We are marking Mental Health Awareness Week with a discussion around Gardening for Wellbeing, on Tuesday 13 May. Speakers including psychiatrist and psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith, Co-Founder of The Glasshouse Kali Hamerton-Stove, Specialist Horticultural Instructor at Bethlem Royal Hospital Sergio Ruano Heredero and food writer, cook and veg grower Kathy Slack will reflect on how gardening positively impacts us all.
Ahead of the talk, Kathy shares an extract from her book ‘Rough Patch: how a year in the garden brought me back to life’, a memoir (with recipes) about life lessons learnt from the soil:
Things are constantly imperfect in the garden. In May, the broad beans get blackfly; come July, the pea netting snaps; the mice eat the seedlings any time of year; the weeds keep coming regardless, dishevelling your neatly hoed rows. Once, I lost an entire brassica harvest to a lone cabbage white butterfly that got in under my netting while I was away with work and laid an army of caterpillars, who munched the whole crop. When I returned, nothing but the stumps remained, sur- rounded by a moat of green caterpillar droppings. Untidiness and imperfection. Everywhere.
Another time, I arrived at the farm one morning, but before I got to the walled garden Benevolent Farmer Brown dashed out of the kitchen and stopped me.
‘You’d better come in,’ he said.
‘Everything OK?’ I asked. He looked like someone had died. ‘I’m so sorry Kathy, but Blossom and her gentleman guest escaped last night.’
Turns out that Blossom, a pig, was being ‘visited’ by a male pig in the hope he would sire some piglets. This boar seems to have been quite a charmer because he thought a fancy meal was the ideal way to set the mood for the evening’s romance. And where better to lavish his date with fresh, organic vege- tables than the garden that adjoined the pigpen. So, Casanova headbutted the pig fence repeatedly until it gave way, escorted a delighted Blossom to the gate of the kitchen garden where he winked and flexed his muscles (one imagines), and then lifted the gate off its hinges.
Now, by this point Blossom is already thinking, ‘Gawd damn, now that’s a man right there.’
But he goes a step further, takes her by the trotter (possibly) and leads her into the patch where, after an amuse-bouche of sweetcorn, he introduces her to the brightest thing he can see on this moonless night: my huge, orange pumpkins. Swept off her feet, Blossom abandons decorum and tucks in, sampling a single bite of each glorious, sweet pumpkin before moving on to the next. They gorge themselves, mauling the entire crop, before returning to their pigsty, replete and euphoric from their adventure, to… Well, we can imagine the rest because Blossom had piglets later that year. I called them all Pumpkin.
A lot goes wrong in the vegetable patch. But the world doesn’t end. Things keep progressing. You still get a harvest, and it is still joyful. It might be a bit knobbly and a bit nibbled, or sometimes a lot nibbled, but it still feels like an achievement.
If rampaging, amorous pigs won’t teach you to embrace failure and imperfections, then gardening books will.
Early on in my vegetable growing, I would pore over gardening manuals. Not one to just have a go, I like to be taught how to do it first. I’m a sucker for a class. So, I read every ‘how to’ book on growing your own food that I could find. And, gosh, they like their rules. It can all seem quite complicated.
For the first few years in my vegetable patch, I would stand over the soil, clutching a mucky, dog-eared manual, reading the instructions (which I had highlighted the night before, naturally), adhering to every word. I had a pH kit to test the soil before planting anything lest it be too acidic or alkaline. According to the books, accidentally planting potatoes in a soil with pH 6.5 when potatoes prefer pH 5.8 would spell disaster. I measured, with an actual ruler, the distance be- tween seeds as I sowed them. If the beetroot was sown too closely packed it wouldn’t grow bigger than a walnut – more disaster. I read so extensively about club root, a fungal disease that affects brassicas and stays in the soil for decades making planting anything impossible, that I was too paralyzed by fear to plant any brassicas at all. It wasn’t worth the risk, was it?
This is the problem with manuals. They make the whole pursuit of gardening seem fiddly and difficult, as if you need a PhD in botany before you can sow a beetroot. Nothing is more off-putting than punctiliousness, especially to a beginner; it can make you feel like it’s all too complicated and cause you to throw your hands up in despair, lock the shed and take up fishing instead.
The big secret that the gardening world will not admit to is this: no one follows all these rules. Apart from, that is, the fastidious old duffers on allotments who sit by their sheds passing judgement on your dahlias and worrying about winning the village show with their enormous marrow. These are the same mouldy folk who get exercised about new-fangled inventions like pak choi and Tenderstem broccoli. You must forgive them. They are lonely souls, adrift in a changing world. The rules are their life raft.
Anyway, in the first few weeks that I was off work, when I dis- covered the veg patch, I was in no state to consult the manual and just chucked a few lettuce and radish seeds in the soil. I didn’t measure the distance between each seed. I didn’t sieve the compost I covered them with. (Actually, I don’t think I covered them at all.) I didn’t keep a note of when I watered or what sort of soil I’d put them in. I even omitted the painstaking tedium of thinning them. And, do you know what happened? Right first time: nothing. Everything grew fine.
Since then, I have adopted a bung-it-in-and-see approach. Which is pretty much how I try to approach life generally these days. Sure, sometimes it doesn’t work. I lost all the broad beans one year because I planted them too close together in the hope of squeezing a few more in but instead created the perfect conditions for chocolate spot (a fatal fungal disease). But hey, now we know that spacing matters.
If ever something failed – more mess – I now saw it in a new light: ‘Oh well, the world keeps turning. And at least it’ll make good compost, or a nice home for bugs.’ These were not catastrophes. Just imperfections. And even imperfections have their uses. It is almost never the end of the world.
