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Perfect for gardening enthusiasts at any level, this podcast is your companion to cultivating success and beauty in your own backyard or flower patch. Hosted by Jane Westoby from Fuchsia Blooms Florist and The Hampshire Seed Company.
Each episode is a treasure trove of practical tips, expert advice, and insider flower farming guides designed to help you sow and grow with confidence and harvest with pride. Whether you’re dreaming of rows of neat vegetables or cutting flowers for bouquets all year round, we’ll walk you through every step.
Let’s grow together!
Jane Westoby (00:03)
Hey there and welcome to the Blooming Garden podcast. The show where we dig into the world of growing, marketing and selling flowers without the overwhelm. I'm Jane Westby and if you're dreaming of a thriving flower farm or a garden that works with nature, not against it, then you are in the right place. Today I'm joined by Jim and Sonia from the Edible Gardeners.
who are about to turn everything that you thought you knew about gardening on its head with their new book, The Circular Garden. It's all about growing more with less, less waste, less cost and a whole lot less stress. We're talking natural pest control, composting without the fuss and how to work with nature instead of constantly battling against it.
So if you've ever wanted to grow a more resilient, self-sustaining garden, this episode is for you. Let's dive right in and welcome Jim and Sonia.
Jane Westoby (01:12)
So hello to Sonia and Jim from the Edible Gardeners. I've really, really been looking forward to this session today. I'm so excited to find out about everything you've been doing because I'm really, really intrigued. So the reason why I contacted you both was to actually find out a little bit about your book that you've got coming out very shortly.
So we can talk about timings in a second, but the first question I have for you is what inspired you to write a book of all things? Whose idea was it?
Jim & Sonja (01:46)
It
wasn't really our idea. Yeah, it wasn't really our idea. But lots of people asked us actually to write a book and visit us to the garden. And our online followers have repeatedly, you know, ask us questions and were really interested in to find out more what we were doing here. And we thought, maybe that is actually a bit unusual what we're doing.
Maybe we should put that out there and get more people to adopt these kind of methods.
Jane Westoby (02:20)
Okay, okay, interesting. So how long has it actually taken you to write the book? When did you start it?
Jim & Sonja (02:27)
Well, we've been thinking about it for years, but the actual writing only took about three months because we live this life and once we had the structure down, it only took a few months. But... Well, we started it last autumn, I guess, in earnest. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So from concept, I guess, it was over a year. But...
Jane Westoby (02:31)
Yeah.
Jim & Sonja (02:52)
We knew we had to put time aside this winter because winter is the only time that we have enough spare time to dedicate to this. In the summer, we're just too busy with the garden and working. So we made time for it this winter and finally got it done.
Jane Westoby (03:09)
Okay, how big is the garden? What kind of scale are we talking?
Jim & Sonja (03:14)
It's an acre and a half in all, but we're not cultivating the whole of that area. Probably, I guess, in total, well, more than half, maybe two thirds of that, you know, and the rest is taken up by the house and non-cultivated parts, I guess, yeah.
Jane Westoby (03:33)
And you mentioned visitors, do you have lots of visitors to the garden?
Jim & Sonja (03:38)
Not lots. We open up for community groups a few times a year. Yes, and then we have obviously friends and family coming and other people's friends and family coming occasionally. yeah, we don't have an open house.
Jane Westoby (03:52)
Lots of it, can guess that lots of people want to see what you're doing.
Okay, what's the ethos of the book then?
Jim & Sonja (04:00)
It's basically a non-consumerist gardening book. We find that lot of gardening books are about buying things. our book is about that you don't actually need to do that. You can use the resources that you already have to grow a garden.
Jane Westoby (04:15)
Okay, gardening, suppose for a lot of people can be quite overwhelming, especially if they're new to gardening. So what's your philosophy on working with nature, kind of with nature rather than against it, just to make gardening more, I suppose, manageable and rewarding?
