What is it about gardening that makes it so addictive? Maybe it´s just a middle aged thing combined with having a bit of your own outside space to do with as you like. I knew I was on the slippery slope to gardening obsession when I was given a weeding kneeler for my birthday recently – and not just that, but I was delighted with it!
Now, if I was to list all of the hobbies I´ve had in my 50+ yrs of life so far, gardening would never have featured – not even in the top 100. I´d have listed sports and more sports and more sports – oh and eating & drinking – but “tending my baby broccoli plants” neh that would definitely not have made the list!
As a kid growing up we did have a garden and my Dad used to grow potatoes from time to time, and there were blackberries just because they were there without us doing anything at all – but my two favourite things that he grew were gooseberries (maybe some of you call them guzzberries – I´ve never understood that) and rhubarb. We had crumbles and pies galore in the Summer and they were delicious but my only interest was eating them – I paid no attention and had no interest whatsoever in learning how to cultivate them.
Fast forward quite a lot of years, but before we moved overseas with the family, and we had our own garden near Brighton. My wife T got quite into growing herbs – and very successfully too – we had thyme and parsley and mint and rosemary – we were quite proud of our little herb garden and used them all the time – but to be honest, I think my only input was to water them from time to time when I was instructed to do so.
Then, as you all now know, we hopped it over to Cancún, México and for much of the time we were there, we lived in a complex with communal gardens so, again, other than the odd herb and plant in a pot there wasn´t much scope for doing our own thing or ploughing up the land and pretending to be Farmer Giles.
So when, where and why did I suddenly get so obsessed with gardening – yep you´ve guessed it LOCKDOWN. And I bet I´m not the only one. Come on hands up – how many of you out there suddenly got that tingly, obsessive feeling when you started to plant seeds and watch them grow – millimetre by millimetre. Come on don´t be shy – there´s nothing to be embarrassed about – we´re all in this together. By this time the whole Covid19 show hit us, we were already in our house in Mallorca with our own garden, we had quite a bit of space but up to that point we grew nothing. Then, suddenly, we had loads of time on our hands (home working on part time hours provided that) and we weren´t allowed to go anywhere (other than to walk the dog – which we did, very regularly).
So my addiction began with weeding. I just couldn´t stop sometimes – I´d see one weed and have to pull it out, then another, then another. T had to come looking for me sometimes to see where I was and what I was up to – I kept getting caught late night weeding – and then the obsession spread to fruit & veg. Part of us was thinking that maybe we´d have to grow our own food anyway as the shops had nothing in them and you had to queue for hours just to get in – so our minds turned to what we could begin to cultivate and I found myself dreaming about becoming this self-sufficient, off the grid Superstar….then I woke up and remembered I had no idea really how to even start.
So if you know nothing about something – where do you head to first? Yep, YouTube – remember the episode on Swimming pools called Taking the Plunge where Ginger Gerald became an instant Pool Maintenance Guru after watching a couple of vids?) well the very same concept came into play here too. I watched a few short YouTube videos and suddenly I could feel myself being transformed into a Green Fingered Magician. Mind you there are some dreadful and embarrassing self help videos on Youtube – I sometimes question myself about this pod and think why o why would anyone actually choose to listen to Ginger Gerald babbling on about all this random stuff – then I watch some of the videos people put up of themselves on Youtube and I suddenly feel so much better!
Anyway, in this particular case, I took an additional step and looked for a secondary source of information to back up my almost perfect knowledge gleaned from YouTube – so I joined the Facebook Group “Mallorca Gardeners”. Now, I´m not a massive FB fan or user – and I know it can get a bit addictive too (I deleted it from my phone for a few months and then one evening, popped it back on there again and started scrolling and scrolling!) However, one thing that is great about FB are the Community Groups. I´ve joined a bunch of ´em in my time. A few years ago we rented a Motorhome in Northern Spain for a week´s holiday – well, at that time and to learn a bit more about that whole community I joined a Group called Motorhome Madness. I loved it – some of the stories were great and some of the detail they went into. But years later I was still a member and I had no plans whatsoever to buy a Motorhome or anything like that – so eventually T obliged me to delete it and Motorhome Madness became a thing of the past. I also love the “ex Holiday reps” groups – there are a few of them and loads of us ex Holiday Reps are on there sharing memories, outrageous stories and old photos and a whole host of other unmentionable stuff. They´re great too. Well Mallorca Gardeners is up there among the best FB groups. It´s fab! You get complete novices on there (like Ginger Gerald) and you get Professional Garden Landscapers; people who own estates of over 30,000sq meters containing vineyards, orange, lemon, almond and olive groves – to someone who just wants to grow a couple of plants in a plastic pot on their windowsill. A great cross section of society all brought together by one communal magnet: gardening! It´s really collaborative, informative and sometimes really funny – and everyone mucks in together.
