have seeds. will sow. my seeds...WILL grow!

I have been absent from this lil blog for a couple of days because we have been having a QT week. Our acronym for quality time. And I guess, in some ways, for quiet time too. So lots of fun kid stuff, which inevitably means that house is a tip but it is full of the smell of fresh baked cupcakes and the babes have sweet smiles on their faces. ;) I'm only partially serious but I'm sure you get the drift. It has been busy, and fun, and there have been a lot of chores neglected, but we feel full (the content yet tired kind of full). And it's all good.

I'll share more about QT week in a couple of days, but for now, here are the results of one of our hours of funness: these little plant pots with mini blackboard labels.

I have been inspired recently to try a little harder to keep plants alive. The other week Sophia arrived home from kindy with this little piece of egg carton complete with dirt, buried sunflower seed and a note instructing me to provide moisture and a little sunlight until it sprouts, and then to plant it in the garden, carton and all, and send Sophia back to kindy with a photograph of the glorious meter high sunflower that will inevitably follow.

This made me nervous. Plants and I don't have a good history. Ok, I'll be honest, never once has there been a plant under my care that has lived. So I put in an extra effort with this one, determined for my child not to be the only one without a photo. There was just one teensy little day where I forgot to water it and it stopped growing. Just like that. My efforts to resuscitate proved fruitless.

It is clear that the egg carton thing is too much of a challenge for me. So...Sophia and I made a trip to Mitre10Mega and picked up some of those super cool little plantable pots with the dehydrated soil pellets. Just add water, stick the seed in, let it grow a bit then bury the whole pot in the planter box. Right? I think I can do that. (Besides, any gardening product called 'Jiffy Easy' must be made for me.)

Sophia got to wield her gardening tools for the first time (gifted to her by this beautiful green-fingered friend), which was very exciting. They were all for show of course. We got a little carried away.

And I am now no longer only responsible for the raising of a sunflower, but for cornflowers and lupin and sweet william and pink paper daisy, snow peas, sweet peas and sugar snap peas...

...yes, we are challenging ourselves...

...and I am envisioning a planter box or two positively bursting with colourful blooms by spring. ;)

For the little chalkboard signs I painted a couple of plastic chopping mats (from the $2 shop) with blackboard paint. Once they dried I chopped them up into rectangles and hot glue-gunned them on to popsicle sticks. Unnecessary but cute. We like cute. (Note: I recommend doing this first so that you can label the pots as you stick the seeds in the dirt.)

So for now our pots line the window sill and we have watered them daily. A good start I think. Will let you know how we go. ;)

x