Growing-your-own is a good thing. Everyone knows that. But it’s more than about tastier food at (once you get going) a fraction of the over-priced, under-flavoured, not-the-freshest supermarket stuff.
The first tentative harvesting of the beetroot from our new-this-year vegetable beds proved the flavour thing. And as well as steaming the beets for dinner, I used the leaves in a salad for lunch – so fresh, so tasty, so nutritious, so waste-not-want-not. Grow more veg, eat more veg. Can only be a good thing, right? (Keep reading!)
While the veg beds are new, we’ve had fruit trees for a number of years. The two sour cherry trees have always produced loads-a pretty blossom but the fruit yields have been disappointing, except for one year that looked promising but the birds got to the ripening fruit before we did. This year, we managed to pick a sizeable bounty, except they were more stone than flesh, so a stunning clafoutis was out of the question. Instead, I made enough pie-filling (aka ‘goo’) for two cherry pies. To ring the changes, I sacrificed one small pie for a-couple-of-dozen cherry-surprise American muffins – that’s a cakey mixture half-filling the muffin cases, then a teaspoon-or-so of goo, topped with more cake batter. Scrummy.
I took a couple to my mum, and half-a-dozen to my gardener who hasn’t worked since lockdown because of family vulnerability to Covid-19. She has given us invaluable advice about how to start and what to grow, plus some of her seeds to get us going when everywhere had sold out during the March panic-buying. She refused to take any money, so whenever I bake muffins or flapjacks or whatever, I drop off a few on the way to Mum’s.
The sharing doesn’t stop there. My neighbour brought round some of her new potatoes the other evening, and in return we have promised her some tenderstem broccoli that is beginning to ‘flower’.
In fact, we’re pretty confident that our small hamlet of 15 homes could be completely self-sufficient as a few of us grow a large variety of produce, then there’s meat, milk and eggs from the farms, deer and rabbit ripe for hunting, and three extant medieval ponds that used to supply the long-gone monks with fresh water. The monks had also stocked the ponds with fish, which were still around until a couple of years ago before the cormorants, regular visitors to nearby fishing lakes, sniffed them out and the poor little tail-swishers didn’t stand a chance.
Sharing is how I, with a science education, explain the ‘miracle’ of Jesus feeding the 5000 with just five loaves and two fishes. He shared his small picnic with a few, which inspired others to share their meagre rations, and so it went on until all the hidden, selfish bounties were divulged and there was enough to go round.
But there’s a moral dilemma. My friends and neighbours share more with each other when we grow our own. We also make a more positive, or less negative, contribution to the environment by buying less foreign produce. If more people did this, there would be fewer planes importing less food, thus saving on natural resources, harmful emissions (e.g. carbon, NOx particulates, and noise!) and contributing to the control of catastrophic, climate-change-causing weather events that hit the poorest communities hardest.
Ah yes the poorest communities, who need to grow and export their produce – asparagus from Peru, green beans from Kenya – to survive, a survival that is a little bit more precarious because we’re trying to be generous and green by growing our own.
I wonder if there’s a solution in the Bible to this quandary.
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