Scotland, ho!

posted by Debi
So, in case you haven't heard...I am quite taken with gardening! I love everything about it. I love watching things grow. I love how complex but also how very simple it is. I love that I can grow things to eat and also grow things just to look at and enjoy.

Shortly after moving into our new house, I decided to take up gardening. This is the first time I have had any green space to call my own. And, well, I went a little wild! You know me, I never do things half-way. Some call it obsession, I call it passion! I started reading everything I could get my hands on about gardening. I joined gardening websites. I even started volunteering with a local community group called 'Falkland in Bloom' that is responsible for the beautiful flower baskets and tubs in Falkland. I discovered a whole world of gardening!

We moved in to our house in March and there was this weird architectural platform in our backyard:

It's hard to tell from the picture but this triangle is almost shoulder height on me and tapers off to about knee height at the far right side. I thought hmmm...this is such an unused piece of space (the New Yorker in me). So, we decided that we would turn this into a vegetable plot.

Well, if you know Scotland, you know that we don't have extremely warm weather. So, despite it being April, it was still too cold to plant anything outside. So, I began growing things from seed in the house. These are some basil plants...

Poor David, every (and I mean EVERY) windowsill in the house was covered with plants...


I really enjoyed growing the plants from seed. For me, this was the first time I had done any gardening in my life. I really liked growing tomato plants (the stems smell like tomatoes).

So, in May, we decided to convert that unused triangle into our vegetable plot. First, we had to remove ALL the rocks. David was the man for that! He happily removed a very thick layer of rocks.

Then we realised that we had really heavy clay soil there. So, I had to dig in both compost and sand to help improve the drainage. I decided that I wanted to do organic gardening and to rotate my crops every year. So, I made five different 'plots'. This is how it looked before we put in any plants (the only thing we had planted early on was onions, shallots and green onions)...



This is a picture of all our outdoor flowers and you can see the potatoes starting in the big green tubs.




Now that it is July, everything is now officially outside and our garden is just starting to take off! Check out our vegetable plot now....
In the upper left hand corner is our curly kale, red chard, broccoli, radishes and sorrel. In the middle top are tomato plants and beetroot (and some marigold flowers). In the upper right hand plots are runner beans, peas, fennel and some nasturtium flowers and the most upper right hand plot (the smallest plot) are some artichokes. Then in the lower left plot are strawberries, one courgette and some struggling okra. Then in the lower right hand plot are our thriving onions, green onions, shallots, lettuce, leeks and spinach. Phew! Not bad for a beginner! So far, David and I have had green onions and radishes from our veg plot and are looking forward to have some red chard, onions, curly kale, lettuce, and shallots in the coming weeks. The end of July should see our first batch of potatoes and maybe some tomatoes?

Oh, and we also created a pumpkin patch at the back of the garden....I'll do a separate blog posting on that and our lovely window boxes.

But for now...I leave you with this happy quote:

"There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling." ~Mirabel Osler

Posted by David


Debi had a business meeting in town, so I decided to tag along, since I've never been. It was a short trip but we had a great time. The hosts of the meeting were NEF; check them out here.