Simplifying gardening and food forests, with David the Good

Continuing on the theme of last week’s episode in which I spoke with Jessica Robertson about community food forests, we’re going to go deeper into the practical knowledge and skills that anyone can develop to create their own plant nursery, propagate their favorite varieties, and get their own garden or food forest established quickly and cheaply.

Joining me for this dive into DIY plant breeding and propagation is David Goodman, better known to his fans as David the Good. David is a gardening author and teacher, focusing on simple methods to grow the most food for the least amount of work. His blog can be found at thesurvivalgardener.com, and he is on YouTube as @davidthegood.

In this discussion we’ll take a look at what concepts and realizations helped David to find success in his early gardening and growing endeavors which he uses to this day.
David is a big proponent of setting up your own plant nursery and we go into his advice for getting one set up cheaply so you can save money from the garden centers and maybe even make money with it as a side hustle.

We also explore the process of selecting varieties and species that thrive in your area and conditions, and the importance of building community through your planting and breeding efforts.

I myself am in the process of setting up my own nursery and agroforestry system and I can vouch for the importance of starting your own plants, not only to save money, but to learn a valuable skill and potentially even increase the quality of plants you have access to.

this is regenerative skills the podcast helping you to learn the skills and solutions to create an abundant and connected future I’m your host Oliver [Music] goet through their diverse range of Publications new Society Publishers books explore topics that are at the Forefront of creating positive change in our world from regenerative agriculture and permaculture to social justice and eco-conscious living their books cover a wide spectrum of subjects that Empower readers to lead more regenerative and fulfilling lives now whether you’re a seasoned environmentalist a curious beginner or someone simply seeking inspiration and guidance on your journey towards regenerative living new Society Publishers is here to support you every step of the way now exclusively for listeners of this podcast you can use the code skills 25 and receive a 25% discount on all ebooks at newo that’s all one word and lowercase skills2 on all ebooks so level up your knowledge today at New society.com hey there everybody and welcome back so continuing in the theme of last week’s episode in which I spoke with Jessica Robertson about Community Forest we’re going to go deeper into the Practical knowledge and the skills that anyone can develop to create their own plant nursery propagate their favorite varieties and get their own garden or Food Forest established quickly and cheaply joining me for this dive into DIY plant breeding and propagation is David Goodman better known to his fans as David the good David is a gardening author and teacher focusing on simple methods to grow the most food for the least amount of work his blog can be found at the survival gardner.com and he’s on YouTube as David the good in this discussion we’ll take a look at what concepts and realizations help David to find success in his early gardening and growing Endeavors which he still uses to this day David is a big proponent of setting up your own plant and we go into his advice for getting one set up cheaply so that you can save money from the garden centers and maybe even make some money with it as a side hustle we also explore the process of selecting varieties and species that thrive in your area and your conditions and the importance of building community Through Your planting and your breeding efforts now I myself am in the process of setting up my own nursery and Agro forestry system and I can vouch for the importance of starting your own plants not only to save money but also to learn a valuable skill and potentially even increase the quality of the plants that you have access to so I’ll hand things over now to David the good welcome David thanks so much for taking time to be on the show it’s great to connect with you after following a lot of your content and watching your YouTube channel for so long how you doing today I am doing great very glad to be here it’s it’s spring here like things are starting to wake up outside so everything is well with the world at this moment yeah it’s also the most exciting time of year for me too because because this is before I’ve made all of my mistakes later in the season that result in killing the things that are just starting to throut now there’s so much promise right now I haven’t screwed it up yet I’m still in the infatuation stage that’s right yes well look before we get into well all of these things that are sprouting and growing and how that relates to propagation and nurseries and all of that let’s start with your own background how did you start out in gardening and growing food what was your point of inspiration that led you to this point well I was I was not from a gardening family my parents did not garden and my grandparents did not really Garden I mean my grandma would start avocado pits on the window sill because she wanted an avocado tree in her backyard and she would grow them until they were two three feet tall and then she would plant them out in the yard and they would die and she did this multiple times because she didn’t actually water them when they got out in the yard she just stuck them in the backyard and they would die so it was not really very promising they had bought a house that had some fruit trees in it and over time the fruit trees mostly died bit by bit they gave up they had a lot of fruit when I was little and then when I got a little older they had less fruit and then they got sicker and then you know it just they just aged out and were not replaced my grandparents loved people my parents loved people and plants were just not really on the radar you know they always had people in and out we had great big family meals and stuff but where all those meals came from it was it was definitely not from the yard I had to go back all the way to my great-grandparents to have anybody in the family that were gardeners and they were in Upstate New York they came from a family that used to keep cows they had cows all over this area but it had kind of built up and there were houses now and cousins over here and uncles over here and people scattered around this Pond where they used to water all of their cows from and so at that that like when I when I actually got up to go and visit I was probably six or seven years old and my my great grandpa had a big quarter acre Garden in the backyard with this beautiful like red Brown Earth and just rows of potatoes and then he had rows of blackberries and raspberries and there were sunflowers that had self-seeded and it was just little beautiful little wooden house that he and my great grandma lived in and the big Garden out back and then my grandma would jar can a lot of the stuff and put it up on the shelves so they still it was kind of like going back in time to the 1940s to go to their their house and they were still living that way when I was little and I thought that was pretty awesome but I didn’t really start to grow anything of my own until I was about six I was in kindergarten and we had a the teacher brought us all these little cups of dirt and it was it was Bethany Christian School and so it was this nice little private school and nice teachers and stuff I did not fit in well at school at all ended up getting pulled from school later but this worked had little cups of dirt and she brought in a package of beans and we planted the beans in the cups and we took the cups home with us and then in a week you know she said that they would Sprout so they did they sprouted in a week and I was like it was like magic that little bean came up and and it separated in the little green I didn’t know they were called kotens back then but I do now and then the the leaves started coming out of the center and they grew and I went oh this is so cool so I got some pots of in whatever containers I could find and I filled them with sand from the backyard I lived down in South Florida so we had very Sandy it’s like beach sand in the backyard and I went through the pantry and my mom’s dried beans and I took all the dried beans that I could find and I planted them in little pots black beans and white beans and kidney beans and lima beans um my family didn’t have a lot of money so we we had a lot of beans beans and rice you know and so so I started all these little these little things the next year I was pulled out of school they were going to make me repeat kindergarten because I was disruptive said I was not I was not learning well and I was I was not emotionally ready for first grade or something like that so my mom’s like no I’m pulling him out because he’s bored and I really was I I just remember not enjoying it at all not getting along well with the other kids the the Hands-On sort of stuff like planting beans that was the coolest thing that ever happened the rest of it I didn’t really like that much my favorite time in school was when we would go out on the playground and I could go and catch toads and insects and that kind of thing when I was sitting in the classroom I just was not happy at all and I think my mom realized it so she pulled me out and homeschooled me so sometime around that time between kindergarten and and starting my first year of homeschool I told my dad I said Dad I really want to have a garden of my own and he said well all right I I I I’ll figure something out for you so he the uh railroad tracks were getting pulled up near us and they had these old railroad ties so he got some railroad ties and brought them home and he took this he took 8 foot by 8 foot section of the back grass in the backyard and he cut