Nobody Panic - How to Grow Things with Alice Vincent

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Stevie and Tessa are joined by the amazing Alice Vincent, author of: 'Why Women Grow: Stories of soil, sisterhood and survival', to talk about all things growing. One expert and two people who have one massive cactus and one fake Gerbera between them, get right down to the roots of why we grow, and weed out the myths about gardening when you've only got a tiny window box to work with. A lovely, lovely episode.Subscribe to the Nobody Panic Patreon at patreon.com/nobodypanicWant to support Nobody Panic? You can make a one-off donation at https://supporter.acast.com/nobodypanicRecorded by Naomi Parnell and edited by Aniya Das for Plosive.Photos by Marco Vittur, jingle by David Dobson.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/nobodypanic.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/nobodypanic. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, I'm Carriad. I'm Sarah. And we are the Weirdo's Book Club podcast. We are doing a very special live show as part of the London Podcast Festival. The date is Thursday, 11th of September. The time is 7pm and our special guest is the brilliant Alan Davies. Tickets from kingsplace.com. Single ladies, it's coming to London.

True on Saturday, the 13th of September. At the London Podcast Festival. The rumours are true. Saturday the 13th of September. At King's Place. Oh, that sounds like a date to me, Harriet. Would you panic with me, Stevie? And hello to Tessa.

Hello, thank you for having me. You're lucky. I was going to try and make some sort of plant reference and with plant link, but I can't. I'm just going to go straight in with sort of just literally what's happening. I believe in you. We have a third person with us.

Who will it be? Me and Tessa, as you know, we're very bad at gardening. We've done that house plant episode that didn't have any tips in it. And everyone wrote in and said, that wasn't helpful. So we decided to, to enlist somebody that I've sort of known and not known for a long time.

You may know her on Instagram already. Her handle is at Naughty Culture, sort of like an N-O-G-H-T-I culture, that's just in case you didn't get the full thing, or on Twitter at Alice underscore Emily, but her actual name is Alice Vincent. She is a writer, a green-fingered woman, who I have literally stared at your Instagram, for so long being like, God, your plants look good.

Welcome to the podcast, Alice. Thank you so much. It is really fun to be talking to you because I feel like I have been very aware of your writing for a really long time. And we've sort of weirdly circled each other in the incestuous world of London people writing things. Yes. Since we're a tiny amoeba. And here we are.

It's a very nice to be here. And your garden is flourishing. it's a real source Yeah, well it's all relative, Alice, isn't it? I've had to throw out my second succulent of the year. It's pretty much the first week of the year. So that's where I'm at. But you've got a book out.

Why Women Grow? Do you want to explain a little bit about the book before we kick in to, please can you help me with our plants? Of course, yes. So the book is, it's not a practical term. I'll put that out there, but there are ones that written that.

are a bit more helpful in that way. But why women grow, essentially like a lot of people in lockdown, I got very weird and lonely and cut off from things and started questioning stuff quite deeply, mostly, what is it to be a woman? What is it to be marrying someone? What is it to maybe have a child or not? And I decided to solve this by going on a tour of gardens

belonging to strangers, 45 strangers, around the country, and then some parts of Europe. and I spoke to an incredible range of women. And we spoke about all manner of things in life and womanhood in their gardens. And these conversations I thought were just going to be about gardening and they're not there about fertility and challenge and creation and protest and identity. And it was really, really fun. And I now feel I have this sort of incredible community. And it's telling their stories.

So, yeah, that's why women are. It is very deep, isn't it? Because there's something about when, well, I just know from my very small experience in not keeping things alive in plant pots that when it dies, the plant hasn't died. My ability to care for something has been challenged. And I immediately don't often consciously, but then sometimes will, a few days later, be like, I don't think that was about the plant. I think that was about me as a woman and how I probably will never be able to be a mother.

Like that is the, I don't want to say that's it, but it's it. I'm looking at the cactus, it's a baby. That's not, but it is. I do think it's, you're right. People bring out this whole plant mum narrative. And that nurturing thing was something I really wanted to interrogate, because I've also met with people who didn't want to have children and gardened because they didn't want to have children.

