Amanda Godber

For my lunch, I don’t tend to take a very long break. One of the things that I’ve found really difficult since I’ve been gardening is having a sandwich or a heavy meal that sits on your stomach, and then you’re bending over and you’re lifting bags of compost on your shoulder or using a spade or whatever, it doesn’t sit well with me. So I tend to have quite a light lunch, either a dal, a lentil soup or a salad, if it’s not too hot and not too cold, I’ll have a raw salad. And I always have a little jar of peanut butter – organic peanuts, only peanut butter – because I adore it and it’s quite filling, but you don’t have to eat too much of it during the day to keep you full until you go home. I always have lots of fruit and nuts in the car for whenever I want to eat. So my afternoon, again, can be very, very varied. Often I try and plan in all my garden assessments in the afternoon. So garden assessments are where I go round and meet the customers, or hopefully potential customers, have a look round their garden, provide any advice I can give them and then I will then e-mail back to them and say this is what I think we discussed and if you’d like to go forwards, this is what we need to do next kind of thing. I usually finish between five and six, but it can go a bit later. I often finish up with just checking my e-mails before I have my cup of coffee in the afternoon and that is my switch-off point. When I have had my coffee, I don’t do anything after that. If I’ve got some phone calls, obviously I can’t be in the office all the time, so if we get any phone messages then I usually do that as I’m drinking my coffee and just return those calls to the customers. One night a week I do go straight from work and do another high-intensity thing in the field with some other people – I like my exercise. Yeah, so that’s what I do most afternoons and, yeah, it’s just deadlines really, trying to get things done. I might have to get things on site for a job that’s happening the next day. So yesterday I had to take some fence posts and some stakes for some trees and some tree ties down to a job ready for them to be there so that the team going on site this morning could start work at a good time. Another time it might just be checking in with a client, “How did it go today?”, that kind of thing, so it’s just tying things up at the end of the day, but I’m very good after five o’clock, five or six o’clock that’s it, I don’t do any more work.