Hands In The Dirt - Notes From a Vegetable Garden: From March 2025 (Extract)

A few early Spring entries from my 2025 gardening journal, Hands In The Dirt — Notes From a Vegetable Garden. Now available on Amazon.

Monday, 10th March 2025

My Garden Food Bank

I’ve had this self-sufficiency garden dream since watching the BBC comedy, The Good Life back in the 1970s. The idea of growing my own food, being self-sufficient, and saving money appealed. Now, I have a chance to do it.

Once summer arrives, the garden will be my own personal food bank. Here in England, with the cost of living rising, food inflation high, everything more expensive every year, there’s a simple pleasure in being able to grow some of my own food.

Seeing the price of fruit and vegetables in the supermarket makes me appreciate it even more. For the cost of a few pence in seeds, the garden will supply most of what I need for several months. And while it’s mostly vegetables that I grow, that’s still a big help.

Fruit, on the other hand, I find not so easy to grow. It often requires higher temperatures, and British summers aren’t always reliable. I’ve had some luck with strawberries, and I’m fortunate to live close to where wild blackberries grow. Very close, actually. At the bottom of my garden, a neighbour’s large blackberry bush spills over the fence, so all I need to do is pick.

Then there is a country park near where I live. Everywhere you look, there are blackberry bushes. For a couple of months in late summer, there are more than enough berries to go around. The best part is, they’re free.

It’s as simple as going for a walk and picking blackberries!

Tip of the Day: Use the garden (or part of it) to grow your own food and save money!

Tuesday, 11th March 2025

The Raised Beds

This year, I’ve been working on building three new raised beds in the garden. They’re fairly big (twelve by four feet, approximately), and I’ve been sketching out plans to split them, one half into a large section, and the other half into four smaller plots.

This plan might change, though, since some crops, like potatoes, will need more room. They do tend to need more space.

When it comes to the garden, I try to recycle where I can. The wood for the sides of the beds came from an old fence that was falling apart. It has seen better days, but the planks are perfect for giving the beds shape and structure.

Tip of the day: Don’t forget to rotate crops in the garden. Recycle wherever possible.

Thursday, 13th March 2025

No-Dig Gardening

The Writer's Life: You Can Never Truly Retire From Your Passion

 

We live in a world that often treats retirement as the end of productivity. We step away from the world of work, close the door, and are expected to slow down. If we are fortunate, the work we leave behind has been a passion. For some, that is true.

But for many of us, work has simply been a necessity. Bills must be paid, and inflation is constant, with the cost of living on a relentless upward cycle. We adapt because we have to. I cannot honestly say that every job I have had was driven by passion. In my experience, the world of work rarely offers that.

I’m getting closer to what is officially called retirement. The good thing is I do not feel my age.

So what then should retirement be?

As the years move on, and the date gets closer, the question feels less theoretical and more personal. Regardless of how old I may feel, my age requires that I think more about it now. It’s like having a little devil on my shoulder telling me that time is moving on and my choices going forward are limited. It reminds me that time is passing and choices might be narrowing.

Awareness focuses the mind.

For many, retirement conjures images of days of leisure, relaxation, and freedom from the previous work routine. A routine of five days a week, getting up, going to work, and nine to ten hours later getting home, comes to an end.

Traditionally, retirement meant stepping back for good. Once you retire, that is it. No more work. But things are changing now, and not necessarily in a positive way. For one, we are living longer, but often those later years are ones where health matters, for both body and mind, and can become more of a problem.

In recent times, the retirement age has been going up in many countries, simply because people living longer has become less affordable for the state. And people are not always in a position to save for their retirement, or have a generous private pension.

Retirement is no longer the short chapter it once was; provided you are healthy, it can now stretch for decades. That is a lot of time to fill. Fortunately, I am doing well when it comes to health and fitness. But for many, health issues take their toll once we reach our sixties and seventies.

And there are two things about the future that I know with absolute certainty.