Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ www.teachinggarden.org
Written by Alan Hickman

In the dim distant past when ‘National Service’ was still in vogue in Britain, soon after they left school, all young men were required to do a period of military service. As I went directly from school into a five-year apprenticeship, my call-up was deferred and I was twenty-one when the axe finally fell. In the event, I decided to enlist for five years in the Royal Air Force as a volunteer - for what I considered a quite princely salary - instead of doing the minimum - eighteen months I think - at a paltry few ‘bob’ a week.
That decision turned out to be a turning point and the experience life changing. Being posted to Singapore for two-and-a-half years, totally changed my perspective of the world and challenged virtually everything I had been taught to believe. I suppose it’s called growing up, but the slow realization that I had been systematically and perhaps deliberately lied to all my life, resulted in a very disillusioned and angry misfit.
The great thing about youth is that the young have the energy to sustain passion and outrage - the best I manage now is to be sporadically grumpy. That said, what time has not diminished is the drive to discover new things, a scepticism of popular ‘truth’, and a deep distrust of people who peddle ‘ologies’ and ‘isms’.
One of the first things I learned in the RAF - apart from how to march in a straight line - was that the quickest way to understand something is to try to explain it to someone else.
On enlistment I was given the usual battery of aptitude tests and, for once in my life, I did rather well. "You can have any trade you want" they said "except aero-engine technician - we’ve already got too many of those." Of course, what had I just spent five years apprenticing to become?! "OK" I said, "What needs the highest score to get in?" "Air Radar Fitter." All I knew about radar was that is was sort of like sonar without the wet, but I took the job anyway. After all, it seemed a pity to waste a rare high test-score on some lesser occupation.
In tech’ training all us erks were about as clueless. At the end of a day’s classes we’d go back to the billet and try to figure out what we’d just been taught. That is when I discovered that by listening to and trying to sort out other peoples’ questions, I got a clearer picture myself.
Forty years later, when I got involved with local garden organizations, because I figured I should actually learn something about gardening, it was, as they say, deja vu all over again. In no time I was organizing a pruning demonstration using the overgrown shrubs in the Pioneer Cemetery on Main Street as the subjects.
Peel Teaching Garden is the most recent manifestation of the need to explore, to discover new truths, and to test old beliefs. An afternoon in the garden with a student or volunteer might have the immediate - if mundane - effect of clearing a patch of weeds, but it is usually a concurrent two-hour session of dialogue and exploration.
I have always held that gladiolus will not overwinter here, but one volunteer insists that in his garden - near Trinity Common and also where he lived in Scarborough, gladiolus corms left in the ground re-sprout. Now, I haven’t yet seen the plants - to satisfy myself that they are indeed gladiolus - but, if it turns out to be true that glads will survive the cold, I’ll take a childish delight in kissing yet another ‘belief’ goodbye.
The gardens themselves are filled with knowledge for anyone who cares to see. Going along the rows of potatoes, picking off Colorado potato beetles and squishing their orange egg clusters - to prevent an infestation of leaf-shredding lava - I noticed a couple of instances of eggs laid on the leaves of the Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense). As I squished those egg clusters too, I don’t know if the lava will actually eat thistle leaves, but being attractive enough for beetles to lay eggs on is one more good reason for eliminating these pestilential imported weeds.
Working in the gardens also gives one an appreciation of time and of timing. Growing plants for decoration and for food is a time and labour-intensive business. At the main entrance to the fairgrounds, three display beds are filled with almost 800 annual bedding plants. To lay out, to plant and to water those three beds took seven people a combined total of twenty hours. It’s no wonder that grand formal gardens of manicured annuals have become a rarity.
Nature proceeds at its own pace and if a gardener is not there when nature is ready, then the opportunity is lost. Adult potato beetles need to be picked off as soon as they arrive and eggs need to be squished when they are newly laid, not when it’s convenient for someone to get around to it. A few days of warm sun and the eggs hatch and the game is over.
Machines and preventative chemical sprays were all developed to make timing somewhat less critical and to greatly lessen the amount of labour required to meet the needs of the world’s burgeoning population. Perhaps, if more people took the time to learn about growing even a small portion of their own food, there might be less call for the abandonment of modern cultural practices.