Gardening Podcast Alex Grows Food

In this episode of the Byther Farm Gardening Podcast, Alex Grows Food creator and presenter Alex Smith joins me to talk about finding joy in gardening, plans for the future and winning the Garden Media Guild ‘Video of the Year’ award.

YouTube Alex Grows Food

Alex’s website

Alex on Instagram

Greek Gigantes beans as mentioned in the podcast from Real Seeds in UK

Transcription of Podcast with Alex Grows Food

Announcement
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Liz – Hello and welcome back to the Byther Farm Gardening Podcast and today I am super, super excited to be joined by my friend, Alex Smith. Hello Alex.

Alex – Hi Liz, how are you doing? It’s great to see you. I don’t see you very often but when I do.

Liz- It’s good, it’s good to chat. Thank you so much for joining us. Right, I am armed with a cup of tea, so if you hear tea type noises, you know what it is. Are you armed with tea, drink? Anything?

I have a very cold cup of coffee. I’ve been up very early doing some video editing and this might be the 9 o’clock one. Where are we now? Half ten.

Liz – Yeah, oh no, cold coffee. No, no, no. See if you’d said, I was waiting for you to say it’s a really cold gin and tonic.

Alex – Oh no.

Liz – I was thinking it’s a bit early in the morning but hey go for it it’s the weekend.

Alex – I used to be really exciting like that but no I’ve got a sports drink, I’ve got a coffee and I’ve got me, my quiet self.

Liz – So Alex, I came to find out about you only last year because you are now
creating videos on YouTube, aren’t you? Can you?

Alex – Yes, the best thing ever. Best thing ever?

Liz – I think so.

Alex – Creating videos on YouTube is one of the most fun, artistic things you can do. It’s great.

Liz – It’s great. So would you mind sharing a little bit with the listeners who you are, where you’re from, what your background is? Give us all the spiel, tell us everything and tell us some juicy gossip as well.

Alex
0:02:03
Well, my dad was an engineer and my mum was a receptionist. No, I came to gardening quite late. I knew, I did a PhD in physics as my background, a bit of a scientist. Organic solar cells, that was my thing. And then during that time, I sort of knew, I did lots of walking outside in the country, I learned to bake bread and stuff like that, and I sort of very much knew that I wanted to start my own little small holding somewhere. That was my big five, ten year plan, that sort of thing.

And then I didn’t really do anything with that until the pandemic hit. And then not even then until the second year of the pandemic, when I went really, really intense on growing my own food, really because where I was, it was really hard to get deliveries from the supermarket. I also had a lot of time on my hands. And yeah, I thought I’d just grow loads of runner beans and little plastic tubs, I had some moving boxes, filled it with soil, I don’t know if that’s food safe, but like a ton of runner beans, more than I could eat. Tomatoes, sweet corn, peppers on this little patio that was horrible and grey and it’s an old military barracks house.

It’s an awful place to live, but it’s a beautiful garden by the end of the season. Yeah, and I got a little bit ill during that time. I spent a long time in the garden growing stuff and I just fell in love with it pretty much overnight. It was one of those, to see something grow from a seed, it was a, I don’t like using the word, but a spiritual sort of experience, you know, it’s like an awakening.

Liz – Absolutely.

Alex – And then, again, I was still ill at this time and I went, you know what, I’m not going to live here in this horrible grey barracks. I’m going to find a house with a nice big garden and just start something. So I used my sick leave to start a garden. So February 22, I moved here, created a massive garden in about six weeks, I think it was ready to start producing. And then over that summer, I must have done a few hundred kilograms. I did weigh everything and write it all down. And I did put it into a spreadsheet, but I didn’t hit my target, which was one tonne of food. So I didn’t really put much effort into it. But it was a few hundred kilograms. It’s a lot…

Liz
0:04:07
Let’s just go back a little bit. Yeah. That was a few hundred kilograms. You’d only had the garden going for six weeks when you started. You were new to the gardening experience and you were disappointed that you didn’t create…

Alex – I was really upset. I didn’t make a thousand kilograms of food. That was my goal. Yeah. I don’t do things on a small scale.

