Whilst researching whether I could grow my own lettuce this summer, I stumbled across several urban gardening blogs and quickly realised that I didn’t need to limit myself to just a few bits of Mizuna. Before long I had a huge list vegetables and only a small stone ledge to put my containers on. This blog will follow my attempts to start my first vegetable garden, in the limited space available. I use the word attempt, so as not to raise your expectations too highly. I once killed a cactus. The only plant I have managed to temporarily keep alive was a Bonsai Tree. It promptly lost all its leaves when Autumn arrived, but I insisted it was simply deciduous. After Spring came and went, two or three times, I admitted that perhaps it was pushing up the daisies, or perhaps it would be if the soil wasn’t mouldy and oddly solid.
Despite it unexpectedly snowing on the very day I decide to start my first vegetable garden (is this an ominous sign?), away I sped from work to Homebase to pick up the essentials I needed to get started. This was the first time I’ve ever been excited going around a garden centre, following years of being dragged around them every other weekend when I was younger by my parents. I am becoming my father… -______-
Let’s hope his vegetable success is also hereditary.
So my first purchases were:
1) One basic propagator, last one in the shop.
2) One box of Jiffy Pellets (as advised by the knowledgeable Mike), with no instructions.
3) One bag of compost from the shelf of a hundred different types of compost. It looks like soil, should be fine.
4) Finally and most importantly an array of SEEDS! :D Namely: (from top left to bottom right) Runner Beans, Cress, Casablanca Potatoes, Radishes, Pak Choi, Mizuna, Peas and Chard. I wanted to buy more but I reads an article yesterday about how many gardens fail because people are over-ambitious, so I’ll start with these and reward myself with future additions if these survive my loving care. I also bought a spray bottle because I wanted to rule out ‘Death by Drowning’ from the list of possible seedling accidents.
