Growing Marty's Garden
Marty Ware grows nutrient dense food in his small garden in North Haven. Photo | Ainslee Dennis
Marty Ware is a horticulturalist who is growing a 26,000-plus YouTube subscriber audience from his North Haven home. The video-sharing platform hosts more than 600 of his gardening tutorials, and in the aftermath of the bushfires, he is hoping people will want to learn how to boost biodiversity in their backyard to help the birds and bees.
Marty's Garden is a small garden in North Haven and its plants, numerous worm farms, and the man who cares for them are teaching and impacting the lives of thousands of people throughout the world. How did Marty's Garden begin?
I've always been interested in growing food. Plants, nature, I love the water ... absolutely anything that allows me to tap into nature.
When I was 28 I got smashed up quite badly in a motorbike accident and so I took that time to study agricultural business at college. I moved into doing that type of work off and on for different companies, managing and doing onsite work, and also had a couple of small micro farms selling to restaurants.
I moved to Thailand to run a surf school, and then came back to Australia with my daughter, Karin. We lived in Tweed Heads in a property that was small and had a tiny verandah - I'd never lived in such a small space and wanted to have a garden, and so it forced me to ask, how can I do this?
“I’d never lived in such a small space and wanted to have a garden, and so it forced me to ask, how can I do this?”
I realised that I needed to learn how to use all of this tiny space to grow as much food as I could. That was around nine or 10 years ago, and at that time YouTube was beginning to get a little popular so I decided to get a camera to document what I was doing. I thought it would be fun and I could also teach people along the way.
YouTube at that time was just a lot of funny cat videos, it was a weird and a totally different space compared to what exists now. So we just started filming everything and growing food on the verandah, and as we started to get good results people started watching. It was just a hobby until recently.
Marty Ware has created more than 500 videos for the Marty’s Garden YouTube channel. His daughter, Karin assists with production. Photo | Facebook - The Marty’s Garden Show
What changed to transform Marty's Garden from a hobby to a business?
I became sick. A few years ago I had dystonia, which is a neurological movement disorder that makes it difficult for people to control their muscles. It can cause abnormal twisting or positions in the body along with spasms or tremors.
At that time I was running some more small businesses, and so I thought, right it's time to scale everything right down and just focus on Marty's Garden and teaching people how to grow fresh food in small spaces, and hopefully help them to solve their gardening problems at the same time.
How can people connect with you, and access your knowledge to build their skills with caring for worms and growing food?
There's about 600 videos on the martysgarden YouTube channel, and I also have a Facebook group called Small Space Veggie Gardening Australia. The YouTube channel is floating on just over 26,000 subscribers and there is about 8500 people in the Facebook group, which is a really active community.
I never counted the subscribers for many years because it was never about that, as I was more interested in measuring how many people were actually getting value from the videos, and I kept going because I saw that people actually wanted to get help.
I've now added a website, martysgarden.com.au and it's got some free courses, as well as paid courses and it's just the next step in helping people to connect with nature and their food.
People now want media that educates as well as entertains. The numbers have always been there but since the introduction of the mobile phone people now can chose what they want to consume in the media.
How does your relationship with God and faith inform your decisions about Marty's Garden?
There have been times when I've nearly packed it up because it's never been really profitable and I've got to pay the bills, but something will stop me from doing it.
About six months ago I was thinking of moving back into another line of work that I am capable of doing, and all of a sudden I was flooded with comments from all of these people saying things like, 'I hope you never close, I hope you keep going, thank you so much you've made so much change in my life' ... whenever I try to pull out of this, something comes forward to me saying, 'hey it's not your time to finish yet!', and now I'm just really believing the growth factor is going to happen.
“It is coming together now, which is really wonderful ...”
It is coming together now, which is really wonderful, and I can actually see a bright future for me and Marty's Garden. Faith is about believing and trusting, and I learnt from a very young age to do that because of the circumstances involved in me becoming a Christian. Basically I'm a surfer who nearly drowned and had to give up and say, 'hey God, you can take my life now, it's all over'. I came to see that this is real.
Do you think the recent bushfire disaster will change people's behaviours to better care for the environment, or be a catalyst for a change in thinking about food and water?
I think it will open people's eyes and create more interest in a green revolution and people will start to look more at food safety and food security. These things evolve over time and sort of snowball from my experience, but the world is still not ready to take on organics.
A tub of coffee grounds collected from a local coffee is one of the inputs that Marty uses to create his compost. Photo | Facebook - The Marty’s Garden Show
Worm farming is one of the ways that I produce organic fertilisers because it's recycled on site, it's very cheap to do, and not too hard to learn.
“Change is needed ...”
What I'd like to see people do in this community is to take one step towards making a change in their yard towards helping the birds and the bees and biodiversity.
Change is needed. When I see nature, I see everything as creation and when I'm gardening I think, 'how does God do this, how does creation work with this and where do I fit in, how do I use that for the planet's benefit, and for my benefit?' I look at everything from the biology on the leaf, to the soil, to the plants being a habitat for the animals, and that whole biodiversity is what makes it all tick for me.
Marty believes everyone can learn to grow food and invites people to also embrace the challenge of learning to live more sustainably. Photo | Ainslee Dennis
