[SPEAKER_00]: You know, to not only think outside of the box, but I always said this about myself to think about, no, no box at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why put yourself in a box?
[SPEAKER_00]: I just try it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Give it a go.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you have an idea on how to do something sustainably for yourself in your home.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just give it a go.
[SPEAKER_03]: You are listening to the Good Dirt Podcast.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is a place where we dig into the nitty-gritty of sustainable living through food, fashion, and lifestyle.
[SPEAKER_05]: And we're your host, Mary and Emma Kingsley, the mother and daughter founder team of Lady Farmer.
[SPEAKER_05]: We're sewing seeds of slow living through our community platform events and online marketplace.
[SPEAKER_03]: We started this podcast as a means to share the wealth of information and quality conversations that we're having in our world as we dream up and deliver ways for each of us to live into the new paradigm.
[SPEAKER_03]: One that is regenerative, balanced, and whole.
[SPEAKER_05]: We want to put the microphone in front of the voices that need to be heard the most right now.
[SPEAKER_05]: The farmers, the dreamers, the designers, and the doers.
[SPEAKER_03]: So come call to be a better world with us, we're so glad you're here.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, let's dig in.
[SPEAKER_05]: Hello, everyone.
[SPEAKER_05]: I hope this finds all of you enjoying a fine spring day.
[SPEAKER_05]: The weather's finally warming up here.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I've been literally digging in to all the things there are today at the beginning of the growing season.
[SPEAKER_05]: Planting seeds and cleaning up and watching things come up.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right now, I'm mostly surrounded by a whole lot of violets and dandelions.
[SPEAKER_05]: I've actually been purposely encouraging the violets over the last several years.
[SPEAKER_05]: They are a beautiful native ground cover, and they do just such a good job.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're low-growing, and when they're bloom, it's just absolutely stunning.
[SPEAKER_05]: And of course, the Dandelions don't need any encouragement.
[SPEAKER_05]: They just arrive on their own in great abundance, as you know, and both are great additions to a spring salad.
[SPEAKER_05]: If you subscribe to our sub-stack.
[SPEAKER_05]: Look out for a recipe we'll be posting for some tasty, violet, lemon crisps.
[SPEAKER_05]: This is a light and delicious, shortbread cookie that I highly recommend enjoying out in the sunshine with a friend or two.
[SPEAKER_05]: So anyway, it's just me today with a really fun conversation that I know all of you gardeners listening and are going to enjoy.
[SPEAKER_05]: And even if you don't garden or if you're an aspiring gardener or even just someone who loves the idea,
[SPEAKER_05]: of connecting with the Earth in a deeper way, and you love good dirt.
[SPEAKER_05]: You're going to be inspired by our guest, Melanie Catillo, of lazy, dirt, wild flower farm in Mexico, New York.
[SPEAKER_05]: Melanie grows flowers and native plants that are field grown without any plastics or peat, and follows practices that protect and support the needs of pollinators and wildlife.
[SPEAKER_05]: And of course, the life in the soil, which is essential for all living things, including us.
[SPEAKER_05]: So, come along with me today in my conversation with Melanie, about what she calls Earth First Gardening.
[SPEAKER_05]: As always, I learned so much, and you will too.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, here is Melanie Katillow.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am what I affectionately call the plant, Wrangler Incheef here at Lazy Dirt Wild Flower Farm in Mexico, New York.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just east of beautiful Lake Ontario.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you don't know where that is, if you look at the map of New York where you see December through sometimes June.
[SPEAKER_00]: You see the Lake Effect Band come off the lake and we're getting five to 10 feet of snow in a few days.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is where my flower farm is.
[SPEAKER_05]: All right.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it's lazy dirt wildflower farm.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so you and I chatted the other day.
[SPEAKER_05]: And as I understand it, this is a nursery, but it is not your typical nursery.
[SPEAKER_05]: So tell us a little bit about what is different about lazy dirt wildflower farm from any other nursery that any listener might go to on any given spring day.
[SPEAKER_05]: I would say that the nursery is small, but wouldn't a lot of democracy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but some people call a backyard plant nursery.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is licensed, of course, by New York State, so that we can grow responsibly without any disease, is there anything?
[SPEAKER_00]: But when you come here, it's literally in my garden, is where all the
[SPEAKER_00]: And they are selected out of the field.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you won't find five-year-old plants waiting to go home.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are out in the field growing wild and free as they're supposed to.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that'd be a fine-like small plant, younger plant.
[SPEAKER_05]: Do your customers come in?
[SPEAKER_05]: A harvest them out of the field?
[SPEAKER_00]: Put them all on?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, because I'm a little protective.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, the field.
[SPEAKER_00]: I worry about things like jumping worms.
[SPEAKER_00]: At some point, I hope to be able to do you dig, but we're not ready for that yet, because I haven't quite figured out a system to let people know what plants they can dig.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I'd like to offer only plants that are young that are between one to two years old.
[SPEAKER_00]: the ones that look like fabric, all the plants are wrapped in burlap or wool pots or sometimes even wax paper.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh wow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, so that's the big difference, and it's small.
[SPEAKER_00]: So instead of having say a hundred wild burgaman or moniatrifistulose plants, waiting to go home on a big table, there's maybe 10, and if someone needs more than 10, I'm happy to go out and dig them for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: right then and there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they get wrapped in burlap or paper and off.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're going to write visiting a garden.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's my goal that when someone comes to my farm into the nursery, it's like walking into a garden and taking some of the baby plant home.
[SPEAKER_05]: That just sounds so lovely.
[SPEAKER_05]: And what really got my attention about you and your farm and what you do is this idea that you literally have
[SPEAKER_05]: a plastic free garden and I love this so much because of course so many of our listeners would be willing to say most of our listeners have some interest in gardening either from a pot in their window or on their patio to maybe acres and acres of farming as we all know
[SPEAKER_05]: those of us that share this passion, it is really a challenge these days to do this without a lot of plastic, without a lot of waste.
[SPEAKER_05]: Personally, I will say this disrealization sort of dawned on me over a period of time, I would get so excited in the spring to go to the Garden Center and buy a whole bunch of plants and just be so excited about it and
[SPEAKER_05]: so gratified to be exercising this desire to dig in the dirt and grow beautiful things and help the earth and all of this.
[SPEAKER_05]: And only to turn around when I was done and observe that I had a big giant pile of waste behind me.
[SPEAKER_05]: And this became more and more just stressing.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I got into this
[SPEAKER_05]: I could find that had the same desire and hear you have an entire garden in nursery, where you have way past it completely.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I'd like to hear a little bit about your story of how you got to this, how you've done it, tips and tricks, pro tips, all those things, just talk about that experience.
[SPEAKER_05]: And like, where did you come from?
[SPEAKER_05]: Where were you in your growing journey when you realized that this is something you really wanted to do something about?
