Nature and Nuture

Our solar tunnel (a slightly more sophisticated polytunnel) is finally up – accompanied by lots more swearing - and should be put into production within the next week or two. It’s stonkingly hot in there on a sunny day (of which today it isn’t – raining but gallingly hot in Dover apparently – sigh) so we’ll maybe try melons this year. We have tomato plants galore as the boys wanted to help plant the seeds and got carried away – it’s amazing how big a ‘pinch’ of seeds is from a 5 and 3 year olds hands!!!! Just as well actually as Rowan ate an entire punnet of tomatoes for his breakfast yesterday. He has big plans to make his own tomato sauce this year, Jamie Oliver style. They are both keen vegetable growers and eaters - thank goodness on the eating side, oh goodness on the growing side. Gardening jobs seem to take twice as long when you have ‘helpers’. They want to set up observation tanks (read ‘water bottles’) for worms and caterpillars – obviously not burying the caterpillars in with the worms, nor indeed burying them atall. Last weekend they had a soil pest (the long white one with the orange head – yuk) under the microscope linked to the computer and scared themselves when it moved on the screen. Then they decided to just do a soil sample so now there’s mud all over the computer desk – sigh.