Gardening Podcast Joe’s Garden
In this episode of Byther Farm Gardening Podcast founder of Joe’s Garden, Joe Clark talks with podcast host, Liz Zorab.
I first talked to Joe online via social media and then met him at an event in London in February 2024. I was so pleased that he agreed to talk with me for this podcast.
Order Joe’s book Garden to Save the World by Joe Clark, founder of Joe’s Garden.
Find Joe on Instagram at Joe’s Garden
Joe’s Garden on TikTok
Transcription of Byther Farm Gardening Podcast with Joe Clark
Announcement
0:00:00
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Liz
0:00:15
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Byther Farm Gardening Podcast and today I am so so excited to be chatting with Joe Clark of Joe’s Garden. Joe, hi, welcome.
Joe
0:00:36
Hi Liz, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate you having me on and it’s my first ever podcast so I am very excited.
Liz
0:00:44
Amazing. Okay, so we’ll be gentle.
1
0:00:47
I feel in very safe hands, very safe hands indeed.
Liz
0:00:52
This is incredibly trusting of you. Joe and I met for the first time, oh, about a month ago, and we chatted a little bit online before then, but it was really nice to meet face to face and go, hello, you exist.
Joe
0:01:09
It was lovely. So we met at the Garden Press then, didn’t we? And I sort of walked through the door and there you were, this bundle of joy came straight up to me and I was like, yes, that’s Liz. And it was just fantastic to meet in person because we talk online and I don’t know if you’re the same Liz, but you sort of e-meet a lot of these people. But really, you tend to never meet in real life. So it’s really nice to actually get out and about and actually meet in person?
Liz
0:01:34
I think one of the difficulties of as gardeners is that if we’re working, we are generally out in our gardens. So it’s not, and it’s okay to have some come and help every now and then, but you don’t necessarily want someone in your garden like a lot, because it’s your garden and you want to do it your way.
Joe – Yeah, I agree.
Liz – So I think, I think these events where we go and we meet up with each other are absolutely brilliant because we’re in a safely neutral territory where we’re not going to interfere with each other’s gardening.
Joe
0:02:14
Yeah, and it was a fantastic day too. I got to meet so many other people and it’s just brilliant to get out and about out of the garden.
Liz
0:02:23
One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you about this podcast is that you are about to bring out your first book, so maybe by the time this podcast is out your first book will have been published and it’s called Garden to Save the World. Joe! This arrived yesterday with me, how exciting is this?
Joe
0:02:43
It’s incredibly exciting. What I find even more funny is you got the book a day after I saw it for the first time. So a little bit nerve-wracking considering it comes out in a month, but I couldn’t be happier with it. It’s been a passion project. Although I had a really tight deadline to write the book, it’s been in the works for sort of 10 or more years. I’ve been making notes every season and just tracking what I do in the garden and what might be interesting for people to learn. And I’m just super grateful to have the opportunity to write the book and how to get it out. And I hope everybody enjoys reading it as much as I love the process.
Liz
0:03:23
So it’s subtitle here is ‘a feel good guide to growing for yourself, your plants and the planet’. But, you know, I actually I look a bit tired today because I spent a long time reading this last night. So arrived during the day yesterday. I was working all day. When I went to bed about half nine last night, I thought, oh, well, I’ll just have a little flick through it. And then, you know, like three hours later, I was still reading it. All I can say is, it is joyful. It is a joyful read!
I just found that I was grinning all the way through. I kind of get half way through the page, and I just kind of see all my face starting to smile again. And by the end of, you know, getting to the point of turning my lights off, my face hurt from smiling. So I think that’s a really good sign.
Joe
0:04:10
Oh Liz, I couldn’t ask for a better comment. That’s the exact goal of the book. There’s so much negativity at the moment, there’s sort of doom and gleam everywhere we turn, and I just wanted to offer a safe space. So that’s the goal with the book, but also my socials, just a safe space people can come, relax, see the positives and just have some fun with me. I try to be as upbeat as possible.
