Potato Grass Heads, Children’s Plant Markers and Recycling Red Noses

Kids’ garden activities are now a routine part of most gardening events. So with a kidsinthegarden stall at our local seedy Sunday the childrens’ gardening activities fitted neatly with me.

By popular request potato head grass heads were on offer. If you have never created these creatures here’s how we did it.

Ingredients

10-12 inches of part of a pair of tights
Sawdust (from local pet shop)
Grass seed
Stick on eyes
Plastic cup

Tie one end of the tights and add a dessert spoon full of grass seed. Top up with sawdust to form oval face shape and tie at the bottom of head. Grass seed must to at the top of the head.  Create a face on the tights. Roll head in a saucer of water and keep damp. Within a couple of weeks, maybe less, a hairy grass top will show. Keep watering the grass and snip when necessary. It really is that easy.

The most popular gardening activity with the children was making plant markers, perhaps because of the immediate effect. For these I used:-

Small polystyrene balls (ping pong balls will also work)
Barbeque sticks
Drinking straws
Rubber bands to keep straw on sticks
Eyes

Assemble and let the children create their own images (use waterproof pens). Planting in the garden is, of course, optional, but highly recommended. Children love to mark ownership of any seeds and plants they may have planted.



If you still have your red nose from red nose day why not recycle it.  It makes a lovely colourful plant marker.

World Book Day: A Book to Inspire your Children to Garden

If I could only take one children's gardening book on to that desert island it would have to be 'Eddie's Garden and How to Make Things Grow' by Sarah Garland. It is a simple, homely and feel good story about a little boy growing vegetables and flowers with his family. It has held the attention of my 6 year old for the last 3 years and there is still more staying power in it.

Give your child their own plot of earth, let them dig and plant their own seeds and any child will identify with Eddie. What helps Eddie's garden to grow? Your little ones may well be able to answer that question and you certainly will because you will be reading it to them lots of time.

The story involves 3 generations of the same family. A nice touch as grandparents often help with nurturing those little green fingers. The illustrations include colourful characters from the garden. The ubiquitous robin always around when digging is on the go, wriggly worms and those evil snails. Eddie himself is inspired by the story of Jack and the Bean Stalk.

There is a useful list of Eddie's plants of 12 vegetables and edible flowers, with brief growing instructions. It is a great starter gardening book.

If you only read your children one book about gardening let it be this one. This is the time of year to get growing and sowing and this is the ideal book to read with your kids.

Growing Upwards, Spring and Ball-Proof Glass

RHS Spring and Design Show
Spring was certainly in the Air at the 2011 RHS Plant and Design Show in London yesterday. This is a gardening show which doesn’t usually have a kid’s element to it. However there were a few unexpected snippets of interest to families with young children.

Plant Heritage’s display held an amazing collection of early spring blossoms, many from ordinary gardens. It demonstrated just how much is in bloom in February and was a timely reminder to me to bring in a few cutting from branches of shrubs from the garden into the house. An opportunity for children to use their sense of smell.  The stall below is an example I suspect of how we would all like our garden to look in the spring.

Mini Greenhouses

I have owned an Access mini greenhouse for about 9 years, although sadly it is at present rather empty and uncared for. It will receive some TLC and be filled with seedlings in the next few weeks. I find a mini greenhouse a good alternative for those of us with gardens too small for a grown up greenhouse.

My sister has asked for one for her birthday. I had thought that the constant presence of cricket and footballs in her garden would rule out a glass house. However I have now been assured by the Access guy at the show that the glass can withstand a hit from either. Surely a great selling point. I’ll let you know how it survives the summer.

My mini greenhouse

The theme of the show was roof top gardens or as the blurb put it 'green roofing for urban spaces'.  Whilst I would not consider a roof garden to be an option for a family I loved the planting on the vertical walls.  This would be great those with tiny patio gardens.

Finally I thought you may like to see the latest version of a ‘green’ car. It was spotted on the road outside the show.

Happy First Birthday. Garden Stars of the Year

We have had a great first year on the blog. When I asked my son what he had enjoyed most about our garden, without any hesitation he listed the following:-

• Digging.
• Looking at the vegetables and feeling how heavy they were.
• Eating the vegetables.
• Finding ‘bones’ in the soil.

Gardens are great spaces to reflect in and also reflect about and its good to see that his memories can be so easily recalled. Our little plot this year has been tranquil, productive and beautiful. The veg area was a great success (why oh why didn’t I start it before?).

My garden stars of the year have been:-

1. Very unexpectedly the french beans which were so very tasty to eat and easy to grow. So there will be more grown up the fence this year and over my son’s den.
2. Nasturtiums which are such good flowers for children to grow. Dare I say even better to grow than sunflowers. Ours reseeded from last year. Because of last years cold winter they took a while to get going, but then flowered until November. It was lovely having some extra peppery flavour to our salads.
3. There are no hostas grown in the ground in the garden as they are munched to death. But hostas in pots do survive and my Sum and Substance hosta looked wonderful this year.
4. My son who has really enjoyed all garden activity.  When it was suggested he should draw a flower he didn't just draw the standard sunflower-type flower.  He produced a whole page of Venus Flytraps, including their food.  I think perhaps we have visited Kew Gardens a bit too often.

