Podcast 738 – Grow Our Own Food (GOOF) – Part 2

This is part two of a two-part podcast.

Hey, this is Tea Blankenship.

Are you a fan of pie?

Where there is pie at Burmese.com.

This pie grants the user of secret access.

You also get free things like videos of Wheaton Labs, the ability to add two thumbs-up

two posts a more.

To get pie, go to Burmese.com forward slash pie to get the inside scoop of what pie can

do for you.

Again, that is Burmese.com forward slash pie.

So I guess, I was going to say, and I'm growing on about 10 acres.

So I'm very, very lucky in the area that I get to experiment on.

But when I work in town at a historic estate, we do a garden and we're talking to people.

We try to sell it as edible landscaping, as incorporating all these perennials into

their urban landscape as much as possible with a few fruit bushes.

And then having just, you know, if it's raised beds or garden pots or whatever, you know,

containers to grow their annuals in.

But yeah, I've had about two and a half acres at my place that I use for edible perennials.

A lot of permaculture designed spaces, but that takes a lot of upkeep still, just mowing

between the rows, mowing around beds, because I have basically eight sections with rows

in them for different trees, raspberries, blueberries, and things like that, gooseberries.

But I never knew that pocket gophers will go into a 50-foot bed of sun chokes, walking

onions and garlic chives, and they will take all of the sun chokes, and they will redistribute

them all over the property.

And food, you will smell, and it's like, okay, I don't know where my sun chokes went.

11 years ago, I planted a 50-foot bed, and now they just pop up here and there.

But if I plant a row of them, they're gone.

They take them first thing.

So I always have to watch where they're coming up and then just go and try and find a few,

because the pocket gophers love them.

Yeah, but I like to frame it as edible landscaping, and that kind of sells the idea to the urban

or the main populace.

And fruit trees, except then they have to be harvested.

And I find that bizarre, but I live in a city that used to all the orchards.

So almost every house when we came here 20 years ago had fruit trees.

It was just what was divided out when the suburban divisions happened.

And now I would say less than 5% still have fruit trees.

Most of those homes have cut them down, because they do not want to harvest them for a

week a year.

They do not want to prune them.

So how we encourage a world that is just innately lazy and doesn't want to physically engage

in the earth to engage in the earth and feel it's worth their time.

I don't know, Paul, because I've been working on that for 20 years too.

I expect that maybe there might be just the level of environmental toxicity, pollution,

bad air that gets into our bodies that makes it harder to do physical activity.

And I know that's kind of had some health problems earlier last year that kind of,

I wasn't able to be as physically active as usual, because of them.

And I kind of wonder how universal this might be, or...

Yeah, you said you're a Minneapolis, hey?

Me?

I'm in New England.

You're in New England.

Miranda's in Minneapolis, okay?

So I've noticed the same thing, even with my 20-year-old adults, like Colin and I have

for mid-20-year-old adult children.

And I'm like, I don't think I have witnessed universally this many humans being this level

of exhausted and tired and not able to cope with the world ever before.

And I really do think it's a combination of probably cell and toxicity in our air and

our water.

I'm so happy today is such a nice day.

I can open all the windows and I'm feeling a lot better than I have been in the last few days,

Brad.

I have a lot to say about that, but I kind of want to go back a few minutes to the chaos

aesthetic.

Yes.

I don't know how to beat anyone on that.

Like it's really...

Yes.

I've been sold this cookie cutter world of like, everything Barbie, it's literally, when

we first started living this life, I've always made a commitment to not buy, will not buy

any plastic that is not necessary and that is not recycled.

So we have an almost plastic free life.

That's wonderful.

But the plastic we buy is, you know, reused plastic.

And I think maybe about year three or four, a documentary filmmaker from Toronto wanted

to come and film us because of what we're doing differently in life.

And I freaked out inside.

I grew up in like upper middle class suburbia and all of a sudden like the internal dialogue

in my being was, oh my God, how can someone come with a camera?

Like all my deck furniture is like old and everything's like not new and not perfect.

And the first step I had to do is that work inside me to be well, yeah, Alexander, the

reason the documentary filmmaker wants to come and film your life is because you don't

have a perfect plastic suburbia in home.

And that's what they're trying to show the world, right?

It's what we're all trying to show the world.

But it's hard to not feel judged in that by the rest of the planet, you know.

Did you go back to the image that you had just before?

It was me standing on one of my Google cultures and what I want to do is I'd love to talk

about for just a moment the idea of the chaos aesthetic, which I believe is what I'm

standing with in this picture.

And so everything we grow here is very much a polyculture and it's, I don't know, I think

by the standards of your mom, it would be fairly feral and chaos and there is a branch

of gardening, I believe, called chaos gardening, which is not quite what I'm shooting for.

But the thing that I'm attempting to do here is I want to have polyculture.

