Dig for Victory!

Recently Jeanne over at Tales from a Cottage Garden posted about views from the kitchen window. here. I took this photo of the view from my kitchen window ....

and this one from the back door (sorry the flash is reflected in the glass) alongside the window intending to post them that day.

About the same time I received in the post a couple of beautiful catalogues from Sarah Raven which are a delight to look through with beautiful photographs of wonderful things to grow.

I also found her book in the library full of beautiful pictures of her kitchen garden.

You can guess what's coming next can't you? I was inspired to grow some of these wonderful veggies, herbs and salads myself. Problem is we don't yet have a veggie plot having moved here last winter we didn't do much in the garden last year until we knew where the sun shone and where it was cold or hot etc. The previous owner had apparently had a space for vegetables but when her husband died she had it covered over with membrane and pebbles - as you can see in the photos taken from the window.

Are you still with me - I will get to the point in a minute if you can bear to hold on a little longer!

I suddenly got the urge to start on making a vegetable garden - we have always grown some of our own and even had allotments (yes in the plural) in the past and a huge garden with a plot for vegetables in our garden in France.

We would need to remove the pebbles and membrane and then dig in plenty of compost and bingo we'd have a garden ready to plant some of these wonderful seeds!

Easier said than done of course! It was such hard work raking back the pebbles and dragging up the membrane that we only achieved a small area before darkness fell.

Bears little or no resemblance to Sarah's photographs does it?! I wonder if it ever will!!

We did have some fresh greenery to go with our salad though even if it didn't actually come from the garden. I had thought to try growing some peas indoors for the tops having seen some pea tops on sale in Waitrose at an exhorbitant price. As you can see we did have some success with these and will be repeating the exercise although according to the library book I should have used a different variety for best results but these were the peas we had already so we used them.

When I think back to our allotment days when we cleared our allotment of 8 ft tall blackberry brambles and grew all manner of vegetables at the same time as working and bringing up our daughter I wonder what happened to all that energy! But then when I work it out it was probably 20 odd years ago and we didn't have our bus passes then! Even so a tray of pea tops looks incredibly paltry up against what we used to be able to produce and what is shown in the photos in the book!. Patience Jane - little by little a vegetable garden will be made. Further installments to follow if we are still able to stand upright or perhaps that should be if I can sit at the computer and my fingers still work!!