Last week I posted about how I wanted to get my garden going but lacked both time and money. Since then, I have surprised myself. Time appeared after I gave my seminar in Sussex and stopped feeling guilty whenever I did anything other than practise it. Then, on a whim, I wandered into a branch of Wilko and discovered that all kinds of gardening stuff is available there at affordable prices.
Hurrah!
So, I picked up some seed trays and compost, which I thought would be enough to get me started and on Saturday afternoon I got to work.
I had planned to plant strawberries and sweet peppers. I started with the strawberries. Then, I double checked the notes on the back of the sweet pepper seed pack and discovered that if I didn’t have a greenhouse I was probably best waiting until late March or early April.
I don’t want to plant anything too early and miss out on the best of the growing time. Since I live in Scotland and it’s perfectly possible that we’ll get snow as late as May, I didn’t think it was worth risking it. So instead I got out the rest of my seeds to see if I had anything else that it was ok to plant in late February.
I found a pack of cucumber seeds that came from a Hendrick’s gin gift set I’d been given for my birthday (ok, I’m a hipster, whatever) and, flicking through a magazine I picked up last month, I discovered it would also be fine to plant some aubergine seeds, so long as I kept them on a windowsill for a while. That sounded fine, I already planned to grow stuff in the kitchen until it was strong enough to go outside.
Everything got planted and watered and set on the windowsill in the kitchen. It didn’t feel like I’d done very much, though. I’ll definitely be monitoring all the seed trays carefully and I might look into planting something else next weekend.
Still having a bee in my bonnet about gardening I decided to get a few more jobs done. I swept the leaves from the driveway and raked the lawn to remove yet more leaves. I haven’t done that since November and, even though we don’t have a tree in our garden, our neighbours do. There were a lot of leaves to clear.
Then I set up a small bug house my sister got me as a moving in gift and that has been sitting in my kitchen waiting for warmer weather. I even replaced batteries in some outdoor lighting. I would have found more jobs to do, but by this time it was around 6 pm and I was running out of light.
So, that seems like a pretty good start. I still have more cucumber seeds, those sweet peppers, lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, celeriac and beetroot to plant over the next few weeks and months. I might need to dig a bed for them all if I can’t find space for enough pots. So far though, I’m having fun.
In Becky's Head 
2 thoughts on “Getting started with gardening”