16. How to Start Gardening for Self-Sufficiency with Huw Richards

Imagine stepping into your backyard to be greeted by a thriving garden, bursting with the fruits of your own labor – a dream Hugh, a young permaculture enthusiast, turned into reality. Join me, Shawn James, as I engage with Hugh about his transformation from a family plot in Wales to a seven-acre canvas of biodiversity. We'll share stories of community-driven farming, and I'll reveal how my new book marries the art of gardening with the science of cooking, thanks to insights from Chef Sam Black. Our conversation promises to be a treasure trove for anyone looking to embrace the virtues of self-sufficiency and unearth the potential of their own green space, no matter the size.

As we wander through the world of gardening, we'll touch upon soil's pivotal role as the foundation of a bountiful harvest, sharing secrets on crafting nutrient-rich compost and the marvels of natural farming techniques. I'll share my firsthand experience with methods like Korean natural farming and the wonders of wood chips in creating a lush, productive garden bed. Discover how to coax the most out of nature's offerings and consider the benefits of a tree and grass-centric food system that can revolutionize the way we approach our own food production.

Wrapping up our pastoral journey, we'll reflect on the broader implications of gardening – how it anchors us to nature and knits communities together. I'll share perspectives on community sufficiency and the transformative power of seed saving. Gain practical advice on converting even the smallest of lawns into a food haven and learn why every setback in gardening is but a stepping stone to greater yield. For seasoned gardeners and aspiring green thumbs alike, this episode is a heartfelt invitation to cultivate not just a garden, but a life enriched by the bounty and balance of nature. Join us, as we plant ideas that will grow into a legacy of resilience, taste, and togetherness.

The Self-Sufficiency Garden Book:

https://www.regenerative.press/book-store/p/pre-order-self-sufficiency-garden
YouTube:
https://youtube.com/@HuwRichards?si=8HoBRYecCV87X3L9
Instagram:
instagram.com/huwsgarden

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hey everybody, welcome back to the cabin. I'm Sean James, the host of the my Stuffer Lines podcast, and I'm here to talk about gardening today, which is not a topic that I often talk about, but if you've been following me, then you see that I've been gardening my entire life, and specifically growing fruits and vegetables, and because of that, I like to follow accounts and watch other people do it, and came across Hughes content on Instagram probably first, and then YouTube, I'm not sure two or three years ago maybe. So I've been following around along in the background and finally got a chance to reach out to you, and we're going to have a little conversation about growing your own food today. So, hugh, if you wanted to introduce yourself to the audience, yeah, thanks for inviting me.

Speaker 2: 0:47

I'm honored to be representing Team Grow Foods on your podcast. Yeah, I'm a 24 year old gardener. I'm incredibly passionate about all things permaculture. I love that as a way of approaching design and decision making in terms of creating a more kind of like self-sufficient lifestyle. I fell into gardening because I just grew up with it. I grew up on a small holding my dad was very interested in. It wasn't like catering a complete diet, but we had cows, we had sheep, pigs, chickens, ducks, an orchard, all of the like and, of course, a vegetable garden. So I started gardening when I was three. When I was 12, a friend of mine was making YouTube videos about gaming. So he had his phone and he was filming with one hand and gaming on the other. He had about 200 views and I thought whoa, 200 views? Well, back then my voice hadn't broken, so it's like whoa 200 views.

Speaker 2: 1:56

That's amazing and I live in a very rural part of Wales, which is in the United Kingdom, so it's a country that is separate to England and a lot of people ask is it near London? So it's around about five hours away, fire, car or train journey. It's very, very slow train, but it's beautiful. It goes through the mountains and my growing zone is roughly kind of as per growing zone eight, but I was looking at the average last frost dates and we seem to match the average first and last frost dates of more. So zone five B slash six, which is quite interesting to see. We just don't get the cold as much in the winter. So yeah, temperate climate and I started making videos and the rest is history.

Speaker 1: 2:50

So 12, you said it started at 12. So 12 years you've been uploading videos.

Speaker 2: 2:55

Yeah, exactly Half of my life. Yeah, yeah, I don't know where it's gone.

