First pickings!

 

Well here we go, just a week after talking you all through our new garden, I have just eaten our first home grown produce of the year! Just a small side salad of cut-and-come-again lettuce, spinach leaves (both grown from seed) and some of the sorrel leaves I mentioned last week too, but there’s always something a bit special about the first time in the year you can go outside and pick an actual component of a meal. When it’s the first time you can do that from your own garden, ever, then even better!

We were down in Devon last weekend - visiting MrEH’s family- and while we were there we had a wander around Totnes. It’s a nice little town anyway, but as we were walking back to the car I saw something I just had to go and take a closer look at…

Yep - that is a planter of strawberry plants, and there were more too - look

Salad - various different leaves and lettuces, some salad herbs like chives, and all inviting people to  make use of them. How wonderful would that be for folk without gardens? And come to that, I just bet it works to encourage some of those who do have gardens to do a bit more with them, too - there would be plenty of people who would think “well how hard can it be?” having sampled a few leaves, enjoyed a tasty strawberry or two, or had a good sniff of some of the tempting herbs as they passed by. 

There you go - that is the full line up of them. Don’t they just look tempting and lush? We had to chuckle though- the white flowered thing in the front planter there is Three Cornered Leek - absolutely the bane of our lives in our teeny tiny little patch of garden at the flat. It’s incredibly invasive - a small patch one year will easily double in size and more year on year, so for the last 20 years, pretty much every year we have pulled up as much of it as we could deal with, only for it to reappear the following year as prolific as ever! The real irony here though was that until a couple of years ago we literally had NO idea that it was also edible! At least we could have got some use from it had we known this sooner! 

I think my favourite planter may well have been the one with a wide assortment of herbs in it -  mainly because I could imagine this being something that might make the biggest difference to the people who pick from it, but also because I absolutely love herbs and can’t imagine my kitchen without them. Fresh herbs just lift food to a new level - while a handful of chopped coriander in a curry, some chives snipped over a bowl of soup, or mint leaves in with peas or buttery new potatoes are just a small thing, they change a quite ordinary food to something far tastier. Indeed, it was no accident that one of the first things I did in the garden here was to start adding to my herb collection, both with bought and sown from seed options.While I might not have a range to compete with the lovely Totnes planters, if all goes to plan fairly shortly I will have Rosemary, mint, sage, parsley, chives, coriander, thyme, sorrel, oregano and basil to choose from. (Lavender too - but that won’t be going anywhere near anything I might want to eat!) My plan is to be able to be self sufficient for herbs at least during the summer and autumn months, and hopefully to be able to preserve a fair amount to keep us going into the winter as well. 

I have seen planters like the Totnes ones elsewhere, but never as well stocked, or appearing to be as well used as these. Perhaps it’s because Totnes is a town where there is less vandalism than in some places, or because it does have quite a “foodie” heritage but regardless, I just love the idea that there are options even for those living in flats with no outdoor space at all to be able to pop by and pick a handful of leaves for a salad, or a quick pesto, or perhaps even a tea! 

Robyn