Earth Matters.

Growing vegetables is one of my great pleasures in life and anyway I'm really an outdoor person, much happier pottering around in the fresh air rather than being stuck indoors. For all of that I very rarely take much notice of the gardening media. I might refer to a gardening book from time to time but by and large the plethora of books , newspaper articles and TV programmes devoted to growing a bit of veg just leaves me cold. But just occasionally something comes along that is really worthy of a second glance and there was an article in today's Independent Magazine that is one of the best pieces of gardening journalism I have seen in a long time. So much is written and talked about garden design or new and supposedly wonderful new systems of doing something that we have been doing for ten thousand years and a good deal of it is just froth, but Anna Pavord's article Earth Matters is a genuine back to basics gem. Nothing is so important in agriculture, and probably for the future of our species, as the maintenance and improvement of the structure of the soil and Anna Pavord manages to get the basics across in a couple of thousand words. Classic gardening writing that should be read by every beginner and a good many older hands as well.