About the founder

The grower behind Dr Forest

I have been growing since before I can properly remember. One of my earliest memories is feeding the tomato plants in the garden.

I grew up with my hands in the soil. As a boy I would disappear down to the pea patch and eat the peas raw, straight from the pod, until my parents were left wondering where Joe had got to. That part of me has never really changed.

I trained as a chef, took a first-class honours degree in hospitality and culinary arts, and spent the best part of fifteen years in professional kitchens. Cooking teaches you to respect an ingredient, and to taste the difference between produce that was grown well and produce that was simply grown. But the industry wears you down. The hours are long and the pay is poor, and in time I knew I wanted out.

When I started looking for a business of my own, I wanted something I could build without much money behind me. My first thought was alcohol, but it is heavily regulated, so I settled on vinegar instead. I made apple cider and mead vinegars and aged them in old cognac barrels. That sent me back to my parents' apple trees, because it seemed only right to grow the apples I was turning into vinegar, and to grow them organically.

That is where the trouble started. I could not find an organic fertiliser I actually wanted to use. Around the same time, running the Welsh coast in the gap between split shifts, I kept seeing seaweed washed up along the beaches, the same seaweed growers have valued for generations. So I began making and selling natural fertilisers on eBay, partly to bring in some money while the vinegar sat ageing in the barrels.

The vinegar, in the end, was never going to pay its way. The fertiliser was. So I set the barrels aside and gave Dr Forest everything.

Today I formulate every Dr Forest blend myself, then blend and pack them by hand at the workshop in Stockport. Nothing is bought in and relabelled. The growing world is full of confident claims with very little behind them, and I try to do the opposite: I formulate to what a plant actually needs rather than to fashionable soil-ratio theories, I work in the standard oxide convention so the figures on a bag are comparable, and when I write about what a product does I cite the evidence and say plainly where it runs thin.

The brand is named after my grandfather, Dr Forrest, a GP for a mining town near Preston. He kept a plot at the back of the garden, mostly runner beans, and made piccalilli from them for family and friends. The spelling lost an R somewhere along the way. The habit of growing your own and sharing it did not.

It is still a one-person operation, which means if you want to know exactly what is in a bag, or why, you can ask, and it will be me who answers.

Joe Barrington, Founder of Dr Forest

Questions about a blend or a recommendation for your garden? Email joe@drforest.co.uk or find Dr Forest on Instagram.