Starting the Garden

Blog Post by Claire.

When it comes to the garden, we are starting out small. After spending the last 2 years in a tiny flat in east London, having a whole garden is a little bit overwhelming.

Although we big plans for the garden, we are starting out with a few things our budget and gardening ability can cope with. Our love of cooking means that herbs are a must, we have parsley, thyme, oregano, tarragon, rosemary and basil growing in homemade planters Chris built out of Ikea boxes. We planted them in mid March and so far they are still going strong!

I find it difficult getting the more obscure herbs in the supermarkets, so hopefully having all these to hand will help add favours to our dishes. We also seem to end up throwing out half used packets of herbs every week, so I like the ‘pick what you need’ approach.

I’m attempting to grow Chillies, runner beans, cucumbers and basil from seeds too. I’m hoping potting up the seeds and keeping them in zip lock bags will create a mini greenhouse to get them going, although I haven’t seen any action yet, so only time will tell. At this stage, I don’t think the veggie patch is going to keep us going through Brexit, but at least we will have some lovely herbs to go with the brexit diet of potatoes and carrots!

We bought some pots to go on the decking and for the front of the house to add come colour. We have pansies, lavender and ranunculus in purple and pink tones. I like having a mix of plants, but keeping the colour tones together. The terracotta pots bring a bit of An Italian summer feel to our decking, now all we need is some sunshine!