Home & Garden
**GREEN Organic Garden Podcast**

The GREEN Organic Garden Podcast will inspire, teach, and promote earth friendly techniques by interviewing organic gardeners who share their journeys, tips, and tricks to simplify the process of growing your own delicious healthy food. Whether you want to have a small bed in your backyard or a full grown farming operation, our guests will help you reach your gardening goals and offer you resources and solutions to everyday gardening challenges, and inspiration to dig down in the dirt and get growing!

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Latest Episodes:

**298. Outside No Matter What | Michelle Lipp | Educator + Listener | Renegade Gardener** Jan 12, 2020
Show notes

1. Tell us a little about yourself.
My name is Michelle Lipp and I am an early childhood educator turned play-at-home mom of three kids and one renegade garden. In the classroom, I was infamously known as the teacher who went outside no matter what.
I’ve taught in 5 states with varying climates and firmly believe in the Scandanavian proverb that there is no bad weather, just inappropriate clothing.
When my eldest son was in his first year of preschool, his principal (and my former supervisor) remarked that my kids must always get to play outside. I realized that I had become an indoor parent--that even though I had no issue dressing and undressing a dozen children belonging to other people to get them out into the fresh air, I had become complacent at doing so with my own.
Outdoor play and nature experiences are so integral to healthy bodies and minds and so vital to early development.
Children learn to sit still by moving around and the great outdoors is an ideal location for this. I needed to get my family (and myself) back outside and I needed a way to be accountable for that goal so just over a year ago at the end of winter, 2018, I founded a local nature based meetup group for families and professionals working with children to gather at local parks, playgrounds and nature spaces.
I call my group Park n’Play.
I live in the Richmond, VA area and our climate is fairly temperate. My group runs from the end of winter through the fall, although it is my goal to eventually have it be a year-round endeavor. I firmly believe that nature play and experience should be accessible to all regardless of age, ability, geographic location and socioeconomic status.
For that reason, I run my meetups free of charge and I am incredibly fortunate to live in an area with amazing public parks and nature spaces. I arrive with a nature-based or outdoor-friendly activity geared toward children of mixed ages and adults, a small, traveling nature-based library with relevant books for children and adults and more than anything else, it’s an opportunity to be outdoors together as a community and reap the benefits of fresh air and vitamin D.
2. Tell me about your first gardening experience?
I grew up when it was still OK to toss your kids out in the fenced in suburban backyard to play all day.
My mother, also an early childhood educator, gardened in our backyard. She had a vegetable garden, a flower bed and my sister and I had our own small plot to tend to. I was a notoriously picky eater who would munch raw chives straight from the whiskey barrel they were growing in and I am pretty sure I was covered in mud and smelled like onions at least until the age of 8.
The garden was a space for imaginative play, mud pies, digging up worms, picking cucumbers that were taller than I was and it was also a place where it was OK to fail, to fall and skin your knee and to learn the hard way that you can’t bring your pet goldfish back inside three days after his funeral.
3. How did you learn how to garden organically?
Adulthood and Parenthood are full of choices and many times we live in a society with option overload.In an ideal world, I would choose only organic produce and buy completely local and garden in a space that is fully free of chemical pesticides. My family currently lives in a rented property and our yard is semi-public and shared. Our property management uses lawn treatments I am not a fan of, so I choose to container garden and grow our produce in a raised bed table. Organic gardening is something I learned mainly by default. My mother gardened this way and I never really was exposed to other methods.

MarigoldFairies — **298. Outside No Matter What | Michelle Lipp | Educator + Listener | Renegade Gardener** Jan 12, 2020
Show notes

1. Tell us a little about yourself.
My name is Michelle Lipp and I am an early childhood educator turned play-at-home mom of three kids and one renegade garden. In the classroom, I was infamously known as the teacher who went outside no matter what.
I’ve taught in 5 states with varying climates and firmly believe in the Scandanavian proverb that there is no bad weather, just inappropriate clothing.
When my eldest son was in his first year of preschool, his principal (and my former supervisor) remarked that my kids must always get to play outside. I realized that I had become an indoor parent--that even though I had no issue dressing and undressing a dozen children belonging to other people to get them out into the fresh air, I had become complacent at doing so with my own.
Outdoor play and nature experiences are so integral to healthy bodies and minds and so vital to early development.
Children learn to sit still by moving around and the great outdoors is an ideal location for this. I needed to get my family (and myself) back outside and I needed a way to be accountable for that goal so just over a year ago at the end of winter, 2018, I founded a local nature based meetup group for families and professionals working with children to gather at local parks, playgrounds and nature spaces.
I call my group Park n’Play.
I live in the Richmond, VA area and our climate is fairly temperate. My group runs from the end of winter through the fall, although it is my goal to eventually have it be a year-round endeavor. I firmly believe that nature play and experience should be accessible to all regardless of age, ability, geographic location and socioeconomic status.
For that reason, I run my meetups free of charge and I am incredibly fortunate to live in an area with amazing public parks and nature spaces. I arrive with a nature-based or outdoor-friendly activity geared toward children of mixed ages and adults, a small, traveling nature-based library with relevant books for children and adults and more than anything else, it’s an opportunity to be outdoors together as a community and reap the benefits of fresh air and vitamin D.
2. Tell me about your first gardening experience?
I grew up when it was still OK to toss your kids out in the fenced in suburban backyard to play all day.
My mother, also an early childhood educator, gardened in our backyard. She had a vegetable garden, a flower bed and my sister and I had our own small plot to tend to. I was a notoriously picky eater who would munch raw chives straight from the whiskey barrel they were growing in and I am pretty sure I was covered in mud and smelled like onions at least until the age of 8.
The garden was a space for imaginative play, mud pies, digging up worms, picking cucumbers that were taller than I was and it was also a place where it was OK to fail, to fall and skin your knee and to learn the hard way that you can’t bring your pet goldfish back inside three days after his funeral.
3. How did you learn how to garden organically?
Adulthood and Parenthood are full of choices and many times we live in a society with option overload.In an ideal world, I would choose only organic produce and buy completely local and garden in a space that is fully free of chemical pesticides. My family currently lives in a rented property and our yard is semi-public and shared. Our property management uses lawn treatments I am not a fan of, so I choose to container garden and grow our produce in a raised bed table. Organic gardening is something I learned mainly by default. My mother gardened this way and I never really was exposed to other methods.

replay of episode 86 with the Amazing Patti Armbrister Jan 06, 2020

Show notes

Here's a replay of my very first interview with the amazing Patti Armbrister! Get ready to join the Patti Armbrister Fan Club coming soon!

