Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

I’m gonna just gonna hit record ok

OK ~ I’ll deliver!

Here’s a listener and awesome teacher! Matt Zoeller to share his garden journey and talking about edible weeds who was on my show back in February 2018 in episode 250.

Listen here to my interview with Matt about Edible Weeds

It’s a privilege to be back here, it’s now the second time I have done a podcast like this the first one was with you jackie like 2 years ago.

so many people have listened to your episode before, I think you are even in my organic oasis guidebook where It all about growing chickens in the suburbs, I spent so much time reading it last year and then I haven’t seen it for a year and then I was on someones podcast the other day

how nutritious they are usually people switch off the station not download it so, this is a cool place to be on the fringe organic gardener podcast which you’ve had some pretty bad-a**ed published guests lately.

I think you are just being humble. I know you dropped lots of great golden seeds. But since I did have Melissa Norris and Jeff Ditchfield my numbers have practically double and so there are a lot of new listeners who haven’t heard

I came up with an acronym…. My name is Matt Zoeller, I teach high school, I have a masters in education but all things health and plants, maybe wearing the color green I do wear a lot of green is something I love but it is not academic, I just have an organic interested, I am always reading and listening!

I live right in Denver, in a suburb, in a neighborhood, IDK how big my house is but it’s not big either

we have a good solid amount of garden space

chickens

salvaging wood

raccoon issue

we got 3 more hens

actually 7 chicks

that are 4 weeks old that’s really exciting

the thing I am kind of becoming famous for

love of eating weeds

my analogy

if you were to move into a house

spring rolls around and suddenly

there’s kale everywhere would you walk out and say we didn’t plant this kale we have to dig them all u

hire some ruminant

you would probably eat it because its kale an its health

most of the main ones we hate the most and probably Canadians

a lot are edible and nutrition

we went there

nutrients panicking

what advice would I have for people if the supply runs out

can’t count on my neighbor

you’re like the perfect guy for this

I came up with an acronym

take it or leave it

Compost

Oeuf (french for egg a plug for chickens)

Vegetable

Immune System

Dehydrate

In the spirit of survival

if I had a blog or we making a book

squeezed it into COVID

Chickens or compost –

I think that is annoying

make a big pile

talking kitchen stuff

do something with it

here’s some ideas

burry it

dig a trench slowly

so practical

your mom does it

whenever this comes up

oh my grandma used to do that

IDK what happened to make altho stop

really good for the soil

I have always

most people have a wrong sense of

don’t throw away biodegradable

the way we compost here

with our food scraps is feed to the chickens

I’l say

that’s it letter

let’s move onto the

Oeuf

so a little

you’re listeners

no curses here (12:18

make a little plug for chickens

they’re so low maintenance

got chickens for 2 year

more stuff

more space

eat worms

kids love them

our neighbors

yeah

V for veggies

yeah veggies of course

I don;t want any emails

this is me

my ting always my thing

veggies vs fruit

I’ll eat fruit

if we are thinking we’re gonna be indoors

grocery stores are what they are

more bean for my buck

ratio or plants

I hate beets by the way

I have that gene

I can eat almost everything else

beat seems like the solid bet

tomato

maybe spits out a

leafy vegetables

leafy greens

grow itself

few things go to seed

thin it out

leafy greens

stay alive

very robust

all of mine are climatized

want me to send

what you said

pigment and nutrition

roll hand in hand

here’s the i

immunity system

informed but unprofessional

natural immune system starting with herbs

herbs

frankly English people

that’s ridiculous

look into herbs

herbs area amazing for so many reasons

immunity is part of that

quite cheap

buying res herbs

in the stores

every

so many are amazing

I have tested this theory multiple times

yet for anyone to prove me wrong

hot take

all herbs in the same color family go with any other herb in that color family

yeah if you are going to put

parsley

sage

oregano

heavy hitters

I did this major

what’s the word

compendium analysis of a lot of different

fresh out of grad school

herbs and immunity

price of them how potent they are and nutritionally dense

my son who is now 4 was in the hospital for

pharmaceutical

first thing

he was in the hospital

no body told us anything

top heavy hitters oregano

all the ones from

I eat it more then anyone else does around my house

I walk through fire around here

there’s other stuff I do too like eat weeds

there’s these claims I didn’t make them up

I will not say that like the successful prevention from the corona virus because that would be bold and reckless and it’s probably not true but you don’t want to be sick in any time in life with any kind of disease, especially now, right.

