How Does Your Garden Grow?

I have a new love in my life - my veggie patch! It's like I've given birth to another child. I've never seemed to have had a green thumb before which is quite sad really when you look back at the family heritage I have. My Grandad was a farmer and in his retirement he kept one of the best veggie patches I've ever seen. He also had a gorgeous flower garden that grew the most beautiful array of coloured and perfumed flowers in Spring. On the other side of my family, my Grandma and Grandpa always had beautiful flower beds of roses, daisies, nasturtiums, hydrangeas and more. Where did my green thumb go?

I think I may have found it, at long last! I've been keen to have our very own veggie patch for a long time so the girls and I could work on it together during our outside play. Now we do because my lovely husband constructed a patch back in March for my birthday and my father who works in a landscaping supply business filled it with beautiful, rich with compost soil. We've begun the process of growing our own food to pick, cook and eat - hooray! We've started off small(ish) with our patch which we've filled with yummy herbs, fruits and veggies but if we get good at this my plan is to build another (and another) so we can plant more.

I am very excited! We have planted tomatoes of a few varieties, lemon grass, curry plant, rocket (my personal favourite), strawberries, corn, basil, chives, parsley, onion and some fancy lettuce but our most exciting plant has been our pumpkin which we grew from a seed we kept from a pumpkin we had eaten. Each day we check on it to see what is happening. This has been a wonderful project to work on from the planting to the watering to just watching day by day to see what is happening to our plants. We can't wait 'till we can pick our produce.

In the back of my mind I have a plan for our little garden. I would love to see the girls use it to give to others so we are calling it our 'Giving Garden'. Hopefully we will get some bountiful harvests so we can do just that. For now though we will just enjoy watching the plants grow.

So far this project has been great for....

• feeling the plants different textures
• smelling the plants different aromas - from the amazing curry plant to the lemon grass
• learning about how plants grow
• learning about sunshine and water working together
• learning about natural ways of deterring bugs, crawlies + night nibblers
• learning about what's good for the garden

Down the track we'd like to....

• make some jam + relishes
• use the rocket on lunch time sandwiches - yum!
• give away our extra herbs, fruits and veggies
• save our seeds for future planting
• use the leaves and veggies for art + craft - potato prints, leaf prints
• grow seedlings/ cuttings to share

I was so thrilled recently to be able to attend a free session at the local library. It was about starting an organic veggie patch with children - just what I needed! There is so much that we will continue to learn about keeping a veggie patch but this was a great start to set us up on our path to growing a garden.

Do you keep a veggie patch? What's in your garden at the moment? It's always a pleasure to hear what's going on in others gardens.