25. Urban Gardening in Tokyo, Japan | Jon Walsh

Jon Walsh, urban farmer, teacher, and change-maker living in Tokyo, Japan, shares his remarkable journey from New Zealand to Japan, and how a tsunami, a tomato plant, and a mission to feed others sparked a whole movement.

We dive into:

• How gardening can be simple—even in small urban spaces
• What makes Japan’s food culture so healthy (just 4% obesity!)
• Jon’s “Grow Some, Give Some” model that helps fight food insecurity
• The power of school gardens to teach kids lifelong skills
• Why rooftops might be the next great frontier in food production
• How gardening connects people, builds trust, and strengthens communities
• And why, if you can brush your teeth, you can grow food.

This episode is a hopeful, practical look at how growing food—even in a flower pot—can create healthier people, communities, and cities. Whether you’ve got a backyard, a balcony, or just a bowl on a windowsill, Jon will inspire you to get your hands in the dirt.

Follow Jon:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-walsh-b282a5

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/jon.walsh.984

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Transcript

Jon Walsh (00:00)
If we can put today's younger generation path by teaching them how to grow their own healthy food from a young age, they can completely change their life for good.

if they know they can grow food in urban places and if you give them the skills to do that, can basically change their life. And one of big things that I found out personally was that the sowing seeds, it takes more physical dexterity to brush your teeth with a toothbrush than it does to actually drop seeds into soil.

So if you can brush your teeth, you can grow food. It's that simple really.

Jollie (00:31)
That's such a great line.

Hey everyone, it's Jollie here with Interrupt Hunger's Move, Eat, Give podcast. Thanks for joining us today. We've got John Walsh all the way from Tokyo, Japan. John, thanks for joining us today, sir.

Jon Walsh (03:01)
Yep. pleasure.

Jollie (03:02)
All right, so, man, this is a big question, but how did you end up in Tokyo teaching urban gardening? You've got a fantastic story, so let's hear it.

Jon Walsh (03:14)
That actually goes way back to 1963 when my father was traveling around Norway. He was posted from New Zealand to the UK to work for the Defense Department, and he really liked traveling, so he traveling around Norway. He quickly found that he loved Norway almost as much as New Zealand.

when my brother and I were born he basically raved about Norway and he said that if he had a choice of living somewhere else outside New Zealand he would want to go to Norway. And then, and that led me to during my high school years I was looking for pen friends so I subscribed to an Australian music magazine and it had like a pen friend page and there was a Norwegian girl in there who was looking for pen friends so I wrote to her

and said that my father had been to your country and he loved it and she wrote back straight away and that was 1988. That's quite a while ago. And we became good friends and we sat down and I went to Norway and I was with her back in the late 90s.

and we became very good friends and then the clock sort of wound forward to 1995 and this Norwegian lady, Mogni Schifsterman, she sent me a little note and said that she's just started writing to a Japanese girl in Tokyo, Japan who's cute and she might be my type and so I started writing to her in Tokyo. This was 1995 and we were like sending real letters to each other. This was...

pre-email and we got on really well and yeah we sort of back and forward and then we started phoning each other in about 2000 and phone calls became more frequent and longer and one month she had a phone bill for like 90,000 yen and she quickly realized well I could actually I could spend that much money and buy like a one-way flight ticket from Tokyo to Auckland

Jollie (04:44)
Yeah, sir.

Jon Walsh (05:07)
And so we thought, okay, this is getting bit out of hand. Maybe one of us should move. So I decided to move to Tokyo in 2002, March. And, yep, I came across for like three months in 1999 to meet her for the first time, but moved in 2002. And the rest, as they say, is history. I've been there since then.

Jollie (05:08)
I love that.

Jon Walsh (05:25)
Yeah, so it's quite a long story, but it basically goes back, it's linked around love. Yep. And then when I moved here, ⁓ I was working in...

Jollie (05:29)
That's a fantastic story. No, I love that. Yeah. Travel the world for love. Yeah.

Jon Walsh (05:37)
IT in Auckland and also the UK where I was living for two years during the late 90s and then moved here to Japan and quickly found out like many foreigners do that if you are not fluent in Japanese the job market suddenly becomes much more constricted and so I basically I fell back on writing I was doing quite well at just

I created writing back in high school and I picked up a job just after landing here at a bilingual magazine, Japanese English magazine, and told the manager that I used to write and he said, do you want to write? So I said, okay, because my first job with the magazine was just a part-time proofreader, just sort of checking English that had been translated from Japanese.

