[hermon]

i am new to this site so i'm saying hello
i have an allotment luckily the other side of my back fence,also i have 6 ex battery hens in the garden.
i have always grown the odd bit of food but nothing to this scale, we had our first home grown tattys this week oh boy they were lovely! lost our carrots in the weeds (can't keep up with it all sometimes! with a full time job and a pony...and husband,oh and 4 cats)
anyway i have lots of questions so look forward to getting help!
i would ideally like to grow all year round and be as self supporting as poss. does any one else find people think you are weird when you have this attitude! (they say why don't you just go to the supermarket!)

[Jake]

Hello hermon

Pretty new to the scale of this too but this time of year everything seems worth it.

I've had loads of people take the mick out of me for getting a plot. I used to explain to them things to do with agribusiness, pesticides and herbicides, being as self reliant as possible.

Since I had my first fully self made dinner (minus the meat from an independent butcher) I will never mention those things again, unless I've head a few pints The taste and sense of achievement is enough reason to do it in its own right.

Great stuff.

[becky]

Hello there Hermon, Congrats on your plot, you will find endless hours of bliss on your plot, the best time is in the evening when you can listen to all the birds. And like you Jake, people took the micky out of me for having an allotment at the age of 22 (then, now 25), I was also the only female, on a group of plots all worked by "old boys", but i proved them all wrong, and now i feel part of a lovely group of people, that enjoy the same things in life.
Good luck with the plot!

[John]

I think we're becoming mainstream again - I used to love veg gardening when I was in my 20's and wanted a smallholding but got sucked into the work work work lifestyle and forgot why.
Now I see more families on the site than old boys and you know, they're doing a great job. nice tidy and productive plots with little in the way of sprays and chemicals to be seen.
Some of them haven't much of a clue, but begginer's luck seems to step in and save them.
I realised the other day that I'm an 'old boy' to some of them - LOL .

[GrannieAnnie]

Mine and OH's kids just can't be bothered to grow their own, mind you, most of them only have small gardens, so they wouldn't be able to grow much.  I try to give my youngest daughter a few bits then plant them for her, but I'm in lIncs and her in Kent, so not easy, but this year she has got 5 tomato plants, 3 runner beans, 3 climbing peas and 2 purple brussels (and a partridge in a pear tree!!).

2 years ago I gave OH's youngest DIL 5 tomato plants and once we'd started eating ours, I said to her, how's the tomatoes coming along?  Well, 2 of them are ok, but the other 3 went manky so I dug them out.  WEird, but ok.  Then a fe months later, we went down there for dinner, and I took her some of my treasured yellow pear and tigerella toms.  Oh she said, they are thos manky ones that I threw away!!!!!! I prefer the red ones from Tesco!!!     Needless to say, I didn't bother again!

[Oliver]

kids just can't be bothered to grow their own

Yes, Grannieannie, I know what you mean. She was having a chat with nextdoors (she is 25 and he is 29 and they got married last year - and they now have a one year old son). She suggested they take on the plot next to her - they have a back gate, so it would be easy peasy. She also suggested they clean their garden furniture rather than throw it away (she 'inherited' it for fellow plotholders). He laughed and said She was so out of touch! They lived in the throwaway society now - the chairs were so cheap from xyz store and as far as growing stuff was concerned, he hated beans and stuff and they both preferred ding meals. Ding meals? whats that? :shock:

As you may read elsewhere she had 60 8 - 10 year olds visit the plot yesterday - they were very enthusiastic about everything and very attentive - as kids are at that age. It's when they get older they change.

Mark Twain (or someone? who?) said something like ' when I was 16 I was amazed at how little my father knew. When I got to 25 I was amazed at how much he had learned'.

He says 'kids of a certain age have other things on their minds like earning a crust to pay the mortgage and so on. Later in life they may see the sense in what we do, and we should be grateful else we may not have plots to work'! I see it all from my shed! Perhaps he is right.

[Jake]

Ding meals must mean microwave meals. Yuk, I've never been a fan of ready meals. I noticed some had sodium metabisulphate in them as a preservative. I also brew beer and use that stuff to sterilize my equipment. It says very clearly on the packet DO NOT EAT. Sheesh it amazes me what people put into their bodies. Even if they are non drinking or smoking types sometimes.

I have to be forgiving though, I jumped off the throwaway culture train only about 2 years or so ago. Until then I was surrounded by tat. It happened all of a sudden too. Like a quarter life crisis maybe.

[GrannieAnnie]

Mark Twain was a clever man, yes, perhaps one day they will come to their senes eh Oliver?  Like our Jake!!! lol

They also won't let thie children watch OH when he kills a chicken, but my view is, one day there will be an apocalypse or something, and there won't be any supermarkets etc, and only the fit and the knowledgeable will survive!!!  If it is in our lifetime, where will they all go?  Yep, to people like my Brian, who although he is a pain in the neck at times, does know how to kill and eat stuff he grows and can catch from the wild.  

His youngest DIL said that she would starve rather than kill a rabbbit, but I said if she loved her children, she would not sit and let them starve while a rabbit runs around the garden.  I hate killing things myself, unless its a cabbage!!! but I would kill that rabbit if it meant me or mine could survive a bit longer, start of a new thread here?  How do others feel on this sort of subject?

[Oliver]

I hate killing things myself

This is a tricky subject for me as I have been known, in my younger days to eat rough. Only occasionally have I caught something and not eaten it. She sort of condones my eating stuff I caught but would go mad if I just caught it and left it. Don't do it any more - ?have seen the error of my ways. The otherone still does ...

I think she would probably learn to despatch things to eat if she had to. He had to kill a little bird the other day because the VET nurse from next door had found her cat playing with it and it had two broken legs and a broken wing. Upset him a great deal.

[Oliver]

Ding meals must mean microwave meals.

Thank you Jake!  
What will their poor little kid eat? He will be one on Monday.  
The 'readiest' ready meals they eat is barbecue stuff. when they barbecue they make a fire in their kettle and cook everything they can lay their hands on. They eat what they need and then freeze the rest. She says if you make a decent fire for two there is too much fire left after the meat has cooked and the coals go to waste.
They have been known to cook potatoes, sweetcorn and quinces on the bonfire on the plot. Other plotholders think they are mad! They are like big kids sometimes ...