Gardening in a global pandemic

For the past three or more weeks, I’ve felt disappointed by the results from all my gardening efforts. I’ve not wanted to garden and felt like I’d fallen a little out of love as the nights began to draw ever closer here in Cheshire. My overarching feeling was that the garden hadn’t performed as I had hoped. But in writing this and going through a whole year’s worth of garden photographs, my mindset has resolutely taken a 180. What harvests we had along the way (which I had completely forgotten about.).

Not all failures are a waste

A week ago, whilst desperately waiting for the thirty green tomatoes we had still clinging to the vines to turn red, I was all but ready to throw in the trowel and never grow another tomato ever again. When I wasn’t looking, my son (aged 19 months) decided to pick every single fruit. There he was, as proud as punch for collecting ‘ma ehg’ (translation: my eggs) and I was ready to shed tears of the months of babying those plants had needed to result in a basketful of unripe tomatoes. I left them on the kitchen worktop and sulked for a few days, until my husband donned my flowery apron and set our four year old daughter to work turning them into a spicy Christmas green tomato chutney. Not all failures have to be a waste; it requires us to be creative and see that there is always a different type of success to be found. (Although I’m still not sure I ever want to grow a tomato again.)

Can you write a book and garden at the same time?

Without a doubt, we suffered some pretty epic failures. There were two major contributing factors. The first was the weather. A heat wave in March/April, with an overcast June/July did not suit the cucumbers, tomatoes or some of the squashes. The french beans we tried to grow in containers didn’t cope either, but our broad beans were the best we have every grown, no strawberries ever made it inside the house and we are continuing to pick handfuls of runner beans every four or so dayseven now into October. Those beans, variety ‘Enorma’, also happen to be very attractive plants - towering steeples of vibrant green leaves with beautiful poppy-red flowers. I have enjoyed them so much I think next year I’m going to forgo my sweetpeas in favour of more.

The second contributing factor would be that I finished writing my book The Joy of Reusable Nappies during lockdown. It meant I was caring and homeschooling our two small children all day by myself, and then working long nights whilst they slept to complete the book so I could meet the publication deadline of this autumn. I altogether stopped feeding plants, preening them, there were no night time slug patrols or garlic deterrent sprays made. There was a lot I could have done to improve our yield but frankly, I was exhausted. It made every single edible even more precious.

Did we achieve our gardening goals?

I was never going to be a self-sufficient gardener this year. I need an allotment to make a real dent in our food bills (we’re still on the waiting list.), but I set out to put something on the table every week and I had completely forgotten that pretty much, we did achieve this. (It took scrolling my camera roll to realise that.) But more than anything else, it gave us a lot of fun along the way, it provided excellent homeschooling activities and gave me respite from the anxiety and groundhog-style days the pandemic forced upon us all.

What have I learnt from growing our own fruit and veg during a pandemic?

Firstly, don’t start too soon and go steady with your growing plan. I played the seedling shuffle on every available surface inside the house for weeks, all for wanting to get ‘ahead of the game’. Then my son learnt to walk and all bets were off as to where I could leave plants or sow fresh seedlings that little fingers wouldn’t be able to reach. It meant things got overheated in the propagator or underwatered on window ledges and overall, it made the start of the growing season feel panicky, and a constant guilt trip between caring for the plant babies and my real babies. Gardening should be enjoyable, sometimes hard work, but not stressful and sowing crops too early didn’t end up giving me the successional planting I’d hoped to squeeze in.

I had big ambitions for how my carefully crafted successional sowings would run and how crop rotation amongst the perennials would work. But it meant I tried to do too much and didn’t allow for the crazy weather we saw this year. We simply don’t have the space for successional growing on a large scale in our small suburban garden. I wanted to grow everything we like to eat, but some of those fruits simply weren’t worth the effort and so my plan for next year is this: to keep it simple. Less varieties but bigger yields (I hope.)

I’ve drawn up a strong, simple plan for 2021 that should provide staple, seasonal crops throughout the year which we can take from garden fork to table fork every few weeks. I look forward to sharing it with you in the spring. I only hope I won’t get carried away as the new growing season begins again.

Bye for now

Laura

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