95: Growing Microgreens | Sarah Harding | Buggy Road Farm | Whitefish, MT

LovingFarmersMrkt

Buggy Road Farm is a microfarm specializing in duck eggs, asparagus, plant starts and microgreens. They use growing methods in line with their ethics: No chemical sprays, pesticides, herbicides, GMOs, antibiotics, hormones, or cages.

Tell us a little about yourself.

I am a mother of 2 children, age 6 and 10, happily married, my husband and I bought this land about 11 years ago, built a house and have been  adding on ever since. We didn’t start out, farming the land, I was an avid gardener, John financed my hobby for the first 6-8 years, until I made that shift from gardener to farmer. Now we both farm full time here.

I’m excited to hear about how your growing microgreens in Whitefish?! We’re still not anywhere making money yet.

That’s the hard part! :~)

WE finally drilled a well, this year, and Mike planted like a minifarm, and I thought that was gonna grow a ton of food, and we definitely grew a lot, enough for us and some extra but as far as 20 CSA shares? IDK?!!

We grow ’em year round. We built a greenhouse on the south side of a shop that John built. It’s insulated. We got a bunch of sliding glass doors from Craigslist. There are 6 set of sliding glass doors in there, it has a polycarbonate roof, and a gravel floor. We start the microgreens twice a week, and move them out to the greenhouse and then we grow them and harvest them twice a week! The microgreens pretty much pay the bills. 

The Duck eggs? We love having animals, and we like ducks, their eggs people really value! A lot of people who are allergic to chicken eggs, can have duck eggs. So the people who want duck eggs really want duck eggs! But we don’t make a ton of money, I think we break even on them, and that’s not including our time. Farmers can never really count.

So it pays for the food though and to have the ducks? So how many ducks do you have?

We keep up to 40, we just finished butchering some old ducks, so we only have 15. We have more arriving in 2 weeks, we’ll raise them through the winter and hopefully they’ll have baby ducks in the spring.

Where do you get ducks from?

The big hatcheries hatch chicks and ducks, they pop them in the mail. They arrive at post office at like 5 in the morning! And they call and we drive down there and we pick them up and you can hear the chicks chirping!

OMGoodness! This is a children’s book waiting to happen.

Quite a few hatcheries. The chicks when they’re born have enough of yolk in their system to survive for a day or 2, 3 is pushing it, as long as they get food and water they pretty much thrive straight out of the mailbox.

I was thinking of getting a duck. I had a guest Amelia Schimetz who had a baby duck and it sounded cute. We just got sheep. Kind of a new experience. Now our chickens just get out they have completely figured out how to go everywhere. They have free roam! I was reading in the article in Flathead Living you sell a lot of micrograms to restaurants?

We do! We sell to high end restaurants. We wanted it to get out to just everyone, so we sell them in green 3 oz packages, to grocery stores, so the local healthful stores, and even a major chain store here in Whitefish.

I would think that would go good in Whitefish!

We have a really good following. We’re lucky to have a really supportive community.

Do you want to tell people what a microgreen is? I wouldn’t have known if I didn’t just read it.

A lot of people call our microgreens sporuts. Many of your listeners, have probably heard of sprouts, and probably sprouted things in a jar, when you eat them, you eat the root and stem and pale underdeveloped leaves. So that’s a sprout.

What we grow is, we have trays of organic potting soil and we seed them. We feed them, they grow for 2 weeks in the soil, then we harvest them with scissors, so you are not eating the root, they are grown like baby lettuce would be grown out in the field. Then we harvest them.

We mix them, Vitality Mix that has a lot of brassicas in it, like cabbage, kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, bok choy, and we put some pea shoots on top. Then we have a Spicy <ix, the exhilarating mix, couple of different kinds of raddishes, and couple of kinds of mustards and arugula.

The chefs love them because they are tiny but perfect and beautiful and flavor and color and they’re just really vibrant! They use them a lot of times to garnish their plates! Our retail customers they love them on sandwiches, salads! Our family puts them on everything! Spaghetti! Chili!

I saw that lovely picture on your Facebook page.

BrideNGroomSalad

It was for a friends wedding!

