Awesome gardening for dummies
When I was a little girl, my parents had a little piece of land where we could grow vegetables, flowers and other things that did not fit in our back garden. I used to join my dad, not necessarily to do any hard work, but to look at how the plants and flowers grow, and to try how good the vegetables tasted. Now, having my own garden (not that big, about 30m2), every spring I get the same enthousiastic energy: I want to grow my own food.
Last year I started with cleaning out a small part of the front garden. You should know, we are a disgrace to our neighbourhood, our front garden is lacking structured design planting and also the gardengnomes are nowhere to be found. Our (non-working, sitting at home having all the time of the world to get the parking place free of weed) neighbours walk past our garden, shaking their head in pure disbelief and disapproval. However, I was brave enough to take a chance. A few days of hard work and some blisters later, I had a nice strip of clean, black sand. I started of with herbs, because they are easy and you can use them for anything from tea to stew. It worked out pretty well, providing rosemary, mint, chive to start with.
This year I decided to professionalise my gardening a bit more by using some kind of planning. Also I bought some books, to keep my spririt up and to be insprired by the pictures. The cherry on the cake is 'my gardening book".
Not only is this notebook especially made for gardening planning, also it has dogs on it, and of course that made not buying it not an option. After buying this, I read some books and made notes, as you are supposed to do when have a special made book for it. Also I sort of used the notebook as a diary, so that I can keep track of my actions, failures and mistakes, to learn from it every year. One day, when my dream comes true and I will have my own farm, I will know what to do. For now, we have been able to eat our own blueberries (just a few), potatoes, peas, lettuce, cucumber (funny shape, good taste), japanese berries, and strawberries. We have had a wet and cold summer so far, but still I am quite happy with how my plants are doing. For our tomatoes, melon, cucumber and courgette, a bit more sun would be appreciated.
In the meantime, I just keep up the weeding and hope for some sunny summer days. We deserve it.
