More thoughts on an English farmhouse garden
Maria, Adam, Laura, and Ji-young, thanks for the comments.
Maria, one of the occupational hazards of growing up English is that everyone just knows you have no cuisine, no cooking tradition. As you can see, for large numbers of English people this simply wasn’t true. They didn’t go to restaurants. Hence it was difficult for visitors to England to encounter English cooking. But our garden and the food that resulted was what I took to be completely normal growing up.
Adam–well there was the the white peacock that adopted us, the bantams and the game hens, not to mention all the farm animals!
Laura and Ji-Young. Yes work. And that leads into
Gardens and time
Several thoughts here. A garden such as we had, is not just a matter of sticking a few seeds in the ground. It takes years and thought and planning. Siting the house and garden and building walls and planting hedges to create microclimates. Planting trees. Pruning them. Getting the perennials going. Building up the soil.
And it also takes time not just to plant (and several successive plantings of the quick growing stuff) but to harvest. I have memories of hours on a milking stool picking gooseberries. And to preserve because although we ate most of the vegetables fresh almost all the fruit was preserved for the winter.
Gardens and space
This garden required a lot of space. Those English who had smaller gardens tended particularly in the war years to grow just potatoes and cabbage because it was the most reliable and economical way to use a small garden.
But also space to preserve. Just the apples. All my family had an attic or back room with shelves where the apples were carefully laid out on straw or newspaper, not touching, so they would last through most of the winter. Many fruits–plums and damsons and blackcurrants and gooseberries–were bottled (canned in American English) for pies and the like. The rest–raspberries, strawberries, rhubarb, all the currents, plums–were made into jam or jelly. This took a large pantry with shelves full of wonderful glowing bottles and jars. But space.
And one final thing. Salted green beans are an abomination and should be banned from the face of the earth.
creating a garden is a lot of work, as you say.
in the winter, you can plant things and forget about them, as the climate does most of the work, but this is not the case in summer. in crete, summer produce grows abundantly, but it also needs constant irrigation. and the most unfortunate part about a summer garden is the pests and diseases, which often leads to the use of chemical fertilisers.
we always have a large garden in the summer, but it is never as organic as the winter garden.
most people now use the refrigerator to preserve their excess crop. so much easier than bottling, but not as pretty as those full shelves of gleaming produce.
No matter what the culture, the process of getting food takes a LOT of time/energy and other resources. This process sounds to me to be only a few degrees from a culture where a woman must spend 4>5 hours a day over a metate to prepare a family’s tortillas. We are still so close to a time when our raison d ‘etre, our only activities, were about nourishment and body heat.
I’ve always felt spaghetti squash was an abomination that should be banned from the face of the earth.
But having thought so, I felt badly for it, all alone in its sole and lofty abomination. I feel much better now, knowing that it is accompanied by salted green beans.
We still gear most all of our activities toward the getting and preparing of food, it just doesn’t seem that way. Working for money, eating, cooking (if you do it), thinking about what to eat, feeding other people — not much has changed at the core, so to speak.
Gardening is an interesting process when looking at the sort of fruit + veg that your family grew. In some cases it is possible to spread out the harvest time period by careful selection of different varieties or store them post harvest for a few months. But in many cases the harvest all comes in one huge glut. Due to the weather my parents 10 plum trees pretty much all ripened within a week of each other. That is a lot of work to preserve them all and a lot of expense (traditional expense = sugar). Not everybody who had a plum tree would have been able to preserve the fruit.
If you look at a modest family orchard of about 15-20 trees, actually using all the harvest is a lot of work and it isn’t “free”. Then you have the veg to worry about.
Bloody peacocks, they don’t taste that interesting and they make a hell of a racket.
But peacocks are so romantic.
It’s true that we still gear a lot of our activities towards food, but the core is different things for different people.
Most of us in this culture have the luxury of spending our food time looking at magazines, books, or food websites in the pleasant process of choosing our next meal, which we then need to decide what grocery store to go to (and within this now, whether we’ll go ‘local’ or not) and whether we’ll spend money on something labeled ‘organic’ or not. Then we get to go home and cook it, enjoying our multi-cultural cookery prowess as we do so.
Our core participation in food is mostly intellectual.
We are reliant on our whims and our educations in terms of what we eat. Not reliant on the sun, the rain, the rocks in the soil, the health of the soil, the health of the animals, and even – to stretch it a bit – our own levels of sturdy physical constitution and health.
