***The random number generator picked: number 12, Amanda, who talked about her daughter eating tomatoes from the garden! Congratulations Amanda I will contact you shortly. And thanks to everyone else for sharing your wonderful memories! I so enjoyed reading your comments.
Spring is right around the corner and already I’m finding lots of rogue plants coming up in my garden from seeds I planted last year. This year I plan to plant in containers (I have no idea if my new place will have a backyard). While I was thinking about what to plant for myself I thought it would be fun if one of you readers could start a container garden as well, so I asked my sponsor Laura (the owner of Cubit’s) if she would do a seed pack giveaway, and she said yes. Cubit’s, for anyone who hasn’t come across this wonderful husband and wife run company, is a seed company specializing in organic heirloom seeds. They are the ultimate seed savers! You can read the interview I did here with Laura last year.
I thought about the seeds you could plant in containers that were easy to grow for beginners and kid friendly and I came up with the following bundle of 6 seed packs:
I have grown all of these veggies and herbs, many of them from Cubit’s, and they all work really well in containers and are really kid friendly as they are bright and colorful. I have yet to meet a three year old who has turned down a bite of a purple and orange carrot or a sweet-as-candy pear tomato. Each seed packet has easy to follow planting instructions on the back.
So, are you ready to plant?! All you need to do to enter the giveaway is leave a comment telling me your best or worst vegetable memory. I’ll pick a winner on Friday via random number generator and announce it here on this post, as well as on Facebook. Best of luck!
This year we will probably turn to containers, since we are between homes. My kiddos love their garden and do pick food from it all the time.
Love Cubits, actually just getting my seed order ready for them
Worst – broccoli, just too many bugs. Best – kale last summer it was amazing!
Ha! I just posted about our seed starting this weekend. And we were talking about growing more in containers this year as we have just two garden beds here.
In California cherry tomato plants popped up around the yard like weeds. I would let most of them go, of course. My little man, two yrs old at the time, loved to walk around the yard munching on the wee tomatos. Loved it!
Off to check out Cubit’s. Thanks KC!
Yum, those carrots look great! I grew some purple ones last year and they were good, but not as pretty as those. Last year, onions were a disaster……..but it was a great green bean year! Most of our squash was not so good, but we got a great crop of New England Pie pumpkins!
THis is cool, I am always trying to find clever ways to get my boy to eat veggies-purple carrots just might be the trick.
Worst memory- We moved to our new house and I had a planter that had some basil. The basil died, but I had a bunch of its seeds. I managed to plant some of the seeds and they started to come up really well. One weekend, I took in a stray dog and she dug up ALL of the baby basil. I wanted to cry.
Best memory- Its not really a memory, but a picture I found. When my grandpa passed away we were looking for pictures to find for his wake. He had the most amazing gardens. We found a picture of my mom standing in front of a house in downtown albuquerque; the entire front yard was the most amazing vegetable garden you could ever imagine. It belonged to my grandpas dad (So my great-grandpa). They didn’t have the space in the back so they grew their veggies in the front.
This year I am determined to have a nice veggie garden. I was thinking about trying containers this year because the dirt here is just so sandy.
I’ll be planting in containers this year as well as my raised bed. This would be perfect because I was planning on using the containers for radishes and carrots.
My garden last year was so disappointing. I’m hoping I can apply everything I learned last year so I can have a wonderfully productive garden this year.
Home grown tomatoes are my favorite. Except the ones I grew last year were pretty tasteless.
Vegetables, yum! Avocado are actually a fruit but my favorite memory is actually of them. My parents had a huge tree and every year we’d harvest hundreds and hundreds of them but this past season the tree had to be cut down! We’re so sad :/ but I have lots of happy memories of every thing we’d make with all the avocados.
No need to put me in the drawing because I was lucky enough to win last year.
Living in New England has been a huge change from my desert upbringing. Here, I’m battling mold, attempting to utilize every single bit of sun, and working to tame my habitual overwatering. The critters I encounter are also different from those desert dwellers that I remember from my childhood . One beautiful New England spring evening, we had some music playing while sipping beers and removing some pesky vines from our garden space. After the sun went down and we were cleaning up, I found the largest, most wildly patterned slug I had ever seen– in my beer glass. We giggled, took a photo, then soon learned that some people use beer to attract slugs out of their gardens. Who knew? Not this desert girl.
Yum! I’d say our worst was almost everything last year. With the extreme heat and my being super pregnant, we just couldn’t keep on top of things as well as we should have. My best luck came with our cucumbers though, those guys grew like wild and kept on giving and giving.
Best – our valentines day ‘love carrots’. We pulled some up for tea and had 2 intertwined. A truly hilarious and perfect moment.
Worst – utter devistation of the kale by white butterfly lava. Tears at bedtime!
My best memory is digging up a section of our backyard with my mom as a kid to plant a garden. It was a rectangle of goodness in the middle of our grassy backyard. I loved helping her out there, especially when the large hedge of lilacs were blooming nearby!
My favorite memory are all the summers helping my grandparents plant, sow, pick, and finally eat the bounty from the garden.
My best vegetable memory – my 1 year old just-beginning-solids, just-walking baby daughter, picking a whole big red ripe tomato off the vine and eating the entire thing in bites by herself with seeds dribbling down her front. I was worried she was going to choke but decided to just let her go at it to see what she would do. She ate every last bit of that tomato. She’s been that way about tomatoes ever since.
When I was a kid, I hated asparagus. We got it from my grandpa’s garden, and unfortunately the way we prepared it was still full of sand and cooked to a mush. My parents made us finish our veggies before dessert, and I have a terrible memory of slathering asparagus with honey in an effort to choke it down. It didn’t help at all! I love asparagus now, cooked the right way!
My best veggie memories are of picking carrots on my grandparents farm in Manitoba and rinsing them in the rain barrel before eating them. They were so sweet and crunchy. The soil on their property was so great for veggies. They always had HUGE veggie gardens that produced so much, we’d share with the neighbours. One neighbour rented out their back 5 acres to plant potatoes. Come harvest time, they’d bring in the machines to get the potatoes off the field. We’d go behind and hand pick all the nugget potatoes left behind. YUM! There is nothing more satisfying than eating food you’ve grown with your own two hands.
I too will be growing more in containers this year here in Minneapolis. Our peppers in pots did better than the peppers in the garden last year. Funny thing, I’ve always loved vegetables – even when I was a kid. I have more “worse” stories from growing them than eating them! Although I do remember the first time I bit into a raw turnip… YUCK! I spit it right out. But they are delicious steamed or fried, weird!
My worst garden memory, is the year our corn got a fungus! It was so horrible looking! Really disappointing to loose all our corn.Then I came to read that, it is actually eaten as a delicacy in some places!
I have so enjoyed reading all of your comments. Such wonderful stories thank you for sharing!
The best/worse memory of our vegetable garden was last spring at the moment (which is normal exciting because your plants are actual producing veggies) we realized that almost every plant we bought at the farmer’s market was the complete opposite of what we thought we bought. Talk about an interesting harvest.
I always start gardening enthusiastically, but never yield as much as I hope. Each year I try something new. I’m determined to grow veggies!