I was in the supermarket, staring at a packet of chillies: about 60 of them in
a little bag, for 89p, all the way from Kenya. How do they do that, I
thought. Barely a penny each – and that excludes the packaging and the
13-hour flight. How can you grow a chilli for a penny?
My own chillies have been the surprise success of the season: nine plants, out
of a possible 30 or so. And seven chillies. That’s it so far. Seven. From a
£1.50 packet of seeds (Ring of Fire), planted, tended, transplanted,
watered, transplanted again, and fed. Moved in and out of the greenhouse,
out of the rain, into the sun: seven little green peppers. And most pleased
I am with them. But then you walk into the supermarket and there are five
dozen of them for 89p. And not for the first time this summer, I thought:
what’s the point?
What is the point of growing one’s own vegetables? Admittedly it has been a
particularly trying year, the garden decimated by various fungal diseases,
the dank promise of blight embedded into the soil for future seasons. Only
the weeds and lettuces have thrived in all that rain. And the slugs.
And my eye has been wandering… an e-mail from an organic home delivery company
here, lovely roll of black tarpaulin to cover the whole patch with there. I
could get my summer back; I could go away for a weekend without a list of
things that need weeding and sowing and picking niggling at the back of my
mind.
I know that we are supposed to be in the midst of a grow-your-own revolution,
baskets of home-grown tubers in every middle-class kitchen, but I don’t
believe it. It’s a fad which will wither away, and you know why? Because it
is unutterably time-consuming, a luxury – nothing at all to do with feeding
the kids, just a lot of pretentious faffing around.
Disillusioned, me? You bet I am. What a futile, expensive, soul-destroying,
filthy, tiresome waste of time. What idiocy. And what a smug thing to do:
“Ooh, I grow my own veg.” How wholesome. What moral superiority.
I remember one particularly dismal moment this year. I had discovered to my
excitement four celery and two celeriac seedlings, from trays I had been
trying to encourage in the cold frame for months. I weeded a patch, pricked
them out, planted them outside, put a little circle of slug pellets around
each one, and proudly showed them to our long-suffering expert adviser Sarah
Wain. She peered. And paused. “That’s not celery,” she said. “It’s a compost
weed.”
So what did we achieve this year? One crop of broad beans out of three, very
nice, I think I have a small bag of them left in the freezer. A few potatoes
before the blight got the rest. No tomatoes; all destroyed by blight. Some
scrawny garlic (a damp disease got that too), skinny carrots, underdeveloped
onions, many of them rotted. There was a pretty crop of the unusual
asparagus peas, which were delicious but only if you picked them at 2-3cm
long. Mostly I was eating the far longer ones, and they were woody. We had a
few normal peas before they caught a disease as well, and now we are overrun
with runner beans (no one likes them). There’s been lots of lettuce and
spinach, piles of courgettes, some good French beans, and the cabbages and
leeks are looking fine for winter.
I have plenty of aubergine plants, too, which have grown to a huge height but
are showing no sign of bearing fruit. I discovered too late that you have to
pinch off the tips to make them grow out rather than up, and nor did I
understand about correct pot sizes. Maybe they will come good; who knows.
And we might have a handful of sweetcorn cobs, but I remember planting 20
seeds with the children, so that’s not much of a return. Ditto the fennel.
I don’t think I’ll bother with fennel again next year, and yet even as I write
it, I know that I will. Because there is something even more irritating than
vegetable-growing, and that is being defeated by vegetable-growing. How can
you be beaten by a brassica?
The last time I wrote in this magazine, I suggested we should decide which
vegetables offer the greatest return for the least effort, because it seems
to me that must be the way forward, if there is one. It’s important to
choose something that’s not only reasonably straightforward and generous,
but that tastes noticeably better than the supermarket ones as well. So were
it not for the fact that they all died from blight this year, I would have
gone for tomatoes, possibly with courgettes, such a generous plant, in
second place.
One reader recommended garlic – “the easiest and most successful”. I don’t
know. Ours never grew properly, and you can buy great bunches of perfectly
decent garlic these days.
Another suggested mangetouts, because you can eat them raw or cooked, the more
you pick them the more you get, and when they become too big they turn into
peas. “And just when you think the plants have served their purpose they can
be dug into the ground to provide nutrition for next year’s brassicas.” I
didn’t know most of that, but then I’ve never liked mangetouts.
A third grower, in Guildford, suggested French beans. Now that I do agree
with: you pop the seed in and a few weeks later you have beans, easy to
pick, delicious to eat. Though you do have to build something for them to
grow up. Then he proposed beetroot, swiss chard and spinach, with
courgettes, leeks and radish. I reckon that’s a pretty good pick.
Sarah Wain went for chard and spinach too: “Chard or Long Standing spinach or
New Zealand spinach by far,” she suggested. “Because it’s all-year-round,
using the same plant, so how easy is that? Beans are summer only.”
Mike Thickett in Kent made me laugh (thanks, I needed it) by suggesting we
work out which is the dullest crop to raise – onions, he thought.
We had lots of other suggestions including, interestingly, asparagus, from a
lady in Dorset. I heard that asparagus was really hard but she swears it is
a “no fuss” crop and, along with shallots, gives the best long-term returns
for minimal effort and cost. I wonder.
I wonder, I wonder. I wonder about the whole thing.
Last weekend saw me muttering angrily about tarpaulin as I weeded yet another
overrun patch. Ideally I would like to cover the entire site for a year.
Kill all the weeds, give us a year off, let someone else do the hard work.
Someone in Kenya.
And then I went to water the chillies and the aubergines one more time, and I
saw it poking out: a small, shiny bright purple aubergine. I was so pleased
I took a picture on my mobile phone. Now, there’s only one of it, and it may
not grow much bigger, and it’s been a long time and a sod of a lot of effort
in the arrival. But hell. I grew it. And you know what? Next year, if I just
remember to pinch off the tips, and get the pot sizes right, I’m sure I can
make more of them.
you really have go to take the rough with the smooth with gardening,you cant legislate nature.you just had a bad year but heh,theres allways next year.keep your chillis in the green house all year,they love a drink,and spraying them helps with pollination.stick with it,and good luck.
bod, canterbury, kent,uk
Dear Alice, I did exactly the same thing! Thought I'd got only a couple of courgettes going well, then after transplanting them and watering etc, there they were - 4 lovely tall dandelions! And I've had a plot since 1997! Just weeds again from the compost mixed with a bad seed batch!
You've had a bad year - we did too somewhat with all the rain ruining the potatoes and onions didn't fare too well either. But every year is so different. Good tomato years and great ones too, wonderful Large potatoes and small waste of timers too.
All the veg is so risky to grow if the conditions are wrong but the absolute satisfaction at not having to buy veg and sharing it with friends, family is so rewarding I keep going even after the bad years. We do bartering. I get wine & more wine, jam and swaps of stuff I don't grow. There's so many rewards.
The peace while I'm there and company of the other plotters makes me glad to be alive.
I'm sure you'll get on better next year. Good Luck!
Wendy MacSkimming, Coventry, West Midlands
Dear Alice,
Enjoyed your article and understand just how how you feel.
Try growing Rocket next Spring - over-winters if not too chilly, grows and grows all year long - can't beat that.
Davina Kynaston
Davina Kynaston, Oswestry, Shropshire