Liz
0:04:29
How many are you feeding from your garden with your one tonne of food?

Alex
0:04:32
Just me and then some chickens came along later on. So, yeah, they got a lot of it.

Liz – It’s a huge amounts of food.

Alex – Yeah, I mean, I think it must have been two or three hundred Ks in the end, mostly tomatoes, most of which are still in the freezer, unprocessed, but yeah a lot of food.

Liz
0:04:54
So, I only ever just freeze tomatoes whole. I cut them in half a whole but I don’t process them before I freeze them, and then because I really like being able to get up in the morning and pick out just some whole tomatoes and cook them for breakfast and I can pretend that they’ve just come out of the garden. I will fool myself in the middle of winter and go, these are like freshly picked tomatoes.

Alex
0:05:23
I didn’t do that this year. The blight got to them really quickly. So I’m actually tomato less and it’s, yeah, that’s a different experience once you’ve gone homegrown.

Liz
0:05:35
Yes. So how are supermarket tomatoes now you know about home grown tomatoes?

Alex
0:05:41
Well, I also started budgeting a bit more so they’re terrible. They are the most waterly, water full, tasteless, plastic, not really plastic, but they feel plastic. I don’t know how to describe it. The skins are just, yeah, and they don’t last very long. That’s the most thing I noticed the most was that when you buy something in the supermarket, it doesn’t last long even in this nitrogen sealed plastic package. If you get it fresh it will last longer. It’s really weird how much that transport impacts things.

Liz
0:06:10
There are other things that I have been horrified by. So a few years ago I bought some blueberries because we weren’t sure whether we liked them or not but I threw a packet in the back of the fridge and forgot about it and nine months later they still looked perfect

Alex
0:06:30
Oh that’s the opposite experience what I was expecting you to say. I normally buy them and they’re mouldy in the middle.

Liz – It really frightened me that a fruit could sit in the fridge for nine months. It was like what on earth has it been treated with? I don’t want to eat it.

Alex – I’m not sure you bought a blueberry there Liz. I don’t know I’ve ever heard of one last thing more than yeah a day. I mean well that’s interesting.

Liz
0:06:58
They must have been treated with something but certainly it was one of those I just looked at them and thought yeah I’m not going to eat those after all this time. So you did this gardening and then what made you take the step from, I’ll grow some of my own food, to I’m going to video growing my own food.

Alex
0:07:26
I wish I could remember the exact decision process because it’s a big decision really, wasn’t it? To buy a camera specifically for it as well and then I’m going to do this. It was Christmas year before last I guess now and I knew I wanted to do a lot more last year. So I wanted to really go big on more of the homesteading angle actually, and do lots of cheese making. I started doing that a little bit. And woodworking, and I was already had chickens, but I wanted to sort of expand that a bit, maybe get another animal.

0:07:52
Yeah, I really wanted to share that, because I learned a lot, and I learned a lot so quickly. And then I noticed that I, one, didn’t remember anything and had to keep going looking up. And then two, I sort of went, it’d be quite nice to bring people along on this journey. So I started off vlogging with an actual, so Sony’s, I’m not going to plug the camera actually, but it has really good stabilisation, it’s designed for vlogging, it’s marketed as for vloggers.

0:08:16
So I’d run around fixing my chicken coop, you know, holding, oh that was really fun, I thought it’d be really quite exciting. And then, yeah, in the end I didn’t. I decided to just make gardening videos, lots of tutorials, lots of how to do, and then become much more of an artistic thing. It was really, I wanted to document my progress and I wanted to get better at being in front of people, really. So it’d been quite a few years.

0:08:40
The pandemic took its toll in many ways, and one of them was that I used to be really darn good at doing presentations. Scientists are famously rubbish at talking in front of people, and we always had these big conferences and we always get together to try and talk and present our results. It’s always quite boring.

