GREEN Organic Garden Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Melissa K. Norris from Modern Homesteading and the Pioneering Today Podcast Nov 30, 2019

Show notes

Melissa K. Norris from Modern Homesteading the Pioneering Today Podcast where everything is homegrown and homemade!The Family Garden Plan: Grow a Year's Worth of Sustainable and Healthy Food Gardeners are so excited to share what we have learned with others who are interested and I feel like that is what we get to do on garden podcasts! And I love podcasts!Want to read my Golden Seeds Shownotes? There's even two versions a long version that's the full transcript and a short version.I’m a 5th generation homestead and as a youngster I didn’t appreciate it. My dad lived through the Great Depression so if hey didn’t raise it they didn’t eat through the winter. I thought everyone grew up like that. With agardenpreserving foodraising beef cattleIt wasn’t until I hit high school really, I didn’t realize I was an anomaly. When my husband and I got married, I was working 40 hours a week and we started our family and I was trying to balance family, and growing our food and all of that, and it has been a 20 year journey to get here.I feel like my husband grew up in a similar situation on a cattle ranch, growing a lot of their own food, baking their own breads and cookies.I feel blessed now to have all that insight as an adult it has served me well, but as a teenager I didn’t really appreciate it. My husband and I got married, had kids and I was working as a pharm -tech. I loved the Little House books as a child, my mother instilled in me a deep love of reading. For us to have tv where we lived you had to go out in the snow and turn the antenna. So I read a lot.I wanted to write books, my lifelong dream was to write historical fiction. I was always writing about dutch oven cooking and barrel riding and all these things. I was at a writer’s conference and they said you had to have a platform with a blog etc. I was like what’s a blog?But I learned, we had dial-up internet. And I wrote this blog about things my heroine did that I was also doing. I thought well I cook in a dutch oven so I’ll share my favorite recipes and hopefully people who wanted to read that would read my books and I eventually got a literary agent, and wrote lots of manuscripts but none got accepted. But then the last publishing house said how would you like to write non-fiction, your blog is amazing. And I said YES! Yes, I will!We raise all of our own beefporkincreasing a gardenBoth of my first books I was doing all of this. Just 2 years ago I was able to “retire” and stay home to focus on writingpodcastinge-coursespioneering today Academy And of course raise our own food! Learning how to do all that while I was working was very Powerful!because so many people are working and want this lifestyle and aren’t able to leave their regular jobs and I was able to say, YES YOU CAN!This is what I didAnd how I can help you do it too!And you do! And you give away lots of free content, but then you also go way in-depth in your classes etc. Being able to feed our family and grow our own food.My new book, The Family Garden Plan: Grow a Year's Worth of Sustainable and Healthy Food often people see we raise fish, or hunt, and then grow 55-60% of our own fruits and vegetables. I have over 20 years doing it on my own plus another 18 years watching my parents. Get info at the FamilyGardenPlan.comI have always raised enough green beens and we always had our own beef.Those were easy for me to see and start with.If your goal is to raise a years worth of food my #1 best advice is you pick one thing, START WITH ONE THINGIf you want, you can do 1 fruit and 1 vegetable.This doesn’t mean you aren’t growing other things, but it means OK, this is the one thing I am going to grow enough of that we will eat FRESH through the growing season and enough to preserve it so we can eat it all the way through till we can harvest again next year!Green beans was one we do. They have been in our family for generations. Tomatoes are Very Versatile in the KitchenMaybe it’s tomatoes for you because tomatoes are very versatile in the kitchen. Once you have one vegetable down, where you feel it’s coming on kind of easy over the seasons you add the next vegetable or fruit. Maybe after a while you add 2-3 vegetables each year. You get confidence and it’s contagious and things go pretty well. And we all have those moments in August where we’re pulling our hair out and saying why did I do this to myself? But then when you see on the shelf “I don’t have to buy that again this year” you will feel so empowered. But if you try it all at once the first season you will get overwhelmed and be like this is way too much to do!So my best advice is build it slowly once block at a time.Where are you located?We are located smack dab in the middle of the mountains between Seattle and the Pacific Ocean. I’m technically Zone 7 but usually our last frost is about May first mid may, a lot of times we have aour first frost mid September. So basically the end of May through mid September.We have a relatively shorter growing season. Still a bit longer then us in Montana.How do you get fish? I was watching the video of your in your pantry. My husband works at a mill, and we get fresh caught salmon as a bonus, so I love smoked salmon. We live an hour from the coast so we also have ea little boat and we catch our limit of crab each year with our 6 crab pots too.Picking Varieties For your ClimateIt’s a good thing in fall and winter months to make a list of things that did really well and things that didn’t.Do a FALL AUDITThis is what I am gonna do again, this needs fixed. If you don’t take notes at the end of summer you are going to forget, you think you wont’ but you will.Especially as you go from fall into winter and you are planninggetting seedsdecide what to plant next yeartake note of crops that were cut short.This is what happened to us with some new heirloom tomatoes I wanted to try. It’s good to try varieties because you never know when you will find a beloved favorite but I always struggle with tomatoes here in the Pacific NW. As a matter of fact I have to grow all my tomatoes in a high tunnel or unheated greenhouse. It’s basically an old carport we covered in plastic.But these tomatoes are more heat loving. They were good for sandwiches and slicing but for sauces etc. Melissa recommends a paste tomato" "I tried someone varieties and usually always do an heirloom San Marzano Lungo No. 2 number to which is an heirloom paste tomato Paste Tomatoes. Especially if you're looking for that whole year saying and preserving them!"If you are going to preserve tomatoes for the year, the majority of your space be paste tomatoes that you can use for pizza saucetomato saucepasta sauceketchupPaste tomatoes are fleshiermore flavorfuldon’t have as much waterso they cut down your time simmering and overall preserving process.Look for varieties in your area. The DAY TO HARVEST is so important. Varieties you want to save will be ones thatproduced fastestforms blooms the earliestdisease feee and of course most prolificEventually you will get the most perfect plant for your UNIQUE Microclimate!It is a REALLY BIG DEAL if your variety needs 120 days versus only 90 days because that means you can harvest for a month instead of just a week. The most important thing you can do is RESEARCH SEEDS that are best suited to your climate and garden!Do you use paste tomatoes for SALSA?YES! There are lots of different paste tomatoes. You don’t want salsa that’s watery and soupy.When picking varieties you want to think:How am I gonna use this thorough the year.Sometimes you’re just so excited about canning and a new recipe but over year, our tastes change and often you find you won’t put up as much jam and jelly as when kids are young. So I would write down this is what we had for dinner, this is how much produce we used? Maybe just do it for a week, and then multiply by 4 for a month and then x 12 for a year. To get an idea.How many plants do I need if I use 4 cups a month?Melissa has a free chart you can download from her website and the book is filled with charts. Lots of charts tell what vegetables will produce but Melissa’s book includes how many berries and asparagus and perennials you will want as well. A big take away is that it’s different for EVERY single family. When picking varieties and ordering seeds, for example cucumbers. We love garlic dill pickles. So I like a cucumber, a Chicago cucumber, it stays firm, is good with yogurt dips etc but also for pickles so I call it a dual-purpose cucumber.If you pre-order the The Family Garden Plan: Grow a Year's Worth of Sustainable and Healthy Food you get all these bonuses including the Amendment guide! I think the amendment guide is worth gold. Do you want to talk about soil health?If you pre-order, it hits shelves January 7th at Barnes and Noble etc but if you pre-order you get access to worksheets an bonus items, video packages, including the companion planting and crop rotation courses.Melissa states that those 2 things alone, companion planting and crop rotation were big enough topics when she was first learning they overwhelmed her. Trying to figure out how to do it in a backyard garden and not on a big agricultural farm.It’s all that I needed and what I use in an usable easy-done format. It’s what I implemented and the charts we used.Soil Amendment Guideis all natural standpoint. You can find a lot of things online that are synthetic, but this is an easy organic natural method for a small garden.They had their soil tested. They found out that the ph level was off from around 12 years of growing. After having a lot of troubles blossom end rot etc did a test for the 12 macro and micro nutrients in the soil and after a ton of research on what to do if soil is high or low and how to fix soil health back in harmony so you can growthe biggest vegetables and harvest the best yields of produce you can get from nutritious soil.I know you have been doing this a long time and it’s working as you feed your family.Getting to the Root of ThingsWhich activity is your least favorite activity to do in the garden?I don’t love to weed, it can be therapeutic but my favorite things are to plant, harvest, just stroll in the morning and enjoy. Weeding, not so much.What is your favorite activity to do in the garden?Pruning.I love to prune. It increases the health of your plantsit gives a larger yield.What is the best gardening advice you have ever received?Crop RotationSoil HealthWe were growing our broccoli, first time, with brassicas and I had this close friend and mentor and she taught me how to prune blueberries…she said:Don’t plant brassicas in the same place for 3 years!Do you have any advice for squirrels and critters?The most effective thing we have found time and time again is a barrier. We have deer, elk, and birds that get our fruit trees and perennials.So I put netting on blueberries and fencing around fruit trees and then on some of the garden row cover especially to keep cabbage moths out of crops.How big is your place?People assume you have to have a big space. But depending on the size of your family and how much you eat of a particular item really makes a difference. We have 14.96 acres, but only grow on one acre, the rest is woods and pasture for the animals. The house and yard are on one acre, less than 1/2 is the orchard and berries. There’s a 20’ x 10’ covered high tunnel where there are 18-20 tomato paste plans and a 10 foot row of hot peppers. And then the regular garden beds of annual vegetables that are about 56’ wide by 20 foot long.Plants that grow vertically. There is a cement patio with grill and ag rape arbor that provides shade as well as grapes, but is only 2 plants on each side so takes up little space. There are herbs in containers spread out through the landscape. Blueberries are with rhubarb so Melissa only has to amend one bed as they both like a more acid ph level in the soil. There’s also an asparagus bed. So less than half an acre in produce. Melissa says she wants it close to the house and water sources for summer irrigation. That way there is no time wasted going back and forth helps with productivity. A favorite tool that you like to use? If you had to move and could only take one tool with you what would it be.Heirloom seeds - green beans - that have been in her family for generations.A favorite recipe you like to cook from the garden?Almost everything Melissa cooks comes from their garden but her husband’s grandmother’s pumpkin roll is a seasonal favorite right now. Made from sugar pie pumpkins. Or a pumpkin savory soup. A favorite internet resource?Lately doing so much research for the book, from scientific sources, extension offices have some of the best information for SAFETY especially when preserving and gardening working with food. A favorite reading material-book, mag, blog/website etc you can recommend?I do really like as far as magazines go. I do like The New Pioneer Magazine and also Mother Earth News which I'm sure most people are super familiar with, but I feel like they have good solid stuff that's always right up my alley as a gardener and a homesteader resources when I'm surfing on the internet.I like to look at Mother Earth News when I’m doing research. Then what do you think about the Magnolia Journal? Chip and Joanna Gaines newest adventure? Final question- if there was one change you would like to see to create a greener world what would it be? For example is there a charity or organization your passionate about or a project you would like to see put into action. What do you feel is the most crucial issue facing our planet in regards to the environment either in your local area or on a national or global scale?You know really I was so what it boils down to for me as I really feel like we would see the biggest change in our world as of every single family and every single household grew at least one item of their own food!And then they cooked with that because I feel like if everybody could see even in an apartment you can grow your own basil on a windowsill in water you don't even need to have dirt! I have a blog post on that, I didn’t mean that got be a plug.Often times people say well, not everyone can do that, if you live in the city or you live in an urban environment or everything.For goodness sakes you can grow sprouts in a mason jar in 3 days!I feel like if every single family and every single household grew at least one thing that they would notice the flavor difference!Then if you're growing something you're going to use it to cook from scratch with it or you're going to add it to a dish and you're going to notice that the flavor change like oh my goodness like this tastes better!Especially when you get kids involved! When my kids grow a vegetable if it's something we purchase in a store before their like, I don't like that I don't want to try that!The Family Garden Plan: Grow a Year's Worth of Sustainable and Healthy Food This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Spotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/

