The Beginning

 Who are We?

We're both (relatively) normal people, we get up in the morning, go to work then come back home, have dinner, catch up with what the other one was doing, do some chores around the house, if we're lucky we have some spare time to sit down for an hours or two, then we go to sleep and the cycle starts again.

A bit about Us

David - originally from Poland where I spent the first 15 years of my life growing up in a southern city of Krakow. It's a popular holiday destination, a thriving city full of culture, beautiful classic architecture, great food with a resident fire breathing dragon (for real! honest!). At the age of 15 I moved to a small town near Manchester where soon after my parents bought their new home. Although I had a basic grasp of English, the local accents didn't make it easy, but I got up to speed fairly quickly. Having finished year 11 in high school I then went onto college and eventually university where I graduated with a degree in Economics. Once out of university I got my first admin job which then took me towards work in payroll where I remain to this day as my day job.

Jo - I grew up in Dudley, in the centre of the UK and worked as an Administrator in a few different sectors for 17 years.  By the time I reached my 30’s I realised that I wanted to do more with my life than just go to the office and home every day.  Following a visit to Eden Project in Cornwall I decided to study horticulture and by the time I was 34 I quit my job and moved to Chester where I started an 8 year career working at Chester Zoo as a Horticulturalist.  I quickly developed a passion for cactus and succulents and love the magic of growing plants from seed.  In March 2019, during the first lockdown I started to grow plants for sale on Ebay and spent the next year building my business until I was in a position to quit my full time job to concentrate on growing and selling plants peat free and without plastic.

What happened next?

As a lot of people do these days, we found each other online and within a few months we decided to rent a house and move in together. The idea was that if we still don't hate each other too much after the 6 months of the rent agreement, then we can take it from there and if things don't pan out, then it's quite easy to just move on. As it turns out, we put up with each other for the 6 months quite well and decided it was a good time to find a house of our own. We searched for a few weeks and finally came across a property that ticked most of our boxes, it remains our hub to this day as we shape it to our needs and taste. Luckily for us the property market back then wasn't as insane as it is at the time of writing this in 2022!

The rise of DJA!

Gradually over time our interests and hobbies started developing around hiking and being in the outdoors. We slowly discovered the world of YouTube and the content independent creators publish on there, it soon became our preferred source for things to watch and we have accumulated a number of channels that we subscribed to and watched regularly (religiously even maybe at times). The first of the DJA ventures was our YouTube channel DJA Adventures which was inspired by a YouTube landscape photographer Thomas Heaton. His mix of nature, adventure and photography content reignited my interest in photography and soon made me want to have a channel of my own to document what Jo and I are getting up to.

 The second DJA venture was DJA Plants which came with the first Covid-19 lockdown. We were due to get married something like 3 days before the country was put into lockdown and without a clear idea of when that state was due to end Jo set upon building up a little plant nursery in the back garden. At that point we were already active members of the British Cactus and Succulent Society and Jo was working as a specialist horticulturalist which gave her a good starting point. Soon after getting the basic frame of the business up and running she quit her full time job and scaled that down to a part time role to focus more on her new business.  (www.djaplants.co.uk).

All good but, what does DJA actually stand for?!

DJA is an amalgamation of our initials. DJ for David and JA for Jo, together giving DJA! Brill isn't it?!

The Future!

This blog represents the Third stage of the DJA growth, which in turn feels like the beginning of a new chapter in our life and what is still to come for us. Is the Third chapter just a blog? No, the blog is just a green shoot of what is to come on our road into the future 😊