Creating Kitchen Garden in Doodleland
Sometimes to start we need a little nudge, or reassurance that we can!
I always said that gardening is still new to me, even though I’ve been doing it for 4 years now and I’ve learned to plant trees, bushes, flowers, make compost, and many other things. But certain topics are yet to be discovered, like, for example, Kitchen Garden.
I wanted to start my first veggie garden in 2023. Just before my son was born - you can watch my naive video here. Anyways, long story short, I’m glad I didn’t and let my mum take over with her tomatoes and I just dove into motherhood.
As I watched my mum, I couldn't' imagine how to do it myself. In 2024 I was hesitating to make a proper start, so dad planted his flowers there and some cucumbers. I was finding excuses, saying now Alfie is a toddler now and I don’t have time for anything,. So just decided to go down the easiest route – to plant some tomatoes in my Clock&Grow set. It basically requires 0 gardening skills: put the preprepared soil block with seed into the container, out the water in, plug it in, and wait for magic to happen. When they grew too big for that planter, I transferred them outside. It was very cold summer for tomatoes so they ripened only by July.
Oh and David (our gardener) gave me few courgette plants. And we’ve out few herbs and salads in. And, oh man, it became Alfie’s favourite thing! Every morning he would ask me to open the patio door and would run to the veggie patch searching for some newly ripened tomatoes.
That inspired me more than anything ever before and this year I’m going full scale! I’m going to grow as much as I can in the garden and see how much harvest we can get.
But even then I felt hesitant again and decided to ask our gardener David, who is helping me a lot around the garden, to help me to start. After we’ve made this video I’ve realised it’s not that scary at all to start a veggie garden. All I needed to do is to create myself a plan to stop feeling overwhelmed and just do it step by step. Here is my video from that day.
When planting a lot, it’s easy to forget something. So, to help myself to remember and understand everything I created a garden journal with schedules and charts (yes, if you watched “Friends”, I’m Monica). And also created a visual board of the year where I could look at and see what’s coming easily. Let me know if you want me to share how it works/looks with you.
The same week we had our uncle around and he was supposed to create some wide shelving’s in the windowsill so I can put more seed pots around. But Big G (as we call him) came up with a brilliant idea of recycling old pallets! I will share in the next article what I’m growing already, so you can start growing something too and grown along with me!
A few tips that I’ve learned from when I just started gardening is that you don’t have to be scared of doing gardening even if you don’t know what to do:
Ask someone with knowledge to help you to start. If there is no one like that, not a problem, read the next tip.
Don’t overthink it. Go to the garden centre, decide what you like and read the labels. It’s important to understand what plants will grow back next year and which will be only here once. Because then you will be left with bare soil/pot again.
With kitchen garden I found it fascinating growing from a seed. I’ve bought myself Click&Grow system and it just can’t get any easier with it. But if you want to plant traditional way - just decide what you’d like to harvest your first year, read as much information about it and go for it. I think that the easiest are herbs. They can put up with partial shade, and don’t require much, just trim them, to use in salads, or on meat, potatoes, soups and enjoy the new growth.