it out of course it’s just sand underneath so we went down to Home Depot and bought bags of potting soil or whatever he got and he put a little bit of black soil in a square for me and I used some of my allowance money and I bought seeds and I started planting back there and I had no idea what I was doing and all I did was kill things but you know six or seven years old I was I was making little gardens in the backyard and as I as I got older I always had a garden every year and I would stick different things back there and it expanded to fill about a quarter of my parents parents backyard and it was not a very big backyard uh we lived in Suburbia it was all you know it’s asphalt and tiny little houses right next to each other had the the chain link fence around the backyard you know it was very much in 1950s houses that were right on top of each other down in South Florida and most people around there had Palms that were ornamentals not Edibles and they had St Augustine grass and was kind of a lower workingclass neighborhood which is now super super expensive I can’t even afford to live in the neighborhood I grew up in but back then it was just they were cheap houses and small yards so that’s that’s how I got started and year after year I basically killed plants in that backyard until I started to have some successes I would get a few cucumbers here we get some lettuce there I I got different types of beans I would plant I somebody gave me yard long beans and I grew them on sticks in the backyard and those really did well for me two to three foot long beans and I found out later you know those were actually adapted to South Florida because they come from Southeast Asia hot humid lots of bugs so when they grew like crazy and they did well for me I started to learn a little bit you know about how having something adjusted to The Climate actually gives you a yield rather than you know all all the all the information I had was from Yankee gardeners even my my my great grandfather up in Upstate New York he told me he’s like oh just put some lime on the ground and plant these beet seeds and they ought to do well for you and none of that did well for me it was it was like beach sand and it didn’t hold any organic matter and I didn’t know it then but trying to annual Garden in South Florida you really have to think differently about it you have to you have to really pick different things because what South Florida wants to be is tropical rainfor if you go into an area where it’s just been overgrown it’s all these crazy ornamentals that have escaped you’ve got these giant Strangler figs and wild palm trees and Ferns and and half of the stuff is like what they sell for as house plants forther North you know all these creeping ivys and various colocasia and other stuff they just invade and they make a tropical rainforest but if you cut it all down you just have hot baking sand that kill tomato plants so that’s how I got started I just killed plants for a long long time until I started to not kill quite so many well I love that story because first of all I know tons of kids including myself who can relate to not sitting still in class just wanting to be out in nature catching frogs and just watching seeds grow and you know it’s a shame that you didn’t have more guidance and more information to maybe accelerate your learning curve when you were a kid but talk to me about the the journey the learning that did happen for you and how you started to have success in your garden Beyond when I was 15 or so my my grandma and grandpa they lived right down the road from us they were less than a mile from our house and they had a house that was on a canal and if you’re on a canal in South Florida there are land crabs that like to live near the water and they dig holes in your lawn and they make these little Burrows when we lived down in the Caribbean they were regularly caught in eaten but people didn’t really do that in South Florida that I know of so the land crabs would dig holes in my grandpop’s yard and he had a few coconut palms that were growing in the backyard and he would take the coconuts and he would put them down into the burrow of the crabs nest and kick them down in the ground and say there go build somewhere else so he would block up the the holes with coconuts and then after a while the Coconuts would often Sprout and he would pull them out and he’d throw them into the underneath his hedge and he would stick he would just it was this constant battle he had against the crabs because they were messing his grass up which is just funny because he was right there was a seaw wall and then there’s this little strip of grass behind his swimming pool they had a swimming pool which was awesome all my friends would like go to my grandparents house but they they would dig these holes the land crabs would come in and nature was trying to turn it back into the swamp that it had been you know in the 1950s or 40s before it had been drained in that area and they built all these mid-century modern little block houses and so I I thought it would be really cool to grow coconut palm there was a pile of sprouted nuts because he would both kick them into the holes and anytime they fell he would throw them back there because they didn’t really even harvest the Coconuts they just existed it was again like somebody had planted them previously and when they fell they were just a nuisance so they would just throw the nuts underneath the Hedge along the edge of the property so there was always a pile of sprouting coconuts there now when I look back at I’m like man if I had had a if I had had the fourthought to have a plant nursery back then I could have just stuck all those sprouting coconuts and pots and sold them by the side of the road but I didn’t later like I could have propagated those I could go back in time they’d be so big by now know so I took one of those I took one of those coconuts home with me and put it in a pot and I asked my dad I was like Dad can we plant this in the yard he’s like I don’t know where that would go in the yard I don’t know and I said well said somewhere in the backyard I mean is there any spot I don’t know so finally he gets around he’s like Dave I guess if you wanted to plant one you could plant it next to the shed back there but if it gets in the way or anything gets too big or causes problems we’ll have to cut it down I was like oh okay okay so I planted it and I kind of knew that once something existed my dad didn’t like to change it so once it was the way it was he would just get used to it being there so it was okay so I planted that coconut palm in the ground and then you know I got I got older and I I went to college and I moved out of the house moved to Tennessee for a while moved back to Florida you know got married had all these these different things along the way but all the time that coconut palm was just growing and growing and growing it was adapted to South Florida it likes the sandy soil and it was very happy to be there in the backyard so after about eight six to eight years or so it started making coconuts and now let’s see 28 years later or so you know it’s it’s it’s this gigantic tree it’s always got coconuts all over it’s way taller than the shed it’s it wasn’t a gigantic variety of coconut and it’s probably reached near its maximum height but it’s it’s probably 25 feet or so and it always have has coconuts on it meanwhile the little garden that I planted where I had my my lettu uses and my cucumbers and beans and everything that’s long gone you can’t even tell that there was ever a garden ever any kind of annuals back there but that coconut is still there it’s it’s like that’s a generational garden and that also you know that taught me something too and that is when you grow something perennial that belongs in the climate once you’ve got it you’ve got it generally it’s if it’s adapted and it likes it there it’s going to live a long time and the area where my garden used to be now they’ve my my mom still lives there and my sister put a plaza of stones over it and they use it for a little sitting area and and there’s no more Garden of course I gave him a hard time about it I like you guys should be planting food there instead of sitting around you know but it’s a really nice Plaza so they they have people over and sit there but just the just the learning that long-term perennials if I could go back in time to again to when I was young I would say plant more trees back there I didn’t get back there to plant trees again until I was in my 30s in my early 30s I told I told my dad I said dad I would love to be able to experiment in that backyard again and at this point I lived in North Florida so we were about five hours North where it freezes where you could grow peaches but you definitely can’t grow mangoes and I said I said I would love to have a more of a tropical research station and plant some trees down there I said that Coconut’s doing so well and Mom planted a little mango back there I said why don’t we plant more and he says H I don’t know you know i’ been trying to keep here take care of the grass back there my knees are not very good I said dad you want have to mow he’s like H yeah so we just put trees back there I said yeah we’ll plant a food Forest back there so starting in 2011 we started planting a food forest and we had the one mango that Mama planted and then we had the coconut palm which was way above it we started planting out from all of that and making islands and little Pathways and ground covers and you know now now looking at it 12 years 13 years after we started it the amount of food that comes out of that backyard for a tiny amount of work I mean if I had known back then again like if like I’m going to live into my 40s so I could have I could have planted I could have planted so much stuff back then that would be just massive right now you know the entire yard would probably be dark with fruit trees um but yeah it it’s like having parents to gave me a little bit of backyard to experiment in