Growing pleasures

Comparing apartments and rent in Dublin and Edinburgh is never going to come out in favour of the Irish. Scottish flats are considerably much bigger, comparatively much nicer, undisputably better, and definitely cheaper than anything on offer in otherwise delightful Dublin. The kitchen in current residence The Castle of Comely Bank is for instance covering approximately the same area as the kitchen AND living room in The Shire in Dublin. Another added bonus is the garden. Yes, there is a garden, and while it is not exclusively private to The Castle, I have repatriated a vegetable patch and a flower bed, as well as taking hold of most of the lawn.

So a new world has opened up, the world of gardening. Sunday was spent in blissful and blistering sun, digging up roots and chucking out old rotting leaves, burying centipedes and millipedes and spiders and other living things (I don't know if that is the way to do things, but I figure it may make good compost, if they don't survive being buried alive?), and generally getting my fingers dirty. The Irish writer was set to mow the lawn with the lawn mower, which until now has mainly taken up space in the workroom and served the very useful purpose of making me feel like a proper grownup. Proper grownups have lawn mowers - and really proper grownups (pensioners, even) have vegetable gardens.

This is previously unchartered territory for me, past experiences limited to successfully harbouring a basil plant in the kitchen for several months, and celebrating one tiny tomato after months of hard labour and hoping for sun. I now face a world of top soil, seedlings, drainage and fertilizer; there is a whole universe of plant varieties, acidic soil and not so acidic soil, germination and harvesting, and I face all this with a blank mind and a very optimistic attitude. Is it a good thing that the soil was very, very dark when I finally managed to clear away most of the old roots and dead plant growth? Are you supposed to clear out all of the old roots? How do you distinguish between your own weedy looking mangetout plants and murderous, vegevorian weeds that needs to be removed? The 8 different vegetables that are now lightly rooted in the little patch outside, together with a variety of herbs, will hopefully in 12-15 weeks end up as delightful sweetcorn, broccoli, turnips and carrots - and if they don't, I had a blast trying. Counting on a heavy loss margin, anything edible that comes out of this will be a bonus, but in the meantime I'm proud as a hen mother every morning when there hasn't been overnight massacres by the surviving centipedes, or general death by exhaustion for those little, lovely green things.

Plant on, I say, plant on.