Category: Political

Vote with your wallet

On By jesskikuIn Gardening, PoliticalLeave a comment

Real Seeds have been my preferred source for seeds since I started growing my own. I found them around 2012 and loved that they were encouraging people to save their own seed, which if everyone did perfectly would put them out of business. They introduced me to concepts like food sovereignty, seed saving and soil health. It was a completely new way of me viewing my food and understanding more of the complexities around how it is grown. 

They are an independent, family run business dedicated to sustainable living and their website contains detailed instructions on saving seeds, as well as guidance on setting up your own seed circles. They sell heritage varieties which are grown and tested in the UK and often come with a lovely bit of background. Many of these plants are no longer grown commercially and without the hard work of seed savers would have disappeared already. Those disappearing varieties are a part of our collective heritage, making the decision to grow them instead of an F1 hybrid is a way of keeping that part of our culture alive. 

We can’t control the decisions of companies that we buy from, but we can choose to buy from companies who make decisions in line with our own values. Voting with your wallet is a way of giving resources and energy to organisations that share the same dreams for the world as you do. Consciously choosing to support those businesses will impact what the world will become. 

As I write this they are receiving so many orders that their website keeps crashing and they only open their online shop once a week as they can’t keep up with demand. Although this meant that I had to wait a little bit longer for my Christmas seeds it fills me with hope. There are many others out there who want to either make ethical purchasing decisions, try growing their own vegetables or maybe learn more about heritage varieties. Across the country there will be a legion of organic, non GMO, sustainably raised seeds being nestled into the earth, ready to stretch out and greet the sky. 

Learning from Black Lives Matter

On By jesskikuIn PoliticalLeave a comment

In recent weeks there has been a big push to make the Black Lives Matter movement even more visible. Although I spoke about this a lot on my personal social media, I didn’t do anything to raise any sort of awareness through this platform. This was wrong of me. Typical behaviour of a person who doesn’t have to confront these issues day to day, and I am sorry. 

If you do not know what Black Lives Matter is, please refer to their website and do some reading. 

What does Black Lives Matter have to do with peas? Why am I writing on a gardening blog about this?

I think that the media around gardening and growing is not welcoming to Black people, and that the institutes that shape our thought around gardening and growing are built on racial inequality. The pinnacle of British gardening, the Royal Horticulturist Society, has at its roots an entanglement with eugenics and much of white gardening is an expression of colonialism (I will write more on this later). These elements have built an environment that is homogeneous and exclusionary. 

To throw this back into gardening terms. Monocultures are good for industrial growers, but not for bees or the environment. They don’t really exist in nature and so need to be reinforced by chemical agents. We have a monoculture in British gardening and because we are in the middle of it we struggle to see the damage it causes. 

Gardeners are always learning about the invisible connections between different systems and how they affect each other, we need to realise that we too are living things who are just as connected to wider systems as our tomato plants are to the bees. We are not separate from nature, and just as we try to shape and control the forces around our plants we too are shaped and controlled by forces larger than ourselves.

Black Lives Matter has caused people to rush out and buy books to educate themselves about how systemic racial oppression exists in everyday life, and to try to understand what they can do about it. We are becoming more aware of what our lives of convenience are built on, and the terrible cost of the advantages that we take for granted. I only inhabit a small space online, with the tiniest contribution to social media – but I want to use it to say that I can see that things need to change here. I don’t fully understand how to make that happen, but I’m learning. 

Gardening for me is spiritually and mentally soothing, and brings me a calmness I don’t get from anything else. Having that connection to the land brings me joy. Not everyone is going to feel the same way about it as me, but everyone should have the chance to. Growing your own food and making your land welcoming for wildlife can be a radical political act which links into building communities, environmental action and food justice. If something is radical it has to be accessible to everyone, and right now it isn’t. By learning from Black Lives Matter I hope we can start to see the systems that exist that result in inequalities and exclusion in a whole variety of areas and learn how we can proactively dismantle them.