My veggie garden is one of my favourite places to be. I love pottering about in there. I love watching the seeds that I've planted, waiting for them to pop their little heads up out of the soil. Rocket is the best for an impatient gardener like myself. Have you ever planted rocket by seed? If so, you'll know exactly why it's called rocket;) Carrots annoy me. They are so sloooooooooow! Hurry up and grow! Thankfully I don't believe that plants understand the English language, otherwise I'd be thinking the carrots were trying to teach me a lesson.
I've recently added an old wooden bench seat to my veggie garden. It's so nice to sit there and make more gardening plans.
I love a really, really full veggie garden. Who doesn't? Apart from the produce though, I love the look! I love seeing vegetables all mixed in together rather than in neat rows. Sue Southam talks about this in her beautiful book: Velvet Pears. I so resonated with her when she talked about how she loves mixing all of her vegies up and that she adds flowers and other surprises to her veggie plots. It's the typical pottager gardening way and is how they used to do it in the old days when it was all about the food. They had the look down pat too but they just didn't realise it at the time.
Sue's working garden at Foxglove Spires. This is my favourite place in her garden.
The 'home grown' thing is so in at the moment. Everyone's going back to basics and making stuff and growing stuff like they did in the old days. It's so homey and feel good and... I love it! River Cottage and Jamie At Home and The Gourmet Farmer all promote this lovely way of life. Back to the simple things - why did we ever have to change it in the first place? Not that I'm complaining about not having to go down to the river and scrub my sheets on a washboard but it's nice to think that gardens and growing our own food has become something to talk about again and is now considered trendy.
There's nothing that relieves my stress more than pulling kikuyu out of my veggie beds and fluffing up the mulch around the seedlings. Aaaahhhhhh....
Not to say that every moment in my garden is relaxing though. Yesterday my blood started to boil when I found holes all through my brassicas' leaves. Not again!!! I vowed never, ever to plant another brassica ever again, two autumns ago. I relented this year thinking things will be different, somehow. Oh, how wrong I was. I just can't grow them. Something always eats them. If they manage to live through the nibbling bugs and moths, then they go straight to seed and give nothing edible to me. What am I not doing right? Hints anyone????? Then I noticed the tops of my rocket had been gnawed off. What self-respecting bug eats rocket?! It's times like these that I wonder whether I can continue being organic in the garden...revenge with chemicals...bwa wawawawaah! Only joking, Lew!
Anyway, I hope you enjoy these photos. They are inspiring to me and have caused me to open up my gardening journal and plan more winter jobs for myself....a glutton for punishment, am I.
I love this veggie garden. It has all the elements of a dream veggie plot for me: cute little shed at the foot of the beds; fenced off area, trees surrounding it, cute bed trims, garden feature in the middle. This would be a lovely space to sit in, have a cuppa and ponder away.
Photo found at: www.walnutsfarm.co.uk
I love this veggie garden wall and old, wooden gate. Every veggie garden should have a rustic gate! I have one that my Dad gave me, waiting to be erected onto an old, grey timber post I've stashed away.
Photo found at: www.hartwoodhousebandb.co.uk
Photo found at: www.housetohome.co.uk 
Photo from Photobucket by Wyndyacre
Photo from: www.grandiflora.pro
These are photos from Jamie Oliver's book: Jamie At Home. I love his garden. It's a typical English veggie garden - walled, pretty, hints of formality, lush....Isn't he lucky he has a gardener? I hear he does do a lot of gardening himself, though. I hope it's true;) He's definitely organic, which is great!
My veggie garden.
I'd really love a fence around it to cosy it up. Not sure if it's a possibility though as it's very close to the house. I have planted some flowering quinces and crab apples at the foot of the veggie beds to give it a sense of 'enclosure' but my next job this winter is to plant a hedge right along the wire fence below the quinces. The hedges will give some height as a backdrop and, hopefully, will look like a living fence. I'd love to have a little garden shed, the size of an outdoor dunny, to sit at the foot of the beds also.
One day....
