PHIL:
Hi there, everybody. Welcome this morning. My name is Phil Wright. I’m the co-host of The Underground podcast and co-founder of WrightObara, a marketing agency specialising in home and garden products. My co-host here on The Underground is Kate. She has been a park keeper, worked behind the scenes on most of the gardening television shows you’ll probably know and love, run a community garden, and works with brands to help them communicate about horticulture and growing.
But I’m delighted to say that we are joined this morning by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, a chef, broadcaster, bestselling author and campaigner, probably best known for River Cottage and for using food, growing and sustainability as a catalyst to inspire change. So please give a warm welcome to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
HUGH:
Hi, everyone. Good morning, guys.
KATE:
Morning. Thank you for joining us.
HUGH:
Absolute pleasure. Thank you.
PHIL:
Perhaps we could start: you’ve said that your growing journey began when you were six years old and you grew a bean. What was it about that experience that inspired you so much?
HUGH:
I think my life changed radically and for ever when my mum and dad did what I was going to do about 30 years later: they moved out of London to the countryside for a better life. They did the classic 1970s downsizing thing. In fact, they did it in 1970.
KATE:
So it was The Good Life?
HUGH:
Exactly. We moved to a rented farmhouse in Gloucestershire, sometime in June 1970, I think. One of the amazing things about it was that we inherited a good-sized veg garden in full swing. The previous tenants had grown veg, and I think they must have found their dream house and dashed off, leaving this stunning vegetable garden.
On the very first day we arrived, we were picking pods of peas and pulling up carrots, sitting on the lawn outside in the sunshine and munching raw vegetables. My mum and dad said, ‘You’d better start growing something.’ So my sister and I put little beans in pots, had them on the windowsill and watered them every couple of days. Up they came, and then they went out on to the wigwams.
We just caught the tail end of the growing season, but up they went: climbing French beans, Jack and the Beanstalk stuff.
PHIL:
Brilliant.
HUGH:
That combination of suddenly being there was an extraordinary bit of luck, because, as everybody knows, growing vegetables is quite hard graft. There’s digging, preparing the beds, worrying about the weather and getting everything going. But we literally walked into a stunning vegetable garden, and it was my dad who really got the bug.
My mum got the bug for the rest of the garden and actually became a garden designer. She has written a bunch of books. My mum and dad still live in Gloucestershire, in Wotton-under-Edge, and they have a veg patch there, which my dad totters down to very slowly with his stick because he’s 91.
KATE:
Wow.
HUGH:
But he’s still immensely proud. Every spring and early summer we’re swapping seedlings. I’m giving him some seeds and he’s giving me some seeds. Potatoes and tomatoes are the things he gets most obsessed about, and still the climbing beans. Blue Lake has been a great favourite of his. I’ve experimented with lots of different types of climbing bean.
KATE:
Was it the growing, or the growing and the eating, that really gave you the bug?
HUGH:
It was the combination of the two. That magical day, and the fact that we were harvesting and eating literally on the day we arrived at that house, changed everything for all of us. My mum and dad have never not had a veg garden. They’ve moved quite a few times, but they’ve never not had a veg garden since then.
I didn’t get sole responsibility for my own veg garden until we made the very first River Cottage series.
KATE:
Oh, really?
HUGH:
I dug up all the flowers and planted vegetables, and that was super exciting. I remember harvesting my first courgette, and my first hen’s egg coincided with my first courgette, so I made a one-courgette, one-egg soufflé. I made a mini soufflé combining the two. I still try to make a courgette soufflé at least once in the summer. I made one on Sunday.
KATE:
Fantastic.
HUGH:
It worked. It went well. It had four eggs and about five or six decent-sized courgettes, so it was an upgrade from the original, but it was very, very good.
KATE:
Since growing that bean at the age of six, have you always been interested in gardening? Or, as a teenager, did you get a bit sulky and not want to know? Has it always been your passion?
HUGH:
I think I drifted away from it a little bit. I went away to university and worked in London for most of my twenties, but I went back to my mum and dad’s place a lot. From 1984, they settled in Wotton-under-Edge, where they are now, and had a really big veg patch. It was always something that was there when I got back.