I believe and I, and you know, I'm totally cool with the idea that I'm just crazy, but

I believe that the root exidates of one plant are the food for other and so earlier there

was mention of getting a big sack of carrots, organic carrots for a dollar per pound.

And the thing that bothers me about that is that those carrots were grown in a field

and the only food that they had as root exidates was the root exidate from other carrots.

So there was no polyculture there.

Yeah.

And so granted those guys took on all of the discipline required to get those carrots

to go in, to get grown out and put into a bag and hauled off and selling them to you

for a dollar a pound is probably four times more than what they would get paid taking

it to the commodity markets.

And so they're like, score, we got a dollar a pound instead of 25 cents a pound worse

mart and stuff.

And so, but I kind of would prefer carrots growing in my, I don't know, it's like, I believe

your word was chaos and it's like, oh, I'll accept that.

So, but I also think that this thing that I'm standing in front of while your mother would

be, you know, pointing at it and shrieking the word chaos, I think it has a beauty to it.

It is a type of aesthetic, it is, it is something.

And so, when I see a bunch of plants growing in a row and all of the weeds plucked, to

me, that sends a very strong message, it says, look, I made mother nature my personal bitch.

Yeah.

And I kind of feel like that's, that is not our function on this planet as gardeners.

I kind of, but that's my opinion, which I know is not just a minority, but as teeny tiny

stuff.

Yeah.

Can you tell the other eight billion?

And so, but I kind of feel like part of it is is like, okay, so it's good that we're

taking these pictures and videos and sharing them, so other people can see them.

And it's like, and granted, your, your mother will attempt to shame you into compliance with

her warped view of how to make mother nature your personal bitch.

You've got a Joe whose boss, and if you've got to kill him, and if you get weeds, you've

got to kill him.

So her whole philosophy set is about more of a death philosophy set than a life philosophy

set.

Am I, am I, am I, am I close to the truth here?

Except, I don't know about you if you've managed, but I can't make carrots grow in a chaos

landscape because they don't compete.

So most of what we grow in the food forests are the like, I call them the sirth, the rival

plants.

They're the ones that can grow and create a harvest and out compete everything around

them so they win.

That's really funny because in my climate, carrots only grow in chaos.

If I put a nice place and they'll, they'll be about the size of a, of a sewing needle

by the end of the year, but if I, if I plant them and leave them alone in the midst of

the weeds in chaos, then they might actually be a reasonable size.

Wow, cool.

I don't, you Paul, do you get carrots in there?

We have not had great success with carrots yet, but we've also, we've had a lot of challenges

to overcome and, but that's another story for another day, but, but for the moment,

what I want to do is I want to, I want to, I want to look in the general direction of

M and, and she, she was telling me about wild parsnips, which I've never seen parsnips

grow in the wild before, but I kind of feel like, okay, hey, here's a thought, maybe instead

of carrots parsnips.

Yeah, parsnips are, at least in my climate, they're just, they're so hardy that, that they,

they grow along all the highway and save, they invade your garden, they grow, they grow

taller than your head, produce, produce tons of seeds that flutter all over the place,

and people hate them because, because of the burns that they cause, but, but if you avoid

them in summertime, then only, only come and contact with them in the fall when they're

right and ready to eat, then they can be a really nice source of food, but if they're

a wild parsnip, hey?

Yes, those are wild parsnips, I also want to mention, I'm not sure if they would be, I'm

not sure how good they are as a, as a, what, I forgot what they're called though, on your,

on your new scale in fall, but they're, the automatic backyard food pump thing.

Yes, they're, they're a bit harder to dig up, so I cannot get really as, as many out of

the ground as I want to at a time, and they kind of, oftentimes the roots will break off,

and of course, this is a climate where the ground is frozen for many, many months, set

of the year, so.

Well, unlike carrots, and, and now I have never, I've planted some parsnips seeds here

about eight years ago, and I don't think any of them took.

I would love the idea of some feral parsnips seeds, but, if they let me send them in the mail.

Oh, right, they could be weird about that, but it's like within the United States to the

United States, so I think it'll be all right, but setting that aside, I have, I have ordered

parsnips seeds to plant this year, the thing I'm trying to get out is to say, I'm trying

to broaden my automatic backyard food pump idea, and I think that the core of it all is the

idea of having crops that have a really massive harvest window, especially in Montana in the winter

time.

How is garlic in your climate?

I'm, I'm sorry, what?

Sorry, how is garlic in your climate?

Because that's, that's really amazing.

We are, we are attempting to get a feral garlic patch started, but that's the one that you

can harvest in this climate every, every single month of the year.