And then I became the main writer for the magazine for eight years until my daughter was born and the creative juices dried up thanks to the late nights and like no sleep during the first few months. And that was 2008 and then I picked up another job at a technical translation company, which I've still doing now. But the big change happened in...

Jollie (06:26)
Yeah.

Jon Walsh (06:37)
2011 when the Tohoku earthquake hit up north in Japan. was a tsunami first triggered by size 9 earthquake which was the largest size earthquake to hit Japan in a thousand years. I think it was about 20,000 people died. It was just huge, absolutely huge. And most of the people died, they were basically washed away by the wave when it came in.

Jollie (06:55)
gosh.

Jon Walsh (07:00)
Yeah, because there was something, I think there was like 30 minutes or so from when the earthquake struck off the northeast coast of Japan until when the tsunami hit the coast and the wave went right inland. think I don't quite remember, maybe two kilometers inland. It was huge. Yeah and

Jollie (07:19)
my gosh. Wow, scary.

Jon Walsh (07:21)
My wife's relatives live up there, and one of them, she said that the wave came within about three houses off her front door. Just huge. Yeah, and that earthquake happened about three weeks after a massive earthquake hit Christchurch in New Zealand, where I come from, down the South Island. And those two quakes just made me, it sort of completely turned what I think about food on its head.

And like most people, I've spent most of my adult life just going to shops and buying food when I need it. Which I didn't really realize until I thought about it how fragile that supply chains are and how little choice that being a food consumer gives us. And so...

And when the two earthquakes hit, I basically sort of realised that if a massive earthquake hit Tokyo like tomorrow, or it could hit tonight, who knows? And if lots of local supermarkets got destroyed and roads got blocked by collapsed buildings, where would food come from? Because I basically thought that trucks carrying food from the countryside would not be able to navigate down roads full of rubble.

and my wife and I at that point had a three-year-old daughter and I just thought that one of the worst things for a loving parent would be to have a child who was calling out for food and for water and I thought I've got to do something about this because when I was watching the news about the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake up north there was one or two towns up there that had just been completely wiped off the map it looked like they had been hit by atom bombs there was just like nothing left

And I thought, that's what happened. That's what happened then. And that was only 14 years ago. That wasn't ancient history. That wasn't last century. That was this century in this country. So it was totally irrelevant. And I thought, right, I've got to change how I get food. I've got to change how my family accesses food. And I thought, OK, probably the best idea would be to actually have a food source at home.

Jollie (08:57)
Yeah. ⁓

Jon Walsh (09:14)
So I bought a flower pot, bought a little bag of soil and some seeds. Like these ones here, little baby leaf seeds. And looked up the internet and found how to sow seeds, which is pretty easy. And then within a month I had a spinach plant and I was like, this is pretty cool. This is really cool stuff. I kind of felt like I just worked some magic, Like something out of Disneyland,

Jollie (09:33)
It is cool. I know. ⁓

Jon Walsh (09:38)
And then I thought, okay, well that worked, so I'm going to try more. So I bought some more pots, bought some more soil, bought a few different kinds of seeds, and then within a few months I had a little herb and vegetable back garden growing out of pots. And I kind of quite impressed myself by that. And then my wife said, there's lots of community gardens around town. Why don't you apply to rent a plot?

in a local community garden where her father had shown her how to grow food when she was a girl. So I thought, let's try that. So I did, and I won a community garden plot which was 15 square meters, which is only just a little bit wider than a car parking space.

And at that time it was only like 5,000 yen to rent 15 square meters for 10 months from March when the local gardens open until January 31st of the following year when they closed for two months. And that cost about 35 US dollars I guess to rent like 15 square meters for 10 months. Yep and in that first year in 2012 I grew like

Jollie (10:34)
you

for the whole season. Wow.

Jon Walsh (10:45)
like 1,500 tomatoes, grew about 60 lettuces, hundreds of cucumbers, radishes, leaves, herbs, herbs, you name it. And I was just blown away, just totally blown away by how productive a tiny little plot of soil can be. And I was actually giving food to the neighbours and taking it to workmates and so was my wife.

