Entering my garden era
Establishing a market-garden-cum-who-knows-what, mental health, and horticultural cosplay.
Writing things down and speaking them aloud can be immensely powerful. I recently did a Q&A with the wonderful newsletter of Galah magazine. Reading the answers back aloud I was suddenly hit by a wave of emotion. One point, which I’m expanding on here, was a real fuck me, we’re really doing this moment.
I wrote about one part of a change that’s already in motion: “creating a market-garden-cum-who-knows-what.” I’m not announcing my retirement in favour of horticulture (a note that’s more for the editors out there), but it’s something that will take up greater degrees of my time. I guess it will inform what I write, and how I think about food. Reading that even now gives me a little pit of the stomach pinch. Not a bad one, just a recognition that I’m doing something that will push the boundaries of my knowledge and skill, and perhaps my body. Something that will be a new frontier in my imposter syndrome. But I’m sure, something that will be life changing.
The market garden, which we’ll come back to, is just one part of entering what I’m grandly and with a little tongue-in-cheek, calling my garden era. My grandparents were respectively professional and amateur gardeners, I saw my mum build a much-loved cottage garden, and I still remember the thrill as a kid of donning a flat cap, wellies and Barbour to drive Dad’s ride-on mower. We had a basic rooftop garden in London, a temporary veggie patch in the Perth Hills when we first arrived in Australia, and then another patch down south that’s mainly huge pots owing to the mass of encroaching and water hungry peppermint tree roots. So, gardening has always been there, but more in the background.
We’re in the process of building a house and with that comes not just what I’m calling the home garden, which has distinct southern and northern sections, but also the productive garden, a hundred and something square metre plot that’s adjoined, and which must be productive, adhering to community rules that we follow organic principles.
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