SusanAnn

All day yesterday I kept thinking to myself must really check in at Mrs Survival, somehow or other I must have known it was a special day! Happy Belated Birthday wishes from across the pond

Hi ~ I'd like to join in please I've not done as much as I would like to, but at least I've done more than I originally thought I would, so it's a start . I have one big wooden veg trough and a small plastic one on a gravel hard area at the end of my garden. In these I have 18 cucumber plants ( I had a small pack of 20 seeds, all germinated but I lost two plants) Three rows of mange tout, and a row of lettuces. On the concrete next to my back door I have about ten tomato plants in an assortment of gro bags and planters. I'm not accurate on the number of plants as my dear elderly neighbour gave me a tray of plants he had left over as he'd planted them too close together and they were all tangled up, some I could ease apart and they are doing nicely, others I just had to put in together and hope for the best about! I'm just grateful to have them, and any tomatoes I get are a bonus. I also have my first ever blueberry plant in a pot, worked out via google that the reason noone round here can get them to grow is that they need acid soil and the soil round here is full of chalk/flint , so I bought some ericaceous compost and it's looking good, I have quite a few little blueberries on my plant already. If I can work out how to do photos later I will This is quite a cold garden for an urban area, but it also can get very dry ( yes I know that's odd for a Brit to say, but I live in the driest county in England ~ we get about 25 inches of rain a year) So everything takes ages to germinate and then you have to run around watering it like mad If you're all still reading ~ I love everyone's pictures it really helps me to see other gardens. Mother ~ I absolutely love your planters and your house is wonderful! Pioneer Woman ~ I'm ashamed to say I didn't know what a Zinnia looked like, I wonder if they would grow over here? Dee ~ I never knew you could keep carrots like that, thank you for sharing it.

This is such a helpful read for me , thank you for starting it Darlene, although I am sorry that your struggles meant that you needed to start this thread. I am struggling this year with my physical health, I have had more joint problems and now my heart arrythmia has needed medicating and I'm getting used to the effects of medication on my body. For me the arrythmia seemed to be linked to the Covid vax and that has also impacted me mentally, in that I've suffered from an uptick in anxiety. Now the best thing for me when I'm anxious is to be outside, and to be doing, but not feeling so good physically has made this not so easy, however what I do find easy is to beat myself up about what i have not done and fail to appreciate the little things I actually can do!!! I'm also increasingly looking after my 92 year old Mum, we have a lot of financial challenges as a family, and trying to keep youngest ds ( who has autism) engaged with the world when all the courses he's tried to go on have ended up being cancelled, well that's sort of added to the feeling that my little world is spinning out of control...... However, I have 18 cucumber plants ( grown from seed ~ go me!) ten tomato plants gifted from an elderly neighbour who I help, a blueberry bush, three rows of mange tout, and a row of lettuces, all in pots and two veg troughs. Yes I could be more productive, and goodness me we need better weather here in the UK as this cold Spring is not making for happy tomatoes.....mainly I am trying to think of this as my learning year, maybe I just need to learn to go with the flow more, life is changing so much right now and I feel it's going to change even more..........

Not sure if you're all interested in links from our BBC, but yesterday we were up to 179 cases here in the UK https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-61640196

Mother I'll bear in mind your sage advice about the button pressing That is such a good idea about filling the bottom of our big trough with branches. I talked to my husband about it, and we decided to take a walk in the local area looking for wood, now we live in a city, but fortunately on the edge of urban woodland....so last night in the early evening we sneaked out like two elderly ninjas and found that on the borders of the woodland someone has been coppicing hazels, we gathered up a few small branches and plan to return over the weekend, it's quite exciting this urban farming business

Oh it's been ages since I've eaten mulberries. When I was a little girl, many years ago, I went to a Convent Prep School and instead of a playground we used the Nuns garden which was a huge lawn with trees growing on it, in the middle of the lawn was a huge old mulberry tree, which was where I got my taste for mulberries from

I really enjoyed your pictures DogMom4 I had an inital set back from hurting my back shortly after joining this forum ( clearly it's a dangerous place!!!) but I'm now getting better and have started on the garden. If anyone is in the UK, and wants a cheap version of a veg trug to grow produce in, I bought a small ( 70 Litres) raised planter with lid from Lidls for £15.99. It's plastic but seems fairly sturdy, the label says it's weather proof so fingers crossed it won't mind the winter. Filled it with compost and have planted a packet of cucumber seeds in it and am crossing my fingers that with the protection from the plastic lid I'll get germination. My window box of oregano is doing well, as is my parsley plant. We dug out last years compost from our big wooden veg trug after our tomato blight disaster and added it to our flower border ( I plan to plant nasturtiums in there, as they're pretty tough and will cope with most things) I need though three more bags of 50L compost to fill the trug, but our car has gone wrong and is in the garage awaiting new parts, as everything is closed down until Easter this won't happen until well into next week! Still I'm glad to have made a start, and more importantly to have found this part of MrsSurvival fairly easily

Welcome back UK Guy Your right the asd spectrum is indeed wide and you must be so proud of your son It's nice to see that there some other Brits on here, although you're both rather a long way away from me!!!

