The Outdoors Parent

Although it seems early, this week we started thinking about our summer veggie garden. I’m told by my green-fingered neighbour that now is the time to plant seeds so that the baby plants will be ready to transplant in a month or two. Sowing seeds directly into the soil round here just doesn’t work–far too many slugs. You can wait a couple of months and plant shop-bought seedlings into your beds, but I thought it would be fun for the boys to grow our plants from seed this year.  Our winter veggie garden was only a moderate success.  We did get some broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage out of it, but the weather was just too warm and the frosts too few for these plants to flourish.  I have higher hopes for our summer garden.

worm stew

So this week I took the boys off to our favourite local nursery to get some seeds.  They then had heaps of fun planting the seeds in a mixture of potting soil and home-made compost.  The compost worms were a big hit with both kids, although extracting one from The Puppy Dog’s mouth was not my favourite mothering moment.  That child has a deep attraction to all things slimy and gross.  The Monkey seemed to get the idea of what we were doing and enjoyed it, even if The Puppy Dog kept wondering round the garden planting seeds everywhere.  Who knows what we will find growing where.

In the end we planted sunflower, snap pea, snow pea and cherry tomato seeds and are watching for them to germinate. We also bought some pumpkin seeds as I want to grow our Hallowe’en pumpkins this year, but they can wait a month or two for planting.  A certain element of surprise has been added to the process by The Monkey who, when my back was turned, pulled all the labels out of the planters declaring “we know what we planted Mommy! We don’t need them!”   So we’ll have to try to identify the plants as they grow.  We may yet end up with a Mammoth Russian Sunflower teepee rather than a snow pea one. We’ll see.