[SPEAKER_00]: My journey started with Native plants, of course, and I started growing Native plants because I had gone out in January and a mine of 10 degree morning at dawn to get the mail.
[SPEAKER_00]: I braved, just winked out into the winter tundra and thinking, you know, it shouldn't hurt to breathe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why do I live with where it's the breath, the gold air, and there was a perfect circle in the snow, and it's first glance.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just thought it was just a dried up piece of grass.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, on the way back from the mailbox, the dawn with light was hitting it just right.
[SPEAKER_00]: I even took photographs of this.
[SPEAKER_00]: It moved me so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: There, a dried up piece of grant and in this perfect circle, Mary, there was little bird trink and bunny trink like they had been jumping rope.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just burst into tears.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought, dear, I can barely breathe and they're out here having a party and finding food wherever they can get it and whatever that is.
[SPEAKER_00]: I even remember coming into the house and saying, whatever this is, I have to grow more of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was new to my smart phone.
[SPEAKER_00]: I put a plant amp on there, ran back outside into the sub-zero weather, the photograph, and found out that it was New England actors.
[SPEAKER_00]: for new England answers and about them, and how to grow more of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It took me to the wild seed project, and my family was telling you, the rabbit hole just got deeper and deeper, and I've never come up for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been down there ever since, and that's how I started.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I had my desire to do up, to grow all the things, all native plants, I hoped that I would have extra.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I first started growing, I decided, well, okay, I'll spend the $100 on getting my nursery license, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I could not figure out at the time, I did not like all the plastics.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought in my mind, I can either get seeds native seeds from Ernst or the Wild seed project.
[SPEAKER_00]: Back then, I didn't know about local equal types.
[SPEAKER_00]: or I could buy, or I have to buy all these bean cracks, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Another one of those, a hundred dollars for me back then.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just, I was very resentful about having to spend money on the thick, and that's, and I think that's where it really started to circulate a little bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I first started, I was growing in plastic because I couldn't find at the time any alternatives.
[SPEAKER_00]: My learning curve was great because before then I couldn't grow a miracle Mary.
[SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't even grow a miracle from speed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, we had to start somewhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew and boy did nature take a good laugh at me because when I sewed all these milk jugs, I started with milk jugs and the deep trays with the little domes and more duct tape than you can shake a stick at, I had over 200 of those out on my deck and I forgot all about them.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's to God.
[SPEAKER_00]: I forgot all about them until mid April and it hit me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I have all my gosh You know, we had a lot going on in our family and I went out and those plants were bursting Some of them had no plants in them right 25% but the rest of them were bursting so I had to do something with them And so I decided to share them and the only way I could share them was
[SPEAKER_05]: Hey, we have to give ourselves a grace for learning.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as I was doing that, I just thought this is so wasteful.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're has to be something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the only comfort I gave myself with the solo cups was that they were recyclable.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where's the black plastic was not?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then came the call, I called, I let people know that I was looking to rescue plastic pots.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my idea was that if they went to, instead of them going to a landfill, they could come here to my farm.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I think that guard as gardeners, like you said,
[SPEAKER_00]: You have you plant all the plants and you're looking at the beauty and then you have this pile of rubbish you have to deal with and I think as gardeners we really are the land where the box got on the plastic we're the one to end up getting stuck with it and so I had got well if everybody people start bringing me pop out of their shut and then one day.
[SPEAKER_00]: and reused all of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what I planted in for about two or three years, those pot.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then one day I came home and there was big contractor bags, you know, the giant 30 different contractor bags.
[SPEAKER_00]: Full of plastic pot.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in my barn, I measured it was a 10 by 25 foot space.
[SPEAKER_00]: Full of plastic pot.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just went, I can't do this anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's something wrong with this system and this is not working.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is just not working and there has to be a different way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, so in researching, I found out and said, you know, well, what did it's like finding a really good recipe?
[SPEAKER_00]: What did they make before the planet?
[SPEAKER_00]: I asked myself, and I researched that someone sent me a link to an old book, I can't remember the life of me to try to love it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a scanned copy and from nursery growing in 1925.
[SPEAKER_00]: how to grow plants with them in 1925.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no plant that bet that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was the boom, like, what do you mean you put them in a wood tray?
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the part that I actually had to walk away.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a walk and really let's sink into my heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: was that they had a wooden tray, all of the little seedlings.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when you went to get your plant, they would literally, I'm not gonna take a spoon or scoop or with their hand, scoop them up and wrap them in this paper.
[SPEAKER_00]: And take them home and plant them right into the newspaper.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just went, oh my God, okay, there's gotta be other ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't find it on the other way, so I kind of made up my own ways based on that idea of the paper that, well, what if I took plants and I burlapped them?
[SPEAKER_00]: What if I dug them up, wrapped them in burlapped?
[SPEAKER_00]: But it really pretty ball on them with twine or I have a woman on Etsy, wonderful woman, her and her son make cotton ribbon, hand dyed for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely beautiful and then soil blocking.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just covered soil blocking and that was a big game changer.
[SPEAKER_04]: So it's like the tool that that creates blocks of soil.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you make your soil for soil blocks, it the soil recipe.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just using regular potting mix.
[SPEAKER_00]: You actually add nutrients and food for your seedlings and it changes everything because you're going to be watering from the bottom so you get healthier plants.
[SPEAKER_00]: On one bamboo tray, because I've switched to bamboo trays, I can fit 120 seedlings on one tray on my grow rack.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can fit 25 trays of plants.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot of plants.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that was the one thing that helped a lot.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just decided that especially after reading that one book and really thinking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what did we do before plastic before 1960, I also refused to buy anything that was not a living thing, that it wasn't going to feed a plant, it wasn't going to feed a pollinator, it wasn't going to feed a bird, I wasn't going to buy it.
[SPEAKER_00]: No no backs at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why put yourself in a box?
[SPEAKER_00]: I just try it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Give it a go.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you have an idea on how to do something sustainably for yourself in your home.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just give it a go.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: You could be on the next big thing.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, I love that so much.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I want to talk about this idea.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think as gardeners, people love the plan that we have totally normalized that experience of going to a large retail place or any size retail place that sells plants and it is normal.
[SPEAKER_05]: This is what everyone does, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: to pick up not only all these plants in plastic, but giant bags of soil that have been her medically sealed and, you know, what kind of life can that have in it?
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, all the chemicals, all that amendments, all the things that are supposed to help us grow things.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's totally normal for us, but when you stop and think about number one how recent this is like a hundred years ago, this was not the way it was done.
[SPEAKER_05]: And to think, wait a minute, just look at what we're doing, have some consciousness about this.
[SPEAKER_05]: The soil sealed up in plastic bags for, haven't noticed how many weeks, maybe years passed.
[SPEAKER_05]: The plants in plastic, the plants that have, you know, what circumstances were they seated in?
[SPEAKER_05]: What kind of soil have they been started in?
