My life is just doing something amazing right now.
I have a dream …
That one day I could… simply put… live off the land.
No longer did I want to rely on the super market to provide me with all my produce. No longer did I want to accidentally consume chemicals (e.g pesticides), and so much more…
I dreamed of a day where I could walk out into my own garden in the morning or evening and pick what I needed from the plants and enjoy my fresh meal, just like that.
However I have always lived my life in small flats with my family, with no garden and very small balcony spaces.
Two years ago, in 2016 I decided I wanted to kick off this dream by growing what I could in the small space that I had. I took in a few small houseplants at first, I really fell in love with cactuses and succulents.
I then moved over to Shoreditch for a short while where I began to take in and care for some larger house plants, which…I kind of killed or nearly killed most of them now. uh sorry… I was not a fit mother please don’t hate me.
But I wasn’t going to let a few failed attempts stop me from achieving my dream, so I started growing produce like potatoes , spinach, tomatoes, etc. I loved it, but for some reason in Shoreditch the air where I was living was super dusty and my plants kept contracting mites/ aphids , bugs… No matter what I did they always came and devoured my plants, it did stress me out for the longest time and made me feel like I just didn’t have the green finger and I contemplated giving up and just having 1 or 2 house plants instead.
Time went on and eventually I moved back home with my family and we were in a new flat with a front balcony space and not much else.
I asked my mum if I could use that space to grow plants and she was delighted to have me grow plants there. (even when i started all the neighbours were telling us how nice it all was and started growing stuff of their own. I love that!:D )
I have to say, I am not the richest person in the world so at the beginning it was all pretty bare and nothing much was going on for the longest while. Over time I went to places like B&Q to shop the plant sales , I visited places like wilkos or searched the internet for hours for the cheapest tools , even hunted the streets and I went to a few nurseries to get cheap baby plants and seeds so I didn’t have to spend so much money on fully grown plants .
This did make my job harder, as I had to teach myself a lot about how to grow from seed and care for the plants in all seasons, but this was really worth it because now I have a much bigger understanding of a wide array of plants and their growing cycles.
Again , I was doing better than before but I did kill a lot. Even recently I killed a ton of plants that I had spent a lot of money on because we had a very frosty cold winter….which hasn’t happened in years, I believed they would be fine out there and then it snowed – that meant game over…
When Spring came along this year I had to rid the space of all the dead… I was back to near empty. A little sad but still undefeated. (At least all my house plants were still alive and healthy)
I took my booty down to the nursery again to purchase a bunch of plants and since then I have collected a few more along the way.
It has most definitely been a hot spring and summer…the hottest ….and to be honest I think the plants absolutely love it.
Currently my house plants and balcony garden is flourishing!
After lots of trial and error, I’ve almost figured out what they all like. .
I’m actually really happy about all this green because recently I have decided to take this path/dream more seriously and go to college to study horticulture ( I got in!haha ) This is going to make a big jump in my current knowledge and really help me in future.
😁 I start September yay!😄.
I also found a person nearby, as well, who’s offering up their massive garden so I can grow my crops all year round.💚✌
– This is a little crazy for me as I have never worked in a garden space, I’m literally going to have plants growing in the ground omg! .. This could either go really badly or absolutely amazing. I’m sure my course will help me out. (still deciding whether i should take it on right now though)
Another crazy thing thats happening is that in the winter the tree I told you I was adopting is coming! (It’s gonna be 2 years of nonstop watering to make it as big and strong as the giants surrounding it but it’ll be all worth it when I have a healthy beautiful tree, that can live maybe 100-300 years and I can indulge in all the amazing fruits – still got to decide what tree to get -please help me with suggestions 😅).
I honestly thought , for the longest time, that I was only going to be able to grow a few bits on my small balcony and now suddenly all these opportunities are happening and my dream to live off of fresh foods that I grew myself is becoming a reality 😍.
I put out my dream into the world and here I am making it a reality 😁😁😁
Its actually so weird how life has played out, I never in my wildest dreams would have thought I would be growing plants and learning about plants… its a very weird reality for me right about now.
Which fruit tree do you think I should grow? I want to try something different and exotic that can grow in UK …😋🤔🤔
Love and Light
Christina Sky
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