Grow Your Own - Eat Your Own!

I've been attempting to Grow My Own fresh garden produce this year after being challenged by Ice and The Organic Gardening Catalogue who kindly supplied some seeds to help get my project going.  I have got to the point where I have been able to reap what I sow and this week I was ready to see some of my produce go from pot to plate!

I was ridiculously excited when I dug down into the soil surrounding my potato plants.  As my hand plunged into the warm soil my fingers touched the first potato I have ever grown.  I actually squealed!  I pulled out potato after wonderful potato.  Their pale skin was flawless.  They were perfect little potatoes.  Grown by me in my own little garden.

It was lovely seeing an end result and we had a really good crop.  I couldn't think of anything to do with them that would be better than simply boiling them in their skins.  They were lovely and the children were happy to eat our home grown produce with their dinner.

My salad continues to grow.  Picking the leaves when they are young makes for tender, fresh and tasty accompaniments to my meals.  The assorted lettuces and the rocket add colour, texture and flavour to meals and sandwiches.  The variety of colours and shapes adds interest.  I even found a couple of radishes that had survived the caterpillars!

I never anticipated how good it would feel to grow my own produce.  To pick it and eat it!  I am definitely converted to growing my own!  Although we didn't get huge amounts of produce, we all enjoyed eating what we grew.  It added variety to our diet and the kids got to try some new things.

I have proved that you can do it even though you don't have a big garden.  You can use pots and troughs and grow bags effectively in a small space.  Recruiting the kids to help sow the seeds and pick the crops really helps them to learn about gardening, nature, where their food comes from and gives them an appreciation of the environment.  It has been a really enjoyable challenge and I will definitely be giving it a go again next year!

My 'Grow Your Own' Progress

We were away for a few days and I was so worried about leaving my plants that I am growing as part of the Ice Grow Your Own Challenge!  That was a completely new experience for me...showing concern for my little potted garden.  I needn't have worried, as although we were basking in glorious French sunshine all week long, Shropshire had quite a lot of rain.  I had moved all my pots into a more sheltered area of my garden away from direct sunlight before we left, and thanks to nature's watering, they flourished. 

My plants have all grown massively.  I have a little jungle growing! The children have pots of flowers and sunflowers which are really coming into their own. It's amazing to see Bumble Bees buzzing around, knowing we are helping them and encouraging them into our garden. The potato plants survived really well and I think it may soon be time to check under the soil to see if we have any spuds to dig out!

Just take a look at my Rocket!  It has gone from being tiny seedlings to 'ready to eat' salad!  It is my first crop ready for consumption and that makes me very excited!  I picked a few leaves to nibble on and I loved the peppery, fresh flavour.  Sowing seeds on a two weekly cycle means there is always a new row growing after you have picked some, keeping the supply of salad going through the summer.

I was a bit sad to see some of my plants had been ravaged by some hungry caterpillars.  The butterflies that the children had been admiring last week, had laid eggs onto my radishes and they had hatched and eaten most of the foliage away.  So I don't think that will be a very successful crop.  I am a bit squeamish when it comes to bugs, so I can't bring myself to remove the interlopers from my plants.  I will take solace out of the fact that I have helped feed the next generation of beautiful butterflies that my children will enjoy watching fluttering around the garden!  Sharing the gardening love with Mother Nature's hungry creatures!!

Hopefully in the next couple of weeks I will have some more home grown produce to enjoy...especially if the rain continues to keep everything well watered for me. I am continuing to take delight out of this challenge and am enjoying sharing the gardening experience with my children!

My 'Grow Your Own' Update!

It's been a couple of weeks since we planted our seeds for our 'Grow Your Own' challenge with Ice and The Organic Gardening Catalogue.  Although the weather has been akin to the Sahara Desert recently, we have tenderly watered our crops and waited patiently to see some evidence of our seeds germinating and exploding into life.  Suddenly over the last couple of days things have started to happen. Tiny leaves have burst through the soil and my troughs and pots are holding the promise of future crops.  We are a little excited to see our own salad leaves and rocket growing. I am already planning what meal they will join as a tasty and healthy side salad.  We are wondering if the beetroots and radishes will form under the soil.  I am enjoying this 'grow your own' project!  It is teaching the children where their food comes from, and is a small step towards living more sustainably.

Before They Grew

Beetroot Seedlings

Radish Seedlings

Salad Seedlings

Meanwhile in my little potted garden, we have had a crop of strawberries.  Delicious red strawberries fresh from the garden, what could be better?  We have had a little competition from the slugs, but mostly our small crop has been perfect.  Placing the straw on the soil has proved a good way to keep the majority of slugs off.  I must have picked the equivalent of a couple of punnets over the last few weeks from two plants.  Not bad for the first year of growing our grown.  Lots of runners have formed so next year there will be more plants and hopefully more fruit!  We are planning to train them to grow along the edge of our garden as it is well sheltered and out of the way of Freddy's garden toys.

Strawberry Plant

Homegrown Strawberries

My potato plant has grown massively but is struggling to not end up wilting under the midday sun.  Keeping it well watered is helping, I just hope it has got the energy to form potatoes.  I so want the children to taste freshly picked spuds that they have grown themselves!

