Growing your own

There's nothing like growing your own food. I'm sitting here eating a bowl of lovely blackberries; a curious mixture of sweet, subtle-flavoured berries and sharp, tart berries with a vicious bite! And as you can't tell by looking at them which category they'll fall into, eating each one is like a sort of gastronomic Russian Roulette. Luckily I love both extremes of blackberry. My daughter, however, only likes the sweet ones, and so her reaction varies from big smiles to twisty-faced scowls and screams, and some spat-out red, juicy gunk.

These blackberries are from our back garden, and there's many more where they came from, and at various stages of ripening, so they should last us for much of the summer. I didn't have any part to play in growing them as they grow wild in our garden. In fact it was a lack of effort on our part that caused them to grow; if we would have spent more time keeping the prickly brambles in check then we wouldn't be blessed with nearly as much fruit. Even so, I feel a certain pride as I sit here devouring them, as they grew in our garden!

My deliberate attempts at food-growing haven't been quite as successful. I have lots of triffid-like tomato plants in the garden, which do have a rather impressive crop of tomatoes, but they're showing no signs of going red. Some of them have been out for months, but they seem determined not to give up their deep green colour. Ironically, I also have a couple of plants which are still on the kitchen window-ledge that I didn't get round to planting outside, and the (very few) tomatoes on these plants have turned a very deep red colour and are ready for picking. These plants are straggly, yellow-leafed and extremely unhealthy-looking in every other way, but it's nice to have a few tomatoes that we can eat now. They always taste much better than the ones you buy in the shops.

I haven't grown anything else this year, but our next-door neighbours have got a nice apple tree, which fortunately for us has some branches that over-hang our garden. They look like they'll be ready to eat pretty soon!