Mind Blowing Life Transformation | How to Escape the City to Become a Farmer

Three years ago, after living in the city for a long time, living in London, I decided to leave the city and move to the countryside because I had this burning desire to become more self-sufficient and less reliant on outside sources. So I decided to move to the countryside and start growing food. I'd never grown anything in my life before so it was a whole huge learning experience but thanks to the University of YouTube, I learned the basics on how to grow food and that was three years ago now and I'm growing things kind of successfully but I'm learning there's obviously so much to learn as you go. I think that's the beauty of it and that's what's keeping me hooked on growing. I'm Gaz Oakley, I'm a chef, originally from Cardiff in Wales. I now live in the countryside but prior to moving here, I started cooking at the age of 15 in professional kitchens and that's my passion, that's my trade I would say. It feels like a click like that, it seems like it's just a blip but it's actually been seven years since I started sharing my recipes on social media and the reason I started doing it was because I'd been cooking in kitchens for years and everyone knew me, all my friends and family knew me as a chef who cooked everything but I decided to actually go plant-based overnight. My friends would just ask me, what on earth are you eating? So I decided to just share pictures of my food so they knew what I was eating on Instagram and before I knew it, actually other people, not just my friends, started following me from all around the world and then, you know, the following started increasing and I decided to start a cooking show because there was no one out there at this time sharing plant-based recipes in the style of a traditional cooking show that I'd grown up watching so I decided to get a credit card, pay for a production company to come and film me in an Airbnb. I just turned up one day at this Airbnb and said, you don't mind if I film, do you? And they're like, oh yeah, that's fine, thinking I'd just be filming on an iPhone, next minute a whole crew turns up with all these boxes and things like that but and I remember that first day of filming, I stood behind, all confident and then they started rolling and I couldn't get words out. I was stiff and shy and nervous but then I realised that all I'm doing is cooking and that's my passion so I just continued with it and I remember going to a festival once shortly after posting my first few videos that I couldn't even watch, they were really awkward, but someone came over to me and said, oh you saved my Christmas dinner because your recipes helped me cook a plant-based dinner for my whole family and everyone loved it and that really just said, you know, was the reassurance that I could make a difference with my food and that was six and a half years ago as I said now and we've reached 1.6 million subscribers and I'd never in a million years thought I'd get there but we did it and obviously Instagram and everything like that is where I post my content too and I have cookbooks and just try and spread positivity and a peaceful message so everything I do is with the mindset of peace and peaceful cuisine, you know, it's gardening, it's cooking, it's therapeutic, it's just spreading joy and peacefulness. Yeah, I started off with just one raised bed, that was two, three growing seasons ago, me and my dad just built this one raised bed and typically I thought I could grow everything in that one small raised bed, I had everything in there, carrots, parsnips, chard, kale, everything then I soon realised, you know, you need to space things out a little bit more so slowly I've been adding raised bed after raised bed but I just try and grow the things that I like to eat, I mean there's not many things I don't like to eat but as the years have gone on I've slowly increased the size of my growing space, I am on a hill which makes things difficult, this is the first year I've had undercover growing space which is a new thing to learn and I definitely have learnt a lot in this first growing season in terms of, you know, melons and chillies and tomatoes and what not but it's definitely exciting when you step into the greenhouse and you can smell all the aromas but I love my greens, I love kale, I love my medicinal herbs, pumpkins, I really am trying to grow some ginormous pumpkins, I want to grow a pumpkin big enough that I could carve a door on it and try and put a little seat in there and sit there in my pumpkin house, maybe one year I could do that but for the time being, yeah, pumpkins, I want to try and grow some because obviously I eat plant based and I want to be self sufficient so things like quinoa and chickpeas and soybeans even, the more things that are substantial for me is great because they make up a big part of my diet, grains and beans and things like that. I think that I have a love hate relationship with tomatoes because I feel like they're very temperamental, they're like a house plant, you give a house plant all of the luxuries that it wouldn't get in the wild, like regular watering, regular feeding, you know, no adverse weather conditions but somehow they're going to find a way to die on you but when I taste them, all of that stress of trying to keep them upright and pinching off the suckers and looking after them, feeding them, it goes away because they taste too good. So I do have a love hate relationship with tomatoes but there's nothing better than juicy, fresh, home grown tomatoes and you realise how much of a monopoly that supermarkets have on you when you grow your own tomatoes because one plant can produce like a tonne of juicy tomatoes like this and you know, just like four of these in your supermarket would probably cost like five pounds, maybe more for organic heirloom tomatoes but when you grow them yourself it's just like one seed, one plant will pump out a load of tomatoes. I feel now, even though I'm not working in the kitchens as much as I used to, I only have a pop up restaurant that I occasionally open, I would like to have my own place where I can serve people my food and my home grown food one day and that's a vision and a plan that I'm manifesting and that's the dream but in terms of my cooking style, now I'm less likely to overdo the dishes, you know, I just want the true flavour of this produce to sing and make the ingredient or the freshly harvested ingredient the centre of the dish and really what shines. I think people need to understand when I open my restaurant you may just have a radish on the plate with a little bit of salt, like literally just, but I'll go out and I'll serve it and I'll say I've just picked this and that's the