I’ve romanticised for many a year on the prospect of home grown produce. Plump green tomatoes jewelling the garden. Straight proud rows of asparagus in tight tidy lines like soldiers. Boozy soft plums you pick a week too late and get drunk on. All the while flapping diaphonously around an immaculately pruned garden with gleaming water features, shirtless addonis manning the BBQ and maybe a resident peacock.
I have spent the last ten years living in a one bedroom flat and managed to cultivate a leggy and fruitless lemon tree and a small crop of windowsill chillis.
But that was then and this is now. Now is a new old house out of town with dusty carpets and very clean air. Now has buildings insurance, shed maintenance, parking wars and yes, yes, now has A Garden. A bloody nice garden at that, not massive but well established with lots of bee and bird friendly shrubs, minifruit trees and a big raised vegetable patch. And an ugly tree that needs to go but maybe we’ll talk about that later.
For now, I have a loamy west facing canvass on which to paint my seedy dreams. I’m going to grow my own dinner. Or some side dishes at least.
Maybe it’s a foodie thing. Maybe a girly nesting thing. Maybe I’m in desperate need of a project but it is a genuinely exciting prospect for me and I can’t wait to get going once these buggering British frosts go south for the winter and I can get planting.
Plans include beans, tomatoes, beets, a decent rosemary crop and some parsnips for the boy. Salads and jams and pickles, oh my. But first, most excitingly, the thrilling prospect of, er, onions. My first crop job is sowing some red onions. A job for today again postponed due to the aforementioned buggering frosts but to be documented fully once begun.
So for now I shall retreat to the pressing issue of the painting of the kitchen cornices but I would like to make a contact request for any joiners- expert or novice level to say hello and pipe up with their homegrown planting and eating tips because I think I’ll need them. You can find me on Twitter @foodieboomboom or instagramming as jsboomboom.
I’ll see you when the frosts have gone.
Food. Boom. 