Year 1 (an overview)

We actually moved into Skull Cottage about a year ago and it was the first time any of us had been in charge of a real live garden. The plot we had inherited with the house was a fairly small and scrubby suburban garden but came with its own advantages (greenhouse, shed, jasmine arch and elderflower trees) and disadvantages (pine trees overhead so lots of pinecones, rocks, weeds, slugs and woodlice).


The green trees you can see are mostly the elderflowers (and a hawthorn). The huge trunks with no tops in sight are absolutely enormous pine trees. They tower way above the house and are protected by law as they're pretty old.

Well, never the people to ignore experimentation fun we began our garden experiments straight away. Unfortunately we didn't keep pictorial or written records and we're kicking ourselves nowas it was good fun if not terribly successful. I (Twinkle) am about the only one who has any garden experience and thats only stuff I remember from back when I was a teenager and my parents gardened and loved to watch Gardeners' World so we were pretty naive and hopeless (to put it mildly).

We planted way more seeds that we could cope with and were terrible at remembering to weed and water. Our garden all seems to have been built over the place where slugs come to party - they ate everything! Despite this we did manage to get some things to grow and we loved doing it.

Here's a quick list of what did and didn't survive our neglectful hands:

Potatoes - grown from some leftover spuds from Tesco that had gone all sprouty these grew magnificently despite serious slug attack and the incessant rain. We harvested several bucketsfull of amazing tasting potatoes in about September.
Beans - all but one succumbed to slug attack and the surviver managed one bean!
Tomatoes - despite our occassional lapses in watering we managed to harvest plenty of cherry tomatoes and they were still going well into October.
Rhubarb - appeared from nowhere and survived everything. Bonus!
Chilli - We planted our seeds way to late so nothing there but we did get one plant from the garden centre which produced lots of tiny scorching fruits despite aphid nightmares!
Lettuce - slug doom! Will be grown indoors this year.
Sweetcorn - our garden miracle. I really didn't expect this to work as both the slugs and the woodlice seemed determined to eat these when put outside. But 4 out of 5 survived and grew and grew and grew! They produced loads of absolutely delicious cobs of corn which bear no resemblance to supermarket stuff. Amazing!

Here they are looking lovely


Needless to say, this year we shall be trying again!