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Constructive Holiday Climate Conversations with Sarah Harding Whitefish, MT Nov 30, 2019

Show notes

Read my this issue of the Golden Seeds Newsletter here.GoldenSeedsIssue15SarahHardingCompassionateConversationsAboutClimateSarah Harding from Coconut at Sea Soap Co.Friday, November 22, 2019I’m super excited and last time she shared a ton of golden seeds with listeners and she’s kind of changed directions so here she’s here to tell us about her new venture the Coconut at Sea Soap Company.We grew up in North County San Diego. We spent our childhood lives loving the ocean and surfing.We moved to Montana when we were 22 and spent the second half of our lives farming, fishing, and raising a family.Now we're Coconut at Sea Soap Company.A family business committed to giving our all in everything we do. We make soap because we want to save the planetWe love the ocean. We love the mountains.Seeing plastic clogging up our reefs and blowing across farm fields broke our hearts.So we decided to reduce single-use plastics. Bar soap and shampoo bars are an easy switch toward our goal of plastic-free showers.And we know gardeners are always getting dirty! Welcome Sarah McPhearson, Sarah Harding?McPhearson is my maiden name.You're in Whitefish where I got a job this year and I feel so excited about this because this week we are talking about saving the animals in Wonders McGraw-Hill we’re reading Kids to the Rescue about saving turtles and manatees. And we did a puppet show called the Turtle Mishap about a turtle who get’s stuck in a plastic six pack holder. Tell us a little about yourself.It’s kind of a long story. When I last talked to you, we were farming full mite growing asparagus, microgreens, cut flowers, it just got the word I think of most is relentlessRelentlessElizabeth Gilbert when she talks about jobs, that every job has a poop sandwich and you have to be willing to eat the poop sandwich that comes along with that job. And we just we got tired of the poop sandwich that came with farming. The relentless with it, we were growing microgreens year round, and how we never got a break and how we never got to spend quality chunks of time with our kidssold our microgramsleased the asparagus field outI still do cut flowers, because after all they’re beautiful!And then I kind of flopped around for a few years. And we were on a family vacation, with my husband and his two brothers, and we were on vacation in Indonesia and we would pull up to this amazing island!on a boatdreamywhite sandlittle spit in the middle of the indian oceanwith coconut palmsjust heaven!And we would get off the boat and swim into the shore and it was covered in plastic! Plastic of every thing you can imagine! and it was heartbreaking I mean it just broke my heart and I got back on the boat and I was talking to my sister-in-law and she was like butwhat can we do?I saidWe can do betterWe can use less plastic!We might not be able to save Indonesia because we’re not Indonesianand soap making this was a skill I already had so I saidI’ll make shampoo barsFor some reason shampoo bottles on the forefront of my mind, I think maybe I saw one in Indonesia. So I did, I came home and John suggested I make some soaps that visitors to Montana would like.We came up withblack bargrizzly barshampoo bar, just for myself and maybe some of my crunchy friends.I called it Mother’s Nature’s Shampoo BarI made it sort of as a joke because that’s what my mother calls me sometimes, Mother NatureI put one of those jokey things on the label but then people got excited about it!The shampoo bar, I’m actually trying to make other scents and then really trying to figure out how to make an all natural conditioner without using basically chemicals because the shampoo bar we make is all naturaloilsessential oilsrosemary extractand then it’s saponified into this beautiful lathery hard bar that lasts a long time, but works really well.So where does the coconut come in? Is it made of coconut butter? Or is it because your story was inspired by the coconut palm trees?Kind of all 3.it does have coconut oil in itit was in a tropical place that I was inspired to start the companymany years ago when I was in a my 20s, a friend told me I was like a coconut drifting at seaI think it wasn’t a compliment like I was unrooted and just drifting, floating where the sea took me, but since then I’ve taken it as a complement, because that’s kind of what coconuts do, they get put out sea, they float around, land on an island, sprout into a palm, make more coconuts that float out to see…So I am kind of trying to reframe it as spreading the good! I am so fascinated in this because I am so curious about the whole coconut craze, so many people are into coconut oil, what is the footprint on coconut since they don’t grow in Montana, but what did I grow up on, olive oil from Italy they don’t grow in Montana and then also my new favorite is avocado oil, which also doesn’t grow in Montana and then is the coconut actually the seed?yeah! exactly, it sprouts into a palm, the the coconut is the seed and it sprouts a coconut.But I just asked my friend Dacia who’s been making soap for years up here, you walk into her house and it smells so good, but just the other day i asked her do you make a shampoo?I love your labels, and they are labeled with a bear.It’s kind of a double meaning from my dad used to sing me Davy Crocket song“Raised in the woods so he knew ev'ry treeKilt him a bar when he was only three”basicallyI love how your so honest about the poop sandwich part of farming. I’m also excited because Patti Armbrister is so big on growing cover crops seeds, because they are like flowers. I was dreaming about growing sunflowers for bird seed but I have a feeling you have to be growing on big acreage for that to be profitable. And Elizabeth Gilbert talks a lot about not putting that pressure on your creativity. I have read Big Magica bunch it’s one of the books I have read over and over and actually have on Audible to listen to.I wanted to be able to farming and gardening again didn’t feel so much pressureshe does talk about thatAnother part of my journey is accepting the way I amfarming was my dream for a pretty long time, working toward farming or farming for a long time. Accepting that I am not the kind of person who sticks with one thing, because our society puts a lot of pressure on people.I can totally agree.yeah! it’s ok, that we’re multi passionate, that we have a lot of different interest for 62 years or jobs and bringing skills form the pastinnovativecreative in our new jobsbig piece of my own personal workok that I’ve had 62 different jobsflakeyflightyI feel like being in 3rd grade this year, that being all those years in pre-k, kindergarten, first grade, Just looking at like I was working on my website and I'm like wow cuz they're so interested in somebody I brought in this typewriter this all the typewriter for one of my students corners and iPads and the other corners and like they're all and they're like if we could just only have an old typewriter! which are super expensive !that is so awesome!!I love that technology sitting right there with youWhat we can do with this go to Google Docs login and I spend so much time logging in and we're switching Centers before they ever get to type more than like one word I mean the third graders have got to learn it like I'm hoping by the end of the semester like it's finally starting to click in the you know some things like pages worth of documents this week so we're 12 weeks in the school but they've been struggling really hard just to get logged in like it is not the easiest thing, and our iPads are so old we can’t go to Google Drive that's how old they are Google Classroom we can access they can access Google docs so anyway but yeah I was so cute that they were like my old typewriter and they're all jealous cuz I only really was letting like one kid at a time to really tyoung for it might be some used ones out there for like a new Portable typewriter is like $175 was like the cheapest one I could find out I was like holy cow!That's really seems backwardsWe’re totally off topic here, so tell us about whatever you want to talk about.Well here's what's interesting about my new company is that I don't actually spend much of my time like selling soap ~ which is really fun because I don’t know that I would actually be that good at you know …selling soap!What I've been spending my time on is writing articles forMontana Woman Magazine, I gave a talk at a plastics symposium, a presentation that on Plastics and what we can do is consumers and how are the most important thing that we can be doing right now istalking about it and having these like really potentially uncomfortable conversations with our friends and family!Because you know there's this is climate crises happening and people aren't talking about it and so we're all just in the keep calm and carry on phase of this emergency !and we need to be panicking a little bit more right now because I love all of this and that’s how we are talking right now because you shared your article on Facebook and I was like Sarah you have to come back on the show and talk about this!and that one was really that one takes my rights I'm so curious So I was researching you know like watching TED talks and reading books and I went to a workshop and you know I just was feeling really confident and really prepared like oh my gosh I can write this article and it's going to be educational and inspiring and informative!And then I went to kind of like a family reunion and eightieth birthday party for my uncle and my another family member totally cornered me and confronted me and was using all of these anti-climate talking points and I did not use any of the things that I had learned and I just like literally froze and turned red and like I couldn't get any words out of my mouthand was like stammering like trying to clear up the 8-year know the world's not going to end in 8 years that's when you know the time that the ipcc you're notso I was very ineffective! But it taught me like this is not as easy as you were about to make its out in this article!This is actually a really difficult thing that you're asking people to do!Then of course I went back and I did more research on listening and empathy and how to have a discussion and you know what TED talks on debates and you know the differences between liberal views and conservative views and our values and I really just dug a lot deeper.Then at my really article changed, it became much more about listening and feeling empathy and connecting on a personal level with that person rather than just talking to them as if I was talking in the mirror to somebody who already believed exactly like I do.So I think it turned out a lot better because I got my but kicked!I'm so glad we’re doing this, I hope I can get it out before next weekend with Thanksgiving coming up I think this is so important because we're all super passionate about it! Tat's what I love about my audience that I love about my podcast but yeah you get out in the world specially where I live like and that's what I wasn't sure about the school that I went you because you don't wear in a very diverse Community wear like a lot of my kids parents work in the oil rig site at least two families do you know Dad's gone much of the month of the timer over in North Dakota working on the oil fields and this week we're talking aboutI'm like well you know the article is all about apoquel spell and I'm like and besides that you guys realize every time you pick up at 5 take for core plastic spoon that's made out of I was saying you know I was cut my six-pack holders up but I was like I hardly ever by six-pack holders but yeah I know but I was glad to hear you said and just you know what I think Forward Thinking Progressive Progressive should be you know environmentalist type of community but I know also like Ryan Zinke came from there and he practically destroyed our EPA who is our Congressman right hardcore Republican choicesThe fact that climate change has become a partisan issue just really makes me feel kind of sick because it's like oil companies got a hold of it and started an anti climate campaign to make more money!That is really a big last question that all of us face I'm changing the subject but I like how we make our livings you know like is how we make our living connects help the earth or hurt the earth and for me there's no question that's that's why I'm you not rich is because most of the professions that make a lot of money on fortunately our wreck doing a lot of damage to our planet! Ethically, there’s no question that I could never do.My husband talks about that a that a lot ~ he's always saying all the jobs I had that brought in a ton of money like as a logger as he used to work in the oil rigs in Colorado back when he was a pup, just planting trees and then are growing my garden you know and I'm trying to like you don't make a living sustainably has always been about so that's part of why he has the dream of building a concrete house or whatever it isI’m glad that you're talking to your kids in your classes about Plastics!in about an hour just even the fact that they didn't know that plastic was made from petroleum is just now that opens their eyes and now they're seeing what everything that's made of plastic maybe hoping I'm hoping that they'll see that they have a choice to use less plasticI'm glad we're in a building that recycles and it's very conscious you see a lot of kids like that they're bringing like snacking grocery sack so you know their parents are using them and just stuck also think like there's a huge like you know this is what I love about podcasting and I know there's so much about Mark Zuckerberg but I love about Facebook is like connecting with Robin Kelson and Laura Behenna other people in the FlatheadI wish I could go to those climate-smart meetings like I just feel like there's there's more conversation the most places in the country and I'm glad to see that these Solutions are coming up!Yeah Robin Kelson is my hero she is so amazing she just has been so supportive of me and my business and she's just doing so much good work!Tell listeners where they can order it online!Yes I learned how to build a website.Wait you were going to tell us some tips for like how we can have those conversations!The number one thing I we interrupt you before we get to where they get yourself toilet like right yeah well then said something about empathy and listening but like you have any extra steps of what to do when somebody starts spouting like false what's the fake newsStep One BREATHEThe number one thing that I'd wish I'd done was breathed like I'm pretty sure I didn't breathe for like 15 minutes they're literally just focusing on my like deep call me back to let my brain know that I'm not in spider flight that this is not actually physically dangerous to me and that I can calm down and then might higher motor functions will start working again and I'll be able to find words!Step Two: LISTENThen listen like really listen to try to get curious about not in like a snarky way level where'd you hear that but kind of like really honestly like where did you where did you learn that? How can I find out more? Like tell me more about what this is that you believe and connecting with them and really listening?I mean the goal would be that by showing respect for them and their viewpoint you maybe at some point you would get a chance to be able to tell your storyStep Three: Know Your Climate STORYThat brings me to the other point of you need to be able t…

Full show notes at the publisher

FoodIsFreeTruck+Table.jpg — **Food is Free Tacoma | Interview 282 with David Thompson | Building Community Through Food** Nov 24, 2019
Show notes

The biggest question I’ve gotten this year again. Is what do I do for my earth friendly landscape and what do I do with all these dandelions? But I was at someone’s place the other day, I could just tell right off the bat, looking down, you don’t have very healthy soil, so I suggested planting some clover, and then also IDK if they have a bag for their lawnmower so when they mow they might be spreading those seeds, where if they put them in the compost pile it would be better. I think… Anyway…

It’s Thursday May 30, 2019. I’m feeling a little mic shy as I haven’t been on my mic for almost a month!