Jim & Sonja (04:36)
Well, if you try to do everything yourself, it can easily become overwhelming. But if you embrace the role of natural systems in the garden, you can actually let nature take over a lot of the work for you. And that takes the strain off it for the gardener, because there's all these things going on by all the
all the creatures that live in the garden share the garden with you. They're doing useful things that help the garden along. it takes quite a lot off of the human gardeners to-do list. So if you make use of what nature is doing and share your garden with nature and encourage natural processes to go on in it, then it's...
leaves you with more time to enjoy and be a part of that rather than, you know, fighting against it and trying to have the perfect neat, tidy, human-centered garden. You know, it's more being part of something bigger.
Jane Westoby (05:40)
So are you saying gardening is not about perfection?
Jim & Sonja (05:43)
Definitely.
Jane Westoby (05:44)
I think that's really, really important to remember. I think a lot of us do strive for perfection and that's difficult in a garden, really difficult.
Jim & Sonja (05:54)
Yeah, mean, the gardens that people think of as being perfect, know, historical gardens with large teams of gardeners laboring away in them, it can be done. But, you know, if you don't have the kind of manpower to do it, then it really is a headache. And besides that, it's just not, you know, it's not really a good thing to aim for.
because of the harm it does to other things that we should be leaving space for.
Jane Westoby (06:26)
Hmm. So now I haven't had a chance to read the book because it's not out yet. When does it come out?
Jim & Sonja (06:33)
the 11th of March.
Jane Westoby (06:34)
So very, very soon. So I'll definitely be getting my hands on a copy of that as soon as it comes out. Although I haven't had a chance to read it, I do know that you do mention about changing planting strategy in that book because a lot of gardeners stick to really, I suppose, traditional planting methods. But what are some of the strategies that you would recommend just for a more...
I suppose resilient and self-sustaining garden?
Jim & Sonja (07:03)
The easiest example I think from our garden is late blight and potatoes. We've got late blight as endemic in our area and we get it usually every August. So we had to change our potato planting around. Traditionally you
plant your early potatoes and then three or four weeks later you plant your main crop potatoes. We now plant everything as early as possible, regardless whether it's first early, second early main crop. We all plant them in late March so that by the time blight hits in August, all the tubers are already large enough to eat. And if the plants are affected by blight, we can cut them back at the base.
and leave the potatoes in the ground and harvest them later. we've now also another strategy is to change only to blight resistant potatoes. So even though the foliage is affected, the tubers will stay absolutely fine underneath the soil. So basically with changing planting strategy, it could be changing the way you grow things.
Garlic, we got a big problem with rust here because it was such a damp area. So now most of the garlic is grown indoors rather than outside because the spores come in on the rain. And if you protect the garlic from the rain, you can grow it successfully.
Other things are just changing the varieties that we grow things. Either they are disease resistant varieties or they're quicker to maturity so that we can harvest them before the pests arrive. That's one of the things we do with chilies, for example. We have huge aphids problems because we grow all the chilies inside and we just grow really early chilies and by the time the aphids come, they're done.
And yeah, planting times can also be an option to plant things later once the pest cycle is through. For example, we don't have an issue with allium leaf miner yet and also with carrot root fly. Luckily, we don't have that. But some people grow their carrots much later in the year after the root fly.
is done basically. And they might have to protect the crop at the end of the season, but they will still get a crop. If they'd just traditionally sown the carrots in April, it would have just been destroyed. Whereas if they sow it in late July, early August, they get a crop.
Jane Westoby (09:37)
So it sounds like timing is really key here.
Jim & Sonja (09:42)
Timing and varieties. Yeah, those are the two biggies.
Jane Westoby (09:47)
So I think we need to start to talk about weeds. So this is gonna be very controversial. know, know, conventional gardening advice that tells us to keep your borders weed free. But I know you have a slightly different philosophy on that.
Jim & Sonja (10:08)
Yeah, well, mean, why, I guess just fundamentally, why should they be kept weed free? Because it looks neat and tidy, I suppose, right? And you want to keep out competition for the delicate, beautiful plants that you're cultivating there. That's probably it in a nutshell, isn't it?
