A few weeks ago, I threw down the Pasta Primavera challenge. The challenge is a personal one, but to make it more interesting I opened it to anyone who wanted to take up the challenge for themselves.

Since it is a personal challenge, it can be as easy or as difficult as you wish (you want to buy a microwave dinner, reheat it and consider the challenge completed? Go right ahead). The road to completion for me, thus far, is still a long one and success a way off in the distance. I want to use vegetables and herbs from the garden, and make the pasta myself (buying those ingredients; I’ll source out the best I can), but the success of the vegetable gardens we have at home will determine how close I get to that lofty goal.

Progress has been slow. Weeks ago, I dug out a reasonable proportion of our garden (approximately eight metres long and over a metre deep), including all the sod, by hand. The garden is now in place and has a small number of different vegetables growing. Almost as many, however, have succumbed to the wild weather over the past few weeks as they are not old enough to weather the storms we’ve been having. To make things worse, birds and other animals appear to have been eating some of these new vegetables. Strangely though, the far more mature garden has not had this kind of animal devastation.

Bird netting is now in place over both garden beds. Although they are far less convenient to enter I hope they will provide the protection our plants need to thrive. We have a large number of peas and broad beans appearing to be on the cusp of growing actual fruit, and we plan to put in some wire to help the peas grow even higher still. Herbs are running rampant in their own little bed and we have a large amount of coriander and parsley drying in our house, which at least gives me something from the garden to use should everything else catastrophically fail.

At this stage, unless the garden takes a radical and dramatic turn for the better, it looks like I’ll be eating Primavera with peas, broad beans and parsley. Not a failure, by any stretch of the imagination.