Spring gardening

Hi friends!
A little while ago we were cleaning up the yard. I'm no gardener, but decided to get a few little cheapy buckets at Target to fill with soil and plant generic flowers that attract butterflies and hummingbirds. I punched a hole or few in the bottom of each bucket with an awl and away we went. The project was really for Paige...an activity that we could do together and she can watch her plants grow; and so far she enjoys checking out their progress each day.




Also, check out the cool gardening stuff my friend Sue (and Paige's Godmother) got/made for her as her birthday gift: pink rubber boots, pink gardening gloves in her size (!!!), pink metal gardening tools including watering can, a board book about "planting a rainbow", and she made a really cute canvas tool belt to hold all the tools. Isn't it neat?


We decided to give Paige her own "bit of earth" (sorry, I had to steal the lingo from The Secret Garden) so she could freely dig, and plant things without worrying about the layout or how it looked. It's her patch to do what she wants and muck around in. She's still not very interested in digging around or getting dirty in it yet but I'm sure it will change as she gets older. We put the area next to her playhouse to give it that cottage garden feel. hee hee! I'm thinking I'll let her pick out her own flower seeds to throw in there and see what happens. In another year or two we'll try carrots or something like that.





Paige enjoys her tools and likes watering her own plants. She seems to burst with pride when she gets to do things on her own, so lately I've been really trying to allow her to do as much as possible by herself. I intervene to show her how if she gets stuck; but I'm trying to let her figure things out on her own. She's even now obsessed with the book "All By Myself" by Mercer Mayer. She's definitely hitting the "I do it" time, so I want to be as encouraging as possible. My baby is growing!