Not even organic slugs taste good

For years I have avoided the green thing. As an issue I actively engaged with I mean. When the New Yorker ran long pieces on global warming or the melting of permafrost I simply skipped them. That's a big one for me cos I usually read everything in the New Yorker - OK maybe not all the theatre pieces, but I did read the one on Monty Python's Spam premiering on Broadway.

Then my interest began to be piqued.

First the New Yorker ran a piece on organic farming, specifically lettuce. It was a long investigative piece on the growth of the organic food market, and how it was becoming mainstream and run by conglomerates and how that ran counter to the spirit of organic farming. Fine I thought, but why all this effort and money going into organic growing of lettuce. Could it be that much better than what I buy at my local overpriced deli supermarket?

A while afterwards I had lunch at Marianne's in Stanford. This tiny restaurant up the coast from Cape Town had developed what can only be described as a cult following. While waiting for our table I ambled through the enormous kitchen garden. Sage, spinach, tomatoes, basil, butternut, celery, cilantro, lemons, rosemary, chives, dozens of lettuces - radicchio, frisee, cos, butter . Rows of beautiful food. And then overlooking the garden I ate the most delicious salad ever. Each lettuce leaf tasted of something yummy.

A taste memory of that salad remained with me over the months. It began to resurrect memories of some of the truly great food moments I've had. Eating asparagus we'd just picked from a friend's farm in the Drakensberg mountains; I am not sure if it tasted better raw or cooked as both were sublime. Earthy and fresh. Bloody hell, it tasted like asparagus. A dessert of gooseberries straight from a garden in Franschoek. Sweet and tart and that earthy thing again. A bowl of meaty tomatoes and bitter herbs tossed in balsamic to accompany lunch and dinner picked from the garden of the guest house we were staying in in Corsica.

Even now, months and years later I can recall the taste of these and other fresh organic produce I have been privileged to eat straight someone's garden.

As with blogging I began to plan a kitchen garden in bed. My visions tended to Versailles. A long elegantly laid out formal potager. Me tending it in gloves and a wide brimmed panama hat. I bought books on kitchen gardens around the world and drooled over square, circular and crescent shaped raised beds dripping with tomotoes and fennell, edged with perfectly tended box hedges and canopied over with sweet smelling roses. But the visions proved overwhelming. I had garden block. I was no closer to picking my own salad.

One hot Sunday morning after another tasteless frisee and cos combination I woke up and raced into the garden. I annexed a rectangle of 3x3 metres from my kids' grassy knoll, sped to the nursery, and gathered some helpers who could dig. By 4pm that afternoon we had a kitchen rectangle. Not very big. Edged with rather unattractive left over yellow bricks. We quartered the space and planted our seedlings.

Six weeks later it really is beautiful although not quite Versailles. So far we've only eaten herbs, lettuce and spinach but the tomato plants are vigorous and ascending their stake nicely. The only bug busters I've used have been crushed egg shells which have worked well and planting some marigolds and onions.

Only hitch is no one in our house except me will eat the spinach. My husband will grudgingly eat some lettuce, and my son says its all green and yucky. Not as yucky as the organic lettuce stuffed slug I ate by mistake. My son says he is waiting for the tomatoes. I can only hope they live up to his expectations. My kitchen rectangle has exceeded mine.