and then and then I actually continued experimenting coming back to the yard in my 30 and starting another Garden again it’s like it’s almost like the millennial thing you know you’re supposed to live in your parents house I didn’t live in my parents house but I still Garden in their backyard you know and there’s nothing wrong with that well so in this realization that you have to pick things that are adapted and do well in your climate already to avoid unnecessary work and then in your case really favoring perennials and going for things that you know they want to live there they don’t require a ton of extra maintenance is really what I’ve gotten to know your content and your messaging from and how has that informed the kind of myth busting that you often do about what is required to set up a garden or required to set up a food forest or an orchard that’s a good question I my wife has said that that my gift is sort of uh translator to normies so I’ll read a lot of of complicated and annoying agricultural texts I read I read the new books that come out but I also read old books I’ve read you know Roman books on agriculture and I’ve read annoying like just these scientific studies on propagation and and looked at very complicated systems I’ve interviewed people that have aquaponic systems I have I’ve I’ve gone and looked at and at farms up in the mountains of the Caribbean where the farmers are basically illiterate and are growing more food than the people with the aquaponic systems are growing down in the valley at their experimental station you know it’s like you’ve got the the guy who gets up in the morning and he smokes the marijuana and he takes his hoe and a bag of roots and he goes and he plants a hillside by the afternoon with just like the machete the hoe the roots and then he goes and he drinks rum and he’s got so much food coming out of that area because he’s actually he actually understands how the climate works and when to plant and what likes it there and and and I think we we have this huge tendency to make things overly complicated and I actually get very frustrated reading all the the scientific stuff because they’re very they’re often very disparaging of the results of backyard gardeners and are the knowledge of people that are not peer-reviewed scientist types right like if you ever read there’s a book called buffalo bird woman’s Garden where she recounts how her tribe up in believe it was in Minnesota how they would grow food before the white settlers came and everything changed and kind of fell apart for them and they got relocated and the level of agricultural information they had passed on generationally for a very long time was was excellent and it was not you know peer reviewed by people in offices it was reviewed by whether or not you starve to death and that’s there’s a huge motivator as nasam Talib he’s a writer he wrote the book Black Swan antifragile he’s a he’s a writer and philosopher and he talks about having skin in the game if you are just if you’re just able to go out and buy a solution to everything very easily you’ve got a garden hose you’ve got a tiller you’ve got a bag of fertilizer you’ve got fire ant pellets to kill the fire ants you know and then you’ve got a pellet smoker you’ve got all of these you got all of these things you just buy the solutions and then you tell people the best way to Garden you don’t really have skin in the game meaning are you going to lose any of your skin are you going to get hurt if this does not work out well for you no not really because you’ve got another job you’re not relying on it so a lot of a lot of my gardening goes back to what would people do before they had a garden hose before they had a bag of fertility they could bring they could go and buy down the street before they had complicated systems like like your your aquaponic systems if you couldn’t get PVC if you need PVC to Garden there’s there’s something wrong you really don’t need that yeah you a lot of these things are helpful or useful like it’s really useful to have a tractor or to have a neighbor that comes and tears out a whole area if a neighbor takes his tiller through and tills the whole front yard over for you and you immediately go and plant potatoes in it and then you keep it up and ho that grass down and keep it and then you build it over time there’s nothing wrong with that but the antifragile systems the skin in the game systems are is it is it going to be able to feed you if if everything shut down do you need it to be this complicated do you need to have a compost tumbler or can you pile organic matter on the ground do you have to have an exact 24:1 ratio of carbon to nitrogen or can you just throw things on the ground you know are are these things absolutely necessary no they’re not I have people like throwing conniptions total fits because I have a bottom on my compost pile I cast a slab and I put a I put a big three bin composting system in my backyard do you need that to compost no is it helpful when you’re running a plant nursery to be able to process a lot of waste coming out of like we’ll get peanut waste from a a peanut processing facility and we’ll get restaurant waste really sloppy stuff really kind of higher carbon stuff mix it together in layers make these gigantic Mounds they’re like 7 Foot by 7even foot Bay it’s really really useful but somebody goes why would you you have a bottom on that compost pile of worms won’t get in it’s like no worms can crawl the walls if they want to I had a worm bin indoors and I put a half a watermelon in it and it got too Swampy the worms climb the walls of my house I’ve seen this it’s crazy they can get into anything is it is it really necessary no but it’s very it’s very helpful so you’re always kind of balancing these how practical is it it may become practical if you are going to turn it with a tractor bucket to have a bottom on it it’s also very practical if you’re trying to compost around trees because if you have a tree when I was down in the I was down in the tropics I made a compost pile underneath the tree and the tree roots would just fill it up so I took some old galvanized sheeting and I threw it on the ground and then I made my compost pile on top of it and the tree roots didn’t get into it and the tree roots grow very fast in the tropics nothing ever stops growing in the tropics yeah if you you know if you stick a stick in the ground it grows like your broom will grow so it’s crazy so so you know getting hung up on the the complex systems is there’s a lot of different ways to do it so the idea is basically you’re going to take you’re going to take a bunch of complicated information and you’re going to strip out what you don’t need and use what you can so trying to make blanket statements like race beds race beds are the only way to Garden or the best way to Garden or I never Hill or you know we we’re only going to plant perennials I I only think food forests are the way to go all these things are they’re very location dependent it’s like when when when God dropped man on the earth he gave it’s sort of a Choose Your Own Adventure World where you can do something like you can plant a pear seed and you can get a tree that is 60 foot tall but if the tree was about 10 feet tall and you cut it in half and then when the new branches came you could bend it sideways and you could grow it along a wire or you could take three pair of trees and plant them in the same hole or you could graft different ones on there or you could breed pairs together it’s like there were all these little hidden unlockable things that were left for us to find you know somebody starts digging yeah exactly so you start digging and you find some sort of uh shiny something in the side of the mountain and you realize you can hammer it out really well it’s like oh that’s gold let’s call that gold that’s really useful so you start finding there’s there’s stuff buried beneath our feet that we can use we people have this idea that you know the soil is just this thing that holds the plant roots but the more they study the soil the more they realize that it’s so infinitely complex you can’t even get to the bottom of it the the amount of life that’s in it they can’t even identify most of the organisms that are living in the soil we don’t know what they do the idea of genetics being just purely like well if you have this and you have this then you’re going to get this does it really work that way there’s not only genetics they they thought that there was a bunch of junk DNA left From Evolution but the more that they’re finding they’re like that isn’t even junk that’s more storage and things get switched on and off depending on your environment the granddaughter may be different because the grandmother ate this particular food I mean it’s like there’s so many layers of complexity what you have to do is you have to start stuff in your backyard and say did this work for me in my backyard and your gardening book kind of gives you a head start like well you got to water things you got to feed things you know you know sometimes and this that the other thing but it’s not the full story really you get you get much more from throwing a bunch of genetics at the backyard and trying five or 10 different methods and then sorting out which methods work well in your climate and for your situation so I’m always telling people you know take take your backyard and experiment with it you don’t have to go to peerreview journals or whatever just does it work if you want to know which tomato variety grows in your backyard go buy 10 packets of tomato seeds plant them all don’t take good care of them the ones that survive and give you tomatoes are the variety that you should save seeds from yeah so you’ve just done like you know $12 of tomato seeds have just taught you which tomato variety likes your yard another way you can you know another cheat code is to go find any old gardeners that are in your neighborhood and ask them what are the five easiest things that you grow around here or what