transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] This podcast is brought to you by sarahraven.com, which is home to everything you need for a truly beautiful and productive garden. You'll also find great and essential gardening kit and stylish lovely things to have in your house to bring the outside indoors, all inspired by the garden and the house being tied together. There's also plenty of garden inspiration, how-to videos and specialist growing guides. So head over to sarahraven.com today to discover even more. Welcome to Grow, Cook, Eat, Arrange, the podcast of me, Sarah Raven and Huw Richards is joining me again. He was here with me in February when we were talking about the amazing phenomenon that is his life. He started growing veg when he was 11 or 12. Well, as he pointed out in that podcast actually, from his pram really, but his YouTube channel started when he was 11 or 12 years old, which is quite an amazing thing. He now has millions of followers who watch him every week, including half the people in the States as well as the UK. It's just extraordinary. Rather like me, I think he has quite high energy levels, which might verge on the manic rather like me. And so he's actually written already. This is his sixth book, which has just come out actually March the 12th, funnily enough, exactly the same day as my new book on growing cut flowers.

Speaker 2:
[01:43] Fantastic.

Speaker 1:
[01:44] Yeah. Sorry. Hello Huw. That's so rude. I'm rabbiting on. I haven't even said hello to you.

Speaker 2:
[01:49] It's all right. We should do a combined gift set. Someone could win a copy of each.

Speaker 1:
[01:53] That would be nice, wouldn't it? That would be very nice. Huw wrote this book just in case any of you didn't listen to the one in February called Veg in One Bed, which was just literally one raised bed and what you could grow from it. What is fantastic is it literally gives you how long it takes from sowing to harvest which is something I'm always needing to look up, and how much you get, and so you can almost work out your shopping list back to the bed, and that's what's so good about it. In a sense, he's taken that one step further with this new book, which is How to Grow Food, which as I said, he has co-written with Sam Cooper who's a chef he works with. It focuses on 70 veg, and it just has these brilliant information panels that you can see at a glance information. It's one of those books that would sit on the shelf, but it would rarely be on the shelf, I'd say. It has not only growing and variety advice, also what to cook with what you've grown. So tell us how this book came about, Huw.

Speaker 2:
[03:02] Yeah, this is a fun project. So Sam and I had written a book before together. Sam's a really good friend of mine and colleague, and we had created a book called The Self-Sufficiency Garden. So I don't like excuses, but I also like to find out what the actual real world results are. And I was like, how much food can you actually grow on a standard half-sized allotment block? And it turns out it's enough of your five a day for over four adults every day of the year, which is a lot. And yeah, it was something crazy, just over 6,000 portions or something of veg from that space, averaging over 100 portions per square meter. And it was that part, the amount that we could grow per square meter, that after that first book, which was kind of just like you could follow along. It was a case study of the garden and you could just see what happened every single month and have some inspiration. But I was like, Sam, I would love to build on this and actually create something that's really useful, that people can take back and apply in their own gardens based off like however much space they have, be it a couple of square meters or be a big like full size allotment plot. But also do it crop by crop instead of month by month, and let's bring the recipes together and let's bring the preserving side into it as well. That's how it just came about.

Speaker 1:
[04:27] Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[04:28] All my publishers and they're like, yeah, that sounds great. Here we are.

Speaker 1:
[04:32] Hello. It is just cutting it a different way. But if you have 12 favorite vegetables, you can just pick out the 12 from this book and it will take you, as you say, from fork to fork. So from the moment you sow to the moment you finished eating it. And that is great. I mean, that is kind of how we all live, isn't it?

Speaker 2:
[04:54] Yes, exactly. And it's just, I feel like a lot of growing food is massively overcomplicated.

Speaker 1:
[05:02] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[05:03] So one of the things that I did for my side, so Sam did all the cooking, I did all the growing info and it's perfectly 50-50 down the middle. But I just thought, why don't you just break down every single crop into three stages? And that's every single crop in the book, how to grow it in three simple stages. And just hopefully give, I think some people just need a bit of confidence to not have to feel it has to be perfect. Don't worry if it's five centimeters a bit further apart when you're planting out your leeks or anything like that, it doesn't at all matter. So the idea was just create something highly digestible and practical for people. And I'm pleased with it. Definitely word for word, it's the most I've ever crammed in in terms of information. That was a good sales pitch, wasn't it?

