If you work in hort

[SamphireAndSeaGlass]

What's your job title and what is your role like? 🌱🌱🌱

@Vegemiteandhoneyontoast

Most of your post resonated. I've excellent relationships with all my clients and most of them I would consider friends. They do prefer women and will give you their life stories. It's quite normal to work alongside them. Also very much a pastoral side to the role.

@SamphireAndSeaGlass the weather is a pivoting factor in the job.

I can't work this week not only coz it's too cold for me but because the ground is literally frozen and unworkable.

Most gardeners don't work / have reduced work in the winter not only because of this but also because of the rain.

But rain is also a problem in summer. In the summer any gardeners will work 12+ hours per day in order to make up for the loss of income they will incur in the winter.

And don't get me started on the heat in summer.....

I worked in horticulture for 10 years before going back to a corporate job and then taking early retirement.

My route was slightly different, I am ex construction and then did corporate construction training and then decided, once a contract had ended, that I wanted to teach horticulture in some way. I had done a basic gardening qualification at the local college and applied for jobs teaching. I got the second one I applied for. My knowledge comes however from doing veg growing, organically, at home and on my allotment. The qualification was just to tick a box.

The job I got was working with mainly teenage boys at various SEN schools, to use horticulture as therapy. I got the job as I'd had the vast experience of working with men in my construction role as they needed someone who wasn't too petrified of teenage boys, as well as knowing how to grow food. This also extended to teaching people with disabilities, and learning difficulties, some quite profoundly disabled as well as dementia groups.

I did that for a few years, then went into running my own teaching business, on a community garden which had to be brought back from a wilderness to a suitable place to teach. I also did a further RHS L2 in practical horticulture. And my PTLLS and DTLLS and also got a foundation diploma in teaching those with learning disabilities and difficulties. At the time I also worked 2-3 days in a SEN college doing 'life skills' using horticulture as a framework.

I worked with my good friend, it was our names on the documents at the end of the day so it was stressful knowing each day we were taking a risk having them on site. We worked with older mostly male teens and into early 20s. Many had violent histories, many had got themselves into a pickle and never got out. And some couldn't even add up basic numbers or tell the time. So i ended up having multitudes of gardening activities that also taught them basic skills. We did everything from teach them bookbinding, so that they could create their own dictionary of the useful words they learnt, to butter making to eat with the bread they made in the earth oven they also made, which also cooked the pizza they made with the tomatoes and herbs they picked that morning.

If I hadn't left the UK after taking early retirement, I'd basically be doing local gardening and potentially teaching low key organic veg growing in community groups. I developed a large range of activities that can help people access gardening from the sterile environments of a children's cancer ward, to creating worm farms from scratch. I also at that time, developed activities to teach the whole of the science curriculum, across all schools years, solely in the garden. It can be done!

Over here in France, I can't work for another 3 years (on an inactive visa) but I've already had requests to run groups and courses, but to be honest, I prefer to do what I do now which is grow in my own garden, and also grow hundreds of plants for swaps and to give away to people I meet to spread the knowledge and joy of heritage veg, and to save as many seeds as I can for the same purpose. Over here, most people have veg plots so there is a huge potential for people wanting plants and seeds. I do it for fun, which is much less stressful.

@AlisonDonut that sounds so interesting. I like the idea of spreading the knowledge and joy too, especially with those troubled young men. Growing the food to put on the pizza in an oven they'd built themselves must have been a good boost for them. We did the same, but only for us - grew the tomatoes for the passata and then built a cob oven and it was enormously satisfying. Best pizza ever.

Love a community gardening project. I've visited many over the years and they always make me smile 😊

AlisonDonut that sounds so interesting.

I am at a crossroads in my career. I have thought about retraining in horticulture. I have an allotment and grow lots of plants from seed. I love it.

You have to be careful that you’d still live it as a job, in all weathers,and, eg, pricking out 500 seedlings not 50.

A friend if mine loved caving. But even he got a bit bored of taking adventure groups through the same cave every day for 6 weeks in the summer.

@Vegemiteandhoneyontoast @TaaLaa Do you do lawns?

When I trained in horticulture and was considering starting a gardening round (didn’t happen, long story) the thought of lugging a lawnmower in and out of a van always put me off.

@StroppyTop I did a few lawns to begin with but don't anymore. At the main property I work at, either the client or my OH, who works with me, do the lawns. As much as I've tried to develop an interest in lawns, it's never happened, though I do like to keep the edges neatly trimmed.

Oh, see, pricking out 500 seedlings is so soothing! At work we all love that job (though it's thousands, not hundreds). It's just very meditative and satisfying.

I think we differ in temperament! I get bored after 20

But I can pick off mealybug with a cocktail stick for a couple of hours if I have the radio on, and weed for about 3 hours with or without radio.

I like to see I'm making a difference. A huge pile of seedlings turning into a barely perceptibly less huge pile of seedlings doesn't give me the motivation I need.

No doubt we do. But it's funny how something you'd get bored sick of if it were optional (because, let's face it, in your own garden, pricking out seedlings is never something you have to do), becomes really soothing when you know you have to rattle through it. And of course it's nicer with company. We usually compete with each other to do it the fastest and it's fun.

