My Garden’s royal beginnings…sort of
My first vegetable garden as an adult started in a single old vintage butler sink on a rooftop in Windsor. Our flat had a small roof patio overlooking the town’s roof tops. I got it in my head that I wanted to fill it full of plants - mostly fruit and veg, so we could wander out and harvest our dinner. The 40 litre ceramic sink offered for free online, would make a perfect planter for my little rooftop food jungle.
We didn't have a car, but there was a train station nearby where we were collecting the sink and I figured we could just take it on the train and then carry it up the 3 flights of stairs to our flat in the High Street overlooking the castle. I mapped out the route, convinced Kevin and made our way to this lady’s house in the lovely rural Berkshire village.
There were, however, two flaws in my plan. Firstly, I didn’t really know what a butler sink was, having only ever seen them in photos. I had no idea that they weighed over 50lbs and nearly impossible to carry anywhere.
The second flaw in the plan was that it was the day before (now) King Charles’ wedding to Camilla, taking place at the Guildhall - directly across the street from our flat.
We had managed to get the sink from collection point to the Twyford train station, then change trains, then to Windsor Central station, drawing stares from everyone walking by and stopping every few steps to rest. We disembarked in the middle of town and were met with walls of people. Windsor was FULL. Journalists and tourists crowded the street. White news vans lined up on every free bit of parking down the hill. A few blokes in full Union Jack attire had been camping at the bus stop across from our front door for a week. There was someone with a fox head who’d been marching up and down the street for days in a protest (I can’t remember if it was for or against fox hunting).
As we stepped off the platform Kevin just sighed and said, “Oh Kat!” in the resigned way he still does when one of my grand plans goes wrong (which is often). I told him we could ditch it, leave it at the station for someone else to grow salads in (or more likely vomit it on a Saturday night, it was Windsor Central Station, after all). “No! Stay here!” he directed and marched to the corner of the station where a broken trolley had been pushed into the corner.
We loaded up the sink and dragged it the two blocks through the crowds.
“Is this a statement on the royal marriage?” reporters asked us as we push-me-pull-youed the broken shopping cart through the cobbled streets and up the hill. “What are you doing?” others asked. Our neighbour we barely spoke to met us in the hallway and squinted in disbelief when we explained we were hauling this enormous sink up to the 3rd floor to grow vegetables in.
Other than the wobble at the station, I was determined. I just wanted a corner of tending something in a life that was otherwise filled with work and commuting.
Growing up, my mom had a big vegetable garden on top of our hill. I would sit on the railroad ties that bordered the plot while she harvested asparagus by the bushelful, watching my youngest brother try to catch minnows in the tank my dad used for fishing bait. Virgil Clark would bring us punnets of strawberries in summer, staying for hours chatting in the kitchen with my parents, we’d stop by the Pospicil’s farm just over the bridge and get baskets of sweet corn and watermelon that my dad would take a knife and cut the sweetest middle bit out for himself before anyone got to it.
Pheasant and venison my brothers shot were regularly at the table and we would buy a pig every so often from the local meat locker for the freezer. Our eggs were delivered by Ralph who drove a long car that I, rightly or wrongly, remember as a Cadillac. He would always try and offer us jars of Rocky Mountain Oysters alongside the eggs - not that we ever bought any of that particular delicacy - I think he just wanted to watch a teenage girl squirm. My mom would make lasagne in big sheet pans, a recipe so good my sisters each claimed the recipe as their own.
In those years, I would sit on that hill of ours and imagine a different life. It wouldn’t be in middle of nowhere Iowa, surrounded by people who knew my name or delivered bull testicles in jars, that was certain.
For awhile, I tried. I ate food grown by people I didn’t know. I was one of those late night arrivals who puked my drink up at busy rail stations and commuted with the same people for months, never making eye contact with any of them. I wore heels and ate salads out of plastic bowls covered with a thin film “sealed for freshness”.
But then one day I found myself hauling a butler sink through Windsor on the eve of a royal wedding so I could grow some salad. In retrospect, I needed something recognisable. I was unmoored, in a different country, lonely and lost and needed something familiar. Some roots are tough like that, impossible to sever.
We made it to the front door, up the stairs and onto the balcony. I spent that afternoon potting up a few salads as we watched the crowds ebb and flow around us. The BBC set up broadcast in the Bang and Olufson three floors down and Trinny and Susannah were broadcasting from a window across the street. It was fun to watch the spectacle, but I preferred my plants.
If I were to pin the start of Gartur Stitch Farm to a day, it would’ve been that one, even if it wasn’t until 8 years later when we would drive up the mile long single track road to see the house for the first time. I learned a lot from that collection of pots on that roof terrace. In the years that followed, that sink moved with us - growing salads in two countries and four houses. It was always getting clogged and turning into a pond or it was a sandy dustbowl when I forgot to water it - but every year it did better, growing more and quietly reminding me of who I really was, someone who grew stuff.
Things I’ve loved this week:
Lunan Bay Farm in Angus has released the first batch of Scottish grown and spun cashmere. I can not wait to get my hands on some.
This post by by Grace Rother - also about food and the rootedness we feel as part of a food community.
This podcast on burnout, specifically as it relates to humans who care for humans.
I am obsessed with the new Taylor Swift album. I am equally obsessed with this country cover of Anti-Hero.