what works well for you they’ll be like oh I’ve grown this type for years and years years and it’s always really easy then grow that what was commercially grown in your area if there was something that was grown in your area commercially before it turned into a city you know that probably grows well because Farmers had skin in the game if they did not make money off of what they were growing they would not grow it if they went bankrupt they moved and that industry disappeared sometimes you’ll have an industry that Booms for five or 10 years and then there’s a big freeze and it dies out and the town might be called you know Citrus Georgia and it was the Citrus capital of Georgia for about five years and then it’s gone because they discover you know in the great freeze of 1847 that that didn’t work anymore yeah so you could kind of like somebody’s probably made the mistake before in your area and that’s your cheat code but otherwise you just experiment all you can and then whichever survives that’s what you’re supposed to grow yeah just let it grow and what I really like the way that you painted a picture of the infinite complexity as well as optionality when it comes to growing and managing a landscape these are living Dynamic systems with billions of years of genetic information adaptation and possibilities locked within this you know tiny little form of life in a seed or in a cutting and we don’t have to know all of the mechanics and the science of how it works to be able to interact with it as stewards as propagators as you know gardeners for lack of a better term and rather than trying to micromanage things there are these shortcuts there’s are there are these patterns that we can tap into in order to be effective and reach our goals when we’re growing or rest stewarding a space and so what are some of the most tried and true I guess patterns or rules of thumb or cheats that you have found that will get you started on this road of experimentation and then figuring out the details of what works in your specific area about it would have been about the early about 2010 or so we bought a piece of property in north central FL Florida it was a different climate from where I grew up I’d gardened in Tennessee for a few years there on a job about six years in Tennessee and then I had done most of my early gardening in South Florida so now I’m at this place that’s not quite tropical and it’s not quite temperate the summer would get up to 100 Dees the winter we Rec Ed an overnight low of 12 degrees that’s a horrible swing that just to say that’s exactly the swing of temperatures that we from winter to summer I feel your it’s terrible right so you’re it’s it’s brutal it’s abusive weather so I was trying to figure out what really grew there and I planted a bunch of mango seedlings and they all died I planted Jackfruit seedlings they actually came back two or three years in a row before they died but I I I was like wow we’re only about 10 frost days from being able to grow papaya and ke limes and maybe even coconuts up here but when it frosted there it really it would swing So immoderately Below you know it would be 70s 80s and then you get an overnight low at 18 and then by mid morning it’s 40 but that was enough to kill all those papayas that you’ve been growing for a year yeah my previous weekend that’s exactly what happened that’s terrible right I mean and you you just when things start to look like they’re swinging up and then you get another like one last hit of frost and just blows all the blooms off of everything y yeah so I’ve got the pictures of all of the new blossoms from many of the fruit trees in the area covered in snow oh that’s awful yeah it’s heartbreaking yeah we had that last year last year here I’m in lower Alabama now just just north of the Florida border and we had a we had weather in December that was in TW the like 80s 80s everything’s nice and friendly and then it dropped down to 16 and it had two days where it never Rose above freezing and but after being in the 80s you know that’s just ridiculous and then you get with in the spring everything warmed up and the trees that hadn’t been killed or damaged too badly by that it warmed up in March near the end of March we got an overnight low in the mid 20s after it had been warm for an entire month every tree had bloomed everything had fruit on it it had fresh new green growth shooting out everywhere and then this cold just took it all off I had a mulberry tree that was almost 10 feet tall and it froze down to about a foot and a half you know so when I was in North Central Florida I was really getting serious about my garden because we had I had started a business the business hadn’t done that great I did not have that much money I did I did well for one year and then I did really bad the next year and then I like slightly recovered and we were able to buy a closure house because the housing market just absolutely cratered Central Florida these houses had been running you know in the 300,000 range and they went all the way down to like 75 to 100,000 in the course of two years I mean and that’s where we bought it we bought it at the bottom now of course if I had kept it I would be rich now but I sold it so that’s the way it always goes you know you buy and I buy it only but you know whatever so God doesn’t want me to Rich he wants me to be humble I think so anyhow we we were looking at this climate I’m going okay so it h it sees frosts but it also has really brutal War warm hot summers and I had been reading some of these permaculture guys Toby hemway had read got Garden recently we had moved and I had watched Jeff lon’s establishing a food Forest the permaculture way you know I’m like compost and I’m like wow I love this like this this food Forest idea I said this I’m going to plant my food forest and I threw a bunch of peaches in the front yard um couple peaches couple plums few Citrus and just just started sticking things out and seeing what would happen and they didn’t really do all that hot to begin with they they didn’t grow that much it was too hot or it was too dry or or something or I didn’t I didn’t care for them enough the soil was not very good and I started looking at what is our climate we we share some in common with the Mediterranean except we get a little bit too much rain but crops that grow in the Mediterranean probably some of them would do pretty well in Central Florida so we found we’ve got some figs and we got some pomegranates pomegranates did not like it that much there are some varieties that do okay they tend to make really ugly fruit in Central Florida but they’re still good it’s just they get spots all over them because it’s so humid you don’t get those beautiful red pomegranates you get things that look gross with little like brown spots all over them the inside’s still fine usually so and I I was like okay so that kind of we’re that zone 8 nine around the world and then I was I started getting into Central American vegetables Malanga cassava then I it’s like some Southeast Asian stuff you know okanawa spinach and Longevity spinach and kuk some of the stuff that like the Heat and I was trying to figure out like how far up would the tropical stuff push and and how far down would the temperate stuff come you know like if something said it was eight or warmer sometimes you know like gooseberries gooseberries technically are supposed to grow in zone eight but it would get so hot in the summer that the bushes would just burn and die like they just gave up and other things that were supposed to be Zone 10 if I planted them underneath a fruit tree they would live like a friend of mine had had planted a bunch of uh pineapples in his greenhouse and he got tired of getting spiked by the pineapples every time he went past them he says these are really annoying in the greenhouse cuz they kept cutting him every time he was going and harvesting there’s pineapples everywhere and they Clump like they make babies along the sides and they keep spreading so he took a ton of them out and he threw them out of the greenhouse at the base of a live oak two years later they were still alive they rooted into the ground at the base of the Live Oak and they continued to grow even though they were outside of the range of pineapple and the bulletins on growing pineapple say pineapple is a full sun plant but they were making pineapples for him in the shade in an area where it occasionally got down into the teens because of the thermal mass of that giant Oak trunk and the canopy making a microclimate so he learned that it would work so we were trying to push up some stuff from further south and bring some stuff down from up North and we looked around the globe well I mean some of our audience across the across the flatness of the earth before you get to the ice shelf so so you know we looked for at similar climates and said what plants grow there and we brought them and we tested them you know hikima and Mexican tree spinach and calabaza squash and all kinds of different things and we stuck them all over the yard and basically whatever really took off we would grow more of and the stuff that was annoying and would fail for a couple of years in a row we would get rid of like you’re saying there’s variability year you don’t exactly know what you’re going to learn but you can kind of find Trends yeah like this one did really well this year and it did really well the next year and we had different conditions in both years I think this is probably pretty good here so a couple of years pretty much tells you okay that’s that’s good so we found that African yams did way better for us than white potatoes did the white potatoes tended to get eaten by fire ants and it got pretty hot pretty fast so you couldn’t grow long season potatoes that make a ton of potatoes you had to grow the the fast determinate types you know 90day potatoes 80-day potatoes and but our our African yams would grow all the way through the summer and they have a Vining they’re all these decoria species that climb up on