Anyway it became pretty clear early on that our piece of land was full of rocks. You couldn´t dig more than a centimetre into the ground and so we had no hope of planting anything directly. However, never fear, there´s always a solution and, despite various warnings to the contrary, after several Youtube videos on how to build raised beds, Ginger Gerald headed to the DIY shop, lined up his tools and constructed not one or two – but FOUR raised beds - with ease and efficiency. Award winning I´d say – although to be fair they weren´t quite straight and I did kneel on a few screws in the process and I almost loseta finger when the drill went a bit mad – but other than that, a major success!
Now the fun begins – time to become self sufficient.
Courgettes – everyone says that they´re dead easy to grow so let´s start with them. To this day, we´ve still not grown a single courgette more than 10 cms long!
Tomatoes – again, perfect Mediterranean climate where we are and everyone does it – so we can too no? Surely we couldn´t fail with these? Well, we have produced quite a lot of tomatoes over the last few years it´s true – but half of them seem to get “bottom rot” (have you ever even heard of that before) and it´s amazing just how many different types of tomatoes there are.
Melons – well, I have a bit of a story here. I bought a melon from a shop, we ate it, I took the seeds, dried them in the sun for a few days and then nonchalantly scattered them into one of my lovely raised beds to see what would happen. And for a while nothing happened – which is pretty much what I was expected although a little disappointing. I wondered if I´d done anything wrong so referred back to Mallorca Gardeners. Well, there are ton of photos of plants clearly not doing so well with that very same question “what am I doing wrong?” And the answers invariably fall into one of two camps – pretty equally:
a) You need to water them more – they need more water. Or
b) You have overwatered them– they don´t need so much water.
Well, that´s a little confusing. As I wasn´t sure if I´d watered them too much or too little I decided to try to forget about them all together. Which I could have done quite successfully except for the very professional little MELON sign I´d carefully written and stuck to the side of the bed! I tell you – I´m a right Alan Titchmarsh.
Anyway, eventually the plant started growing, and growing and growing like a triffid. It spilled over the sides of the raised bed and just kept going with a mind of its own. I was getting very excited just dreaming of the succulent melons I was going to produce. I even had daydreams about leaving an honesty basket outside the house full of my melons and asking for other home grown veg in exchange! I wonder what the veg exchange rate is? I guess it depends a bit where you are and how long it takes to grow your items. Maybe two aubergines for one melon? 6 tomatoes? A good size cauli – the mind boggles!
However I still had a minor problem – although the melon vine (oh yes it´s a vine folks) just kept expanding – there no fruit appeared at all. Just huge leaves and branches. I´d watered it religiously throughout the whole Summer and now that Autumn came it had some rain too – which just made it expand even more, it was taking over everything around it – but still no bloody fruit! Unbelievably depressed, I found myself under considerable pressure just to give up on it, throw in the proverbial towel (or trowel in this case) and make space for some nice, easy, more contained Autumn veg like beans, broccoli, carrots. So, with a heavy heart and a feeling of overwhelming personal failure I went to dig out the melon plant but as I lifted the first huge leaf what do you think I saw? The most beautiful thing in the world. A picture postcard of a melon , already the size of a football just sitting there looking at me and saying “Here I am Ginger Gerald – why did it take you so long to find me?” It was an emotional moment for us all (well, that´s actually a lie – T just said “about bloody time” and nobody else actually gave a toss!).
