Chloe helped her mum, Gemma to plant seeds in the warmth of her home. She used egg boxes and recyclable coloured flower pots.
They will be putting them on the windowsill in the conservatory, until they have germinated and grown enough to be planted in their garden.
Two years ago we decided to grow an avocado stone. The Little Seedlings tried the Avocado fruit. Only one out of five Seedlings liked it!
We had another go last year. This time we placed the stone into water using a special ‘Avoseedo’ tool. We waited for it to grow and after about nine weeks the stone started splitting.
About six weeks later, a small sprout appeared at the tip and roots began to form at the bottom. Two months went by… then the roots and shoots began to get stronger. In June, we planted the small tree into a pot with soil.
We were given another stone by our neighbour and decided to try growing that too. We now have two thriving trees.
On our walk around the garden today we found everything had turned to ice! Theo pointed to the spade and Fearne tried to pick it up. When we carefully moved the spade we saw it had left a print in the ice in the shape of a spade!
We decided to look around the garden and find different shapes and frozen solid items.
While we were looking for frozen areas around the garden, Fearne found:
Theo copied Fearne, looking around and found:
Its lovely to find winter treasures in our garden! What have you got growing or freezing in your garden this winter?
While we were all out it the garden, the Little Seedlings kept trying to pick the pretty flowers. We made it into an activity by making some amazing flower prints on fabric and paper. First we got some cotton napkins, placed the flowers on one side and folded the napkin in half to cover the flowers. We all had fun bashing the napkin with a rolling pin.
After a few minutes, we opened up the napkin and carefully peeled off the squidgy flowers. The patterns made by the flowers were very pretty and printed on both sides of the napkin like a butterfly.
The children enjoyed this activity and extended it by mixing paints to make different colours, shades, prints.
Tracie has a lot of nooks and crannies where she grows in her garden and she has decided to use the back end of the garden (where she gets the most sun!) for her growing challenge.
Here is Gemma’s garden on a sunny day in February! Let’s get digging!
This is Phyllis’ garden in January 2021. It was very cold that week and we have had some snow.
Phyllis’ little Kitten is Hebe and we’re sure you’ll see a lot of him during the challenge.
We are three generations of gardeners starting a gardening challenge to see the difference in the ways we garden and grow!
We will all have the same seeds and grow them in our own ways. We will give regular updates and are looking forward to sharing the results. Follow the Garden Challenge with our hashtag GardenChallenge2021!
This year the theme in our ever-changing garden will be a rainbow explosion of colours to represent our hard-working Key Workers. So far we have looked through gardening magazines to find various plants we could use. All the children have chosen their favourite colours and plants, which we will incorporate within the two gardens.
Our BIG project will be to extend our pond area for all our wildlife. Our main pond is in a raised bed but the wildlife need more space so we’re looking to extend it across the bed. The children have asked for a water feature so this might make an appearance.
Over the last couple of years we have had so much success with our raised beds, however we need to make these changes. We are always finding new and exciting ways to garden. We’ll also be putting up the new greenhouse and VegTrugs.
We will keep you posted on the projects, so keep returning to our website to find out how its all gone throughout the seasons.
Following our lovely activity with leaf printing we decided it would be good to use the baby pumpkins, that Georgia kindly brought in, to make pictures.
Tracie set the activity up and the children loved it so much they wanted to print on other materials. When we had finished, Leo asked if we could make other pumpkin pictures. Emma helped the children make a display for our wall.
Tracie's Treasures 