Luckily, I’ve found the antidote in a corner of Reddit called Mighty Harvest
Every spring and summer, when I come home from the allotment smug with the success of one radish, or five peas (and that is individual peas), or the handful of semi-squashed raspberries so unappealing the birds have rejected them, I think about a popular corner of Reddit called Mighty Harvest. There are well over 100,000 people there, who must feel as reassured as I do by the collective struggles of growing your own. It’s full of ironically triumphant photos of miniature melons no bigger than a fingernail, tomatoes that have come to a fancy dress party in a redcurrant costume, whole vegetable patches reduced to the scale of tiny dollhouse furniture.
I love Mighty Harvest. It isn’t just that it’s funny, though the captions often are very funny. It’s that growing your own fruit and veg can make you a bit self-satisfied, and it is the perfect antidote. I can be prone to banging on about how much better our homegrown potatoes and tomatoes and peppers taste than the ones from supermarket. They really do. They taste so much more like the thing they’re supposed to taste like that it’s silly. My brother won’t eat cucumber from the greenhouse, because he says it tastes too much like cucumber.
A couple of decades ago, the novelist Barbara Kingsolver wrote a beautiful memoir called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, an account of her and her family trying to live more self-sufficiently for a year. It’s less quippy than Reddit, but it makes similar points. Growing produce can be hard, time consuming and expensive. It requires planning, commitment and access to green spaces. I only have an allotment because I moved to a town where the waiting list was two years long, instead of the 20 years plus that I’ve seen in cities. One of the common threads on Mighty Harvest is that people are doing their best in whatever space they can find, growing in pots and containers, in small gardens, on the balconies of flats.
‘Last year, plot-holders communicated only by grunting the word “slugs” at each other’
All of this makes me hyper aware of food waste. Once you’ve seen the effort that goes into growing a lettuce, you make sure you eat that lettuce, tiny or not. The supermarket detaches us from what’s on our plate, and growing it, if that is an option available to us, brings us back in touch with where it comes from. I have let a packet of radishes from the supermarket, which cost 59p, shrivel in the salad drawer. But I won’t waste a single radish if I’ve grown it, even if that means turning it into the shy and reluctant star of a scrappy salad, or dipping it in salt, if I’m feeling French.
The economics of veg growing can be absurd. For ages, I subscribed to the world cinema streaming service Mubi, in the hope that instead of watching Below Deck, I would spend my evenings brushing up on my Cassavetes. What happened was that every month the subscription fee would go out of my bank account, and every month I would realise that the single film I had watched on Mubi that year was costing more and more. In the end, I worked out that I must have spent more than £80 on a single film, while also developing a minor sense of self-loathing at my lack of taste and refinement. Growing your own fruit and veg is a bit like Mubi. You don’t want to look at the finances of it. It’s best not to know your shockingly spicy chilli pepper cost more than a takeaway for two.
Some seasons are more fruitful than others. Last year, at the allotment, during the long wet spring, the plot-holders stopped talking in full sentences and began to communicate only by grunting the word “slugs” at each other. The slugs ate everything before we could. For a while, there was not a lone skinny, anaemic carrot left to show off on the internet. Even the onions went down. But failure is as much a part of growing as success, if not more so. Mighty Harvest is a great leveller, a joyful celebration of disaster, and resilience, and a proper reminder of who or what is really in charge. (It’s the slugs.)
Photograph Getty
Editor’s note: our recommendations are chosen independently by our journalists. The Observer may earn a small commission if a reader clicks a link and purchases a recommended product. This revenue helps support Observer journalism.
Social links
Copyright © 2025 Tortoise Media
All Rights Reserved
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.