Growing An Organic Vegetable Garden (Part 1 : Preparing to plant the seeds)

Today I was a bit grumpy. We woke up late, so I didn't get my morning coffee, and I had a killer of a headache.

Unfortunately this meant that I got a bit cross about the lack of things being ticked off my 'to do' list, the main reason being that everything takes SO much longer when you have kids....especially if they want to "help" all the time.

Take for instance the task of planting of some seeds for our vegetable garden. We collected empty toilet rolls to house the seeds in last week. I wanted to put the seed raising mix in them on Friday. Corben wanted to line them up, knock them down, then line them up again....

Today I decided that we really should plant the seeds. Guess what? Half of the toilet rolls were missing *sigh*. While I caught up on my morning coffee's, Corben found the missing toilet rolls and began putting them into our tupperware container. Forty minutes later...it was done:


Next began the task of filling each toilet roll up with a potting mix formulated especially for seeds. Lexi sat and supervised from her highchair, while Corben scooped the potting mix out of a bucket with a spoon. I tried to help, but my application to assist was declined:


Then the baby kept dropping the toys she was playing with, so her brother would hop down off his chair and get them for her. This cycle occurred every 3 to 4 minutes and took roughly 45 seconds to complete (mind you, it was SUPER cute). Despite these interruptions, the task of filling up the toilet rolls was complete almost an hour and a half later:


Since we had to go to an appointment and pick up Matty from work, nothing further got done. So tomorrow we will pick up where we left off and plant and label the seeds (I hope).

Pre-kids I would have busted the whole task out in under 20 minutes, but I try to be thankful for the times where he is interested in helping me do things. One day, in the not too distant future, it won't be cool for him to hang out with his mum learning how to bake, sew or garden and I don't want to wish that I had slowed down and enjoyed these things.

Sure, not much gets done on the 'to-do' list, but the quality time we spend together is so much more important than a list!