Tales of My Veggie Garden — Past and Present
Growing my own vegetables is a balancing act between intuition and facts on the ground
In the spring of 2020, we asked the landlord’s Malawian gardener to help us prepare a small bed for us to grow our own vegetables.
The ground around our little cottage is mostly bush veld and very stony soil, but we identified a small spot outside our kitchen we could utilize.
The gardener did the back-breaking work of breaking up the ground, removing the larger stones, turning the soil and forking in many bags of compost.
I planted kale and baby lettuce while hubby tended to the tomatoes and capsicum — green peppers if you pick them early, sweet and red if you wait instead. Hubby grew the capsicum in pots on our veranda.
All four veggies thrived with his green fingers by my side.
I grew the kale and baby lettuce from packet seeds. Hubby grew his tomatoes and peppers from the seeds of store-bought veg which he’d cleaned and dried.
He’s a natural!
I only learned once the kale was ready to harvest that it is NOT spinach or Swiss chard. You can’t rinse and chop it into a salad. The leaves are thick and fairly bitter and you need to steam them to soften.
