I first started to use the name Outgrow and the subtitle ‘The art and practice of self-sufficiency’ for my Substack newsletter. It’s been over a year now and the name and title have gradually grown on me and seem to work well as descriptions for all of my various gardening related media. This article explains why I made a change.

History first

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I started out with a YouTube channel: The Seaside Allotment and this worked well for me, because my main website at the time was called (still is called) Seaside Life and - not surprisingly - I live 5 minutes walk from a beach.

However over time I found this name a bit limiting, because a lot of my gardening was actually in my garden at home, which we started to call the Kitchen garden. So eventually I decided to rename my YouTube channel Steve’s Seaside Kitchen Garden & Allotment, but this was such a long name that I was never very happy with it.

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It also frustrated me that although this name worked well as a description of WHERE I gardened it said nothing about HOW I gardened. It also didn’t work very well for the title of my eBook or Newsletter, so changing it was inevitable at some point.

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I did toy with the idea of just calling my channel by my name: Steve Richards, but there are several much more famous Steve Richards’ around and I wanted something that people could easily search for and find, my name didn’t work that well for that.

About 18 months ago, Outgrow popped into my head.

Outgrow : The art & practice of self-sufficiency

The idea for using Outgrow first came to me while thinking of a name for my Substack newsletter. The inspiration came from reading a book called Outlive, The Art and Science of Longevity. I didn’t actually like the book very much, it was too theoretical with way too little art, and that got me thinking that what it really lacked was art and practice, rather than being all science and theory.

As I thought about my dislike for the book, out-grow popped into my mind and then I realised that ‘art and practice’ was what I was looking for in my life and approach to gardening. So “Outgrow : The art and practice of self-sufficiency” was born, this was eventually shortened to “Outgrow : The art & practice of self-sufficiency”.

Outgrow

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Outgrow has two meanings to me, both of which worked:

  1. First, there’s outgrow in the sense of growing up, outgrowing old beliefs, old traditions, more broadly outgrow in the sense of self-improvement. I liked this meaning a lot, there’s so many myths and outmoded ways of thinking about growing your own food and there’s also a lot of people who are held back from achieving better results because they resist the use of new technologies and new scientific discoveries, including for example our understanding of soil science.
  2. Second, there’s outgrow in the sense of competing to grow more, I’m completely disinterested in competing with other people. I do however love to compete with myself and try to grow a richer, more varied and tastier diet each year, trying to outgrow my former self.

There are a few spin off benefits to the name: