A few weeks ago, Ronnie’s parents came to stay for the weekend. They came about a year ago and transformed our courtyard, this time, they created us a kitchen garden!

This is the section nearest the kitchen door when they arrived. It’s essentially a ramshackle section built on the remnants of the old outdoor toilet and coal stores.  

The DPC, laid to kill weed, was pulled up and we set to work pulling up the roots of the anaemic weeds beneath, three bins worth to be precise. Ronnie’s dad used some of the various bricks and tiles we had hanging round the garden to build up and secure the walls and smoothed over the earth ready for planting. Before I knew it, it looked like this… 

It was then time to start planting, we were given an amazing selection of home-grown plants including beans, tomatoes, chilli, asparagus peas, butternut squash, Chinese cucumber, horseradish, potatoes, pumpkins and rather ambitiously, watermelons!  

Each of the plants were planted in carefully chosen positions and staked as needed. The kind help of Ronnies mum and dad created a manageable portion of the garden to look after & It’s great to have all of these vedgetables just a few steps from the kitchen door, I can’t wait for them to be ready!  

The same weekend, we were also the grateful recipients of a variety of herb plants, my aunt & uncle liked the herb garden we’d assembled a couple of weeks before, but the plants apparently weren’t up to scratch so they gave us some superior speciens…I’m pretty sure I have the best stocked herb garden in town! 

Meanwhile, Dottie found a great vantage point from which to keep an eye on the weekends proceedings…she’s not as silly as she looks!