From me to you to Mexico...

Oh dear, I’m in a highly obnoxious mood and I've just drained ten cups of coffee. I’m afraid I really can’t vouch for the quality of this post so perhaps we should begin with an apology: sorry. To be honest, given the Latino theme, you should just be grateful that I didn’t start off with an “hola” or perhaps an equally cliché “olé”.

Back to the point. I’ve been planning to write something about other people’s gardens for a while, and now I’ve started, I’m finding that the strongest offerings are all coming straight out of Mexico.

I’m slowly becoming my friends' “gardening friend”. People talk to their mothers about me. Although, I think that may be part of a wider attempt to drag them kicking and screaming into the brave new digital era. In my head the conversations go a little like this: “come on Mum, turn off Radio 4, don’t worry, it’ll still be there when you come back. That’s right, now turn on the computer… yep, the big ‘on’ button. No, no, don’t worry there’s far less hardcore porn and inappropriate imagery than the Daily Mail would have you believe. Come on now Mum, if you do it, you’ll get to read Rachel’s blog. You know Rachel, my gardening friend.”

Although this has all come slightly out of the blue, there are a lot worse things to have your name associated with and the up side is I get invited into other people’s gardening spaces. It turns out this is a surprisingly personal space, I’m starting to realise that the way people garden is often fairly representative of who they are.

Let’s start with Mr Mundo, my favourite person in all of Mexico. He’s always been surprisingly supportive of my gardening writing. I’m not suggesting that it’s surprising that he’s been supportive, I just didn’t realise that he had any interest in gardening. Then a couple of months ago he started talking about his own Mexican medley of a garden. I’m not entirely sure if I had anything to do with it, but can we just pretend I did? Mundo’s Mexican Medley makes me jealous. It makes me want to leave London behind and spend the rest of forever chasing the sun. He started with a coconut palm, followed by rosemary and sage all grown in old peach tins bought for 3 pesos from his local bakery. He’s also been busy growing fruit that tastes like “sour mud”… I'm not entirely sure why.

Then, of course, there’s Bella and the legal eagles who are all busy getting Chilli in the City. The lovely Bella and her lovely flatmate clearly thought Mother Nature could do with a bit of accessorising and have added a pair of Anne Klein’s to the mix… I’ve come to expect nothing less from these ladies.

They’re not alone though, apparently the whole legal team has formed a kind of chilli growers’ support network. I suppose one added benefit is that they could be offered as an antidote to work. Someone could stand at the lifts handing out chillies as people leave. Red for a bad day, green for a ‘gouge your own eyes out’ kind of a day... the eye-watering burning sensation might just take some of the pain away. Then again, maybe not.

Oddly enough, last week I met a friend who’s just got back from Mexico. She came home, promptly got fed up with London, ran straight to Wahaca for some solace and remerged with two packets of Serrano chilli seeds that she thought would be just perfect for Rachel, her gardening friend. I’m gonna get me some of my very own chilli in the city...

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Live or Let Die?

I’ve just got back from a long weekend running around Scandinavia with one of my girlfriends. Lots of interesting things happened that weekend. Among the less interesting things was her announcement that she no longer kills insects. She told me this whilst tenderly plucking a blood sucking flying thing from her arm and releasing it back into the wild. When I say less interesting, I mean less interesting for you. There’s no getting around it anymore, I’ve become a fully fledged gardening geek so in fact I find a decision like that fascinating.

For a few weeks now I’ve been studiously ignoring the growing sense of guilt at my brutal approach to any insect that manages to find its way into my garden. I’ve doubtless learnt this behaviour from my mum who positively enjoys the crunch of a snail meeting its doom. She in turn learnt this from her mother who used to throw spiders into jars of bleach. “How cruel!” I hear you cry? And whilst I must agree, “she lived in different times”, I find myself replying, “tougher times when it was difficult to muster sympathy for the Andrex puppy let alone an unwanted spider.”

I digress. I don’t think my guilt comes from the actual killing of bugs and grubs, it’s more that I haven’t taken the time to think about it enough and decide my stance. This has left me in a thoroughly unsatisfactory position. When I choose to ignore a woodlouse scurrying away from me back to the safety of my beetroot pots, I feel a little ball of resentment grow inside of me. By contrast, when I leave them to it, my lettuce end up looking positively polka dotted.

I think it would be a worthy thing to spend the time researching the ecological impact of the insect inhabitants of my terrace and making a valid judgement that way. Unfortunately I am not always a worthy person and I’m hoping that the more ecologically versed among you will comment and let me know what to kill and what to keep.