Having a healthy immune system is one of the best things you can do besides washing your hands right?

Yeah! So add to that

• turmeric
• ginger
• cayenne pepper

those three go together

if anyone wants to have a nice germ free

If anyone wants to have you mind blown and you own a nice germ free astronaut suit Illl show you all of my killer coffee recipes.

garlic too!

super power of the immune system

really cheap

garlic chives

any bulb you put in the ground

eat a little bit of it and you’ll be it’s powerful! I have so much!

Sometimes I just plant them and forget about them suddenly you have to

yeah if it sits for too long it starts to grow in your fridge with that green shoot.

Yea, I know but I haven’t had as much planting them.

I plant them in Oct on Halloween if I can and then harvest in July

start the in the fall m in Oct it’s out of the regular season. You get these shoots sticking out of the ground in the snow it’s amazing!

Start a few now you’ll probably get the chives or put them in and forget about them and 2 years later you’ll be like what is that plant, oh that’s garlic! Cool

that’s fun! some of the healthiest stuff is like garlic

I just talked to Diane Blazek from the National Garden Bureau about victory gardens and they are calling it version 2.0 because they added planting a pollinator border and growing some flowers like chives for the insects and pollinators.

IDK, the going back to garlic

garlic and onions

you can’t just eat like an apple just too powerful. IDK, maybe someone an speak to this but it seems like the same quality that makes it potent to your taste bud perhaps the same quality that make it efficacious to your immune system?

sweeter that’s sort of a rubric that runs in my head, checks out, like weeds, they don’t taste like cotton candy they taste like spinach at best.

They go good together!

they go good with lots of stuff

I’m not trying to rag on them

There are a lot of tasty ways to eat hard to eat things.

C.O.V.I.D.

here’s the D

it’s forced grant me a little clemency on my acronym here,

dehydrate

• in the grocery stores all the nonperishables are selling out fast
• all of the frozen stuff is selling out fast
• the produce as far as I can witness is not selling out so fast, I’ve had very little trouble finding produce

So the trick here, if you want it maybe you don’t need it is to dehydrate

if you have a dehydrator then you probably know what you’re doing but if you don’t but

• if you have an oven
• if you have a freezer

you have the means to take perishable things and make them non perishable

we’re all stocking up

you can stock up on produce

it is possible

I sound like more of a food scientist then I am, because most of life I’m wiping buts and cleaning dishes but

my son is gluten sensitive, he can’t have gluten in it

A lot of the good chips have gluten in it and we try to not eat in a lot of corn and stuff.

Corn is really hard to give up, it is in everything.

it is! no one’s allergic to corn in my family but

the health benefits of corn, at least there’s like none of like corn chips

we started messing around dehydrating things, let’s try this

everything is able to be dehydrated

I made my own spices

• I got a motar and pestle
• why can’t there be a healthy chip?
• how hard could this be?

jackie clear my schedule! my wife’s name is jackie

I bought a bunch of vegetables and shredded them in a food processor

kale kept the stems

used all the parts that you normally don’t eat and give to the chicken

made a liquid

got to increase the viscosity

added some flax seed and chia seed I think, and that’s about it, laid it out like a cake on some dehydrator sheets

green chips

kind of a pain in the but to make, it just takes time. But it’s pretty cool

hot take from that nugget

what makes chips good is salt!

