Eye Grow: New Fun Gardening toy for kids!

You never know where you might find a fun garden-related item. I usually start looking at all of the garden centers this time of year to try to find a cure for my Spring Fever. Every once in a while you discover something when and where you're not even looking. This happened to me last weekend when my family went to Michael's craft store because my daughter was looking for something to use on her American Girl Doll website. That's where I found these cool little "Eye Grow" plants at Michael's.

The "heads" are actually a nylon mesh filled with soil. The top of head is contains ryegrass seeds that grow to become the hair.

These remind me of the Chia Pets a little, but I like these Eye Grows better. I think they are more fun for kids because they are pretty cheap and very colorful with big cartoon-like eyes. Each one comes with a sticker sheet of mouths so you can design the expression yourself.

I searched the Internet to find out more about them and found nothing. The company listed on the Eye Grow boxes is Sourcing International. When I searched for Sourcing International, all I found is a site about their Grow-A-Head products. Here is one of the pictures from that site, their grow-a-pets:

I've never seen these before. It's strange that they don't mention their Eye Grow products at all. I couldn't find any references to the eye-grow anywhere on the Internet.

I can't wait to start these growing. I am giving some of them to my niece and nephew, but I will post pictures of the ones we keep as soon as their grass hair has grown out. These are perfect for a little Winter gardening fun. A year or so ago, we had fun with the Magic Sproutz secret message plants in a similar way. Come to think of it, I haven't been able to find those again either.

So what do you think about the Eye Grow plants? Has anyone else seen these? Would you buy them if you saw them, or am I just a big kid for thinking they are cool? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Picking Carrots, Planting Potato Onions

Today was a beautiful Fall day here in Kentucky. I cut the grass for the last time this season and cleaned up sticks and leaves. I also was able to work on the greenhouse a bit more.

My younger daughter came outside about when I was finishing up and asked if there was any gardening that she could do. Of course there is always something to do in a four-season vegetable garden, so she got to work picking lettuce and carrots.

Then, together we got a growing bed ready by adding compost and turning the soil over. Here, she planted some more garlic and potato onions.

Not many people are familiar with potato onions. If you like onions and have never grown potato onions, I strogly suggest that you look for some to try. They are a bunching onion similar to shallots, but they actually produce round bulbs. Here is what they look like while they are growing.

Last year was the first time we grew them and they were great. We ate them just as we eat regular onions. They are even easier to grow than regular bulb onions. They are planted in the Fall, and sprout in the Spring about the same time that daffadils do. They aren't harvested until mid to late Summer. It is a long time from planting the bulbs to harvest, but other than watering, he gardener has nothing to do for them. The potato onions that we grew are an heirloom variety so any bulbs not eaten can be planted again in October for the following season. That is what we did today and I can hardly wait to harvest them next summer.

It is really great to see garlic and potato onions growing tall and green in early Spring. For our vegetable garden, that has become the official beginning of the new growing season. It'll be here before you know it.

Gardening, Children and Friends; A Winning Combination!

I have always loved seeing my daughters enjoying the garden. Recently they had some friends over and they all joined in the act. They picked and ate all of the ripe strawberries before I could even get the camera. Then they set out to pick the peas.

These were Maestro Peas and they were magnificent with eight to ten peas per pod!

After the girls filled their bowls with these plump pea pods, they retreated to their treehouse to shell the peas.

They had so much fun with it. They did not consider it work.

They were surprised how many peas they had ready for the kitchen by the time they finished.

We cooked them for supper that night and we all thought they were delicious except for one friend, and that was only because she didn't even try them!

It was really fun for me to watch them all enjoying the harvest!

My daughters are gardeners too!

I still have much to write about our visit to Baker Creek, but for the last two evenings my time was occupied with spring planting. The best part about it was that my daughters helped.

Tonight my 14 year old helped plant the third and final wave of the early tomatoes. We planted "Siletz" and "World's Earliest". It was a big help having someone help me remove the plants from the recycled CD spindle containers that they were planted in.

We put crushed egg shells in the planting holes to give the tomatoes added calcium.

