I present a brief story of food love and loss. One that begins and ends with the greatest cucumbers I’ve ever eaten.
Mum gave the first one to me, fresh from her small greenhouse.
Small, stubby, military green.
Taken home, tasted, followed by a wide-eyed pause as I thought: “OK, how did she do this?”
Within a month, I have a greenhouse of my own. I had to ensure I too could grow my own highly superior cucumbers.
The cucumber had tasted like no other cucumber I’d known. It tasted 100% cucumber.
Every other cucumber had been a terrible cucumber by comparison. Weak, watery, a taste so distant it was like cucumber homeopathy.
Imagine what else I’d missed out on.
The greenhouse was supermodel beautiful. Sleek and extravagant. Danish.
Somehow floating before laurels that applauded it in the breeze, it was almost invisible but for fast-moving clouds reflected on panels above. Soon each glass side-pane hinted at tasty treasures within: burgeoning tomatoes. Chillies of every seed and strain. Dark green feathers of mint.
I should have been doing this years ago.
Gerald Stratford has been doing it for 60 years.
He’s a former butcher and barge controller now in his 70s and his speciality is growing very big vegetables. Much bigger than you’re thinking. So big that when he started posting pictures of them on Twitter/X he immediately attracted 300,000 followers.
The author of Big Veg, Gerald likes marrows larger than cats, onions the size of netballs. Onions are his favourite.
Each day begins in one of his four Cotswolds greenhouses. “First thing that hits me is that lovely smell of warm soil,” he says.
I think of that same moment in my own greenhouse. That smell of life.
“It’s like connecting with Earth, isn’t it?” I ask, and he says, “Oh yes.”
By 7am, he’s tapping his plants, waking them up. Bothering strawberries, inhaling it all, enjoying that floaty atmosphere.
“And I’ll touch one of the tomato plants, and that glorious tomato smell surrounds me. Oh, I love that. It’s better than any painkiller.”
The sound around him: muted and somehow cut off from present day.
Pops of reds in greens; the nourishing heat of some damp distant jungle.
Smells so loud they’re in colour.
Soils that rich you could grow an inch yourself if you just stood still.
“Last year I grew a very big tomato,” he shares. “Just under 4lb. And we brought it in, and sliced it, laid it on wholemeal bread, put it under the grill, and we ate it that day, with just a little olive oil and some Himalayan pink salt. And it was beautiful. That plant grew just for me to do that.”
His voice fills with something like prayer.
“I look upon the plants as … they’re repaying my love by growing nice and big for me to eat them. And we have fun. I’ve got a radio in every greenhouse and I’ll tell them what’s coming up. I’ll say: ‘Come on kids, let’s have some Mark Knopfler today!’”
Like Gerald, I came quickly to love the order and ceremony of it all.
Seeding, planting, watering, airing, plucking, potting, Mark Knopflering.
The warmth of exotic lands. Otherworldly light. The sense of protection. Tenderly tending, sometimes in sunshine, sometimes under rains battering the thin glass roof above.
Slow victories, frequent failures. Peppers for stews. Lettuce, so fresh and clean (Gerald recommends dousing in cold water, then a sprinkling of sugar to make the lettuce sing). The hot sauce I made from angry chillies that was less a hot sauce and more an unlicensed chemical attack.
Knowing that your favourite tomato had grown by a millimetre overnight.
Realising that you had a favourite tomato.
Professor Tomonori Kawano, a plant biologist at Japan’s University of Kitakyushu, grew up the son of a farmer with that same smell of warm, wet soil in the air, surrounded by “french beans and aubergines in the greenhouse”.
He must feel like me, and when I ask if it is normal to have a favourite tomato I think of almost as a little person, he says: “It is an interesting point of view. I am happy to know that.”
Which is a very polite way of saying: “No.”
I mention playing Mark Knopfler to jalapeños, and Tomonori brings up the Kojiki: the collection of myths and historical accounts from eighth-century Japan which told of the “many Japanese monks, poets and ordinary people who would offer songs and poems to comfort the surrounding nature” and who “considered it perfectly normal that we should have a conversation” with whatever lives alongside us and whatever foods we’ve nurtured ourselves. Connecting with Earth, soil somehow so good for the soul.
In 1971, the Salyut 1 space mission was launched by the Soviets.
The world’s first space station, it carried within it the first cosmic greenhouse – nicknamed Oasis – but it would not be until 1975 and Salyut 4 that two cosmonauts would be allowed to actually eat the very first vegetables grown off-planet: space onions.
Dr Sandra Häuplik-Meusburger of the Vienna University of Technology is an expert in space greenhouses and astro gardens, and the author of Architecture for Astronauts.
She tells me about Valentin Lebedev, on board Salyut 7 in 1982, who said: “It is amazingly pleasant on board to look after plants and to observe them. They are simply essential to men in space.”
