Kid Friendly Food Gardening – What’s Growing In Your Garden?

We are staring down the end of spring here, and the garden is bursting into life!

All our hard work of planting seeds and digging and mulching is beginning to pay off with flowers and seedlings sprouting and the promise of food to grow!

Here’s a quick garden tour…

As you can see by the photos above, things are looking green again!

The peas are almost finished, with only a few pods that have somehow survived us all wandering out into the garden to eat fresh peas from the pod. We’ll leave a few pods on the plant to dry out so we can plant them again come autumn, and as they die back we’ll plant more zucchini and squash in between the smaller plants, and we’ve already added climbing beans around our remaining tee-pee which will soon sprout and grow up and over the dwindling pea plants.

Speaking of beans, something is eating the leaves of our sprouting beans! I’m not sure what it is, but we’ve planted so many beans I am hoping that losing a couple won’t be the end of the world. But if anyone has any ideas what could be eating the leaves of our beans please let me know!

The chamomile is in full flower at the moment and the harlequin beetles love it! Any plant that attracts insects also attracts kids and our kids have spent lots of time with magnifying glasses and bug houses checking out the harlequin beetles. We are also researching how to harvest, dry and use the chamomile, though we’ll probably leave this year’s flowers to self seed again (these ones were self seeded from a single plant last year) and hopefully have a big enough crop next year to do something with.

We have so much borage growing that it is becoming a weed! But the bees love it and the kids love to pink the tiny edible blue flowers to add to salads and decorate cakes. In this bed you can see the rainbow silver beet (rainbow chard) going to seed and our bare pea tee-pee. Soon the tee=pee will be cover with beans and this bed will be full of zucchini and squash too.

This is a golden zucchini seedling. I let the kids choose one new thing from the seed catalog to try this year and this was Zoe’s pick. Hopefully soon we will be eating golden yellow zucchinis!

Our poppies are flowering! These huge old fashioned poppies were grown from seed collected by a friend and chucked in the garden months ago. We then promptly forgot about it and planted garlic on top of them… so we have garlic and poppies all growing together, which doesn’t please the garlic happy but makes us happy! You can also catch a glimpse of our potatoes (these ones are growing in tires) and just a little of our prolific rhubarb crop.

In this bead we’ve planted lots of different things. In the foreground there should be sunflowers sprouting any day now.

Behind them is the first of our ‘three sisters’ plantings of corn with beans and pumpkin in the middle. The idea is for the beans to grow up the corn and the pumpkin to ramble underneath as all three plants benefit each other. We’ve never tried this before and I am not sure how it will go as our beans have all sprouted well before the corn, but we’ll see!

Behind the ‘three sisters’ are mounds with pumpkin, catelope and watermelons. The melons are always a gamble, even though we buy varieties that do better in cooler areas, but getting fruit will depend how long and hot our summer is, so fingers crossed. At the very far end is another bed with ‘three sisters’ planting and then some bush beans.

Apart from what’s in the photos we’ve also planted tomatoes, cucumbers (three kinds thanks to my boy insisting we needed to grow special pickling cucumbers), capsicum, turnips, radishes, lettuce and more that I can’t remember. Every week we seem to find another patch of dirt to pop some seeds into, so if we are lucky, in a few months we will be able to show you a garden bursting at the seems!

What is growing in your garden?

We’d love to see your kid friendly food garden! If you’ve blogged about your garden please leave a link in the comments so we can check it out and share it with our readers.