Garden, it's time for ….

Just come in from the garden for a cup of tea. I spent much of yesterday weeding around the onions and finished trimming the borders round the veg plots. It is now looking very tidy. This morning there was more weeding, this time round the carrots, which I previously thought I would have to reseed entirely. There are more than enough to provide an early crop, and I will reseed the gaps for a later crop. Wish I could say the same about the sweetcorn and parsnips. I also prepared a couple of plots for courgettes.

Temperature in the greenhouse at 9am was 22°C, and it is now up to 30 with the door wide open. Cucumbers are about to flower, and I have already transplanted 5 cherry tomatoes brought on from seed into large pots. Standard toms will be transplanted this afternoon.

Tea break finished. Back to work.

In writing this, I realise that I will be very much going against the general flow of those who genuinely enjoy their “potaging” on the forum and posting adversely on the subject may well be viewed as blasphemy. Never mind – here goes!

Looking at it in terms of the end result, it really does look like damned hard work. Surely Abi’s postings over the last couple of days rather prove this. It’s just a continual battle against the weeds – that is, I suppose, if you’re doing it organically and there’s not much point if you don’t.

From the moment you sow the seeds, the first disappointments appear. Half of them don’t germinate or die because they’re too cold. The others have to be thinned out and transplanted and even then, you can’t see them for weeds.

I’ll admit that this is the time of year when a vegetable garden can look at its finest. But then what happens – the cabbage white appears and eats most of it and then there’s the blackfly and then the weather starts to heat up and unless you’ve got a well and a pump, you’re fighting to find water or the whole lot dries up.

Finally when you come to harvest, nothing comes out of the ground looking as it should – what looks reasonable on top bears no resemblance to what’s going on under the soil and even if you’ve got a crop, you’ve got to have somewhere to store it to stop it all going rotten.

I completely understand that there must be some sort of psychological satisfaction to growing your own, but realistically, the economics surely don’t add up when you can pop up to Lidl and buy your veg at a quarter of the price in good fresh condition. I know, it’s not produced organically, but none of it’s killed me yet.

And all the time you can be lying in the sun with a beer or a glass of wine looking at your flower garden instead of being on your hands and knees.

I’ll fetch my coat!!!!

JJ has got it all wrong. While couch potatoes lounge around piling on the pounds, but doing nothing to stimulate the mind and body, we gardeners are doing both at the same time.

And despite the few failures in the garden, I have row upon row of potatoes, peas, beans, onions, beetroot, lettuce, brassicas, turnips with swedes to follow, many of which will see me well into next year. And while you are buying vegetables from Aldi, many of which come from Spain or further afield and therefore have a heavy carbon footprint, I am enjoying fresh food straight from the garden throughout much of the year. In my case losses to blackfly and other garden pest are generally minimal, and the vast majority of my vegetables come out of the ground in good condition. What I can’t eat at the time is stored. Onions are hung in the shed, potatoes stored in a cool corner in the rear of the house, and what can be frozen goes into the freezer.

Economics are are another issue. I save a small fortune by growing my own. I don’t use chemicals other than washing up liquid to spray blackfly and caterpillars, so my produce is much better than supermarket food unless you pay substantially more for bio. Time expended is not time wasted, and should not be monetised. No-one asks a modeller who has just made a replica of a warship out of matchsticks, or someone who spends hours learning to play the piano what the cost in time was. And no-one can put a financial value on the satisfaction of sitting down to eat food you have produced.

By all means you can sit around, drinking your beer, and seeing time passing without any sense of achievement. Time is one of our most precious gifts, and it is so sad to see it squandered. When your time is come, and you are asked “What have you achieved in life”, I will have a list of things, you will have a beer belly.

That reminds me. The local bar is open. Time for a couple of beers before cutting the grass and finishing the flower borders.

Anyone that doesn’t grow their own vegetables will never know the difference from what you grow yourself and the veg  that you can buy ( so called ) cheaper in the supermarket .

Abi K  likes to write about the hardships of gardening , or so it seems . ( I’m sure I will be corrected )

We garden organically , sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t , but it is always worth doing .We have few disappointments , at the moment the problems that we are having in the veg garden are due to climate change.

I have grown veg in the same spot for 30 years , so there are very few pests , but we used to have Winters too .

Me too…genuine respect and a smidgeon of envy…

fortunately I have good friends who grow their own and often get given baskets full of lovely home grown veg.

i repay in other ways…

keep it up you gardeners ,I’ll carry on reading your progress and enjoying  the posts….if not the veggies.

JJ, I started my last post earlier, but then my pals wanted to go for their evening walk. I forgot to click on submit. Then it was time to eat, and I listened to the wireless for a while, the BBC Home Service of course. I finally got back to the forum and submitted what I had written. Although my post is timed at 10:53 it was written before you posted. Nice to hear that you are into music. For relaxation I strum a few notes on the guitar and rattle a few ivories on my electric keyboard. I’m not a musician, never will be, but it’s fun.

Hope the beer belly comment didn’t offend you. It was said tongue in cheek.

You were up early this morning, Marmite. I didn’t get up until the usual time of 6.50 in time for the Today programme, although my cat woke me at 6.

Just about to resume work. Forgot to water plants in greenhouse last night. Nearly finished flower border in front of house last night. Another half hour should see it done. Another border at the end of the lawn needs tidying up, but that won’t take long. Should have a relaxing hour or so on the mower this afternoon. I’m running out of jobs to do. That will change when 10 tonnes of sand/gravel arrive to repair my drive. A tractor will do the hard work, but there will still be some levelling to be done by hand.

Please don’t worry Ali – I don’t offend easily! My original post was somewhat tongue in cheek as well – you do seem to be ploughing through a mountain of work though. How are you going to shift all that gravel – have you got somebody who can help you?

Going back to the garden – although we don’t grow vegetables, Mrs J loves her cooking and we never eat pre prepared food. To this end, she has a very extensive herb garden which – yes – needs weeding! I’m all in favour of this as at the end of the day I’m the main recipient.

It’s interesting that the French, for all their puffing and blowing about food, often as not, haven’t a clue how to cook vegetables which are often served boiled to pulp. A certain crispness maintains the flavour without losing the texture and surely this is important.

John James wrote:

My original post was somewhat tongue in cheek as well

That was quite obvious. Incidentally, do you have a recipe for tongue in cheek?

John James wrote:

How are you going to shift all that gravel

A farmer friend has already said he will move it in the bucket of his tractor. I couldn’t manage otherwise.

Anonymous wrote:

Our tomatoes . . . have just been put outside

In past years I have grown tomatoes in the polytunnel, but put a few out in the garden. The outside tomatoes always turned black, so I now keep them all inside. Last year the crop was so great that many went through the food blender and were frozen for use in chillies and soup at a later date, and others given away. I will have less plants this year – at present 5 cherry variety and 4 standard are in large pots, but I would like at least one more standard. Chillies and green peppers were kept inside until they fruited. Same with cucumbers.

The garden has had to take a back seat at the moment, as far as my part in the proceedings is concerned, I’ve been otherwise occupied with a paintbrush, but Mr F has plenty of seedlings and plantlets coming on in the greenhouse for when I’m back out there!