VEGIE GARDEN BIRTH…
Week 1.
Why did I, a Pilates Movement Therapist go full scale home gardener? Read about it here.
You don’t have to be an expert gardener to cultivate a varied and tasty crop.
I’m writing this blog to prove it!
Here are the 2 reasons why I started a vegie garden this year:
- To show you how easy it to grown your own food.
- To do first hand research on what gardening requires, so I can teach you how to garden without hurting yourself.
I’ll do the hard work and problem solving for you, so you can garden with the best movement patterns possible!
Being a first time gardener responsible for the well-being of the entire crop, there was a lot to learn and I can imagine that most people would find all of the information a little hard to handle initially.
Germination rates, soils, staking, fertilising, what to plant etc etc the list goes on….and it can be a little overwhelming.
So, I took a page from Richard Branson’s book and adopted the ‘screw it let’s do it’ mentality.
Taking my yard by storm I marked out the Kikuyu 13 metres along the fence line, as of course it had to be as neat as possible.
After marking it out, I called in the muscle – you all know who I’m talking about!
After cultivating the soil to about 40cm deep, it was time to bring in the soil.
With some untreated wood as a delineator, I tried to make it as clear as possible to my Kikuyu that the garden bed was OUT OF BOUNDS.
Being an eager beaver, full on 100% committed to this – and totally impatient, I set out to find some heirloom seedlings…
Returning home with:
1x punnet of Corn
2x Tigerella Tomatoes
1x Black Russian Tomato
1x Yellow Cherry Tomato
6x Red Cherry Tomatoes
1x Punnet of Spinach
1x Punnet of Cucumbers
1x Punnet of 5 Colour Mix Silverbeet
Start small was the advice. Yet, nothing about me is perfunctory, so you’ve got it.
I went all in, 100%.
And.
I didn’t stop there.
I planted much, much more…!
I’m off now to work on natural pain relief for bad backs, hips and you name it, we help it, so…
I’ll rattle off the lessons that were learned quickly so I can get to work on time!
Ciao, and see you in the studio =)
Mel
Lessons:
- It’s much easier to get someone else to dig your garden beds – bit cheeky, but he enjoyed doing it!
- When shoveling dirt from a trailer into a wheelbarrow it’s important to use your hips when rotating, otherwise you really feel your back (learnt this after 1/2 tonne of shoveling)
- Allowing your back recovery time after a mild aggravation is important. Going back to the basics of core stability exercises and switching off grippy muscles was super helpful to my recovery the next day.
- Learning by doing, and just in time vs just in case is the way I like to roll =)