Hard physical work, is what growing food is. And even as a corporate VP, I never had a boss as brutal or demanding as the soil and weather can be. Or rather, if I had come across one I could leave – as people do, in ‘jobs’. Farming. You are tied to that soil and all that goes along with it. A harsh taskmaker.
And the ‘man to dig once a week’. Yes, necessary. I’ve tried to dig gardens myself with this old-fashioned thing one calls a shovel or a spade and literally, factually, simply could not do it. I did have to have someone else do it. Once, it was the guy I was married to. Simply, as most men do, he had more upper-body strength. Fact of nature, in general. The next time I had the farmer down the road plow the soil up with his own hard-won, battered, always-falling-apart and thank goodness he knew auto mechanics to always fix it or there would have gone his livelihood – tractor.
The luxury, the real luxury, of working with one’s mind instead of with one’s hands is not a small one.
Rachel, anyone who has read the canon of brit cookbooks knows that the British certainly have many wonderful culinary traditions and so many are centered on the garden. As to time….
my encounters with rural people has given me the strong impression that it is a huge amount of work and time, but I do notice that vegetable gardeners seem to take pride. I have seen this in rural new jersey and in italy where people put immense labor into the earth. But they are so interested in swapping stories about the weather this year and methods, etc. they love to show off.
If you buy things–a house, or a car–all these things sort of fall apart over time. the kitchen gets worse year by year. But the garden grows to fruition over time. We built walls last year and tore up grass. It killed us. But now that’s done and we’ll plant some fruit or a trellis, and then something else this year. Each year we build and trees and plants establish and mature.
I do agree it is work one way or another, and it’s not for everyone. In fact, many people romanticize it and have no idea the commitment required. so i’ll put gardens and marriage and children in that category of a lot of work (and space), but worth it. :)
cheers.
The most common problems I’ve seen with school and community gardens is finding the actual gardeners and someone to haul soil, amendments, etc.. After that you run into the people problems, petty arguments, power plays, etc..
Again, I’ve seen fabulous examples of gardens that work, but it takes a village or rather what is known as a garden committee these days.
Occasionally, they work with just one person on site who is really dedicated, usually a teacher, sometimes a parent. But after this person leaves (or resentment builds) the garden programs usually stop.
I’m not saying that these aren’t good ideas. But I’ve seen so many problems with the way they are implemented. Even when everything is kumbaya, honky dory there are the administrative, bureaucratic and space/time issues to consider.
When I read opinion pieces or letters to Obama for big sea changes, well, I can’t help roll my eyes. Very cute PR ploys, “shake things up”, “get them thinking” and so on.
The problem isn’t lack of awareness. The problem is that there’s a lack of understanding about processes. The political/bureaucratic process, the natural process of developing a small garden (which can take years), the economic process of human and capital resources that have to invested for fairly small outputs, the process of people learning how to work together without arguing about the most trivial things…
And no, it’s not the school janitor or custodian’s job to take care of the garden.
I have so many things to respond to all these interesting comments. Tomorrow! I hope!
I’d like to invite proponents of big sea changes and national decrees for school gardens and local/seasonal school lunches to visit Los Angeles. I can take them around to a dozen or so schools, visit local politicians and bureaucracies, do the rounds- so to speak.
After that, maybe they can start pilot programs in one school per city council district. I don’t mean an “initiative” to start pilot programs. I mean work on the whole thing, from funding, fleshing/building out space, hiring, training, gathering enough human resources to sustain the programs, etc… Hey, that’s almost the easy part, there are site specific social-politics to deal with as well.
I’ll give two examples of schools I’ve visited. There are better, worse and everything in between schools.
One has a full blown cooking classroom with ovens, gardens divided into plots for each grade, a supportive and dedicated principal open to just about anything that will benefit the students, a strong pool of middle class to affluent parents who are involved, enough space to build a full service kitchen…a highly organized school overall with lots of resources to implement and sustain programs.
The other school is cramped, morale is low, staff and visitor parking has over flowed into the track, tennis is played on a roof top because of lack of space, they have a cooking room (leftover from the days of home economics) but the teacher is a fry cook and so paranoid about job security he will aggressively argue with just about any visitor to his class, the Parent Teacher Association might as well not exist, rates of overweight/obesity are high, the school overall has a very high rate of remedial students, and the principal is exhausted.
Why does any of this matter? Because big initiatives are implemented at the local level, on site.
That would be exciting to see, Ji-Young. Either case scenario. It would even be interesting to see which one was chosen to develop, and by whom.
It’s a funny thing, but whenever I hear the phrase “It takes a village” I say to myself, “Where is that village?”