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JM Fortier ~ Grower’s & Co.

Welcome to the Green Organic Garden. It is Wednesday, December 16, 2020, and I have the most amazing guest on the line, the world renowned gardener, he’s going to rock us with his new venture Growers & Co.here today to talk to us isJM Fortier, welcome to the show JM!

1m 21s

JM Fortier

Well, it’s so exciting. I feel like there’s fireworks coming out. Hi. I’m so happy to be there. Oh my goodness. Well, I am so happy to have you here and to talk about everything you have going on your new venture withGrowers & Co. your, I love the t-shirt that says small-scale farmers are changing the world. And I hope we’re going to talk about that a little bit today and just, but I do have a ton of new listeners since the last time you were here. So just in case they were like, who is this? I don’t know how they could, but if they are, do you, what, tell them a little bit about yourself.

2m 1s

JM Fortier

Sure. So, so people call me JM, so I go by JM and I started a small organic farm we’re in 2004. So that was a while back. And then that farm, the fame to claim of that farm was that we were farming an acre and a half, which we still do today. And we use no tractor. We use hand tools and then we go to farmer’s market and then we have CSA and we deliver it to the local food co-op and we’ve been able to make a living farming, this small piece of land for, you know, almost two decades now.

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

And eventually I wrote a book called the market gardener, which described the strategies that we use to make the farm, you know, productive and also financially viable.

2m 48s

JM Fortier

And the market gardener is now translated in 10 languages and it’s sold over 2000 and 200,000 copies. And a lot of people know me for this, you know, they’ve read the book and I think it has helped them just figure out proper ways to start a small farm or just like learn new gardening, gardening practices, or learn about tools, new tools that they perhaps didn’t know existed and how to use them. And so that was, that was kind of when people started to know a little bit of who I am, because I was promoting the book and people are reading my work.

3m 26s

JackieMarie Beyer

And so many of my guests who are market gardeners are following your steps. Exactly. And they’re talking about their success. I mean, I heard about you from Joyce Pinson back, I think in episode 45. And she was just raving about you back then. And I immediately bought the bucket. My husband has poured through it and just we’ve put some of the things like he’s desperately trying to build a pond and just, we just have a little mini farm. But 200,000 copies! I went to ghostwriter school this summer to learn how to write. I’m trying to write this book called Rockstar Millennial. And he said that like a self-published book usually sells 300 and a traditionally published book sells 2000. You are 100 times at 200,000 and that’s because you are changing the world and teaching people, how small farmers should he want to touch on that? How are small farmers changing the world? Small scale farmers.

4m 20s

JM Fortier

Yeah. Well, you know, that’s wow. I’ve met, you know, I’ve been very fortunate because, because of the book, you know, I didn’t, first of all, at first I was kind of touring. I was invited to talk about my work and talk about the books. So every time that happens, I go and visit farms and visit farmers. And that was in Canada. Then it was in the US, then it was in Europe. Then it was in Australia and New Zealand and then, you know, Central America. And it’s just like all over the place. And then every time I would see farms and farmers, you know, the local food system, it’s happening, people in that community are getting together at the farmer’s market. They’re talking about the local foods.

4m 60s

JM Fortier

It’s bringing people together.

And the people that are on these farms, they work super hard. It’s never easy. Some of them get this discouraged, but they keep that it. And it’s just, it’s so full of hope. And it’s so full of it’s. So counter-culture with regards to, you know, you know, big ag and big super stores and Amazon and everything is disconnected from everything.

But then when you go back to a local food farm, you’re like, okay, I’m buying salad from you and you’re growing them and we meet each other and it’s all positive.

It’s all ecological. And the money’s kept inside the community so positive. And so, you know, I knew that, but everywhere I go, it’s the same.

5m 44s

JM Fortier

It’s so positive. And then the more of these small farms are out there. The better the community is connecting with these farms. And then it just creates a strong local food scene. And everywhere I’ve been that I’ve seen a strong local food scene, it’s a happening place on many levels!

And so for me, when I look at environmental disasters and climate change and, and, and corporations, and just the takeover of so many of our common goods for me, the bright hope, you know, the Jedis of this struggle are the farmers that are doing the work!

6m 28s

JackieMarie Beyer

And, and absolutely, I mean, I, I think I sent you an email about this article I read in Rodale’s, we’re getting gardening magazine back in 2000 where they talks about the problem is not that we don’t have enough food today. It’s distributing that food. And that’s how small scales farmers can really, I think, make that change because it’s the distribution. And with small scale farmers, we don’t have to have this giant distribution. We don’t have to ship our tomatoes 20,000 miles and pick them before they’re ripe and before they have the proper nutritional value, we can, you know, get them from our local farmer.

7m 8s

JackieMarie Beyer

And it’s building that community and talking about hope like Mandy Gerth talked about hope, you know, she was like, it’s us crazy farmers, but it’s also the crazy customers who come and support us and building those communities. And she follows your practices. You know, she has the BCS tractor and they have the same bros and the same length. And like, those are some of the, you are talking about that, like some of the cause that’s one of the things that I think I’ve heard a lot of the people talk about. Like, you have like a, a standard link row, right. And like a size of a bed and specific walking polices, you walk in places you, you plant and don’t plant, am I right?

7m 50s

JM Fortier

Yeah. So when, when we, when we started our farm, we didn’t want to use a tractor. Not because we didn’t like tractors, although we don’t really, we’re not tractor people, but because we had, you know, under two acres to farm. And so what we tried to do was maximize, you know, square footage so that everything would be planted. And when you’re a mechanized farmer, a lot of the space is for, you know, turning at the end of the row and just attractors. They, they end up eating a lot of space in this spacings between each row is really wide because you’re cultivating tools are, you know, adapted for larger scale production.

8m 33s

JM Fortier

And when I started farming, a lot of the small-scale farmers were kind of using tractor scale techniques on small acreage. And it just, it wasn’t a good fit.

So what we did was maximize we started to, first of all, we adopted a permanent bed strategy. So like most home gardeners, you know, we have permanent beds and then we don’t plow chisel and remake them every year. We just we’ve made them once we’ve hilled them. And then we’re just cultivating on those beds, but the beds are 30 inch wide. And the pathways where we walk. So we don’t trample the beds. They’re 18 inch wide, which is a 48 inch center to center bed, four feet center to center bed.

9m 19s

JM Fortier

And that has become a standard that we use and a standard that all thousands of market gardeners are using now. And within the 30 inches, which is really the bed where we plant, we really use close spacings. So we’ll, we’ll go from 12 two to one 12 to down to one row for the different crops. You know, radishes is going to be 12 rows on 30 inch. Beans is going to be one row, but, and then you have cauliflowers, all the different crops have a different grid pattern, but it’s all on 30 inches. So that creates somewhat of a, how can I say, like a parameter to, from which to work with.

10m 4s

JM Fortier

And that’s really the difference.

We’ve created like a constraint, which is the bed with, and then we’ve worked inside that constraint. And we quickly figured out how to optimize production in that 30 inch bed.

the proper tools

And, and then the tools, the proper tools, the broad fork, the wheel hose, the cultivated POWs, the wire weeders, the seeders… All, all tools that are really, you know, hand push or handmade or made for humans. And in that bed that has become kind of our whole ecosystem to operate from which, and then listening to me talking like this, it sounds very esoteric, but it’s not. It’s just like, instead of doing whatever we have, you know, we have guidelines of, okay, so this is the bandwidth, this is the spacing for this crop.

This is the seeder for exactly the perfect density for that. This is the, we used to cultivate this crop and we’ve standardized a lot of things.

And, and when I published my book, you know, a lot of people adopted these standards. So now most, most market gardeners are working in: 

• four feet center to center bed
• they have black tarps,
• they use BCS walk behind tractors,
• they use wheel hoes,
• they use push seeders 

You know, we haven’t invented anything. And there were people doing the same thing before us, for sure. But I think my, my book and my work has popularized it, if I can say that.

11m 36s

JackieMarie Beyer

But did you invent the wire weeder thing or like, didn’t you say there were two new tools that you designed that were coming out?

11m 46s

JM Fortier

Yeah. Like when you talked, when we started the podcast together, you talked aboutGrowers & Co. andGrowers & Co. is where now I, you know, we do, you know, I am the editor of a bi-yearly magazine where we talk about small-scale farming change in world, people that are doing it, why it’s important and just like gardeners and chefs, and just so many people involved. And we tell their stories, and it’s such a beautiful work! I’m inviting all your listeners to, to check it out. It’s, you know, the Growers Magazine, it’s at Growers & Co.and it’s, it’s amazing. It’s amazing. It’s amazing. But it’s also a farm where, and tool company, where all the designs that I wanted to do are now available, because you were talking about the wire weeders, we’re talking about other tools.

12m 34s

JM Fortier

These are all tools that have been around. I’ve seen them in Europe, Eliot Coleman, who was really my mentor and somebody that I really like, you know, he gave me prototypes for those wire weeders that he messed with and that he found in Switzerland, like 30 years ago. And, and so I, I just, at one point with Growers, I now have a business that can, you know, make the tools and, and, you know, ideally make it profitable enough so that we can make more tools and just make new designs and better serve mostly home gardeners. Also with these tools that are professionally made, but that are, you know, you can’t find in hardware stores or they’re not available.

13m 15s

JM Fortier

These are, you know, these are specifically tailored to our needs as market gardeners. And, and, you know, the broad fork is probably the most popular one that people know home gardeners know about the broadfork, but, you know, the one that we make is the one, and I’ve been using the brought forks for 20 years. And for me, there’s a difference between one and the other. They’re not all the same. They’re not all created equal. And so I’m kind of a geek that way. And so all the tools with Growers now are really the tools that, that I’ve designed and that I love.

13m 50s

JackieMarie Beyer

And it’s so true. Like I just happened to stumble upon a broad fork on Amazon once for $99. And I can’t even believe I hesitated and I have not, and I love our broad form, but it has fallen apart twice. We’ve had to like put it back together. And then I love that yours has wooden handles. And you were saying that makes it light. It makes a beautiful construct. Like, there’s definitely, I can’t wait til we get one because I want one down in our mini farm. And then I want one close to the house in our home gardens. Like we can definitely use too. And my husband turned she’s entire, the last two years in a row. He has turned the entire mini farm, which is like, I don’t know, a 10th of an acre and not quite equipped with the broad fork.

14m 33s

JackieMarie Beyer

Like we bought a rototiller and a tractor and he hasn’t used either one of them. He just uses that broad fork. And I just, I just think it’s invaluable. And I think the one you have built is, again, like you said, I love that as wouldn’t handles, it’s beautiful. And, but also like the space between the, the metal and everything about it. It’s hard to imagine someone can be so passionate about a broadfork, but it’s so true. Like it’s so handy. It does such a great job.

15m 2s

JM Fortier

Well, you know what, it’s the name of my farm is broad fork farm. It’s in French, Les Grelinette, which is the original inventor of the broad fork in France. But, you know, it’s the broad fork for me symbolizes a lot of things. You know, it, it, it’s definitely about taking care of the soil because unlike a rotor tiller, which you’d be kind of, you know, plowing and kind of like messing all the, you know, all, all the ecosystem that’s in the soil and it’s all layered and there’s there fun guy, and there’s all these different microbiome that we don’t know about. We can’t see, but they’re there, it’s an ecosystem. And then when you, when you go with a rotor tiller, you, you’re kind of just like destroying the whole soil structure.

15m 43s

JM Fortier

You’re just kind of messing it up all the, all the life that’s in the soil, it gets kind of like, it’s like an earthquake. It’s like an earthquake, a tornado and a fire at the same time. It’s like complete destruction of the universe. And so that’s what, that’s what, you know, really that’s what a rotor tiller does. It looks great. You know, you have the soil that’s really nice and really brown, and we’re accustomed to kind of feeling that that’s the soil that we want, but it’s, it’s really when you, when you look at it and when you study soil systems and, and you study the effect of, of different tools on soils, we know it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s confirmed a hundred percent that no till systems are, are better for the soil and in the long-term more productive because it goes, when you wrote her till it’s like, it’s like blowing on a fire, you get a hard flame.

16m 33s

JM Fortier

You know, a lot of, a lot of the mineralization happens. It’s the soil becomes active, but you’re depleting the, the humans that’s in the soil, you’re kind of depleting the organic matter, slow. You’re kind of burning it up. So all of this, to say that the broad fork, it allows you to make sure that your soil is loose and deep without destroying it without inverting the layers. And so that’s why this tool for me, it’s not just any other tool. It’s a very, it’s very symbolic of how we want to be cultivating the soils and how we want to be producing food and, you know, grown with care and by people who care doing the extra effort to make it really, you know, really profound.

17m 18s

JM Fortier

And so the broad fork for me is that, and so to have, but then, you know, we’re also commercial, you know, we need to get things done on the farm. We have an eight to five and we have, you know, 300 people that we’re feeding and we have kids and it’s just like, you know, we want things to, to happen. So a broad fork for me, needs to be, you know, the right way, not too heavy, not too light. It needs to be, it needs to not break. So I can use it for many, many years and this kind of same ethos that I have for the fork I have for, you know, the oscillating hose, that way I use the cultivating, the wiggle wire hose I have for the wire weeder I have for all the hose that I use.

18m 2s

JM Fortier

It’s the same, you know, these, these are tools that I want to have for many, many years. And so, you know, I’m at the service of trying to make them better, better than, than you know, those that I can found on the market.

18m 15s

JackieMarie Beyer

Okay. Awesome.

Tell us about the clothes and the farm wear. 

18m 24s

JM Fortier

That’s another Epic adventure. I don’t know. I’ve, I’m so passionate about it to be Frank. Like I, I traveled a lot and for me, you know, I spend 40, 45 hours a week outside cold weather this morning. It’s a zero Fahrenheit here at the farm. And so, you know, we’re, we’re outside in the greenhouse, we’re removing row covers, we’re doing staff. And so the, the clothes that I wear become a bit of my tools also, it’s like my, my working clothes. And I’ve been thinking about better clothing, you know, pants with knee pads, because we’re a lot on our knees, a tool belt so that we can carry more tools with us, you know, just like big coats that are more durable and that breed and, and, you know, obviously a lot of the Growers in, in my ecosystem, my community, we, we just, we buy stuff from the Salvation Army.

19m 26s

JM Fortier

We just kind of rip it out. But you know, there’s some, some times we like something and you like a piece of clothing. We want to keep it. And, and so with Growers, what we’re doing is we are, we are designing and manufacturing clothing that are really tough, durable, but they’re also designed for playing outside, being a gardener or a market gardener. And the special touch that I want to give it is that it also looks good because, you know, I think, I think farmers are cool and they should look cool and they should feel cool and they are cool. And so the clothing also needs to give you a little bit of style.

And so that’s my project, you know, to be behind a farm wear company that does amazing, you know, tools and amazing clothes that you want to wear to play outside.

20m 18s

JackieMarie Beyer

And then can you tell me something about, you want to see the people on the billboards farmers and not just right. Like the people, not just recreational lists or something like that. Like you think farmer’s….

Farmers are changing the world

20m 35s

JM Fortier

Yeah. Farmers are changing the world and yeah, this story that I was telling you was because everything’s a long story. So I, you know, I try to make them short, but this idea of, of, of a farm wireline is it also a comes from the vision of having mult of having more farms everywhere in each state, in each town, feeding more cities. You know, we want to see the multiplication of small ecological farms. And ultimately I believe that’s how, that’s the only way we, the only means to replace kind of the mass production. That’s really malnourishing us.

21m 16s

JM Fortier

Okay. So we need to have more, more vibrant ecological farms. People are in the countryside, it’s creating a local economy. People are eating locally. It’s good on the ecology that this feedback is so positive, but how do we get there? So for me, when I look at what the last 40 years, there’s some trends that really happened. And one of them is because I grew up, you know, I didn’t grow up on a farm. I used to skateboard and snowboard, and that was my universe. But I remember how it was cool back then to be a skateboarder. And later on, I, I started to rock climb and I was, you know, reading Locke, rock climbing magazines, and then Patagonia had these billboards of rock climbers.

21m 59s

JM Fortier

And it was just like, you know, rock climbers were superstars and you’d be cool if you do that.

And I’ve always been thinking, how about we have farmers instead? You know, these people are feeding the community. They’re working hard, they’re playing outside. They’re, they’re living a courageous and inspirational life.

And so I went to Patagonia twice to pitch them the idea of saying, why don’t you guys focus on, on farmers and, and create a line for them functional where that will help them in their work, just like you did for rock climbers and starting start to tell their stories and start to praise what they’re doing and make them then the hero.

22m 40s

JM Fortier

And, you know, I had a certain traction, but eventually it didn’t pan out. So I just decided to kind of go for it myself. And, I surrounded myself with great people here and we’ve started Growers & Co.and, and that’s really what we want to do.

So, so that’s the story about rock climbers and farmers and how they gel. It’s the whole concept of portraying farmers as heroes because I do think that they are!

23m 10s

JackieMarie Beyer

Absolutely, I mean, we all need to eat. I mean, we’re facing this huge health crisis with people not getting nutrients out of the food. Like, it’s just, it’s like this crazy thing where we have all these obese people, you know, but it’s because we’re eating nutritionally, valueless food is so much easier to have access to because, you know, big ag is getting, I think, you know, what is it subsidies from things so they can make food cheaper. So it’s, you know, a parent, who’s struggling to feed five kids, it’s easier for them to buy a box of super cheap, you know, low nutrition cereal as compared to, I mean…

I, you know, I can remember picking my stepdaughter granddaughter up after school and she bought a thing of blueberries and she thought a whole $5 container of blueberries before we got home. If you have five kids, you know, how are you going to do that? And just, it it’s so true, like we really need to level the access to nutrient dense food.

24m 25s

JM Fortier

And, and, and Jackie, if I can, if I, if I may, we need more people gardening.

And that’s where people like you come into play because we need to talk about gardening, we need to get excited about it!

Blueberries

And we need to be passionate about the important skill of gardening, those blueberries, that $5, $5 a pint they’re cheap when you’re picking them yourself. Cause blueberries, they’ll just grow! And

24m 53s

JackieMarie Beyer

Because I am so struggling to grow blueberries!

24m 58s

JM Fortier

I have tricks for that, but you know,

25m 1s

JackieMarie Beyer

Like one problem we have, we finally got a soil test and my pH where my blueberries are is an 8.3.

25m 8s

JM Fortier

Yeah. Well, that’s perhaps on the, it should be a bit lower, but you know, they need to be acidic. So, so that’s, that’s important, but that’s, and sometimes it’s the cultivars, you know, but blueberries, you know, we don’t grow them super commercially. You know, we don’t, we don’t feed 300 families with blueberries. We have just some for our families, but except for picking them, I found, which takes a lot of time. You know they’re not that hard, but you know, anything that you can grow in, in your home and your, your garden, you know, if we, if gardeners, if gardener is what measure, you know, the money that they make, you know, like we do, when we’re American gardeners, they’d be astound or amazed how much produce they’re getting out of their gardens.

26m 1s

JM Fortier

And that would be, you know, harvest for $50, you’re like, wow, this is amazing. And then, but they don’t, people don’t do that. They don’t count how much this is worth, but if they did, I think it would be a great incentive to, you know, garden more heavily, because, you know, you’re producing money. You don’t need to buy stuff. It’s, you know, for me, it’s, I get over passionate about this, but I, I think gardeners are also playing in this good food revolution they’re playing a super important part.

JackieMarie Beyer

Oh my gosh, it’s so true. Like, my husband was so passionate about planning our apple orchard, and like, I can’t believe how many apples we get year after year after year. And like the raspberries, like from our raspberry bushes that like you put in, and then once, you know, once they take off, just how much they’re growing, which is what I’m hoping with my blueberries, I mean, seriously, I have two plants and I got five blueberries this year. Like, I am really struggling with that, but I, you know, maybe I’ll figure it out. Like, I’m trying to decide, like, should I take them out of the dirt and find some other dirt, the people who did the soil test, she sent me like, this Espoma, that is it to put number?

27m 16s

JackieMarie Beyer

But I’m like, should I just start over in different pots in a different bed? Like, what should I do with these two plants I have that are just not doing anything for me. This is their second year five blueberries.

27m 29s

JM Fortier

Yeah. I think second year you need to wait for fourth year. That’s really, really good.

27m 33s

JackieMarie Beyer

The second person that told me that I’m just being impatient. Yeah.

27m 36s

JM Fortier

Yeah. Well, not impatient. Just perhaps not aware that blueberries, they take a long time to establish their they’re growing their roots. And it’s when their root system gets well-established. Then, then the plant, you know, sets to set the fruit. But before that, it’s not ready yet. So don’t worry too much.

27m 54s

JackieMarie Beyer

First year, I thought it was, cause I just didn’t water him. Cause watering is like my major struggle. But then last year I really made sure they got water and Oh, maybe they just cause they are, they’re still, they’re very short. They haven’t really grown.

28m 9s

JM Fortier

Give them time and keep, keep loving them. That’s it

28m 12s

JackieMarie Beyer

Hail? Yeah. Azalea thing. I think she said I should get this Espoma Azalea.

28m 21s

JackieMarie Beyer

My husband, my husband is like, you want to put what in there? Yeah. I was just like

28m 26s

JM Fortier

The natural, you know, it really depends on it’s. It’s always hard to give recommendations, you know, over a phone conversation because I don’t see the plants and I, but sometimes, you know, it’s just a matter of letting things settle sometimes. And in the case of perennials, I think most of the times that’s what needs to happen. And so if your pH is on the acidic side, you know, and you have some wood chips or sawdust around your plants, and I think it’s just a matter of years before they start to pump out.

Tomato Blossom End Rot Challenges

29m 4s

JackieMarie Beyer

Awesome. So the other challenge I had this year was the blossom end rot on my tomatoes.

JM Fortier

Yes. There. Yes. Yes.

Blossom end rot, blossom end rot and such a, you know, you have those that we, we mostly have it on peppers. We have it also on certain, sometimes on tomatoes, but beautiful peppers like, Oh, gorgeous, big and fat. And then you have the bottom, that’s all rotten and you can’t sell anymore. So, you know, blossom end rot has to do with calcium.

And that happens when it gets really warm or really hot. And then the plant doesn’t get enough calcium from the soil because mostly it’s, it’s, it’s not hydrating itself in us. You know, the demand, the plant is, is wants more calcium, but it’s not getting enough water because the water is not compensated because it’s transport transpiring a lot too. So, you know, it’s a complicated thing to say that the way we work around that is that we foliar spray in August preventively with calcium on those plants. So, you know, tomatoes or peppers and the foliar spray of calcium just makes sure that there’s not going to be a deficient, a deficiency because if you put it in the ground, then you’re left with the same problem, because the problem is not that there’s no calcium in the ground.

