As mentioned in the blog description, the dream would be to have a lifestyle block with room for chickens, dogs, a couple of cows or sheep for the freezer, big veggie patches and orchards ... well that’s the dream for us. The reality is a decent size back garden and a cat in the middle of Dunedin suburbia, this in itself is pretty amazing for us. We were lucky enough to buy our first house and first garden (no more flats!) in the winter of 2012. The garden came with a well-established veggie patch so we were straight out there putting in our first veggie seedlings and generally enjoying having our first bit of outdoor space!
This blog came about as, whilst we are by no means self-sufficient, we have been amazed at how much we have been able to get out of a garden with one veggie patch in our first year and thought we would share some of our stories, just to show that you don’t need the big lifestyle block in order to start leading a little bit of the Good Life. The fresh produce from the garden also leads to great cooking and recipes arising from vegetable gluts (I’m looking at you tomatoes), and without getting too little house on the prairie about it, I might throw in some blog posts on my rainy day activity of quilting.
So in case you think that we might be a bit too hippy dippy about it all, rest assured we are very much creatures of the modern age (one poker-playing IT consultant and one gadget loving administrator) and both work full time. I do try and spend a couple of hours each weekend out in the garden but more often than not I won’t quite find the time, luckily the garden does seem to forgive me even if the weeds do threaten to take over sometimes. Also, in case you think we might be experts, we are most definitely not! I am fully expecting this blog to chronicle failures along with the successes. However, I am originally from a small village in Kent, England, and my parents have always been veggie growers but as a teenager I didn’t appreciate the wonders of a fresh vegetable, I couldn’t wait to escape to the bright lights of my Uni town and then London in my 20s. It was only in my 30s after moving to New Zealand and settling down a wee bit that my ambitions started to turn towards the domestic, it seems some of the parental green thumb has rubbed off on me and husband in particular has been impressed at how much I seem to have remembered from ‘enforced’ childhood gardening! Mum and Dad are also very surprised J
So if you think you don’t have enough space or time for the vegetable growing and home-making, that might not be true. Hopefully we might be able to inspire a few others not to wait for the lifestyle block dream and to turn a flower bed in to a veggie plot. There is nothing like the proud achievement of a home-grown vegetable and eating something yummy put together with things from the garden. Husband, with an avid (sometimes rabid) interest in politics and economics particularly enjoys the element of ‘sticking it to the man’, that being almost self-sufficient in the veggie department brings! We've even made our own cheese and bread, admittedly not every loaf or block of cheese but enough to make us feel like we have our own little slice of the good life here in suburbia.
I hope you will enjoy the posts to follow, I’m abuzz with good intentions of blogging regularly. If you have any topics you would like to hear from me on, then do get in touch or leave me a comment.
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