The gardening torture dilemma!

An annual, 'do I or don't I' plant up my veggie patch question and the reason I always do!

My dear departed papa was a green fingered, garden wizard! He only had to look at a plant and it would double in size over night. His garden was a masterpiece of clipped edged rectangles, filled with symmetrical lines of every vegetable imaginable, there wasn’t a weed in sight unless it was edible - row upon row of orderly plants behaved as if each and every one had been kissed by the black bearded god with the hoe for its perfection. I remember staggering as a young child under the weight of 6lb Savoy cabbages. Carrots and parsnips, not just one, but the whole crop, where each would weigh over 1lb and still be perfectly edible; much as I wished they weren’t - I hated parsnips back then, and Savoy cabbages for that matter! In fact, much to the utter chagrin of my poor papa, his three girls hated everything about most vegetables, beginning with the maintenance. During the drought of 1976 we whinged horribly every time we were asked to carry yet another bucket of dirty dish water the 150 or so yards from the back door to the garden in an attempt to keep alive the never ending greenery and roots that all three of us would refuse to eat. We would peel shallots with listless boredom and complain bitterly about having ‘onion fingers’ for days afterwards. We grizzled while we topped and tailed French beans and were berated harshly for wasting more than necessary if anything longer than just the top or the tail was spotted in the chicken bowl when finally the last one was done. The list of chores, do’s and don’t’s were endless and for us, without the least compensation. All three of us were vile that summer.

The only saving grace about my fathers having green fingers was his seed catalogues. They arrived, in those days, in a brown envelope just before Christmas and we three girls were forbidden from touching them until he had placed his orders, something my two younger sisters didn’t give two hoots about, however, for me the temptation to disobey was placed and of course, I did! I remember sneaking into his potting shed to gaze at the myriad pages of exotic looking flowers and plants with such longing, why he didn’t want us to see inside was a puzzle to me and of course, eventually I was caught, as I always was, and only afterwards realised that my constant pleadings of why he wouldn’t order any one of the fabulous array of flora advertised being the very reason he’d forbidden us in the first place! They fell on deaf ears anyway though, his reply was simple, they weren’t edible, a waste of time and space and far too fragile!

End of conversation!

These catalogues ignited a reluctant passion - from a relatively young age I began to dream of a garden full of flowers instead of vegetables and eventually, with much persuasion and more hard work than I bargained for to prove to him that this wasn’t another whimsical idea to be abandoned but a month later, (he knew me too well), he sectioned off a corner of his beloved plot just for me. Where upon, I very quickly discovered, not only that all those brightly coloured flowers from far off lands did not take kindly to Sussex soil, nor the climatic conditions - my Agapanthus which, disappointingly, arrived in brown paper as one bulb didn’t even flower before shrivelling to a gooey mess in the soil - but also that my fingers, whilst sore and blistered, were not green like his!

Between then and now though, I have learned that growing anything at all takes patience and a vast understanding of environmental conditions, in fact the process of learning this was so much harder than the gardening itself!

I changed my entire opinion of my fathers fanatical cultivating and storing of homegrown produce. I came not only to love the therapeutic art of growing and caring for fresh veggies, herbs and fruit but actually enjoyed the often laborious task of nurturing from seed to plant, even the endless weeding. However, no garden I have worked on has come even remotely close to being as tiresome and complicated as my veggie patch here in France, on the this hill;

It is the curse of my every day between now and autumn…

It is the cause of my having to repair many a broken handle on hoe or spade, or more correctly my husband because he makes a much better job of it!

It is an arid and mostly fruitless patch of stone and clay that refuses to be nourished…

Perhaps a malediction was cast by previous owners to rest on the shoulders of anyone who dares to turn a sod of soil therein, who knows? It has broken my spirit and my back more times than I care to mention but I will not give up - there is always another trick to experiment with. Although, the list is getting shorter!

My 50 x 30 metre patch faces south east. At the height of summer it is an inferno of heat and dust comparable, I imagine anyway, to the Shahara desert, heat waves, the type of which I’ve only ever seen on sand dunes, hover diaphanous and lethal over the earth, my lettuces and salad leaves wilt and shrivel to something about as appetising as a bowl of potpourri and even though it is sheltered on three sides by shrubs and fruit trees, the wind will somehow find the gap and cause mini tornados to pick up the dust and dance between the plants, drying the soil and everything planted within to brittle uselessness. Every year I battle with Mother Natures tantrums and throw back twice as many!

Fenced off, to one side of the sheep field, my rectangle of horticultural and climate chaos is accessed by a gate which no longer opens with ease. Meaning, because I have to walk through the field to get to it, that for every visit I must arm myself with a water pistol to fend off any attempt by Rambo to thwart my entrance which should take a bare 2 seconds but, depending on how much equipment I’m transporting, can take minutes; more than sufficient time for Rambo to charge, head down, horns aimed, making the act of simply just arriving unharmed a somewhat laborious and necessarily strategically choreographed manoeuvre. Although just this week I have been transporting their hay in the mornings (mainly to avoid jokes from certain work colleagues about a roll in the hay before class because invariably I arrived with hay on me somewhere!) wrapped in an old white sheet and this seems to terrify all of them so from now on I will wrap myself in a sheet and walk, ghostlike, to the gate and hopefully gain entry without returning with yet another giant bruise on my behind, providing I don’t trip over the sheet of course!

This weekend marks the beginning of winter break in the Occitan region of France, it is always at this time I begin planning my years plantings. Every year I ask myself the same question, ‘Is it worth all the effort?’ and my answer is always the same… ‘no way, another year of breaking my back for nothing, not a chance!’ and then I think of my dad… he would have been 80 years old on February 5th, his life was cut short by cancer on the day of his 58th birthday. He died,over 20 years ago before both of his parents but not before my mother, his beloved wife, , which makes this month and every gardening decision I make very poignant; and so, despite every constraint, the work begins.

To be continued…