GARDENING | Growing Tomatoes

One of my Nanny kids is a huge lover of cherry tomatoes. To the point that she will quite happily just much on a couple as a snack or have as a side with a sandwich. We've really been lucky with her as she has always been a good eater and is willing to give anything new a try. She does have her favourites (weetbix, vegemite on toast, peanut butter sandwiches, etc) but she also loves her fruit and veg. So naturally, I want to keep fostering this love for all kinds of food as do her parents.

With her about to become a big sister in July, I've been thinking about all the activities that I wanted to start introducing so that she feels like she's getting enough attention while Mum is home on maternity leave. By pure chance, I was in Bunnings (looking for the bar light globes for our kitchen) when I walked down one of the isles and discovered their gardening kits. Or more importantly, I found Mr. Fothergill's gardening kits.

These kits are amazing. They retail for $10.48AUD and they come with everything in it that you need to plant whatever you want to plant. The pot is a decent size, like those black plastic pots that you see a lot of the flowers they sell at bunnings come in. It also has a little tray to catch the water so it doesn't spill everywhere.

On the back is a full set of instructions, so if you are new or lack a green thumb (like myself) you have all the information on hand about what you are going to grow. It covers how deep to plant them, the amount of sun they're going to need, how long it's going to take before you see sprouts and how long it will take for you to get your tomatoes. The last two are very important as it means that as an adult I can keep her interest on the tomatoes and have a roundabout idea of when we're going to start to see movement inside the pot.

When you take everything out of the packaging, it looks a bit like this. You'll have five disks of compacted dirt, a packet of seeds and the pot. What you're going to need to get is 5 1/2 cups of warm water, a bucket or large bowl to allow the disks to soak in and either a spade or, if you don't have a spade, large spoons to help put all the dirt inside. Take everything outside when you do this because it does get messy!

The slowest part about the whole process is waiting for the dirt to soak up all the water. It took five to ten minutes for the disks to finally break apart. Part of that was because I was concerned that just fully submerging the disks in water was going to end in slush more so than dirt so I added water in cup by cup. However, once the water was all soaked up, the dirt was easy to break apart and we were then able to move it into the pot.

Once the dirt was in the pot we got to planting the seeds and finding the perfect spot for them. We're heading into winter here in Sydney so making sure they didn't die because of the cold was very important. We eventually settled on the windowsill in the kitchen as the sun hit there most of the day and it meant that the seeds wouldn't get flooded if it rained. It was also the perfect place to allow my Nanny kid to check every day to see if anything was growing inside of it.

At the time of writing this, we don't have any sprouts just yet but I will keep you updated on how our first venture into tomato farming goes. You'll find all the updates on my instagram.

If you're interested in getting your own kit like this one you can find it at Bunnings in the seeds isle. If you want some more information on it you can find it here.

What I did notice when picking up this kit is that Mr. Fothergill has a couple other kits with strawberries and chili's, so if this goes well we may have to have a look into branching out in the warmer months.

Is there anything that you like to grow or would like to have a try at growing?