Back to my roots

Was browsing through the Property pages on Friday and happened to stumble across this house for sale.
It is actually the house that I grew up living next door to (in the top picture the house to the right is where I lived with my Mum, Dad, brothers, sister, dogs, and multiple rabbits till I was about 16)

I was most interested in the pictures of the garden though, as this is where, at about the age of 8 or 9 I would stand in the garden peeking through the fence at Major Miller (Rt. Major, Duke of Wellingtons Regiment) tending his rows of veg. I figure the fence must have been lower back then - either that or I'd climbed on top of something to look over it! Can’t quite remember!

Back then there was no lawn or flower beds (that I recall - or at least not at the bottom of the garden) just a nice rectangle of soil full of different colours and shapes of veg!




Occasionally Major Miller would let me go round to his garden to `help` with some digging or planting. From this apprentice role I was promoted to having in my Mum and Dads garden a 6 foot x 4 foot veg patch down by the shed which I can actually remember my Dad measuring and digging out for me!



I'm sure I grew some carrots and lettuce in this space, and can remember a runner bean wigwam one summer... although this is 20 years ago. I know we also had 2 apple trees, rhubarb and a greenhouse in which we had tomatoes each year and occasionally peppers too - and I defiantly remember the hot smell it had when full of toms in summer or the smell of Jeves Fluid when the glass and staging had been washed down.

I can’t remember what ever happened to my veg patch - I guess I got interested in something else and it just got re-turfed...

Twenty years later though I'm now growing on a slightly larger scale, even if my 6x4 patch seemed big when I was little! Wonder if undergardener will retain happy memorys of playing on the Pellon Plot when he gets older...