*David Thompson from Food Is Free Tacoma is here to share his journey.*

Tell us a little about yourself.

I’m a navy veteran, 35 year mechanic, and I am retired. Wht I do is I have a free table and everything I grow in my garden I give away.

*Tell us a little bit more, how did you get started with this? Did you just say one day I want to put a table in front of your house?*

**I saw food is free project on Facebook, it was about veterans and** giving away our extras to your neighbors.

I started with a small garden about 700 sq feet and now it’s 4000

tried to give it to family

kids

I tried a table where the food is free and started from there its grown into quite the little non-profit.

*I like the way it started with Facebook.*

I have my FB page

food is free

Started a new project called gardens for the people

Parkway gardens throughout the city of tacoma for people to share their food directly between the sidewalk and the curb. Hoping to do 10 of those this year.

*I love that idea, because where my mom lives there’s all these places just like that are covered in these little yellow flags and that’s where you’re talking about growing the ood?*

We ammend the soil and remove the sod with local compost and plant straight into the ground.

*I love this idea!*

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

I used to watch Crockets victory garden, I used to dream about having a garden but it wasn’t till I got older got this house with a small garden

10 years now.

I made a lot of mistakes, vertical gardening, I tried a lot of different things before.

Tell us about something that grew well this year.

my cabbages

grew really well

tomatoes didn’t do too bad last year either?

I think we had a cool summer last year. That really helped the cabbage a lot.

*Did that help with the tomatoes? Do you put them in a greenhouse, they don’t like the cold do they?*

Yes, that’s true. The only thing I grow in the greenhouse is peppers.

Is there something you would do different next year or want to try/new?

I’m kind of busy with the Food is Free project but next year I would like to try aquaponics.

*And what’s making you think about that?*

Well, I have this friend in Wyoming whos into hydroponics and he’s grown a lot of stuff there, and it’s just an interesting way to combine fish and food in an urban environment.

*I know my listeners are interested in that as those episodes get downloaded a lot.*

Tell me about something that didn’t work so well this season.

tire gardens

I tried tires with tomatoes one year, I got alot of bugs and stuff inside the tomatoes.

Which activity is your least favorite activity to do in the garden?

weeding, I’d say weeding, it’s not one of my favorites, but it has to be done.

I can relate that today, I went to the garden for the first time in a week, and I can’t believe what’s coming up and mike did warn me that I should cover the fresh weeded beds with mulch of straw and I didn’t it seems like the weeds are just coming up like crazy this May!

What is your favorite activity to do in the garden.

transplant

fun instant garden

*I totally agree! And I’m pretty excited because I planted a bunch of zinnias that are just about ready to go in the ground.*

What is the best gardening advice you have ever received?

stay organic. I’ve learned to build my soil, because I’m challenged on money I’ve learned to be frugal so I do whatever i can for free

*What are some secrets you’ve learned?*

woodchips

When I first started out I had raised beds

wood chips in walkways made soft loamy soil. Eventually the wood rotted out. What I learned is the soil where the wood chips were was a whole loat better then in my raided beds it was a soft loamy soil.

*Where’d you get the wood cips.*

The local power company – have to trim trees for the power lines so they will deliver them to your house for free!

Tacoma is a pretty big suburban area right?

Yes, we have about 100,000 people

*Have you had any problems with getting neighbors on board? What have been the challenges that way?*

They are excited about it, when you tell them it’s about growing food. I go out and get them started in a vegetable garden and they tend themselves and then share the harvest.

Hopefully everyone gets involved, we see them around town now with these free little pantries.

*Ohhh kind of like the little libraries popping up all over. I love them!*

What I do is I ask them what kind of vegetables they like. If we can grow them in this climate we help them grow so they can feed themselves.

What the process is, I ask for volunteers that want to tend the garden

So we get out there and plant a garden for them,

supply all plants

seeds

and all they have to do is weed it and water it from then on.

*Where do you get the seeds and plants?*

plants get donated from local community gardens that have too many starts

local farm

donations of seeds

*Didn’t I read that it started from some health issues?*

I’m a cancer survivor

started from the necessity of having to give the food away because I have too much of it.

I can relate to that, I feel like Mike and I have too much of, but I find it is stuff like too much swiss chard or kale that people don’t want or maybe we don’t have enough extra. I’m about at the point where I don’t have to buy much produce from August through November. I think this is a great solution! I love how you are teaching people to garden themselves. You’re not having any problem with people saying I don’t want food in my front yard.

The city is really excited about it and behind it all the way. They;ve been very supportive.

Right you’re giving free food to local neighborhood, and they get to participate even if it’s just watching it grow but sometimes they even pick tomatoes or things. Kids have access to locally grown food.

A favorite tool that you like to use? If you had to move and could only take one tool with you what would it be.

Broadfork

A favorite recipe you like to cook from the garden?

cherry trees

plum tree

home brew I make wine and beer and cider

I grow hops for my beer

I dpn’t have a grape vineyard, a lot of times people have grapes growing at their house and they on’t have anything to do with them, so through the years I just pick up grapes from friends and neighbors.

A favorite internet resource?

harvest first

They are our local food organization, they sponsor farms and local events.

A favorite reading material-book, mag, blog/website etc you can recommend?

The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower’s Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming by JM Fortier

If you have a business to you have any advice for our listeners about how to sell extra produce or get started in the industry?

YEah! IT’s really easy to get started, all you have to do is put up a little table in front of your house and I put a sandwich board and put out in front of your house and an old table. Put it out, you’ll meet your neighbors, great way to build community.

Final question –

If there was one change you would like to see to create a greener world what would it be? For example is there a charity or organization your passionate about or a project you would like to see put into action.

What do you feel is the most crucial issue facing our planet in regards to the environment either in your local area or on a national or global scale?

food security

A lot of times people don’t even know where their food comes from anymore, we have become disconnected, by knowing where you food is and participating in it and growing it yourself. You can take control food security and have a little bit of power in that and say in what you are eating.

I think we need to go back to small agriculture.

*What does that look like, can you explain to listeners?*

I would love to see victory gardens again. I think it was a great trend. For people to get a say in their food security!

Do you have an inspiration tip or quote to help motivate our listeners to reach into that dirt and start their own garden?

It’s really simple to do, if you are here in teht acoma area I could come by if you have problems,

Grow something simple

tomatoes are pretty simple

green beans

give it a try and see how it goes!

Mikes aboot to plant our greenbeans, he’s been digging up the minifarm with the broadfork, I think he said he was gonna try to get them inthe ground today May 30, 2019

How do we connect with you?

foodisfree253.com

facebook food is free tacoma

foodisfree.org

Let’s take a minute to thank our sponsors and affiliate links

Please support us on Patreon so we can keep the show up on the internet. It cost close to $100 a month just to keep it up on the internet for the website etc so if you could help by supporting it with an $8/month contribution or $10/month to join the Green Future Growers Book Club where we can delve deep into some of the best gardening books that have been recommended on the show! GoDaddy even is bugging me for dollars just to have the domain name…

https://www.patreon.com/OrganicGardenerPodcast

The Organic Gardner Podcast is sponsored by Health IQ, an insurance company that helps health conscious people like runners, cyclists, weightlifters and vegetarians get lower rates on their life insurance. Go to healthiq.com/OGP to support the show and see if you qualify.

Over half of Health IQ customers save between 4-33% on their life insurance.

Health IQ uses science & data to secure lower rates on life insurance for health conscious people just like you green future growers! Like saving money on your car insurance for being a good driver, Health IQ saves you money on your life insurance for living a health conscious lifestyle.

To see if you qualify, get your free quote today at healthiq.com/OGP or mention the promo code OGP when you talk to a Health IQ agent

The Good Seed Company

Now Let’s Get to the Root of Things!

We’d love if you’d join **Organic Gardener Podcast Facebook Community!**

The Organic Gardener Podcast is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com

If you like what you heard on the Organic Gardener Podcast we’d love it if you’d give us review and hopefully a 5 star rating on iTunes so other gardeners can find us and listen to. Just click on the link here.

**and don’t forget if you need help getting started check out our new**

Free Garden Course.com

MarketGardenerBook — **Food is Free Tacoma | Interview 282 with David Thompson | Building Community Through Food** Nov 24, 2019
Show notes

The biggest question I’ve gotten this year again. Is what do I do for my earth friendly landscape and what do I do with all these dandelions? But I was at someone’s place the other day, I could just tell right off the bat, looking down, you don’t have very healthy soil, so I suggested planting some clover, and then also IDK if they have a bag for their lawnmower so when they mow they might be spreading those seeds, where if they put them in the compost pile it would be better. I think… Anyway…

It’s Thursday May 30, 2019. I’m feeling a little mic shy as I haven’t been on my mic for almost a month!

*David Thompson from Food Is Free Tacoma is here to share his journey.*

Tell us a little about yourself.

I’m a navy veteran, 35 year mechanic, and I am retired. Wht I do is I have a free table and everything I grow in my garden I give away.

*Tell us a little bit more, how did you get started with this? Did you just say one day I want to put a table in front of your house?*

**I saw food is free project on Facebook, it was about veterans and** giving away our extras to your neighbors.

I started with a small garden about 700 sq feet and now it’s 4000

tried to give it to family

kids

I tried a table where the food is free and started from there its grown into quite the little non-profit.

*I like the way it started with Facebook.*

I have my FB page

food is free

Started a new project called gardens for the people

Parkway gardens throughout the city of tacoma for people to share their food directly between the sidewalk and the curb. Hoping to do 10 of those this year.

*I love that idea, because where my mom lives there’s all these places just like that are covered in these little yellow flags and that’s where you’re talking about growing the ood?*

We ammend the soil and remove the sod with local compost and plant straight into the ground.

*I love this idea!*

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

I used to watch Crockets victory garden, I used to dream about having a garden but it wasn’t till I got older got this house with a small garden

10 years now.

I made a lot of mistakes, vertical gardening, I tried a lot of different things before.

Tell us about something that grew well this year.

my cabbages

grew really well

tomatoes didn’t do too bad last year either?

I think we had a cool summer last year. That really helped the cabbage a lot.

*Did that help with the tomatoes? Do you put them in a greenhouse, they don’t like the cold do they?*

Yes, that’s true. The only thing I grow in the greenhouse is peppers.

