Do you remember the miserable Easter weekend? It was blowing a gale and *insert appropriate word here* down with rain outside. Well it was that weekend, Good Friday – 2nd April 2010 – that I took the plunge and planted the first thing since a carrot top on a saucer, runner bean on a piece of tissue paper and cress in half an egg shell. Yes, that was the day I caught the bug.
It had been around thirty (gulp) years since I’d grown anything successfully. Countless houseplants had ended up in the green recycling bin. Two compost bins sat outside in the garden with nothing much but grass clippings in them. Yet I had decided that this year I was going to start growing my own vegetables.
Now I’ve got a large garden (by my standards anyway). I’d let a quarter of it go fallow for the last two years. To be honest, there was so much stuff that had been deposited in the nine years we’ve lived here (tools, rockery rocks and top soil moved from one end of the garden to here etc.) that it was just too much trouble to shift it all to mow the darned area. So I claimed it was fallow. It was a butterfly meadow. It was a shady long grassed area where my two cats could hide and pretend to be their big cat cousins whilst unsuccessfully stalking the giant wood pigeon that would taunt them from the fence six feet above. It was anything other than a potential veggie patch.
I cut the dead grass with the lawn mower, sprayed a decent amount of weedkiller onto it, and then after a couple more weeks, when it was all dead, hired a bloody great Rotavator and dug the lot over. Hubby showed me how to rake, hoe and dig it properly, and then I prepped the soil as best I could. I was planning on using a two meter by six meter strip of it and plant everything else that I could in containers.
I had trolled through the many pages of eBay looking for anything that I could use as containers to plant things in. I found a really great supplier of plastic “trugs” or gorilla buckets if you prefer. Colourful and with the handles either side, easy to move. I cut or drilled holes with a hole cutter, added crocks and organic vegetable compost, and sowed carrots, turnips & onion sets.
Then I faithfully went outside every morning to check whether anything green was starting to show above the surface.
I cannot describe the immense happiness and satisfaction I felt when the first potato started to spout above the surface, closely followed by the turnips. The carrots seemed to take forever to start to show, almost three weeks later they eventually did peek above the soil.
On the same day I planted the potatoes, I planted courgette, French bean, butternut squash and cabbage seeds and sage, marigolds and nasturtium seeds as companion plants.
I can honestly say I’ve been bitten by the bug. Almost everything I’ve sown has come up strong and healthy, with the exception of some tomatoes and peppers – and I’ll admit I went out and bought ready grown plants, and then had my seedlings come up!
I have spent hours and hours ploughing through pages and pages of information on the internet and thoroughly enjoyed every second of it. I learnt that with tomato seedlings you plant the whole stem into the compost when potting on as the stem has the ability to produce roots, and that is what makes them strong and heatlhy. My first effort was tall and leggy after potting on, and fell over and died from the water pressure of a mist of water! Well my later seedlings are getting strong and big and I will have cherry tomatoes that I’ve grown from seed – I Will!
It will probably take years to break even on what I’ve spent starting up with this veg gardening mallarky, but having tasted my first harvest of cut and come again lettuce leaves last week, it’s worth every penny! I love this gardening mallarky. I didn’t think I’d do so well, but Hubby is so proud of me that it makes it all worth while (although if I worked out just how much I’d spent, he’d probably faint if I told him..lol!)
I’ve just planted my last two lots of seed potatoes for summer – Vales Sovereign and Sofia. I’ve got Lady Christl and Charlotte potatoes nearly ready, Red Magic and Blue Belle for a bit later on, and I found some Vivaldi seed potatoes which I’ve got planted. I fell in love with those when I bought them at the supermarket, but was loathed to pay nearly £2 for a small bag each time – I vowed to grow my own and darn it I am!
I will start again when the Christmas seed potatoes start to be sold later on this year. The thought of my own potatoes with Christmas dinner is wonderful.
I’ve been inspired by wonderful and helpful websites, and seed sellers and even by the old chap who delivered and collected the Rotavator from me, who is mostly retired but does one day a week to keep a bit of spending money in his pocket and keep him active and his wife from going mad (his words!).
I wait with anticipation for my first carrot, and my first handful of new potatoes.
