Comparisons

Sunday morning Miscellany

 I don’t believe it. No time for growing vegetables?

I’m driving along the road listening on a beautiful Sunday morning listening to Sunday Miscellany on RTE Radio 1. Usually I just let the voices drift over me but today I’m taking notice as a woman reminisces about how their parents used to grow vegetables. She was pondering on how they managed to find the time to garden without having two cars, a dishwasher, microwave and other modern day devices to save precious time, as she can barely have time to cut her grass.

I’m finding myself talking to the radio; I suppose it makes a change from chatting to the tomatoes on the windowsill in the front room.

Making comparisons

Grass is more labour intensive than growing your own vegetables, I tell the unresponsive box. If you think about it, most of us are out every week for hours in the heat of the day looking after our lawns. No sooner have you finished cutting and composting, it looks untidy again as the weeds start to appear before the mower goes back in the shed. It’s a constant battle with the mower, buying petrol, coaxing it to start in the first place, unblocking the grass without chopping your fingers off. It’s not good for the environment either with more and more chemicals on the market claiming to give you that bowling green finish and insects being sliced by the mower blades.

A vegetable patch on the other hand, when set up in early spring will only need a slight tickle with a hoe to keep the weeds down once a week. The rest of the time can be spent relaxing in the garden (without a noisy mower and strimmer), harvesting the peas and beans and munching on the strawberries. Its not that we need to completely get rid of lawns but there can be a balance. A manicured area of grass, a patch of meadow, fruit trees and bushes and of course a veggie garden.

Positive mental attitude

The person is telling me that her parent’s incentive for the edible garden was to be more self-sufficient and save money. But after a few years of hard labour and poor crops the father gave up and put grass seed down instead. The crops that didn’t perform were beetroot; they were tiny specimens because of the poor soil (see last weeks article), and peas. It wasn’t that the peas didn’t produce but that as a child she loved eating them straight from the pod so few reached the plate. It’s simple, I shout, stop growing beetroot and grow more peas.

Muddling through

The hardest part of changing your lawn to a bed is not just growing the veg, but growing your confidence and getting a little bit of know-how, I think to myself as I navigate a roundabout. I recall when I became a parent for the first time. I bought the parenting books, watched the DVD’s, listened to endless stories from other parents and bought all of the equipment that was supposed to make the transition from self-indulgent singleton to responsible parent. When the baby was born everything I learnt went out of the window and I found myself just muddling through from one day to the next, with the least amount of discomfort for both the baby and me.

Switch off your brain

The same fate can befall someone who is considering starting vegetable growing. It’s the thinking that’s the hard, tiring part, and on the whole should be avoided at all costs.

“Switch off your brain for a while”. I’m telling the person on Miscellany. I’ve been gardening now for 30 years and I still can’t get to grips pests and diseases. Why clutter up your brain with a load of information about pests that you don’t have? If something does start munching your crops then it’s time to ask a friend or go on the internet. I’m still muddling around myself in the garden and every year pick up more pearls of wisdom.

Of course there will be an initial learning curve –which does take time, preparing a bed, making sure that you give appropriate space to each plant but it’s a slow process –if you make a mistake in one year, its not a disaster, just change it next year –this time scale is maybe why older people like gardening more than younger people who don’t do delayed gratification well. There is never any rush, what you can’t do at one time, you can even leave for another season. Sit by a big open fire in winter to plan your planting. Prepare the feeding of the beds with compost and manure late autumn when it’s cooler and you are not being chased around by midges and dopey flies. The edible garden has a relaxed, all year calendar, not just a few mad months of growing in summer like a lawn.

Is it just a fad?

The woman on the radio feels that growing your own might be a fad and after waning interest, will re-appear in 30 years time. Hopefully then, she says, she might have enough time to grow her own like her parents used to do.

Do it now. I am encouraging the voice over the airwaves. Start small. Try planting some salad –lettuce, radish, spring onions, Maybe a couple of strawberries and a currant bush, something easy and that you will enjoy eating.

Her fantasy garden could become a reality a lot more easily than she imagines. There are companies springing up around the country that will make you a raised bed, fill it with soil, plant the vegetables in it for you and even come back to do the weeding throughout the growing period, if that’s what you want.

Thankfully the Suburban Farm piece on Sunday Miscellany is only five minutes long. She concludes by saying that her parents found the vegetable gardening “backbreaking and tedious”. They are two words which I may associate with looking after a large lawn, but not my raised beds.

The voice fades out and another person pops up to talk about leaving school when she was young. Thank goodness for that, I am feeling my blood pressure lower and fall back into the verbal comfort that makes this radio show generally so relaxing.