94: Ryan Pesch | Lida Farm: Good Food, Grown Well | Farmer’s Markets, a CSA and a new Winter Passive Solar Greenhouse Ryan shares his Organic Gardening Journey | Pelican Rapids, MN

Welcome Gardeners to the show today!  I’m super excited to introduce my guest owner of the Lida Farm in Pelican Rapids Minnesota just an hour east of Fargo, North Dakota where Good Food is Grown Well. Raising a family while growing a variety of produce in this challenging climate will inspire every gardener that choosing to eat well is an option while we learn some great secrets and tips.

Tell us a little about yourself.

Where to start? My wife Maree, and I own and operate Lida Farm, we’re both in our 30s, we’ve been doing our current location for 12 years. I got into organic commercial production a few years before that. We have got 3 kids oldest is 10 Sylvia, Willem is 8, and Graham, our youngest is 5. That’s the whole work crew and family at Lida Farm.

KellyGoddessOfWheat

Although we do have an Apprentice Kelsey Wolf who has lived with us here the past couple of summers and is probably gonna sign up again!

We live on a 20 acre farmstead, here in Minnesota’s’ lake district, the west central lakes district, the land of 10 thousand lakes. This year we have 3 and 1/2 acres of produce, it’s an integrated farm operation, we have a few hundred broilers this year, we raised 7 hogs we have a milk cow, cow calf pair on back pasture. That’s kind of the operation. I also have a day job, always a surprise to some people. I work full time for University of  Minnesota extension.  A lot of time people think I must do horticulture  but I do community development and business community. I do a lot of spreadsheets, market analysis and stuff. That’s sort of a thumbnail sketch of my life.

Wow! That’s a lot, plus raising a family!

It’s a lot to run. basically run

these all these crazy things people do to make a mortgage each month, so I can’t really give up one or the other at this point.

I guess you have to do what you gotta do. I’m surprised at some of the things I’ve done here in Montana.

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

I’m originally from East Grand Forks, which is in Minnesota, on the  border  with North Dakota. Some people might be familiar with the Red River Valley, it’s a great big flat and North Dakota and South Dakota where  a lot of sugar beets and potatoes have been grown.

My first gardening experience, East Grand Forks  is a blue collar company town

in the shadow of sugar beet factory lagoon and a potato processing plant potato ex

family plot, did the really standard things everybody’s family grows. next to my uncle

sugar beet factory

lagoon

family plot standard things everybody.

Small thing like anyone is doing  in their backyard. Maybe 30×40 feet… it was kind of an abandoned industrial area, and abandoned piece of ground, a bunch of weeds growing up. What a lot of people are doing today, in urban gardening taking an  abandoned lot and making community gardens out of them.

Kind of like squatting in an gardening sense.

What does organic gardening/earth friendly mean to you?

For me, when thinking about it, I always think about some kind of farming that cares for creation that we have been entrusted with. One, to me I think the best of organic farming,Ill speak in terms of farming instead of gardening, because that’s more my scale if you will, something that brings more people on the land, a lot of something is celebrated on your farm, bringing community together. I think a lot of people are divorced from the land, everyone lives by a strip mall, it seems. There’s a hunger intrinsically in people’s hearts for a reconnection operate. We operate a CSA. At our end of season harvest party, we brought a lot of people to our farm and the  people touch the earth saw the animals in pasture, ate with each other, music, the community that can build around a local organic farm. I think that is the best that organic framing can bring in large part, when you think about it kind of part of conventional ag has been how do we get as few people on the ground as possible. How can one person grow as much as possible? That’s where ag has been, and that’s where it continues to go. I was a neighbors and he got these 2 robotic milkers, hundreds of animals going through the

opposite of where a lot of organic farms are going. more people engaged in farming.

Some people might say we are really inefficient, but I think of it as reconnecting people.

families out working the ground together, community

Seems like you must be efficiently to be doing all of this and raising all this food, and producing for a CSA and have all these people come. Just seeing what my husband did last year and what it took do produce what we did and think about what it would take to run a CSA maybe we just need to learn some efficient techniques. 

