There was an attempt to…be green fingered

Being confined to my immediate environment at the beginning of the year limited my activities to the house and the garden.  Despite a general dislike for getting my hands dirty, it was time to return to the land and attempt to grow my own vegetables. After all, witnessing the supermarkets go into meltdown during the first lockdown, building up my practical skills for the next apocalyptic event may come in handy. The thought of watching people wrestling for the last remaining leek on the evening news whilst smugly munching through a meal made with ingredients from my own garden was too much to resist. If only I could grow toilet paper I’d be set for any future outcome.

Given that my meagre back garden is not exactly rolling acres of farmland, I had to carefully decide what to grow.  I found a book called “All You Can Eat In Three Square Feet” which is a bold claim considering my appetite, but at least the dimensions available to me outside fitted the description.  It also contained a list of “low-effort” vegetables to grow, which seemed to be appropriate for my skill level.

Following the book’s advice, first I had to construct a raised bed.  With lots of DIY-intensive options involving cutting wood, drilling and all sorts of opportunities to end up with something that would fall apart at the first gust of wind, I sought out the “cheat mode” option, which basically required me to slot a few bits of wood together and it was done. Gardening is easy! After filling the bed with compost, I officially had a plot of land in which to grow my veg.  What I would find out over the course of the next few months is that I had really created a massive communal cat litter box. There is surprisingly little air time on shows like Gardeners World that show Alan Titchmarsh picking out cat shit between his carrots, whilst loudly cursing the cat that did this.

My biggest mistake was letting the kids help with sowing the seeds. What was planned as a cunning ruse to get them away from technology and in touch with nature meant that instead of carefully sowing the seeds the correct distance apart, handfuls were unceremoniously dumped into the ground in piles, before rushing back inside to get another Internet fix.

With everything  in place, it was a matter of watering every so often, picking out cat shit, cursing, and waiting.  Fast-forward a few months, and to my utter astonishment, we had actual, healthy(ish) plants, ready for harvesting. Here’s the status of the final selection of our yield,  from worst to best.  A Top of the Crops, if you will.

Onions:  I clearly do not know my onions. The seeds went into the ground, and absolutely bugger all came out. Maybe they were taken by squirrels (who decided to  join in with the cats in a competition to see which animal could destroy my crops the most).

Radishes:  Selected for their quick growing capabilities, these did come out of the ground looking like an actual radish, but in miniature. They are positioned low on the list as despite being a relative success, nobody actually liked to eat them. Maybe that was a bit of an oversight on the seed selection there on my part.

Carrots: Despite my best efforts in trying to “thin out” the plants in the area where the kids had dumped four thousand seeds per square centimetre, the carrots were a victim of overcrowding, and as a result were much dinkier versions of anything you would buy in the shops.  Despite their diminutive stature, they were perfectly edible and were even consumed by the boys without any fuss (or at least without any more additional fuss when being asked to eat vegetables). 

Peas:  These take the top spot as the plants managed to thrive despite having to grow on my homemade “trellis”; A haphazard construction of string, garden canes and a shitload of electrical tape to hold it all in place.  They were the only crop that turned out to be in its normal size, and were able to provide enough for more than one meal.

All things considered, given that not everything died (plants or people eating them), I was willing to chalk this project up as a partial success. However, there was a realization that all the time and effort resulted in a harvest of enough food to make a very weird soup for about three small children. And then there’s the cost; The money alone spent on bags of dirt (…Dirt!) to fill the raised bed would have been enough for a couple of 12” pepperoni pizzas. So whilst I think we’ll certainly give the whole self-sufficiency efforts another go next year, I won’t be giving up supermarket trips for the Good Life any time soon.