9 reasons I'll never be a gardening influencer

From overgrown potato beds to forgotten harvests

As she crawled through the grass on her hands and knees with shears and a sickle looking for where the bloody hell the potato crop had got to, she came to the sharp realisation that she was never going to be a gardening influencer. Or any influencer for that matter. Not that she ever had any aspiration to be.

She will always be the ramshackle one, the one who doesn’t believe in gloves, plants too many tomatoes and forgets to water.

So here we are, 9 reasons I’ll never be a gardening influencer.

1. I treat sowing and plant instructions as a vague guide

Just like recipes, I take them as a guide with flex to do my own thing. Sow by the end of April, I’ll end up pushing it till the end of May. Rows must be 12 inches apart, let’s see if we can’t squeeze them in a little bit closer. Cover and keep in a warm place…hmmm we’ll see. If any seedlings make it, it’s a bit of a miracle and even then, it takes for ever for me to plant them out!

2. Who needs labels?

If I decide to label seedlings, I either use sticky labels which get ruined by my sporadic watering or I’ll draft a plan in my notebook with the beds and trays and then forget which is which. Usually, it’s a case of waiting until the first few true leaves have arrived before I know what is what. The problem is, how do you tell the difference between a chilli and a pepper or cucumber and courgette - you have to wait!

3. My plant knowledge is rubbish

What’s the difference between calendula and chrysanthemum or hebe and hydrangea? The spelling! Ok, I’m being facetious. I know what all those plants look like, but when people start with the full-on gardening speak, I get lost and find myself blithely nodding along, all the while making a mental note to check out what they’re talking about later. Why not just admit to them I don’t know? Well, that’s a question for another day. I do know my veg though.

4. Watering is a bit hit and miss.

Outside we’re generally ok, it rains, but I forget how much the heat in Doug¹ impacts the water level in the soil. I’ll often leave it to a point where I’m creating holes in the beds so the water can easily get to the plant roots rather than sitting on top of a dry bed or travelling elsewhere. And it’s not as if we don’t have a water supply in Doug, it couldn’t be easier, but that’s still too hard for me!

Houseplants are another matter; I swing between leaving them for dead and overwatering and then I’ll realise after a week or two that my poor monstera is silently suffering in a puddle of water.

5. Weeds are my friend

I love weeds, no plant is a weed, except for marestail, Japanese knotweed and giant hogweed, but apart from that I’m happy. I try to collect up all wind pollinator’s seed heads before they flutter off which is tricky given the sheer volume of thistles we have, but they don’t half look pretty. Not only do the flowers feed pollinators, but also I’ll often find various flies and shield bugs feasting on the seed heads. Unfortunately, though, they can have a negative effect on the crops, as demonstrated in my potato bed.

I rotovated the bed earlier in the year, but not deeply enough which meant I still needed to dig the trenches for the potatoes, except I didn’t. Instead, idleness prevailed and I just dug a hole for each potato and popped one in. The potato plants started popping up but then so did the grass and the rest of the weeds and soon, it was just another wild meadow area. At the weekend I decided it was finally time to get them out of the earth, but I had to find them first. That’s why I found myself on my hands and knees using shears and a sickle to cut it all back in the hopes of finding the remnants of potato plants. So far, I’ve harvested about 40 potatoes, a ROI of 3 potatoes per plant.

Potatoes are supposed to be super easy to grow and they break up the earth. Not this year, it was a total fail. Well, apart from the 40 potatoes. But I have a cunning plan. I’m going to cut the whole bed back, cover it over until spring and then hope that the potatoes I tactically left behind grow and I get a bumper free crop next year.

6. I forget to harvest

The most exciting part of the gardening game and I forget to bring in the harvest. The potatoes being case in point. I like to wait until the tomatoes are splitting, the rocket has bolted and the courgettes look like marrows. Then I’ll collect it all up and fret about what I’m going to do with it all. How much courgette do I need in the freezer? Do I have enough jars to make chutney? How much tomato soup can one person eat?

7. My compost is a dumping ground

The aim was to keep the Dalek composter for kitchen scraps in an effort to keep the rats away from the tasty waste. But rats burrow and so it wasn’t long before they found their way in anyway {facepalm}. Now we’re officially using the 3-bin composter E built for me, and now everything is going in the same bin. The original plan was to separate out the hardier waste (weeds) from the quicker to decompose allotment and kitchen waste, but no, it’s all just green waste in one bin. Another problem.

To anyone who has even the slightest inking about composting you’ll know you can’t just fill a bin of green waste, it won’t decompose into gorgeous compost it’ll rot and invite pests. I am trying to remember to add brown waste, like cardboard, branches, leaves, paper etc. but I just forget. There’s a theme here, right? Forgetting. However, I am now the proud owner of Garden Influencer Extraordinaire Charles Dowding’s new book: Compost – Transform Waste into New Life, only I haven’t cracked it open yet…

8. My gardening and nature book collection is huge…

…but have I read any of them? I dip in and out of some of them and tend to read more nature based story telling books like The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel and English Pastoral by James Redbanks, but I am that person who goes into a National Trust gift shop and comes out with at least one new book every time. As I don’t bother to read them, I’d like to say they are all sitting in my bookcase looking pristine, but no, I moved them into Doug and now they are covered in dust and bleached by the sun. My Mum used to say I can’t be given anything nice because I won’t look after it and she’s right, I have an allergic reaction to pristine and perfect, but that doesn’t mean I won’t value it.

9. Gloves are pointless.

I have several pairs, somewhere, but I rarely use them and when I do need a pair, I can never find them. Instead, I do without, ending up with chipped nails, scratches up my arm and a billion tiny courgette splinters. You could liken my approach of clearing things out to a bull in a china shop. Give me a pair of loppers and I cut at will, the hedges invariably end up with a shorter back and sides than they needed and I’ll often snip a perfectly good bit of plant while trying to prune the dead stuff, like the healthy cucumber vine I destroyed with 4 little beauts trying to grow on it. After all of that, come back indoors with things in my hair, bugs crawling on me, ripped clothes and covered in mud.

It’s chaotic not mindful

I have a huge amount of respect for nature, you’d be daft not to. I talk to the plants, the bees and anything else that moves for that matter. The sea views, sunsets, storms and rainbows are incredible and watching those little seedlings pop up and harvesting my crop can be magical. But I’m unlikely to be channelling the mindful mother earth spiritual vibe anytime soon, unless I have an epiphany. You’ll more likely to find me learning through the chaos and contemplating my next steps with a cup of tea (or wine), wondering whether I should sacrifice one chilli plant to green fly or try to take them on. I already know the answer to that one!

1. Doug is the name of my Polycrub, a glorified and souped-up poly tunnel with a 12-year warranty. It’s a wooden framed structure with polycarbonate sheeting. I talk about him a lot and usually refer to him by his given name, Doug.

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PS. Don’t believe the hype in these photos, it’s not all blue skies and sunshine in Orkney. The one below was taken yesterday just before Kiki & I got battered by a hailstorm travelling at 40 plus mph!