Who or what inspired you to start using organic techniques?

Kind what got me into the whole local food movement in general, I studied at Gustavus Adolphus College  a Swedish college in Minnesota no surprise? Right in the southern part of the state. I was like any idealistic late teenager, involved in the environmental movement, involved in college politics. For me, it’s like everyone wants to make a stamp or change in the world. What got me in the local food movement, in the same town there was a food compl, the St. Peter food coop, been there since the 70s small coop local farmers, semi-reformed hippies, turned onto the scene, doing environmental work with your 2 hands, connecting with local farmers, directly supporting those local farers who are in turn doing good practices on the land. Seemed much more of a straight line of change on the landscaped. Instead of other people try though policy change which is like a black hole. I can get involved though this vehicle. Led me to organic farming which led me to doing an apprenticeship.

RyanHarvestingWheat

Did I see you did it at Foxtail Farm?

I worked there for Foxtail Farm, they’re one of the first CSA’s in and around the twin cities in 1999-2000-2001

how far, at that time there were maybe a dozen CSA’s in Minnesota.

committed to CSA members, in their 3rd year at the time. Now in a point of comparison. I think Minnesota has probably 130 CSA operations.

Im just gonna break in and explain CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Do you want to explain what that means?

Some people say it’s a subscription model. people are paying up front a share of the seasons’ harvest or vegetables each week. It’s since then applied to other products. Most people think of vegetables, but there are now meat CSA flower cut flower operators and non-ag products a non profit down the road, with community supported art, where you get a different piece of art each month.

A few people have told me I should get onto this thing called Patreon that’s like that for musicians and artists. Where you can get like a new song each month or a drawing or painting or something that people get a digital copy of. Kind of like Kickstarter or something?

How did you learn how to garden organically?

On the commercial side of horticulture, you learn a lot by being hands on for a couple of seasons, It’s hard to imagine, I’ve got this 20 x 30 plot, how do you scale this up to 2 acres. At that time at Foxtail we were doing 15-16 acres. What does that even look like? It’ helps to see, how to scale equipment, learn how to do things quickly or efficiently to produce a good looking box each week?

My husband made some good looking boxes, but I thought here’s one or 2 boxes, but how are we ever gonna make 50-100 of these?

How did you find your apprentice? Through the WWOOFing program or Todd Ulizio talked about using ATTRA in episode 3.

Land Stewardship Project very active organization, that supports organic growers and sustainable ag types hosted a lot of internships on sustainable ag farms.

That’s how I found them, I went to 3-4 different farms over a week, and Foxtail  seemed like the best match. I want to get into this organic farming, find where you’re most comfortable and there is a good fit.

you hear about internships and apprenticeships that go bad, somebody lasts only 6 weeks on a farm, and then they disappear, some is personality mismatch which happens on any day.

you just got to find one that works well

Willing workers on organic farms. WWOOFers. Some use it as a way of seeing the world as well. Australia   usually those are short term stints as compared to long term stints.

I had some guests on Neke and Jeremy who went down to Argentina and other places.

advantage of woofing it. The disadvantage you don’t really see the full cycle.

If you’re really serious about getting into it, there’s a lot to be said of a whole season from seeds being planted before the final wrap up when the snow’s gonna fly.

It kind of helps you learn about different places, 

where’s the sun in June, compared to where’s the sun in September, when you spend a whole season in one place there’s a great benefit. Having all those experiences can only help people.

Tell us about something that grew well this year.

