June in the Kitchen Garden

After only two months of opening, the kitchen garden is looking fabulous and is already providing food for the table.

Mark was sowing seeds and planting his plot up on the very first day of opening and is now reaping the rewards. I caught him in the street the other day on his way back from the kitchen garden looking very pleased with himself. He proudly showed me a very impressive bunch of radishes. It’s amazing what can be achieved in a couple of months and its only June. We have another 4 – 5 months of growing season yet so it’s very exciting to see what lies ahead.

It’s great that we have such a diverse group of plot holders ranging from the eldest a lady in her 80’s down to little one year old Grace who’s mother tells me sowed the seeds herself. I captured a very cute picture of her watering her seedlings.

We are very pleased with the enthusiasm and effort everyone is putting into this new venture, it’s fantastic. Such a wonderful variety of veg and some of the beds are a work of art, so neatly planted, so well watered and so obviously loved and cared for. Crops cannot fail to flourish with such TLC. And to top it all this has been achieved with a broken water pump!

Which by the way we are very sorry about and have a more robust one on order.

Last week Bradley and I got together with some of our budding “little Gardeners” to plant pumpkins. The pumpkins were grown from seed in pots in my greenhouse at home so that we had decent size plants for the kids to handle and be tough enough to fight off the slugs. The children loved it and with Bradleys help and encouragement got well engrossed in the whole process from digging the hole, to planting the pumpkin plant and then watering it at the end.  When the job was finished each plant was given a  name which was decided upon by  pulling  names out of a bag.

We have Frankenstein, Spookley, Spice, Jack and Dairy Pumpkin.

Only kids could come up with such wonderful original names.

Pumpkins need a lot of water so we invite all the children to help them grow by giving them a drink every time they visit the kitchen garden.

Hopefully come autumn we will have bumper crop to share out and have a pumpkin lantern competition for Halloween.

If you are wondering what the two pots sunk in the ground either side of the pumpkins are about, it’s a watering aid to direct the water directly to the roots to avoid waste.

Proud little pumpkin planters.