Gardening for non-gardeners

Hello, I've been gone such a long time, busy with family and work and life in general.  One of my latest adventures, shared with Mr Letters From Home, has been a brief foray into gardening.  Now, although I love all the domestic arts such as knitting, sewing, crochet, baking etc, I have never quite got ino gardening, it's never been my thing.  But this year the gardens were looking a bit sad, in need of cheering up, and a bit neglected, so we decided that despite our horticultural ignorance, it was time to do something about it.

We started with the little rockery at the front of the house.  Here are the 'before' pics.

Some nice shrubs and a eucalyptus tree, but no colour - apart from brown and green!

Mr LFH covered the area with slate chippings, and we discovered some old cobwebby pots in the garage, which I cleaned up and filled with plants.  Now it looks like this!

We then turned out attention to the rockery in the rear garden.  There is no 'before' pic as I was so ashamed of it.  It looked like The Land That Time Forgot.  So we filled three wheelie bins with brambles, nettles and weeds, cleared the area, and covered it with bark chippings and found more pots and bought some more pretty plants from here and here.

By this time our confidence knew no limits, so the next step was to buy some packets of easy, quick-growing veg, and have a try at Growing Our Own.  I didn't want to spend a lot of money in case it all went badly wrong.  When I am buying yarn, I am happy to buy luxurious, expensive natural fibres, because I know I'll be able to create something lovely with it, but I am less confident with gardening, so with my 'easy seeds' I bought some plastic pots and compost to create my mini patio allotment.

Don't you love my trendy wooden markers?!

It has been a week now since we sowed the seeds, and amazingly nothing has died, I even remembered to water everything on most days, and some days it rained, so that gave me a day off.  There is no action on the carrot front, but there are little green fuzzy bits in the salad trough and bag, so one of these days I might be sitting on the patio, eating a meal al fresco, that includes some freshly picked salad leaves.  On the other hand, there might be some fat, happy slugs and pests wandering around the garden, thanking me for their dinner.  We shall see.

Any comments, advice or inspiration that you can give a clueless but enthusiastic gardener like me, please feel free to comment!

Oh, and another thing, even if I don't blog regularly, I do love to read your blogs, and if you ever feel like giving up blogging, please don't!