Gardening

Well, that was quite a weekend! The weather has finally decided that it’s summer, so we were all in shorts yesterday. And we (well, Anne mostly) managed to get our peas and broad beans planted, finally. So, everything that has to be in the ground now is – chard (coming up!), fennel, potatoes, broad beans and peas. The tomato plants are doing well on the kitchen windowsill, and the peppers, cucumbers and courgettes are growing nicely in the outhouse, together with some bedding plants. The only thing we’re still waiting to come up are the butternut squashes. And, with any luck, we’ll get the sweetcorn planted in empty toilet roll tubes later today, ready for planting out in a month or so, after we’ve dug up the broccoli plants (picked the last of the crop last night :-) ). All in all, we’re pretty pleased with the garden now. Quite a change from a couple of years ago, when we had totally abandoned the garden for various reasons (time, children, bad backs and so on). And it’s very nice to have it as a place that is being used, worked in and loved, and it’s even nicer to watch things growing that we’ve planted, and that we’ll get to eat in a couple of months!

Kinesis has a good post today about the link between our food and the politics of justice. Growing our own food, buying from Farmers’ Markets , buying organic or free-range meat and buying fairly traded goods all help us to live out a belief that we should not exploit others and that our food should be good food, not intensively produced, badly prepared, wastefully packaged rubbish whose sale is governed only by profit rather than the welfare of the environment, the farmer and the consumer.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 10:37am on 02 May 2005
Category: Food, Life, Politics, Struggling, General