Is there something you would do different next year or want to try/new?

I’m kind of busy with the Food is Free project but next year I would like to try aquaponics.

*And what’s making you think about that?*

Well, I have this friend in Wyoming whos into hydroponics and he’s grown a lot of stuff there, and it’s just an interesting way to combine fish and food in an urban environment.

*I know my listeners are interested in that as those episodes get downloaded a lot.*

Tell me about something that didn’t work so well this season.

tire gardens

I tried tires with tomatoes one year, I got alot of bugs and stuff inside the tomatoes.

Which activity is your least favorite activity to do in the garden?

weeding, I’d say weeding, it’s not one of my favorites, but it has to be done.

I can relate that today, I went to the garden for the first time in a week, and I can’t believe what’s coming up and mike did warn me that I should cover the fresh weeded beds with mulch of straw and I didn’t it seems like the weeds are just coming up like crazy this May!

What is your favorite activity to do in the garden.

transplant

fun instant garden

*I totally agree! And I’m pretty excited because I planted a bunch of zinnias that are just about ready to go in the ground.*

What is the best gardening advice you have ever received?

stay organic. I’ve learned to build my soil, because I’m challenged on money I’ve learned to be frugal so I do whatever i can for free

*What are some secrets you’ve learned?*

woodchips

When I first started out I had raised beds

wood chips in walkways made soft loamy soil. Eventually the wood rotted out. What I learned is the soil where the wood chips were was a whole loat better then in my raided beds it was a soft loamy soil.

*Where’d you get the wood cips.*

The local power company – have to trim trees for the power lines so they will deliver them to your house for free!

Tacoma is a pretty big suburban area right?

Yes, we have about 100,000 people

*Have you had any problems with getting neighbors on board? What have been the challenges that way?*

They are excited about it, when you tell them it’s about growing food. I go out and get them started in a vegetable garden and they tend themselves and then share the harvest.

Hopefully everyone gets involved, we see them around town now with these free little pantries.

*Ohhh kind of like the little libraries popping up all over. I love them!*

What I do is I ask them what kind of vegetables they like. If we can grow them in this climate we help them grow so they can feed themselves.

What the process is, I ask for volunteers that want to tend the garden

So we get out there and plant a garden for them,

supply all plants

seeds

and all they have to do is weed it and water it from then on.

*Where do you get the seeds and plants?*

plants get donated from local community gardens that have too many starts

local farm

donations of seeds

*Didn’t I read that it started from some health issues?*

I’m a cancer survivor

started from the necessity of having to give the food away because I have too much of it.

I can relate to that, I feel like Mike and I have too much of, but I find it is stuff like too much swiss chard or kale that people don’t want or maybe we don’t have enough extra. I’m about at the point where I don’t have to buy much produce from August through November. I think this is a great solution! I love how you are teaching people to garden themselves. You’re not having any problem with people saying I don’t want food in my front yard.

The city is really excited about it and behind it all the way. They;ve been very supportive.

Right you’re giving free food to local neighborhood, and they get to participate even if it’s just watching it grow but sometimes they even pick tomatoes or things. Kids have access to locally grown food.

A favorite tool that you like to use? If you had to move and could only take one tool with you what would it be.

Broadfork

A favorite recipe you like to cook from the garden?

cherry trees

plum tree

home brew I make wine and beer and cider

I grow hops for my beer

I dpn’t have a grape vineyard, a lot of times people have grapes growing at their house and they on’t have anything to do with them, so through the years I just pick up grapes from friends and neighbors.

A favorite internet resource?

harvest first

They are our local food organization, they sponsor farms and local events.

A favorite reading material-book, mag, blog/website etc you can recommend?

The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower’s Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming by JM Fortier

If you have a business to you have any advice for our listeners about how to sell extra produce or get started in the industry?

YEah! IT’s really easy to get started, all you have to do is put up a little table in front of your house and I put a sandwich board and put out in front of your house and an old table. Put it out, you’ll meet your neighbors, great way to build community.

Final question –

If there was one change you would like to see to create a greener world what would it be? For example is there a charity or organization your passionate about or a project you would like to see put into action.

What do you feel is the most crucial issue facing our planet in regards to the environment either in your local area or on a national or global scale?

food security

A lot of times people don’t even know where their food comes from anymore, we have become disconnected, by knowing where you food is and participating in it and growing it yourself. You can take control food security and have a little bit of power in that and say in what you are eating.

I think we need to go back to small agriculture.

*What does that look like, can you explain to listeners?*

I would love to see victory gardens again. I think it was a great trend. For people to get a say in their food security!

Do you have an inspiration tip or quote to help motivate our listeners to reach into that dirt and start their own garden?

It’s really simple to do, if you are here in teht acoma area I could come by if you have problems,

Grow something simple

tomatoes are pretty simple

green beans

give it a try and see how it goes!

Mikes aboot to plant our greenbeans, he’s been digging up the minifarm with the broadfork, I think he said he was gonna try to get them inthe ground today May 30, 2019

How do we connect with you?

foodisfree253.com

facebook food is free tacoma

foodisfree.org

Let’s take a minute to thank our sponsors and affiliate links

Please support us on Patreon so we can keep the show up on the internet. It cost close to $100 a month just to keep it up on the internet for the website etc so if you could help by supporting it with an $8/month contribution or $10/month to join the Green Future Growers Book Club where we can delve deep into some of the best gardening books that have been recommended on the show! GoDaddy even is bugging me for dollars just to have the domain name…

https://www.patreon.com/OrganicGardenerPodcast

The Organic Gardner Podcast is sponsored by Health IQ, an insurance company that helps health conscious people like runners, cyclists, weightlifters and vegetarians get lower rates on their life insurance. Go to healthiq.com/OGP to support the show and see if you qualify.

Over half of Health IQ customers save between 4-33% on their life insurance.

Health IQ uses science & data to secure lower rates on life insurance for health conscious people just like you green future growers! Like saving money on your car insurance for being a good driver, Health IQ saves you money on your life insurance for living a health conscious lifestyle.

To see if you qualify, get your free quote today at healthiq.com/OGP or mention the promo code OGP when you talk to a Health IQ agent

The Good Seed Company

Now Let’s Get to the Root of Things!

We’d love if you’d join **Organic Gardener Podcast Facebook Community!**

The Organic Gardener Podcast is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com

If you like what you heard on the Organic Gardener Podcast we’d love it if you’d give us review and hopefully a 5 star rating on iTunes so other gardeners can find us and listen to. Just click on the link here.

**and don’t forget if you need help getting started check out our new**

Free Garden Course.com

Health Coach Sarah Clark | Host of the Get Pregnant Naturally Podcast | Author of Fabulously Fertile Nov 18, 2019

Show notes

Interview 289 with Health Coach Sarah Clark | Author of Fabulously Fertile + Host of Get Pregnant Naturally Podcast

https://fabfertile.com/

Thursday May 2, 2019

I have another podcaster on the line we are going to talk about eating healthy today. The Get Pregnant Naturally Podcast.

Thanks for being on the show today. This is something that touches me personally, because Mike and I never had kids. I always tell people if I would have had my iPod touch when I was trying to get pregnant I’m sure we would have had kids. But anyway tech has come so far so I’m glad you have some solutions for people!

Tell people about your podcast and business.

I help couples who are struggling with infertility. I had my own struggle I was diagnosed with premature ovarian failure at the age of 28 and that is the loss of function of the ovaries before the age of 40.

For me I had these weird health systems

cycles were irregular
urinary tract infections
acne in early 20s
cycles were irregular

I got married at 25 kids at 28 my cycles were still irregular so I went to my OBGYN and that’s when I was diagnosed with premature ovarian failure. I remember her reaching up for the packet to the IBF clinic and off I went.

Basically being told that my only option was to have donor eggs. I never looked back to any of the health systems I was dealing with.

So I went straight to the clinic and got a list and I got a donor egg and had my daughter. She is 17! So this is the back in the day you say donor eggs and people are like IDK what you are talking about.

Now with western lifestyle people are having effects.

I was wanting to have kids close together, I was super stressed, I went in and those embryos failed. On the second list with another donor I was lucky enough to have my son will fresh transfer he’s 14.

After that my health took a nosedive, after I had my daughter, I took antibiotics for every sinus infections. I ended up

gut
vertigo
toenail infections
dandruff
chronic bladder infections
peeing blood
yeast infections
sinus infections just wouldn’t go away

I was in HR at the time, I wanting to bring life coaching into the corporate environment. I took a life coaching course.

Health and wellness

That’s where I discovered I had these food sensitivities

I found out I was intolerant to diary and gluten
low and behold by making lifestyle changes
bladder infections went away
sinus infections
skin became clear
stool test a little while after that, so then I healed the gut

For me, I didn’t discover this to be 40

if you are cycling naturally for me food and diet are the key to everything.

I love to hear that, my show is all about growing healthy food, I am more the organic eater and we have that in common because it sounds like we were saying in the prechat your husband is more the gardener too.

for our couples that we coach

elimination diet

Take out top allergens

dairy
gluten
corn
soy
peanuts and
eggs

Take them out for 10 days.

you can do anything for ten days then you systematically introduce them. You don’t go out and have a pizza.

then this is the important part, this is the gold standard to see how food impacts their body.

First you bring in corn which

part of the body

corn can flare up the asthma

talk about a lot on your podcast, it’s the most GMO and sprayed with glyphosate. A lot of people have issues with corn.

Can we back up a minute, People complain about corn, people don’t realize corn syrup is in like everything

Over 60-70% are tolerant to dairy.

high fructose is in everything, I have found corn starch in orange juice. What is it doing there? It’s a filler.

I think dairy and gluten are becoming a lot more mainstream but still even in my circles of people, maybe not as much, I did a whole rack of people who were doing KETO.

I was talking to a lot of people and the amount of people doing KETO there was the paleo crazy and now KETO.

Keto can be right for some people so we do the elimination diet

feel dairy

feel sinus

feel fleghmy

digestive issues

impacts its digestion

gas
burping
mood
adhd
depression
anxiety
stiff joints
arthritis
acne
eczema
rosacea
dermatitis
auto immune
function thyroid
thyroid dysfunction

The food piece is huge because we are in the middle of this experiment

we recommend everyone going organic because we are in the middle of this food experiment as we use glyphosate on everything

herbicides and pesticides

impacting

it used to be 60-40% impacting fertility and now it’s 50%50%

What about all these other symptoms.

Look at all the other diagnosis and symptoms were all facing. I’m hearing all sorts of symptoms it affects other people.

a lot of times

this infertility diagnosis
premature
especially with unexplained infertility

People usually look at food last but it should be what are you placing on your fork everyday

if you have a food sensitivity

hormonal birth control

a lot of people were on the pill for years which can impacts gut health. You can eat this beautiful diet and if you are not absorbing it effectively.

food sensitivities

gut infections

work with people

looks at DNA in stool

the majority of people are coming back with gut infections multiple parasites

yeast infections again it’s the health of the gut

what predisposed you, was it the environmental toxins, was it the pill, high use of antibiotics?

I was peeing blood and then I changed my diet and made these lifestyle changes as well

food is the most important thing to start with the elimination diet to see how food impacts your body so you will know exactly. Sometimes we think we have this digestive issue or

skin issue or we’re just an irritable person

When we take this food out we take the inflammation out of our body and start o feel improvements. that’s causing how it’s impacting us

Didn’t I hear on an episode of your show that or a blog post that walks you through how todo the elimination diet step by step.

Totally. It released the middle of may

how and why to do the elimination diet we go through the exact steps.

