The never ending vegetable box

My Rocket Gardens Window Box Garden arrived today, now I don’t actually have window boxes (the amount of vegetables that arrived, you’d need quite a lot of window boxes actually) but I do have a small garden with quite a lot of patio. I certainly don’t have space for a vegetable patch, so I’m restricted to containers, which actually is quite a good thing, as my soil is poor and the existing beds are in quite a bit of shade, whereas the patio isn’t in shade and the soil is as good as the compost I buy!

When the box arrived it was a fairly small thing and I was thinking, “What, that’s it?”, then I opened it.

Half empty Rocket Garden box

Inside was a virtual Aladdins box of well packed baby vegetables in a bed of straw, I had enough salad leaves and spinach to plant fully my giant (fake) antique bath tub I brought from Ikea the other day, plus dwarf french beans, peppers, basil (greek basil, mmmmm, not sure about that, I’m used to ‘traditional’ basil, I’m sure it’s ok though, although luckily I have some ‘normal’ basil sprouting as we speak on my kitchen window sill), coriander, parsley and carrots.

So lots more plants to join my cucumbers (which Girl Lacer by the way is getting very attached to, she comes and says hello to them). Four of my six cucumbers plants seem to have survived the great chill by the way. The salad and carrots are staying outside under fleece; the salad is under fleece principally because there’s still a bit of a risk of frost (the month long range forecast does not look good), the carrots are under fleece to try and stop the birds getting at them. Rocket Gardens recommended considering the current inclement weather to keep the peppers and herbs inside, however I don’t have window sills big enough for my peppers, so they’re in my greenhouse (read cheap plastic thing) but hopefully they’ll be ok, if it starts looking really cold (will someone tell the weather please that it’s actually the end of April?), I’ll bring them in at night. The herbs are currently on my living room window sill.

I am just getting so excited about all that salad this summer (hopefully, if I don’t kill it / the slugs and snails eat it before me – my garden has a major slug and snail problem).

Snail on my front doorstep this afternoon, trying to do a spot of house invading

I am just picturing though that cheese salad sandwich though; rocket, mizuna, golden streak mustard, cucumber, sliced peppers, cheese, heck I may even make my own bread (but I won’t go as far as making my own cheese!).

Girl Lacer gets her first choice school!

Never had the wait for the post seemed so long. It didn’t help that the kids i.e. Boy Lacer woke up earlier than normal this morning, nothing beats (not) the pre 7am alarm call of a screaming 2 year old. So that woke everyone else up; Girl Lacer instantly resumed her previous night’s imaginary game of ‘lets go to the pirate ship’ as in the pirate ship at the Princess Diana Memorial playground, so that involves an imaginary trip on the bus, followed by an imaginary trip on the tube, which I had to come on, whereas I was having trouble keeping in touch with the actual reality of getting dressed and getting breakfast.

Now the post is never particularly prompt, it has been known before to come during the school run, the afternoon school run, so I could have had a long wait, but luckily the postlady was merciful (she’s a nice postlady, if she sees you in the street and she has a parcel to drop off she rushes over and gives it to you, instead of carrying merrily along her way and then promptly dropping the parcel off at the post office for you to go and queue up and collect later (which is a pain), when she first did that, that so shocked us, hardened ex-inner Londoners, ahhh life in the ‘burbs).

So Girl Lacer gets her first choice school, it’s the same school she goes to nursery at, so she’ll be there in reception with all her little nursery friends. It’s not that surprising she got it, we live literally a playing field away from it, but it is an extremely popular school. The catchment area for it this year was the miniscule 0.8km, I’m sure in the three primary schools I went to as a child, I lived far further than 0.8kms for all three of them. Anyway it’s extremely popular as it is a rather excellent school, just from the nursery alone, Girl Lacer now knows most of her letters and can hazard a very good guess at the first letter of most words, plus she can do basic addition and subtraction and is starting to explore multiplication and although she can do all this it is in no way a hot house. They have an excellent reputation for special needs, which considering now that Girl Lacer has a place, Boy Lacer will follow in 2 years (nursery in 1 year), may be rather necessary.

Also in the post today was the new Aranzi Aronzo translated book, which is very cute but looks rather tricky, more on that later but needless to say I want to make everything! And (drum roll) by Rocket plants, so they’ll have to be extracted from their cosy straw bedding and planted today, I’m going to be busy!