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Melissa K. Norris Family Garden Plan Book Winner Announcement Jan 06, 2020

Show notes

Announcing the winner of the Family Garden Plan Book and if you didn't win don't forget to preorder today because it is released tomorrow and you want to get all the great bonuses that come with this book! I ordered a copy for me just for the bonuses. You can order a copy at https://melissaknorris.com/familygardenplan/

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Win a Copy of the The Family Garden Plan: Grow a Year’s Worth of Sustainable and Healthy Food! Jan 01, 2020

Show notes

What's your preference?

Do you like long show notes that transcribe the full episode or do you like shorter versions? I made 2 copies of Golden Seeds From Melissa K. Norris. One I actually took notes by hand, 13 pages worth and then I typed them off. The other I just transcribed while listening. Which is your preference or do you just like to read it on the website? Would you like a printed copy delivered to your home each month?

Golden Seeds from Melissa Norris Short

Golden Seeds from Melissa Norris Long - Full Transcript

I'd love to know which you like better if you cold just hit reply and say long, short or website I'd really appreciate it!

Don't forget to sign up to Win a copy of Melisa’s New Book Hereand leave her a 5-star review when you're done reading it!

Happy New Year!

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306. How can we keep our food safe AND healthy? | Melissa Kagiyama | Key to the Mountain | Missoula, MT Dec 29, 2019

