The need to produce food revisited.

October

• OK here we go again I'm going to carry on looking at my need for the occupation of veggie gardening.
• Aha feeling good today .I actually planted in some snow peas, started up my lettuce and leeks in grow pots.
• Ive also been out to the peninsula and got loads of wonderful,spending an hour in a beautiful spot making sure my kids don't come back covered in sea weed (NOT A PLEASANT THING !!). Sea grass is an amazing, not to smelly seaweed ,it looks aesthetically great. It acts as a great mulch that feed the plants with all those wonderful minerals that seaweed has every time it rains.The most important thing for me at the moment it gives the garden a feeling of being completed.
• I actually weeded  some of the paths around the garden beds and realised that as talked about in some of the tutorials i have been caught in the labour of creating food ,due to the presses of the environmental factors of spring.
• Today i actually was able to relax, enjoy and take advantage of a beautiful peninsula day.

This reflection has actually made me look at what I need from  gardening and have found out it is simply to produce food .All the other factors I have talked about the( labour creating a beautiful the spiritual aspects) are contributing factors .

As Visser 1992 points out "Human Beings work hard to supply themselves withfood: first we have to find it, cultivate it, hunt it,make long term plans to transport and store it, andkeep struggling to secure regular supplies of it".This is something I need to do by gardening storing making marmalade chutneys ,drying fruit e.t.c.

 I have always needed to produce food and wherever I lived have grown something even if its minimal i.e salad in containers .I realised also this has led me even when traveling i have always gardened by schemes like woofing ,finding it the way to connect to a country and similar people and just the act of growing food and the amazing things you can grow in different countries i.e melons ,aubergines ,kumara. Which are all very exciting for someone that has been brought up in the north of England and Scotland where it spuds leeks and cabbages.
A huge need for me is to produce food by the act of labour.I know it has huge links to my self perception ,what i a want from life ,spiritual aspects,. It is an activity  that  i have done for so long it has come part of me ,my belief system is based on it .

References
Visser, M. (1992). The rituals of dinner. London, U.K: Viking, The Penguin Group