How Vegetables Saved my Life

How I discovered that growing veg was a powerful restorative, and the grisly tale of why I need restoring in the first place.

Hello you lovely lot. This is my monthly Tale - a story from life in the veg patch - which is free to all subscribers. If you’d like to consider upgrading to a paid subscription, it costs less than a fancy packet of heritage tomato seeds per month and you’ll also receive a monthly video (like this), a weekly recipe (like this) and plenty more (see here). Whichever subscription you pick, I’m just grateful you’re here. Otherwise it’d just be me and the slugs. So thank you.

Now, you’ve probably worked out that I believe growing food is uniquely powerful in restoring mental health. But I want to explain why I think that. Which means telling you the grisly tale of how I came to need restoring in the first place. (The first part of it at least, there’s more to come in future posts.)

Fair warning, there’s some stuff about depression here, so do look after yourself and maybe come back to read more later if needs be. And, if you suffer from uncontrollable eye-rolling and/or are squeamish about feelings, then you have my sympathies and this one isn’t for you.

How Vegetables Saved my Life

Summer 2012. Daybreak. A glorious June morning in the Cotswolds.

House martins chirrup as they dart about over the poppy-flecked fields beyond. I am sitting, pajama-ed, on the edge of a raised vegetable bed in our garden. The cottage I moved to with my husband a few years ago is glowing in the morning light. The pale Cotswold stone turned amber, warm and welcoming.

I am sitting amongst all this beauty. Sobbing.

I mean, uncontrollably. I am half worried I will wake the neighbours, or frighten the sheep in the nearby field. Proper bawling.

But I have no idea why.

Jetlag? Yesterday I flew to New York from London and back for a half-hour meeting with the US creative director of the advertising agency I work for. In the end it was barely a fifteen-minute meeting and it mostly involved him shouting at me.

Or it might be nerves about the creative briefing I have to give this afternoon, at which I will attempt to convince a pair of understandably jaded men that writing a radio advert about the cholesterol-lowering qualities of a cooking fat spray is the most exciting thing they will do this year and will definitely, definitely win them awards.

Whatever the reason, I have noticed lately that this is becoming a morning ritual. I wake up feeling like someone has put lead weights in my lungs. I have a nameless dread that everyone I love is dead. I sit amongst the overgrown vegetable patch in the hope of a little peace, or comfort. I get in the shower and go to work.

Which is what I had better do now, because I have a PowerPoint presentation about the chocolate buying habits of Saudi women to finish on the 06:32 to Paddington before my 8am client meeting in London.

The morning does not go well.

I can’t work out how to turn the shower on. It is quite a complicated mixer tap arrangement, but then I have done it every day since we moved here 6 years ago and never struggled before. And there’s a similar fog about where to put the keys to turn the car on. It is not that I have forgotten, I can see the shape of the gap where the information should go, it is that the answer hovers just out of reach. Like when you can’t recall a particular word, or momentarily forget what eight times four is: it is right on the tip of your tongue, you know you know it, but it persists in alluding you.

Probably jetlag.

Things continue in this vein for a few months.

I travel internationally most weeks, I work fourteen-hour days, I commute four hours a day, I write a lot of PowerPoint (I dream in PowerPoint too), I fail to enthuse creative teams, I make dancing on the head of a pin into an art form.

What permeates these weeks most is a sense of dread. Physical, stomach-wrenching, stuff-of-nightmares terror. It doesn’t stem from to a particular worry. It is a directionless, panicky, pit-of-the-stomach fear that makes you recoil from every noise in case it finally signals what you have been braced for, the sky falling in and all about being lost. I wake up with it, like a lead duvet smothering me, carry it wrapped about me all day, and then fall into bed, exhausted and sink beneath its weight into a fitful sleep.

So there I am with my nameless terror in my Jimmy Choos, my corner office, my excellent PowerPoint skills and I am climbing the ladder to join the board of my most recent ad agency where I have been for almost a year.

One morning, I had a routine nurse’s appointment.

I had moved a few conference calls and managed to get her first appointment of the morning, but it would shorten my working day, making it even more hectic so I was already wound tight. And anyway, it was eating into my preferred sobbing-in-the-vegetable-patch time.

“Your blood pressure is quite low”, said the nurse: a plump, motherly figure with kind eyes. Everything you want in a nurse. “Are you feeling ok?”

Maybe it was because it was the Sobbing Hour, or perhaps it was her warm eyes, but I dissolved into tears and garbled something incomprehensible about work being a bit stressful. She gave me a box of tissues, deposited me in the waiting room, spoke to the receptionist and marched me straight in to see the doctor.

Who was terrifying. She was the doctor you hoped you did not get allocated to when you booked an appointment. She was fierce, dismissive and abrupt. She couldn’t locate a bedside manner if it hit her with a bedpan. Still, she looked at me, prodded me, weighed me, took a load of blood tests, asked some probing questions and then signed me off work for the foreseeable future.