0:08:57
So I went on this course where it’s about trying to make that quite interesting, exciting, adding value in terms of the experience when you get people together. And I hadn’t done it for about four years, five years. And I’d forgotten how to talk to anyone. The pandemic was really quite isolating for me. So yeah, I completely lost that entire skill set.

0:09:13
So it’s sort of all these things, but yeah, how do I improve my presentation while also how do I remember what I’ve done and yeah, just sharing this like learning journey, that was the idea. It was quite a nice wholesome thing really.

Liz
0:09:24
It does sound like a really sensible and good combination as things come together.

Alex
0:09:30
It all aligned really nicely, yeah exactly. And then it started becoming a bit more, I don’t know how to say it, but hard work, a lot more production, a lot more to edit. I put a ton of effort into my videos, way too much effort into my videos. It would take me, it shouldn’t take, I don’t know how to say, I did a six minute video and it took about 100 hours I think to edit and like it shouldn’t take that long.

Every frame was perfect, it was on the beat, I was getting the mood of the music, spent 20 hours finding the right music, capturing all the B-roll. I mean, it was, it used to be, yeah, it was very simple, going out with a vlog and this 20-minute video, and then it suddenly became this perfect, like, crafting this video that was forever, it would live forever, that was the idea. And I was getting really good.

Liz
0:10:21
Have you now found a happy medium where you’re not spending so much time away and editing?

Alex
0:10:28
Um, no, because…

Liz
0:10:31
Oh no!

Alex
0:10:32
No. So I’ve just started a video, it’s rendering right now, because that’s all I do. And I did it in a very different way, which was, let’s have two cameras set up, let’s just do it to camera, and let’s try and, let’s be well cut, let’s fancy stuff. How can we bring down the editing time, forget the filming time, let’s just do the editing time.

And I got it down to about five hours to get most of it done, so I was really quite happy with that, that was a significant improvement, similar sort of run time but now I started adding the music in and I must have been up for about two last night and it’s challenging. It has come down a lot but you know, usually they try and talk about doing one a week and I can’t do that. That’s just too much for me. I’m wouldn’t sleep for four days.

Liz
0:11:19
I think it’s down to, I mean, I usually say somewhere between eight and 30 hours of editing, depending on how complex and how long, which actually makes it viable.

Alex
0:11:30
That’s reassuring to hear, actually. Okay, so yeah, if I could hit 20, I think I’m on about 25 right now so that’s not too bad and I shot it all in one day as well, I didn’t have to go back and do more so that’s also a joy. So yeah, YouTube’s lovely guys if you want to do it but no, do it sensibly.

Liz – Yeah, the thing is I think there are two things you can do. You can do the vlog thing which I did as you said, you know, you started that, I started out doing the vlog thin,g but it comes to the point where you go do I want to keep on producing vlogs or do I want to create something that is, not a masterpiece, but something that in terms of production value you feel very proud of?

Alex
0:12:15
Proud is everything, exactly. It’s finding that.

Liz
0:12:18
And I wanted to…

Alex
0:12:19
If you’re proud of something, the views don’t matter at that point.

Liz
0:12:24
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Alex
0:12:26
If you’re proud, the views don’t matter at all. And then that’s a great video.

Liz
0:12:28
Yes. Sorry. So it’s a great video, but how’s the actual garden? Now, how is your garden? Here we are, February 2024. Yeah. Interesting autumn and winter. So we’ve had, well, where we live, it’s been incredibly wet. But how’s it been with you?

Alex – I’m trying to remember what happened. It started off very, very cold, very, very suddenly. We had our march almost in November and then it was very wet. And it’s very wet. I’m in Cambridge, which is famously one of the driest parts of the UK. You get lots of droughts almost non-stop. And the chicken area was just completely, the chickens were falling over sometimes. It was so wet, so muddy. Never seen it this muddy before. The garden is a bit bare. I didn’t do much winter planning. I’m really bad at winter. I’m very much an annual grower, so I don’t really, yeah, I’m very short-term thinking. And then by the time it gets to September, it’s kind of too late. So that’s kind of the trap I fall into quite a lot.

