Me and my daughter

[Gforster]

Hi there everyone, I have joined this forum to help me and my 9 year old daughter with our new vegetable patch.

She will be doing most of the gardening initially as I will probably have to spend 6 months in hospital after removing 12 tonnes of concrete from the back garden in order to build the veg patch in the first place !!! (no really thats how much there was !) dedication to the cause and all that.

I am looking forward to talking to you all and hoping that we can get some top advice from all the experienced gardeners on here.

[terrier]

Hi Gforster and welcome to the forum. With 12 tons of concrete you've got plenty of hardcore for pathways and greenhouse/shed base.

[Gforster]

I was thinking about building a small estate around the corner to ease the housing crisis... once I have recovered !

[yoanbob]

Hello gforster what are you planting?
my two nephews (7 and 4) have their own veg bed on my plot they love it!
good luck with the housing project! lol

[Gforster]

As much as we can !

we have chitted some potatoes and are getting ready to plant them, and we have already put quite a lot of seeds into trays and into the mini greenhouse, currently we are trying :-

Broccoli
Parsnips
Cauliflower
Carrots
Peas
Beans
Tomatoes
Leeks
spring onions


We thought we would start with veg that we buy every week and experiment further from there but we are open to suggestions

[vicky]

Welcome!
I am also an owner of a 9 year old girl....She is in charge of the strawberry beds - especially in july!
Have you thought about cucumbers? They're pretty easy even without a greenhouse and taste totally different to shop bought ones, my daughter can eat a whole one in a single sitting!

[jackie j]

Hi and welcome i am also a newbie to this site and to growing veg. My daughter is nearly twelve and at first was quite excited when i got my allotment in September .She put lots of bulbs ( daffs etc ) in a small bed at the front of the Lottie they are really lovely, better than mine in the garden, but does she care No !!! She joins me occasionally and moans when she is there and cant wait to go home.
So good luck with your daughter just grow things that you both like and don't worry.
Hope you will recover quickly I am waiting to have manipulation to my shoulder under GA.

[Gforster]

I thought about cucumbers, we tried some last year in a grow bag and managed to get two really small ones. I think we didn't really look after them properly so maybe this year we will !

Do they take up much room ?

We will have to do them outside as we won't have a greenhouse until next year (got to finish the staging off).

[Gforster]

Hi and welcome i am also a newbie to this site and to growing veg. My daughter is nearly twelve and at first was quite excited when i got my allotment in September .She put lots of bulbs ( daffs etc ) in a small bed at the front of the Lottie they are really lovely, better than mine in the garden, but does she care No !!! She joins me occasionally and moans when she is there and cant wait to go home.

We are quite lucky in that our patch is in the garden and to be honest I too thought that her interest would dwindle too but when I came home from work on tuesday and found her in the garden in the pouring rain shoveling concrete debris into a wheelbarrow so as to help the building of the patch along, I knew that she was fairly serious about it.....

[peanut]

Hi Gforster

Welcome to the vine!
I always grow a few Cucumbers, Marketmore was the last one. They don't take up much room at all and can be grown either in the ground or in pots climbing up canes with string threaded through.

[Gforster]

Thinking about it this is where we went wrong, the cucumber last year grew out of the bag and "crept" along the floor, after a big of digging about and the last reply it seems that they are supposed to grow up along canes....

Well thats the biggest lesson I have learned so far...

[Eternal Sunshine]

Hi Gforster & Jackiej - welcome!

The only one of my children that's interested in the allotment is the 11 year old. She came with us to dig her own patch from the mess of weeds & piles of rubble on Good Friday. She carried on even though it was very cold & kept snowing! Last year she was only interested in building fires to burn the rubbish on our new plot, so maybe she's changed to wanting to grow things this year. Time will tell... For Easter I bought her some fruit bushes instead of an Easter egg & she didn't seem to mind.

Gforster, my eldest daughter has applied to go to Lancaster uni in Sept, so maybe you can build some student accomodation for her from all that rubble.

[Gforster]

Excellent !

Lancaster Uni is a brilliant place (went there myself and stayed !).

If she needs any advice regards the area let me know, I can give you my e-mail.

I will do my best to build some accomodation but I fear they would only convert it into another bar.....

[Eternal Sunshine]

Cheers - just have to see how she gets on in her A levels now (poor thing!)

[Lancs-lad]

Hi Eternal Sunshine

This is my first post on this site. I just spotted that you are in Preston and sharing the same weather conditions as myself. I am just up the road from you, in Garstang. We recently moved into a small bungalow with a small garden :-( . We left a four-acre smallholding with quite a large veg plot, on which I had a twenty foot polytunnel. I now have an 8' x 6' greenhouse.
The first week we were here I dug up the back lawn so now have somewhere to grow a small supply of fruit and veg :-)