Speaker 1: 3:01

That's great. Yeah, so you've. It looks like recently you've changed, you've acquired your own so so it seems that a lot of your content, up until a certain point, was filmed at your father's place or at your, your family home.

Speaker 2: 3:14

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 3:16

That's that's recently changed.

Speaker 2: 3:19

I haven't been living there for about four years. It's about half an hour away and I have this new project which is just starting to enter its third year. It's on a seven acre parcel of land. So a friend of my colleagues got a homestead and they were like we've got too much land. Would you like to use one of the fields and go into like a long term agreement? And I was like, yes, please, it's only 10 minutes away. So that was an appeal.

Speaker 2: 3:49

And it's this beautiful south facing field around a mile from the coast. So I use a lot of sea reading the garden, obviously, because that's a fantastic resource. And yeah, it's just, it's finally at that stage where it's time to say goodbye to the old garden and have this, this new garden, which is kind of like the main part is this half size. In the UK we have allotments, so it's a half size lot, not a lot. So that's 125 square meters and so I don't know the square feet roughly 1300 square feet or half the size of a doubles tennis court just within the boundaries, and then and then it's the rest of the field where we're doing a lot of interesting projects.

Speaker 1: 4:39

So that's what interests I think probably a lot of people now like used to be. Of course, that if you were in Britain, as my ancestors, where you came to North America for opportunity and in a lot of cases land and land ownership, and you know the allotments that what was allocated was, you know, in Ontario about 100 acres was a typical homesteading plot, and then as you go east it was 600 or west it was 640 acres, so a section, so a mile by mile. So you can imagine coming from Britain and then having this opportunity to this vast land and that could. What do you do with that? But things have changed dramatically.

Speaker 1: 5:18

Prices of real estate globally but here I can speak specifically have gone up to a point where most people can't afford anything. So I just today released a video or filmed a video talking about what you can do on small acreage and you know how small an acreage you can actually grow enough food for for a family on, and it is. It's a lot smaller than people realize. We haven't had to experiment with that here in North America until recently, but of course people like yourselves have been perfecting this for hundreds of years, growing in small spaces and working as a community too, so somebody produces one thing and somebody else produces the other. Yeah, so it's quite different, but in on the on the other hand, quite similar.

Speaker 2: 6:04

Yeah, I'm wondering, like, what is for you, like in terms of normal grade, like pasture land? What average price per per acre is it around you?

Speaker 1: 6:15

So interesting. So I, like I've kind of specialized throughout my entire life with degraded or less desirable land. So I've always purchased land or were operated in areas that were poor for agriculture and even for tourism. So quite cheap comparatively. But just to put it in perspective, like right now, if you were to buy a piece of property, say two or three acres here that's just bush, not agriculture lands a few hundred thousand dollars Can you get a loan.

Speaker 1: 6:48

Yeah, yeah, and if you should, I go down to agricultural zones, well, even across Canada, in somewhat desirable places. So I was looking at some land down where my families from down in Nova Scotia, indianapolis Valley, and it was. It's 400,000 for 40 acres of fairly decent growing land, but that's probably half of what I would pay here in Ontario.

Speaker 2: 7:16

Yeah, it's. It's hard because I think that you know there is a lot of land out there and I kind of especially, if you like, look at cities now I kind of wish that it isn't practical, but I wish that everyone had access to their own like little patch of land to just do whatever they want. I think it's so important.

Speaker 1: 7:40

It's funny because a common comment and I get this on almost every video that not everybody can do that. If everybody did that, there'd be no land left. Well, that's simply not true. If you look at how much food you can grow on a small parcel and the fact that you'll steward it better if you owned it and you would do everything you can to improve that land like, I think it's quite the opposite. I think if we all had a little quarter acre parcel, it'd be amazing how much food we could produce and how much higher a standard of living we would have.

Speaker 2: 8:07

personally, yeah, yeah it's, it's kind of that there's. There's a such a power in having a small space. It's a bit like I mentioned cities. If it's a bit like that skyscraper mentality, when you have a lack of land, you kind of like go up, you go vertical.