Show notes

Melissa Kagiyama from Key to the Mountain I buy all my food from local farmers and then cook it.How do we connect with you?I love sharing with everyone so grateful you are all listeningagain, my name is Melissa Kagiyamakeytothemountain.comwant to sharejust hit the contact usI respond to all emails!I love getting requests for new food and flavorshave an Instagram key_to_the_mountainOn Facebook at Key to the MountainAre you a millennial born between 1980-1995?Yeah Millennial!Awesome!Today is Friday August 2, 2019!So I am so excited to introduce my guest today who I met at the Farmer's Market when I was in Missoula for the 1/2 Marathon in June. And she gave me something that not only did I love but helped me complete the Missoula 1/2 Marathon standing up! From Key to the Mountain in Missoula Montana here's rockstar millennial Melissa Kagiyama!I have had guest come on and talk about food they cooked from the farmer's market. You said when you first moved to Missoula, you were blown away by the quality of food available at the farmer's market and then you started cooking with it. People often wonder about those things. I am more the organic eater at my house and I feel like you as we were saying the pre-chat that you struggle with water. Tell us a little about yourself.I really appreciate all our local farmers that are doing all that work. We cook it so we can preserve that amazing food that we grow for all year.Tell me about your first gardening experience?A brief background, grew up not cooking, eating everything from a can, not cooking dinner, which is a way a lot of millennials grew up, with both parents working, it takes a lot of time to cook fresh food so we didn’t eat a lot of fresh food. When I got into college, I got really exhausted all the time, I felt like something wasn't right, like I was sick, I went to the doctor. I was sleeping like 16 hours a day because I was so tired. Going to the doctors telling me I’m fine and it was all in my head, was very discouraging and disempowering. I said, I’m gonna find something out and I'm gonna do something about it.After much searching I found indian holistic medicine called Ayurveda what that is in a nutshell is directions on how to live and eat on a balanced lifeTells you how much to eatexercisesleepAyurveda: It's really about entire lifestyleReally for me, what shocked me so much was about the food I was eating, I thought for me if I was eating canned green beans, I was getting my vegetables, but that is not necessarily true sometimes its true it dependsI felt completely healed, I learned all this knowledge about how to eat. I finished my degree really great! I started teaching, so at this point I was cooking all my foodbasically really simple recipessaladspaghettiBut I was actually cooking my food. A book I really love is Mark Bittmans’How to Cook Everything―Completely Revised Twentieth Anniversary Edition: Simple Recipes for Great FoodThat’s where I learned how to cookI really recommended that bookI started teaching and I taught musicI had all sorts of kidsyoungoldpoorrichwhatever backgroundI noticed after lunch I couldn’t teach the kids, they weren't focused. They were acting crazy bouncing off the walls. For me I personally decided it was because of what they were eating. I felt the same thing happening to me in my childhood, eating food that wasn’t actually supporting me was happening to my students.Then I moved to Montana, when I got to the farmer’s market I was like imagined! I was like:This is what food is supposed to be! When you get something fresh from your garden!I felt even betterWe have such a short growing season and I wondered how can we take this amazing high quality food and keep it for the whole year?So we’re a really high quality food manufacturing companyWe believe everything we do we feel food should, that food should not just fill your belly but it shouldmake you feel amazing!help you think clearly!empower you in everything that you do!Everyone in the food chain should benefit from eating Taking from the earth, so we source locally, we really trust our Montana farmers and organically that’s always better all the way! All the way through the chain till we get to the person who is eating the food so we are supporting that person to living a healthy organic life!That's sort of a long answer to my first gardening experience but that's how we came to be!That's why I love millennials so much! I think that what you are doing is so important. It reminds me of this little cartoon I saw on Facebook it's these 2 carrots talking to each other and the once carrot says, why do they call you food and me organic?Also Andrea Catherine who used to come on my show and talk about Ayurvedic healing and taught us some of those tricks and how to eat from the Farmer's Market. What I got fromMelissa was this EnerGHEE, and I also had this packet of gel I bought. I loved this so much more it was natural, it was easier to carry and just so fantastic for the half marathon!I was surprised to hear you say, I find I have a hard time at 2-3 in the afternoon. I get a lot of sleep, I go to bed early and get up early. We have our first potatoes from the summer finally because we have been eating store potatoes and are so excited to have garden fresh food.Let me start with that since you are talking about it.The EnerGhee is like a snack bar but it's actually foodwalnutsraisins and GHEE which is clarified butterAyurvedically it's actually super healing for your digestionheals your gut and boosts your metabolismSuper healthy been around for thousands years. It's getting popular with KETOWhole 30 dietsWe've taken food and blended it in the proper proportions. Taken the food so you don’t need a ton of one thing to get you through the dayyou get protein from the walnuts so you don’t need more proteinthat’s just a misconception that a lot of people haveYou also get the sweetness from raisins which are also natural! Healthyeasy to digestbalanced portions of real foodpeople love itit’s flying off the shelveswe put it in some grocery stores and we struggle to keep up with the orderswe do a lot of jamso, we get all of our produce from local farmerswe don’t put a ton of sugar in our jams, so what other manufacturers doFirst if you are gonna make this at homeyour gonna mix some:fruitsugarlemon juicepectin maybeboil itcan itWhat manufacturers do is they add sugar, extra sugar is much less expensive then fruit, you only need so much sugar but if you add extra sugar you increase your profits.that’s what manufacturers dosometimes add waterthat super dilutes the productsby doing that it’s so watered down more pectincorn starchwhateverby then it has not got enough flavor so that's where the natural colors and flavors come inwe argue food is already flavoredhigh quality fooddon’t need to add flavorsjams like you make at homebarbecue saucerelishplenty more products in the workssame ideas that there’s no fillers because we want to eat food.How does it stay on the shelf? Isn't the reason so it will stay preserved?I get that question a lot, I have to be careful how to answer this? When you are making food to preserve at home, it’s going to last years and years but because of the sugar, so for example, honey is shelf stable and never goes bad because it’s sugar. sugar is a natural preservativebut you only need a certain amount of sugar. I think 60% is is a good safe amount of sugar, you don’t need 90% which is what so much on the store shelves is!Yes you do need sugar but not that much sugar, that said a lot of our jams are low sugar and we do use a low sugar pectin which has calcium but that's just because we are going extra low sugar. If you are making jam at home you are going to get that high quality super flavor of how it's supposed to be made.And the flavors of the jams are:Flathead Lake Brandied CherryWild Huckleberry Habanero JamJust Peachy Jalapeno JamHuckleberry Chipotle BBQ SauceIt's basically what relish should be. whatever you have at the end of your garden seasonsquash cauliflowerdoesn't mattertake itchop it upput it in a brineput it in your jargreat way to use leftover vegetablesit's very creative. So delicious because it's actual vegetables, anything home canning would do.Yesterday, I did an interview with Brian Moody From AERO about cooking things using up vegetables in the garden at the end of the summer! I think listeners will be interested in how to use food from the farmer's market and things they are making! One of the most downloaded episodes on my show is Ed Evanstan from Helena talking about the new cottage food bill. Enabling people to sell value added products to the farmer's market, the start has to be a hand to hand sale, can't go in the store and you are example of someone who started out that way and now has a business solving a problem that a lot of us have that food that gives you energy and enables you to live a healthy life. people ask me, when you are eating organically, is so expensive how do you justify that?how can you put a price on your health?I would argue to take a look at your priorities and decide what you think what is most important.This is a choice that individuals should makedo you valueyour healthyour selfthe earth nice carsbig houses?You probably hear my opinion when you are eating well, you're gonna save so much money on medical bills and you are going to have so much more energy to go out in the world and create value and therefore create more money for yourself.You are not going to pay for more food, it’s almost hard for me to wrap my head around thatI used to think that wayBut it's more about how can I create myself to be the best version of myself to create more prosperity for myself. Then I can afford not just what I want but the other things including the houses and carsYou don’t have to choose between those, but it starts with taking care of ourselves.Another thing you were talking about processed food.processed just means cooked, so we have to be careful how we think about thatchanged some sort of way, if you get lettuce from your garden, and you chop it up, you have just processed that lettuceif you spear some fish and it’s almost raw you have processed the fish. Over-processed foodWhat happens, what you are talking about, you’ve shortened the word is over-processed foodwhat we are getting on the shelf sometimes is overly processed is it has extra preservatives, the reason why that happens is its meant to be safe, I’m all for safe food.First I’ll talk about we’re overcooking our foodI’ll give you an example.In order to make pickles, I don’t recommend starting with pickles because it's a really big process because vinegar is added.If you are going to go to the farmer's market to sell something I would start with, I would do a jam or baked goodthere’s a couple other simple recipes that you can do, that are not super risky, so they’re very easy to get into the market. With pickles you have to send them to a processing authority and they send them back to you how to cook them, to make sure your food is safe. Which is awesome, I'm all for safe food. But when I sent in our squash pickleThey sent the squash pickles back:I have to cook them for 18 minutes and when I did that, they got shriveled up, basically all the life and nutrients is cooked out of them. The reason for doing that is they are thick you have to cook them a certain amount, so you have to make sure that anything potentially hazardous is cooked out of the picklesfood safetylaws are to keep us safe which is really good. But when you cook something at home you’re probably gonna cook them for 6 minutes, maybe 15 minutes top, you will preserve all of that nutrition. I am an advocate for cooking this at home, just follow the recipe and you’ll be fine!The other thing that we do is add a whole bunch of preservatives, I'm saying we as a society, so that the product will last a really long time.When you cook these foods at home, they'll stay fresh for 2 years.Our season for growing until we get to the next season is only one year so it doesn’t even need to last 2 years. But putting all those preservatives lets it be on the shelf, it last forever, it's great for shipping really far, there are so many reasons to do that. But we don't need to do that , it doesn’t support our health. When you put preservatives in excess in products it's killing any potential bacteria that can grow in the food but when you eat that you are killing stuff in your gut health. When we eat food hopped up on preservatives you are doing that. If you make it yourself or buy form your farmer’s marketbigger manufacturer practiceslabel you can see what’s in it then your good to go!Awesome, have you ever thought about teaching at the Good Food Store they have that classroom there. I think people would like to learn this and then they would say this is too much work and they would by yours.Interesting idea, usually at the farmer’s market I explain and people say, oh, that makes sense so it becomes sort of an easy sell because people understand the value that they are paying for!something I’ve learned that kind of surprised me and I love sharing itwhen you look at the label, we pretty much all know that whatever is first in the ingredients is what is the most in the product so what we are starting to do as a culturewant to make sure that food is the first ingredient not sugar. What manufacturers will do is split the sugarI'm a big label reader. What the label might say is it might be blueberry jam,blueberriescorn syrupsugarbrown sugarsucroseSeparately they are less then the blueberries so they split up but if you put them together it’s still sugar!That is not always the case!Sometimes for example there is sugar and brown sugar in cookies is for flavorYou can tell if it’s very neutral sugars you wonder why is it being split into different sugars.You can also look at the added sugars. If one tablespoon of someone's jam if the sugar content is 18 grams there’s no way blueberries is the first ingredient!an interesting thing about labelswhat I have found, I'm not that big of a manufacturer yet, it’s like the wild west in labeling, you can almost put anything you want on your label and there’s no one enforcing it or verifying it. So if I did put more sugar in that blueberry jam but I did list blueberries as the first ingredient, it's not like there is someone in the kitchen actually measuring what sugar I am putting it. What they tend to do...

