Weekend in the garden | by Mariella

To forget how to garden is to forget ourselves’- Mahatma Gandhi.

This is one of my favourite quotes from “Jane’s delicious Garden”, by Jane Griffiths. It’s all about growing organic food in South Africa and has been my garden bible since I decided that I indeed have green fingers. I cannot recommend this book enough. It’s sensitive, insightful and easy to understand. Reading it makes me feel very capable of not killing everything in my garden!

I can also recommend spending a sunny weekend in the garden. It gives you time to focus on the details, the beauty of your garden. To meet the creatures that live there, like this little Slug eater and his 2 siblings hibernating under some cardboard mulching, 

and to meet the interesting vegetables and fruit that live in your garden too! We grow some heritage veg, like this ‘Purple beauty’ pepper which does go bright red eventually and this stuffing tomato, the last of the season, which dried on the vine and looks like a cartoon character! 

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Forming a relationship with the place your food comes from is like investing in getting to know yourself better!

I also learnt all about levels this weekend. It was one of those Mercury retrograde situations where, no matter how my husband tried to explain the concept, I just didn’t get it! After some time, I eventually understood how to work out the contour lines of the land in order to plan our new beds. Our vegetable garden is on a gradual slope and we do this to ensure that the water is evenly distributed and doesn’t dam up somewhere or create erosion somewhere else.  We used a long transparent pipe filled with water and two sticks with lines drawn on them in the same place. One person stands roughly where you would like the bed to start and the other plants stakes at intervals, making sure the waterline in both ends of the pipe is level with the lines on the sticks at each spot, simple really! We measured and planted stakes every meter. The row of stakes planted is the edge of your bed, and it’s good to do this several times down the slope as the eye often has trouble reading the incline correctly.

‘A year from now you may wish you had started today’, Karen Lamb.  This is another quote I really like! Even if you start like I did, with a small unintimidating garden box, you’ll be so happy you did, once those first little green shoots poke out of the soil. And now is the time!