But the trouble, of course, is that weeds are of incredible value to wildlife, to insects and the things that thrive on them. Mostly their favorite plants are weeds. And if we want to have nature working for us in the garden, then we have to keep a bargain with it, basically. And our end of the bargain is leaving some space for it.
in amongst what we're doing and letting weeds have a bit of space in amongst things is a very, very easy way to do that. Just by allowing them to be there, we're building the chains up from the bottom. That's where it all starts. And the small things that need and thrive on them then are of value to the next things up the chain.
that are doing useful jobs for us around the garden. So, I mean, that's simply it, really. It's part of the bargain that we need to keep with nature.
Jane Westoby (11:35)
Yeah, I suppose one way of doing that, and I know a lot of people do get involved with No Mo May, so that's a really easy way of, I suppose, easing your way into some of that as well.
Jim & Sonja (11:50)
Yeah, it's a start. When you when you see what happens to your lawn when left for a month unmown and you see all the little flowers pop up, you know, I think it gives it gives people an immediate handle on what there is, you know, lying there in wait what potential there is, if you just kind of leave things to get on with it a bit. We would say why just leave it
Jane Westoby (12:14)
Yeah.
Jim & Sonja (12:17)
to May, we only mow once a month all through the year in the areas where we mow. Most of the garden, probably now the grassy areas are left to meadow and Jim just cuts paths through the meadows with the size. the wildlife benefit from leaving things to meadow is even
even more than just leaving it for a month. But even in a month, you get all the low-growing flowers, you get your clovers, you get salindines, what else do you get? Self-heal. Self-heal, all the cute little flowers coming in, providing lots of wildlife benefits. But when you leave it to meadows, of course, you get seeds as well. And then you get the birds come in to eat the seeds and the hair comes in to nibble on the grasses.
One other thing I want to mention about, you know, leaving weeds and grasses in the flower borders is that first of all, it attracts its natural bird food and natural wildlife food, but also it provides a really pleasing contrast, especially in times of drought. And it just contrasts the flowers very nicely. So it's just a question of changing the aesthetic.
Jane Westoby (13:32)
Yeah, and changing that mindset as well, rather than battling with weeds all of the time.
Jim & Sonja (13:38)
Yeah, I mean, the other thing we do with weeds, of course, is eat them, because a lot of them are very tasty. So that's one way of reducing your weeds. And in the vegetable beds, we weed them out at a very young stage. So I would say learn to identify the weeds at cotyledon stage, really. When they pop up, I can immediately see these are cleavers coming up. I just quickly hoe them out.
doesn't take any time at all. Elsewhere in the margins and in our meadows, we just leave them. But in the vegetable beds, I do remove them at a young age.
Jane Westoby (14:03)
Yeah.
Yeah, okay. Well, that's probably the chapter I'm probably gonna look forward to reading the most in the book, because I know you've got a whole chapter about that. But you also talk about hedge trimmings as well in the book that are often seen as waste, but what are some of the other kind of creative and practical ways that you can reuse them within a circular garden?
Jim & Sonja (14:35)
Well, I mean, you've got to think about what they actually are, you know, what goes into them. They are nutrients that the hedge plants have taken up out of your soil and combined with carbon that the plants have taken from the air. So if you chuck out your hedge trimmings, if you put them in your brown bin or haul them away to the tip, what you're doing is just exporting
the nutrients that have come straight out of your soil and they have to be replaced with something, which is then where people end up having to buy in fertilizers and whatever else because you can't just always take from the soil. It has to be replenished. But if you keep the hedge trimmings and do other things with them around the garden and there's lots that you can do, you can just shred them.
A shredder is a very worthwhile thing to have if you've got a lot of hedge trimmings to manage. Run them through the shredder and spread them as mulch. You can put them on your paths. You can put them into the compost. You know, there's endless things you can do with that. If you don't shred them, you can use them to pile up somewhere and make a bug hotel. People love to buy these made up.
bug hotels for the garden and do something nice for the bees and insects. you don't need a bot thing to do it. Just a rough heap of hedge trimmings is perfect for them. And that will gradually break down and return to the soil. If you keep chickens, as we do, you can also use your hedge trimmings to stuff into gaps around the bases.
of the hedges, just as a barrier to keep chickens out of your veg beds, where you don't want to be. You don't need a fence, you don't need to spend money on fencing, you can do it with hedge cuttings. It's a very valuable resource, actually. The other thing we do is we like to reclaim the leaves, the leaf mold of the hedge trimming.
