Veg Plotting and Me

Hello! Can you see me?

Hello and welcome!

How many roles can a person have in a lifetime? So many, it can feel like being inside a giant glitterball sometimes. Each pane denotes an interest, character facet or something I've been or yet to be.

A child, wife, friend, aunt, sadly not a parent, student (twice - mature and immature), a very uncivil civil servant, scientist, project manager, charity worker (science, events management and education), business analyst, freshwater biologist... these are just some of the roles I've managed to chalk up so far.

Now I'm a subversive soprano, a distance carer and a blogger. More recently  blogging has given me the opportunity to be freelance writer too. Who knows what else might be in store? It's an exciting time and I feel very lucky.

When I set up Veg Plotting, I fully intended it to be a blog about my allotment. However, I soon realised too many other interesting things were crowding in which I needed to talk about, and so my plot is my place of inspiration nowadays as well as providing some of the subject matter. 


It's always nice to have a bit of special blog bling:
 here's a little something from the Garden Media Guild, which  also happened in 2012 :)

Here's a little bit more about me, my loved ones and where I live...

I'm no expert: you'll find this blog is about my discovering new things about gardening or working things out for myself, especially as I like to try something new each year. No-one in particular gave me a love of the soil at an early age. I finally got the gardening bug when we moved to our current home in Chippenham in 1999 owing to the challenge of a 15 x 15 metre plot on a 1 in 10 slope with a limestone clay soil.

Then a few years ago my husband (Non-Allotmenteering Husband aka NAH) was ill for a while and I became concerned about the food we eat. So I took on an allotment in 2003 - luckily no waiting list then - which I've been cultivating ever since. I grow pretty much anything on there, apart from most brassicas as NAH won't touch them - we're talking about someone who only liked peas when we first met. 

My blog header picture is part of a view from our house and the rainbow represents future possibilities as well as showing I'll write about anything which interests me.

Some further introductory information you might like to read:

• Meet and Greet - a very quick introduction I wrote for 2012's BlogCamp in Brum
• You can find out more about my garden and allotment on their dedicated page
• How and why I came into blogging; plus a quick blog tour around my key features if you're unfamiliar with blogs; and my Glossary page for all the abbreviations (e.g. NAH) I use regularly
• The story behind the name of Veg Plotting and VP
• All about my profile picture at the top of the page, which is also my avatar across the web
• My New Life's Resolutions: the four guiding principles forming my life's framework
• Where I'm Veg Plotting: an introduction to Chippenham and the area surrounding where I live
• And not forgetting my very special garden helpers, Skimble and Jess

And now for some blogging philosophy...

I value your comments, especially when this triggers a discussion amongst you, me and other readers. If you have problems in leaving a comment, please do get in touch via vegplotting at gmail dot com or via @malvernmeet, so I can get the problem sorted.

Your questions are welcome and I'll answer them in the comments, though sometimes they'll deserve a post of their own. You might like to see what I wrote about the information given in blogs and my approach to answering questions. I endeavour to take this approach with all my writing.

As well as talking about my own experiences, I like to provide links to good quality information should you wish to know more.

Nearly all the photos you see are taken by me especially for the blog post in which they appear. These are my copyright and are deliberately a relatively low resolution. Photos in the few guest posts I have are usually supplied by the guest blogger, are credited to them and are their copyright. There's a handful which I've sourced via Wikimedia. In these instances the source and the photographer are credited.

I have a limited amount of advertising in the right sidebar. This is purely to cover the costs of my blogging activities and won't be harming my independence or content in any way. This also applies to anything I get to review: I'll tell you if it's good or bad. I wrote a blog post about why I'm accepting adverts and how I aim to continue to Blog with Integrity if you'd like to know more.

If you'd like to get in touch, you can reach me through: vegplotting at gmail dot com [NB I write it out this way instead of giving you a linkable email address to prevent the usual spambots which might come your way if I did]