[SPEAKER_05]: And that doesn't even get to the chemicals and all these amendments and things that are supposed to be helpful.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here's a farm I try to think about,
[SPEAKER_00]: who's coming after.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I have my farm is over 220 years old.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have hand prints in my basement of children that lived here in 1920.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have handwriting in the barn when they put in a cement when they covered the stone with cement, you know, 1921 woods.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my farm was in the wood family from the very beginning until the 1960s and then entered into my
[SPEAKER_00]: So I have lots of reminders that I am only a temporary guardian here that other people are going to come after.
[SPEAKER_00]: Other generations of birds and pollinators are going to come after.
[SPEAKER_00]: So all that depends on what I do with my soil, everything depends on how I treat what I have.
[SPEAKER_00]: No matter what my neighbors do, I'm very fortunate, I know that I am blessed to have
[SPEAKER_00]: for acres that tend with neighbors to do not pray, who we love wildlife, that we have a lot of trees on our road till.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know that a lot of people from someone who lives in the suburbs does not have that, that they have to work to get their neighbors to not pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: or perhaps live in an HOA where they're having a problem, trying to grow the propoundators and a wild Birmingham garden.
[SPEAKER_00]: But here at the farm, I have 200-year-old maple trees.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right out here in the front that they're at me every day and hold me accountable.
[SPEAKER_00]: They hold me accountable.
[SPEAKER_00]: As does the female raccoon that nested in them, it's really, it's very, very, who cares down at me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, you know, so there's lots of reminders.
[SPEAKER_00]: that I'm responsible for who, for the welfare of who comes after me, and it's a big responsibility.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I have a lot more fun with it than most people.
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, it is a big responsibility, but it's extremely empowering, I think, for each of us as individuals, to realize that whatever our circumstances are,
[SPEAKER_05]: And I will say this, maybe some people are arguing with me, but whatever your circumstances wherever you live, whatever you do, you have an opportunity to make good dirt.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_05]: And for those of us that have a few little acres is exciting for us because we can maybe have more opportunity to play around with it and experiment, but that deep commitment to doing what's going to be good for the earth.
[SPEAKER_05]: what's going to help the good dirt and these days we certainly cannot count on leaders, policymakers to straighten this out for us.
[SPEAKER_05]: Unfortunately, we are where we are because of decades and decades of decision making that hasn't made the difference that needs to make.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, our kitchen sink or our window sill.
[SPEAKER_05]: And if you don't have a garden, you don't have a patio, you don't have a window sill.
[SPEAKER_05]: You can compost your food.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's a whole other episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's huge.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I have some folks who come to visit farm because they live in the city.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they don't have anywhere to really grow one other than their patio or their their port their front porch and we've come up with really creative ways for them to grow one in part and would wouldn't raise right on their front porch but someone who comes to my farm it told me this really wonderful very wise thing that it doesn't matter how much you have it matters and what you tend
[SPEAKER_00]: If you go, he takes his children to a local nature center, Baltimore would, and he said, he tends that, he tends it because they volunteer there.
[SPEAKER_00]: They attend workshops there and other programs, but he's always telling it's what you tend.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you don't have to have land or a big garden to be tending something.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he's very big on teaching his children conservation and appreciation for wildlife and tending what they have.
[SPEAKER_00]: And tending things that they don't have yet but they're creating, you know, creating is also a way to form of tending.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's beautiful.
[SPEAKER_05]: What I want to say about that too is it helps cultivate that idea, you know, like property and lot lines and all that kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_05]: That really, those things aren't real to the earth and the soil, you know, the who owns that, who has a piece of paper that says it's theirs, versus someone else's, um, the pollinators don't care.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, yeah, they don't care.
[SPEAKER_05]: So, yeah, and so,
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, that idea of tending wherever you can, wherever you are able, even if you go to a park, even if you go to a conservation place, even if you go like a community garden, or you just walk down your sidewalk and there's a tree that you notice.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can speak to that tree.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you can give water.
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to live in the city years and years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was a tree on my street that they had put an iron grate around.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I felt so horrible for this poor tree.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would go out during this summer and water it just because.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And threatened to rip up the grate.
[SPEAKER_05]: we can create relationships all around us without having to think crazy.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm giving y'all permission.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm giving all of you listeners permission to go out wherever you are go out on your walk, on your way to work, whatever, and make a friend with some plant or tree or natural area or butterfly.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, everything really.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's appreciate and beauty wherever you go, wherever you find it.
[SPEAKER_05]: I love this idea of tending.
[SPEAKER_05]: I just love that.
[SPEAKER_05]: And yeah, take it water or you know remove harmful things from around it if you can.
[SPEAKER_05]: But if you can't just make friends with it.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I think that's very powerful.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think it's very powerful for not only the plant, but for for you as well.
[SPEAKER_05]: I know that we have seven acres here.
[SPEAKER_05]: And we've been out here 12 13 years now.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I've caught myself over the years sort of doing that more and more.
[SPEAKER_05]: I want to do it consciously.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like really, notice the trees as individuals and really familiarize myself with all the Nixon crannies around the place that at one time out of you may be felt like, oh, that that spot really needs to be tamed or, you know, that's a mess I need to get in there and do something.
[SPEAKER_05]: And now as I've traveled this journey, I can look at those places and say,
[SPEAKER_05]: What's in there?
[SPEAKER_05]: What wants to grow there?
[SPEAKER_05]: What can I do to make good people in there?
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: And this gets into something else.
[SPEAKER_05]: You said you grow only native plants.
[SPEAKER_00]: I grow what is native to my area, to my equal type.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's funny because people will buy my website and they'll contact me to order plants.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they're in like Virginia.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or one lovely woman was in Texas and another woman was I think of Pennsylvania.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I can't ship your plants because then they're not going to be local to you, and then I spend a time to find a local native plant independent native plant nursery close to their location and send them links and say, just tell them lazy to do it while flower farms are done.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here at the farm, I am balancing two things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm balancing sharing native plants that I grow.
[SPEAKER_00]: but also growing a habitant for a while right first that comes first, even when I'm harvesting flowers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's probably the third thing is that I'm also a flower farm.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm also growing flowers and making floral arrangements.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my harvesting, yeah, my harvesting takes on this whole other, so I have a lot of processing.
[SPEAKER_00]: that, for example, if I were to go out pickings in is, or a better wild minority, which I did, it's just my favorite native plant.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't tell the others.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, you beat them, y'all.
[SPEAKER_00]: It looks like a firework.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just beautiful.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it supports so much wildlife.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the deer don't like to eat it, which is the other perk.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, so if I were out in one of my wild
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm one of the flowers that was ready to be cut.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn't cut it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would move on and it could be the most perfect, beautiful flower and I won't cut it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will come back.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I actually tell the babe, well you enjoy your lunch, I'll be back.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll come back.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll come back and I'll go do something else far, far away.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I'll come back and maybe harvest it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes I don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes I'll tag that flower for seedlings
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'll tag it with a little piece of ribbon cotton ribbon cloth.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll come back and I'll harvest from there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just because I know who made this deed.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh my gosh.
