I love gardening!

Some of our neighbours have an allotment and have started to put out an honesty box with surplus produce. So far we've had two large courgettes/small marrows and a bag of french beans. I love going past and seeing what they've put out and I'm really looking forward to tomato season. However, lovely as it is to have someone's produce to eat, eating your own is far more rewarding.
Last night we ate potatoes I'd grown myself! I planted a few left over, sprouting potatoes from my veg rack into a a council recycling box (the box scheme was replaced by a bin scheme and we were encouraged to recycle the boxes so I've turned mine into a container garden) and they've done well. As a full-blooded Irish girl I was inordinately proud of my ability to grow spuds and I turned them into a salad with my neighbours' beans. I'll definitely try growing them again next year as they were delicious and the plants looked lovely growing in the garden, especially compared to the bloody salad...

I hate gardening!

I don't really, I love it but it's so frustrating. I've just been outside with a squeezy bottle of soapy water washing my cabbages. Washing my cabbages you ask? Yes, washing the eggs, caterpillars, flies and mites off the poor, holey leaves. As you know the salad project was a disaster so much so that The Girl labelled the above photos "Salad Apocalypse" and looking at the bed is one of those "if I don't laugh, I'll cry" situations. Not only have I ended up with nothing to eat but it looks so damn ugly. I remember once complaining of my battles garden beasties to my dad who spent so many hours in the garden growing most of the fruit and vegetables we ate as children. He told me that gardening was a constant battle with nature and of course he was right. Our gardens are not natural, we strive to create an artificial environment that is what we consider to be useful or beautiful. The trick is to do it in as natural way as possible, hence the soapy water rather than a chemical pesticide.

The Salad Project

I meant to give you regular updates on this but things have not quite gone as planned.



First, one of the cats was digging up the surrounding earth to use as a litterbox and tearing at the fleece and the cellophane cover. I started covering the plants with the offcuts from the hawthorn at the bottom of the garden (which I still haven't been able to throw out as my next-door-neighbour's builders haven't returned to empty my garden waste bin which they filled with rubble) as I thought the thorns might keep furry bottoms out of my salad. Eventually it worked though I have noticed Professor McTufty (one of the feline visitors to the garden) is still sniffing around the area.



Unfortunately that has not been the end of it as, lacking the protection of the cellophane tunnel, the leaves have now provided a delicious meal for every slug and snail in the garden.



I may well have to start again with a new seed roll and anti-cat measures from the start but I'm a little disheartened and I wonder whether it's worth it.

The Salad Project

Year after year I've planted tomatoes and watched them die of blight before I could harvest them, or had such a bad summer that they never ripened. This year I've decided to grow something a little different.

The builders doing up a house down our street were putting a broken chest of drawers in a skip so I asked for the drawers to use as planters. I filled them with potting compost from The Range (more of that later...) and put a seed roll from Waitrose into them. That was late on Wednesday.

Today is Sunday...

We have leaves! They're growing under a film that will puff up into a kind of poly tunnel as they grow. I'll keep you informed as they grow.