Speaker 2: 8:27

I think in terms of if you only have a small gardening garden, yes, you can go vertical, but I think I think where, where the yields really come from, is just like you, because you're forced with a confined amount of space, you have to be a lot more clever with your planning. What I found since actually downgrading to a garden is around three or four times as small. I reckon it's just as productive because I am a little bit more yeah, I'm spending a bit more time thinking about it because I don't have the luxury of opening my wings and I'll do a bit of this, bit of that. I'm like, oh, I need this to make a difference, and so it's been. I've quite enjoyed a little bit of a perspective shift in that and I've been blown away by how much you can grow in this little space.

Speaker 1: 9:18

Let's talk about that quickly. They're not quickly. You wrote a book and is that it's coming out or it's out now?

Speaker 2: 9:26

It's coming out. So it's coming out in the UK in early March, sadly, because it was like right at the only went to the printers at Christmas time. It's coming out because it has to come across to the US. It's coming out in mid May, but I am I am selling it myself on my website, regenerativepress. So if you get it through there it'll actually come earlier than the US edition. The only thing that's going to change is how you spell, how you spell certain crops and certain words, really, so you can get it a bit earlier in time for your season.

Speaker 1: 10:04

Can you tell us a little bit about what the book is about?

Speaker 2: 10:07

Yeah, so it's a book that I. It's a project that I've done with my colleague, sam. On Instagram he's known as chef Sam Black. He is a professional chef by trade and I stole him from the kitchen and I showed him the world of gardening, which was crazy. He was a bit like a fish out of water to begin with. He was like what? Another tea break, yeah.

Speaker 2: 10:35

But we get on like a house on fire and so he's seen the perspective from what the land produces and we have this thing where, you know, I think a lot of restaurants have it backwards. Very often they're demanding the producer, the farmer, the fish, the hunter, what they want, whereas for us it's like we restaurants or a diet, should respond to what the land provides at that certain time. So, yeah, it's seasonality, but it's it's seasonality without any excuse. Of course there are different preserving methods to extend those seasons, to extend the flavors, to have a fusion of those different seasons, but we were just kind of in this agreement that Looking and growing or the producing of food is very much seen as two very separate disciplines, but for us it's the same thing.

Speaker 2: 11:33

So cooking starts when you sow the first seed or you fire that arrow and gardening finishes when the harvest is in your belly. It's one continuous process. We wanted to create a book catering to people who have a smaller space so it's smaller than the average back-size suburban garden here in the UK a half-size lot and plot just to show people that you can grow a lot of food. We grew almost 600 kilos of food in the first 9, 10 months, so in terms of a conversion that's around 1,400, 1,500 pounds of food.

Speaker 1: 12:16

Any idea how many calories that would be?

Speaker 2: 12:20

No, so I've got a lot of fun calculations to do now. We grow over 50 different crops, so a big thing for me is to ensure that you have flavor and diversity of flavor. You don't want to just be growing. It could have been technically more productive if I just stuck to four or five staple crops, but you would get slightly bored out of your mind. I wanted to make sure that I had lots of options, so we're growing all sorts of herbs, all sorts of vegetables, mainly annual focused.

Speaker 2: 12:52

So my next project, now that the book is actually done and I have a little bit of this is dangerous. Actually, I have a little bit of spare time. I'm going to do some calculations, working out what the value was, working out approximate calories. However, I don't like to go down the calorie tunnel vision because if you look at a lot of the food that you get from the supermarket, nutritional density has been declining from our foods for many, many decades. So, compared to the 70s or 80s, you're having to, in some cases, eat two or three times the amount to get the same quantity of nutrients, but you're bulking out lots more calories because, in terms of the supermarket, they pay farmers based on weights, not by nutritional density. So that's a really important thing I'd like to highlight.

Speaker 1: 13:47

Yeah, that's important. Yeah, for sure. I focused the opposite on calories, first because I'm looking at it from a self-reliance perspective. So my philosophy is secure your calories, secure what you need to survive, your macros. But also because we're very health conscious and we try to do everything organically. We try to get all of our nutrients from our food and from our surroundings. Then we can diversify in order to provide those things, and a lot of that can be provided in our cases going to be perennial based.

