The Occasional Gardener: Growing vegetables in a plot of your own is back in fashion - but not in the heart of the country, writes Sarah Marriott
America might be the original fast food nation and home of the Big Mac - but did you know that 40 per cent of US households grow their own vegetables? That means families in 34 million homes are trying to avoid dodgy, mass-produced, preservative-laden food and eating home-grown veg - or at least they were in 1984, according to the US National Gardening Survey.
Wherever you go in Europe, you see vegetable gardens. Travelling by train in England provides views of neat rows of cabbages, beans and potatoes in allotments alongside the tracks while many eastern European towns are surrounded by cultivated plots, often with small chalets for sleeping in during the summer.
Growing was also extremely popular in Soviet Russia - in the 1960s, half of all the vegetables produced came from private plots of land and by 1985, five million allotment holders were growing over a million tons of fruit and vegetables.
Many French towns, such as Amiens with its famous cathedral, are bordered by allotments and small market gardens. In Italy, a country obsessed with good food, growing your own is part of a culture which "does not consider vegetable growing to be an unaesthetic activity to be hidden away, but one which, like the washing strung between the windows of ancient palazzi, is part of the essential fabric of daily life", according to The Allotment by David Crouch and Colin Ward. Visitors to Florence's Boboli Gardens and Michelangelo's Belvedere Fort will see intensively cultivated vegetable plots right next door.
In Ireland's recent past, growing your own vegetables was seen as a sign of poverty. After all, why get your hands dirty when you have the cash to buy the spuds? But now the tide (or should that be auld sod?) is turning and the - hopefully enduring - fashion for chemical-free produce means that more people are converting a flower bed or part of a lawn.
And the publicity around RHS prize-winning veggie gardens - such as Dundalkman Paul Martin's Salad Days with its lawn of edible leaves, and Cancer Research UK's Garden Quartet, in which herbs and vegetables represent the four movements of a piece of classical music - encourages even diehard supermarket shoppers to sow the odd pot of herbs and tomatoes. Having said that, a vegetable plot isn't a common sight in my part of County Roscommon and my phone hasn't exactly been ringing off the hook in response to posters advertising the gardening club I hope to set up in Ballaghaderreen. The idea is that like-minded gardeners can share their knowledge of local growing conditions and swap tips, seeds and books.
But I recently had a satisfying spud-u-like conversation with a retired cattle farmer who was busily digging up his Caras when I wandered past. After giving me a couple to store for next year's planting, he showed me a long, thin, knobbly specimen: "My grandson planted it but we don't know what it is." My neighbour's two tubers had produced 40 small spuds which my Kitchen Garden book identified as pink fir apple, a high-yielding variety perfect for salad.
I happened to have with me a couple of my newly-harvested potatoes and he was bemused to see their purple skins and peculiar shape, which resembles a squashed tennis ball with cellulite. A heritage variety, Black Bog were grown by our ancestors and are said to be resistant to rot and blight. Although they survived our rain-drenched spring, which my other seed potatoes didn't, I'm not sure I'd recommend them for dinner. I was actually apprehensive about eating them at all, because when I boiled them, the water turned a bright shade of lime green. They tasted okay - and I lived to tell the tale - but the greyish flesh with purple streaks isn't particularly attractive.
Black Bog is an unusual potato and easy to grow - and it's important that we learn from the potato famine, which was partly caused by not cultivating lots of different varieties - but I have to admit that I probably won't be planting many next year. The vegetable-growing bug can hit the most unlikely people. "Heaven is like Sissinghurst [Vita Sackville-West's famous garden] with turnips," says legendary feminist Germaine Greer.
Well, I'm not sure about the turnips, but I agree with her general idea.