Liz
0:13:31
Alex , there’s an awful lot of growers who do that. And I think if that’s what works, then it’s absolutely okay. There’s so much pressure to, and I, you know, I pile the pressure on people by saying, you can be out there all winter, but the point is, is you can if you want to, but it’s not you have to be.

Alex
0:13:52
I know, the thing is, I had this lovely garden, it’s about 0.1 acres, let’s just show off, I rent it, it’s not mine, but it’s so empty right now. And-

Liz -Sorry, how big is it?

Alex – Point one of an acre.

Liz
0:14:03
Right.

Alex
0:14:03
So it’s reasonable. With six sort of, I don’t know how long a lot of them bed is really, but they’re quite long beds, the ones I’ve got. But they’re all empty and they’re all, yeah, they don’t really do much for me right now. And it’s quite, I feel like it’s, given how much time I put into gardening, and now it’s such a lull in the year for me, I really feel winter. So I really want to get into it this year. Because yeah, I feel like I’m missing out in a big way and my life is sort of hollow but there’s something not there you know.

Liz –
I think the thing about winter is quite difficult because you know like you I don’t do winter I kind of go I always talk about pajama o’clock but pajama o’clock is like the end of November.

Alex – Okay excellent.

Liz – Until now-ish you know I’m just not interested. I will go out and do the odd bits and pieces. But there are things to harvest if I want to harvest them. But I don’t feel any pressure to go out and be doing stuff in the garden. And I think winter is the time that we can have the very best gardens we could possibly ever have, because we have gardens in our imagination. So we can just dream. We can dream of what it’s going to be like sometime.

Alex
0:15:19
Well, this is the great thing about videoing is you can look back at all the old, I look back at all the old clips all the time. Look at that, look at the lovely green yellows and yeah, that’s where I am right now. But then I go outside and then it’s very…

Liz – Different.

Alex – Bleak. Yeah. It’s not great. And the chickens are looking at me going, oh chard, I’ll have some chard please, and it’s all been hit by the frost and I didn’t cover it and yeah, stuff like that. That’s all.

Liz
0:15:45
It’s um, I think it’s a very common one and I think it’s one that actually we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t beat ourselves up about. We should go, actually it’s winter and…

Alex
0:15:54
So we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t ever beat ourselves up, you’re right. I mean, there’s always another year anyway. It’s not like it’s, yeah, life isn’t on the line exactly there’s no law which I’ll say yeah no one has to go and garden.

Liz – And there’s no hurry to start at whatever time?

Alex – I do like to use March and April to do all the clearing a lot of people do their bed preps in November and December and stuff like that and tidying up I want that I want to sleep, recover and then I spend my March normally doing clear up so I leave all the stuff for the ladybirds and things, that’s kind of nice I guess.

Liz – Exactly.

Alex – Being lazy kind of works that way.

Liz -I don’t know if it’s being lazy, I think more and more people are recognising that if you leave all the growth, all the stems, all the seeds, providing food for wild birds and shelter for small mammals. And so actually, that’s a win-win, because what would be the point of gardening if we didn’t have our wonderful wildlife?

Alex – Yes. Yeah, no, exactly. And it’s lovely to have them. You need some marigold seeds in March now, even. Just go outside. They’re still there, they’re ready. They’re fine They’ll be viable, I think, probably. It wasn’t that cold this year. So yeah, you can just go and take them from the fresh, almost, from the vine, not quite.

Liz – Yeah, so let’s, shall we have a little campaign, you and I, Alex, to take the pressure off people? So this time next winter, we will do a concerted…

Alex – Put your feet up.

Liz – Yeah, let’s put our feet up and make it a national, a national thing, saying we don’t pressure people.

So having said that, last November we met up in London because something exciting happened, didn’t it?