[SPEAKER_05]: What a wonderful plant to make.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm with you.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm with you all the way like talking to the bee and leaving it alone and walking, going, coming back.
[SPEAKER_05]: But what you just said, I've really, really learned something.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, I knew it already, but I hadn't connected the dot.
[SPEAKER_05]: And you know it's been healing.
[SPEAKER_05]: So then you know that at the end of the season, that's the flower that you want to collect the seeds from.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_05]: Is that what you're saying?
[SPEAKER_05]: Is that you tag that to go back and harvest the seeds?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, oh my gosh.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, yeah, I could go in and say, okay, this whole seed had this whole patch of wild Bergman obviously has been tolerated.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I kind of like to have one that I make special.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's just special because I saw it pollinated and oh my goodness, I have to have that one.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to that's the one that I'm going to use for growing more specifically germinating by human hands with a little luck from nature instead of just letting them go wild.
[SPEAKER_00]: That that was seen had go wild.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is creating relationship.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, and I have learned over the years to be very careful what I asked,
[SPEAKER_00]: nature.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I have learned the hard way.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have had times where I have said, oh, I wish I had this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now have an abundance.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it which is just a wonderful, wonderful thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, for years, I have people always asking if I had sweet grass.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would have to say, well, that's a no, I don't have any sweet grass.
[SPEAKER_00]: if I did, I wouldn't tell it because it's sacred.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't have any.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had looked here, I've lived in the house for 20 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had looked for years for sweet grass so that I could protect it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I must have studied outside that I didn't have any sweet grass because last year I was walking along in the spring.
[SPEAKER_00]: And said, what the heck kind of grass is that I've never seen that before.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's just gorgeous, just beautiful.
[SPEAKER_00]: I took a photograph of it and it was sweet grass.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it wasn't just a little patch, Mary.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the ten foot.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got out in my measuring tape.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a ten foot swath of sweet grass that is eight feet deep.
[SPEAKER_00]: with nothing else growing at the end of the universe her and looking at this to be grass and then behind it there's another pant over by the house there's another pants it's everywhere it's absolutely everywhere so now I have a friend who's coming this spring and she's going to teach me how to tend it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now I could share a little bit when someone asked for it and just gift it as a gift, responsibly and tend to that sacred plant.
[SPEAKER_00]: Street grass is a native grass that has been used for ceremonies by Native Americans, probably since the daughter of mine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, writing is a grass, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Robin Kilmer, that's usually how people have found learned about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a wonderful, wonderful book.
[SPEAKER_00]: and so I hadn't read the book when I found the sweet grass.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had that right at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And friends of mine who grow native plants were just a, you really, you have a native plant nursery, you really need to reach for those books.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to read Doug Palmy and I didn't, I just, I didn't have, I was so busy growing native plants from seed and learning everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: that I kind of wanted at the time my first three years I kind of wanted to me and her down my own path.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there was this week grass and the other one read last two years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was in the woods where I go hiking over at Mexico point and they have this beautiful woodland trail.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's full of jewelry, which is this beautiful beautiful plant with a little orange or
[SPEAKER_00]: love them and they're especially made so that the bees have to nestle in and get in there for the nectar and I just adore them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I clicked figure out because I have a vertical hole here on the west side of the farm and I clicked figure out plan I don't have a jewel weed is an exchange of no jewel weed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have an upside I can't believe what I mean jewel weed and I forgot all about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well last two springs ago, I'm out there walking around looking at everything, and there was a little patch of jewelry.
[SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't believe it, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It was so excited.
[SPEAKER_00]: It took autographs and I ran inside, I put it on my map, and told everybody I called friends, you won't believe it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was literally just a little not even a foot wide clump of jewelry that I was just excited.
[SPEAKER_00]: And following, praying.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm looking around.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is so prolific here that last year when I had to dig up, I was putting in a new bed in the meadowwalk.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was full of dual weight, bait, seedlings, little babies coming up.
[SPEAKER_00]: I put out on my newsletter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Please come and rescue us, come and show me the heat.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not so bad about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just a gift.
[SPEAKER_00]: You never know who's listening.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, that is so true.
[SPEAKER_05]: And you know that at June,
[SPEAKER_00]: weed is a remedy for poison and so now I make a staff for with the bill we're giving thanks as I harvest yes oh my goodness and they say they say that it it grows in proximity with poison ivy yeah isn't something the wisdom of the earth's amazing and also
[SPEAKER_05]: giant patch of nittle which which I love and I love to go out in the spring before it gets too stingy.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's good for you.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's so good for you.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's good for your bones.
[SPEAKER_05]: It has all these minerals in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very good for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like garlic.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a non-native plant.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you pick it in the spring before it flowers, you get the ultimate revenge.
[SPEAKER_00]: You turn it into
[SPEAKER_05]: or another plant I wanted to ask you about that's a favorite of mine.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's just not native Tulsi.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, Tulsi.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then you were talking about be careful with the wishboard.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I bought a Tulsi plant years ago, you know, just like a little pot or something and put it in.
[SPEAKER_05]: and it came up nicely and the next year it had spread a lot.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then two, three years down the road, it is everywhere.
[SPEAKER_05]: The Tulsi is everywhere, but it's okay.
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't mind.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's a beautiful plant in India.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's revered as like the queen of the garden.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's a relative of basil.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, it is a basil.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_00]: Holy basil.
[SPEAKER_04]: You'd be one of two.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right up, too.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, with the being in that native, usually if I see on a packet or a feed description, stuff, so that I know, oh, that's something I need to kind of watch for.
[SPEAKER_00]: I need to kind of be aware that I need to get out there and get them feeds before they're ripe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like a native plant that is abundant.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's very abundant.
[SPEAKER_00]: I call her, a plant as abundant.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead of using the word aggressive,
[SPEAKER_00]: I like the word abundant.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's a party dowel.
[SPEAKER_00]: She loves everybody, she just wants to go everywhere and have a great time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Downey sunflowers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of the native sunflowers hit our abundant.
[SPEAKER_00]: I planted three plants by my mailbox because my male carrier, he loves the color yellow.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I put these there and it's all yellow garden up there and last year I was like, where are you guys coming from you, where I'm tree where and they were just the birds, you know, they eat the seeds and they, you know, just like with the Tulsi, they go everywhere, and so I have learned to go out and Pervis those seed heads just as they ripen.
[SPEAKER_00]: so that I can put them over in the other garden.
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually take the whole stock and I hang it in the tree over on the one side where they can have free rain and the fins that will come and they'll hang upside down.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's great fun to pull a chair up and watch.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they'll self-soul.
[SPEAKER_00]: So usually, if I see something with the Tulsi, if it's a self-soul or make keep an eye on there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the Tulsi is beautiful.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's so fragrant and spicy in a garden when you're walking along a summer day.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an absolutely beautiful.