I think I should qualify here that my ambivalence to insectkind is not wholly unfounded. Some of you may remember that earlier this year my rosemary bush was infested with beetles, though they’re now departed, the rosemary failed to flower this year and has never quite recovered. I have countless similar such stories where my plants have been left battered and bruised by some insect or another.

On the other hand, I do love it when my plants are adorned with butterflies and bees. More than that, gardens depend on a diverse wildlife, and who am I to decide what stays and what goes?

But my rosemary… butterflies… basil… bees… oh the dilemma.

I think I’ve reached a conclusion… I pledge to only kill insects that I’m sure are causing harm to my plants. Oh and mosquitoes. My war on mosquitoes will be waged until my death.

Thanks for listening.

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All Things Edible

For me, one of the most appealing things about having a garden is the possibility of growing my own vegetables and becoming self sufficient – well not exactly self sufficient, I’m a meat eater after all but you get my drift. Well now I have it… to date I have two thriving pots of lettuce, 7 tomotato plants, 3 pots of beetroot, 2 pepper plants and my most recent addition, 10 little pots of red onion seed.

Perhaps my pride in my little vegetable patch is a little premature given that the only thing that’s ready to eat is the lettuce, and my partner and I aren’t able to eat it quickly enough so it’s starting to wither. But, still, I wasn’t expecting my friend’s slightly dismissive comment during an evening on the roof terrace, ‘oh growing vegetables, it’s great isn’t it, it’s so trendy now too, everyone’s doing it.’ Now I don’t take offence easily, but I was offended. ‘YOU DON’T GET IT’ I wanted to shout. The romance of growing vegetables lies in the premise that it’s not just part of a trend. Exactly the opposite in fact, it’s an attempt to remove yourself from a consumer driven society. To only produce what you need (there’ll only be one pot of lettuce next year), to learn to care for and understand what you are producing, and to work hard to produce it. And as a new-comer to this gardening malarky, it is damn hard work.

Suddenly there are so many things to consider. When I buy my fruit and veg at a supermarket, I merrily ignore the chemicals that have been used to grow and and protect the plants I’m eating. When I grow them on my roof terrace I’m suddenly filled with paranoia. Will the dye from the wool I’ve used to tie my tomato plants contaminate the fruit? What kind of fertiliser is safe to use? Is this whole exercise going to be fruitless anyway given the levels of pollution in London?

The tomatoes started off so well, lovely, little shoots grown from seed that grew and grew. Then, we went on holiday and came back to what can only be described as natural selection in action. Half of the shoots were dead and disintegrating, and the other half, for reasons unbeknownst to me had tripled in size and were literally bursting out of their containers. The survivors were swiftly transferred outside into appropriately sized pots. The next day London was hit by a frost, seven survived. They’re now doing well with no fruit yet but full of clusters of beautiful yellow flowers.

The BBC Website tells me that I should be aiming to have single stemmed tomato plants and to achieve that I have to snap the other branches off. What?? This seems to be a familiar theme throughout the gardening world, lovingly nuture your plants from seed, and then when they’ve grown to a reasonable size, ruthlessly destroy the weak to save the strong. Logically I realise my garden is not the site of an epic battle of morality and that at some point the deed will have to be done, but until I’m ready to pluck up the courage to do it, my toms will remain multi stemmed.

The beetroot are my greatest source of pride. The Guardian newspaper gave away a guide to gardening that advised soaking the beetroot seed in water for 24 hours before planting. Now I have no control sample to compare them to but the beets have done amazingly, their healthy green leaves stained with the unmistakeable red of beetroot make me smile every time I see them. However, I have no idea how I’ll know when they’re ready. The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) say that there are three harvests, starting in June ending in October. To my mind that’s four months of wondering and waiting and a massive window of opportunity to get it wrong. I’ll keep you posted…

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Welcome to a city in bloom...

So it’s been months of waiting and wondering and at last the fruits of my labour are being realised… kind of. My little north London roof terrace is finally starting to bloom, blossom, sprout, grow and do all the other things that greenery is supposed to do.

Before we begin there are 3 things you really should know about me. First, patience is not a virtue I possess. Second, the reasonably sized roof terrace was very much the selling point of my flat. Third, despite my mother’s kind reassurances, I am most definitely not green fingered.

Why the blog? Well it’s pretty simple really, my family and friends are bored of the daily updates on the state of my rosemary but I can’t control the urge to talk about it. I imagine this dilemma to be akin to a new mother’s relentless baby talk. To the doe-eyed parents, their new bundle of joy is the centre of their lives (and hence they assume it’s everyone else’s too), to their childless friends, there’s only so much discussion about colic that they can stomach.

And so I turn to you blogger, I need to document the development of my little tomato plants, I need to know why my coriander is now 2 metres tall and I need to find other urban gardeners who try as they may, just don’t have the magic touch.

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