The inspiring story behind famed gardener

Retired soldier Mark Valencia is well known to many gardeners for his hugely popular gardening videos under the name Self Sufficient Me (‪@Selfsufficientme‬ ), where his knowledge and sense of adventure seem boundless. Subscribe 🔔 http://ab.co/GA-subscribe

But his path to reaching this point is even more fascinating.

He and his wife Nina, also a serving soldier, moved to a 3-acre property about an hour’s drive from Brisbane with the dream of one day leaving the military and leading a quieter life.

With two young children and both highly busy careers, something had to give, so Mark decided to give full-time parenting a go.

He says the first five or six years were really hard, surviving on one wage, so he set to growing as much food as he could. Most of the block was cleared lawn with an acre of scrub, so his first task was setting up a chicken coop and putting in garden beds and fruit trees. Now those trees are mature and he’s learnt a lot about growing food, so it’s much easier.

As well as suffering a badly broken arm in an army parachuting accident, both he and Nina suffer from PDST from their time in the military. Now he has learnt to appreciate every moment in the day, and he credits much of his mental health recovery from being in the garden and the satisfaction of growing his own food.

Nina said she got sick of hearing him telling the same garden stories again and again, and said he should record his advice online, so he started a YouTube channel.

“My first 100 videos were awful - I was being too much of an army instructor and not myself,” he reflects. The turning point came when he just talked off the cuff about his favourite lemon tree. The number of viewers quickly shot up and his YouTube channel took off from there: he now has about 2.2 million subscribers on YouTube and 1.2 million on Facebook. “I have to pinch myself,” he says.

Filmed on Kabi Kabi Country in Bellmere, Qld
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