So in my first year of urban farming I became a producer in Tokyo and that was pretty shocking too because this city is basically covered in concrete. There's not much, there's not many green spaces around. Parks are far and few between and I just, it was amazing and I wasn't really thinking about what I had done. It was more about what I could do in partnership with Mother Nature.

to grow food in the city. And that sparked everything. And I took my four-year-old daughter to the local garden one day and dropped some seeds.

in her hand and showed her how to sew them and she picked it up in about 30 seconds and she's known since then how to grow food and when I did that I thought well I've just taught a child how to grow food maybe I could teach other children and many westerners when they move to Japan their first choice of job is teaching English because most westerners when they come here can't speak Japanese

Jollie (11:44)
you

I love that.

Jon Walsh (12:02)
I didn't want to do that, so I thought maybe I could get into teaching, which I had no experience of, at schools and teach children how to grow food. So I got in touch with a local international school run by a Californian guy who I had written an article about for the magazine that I used to work for prior.

and I asked him, does your school grow food? And he said, no, but we're interested. Do you want to come in? So I went into a school and met the deputy principal and I had a whole lot of photos of the different vegetables I had been growing in my first year at my community garden, covered his desk with them and he said, can you teach for us? And I was like, that wasn't my plan because I actually...

My plan was to to basically say, I can set up 10 planter boxes at your school and sow seeds in them. That was my offer. Not to teach, but just to start growing food there. And he was quite okay with that. But when he saw what I had grown through the photos that I covered his desk with, he said, do you want to teach? And I had no teaching.

the experience. I've had a speech problem since I was six. Those two things they don't support teaching at all. But I just thought, okay, what the heck? This is a great cha- a great chant and a really good challenge. So I just thought, I'll take you up on that. And then I spent the next three months creating ten different urban farming lesson plans and started teaching grade four kids.

Jollie (13:21)
Yeah.

Jon Walsh (13:35)
and that was 14 years ago. And since then I've taught 2,000 people around Tokyo and Japan how to grow food. I've taught 1,500 students to grow food, set up more than 100 gardens around the city, mainly at schools and hotels and private homes too. And yeah, I basically become Japan's leading

Jollie (13:44)
you

Jon Walsh (14:00)
native English speaking urban farming consultant slash teacher. So yeah, I'm in a really niche market. I've got two staff members now who they may become future competition, but hopefully we'll continue collaborating. But it's a really extreme, a really sort of niche market. But it's been one of the greatest things I've done.

Jollie (14:12)
you

That is so exciting. I love that. love so much. Yeah, there's so much about your story starting back from like, you know, going all over the world to find love and follow it and meet your wife and the different perspectives you get from traveling is just wonderful. And then I just, love the story about your daughter.

Jon Walsh (14:20)
It's just been really, really good.

Jollie (14:39)
It's just, it's so funny. when I started growing like microgreens recently, you know, and, and I'm like, Hey, you know, I almost feel like a new dad when every time, you know, something pops up out of the dirt and, and, and it just, it's so exciting. But so many people say I don't know how to garden.

you put a seed in the soil and you cover it and you water it. that's it. That's it. I love hydroponic gardening because you can do it inside. But yeah, I mean, it's just, it's so simple. I don't know why we have this built in fear of gardening. So I love that you're helping so many to overcome that fear and especially young people. That's just wonderful.

Jon Walsh (15:00)
Hmm.

⁓ yeah,

Yep, well, the big thing about teaching children is they're the future. And

If we can put today's younger generation on a healthy path by teaching them how to grow their own healthy food from a young age, they can completely change their life for good.

Jollie (15:24)
Skim it.

Jon Walsh (15:32)
if they know that they can grow food in urban places and if you give them the skills to do that, can basically change their life. And one of big things that I found out personally was that the sowing seeds, it takes more physical dexterity to brush your teeth with a toothbrush than it does to actually drop seeds into soil.

Jollie (15:33)
That's...

Jon Walsh (15:52)
So if you can brush your teeth, you can grow food. It's that simple really.

Jollie (15:56)
That's such a great line.

I love that. So I came across you like San Antonio to Tokyo. That's quite a ways. And we have some really neat urban gardeners in the States. They're popping up all over the place and they're passionate and they're sharing their knowledge and getting other people involved. And it's just community building. But the way I first found you, so...

In the states we have 42 % obesity rate. In Japan it's 4%. And so I started digging into like school lunches. And Japan is really held up as having the healthiest school lunches anyplace I could find. There's a law in Japan that says if a school has 500 kids or more there has to be an

Jon Walsh (16:29)
Yes,

Jollie (16:49)
on-site dietitian. If it's less than 500 students, they could share the dietitian with three smaller schools. the Japanese are so focused on healthy living and there's a lot that comes from that, but you've been there for a while. if you could shed some light on

Jon Walsh (16:57)
Bye.

Jollie (17:08)
on this focus on healthy living in the Japanese society.

Jon Walsh (17:13)
healthy living? well, yeah, it basically comes down partly to where people live. I think like in most countries, urbanites tend to rely more on public transport, whereas if you're further out, you're sort more likely to have a car. Here in Japan, though, I

I read quite recently that school lunch program here in Japan was started by the government post-war. I think it was around 1946, maybe 1947. And the government basically came up with a nationwide policy to provide school lunches for all children right throughout Japan at their schools.

And so, like you mentioned about the dieticians, basically, their job is to sort of basically create balanced meals for the kids and those meals sort of comprise things like milk, fish, rice and vegetables. So there's like a mix. And students are taught how to put

how to serve the food. I don't think they're taught how to cook when they're younger, but they're taught how to serve the food. all Japanese elementary schools, they have like gardening teachers that teach all students in, I think it's grade two, how to grow tomatoes, sunflowers, and morning glory flowers.

And so both my kids, they've been through Japanese elementary schools and they both come back with a tomato plant growing in a little plastic box. And their summer holiday projects to basically keep that going throughout summer and grow some tomatoes. But they're all taught how to grow food and they're all taught how to serve food to their classmates and put the food on plates too, I believe.

Jollie (18:33)
out.

Jon Walsh (18:47)
So there's a wider broad-based awareness of healthy food that starts at a very young age here in Japan. the diet here has a huge role to play in this 4 % obesity statistic that you mentioned. And I was doing some research about this whole thing today triggered by

Jollie (19:02)
you

Jon Walsh (19:14)
I'm your podcast because I wanted to basically find out what's going on here. Because when I walk around Tokyo and this city's got it's got about 15 million people during the day. It's huge. And when I walk around Tokyo, I work in like one of the busiest parts here. I would be lucky to see one overweight person in three months.

That's amazing. Absolutely incredible. Everyone slim.

Jollie (19:33)
Wow, that is amazing.

Jon Walsh (19:36)
and it's partly due to diet and it's partly due to basically that Tokyo's got a really good public transportation system and many people just don't need cars and if you don't need a car then you're likely to get around by bike and train and if you're taking trains you're going to be walking up and down subway stairs multiple times a day

Jollie (19:55)
you

Jon Walsh (19:57)
and you're probably going to be riding your bike from your home to the local train station and then walking from the local bike park to the train station and then walking downstairs to the train catching the train then walking upstairs and then walking from your exit train station to either school or work so there's basically walking every single day for most people here and a pretty good diet that's comprised of usually

natural and low-fat food, lots of green tea, which is really healthy stuff, and also one big factor that I found about why people here are so slim is basically like smaller serving sizes and often served on smaller plates.

And I think that if you serve food on smaller plates, you automatically cut down how much people eat. Right? And I think that's a pretty good trick that parents can use to cut down how much food that they eat and their family eats too, just by serving dinner and lunch on smaller plates. Yep, so there's those factors there. And also...

Jollie (20:48)
Right? Yeah.

Jon Walsh (21:04)
Buddhism has a big part to play in my Japanese diet too because apparently there's a Buddhist concept that you should stop eating when you are...

80 % full. Okay, you should stop eating when you're 80 % full. And that's apparently because it apparently takes the brain about 20 minutes to realize that the stomach has become full. So if you only eat about, if you stop eating when you're like about 80 % full,

Jollie (21:17)
I've heard that.

Jon Walsh (21:33)
you'll give your mind time to register that your stomach's full and then you're not likely to overeat.

Right? It's pretty simple stuff. Yeah. So, yeah.

Jollie (21:40)
Yeah, yeah, but everything,

yeah, everything just blends together though and it creates a healthy environment around everyone, a community.

Jon Walsh (21:48)
Yeah, and I find that personally too, because I'm,

yeah, that if I want to have something after dinner, like a cake or a biscuit or something like that, I've personally found that the best time to have it is straight after I finish dinner. And it's for the reason that I mentioned, because if I eat a snack straight after I finish dinner, my stomach doesn't register that I'm And I think that I've got space to eat something else, which is like pretty dangerous stuff. And I think it's...

that the best idea is to basically wait maybe half an hour until after you've finished dinner and then see whether you want to have a snack. And you're most likely not going to be so keen to have a snack if you wait about 30 minutes after dinner. But if you snack straight after you've finished dinner, you'll probably gain weight.

