Grow your own - A plot to reclaim our lost values

AT one end of an economic cycle we usually see excess on a grand scale, bling made universal as it were.

At the other end we see conspicuous frugality and endeavour almost Calvinist in character. Public penance made practical, uplifting and, with a bit of luck, edible.

One of the commendable responses to the collapse of loads-a-money silliness is the renewed enthusiasm for growing your own food, especially vegetables.

No social achievement rates higher today than being able to present slothful friends with a jar of home-grown, home-pickled courgettes. If your plot, private or rented, can produce the makings of a chutney with real fiery zest, instant green credibility is assured.

Celebrity must wait until you get the chickens.

This trend got the ultimate blessing when US First Lady Michelle Obama began a kitchen garden at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, a garden that will be reproduced in the Phoenix Park in Dublin as part of the Bloom 2009 festival over the June Bank Holiday weekend.

The objective of this exercise, hosted by Bord Bia, is to encourage those thinking about growing vegetables or fruits to have a go. It will also promote healthy eating and offer visitors advice on planting, harvesting and cooking their own food. All an entirely commendable, rewarding, satisfying, and a spiritually uplifting exercise. And it’s far, far better than going to a gym — good for the pecs and good for the pot.

In reality, this silent revolution is much more than a response to the recession.

It is an attempt to reassert of a degree of independence by corralled consumers. It is a rejection of the gunge that most industrial food has become. It is also an entirely natural desire to work with the world, to work through the land, through the soil.

“Reconnecting” is how this is described by some Greenistas but in a country so close, but yet so far, from the land that may bring little more than a sceptical smile. It is not too hard to see why — after all this is a country where snagging turnips was as close to legal torture as we got.

If this movement is the conduit towards us beginning to take our environmental responsibilities more seriously then even better.

Anyone who has visited Havana in Cuba recently will have noticed that there remains hardly a square metre of land that is not used to produce some kind of food. Though that endeavour is based more in humanism than in politics it is a lesson we might all consider.

Of course you can buy vegetables very cheaply in supermarkets but consumers are increasingly suspicious of tomatoes that, like a Hollywood grand dame, use every device possible to defy the aging process.

As was it so eloquently shown in the old story of a dying man who told his feckless son that a fortune in gold was buried in their orchard. Naturally enough the son dug but found nothing. Until it was time to harvest the apples that is. By aerating the soil the son had ensured a bumper harvest, a lesson he never forgot.

Local authorities, schools, semi-states, religious orders and more or less every urban or semi-urban land owner should consider if they can help satisfy the growing demand for land to rent to grow vegetables.

The objective of the exercise might be to grow food but it could achieve much more than that.