Zach Galifianakis

Older than Murray.

The director of This is a Gardening Show is Brooke Linder, who also proved his skill at mixing different topics and comic tones in the live Netflix talk show Everybody's Live with John Mulaney.

These gardening shows rely on a basket of tricks.

They use time-lapse photography to capture both growth and decay.

They use the segments with kids for pure comedy.

Galifianakis also visits different farms and farmers to sample their wares, and every time he bites into an heirloom tomato or a homegrown carrot, he pronounces it the best one he's ever tasted.

And I don't think he's kidding.

In the course of these compact 15- to 16-minute episodes, he learns how to graft apple trees, make richer compost, and generally how to self-sustain.

The future is agrarian, he says in every episode, and not as a punchline.

And he points out how happy the Canadian farmers all seem to be, even Murray, as well as how much tastier the locally grown fruits and vegetables are.

In several spots watching This is a Gardening Show, I became nostalgic for a past I'd almost forgotten.

When I was a little kid, my Uncle Tom had a farm-sized backyard where he grew cherries and tomatoes and harvested seeds from his hottest peppers each year to keep growing even hotter ones.

He also could walk through the nearby forests and confidently forage many types of wild mushrooms, leaving the poisonous ones behind.

I also remember a corn farm in Ohio where on harvest day the farm would set up boiling cauldrons in the fields and invite the public.

You could go there, pick ears right off the stalks, shuck and boil them on the spot, and eat what I still remember was the best corn I ever had.

Zach Galifianakis, in his new series, spreads that kind of joy for eating as well as gardening.

But he issues a dire warning, too, that if we don't return to our roots, the roots in our own gardens, our future may end up being a lot more bleak.

That's a bitter pill to swallow, but This is a Gardening Show serves it up persuasively and deliciously.

Oh.

Um, well...