Gardening content may be the last wholesome corner of the internet, and one of the few that feels less undermining than its old-media counterparts. When I finally got my own piece of dirt after decades of apartment living, I learned almost everything about growing from YouTube and a Facebook group filled with people in my state who seemed to know all there is to know about plants. I’ve since established seven fruit trees, three berry bushes, and a glorious cut flower bed; produced bushels of tomatoes in the late summer; and earned the informal title among my local friends of “the lettuce queen.” I owe it all to the internet.
As such, I had high hopes for comedian Zach Galifianakis’ new Netflix series, This Is a Gardening Show. The show, which debuted on Earth Day, comes across as a sincere attempt to share a grower’s enthusiasm with the rest of the world. Netflix’s thumbnail for the series is a photo of Galifianakis reclining on a bed of nasturtiums, one arm thrown back behind his head, his lightly sunburned face suffused with more unadulterated bliss than I have ever seen him exhibit in any of his Hollywood performances. This is manifestly a man who gardens, and who loves gardening. The motto of This Is a Gardening Show is “The future is agrarian,” a sentence Galifianakis repeats regularly with a kind of wistful yearning. His intent is admirably evangelical, but his zoomed-out approach—six episodes, mostly themed around specific crops (apples, corn, root vegetables, etc.) and interviews with master gardeners—lacks the practicality I craved when I was first seized by the desire to root around in the dirt. The series, alas, suffers from many of the shortcomings of old-school gardening-themed TV.
Gardening shows fall into two rough categories: the aspirational and the pragmatic. For ages, gardening TV—a huge amount of which seems to come from Britain—belonged primarily to the first category. Aspirational shows feature a host who chats a bit about planting out spring bulbs, then dons pressed khakis and heads out for an on-site interview with the owner of some magnificent horticultural spread that is the product of either an all-consuming personal obsession or a full-time staff.
The quintessential example of this is the BBC’s Gardeners’ World, hosted by Monty Don (aka Montagu Denis Wyatt Don OBE DL VMH). Each episode begins with Don, golden retriever at his side, performing some homely task, like trimming back the fall grasses or mulching his perennials, then briskly segues to people with first names like Rannveig who have six greenhouses full of rare alpine lilies whose scientific names they know by heart. Or perhaps the show pops by a stately home like Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, where Vita Sackville-West planted her famous white garden, to interview the head gardener there.
Such shows resemble those cookbooks fat with full-color photographs whose complex recipes are meant more to be ogled than followed. “I read cookbooks in bed, like novels!” the people who favor these books like to announce, though it’s unclear if they ever cook from them. I suppose there is a place for such things, but I prefer both my recipes and my gardening shows to be actionable. Even Monty Don’s supposedly relatable gardening chores take place on a two-acre yard he calls Longview, which is divided into named “rooms” (“The Jewel Garden,” “The Paradise Garden”) and includes a simulation of a woodland glen. Speaking as someone who got exhausted just setting up three raised vegetable beds, this sort of extravaganza could only ever be the stuff of dreams.
While aspirational shows—with their lovely cutaways to blossoms nodding in the breeze and songbirds perched on budding branches—can sometimes be relaxing, their heavy rotation of unattainable horticultural splendors gives them an unsettling resemblance to social media influencer accounts—whose backyard could ever hold a candle to Longview? The internet, fortunately, has stepped up to provide gardeners with more practical content. Want to know why the seedlings you started indoors have gotten so leggy? How to get more blooms from your zinnias? What to do when your nightshades show signs of the dreaded blossom end rot? There’s a 15-minute video on YouTube offering you time-tested advice on this from a person with a jerry-rigged grow-light setup similar to the one in your own basement. In fact, there are 20 such videos, each with a comment section featuring advice from other gardeners.
The best of these gardening channels boast a substantial library of targeted videos. Whether you have half an acre of raised beds or some pots on a balcony, chances are you show up with specific questions in mind, and you don’t want to sit through a lot of palaver about how tomatoes are actually a fruit and corn is the product of centuries of crossbreeding grasses. Most of these videos don’t need to be more than 20 minutes long. The very best of them are filmed over weeks and show the results of the gardener’s practices. More ineffably, the hosts seem like people you could sit next to on a bench to talk about plants and soil and mulch on a sunny afternoon. It’s a parasocial relationship, sure, but a very laid-back one. Here are a few recommendations:
Location, location, location: All good gardening channels make sure you understand how climate determines what and how you grow. This energetic New Jersey native makes a habit of mentioning that he lives on the southeastern coast of North Carolina in every episode, but his ingenuity in “zone pushing”—growing crops just outside his region’s hardiness zone—adds a certain suspense to each season’s programming. Few home gardeners will be as committed and energetic, but every episode is focused, concise, and full of real tips on how to maximize production and fend off the diseases and pests that torment us, even for those nowhere near balmy Zone 8, where the Millennial Gardener reigns.
Jenna’s channel could easily double as ASMR; her voice is calm and soothing, and Jenna herself is almost supernaturally wholesome. Based in Ohio (Zone 6a), she provides plenty of advice for gardeners like me, who grow in cold and windy climates. She’s particularly good at targeting specific issues: how to test the germination of older seeds, how to grow spinach, how to use frost cloth. But I’ve also found great value in the videos where she reviews all the seeds she plans to plant in the coming year. Her recommendations—including for the rubber gardening boots I bought last month!—are always sound.
Luke Marion and his wife Sindy run a full-fledged business out of their Michigan headquarters, selling seeds, fertilizers, and other supplies. Knowing that makes the sometimes rambling, unscripted quality of Luke’s videos on such topics as pruning fruit trees and building deer-proof fences more endearing. He’s no mogul, just a guy who loves growing and found a way to make it pay. The information he offers is invariably sound, and a recent episode where he pointed out the diseased branches on trees sold in big-box stores will sure save many viewers both money and heartache.
Ashley is a soil scientist, so her videos typically drop a lot of data on her devoted listeners. This can sometimes be overwhelming, but anyone who can grow tomatoes in Saskatchewan must be listened to. Her grandmother’s tip for skipping the hardening-off stage with seedlings grown indoors worked perfectly for me, so this summer I’m fully on board with her most controversial recommendation at all: not planting tomato seedlings deep.
Epic Gardening and Jacques in the Garden
It seems like there’s a little gardening cult down in San Diego centered on Kevin Espiritu and his pal, the “garden hermit” Jacques Lyakov. Like MIgardener, Epic is a business with multiple employees and a full range of products sold on their website. Nevertheless, their channels have an easygoing quality and some running jokes (like Kevin’s hilarious pronunciation of “chamomile”) that keeps the tone friendly and down-to-earth. While their Zone 10b climate puts some of their recommendations out of reach for those of us further north, I especially appreciate their love of flowers, which many vegetable gardeners neglect.
Cassandra grows an astonishing amount of food exclusively on her deck, enough of it that she also devotes much of her website to various techniques for preserving harvests: canning, dehydrating, and freeze-drying. Expect to hear a lot about GreenStalk vertical planters from her, but then many YouTube gardeners fund themselves with associate links, and you can’t argue with the results she gets. Plus, in the off-season, she posts lots of smart videos on how to maintain a pantry and stretch your grocery budget.
Ben Vanheems is a former gardening magazine editor and the YouTube face of the U.K. garden-planner company Growing Interactive. His unfailingly jolly demeanor and dirty fingernails are an instant mood-lifter, but I especially appreciate his videos about how to repurpose random free junk—from fish scraps and those oversize Ikea bags to cardboard toilet paper tubes—into gardening supplies. ”Make an Instant Raised Bed for Less Than a Coffee” is my idea of great gardening content.
Dowding’s videos tend to sport titles that promise some specific instruction—such as a beginner’s guide to no-dig gardening, his specialty—and then turn out to be rambling tours of his extensive vegetable gardens in Somerset, England, as he talks about whatever comes to mind while he encounters various beds and plants. All the same, Dowding is the guru of the no-till, no-dig gardening method, and there’s much wisdom to be gleaned from his channel if you have the patience. And if you follow his advice and opt for no-dig, you’ll make up for it in all the time you save working a shovel.