[SPEAKER_05]: It is fantastic.
[SPEAKER_05]: But how that story evolved with the abundance of Tulsi was absolutely everywhere you looked.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I loved it.
[SPEAKER_05]: I never like rejected it or I never had feelings of, oh, I've got to get rid of you.
[SPEAKER_05]: It was more just like, wow, look, you're everywhere.
[SPEAKER_05]: And over the years, it has reduced really, and yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so now I get a nice amount of it, but it's no longer everywhere.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I've never called it.
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, I do harvest it to use it, but I've never pulled it out.
[SPEAKER_05]: Just be pulling it out.
[SPEAKER_05]: And even in the spring when things are first coming out of the ground and you're not sure what they are, you know, how those little sprouts look alike.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'll look, watch very carefully for the ones that I know are tells you they to at a certain point they're very distinctive also if you as take a leave and smash it between your fingers you can.
[SPEAKER_05]: very early on you get that fragrance.
[SPEAKER_05]: So you know that that's a Tulsi plant.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm very protective of it.
[SPEAKER_05]: I just have this thing about Tulsi.
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_05]: It has such a presence.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, it is just on it.
[SPEAKER_05]: It is.
[SPEAKER_05]: So, so, to all see, and I have come to a really nice kind of understanding wonderful.
[SPEAKER_05]: And there are other plants that have not followed her behaviors.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, like, I think you and I have talked about mugwort.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, my goodness.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, mugwort.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, if I didn't do anything out in the garden, if I didn't pull any mugwort out, I think it would be.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: It would be a mugwort
[SPEAKER_05]: And then it'll come up and it'll be this big tall three or four foot thing.
[SPEAKER_05]: And if you let it go to seed then okay game over you're just yeah it's just everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's hard to get to all of that seed in the summer and do it really is and here at the farm every morning at dawn starts with a garden work.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't bring my phone with me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't take any notes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just am out there to greet the day.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're usually by the time I'm done and I walk around the back.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been about two hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm walking back.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's when I'll make notes of, oh, I remembered that, oh, that is like about to go to seed or it's flowering.
[SPEAKER_00]: If it's a problem plant, I will notice I'll try to notice when it's flowering.
[SPEAKER_05]: After it flowers, I need to get out there and whack it back with the weed whacker, and that kind of keeps people in check one of my favorite garden tools in the summer and people might be shocked to hear this, but I have a little tiny 14 inch mower, it's a, it's battery power, it doesn't use gas, it can get in all the little nicks and crannies and I just, oh, I just love to go in and
[SPEAKER_05]: a place that, you know, it's got a lot of mugwort or a lot of, you know, grass suit, I don't want there or ground ivy or whatever.
[SPEAKER_05]: I can lower that thing like almost down to gravel and you get this wonderful patch of earth with all this wonderful multi stuff on top little green flakes of, oh, it's just the best thing.
[SPEAKER_05]: And you can just
[SPEAKER_05]: plant right into it.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's just so much fun.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I just love that tool.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I highly recommend gardeners, you know, don't be afraid of the moor.
[SPEAKER_05]: At least that one.
[SPEAKER_05]: I want.
[SPEAKER_05]: to ask you a specific question.
[SPEAKER_05]: The term cultivar.
[SPEAKER_05]: Now in my understanding, and you correct me from wrong, I'm sure you know where this is going to be.
[SPEAKER_05]: A cultivar is when someone has taken a native and they have tweaked it in some way or another.
[SPEAKER_05]: So a lot of these places sell them as natives, but they're actually cultivars.
[SPEAKER_05]: So what do you think about that?
[SPEAKER_05]: Help me out here.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a great question.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, I think what you're trying to talk about is to call the native var, where they take the native plant like Echin Asia, Papia, and made it like purple with a little fuzzy top in the middle and then called powwow, Echin Asia for their powwow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so in my mind, for my farm, a cultivar is a plant that has been altered through breeding
[SPEAKER_00]: for example, or zinnias, to do certain characteristics, where a native plant is just that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just, like, I love to use Echinacea Perpilla because it's like the Monarch butterfly.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the gateway plant for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you take an Echinacea Perpilla, which is the comb flower?
[SPEAKER_00]: Purple flower.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the straight species.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, and this is why I tell a lot of the guests, so I don't have customers, I have guests.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're guests to my farm, they're guests to my garden.
[SPEAKER_00]: I say to people, they'll ask if I have, like, for example, Echinese apparel out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll get a chance to explain, well, this is where having some sorts of familiarity with scientific names for plants really does matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: so that when you go into a nursery and you see a connector for Pia on the plant tag and there's nothing after that, then you know that it's well, it's supposed to be, hopefully, a straight beefy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is indeed native, it's the original.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know the real thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So with the
[SPEAKER_00]: If you look at the plant label or this is Echinacea Pupia, it'll be in quotes, Palwam, or some of the other wonderful names.
[SPEAKER_00]: And those plant, it's not so much an opinion Mary, but it's scientific fact.
[SPEAKER_00]: We know from a bird since a lot of the research from Mount Qubis Center that many native plants offer, they've evolved with insects.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've evolved with birds.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the difference between eating an apple versus the snickers bar.
[SPEAKER_00]: The nutrition that's going to be there in the native plant is just so unique for those for that wildlife.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not to say that you won't be pollinators using a Canadian powwow in your garden.
[SPEAKER_00]: But my idea of my thought is that why would you offer a snickers bar when you really want to offer an apple?
[SPEAKER_00]: I tell you why, because it's called seduction.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and the big plant catalogs, I have one here on my desk.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, yeah, yeah, I fell for it.
[SPEAKER_05]: Just last season, I fell for that.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's so funny.
[SPEAKER_05]: You should mention the powwow.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's kind of.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: I did, I just went crazy over that powwow thing and bought one at the native garden center.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, this is what's confusing to me because I, you know, I feel like that's a place where I can, like, you know, I can do this but now I know, now I have more of an understanding of this is thing and native ours.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, thank you for that term.
[SPEAKER_05]: But another one, what opened my eyes to it was that I know that,
[SPEAKER_05]: Native Achilia, yes, is white, yes, but you go to these places and there's all these beautiful pink or ruby red and peach and coral and all these beautiful ones and they're, well, which is it, you know, all the books say that the native Achilia is white and I have it all out of my
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, the old pony pad eggs, the old horse pad eggs and stuff.
[SPEAKER_05]: It comes up all over the places on and I have transplanted so much of it.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I have a lot of it, but, oh, I want the color.
[SPEAKER_05]: She know, like again, Sebastian, but now I know.
[SPEAKER_05]: And now and and thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you for educating me on that.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's not the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: for the pollinators now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so if you're growing for earth first, you wouldn't really want a native art.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the zinias, the zinias are mostly for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sweet peas, they're for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I share them and have it lead to the pollinators.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm growing for a wedding that's next fall.