Full show notes at the publisher

Replay of interview 166 with Sally Fallon author of the book Nourishing Traditions Dec 23, 2019

Show notes

When Melissa K. Norriswas on the GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast recently we talked about the amazing tip I got from my interview with Sally Fallon about needing to eat a healthy fat with beets etc to get the full mineral and nutritional value from root vegetables.

Check out the replay and see if you don't learn a ton. Sally Fallon and the Weston A. Price foundation was originally introduced to me when I interviewed the AMAZING Mandy Gerth From Lower Valley farm. Also great interviews.

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**304. The Organic Gardener Soil Food Web Expert Jeff Lowenfels | What would Greta Do? |** Dec 14, 2019
Show notes

Jeff Lowenfels author of the Teaming With Microbes Soil Trilogy shares his system for creating healthy organic ecosystems and how we can all work to save the world if we just answer the question What would Greta think?
If you wondered why we changed the name to the GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast there will be no doubt when you finish with this amazing episode. Get ready for Jeff to drop Golden Seeds Galore!
JEFF LOWENFELS "LORD OF THE ROOTS" AUTHOR OF THE SOIL TRIOLOGY:
Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web
**Teaming with Nutrients: The Organic Gardener’s Guide to Optimizing Plant Nutrition**
and
**TEAMING WITH FUNGI**
**The Organic Grower’s Guide to Mycorrhizae**
AND NOW HIS NEW BOOK:
***DIY Autoflowering Cannabis: An Easy Way to Grow Your Own***
**Tell us a little about yourself.**
I was a lawyer, I worked for a fortune 500 company
always been a gardener
**Tell me about your first gardening experience?**
my father had to take over a family
8 acres
frustrated farmers
all the magazines
JI Rodale
came over to the house for dinner
I must have been about 10-11
**How did you learn how to garden organically?**
My first memories are being pushed around in a wheel barrow by my father in the garden
The first thing I planted was a wedding cake strawberry planter
Im in Anchorage Alaska, the longest running garden columnist
My new book is on a brand new kind of cannabis
It will be the next tomato plant
remember when the snap peas came out
everybody had to grow them
still growing them today
has no photo period
same size as a tomato
produces from seed to harvest
just like a tomato plant
small plant

one of the things I love about the books is the diagram in the back with the plant diagram, leaves
plant leaves
nitrogen deficiency
if you don’t know what the photoperiod thing is
cannabis has to have 12 hours day 12 hours night
they require
12 hours + one minute
poinsettias
cactus
triggered by length of light
If you take a christmas cactus and leave it in a situation where it gets more daylight then darkness it won’t bloom no matter what.
A Russian guy was wondering around in 1923.
vo
area
Says he what is that? looks down and sees this little plant
cannabis plant must have escaped from a hemp plantation growing for rope or something of that it thought. oh my gosh it’s gonna get cold here and I haven’t started to flower
photoperiod
In 1973 a bunch of hippie
they came out with a commercial but the size of the whole plant was the size of a thermos bottle the whole plant
it wasn’t very good the cannabis wasn’t very strong
people lost interest continued to breed them in the background
5 years ago
3 years ago started to get great
2 years ago they were phenomenal

