My dear fellow amateur gardeners... Lockdown gave the Dennis family the time to create their own veggie garden, discovering the magic of watching plants grow from seed, and the taste of home-grown tomatoes, carrots and peas BY LIENEKE DENNIS
Proud gardener Lieneke Dennis.
LIKE MANY other South Africans, my husband and I decided to start a vegetable garden during lockdown. The idea had been floating around in our consciousness for a while but like many of you, work, the stresses of everyday life and kids in various stages of education placed any plans for a vegetable patch of our own firmly on the back burner. Life was just too busy. And then lockdown came. In the first month, we took lockdown on the chin, like most of us. We cheerfully stayed indoors, caught up
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on movies, learnt to bake bread, make apple cider and video-chatted with friends and family. Then lockdown was extended and we realised something else – we were in it for the long haul. This was our new normal for now. We had time on our hands – time we’d never had before. A dear friend who lives on a homestead in Northern Cape had sent me a photo of a mound of lush, orange butternut squash which she had harvested that week. I shared it with my husband after a really excited phone
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conversation with her, knowing his love for growing vegetables, inspired by school holidays on his grandfather’s farm in Abbotsdale. Without my knowing, he popped a few butternut seeds into soil in an ice cream container and within a week, we had six seedlings, to our excitement and amazement. It became an exciting project and journey and we could see, on the horizon, the possibilities of a life that is so different to how we’ve been living up to this point.
