Kid Friendly Gardening – Summer Garden.

Our food garden is at it’s peak production right now. With lots of long sunny days and lots of lovely bore water things are growing, fruiting and ripening and we are are to fill our meals with home grown food as well as share with friends and family.

It’s the best time of the year to be a gardener, and the most exciting time for kids. Eating tomatoes right from the vine, snacking on green beans whenever you get hungry, picking all kinds of interesting things to put in potions and brews in the outside play kitchen, and seeing all the work, watering, and waiting come to life!

Here’s a quick update of our kid friend food garden, the things that are growing well, and the things that have been a bit of a flop!

The zucchinis we slow to start this season, but we are finally facing that lovely glut of zucs. This year we planted some golden zucchinis as well as the regular green ones. And it looks like we might have a glut of these gorgeous golden nugget pumpkins too!

I love the shape and colour of these gorgeous squash. They were slow to start like the zucchinis but are now producing well.

We tried the classic three sisters’ planting this year of beans, corn and in our case, pumpkins. It’s not been much of a success as I forgot to take into account the fact that the beans would grow way faster than the corn, and in fact most of the corn failed to germinate at all, and climbing beans don’t like to trail in the dirt. We’ve salvaged the beans as best we could, and the pumpkins are growing great, but next time we’ll give the corn chance to grow a bit first.

The tomatoes are ripening already! This is a minor miracle for us as we usually don’t see any red until March!

The long sunny days that have ripened our tomatoes have done nothing for our watermelons unfortunately. It should have been a great summer for melons but the three seeds that germinated and grew into seedlings are still tiny little vines with no chance of bearing edible fruit now.

We also had a really dismal potato haul. I am pretty sure the potatoes we did harvest were all smaller than the seed potatoes I cut up to plant months and months ago! We’ll just have to plant some in a different spot this winter and try again.

But there is always the big tall sunflowers to make me happy. Can anyone look at a sunflower and not smile??

Another bug success this year are the cucumbers. The small bed is overflowing with three kinds of cucumbers thanks to an happy accident where small hands spilled a whole packet of seeds and we decided not to bother picking them up. There is also beans climbing in and around the cucumbers as well as bok choi, radishes, a stray sunflower and dill! Who cares about careful spacing of plants? Not us!

We have had incredible numbers of harlequin beetles at our house this year. Swarms of them have literally darkened the sky and we find them covering all our plans… but they don’t seem to be doing any damage and they make a really interesting addition to garden.

So what’s growing in your garden?
If you’ve blogged about your garden please leave a link in the comments so we can pop over and check out how your garden is growing.

We bought all our seeds from Eden Seeds this year – this is not a sponsored link, we just like their range and their service.