I think, so at the end of the process we just up on some salt and our kids were eating them and loving them!

some families are just UBER healthy, our kids love eating weird stuff.

my kids go to public school! So they get fed candy all the time much to my chagrin but they are still loving these green chips

it takes a little time

it is pretty fun to do

make the batter like we say in the food processor.

• shred it up
• freeze it ad thaw it out later
• you could put it in a smoothie

A we’re using the whole vegetable!

B we still have vegetables from last summer we’ve been able to eat all winter long just cause we froze or dehydrated!

so today I’m gonna do that soon, we have a big batch ready to grow but the dandelions just started to show their little face around here, so our plant is today to top off all of our kale and leek with dandelion to keep us alive through the apocalypse!

I think listeners will love this and say lets go pick those!

The teacher next door to me dehydrates a ton of food. I like that recipe I think it would go good with some cherry tomatoes in it, it reminds me of those fourth of july chips. I think

We thought should we market it this? Then we saw it in our grocery store of course it was like

20 bucks for a bag of chips. It’s very doable.

The hard part about doing it in your oven is you’re usually doing this when vegetables are in full bloom, oven running in the summer when it’s hot.

so what’s the E?

Is there an e? Did I forget the e?

Oh, no you’re right.

the 19

I’m thinking of you want to have this circle of 19 people. You can put it in the comment seciton.

The 19. We legitametly ran out of toilet paper because everybody bought it up.

I hear you we were down to our last roll, so I called the store and she said I had to be at 7:00. there was a line to go in and people were just rude. Then we were on line at the tp aisle and these people come up and are just like what’s going on, and we said this is the line and they were like screw that and just walked up and took some and turned to me and said you better get some honey it’s going quick…

The panic was in NY and we didn’t think it had hit Denver, we’re down to like 3 rolls and we checked like 7 places and called and they laughed us off the phone.

Yeah, I’ve been calling for like 2 weeks now.

I know my wife is really frustrated. Truth be told

we have a bidet,

I could not recommend more but my wife is pregnant and she has a unique relationship with toilet paper so I thought I have to get some TP.

here’s what I did, I got on nextdoor.com I assume some of you stocked up, we’re legitimacy don’t reprimand me for not planning ahead, we’re all doing the best we can.

within 20 minutes I had 8-10 rolls offered to me, some were delivered to the house, after that I had to turn people down, thank you thank you , so kind

it worked within 20 minutes, I just asked for it we got it, and some time after it, I have more neighbors in my phone then any other neighbor. So I texted everyone, and said hey you all, we should have a thread going because we have some neighbors who might need help.

there’s a widow and some older people

be in communication and everyone was like good call, the next day I’m talking to one of my neighbors

And I’m like we have

this neighbor who could fix anything and a navy vet who could protect us if that came to try to steal and I was saying I’m gonna be a liability to this situation

He said dude your super power is having the humidly to ask for toilet people and having all of us in your phone.

no one of have each other in our phone

that was my 19!

I was gonna talk about community

spreading the joy

being less busy

going on more walks

planting some flowers

cause that seems huge right now

in times of big

flip my whole yard

people will steal it

I’m gonna grow more then plants

Compost

Oeuf (french for egg a plug for chickens)

Vegetable

Immune System

Dehydrate

hypen 19

Get out there spread some love! Live locally! How’s that?

I think listeners are out there feeling more connected to everyone out there listening and the other Green Future Growers and I will put up the other episode October 18, 2018 when you shared your edible weeds talk!

I think Americans don’t like uncertainty, people are out of work. My uncle just talked to me on the phone, the last day with my student we had this little moment where I said, you know my mom was a kid there was the polio epidemic and my aunt lived with polio, she had one leg shorter then the other all her life and we beat that and we will get this together.

One last plug, Jackie you cover your ears. Get out there and send a couple of bucks her way and this is a cool resource.

Awww. thank you. That’s really sweet, you can buy a copy of the Organic Oasis Guidebook for your neighbor.

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