Get Going with Growing 6

Vegetables can be pretty too.
Zucchini flower... quite lovely and the zucchini's are tasty too. 

Guess who has been eating our spinach this time??? 

We have! 

And it is great :) The taste of fresh spinach on pizza and in lasagne has been wonderful. 

Spinach waiting to become part of a meal for the family 

This lasagne was SO tasty... fresh and healthy 

We have continued to add to the garden plots... what started as four little boxes three and a half months ago is now eight boxes planted (with two more ready for new plants) and a glasshouse full of food producing plants. The apple trees are full of little apples that are steadily growing which is very exciting. I am quite surprised by how quickly things have grown and thoroughly enjoying the fruits of our labours. 

The original plots

The garden now

The weather has been really changeable which has had its challenges but earlier this week we had some really hot weather followed by warm steady rain showers, I couldn't believe the growth in the garden from that... bean seed that had just broken the surface the day before grew almost two inches over the day. Nature is amazing! 

Webbs Wonderful Lettuce seedlings

I have now planted spinach seeds and lettuce seeds and they will go into the empty plots in time. I am getting better with nursing my seeds to the next step, it is about nurturing them- giving them what they need as they grow and adjusting the care as get bigger and stronger... like any baby really. One thing that has worked for me is using egg cartons as seed trays, it makes transplanting less stressful on the seedlings and they are a little easier to keep moist once the seeds strike. 

Every day there is something new to see and, as always, learn :) 

Broccoli on it's way

Getting Going with Growing 4

Gardening is a pursuit that teaches important life lessons... this week resilience, patience and wonder.

After the attack of the killer sheep and the subsequent repairs to the fencing as well as putting up some wind proofing for my latest attempt at growing corn I thought we had catered for just about everything.... but not quite!

Public enemy no 2 has been identified and no it is still not the white butterfly.

This time it was unseasonal weather! Check out the little video clip below to see what hit, literally, our garden earlier this week.

The size of the hailstones were quite spectacular too.

The spinach that survived the attack of the killer sheep did not fare quite as well against the hail stone

bullets that pelted down from above.
Worse still was the unexpected frost from the hailstones overnight as they did not melt away... the potatoes (largely self seeded) did not fare well as the blackened curled leaves here show. I am hoping that they might come away again though... fingers crossed.

The pumpkin plants however do not look like they will come away again. It was so disappointing as this is my second attempt with my pumpkin seedlings and they were looking so good, now they are yellowed, curling up and very sad.

BUT this is gardening, and there's no point moping around about it. This is where resilience comes in, I could chuck it in claiming it is too hard with the pumpkins, the spinach and the brassicas but I have a glasshouse full of growing plants (and I am lucky I still have five pumpkin seedlings in the glasshouse to transplant).
There are seeds coming away that we planted a couple of weeks ago and I thought were not going to strike... they are now popping up all over the place!
The other day I was looking at the bed where I had planted sunflower and sweet pea seeds two weeks ago and there was nothing happening, I had decided I would put nasturtiums in there instead when I got the time... well today I walked past and had a look to water a couple of seedlings I had planted earlier and lo and behold there are a whole heap of little seedlings now coming through, what a difference three days make! A little bit of patience pays off, and if they had been right up when the hail hit, who knows, they might not have fared so well.

Sunflower seedling... exciting! 

On reflection there are lots of life lessons I am getting from gardening, here are a couple from this week:

• very few things in life are ALL bad, focus on what is going right if you can
• don't put all your plants in the one spot, diversification is key
• if at first you don't succeed, look at what you could do differently and have another go 
• it is OK to try something and fail... that is a great place for learning to happen 
• patience is a virtue and nature knows it well

In gardening, as in life, you win some and you lose some. If you are prepared to focus on the wins, work through the losses and approach as much as you can with a sense of wonder then all going well things will bear fruit. 

Getting going with growing!

It is spring time here and I have started vegetable gardening this season with the vision of slowly building up skill and hopefully crops over the coming months.

We are blessed with the space to create our garden but have decided to start small with raised plots so we can manage our plants better and experiment with mixed plantings and different soils. We have also refined our compost bin and have got seaweed breaking down for a homemade fertiliser (I am not sure what else my father did but I know he used seaweed and had the most amazing tasting tomatoes ever so we'll see if it was the seaweed in time)

We are growing some plant from seeds and have also purchased some seedlings. The seeds are doing really well at the moment (my father used to get me to strike seed for him as I was good at that bit but nuturing the seedlings as they harden off was where I used to struggle... I hope this time round I can manage to get our seeds past that delicate stage, if so we will have a bumper crop of pumpkins!)

As you can see I am getting quite inspired by this gardening thing. It seems to be the right time, place and space to get growing for a number of reasons:

1. Growing your own vegetables means you are better informed about what products have been used on and around them. This can impact on the flavour and potential health benefits. We are experimenting with using natural products and techniques (like spreading egg shell and wood ash around plants to ward off slugs) 
2. It gets me out of the house, away from the computer (unless I am looking up information about gardening!) and working with nature. It gives me a new place to let my mind wander or to practice mindfulness depending on what I am needing at the time. It improves health and wellbeing before we even get to eating!
3. Our little boy is building an understanding and appreciation of where food can come from. He is learning about nurturing the plants to help them grow. It is another way that he can contribute to our family and hopefully share with others too. 
4. It brings me closer to my dad. Dad was a great gardener and we always had a bounty of fresh vegetables from his garden which I never fully appreciated until recently. 
5. It brings our little family closer together. We are all involved in building up our garden and on good days we are all working together in and around the garden. I am looking forward to eating our food together too.    
6. It is cost effective, especially with the pumpkins I am growing as the seed came from a pumpkin we ate recently! As I learn to harvest seed from our plants this will be more so in coming years I hope. 
7. It is providing me with an opportunity to reuse/recycle/repurpose. We have used old trays to make square vegetable plots/beds. We have also used some trays and other wood off cuts to make a shelf/table for potting and seed raising. Plastic bags have been used to provide a warm cover for seed trays and also as a temporary fix for a couple of broken glass panes in the glasshouse. We have used my father's old drum for making our seaweed fertiliser in and are reusing one of his compost bins too. 
8. There are many small successes to celebrate on the way to getting something to eat out of the garden. Seeing a plot planted out, seeds coming up, plants growing, weeds abating a little... all the little things help to make you feel like you are achieving something and that is good for the soul. 

For all the reasons above and probably many more, I encourage any would be gardeners to give it a go. We are going with trial and error, using some companion planting and other methods to reduce pesticides (and for aesthetics too, putting marigolds in with the vegetable plots looks pretty). There is a wealth of information online and people in our communities with a wealth of knowledge too. 

If all you have is a small patch of ground that is OK, you might only have a window sill but wherever you are if you can and feel inspired to give it a go I say go for it... the outcomes of your efforts are healthy in a number of ways and potentially very delicious :)