I enjoy gardening, and I have a small allotment 5 minutes walk from my home. I’m not an expert at all, but I enjoy the process of shaping the space, trying to make things grow. I even enjoy the “pottering around”, the regular small tasks of weeding and watering and harvesting.
I don’t know much about farming. I’ve enjoyed watching Clarkson’s Amazon show on farming. But I don’t claim any expertise on farming. Nonetheless, since I jot my thoughts down here, I’ll share a couple of differences I’ve recently spotted.
1) Farmers generally want all their crop to ripen at once. Because farmers use machines, they want all the pea pods to reach ripeness the day they drive the harvester into the field. Every plant and every pod on each plant would ideally be the same ripeness.
By contrast, a gardener often wants their plants to produce a succession of pods, either by different plants ripening at different times, or by each plant producing pods for an extended season. Otherwise you end up with a glut one week and nothing for weeks either side. Gardeners are not mechanised, and don’t have multiple fields, so they often prefer varieties that spread their cropping over weeks.
(I think that is why climbing beans work so well for gardeners but not for farmers. They take up less ground space, and then produce a crop over many weeks, rising up the plant as the plant matures.)
2) Farmers can rely on sheer scale to overcome a lot of pests. If you plant a large field with tens of thousands of seeds, annoying pigeons or rabbits or slugs might eat a few young plants. But a few pests cannot take out a large percentage of the crop. And the large field with bare soil provides limited cover in the early stage, making it easy for predators to keep pest level manageable. An orchard of plums will lose thousands of plums to wasp larvae, but still get a good harvest of unsullied plums, because the wasps can’t get everywhere. But a single plum tree might have 90% of plums lost to wasps.
By contrast, a gardener only wants 10 lettuces over a month, and so sows 10 seeds. And an unfortunate slug glut when the plants have 3 leaves can easily wipe out the entire crop. (This spring was cold and wet- the slugs multiplied fast while the salad plants grew slow, and the result was carnage.) If you plant enough plants to ensure they won’t be decimated, you will often end up with far more of a single crop than you can actually use.
Gardeners put more effort per plant into defending their crops because they are trying to get an ideal amount of produce with a relatively small number of plants.
I’m sure there are other differences between gardeners and farmers. Fundamentally, farmers are running a business and gardeners are doing it for pleasure. But as I think about what varieties to choose next year, and how much of each thing to plant, these two contrasts have come into focus for the first time for me.
Jots and Scribbles 