Gardening with Jamie Oliver : The Creation of a Greenhouse Herb Garden

I am not necessarily your typical consumer. I shy away from reward cards (unless I can link them to my frequent flyer card) and have resisted signing up for a Woolworths Rewards card. But I do have children and they, as most marketing teams know, make a beeline for a good promotion. We have collected the past two card releases from Woolworths with hesitation.

The new Woolworths launch of Jamie’s Garden Collectibles has been a real talking point in our house. We already grow a small amount of produce on our small suburban block, so the premise for this collection sat well with me on some level.  Whilst the accumulation of stickers for the book would only be successful by shopping at Woolworths, it is already our local supermarket so is no problem. Plus the stickers are fairly fabulous with both tactile and olfactory senses being utilised.

There are  128 stickers to collect, which at a minimum will cost your typical person $640.00 worth of shopping if they are lucky enough never to get a duplicate and  don’t buy any Jamie licensed food goods (which attract additional stickers). Fortunately we have grandparents who have been asked to collect these by their over enthusiastic grandchildren.

But let’s put that to the side for a moment and talk about how excited my children are about healthy food and gardening as a consequence of this initiative. They want to go shopping with me and they can label many of the different fresh food items as a result of the book (although I’m happy to suggest to others that it is simply my awesome parenting skills). For the last few weeks they have been asking to buy the Jamie’s Garden Greenhouse. For $10.00 I let them know that they were welcome to put their pocket money towards it. Guess what they bought this week!

Yes – we became the proud owners of our very own Greenhouse which I am happy to say is the perfect size for budding horticulturists. On a rainy afternoon we decided to unpack and build our greenhouse. Both kidlets were bubbling with energy and couldn’t wait to get started. Putting together the house was a little tricky for little fingers so I assisted them.

Once we had pieced it all together it was time to create the soil patch to plant our seeds. The kit comes with a wafer thin disc of soil which the instructions said would expand with the addition of water. We placed the disc in the garden bed and added 375ml of water and watched as it grew and grew – first gaining height and then expanding sideways.  Both kidlets then spread the soil around the garden bed before we started planting our 4 herb groups: chives, basil, coriander and garden cress. So many seeds – not enough holes! I’m looking forward to seeing how successful our garden turns out to be.

Over the next week we should see our cress grow. In the coming weeks the rest of our herbs should grow which we will add to our cooking! Stay tuned!

To grow your own Jamie Oliver Greenhouse simply head over to your local Woolworths or click here to source them online.

Read our progress –  Gardening with Jamie Oliver : Harvesting Our First Crop From Our Herb Greenhouse

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