And now if you go to a commercial dispensary in lots of places they are actually selling auto flower cannabis. When you use cbd products a lot of that comes from auto flower cbd plants. So if you are a home grower and you want to grow your own cbd auto flower. you could do that.
I’m getting a little a little bit a head of myself. A lot of listeners are thinking,
It’s all over Canada now, if you are not in a state where cannabis is legal, but it will be no question about it. It’s coming!
***DIY Autoflowering Cannabis: An Easy Way to Grow Your Own***
**As gardeners exciting event to wait for!**
these plants are spectacular.
different colors
different chemical extenuates
It’s a whole new aspect of gardening!
you can bread your own
just like a tomato plant!
so there you go, now I have 4 book
I am looking for a 4th book for the series
*tell us little more about eh teaming series in general*
the teaming with microbes was a different type of book, when it came out so Timber Press my publisher, the publisher scratched their head
they weren’t sure any of this was true!
**What I was talking about was how plants feed themselves!**
**in a nutshell here’s the system:**
they use the photosynthetic energy about 50-60% of it actually, not to produce a tomato or cannabis flower. They use that to produce exudates these are substances that contain carbons that drip out of the roots into the soil!
Now, we’re talking right now, you're exudating right now, your sweating, Your doing the same thing the plant is, and so that sweat is going onto that skin and what does it do? it attracts bacteria and fungi. That’s what these exudates in the soil do, they attract bacteria and fungi!
The reason why people use deodorant they want to contain the bacteria and fungi etc.
In the plant world the exudates go out into the soil and they attract bacteria and fungi. Why? Because they contain carbon and the bacteria and fungi need that carbon, so they eat the carbon. They don’t eat everything else that’s in the exudate, so they poop it out right there and it contains nitrogen in plant useable form . But more important the bacteria get eaten by protozoa and nematodes.
Nematodes are blind microscopic hairlike worms and protozoa are the things you studied in high school but don’t remember anymore.
amoebas
parameciums. They eat the bacteria and fungi and they poop out the excess. So you get plant usable nutrients being created as a result of these exoduses being consumed and then the bacteria and fungi being consumed so the plant is indirectly feeding itself
And if it wants a different mix of food it changes the exudates by attracting and makes the different mix themselves
bacteria and fungi
bigger guys eat the
soil food web
food chains
every now and then something looks up and sees another food chain
and connects it
two chains connected
form a web
All these things running around in the soil are creating tunnels where air can get in, water, a reservoir
spaces from water for the little guys to hide from the big guys
bacteria and fungi are producing all sorts of substances
acids that decay things
bacteria produce slimes that enable them to stick together but also enables little particles of soil to stick together
soil structure comes from these bacteria and protozoa on up.
You start to get a picture as a result of putting out there exudates creating its own food and changing the recipes to its own like
soil structure improve and created
So the plant is in charge of what’s going on, we tend to think plants are these stupid sedentary
now there are even stories about sounds plants make, I read a story a couple of days ago, the sound plants make when they are attacked and cut
wow!
How the p
really delve into how the plant attracts it’s food
bacteria
nematods
protozoa
all the way on up to us
By us I mean the gardener
we come along and we rototill
what does it do?
destroys the fungal network
up not he surface
Rototilling cuts a worm in half, when you cut a worm in half, you don’t get two worms.
what do we do now?
When you put the chemicals down, the plant says to itself, because they aren’t stupid, why are we expanding so much of ourselves to produce exudates to produce food?
you have to become
have to apply these fertilizers every 2 weeks because you have destroyed the soil food web
you’ve scared it away
In some instances the worms for example don’t like these chemicals so they go away!
Sometimes you get a microbe that loves the chemical you are putting down and you get an imbalance and the system doesn’t work right.
The whole system becomes screwed up when we step forward and try to artificially create
so much better then we can
I always end talks by pointing out to people The Red Woods
375 feet tall!
Over 500 years old
How did they get that big without anyone putting any Miracle Gro on them?
**They teamed with the microbes!**
They put out the exudates, they attracted the bacteria and fungi, who in turn attracted the protozoa and nematodes who ate the bacteria and fungi, pooped out the excess and fed the plants!
This is what they are doing today
So this is the system!
There’s no arguing about it. Timber press, realized about 6 months in when they went to the second printing
this is the system!
There’s no arguing
republicans
democrats arguing
this is what happens!
if we don’t accept then we’re bucking the system
**THAT’s the BASIS of why you should become organic!**
team with these microbes
so much easier
why do we have to roto-till? It’s a stupid thing to do.
to plant a pea plant
pea
marigold
You rototill for that? why?
if you are having problems getting it into the soil, take a dowel and make a hole, you don’t need to destroy 16 feet of soil structure to plant a seed. You take a 2 by 4, run it down the garden, make a furrow.
***Well, won’t the weeds overrun it, or if there is sod there to start a garden, isn’t that why people use rototillers?***
That’s why people use cover crops, that’s why as I point out in my books, there is no such thing as bare soil in nature.
**We use mulches. So when I plant my garden, I cover the non-planted areas in mulches.**
That does 2 things.
It feeds the microbes in the soil and it prevents the weeds from coming through.
If I don’t plant mulches, I plant a living mulch which are cover crops.
The only thing you have to worry about is competition if a weed is coming up, it doesn’t make a difference you’re plants doing fine.
you’d never know
that anything has never been rotated
want to use the right much
**You want to use the right mulch. It turns out the bacteria creates the kind of soil that annuals and things that are in the ground less then a year like**
FULL SHOW NOTES COMING SOON!
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Teaming with Fungi: The Organic Grower's Guide to Mycorrhizae (Science for Gardeners) — **304. The Organic Gardener Soil Food Web Expert Jeff Lowenfels | What would Greta Do? |** Dec 14, 2019
Show notes

Jeff Lowenfels author of the Teaming With Microbes Soil Trilogy shares his system for creating healthy organic ecosystems and how we can all work to save the world if we just answer the question What would Greta think?
If you wondered why we changed the name to the GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast there will be no doubt when you finish with this amazing episode. Get ready for Jeff to drop Golden Seeds Galore!
JEFF LOWENFELS "LORD OF THE ROOTS" AUTHOR OF THE SOIL TRIOLOGY:
Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web
**Teaming with Nutrients: The Organic Gardener’s Guide to Optimizing Plant Nutrition**
and
**TEAMING WITH FUNGI**
**The Organic Grower’s Guide to Mycorrhizae**
AND NOW HIS NEW BOOK:
***DIY Autoflowering Cannabis: An Easy Way to Grow Your Own***
**Tell us a little about yourself.**
I was a lawyer, I worked for a fortune 500 company
always been a gardener
**Tell me about your first gardening experience?**
my father had to take over a family
8 acres
frustrated farmers
all the magazines
JI Rodale
came over to the house for dinner
I must have been about 10-11
**How did you learn how to garden organically?**
My first memories are being pushed around in a wheel barrow by my father in the garden
The first thing I planted was a wedding cake strawberry planter
Im in Anchorage Alaska, the longest running garden columnist
My new book is on a brand new kind of cannabis
It will be the next tomato plant
remember when the snap peas came out
everybody had to grow them
still growing them today
has no photo period
same size as a tomato
produces from seed to harvest
just like a tomato plant
small plant

