This page is going to be devoted to my latest hobby, the garden. I am not a gardener; I have to look to my husband for that! He is the one who sometimes has to lure me out of my shell and coax me into the garden to plant seeds, take pictures, pick salad or simply to sit in the sun (or being Scotland rain, sleet, light cloud, rain again and bursts of sun…).
Planning is something you are supposed to do with a garden. I confess the only plan I had was to grow things that you couldn’t normally buy in supermarkets. Among my first ideas were:
Yellow Courgettes, different types of basil (lemon, lime, Thai, Purple…), yellow tomatoes, stripy tomatoes, purple spring onions…
We bought a couple of trays of salad plants from B and Q and to be honest I was not hopeful. When we put them into the vegetable patch they looked too small and pathetic to survive. But I have to eat my words, they have grown very large! Their taste surprised me – I thought home grown salad wouldn’t be all that different from the salad you can get in plastic from a supermarket, but I was wrong. The taste is stronger, fresher somehow.
It is quite surprising the amount of people that have mentioned ‘The Good Life’ since my husband and I started growing some of our own food. Whilst being self-sufficient has some appeal it isn’t the aim.
The main aim is to enjoy growing things. I think we have succeeded in that. The day the first little chilli seedlings that appeared in the foil ‘pocket garden’ I knew I would enjoy sowing seeds and seeing them grow.
The second aim is currently twofold: 1. to grow things that are not usually available in the supermarket. This is partially accomplished. I have a number of unusual chillies growing in the greenhouse that I don’t usually see on sale elsewhere, also my first round courgette has appeared. I have got tomatoes growing some yellow, some stripy. I have since discovered seed for more unusual varieties of tomato: sausage shaped ones, sausage shaped ones with stripes! I have discovered a place where I can get saffron crocus bulbs. I suppose ‘unusual things’ isn’t quite correct. Perhaps I should say unusual varieties of ‘normal’ fruit and vegetables. For example I have found purple carrots, yellow courgettes, blue potatoes. The search continues…
Part B was to grow things that are advertised as being ‘easy to grow’. This is my first time planting things and pretending to be a gardener. I don’t want to be put off by my fruit and veg failing to grow. I have learned that courgettes are very easy to grow! It’s stopping them turning into marrows that is the hard part…
Today I planted some kale, perpetual spinach and some more climbing beans. I am keeping my fingers crossed and hoping these will come up.
So it is ‘The Good Life’? It is interesting to find out just how many people do grow their own vegetables especially when you start talking about it. I have been asked to bring into work a purple carrot and a round courgette, mainly because they’d never heard of them before! But lets face it, who wants a boring orange carrot when you can have a purple carrot!
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I think that growing your own food is, as with doing all things yourself (be it making bread, knitting / sewing clothes, doing DIY), incredibly satisfying. It may not be self-sufficiency a la Good Life, but it is taking that little step and saying “I don’t need to depend on the supermarkets to feed me.” And, of course, those unusual ones are even better!
Plus the satisfaction of being able to continually pick food once it has started growing is just wonderful – the spinach particularly should last you for ages
(when I grew it on my allotment, it lasted all summer, with at least two meals of spinach a week; over here, it didn’t last as long before it died, but then I only had three plants actually survive the seedling stage, and we still had well over two months of at least one spinach meal a week)