Hi Wychwood, yes I'm planning to hang around, this is a nice little corner of the internet and there's lots to learn and be encouraged by. I really like your signature quote thinngy

Found you ~ I'm afraid that I'm not really that sure what I'm doing, but I'm doing it with enthusiasm I'll be back ( probably tomorrow) to tell you what I've been doing and to read some more in this section. Mother I look forward to reading your transition story

Wow Mother!!! Sixty years of country homesteading experience I think that will stand you in good stead with your new adventures in more accessible self sufficiency Deck boxes sound like a really good idea, I've just tried an experiment with a small window box type planter hanging from my back gate...last year I put petunias in it, which are pretty but inedible! This year I successfully overwintered a large oregano plant in my veg trug, we're digging all the soil out of the trug after a bad tomato blight year last year, but the oregano plant is huge and healthy so I've split it up and put all the new off shoot plants in the window box, it's still a pretty plant I think, but has the plus point of being edible

Mother I am not that good at describing things accurately in print ~ but I'll give this a go I'm probably going to use lots of words and if it gets boring just stop reading, unless of course you can't sleep, in this case read on Sadly this garden isn't easily cultivatable. It's a crazy garden with four different levels with lots of concrete/brick steps between each level. This is because our house is in a row built in front of the terminal morraine of an old glacier, it creates a natural city boundary , which is nice in some ways, no one will build behind us because the land is unstable and poor, ,so it's urban wasteland/woodland...but it also means I have drainage pipes underneath a thin layer of soil in most of the garden diverting a stream coming off the gravel morraine . I do have a sunny area at the top of the garden it's a gravel area on top of concrete foundations from an old outbuilding....here I have a vegetable trough, and containers and I think that container gardening is my way forward, so yes I should really hang out in Urban Homesteading

I hope it's okay that I keep replying, I don't want to totally take over the introduction thread, but at the same time, I am British and I can actually answer these questions, and it's so nice to understand each other's lives and cultures !!! I'd absolutely love a conservatory, but this house is too small and the garden space is stepped upwards so there's no where for it to go. My Granny had one, and she used it just to grow tomatoes in, the smell of those tomatoes under glass on a hot Summer's day was heavenly Council houses are what I think you'd call social housing. They are usually built in big estates, and will be of similar styles. The first council estates were built in the 1920s, part of a " building homes for heroes" drive after the first world war, also Labour councils encouraged them in industrial towns to provide cheap homes for workers as we had increasing industrialisation moving workers from the countryside to the towns. Originally they were all rented properties, but then in the early 1980s Margaret Thatcher had the bright idea that home owners are more likely to vote Conservative, and opened up a scheme to allow people to buy their own council houses, which had it's ups and it's downs. Lots of people got to buy houses cheaply, but unfortunately there was no more building of social housing so the low cost rental housing market largely dissappeared. I'm not that good at history, and there are way more ins and outs of it than this, but I hope it gives you an idea. And yes allotment which I went on about in a previous post are nearly always away from the house. It depends on the local bye laws whether you can keep animals or not, the ones nearest to me do not allow it, but I have visited other places where people have kept chickens and even a pig

I'm still learning how to use this forum, and I'm meaning to reply to Jeepers as well so I hope she sees this. I'm not sure as I've never been to America, but it looks like our gardens are roughly equivalent to your backyards. However our gardens vary enormously in size, I live in a traditional old terraced house ( lots of small houses usually in a city joined together in rows), the house itself is kind of small, 800 square feet, we currently have four adults living here, and it's manageable. The garden is small/medium ~ you have sparked my interest in size, so just been outside with a tape measure~ it is 15 feet wide and nearly 40 feet long. It's behind the house, in front of the house are steps and a small gravel area leading straight on to a footpath and extremely busy road. I couldn't grow enough to support our family in a garden this size, but I can do something which is better than nothing Now my sister married an investment banker, they live in a big ( eight bedrooms, eight bathrooms) modern house, on 300 acres of land!!! Most of the land they rent out to a farmer, but they still have an enormous amount of garden space, which I would give my eye teeth for!!! They are not interested in self sufficiency at all, but have a full sized tennis court, and are just going to have their flower garden ripped out to put in a swim pond. An allotment is something totally different, it is a plot of land rented by an individual to grow vegetables and flowers on, usually you rent from your city council. I am currently on the waiting list for one, it's a long wait for a good plot, and the rents are going up all the time, when I come to the top of the list I will only get the choice of the plot they give me and will have to work out whether it's worth it or not. Some areas of the country have totally beautiful well kept allotments and they are a true joy to behold....I don't live in such an area, but I've put myself on the list to give myself another option! And now you probably all know far too much about me and the UK !!!!

I will just say that "prepping" is not a word you hear much in the UK . Especially not in England, I think there are more folk doing self sufficiency things in Wales and Scotland who might lean in that direction, as they have more rural and remote spaces......most of England is quite densely populated and land prices are high, so the idea of big self sufficient gardens are just a dream, but there is still a lot you can do on a small scale if you want to! I wonder though if the Ukraine/Russia conflict will change our minds on this, we may be out of the European Union, but we are still very affected by what goes on there and our petrol prices are going up fast, and although we don't have anymore Covid food shortages, there are still odd gaps on the supermarket shelves from time to time.