one of the things I love about the books is the diagram in the back with the plant diagram, leaves
plant leaves
nitrogen deficiency
if you don’t know what the photoperiod thing is
cannabis has to have 12 hours day 12 hours night
they require
12 hours + one minute
poinsettias
cactus
triggered by length of light
If you take a christmas cactus and leave it in a situation where it gets more daylight then darkness it won’t bloom no matter what.
A Russian guy was wondering around in 1923.
vo
area
Says he what is that? looks down and sees this little plant
cannabis plant must have escaped from a hemp plantation growing for rope or something of that it thought. oh my gosh it’s gonna get cold here and I haven’t started to flower
photoperiod
In 1973 a bunch of hippie
they came out with a commercial but the size of the whole plant was the size of a thermos bottle the whole plant
it wasn’t very good the cannabis wasn’t very strong
people lost interest continued to breed them in the background
5 years ago
3 years ago started to get great
2 years ago they were phenomenal

And now if you go to a commercial dispensary in lots of places they are actually selling auto flower cannabis. When you use cbd products a lot of that comes from auto flower cbd plants. So if you are a home grower and you want to grow your own cbd auto flower. you could do that.
I’m getting a little a little bit a head of myself. A lot of listeners are thinking,
It’s all over Canada now, if you are not in a state where cannabis is legal, but it will be no question about it. It’s coming!
***DIY Autoflowering Cannabis: An Easy Way to Grow Your Own***
**As gardeners exciting event to wait for!**
these plants are spectacular.
different colors
different chemical extenuates
It’s a whole new aspect of gardening!
you can bread your own
just like a tomato plant!
so there you go, now I have 4 book
I am looking for a 4th book for the series
*tell us little more about eh teaming series in general*
the teaming with microbes was a different type of book, when it came out so Timber Press my publisher, the publisher scratched their head
they weren’t sure any of this was true!
**What I was talking about was how plants feed themselves!**
**in a nutshell here’s the system:**
they use the photosynthetic energy about 50-60% of it actually, not to produce a tomato or cannabis flower. They use that to produce exudates these are substances that contain carbons that drip out of the roots into the soil!
Now, we’re talking right now, you're exudating right now, your sweating, Your doing the same thing the plant is, and so that sweat is going onto that skin and what does it do? it attracts bacteria and fungi. That’s what these exudates in the soil do, they attract bacteria and fungi!
The reason why people use deodorant they want to contain the bacteria and fungi etc.
In the plant world the exudates go out into the soil and they attract bacteria and fungi. Why? Because they contain carbon and the bacteria and fungi need that carbon, so they eat the carbon. They don’t eat everything else that’s in the exudate, so they poop it out right there and it contains nitrogen in plant useable form . But more important the bacteria get eaten by protozoa and nematodes.
Nematodes are blind microscopic hairlike worms and protozoa are the things you studied in high school but don’t remember anymore.
amoebas
parameciums. They eat the bacteria and fungi and they poop out the excess. So you get plant usable nutrients being created as a result of these exoduses being consumed and then the bacteria and fungi being consumed so the plant is indirectly feeding itself
And if it wants a different mix of food it changes the exudates by attracting and makes the different mix themselves
bacteria and fungi
bigger guys eat the
soil food web
food chains
every now and then something looks up and sees another food chain
and connects it
two chains connected
form a web
All these things running around in the soil are creating tunnels where air can get in, water, a reservoir
spaces from water for the little guys to hide from the big guys
bacteria and fungi are producing all sorts of substances
acids that decay things
bacteria produce slimes that enable them to stick together but also enables little particles of soil to stick together
soil structure comes from these bacteria and protozoa on up.
You start to get a picture as a result of putting out there exudates creating its own food and changing the recipes to its own like
soil structure improve and created
So the plant is in charge of what’s going on, we tend to think plants are these stupid sedentary
now there are even stories about sounds plants make, I read a story a couple of days ago, the sound plants make when they are attacked and cut
wow!
How the p
really delve into how the plant attracts it’s food
bacteria
nematods
protozoa
all the way on up to us
By us I mean the gardener
we come along and we rototill
what does it do?
destroys the fungal network
up not he surface
Rototilling cuts a worm in half, when you cut a worm in half, you don’t get two worms.
what do we do now?
When you put the chemicals down, the plant says to itself, because they aren’t stupid, why are we expanding so much of ourselves to produce exudates to produce food?
you have to become
have to apply these fertilizers every 2 weeks because you have destroyed the soil food web
you’ve scared it away
In some instances the worms for example don’t like these chemicals so they go away!
Sometimes you get a microbe that loves the chemical you are putting down and you get an imbalance and the system doesn’t work right.
The whole system becomes screwed up when we step forward and try to artificially create
so much better then we can
I always end talks by pointing out to people The Red Woods
375 feet tall!
Over 500 years old
How did they get that big without anyone putting any Miracle Gro on them?
**They teamed with the microbes!**
They put out the exudates, they attracted the bacteria and fungi, who in turn attracted the protozoa and nematodes who ate the bacteria and fungi, pooped out the excess and fed the plants!
This is what they are doing today
So this is the system!
There’s no arguing about it. Timber press, realized about 6 months in when they went to the second printing
this is the system!
There’s no arguing
republicans
democrats arguing
this is what happens!
if we don’t accept then we’re bucking the system
**THAT’s the BASIS of why you should become organic!**
team with these microbes
so much easier
why do we have to roto-till? It’s a stupid thing to do.
to plant a pea plant
pea
marigold
You rototill for that? why?
if you are having problems getting it into the soil, take a dowel and make a hole, you don’t need to destroy 16 feet of soil structure to plant a seed. You take a 2 by 4, run it down the garden, make a furrow.
***Well, won’t the weeds overrun it, or if there is sod there to start a garden, isn’t that why people use rototillers?***
That’s why people use cover crops, that’s why as I point out in my books, there is no such thing as bare soil in nature.
**We use mulches. So when I plant my garden, I cover the non-planted areas in mulches.**
That does 2 things.
It feeds the microbes in the soil and it prevents the weeds from coming through.
If I don’t plant mulches, I plant a living mulch which are cover crops.
The only thing you have to worry about is competition if a weed is coming up, it doesn’t make a difference you’re plants doing fine.
you’d never know
that anything has never been rotated
want to use the right much
**You want to use the right mulch. It turns out the bacteria creates the kind of soil that annuals and things that are in the ground less then a year like**
FULL SHOW NOTES COMING SOON!
Sign up for our newsletter full of Golden Seeds dropped by my awesome guests!
To get a copy of the golden seeds issue emailed directly to your inbox!
And to enter to win a copy of Melissa K. Norris' new book The Family Garden Plan sign up here