trees they’re actually one of one of the varieties was on the invasive species list it grew so well and if it’s on the invasive species list and it’s edible that means that it’s suited to your climate probably more than suited to your climate so we ended up kind of retooling and instead of planting the stuff necessarily recommended by gardening books if you get a book on Florida gardening generally the Florida gardening books are all about how you can try to keep Yankee crops on life support it’s not about how you can grow plants from Puerto Rico that would actually love it it’s about how can you grow The Familiar crops of Europe in this climate like how early do you have to plant your sweet corn maybe you’re just not supposed to grow that much sweet corn or maybe it’s too much trouble you know or maybe your summer squash getting drilled by Vine borers means you should be growing a cuer mashada that’s more adapted to the tropics and just pick the fruit when they’re young or grow a linary Cera like any of the bottle gourd family the kakua squash they grow like weeds they’re like gigantic I won’t say the zword because it’s a familyfriendly channel but they’re like a giant cuer peepo that’s green but you can cut them in pieces you know sorry I can’t understand that stuff mom made me eat it when I was a kid I I refused to say it on my channel I will not answer questions regarded that that’s not aort of the gardening world don’t say the name don’t say summon it if you turn if you look in the mirror and you say it three times yeah so so you know I started planning this stuff and I didn’t really take that great a care of all of it I wanted to see how it would do and I’m I’m kind of lazy in my gardening sometimes I I don’t don’t necessarily go out to the Garden every day and pull weeds and that also kind of lets you know you know genetically what is supposed to be in your area if you don’t take great care of it and still makes you food that that’s my kind of crop and that also you know fits with most people’s actual lives I mean most people are not farming for a living or farming for their their food full-time backyard gardeners want to get some food out of there and people that are more prepper survival oriented they want to make sure that they have calories in the ground but generally you know the the vegetables that are being grown won’t even really fill you up you know you get a canister of seeds and it’s from this survival seed bank and you keep it underneath your your mattress you know with your beans and your block of gold and your Ron Paul Revolution sign you know all that right so you’ve got all this this this thing like this this Talisman right here is going to save me if the grid col is I’m going to pop this thing open and I’m going to grow Cherokee purples black seated Simpson golden wax bean it’s like yeah no if you don’t know what you’re doing ahead of time it’s not GNA it’s you’re not going to have much food and also lettuce is not going to fill you up lettuce and greens forget that like R you you need meat and potatoes is what you need if you’re going to stay full yeah carbohydrates and fats and proteins yeah right so first of all we figured out what plants liked our climate by just planting tons of stuff and the stuff that didn’t die and the stuff that thrived we kept growing it this turned into the book totally crazy easy Florida gardening because after about five years of doing this I was like wow it’s actually really easy to grow food now we can grow a th000 pounds of food in the backyard that was kind of the goal can we grow a thousand pounds of food in the backyard without working that hard at it and we figured it out meanwhile we had the Food Forest going around the edges so over time that was maturing and bringing in more and more food every year and all kinds of surprises every time we had something that we found that looked interesting we would tuck it into a gap and if it lived it lived and if it died it died but we found out that if we replace our white potatoes with manga with which is taro if you’re not familiar with manga Taro yeah we grew Malanga when I when I had the farm in Guatemala that was one of our main crops you know it’s yeah so as long as you got a wet spot or somewhat moist spot basically your carbohydrate yeah yeah I mean they’re invasive in parts of Florida too there’s areas where you’re past like all these elephant of ornamentals yeah they like the big leaves that look like elephant ears and the different colors that can come from them I mean that’s some really high quality stars there it’s very very good and it and when you cook it it’s it’s delicious it’s almost like dumplings well you definitely have to cook it right it’s it’s kind of poisonous if you don’t oh yeah it’ll tear you up if you don’t cook it yeah yeah I knew knew somebody that had some growing in their yard and and it didn’t work out well for he said he said the people that were here before said you could eat these elephan ear so I think she like stir fried them or something and he almost went to the hospital with his throat swelling up all those graffed crystals that’s not cool yeah make sure you know what you’re consuming and and growing when you’re experimenting with new things in your area that’s it’s also otherwise you’re going to find out that you were the that wasn’t adapted yeah exactly you just yeah I didn’t survive I was not adapted to this season I learned something this year I died well so look one of the things that I was noticing in this list of things that has worked out for you and some of the principles that you could apply is what was missing from that which is not a lot of information on how to manage the fertility of your soil not a whole lot of information on the amount of watering that different plants needs and this is really something that I’ve been exploring on the podcast for a while now through interviews with people like Joseph loft house and Shane Simonson I know you did an interview with for going to seed podcast is that sometimes your terrible conditions are the perfect growing environment for something that you hadn’t considered and much like you were saying a second ago is like we are very limited from this kind of common global ized diet based mostly on northern European or Mediterranean crops which should not be applied everywhere do not do well in let’s say most of the world’s terrestrial surface and shouldn’t be the base of the diet for everybody across the world and when you start to open up to what naturally grows in certain areas what were the traditional diets of different places you don’t need to go into creating this perfect chocolate cake crumbly High organic matter soil with perfect irrigation needs what you open up is all of the possibilities with exactly the unique difficulties of your area and what the potential of those are so beyond this you know minimal effort looking to see what grows well let’s go into one other side of this which you alluded to earlier which is saving seed and how you can start to adapt the things that maybe aren’t great in the beginning or even improve the ones that are doing decently when you get started talk about that process of saving seed breeding land race gardening which you also are big into yes and you mentioned Joseph L house he was very very influential I I didn’t read him until two years ago I got a copy of his book somebody said you got to read Joseph loft house I read his book I was like this guy is my brother from a different mother and I ended up getting I I mentioned him in one of my one of my videos how much I had enjoyed his book and I plugged it I’m like get this book this is fantastic it’ll it it’s it’s very very helpful because it it opened just a I was already kind of on the edge but then mixing all the heirlooms together and throwing them at the ground and then seeing which one survive I was like yeah yeah he’s done it he’s gone much further into the seed saving angle of it whereas I was just looking more at species and and and he’s further into like tweaking the species to actually fit so backing up a little bit to to soil and ecosystem first somebody wrote me about a year ago and said we bought this piece of land it’s down in the Florida Panhandle what do we need to do to make it into like we want to build a food forest and we want to grow this and we want to grow that and we and I said I said where are you located I was like there I we in such and such I said I think that’s mostly pin land and I said do you have any pictures so they sent me some pictures and I got the address and I did a Google Street View and I drove past their house on Google street view my kids think it’s hilarious you dropped the little man from the air and he just falls on the ground and then you’re in a neighborhood you know what a tool and it’s really handy so I’m looking along the sides of the road and I see there’s grass along the sides of the road through that along the highway where this is located the grass has patches of sand showing through it everywhere like eroded patches of sand the grass looks horrible there’s a neighbor and their yard is they’ve got a mow yard with a couple of trees in it and but it’s it’s not really a yard it’s like patchy sand weeds it’s horrible and I wrote them back and I said okay this soil is not suitable for most agriculture I said everything you do up here is going to be completely uphill because this is a very specific ecosystem this is pin land I said your undergrowth is probably gallberry I said you may have a few wild blueberries you may have a lot of wild blueberries depending depending on if they have worked their way in there or not I said you probably got yaon Holly I said this is fast draining horribly acid uh and and I said it’s a reason that they they Farm Pines here I said it’s torically this was not a great place for farming if it if it liked acid you could do it and you could run land race varieties of cattle through there that would work you could run goats through there you could lime the area real real good