There are so many fantastic things happening in the world. And let’s just not get bogged down with all the negativity. Our gardens are such a fantastic space to utilize. I know you’re the same. I’m out in mine all the time and getting outside just I feel the negative energy just leaving my body especially when the spring comes it’s just a brilliant time to get involved in nature and nature can repay you tenfold with however you get involved.
There’s so many fantastic ways whether it’s gardening which is sort of our passion or whether that could just be looking at your local wildlife or making homes for the birds or hedgehogs or whatever your interests are, it’s just a fantastic hobby to be involved in and I feel privileged to be able to help out a little bit in this in this space that we’re in.
Liz – Well I think the book is a really positive addition to a gardener’s bookshelf. I think it’s great. I’m really pleased that you’ve written it and I’m really pleased for you that you’ve written it. I know how exciting it is and how nerve-wracking it is when your first book comes out. So let’s have this conversation again in like 10 years’ time when you’re bringing out your fifth, sixth, seventh book because I bet you it will be just as exciting.
Joe
And probably just as nerve-wracking too. We did sort of do an advert video last night and I’ve been doing social media for a few years now so I’ve released some quite important videos before but I was so nervous. I was sort of shaking typing out the captions and then put it out and luckily we had some really nice comments straight away and it just put me at ease. But I think when you put so much work into something you naturally want it to do well and this being a slightly different take on a gardening book, so rather than sort of an instructional how to garden, how to grow your tomatoes, for example. There’s so many brilliant authors who have covered that in fantastic detail.
So I wanted to maybe approach it from a slightly different angle, with sort of the Joe’s Garden theme of keeping it upbeat and joyful with some tips and tricks sprinkled in. And at the moment, especially, I’ve tried to put money-saving advice in throughout, because gardening used to be a fairly cheap hobby. But with the cost of living, things are getting expensive, really expensive.
Liz
0:07:06
There was a period when all gardening was always about doing everything as cheaply as possible. And then somewhere along the line, OK, I’m not going to point any fingers, the marketing guys. So not a company, that’s not a specific company, this is like anyone in marketing kind of went, here’s another product that we can make money from, and all of a sudden every gardener had to have, we had to have all these things, and it was like, why have we got to have all this gear, all this equipment, all this kit, all this stuff.
Where traditionally gardeners have made do. We have been really resourceful. And it is quite sad to think that there was a period, I’m guessing from the 80s onwards, where it just became just another way of getting us to spend our money. And people joke about, you know, your tomato, that beautiful homegrown tomato has cost like $500 to make is kind of the quote that they do. But actually, that’s because we’ve just bought into that whole thing of you’ve got to spend loads of money to grow food and you really don’t.
Joe
0:08:21
It’s so true. The gardening companies, again, no names mentioned, they know we love our passion and they know once you get involved in it, it’s so addicting and you get hooked. At least I did, I’m sure you did too. And then what happens is you start to go to the garden centers on the weekend and it starts to become your life.
Then you see a new product and you think, oh, I’ll get that one. So you buy that, you put it in the garden and you realize, well, that was good fun. So then you buy another one. And before you know it, you’ve got this really high tech garden. And I only realized I had done that once I got my allotment last year. So I, after I think it’s about five or six years of waiting, I finally got an allotment.
Liz
0:09:03
Congratulations.
Joe
0:09:05
Thank you. I’ve loved it. It’s such a shame the waiting lists are what they are, but to anybody on a waiting list, it’s well worth it once you get one. And I realized how all of this high-tech stuff that we’ve got, irrigation systems, raised beds, none of it is necessary. If you want to, fantastic. But that’s been such an eye-opener for me. And the allotment, I’ve kept it as sort of a very fair generic allotment, open ground, a couple of very small raised beds built out of upcycled pallet wood, which is my new one of my new favorite things to do.
My carpentry skills are a little bit iffy but we make the best thing about gardening. You don’t have to be a master carpenter or a pro at arts and crafts because ultimately as long as it works who really matters what it looks like and that’s the best part. You can just get stuck in and you can do it very cheap to get started. But I will warn people who are maybe thinking about getting started, once the bug gets you it is very easy to spend your hard earned pennies on all the gear.