We recommend going 100% organic during this time

I’m sure you maybe talked about this what the dirty dozen. If it’s cost prohibitive that at least the foods from the Environmental working group, I think strawberries there were over 75 pesticides on strawberries. Click here for the clean 15. Never get conventionally grown strawberries their like grown with so many pesticides.

I did talk about the dirty dozen and the next ones are like spinach and kale. I found that at school at the salad bar I would pick strawberries almost every day. Especially I wills and there in the store for like ten minutes going back and forth, I should buy these their healthy fruit and I never eat fruit, and then I’m like I shouldn’t buy these because they are wrapped in plastic.

My husband always says I should wash them with vinegar I think.

tap water

It’s not about perfection

typically

filled have water that is

chlorine floride

Berkley

water filter

tastes awesome

why do I feel so parched?

I have interviewed a few doctors, I think the challenge I have is the food is not being absorbed well. I need to figure out my gut health. Yesterday I was talking to this fitness coach, and I was telling him I always conk out at mile 10, and he was saying if I just learn what my body needs, and to eat something every 20 minutes while I’m training, a fitness bar, gatorade, gel pack or what.

I have never ever thought when running a marathon that it would be my nutrition I always thought it was just not training enough running far enough etc. So the value of nutrition is just great because he told me that would make all the difference.

I have 2 more quick quesitons. Your in canada? In toronto. You get local food all year long.

Cucumbers

tomatoes

I guess they are importing some of the oranges

apples

broccoli

cauliflower

dry and wash your produce

30-40k

organic box delivered weekly

farms in your local area

customize the box

surprise to what I get

organic food

greenhouses

may 2nd

cucumbers tomatoes

kale

importing from oranges

imported

broccoli

cauliflower

bananas

most of the stuff s we get into the growing season

micro greens

cilantro

basil

basil plant will come in the box

exciting

I’m glad you said you get a box, a lot of my listeners might be interested in filling your box! A lot of my listeners are interested in growing for market. We are focused on the same things for the same reasons, I love to eat organic food and veggies all the time. I love our fruit like our raspberries. I do find fruit is messy, but that’s my weirdness. I like to hear about those things. Even if they have extra produce. If I go out of my way to share this, kale is one of them, I think it’s #2 or #3 on that list of dirty dozen an I think it grows well.

i also get a local meat box

it’s your health if your health is impacted

preventative

people with fertility

diagnosis

straight to the fertility clinic

60k dollars

elimination diet

lifestyle changes

going on in our body

some people

go that way

if you can’t conceive

food is a really good place to start

foundational pillars

sleep

movement

environmental toxins

plastics

IDK I have them I literally feel

disease

tools of functional medicine

broader

catching it before it goes

blood canisters review

and so a lot of times we find out there’s a gut infection going on with the man

hight sensitivity to gluten

non-celiac

equally as important

doesn’t want to procreate

highly sensitive to gluten

cross reactors

avoid oats

even gluten free oats

risk of contamination

body is having a reaction to that

they can be intolerant to dairy

cross reactor

protein

intolerant

lactose intolerant

Kevin

take out dairy and gluten

highly sensitive to

sandwich with bread

crumbs can cause inflammation

weeks to months to reset itself

food sensitivity thing to look into

switch everything to organic

eliminations diet

allows you to see your body reacts to food

xyz that i had on Friday

never really know

skin issues

acne

food that we had there

come to us

have an intolerance to eggs

infertility

more intolerant to the whites to eggs

food sensitivity test

leap MRT

foods and chemicals

foods...

Tad Hussey ~ Keep It Simple Farm and KiS Organics Cannabis Cultivation & Science Podcast Nov 15, 2019

Show notes

Read the text version of my interview here: Golden Seeds Issue 13 Tad Hussey

My interview with Tara Caton At the Rodale Institute Hemp Botanist

I’m curious how you found out about me.

Haha, IDK? Well, one I’m always looking for guests! But I did just release for Earth Day April 22, 2019, this interview with Tara Caton from the Rodale institute last week and since then I have been online researching hemp and cannabis and I am just flabbergasted at what has changed because when I started my podcast in 2015, I couldn’t find someone to come on my show and talk about hemp or cannabis for 4/20 day.

The other thing is I have always dreamed of being a sunflower farmer, and originally I thought I would sell sunflowers to florists, but then I thought bird seed would suit me better but this last winter, I thought I would like to grow sunflower sprouts after I was going crazy looking for fresh greens and my step-daughter gave me some and I was so excited, after the romaine recall. My husband planted so much kale and swiss chard etc last year for me, I didn’t have to buy any greens from August to November!

Wow, I can tell you’re a plant enthusiast.

Well, I’m a sunflower and hemp enthusiast!

It’s Thursday, April 17, 2019! Earth Day is coming up on Monday! I have another podcaster on the line. His business is KiS Organics. Welcome Tad Hussey!

I know we’re gonna learn a lot!

Are you in Oregon, Washington? Somewhere by the Pacific Coast?

I am in the North West. About 20 minutes east of Seattle in Redmond, Washington.

Tell us a little about yourself.

Sure so, I’m 41 years old, I grew up with father actually both my parents running a commercial nursery and landscape business here on 7 acres in Redmond. So, I grew up around plants, but wasn’t that into them. I kind of moved away from it but after college I came back with a masters degree in another field and I had trouble finding work in that field I really enjoyed.

So I ended up coming into my parents business which was all about compost tea at that point so I ended up learning all about:

compost tea
microbes and
gardening

from that we sort of expanded we got the property where they originally had the landscape country.

This was about 2011. This was sort of the time of victory gardens and backyard chickens. Nurseries were sort of failing so we knew we didn’t want to do that.

So we started this thing:

KIS Farm

Keep It Simple Farm

It started out as a feed store.

I knew there were no feed stores in Redmond, I wanted a place to have feed cause I was getting into backyard gardens and wanted chickens.

All these people started coming in who wanted:

horse feed
dog food

and all these other things. So we expanded that into an edible nursery. We had all these unique

edibles but we found out people in our area didn’t care. So we shaved that down to your classic favorites you find at a lot of other places.

There’s also an educational trial on the property that is focused on teaching about native habitat and salmon spanning. We get a lot of boy scout and girl scout troops through there.

There’s an outdoor preschool on the property that meets 5 days a week a lot of fun.

So the kids are out there running around in the woods learning about the outdoors which is a lot of fun and on top of all this we also have:

chickens
pigs
goats

free ranging on the property.

We also grow vegetables!

We have a you pick, a large green house an 85 foot greenhouse and also a pumpkin patch. Every year we plant that out and so people can stop by and buy organic produce on their way home from the store or home from work. That’s sort of what KiS Farm is all about, focused on education and community support and helping gardeners and growers learn how to sustainably organically.

We also have KiS organics which is an online garden store provider

offering a variety of soil amendments as well as soils that we have created that we have created specifically for growing high value crops like cannabis and tomatoes. We work with a lot of the legal market here and as far away as Puerto Rico.

Essentially what it is, is this whole idea of living soils this concept that we try to create living ecology in our containers with our media or in raised beds, indoor or outdoor, as a way of allowing the microbes and all the things I’m sure people have talked about on your podcast to really control the growing process so we’re not perpetually throwing out our soil every cycle each year and have to start over every years and learning how to amend that soil to build and grow each year.

In between episodes today, I was listening to your talk with Jeff Lowenfels, who wrote Teaming With Microbes and Teaming with Nutrients: The Organic Gardener’s Guide to Optimizing Plant Nutrition, etc it was interesting to hear you talk to him. I was supposed to interview him but he wanted me to wait till I had read his books. One of the things I really loved about your site is you seem really natural.

And Jeff’s newest book:

DIY Autoflowering Cannabis: An Easy Way to Grow Your Own

Yeah, I never grew up without organic gardening, it’s something my parents have been doing since I was little. My dad did the chemical thing as a landscaper back in the early 80 late 70s but moved away from it for health reasons after he learned about the dangers from it.

So organics is all I’ve ever grown. It’s funny when you mention cannabis, because when I was growing up I was always really anti-cannabis. It wasn’t until I started this compost tea business, or my parents started and I was in my early 30s. Idk really know anything about cannabis and I would get these phone calls from growers and they would say things like:

“I want to use your compost tea and I have 40 tomato plants under artificial lights, and I started looking into it and realizing this is a huge industry and these people don’t know what they’re doing in regards to compost tea.There’s all these myths around that subject and I started writing on these forums and communicating and really trying to get all this information out there.

I thought I should try this and wanted to try growing it and learning about it and I went into this hydroponic shop and I was blown away!

I’d only been into nurseries and I had never seen this wide selection products!

My first reaction was I can’t wait to try this on vegetables! I can’t wait to try this on tomatoes!

Cannabis is this special plant and we need all these special nutrients and a lot of that is just marketing! As my knowledge grew over the years I realized that all those products if you start reading the ingredients are just the same stuff with a 1000% markup of what you will find in your garden center store or you can make yourself!

From that I realized this market that needed education because it’s been underground for so long that a lot of growers all they could do is they could talk to their buddy who could talk to their buddy, who could talk to the hydro!

There was no access to information like there is now.

That’s why I started my podcast which is called the cannabis cultivation and science to try to bridge that gap between the organic gardeners and the horticulture world.

That’s what I love to hear and that’s what I keep telling my husband, this is a very specialized skill and there is going to be a lot of people interested.

Well, I think anyone can grow cannabis if they are interested. I think it is a specialized plant for medicinal properties. But it really does want to grow, it’s called weed for a reason. If you can grow a good tomato or a good pepper you can grow a good cannabis plant.

There are a few things are different. Most cannabis plants with the exception of auto flowers, are photogenic, as in they need a certain amount of light (lack of light- dark cycle). It’s pretty straight forward. You’ve probably grown 1000 of tomatoes, so you would probably be really successful at it!

Well, my listeners know, that technically I’m not the gardener, I’ve grown some cherry tomato plants. My husband is more the gardener and I’m the organic eater. I do like to grow sunflowers and I did grow lettuce for my guinea pig.

But as I was just saying, yes it might grow like a weed, but if you are growing it for the flower that people are going to want to smoke, you are not going to want seeds in there, there’s that whole part, there’s the light thing like you were saying, and then there are the regulations again, if you want to have enough product to last a year, I mean it depends on your situation.

I guess my point would be I would say it’s the same growing principals for someone growing tomatoes as for growing cannabis as for growing for the soil really learn the plant. There are unique challenges to grow cannabis.

Here in Washington as one of the first states to go legal, we would have a bunch of underground growers who come in and say, I have been growing 30 plants in my basement for 20 years. and grew using this line of nutrients and suddenly they are in this opportunity to be a million dollar grower as a master grower and they didn’t realize it doesn’t scale that way

1000 plants

skill set

gardener and a farmer

a lot of people failed and lost a lot of money here in these markets or they are struggling to maintain because the cost of production is way too high so that’s what I am seeing here.

I think that is along the same lines, not even up to 1000 plants. My husband always says you couldn’t really grow it here in Montana, because you wouldn’t et the daylight, you wouldn’t get that 12 hour light period during the season. Like my dream is to grow unlimited amounts and people because they were growing to get the most potent in their basement, I think there should be big varieties and what are they putting in things, they say emergency rooms visits are up because people don’t know how to eat their edibles and keep overdosing.

What I love about your site is growing it in dirt and growing it naturally. People are doing things in those small spaces, who knows whats in their pot.

I think there is this assumption because cannabis is this groovy pat, it’s a bunch of hippies listening to reggae. There’s a lot of people who were doing a lot of bad things back when it was in the black market.

One issue we see is people using things like a bud hardener and there are lot of people using things that are illegal for use with edible crops it raises their weight of various yields, using things not approved for use on edible crops. The effects if it is combusted vs eaten you know through your lungs versus through your stomach.

