The internet is a cesspit...let's sow sweet peas!

Doom scrolling, a pleasure park for rats & one way to be happier in the digital age.

I’ve been thinking about the lives we live nowadays. The online parts of them, anyway. More specifically, I’ve been trying to formulate a plan for our little boy who, unlike his ageing, decrepit millennial mother, will come of age in a brave new world. A world filled with the incessant buzzing and blinging of alarms, with online personas, ‘personal brands’, selfies, TikTok, Instagram and all the interactions with strange, faceless people that occur on those platforms. A world dominated by the constant, pervasive bleating of a million machines.

It’s weird remembering that, as a 16 year old, I had a brick of a phone that was routinely lost under the cushions of my parents’ couch for days on end. I never thought to look for it (and it usually still had at least half its battery left by the time I found it). And it was a high tech phone. It had a colour screen! It’s weird remembering that from this vantage point, where I have become the sort of person who - I shamefacedly admit - carries my phone with me, from room to room, like some kind of portable CPAP machine.

It’s a pattern I don’t really know how to break, because in an effort to spend my entire life gardening and writing, I’ve crafted a career that kind of requires me to add my own voice to the incessant bleating. Only difference is I’m bleating about soil improvement, flowers and weeds, and my newest Substack posts.

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But here’s what I realised a few days ago: for the most part, I’m a bleater. I’m the one flinging content out into the ether, populating your world with my own random thoughts and 9 second video clips (sorry!). I spend an inordinate amount of time on Instagram, but it’s usually making videos and replying to messages, rather than doom scrolling. And I think it’s given me an inaccurately positive view about the app.

I’m not totally sure there is really anything positive about Instagram, when I think about it.

Two days ago, in a fit of exhaustion, I blinked and discovered myself actually doom scrolling, properly. For ages. Just whiling away minutes of my life on the explore feed, mindlessly consuming digital tripe at the mercy of the algorithm. I wasn’t using Instagram as a ‘creator’, I was just… using Instagram. As it’s intended to be used.

And shit, it’s awful.

I’m 26 weeks pregnant and somehow the algorithm knows this (probably all the maternity onesies I’ve been buying online), and all it wants to show me is weird-ass videos of 7-child families in Texas doing choreographed dances that serve absolutely no purpose (the cognitive equivalent of smashing Smiths barbecue chips into your face), or reels about very sick children and seriously late-term miscarriages. WTF!!!! What the hell is wrong with this app??? It’s AWFUL. Is this what it’s doing to everyone who isn’t using it for work or work-adjacent activities? Is this what it’ll do to my kid, when he eventually finds his way into the dark portal of the internet? Is this what it does to you too??

In the 1970s, a psychologist by the name of Bruce Alexander devised a series of experiments examining the patterns of behaviour that underlie drug addiction. What follows is an oversimplified, abridged summary:

In one condition, socially isolated rats were placed in a cage and given the option of drinking regular water or morphine-laced water whenever they liked. Theyexclusively drank the morphine-laced water, and in insanely high quantities. In another condition, the rats were offered the regular water and the morphine-laced water, but they were not kept in isolation. They were housed in Rat Park; a cage filled with other rats, games, toys and stimulating activities. They still drank the morphine-laced water a bit, but... let’s say they ‘dabbled’. They enjoyed it in something akin to healthy moderation. They still lived nice lives.

Rat park.

Although subsequent researchers have failed to replicate these effects, the Rat Park studies caused a stir, and led to a change in thinking about addictive drugs. Previously, the consensus on drugs was that any exposure to a highly addictive substance would cause immediate and enduring addiction, regardless of the environmental context. After Rat Park, people started thinking of drug addiction as the symptom of an unhappy, isolated and lonely life, rather than the cause.

What’s this got to do with Instagram and failed utopia that is our modern internet? And - more to the point - what’s it go to do with gardening?

Our phones are engineered to steal our attention at any opportunity. To lure us so deep into the infinite scroll we forget who we are and what we want. And the best defence we have (if we’re not willing to eschew all technology entirely) is to build our own rat park. To ensure that our lives are rich and fulfilling outside of our phones, and, in doing so, to rob them of at least some of the power they hold over us.

The garden is the perfect salve for some ill-spent time on the internet. It is not angry, it’s not scary, and it doesn’t involve nasty interactions with people who you’ve never met and will never see or hear from again. It really is the place where we should all be spending the majority of our time. It’s rat park.

And today, I think you need to fill your rat park with sweet peas.

Sweet pea season is upon us. You have about a month to get your act together and push these precious little skittle-sized seeds into the ground. Actually, you have way more time because if you live in Perth you can really sow sweet peas whenever and they’ll still come up fine. But if you want sweet peas that bloom in time to usher in the first sunny days of spring, now is the time to sow them.

If you’re a paying subscriber to this newsletter, let me direct you to the full and comprehensive guide I have written to growing perfect sweet peas. You can read the whole thing here:

For today, and for all of my free subscribers, I am offering an abridged version, with five main tips I think you should know if you want to grow these gorgeous, highly fragrant, perfect little flowers. Here they are:

Buy for fragrance.

The packet will say if the sweet pea variety is a fragrant variety. DO NOT BUY ANYTHING THAT IS NOT FRAGRANT. It’s as depressing to live in a world where sweet peas have no scent as it is to live in a world where people make a living filming themselves unboxing plastic crap they bought off the internet.

Improve your soil.

Sweet peas reward all the effort you’re willing to put into your soil. They’re thirsty, hungry plants and if you stick them in Perth’s rancid sand their stems will be puny they’ll never make you truly happy. Get a big bag of animal manure and get your soil in tip top shape. If you want more help fixing your sandy Perth soil, you can grab a copy of my new ebook on exactly that topic here.

Sow your seeds direct.

Sowing sweet peas in fiddly little punnets only to piss them off by transplanting them weeks later is as much a waste of your time as doom scrolling on instagram. It’s a happier waste of your time, I admit, but a waste of your time nonetheless. Stick those seeds in the ground! Nice and deep. They aren’t fussy and if your soil is healthy bugs rarely eat sweet pea seedlings. They don’t like being shifted either, so by sowing them direct, exactly where you want them to grow, you’re doing them (and yourself) a favour.

Use a climbing frame with thin gauge wires (or sticks!)

If your sweet peas never seem to hang onto your climbing frames, it’s because the frames are too chunky. Sweet pea tendrils will only hold onto stuff that is about the thickness of chicken wire, or - at most - a metal coat hanger. They’ll cling onto wood, metal and plastic; they don’t care about the material, they just care that it’s relatively thin. Bamboo stakes won't work, unless you add twine or thin wire around them, for the sweet peas to grab. Oh, and use a heavy duty climbing frame - if you look after your sweet peas they’ll grow nice and big and will need all the support they can get. Those shonky little frames from Bunnings (pictured below) just won’t cut it.

This is no good

This is also no good.

Pick your flowers!

Last bit of advice: pick your flowers. Sweet peas are the perfect flower because you actually need to pick them. I feel guilty picking almost everything that flowers in my garden, but not sweet peas. If you don’t pick your sweet peas they will simply set seed and stop flowering sooner. For a long harvest window, a house full of the scent of spring, and a life that is far too joyful to even consider logging into Instagram… pick, pick, pick them!

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Thank you for reading! See you next time for more Lo fi life!

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