By Geoff Fisher 
By Victoria Plum
Bad luck if you weren’t with us at Reepham Town Hall this month for the Reepham & District Gardening Club meeting – a hilarious and witty chat describing Andrew Brogan’s completely non-gardening early life and his decision at age 31 to create a garden.
And what a garden! Unhindered by old-fashioned English ideas of double digging, fertiliser and storing dahlia tubers, he went full-scale into all sorts of hardy exotica, palms, bananas and bamboo – not just any bamboo but a giant variety that grows one foot per day (though that can’t be for 12 months a year surely, I forgot to ask) and has roots 28 feet long.
The garden he made, Henstead Exotic Garden, near Beccles, is open on Sundays in the summer. The photos are certainly stunning. And Mr Brogan brought along plants for sale, rare things, and we clustered and fought to buy the most exciting, which actually was all of them.
I have just entered an online competition to win a visit to the Millennium Seed Bank (MSB), which celebrates its 25th birthday this year. It is obviously a vastly superior version of the old biscuit tin I have in the shed, with ancient, leftover seeds that might come in useful and I can’t quite discard. Cool, dry and cosseted, the MSB contains more than 2.5 billion seeds of countless species. What a wonderful and foresighted scheme.
I have heard talk, on Radio Four of course, of how this country should be more self-sustaining in food production with concerns over solar “farms” wasting farm land, housebuilding on farm land and concerns over the costs, in every way, of chemical control of weeds and pests.
Those poor farmers are having a hard time making money from their acres by actually farming them, so who can blame them for selling off land?
There is an answer. I know that farmers do a wonderful job growing lots of sugar to make us fat and corn to make that lovely cake they sell in supermarkets, but what we need is more smallholdings producing vegetables.
The productivity that can be obtained from smallholdings is phenomenally more than that from farming. Two or three acres can support a family, and yet a farmer of, say 500 acres, which is a tiny farm, will bemoan the fact than they cannot make money.
The soil enrichment and biodiversity engendered by those clever smallholders has to be seen to be believed. Visit Eves Hill Veg Co in Aylsham to see this in action. They grow and teach others how to grow. How wise and forward thinking is that? We need more of it.
Tuesday 9 December at 7 pm will be the gardening club Christmas party. Please bring a dish of something tasty to share. The committee will entertain us and there will be a quiz, hooray! Its always an enjoyable evening, so do join us in the Town Hall, Church Street, Reepham.
Above: Andrew Brogan with just some of the plants he brought to the Reepham & District Gardening Club meeting in Reepham Town Hall. Photo: Tina Sutton