My first container herb & veg garden

Container Garden Smallest Smallholding

Spring is tempting me. When the sun is out, it’s glorious and the warmth is invigorating. The trouble is, we’ve been plagued by clouds and even sleet last Saturday. But I’ve been trying to plough on (not literally) and continue to make even the smallest steps of progress on my little urban garden patch I call The Smallest Smallholding.

The area between the kitchen door at the back of the house and the garden gate is fairly redundant at the moment, but in summer (and especially now we’ve been keeping the hedge height down), it can be a bit of a sun trap at certain times of the day. A bit of bare wall had become a dumping ground for old disused pots and bricks, so I decided to rip out the perennial weeds and try to smarten it up a bit.

Oregano in pot

 

With the short brick wall behind it the warms up in the sunshine, I thought it would be the perfect spot for putting a mini container garden. Something a bit closer to the kitchen, and something to bring a bit of life and cheer to the rambling mess outside the conservatory.

Lady Lavender variety

I started this mini side project a couple of weeks ago, using some old slates and bricks to create a shelf to keep the ants out of the pots. I began by collecting up all the sad and neglected old pots, and began planting in some lettuce plugs but this weekend I decided to add a few flowering herbs in (anything for the bees is fine by me), for both fragrance and colour. I might even get around to using the herbs in the kitchen this year! I also found a lovely compact lavender that I’ve not come across before called ‘Lady Lavender’, which has now been potted up in an old terracotta pot and added to my growing container garden collection.

Cambridge Favourite strawberries

Feeling a bit fancy free, I indulged myself with two 95p ‘Cambridge Favourite’ strawberry plants – breaking the bank, right? – which I need to pot on. I am considering pooling my pennies together and getting a few more and pulling out the old terracotta strawberry container, but I’ve not had a huge amount of success with it in the past since I’m fairly forgetful when it comes to watering. But this year, you never know. I’ll just have to see if I’m up to it since everything is becoming much more of an effort as I pass the 22 week mark in my pregnancy.

I’ll just have to keep ploughing on as I best I can (and remember to water).

Top 5 All-Purpose Edible Plants

Herbs and alliums are two of my favourite types of plants. I love to grow them, eat some of them (in large quantities), admire their amazing flowers and watch the bees and pollinators feast on them too.

I’m currently in the throes of planting lots of alliums – mostly onion and shallot sets – but I’m also looking to boost my wildlife-friendly flower borders with a few ornamental and “dual purpose” herbs, legumes, and alliums too. Here are some of my favourites that you might want to grow in your flower garden, veg patch or allotment:

chive-flowers

1. Chives

Chives (Allium schoenoprasum) might seem like an obvious choice, but they really are an all-purpose allium. These little beauties can be harvested throughout the year for extra onion-flavoured zing in your culinary endeavours. Cheap to buy, easy to grow and fantastic for pollinators, they can feature in container gardens, veg patches, herb gardens and flower borders alike. There are an abundance of varieties available, from mild to strong flavoured, compact 6inch plants or broader and taller 2ft specimens (A. var. sibiricum), as well as a selection of (edible) chive flowers, with white (withs silvery-green foliage), pink and mauve varieties readily available. Try garlic chives (Allium tuberosum) for a garlicky twist to the traditional light onion flavour.

2. Rosemary

Another obvious choice, but no garden or veg patch should be with some rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis). Whether you’ve got acres of space or just a patio to play with, you can enjoy this unique, fragrant herb and your local pollinators will thrive on the abundance of delicate, blue flowers. Here at the Smallest Smallholding I’m growing Mrs Jessop’s Upright, a tall and narrow variety that fits perfectly in between the flowers in my long borders, but if you’ve got slopes or need ground cover try Prostratus, a cascading variety.

3. Welsh Onions

I first saw welsh onions (Allium fistulosum) being grown in my mum’s garden amongst the verbena bonariensis, and it’s flowers were like a magnet for the bees. I’ve since found a few pots of welsh onions in the poorly department of my local garden centre, and they’re now going in my flower borders. Welsh onions can be eaten from bottom to top, and produce fluffy globular pale green/yellow flowers in summer. They’re great for compact gardens, growing tall from smaller clusters.

lavender-3

4. Lavender

Scent, flavour, texture, colour, lavender has it all. A staple in many English country gardens, allotments and veg patches, lavender might be a common feature, but its place in our growing spaces is well deserved. Bees, butterflies and other pollinators will flock to any variety (though English is preferred to French), and there’s a plant for every growing space from compact Hidcote through to the long, tall spires of Lavandula angustifolia. Bake with it, smell it, look at it… just enjoy it.

5. Peas (and Beans… legumes in general)

I’m a bit of a pea-growing novice, and have little experience. I’m growing some this year, because these vertical-growing legumes are not only a welcome culinary treat, but the sheer number of varieties of peas and beans available means that there’s not only a variety for every taste, but also a huge array of flowers that are so beneficial to pollinators. Peas and beans look great in any vegetable garden but can also add height, texture and colour to ornamental borders too. And with nitrogen fixing qualities, they’re fab for crop rotation and healthy soil.