How did you end up with microgreens? Where did you learn about that . One thing let me make sure, the vitality mix, is the sprouts, not something you’re putting in the soil?

We grow a flat of kale, and a flat of broccoli, and then we harvest them and mix them together, and that is our Vitality Mix.

How did you learn how to do that?

People ask me that all the time, but I don’t remember where I first heard about them. Here at the community college in Kalispell, a lovely man, Bill McClaren, I think was his name. Bill McClaren, at the Community College, offered a class at FVCC about Microgreens. I believe it was just one session, in it he taught us about microgreens, how to plant them, gave us seeds and soil and trays. He mentioned that his granddaughter is a farmer in Bozeman and she grew and sells 200 flats in Bozeman. It was something I had already been thinking about would be good for us. When he said that getting struck by lightening. And I thought “That’s what we’re gonna do!”

Awesome!

That was the plan! I came home from that and we started growing a whole bunch and built the greenhouse from there.

Microgreens are so healthy for you! It’s so fresh!

They are grown a little longer and they are grown with sunlight, so the plant actually photosynthesizes! Sprouts are usually grown in water on your kitchen counter. The leaves aren’t green and developed. It also doesn’t have as high of risk of food borne illness, because the bacteria does have the potential to grow in the watery, tightly-packed environment.

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

Well, my dad loves gardening, so that was farther back then I can really clearly remember, we had a garden. I grew up in San Diego, a southern California garden with southern artichokes, and lovely warm things. Yeah, helping my dad, he was a high school teacher, so in the summer times he would take on landscaping jobs for other people.

What does organic gardening/earth friendly mean to you?

I think that it’s not super complicated having respect for the water and the soil and the life in the soil and the life on top of the soil and the air. Just not doing anything, doing no harm. It takes a lot of thought, you have to be careful with what you bring in, there is so many pollutants from chemicals and petrochemicals that are in the materials that you could potentially bring onto your farm, like manure, or straw or hay or feed, or even top soil. You have to ask a lot of questions, you have to know which questions to ask to make sure you are not unintentionally polluting  your little piece of land that you are given the honor of being the steward of.

Do you have any questions listeners should ask?

For us, knowing our fellow farmers is important, we know the people that raised the hay for our rabbits and our ducks and chickens, we know that it hasn’t been sprayed, we know that they are doing a fantastic job taking care of their soil, and the same with the straw. We brought it from a fellow AERO member, we know that it’s organic

Straw is especially is tricky, here in the Flathead Valley a lot of farmers spray with a persistent herbicide that lasts up to 7 years. It passes unchanged through the animal’s digestive system. So if the animal. Say your friend has a horse and she feeds her horse hay and we don’t know where that hay came from and the horse eats the hay, the hay has been sprayed with this chemical. I believe a lot of times it goes under the name millennium, but it has probably 15 different trade names it goes under. So that chemical passes unchanged through the horse to the manure, then anything you put the manure now has that chemical in it. So you couldn’t grow peas, in that because they would shrivel, if it had enough in there.  It affects tomatoes, all broad leaf plants, besides the grasses they are looking for when they are growing hay. It’s complicated!

Peggy Jane Ousley one of my first guests was the first one to talk about that. I’ve had a while wrapping my head around the weed-free concept, I think free … chemical-free but that’s not it. That’s part of why we got sheep to expand the garden we need good manure to put on there. Finding fresh fertilizer in your 

We pay a lot of attention to the microbial life in our soil. So doing things like composting, even we call it “Our Vegan compost,” because  we don’t put any animal products in there, on the chance potentially it could have been contaminated. So we put weeds, leaves, brewers mash, and chaff from our local coffee roaster, and coffee grounds. All those things are introducing these microorganisms. Also we do a lot of compost tea. We take the worm castings from our worm bins, put it in a five gallon bucket in a little cheesecloth with water, with a fish tank aerator and make this tea that we can spray and that introduces good microbial life into the soil.The theory is if you have enough of the right fungus, and microbial life that you really don’t need a lot of fertilizer except of the humus that it introduces. 

