While Zach Galifianakis finds peace in gardening, I’m at war with raccoons
I caught a raccoon almost literally red-handed the other day. The night before, it (and presumably the comrades in its pack, technically known as a “gaze” of raccoons, because sure why not) had assaulted my garden, digging holes willy-nilly and uprooting seedlings I’d just put in the ground. In my three years of gardening, I’ve never actually seen the critters I’ve been at war with, on account of their nighttime raids. I’ve only found their aftermath. But now I had solid evidence: A muddy paw print on a watering can the invaders had tipped over to get a drink.
You might wonder, then, why in his new Netflix docuseries, This Is a Gardening Show, Zach Galifianakis gushes about the joys of adding water and nutrients to a plot of land, hoping something actually grows, and then further hoping that it doesn’t get uprooted by omnivorous nocturnal bandits. “I honestly think for human beings and for the world itself, the only future is agrarian,” says Galifianakis, himself a gardener, in an episode about composting. “We should all know how to garden. It’s a better hobby than jetskiing.”
It’s exactly because gardening can be so frustrating and seemingly arbitrary — though, admittedly, much safer than jetskiing — that it is, in fact, joyful. Visiting various farms across six short episodes, Galifianakis finds that gardeners seem happier and funnier than most folk. Maybe it’s because they get to be outside all the time, or they’ve got balanced diets, or because they’re reliving their childhoods as they search for earthworms wiggling in compost. Or, more likely, it’s because raccoons have somehow vanished from that part of the world.
This is not the Galifianakis of Between Two Ferns fame, in which he eviscerates celebrities who are in on the joke. His new show is still funny, of course, though in a sweeter, bucolic way. (A good chunk of the humor comes from not-especially-insightful — at least as far as gardeners are concerned — segments in each episode in which he asks school children about food.) When Galifianakis is traipsing around gardens, the biting, sardonic wit of Ferns gives way to genuine awe of what these farmers can accomplish.
I identify. While I’m walking around the garden in the morning, watering and assessing the damage, I’m also cutting flowers to hang inside and dry. I’m watching bumblebees bumble around, fertilizing my native plants. I’m snapping new spears from my asparagus plants and eating them raw. (You haven’t lived until you’ve had asparagus straight out of the ground — they’re unbelievably tender, and mine have a somewhat peppery, garlicky taste.) Unlike the masterful producers profiled in This Is a Gardening Show, I’m not generating nearly enough sustenance even to feed myself, true enough. But in my experience, that’s not the point.
A glimpse into their operations stands in stark contrast to modern industrial agriculture. Food prices are skyrocketing as farmers struggle to pay for fuel and fertilizer, especially after Iran closed the Straight of Hormuz. People are freaked out about ultra-processed fare. Droughts are exhausting water supplies as the world gets too hot to feed itself. While humble gardens can’t feed the world on their own, they can certainly help with food security, especially when tucked into cities. Heck, you can even grow crops on top of buildings, under the shade of solar panels, thus generating both nutrition and clean electricity.
Whereas industrial farms grow monocrops, like vast fields of wheat, gardens are more diverse and adaptive to a changing planet. Galifianakis, for instance, visits Royann Petrell and Sylvain Alie, founders of Steller Raven Ecological Farm, who’ve developed a variety they call the “future of tomatoes,” in that it “doesn’t mind 140 degrees in a greenhouse.” They say its taste improves the hotter it gets, in fact. Compare that to the industrial, perfectly formed, perfectly tasteless tomato you’ll find in the supermarket.
Even though it was released on Earth Day, this is not a show centered on climate change, which is a massive threat to farmers big and small. We can imagine that these gardeners might be struggling with water shortages or extreme heat waves withering their crops, or growing seasons getting thrown out of whack. But more often, Galifianakis jokingly predicts a kind of generalized civilizational collapse. “There will be mass population decline, and there will be a small group of people that will be able to continue on, and their lineage will be able to continue on,” he says. “But a lot of us are gonna die.”
Apocalypses aside, This Is a Gardening Show is a charmer, much more about triumphs of gardening than its many lows. A garden abhors arrogance — one thing after another lies in wait to humble you. From your many struggles, you realize the futility of struggling: Pests will come and go, weeds will grow even in the event of a nuclear winter, and a carefully tended vegetable will simply give up and die on you. Sometimes it’s your fault, and sometimes a plant is just trying to be difficult. Living in San Francisco, our infamous microclimates mean one species might grow big and strong in someone’s backyard a mile away, but struggle to survive in my own. I’m still learning, and will probably always be learning. And I’m very jealous of the masterful gardeners in the series.
As the seasons come and go, you find a rhythm in gardening, and things click into place. You learn that as much death as life visits a garden, and that’s OK. You problem-solve and improvise not just because you have to, but because it’s fun. Share a garden with someone and you forge a unique bond, like Petrell and Alie strolling hand-in-hand among their tomatoes. “Can I just say, off the record, seeing you guys hold hands through the garden, that’s what does it to humans, right?” Galifianakis says. “The garden is good for us. It can be a lifesaver.”
But then, inevitably, return the frustrations, which we don’t see too much of in the show, and the adaptations they demand from the gardener. For my part, I imagine raccoons are digging up my garden to find earthworms, grubs, and other invertebrates. (To be fair to raccoons, I can’t rule out an opossum as the culprit, or they might even be co-conspirators that trade off nights. But living near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, raccoons are absolutely everywhere in my neighborhood.) But I drew the line when they repeatedly dug up my sugar pea seedlings last year, which I had for weeks grown from seed, then transplanted into the ground. So this year, instead of providing a single A-frame trellis for the plants to climb, I locked the seedlings inside by breaking a second frame in half and zip-tying the two pieces to either end of the structure. Irony among ironies, though: Research suggests that raccoons love solving puzzles for the fun of it, so they’ll get the same pleasure breaking the cage that I enjoyed improvising.
But back to the show. The quaint farms that Galifianakis visits are as much producers of sustenance as they are of knowledge. You’ll learn a lot from the series, like where apples came from, how to graft a fruit tree, how corn will develop weirdly if not pollinated properly, and what you shouldn’t add to your compost bin (if you think plastic utensils are OK, maybe gardening isn’t for you after all).
The short series won’t turn you into a master gardener. But it doesn’t have to, because much of the thrill of gardening is figuring it out for yourself through trial and error, when dealing with raccoons or otherwise. “Very pompously, if I were to offer a remedy to the human condition, it would be a garden,” Galifianakis says. “Or acid.”
So Zach, the next time you’re in San Francisco and want to lend me a hand, let me know. With the raccoons, not the acid.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline While Zach Galifianakis finds peace in gardening, I’m at war with raccoons on May 1, 2026.