Growing family vegetables — Jen Potter

Growing a connection to nature

I’ve stated that this blog is about our family working towards living a more sustainable lifestyle. I hope to explore new eco-friendly products, and try new techniques to reduce our environmental footprint.

But if you follow me on Instagram you’ll see that a lot of my posts are of my kids, quite probably just playing around outside and getting their hands dirty. But taking photos of kids digging in mud is surely a bit of a tangent from the important topic of sustainable living, right?

We’re city folk. Busy family life means that the weeks could easily float by without even noticing another creature that’s not human. Heck, when I was younger and living in the city centre, I’d almost be taken aback by the sight of a cat wandering the street!

But when we get disconnected with our world, we probably start to care less. I know that’s what happened to me. So I really feel that it’s important that my children feel a strong connection to the world they live in. Hopefully my two mud-diggers will grow up knowing more than me, and feeling more connected to the world around them. After all, they’re going to have to live with the mess that our generation and the generations before them have created. Perhaps these two sprogs can be part of the solution, who knows?

So when I see an opportunity for them to just learn something about the way the world works I’m going to try to embrace it and not rush on. That’s going to be hard (because we’re usually late for something). But as I learnt during the depths of lockdown it was so worth it.

Growing veg

With this in mind, we are celebrating National Allotments Week this week by digging up our garden produce. We, like many others, grew more veggies in our garden this year than ever before. We’ve tried lettuce, radishes, strawberries and rhubarb, potatoes, tomatoes, and carrots. We picked the carrots this weekend, which was a new experience for us all. To be totally honest, they were a little bitter… But the strawberries and rhubarb are excellent.

I’m not sure we’ll be putting our name down for one just yet, but growing your own in the garden is certainly an experience to be repeated.