Personally I wouldn’t let friends just go to a recreational pot shot here in Washington and buy anything, I tell them which growers are producing safe product so your not risking anything by

taking it and I think it’s another consideration a lot of people should grow it on their own.

and go to your website where they can learn how to grow it naturally!

I think fertilizing and soil testing responsibly in a way that is more affordable! I know when I first started out gardening I would go to the store and I would buy the cheapest potting soil I cold find and then go to the fertilizer department and find a bag with a photo of a tomato on it.

in my experience

for me my suggestion is invest in your soil

best soil you can build using the best local inputs you can find and do a soil test and potentially a water test

We are finding a lot of people don’t have a commercial water supply

finding things

people’s water

lot more sense

customize their nutrient program for their garden. How much nitrogen is very different if you are growing lettuce and corn is different for sunflower

The right source the right products to maintain

$25 for the one we recommend

logan labs

There are ones you can do at home but are not quite as accurate, but here in Washington state there are 4-5 free soil tests they will do for you.

I was going to say, the water testing. We have 2 wells on our property, the first one is a shallow well about 19 feet deep and then a few years ago we started using the deep well that’s 560’ And he’s been using the shallow well always and now the cloner is clogging up and we wonder fi that’s from the new well.

One thing to consider your soil could be over calcium and then it could change your nutrients could be high in bicarbonates. There’s so many variables, getting it to someone who can interpret that information and a lot of

times there’s local extension agents or services.

There’s something that was brought to my attention by his book the Intelligent Gardener

Steve Solomon it’s a concept from 189-

William Albect a concept of crop nutrition

The idea that we can get the minerals and soils balanced to certain levels

healthier for us to eat

Steve talks about in his book he has some very anecdotal stories and they are quite powerful

check it out that and

Teaming With Microbes

Everyone who asks me where I should start

organic is great!

he could care less about being organic what he cares about is that his food is nutrient dense. It’s much more important

the minerals are in the soil chemical or organic source

tomato

has all these properties

how is it going to get high in iron sulfur nutrient attributed to it if it is not in our soil.

Which is a really good point if they are not in our crop they not going to be in our bodies

may not be enough

balance the soil

can do this organically

getting a soil test

right level of these trace levels of macronutrients.

In Montana, I asked the guy from the extension office is going to come on in May, once I get the results back from the extension then he can help me.

Yes that is going to get you going in the right direction

not the end all of the quality of your soil

Native Landscape Design | Prairie Nursery | Interview 288 with Neil Diboll | Westfield WI Nov 03, 2019

Show notes

GoldenSeeds#12.NeilDiboll.Prairie

The Golden Seeds aren’t perfect but it’s a start. I like to read them in PDF format better what about you?

Neil Diboll, President of Prairie Nursery, Inc.

On the Web:

www.prairienursery.com

www.facebook.com/prairienursery

1-800-476-9453 (1-800-GRO-WILD)

We would love to help you with anything and even help you find some seeds or plants that would grow!

Gardens are focused on needs desires of humans only life gardening for all farms plants

animals
critters
bugs

sustainable ecosystem on people’s properties native plants. The real importance of native plants is that they

have co-evolved with other linked to one

brought to another

long periods f coevolution support very few of other invertebrates adaptation foundation of the food change limited value ecology

what resource was important

doug

bringing nature home

more valuable

the other thing to get the chemicals out of the environment

native plants are great because 1 you don’t have to fertilize

and you don’t have all the maintenance associated with it and opposed to a lawn you don’t have all the petrol chemicals and

gasoline building it or running the equipment.

steal plastic

most important

if I don’t see holes in the leaves of my plants. I’m a failure as a gardener

encourage my plants to be eaten

insects are eating them and insects are eating the birds so I have an ecosystem in my yard.

I mean birds eating the insects.

You are creating a food chain, creating a food web, in your garden. So we are no longer just gardening for human interests and human returns gardening for all forms of life sharing

revolutionary concept for gardening.

Tell us about your very first gardening experience?

I started out in first grade with my first garden. Our class was raising money for some endeavor by selling garden seeds for ten cents a packet, door to door to neighbors. I decided that if I was going to sell people a product, I should at least try it myself. The garden was a miserable failure due to terrible soil conditions, and I suspended my gardening efforts for ten years.

I learned to garden organically at age 16 when I decided to try vegetable gardening again in the same backyard. This time I double dug the future garden two spade lengths deep in the fall, and filled the hole with the leaves we raked up in our yard. The hole consumed all the leaves without hardly denting the chasm. I then collected leaves from the gutters on my block, and filled the hole with one foot of leaves, covered by an inch or two of clay, until I had a three foot tall “mass grave,” as my extremely skeptical parents referred to it. A giant mound in the backyard. By spring, it had settled down to about 18 inches in height, and I planted my garden.

It was a spectacular success, producing an abundance of vegetables and greens, and I was suddenly a genius gardener!

Used that garden for years ~ even after I went to college my parents used it for years.

I love that! It’s like you built your own deep beds right there. Like what people talk about today building deep beds no till style. Tell us about your amazing CV that talks about all these things.

I went into business in 1982! Why did I go into business? Well, for a number of different reasons.

I worked for the US. Forest Service in Colorado and the University of Wi where I live now. But there was limited employment for 6 months. and I just wasn’t a public sector person, there was a lot of bureaucracy. Then when the recession of 1981-82 hit.

When you can’t find a job, what do you do? You create your own

I created a backyard garden

retiring at age 68

old farmhouse

outside of greenery

ok if we use that land if we rent the house

can I buy your plants and move your nursery

why don’t you just come down and run it

where the hell is Westfield

bought a cheap old trailer.

2 neighbors building garden in their backyard.

We were the talk of the town

little did they know we had girlfriends

but we let them talk. It was a barebones existence because in 1982 native plants were still weeds. We couldn’t give it away! My friends said hey, plant

day lilies

iris

I was like this is the future! I’m not giving this up! The problem was the future hadn’t caught up. We kept at it.

I was like I went to college for this?

first color catalog

sales doubled

interesting journey

tough rows to hoe

ahead of the curb

things came

There’s very good reasons why native plants make sense. It’s the four Es I call them.

esthetics

first trees and shrubs

flowers grasses and shrubs

use the environment

don’t need all these chemicals

don’t have to use all these pesticides fungicides or gasoline for growing lawns!

You have deep rooted plants that increase water infiltration into the ground. Instead of that running off you have amuch more closed loop system

also have strips if you do have areas where fertilizers are applied native grasses with deep roots you have fertilized water running into them it can filter out that chemicals

3 energy

use a lot less energy then a lawn

nice beautiful prairie

burn it every other year

not spending a lot of time and energy

4th e is economics

It can save you a lot of money on time and maintenance.

The 5th E is an emotional connection to the

planting prairie

psychologically

So Neil do you want to give us some tips if you want to go this. I find the biggest barrier is where to start, find information, like that day lillie and irises are not native plants.

The first thing to do if you are just getting started with native plants is to avail yourself of all this resources on the internet

Most states have a native plant societies you will meet people who are into native plants but if you don’t want to be involve

Illinois wildflowers also have trees and shrubs

Another called the prairie ecologist which is an individual who puts out phenomenal information on prairies

You can get your own wildflower book

nature preserves

learn the plants on your own way! I took a botany in college where you get the basics but the best is to spend the time out in nature where you see them in action. With pollinators and butterflies on them.

On our website there is tons of info. We have lots of woodland parts that are midwestern but people who live in different part of the country they have completely different plants from us

you wouldn’t want to use our stuff in AZ

cal

grow in the high mountains

so the rest

find what the best plants are start with the university

I was gonna say your website because you share tons of information.

www.prairienursery.com

Do you want to talk about pollinators?

Of course, pollinators are extremely important!

33% of the food we eat as human beings require pollination so we have a vested interest in supporting habitat for pollinoators.

largest producer of cranberries

drain marshes

plant cranberries in them

good pollinator populations

weeks of

strips of prairies that will be available

vested intersted

The whole food chain is dependent upon insects!

We have had a long standing relationships co-evolution

native flora and native fauna

interesting

most plants use chemical warfare to ward off insects that would eat their leaves. So pants have adapted to

distasteful

overcome toxins we use

classic example the monarch butterfly that eats the toxic weeds of the milkweed family

relationships

native insects

native plants

nonnative plants

Very rarely do you have the depths of the relationships of the other critters that utilize

It’s not there.

Nonnative plants do not supply food or sustenance

do not support

native plants are so important!

relationship and native plants and between native plants and pollinators.

The best books you can read is called:

bringing nature home

entomologist

university of nature

close relationships between native plants and

really explaining why native plants is so important!

I always tell listeners always leave a 5star review for that book so everyone can read it and I just read from AJ that he planted a pollinator border and when I went to the Brooklyn Grange one of the best parts was the pollinator border. IT’s so pretty it goes around their farm and full of snap dragons, and zinnias and cosmos and tons of herbs and lavender etc!

You know it’s interesting the organic gardener can take this to the next level!

Beyond

pollinators

pollination vegetables

you also have bio control mechanisms

supported by native plants

There’s a plant called the rattlesnake master

yuca-folium but it’s actually a carrot humble and this plant is pollinated primarily by wasps. A lot of people would say don’t plant, but theses are a very high percentage are parasitic wasps

what do they do? very small

relationships

There is a parasitic wasp that attacks just about every other:

insect
spider
tic
mite

creator that flies around in the air

parasitic wasp

rattle

I think the people are one of the few plants around here that grow outside our deer fence that I think attract a wasp.

But here’s what’s so cool, I had a customer who

tomato horn worms every year on his

1/4 pound

had rattlesnake master and it takes 3 years for the perennial seeds to mature and begin blooming. He called me and said I have no tomato horn worms what’s going on.

I said do you have rattlesnake master? Is it blooming? He said, yeah’ it’s doing great!

Well rattle snake master attacks the tomato horn worm from the inside out. It burrows in and eat it from the inside out and kill.

He say’s my prairie is my insecticide

maintaining the balance

That’s what they are doing with the rooftop garden For years people have known all about this but it’s a new concept for people that you can use non chemical.

Well lots of people ask about this on my show or in my Facebook group. I have had people talk about this, but not in such specific detail about attacking tomato hornworms, I do think people will say where do I get Rattlesnake master?

you don’t want to focus on one plant

core on our landscaping is biodiversity What we are trying to do is spread the diversity of our native plants

diverse area of different flowers

grasses

shrubs

trees

you are now setting stage t make space to support all these different creatures that make life

native shrubs

more native grasses

more beneficial

you will have a wide away of critters nature that allows you to maintain a balance naturally

Everyone knows when you spray you are killing good guys and bad guys

I tell customers get rid of that stuff right away, take them to a disposable site. We know they kill the good guys!

Here’s the revolutionary part.

in my native garden

if I don’t see holes in the leaves of my plants

fairlure

people only

our own benefit and enjoyment

biodiversity

restoration

creating habitat

creating sanctuary for all sorts of life

if I am not feeding the insects in the

complete failure as an ecological gardener. I want to see the holes

plants because I know then if I am feeding my neighborhood.

That’s interesting because last year I...

Health IQ vegetables celebrating the health conscious — **Replay of interview 291. Industrial Hemp Project | Rodale Institute | Senior Lab Technician | Tara Caton** Oct 14, 2019
Show notes

Tara Caton

Rodale Institute

Senior Lab Technician

Industrial Hemp Project Lead

It all started when this listener said, every time I hear you say millennial I think of this video of this guy bashing millennials sitting around in their yoga pants and so I made my own video of the amazing millennials I interview who are so not ever lazy. I was going through some old Organic Gardening Magazines. A lot of my listeners are asking me how to get rid of pests organically and there were all these letters to the editors saying I’m not ever reading to you again because you are too political and they answered back and said we believe they are integrated and you can’t have one without the other.

