Garden Goddess hard at work!

The first real (as against virtual) vegetable/ fruit that I have grown in my entire life!!!
Dedicated to U, without whom, this great accomplishment would never have been possible!
Love you U and you too, tomato!  :-))

My friend U is, after my mom, the most gardening obsessed madcap, (lovable, but madcap nevertheless) I have ever come across. Each time we would go out shopping and I would wander towards the bags and the shoes, U would invaribly make a beeline for the shop that sold pots and soil! While I was busy tending to my 2 large farms on the cyber world of Farmville, U had her own real garden with coriander and mint and tomatoes and chilli!!! Before I met U, I hadn't come across a single person inclined to grow tomatoes in their balcony!

So when we were moving to this new house with a humongous garden, it doesn't take one to be a genius to guess who was most excited about the garden! After a while, U's enthusiasm started rubbing off on me and I outlined my plan to fill the garden with flowers - roses, dahlias, lavender and tulips and corn flowers and well, whatever flowers one could grow in the wet and cold British weather!

So here I was, envisaging myself running in slow motion in this flower filled dale, carrying a basket and plucking flowers from my pretty garden and sticking them in vases, when my reverie was broken by a look of utmost horror on U's face.

"What's the problem?" I asked

"Can you eat them?" U said stiffly.

"What??? Seriously what???" 

Did I hear correctly? Did she seriously ask me if we could chomp down the beautiful tulips and dahlias and lavender....

"Can you eat them?" she insisted.

"Err...... no" I said hesitantly, thinking oh well, you never know! Maybe U, who by the way, is also a brilliant cook, knew recipes that I hadn't even heard about.

But before I could ask her if she knew any recipes for rose sauce or lavender flavored gravy, U spoke again. Sounding a lot like my MOTHER, she said, 

"What's the point of growing things you cannot eat!"

"Err, because they look pretty" I ventured. Why else does one grow flowers I wondered, ready to quote Shelley and Wordsworth if need be.

U shot me a withering look that would have been more effective than the best weed-killer in the market. Now if she had been me, she would have said "Screw pretty" or "F@#$ pretty". But she is far more polite and well behaved, so she just said, 

"Well, you can't eat pretty. You better stop wasting time on Farmville and on growing flowers and grow something useful instead! And if you don't, I shall come down and kick your ass!"

Now I may have my faults but I do have the good sense to recognise a threat when I hear one. So to pacify her, I promised I shall most definitely grow something "useful", hoping in a few days it will be forgotten. But No!! U spent the next few days, scouring shops for books on gardening and on growing "useful" things, which she then handed over to me along with the promise of making good on her threat in case I reneged on mine. Once we moved into the new house, and I had my fill of planting flowers, I thought, what the hell, let me try some tomatoes. I got 2 plants; one as a backup in case one of them died and planted both in pure compost so they would have no option but to grow! 

The little tomato that started it all!

And guess what? I found one of them sporting a little baby tomato and my relief and joy knew no bounds. And all along I had been torturing myself with this (now seemingly erroneous) belief that I just couldn't grow anything. And all because I had killed a cactus once by feeding it beer (the underlying thought was to give it a taste of weekend revelry) and because I have bought plenty of mint plants from the market only to find them wilt and die in the next few days in my expert care! 

So, this was nothing short of a miracle! As the no. of tomatoes grew, I got myself some more tomato plants - cherry tomatoes this time. And soon enough they seemed to burst into tomatoes as well! Now, I think I have grown enough tomatoes to have my very own Tomatina festival!

And then I decided to spread my wings for the next level of difficulty - herbs. I got myself some basil and mint and surprisingly even they seemed to thrive. Looks like I was on a roll!!! Brimming with new found confidence, I set my sights on conquering that one herb, Coriander, growing which till now has been for me a task of Himalayan proportions; and one where I have not even managed to reach base camp. I had tried to grow it in my garden in Jakarta and failed. I had tried to grow it in Mumbai and failed. I had tried to grow it in Singapore and well, failed! 

So this time, I decided to enlist the help of an expert blessed with green fingers. I followed her instructions but once again, nothing happened! Looked like growing coriander was going to be one of those things I would never ever succeed in doing! So in a fit of irritation, used the soil with the coriander seeds in planting some more lavender. And then suddenly, 15 days later, I found the first coriander sprouts coming out of the lavender! And this time it was not joy that hit me but the worry of what was going to be worse, lavender flavoured coriander or coriander flavoured lavender.

Relocated as many coriander saplings as I could salvage from the lavender

With this success under my belt, I was no longer the struggling gardener but a Garden Goddess in my own right! So for the first time in my life, I decided to do some forward integration and make something useful from all the damson plums and the apples falling off the trees and being eaten by the birds or squashed under the feet of my 2 little monkeys

Damson plums

Which led to what till now I would have called the Unthinkable - me making a Spicy chutney, / jam, an act that until now I thought was the prerogative of my mom and people from a few generations back! This time, however I justified it as the vagaries of the Unemployed and also blamed it on the fact that I was spending too much time reading the cookery blogs!

Now it is a different matter that in a burst of enthusiasm I completely forgot that I detest all forms of jams, even the ones called chutney. And that both and V2 are not sweet eaters either! So the only people eating this painstakingly cooked fruits of my labor (bad pun!) are little V1 and my Gujju cook, both of who love all things sweet! Well, one lives and learns! Or in my case, cooks and learns!

As of now, given the grand success of this yr, there are much bigger plans for next - 

There shall be an attempt at growing onions, garlic and radish and carrots! 

And who knows, for all you know I shall be making wine from the grapes and the damsons growing in the garden. Now that definitely won't be the Unthinkable, will it? 

Cheers to that!

Grapes that haven't yet ripened..