 

The thing that grew really well this year, was our pepper crop, I was suspicious that it would go anywhere, this year was the first year we had a bit of an aphid issue in our greenhouse, when I put these things out, they were looking

see a crop have some aphid issues, it usually has these lower leaves that are turning yellow. not falling over dead, but a stressed plant, aphids are taking little bites of nutrition. They looked bad, but what ended up happening  here in Minnesota, we had the miracle growing year,

We had some wonderful timely rains, all the way through the early part of August.

we’re getting rain, rainy season that is gonna go typically April, May, a little bit into June, you get iffy rain through June and July we had some wonderful rain that happened into early august

got plants established, didn’t do any irrigation really, then we had a lot of heat, a good long growing season. That really did well for peppers. I didn’t know what to do with them.

We had about 2300 pepper plants!

once you start getting and a really good bumper crop!

what do you do?

At the market we were selling off half and full bushels for people to freeze and hold somethings over. Members were asked to come out and pick pepper to freeze to have over the winter.

we did a bunch of that ourselves but there’s only so much you can do.

You said you’ve been doing this for 10 years? How do you decide how many peppers to plant?

12 years here,

1 year,

2 years at Foxtail

I’t about my 15th season

To figure out the scale issue, get’s to be a little tough. One way I kind of think about it, I had the experience of 2 years on the same farm. What you end up getting a sense of the proportion of different crops. Winter squash takes a lot more room, sweet corn. So you got a sense of if you had a one acre field.

LidaFarmHarvest

what proportion of different crops. How to get a good mix. That’s what we’re trying to do with the CSA because if you don’t have the mix it doesn’t work so we’ll

what’s happened over time

first year we were doing farmers

1/3 of an acre

but I had a sense of those proportions. So maybe 30% was dedicated to pumpkins and winter squash and another 15% sweet corn on down the line. So as we’ve grown from 1/3 of an acre to 3 1/2 acre the proportions are pretty much the same you just keep adding more.

It’s hard to say I have x number of shares I have to fill, I need x number of plants

some people will do that and there are even calculators online. Johnny’s has a nice calculator. I you google CSA calculator you can get some that are helpful with crop planting. But I’ve just been winging it.

 

I have spreadsheets galore in terms of financial analysis, was the farm profitable. But an actual crop planning, getting that figured out? No, I don’t do it at all.

What happens you say, last year I was pretty long on peppers, maybe I should do 1800 instead of 2300, or last year we were a little bit short on cauliflower. we did about 3 flats, for spring planting, we should bump that up to about 4 flats.

after you’ve done it for years, you’re looking at what I did last year, and then you’re projecting forward. Even on a commercial scale. Some are more planned out and there are a lot like me.

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

One book I picked up this year that I have been really interested in. A lot of us in commercial horticulture have been devotes of  Eliot Coleman is the standard. A lot of people know his new organic grower, The Four Season Harvest.

TMarketGardenerBookhe guy that wrote a book last year Jean-Martin Fortier. He wrote a book called  Market Gardener: A Successful Grower’s Handbook for Small Scale Organic Farming essential for an acre and a half…on his market farm in Quebec. He has some interesting techniques, one I did a little bit of this year, but I want to do more of next year. He’s using tarps as a solar

he uses it quite extensively

taking a large tarp putting it over a space in terms of reading it for planting it at a later date

retaining a lot of moisture like mulch but at the same time it’s warming up.

warming up

seeds are germinating under the, because there is no light they are also dying under the tarp

put it over a given area. A lot of people have done this

you have this nice really friable, you see a lot of earthworms,

having a nice clean slate

French Term in Europe on organic vegetation. it’s called

acqualeration, so that’s the technique

next year

using woven black fabric, we did that with

landscape

with our garlic beds some areas in one front field

using aqualtation. That’ landscape fabric.

sandbags on either sides of that

made garlic planting just beautiful

something we’re gonna have a little more of.

Joyce Pinson talked about that book. My husband did some of that. We planted a mini-farm, it was total forest land as much as sod, and he put that black plastic down where he planted his wheat, but he saw this other thing about building a reservoir in there. Joyce was excited about implementing some of his techniques too. 

I think it’s a good resource for people who are looking to start out

I think if you are looking to do a little

we learend a lot from that book. I want to say, I read it in the spring, his main crops is microgreens and he sells them to restaurants

he does a lot of greenhouse tomatoes.