Speaker 1:
[05:50] That was a good sales pitch. I'm going to do another one now. But I mean, it basically, I've been growing vegetables a very long time, but I made some notes of things that I didn't know. And I love that, that you are 27 years old. And I am 63. And yet you still learn. And that is one of the really brilliant things about gardening, I think. But so potatoes, I have, it's true, mulched them to protect against frost. But it had never occurred to me to mulch again with grass clippings once the home has fully expanded to help with water retention and obviously fertility, etc. And so I was looking at the picture in the book where there were these pots of potatoes and they've got this green stuff all over it. And I honestly looked for about a minute thinking, well, what on earth is that? Because that's not a potato home. It's just like, but anyway, I then discovered it was grass clippings. So how did you decide to do that as a system, which I'm going to copy?

Speaker 2:
[06:53] So I'm a permaculturist. And what that is, is just looking at systems and patterns in nature that you find, and then think, how do I translate that to help me with making things more productive in my garden? And so the whole point of mulches and utilizing what is natural is kind of just the way I like to work. I think a really simple thing is that you can look at, say, a woodland and you can look at the different layers of plants, and you've got your climbing layer, you've got your ground cover, and then you can just put all of those elements together, and then you've got a design package to then design a garden, and then just plug in the plants that do occupy those niches. So it's just with potatoes, just trying to keep it simple and just let nature kind of work its magic. I'm not a scientist, so I just look at what works well and trust in the process. At the end of the day, look, a lot of people get really excited about microbes, and I'm so happy for them. And the issue with me is that I can't see them, but I can see how my plants look. And if my plants look healthy, and if they're happy, and if they're producing, then that's me having faith in the fact that I'm doing something right. And that has always been the case for me with particularly using grass clippings in the right way.

Speaker 1:
[08:18] Yeah, well, I'm going to try it. And the other, there are a few, the other tip that I spotted, which I really genuinely didn't know. I've always struggled with carrots. I mean, partly because we're on clay soil like you here. And I adore freshly pulled carrots. And I do know that brilliant thing that you talk about, which is the push-pull technique, which I just love that. It's so brilliant, isn't it? But I didn't know about putting a plank on your row of carrots to keep them cool. Because heat, like with lettuce, inhibits germination. And that is just such a clever thing. So I'm definitely doing that.

Speaker 2:
[08:56] That's another permaculture thing from a guy called Bill Mollison. Yeah, it's a simple hack because what you're doing is you're preventing the evaporation of moisture in certain plants, including parsnips as well. That where if they dry out during that phase, you're going to get sporadic germination.

Speaker 1:
[09:15] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[09:15] And I don't like sporadic germination.

Speaker 1:
[09:18] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[09:19] Especially if it's like parsnips.

Speaker 1:
[09:20] Yeah. It takes ages and you don't know until it's too late to resew. Exactly. Yeah. And there was one other I jotted down, which is, and I get asked this so much because I teach about vegetables two or three times a year, not so much now. But one of the questions I get asked most is that thing where your courgette gets almost like blossom end rot, which you write quite a bit about with the fruiting veg, where it's sort of growing perfectly well and then it just drops off and it rots at halfway down. And I have really struggled with that, particularly with the early cropping ones like Bianca, which is one of the separate stuffing ones. And what you say, which is quite right, I think, is that I planted mine along a path so they're in a row. Whereas if you put them in blocks a bit like sweet corn, they then will cross pollinate much better. And so you will get much better pollination. So you won't get that dropping.

Speaker 2:
[10:18] Yeah, it's just trying to think, okay, what is the issue here? Now, there are other things that can cause blossom end rot as well, like kind of sporadic watering.

Speaker 1:
[10:29] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2:
[10:31] And calcium and so for basically each crop, I just think what is that challenge that most gardeners will come across at some point, potentially in their first season and they're like, I don't know what to do. So I was just kind of like retracking my whole kind of growing history and then all of the people that I speak to and try and make sure that I can bust some of those issues that they get.

