It started like many rock ‘n’ roll stories do – with a breakup.
Jesse Roper returned from touring with his band to the news that his girlfriend was leaving him. He was gutted for days. Maybe even a couple of weeks. But one morning he woke up and noticed he was feeling pretty good.
He hadn’t posted to social media for a while, and on a whim he walked out to his garden and said, “Hi there ladies and gentlemen, my name is Jesse Roper … today on what’s in my garden, man: peas!” in a goofy voice in a goofy mood.
He posted the video with a chuckle, mildly curious what people would think, and forgot about it. Late that night he checked the post.
“The feed was just like comments after comments after comments. Like, better than anything I ever post. So it’s like, I guess I gotta do that again. So I did.”
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Now anywhere Roper goes people yell out, “What’s in my garden, man!” It’s become a major fan favourite though the content varies widely. One video Roper shows a slug munching away on a petunia. In another, he gives a tour of his compost pile.
Gardening is genuinely something Roper loves.
“Now that I’ve had a garden there’s no beating it. Rolling out to the garden for some fresh lettuce for your salad for the night, and it’s that easy? And everything tastes so much better because it’s not been sitting on a boat or a shelf for a week.”
The next step is learning to preserve because the bounty is more than he can eat.
“Things are busting on me. I thought I ate a lot of vegetables until I grew this many. I thought I had to plant so many pickle plants to make a lot of pickles, and I was wrong. Now I’ve got way too many pickles. It’s crazy! And I thought they only grew to be this big,” he gestures a standard dill pickle size, “but they grow to the this big. I’m just learning all the time in the garden. It blows my mind.”
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