[SPEAKER_00]: And part of it was she would like Dalia's.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she wanted the Dalia tubers,
[SPEAKER_00]: to share with guests the following spring.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's going to mail them to her guests.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she couldn't find a flower farmer who would be willing to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said, sure, of course I will.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I have over 350 Dalias that are going to go in the ground this year.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's not dividing them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a major undertaking.
[SPEAKER_00]: But those are for, you know, Dalias are very specific.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're in such a way that they are really
[SPEAKER_00]: But if I can't get in there until they're fully open.
[SPEAKER_00]: So those are for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are not for the earth first.
[SPEAKER_00]: And recognizing that I have to be responsible to make sure that they're kept in check and everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: And with the native artists like the Powwow,
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a seduction, it is really a seduction.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the ways I kind of keep myself in check because I love to have a doctor.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, man, if I could grow nothing but to have a dose, I would, my flower farm, when I first started thinking about a flower farm, Mary, with the grow high drinkin'.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're in the secret.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, there are native hydrant.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, nobody knows.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was going to take off my acres and grow nothing but high drinkin', maybe some roses or maybe some punies.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was before I really went into the flower farming rabbit hole.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I saw Hydrangea at a friend's house.
[SPEAKER_00]: Huge, gorgeous, limelighted Hydrangea with the flower head like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, oh yeah, Hydrangea because I could sell them to florists.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's super easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a perennial.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't have to worry about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were there for lunch.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't see one butterfly, land on the page range.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I looked into the moment, oh my gosh, there's nothing that lays eggs on it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't see any butterflies on that one in particular.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I went to another friend's house and this really demanded it for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had flies, house flies.
[SPEAKER_00]: Swarming over the whole thing and I'm all about that bugs and dirt are not for letter words, but I can tell you I do not like house flies and I just said, oh, no, I cannot have a field of exchanges, but I think that it comes back to saying,
[SPEAKER_00]: that balance between having an earth burst what's good to something going to lay its egg on that is something going to eat the bugs that come to this plant and then also balancing our need for beauty and kind of adjusting our lens of what's a beautiful plant, you know, a native plant.
[SPEAKER_00]: To me, I think that there is no other mechanism that is as beautiful as a great species
[SPEAKER_00]: especially in winter.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're just not the same and help and help thrive.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know you can tell I have a friend of mine who has a package of Echin Asia, and it's my goal to have a huge patch of Echin Asia, because they just are absolutely beautiful.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know you can cut those flowers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Echin Asia you can cut the flowers.
[SPEAKER_00]: when they're first, when the petals are straight, and they're just about opening, that's when you want to cut those flowers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or you can leave them in when they go golden browned like in August, when they have this beautiful golden hue to them, you could use them in a beautiful fall of arrangement.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely stunning.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think that's the struggle, is that we are marketed as gardeners.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're constantly being marketed to as a consumer.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it's a girl and those seed catalogs like we talked about those seed catalogs come right in January and February when we're all, you know, no matter where we are in the United States, even if you're in a warm climate, you know, you're going to have a winter season and those seed catalogs come and barge you were very, very vulnerable and that's when you have to be tough.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why in July.
[SPEAKER_00]: And by best step, I could give anybody with their garden, in July, the height of your season, look at your garden and make your seed list.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of seeds you don't have yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you already have, then he is growing in your garden.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to buy any more than he thinks.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to learn how to harvest and save your own state.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to buy bean seeds anymore, or even tomato seeds.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to learn how to save your state.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's brilliant.
[SPEAKER_05]: All you gardeners out there, they're going, oh no, no, please no, that there are beautiful native hydrangeas you are.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're absolutely gorgeous.
[SPEAKER_05]: And do they have the giant colorful balls now, but they're gorgeous.
[SPEAKER_05]: So looking to that, and the other thing I wanted to say before forget is, you know, a friend Mary Reynolds, who has been on the good dirt podcast, and I shared with you the other day,
[SPEAKER_05]: We can no longer be gardeners in the traditional sense of creating beauty for ourselves, but we are guardians.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are guardians.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that just does tell so beautifully and with your earth first method, earth first philosophy and heart and intention.
[SPEAKER_05]: There's so many things in that.
[SPEAKER_05]: And.
[SPEAKER_05]: As we begin to think about wrapping up a little bit here, I want to assure our listening audience that we don't mean to kibash going flower shopping and their ways to do it and their ways to support your local nurseries and I want us to talk about that a little bit like you have found ways and I think, you know, one big way if you're kind of a loud mouth like me.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, you go into these places and you can say, gosh, I love it here.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's so beautiful.
[SPEAKER_05]: You all do such a good job.
[SPEAKER_05]: But I really, I really get discouraged at all the plastic.
[SPEAKER_05]: And you can start out by just being vocal about it and
[SPEAKER_05]: These people like us, you know, they love the earth too.
[SPEAKER_05]: And who knows, which one of these retailers will open their eyes to that and say, hmm, maybe there's something to your your point thinking creatively out of the box.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, you know, let's just not even be in the box people, but anyway, that that's kind of a long way off to think we're going to change the whole industry, but easy way to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think if it's a gardener guardian.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you go into your favorite nursery, you, well, first of all, you want to support independent nurseries that are growing from seed.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is always okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like going into a bakery and ask you if you're allergic to a certain ingredient, is it in there?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it from scratch?
[SPEAKER_00]: Where do you get from cherries or whatever?
[SPEAKER_00]: You can do that in a nursery.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if the person you're at the counter, wherever in the aisle, doesn't know, ask them to find somebody who does.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can ask, do you grow this from Steve, where's a cutting, or is it brought in as a plug?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that tells you a lot about that nursery.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing that you can ask is, can I bring back my plastic containers from my order here?
[SPEAKER_00]: right when you walk in the door.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, can I bring back my plastic pots for you to reuse?
[SPEAKER_00]: Will you reuse the plastic pots?
[SPEAKER_00]: One thing that you could do is you can have a paper bag and right as you're putting the pot away from your planting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right where those pots came from and put them right into your car.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there's there for the next time you visit that independent nursery.
[SPEAKER_00]: stored for nurseries, both for plants or suffering.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to get root ground plants and I think of the gardener.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's nothing more that can be plant that's like a snap dragon, it's for example.
[SPEAKER_00]: You plant a snap dragon or the dope fight weed and you pull it out of the pot and it's root-bound and you plant it anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: You rough it up hoping it's going to make it and then it dies.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I think it's gardener.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's only human to blame ourselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not our fault.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's that the plant has been a plug and ventrance plants at so many times and it's root found.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think as gardeners, we really can do a lot to know where our plants come from, where those seeds come from.
[SPEAKER_00]: Especially with native plants, you want local eco type.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's such good advice.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it applies to everything that we want to think about as consumers.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: cultivating a relationship with those that are providing what you want to buy.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's so powerful.
