I’m having a tradwife summer – but I’d rather be a tradhusband | Emma Beddington

I love gardening, hate cooking. After five years learning how to grow fruit and veg, I’m now stuck with, well, a load of fruit and veg. Can I get my own tradwife to make them edible?

I’ve spent much of the last week picking, then sorting through berries, making, straining and freezing various compotes and conserves, washing and batch-cooking chard and spinach, podding and shelling broad beans. I’m not having a granny summer, a Sydney Sweeney summer or a nun girl summer (all of which I’ve seen suggested as themes for 2026); I’m having a tradwife summer. It’s basically Ballerina Farm here, without the rosy-cheeked, tousle-haired children, raw milk or plane-company-heir husband – and my tomatoes aren’t even ripe yet.

It’s taken me five years as the genuinely grateful, happy guardian of a garden to fully appreciate the issue with growing fruit and vegetables: once you’ve done it, you have lots of fruit and vegetables. I understand that’s a privilege, not a problem – and indeed, the whole point of the enterprise. And some produce is pure, easy pleasure: strawberries and raspberries, mangetout and lettuce (at least if, like me, you accept the occasional surprise protein bonus in your salad, thanks to slapdash washing). But other stuff that thrives here requires prepping and cooking to be edible, and with my family and friends dodging my calls offering my various gluts, I find myself resignedly donning an apron and doing what I imagine my ancestors spent centuries wishing they could avoid.

I love gardening (while occasionally being reminded of my friend Alice saying it’s “outdoor housework”). I’m fully committed to carting watering cans and endless bags of compost around, futilely trying to deter cats from using the raised beds as a litter box and attempting to resuscitate everything that’s trying to die at any given moment.

But at harvest time, I’m reminded I hate cooking and unfortunately married a man who feels the same; a grave strategic error. So it’s a tradwife summer, when I really want to be a tradhusband, the rugged provider who strides into the kitchen with an armful of dirty, insect-ridden bounty, then sits down after a well-deserved rest to enjoy eating it. What I’m saying, I suppose, is I’m in the market for a tradwife: it’s an unpaid post, but you get all the courgettes you can eat.

• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist