Growing Our Own Food

This year Mr L built a vegetable patch in our garden for us to have a go at growing our own food.

I grew up with my parents growing their own vegetables, and Baba has always shown a great interest in their huge vegetable patch. Ours is nothing in compassion and we really didn’t know what we were doing when we first started. But we kept going anyway and started to plant our seeds.

We brought a selection pack and planted carrots, potatoes, beetroot, purple sprouting broccoli and onions, and we waited.

Over the last few months lots of things have been growing in the vegetable patch and we have been a bit clueless to what is actually growing and what isn’t growing.

Over the last few weeks Baba has been consistently asking if he can pick his vegetables and to be honest I had no real clue, so I decided to get my mum in to help to see if any of the vegetables could be picked.

I had guessed that the potatoes had taken over the whole vegetable patch, and mum confirmed this as well.

So her and Baba got cracking with digging up the potatoes.

Baba was so excited when the first few potatoes were picked and he didn’t stop grinning and shouting that there were more potatoes in the ground.

It was so lovely to see him so proud of what he had planted, and we managed to get some really big potatoes as well as some dinky small ones. But I am sure they will all be fine in a potato salad.

Baba and my mum dug up all the potatoes and we had a huge bowl full, we also managed to get a couple of carrots and two beetroot, there are some more but they need to do a little more growing as they are all still very small.

But I think for our first attempt we have done really well, and to be honest I don’t think that Mr L or myself really thought anything would grow in the garden.

Although there are a few things that I have learnt for next years vegetable patch.

1) Not to use the green square netting to stop the dogs from going on the vegetable patch, before we knew it the vegetables were growing and the green squares were stuck as the plants were too big in them. This has meant that I have had to cut the netting off at the end of the growing which was not fun!

2) We need a lot more soil in our vegetable patch and this is something that we will be adding too this year. It is currently half full, and that is not enough we need it completely full, our carrots and all our veg is a little diddy because there wasn’t enough soil for it too grow bigger.

3) The potatoes need to be grown in something different, I am thinking one of those potato sacks that you can buy, as they really overtook the vegetable patch. The onions haven’t grown at all as there was no place for them because of the potatoes. I am hoping if we transfer the potatoes to a sack then we can grow more things in the actually vegetable patch.

4) I need to deweed the vegetable patch, there were some serious weeds in that patch, and I didn’t even think to weed the patch! Stupid I know but next year I seriously need to do that.

5) I need to read and study vegetable growing a little more over the next year before we start again.

But for now I am a little bit impressed that we managed to get anything and am so happy with how happy it has made Baba and can not wait to see if the carrots and beetroot can get a little bigger before we dig them up.