My 11 year old daughter is great with a rake. Last night she worked up the soil in several of the existing raised beds.

I have different sized beds but I think my daughters like the 4'x4' beds the best. Just like Mel Bartholomew of Square Foot Gardening says, it is easy to reach any part of the bed from all sides. Here my daughters are planting green beans in one 4 foot by 4 foot bed:

Another great thing about raised beds is that you can sit or kneel in the grass and reach in to work the bed. Below my daughter is planting red onions next to the first early tomato batch. Onions are great companion plants for tomatoes.

Gardening with my daughters is great fun. I love when they want to help, but I never make them. When I was a kid, hoeing the garden was part of my chores and I hated it. It took me many years after that to actually like gardening. That is probably also why I don't like hoes (sorry Carol).

I want my daughters to enjoy gardening, and I think they do. They have grown up playing in the garden and helping as much or as little as they want. Now that they are getting older, when they do help, it helps a lot! Why this is great is not because more work gets done. This is great because it gives us some wonderful quality time to talk and be together in nature. I'll gladly take as much of that as possible, even if nothing we planted together grows at all.

Gardening with your children is a priceless gift indeed.

A Potato Green Thumb Sunday Update

Have you ever heard of growing potatoes in tires? You fill a tire full of garden soil and plant a few potatoes. After the plants get to be about two feet tall, you add another tire on top of the first one and fill more compost or soil around the potato plants up to the top of that tire. When the potato growth gets taller again, you add another tire and more dirt. I've seen people get up to five tires high! The potato plant amazingly makes more tubers along what was originally the above ground part of the plant.

Well, I don't have any extra tires to do this with and I think that would be a bit ugly anyway. However, the idea is a sound one so I am attempting to repeat the concept using boards to make my raised beds higher and higher.

I have Kennebec and Yukon Gold potatoes tightly spaced in the raised beds so I can do this. last year I tired this with some success, but the beds were too large. It takes a lot of extra soil to raise 20 square feet even one foot higher.

This year I planted them in beds 4 foot by 3 foot, and 4 foot by 2 foot, so I could more easily add more wood and soil to the beds. Unfortunately, that is STILL too big of an area.

By accident however, I discovered the perfect size bed for this technique - about 2 foot square.

My daughter planted only two seed potatoes in the corner of her garden bed. I then built up that portion of the bed with wood stakes and boards. As the potato plants keep getting taller, we will add another layer of boards and fill that in with more soil. By the time we are done, the "box" will be almost three feet tall.

What makes this even better than the tire idea is that we can take off some of the lower boards to harvest "new potatoes" any time we wish because the first tubers that are produced are at the bottom and as long as we keep making the box taller, the plant will keep producing!

Ironically, since I won't be capable of making my larger potato beds very high, my daughters 2x2 potato bed will out-produce my 4x3 beds. Next year we will make several small bed/boxes like hers. My daughter has really been teaching me about gardening this year without even trying. When it comes to these potatoes, good thing she has a green thumb!

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A Child's Garden for Green Thumb Sunday!

I haven't been very good at displaying a green thumb this spring, but my 10-year-old daughter has! I am very proud of how well she has done with her cool season garden bed. This year we built two 12x3 garden beds exclusively for her and her sister to work with. She decided that one bed would be for cool season veggies and the other for the warm season crops. Here is her beautiful cool-season bed:

On one end she planted broccoli and several kinds of leaf lettuce.

In the middle, she planted more leaf lettuce, head lettuce, spinach and garlic.

On the other end, she planted onions and more spinach and lettuce.

Also notice the two potato plants on the top right of the above picture. When we built the new raised bed for her, we dug some dirt out of the existing garden. The most fertile soil was from where we planted potatoes last year. While digging, my daughter found two of last year's potatoes, so she decided to stick them in her garden to see if they would grow. Of course with her green thumb, they are growing like crazy! Now we know where Sammy, her Guinea Pig gets her green thumb from!

We have already enjoyed eating salads from her garden. It has been great because she has at least five different types of lettuce and spinach. I am so glad that she planted this cool-season garden, because I didn't plant any spring lettuce or broccoli. I was much too busy working on building our deck. By the way, it is getting closer to being finished. The floor is done, so we were able to put the furniture out.

