People who grow their own food must seem insufferably smug to more shop-dependent folk.
We’re always banging on about how we don’t know *what* we’re going to do with all these asparagus spears, or mangetouts, or courgettes, when everyone else must make do with mean little plastic-wrapped packages with faint-inducingly high price tags (for you and for the planet).
We wax lyrical about popping sweet, fresh peas straight from the pod, when the norms have to settle for frozen. And you should see our Instagram posts. Every year it’s the same: trugs and baskets and bags overflowing with the kind of quantities that put even the more generous veg box schemes to shame.
We also go on quite a bit about how much we’re enjoying all the things which are pretty much impossible to buy. You know: super-ripe, taut-skinned, juice-laden beefsteak tomatoes (rather than the hard, not-quite-ripe versions in the shops), garlic scapes, brilliant yellow (and spherical) Crystal Lemon cucumbers, American land cress, buckler’s sorrel, oca or sweet pear-flavoured yacon.
I do try to restrain myself when in the company of non-GYO friends, but it’s hard not to gush. The thing is, growing your own opens up a whole new world of foody pleasures you just can’t get any other way – and it’s just so damn interesting.
Just now, for example, I am watching my medlars blet. This is a process which would have been quite familiar to the Tudors – and indeed probably the Romans too. Both Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote about medlars: they are such curious things it’s not surprising they capture the imagination so.
Back then, they didn’t mind their fruit and veg looking a bit ugly, and a good thing too as there are few things so ugly as a bletted medlar.
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