Jollie (22:16)
there.

Yeah, sure, sure. Those are all good. thanks for shedding light on that. That makes it, makes sense. The environment's been built around to, to create a healthy environment. So I love that. Thanks. all right. So let's get, let's get back to, to one of your passions in life, container gardens. you've help people build

Jon Walsh (22:32)
Thank

Bye.

Jollie (22:50)
all kind of beautiful container gardens to help feed themselves and their family, like wall units and hanging units and containers and all stuff. so look, like if you could design like the, perfect balcony garden for someone with a small place to grow, how would you do it? What would you tell them?

Jon Walsh (23:11)
Okay, the first thing is to find out which way the balcony is facing. If it's south facing, that'll be good. But if you're living on the dark side of the apartment block or something like that, and you just have shade, then you'll be quite limited in terms of what kind of plants can be grown.

but if you live on the sunny side, you're lucky. So the key points to setting up the effective balcony gardens. Number one, find out where the sun shines and put most of your plants there. So that might be down the right-hand end, it might be down the left-hand end, who knows? Yeah, so basically just find out the part of your balcony where the sun shines most. Then you'll probably have a...

outer wall which will block the sun if it's a solid wall as opposed to like a fence like a mesh fence yeah so if you have a solid outer wall to your balcony if you're living

off the ground for an example here. You'll have to lift up your plants to maximise the sun exposure. So what you can do there is just put a table outside and then put your plantar boxes on the table so that they receive maximum sunshine. You can look at somehow attaching plantar boxes to the wall. There's different ways that can be done. What I do personally out here is I've taken a

kit set, stainless steel shelving rack, quite similar to the one just behind your left shoulder. And I've taken that outside to my balcony and then put planter boxes on it just like you've got right there. Yeah, I just have put planter boxes on the shelves and I've moved the shelving cabinet to the balcony which gets like about four, five hours direct sunshine per day. Yep.

Jollie (24:48)
And

that's enough.

Jon Walsh (24:49)
That works.

So Sunshine or lack of it basically plays a big Factor behind what you can grow and plants that grow fruit like tomatoes cucumbers Peppers that kind of thing and those plants need maximum sunshine because those plants need so much Energy to produce the fruit

as opposed to green leafy vegetables like lettuces and spinach and baby leaf like these ones here. These don't need so much sunshine so if you want to grow green leafy vegetables like these you can get away with two or three hours direct sunshine per day. But if you want to grow plants that create fruit like I mentioned before you need maximum sunshine, hopefully.

six hours plus per day. And if you don't have that, you can look at if you have a flat roof, you can maybe look at setting up like a rooftop garden. Or if you don't have access to a roof or if you don't have a flat roof, a good idea that I mention to people is just to talk around your network and ask whether a friend or a workmate or a partner, whatever.

knows someone who has got a flat, safe, sunlit space that you could use to grow food. And if they do, and they're keen to work with you, you can just say, right, can I come and set up like a rooftop garden at your place? And if I do, then we can share the food.

Jollie (26:13)
I love that. I love that. thanks. I appreciate it. So what about like root vegetables? Have you figured out an easy way, a successful way for like potatoes and carrots on a balcony garden?

Jon Walsh (26:14)
It's really simple.

Yeah, yeah, green vegetables. The main one I grow is like radishes like these. These take about 20-30 days. They're quite small, like potatoes. You can grow those in a bucket or a, like a planter bag. Like a fabric bag with handles. You just sort of put soil in them and then get what's called

Seeding potatoes which are like the cut potatoes where they've got the little sprouts coming out the top and then just lay those on the soil and then gradually cover them as the sprouts grow. Carrots, yep, you just need to make sure that the soil is really really fine because carrots when they grow down if they hit like something hard like a rock they'll grow around it. So to get straight carrots you need very very

fine soil that doesn't contain rocks and twigs or other hard things like that. Yep, and you can grow carrots and potatoes and most root vegetables in large planter boxes in the ground, whatever. Yep, in fact one of my bosses, he grew what's called a large Japanese radish. It's about like about a foot long.

in a stocking that he filled with soil and he dropped one seed in it and the radish basically grew down inside this stocking and he just basically hooked this stocking to the wall so he didn't actually use a garden at all he just used a stocking full of soil and that worked apparently. No, no.

Jollie (27:37)
wow.

