SMALL GARDENS in CHINA

SMALL GARDENS in CHINA

It’s second nature for the Chinese people to grow vegetables and every space they can find will be planted, in window boxes, along side the roads, at their work places and even beside the canals.
I have recently returned from China where I did a five month stint teaching English to University students in Shaoxing, just south of Shanghai. This picture was taken out of my kitchen window over looking the canal that separates the college and a factory on the other side. Some mornings when I was making my breakfast I would see a woman row this little canoe down the canal to attend to the vegetable patches that clung precariously to the canal walls. These garden beds had been built by dropping bricks into the water until the pile reached out of the water. Then soil had been added ready for planting.
I was in China from late summer through autumn into winter and witnessed the growth of these small vegetables plots. The trellises to the left supported a large crop of marrow type vegetable and the staple green leafy vegetables that we call pak choi grew in the small gardens along the edge. I watched the progress of these gardens from the time the gardener sprinkled the seeds onto the soil to the time when she came to harvest the healthy bunches. I winced as she rinsed off the vegetables in the canal water knowing that the water was polluted but they would get another rinse off at home. In between she added more soil, pulled out weeds and ladled out some brown liquid from the big brown jar in the middle of the picture that was a fertiliser of some sort, most probably organic.
In winter I watched as a heavy white frost settled onto the green vegetables and thought that it was the end of the crop but miraculously when it melted off, the vegetables were fine and perky. Of course the marrows had long been picked at the end of autumn and all that was left there was the brown remains of the vines. Come spring the whole process would start again.