Grow (at least some of) What You Eat

For a while now, I’ve wanted to grow my own food. My first attempts were rather abysmal. I managed to kill a rosemary plant – the hardy, low maintenance herb, did not last very long under my care. I’ve persisted in my efforts, and finally can say that I’ve had success.

This season, I’ve harvested potatoes, tomatoes, marrows, chillies, peppers, carrots, peas, gem squash, mint, basil, parsley, and spinach. I’ve sprouted avocado seedlings, blueberries, sweet potatoes, lemon tree seedlings, a grape seedling and butternut. 

I have a section of the garden where I planned the space and planted the seeds. Then there are plants that have sprouted because I dug my vegetable scraps from the kitchen straight into the soil as a means of composting them, instead of going through the arduous and rather messy ‘technical’ process of composting. This, according to a friend, is my jungle garden. Both have borne food.

I spend up to two hours in the morning tending to the plants – it’s easy enough to do this in Cape Town, where the sun rises before 6am in the summer. I get on with the rest of my day and in the evenings, before the sun goes down, I collect my harvest for the day.

As someone who thought that I was incapable of keeping any plants alive, this has been an empowering experience. Over the festive season, the only fresh produce I had to buy was onions. The impact on my budget was quite significant. The bigger impact was on my sense of autonomy. If I had had no other resources, I could still feed myself. 

Living in a country that exports over 9.5 billion dollars’ worth of fresh produce a year (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1310229/south-africa-export-value-of-major-agricultural-products/) yet has a poverty rate of 55.5% (https://databankfiles.worldbank.org/public/ddpext_download/poverty/33EF03BB-9722-4AE2-ABC7-AA2972D68AFE/Global_POVEQ_ZAF.pdf), I’ve been having a hard time grappling with why it is that a country as bountiful in its produce as South Africa, has people starving. It led me to thinking about how we’ve been conditioned, over generations, to believe that the only way we can acquire food is with money. This is particularly true in the urban areas of South Africa, where the ideal is to have a job that earns you enough money to buy the food you need. 

The notion of growing at least some of the food we need has been conditioned out of us. What might have been space to grow a few veggies has been turned into paving space for parking our cars, or worse, a grass lawn. And it’s easy enough to be tricked into believing it’s better to buy the food than grow it – we’ve been sucked into the 9 to 5 work schedule that allows no time or space for doing anything that grants us even a smidgen of self-reliance.

I hope that my little food garden inspires my neighbours to follow suit, and that we, by producing some of the things we consume, can loosen the grip that having a full-time job has on our quality of life.