Sprouts

I went to Jamie Oliver's The Big Feastival in June and one of the restaurants featured, Wahaca, was giving away what I thought were colourful matchbooks (sorry, no pics of how cool they were, but their website gives a bit of an indication). I don't smoke, but I took one anyway (who's not a sucker for free kit!). It turns out they were little packs of seeds with instructions on how to grow chilli peppers. For 0.98p, I got these little pots full of compost from Wilko’s (and basil seeds to boot – why not?) and have been watering twice a day. The basil came out in about 3 minutes (makes me wonder what weird genetically modified seeds they are, but oh well) but the peppers (10 seeds in total) had been stubbornly avoiding my advances. Until a few weeks ago. The absolute glee on my face when I came down one morning to see one teeny little green sprout in one of the chilli pots. To start, only one sprout graced me with its presence, but I decided I was going to be patient. To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether I was killing them with too much water (my thinking: that soil looks so dry and the pots are in the sun so they need a bit of a spritz… but chilli peppers equal dry climates, oh damn, I'm going about this the wrong way) but I think they like it.

Since that first little green sprout, I've had 4 more come up. My partner saw some chilli plants in someone's house recently and they were about 4 feet high after only a year. AND they were producing green chillis about 5 inches long! I haven't thought about what I'm going to do with these sprouts when they get to that point (i.e. where will they live?), but I love the idea of being able to cook with something I've grown. And chillis boost your metabolism ;-)

The basil (pic above) has its ups and downs - literally. Some days the sprouts are leaning horizontally to the point where I'm pretty sure they're dead and other days they are perky and looking promising. I think I need to thin them out as maybe they're competing for space (I'll get another pot from Wilko's and try to transplant - my partner got a kick out of that appropriateness of that word) but they are perplexing me. I saw pots of herbs in Sainsbury's the other day - a more mature properly recognisable basil plant for about £1.50 and I sighed and thought 'I could just buy that...' but I'll stick with them. Patience is a virtue. Which I lack.

There is something to be learned here which is applicable to the 'something else' in life... I guess this is just about the simplest version of creation, isn't it? Nothing god-complexy about it (I had nothing to do with the sprouts from that perspective and don't claim that genius), but I think it's neat that where there was nothing but a seed, there is now something green and growing. I think that's pretty awe-inspiring and as we're starting small, growing plants is this week's contribution to getting in touch with my creativity.