30m 36s

JM Fortier

The problem is just the plant because it’s warm. And because it’s so hot, it’s having a hard time accessing the calcium and channeling it to the fruits. And so that’s how we deal with it. In August, we, every week we systematically spray foliar, spray calcium on the plants and we use the dosage that are on the calcium that we buy. And we use a pretty typical backpack sprayer. And that’s it.

31m 6s

JackieMarie Beyer

Is it like seaweed or something?

JM Fortier

Yeah, well, you know, when we do calcium foliar sprayers, when we do that,

you know, when we’re spraying, we add also seaweeds because the seaweeds, they add a lot of trace minerals. There’s a lot of trace minerals and see me. That’s why, you know, it’s people in Japan are very Nasia. They eat a lot of seaweeds because it’s really rich with a lot of things that we, we might not have in our regular dialect. So, and then we spray that because the two can work together. They don’t, the calcium doesn’t, does it have a negative impact or effect on, on the what’s good in the seaweed? So we spray both at once and there’s a lot of things that when we do spray on plants, you know, we try to maximize our time.

31m 57s

JM Fortier

So we do in the same spray there, there’s going to be some times, sometimes we spray with, with soap for aphids and then we’ll also put something else. So, you know, this is something that we, that we’ve kind of debugged and experimented with and we know what to spray just by themselves and what to spray together.

Market Gardener Online Course

And, and I try to, you know, I try to share all this knowledge that, that me and my staff, and then over the years, they all the, all the knowledge that I’ve kind of developed, you know, I have a, an online course, it’s the masterclass and in the masterclass, you know, I give this information out, but it’s, it’s also a video of how we do things, why every step of the way.

32m 44s

JM Fortier

And then what we, what I want to do is to just help people in a very clear and concise manner, like, okay, this is how, you know, I do carrots from seed to harvest all the steps.

You know, how I deal with insects. This is how, this is how this is how, and it’s, it would be like a YouTube channel, but it’s a, it’s a deeper to program, you know? And then we have some of my, you know, former farm staff that have been with me that are answering these people’s question. And they’re just like, we have a peer to peer group where people, you know, share their problems and then other people gives insights.

33m 24s

JM Fortier

So what I’ve tried to do is just create a knowledge, a knowledge-based place where professional market gardeners or avid home gardeners can get, you know, information that they can’t find online. So that’s another, that’s another project that I have. I have a, quite a few, but I’m just, I’m so passionate about this, that I have too much energy. It needs to go somewhere.

33m 50s

JackieMarie Beyer

Oh my gosh. But you are totally changing the world doing this. Didn’t you tell me 2000 people have gone through that course. And it’s just invaluable. I mean, it’s, I know people who have taken that course, we talked about Ray Tyler. He just raved about how much he learned from you. Like yeah, you have that class and, and, you know, I can’t stress enough, but I think also you have also donated a lot of free content out there, that has helped people. But if somebody’s serious, I mean, it’s an investment.

34m 30s

JackieMarie Beyer

That’s like, you know, you just, you know, if you’re really serious about becoming a market farmer, I think it could really help people like people have given you feedback that it’s really helped them. People have talked on my show about how it’s helped them.

34m 45s

JM Fortier

Yeah. This is, this is always, you know, when you’re an entrepreneur, you do things. And when you look back or when other people look at your, some of your success or like, Oh, this guy, you know, he’s just everything’s happening. But you know, I’ve had a lot of doubt. There’s a lot of money that went into that. And a lot of my time and I have two kids and a wife and I have, you know, I’m running a farm program and I have my own farm. And I I’m, you know, I’m helping, you know, in doing policy work here on, on the state level. And there’s so many things that I do. But whenever I hear you talked about Ray, you know, you’ve had Ray on your show and you know, the story of Ray, Ray, Tyler, and what, where he was.

35m 29s

JM Fortier

And, and when I met him where he was with regards to his farm and his farming, he has like, I think six children and, you know, the farm was not, it was not happening at all. And it was, it was a struggle. And, and where he is now, he’s a highly successful farmer. He also teaches. Now, he also has an online course and, and, and I’m not, I’m not taking credit for the success of his work. That’s not the point here is like the, this evolution is what I care deeply about of people making it work on their farm for me, that’s, that’s, that’s awesome because I know that it can be a very positive experience.

36m 9s

JM Fortier

And I know that people want to eat local foods. It’s just a matter of how you approach your farming.

And if you can become a better farmer, and if you become a better farmer, you become a better husband, or you become a better mother and you become a better neighbor and you become a better, you know, Christian, because farming can be a very struggling kind of work.

You know, you can really work very hard and not have a lot of success, but if that changes and then the, the level of energy and effort that you put into it translates into success and, and crop success and market success. And then it leads to a good life.

36m 50s

JM Fortier

And that’s, that’s what I care about. So anyway. Yep.

36m 57s

JackieMarie Beyer

Oh, I love all of that. It’s so true. You know, and like, in a lot of ways, like, I’ve, you know, done the same thing with my podcasts. Like I’ve paid at least that much for classes, like probably twice that learning how to be a successful podcaster, which has like, my husband is probably just like, Oh my goodness. And just, you know, I think there’s a certain learning curve. And I think, you know, I don’t know. I should probably, but anyway, my financial problems are more, probably rooted in my lack of business sense, but also it takes time.

Like sometimes, I’m like six years, when I graduated elementary, you don’t want to just go into school to be an elementary teacher. I remember being with a teacher in the classroom, she’s like, well, it takes five years to become the teacher. I’m like, wait, five more years after I’ve just been in school for four years. Why does it take that long show? Thinking that you’re going to start an online business and be profitable in less than five years? You know, I think is idealistic and I’ve almost worked full time the whole time I’ve been doing this. So, yeah,

38m 3s

JM Fortier

You’ve told me, you’ve told me that you’re also writing a book, which is another big endeavor. It takes a lot of, a lot of time. It’s not easy. There’s this little feeling and you’re putting a lot of time writing it. And you’re just hopeful that it’s going to be, people will want to read it. Then that’s a, it takes courage to do that also.

38m 24s

JackieMarie Beyer

Well, thank you. Yeah, it does. Well, we wrote our first book, the Organic Oasis Guide Book last year, which I think I have sold all of four copies of I’m not joking. And just, but I think, like I heard a podcast talk about having to go on your own book tour, and you were talking about how you traveled in, so that could be it. I don’t know. Anyway. Yeah.

38m 46s

JM Fortier

Jackie, the book, the book tour lasted five years.

38m 50s

JackieMarie Beyer

Oh, wow. Yeah. So!

38m 53s

JM Fortier

It was quite a book tour. And at the end, I can tell you, I was so fed up with it that I didn’t want to do any, any more talk on radio podcasts, nothing for three years. I was, you know, from 2000 and 2018 to kind of this year with me coming up with Growers and the magazine and wanted to tell the world about it, I’ve been quieter because I was just kind of like, tell your story 5 million times. You’re just kind of fed up with it. But writing a book is also about telling stories and then you need to do it and it’s work.

39m 29s

JackieMarie Beyer

Yeah. Well, cool. Well, is there anything else you want to share today that we didn’t touch on, but I know you’re busy. Yeah.

39m 38s

JM Fortier

I’m going to go back. Actually, we were finishing our crop plan for next year, but with this, with the crew here, but I hope everyone’s safe. I hope everybody’s excited about next year’s garden. And I’m inviting everyone to check out Growers Magazine, Growers & Co.and, you know, write me an email. Give me feedback about it, how you see this. And yeah, that’s an invitation to everyone!

40m 5s

JackieMarie Beyer

And buy a broadfork! Get one of his broadforks or check out his tools and take the masterclass. If you want to be a, a market farmer and just make sure you leave him a review on Amazon and, and just start do all the things. Definitely check out his website. There’s so much tons of information there. Get some of his farm wear, and thank you so much for being such a gracious guest today.

40m 31s

JM Fortier

Well, thank you, Jackie, for having me on and all the best on the podcast and send me a copy of your book.

40m 37s

JackieMarie Beyer

Well, thank you.

Have a great day. Stay safe. Happy holidays.

Growers & Co.

The post 347. Growers & Co. | JM Fortier | Quebec, Canada appeared first on GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast.

A podcast dedicated to educating and promoting the b

Links we talk about

Lisa’s Website

Full list of Online Courses

Jonathan & Megan Leiss: The No-Till Micro-Scale Flower Farm  – available anytime

Lisa Ziegler: Flower Farming School Online: The Basics, Annual Crops, Marketing, and More! – Registration Opens October 2020

Steve & Gretel Adams: Growing Cut-Flower Crops in Hoop and Greenhouses – Registration: November 16-20, 2020

Jennie Love: The Wedding Process – Registration is only open October 1-5, 2020

Ellen Frost: Florist School Online: Growing Your Business with Local Flower

Vegetables Love Flowers: Companion Planting for Beauty and Bounty

Welcome to the Green Organic Garden. It is Friday, August 21st, 2020.I have the most amazing guest on the line, she was guest number 2, she came back after that and today she is here to dazzle you after her 3rd book called Vegetables Love Flowers to here is Lisa Ziegler.

Thank you so much, Jackie. It is so my pleasure to be here and really, I do remember now that I was number two, that was a long time ago. Wasn’t it?

Welcome back, tell. I do have a lot of new listeners since December. And so tell them a little bit about you because maybe they haven’t heard much about you.

Urban Flower Farmer

Sure. Thanks. So I, if you can’t tell from my accent, I am kind of in the South, I’m on the coast of Virginia. I’m in Southeastern Virginia and I am an urban flower farmer.

My little three acre farm is right in the middle of the city. Literally I’m surrounded by 200,000 residents and my place. Although when I first, my first half of my career, I only had an acre and a quarter totally, including where my home was.That’s now up to almost three acres and I have no hoophouses.

The Flower Farmer: An Organic Grower’s Guide to Raising and Selling Cut Flowers

Everything I do is grown outdoors in a garden or a field. And, you know, I started farming in 1998, like so many other people after reading Lynn Byczynski’s book, the Flower Farmer and just hit the ground running because I’m such a follower, meaning I really followed her instructions. I think it helped me to be successful right out of the gate.

And when you’re successful out of the gate, it helps you just to keep on going after it, you know, not everybody is like us, Jackie, where you were talking about how you kept trying and trying with your podcast.

Some people just throw in the towel and I understand that, but then there’s people like me and you that just keep bulldoze and after it, and but for me in the flower farming, my first customer ever that I had just really took me under his wing and ushered me right into this business.

And then I just ran with it. And my business has really changed over the years.

I started teaching and doing lots of programs and speaking to groups and that led to a book deal. And then I started writing books and speaking even more and traveling.

And during that time I launched an online garden store called the Gardener’s workshop.com where I just sell the same tools and seeds and supplies that I actually use in my gardens and the same seed varieties.

We do not save seed. We just buy extra from the seed houses and package them with our instructions and offer those to our folks that are looking for great cut flower garden seeds.

And then about three years ago, I launched online courses. I built my own first course and it’s such an undertaking and needs such an admin support that I knew that I wanted to have higher level courses, you know, for people to be able to build their business.

And so I began publishing online courses for other flower farmers in the industry, people that I’ve connected with and known for years and know they’re awesome teachers and instructors, and wanted to publish kind of like being a book publisher. I just do it for online courses.

Flower Farmer and Florist Online courses

And that is just really mushroomed. And our business is now being built on, we are offering online courses that better to start businesses based on flowers, whether you’re want to be a flower farmer and build that business, a farmer florist.

Florist School Online

And now we’ve even offered have coming out this fall florist school online, which is all about a floor D design studio, Ellen Frost. And she only uses locally sourced flowers. So she’s like, it’s just amazing. So that’s been kind of how we’ve evolved through the years and it’s just pretty awesome.

I just absolutely love what I’m doing.

I love everything that you’re doing too. Like I laugh because you could see that we persevere, but like I have not persevered with my Lynn Byczynski dreams of becoming a flower farmer. I am totally struggling and I didn’t even know Any sunflowers this year. I’ve like less than a dozen sunflowers. And I just want to be a better, like, I just, I don’t know. Anyway, tell us about the courses.

0 (5m 42s):

Sure. So, so when it started out it’s to 2018 is when I launched the first course, which was flower farm in school. And that was my course. And it was all about, I understand the importance of people learn and how to start a business because what people don’t understand is every business is unique and it’s hard.

It’s hard because there’s a lot to do and learn. And flower farming is no exception to that. It’s not just about growing the flowers. You’ve got to get your business foundation set up. So I knew that was going to be a good part of my course.

Lisa Ziegler: Flower Farming School Online: The Basics, Annual Crops, Marketing, and More! – Registration Opens October 2020

And so my course, which is now referred to as flower farm in school, the basics annual crops marketing, and more really helps people to get all the nitty gritty of the business stuff out of the way. It’s so simple when you know what to do, you know, it’s like, yes, you need a business license. Yes, you have to charge sales tax. If your state requires it, and this is how you do it, and this is what you have, you have to have insurance.

Growing Annuals the Biggest Bang For Your Buck

And so it’s kinda like getting those things that people tend to put blinders on and don’t even want to look at, we get that out of the way. And then we go to town showing people how they can get into flower farming, growing annuals, which is the biggest bang for your buck and the easiest and the lowest investment to get in on and to make the most money.

Teach you how to sell and find customers

And so we kinda, I kind of immerse people in here. Let’s get you started, let’s get you growing flowers. Let’s teach you how to sell. Let’s find some customers learn how to harvest, learn how to run a farm and how you, the conditioning of the flowers, all those steps, you need to get your business rolling.

And then, okay, then let’s start adding some of these high value crops. And that’s when I asked Dave Dowling, if he would be interested in doing a course, cause he’s like a walking encyclopedia. If anybody doesn’t know Dave Dowling, he was, I’m a farmer for over 20 years.

President of the cut flower association for many years and other jobs. And he’s just a wealth of information and experience.

So he does a course called flower farmer school: bulbs, perennials, woodies, and more.

So he builds on what people have learned once they get their business started this fall, we’re adding yet another builder on that. And Steve and Gretel Adams of sunny meadow flower farms and from Ohio are actually doing a core of flower farming school course on growing cut flower crops in hoop and greenhouses.

Steve & Gretel Adams: Growing Cut-Flower Crops in Hoop and Greenhouses – Registration: November 16-20, 2020

And that’s going to be amazing. They’re full time farmers. It’s, they’re the sweetest cutest young couple ever, and they’re doing it! You know, they have 17 houses and they’re growing out in the field as well. And they have quite a business going.

So we kinda offer you every level. Some people don’t even ever want to go past the basic. They just want to grow some flowers, sell a few bouquets, add some money to the family coffers and go on. Other people are looking to ramp their business up and we’re trying to provide it all.

Then I started getting questions from our students saying, Hey, we want to do weddings. So I knew exactly the who I would ask if she was interested. And that was Jenny Love of Love’n Fresh Flowers, because she was like the industry leader in the farmer florist world. I mean, she was she’s in Philadelphia, she’s doing tons of big and small weddings, very experienced.

And her business savviness is amazing.

I mean, I’ve listened to her course several times, myself. She just has such, you just learned so much about organizing your business, whatever it is. So I knew that she would be a great addition to our lineup for people to be able to make the most money that you want to make from growing your own flowers, obviously doing events and doing the flowers for events, sorry, is the most dollar per stem that you can get.

Events is the most dollar per stem you can get.

And so I knew that was going to be a really great one. And, and then we added Ellen. I mentioned already the Florist School Online Ellen Frost for anybody that is not familiar with her, she’s in Baltimore. And she ends a design studio. It’s not a classic flower shop where you walk in to order flowers. She is got a design studio, which is really not open to the public where they do a lot of events, both weddings and those types of events.

But she also don’t know how quite, how to explain it.

But I say to folks, Ellen’s business model is what I think most people that want to get into the flower shop business think a flower shop is about, you know, she does events with her customers. They have flower book clubs, they have flower arranging war contests.

I mean, they just, she has built this amazing business, but she only uses flowers that are grown within a hundred miles of her shop year round.

And so her business model is just absolutely amazing!

And she is actually cultivated farmers and helped them because she needed them. And we’re really excited.

All of those classes, all the registrations typically are open once a year and all except Dave’s bald class, which they’re actually in school right now. All the registrations are open October 1st through 5th is my course. And Jenny Love’s farmer florist. And then mid-November, the registration is open for Farm in school, growing cut, flower crops and houses and florists school online. Both of those are mid November.

But anybody that has questions, they can go to the Gardener’s workshop.com and go to the online course page. All the courses are listed there and there’s even a little calendar you can click on at the top to kind of show you all the dates of when school runs and when registration opens.

Cause I know it’s very confusing, but that’s in a nutshell, that’s kind of all the different courses that we offer and they’re kind of rolled out because, you know, I found that, I don’t know, Jackie, have you ever taken an online course?

I love online school.

Yeah. I mean, so a lot of people, cause I didn’t know about online. I mean, I literally, this is so funny. I learned how to build online courses by taking an online course. And I was so nervous,

Did you take Amy Porterfield’s?

I did not, I took Teresa Loes? And I don’t, I’m not sure that she even does it anymore. Cause she’s now a big coach for CEOs, digital CEO. She is my business coach as well. And anyway, so I took her course and I didn’t, I didn’t know what to expect.

I couldn’t, I was so afraid when it started that I actually, cause I have, I mean I have a crew of folks that helped me in my business. I made a couple of them hanging out later that day to make sure I could figure out how to get on when the class started.

I mean, it was like, that’s how intimidated. I mean, people think I’m so competent, right? Don’t do me in technology. I mean, I’ve learned a lot, but anyway, so because there’s so many of us that haven’t done it. So I like to always explain of how it kinda works.

So first off the first thing people need to know about online courses when they buy them from us anyway, is that when you buy a course from us, you have access for your lifetime. It’s not like a onetime, just watch it and you’re done and you have to buy it again.

It’s just like buying a book. But instead of picking the book up, you log into your online course library and all of your classes, like if you bought, we have people that have bought multiple of our courses and when they go to their online library, all of those courses are right there for them.

And you can watch them as many times and as often as you would, like as well as there’s PDF downloads and there’s tons of resources. And so our schools, we sell two type types of courses.

The first is on demand courses

Those are the courses when you go to our page, it’s like, I think the first three or four, you can buy them anytime they’re shorter courses and you can buy them and watch them as much as you want the same as with our schools, then our school courses, registration and enrollment is only open once a year, typically for only five days. And then school starts about within a few weeks of registration. Then school, lasts six weeks.

And that means, let’s just say if school started today. So that meant this morning, when you got up, if you wanted to see school, you would log into your library. And lo and behold, there’s a bunch of videos loaded in there for you to watch as well as any resources.

And then you have all week to watch them. And then at the end of the week we offer, which I think is probably one of the, the most significant things that our students just really love is we offer live Q and A sessions where the students hookup with their instructor and ask questions after watching their videos.

And that happens every week with each new class for six weeks. And at the end of six weeks, your library is slammed full of a bunch of videos. We also record those live Q and A’s and those are actually put into your library.

So you can go back and watch them and something that is happening for my course currently, because we’re now getting ready. I’m in October, that’ll be my third class, the third year that I’ve done it. So the students this year will be able to watch both of the course, the course Q and A’s from the previous years.

So the content gets richer. You know what I mean? It’s like, because people ask great questions. And so I just really find that the content gets bigger and bigger as well as the instructors actually add additional content to their courses from year to year.

And even the past students get access to that. So if you bought it two years ago, last year, when I added stuff, the people from the year before get access, you know what I mean?

It’s all going into the same pot for everybody to look at. So we’re excited this year, we’re adding some really awesome new stuff to my course, one of them being, I think it’s such a great opportunity, especially for starting out farmers, we’re offering a photo library.

That means that we’re going to give you photos of different zinnias of different sunflowers so that if you’re building your first website, you know, you’re just starting your business and you don’t have, I mean, that’s a complaint that we hear from people.

It’s like, Oh my gosh, when I first started my show, I was like, maybe I could put like a stock library cause I have so many thousands of pictures and that could be like my free thing for people, like way back I always thought that then that’s really a thing. I never did it. I should have done it.

Flower Photo Library

No, but it’s so much more, I mean, as everything is, you have to have a platform to put them on that people can get it from, I mean it’s yeah. So anyway, so we are adding a flower library for our students to use, to help them get started, to promote themselves and to show their customers, you know what their growing, and we’re doing some marketing sessions and building emails.

And you know, with the COVID pandemic, Jenny Love just added an amazing four video bonus series to her course, which were actually people can request it and she all has been offering it and she will for the next couple of weeks offering it free to anybody that wants to watch it.

And it’s about how, you know, she’s, I mean, she does like big high dollar weddings. And when the, the virus broke out her business, I mean they all, they all canceled literally, I mean like a week she just watched her business evaporate as every other event florist had happened.

And so these sessions are about how she has pivoted and what she’s doing differently. And so we’re trying to add to our courses what to do. I mean, this is a horrible thing, the pandemic, right.

But stuff like this happens in business and you have to have tools to use, to manage and to get through it.

And so we’re adding information to our courses to help people, even through this, you know, troubling time.

Oh my gosh. Right before, like I was pulling in the driveway and I got an email from a parent, I had one of my students last year who started a wedding business this year. Like they have bought this place that they thought was going to be a farm.

And then I don’t know, somehow, like everybody loved the, and people wanted to have weddings there and she ended up, she was booked for this entire summer. It’s her first summer.

And she said at the beginning it was horrible. And now at least they’re having a few weddings, but it’s very limited people and the cleaning and she’s like, Oh my gosh, I am so exhausted, but she’s young.

And they’re pivoting. She also like when it first happened and they didn’t know, she bought like dozens of ’em, like her goal. She, she went to school for animal agriculture, you know, she wanted to like have like, they bought it to be a cattle ranch, I think, and ended up with this wedding business this year.

So in the beginning of the, when school first got out, she was like, they were like, she’s like constantly missing their kids missing the Hangouts. Cause they’re going to get 120 pheasants and 20, you know, 50 ducks.

And like they, they must have got 200 chickens ducks and they were going to do it organic. Plus she still had the wedding.

Oh, I just people who can pivot. But what, the only thing I was going to say, so I’ve been listening to Jesse Frost’s podcast, you know, for the farmers. And he just had these people on talking about the biggest thing to their success was doing an incubator year

and having an incubator year because they worked at this incubator farm and learned all the businesses and got all their marketing and all the things that you’re teaching in practice at this already established farm net.

And then they’re in their third year, but she said, but then to go to their first year at their actual own property and they had so many of those pieces already in place that they could focus on building the infrastructure, but trying to build the infrastructure and learn the marketing end. Everything that you’re talking about that you teach in one year by themselves would have been so hard.

