Yes, here we are planting seeds with our winter coats on. Hopefully from here on out April feels like April, not January! Needless to say, we were eager to turn to this month’s Green Time from Ranger Rick Jr. without waiting for the weather to cooperate!

Ideally, you’ll have a plot of land in which you can truly plant vegetable seeds. Those of you who have followed this blog for a long time know that we used to only have a balcony, and how excited I was when we graduated to a patio with access to a small patch of grass. We still have no true yard, so our “garden” for this project is in a shoebox… which means likely our plants will crowd one another and not grow very tall. Still, I wanted Travis simply to enjoy fresh air and the tactile feeling of dirt and seeds, even if we don’t end up with edible veggies. If you have a real garden, please share your results in the comments!

So, back to our shoebox garden… First we needed to buy seeds. We headed to the garden store for one pack each of the magazine’s suggestions: tomatoes, beans, carrots, zucchini, and peas.

The first novelty for Travis was seeing the difference in size – pea seeds much bigger than tomato ones, for example.

Even mommy didn’t know what carrot seeds looked like!

We filled our shoebox with a nice layer of soil.

Next, we carefully dug a small hole for each veggie and placed two or three seeds in each hole.

Travis loved the planting, and patting the dirt back over the holes.

A little bit of water (which we’ll do each morning), and now we wait!

Travis had so much fun with it that I let him play indoors with the leftover bean seeds with his shovel and some old flower pots.

I’ll update this post if our veggies manage to sprout in their shoebox conditions!

Update: We have veggies! Travis is thrilled when we go out each morning now to water the plants, all of which our coming up – tiny zucchini leaves, tiny carrot tops, little bean curls… Exciting!