In search of the good fruit.

Hello old friend.

After a strong case of burnout, both from professional and personal realms, I am back! Stronger than ever? Perhaps not, there is still an awaiting mountain of emails that need to be scaled, and a YouTube channel that forever demands, yet Substack feels like a small island of refuge.

Only a couple of months ago I was seriously debating jumping ship. The algorithms here have kicked in, and what was meant to be a creative outlet got gobbled up into a bit of a pressure can. But sometimes you just need a little shift in perspective, helped by someone asking me one simple question; why don’t you have your own website?

As a master procrastinator (please watch this hilarious TED talk that breaks it down), I realised that treating my substack like my own website would be far simpler than trying to craft my own from scratch, and it has all the tools I could possibly need to get across what is most important to me. And that is to make growing food as accessible as possible to as many as possible.

With the option to do blogs, livestreams, upload videos, have various pages, it was the answer that was always there yet sometimes you just need a little time to see things more clearly. Time is a good healer, but it is also a good revealer.

One thing that has revealed itself is that I still take on too much. In recent years I have been better at saying no, but I am far from where I should be. There are so many exciting (aka distracting) low hanging fruits all around that are a fun easy pick, yet are all fruits made equal? Certainly not. The low fruit are good when you’re hungry, but often the best fruit is a little higher up, or at a harder to reach location, and when you’re full, you rather focus on the quality rather than the quality.

I have been victim to my own lazy harvesting technique of going after too much of the low hanging fruit, when I already have plenty to be getting on with. That fruit has started piling up and rotting, and so for the last couple of months I’ve had to sort out the rotten from the good, and leave any new fruit I come across on the tree for someone else or someone else to enjoy.

So what kind of fruit is substack? Well when I picked it it was a little unripe, the motion was made, the substack was created, yet the timing was a little premature. I meant well, but meaning well isn’t enough, and as I sorted through the pile of fruit, I found that this particular one has now ripened, and after spending the last couple of months sorting through everything that was piled on top, it is time to truly enjoy it, and it is a fruit I get to share with you.

I am sorry for the radio silence that has occurred. I needed to carefully consider the future of this space rather than coming to a hasty conclusion, or entering into a doom-stroll down this path with no knowing of where it may lead. Sure that sounds like fun at least to begin with, but for me there at least has to be some purpose or destination in mind, and that has now revealed itself to me.

And so I am indeed back, and goodness me does it feel nice to just sit down and finally let some words flow onto the page.

I’ve also missed you the most, the interactions, the ideas, the livestreams, and that is what I realise is at the heart of this. You. This is one big opportunity to collaborate. There’s enough stress in other areas of life, let this be a haven filled with abundance.

There is much to share, but for this first post, I will give you a super brief overview of some the things growing on in the garden.

Yet again this has been an experimental polyculture project for me, with multiple experiments already providing some really interesting results. My favourite of the lot has to be planting mashua at the centre of a vertical runner bean trellis, and now the mashua is weaving between the beans. I really want to do some more content based on polyculture gardening as I find I get a lot of questions coming in about it, and people saying how much they love the feel! I am glad I am not alone thinking that a little chaos creates a feeling of calm yet wonder.

As a garden it has of course been providing food too - with the first of the tomatoes and cucumbers already devoured, alongside peas, potatoes, salad leaves, beans, herbs, edible flowers, and fruit! A new one on me this year is Japanese wineberry - wow is it delicious! The fruit also have a slightly sticky feel - similar to that of a holding a wine gum - but much healthier!

I will film a YouTube tour shortly, and it will feature highlights from this space not only now, but from earlier this season too.

It has been such a fun growing season with Dyfi Plants. Okay, I totally underestimated how much fun I would have with it and how much time it would take up, but the concept has been proved. We have sold to hundreds of individual customers both in person and online, and as a team we have turned our focus to prepping for the next growing season. We are doubling down on local sales, refining our online range, and preparing a lot of associated resources.

Whilst we don’t know if we will do one more online plant sale a little later this season or not, we are about to offer signed copies of books for sale as one core benefit of the nursery has been creating efficient systems for packaging and posting which we can utilise for other products too, and at this moment in time there is nowhere online where you can order signed copies of both my books, and Sam’s, but that is about to change. If you were one of the customers who ordered this season, thank you. We cannot wait for the next growing season, and to have a few months to gain momentum rather than this year where everything popped into existence a month before spring started!

Well it finally happened, I officially love flowers. Zinnias, cosmos, dahlias, sweet peas, poppies - the lot! Earlier this season the herb garden was cleared to make a blank canvas to have a go creating a cut flower garden thanks to multiple sources of inspiration including visiting Millie and Paris of Alma Proust last year.

I decided to opt for a polyculture style of planting most of the flowers, spacing each plant around 20cm (8in) apart and just watch what happens. I am so very pleased with the result, and next year I plan to very much do the same, but perhaps on a larger scale!

Also, if you happen to find a part in one of my VERY old YouTube videos where I said ‘what’s the point of growing flowers because you can’t eat them’ there will be a reward! It would be hilarious to capture that and do a reaction/response video to my old self!

Thanks to partnering with Tracmaster we now have a BCS 2-wheel tractor which has been a total gamechanger. At our site I usually measure things by Llyr-power. Llyr, who is one of my colleagues, is a force of nature, and thus provides a useful measurement to compare things to. For example on a good day I may be 0.7 Llyr-power, and the ride-on mower is about 5 Llyr-power. Now the BCS is like 20 Llyr-power - just don’t tell him that!

Joking aside, Llyr has used the BCS to open up a lot more ground for cultivation this year. From a whole terrace dedicated to growing rare heritage oats, to two large market-garden style patches, the BCS has only just scratched the surface for what we have planned, and has propelled the site forward in development.

Did you know that I am judging a national gardening competition?! Top of the plots is a collaboration between Gardena and The National Allotment society to showcase and celebrate the diversity of gardens in the UK. There is a little over 2 weeks left to enter, and with categories like best small plot and best new plot there is something for everyone. Entering is super easy, just write a little description and share some photos! Please do enter, as I am truly enjoying what is coming in so far, and I also get to visit the finalists! Enter here.

From Friday 12th September to Sunday the 14th of September the annual Wales Permaculture Festival will be hosted at Henbant Permaculture in North Wales. It is such a special location, the festival is always very wholesome, and there are some fantastic sessions lined up. I look forward to seeing some of you there! More info here.

A couple of weeks after the permaculture festival I will be at Henbant again to co-run an introduction to Permaculture Design course with Matt Swarbrick. Whilst we already have enough booked on to guarantee the course will run, there are still a few tickets available. Find out more here.

I have suddenly realised that it is August and I haven’t filmed even one garden yet for the Inspiring Garden series to release over the winter months. I have some time later this month to travel to pretty much anywhere in the UK to film as many gardens as I possibly can. If you know of any exciting food-focused gardens of any scale near you then I want to hear about them! Please do let me know in the comments or by sending me a message!

A new page has turned, time to blow away the cobwebs.

Substack, I’ve missed you.

To my supporters: