Jeff Tanun

Jeff Tanun has spent more than twenty years working other people's gardens and one stubborn plot of his own. He started on maintenance rounds, moved into planting and kitchen gardens, and now spends his working weeks between private gardens, a productive plot he runs on no-dig beds, and the endless business of keeping tools sharp enough to be worth carrying.

His own garden is heavy clay on a slight north slope, which he describes as the single most useful thing that ever happened to his gardening. Clay punishes shortcuts. It compacts if you walk on it wet, it holds water in winter and sets hard in August, and it taught him earlier than most that soil structure matters more than fertiliser. Almost every method he recommends here was worked out on ground that resisted it.

He grows food seriously and ornamentals gladly. In a normal year that means around thirty raised beds of vegetables, a small orchard of trained apples and pears, a long border he has been quietly rebuilding for a decade, and whatever he is trialling that season because a customer asked a question he could not answer properly.

Jeff is a convert to no-dig rather than an evangelist for it. He dug for years, stopped, and found the beds easier to work and quicker to warm in spring. He will still put a fork through compacted subsoil when a bed needs it, and he is happy to say where the method has limits, which is usually perennial weeds and the first season on genuinely bad ground.

The bulk of his working life is spent answering the same questions people write in with: why the tomatoes will not ripen, whether that patch gets enough sun, what to do with a lawn nobody wants. He is unusually direct about the answer being no, and about the difference between a garden problem and a shopping problem. Most gardeners need fewer tools and more compost.

He is a slow, sceptical buyer of equipment. He owns tools that are older than he is, sharpens them himself, and thinks the join between a handle and a head tells you more about a tool than any brand name. When he recommends something here it is because it survived a season of real use, and when he has not used a thing he says so.

Outside the growing season he propagates, mends, sharpens and plans. He keeps written sowing records going back years, which is where most of the timings on this site come from, and he is firm that the most valuable gardening skill is not knowledge but the habit of walking the beds for five minutes a day.