You definitely do notice the progress - I love seeing a polytunnel full of rows and rows of six-packs I've pricked out, especially if I know I'm going to be using those plants a few weeks later. I think it's the element of it being a production line that makes it appealing, though. At home, I hate doing seedlings because I know it's endless stages of sowing seed, pricking out, trying to find a spare bit of windowsill, remembering to water them, hoping they don't get leggy, potting them on, hoping the slugs don't eat them, planting them out, then ... well, usually finding the slugs have eaten them anyway.

In the nursery, it's just bam bam bam, done, lovely healthy plants.

Yes, it does get very tedious. I spent some time as head gardener in a city farm, which was open year round and had visitors every day except Christmas day. In which the staff still had to attend because of the animals.

I can confirm pricking out hundreds and hundreds of seedlings when you can't feel your fingers is not pleasant. Making things look good and blocking off areas that didn't look their best in the winter would result in people barging in to look anyway and the worst was people leaving doors open that needed to be closed to maintain some warmth thus destroying so many plants after all the hard work had been put in to them.

But the hardest is the watering. You spend hours and hours in bed devising ways to get things watered but not drowned, regularly, without shouting at people endlessly. Especially when you only go in part time. If you put trays to catch the water they drown them and forget to tip the excess out. If you let them water them as often as they can, and don't put trays down, they forget and in a greenhouse two days of that and they are dead. If you set up drip or trickle irrigation, some doogooder thinks you've left the system on incorrectly, even with signs, and labels. It is a constant battle.

It did my head in.

My first horticulture job was at a nursery doing pricking out. There were three of us, all women, stood around a table in a polytunnel working as fast as we could. We'd get through a tray of 250 seedlings in about 15-20 minutes, encouraging each other by saying 'Whack 'em in, girls, whack 'em in'. It looked brutal but the plants all turned out absolutely fine. Did that five mornings a week in spring and summer and really enjoyed the work and female companionship.

@StroppyTop

Lawns? Seriously I cba with them.

What doesn't help is that I'm very short and don't have arms long enough to start petrol equipment, let alone lift it into the car.

I do have a couple of people I do Lawns for. I use a ratty electric mower that I can lob in the back of the car abd an extension lead with circuit breaker. They aren't large Lawns either.

Lawns, do, tho, proper mess with your schedules coz they have to be dry in order to cut them.

It's so much fun, isn't it?! It's definitely the camaraderie that makes it.

We also enjoy showing up the blokes by being faster than them with some of the middle-weight jobs. Where I work, there are definite 'pink' and 'blue' jobs, and we women always enjoy it when we get to do the blue jobs and show that we can - and when the men end up doing the 'pink' ones and we can tease them about how slow they are. (We do all get on very well, despite teasing.)

Yeah, it was fun! We used to chat non-stop and laugh about all sorts of silly stuff as we worked and I enjoyed that so much.

At the place I worked, the blokes were in a barn filling up the pots with compost and we'd work so fast on the pricking out that they couldn't keep up with us. I never did do any of the 'blue' work there, though. It was in the 90s and very segregated, which was fine by me as I enjoyed working with the other women.

I am 67 and sorta retired but I worked doing design and build with sweetheart since giving up social work in the 90s. A decline in partner's health meant giving up the rufty-tufty landscaping in 2014and going into jobbing gardening on my own, although I only have a coupla customers now. I would have loved to be a nursery worker and did contemplate having a little plant stall...but space...and energy. I do have another vague idea to supplement my state pension (rubbish at self-employed financial management) as a personal garden tutor...along the lines of 'do you want to make a garden? Working alongside a retired gardener'.

My eldest and partner are gardeners, so we sometimes collaborate. I have never been particularly industrious (absolute idler in fact) even when younger and fitter. Generally just worked enough to pay rent and bills then downed tools. I expect posh designers and hard workers can earn £££ but otoh, I bloody loved it (especially after years in failing social care).

Me. I have a six acre garden open the public and I also write about gardening (not so much now, but I was a garden writer/journalist). I don't find it relaxing. I have more sleepless nights about the garden than anything else. I fret about it constantly. For my purposes I find gardening courses teach all the wrong stuff and I much prefer to train people myself.
Sometimes I enjoy the actual physical stuff about gardening but mostly I love the fact that I have created my own world full of pictures and resonances, and can share with others. Then there are plants. That's where much of the joy lies. I collect antique china, but could never afford that perfect Blind Earl tureen or spectacular Meissen goat. But I can afford a tree peony that originally came from a remote Chinese monastery, or a blue poppy from a Bhutanese gorge that nobody's ever found again. So it's all about fulfilling fantasies but it's bloody hard work and totally life-dominating. I do get my gardening life is not entirely typical, though I do know several other people like me. And in general I find women are better gardeners than men for all sorts of reasons.

Yep, gardening has been the focus of my life for the last 30 years.And no, I don't find it restful either...the stress of raising plants from seed means never going anywhere, ever. I have killed numerous thousands of innocent plants - especially the summer attrition - but it is egalitarian, accessible, almost free, nurturing, creative, thrilling, optimistic (deluded)...
6 acres!!! - I am at my wits end with a couple of allotments (I don't do much gardening in our wood, also almost 6 acres).