GREEN Organic Garden Podcast

I just want to make sure everyone has the link to enter the contest The Organic No-Till Farming Revolution: High-Production Methods for Small-Scale Farmers to win a copy of Andrew Mefferd&#8217;s amazing book here&#8217;s the link to enter the contest and listen to the interview here: Interview link Andrew&#8217;s book outlines the advantages and disadvantages of different methods of no-till agriculture that are being practiced today by many small scale farmers and how they can easily scale down to backyard gardens which has been a challenge in the past. &nbsp; Key to the Mountain I also have some updates about our garden in Montana and also I talk about Melissa from Key to the mountain who has a small business I met at the Missoula Farmer&#8217;s Market and I just loved her Ener-ghee packets I got to run the Missoula half marathon. Our biggest challenge in Montana is probably just getting everything in so late mixed with lots of cool weather and rain. the link to enter the contest by filling in the poll is The Organic No-Till Farming Revolution: High-Production Methods for Small-Scale Farmers So far the responses to the question: What&#8217;s your biggest garden challenge at this very moment? Win a copy of Andrew Mefferd&#8217;s amazing book here&#8217;s the <a...

Part 2 of Denise and Tony Gaetz, from Bare Mountain Farm are here to share their flower farming journey. Their belief is that healthy soils equal healthy plants which provide for vibrant, strong long-lasting blooms. Over 10 years of Growing at Bare Mountain Farm Living in the Willamette Valley of OR, they&#8217;ve been on their farm for about 27 years, they have 10 and 1/2 acres grow flowers on only about an acre and 1/2. They&#8217;ve been doing this for over 11 years, starting next year will be their 12th season. This is a second career. Both had previous lives and sort of semi-retired, but not really retired because this is a lot of work. But they&#8217;re doing something that both of them really love, it’s hard work but it’s super they enjoy it! How do we connect with you? Bare Mountain Farm as in Bare Naked. We also have a Facebook page, and Pinterest page, and Instagram. Full show notes This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Spotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/

Originally published Jan 1, 2016 Denise and Tony Gaetz are featured in Andrew Mefferd&#8217;s book The Organic No-Till Farming Revolution: High-Production Methods for Small-Scale Farmers And most of all I want to make sure you have the link to enter to win a copy of Andrew&#8217;s awesome book Denise and Tony Gaetz, from Bare Mountain Farm are here to share their flower farming journey. Their belief is that healthy soils equal healthy plants which provide for vibrant, strong long-lasting blooms. Tell us a little about yourself. Denise: We live in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, we’ve been on our farm for about 27 years, we have 10 and 1/2 acres. We grow flowers on only about an acre and 1/2. We&#8217;ve been doing this for over 11 years, starting next year will be our 12th season. This is our second career. We both had a previous life and are sort of semi-retired, but not really retired because this is a lot of work. But we’re doing something that both of us really love, it’s hard work but it’s super we enjoy it! We have 4 unheated, unlit hoop houses that we have built, we have a little greenhouse where we start everything. For the first ten years of our business we sold in the Farmer’s Market in Corvallis, Oregon. A couple of years ago, the demand for our flowers from florists and designers increased, so we started to sell directly to florists and designers. The Farmer&#8217;s Market was a blast and we really loved it but it was a lot of work and very long days! So we decided we would let that one go, and just sort of focus on selling directly to florist shops and designers all up and down the valley. From Portland all the way to Eugene. Tony: We are what you might call a micro-farm in a sense that our objective is not to become world flowers inc but to use sustainable practices develop a nice business that really concentrates on selling to a local area. We sell from Eugene which is the southern end of the valley to Protalnd on the northern end. A lot of what we sell is seasonal. We do some season extension as Denise allege about in our hoop houses. What we try to do get our product at is at peak for our area and work it that way instead of we were trying to raise orchids in the middle of winter or something like that well sweet peas are on in June. It&#8217;s that sort of thing. We try...

A replay of one of the most downloaded episodes of all time from last spring! In Search of the Next P.O.T.U.S.: One Woman&#8217;s Quest to Fix Washington (In Search of a Popular America) Judy Frankel shares her incredible gardening knowledge, her expertise in the pesticide and sustainable agriculture industries, and journey to grow nutritious food for her health and family. Tell us about yourself. I grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania believe it or not, and I have the farm genes in my genes… It was eating those unbelievable tomatoes. Uou just can’t buy those tomatoes in the supermarket. I moved out to California it was because I wanted warm weather all year. Wrong! So when I tried to grow them on a balcony&#8230; When I met my first master gardener. I took the 10 week course, and passed the test. You have to do a bunch of volunteering. Then we moved to Massachusetts. I took it again there… This zone is completely different. California is all about growing food. The mission is to teach low income families to grow your own. In Massachusetts you can’t do that because their growing season is only 3 months long . You can do it in Montana if you have a greenhouse. If you take your plants inside. full show notes coming asap How do we connect with you? pledgeforhonestcandidates page. I’ll answer your questions. 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&#8217;d love it if you&#8217;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. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Spotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/

It&#8217;s July 16, 2019 &nbsp; Hey Everyone! So I just wanted to give a little July update, make sure you heard about the Andrew Meffered interview and giveaway and had the link to win a copy of The Organic No-Till Farming Revolution: High-Production Methods for Small-Scale Farmers Also Organic Gardener Podcast listeners can receive a 20% discount at Growing for Market Organic Oats In my interview with Judy Frankel she talks about how when her daughter became ill they found non-organic oats contributed a lot to her health decline and that oats are sprayed with glyphosate 168. Judy Frankel | In Search of the Next P.O.T.U.S.: One Woman’s Quest to Fix Washington (In Search of a Popular America) &nbsp; @NomadikDreamer on Instagram The Organic No-Till Farming Revolution: High-Production Methods for Small-Scale Farmers Giveaway ends Sunday July 28, 2019 Enter to win a copy of Andrew&#8217;s Book by filling in the poll here: https://forms.gle/qTWJcDxhtZiMjoA18 What podcasts do you listen to? Are there any shows you think I would make a good guest on? I know the guest on the Organic Gardener Podcast share so much great information I think it&#8217;s imperative we share their stories so do you know any other shows that would like to hear them? This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Spotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/

Announcing The RegenEarth 2019 Online Conference: Living Soil Growing Your Backyard Regen Garden Reversing Climate Change through Regen Gardens The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. ~ Bill Mollison Because change means all of us Do something that actually makes a difference to your life and the planet’s. The RegenEarth 2019 Online Conference: Living Soils will be presented from 16 – 18 September 2019 from 7pm to 9pm. What’s On? Time 16 September 17 September 18 September 19:00 – 19:40 Why Regen Matters! Climate change, future proofing and building a carbon sink. The greatest secret: No-dig Gardening! Animals in the system! Chickens in a backyard permaculture system. 19:40 – 20:20 The importance of food, how it’s produced and community nutrition. Building soil with earthworms. Intro to Backyard permaculture. 20:20 – 21:00 What is soil? How do we build it? How do we nurture it? Compost and fungi. There’s life in that there soil! Bringing it all together! What you get: A personal carbon sink Change that matters Easy steps Fresh Food A Better Planet Cleaner Water Cleaner Soil End of Chemical Use Grab your place at the Online Conference for just $67...

To win a copy of Andrew’s Book answer this poll where you can enter the raffle. And remember you can get a 20% discount by using the code: garden on a subscription to Andrew’s awesome publication Growing for Market magazine or any of his books or the books in their online store. I know you are going to love this interview as much as I did. Remember to share this episode with a friend! The Organic No-Till Farming Revolution: High-Production Methods for Small-Scale Farmers The Greenhouse and Hoophouse Grower&#8217;s Handbook: Organic Vegetable Production Using Protected Culture Andrew Mefferd is editor of Growing for Market magazine. He has spent 15 years working on farms in six states, including a year working on a no-till research farm, and worked for seven years in the research department at Johnny&#8217;s Selected Seeds . He travels around the world consulting with researchers and farmers on the best practices in greenhouse growing and sustainable agriculture. He is the author of The Greenhouse and Hoophouse Grower&#8217;s Handbook, and has a passion for promoting local farming movements. He lives and farms in Cornville, Maine. The Greenhouse and Hoophouse Grower&#8217;s Handbook: Organic Vegetable Production Using Protected Culture coupon code for your listeners for either the book or a subscription! OGP New Society willing to give away a book its really up to you to decide how to give the book away!! I&#8217;m so excited to hear that because I usually would give the copy you gave me away but it&#8217;s one of the ones I really want to keep in my library. Well I love my listeners that&#8217;s amazing! They are all dedicated to growing a greener future by saving the planet not just growing food but growing an organic oasis. I&#8217;m not from Maine, and moved here and love it! So I feel I can

