I’m working with innocent as a Sow & Grow UK Ambassador from February to April 2017. Follow the tag #SowandGrowUK for updates #sp
The sun is shining and we’ve officially leaped into spring! It’s the perfect time to start planting seeds and bulbs and if you’ve been following my #SowandGrowUK blog posts and updates, you’ll see that we’ve been busy on this front already. The cress seeds have grown and have mostly been eaten, the carrot tops are growing taller each day and the green beans are almost reaching the sky! This week also marks National Gardening Week, so if you’re still looking for a reason to don those gardening gloves, I’m hoping this post will inspire you to get growing at home, too.
An update on our Sow and Grow UK growing pots
As you may remember, we started the innocent and Grow It Yourself (GIY) Sow and Grow campaign back in March, when we received a pack of goodies which included a growing guide, a few Sow and Grow compostable cups, a bag of compost and three packets of seeds – cress, baby carrot seeds and green beans.
The children and I threw ourselves straight into the project and started off by planting the seeds (according to the instructions) straight into the Sow and Grow cups. We kept the cups indoors and watered them regularly. We’ve already made some recipes with the cress, including these Salmon, Egg and Cress Open Sandwiches. We’ve also re-planted our beans into a larger pot, adding more compost and a cone trainer. And we’ve continued to water our carrot seeds in the compostable cups, which also grown a little bit more, albeit at a slower pace than the cress or beans.
In the last couple of weeks, the green beans have really shot up and we’ve now added some bamboo sticks to our training cone, as the beans outgrew the cone! We also visited the beans growing at Grandma’s house over the Easter holidays, which are also growing super tall.
We’re still waiting for any beans to appear.
We’ve thinned out the baby carrots (by pulling out some of the tops) to make some more room for our baby carrots to grow. By the time you read our next update, we hope to have planted out the carrots into a raised bed in the garden and we’ll probably be able to move the green beans outdoors too.
So far so good. Keep watching!
Beans in a pot, with a training cone and additional bamboo sticks and our baby carrots.
National Gardening Week 2017
This week it’s National Gardening Week and we’ve started to think about where to put our new raised bed. We have an area at the end of the garden which gets quite a bit of sun, so we think we’ll build a small raised bed to start with there. In the meantime, we found a ceramic pot outside, with an old root within it which wasn’t doing very much, so we decided use our newly acquired sow and grow skills to plant some of our favourite outdoor herbs in the pot instead.
My 7 year-old remembered all the steps we took when we planted the cress and beans and simply did the same but in a bigger pot. I explained how someone had already started growing the herbs that we found in little pots at the garden centre, and that we could simply bed them in by taking them out of their pots and putting them into some fresh compost. Elena said that she liked this sort of short-cut and she’s excited to see how the herbs continue to grow.
We’re looking forward to adding some of our herbs to our recipes, soon, whilst we continue to wait for our beans and carrots to grow.
A visit to Fruit Towers to meet the innocent team
Ever wondered what happens when you ring the bananaphone? We did, so we rang to arrange a tour innocent’s headquarters in London, known as Fruit Towers. The children were excited to see where their favourite innocent smoothies and fruit juices are developed, as well hearing more about innocent coconut water and innocent fruit bubbles, and in turn we were able to give the innocent team a personal account of our Sow and Grow success so far!
We were all particularly impressed with Fruit Towers and we loved the fact that innocent have been able to bring so much of the outdoors inside – with plenty of indoor plants, a roof top garden, fresh air time (an alarm sounds when it’s time to open the windows!) grass-green smoothie vans and even a mock grass carpet throughout all fives floors of the innocent offices! Plus they have a fun communal area for eating, meeting and playing table football.
It was also wonderful to be able to hear about how innocent themselves have grown in order to become the UK and Europe’s biggest smoothie brand with products available in 15 different countries, whilst being environmentally friendly (they are working towards making Fruit Towers completely paperless soon) and super forward-thinking. All of the ingredients that go into innocent smoothies are sourced sustainably and 10% of the company profits go straight to charity. We also loved hearing more about the innocent ‘big knit’ project (with Age UK) where 25p is donated for each smoothie sold with a little woolly hat on! We also loved the innocent heaven wall – where all the retired smoothies and products go!
So, it’s definitely been a busy few weeks for us. We’re looking forward to the Easter weekend now and are already planning our next little sow and grow project.
Is your school signed up? If so then upload your photos at https://innocentsowandgrow.com/ to be in with the chance to win monthly prizes from innocent and see your classroom crowned as Sow & Grow champions!
Following the repackage of innocent kids drinks, consumers can also win seed packs by following the instructions on pack. Available nationwide now in most major supermarkets. Good luck!
Come back and see how are seeds are doing in a few weeks’ time or follow our updates on Instagram:
Look out for the hashtag #SowandGrowUK
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#ad I have been compensated for writing this post. All opinions are my own.