This year I was determined, if I was going to be stuck in lockdown again, I was going to grow some food of my own. I’ve had a mini greenhouse lurking in my cupboard for ages with nowhere to put it, so I decided to set it up by the window – my living room has one massive window, not quite a picture window but pretty big – and use it as a grow table for vegetable seedlings. I determined that everyone I knew who’d made a roaring success of growing their own last year had been doing so in decidedly make shift circumstances, perhaps the key was to keep things simple. So while I ordered seed compost and greenhouse variety seeds, I dispensed with commercial seed trays and closed the tab of grow lights, and instead planted my seeds in old egg box trays, stuck them in a patch of sunshine beside the radiator, watered them regularly and hoped for the best. I thought perhaps a couple of them would germinate, only for me to end up with four plants each of courgettes, cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers. I gave away a couple of courgette plants to friends with greenhouses – four is more than one person could ever eat their way through even if I had the space for them which I don’t – and I’ve lost a tomato and a cucumber plant since – another cucumber plant decided to use the tomato plant as a climbing frame and in the process strangled the poor thing. My living room window area is decidedly jungle like at the moment but after months of flowers that never became fruit, I finally have my first tiny cucumber growing. I’m also told that my tomatoes won’t produce fruit until they’re at least a metre tall, and one of them is nearly as tall as me now so I’m hopeful.
I also tried growing baby carrots in yoghurt pots, however, while I got a lot of leaf action the roots never came to much. However I suspect that they didn’t get enough water and light in their early days, so I’m starting a new batch on a nice sunny window ledge to see if they do better. (At the start of the year I was trying to keep track of how much ‘recyclable’ waste I was going through, and as part of that I determined to keep my yoghurt pots and similar to use as starter pots for seeds. The answer is that it mounts up really quickly and is generally quite horrifying to be faced with. I’m very much onboard with the fact that the big polluters are doing most of the damage and need to be held to account rather than blaming individual consumers, but we as individuals still need to do our bit. I’d been putting aside all the cable ties that came with bits of kit I bought over the last year, hoping to find some way to recycle them and am delighted to have repurposed them for staking my cucumbers and courgettes when they were tiny but leggy and floppy.) I may have underestimated how much and how fast the seedlings would grow as they rapidly outgrew their initial homes and for a while there it felt like I was constantly repotting. It’s a good job I never throw out any plant pots, as I was definitely playing musical pots with my plants for a couple of months. Still holding out hope for some cucumbers and tomatoes at least!
What I’d never realised about growing these kind of plants from seed, is that when they’re small they grow and change so much and so quickly. My cucumbers and courgettes in particular where a delight as seedling, changing and growing day by day, I got a bit obsessed for a while but when lockdown was really biting and it felt like I’d lost all sense of time and winter outside would never end, the progress of my seedlings reminded that time was indeed still moving and the world continued to turn. (The way, when I returned from a now-rare work trip away, my efforts to keep my tomatoes from drying out while I was gone had caused them to double in height.) Even if I never got a single vegetable from any of them it would have been worth it to have these green growing things to care for through this strange and troubled year.
I decided to give growing herbs one last chance. Getting a batch of Mediterranean herbs I leaned into the overly sheltered nature of my back window box, and hoped to coddle them through. Despite two separate thyme plants having met a desiccated end, it was overall a success, not even the late snow in May could keep my rosemary, marjoram and purple sage down. (The sage wasn’t part of the original herb plan, but I do occasionally cook with sage and this year there was an actual fresh sage shortage, and dried sage is an extremely poor substitute, so I kept hunting until I found a seedling and it has rewarded my determination.) After that success I decided to venture into mint and parsley who’ve had some dramatic reversals of fortune. Early on the got caught in the late snow and I thought the parsley was a gonner, but once the sun returned it perked right back up again and is thriving, whereas the mint which was going great guns initially has frizzled up and died with all the sunshine despite my best efforts to keep it hydrated. My dad even brought me some chives that are clinging on for dear life outside my kitchen window. If there’s been a narrative of my window boxes this year it’s been a divided fate between roaring success and dismal failure – even the flowers were hit and miss this year, with one window box of fuchsias flourishing and the other looking like they’ve been through a blast furnace, even my heather plants living in the same window box – one on either end – had divided fortunes, one thriving and the over brown and sad.
In many ways this has not been a normal year, even without taking the continuing pandemic into account, the weather has been extreme, months of snow – snow and hail in May! – and then almost constant sunshine throughout June until this last week it broke with almost biblical rain, so honestly I’m amazed and delighted that I managed to grow anything. In a normal year I definitely wouldn’t have been home enough to give the veggies the amount of coddling they clearly needed, but it has been a genuinely delightful experiment. I’m also hopeful that I’ve learned enough from having the time to learn through trial and error that next year I’ll be able to manage more herbs in the window boxes, and maybe some spring onions and carrots – perhaps even just the one tomato or pepper or cucumber plant, I’ve got the tomato feed now – on my window ledge. There are still few greater or simpler joys than cooking with something that I grew myself, even if it’s only a sprig of rosemary or some sage in the risotto, some mint in a cooling beverage or finishing off a dish with a garnish of parsley. That is most definitely worth all the frustration and heartbreak of keeping on at trying to grow my own.
Cupboard Life 