The Farmer&#8217;s Office One of the things my guests have talked about a lot is effective bookkeeping and record keeping whether your a small backyard gardener or a busy market farmer. Today Julia Shanks is going to share her knowledge of business, farming, cooking and restaurants, her books and her new course on how to be the most effective producer you can be and how to enjoy growing a successful garden. Julia Shanks Author of the The Farmer&#8217;s Office: Tools, Tips and Templates to Successfully Manage a Growing Farm Business is here today to share her brilliance and talk about her new course the Farmer&#8217;s Edge starting January 11th, 2017! FULL SHOW NOTES COMING SOON! Let&#8217;s Get to the Root of Things Which activity is your least favorite activity to do in the garden. No, I love it all. I can’t get into the garden enough. I love weeding in the morning with my coffee I find it meditative . . . What is your favorite activity to do in the garden. Probably, I do enjoy the weeding I get the weeds in the thread stage and I get to see the clean beds…. just sitting and pondering the different cycles vegetables behind watching the vegetables.. What is the best gardening advice you have ever received? Well, I’m thinking the most recent gardening advice there’s a dfference between decomposing vegetables and compost my compost system isn’t very good, that’s I tried that. as long as it’s composting well, if the worms the die… the compost gets really stinky, I have a lot of worms in my soil, I feel like I’m vermi-composting, it’s aerated, You have to drill al to of holes, holes in the bottom of the bin… as you put not gonna get the same air s A favorite tool that you like to use? If you had to move and could only take one tool with you what would it be. I don’t have a lot of tools, I need my hose to water, I just got drip irrigation I have a trowel, a Well, I just got the drip irrigation hoses, I bought them at home depot, I just snaked them around the garden… water doesn’t plant everything pretty darn close small garden, 100-200 feet was enough… especially with the drought, on the be...

Since Ellen Polishuk and I talked about my interviews with Richard Wiswall and Julia Shanks last week I thought I&#8217;d replay them for listeners this week. Here&#8217;s the amazing Richard Wiswall. Welcome to today’s episode of the Organic Gardener Podcast! I am thrilled to introduce my guest who has written an amazing book about the business of organic farming that I think will inspire listeners to think about the options for their future. His book starts out peaking interest with a quote from a talk a fellow farmer gave at the New England Vegetable and Fruit conference “Sometimes I think I should have listened to my parents and become a doctor or a lawyer, but you know, I don’t think I could take the pay cut.” Eventually he would write the Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook: A Complete Guide to Managing Finances, Crops, and Staff – and Making a Profit. This book comes with a companion CD that included templets for creating worksheets, budgets including cash flow projections, and even payroll. He’s manager of the Cate Farm a family owned and operated organic farm in Central Vermont that includes 22 acres and seven 100-foot long greenhouses of organic vegetables, medicinal herbs, and flowers. Everything they sell is certified organic. Tell us a little about yourself. So I’ve been farming full time for about 35 years now. Business has changed over the years, for the first 20 years, I was a highly diversified organic vegetable, herb and flower produce that sold to markets in Central Vermont and through Deep Root Organic Coop, which is a growers coop that sells to Boston and NY to bigger stores. We had a CSA in the nineties, went to Farmer’s market for 25 years. As I get older I don’t want to work as long and hard as I used to so we no longer do the CSA or Market, even though I’m big fans of both of them. The other thing I’ve been doing besides farming is to help other farmers trying to help tune up their businesses, because I’ve seen a lot of people after 9-10 years they’re struggle after making long hours, their burning out because the money is not there. I was helping others at conferences etc so I wrote the book because I saw things that came up over and over again that seem to be point needing to be addressed. In short farmers love doing what they do for all the right reasons, being outside and watching plants grow, and nurturing them and producing delicious nutritious food, what could be better there’s a fundamental satisfaction from that. I don’t think anybody gets into farming because they want to be a business person, and study business sheets and cash flow projections but ultimately the reality is farming is a business and you have to know the business end of it where you’re not gonna succeed. You can be as ecologically sustainable but if you aren’t economically sustainable that goes out the window because you wont be in business anymore. I try to get people to spend a little time to work on their business not just in their business, and ask them to set aside 3 hours to do some long range thinking and planning and look at the business and also analyze where the money comes and goes so you can work fewer hours and make more money, ultimately that would be great that’s what a lot of people want. I think a lot of...

I am delighted to introduce my amazing guest from Plant to Profit Farm Consulting Ellen Polishuk is here to share her amazing knowledge and story as well as her new book available on amazon or her website! Start Your Farm: The Authoritative Guide to Becoming a Sustainable 21st Century Farmer Listen to your first audio book for free by clicking on our audible affiliate link Tell us a little about yourself you were telling me today in Washington DC you had snow today. Yup! as you said, just the end of January having a little bit of snow raised in the DC Suburbs 55 been here a long time whole career has been in agriculture vegetable gardener part of a farm called Potomac Vegetable Farms 25 year career there growing and selling organically grown vegetables herbs cut flowers Tell me about your first gardening experience? It’s good story everybody has to start somewhere easiest way to describe it I think I was just born loving plants, they were sort of my sort of pets as a little child I would collect indoor plants in my room. I got a community garden plot when I was like 8 goes back quite a long time even though I grew up in a cul de sac, the most ideal suburban childhood but somehow agriculture grabbed me ended up getting a degree in horticulture in college not growing up on a a farm. Do you want to tell listeners what sustainable agriculture maybe means to you did you learn that in horticulture school? As a young person when I first 15-16-17 years old, luckily I worked on farms, that were quote unquote, &#8220;organically&#8221; started getting Organic Gardening magazine like everyone else, keep up and see what other people were doing sustainable ag organic more specific and legally

I&#8217;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 &amp; 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 <span...

&nbsp; For Valentine&#8217;s Day I asked Mark Usewicz from Mermaid&#8217;s Garden NYC to talk to us about their Fish Market and CSA since it seems like the news is all about the Mediterranean diet. I love fish, and caring for sustainable Oceans and water is important to me, and I think it probably is for you too. I&#8217;ve got some great videos of my mom making her delicious fish I&#8217;ll try to add at the end. Sorry it took so long to get this out there, but I always say the perfect interview happens when just the right listener is in the audience! MermaidsGardenNYC.com Mermaid&#8217;s Garden On Instagram Check out Mark&#8217;s pieces in Martha Stewart Tell us a little about yourself, Mark Usewicz. I was trained as a chef restaurant business lived in NYC last thing I wanted to do was open my own restaurant and the next worse thing is open my own business but my wife was in the restaurant business trained as a fish biologist We saw this need for a great fish market in our neighborhood, there really wasn&#8217;t anywhere great to buy fish We knew a few fishermen and we built this network started a fish share kind of like a CSA or CSF but we&#8217;re not the fisherman Started by connecting our customers with a weekly fish sourced in the Northeast we work with fishermen on Long Island Massachusetts Rhode Island Developed this whole network of aqua-culturists small boat fisherman retail space fish share going retail market all domestic small boat fisherman sourced seafood I grew up in Buffalo, NY so other side of the state a lot of people don’t know where that is in NYC, different vibe different pace I grew up on Long Island and I have sooooo many fond memories of buying fish on the docks from the fisherman in Freeport on Long Island. My mom would cook all the fish from scratch, cut the heads off scale it etc&#8230; and then there&#8217;s been so much on the news this year about

Onika Abraham from Farm School NYC shares her passion for sustainable agriculture and food justice education in New York&#8217;s 5 Boroughs. I&#8217;m so excited to introduce my guest from Farm School NYC Onika Abraham! Tell us a little about yourself. I reside here in beautiful Brooklyn NYC. I’m originally a New Yorker from the lower side Manhattan, if anyone is familiar with NYC accents, it&#8217;s obvious. Grew up in NYC from parents who grew up on farms, always loved visiting my grandparents seeing them grow what they eat and always inspiring to me! I have come full circle by being the director of Farm School NYC Tell me about your first gardening experience? I have to say, I grew up on the lower east side on the 18th floor an apartment lucky to have a little terrace little concrete shelf does not sound like a bucolic farm but was definitely my first gardening experience My mother grew up on a mid size family farm in Alabama, when she moved here she brought her love and passion for growing things with her and she just recreated that in a little postage size terrace. I really grew up in pots and containers on my parent&#8217;s terrace had to be flowers house plants and all different flowers zinnias marigolds were some of her favorites I remember from when I was a kid! Awwww that&#8217;s like the sweetest story. I didn&#8217;t really get to meet a lot of people from NYC proper, even tho my cousins lived on the Upper East Side, but we only saw them at Christmas and it&#8217;s fun to imagine, a little children&#8217;s book. Have you seen Sarah Stewart&#8217;s book The Gardener? What is FARM SCHOOL NYC? Is it for adults for kids? What kinds of classes do you have? &nbsp; FARM SCHOOL NYC is for adults folks who are interested in learning how to grow sustainably sustainable organic practices people who want to use that knowledge base to address some of the inequities in our society resources health wellness access to...

