🔑 Aug 2025 · After four years on the waiting list: plot 27B is mine. Ten by five meters of weeds, a collapsed shed, and one defiant rhubarb that survived the neglect.
My first year in the vegetable garden
🌿 Aug 2025 · Week one: cleared bindweed with roots like electrical cable. Met the neighbors — Ted (forty years of tomatoes) and Priya (chili evangelist). Their advice contradicts perfectly.
🍂 Sep 2025 · Double-dug the first two beds. My back filed a formal complaint. The soil underneath is beautiful though — dark, crumbly, full of worms. Ted nodded at it, which I'm told is high praise.
🧄 Oct 2025 · First things ever planted: garlic cloves and overwintering onions. Buried them, watered them, stood there feeling like I'd done agriculture.
📚 Nov 2025 · Winter homework: seed catalogs. Ordered with the restraint of a lottery winner — 23 packets for a plot that sensibly holds 10 crops. No regrets yet.
❄️ Dec 2025 · Plot asleep under frost. Built a compost bin from old pallets. There is a specific pride in making something square from things that were free.
🌱 Feb 2026 · Windowsill season begins: chilies and tomatoes sown in yogurt pots. My kitchen is now 40% seedling nursery and my partner has accepted this.
🥔 Mar 2026 · Chitting potatoes on the bookshelf (they sprout better in light — who knew). First direct sowing outside: broad beans, in a cold snap, on Ted's dare.
🌧️ Mar 2026 · Learned lesson #1 the wet way: seedlings CAN drown. Lost a tray of lettuce to overwatering enthusiasm. Grief was brief; reseeded same day.
🐌 Apr 2026 · The slugs discovered my transplanted lettuce the same night I planted it. Casualties: 14 of 20. Countermeasures deployed: beer traps, copper tape, nightly patrols with a headtorch.
🌱 Apr 2026 · The garlic from October is a foot tall and I did nothing. Autumn me quietly high-fived spring me. This is the magic trick of gardening: planting is a letter to your future self.
☀️ May 2026 · Everything in at once: tomatoes out, beans up canes, squash in the corner Ted warned me it would conquer. The plot finally looks like the catalogs.
🥬 May 2026 · FIRST HARVEST: radishes and a bowl of salad leaves. Ate the radishes standing at the plot, dirt brushed on jeans. Best radishes in recorded history, obviously.
💧 Jun 2026 · Heatwave week: evening watering became a two-hour meditation. Discovered I no longer check my phone at the plot. Didn't plan that. Best harvest so far.
🐛 Jun 2026 · Found caterpillars skeletonizing the kale. Picked them off by hand into a bucket while having a long think about my place in the food chain.
🍓 Jun 2026 · The strawberries Priya gave me as runners produced exactly nine berries. Shared them at the plot bench: three mine, three Ted's, three hers. A complete economy.
🥒 Jul 2026 · The zucchini situation: two plants, because I didn't believe the warnings. Now supplying the entire street. Neighbors have started pretending they're not home.
🍅 Jul 2026 · First ripe tomato — a Sungold, eaten warm off the vine at 7am. Ted appeared, nodded twice. TWICE. Career peak.
🧺 Jul 2026 · This week's haul: beans, beets, the eternal zucchini, chilies going red, potatoes like buried treasure. Cooking has reorganized itself around what the plot says.
📓 The ledger · Spent: about £240 and every Sunday. Grown: roughly £90 of vegetables. Terrible economics, unbeatable exchange rate — I know where food comes from now, and my resting heart rate dropped.
🌰 Next · Autumn plan already drawn: more garlic, less zucchini (lesson learned), a small pond in the wild corner. The rhubarb that survived the neglect? Fed the whole street as crumble. Respect.