Zach Galifianakis applies comic touch to his enlightening gardening show | Canada Voices

Zach Galifianakis wants to teach you how to grow vegetables. For fans who only know the comedian from his satirical interview show Between Two Ferns or star-making turn in The Hangover trilogy, that might seem like an odd fit. But outside his work in entertainment, the standup comic has spent the last 25 years as an amateur gardener.

Speaking about the hobby from his British Columbia home – Galifianakis has been coming to the province for more than two decades and he bought property there alongside his wife Quinn Lundberg, who is Canadian, after the birth of their first son – his tone oscillates between philosophical and practical. Joking and serious. Working in the soil can be great for your soul. Agrarian practices are also something we’ll need if we expect humanity to survive.

That tone extends to Galifianakis’ latest project This is a Gardening Show, out April 22 on Netflix. Shot around Comox Valley, Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands in B.C., each episode runs around 15 minutes, with the comedian interviewing farmers and plant experts about their practices, and having loose, funny chats with children about their experience with horticulture.

“To talk about gardening without children involved kind of defeats the purpose,” the comedian said. One of the main reasons Galifianakis had for creating the series was passing on agricultural information to the next generation and starting a conversation about the challenges society might face because of climate change. “It should never be just for old people like me. This is something they should know right away.”

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That’s not to say This is a Gardening Show is all doom and gloom. The format makes for a cozy comedy. Galifianakis punctuates the series with an earnest desire for the audience to learn alongside him and a number of foreboding quips that in the future, this information will be absolutely necessary to get by.

Ahead of the premiere, we spoke with the comic about the show’s Canadian connection, why he created a gardening series and the value we can find working in the soil.

You’ve got a home in British Columbia. Why put roots in the area?

I remember when we had our first kid, I was holding him up and he was eating grapes straight off of a vine. My wife turns to me and goes: We should move here. And I said: Yep. It was that simple. It just seemed a good place to be. So I really feel fortunate to be in the province.

It seems like an opportune time to have property in Canada.

Well, it’s a bit more sane, to say the least.

In This is a Gardening Show, one throughline is talking about the end of society and how we’ll need to learn gardening skills to survive. Was that a jumping-off point for you when creating the show?

Maybe I’m being dramatic, but it does seem like in the future we’ll need to know this stuff. But even if we weren’t facing environmental challenges, it’s so good for us to be in the dirt and to revitalize the soil. We’ve kind of dustbowled the world with industrial farming. I want people to know this stuff, that’s all.

I understand the premise evolved a lot.

When I first started thinking about the gardening show, I was in my greenhouse during COVID. I was dreaming of creating a YouTube “how to” video. I was going to make it look like I filmed it myself.

I was going to wear heavy prosthetics, so you didn’t know who I was. Then I’d just shoot a video talking about how to grow tomatoes. Slowly the camera would follow me outside into this beautiful cinematic [shot] and then Paul Simon would be singing in my garden. I wanted to trick an audience. What if people were stumbling on this while learning how to grow a tomato?

And out of nowhere, these producers called to ask if I would be interested in making a gardening show. It changed a lot from the original idea and ultimately became more of what the show is. I wanted this to be a very simple gardening show that wasn’t overwhelming. So people could think: Oh, I could do that.

I was pleasantly surprised at how much I learned about gardening and vegetables while watching the show.

Humans gather around these things that come out of the ground. We cook them. We talk around them. They’re essential. They’re everything. And I think the better cultures have a tradition with food and where it comes from and the appreciation of that. Even in Canada, the French Canadians have a real connection to gathering mushrooms. It’s something they do that’s kind of been lost on the English side.

Did making the show change your relationship to food at all?

I’m a chubby little guy but I love fresh vegetables out of the garden. My goal in life is to, every year, have a harvest that I can either give away to some people or to have all the time. I want to be able to hand off this knowledge to my kids. I think it’s important. I was just in my garden before this. I’m trying to make my own fertilizer. I take oysters and I cook them and grind them down and to make lime [used for enhancing fertilizer efficiency and microbial activity]. I’m trying to learn the detailed stuff the old fashioned way, not the modern way.

I don’t think you’re wrong, but do you earnestly believe we’re gonna need that kind of a skill set?

There’s a documentary that is very hopeful, but it will scare you, called Kiss the Ground. In this documentary, the scientists say we have 64 harvests left. When you put it that way, you think: whoa. Now, I don’t think that impacts everyone. But this is a time to be conservative. I’m a liberal, but this is a conservative thought to me. This is what being conservative is in the best, purest form.

In the show you also note that people working in nature or gardening seemed happy. It was good for the heart and the brain.

I see it. I’ve been lucky enough to travel around. When I do, I always search out a garden, because those people are usually just the greatest. Not the hippies, but the real people that have old practices. It’s very healthy for their soul to dig in the soil and to see the miracle of a plant.

This interview has been edited and condensed.