You Reap What You Sow.

At least some of it!

Growing up and living in a city the adage of you reap what you sow was abstract and mostly applied to behaviour that wasn't up to scratch. Fair enough, it is true after all.

Well, now that we have our own little " Kitchen - garden " ( locally most refer to it as
a ' Küchelgarten ' ) we are literally reaping what we have sowed. A mini - gardener's delight. Calling it a kitchen - garden is apt. We do grow food in it and I made sure it was right outside our front door and only a few meters from our kitchen. My theory was that if I don't see it every day, I would forget to tend and water it!

There were times when I did forget the laborious task of watering our garden. We don't have an outside tap and unless nature has been kind with a lot of rain, it means lugging the jerrycan into the shower to fill four or five times. A few plants didn't survive, but some did. Seeing growth spurts of homegrown vegetables is nice. It sounds silly, but I do feel proud of this.

Our garden is fairly visible to neighbours & passers by, which puts some pressure on us to keep it nice...As luck would have it, the vegetables that didn't get a growth spurt of any sort are in plain sight of anybody. The vegetables that grew into abundance are hidden behind the fence. At times I do feel like putting a sign up stating that we do have vegetables that survived life with us!

Bob and I have been deciding for days when we should harvest the first one. Yesterday was the day. As the lawns in our garden seem to be turbo charged, Bob was yet again having a workout behind the mower. That marvelous smell of freshly cut grass was permeating everywhere and it instantly set a scene of in-the-moment-happiness. The freshly cut grass smell was only trumped by a sharp looking lawn...and the fact that we had grown our own bounty, supper was on us.

Our star performer. From the top it looks like a bunch of elephant's ears flapping in the wind, but underneath is a busy greenhouse made by nature.

The stem of each leaf has tiny needles and even parting the ' elephants' ears ' involves nerves or rather hands of steel.

Gosh, look at the size of it!

Isn't that a wonderful environment to grow up in? Nature is so amazing: it has created a natural shade cover for the vegetables to thrive. Wow. If you look closely, you can see our front door peeking through in the top left hand side of the photo.

Biggi