welcome to my blog

 

Hello, and welcome to what I hope is the first of many posts about gardening in an urban environment. The aim is to share experiences, both good and bad, and to pass on helpful tips. Whether it be producing fruit, vegetables and plants in general, the size and shape of your plot is certainly no barrier to success. 

We embraced on this garden over twenty five years ago; then, it was little more than a wilderness, untouched and unloved for years. It was an odd shaped corner plot - the outside of which hedged by a mixture of privet (ligustrum) and hawthorn (crataegus). The only other shrubs of note were an enormous laurel, an overgrown hypericum calycinum and two magnificent camellias, which were in full bloom the day we got the keys to the house. Everywhere else was knee high grass and weeds. 

We did little more than cut back and prune for the first few months. Our main priority was to make habital the shell of a house we had just bought - the folly of youth! The house was as neglected as the garden, there wasn't even a kitchen. Ironically, once we started clearing out the garden, we found four Belfast sinks! But slowly, as we cut back we saw where once borders had been, paths and even a grass covered patio. There was also a dilapidated shed and a homemade lean to greenhouse made from corrugated plastic sheeting. Inside was an Aladdin's cave of old gardening implements. Old clay pots, bags of peat and garden lime, seed trays and even pots that seem to be Bakelite. This, I suppose was our starting point. I was given three tomato plants and these took pride of place in the newly cleared greenhouse. 

I found myself using these spaces as a break from doing up the house; watering, pinching out side shoots: all became welcome distractions. Of course we hadn't a clue what we were doing, but we knew one thing: we wanted to feed ourselves and our family with organic food, and the cheapest way to do this was to grow our own. I started avidly reading gardening books, and every Friday evening watching Gardeners' World, I found a new hero: his name was Geoff Hamilton, and I still cling to his every word. 

Those first tomatoes were a revelation; picked warm, when perfectly ripe they tasted and smelt of the very essence of summer. They were a million miles from the rock hard, tasteless fruits from the supermarket. And they were more than just a tomato: 

They were a beginning.

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