and make some pasture out of it and then the cows you know regeneratively graze it up into something I said but really as soon as you cut the trees down I said if you look at the neighbors yards I said it’s patchy sand and grass I said the drainage and the acidity I said you’re just going to be fighting geology the entire time I said so you might have to rethink what you’re growing like they’re want they’re like we want to grow apples and we want to grow plums and we it’s like if you dug those into the ground there they would stay at the same size for the next five years if they lived and then they would die like they they are just not going to like it there it’s very sad but this is what you got if you were going to plant a blueberry farm you might do all right but you’re going to have to think about that too cuz if you buy the homestead you’re buying the soil and there’s you know there’s there’s kind of the elain Ingram camp where like any soil in the world can definitely be good and you know it’s just a matter of having the right microlife in the soil and there’s some truth to that I’m not completely and utterly convinced that any soil is going to work that way but you can definitely make it better but you’re starting with something that is really difficult so yes you’re like I there’s a guy calls himself Florida bullfrog he’s on YouTube and I have been working with him on a book on land race chickens he has land raced chickens he has that piece of that really awful scrub he said it’s so hard to Garden there that he just switched to having chickens be his main source of food and he eats Wild Greens and he grows small patches of garden that he has the chickens work and turn the soil and manure it and then he gets enough fertility to grow some crops but just small patches of vegetables but he eats a lot of chicken and eats a lot of eggs and he said historically that’s what his ancestors did they actually released the chickens into the woods and the ones that lived lived and kept breeding and then he said we had no idea how many chickens we had the uncles would have like they were into fighting and everything like way back when he was a kid and he said so they had all these wild Scrappy game birds that could fight off the foxes and all of the other things that are all hungry because there’s nothing to eat in those pine lands you know so so he had like basically chickens that were living in trees around their old Florida Cracker house and they would go out there and they would shoot a couple when they wanted a chicken dinner and they would they would tack up boxes on the trunks of trees and the birds would jump up in there and lay their eggs because it was a little dark spot with a little hay in it and he said that was mostly what they did to eat off of you and you’ll find like in that area people hunted and they ate meat and they ate some berries and stuff but it was not like this was not land that was beautiful rows of cabbages and corn and that kind of stuff it’s poor poor soil so you have to have animals that are actually adapted to live on the animals eat the limited undergrowth and then people would eat the animals that’s historically how they were living so you know if you’re starting with something like that I’m going back to land racing yes do what you can to improve the soil sum and then throw as many varieties as possible at it and see which lives he did it with chickens but you might try that with pumpkin varieties I took about 15 different varieties of ker mashada which is the that’s the species that is butternut which is a southern the southerners love to eat their butternut squash and seminol pumpkin which goes to the it’s named after the seminol Indian tribe but it actually predates them the little tough pumpkin that stores for as long as a year and it Roots very heavily along each node so the bug pressure if it kills one part of it the other part of it keeps growing and it manages to grow through the Heat and produce whereas a lot of Northern pumpkins they get destroyed by bugs and they’re gone I’ve tried to grow hubard squash multiple times here always gets killed on me it’s destroyed in a few months it’s all gone and I rarely get a squash seminal pumpkins I get a lot so I planted a whole bunch of different varieties the ones that live you save seeds from particularly the ones that just show up and self seed and they grow themselves like if you feed some pumpkins to your pigs and then you move your pigs that area there the pumpkins will grow out of it and you’ll get tons of pumpkins sometimes if you put them directly in the sand you don’t get that so there may be some Synergy going on there but what Jo Joseph Loft House does in his area of Utah you know he takes tills the weeds under and plants crops and he barely takes care of them other than irrigating the ones that survive and make fruit he replants the seeds from those and after and he continually adds more genetics and after a few years of this he’s got stuff that is productive even on his poor soil so there’s definitely a lot of potential there and takes take take what survives when I was in Indonesia I went and I was Consulting with a Ministry over there that was there was an Indonesian guy who was really good at installing these well systems and ram pumps so he was putting water into Villages that were you know 2 miles from a good clean water source so they asked after they had gotten some of these wells in they said would you come here and help us figure out how to grow some stuff and I said well I said I’m not that familiar with the Indonesian climate or what their their history of Agriculture is or that sort of thing but I said but I’ll look around I’ll help if I can I said I can’t I can’t claim I’m going to be more expert than the farmers that are already there but there was a school and they they each had garden plots and the kids paid a few dollars a month to be in this school and they they learned English they learned they actually they actually it was a very nicely done school but they didn’t have power they didn’t have much running water they had a well you know and they the kids had Garden patches and they would grow produce in the garden patches they would get up really early before their classes and they would grow their Gardens and they would sell the produce and give some of it to their families that lived in the village that was a couple of miles away out in that field he was asking like what type of what type of this would you grow what type of this would you grow and he says what type of tomatoes would you grow well I was out in the field and they had they had tilt this area under and killed off all the most of the grass and stuff and they had been making these little garden beds I I came across a tomato plant that had tomatoes all over it and it was this shrubby tough looking little tomato and this is a pretty dry area this is in teamour and this tomato was sprawling along the ground and I said did you plant that tomato I it’s just like out in the middle of the field they were like we’re going to expand over here and I said did you plant this tomato and he says no no it just grew here after we tilled it and I said that’s your tomato right there I said I said when those fruit ripen up if they are any good I said save all of the seeds from them and replant that tomato I said you didn’t do any work for this you didn’t irrigate it I said forget buying tomato seeds or named varieties from the city I said this right there is yours I said name it after your parents it was his parents field that they had donated to the school to use and it was one of the teachers and he said my parents said we could use this field I said name it after your parents I said or or whatever I said this is your variety and I said share seeds with everybody that’s around here I said because this one I said it’s already Nature has already selected one out for you who knows where it came from no idea maybe they grew maybe there’s a tomato field there some years ago or something or maybe somebody was was eating a salad out there I have no idea but that variety right there that’s the one you want and so you that that kind of looking for what’s already there so I I told this couple that had this poor soil I said what you’re going to want to do because they said we’re going to clear this whole area I said be careful before you clear it I said clearing you know clearing all those Pines and everything out of there I said I understand you’ve got to get space for your house and that sort of thing I said but you may have persimmons there I said you may have wild blueberries there I said’ if you’re really lucky you might have some paaw I said you might have some edible cactus I said you might have some you know some wild May Pops I said you want to keep some of those yaon holes that’s one of our native North American sources of caffeine I said there may be something in this ecosystem that you can already leave to start building your food Forest around I once looked at a a piece of property for a prepper guy in Central Florida and he had really sandy poor soil very scrubby it was that yellowy white sand I stepped over two rattlesnakes two piggy rattlesnakes was when I was out there we spotted I mean it was just like this is not a friendly environment there’s like a patch of weeds and then sand and then another patch of weeds and then sand and I noticed that there was a variety of mayw growing all over the place and this Mayha it makes these little kind of astringent fruits that you can make jams out of and I I saidwell okay I said there’s a there’s a fruit I said ‘ don’t cut all those things down I said there’s a little bit of food at least you’re going to feed the animals with it you can make some jam out of it said but also I said I think I remember Mayha is compatible as a root stock for pears I said I’m going to come back and bring some pear cion wood when it’s the right time of year and so what I did was I I came back with pearwood and I grafted it onto some of the mayw that are