We’d been growing potatoes in bags – the sort you add more soil to when the potato leaves have found their way to the surface, bury them and let them break through again and so on until the bag is full. We knew that you’re supposed to wait until they flower before harvesting but ours hadn’t and the first couple of bags we planted were starting to go yellow as if they’d been hit with blight. Turns out that in fact this also means they’re ready for picking so we tipped the first bag out to see what we got – and personally I’m pretty impressed!

To a farmer growing potatoes is as trivial as breathing in and out, but since I’d never done it before it felt like a real novelty. We went with anya potatoes which are small, thin and tasty. We planted two in each bag starting back in March and that was long enough to wait! Anyway, have a look at the photos below to see what we did and ended up with:

This plant growing is definitely a learning experience and there are lessons we’ll be applying next year such as thinning the carrots and beetroots out more, what to plant from seed and what to grow indoors first and many other things. It’s been fun so far and it just makes me want to buy a house with a huge garden so I can fit poly tunnels and grow grow grow! I think I’ll need that lottery win first though…

It turns out that the BBC has decided to copy us with their Dig In campaign to encourage people to grow their own veg and I for one take it as a compliment that they were so impressed by my time lapse video that they launched this nationwide initiative.

Anyway, our smaller veg plot has some raspberries, spinach and lettuce growing and you can see from the pictures below that they’re doing well. Some way off providing us with a meal but at least they’re growing in the soil we got (the latter two were sown from seed so the hours Rachael pored over which soil to get was well worth it).

The larger veg plot (the one in the video) has some carrots that we’ve just transferred from growing in our kitchen and we’ve planted some onions too. We’ve still got leeks and some other veg we’ll put in but it’s not time yet (apparently). As if that range of veg isn’t enough we’re also growing potatoes in bags (you roll them up and add more soil as they grow through and eventually you have more potatoes than you know what to do with), more strawberries (having been such a success last year) sweet peas, rhubarb and probably more that I can’t think of right now. I think it’s fair to say we’re hedging our bets and trying lots of different things to see what works and what doesn’t.

I never thought I’d actually enjoy gardening but strangely it’s quite compelling, although it does require patience to say the least! Anyway, I took some pictures to show the various things we’re doing so have a look below – they’re a bit more interesting than your average gardening magazine photos I think!

So a couple of weekends ago we acquired some planks of wood and built a 2m x 1m frame that we’d fill with soil and grow things like carrots, leeks and onions among other things. We also decided we’d convert our rather pathetic water feature into a 1m x 1m plot and grow some more veg. And to top that we’d grow some potatoes in bags and expand our strawberry growing project that was such a success last year. We ordered a tonne of quality top soil and this weekend had the small task of shifting that soil and filling up our newly built veg plots.

My camera has this cool time lapse feature so I thought I’d put it to good use and condense an afternoon’s hard graft into a couple of minutes for your viewing pleasure below:

The thing I love about time lapse videos is that it looks like we know what we’re doing – but I can assure you we made it up as we went along! We were also lucky to have our neighbour’s daughter over to help with finishing the job – it’s not surprising that a 6 year old would want to get their hands dirty!

Anyway, the next step is to figure out exactly what we want to grow and when we should start the planting. I’ll keep you posted!

We have (or rather my good lady has) been taking good care of them as they’ve grown from little shoots. We kept looking out for little green strawberries to appear and when they did we were counting the days until we could eat them! Unfortunately the local bird population had other ideas so we netted them up after one particularly juicy strawberry disappeared without a trace one day (and my good lady swears she didn’t eat it).

More and more red strawberries looked almost ready for eating and then last night we decided enough was enough – it was time to harvest! As the title suggests, they really do taste sweeter when you grow your own. We’ve bought a few boxes of strawberries lately but they didn’t taste half as nice as the ones we picked – they were delicious!

Of course my good lady’s creative talents with food presentation made them taste even better:

So if you’ve got hanging baskets filled with boring pansies or some other tedious flowers then why not throw them in the bin and plant something you can later eat? That’s my kind of gardening! And if you don’t like strawberries then not to worry, invite me round your house and I’ll eat them for you!