And that's really interesting too. And I think it's very telling that it was during that very, over the past few years, when things were really turbulent bad, we couldn't leave our houses, people started growing in a way that they'd never really wanted to grow vegetables before. People wanted to be outside and wanted to raise plants. And yeah, so we do it for all sorts of reasons. And because it's often just seen as one of our many domestic duties,

it's not looked at or interrogated at all. So hopefully the book will do that. Excellent. It sounds absolutely incredible. Did it change your perspective? on yourself, on your, on your feelings about marriage and men and things like that, did you come away, did you come away a different person, blossomed, if you will, grown as a different plant?

I think I came away, yeah, did I bloom? I think I've come away both a calmer, more empathetic and also angrier feminist than I was before, which was quite an angry feminist. So all of those things, yeah, it really did. it was a huge, you know, I am making air quotes personal journey, but it really was. I did end up getting married. I'm having a baby a matter of days after the book comes out. So I guess we've made some decisions on that front.

But more than that, I just found the whole process really, genuinely really wonderful to go and meet all these incredible people I never would have encountered before and realised that behind every garden and behind every woman you see in a garden, there's a lot going on. And we make spaces for ourselves because society often doesn't allow us the space that we need. So, yeah, it was great. I feel really lucky to have been able to have done it. Amazing.

Sounds wonderful. And so you mentioned that you have, you know, you have, of course, written other books. I'd say that book is for everybody because it just feels like that's like a book that, whether you're interested in gardening, if you're not interested in gardening, we're all interested in stories and why people do things and like the deep kind of elements that you connect with nature and all of that. Of your books, which would you recommend for people who practically wanted to start gardening and just how, I just don't know how. So there's one called How to Grow Stuff. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah,

that'll do the job. That was 20 plants that I grew on my balcony and it will do house plants. It will do herbs. It does a few edibles. And it does, very, very simple flowers and it's written very plainly. And I gather that people have found it really permission granting and exactly what you need. If you're like, I'm terrified of all of this. Right. If you don't want to tell anyone you don't know what a perennial is, the book will save you. That's how to great stuff. What's a perennial? It's a really good question. A perennial is a plant that looks like it's dead over winter often, but we'll come back and surprise you in the spring and it's not dead at all. Me, I'm a perennial.

Praniel! She looks so dead in winter. I hate the winter so much. So I'm using deadhead you. It's the opposite. Yeah. No, no, you just leave me be. I just leave it be. Don't deadhead me. Do our deadheader? Yeah, no, we just want to let you go brown and crispy. That's me. Have your moment. Yeah. And then, oh, one day in March it'll be like a little green shoot. We're like, hi, welcome back. That's me. Is the opposite an evergreen? I really, Hermione Granger got my hand up here. Is the opposite of Brennan Evergreen? No. I'm leaving. slightly more technical. The opposite would be an annual, which is a plant that you sew, so you sow the seed of an annual in, say, March. It will be completely fantastic over summer.

It'll really do its thing. And then once it's flowered and gone to seed, that's it. No more annual. All done. Burns bright, not very long. The sort of Janus Joplin of the plant world. What's the point of that? I mean, actually, no, the point of it is because, you know, live fast, die hard. You know, that's sort of, no, live fast eye young. Does it leave some seeds behind the annual? Exactly, yeah. So the annual, if you leave an, and if you grow from seed and you put in your garden and then by sort of September, October time, you're just, I'm so done with gardening,

I need to go back to like whatever else I was doing before I got plant obsessed. And you haven't deadheaded it. What it will do is it'll shoot out seeds all over your flower bed or your pot or your windowsill. And then it'll do its own thing. And then next year you'll get surprised by another annual. So it does keep going. Oh, God, that's the point of it. You never know where your next annual's coming from.

Pretty exciting. If it's something like a nasturtium, you only ever need to sew them once because they're just like, hi, all the time. You can't get rid of them. I really like that. That's me. So sew me once, can't get rid of me.

I don't know what I really know where that when I'm going to. You do know where I'm going to pop up. You do. I'm very predictable. Okay, so what sort of tools we're looking at? for you've you've got say boxes, window boxes or plant, you don't have a garden garden, but you feel that you want to create something because my go-to has been, oh, just bylads of fake plants, I don't want to do that. I want to actually have real life

and in my house. What are the kind of your basic tools to start with? Honestly, up until about a year ago, I used a child's trowel for basically everything. Great. You really don't go wild in the garden. they're set up to make you spend money on stuff that you don't need. So you don't need to go and buy like a mattock, which is a, I need to be fun but unnecessary. You're damn right. I don't need to go. Do you know how I would?

