Love The Garden

Preschooler Play - In The Garden

Getting your children outside in the garden is fantastic. They can soak up the vitamin D, play in the dirt, and make a mess that doesn't need to be cleaned up. At our house, the children are out in the garden every day. I wrote about some of the activities that my daughter was doing in the garden this time last year. This year, being nearly four years old, she is really getting into "being a farmer".

So how to go about getting them started?

Don't be afraid of children damaging your plants. Give them their own garden bed instead, where they are free to dig and plant and play as much as they like. Miss 3.5 has just finished eating her way through her first crop of peas and carrots, and has planted a new crop of carrots and leeks. She also has plant pots full of petunias. She spends her days digging in the garden with her little spade and watering her plants with "muck gooey", which is a broth that she makes up herself full of dirt, water and a little liquid fertiliser.

Don't be afraid of them getting dirty either. Put them in special gardening clothes and remember that mud washes off in the washing machine.

Have fun!

How do your children play in the garden? What do they like to plant?

My soon-to-be ex garden

For the last four years we have been living in my parents' house. One of the joys of the house is also a curse - a massive suburban garden. When I was pregnant, the garden was severely out of control, but over 2011 I bashed it into shape and it was looking quite lovely.

This year, the garden has been a little more neglected, but not a total loss, for three reasons:
(1) I have been back at work. This cuts down on the amount of free rambling time that I have.
(2) On-again, off-again builders. When people are throwing bits of rubble on your garden and stomping on it, it's at little demoralising.
(3) Our impending move. Since we'll be leaving very soon, I've lost a bit of motivation.

Currently, half of the garden is gorgeous...

... and the other half is overgrown.

There didn't seem to be much point in a spring veggie patch, so there are only the three raspberry bushes, blueberry bush, grape and passionfruit vines, rosemary plant, parsley patch, two resilient leeks, and a lot of well mulched soil.

But spring is here and being outside in the dirt is so much fun!

Miss 1 and I decided to re-pot and renew our herbs, ready to take with us to our new house.

The sorrel was severely pot bound.

The newly updated herb garden has two different oregano plants, Vietnamese mint, basil, chives, two bay plants, strawberries, lemon thyme and regular thyme, mint, sorrel, two different chilli plants, coriander, rosemary, curly leaf parsely and flat leaf parsley.

I have a bunch of heritage seeds and poppy seeds, as well as some herb and vegetable seeds dried from last season. Perhaps I can plant those in pots too...

International shipping. And outside in Melbourne.

Although it's raining today, the weather has been lovely in Melbourne lately and that means that we have had lots of time outside in the garden - me gardening, Darren mowing, and Miss 1 pestering the chickens.

The flowers are putting on quite a show.

Inside the house, I have been painting. Here's a sneak peak at the canvas that will be listing this weekend.

Antique White, Vines

If you've seen my FB, you'll know that I was most excited on Sunday to receive my first international order. Shipping on large notice boards within Australia is expensive enough as it is, so I'm extra pleased that someone loved my work enough to pay for shipping all the way to America.

I spent most of Monday lunchtime in the post office, where I thought that I'd be clever and remember to fill in the shipping form before lining up, only to discover that registered post has a different shipping form, so I had to go and fill that in and line up again. Sigh. My customer purchased 'Brown, Autumn' and I'm hoping that she loves the canvas when it reaches her next week.