(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]