Speaker 1:
[10:54] Yeah, very good. So there are two questions I want to ask you before we go on to your April sowing veg list. So the first one is, if you are busy like I am, and I can't spend my life growing veg, I mean, the self-sufficiency thing is sort of all, it's sort of great if you can do it full-time, but how much time genuinely do you think it takes to grow the veg that you talk about in your self-sufficiency book for a family of four?

Speaker 2:
[11:27] Yeah, people really don't like my answer.

Speaker 1:
[11:29] No, it's more than full-time.

Speaker 2:
[11:32] No, no, no, it's far less. But people don't like it because they just don't understand how. But the issue is, is that if you've got a challenge, like you're trying to grow as much food as possible, you have to approach it in a very different way of growing. And actually, all the time is saved by carefully planning out in winter. So for the self-sufficiency garden, what we did was, well, what I did was I just laid out, I did a monthly planting plan month by month. I knew everything that was going everywhere. I knew what I needed to sow the month before to succession plant. And so it was actually quite easy to do in the growing season because I already knew what I was doing. But someone new to gardening isn't going to get that. So it's a skill. And I'll just be completely honest with you. If you're the kind of person that like me, that like wants to be really good on the piano and then has a lesson and then realizes it's really hard, you can kind of get really deflated and it's the same with gardening. But if you just like stick at it a bit, as soon as you start to understand, oh, so that's what an octave is and that harmonizes and that's it, you know, all these different things. It's suddenly you get you reach this point where everything kind of goes up together. And that's what like I kind of realized with the gardening is that if you just understand the basic principles, which you will get in the first year, but all plants want pretty similar things. So that's a lot of the kind of thinking out of the way. And so that's kind of really what I wanted to do. But in terms of timing, this is the crazy part. And I wouldn't include the harvesting side of it, because I'm like, don't, you can rush it. But it doesn't actually take that long to harvest at the end of the day. But I would say on average, over the season, for all of those crops that we grew, it is maybe like four to six hours a week, including watering.

Speaker 1:
[13:30] Well, that is amazing. That really is amazing.

Speaker 2:
[13:32] But that's only if you spend the time to carefully come up ahead.

Speaker 1:
[13:35] So you've got no failures, basically, is what you're saying.

Speaker 2:
[13:38] I remember doing the calculation after, because we measured everything. We measured every single gram of food that came out. I didn't measure the marrows, because I was like, that's cheating. So none of the marrows got in. So really, I could have fed a whole town, you know what it's like. But I remember then doing the time calculation, and I had to do it two or three times just to make sure it's right, because I was like, oh, dear, this goes against what everyone thinks. And that's like really, I love that. It's really exciting. But unfortunately, a lot of people don't believe it. And that's hard.

Speaker 1:
[14:14] Yeah, well, we can read your books and we will believe it. Okay, I've got one other slightly naysayer question, I'm afraid. So that's fine. So that's on the time, but then on space. So here, I do have a big garden, it's over an acre and a quarter, but we only have a tiny proportion, probably a tenth of that devoted to veg. We do have a glass house with an earth bed in it. But so I come from a slightly different angle to you to production in that I really like cut and come again crops, and I don't like things that sit in the ground for many, many weeks without getting a harvest and then the harvest is a one-off. So for instance, parsnips 20 weeks from seed to harvest, Swede 24, you very generously give all this information. Swede 24 weeks, celeriac 24 weeks, celery 16 weeks, cabbage 16 to 20 weeks. No, thank you if you're me because I don't have this space. But anyway, you give the information, but I'm just interested that you always include things like Swede, which I would controversially like to say, I think farmers should grow and not vegetable growers, home vegetable growers.

Speaker 2:
[15:25] I understand completely. Yeah. I'm allowed to defend myself.

Speaker 1:
[15:30] That's the whole point.

Speaker 2:
[15:32] So I love it when people bring up those kind of things because my simple answer is that's what you enjoy doing.

Speaker 1:
[15:40] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[15:40] So if you enjoy doing it, do it. There's no guilt needed in gardening. If you like digging, just dig. I don't care. The fact that you're growing and having fun, that's what matters to me.

Speaker 1:
[15:51] Yeah. Okay. Can I come back at you now then?