[SPEAKER_05]: And you know, they need us retailers, people selling things.
[SPEAKER_05]: They need us.
[SPEAKER_05]: We are the customers.
[SPEAKER_05]: And when we start asking for things politely, we don't have to be, you know, complaining about it.
[SPEAKER_05]: But I love the way you describe that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Just tell me about where you're getting your things.
[SPEAKER_05]: So,
[SPEAKER_05]: The ideal thing is finding someone that grows from theater, cutting right at their location.
[SPEAKER_05]: So the problem I'm assuming, and you can correct me from wrong.
[SPEAKER_05]: The plugs have, they've ordered them from somewhere else in the plugs that've been shipped and all of this.
[SPEAKER_05]: So they already in your mind is kind of nice.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, because you don't know how they've, you know, the, it's the product comes down the pike, you don't know how that's been treated before it kicked there, you know, and you want to really ask your nursery for people, you know, because you can't grow everything, it's just impossible from a nerd dream and search standpoint for my experience as a very small nursery, I can't grow everything, so if I couldn't in the past, I would get.
[SPEAKER_00]: from other local nurseries, small nurseries like mine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, my, like what my butterfly weed, my butterfly milk weed was decimated.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had people who were really waiting for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had to call another nursery to see if they had some.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was very transparent with my, my guests and said, you know, this plant was not grown here.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was grown at this nurse local nursery
[SPEAKER_00]: But it will be in plastic and I would wrap the plants when it happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrapped the plants up in craft paper or burlap.
[SPEAKER_00]: I take the plastic pot back to my friend who re-use in that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the gardener doesn't have to be responsible for the plant stick.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we can't grow up with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the larger nurseries, they're dealing in thousands of plants.
[SPEAKER_00]: all that came in or where the seed came from.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I, I do get this question a lot of, well, why do you tell people to grow their own seeds?
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't you want to sell the plant?
[SPEAKER_05]: No, yeah, it's not all about one transaction.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not about, okay, here, it doesn't pay.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know what my enough is financially.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know what enough is and my enough every year is just to be able to pay my taxes.
[SPEAKER_00]: to be responsible for keeping this in my family and being the plant wrangler and chief here until I can pay it for just somebody else.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I know my enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't need to make a million dollars.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you saw my old farmhouse, you would disagree with me, Mary.
[SPEAKER_00]: But so I want people to learn how to grow from speed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't, once you buy a mother plant, right, call a mother plant is a plant that is two years old that is begins to be established.
[SPEAKER_00]: You plant in your garden.
[SPEAKER_00]: She becomes established and she gives you the wonderful gift of seeds.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our job is to take those seeds and either not wait our gardens in the spring and let those seeds germinate in nature's time or bring those seeds in.
[SPEAKER_00]: grow them sustainably and get the plants back out into the garden and maybe share with some friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I advocate growing your own vegetables and flowers and roots.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's the worst that's going to happen?
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to go down the rabbit hole and you're never going to want to buy another plant.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a great thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it is a good thing because you have as a
[SPEAKER_00]: that you won't learn if you just go out and buy the plant like, you know, for example, this lovely mug.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I were to go out and make a mug versus buying the mug, I learned a lot more and I get the experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there is nothing like seeing a seed that you put on the soil germinate and grow into a beautiful plant.
[SPEAKER_00]: that supports pollinators, that feeds the birds in winter, that feeds your soil, because you're gonna leave it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're just, I don't do anything here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I live the latest gardener you've ever met in your life.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't clean my garden in spring at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Other than garlic mustard, that's what I'm doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm picking garlic mustard in spring.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything out is the one.
[SPEAKER_00]: But don't even mulch.
[SPEAKER_00]: I live the plant mulch themselves and the leaves mulch them and I advocate.
[SPEAKER_00]: growing your own from seed whenever you can, you know, yeah, it's so much easier and it's it's such a deeper connection.
[SPEAKER_00]: It really is a deeper connection, you know.
[SPEAKER_05]: That connection that you're talking about and that, you know, that lack of the need for the transaction, you're not trying to create a thing where people have to come by for a piece.
[SPEAKER_05]: this is the new paradigm.
[SPEAKER_05]: This is it.
[SPEAKER_05]: This is where it's about creating connection.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's about creating community.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's about experiencing the process and the miracle of the natural world.
[SPEAKER_05]: And this is the new paradigm, Melanie, and I thank you so much for representing it and for teaching us and to taking us here with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi, I'm learning and you know, I'm learning that it's
[SPEAKER_00]: they're just going to be plants that just don't make it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the best that we can do is to learn about the processes of deep knowing, growing from cuttings so that we can have that deeper connection, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And ditching the plastic, I think, is part of that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, so it tells about peat.
[SPEAKER_05]: Now I know that you personally avoid using peat on your farm.
[SPEAKER_05]: So can you tell our listeners why that is and just a little bit about it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, well, peat is a non-renewable resource.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's from peat bags that hold carbon.
[SPEAKER_00]: We know that it has carbon to question.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sub-questration is really important to our planet with climate change or global warming.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have found using peat just,
[SPEAKER_00]: doesn't make sense when everything is already in my compost.
[SPEAKER_00]: So here at the farm, I don't use bagged soils because when you put them in the plastic, it all the microbes, all the good things are killed.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no oxygen for them to live.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I use compost.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes I will make some coarse sand with it, depending on what I'm growing, but otherwise everything is compost.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't mix anything that is not natural.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know about you, Mary, but I don't find anything sterile in my garden.
[SPEAKER_05]: Even though the experts will tell you that your soil needs to be sterile, no, because then you'll have less weeds.
[SPEAKER_05]: Actually, what I do is like what I've done here, just for my microgreens this week, a growing microgreens in a window.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what I'm going to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to ask you all about that.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I, I filled the bowl full of my homemade pottings of oil.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I'm leaving it there for just a few days because I can see if the weeds are going to come up.
[SPEAKER_05]: I can see them and I can remove the weeds that are going to come up and then I'm going to plan on going to greens on top.
[SPEAKER_05]: So Pete, so when you go into gardening places, earth first gardeners will be very vigilant about, you know, looking and seeing if there's Pete in this potting soil with the Pete, one of the great ways to avoid the Pete is by using your native soil, using the soil that you already have, nurturing and tending to that soil.
[SPEAKER_00]: So here at the farm, I follow, what's it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Brianna broke from Blossom and Branch Farm.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought maybe I was, you know, just so far out of the box, I had no idea what was going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I was, I gave it a go.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I saw that Brianna was doing, and I, oh, okay, I'm not the only one.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel much better.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I do here at the farm is, a use my native soil as much as possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I first started Mary,
[SPEAKER_00]: When I first started, I did the cardboard method with the compost on top.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I noticed that gardens where I didn't, where all I did was weed, and then add a little bit of mixed in a little bit of compost, that those plants actually did better than the ones in the cardboard mulch thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I didn't know why.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I stopped using cardboard.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now what I do is when I start a new back, if I were going to start a brand new garden bed, but how big it is, I till up the soil with my garden home.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the whole that I use is specific, a very specific home from gardeners workshop.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we were in the barn, Mary, I would show you what the thing would like.
