The FarmED Podcast: Rough Patches and Veg Growing with Kathy Slack

Alex talks to cook, writer and veg grower, Kathy Slack about her book, Rough Patch, and how growing vegetables helped her recover from burnout.

Kathy had a high flying career in advertising before she suffered a physical and mental collapse that left her ‘distraught, crippled by depression and grief and panic’.

She explains how her mother coaxed her out of the house into the garden and she ‘would sit on the raised beds with my cup of tea and just watch the soil and the weeds and the bugs and the life there…and something about being close to the soil started to heal me.’

Then she just sowed a couple of seeds and watched them grow. She describes to Alex the ‘sense of awe and promise and wonder’ of seeing ‘a tiny little seed turn into a radish in like three weeks’ and talks about how growing veg can be more empowering than growing flowers, giving a sense of the agency, of actually growing food to feed yourself.

Her book includes recipes and Kathy also runs cookery classes, so she talks to Alex about how she plans her growing! Kathy describes working in the kitchen garden at Daylesford and writing food columns for lifestyle magazines and she offers advice for anyone who knows nothing about horticulture but wants to get going with growing some veg.

‘I realised that I could mostly ignore the manuals and just experiment and now I'm a very messy gardener, not particularly proficient but I really embrace that messy ramshackle way of growing. There are so few places in life where it's okay to be a complete failure at something and you go well that's okay I'll just it again,’ Kathy says. She advises against jumping straight onto an allotment. ‘Start with radishes or lettuces or something that if it goes wrong, you can just sow it again. Then maybe if you've got pots and a warm balcony, maybe progress to tomatoes the next year.

‘So start small and get hooked on that joy of going, here I am picking a tomato that I've grown myself.’

Links:

https://www.kathyslack.com/