Grow Your Own

Tonight we ate, for the very first time, vegetables that I'd grown myself in our little back garden. Sure, it was only a lettuce, but baby steps are better than no steps at all and I can't describe the pride with which Christopher and I went outside, chose a lettuce, cut it, and prepared a simple Green Salad to accompany our dinner of Spaghetti & Meatballs. Anything that gets a three-year-old to eat a plateful of unadorned lettuce is worth it in my book.

I'm sure I'm not alone. I thought that vegetable gardening would be difficult, time-consuming and that you were either born with green fingers or you weren't. Sorry to all those gardening buffs who ply a trade full of seeding, weeding and feeding, but it's actually not that hard. To paraphrase Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (or 'Hairy Knitting-Wool' as he's affectionately known chez Homer), plants want to grow, leave them to it.

So that's what I did. I bought some plug plants from the local garden centre (£1.50 for 6 plants, not bad), stuck them in a patch of earth that I'd rather half-heartedly dug over and watered them occasionally when I remembered. I did a bit of weeding last week, but only because we'd been away and the lawn had begun to encroach rather badly on my self-styled 'allotment' .

I would feel quite smug, if I didn't know how little I'd actually done in the way of work (let alone back-breaking labour and - eek! - actual digging). Roll on the crop of 'lazy' broad beans - I can hardly wait!