Go on to my head. What's a mattock? I think it's a pronged, a big, this boy. Big boy, long boy. Trident. What is it? Is that, you're right. It is that kind of thing.

Oh, great. Good one. It's quite, it's a real pole dark tool. It looks like it shouldn't still exist, but it's really useful if you are more established in gardening. You don't need to go and buy one of those, or indeed, even anything like a hand spade or anything like that. What you need is the biggest container you can fit on your balcony or your window box or your windowsill, and you need to make sure that it's got something that will let the water out in the bottom, ideally a hole. Because the biggest mistake people make when they're planting for the first time is they try to keep something alive,

in these tiny little pots that you might buy from like urban outfitters or Sainsbury's, right? The more space that a plant has, the more it'll be allowed to do its own thing. And it will kind of look after itself. So the soil won't dry out as regularly. If it wants to set seed, it has more room to do that. It's got more room for the roots to grow. So I've always found that you have a big container. It will largely look after itself.

So just get a really big, it can be a bucket. Like it doesn't need to be fancy. That's a place to start. And then you can fill that with compost or soil, ideally peat-free. We might not have time to go into peat, but basically don't buy peat. So essentially, peat bogs are the British equivalent of rainforests. They trap billions of tons of carbon. And every year, the horticulture industry disrupts them and digs them up so we can have

bedding plants, which is not really something we should be doing in a climate crisis. So the peat-free campaign has been something of a horticultural nerdery, but in the last year we've seen supermarkets start to stock peat-free soil, so it's a lot more easily accessible. So just buy peat-free soil, if you're buying soil. And then you've got your big box with lots of soil in it, and from there, you can kind of do what you want, but you've got the real basics of like space and good growing matter,

and you need to put it somewhere where it gets a fair bit of sunlight. Frequently we'll overwater things and we'll shove it in a dark corner. It's got no access to light. We're like, why is it dying? I water it every day. And it's like, it hasn't. Plants make food out of light. So if they can't see the light, they're sort of just running.

It's like the equipment of just being dunked in a bath endlessly when actually you want a sandwich. So yeah. Right. And there's a lot of, you mentioned about the kind of hole in the bottom of the pot. One of the things that I did was when I, you know, before I found out about you supposed to have a hole, my stages were, I think all the roots just rotted and I just like drowned them all. Then I was like the hole in the bottom. There was a hole in the bottom in a little dish, but then I didn't raise it. Basically, there's a drainage system that is necessary for plants,

isn't there? What is the best one to do? Because I still haven't really got there. Because at that point I was like, drainage, I'm out. What am I? A Roman creating an aqueduct. You know, I didn't know what to do. You just need a hole. Right. Right.

Okay. Fine. Yeah. There'll be a lot of, there's a lot of talk about using fancy pebbles or broken bits of crockery or slowing down the water. As long as it has a means of the water getting out, which can be a hole. Or, I mean, frankly, I've got some containers that are. massive and they don't have any holes in, but because they're so big, it kind of all comes out in the wash. But really, if you're dealing with, say, the equivalent of a storage box, like one

of those plastic crates that everyone's got lurking somewhere, put a few holes in one of those, and that will be fine. Say you've got, say, a antique French wine box. Okay. Beautiful. And you've put it, you've drilled the hole with your drill, because you remembered about the drainage. but then you've put it just directly onto the concrete, so it's not raised. So the whole, and then you just hope for the best. Is the whole moot? Is the whole moot?

Exactly. Do I need to raise it up in order for the hole to come out? Or yes, you're saying yes. I do, ideally, yes. I'm actually saying, I'm thinking now of my mother's tiny ceramic pot stands that she had everywhere on the patio when we were kids. I don't use them. Some people do, I don't.

Water, as we know, gets into all manner of tiny spaces. So it will find, you know, gravity is our friend. in this situation. It will be okay. Okay. Oh, that's good to know. Thank you so. I was like, how are we raising all of our pots?

Like, who's buying pot raisers these days? Lots of people. Okay. The water will seep out underneath. Not me, though. Okay. Yeah, just the water, as long as it has a hole and it's not a hermetically sealed box, you'll be fine.

Perfect. Okay. And I've had no question about, unless you have more pot-based questions. No, I'm happy with my pot. How do you grow pot? No. I've got a question about small garden situation. So say you've got like a bit of garden.

