My Recent Article On Vegetable Gardening Trends Saw Several In Depth Responses. Here Is One From Neil Clements That Caught My Eye.
Neil wrote ….
When I think about what my grandparents on my mother’s side ate most of the time, their veg patch would have been fairly simple I think. Various brassicas, carrots, parsnips, onions, leeks and potatoes. They also had half a dozen plum trees but no other tree fruit that I can remember. Plums were either in a crumble, jam or chutney. It feels like they ate those things with a different form of meat every day, certainly every day I stayed there! My grandfather on that side was from an engineering/farm hand background so pretty working class.
Cabbage
On my father’s side, my grandfather was a keen grower. His tastes were broader in the fruit department and he also grew a lot of flowers, but his family had a history of being house staff for some fairly wealthy people and as such he’d encountered a lot more “exotic” offerings. My great aunt cooked for the Wills family, who were from what I can gather one of the leading tobacco importers in the UK back then. She cooked for royal guests on a regular basis as well as other high profile visitors, and would have used things that most lower class folk hadn’t even heard of. Cuttings and seeds of those things inevitably made it back to other family members via my great uncle, who was the head groundskeeper, when they were available! I was very young when that grandfather died, but I will always have a hazy memory of his fruit patch full of bushes, vines and ground cover plants in colours that could nearly match a rainbow!
Moving on a generation to my dad’s allotment and later, his garden, he couldn’t be bothered with anything complicated. We had runner beans and peas coming out of our ears, and carrots – endless carrots! Onions were less of a thing but we grew a few. Lunch for me was often freshly picked peas and carrots which I washed in the water butt on the allotment, I ate them as we worked. Fruit was a huge strawberry patch. Huge to the point that I rarely want to look at a strawberry even now! Nothing I buy in a shop tastes anything like them, although I have picked up a variety that took my memory straight back to my childhood when I tasted them in a customer’s garden – a walled garden of a large farmhouse which was built several hundred years ago. Runners of those were taken and they’re now expanding a small strawberry patch in my own garden. Until this point every stage involved digging, lots of digging!
I suppose that timeline brings me to where I am now. 44 years old, with a very rebellious character but still a keen interest in growing! In my own garden I don’t dig, I don’t sow much in rows apart from things needing finer compost than the woodchip to get started, and I don’t pander to the requirements of needy plants. I spread everything around, even broad casting carrots, parsnips and other small root veg amongst my sprouts, yakon, courgettes, Jerusalem artichokes etc… Whatever takes my fancy. I prefer my veg harvesting to be more akin to foraging and the no dig approach means a lack of weeds. That allows a more disorganised approach because weeding is less of a requirement. I also like trees, so far I’ve introduced crab apple, commercial variety hazel, greengage, mulberry and medlar. They’re well spread and to the north east of the veg so shouldn’t shade the veg too much, but time will tell.
From reading your article, it seems I’m following a common trend. My grandfathers, especially my dad’s dad, would turn in their graves if they saw how I do things!
Thanks
Thanks to Neil for his insights. Often by looking back we can see a clearer way forward.
If anyone else would like to write extensive length responses to any of my own articles, or even pen a full article yourself, please let me know. I’m happy to welcome guest contributors that have worthwhile insights, experience or opinion.
