Time to attend to your own patch, says Tom Hodgkinson in this extract from the “March” chapter of his self-sufficiency manual

The ancient Greek poet Hesiod, in his Works and Days, outlined a vision of everyday life in a Golden Age set in the mythical past, a sort of Greek version of the famous hobo song ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’, a pagan Garden of Eden. It seems in that happy time, no one had to work for food:

.  .  . all good things
Were theirs; ungrudgingly, the fertile land
Gave up her fruits unasked.

We have been trying to get back into that garden for at least 2,700 years, but life still seems to be dominated by unremitting toil, envy and want, despite all man’s ingenuity in the area of technological advance.

But the work involved in creating a small and productive garden need not be immense. One or two hours a day should be enough to create your own little patch of paradise. There is a deep satisfaction in seeing and tasting the fruits of your labours in the form of something edible. Pleasure follows work. At the end of the toil, there is a feast.

Your garden is a retreat. The small farm is praised by Virgil as an escape from the troubles of the town:

Quos rami fructus, quos ipsa volentia rura
sponte tulere sua, carpsit.

[The fruits his boughs, the crops his fields, produce willingly of their own accord, he gathers.]

The troubles of the world recede into the distance and seem unimportant alongside me, here, now, with this mattock, the sun on my back and the earth under my fingernails. It is surely very possible to create this Epicurean sense of ‘undisturbedness’ (one of Virgil’s strongest influences was his teacher the Epicurean philosopher Siro). You can be an Epicurean today: simply unplug the television and the broadband and cancel the papers. We are told repeatedly by the hubristic self-congratulating technocrats that we are lucky to live in an age of lightning-fast electronic communication because, it is said, ‘information’ is good – but information is not the same as knowledge, as David Hockney put it when I went to interview him, and it is true that we hear less about quality of information. I would submit that the quality of the information that emerges the television is almost always extremely poor and not to be trusted. It disappoints. I feel depressed after watching television.

But gardening really does work: it is therapeutic, useful and beautiful. It nourishes mind, body and spirit. To create your own garden is the most sublime of all pleasures. The conclusion of Candide is that ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin.’ We may have been thrown out of the Garden of Eden, but at least we have the potential to create our own paradise.

The kitchen garden must be sited as near to the kitchen door as possible. The closer the plants are situated to the kitchen, the more likely it is that they will be well looked after. Seeds can be sown in trays or plugs on the windowsill or in the greenhouse and the seedlings planted out when they are big enough. Or you can buy little plants in the market. There is no shame in this. Many real gardeners buy seedlings from the experts rather than going to the trouble of growing everything from seed themselves. Last week, I bought twenty-four little lettuces from a cheery small supplier in the market, and they were ready to plant out immediately. What a lot of work that saved.

I sow rocket and chervil everywhere, in pots and in the earth outside. Salads are easy to grow, as long as the slugs are kept away. (I have found that the only measure that seems to work is to put a thick layer of eggshells around the stem of your growing plants.)

It makes a lot of sense for the thrifty householder to grow salad, because it is expensive to buy. This contrasts with the potato, which takes up a lot of space in the vegetable patch, can be surprisingly worrying, as it seems so susceptible to disease, and involves quite a bit of thought and work: chitting, planting, manuring, earthing up, protecting from disease. When you dig the potatoes up, they often seem to be peppered with slug holes. And they are very cheap to buy, so the whole palaver can seem a little pointless. It is true, though, that the process of actually digging them up is hugely enjoyable, and new potatoes, particularly, taste far better than anything you can buy. Now I tend to plant a load of First Earlies, light salad potatoes, and leave it at that.

You could make the same argument against growing onions: you need a lot in the kitchen, they take up a lot of space in your patch and they are cheap to buy. But could you tell the difference between an onion bought in the shop and a home-grown allium? Probably not. But peas, beans, salad crops, herbs: these really are much better than anything available in the shops. Next on the list would come root vegetables such as parsnips, turnips, beetroot and carrots. Then kale, cabbage and broccoli.

One popular vegetable which I am not currently bothering with is tomatoes. Again, here we have an extremely labour-intensive crop, vulnerable to disease and in need of a great deal of warmth and attention. I have consistently failed to produce good tomato crops over the years, despite staking, tying, feeding, pinching out .  .  . and I don’t even like tomatoes very much. Better to leave them to the experts, I think, especially when you are starting out. The temptation as a beginner is to try and grow a huge range of veg when the sensible thing would be to limit yourself to perhaps ten packets of seeds.

Broad beans are very easy to grow and good ones cannot be bought in the shops. They freeze well, too. Last year, we had forty plants, and this year, I have about eighty. Peas, too, are an absolute joy. There is a huge range of varieties out there, from the towering Alderman or Telephone to the humble Kelvedon Wonder. They should be sown every two or three weeks and can be grown quite early. This year, I waited until the first week of April, because the weather was so cold. Sweet and delicious straight from the pod, they barely need any cooking and will go with anything. Kids love them because they are, after all, nature’s own M&Ms.

Radishes are easy: they grow fast and anywhere. I keep a bowl of them on the kitchen table, in water, for constant snacking. I also tried growing something called French Blend, a mix of salad leaves such as mustard, chervil and rocket, but I don’t recommend it, as one leaf tends to take over. This year, I let three of the radish plants go to seed, and they produced beautiful flowers on a large spreading plant. They then formed seed pods shaped rather like a cutlass. I collected the seeds and next year will sow them.

Sow every week! Keep sowing! Keep your seeds in a biscuit tin. Sow beetroot, sea kale, chard. Read gardening books in the evening. There are plenty out there. In 1563, one Thomas Hyll observed, ‘to the makying of bookes of gardenyng there is noe ende,’ and this is very true today. The titles are not always very imaginative: my favourite guide used to be Grow Your Own Fruit and Vegetables by Lawrence D. Hills, the great organic gardener, but my new favourite is Grow Your Own Vegetables by Joy Larkcom.

Lastly, can I recommend nasturtiums? They grow anywhere, look pretty and you can eat the leaves and the flowers in salads. And you can collect their seeds: put them in a jam jar, cover them with good vinegar and, a few months later, you will have a very passable caper substitute.