And I think because that's the other sort of like I think my friends fall into two camps. One's like the urban gardener as Tesla is next to me. And then one is a bit of garden outside, frightens them. Let's just not look at it. Let's not look at it at all. A paddling pool occasionally in summer, that's all we're going to do there. what you've got a patch of grass there's probably some soil involved and there's nothing else like in it what's the first thing you're doing to kind of you know get going if you want you're sort of

looking at it being like maybe I'll plant but where and what so if you have boundaries by which I mean a fence or the edge of a garden or a growing space which I imagine you do unless you're living on a landed estate in which case I imagine don't have a reason to panic anyway but um So if you've got boundaries, the thing that actually really transforms a growing space, and that doesn't matter whether that's a tiny balcony or, you know, a small urban garden is growing up because you can make your grass look beautiful and you can have these little flower beds down the side, but you're still going to have a whacking great big fence, which if you're in an urban environment and it's anything like mine, it's sort of being pushed over by the neighbours

and you don't really want to get into all of that. So it's probably quite ugly. So you can get plants called climbers, which do as the name would suggest, and they grow up. And they grow very quickly. So things like a clematis or a honeysuckle or even ivy. They grow really fast. They grow up. They will cover your boundaries, is what we call in kind of a garden design sense. And suddenly what you're transforming is this sort of green little box where you put a pattern pool into something that looks more like a green erasus.

And that's the same. I did that on the balcony as well. So that wasn't even that complicated. I didn't even grow climbers. I just turned one pot upside down beneath another pot, which means that you're raising a pot up to about three foot. And then if you grow tall things from there, suddenly you've got a differentiation in height.

So not all of your plants are at like two foot tall, which looks very flat. Instead, you've got big ones that are like up that head height and then little ones alone, you get this illusion of greenery. When you do walk past a balcony that's gone, up and around, you do immediately think, wow, well, there lives, nature's, nature's own handyman. Yeah.

You think, you do, you are like, that's a whole different kettle of fish than just a few pots on the, you know. Do I would love to do a honeysuckle border with the climbers doing? Boundary, please. Sorry, my honeysuckle boundary. I would be going sort of up and around the window because that's what I'm working with. Beautiful. Thank you so much.

Would I need to put a stick? When they say climbers, do I need to help them climb? Do they need sticks and bits and a ladder? Yes. Not a ladder. So you can quite often, if a climber is being sold in, say, a garden centre or online, it will come with its own mini stick situation scaffolding. You can also buy some or you can kind of construct it if you're the kind of person who has,

I don't know, like half an old era. So much about gardening, especially rookie gardening, is sort of like, let's see what we can do with this. old ladders actually do look. I had one of my old balcony. They do look quite lovely, just propped up and you can put plants on the steps and that's something. But yes, in terms of your window, what I would do is probably train some wires,

which sounds technical but isn't essentially if you can put some screws in the wall, which I feel like you've got to drill to drill holes in vintage antique wine crates. So you're probably handy enough. And it's just a case of looping the plant around, doing something we call tying in. You use twine and just literally tie the plant.

They'll dance them to the wire. Oh, okay. With twine. And it will probably, the climbers like to grab onto things anyway, so it'll probably find its way there. But yes, you can tie it in, and it will train all the way around. And you can do that. You can even, you can tie in anything that's a vine,

so a nasturtium, a sweet pea. You know, if it grows a long way, you can, you can put that, you can tie that to anything. You can have an amazing nasturtium window, which would be very easily done as well. Oh, wow. Because that feels like next level. It does, yeah.

And in terms of climbers, are there, like, things that you have to kind of do for them that you wouldn't have to do for maybe like a potted plant? Like, do you have to water them more or do you have to, or is it literally just a case of normal maintenance? They just like growing, yeah, they're just like growing tools. So the general, I mean, you know, every plant is different and has different needs, but the general rule is don't let the soil dry out too much. you want it to keep kind of fairly moist

and plants in pots will dry out because they're not, they don't have the root systems to take moisture from the earth. So if you are only container gardening, you're going to have to water more regularly. By the time the clocks go forward. So between March and October,

feed things occasionally once a fortnight with liquid plant food, chop off the dead bits. Do that to most plants. You'll be fine. That's good to know. And when you say about dry soil, do you stick your finger in the soil to, like, see, because the top is always dry. That's my issue.

