My partner Noel and I decided one summer to start a project in the garden. It all began with a pallet. We wanted to experiment with something we had seen and began creating our herb garden recycling the wooden pallet. We grew garlic and potatoes in some pots, spring onions and lettuce in the pallet with a handful of herbs. I can’t describe the excitement when that first shoot came up…..
The enjoyment of planting and tending to these herbs and vegetables, with my partner too, was a really fun process. Walking into the garden on a summer’s day and picking our food for lunch felt like such an achievement and the flavours of home grown food being extra yummy!
The benefits for us were huge! We have a rewarding hobby that is healthy for us in so many ways. It is a physical workout (beats going to the gym in my eyes) . We are getting our vitamin D working in the sunshine amongst nature. Gardening has been known to release the happy hormone serotonin, which will also be strengthening our immune systems. It is great knowing where our food has come from, growing it organically, being better for the environment as our produce is not wrapped in plastic or travelling around the world to get to us. So we found this new hobby offering us healthy minds, healthy bodies and a healthy environment.
Deciding to grow more herbs and veggies was an easy decision but the research and planning took some of the fun out of that. With both of us in full time jobs we had limited time to sit down and plan it all out. There was so much information out there, it was quite overwhelming for two fairly new gardeners. It took a while to compile information and to decide what advice to take that we waited until the following year to actually get planting.
We know what it is like beginning projects in the garden, with all the enthusiasm but limited time. Lots of books, magazines, videos and programmes filled with information coming from all angles. We wanted to create a platform, a template, that is easy to go through, feeding you with all the information that we needed at the start of our journey.