Monday, 21 October 2013

Growing things

When I first started blogging I was chatting about my mission to spend more time in the garden and grow more things.  Looking outside now I can see a mountain of weeds swallowing up some of my early attempts at vegetables.  I really am a fair weather gardener I'm afraid.
But having said that I have had a reasonable amount of success - especially considering my bizarre timing in starting to work on the garden ( the end of the summer ).
 I planted rocket which I did enjoy in a few small salads and on a fair few cheese sandwiches.  I felt hugely proud of that rocket but clearly had some learning to do because I hadn't covered it and the lovely butterflies that arrived in my garden enjoyed finishing off every last scrap.
 I also planted swede which I separated out once they had grown a bit and re-planted.  I think I chose the morning of the hottest day of the year to do this and think that any hope of swede this winter is long gone.  The poor things were dry as can be by the end of the day.
 I tried a few other things far to late and am left with my one surviving plant which I am super proud of - my runner beans.  They are growing so well and even though it is late I have collected a number of crops in the last week from them with more to come by the looks of things.
Here is my first harvest

They were absolutely delicious - made even more so by the happiness I felt at having grown them in my own garden - yay!
The first harvest went into a lovely dinner of spicy chicken and rice.

Followed swiftly by a chocolatey tray bake that I had been inspired to make by a work colleagues contribution to staff meeting.

So even though my dreams of self sufficiency and a fully functional garden that feeds us are still a long way off this little bit of achievement made me very happy.

For the rest of this week I'm going to be training super hard to prepare for the great south run on Sunday- this might mean I need to lay of the chocolate tray bakes a bit! Any sewing I do will need to be of the relaxed - not too adventurous - variety so I will share what that ended up looking like towards the end of the week.
 Hope your Mondays have passed quickly and the rest of your week is filled with smiles.
x


No comments:

Post a Comment