During this lovely summer in ‘Broke(n) Britain’, and we have to come to grips with the fact that the country is in more debt than post WWII, a fun phenomenon has taken hold – guerilla gardening! What it means is that people just garden anywhere in this overcrowded urban space (London). In our case, we started a veg garden outside our front gate, on a raised council-owned bed that was previously an overgrown dump for disposable nappies (which we all know they’re not), cigarette butts and discarded half-empty cans of strong lager (which at least acted as snail traps).
It took guerilla husband months to dig out the bush, dig it over, compost it and we planted from seed. (see pic attached) Now most meals at night include something from the garden – last night was spinach in the salad, strawberries fresh every day for breakfast, but we can’t WAIT for the potatoes (in the foreground in the pic) and the beans have just started flowering. It’s pathetically addictive, we know every new leaf. Here in the UK there aren’t too many “noonoos” munching on the plants – if you leave them alone, it all works out, the aphids and greenfly come, but the ladybirds eat those and so on up the food chain, the largest surviving predators are the snails, who as an armour-clad army are truly daunting. But the birds take care of those.