Liz – So let me, if you wouldn’t mind going back a bit and talking a a little bit about where your love of gardening came from, because you talk about this as your inspiration in your book, but do you mind sharing a little bit about where you learnt gardening and where your inspiration comes from?
Joe
0:10:38
Yeah, of course. So I don’t think my experience was too unique in the respect that my motivation came from my great-grandmother. I was incredibly fortunate growing up. She lived next door to me, so naturally when my parents were at work or school holidays, I was around there every day. She was my best friend. We did pretty much everything together. And she worked on farms. That was her job. She was essentially a farmer.
And she always had a fantastic garden, and I would be out and about helping normally, for example, might be weeding a flower border and I’d get told off for pulling out the flowers and leaving them the weeds because they look pretty to me. And now writing the book, I’m like, that made sense because I’m big into sort of rewilding and I was doing it from a young age without actually realising what I was doing.
But she taught me in a way that was fun, engaging and inspiring rather than, come on, Joe, and dragging me out into the garden and forcing me to do stuff. And that’s why I tried to carry over into the socials and the book is to make it fun, make it upbeat. And rather than sort of lecture to people or say, you must do this, or this is how it’s done, just give people ideas and let them almost find their own style or their own way of doing things. But I was incredibly lucky, we had sort of gardens next door to each other.
And then on my other side of the family, so I’m half Italian, so that side of the family, my Italian granddad, I think most sort of non-Italian granddads, they’re growing tomatoes and oregano and basil. So I had it on sort of both sides of the family. And it was interesting to compare the styles. So we had sort of the Mediterranean style of gardening and quite a traditional English style of gardening. And I sort of took both sides and then as I got older, put my own little twists on things.
And that’s how we’ve sort of arrived to where we are today. I feel incredibly lucky to have had that introduction because I think I would have found gardening without it, but I probably would have found it around this stage of my life where I’ve had 27 amazing years being out in the garden, creating so many happy memories and just lucky to find my happy space at such a young age.
Liz – Yes, absolutely. So you’ve got your allotment now, but what’s your, have you got a garden at home?
Joe
0:13:14
Yes, so very lucky.
Liz – Tell me a bit about it. What’s it like? What do you grow in it? I’m being nosy. I need to know.
Joe – How long have you got this? I could go on all day.
Joe
0:13:24
So it’s actually my parents’ garden, I’ve sort of hijacked the bottom part. So probably about 30 foot long and 20 foot wide. I’ve deliberately kept it to that size because A, it’s not my garden, so I can’t hijack the whole plot of land, and B, I feel like people can relate more to a smaller space. And that way I can sort of understand when people say, Joe, I’ve got very limited space, or how can you maximise the space you’ve got? So I’ve deliberately restricted myself primarily growing in containers and raised beds, because the soil where I live is not great, to be honest with you.
We’ve tried and tried to improve it, but unfortunately my garden has a septic tank. And I wasn’t keen on the idea of growing straight in the ground, right next to a septic tank. So, sort of by accident, I’ve become a container raised bed gardener. And it’s brilliant. I love it. It allows you to control your crops so much better.
In regards to what I grow, it’s probably easier to answer what don’t we grow. I’ve tried almost everything from things that maybe might surprise people that you can grow in the UK climate. Am I right in thinking you grow peaches? I do, yes. Yes, there are just silly little things like that, that maybe people don’t know we can grow in the UK. I successfully grow kiwis every year. Kiwis love our climate. And what other fun things? Luffers, luffers is a big one that people seem to be enjoying at the moment, sort of the bath sponges. They’re fantastic.
0:15:07
I will admit that I’m very lucky, I’ve got two greenhouses and two poly tunnels, which allows me to experiment a little bit. But this year I’m going back to basics because I’m sure, as you appreciate, we’re incredibly lucky to do this as a job, but it takes up a lot of time and that often came at a detriment to the garden. So instead of trying to grow these fantastic fancy varieties and unusual crops, they can maybe be a little bit harder to grow sometimes when they take a little bit more care and love.
