Are you ish by nature or nurture?

[JuzaMum]

Hi all

I wondered wher you all got your ishyness from? I am becoming more ishy the older I get. I was brought up in town (still in the same town now). I never learnt anything about trees, plants, gardening etc. I remember refusing to eat fruits a friend had scrumped as they were 'dirty'! Produce had to come from a nice clean shop - I knew nothing of the pesticides used to produce these 'clean' fruits and veggys.
However my mum did make clothes for me and I was very snobby about sliced bread and prepackaged cakes - my father was a baker so we always had nice fresh bread and cakes. My expectations of life where to work to buy what I wanted. So now I don't work and want to keep it that way so I can raise my children but struggle with my lack of knowledge of how things/nature works.
I am very impressed with (and envious of) those of you who can build a chicken house or grow more than slugs and caterpillers so please share your secrets with me

JuzaMum

[little blue duck]

bit of both ... maternal great/grandparents farmers, but I never knew them,
brought up in a towny village, big garden, some veg but flowers too.

husband the same .. in the blood but not much experience.

we now have goats, pigs, poultry, veg, mini orchard... have learnt "on the job" and find we build & have a go at fixing much more as "needs must" and can't afford for anyone else to do it!
have our own eggs, meat, milk in hand-built housing, and love living the life.

Will one day learn to sew & knit, to be more self suffiicient. just need to get round to it :)

[The Riff-Raff Element]

I grew up in Norfolk in the 70/80s at a time when there wasn't a great deal of money around. My parents - particularly my father - were very self reliant. He was a city boy, but moved to Norfolk during the war and lived right out in the sticks. He was very practical: did his service in the RAF as a flight engineer and worked all his life in engineering. We made do and mended, grew veg and spent time on PYO. My mother preserved and produced meals from very little.

I guess I got it from them.

[boboff]

Nature, I am tight.

[pelmetman]

I have been green for years, well before it became fashionable ................except in those days it was called being mean .................I get buzz out making something out of nothing

I was a late developer when it came to gardening as we only had a small concrete yard as a kid.........I do remember sowing my first pack of seeds when I was in a married quarter with a garden............I was disappointed when nothing came up .............apparently December is not the right time to sow seeds outside

Even with our business I try to recycle as much as possible, just completed an order using a bit ply my MDF blanks were delivered on and recycled timber

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[old tree man]

I am absolutley certain that mine was nurture my mother and father were both gardeners, my sisters and brothers all have green fingers, what i found most interesting is that my sister has traced our family back a few hundred years and we are related to Prussian gypsies who were forresters, so having northern Germanic roots is so exciting and that i have carried on family tradition without knowing it

[Green Aura]

My parents grew veg but no fruit that I remember and we had a standing order with the local poacher for anything he got! Everything except bread, which both parents tried to make with disastrous results was made from scratch although fairly plain meat/fish and two veg. They also did some preserving, mainly bottled tomatoes and picallili, but also some fruit preserves when they were cheap on the market.
We had a fantastic butcher that only sold local produce and did any of the processing himself - sausages, bacon etc. Funnily enough I've only recently found another - any remaining butchers where I previously lived were cr4p!

I lived for a few years in London where I did nothing Ishy, it was only after I had my daughter that it seemed increasingly important - it was amazing how much I just knew how to do though- presumably just through observing my parents as a child.

[happyhippy]

I grew up in Australia,and was influenced by having alternative friends.I then in my late teens became "alternative" myself and still am.I think it suits my personality,as I am very independant by nature,and find living a self sufficient type life is liberating.My parents were your average working class couple,did'nt grow any fruit or veg,but they did make do with what they had,even though in later life they had more money.

[MKG]

I'd never really thought about it. It's certainly not from my parents. I do remember donkey's years ago hearing about a spare allotment, so I took it just out of curiosity. I enjoyed it. Around the same time, wine began to sharply increase in price (went over a pound a bottle!! ) so I thought I'd try to make my own, bought a book or two and that was it.

So I don't think it was either nature or nurture - just simple curiosity and tight-fistedness.

Mike

[spider8]

It's a bit of both for me. My parents were poor so had to make do and mend and mum cooked cheap filling meals from veg and cheaper cuts of meat and they grew their own veg and fruit, kept hens etc. I hanker after a place where we can grow stuff ourselves and am always shopping in charity shops rather than buy new stuff........just our way of life now and will always be.........once we have a place of our own up here (sigh).

[Ellendra]

I was born for the ishy life, but my parents don't want it. I think dad's still hoping it's just a phase I'll outgrow. Mom seems to have accepted that this is how I've got to be, and she supports it, even if she doesn't always understand it.

[yvette]

Really interesting question. Family a mixture - mothers side rural agricultural workers, father's side urban working class, but both thrifty and self-reliant, made things are grew things. I suppose I liked to think I had thought up this way of life all by myself, but when we were forced to live on a very low income for a while recently, I realised just how much careful management I had learned from my parents, and was so grateful to them. I have also inherited some of their attitudes - to environmentalism, and to money (save up, don't borrow, houses are to live in not to speculate with, material things are not the route to happiness).

[KathyLauren]

I sure didn't get it from my family. They are about as un-ishy as one can get. Major influences on me were the hippie / "back to the land" movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, and the Club of Rome "Limits to Growth" publication in 1972.

A few years ago, my wife and I moved to one of the places that the back to the land-ers moved to, and we found that they are mostly still here, still living on the land. How cool is that?

[Thomzo]

I grew up in 3rd floor flat in central London but my dad took on the caretakership of a small garden in Covent Garden that had been created in an old bomb site. Sadly it's now the basement floor of a modern office block. Although I used to go with them, I didn't really get into gardening until I bought a do-er upper house with a large garden some 20 years later.

We were dirt poor when I was a kid and my mum is the queen of make do and mend. I had all sorts of home-made toys and clothes from second hand materials or recycled packaging. So I guess it's a bit of both.

I've definitely become more ish since joining this site. I feel a lot more confident to try new things knowing I've got you lot to support and advise.

Zoe