So I'd been cultivating my windowsill vegetable patch, which wasn't all that great space-wise, but it was growing along nicely. But as you may have gathered from the title, it has suffered from a murderer. A serial plant killer.
To refresh your memory, the plants I had growing were spinach, green beans, cherry tomato, endive, courgette, watermelon, fennel, radish, gherkin and red beet. The spinach was starting to get into flower, so I picked all the leaves that were edible (about 10 or so), put them in a salad, and had a nice meal of them. I took pictures, but they have been lost along with my poor bricked phone.
Next up, green beans. I hadn't even noticed, but some of the little white flowers had started to drop off, and where they had fallen off small green beans were growing. The plant itself was also pretty small, so I had to pick some of the beans to prevent the thing from collapsing, and to make sure the other tiny beans were getting some nutrition. So I ate 3 of my own green beans in my risotto last Sunday, and I was pretty well able to distinguish my own from the other supermarket-bought ones (they tasted better, but the texture was not so great, a bit rubbery/chewy). And I still have some beans left growing, so I will make another mini-meal out of those sometime soon.
Those were the success stories.
Another photo I have lost, less unfortunately, is the one of my spinach plant after my killer cat knocked it off the window sill. There were dirt and roots and leaves everywhere, and he'd started to eat from it as well. Then, I came home to find all the beet plants on the floor, because he had pulled them out of the ground and just left them to die. I could have put those back, but they still had very small roots (no beets to be found) and I didn't think they would make it as they'd already gone pretty limp.
At that point, I moved some of the more precarious plants (the beans, the watermelon, courgette and gherkin) upstairs to my bedroom, to prevent them from being slaughtered as well. I thought the serial plant killer wouldn't touch my tomatoes (nightshade, should be poisonous), endive and radishes (bitter) and fennel (too big a pot).
I was right on two accounts, but one day I came home to find my endive completely eaten away, just a few sad little green parts visible. Not that I particularly like endive, it was the plant I was least enthusiastic about getting (maybe apart from the watermelon on practical accounts), but still, it was part of my garden. And today I came home to find most of my radishes uprooted. Not that there were any radishes underneath, just pretty small root systems, so again it hadn't really been growing properly, but it's the principle that matters.
Anyway, spinach, beets, endive and radishes have been murdered off quietly and efficiently, mostly while I was at work. I'm starting to think the cat was suffering from the lack of attention due to my caring for these plants, although the lack of development on the beets and radishes may tell you something about how green my fingers really are. So maybe it was just plain boredom. Or puberty.
Five down, including the thyme that perished earlier, six to go. The beans are still growing nicely, which is good. The cherry tomato is getting pretty big, but no signs of flowers as of yet. The fennel looks like it's doing okay, but I have no idea what's going on beneath the earth; it may be another failed attempt at a root vegetable. The courgette, gherkin and watermelon are getting a bit out of hand, and I'm thinking of moving those to my parents, as their own veg patch failed to deliver and they have the space to actually grow these things.
All in all, not really something I could eat myself full on, let alone make a living out of, but still, any result is a better result than I expected on the outset. And the lack of snails and other natural hazards is more than made up for by my own feline plant danger.
