by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
When I was growing up people were taught how to garden properly, and people did their cooking mostly from scratch, and many from the vegetables that they had grown themselves.
The allotment garden system was something that helped many people to get out into gardening and to enable them to grow some food for themselves, and the history of allotment gardens goes back a considerable while, in Britain as much as in other countries.
But you can also use whatever other space that may be available to grow some food to you and your family. Even a small back garden attached to flats or a house can be used. Don't have lots of lawn; grow food instead. Grow things in containers on the patio and elsewhere.
Containers for gardening can be nigh on anything and I use builder's bags filled with soil, plastic tubs in which trees come to parks from nurseries, large buckets and even an old bath tub or two.
I like root vegetables, and have been very successful with potatoes, many of which have grown entirely by themselves as volunteer plants having been in the compost. Other have been planted but never from seed potatoes. I only use store bought potatoes that have sprouted, as does happen at times, and at times only a thick bit of peeling with the shoots on them. It all seems to work very well.
When you grow your own you also need to find a way of preserving the harvest, especially of it is a bumper one, for the leaner times and for that purpose it is well worth the money time and effort to get the tools for canning and preserving in other ways, including drying.
Allotments are a great way of taking a trip in food self-sufficiency but the waiting lists in many places are tremendous and thus make a start wherever you are and can, but, if you want, get yourself on the list.
Allotments also are a great way to meet other like-minded folks and often the allotment societies are real lovely communities that help one another and not just as far as the allotments go. This is probably more pronounced in some places than in others, but...
Besides the obvious money-saving benefits of growing your own produce, tending to your plants on a regular basis is also very relaxing.
Gardening brings you down to earth, pardon the pun, for it does in more than one sense, and you've got the birds singing and plants growing around you.
It is also a great way to create life rather than to waste it. We've become such a wasteful society, that that kind of thing is very important.
You don't have to resort to chemicals and other harmful products. Things like nettles can be used in so many ways as a healing aid, and I use vegetable peelings as a natural compost. But then again, at time the spray has to come out, especially when the little critters insist on munching on your food.
There are, though, things that you can make up yourself from natural things that work and you can spray such “teas” onto the plants to rid yourself of a variety of plagues.
The biggest plague we who love and grow potatoes always fear is the blight, and for that reason you should not have tomatoes close to the potatoes.
So, now get out there and get your fingers dirty.
© 2010
