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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
I never wanted to be a gardener. That’s why I moved to the concrete jungle that is London’s East End. But gardening found me — eventually — after my wife put our names down for an allotment.
We first signed the waiting list more than a decade ago, when our youngest (referred to by his two older brothers as “Tiny”), was barely potty trained. Now he is sitting GCSEs and towers over my wife. Still, at least he’s now better able to help dig out the sections of turf we are trying to fashion into vegetable patches and flower beds.
For the past two years we have been responsible for a 250 square metre patch of earth, part of an allotment plot, straddled by the Docklands Light Railway. It’s on my route to work, goading me to crane my neck on the morning commute to check on the pond we created from a discarded enamel bath, or whether the rose bush my wife pruned to its stump (on the advice of an online gardening site she found) had started producing buds again (it has!).
Over those two years, my time as an urban gardener has taught me two things. The first is that gardening, surprisingly, is a lot like business — or rather, the branch of business that has most fascinated me during my reporting career: entrepreneurship. Rather than just writing about new ventures, I’ve now got a start-up of my own: one that is quite literally at the seed stage. Like the process of building a business, managing an allotment is the art of creativity, often dealing with the unexpected, and defying the received wisdom about how to make something happen.
For instance, like the vast majority of start-ups, my gardening venture is built on a shoestring: using the sources of funding that entrepreneurship professors refer to as the three Fs: friends, family and fools.
Fortunately, my wife and I have more than enough of the first two in this categorisation to have to contend with finding the third. While the East End of London where we live bears little resemblance to the place you see on screen — no EastEnders-style soap opera gangsters or Mary Poppins dancing chimney sweeps — the stereotype that this part of the capital is a place of strong community bonds is still true. We therefore have no shortage of neighbours volunteering to water our plants when we are away or willing to offer us cuttings from their plants to seed in our beds: this season generated a bumper crop from a rhubarb plant offered for free on a local Facebook group.
Planning how your plot will look is useful, but you also need an entrepreneurial ability to pivot: the art of moving on when something clearly isn’t working.
In our case, it has been the netting tunnel kits we thought were so perfect for protecting our strawberries, not considering the local wildlife’s ability to dig under the gauze to reach the fruit or its desire to squat on top, crushing the plants below. Despite the considerable extra cost, we have now bought a dozen plastic bell cloches, placed strategically over each plant and secured with tent pegs. Nothing gets through these, not even the slugs. They also act as tiny greenhouses for the strawberries, helping the fruit ripen beautifully. Now we just need to find a new home for our redundant nets.
Turning a scrap of land into an urban oasis also involves a lot of dealing with failure: the tomatoes that I carefully tended in the communal greenhouse that could not cope with the open space of the vegetable planter and slowly withered, the onion bulbs eaten by the foxes and squirrels that roam our plot after dark and the aubergine plant mullered by pesky slugs.
Like every successful founder, we make such mistakes into learning opportunities — there is no shame in buying more mature tomato plants from the local garden centre, for instance. But we still have a way to go, and planting space to fill, before this venture reaches maturity.
But there’s something else as well: it’s that this new endeavour has opened doors to conversations with the other members of my family, notably my father. The newspaper industry, which has provided me with a career since leaving university, never interested him that much. But gardening is one of his passions.
So now we have this common bond. Often it manifests itself in me asking his advice, such as how much to tame the rampant mature rosemary bush at the corner of the plot or the best way to keep slugs off my fledgling strawberry patch. I’ve found he lingers longer on my weekly catch-up call to answer my questions, even initiating the conversation himself, rather than just asking: “Do you want to talk to your mother?”
I’m calling him our angel investor.
Jonathan Moules is the FT’s newsletter editor
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