There's something to eat from it that, whether it's the greens or the roots or the spring

garlic, or every season of the year, not every month, because sometimes they're underground

scores, but I, I kind of feel like if, if you've got a really robust garden, I've got

that has food pumping out all winter long, and you've got like, let's say some chickens,

then I kind of feel like between the stuff that you can harvest out of your garden in

January and eggs and some chicken, that you might find that you're frequently getting

100% of your meal from what you've grown on site, and, but then if you happened to put

up some apple sauce and some dried apples and, and a little bit of this and that from your

garden in the fall, then that's, because like rather than like, oh, I got, I got to have

this garage-sized pantry to put up all my food and, and store stuff so that my family

can get through the winter that you can reduce that by 90% because you got plenty of food

out there waiting for you to go get it right now, and, and this other food that you've put

up is, is nice to add to it, but it's, you know, it's not your staple, the stuff that

you're bringing in today is your staple, but this is me and my crazy, but I've got people,

like, I, is it Alexandra's mom, who is pointing at it and saying shame, shame on you, shame,

and it's like, I kind of feel like that's, so, so that kind of, that, that kind of finger wagging,

combined with the thing about the people saying it costs more, and the people talking about the

amount of time, between those three, and that's just the beginning of the list, just those three,

it's, it's challenging to persuade people to make the leap. I did see a garden, I think was,

was it this last summer maybe, maybe it was last fall, but I saw a garden, this woman was telling me

that she put two sun chokes in the ground because they came from somebody or something, and she

just stuck them in the ground two years ago and forgot about them. And now this whole corner of her

yard is just packed full of the flowers of the sun choke and they look lovely. That's an amazing

story. And I was saying like, you know, I think that there might be about 200 pounds of sun chokes

in the ground right there, like if you started eating them right now, I don't think you would

ever reach the end. So how many days a week do you eat sun choke? Where's sun root? Oh, I'm, I'm, I'm last spring, I was eating them

every day. Right now, I mean, I, I know some of you are familiar with the fact that I did some,

I had some health comedies and I'm doing some food as medicine that says right now, don't eat sun

chokes. And otherwise, I would, but you're asking what I, now I can't tell you that the people who live

here are eating sun chokes almost every day. And so it is a, it is a staple here. I mean, we've

got enough sun chokes right now. I think that we can keep probably 20, 25 people fed year round

just on sun chokes. So are those stored in your house? Or are you keeping them outside? Oh, they're outside.

I wear because like, I've got six foot deep frost line at my place. Like, there's nothing I can't get a quarter

inch into the ground. So anything, you can dig any time the ground is soft. So one of the

you can't, but you still have, you know, times in December and times in January and all the way

through that it's soft enough that you can dig. Oh, there's no way I can do that from, like,

dismember through April. I'm not getting in the ground unless I had them in my hoop houses,

which right now I, I can only get down an inch in the hoop house and that's been, you know, 60

degrees for the last two weeks and it's hot there. Wow, because we don't get still frozen

underground. Like, I can do barefoot grounding almost every day throughout the winter.

And we will get down to like minus 20 or minus 30. Oh, that's Celsius. I don't know what is

similar at Fahrenheit when you get low. But it doesn't stay hard. So, you know, it might be hard

for a week or two, but then it will fall. So I want to say that we've been harvesting

sunshooks here December, January, February and now we're in the march and we can harvest sunshooks

today if we wanted. But it is true that if we have a hard freeze, it's like it's going to be more

challenging to get to them. And, but if it's, if the day warms up a bit or if it's been warm for

a couple of days, then it's like, oh, let's all go out and get a bunch of sunshooks. But let's get

two or three times more than we would normally get and then bring them inside. And, and of course,

the only last about three or four days before they start getting soft. But we have ways of storing

them so that we can get weeks or even months if we want. But normally, I'm too lazy to do that and

I just go out and get a bunch when the ground is a little bit soft in December, January, February.

And I have not had trouble, you know, like, oh, is it kind of soft? It's going to be soft today,

maybe. And then going out. Yeah, you are more like us, but for Miranda, you would have to dig

in the fall before freeze and in the early spring after thaw. Also, store them in like a wet

sand in a root cellar. So also what I've done is gone out there and be like, I'm going to grab

some sunshooks and it's like, oh, wow, the ground is like cement. And let me try to pry. And it's

like, oh, this is too much work. It's annoying. Go into the house, fill a picture up with hot tap

water, go out and pour it over where my sunshooks are. And then pluck them out. And so I've done that

a couple of times. And so it, the key is is that there's food out there. And the next thing

is like, if you've got a bunch of food out in your garden that you can harvest year round.

And now I want to say zero effort. So there's, I, these sunshooks were planted years ago. And we

didn't do anything for them. We didn't pluck the bugs or the weeds or the watering or any of that.