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Spotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/

The GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast December 2019 Dec 14, 2019

Show notes

Are you wondering why we are rebranding ourselves as the GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast?

Listen here to learn what's new!

Get ready for our first episode as the Green Organic Gardener Podcast where Jeff Lowenfels author of Teaming with Microbes, Teaming With Nutrients and Teaming With Fungi and his new book on DIY Cannabis, from Anchorage Alaska prepare to be dazzled! Afterall what would Greta think?

Love all of you green future growers out there!

Do you have your climate story ready?

Hey there Green Future Growers! thanks for joining us today. If you're new to the show, I hope you'll subscribe on iTunes or your favorite Android app and let's get growing.

18s

JackieMarie

Hey everybody, JackieMarie Beyer here, I'm driving to work so there might be a little static in the background, but this is like a good place for me to record, I feel like because it's kind of quiet in my car for me and I don't know it's just a good time for me. Thoughts are fresh in my head, I find like when I get my microphone out and I'm sitting at my desk later in the day, or even if I get up on a Saturday morning and do it, I'm just like, what was I going to say?

48s

JackieMarie

So anyway, in case you happen to notice there's a new word on the podcast logo, the Green Organic Gardener podcast. And it's funny because like, I've been trying to figure out how could I narrow my niche? And like reach out better to people. I mean, I feel like I have my avatar dialed in, but I don't know. I just, I just want to be unapologetic on my show and I, 1000% support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal, and believe that, you know, just that my podcast, you know, definitely has an environmental focus.

1m 36s

JackieMarie

Like I call you Green Future Growers because I believe we're all dedicated to growing a greener future. And so I hope I'm not offending anybody. And if we lose some listeners, I think it's just like, I was listening to Sally Hogshead yesterday on the Marie Forleo show. If you don't know who she is, she wrote this book called Fascinate and like, I've taken her Fascinate quiz. If you're a listener and you've taken her Fascinate quiz and you want to send me your results, that would be so amazing. Or just like anything that you feel that would help. But like at the top of my, every time I do an interview with anybody like Sally Hogshead has this Fascinate quiz for businesses and she kind of like gives you these four powerful words.

2m 21s

JackieMarie

And I look at those four words every time I get on the mic to do an interview and talk about. Anyway, it's what Sally was saying like on the top of her front page, she has this thing about Hogshead means, I don't know, like 144 barrels of mead or whatever, if you don't like it. Like, I guess she gets a lot of flack about her middle, her last name, but she put something up there, like some kind of like curse word, or just like, if you don't like this, I don't know. But she says, people have actually written her and said, we were going to work with you until we saw your homepage. And then we decided not to, and she's like, what a greet screener.

3m 4s

JackieMarie

And so I do kind of feel like, and I know there are people out there that have very different political beliefs from me that have been listening to my show. And I, you know, you're more than welcome to listen. I've said before, I'm everybody's favorite Democrat. If you're a Republican, I have plenty of friends who are Republicans, but I am definitely very political. Mike and I are, you know, our marriage, our, a lot of our foundation, I was what we believe is we're hardcore environmentalists and you know a lot of what Sarah Harding said, I guess maybe that's where it came from. Just doing that interview with her last Friday and talking about we don't have time.

3m 46s

JackieMarie

We need have these climate conversations. We need to be taking bigger actions. You know, I'd love to Greta Thunberg. I just think this is going to help us connect better and I don't know, we'll see what happens. So I posted on Facebook and people voted and it seemed like the votes were all over the place. Anyway, I have to go talley them up and see if there was a real defined winner. I think it was the middle picture. It seemed like the majority of people, which I think is like a capital G with lowercase reen. People had some good comments, like maybe should make the banner orange or do this, make it pop more, it was hard to read.

4m 32s

JackieMarie

But I think another thing that kinda got me was somebody else came out with THE Organic Garden podcast, like with a capital T H E. And I was like, but also there is an organicgardener.com and I've never really wanted to have trouble with them. And as I make the Golden Seeds Magazines, which if you subscribe to the email, you can read, I usually post them in the show notes. It's always been kind of my intent like someday I would love to have, especially now that Rodale's Organic Gardening magazine has gone. Like, I just totally want to Golden Seeds newsletter, magazine, whatever it's going to be called.

5m 13s

JackieMarie

And I think that it would be great. And I think Amazon can print them and ship them pretty cost effectively if they're in black and white, but you can have black and white with a color cover. And the more I feel like the more I'm practicing making them the quicker I'm getting at them. I've been trying like with Melissa Norris is episode, I actually make two versions. Cause one, I actually sat down with her episode and a piece of paper, I think 13 pieces of paper's what I came up with the end and actually took notes by hand and then typed up my notes, to see if that was a little better. And I, I, I don't because people have told me, it's my responsibility curate my content and I would love to do that just, you know, if you've ever looked at my show notes, you know, they're just my notes I take while people are talking, I actually like played both Sarah Hardings and Melissa K. Norris' episodes and had like Google docs type to text them.

