When it comes to gardening I fall into the hopelessly romantic camp.  Even crawling along hand-weeding and hating the drudgery of it all, it isn’t long before I fall into day dreaming about the beauty of large walled kitchen gardens with fruit, vegetables, herbs and cut flowers jostling for attention.  I dream of a garden sheltered from the wind and the worst of the horizontal rains.  A garden not inflicted by gorse invasion nor stalked by Pukekos who pace the borders looking for a chink in the fence to waddle through.  A garden not flattened by big basset paws.

Day dreaming is a soothing way to keep some of the gardening monotony at bay.  That and a good audio book.   Without such distractions I’d fall into despair and continuously overwhelmed with the herculean efforts it actually takes to build and manage a successful kitchen garden.   It’s the attention to detail that matters and thereby hangs my greatest failing.  I’m  a big picture, see it and dream it kind of girl so meticulous planning and good gardening habits fall by the wayside replaced only by frantic panics about what I haven’t done and what might have been.

Last growing season was poor.  Not just for me but for home kitchen gardeners generally.  Not enough sun for growing and too much rain that washed away the seeds in the first place.  But that was last year and we’re now looking forward to what the new growing season will bring.  That’s the great thing about gardening – you always have next season to dream about.

The seeds trays are planted out and after only a week the broccoli are eager to win the growing race.  It’s a nerve wracking time though waiting to see if other seeds are going to co-operate or play hard to get.  In the meantime, there is much hard graft to be done.  Aside from the blessed weeding, we have two new beds to build and fill with soil ready for new crops.  I’m moving strawberries out of the main garden so we can grow more soft fruit bushes under the fruit cages and creating new salad beds.

I am hoping that this being our fourth growing season since we first  built our kitchen garden patch. Since those days my initial rotation plan has been revised each year as I understood what all the crops needed and my best endeavors to keep a garden journal have failed.  I tell myself this year will be different.  I shall be more meticulous about labeling things, recording things and doing things as planned.  But I suspect I shall slip into more day dreaming and just see what nature delivers to us.

Pestle and Mortar from Le Manoir