A round "vegetable" garden

Crouched on one terracotta tile 'stepping stone' or another for a couple of hours pulling out weeds makes you realise what it is that makes people conform. Why not simply have a rectangular vegetable garden, if vegetables is what you want? The weeds would slip out with a simple tickle of a long handled rake between the rows and I would be sitting back admiring my "work", with a good book. Or indeed, like my neighbours, I could have such a huge vegetable garden I wouldn't even sully my hands with a rake. I would plough it all with a bulldozer and never darken the doors of any supermarket selling second rate veggies for the rest of time. My thoughts about the garden, so rosy, last year, its first, get darker. The tomatoes were still green when the first frosts came, I had to give away all my huge "frisée" lettuces for pretty much the same reason: it was virtually winter and I was too cold to eat salad. And the courgettes were really quite few and far between. One friend saw my solitary pumpkin and asked me if I had ever tried fertilising by feather. And so, guess what, I had decided this year to make the vegetable garden a slightly bigger circle in order to put in a couple more pumpkin plants! and as I see it now, pull out more weeds, or discretely pop in a few more flowers, so it is pretty, at least.

So there is a circle of sunflowers growing around the scarecrow and round the garden, as if drawing the design of a ball, there are trails of yellow marigiolds to keep creepy crawlies at bay. In the middle of the vegetable garden there is another circle of dahlias and there is now a little cone of sweetpeas. In a few weeks the sunflowers will be so tall there will be a lot less room for the weeds and none at all for any ideas of popping in an extra lettuce or two for the slugs. And now, I don't even need to. My neighbours, not surprisingly, have had great results from their bulldozer. They have just given me two of the most wonderful lettuces, already grown. Amazingly, it was our little round plot that got them started. And even more amazingly, we already have little tomatoes growing. They might even ripen before Christmas this year!