Strawberry forever: The delights of an organic garden are shared with young and old. Picture: Frankieb

Vegetable patches can be surprisingly social places.  Ours is especially so as it is in our front garden.

These days I spend time in the mornings and evenings pottering about.  It is fun to inspect all the changes taking place.  

While I am out there, I get to wave to neighbours driving by.  It is common for our immediate neighbours to stroll over for a chat.

Even people I don’t know will slow down just to gaze at a thriving vegetable patch and wave at the resident gardener. 

People are interested in organic gardens.  One neighbour told me she loves the smell of our garden as she walks by. “It is so refreshing”, she told me this morning.

I understand what she means.  I find seeing and smelling real food growing is soothing to my soul.  Food is about our basic survival – its very presence reassures.

My favourite garden smell is the aroma of tomato and basil plants after they have been watered or picked.

Every few days over the summer, my one and a half year old neighbour comes over and together we pick and eat the strawberries.  “More strawberries!  More strawberries!” she declares with her cheeky baby grin. 

I have friends who drop by to help harvest and use the incredible silverbeet.  It is a great feeling to send someone off loaded up with fresh produce from your own garden.

It isn’t just people who are drawn to our garden.  If we are out there the cats will join us and play chasey around the garden beds.  I am grateful they are ineffective and disinterested hunters.

The native trees that form a border around the garden attract lots of birds.  I think of them as my gardening partners.  I see them fluttering about feeding on insects.  

It feels good to know there is nothing out there on the plants that will harm any anyone. 

This is especially true as a thriving organic garden, just like serving a home cooked meal, is wonderful way of drawing people together.

Dining dilemma: Homegrown brings its own challenges. Picture: yourpatchorganic.com

It is a humbling day when you realise you can’t feed yourself. No, I haven’t had a stroke or any health crisis.  I am staring at a vegetable garden and I don’t recognise the plants.  This happened to me earlier this year when an organic vegetable patch was installed – yes, installed in my garden.  Not recognising the plants was just the first shock.

Harvest time was the second moment of awakening.  I would watch the vegetables ripen and look so handsome and I didn’t pick them.  I was proud of them – I admired them – like a little art show in my garden.  I seemed to be missing the pathway in my brain that said, “Pick and eat girl”.

Cam our garden man told me not to feel too bad.  He said that it takes a little while to get into the habit of harvesting.  I felt grateful for his generous comments.  Inside I felt like a child.  My vegetables were like a sign in the front garden saying: “Look everybody this woman is as lost as a human can get.”

I am used to a very different path.  The page in the recipe book tells me what I need from the supermarket.  It might be expensive or out of season but hey, it’s in the supermarket and I need it.  I cook, I enjoy.  I am accomplished at this way of preparing and eating food. Until recently I felt safe and confident in the rhythm of modern eating.

Now the garden is telling me what to eat.  Here are my silverbeet, carrots, beans, and lettuce.  This is where the meal needs to begin.

I have no recipe books like this.  I want my garden to come with a recipe book of its own.  What are the 10 ingredients I need to make this a meal?  That is what I am used to.  In my past, the produce has been an incidental part of a blend called meal.

Now I need to cater for a different type of food – the star performer.  It is fresh, it is tasty and it wants to be the main act.  Over a few months of playing this new game I finally come to understand – it deserves to be.  A wise woman told me, “when you cook with organic produce you don’t have to work as hard to make a great meal”.  I learn that she is so right.

It takes me a little while but I start to gain confidence in this more minimalist form of preparing food.  A splash of that, a pinch of this and there is delicious food.  At the same time I start to hunt down other organic ingredients that are recommended to me by wise elders in this mysterious new world.  My family begins a new way of eating.

One morning I am standing in the kitchen chatting to my teenage daughter.  It is the end of winter and I have lost weight.  I show her that my jeans are falling down.  “I just don’t get it, we are eating real butter and full cream milk and I have lost weight.”  “Well Mum,” she replies, as if I asked her the simplest of questions, “When you eat a whole food you don’t need to eat as much.”  I feel like a beginner in my own life.

It is a humbling day when you realise you can’t feed yourself. Surely there is nothing more basic to survival than knowing how to eat.   Like so many other points of transition it takes a low moment to recognise that something needs to change.  A wrong path has been taken. The road to survival is in a different direction.