Part 2 Michelle and Larry Lesher from Eastward Gardens drop golden seeds galore in this episode about running a small successful Flower and Vegetable CSA in Indiana. 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? Understanding the importance of how we teach our children. Long days inside, sitting down in a class room was not what we were designed to do. We were designed to move, to be in nature and to grow our own food. There is a place for textbooks but it should not be the primary line of education for our children. They need hands-on practical education. We would love to see more schools participate in true education, using agriculture as a lesson book. In every school should be a garden education fresh air sunlight nutrition experience principles of health important health of growth of minds and bodies passion likes mother sand farther really try to get I was thinking about this question I think it’s important using the garden as an education tool greener world part if we could get people to understand the impact that agriculture has on our planet carbon secessions understand how much we could change some of that through our ag practices when we do that disease problems associated self inflicted sedentary lifestyle choices don’t think about is our food is fundamentally most plants photosynthetic level functioning even just above 60% 90- photo rusvaretraols secondary metabolites food nourishing dealing with on a global scale re-imagining what agriculture can be part to see what can be don’t think we’ve begone to tap the genetic potential world would be a much How do we connect with you? eastwardgardens on Instagram <a...

Full show notes coming soon! How do we connect with you? eastwardgardens on Instagram We were city kids, he was a professional skateboarder and neither of us had a background in farming. There&#8217;s just the two of us but we do it for a living. I think I found you on Floret. How big is your place? I&#8217;m going into my 3rd season growing flowers. We&#8217;re going on selling vegetables etc on 3 years. I was a nurse with the dream I could leave my job. took us a while try to make it quick We moved from Seattle to louisville so I could go to grad school that’s when Larry started interning on a farm. He&#8217;s been farming ever since then. I just joined full time in June I quit my job. That&#8217;s when I bumped up the flower production. I can do more with it a lot of flowers we grow on 2 acres our farm is 16 1/2 acres We crop rotate we only have, theres about 6 acres of workable we rotate it and do about 2 at a time. We sell Vegetables fruit culinary herbs micro greens &nbsp; We sell a lot of micro greens through the winter, we sell a lot of microgreens through the winter months. Culinary herbs who do you sell those to and do you want to tell listeners the diffeence between culinary and medicinal? we just specific culinary herbs people cook with rosemary thyme sage sorrel parsley basil Who do you sell to? A CSA? 20 week CSA 2 famers markets a week local health food store small scale because there&#8217;s just the two of us have health food store we consistently 20 week CSA program 2 farmers market May or June &#8211; Oct radishes turnips arugula flower share this year for the first time flower bouquets in with vegetables ranunculus anemones Start April 4-6 weeks once they start more veggies I can...

Things I talk about today blueberry bushes mason bee disaster buckwheat cover crop Mike&#8217;s Minifarm Weeds • Weeds • Weeds &#8211; in the garden Summer Solstice Challenge coming possibly June 20, 2019 New Job in a New Restaurant learning about recipes and sharing gourmet recipes Health Club Bliss &#8211; massage therapy for gardeners So what&#8217;s going on in the garden? Mason Bee Confession Olivia Shangrow from Rent Mason Bees Dr. Andony Melathopoulos ~ PolliNATION Podcast Apple and Pear Trees Blooming Blueberry Plant Update Blueberry Plants from Lowes &nbsp; My arugula past it&#8217;s prime is a bit bitter really strong already If you&#8217;re not in the Facebook Group I&#8217;ve been posting pics about the minifarm and updates etc. <img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-5569" src="https://organicgardenerpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/IMG_6645-e1559333094673-225x300.jpg" alt="" width="225" height="300" srcset="https://organicgardenerpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/IMG_6645-e1559333094673-225x300.jpg 225w,...

Modern Homesteading Podcast Tell us a little about yourself. East Central Indiana nice and cold here married to my wife Mary for a little over 26 years 3 daughters couple of grandkids running around Most of my life I was a truck driver Had my own trucking company led to me being gone a lot led to some bad eating habits Sure! It&#8217;s tough when you&#8217;re on the road. It lets you listen to a lot of podcasts but it definitely makes being healthy a challenge. Tell me about your first gardening experience? Kind of I grew up on a homestead really, we didn&#8217;t call it that but we had animals large garden more property did all those things always grew up working in the garden in garden never thought about it being my garden first time it was about 3rd or 4th grade Really got the bug for growing something on your own! in school believe it or not bean plants styrofoam cup gardens at home I remember that vividly, growing that bean cup grow and replanted it in the yard! gave me a bug Like I said, we worked in the garden all the time always loved That Green Freak in school! loved growing stuff gardening animals teenage years got more into cars and girls stayed away from it in my mind always assume I’d be living that lifestyle I always wanted to be Caroline Ingalls in the mountains, I knew the minute I walked into Mike&#8217;s house this is what I have been dreaming about all my life, it&#8217;s a little bit bigger. How did you learn how to garden organically? it never seemed important to me then in my ind I thought I guess I thought about sustainable practices But my dad he would dump any chemical fertilizers on the lawns dealing with the animals we would pump em full of antibiotics whatever would...

I know you are a going to love this interview I did with RockStar Millennial Nick Lubecki as much as I did because I listened to it today as I drove to work. So the shownotes are completely raw from the day we actually spoke. I didn&#8217;t have time to fix them but they are great! I have 20 episodes in the bank I can&#8217;t wait to share. In an ideal world, I would share them all right away! But in reality it&#8217;s all I can usually do to produce one a week. I will try though to get them caught up so they are current! In the meantime I hope you enjoy as much as I do. I&#8217;ve been having some sound problems too it seems in Andony&#8217;s podcast last week I thought I was too loud, this one I feel like I am can&#8217;t always hear everything I say? I&#8217;m as frustrated as you are that way, as I just copy and save everything, the settings don&#8217;t really change? I feel like ever since January 2018 I&#8217;ve been struggling with my sound? But I think you will love the content as much as I enjoyed recording it! Happy Spring Everyone! Tuesday February 5th, 2019 Today we have a rockstar millennial Nick Lubecki from Grow Pittsburgh who is giving a presentation on Learning Circle: Weed Management in Intensive Veggie Production. Tell us a little about yourself. Right now I am the Farm Manager which is a project of Grow Pittsburgh urban nonprofit help people start community gardens around the county we have 2 urban farms Currently I manage the Braddock farm about an acre or so borough of Braddock town just outside Pittsburgh last remaining steel mill in the next door It reminds me of the Brooklyn Grange on your website with the urban mill and the farm together. Yeah! It&#8217;s a great photo shot for sure! Tell me about your first gardening experience? my first memory visiting grandparents in northern PA They had a huge garden fruit trees sunflowers all that sort of thing as a kid I was really excited about that! at our home, my grandmother helped put together our first big garden, Imust have been 5-6 years old. Do you have brothers and sisters? Yeah, we were all involved at first, eventually became me and my brother and we&#8217;re still growing together today! we are about an hour about north of the city! I&#8217;ve been gardening for a while! Tell us about that. How does a millennial come to be growing as an adult. <p...

Do you want to know how to recognize Bees in your garden and neighborhood? Do you want to plant flowers that will invite more bees to your garden? I&#8217;m super excited because for Earth Week, it&#8217;s April 27,2019. I have the Assistant Professor Pollinator Health Extension from the Department of Horticulture | Oregon State University, Dr. Andony Melathopoulos from the Pollination Podcast! Oh there&#8217;s more then one bee?! When I do master gardener training is I help people identify 5 bees that are in North America. When you garden for bees it gets kind of complicated. If you can identify these 5 bees then you can go visit a neighbor&#8217;s garden and say oh! I see that bee on this plant. Identify 5 Bees | 10 tips to use in their garden tomorrow cheat sheet Pollinator Habit Tell us a little about yourself. I’m in beautiful Oregon looking out the window in Oregon Horthornes are just starting to come into bloom Ceanothus the California Lilac Tell me about your first natural or gardening experience? How did you fall in love with horticulture? I was an urban kid, I remember I come from a Greek immigrant family. I remember my aunts and uncles having great tomatoes and going to Greece and the produce there that just tastes wonderful. I remember starting to do it myself in my late 20s in the most northern part of Canada In the Peace River District where we would get a frost August first so we grew a lot of Kale! Where is that? Nova Scotia or the Yukon? It&#8217;s mile 0 of the Alaska Highway. It&#8217;s the most northern growing area in the US. the one things that lovely when it hits solstice. sun dips down around three and then just pops up again You get this really long exceedingly quick and rapid growing season It&#8217;s amazing! The downside is you&#8217;re always dodging the frost One year I had the audacity to grow tomatoes and the ones that grew they were the size of a marble I was like I&#8217;m learning! What could you grow? Could you grow potatoes? potatoes frost pocket I was working at the aG Canada research stations It started because it was so far from anywhere the idea was to make people self sufficient <span...