And we just go out there whenever we're in the mood and grab some. So zero gardening effort

after the initial introduction. And we have normally we've got kale as well because it'll

recede itself. So there'll be kale walking on ends and sunshooks year round. And we're going to

expand that hopefully with parsnips and the spirit and some other things. But as long as there's

all this food out there, just this enormous amount of food, it comes with a beautiful

sensation of safety. Because if anything goes weird, I have an enormous amount of food. Whereas

the people that didn't garden, if anything goes weird in their life or I don't know outside

of their lives even and food becomes scarce, they're in trouble. I am not. I just, and so when

people are talking about the amount of work or the cost, it's like here's a whole bunch of food,

an enormous amount of food that just sits there and patiently waits for when the person's in

the mood to go get some. Something I wanted to bring up is the community that maybe in previous

times people would kind of get together as a family and the community aspect of it all doing

things, doing the same thing together would have energized people to be able to put up these

the food and preserve it. And it just also reminds me of reading about the Native Americans on

the plains putting up prairie turnips, which they live in a cold climate where the ground freezes

too. And they would pick all the prairie turnips you need for the winter and then

braid them to dry. And that kind of makes me think maybe in colder climates, like Miranda's I think

would be maybe we dry the sunshokes or the prairie turnips. I would perfectly. And then they

rehydrate perfectly. Yeah. A couple of interesting things, one girl was telling me about how she's

got a bucket with some soil in it and that she keeps in her refrigerator. And then she puts a

bunch of french shokes in there and she said one time she forgot about it and she went in and

it was a year and a half later and she pulled those sunshokes out and went and stuck them in the

ground and they took off. And so boy that's that's going to keep your sunshokes a long time.

There's also another idea that we're experimenting with right now is we've got a jar

with a bunch of saltwater in it and we drop some sunshokes in that and we think it's going to like

they'll be able to keep for months that way if we want to do it that way. But I think we all know

that if you put sunshokes on the counter about three days later they're going to start getting soft.

Yeah, they just dry. So when you start learning about drying as a preservation for your fruit and

the whole world changes. The first time I dried herbs I think I was 20-ish and I threw them away

because I didn't even know if they were edible still because I had no one to teach me. But

you know 30 years later drying food has been my priority focus in terms of preservation

because it is the way people have cared for themselves in winter for millennia

and because it is a zero cost food storage. And so most of our greens and our herbs and our

sun roots and lots of our fruits I'll get dried as a storage option.

No, I think the beautiful thing with drying or canning or freezing or any of the food preservation

techniques is that you end up with a slightly different food product which then adds variety

to your menu. So I mean I think apples are like one of the most wonderful things to grow.

I mean their harvest window is a little small but we had one apple tree that was pumping out apples

for six weeks. We thought that was pretty amazing that you know just constantly pouring off apples.

But there's the idea of the fresh apple. There's the applesauce, the dried apple.

I, we experimented last year a lot with concentrating our own apple juice. So you have a

lot bunch of apple juice and then we just put it in the crock pot for a day and it reduces it

about 70% and then we would use that to make jams instead of using store-bought sugar.

So we're, we hope to move over to using all fruit sweeteners instead of sugars.

But it does. And on top of that I kind of feel like a thing I want to do is we've got these

giant solar food dehydrators and one of them has the rocket assist and that's now where to

a point in time when that's the only one anybody here wants to use and then they don't even care

like what the weather report is or whatever. They always once again load it up with a bunch of

stuff to be dried. They always start a fire in the little rocket part. Always because I don't know

it's they're on autopilot. It doesn't matter. It's going to get dark and this way it'll still be

a little warm and the air will still be moving through the system. But everything dries about

four times faster with that and it's like so everybody wants to always and I just kind of feel like

this thing is so great. I kind of want to infect more brains with knowledge of this thing's

existence because you're right. Once you start drying food everything changes. There's so many ways

to do it and many ways are easier than others and many ways are cheaper than others. I met a guy

once he's like here try try these prunes that I dried myself. I think it costs about five times

more than if I just bought the prunes at the store to dry them but you know they're still good.

Anyway try I once we start talking about how to dry food I suspect that'll fill two hours.

But one of your big hardest ones is mulberry. Mulberry has maybe three weeks I would say of daily

harvest. I don't know if you've played with mulberry but it is a very very very big tree and it

grows very quickly and it's cool because mulberry looks like kind of like a raspberry or blackberry

except with a tiny little stem and it grows right off of the wood of a tree which is bizarre

and to harvest mulberry your best is to put a tarp or a sheet on the ground and shake the tree

and so every day for about three weeks you get a huge bowl of mulberries from shaking the tree.

Hi this is Mark there are a lot of reasons to get angry these days but I prefer to focus on the

positive things that we each can do to make this world a better place. The book building a better

world in your backyard instead of being angry at bad guys there's a great resource for just that.