*I have always wanted to sell ad space for Rodale’s so I would see Organic Gardening Magazine in every store i went to as I traveled around.*

It is Tuesday March 26, 2019. I am so stoked because not only is my guest a rock star millennial but she is the Senior Lab Technician at the Rodale Institute on the Industrial Hemp Project . So welcome Tara Caton!

Over the course of a four-year trial, we are exploring hemp’s powerful potential to heal soil and support farmers.

Hemp, marijuana’s non-psychotropic cousin, was grown in Pennsylvania for more than 260 years as a valuable cash crop.

Tell us a little about yourself.

Shownotes coming ASAP! to read what’s done already click here.

The Organic Gardener Podcast is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com

If you like what you heard on the Organic Gardener Podcast we’d love it if you’d give us review and hopefully a 5 star rating on iTunes so other gardeners can find us and listen to. Just click on the link here.

Let’s take a minute to thank our sponsors and affiliate links

Please support us on Patreon so we can keep the show up on the internet. It cost close to $100 a month just to keep it up on the internet for the website etc so if you could help by supporting it with an $8/month contribution or $10/month to join the Green Future Growers Book Club where we can delve deep into some of the best gardening books that have been recommended on the show! GoDaddy even is bugging me for dollars just to have the domain name…

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Over half of Health IQ customers save between 4-33% on their life insurance.

Health IQ uses science & data to secure lower rates on life insurance for health conscious people just like you green future growers! Like saving money on your car insurance for being a good driver, Health IQ saves you money on your life insurance for living a health conscious lifestyle.

To see if you qualify, get your free quote today at healthiq.com/OGP or mention the promo code OGP when you talk to a Health IQ agent

The Good Seed Company

Now Let’s Get to the Root of Things!

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PotForPot.com | Interview #293 with Josh Jacob Mezher ~ Rockstar Millennial Oct 14, 2019

Show notes

I’m so excited! On Tuesday I talked to Tara at the Rodale Institute and she got me so excited about all the things going on in the Hemp World. I’m so excited to introduce Josh Mezher from A Pot For Pot.

If you want to read the Golden Seeds just click here.

Are you a Rockstar Millennial born between 1980 and 1995?

I was born in 1986

Awesome! I’m writing a book about the rockstar millennials I interview on my show!

Tell us a little about yourself.

Been in the cannabis industry for about a decade now. I moved from the UK to go to school at the USC Santa cruz.

I moved here at a great time where you could legally grow your own cannabis at home and walk down the street and take it to a medical dispensary.

I actually dropped out of school

hobbies

I always loved gardening and it’s an amazing plant to grow!

I love all of this! Tell me about your first gardening experience? Did you say you grew up in the UK?

My mom is actually a California and she is actually a fanatical gardener. As a young kid I was always trudging around vegetable patch.

digging up the garden

underrated species

I give full credit to my mom, for everything she taught me, I have applied that

vegetables
flowers
more utilitarian based plants!

I love that answer! I am not sure I express enough on my show that what makes the rockstar millennials so amazing it’s because of their awesome parents! Of course my husband is a parent to 2 rockstar millennials!

How did you learn how to garden organically or do you want to talk about what’s going on?

i didn’t start

hydroponic side of it

focus on the product

It’ funny the evolution of cannabis cultivation is really going

traditionally this plant has been grown in small spaces inside houses.

A lot of people are not aware of, is how much cannabis does the U.S. produce? and who produces it?

now they get marketed PR

impressions

there are these huge cannabis

predominately

11k tons grown annual

low end estimate

largest cannabis farms

barely hitting

one to five tons in production

hundreds of thousands of people who are growing this in their garden

larger scale

smaller scale

plant that is spread throughout the country and doesn’t get a whole lot of recognition

Out of the house and out of the cupboard!

This plant has so much to offer. I can’t believe I see adds for Hemp Levis and Hemp Overalls. I can not believe the growth in this industry in just a year, stuff that wasn’t there a year ago.

its cool

look at the cannabis plant

indica

sativa

rooterallis

auto flowering

original plant

archeology

humans

domestified

started agriculture

really good reason

forget about the drug side

mind altering affect

put that to the side

have a plant that almost naturally grows rope.

branch

twist

you could throw

secondly it gives seeds that are so nutritional

hemp and cannabis and how healthy it is for humans to consume

other aspect

mind altering

My husband is pointing to all this research that humans are not getting a lot of our nutritional value because we used to get a lot of it from animals that we eat but they are not getting it in their grain so it is not passing on to humans. … People always tell me that hemp protein is good for me, and I can’t afford to buy it and why can’t my husband grow it for me?

medical effect

often draw the parallel of Michael Pollan’s book

evolved us

cannabinoid system

designed to work in the home growers club

I don’t agree with a lot of laws around cannabis cultivation

In Nevada, you can’t grow cannabis at home if you are within 25 miles of a dispensary. Even in California you are not allowed recreational without a card.

I would like to see people grow their tomatoes, next to their cbd pot, thc pot growing next to it

I mean who grows the most tomatoes in the US?

IDK marijuana growers?

No home gardeners…

I would say that I think there has to be a certain amount of regulation because people are going to the emergency room for overdosing on al these edibles they don’t know what they are doing and I would also say it’s not the easiest plant to grow.

I would beg to differ ~ It’s called weed for a reason and it’s also called pot for a reason because it’s always been grown in a pot I have a whole blog on that

What we have tried to do is to create the right conditions

having great soil

plant in the right soil it should grow

it’s all in the soil!

Our goal is to make this really easy for people

our average customer can grow 3 oz in 80 days!

We want to demystify this plant that is really easy to grow, i mean don’t get me wrong but the only time it’s really hard to grow is when you start to scale up.

If you grow a couple of plants in your backyard.

We try to educate people on soil but also

on a particular variety of cannabis that doesn’t get anywhere near enough credit

which is auto-flowering which is the street name, called rootarellis.

If you look at the cannabis ~ indica and sativa and forget everything you have learned of the cannabis plant from a different perspective.

When does this plant flower? What most

commercial growers which is photoperiod

and it only flowers once a year in the fall

cannabis gardener

have to grow it in tents because you have to get the 12 hour darkness to generate hormones to say to start flowering

rooterellis

auto-flowering,

that strain evolved I actually make the argument that it is the original strain of cannabis that we created photo period

I’m alive

above the ground

right way before I die

flowers

80-100 days from seed

one of the cool things about rooterellis

high in bcd and it has tech

10% all day in rooterellis

Commercial growers don’t want to grow the plant predominately because you have to start from seed and you can’t clone it.

lose a little bit of crop consistency

square foot greenhouse

all these seeds

grow a couple of plants

grow 20 foot tall

If you want to grow a 3’-5’6’ foot plant

never exceeds 6 foot

typically 2-3 foot range, and you get an ounce a foot that it grows

I have customers in San Francisco who grow them on their windowsill for fun.

I am here in a state where if you have a medical marijuana card you can maybe grow 8 plants. I also feel like another problem is that people grow it indoors and I would like to see what you do is that people are growing it organically in their gardens and not with a bunch of chemicals indoors.

takes the heavy metals out of the soil

When I talked to Tara about their hemp trial and how good their soy beans which grew after the hemp was incredible!

Before we get to the root of things let’s take a minute to thank our sponsors

Getting to the root of things!

What is your least favorite activity to do in the garden?

trimming of the plant

harvest

30-25 cuts per gram of cannabis

just to get it t the flower

One of the most mundane parts of growing the plant is

And it’s all sticky and your fingers are sticky.

The only blessing.

fingers are st

within the industry one of the more challenging jobs. I can definitely say I have trimmed my fair share and it’s mundane!

On the flip side what’s your favorite activity to do in the garden?

I think my favorite activity is playing with the plants, Is kind of playing with the plants altering their growth pattern and training them a bit.

I’ve got one plant that’s a regular plant kept in a vegetative state for 365 days

I’ve trained it, it has this sort of twisted bonsai planting you can do a lot of pinching the stems ~ you can slow down one shoot so another one catches up, thinning it there

That’s the fun part of growing! Trim your plant as it grows, it’s very rewarding thing that takes quite a bit of time but is worth it in the long run!

What is the best gardening advice you have ever received?

Don’t overwater your plants! Definitely the biggest complaint we get.

Plants don’t need that much water, depending on the species

haha, my listeners are like this is the plant for Jackie! Because I struggle to water my plants the most!

A favorite tool that you like to use? If you had to move and could only take one tool with you what would it be?

My phone ~ It’s the star trek transponder

I’m still curious did you say you are doing a daily call with Amsterdam?

We haven’t even been selling the product for a full year yet This year is our growth year.

Last year was more like

testing the product
customer results
data back

somewhere in the pacific

weed inventory

We’re giving away 1k units looking to, trying to get 10k product testers on board

We kow the product works but we’re looking for testers to grow one ton of cannabis. We work with

ilovegrowingmarijuana.com

strategic partners at this point

My week includes 12-14 hour days but I I love it

Been waiting for the opportunity so not complaining there

satisfaction

thrilled with the results

tag line for this year

help us grow one ton of Tax Free Cannabis by being part of this 10,000 growing army we are sort of creating here.

How do my listeners find out about this?

The program is launching here in a couple of weeks.

1000 kits we give away

We’re trying to target it to

veterans
people in need
opioid addicts

every hundred kits we sell we can afford to give one away

We’re in start-up mode. We’re a scrappy little bootstrapping company here!

Go to the website an sign up for our newsletter.! Just after April 20, 4/20/19 which is a good time to get growing.

Tell listeners about the kit because I’ve been to your website!

Releasing two versions of the Pot 4 a Pot kit.

so, what we want to do is empower people to grow their own

affordable

simply

The soil is the key ingredient it’s a blend 18 in gradients

Kit comes with:

fabric pot

great for growing cannabis in

carbon dioxide

saucer

seedling kit

scissors

watering can

neem

diatomaceous

new version comes with a smart phone camera lens

sticker

grow guide

coupon can go to

discount on your seeds

can’t com

as far as I am concerned we ship everywhere

there’s no THC in our product.

Provide you are willing to grow

We have sent them all over the world at this point to some surprising countries.

He’s in the Netherlands, ILoveGrowingMarijuana is able to send seeds anywhere they want to.

And then on top of that my mom and her friends are buying all this cbd oil to reduce their brown spots. I’m like seriously, you have no idea how much they laughed at me back in the 90’s. I’m glad. But it drives me crazy how many people mocked me for saying it could help us!

the blessing of the cannabis plant

Succession Lettuce Interview 287 with Ray Tyler | Rose Creek Farms | Tennessee Oct 06, 2019

Show notes

Thursday, March 28, 2019!

It is a pleasure to be here!

Thanks for dealing with my tech problems gla we were able to connect!

Back in the spring of 2009, my wife asked me to plant a small garden so she could can some salsa for the winter.

Laid off- started farming with a tractor on 2 acres (terribly!), got into chickens, laying hens, pigs, and even a few cows.

And after a radical diet and lifestyle change that followed our Daughter health crisis we started to consume large amounts of Vegetables, a lot less meat and in the fall of 2015 we made a leap of faith to sell our meat business, stop using a tractor, and farm using only one acre. Our farming friends thought we were insane, but we were pretty certain that focusing on just produce would allow us to master the lettuce crop in 2016. We had lettuce for sale every week that season! We were so thrilled to discover that we tripled our income on half the amount of land that year! Excited and inspired, we knew we were heading in the right direction. By focusing on creating better growing systems in our produce operation, changing our farm practices, we now have year round production, a near weed free farm (which makes me thrilled nearly every day) and being really aggressive and creative about our sales outlets for our area, we have been able to live a sustainable and enjoyable life, rarely working in the fields more that 8 hours, which was one of our top goals!

wife ashley – 5 kids

1981

Tell us a little about yourself.