Jane Westoby (16:27)
Yes.
Jim & Sonja (16:44)
tend to pile them up on a veg bed that has been cleared and wait for the leaves to drop. And then the leaves make a beautiful mulch. So it's like a self mulching bed. And then we either cut up the remaining twigs by hand. We've stopped using paper products in our compost. So in order to have enough brown materials, we need a lot of twigs.
So we've got a big, we've got an extra compost bin just to store our brown materials throughout the year. And that's where a lot of the chopped up twigs go so that we can use them throughout the year to add to our compost.
Jane Westoby (17:09)
time.
okay. So that will probably lead us quite nicely into composting because a lot of people do struggle with composting. What are some of the, I suppose, most common mistakes that you think people make with composting and how can someone really improve their composting game?
Jim & Sonja (17:42)
There's a huge amount of advice out there about composting. And I think just the sheer volume of it is possibly what intimidates people and gets them into bother with their compost, trying to follow it all. That's actually really rather simple. The main issues that we see
causing problems for people's composting is first of all, having the heap too dry. So these Dalek bins, which are classic, they can work fine, but they're very watertight actually when the lids are on them. And if people fill in fairly dry stuff into them to start with, it'll sit there forever.
Really, I mean, you can think of it, if you think of your house, it will stand for centuries, ideally, as long as the roof is intact. But when the roof starts leaking, it doesn't take long for the timbers underneath it to start rotting away and the building goes in short order. And that's just the same with the stuff in your compost bin. If it's bone dry, it's just not going to break down. So that's the work.
Jane Westoby (18:45)
You
That's a really
great way of thinking about it.
Jim & Sonja (18:53)
That's an easy thing to remedy in your compost. can leave the lid off when there's a rain shower and the water in that way, or you can take your watering can and pour some in if you notice it's dry inside. So that's a dead easy win. And the other thing that usually causes problems is putting too much of any one thing in at one time into it.
So grass clippings, of course, is the classic. You cut your lawn and you've got a great heap of them. Don't chuck them all into the compost bin at one time because it just won't work. If the compost is going to work, it has to be a real mishmash of everything. And the easiest way to mix it all together is to add bits of everything as they come along.
but only in small amounts. So there are recommended ratios for green material to brown material, so leafy stuff to woody stuff going into the compost. I don't think you need to worry too much about that, but you need a pretty decent amount of woody stuff, like a quarter anyway of the total compost volume.
And that's where the hedge trimmings and leaf mold, you know, gather the fallen leaves in autumn and store them to add into the compost as you go. As long as you're mixing everything in, your kitchen waste, your, a bit of grass cuttings, you know, a bit of leaf mold, that's mixed up and moist, it will be great. And I should, I want to add that
The main problem I see with people complaining about composting is a lack of patience. Some think it's going to be in a couple of months they're going to have compost when realistically it's going to take a year. We also compost human urine that even takes two years. And the longer you leave it, the finer it's going to be.
Jane Westoby (20:42)
Yes.
Jim & Sonja (20:57)
and you can move it along by turning it, but even if you don't turn it, it'll compost down eventually, but it takes time. And as long as it's well mixed. Yeah, as long it's well mixed, but...
now I've lost my flow. One second.
Jane Westoby (21:12)
Well, I've got a blog about composting as well, actually, because I think the patience is definitely something that I see. And you're right, you know, that if you add big chunks to your compost heap, it just takes a lot longer to break down. And as long as you know that and you know it's going to take a year and that it does need to be mixed and it does need to be turned and you've got that patience, that's fine. If you don't have the patience, there are things that you can do.
You can, as you mentioned earlier, put everything through a chipper. So you've got much smaller pieces. And actually, if you turn a compost heap every single day for a week, and you only put the small chippings in there, and then in maybe the second week, you turn it every other day, and then from the third week, maybe every three days, and you go on like this, you can actually have compost pretty quick. It is possible to do.
Jim & Sonja (22:06)
Yeah, but what an aphrodisiac.
What an aphrodisiac. at what point?
