Some weeks the garden just gives. This was one of them — and we filmed the whole haul, from the beds to the barbecue. Here’s the 30-second version:
One week, one plot
Everything in that video came out of a single week on our own plot: two buckets brimming with tomatoes — ribbed heirlooms, sweet cherries and a few golden ones — alongside a tub of borlotti beans with those unmistakable pink-speckled pods, fat ears of sweetcorn, and a dried sunflower head we sat down to deseed for next year’s sowing.
Then the best bit: the corn went straight onto the barbecue. Plot to plate in one afternoon — which is really the whole point of growing your own.
Saving sunflower seeds
If you’ve never done it, harvesting your own sunflower seeds is one of the most satisfying jobs of late summer. Let the head dry, rub the seeds free over a cloth, and store them somewhere cool and dry — free flowers (and bird food) for next year. It’s a small thing, but it closes the loop on the season.
How we made the video
Regular readers know we document the filmmaking as much as the gardening — it’s part of the “fuel your curiosity” idea. This one is real footage, narrated in Peter’s real voice. The aerial shots are from a HoverAir drone; the edit was assembled with Claude Code; the on-screen captions and title cards were rendered with Pillow; the music bed was generated with fal.ai; the narration was timed against a Whisper transcription; and it was all stitched together with ffmpeg. The tools change from video to video — the garden, and the harvest, are always real.
More from the plot: the whole farm behind one croissant, our farm cats explaining plant nutrients, and the carbon-smart thing to do with old cardboard.