Alex – It’s outrageous, yeah, it was really exciting. Where did we go? It was Savoy, was it?

Liz – Savoy in London, yeah.

Alex – Which in itself was amazing. But yeah, we were at the Garda Media Guild Awards 2023, and someone might have been nominated for one or two awards. Not sure who that someone was. Oh.

Liz
0:18:10
It was you.

Alex
0:18:12
It was me.

Liz
0:18:13
So what were the two awards? Remind me of the two awards.

Alex
0:18:17
The first one, I was nominated for the Alan Titchmarsh New Talent of the Year Award, I think it was called. And I was also nominated for Garden Video of the Year, which by some miracle, yeah, I won, which is kind of cool.

Going from vlogger in January to Garden Best Video of the Year by August is outstanding. I didn’t, yeah, I’m still in shock over it. I’m lost for words still. I remember during the dinner when it was announced, I basically couldn’t speak for about an hour after it was said. Yeah, I still struggle to find the words to it.

Liz
0:18:55
I was actually videoing you while they were reading the announcement. So I was at the same table as you and I just kind of moved around a bit and I was just videoing you and you were like listening to what they were saying and they were describing you perfectly and the penny didn’t drop and the penny didn’t drop, literally until they said the name of the video. And even then you just sat there looking and then I could just see you go, oh, that’s me.

Alex
0:19:23
Yeah. The thing is, I mean, you look at, you go on the website, you can see all the nominated videos and they all have this, you know, they do the, I don’t know how much videography people look at, but you see all those nice sort of sliding polished shots, professional documentary commissioned works and then little old YouTuber just starting out with a point and shoot camera, you know, hasn’t even got a lens, it’s just got a built-in zoom, you know, and yeah, suddenly you get an award. So that was, yeah, that was shocking.

Liz
0:19:51
Well, you’re in good company, you know, because I won a slightly different award but the category changed.

Alex – So couldn’t run again. Yeah.

Liz – Yeah so I’ve got that award forever now because they’re not going to be doing it again. But yes it is a really odd experience, it’s very surreal and I still grin about it now. I have the award in my office and everybody said to me ‘what are you going to do with it’ and I kind of went ‘oh I’ll put it in a cupboard’, but actually I think it’s a really good thing to have out.

Alex – I love walking past it, so I have to go past it to get to my desk where I do my editing and it just reminds me that yeah don’t yeah don’t worry about your output, don’t judge yourself, it’s yeah you’re doing a really good job. I think everyone needs to think that anyway, but yeah, that imposture thing, just get rid of it. And yeah, just chuck videos out, it really helps for that.

Liz
0:20:55
Let’s take that thought that you just said, and let’s apply that to your garden. You know, when you said you were really disappointed about not growing so much?

Alex
0:21:05
Oh, yeah. I know, I know. I think I do beat myself up quite a lot as well. So, yeah, that’s what I need to do. I’m really quite confident at the start of the year and then towards the end of the year, I’ll go, Alex, why did you do that? Like in an edit, why did you cut that? Exactly the same.

Liz
0:21:22
Gardens are great levelers. They teach us all the time. And just when we think, yeah, I know how to do that, nature teaches you this.

Alex
0:21:32
Yes. I like to think of myself as a tomato guy, having grown so many hundreds and yeah the blight really hit early last year and that was a yeah it was horrible last year.

Liz – The blight was horrible last year.

Alex – It was wasn’t it? I was surprised, I was surprised it came so early I did it all vertically how you should to minimize disease I did a video on avoiding pests and I went darn that’s end of September and there’s a little bit of blooming on the leaves and then it went immediately, by October it was gone.

Liz
0:22:05
Yeah, blight is an incredible thing, isn’t it? It just, it hits potatoes and tomatoes and they’re just like there one minute and then gone the next.

Alex
0:22:18
I’ve never grown a potato. That’s my biggest imposter moment.

Liz
0:22:23
So are you going to do it this year?