6m 14s

JackieMarie

But to be honest with you, it was just as hard to edit them those, because there's just so many words and it makes it all in one, like it's almost easier to just do it from my show notes, but I am not the fastest typist in the world. I'm not the slowest, but the best I've ever done is like 60 words per minute. I do have a pretty good accuracy rate. I usually am in the high nineties, if not a hundred percent accuracy, but you probably don't care about any of this. Anyway, just wanted to let you know, we are not the Organic Gardener podcast anymore. We are the GREEN Organic Garden Podcast. And hopefully those of you who are listening are going to love this change because you can connect and you can relate, and you support the Green New Deal and you want to see more action taken on climate change.

7m 2s

JackieMarie

And you want to see everybody in your neighborhood have an Organic Oasis and you want to help get rid of those stupid yellow flags in my mom's community. Like I just can't believe they are having these huge water problems. You know, obviously it's from seeping in through people's lawns. To me, it just seems like that's gotta be the most obvious thing. And yet still everyday you go out there and there's, you know, six lawns on her three blocks or whatever that have those little yellow flags! and you know, so every day it's like, so many of her neighbors are spraying these chemicals. It just drives me crazy. We just got to get rid of those.

7m 37s

JackieMarie

And so to me, and also like when Rodale's, I've said this a couple of times, like I've been going through old episodes of old issues of our Rodale's magazine. And they talk about that they have people who write in and say, Hey, we're sick of your politics. And they are unapologetic about it. They say that, you know, we feel like, you know, politics is part of it. Like, you know, we need to make sure that our listeners/readers know what's going on.

8m 4s

JackieMarie

And like Bob Quinn talks about he got into organic because he wanted organic standards. So we don't have organic standards. Like every time I go to the grocery store and I buy lettuce, I'm like, is this really grown organically? And now what's the big problem they're finding, even with organic oats, that even if they're grown following, all sorts of organic practices, there's so much Roundup in the water that just using the water in California and stuff is like, the food is coming out with, it's not organic, it's coming out with traces of glyphosate in it and traces of Roundup.

8m 38s

JackieMarie

So we're all getting that, no matter what you're eating, even if you're buying all organic foods because they've just put so much into our environment. And I just, I don't know, let me know what you think if you're really against it, Hey, we don't have to change it. It'll be easier. Cause I certainly haven't figured out how to do it. If I have to buy a new website, like the GREEN organic garden podcast, or maybe we'll just buy the greenorganicgarden.com. I don't, I don't know how that's going to be. But anyway, JackieMarie Beyer it is December 5th? Sixth? It's December 6th, driving to work on yet again, another blackie icy rainy road, not snow, but I get to go home to Mike every night and he's just been so wonderful.

9m 29s

JackieMarie

It's just like, there's nothing like walking into a clean house, with last night I came in and smelled so good! Food cooking and just warm, lots of firewood, like Melissa Norris talked about how much of their food was from Thanksgiving, was from their garden. And not that much of our food, like I think the potatoes were really the only thing from our garden. So, but it's exciting to have food. There was one point where I thought about, should I call my podcast the Organic Eater? Because we all know I'm more of the organic eater. Even though I don't get to spend as much on organic food, I have been buying more and more.

10m 14s

JackieMarie

Yesterday I walked into Super One foods and it was so crazy. They switched everything like where the organic food was, is now the normal food and where the normal food was is the organic food or whatever. The conventional food. I shouldn't say it's normal. And I was so surprised I was completely lost, but I wondered does that mean they get so much organic people shopping for organic that they put that in the prime place where people walk or, you know, I just wondered what was going on, but I have been following Bob Quinn's advice. And when I stand in the grocery store and I'm like, should I buy the organic version? Should I buy the other version? I've been trying to choose the organic version way more.

10m 56s

JackieMarie

So anyway, we'd love to hear from you. If you have any feedback, certainly got lots of feedback on the new logo so I was kind of afraid to even post the logo ideas. So happy holidays, everyone! Make sure you're having those climate conversations and you have your climate story down.

11m 19s

JackieMarie

Oh yeah. And then don't forget, we're giving away a copy of Melissa Norris's book. It's gonna launch on January 7th. But if you sign up in the Melissa Norris show notes, like it's like right there right away. And I think like I had a problem with my website and it was down and then they've reput it up.

11m 41s

JackieMarie

And now the show notes just appear underneath. Like when you go to details, the whole show notes are there. I don't know what I'm going to figure out how to fix that. So you can just go to details. And, and then the link to sign up to win the book is right there. So if you want a copy of her Family Garden Plan, all you have to do is click on the show notes and maybe I'll put another link in these shownotes so it's right there too.

12m 14s

JackieMarie

And then I would talking to Patty Armbrister about actually starting up the Patti Armbrister fan club. I've been trying to talk her into, well, actually she agreed to do a monthly call, a question, answer where she will.

12m 28s

JackieMarie

So I know you're gonna be excited about that. I had Fiverr design, some t-shirt logo. So I think that'll be fun. And coming up in the new year, we're getting ready to relaunch the Organic Oasis Masterclass. So kind of taking some of the things we learned from freegardencourse.com. I've re-done that, almost have that done. So that's only going to be like a very short 30 to 45 minute course. And then the Organic Gardener Masterclass, the Organic Oasis Masterclass is going to be a full out course. I think that's going to go over the course of the year. And so you'll be able to get the Patti Armbrister Fan Club access. I'm just going to be kind of bundled with that somehow.

13m 18s

JackieMarie

So that's, what's new with me. What's new with you. Happy 2019 and here's to our best garden ever in 2020.

13m 26s

OUTRO

Do you know someone who would benefit from the Organic Gardener podcast? If you like, what you hear? We'd love it if you shared the Organic Garden Podcast with a friend. Thanks again for listening.

And don't forget to enter to win a copy of Melissa K. Norris' new book The Family Garden Plan sign up here

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