The Ice campaign promotes sustainable living and growing your own is one way of doing this.  In the long term I can see it also being a way to save money when weighed up against the cost of buying organic produce. Even someone with a small garden, or even a well lit balcony can create a potted garden using pots, troughs and grow bags.  I know with my small garden project I will never be able to be self sufficient, but just to get a few lovely baskets of fresh, chemical free garden produce is a wonderful prospect!

Mother's Day Gift Ideas from Asda

Mother's Day is on Sunday March 18th.  If you have a mum like mine, who isn't really a lover of cut flowers, but who does love pot plants and flowers in the garden, then Asda have a great range at great prices that will be just perfect!  

I remember when I was a little girl and I bought my mum a Purple Flowering African Violet for Mothering Sunday.  She was so delighted because it would last all year round and not have to be thrown away after a week or so like cut flowers.  My mum has always been very practical like that!

'The Garden' range includes a selection of  grow your own plants, all beautifully presented in presentation boxes especially for Mother's Day.  Mums can plant Lilies in a basket, Freesia in a Ceramic Pot or Irises in a Planter.  If your Mum enjoys cookery too, you can also buy a Herb Trio consisting of three pretty pots to grow basil, chives and parsley on the windowsill.

These gifts are all just £5 each which is great value.

Grow Your Own Flowers

The Garden Range also offers some fun gifts for gardening mums to keep outdoors looking 'blooming lovely'  including a pretty 'Welcome to My Garden' sign, gorgeous metal bucket tea-light holders and a handy tin for storing bits and bobs.

Garden Tin £5

The tin would make a lovely gift filled with packets of seeds, a ball of twine, plant labels and maybe some of mum's favourite sweets so she can have a treat while she works in the garden.  It is very pretty and sturdy.  The bucket tealight holders have a heart shaped cut out on the front.  They will look lovely alight on a spring evening.

Tealight holders £3

Asda have a whole host of other great Mother's Day Gifts including a fun 'Breakfast in Bed' range, a lovely kitchen range for mums that love to bake and they even have pocket money priced pressies for little ones who want to raid their piggy banks to buy something special for Mummy! 

This cute mug is just £1 and is bound to make mum's cuppa taste perfect on Mother's Day!

With an amazing selection of gifts to choose from, at affordable prices, you can get your mum something she'll really love.  Head to your local Asda or go online at asda.co.uk to find out more.

**Asda kindly gifted me some Mother's Day goodies to make my mum's day!  But no compensation was received for this post**

Gardening and the Joys of Growing-Your-Own!

I have never been the most green fingered person in the world, but I do try hard when it comes to gardening.  It isn't through want of trying that I fail to have an amazing and well stocked garden.  I fantasize about having a garden with an orchard growing apples, plums and pears.  I imagine myself making delicious pies and crumbles using my home grown fruit.  I'd love rows of carrots and onions and potatoes, giving my family the freshest possible veggies.  A greenhouse growing fresh chillis and vine tomatoes would keep us in homemade salsa all year.  Embracing the concept of 'grow your own' would be a wonderful way to live a more sustainable existence in this modern world.

When I was growing up, we lived in a house with a huge garden.  I didn't appreciate it at the time, nor did I realise how amazing it was that my dad grew all his own vegetables.  Row upon row of plants tied up to bamboo canes, tethered using a leg from a pair of my mum's old tights stood in a regimental fashion over three quarters of our garden.  As a child I remember longing for beds of beautiful, bright flowers, but my dad's ethos was if you couldn't eat it, he wouldn't grow it!  I recall helping him harvest peas, beans, rhubarb, strawberries, tomatoes, cabbages, onions and my own personal favourite, purple sprouting broccoli!  In hindsight it seems quite idyllic and I'm sure even during times of austerity it meant we always had food on our table.

The reality of gardening for me is however a very different story.  We moved into a brand new house, and although our home is lovely, we had to compromise on the garden.  It is a very uniform square plot with high fences on every side.  The sunlight doesn't reach into all the corners and the soil is very poor.  In fact, the layer of top soil is so thin you can see the rubble left over from when they were building the estate through the turf.  It is not a great garden, but I was not going to let it dampen my determination to grow my own!

Last year my gardening project got under way  and with the children's help we set out to make a potted herb garden.  Using troughs and terracotta pots, we planted up Parsley, Basil, Chives, Oregano and Mint from seed.  We also sowed an array of fabulous sounding salad leaves in a gro-bag.  We tended our seedlings and watered them everyday. We were very proud of our work and quickly we began to see the pots fill up with the aromatic plants.

Snipping our first handful of chives was a real revelation!  Picking a baby salad leaf and eating it fresh from the soil was more exciting than it really should have been.  We had worked with what he had and were reaping the reward of having some wonderful ingredients ready to use straight from our garden.

The end of this tale is sadly not a happy one.  One day a few weeks ago high winds battered our garden causing the next door neighbour's six foot fence panel to crash over, crushing and smashing our herb garden.  My foray into growing-my-own was over.  However, all was not lost.  As I look forward to the time when I move to a new house, the garden will be a big consideration.  A little sunny space with fertile soil to grow some plants is now a definite priority!

Image from Love the Garden.com

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