Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.

Benjamin Franklin

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Improvement, achievement and success are powerful words to me and they align nicely with my life-ethos: Design and create your ideal life, don't live it by default - Tomorrow isn't promised so be humble and kind. They're positive words that hint at the path to success being somewhat of a journey of improvement and achievement however, of course, we need to insert failure there also as that's a large part of the road to success.

I've been on such a journey over the last several weeks with my vegetable gardening and whilst I'm a long way from calling it a success I'm gaining some improvement and achievement so far and that's pretty exciting for me. My plants are doing great!

Today I plucked some radishes along with lettuce and spinach leaves and used them in a salad for dinner tonight. It probably doesn't seem very momentous however for me it's a very cool moment as eating my own home-grown produce brings a lot of satisfaction. In truth it's not the first things I've harvested as last week I took a bunch of spinach leaves and made a meal of ricotta and spinach cannelloni with it. It was super-tasty and, again, the fact I grew it for myself made it taste even better.

I've worked pretty hard at making my vegetable garden as successful as possible and its growth has been exponential. It's been so much fun to go out there each day to check on the plants, encourage and nourish them and sing some growing songs for which they're paying me back in growth. It's been a very enjoyable process.

Above you can see one of my strawberry plants with a few strawberries starting to sprout. I have several of these plants and it won't be long before I'm enjoying my own strawberries. I'm not sure how many I'll get but I'd say enough for a few strawberries and ice cream serves at least!

I ate breakfast in the garden very early this morning and as the day brightened the blossoms of my fruit trees released their scent and it was simply glorious.

I sat amongst them, kept them company and was feeling pretty happy about how everything is going; hard work and effort pays off. The image above is my potted apricot tree which has started to bear fruit for the first time. It's only a year old and I'm not sure what the fruit may be like but I'm planning to dry them rather than eat them fresh. Ok, some will get eaten fresh. More than some probably. Drying them will mean I can use them over a longer period and will probably use them for baking however I've been meaning to try chocolate-dipped dried apricots for a long time so that will probably happen too.

I picked up a couple of almond trees the other day; the plan is to transplant them into fresh, and larger, pots in a week or so then they'll join my orchard of fruit trees so in coming years I'll have a bunch of almonds also. I don't know how long it'll be before I can harvest the nuts but I'll enjoy the process of getting them there no matter how long.

It's always a good day when I get to eat my home-grown fresh produce and despite some unpleasantness later in the afternoon I had a reasonable day overall. I'm probably going to start early again tomorrow and breakfast in my garden again as it felt like a pretty nice way to start the day. There's something about seeing the sun rise and breathing that crisp fresh air...It didn't remove my headache, but made having the headache more tolerable.

I hope y'all are coping with the week so far and have a great day; Wednesday is around the corner and that means the run into the weekend starts too! Tough it out y'all, Friday is coming.