Why Alex Smith thinks YouTube is one of the world’s greatest achievements

Alex Smith, the voice behind @AlexGrowsFood YouTube Channel and website, has been shortlisted for The Alan Titchmarsh New Talent of the Year Award 2024 at this year’s Garden Media Guild Awards ceremony. This award is sponsored by T&M, and so we were keen to find out more about Alex and his journey to this coveted shortlist! Here’s what he had to say…

Tell us how you got into gardening?

I was one of those outdoorsy people who was really good at indoorsy things and got trapped at a desk and spent 12 hours a day on a screen. I still walked everywhere, cooked everything from raw ingredients and had a vague pipe-dream of starting a small farm. But it wasn’t until the second year of the pandemic, when I had a garden and the time to start experimenting, that I properly started trying to grow food in some not very food-safe plastic tubs.

In the summer of that year, I got really ill and ended up spending all my time in that little patio garden and discovered so much about plants and insects. Later I decided that, if I was going to be ill, I might as well enjoy it. So I moved and rented a large garden (with an expensive house attached). Growing my own food then suddenly became a part-time job.

What’s been your greatest gardening achievement?

I moved into that house in late February and I was physically unable to do much at the time. I remember spending pretty much every day trying to get the garden ready and only just about having it done for the start of May. It was a lot of unpacking to free up the cardboard, and then trying to find a cheap(ish) source of compost for the no-dig beds, and then making the beds with arms that barely worked, and these intense dizzy spells when I bent up and down too much. It was slow going!

I couldn’t drive, so I was cycling across town with bags of compost heaped on the pannier rack and sets of stakes strapped to either side of my bike with bungees, straddling them like I was John Wayne. I think I grew a few hundred kilos of veg that year but it was all won in the late winter and early spring.

How has a garden or landscape influenced you?

My gardening style is really just a mix of everything I’ve basked in online, plus the sad realisation that I have compacted clay soil and live in a very windy area. That, and being quite ill when I started gardening, led me to try to grow pesticide-free food, which meant I learnt about the destruction of soil biology and how it lowers the nutrient density of your food and makes your garden less resilient to both wet and dry weather. The combination of these things really pushed me towards ‘no-dig’ as a method of growing.

My first garden was too small even for that, and it was written in my contract that I had to keep the lawn the size it was so, after stealing as much as I dared to create slightly wider beds, I did a lot of vertical growing, especially on the patio area, in plastic tubs and in grow bags – and still do.

How has using social media impacted your gardening journey?

Social media is incredible. Instagram was my gardening diary in my first year of growing and you could quite literally feel the excitement transmitted between the accounts you’d follow.

YouTube is where I learned the most, as really it transferred a tonne of confidence which written instructions never quite achieve. YouTube is probably one of our greatest achievements, it’s such a great educational resource. It’s part of the reason I made my own channel – @AlexGrowsFood – I really wanted to give back and to leave some record of what I’ve done. Last year I was proud to win the GMG Garden Video of the Year Award  – I literally went from a YouTube zero to creating award-winning content in about 8 months! Now I spend my time making little films about gardening and I’ve even started doing some freelance social media editing on the side.

What’s your single, most important piece of gardening advice?

Both you and the plant want the same thing – to grow fully formed (and delicious) fruit! So trust that the plant knows what it’s doing and that the garden will find a way to create something magic.

My unpruned summer fruiting raspberries have just put out an even tastier second round of fruits and I still get tonnes of marigolds, nasturtiums, sunflowers, rocket, chard – you name it – from letting things go to seed and decay over winter. If you’re short on time, just focus on keeping the bindweed and couch grass at bay and trust that your plants can do their thing without you. It’s not necessarily optimal, but it’s much much easier.

If you were stuck on a desert island and could only take three plants – one practical, one beautiful, and one unusual, what would they be?

A tropical island is going to be frost-free, and maybe even blight-free, so I’d take a tomato plant, probably a cherry like a ‘Sungold’ and hope that there are other plants there that I can turn into supports and that it rains at some point!

The beautiful plant is tough… I’d probably take some French marigolds because I try to grow them everywhere. They last most of the year and, for me, they signal the start and end of the growing season – maybe they’ll be perennial on this island.

My unusual plant is an even more arbitrary choice. I really like the coppery bark on a Prunus serrula and I definitely don’t want to live somewhere without trees so I’d probably pick that. That choice would probably change week-to-week, but I definitely want a tree.

What’s next?

I’ve been saying it for a few years now, but I expect that I’ll move house soon which means finding a new garden or plot of land so my plan for the current patch is a bit light. Instead I’m focusing on things that I can take with me so I’ve started studying for a horticultural qualification – it turns out that there’s a lot more to gardening than no-dig veg beds and companion plants, including learning Latin ad nauseum…!

I’m also trying to tie-in my physics & software background so I’ve started creating some free gardening software tools for people (and myself!) to use over on my Alex Grows Food blog which will hopefully be out in time for people to use next year.

More about the Garden Media Guild Awards

Each year, the Garden Media Guild celebrates talented gardening professionals with a selection of highly-contested awards. The shortlists include authors, journalists, photographers, vloggers, podcasters and gardening influencers.

This year, Thompson & Morgan is proud to sponsor ‘The Alan Titchmarsh New Talent of the Year Award 2024’. This special award is for “the person that has made outstanding first steps in the world of garden media, demonstrating talent and potential in his or her field.” Find the full list of GMG awards here.