 

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

Kind of a banner year, something that’s problematic.

Failed on this year two. Fall brassicas well. Generally they do better. We typically have a really short spring. Makes it difficult to get them in early enough, if you put them in too early all they do is freeze! In the spring typically a lot of broccoli, get’s stressed out it just doesn’t do that well

if you time it out right it does beautiful.

days are getting shorter bolting is just not an issue,

days are getting longer things want to bolt

Think of all these fall greens! I always seem to fail, when should I get those fall brassicas in? Here again I took a new variety of cauliflower was just 12-10 days later then the other one and it made all the difference! I planted it,

it’s easy,

you can get a week off, you missed

That was the big thing I learned was that I thought fall planting would start planting in the fall, but you’re actually starting the seeds indoors around the end of June, July before summer even starts. When are you putting the plants out the middle of August, September?

we had planted that cauliflower 3rd week of July, and that was too late!

OK, so you started by seed and put seeds in the ground in July? or put plants out?

No we put plants out!

We start everything by seed.

When do you start the seeds.

I think we start the seeds I think we started the end of June and then July

this was a longer season cauliflower Skywalker if I had done Snow Crown which is a shorter season I would have been fine.

there are some calculators on finding fall planting dates,

essentially you have to add at least 14 days! And of course depending on when you are planting it it gets exaggerated for any crop!

If it’s a shorter season thing that you are planting longer. You’re typically not thinking about fall crops in June, you’re barely getting summer crops settled. You don’t want to think about fall crops because you’re just thinking of summer but you have to.

My other big lesson was pay attention to variety. One thing I hope people are learning that you said is you might have some challenges in the beginning most of what you grow is going to surprise you!

Something that you find is easy to grow and is generally successful every-time.

For ourselves, we do a lot of tomatoes, generally for me tomatoes

Do you want to explain what  a heavy feeder is?

they’re not

how much nutrients does it take out of the soil?

sweet corn takes a lot of nitrogen

lettuce is actually a pretty heavy feeder,

usually comes and goes have

broccoli is a heavey feeder, takes a lot of nutrients out of the soil. Peppers, tomatoes generally aren’t

pretty well in our soil

surprisingly we always seem to do carrots just fine. I always here from people, eE can never grow carrots but they’re only an inch and a half long, stupid looking.

because our soil is really heavy

Our soil is just a base of yellow clay that we grow in and keep heavily amending each year, we always have carrots really well

I think a lot of it is tillage

are not going very deep in their soil. Need to dig do deep tillage, get like a subsoiler.

Do your tomatoes turn red? and everything? or do you start em in the greenhouse? We have a hard time getting our tomatoes to turn red?

Part of what we do with tomatoes, last year we grew like 28-29 different of varieties. So what we do is we grow just a crazy number of varieties. So we find somethings gonna turn out fine. That diversity, os if you grow enough kind somethings gonna do just fine

grow all in the greenhouse from seed, transplant out into the ground

this year for example tomatoes, maybe because we had this banner season they matured earlier then we typically get, tomatoes were completely done by the end of September! We had people, a lot of times end of September we’re pulling out the bulk crops, the large amounts of tomatoes people are buying for canning or by the bushel, half bushel

We’re all gone by end of Sept.

I’m gonna say that was past our frost. I think we had to pull them out by then.

By the fifteenth or if you can get past that, it ends up taking out foliage, the tomatoes are gonna be fine and then the fruit is going to be exposed.

Then the fruit gets more sun because the foliage is gone?

Um, usually by then its red, it needs to be red by then to make it. Generally they’re ripe by then.

