Gardening….

The British are apparently mad for gardening, an offhand observation might say what (traditionally- I know, I know-  we’re all budding Gordons and Jamies now) we lack in the kitchen we make up for in the… garden

I’ve always wanted to be good at it: planting buttons as a wee little thing and hoping they sprouted out of the muck down the bottom of the garden where I grew up- but as you can see efforts are blighted when you don’t have the right sort of horticultural knowledge or skills.

Last summer more misery was upon me. I tried growing tomatoes in a grow bag. Bit of advice to anyone thinking of embarking on a tomato growing journey this summer- you’ve got to give them room- I tried to cram four plants to a bag and results were disappointing to say the least- I think I spotted two little green baby fruits before we all went away for the weekend during that crazy heat of last summer (remember? When you could get all sweaty and dizzy on your morning commute?) and all the plants were frazzled to death. Very traumatic.

So, I decided to get some professional help. I went on a course this year which was run by a flowery shirted lady who taught us, amongst other stuff (like how to dig), how to graft bits of plants together. I got quite excited by the prospect that you can just kind of naturally weld bits of plants together- a bit too excited though as accidentally tried it on me own finger- messy. - Now I’m trying to pick up tips from my clever environmentalist colleagues down here at the Eco-village.

I’ve learnt a few tricks of the trade. Clare the lady that’s making our roof garden look like something out of the Chelsea Flower show has taught me about the wonders of Manure (‘Go on have a smell, It’s beautiful isn’t it’!!) and ‘slug pubs’ which are when you make a little well of beer in a yoghurt pot or summat and they (like a lot of other folk out there) go crazy for the beer instead of, say, your lettuce (I can understand the way these slugs think) and hop into the ‘pub’ of beer and then they drown. Which isn’t so nice- but at least they go happy and we can have un-holy lettuce leaves for lunch.

Here’s a couple of really quite bad gardening humour-style jokes. Ha. My treat, honest.

Why do potatoes make good detectives?
Because they keep their eyes peeled.

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; 
Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad

When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed
and not a valuable plant is to pull on it.
If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant
 

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