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I don’t grow vegetables. Yes, that’s right, not even a tomato. Nothing. Nil, as they say at the World Cup.

No heirloom peppers, no red, white or blue potatoes. Cucumbers need not apply, either. And if you are a rabbit, you had better go to someone else’s yard looking for carrots, ‘cause you won’t find them here.

I’m not sure how my aversion to vegetable growing began.

Perhaps it started when I was 10 and got paid a dime for each row of sugar beets I weeded.

And when I say “row,” I mean ROW, as in a couple of football fields long.

It took the best part of the day to make a dollar.

Or maybe it was when my dad’s uncle – who always looked like he was about 100 years old – started expanding our vegetable garden toward infinity.

Uncle Ernst had lived his life frugally in a brick house on a small plot in suburban Copenhagen. He was married and had two grown sons, but I don’t remember meeting the boys or the wife. Her name was Lily.

When my dad bought the hobby farm that later became our full-time home, Ernst showed up to offer some help with the landscaping and gardening.

Ernst believed in rising with the sun, cold showers and bare feet in clogs all year long. He started every day eating raw oatmeal with milk and sugar.

And, oh boy, could he garden.

One summer he propagated our small cluster of black currant bushes into three 40-yard-long rows of close to 200 bushes.

The same happened to the strawberries. We went from a lawn-sized patch to close to an acre in less than two years.

“Why not?” asked Ernst. “You have the space to do it.”

They were Senga Sengana strawberries, special plants, he explained, that would produce bumper crop after bumper crop.

And they did.

And we picked and weeded our way through the summers.

Add potatoes by the sackful, leeks, onions and stubborn green and red cabbage, and you get the picture.

World War III could have hit, and we’d be fine.

But it didn’t. Yet Uncle Ernst grew even older and more frail, and the upkeep of the giant veggie plot became too much for a busy family even when all four kids, and some of their friends, were put to work.

I don’t remember the exact moment, but I’m sure some drizzly October evening, 25 years ago, while I was picking potatoes out of the muddy dirt, I made a quiet resolution to never grow my own veggies again.

So far I’ve stuck to it. And by the way: A new farmers’ market just opened down the street. No need to take the joy away from the farmers.