As soon as I’m back home, I’m in the garden. I say that in the present tense because it’s still the case. I go and see my mum and dad every other weekend or so at the moment because they’re getting on a little. Within an hour or two, I’m down in the veg garden seeing what’s there, what’s for supper and what can be brought back into the kitchen and put on the table.
Even when I was a Londoner, I had half an eye on getting back to Wotton to check out the veg patch. That’s actually what inspired River Cottage. I did a series called Cook on the Wild Side for a couple of years before that, where I was on the road and it was very much about foraging.
KATE:
Okay.
HUGH:
I found River Cottage for nothing to do with looking for a television location. I just wanted to spend more time in the country, get out of London for as many weekends as I could, and I managed to find this cottage. I rented it with my then girlfriend Marie, who is now my wife, and our friends Alexandra and Ivo. They moved down to Dorset about 15 years ago as well, and now they have a full-time veg patch. For all of us, it was a major deal.
After we’d been there for a couple of years, I had the idea for the show. We were talking about a third series of Cook on the Wild Side, and I thought, ‘Do I really want to get on the road again? I really like it here.’
One Monday morning, when I was trying to stay into the week if I could, I bashed out a one-page proposal and fed it through the fax machine to Channel 4 in London. I said, ‘What about, instead of Cook on the Wild Side, we do a downsizing thing? I’ll just stay right here. I’ll plant veg, get some pigs and chickens, and see what happens.’ I thought we might get one summer out of that. I had no idea it was going to carry on. We then filmed River Cottage for 15 years.
PHIL:
Do you think the act of growing food changes your relationship with food?
HUGH:
One hundred per cent. It can’t not. The act of growing food is fascinating. It’s an act of self-reliance, it’s an act of commitment to nature and, sometimes, it’s a political act. Lots of people who are into growing are kind of revolutionaries. They do one thing at home and then go out into the world, and they often have quite a radical idea about how the world should be.
In America, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a real sense of a growing revolution. Lots of the anti-establishment movements of the sixties, alternative lifestyles and a different vision for what it is to be human were born of people who were growing food. I think that’s still the case.
There are people with busy lives, working in jobs in town, who go down to the allotment at the weekend. Even that, I think, is a quiet act of revolution for a lot of people. It’s: ‘This is what I do with my own time. I grow my own food.’
KATE:
Veg boxes are quite popular at the moment, or people might buy their vegetables from a farmers’ market or farm shop. Do you feel they’re still missing out on that particular part?
HUGH:
I’ve talked for quite a long time about the whole idea of where we get our food from. In the introduction to the original River Cottage Cookbook, I invented a rather pompous phrase called the ‘food acquisition continuum’, which I still trot out from time to time.
We all eat every day, and we all have slightly different stories about where our food comes from, where we go to shop and, particularly, where our veg comes from. At one end of the continuum, of course, many of us get pretty much all our food, including our veg and fruit, from the supermarket. That’s fine, but we might also be quite dependent on manufactured food, ready meals or the buzz phrase now, ultra-processed foods. That’s one end of the continuum.
At the other end of the continuum is the hunter-gatherer: someone, or a group of people, who wakes up every morning and the cupboard is bare, but they go out into the wild and gather food. There are very few people left on the planet living that existence, but those are still the two extremes.
My contention around River Cottage, and the campaigns I’ve done around cooking, growing and eating more healthily, is that pretty much everyone stands to benefit from moving across the continuum, away from dependence on manufactured, highly processed foods and towards a more direct relationship with food. We’re not realistically aiming to become hunter-gatherers again, but the problems associated with ultra-processed food, including the obesity crisis and the domination of big food brands more or less manipulating us to eat how they want us to eat, are causing terrible damage to our health.
It’s a relatively new problem. It’s post-industrial and really a problem of the past few decades. For many hundreds of thousands of years, every single human on the planet was a hunter-gatherer with a very direct relationship with food. We weren’t stumbling around like idiots, poisoning ourselves because we knew nothing. We were deeply in tune with our environment.
Choosing ways of acquiring food that move you along the continuum is inherently satisfying, good for the soul and good for your health. There are lots of exciting ways to acquire food that aren’t dependent on industrial food manufacturing.
Even when you’re in the supermarket, you can buy seasonally from local British growers and look to see what has come out of the fields in the UK. Or you can go a step closer to your local community and get your food from a farmers’ market.
