In praise of unremarkable veg
Posted on May 5, 2013 | 9 Comments
If you’ve got nothing more than a 3x3m patch of urban garden, here’s a suggestion – dig it up and grow potatoes, carrots and onions. Why? Let me explain…
The idea was prompted by River Cottage chef Mark Diacono’s book A Taste of the Unexpected. Diacono argues that life’s too short to grow unremarkable food like the three aforementioned vegetables, which are cheaply available from the shops anyway and taste no better when grown at home. Why not, he says, grow unusual things that are hard to find in the shops, no harder to grow, and utterly delicious?
I appreciate his logic, but I want to put the case for unremarkable veg. Here’s my eight point manifesto:
- More often than not, even unremarkable veg simply does taste better when you grow it yourself. So there.
- And wacky vegetables don’t necessarily taste better, they’re just less familiar. I think there’s at best an element of ‘the grass is greener’ in the view that, say, mashua tastes better than potato, and at worst perhaps a hint of foodie snobbery. If you ate mashua as your everyday staple, maybe you’d be lusting after potatoes. Though I gather that if you eat too much mashua you cease lusting after anything…
- There’s a wealth of varieties of the familiar vegetables available to home gardeners that you can’t usually get in the shops – so if you’re fed up with bog standard Desiree potatoes, then grow something more unusual like Pink Fir Apple, and help to keep the diversity of our key crops alive.
- It may be just as easy growing unusual vegetables as familiar ones, but actually it’s not that easy growing vegetables at all. Propagation, irrigation, pest control etc can all cut into your time, especially with fancy leaves and transplants. If life’s too short to grow potatoes, then it’s probably too short to grow red komatsuna too. But if you’re that busy you’re probably pulling a big salary – so buy the fancy stuff at the shops and give yourself a workout by getting those potatoes in the ground early in the spring, and then more or less leaving them be.
- Become your own food security expert – grow as many potatoes as you can in your urban garden, and then work out how much you’ve grown as a proportion of your annual calorific intake. Makes you think, huh? But then if everyone’s growing basic veg in their gardens, just think how much more food secure we’d be…
- Measure how much time you spend growing your veg, and measure your fertility inputs. Seems like a lot? Go to point 7. Doesn’t seem like much? Go to point 8.
- Damn right it’s a lot! Think of it as a wakeup call to figuring out how to wean yourself off industrial agriculture.
- Damn right it’s not much! Think of it as a wakeup call to figuring out how easily you can do without industrial agriculture.
Hey, it’s been a late spring. Maybe it’s still not too late to get some of those unremarkable vegetables in the ground. You might just find the results are remarkable…
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Brilliant, Chris!
I’ll put a link to this on my online course. Should get them thinking.
Thanks Patrick! How’s the online course going?
Very well, thanks. There seem to be plenty of people out there who can’t make it to a residential course, or afford the cost, either.
One made the point that your advice is particularly pertinent to people in the north of Britain. So much of the unusual stuff is tender.
I have a similar spiel about heritage varieties. ‘Heritage means that not many people grow it any more. Ask yourself why. If it’s because it doesn’t taste very good or is prone to disease you may want to give it a miss. If it’s becasuse it has a short self life that won’t matter to a home gardener. You may want to grow it just to preserve genetic diversity, but be clear about whether that or filling your family’s belly is your main motive. The two are not necessarily compatible.’
Potatoes, onions and carrots are going to keep you alive, I dare anybody to live off the same space devoted to goji berries and artichokes. Of course this is why our horticulture changed – before the war it was sea kale, Chilean guava, etc, once the war started we needed to stay alive under seige. It’s all about maximum calories from the smallest space.
We’re not under siege now but we do have soil issues, population pressure and fossil fuel issues. For this reason it could be worth looking at big carbs from sweetcorn instead of spuds cos you can use the stalks on your compost pile reducing space set aside for fertility. Of course that is John Jeavon’s style (http://www.growbiointensive.org/).
It seems there are a few of us heavily influenced by forest gardening but just want to grow actual proper, real, fill-your-belly food. Martin Crawford’s Forest Gardening is practically my bible yet my gardening doesn’t resemble anything like it.
Anyway, just a few thoughts.
Thanks for those comments. Not sure about maize in our climate – you do get a lot of carbon for your compost heap at the end, but not very much carbohydrate per hectare from the sweetcorn. Especially if the badgers get there first.
Interesting point on the heritage varieties too. There’s surely a value in preserving as much variety in the germplasm as possible, but whose job is it to do so? Will we be like the dodos that didn’t need their wings on an island without predators, until…
I have recently come to live on a farm where quite a lot of their own veg is grown. There is no greenhouse or polytunnel and the garden is relatively small, yet we are still eating delicious overwintered leeks, red cabbage, brussels sprouts, and bountiful sprouting broccoli and kale sprouts (I’m sure this is why the old Scots grew so much kale – not to eat the leaves, but to snap off the leader in late winter and eat the copious side shoots – even more delicious than sprouting broccoli and many times more prolific). I think if we eat seasonally then every veg is ‘exotic’ i.e. unfamiliar. Think of the first new potatoes when the stored winter ones have run out… the first peas if you don’t buy supermarket/tinned/frozen ones… even the humble radish, baby carrots – anything really, if you haven’t eaten it for a month or two. However if we eat continual year-round air-freighted supermarket mange-tout then I can see there’s not much incentive to grow them yourself!
Excellent point – there are many ways of making our food ‘remarkable’, and there’s surely an element of seen-it-all leisure class ennui in the endless fads over the latest exotic fare. I totally agree with you about the benefits of keeping to local seasons – to me nothing tastes more exotic than the first apples of autumn so long as I haven’t been eating New Zealand ones all summer…
1. Unusual things are in fact harder to grow. The usual things are the usual things for a reason.
2. Why does nobody ever talk about soft fruit? Especially if you have little time and want to grow a taste explosion, raspberries and blackcurrants are the ticket.
3. And if you have even less time (and some patience) plant a vigorous apple tree, which will deal quite well with I-haven’t-got-a-clue pruning every few years, and otherwise the only thing to do is eating the fruit.
Could we add some other vegetables like tomatoes, butternut squash cucumbers and possibly mushrooms to this list? I love your line of thought with these unremarkable vegetables, along with other standard, run of the mill staples like milk, eggs and wheat, but in the end it still doesn’t seem like a high enough diversity food to me. Personally I’ve never been a fan of growing huge quantities of expensive microgreens and other fancy herbs and vegetables for posh urban restaurants and ice cream parlours and whatnot for the sole purpose of making as much money as possible. So please give me your thoughts on what other unremarkable veg I could concentrate on.