Sowing and Reaping
Urban gardening can bring us a close connection with our cuisine and community. Can it help us become magnaminous in defeat? Illustration by Bethany Thompson.
At first glance, it’s easy to draw clear lines between victory and loss in the back garden. Crops are either edible or they're not. Flowers bloom or die; seedlings take to their host soil or wither; the sun, rain and pollinators turn up in the right volume or they don't, and the garden thirsts or drowns. But the months-long process of planting, maintaining and finally – hopefully – pulling up a cluster of fleshy potatoes or plucking rough-skinned peapods from the vine, a hobby I adopted during the second lockdown – has forced me to reconsider ideas about success and defeat. If the caterpillars and birds get to my cabbage leaves before I can, or the weeds smother a bulb before it can establish its place among the vegetable kingdom, have I really lost out?
One of us, after all, has been fed and besides; the little ecosystem behind my flat has been nourished, refreshed and kept ticking over another year – so what if I was only able to harvest enough for a single side plate? Sonny, the illustrator of this article, and their wife Sarah created a veg patch in their back garden. They’re growing tulips, hydrangeas and pixie pan apple blossom, as well as potatoes, peas, strawberries, raspberries, kale, and seedlings for beans, tomatoes and Swiss chard. The flowers “are aesthetic but they make us happy, and the bees too,” says Sarah.
“We grow stuff to eat but we started getting into gardening as a way to spend a bit of time outside after the workday to decompress. Not everything we set out to do works; our cabbages feed about 500,000 caterpillars and we accidentally fried some plants by using bottles as mini-cloches.”
We’re not alone: during the pandemic, millions of people took up gardening. Sales of compost, trowels, seeds and that shiny tape that deters slugs from sliding into your pots for a free lunch are all up.
“The main thing is we’re learning as we go and enjoying it. Getting 10 potatoes from one manky tater in the cupboard is a great feeling," says Sonny. It’s that connection that gardening can give people, between the green mass crowding raised beds and the food in their fridge, as well as its therapeutic aspects, that led Paddy Dunne to set up Leith Community Growers, a veg-growing scheme that's planted a whole series of vegetable patches and tiny gardens across Leith, Edinburgh.
“We’re a community garden project without a garden,” he explains. A fundraiser with local charity Edible Estates, he established the group in the first months of the pandemic. “I spent a lot of lockdown delivering seeds and composts and pots to people.”
Paddy now spends his days crisscrossing the neighbourhood, a cycle trailer full of seedlings and compost lurching behind him, as part of this mission to green the city and give residents a living lesson in the link between the world of plants and what ends up on their plate. The compost is mulched from leftover veg donated by a local greengrocer and the brakes are “a bit terrifying” but, he adds, “it’s immensely satisfying to pull up and start unpacking a garden.”
In the beginning, Paddy focused on crops that were easy to grow in small spaces, such as mustard seeds, peas and spinach. Since then, he notes, “we’ve had people donating a lot of seeds so we’ve had Aztec broccolis and exploding cucumbers and perpetual spinach and cabbage trees. Last year we had wheat; this year we’re going to do flax and dyeing plants.” One recent push saw the group distribute dozens of seed potatoes to city residents, encouraging them to plant the hardy tubers in their owns bags, pots or small plots.
“Potatoes are very easy to grow. And even if you’re not that keen on them, there’s something magnificent about digging up your own potatoes and be able to wash them and cook them. It’s amazing.” With the hope of spreading that idea within the community, Paddy sourced the veg from a farm in the Scottish Borders, returning with his partner’s body weight in seed taters.
“We’ve just been giving them away and talking to people about them. We’re growing loads at the garden and we’ve dropped loads elsewhere, with various community groups and projects around Leith. ”Everything the group produces is grown to be eaten, even if it’s not grown in great amounts. Paddy has helped plant new gardens along the flanks of Scotland’s most densely populated street, out of disused police boxes, in the backs of tenement buildings and on old waste ground.
“We know we’re never going to grow enough to supply a community kitchen. There’s no space for us to have a proper garden but that also means it’s an a really interesting place to try and adopt bits of land.”
As well as the police box garden, Leith Community Growers has planted hedgerows in parks and vegetable patches on waste-ground. His biggest success so far, he says, was growing a small crop of wheat in the middle of the city.
“Even if people don’t eat bread, everybody knows what bread is. It’s a familiar food product, but it’s also massively commodified, so it’s a really interesting opportunity to talk to people interested in that. Where does your bread come from? What is in your supermarket bread compared to what you’d put in it, were you to grow and mill and make it yourself? It’s a way to talk and think about food.”
Though Paddy says he’s not a very successful gardener in his own right, he says the work has revealed a lot about success and failure.
"I am not a very good grower,” he admits. “My strength is is cycling around talking to people about growing. The community side is what I’m quite good – the growing side gives me a lot of stress and anxiety. I’ve had good success with potatoes, for example, but I’ve never really had that much success with onions and garlic.”
“If you plant enough things, some things will grow and do well and some things won’t. The worst feeling I ever have is when I don't do the thing.” He recalls an idea he recently heard on a podcast about the difference between productivity and fruitfulness. "A tree might be fruitful. But a tree has long periods of dormancy and then times of blossoming, of flowering, of making fruit.”
“Fruitfulness allows you to be unproductive if it’s the wrong time of the month or year or day, and that's OK: just accept that what you need is to drink tea and chat to somebody, and do that for the rest of the afternoon because it's the right thing to do.”
Sowing and Reaping was first published in 2022, in our Failure issue.