The burnout was so predictable, in hindsight.

I had been stressed for a decade and jet-lagged solidly for a year. Like so many others, my body and my brain shut down. One week I was flying to Dubai for a lunch meeting with the board of a multi-billion dollar company and the next I was sat on my sofa unable even to make a cup of tea. I would remain on that sofa, tea-less, for almost a year. And rehabilitation would come from an unlikely source.

When we moved out of London to the Cotswolds I started growing vegetables straight away. It had been one of the main motivations for moving, to have a garden. As soon as we moved in, I cleared a little square of ground in our new garden, marked it out with tent pegs and string, and allocated it to vegetables to tide me over until we installed raised beds.  At weekends I would thumb my dog-eared RHS manual, kneeling on the soil and wondering if ‘plant to a depth of 5cm’ meant from the bottom of the 1cm long broad bean seed or the top. I like to be precise.

Over a few seasons, I had become a competent novice vegetable grower and would take gluts of beans and courgettes into work to foist on anyone who didn’t look at me like I was mad. These were people who lived off Deliveroo and stored shoes in their ovens; they must have thought I was from another planet.

Now, off work, sick, and drugged-up, I couldn’t settle to anything.

One day, fidgety and jumpy, Mum (who came every day after it was silently agreed I should not be left alone) made me tea and sent me out into the garden; anything to get me out of the house, even if it was only a couple of metres. 

Clutching my tea, I take up my familiar sobbing spot, perched on the edge of one of the raised vegetable beds. But it is long past the Sobbing Hour and the sun is high overhead. The beds are full of weeds, ramshackle and unkempt from weeks of neglect. I balance my mug on the wooden frame and place my hands on the soil and stare at them. The soil is warm from the summer sun. At first I see nothing. But after a minute I notice movement: an ant scaling my thumb which has blocked its route to who knows where; tiny weeds fluttering in the breeze which must seem like a gale down there; armoured woodlice bustling over the soil, self-important generals off to organise the troops. The soil that I thought was bare is in fact fizzing with life. Like when you look at the apparently empty night sky for a minute before the stars pop out.

I didn’t know then that this was the beginning of recovery and the start of a whole new life.

That over the course of year, the vegetables patch, very quietly, would save my life. It would reconnect me with the world, show me a new path and give me hope - a battery hen let loose and shown the free-range world.

Within weeks, the vegetable patch became my refuge. An escape to another world: of seedlings and worms (and seedling-eating mice too, but let’s stick to the positives for now). I entered their domain and saw all nature’s struggles from on high, like a giant visiting a new planet watching the tiny inhabitants with detached fascination.

One day I watched a woodlouse was battling to move a fleck of bark, its tiny body straining against the weight, little legs scurrying beneath it to find traction.

“Gosh,” I thought, “that woodlouse is really wound up about not being able to shift that piece of bark. She must be really pissed off. Perhaps it’s blocking her route home. Or maybe even blocking her actual home. Look how her whole being is consumed by such an insignificant task.”

I was reminded that my own struggles were, in The Grand Scheme of Things, just as inconsequential. The world would keep on turning even if I missed a client’s workshop. In fact I could single-handedly bankrupted the agency and all our clients with it and the sun would still rise, just as it would if this woodlouse failed to move the bark. Physically and mentally, both this woodlouse and I felt like the world was ending. But, from my macro view on high, I could see that for her, it was not. So it probably wouldn’t for me either.

Another time, a few months later, I spent most of a day planting radish seeds. It’s not a big job but I was slow. And totally immersed. I had just one task and nothing to distract me. I found such jobs reassuring too. I would imagine all the other vegetable gardeners over hundreds of years who had sown radishes just as I was now. It was like stepping out of time, doing work that had been done for years in a landscape that had looked this way for generations. It was a world away from my life in London where things are constantly in flux, changing and splintering with every kneejerk reaction. I felt connected to the landscape, the soil and to the generations of growers who had gone before me.

And connection is what vegetable growing is all about. You cannot help but feel connected to the space. You spend so much time at close quarters with the earth that you develop an intricate knowledge of its habit: which bits are clay; which are free-draining; which are especially infested with bindweed. This sense of connection was a revelation to me. When I saw nature up close I knew that this was real life, not the construct I was part of in London.

The vegetable patch was not an escape from reality. It was reality.

I was not ‘getting away from it all’ when I came to the patch, I was putting myself back in, back at the centre of things. And at the centre of things, everything was simple and clear. In the kitchen garden I was reminded that the worlds we live in day-to-day do not ultimately matter very much and that what is real is the nature that surrounds us.

All that, from planting radishes and watching the woodlice.

Over the next year, I would put my hands in the soil and find peace, hope and a new way of seeing things. As I cultivate the land and reconnected with the earth it would restore my hope and help me begin a more connected life.