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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Adey Baker" data-source="post: 1416257" data-attributes="member: 1805">Mike, thanks for such a detailed posting.I knew a farming family close to where I lived who were, how shall we say, very 'old-fashioned' and didn't take up all of the mechanised options until absolutely necessary. The son is only a couple of years or so older than me yet I can never recall him looking 'young!' I've seen him and his father weeding a crop in a field by hand with hoes (on many occasions) and about the only time we saw him 'relaxing' as such was on a Sunday evening, after chapel he would sit on the little bridge over the brook through the village for half an hour or so before going home for bed ready for yet another 7-day week!My father always tended his garden and also had an allotment for many years and I've followed suit since I got married. It's something I've always accepted as 'normal' and I don't see it as any great problem. I have a reasonable-sized garden and always grow some of my food there but, looking out over all of the neighbouring properties, I can't say that anybody else does, apart from a few tomatoes in a greenhouse. All the house around here were built in the 20s and 30s and have the good-sized gardens that were quite normal then yet everyone nowadays seems to turn them into outdoor rooms with all the stuff that those garden makeover programmes seem to promote! If everyone with the right-sized plot turned some of it over to food production we could, at a stroke, take away a lot of pressure from farmers and market gardeners and of course all those imported vegetables that 'cost' so much in oil. But the tradition of following on from father to son seems to have been lost now and few seem to have the time, let alone the inclination to 'grow your own.'</blockquote>

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