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Welcome to Grow Cook Eat Arrange, the podcast of me, Sarah Raven, and a roaming list of wonderful and interesting visitors.

And today I'm joined by Alfie Nickerson, who is a young guy who I came across through a mutual friend called Tom Hammock, who's a painter, who has painted and done some amazing woodcuts of Alfie's extraordinary daily fields in North Norfolk.

And he has this flower farm in a really quite remote part of the British Shiles, which I think is such an impressive thing, because it's brave enough to grow dahlias, I think, on mass, but then to try and get them to market in London. And so I've been really interested in talking to Alfie because for me, it's such an achievement what he's done and he's so young. So welcome Alfie. It's very, very nice to chat to you. Will you just

tell us a little bit about your personal story. So I know you're brought up in Norfolk, but kind of

from when you were a boy to now being a renowned flower farmer. Well, I wouldn't say well, I'd started off living in London

for the first 23 years of my life, of which I finished school when I was 18 and decided that I never

wanted to basically be inside again. So moved outside almost to the day after my final exam and started working in

London with sort of three or four different gardeners all doing different sort of things between

maintenance and landscaping basically. And I sort of had this thing after doing it for six years

where I hit this wall of living in London

and feeling not fulfilled in terms of what I really loved about the gardening aspect of it.

So I loved just growing things from seed all the way through to seeing the blooms at the end.

And I was doing this on a much smaller scale.

I was actually doing it with trees in my garden in London. And just slowly started to realise that if I was going to do this

for a longer period of time, I needed to completely change it up. So I decided basically I was going

to try and grow vegetables in Norfolk on a much smaller scale, just

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