Instead of throwing my arms up in frustration at governments or big corporations there's a list

of ideas that we each can tackle to affect change. Information about this book and other resources

can be found at permis.com. So I have a lot of mixed thoughts about mulberry I do know that whenever

I encounter a person who has a whole bunch of fruit trees and they're angry at the birds

and they say like I don't get any of the fruit from my own fruit trees because the birds always

get to it all before I do. I always think about mulberries because the birds prefer the mulberries

over any other fruit and so sometimes they'll be so busy eating the mulberries that they won't

eat your other fruit and you'll get to have some of your own fruit for yourself.

I don't care for mulberries myself I mean I like the idea of feeding them to chickens

because the chickens will self harvest I like the idea of which other mulberries have you had before

I'm I'm sorry what what color mulberries have you had before black like it looked like black they

look like giant long blackberries you know some minor tiny blackberries and there are other

ones that are whiteberries so there's so much variation in rivalry but if you haven't found one

you like yet I would say keep trying yes there's a nearby tree that's a white mulberry tree and

it's just so hard to tell which ones are ripe you have to like you have to put your finger on every

every one ends if it's soft enough that maybe it's ripe and you try it and yeah just shake the

tree though okay there's the ripe ones I'll follow on the ground and the ones that aren't right stay

on the tree till tomorrow okay but yeah it's kind of like radish peas do you guys do radish

peas is something you could put on your your a massive harvest food if you like but they're really

hard to tell which ones are nice and tender and which ones have gone hard hey yes

we've I don't know that the whole thing where you can't tell is a is a big deal to me

yes I know we get people here all the time that are foragers and they see that our property

has a lot of Oregon grape but most the time Oregon grape it's like not yet ripe

uh or two ripe and it's it's hard I can't tell the difference between and and it's like it's

it's it's good for just this teeny tiny window but through all the phases they look the same

and uh and they they come on at different times so anytime you're like uh oh I plucked one

Oregon grape and it was good then all the rest of the Oregon grapes on that same plant are not good

kind of a weird anyway I don't I do I've stopped even trying to taste the Oregon grape I don't

want to anymore that kind of reminds me there's a I think a recipient crap up all that

they taste absolutely horrible until until one until about the frost and at this at that point

they they turn from rock hard to very soft and it's easy to tell them and they're another one

that I think could be a soul building crop I think because it's like they don't get a lot of

predation but they they have just so much flavor to them that if you see them a lot in ornamental

plantings but but I tried it but I eat as many as I can whenever I see them just because

that they're they're really good they're kind of this sour sweet almost like a candy flavor

so as as we're getting to the end of our recording thingamabab here uh and you you before we

started recording you were talking about how you would like to talk today a little bit about

foraging and I and I do feel like that is just such a a critically important part of all of this

and then of course some of the people said that the thing that I'm doing is I'm basically

I guess doing forage gardening which sounds cool to me but but authentic foraging as I think

the or normal foraging I should say it's going to be more like I was already growing there

and then there was some mention of uh some what some of the native folks did and and so where I

live like like Lewis and Clark came through here with Sacajawea like like within a mile

of where I'm sitting right now and um uh on the way through here apparently she found sun chokes

and was feeding these guys sun chokes that's amazing yeah so I'm kind of like I'm really

liking the sun chokes now so do you think your your patches descended from those sun chokes

absolutely not I imported the I have a wild patch it's kind of it kind of has a little weed pressure

so I'm think I'm going to try to spread it but yes my understanding is with sun chokes

is that if you never harvest them the plants become kind of small and pathetic and the tubers

become small and pathetic I've heard of it but it just makes a lot of a difference oh okay

I guess that's what I think it's got weed or a bishop elder that if any if maybe Miranda knows

about them in my in my area the big the two big forage things that the general public is

wild for are two things that cannot be domesticated and so morale mushrooms yes and um I'm

going to say huckleberries knowing that the word huckleberry changes from region to region saw

I'll qualify it a little bit by saying Montana huckleberries yes are they of axonium species

boy I have part I do not know okay but I do know I have I have heard about huckleberries like

six different things from six different regions that are called huckleberries oh there's

morale mushrooms right there they list us yeah I think they're called the the this area's

huckleberries they're really good too they're but that but they're I never find very many of them

for some reason not be looking in the right places I know that a Pacific Northwest the thing

that they call a huckleberry is it looks more like a gooseberry and it's a it's a red high bush

berry yeah these are my favorite when I was a kid and then around here the huckleberries are

kind of uh they look like a reddish blueberry they're smaller um and they definitely have a taste

that is different than a blueberry they taste more like a cherry maybe we have a base that looks like

a tiny apple base or do they have a base that looks like a blueberry base oh good question tell

so like we have service berries or Saskatoon berries which are a tree berry and they're blue

like a blueberry yeah we have tons of those growing wild everywhere including on my huckle

cultures and those ones will have like an apple base they have like the the rose family base

to them and then the vaccinium species will have more like a square base okay so the service

berries um it I you know on this is I got to tell a quick story I was visiting up near flooded lake

and this guy is showing me his property and he he pointed at this service berry and he said

