Talk About Gardening & Stories From Nature And The Wider Green Environment

My podcast is called Roots and All and I'm the host, Sarah Wilson. The show started off being about gardening but it's branched out to include stories from nature and the wider green environment. Listeners are from across the globe and are a mixture of professional and hobby growers of all types of plants.

I listened to a LOT of podcasts before I decided to start my own. Roots and All was born out of a dissatisfaction with the gardening shows that were available at the time; too much spraying pesticides and digging the soil over all the time. I wanted to promote a gentler way of doing things. I decided to start a podcast in Jan 2018 and it was June 2018 when the first episode went live.

Hahahaha....podcasting is a full time job you don't get paid for, right? Episodes take between 1 and 2 days from start to finish and I would say each episode costs around £150-200. I fund the podcast myself because I strongly believe in what I do. With regard to finding the time to podcast, I do have a day job, but luckily I work for myself and can be flexible. The podcast gets done when it gets done, but somehow it's always scheduled and ready for release at 8am every Tuesday!

A few episodes have been sponsored, but that's been a drop in the ocean when it comes to covering costs. I sometimes get free books and am over the moon with those! (I'm easily pleased.)Sponsorship came when I was reaching around 8-9000 downloads a month. The best thing about podcasting in terms of what I gain from it is the opportunity to speak to the amazing guests who come on the show - some are doing amazing work, some are the top experts in their field, some are super interesting and others are horticultural royalty. The research for each episode also provides me with a great opportunity to learn, which feeds into my own work skills.

I'm sure many other podcasters would go grey if they could see my podcasting process! It's just me and some basic equipment, sitting in my kitchen. I use Audacity to edit the material and I run it through Auphonic and that's it. I am a complete technophobe and each episode has the rough edges knocked off before it's thrust into the world, warts and all.

The vast majority of my downloads come through iTunes. I have a website where people can listen too, if they're not familiar with the whole idea of podcasts. I find many listeners come through Twitter. I had a personal account with a few thousand followers before I launched the podcast, so that helped feed people through to the Roots and All Twitter account. My advice to people using Twitter is don't be afraid of posting multiple times a day and reusing content, it seems to work ok!

I know it's the oldest advice in the book, but just get on and do it. You won't start out perfect and you'll change and adapt as you release more episodes, regardless of how much effort you put into achieving the perfect first episode, so you may as well get on and launch it! Facebook forums for podcast creators are a really good resource for new podcasters and if you're not sure what you're doing at the start, employ someone to help get you off the ground. I did and it was worth every penny.

twitter.com/rootsandall
facebook.com/rootsandalluk/
instagram.com/rootsandallpod/
Email podcast@rootsandall.co.uk
Roots and All website rootsandall.co.uk
Patreon patreon.com/rootsandall
GoFundMe gf.me/u/w7sy4c