Seeds of change

There was a time, half a century ago, when vegetable gardening was the preserve of old boys on allotments and jobbing gardeners in spacious suburban gardens. No longer. These days, the vegetable grower is as likely to be a 30-year-old female social worker with a small urban garden and a Point of View about pesticides on supermarket carrots, or a young family who have escaped the city for the country, or a recently retired couple on an executive housing estate who want to combine flowers and vegetables in an ornamental potager. Vegetable gardening is now as much a lifestyle choice and cultural statement as it is the cultivation of a variety of (mostly) nutritious comestibles.

Vegetable growing has changed along with the people who do it, thanks partly to the television and the media revolution (which has spawned cheap and plentiful specialist-interest magazine titles) and partly to scientific and technological advances which have introduced inexpensive and innovative materials to the amateur gardener. Plant breeding has ensured a tidal wave of new varieties which are more compact or disease-resistant, hardier or higher in vitamins and generally less bother.

A vegetable plot used to be a large, flat rectangle, where seeds were sown in long, straight rows, using a four-yearly rotation system to try to inhibit (usually unsuccessfully) the build-up of pests and diseases. The plot was dug thoroughly every autumn, and rotted farmyard manure was incorporated at a depth where few vegetable roots could reach it and, in the spring, it was usually limed with calcium carbonate, whatever the pH happened to be. Growmore, a granular fertiliser containing equal amounts of nitrates, phosphates and potash, which was introduced during the second world war, was scattered over the soil about ten days before sowing, to give the seedlings a boost.