This is a Gardening Show on Netflix: Zach Galifianakis brings humour, gentle prodding on an agragrian mission

As Zach Galifianakis is wandering through the forest, he says aloud, “It’s nice to be between the ferns again”.

That’s a little nod to anyone who remembers – and adored – his Funny Or Die talk show series Between Two Ferns, in which Galifianakis interviewed famous guests with a persona that could be awkward, combative or just strange.

Galifianakis is one of the great comedic actors of this century, known for being kooky, deadpan and provocative in an unexpected way. The 2008 film The Hangover was his big breakthrough but he’d been on the edges since the late 1990s.

If you need a someone to be up for almost anything, he’s the guy you call, and even with his occasional spikiness, he’s still someone you want to hang out with.

Still, a gardening show feels unusual, even for Galifianakis, but then you watch it and you realise that it’s peppered with his trademark witticisms and off-kilter humour.

But it’s too short.

That’s an incredible thing in an era when it feels as if most TV and streaming shows are stretched out almost purely for engagement figures, but Galifianakis definitely leaves you wanting more.

His series, the declaratively titled This is a Gardening Show, runs for six episodes with each chapter a mere 15 to 17 minutes long.

In a flash, in under two hours in total, it’s over, when you feel like you were only just settling in the idyllic world Galifianakis has welcomed you into.

The series was filmed on Vancouver Island, and while the organising principle is his belief that “the future is agrarian”, it’s actually more freewheeling, and really wholesome.

In each episode, he interacts with kids who seemed to be aged between five and seven, and ask them a bunch of questions either directly or tangentially connected to the show – do you know what foraging is as well as his comic exchange with a five-and-a-half-year-old boy who insisted he has 11 children of his own.

Galifianakis is a gentle presence with the kids because he never talks down to them and appears to be genuinely interested in their answers and ideas.

It explicitly links the idea of the future through these young’uns with the wider theme of the show, which is sustainably and a connection to nature.

Each episode is structured on one particular thing – apples, tomatoes, foraging, root vegetables, corn and compost – and often feature experts and farmers.

Galifianakis sometimes plays the fool when you suspect he knows far more about his subject than he lets on, but his delight at seeming discoveries brings you along with him.

This is a Gardening Show will be released on April 22, which is Earth Day, and Galifianakis is clearly a passionate advocate about getting back to basics in our touchpoints with the food distribution cycle.

He’s the perfect Virgil for this shared journey.

He doesn’t have to say so explicitly because he doesn’t lecture, and we all already know this, but there is something really uncomfortable about getting our fruit and vegetables individually packaged in Styrofoam trays, wrapped in plastic, the misshapen ones already rejected by the supply chain.

Not everyone can tend to a home garden, whether because of a lack of space or time, but Galifianakis’s show is a gentle but prodding reminder that we can all do a bit better.

Maybe that’s getting involved in a community garden program or trying to get to one of the many farmers markets that operate on weekends in every capital city in Australia, where the sellers are knowledgeable and the produce is so much better and keeps longer than what passes for such at the major supermarkets.

The point is to be present and connected to what you’re eating, because fruit and vegetables don’t just sustain our bodies in the short term, but is an essential element of a sustainable future, which may very well be agrarian.

This is a Gardening Show is streaming on Netflix from April 22