Giving back and a place to switch off, your garden offers many rewards, says Jamie Marsh in his weekly Jamie’s Little Allotment column…
I was thinking the other day that the vegetable garden wasn’t really producing much yet. Then, as I started picking a few bits and pieces, I realised just how much was actually ready.
Before long I had a handful of strawberries, some raspberries, crisp salad leaves, a bunch of spring onions and the last of this year’s broad beans.
Looking forward to picking the first peaches off the tree
I’ve already been enjoying lovely early potatoes, the first tomatoes are starting to colour up, and the peaches on the tree are swelling nicely. It suddenly dawned on me: the garden had quietly started giving back.
We spend months sowing seeds, pricking out seedlings, planting, watering and weeding. It’s so easy to get caught up in the endless list of jobs and forget why we started growing our own food in the first place.
Then, almost without noticing, everything begins to change. The funny thing is that it never happens overnight. There isn’t one day when the garden suddenly bursts into life.
Lovely early new potatoes are always a delight
Instead, it rewards you little by little. One evening it’s a handful of salad leaves. The next it’s a few early potatoes. A couple of days later it’s raspberries for breakfast or strawberries for dessert.
Before you know it, you’re walking back to the house with something fresh almost every day.
It’s not just about the vegetables either. The greenhouse has that unmistakable smell of tomato plants, the bees are busy from morning until evening, butterflies seem to be everywhere and the whole garden feels full of life.
After all the weeks of nurturing tiny seedlings, it’s a lovely reminder that the garden gives back in so many different ways.
I think that’s one of the reasons so many of us love gardening. Yes, we enjoy the harvests, but the garden gives us so much more than fruit and vegetables.
It gives us somewhere to slow down, switch off from the pressures of everyday life and clear our minds.
Even half an hour pulling a few weeds, tying in tomatoes or simply sitting with a cup of tea listening to the birds can leave you feeling better than when you went in.
In a world that always seems to be rushing, the garden has a way of making us slow down.
One of the things I’m looking forward to most is those first peaches. My tree is trained against a brick wall where the fruit soaks up the summer sunshine.
Picking a peach that’s warm from the tree, juicy and sweet is one of the most rewarding moments of the gardening year.
Every year I look forward to that first bite, and every year it reminds me exactly why I put all the effort in.
Perhaps that’s the biggest lesson gardening teaches us. The garden doesn’t suddenly switch from giving nothing to giving everything.
It just quietly starts giving back, a little more each day, until one day you realise you’re eating something you’ve grown almost every day of the week.
Somehow those little rewards make every hour spent sowing, watering, weeding and waiting feel completely worthwhile.
If you’ve got any questions, or just fancy letting me know what you’ve been getting up to in your garden, drop me an email at> jamieslittleallotment@gmail.com
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