From veg patch to vogue! How a 72-year-old ex-trout farmer with a talent for growing giant vegetables ended up starring in Gucci’s latest ad campaign
And the models! They were lovely — but so thin and shivering and none of them ate anything and just smoked, instead.
By Jane Fryer
The Daily Mail
11 June 2021
Excerpt:
From then on, Gerald posted a few veggie pictures a week, Liz taking the snaps and him brandishing his home-grown goodies and grinning.
In one, he proudly holds a gigantic carrot with the caption ‘I wish I could send the aroma it’s Devine [sic] cheers’.
In another, he’s holding a celery the size of a suitcase and asking his followers, ‘Now what shall I do with this big boy celery?’
Some people queried his grammar, but he’s having none of it.
‘You don’t need to punctuate,’ he says. ‘It’s not like you’re writing a letter, is it?’
Until May 16, 2020, when he tweeted a couple of before-and-after snaps of his early rocket (a variety of potato) accompanied with ‘my first early rocket very pleased’ and, well, everything went a bit mad.
‘An hour or so later, the phone started tweeting and bleeping and making so many strange noises,’ he says. ‘It wouldn’t shut up. It was really annoying!’ says Liz. ‘We thought something must be wrong. We barely dared touch it!’
But within two days, he had 72,000 likes and 9,000 new followers and, assuming the phone must be faulty, he called in his nephew to sort it out.
