Loving our Garden

I have never been much of a gardener, and in all honesty have been pretty uninterested in becoming a gardener. That is, until we renovated our garden. Suddenly I really enjoy it! I don’t like weeding and I still don’t really know what I am doing but I do enjoy choosing plants and seeing them grow. Luckily hubs knows a bit more about gardening than I do so it is very much a joint effort.

Renovating our back garden was such a good decision as we spend a lot of time out there and it really is looking so lovely out there now. We just bought some beautiful new plants to inject some more colour and texture. We like to try and mix up things that flower at different times of year and are different colours to keep a nice bit of variety. (You can see the before and afters of the renovation here.)

garden aug 2015

Monkey loves the garden and he loves gardening too. He is great at watering the garden, with the hose or a watering can and he just loves to dig. We do have to stop him digging up plants as he can be a bit overenthusisastic sometimes! He loves helping though and is always happy to push bits around in his wheelbarrow too, little love!

Monkey Gardening

I’m also really proud of him as lately he has gotten so inquisitive with bugs and beasties that we find when gardening. He so so loved finding some wiggly worms when we were digging at the weekend.  just love seeing how happy he is to touch and explore them. He has picked up woodlice, ants, ladybirds and all sorts too.Monkey and worm

I’m proud of myself too as I hate all these things and don’t like touching them but I try really hard not to share my fear with him. I really don’t want him to learn to be scared of things because they scare me, if that makes sense.

We really enjoy all of our time outside together and hope we can continue to for many years, and get LM involved too when we are less concerned about her eating mud and worms :).

Do you like gardening with your kids?

My word of the week is gardening.

Country Kids from Coombe Mill Family Farm Holidays CornwallMy Bored ToddlerThe Reading ResidenceMammasaurus

Bug Hunting

Last weekend Monkey’s Auntie Ericha and Uncle Paul popped over with a surprise for Monkey – his very own magnifying glass and bug pot! I had thought about getting Monkey a magnifying glass for a while for our nature hunts, but hadn’t got round to it. I hadn’t thought about getting a bug pot though and it is fantastic, both went down a treat!

After showing Monkey how it all works the intrepid explorers headed out into the wild (of the back garden) to go bug hunting!

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They found a centipede, tiny snails, woodlice and a wiggly worm to inspect in the bug pot.

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It’s great because both hubs and I are a bit wimpy with bugs (especially spiders, I have a really irrational phobia as I am sure many people do) but we really don’t want to show Monkey our fears and make him scared of them too. So whenever he is around I have to stamp down my fears as much as possible. For example there was a HUGE moth flying around the conservatory the other day while we were in there and I was trying to let it out but it kept flying at me. I hate when things fly at me but was trying to keep calm and laugh it off in front of monkey, but when it flew at him it really freaked him out bless him!

Anyway, I digress, the point is that by encouraging Monkey to look at bugs without being scared, hopefully we can avoid passing our fears on to him. After bug hunting they “gently” put the bugs back where they live.

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Monkey had so much fun bug hunting so we will have to do it again, and the magnifying glass is a huge hit as he is inspecting everything with it bless him! Including a story at bedtime 🙂

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Country Kids from Coombe Mill Family Farm Holidays Cornwall

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