[SPEAKER_00]: The hoe has a head that is set of coming straight down.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like a traditional home, that way, it's actually angled.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this, oh, you actually see it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's right in front of you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you're literally scooting along and instead of the traditional home, when you dig up that deep bed, when you dig up your bed, that soil, you're pulling up the weed bed, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You're bringing all those weeds to the light to germinate.
[SPEAKER_00]: This whole only does the top inch of soil, where the seeds are, where they're germinating.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I put in my new bed, if it were lawn, I would bring out my pitchwork, loosen up the soil and then bring this hole through and get as many of the perennial weeds out as I could.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I mixed in a little bit of compost and I plant into it immediately, immediately.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes I will do a cover crop first for eight weeks,
[SPEAKER_00]: I could use the lower and then I plant clothes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I plant tight, yeah, where the 18 or three feet spacing?
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, no.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, because I don't want to weed.
[SPEAKER_00]: I plant eight inches apart literally eight inches apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then that's it for my garden pack.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no peat.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no amendment.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's building that natural biome that's already in your soil.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I know that on your farm there, you sell wool, seeding pots.
[SPEAKER_05]: So tell us a little more about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, the wool pots have changed everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: In between the soil blocking and the wool pot, they just made everything stole much easier from me.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I'm going for being someone who, and I tell everyone this, I could not grow my gold.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not kidding, Mary.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would sprinkle them in the seeds and nothing would in the soil and nothing would come up.
[SPEAKER_00]: I tried everything for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just someone who I'll grow anything, I'll try anything from seed or cutting.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's because of learning about what's in my soil, but also the soil blocking and the wool
[SPEAKER_00]: that they just, I felt both of those have helped me learn that seeds need warmth and they need water to germinate properly.
[SPEAKER_00]: They also need good soil.
[SPEAKER_00]: But with the watering before I would miss on top with my spray mistor and I would water.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would pour the water right on top of those seed trays.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, if the seed needs light, for example, it's not going to germinate.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has no light because it's now it's down in the soil or it's getting dampening off.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, if it does germinate, once your plant does germinate, you're basically flexing all the nutrients that are in the soil out of the plant.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the wool pot, water from the bottom, and what happens is the wool, this is 100% wool.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're a little tiny palette to make them with your soil instead of things like peat or coconut, par, or cocoa, the wool palettes, when they start to buy out a grade, they fertilize your soil, so you don't have to fertilize your plants.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wool pot is the same way, so what happens is the roots come through, just like with the soil blocking, the roots come through.
[SPEAKER_00]: They air proven themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: So instead of circling a plastic pot, the roots, ranch up and break off, they make more roots.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you give a stronger and healthier plant.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you don't have to throw it away from it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're absolutely wonderful.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're 100% wool.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wool that is used to make these is wool that would be burned or put into a landfill.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not used.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am trying to find something that was sustainable beyond the Berlin, stumbled on wool pot, they are made in Britain, and called them and said, how do I get these?
[SPEAKER_00]: I need these on my farm, I'm trying to ditch plastic, and I'm struggling with having young plants.
[SPEAKER_00]: growing in the Berlin.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I will tell you cutting up coffee bags.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no point.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of work.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the wool products are just so much easier to use.
[SPEAKER_00]: The germination rate is off the chart.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that is the best.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you sell those on your website.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're on my website because when I find a good thing, Mary, I love sharing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I absolutely love sharing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're painting with the soil blocks.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're just so much easier to plant.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to dig a big hole.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I plant these, I take my hand, coop up the dirt and plop them in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Scoop the dirt back.
[SPEAKER_00]: With the soil blocks, same thing, little tiny block.
[SPEAKER_00]: Scoop, put it back in, water it in, and that's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: So can they find the OS soil blocks on your website as well?
[SPEAKER_05]: No, but I have a YouTube about using soil blocks.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great.
[SPEAKER_05]: And where else can people go to find out more about you and see you later here.
[SPEAKER_00]: To see the farm reenaction on my YouTube channels.
[SPEAKER_00]: Probably the one of the best places that's youtube.com, backslash, lazy dirt, wildflower farm.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not really unfazed book in Instagram as much as I used to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm on Thubstack and so wild cardens.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's where I share the behind the scenes of growing the three-acre, four-acre Habitat cardens.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I went by lazydirtfowerfarm.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I sent out a weekly newsletter, which is really a love letter to other cardens about things that are happening
[SPEAKER_00]: ideas or asking for ideas.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you meet a gardener, there's always what I love to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tell me about your garden.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you got going, I learned so much from other people.
[SPEAKER_05]: So yeah, that's where to find me.
[SPEAKER_05]: And you also have an online garden group.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is new this year.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm calling it garden circles.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that came about because I was doing some online zoom workshops over the winter and how to sew.
[SPEAKER_00]: seeds winch or so seeds without plastic, without the jug been all there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the things that was asked every single session was, could we do this again?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it was, it's so informal.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I said, once a month, we'll do a garden circle.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the third Tuesdays at 6.30 on snowm will meet.
[SPEAKER_00]: And just do what's going on with other people's gardens and asked questions of other gardeners.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then in the spring through fall, it'll be on Zoom and here at the farm, so people can come to the farm that around.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, that's wonderful.
[SPEAKER_05]: Where can they find that link right outside or I have a calendar of events.
[SPEAKER_05]: Well.
[SPEAKER_05]: Melanie, we have so many things to talk about.
[SPEAKER_05]: And here we are, the season hasn't even been gone and I already have so many things to share with you.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I know we're we're going to be talking again probably a lot.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm really excited about it.
[SPEAKER_05]: So thanks so much for coming on with me today and talking all about gardens, especially your earth first gardening was I'm so inspired.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm so excited.
[SPEAKER_05]: You've really got me fired up for the season.
[SPEAKER_00]: So thank you for having me, Mary.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was
[SPEAKER_00]: to be here and just kidding with you and all your listeners.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you everyone so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: We will do it again.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you for tuning in, calling in, and spreading the good dirt.
[SPEAKER_03]: We love hearing from you.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can reach our listener voice mail at 4443-459-1950.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's 4443-459-1950.
[SPEAKER_03]: you can find this number in our show notes and in our Instagram profile.
[SPEAKER_03]: This show is produced by Lady Farmer, a slow living lifestyle community.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the original music is composed and performed by John Kingsley.
[SPEAKER_02]: For more from Lady Farmer, follow us on Instagram at We Are Lady Farmer.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's We Are Lady Farmer.
[SPEAKER_02]: Or join us online at www.ladyfarmer.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll see you next time on the Good Dirt.
[SPEAKER_02]: Goodbye!