Jane Westoby (22:10)
but it's a lot of effort. It is, but if you
desperately need compost within eight weeks, eight to 12 weeks, you can do it, but it is a lot of effort. We have both here. So I have a small heap that I turn regularly and put small chippings in and I get some regular compost from that. And then I have my long heaps, which I do just leave for a year, maybe even sometimes two years and just let it break down. So we do a little bit of both here because I couldn't turn.
couldn't turn all the compost we have here. It would be too much work.
Jim & Sonja (22:40)
Exactly. The point I was also going to make about
having realistic expectations is that the compost that comes out of your compost bin is not going to look like the bagged up stuff that you buy, because that has been sifted, that's likely been hot composted. But it doesn't need to look like this. Seeds will happily germinate even if it's a bit rough.
Jane Westoby (22:50)
Yes.
Jim & Sonja (23:01)
And if it's very rough, like after three months, we usually use our rough compost as a mulch because it will continue to break down, but it does actually make an excellent mulch on the vegetable beds. we don't, all the compost doesn't need to be super fine. We can use the rough stuff as well.
Jane Westoby (23:14)
Mm.
Yeah, that's a very, very good point actually. Yeah, you don't have to, you know, don't have to, especially maybe if you're filling something like a raised bed as well, you know, it doesn't all have to be, you know, super perfect compost that's come out of a bag. It will continue to rot down. So that's something we do quite a lot. We put a lot of the rough, our rough compost at the bottom of the bottom of our raised beds, which works really well. So that's great.
What about water management? With all of the changing climate conditions, water conservation is becoming quite critical. Do you have any top strategies for just making a garden, I suppose, more drought resilient?
Jim & Sonja (24:06)
We have really a three-pronged approach to this. We add a lot of organic matter to our soil to make it hold the moisture better in the first place. So when I'm saying a lot, mean, six, eight times a year, we add mulches or material to the top of our beds.
Jane Westoby (24:31)
wow, that's
quite a lot. So that's like every couple of months.
Jim & Sonja (24:35)
Yeah. So, and that brings me to the second point. We try to have everything mulched by mid to late April so that the winter moisture is kept in the soil. So the first two cuts of the grass are going straight onto the vegetable beds. So that's the, I would say use the mulch material you have. And for most people that is going to be grass clippings.
Jane Westoby (24:37)
Okay.
Jim & Sonja (25:01)
and or leaf mold or rough.
Jane Westoby (25:02)
and you just put the grass
clippings straight on the bed fresh.
Jim & Sonja (25:06)
Yeah. But again, everything we cut, we cut the grass, Jim cuts the grass with a size. So it is a longer cut than with a lawnmower. So it does have a completely different texture to what comes out from a lawnmower blade. So you don't get the matting. Sometimes if you use the one from the lawnmower,
It's very fine and you get a bit of matting and some people have said it doesn't smell so nice. We don't have that issue at all when it's a longer cut. yeah, so come late April, everything is covered in, well, it looks like hay by then because it dries into a sort beautiful hay color. And then the third thing we do is we gather water from every available roof.
Jane Westoby (25:34)
you
Jim & Sonja (25:55)
So that's the greenhouses, the shed, the garage, the cottage. And then we just have some standing around as well that just catch water. But I have to say this, we actually don't water our garden at all apart from the greenhouse and the polytunnel. Sometimes I'll water things in when I'm transplanting things, but we also direct so a lot.
We are in the moist part of the country, but still, even often we get in May and June we get a dry spell. But yeah, basically I don't like watering in the garden and I don't do it other than in the polytunnel in the green.
Jane Westoby (26:35)
It takes a long time, doesn't it?
It sucks time. Okay, so in terms of natural pest control then, instead of reaching for the pesticides, how do you think gardeners can encourage a natural balance in their garden just to keep pests under control?