My name is Ray Tyler with my wife Ashley of Rose Creek farms down here in Selma TN

Between Memphis and Nashville

Mississippi border

Kind of in the edge of that zone 7-zone 8

depends on what kind of year we are having

trying to grow as much food as we can on one acre

Battling the pests that never seem to die and the endless weeds thanks to the humidity

raising 6 young at the same time! And having a blast!

Wow you must have had a new baby!

7 month old baby to 10 years old so there is never a dull moment!

How great is that? These kids being raised amongst others by a garden like this!

as they get older

we don’t make them work on the farm

We know a lot of children who were forced to work who hate it

all do the house chores dishes

farm

they only work if they want to and we pay them for it

It’s created a very healthy environment

They look at the farm as a very positive aspect of their life

fortunate

every year they want to make more money

do more things

so it’s a kind of tremendous joy

So we are homeschooling as well so they are always with us.

Now do you have animals too?

When we first started 10 years ago, we had this dream of farming full time. When we first got started, for the first few years the farm was absolute chaos!

We’re trying to

start a business
farming things in the south
raising children

It’s a pretty tough market

east coast

west coast

local food

pretty tough gig!

theres not a lot of information on small scale farms in the south so we were really carving out this farm from not a lot of info we could find anyways.

We were on 2 acres

2-3k chickens
300 turkeys
50-60 hogs
cows at one point
2 acres of produce with the tractor

we were

starting

I’ll bet you learned a lot.

We learned a ton! so much!

we learned just a ton!

we got at this point at 2015

when a lot of people start farming or gardening, thinkingwe have this idea of we want to have time we wnat to go out work the land of our family

Get out of the rat race and the 9-5 grind and we wanted to farm to escape that

Fast forward a few years and I was finding I had less time for my family before I started farming then after

In 2015 we had this wakeup call, February 2015

greenhouses packed of transplants for production

big batch of broilers on order

My wife came home with my daughter and said are you ready for life to change?

I said don’t be silly we’re farmers, nothing new around here

Can I just back up, your baby daughter?

Some back story, we sent our daughter to a dentist, they saw something funky to gums and it came back positive for carcenoma, and she was 6 years old!

It was a big deal, and a tough time to put the farm on hold

spring

tough time to do that

best thing that ever happened to us

believe it or not

organic farmers

worst eaters of all

on the road

deliveries

not spending as much time as you would like cooking your food

So our health was terrible!

gaining weight

ailments

so what it did basically we had to take a step way back and reevaluate everything we were doing and the children, we had 4 at the time

With all the chaos that comes with

all those animals

driving to market

and all that time we were taking her to the hospital

our daughter is cancer free just so you know, we thank God every day for her life!

at that season ~ we were like, what we want at the end of the day

you can have a farm and houses and land and cars what is important is that at the end of the day we are surrounded by the ones we love and they love us

we stressed for the rest of our life would be based on time with our family and brought everything back through this lens that looked like

if this takes away time from our end goal

healthy family
home school them
time
trips
experiences

If it takes away from any of that we have to reevaluate if that’s what were supposed to be doing at this time.

we questioned should we keep farming? This is a big deal if there were a few weeks of her to live.

There is nothing worse for a parent to be faced with the thought for losing a child and we are thankful we did’t have to do that. But we realized that life is precious, every moment is fleeting, you never know if tomorrow or today is our last day.

At the end of that season we basically got rid of our animals and changed our diet for her

no pork
vegetable based diet
to help her recover from cancer
less meat
more produce

looking at raising the animals, if processing them was no longer bringing us joy so we imagined what life would be like for us without the livestock portion of our business

life would be good if we

didn’t have to feed the pigs
take care of all these turkeys

sold the livestock

We’d been growing on 2 acres

Had all the tractor equipment where I had no idea

sold all the equipment

went down to one acre

knew I had a big market for lettuce

developing on how to have it year round

never really had the time to give the proper attention to this crop

focus her in the south

lettuce needed to be planted

cultivated

time and attention that it needed

all the animals

one acre

Really focused on 10-15 crops

tripled our gross on the vegetable side of business on 1/2 the amount of land for probably

working

2016 commitment we were only going to work 8 hours a day

I wanted to be home for suppers, put them to bed, and to have that quality time in the evening.

How were able to do that? Did you hire help? Farmer only working 8 hours a day during the season? Maybe in Tennessee your in season all year?

In Tennessee, three’s this time in August its so hot, other then greens there’s not a whole lot going on, everything’s just done.

how we did that

We already had some accounts that we had been working on for 5 years

we were very deliberate what we were going to grow

growing is the easy part

selling is the hard part

sales

records

what we knew we could sell

80 varieties of vegetables we cut out all that waste and we grew the probably 10-20 crops we knew we could sell at that time of year

Simplified everything!

another thing we did

we still o to this day at certain times of year

what killed us wheat

wheat acropolis down here in the

Invested in like $2000 of landscape fabric.

automated

10 hours of cultivation

for the season

landscape fabrics

laid out the fabric
plant
set up automatic water
next thing you do is harvest and sell
eliminated hundreds of hours

Eliminated hundreds of hours on watering and and cultivation

changed everything!

Streamlined our whole process,there’s a lot more complicaterd but aht’s the basic thing

knowing we were only growing

I did spend $1500 various educational consulting for my business

I want to make this thing happen this year, I could figure this out but that investment in the education really helped combined with my experience

Can I just ask, did you take a class or invest in a mentor? REad books?

A number of things:

I did a series of phone conversations with Curtis Stone

He took a look at our farm, he didn’t really tell us what to do but asked us some questions of, have you considered this?

I already knew what to do, but having that sounding board really helped a lot

Then I did another series of consulting, be cause me and my wife farm together

farming with a partner

that was really the biggest thing

interseeding thing

At the end of 2015 I hired JM to come down to my farm, I ended up selling tickets for that event, because it is pretty expensive so I sold tickets for that event which sold out in a short amount of time

idea to give me some tips on my farm but since I spent so much time organizing this event, we became great friends, but I didn’t get the consulting I was planning. Doing workshops on a farm is a tremendous amount of work. So it was a mixture of all that

It wasn’t as much what we did as what we did not do. When you drop a pretty large animal business, it opens up a tremendous amount of time.

Having that other business took up a lot of brain wave, like where’s this going to be sold so I was able to put time towards my produce production.

And when you go from two acres to one acre it just makes things Very very simple

When you go from chaos to order it makes things very easy to metabolize

how all this was going to work

I had 5 years experience before . It was just taking out the fat and really leaning being deliberate about what you are going to grow and getting some other help looking at the whole system!

You have no idea how fascinating this is to us. My husband and I are drooling over this place in Maine that is 175 acres of woods with 13 acres of farmland, with 2 homes, we are in just 20 acres. It’s like less then 60 miles from Johnny’s selected seeds in Maine. It’s got a house that needs a ton of work, I feel like the house could be an awesome education center. I just can’t imagine what it would take. My husband grew up on 1200 acres and we’re just so boxed in here. I keep asking the realtor aren’t there any records, that’s what I feel like what we need to do, is to offer a farmer in the local area that cuold pay...

permaculture student online Matt Powers — **299. Permaculture Soil Science & Solutions | Matt Powers returns | ThePermacultureStudent.com** Sep 28, 2019
Show notes

Permaculture Soil Science & Solutions KICKSTARTER campaign

Matt Powers Rockstar Millennial, high school English and Social Studies Teacher, and Permacutlure Curriculum designer is here to share his amazing journey and passion to teach everyone he can reach about the power of permaculture. Working with some of the most scientific names in the field including Elaine Ingham, David Montgomery and the Geoff Lawton Matt is on a mission to change the way we look at soil in the 21st century.

Matt was my guest on episode 132 where he shared his amazing garden journey from professional bass player to high school educator to science curriculum creator!

This episode is a must listen for any master gardeners or even novices who want to learn about soil in a way that any high schooler can understand. With over 20 years of experience teaching and gardening Matt’s passion shines through as dad, husband and steward of our planet.

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Tell me about your first gardening experience?

Tell us about something that grew well this year.

Is there something you would do different next year or want to try/new?

Tell me about something that didn’t work so well this season.

Which activity is your least favorite activity to do in the garden?

Have you had any problems with getting neighbors on board? What have been the challenges that way?

A favorite tool that you like to use? If you had to move and could only take one tool with you what would it be.

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The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower’s Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming by JM Fortier

If you have a business to you have any advice for our listeners about how to sell extra produce or get started in the industry?

Final question –

food security

I would love to see victory gardens again. I think it was a great trend. For people to get a say in their food security!

Do you have an inspiration tip or quote to help motivate our listeners to reach into that dirt and start their own garden?

Mikes aboot to plant our greenbeans, he’s been digging up the minifarm with the broadfork, I think he said he was gonna try to get them inthe ground today May 30, 2019

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Interview 289 with Health Coach Sarah Clark | Author of Fabulously Fertile + Host of Get Pregnant Naturally Podcast

Thursday May 2, 2019

Tell people about your podcast and business.

For me I had these weird health systems

Basically being told that my only option was to have donor eggs. I never looked back to any of the health systems I was dealing with.

After that my health took a nosedive, after I had my daughter, I took antibiotics for every sinus infections. I ended up

Health and wellness

That’s where I discovered I had these food sensitivities

elimination diet

Take them out for 10 days.

Can we back up a minute, People complain about corn, people don’t realize corn syrup is in like everything

Keto can be right for some people so we do the elimination diet

impacts its digestion

The food piece is huge because we are in the middle of this experiment

Look at all the other diagnosis and symptoms were all facing. I’m hearing all sorts of symptoms it affects other people.

We recommend going 100% organic during this time

why do I feel so parched?

I’m curious how you found out about me.

Are you in Oregon, Washington? Somewhere by the Pacific Coast?

Tell us a little about yourself.

There’s an outdoor preschool on the property that meets 5 days a week a lot of fun.

We also grow vegetables!

We also have KiS organics which is an online garden store provider

My first reaction was I can’t wait to try this on vegetables! I can’t wait to try this on tomatoes!

There was no access to information like there is now.

I guess my point would be I would say it’s the same growing principals for someone growing tomatoes as for growing cannabis as for growing for the soil really learn the plant. There are unique challenges to grow cannabis.

What I love about your site is growing it in dirt and growing it naturally. People are doing things in those small spaces, who knows whats in their pot.

and go to your website where they can learn how to grow it naturally!

The right source the right products to maintain

William Albect a concept of crop nutrition

Which is a really good point if they are not in our crop they not going to be in our bodies

right level of these trace levels of macronutrients.

Tell us about your very first gardening experience?

I created a backyard garden

There’s very good reasons why native plants make sense. It’s the four Es I call them.

good pollinator populations

classic example the monarch butterfly that eats the toxic weeds of the milkweed family

native plants

native plants are so important!

You know it’s interesting the organic gardener can take this to the next level!

There is a parasitic wasp that attacks just about every other:

tomato horn worms every year on his

core on our landscaping is biodiversity What we are trying to do is spread the diversity of our native plants

Here’s the revolutionary part.

Industrial Hemp Project Lead

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trying to grow as much food as we can on one acre

We were on 2 acres

best thing that ever happened to us

you can have a farm and houses and land and cars what is important is that at the end of the day we are surrounded by the ones we love and they love us