 Something you would steer new gardeners away from that you find is typically challenging to grow in your climate

Anything that really likes a lot of heat and is a long season crop, is really hard to do. Usually there are way of doing them, you are kind of swimming upstream. Here in MN doing sweet potatoes. I was just at the Madison Farmers Market two weekends ago, for MEA vacation. Down there you’re probably going across 2 different growing zones when you get down to Madison in southern Wisconsin, these people had just wonderful sweet potatoes

Here you would almost have to cover them, plant them early, cover them with the plastic. It just isn’t worth start with something a lot simpler! Melons are pretty difficult as well, unless you put them on IRT, infrared transmitting plastic, or plastic mulch. It’s kind of hard to get a good crop because the soil doesn’t warm up soon enough. Melons are typically a long season crop. They never get there. Those are 2 I’d recommend staying away from

Do something that takes 60 days.

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

Well, for us, I think trellising is one, that I have a hard time with. Again it kind of has to do with scale.

Realist with one

Georgia Weave to hold up your tomatoes around your stakes to hold up the tomatoes,

Something to do with scale. WE had about 3000 tomato plants.

Daunting. That just shoots those stakes in the ground. It’s just me and a five lb. hammer. It’s a little tough to get going. Typically when you do get going it takes a couple of days, but it’s one of the most rewarding job when you are done! When it’s done its a beautiful sight for about half acre.

I always like the tomatoes cages?

For most people think tomatoes I think it works great but think about putting out 300 cages or buying 300 tomatoe cages.

a lot of people commercially and twine will do the weave

hardwood stakes for pennies

baling twine is

$12 or $15 something like that.

That’s encouraging if you could do it, people could do it on a much smaller scale. Adam Pruett in Episode was talking about using Nylon Nets. 

There is a Nylon product like a plastic netting. Horton Nova a lot of commercial

plastic clips, then you’re clipping to the netting

trellis netting

a lot of people use it for peas

put out some posts, you put that Norton Nova or plastic netting on, if you do it right it will just climb up there

I hate that system to each your own. You just go through so many of these clips.

Are they like clothespins? 

They are like circular clips.

It’s kind of like the Plastic mulch, its one of my least favorite inputs, because the amount of waste is ridiculous

really hard to reuse

becomes such a tangle, you end up ripping up the plants with the netting, you end up with all the clips all of the place, and

on a certain scale

people us it, and especially on a commercial scale bu then there’s all thesepiles of this stuff

on a smaller scale you can get away with cleaning it out and

really common using that plastic mulch on a scale, if you go to California

acres of this drip tape, you never have to read but it all gets thrown….

I like that thinking, where does all this stuff go?

What is your favorite activity to do in the garden.

I think probably most growers, commercial growers

I love cultivating

taking a cultivating tractor you are going over the plants just to kill off weeds

you have these shovels and shanks that are attached to the tractor, or you might have a tine weeder that goes behind a tractor. There’s just nothing  better on a sunny day,

slightly windy sunny day

just drive over the beds

killing off millions of weeds, sort of like the trellis example, when your  done you can look back the field and think it looks like pretty!

I like that. It’s like cleaning the chalk board. Or digging a new bed. One of my favorite activities in the garden is removing the sod and digging a new bed. It looks so good when it’s done.

What is the best gardening advice you have ever received?

It starts

Gardeners give a lot of advice

It’s maybe more of a saying then one thing Paul would always say, “Paranoia will destroy you.” One thing I have always thought about, gardening as much as farming. It’s more of a head game, really more to do with your mind then actual work.. When you get to a certain scale, you’re managing so many crops that have to be dealt with in so many ways it’s easy to get super anxious about it and in a commercial setting you start to wonder what is that other vendor doing? How is he doing that? Is my stuff as good as his stuff?

What you sort

could take down your hardest season

each task will get done in it’s time. “Paranoia will destroy you!”

Mike and I actually met planting trees, when I was in college, my friends were like you should go plant trees and I was like can I do this and I asked this athlete friend what I could do to get in shape and he said it’s really about attitude.

Have you ever entered a fair? How’d that go?

No but my daughter has, she won grand champion at our county fair 2 summers ago, with her entry of assorted vegetables.

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.

