Lending a Helping Paw

We have many wonderful adventures with our human guardians, Polar and Grizzly, so we try to be good and helpful bears when we are at home. 

One of the ways we can help is by gardening.  We love to explore and to play in the garden, climbing the shrubs, smelling the flowers and looking for interesting things in the pond, so it seems only fair to help to look after it.  Last weekend, Hanley Bear found frogspawn in the pond.

We know that there is serious work to be done when Polar gets her big boots out.  These are so big that a small bear could make a den inside one!  This time, Polar had some early potatoes to plant in one of the vegetable beds. 

'Let us help!' cried Endon, who loves to eat potatoes, especially scrummy little new ones. 

'Okay, bears,' said Polar.  'It'll be quite hard work, as we need ten deep holes to put them in and you only have little tools to dig with.'

'I have an idea!' I said.  I asked Polar to fetch the bulb planter from the greenhouse and pushed it into the ground where we wanted the first potato planted. 



It was very hard work for a small bear and it was even harder pulling it back out of the ground.  Hanley and Endon came to help and, after much huffing, puffing and pulling, we had our first potato planted.

Then we had to squeeze the bulb planter to get the soil plug to drop out of it, which took all three of us using all our might again.

'Poor little bears!' said Polar, seeing how out of breath we were.  'That's very heavy work for you.  Why don't I make the holes, then you can roll the potatoes in and use your little fork and spade to cover them over?'

This sounded like a much better idea.  Soon, we had all the potatoes planted and could have fun exploring again.

Polar put some netted frames that Grizzly had made over the potato patch, to stop naughty cats digging in it.  One of these made a very good small bear trampoline!  We did lots of bouncing and kept jumping until we were too tired to jump any more.

We went to check on Polar's nursery of spare plants.  'Some of these might be for the Secret Garden at work,' I told the other bears.  We hope to see it one day soon

When we went into the greenhouse, we found lots of pots to sort out and to clean.  We know this is a boring job Polar hates and were going to make a start on sorting them for her, when Grizzly came to fetch us.

'We're going to the allotment now,' he said.  'There are more potatoes to plant down there, and some onions.  Would you like to come along?'

'Yay!' we cheered, and we jumped into the big trug.  When we arrived, the small bears ran up the path to check on the garlic we had planted.

'It's taller than us!' Hanley Bear announced.  'And it's still very smelly!'

The onions were rather smelly too but, as they didn't have to be planted too deeply, I said I would take care of that while the smaller bears helped plant potatoes again.  I made some neat rows across a bed which Polar had raked ready, then started spacing out the onions in them.

There were a lot more in the bag than I had expected.  Even after I had planted a whole bed of them, I had enough left for four more rows.

'I'll plant those, Sonning,' said Polar.  'You've been such a good bear but you've done enough for one day.  Come and sit down by the shed and have a nice, cool drink of water.'

Hanley and Endon had been busy too, helping Polar and Grizzly plant potatoes.  There was only one job left to do, which was to put rotted horse manure on the beds.  We left that to Polar and Grizzly, as we can't push the big wheelbarrow and we knew we would need baths if we got the horse poo on us!

When we got home we had scones and rice pudding for tea, then settled down for a well-earned sleep, as we were due to go on another adventure the very next day.