Get In My Garden

Today we meet Jordan Mara of Mind and Soil. He will discuss his company mission, how gardening can be one of the best activities for our mental health, some of the research into specific soil microbes that help our brains and so much more.

This is a very exciting and inspiring episode, and Jordan shares about following his bliss to start Mind and Soil, details on how to be involved with his free online workshops, and at the end we dive into the four components of attention restoration theory, which I found very interesting!

Today we meet Leo Horrigan, a documentary filmmaker with the Center for a Livable Future at John’s Hopkins University. He is helping us understand the food system from farming to food access, and creating educational programs around their research.

We learn the five most important components to look at as we repair our food system.

Leo shares about a lot more including how farming and carbon will always be linked and about how we are studying the prairies and soil to make sure we can restore and unlock the potential of soil.

This is the second half of the interview with Nina Folch of Compost Santo. She shares about why she likes composting in the winter, how she looks at microbes in the microscope, and some of the realities of running a Soil Food Web Lab as a career.

Today we meet Nina Folch of Compost Santo located in Northern New Mexico. She is a student of the work of Dr. Elaine Ingham and others, and I’m so grateful to her for sharing so openly about the composting business she manages, the things she most loves about this work, and some of the challenges they have faced while the business has grown over three years.

IF you are interested in composting as a business and are are interested in the details of running such an operation, this is an episode for you!

I learned a lot from Nina and will feature the rest of our interview ASAP once it’s completed.

This episode is published on the first Monday of the year, happy new year, and I hope you have all have had a chance to look to the future and do some planning. Now is actually a great time to start composting. in preparation for spring.

I’ve been wanting to have an show for a while about the benefits of getting children back into nature. I recently read, Last Child In the Woods, now a classic book from 15 years ago about nature-deficit in children.

If you have younger kids in your life, today’s interview is with Jenny Bailey co-creator and author of a new book series for younger children, including a soundtrack which is featured at the intro to this episode.

The series is called, Tales from Mother Earth, and Jenny will be talking today about their first book which is about bees, then she will share about their educational initiatives in the UK and their mission to empower younger people to become passionate and responsible stewards of the earth.

But before our interview, I will review another new book, a graphic adaptation, and it is a graphic novel adaptation of the best-selling memoir by Edward O Wilson. For those of you who haven’t read his books including his most recent Tales from the Ant World, he is an amazing and fascinating adventurer, a researcher, biologist and entomologist who has been a staple at Harvard University since the 1950s. 

This is Episode 75 with John Craig the master composter who runs grassroots nonprofit, We Compost, located inside the Farm and Food Lab in the Great Park at Irvine, California.

John tells us how to get started in composting, some basic methods to try, and some of the experiments they are doing with worms and composting at the Farm and Food Lab.

Then he shares the components of good composting and about his composting symbol that he has created for people to use while promoting and normalizing composting and compostable products.

Later, we discuss the basics of how to deal with specific composting issues and two book recommendations for vermicomposting and understanding the soil food web.

Finally, John shares how to find the right local worms that will thrive in your soil, wherever you are located.

Today Jennifer Lauruol will tell us about the ecologically-minded area of Lancaster England where she lives and some of the community and research programs they have there around sustainability and food security.

She talks about how she markets herself as an edible landscape designer, helping to restore spaces with native plants using permaculture concepts and getting people interested in healthier garden spaces.

She goes into how she is able to get suburbanites to come around to the idea of native plants in their yards, and about ways she incorporates these plants to make a statement in the landscape, as well as some of the terminology she prefers to use when communicating with people unfamiliar with permaculture principles.

Jennifer shares some great book recommendation and mentions very interesting landscape designers who have inspired her or paved the way to where we are now in the movement. Listen to the whole episode, because Jennifer gives some great recommendations sprinkled throughout the interview.

In the last section, we talk about animal life, keystone species of plants and animals, and understanding each piece of the ecosystem by observation to uncover what nature is telling us in our specific ecosystem.

Jennifer discusses going beyond permaculture with an indigenous approach to communication with plants and fungi which places humans directly into the natural environment with so much reverence and connection.

You can reach out to Jennifer after the interview, her cantact info is available at the end.

You are listening to Episode 72 of the Get In My Garden Podcast.

Woniya was runner up on the survivalist show Alone, Season 6, where she survived two and a half months in the far northern region of Canada.

