The kitchen garden calendar
Our step-by-step guide to growing your own food all year round. Mark Diacono shows you how to get started...
Growing even a little of what you eat weaves a thread of pleasure through the year. Your first home-grown cherry tomato wrapped in a single basil leaf becomes the taste of summer; asparagus – cut just after the water goes on and submerged as it rises to boil – is May on a plate; the perfume of quince sweetening the house is autumn; succulent, sweet, just-steamed sprouting broccoli makes a pleasure of the cold-fingered harvesting.
Home-grown food is – I promise you – extraordinary, but food is not all that a veg patch offers. You become part of the quiet marvel upon which we all depend. That plants create food from sunlight, soil, water and air – that they provide vitamins, minerals and antioxidants in the frequent, small, combined doses we need – is a miracle. We were made to eat them.
The rhythm of growing and eating sensitises you to the seasons and the mini-seasons between and within each. You come to understand why it’s best to leave the parsnips another fortnight, and why this tomato tastes so good straight from the plant and that one is perfect for cooking. You become a better cook by wanting to use your harvest to its best. It makes food become something that you do rather than just what you eat.
Whatever you might need in the way of well-being, a veg patch can provide. It can be a place to be solitary or sociable, a source of quiet or conversation, and having your hands in the soil reduces the time with your head in a screen. Life becomes a little more analogue. Your patch is a place of hope: the sun rises and seeds germinate whether you are happy, flat, angry or hurt. Gardening reminds us that life – and the extraordinary process on which we depend – endures; that there is a time beyond our mood or circumstances.
Growing your own food is also the single most effective thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint. Our food industry consumes extraordinary quantities of fossil fuels and other resources by its need for fertilisers, transportation, processing and wrapping that in turn release greenhouse gases and poison our watercourses. What we eat accounts for around 30 per cent of our carbon footprint, and eating your own chemical-free, unprocessed, seasonal food can make a sizeable dent in that.
Gardening can shift your mindset too. Engaging positively with the political act of making food choices may lead to you being more concerned about where the rest of your food is coming from, who produces it and how. It’s perfectly possible that you become – if you are not already – one of the many adopting a more plant-based diet; that you engage with other elements of your carbon footprint. As Michael Pollan perfectly put it:
“Growing even a little of your own food is one of those solutions [to climate change] that, instead of begetting a new set of problems – the way ‘solutions’ such as ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do – actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon.”
For most of us though, growing food is dominated by pleasure. We live many of our important hours around the kitchen table, and sharing delicious food you have grown with those you love is truly life-enhancing: it roots you in the earth and acts as the seasonal clock around which family, friends – and the soil that supports us – come together. So be excited; even if you are planning just a few pots by the kitchen door, this is a big deal. Now let me help you get it right.