Growing Weeds!

If you have just logged on to this post in the vain hope of learning tips on how to grow recreational smoking substances, forget it! I'm actually in the running for the title, 'The World's Worst Gardener!'

The only thing that I have successfully managed to grow in my whole life was a moustache. I can't even grow a beard, it always ends up looking like an old worn tennis ball stuck to my chin.

It all started way back when I was a child, both my brother John and I were staying with our Grandparents. John, being a little older than me, used to work in the garden with Granddad while I stayed in the kitchen with Nonna, cooking. One day, Nonna wanted me out from under her feet while doing the weekly clothes washing. This by the way wasn't just chucking a load of clothes into a washing machine and sticking your program of choice on. It required military-type manoeuvres, taking out an old vicious tub-washer. This thing could rip a grown man's arm clean off! The clothes then had to be passed through a mangle, which I'm sure had been used as an instrument of torture back in the Spanish inquisition! This industrial piece of hardware removed all excess water before the clothes were hung out on the line to dry.

This particular day, I was allowed into the garden with my brother and Granddad to do a little gardening. We had a smallholding, so we grew all our own veg. Granddad prepared a small patch for me and then gave me some radish seeds to plant. I did this with the utmost care and then I watered them as instructed, then sat for the rest of the day staring at the patch of soil, willing my radishes to grow. I ran into the house and announced to Nonna that we would all soon be feasting on the finest radishes any human had ever encountered and if she had any recipes for radishes she should be getting them ready now. 

That evening, I was unable to sleep with the excitement of my new-found love of gardening. The very next morning, I eagerly ran from the house to my radish patch, ready to harvest my first batch of salad products, only to find an empty patch of soil! I was distraught - someone had sneaked into the garden under the cover of darkness to steal my prize radishes! I ran back to tell Granddad of the theft. He, of course, laughed and told me it takes time for plants to grow and you must be patient and nurture them... stuff that! By the time they were ready for harvesting, I was so uninterested in them I don't think I even ate one of them. This lack of interest in gardening has stayed with me all through my life.

One thing I did develop a love for, though, was cooking. My times with Nonna in the kitchen are among some of my most special memories of my childhood. I have a blog called Cooking With Babbo and Nonna, and hopefully a book of the same title coming out soon. I love creating my own dishes, as Nonna often did, while also collecting authentic recipes from around the world. So with this in mind I decided to put my phobia of gardening to one side and start again to grow my own herbs. 

I use a lot of basil and coriander in my cooking so I decided to grow my own. I have now developed more tolerance and patience since I was four years old so I knew I would have to wait for the plants to grow. What I wasn't aware of was I seemed to have put an advert in the slug and snail gazette announcing that a batch of fresh herbs would soon be available for all slugs and snails to eat within a ten mile radius of my house! My house is situated in the centre of a small wood and my newly grown herbs seemed to attract a plague of snails and slugs of Biblical proportions. No matter how I tried to stop them they still kept on coming. In a desperate attempt to save my precious herbs, I took some that were in pots into the house one evening. The next morning it was like a scene from a Hitchcock movie; there were slugs crawling up my windows! I could take no more, so I reverted back to my good old trusty supermarket for my supply of herbs.

A few years ago I noticed what seemed like a few nice flowers growing at the bottom of my garden, so I moved them and planted them about the garden, and watered them, and was pleased to see that for once I was able to grow something instead of killing it! Soon the garden was awash with these plants - they were thriving. Until a friend of mine who is quite a keen gardener called in for a coffee and a chat one day. He took one look at my garden and gasped, “Oh my God you need to get rid of those weeds - they will take over everything and kill it!” He was, of course, correct. I had been nurturing a flowering weed that destroys all in its path. It took me two days to dig out all the plants and the roots, as in true horror-movie style, they can reproduce just from a single fragment of root. I then had to burn them all to make sure they couldn't reproduce.

I would still like to grow my own veg and herbs but I don't think that my nerves could take the strain. Before my failed attempt at growing herbs, I had no opinion on slugs and snails at all. Now I have a pathological distrust of the little slimy creeps. I don't wish them harm and I think they know this, and they know I'm a soft touch. Strangely, since I stopped trying to grow any plants in the garden, I haven't seen any slugs or snails in there. Even though my wife grows lots of flowers, successfully I have to add. But there again, as I have written in previous blogs, nothing is a match for my wife if she considers them vermin. I'm only hoping she doesn't change her opinion of me from "husband" to "vermin"...