Of Vegetables and Children

by Edward Schuldt, European Gardener

A crowded garden in Gapennes

Raspberries... but not in Gapennes

The Lesson of Gapennes

Gapennes is a rural hamlet in farming country in Northern France, about 1 hour south of Boulogne.  One of the great benefits of having our ‘maison secondaire ‘ in Gapennes  is that the soil there is ideal for growing things.  The other, more surprising discovery is that our fruit and vegetables seem to do very well on their own in Gapennes, without our constant pottering about or standing guard over them. 

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This was a lesson I needed to learn anyway if I was to retain my main house in England, about 200 miles away from our little ‘weekend’ house in the Picardy countryside. 

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A Secondary Lesson

There is also a similar lesson to learn if you have kids old enough to be independent, and want to be on their own for periods of time without you monitoring their every move.  If you have raised them properly in the first place, and trust them, then they can flourish without your constant interference.

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​Children Are Like Vegetables

So it seems also to be with vegetables.  They can thrive without constant human presence.  Before you can leave them for a few weeks, however, you have to have prepared your vegetables’ garden home so that they are reasonably able to take care of themselves.  For example, any seedlings need to be sufficiently protected from slug and snail predators (a barrier of small broken stones and bricks and sharp sand can help, with lots of jagged edges to the bricks and stones; and the smaller the better). 

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​The garden also should be left weed free and the larger plants like tomatoes staked as necessary.  The soil itself should also be of a condition that it is able to retain moisture for a length of time. In other words, it has lots of mature, well rotted compost in it, and possibly has been mulched. Actually, I do not go in for mulching much; I just tend to grow the plants closer together.  (This bunching together also helps to keep the weeds down.)

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Of course it helps if you can rely on a rainfall or two during your absence, but established plants can go for fairly long periods without the need for watering.  Some gardeners over-water their plants, which in the long run can develop weak and shallow root systems.  And some parents over-feed their children, also with not-so-beneficial results.

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But you really don’t need to be around that much for these vegetables to flourish. In fact, I sometimes wonder if they do better without me around!   (Young parents can often feel that way when they return to pick up their children from the babysitting grandparents. “Honestly, the kids have been as good as gold while you have been gone! They only started whining when you knocked on the front door!”)  Anyway, increasingly, I am finding that I can leave our Picardy  house for as long as 2 or 3 weeks, only to return to a flourishing vegetable garden. 

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​No Nannies Necessary

Vegetables, it seems, do not need a Nanny state to survive.

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This realization first came to me one October afternoon, during one of my returns from England to Gapennes, and after the first summer of my new vegetable garden.  On arrival, I had checked out and opened up the house, and all was in order, and Diana was busy preparing  the bedrooms and unpacking.  So I wandered to the back of the house to turn on the hot water and inspect the vegetables.  This was the end of October, so on that first occasion I had expected most of my garden to be nearly dead, ready for digging up and being prepared for next year. 

But no…..awaiting patiently for my return were gigantic leaves of dark-green spinach (each leaf a meal in itself), purple beetroot bulbs as large as American softballs, ten-foot sunflower plants bursting with seeds, several cucumbers each about 14 inches long (how on earth had they survived outside?), luscious mounds of dark-green parsley, and horrendously obscene courgettes  (zucchinis) now transformed into les courges (or marrows). 

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There were even handfuls  of cherry tomatoes and some marmande (beefsteak) tomatoes that had not yet succumbed to frost.  I had expected the carrots and potatoes to be okay, but had not expected them to organise with the other fruit and vegetables such a surprise party.  (I am still waiting for such a surprise party from my own children at the end of one of their own periods of independence.)

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Raspberry Surprise

Most unexpectedly, there were also raspberries.  Until this point, I had only ever grown raspberries which matured in July, and I had already had a Gapennes crop that summer.  Nor had I deliberately planted an autumn variety.  They must have been among the uprootings  the woman in the property behind our house had bequeathed to me early last Spring when she was culling her own stalks.  Clearly, raspberries thrived in Gapenne’s rich acidic soil. In fact, they were proving to be as vigorous as weeds.  But what a weed!  For the 3 or 4 days that we were going to be in Gapennes this time, we would have freshly picked raspberries to adorn our cereal each morning. 

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Sharing Abundance

It was also fairly easy to determine what to do with the vegetables.  At least with most of them.  But as any experienced gardener will tell you, large overgrown zucchinis that have morphed into marrows can be more difficult to dispose of.

If you are lucky enough to have friends or neighbours who don’t grow them, you can simply give them away.  But don’t give them all away!  They are one of Nature’s most fantastic and versatile plants.

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Be sure to take a look at a classic French recipe to help you reduce your supply of these delicious monsters.  

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