Jo Whiley: ‘I've given up on growing veg – you cannot beat the slugs'

Telegraph

24-04-2025

'Last year, the vegetables were a disaster. The slugs had the time of their lives,' says Jo Whiley, recalling every gardener's worst nightmare. 'Everything I planted got eaten. Snails went on the rampage, too. I'd come home from work and go out into the veg patch and see this black, oozy sea of mess.
'It was a particularly wet year, but I thought, 'I'm not giving in, I'll plant more runner beans, more peas, more lettuces, more strawberries, more of everything'. But I'd come back and find they'd decimated the place all over again. I never get stressed in the garden, but this really stressed me out.'
The slimy little creatures clearly got under Whiley's skin. 'I had to find a solution,' she continues. 'I read books, did endless internet searches, quizzed gardeners. I even asked Monty Don! In the end, this is what I have learnt about slugs: you cannot beat them. There is nothing you can do. Nothing. They will always win, so you might as well just give in.
'After last year, I knew I had to make a change. There are a few veg that I will optimistically carry on growing, like potatoes and beetroot, plus a few herbs – hopefully the ones the slugs hate, like rosemary, thyme and mint. But my bigger plan of action is to turn over a lot of the veg patches to growing more cutting flowers instead. In the last few years, I started cutting a few roses to bring into the kitchen, but now I'm hoping to grow enough flowers to fill the whole house.'
It's late afternoon and 59-year-old Whiley has been busy in the garden of her Northamptonshire home, digging, planting and watering all day. She is now relaxing on a large Oak & Rope bench she bought for the family earlier in the year. It hangs right beside the treehouse that she and her husband, Steve, built for their four children when they were small.
'The seat was a surprise,' explains Whiley. 'As soon as I saw it, I fell in love with it. I had all the children's names engraved on it, plus something that Steve says to us all the time: 'Live the Life You Love and Love the Life You Live.' It's become the family motto.'
Having made her peace with the slugs, she's now in the middle of deciding which flowers she will grow, but it will definitely include the ones that never fail to make her happy. And first on her list is the sweet pea. 'They're one of my all-time favourites, particularly the brightest ones… those iridescent blues, dazzling pinks, mad oranges. I love that clash of colours,' she says. 'But more than that, it's a flower I'm very nostalgic about, because my grandad used to grow them. Whenever I see them, it brings back all these wonderful memories of being in the garden with him. He was such a big influence on me; it's where my love of gardening first started. Mum, too, has always had a passion for gardening, no doubt inherited from him. She used to run a village post office, and every year she'd grow sweet peas and dahlias to sell in it. It must have looked amazing.'
Whiley admits she doesn't grow her sweet peas from seed; she goes to Coton Manor, near Guilsborough, where she buys quite a lot of her plants. 'It's an amazing house and garden, and they grow these spectacular sweet peas. There's a particular weekend when they bring them all out and you've got to get down there quickly, otherwise they'll all go.'
She then uses large frames from Agriframes, which come complete with jute netting. 'Once I've got the sweet peas in the soil, I'm even tempted to plant a few fruit bushes around the edges; maybe I'll sneak in some raspberry plants.'
One part of the garden she constantly keeps her eye on is the huge lawn. 'I'm quite a neat and tidy person, so I can't bear it when the lawn looks overgrown or patchy – quite hard when you've got two dogs and a cat,' she says. 'Not only that, but I'm also the sort of person who walks around the garden barefoot – I do my radio show barefoot – because I love feeling of the tiny blades of grass between my toes. With a house full of teenagers and twentysomethings, we're also a very loungey family, so once the summer arrives, the lawn is where we all socialise.
'Thankfully, we finally got round to installing a Gardena water system for the lawn. We also got one of those robot lawn mowers,' she adds with glee. 'It's a Kress model and it's fantastic. When we first bought it, I got home from work and Steve, who's obsessed with the lawn, said, 'You've got to come into the garden, I want to show you something'. There in front of us was a beautifully cut, stripey lawn. We'd never had that before. The only problem is that the robot has a habit of getting stuck in certain corners, so I'm always in and out, trying to disentangle it.'
Having decided to spend less time growing veg, Whiley has also had the chance to focus on something else that has been bugging her for years: her deep borders. They run all the way down one side of the garden to a stream and a massive weeping willow. She's determined to get them right in time for summer.
'We've been living here for 16 years now, and I've never been completely happy with the way the plants in these borders were flowing into each other. So, this year, I've been doing lots of finessing, to make them what I've always dreamt they could be. I want to get the heights right, add structure and create some lovely drifts of colour,' she says, reeling off the names of some of her latest purchases – among them, Cephalaria gigantea, Verbena ' Lavender Spires', Achillea millefolium 'Salmon Beauty', Thalictrum ' Black Stockings', and Hydrangea aspera 'Hot Chocolate'.
With so many garden projects on the go, Whiley knew she might need a bit of help, so she has called on her eldest son, Cassius.
'All the children have been incredibly reluctant to do anything in the garden,' she sighs, 'but Cassius, who's 24 and works in the music industry, needed some extra money, so earlier this year, I paid him to give me a hand weeding and mulching to get the ground ready. He was brilliant, and at the end of it he said to me: 'You know, Mum, I finally can see why people garden.' But the icing on the cake was on Mother's Day, when he handed me a card. In it, he'd written: 'Thanks, Mum, for teaching me how to garden.'
'I guess we're all starting to realise that being outside, putting our hands in soil, touching plants, watching things grow… even walking barefoot across the grass, is good for us,' she says. 'Life can be hectic at times, which is why the garden is somewhere I go to forget about it for a while.
'Only last week, I got home and automatically started moaning to Steve about something. Then I paused for a few moments and said… 'And this is why I garden'.'