Gardening

From growing cress in an eggshell who had a big smiley drawn upon it as a kid to growing different varieties of tomatoes nowadays, the gardening bug never left me. I love the satisfaction of being able to pick up my own culinary herbs from the pots kept on the patio. There is an old adagio which says that nothing tastes better than something home grown, I tend to agree with that. Although we are not totally self reliant, our small patio garden gives us the joy of the seasons from the first strawberries in the spring to the butternut squashes and pumpkins in the autumn passing by our summer fiery chilli peppers. The beauty of gardening allows you to try varieties that supermarkets just simply don't sell very often or not at all from heritage carrots to black tomatoes. There is also the magic of seeing a simple seed rewarding you with so much.

Just to touch upon Gardening, it is really hard to get it right and even if you think you are getting it right you might not. It is so difficult. There is something called weather, and another called ecosystem. Both are in play and try to stop one or the other, and actually, internally, you should not stop anything, try to prevent in a practical way which would limit harm but be thoughtful about it always.

I will share a sad story. We have a pond with Koi Carps and Frogs in the Garden. The Carps are about a dozen and called the Reservoir Dogs: Mr White, Mr Orange, Mr Red, Spot (the Carp with the black spot on its head) and so on.

Our Reservoir Dogs. The weirdest bit is that we absolutely love them. We look after them. We like them to bits.

Now ecosystem for ecosystem, not to do incredimental changes, we included Frogs in our pond which was a lovely addition to it but also Lotus Flowers. 

Our Frogs and Fish in the Pond.

It was absolutely working fine until a Grey Heron decided to plunder our Pond. It only got a Frog. Then we protected the pond with a net for a while. It was not the best solution but the Heron went on its way and left our Garden. However we had to make sure no Frogs got caught in the net every morning.

Our Lotus. It is a nice landing pad for the Frogs.

We got rid of the net as soon as the Heron stopped stalking our pond. Did we do good or bad, we don't know, but we didn't want our Fish and Frogs to be plunder just like that.

Our Frogs are an ecologial way to look after the Garden. They get rid of the Slugs.