We had some successes in the garden last year and some disasters! Monkey grew some lovely cucumbers, our apple tree gave us our first 4 home-grown apples and we had wonderful sunflowers again. But not everything in Monkey’s garden grew. We gave him part of our garden to turn into a veg patch, Daddy P dug in a load of compost, Monkey planted his seeds, and waited. He watered the plot religiously but sadly all we got was one tiny radish. The soil here really is rather dire. So this year we are taking a slightly different approach as green fingered Monkey tries to grow some veg in pots, as well as his sunflowers. The plan was also to grow cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers in our greenhouse.
We received a few sunflower seeds last month from Supalite to get us off to a start. We’ve had a sunflower growing competition for a few years now, Monkey always seems to win. Uum. We always start them off in a pot on the kitchen windowsill. This year we were given a tip to soak the seeds in water for 24 hours before planting. Over the last few weeks we’ve watched as the sunflowers have started to sprout. We now have 4 seeds sprouting up and will be planting them out in the next couple of days. monkey has already bagged the tallest as ‘his’. We will have a Monkey, Mummy, Daddy sunflower as normal, but this year we will also have an Elspeth sunflower, in memory of Jenny’s daughter.
Next up for green fingered Monkey were our cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes. We’ve planted the seeds in our propagator and cleared a space on the kitchen windowsill.
Before long our cucumber seedlings were sprouting up well and needed moving on.
Monkey helped me re-pot them and then Daddy P watered them and put them in the greenhouse. When we went to check on them disaster (or Daddy P) had struck and we’ve since lost the lot. No cucumbers for us this year. I think my Greengrocer husband over watered them. He has now been banned from touching Monkey’s veggies!
So we now have our peppers and tomatoes ready to re-pot and then they’ll go into the greenhouse.
We planted radish, carrots, sweet peas and spring onions seeds into containers on the patio a few weeks back and now these are all sprouting up and we need to thin them out and replant. That’s our job for this afternoon after school as the sun has decided to make a welcome return.
Green fingered Monkey is going to be busy helping me in the garden over the coming months as we water our plants and watch them bare fruits, vegetables and blossom.
Are you growing anything with your kids this summer?
disclaimer: we were given 5 sunflower seeds to assist us with this post
Monkey is welcome to come and be green fingered in my garden any time he likes.
We are going lots of Cosmoses this year that B picked as seeds from last year’s flowers. The first one flowered yesterday. It is good to say your sunflower seedlings as we planted a few of those as well, but we’ve got weeds coming up in the same place so I may be able tell the difference now!