Ember's Veggie Garden

Vegetable gardens are important, especially in our house. We love the convenience of being able to go collect fresh and healthy food straight out the garden. I believe that letting children have their very own vegetable garden is highly valuable. Not only do they get the satisfaction of choosing, planting and eventually eating produce that they grew, but they learn the intimate steps that go into nurturing a vegetable from seed [or seedling] to the plate. They get a sense of achievement of producing something that can be served up to eat for dinner! Nothing prouder than a child who has made a meal from their own produce!

There are some many things a child can learn from having their own veggie garden. How to carefully and gently place the seedlings in the ground and cover the roots with soil whilst making sure the seedling are upright and the soil is firm around the base. Sowing seeds at the right depth and making sure they are watered. Learning how big different plants get, the different seasons that plants grow best in, how to identify pests and what good bugs might visit. Work out if they need climbing structures, benefits of mulching and how to know if something is ripe and ready to pick. Plus so much more.

Today we finished setting up Ember's very own vegetable garden. I bought a cheap second-hand raised planter a few weeks back which was the perfect size for her own garden. 

I let her choose the plants and seeds to put in the bed. Well...almost, I did say no to planting lemon seeds! She was astonished to learn that she would probably be 10 before a lemon seed grew into a tree big enough to get a lemon from!

She chose tomatoes, blue popcorn, snow peas, broccoli, capsicum and cucumber. All her favourite vegetables! We planted all but the cucumber, as the seedlings have only just emerged in the hot house. They will go in to her veggie garden in about 2 weeks time.

We dug up some of our mystery tomato seedlings from the unused chook run to put in her bed, as my tomato seedlings are still too small. Will be interested to find out what sort of tomatoes they produce! [my bets are on cherry tomatoes]

[PS. that is the remains of a face painting of a dragon on her forehead...not blood!]