It's 10:15, just over 12 hours since my last blog post, and I am woken up this morning by a text message from my partner saying there is a 60% sale on garden furniture at Argos. So, cup of tea and bowl of porridge in hand, I begin trawling the Argos website looking for bargains. I'm not sure I need anything, but 60% is 60%, and I do have birthday presents to buy. Now, this is the partner who until recently had never tried his hand at gardening, but who, in the last few weeks has produced radishes the size of beetroots and has a courgette plant, fully in flower with budding courgettes to die for. Although, he has no strawberries to speak of, whilst I, controversially, have had 3 pudding bowls worth in the last few weeks....small victories!
Anyway, I digress. Back to the veggie patch.
There has been one and a half overnight casualties. The freak high winds, that have managed to create mini cyclones in the sheltered corner of my small garden where I've situated my patch, have snapped a stem off my one healthy courgette, and the shock of a night outside has left the already infirm other courgette looking decidedly flaccid and perhaps on the way out. However, I intend to put on a brave face and remain hopeful and determined that a spot of sun and bit of water will do everything the world of good.
My forest of sticks stuck into the ground every few inches to prevent next door's cat using the vegetable patch as a toilet seems to have worked so far, and I can't see any scratched up plants. Although as I type this, the cat has just landed off the fence and is happily zigzagging in and out of the twiggy forest.
The over plucked rhubarb plant seems to be producing new shoots. With this plant I did exactly as told, and didn't pull up a single stick of rhubarb in its first year, hoping for a stronger plant the following spring, but one year later and it looks exactly the same - 3 sticks. So in pure frustration and in desperate need of a rhubarb crumble fix, I pulled up the 3 prize sticks last night, and fingers crossed with another shoot appearing this morning I haven't killed it. And the crumble was delicious!
As always, I rushed into the garden in my dressing gown and slippers, immediately managing to get mud on both and throughout the rest of the morning have been finding a variety of insects appearing from inside my gown, compounded by already having half the garden under my fingernails. At moments like this I daydream of finding gardening gloves that don't turn my fingers into clumsy fat sausages, leaving me unable to do weeding or planting whilst wearing them. But am brought back from this reverie by noticing my chapped ungloved hands, and sniff a small sniff of regret that alas I shall never be a hand model.
So, still in pyjamas at midday, and after a long chat on the phone with my mother, and discussing if I sleep walked as a child or not, I pull up my final 3 radishes. There is only one word to describe them. Disappointing. Radishes that should normally take 4 weeks to mature, but have had a luxurious 8 weeks of watering and nurturing, have rewarded me with an inedible nothing.
Refusing to get depressed by my distinct lack of success, I've finally got dressed, and have just returned from sowing yet more radish seeds, in the blind hopefulness that with well-dug, stone and weed free soil, this time my radishes will reach the glorious globular heights of my non-gardening partner's beetroot sized specimens!
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