N IS FOR NOSTALGIA

Remember when a tomato tasted so tomatoey that it didn’t need any accoutrements?  You could eat it just as is.  How about eggs?  Beautiful thick whites and yolks that were as golden as the sun. Carrots that had such a strong taste you could tell if someone had left them out of a dish.

That is why I grow my own; I don’t eat tomatoes anymore if I haven’t grown them & I can’t tell you the last time I bought potatoes or carrots.  I grow for the taste and the benefits that eating organic will bring.  There is also a lot of pleasure and pride when you have a garden.  Any idiot can throw some seeds in the ground but it takes dedication to grow those seeds up to become food.

But the best thing is when I taste my veggies and it takes me back to when life was simple.

I often wistfully look back to my childhood and remember my father’s veggie patch which wasn’t enormous but it was prolific. Radishes, tomatoes, beans, carrots – Dad worked 5 days a week but made sure we had a patch.  My maternal grandfather had a massive vegetable garden and fruit trees despite the fact that he ran his own business and most of my mates & our neighbours had a section of their back yard that was fenced off for the food garden.

We even had chooks (chickens).  Dad was a country boy but was very sensitive to his city raised, animal loving daughters.  We had pet chooks and eating chickens (EC’s).  We were forbidden to befriend the EC’s and they were kept in a separate pen from our pets but everyone was allowed to free range during the day.  We each had a bantam hen which became quite a big brood after we introduced them to Roger the Rooster.  (No pun intended – we were only little then)  In those days chicken was a luxury, everyone kept them for the eggs and only ate one if it was getting on a bit or at Christmas.  We never questioned the fact that every second Sunday we would have a roast chicken dinner we just felt very lucky.  We were blissfully unaware that the chicken on the table was, until only recently, up in the chook pen and Dad, bless him, was making sure that none of us three girls made the connection by waiting until we were over at a friend’s house on the weekends before he killed any. Its not that we didn’t know where our food came from it’s just that we wouldn’t eat it if we were personally acquainted with it. Those chicken dinners were wonderful, as were the sandwiches at school the next day. 

I love it when people come to me and ask me how to grow something; or when they tell me they have cooked something using produce from their garden. There is something wonderful about sharing information about our gardens and its age old.