However, the lack of household enthusiasm didn´t dampen my spirit – not only did I post a picture of me with my prize melon on Mallorca Gardeners group but, wait for it, I even got the picture and a whole article written about me and my melon in the gardening section of the Mallorca Bulletin that week! Finally I have something to add to the “achievements” section of my CV! Now I am not sure if this story makes me a “Lucky Barstard” but it definitely makes me a sad one!!
But life isn´t all about Melons is it now? Oh no, there are bigger fish to fry – like Butternut Squash for example! Now I´ve got you hooked! Now then, the Vegetarians & Vegans out there will no doubt know all about the properties and virtues of Butternut Squash but the rest of us – well, not so much I guess. I do know that I produced 9 marvelous BS´s this year and it´s amazing what you can shove ´em in….curries and stews, and curries and stews – oh and you can roast them too – they are like Sweet Potatoes but not quite as tasty.
Now I have to confess that some of our most significant success stories have just been delivered to us without us having to do anything at all. We´re extremely lucky to have 3 fabulous olive trees - one of which is the subject of a framed oil painting in the house – how cute is that? However, apart from giving them a short back & sides once in a while I do bugger all to them and they produce very generous volumes of olives. The first time I tried to harvest and then process my own olives it all went horribly wrong and I ended up having to throw away 100´s even thousands of slimy and mouldy olives. However, we´ve stuck a bit more to the book this year and followed some fine advice from members of Mallorca Gardeners…and we´re hoping for better results this time around! I do like an olive it has to be said and I also like the dad joke “olive an olive please” – always good to roll that one out incessantly throughout the olive season.
Now then the other gift from above was the discovery of a grape vine. When we cleared out a whole bunch of weeds and rubbish to mount the beautiful Raised Beds I talked about earlier, we came across what looked like quite a mature grape vine that we´d never seen before. So all we did was to give it a bit of space, sun & water and hey presto – it started producing the most tasty green grapes known to man! This discovery was on a par emotionally with the melon moment. However, things didn´t go all our way. As I monitored the progress of the bunches of grapes on a daily basis through to maturity and checked them to see when they would be perfect to pick – I didn´t realize that the resident Flying Rats (that´s blackbirds to most of you) were doing exactly the same and they were just one flap of the wing ahead. Well, the bunch of barstards ate every single grape that year and I was absolutely gutted. I already had dreams of opening my own Vineyard and the “Ginger Gerald” brand competing with Chateau Neuf du Pape for awards – but with my one old vine, and no grapes, my hopes and aspirations were once again cruelly crushed! Now I can hear all the empaths amongst you listeners out there crying into your coffee (or glass of wine) in a sign of communal disappointment – but never fear, do not despair, the following year I took some very sound advice from, yep you´ve got it again, Mallorca Gardeners, and I bought a load of tie up sweet bags. Before the grapes matured I popped a bag on each bunch so the rain, sun and light still got through to them but the flying rats were defeated! Marvelous. And I can´t begin to tell you how good they tasted second time around……
I actually took a bunch into work one day and shared them around all proudly and they went down a storm. It was quite a conversation opener and it turned out that half the office had also got obsessed with growing their own Fruit & veg since the pandemic too! A day or so afterwards, I was having a quick wazz at work and a colleague of mine came to the adjacent urinal and guess what his opening line was? “How are you getting on with your beans this year?”. And that very conversation, folks, perhaps sums up very succinctly one of the slightly stranger aspects of Ginger Gerald´s life.
Wow I seem to have gone on forever and I´ve not even mentioned celery, carrots, peppers, chillies or even leeks! You know what, I´m going to post a few pics of my horticultural successes and failures on Insta & Facebook cos I just know you´re dying to see them. I reckon you are a little bit obsessed too! So check ´em out and let me know what you think. You can even post your own. If I can find the copy of my Melon in the Mallorca Bulletin I´ll pop it up there too so I don´t get accused of lying!
Ladies & Gents, I hope you´ve enjoyed Green Fingers today. Maybe it´s inspired you to get out there and start your very own fruit & veg enterprise – if so, best of luck!