It doesn't take much. You just look around and

you could look in your recycling bin and see what you're going to throw away even and fill it with dirt.

Jon Walsh (27:59)
Yep, ⁓ yep,

I've actually got a lesson that I call like junkyard gardening where I basically like show students that if you have a clean container like a plastic coffee cup from the local convenience store or like a ramen bowl or cup noodles, whatever, as long as you have a clean container that you can punch holes into to drain, for water to drain out of.

you can grow food.

Jollie (28:23)
I this. It's so cheap. Yeah, I remember talking to you about the cost of buying a tomato at the store versus a pack of seeds.

Jon Walsh (28:23)
Yeah, so we

Yep.

Yes, that's one of the big benefits about growing your own fruit. I personally, I normally grow about more than 1,000 mini tomatoes per year just from about six or eight mini tomato plants that I buy for about 200 yen, which is probably maybe about less than one US dollar.

And one plant, one mini tomato plant, I've found that it typically produces about 150, maybe 180 tomatoes. So the price per tomato goes down to like about one yen, which is that's basically free. Compared to if I buy a carton of 12 tomatoes from the supermarket, that costs about 200 yen. And that's about the price of

a tomato plant that could grow 1600 or 1800 tomatoes. So the value of growing your own food is massive. And you will have no plastic packaging, no transportation, no trash, and it'll taste fantastic, providing, you don't use chemicals, and it'll be local, and you can pick it when you want. So it'll be,

Jollie (29:32)
Yeah, it's incredible.

Jon Walsh (29:46)
hyper fresh food.

And one more point about that. I'm lucky about the look. Yeah, one more point about local food When you pick it yourself, it's it's I'm gonna have maximum freshness plus nutrients because like you probably know Nutrient content of food drops by the day after they get picked So if you're eating lettuce that you bought from Your local supermarket that was picked maybe three days ago, maybe four days ago

Jollie (29:47)
Yeah, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. Everybody's complaining. Yeah.

Jon Walsh (30:09)
and stored and then trucked to where you live, to your local supermarket, the nutrient content of that food is going to be significantly less than if you grow it and pick it yourself locally, where the nutrient content is going to be maximum and it's going to be super fresh. So where you grow the food and how quickly you can consume it after you pick it is going to have a big

Yeah, that will greatly affect your nutrient intake, and our grandparents, they may not have all known this, but that's what they practiced when they grew food locally at home. And this is one of the big things that I've sort of come to realize fairly recently, is that our grandparents' generation and every single generation prior to them,

Jollie (30:39)
Yeah, sure.

Jon Walsh (30:54)
ate organic food. Now organic food is like a niche product, But it's crazy stuff because that's the real stuff. That's the natural food. And the other stuff that's been sprayed by commercial farmers is now just called food. So what's happened has been a reversal of what's the word? What we

considered to be food has been completely flipped. The real food's now got this organic label and the chemically processed and sprayed foods now are just called food. And our grandparents just used to call the real stuff food that we now have this label for and we're now eating what we call food which is basically sprayed with poisons.

Jollie (31:18)
Yeah.

Jon Walsh (31:35)
So I think it's really key to realise what's happening with the vocabulary behind food and realise that the real stuff doesn't need the labels and that the poison stuff should have the labels so that we can more simply and more clearly realise what we should be eating and what we should not be eating.

Jollie (31:35)
Yeah, sure.

Thanks

Wouldn't it be great list of along with a list of ingredients? Like here's here's the chemicals that were used in growing something. But, you know, the expensive stuff we call organic now. I love that. I love your point. Our grandparents used to just call it food and it was a lot cheaper. So I got I got two more questions for you. I didn't want to get let you get away with the out these. I want you to talk about your food havens.

Jon Walsh (32:20)
All right, yep.

Jollie (32:20)
Because

when we encourage people to grow food in their backyard, at school gardens, or at work gardens, I really strongly encourage them to take a portion of that and turn it into a donation garden to help our...

Jon Walsh (32:30)
Yep,

Jollie (32:31)
our neighbors who struggle with food insecurity and hunger. And then I also want you to talk about your dream after that of approaching a multi-story office building and bringing people together to grow on the rooftop. So why you start about your food havens.

Jon Walsh (32:41)
Bye.