already growing there they’re already adapted to the really hard soil if if I took a pear grafted onto the normal pear root stocks and planted it out there it would probably hate it and it would probably die unless he took really good care of it piled up the mulch got his worms and his mushroom compost or whatever he was going to do some Boutique you know Kel meal or whatever I said I said we’ll just graft onto it so we grafted onto the mayos and the parion actually took and started growing out of the Maya so if you have your wild pons I said if you find any wild pons out there then you can go take your Japanese pons graft them onto those existing ones and get them to grow in our yard we have this invasive Bradford Pear that’s popped up all over the place it’s thorny it makes a little hard fruit that’s worthless I mean maybe some of the birds eat it but they don’t seem to eat much of it because they hang on it all winter and then they drop on the ground and they start more it was originally an ornamental tree that escaped and has gotten uglier over time as it’s gotten more wild so a friend of mine started grafting onto his and he grafted cultivated pairs onto it so last year year we grafted onto the ones that are growing in our backyard now we’ve got great big like eight foot of growth from the last year because it was already an established Scrappy weedy root stock we put something cultivated on top of it and grew it so sometimes it’s a matter of looking and seeing what resources are already there what wants to grow in your soil that’s already there what plants are adapted to it and if you don’t really have much growing there to begin with take a whole ton of genetics and throw it at it and the stuff that lives is supposed to be there if it gets all kinds of pest problems and they die on you they weren’t supposed to live there some it’s like I’m not going to bother spraying everything I’m G to plant a whole ton of stuff together let it all fight whatever lives that’s that’s what I want now if I was starving and I really really had to have food I would try to improve the soil for the highest fertility possible in the first year so your land racing thing is good for your long-term experimentation but like say you know we’ve got covid 20 comes along and like oh no you know we’ve got this one’s even worse in that case you’re going to save your own manure and urine you’re going to go out to the woods and sift compost from underneath the trees and mix it into your beds you’re going to get the highest fertility possible you’re going to grow all of your calorie crops first don’t start with the lettuce and the tomatoes forget that you want potatoes or if you’re more tropical you want cassava and Taro and yams and sweet potatoes you know grow grain corn forget sweet corn grow grain corn because you can store it you can eat it it’s high calories it fills you up get some chickens you know that kind of thing but you’re going to grow as many calories as possible Right on the front end if it fills you up if you can eat a salad and you’re still hungry that’s not what you want that’s not what you want that may be nice but that is not going to keep you fed the idea is to keep your stomach full so you can keep moving you can take care of your family and you can keep planting and farming because you’re going to jump into it so you you build the fertility as high as possible and plant as many calories as possible but that’s just one of the tools you use you know it’s like don’t get don’t get hung up on the systems I only do like I said I only do rose beds I only do Food Forest I do what else depending on the situation you’re going to switch and you’re going to be just as adaptable as your plans yeah you know if you’re if you’re doing something and it doesn’t work change yeah it’s such I mean the stories in there Illustrated so many of the things that I would have otherwise gone in and individual questions and I I think that the principles here just the basics of growing what grows well already where you are no matter how challenging it is no matter what the individual shortcomings of the soil or the temperatures or the frost dates or whatever it is grow what grows like a weed where you are and then build on from there you can you know over time start to adapt the seeds through saving you can start to bring in different species and whatnot but if you started that as a base it takes away maybe 80 % of the failures and the challenges that people have in the beginning and honestly I think it’s one of the most overlooked Solutions in the conversation around regenerative agriculture which is a big point of conversation in in my day job is I was like okay how do we get to lower use of fertilizer and less pesticides and how do we wean ourselves off of herbicides to control the weeds it’s like well if you try and grow something that is going to struggle under your conditions regardless just because there’s an established market for it or because your Machinery can do it efficiently you are always going to struggle you’re always going to need inputs and expenses that are going to cut into your profits and the viability of your business I think honestly if more places and more people would just embrace the things that did well there as well as what their cultures and their their Cuisines are based off of instead of trying to grow the uh the grocery aisle for your Italian cooking kink in in the tropics you would probably have a lot more success and something to build on as well as something unique to offer that would make it fun to travel again instead of getting the same mey flavorless tomato in every single grocery store from Manila to to Berlin and so that’s right that’s exactly right yeah and so I guess before we wrap it up today can you tell our listeners first of all maybe just a couple of small points of advice to get them started in getting those successes and then where they can find out more through the many resources that you have available yeah first of all find those older gardeners in your neighborhood if you can find anybody that’s already growing you know there’s an old lady down the road that always seems to have a lot of tomatoes that that knowledge has been lost unfortunately you know as we move through the Industrial Revolution and particularly when when women enter the workplace in in droves in the 60s and 70s a lot of the information was being passed on generation Ally like my great grandmother knew all about canning she knew all about sewing she knew all these home skills that had been traditionally preserved generation to generation when the company started breaking up the family and and putting everybody plugging everybody into office jobs a lot of that traditional information was lost we lost a piece of our Our Heritage so if you could find anybody that still has any of the heritage of your area if you go to like historic reenactment where people are making sugar cane syrup the way they used to or doing you know beekeeping or or any of that kind of information well what did they used to do what did they used to do before you could buy a solution don’t think the easiest thing is buy a solution somebody came over to my house the other day and borrowed one of my broad forks I told her I said you can borrow this broad fork and and and she says oh I only have a little patch I’m going to borrow the broad Fork so she borrowed the broad Fork she came back you know week or two later and she brought it back to me and she said it was so hard to use my husband just went out and bought a tiller for me I said oh really I said I said did you use one before she’s like no I just kept trying to jam it into the ground it doesn’t want to go in so I said oh let me show you she says well our grass is really hard I stuck it in the sod and I stood on and I rocked back and forth and rocked it into the ground she’s like oh that doesn’t look that hard and I said I’m sorry I should I I said I didn’t realize that you didn’t know how to use it that little piece of information of you just rock on it and use your body weight and you tip back and you just put it four inches further back and you rock on it you tip it back it looks like magic so easy when you see it yeah but you hand somebody something that they don’t have I had somebody tell me once I was I I was at a I had my plant nursery booth and I had her Simon trees Japan Pon trees he comes by and he goes what’s that I said it’s a Pon he goes I hate those that’s the most awful fruit I ever tasted in my entire life I said really he goes it’s like oh man made my tongue hurt and I said oh I said you got it too early I said our native pons you get them too early I said they’re very very stringent I said it’s terrible I said but when they’re fully ripe I said they taste like honey and sunshine I said it is the most delicious fruit it’s the closest thing to a mango you can grow in our tempered climate and he’s like really I said yeah I said you let it get fully ripe I said it’s like sugar sweet I said besides this is a fuu pron it doesn’t even have a stringency about 10 minutes later he bought a tree from me and I thought you know if somebody handed me a banana and said this thing’s good to eat I would try to take a bite of the end of it and if you if you know you never seen anybody with a banana before you bite the end of it off feel like oh gosh it’s got a little sweetness in it but it’s like nasty because you’re eating the peel you don’t even know right so so that’s the big gap so the first thing is go find somebody that’s done it before and if you go down to your go down to your extension office and ask him I said what used to grow here what what do people Farm around here I said go to your you know go to your feed store go to your feed store what do the farmers grow around here now of course they might just be growing corn and soy but what did they used to grow oh they used to grow they used to grow tons of potatoes for potato chips before it got cheaper to buy them from Idaho okay well good you know you can grow potatoes