I am also trying to find ways to engage with my kids and get them up and active – taking their minds off the screens and trying new things, ideally out of the house.
A mid week delivery from my favourite pot supplier provided the perfect opportunity to mix up our routine and get everyone (well, two of us and the dog) out into the sunshine.
Here is a blow by blow account of this morning’s impromptu gardening lesson.
The grandma and grandpa pots are great fun and the kids laughed themselves silly when we unpacked them. We had a bit of a play giving them different hair styles with a couple of succulents and lettuce seedlings I had kicking around
These pots really lend themselves to silly hairstyles but I was also keen to try a bunch of new seeds that I ordered recently to experiment with for livening up salads. My smallest took a break from his screen to help me.
These pots do have a drainage hole in the bottom but if you choose to unplug it and plant directly into the pot you will need a coaster to stop the pot leaking when you water it. Also, the seeds I’m planting don’t have a very deep root requirement so a shallower inset pots works well (and can be replaced easily if our plants don’t thrive).
To try and keep things tidy (hahahahaha) we set up our materials in a shallow tray on our verandah table.
We used:
- Decorative pots
- Plastic pots
- Good quality seed raising potting mix
- Radish Sprouts/ Pea Shoots / Rocket seedlings
- Watering can
- Labels (we used pegs but paddlepop sticks or something similar works just as well)
We filled each of the plastic insert pots with the seed raising mixture to approx. 5mm below the rim of the pot. Then smallest sprinkled radish sprout seeds into one pot, and pea shoots into another. A good rule of thumb for planting seeds is that you plant them about two times the depth of the seed itself (so a big seed like a bean would be planted at about 15-20mm deep while smaller seeds like the radish sprouts are best at about 5-10mm and super fine seeds can be laid on the surface and lightly covered with a sprinkle of potting mixture). He covered our seeds with about 5-10mm of potting mixture and watered them in. We also potted our rockets seedlings into a pot with the same seed raising potting medium.
There was some pretty intense discussion throughout about who should have what hair. In the end smallest decided Grandpa could have the pea shoots as he doesn’t like them and that way grandma can pick them off him whenever she’s hungry. As radish shoots are high in oestrogen it seemed a good fit that she wear those although in the end she looked more fetching in the rocket shoots, and we popped the radish shoots into a sill and sage dream pot within easy picking distance.
We’ll continue to water these, keeping them moist and on a sunny window sill until they are ready to grace our table or our sandwiches. All in all it was a pleasant way to spend half an hour – a new skill for the smallest, a good couple of giggles, a bit of accidental reading practice as he read out the blurb on the seed packet and the excitement of waiting for the shoots to emerge. And only a smallish amount of mess for me to clean up before the next call for food.