Space travellers, says Sandra, come to think of the plants they grow in space stations as “companions and pets and almost imaginary friends. They provide a daily pleasure. In space, fresh food is more valuable than gold or diamonds. Those, you cannot eat …”
Greenhouses in space, she has said, take their place alongside music, art and literature in nourishing not just bodies but minds.
Humans like taking care of plants, she says, and I’m reminded of the sense of protection you feel a greenhouse brings. All the times I opened or closed that door and was sure my plants felt safe and looked after, and how that was part of the pleasure I would take from it.
Though some would say that is also a problem.
Paco Calvo is professor of philosophy of science at Spain’s University of Murcia and co-author of Planta Sapiens: Unmasking Plant Intelligence.
He thinks plants have had it too easy, too long, and it’s partly the fault of the greenhouse.
“Maybe domesticated plants are like the dumb guys, the stupid guys of the green world. Because the stuff they’re able to do is a joke compared to their counterparts in the real world!”
He thinks greenhouses are part of a culture of plant mollycoddling. We line them up in neat little rows, mist them, coo at and cosset them, we play them Mark Knopfler. We are raising snowflake generations of workshy shallots and very entitled cucumbers.
“Take vines,” says Paco. “Take pea plants or tomato plants. We keep forgetting we’ve been sticking a pole next to them for thousands of years. And these pea plants are like: ‘Oh, there’s a pole! This is convenient, I think I’ll just twine around that,’ and they have become spoiled.”
I had never before considered I had been spoiling my peas.
“Generation after generation, it’s like spoiling children. Oh, the fridge is full of food. Well, surprise, surprise, somehow there is always food in there! How did it get there? Who cares! And the kids just take the food back to the sofa and scroll down their screens. They make no effort. It’s this way with these plants.”
Paco suggests that keeping our tomatoes, peas and parsley constantly unnerved, tense and unsettled is character building. He says that if they come to get used to our constant pathetic nurturing, then life in a greenhouse “becomes a really boring way of living for them”.
They require not comfort to truly live, but chaos, he suggests.
“The best tomato in Spain only grows in the valley greenhouses in the east of Almería. The Raf. It is the golden tomato, the best, right? And they have a special taste because they suffer a lot. They are very stressed tomatoes. Because they are grown in soils with salt. The type of soil that makes them work and search for nutrients themselves. And because they are so stressed they develop a very [specific] taste. So it’s good to move a tomato from its comfort zone.”
Tomatoes don’t need Mark Knopfler; they need dire straits.
I put this idea of tough love for tomatoes to Gerald Stratford.
“Well, I mean, I’ll tell tomatoes off,” he says, taken off guard. “Like if they haven’t grown big enough! I mean, I’m not afraid to tell them off!”
If Gerald ever works out that he can grow even bigger veg by being more confrontational with them, we may have another James and the Giant Peach situation on our hands.
And then, one day at home, tragedy.
The winds came. And I watched that afternoon from my window in rising horror as the trees around my greenhouse swayed and bucked, and the tips of the tallest seemed to bend to the point of doing pilates.
Pine cones dropped like heavy bombs around it.
A tree fell, and as the winds grew stronger still, the door of the greenhouse began to rattle wildly. And as the winds reached 72mph, off came that door, bouncing and crashing dangerously around, leaving my poor baby tomatoes exposed to the storm.
I ran outside but had absolutely no plan, and do you know what happens when a planless man who wears glasses runs out into a 72 miles per hour wind?
His glasses fly off at 72 miles per hour.
And when his wife finds them and presses them back on his face? He finds the lenses have shot out too. I’m fairly sure my glasses broke a land speed record.
And then, the CRASH.
My greenhouse – my tomato palace, my chilli castle, my vegetable slaughterhouse – collapsed and shattered into a hundred thousand tiny sad Danish shards of lost dreams and wasted achievement.
I just stared.
Once I’d found the lenses for my glasses, anyway.
I get my cucumbers from Mum again now.
She takes pride in growing them; more still in giving them.
I will return to greenhouses soon. Maybe a small lean-to, placed somewhere less windy. A few modest pots. A little lemon tree, because my gosh, if you think a homegrown cucumber is powerful, try a lemon.
And I know that somewhere in the Cotswolds, Gerald will be doing the same, and millions of others like him.
And that somewhere high above us all, some astronaut in the vast unending silence of space is inhaling what Gerald calls that “lovely smell of warm soil” – and making, even from there, that same incredible connection to Earth.
Somebody Told Me: One Man’s Unexpected Journey Down the Rabbit Hole of Lies, Trolls and Conspiracies by Danny Wallace is out now (Ebury, £22). To order a copy and support the Guardian and Observer, go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply