Being thankful for small harvests

I've been quite grumpy recently about our veggie patch. When we started to grow veg this year, I didn't have any particular expectations of what I hoped to achieve. But then my enthusiasm went into overdrive and my mind started thinking about self sufficacy and all of a sudden I had great expectations for my veggie patch and I'm afraid to say became very disappointed when it didn't live up to all my new big ideas.

It hasn't been helped my numerous articles recently on how to deal with vegtable gluts - arrgggghhh - if only we had had a glut. I had dreams while on holiday of all the blanching and freezing and cooking and freezing I would be doing when I got home, but no, nothing remotely resembling a glut materialized.

Then I thought - hold on a minute - we have grown things this year and eaten them, I must remember to be thankful for that. The green beans did well and we grew enough for a good harvest to eat each week, we have borlotti beans drying as we speak and the tomatoes are coming along, OK not masses but probably enough for what we need each week. Of course the courgettes were the big disappointment of the year and next year I won't get carried away by fancy yellow varieties and will stick to a good old green variety.

But what I must really be thankful for is the masses of potatoes I've got!! Well with a whole new vegetable patch turned over to them, I couldn't fail could I?!

But it turns out my real talent in vegtable growing is my interesting shaped potatoes - here's one that looks like a mouse and I've dug up other oddly shaped ones too!



So with so much in life I've learnt a lot this year about vegtable growing and have ideas about what I will do differently next year and that's the thing to keep hold of, to remember to take baby steps rather than galloping off with heady ideas of self sufficacy - especially when I hadn't set out to do that in the first place!

Talking of galloping off, here is a visitor who seems very interested in our veggies too . . . !