I spent most of my youth in a house with a garden the size of a tea towel. There, my grandmother grew rambling roses, grapes and geraniums, and I have memories of me and my sisters meticulously plucking the petals off every single bloom in the yard to recreate the colourful flower carpets of our town’s Pentecost procession. Next door my grandparents had an allotment exactly the same size as this flower garden and there my grandmother grew lettuces for lunch and French beans for that famous Austrian dish of ‘Rahmfisolen’. There were also tomatoes and cucumbers, radishes and blackberries, but those don’t stand out in my memory as much as the rows upon rows of giant butterhead lettuces and my grandmother’s preferred method of slug extermination, which involved a pair of scissors.
Maybe this is where the seed was sown and where my love of gardening started. For a teenage girl I certainly spent a disproportionate amount of time on digging in the dirt and my pocket money only ever went on two things: plug plants and horse riding paraphernalia.
Eventually, after years of trying to grow flowers on balconies in shared flats, two life changing things happened in quick succession. First I got married and a week later we moved from our shared fourth floor flat in the city to a rented ground floor flat in the suburbs.
In our first year living in our new garden flat I grew tomatoes in apple crates on the edge of the communal lawn. After the apple crates came the front door flower bed project and then, one day in March, the garden maintenance people arrived with chain saws and a wood chipper. Three days later they had felled some of the bigger trees and destroyed most of the ornamental shrubs, leaving behind a cubic tonne of wood chips and a sad looking mound of soil in the far end corner of the communal garden. Well, one person’s wasteland is another person’s allotment, or as Thoreau put it so nicely: “it’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
And thus, an idea was born.
Building two small raised beds with the soil from the mound seemed straightforward enough. The mound, however, turned out to be a former landfill. First came the bricks, concrete slabs and half a cast iron furnace, then came an estimated five hundred panes of window glass, shattered into pieces.
There comes a point in many a project, where so much has been invested that it seems foolish to stop, even if it might be the prudent thing to do. This is what behavioural scientists call the sunk cost effect though I prefer the term pigheadedness. And so I soldiered on for three days and with the help of my lovely neighbour, who is a horticulturist and knows how to wield a spade, two raised beds finally emerged from the mound of hell and a guerrilla garden was born.
2019 was a trial (and error) year. I tried to figure out which parts of the plot get the sun, if the soil was any good, and I also learned a lot about growing vegetables from seed. There wasn’t much of a plan to anything I did and because of this I almost completely missed the boat on winter crops. I have a feeling that the phrase “lesson learned” is going to feature a lot in this journal… because the lesson I learned was to really plan what to grow, when and where. And here’s another lesson I learned: sticky notes are a gardener’s best friend.
The plot has now expanded to included a further two (and a half) raised beds, a wimpy plastic greenhouse with a hole in it and a cold frame. Now all I have to do is wait for the weather to get better…and maybe order some more seeds…