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 <span...

Tara CatonRodale InstituteSenior Lab TechnicianIndustrial Hemp Project LeadWant to read the unedited computer generated transcript provided by Podscribe, just click here.It all started when this listener said, every time I hear you say millennial I think of this video of this guy bashing millennials sitting around in their yoga pants and so I made my own video of the amazing millennials I interview who are so not ever lazy. I was going through some old Organic Gardening Magazines. A lot of my listeners are asking me how to get rid of pests organically and there were all these letters to the editors saying I’m not ever reading to you again because you are too political and they answered back and said we believe they are integrated and you can’t have one without the other.&nbsp;I have always wanted to sell ad space for Rodale’s so I would see Organic Gardening Magazine in every store i went to as I traveled around.&nbsp;It is Tuesday March 26, 2019. I am so stoked because not only is my guest a rock star millennial but she is the&nbsp;Senior Lab Technician at the Rodale Institute on the&nbsp;Industrial Hemp Project . So welcome Tara Caton!Over the course of a four-year trial, we are exploring hemp’s powerful potential to heal soil and support farmers.Hemp, marijuana’s non-psychotropic cousin, was grown in Pennsylvania for more than 260 years as a valuable cash crop. Tell us a little about yourself.Shownotes coming ASAP!&nbsp;to read what’s done already click here.&nbsp;The Organic Gardener Podcast&nbsp;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.comIf 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&nbsp;link here.Let’s take a minute to thank our sponsors and affiliate linksPlease support us on&nbsp;Patreon&nbsp;so we can keep the show up on the internet. It cost close to $100 a month just to keep it up on the internet for the website etc so if you could help by supporting it with an $8/month contribution or $10/month to join the Green Future Growers Book Club where we can delve deep into some of the best gardening books that have been recommended on the show! GoDaddy even is bugging me for dollars just to have the domain name…https://www.patreon.com/OrganicGardenerPodcastThe Organic Gardner Podcast&nbsp;is sponsored by&nbsp;<a...

I’m super excited because my guest is as passionate about social justice as I am and she’s used her life and skills to really connect social justice and food justice together. I think you will love this interview with Leah Penniman from Soul Fire Farm&nbsp; in New York!&nbsp;Soul Fire Farm is committed to ending racism and injustice in our food system. 20 years of experience as a soil steward and food sovereignty activist.Tell us a little about yourself.Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the LandDefinitely, I’d be happy to!I’ve been farming&nbsp;22 years and I am the founding co-director of Soul Fire FarmsIT’s a little community farm run by Black-Indigenous Latin and located&nbsp;up in the mountains of Grafton NYin love with farming my whole life, NY and really see it as a&nbsp;foundation for social justice and environmental stewardship. Here at Soul Fire FarmsWe are committed to ending racism in the food system.Part of that is what we grow in our food.We grow on 5 acres and&nbsp;all of that gets boxed up to those who need it most in the communityrefugeesimmigrantspeople who have an incarcerated loved onelatin indigenous folks who want to farmWe have cultivated 500 new farmers over the years through our program.How are you supporting your farm if you are donating all of this food? Where are you getting your money from do you sell some food too? Do you get donations? Where do you get your income from?That’s a really valid question, we&nbsp;started out as a family farm and we started out to be a viable business.&nbsp;it would be a little strange to be training the next generation of farmers if it was a farm&nbsp;that relies on donations or a&nbsp;slush fund.&nbsp;So we use a sliding scale modelpeople who earn more money and have more wealth pay morelessbalanceThe farmer get’s market value for the producenon-profit branch to our work we get some funds for that that helps with our education&nbsp;youth programs we dopublic educationWe travel all around the regions sharing information about food justice.I love all this, this weekend was the indigenous march in Washington DC and the kids at a large interaction with the&nbsp;and the government shut down over immigration and here you are helping train immigrants and doing all this wonderful work. I feel like it’s such a timely topic.Tell me about your first gardening experience?So, I did not grow up gardeningI did grow up in a rural area and was&nbsp;friends with the trees for sure. Our family was often&nbsp;one of the only brown skin families in...

It&#8217;s Tuesday, January 15, 2019. You must be doing something right? I can&#8217;t seem to get anyone to watch my videos. The one thing I have noticed lately is, we don&#8217;t really watch tv so in the evenings, what we do, we&#8217;re about done with our day around 8:30ish. We stream Youtube. Watching on TV you can&#8217;t interact but I get on the iPad and if I like their video or make a comment I get a lot more people who seem to be interested in my channel. You have like 35, 53 views, etc. I have like no views. 0 views at all. Watching others, I&#8217;ll have to try that. You have to be persistence. We&#8217;ve been doing it for a year and we&#8217;re only just getting somewhere. I see it as you&#8217;ve only been doing it for a year! Honestly it&#8217;s been the easiest gardening method I have ever learned! Savvy Organics Farm YouTube Channel Savvy Organics Farm On Facebook Savvy Organcs Farm On Local Havest Tell us a little about yourself. Sure, well basically I’ve been gardening most of my life since I was s little kid, life happens to you, and you have kids, we have 2 kids. We always have a family garden, nothing but raising a few vegetables for ourselves. The last few year with the kids out on our own. We have 5 acres, so we don’t need it for livestock and when the kids were in ag. October 2017. We kind of came up with the idea, what are we going to do with our land now? We&#8217;ve always been avid gardeners so we started . market gardens CSA programs reasons they do it health benefits 1/2 acre and pasture next to our house basically ripped what are we doing Just watch YouTube at night Who do you feel like you&#8217;ve been watching that give you the most. The subjects range from homesteading to organic gardening Some of our favorites. MI Gardener he’s a good one Justin Rhodes with the abundant permaculture vlog everyday they do everything livestock and gardening Living Traditions <span...

This replay is a must listen episode about building soil health that was originally published February 2017. It is Monday, January 2nd, very early in the morning and I am headed back to school today. I know you are going to love this guest from Black Swan Organics and Grow Ohio Valley in Appalachia! What a great guest to follow up after Jean-Martin Fortier because Danny is basically doing everything JM Talked about. A great educator and farmer you are going to love this episode as much as I did! Grow Ohio Valley.org is a nonprofit organization working to improve food justice in Appalachia.Grow Ohio Valley is working to fashion a new economic landscape, one offering increased prosperity, improved health and a better environment. Things they do is change: • Vacant city lots become fertile and productive. • School children who think it is “normal” to grow and eat healthy food. One thing I am curious about is their “Food Stamp Challenge” From Black Swan Organics andGrow Ohio Valley here’s Danny Swan. Tell us a little about yourself. Sure, I’m living here in Wheeling West, VA. It&#8217;s kind of hybrid Appalachia Coal town and mid west Rust Belt town. Has a lot in common with some of it’s larger brothers, like Cleveland and Akron. Had lots of steel mills which have largely gone away and coal mines, that are dwindling, kind of post industrial situation. I grew up about an hour away, and I came to live in the big city about 10 years ago. At that time kind of found a love for organic gardening trying to share that with other people since in a variety of ways. Sharing the Love One of which is Grow Ohio Valley, a company founded with other people here in Wheeling, West VA to bring this local food movement, which is pretty fringe here. You’d call it a rust belt climate…. What does that mean a rust-belt climate? Wheeling, it’s been a hard up town. It was pretty prosperous up until the 60s and 70s and before. As factory work moved overseas, and as coal ran out or other forms of jobs, there are: high unemployment rates everything that goes with that poverty low scores on health performance low educational performance high drug usage which is a big thing we&#8217;re seeing right now. It&#8217;s a kind of mentality where people just want a job … want things to get back to normal as they remember it … so things that relate to long term health, don’t...