But I can never tell if it's dry or not. Yeah, exactly. Stick your finger in. Does it feel like something you might make biscuits out of? Does it feel like a face mask? You know, if it feels like a face mask, it's fine. If it feels dry and crumbly, you need to water it. Biscuits and face masks.

If it feels like a face mask, it's fine. How wet is that quite wet? The way it's hand, no, imagine just like moist, moist. Like porridgey. Porogy. Moist, moist. Okay. Yeah.

Christ. Okay. I've heard you put your finger in. If, when you take it out, if it's got soil has stuck to your finger, you're doing okay if your finger comes out. Yeah. Clean as a whistle. That needs a water.

Interesting. What do you think about that one? Also, also the same. Yeah, no, that works as well. I think I might have even used that one in the past as advice. Sometimes if you touch very dry soil and you have a slightly sweat your finger you're going to end up with sure. The slight confusion.

Good Lord. In the summer months, famously sweaty-fingered summer months that we've been looking through. That's what happened. So what do you, when you speak to people who are rookie gardeners, what are the biggest mistakes, bar like not putting a hole in the bottom of your pot?

What are the things that people say again? Because I imagine at parties, people are always like, oh, this is here. I'm going to chat to her about my insert cool name, Latin name for a plant that I don't have access to at this point. Pansy is the only one I'm thinking. What are the biggest kind of, like most common issues that people chat about? I genuinely think a lot of it is real kind of fear that they're doing a bad thing and it's gone horribly wrong. You know, you said, oh, your garden is looking nice at the start of this. Stevie, I've not really done any real gardening in literal months.

I've sort of let it be. And some things have died and some things have taken over. Plants are a bit like people. They'll wake up on a Monday and maybe they don't necessarily want to get out of bed, but we've all got to go and have a shower and put clothes on and go on with our day. Plants are kind of the same. They turn up, they grow. We do kill a lot of them.

but I think it's, with the house plant thing, so often the plants that we grow inside are used to sort of having sub-tropical jungles to grow in, and then we bring them into our lounge or our bathroom with no natural light, and we wonder why they die. But a lot of it, once you start growing things outside, you'll realize that it just turns up. So not panicking is a first, like, you're probably fine. If you want more reassurance than that, I would say putting plants in the wrong place,

And that does sound like, how do I know what the right place is? But, you know, even like get the compass up out on your phone and see what point it outside your back door and see what direction it's looking at because a north facing garden will have a lot less light, for instance, than a south facing garden. And if you have a very exposed, you will know if your garden is good for sunbathing in or not, essentially, or if your balcony is very warm or not. and if it is you will want to grow plants that grow in sunny regions so things like geraniums or nasturtiums or even roses these are all good like we call it exposed but good warm south-facing plants or you can Google good plants for south-facing environments think provence think lavender that kind of thing if you've got realistically if you are in an urban environment

you're going to have shade pockets and actually shade gardening is far easier than people think. So, you know, lots of lovely ferns, lots of green plants, lots of woodland plants, they tend to just look after themselves. So I think the problems start when people kind of go to Columbia Road Market, if you're in London, or they go to a garden centre, and they're like, that one's pretty, buy that, don't really know what it is, bring it home, chuck it in a dark corner, water it excessively, really. I mean, I never, I don't really water things very much, even in summer because I have like an existential climate crisis nightmare. But this thing we're like, we need to water plants, we'll water every day.

It's crazy. You don't need to do that. And then wonder why it dies. And a lot of the time, really, if you pick the right plants for your aspect, you sort of make sure they've got enough space to grow. They'll probably do it, which sounds very simple. But it's like many things in life, they're kind of trees around us do it all the time. Like once it's in a place where it's happy, it will carry on. Yeah, and I also like what you said about how in your garden,

some things live, some things die, somethings take over. And it was like, hang on, whoa, whoa, whoa. So, like, if I had, you know, the horror I have when anything dies, I'm like, well, that's, I, I'm going to kill everything I touch. Like, I'm clinging on too tight with the death element. And it feels like even if I had, because my mom's been like, I've got like a little garden, my mom's got a garden, and she'll kind of be like, oh, yeah, that's kind of what,

they kind of haven't really worked. And you're like, I'd be so sad all the time about the ones. that hadn't worked and think I'd done something, but actually sometimes it's kind of beyond your control. And I quite like the idea that it's like, you try things, you win, you lose, like, if that's not working, move it. Oh, it hasn't. Like, because one of my, literally one of my questions, and this says, this says too much. What happens when, when you have to say goodbye? That was, I don't, how I've worded one of the questions. And I think that sort of says that, A, don't say goodbye because they're a plant, and B, like, it's fine.

