Nobody Taught Us How to Grow Anything, and That Wasn't an Accident

Ask most people under fifty when a tomato plant needs more water, or how to tell if soil is tired, or what to do with a glut of courgettes before they go soft, and you'll get a shrug. That's not a personal failing. It's the predictable end point of a few hundred years of policy.

Before the Enclosure Acts carved up the commons and handed them to landlords, growing food and reading land were ordinary skills, passed down the way you'd pass down how to tie your shoes. You didn't need to be taught it as a subject because it was simply how people lived near a place. Once the common land was gone, so was the daily practice. A skill nobody uses for two or three generations doesn't survive as folklore — it just goes quiet. We didn't lose the knowledge of how to grow things in some abstract, cultural sense. Families lost the plot of land where a grandmother would have shown a child how to pinch out a tomato sideshoot, and the knowledge went with the land.

That's the part of the enclosure story that doesn't get told as often as the headline one about who owned what. It wasn't only an economic theft. It was a theft of competence — a quiet, compounding one, where each generation that grew up without access to growing space had a little less to hand down than the one before.

We think that gap matters as much as the acreage does. The vision for Rooted Common Ground Farms isn't just "give people a bit of soil." It's trying to rebuild the conditions where that ordinary, unremarkable transmission of knowledge can start happening again — where someone who has grown vegetables for thirty years ends up, almost by accident, teaching someone who's never grown anything, because they happen to be kneeling in the same bed on a Tuesday afternoon. Not a workshop. Not a course with a certificate at the end. Just the normal way skills used to move between people, before the places where that happened were fenced off.

There's something else bound up in this that's worth saying plainly: not knowing how to grow food isn't a character flaw, and it was never supposed to be common knowledge you'd absorb from nowhere. If you've never grown anything, that's not evidence you're disconnected from nature in some personal, individual way. It's evidence that the land you'd have learned on was taken out of reach before you were born. The shame that sometimes attaches to "I don't even know how to keep a houseplant alive" belongs somewhere else entirely — with the history, not with you.

That's also why we're wary of anything that turns a community growing space into another place where you have to already know things to be welcome. A plot that quietly sorts people into "people who know what they're doing" and "people who don't" just reproduces the same old gatekeeping with a nicer name. The land we're working towards wants the second group as much as the first — more, probably, because that's where the actual repair happens. A confident gardener doesn't need the relationship with land restored in the same way someone who's never had access to any does.

We're not pretending a few raised beds undo a few centuries of lost knowledge. But every time someone who's never grown food before ends up elbow-deep in soil next to someone who has, something that enclosure interrupted starts moving again, in a small way, in that one spot. It's slow. It's unglamorous. It doesn't show up as a headline. It's also, we think, one of the more honest forms of repair available — not reparation in the grand sense, just the ordinary transmission of a skill nobody should have had to relearn from a video on the internet in the first place.

That's the thinking behind why we keep saying the land isn't just for growing vegetables. It's for growing back the kind of knowledge that used to just live in a place, in the people who had access to it, before that access was taken away. Better together applies to compost as much as it does to anything else.