It always surprises me that while we’re in the height of summer and enjoying blazing sunshine in the day, that come February the mornings are already so dark. I have the privilege of being woken before 6am most mornings by little voices and hands. In the last week I’ve noticed how much longer it takes for the sun to lighten the sky in the morning.

I’m getting so used to treating our garden like a supermarket, sometimes I forget how many failures we’ve had on our journey learning to grow our own food. There’s been so many hard lessons, we’ve had issues with soil quality, wind, pests, too much water, not enough water.

I’ve fallen in love with courgettes this season. Thankfully ours are growing well this year since we gave each plant a stake to climb. Last year we had several plants in our garden, but I feel like I wasted them. I’d regularly forget to go and check for fruit under the huge, spikey zucchini leaves.

Learning is one of Mark’s superpowers, he can consume, understand and apply large volumes of information about a range of topics. This has been a huge asset for us as we’ve developed our land and our home.

Last year, he focused on syntropic gardening – a method of cultivation that aligns closely with the natural processes and symbiotic relationships found in ecosystems.

Starting a veggie garden was something we’d always planned to do at some point, but the question of access to fresh food was top of mind at the start of the pandemic, so as soon as we could buy plants, we got planting.