So I think this is awesome. I love your six year. I want to call like ask you like maybe sometime when you’re not like super busy, if you could look at my course and give me some advice, because I came out with a six week course called the organic Oasis masterclass and I just have not had any luck getting people to sign up.

And then I was thinking, well, maybe it’s cause it’s six weeks and it’s too long, but maybe not. I don’t know,

Take it. It’s very deep. That’s why I have five people that do admin on my courses. It’s big business. I mean, meaning that it’s a lot of work to do all that needs to be done. I mean, we’re all right there answering emails every day from students helping them with troubles.

I mean tech stuff and yeah, it’s very, it’s like going to college. Well, it’s different. I mean, it’s busy. I mean, it’s people just think, Oh, you do it and put it online.

Well, it’s huge to market it. And then you have to support the platform and people have troubles. And anyway, so yeah, it’s crazy.

Well, I love all these classes. It’s so exciting! And I think like it’s key if you’re going to be successful. And like, so I’m the kind of person you were talking about in the beginning. Maybe that just like wants to maybe take a few bouquets to the farmer’s market or do some little stuff or, Oh, did I lose you or ideally I want to just paint bouquets, but I love like, I just want to have more flowers.

So like what kind of tips do you have for like people like me who maybe, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go to market, but

You don’t have to first off, we have a lot of people that take our class, my class PA, and Dave’s really that are just avid gardeners. People that want to ramp up their garden and game.

However, we do have, I do have an on demand course on my, the Gardener’s workshop.com called the easy cut flower garden.

And it’s really about having a really small cutting garden and how to maintain it, meaning to keep it producing lots of flowers all the time from the beginning to the end of the season.

And when you add cool flowers into that, which is the cool season, growing flowers, you can really have flowers for a really long time.

Nobody is you don’t have to make this into a business. You know, you can grow flowers for your own personal enjoyment. You know how many people we have that have gone through our school that are like growing flowers for like you’re talking about.

• one lady is in a painting club.
• Another person provides flowers for her church.
• Other people just give flowers away or
• they just cut them, enjoy them and compost.

The Problem is People Grow too Big of a Garden

So, but you, the problem is people grow too big of a garden. So my number one tip is to start very small, but easy cut flower garden is literally based on a three by 10, three feet by 10 feet garden. And that gives one to two handfuls of flowers a week.

When you plant it with cutting gardens, the recommendation of cutting garden flowers, and then take care of it and treat it like a cutting garden and people that’s what Bates people into wanting to grow more because they can’t believe how much it produces from that little spot.

And it’s so, I mean, who can’t take care of a 3 by 10 spot? You know what I mean? It takes minutes every week, literally.

And so you don’t have to go big. So we have classes for gardeners and for people that want to build businesses.Awesome. I ought to check that out more, starting with a 3 by 10?

Maybe that’s my problem. I always try to go too big and I’m horrible at trying to take care of anything. Cause my biggest struggle is always watering and watering all the time.

What about like, if people like me who also want to grow them for like the bees or for like the vegetables, like your book, Vegetables Love Flowers , like isn’t there a point of like growing flowers just because it will help your neighborhood if you have a vegetable garden?

Vegetables Love Flowers is not really about vegetables. It’s about how flowers benefit vegetables. So the book is really about growing flowers, but it offers the tidbits of why you should grow flowers in your vegetable garden.

First and foremost is without a flower there’s nothing, you know, there’s nothing for pollinators. There’s I mean, all of the beneficial insects and creatures and all the bees, native bees, they all need flowers.

Nature’s Workforce

So without them, there’s no reason for any of those creatures to be in or live or visit in your garden. Nature’s workforce is far more powerful than anything we can reckoned with and it is much more efficient. It does a much better job.

It works 24 seven where you can’t and the number of vegetable gardens that, especially when I was writing that book, it was so interesting to me, how many men I don’t want to pick on guys, but I’m thinking of old retired guys of which my husband is like in that group, so I can say this.

That had these immaculate amazing vegetable gardens, but yet they’re still, you know, they’re like thinking organic is crazy. There’s no way I could grow without using products is what they’re saying.

And I go to their gardens and it’s like, there’s not a flower there’s lawn and there’s a vegetable garden plopped in the middle of it. And I say to them, I mean, why in the, would a bee or any beneficial creature even come this way?

Yes, your vegetables do bloom, but not nearly enough to attract and sustain these creatures come in and stay in your garden. So flowers are an essential piece of the organic system that the world was based on.

And if you want to keep that system going, you have to have a constant flow of flowers.

And the only way to do that, that’s why vegetables, love flowers is a perfect book because it’s all about why you should put a cutting garden in the midst of your vegetable patch.

Vegetables Love Flowers: Companion Planting for Beauty and Bounty

Because when you treat a flower garden, like a cutting garden, that means you’re constantly harvesting and cutting it, which means the plants are constantly regrown and bringing up new flowers. And so, because here’s the classic story that I hear. Well, I planted marigolds. Once I put, I said, well, how big is your garden?

Oh, like 50 by 20 big, that’s a big garden. I said, Oh you did. And they said Jack, but one pot of Mary Golden, but like three or four weeks, the blooms were gone. You know, it’s like in spring when everybody’s pumped to grow people, plant a few flowers and then they just leave them.

And that’s the end of the story because they get consumed with their vegetables. But in fact, by putting a small cutting garden in the midst of your vegetable garden and tendon it alongside your vegetables and cutting the flowers, which makes the plants constantly reproduce.

There’s plenty for you. Plenty for the bees. You’re not leaving flowers in the garden. You’re cutting constantly cutting the garden clean, but there’s always new flowers coming along. And, and it just is the basis of an organic garden. You can basically not organic garden truly.

Cause we use no products. We don’t even use organic products in our farm. I mean, we use organic fertilizer, but we don’t use organic pesticides at all. And so, and we don’t find it necessary and we grow perfect blossoms without it. So flowers are at the root of everything.

I bought some nematode yesterday. Do you use nematodes? I feel like I hear everybody talking about adding.

No, I don’t

Go ahead.

No. As I say, we pretty much don’t use anything. I mean, we take care of our soil and build it and add a lot tons of stuff and do soil tests every year to make sure it’s balance and grow lots of flowers and anything.

That is a real pest problem. We don’t grow those types of things. And so we just, we, I haven’t faced a problem to need to get nematodes, but no, I, we, I’ve never done that.

Cool. Well, we haven’t either. Mike’s like, what are you buying and what do you want to do with it? But I feel like all these soil keep telling me, that’s what I should do. No. As a matter of fact, I’m struggling to be like, to get them to be like, give me a, like a actual, well, one person I talked to she’s like, well go to the box arena that store near you.

And I was like, but I want to place the order them online. She’s like, well just go to Amazon. Any of those will be fine. And so then I went to the box of rain store yesterday and finally bought them there.

But I’m just curious about like, I don’t know, you know, like that’s kind of how I I’m like nervous about putting something into the system. That’s never been there before.

Mike feels like we’ve always been super productive, but also like I might, keel is covered in bugs and I, I don’t care, but I feel like if I was ever going to try to sell that kale, I can’t have these bug bites. Like there, I do not really have a leaf of kale that doesn’t have bug bites.

Well, but nematodes, isn’t going to help that. And that’s why we use row cover. I mean, you protect your crops from the past. That’s a pretty basic organic step in protecting all the brassicas, all the, you know,

Anything that gets those, you know, the moth light lays eggs on your kale. And then the babies are born in their caterpillars and that’s, what’s putting holes in your leaves probably. And that would be, you know, you can use BT, but that’s not even necessary. So we row cover to prevent that whole process from happening.

Okay. And when you say row cover, like from like the day I put the seeds in the ground, I would have had row cover over it the whole time. It’s too late to put the row cover over it now.

Correct. You’ve already got the bugs.

Okay. All right. Well, I have row cover because of you because you told me what to buy and where to get it. And I got it and I even have a protected in special cans now, finally, and yeah.

Well, anything else you want to share with us? This has been awesome.

Well thanks. Yeah. I mean, they can just, they can find me. I mean, I’d love to connect with folks on Facebook and Instagram Gardener’s Workshop Farm, and I do lots of live broadcast.

That’s the way people can ask me questions and connect with me directly. And you know, the Gardenersworkshop.com is where it’s at and we’re actually launching a podcast. We’ll be coming out later this year,

You are? YEAH!!! awesome!

At field and garden, which is the name of my blog. And we’re just adding another component and really going to do a lot of talking about business and farm business and, you know, just really to support our students even in another way. And so it’s pretty exciting stuff.

And we actually are in the midst of moving everybody else’s downstairs, we just moved up, bought a commercial building to move our warehouse, our fulfillment center for an online garden store off of the farm because it’s kind of like growing out of its. And so we just have a lot of exciting stuff going on and I’m actually going to be doing a Facebook live, I do on Fridays called “Meet me on the porch. “I’ll be doing at four o’clock I’m on most days. It does change the time on Fridays anyway. So it’s a lot of fun. I love connecting with our people, the gardeners and farmers.

And you are just a wealth of knowledge. And thank you so much for sharing everything with us today!

My pleasure. Thank you for having me. 

My Garden Journal

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https://www.earthweeksummit.com/

Tell us a little about yourself.

In Denver CO, one of a big family

I’m 59 years old

we were nature kids

IDK if they understand that they are nature kids

being one of 8 kids ~ my poor mom trying to cook for 10 people 3 times a day

• climbing trees
• digging holes in the backyard

At age 10 got my first job working for my dad if I needed a dollar

He was a petroleum engineer, so I plotted all the data. You plotted a curve on logarithmic paper and draw it out to 0. No wonder I’m such a nerd! and I’m on my 5th grade. I ask him

• what are you doing?
• why are you focused so much on this?

I was age 10 that was 1970 he said, I’m talking to people at the oil company.

I thought the adults have it under control

first earth day was in 1970

10% of the population

it was really started as a teach in

series of teach in

people just get together and talk to each other

what do you feel like is important

what do I feel is important 

and what do we need to make the environment personal to them

working on projects together

demanded the government change them?

That was the start in 1970 under Republican Nixon

• started the EPA
• clean air act
• clean water act

I thought great we got this thing together!

1978 President Carter came to colorado

opened the solar energy institute

I went to the University of Colorado and said I want to work in Solar and they said we don’t have it so that should have been my first clue, that maybe the adults don’t have it under control

got into engineering

my way to make a big impact

results weren’t just the water saving projects didn’t have the results I expected

no culture around it we just did projects and left

we didn’t ever deal with the people

I wasted a lot of years trying to do things in my community on my own

spending up a lot of effort and not having much impact. 

I ended up in Longmont

became a non-profit

in less then 2 years

I don’t think I heard the word community when I went through engineering. That’s sort of what brought me what I am doing now, I learned what works in Longmont, I went to my hometown, and want back to Denver where we had similar amazing results!

We’re told for climate action to do these things, but the first climate action should be:

start a TEAM

climate action

• grow more food
• do recycling in your kids school or start a community garden
• bike share
• make a huge impact

that’s why I started the Green TEAM Academy

2nd year of doing this Earth Week Summit

the Green Organic Garden Podcast is one of our sponsors! That’s so exciting.

That’s how near and dear to my heart this is, and do you know the senator who got that started is a play I have about Senator Gaylord Nelson. The play is about this little Bear Sally Bear who is upset about not having anything for earth day prepared and her bother billy bear is like why do we celebrate earth day anyway and she explains everything you just said and the other is the Turtle Mishap about a turtle stuck in a six-pack holder.

The Turtle Mishap Play

And then I have a video on YouTube about the science Earth day and its based on Bill McKibben’s book Fight Global Warming Now on how to start an earth day event in 3 weeks.

This is so exciting I haven’t met a lot of earth day nuts like me.

that was a long answer

doing so much already

One of the big things that changed things in Longmont was having an earth day festival

What was so weird for me was, as an engineer, the biggest thing I had ever organized was a family birthday party we ended up with this fairgrounds space and it was like 10 times bigger then we wanted, but the deposit wasn’t due till 6 months later which is why we picked this space

none of us had ever written grants before, but we learned how to write grants and we had over 1000 people come to our first earth day festival

• city council
• mayor
• 35 youth booths
• eco hip hop performers
• school choirs
• climbing wall
• teaching about everything from marine animals
• recycling trivia

non-profits and the local government

A combination of that and people had said before that nobody in Longmont cares about sustainability but to have 1000 people, obliterated that myth.

That’s one of my tips, if you are trying to build a community, you are trying to get partners to work with you, best way to do it is to have an event!

it’s like Hallmark for Valentines Day, they wouldn’t consider not doing something on valentines day, so if you are trying to establish yourself and get some partnerships around Earth Day which is April 22.

the timing of the summit starts on April 10-18

Earth Day is

What I love Earth Day for me is that is when I need to plant my sunflowers if I want them to go to seed in the fall.

Also, our first Earth Day, although not a lot of people showed up but we put the pictures etc in the paper and then people learned that there were backpacks made of recycled bottles for sale at the local office supply store and there was a green builder in town, so the publicity after made sure everyone learned about it anyway.  

That’s a sneaky trick. That’s a good point, all the promotion befoer the event, sending them to the

• schedule 
• showing them all the different organizations

that’s all part of the awareness building

I was gonna say, that my husband grew up in Colorado, and Boulder has a big spot in my heart because they really supported my hemp business back in the 90’s

so so excited about this whole thing

• main vibes that I am committed to is that this is a 
• creative
• collaborative to be online together

in this specific time

• fear
• risk
• which we need to know about a lot of those aspects

This is going to be such a nice contrast for people to dive in here

• live workshops
• happy hours
• when people register you are going to get access to last years speakers too! There were incredible speakers there!

website is earthweeksummit.com 

If you click on the schedule you will see how it all lines out

The first day there is a keynotes

2 hour live sessions

We’re going big this year, as you said the first time its kind of like, we had a couple hundred people last year, this year we are gearing up so we can have 1000s on these live sessions

happy hours will allow you to break out in break out rooms so you can talk in small groups

Facebook group

April 10th is our kickoff

Hip Hop Forestry

omg I need to find this guy and bring him to our community. I ended up adding a day to the summit to feature him

Dr. Thomas Richard

• musician
• professor at Yale university
• forestor
• diversity professional

How to make the environmental movement more inclusive

he’s the keynote speaker yes on Friday April 10th

Wait can you just explain a little. 

I am on there too talking about

One World Wellness

what’s happening in this moment

• virus
• environment and our health
• things we should have bene thinking about

You’ll have to check it out

He is an African American guy his message a lot of the environmental movement is a lot of white people coming at it from a certain perspective.

Michelle romero

Green For All started by Van Jones

on the admin with Clinton

her background was working in racial justice an immigrant issue

friends living near refineries

kids suffering from environment pollutants

bigger social justice issue

key part is that if there are only a few people working on this were not going to make it happen

Just like the original Earth Day, Senator Gaylord Nelson how is the environment personal to you?

You might be thinking polar bears and someone else might think childhood asthma

how is it personal to how we can relate is the way we can make a bigger impact and turn this around.

OK, what other workshops are there?

good mix

Americas for Conservation and the Arts

listening

using your plays and bringing in these other aspects

spoken word artists

Americas for Conservation and the Arts

promotordas verdes

spanish speakers

works in all the americas

went in after the hurricanes in puerto rico

solar spaces

to help start gardens and

including the arts

Michael Alc

project motivate to plant 1,000,000 trees on one day in colorado

solar coop – coalition of people who own solar

island micrograms

individual areas

feed their own power to themselves

Franklin cruise is a spoken word artist

I mentored 22 green teams

• faith based
• schools
• businesses

sustainable highlands was one of our teams

after going through our process they started seeing issues that were beyond what their own level so they started the Northside Community Alliance so they started a collaborative meeting with all the different teams in their area

used to

bike share

We should be able to do that thing somehow here

• Other projects they are taking on include policy review
• in any of the planning processes going on
• for sustainability

So that is Northside Community Alliance which is, Tuesday April 14, from 12-2:00. In our town, they want to build a school and it’s been voted on 3 times and one of the things my husband and I are concerned about is if we are going to be paying for this building till 2040 we want something that is going meet sustainable design and requirements of the future with a green design.

They’ve had people come in and tell us it might not be safe for kids, and the repairs are 14 million dollars, a new school is 17 million so we just keep spinning our wheels so fixing things instead of building a nice new school you are saying what we should do is start a sustainability committee for our town.. 

YES! Once you know the solution is always start a team

It’s like YES we can do this! I can give you example when we were working in Longmont, CO. They had a sustainability plan they had started 2 years ago, the council sort of shifted and said we’re not going to continue ~ they shelved it and told the city staff do not work on sustainability. So when we were reaching out to city staff and they were unresponsive, we couldn’t figure out what was going on.

We didn’t know that history, so once we became a TEAM. We did things one day there was a meeting and you could stand up and speak for 3 minutes. So, one day we had 6 of us lined up you could speak for 3 minutes

We each said we want you to have a sustainability plan

• the first person said you took the funds from the federal plan and you never did it
• the next came on and talked about children’s health
• and another who talked about economic competitiveness with cities around us who had a plan and new workers who wont want to work in our town
• and the next…
•  and we got to the fifth one and they said ok, we were like wait we have one more speaker but they said ok, well do it.

when we go individually, I had never been to a council meeting, the first one I was probably in my late 40s

The way that our school districts and city governments work if individually we reach out and tell them something they feel bombarded but is we form a team together we represent this group of people.

we’re gonna ask you

we want our school to be net 0 energy meet the energy star rating of 99 and be a well school something like that based on a rating system. You an easily research some kind of those rating system and come up with something

TEAM ~ everyone comes up and says that same message!

Ask will you sign the petition to ask the school? Then you go back to the school board and say, now we have this many people have signed this thing, we’re telling you we want this. At some point they realize we work for you, we’re the boss and your the employees not the other way around.

It’s us, figuring out we are the ones who have the power that actually can do this.

In my book, in the course and coaching I do, my course is empower

Yes Jackie that is exactly it, start a TEAM!

You know what I was going to say too, most people are not going to do it, so when you step up you represent more people. I frequently say when you write a member of congress you represent like 22k people because that many people are NOT going to write so when you pick up the pen, or the phone, or write that email you are really making an impact. 

Afterall what did Margaret Mead say?

And look at all that you have done! It’s great when you talk about expanding incrementally! Tell me about your book!

in the book

course

step by step

such a great point when you show up, especially when you say I’m part of a team, it’s like you have 100s and you become an amplifier for invisible people behind you. A lot of times, school board meetings will be broadcast, so you are getting this message the more you put it out there

the book is super exciting!

not gotten a lot of uptake

I do not want to do it again! So I am in a program so I have a development editor and different editors so I make sure that the book that I am writing is going to resonate

Climate Action Breakthrough

really what we are talking here

if people understood that this thing when you tell somebody I want to take an action well you should bring your coffee cup, that was back when we could go to coffee shops, but you can say:

• bring your coffee cup
• recycle more
• install a LED light

That’s ok, but we need massive transportation, so when you focus on that personal level, first of all

• it’s exhausting!
• you know it’s not enough it’s depressing
• policy level it’s important but its’ slow so again it’s depressing and frustrating

there used to be a thriving garden! And a small group of people could revive that in a year that could demonstrate and go to the school board and say hey

this is what we are doing

mission of the school so 

• student leadership
• understanding biodiversity
• aligning with the schools missions always come back to that
• having kids take initiative
• integrate all the science and math
• grant writing

When you do that you are leading by example, maybe you will inspire another school to do it or there’s a faith community we could convert these large lawns!

A new guy who came who was a master gardener, you’ll love this! He was like, I don’t care about battery recycling it’s great but I want to feed the poor and I am a gardener!

He convinced the church and they delivered

fresh produce

mostly neighbors who are immigrants from African

growing greens

• collard greens
• mustard greens
• nutritional greens

coking classes

helping them re-invorgorate

traditional recipes and share it with each other

doing that kind of stuff

I could be doing this at work! I could do this at school! I could do it in my neighborhood!

this to me is why I call it climate action breakthrough! Because what we are doing now isn’t working, we are on the path of failure! We need to do things different and this is the thing!

Awesome! I love all this. I have actually ben listening to non-profit podcasts and thinking about making this into a non-profit instead of a business.

Yeah! Get those Earth Day Plays out there! The cool stuff that you’re doing making it more of an educational resource that could be funded. WE have talked about having an education center. Especially I am by trade an elementary school teacher and we recently partnered with Patti Armbrister who teaches high school agriculture.

in this point in human he history

there are so many things that are being

ok, humans

we can teach you the easy way

or you can learn the hard way

support that are growing or support the people around you who are doing it or maybe getting something from countries away because it’s 5¢ a pound cheaper

this moment is going to be invigorating their own food! I think that is a great idea!

Jackie

has anybody talked about victory gardens for this kind of coronavirus time? Has anyone come up with that idea. 

I did get an email yesterday and I immediately wrote back to them and ask her to come on and you can listen to that here:

Victory Gardens 2.0 interview #315 with Diane Blazek |National Garden Bureau

And Johnny’s everything was on backorder, and Baker Creek Seeds was shut down over the weekend and I talked with Ira Wallace who runs the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

It’s so beautiful because people are home more!

what I love about this moment are essential are:

• the people bringing us food
• health people
• back to those basic what it is
• taking care of your own wellness

Start of seeds

went got the little seed starter plastic thing, I have a couple of packets of seeds, I got the little seed starter, I live in an apartment, other people are probably wondering too, 

My entire garden is one huge pot that is going crazy with 

basil and mint

that’s good

if I wanted to start something that would be good in my apartment? I have a little sun in a south facing window, so it doesn’t have a lot of sun in the summer, it has an awning.

I’m gonna be sharing with on the Green Team Academy Podcast

Well, I am like you and I like to have herbs in my windowsill, and one of the bonuses to having it in your windowsill is it’s close to water, but I suppose you just said a window, not necessarily the kitchen…on a patio in an apartment…

Where did you say your window is? What is that called? A fire escape? A balcony?

I was gonna say a cherry tomato plant would be perfect but if you have an awning and no sun, that’s not so good.

My daughter has a little balcony.

I love a cherry tomato because they get ripe over time. What I learned form my podcast, you can take a cherry tomato and slice them, put them on a baking sheet, freeze them, and then they make a great sauce in winter, easy, don’t even have to blanch them.

Cherry tomato we get so many but regular tomatoes we have a hard time getting them to ripen. Another good potted plant you could do chives, rosemary is tough but my friend Nola is great with rosemary.

Arugula Love

I always like something that is going to give me a fresh taste in winter, I like arugula!

Arugula Planted July 27, 2017 Harvested in December

We just planted it in my classroom. You can eat the sees when they are the size of your nail on your pinky full of flavor put 4 tiny leaves on a sandwich but also the leaves get big enough to make a full salad.

