Salad growing

I am a big fan of flowers in a garden and as such have not been able to bring myself to give up any potentially flowering space in my garden to growing vegetables which can sometimes be rather dull looking plants.  However I did have a seed sowing session earlier this year and as a result we had some vegetable plants that needed homes.

My children had a boat shaped sand-pit that we had submerged into the borders and in the past couple of years they have spent hours playing here.  My advice to my son a few weeks ago was not to stand on the lid of the sand-pit but he chose not to follow this (when do children start to listen to parents’ advice by the way?) and ended up with a large foot shaped hole in the lid resulting in more of a pond than a sand-pit with lots of drowned creatures.  And so we said good-bye to the sand-pit.

This did leave a small veg patch sized space in my flower bed so I decided to plant out some of the seedlings we had raised.  We had sweetcorn,pumpkins, sweetpeas and sunflowers and also direct sowed some beans, radishes and spinach.  The slug problem that I have had this summer put paid to most of this though and we now only have the sweetcorn and sunflowers (both of which have happily recovered since the slug pellet introduction) so all in all a pretty unsuccessful attempt at vegetable growing – I will stick to flowers next year!

I did want to grow some salad leaves though and given the slug and snail invasion of my garden decided that they might be easier to control if my salad was in a planter.  I got this lovely wine crate, lined it with plastic and added compost and seeds (and a few slug pellets just to be sure!) and we now have a great supply of salad leaves to eat.

Salad leaves

My son was keen to grow some different coloured carrots and I allowed him to plant some in a spare plastic plant pot.  We harvested them at the weekend and they were very tasty!  He didn’t get all the colours he was hoping for with a lack of the red carrots but yellow ones were novelty enough especially as they tasted like orange carrots, much to his surprise.

Elliot's carrots