In the interest of keeping up the changes I’m making to really stick to my goals of planting and harvesting from our garden this year I am endeavouring to do a little gardening every day. Even if it’s just watering something. Yesterday we didn’t have such a good day, the children and I and we didn’t spend any time at all in the garden sadly. It probably would have done us all good. Oh well. Today, being Tuesday, we have a regular playdate with friends – all the Mummies get a good catch up and the children do too. They also turned the water off here. Made for another reason to go. 🙂
Upon coming home I had the urge to do some form of gardening. I decided to plant out some seeds today with the children. Orik was down for a sleep so Allegra and I headed out onto the decking with some egg cartons, some seeds, some ice-cream sticks with the seed names written on them and some cling film. We planted Tommy Toe Red, Tommy Toe Yellow and German Johnson tomato seeds. I know Jasper LOVES eating little “marties” so the Tommy Toes are for him and the German Johnson is apparently one of the parent plants of the Mortgage Lifter tomato, so named for its prolific nature and the fact that it enabled its developer, Radiator Charlie, to clear his $6000 mortgage in 6 years. The German Johnson is a big meaty tomato and great for slicing and also great for canning or preserving which is primarily why I chose it.
We also planted some Cayenne chilli seeds – great for drying and grinding as well as using fresh. I love the teensiest dash of cayenne pepper in my macaroni cheese so looking forward to dehydrating and grinding my own. I think I might end up with a gross oversupply so I will have to see what else I can make with chillies. I had some Californian Wonder capsicum seeds too so in they went. I hope they fruit heavily as I absolutely love capsicum.
And for something different I planted some Sugarbaby watermelons too. They’re smaller with a black skin but apparently prolific fruiters so in a way I hope that the 6 seeds I planted don’t all sprout. Then again. 🙂
Once we had planted our seeds we watered them in using an upcycled golden syrup bottle. It is easy for the kids to use and hard for them to over-water and wash out the seeds. We gave them all a good watering  and then covered them all in cling film. Part of me cringes at the idea of using cling film. It’s a non-reuseable, non-recyclable landfill nasty made with horrid plastics but we don’t have a green house and we needed something to keep them all warm. And with that we “cuggled” our baby plants and came inside.
Sorry for the dodgy photo, it was getting dark.
Also as an update, almost ALL our seeds have sprouted! I can’t quite believe it to be honest as I didn’t expect anything from our split peas/lentils. The kidney and cannelini beans are yet to sprout but the kidney beans have nearly doubled in size and even the cannelini beans are showing signs of swelling so I have high hopes. 😀
Rabid Little Hippy 