Happy Birthday My Justin...

Today is my partners birthday and it is, in part, his fault I have started this blog. In my quest for self sufficiency, I have been reading other people's experiences on blogs such as this, all of the advice and information has been invaluable. Not that I am in anyway experienced, but I am learning. Justins thought was that I should be sharing our veggie venture, creating a sort of online journal, so that I can look back and see how it started, having a good measure for the progress we make. I love that he is enthusiastic in his encouragement of my humble beginnings in our Veggie patch. And although I don't want my blog to be predominantly about the growing of vegetables, this post is for him.

The veggie patch was a little inspired by Hugh, that infectiously enthusiastic chap from the river cottage series, oh the seed had been planted long ago, but he definitely made sure that seed germinated, and grew! As a vegetarian I can't enjoy all he does, but I respect when he slaughters an animal, he respects the animal enough to waste nothing. With this new idea of growing my own food, high on information overload gleaned from two months of non stop internet research, I went to Justin and rambled and ranted and raved about all things permaculture, and growing our own veg. Poor Justin, for all he had to listen to, watch, and read.

The first thing I did was plant pumpkin, right next to my ashamedly unused greenhouse.

 There are 3 Kent pumpkins and one melon of some sort, but that's a tale for another day. I am amazed at how fast they've grown in less than a month! We also have 2 raised garden beds and are hoping to make use of every part of the garden we can for food.

My veggies planted just before the end of the year.

The same bed this morning!

We are currently growing cabbage, tomatoes, lettuce, broccoli, cucumber, pumpkin, some sort of melon, leeks, celery, strawberries, zucchini, and butter beans. There are also various seedlings we have grown from seed, I can't wait to plant them, watch them grow and eat them.

I still have a lot of work to do, and there is so much more I will share over the coming weeks, but it's a fair start, and for Justin's dinner, tonight we ate something I'd grown, some delicious home grown Basil on some home-made pizza's.

Happy Birthday my Justin.
Bek.