Quick Strolls - growing closer to nature
Welcome to Quick Strolls, shorter walks with the guests from A Life More Wild, in which we look at particular issues and ideas that we've come across in previous seasons.
In episode three of Quick Strolls, we talk to a few people whose passion for growing and getting their hands dirty has changed their lives, from a guerilla gardener who looks at how soil changes our brain chemistry, to a model who became a food writer and a chef who’s leading his own vegan revolution.
We often think of nature as a place to go, a resource to be drawn on when we need it. But as several guests on A Life More Wild have shown, we can connect more deeply through growing and planting - creating a reciprocal relationship with the natural world
Ellen: It's so good to get your hands in the soil. There's all sorts of incredible bacteria and cultures inside soil that are ridiculously good for us. So something called mycobacteria bacilli, which is a natural antidepressant and in some cases has been found to be as good as an antidepressant as you'd get from a doctor. And soil has something called geosmin in it, which is what gives it the petrichor smell after rain, which lots of people say is their favourite smell. Humans are something like 20,000 times more sensitive to the smell of geosmin than sharks are to blood. It's really a reviving smell, calming and relaxing and a mood-enhancing smell for everyone, but in particular for women.
For model-turned-horticulturalist Poppy Okotcha, it was also about what she felt living in tune with nature had to teach her…
Poppy: I think one of the great things about gardening is that you start to understand the cycle of life and death, in a very different perspective than we are sort of sold it from our sort of culture. Rather than it being this really terrifying, awful, gory experience that we don't talk about, it becomes really central to a healthy growing space. So, for example, composting that's all about death and decay. But if you don't do that, it's really hard to maintain healthy soil -- pretty much impossible. And if you can't have healthy soil, you're not going to grow healthy plants and healthy plants get hit by pests and disease so much worse and it's not as good for us. So, I suppose pests and death and decay in a garden has this like amazing kind of teaching, I suppose, which I didn't get until a bit later in my growing experience.
And then, in a sprawling Welsh garden, we met up with Gaz Oakley, vegan chef and food campaigner. His own relationship with nature had begun when his bodybuilder diet - packed with protein and not much else - began to cause him health issues.
He switched to plant-based eating, moved to the countryside and saw his life and health transformed. Now it’s his mission to spread the word…
Gaz: I've seen the importance of growing food, and not only from the physical effects on the nutrients that I'm getting, but also the mental benefits of growing like I mentioned before. And it's, it's, it's made me realize, why on earth am I not being taught this in school. Why wasn't I shown how to grow food, or why wasn't this knowledge passed down from my parents? Where was it lost?
So now it is my mission to encourage as many people as I can through my videos to reap the benefits of growing food for all of the reasons that I mentioned. Because, you know, we are lucky in the UK a lot of time, unless you're living right in the center of cities, you, we do have some outdoor spaces that we can we can grow food in, and you don't need a lot of land. I wish I started growing food on my balcony in London. I had enough room to grow a few pots of things, but there's loads of community spaces, allotments. They're not expensive to, to get hold of. It's just getting them in the first place is hard, but the more people get into growing food, the more of these community projects are going to be about. So it's about encouraging the next generation to do it and feel the benefits that I've got too from it.
But on top of all this - the health benefits of getting your hands in the soil, the meditative power of gardening, the improvement to your diet - Gaz gave us one extra, really good reason to strengthen our connection to nature and grow our own food…
Gaz: Food cooked with love, has it as an impact on your energy. I think, you know, if you go into a, if you go into a fast food restaurants, and often the employees there, they don't want to be there, and you know, they're throwing these meals together. It's not cooked with love. And I think that that's only going to make you feel a bit crappy, if I'm honest. You. So I think that's why Nan's food always say so good, because it's cooked with love and passion. So if you cook with passion and love too, you're bound to make delicious, tastier food.
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