Basil

The one thing for basil for us, we can get a frost maybe any day of the year, except for maybe 2 weeks in July, we’ve had a frost August 8th that would kill basil. But it also will grow well starting from seed except for maybe in Dec and January. I just love the taste of fresh herbs.

Especially in winter. You get up your bored I would eat a cookie if I had a cookie so I can eat some basil or mint and chew on that. The other thing I do, is I like to do sprouts.

those of us just starting

so when you’re picking something

does it matter who you pick it

do you try to break off the top part

whole stem of it

especially in the winter

try to use it the way I would a cookie

get up and I’m bored I would eat a cookie

I can walk over and pinch a bit of mint and chew it

has more nutrition

whatever else I’m gonna eat next

other thing I like to do

is sprouts

I have a hack for doing your own sprouts

don’t’ have the sporting kit

2 kind of seeds

• lentils
• mug beans

whites are so great with this hack because they are bigger

• soak them overnight
• rinse them
• put them into a small plastic colander, if it was able to hold water it might hold a quart

seeds or beans in there

set them because it has a handle I just set it over a bowl

anytime I come by I rinse them, and within a few days that whole thing is going to be sprouting

so amazing!

the other sprout things

smaller sprouts, it’s more of a production because the seeds are so tiny this little thing

sprouting hack

We’re in lockdown, we can go to the grocery store, idk about you, but I have beans in my cupboard I can always sprout them if I have water, so I always have somethign.

IDK if that’s gardening but it’s growing.

Can you just put regular lentils. Cause to me that’s the challenge. I have not been able to find alfalfa seeds that I can sprout, I finally found this radish, clover, fescue mix I bought for my little scientist kid because I knew he would be excited to see how fast they fill up the jar.

I forgot the seeds, I’m trying to stay home for 13 days, I did go to the bank today, so I am trying not to go back to my classroom for 2 weeks, but I’m not sure I’m gonna make it.

• teaching in South Korea
• Saudi Arabia
• buy them

organic ones

if possible

bulk section

where you would get everything else

now the bulk section sometimes the beans are wiped out

at natural grocers in the

whole bulk section

a little rice left but all the beans are gone

If you lentils in your cupboard

try it

they are very tasty

and more substantial

bigger they are

I think people might have some beans left when this is over because people went and bought a bunch of beans and then won’t cook them and will have them leftover after this is over so they might end up doing it then too.

I love sprouts!

focusing on our wellness

vegetable that you have

sprouts have some crazy amounts of nutrients 

we’re all trying to boost our immune system!

And I love how it adds some diversity to your salad if you want something different, I really like alfalfa sprouts with sunflower seeds, dry roasted sunflower seeds, it makes it elegant or decadent I think. Adds some texture!

Whatever you would use on your salad, eat them with a fork or wrap it up in a wrap!

Perfect, what else have we not talked about today you wanted to talk about?

back on the summit

one fun part is happy hours

The whole focus is grassroots climate action

people that have been signing up

earth week summit

Once you sign up you get access to our green team cafe and our Facebook group

People are already getting in there and introducing themselves

all the cool projects they are doing around the world

it’s not presentations but lets get on and meet each other! We are going to use zoom break out rooms, so during that happy hour you will suddenly be in a groups with 4-5 people from around the world that are interested in this thing

I am excited about that we are isolated! We are not able to go in our classrooms or hang out and meet for dinner or cafes etc.

And it’s so hard! 

I know people just feel like I am just going to sit and listen

evening sessions

it is hard that we have this way that you can hop in there! 

You might have said they were talking about this and that that they were thinking our new school how to push the school board or something and someone might say oh yeah! We just did that!

that’s gonna be a fun part of it!

really honored to be offering the community when so many other people’s earth day events got canceled

excited for all the people with outreach

alliance center

gathering hub for non-profits in Denver

Metro Denver Nature Alliance

a lot of activities for getting kids outside

the GREEN Organic Garden Podcast

So last year we wrote the Organic Oasis Guidebook. It’s 12 lessons 

There’s a challenge for new gardeners

This is my 5th year, it was always the Organic Gardener Podcast and in December we became the GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast, so we teach people how to create an organic oasis, a place you want to hang out and enjoy maybe not necessarily vegetables unless you want to maybe you live in California or somewhere where farmer’s markets and fresh food is plentiful but you want a nice landscape etc.

I usually work full time, so I take what I have learned from my guests that I’ve talked to and then talks about what Mike has done at our place over the last 27 years plus lots of pictures and worksheets for you to fill in!

Sounds like no matter where people are in their journey. You are doing the same thing I am doing. Learning from other people.

I had this idea of the Green Team Academy but I was like I need stories and to find people who are actually doing it, talking to them on my podcast I was like oh now I got it!

Sounds like with your podcast you have been able to share

• through learning through everybody’s individual skills
• bring all these tips
• distills those best practice guide

you can interact with it with all the worksheets.

Buckwheat before chop

It is designed to take it out there with you in the garden. One of the tips people have said over and over on my show is that their journal is one of their most valuable tools and resources even though with climate change things don’t always work as they used to, but another thing, people are surprised about is that cover crops are not just for big farms but for small gardens like even a bed that’s only 4×4.

The Online Earth Week Summit share with your friends

What is the UN75?

This is another whole cool part of the summit it keeps getting more and more so I can barely hit all the cool parts

the UN is getting ready to turn 75 and they are doing something called a global consultation, they have not done one for like 30 years. What they are doing is surveying the world and saying what should we work on?

what things need international cooperation?

• what things do we need to do to make it a better world?

As one of our partners for this event is the UN Association of Boulder County

support the mission of international cooperation of the UN

as part of this global consultation people who sign up as part of this summit will also get to complete this survey so it will be compiled, what do you think is important for the UN and made available for other decision makers.

city council

another way to do this

have this

We should do more about climate action, this will be delivered to the US Congress and other folks so it’s another tool that we can be using that is advocate this is what people care about and this is what we should be working on.

Well the UN is something that is near and dear in my heart, and if you look back in my journal what is one thing I would like to see, support the International criminal court, I tell my students why are we not worried that Texas is going to attack us? Or that NJ is going to start a war? Because we have a Constitution and courts of law and if we would just support the ICC we could abolish war in one fell swoop.

Awesome I didn’t realize they were turning 75.

More so now then ever we see, luckily, finally that we have to work together

no one person that can solve it

Again, if we come together and make our voices heard

As you were saying Jackie if you call your senator, you might be representing thousands of people in the same way as if you complete this survey. If we can say 

we had 1000 people and they think about 

• climate action
• local food
• protecting water
• k-12
• criminal justice

that gives them a little more information because again, they are working for us

supporting those goals that people believe in

• corona virus 
• international cooperation
• value of true leadership and risks the lack there of in a nutshell to not to get off on another topic

That is another exciting part of the Earth Week Summit!

Thanks for all you are doing!

When you were saying caring about water, we have the inland ocean because what we do inland affects your ocean, and the Colorado watershed and how to be part of these groups that determine the quality of your watershed

can’t wait to introduce you the whole group with the green organic garden podcast, I love that your are GREEN FUTURE GROWERS because we can all do that together.

To get a copy of Joan’s Book the Climate Action Breakthrough just click here

Also by Joan

Tuning In to Inner Peace: The Surprisingly Fun Way to Transform Your Life

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The Good Seed Company

Now Let’s Get to the Root of Things!

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

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The post 314. Green TEAM Academy | Online Earth Summit| Climate Action Breakthrough Joan Gregerson | Denver, CO appeared first on GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast.

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 was wondering what would I do if I was going to take this kale to market. I don’t care about the bugs and holes.

There’s been lots of info in the news lately about the failure of sales of blemished fruits and vegetables

sell perfectly good food

scab

rust

not perfect in appearance

leading change

blemished fruit and vegetable section

people refuse to buy it

function of people not understanding it

perfect

Look at the amount of waste it’s such a huge waste that gets thrown away.

I haven’t seen an increase in the # of

What drives me crazy is that those supermarkets don’t even compost it. We always have used bananas for sale. But I hate that it just goes in the garbage. Maybe a lot of it I’m sure is education.

I am just shocked everyeimt I walk into home depot or lowes are these giant roundup chemical lawn weed killer right in my face, at the entrance to the gardening section!

Yes the smell of the chemicals.

I know exactly. I talked to Jacqueline Freeman who hangs out in that isle when her husband is hoping and pretend to not know what she needs. and then she engages them in a converstaion. But I know I hate to even walk down that isle.

Rarely need to use any pesticide.

one option

kill weeds with glyphosate

cost effective

other ways to do it with tillage

cover crops

Where you can vanquish the weeds

A lot of people with smaller areas will smother weeds with

• tarps
• cardboard
• compost

on top of cardboard

smothering

blue grass lawn

perennial weeds we recommend that people smother for a full growing season.

april-oct

There are a few weeds that take 2 years or longer to smother:

• canada thistle
• bindweed
• vetch

I’m so glad I talked to you. I did this interview with Mandy Gerth, I was like I’m gonna do this tarp thing. I got on Farmer’s Friend and it was over $500 + shipping. But I posted in Facebook is this what I should expect to spend, but I found out that a lot of people use old billboard plastic.

The other thing Mike and I were talking about there is a meadow we have that is down on the end of our property, I keep saying we could smother the spotted knapweed down there and smother them in a month but he said it would take all year so now talking to you I realize as I should always know listen to mike.

I want to get a permit and grow some hemp there.

I was ahead of you growing hemp in college. Haha.

I think that is going to come around too! I can’t believe how much it has changed. 3 years ago, I couldn’t get anyone to talk about it for my 4/20 episode.It’s amazing what has happened!

Wi leading producers for making rope for the then it was made illegal later. So it’s this great crop for:

• fiber oil
• great products

guilt by association

guilt that was underserved

Suddenly they are realizing that marijuana has good medical uses and probably safer then alcohol.

You know there’s actually a book called Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?  that starts talking about this soccer came down in Brazil or somewhere and there were no problems like at a football game where people are drinking.

People always tell me I should eat hemp protein and hemp hearts etc because I am a vegetarian. We would like to build a house out of hemp concrete. One of the biggest people involved in getting it outlawed was William Randolph Hearst and then Rodales sold out to Hearst Publications, I just can’t believe it!

Back to native plants.

There’s endless topics we could talk about.

Let’s talk a little bit about roots!

Great excellent!

When you talk about prairie plants

About on average 2/3 of average

biomass resides underground.

average prairie grass

1/3 of it above ground.

Some plants have 85% of living plant matter underground in their roots

Many have very deep roots, grasses in general depending on the species. Many have very deep roots 1-8 feet deep go 10-12 feet or deeper! They encompass really wrap themselves around the plant holding it in place and preventing erosion.

The average grass plant loses 1/3 of it’s roots at the end of the growing season every year! And what happens to those roots? They turn into organic matter!

And so, the prairie and grasslands in general are regarded and associated as some of the highest quality ag soils in the world because of the organic matter that has accumulated over thousands and thousands of years in those ecosystems.

What has happened to the American Prairie is they are now some of the

rarest ecosystems in the world because it has such tremendous ag value it was plowed under relentlessly for economic reasons and converted to

• wheat
• corn
• hay
• soybeans

Which is why it’s so rare. But of little of note the American prairie that escaped the plow for people who are looking to restore the earth

Grasslands are one of the best things you can plant

• hold the soil
• encourage water into water table
• restore nutrient level
• create high quality habitat

Here is another interesting point, now I don’t have actual data

ecological structure

prairie

vs

forest

There’s about a 50/50 split in the forest community between the tree trunks and the leaves, branches etc and roots depending on the forest type and species.

In the prairie you have about 2/3 underground and 1/3 above ground.

The never ending deep into the soil

most forests, verbaceous you don’t get the depth of rooting.

Most forest soils have very thin layers of top soil you have this massive amount of incorporation over time in prairies.

So in theory over time in prairies, so prairies because of the deposition or suspension of organic matter in the soil are more adept at taking carbon dioxide out of the air then forests.

People are planting trees to reduce carbon levels in an effort to reduce global warming, but if you look at the ecology of the grassland system with deep rooted plants that are constantly adding organic matter i.e. carbon into soil every year. Prairies theoretically will take more carbon dioxide out of system and keep it or suspend it in the soil so it’s not going back into the air.

The organic matter that decomposes at the surface is invariable converted into other forms of carbon including  carbon dioxide goes into the soil and turns into organic matter is not except slowly released by microorganisms.

Can I ask you a question about golf courses? Didn’t it say you worked on golf courses?

Well golf courses, they used to be the classic ecological desert. When you are looking at maintaining:

• greens
• fairways
• tees etc

They are very high maintenance with

• irrigation
• fertilization
• pesticide application

So more and more golf courses are changing their ruffs from non-native  plantings to native plantings like prairies and it has worked with a number of golf courses. It creates a new experience for the golfers

frustrating

into the ruff

creates high quality habitat on the golf course

uptick in golf courses to create an ecological value on their properties there is a tremendous opportunity for courses to participate.

It also saves them money. There’s that fourth E, economics.

And they do ok, like the ecosystem and the butterflies etc that are in the rough, from all the pesticides they are spraying on the golf course?

Spraying the fairways, then you wonder are you creating a high quality depth trap. But more and more golf courses are using pest management so they don’t have to spray because their customers are saying hey, I’m touching that grass I don’t want to walk out there where all these pesticides are. Your seeing the real change, I’m not saying it’s universal but you are seeing a new sensitivity.

declined 20%

they have tracked, IDK if you read this article in the NYTimes the correlation of interest of golf and the decline of Tiger Woods, golf has dropped off a cliff and now they are all excited again.

As society changes, and cultures change increasing attitudes.

But you wouldn’t know that when you see people still have so many lawns

chemicals in the environment

lawns on their homes and this is the default landscape. This is the true tragedy of this because e have this tremendous  opportunity to restore our planet in our suburbs, around the world here in the united states, we have millions of acres devoted to peoples homes that could be converted to native prairie landscapes with local

• trees
• shrubs
• habitat

We would get rid of pesticides, fertilizers etc and have homes for birds. This is where we are on the real frontier. You can improve the planet. People say I’m just one person,  I can’t do anything NONSENSE!

You can do something on your property.

downtown mi

native garden

shrubs

urban wilderness of downtown

If more people in the suburbs did this we would have a critical mass

habitat

support some life

If everybody did that in across the country, we could have a huge impact at least in our country, if one person in combination with the neighbors it could have a vast impact.

Also, it would reduce cost for taxes if you don’t have to pay to have shared areas around a community to be irrigated etc. Can I ask about like soccer fields where kids are playing, in my mom’s town there’s a thing going to help with playgrounds.

I’m not a turf expert but we do have a normal lawn mix that made of fine fescues that are very drought tolerant so it’s a great alternative for a low maintenance lawn. But it’s not a turf grass, so you should always select the proper turf grass.

I like that people are saying we don’t want to use these chemicals wear these moon suits where you kids play and your pets go

birds and things

I was at my moms last june and I’m looking at these yellow flags all over the block, that say don’t walk here for 24 hours and I’m like what happens after 24 hours it’s gone down into the water, and then they have a water problem. What do you think?

I was watching AOC on the democracy now, and when she gets elected and she’s taking her high speed bullet train in 2028 when she returns. People are visioning the future. Like you started your business back in the 1980s and I think a lot would be teaching people. You’re probably ready to get off the phone.

Our business, we basically don’t advertise but our business has grown almost exclusively word of mouth by people seeing their neighbors yards and saying where did you get that?

prairie nursery has grown

education and exposure

we don’t go out and say you shouldn’t do we say here’s an alternative that’s better and you are going to like it better.

rather then scold

we have a better alternative

plant

I don’t just get beautiful flowers grasses, I get birds and they think wow! this is great!

Whenever you are looking at any social change event you just have to say I have a better alternative and promote that!

hey I have something better rather then the green new deal

deal with our resource base

living lower on the food chain

inters

What about your least favorite activity?

Well because we have an organic vegetable garden is picking Colorado potato beetles off the potatoes and eggplants and squishing them between my thumb and forefinger, although it is strangely rewarding nonetheless. That’s my least favorite thing squishing beetles.

My favorite gardening activity? is burning my prairies in spring.

prairies evolved under the influence of flower

Partly Native Americans who did it for the economic benefit for hunting

elk

forest you don’t get large meat. If your economy is hunting and gathering etc

burning the forest

americans were able to increase their food supply

prairies don’t exist in kansas etc.

extend into Illinois

Ohio

Wisconsin

indiana all the way to NY and Connecticut

burning the prairie

important factor

prevents

helps to control cool season non-native weeds

quack grass

kentucky blue grass is a weed in the prairie

red

white

problem in our prairies

green up in the spring sometime around late April

burn our prairies it’s a lot of fun to help control the invasive.

Do you want to explain. Is it to add nitrogen to the soil right?

adds potassium

just controlling

reduce the invasion of unwanted woody plants native or non native and containing cool season weeds

The other factor are most prairie plants are warm season 70s

cool season they start growth 4-6 weeks before the prairie plants so by waiting till just before the plants you knock back the cool season weeds

4-56” tall so you deprive them of their generate from root reserves stored  with less energy

soil is black and the beauty of black is it makes the temp increases dramatically.

In green bay on may 1st we did an experiment was the top inch was 18 degrees higher in just  4 days

that stimulated the growth

disadvantage

very specific process to favor native prairie plants because they evolved under fire.

It’s beneficial

destructive

burning the ecosystem

management tool for making sure they do well and prosper and keeping woody plant out

If you look around the world and you look around the ecosystem

sequen

Yellowstone

lodgepole forest usually burn every 100 years, but what it did

surpassed fro so long

morning yellowstone

explosion of wildlife

like bison and elk and other grazers in other eaters

redwoods forest that is burned it looks terrible the first year but after that they have this 6-12 inch thick bark

generate new

survive

some ways benefited by fire

remove competition

great for redwoods not good for the doug fir but great for the redwoods

ecosystems

every other year

1000 years they burn but they almost invariably maybe you shouldn’t put your your house in the lodgepole forest.

planting

people putting house in the chaparral

if they had burned

wouldn’t have built up to the level

But people don’t pay attention to that and they don’t look at ecology.

Huh, I feel they could have paid more attention that it could have been prevented, my brother said something like that they had their houses in the wrong spots.

9 The best gardening advice I ever received about gardening was from Bob Smith, who founded Prairie Nursery as a hobby in 1966. 

Wasn’t even 1/2 an acre, he said Neil He told me “You gotta be ruthless.  Don’t get sentimental about the plants in the nursery.  Sometimes you just have to tear up old plots to create newer, more productive ones.”

when it’s time to make a change you got to move forward

absolutely right

utility it’s time to swap it out and put  something new in.

He’s like the original Mari Kondo of the midwest before so tidying, and sparking joy, it’s really working for me, I say thank you and move on.

10 My favorite tool is the drip torch, for starting prairie fires. A canister with 20% gasoline. What a professional pyromaniac uses. haha.

11 How do you pick a favorite recipe?  Impossible! I grew some incredible butternut squash last year. And I dumped the compost into the hole, I dug these big holes, I was like we had extra compost, we had so much.  I was rotating to our second pile and I said put this in the hole!

through gallons

butternut squash

cooking

cook our last squash

don’t keep anymore

for some reason

• butternut squash
• maple syrup
• bacon
• garlic/onion

Omgod it’s tremendous

curry butternut soup

Vegan without milk, I love that!

Chipotle peppers.

I smoke my own on

all weekend endeavor

sat morning

end sun

adobo sauce give them for christmas presents and people just clammer for them!

All sorts of things you can do with butternut squash.

I bought some coconut milk to do that yesterday.

12 My favorite internet resources are about native plants, such as Illinois Wildflowers, Missouri Botanic Garden, National Wildflower Research Center, and Biota of North America Project. Wild ones landscaping group.

13 Best book on the importance of native plants and their role in sustaining all life is “Bringing Nature Home” by Douglas Tallamy   .

BOIA App? Agrarian

occurs in every county in the US

amazing resource

local state resources

have really good native plant resources

native plant society

wonderful things

great conferences

national group

the wild ones

natural landscapers

sustainable landscapes

mini

don’t do what I do, I didn’t have a clue.

I’m a plant nerd my degree is in environmental sciences

I new I needed to be independent and start my own direction

strongly motivated

little nursery was not even a half an acre there were a few small native nurseries

Nobody was really promoting it,

universities that had aboratae

speaking into our society I wanted to take it to the mainstream

selling people

plants and seeds and providing them the info on how to do this

I was clueless

didn’t understand business

every day is a final exam

• marketing
• employee relations
• finance
• taxes

You’re like graduate school for the rest of your life, every day is a job interview where you might talk to 5-10 customers who say, do you have what I need?

After 37 years #1 you have to have an excellent product and you need to provide excellent customer service.

Our business sells native plants for ornamental and ecological restoration, rather than for produce.  However, the rules of business apply across the board:

a Produce an excellent product you can be proud of and stand behind

if you don’t have that go home

b Provide excellent customer service – no one’s perfect

without the customer, the creates your paycheck

c Treat your customers fairly, as if they were your best friends

The other customers are my employees even the person with the lowest job description in your company you are no one without their people I try provide them with what they need to do their job best

d Treat your employees with respect, help make their jobs as easy as possible, and pay them as well as you can possible afford. I didn’t go into this business to get rich.

If you love what you do you never work a day in your life. Try to take care of people to the best to your ability.

Maintain a solid presence on the internet with an excellent website that reaches all your potential customers.

thank my lucky stars when we started out  were a mail order nursery. We got the letters with the orders in  it transitioned to 800 #s. Then in the 2000 transition to the internet

85% of orders come on the internet. I have half of the staff answering phones, the only way to find your customers. If you don’t have a good web presence it’s gonna be a tough row to hoe.

f Never lose track of your values and the reasons why you went into business in the first place. Keep true to values and dream never lose site

make sure the organization shares that. I am so fortunate that I have a wonderful group of people, everyone’s drinking the cool aid and are aware of why we exist restore their little piece of the planet.

15 The most critical change we can make as a species is to reduce our environmental impact by reducing our consumption of resource, living lower on the food chain, and respect all forms of life with whom we share this beautiful planet.  If we continue to undermine the foundation of life, we will eventually become victims of the extinction process we have set in motion.  Restoring the integrity of the Earth using native plants appropriate to each unique region is something everyone can do to help heal the torn and rendered fabric of our planet.

there are so many great charities

that always helps, the real bottom line is humans have to come to the conclusion we are one species among many. We have this notion that we are the superior species and the earth was given to ours for our own exploitation. As long as we follow that credo, we will continue to despoil the earth at our own risk. We can isolate from ourselves from the collapse to some degree although some people are already feeling the effects.