Alex
0:22:26
Yeah, I will. Yeah, last year I couldn’t eat many carbs and this year I’m going to go, I’ve got big on it, so yeah, I’m going to go loads and loads of potatoes in nice big buckets I think is what I’ll do. And then, well, that’s a big patio.

Liz
0:22:38
Yeah.

Alex
0:22:39
And yeah, see what we do. I don’t know, I understand the first day, the second early, but I probably missed the first early now, I’m not sure.

Liz – No, no, no.

Alex – We’ll find out.

Liz – No, no, no, you’ve still loads of time.

Alex – Teach me Liz, what am I doing? I’m such a… This is the thing about teaching yourself and being relatively new and then putting out stuff you’re always like, do I actually know enough? There’s always that impostor element.

Liz
0:23:02
I will plant potatoes up to the middle – end of August.

Alex
0:23:10
Oh, that’s the rest of the year. Oh, the ages. Yeah, okay, never mind then.

Liz
0:23:14
So, end of July, early August ones, you’re going to harvest at Christmas, so you’ll need to be able to take them in somewhere warm as the frost comes. But yeah, you can still be, you’re not going to have huge main crop potatoes the later in the year that you plant them. But lots and lots of people plant potatoes on St. Patrick’s Day, which is middle of March. So she says, I ought to know this, shouldn’t I? March the 17th, March the 18th.

Alex
0:23:47
I barely know what Christmas is, so you know, it’s fine.

Liz
0:23:50
So yeah, no, I think most people will sow potatoes sort of from late February to late March, even even into April and they’re going to be absolutely fine. So you’ve got plenty, plenty, plenty of time and I’m going to request that you actually video that experience.

Alex – First time potato grower.

Liz – Yeah because there is something just so wonderful about harvesting potatoes and it doesn’t matter whether it’s your first time or your you know 40th time for doing it there is still something wonderful because you don’t know how well they’ve done until you lift the plant.

Alex – Oh I see.

Liz – Or until you tip the bucket out or until you plunge your hand into the soil you just have no idea.

Alex – Can you not peep around like you can with carrots? Just brush around the, no okay, because I think that’s cheating okay.

Liz
0:24:47
Yeah no with carrots that’s really satisfying and go up yet. No, and that’s not quite big enough yet

Alex
0:24:52
Okay, just say yeah, I’ll do that. Have you got one that stores well Liz. I’m really quite into my garlic I feel I’m still using garlic. I harvested in like July. I can’t get over that.

Liz
0:25:05
So no, I don’t choose to store potatoes. So I eat potatoes fresh and I don’t harvest them all at once. I tend to do one plant at a time or maybe two plants at a time. And then when the potatoes are all gone, I then go on to other carby veg that will sit in the ground over winter.

Alex -Okay.

Liz – Carrots, parsnips, celeriac. And also I will replace that carb with beans. So not green beans, but inside beans. And there’s one that I grow a lot that’s called Greek Gigantes. So it’s a runner bean. It is huge. You don’t grow it for the green pod, purely for the beans on the inside. And they are, I’m doing signs at you so you can see how big they are.

Alex
0:25:59
It’s like a two pound coin was twice the size. That’s what I look like.

Liz
0:26:05
Yes, they are huge. They are huge. And they taste like buttery mashed potato.

Alex – Interesting. Greek?

Liz
0:26:16
Greek Gigantes.

Alex – Greek Gigantes. I haven’t got a pen. I’m going to write that down.

Liz – – I’ll tell you what, I’m going to leave that in the show notes.

Alex
0:26:28
Yeah, please do.

Liz
0:26:30
They are absolutely wonderful. Gigantes beans are great, they’re big, it’s a white bean on the inside of the pod. And really does, it kind of, well for us it just replaces potatoes.

Alex
0:26:45
Okay, that’s a really interesting idea. I’ve not tried doing dried beans, I did, actually no, I did do it one year but I sort of ate them really early.

Liz
0:26:51
Oh I don’t dry them. I don’t dry stuff because…

Alex
0:26:53
You don’t preserve. Oh okay.

