Agricultural London

The other day, a friend gave us a pot of honey. Nothing remarkable in that, you might think. But wait. The label says “Greenwich Honey” and has his name and address on it alongside the picture of the bees and flowers. It was honey that he had cultivated from hives in his back garden. He works for London Underground and spends most of his working day in a subterranean office without any natural daylight, the passing hours rhythmically punctuated by the rumble of the tube trains overhead. In the evenings and at weekends, he spends time nurturing his bees and also tending to an allotment which is conveniently located just by his house in Greenwich. I don’t know whether it is because I know it is my friend’s honey and not a store-bought honey but to my mind, it tastes crisp, fresh and floral, and of course much better than anything that you could buy in a supermarket!

During the summer, my partner bought a tomato plant from an open garden event down the road and planted it in our back yard. We had been neglecting our garden for some time now (spending too much time indoors blogging, no doubt) and I was not convinced that we would ever see any fruit from that spindly little plant. Sure enough, we carried on neglecting our garden, including the poor little tomato plant, but to our great surprise, last week we wandered out amidst the long grass and scruffy looking shrubs and found a couple of perfectly shaped, bright red healthy, plump tomatoes hanging pendulous sleep from what was now a rather large plant! We plucked the ripest looking one, sliced it into quarters and slowly savoured each piece. Needless to say, they were each succulent and more delicious than any tomato I had ever brought home from the shop wrapped in plastic. Since then, the plant has been producing a regular flow of lovely fresh tomatoes!

There is something delightful about food that you or someone you know has grown or cultivated with their own hands. It feels even more special when it has been nurtured, almost unexpectedly, in an urban metropolis which you would usually associate with concrete, Tarmac, skyscrapers and steel. For most of us who live in cities, maintaining a connection with nature and the earth can be elusive — and we often forget how important a nourishment that connection can be to our mood and spirit. So for me, it was great to be reminded of that connection through being reminded that our food comes from the earth and not from supermarket shelves! It is so easy to re-establish that physical and spiritual connection by simply spending more time tending to my garden — there it is, waiting for me to give it some love and affection: all I have to do is make the space in my busy schedule to go out there and commune.

So in the next few months, we will be out there much more in the fresh air mucking about in the dirt to get the main part of the garden back into order. We are also going to transform a small section at the back into a vegetable garden — that is a slightly daunting task but we’ve got the books and we’ve got the Internet so we should have all the information we need to start on that new projects! I just need to make sure that I tear myself away from the books and the Internet for long enough to actually get the vegetable patch going as a physical entity and not just a grand plan that I blog about…

Photo: thanks to imageo from flickr.com (CCL)