THE 2011 PROJECT (4)

The 2011 Project is going a bit like the curate's egg; good in parts (up-to-date pictures will be provided, once my daughter has refound her lost camera).

The new lawn part is going fantastically. Certainly my mother-in-law (my technical adviser on matters garden) makes appropriate cooing noises every time she visits. My heart rate went up a few notches, after I came back from holiday and found some molehills on the edge of the new grass. But he turned left rather than going straight on, and I got him the next day under the hedge.

The kitchen garden, on the other hand, has been a bit of a disappointment. That is partly due to my daughter's going into normal teenage mode, i.e. total inactivity. In not doing any work post-planting, she quickly managed to produce half a garden's worth of serious weeds. On my half, my potato plants took hold and flowered. But we were a bit late in planting, so when I harvested the crop this week, there were only 20 or so edible tubers. Mock not; that is the first food ever produced by my own fair hands.

Besides, 20 potatoes is enough for one meal. So tonight I invited my mother-in-law to dinner in order to eat them. After cooing over the new lawn, we sat down to fish in a cream and mushroom sauce, with new potatoes and a tomato and onion salad. I think she liked it.

My daughter's half of the kitchen garden has now been sequestered by me, and de-weeded. Next year I will plant potatoes in it - good for cleaning the soil, sayeth my mother-in-law - and something different in my half. I am starting to get into this horticulture thing.

Walter Blotscher