Yeah, okay. Food Havens is a strategy that I came up with in 2013. the concept behind these strategies can sort of basically be summed up in four words. Grow some, give some. And what I basically do is I contact schools that I work with and I ask them, right, after we've...

set up some gardens for you and I've started teaching your students to grow food at school. Can we donate some of that food to the local food bank? And by some I'm talking maybe like 10 % or like if they have like ground gardens which may be like 10 square meters and I'd say okay why don't we allocate maybe one square meter call it a donation garden and basically

say that whatever the kids grow in their donation garden is going to be donated either to a food bank, a community support group, that kind of thing. And schools love it. Totally love it. I've had like 100 % buy-in to that. one of the, I think there's at least two different reasons that they love it. And the first one's that

many schools that I work with here in Tokyo, they have to do something for the community. They have to actually be doing something constructive in terms of like community support. So maybe like I'm cleaning up beaches, I'm sending classes out to tidy up local parks, pick up litter, that kind of thing, or supporting elderly people around the community, that kind of thing. If a school gets a garden with a donation program chucked in, or linked to it,

the school gets that community support program and they don't have to do something because my kids do it with my guidance so the teachers don't have to do

anything extra. It's just wrapped into my standard urban farming programs and I've got multiple schools that I've been working in now because I've been working at... I've launched urban farming programs at like nearly 20 different schools around Tokyo now and I've got a...

I've got about five, six of them so far to basically run Foothaven's programs and they love to donate food at the end of the season, usually late spring. And I get the kids to pick, to basically harvest food, we put it into large bags and then we take it across town by train to the food bank and we get the food bank staff to put out a big table outside their office and the kids lay the food on it.

and then we get some photos that the schools can use to promote their community support, the activities. the schools win, the food banks get free student-grown fresh food for nothing. Most of the food that the food banks here get are processed in cans, bottles, packages, you name it, and often full of chemicals.

I want to basically start my own movement of getting schools and companies to set up gardens at school and work and get them all to join into my food haven strategy where they grow some and then give some. And the plan is to basically

flood local food banks with fresh student and office worker growing food all like within Tokyo. So we'll be helping to cut out the farmers and basically do it all ourselves in Tokyo and use whatever sudden-lit space we can find. For example, the rooftops of office blocks. Schools have lots of ⁓ sudden-lit space they can use to start gardens.

Jollie (36:06)
you

Jon Walsh (36:10)
And the kids at schools specifically, they learn that what they're doing is not for them. It's to... My kids would basically get told that they'll be growing food, not for them, but for people within the community that have greater need than they do. So we're basically helping students to put food on plates for people who...

who need it more than they do. So that makes them stop looking inward so much and basically completely change their focus to looking outwards. those students come to realize the power of urban food and what they can do to help change other people's lives by growing food at school and donating some of it.

to people that have greater need. And that links directly to your second point about the office.

office rooftop garden plan and that can be summarized basically as if there's like a 10-story office block that's got a safe, deaccessible rooftop. Another plan would be for someone like me to basically contact each company within that building and ask them whether they would like to have some staff participate in a shared rooftop garden.

So if all 10 companies want to participate, they would send some staff to the rooftop and I would help them to build raised gardens. So the ground floor building might get the left-hand corner, the second floor company might get the other corner. So they'll all get their own garden and they'll all learn how to grow their own food. And the beauty about this strategy is that there would be

multiple gardens managed by different companies within the same office block and they would start communicating by default because they're all doing the same thing, growing food and they would talk by default and for example if there's one garden where they were growing lots of tomatoes and

asked staff from one of the other floors who wanted to grow tomatoes, they could just walk over there to the first garden and say, hey, show us how to grow your tomatoes and vice versa. So staff who wanted to know how to grow herbs could just go and find one of the other gardens where they're growing herbs and ask them, can you teach us? And then you'd start to get people sharing fruit.

and when people start sharing food they start talking and communicating and building trust and then you've got community starting right there starting from seeds on a

urban rooftop. one more benefit about this kind of gardens that here in Japan we get lots of earthquakes, basically like daily, but we don't feel most of them. And I thought for years that if there's a massive earthquake and if you know people and they trust you and you trust them, you're going to be much more likely to want to help them.

Jollie (38:42)
you

Jon Walsh (38:51)
and they will be much more likely to want to help you.

as opposed to if you don't know your neighbors or you don't know other people working within the building that you do. So gardens can build up trust and relationships and friendships and the more people that we know and trust, that means the more people who we can potentially help and who can potentially help us if we need help. And that all starts from sowing seeds.

and sharing the skills and sharing food too.

