Growing veg isn’t such a bed of roses

I’LL tell you what, it’s easy this vegetable growing lark isn’t it.

We’ve bought some raised beds. We dabbled around the edges last year, with a few pots of tomatoes and French beans.

It was like Sainsbury’s in our garden. Our greatest success was with our abundance of courgettes.

I mean we had thousands, we could have staved off a couple of famines with our truckload of courgettes.

They were however a revelation. Not the watery tasteless variety shipped in from foreign climes, no these were delicious, juicy and meaty.

All in one courgette, and for a vegetarian that’s no mean thing to say. We’re definitely going with them again this year.

So rather than a toe dipped into the world of vegetable growing we thought darn it, let’s jump right in.

We ordered three planks off the internet. Why? I hear you cry, did you not just get some scaffolding planks from the builders merchants?

Well we would have done but there is, and get this, a deficit of scaffolding planks, as everyone is doing this vegetable thing these days.

It’s the new black apparently. So we aren’t the groundbreaking Tom and Barbara we would like to think. Evidently we’re the last to jump on the bandwagon.

Anyway, here on the bandwagon having spent a day putting these pre-sawn planks together, we then ordered two tons, I’ll repeat, TWO tons, of soil/compost.

It was delivered on an articulated lorry.

Then we had to transfer, in our new wheelbarrow, the said soil from one end of the drive, up the side of the house, past the garage and round the back to the freshly erected plots.

This was done with the help of the neighbour who clearly realised that we were well out of our comfort zone and that we would still be shovelling in spring 2012 if he hadn’t wheeled round his own barrow and mucked in.

Eventually they sat like freshly dug graves and by ’eck we was proud.

Then I heard on “Gardeners Question Time”, my new gurus, that new vegetable plots should be left to stand for six weeks minimum so that the soil can absorb all the nutrients it needs.

This is something I feel we should have known before we started to fill every window ledge in the house, with sprouting seeds.

Who said growing vegetables was easy.