Back to the Future

Growing food

 

When I was a kid every back yard in our street had a vegetable patch and the traditions of growing vegetables were passed on simply by the fact that the whole family were involved in the chore of tending to the garden. The affluence following the 50’s and 60’s in many, many ways saw the traditions of growing your own and backyard varieties of  fruit and vegetables simply fade away due to the era of convenience and commerce and even more disturbing was  the dependence on fertilizers, pesticides and such which changed the methods of back yard gardeners.

This is my grandfather in the 1920's

- must be in the blood.     

Back in the late 70’s I felt a need to learn to grow food using techniques not involving manufactured fertilizers or pesticides as I saw that in the future there would be perhaps a need to grow food to survive and even more importantly that in a depression we could not afford the manufactured products to have success in growing vegetables. I am far from an alarmist but the ability to grow food, without any modern aids and using what is available within the environment, is something I believe is vital to our survival in the future. I learned about soil and how to improve it naturally, I read books on permaculture and natural organics plus sourced tips on how to do everything from making fertilisers to how to keep white butterflies from laying their eggs on your cabbages. I learned to use materials from the local environment to build retaining walls or simple stakes to hold up say tomato bushes, not using shop bought seeds etc etc…

Old house stumps used to make a retaining wall.

So over the years I have leaned much – and have practiced the things I have leaned in the many gardens, I created, in different parts of the world. Travel created good experience having had gardens in diverse places from the tropics of Australia to the colder northern reaches of Holland and places in between. So I thought why not make a series of blogs on different techniques to encourage you to grow  your own, save money and perhaps encourage some of you to share your tips and experiences. Here where I live there are no gardening books with growing information peculiar to this region so the thought has been with me to perhaps write a small vegetable gardening book for this area and what a better place to practice the art of producing such, and use you all as my guinea pigs.