that’s a good start drive around your neighborhood and see what Gardens look good go see if there’s any old fruit trees around the neighborhood you know that gives you your first little bit of knowledge if you could find any historic information on previous Industries where people had skin in the game what did the settlers grow if there were indigenous peoples there what did though what did they grow how did they grow it there’s a reason that single row gardening has lasted for so long it’s it’s not because it’s suited to you know tractors driving through it that that helps you know they plant it so they can drive tractors through it now but the reason it was widely spaced and they grew grain corn Etc back in the old old west was because it had to rely on rainfall so maybe growing things really close together in a squarefoot garden is not right for you you maybe you wanted to grow a lot of food you space it way out you got plenty of land space it way out you never have to water it it’s a different way to think so so start with that and and also don’t be afraid to experiment don’t be afraid to look stupid don’t be afraid to do weird things that you know stick it in the ground and see if it grows I I’ve known people that have wanted to grow food forests and they’ve bought potted trees and they’ve looked at videos and they’ve read books on food forests if you read the two volume how you know the the big two volume Food Forest guy by Dave Jackie and Eric ton it’s got all of this technical information on Old Fields and succession and it will make you want to yank your hair out it’s great information but if you’re just like how do I start a food Forest if you start if you get right into that technical literature you may find that fascinating later but no you just need to grow food go out and plant a bunch of stuff in your yard Pace it off at randomly you know 12 feet 20 ft whatever seems about right to you if stuff gets too big cut it down start a whole bunch of stuff from seeds and cut Cs and plant it everywhere you know learn how to learn how to air layer learn how to start stuff from cuting you could start 70 fig cuting in like an hour cut a bunch of branches into pieces and put them dip them in some cheap rooting hormone and stick them in a pot and put a bag over the top of it to get a little bit of humidity and then just ignore it for about two months and then plant them all over your yard the ones that don’t do well cut down and feed them to the ones that do do well just chop them in pieces you know this is exactly what I did last week yeah this perfect advice CU back where we used to live there are tons of semi wild figs just out in the middle of nowhere that nobody’s taken care of in a long time and between the walks around the neighborhood that I would do and my partner’s parents who’ve lived there their entire lives they know where all of the best fig trees around the neighborhood and that’s exactly what we did we got about 15 cuting from all of our favorite ones especially the ones that we know fruit early in the season middle of the Season late in the season in order to spread it out as much as possible and you just Des my task for tomorrow is putting those all in in rooting hormone and putting them out both in the field and also in propagation to see what takes yeah and so don’t don’t wait until you’ve got it perfect and you’ve got all the information you’ve got everything drawn and you’ve hired an architect and whatever because you’re not going to do it a lot of a whole bunch of savings you buy the perfect already ready to fruit tree from the nursery that’s got the tiniest little root ball you know there’s so many things that you don’t have to do no no get it in get it in the ground and just start planting and remember that you can cut it down if you don’t like it later it doesn’t matter that much or prune it smaller things don’t have to be 60 feet tall cut it down and if it dies well it wasn’t supposed to live you know that’s that’s it you you’re going you are going to die one day you have a limited amount of years in your life you are not going to know everything that you need to know the amount of knowledge that you have is just a tiny grain of sand people are always telling me in my YouTube videos oh I didn’t know you didn’t know that you’ve been gardening for so long I’m like I don’t have all knowledge if I had all knowledge I would be God I’m not God I’m trying to figure this out a little bit at a time like everybody else but I I have found I you know the worst decision is to just sit there and not make a decision you’re better off making a bad decision and then learning something from it and doing it again you know 100 ways that will kill that plant and one that works and build from there like you don’t need to have all this academic knowledge and a bunch of perfect tools to get started and I love that message and so tell our listeners where they can find the books and the resources that you’ve put out there to give a little extra information to help them get started and find early success sure if you are into Florida gardening I know some a lot of you guys are not going to be from Florida but if you like Florida gardening I’ve written a few books for the State of Florida I wrote totally crazy easy Florida gardening I wrote create your own Florida Food Forest which is a great big fun guide to food Forest it’s got 150 illustrations in it by 54 different artists I had volunteer artists so it’s really cool it’s everything from little kids to like fantastic professional artists Illustrated this book beautiful create your own Florida food forest and then I also wrote a book called Florida survival gardening which is the the crops that are high calorie that are adapted and high nutrition that are adapted to Florida if you were to garden with the utmost Simplicity I’ve also written the book compost everything which is for everybody you know it’s it takes composting makes it simple grow or Die the good guide to survival gardening and I wrote a little book called grocery row gardening which is our current favorite Gardening System where we mix trees perennials ground covers and we basically have little strips of food Forest Hedges that W with pads in between and you end up with a beautiful vibrant non sprayed ecosystem where all the plants just fit into niches and grow us lots of food last year we got over 2500 pounds of food out of our backyard which is not a lot for a farmer but it’s a lot for a backyard Gardener and you know you you can also find my website I have the survival gardner.com where I post every weekday I have a gardening post a lot of gardening blogs and everything have gotten really junked up I don’t know if you try to search for information on Google now but you get a lot of junkies SEO Orient to basically copy and paste from Wikipedia and AI written articles and things like that we don’t do that it’s just me I write posts and I write what we’re doing in our garden and how it’s working and it’s the first thing I do when I get up in the morning at dawn I bring my cup of coffee in the office and I I write about what we’re working on and I always answer questions over there too so if you got a question go over to the survival gardner.com and leave it in the comments and I will get back to you and you can also find me on YouTube David the good I have a YouTube channel and I don’t necessarily get as in-depth on the YouTube channel as the books but a lot of people like to see what’s going on and so YouTube is where you can see what my Gardens actually look like and if I’m just making all of this [Laughter] up well look I can vouch those are awesome resources they’ve given me tons of ideas even though we’ve got a lot of differences in our climates and our growing conditions but the the ideas are really sound and they’ve really helped me from the beginning when I was also like you know I don’t have gardening experience maybe I should just gather gather gather gather knowledge and now you just got to get started and this kind of stuff takes the anxiety out of it takes the over planting out of it and this is what’s really going to grow food for you so David thank you so much for taking time today it was awesome to finally connect with you and there’s so many more things that we can expand on I would love to go more into plant propagation at another time we’re starting a plant nursery but we’ll leave that for another episode and yeah again thanks so much for making time thank you very much I really appreciate it thanks again to David I’ve linked to his blog his YouTube channel and his Amazon book store in the show notes for this episode on the website at regenerative skills.com now before we wrap this up just remember that these episodes are only the beginning of the learning resources design and coaching Services in-person courses and interactive community that are available through regenerative skills the Discord server is our free community where you can connect with other like-minded listeners Exchange ideas stories tips and resources as well as interact with me directly and quite a few former guests from the show our Instagram account at regenor skills is the best place to see the projects that me and the team are working on both for clients and collaborators as well as on our own properties I’ll also be announcing the certification courses workshops and Gatherings that we’ve got coming up later this year if you’re interested in getting dedicated support for your own project you can now schedule a free planning session with one of our team members through the request form on our website you can also find all the links show notes and past resources there at regenerative skills.com we truly believe that no matter your experience your knowledge abilities resources or background you can be a powerful force for regeneration on this planet and we’re here to help you find your path so as always remember to keep taking those little steps every day towards a regenerative future and I’ll be right by your side along the way