The Beach

We took a trip to the beach yesterday, it was a lovely day. We had a picnic on the beach, the Chicken Child discovered a fondness for chili olives and also found he was able to eat black olives with stones in! He carefully chews the olive and spits out the stone, I feel VERY proud!

Enjoying a banana muffin

Mama and Chicken Child

This week the hens have been laying some fantastically odd eggs. On the left is one of our usual eggs, so large they do not fit into 'jumbo' egg boxes! Second from right is a near perfect sphere. We don't know who is laying them, but they're keeping us amused. Chicken Child laughs when he sees them and so we regularly look at the 'funny little eggs'.

New addition to The Children's Garden

We had a lovely day in the sun, this fantastic weather has made us want to be outside all the time! Today we were busy making a growing area. I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do and after some dithering we settled on an area towards the bottom. 

Children love dens and a space to call their own, so a 'room' was required.

This is the Children's Garden, on the right is the swing and at the far end you can see the jumping mound.

 Here is The Chicken Child washing his car. He takes great pride in a clean car and spends alot of time making sure it's 'just so'!

We began by setting out bamboo canes to create a frame for our runner beans and nasturtiums to grow up. We then wove string between the poles to make zig-zags and spiderwebs.

Here CC brings a tray of pots to add to his new growing area.

We gathered small pots, a large pot of compost, CC's miniture gardening tools and part of a mini poly-tunnel to create a 'greenhouse' within the growing area. 
I dug a bed for the runner beans and nasturtiums at the base of the canes. We will sow these in pots on Wednesday when our friends come to play and plant them out once they've had a head start on the slugs!

Sowing seeds in the new growing area

The Children's Garden

Being a mother and childminder I need to keep an area of the garden just for play! Dadar and I created a safe area within our large garden by fencing it of from the veg patch, greenhouse, chickens etc. We erected a swing (which was being thrown out by my Mum's neighbour!) but that was it for a while.

The Chicken Child has lots of outside toys including a fantastic tipi (a Christmas present from Grandma) and a Little Tykes car (a Birthday present from Grandpa).

The children's garden was alright, safe, but a bit boring. I bought a large, shallow trug and filled that with sand. Next I created a digging area by removing some turf, this was instant success with CC and all his friends love to dig and get messy when they come over. It's now baked solid thanks to all this hot weather we've been having so tomorrow I will have to address this! I Found this great example of a digging/growing area and will be taking some ideas from there.

I created a jumping mound, this was also instantly loved. The children use it exactly as I thought they would, with imagination! One moment they're climbing and jumping, the next they are sliding. Sometimes it's a horse others it's a castle, an 8yr old I care for saw it and decided it was a trench! He's been studying the World Wars and is a tad obsessed at the moment.

I would like to make the area more interesting and so over the next week I will be;

• exploring different ways of breaking up the space
• creating shelters, dens and hiding places
• developing a growing area and other points of interest.

Pictures to follow!