This episode was originally posted August 2018. It&#8217;s a great resource for building soil health. If you want to join the Patti Armbrister Fan club send me an email! &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Connect with Patti Amazing Arbrister on Facebook at her Agrarian Food Web Page! I&#8217;ve been wanting to see some podcasts on you know the organic gardeners when we talk about soil health and composting and the principals of cover crops they just turn their lights off and don&#8217;t want ot talk because they are doing organic gardening and every single farmer including your household vegetable gardeners they&#8217;re doing production organics they&#8217;re on a fast pace to destroying their soils and don&#8217;t know it finally on fb yesterday, the day before one of my friends, she is a leader in organic gardening, she made a video on the same topic, when I started hearing about soil health she didn&#8217;t think they were talking about her, when she realized the principles are about her they have this mindset they are above and beyond soil health they are some of the ones the fastest What are they doing? To ruin their soil. These are the principles for regenerative farming or gardening 1. Minimum disturbance to low disturbance boar bottom plow shovel chisel roto tillers use a broad fork a real shallow device That&#8217;s minimum disturbance 2. Keep the soil covered 24/7 365 other then the day you are going to pull the weed mulch soil should be covered so when you look at it you should either see dead organic matter wood mulch/chips that you&#8217;ve added or you should see live plants never see bare ground next rule or principal 3. Plant diversity more plant diversity Companion planting farming solar rays of sunlight that is coming to the earth as those plants do photosynthesis then they are dropping root exudates ~ they leak them out of their root system for the soil food web Uses those sugar and carbohydrate Then they deliver to the plant something the plant needed. They do this with signals depending on the root exudates. Let&#8217;s say it&#8217;s a corn plant, it needs nitrogen. And next to it is a, tomato and a tomato needs...

Justin Rohner is a presenter and speaker and owner of Agriscaping! I didn&#8217;t realize you have a restaurant. Tell us a little about yourself. Serve a number of restaurants in the Phoenix. About me and who I am which is sort of a serial entrepreneur. honed my skills to put all my eggs in one Agriscaping I&#8217;m all about improving local food economies strengthening families strengthening communities what I&#8217;m doing fits into one of those categories. Tell me about your first gardening experience? born in Alexandra VA just outside Washington DC, my dad was in the FBI I remember a forest, living in a forest and went back and visited it was 4 trees thick by a busy road! It was nothing but a couple of trees but I was a kid. I moved to Arizona when I was young Being in the garden with my mom little kid probably about five years old peas seeing this caterpillar rolling across the slow motion tiny thing in the garden I could be with the caterpillar infatuated by everything about how plants grew and that we could eat this stuff My mom telling me about how the butterflies oddly enough same time of year we’re doing this recording when that whole scene played itself out. From then on you couldn&#8217;t get me back inside. My mom would yell and I didn&#8217;t even hear here because I was just so engrossed in how life worked. outdoors continue to expand first passionate experience to be in the garden and what it tasted like and how something that had grown I think a lot of my listeners are going to relate to that story about being kids like that and getting lost in the garden maybe even today as an adult! How did you learn how to garden organically? back then backyard gardening there really was only we had our compost piles grandpa owned a dairy farm last in Tempe Az where AZ State U resides dairy farm in the family seeing all that stuff work too normal Distracted me a lot from making this a profession is it was so normal as a kid it was just the normal...

I feel like I haven&#8217;t explained exactly what is the big difference between the Free Garden Course itself and the 2019 Challenge that is worth $37.00? So the Challenge will officially start Monday, I want to give Progressive Radio Network listeners one more time to explain exactly what the challenge is enough. And really there is not that much! EXCEPT when you complete the 2019 OGP Challenge One if you live in the United States and you sign up for the challenge and you are one of the first 25 people, you will get a hard copy of the book and a hard copy of the garden journal delivered to you! When Mike reads it I know it&#8217;s good! And it keeps the checklists all together. &nbsp; 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. Free Garden Course Workbook <img class="alignnone wp-image-5422 size-medium"...

Get Hippie Certified! Welcome to the Organic Gardener Podcast today it is Thursday, February 28, 2019. I&#8217;m so excited to talk to my guest from Texas because I&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;s been really successful over the years. I started out doing what we know and often that&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;s the most...

I start out with the formal Arthur but by the end of this interview with this rockstar millennial you&#8217;ll be referring to him as your good friend AJ too because he speaks for the earth and is just one of the most awesome stewards of our planet out there plus he&#8217;s just a natural action taker and educator! &nbsp; He said post it raw and I know you&#8217;ll love it, if you want to see my shownotes just go here otherwise you&#8217;ll just have to listen to to here him share all these golden seeds every neighborhood should know. And don&#8217;t forget to sign up for: Creating Your Own Organic Oasis and FREE Garden Course Webinar I also want to invite you to our next webinar either Sunday, March 3, 2019 or Tuesday March 5, 2019. I am giving an ONLINE Webinar about Creating Your Own Organic Oasis and how FREE Garden Course can help you develop your own organic oasis. And you can also learn is the 2019 Organic Gardener Podcast Challenge for you. Sorry I forgot to mention the other day it had a $37.00 fee. It&#8217;s certainly not for everyone but I think there are a lot of my listeners who want some guided instruction and a cohort to learn along with. There are extra assignments to post in a Secret Private Facebook Group where we will go through the course over 6 weeks and if you get all the work completed you will graduate on Earth Day 2019 with a certificate signed by me! So I hope you&#8217;ll join us. Thanks always for listening and reading! &nbsp; To learn about the 2019 Organic Gardener Podcast Challenge click here! We’re giving away 25 free workbooks to the first 25 listeners who sign up for the $37.00 challenge to finish all of Free Garden Course, pass a midterm and final by Earth Day 2019, April 22nd! If you just want to purchase the books on your own you can order them direct from amazon here! Free Garden Course Workbook <img class="alignnone wp-image-5422 size-medium aligncenter" src="https://organicgardenerpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/MyGardenJournal-233x300.jpg" sizes="(max-width: 233px) 100vw, 233px"...

Hey we made the top 2 in organic gardening and #5 in regular gardening on Feedspot for 2019! I didn&#8217;t really understand what feedspot was till yesterday when I actually entered my email and got their newsletter this morning. Very cool. It basically sends you interesting news in your feed from your favorite sources. Creating Your Own Organic Oasis and FREE Garden Course Webinar I also want to invite you to our next webinar either Sunday, March 3, 2019 or Tuesday March 5, 2019. I am giving an ONLINE Webinar about Creating Your Own Organic Oasis and how FREE Garden Course can help you develop your own organic oasis. And you can also learn is the 2019 Organic Gardener Podcast Challenge for you. Sorry I forgot to mention the other day it had a $37.00 fee. It&#8217;s certainly not for everyone but I think there are a lot of my listeners who want some guided instruction and a cohort to learn along with. There are extra assignments to post in a Secret Private Facebook Group where we will go through the course over 6 weeks and if you get all the work completed you will graduate on Earth Day 2019 with a certificate signed by me! So I hope you&#8217;ll join us. Thanks always for listening and reading! &nbsp; To learn about the 2019 Organic Gardener Podcast Challenge click here! Click here to read the tentative syllabus We’re giving away 25 free workbooks to the first 25 listeners who sign up for the $37.00 challenge to finish all of Free Garden Course, pass a midterm and final by Earth Day 2019, April 22nd! If you just want to purchase the books on your own you can order them direct from amazon here! <img class="alignnone wp-image-5421 size-medium...

&nbsp; Olivia Shangrow is an Awesome Rockstar Millennial and the biologist and operations specialist for Rent Mason Bees. She completed her bachelor of science degree in biology from the University of Washington. She&#8217;s passionate about teaching the public about wild bees and her research focuses on increasing the value of rural and urban habitats for native insects. I can share information on the mason bee lifecycle, what to grow in your garden to support them, and the best ways to care for/host them in your backyard We&#8217;re up north of Seattle in Bothel, we do some propagation in Oregon too! We travel a lot but when we’re actually hands on in Washington Tell us a little about yourself. I’ve always been interested in bees my whole life, myself have been hearing the bees are struggling and our bee populations are down. I just decided when I was finishing school I wanted to do more to help bees and that&#8217;s how I ended up running a program where I rent bees. I have to back up a little what made you want to go to college and get a science degree and what about bees? Watching Bee movie? I think I’ve always loved all types of animals! I can’t remember when I first decided that I thought bees were awesome! I had heard of the honeybee before but I ended up I took a class in between high school and college where I learned about the Mason bee. That opened up my world to something I never knew existed. When I went to college I went back and forth between different programs, I finally settled on biology that coupled my love for nature but would help me get a job in the future. I wanted something that was applicable and hands-on Anytime I got to do any kind of independent focus where I got to pick what I was studying I always chose bees When I was senior research project went out to one of the power pollinator patches stuck my head in big bushes of flowers and counting the bees Identifying honeybees bumblebees anything I could find had so much fun with all of those projects it landed after I was in college I ended up with a job in bees. I always say you never know what you are going to learn in college what jobs that you will learn about, I always tell them take any job you can to travel. I got to take a class in Olympia in Washington where we studied starfish and all sorts of cool sea anenomes. I love how you picked places to learn about bees. I don&#8217;t actually know anything about mason bees other then their a native bee? So sure, they’re a native bee found in the US there are a lot in the pacific northwest, their range is pretty broad. a bunch of different...