Some people in wealthy nations and northern climates can postpone it a bit but eventually it will catch up to us

earth is here for people

idk at the concept of native americans

realized that the are just part of the whole

Eurocentric culture

more of a this is ours let’s take it but until we get over that we are going to continue to ruin the planet at our own risk.

million

no rational reason to hasten this process we need to take care of our mother.

but we need to completely revamp our relationship with the other inhabitants

without them we are dead!

16 “Homo sapiens merely awaits its appointment with the sediments.  There is no reason to hasten the process.  Take care of your Mother.”

How do we connect with you?

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!

The post Native Landscape Design | Prairie Nursery | Interview 288 with Neil Diboll | Westfield WI appeared first on GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast.

I’m super excited to introduce my guest today Julia Henderson from Confluence Farm who is not just a gardener but a chef who is going to share their garden journey from restaurants to organic farming and more!

Sorry folks show notes to be completed in the future! Enjoy the audio!

Rockstar Millennials

Confluence Farm is an organic vegetable and flower farm located in Sebastopol, CA along the picturesque Green Valley & Purrington creeks. Julia and Andy are chefs turned farmers who truly understand high quality products and making people happy. We focus on generating the healthiest soil we can in order to grow the most nutrient dense and healthy vegetables possible. A confluence is when two entities come together, be it water or people. Our food and flowers bring people together, whether it be at on our farm, self grown and catered events, or nurturing our own community and family through markets. Our motto is “Come Together, Eat Well”.

Tell us a little about yourself.

My name is Julia I own a 3 acre farm

an hour north of SF

certified organic

vegetables

I used to be a pastry chef

my husband

we met in San Francisco

always had a garden

only a small amount

about 4 years ago

we were both looking to transition away from the restaurant world

we still wanted to do something with food

the property where I grew up

it had been bought to be a farm when my flimsy original moved there

saw the potential for it to be a farm

we decided to move back

having worked in the food industry

committed to working with local growers

for the ingredients we used in the food

husband especially had the green thumb out of the two of us

inspired by what he saw

dove in headfirst

neither of

3rd year

exciting

backstory

farmers mart

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

my mom has quite a green thumb

always had a garden

some vegetables

still has a garden to this day

right next to the farm

• flowers
• perennials
• least
• cherry tomatoes
• lettuce
• swiss chard

what ever else she was interested in

can’t say I had a super green thumb

interested

later in life

learned a lot love for plants

first ex

How did you learn how to garden organically?

her garden was always pretty small

when we decided to start the farm it was important to be organic

getting certified from day one

Tell us about something that grew well this year.

I was happy with was our carrots

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

bringing someone on full time

needed more help to be productive

bringing on hands and help

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

biggest pest pressure are flea beetles

love baby greens

brassicas

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

moving materials

moving plant material out

• tarps
• row cover

feels a little bit like straight manual labor

What is your favorite activity to do in the garden?

I really love greenhouse work

seeding

tending to the baby plants

one of my specialization on the farm

love the

harvesting flowers

we don’t have as much flowers as vegetables

What is the best gardening advice you have ever received?

Um, I think well one thing I think is the idea that there is a difference between dirt and soil

you really want to keep your soil alive and active

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?

greens harvester

baby greens

lettuce mix

cuts it extremely fast

A favorite recipe you like to cook from the garden?

we do is kind of an easier go to

rice bowl

grain bowl

veggies on top

one of my favorite things he make is incredible tomatoes sauce

A favorite internet resource?

youtube

is really great

a lot that we have learned from youtube

Curtis stone

learned a lot from his videos

about growing is really helpful

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

Jean Martin Fortier Market Gardener he focuses on especially for a smaller farm

certain resources

geared towards

maximize efficiency productivity

how to

small farm

how to really be more

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 that one of the advice that I would say is to really think about where your farm is  and where your market would be

do some research

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?

yeah that’s a hard one there’s so many thing

moving towards renewable energy

create jobs

effectively implemented on a large scale

see in my life time

it would make a big difference

talk about

more solar

farm and property

that’s something I would really like to see change

within my own work

responsible ag practices

sustainable ag practices vs not

really important to support farms that are really doing it right

small medium larger scale farm

supporting

putting our dollars towards those farms

ag practices have a large impact on the land and

environment

really complicated

global economy

need to feed the world

really supporting farms that are making it

an effort

gives back

that’s something I really hope in my lifetime we more support for

really funding

more support and research for that

actual

funds to help people to implement things on their farms to soil

our markets most are fairly small

we’re gonna be at one a little bigger next year

most are small to medium farms

a lot of people are organic

some are not certified

some do not

conception from people

all farms

common misconception that all farms at a market are organic

hard to compete with other farms that are not

pretty good awareness

smaller

most of the other farms

if they’re not certified

growing organically using good practices

hard to compete

relay why there’s value

in what you are growing why it might be more expensive

work on our messaging

value in our product

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

you would be amazed how much you can grow in a small space

plants s

easy and prolific

tomatoes

summer squash

if you are interested

grow a lot of food

just a yard

few pots of different vegetables

really rewarding to

bias both cooks

rewarding to cook with fresh ingredients

extra satisfying

fresh ingredients

don’t be intimidated

that’s such a good point

my sister was asking what should she grow in her backyard

even if you don’t use them all

snip some herbs

cook with them

bring in so many

How do we connect with you?

our Instagram is @ confluence farm

facebook

website is confluencefarm.com

great way to get a sense

my one of my really close friends

her mother did it

really talented artist

farming

politics

how i built this

farmsmall/farmsmart

farming focus

ted radio hour

doesn’t

listen with forage beautiful all about herbs

herbal studies

really

every episode dived into an herb

have another herbalist on

growing of it

I was gonna say

a flower farmer who would be amazing to talk to

Heather

full bloom flower farm

wealth of knowledge

young

andy’s age

wealth of knowledge

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The post 278. Chefs turned Farmers | Confluence Organic Farm | Julia Henderson | Sebastopol, CA appeared first on GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast.

I have lots of guests that have been booking and lots of great interviews coming up! A Montana rockstar running the food truck here in Montana! 

Tell us a little about yourself.

I did grow up on a farm and a ranch

A little bit about my past

I was raised in a world of agriculture

I grew up on a farm and ar ranch that was not always organic, my dad converted to organic in 2007

I was 10 years old it was interesting as a young child to see that process of old ways and shifting to new ways of organic and

how much better everything becomes with that process

with that conversion

we moved to a lot of diversified crops

Before we had converted to organic we were just doing the same old thing everyone else does. Switched to doing a lot of

wheat

and same

clover

alfalfa

growing ancient grains

• kamut
• farro
• lentils
• chickpeas

while we were learning and growing all those

I was also at a pretty young age learning to bake

native to Montana at that time

I think that was where I got a pretty strong base

with working with local and available at any given time.

That’s the farming side of it.

We raised cattle as well. So that was really interesting for me to grow up working the trails and the

to grow up working cows

trail them

calving season everything you go through

on the organic side

everything 100% organic

grass fed

everything takes longer

I remember watching food inc when it came out

I remember seeing the vast difference competed to the feed lots they have pictured!

Everything how everything is so crammed

compared to our open pasture

administering antibiotics and growth hormone

we were just allowing our cattle to grow naturally it takes longer but I believe it does allow for a healthful product

and a product that tastes better

Through all that processI think I gained a really good appreciating for the organic food system

extra time and thought that goes into it

That’s the same for a lot of people who are gardening

I love to have conversations that they are trying

some are working and some aren’t

learning what grows well here and what doesn’t

how to utilize in cooking.

Did you have a lot of brothers and sisters? You seem like you had a very mature upbringing. Mike and I were talking about chores the other day.

similar upgrading

yeah I have 3 brothers and 2 sisters

I’m the 2nd oldest so I just have one older brother.

We’re ranging in ages in 23 down to 7.

I think growing up especially with so many younger siblings inputs a little bit of extra responsibility automatically to a person.

I think that was some part of it

cooking was something because I did like to do it, but I didn’t always cook because I wanted to

had to do but it was something we had a lot of people to feed

working on the ranch

not always great help

had a lot of kids

We were out there whenever we needed to be.That built a really good work ethic I appreciate all of those opportunities

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

Yeah! You could say, we did have a pretty good garden for the majority of my childhood

wouldn’t classify myself as a green thumb I am better at cooking then gardening. I enjoy the process. I had my little herb garden on the back porch in college.

• tons of root vegetables
• melons
• corn one year
• strawberries
• rhubarb

Pretty standard things you could say

definitely lots of salad greens and tomatoes.

Now you’re up in the northern part of Montana, close to the border of Canada. Very cold right. Not easy to grow food.

It’s not, unless you have a greenhouse

even still there’s challenges. I’m about as close to Canada as you can get. It takes about 40 minutes to drive to the border.

from where I live

It definitely does present some challenges

climate but there’s ways to work around it.

I think that’s where experimenting with what really grows well in Montana. There have been a lot of farmers around the area spending time.

fruit trees

varieties of tomatoes and peppers

what’s gonna produce the best in the soil in the time frame that we have. Very different from other states across the country.

I was just going through our garden journals from when Mike puts the seeds in the ground, for the most part it’s between the 7th and 10th of April, cool starts, lettuce, spinach, peas, etc. Stuff that can’t have a frost, it’s more like green beans etc. it’s right after our anniversary in the first week in June.

I also have dates of when did we first harvest it, and things like, I thought we didn’t really harvest asparagus but actually it was for like 5 years. A lot of my guests have said keeping data was good.

Even so, I think your ahead then I am with the gardening data

I agree with you, I love to analyze data! I haven’t done it as much with gardening but especially for the STREATERY this past year.

I closed for the winter and so it’s been a time to rest and regroup

closed through

I have been going through numbers and analyzing what worked and what didn’t

• what days of week?
• what events better?
• which menu items did the best?

I could spend hours pouring over the information.

Why don’t you tell us all about Streatery and your food truck and how all that got started.

Getting into a little bit of the agricultural background.

Now getting into the culinary realm I entered a few years ago, it all kind of started gradually. Like I can’t remember a point where I decided I want to be a chef. It just sort of accumulation of events in high school I did a lot of farmer’s markets

mostly baked good

local

I would go to the mountains and forage for

• June berries
• currant berries

ancient grains we were growing and grind the

local honey

as many things I could get my hands on. Feature all of those local ingredients.

My senior year of high school I took a trip to California to the bay area. I thought this was interesting.

I interviewed Liz Carlisle!

So, awesome Liz Carlisle wrote this amazing book called Lentil Underground

farmers in Montana who were some of the first people growing organic lentils and just that process because now Montana is the number one producer of lentils. She goes through the whole story!

They are who are your parents?

Chapter 12, in

Lentil Underground

the gospel of lentils

because of that she flew my family my siblings and everyone out to California when she launched the book

It wasn’t just my family it was all of the families featured in the book, and we stayed in this huge Airbnb house and had a great time and got to meet all the people who were reading the book and explained about the process of everything

through that trip I made a lot of great connections.

One of them, are here near Havre and they farm as well they are Doug and Anna Crabtree with Vicious farms. On that trip, they sort of casually offered me a job in between that summer between high school and college.

I had decided to go to culinary school but didn’t have a plan beyond that. They hired me on as their culinary specialist and I lived out at their farm M-F cooking for their farm crew.

At the time, I felt highly unqualified. It turned out really great! I loved every minute of it. It gave me freedom to cook whatever I was feeling that today but also to use what was readily averrable and  locally grown

We were totally tracking each other on

• what’s important in the food world
• what’s nutritious
• how can we utilize these things?

they were really great to work with. I think I got lucky to get that opportunity.

Then in the fall I attended Culinary Institute of Montana in Kalispell. It takes a little under 2 years to get an associates degree. I graduated in Dec 2016 and kind of just craving an adventure at that point. I had always leaned towards entrepreneurship and self employment and tie that into the food world, so the most obvious choice was to start a restaurant but that seemed daunting at the time.

I actually moved to Maui

went with the WWOOF program

worldwide

They have this great online directory

wwoofusa.com

You can essentially type in the type of agriculture you are interested in or you can type in the city or state that you would like to

go have an experience

You can stay from a week to a month to several months! Depends on what you are looking for and what the the operation needs

you go and the standard agreement is you work 20 hours a week then in return you get free room and board so some places that means they feed you 3 meals a day someplace that means give you staple ingredients and a kitchen

literally ground breaking

• We made raised beds
• worked on some beehives
• managed a farm stand

It was very rugged. I actually lived in a tent for a month. We didn’t have running water and we had to haul that up to a top of a mountain.

Did you get to go to the beach?

It was hard work but it wasn’t’ very long so there was definitely lots of free time.

the farm in Maui

You could see the ocean from the mountains of Maui called upcountry. 

You could see the ocean and beach but to actually get there you would have to walk a few miles to the beach. Since none of us had cars. Between that and hitchhiking, so we did make it to the beach a couple of times.

There were other people there? Were you scared going from Montana to Hawaii? Were your parents like oh my?

My parents were nervous but I was ready. I had a skype interview. I had my tent and a general plan and they picked me up at the airport. After a while I got a phone call from mom after I was there a couple of days she was like I know that you landed in Hawaii, but never confirmed you made it to the farm. I thought I should check.

There was quite a big group of people

• CA
• North Carolina
• Montreal
• Netherlands
• Colorado

It was a great group of people

work together

have adventures together

Quite a few of us ended up switching to another farm after a month.

permaculture farm

rancho relaxo

first I had learned of permaculture

found this farm online through the website

said it was fruit orchard

Did mention permaculture but I didn’t know what to expect and so in my mind I thought it would be rows of

• orange
• avocados
• mangos
• papayas

permaculture

looked like the garden of eden!

mystical

You walk in and there is this winding dirt road going through this tropical forage. Going on the first tour and he’s pointing!

there’s a banana tree

mango

coffee is growing

tilapia ponds

2 chicken coops

vegetables gardens

intermixed and benefiting from each other in turn!

That was a wonderful experience to see that different approach to agriculture.

While I was at that farm it didn’t take the owner long to learn I could cook. So we ended up

putting together a farm-to-table event while I was there!

We had a group of people come out to the farm.

A local hunter brought some venison tenderloin

lots of greens

eggs

veggies from the farm

featured as much local produce as we could get from markets and things

four course dinner with wine pairings

fantastic. IT was this little moment of paradise in my past.

Then the advent of Streatery came about a year later. I moved back home in the summer of 2017

To help out with a few things. We had a huge farm tour coming up.

We were also a little short handed, my dad needed me to help

• sort cows
• drive tractors

thing I hadn’t done in a long time after being away. It was good to get back into that

summer of 2017

Towards that fall, I noticed that we could possibly benefit from some direct marketing of our organic beef and pork had been implemented at that point.

I started applying for a grant

working for

• a website
• freezer
• license

to distribute locally some of our meat products. While I was working with our business development centers, one of the representative told me hey there’s this vacant food truck that is just sitting behind a brewery in town

you should contact them

see if they are renting it or something, because I think if someone decided to do something it could be successful

I contacted the brewery

I didn’t think i would come to much. I thought what the heck I have time, I’ll just call them up and see what the plan is. I told them who I was

I had a culinary education and I had a farm-to-table style of cooking and they got back to me and we had a meeting. This was January of last year. We made up a contract so I could rent out the truck month to month.

park outside their brewery

any events

take it to them

thats how Streatery was born

Wow!

That’s interseting my step-daughter who runs a food truck, she is right outside a brewery and she thinks the location is key. They are so busy all the time. It’s a big recreation area, it’s 28 miles up to the wilderness for hiking, snow mobiling, and fishing! In the summer you can actually drive through to Glacier National Park. The brewery is not in town it’s out there. They have the pizza truck and sell pizza and salads they do a killing. Is that in a small town.

I’m curious what’s it called?

I think it’s called Fire and Slice. he has a pizza place in town and I think the food truck is at the brewery.

Well that’s really cool!

It’s definitely been great to work with the owners of the brewery. They are always giving me super good ideas and really supportive of any things I was thinking of trying. And just nice to have them as business mentors as well!

They are about to celebrate their 5th anniversary of the brewery open and so with them finishing 5 years and me finishing my first year, we have the same processing system, I can say, what do you think about these numbers?

this idea? or marketing things this way?

it is my business but having help is great.

I’m curious to here what numbers they tell you to look at

Michael and aaron are the owners of triple dog.

mechanically minded more so then I am

if something

this is an old truck that I have it is an old

1968 ford

it definitely had a couple of problems last year getting it from point a to point b sometimes so it was nice to not have to do it myself

getting involved but not winging it

It’s definitely been helpful along the way. They also chime in with ideas for new menu items.

That’s something I love about Streatery

unique is that

our menu is constantly changing

set menu for spring

summer

fall

but even within those set menus we are constantly introducing new menu items sometimes every week!

depending on what’s available

Last year I had people who have big greenhouse and garden

tomatoes and jalepenos

golden plum variety of tomato

so many couldn’t get rid of

fast enough

sent this message

we have these golden tomatoes

what to do with them. I said let me think about it and I’ll come up with something

The Hipster Chicks

I had this sourdough I had the locally bakery make for me out of Montana flour

garbanzo beans that I cooked down with garlic and other seasons. They were cooked enough so they lost their shape but didn’t blend like humus, so they still had texture to them.

sharp cheddar Montana cheese

sliced the golden tomatoes and put them on the sandwich and grilled it!

I served with a creamy cilantro curry dipping sauce. I called it the hipster chick!

It was something I featured for a couple of weeks to get through their golden tomatoes

Every once in a while I can feature something like the hipster chick. It was one of my most creative

eccentrics dishes that I have come up with the truck.

Havre is a huge agriculture community. It’s a very much meat and potatoes kind of town

except for a small group of people who would rather not. every once in a while I have 

still lots of specials that are like

smoked meatballs and mashed potatoes with IPA gravy

It’s delicious! I like that one!

It’s a fine line between super creative and using what’s available and everyone thinking your a hippy!

My husband is a very meat and potatoes, but he grows a lot of vegetables so he’s a little more adventurous.

So that food truck you went into already had a

You know it did have some things

counters

warmer

chest

we did add

I first toured the truck

mini fridge

chest freezer

The owners of the truck added in fryer with that we had to add a ventilation system which was tricker then we thought because it’s such a small space we had to have it customer built

small oven

for the truck

bought a big smoker to hook onto the back of the truck

I used it a little bit last summer but I hope to use that more this year

Getting a lot of smoked meats and a bit of barbecue. I did a smoked mac and cheese that went over really well.

tips for starting a truck

Definitely consider your potential menu

I know that can be really daunting just starting out because you don’t know what people will respond well too?

Or what will be available but if you can get a general idea of what you would like to cook that would be very helpful

especially if your truck doesn’t have equipment

for what was available

for example

the oven that I have it takes up so much powers

I have two generators on the back of the food truck but the oven if it is on pretty much takes an entire generator just to power that

something to consider

so either get a huge generator or come up with recipes and menu items that wouldn’t take a lot of power

I do use the oven use it for things when the oven can be on before I am open and then put it in the warmer that takes up less electricity

I wouldn’t even have thought having a generator

I’ve never worked on one. She’s in a permanent place and they are hooked up to power and then I think they have a wood fired pizza oven.

that’s really interesting I’ve thought of doing not pizza but flat bread

dipping sauces

require oven

you know the past year I just used the generators because I didn’t want to have extension cords running into the

closer to the building all the time.

We’re thinking about parking it closer to the building and wiring the electricity into the building but making it detachable so I can still  leave to go to events too

We’ve talked about a few of those things. And we talked about water yeah so that’s the thing

For a normal day the brewery I could fill the sinks, we would be fine not run out of water. But at events I can’t drive the truck around while the sinks are full of water it would splash around.

so, what I ended up doing is I just went to the store bought really nice 5 gallon buckets that had water sealed lids and I bought 4 of them.

I would

• fill up my water tank
• fill up those four 5 gallon buckets

so I could bring them to the event so I cold use them for the dishwashing watrer and still have water in the tank for 

• hand-washing
• various cooking

3 compartment sinks

20 gallons

filled up for washing dishes doesn’t include 

• mopping
• hand-washing

necessary

Water is huge so either get a ginormous water tank or have a plan in place but it also depends how you use the truck too

because like I said, the days at the brewery it wasn’t hard to haul a 5 gallons but eventually I got a 50 foot garden hose and before the brewery was open run the hose and fill it up that way.

The first 6 years I was married to my hsuband we didnt have running water at all and the last two winters we’ve had some challenges, so we haven’t had running water the last two winters so I completely understand.

it just, I can’t believe it took me so long to buy a hose

I was getting pretty buff from carrying these buckets of water everyday, I was walking around the store and I was exhausted I saw these hoses were on sale for 10 and the next season I’m looking forward to that.

We got one of these hoses that rolls up flat and is really high pressure. I was watching the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up book woman on GMA this morning. Have you seen that movie Chef about the guy who travels back from Florida with his son?

Everyone keeps saying I should watch it.

Building

• my team
• connections around the state
• working with different producers
• have visited each producer that’s growing food for me
• go visit the other farms that
• produce and dairy products

That’s something I’m looking forward to!

• taking on more events
• more catering this year

Whats Catering like?

it can be either/or

depends what the person was looking for

Catering was something I never really advertised but so many people ask me about catering so i think I will start easing into it, I did do al ittle bit of it last year.

Some people, I catered a wedding and they want the truck for the ambience

food truck kind of feel

backyard style of wedding

We did street tacos and food kabobs really cute kind of event.

Some people want more casual for a business meeting like soup and sandwiches kind of thing using local ingredients that sort of thing more thought put into the presentation.

Then I’m also looking to do more

farm-to-table style events out on the ranch

something my family and I have kind of been working towards kind of very gradually.

implementing a commercial kitchen on the ranch

food truck prep  but also in the future host 

various farm to table events

smaller upscale

maybe not tons of people but low key good food

bring in local

• farmers
• people in agriculture
• fellow chefs

to speak and talk about the food and what’s going on in agriculture in Montana

Those are some of the ideas currently occupying my brain for next year

I would say for anyone considering getting into an industry my one piece of advice coming to me now

plan everything now

A lot will probably change as you go but the more you can plan ahead the better off you will be.

That’s been very helpful for me. Last year I had like a month and half to get the 

• menu written
• printed logo design
• get the truck functional
• schedule events

will have reopened

Now I’ve had 4 months to

• decompress and 
• plan and
• write new menus 
• think about new events we can do

powerful

What data can you recommend and how many people are on your team?

