My Fairy Garden Review -Fairy Kitchen Garden

We are very much into gardening and growing at the moment with the summer on its way.  I have been keen to find ways to introduce my youngest daughter Florence to gardening, with adult supervision. Florence is already starting to role play and understand magic a little and gets very excited when we talk about fairies, especially as the tooth fairy has just visited her brother for the first time!  *We were kindly sent the My Fairy Garden Fairy Kitchen Garden to review from Interplay*.  There are also other garden range kits to collect such as the unicorn garden or the magic bean pot and I’m impressed that you can join the My Fairy Garden club to receive seeds in the post and a fairy letter.  This is something that we will be signing up for.

Review

The My Fairy Garden kit comes with a planter box, cute picket fencing, a house to assemble,  pea seeds and (the important bit) a little fairy.   Together we easily assembled the kitchen garden, by slotting together a few parts.  Florence then filled the planter with soil and placed the fairy house and fairy in the garden.  The microgreen pea seeds need soaking for at least 6 hours in a cup of water.  Florence placed them all in the water cup with my help. We then  planted the pea seeds in the garden roughly 2cm apart.  We are now on microgreen watch and are looking forward to having them with our summer salads.

Pros

• We will have some delicious salad greens to eat with sandwiches and salads.  I’m hopeful that they will be more enticed to eat their greens which are packed full of nutrients and vitamins because Florence made them for the family.
• It really engaged Florence’s attention and we had some quality time together.
• It encourages use of fine motor skills in handling the pea seeds which are the right size for little fingers to grip.
• It’s a great introduction to gardening with little space needed.  It’s something that Florence can call her own little garden.
• You still have half the seeds to replant and you can re-use the kit over and over again
• You could always gift this kit to an older child who is wanting to do this independently.
• It encourages patience, waiting for your greens to grow.  In an age of instant gratification I think patience is a really important lesson to learn.
• It would make a perfect Birthday or Christmas gift as it’s an affordable price for gifts.
• Finally it’s a really pretty addition to a window sill or garden.

Cons

• There were a couple of small plastic packaging bits that I don’t think are essential to the kit.  So if they could re-think a small part of their packaging that would be great!  That said, the overall box can be recycled as it’s made from cardboard.

Tips

Finally a couple of tips

• Start making the kit earlier in the day, so after 6 hours of soaking the pea seeds you can finish the garden.  Or alternatively soak the pea seeds overnight (no longer than 24 hours)
• Put the cup with the pea seeds soaking out of reach of little hands to prevent losing and spilling the pea seeds whilst they wait. Florence was eager to keep checking so having them out of reach meant I could supervise the checking of the seeds soaking.

So I hope that this review is helpful to anyone thinking of purchasing this My Fairy Garden kitchen garden kit. As always my views on a gifted product are my own honest thoughts and opinions. I do really recommend this kit as a great fun way to introduce gardening and some magic into children’s play.