Jollie (39:16)
you

Jon Walsh (39:18)
So that's my plan, to basically build my first office, shared office rooftop garden this year and then promote that as widely as possible through social media and spread the concept worldwide and see what happens.

Jollie (39:18)
This is beautiful.

I just love that. Yeah, one of my goals, think we can definitely bring in, excuse me. I think we have to bring back the idea of Victory Gardens.

Jon Walsh (39:32)
Hmm

Jollie (39:43)
at the end of World War II. I love telling people 40 % of all the produce grown in America by 1943, 1944 came from backyard and community gardens. Everybody, everybody was gardening. you see pictures of how healthy and how happy everybody used to look. And everybody knows that our communities used to be, we were so much better at building communities. We were so much friendlier with people. We cared

about other people more. All starts with planting a seed, John.

you got a beautiful heart, man. I just, I just love what you're doing. I love how you see the world. I love how you see the, the soil and, and, and the people around you. you're making a huge difference and, making the, community around you.

much better and the people around you better. so tell me how can people get ahold of you and learn more about what you're doing?

Jon Walsh (40:31)
Jim.

look me up on Facebook. John Walsh. That's J-O-N. Um... I'm on... um... LinkedIn. Um... yep. That's the best way to contact me. Um... yep. Just... uh... directly through Facebook's probably the best way. Yep. Um... and... uh... uh... uh... one final point. I think... um... that... and probably this...

One of the simplest ways that ordinary people can make a difference is to basically learn how to grow food.

and then share those skills. So basically sort of teach other people how to grow food and try to sort of motivate them to. Because it's one thing to learn how to grow food, but you've got to have motivation to actually start sowing seeds. And I think that the more people like us who know how to grow food and can motivate

other people to do the same we will basically spread the good news about growing food as widely as possible and that's going to have a huge impact.

Thanks

Jollie (41:28)
Couldn't agree more. Well said. Well said. John, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for taking some time with us today and sharing your love of plants and community. It's such a simple message and gets us back to our roots. So thank you so much.

Jon Walsh (41:44)
It

does, yeah. It certainly does.

Jollie (41:49)
I've really enjoyed getting to know you and hearing how you see the world and what you're doing half a world away. We could be doing this all over the world, so we just need to get more people sharing the good news.

Jon Walsh (41:50)
Mm-hm. Again.

Yeah. ⁓

Yeah, no, I'm not sure about how gardening is perceived where you are, but over here, urban farming is almost perceived to be like a new trend.

Yep, which it's not. It's not at all. Growing food locally has been what people have been doing for centuries. So there's nothing new about it. It's just that what I think's happened is that the majority of people who live in large cities where basically it's never taught how to grow food, these last two generations, our...

Jollie (42:22)
Hahaha

Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Walsh (42:39)
Grandparents' generation was probably the last generation who had the majority of people who knew how to grow food. And that was largely because most people grew food at home.

and the kids, and many kids spent lots of time sort of running around gardens that their parents were keeping. But I found that these last, youngest two generations, these skills just haven't been passed down. And it's partly because food is so simple to get these days in certain places, especially Tokyo. There's no shortage here.

Jollie (42:50)
Are you?

Jon Walsh (43:10)
There's just so much food that people can purchase from supermarkets. yep, there's no such thing as a food desert over here. No such thing at all. So we're sort pretty lucky. Yeah, but I've found that the older generation there, basically the ones who lived through the war,

and were born just afterwards. They're basically like the last generation who the majority of them know how to grow healthy food. So we're losing some really valuable skills, but it's very simple to pass them on, I think. And you're doing it, which is great. There's a lot of people like us who are doing it, but it's so important just to pass on skills about...

Jollie (43:34)
Yeah.

Yep. Starting young.

Jon Walsh (43:48)
how to grow food and try to sort of get rid of the misconception that many people have that it's difficult or I can't grow food or whatever I try to grow food dies. There's many simple ways around that and one of them is simply that some people just sort of put too much soil on top of the seeds when they sow the seeds.

Jollie (43:59)
Yeah.

Jon Walsh (44:04)
When you know that you just need like no more than one cent... No more than one centimeter of soil should go on top of your seeds that will fix many problems.

Jollie (44:13)
Wise words, trial and error. All right. Well, this has been wonderful, John. I really want to stay in touch with you. So like every once in a while, I'd love to like set up another virtual call and just check in on your progress and how food havens are going. And I really want to hear next time you get one of those rooftop gardens going in an

Jon Walsh (44:13)
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bye.

Peace. ⁓