Gabrielle and Beth put their blue and yellow gumboots on and I put my big, black boots on. Gabrielle was playing 'Farmer Brown'!
We are going to plant our lettuce in old tyres. We have not painted the tyre yet, we still need to get special paint to paint them with.
On Sunday we bought six lettuce plants, two of each - 2 cos,2 red and 2 frilly.
We watched this YouTube video and realised we could also do that, even if only on a small scale for now! These people have planted lots of vegetables. They even have chickens and goats and they live on a small property in urban Pasadena, California. They live in the middle of a built up city, with a freeway nearby too! This inspired my mom to plant our own vegetables, although she has always wanted to do this anyway.
We planted the lettuce in tyres because we stay in a rented house and at any time we could move, leaving behind our good soil and vegetables. It is our family's goal to one day live on a smallholding where we can plant lots of vegetables and have our chickens, but we can't wait until 'one day' and hope we will live on a farm, we will probably never plant veggies then. We have to do what we can 'now' not sometime when we live on a bigger piece of land. We have to make a start and learn here, so that when and if we move to a bigger piece of land we would have made all our mistakes here and not waste time and money experimenting.
Unfortunately we found lots of fat, white, disgusting grubs in the compost we got from my granny and grandpa's house when we planted our lettuce. We took them out of the soil and laid them on the ground. Then Cody found them. It was so disgusting! He ate the grubs, no problem!
We found a spider and it's abdomen was half the size of it's body! We put it into a jar to show my dad. I will, from now on, always wear gardening gloves when I work in the soil! I don't want a spider bite from an ugly-looking spider like that! We found another spider, black this time, but just as scary!
We stuffed newspaper in the side of the tyre so that we would not waste soil filling up the hole. Newspaper decomposes, so it does not matter if you put that in.
We filled the tyre up with compost and seedling mix that we had bought a few weeks ago from the nursery in Noordhoek.
Each of us children got a turn to plant one lettuce plant. I planted a cos.
I am looking forward to the day when I can have lettuce leaves from OUR garden in my salad!
I will post pictures as soon as they grow bigger.
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