Our gardening dream - a sorry tale of slugs, snails and other disasters. (Children's Vegetable Patio Planter Pack)

Member Name: azana

Product:	Children's Vegetable Patio Planter Pack
Date:	22/06/09 (62 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheapish and no assembly

Disadvantages: I am rubbish at gardening

At the start of every Spring, or what I believe gardeners call "the growing season", for some reason I convince myself that this will be the year that we will dine on an abundance of home-grown vegetables. I have visions of my rosy-cheeked cherubic children picking their own carrots and courgetttes and begging to eat them, I buy into the gardening dream.

This year it appears that my annual gardening ideal was very much "du jour". With the BBC giving away free seeds via their website, and a myriad of articles talking about how growing-your-own was "back", it seemed I was not alone in wanting green fingers and to encourage my children to grow and eat something.

This lead me to purchase this pack for £15 from my local Garden Centre, it is also available at www.greenfingers.com for the same price.

The planters come flat-packed in a plastic bag, there are three of them in all of different dimensions - (Small 35x45cm high. Medium 40x30cm high. Large 45x25 high). You also get instructions, and will need to buy a couple of bags of compost before you get planting, despite being small you need quite a volume of compost to fill these - the exact amount in litres was on the packaging.

These planters are of ideal size to go on a patio or in a small garden. They are made of polyethelene, which is quite thick, and don't require any more preparation other than getting them out of the packet and filling them with compost. The polyethelene has a kind of web inlay so it won't tear.

This we managed fine, though I would advise putting the planters where you want them to be before you fill them with earth as they are suprisingly heavy once filled. As you may have guessed we found this out after the event - luckily the planters have very well sewn on handles so we were able to reposition with a little bit of effort on my part.

Once filled with plants or seeds, the planters have drainage holes so you can water them and give your vegetables a fighting chance of growing. There are also some instructions and ideas of what to plant - perhaps I should have followed these rather than going with letting the kids plant what they wanted, but nevermind at least this approach was more spontaneous if fatally flawed.

We planted our planters with potatoes, in the large tub, and to start with a positive these worked well, we have a crop of potatoes, ok so not enough to feed huge numbers of people but some at least.

Apart from that our end results are absolutely nothing like those on the picture above - the planters and soil are identical but due to our poor gardening skills coupled with regular invasions of slugs, snails and rabbits of late, we certainly don't have the abundance of crops pictured. We have had one crop of Rocket, about two carrots and some strawberry plants that look like they might produce a whole strawberry -possibly.

This is no criticism of the planters themselves which have held up to the rigours of the English weather and regular assaults by watering can-wielding small children quite well. The blue has faded a little in the sun that we have had so far this year, but I am pretty sure these planters will go on to see us through another season of disappointment next year.

I think that it is great to try and grow something with children, they really love having a go even with the mediocre results you might achieve if you are anything like us. These planters would fit well into a garden of any size and can be packed away after use. They are fairly innocuous to look at - the blue (pictured) is not too bright and there are inspirational, if inaccurate in our case, pictures of vegetables on each planter.

I would recommend these planters as an alternative to pots or wooden planters which are much more expensive, I just hope you get better results than us! The same company also produce a range of less child-orientated planters for strawberries, herbs and other vegetables. Recommended, unlike eating my pitiful carrots and strawberry.

Summary: Some planters to help you and your kids grow things - possibly