(This is an extract from the latest Earth Blog article: a helping hand in deciding how much you need to change your life to really make a difference)
Here’s a photo of my vegetable patch. At the front are two rows of lettuce and a patch of spinach – the kinds that you can keep picking and they will keep growing. Halfway down the raised bed (surrounded by thin copper wire to deter the slugs) are some tomato plants – two different types. At the far end is a wigwam consisting of eight bamboo canes cut in half and a piece of plastic-coated metal rod I found in a hedge a couple of weeks ago, thinking that it might come in handy. There are twenty-four French bean plants beginning to curl their way up the canes and I reckon we will be giving beans away in a few months time. The three pots on the left contain herbs: oregano, basil, tarragon and a few garlic cloves I threw in the soil to see what would happen; and there are a couple of chilli pepper plants courtesy of my Dad who also supplied the beans.
It’s not a very big vegetable patch, but it’s the first time I have ever grown my own food – yes, despite all the other things I have striven to do, growing food wasn’t on my list of priorities, but now I’ve started I want to do it properly and learn all about growing seasons, pests, propagation, seed keeping, nutrients and anything else I can find out. It was never really an option, growing food: I left the house at 8 o’clock every morning while I worked in London, and got back at 7, with barely enough time to eat meals and spend some time with the children during daylight hours. I should have tried to grow food, really, but never got round to it. I could have taken the children out with me to plant seeds, water the growing plants and pull out weeds, but it just didn’t seem important: it does now – I am no longer on the corporate treadmill.
…
Leaving my well-paid job to do full time environmental work was a step; learning to cook with just local, seasonal and dried produce was a step; starting to grow my own food was a step; switching off my central heating, after progressively turning it down further and further was a step; switching off the television and deciding to talk, play cards, read and just enjoy each other’s company was a step. But here’s an interesting thing: almost none of these steps will be featured in the countless lists you read in newspapers and magazines for “turning green†– they are all too big for the mainstream media, and even the mainstream environmental groups to propose to an “unwilling†public.
[Read the complete article at The Earth Blog]