I guess for most people a garden is a place to relax in, to entertain in and to beautify your home. While my garden has all those functions it has another. For me a garden should supply at least some food and other needs for me and my household. I'm not doing a Tom and Barbara (in The Good Life British comedy of the seventies) - quite apart from the impossibility of keeping pigs and goats in suburban Perth I have no desire to so - but I do like the idea of growing food plants. I've been doing this for most of my life for lots of reasons but mainly because I love to nurture plants and to be able to wander out to the vegetable garden and pick dinner. I'm lucky in that I have a reasonable size block of land with an area ideally suited for growing vegetables and even at difficult periods of my life I've always managed to have at the very least a collection of herbs and mostly there is much more.
What is interesting is that I now find that I have been ahead of my time. There has apparently been a sudden revival of the urge to grow your own food with even apartment dwellers setting up mini gardens on window ledges and balconies. I have to wonder exactly how much they harvest from these minute gardens but it's a trend that can only benefit anyone who tries it. Fresh picked vegetables and herbs are not only good for you - they taste so much better.
And just to prove my point here are some photos of my recently planted vegetable garden.
Not much to show yet with most of the plants still hidden among the mulch but I'll give you an update in a few weeks.
And just to show we have something almost ready to harvest, a few grapes. The last few years we've lost most of the crop to heatwaves and/or powdery mildew. So I've got my fingers crossed.
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