Pleasures of the Fresh ; Growing Your Own Home-Grown Vegetables Don't Just Taste Amazing They're Also As Much a Celebration of Their Season As Holly at Christmas or Eggs at Easter. In the Second Part of His Fabulous, Easy-to-Follow Guide, Monty Don Shows How Anyone Can Grow Sensational Summer Veg

Daily Mail › March 12, 2006

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Summary

One of the best reasons for growing vegetables, fruit and herbs at home is to make, and take, the best of each season. Fresh seasonal food is something that most people would agree is at the heart of a healthy and delicious diet, and yet it goes against the entire supermarket culture of having ingredients from all over the world available every day of the year.

This is trumpeted as 'choice' and 'meeting the demands of the consumer', and yet it depends upon unripe, tasteless fruit and vegetables, force grown, often brought from the other side of the world. Everything is based upon appearance and the ability to travel and store well. So this 'choice' does not extend to giving us the very best of each fruit or vegetable, valuing it as something special to be relished while it is at that point of perfection.

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Extract

Pleasures of the Fresh ; Growing Your Own Home-Grown Vegetables Don't Just Taste Amazing They're Also As Much a Celebration of Their Season As Holly at Christmas or Eggs at Easter. In the Second Part of His Fabulous, Easy-to-Follow Guide, Monty Don Shows How Anyone Can Grow Sensational Summer Veg

Good food in its season should be a celebration and marker of that season - just as we have holly and a Christmas tree at Christmas time or Easter eggs at Easter. To everything its season, and to the gardener and the cook a rich, rolling festival that provides treats right through the year. Nothing beats fresh fruit and vegetables gathered straight from the garden or allotment and eaten when it is exactly at its best.

This is what a supermarket can never bring, because ripe fruit and vegetables rarely travel well and do not last long on the shelf. A pear, for example, is one of the most juicy, delicious fruits in the world - but only for about a day. No shop could operate on that basis, but the gardener can.

New potatoes, asparagus, sweetcorn and peas lose their sweetness almost as soon as they are gathered and they shoul...

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