AGAINST ALL ODDS

A gardener’s lot is not without its trials and tribulations. However, despite a pandemic, a lockdown and relentless predators last year, keen grower Sandra Barnes has reasons to be cheerful

- Sandra Barnes

I have always been an avid grower. Dating back to when I was a child, I was given a small piece of garden which I proclaimed was “my vegetable plot”. From those early days, I was hooked and from that moment my passion for growing has stayed with me. However, last year’s growing season, as I was going to discover, was to be totally different and somewhat of a challenge in more ways than one.

A frisson of excitement enveloped me as I cleared the dining table, covered it with a plastic tablecloth, and set down my bag of seed compost, cell trays, flower pots, and a variety of seed packets: sowing red and yellow tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce, aubergine, runner beans, courgette, basil, lemon basil, thyme, and various flower seeds.

I didn’t have any pepper seeds, so several weeks prior to my grand sowing day, when I was chopping a shop-bought pepper for dinner, I saved a few seeds, putting them between two sheets of kitchen roll and setting them aside. I planted four of these pepper seeds.

There is something very calming and therapeutic about sowing seeds – the promise of giving life, creating a living organism, which in turn repays its debt by sustaining our lives once it bears fruit.

Each morning I awoke, eager to go to my dining room (which now resembled a nursery), excited to inspect each flower pot and seed tray, expectant to see which seeds would break through the surface first, watering where necessary and encouraging them to grow.

LOCKDOWN!