Speaker 2:
[15:53] Of course.

Speaker 1:
[15:53] Because I do. I love doing that. But why would I want to grow bleed and Swede? Because I can buy them. They're really cheap and they take 24 weeks. So I would rather use that precious ground, still doing my wellness, kind of getting out there, looking after myself by gardening. But it wouldn't be on Swede.

Speaker 2:
[16:11] Well, you don't have to grow Swede. You're an adult. So you can pick and choose what you want. What I would say is Swede, you could get first harvest in about six weeks from the tops when you thin out. So that would be a cut and come again. The other way that we've been able to produce a lot of the food is, well, actually, look, I'm not really into leafy stuff.

Speaker 1:
[16:36] No, I could tell.

Speaker 2:
[16:39] So it's like a lot of the leafy stuff, you can act like cut and come again, like onion leaves, like beetroot leaves, like carrot tops. That's fine. They just keep producing. But look, I'm after flavor. But if you want your salad, go ahead and have the salad.

Speaker 1:
[16:54] You want your steak. Okay. We'll agree to differ on that. So before we finish, I want to move on to your April sowing list. So I think you've got five or six things that you really feel are absolute must sows for April. I'd love to hear what they are before we finish.

Speaker 2:
[17:12] Yes. Yeah, absolutely. What I would also just say based on the last topic is, my favorite thing to do is just go and visit other people's gardens, because you see what makes them tick, and they have been a different perspective, and I'm like, oh, I love that. I think that's really important. If you can this year, just check out something like the NGS, and just go and just have fun nosying, because gardeners are very nosy creatures.

Speaker 1:
[17:42] They are. Very competitive too.

Speaker 2:
[17:44] I'm enabling you to nose. But anyway, in April, April is fun because we're approaching, depending where you are in the UK or the world, your last average frost date. For me, for a bit of a grace period, I aim for mid-May. For some people, it might be end of April. You can start thinking a lot more about the tender crops that are really fast to grow. If you sow these in March, they'll be way too big to put out, like your squash. Any squash, a really nice staple of mine that I then grow and keep over winter because you can't do much cut and come again over winter. But I can take from my stored harvest like Crown Prince just roasting that such a nice dependable squash to have. Another thing as well that because it just grows so quickly, Runner Beans. Now, you probably know this, but a lot of people don't. Runner Beans came to the UK actually as an ornamental. We didn't realize it was edible. But the really cool thing about Runner Beans is that you can eat flowers, they're like a really nice garnish. They've got a nice beany flavor.

Speaker 1:
[18:54] I was so happy to see that in the book. I was so happy to see that.

Speaker 2:
[18:58] If you're getting desperate, you can even cook the leaves. You can eat pumpkin leaves, you can eat cucumber leaves. There's so much food that's growing in your garden that you probably don't even realize is. So if you ever like a little bit short, that's fine. So yeah, Runner Beans, Black Knight, that's a fun one. You got White Lady. I really like to actually plant a mix of both the red flowering and the white flowering. Ones together.

Speaker 1:
[19:22] Yeah, I totally agree.

Speaker 2:
[19:23] And then the other thing is back to kind of like the squashy realm. For Cucumber is Market More. And Market More is like my dependable outdoor go-to variety. It's just fantastic. Don't get me started on all the cucumber salad recipes that I have in my head. And then you have courgettes, obviously. Now, I think courgettes are great because I've discovered that I can chop them up and put them in the air fryer. By the way, this air fryer was a gift. I did not buy this. It was against my will. So I'm just making the most of what's been given to me.

Speaker 1:
[20:02] It's for your chips to go with your steak.

Speaker 2:
[20:05] Well, exactly. Some people cook steak in an air fryer, but no, can't start and skill it. Anyway, something like courgettes, bit of cauliflower, bell pepper, just that with a bit of like proper seasoning, like some salt and smoked paprika, bit of chili or Cajun spice. Just that's like one of my go to side dishes. So courgettes are great for that. Like Romanesco and Black Beauty.

