Baby steps - getting started

In the name of Allah most gracious most merciful.

planting turnip seeds for soup

Also 5^th August 201.

There is a buzz in the community about growing food and treading on the earth gently. I like it when people say to me that they have no interest in gardening but when they are reading some of the stuff I write it makes them want to go out to a nursery, buy plants and start growing food.

tilted baths

Here’s a heads-up.  You don’t need much money to start up! You just need to unlock that love for it, it may become a bit obsessive sometimes ha ha but you will calm down after the honeymoon.  If you have a small piece of land, clear out the grass get a few bags of compost and dig it in. The winter rain will bless it with watering. If your piece of land is big, start with one bed or one corner at a time. If you have no soil and only concrete get some milk trays, tyres or old wooden crate or bath and some gardening soil.



red cabbages and chards

iris corms

 

seeds of love

Then you visit a friend with birds, preferably cockatiels or birds that eat sunflower seeds, borrow a few seeds, and push it into the ground not too deeply and you have sunflowers coming up! Buy some packets of seeds such as spinach or Swiss chards (a winner) read the directions and put them in both vegetables and flowers ( try your hand with cosmos flowers it never fails to impress). Now take a drive to Houtbay with strong clippers in hand, on the pavements there are much overgrown fig trees. Clips some good branches (you’re pruning, if anyone stops you) just above the joints and come home keep them in a bucket of water for a day and push them right into a buckets with good soil/compost. In a few weeks’ time all the leaves may have dropped off but you may see a bud or two. Daar is die vye bome. Hey I’m only kidding, rather ask permission from your neighbour to trim the branches overhanging your wall.

Visit friends with gardens and don’t just sound interested, be interested and they may offer you some seedlings, seeds, cuttings with advice. I would! You’d come across the gardening snob or two – ye have to use this kind of organic fertilizer and this kind of mushroom compost. Take no notice - you are there to learn. Get chicken manure from a friend with chickens and google how to water it down to feed your plants. Then check out the nurseries and see which ones sell little plug seedlings for a rand each, and plant them about a ruler's distance from one another. Spend your money that you were going to buy, candy, chocolates, Gatsby, lipstick or cigarettes or how so ever you splash money on and buy some varieties or lettuce, cabbages, broccoli or whatever you think. Even if it was the wrong choice or no one in the house eats let’s say kohlrabi, learn how to use it or give it to friends. Now you’re making progress ne.

Start looking at how you chuck away all the peels of your veggies. Make a furrow in the small piece of ground you have and chuck them there instead. Hey it may be full of surprises – potatoes, sweet potato, tomato and butternuts may sprout up there. Gently with your hands scoop out the plants with all of the surrounding soil and place in your patch. Soon you may not have any space left so you start taking out your old Tupperware bakke and drill holes in them and all those empty blikkies and maybe an interesting container or two and start by the holes first then a handful or two of stones from the driveway and then some good soil and hey you’re getting there! Oh and drop hints for what you would like for your birthday/anniversary, a pink wheelbarrow, an antique watering can, some meters of hosepipe and so on. And take a drive to the Rabbit King in Schaapkraal (thinks Kraal Rd) you will find really cheap used garden pots and lots more. But give yourself some cut off time, you can get lost in the rabbit hole.

Now go to your cupboard where you have lentils and sugar beans, black eyed beans, kidney beans and sommer while you are at it. Take out that packet of coriander seeds make some shallow furrows right around your beds and sprinkle in the seeds. Lightly cover with soil and pat down. Danya galore. Now you are ready for an entire morning to spend in the nursery, cancel all your appointments and get into your car with, later! There are coffee shops there too.

Later we’ll chat about making your own compost or getting someone to help you make it.

Plant food and start your garden with Bismillah today!