Jim & Sonja (26:54)
Yeah, I mean, it's really all about that balance. And there are lots of predators who will use what we think of as pests as a vital food source for themselves. you know, the way to encourage that balance, mean, reaching for the pesticide, you can wipe out a pest, but the amount of
collateral damage that that does is just huge. For one thing, I mean, obviously it's a poison and it's got to poison all kinds of things that are beneficial as well as the one that you're concerned about causing the problem. Then you're taking away food sources for the predators that you want to be there to fulfill that role. So, you know, if
If things are seriously out of whack, you know, if you've got slugs by the thousand that are just, you know, decimating everything in their path, you have to do something because, you know, when you get a six inch long slug, there's no garden animal that's going to do anything to that. Birds won't touch them. Frogs won't touch them. You have to deal with those.
forget about the slug pellets, you know, this is gardening, you have to be willing to get your hands dirty. When we started, we had a pretty massive slug population in the garden and the way that we got it back under control was just to go out after dark a few times in the season, yes, head torch and a sharp knife and just stab them, you know.
Jane Westoby (28:25)
with a torch.
Jim & Sonja (28:33)
hundreds and hundreds of them in a night and just leave them there. They were all gone by the morning. So stuff was coming out and eating them. And, you know, we did that a few times a season for a couple of years and, and the problem vanished. It doesn't mean that we don't have slugs. There are slugs and that's fine because, you know, the birds eat them and the frogs and toads eat them and
Jane Westoby (28:41)
Yeah.
Mm.
Jim & Sonja (29:01)
you know, that's great. They keep them in balance. They don't do any damage to our plants that, you know, that they can't handle. So that balance then is there. And because you didn't wipe out the pest, then it was there for the birds and the amphibians as a food source. And they're then, they're then
tuned into the fact that they're there and they're using that resource. it was the same, another really good example is the gooseberry sawfly, the larvae. They can be just hideously destructive on gooseberry and current bushes. They'll strip the foliage in no time if there's loads of them.
We had this problem, I think, maybe in year two or three, quite early on. And, you know, we were told by a very experienced gardener that the only way to deal with that was this really dreadful spray. And so being naive, we followed the advice and used this stuff and just were horrified by how vile it was.
It did seem to solve the problem, but that was only in seeming because the next year it was even worse. Yeah, because the predator had been killed as well as the the piest. Yeah. So then we realized that what we needed to do was the same as with the slugs. Watch out for those sawfly larvae on the leaves. And when there was far too many of them, just go through and squish them by hand.
Jane Westoby (30:24)
Yeah.
Jim & Sonja (30:42)
manual control. Yes, manual control. And that took out the huge numbers that were causing the problem, but it left enough there for the wasps and the tits and whoever else was coming along to take them as food for their young to then again, tune into that food source and gear up for it. you know, since since since the two
Jane Westoby (30:44)
Yeah.
Jim & Sonja (31:08)
two years, think, really, we only had to do that ourselves in a big way. And then the problem vanished. You know, it takes care of itself. One thing I want to add about the slugs is that if you're doing manual control, you can also look at what species of slugs you have and leave the beneficial ones. Because the slug pellets don't discriminate between leopard slugs and Spanish slugs. They'll just kill everything.
Jane Westoby (31:16)
Yeah.
So see you
next
Jim & Sonja (31:35)
And same with beer traps. They will kill everything and they will kill other things as well. So we're not keen on the beer traps because they also have a lot of collateral damage. We really think it's best to get your hands dirty, but you can decide exactly which species to target with that. And you will never get them all. It's just not possible. And you don't want to get them all because you want that food source to remain, but in a manageable number.
Jane Westoby (32:02)
Yeah, so I suppose that's where kind of habitat creation, you know, really comes into effect as well. So that you do have those predators in the garden. Do you have any kind of effective ways that gardeners can create these habitats for all of the beneficial wildlife, the predators, even in a small urban garden, maybe?
Jim & Sonja (32:27)
I'd like to actually start by pointing out two things that I think get neglected a lot. So one thing is the importance of darkness in a garden. Darkness is actually a very important habitat. And, you know, people have solar lanterns, they have little stringy lights, they have really bright lights on their houses. And that's one thing that no matter what size your garden is, you can make sure it's dark at night.
