100 posts later – growing a garden and documenting it all

Well, this is slightly strange.

This is the 100th post on Our Spanish Farm.

One hundred.

When I started this blog, I don't think I really imagined what post number 100 would look like. I'm not even sure I genuinely believed there would be a post number 100.

I certainly didn't have a grand plan.

There was no content strategy. No five-year vision. No carefully prepared editorial calendar.

I had a garden.

I was learning how to grow things.

I was learning how to preserve what I grew.

Things went wrong with impressive regularity.

And I thought it might be fun to write about it.

So I did.

And somehow, here we are.

It started with a garden

The funny thing about starting a garden is that you never really finish starting a garden.

At first, you think the goal is fairly straightforward.

Build some beds.

Fill them with soil.

Plant vegetables.

Harvest vegetables.

Congratulations. You have a garden.

Except that's not what happens.

You grow tomatoes and decide you need more tomatoes.

You grow cucumbers and suddenly need a trellis.

You grow too many cucumbers and suddenly need to learn how to make pickles.

You grow potatoes and need somewhere to put the next crop.

You discover dahlias and immediately start calculating how many could theoretically fit along a 15-metre wall.

One raised bed becomes several. Several becomes quite a lot.

You build shelves. Then potting tables. Then planting stations.

Then structures to hold all the plants you're growing because apparently buying one packet of seeds and behaving normally was never an option.

A garden has an extraordinary ability to expand into whatever space – and whatever amount of your life – you give it.

Mine certainly has.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing

Looking back is particularly entertaining because the blog has documented something I hadn't really appreciated while it was happening:

I've learned an enormous amount.

Not because I became some sort of gardening expert.

Absolutely not.

Mostly because I've made enough mistakes to accidentally acquire knowledge.

I've planted things too early.

I've planted things too late.

I've overwatered things.

I've underwatered things.

I've carefully nurtured seedlings for weeks only to plant them outside and watch something eat them overnight.

I've spent months growing a vegetable only to discover that I don't particularly like eating it.

I've stood in the garden staring at a plant thinking, What on earth is wrong with you?

And occasionally I've stood in exactly the same place thinking:

HOW DID I GROW THAT?!

Those moments never get old.

Then came preserving

Growing food eventually created another problem.

What do you do with all of it?

There is a very specific moment in vegetable gardening when abundance stops feeling entirely like a blessing and starts feeling slightly threatening.

One cucumber is lovely.

Five cucumbers are exciting.

Twenty cucumbers require a strategy.

That led me further into preserving.

Pickling. Freezing. Dehydrating. Water-bath canning. Pressure canning.

Suddenly the garden wasn't only about what we could eat that week.

A tomato harvested in August could become sauce for January.

Cucumbers could become jars of pickles.

Beans could go into the pantry.

Peppers could be dried and used months later.

The garden began stretching beyond the growing season.

And that changed the way I looked at growing food completely.

I stopped thinking only about what can I grow?

I started thinking:

What do we actually eat, and how much of it could I produce myself?

And somewhere in there, the blog grew too

While all this was happening outside, something else was quietly growing.

This website.

At first, writing here was simply a way of documenting what I was doing.

A project.

A harvest.

Something I learned.

Something that went spectacularly wrong.

A recipe worth remembering.

I wasn't sitting down pretending to know everything. Quite the opposite.

A lot of this blog has essentially been:

"I tried this. Here's what happened." And I think that's why I've kept enjoying it.

The blog doesn't need the garden to be perfect. Thank goodness.

It doesn't need every harvest to be enormous or every project to look like something from a gardening magazine. The failures are part of it.

Sometimes they're the best part.

The photographs tell a story I didn't notice happening

One of my favourite things now is looking back through old photographs.

When you see your garden every day, change happens almost invisibly.

A new raised bed doesn't seem particularly dramatic once you've walked past it 200 times.

The tiny tree you planted doesn't look much bigger because you saw it yesterday.

The corner you cleared and rebuilt simply becomes what that corner looks like.

Then you find a photograph from a year or two earlier.

And you think:

Bloody hell.

Did it really look like that?

The same thing has happened with the blog.

One post didn't feel like much. Neither did ten. Or twenty.

I just kept writing. And suddenly there are 100 of them.

The garden has changed me too

This might be the part that's hardest to put into words.

I started growing vegetables because I wanted vegetables.

Simple enough.

But somewhere along the way, the garden became about much more than food.

It gave rhythm to the year.

Spring isn't just spring anymore. It's seed trays, tiny tomato plants and checking the weather forecast obsessively.

Summer is early mornings, watering, harvesting and walking into the kitchen carrying far more zucchini than two people could reasonably need.

Autumn is clearing beds, planting garlic and thinking about what worked and what absolutely did not.

And winter isn't really the end anymore either. I'm learning that here in Spain, it can simply be another growing season.

There is always a next thing.

A seed to sow.

A bed to prepare.

A harvest to preserve.

A completely unnecessary garden project that suddenly becomes absolutely essential.

I've also learned to appreciate abundance

There are moments when I walk back towards the house carrying a basket of vegetables and have to remind myself how extraordinary that actually is.

These things came from seeds. Tiny, ridiculous little seeds.

Some soil, water, sunshine and an unreasonable amount of attention later, I'm carrying food into our kitchen.

Food that didn't exist a few months earlier.

I don't think that will ever stop feeling slightly magical.

And perhaps that's one of the reasons I've written 100 posts about it.

There is always something worth noticing.

So, what happens after post 100?

Post 101, presumably.

I'm not finished with the garden.

Not remotely. There are still things I want to grow. Things I want to build. Things I want to preserve.

There will undoubtedly be more successes, more disasters and more occasions where I plant 70 of something despite having absolutely nowhere to put 70 of something.

I want to keep learning how to make this little piece of land more productive.

I want to grow more of the food we eat. I want the pantry to become fuller.

I want flowers everywhere. I want to experiment.

And I want to keep documenting it.

Because I've realised that Our Spanish Farm has become something I didn't really anticipate when I published that first post.

It's a record.

Not just of vegetables, harvests and recipes, but of creating a life here.

The garden changes. The seasons change. I change.

And every now and then, I get to look backwards and see how far all of us have come.

So here's to the first 100 posts.

To the vegetables that grew.

To the ones that absolutely refused.

To the jars filling the pantry.

To the projects that started with "I have an idea..." and somehow involved a trip to buy timber.

To the seeds.

To the dirt.

To the ridiculous quantities of zucchini.

And to whatever comes next.

I genuinely can't wait to see what post number 200 looks like.

Thank you very much to everyone who has been reading, following and commenting. It might seam insignificant, but believe me, every like ad every comment makes me happy beyond reason ;)