Would you agree? Yeah, it's something that you get more used to. I think that's a very sweet question. I saw yesterday I did go out in the garden for the first time in weeks, and essentially geraniums, pelagoniums, give them their proper name, don't like frost. They will die in frost. So people take them inside in winter.

I did not do that this year. So then obviously it snowed excessively. and all of mine are dead basically. So, and not just dead in a sort of, oh, it doesn't very good, in a sort of horror movie style zombie plant kind of way. All of them, about 12 of them. And yesterday I did indeed say goodbye. And I took my secretars and I cut them all back and I lifted them out

and I put them in the compost. And I had a moment. And I was just like, you know what? Maybe next year I'll be better. But there were also, for all of those dead ones, there were other things that were coming into flower. There were bulbs coming up from the ground. The grass was looking nice.

The water butt was full. I could hear a bird singing. You know, you realise that it's part of a much bigger cycle. And apocalyptic as things sometimes seem, nothing is dead all the time. Like there will always be something growing. And I think when you start gardening, you worry, oh, I'm going to kill it.

And as you continue to garden, you think, oh my goodness, that's alive. And it's a shift. And you just have to get used to realizing that when you kill something, you probably learn something from it and you won't kill it next time. Oh, that is, it's very lovely, isn't it? It's sort of quite psychologically helpful in life. Why women grow?

Why women grow? Your point there about you digging it out and you're putting it in the compost. Compost. I was about to say, but it's interesting conversation of quite a simple word. I wasn't supposed to be discussing it. it leads me to something I've been doing which is I've been growing some things that they're outside

they're not surviving I am not removing them I'm simply adding more into sort of a cannibalistic my logic was the new plant will eat the old plant and it will that will be nice so it was like a bunch of dead stuff in the pot I just stuck a new mint plant in there

and then I thought the mint will take up the nutrients from the death of the other one and life will be reborn. What do you think? I mean, the response in the room suggests... Okay, is mint not a good idea? No, mint is... Actually, that is... If you're growing mint, never grow mint in a flower bed unless you have acres of space. Everybody who keeps saying that to me...

It's a voracious. And everyone's like, oh my God, you can't stop a mint. Once it's minting, you're off or whatever. once you pop, you can't... It's minting, you're off. Yes, that's what everyone says to be of parties. I can't move for people talking about their mint. And then I can't...

It's keen to keep the damn mint alive. My rosemary, if you're interested, thriving. Hardy boy, but mint, and that's why I keep us adding more mint into the pot. He is contained. He's in one mint pot on account of this issue, everyone's saying, oh, the mint will take over. And now he's just...

I've also had mince die, though. Like, they don't like winter much, but if you're paying... shouldn't you cut back all the dead bits, then they will return. I would generally say while the process of decay and worms and soil is a very beautiful, genuinely a very beautiful part of gardening, which we don't have time to go into today. But yes, that's the next stage. Your new plant will not benefit for the nutrients of your old plant because it has to go to be quite a big decay process to make compost.

like making compost takes quite a, you know, six to 12 months, and needs other things in it. So I would, if you've got a dead plant and it's just a little bit of hard, tough root balls surrounded by compost, I'd just whip that out, probably put in some new compost if you have some, not at the end of the world, if you don't, and then put your new plant on top.

Give him a chance. Give him a chance. That's a huge blow, frankly. It is. Look, it's nice. You can spring clean your mint. Yeah, at least now, I know. No, for sure.

Because if I'm honest, I did know that in my heart. You're just hoping. It's hoping. You'd say, you know what's fantastic? Just popping a dead plant on top of that. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. You know what?