Speaker 1:
[20:31] You know how Instagram sometimes is really annoying, but also sometimes really brilliant. And literally this weekend, I saw that the most fantastic recipe on Instagram. I'm afraid I don't even know who's doing it. But they literally were cutting down from the stem end to the flower end of a courgette with a very fine sharp knife all the way down, leaving it intact just like you would if you were cutting an onion. So it's left as a sort of tying it together one end. And then they turned it over and did it again, so that you basically get all these tiny strands of courgette, but they're all held together at the flower end, if you saw me. And then they dip that into a batter and then into a flour and then fried it like a sort of tempura.

Speaker 2:
[21:18] Naughty.

Speaker 1:
[21:18] It was amazing. It was like it's fan. Yeah, I'm copying it. You can copy it too.

Speaker 2:
[21:23] I love that. Thank you. You slightly changed my life again.

Speaker 1:
[21:28] Anyway, let's finish your list before we get too excited.

Speaker 2:
[21:32] You know what's so like funny is I used to think growing flowers is such a waste.

Speaker 1:
[21:36] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[21:37] Like when you could just grow food and then unfortunately, you're one of the people that has like converted me to making sure I grow some flowers as well.

Speaker 1:
[21:46] Excellent. I'm glad to hear it. So tell us about a couple of flowers then.

Speaker 2:
[21:51] Yes. Well, again, you've obviously got like hardier ones, but April love nasturtiums, just any kind of mix. You've got lots of different mixes to choose from because you can get climbing ones, you can get like apricot ones. A nice one is like a tip top mix. Especially if you're new to growing, just get a mix and plant them out and just enjoy the color and enjoy the spice and it's such a good thing for bumblebees. Then another thing of mine is borage.

Speaker 1:
[22:24] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[22:25] I love borage is just apparently I was doing some research and the average borage plant has 950 flowers and I think it can replenish its nectar every five minutes per flower.

Speaker 1:
[22:38] That's incredible.

Speaker 2:
[22:39] So please grow some borage guys.

Speaker 1:
[22:41] And it's self-seed so it just self-perpetuates and it's got such chunky leaves. If you don't want quite as much of it as self-seeds, you can just pull it out in a trice. Yeah, it's a brilliant plant.

Speaker 2:
[22:51] And it's blue, which is quite a rare color.

Speaker 1:
[22:53] And it's blue and it's the leaves edible. You might think, oh, but they're so they're so sort of furry or even prickly. But actually in Italy, they wilt it down and put it almost like you might use a spinach, but it's peppery with ricotta in a tortellini.

Speaker 2:
[23:09] Wow.

Speaker 1:
[23:09] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[23:09] I like that.

Speaker 1:
[23:10] Yeah. Thank you, Huw. That's utterly brilliant. And I'm going to get you to join me again in a couple of months to do some more what we're saying then and also Sam Cooper, the chef that you work with. I'm going to get him to talk about the food when we get into harvesting time proper in June, perhaps, so that would be great.

Speaker 2:
[23:29] I could listen to Sam talk about food and cooking and ingredients for hours and I get to. So I hope you enjoy it.

Speaker 1:
[23:37] Good. Thanks so much. See you soon.

Speaker 2:
[23:40] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[23:45] Thanks very much for listening to Grow, Cook, Eat, Arrange with me, Sarah Raven and the great young vegetable grower, who's become such a phenomenon. And the guardian, I think, called him something like the new voice of gardening or something. And I can see that. I can definitely see that. Next week, I'm joined by Adam, my husband, Adam Nicholson. And we're actually going to talk about something dear to our hearts, which is the garden at Sizzlinghurst. And Adam is going to talk about the history. Well, it's really Adam's episode. I mean, I'm going to interview him about his grandparents making the garden at Sizzlinghurst. And then we're going to take it right up to the current day and the triumph that Troy Scott Smith has created with the National Trust, alongside the National Trust in the White Garden, et cetera, at Sizzlinghurst. And that Dan Pearson and Troy have created in the new garden at Delos, which is controversial. Some people don't like it. Adam and I both absolutely adore it. We love Greece and we love the garden in the new garden at Sizzlinghurst called Delos. So it will be a great pleasure to have Adam here next week. So I hope to see you then. You can find more information, photos and advice sheets on all the plants and recipes we talk about on this podcast by heading to the show notes or at sarahraven.com/podcast.