So this year, I’m going back to sort of my roots, which is going to be a very basic garden of tomatoes, leafy greens and quite easy to grow varieties too, because over the last couple of years, we’ve had a lot of… I live in farmland and there can be a lot of disease like blight in my area
1
0:16:11
And I’ve learned, keep it simple, try to use blight resistant varieties. Early varieties have a special place in my heart. I love them, they’re not the best choice. I’m going to try to keep it simple this year so I can actually enjoy the space rather than worrying about, have I done this, have I done that, have I watered this properly, have I wrapped this in frost fleece, just enjoy the space.
Liz
0:16:42
I think, I think we all go through phases of let’s try something wacky, let’s try all the new things that are out. So last year I tried a whole load of new tomatoes which I chose because of their taste, allegedly. I didn’t enjoy them. And so this year I’m going back to, I’m not so much going back to basics, but going back to I know work from my palate.
Joe – Yes, yeah. It just allows you to enjoy the process again. I was putting too much pressure
on myself trying to grow things that maybe aren’t suited for our climate sometimes. So, there’s tried and tested varieties and as well as soft fruits, I enjoy the growing process sometimes more than the harvesting process. I’m one of those people where for me, seeing it emerge from the soil, seeing it germinate, burst into life, that’s the fun part.
And then I tend to give the produce away. I do keep some for myself, but there’s one massive exception to that rule, and that’s soft fruit. So this year I have bought, I’m ashamed to admit quite how much, but I bought a lot of bare root fruit plants. So I’ve got quite a lot of established ones. That’s about what I need now, I need a lot more. So we’re going to be doing a lot with soft fruit this year.
Liz
0:18:11
And what have you got? What have you bought?
Joe – We’ve bought multiple types of gooseberry, multiple types of raspberry, loganberry, pretty much every type of current I could find. So red current, black current, I believe one’s even called white current.
Liz
0:18:33
White current’s great. So you found a pink current?
Joe
0:18:36
Yeah, blueberries, pink breeze, which is, I guess, the pink version of the blueberry. And lots of strawberries and even some trees. So we do have established fruit trees. I’ve got a lovely pear tree. I’ve got six plum trees, which are amazing. Although it’s a battle every year, can we beat the wasps? But we’re adding in apricots, cherry, and I managed to get my hands on a candy floss grape vine, which I’m incredibly excited to try because I’ve been trying them in the shops. So let’s see if we can pull it off in our UK climate. But how about you, Liz? What are you growing this year?
Liz – Oh, so I’m also a fruit person. I like soft fruits because they’re so expensive in the stores and they’re so easy to grow at home. And the only reason they’re expensive is they actually need to be hand-picked. So they haven’t…
I watched a program where they had tried to create a mechanical, like an automated raspberry picker. And it took so long for this thing to carefully get, like, you know, sort of work out exactly where the berry was and then hold it, like, just gently enough but firmly enough to get hold of it but without squeezing and pull it off. It sort of pulled one berry every three to four minutes and then we just said we do it. So although in theory it can do it, it just can’t do it at any speed. So you need to pay people to harvest soft fruits and that makes them expensive.
Plus, they go off really quickly. So it always has to be, it’s with short order and high manual labor costs. So I’m kind of thinking as soon as you pull a fruit off a plant, it’s starting to lose its vitamin C content and its taste, I think. And if you’re keeping it for days, you’ve probably harvested it before it was fully ripe. So the sugars aren’t going to be as sweet. If I can get that at home and that’s what I want. So I have I have autumn fruiting raspberries because they’re so easy to look after. I have an embarrassment of strawberry plants.
Joe
0:20:59
There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Liz – And then and then I have masses of currants. And I’ve actually got a mulberry tree which I don’t know if mulberry counts as a soft fruit but it looks like a soft fruit so I’m going to say it’s a soft fruit. But mulberry trees take a long time to start fruiting so I’ve had it in the ground for two years so hopefully in about another five years I will be able to start harvesting fruit from from it. And then I’ve got, I have an awful lot of natural blackberries in the garden.