So, I heard Thom Hartmann read the actual wording from HR109 about the Green New Deal and thought that&#8217;s what I want but it&#8217;s taken me over 20 minutes to find the actual text so I&#8217;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&#8217;t really mean to read it all but it was so good I couldn&#8217;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. <h3...

So this is our Organic Gardener Podcast Challenge for 2019: Complete Free Organic Garden Course in 6 weeks. Starting March 11, 2019 and ending on Earth Day April 22, 2019 Join the Private Secret Facebook Group of Green Future Growers and post all assignments each week by midnight Sunday. Complete all lessons, quizzes and bonus assignments. Submit midterm and finals for credit. Receive your certificate on Earth Day Monday, April 22, 2019 to celebrate! Do you want to learn how to improve your soil health? Do you want to know how we built our organic oasis over the years? Would you like extra help finishing Free Organic Garden Course? We know it&#8217;s a lot of material because we created it, but we&#8217;re here to help you finish and come out with a plan to create and most of all be able to enjoy your own organic oasis in 2019! 2019 Organic Gardener Podcast Challenge Tentative Schedule pdf Watch the video to see the tentative schedule Don&#8217;t forget the bonuses as a founding member of the first 2019 class! Get our List of Favorite tools for any homestead or oasis. Recommended resources ~ Reference Books every garden library should contain. You’ll also get a copy of my relationship building checklist already filled in so you know exactly what episode to listen to help you on your garden journey. And we’re also going to include for the first 25 people who sign up we’re also going to include a copy of both the Free Garden Course Workbook and a copy of the Garden Journal! (*hardcopies to US locations only ~ international students will get a digital pdf) Click here to read the tentative syllabus Join here for only $37.00 by March 8, 2019 and let&#8217;s get growing! Remember you can check out the first few videos of Free Organic Garden Course here! If you just want to purchase the books on your own you can order them direct from amazon here! <img class="alignnone wp-image-5421 size-medium aligncenter"...

I know you are going to love her because she was our Crossfit gardener of the year in 2015! And you have taught me so much! I love all that you do and your delicious food and what you do! And she&#8217;s gonna share their new LVFarm Academy Tell us a little about yourself. I am Mandy Gerth! Farmer and co-owner of Lower Valley Farm in Kalispell, MT my husband Jay and I are are going in our 7th year of full time farming. We run, I think we&#8217;re at about 4 acres of production all organic primarily sell through a CSA 2 acres of that is using the intensive model that was kind of pioneered by JM Fortier! I know you had him on your show! community supported ag winter squash sweet corn potatoes separate rotation then intensive I think that is new since I last talked to you. We go really hard may through oct we run a 20 week vegetable CSA Kalispell Farmer&#8217;s Market do a tiny sizable amount of wholesale food aggregate directly to small grocery store chains overview of the farm! We also have 3 school-age children 7,9,11 they have grown up on the farm very literally co-owners awesome crew really helped make this farm go under all of that is our community, we also couldn&#8217;t do this without our awesome customer base! I could talk about the farm forever! OK, I think, what we want to hear about what&#8217;s been going on and how does your journey go from gardeners to farmers. Back to the beginning? We started out thinking we would be running livestock vegetable operation would be what would help us make money while we get a livestock operation going. Before the beginning ~ what made us want to do this our family had a life changing experience eating nutrient dense &nbsp; We volunteered on farms a lot! We loved being a part of our farm community in that way in Indiana We were doing a raw milk share you can do in Indiana but not in Montana super local food ...

Hey everyone! So watching the news this morning, 1 year anniversary of the Parkland Florida massacre at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High. The interesting fact about Marjorie Stoneman Douglas for me is that she was a passionate environmentalist! She basically created the Everglades. I never heard of her till last fall, when we read about her in the incredible Wonders curriculum. So, IDK for me I have more of a connection there then to the other shootings in our schools. I wish I had some words of wisdom for you today. All I can say, is I feel like what we need more then anything is to teach kids proper use of social media. It should be our tool to teach them how to connect with like minded friends. I am not a fan of violent war games and I do think video games and television has a huge roll to play. Why we glorify violence? Sex and violence. Anyway off-topic. My mom actually told me about this, but my favorite musician Michael Franti wrote a new song and he was promoting it on the Morning Joe. It&#8217;s called a Flower in the Gun. I wish I could say Mike and I were ready to launch our Free Organic Garden Course today. We&#8217;re close that&#8217;s all I can say. I posted a pic on Facebook yesterday of Mike reading the workbook. That&#8217;s always a good sign, because he never reads anything online. He&#8217;s approved everything and I have almost finished all the recordings. We&#8217;ve aimed to use our place as a guidebook to help you take your garden journey to the next level using pictures to try to illustrate as many concepts as we can that have been taught on my show. Today I am going to visit with the AMAZING Mandi Gerth! Can&#8217;t wait to share that with you! She also has a class coming out ~ The Lower Valley Farm Academy. If you didn&#8217;t get to catch the webinar Steve (and I ~ haha ~ I could barely get on the line) put on was very informative. Something I could watch a few times to get the hang of all he said, but a lot of what he teaches is an in depth version of the same principles Patti Armbrister has shared so I know you are going to be super interested. He hasn&#8217;t released the replay yet but when he does I&#8217;ll make sure you get a link. So, wishing you all a very Happy Valentines! Stay warm and safe and thanks always for listening! I hope you have something growing, something you&#8217;re tending too, caring for watering, because really plants are more then just something to look at they become almost like family. I love my herbs growing in my windows. I look at them everyday with a little bit of love. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Spotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/

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&#8217;s on Go-To-Webinar not Facebook. And I was like oh YEAH! So easier for you. You can register here if you haven&#8217;t registered yet! Click here to register for the ONLINE Soil Health Webinar Just enter your email and you&#8217;ll get an invite with all the info! I also mentioned a couple of things in the news. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez&#8217;s green new deal and the Sunrise Movement. I hope you&#8217;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&#8217;s felt politics and sustainable ag were interconnected. And Mike and I feel that way too. I hope you do to! That&#8217;s why you&#8217;re green future growers with me! Anyway. Happy Valentines! This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Spotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/

I&#8217;m just thrilled to be back behind the mic it&#8217;s January 7th. I have a great guest that was recommended by Lem Tingley from Growing Spaces in episode 256 and here from the Whole Kids Foundation is Nona Evans! Whole Kids Foundation Facebook Page It&#8217;s always so much fun to see how seeds that you sprinkled about germinate. It&#8217;s so fun to know how we connected! Thank you so much! I reached out to you and you said you checked out the podcast and thought it&#8217;d be a perfect fit. Tell listeners about the Whole Kids Foundation because I had never heard of it! We are on the order of things, a pretty moderate size non-profit organization. We are Whole Kids Foundation and our mission to improve kids nutrition because we know when kids are well nourished they learn better have the opportunity to reach their full potential. we found 3 ways we are capable of reaching children. 1. salad bar equipment for schools Because the moment you put a salad bar in kids have the power of choice and kids get to choose the vegetables they want. 2. support school gardens which is how I connected with you. we have the honor and pleasure with supporting 5,000 school gardens in USA, UK and canada we know when kids are connected to the roots of their food they make better school choices. it’s not just kids The secret is: It&#8217;s not just kids it’s us adults too when we start understanding what the magic we all make good choices. Personally I’m a foodie I’ve worked in the food business my whole life but I didn’t meet vegetables until I was well into my 20s. Kids need to know...