I'm gonna rip that out I've got this seed catalog or this this this tree catalog and I'm ordering

up Saskatoon's and so I you know you do the face palm and you're like it's actually the same thing

you know and he's like no it's not it's it's a totally different plant and it's like uh it's the same

species it's the same and it's like they're also called June berries and so uh so June berries

Saskatoon and service berries are all the same thing and it took me about half an hour to convince him

of that yeah well and it depends on the variety whether or not they're really delicious or not

so his wild variety might have been kind of seedy and bland and the one he was growing was growing

for a really juicy berry is the same as um like cauliflower and broccoli and and cabbage and

kale are all the same species right right they're just grown for different parts so they become

you know really tender in different regions I think that a lot of the issue people have with wild

fruits is that they don't get them from the right soil and shade conditions and that are they're not

in a place where that date where they're able to fruit well and there's only a week that they're

perfect right because before that they're not ripe and after that they're dried yes I noticed the

wild wild around here are so delicious so they're kind of red red colored they're just the ordinary

wild whatever variety we have here but I think another thing that we are this year but most

continents don't think of as a food um as lambs quarters and we eat a lot of that but we

it grows everywhere here including on our Google cultures and we just let it go so we eat a lot of

that but okay you you were you had a lot to say about foraging like how much of your diet would

you estimate is from foraging um so for me I think I get maybe at least 70% of from for

vegetables from foraging in the summertime I'm still working on the staples like the rubiches

the rubiches and the and making sure to have enough acorns I didn't really get to the acorns

very well this year but so I would say around 70% of my vegetables and then for my valley it's

a little bit if you're with fruit but nice and yeah and so what what are the things that what are

your like what are your bigs for calorie wise from foraging so personhips are probably one of

the biggest acorns to mushrooms and in late summer I grew up foraging so so late summer we'd often

just like have have pasta and mushrooms every night especially kind of the woods and chicken

of the woods chandeliers um what else there's her her maybe summer there's milkweed which is a very

big one um which we do boil we don't just or I I tend to boil it because I don't think I can

digester ganty commons of raw milkweed um but um other ones are oh ramps ramps are a really

good calorie source that that is something that people are something that that needs more attention

in terms of intentionally spreading them to areas that have been abused and logged so that they

don't have their natural populations of ramps and wildflowers like they used to um there's wild

cherries I've just gotten into this for less fall that are they're very good they're a little

bit more like a wild personhips or personhips in general then you're close to your career

oh and right now I'm stepping maple trees and boiling down the stop to make syrup

so that's a big one for my climate um

I like I kind of so I know my causal has a sugar bush and he makes maple syrup every year

and um I and as he's describing the process of making this syrup I perpetually think like I

wonder if adding something rockety to that would make it burn less wood but I don't know I think

part of it is that he's got such an enormous amount of wood and I and I do want to make a

tiny sound in general about how so much of Montana and I don't know about your area but

the so much of Montana everybody is burning their brush right now we have we have some of that here

not a lot of it I think people are a little bit like this is this is this is a sort of region where

chemicals are almost a household word people but people are really environmentally conscious and

want to want to let them let it decompose or leave it for a while that I stopped at oftentimes

I I was visiting with a neighbor who was getting ready to burn and I said I bet I could come up with

one hundred things that would be better use of that wood than burning it

exactly and he didn't have time to even hear the first two and it's like okay that's that's

fair it's your wood and your property you can do whatever you want and of course it kind of comes

back to is it is it Alexander's mom you know where it's like seeking a particular aesthetic

you know and that and it's like I need this to all look a certain way and if I burn it it's cheaper

than putting it into the garbage can yes so I wanted to tell a story quickly um I have sort of

kind of a neighbor lives across the valley um so has shown has shown some interesting foraging

and so I teach him um a planter to whenever whenever whenever I see him kind of time of year um

but I run into him at this at the local store the other day and was I was buying a bit of cheese um

and he said oh so you eat real food aha it was just like every probably the centros are more

I mean it's it's not bad cheese but it and I like cheese said um I don't have animals so um

like all these acorns to me that feels like real real food that nettles they're so so delicious

and nourishing I I don't know how much help I could probably go on forever about how amazing

nettles are but no yeah nettles I think that could easily fill three or four hours right there

they're like with the super food that people how you eat acorns how do you boil them?

