Farming Roots and My Gardening Grannie

Where and when did it all start, this overwhelming need to garner, cook and preserve good things from my garden, to nurture small green things and to share this abundance with as many people as possible.  I have never given it much thought until now, it has crept up on me rather, while I was weeding perhaps! But it began with a very greedy 8-year-old and a very loved gardening Grannie.

Clock golf and baked potatoes

Growing up in a farming family near Henley-on-Thames (I've not moved far!) We were still eating tea in the evenings at 6 in those days.  A spread of bread, cheese, pickles, jam tarts and wagonwheels from my memory, all good 70's stuff that would be unthinkable today! By 7pm I would have escaped the tidying up and nipped next door for round two, just in time for the Archers and while Grannie sipped her sherry I would dip into the yellow "cheesy biscuit" tin and talk about the school day and the garden. My abiding memory of that time is the smell of baking potatoes (there would be one for me too!) and watching her assemble a plate of buttery garden lettuce leaves, complete with greenfly, sprouted seeds, pickled beetroots, a few tomatoes warm from the frame and a slice of ox tongue.  I'm sure there were many other meals but this is the one that I remember most vividly. We'd sit on the patio looking out over her immaculate little garden eating a feast that 30+ years on I can still taste. So I think it was Grannie, with whom I played endless games of Bridge keno after dinner in winter and hours of clock golf in the fading summer evenings that lit the slow burning fuse that was to become a horticultural blaze in adulthood. Sadly Grannie didn't live to see the garden that we have created here and often I wish she was here to ask this or that question or to walk round the flower garden with me. She did help me though, more than she would ever have imagined. by leaving me her gardening books, among which I found a battered copy of Mr Middleton's week by week guide to vegetables fruit and flowers, what I would have done without that little book in the early days I do not know.

Farming roots

Farming runs in the blood, in my case right back to a patch of ground at the tip of Cornwall circa 1066 unbroken as far as I can see although it may end here as both the children currently find the idea abhorrent! ) Everything I have ever done from the age of 4 has been linked to food or agriculture. Pictures of me "helping" build the pole barn in my red suit aged 5 remind me how involved I was and one of my earliest memories is of feeding cows on cold winter evenings surrounded by the comforting smell of maize silage and the steaming breath of beasts.

I was immensely lucky growing up that in addition to our own poultry rearing operation and beef herd there were a few farmers around us that were happy to take on a teenage girl who wanted to drive tractors and milk cows in the holidays and at weekends, and I did, at every possible moment. They were magical summers, I was young, brown, strong, happy, smelling of dust, cow muck and tractor oil. Moving sheep, bale carting in a burning sun, milking jerseys or following the seeddrill with a press," King of the new york streets" and Tina's "You're the best" on the tractor radio. We will probably say nothing of the rather scrumptious agricultural placement students!   It wasn't really much of a surprise that I ended up at the Royal Agricultural College.