Joe
0:21:43
Oh, delicious. They’re one of my favourites. They’re a guilty pleasure of mine. Every, sort of where I am, every September usually, there’s just something about the natural ones that they just, for me, taste incredible. They taste so much better than the cultivated variety.
Liz
0:22:03
So I have got, very nicely, a friend has given me a thornless blackberry, which will go in the ground this year. And I’ll train along a frame. But we do have quite a lot of hedgerows around. So we’ve got quite a big plot here. So we’ve got quite a lot of hedgerows. And I’ll probably just harvest from those. And it’s free food.
Joe
0:22:26
Yeah, fantastic for sort of puddings, desserts, wines, jams. That’s something I’m trying to get into and I know you’re quite big on, am I correct in thinking you’re quite big on making the wines?
Liz
0:22:43
Oh yes, I make masses of homemade wines. I’ve got to start by saying I don’t drink homemade wine, I don’t drink alcohol generally, but I make vast amounts of wine and then I use it in cooking. So I cook off the alcohol and you’ve just got all that lovely flavour. Mr J does enjoy a glass of wine on non-school nights. Yes, we get to our age and still talk about them being school nights! Yeah, I make and I grow a lot of things specifically to make wine with them.
And one of the other things I’m growing and hopefully we’ll get a really decent harvest from this year is I’ve put in a hedge of roses. So these are, and I can’t remember if they’re dog roses or wild roses, but whichever they are, they’re the ones with the, I’m holding my hands in a circle. The rose hips are about an inch or so across and they’re sort of round, a slightly squashed globe. They are huge.
And I just, so it’s the Rosa rugosa plants, which is kind of, which basically is a rugged rose, I think, is what one would take that to mean. Don’t quote me, I didn’t do enough Latin at school to know really what that means, but we’re going to talk about either wild or rugged rows. And so I’ve got this hedgerow that is probably about, I’m guessing, 150 feet long.
Joe
0:24:18
Wow.
Liz
0:24:19
It’s a big garden. We’ve got a big space to play with. So I’ve put in this huge hedge in the hope that there will then be a vast amount of rose hips in the winter or in the autumn. And I don’t do anything with them. I basically I harvest them, stick them in a bag and put them in the freezer and they stay there until I’m ready to use them.
Joe
0:24:42
So rose hip is something I used for the first time this year because I don’t know why, I was always a little bit scared of it. And then this year I made some syrup and jams out of it and it was delicious. It shocked me, a, quite how easy it was, b, there’s absolutely nothing to really be scared of if you do it correctly, and c, it went so far.
I’m the same, so I’ve got about 30 foot of wild rose, dog rose, however we want to call them. And I got a surprising amount from that one bush. I believe it’s actually two bushes now that have sort of met in the middle, right at the bottom of the garden. But that’s an area I’m really trying to learn more about is to, OK, we grow these fantastic crops, but what can we do with them?
And that’s something I try to incorporate in the book as well because, for me, quite often a fruit or a vegetable picked at the correct time and preserved properly is far yummier than a bit of produce brought out of season in the supermarket. I’m a massive, massive fan of pickling so this year I’m going to try some, I’ve heard through the grapevine and I’m not sure how true this is, but apparently pickled watermelon is quite good. How will that work? I’m not entirely sure yet, but we’re going to find out this year. But that’s what I want to try to do to maybe spice things up a little bit this year.
Liz – That sounds fantastic. So we are not pickle fans in this house. I do make some chutneys.
Joe – Oh, I love a good chutney.
Liz – Lots of vinegar in them. And I make flavoured vinegars. But I don’t then pickle foods because I don’t particularly like that real tang of vinegar within foods.
Joe – Yeah, it can be quite an acquired taste.
Liz – So, so yeah, so this year maybe I will encourage you to try some different vinegars as well, some different flavored vinegars.
Joe
0:26:59
Oh, I’d love to. I’d love to. I’ll be following your lead on that.
