It’s so hard to know how to start these things, these things you’ve never really
done before, especially for someone like me who is a little bit introverted, to speak,
in front of a camera to an unknown audience.
As I don’t really know where to start, I guess I’ll start with who I am and why I’m here.
My name is Bruce Darrell.
I was originally from Canada but have been living in Ireland for the last couple of decades.
I was trained as an architect, and I used to work in the field of visual arts, producing
CGI imagery, but I don’t do that any more.
I’ve worked with an independent think tank on the interrelated issues of food security,
climate change, energy depletion, economic systems and working on systems design in general.
In ways I guess I am still am doing the same thing, only in a different, more practical context.
I have been helping to develop an ecovillage project here in Cloughjordan, Ireland, where
I’ve built our house and now live, work, explore within the context of this wonderful
and innovative community.
More recently I’ve been spending a lot of time in my vegetable gardens, growing food.
And now, I am entering the strange new wold of becoming a creator of videos about growing food.
I don’t grow food as a hobby, or to improve the health of my family or to get closer to
nature, though these are all perfectly acceptable reasons to have a vegetable garden.
I grow food because I believe that it's an important thing to do right now.
A number of years ago I started to understand the relationships between the many of the
problems in the world and our seriously flawed food supply systems.
I realised that changing our food systems was essential in order to mitigate against
climate Change, and adapt to Climate Change, to deal with energy depletion and resource
scarcity, to adequately manage waste, pollutions and land degradation, in addressing poverty
and corporate control, and fundamentally improving the resilience of our lives and our communities.
More specifically I came to believe that many of these problems could be partially or substantially
addressed by more people growing more of their own food.
This is why I am here.
This is what I do now, and that is why I've started a Youtube Channel.
I realised a few years ago that I needed to dramatically improve my skills, knowledge
and ability in growing food, in growing vegetables.
I needed to take it much more seriously, to be more productive, to be more creative, to
better understand the fascinating world of being a grower.
If the world needs more growers, then I felt I really needed to try to be one.
I took on the challenge of trying to skill up, to try to educate myself.
So, I bought a lot of books on the topics of growing your own vegetables.
I learned a lot, but also became quite confused because many of the authors of these books
were telling me to do different things.
There was a lot of conflicting advice and contradictory approaches.
I had one book telling me that my main job was to dig my garden beds as deeply and as
thoroughly, and as a loosely as I could, incorporating as much fertility as I could, in order to
maximise the amount of productivity per square meter.
But another insisted that I shouldn’t be digging at all, that I’d only mess things
up, that I would destroy the beautiful strata of soil that was created by a healthy soil ecosystem.
This was just one of the many points of contention and contradiction within the books that I read.
I found myself trying to understand who was right and who was wrong, because even though
I understood the methodologies behind each approach, they couldn’t all be right,
or could they?
I found that my limited experience growing food wasn’t enough to be able to evaluate
which method, which set of methods, was best for me, my garden, or the climate of Ireland.
So I decided to try them all out.
And that was the genesis of the RED Gardens Project.
I have been working on this project for a number of years, but this year I decided to
do things differently.
Firstly, I needed to take this project much more seriously, to be more active.
I also expanded the gardens, first there were 4, then 5 and now there are 6 small scale,
family sized gardens, each one following a different methodology, a different book.
I have also started another significantly larger growing project, which I’m calling
the Black Plot, because I don’t really have a better name for it yet.
This new, intermediate scale garden is not following a particular methodology or approach,
as encapsulated in a book.
It’s much more experimental, but much more on that in later videos.
Together, all of these gardens comprise what I call the RED Gardens Project -
RED stands for Research Education Development.
This is an R+D project
I see this project as part of a global movement that is working to develop creative, appropriate
and sustainable, resilient solutions to the problems of how do we feed the world,
how do we best feed ourselves?
The final big step this year is starting a YouTube channel.
This will be the primary medium for sharing this project with the outside world, for documenting
what has succeeded and what has failed, for posing questions, for speaking answers.
And here I am, first video.
I really didn’t intend this first video of this YouTube channel to be so personal,
but it seemed like the right thing to do.
I’m going to be producing a lot more videos in the near future, so if you like this sort
of thing, please subscribe because I’d really value engagement and feedback.
In the near future I am going to launch a crowd funding campaign to raise funds for
the development of the Black Plot, so please keep an eye out for that as I would really
value your support.
Finally, thanks for watching, I think this is going to be really interesting!