Tales of My Veggie Garden — Past and Present
Growing my own vegetables is a balancing act between intuition and facts on the ground
In the spring of 2020, we asked the landlord’s Malawian gardener to help us prepare a small bed for us to grow our own vegetables.
The ground around our little cottage is mostly bush veld and very stony soil, but we identified a small spot outside our kitchen we could utilize.
The gardener did the back-breaking work of breaking up the ground, removing the larger stones, turning the soil and forking in many bags of compost.
I planted kale and baby lettuce while hubby tended to the tomatoes and capsicum — green peppers if you pick them early, sweet and red if you wait instead. Hubby grew the capsicum in pots on our veranda.
All four veggies thrived with his green fingers by my side.
I grew the kale and baby lettuce from packet seeds. Hubby grew his tomatoes and peppers from the seeds of store-bought veg which he’d cleaned and dried.
He’s a natural!
I only learned once the kale was ready to harvest that it is NOT spinach or Swiss chard. You can’t rinse and chop it into a salad. The leaves are thick and fairly bitter and you need to steam them to soften.
Kale is among the most nutrient-dense plants on the planet — a cruciferous plant in the same family as cabbage, brussell sprouts, cauliflower and broccoli. It contains Vitamins A, B1 (thiamin), B2 (riboflavin), B3 (niacin), C, E, and K.
In addition, it offers many minerals — manganese, calcium, potassium, magnesium, iron, phosphorus, sulfur and selenium!
Kale is high in fiber, supports heart health, helps prevent cancer, is recommended for those with diabetes, promotes bone, hair, skin and eye health and aids digestion.
Despite a myriad of health benefits, neither of us enjoyed the taste but ate what we harvested and vowed never to grow it again!
I won’t sing the nutritional praises of lettuce, tomatoes, and peppers, or this will turn into an endless story!
What I want to tell you about was our ongoing battle with the birds as the tomatoes and peppers ripened! We couldn’t afford protective netting, so it was always a game to see if we could pick the ripe ones before the birds pecked them to pieces!
I reckon we managed a 70% success rate and didn’t mind sharing!
The following year, I was busy writing on News Break and Medium.
I’m not a rapid-fire fast writer, so couldn’t put aside time to sow veggies in the spring of September 2021. Then hubby suffered a stroke in January 2022, and that put paid to my writing as I switched careers to become a 24/7 caregiver during his four-month recovery!
By then, winter had arrived — too late for planting.
I followed through with my decision to grow veggies again come Spring (September 2022.) I knew it wouldn’t be easy, as I’d have to do it without hubby’s physical help — he can only move around slowly with his walker, so can no longer help me in the garden.
At first, I was reluctant to go ahead for fear it would exacerbate the feelings of helplessness that sometimes overwhelm him. But I’ve made a point of sharing my planting plans with him and asking for his advice when I need it, so he doesn’t feel left out.
No kale, lettuce, or tomatoes this time!
I sowed Swiss chard (a type of spinach) and green bean bushes where the kale and tomatoes used to be. His container of two capsicum plants has revived and tiny peppers are popping up all over!
The Swiss chard and bean bushes took ages to germinate as we suffered three weeks of extreme heat shortly after I’d sown the seeds.
I’ve had good harvests from both — the bean bushes have reached the end of their life cycle, but I should get another harvest from the chard within the next week.
I’ll plant more once this current heatwave is over, and am looking for seeds for zucchini (baby marrows) to sow in place of the beans.
I also have three containers of new peppers growing from seeds on the veranda — two are sweet peppers and the third is hot baby peppers!
The parsley isn’t doing well.
I sowed the seeds in three oblong trays in which I’d grown the baby lettuce two years before. The parsley germinated well but needed thinning out — I ignored hubby’s advice to leave them alone and most of them died!
I sowed more seeds on Sunday after mixing in fresh compost and fertilizer and will not thin them out this time. I haven’t transplanted any pepper plants either, although each pot has three growing.
All I do now is ensure the soil is moist in the early morning, talk to each plant, and caress their leaves with loads of love and bare hands. (I seldom wear gloves because I love the granular feeling of earth under my fingernails.)
I’ll allow nature to take its course and follow hubby’s intuition to not interfere!
Let me leave you with a song of inspiration:
Let’s keep growing!
I wrote this post in response to the Nature prompt from Dr Preeti Singh. I appreciate the opportunity to share my veggie tales!
Please enjoy more stories from veggie lovers:
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