Mike makes some kind of compost tea with the chicken manure, and wrap it up in the cheese cloth, and when he opens the lid, I’m always like how do you stand that?

That’s good stuff! It’s really important to aerate it to encourage the good bacteria and not let the bad bacteria grow.

I’ll have to ask him about that. You put a fish tank aerator in it.

One of those little bubblers, tied a washer to it a porous stone, so it bubbles from the bottom up.

Who or what inspired you to start using organic techniques?

I’ve always been pretty crunchy. Starting in high school I spent a lot of time at my best friend’s house, and they were what most people would call “hippies”. They had a big garden, and we cooked a lot and did batiking. I was always attracted to the natural healthy way.

Here in Whitefish, Pam Gerwe from Purple Frog Gardens taught meabout the way natural, more then any other one person about the actual way in which you go about being natural.

 

AsparagusPlanting

Tell us about something that grew well this year.

We pretty excited our Asparagus is going well. We planted 1 year old crowns 2 years ago. This coming spring will be our first harvest. We harvested a tiny bit last year which wet our taste for fresh We planted a 1/4 acre! Hoping we get a lot of asparagus this spring!

We have 5 or 6 different vatieites. I’d say the purple asparagus is the most beautiful. It’s pretty striking.

What’d you say crowns?

Another farmer plants seeds and grows them for a year, and pulls up the crowns, from what I’m imagining is in their beautiful sandy soil, they box em up and sell them to us. So we are buying one year old crowns, we get a one year head start, so the success rate seems a little higher. Virtually all of our crown sprouted and is growing well.

So next spring you’ll have them.

We planted quite a few crowns. We’re hoping for a couple hundred pounds over an 8 week period!

So now did you plant them spread out over 8 weeks or how’s that going to work?

We planted them all at the same time, they’re in rows, double rows, dig a trench and then you plant them at whatever the prescribed amount is. Right now they look like a mini forest of fronds tall ferny fronds, most are about 6 feet tall. We’ll mow all that down, then in the early spring, when the earth is just waking up. In May, the crowns will push up out of the earth, We’ll wait till they are about 6 inches tall, and well cut off every spear and we just keep harvesting them. Then let them grow up to seed for next year.

We have like 6 asparagus growing. They never really did very well. When they come up they don’t make it a foot or two, I just eat them, they are so delicious.

yes they are delicious raw.

I always think we have a major shortage. there are some fresh wild asparagus in Montana but not enough.. I’ll bet the restaurants love them too.

We did a little bit of research before we decided to invest a lot of time and money in this project. The other farmers said, we sell every single stick we can grow. Hardest part is to keep it weeded. Asparagus don’t compete well with weeds especially perennial weeds like quack grass. Keep out of the asparagus patch. Totally true for us. We can sell every stick we grow so far. But the weeds are the difficult part.

So how do you deal with them?

We spent so many hours just hand weeding. Early on when the weeds are tiny, we use a stirrups hoe to knock off the babies, just under the surface of the soil. We also did a path of a layer of cardboard, and then woodchips in the paths, just to try to smother a portion of the weeds. And then just hand pulling over and over!

That’s a lot of hand pulling a 1/4 acre but that is gonna be worth it. I think you’re gonna like those!

We’re excited about it. It’s gonna be really good. It’s gonna be a ton of hard work. It’s gonna be super intense because we;re gonna be harvesting every single day for 8 weeks. IT’s a whole farm season worth of harvesting 8 weeks. So all the marketing and delivering is condensed into a short window! Hopefully it will pay off and be worth it!

I think it will, I think you have some good karma on your side.

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

We didn’t even finish this season before I was already excited for next season. We are gonna expand our edible flower selection for next year,that was something we just kind of did a tiny bit of and the response was fantastic. It seems like the customers that really like microgreens also like edible flowers. So that is something we’re gonna do more of and also our cut flowers.

So what kind of flowers?

This year we just did violas and nasturtiums and lemon gem marigolds and bachelors buttons, and calendula. But next year we’re gonna try a whole list!

Just? That sounds like a lot!