Looking forward to our 2011 garden.

Spiders' Webs, Hoar Frost and a Festive Walk

Spiders’ webs are great structures for children to look at, copy the patterns and to view spiders.  Back in September the spiders were hard at work in the garden weaving away.  It was impossible for me to pass through my archway without getting threads tangled in my hair.  However by the time I got my act together to photograph some of the webs the spiders seemed to have all miraculously disappeared. 

So at Christmas I was delighted to find some webs sparkling with hoar frost.  The frost shows off the patterns perfectly.  Apparently an orb web is the one we most commonly see and link with spiders in the UK.  The spider anchors silk lines that radiate from a centre, to grass, stems and other structures. It then weaves a sticky spiral of silk around the centre.  Threads are then woven round to strengthen the outside of the web.  It is the stickiness of those threads that attracts water from the air so making water droplets.  There is more information on spiders and some activities for kids by The British Council.

That same day the hoar frost was so amazing that the camera was a must for a walk around the garden and then further afield.  This was certainly a snowy glittery Christmas for us.

What to do with all those Leaves in the Garden



Making Leaf Mould

We have been making leaf mould in our garden and have done so for the last couple of years. It is an easy gardening activity for children; one that gets them into the garden in the autumn. Leaf mould is organic and involves no carbon footprint. It is simply a case of raking up the leaves, bagging them and storing them, and then waiting.

Here’s how we do it. The garden has leaves mainly from Silver Birch, Goat Willow, Oak and a little bit of Acer. We rake them into piles and bag them up. I know that many people use black plastic sacks. We recycle and use the plastic coverings you get when clothes are returned from the dry cleaners. We like it best if the leaves are dry as they are not so cold to handle. As water is an essential ingredient for leaf mould we place couple of holes in the plastic bag and the add water.

A couple of times I have left some bags of leaves under shrubs and find that as the plastic begins to disintegrate and worms worm their way into the leafy mixture the leaves return themselves to the garden with very little help.


The filled sacks then spend the following 18 months in an old dustbin in the garden. We spread the leaf mould out onto the soil early spring as a kind of mulch. This is another gardening job for the children help with. I have also sieved the leaf mould and used it with potting compost for transplanting seedlings.



Last years leaf mould

 The people at Gardening Organic have more detailed advice about what to do.

But why oh why is it called leaf mould? There is nothing messy or mouldy about it. It doesn’t smell and once rotted down turns into a lovely friable material. The name conveys up images of fungus and stained walls and must surely put some people off. How about calling it leaf compost or leafy soil?  Love to hear your suggestions.

Let me know what you do with the leaves in your garden. Please please don’t say you take your leaves to the local rubbish tip. We find it so simple to recycle them inside our garden and hope you can too.











The London Wetland Centre: A Great Garden in the Heart of London.

If you hadn’t thought of a wetland as a garden, then please think again. All the elements of natural beauty, native planting, seasonal interest, open space, and water are present in a wetland. For me and for my son the London Wetland Centre is a fantastic garden. We had one of our many visits there this week and I thought I would share with you some of the simple pleasures he loves there.

• The trail of the duck feet marked on the ground leading to explore the children’s adventure play area.
• The mock duck nest and its eggs, together with the ‘dinosaur’ bones.
• The new webcam set up in a pond, filming both on top and under the water. He spent ages operating this, focusing, zooming in and out, and looking at the screen to see what he had found.
• The pathways that lead off the main pathways and then rejoin later on.
• The willow dens, both when they are covered in leaves and in their winter state.
• The foot operated water pump in the new rain garden.

And for me there is always something new. This time it was the new rain garden. Opened by Alan Titchmarsh in September it shows how gardens can be sustainable by capturing and using rainfall. It forms a series of rain gardens, fed from the roof of a pavilion.  This is made from a converted cargo container and  provides living space for animals and insects in its walls and a green roof. There is a prism to view the  green roof.



I do not have a full photo of the garden to show you as was so bowled over by the fact that a flower meadow was still flowering in November that I concentrated on the flowers.  I have since learnt that they are from Pictorial Meadows. They provide an unique colourful meadow-flower seed mixes that rapidly produce a naturally vibrant display with an extended flowering season. The mixes contain no grass and all the green foliage you see are part of the plants.


So Wetlands are not all about birds, though there is presently a bittern at the London Wetland Centre and plenty of other wildfowl to see and things to do.  And, oh yes, there are also at least the six water voles we saw at the Wetland Centre in Arundel this summer.