It started a few years ago. We moved out to the country and would be driving past someone's yard and there like a shining beacon were their vegetable gardens, standing tall and proud, tidily manicured, boasting large, fresh vegetables..... and so it began, my envy of all things gardening. You see for years I couldn't even keep a house plant alive. In fact if I'm being honest I have been known to kill cacti. My Mum, kindly advised me one year that you do need to water plants, they need to be repotted on occasion and need some tlc. Well, unfortunately with four young children, numerous pets, homeschooling, and a hobby farm, if the plant wasn't able to shout up for itself it didn't stand a chance, and so began my impressive resume of black thumb. So you can see that gardening definitely is a challenge to me, and hence the gardener's envy as I pass people's beautiful veggie gardens. Until one year as I passed a garden that seemed to spring up in effortless time, from a once tilled rough hewn garden to a flourishing vegetable patch, that it struck me, it wasn't really hassle free. You see, people pass our farm, and things look effortless. One day there'll be some Nigerian does dotted around the fields and the next.... just like that 13 babies accompanying them. However, there is a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes to achieve this. That's when I realized it must be the same with gardening, and well, to be honest, I just didn't have the spare time.
Jump forward in time to a couple of months ago and my husband, my farm dreamer, decided it was time to start a garden. Having skimmed several 'Back to Basics' books I knew that all of them advised starting small. Well, starting small doesn't seem to be in our vocabulary for some reason, and so we ordered every possible vegetable seed you can. Then we had the bright idea of winter sowing! We have since become the proud owners of somebody else's cast off 2L pop bottles and have begun a plastic bottle garden.
This is the beginning of our journey. I'm inviting you on a journey with me, I can't even pretend to know what the outcome will be. I'm hoping it will be one of immense proportions. I'm hoping to be able to take you on a step by step of how our garden goes from a bare patch of field, to a roaringly successful vegetable patch, providing bushels full of vegetables. Of course on the other end of the spectrum is the grave realization that things may not go as planned. Maybe the winter sowing won't work, maybe the wildlife will eat it all down before we can get to it. Maybe I'll never quite get the right amount of moisture into the soil. But, come with me on this journey. You see not everything always works out just so, but there's always a lesson or two to be learnt along the way.
I'm excited to learn knew things, I'm excited to see how this will go, a little apprehensive too... you see it's easy to be all gung ho in the beginning, then comes the weeding and the harvesting and the preserving. I'm worried we may well run out of steam. I'm concerned my dreams of one day becoming a successful gardener may come crashing down around my ankles. However, I'd rather give it a try than never know..... lets see how this goes..... Oh and keep an eye on our site.... we hope to be able to introduce you to some new comers over the next month or so!
