Green thumb?

The women in my family are gardeners. My grandmother's garden was every child's heaven, with pickable fruit, little hideyholes, a mini-train track, and a table and chairs made out of a dead tree trunk. When my grandmother died, my mother took up the habit, and our backyard slowly morphed from a potential cricket ground to an oasis of calm.

With the financial market the way it is and of course being a proponent of a healthy vegetarian diet, it seems natural that I follow in the steps of my foremothers and try my hand (or rather, my thumb) at growing my own greens. Sadly, I am somewhat limited by living in a unit, but nevertheless I have set my balcony up with a few herbs and small vegetables, and excitedly check them each day. I'm sure that my ancestors are watching as I overwater the Aloe Vera, prune the mint out of existence and, most embarassing of all, fail to realise that it's normal for Basil to die over winter. I quietly hope that I inherited the green thumb, and it's just taking a while to form.

There's something so satisfying about "just ducking out for some lettuce" (or tomatoes or basil or mint or parsley or rosemary or coriandar or .... hopefully snowpeas) without leaving home. Better still is knowing that it's fresh, there's no pesticides, nobody died harvesting it, and no carbon emissions were used to transport it to me. Let's give kitchen gardening the green thumbs up!

Photos: my mother in her garden (right) and me in mine