Grow Your Own: Farmer’s sons returning to the land

About 14 months ago, I realised there comes a time in a man’s life when he gets too old for this hell raiser existence — when he wants to settle down and grow food for his table.

I had to do something. Man, I was hitting it pretty hard. You name it, I took it — Mighty Munch, Hunky Dorys (Buffalo Flavour), Johnny Onion Rings, those Keogh ones in the nice packaging; I was out of control. I needed to get away from the sources of temptation, to stop seeing my solutions in the bottom of a crisp packet. So we got an allotment, my brother and I. Farmer’s sons returning to the land. Our farmer instincts, long buried, slowly reawakened like ancient seeds sprouting again. (Not all farmer instincts were reawakened. We resisted the temptation to sell a site with good path frontage.)

This time last year, I wrote about the shiny new tools and the shame of buying manure in Homebase and planting without knowing what we were doing. I said we had to sit back and wait.