yes so we have the red acorns mostly red okcorns and it's harder to

reach them when the harder to turn them into flour than for white okcorns which is what a lot of

people have in different places like further south in some cases are especially in maybe more like

in in Europe they're in um the UK there's a lot of white acorns but we have red acorns which have

about 30% fat in them which is amazing but that means it's harder to turn them into a flour that's

useful so I essentially crack them open I mean I dry them I crack them open I I put them in a pot

bring it to a boil leave it for about 12 hours pour it out do the same thing again then

continue for about a week until they taste good and actually sometimes sometimes I've given

them to people and people think that the less lead shakeorns case better than the more

leech ones so so maybe they just need some a little bit of that tendon but I think if you're

eating them a lot a lot of them then it makes sense to reach them a bit more

so then I don't know if I've ever had an acorn flour I've always kind of felt like

acorns are more like pig food but I know it can be done and that it just takes work to you know

do it like the the process that you just described when you're all done you have a

a piece of sorts a what a paste well for me for me they're the whole acorns okay I use them

essentially like like beans oh or like a like a rice almost but a big big big piece of rice and

stuff okay all right my use of them and uh do they charge do they look like a fatty rice

sit in yes oh okay all right we got just a couple minutes left um does anybody else have

anything they want to say to kind of wrap up grow our own food for today

I think the thing that we really haven't touched on at all is how necessary it is for the

earth for us to be growing our own food because you know caring for the planet is such an essential

part of having a place to live so while lots of people want to spend money on a gym pass

and go work out on equipment every day if we pick up tools and shovels and we put that

energy into the earth exactly we get a wonderful body workout and beautiful food

and so looking at those places Paul where we can take the energy resources that we put somewhere

not useful and put them into growing our own food then we create a commodity based on shifting value

and caring for the earth I think that along those lines because so much of my

passion of this stuff that I do comes from like how do we solve these pollution problems

and uh I think I'm I'm gonna make a statement I think is true but I could be wrong I think

half of the world's pollution is rooted in our food and if you

and and and so many people want to go and fight a fight with a bunch of politicians and corporations

and whatnot to clean that up I really think that if you get the food from your garden that

cleans it up and so I I mean I think it would be I mean the plus the other thing is is that there's

a lot of anxieties these days about so many different things and I kind of feel like the pressure

to people to get a job so they can pay their bills so they can finally solve financial problems

so they also need to get a better paying job and so on and so forth you know and they got to

pay for the food and and they have a family and if they they have to feed all these people

and so they need a job that pays even more and and the cycle is kind of endless it just seems so

very very stressful I kind of feel like what I want for these people to do is grow a garden

and I want to talk about a garden that's really easy and pretty much free and as opposed to

how most people are advocating spending $20,000 to grow $5,000 or the food or putting in

a 500 hours to get $5,000 of the food in which case it's like what is that $10 an hour I would much

rather advocate for something where they will actually save like $5,000 per person in their household

by having a very simple garden and it won't even take up very much space and yes it will

offend Alexander's mom and it's like but you know tell her to stop looking at it or something

but so this picture we're looking at right here I'm growing this garden on a very narrow shelf

of solid rock and so people complain about play or sand and it's like oh I got you beat I've

grown this on rock this is a solid rock and it's like I think that this is sitting on something that's

about I think I'm going to guess it's seven feet wide and so I've planted these hogal cultures

that are 11 feet tall on a shelf that's seven a seven foot wide rock if I remember you had to

bring that soil from other parts of the lab right I did I did from so this is base camp

which is a solid rock the lab has deep alluvial soils but I think two thirds so there's a lot of

logs that we found on site and most of the dirt like material came from the same property there's a

sand pit off in one corner and so we brought a bunch of that over but we did bring some soil down

from the lab in a dump truck it's true yeah so um but it's you know at the same time I kind of

feel like while the amount of work we put in to building this hogal culture would be unacceptable

to most people I suppose um the key is is that you know there's a lot of food in this picture

and we're growing it on solid rock yeah you don't have to go rock sounds kind of impossible

um but you know we did a thing and so uh but the great thing is it's 11 feet tall so

we we placed seven feet of shelf with 22 feet of garden 11 feet on this side and 11 feet on the

other side yes and it lasts forever to I mean not forever exactly but it lasts many many more years

from from now the effort that you put into it I think so I think so hopefully yeah so um

is Miranda still here yep one step here okay Miranda do you have anything else then you

it seems like you you've been quite a long time uh you know maybe what do you have anything else

to add before we wrap up for today um no I like hearing from other people I know our climate

zones are a little bit different I've had a solar dryer and everything inside we have such

absolute humidity in the air here in the summer that I have to have fans I have to have electric

fans running for trying to dry anything it's a very big challenge to try and just use solar for

drying here um I do have you know I've had permaculture gardens going for about 11 years I love to

use cubicle culture usually I use it um to fill in ravines because I have five acres of land

with former corn and soy fields and so we have in there all on um at probably a 15 to 20 degree

angle on heavy clay soil in the hills and so we have to try and repair those ravines and so I do

google culture there to get a slow breakdown of nutrients going into the soil and you know not

letting everything else erode so I have used that um I like to hear what works for everybody else

and I don't think there's any one method that works for everyone so I think we have to like

really work at what works good in this area what works good in urban environment what works good

on heavy clay soil so yeah I think it's good to share ideas yeah I'm glad that we're not all

required to grow it the way that Alexandra's mom would be comfortable with um and uh and I

