I'm not sure whether I've mentioned it before, but I embraced the "grow your own" philosophy this year, and since March I've worked hard in the garden to turn it from a muddy quagmire that I was too embarressed to let visitors into for a smoke, into a haven of lovelinees that can provide us with food and flowers, and be a venue for chilled out afternoons in the sun. It was very hard in the beginning, but it's been worth it I can promise you. I love sitting in my garden now and surveying my little kingdom.
And now it's yeilding actual food! How exciting is that! I have lots of little green tomatoes waiting for some sunshine to ripen them, a reasonable amount of strawberries from plants that I didn't expect to flower until next year, carrots, a host of spring onions, potatoes, lettuce, sweetcorn and enough brambles to keep us in pies and jam for a long time to come! I had some coriander too but the very hot weather recently caused it to go all leggy and flower so now it just looks nice in it's pot. Nothing wrong with looking nice! I've enjoyed having fresh cut flowers from my garden adorning my house too.
This year my intention was to learn from my mistakes, so that next year I could produce successful crops, so anything we get to eat this year is a bonus really. My biggest learning curve in this has been that everything grows much much bigger than I expected! Teeny tiny seeds grow into very large plants! So next year I will sow less and be more prepared to give them room to grow. And I need frogs and birds in my garden to deal with numbers of snails that would give me nightmares if I let myself think about it :shudder:! I lost a lot of my early efforts to the snails and now have to have a daily snail patrol. 6 months ago, if you'd told me I'd be picking snails up with my bare hands I'd have run screaming from the room. Now I just go out there and pick the litle sods of my gorgeous plants and hurl them away.
Dietgirl Shauna has been gardening too, and she has managed to come up with some clever reasons why gardening is like weight loss. This is why she has a book and I don't ;)
5 comments:
I am impressed. Very impressed. I am afraid I dont have green fingers
Ohmygosh! You just reminded me that once I wanted an allotment and was put off the thought because I wasn't fit enough. Hmm, maybe I just will now!
Well done on that fabulous gardening!
How cool! Maybe I will try this next year...
Carrots! Brambles! SWEETCORN! How cool. I can only imagine how good your own sweetcorn must be. Very very cool :)
Don't talk to me about snails - they use my garden to have their annual general meeting! Reminds me of the time I bought some of those slug pub things - you dig them into your flower bed with the top just sticking up and fill them with beer. The snails are attracted to the beer and then fall in and die. I hurried along to Sainsburys to buy some beer and they had some small bottles of French beer on offer at 17p each. So I bought a few bottles. The lady at the check-out commented on the cheapness of the beer and I said, "Yes, not bad, considering I only want them to give my snails." The look on her face was priceless!
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