Grow your Own - how to start

Drug addicts perplex me. I can't see any pleasure in ruining your brain, ruining your health, and often quite literally ruining your entire life.

They are a relatively recent development, historically speaking: there have always been deranged hermits who ate dodgy mushrooms in order to speak in tongues, and but they were always few and far between, nothing like the masses of druggies we have these days. 

Everyone has their theory, of course, from godlessness to laziness, with a side issue of mental health issues combined with our incredible wealth: at no other time in the history of civilisation have people - and when I say "people" I mean the general population, not the teeny tiny number of lords and ladies - not had to spend all their time and energy working the soil, to grow food, in order to live.

And that's the basis of my hypothesis: it seems to me that drug addiction is a plague that developed at the time of the Industrial Revolution - a time when opium dens sprang up in cities, when density of population created poverty, disease and the sort of black-market mentality that would encourage self-harm for money.

It wasn't until 1868 that the Pharmacy Act was created, recognising dangerous drugs and limiting their sale to registered chemists and pharmacists. Until that time, it simply wasn't an issue: the general public lacked the money or the contacts to buy drugs in sufficient quantities to harm themselves.

So why then? Why were the mid 1800s a time when madness descended on the population? Partly it was due to money - the man in the street was suddenly able to earn more money than was needed simply to survive - but the reason he was able to earn this excess money was the division of labour between those who raised crops and animals for us to eat, and those who worked in shops and factories.

Without having to tend crops every day, without having to look after animals, men (and women, of course) lived their lives one step removed from basic survival, which might on the face of it seem like a good thing: just "scraping through" is not a comfortable way to live. But once disconnected from this contact with nature, the town populations found that there was a hollow place in their lives that they didn't know how to fill.

Some found healthy ways to fill the void, with hobbies, good works, social clubs, friendship, and self improvement through learning: whereas others took the easy route and hit the drugs.

It's no coincidence that there are a growing number of gardening associations created for ex cons, for people with mental health problems, for shell shocked veterans, for the underprivileged kids: show 'em some weeds and oh look, they immediately get better. But it works. It really does.

There are also an increasing number of town vegetable beds, community gardens, local gardening groups and associations: we are all starting to realise that we have produced a generation of children who are completely out of touch with nature: who can't recognise common trees, who literally don't know where their food comes from.

Ever worse, their parents are the generation who have grown up eating nothing but fast food, and who don't know how to prepare vegetables, how to make a meal from basic ingredients: and this was highlighted last year, when the government started a well-meant initiative to provide low-income families with a box of groceries intended to make healthy lunches for one child, for a week.

This was blasted on social media: distraught parents, faced with a couple of potatoes, carrots, raw pasta and other items, had no idea how to make food from it!

Another aspect to the problem was most people's complete unawareness of the food supply chain: people on social media were commenting, indignantly and very loudly, that to buy that same set of ingredients at their local supermarket would cost a little over £5, rather than the £25/£30 that it was costing the taxpayer. They seem to be completely unaware of the massive logistics of storing the fresh food, picking it, packing it, moving it from central warehouse to local warehouse, to big van, to little van, to their doorsteps - every step of which costs money. There is no such thing as 'free delivery' . 

And - of course - the government has learned, time and time again, that simply issuing food vouchers does not work, because half of the recipients immediately find "black market" ways to get booze and fags with their vouchers. Hence their decision to send out a box of actual groceries.

What can we do, though, to break this barrier? How can we 'get back to nature'?

First and most obvious, start to grow your own vegetables! 

Start simply, with cress on a piece of kitchen roll:  right.

My generation always used to do this, usually overseen by doting grandparents. Does anyone have time to do this, any more? A packet of cress seeds costs just a pound or two, and will take you all summer to use up.

You literally just put some moist kitchen paper (or an old flannel) into a shallow dish, sprinkle on a few cress seeds, keep it just moist for a week or two, and there you go, cress.

So you can then enjoy your own egg-and-cress sandwiches. 

Once you've done it once or twice, you learn about something called "successional sowing" which means that if it take 2-3 weeks to grow, and it takes you about a week to eat the contents of a tray, then you need to start a new tray every week, so that by the time you've eaten up all the cress in one tray, the next one is just about ready for harvesting.

 So instead of just doing it once, you'll have two or maybe three of them on the go, at any one time.

 Move on to growing lettuce in shallow seed trays, either indoors on a sunny window ledge, or outdoors in a sunny spot, or in a greenhouse if you have one: even those cheap plastic greenhouses - left - work really well for sheltering the lettuce plants, and keeping the bird poo off them. 

This photo is my little plastic greenhouse from last year: I would start a new tray of lettuce every couple of weeks until I had six or so trays on the go, and that was enough to keep  me in lettuce for most of the summer.

Then, once you have the hang of that, you could think about growing some actual veg: and the trick here, is to only grow things you actually eat. There is no point growing cabbage and Brussels sprouts if no-one in the house likes them.

Also, grow things which are expensive to buy: potatoes and carrots take up a lot of room, and are very cheap to buy, so unless you have a huge garden, there seems little point trying to grow them at home. But Asparagus, on the other hand, is expensive to buy, but very easy to grow, if you have the space for it.

I also grow Climbing French Beans - they are as easy to grow as Runner Beans, but I don't really like Runner Beans, because they are often stringy and tough. Climbing French Beans, on the other hand, are tender and yummy, they freeze really well, they're dead cheap to grow - one pack of seeds provides dozens of plants, plus at the end of the season, you can leave a couple of pods on the plant, let them mature and start to go brown, then lo! and behold, you have seeds for next year. Free.

Fruit, likewise: I grow Raspberries, because they are ludicrously easy to grow (I go for Autumn-fruiting ones, which are super easy:  none of that faffing about with this year's canes and last year's canes) and yet they are extremely expensive to buy, because they are so fragile, and because they go mouldy so quickly, once picked and packed. Far better to have them growing in your own garden, so you can pick a bowlful when you want them. Again, they freeze quite well, although they lose their texture once defrosted - but they can still be used as a sort of semi-coulis, with ice-cream!

And best of all, the act of growing our own reminds us of a few things that we would do well to reconnect with: the seasonal nature of fruit and veg, the importance of learning how to store excess produce (grow-your-own is synonymous with "glut" !), the joy of sharing your excess produce with others, and even the joys of working together as a community, where one neighbour might grow courgettes while another grows beans, and you can mix-and-match among yourselves, to share out the gluts.

So there you have it: start small, but do start.

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