The Edible Garden

A foreword from Alys

Why I garden.

I garden because I am hungry. Or, more precisely, because I have a hunger that can only be satisfied through soil and satiated through fresh growth. I garden because I have to, it is how I define who I am, it is one of the ways I make sense of this world and it is how I pay back my place in it. Over the years I have come to see is not just that I garden, but how I garden that matters.

Making The Edible Garden has been about finding a way to garden that is as gentle as possible upon the world. A garden that will please and feed me and still be a home for all others that visit it. By choosing to grow my vegetables alongside my flowers in a perfectly pleasing muddle that is polyculture, I have found a way that allows the best of all worlds.

The aim is to eat at least one meal a day from the garden throughout the growing season and to have enough living things in the store cupboard to keep the winter bearable.

I’ve gathered some friends together for this journey. Some will tell you about permaculture, others about how to make delicious things with stuff that you grow or find - everyone shares one common belief about how happiness is formed; that real pleasure is something that is created not bought.

This is Alys’s first solo series but she’s been, and still is, a regular presenter on BBC Two Gardeners’ World at 2030 on Friday nights.