Monday 22 April 2013

Plants, pots and... erm, bricks!

Having children makes you do things you would would never have even considered a few years ago. And this is certainly the case with me and gardening. The craze started off with a vegetable patch last year when Rosie was first walking around outside, we cleared and edged off a small area in the garden which we proceeded to dig over and well, grow stuff. To be honest it wasn't a great success, but on the bright side we did get one leek, two weird looking carrots and a few rather yummy green beans.

So I thought I would focus efforts over the Autumn / Winter on composting some of the leftovers from the ill-fated vegetable patch with regular house hold food that I could show Rosie breaking down over time, so we added the usual stuff: eggshells, potato skins, the odd teabag etc. But I also got to work saving ash from dead wood that I have been clearing from the garden to create some lovely pot-ash. I almost sound like I know what i'm doing, believe me I don't i'm really just trying to expose my offspring to more aspects of outdoor life.

Roll on April and it's planting time. Over the last few years my Wife has been collecting an interesting array of pots and old things to grow flowers in. We have some old metal watering cans and buckets which look great. Alas i'm not allowed near them so in this case we found some old wicker baskets in a skip, and asked the guy filling it up if we could have them, luckily he said yes so we trotted off down the road back to the house with our new stash.

This is us looking through all that lovely compost, for some reason Rosie just kept shouting 'Muddy puddles' - too much Peppa Pig me thinks, but once she got hold of it, it was apparently hilarious.


Next we had fun filling up the baskets, I can't begin to explain how messy that was but if you have children I guess you can imagine, chocolate  mud, paint, play-dough it's all the same principle when it comes to mess.


That's cousin Olivia in the pink fairy dress piling some compost into the other half broken basket that we acquired. We then spent a little while planting the baskets with three sunflower seeds by putting one in each third of the basket. Right job done. 

So the next task was to see what else we could find around the place that we could plant up, and you can probably see from the photos where i'm going with this if you look carefully. Whilst we were sourcing the baskets my wife had found some bricks lying at the back of our garden and had moved some pre-grown flowers (don't ask me what they were) into the three holes in one of the bricks. 

This gave the girls a good idea of what they were about to do, well we think they got it anyway. So we took the other brick and the girls added compost and seeds to the three holes (ish)




It was great fun and they really seemed engaged in placing the 'tiny flowers' (as we called them) into the holes, we put one in each hole, the girls took it in turns Rosie planted her seed then stepped back allowing Olivia to take a go after watching me pop a seed into the first hole.

Next everything needed watering:



Even my youngest was in the mood for flowers that day, here she is with Grandma rocking a daffodil:


After all the hard work planting I thought we should probably spend some time doing something more active, so later that day we built the famous 'super slide' - whilst your mind is racing in anticipation i'll explain. The super slide is when you get a free standing slide, put it on-top of a small hill, put padded square things down the hill and create one massive slide experience. Oh and you need a stern looking lab to supervise:


Well that's all for this post about growing, I will report back in a few months when we have some 100 foot sunflowers growing out of a brick,

Ta ta

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