I would take is a wheel hoe, it seems like a simple little device, you can cover an amazing amount of ground with a wheel hoe, like a traditional operate

I saw Mandy who would win my Gardening CrossFit award for the year demonstrate how to use one at the Lower Valely Farm tour.

Eating or harvesting vegetables or fruit on time? 

We’re not alone, were kind of the same way, we get burdened as much as anybody.

I’m always surprised people don’t freeze peppers,

you don’t need to blanch

If you are growing peppers, you have no excuse if you haven’t preserved peppers if you aren’t freezing them.

Megan Cain talked about that the first time I ever heard of it she said you could just dice them up and throw them in your freezer.

WinterGreenhouse

Do you have any secrets for preserving food-making it last? 

WE do some  traditional things in terms of Tomatoes

Last year we did put in our root cellar with our winter greenhouse.

#1 thing we learned doing that last year, is that preserving for example, think of root vegetables you want to keep crunchy, like a carrot, turnips or beets. 

Take a bale of peat, wash vegetables so you are getting rid of that mix of soil, I found that it’s really best if you wash them if they are nice fresh crunch crispy and put it in put it in wet peat

plastic bag

as long as you’re keeping that at a nice temperature, ideally a cool wet place, you want high humidity. That’s what a root cellar does, but a lot of people don’t have root cellars. We used to keep it in our milk house above freezing

Speaking of  I thought we were gonna talk about your new solar greenhouse? Passive design, and maybe even your kickstarter campaign?

this was a huge project for us, it damn near killed me

couple of things we had in mind to do for the last few years. One was to bring on some housing so we could host an apprentice who could learn from us.

last year older greenhouse is getting pretty old

being inspired some others in our  area we said hey let’s just do this as one great big project

brough in a tourist cabin

brought in a 14×20 cabin, onsite to house Kelsey our apprentice

on the side of both of those things

 

16×32 winter

passive solar a lo of times the

oasive active solar, really its

design

The heating comes from the building itself, the passive part is how can you design a building or structure you can actively, you can take the heat and the light from the sun and retain heat in the building. So what you see with a lot of passive solar greenhouse butyl here in Minnesota. We excavate deeper into the grounds, below the foundation. In that area, in that rock putting in a 4inch drain tile. Would be called solar air thermal. The tubing in that rock, is under the floor, that’s hooked up to a tube at the top the crest of the greenhouse. So as the greenhouse warms up, what it does is suck that air near the top, in through that tiling in the rock

, essentially pushing that hot air into the rock

heating think of the rock like a sauna

heat gets retained intact rock, the area under the foundation, under the floor of the greenhouse stays warm, vents in the ground allows the hot air rises to heat that greenhouse overnight?

Retaining the heat from the sun. The other thing that we added on to this to kind of improve on this design, we have a wood boiler that is hooked used to heat our house. We put a layer of deep sand, we have that

foot an half of sand

pex tubing

heat garage

under the floor of the garage

second layer

we have that hooked up to 2 solar panels.

not making electricity, they are taking the heat from the sun, heating up water or fluid

pushed through that tex tubing in the ground and it keeps the floor of that green house very warm and then it goes back to the wood boiler. We have a couple of different ways of heating that greenhouse. we did that started on that thing last June and finished towards the end of dec! Long project. What we are doing in that greenhouse, is cool season greens and crops, that grow in a cool season environment. Asian Greens, salad mix things like that.

 

I like the way you say that clearly, my husbands been talking to me about it and now I have a clearer idea. I like the fact that you pointed out they like the cold weather more. My spinach bolted right away last spring, the spinach that came back just from seed was soooooo sweet. And I have one last cauliflower to go pick.

A favorite recipe you like to cook from the garden?

I’ll recommend a cookbook how about that? We actually gave this to our members as an Cookbook incentive for signing up a little

SImplyInSeason

Simply In Season Harold Press,

really a nice cookbook organized seasons by season

tried a lot of these recipes always seem to be a winner

put it in a newsletter

greek skillet uses fennel. I try to focus on different recipes that will use a sort of an oddball

thing that people maybe are not used to buying or are gonna come in your CSA box.

