 Growing Gardens
with Julia Hancock
It's a Mad World
In the aftermath of the New York incident many of us have been wondering whether there is any point carrying on with our gardens. Why bother if the world is going to end tomorrow? But it's precisely at a time like this that we need to ground ourselves in reality, and what better way to do that than in our gardens?
There might very well come a time when we have to dig up our roses and flowerbeds to plant vegetables and fruit trees, just to survive - if the worst happens and food becomes scarce.
We'll be glad that we saved those prize tomato seeds that a kind neighbour shared with us last summer. We'll dredge the mists of our memories and recall how our grandparents and great grandparents preserved, pickled and dried to take advantage of seasonal gluts and see them through lean times.
We'll discover skills we never knew we had - hand-pollenation, grafting, hybridising - and become incredibly inventive in our necessity. We'll recycle because we have to, not just because it makes us feel good. We'll learn about growing things without chemicals and manufactured fertilisers because they simply may not be available any more. We'll experiment with cash crops and successional planting to increase the productivity of our plots.
We'll become incredibly miserly with water and will manage to grow food with minimum moisture and maximum mulch. We'll make every drop count, including our own excretions.
Suddenly our culinary repertoire will expand to include quick-growing Asian vegetables, lightly stir-fried; jakfruit and plantains spiced into curries; soups made from nettles and other edible weeds; cakes flavoured with seeds and berries; not to mention the beverages, alcoholic and otherwise, that will be quietly fermenting in our tool sheds.
Many of us have adopted some or all of the above practices as a way of life for years. It's not such a bad, mad world.
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