What’s your book about? It’s my friendly beginner’s guide to gardening that is all about giving people the confidence to start their gardening journey. If you’ve never tried gardening before, you can pick it up and hopefully feel inspired and excited to begin, rather than fearful. And if you’ve gardened before, it’s still full of new ideas and projects try your hand at, whatever outdoor space you have.
What one piece of advice from it would you like to share? That becoming or being a gardener is just about starting. You don’t need to have loads of space, loads of kit or loads of knowledge already. Starting is by far the most important thing, because if you don’t plant it, it won’t grow.
What first sparked your interest in gardening? One of my favourite places is Kew Gardens, and about 13 years ago I found myself in the shop there after a visit. There was a whole wall of seeds, full of amazing food that I could grow, so I bought some packets and took them home. I love to learn by doing, so once I began, I was completely obsessed and I have been ever since.
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What is the best part of your job? The variety and the fact that curiosity is at the heart of everything I do now. I wasn’t very good at working in an office, to other people’s timelines. Now, every day is different. I get to write, podcast and create content, but ultimately it all relies on getting out in the garden, being led by whatever I think is interesting and trying new things constantly. I get to spend my time observing and interacting with nature in my garden, which is what I love about it so much.
Can you share your biggest gardening mistake or failure? When I was new to gardening, I definitely made the mistake of putting tender things out in the garden too early, and still to this day I am not always as diligent as I should be with hardening off. I am also guilty of sowing too many things and then not getting round to finding space for all of them. But I don’t really see them as failures, because I think that you have to get stuck in to learn things and that’s just part of the process.
What do you wish you’d known earlier? I wish when I started that I hadn’t seen gardening as a load of rules that I needed to understand and remember, like crop rotation or soil pH or what weeds you can’t put in the compost bin and how to sanitise tools. I wish I’d seen my garden as a kind of playground to experiment in: a dynamic living thing that’s going to teach me things and nourish me in lots of different ways, and that I just need to get stuck in and not be afraid of getting things wrong.
What’s your guilty gardening secret? I am quite bad at watering houseplants. A few that I care about do really well, but many have perished.
GIVE IT A GROW: SIMPLE PROJECTS TO NURTURE FOOD, FLOWERS AND WILDLIFE IN ANY OUTDOOR SPACE
by Martha Swales
- Penguin Life, £18.98
- ISBN 978-0241710364
- SQUIRREL_13986359
What’s your favourite garden? My mum’s. It’s an incredible oasis – there are plants on every wall, flowers everywhere, it’s alive with insects and birds, and stunningly beautiful. Luckily, she lives nearby so I pop in all the time. These days, we both learn a lot from each other. It’s a very beautiful thing.
Not many people know this about me… I compete in strongwoman competitions, so when I’m not in the garden or working in TV as a producer and director, I do things like pull buses and lift rocks.
Anything exciting in the pipeline? The thing that I’m really excited about at the moment is the podcast that I host with my friend Jamie Walton, who is also a gardener. It’s called Home Grown with Martha and Jamie and is a weekly podcast where we share lots of seasonal, hands-on, practical advice about growing food and flowers, and creating pollinator-friendly spaces that are abundant with wildlife.
