It had to begin somewhere!
I started off having no interest in plants whatsoever. This was because I had tried in the past (and failed!) to keep a plant alive. Not only did they die, but I would get covered in mess for apparently no reason whatsoever.
Added to that was the fact that I had terrible hayfever growing up – grass, trees and flowers made me sneeze and gave me red, itchy, puffy eyes. They may have been beautiful to most people but I didn’t like them at all.
For me, gardening was a total waste of time.
I thought gardening was boring – it was something old people did.
I didn’t think it was for me at all and that frame of mind stayed with me until my children were born. Then I started to think about food differently. I wanted to be healthier and set a good example for my children.
I had never been fond of vegetables; thinking of them as soggy, tasteless additions to meals and I would avoid them as much as possible!
I knew that I needed to change and lead a more healthy lifestyle, not just for me but for my whole family.
I began to introduce more fruit and vegetables to my diet and our family meals were healthier than they were before. However, the more information I read, the more I found that people who grew their own vegetables at home or on an allotment said they tasted so much better than those at the supermarkets.
One day, completely out of the blue, my Husband returned from the local DIY shop with some strawberry plants.
It was almost summer and they already had fruit on them.
Just a couple of weeks later and we had the most delicious, ripe strawberries.
Technically, all we’d done was buy the plants and put them in a pot with some compost, but the feeling of eating something that had grown at home was new to me and I liked it.
The plants were alive long enough for the fruit to grow to full size and ripen – I hadn’t killed them and it started the ball rolling…
What else could I not kill?
Instead of getting bored with the idea of growing and it fading away, I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Those strawberries (in the photo, above) had changed my mindset completely. Growing something you could eat was fascinating and rewarding.
Before I knew it, my tiny back yard had buckets with pea plants and tomatoes growing in them and I managed to keep most of them alive too!
Not knowing a lot about gardening at the time, I had no idea that if I wanted to grow from seed, I needed to be sowing in March (good old UK climate) so I bought plug plants from the local garden centre.
This was brilliant for me because they were already established and I didn’t need to do much apart from water them (and make sure the dogs didn’t eat them!).
Buying plug plants is a great way to start as a beginner because all the hard work of sowing seeds and potting up when they get bigger is taken away.
This is the trickiest part of growing because many seedlings don’t survive and it can make you feel like you’ve failed, but that isn’t true. Many of the top gardeners out there lose seedlings and plants due to lots of different factors.
After that season had ended (and we had eaten all the strawberries, peas and tomatoes) I started planning for the next growing season which happened to be even better. I will tell you about that in my next post.
If you need some help with planning your vegetable growing whether you are a beginner or have some experience it can help massively to keep all of your information in one place by using a planner. I’ve designed my own (Like the one here) which you can see on my planners & journals page:
I hope you found this post helpful – if you did please leave me a comment below and do visit my instagram page and Youtube channel where you can see more of what I’ve been up to.
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