Today she shares her ideas for how to foster the right mindset and have a high chance to surviving in any environmental conditions, some simple practices we can all use to open our senses to our environments and how to connect with our landscape wherever we are located.

Then Woniya talks about her experiences teaching people about ancestral skills and all the awesome programs she has created through her business, Buckskin Revolution.

You can follow her work and learn more about her by searching Buckskin Revolution on social media and online.

You can follow this podcast @getinmygarden on Instagram, and subscribe to the show wherever you listen from, if you’d like to receive new episodes. Also, please leave positive reviews if you want to support the show!

Next up we will have more natural farming stories and learning from Elton Ray James and Kyle Perry.

Today we meet Elton Ray James, cannabis grower and lifelong mushroom activist, co-creator with his wife of the largest mushroom growing group on Facebook.

He shares how he ended up developing a cannabis business with a California micro business license and what that can mean for growers getting into the industry.

Then Elton discusses how mushrooms can open the mind to a lifelong thirst for knowledge, and some of the very awesome visions he has for developing his farm into an entheobotanical tourist destination.

I ask him about where we are culturally with magic mushrooms and other psychedelics. Then Elton talks about how his life working with fungi affects his farming methods.

Later in the month I will publish the rest or Elton’s vision for creating his destination farm he calls an amazement park!

At the end of this week, we will meet a soil entrepreneur from Tennessee discussing his novel soil business and his beer kashi product made from spend brewing grains.

Then next week, the amazing and talented Woniya Thibault, primitive skills expert, sustenance farmer and survivalist, competitor and runner up on Season 6 of the History Channel show called, Alone, which is also available on Netflix, will join us to discuss how we can all become closer to the earth and gain primitive skills. She will also tell us about her educational company called Buckskin Revolution.

This is Part 2 of my chat with natural farmer and community activist Marco Thomas in Petersburg, Virginia. We talk more about the IMO solutions, Korean Natural Farming principles and building up the farmers market culture in his city. His mission is to share with his community and teach them that it is possible to feed a family low-cost, nutritious food off a small piece of urban land.

Subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen from, and if you didn’t hear the first half of the interview, listen to #68.

Follow Marco’s work on instagram @marco_is_growing to see his amazing garden and projects. Follow this podcast @getinmygarden.

Today we learn more about Korean Natural Farming and making indigineous microorganism solution from Marco Thomas an urban gardener and natural farmer based in Virginia. His mission is to share with his community and teach them that it is possible to feed a family low-cost, nutritious food off a small piece of urban land.

This interview will be published in two parts, so subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen from, and hear the second half later in the week.

Today, Marco discusses the first steps to getting starting in natural farming and enriching the land with locally harvested microbes.

Follow Marco’s work on instagram @marco_is_growing to see his amazing garden and projects. Follow this podcast @getinmygarden.

We are back with William Padilla-Brown discussing how to grow mushrooms in a hugelkultur mound, how a myco-focused permaculture lifestyle has benefitted his young son, and then he shares some of the most interesting things he is working on right now such as mushroom breeding for traits and understanding their DNA.

William is a great example of a super-learner who is working towards a healthier world. He always has many interesting current and upcoming projects which he will share at the end of the podcast.

This is the third segment with Casey Ernst and Keisha Wheeler of Catalyst BioAmendments, a composting and soil company they run with business partners, Zach Ellis and Gregory Munn in Northern California. You can follow their adventure on instagram @catalyst_microbe_adventure, and you can follow mine @getinmygarden. If you want to hear more from them, you can tune in to some of the earlier episodes this past several weeks.

In this episode we learn the backstory of how two soil food web geeks took their passion for microbes and their education with Elaine Ingham’s Soil Food Web School and made it into a business. Then we discuss the popularity of soil food web with the cannabis industry and the special considerations for this crop. Lastly, Casey quickly talks about caring for the compost and soil food web during the winter months.

Today we learn about the Soil Food Web, what exactly it is and then we explore some of the basics of fungi in the environment and how plants interact with them. We talk with Casey Ernst and Keisha Wheeler of Catalyst BioAmendments, a composting and soil company they run with business partners, Zach Ellis and Gregory Munn in Northern California. Follow their adventure on instagram @catalyst_microbe_adventure.