Liz
0:27:02
Well, we will have a chat when we finish recording and I’ll talk to you about some of those because that might be quite a fun project to do this year. When I chatted with Rob Smith from Rob’s Allotment, he was talking about having made some quince jam or preserve sort of thing. And I said to him, oh, can we do a swap? So when we got to the Garden Press event in February, he sidled over to me with this jar of stuff and he just passed it to me and he started walking away and I went, ‘come back’ and I handed him a half bottle of wine.
Joe – That’s what it’s about, that’s the fantastic part about gardening. By nature I believe us gardeners are quite a generous bunch. We like to share but we also kind of like to what we’ve done and what we’ve made. That’s such an important part of it, sharing with your neighbours, sharing with your friends, sharing with people you’ve just met, somebody you met on a podcast.
Liz
0:28:10
So, here’s my challenge. For next February, when we meet next February, I will bring you some flavoured vinegars, for you to try different flavoured vinegars. If you would bring me a small, and I do mean a really small, like a tiny taster jar of something that you’ve pickled.
Joe
0:28:31
Definitely. Definitely. That sounds like a fun challenge.
Liz
0:28:35
I think that’s a good swap. I can imagine getting there and I’m going to have all these things I’m passing out to people.
Joe
0:28:41
You’re going to need a suitcase at the next garden press event. I go, oh there’s Liz and her little suitcase.
Liz
0:28:48
Well, we went in and I had my handbag searched and I was thinking, please don’t ask why I’ve got half a bottle of wine in there. It wasn’t like a big bottle that I only had half of, it was a half-size bottle. It wasn’t one like I’d already drunk half of.
Joe
0:29:05
I’d love to. It fascinates me, this world of using our crops. So recently I’ve really gotten into zero waste cooking. So taking our vegetables, and it works fantastic with homegrown crops, so taking the vegetables we’ve grown and trying to use as much of it as possible because as you know most of the time most of it is edible and quite a lot of the time the bits we throw away are delicious. A great example that I did recently is broccoli or calabrese where…
Liz
0:29:43
Oh, you chopped up the stems and kind of made them into like a fritter or something, didn’t you?
Joe
0:29:48
Yes, so I’m a little bit strange. I actually quite like to eat vegetables raw. There’s just something about it, I’ve always done it as a child. Runner beans, for me, it’s sacrilege to cook them. I will pick them and eat them raw and it’s sort of a fight between me and my nan as to who gets them first, because she loves them cooked in a roast dinner, and you’ll find me just chomping on them at the allotment.
But broccoli, surprise me, a, how nice it is raw, but that’s maybe quite an acquired taste, but lightly blanched, dipped in a very simple batter mixture, and then dipped in, again, we made breadcrumbs out of old stale bread, maybe put a few dried herbs in it. It was surprisingly nice and it made a fantastic side dish to go alongside the sort of florets at the top. And that’s what we’re trying to do, is just incorporate new recipes. What can we use? Some of them work really well, that was a triumph. Some of them maybe not so much.
Liz
0:30:47
The other thing you can do with the really big fat broccoli, calabrese stems is if you slice them really thinly you can almost use them in the same way that you can with kohlrabi. Both the cabbage family, you know, they’re both brassicas, it’s a fairly similar, it’s a stronger taste from the calabrese than it is from the kohlrabi, but it’s not that dissimilar and it’s like what do you do with all those bits?
Joe
0:31:18
Yeah, kohlrabi actually funnily enough was a new addition to my garden maybe about four years ago and I haven’t gone back since. It is incredible, it’s one of my favourite things to grow, stunning vegetable, very attractive.
Liz
0:31:32
They look like space men, so yeah.
Joe
0:31:34
Yeah, they look like little aliens just popping out the ground and delicious. I’ve been using it as sort of a mashed potato substitute and it’s incredible. Yeah I was a bit late to the party with that one but for anybody who hasn’t tried it I can’t recommend it enough.
Liz – Yeah that is an interesting one. I grew it, I didn’t like it, I cooked it and didn’t like it and then last year I had it sliced very thinly raw and it was like, I love it!
