This is Acid Man.

Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined as usual by my friends Kea Milburn.

Hello. And Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today on this special microdose we are talking about gardens and gardening.

So, why are we talking about this now? Keir, you had something you wanted to talk about.

You had this topic suggested to you by a friend, and then we did a sort of, we've done an episode

on growth, and we focused on personal growth and economic growth.

But gardening just seems like a really interesting, interesting sort of topic to get into.

And like when I've been doing some reading around it, I read this book by Olivia Lank called The Garden Against Time.

And I had these statistics about lockdown.

She starts a book up, you know, talking about lockdown, the

COVID lockdown. Apparently three million people in Britain started gardening for the first time

in 2020, you know, the beginning of lockdown. Over half of those are under 45. So it's like a new

wave of people getting into gardening. In the US, it's mirrored as well.

18.3 million people started gardening during the pandemic in the United States, apparently.

And there's like, if you think about that, there's lots there actually about, you know,

so there's working from home, you know, people were furloughed, etc., which gives you this question,

well, is gardening what we do if we didn't have to work?

You know, if we remove the realm of necessity, is gardening part of what we do?

That seems to be the indication from lockdown.

But, of course, we were stuck in our homes then, so that might distort it.

You know, and lockdown also was a time when these big inequalities were revealed, particularly

around what your home looked like and whether your home had a garden.

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