Growing a Food Garden Full of Useless Food

Now that I’ve decided to grow food, it’s time to be a bit more specific. After all, there’s no point in growing a garden full of food that nobody wants to eat.

Food No-one Wants That Everyone Always Grows (and is therefore always trying to palm off on me):

1. RADISHES

Yes, they are the easiest things to grow. Toddlers scatter seeds in gleeful abandon, dump half a watering-can over them, come back in a few weeks and voila! Radishes!

Who eats radishes? Besides old Italian men, who miraculously bite into them (and onions) without shedding a single tear? I may have flung them, in desperation, into a salad or two in my time, but I don’t recall ever deliberately purchasing any.

2. BEETS

Get away from me with the stinking beets already! If I want beetroot on my burger, I want it pickled, sterilised and canned. Not hairy and dirty and raw and crunchy!

3. PUMPKIN

I’ve got nothing against pumpkin. It’s yummy. It’s nutritious. I have been known to pay for half a butternut when I’m planning on making a roast.

But pumpkin vines don’t give you a specified number of pumpkins in accordance with roast dinner schedules. They give you TEN BILLION pumpkins all at once. Usually when it’s really hot and you wouldn’t cook a roast if someone paid you.

4. MACADAMIA NUTS

Any nuts that I have to a) pound open with a hammer and anvil OR b) roast before eating, I can’t be bothered with. Anyone who wants to give me shelled and chocolate-coated macadamias, however, be my guest.

5. OLIVES

So many people are planting olive trees, now, like the trendoids they truly are. But olives can’t be grazed from the tree like apricots or plums; salting and marinating all takes time, and if you do it wrong you end up with rotting buckets of olives. Erk.

To be on the safe side, I want my olives to come from the supermarket.

6. CHOKOS

The day I use these tasteless alien pods in my kitchen is the day the Japanese start lobbying the Danes to stop killing whales.