Joe
0:32:07
It’s so versatile though. It is so incredibly versatile. You can chop it up raw in salads. You can blanch it, you can cook it, you can boil it, you can. Another thing we did with it was chop it up very small into very small cubes. Again, I’m doing that, I’m holding up my hand to the camera again. And we sort of very lightly fried it. Oh, it was delicious. There’s just so much you can try with it. You can use the leaves, the foliage. It’s a big thumbs up for me, kohlrabi.
Liz
0:32:40
And do you grow a purple or a green kohlrabi?
Joe
0:32:45
I grow both for my OCD, because I sort of do purple, green, purple, green in a row. And I think it looks really effective.
Liz
0:32:52
Are you harvesting two at a time to keep the pattern going?
Joe
0:32:56
Yeah, yeah. You know me too well. I have to keep the pattern going and then, because they have such a long growing season, I then have the pattern ready to replace the ones I’ve grown. But this year, so last year I went to Wisley, RHS Wisley, and I had a look around their vegetable garden bit where the cafe is, and they were growing giant ones, and I’d never seen them before. So this year I’ve got them on seed order, and I’m going to try to grow… I love growing giant vegetables because, like I say, I enjoy the growing part. If you’re an avid eater, giant vegetables might not be the best one for you. But I’ve got to try them this year because they were almost like the size of sort of a football. I was like, oh, I quite fancy giving that a go.
Liz
0:33:43
Joe, I got some seeds for giant cabbages which came from the world record holder.
Joe
0:33:50
Oh, are we going to see you in the Guinness World Record 2025?
Liz
0:33:56
No, not at all. No, not at all because growing giant cabbages actually doesn’t interest me at all. But I could be persuaded to part with them.
Joe
0:34:03
I mean, a brown envelope might go across the table in a minute. I’ve actually secured giant tomatoes and giant pumpkins. Now, I don’t know how the pumpkin’s going to do in my climate, but, well I’m a tomato person, but for me it’s just the fun of giving it a go. I love it and I want to start getting involved more in the sort of harvest festivals at the end of the year, sort of the local community stuff.
And we’ve got these fantastic online communities, but sometimes there’s a brilliant one just outside your back door in your local gardening club or apartment. I feel like if I can grow a giant marrow or something to bring to the party, it will get really exciting.
Liz
0:34:54
I love the whole harvest festival, harvest celebration things, because so often as gardeners we do all this work at this time of year and then we forget to do the hurrah at the end of the year. You and I were just talking about this before we started recording, wouldn’t we?
Joe – Yeah, I don’t know if you’re the same, but the minute the sun comes out and we hit spring, we feel good, we get the energy, and we hit the garden at 5,000 miles an hour. But then when it comes to September, when all of these harvest parties and local events are happening, you’re almost a little bit worn out because you’ve been going 5,000 miles an hour all summer and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
I love it but it’s just important to keep that enthusiasm up towards the end of the season because you know you’ve got those sort of four or five dark months coming and this year I’m really going to make the most of it because this winter was especially bad where I am. It was just the ground is sodden, it’s really cold. It’s been a bit of a cold and dark one.
Liz – So we’re going to celebrate like mad. Now, Joe, would you come back and talk to me in the autumn again?
Joe – Yes, I would love to, Liz.
Liz – Brilliant. OK, so we are getting very close to running out of time on our recording bit. So I’m going to say, Joe, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I hope it hasn’t been too scary for your first one.
Joe
0:36:29
I’ve loved it. It’s my first podcast. I couldn’t have been a better hand. I’ve absolutely loved it.
Liz
0:36:34
iJoe, thank you so much. I will leave links in the show notes of where you can find Joe on social media and also to his book, Garden to Save the World by Joe Clark, founder of Joe’s Garden. Thanks, everybody, for listening. And Joe, thank you so much for joining me.
Joe
0:36:53
Thank you for having me Liz, it’s been a pleasure.
Announcement at end of Byther Farm Gardening Podcast with Joe’s Garden founder, Joe Clark.
The podcast you’ve been listening to is a Byther Farm production, all rights reserved.
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