Last year, I had 4 people part time I have one other girl who’s interested and enthusiastic in joining for the summer that will bring us up to 5

I have one or two I am thinking about adding to the team

increasing the hours of the members I currently have

We’re switching days open and I’m still talking to everyone’s schedules how to make it work

I’ve been thinking about the potential in the people who work last year and how can we best utilize everyone’s talents in a productive way

with data

I love to analyze everything but I’m no expert

One thing I have been dwelling

the Prado Principal

rule that 80% of the results are because of 20% of inputs

An Italian who noticed that 80% land owned by 20% of population

wealth owned by 20%

average person only wears 20% of closet

really analyzing that with menu items

Keeping that rule in the back of my head?

20%

what did people really respond to well

same with events

what work did we put into last year that really brought fourth bulk of positive result? as opposed to what did we do that didn’t make that big of a difference

different for every business

• community
• specific look at this
• principal

You’re really wise for your age. Do you use social media since you are more tech savvy and grew up in a more tech world.

yeah! I do utilize Facebook for meat distribution and Streatery and Instagram

I haven’t used Instagram as much for Streatery will do that more for 2019 season

@streaterymt

pretty effective like it to keep everyone updates

adds if we are going to be at a certain event

I love to use Facebook to post

• give credit to people growing our ingredients
• cheese
• beer from
• Triple Dog
• beef in meatballs is from prairie grass ranch

give credit

pretty good platform

I think fb has and Instagram are both valuable tools in their own way

wider audience for the content

Instagram is growing

focusing more FB ease into Instagram

yeah, one thing FB that I’m planning on implementing this year is  just like for every month we are open I will pin post to the top of a business page have an image that has our schedule. 

I am hoping people will get used to see that

Streatery will be at these three events at these locations at these times

• Triple Dog at these times
• farmers’ market these weeks

so it’s a little more clear

post all the days

the day before

one image

thank you so much for having me

I appreciate that opportunity

I feel like Facebook is so much easier to share a link then Instagram is.

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Get Hippie Certified!

Welcome to the Organic Gardener Podcast today it is Thursday, February 28, 2019. I’m so excited to talk to my guest from Texas because I’ve been looking for someone to talk to us about Organic Lawn Care! So from Hippie Fertilizing here is AJ Olson!

What would you like to know, actually how you found me was you shared a micro prairie article that I had had shared on my Hippie Fertilizing Facebook Page.  So you posted something and I shared it and you liked it and I sometimes look at who like’s my posts so I can figure out what people like and look for more things like that to help them.

Hippie Fertilizing Natural Organic Lawn Care

I’m a H town baby

Im 31, I grew up here Houston in between here and Galveston

I’ve been in lawn care and tree service. I thought how can I learn something and grow as I learn?

Lawn-care seemed to be something that would keep me moving, because I  hate to sit still. It’s been really successful over the years. I started out doing what we know and often that’s what we see on TV on commercials or what friends tell us.

I found out the hard way that doesn’t work very well! Put down some weed and feed, burn some lawns, spray some weed killer,  get very sick! No that doesn’t look like a good idea anymore! I’m gonna get older one day I don’t want to kill myself to make a living.

Hippie Fertilizing Natural Organic Lawn Care

That’s where I found out about organics and every since I did it’s been such a wonderful thing!

Not only a great way for me to have a business where I can do something positive.

Also it’s been a fun amazing way to educate others on the 

• importance of our environment
• how we effect ecology
• supporting soil biology is the best way to go! 
• It’s the most environmentally supportive and supports our own health!

That’s good to hear because the number one question I got last summer was How do I take care of my organic lawn? Do you want to give some tips for how do we build soil health in our lawn?

Can I say what the biggest question I got last summer was?

How do I kill the weeds?

That’s always the top questions

Yeah they say the same thing to me? What do I go buy?

And heres what you do. A lot of people don’t like my answer in the beginning because it’s an education process.

• Why is it a weed?
• Why do you want to kill it?

You know most of the weeds have benefits to the soil, so they’re not really weeds you just see so many silly commercials from those big companies out there that want you to buy their stuff and it’s not worth it!

alright?

How do you take care of an organic lawn?

You sit back and relax and let it grow!

A good way to start this, because I know there are lots of people who are like I have to do something?! 

Go to the store and and get some organic molasses!

Molasses has

• iron

• calcium

• magnesium

• potassium

• B vitamins

• lots of sugar that feeds the soil microbes

I know people are like I need to jump on this and do something so grab some molasses and sweeten up the day.

You know what’s awesome about that, I put a tiny shot of molasses in my coffee each day and I put that on my plants at the end of the day I wonder if that helps them grow?

Well the molasses, and the coffee, coffee has a very low consistent rate of nitrogen. If  you have 

• roses
• azaleas
• other acidic types of plants.

I actually put it in my basil, lettuce, whatever is in my window. I love that idea! Go get some molasses, like a cup of molasses and a gallon of water. 

8 oz of molasses?

I have a tank, so typically I’m putting a quart, which is 32 oz reservoir

A gallon is 128 oz. So I use about a quart (1/4 of a gallon) of molasses  for about 50 gallons of water. So for home gardeners usually has a 32 oz reservoir I recommend 8 oz of molasses

Organic Lawn Care Natural Spray

Spray it on anything to your hearts content, it won’t hurt anything it will just make your plants and grass greener!

This is so fantastic! I am so glad I talked to you! So what else do you tell people for their soil health?

I follow a couple of Rules for Organic Lawn Care

#1 if I can’t touch it with my own hands I don’t use it!

If you think your following an organic program

Let’s say your using a pre-emergent,

read that package

if it says you can’t touch it with your bare skin maybe you should wonder why you are using it at all? 

• We walk on our lawns, we have pets
• They have smaller kidneys etc
• Pets can’t handle stuff the way we can, they can be 5 times more affected by it!
• “No it’s not that bad!” someone will say
• You need to wait 24 hours before you go on the lawn, ok pup?!

I know I hate  those little flags that say don’t walk here! 

Besides pets, where do babies crawl in the summer. Exactly!

I remember before I started Hippie Fertilizing I had a lawn maintenance company

I had a customer

using organic products on her lawn, she was like look AJ it’s looking a lot better but how do I kill these weeds.

I said, let me ask you why do you want

My little one year old is learning to walk, I want her to walk on these weeds in her bare feet.

I said, hold on, let me explain this to you and ask you some questions?

So you want your little baby girl with her little baby feet on the lawn you want me to poison because of the weeds?

I heard her pause for a moment

I could hear in her voice it clicked, Oh, I get it! 

Your little baby girl is more important than what you feed weeds are.

So for me it’s about sharing that message so

feed soil first

relax guys

I hear it all the time, AJ, my lawn is killing me! No, it’s not.

You’re really funny and that’s a super powerful story about the baby and her mom.

So, to go on to how to feed soil biology

what i’ve learned and experienced

humic  acid it’s amazing

If you heard good stuff it’s true

If you heard bad stuff they weren’t using it right or enough. to spray on everything with the molasses

What’s humic acid?

it’s a by product or it’s a product typically from what’s called Leonardite ore

• chelates minerals
• opens up clay
• neutralizes toxins
• benefits in the soil are such a long laundry list

I couldn’t explain it all in a little talk, I’d have to go back and make a whole script

serious stuff

It’s good for

• trees
• roots
• feeding microbes
• boost fungal activity in soil

people get freaked out! 

bacteria

fungus

nasty

we see 3-4 types that are bad

100s that are good

before you get rid of the bad stuff ask yourself are you even working on feeding the good stuff?

humic acid is great!

plant based amino acids!

• alfalfa meal
• cottonseed meal

Not a big fan of soy bean or soy fertilizers, they’re ok definitely better then a big brand chemical fertilizer

Plant based amino acids and they don’t smell like manure based which I’m not against

AJ you do organic fertilizer so you say you spread crap everywhere?

Not cause I’m against them but they tend to smell more and customers tend to not like that.

I know when Mike makes his chicken manure tea, I’m like how can you smell that, it makes me want to gag when he just opens the lid. It smells really strong, give him a lot of kudos. 

poultry litter is great

it’s a good nitrogen source, when it’s diluted well because high nitrogen can burn things a little.

it’s excellent

more of a true slow release

here a lot about that

I used a slow release fertilizer

Was it really? I never heard of a slow release red bull, from what I’ve learned, there’s not really a quality slow release chemical fertilizer

Organics

They’re all slow release because they have to be utilized and eaten up by bacteria

I haven’t heard of any of that stuff, slow release, but I’m not in the lawn care business. This is fascinating ot hear all of this, I think most people don’t even pay attention to what their landscaper does.

Organic goes back to you only do what you know. It’s important to get the right info out there.

If you did a google search right now, you could look up 

how to treat brown patch.

That’s a common one.

It’s all over my mom’s town, they kept telling me it was crab grass, and I kept telling my mom, you should take your soil over to the extension office and you should plant clover in our lawn. Cause the other thing all over her town is this bindweed vine all over.

I’m not a super plant expert, It may be invasive

I’m just starting to learn about

• native plants
•  prairies and wetland

get more knowledge

emphasize hey

pointing at your neighbor

environmental green space and how we’re impacting our community.

Check this out I want to give you some numbers.

on 4000 square feet of turf do you know what the average rainfall is?

I have no idea?

1” per week

Is that average? That sounds like a lot.

Its’ been wet.

We’ve had snow all February! I remember months where Mike was like I want to go out an turn the beds and it’s just been cold and snowy all month!

For 4000 sq feet 1 inch per week that equals up to almost 10,000 gallons

It’s 9920 gallons in one month

I know all about water that way because we hauled water for years. We had a 1200 gallon water truck! 

let’s take another look at our lawn for the 4000 sq foot,  if we can absorb if we can 8” in a single day, that’s over 27,000 gallons on that same turf

Here in Houston we’ve had lots of flooding. 

I’m sure you heard of Hurricane Harvey

It flooded a lot of stuff! I continue to bring it up and mention it in a lot of my articles It was a huge impact.

It devastated a lot of people. Quickly people forget the tragedies that happened but I don’t forget because I work in this stuff.

People say well it has’t rained for 3 weeks we’re going for a drought. Then when we get rain, I say don’t worry we’re gonna get 6 weeks of a drought it’s gonna dry up

passion and love for soil biology is how much it can take a load off of our infrastructure and our sewer and drainage if if we could absorb 27,000 gallons of water! That would reduce so much of our flooding.

I interviewed Anastasia from the Brooklyn Grange and they were able to start because they got like a $200,000 infrastructure grant. But I’m confused how do you absorb all that rain in a single day? It seems like a huge amount? Do you get that often?

It really is a lot!

No, like 2 inches of rain is a super heavy downpour! But that’s my point if you could handle so, then our regular nasty rains wouldn’t seem so bad.

So how do you help your lawn absorb more water? What I am worried about is that yeah we have all this snow, but it snowed so hard before it snowed, I think it’s all gonna run off because there is that big sheet of ice first. Tell us about your situation.

We don’t really have snow, and we don’t it’s definitely not freezing here like 3 days

The way we get soil to absorb more is you feed it

more you build up soil structure

• more porosity
• absorbability

The longer you let your grass grow

Here in my area of Texas and along the southern coast we have a lot of st Augustine grass and people want to cut it down to 2”

if you read better info out now

best height to cut your grass is 4 inches!

tell my customers

it’s not a golf course grass

it’s a lawn turf grass! 

Let it grow!

• The more you let it grow the more it will naturally choke out weeds
• more you let that grass grow the more the roots are growing! 
• They are digging into that soil
• further they open it up they are able to pull that water down into there
• the longer that it is

When it’s raining buckets and the longer that grass is, the more plant diversity in your lawn the more it will break up that soil when you get that heavy heavy rain it will go down easy.

It was so interesting one year, Mike was mowing the orchard and it was like the last day it got rain for the summer like the end of July and the outside that he cut was like brown and crunchy and the inside circle grew tall and was green and lush and healthy.

The other thing I want to ask is about diversity should people have like clover etc mixed in or do you mean in the soil?

the more you feed your plants

clover is amazing stuff

naturally pulls nitrogen into the soil

legume

Back in the Old Farmer’s Almanac it used to say sow clover into your land so you would get free nitrogen so we just kill it

dandelion are like little oil rigs that have deep tap roots taht mining up calcium and other minerals

soil again

deep tap roots

the more plant diversity the less likely you are to be affected by crab grass or brown patch

chinch bug

worms

sod

couldn’t have just sod

didn’t have just st Augustine

Chinch bug issues

create a situation where we have more problems

People talk about if your a hippie and organic they say AJ why do you drive a diesel?

I say you can’t pull 10 tons (20 thousand pounds) with a Honda civic or a smart car

I can’t use one because it won’t pull 20k pounds and sometimes I have to pull 20k of soil

we  have silly expectations

I want it to be weed free! Why?

It’s been raining for like 2 months straight here! It can’t stand it as well  if you have different plants in your lawn. When we go back to

soil biology when you have different plants they feed different bacteria. All plants send out exodates 

its something that most people don’t know about

• Clover
• dandelion
• Even crab grass

also mining up calcium

through their photosynthesis which is what makes the plant food but it’s not really feeding the plant as much as we think it’s feeding

• fungi
• bacteria

more you have it’s essentially building up a super strong immune system

I think it’s wonderful to have a beautiful lawn, but lets mix it up the immune system so we can fight  off cinch bugs etc.

So how can we build up our immune system?

I’m sure there is special practices

What would be awesome is to do a light top soil top dressing, I want to create something like an urban lawn and native prairie!

I love this because I keep thinking about those silly little yellow flags on the lawns by my mom’s border it would be a pollinator border.

low maintenance

If we had a pollinator border it would support

butterflies and bees

help our our ecosystem

Less maintenance and

emissions from gas

weed-eaters

better absorption of soil

less water so you are using less city resources for something that doesn’t really serve a purpose

An urban prairie or wildflower meadow

that doesn’t

releives stress

help out with blood pressure

more stress you have

can affect your joints and whole body

flowers and different plants

you’d have less stress! and better blood pressure!

• ecologically

• economically

It just makes sense to give up our true green version of a lawn

So you encourage people to mix wildflowers in their yards? Do you have any secrets for growing wildflowers I haven’t had any success with those wildflower seeds packets?

I just let my backyard go nuts

The thing that I have learned recently is that 

something that helps seeds start is fungal activity going on in the soil.So the more fungal activity the more likely it’s going to germinate and grow

Start with a little wildflower mix

quality compost is vastly different then what you are going to find at a big box store.

mulch that hasn’t been aged completely,

Real good compost has been aged property and good fungi

Anything you are going to do I will say use compost!

It has a beautiful bio-diversity

• plant flowers
• vegetables
• anything

Where do you get your compost? Do you teach people at home? I would think that would be a great out reach for landscapers? It seems like the compost is non existant in her town now? 

I’ll tell you all the time

use compost

drastic

I have my own compost in my own backyard, only use it at my house

don’t use it in my customers if I’m doing some transplanting

I had great success and a couple of years we had a deep freeze and I didn’t cover my stuff and my stuff was still blooming because of compost

For my customers and everyone who doesn’t have the space or time

I get my stuff from 2 places

The Ground Up here in Houston, TX

is an excellent compost manufacture

Nature’s Way Resource

both have quality compost

New Earth Compost

I get another soil

All three make quality soil and compost products

I would guess if you are all over the nation you’re gonna want to look at a quality nursery and ask where it comes from because 

quality organic nursery

Know where the good stuff is at, don’t go ask the dude at home depot or lower

Go ask the person at your local nursery, and you might say it’s really expensive to buy there but it’s also really expensive to buy new stuff. So just get the good stuff.

In my mom’s town they can go to the local Botanic Clark Garden and on Saturday’s they sell good “black gold” or 

Bioferm

it is black gold!

you asked what I think

What do you think about compost?

quit thinking about it just compost your lawn and salad beds because this stuff is amazing!

when’s a good time to do it?

all year long!

People say AJ, you can’t do that in summer time

Only if your compost is too hot

• soil thrive

• cools down really quickly

• good carbon

• I do it all year round here.

I always think it’s funny cause I like clean garden jobs and I feel like that’s one of them. I’m also very passionate about not throwing food waste away.

It’s good point to bring up because I don’t throw any food waste either, at my home we put it all by the sink

I always talk about my favorite anniversary present was when he put the compost pile outside my kitchen.

Aw, making things efficient and thinking about his sweetie.

It’s not a big hill but it is pretty steep to the chickens to feed in the slick snow during winter. Yeah we have like 7 compost bins. 

Especially if you eat a lot of veggies

it doesn’t really smell, it doesn’t attract bugs like people think.

I know I’m always like if we don’t get problems here in the wild why would it be worse in the city, I know they have raccoons and my mom’s town is inundated with rabbits but IDK I feel like we live in the woods and have every animal here!

I help with this

Clear Creek Environmental Foundation

Clear Lake

Quite a few systems

go out on boats

pick up a whole bunch of trash

• egrets
• cranes
• turtles
• fish

wildlife is so important!

we love to look at it on tv and pictures! we watch nature

if we were more environmentally in tune, we wouldn’t have to watch tv

We could have a beautiful wildlife habitat around us. We wouldn’t have to think about stuff effecting our homes. Something I like to ask people.

I get asked about pests and how to kill bugs.

Why do you want to kill the bugs? What did it do to you?

According to the cdc website, on average 1.6 people die a year from a spider bite. A lot of things are more prevalent then a spider or cockroach.  Dude your car wrecks lots of things are more prevalent or dangerous then a spider or a cockroach.

Just relax, it’s not gonna hurt you.

Good for Natural Pest Control because they eat flies and mosquitos!

Here in Hippie Fertilizing I just want to do my best to be environmentally and conscious about the impact that we make.

Awesome! I love your Facebook page and all that your doing and that you’re a rockstar millennial. Do you have any advice for someone if they wanted to start their own buisness?

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

Teaming with Fungi: The Organic Grower’s Guide to Mycorrhizae (Science for Gardeners) 

Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web

Teaming with Nutrients: The Organic Gardener’s Guide to Optimizing Plant Nutrition

If you have a business to you have any advice for our listeners about how to sell extra get started in the industry? Getting customers and that sort of thing?

If you read those books you will be light years ahead of your competition who only knows about the stuff at the big box stores.

They don’t know about the stuff at that wonderful beautiful nursery. When you understand that you are doing and why our are doing it you can convey that info to your customer because your customer they need to be educated so they understand why it’s important to make a difference

Have fun with what our doing!

You’re gonna here a buzz, “I’m an expert at this ” google marketing etc. 

Nobody sells your business like you do!!!!

you’re gonna face some challenges

don’t give up

don’t be scared

educate your customer

the more you win

What’s been kind of successful for me is sharing stuff as I learn it

share it with my customers and followers

for me personally I use Facebook

Instagram a little

Having a google my business profile

Having a good website helps, you don’t have to pay thousands

I pay what I feel like is very little for an amazing amazing product online! 

I use social media a lot, that’s how you came across me. Don’t get all worried about using your outlet and nurture it.

if people follow you on youtube

Pinterest account

don’t get all stressed out if someone says you need to do all this

pick one or two and use it a lot! 

Mike asked me once, a friend asked him where do I tell his mom to see our garden the website and I was like no, actually the biggest place we have most of our pictures is on Instagram. My site is mostly just my guests and show notes. I need to change that.

I think educating your customer anytime.

If you have any rule

• 80% educate
• 20% try to promote a product

I don’t want to sell it to you, but if they want what I got that’s amazing!

you need to do this

software

I don’t hardly run ads that much, it’s not on what I sell, it’s more just information that I have

that’s what works fro me anyway

don’t be afraid to make videos! And be yourself! Just go out there and do it!

will you do a video with me? 

No, I’m scared

But it is scary, my first video I ever did was teaching subtraction, and hands down everyone said, we don’t want to see you we like the one looking over your shoulder. 

Maybe it was your content, idk how to explain it, but all my videos have me in it.

Fortunately I have people willing to be in my videos, those go off without at a hitch!

It could be the kind of content you had at the moment, if I had certain explainers it would do any justice to have me in the video vs what I maybe trying to explain?

I would say, go try it again.

I still do it, if I am posting how to dig up the potatoes, or how to pull garlic or check out all these butterflies on my echinacea plants. I think that’s good advice do video!

Get out there! do what you’re afraid of! Get your feet wet!

Get dirty! Spray molasses on everything!  Sweeten up your day!

comes from a rap song by naughty by nature

One of he slogans I have is

Are you down with SSB? yeah then you know me!

SSB = support soil biology

Hippie Fertilizing Natural Organic Lawn Care

another slogan is Nobody knows grass like a hippie!

How do we connect with you?

hippiefertilzing.com

my website

youtube

find my channel there

facebook

business page

I would love it

anybody who’s interested

go check out

the groovy tips section of my website

I have a lot of blogs

earthworms to molasses

soil flocculation

one of my favorite articles

6 reasons not to use weed and feed

you may have already known

deeper that you haven’t known

even more info gonna come.

We’re gonna start a series of things called soil buddies

talking about why these things are important in your soil like 

earthworms

They’re gross  right, we don’t want to touch them so vital to soil and if we paint a different picture!

And let’s start with our kids because 2 years ago I was teaching 2nd grade and I said I’m gonna get my kids a worm bin for a class pet. They couldn’t stay out of the worms in the classroom! I did bring it on Monday for the garden club when I made this video and they loved it!

Thanks for sharing with us today you rockstar millennial!

Post it raw, don’t worry about editing it!

I could post it today and then as a bonus replay

Do you know who Howard Garret the Dirt Doctor is? 

That’s how I learned!

I found the dirt

I got a lot of it from my grandmother

I used to volunteer with her by a nature center

to volunteer!

she would bring out snakes

do demonstrations and teach people about the snakes

video was posted about me

your grandmother would be so proud

be with her in the nature center

flowers and gardens and roses

I didn’t realize that was such a big impact

hit ton

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

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https://www.patreon.com/OrganicGardenerPodcast

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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!

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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

 Free Organic Garden Course 

Remember you can get the  2018 Garden Journal and Data Keeper to record your garden goals in our

You can  download the first 30 days here   while you’re waiting for it to come in the mail. 

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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.

The post 281. Organic Lawn Care | Hippie Fertilizing | Arthur Olson Jr. | League City, TX appeared first on GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast.

So, I heard Thom Hartmann read the actual wording from HR109 about the Green New Deal and thought that’s what I want but it’s taken me over 20 minutes to find the actual text so I’m going to share it with you and you can decide if you want to support it and the Sunrise Movement or not. 

So I didn’t really mean to read it all but it was so good I couldn’t help myself and it only took 10 minutes. 

Let me see if I can grab the highlights here especially as they apply to farmers and gardeners but the whole thing really applies to any environmentalist and if you listen to my show you probably are an environmentalist. 