Something I love to do when I drive into River Cottage is take a very slight detour past a lovely small farm. There’s a table by the gate outside with a pile of produce and lovely bunches of flowers, grown by the amazing Lady Beryl who lives there. I stop and see what she’s got, and I grab something if she has it ready before me. For example, I might grab a bag of runner beans. She also does lovely seedlings, and if I’ve got a few gaps in the garden, I’ll buy a couple of trays of her leeks to plug that gap.
The two ultimate and most satisfying ways of acquiring your food, I think, are to forage for it and to grow it. Everyone can do a little bit of both, even if it’s just a few herbs in a window box or a few tomato plants in a sunny window. You can do it.
Even if you haven’t got time for that, when you go for a walk, you can go foraging. It might just be a few blackberries. Don’t miss them. It’s a bumper crop, but they’re early this year because of the incredible sunshine. Go and grab a few handfuls. It doesn’t matter if they don’t make it back to the kitchen for a blackberry and apple crumble. Even if you scoff a few while you’re walking, that’s still worth doing.
The two must-do foraging things for me are nettles in the spring and blackberries in the autumn. Then, if you can find a little bit of space to grow a few of your own vegetables, that’s the ultimate satisfaction. Taking that produce back to your kitchen, there’s no greater story of pride in where you got your food from. ‘I went to a farmers’ market and met the lady who grew it’ is great. But ‘I grew it myself at home’ is as good as it gets.
PHIL:
Do you think it’s more relevant now to grow your own food, with what’s going on in the world, than it was when you began?
HUGH:
I think it’s more relevant, more satisfying and more important than ever, because the opposite end of the problem is also more extreme. The domination of ultra-processed foods and the power of brands and advertising are so hard to resist.
I’m not a purist about it. I still have my favourite chocolate bar. One thing that has changed is that I eat so many fewer chocolate bars and crisps now that I have an electric car, because you don’t pull into the garage to get petrol and run the gauntlet of the crisps and the Picnics. I have my favourite M&Ms and crisps. I don’t mind an M&M. Instead, it’s when I’m on the train and the trolley comes past.
KATE:
Oh, yes.
HUGH:
It’s not about being perfect. It’s about getting enough food into your life that is made from raw ingredients and cooked from scratch in the kitchen, locally sourced if possible. If you can grow some of it yourself, that is just priceless. Absolutely priceless.
KATE:
You’ve always been a strong advocate for growing organically. Why is it so important to you?
HUGH:
One of the reasons it’s great to grow organically is because it isn’t that hard, so why wouldn’t you? Obviously, we come to somewhere like Glee and there are lots of things to help bash the bugs on the head and increase the fertility of your soil. Some of them are genuinely helpful.
But I’ve been growing organically from the beginning, and I’ve found there’s always a way to do it naturally. What I think is really interesting is that, between organic farming and what is becoming the slightly broader category of regenerative farming, regenerative agriculture and regenerative horticulture, I feel we’re on the cusp of a different way of doing things.
The penny that has really dropped is the understanding that soil fertility is intrinsically capable of looking after itself. Soil has everything it needs, if it is well looked after, to regenerate its own fertility annually.
For example, as we were talking about before we came on, you can cover your ground in a really good mulch and keep the moisture there. Then so many of the bugs can get to work. Between crops, over the winter or as the spring warms up the soil, if it’s moist and well covered, everything gets busy. All the mycorrhizae and the microbiology in the soil start to prosper.
We need to get away from the idea that soil is something inert and that you have to put the fertiliser in. It’s quite capable of generating and regenerating its own fertility year after year. A good covering of decent compost gives it a lovely boost. There are also some fantastic recipes for homemade soil stimulants, things like nettles in a bucket, and seaweed is another one. They’re natural ways of giving it a boost, from nature back into nature, bringing in a little bit more that can help.
I like to make the comparison with the renewables revolution. Go back 20 years or so and it was: ‘Is this really going to happen?’ Now, in the UK, more of our power is produced by renewable energy than from fossil fuels.
In home vegetable growing, commercial horticulture and large-scale agriculture, I see farmers and growers looking around and saying, ‘Why am I putting these expensive, fossil-fuel-derived fertilisers on my soil? Why am I paying for chemicals to kill all the bugs, while also killing a lot of the life in the soil that I then have to put back artificially?’
