Grow Write Guild #4 Write about your Garden Mentor or Muse

 You may notice that I have skipped the third prompt - Describe Your Garden Right Now. My last post pretty much did that and I am bored of writing about my own garden, which is why I started using these prompts. Onwards!

I started gardening in 2012, after doing pretty much no growing of any sort before this. I think it coincided with the beginning of a natural inclination to nest (I had my first baby the following year), an addiction to the self-sufficiency promoting TV series, River Cottage, and a throwaway comment by a person I admired saying that they grew their own veg.

As my interest grew and I started to check out gardening books from the library, I became  acquainted with Joy Larkcom whose books I now own and who I even met in person which she gave a talk in my local GIY (Grow It Yourself) group. I loved her story of taking her husband and children on a year long campervan tour of Europe in the 70's to research vegetables, bringing new seed varieties and growing/harvesting/cooking techniques back to England. I was also encouraged to hear that she took time out of work to raise her kids, and then returned to have an important, creative career. Any story of parents who go on to have interesting careers after spending time out of work to raise their kids makes me excited as I am currently in the staying-at-home stage (well I guess plenty people are in 2020 with the covid lockdown but my housebound state has been going on for four and a half years).

Another element of growing food that gets me excited is seed production and saving. The previously mentioned GIY group also held a talk with Madaline McKeever who owns Brown Envelope Seeds in Skibbereen, one of only two places in Ireland raising and harvesting their own seeds (the other place is Seed Savers in Co Clare). Again, she was a woman who had raised her family and had changed careers when she switched from dairy farming to seed production. The idea of having a business that concentrates on a micro element (micro in focus, not in importance or workload) of food production draws me in far more than an expansive endeavour.

Writing this post makes me miss educational talks incredibly! There are plenty more people whose work and contributions I admire, especially local people whose gardens I see and hear about. And it is the local gardens that are really sustaining me at the moment as I walk the roads again and again and again….