I was just lazy. The more death the merriot. That's what you were going on. But now I've had the absolute definitive answer on that. I need to give my mint the best chance. And if you are planting mint over mince after mince, they'd test it. I would look because, look at the roots. Because there'd probably be some tiny little baby, like,

zombie mint pans emerging from the route, which it means it's still alive. I don't want any part of that. I know, thank you. Okay. Okay. So it was like, that's a psychological issue. Matt, start fresh. I won't. That's none of my business. But you did try to, she did a lot of attempted propagation, didn't you? What was a lovely word? She made a leak out of a leak. I did make a leak out of a leak. I did make a leak. stole it or it fell out of her window or something. I did it twice, the leak. Yeah. So it chops the end of a leak used in a suit, put the end in a glass.

which TikTok had said to do, and I was like, as if. And then two days later, a new leak. Two days later, a new leak, I think is an exaggerating. Is it? Please. Two days later, a new leak. Not a whole new leak, but the beginnings of life had begun again. Whether you'd want to eat it is another matter.

But, yeah, it's essentially the bottom of a leak. Like the bottom of a spring onion is a root. Therefore, if you put it in water, it will make new root and until we're at the top. Ah, okay, so that you can, thank you. One was a leak, and then I tried it with a spring onion. onion. And remember I got ever so stressed because I had that sexy spring onion. Yes. So I put the spring onion out under the gardener. It grew so successfully and well. It was honestly two foot tall. And it was chunky. Chonky like it was a muscular. And I'm going to say it, sexy leak.

No, wait, sorry, spring onion. And it flowered on its top. That's, I didn't know, I was so scared of it. I didn't know what. Did you just throw it away? No, I wouldn't touch it. Yeah, right. Is it still there? No, it died. And it's become the mint, of course. so sorry of course because that's so I tried it with an onion and then I just had a rotten wet onion

in like a mug so that's really sad but that's really cool so I was going to ask about a top top propagation veg to try but that's without going into two because I know it's a big

it's a big it's a hot topic yeah it's a hot topic and also the the broader issue with veg is that if you've kind of you've grown it and then you're regrowing it Just, it's a bit like people like, oh, I've saved my tomato seed, and then I've grown some more tomatoes.

There's a very big, complicated thing about seed heritage and whether seeds can be used again. It comes into a camp of just because you can doesn't mean you should. Understood. Fun thing to do and be like, oh my God, it grew. Do you want to eat it? I'm not sure. Oh, why not? Some plants are grown with an understanding that they're, if they're grown organically,

there is a way that you can just keep those seeds going through. but our agriculture and our farming is such that often things are treated with quite a lot of chemicals and processes, which means that they're not fertile to take forward into the next stage due to all the kind of weird GM stuff that goes on. So it's,

I wouldn't be able to give you like a big scientific answer. It's just something to be like, fun to maybe look at might not be one to necessarily eat. And if you are interested in that, do look into kind of fertile, seed, heritage, growing on vet kind of thing. If you're growing veg, just make sure that you know what seeds you'll get it. If you are interested in growing your own vegetables, would you recommend then starting with

the seeds and getting them and not attempting from old food? Bingo. Basically, get it from plugs, get it from seeds. There are some amazing seed companies out there that are organic and that are heritage seeds, which means you can just keep on going forever. But your average pack of tomatoes from Tesco, no idea where those seeds came from so you might not want to save them and start again. How interesting. You end up like it's like a dinosaur's egg,

isn't they? Listen, there's so many things I've had to pull myself back from the edge here. I'm going into this, a new woman. You've got to get How to Grow Stuff by Alice Vincent. Yeah. A great starter book. And also Why Women Grow for just the psychological element and deeper elements of gardening.

Why Women Grow, Colon, Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival. Oh, yes, please. It's very good. Yes, please. Thank you so much, Alice. That is really helpful. It just sort of calms one down when you kind of like

hear someone set, be like, it's okay, I tried this and then some people do that, but I don't. You're like, oh yeah, it's such a personal thing. It's not a scary thing. It doesn't mean you're like... You can't be a mother. That is the feeling, isn't it?

A bit, isn't it? Only a bit. And also very deeply. Follow Alice on Twitter. So Alice underscore Emily and then at Nauticulture on Instagram. Best of luck with both. Book and The baby.

Yeah, the book is out on March 2nd. The baby, who knows? Hopefully, some time after that, that's what I'm hoping. Wow. Well, look, be nice to have it come back during your book launch, I hope. Yeah. It starts to happen. That would be amazing.

Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Oh, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. And yes, thank you for listening, and we will see you next week for more. Nobody panic. I'm absolutely jonesing to get home and sort out that mint. Thank you so much, Alice.

You're absolutely lovely. And see everybody next week. Bye.