A well-balanced organic system, which is quite easy to achieve on a small scale in your own garden, produces the most wonderful food and looks after nature while it does it. I wouldn’t do it any other way. I like to think we might be on the cusp of a similar revolution in the way we grow, so that the regenerative, organic way starts to make more commercial sense and people say, ‘Okay, I’ll go down that route.’
PHIL:
You have a collaboration with Seed Revolution, and we’re going to bring Max on in just a moment to talk about that. But before we do, tell us a little bit about your High Fibre Heroes.
HUGH:
High Fibre Heroes is the book that came out earlier this year. I’ve been writing recipes that are particularly focused on plants. I’m still an omnivore, by the way, but I’m so much more competent now at cooking plants than I was ten years ago. It’s about getting away from the veg being an afterthought on the side of the plate and making it the hero ingredient.
My high-fibre heroes include things like oats, nuts and seeds, but the 12 I’ve chosen, which each get a chapter in the book, are everyday vegetables that everybody knows and knows where to get: peas, carrots, cabbage, tinned beans, cauliflower, leeks, mushrooms, tomatoes, lentils, spinach, sweetcorn and broccoli. They’re things you can grow yourself.
If you can’t grow them yourself, you can source them fresh or frozen, or, in the case of beans, tinned. That’s not an ultra-processed food. A good old tin of beans is a very useful ingredient. Instead of just having those vegetables on the side, I give them each hero recipes in their chapter.
This fits so well with our organic seed range, which Max and James have partnered with us so brilliantly on. We can grow all those vegetables, and more, from scratch, and they can be at the heart of the kitchen. Then, if you need a little bit more, a veg box scheme, farmers’ market, farm shop or UK-grown produce in the supermarket can bring in the extra bits.
I keep a packet of frozen peas in my freezer most of the time because they’re such a useful ingredient. Also, of the ones I grow in the garden in June and July, only a fraction make it to the kitchen. The kids are out there scoffing them, and I’ve got no problem with that.
Those are my hero ingredients, and they’re the best way to get fibre into your diet, which nurtures your gut biome. I see that as completely parallel to looking after the soil. Looking after the microbiology of the soil and looking after the microbiology of the gut are two parallel ventures, and they go hand in hand.
Growing organic vegetables at home and eating them as much as you can through the year is a wonderful way to feed your gut microbiome. Look after your soil microbiome, get the fertility there, get the veg growing, eat the veg and look after yourself. It’s a lovely virtuous circle.
KATE:
So look after your soil and it will look after you.
HUGH:
Indeed.
PHIL:
This sounds like a great time to bring Max on. Max, if you’d like to join us. Max is from Seed Revolution as well. Well done, Max.
Before we go on to what you two have created together, perhaps you’d like to tell us a little bit about Seed Revolution and what you’re trying to change in the way we approach growing from seed?
MAX
Absolutely. I started Seed Revolution about three years ago. Post-Covid, I was living in London, having grown up in the countryside, and after a year or two I was finding life quite... It was a sort of early-life crisis.
I looked around and saw everyone my age, at every chance they got, heading into a park, potentially a pub garden, but essentially trying to find some kind of connection to nature. I was a little bit dissatisfied with my job and wanted to get back and have that contact.
I thought the best and simplest way to have that connection to nature was to grow something. Why was no one from a younger demographic growing? I don’t think they saw themselves in it. It wasn’t accessible and it wasn’t particularly exciting.
Seed Revolution started with that in mind. I spent a bit of time researching wildflowers, which is where we started. There’s the standard statistic that gets trotted out all the time, that 97 per cent of wildflower meadows have gone since the 1930s. Then there was this whole mystifying thing about how wildflowers grow.
I wanted to make it really simple. I started off with ‘Make Britain Wild Again’, then realised that aligned me a little too closely with a not particularly nice man in America, so I changed that to ‘Rip, Scatter, Wild’. We included something called ‘No Grow, No Fee’.
It’s about giving someone the courage to try something new, because there’s nothing more deflating than buying something, trying to grow it and then nothing happens. We’re trying to reach anyone who has thought about having a go, gone to a garden centre or looked online and thought, ‘This isn’t for me’, and make it a little bit more for them.
