Starting a vegetable patch
At this time of year everything is flourishing and green, the fields are filled with wild flowers and the bees and minibeasts are in abundance. With my own little vegetable patch thriving I thought I’d share a “how-to” start your own growing project, which is a lovely project to do with little ones and great for your wellbeing. Hopefully you’ll end up with some yummy home grown veggies to enjoy too!
I’ve discovered that herbs and chillis are great for growing on window sills, or if you have space in the garden for a veg patch or raised bed you have more options for what you can grow. You can even use containers of all shapes and sizes for growing. It’s important not to feel pressure, just let the magic happen and use the process as an experiment!
This year I planted a few vegetables and herbs from seed back in April; parsley, oregano, mint, Thai basil, chillis, lettuce, sugar snaps and runner beans. I re-used some trays and filled them with compost, you could also re-use yogurt pots or use toilet roll tubes for planting your seeds. Pick up some compost and choose which seeds you’d like to try at your local garden centre.
First, fill the pots with compost, sprinkle a few seeds on top and cover with a little more compost. Pop them in a warm spot on the window sill and make sure the soil stays moist by watering them each day (but not so it’s too soggy).
After a couple of weeks little sprouts start appearing, it all feels quite magical!
Now is the time to nurture those little sprouts!
In actual fact there’s very little to do at this stage other than give them a little water and watch them shoot up…
… and keep shooting up!
Once they outgrow their little pots you can re-pot them into a bigger container or plant them straight out into the garden. I kept the chilli plants indoors on a sunny window sill but everything else was popped into a raised bed outdoors. Last year upon moving a number of chilli plants out into the garden, the next day the entire plants had been eaten!! So having learnt from that I decided to keep the chillis indoors to see how they fare.
At this stage it’s important to keep watering your little plants each day, and checking in to see how much things are growing. The lettuce did really well in early summer and I was able to pull off leaves to have in a salad each day and they just kept growing!
I found out that runner beans and sugar snaps need LOTS of growing space to get nice and tall, so this meant replacing short bamboo sticks with 6 ft sticks and they seemed so much happier!
I’ve now got lots and lots of sugar snap peas and runner beans sprouting. The chilli plants haven’t quite formed any chillis yet… but hopeful they might appear soon too. Out of the herbs, the parsley, mint and oregano have done brilliantly in pots in the garden.
It’s a little bit of trial and error but it’s incredibly rewarding eating some of your own home-grown fresh vegetables for dinner!
Such a fun experiment and we’d recommend delving into your own veggie growing for a wholesome project the whole families can get involved with.