If you need to go out in the garden at night, use a head torch. Don't have constant illumination on, because there's a lot of animals that really do need that darkness. And the second thing that also gets neglected quite lot is the access to soil. Really minimize the use of slabs, paving, concrete, landscape fabric. It all prevents animals accessing the soil. mean, bees...
there's lots of ground nesting bees, need the access to the soil. And if there's barriers everywhere, they cannot live basically. So that's two things that you can do with whichever size of garden. The other thing, of course, that's really important is creating a pond.
And even if that's just a kitchen, old kitchen sink, it'll make a huge difference because you get different types of wildlife in. For us, amphibians do most of our slug control and it's a huge, huge help. Meadows we've already touched on, that attracts a lot of different insects, a lot of birds eating the seeds. And we also get hares and...
Leverets actually has raising their young in our meadows. Hedging is not just shelter for us, it's shelter, especially if it's thorny hedging, it's shelter for the birds. We don't even have any bird boxes up. All the nests, we've got hundreds and hundreds of meters of hedges.
basically divided the garden into garden rooms and they're all hedged, fully hedged around. So there's lots of nesting space available there. And then these birds that nest there do our, you know, they eat our mealy aphids, nothing is netted. So the birds have access to all the, the, the cabbage whites, caterpillars and so on. Yeah. And that's,
you know, talking about really small gardens. In fact, everything in the garden has got potential habitat value. You know, if you've got a border that you've allowed some weeds in, that's habitat right there. You know, if you've got a bed of, well, any sort of food crop at all.
it's likely to have some insects in about it. If you leave that open access, then birds and wasps and everybody else can go in and take what they need out of it and at the same time, keep it, you know, keep it healthy and growing well. So actually, it's, I think, kind of a mistake to see a distinction between
your garden and habitat because it should all blend into the same thing actually. Yeah, there shouldn't be just a corner of the garden that is habitat. The whole of the garden is a habitat.
whatever something may be.
Jane Westoby (35:48)
That's a really interesting
way of looking at it to point out that all of the gardens is the habitat, not just one bit. That's fantastic. So that's probably all the time that we've got, all that we've got time for today, which is so disappointing in a way, because I would love to talk to you guys for hours and hours about this. It's such an interesting subject.
But I guess I'm going to have to just wait for that book to come out, aren't I, so that I can read all about it and read more. So the book comes out in about a week. It expands on everything we've talked about and more, I guess.
Jim & Sonja (36:17)
Well, it's not all late now.
Yeah, yeah, there's even a chapter on preserving. So it really is circular, everything. There's no food waste either in the garden. It all gets preserved.
Jane Westoby (36:36)
and the book is called...
Jim & Sonja (36:39)
The Circular Garden.
Jane Westoby (36:41)
The circular garden, okay. So thank you so much for talking to me today. It was very enlightening and I'm sure that our listeners will be very intrigued as well. And I hope they do go and get that book. I will put a link to it in the show notes as soon as it's out. I'll put that link in there and customers can go in and have a little look at that as well.
And if anyone does want to see a little bit more about what you're about, how can they find out? What's your Instagram handle? Do you have a website?
Jim & Sonja (37:14)
Yeah, Instagram is reasonably good life. And the website is www.ediblegardeners.co.uk
Jane Westoby (37:20)
Perfect, I'll put a link to both of those in the show notes for anyone who is interested in finding out a little bit more. thank you so much for coming on today.
Jim & Sonja (37:30)
Yeah, thank you. It's been fun talking to you. Yep, thank you.
Jane Westoby (37:36)
Wow, how great was that? I could have talked to Jim and Sonia all day long. I love their take on gardening. Simple, sustainable and completely doable. If you're as hooked on their approach as I am, then do make sure you check out their book, The Circular Garden. I will pop a link to that into the show notes for you so that you can grab a copy because it is not available on Amazon. I'm sure I don't need to tell you why.
I think speaking to them both, it's pretty obvious that they live a very sustainable lifestyle. So if you want to grab a copy, the link will be in the show notes. And if today's episode got you thinking about ways to grow smarter, not harder, I'd love to hear from you. Come find me on Instagram at the Hampshire Seed Company, or even go and find Jim and Sonia as well.
And if you haven't already, make sure you hit the subscribe button so that you never miss an episode. That's it for today. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.