Liz
0:26:55
I’m not organised enough to think I might need some beans tomorrow, I’d better soak them overnight. So I cook them and I freeze them in portions in containers.

Alex
0:27:05
Oh I see, that’s very clever. That’s, oh okay, so you just do your batch cooking sort of in stages, that’s kind of cool. I’m not really, that’s the bit I’m not worried about yet is the preserving side. So my garlic’s just in a tote bag that I had lying around, right? So yeah, okay, interesting.

Liz
0:27:20
My mine is in a basket on the kitchen side. It’s in, you know, it’s no different. But yeah, so things like, things like those beans, yes, of course you can do dried beans and I should advocate that people do dried beans, unless you’re like me and are so disorganized that you don’t actually know what you’re going to be eating today, let alone tomorrow.

Alex
0:27:41
Yes, I’ve got a ton and ton of mason jars and they’re just empty right now and instead I just use the freezer. I sometimes parboil runner beans, sometimes French beans, sometimes I just risk it. That’s about as far as my preserving has got. And that was the idea last year, I wanted to do homesteading, but I just ran out of time with all these videos. That was a new thing for me.

Liz
0:28:05
I have been homesteading for about five, six, maybe, yeah, about six years before I started using a canner, a pressure canner. And although I do pressure can stuff, it still terrifies me.

Alex
0:28:20
Just a big explosion in the kitchen?

Liz
0:28:23
Yes, so I’m like, oh, no, it’s not even that. It’s that have I definitely preserved the botulism and so my fright is every time I open a jar is this going to be the last one and it’s you know all the instructions you are given if you follow USDA so that’s the American system.

As long as you follow their instructions properly, your food is going to be safe because they give you guidelines that make sure it’s absolutely safe. I wouldn’t ever advocate going off script in terms of what their advice is because people do. They can all sorts of very odd things and I kind of see them and I go, ‘gasp’!

Alex
0:29:16
I can imagine you there with three thermometers just making sure it hits temperature. You just can’t trust one.

Liz
0:29:22
Oh, OK. So if you’re doing pressure canning, it has a pressure dial on the top of it. So you know that it’s getting to where it should be. But even so, I still, in the back of my mind, just think, hmm, is this the one?

So I was chatting to someone the other day and they were saying how nice it was when you, when you garden, you were brought back to the house with like a big basket or a bucket full of veg and arms full of veg and then you kind of go, oh no, because that’s only half of it. It’s the preparing it to eat is the other half of the work. And I think lots of people think, oh, gardening is about growing, but it’s as much about preparing and cooking as it is about growing.

Alex
0:30:07
Again, I’m not organised either. I love cooking, but I’m not organised to work out when I need to have a certain kind of food in to cook something with, which is why I’ve got chickens to some extent.

Liz
0:30:17
Yes.

Alex
0:30:18
If I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m like, oh, that needs to go now, so you can have some, a lot of things anyway.

Liz
We have got just a couple of minutes left so I would just ask you if you don’t mind reminding people where they can find you on social media and YouTube and all of those things.

Alex
So yeah I’m mainly on YouTube at Alex Grows Food that’s my account. I’m also on Instagram if you really want to follow as Alex.grows.food. The other one wasn’t available and I’ve also got a website I’m starting, I’m sort of relaunching, which is alexgrowsfood.com. I’m sort of trying to put my grow guides into text form and embedding the videos into there. That’s sort of the idea with the website really.

But yeah, you can find me at any of them. But yeah, the YouTube channel is where I do spend all my time and as soon as this call ends, I’ll be uploading something because that’s all I do now.

Liz
Brilliant, all he does, he says. Alex, thank you so much for joining me. Hopefully we will see each other again very soon.

Alex – Yeah, I’m sure in the next couple of months, as the weather warms up and the light comes home.

Liz – Yeah. Yeah. See you again.

Alex – Thanks. Good to see you again Liz.

Liz – Cheers.

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