You’ll learn a little from your successes—and a whole lot more from your failures. And that’s the thing: only through doing something will you become skilled at it.
Forget YouTube: Why Your Own Patch of Earth is the Best Teacher
There’s a growing trend in the world towards artisan producers, small market gardens, and little flower farms and a host of people who aspire to become growers—and alongside their rise is another trend, not one sprouting from the soil, but one that’s thriving online.
Scroll through Instagram or TikTok and you’ll find countless “farmers” in wide-brimmed hats and perfectly aligned, picture-perfect flower fields, offering courses, eBooks, branded jumpers, and downloadable dream-farm blueprints. They’ll tell you in tall neon print how they make six figures a year on a postage-stamp plot, or how they’ve developed systems from no-till, to no-weed, to no-work. And each of them is happy to share their secrets—with you, for a price.
From the ranks of stout and jolly ladies with can-do attitudes telling you just how easy it is to make a fortune as a flower farmer, to the tweed- or corduroy-wearing, self-deprecating experts who’ve apparently reimagined salad growing, these masters of their crafts all have one thing in common: they want your money. And in most cases, once they have it, what you receive in return is nearly worthless.
Their online persona would have you believe they’re making a living from their land. But look a little closer: their hands are suspiciously clean and uncalloused, their fields and beds immaculate in every frame, and their carrots or dahlias always appear flawless. Deep down, you know this vision of perfection isn’t farming. And experience will teach you that these experts aren’t in the business of growing—they’re in the business of selling a glorified version of the farming idyll.
Now, to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with earning a living through knowledge-sharing. Teaching has value. But the glossy and always muck-free version of growing that’s taken over online often skips the crucial bits—the growing itself, the farming, the backaches, the weather disasters, and the failures.
Scratch the surface and you’ll see that much of what’s being sold isn’t any different from what you could learn for free from a seasoned allotment grower, a neighbour with a veg patch, or a quick chat with a farmer at your local market. Better still, you could just turn over some soil and have a go yourself.
Because here’s the truth: your own patch of ground will teach you more than any YouTube expert ever could.
You’ll learn a little from your successes—and a whole lot more from your failures. And that’s the thing: only through doing something will you become skilled at it.
Want to know when to sow carrots? Check the seed packet, then try sowing at different times and see what happens. Want to understand succession planting? Do it. Curious which flowers thrive in your climate, or how long they last in a vase? Grow them. Watch them fail. Grow them again. Through repetition on a small scale, you’ll learn what works for your patch, in your local climate or microclimate—and only then can you scale up.
There’s a certain wisdom that only the seasons can teach. Like seeing your first tulip push through wet spring soil. Or losing a row of lettuce to a sudden warm spell. Or a bed of carrots to the dreaded root fly. It’s messy, imperfect, and sometimes maddening—but it’s real. And that reality is worth far more than any slick, pre-recorded one-hour webinar.
Courses—online or in-person—can have value. They can offer a shortcut, a nudge in the right direction, help you dodge the most obvious mistakes. Sometimes they might even show you that you know more than you thought and what you lacked was confidence. But if a course isn’t rooted in real experience—if it’s not backed by soil-stained fingernails and a working business that actually grows things successfully—then what it’s selling isn’t knowledge. It’s aspiration. Wrapped up in pretty packaging, with access to well-edited videos and sowing calendars suited to a patch of earth somewhere far from yours.
This isn’t gatekeeping—it’s grounding.
If you’re thinking of growing your own vegetables or starting a flower patch, don’t let the online noise distract you. You don’t need a branded growing planner or a €199 “starter toolkit.” What you need is a small bit of land, some decent compost, and a willingness to get things wrong before you get them right.
There are plenty of free online resources that can help in a general way. There are great books—many of them decades old but still full of gold. But there are no shortcuts to becoming a good grower.
Here’s a truth I’ve found to be almost universal: if you want to grow something successfully, you have to grow it three times—the first time to fail, the second to learn, and the third to get it right.
When it comes to growing, real learning only comes from doing. From deadheading. Compost-turning. Sowing, planting, and the quiet satisfaction that comes when something finally goes right. It comes from watching what works where you live—with your soil, your light, your weather, and all the pressures that come with it.
So go for it. Turn over some earth. Get your hands dirty. And remember:
