What started you off on your vegetable growing career?

[OscarSidcup]

My first contact with vegetable growing was when I was 7 - we moved to the country side and my mother got this massive area to grow vegetables (or legumes as we call them in France). I was tasked (against my will) in doing all sorts of things in the garden, all the time, even being told to go pick carrots, tomatoes and raspberries . Needless to say I hated every second of it.

Roll forward 40 years and last year I moved to the country side (first time outside of zone 1!) and, as soon as I could, built raised beds, germinated seeds and planted out... Installed netting and water irrigation system... Now I am even pickling produce and sterilizing jars. What next, jam making?

Needless to say my mother finds all this highly amusing never forgets to remind me how much I was whinging about the whole thing!

But the added bonus is also that I met all these wonderful people on this forum - great escape inside when I am in the garden and online chatting away!

[PLUMPUDDING]

I was my father's helper from being very small, mainly doing menial jobs like carrying buckets of stones and weeds and fetching tools for him. I was shown how to tap the tomato canes to help with pollination and to dead head the dahlias.

I started growing fruit and veg for myself when I got my own garden when my children were small as there was a lot of information in the news about the huge amount of pesticides that were routinely applied to our food crops, some of them systemic so they couldn't be washed off. I didn't want to feed my children chemicals so have grown the majority of what we eat myself ever since so I know that it has no nasties on it and is super fresh. I don't think there are as many pesticides used now, but still prefer to grow my own. You can also grow better tasting varieties than they sell in the shops, and home grown are usually more tender and cook faster.