Today I reached a massive milestone. I am so insanely proud of myself. As bucket lists go, this might not be up there for most people but for me...
Before I build this up too much, let me explain a little. I have no garden to speak of. Our house was some kind of business in the days when people didn't expect gardens. And they probably shared the land with the local pub to graze their geese or whatever. So we have a yard, not a yard like my aunties in Liverpool had at the back of their back-to-backs, or a "yard" like the baa baa of the family threatened to come round to when we argued, (I sense my working class credentials slipping into nonsense), but a yard. No lawn. Actually nothing but a few broken bits of staircase and some old bikes.
We do however, have a front garden. Not a yard, a garden. No grass, but no old skateboards either. And since it's south facing, and however good the weather we are still too English to consider sitting out at the front of the house, I decided to turn it into the vegetable patch. (Obviously our street isn't on an estate or we could be English enough to do that other kind of sitting out at the front of our house in our pink onesies - which just auto corrected as penises; try it; I was tempted to leave it - with a fag on, waiting for the kids to come home from school.)
So, back to the front of the house, metaphorically, whatever you might be imagining as a plot, half it. It's small. And not any shape recognised by a primary maths textbook. And in this space I have plotted. And I have toiled. And I have cultivated. And I have carted the bath water down in buckets everyday as we don't have a hose. Or an outside tap. Or a tap nearby as it's the front of the house remember.
And somehow, I have grown stuff. Enough to make strawberry jam, salad everyday. Rocket leaves on pizza, rocket leaves on everything if I'm honest, teeny tiny aubergines.
But today I have finally achieved my "Good Life" dream. Today I ate home-grown, home-made strawberry jam on toast for breakfast, home-grown,home-made leek soup, home-grown, home-made lavender shortbread and for tea it was pasta with home-grown courgettes in home-made pesto from home-grown basil.
This is not such a big deal to my friends with industrial sized allotments and perfect patches at the foot of their garden and those of you with a bent towards the practical will by now have realised that there probably aren't enough leeks in that tiny patch to see me through the winter and that very few of my tomatoes are red despite my early planting. Some of you may even be starting to echo my cynical husband who suspects I might not be recouping the cost of seeds at the moment, but to me this is the pinnacle. My children will eat the tomatoes grown in the garden because they grew them, they will even give aubergine another try, and courgette can, it would appear, be smuggled into lasagne in surprisingly high quantities. And every time I tend the tomato plants I am transported back to the greenhouse in our back garden and my Grandad, who my dad says would be proud of me.
And I'm writing this with a glass of Pimm's, savouring the last taste of summer with home-grown mint and home-grown cucumber. Message me your best courgette recipes.