KATE:
You talk about wildflowers. How on earth did the partnership with Hugh come about? Wildflowers can be scatter-and-go, whereas food is a little bit more complicated in some ways. How did it fit?
HUGH:
A little bit, but those vegetable seeds want to grow just as much as Max’s fantastic wildflower seeds.
What was really interesting to me was the kind of shops I use near where I live: a lovely local farm shop, a local deli and a health food shop. I started noticing that this box of seeds was popping up by the till, called Seed Revolution, with stunning design and great graphics, talking about growing as a political act, a revolutionary act.
And it is. If you’ve got any corner or rough patch of your garden, or you just want to turn over a bit of bed and scatter some wildflower seeds, they’re going to come up.
I was impressed by the design and by the fact that they were popping up in the kind of shops I liked. Then I found out that the son of a friend of mine was helping Max with the project. We all started talking, and Max said, ‘Why don’t we do River Cottage organic seeds?’
It’s something I’d been thinking about for a while, but it was on the back burner because there were so many projects going on. Max and James have so much energy. They got the whole thing up and running so fast, and we’ve had an amazing summer. We launched with 20 varieties this spring, and we’ll have 45 by next spring.
We’ve got a stand here at Glee and we’re chatting to lots of people. They seem to really like it. Of course, there are a lot of vegetable seeds out there and they’re very well represented here. You plant them and they’ll grow too. But there’s something that is really special to me about the seed being sourced organically.
MAX
We still have fantastically high germination rates, and we have lovely... We haven’t gone down the photographic route on our seed packets. Obviously, some people find it useful to look at exactly what it is.
HUGH:
‘This is what your bean will look like. It’ll be this colour and the pods will be this shape.’
MAX
Exactly.
HUGH:
We’ve gone for colourful illustrations. The first few were done by my goddaughter, who is also a friend of Max. She’s brilliantly talented, but also a busy student. Off the back of that, we found a couple of great artists.
We accurately illustrate the variety, but we do it with these lovely colour images that I think are inspiring. They get people to feel a connection with the creativity of growing veg.
It has been super exciting. It has been a great summer. We’ve been growing all the varieties at home and in the garden at River Cottage, and the results have been superb. We’re very excited about the next step and going to 45. Then, who knows, maybe more than 45.
PHIL:
Onwards and upwards. Are you on veg now, Max?
MAX
I am. There was a lot of synergy with Hugh’s story. I started on wildflowers and moved to veg. Mine was a carrot when I was about six, but I think I just picked it up and had nothing to do with the growing process. That was more Mum.
There’s companion planting, certainly, but it’s an obvious next step to go from wildflowers to veg. The organic element is obviously key to River Cottage, but if you’re going to garden organically, why not start with an open-pollinated organic seed?
To build on the design element as well, I think for a long time seeds and seed packets have been treated as a commodity. They’re going to be there and you’re going to get them because you need to grow your cucumber that year. I think it’s much nicer to have something that draws you in, that you want to pick up, and in the end make it slightly giftable. Then we can get more people into this growing revolution.
HUGH:
That’s a very good point. We’re growing seeds for people to take home and grow, but also to give to their friends to grow. I love the idea of turning up with a packet.
We like bringing gifts when we go and see our friends, go round for dinner or go and stay. We like to take a bottle, always welcome, or maybe some chocolates or sweets, always welcome. But if you give something that is then going to grow, bloom, flourish and feed them, I think that’s really special.
I love giving people trees as well. When people get married, have a birthday or move house and have a slightly bigger garden, I give them fruit trees.
Now, wherever I go, I’ve got a sack of River Cottage seeds and I’m handing them out. I’m like Father Christmas. People are always super happy to receive seeds, and it gives you that little nudge: ‘All right, now I’ve got the seeds. I’ll do the edge of my herbaceous border and fling in some rocket, lettuces and beetroot, and they can all grow together.’
The other key thing is that you don’t have to grow in regimented rows. I do what I call a bit of mini-field broadcasting. I like a raised bed or a no-dig system. The mulch I was talking about is a brilliant way to grow.
