Podcasting Burnout
I started The Garden Path Podcast in 2015 and now it's 2023! Time flies if you are having fun...until you aren't.
I started listening to podcasts in late 2011 and early 2012. I’d newly returned to the office after hiking both the Appalachian and Florida Trails in 2010 and 2011 and then working remote field jobs for those times in between and after our hikes. Sitting back at my desk from 8-5 with that one hour lunch break was rough. My husband Chris and I were gardening at a community garden since most of our life was still in storage and we were renting a tiny house not far from our work office. Life was small and enjoyable! But those hours of day to day work were rough and I listened to my fair share of Pandora and then streaming NPR, and then I began hearing a few bloggers posting about podcasts.
Somewhere in all of that I downloaded iTunes and began looking around at the meager podcast offerings on the app. I couldn’t tell you everyone I listened to because so many are gone now but I know I discovered Ken Druse and his podcasts through there and dug into Margaret Roach’s podcast episodes as well. Joe Lamp’l even had some podcast episodes, I think they were snippets from his tv show turned into a podcast, well before his Joe Gardener podcast came into being. There were all sorts of tiny, homegrown podcasts, sometimes lasting only 10-20 episodes and then disappearing. I loved the Cultivate Simple podcast from the folks at Chiot’s Run, this was back when Susy (and everyone else) blogged often. It was that sweet spot before podcasting went mainstream, before Serial, really. I came back from maternity leave in 2014 to Serial taking off and after that, the podcast world really started opening up. And closing down as well. Some of those smaller garden and permaculture podcasts I was listening to began going stagnant around this time. But I wanted more!
And so I started my podcast in late 2015 by downloading the sound editing freeware Audacity and recording directly into my computer, no special mic at all (what was I thinking?). Did I have a goal? Not really. I wanted to talk to my family and friends first and then branch out into more uncomfortable territory, talking to gardeners I didn’t know and more famous authors. As an introvert and someone with a heaping smidge of social anxiety, I’m not sure what I was thinking when doing this. It was great for breaking me out of a rut and challenging me—but—to this day, before an interview, I question my life choices and regret scheduling the interview until it is over. Only then do I realize, “That wasn’t so bad!”
At the end of 2019 I thought the podcast was going to go on a long-term hiatus. I ended my last episode and figured I would enjoy a leisurely year of quiet on the gardening podcast front. Then COVID happened and suddenly I found myself wanting to speak into what was then my new portable mic, recording episodes of me chatting away to the world from my garden. Suddenly podcasting was ok again and I’ve carried on ever since.
But I just can’t anymore. You know how sometimes you just can’t bother to pull the weeds? It’s too hot and humid, the bugs are too bad, and you’d rather be relaxing in the hammock with a book instead? Yeah, that’s me. I can’t be bothered to read the books publishers send, follow the latest hot gardener, talk about how to grow tomatoes for the umpteenth time…I want to read the books I want to read, grow the plants I want to grow, and not care what up and coming garden influencers are doing. To be fair, I’ve long since moved away from caring what garden influencers are doing and I think that deserves its own essay at some point in the near future.
My podcast was never the hottest garden podcast out there. I tried for a while. I cared A LOT for a while, anxiously looking at download numbers, trying to promote it constantly on Instagram (and for a while, Twitter). I’m not good at self promotion. It feels gross to me. And self promotion on places like Instagram are so chaotic with algorithms that you never knew what would hit and what wouldn’t. Plus, it was its own side hustle, and I didn’t want to constantly be side hustling for something that was in essence a hobby. I made/make no money from my podcasts. There was a time I wondered if I should do a Patreon and then thought, why? It would be yet another side hustle where I would have to put up more content for the paying Patreon folks. I was a new mother in those early years and working a full-time job, plus everything else life had to deal, why was I putting all of this extra effort into what I thought I should be doing with something that was supposed to be fun? Sometimes I wasn’t having much fun.
I quit the podcast Instagram account finally in spring of 2022 and really should have done it sooner. I’ve left Patreon in the dust, never to be thought of again. The solo podcast episodes were truly enjoyable but I often wondered if I was rambling into the void. All I know is that I am very burned out. So, where do I go now?
For now, I write. I have a lot boiling over in my brain that needs to make its way out and I’ll be sharing more of that here in the coming months. I know I’ll return to podcasting at some point but I’m unsure of what that will look like. I hope I can figure that out while writing here and am open to ideas. I like the idea of a rougher, uncut, less produced podcast—honestly, getting back into podcasting’s roots. Before everyone NPR’d the hell out of their podcasts. I know I want to talk about deeper ideas in gardening and ecology. More existential, less about how to grow the best veggies.
What I want to know from readers are things you think about on the deeper end of gardening—tell me your existential thoughts about your garden and nature. What comes up for you time and time again when you think about gardening? If you read this on the Substack app or on the website feel free to leave a comment. If you read via your email you can hit reply and I’ll be able to see your reply to me. I can also be reached at thegardenpathpodcast at gmail dot com.
Also, tell me what books you are reading right now! Summer is around the corner and I want to devour as many books as possible!
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and On Texas Nature and can be found on Instagram at @oceanicwilderness. She hosts two podcasts, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and The Garden Path Podcast.
Public gardens of Texas. You might end up with a book. Plus such a series could be a travelogue and maybe there’d be grants.
Sometime you might want to write about the Chickasaw approach to gardening -- check out Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, OK. As a starter for a series on the various tribes horticultural cultures.