I’m learning more so we’re gonna be trying and sampling as far as taste.

most of those, except for the calendula, they tasted delicious!

nasturtiums are sweet and peppery and beautiful!

Lemongem marigolds have a very lemony aftertaste. The violas are almost pepperminty and really delicate and delicious! So we’re excited to see what else we can grow for edible flowers. We’re gonna expand cut flowers, we’re really expand our selection of our cut flowers, but I don’t think most of our customers will see most of that because we plant to sell most of those wholesale. I really like selling directly to the florists and let them fuss over making the bouquets, and flowers just gorgeous and beautiful.

I thought about being a flower farmer, so actually I planted 750 sunflowers this year to see if I could cut them and be consistent, I realized that 750 sunflowers is like nothing. I need to be like 750 sunflowers a week,  I could have brought a few bouquets in my house every few days, but as far as taking them anywhere I never actually cut any. I decided I would save them for the birdseed and the birds ate them after all, I got a lot of pictures to paint.

I put the first batch in on Earth Day in April, then the next ones the middle of May and last some at the first of June. The Martha Stewart ones that I put in first bloomed last because they were the biggest and tallest. They were huge 12 feet tall and the huge giant heads. The ones that were most likely to pic. My husband said why don’t you plant the birdseed these packets are expensive. Then they didn’t last in the vases. Lisa Ziegler, suggested pro-cut flowers. She plants 1000 a week.  She’s in Williamsburg. She plants 1000 sunflowers a week. So 750 still just weren’t enough. She cuts 10,000 stems a week during her high season. There were some that were really pretty, they had some deep dark black centers, some Burpees but they came with only 25 in a pack.

They’re pretty expensive. We found that with our tomatoes, if we put plant them when other people are planting them really early. Or we can wait till March or April, the ones we plant early just hang out, and the ones we plant later end up catching up and surpassing them. It’s maybe our cold and the length of our days. Planting them later is better for us, because we don’t have to take care of them as long and it seems better for the plants because they just took off later.

I decided I should have planted them all earlier, around Earth Day. Everything came on the middle of August.

Sunflowers are really cold.  You’re in the banana belt aren’t you.

They call it Tropical Montana here sometimes. My husband was worried about. They’re pretty hardy, they’ll grow like spinach. Eureka’s ahead of us, we’re south of town, so Eureka’s stuff blooms 3 weeks ahed of us and then I have friends in Trego that are 3 weeks behind us and so on down the line.

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

There’s always failures. That happens pretty early on with our seed starting, I’m thinking with our cut flowers, a flat that fails to thrive, it’s not getting the conditions it needs, It’s not warm enough or sunny enough, or bad seed. So we didn’t have as many varieties as we had hoped.

That’s encouraging to listeners the failures are not a big deal. Something you’re gonna forget about.

I’m not aftraid to kill things If you’re not killing things, you’re not trying hard enough. We’ve kind of backed off enough a bit from trying to push our zone. We’re not trying tobuy zone 4 or 5 fruit trees because planting fruit trees is a pretty big hassle. So all of the fruit trees we buy now are all solidly zone 3. They’re not early bloomers. Because that’s what gets our fruit when the blossoms bloom early and then when we get our spring frost, and all the blossoms die and we don’t get any fruit that year.

I like that advice that there are trees out there that don’t bloom early.

… and vines lots of fruiting kiwi and mulberry There’s a lot of vines that are technically in our zone Because the zone is based on our winter lows, but because of our late spring frost they just don’t make it.

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

IDK about easy to grow, but generally successful,I really like growing squash. We don’t really sell our squash. I just grow it because it’s generally successful, and something about the huge plants and the huge leaves and the huge squash really feels successful! You get this 15 lb blue hubbard squash and you feel like you did something right.

I love looking at the squash plants, I like take my camera down there and like getting down low and imagine little fairies that I’m gonna write a book about someday. We don’t buy pumpkins, they don’t do very well.

We grow small pumpkins,.We don’t grow the big ones at the store. We grow special vaireties, most of our seed buying and our outdoor plants through Fedco out of Maine. They have a lot of cold hardy vegetables. They write the length of season right on there so we try not to choose anything less then 90 dayss unless we’re willing to plant it early and baby sit it.

We get the Microgreens thorough Johnnys.

Fedco, they’re committed to no GMO seed, lots of organics, ecologiallcy raised, they know their farmers. They have a seed labeling system, each variety has a number, and number 1 will be organically grown by a small farmer,#2 will be like organically by a large conglomerate, there are a couple of numbers we generally avoid 5 &6 company known to be involved in GMO. Then we just boycott them. So you know where your seeds are coming from.

GMOomg

We talked about that movie GMO OMG! Last week it played in Eureka. People will like that I think because it got a lot of downloads. It seems like listeners must be interested, the lady who came on last spring got a lot of downloads last spring too. So they will probably want to check out that Fedco.

We usually order at the beginning of January. Fedco‘s really neat because they offer volume discounts if you get some people together, the more you order the more you save and they are already more affordable. Much more affordable then Home Depot.

I’ll bet people are thinking about hosting a potluck with the seed catalog out, and submitting a  bulk seed order.

Save yourself a week to read the seed catalog, not glossy, it doesn’t have big pictures, so you really have to read and imagine the plant description. They also use a lot of humor and a little political. Fun catalog! Really entertaining.

Fun thing to do in the winter, the days are already getting short. It seems like forever before the sun comes up!

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

I wouldn’t want to steer anybody away from anything. I feel like people are always doing things they say can’t be done. I love here, people are growing sweet corn, which other people said it can’t be done. When we started planting fruit trees, and people would say you can’t grow fruit in Whitefish, you can’t get a red tomatoes in Whitefish!

I don’t want to be a naysayer! Go for it! Grow it! Try it! Kill it who cares!

That girl Amelia  grew sweet potatoes. Ryan Pesch is growing an hour east of Fargo

We’re humans, we have big brains we can use them for good like figuring out how to get a red tomato!

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

I pretty much like a lot of things about it. My kids, Ill be like “I’m going out to play” and one will turn to the other and say “when she says play she means work.” I like it all, opening leaf bags, other things people might dread, mowing! I really like mowing! Wheelbarrow rows!

mowing…

MicrogreenBoxes

What is your favorite activity to do in the garden.

I really love planting seeds. Which is a good fit with the microgreens cause I get to do it 2xs a week, for a long time. I think seeds are such a miracle, cause they’re these tiny little balls, they transform and they just jump out of the  ground and become this beautiful plant if you let them, but we don’t let them, we chop them off!

Lettuce seeds are one of my least favorite to plant because they are so small. You don’t find that a challenge?

No, I think they’re amazing! The transformation that it goes with a little water is incredible!

Have you seen that movie GMO OMG!? Because the little boy in it is just like you. That’s how the father starts out, is his son is this little boy, who’s 3 and his favorite thing is to collect seeds, he loves seeds. The whole family goes on this journey to see, what is a GMO? And what’s going on? and they end up going to Monsanto… and it all starts with his little son’s love of seeds. 

That’s great.

Tell us about the best crop you ever grew.

Every spring we start way too many tomatoes, those seeds are just so tempting! We have friends who collect and save seeds, and they give us zip lock baggies full of seeds so we end up just starting a ridiculous amount of tomatoes. This year, we grew lots of red tomatoes in Whitefish because it was an early warm spring which turned into a hot summer which now turned into a beautiful warm fall! We grew a lot of tomatoes and peppers which are generally hit and miss in this climate.

BuggyRoadFlowers

But even though the we grew a lot of tomatoes and peppers, our most successful our kids! It’s such a  special time for us to nurture our little people!

We might some day be better farmers, but right now its the best time to nurture and raise our little kids and crop of children we have growing!

So we had a pretty early freeze even though it’s been a warm summer? How’d you get them to turn red? Ours definitley didn’t turn red.

We have a little greenhouse, and we also have a good size high tunnel, in our garden we had that early freeze, our garden turned into a jungle this summer, it was full of sunflowers and kale and they just sort of formed a protective canopy over the tomatoes and kept the frost off long enough to ripen.

If you grow a ton of tomato plants did you sell them in the spring? To me it always seems hard to find organic plants. I guess I don’t shop in Whitefish….

We took a bunch of tomato plants to market in the beginning, but we didn’t sell a bunch of tomatoes. Once we started getting the red tomatoes this summer, we boxed em up and took em to the health food store and restaurants to help us get rid of the bounty. And we’ve been eating tomato soup.

Mmm do you have a recipe?

No, I’m not a good cook! We put a bunch of tomatoes in the blender with some basil or garlic or whatever else we have, put it in the pot, maybe some spicy peppers if Wesley’s not around. I’ll put cream in there if I’m in a creamy mood we eat pretty simply.

I like to put rice in tomato soup. Creamy tomato rice soup. 

Yeah! That sounds delicious

What is the best gardening advice you have ever received?

My friend Pam Gerwe told me, I was saying do you have any scraps of wire laying around, I’m gonna put some fences around my fruit trees. She said “Sarah, knowing how much you garden you should just fence your whole property”

And I thought “No way! That’s gonna be way to expensive that’s ridiculous!”

But a year later, my little hoops were not keeping the deer out. It was the best investment so far!

Yep, we struggled that, we had little beds with small teepee wire things, eventually mike fenced off 260′ of fence. Then he fenced off the new mini-farm. We have 6 foot high fence everywhere. 

I would also recommend, we put up the back mesh deer fence, the black plastic, the invisible fence, they just punch through it. So now on one side of our property I call it “franken-fence” cuz its zip ties. I would recommend investing a little more and getting the 10 foot wire game fence all the way around.

I think ours is 6′ tall but it works. Those Whitefish deer are unique. I swear they are always walking in the crosswalk.

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

My daughter raised rabbits with 4H, so she was in the fair last year, it was a very fun experience. It’s my favorite thing to walk through the expo building and look at all the vegetables, but I’ve never gotten around to entering.

My hard thing is your taking your prize winning best vegetables and then by the time you go get them on Sunday they’re not looking so good.

You’re bestest wilted zuccini!

Yes and our prize winning eggplants this year! We ended up with lots of eggplant anyway so it didn’t matter, but usually we don’t have that many.

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.

John, my husband, he’s not a tool. He’s definitely the one thing if I had to move I would take with me. Other then that, I am gonna say, the stirrup hoe it’s super useful but nothing beats a good shovel unless it’s a good pitchfork! IDK, I like all three of those quite bit. I’m not garden gloves wearer. I’d leave those behind.

No, they’d be going with me. I thought you’d say a wheelbarrow, when I first came up with this question I thought a shovel, but then I decided it would be a wheelbarrow. 

I think I could put it on something and drag it thought. The newest tool to me is the stirrup hoe, found it at the thrift store last winter or so, and I got to use it and it was just really fun! The new toy! Maybe that’s why it’s on the list.

A couple of people have said that was their favorite tool. Yeah, I think for sure a shovel, it would be hard to grow a garden without a shovel.

Eating or harvesting vegetables or fruit on time? 

We do have an extra freezer, so for a lot of things I figure out how to freeze them, whether that’s grating them and freezing them and even with eggs, you can crack eggs in a mason and beat them and freeze them. With zuchini I grate and then freeze it raw, then you can add it to soups, or crockpots or whatever.

For fruit I like, I make apple butter and plum spread.

For tomatoes, I puree them and then put them in yogurt containers in the freezer.

I freeze a ton of raspberries, make a lot of basil into pesto. Freeze that.

I’m big on freezing and just eating, when it’s in season we eat a lot of it! When it’s gone hopefully we put some in the freezer.

I’ve been so frustrated with yogurt containers, what’s with these tin foil lids? 

We buy big ones, even the really big ones, those work really well, we make bone broth out of chickens or ducks. It’s  pot size you can let it defrost a little and then dump it into the pot!

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

I’d love to say I dehydrate and I can and do all these things, but truthfully, I don’t. I would love to dehydrate some of our apples, we make a lot into juice and the ducks love the pulp.

The only thing I actually can is pickles, we had a successful pickle year because of the heat! So we did 75 jars or something like that!

Yep, we had a lot of pickles. 

It seems like a Herculean effort when you have a lot going on to add canning to our list, but a couple of late nights!

Do you have any special techniques for cooking weird or unusual foods?

This morning we harvested and butchered 22 ducks, they’re quite old, most of them are about 4 years old, which for a duck is getting up there. So they’re not gonna be delicoius roasting duck, so we pulled all the meat off of them, and we’re gonna duck sausage out of them. Add vegetables to our sausage. We’re gonna put some beet and carrot and squash! Package it up ourselves and freeze it!

A favorite recipe you like to cook from the garden?

We cook a lot from the garden, I’m not a recipe type of cook, I’m more of a what do we have? Let’s put it all together kind of cook. Weat a lot of venison, doesn’t have a name sauted vegetables with a steak, ground meat.

No I don’t have a favorite recipe, it’s

Different every time. WE eat really well. You can’t really go wrong when you have super high quality ingredients. Just put a little salt on it and eat it.

I just like salt and pepper. I don’t even put butter on corn etc.

A favorite internet resource?

I’m not a very skilled computer person. I do use the internet. I think there’s a group on Facebook, the Flower Farmers. I learn a lot from them. Floret Flowers.

Wow in Washington! My friend Dacia who has a business Simply Josephine just sold them a whole bunch of aprons!

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

I aspire to read a lot I do read a lot more during the winter let me tell you what is on my nightstand right now.

ResilientAG

Resilient Ag by Laura Lengnick, she spoke at the AERO conference,

my Johnny’s Seed catalog

ResilientGardener

the Resilient Gardener  by Carol Deppe

FlowersForSale

Cut Flowers an older Bootstrap Guide Flowers for Sale

JoelSalatin

I really love Joel Salitan, I’ve read all his books and am inspired by him.

I really enjoy reading, I kind of consumed most gardening books at the library.

BAckyardMarketGardening

Market Gardening by Andy Lee

Joy of Gardening

the Joy of Gardening and

HowToGrowMoreVeg

 How to grow More Vegetables

GArdenersGuideToBetterSoil

Gardener’s Guide to Better Soil

The fedco catalog!

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?

Backyard Market Gardening Book, Andy Lee his tone in it is really positive and really encouraging. I think if people start with, they will be inspired to start with whatever they have. Just start and start learning and trying and making mistakes and learning from those.

I think it was in the

Somebody said you don’t know how to care for 20 acres until you know how to take care of 1 acre. So don’t worry if you don’t have a piece of land, just start

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’m going to talk to you about something that is really close to our heart. We are part of a care farming program in the Flathead started by Martin Fisher. We have 3 client that come to our farm once a week, they are disabled in some way, whether it is a dramatic brain injury some seniors come and they feel capable, they feel part of something, it’s really empowering they’re learning about food systems, and nature, and learning skills they could apply to a job, and that would be something that I would encourage people through A+ health care, they need people donate their time,

they need drivers,

folks who can’t get out of their houses to get them to the farms, they do a spartan race for these folks at Centennial farm in Kalispell, getting the people who weren’t born as lucky as we are getting them in touch with nature, and in touch with food, and make better life choices.

It’s the only one in America, they’ve done it in Europe, and in the Netherlands and now they started one in Switzerland I think? I’m so proud to be a part of it.

In a lot of ways we’re ground breakers. Jeannette Rankin, first woman elected to Congress in the US, and  AEROMT and I was talking to Neva.

From my interview with Neva Hassanien, episode 92:

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“There are a lot of efforts to increase access to nutritious food across Montana including in the remote areas. Food Corps is a program that helps to do just that. It was developed by Chrissy McMullan here in Montana, although now it is a national program, so Montana has a lot to be proud of.  Basically Food Corps is connected to Americorps Vista, young people mostly who want to serve, who want to help with food related issues can apply to join Food Corps.”

And of course we have Denise Juneau is the superintendent of Schools in the state of Montana who started Graduation Matters which is spreading around the US to improve graduation rates.

I was thinking what you said…

That’s really true!

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

How do we connect with you?

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Buggy Road Farm Facebook Page

 

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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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