About

For a long time I lived an abstract life. I grew up indoors. I played video games. I went to school and focused on maths and science. I earned a PhD in physics and spent a few years working on software that simulated how simulations would perform on different computer chips….

None of it was as real as growing my own food.

Getting my hands dirty in a small patio garden was a moment of awakening. It felt like the first ‘real thing’ I had done. I used to walk long distances through nature and I spent years perfecting my bread baking technique but taking a small seed and growing it into a 9 ft sunflower hit differently. 

While I had wanted to keep animals (my 2019 five-year plan had ‘start a smallholding’ on it), I hadn’t really taken growing vegetables that seriously. In 2020 I moved to Cambridge into a old terraced ex-military house with a 6m x 6m grey concrete garden attached. A few weeks later we were in lockdown. 

I grew sunflowers and pumpkins like everyone else but it wasn’t until the second year of the pandemic that I really got carried away. Work from home was still in full-swing at the company and my local network was still thin so I spent most of my time turning that bleak garden into something beautiful.

2020 was a year where it was difficult to get food at the supermarket so most of my 2021 planting was going to be edible and due to the small space, the ugly fence that desperately needed hiding and a clause in my tenancy contract that stopped me digging up the lawn (much), I decided to grow vertically. It made that small grey space, very big and very green very quickly. And I would end up with more peppers, runner beans and sweetcorn than I could eat. 

It was good timing because it was that year that I got very sick and spent a lot of time in the garden, posting pictures of everything on Instagram under the new handle @alex.grows.food. I ended up on sick leave while I tried and failed to get a diagnosis but, almost instinctively, I was convinced it was some toxin. Something I was breathing, something I was drinking or something I was eating…

I became obsessed with eliminating substances, including pesticides, from my diet (I later discovered eliminating carbohydrates did the trick). I would learn about industrial agriculture, the impact on soil health, the dependency on more pesticides it creates and the economic issues it causes farmers. I’d listen to audio-books about the benefits of a no-till, no-pesticide approach, learn about the regenerative movement, nutritional density, mycorrhizal fungi, rotational mob-grazing as a way of replenishing soil. I started planning my farm, my little smallholding I’d wanted for years. And I put some of these principles to use in my tiny garden. 

At the end of February 2022, a dozen trays of seedlings and me moved into a massive 0.1 acre garden (with a house attached). Work to transform the garden began immediately. Up went bamboo supports, down went all my moving boxes and away went all my money so I could buy some compost to put on top. By the start of April the lawn was converted into four long no-dig beds ready to grow everything I could ever want. March, April and May were entirely about sowing seeds, hardening off plants and avoiding late frosts, but the summer was an endless harvest. I weighed everything and produced hundreds of kilograms of fresh organic food – mostly in Sungold tomatoes. 

In 2023, I went again but decided to film everything. And so Alex Grows Food began. I bought a little ZV-1 and went vlogging with it around my ‘homestead’, but very quickly I ended up focusing on making education gardening videos instead. During the summer I got a little experimental with my style and in August I ended up making an award-winning video. 

Now, with dirt sitting merrily under my nails and in the cracks of my knuckles, I make a range of gardening content across YouTube, Instagram and this website.