In the past year or so I've been experimenting with organic gardening in my small student house garden. I've grown a reasonable crop of potatoes, carrots, leeks, strawberries, parsley, basil and chives thus far. Over the winter I got some onions in, which are doing well, as are my next crop of early potatoes:

But I thought my experiment with cabbages and cauliflowers was a complete failure. Several cauliflower plants grew quite big but either died from pests (I grew my companion plants too late) or just sprouted useless flowers. But then today whilst weeding I found two plants that looked more like... success!

I've also got a nice crop of cabbages that I'll start eating just as soon as I finish the bits and bobs in my fridge:

A friend of mine now studying at Goldsmiths wrote the following in an article entitled Culture & Cultivation: The role of the Garden in society:

I think that gardening is one way of addressing and re-balancing the [ecological] disequilibrium. Gardening as art can be understood as an ethico-aesthetic discipline. This involves an examination of the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, ecology, politics, individual subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Gardening provides a remedy to the degradation suffered by the environment and by society. It is concerned with the world and the people in the world. Gardens provide a model of how we should live; a model of social, environmental and economic stability and harmony.

Amen to gardens, and death to concrete / decking / gravel / ugliness!