Eating From Your Garden, Yeah Right

Eating from one’s garden is incredibly satisfying, but it’s not all as easy as it seems. Sometimes vegetables don’t grow as expected (my beets were tiny last year), there’s pests to keep control of (that darned codling moth is such a menace), and then there’s soil quality to keep on top of, this one is a biggie if you want a good crop.

Even when all garden processes are going perfectly to plan it can still be difficult to eat solely from your garden, especially if you live in cooler climates and do not have a glass house. This article from Wendyl out of her book A Natural Year is an entertaining read as she shares her thoughts on home gardening.

In my days editing women’s magazines like Woman’s Day I was often accused of selling my readers lies about various celebrity lifestyles. Or course I did. In those days they were tabloid magazines. And no I’m not very proud of that.

Today I think the magazine selling us lies are home and garden magazines. Nestled between their luxurious pages are unrealistic hopes and dreams of perfect homes where no one spills their wine, forgets to dust, leaves an old newspaper lying around or can’t afford to paint it twenty shades of white. I do know a few people who live in homes like that, but they are very wealthy and can afford decorators and cleaners and don’t have children.

And that’s just the home bit. The garden bit of these magazines features an endless parade of celebrities and chefs who tell us that they ‘eat from their garden’. Apparently, they tend and create these amazing gardens on their properties and are living the good life eating only the produce they grow.

Yeah, right.

Many of these people have teams of gardeners who either create a garden just for the photo shoot, giving the appearance of a working garden. or maintain these gardens to a very high photogenic standard.

Real gardeners know that eating from your garden exclusively takes a lot of time, planning and patience, and even really good gardeners who do nothing but garden every day of their lives occasionally have to pop down to the shop because they feel like eating pumpkin and they’re not in season. Crop rotation is a thing, but you have to be really good at it to have a variety of vegetables available every day.

We eat from our garden, most of the time. Which means some weeks we eat broccoli all week because it is ready and will spoil if we don’t. Then some weeks it’s silverbeet because that’s all there is while we wait for the rest of the garden to mature.

In the summer we feast on tomatoes, potatoes, basil, cucumbers, celery, all types of lettuce, rocket, kale, silverbeet, spinach, beetroot, courgettes, squash and turnips. Well, that’s what we ate last summer. In the winter it gets a little more sparse and we’re down to kale, silverbeet, spinach, celery, some hardy lettuce and rocket, broccoli, cabbage and beetroot – but not all at once.

This is the first year we’ve been able to do this, and that’s because we’ve been living full time up north. When we were dividing our time with Auckland keeping a garden was a nightmare. I would leave having planted everything out and having it all looking beautiful then I’d come back after two weeks to find something had gotten in and eaten it all, or it had been attacked by pests or the weeds had overtaken it.

To eat from your garden you need to be there everyday keeping an eye on things and rotating crops. And you are very limited by what you can grow in season  and therefore your eatings gets a little boring. Sometimes you just need some mushrooms, and for the life of me I can’t grow carrots. So no, I don’t eat entirely from my garden.

What I think is realistic is if we aim to eat some of our food from our garden because anyone can do that. Well, just about anyone. If you’ve never gardened before start in summer when everything grows so much better and just buy a 25-kg bag of vegetable mix, cut out the plastic on the top, poke some holes in the bottom for drainage and plant a few plants in it. I’d start with something simple like lettuce or rocket and maybe a tomato plant, and keep it watered.

If you can manage that, your tastebuds will take over when they first sample those freshly picked leaves and that perfectly ripe tomato.

It may also interest you to know that studies have shown that you get more nutrition from vegetables the sooner you eat them after they have been picked.

Eating like this is so satisfying because the garden and the season dictates what you eat and to me that is a very ancient way of feeding your body. We humans developed as seasonal eaters as we learned to grow crops or foraged. We ate what was around at the time, not what was grown in the US and shipped out to our supermarkets.