I grew up eating fennel, cause my mom grew fennel. and Ikno but I bet a lot of people don’t and mmmm doesn’t that smell good! 

A favorite internet resource?

One place I often will go is Minnesota extension has this disease key, for both plants and insects

what’s wrong with my plant? You’ll find this binder, organized by crop. You’re gonna see something little bit funky with your plant you kind of remember what it was,

its organized by pictures.

that is mosaic virus

I guess this is some oddball fungus

I also do like ATTRA for commercial information organized by fact sheet

more of a midgets

Moses Midwest Organization Sustainable Education Sercvice

good resources for commercial organic vegetable operators

find out or figure out if something if something is allowable, they actually have an answer line call somebody with a questions and they get right back to you they’re really responsive.

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

Tiny Farm blog. They operate a small market garden. He does a good job of talking about techniques, varieties that he uses on his operation. How he sets up his market table, the nuts and bolts of what’s working and not working.

Applies to our scale of agriculture.

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?

I think the number one way to get started is join a market. There’s a lot of different way of marketing produce and what I found easiest entry point is farmers market, you’re not promising much, you always have to think about if I crash and burn what will happen? If you don’t have a lot of experience there’s a good chance you’re gonna. right? If you are one vender amongst others they’re not here anymore it’s not that big of a deal. That way you don’t have to worry about quantities if something underproduces you’re just gonna go with less radishes not a big deal . If you start taking names and numbers for your inaugural CSA, for 20 boxes. You know bad things can happen

want to do a farmers market can do 1/2 acre or 1/4 acre intensively. Do those crops that already do well, and observing what other people are doing. If you know how to grow cucumbers really darn well just do that and bring those and look at what others are doing.

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?

I think when it comes

a lot of people that come on this podcast

organic agriculture is gonna help s

what that would really take, what it really takes are more growers that are engaged and profitable. If I think about the work of some organizations be, here in Minnesota, the work of the sustainable farming association

and the work of moses

2 organizations really geared to growers learning from growers, setting up mentorships,

learning from each other

individual growers aren’t trying to hold onto magic secrets if you will, there really is a community of people that want to share with prosper and so we all do better

2 organizations its sustainable farming association and moses, I want to put my support behind.d Especially if you are in the midwest.

if you want to make the trek The moses conference in the spring.

lacrosse Wisconsin

4000 attendees

largest organic conference in the US those of us plotting away at things. day in and day out. It’s educational but its also inspiring to be amongst a community of growers like that.

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

Just do it! Kind of thing. Again I say gardeners have too much advice for each other, if you listen to all the advice you wouldnt do anything because it just seems so difficult. so just do  it!

give it a whirl

hands on! Far surpasses what you re gonna learn in a book! Trial and error kind of where it got a lot of us to where we’re at!

How do we connect with you?

If you have any interest in our operation www.lidafarm.com

lidafarmer@gmail.com.

We operate here in the northwest Central Lakes District.

Are you speaking at the conference?

I am speaking at the Moses Conference end of February, end of March?

I will be speaking about winter greens production and passive solar, deep winter greenhouses! I’ll be speaking about growing greens, economics as winter green production as well as building structures, passive greenhouse structures.

OGP is dedicated to encouraging gardeners and people who want to grow food and flowers to choose an organic approach and helping you create your very own organic oasis.

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:

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If you have any comments, questions, guests you’d like to see, or topics you’d like us to cover please send us any feedback positive or negative. We’re here to serve our audience and we can only improve with your help!!! Thanks for visiting Mike’s Green Garden changing the world one garden at a time.

 

About the author, Jackie Marie

I'm an artist and educator. I live at the "Organic Oasis" with my husband Mike where we practice earth friendly techniques in our garden nestled in the mountains of Montana.

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