I think that each of us is an artisan in our own way and the way that you know so when we grow

food where we each have our own philosophy set scenario an artistic way of going about doing it

that means that Paul my mother's kale is about ten times the size of the kale on your

google culture she grows really intently beautiful huge vegetables and that spacing is a lot

about what allows the vegetables to get really really beautiful in the ground so you know there's

different ways I think I should point out that I think that the picture you're looking at right

there I think that's from late May and so that kale is just getting started for the year

but in that in that picture but along the lines of what you just said about your mom I've

visited a garden last summer where um everything the guy did was it was organic it was all monocrops

and he had net over everything because he had insect trouble like like there's no tomorrow

but uh like he had onions that were almost the size of basketballs like they were like about like

that they were walla walla sweets um giant giant I've never seen an onion that big and uh and he had a

lot of so I kind of felt like when talking to him about gardening I feel like I'm the padawan and

he's the master because and I'm printed I do everything the opposite way that he does but clearly

I'm the doofus and he's the brilliant because he's producing more food than I am and he's also and

then also like I have I'm jelly about that those onions and there were a few other crops that he had

for it's like wow that is yeah my mom's beets are like that too so it is what I have learned to

to take from that agricultural model into the food forest is spacing so what we do now when there's

enough hands on deck because if there isn't enough hands on deck our gardens look very much like that

and they're all wild and they grow themselves every year and we do nothing except harvest

but when we have hands on deck to make spacing we've actually started doing a technique that I

call nesting so that around each of the plants that we value more than the other plants in the

food forest we create sort of a mulch nest we usually do it like a layer of compost and then a

layer of straw say around the base of that kale and I will either harvest the greens around it

for in the house or I'll just if I have too many I'll pull them out and put them down as green manure

and then give that one you know veggie plant it is more valuable to our households than

another one more space and then you start getting that ramp up too we call those rather nests we

call them donuts yeah yeah so we'll we'll basically make a ring around a plant that we like

that we want to keep now granted it keeps the guilds away but so much of our soil at base camp is

a very low quality soil and it's like so adding a donut of mulch around something will help it

get a little bit of a boost but if you look in this picture there's a lot of snowberry

and so what I do is I let the snowberry get to be like a foot or two tall and then I clip it

down to about four inches tall and the material I clip off is effectively a type of mulch but more

importantly a bunch of as the snowberry plant above grew the root system below grew to match it

and the snowberry is a nitrogen fixer so when I clip the plant short a lot of the root dies off

with putting a lot of nitrogen into the soil and then when I lay the mulch on the

Google culture then the part of the plant that I left behind helps to hold it up on the

Google culture so it didn't just roll off anyway sorry we were talking about mulch and yes

that's a whole other topic I'm also to bring up sometimes in the in these ecosystems like what

you're saying with the big insect population sometimes the soil is too rich or there's too much

sunlight too much water for a particular plant to actually thrive without any extra support

where they're they're actually adapted to these low competition ecosystems where you might

find them growing like maybe even on a rock ledge in the forest but then they're transported to

these sunny well-watered well-complicated gardens that should should be growing centrokes or

milkweed or any of those sunny opening rich soil riparian loving plants that we see

and like they're the ramps too in the forest it would be hard to grow ramps in full sunlight

because they they require but they're kind of delicate there they have they have this

short season between between kind of thought the ground is thought out they start growing

and then when they when the leaves on the trees come out they stop growing and then they're done for

a year these these patterns of growing that maybe we are we are looking at as much in the domestic

plan but there's still the plants still remember their original habitat so I um I think it's time

for us to wrap up mostly because I know that I told somebody that nine minutes ago I would be

outside and and going with them to Cooper Cabin um so I'm gonna I'm gonna but thank you all for coming

and and helping us to make this a nice little panel discussion of of growing food I saw a lot of

chat going by and if if I'd have been thinking about it I would have said Andreas can you pick out

something from the chat for us to talk about or something but but I think we uh we filled that time

very very well with lots of of fun things so if you like this sort of thing come on out of the

forums at permis.com where we talk about growing our own food home-steading and permaculture all the time

thanks Paul thank you put Paul's brain on your plot do you have a hunk of land but don't know

where to start do you have a world-changing permaculture idea and you need some feedback do you feel

like the guy in overalls man explicably hold the keys to all your wildest permaculture in home-steading

dreams well you're probably wrong but if you want to give it a go anyway you can hire Paul for

a consultation he will be all yours for a whole entire hour schedule your Paul

Versace in today at permis.com slash consult permis.com slash consult