Gardening and women's rights?

Love gardening too. Planting seeds and watching them grow. It's just gardening with the kids but I find it life affirming and it keeps me sane and makes me happy.

Superloud what a lovely thread. I only have a small garden, but I love it. My favourite foods to grow were purple sprouting broccoli - it was so sweet and tender, and cauliflower. When I did the cauliflowers the weather was just like it is now, and it was fascinating to watch them grow.
I'd never thought about gardening/feminism, but I guess the gardening calms me so I can continue to read the Feminist boards

This has reminded me of a book I must have read twenty years ago which has always remained with me (I read quite a lot) I haven't read it since, but I think it could be very apt for this thread.
Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot - has anyone else read it??

This is lovely. I’ve recently accidentally got into gardening. Dp suggested we make the large bramble/broom bush that was my garden into a nice garden where we could entertain and spend the evenings watching the bats. I didn’t realise at the time that he meant he’d stand around fiddling with fairy lights whilst I Completely re-landscaped.

I’ve spent the past week hacking back the neighbours ivy that was a good four foot deep on my side, extending the patio to relocate the shed and building raised beds. Every night Ive come in bruised, bleeding and bitten but the sense of accomplishment makes it worth it. I feel less of a gardening fraud each week

I think for me I’ve never thought of gardening as particularly feminist, but I have always found it very female At considerable danger of propagating (!) stereotypes, I find it a very nurturing thing to do. Feeding, watering, looking after, growing, creating life essentially. I think that connects to other women across the years, those finding refuge from spouses, those fabulous old school English gals who had more time for their roses than their husbands, the time invested, the patience.

Also being a bit stronger than I'm used to

Inability to deal with full sized bags of compost and irritation at the relatively higher cost of smaller ones was one of the things that spurred me to (slightly) improve my pathetic upper body strength.

What a great thread I love gardening but I’m still a novice.

I’d never connected it to feminism though.

Radishes are one of my bigger successes this year, I had no idea you could make pesto from the leaves though.

I’m really pleased with the increased variety of birds and butterflies I’ve got in the garden this year now I’ve got a good selection of flowers going.

I’ve not yet tamed...

This is a fantastic thread! We have a very large garden, which I’ve. It yet tamed from being completely overgrown when we moved in. We planted lots of fruit trees, which are now gloriously unkempt and abundant.
Lots of saplings have sprung up from wild damson/plum stones (dropped by the birds?), in places I don’t want them...but wonderful to see what Nature does so easily in comparison to all the failures I have when trying far too hard to grow!
None of my family like gardening (dd mildly interested in flower colours, ds likes digging, they both are great waterers). Not a great deal of feminist activism either...it’s my time alone, mostly, listening to podcasts and talking to the plants. I’ve always found gardening essentially female, calming and powerful.

As a child i loved digging in the mud and climbing trees. Now i do the same but call it gardening.

I was just thinking of somethings that is mostly female spaces.

I love growing things too, veges or flowers. Want to expand operations.

What a lovely thread :-) I have a pocket handkerchief of a garden, which I love, but is somewhat frustrating in its scope, but my allotment is my happy place. Allotments are odd spaces: where your personal gardening space is very visible, and I'm constantly intrigued by how people of different ages, sexes and backgrounds make decisions about how to use their space: there are definitely some patterns...

I love that poem!

By the way, arf at SLPA and DP at the cinema watching Disney when you expected something else.

Superloud - I love the poem.

I got a brilliant food composter via a council discount scheme. You can chuck ANY food waste in at all, plus your usual garden waste, and because it’s a hotter compost system with different microbes it breaks down faster than the black tardis ones.

Posters are so right about gardening being good for mental health.

I love mine, even if it’s smaller than I would like. I live on a very busy high street, when I potter around in the front garden it’s very social. I’m always chatting to neighbours and complete strangers.

The back gardens private though. It’s so peaceful, unless the kids are playing football.

I need to set up a small compost heap. That’s my next job.

I'm absolutely positive that poor women would have kept kitchen gardens if they could, but it wouldn't have been something to which you aspired. But naice middle-class ladies were meant to be decorative, and certainly not to have compost under their fingernails. It's something that they would have been cut off from.

Although going back further, ladies would have been expected to be able to keep a kitchen garden, dry herbs for medicines and so on - although I'm sure they would have had staff for the actual digging bit! But they were expected to know and be able to direct operations, I think (based only on my reading of historical potboilers, mind you ).

Lovely thread. I've got into gardening recently after being terrified of it for years. My old house had a massive, overgrown back garden and all we ever really did was try to keep it under control. We now have a tiny but lovely garden, and I have claimed it as my domain . There's something incredibly calming about pottering around deadheading roses or training creepers, and something very satisfying about a good prune or tidy. Love it!

The value of Gardening for Ladies wasn't what it contained so much as what it represented: permission to go outside and do something

I love this! Makes me feel connected to those ladies!

That’s interesting about “Gardening for Ladies”. See I was actually thinking that an affinity for growing things in females was actually perhaps quite deep-rooted in human terms... I was thinking about hunting and gathering times when presumably the females and children (?) were responsible for foraging in woods etc and would therefore have had to know about edible v non-edible plants etc?

never standing on damp ground because of the unhealthful emanations that would rise up through their skirts...

This made me smile - rather wryly as it reminded me of yesterday afternoon when I was out planting some fushia plugs and the heavens opened with the most almighty crash of thunder for good measure

I'd second Wilko for seeds. Also don't overlook B&M either for gardening basics. I've just bought a couple of bags of white spar from B&Q to line a hedging bed (I wanted bark but it would be an open invite for the local cats to use it as a litter tray). You can imagine my chagrin when I discovered that I could have had the exact same product from the B&M garden centre for half the price...

I want to do lots of things but don’t have the get up and go to actually do them... I don’t know why!