There are two ways. You can have that lovely hay mulch, grow the seedlings and put them in. Or you can clear a few little spaces, broadcast the seed and let it come up. By having the mulch over it for several weeks, or even months, before you grow, you’ve boosted the soil fertility. Then, when you clear away the mulch, lightly rake the soil, in go the seeds and up they come.
You can have mixed crops coming up together: rocket and chard, different types of lettuce. See what pushes through. I love doing that.
And my top tip, which those of you who use no-dig systems probably know, is that I now say in the same breath that a no-dig system needs to be a no-compaction system. You do not walk on those beds, as much as possible. That’s why all our beds at River Cottage, and mine at home, are 1.2 metres wide. You want to be able to reach the middle from either side. Kneel on the edge and dip your trowel into the middle if you need to loosen something up.
That’s when the soil really flourishes. If you have mulch on it and a little bit of compost, which you don’t even have to do every year, and it’s no-dig and no-compaction, the soil is allowed to breathe. All that microbial activity is allowed to flourish. That is an amazing way to naturally regenerate your soil’s fertility.
KATE:
Can I ask you, Max, if there was one flower seed you could grow with veg, as the best pollinator and companion plant, what would you suggest?
MAX
Sainfoin. It’s a pink legume. It was super popular pre-war and great for fodder, things like that. It is one where you need a particular type of soil, but if you really want a pop of electric pink, it would essentially be Barbie’s favourite flower. Bees love it.
That’s the one where, if you spot it in a meadow or a garden, people always stop and say, ‘What is that?’
KATE:
And what’s that called again?
MAX
Sainfoin.
KATE:
Okay. Is that one you always have in your wildflower range?
MAX
Yes, as much as possible. It likes really nice chalk soil, so if it’s too wet it doesn’t love it, but I try to sneak it in as and where I can.
HUGH:
I wanted to complement my veg-growing activities this year by growing some wild seed from Max. Last autumn, I put my pigs out into a field because, if you remember, it was a bumper year for all top fruit and anything that grows on a tree. It was the biggest acorn mast year I’ve ever seen.
We put our pigs out to wander and, as well as chewing up the acorns, they raked up the soil. I went broadcasting Max’s wildflower seed in all the bits that the pigs had turned up.
Unfortunately, I left it a little bit late in the day and the seed didn’t go down until May. From the day I threw that seed down, there was barely a drop of rain until two weeks ago.
MAX
But the seed is still there. I’m sure they had a little nibble, but that seed will overwinter and it’ll know when to go again.
HUGH:
I’m quite excited that we’ll have all sorts of fun wildflowers popping up. We’ll take the ponies and goats out of there from about March and see what comes up.
PHIL:
We’re going to have to wrap things up now because I’ve been given the time. But I want to ask you very quickly the one question we’re asking everybody at Glee: what is one thing the garden sector can learn from outside the industry?
HUGH:
If it’s not too annoying to repeat myself, I’ll go back to what I said about looking at what has happened with renewable energy. It felt like a struggle, it felt as though it might never get traction, and it felt as though the old industry, the fossil fuel industry, could never be bested.
Of course, it’s still extremely powerful and there’s a lot to do. But if you see how we’ve had a revolution in the way we make power from the wind and the sun, and how it’s changing energy all over the world, I think that’s something we can all learn from in the way we grow.
We do not need chemicals. We do not need fossil fuels. We do not need to treat soil like an inert substance. We can embrace its living nature and allow it to flourish, and it will feed us without costing the earth.
PHIL:
And Max?
MAX
For us, it’s very much at the core of Seed Revolution: simplify the buying journey. We don’t need people to go in and see A, B, C, D, E, F, G and H. Give them a simple price so they understand what they’re doing. Demystify it and de-risk it. Sell them a narrative.
They can go in really easily, know what they want, know what they’re going to pay for it and know it’s going to work. If you do that, people are naturally going to engage.
I come very much from a consumer-brand background. It’s quite simple: you know what you’re getting. But I think you sell a lifestyle. Most consumer brands do it, whether it’s matcha or beans. We can do it with seeds and we can do it with the gardening sector as a whole. So simplify, demystify and make it a little bit more attractive.
PHIL:
Lovely. I like that. Max and Hugh, thank you so much for joining us this morning. Ladies and gentlemen...
HUGH:
Thank you very much. A pleasure to be here.
MAX
Thank you.