How to grow your own vegetables

We were visiting another island to have our cats spayed and went to a local shop there.  They have so much more that we have in our little island shop!  We bought these cool educational tomato growing kits called "SUTTONS fun to grow" (have you ever wondered HOW does a tomato grow?).  Each Pot kit contains a peat pot, 'magic' compost black, seed and a fun facts sheet.

My sister and I are now happily growing our own tomatoes. 



It's not like we have not grown our own plants before, its just that these are set up so nicely and have a little educational pamphlet with them and they are really appealing because they are so cute.

Strangely enough the seeds in the little pot took longer to germinate than the extra seeds we put in a bigger pot under our own plastic lid.  They already germinated last  week, within a couple of days and today was the first day my one in the little pot germinated.

My sisters bigger pot germinated earlier and her little pot has not germinated yet.

They were both under the same conditions - each set being on our sunny bedroom windowsills.


Have a look at http://www.suttons-seeds.co.uk/ because thats the the address on the little yellow pot.

My parents have always grown their own vegetables, fruit and herbs because we used to have a small farm in Africa.  We learn as early as crawling and walking and talking the process of seed to seeding to product and then also havesting and storing the seeds we needed for the following year.  We learnt all about compost and earthworms, bees, butterflies, aphids and ladybirds.  We learnt about companion planting and the medicinal poroperties of plants and which plants were poisonous.  We grew up with herbal teas, homemade jams and fresh vegetables straight off the plant.  Our sunflowers used to grow taller than the house and the heads were bigger than dinner plates.  Our horses, bunnies and birds used to eat sunflowerseeds straight off the heads.  We grew our own mielies (Corn) and its delicious strait from the cob).  Its a wonderful way to grow up :D

Here of course the climate is different, so our efforts are not successful. The wind blows too hard even in the summer and we don't have a greenhouse or polytunnel yet.  Our vegetable and herb garden used to be bigger than our whole house and garden here and we used to have over 400 trees in our garden with lots of fruit trees and now we have none but its a good learning experience and we have all our past knowledge to build on.

For the past 3 years now we have germinated our seedlings indoors and then hardened off but had little results due to the huge amount of slugs, snails and of course the wind.

We are tweeking our system gradually so hopefully this year will be better.