Growing your own Food

The boys love everything to do with gardening and growth and if you have been following our little projects you will know that we have been trying to get our garden ready for the summer.

This, at times, has been a really hard task but we have been pushing through it to really get it ready.

With the boarders cleared, dug and turned over the next task is to get something planting.

Growing up, at my parents house, we were lucky enough to have a very large garden; large enough that a quarter of it was my dads own allotment. I loved helping him grow our own food and I always had pride in helping him harvest it all too; something that I wanted to replicate with the boys.

Before we moved the boys were interested as much as I was as a child and last year decided to plant different things for Grandad to grow. Even now when we visit him they enjoy getting out in the garden to help!

With the garden now cleared William was quite keen to find out what we will be growing and where we will be growing it.

We decided then that we would dedicate the area underneath out living room window to all our vegetables.

 Before we started planting we had to choose what we would like to grow.

The boys chose to grow Tomatoes, Cucumber, Lettuce, Carrots, Parsnips, French Beans and Runner Beans. 

 We bought a variety of different pots and filled them with soil from our garden as well as some graded top soil.

With the pots ready it was time to plant our seeds.

Next we moved onto the Runner Beans and the French Beans.

We decided to use see through pots (recycled plastic cups from James' birthday) as these are usually quick to sprout and root and  thought it would interest the boys to see the change.

We have discussed that these will grow quite quickly and that they grow tall so we will have to transplant them from the pots to the soil and build a frame to go up. Until then everything planted all that was left to do was water them all.

We had discussed that each seed looked different but the same thing would happen and although at the time I don't think they fully appreciated each stage it soon became clear that more was taken in step by step.

Every day at the start of Home Ed we will assess the plants and used this easy to follow guide as a stepping stone to our discussions.

With a little bit of luck seeing the stages within these plants will help them realise what is happening with the others.

Hopefully next time you will see us having some healthy plants growing.