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&#8217;s going to give a webinar on the 5 Principles of Soil Health By the time he&#8217;s finished you&#8217;ll not just know the difference between dirt and soil but how to make your garden feel like an enjoyable place not a second job! Many of my listeners have shared with me that time is the number one barrier they have to living in their ideal organic oasis. Steve has secrets that you can learn to do in your garden that will reduce the amount of labor and energy you have to spend because he reduces the need to till the soil and do a lot of that back breaking labor that makes gardening difficult. He also helps you reduce the weeds in your garden which was another question I get a lot so I wanted to make sure if you want to learn more about soil health you knew about his webinar. Mike and I got a little preview yesterday and we were able to really see what he is talking about with the slides and photos he includes. He&#8217;s giving a live webinar on Tuesday February 12th morning at 12pm EST, 10am MST, 9am PST. So if you want to join us that would be great. You can ask questions and see his slides. &nbsp; Register here! I know we&#8217;re gonna do a couple of these, including another one the following Saturday morning because he&#8217;s got a lot of info to share and the more people that learn these soil health techniques the happier mother earth will be. You can register for the webinar. I know he&#8217;s going to offer some bonuses just for my audience so let me know if we can do anything else! And let&#8217;s get growing! ps. if you haven&#8217;t seen my pics of my herb experiments I&#8217;ve been doing this winter trying to get some herbs growing in my windowsill, you can see those on Facebook or Instagram. I&#8217;ll try to get a blog post out about them. &nbsp; This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Spotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/

Snake River Seed Coop and Earthly Delights Farm Internship Program Monday, Martin Luther King Day, January 21, 2019 You are going to love her blog Earthly Delights Farm, at but I invited her here because she runs the Snake River Seed Coop so here&#8217;s Casey O&#8217;Leary. Tell us a little about yourself. I’m in Boise, ID I don&#8217;t own my own land but I farm on a 3 acre in the city. I farm on about acre and half and share with the landowner who runs a nursery and other farm projects. On our farm we grow about 100 varieties of seed crops for the Snake River Seed Coop We also have a CSA program I have been doing for the last 15 years, spring and summer 18 week CSA 45 members going a different route, we&#8217;re just gonna do a fall CSA pickup. Just one big pickup in the fall of storage crops and instructions on how to store them. Also, spring garden box shares for people who have small urban gardens, we&#8217;re making 4&#215;4 garden boxes of seeds and starts I just want to make sure I am understand, you are actually giving them a 4&#215;4 garden bed with the lumber etc, or just the stuff that goes in them? No, we&#8217;re assuming they already have the boxes and the soil in those boxes It&#8217;s a pretty common thing for Urban gardeners to have some sort of 4&#215;4 or 4&#215;8 box just a way to maximize the amount of food they get out of it and use locally grown seeds Is this your first year offering that? Yes it&#8217;s the very first year It&#8217;s interesting, you had mentioned in starting market farms I’m in an interesting place because I&#8217;ve been running a CSA for 15 years I am getting to the place where I am burnt out In the past I have run this massive internship program that is really involved and a CSA with a lot of moving pieces and a serious commitment all season long. I&#8217;ve been wanting a bit of a break, us farmers can’t just take time off in the summer, but just not having to harvest for CSA every single week would feel really nice to...

Free the Seeds! provides community-powered opportunities to build a sustainable and resilient future through real seeds, real food, and real skills. We look forward to you joining us for our 4th annual Free the Seeds! on March 2, 2019. This year’s fair will be held again in Kalispell at Flathead Valley Community College in the Arts &amp; Technology Building. The fair will open with the seed swap and vendor booths at 9 am. The seed swap will run 9 am–noon. Workshops, booths, and kids’ activities will be held 10 am–3:30 pm, with a 45-minute break for lunch at 12:15 pm. Food will be available for purchase at the event all day. Ready for some inspiration? Check out our workshop videos from the 2017 fair. We look forward to seeing you in March 2019! Free the Seeds! is a program of Farm Hands – Nourish the Flathead, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, whose mission is to reconnect people to the sources of their food and those who produce it through education, outreach, and market support. 2018 Free the Seeds! Last year we handed out between 15-20,000 packets of seeds. Donated by local growers and seed companies. Volunteers who help clean and pack the seeds. Every year we have over 1000 people show up. The event is free at the local community college and there&#8217;s events upstairs and downstairs. It&#8217;s an incredible lively gathering and information. Resilient Communities Tweet ThisIt&#8217;s a great way to learn about growing food and what&#8217;s involved in having access to good healthy local food and why that&#8217;s important. One example there are folks who process herbs and teach how to make tinctures, and how to grow the herbs for oils, medicinal purposes. Workshops on Herbs ferment your food Sourdough how to raise chickens well taught by experts in the field all from the Valley So this is the 3rd? 4th? We started 4 years ago this is our 4th! Do you want to talk about what tips or tricks have made it successful as it keeps growing? The main thing is we didn’t limit to a sharing of seeds help people get access to quality food for their health and their families health So we made it about sharing seeds information skills inclusion of workshops The whole event is free! That&#8217;s important! We don’t sell anything so there are...

Happy Anniversary to you Green Future Growers. Thank you for letting me be your host of the I hope to finish up the updates to Free Garden Course and the workbook for you this day or this week at the latest! Free Garden Course.com Free Organic Garden Course Let&#8217;s get growing! This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Spotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/

Andrea Catherine introduced me to Lindsay Jean Hard who wrote Cooking with Scraps: Turn Your Peels, Cores, Rinds, and Stems into Delicious Meals something I&#8217;m super passionate about and learning about. She blogs at this place called Food52, which I love reading and I get their emails it&#8217;s always exciting! I was just reading somewhere about broccoli stems were even more nutritious then the florets maybe we&#8217;re gonna learn more about nutrition too! Well, i don&#8217;t necessarily have a nutrition background but there is a lot to be said as far as nutrients and great things in the peels and things that we tend to discard a lot! There&#8217;s benefits to not throwing our scraps away! Oh year I was loving he sugar peels looked awesome because I&#8217;m always trying to get more fruit and fiber in my diet and I think there&#8217;s a lot of fiber in the peel right? Tell us a little about yourself. My path to where I am now has been an interesting one Like you said I got my masters in Urban Planning here at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I worked for our local downtown development authority for a couple of years, so that was a solid 2 years to put masters to good use. Then my husband and I moved to Japan. The intersection of cooking and writing. We joined a CSA when we were there where we would walk down the street to the local grocery store and pick up a box of vegetables. CSA learning process every week walking into the store to ask what is in my box That&#8217;s where I first started thinking about cooking with scraps because I knew these farmers taking this time and energy to grow. putting it all to great use friends of ours from college told us they were going to start Real Time Farms.com resource to find farmers near them and learn about their growing practices and connect with restaurants and see where those restaurants were sourcing their ingredients from It was a really exciting time to be working for a start up We were acquired by Food52.com It&#8217;s a food and lifestyle website. I worked for them for 6 years community management <span...

&nbsp; Today, I&#8217;m excited to introduce my guest from Tara Austen Weaver who&#8217;s written a book about growing &nbsp; Growing Berries and Fruit Trees in the Pacific Northwest: How to Grow Abundant, Organic Fruit in Your Backyard I know that you are going to love this because it&#8217;s got lots of great tips for anyone living anywhere not just in the Northwest and I&#8217;m super excited because last summer I was visiting Nola&#8217;s yard last summer because her blueberries were amazing and I am bound and determined to grow some this year! And there&#8217;s just so much to learn so welcome to the show! Tell us a little about yourself. My mom had a giant organic garden! I guess I’m sort of a second generation gardener I actually grew up not really liking to garden I liked playing and running around but weeding seemed like drudgery to me! I have all these very visceral memories of just being out in the garden and sunshine, my mom would pop cherry tomatoes into our mouths when we were kids, because we just picked it in the sunshine! fruit that was warm from a tree So I have all these really positive memories of being in a garden but not doing any work! I was living in San Francisco in my late 20s, early 30s I started coming back around to the idea of gardening I remember one year for my birthday I got the idea to build these window boxes ~ I had gotten into cooking. I wanted to grow herbs. It is so irritating to buy a whole bunch of parsley when you just need a sprig. I lugged these boxes home and I&#8217;m dangling out this window and holding this heavy drill and I got them put up and filled them with soil and nestled my tiny little herbs and was so so pleased! Then within a week or two, I noticed the sage leaves had this kind of white stuff on it. I was concerned and I lived on the foggy side of the city and thought oh my is this is fungus or blight on my herbs and when I went to investigate I discovered it was pigeon poop and I realized I wasn&#8217;t gonna be a gardener in the city. It wasn’t till I moved to Seattle about 10 years ago that everything fell into place, Seattle has such a giant gardening community! Everyone here it seems even if they just grow beautiful yards edible ones and everyone is out working and tending vegetables I got bitten by the gardening bug quickly used up all of the area didn’t have much of a yard I got a community garden plot started studying permaculture Eventually my mother moved up to Seattle and bought a house on half an acre! For the last 9 years we have been collaborating The Neglected Orchard there were 9 fruit trees on the property but they were engulfed in blackberries <p...