story and you know there's nothing better than a freshly picked peppery radish is there, so I mean for me that is like a Michelin star meal. It makes me a little emotional because it's like a whole journey and food for me is a story but I feel so much more connected to ingredients now than ever before, I feel like more of a chef than ever and now it's just letting the hero produce shine. I knew how important making your own compost was before I even moved to Wales and set up my garden because I just watched so much YouTube and people like Charles Dowding expressed to me and Hugh Richards how important composting was and also just realising there is a whole cycle involved in the garden, you know, and cooking involved in that too, so any of my kitchen scraps, I don't want to give them away to the council, this is precious material to make more compost for me to grow more food in, so from the very start I started composting but then I soon realised that you can never have enough compost so I now, you know, try and build up my supplies as much as possible by going to like coffee shops and asking for their coffee grounds and I recently adopted some rescued chickens, so as much as I'm so happy I can give them a new life, I know that their poop is going to be very beneficial to my composting, it saves me buying it, I don't want to, I want to try and avoid buying compost. I've got a compost corner, it's now the chicken's favourite place to be, they're always scratching around in it and I just, yeah, I just want to make as much as I can. I made a silly mistake because it was lockdown when I was looking for a property to move to and I was in a real rush to leave London, I sort of said yes really enthusiastically when I saw this property, to be honest with you I actually didn't even view the property before saying yes, I sent my parents because I was locked down in London, so they went and viewed it and they said it was amazing, so I said okay, just put an offer in. I just saw that it had a lot of land but I didn't realise how much of an issue the hill would be and being on a hill would be for my growing. It is south facing which is nice, so it's sort of, it's like a solar panel, it's the right angle for the sun but, you know, to try and create a bed you're digging out all this clay, it's really difficult, it's hard work and just to water it's, you know, up and down a hill, it's a good workout but I cannot wait for the day that I have a dedicated space for my growing that I can welcome people to and there's no way that's going to be on a hill, it's going to be flat and it's going to be an absolute joy just wandering around the garden, flat land, my wheelbarrow is going to be a joy to push around, but I've got an amazing dad who is, doesn't mind getting his hands dirty and helps me out building raised beds and digging, he's fully involved and I can't thank him enough for all the help he gives me on this hill. Yes, so my winter plans this year, as I said, the dream kitchen that I'm hopefully is going to be a success. I can't even picture it being real right now because it's been three years in the making, three years of filming outside, so that's the major plan, but in terms of things that I'm going to grow, I just want to use this undercover space to its full potential because it's a big investment, it was a lot of hard work building it, so I need to use this space as efficiently as I can, so I'll definitely need some tips actually on what I can grow in the winter in here, but I definitely have going to need my greens and a good supply of that, my salad, herbs, things like that and anything else I can get in here would be great. As much as I'm not a big fan of the cold, I think winter time is a really great time to sort of plot and plan what you're going to grow next season and in life too, how you're going to grow and how, what goals I have, so I'm going to grow my food and grow personally. With my roots growing here, my roots, personal roots in Wales have seemed to have solidified. I love being in Wales, I love being home. Moving here, I feel connected, I feel a sense of home and in Wales we have this saying called hiraeth, which is like a longing for that connection to your land and your home and that's definitely been my journey, hiraeth is coming home, that longing for Wales and being back here, so I'm grateful for that. My favourite crop, I think cucumber. I love seeing them almost grow in front of your eyes, they grow real fast, they pump out a load of fruit and it's like when you cut into it and it's so, you know, it's got so refreshing, it's so, it's rich with water and they taste so much better than the supermarket ones. It's a real special thing to grow, so I think I'd say cucumber is my favourite thing to grow, along with pumpkins too, they just grow to obscene sizes, depending on the varieties, they're nice. And the crop that I think has the most uses that people don't realise, chard is springing to mind. I think that the stalk has a more of an earthy taste to the leaf and the leaf can be treated like spinach. I've made things like kimchi with the stalks or you can just, you know, boil them or steam them and they just taste sweet and earthy like beetroot. I use the leaves when they're really big as like, almost like a tortilla, you can make them crispy because one chard plant produces so many leaves. I portion it up into portions, I freeze it and then I have then a bag of frozen chard for the winter, then I can just throw into a stew or a curry. Chard is just prolific the way it grows, so I think that's underrated and it looks beautiful, doesn't it? It's like traffic lights of colour, that's how I describe it, all different rainbow in the garden. I'm so regretful that I didn't start growing food earlier on my little balcony when I lived in London, because I had a small balcony. I just thought, oh there's no way you can grow food on there because it's too small, but actually you don't need that much space to grow a good amount of food, you just need a few buckets. I love a YouTuber, MyFamilyGarden, Moth and Ali his name is, he actually has a small container garden just to prove to people how you can grow in anything. He's turned a bathtub into a planter, a raised bed, you know, there's so much that you can do on a balcony or in a small little porch area. So that's my message, is please don't be put off by seeing big farms or big homesteads or gardens, you can grow in a small space. A guy I met in Jamaica, a really inspiring Rasta guy, he said turn your lawns into a farm. If you have a small patch of grass, put some cardboard down, put some soil on top and start sowing some seeds and turn your lawn into a farm. It's the best thing for your mind, your health and your well-being.