But this post is NOT about the deck, it is about my 10-year-old Green Thumb Daughter. My other daughter has a pretty good green thumb too. She planted a whole bed of flowers in the main garden but they are all still very small. I'm sure I will have beautiful pictures of it to post in about a month. It's nice having good gardeners for daughters to pick up the slack for ol' dad.

Happy Green Thumb Sunday, and have a great Memorial Day!

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Magic Sproutz For Green Thumb Sunday!

I have written several times before about The Spinmaster Magic Sproutz Secret Fortunes plants. We have just grown two more of them and our new fortunes are "Adventures Await", and "Long Live".

The symbols on the other side are a sun and a horseshoe. If those secret fortunes are referring to the garden this year, I like them! Adventures, long life, luck and plenty of sunshine - sounds like a winner!

My family enjoys these Secret Fortunes plants but I would like to find some of the new Disney Magic Bean Message Plants. Has anyone seen these?

They appear to be just like the Secret Fortunes Plants, but the cans have Disney characters like Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh on them. You also get to pick the message ahead of time. Messages are things like, "I Love You", "Thank You" and "Happy Birthday" so you can give them as gifts.

I have not seen them in person. Robin commented on one of my Magic Sproutz posts about them. She found a website in Hong Kong called Sun's Collection selling them. That's where I got the above pictures. Does anyone know if these are available in the United States?

These Spin Master Magic Sproutz products sure are mysterious. They are very hard to find in stores, and there is not a lot of information online. That is why I keep bringing them up. People are contacting me with questions about them, but I don't really know much. All I know is that my daughters gave me one last year as a gift and we really liked it. We then found them again later for $1.00 each at Walmart in the discount toy bin.

These really are neat little novelty plants. As far as I could find out, the plant is called Jack Bean or Sword Bean, which is also called the Chickasaw Lima bean, Brazilian broad bean and other names. These are cool, but why are they hard to find?

Here's the beef with these products as I see it; They are marketed as toys! Spinmaster Company, if you are reading this, please understand that you are missing a huge market by not showing these to us gardeners! We are the ones that can appreciate them. Our kids are the ones who would want these, not regular kids that happen to see them at Wal-Mart or Dollar General while they are looking for their favorite action figure. You need to put them on the shelf next to potting soils and seed trays at all the box stores where we spend insane amounts of money this time of year because we just can't wait to get our hands dirty and plant something!

These Magic Sproutz products, especially the Disney Magic Beans, need to be put right next to the Jiffy Kid seed cups. Have you seen those? My kids just had to get one of each kind:

These Jiffy cups are just a peat pot with a soil disc and a seed! Not near as cool as the Magic Sproutz Secret Fortunes. They need to be more readily available. Sorry about the rant. Do you agree with me?

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Let Your Kids Help in The Garden

It is a great idea to let your children help you in the garden. I used to be a perfectionist and resist the help of a little one because things would not be done exactly right. Now I see that it is worth losing a seedling or two to have your children by your side in the garden. Even if they only help in small ways, they begin to understand how plants grow. They get to be part of something bigger than themselves. They marval at God's workmanship in every step.

So far, my daughters have been able to enjoy watching broccoli, lettuce and peas grow from seed to harvest. As for the tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, beans and everything else, they now want to check on the progress almost daily and notice even small changes in growth. Because of my girls, we have planted more vegetables than I originally planned. Every time they want to plant something new, we find a little more space. They recently planted corn and green beans.

I know it is kind of late in the year to be sowing seeds, but as long as we don't have a very early frost, they will make it. This weekend they will be planting pumpkins and gourds. We don't really have enough room in the garden for such space hogs, but by being a little creative I think we can manage. I will save the details for a future post.

The bottom line is that gardening is a great family activity. Our family is having a great time and learning a lot together. If you have a garden of any kind, I encourage you to involve your children in the tasks needed. As long as you can get them to see it as fun as well as work, they will want to visit the garden again and again!