home grown vegetables

1. Growing Vegetables.

You don’t have to be Percy Thrower to grow a few tasty, homegrown organic vegetables. The Allotment or back garden is a great English tradition which enables you to not only grow vegetables, but, also escape from the turmoils of life (i.e. wife / husband – delete as appropriate)

A good vegetable plot gives great satisfaction. True, it is pretty hard work – there are innumerable pests and it is much easier just to buy from Tesco’s. But, when you grow your own vegetables and pick straight from the plot, you realise how much mass produced farming has reduced taste. Through growing your own vegetables, you realise that nature never intended vegetables to be uniformly the same size, shape and colour. It’s not just hyperbole to say homegrown veg and fruit tastes much better, it really is true.

Not only do you get better taste but you can control and know what if any chemicals are sprayed onto food. It is said, conventional crops are sprayed upto 27 times. That’s an awful lot of chemicals.

2. Village Show.

One day, this Marrow will be 2 feet wide, not 2 cm long…

My Marrow is bigger than yours. – Only in England would we get so much joy from vegetable growing competitions. It is a work of art to grow giant vegetables. Your favourite vegetable can almost become like a pet; feeding it everyday, nurturing it from seed to competition winning size. And what can compare with the prestige of a 1st place from the Upper Slaughter Village Vegetable competition? The fact that your competition amounts to one retired old lady, is neither here nor there. First is first!

3. Women’s Institute
Where would England be without the WI? And where would the WI be without jam and where would jam be without soft fruit in gardens throughout the land. So the Women of the institute are to be praised for their efforts to cook bake and jam the produce from our gardens and allotments (particularly the strawberry jam ed.)

4. The English Garden

Glorious drifts of colour

We like to complain about the weather in England. But, the truth is the English climate allows for one of the most versatile range of plants and flowers from anywhere around the world. With careful planting an English garden can have different blooms for almost 12 months of the year. Famous English gardens can grow anything from Cacti to the most delicate Geraniums. Yet, for all the variety, you can’t beat the good old fashioned English cottage garden. A lack of formality and order, just a joyful hotpotch of colour, fragrance and selection of plants.

The English border

The informal cottage garden can actually be quite time consuming, but, the effort is definitely worth it. When all is done, we can just sit back and enjoy relaxing in the garden.

This post is part of the Guardian’s project – Three Things I love about England