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

Posted on November 26, 2012 7 Comments

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…

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!

Calendula 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.

garden tour 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.

zucchini 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!

poppies 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.

garden bed 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.

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Filed Under: Garden and Growing Tagged With: activities for children, gardening, kid friendly food garden

Read the comments or scroll down to add your own:

  1. tricia says

    Gorgeous garden Kate. Inspiring :-)

    I especially love your fence – looks just like what I have in mind for our new garden.

    Reply
  2. Debs says

    What gorgeous pics! Makes me wish my garden was more established… we’re getting there. Fresh peas from the pod sounds unreal!

    Reply
  3. Kate says

    harlequin beetles! Thank you! We’ve had a few in our garden and my daughter was asking what they were, now I know! Your garden looks fabulous, inspiring me to get busy with ours. Christmas Bunnings voucher where are you?

    Reply
  4. [email protected] says

    Your garden is looking great! Beans seem to be very tasty to predators…the wallaby always goes for them first but the ladybeetles give them a hard time to as well as grasshoppers…check early in the morning and you will probably see whatever they are.The hot days are taking a toll on our vegie patch but hoping to salvage most of it…rain would be lovely!
    Thanks for sharing your planting and inspiration with us…i am always writing about gardening with the kids …love it!

    Reply
  5. Amanda says

    Looks good!
    We are looking after my parents garden while they are on holidays and benefiting from their veggie patch…
    Strawberries, raspberries, mulberries, tomatoes, rhubarb, beetroot, carrots, sugar snap peas, beans, lettuce and sweet peas! :)

    Reply
  6. Linda says

    http://lrbritton.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/our-vegie-patch.html

    Oh I wish I had your space!! We have a small dedicated veggie patch and when we can keep our canine menaces out of it, we manage ok. Can’t wait to see what you produce!!

    Reply
  7. Rachel says

    So amazing. I think it’s so wonderful that you are showing your children the growing cycle! And the photos are great. I feel like I’m there with you. And, since it’s the dead of winter (well, just feels that way) where I am, I needed that!

    Reply

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