Hello and welcome to the Slow Home Podcast. This is episode number 112. Thank you for joining us. I'm Brooke. This is Ben. Gaday. G'day. G'day. How you doing? Rude.

So rude. I'm so sorry. My email pinging at you. Today is a wonderful episode with Kirstie Barchak, who is a Melbourne person.

She, human being of Melbourne.

A Melbourneite.

A Melbourneite, a Melbourneian.

She and I talk about gardening as a general you know, general umbrella theme, growing food for your family specifically.

First of all, this is something that I just super love.

This has been a passion for yours for ever since we've had a garden.

Yeah, yes, it has.

But I think I've kind of dove head first into gardening

when I was at my worst, you know, mentally and emotionally when the kids were tiny babies. And I

remember the pleasure I got from, from growing something at that point it wasn't vegetables it was

just I planted like a native garden and I remember distinctly spending time outside even if it was

just 30 seconds on the way to or from the clothes line which is something I still do almost every

single day checking the growth of things and And I started to realize, you know,

like, recognize the way things were unfolding and growing. And I don't know, the miracle of it

really struck me. And at the time, I didn't realize that what I was doing was practicing mindfulness

because I hadn't discovered, you know,

simple living or anything at this point. And I was really just in a horrible place, emotionally,

mentally, in pretty much every kind of way. But that was my, my kind of, I don't know, my sanity check.

So Kirstie and I speak about that quite a bit in today's episode. But also

her, she's written a book recently. And this is something that I know will appeal to so many

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