Based on: the October 2018 report entitled “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC” by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the November 2018 Fourth National Climate Assessment report

HR109 Recognizes the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal

Goals:

(1) it is the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal—

(A) to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers;

(B) to create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States;

(C) to invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century;

(D) to secure for all people of the United States for generations to come—

• (i) clean air and water;
• (ii) climate and community resiliency;
• (iii) healthy food;
• (iv) access to nature; and

(v) a sustainable environment; and

(E) to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as “frontline and vulnerable communities”);

And then they lay out their plans to meet these goals by

#1. Building resiliency against climate change

#2 Upgrading our infrastructure including guaranteeing a right to clean water and ensuring any bill regarding the infrastructure addresses climate change.

#3 Meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources

For Farmers:

Working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible, including—

(i) by supporting family farming;

(ii) by investing in sustainable farming and land use practices that increase soil health; and

(iii) by building a more sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food;

I mean this is really general but reducing the pollution and negative affects of climate change.

 And then at the end:

L. ensuring that public lands, waters, and oceans are protected and that eminent domain is not abused;

(M) obtaining the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous peoples for all decisions that affect indigenous peoples and their traditional territories, honoring all treaties and agreements with indigenous peoples, and protecting and enforcing the sovereignty and land rights of indigenous peoples;

(N) ensuring a commercial environment where every businessperson is free from unfair competition and domination by domestic or international monopolies; and

(O) providing all people of the United States with—

(i) high-quality health care;

(ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing;

(iii) economic security; and

(iv) clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.

The post The Green New Deal HR 109 appeared first on GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast.

OK, for starters MY BAD!

So, Steve Szudera who was my guest in episode 253 talked about nutrient rich soil is going to teach a much more in depth class on building your soil health.  He’s going to give a webinar on the

5 Principles of Soil Health

I made the webinar post the other day, sent it out, sent the link to Steve and he said, but hey Jackie I told you it’s on Go-To-Webinar not Facebook. And I was like oh YEAH!

So easier for you. You can register here if you haven’t registered yet!

Click here to register for the ONLINE Soil Health Webinar

Just enter your email and you’ll get an invite with all the info!

I also mentioned a couple of things in the news.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s green new deal and the Sunrise Movement. I hope you’ll support and tell your Senators and Congressmen this week and be part of the

OPERATION GREEN NEW DEAL BLITZ

I also mentioned Comedian Lee Camp who talked with Ellen Brown about how Europe is leading the world in renewables because they have these things called infrastructure banks.

You can watch the interview here.

I think I also mentioned that when I was reading some old issues of Organic Gardening Magazine from years ago, there were lots of letters to the editor complaining about them mixing politics with gardening and they wrote back they were sorry they felt that way but Rodale’s felt politics and sustainable ag were interconnected. And Mike and I feel that way too.

I hope you do to! That’s why you’re green future growers with me!

Anyway. Happy Valentines!

The post My Bad! Soil Health Webinar not on Facebook!! | Green New Deal | Lee Camp and Infrastructure Banks appeared first on GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast.

I start this interview reading an article that Jason Stuck submitted to me to link on my website. I knew listeners would enjoy it and gain value from the article, but I also asked that someone from Growing Spaces come on the show and talk about their awesome Geodesic Dome Greenhouses.

5 Garden Herbs for Flu Season

Look forward to learning how to garden as I go, and learning from customers.

Well, I can relate to that, we have a lot in common that way.

So you guys are in Montana?

Yes, my show is great because I have awesome guests and they are interested in Green jobs and I call them green future growers, because they are interested in learning about 

they’re kind of visionaries and entrepreneurs who can make a green business as much as growing a green planet.

Agents of Change

I think that fits right in with what we are trying to do here. We call them “agents of change” Where we highlighted some of these green businesses that are 

non-profits trying to build a sustainable feature

how they use the products.

More focused on them and how they use the dome. I think that fits in with some of your listeners.

I was curious how many listeners you have.

Well, I guess when it comes to podcasting, I guess it’s a bit difficult to really tell. I know my stats say that I get about 1500 downloads per episode. But how many actually subscribers I have? I don’t know where you get those stats?

But Google Analytics says I get 1000-1500 people going to my website each month, but then they seem to leave right away. Like 60 seconds and they’re gone.  I think they want more video then audio.

So last Christmas my husband and I put together this Free Garden Course last Christmas break and pounded out the first 6 lessons, but I’m kind of stuck on the other 6. But now I’m close. I did actually reach out on the phone and talk to my listeners and I have had several listeners on the show. Often they have more experience then I do, kind of like my husband who’s goal is to grow as much of our produce as he can. 

We are in the same process, we have

• a lot of words
• need more videos
• infographics

I was listening to a show on promoting your website the other day and he was big on infographics. I go back and forth on my show notes, it doesn’t take much more to do the typing while I am editing the audio. Which I like to do my own audio, I feel like that helps me it’s good for me to listen to the interviews multiple times so I can synthesize what my guests say with what we do here in the garden.

How long are they usually?

Well, my ideal is 35 minutes. But because I am on PRN.fm who needs a file of 53-58 minutes. My listeners like longer episodes because they like the content.

 Welcome to the Show today and here’s Lem Tingley from Growing Spaces!

I’m the owner. We’re based in Pagosa Springs. My wife and I bought the company from the owners Puja and Udgar Parsons they developed the growing dome almost 30 years ago after working with Buckminster Fuller and John Denver at the Windstar Ranch out in Aspen Colorado.

It’s a geodesic greenhouse kit that allows you to grow food year round even in extreme locations like Montana or Colorado!

I think someone reached out to me. I know my listeners are definitely interested in extending their season. One thing I have learned is that in some ways it is actually easier to grow in Montana then a lot of other places because we don’t have the bugs but I am chomping at the bit for some greens. 

I generally don’t have to buy produce from August until about November anymore. I finally bought my first bag of produce the other day and what happens they have the romaine recall.

  Janet and I first met Bjorn Oliviusson

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

My mom, got a plot she would take us there and grow our own vegetables. 

not a whole lot. We would bring those vegetables home and eat them ourselves. It was a short growing season out in Mass but it was nice to have that opportunity in the town that I grew up.

Tell us about how you bought the Growing Spaces 

I’m an engineer

Colorado

48 years old Just kind of always  had that entrepreneurial bug. I realy wanted to do something that helps

something with the

• environment
• sustainable living

Looking at companies that

photovoltaic and other sustainable tech

search

looking to retire

put their business up on the market

The produce being an energy efficient net zero design really attracted me to the product and company to 

help promote a healthier and more sustainable lifestyle through the sale and distribution

growing dome sale

That’s where we got really excited and have had lots of fun working with the staff and meeting our customers as we go. With the hope eventually we will have our own domes here in where we live in Golden, Colorado

incredible experience of the past year.

So many things I could ask there, and my husband was born in Colorado. We’ve been down there several times, he lived outside of Aspen in a little town called Basalt. Of course I’m thinking is your business booming for growing cannabis.

people do use our domes to grow cannabis

Doesn’t really apply to commercial growers of cannabis because of the dome shape but it’s perfect if you are going to grow your own

market to the home gardener

Those plants are very happy in our dome.

Speaking of backyard gardeners, since listeners can’t see the website do you want to tell listeners about the kids.

We sell the dome in 6 different sizes

all the way from 15 feet in diameter to 42 feet so it depends on your application.

If you’re just growing food for a family of 2-3 you could probably grow it in the 15′ diameter dome. Which is about 150 sq foot of gardening space for organic fruits and vegetables.

The 42 foot dome we usually sell to schools and community gardens and it will feed 15 or more people out of that dome. It’s a pretty large structure at that point. 4 different sizes in between.

6 different sizes

• 15 feet in diameter
• 42 feet in diameter

Geothermal Greenhouse Partnership

in Downtown Pagosa Springs.

• Education dome

They’re doing some exciting things with those domes one geared toward education

local school kids to do classes in that dome. 

• There’s another more of the community dome

rent beds

community groups

3rd dome

• innovation domes

farm to table

local growers come in to do more innovation with aquaponics and hydroponics.

Back to your other question what do they look like.

These are geodesic shaped invented by Buckminster Fuller. 

It’s made out of

• glazing pannel
• cut into triangles to form the geodesic shape
• doug fir and lumber

structure

• 2 foot wall structural wall at the bottom to form the circular foundation
• Then we put insulation
• weather resistant siding around the base as well

Now do you install them, or it’s a kit people put together themselves?

Either way.

We ship all over the world

You can install yourself, you just have to be handy with a saw or a socket wrench or you can hire us to install it. We mostly installs here in CO but we’ll go anywhere in the world. 

We can help you find a contractor locally.

Can take 3-6 days depending on the size.

All the instructions online and helpful videos on our website that show you how to install. You can always call us to help guide you through it.

What’s the base made out of? It seemed like they had some rock bases?  Are they all the same?

All the bases are the same that we ship. It’s just a lumber structure 2 foot high but a lot of owners will customize the siding. 

That may be important if you have an

• HOA
• want to match the decor of your house

encourage people to customize the siding

But behind that siding the structure is the same. 

landscaping material

simple lumber structure. 

I’m sure people are curious, can you give us a ballpark price range?

15 basic kit for kit without shipping would be $7800

prices go up from there

22 foot starts at $12k

42 foot dome $39k

That’s really just for the kit itself, then you work with a product specialist about where you are

• located
• shipped
• installation options

owner supplied items

• insulation
• sheet metal
• costs of those

You can purchase those at your local box store before installation.

So, how cold can it get? I know when Mike builds plastic covers etc he figures he can get down to about 27º and then after that it’s just not gonna work. How cold can it get and can you get a heater?

We do recommend heaters for the colder climates where you are not getting so much sun. Like up in Canada you might want some external heat.

You can typically grow year round here without external heat and that’s because there is an indoor pond

During the day it will radiate the heat during the night

It stays typically 25º inside the dome then it is outside the dome even in the dead of night so you can really plan around that and make sure those vegetables are warm and cozy in there during the night.

If you are going to have a long period of time without sun you might need some external heat

We have had experiences where people can grow tomatoes year round

frost hearty plants leafy kale etc you might want to make sure you are optimized for the winter.

That could really pay off if you were not having to be buying produce. I bet you could have fresh tomatoes from June through November which would be awesome for us. I was looking at this house the other day that someone was moving into, that had a giant glassed in porch and I was thinking it would be so nice to sit there at a kitchen table in the winter! 

yoga studios

party spaces in there to have a table

lots of different uses of the dome then just growing food

people get into the spiritual environment of being with the plants.

The other thing I like about it, this was always a big struggle with me with the schools is that when the majority of the work in the garden is going on is during the summer when kids are not in school.

We work with a lot of schools

There are great curriculums not just around growing food but also

• engineering
• STEM
• thermodynamics
• how to be used for different applications
• experiments
• project based learning

fun to visit the schools in the area and see what types of curriculum they are using

Now is there something about that design that makes it more heat efficient and then of course I am more curious about the pond? Did you say there is a pond in all of them?

It comes standard with the pond to act as the thermal mass

We do have customers who use

• geothermal
• other types of thermal mass

The pond is a really nice feature because not only does it act as a thermal mass but you can grow fish in there

• harvest fish
• decorative fish
• use the fish waste for aquaponics
• kids go crazy over the fish as well

aquaponics system

harvesting fish

Key is passive solar design

• polycarbonate panels
• can diffuse the light
• right types of light that plants love

bathes the plants in the light as well as warming the greenhouse

solar powered fans

photovoltaic panels that power some of the fans as well as the water fountain in the dome to circulate the air as well as there is an undersoil fan that keeps the soil warm and humid in the winter time that runs off solar panel

net zero design

don’t need external power unless you want grow lights etc.

Self sufficient without external power or heat sources.

As someone who has looked at a lot of career websites, teaching kids engineer skills is huge and Steve Jobs was always complaining we don’t have enough engineers in the US. One thing I was looking at it looks like they have ventilation on top? Is there a panel that opens on top or do they all open?

bringing into the dome

certain panels that open

depending on the size of the dome some will be on the bottom or top.

standard

vent openers

green house store

They are actually controlled by a beeswax that expands and contracts with the heat

as the beeswax warms and expands

creates a chimney effect as cooler air escapes out the top

solar attic fan which increases circulation

PV panel over the top of the dome based on the thermostat is an option people like because it will improve their circulation and good in windy conditions

sudden gust of wind

Is there anything else we haven’t covered?

The customization.

sell the shell of the dome with the indoor pond

up to you to design what you want to do with the design

hydroponics or aquaponics

other types of features in the dome

customizing outside the dome to fit in with your landscaping

What we have found is that once it’s built customers really like designing and building it out

Even if they are not gardeners they have fun learning how to garden in the dome. 

It’s a bit different challenges with bugs and things of that nature so the same things apply like integrated pest management

You can actually use the dome to introduce the beneficial insects

Meeting with our customers around the state and around the country it’s been fun picking up what they’ve learned about growing in the dome and how they adapt to the different ecosystems in the dome.

Also using the

vertical space

vertical aspects of the dome as well.

Lots of fun to see how customers are utilizing and designing the domes.

Cool, well there’s certainly lots of cool pictures of different designs, flowers etc. Probably you could even have bees?

one of our specialists is actually a bee specialist. We usually recommend if you are going to build a hive you do it somewhere away from the dome so as your working in there you don’t interrupt their territory. If you have the hive about 20 feet away from the dome. They can still fly in there and pollinate your plants and do what they need to do but they are not going to interrupt your gardening

We actually have a hive outside the Pagosa springs.

Where is it again? Southern Colorado?

It’s on the west side of wolf creek pass, by Durango

deepest hot springs in the world

encourage you to go visit the Hot Springs and visit our park facility there. Stop in and say hi!

off of 160

8-5 m-f

We are going to look to build more of these demonstration domes so it’s a little more accessible. We are about 5 hours from Denver.

What else?

I encourage people to go to the website  at Growing Spaces 

good content there on the website and in blog posts

Lots of videos on different customer and how the are using their domes

educational resource for any organic gardener

building more content around integrated pest management, soil management, organic gardening here as well over the course of the next year. 

You can always sign up for our newsletter as well to get updates on our blog posts as well as local dome tours

A lot of time our customers will open their domes in the area

Growing Spaces.com

peruse the website and learn about gardening and the growing dome.

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?

One of our challenges is shipping. It’s a pretty big kit and so it’s pretty costly to ship across the country and it adds carbon to the environment. So we are gonna start to look at ways to drop ship materials so we can source locally. 

Demonstration domes

Look at installers and sales reps in areas around the country, we have some scattered throughout the country. We are really interested in looking at people, our customers, who already have a dome so they can also use that dome as a demonstration dome who could bring customers in and teach them about it and then be able to provide that advice locally versus coming to Pagosa.

If there are people interested we encourage them to reach out.

more so

we’re really starting to work

• farm to table
• indian reservations
• small business applications for use of the dome

supply food for local communities and food shares out of the dome

commercial applications for the dome throughout different communities

If you are going to grow extra food out of the dome selling even at farmer’s markets.

That’s interesting because just yesterday as I was working on my garden course and going through an old interview I did with Anastasia Cole Plakais from the Farm on the Roof at the Brooklyn Grange in NY, and they install farms all around and they teach people how to install farms and one of the things she talked about for their bottom line was how building those relationships.

Building Relationships

Talking about the same things your talking about and looking around the community and what other people you can help serve by focusing on what you do best and what they do best and coming out with an overall better outcome and it sounds like you are doing a lot of that working with farm-2-table and Indian reservations. I used to teach on a Reservation so that is something near and dear to my heart and working with community gardens.

I know in Montana one of the challenges for us to come up with something to put in a share from May-August so it might be helpful to people like us, or even for us to just have tomatoes which would be huge.

Superfund Site

We just did a video on someone in Leadville, CO that’s growing at 10k feet. They grow food share and they do that 12 months of the year so that’s a very exciting project and that used to be a superfund site based on the mining industry

Built this community garden where there used to be mining wastes

superfund site

great

Even over the course of times as the business grows, what we would like to do is to make sure were donating a percentage of profits and donating domes to

• impoverished neighborhoods 
• food insecure schools
• and other non-profits

That don’t have the benefits of having organic food in their community or where it is very expensive because it gives them the ability to grow their own organic food.

We have one in south Chicago, that’s providing local food to their community as well as the far north reaches of Canada where they have 0 access to growing their own food and the sun isn’t shining 6 months out of the year. 

We want to make sure this business is supporting those applications and making sure that people have access to food year round.

EXCELLENT! So, here’s my 

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?

Locally

Locally is the key word in my mind! Everything should be sourced locally. Whether it’s energy from the sun or other types of energy you can harvest locally or 

food

sourcing your food locally or growing your food locally

It not only helps the infrastructure in terms of supporting less greenhouse emissions through less transportation but it also builds community and brings people together around a common cause whether it’s energy or food around sustainable living

There are a lot of charities we support

Denver Urban Gardens

Whole kids Foundation

What Whole Foods is doing for kids around whole earth and what they are doing for more impoverished communities

There’s lots of smaller charities 

Cloud City Conservation Center

Pine River Community Garden out of Bayfield

all these community projects are doing a lot to making local food.

geothermal

big fan of anybody out there doing locally grown food or energy sources.

Cool, my husband and I are really interested in Geothermal and of course we’re really big on growing local!

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

I get most of my inspiration from my customers. We’ve been out doing tours and capturing their testimonials. They say things like 

eat more vegetables

nothing can compete with growing off the vine

inspirational quotes that inspire me to get me to get my hands in the dirt and grow my own food because I’m not exactly practicing what we preach today because we don’t have one yet in my background.

Another question I came up with is it kind of reminds me of a Yurt, which are movable, is it like that or is it kind of permanent?

It probably isn’t as easy as moving a yurt and if you are in a windy area again we recommend you anchor it with cement piers. I wouldn’t recommend moving it very often but if people move we can help, or recommend.

As far as Tiny homes go, I could probably live in one of these they look so cool and pretty and you have these pictures of these in the snow and I love the whole glass piece. I just love when the sun comes out I used to tell people I’m solar powered on a sunny day you can’t hardly keep me inside, although I’m not a hot weather girl. Give me the sun on cool crisp day!

It is a solar passive design. With the geodesic space the snow kind of just sluffs off the dome. So when it snows and the sun comes out, it just

Nice design for preventing snow, wind, hail. We’ve actually had domes stand huricane force winds that other structures don’t.

Mike has had a couple of times where the weight of the snow, we were shocked that the plastic held and the metal or wood beams actually broke. Several people we know lost several hoop houses last year under the snow!

We’re rated up to in some areas up to 60lbs per square foot of snow. In that Tahoe region, it’s a great design with that heavy amount of snow.

How do we connect with you?

our website is Growing Spaces.com 

800-753-9333

to talk to a product specialist to get more info about the dome

go to our website Growing Spaces  has a ton of information.

Encourage you to check out some of the videos or going to the youtube site.

Thanks for taking some time with us today They’re just beautiful and such a great thing to help people extend their season and the sustainability piece is just awesome!

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

 Free Organic Garden Course 

Remember you can get the  2018 Garden Journal and Data Keeper to record your garden goals in our

You can  download the first 30 days here   while you’re waiting for it to come in the mail. 

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

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.

The post 256. 5 Garden Herbs for Flu Season | Geodesic Domes and Greenhouses from Growing Spaces | Lem Tingly | Pagosa, Springs, CO appeared first on GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast.

I am so excited to tell you about this awesome Soil Health Summit that my past guest from episode 253 Steve Szudera put together with over 25 Expert Farmers and Gardeners talking about how to care for our soil!

Soil Health Summit

We’ve spent the last 3 months interviewing top experts  all over the country!

Experts talking about

• Seeds adapted to area
• microbes –  within both our soil and our bodies
• edile landscapes

A lot of people coming together and sharing their experience not just for soil health but a lot of things that they have done around the country that all ties back to the soil!

It all starts with the soil!

They talk about how they maintained and restore soil health and keep their projects going!

Awesome! Well let’s give listeners some specifics! Because quite a few of the people that are going to be there have been guests on the show like Lee Reich and the Kombucha Mamma and Jacqueline Freeman the treatment free beekeeper and John Montgomery and his wife Anne Bikle!

Productive agriculture

Probably one of the highlights, I’m connected to productive agriculture

4 guys traveling the U.S. on a pretty massive scale! These guys have been 20-30 years of soil health on their farming and ranching operations. But in addition to that they do gardening on a massive scale!

Dave Brandt Soil Health Consultants A True No Till Pioneer

14 acres market gardening at one time! That’s massive. Him and his wife did that, he talks about how they put that all together.

 Ray Archuleta  a soil extension person.

Dr. Allen Williams has a ranch in South Georgia integrating livestock in with that which will help with people who are

Homesteading

as well who can take that and use that. he talks about the systems he does.

There’s two-three calls with homesteaders, including one that talks about a couple that came out 30 years ago out from Chicago!

It was pretty rough when starting out, 30 years of mistakes, they share those mistakes so people can avoid them in case people can do it or are dreaming about it.

Dreaming about it

favorites

Jerome Osentowski

is actually at 7200 feet, sounds like it was a steep rocky mountainside. He’s been up there for 30 years he used to market garden as well.

He moved to Colorado moved steep rocky mountains and built this climate geenhouse thing

high tunnels

put together a climate battery system

Kalispell in a school up there.

Huh, I wonder if they did it at Olney Bisell, I’ll have to look into that?

He talks about that in his call as well, he actually grows Bananas at 7200 feet and lots of other trees and plants he grows all year round! It gets pretty cold there. It’s pretty amazing what he does! We have some things on  seeds too!

Brims in Waco Texas

familiar with Bill as well. Both these people work in this heritage seed thing, bringing seeds to people!

more Bill McDorman talks about adapting seeds to area is so crucial! Looking for that seed!

You might be looking for as well. With your short growing season and you shared some things with me about growing in your shaded areas.

It might not seem so intuitive but it’s all about the seed! I certainly get that. This is adapting seed just by growing it.

Bill told me I think he did a workshop somewhere around Pheonix before our call, and he sold loads and loads of seed at that workshop because he’s such an expert in that area and he knows what does best in what areas.

If you go on their website which is on the call, you can actually look at those areas that he has on that map and you can figure out where your at and what seed is reproducing  in that area.

Yeah! He was a fantastic guest and he did a workshop up here and we’ve grown lots of things from his seeds we couldn’t normally. Mike get’s some short season corn adapted to the Rocky Mountains and also he grew a watermelon and cantaloupe from seeds I got from them.

You didn’t mention me!

You were the first call kind of cutting our teeth

first into the podcast

you and I have connected a lot since and just what you do in NW Montana with your husband Mike then spreading the word about organic side.

The path to

A lot of these soil experts start to focus on nutrient density and just growing good food through the summit a on a path about nutrient density of food

Dr. Allen Williams in Chico, CA Chico campfire and they were right in the middle of the episode with the campfire out there, and he said you just can’t imagine!

