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How social media is inspiring young veg growers

Kitchen gardener Jamie Walton – aka Instagram’s Nettles & Petals – is part of a network of content creators who are making grow-your-own gardening appealing to young people and beginners through their videos

You have 1.2 million followers on Instagram and now a book – what gardening ideas are you trying to get across to people?

My first book, Nettles & Petals: Grow Food, Eat Weeds, Save Seeds, contains lots of practical advice for creating or transitioning to a garden that’s more focussed on ecological principles. It includes many DIY projects – from building worm farms to wildlife ponds – as well as growing guides. There’s lots about soil health because learning to focus on that rather than the individual plants dramatically changed my practices, improved my success as an ecological gardener, and also had a profound effect on my mental health.


© Samuel Binstead
Nettles & Petals: Grow Food, Eat Weeds, Save Seeds by Jamie Walton, Leaping Hare
You seem to be part of an online movement that’s making veg growing relevant for a much younger audience – tell us about that.

There isn’t a community of us who said “Right, let’s become content creators and start a movement.” I just started making videos to document what I was doing in the garden. After a while I began connecting with like-minded people online. It’s now grown into a network of creators, including Patrick Vernuccio, @thefrenchiegardener, specialising in urban balcony gardening; Sarah Gerrard-Jones, @theplantrescuer, whose focus is indoor plant care and rescue; and Martha Swales, @marfskitchengarden, a city gardener sharing easy-to-follow garden projects and recipes. We all try and help each other out – it’s a nice community trying to create a more wholesome version of social media.


Many of your videos feature traditional veg such as chard and tomatoes – who’s your audience?

Many of my followers are beginner gardeners and it’s so nice to hear people all around the world saying they’ve been inspired to start growing their own food after watching. I also get parents messaging me to say they watched my videos with their kids and now they’re growing veg together, which is amazing! One person even came up to me at an RHS show saying I’d inspired her to quit her job and take an RHS course. These moments inspire me. Traditional garden shows don’t always resonate with younger audiences, but seeing people online who are your age or who look less like the average gardener, makes it all feel more relatable. I also love highlighting unusual veg in my videos, but I know if I post about tomatoes it’ll do well.

It’s nice to hear people all around the world saying they’ve been inspired to start growing their own food after watching my videos.

Jamie Walton, aka Nettles & Petals

What does ecological horticulture entail?

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Jamie Walton, aka Nettles & Petals, in his garden
Marigolds and Lobularia maritima are included in Jamie’s productive beds to attract pollinators

A commercial market garden I set up in Sandsend, near Whitby, three years ago was on a north-facing slope by the sea, and didn’t see much sun for four months of the year. We still had produce growing year-round, which showed me the importance of setting up a garden ecologically – with both healthy soil and an ecosystem as the focus. Ecological horticulture promotes biodiversity, but it’s as much about soil health, water conservation, compost creation, building wildlife habitats, and of course incorporating perennials and native plants.

There’s a real commitment to zero-waste, circular gardening practices, aiming to reduce the need for outside inputs such as compost, fertilisers or pesticides. That circular process of gardening creates a biodiverse and healthy space in which your plants – and all the life they support – will flourish.


Do you welcome in all creatures, including pests?

In my gardens, I honestly don’t have many pest problems now. However, when you’re first setting up, it does take a while to cultivate a balance between pests and the predators that eat them, and you will have losses within the first couple of years. Sorry, but there’s no way around it! It doesn’t happen overnight, but once you’ve cultivated that balance, you don’t have to spray, nor introduce nematodes – we didn’t even net. It all comes down to welcoming in the creatures that prey on pests. That can be as simple as putting up bird boxes to attract birds, which then eat cabbage white butterflies; or putting in a pond to provide habitat for slug-eating frogs. It also comes down to companion planting – grouping plants for mutual benefit. For example, growing corn, which climbing beans can then grow up. These in turn fix the nitrogen in the soil for growing squash, which shades the ground, reducing evaporation and weed growth.


You’re a fan of weeds, especially nettles, and the virtues of eating them. Do you allow these plants to flourish within your borders too?

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Nettles
Jamie grows much-maligned nettles for culinary use as well as to provide habitat and forage for wildlife
© Samuel Binstead
Nettle seeds
He also uses delicious and nutritious nettle seeds in his cooking
For a lot of people, nettles – my favourite – are some of the most persistent weeds they’ll encounter, but they have many benefits and provide habitat and forage for so much wildlife. I grow nettles in pots as a crop, because then I can control their spread and, when they start producing seed, I move them, cover them or simply harvest the seeds, which are delicious and packed full of nutrients. Once you process nettles in any way, their sting is removed. They can be made into nettle tea too, but I generally only use liquid fertilisers within the first year or two of setting up a garden because you can end up with a dependency on them. It’s much better to create healthy soil that plants will thrive in. I also grow thistles and dandelions, plus many more within my floral and productive beds, but I don’t let anything take over. I’ll intervene to re-establish balance.


Should more of us garden ecologically?

Chemical-based agriculture has had disastrous effects on our ecosystems. I believe that ecological growing is the solution, but it’s important to highlight that these aren’t my principles and practices. I’m simply rediscovering indigenous techniques that were once commonplace all over the world. The Three Sisters planting method for example, which incorporates three plants that grow in symbiosis with one another, is growing in popularity again. Yet it is rooted in native American agriculture. I highly recommend reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass for more on this planting method as she explores the Native American traditional relationship with the land. Looking back to the past may actually offer the key to the future.


© Samuel Binstead
Beds in Jamie’s garden contain a diverse mix of plants, from foxgloves and aquilegia to lupins, chives and buttercups, promoting biodiversity
What does the future hold for you?

I’m setting up a larger community-focused market garden in Pickering, North Yorkshire, that will produce food for local food banks and low-income families, along with recipes. It’s going to be an experimental site, with agroforestry, and it’s on heavy clay – I like a challenge. I’d like to form a network of them across the UK, and possibly further. I really love what I do, but growing for those with limited access to good, organic food is more fulfilling. I have conflicting thoughts on being a content creator – it’s not what I ever planned to be – but I’ve realised that having the reach I do means I can do so much good, both off and online. If a million people see a video about pollinator-friendly flowers and then if even half of those sow some seeds, that has a potentially large impact for global ecology. And that’s pretty awesome.

Nettles & Petals: Grow Food, Eat Weeds, Save Seeds by Jamie Walton, published on 27 March 2025 by Leaping Hare. Available in hardback £16.99.


This page is an adaptation of an article published in the March 2025 edition of The Garden magazine, free to RHS members every month when you join the RHS.
 
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