editorial / yardstick / suit yourself / going underground / filth / proud? / talent sprouts
cook / make / urban harvest / interview
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editorial / yardstick / suit yourself / going underground / filth / proud? / talent sprouts cook / make / urban harvest / interview |
Suit yourself Being subversive doesn’t have to be about shouting on street corners. If you resent having to pay for a whole box of poxy, flavourless tomatoes when you only want one, poxy, flavourless tomato anyway, growing your own may be the answer. It’s your way of sticking two fingers up at the supermarkets that you hate visiting anyway. Two people who could be described as experts on not being experts on home growing are Dave and Andy Hamilton. They have been running a website on how to be “self sufficientish” for the past year, and both grow a selection of fruits, vegetables and herbs. They are both keenly aware of the shortcomings most of us face when trying to grow our own stuff. Maybe you live in a rented flat with a landlord that issues sets of rules regarding whether you should or shouldn’t wear shoes in the house, let along dig up the garden. Or maybe you only have a window ledge to call your own. They know all this, mainly because they have been there themselves. |
Their website focuses on one type of vegetable at a time, rather than vast complicated feeding patterns for various vegetables, and is an excellent resource for those of us who don’t know much, and need to quickly find out why our basil plant’s keeling over, or making our little onions bigger onions. Both Dave and Andy live in rented accommodation, and have much advice to offer the ‘challenged’ gardener. So there’s no excuse. As Andy says, “If you have somewhere to put them you can grow almost anything in containers. If you have 100 acres of land or 1 metre of concrete everyone can lower their ecological footprint”. And, one presumes, have a shitload of good food as well. Andy says he got into self sufficiency when he “got annoyed that food was sprayed and came from the other side of the world” and thought “I want to eat organic, I want to know exactly where it comes from, and the only way to do that is growing it, really”. |
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