Twenty six years of life in the Caribbean, with limited supplies of fresh water and little/no garden (specially when living on a boat, as I did for the first 6 years) means that I have no experience at all of gardening. I’m working on changing that. I love flowers. Tulips bring a smile to my face. The sight of a carpet of bluebells in springtime gives my heart wings (did you know that the UK is host to about 50% of the world’s bluebells?). So now that we’re at Les Terraces full-time I decided that it is time to start learning about growing things. Last year I bought a couple of bags of daffodil and tulip bulbs. I read the destructions carefully and planted them out in a tank on the top terrace. My dearly beloved made encouraging comments such as “waste of time”. I ignored him, crossed my fingers and hoped that he was wrong.
When we returned to the UK before Christmas to see family I dashed down to the excellent garden centre a few miles from my sister-in-law’s house to pick up some seed trays and other propagating materials, as I’ve not yet found one here that has anything close to the same selection. I hadn’t factored the season into my shopping expedition. Gardening supplies had been relegated to a large outdoor hangar, while the shelves groaned under the weight of festive merchandise, but I managed to find all that I needed (quite a different discussion to “all that I wanted“). Again, there were a few sotto voce comments on the futility of my expenditure. Mentally, I stuck my fingers in my ears and went “lalalalalalaaa”.
A visiting puppy decided that the tank containing the bulbs looked interesting. Fortunately, she was caught before she was able to wreck too much damage. I used the earth she had spilled from the pots stacked in a corner to repair the tank, and hoped for the best. I am so excited….. little points of green are now peeking through the black soil. No, it isn’t grass or weeds. These are definitely planned.
Last week I brought the seed trays upstairs, and lugged a 40l bag of potting soil up onto the top terrace and, in freezing temperatures, started the process of trying very hard to prove Graham wrong. My mother had brought me packets of seeds for poppies, foxgloves, morning glory, sweet peas, nasturtiums and radishes when she visited last year, and I (very optimistically) had collected seed pods from last year’s begonias (they’re free, why not try?). I planted all of the seeds and set the trays out in a warm place (away from the attentions of a marauding puppy). I’ve kept the trays moist, but not wet. And hoped. Yesterday I thought that I could see pale necks breaking through the soil. I couldn’t resist looking again today …..
I am very excited. I don’t think that I’ve been so psyched (about plants) since I grew a broad bean on blotting paper in biology class in lower 4! The radishes have gone great guns – the packet said that it was about a month from seeding to harvest, but I didn’t believe it. The sweet peas, morning glories and nasturtiums are also showing their first leaves. We shall have to see how the rest do, but I have a little more confidence now that we may see something. Obviously, I’m no Percy Thrower or Capability Brown, but I’m not the black-fingers I feared I might be. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the flowers that friends brought me this weekend, after a bit of a rotten week. My thanks to Ian & Janet for the joy their gifts are bringing.