© www.flowerpictures.net

© www.flowerpictures.net

May Day Bank Holiday Ramblings

I sat down at my laptop a couple of weeks ago and thrashed out a blog post – it wasn’t very inspired, more like a list of everything that’s going down (or growing up) in my greenhouse. I wouldn’t want to read it, and I couldn’t see any reason why anybody else might, so it has sat unpublished whilst I work out what I wanted to say next.

Every day I seem to have a long list of things to do – some days I manage it, and sometimes it goes out of the window. For instance, yesterday, instead of turning out my books and clothes (I’m having some major “I NEED TO SORT OUT MY LIFE” moments, which translate into gargantuan spring cleans) we decided to ditch everything and head out to Cambridge for the day. We don’t live too far away, and with the extraordinarily handy Madingley Road Park and Ride, for all intents and purposes it’s so easy to get into the town centre. You see, I have a new love affair with Cambridge. I feel at home there. Rich said in some ways it reminds him of Edinburgh, and I agree. It’s almost as if the place lives and breathes history – there’s always a sense of what was living alongside what is and what will be. I’ve now decided that I’d like to live closer to Cambridge, before I make my big move to the coast. One day.

But back to my little plot, my little bit of England, and things are all going a bit higgledy-piggledy, as I knew they would by now. With the burst of summer that was thrown at us a fortnight ago, everything surged ahead, ignorant of nature’s summery false start. In the greenhouse the peppers and chillis are growing slowly and diligently, and I have high hopes for strong plants that will fruit abundantly this year. Likewise the kale and cabbages are doing well, perhaps because I am much more attentive this year, and they’re not being fried alive in the Smallest Smallholding Valley of Death, aka the conservatory. The greenhouse staging has somehow forced me into a routine of care, as I no longer forget to water my seedlings and visit them at least twice a day to find out how they’re getting on. Funny how a piece of furniture can have such a positive effect.

The woodland strawberries were sown weeks ago but are yet to show any signs of life; I fear I may have bought a duff packet. The leeks are also growing with purpose, looking strong and sturdy, yet I can’t help but brush my hands over the tops of them, and let the tips tickle my palms. There’s something very relaxing and almost hypnotic about standing in your greenhouse, and sweeping your hand over your tray of leek seedlings. I thoroughly recommend it. In the words of Mrs Doyle “go ooonnnnnn”.

Of course the grass and weeds are surging ahead at an unforgivable rate; at least, unforgiving to me as our lawn mower has packed up and at present, I’m forced to borrow my mother’s electric mower with a blade measuring just 30cm in diameter. Not only does juggling the extension lead and mower lead require great skill, but mowing takes half a day and makes me cross. We’re getting to that time of year where I begin to feel bad tempered towards my Smallest Smallholding; it teases me, refusing to be tamed and reminding me exactly how insignificant I am when it comes to me vs. the forces of nature. I blame the bindweed. It’s a bad influence. But armed with my spade, and a lot of (blood) sweat (and tears) and determination, and possibly a book on permaculture, I shall one day conquer it. Ha!

Actually, things have been getting out of hand a lot earlier than usual this year. No doubt hundreds of bloggers across the country have noted the early arrival of spring/summer, and here it is no different. The bluebells and wild garlic have already filled my local woodland, at least two or three weeks earlier than ‘normal’ – whatever ‘normal’ is these days. The honeysuckle and clematis montana are already out in force and over a fortnight ago our first blackbird fledglings were out on their own.

So strange.

But then, the past month or so I have been feeling strange. Very, very occasionally I’ll have this feeling that my life is changing by small, almost imperceptible degrees. It’s hard to explain, but it’s a definite feeling of life moving on, or up, or sideways – just changing. Maybe it’s growing up, I don’t know. Sometimes it feels right and sometimes it leaves me feeling as if I never have enough time and I’m always behind it – I’m not moving fast enough with it and it’s leaving me behind. In fact, lately I’ve been feeling as though I’ve been wading through a quagmire and not making much progress at all – things are on hold, I’m never changing or moving and I’m going to be stuck where I am – financially, emotionally and socially – for the rest of my life.

Hence the massive spring cleans. It’s like getting read of my past’s detritus – those bits I cling on to and won’t let go because somehow I’m scared I’ll forget what it was like to be a slightly oddball teenager with passions and imagination and high hopes for the future. But in reality that translates to holding onto old clothes, scuffed up panpipes, oil burners, books that I will never, ever read again… as if I will never be that interesting or imaginative ever again if I let these things go. And living in a house that resembles a building site is like living some sort of lifestyle purgatory. I can’t stand that feeling. In a way it drives me to do more, achieve more, get something – anything – finished. My book would be a good starting place. Oh I know what you’re thinking… oh yes, another ‘would be’ novelist, nice dream, fat chance. But writing and being a writer is the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to ‘do’ or ‘be’, and as acting looking a less and less likely option for me, writing is something that I think will satisfy all the different parts of me. Gardening, growing veg, loving wildlife and attempting to live self-sufficiency is part of my lifestyle, what makes me happy. It all mixes in together. Writing is something that I want to do for a living. About time I made more of an effort! And stop making excuses and found the time.

Happy May Day.

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