Since lockdown started we’ve been working on growing our own vegetables

One way to pass the time.

Ever since lockdown began I've been kicking myself that we didn't plant fruit and vegetables in our garden last year. With the kids at home all day they've been eating me out of house and home and having our own fruit and veg in the garden would mean a lot less trips to the shop. Hindsight is of course 20/20 and none of us saw the current pandemic coming, but still I thought what better time than now to catch up on the planting that I wished I'd done last year. My local community has a WhatsApp group and one of my neighbours recently posted that they had seedlings if anyone would like to start growing their own vegetables so I got on to them straight away. After a social distancing drop off of the seedlings which consisted of courgettes, squash and pumpkins, we all got to work in the garden. We're very lucky to have the garden that we have as not only is it big enough for planting veg but it also gets a lot of sunlight during the day. In fact the houses in the area that we live in were purposely built with big gardens in the 1950s so that residents could grow their own food. We created a small plot at the back of our garden, as the end of the yard gets the sunlight for the longest period of time. After gently planting all of our seedlings we gave them a good watering so the soil would be nice and moist. Even though they are veggies that usually appear in autumn I'm not sure how much growth we'll get this year as we didn't plant them in early spring, but we've got to start somewhere. We've also been offered raspberry and strawberry plants from relatives that we'll be able to collect after lockdown that the kids are very excited about. I'm really looking forward to seeing how our plants will turn out and can't wait to try some when they do. Will definitely have to create some fantastic HerFamily recipes with them down the line.