They had to postponed days of their workshop. But the big thing is more about where they landed down there, they were on their drive to the workshop didn’t see a bit of cover crops on a 2-21/2 hour drive didn’t see a bit of ground cover!

There’s a lot of market farming and produce grown there that is shipped all over the country for market farmers. They are talking a lot about and Allen has this farm in Georgia, it’s a ranch but the  main focus is the frost health nutrient density. People need to understand

We need to feed the soil!

First is to keep that Armor Layer there!

no till 

Gabe Brown

Soil health Acadmey

5 principles

No matter where they travel around the US or globe

If we feed the soil feeds us it feeds our our plants that natural nutrient density back do that through soil health. That’s kind of the main topic that came out of the soil health summit, we need that food to get that nutrient density back

You shared on our call how you and your husband are doing cover crops and different things, just establishing cover crops like you do and leaving them stand or breaking them off so we have that armored layer on top of the soil!

Armored layer of soil

Whatever we can do to leave those living roots through growing cycle all the way in the spring all the way up until freeze up in south living roots

I get really excited with people doing that because that is so

key to live a healthy lives

and there’s a great source of abundance to living we can have!

I’m so glad you said that, and I just feel like its cause of my great guests like you that I have learned all this since I started my podcast. I mean I knew some things, certainly like I said, Mike’s been gardening here for 25 years now but not anywhere what I do now about soil health and nutrient density.

A lot of my listeners are going to know a lot of this, but what they might have learned is how much easier it is to do! I know a lot of my listeners are going to love this summit!

Tell them the details! They’re audio files that listeners can download, there’s the website soil health summit at tabletop farmer and they register and then they can go to the website next week and download the files or how is that all going to work?

Soil health summit

First off if they go to soilhealthsummit.tabletopfarmer.com

• We will be releasing starting on December 12th, 2-3 speakers a day all until 21st 
• Then on the 21st all speakers will be up on page

You register there at  soilhealthsummit.tabletopfarmer.com

And then you will be sent a link to access

mix a variety a lot of fermenting

Anne Bikle

Her husband David Montgomery who was in episode 186

has a geologist

human microbes and how we need to take about those.

Along with the

The process that we are going to mix these up a bit so we don’t have all one type of person on one day.

It’s a great groups of speakers Maybe I’ll do some replays of episodes of some of the people that are going to be there! You were just on November 11, 2018 episode 253  you can listen to my interview with Steve Szudera!

I’m excited to listen because we did that a long time ago and I want to remember what we talked about.

It’s a relaxed call and there’s loads and loads of information here.

And it’s all free!

You can go to that website now and see the speakers and talkers! It’s so important I’m so excited you put this all together! People are more interested I feel like people have been asking me more to answer questions and do interviews! I’m so excited people are learning about it and getting interested! I’m starting to get more comfortable talking! I’m glad people are applying these best practices. 

That’s so sad that in California they had all that land that was barren, I think that’s why Liz Carlisle wrote her book the Lentil Underground questioning if we know these are best practices why don’t we follow them? I think we might have talked about this on my call!

Traditional Farming Practices

A lot of it is just traditional farming practices shadowing what we do. Unfortunately big box home improvement stores have taken the garden industry and they have made a huge business out of it. And they are not so concerned as what’s best for you as to what they can market to you.

I have watched this for the last 4 years and become quite frustrated with that fact. I have sat in parking lots observing on a labor day weekend the sales that come and all of a sudden people are loading up with trailers soil amendments and rototillers and everything they can think of because they want to grow their own food  they want that best tasting garden fresh.

Mother Nature

They rely on home improvement stores but mother nature provides us with everything we need. You know this as well as I do, what mother nature can do for us!

The other side of it is, I talk a little bit in this soil health summit, and some of the speakers feel the same way I do. I wasn’t sure at first but the word organic has gotten a little too much of a word out there that when people see the word organic they get that attention because people want to know what it is rather then what it is about.

NoTill Market Farming

And some of the issues with organic is that the tillage processes, I have found some no till market farming. One in particular I was unable to get them, but it’s cause they were located in the California fires are, but they have been no-till market farming for over 10years now.

They have testimonials from people who talk about how juicy and tasteful their product is!

Tell everyone one more time the website! 

Soil Health Summit

And it starts what day?

It starts December 12th-21st!

By registering for it you get access to all 26 speakers!

I know it’s gonna be awesome and the golden seeds are going to be dropping golden seeds galore!

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

Free Garden Course.com

 Free Organic Garden Course 

Remember you can get the  2018 Garden Journal and Data Keeper to record your garden goals in our

You can  download the first 30 days here   while you’re waiting for it to come in the mail. 

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.

The post Learn How To Unlock The Secrets To Nutrient Rich Soil | 5 Principles | The Soil Health Summit appeared first on GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast.

I am thrilled to introduce my featured guest today on a webinar by John Lee Dumas and the guy hosting the webinar wanted a business example and she explained she sold compost tumblers and I was able to connect with her and today here is her husband Java from Java’s Compost!

Tell us a little about yourself.

I live in the NE my wife and I and our 3 children

NE region of NJ

we own a little company called Java’s compost

Java’s Compost Service

we basically offer 2 services

one is a do it yourself option

basically the do it yourself option

we have a starter kit

set up

a set of items that a backyard or home composter might want

keep things simple

We want to set up a system for people. A lot of times when your steps are not clear, its easy to get in your compositing efforts. At some point the system breaks down

The system

includes a tumbler

includes a square rectangle shaped bucket that its easily in the sink or a corner or someplace

and a counter top

all optional

if someone says, I have a composter already in the backyard, we will work with whatever system they have or whatever they want

Compost Orientation

Also, we have an option for an orientation where we go over the

dos and don’ts in your backyard

what can you compost

what are the important steps

the recipe

so people are well educated or better educated

they know what whatever happens you can always remedy your system

Things that can come up can be

smell or pests

dy

full

I love this because one I am building a garden course, and I feel like the first step is building compost and people are like ick, no, but I love the orientation idea I think you should have a compost orientation webinar.

Compost Orientation Webinar: we have been talking about for a while

how can we digitize this whole thing where we have the resources that we make available for a broader audience

strategies

techniques

etc

we haven’t had time to get around to it,

definitely

god willing

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

Well you know interestingly I don’t have a ton of gardening experience, but my first exposure was as a small boy. I grew up in San Francisco CA I was about 15, w

when I was about 4-5 years old we had this backyard area

my mother when she was in her late teens lived on a farming commune in West VA

She picked up some farm-gardening experience and she decided to plant some simple vegetables

go out there occasionally

I don’t remember specifically what she grew tomatoes or anything

I thought this is pretty neat, I remember I didn’t know you could grow food in your backyard. Most kids grow up and think you get food at your local market

That was my first exposure.

We had some family friends in northern California, and they had a small homestead, and that was a very powerful experience

I think we only went up there once or twice but it left a lasting impression

animals they were managing

They were doing all the things a homestead does

churning their own butter

cream

do those things

gardening

basic animal husbandry

the beauty

magical most of that

really stuck with me

Over the course of time, it’s been mostly circumstances or time that has allowed us to do some gardening, or prevented us from doing as much as we like

Those are  my early experiences  to growing your own food and a little bit of self sufficiency

To be perfectly honest, I still feel like I am about as close to doing all of that as I was when I was 5-6, as far as being able to spend chunk of time doing any of these things

that is our hope to do more of that in the future

We did have some time, when we lived in a different town and the kids were  much younger

joined the community garden

having

bring my boys down there

manage my plot

when everything was really popping

beets were coming up

string beans

cabbage

tomatoes

all these beautiful things.

magic of seeing that stuff on your kitchen table

everybody was impacted

new town we haven’t been able to start it yet, but again, god willing we will be able to that’s one of our goals.

But what I love about that is you’re actually talking about exactly what I think is important that even though you’re not ready to garden now, you’re figuring out the compost part before you get to garden.

I’m trying really hard not to interrupt because I was actually interviewed the other day and realized what people are talking about.

so the full service where we provide the same kit,

you get

• a tumbler
• a bucket
• bin

we take care of the composting

the only thing the family does if they want the full service option is they scrape their plates and clean out their fridges , whatever they are doing in the bucket we provide them

That bucket is put out once a week similar to their garbage, and we bring it around back on their property, and manage everything on their property and they get 100 of the finished material with minimal work. That’s the full service option

you can get a significant amount of material that way.

Full service

• a tumbler
• a bucket
• bin
• we take care of the composting
• manage everything on their property
• they get 100 of the finished material with minimal work.

4-5 member family

You’re producing upwards of 5 gallons or more a week, you’re filling up your bucket to the top

that’s over a 1000 lbs of food scraps every year for that family

you break it down

ends up being somewhere between

200-250 lbs of composting material per person

which is actually the EPA average that they have listed on their website

for food waste per person

When we’ve done data collection we come up just about their number

@241 lbs per person

our numbers come up about the same.

so you can get a lot of material

In the end you come up anywhere between 5-6-700 lbs of material a family would have at their disposal

they can put compost material on their

• vegetable garden
• landscaping
• lawn application

we can do that as well

landscaping application

do that as well

I wish you were here, my mom’s neighbors could use that. Your pictures are so gorgeous and the things are clean

Do you mix it in with grass clippings etc? Leaves, how does that work?

what we

the tumbler that we use fro the most part

Jora form composter

that the manufacturers recommended carbon input or dry material is wood pellets

used for horse bedding

it’s a soft wood, I believe it’s pine

collected at lumber yards

from the sawdust

pelletize it

incredibly effective

very efficient

that’s the carbon input that we put in to every batch that we put into the composters

Every week this is what we do

this is what we tell the diy customers

work out your ratios before hand,

fill up the first fraction of the bucket

1/4 or 1/5 of the way with the wood pellets

that changes the ratio, typically you look on line, you do some reading

if you look online the ratio is typically 2-3 one

dry to wet

browns to greens

you typically have more of your carbon rich material then your nitrogen rich

because it’s pelletized

but when you’re using the wood pellets

moisture it expands

In the brochure, it says something like,

carbon-nitrogen

dry-wet it’s only 1-10 when you’re using the wood pellets which is a significant reversal the extreme

normal carbon material that you put in

it expands a lot typically we don’t go with 1-10 we go with 1-4 or 1-5

we have found that when a family is just starting out we encourage them to use more then less, start out with 25% of your bucket with wood pellets for the first two weeks

2nd two weeks so 20%

then scale back you can use less and less, so you are dealing with smaller ratios

once you get a good healthy

that will help element odors sand pests etc.

very effective way of managing your compost bins

wood chips in our own composting efforts over the years we have used a mix of wood chips and pellets

years ago we would save up our paper bags from local grocery store

every couple of weeks, I would go through and spend 12 hour 40 minutes, shredding paper bags and adding that to the compost bin but when you have a ready supply of wood chips or pellets it makes it easier to manage the labor you have to put into

only down part

the more labor intensive dry material

more

the free dry material

• paper bags
• junk mail

more labor intensive

super simple material requires a little more to access you either have to find a

• tree guy
• neighbor who just took a tree down,
• wood chips
• tree taken down
• or pay for wood pellets

pros and cons and all the different options

a lot of times

different carbon sources and components

all the options

in this day and age

people are so busy they just go with the one that’s simplest

least amount of labor

as you said earlier or maybe it was on your website, they’re already buying this and spending money on it.

do you want to tell people what it looks like? Because I’ve been to the website and seen it.

dEsigned in Sweden but it’s manufactured in China, around 1992?1994

There was some claim to them being the first or if not the first

the original tumbler

whether they were one of the first or just t created a really nice version

it s a very

created a really nice version

nice looking piece of equipment

• galvanized steel
• weather resistant paint
• olive green color
• insulation

styrofoam ~ polyethylene=food grade styrofoam

not polystyrene is the stuff outlawed in CA for use n outlawed for use with food materials

not a harmful material

in terms of the design

it’s simple to manage

the turn on it is super easy

used many different types of tumblers

old tumblers

difference between these different models

there’s so many ways to compost

different tumblers on the market

utilizing whatever tumbler option

whether it’s a cost factor

preference for one system over another

it had really great reviews when you looked online

gardeners

backyard gardeners were raving what they were getting from it

really high temps

calming

depending on the season

wasn’t completely dependent on being in direct sunlight

most people probably know this

heat generated in the compost pile is not from sunshine but

is from within

do to the micro-biology in large part

I think

I want to make sure I’m still on question.

many people might not know the biology of a compost pile and I like the way on your website it shows all these pictures

what comes out of it

open design, don’t have to bend

and ti looks like there’s a

designed for easy

that’s why we opted to get the JoraForm tumbler

It looks like it has 2 compartments ~ how does that work

we had in our backyard we had 2

what we had done prior

we had two tumblers

when you get one tumbler

most people know you’re just filing it filling ~ filling ~ filling

when do I use this stuff

man having to sort through to get some handfuls

we had two so we could fill it up

we would close it and keep turning it and start filling

it has 2 compartments build in

that allows you in terms of the compost

allows you to do the same thing

fill up one compartment

filling up the other one

both chambers are always getting turned

constantly feeding the chamber

getting oxygen in there to fuel the bacterial population that is breaking down all that organic matter

it’s all metal

industrial grade plastic

most common tumbler

people will find after about 2-3 years

materials start to separate

locks will start to come

hinges will start to separate

deteriorate

make repairs on these things

repairs are not that easy

handier then others

metal on metal

same

start

hardware and latches don’t start pulling away

hold up well over time

again

it’s not the

you could always say if there’s one system that’s perfect

you know in terms of urban and suburban

how much organic material

close to 50%

in our country is compostable

roughly

20-30% is just food

a lot of material out there that is

organic

will break down

will provide food for bacteria

that will then provide a material that will enrich our soils

in our homes

flowing through our homes and day-to-day routines

lifestyle ways

rerouting those waste streams

they’re not wasted

phrases

don’t waste your waste

don’t even like to call food scraps waste

i agree

it’s not a waste

not garbage

incredible resource that

nature of food

organic material

whatever is wasted is not meant to put into a system

doesn’t get to break down and feed into the soil again

I understand the creator made organic material so that there isn’t waste

food scraps into

won’t break down in a few lifetimes

that’s not where your’e gonna get

the finished material that your’e supposed to

is going to require a change

rich resource

retraining ourselves to think of our food scraps

the way we think of regular recycling

everybody knows to put your specific plastics

know to put certain plastic recycling bins

years and years where it became second nature

don’t even think twice

in terms of organics

I think obviously people are talking about

backyard gardeners are thinking bout this forever

environmental impact of our habits becomes more well known

commonly wasted in terms of organics in terms of your own products

municipally sponsored pick up service

as society and plane

people are

in a better position adjust cents in our willingness

get our

so what we found out when speaking to a couple of municipality

there are regulations that prevent from 3rd party

organics

can’t cross lines

everything you generate on your property

has to go to the garbage hauler

has to be brought to a licensed facility

landfill or licensed composting facility

organic food scraps

different then yard debris

• grass
• leaves

etc

we don’t have a lot of composting commercial options here

only have one in the state that is creating finished compost

another one that is really a waste treatment plant

they’re working with some towns on a pilot program to reroute their organics

wastewater management system

with the communal composting option

when we spoke to the mayors or representatives

it would be ok if you had a shared composting unit

talk to NJ DEP

locally decided issue

we have a 100 gallon

106 gallon composter

capacity is significantly

3 families pretty aggressive with their composting

town we talked to said that would be fine.

It’s a fantastic option

I think what you’re hinting at

You might have one person who is very experienced and confident and then have a couple of other families who really believe in it but just are not as confident

need a little help

we offer it as both as a diy option

assemble tumblers and deliver them

take the different families

how best to manage their shared unit

it also fits into our full service as well

Unfortunately nobody’s taken us up on it yet, we’ve had a few people who have kind of looked into but it does require people being on the same page

because you do have rotting food and you need to have a responsibility to make sure that it’s being taken care of

you’ve got the help that you think you might need

great option

local town tbat

environmental committee and there were some people in that audience already doing something similar to that

perhaps not as aggressive

help people assemble 100% of food scraps

upwards of 3000 lbs in a year

probably almost 2000 lbs of finished compost a year that those 3 families can draw from for whatever purposes

donate to community garden

lawns

vegetable gardenes

We have it there and up on our website because we want people to consider it and it helps shares the responsibility

you also have one for schools right?

That’s the same one that would be helpful shared unit

We set up schools and after school programs

they have a much higher capacity.

Its a great opportunity for kids to get involved in both situations

We had a local charter school, because they have 2 of them recently, we had an opportunity to

meet with their science department

composting initiative into their curriculum

talk about some of the ways they could do that

meet with their facilities person

these have a greater capacity

We have a local community center

• classes
• serve snacks in the afternoon
• kids there

waste from all he foods that are being handed out

large units were using it quite a bit.

really used quite a bit

We want people to consider these

We have talked to a number of small cafes, and stuff like that but in NJ difficult with the regulations

• some limits
• as things begin to change we could have
• local bakeries
• small restaurants

composting all their own material and doing some great stuff with it but currently you have have to use all the finished material on the premises of your business. There is not a lot of real estate in some of these places.

It’s very challenging

There are one or 2 exemptions you can apply for

But so far it’s been a little bit more challenging then I think some business owners want it to be

So there hasn’t been a lot of traction there, there has been a huge amount of interest you have to jump through,

We are also trying to work with people to explore ways that some of the regulations

could be modified

like small restaurants and cafes

Can I ask a questions. You said your goal was to collect 100% of your food waste but there are things you can’t put in these right? Like dairy, butter etc.

It depends on the system that you are going to use some people are just throwing stuff in a pile

throwing stuff in a pile

• dairy
• fat
• protein
• meats

These things take a longer time to break down then your fruits and vegetables

That means an odor is going to linger if it is not well taken care of

The truth is and most people know this if you have a poorly managed compost pile of just fruit and vegetables it’s gonna get really bad

then it’s more like decaying food it’s not really composting

it’s all decaying

one is an anaerobic environment

it’s a different set of bacteria it’s a slower process

it’s cooler

also produces these offensive odors to humans

but to

• raccoons
• rats
• dogs

they love it

What we try to tell people, if you are willing to make sure your pile is managed well,

anything that was a living organism can be composted, that includes

• meats
• dairies
• fats

for those people that eat meat, things that are left over

that is all biodigradeable and will be broken down  by the micro-biology

The same tips that you use for creating a good compost pile that’s just fruits and vegetables

same steps you need if it takes dairy and fats.

You want to make sure they are in small pieces

Can’t just throw out a rotten steak,

1/4-1/2 pound of rotten meat

you will end up attracting flies and all the rest

If you cut it down as if you were preparing a stir fry or something like that

mix it in

other food scraps, dry material

that’s one of the most important parts is making sure you have an adequate supply of carbon rich material and an

oxygen rich environment

That’s really the key

Are you cutting up the material small enough

cheeses

yogurt

small enough in it’s  portions

mixed inwell enough with the dry material

turned

no oxygen

it’s going to be a terrible smelly mess

it’s

not because it’s got meat

there’s cheese

not enough oxygen

and carbon rich material

we’ve learned how to manage that and the importance of

making sure you have an adequate material, we tend to be pretty aggressive with carbon input

buckets have a good portion of carbon rich material in it.

Whether it’s

• wood chips
• wood pellets

put them in their beginining

absorbs the moisture

mitigates odor in your kitchen

carbon input when you dump it

makes cleaning out the bucket easier

we say 100%

you don’t have to

it’s totally up to you

we try to help people the reason for the precautions are commonly put out there by backyard composting information resources

They’re there for a good reason because a lot of time people don’t put the effort into taking care of their compost pile

There are options

there is a way to recycle all of it!

Are there any things we didn’t touch on or we missed?

Not necessarily no, it’s

I think we’re very excited that composting is becoming a much more familiar idea many more people then are willing and interested and learning about it and trying it out

can see

it’s not as difficult as you might think

It’s not as difficult

there’s always a way to remedy a bad pile

just a chemistry issue

bad smells

if you see there’s a pest issue there is always a way to get it back to you know where you want

How do we connect with you?

so we have a Facebook page

javascompost.com

may have an Instagram

Currently based in NJ in the NE area but that’s how you get in touch with us.

I love now instagram came up with Instagram TV came up with a way to videos up to 10 minutes and it’s so much easier then youtube, or I think so

Thanks so much for sharing with us, and helping care for our schools and students it’s so obvious looking on your website how much your doing to help our

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The post 249. Java’s Compost “Designed for Easy”| Java Bradley | Northeast NJ appeared first on GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast.

This episode was so great I couldn’t hold it to myself. Erik Ohlsen is here to share his passion and knowledge of permaculture design and how you can start your own business that makes a great profit! It’s completely RAW, no editing at all including our pre-chat but I think you will enjoy it as much as I did and it goes so well after the last two awesome shows with Lee Reich and Susan Harris. Hope you enjoy and please support our patreon campaign if you can. We need your help more then ever to keep the show up on the air.

Tell us a little about yourself.

Erik Ohlsen director of the Permaculture Artisans designs

• water harvesting systems
• anything under the sun
• doing this work since I was 19

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

I have 2 answers for that

• Going out with my Grandma Marie
• My first gardening experience at 19 years old

Tell us about something that grew well this year.

I’m looking at an Asian Pear, we are having an asian pear bumper crop, eating too many giving them away as fast as we can.

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

One thing,  a lot of what we do are perennial based, a lot of it, a new persimmon that is finally doing well this year.

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

One of our big issues here are gophers.

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

trapping gophers…

What is your favorite activity to do in the garden?

what I would call chop and drop

What is the best gardening advice you have ever received?

don’t over think it

avoid paralysis by analysis

I don’t think there is any better skill a gardener can learn

listen to the garden

best skill to cultivate

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?

The Rogue hoe.

A favorite recipe you like to cook from the garden?

OK, so my favorite on my moms side my mom is from Argentia, goes back generations in Argentina, grandfather was born in Italy, my mom perfected is our family:

Puttanesca Sauce

A favorite internet resource?

Plants for a Future

A favorite book to reccommmend?

The Carbon Farming Solution: A Global Toolkit of Perennial Crops and Regenerative Agriculture Practices for Climate Change Mitigation and Food Security

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?

Global warming

we are seeing the results both from an environmental and a social catastrophe

would be a huge WAKE UP call

How do we connect with you?

Permaculture Skills Center.org

chat box you can click I get those messages

people can send me an email

erik@erikohlsen.com

check out the website

let us know if you have any questions or inspiration.

The post RAW!!! 247. Permaculture Skills Center | Erik Ohlsen | Sonoma County, CA appeared first on GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast.