Jane Perrone loves being outside, experiencing first hand the infinite intricacies and fascinations.  She loves growing her own delicious, fresh food.  She blogs about gardening at www.Perone.blogs.com  Jane is a journalist and gardening editor at The Guardian, one of the biggest newspapers in England.

 

In This Episode You'll Discover ...

Water conservation in the UK
Mint:  rat repellent, tea and 99 other powerful uses
Technology and the future of gardening - robots, automation and sensors

Sponsors:

How healthy are you really? Take the test at  http://NutritionWeCanTrust.com
Discover weedless gardening - Straw Bale Gardens by Joel Karsten
Need an aquaponics equipment list?  Fish-powered gardening is powerful!

 

 
Resources & Books
The Well-Tempered Garden by Christopher Lloyd

Plants for a Future  --  PFAF.org

Royal Horticultural Society

Tropical Britain

 

 
Watch the Podcast Interview Here:

 

 

 
Transcript:
 

Dave:  Well good morning, good afternoon, or good evening depending on where you are in the world when you listen to this.  I'm Dave Ledoux, and welcome to another episode of Back To My Garden.  Today we get to go across the pond over to England and we're talking with Jane.  Jane loves being outside, experiencing first-hand the infinite intricacies and fascinations with nature.  She loves growing her own delicious, fresh food.  She blogs about gardening at Perrone.blogs.com and we're going to talk about that.  And she's also a journalist, and a gardening editor at The Guardian, one of the biggest newspapers in England.  Joining us from London, England, please welcome to the show Jane Perrone.  Hi Jane!

Jane: Hi!

Dave:  How was my introduction?  Did I get it mostly right?

Jane:  You got it completely spot on.

Dave:  Fantastic!  I want to hear your stories, and the listeners want to get to know you better.  Take a minute or two and share with us a little bit about your background, and how did you fall in love with gardening.

Jane:  Okay, as you said I'm the gardening editor at The Guardian newspaper, and I always say to people who say "how did you get your job or how did you get into gardening?"  I always say I used to be a "real" journalist, which is a bit of a joke really.  My professional training is in journalism, so I did an English literature degree which was fun, but not very much practical use for journalism.  Then I went to the States and I studied a masters of mass communication at Louisiana State University, then I came back to the UK and I did a year doing research into the internet and journalism.  And then I did a journalism course to do local newspaper in the UK, and then I finally got my job at The Guardian, so I've come from a very traditional journalism background.  The flip side of that is that I've always been fascinated by plants, and from a very young age been growing stuff.  Started off really with houseplants, which was my first love as a child, and there's a very sad picture of me looking very geeky with a big table full of houseplants in my bedroom when I was about maybe thirteen.  I wasn't the coolest of kids, I just loved plants.  I had a big terrarium full of houseplants, but I also remember one of the first things I sowed as a seed was parsley.  And I remember sowing this parsley seed, and I don't know whether I read the instructions on the packet or what I did, but I remember sowing it and then coming back the next day and being devastated that nothing has happened.  Then going back the next day, still nothing had happened, nothing had sprouted.  And finally, forgetting about it and going back about two weeks later, and as we all know, parsley is very slow to germinate, and two weeks later I was absolutely amazed that the parsley was coming up.  That was another reason why I got completely hooked, seeing that transformation from a seed to a fully fledged plant that, in many cases, you could eat.