Today, I&#8217;m excited to introduce my guest from Tara Austen Weaver who&#8217;s written a book about growing &nbsp; Growing Berries and Fruit Trees in the Pacific Northwest: How to Grow Abundant, Organic Fruit in Your Backyard I know that you are going to love this because it&#8217;s got lots of great tips for anyone living anywhere not just in the Northwest and I&#8217;m super excited because last summer I was visiting Nola&#8217;s yard last summer because her blueberries were amazing and I am bound and determined to grow some this year! And there&#8217;s just so much to learn so welcome to the show! To read the full shownotes click here. Tell us a little about yourself. My mom had a giant organic garden! It wasn’t till I moved to Seattle about 10 years ago that everything fell into place, Seattle has such a giant gardening community! Everyone here it seems even if they just grow beautiful yards edible ones and everyone is out working and tending vegetables I got bitten by the gardening bug quickly used up all of the area didn’t have much of a yard I got a community garden plot started studying permaculture Eventually my mother moved up to Seattle and bought a house on half an acre! Tell us about something that grew well this year. I’m coming off not a fantastic garden year, because I moved this spring! I wasn’t thinking it through thinking I could move and garden and that didn’t really happen! Perennial gardening is growing obsession I have a busy life and in the summer I also like to go hiking. I am really really interested in those things that don’t need as much help and tending as lettuce and peas do those twelve blueberry bushes were fine and asked nothing of me! master recipes I have developed over the years this jam crisp you can make with any fruit the other thing people don’t realize commercial growers grow certain varieties because they stand up to transport that will stand up on the shelf. There are a lot of amazing varieties that don’t get grown commercially because they are just too fragile. My favorite strawberry variety is called Shushkan not grown commercially They really need to be processed within 24 hours They have the most amazing flavor Is there something you would do different...

I just want you to get a copy of Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow I interviewed Tara Austin Weaver and hope to release the full version of my interview today, but in the mean time, I think you should go to your library or local book store and pick up a copy of her inspiring and delightful memoire. You can order her amazing book Growing Berries and Fruit Trees in the Pacific Northwest: How to Grow Abundant, Organic Fruit in Your Backyard on amazon in advance and while you&#8217;re waiting for it to come I recommend you read Orchard House: I guarantee it will inspire you to grow some food, grow some berries, and love your family! It brought back so many memories for me of growing up with mother (and then marrying a man) who never stood still out in the garden. Something always needed (needs) pruned, pulled, weeded or tendered. Her dedication to creating an oasis for her nieces to enjoy and her relationship with her family will probably bring back memories of growing up and sharing time together around food. A delightful read from start to finish, nothing better on a cool winter day when you can&#8217;t get outside yourself! Growing Berries and Fruit Trees in the Pacific Northwest: How to Grow Abundant, Organic Fruit in Your Backyard So don&#8217;t forget order her new book and read the memoire and leave her a review on Amazon so more people will be inspired as well! 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 and don&#8217;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<img class="alignnone wp-image-54193 aligncenter"...

I&#8217;m so excited because is gonna energize us and it&#8217;s Sunday January 6th and I just talked with Lindsey Jean Hard yesterday who wrote the book Cooking With Scraps! Cooking with Scraps: Turn Your Peels, Cores, Rinds, and Stems into Delicious Meals Hi everyone! I&#8217;m glad you got a chance to talk to Lindsay Jean and I interviewed her and it was really valuable. I have the cookbook in hand! Today, I want to share what I am up to in this transition the holidays I&#8217;ve been making things like polenta And craving cooling herbs mint cilantro coconut! Shredded coconut and coconut milk recognizing my body&#8217;s wanting to cool off from the inflammatory foods of the holidays! IDK if anyone is experiencing that. I can totally relate except in a different sense. I was really good during the holidays, it&#8217;s more of an after the holidays problem. I went home, had a great holiday with my family! I hadn&#8217;t been the four of us, my parents and my brother and I, and especially with my brother and I and just thankful to soak up all of that love! And maybe a little more gluten and sugar then I normally eat my body was really feeling that for a while I got home still wanted nourishing foods I had this cornmeal from Wicked Good Farm polenta! Last night we had friends over, and so I put a whole chicken in a crock pot chicken had been with tomatoes onions peppers put that over polenta! We also made polenta fries! I&#8217;m happy to tell how to make those things using organic cornmeal and having something different then just flour is really nice! I feel like I get that nourishment without getting inundated with sweet things! How do you make polenta fries? I just saw something on Facebook about vegan quinoa nuggets! There was a restaurant in Ann Arbor that had really good polenta fries! I think it was Grizzly Peak Brewing Company. Make polenta like you would 1 cup fine to medium cornmeal to 4 cups of water you can...

I&#8217;m so excited I have a listener on the line who is going to share a ton of golden seeds! I talked to her before from Florida and she is going to share with us about her Sustainability Project! 1. Tell us a little about yourself. By day, I’m a REALTOR® and beekeeper. I&#8217;m also a 3rd generation farmer. My grandparents owned a 100 acre wheat farm on the prairie in rural Dufresne, Manitoba. My family lived off the land, they grew their food seasonally in a 1 acre vegetable garden. After the local community collectively brought in the fall harvest, they would busily preserve and can their produce for storage in their root cellar. These people were a hardy bunch, they managed to survive the brutually harsh winters with minimal resources using a wood burning stove for heat, crude electric and no running water or indoor plumbing. They kept and cared for livestock and only took what they needed to survive, my ancestors practiced “The Tragedy of the Commons” method. That&#8217;s how they managed to raise a family of 8 in rural Manitoba. And Manitoba is where people go to see the polar bears right? Yes Churchill Manitoba is where the polar bears are. Then you went to the opposite end of the continent practically to Florida. Yes I did I got hired to work for Disney at the Epcot Center back in the early 80s and that&#8217;s where I met my husband two weeks later and we&#8217;ve been here ever since! That&#8217;s so romantic! I always wanted to work for Disney, I tried to get a job or get into art school at the California Institute of Arts in LA. Well, they must have liked me! I managed to beat out 64 other people fro the job! So yay for me! And you worked there for a long time right? Yes 35 years! 2. Tell me about your first gardening experience? We used to visit the farm in the summer time every two years, however my mom! When my mother moved to the big city of Toronto, Ontario, she became a backyard farmer and composter carrying on her family farming tradition. I began helping my mother garden as a young child, she taught me valuable lessons in planting, harvesting and food preservation skills. All these years later I&#8217;ve been utilizing this and it&#8217;s been working out fantastic for me. Luckily for me, both my parents were award winning gardeners so pulling weeds or fresh carrots comes naturally. So then is it challenging down in Florida? Do you have to learn different practices to grow in that climate? Well, gardening is pretty much the same wherever you go. IT&#8217;s just the conditions and the climate. In Florida there is a sandy soil, where my parents lived it was a deep rich soil. You have to plant things things that grow...

I&#8217;m so close to wrapping up Free Garden Course.com and I know you are going to love the new one that will take place in a real google classroom! When it&#8217;s ready, we&#8217;ll have a new 2019 Garden Goals challenge and full color workbook I think you will love! Go ahead and listen to last year&#8217;s challenge. There&#8217;s a facebook group you can join and even access the google classroom with access code 75yju4. Do you want to save time in your garden? Do you want to grow a garden full of healthy vegetables but feel you don&#8217;t have time? Do you struggle to get all the weeds pulled and watering done in the heat of summer when your friends are all headed to the lake? Are you tired of paying the high cost of organic vegetables in the store but struggle to grow your own? Well, our 2018 Garden Goals Challenge will help you find success in your garden journey! Free Garden Course.com So, if you follow me you probably know that I created a Free Garden Course also known as Free Organic Garden Course over Christmas break! Days 1-8 2018GardenGoalsChallenge For the first 8 days of 2018 I&#8217;m going to walk you through the steps of planning your garden goals so you are growing awesome nutrient dense vegetables with the least amount of work and time. Now I&#8217;m not gonna fool you and say it&#8217;s all gonna be easy but I will say it will be worth it. Day One is all about brainstorming! You can download the first 30 days here while you&#8217;re waiting for it to come in the mail. <img class="size-medium wp-image-4367 aligncenter" src="https://organicgardenerpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/SailboatPeas-225x300.jpg" alt="boat of peas" width="225" height="300" srcset="https://organicgardenerpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/SailboatPeas-225x300.jpg 225w,...