There’s no time like the present, especially when you have a balcony garden to revitalise. As you can see from the snapshot, I have a lot of work to do, but to be honest, I’m relishing the prospect. When I started Plotz, it was all about urban gardening - green amongst the concrete, veg growing in junk, the gardenless taking back the initiative and breathing life into seemingly barren spaces. The lessons I learned up at Dave are invaluable. I know more about the seasons and pests and rotation than I ever did before. I also know that I can build structures and nurture seedlings above and beyond a few pots and containers.

So now the hard work begins. I figure that the best point is to examine what I have, figure out what I need and make a plan based on somewhere in between the two. For now, I have a lot of junk and dead leaves, but to be honest, that’s what the Ghetto Gardener thrives on! Plus, I have a secret weapon - that green dustbin contains the compost I’ve been nurturing for the last 18 months

So much has happened in the last few months… On the very plus side, Cleo the Wondercat is very much on the mend and starting to leap up on things. She managed to catch two moths the other day!

But, the Green Centre, and Dave, and The Isle of Shed are over. My parting from them was filled with a considerable amount of sorrow, and even now I find it hard to look at the pictures on this site without feeling tearful. I can’t go into specific details, but the parting was not a dignified one. All things must pass.

So now here I am, back where I started, with a balcony and some pots and the desire to grow my own vegetables - tabula rasa, except I take from the Green Centre my year of learning, the successes and the failures, and put them in Sam. There’s a lot of cleaning and sorting to do, and this is where I intend to catalogue it and show some progress. It may be late in the season, but there’s winter vegetables to sow and building projects to start.

Dave and the Isle of Shed are Dead - Long Live Sam and Plotz!

Our beloved cat, Cleo, suffered a stroke over the weekend and so all blogging is on temporary (but brief) hiatus whilst we get her settled into recovery mode. The prognosis is excellent as all the information points to feline stroke having a good chance of full recovery. She’s still alert and chatty, just a bit wonky in the motor skills department - but she’s determined to get better!