Speaker 2: 14:19

Yeah, so my case is. With this garden, it's enough vegetables for two adults to be completely self-sufficient year-round in terms of their vegetable needs, and that's what I'm trying to focus. It's like I would love a stage where I'm completely reliant, I'm off-grids, I'm not dependent on anything, I can look after myself and I can look after my family. That's the end goal. I think my perspective in terms of nutrition is that micronutrients are just as important as macro, especially in the long term. There's a lot of hidden malnourishment in our populations, where people are getting plenty of calories, but there's a lot of issues with the lacking of the micronutrients, and so it's something important for me. Moving forward is to tread the line between filling your belly and feeling full, because it's not a fun place to be in a constant state of hunger, but also to make sure that you're not going to have any long-term implications from that.

Speaker 1: 15:31

Yeah, and it's not only a lack of variety and composition of the food itself, but the nutrients that are missing from the soils. I'm not sure what the soils are like where you are, but here, because of the industrial food system, the way we basically rate the land, the soils eroding, but it's also been depleted. And it's funny because I told the story a couple of times, but back in, I remember 2010 geography, which would have been what would that be like 1985 or 86? I remember my geography teacher telling us that the most, what we thought was the most productive land in the nearby marshes where almost all of our vegetables were grown, that soil had been depleted of nutrients by decades prior to then and that you couldn't grow anything in it without fertilizer and supplements.

Speaker 1: 16:22

But you drive by it and it's perfectly flat, it's a flood plain, it's black, black, deep soil and you would think, wow, that's rich soil. But that's simply not the case. So we're eating food that is growing in this soil that does not have the vitamins, the minerals present in order for the food that those plants to uptake. But you can't see that just looking at it. You hear the criticisms that our food is just grown for transportability, basically, and perishability. But you also are not getting the nutrients that you think you're getting. It's not just that, they're kind of bland compared to what you can grow in your garden.

Speaker 2: 17:03

Yeah, and there's also that link between flavor and nutrition as well. That's why partly why homegrown food yes, you put in the work, but it tastes so good. Or wild meats taste so like venison or something like that taste infinitely better than something that a farmed venison same with fish. So we're losing this. We're becoming kind of divorced from the link between nutrition and flavor. We're like fast food. You've got all those artificial flavors. It's really confusing our mindsets, and I wouldn't call industrial farming farming. It's just mining, it's very exploitative. Farming is where you like steward and you care for the land, and that's something like. For me is paramount, because if I want to be able to produce food for myself, I need to make sure that the soil is in a good enough state to keep on providing that, and so it creates a situation where you have to have a mutual respect, otherwise it will just come back to bite you in the future.

Speaker 1: 18:10

Well, in creating a fairly complex system where industrial farming is very or extractive farming, whatever you want to call it is very linear, very simple. Here's the input and here's the output, where a regenerative farm or a historical farm would have multiple crops, multiple animal species on that. How those are all integrated provides a healthy ecosystem. But that's lacking and I talked about that on this video that I just made. That land being so expensive, first of all, and being forced into less desirable, degraded land like I have, there's no opportunity to have enough livestock in the system that would provide the manure, for example, to help improve those soils. So you have to start looking at alternative ways to do that and what's different like these and I did mention also my two properties they were both homesteaded back in the 1800s and they were both abandoned because they were so unproductive.

Speaker 1: 19:11

But what we have now, first of all, is the wealth, but also the transportation and the knowledge to improve soil by bringing in inputs from somewhere else where it wouldn't have been practical to, let's say, get a bunch like a truckload of straw or hay from the prairies here, a couple of thousand miles away, and bring that in to add organic material to the soil. They couldn't have done that in the past, so I'm not sure how like where you're getting I mean seaweed. That's a great resource to have nearby. A lot of us don't have really anything other than what we're going to be able to plant in order, such as cover crops, and they're just bulky materials to build that soil. It's harder to get the manure in, but it's possible.

Speaker 2: 19:57

It is possible. I think there's a few quick wins, like my kind of background is a whole permaculture side of things. And so there's this thing. Like everyone was like, oh no, don't use any fossil fuels, like I get why. But in permaculture it's like if you're going to design a landscape that is going to be like the whole idea is that it's going to permanently kind of be there, or the idea is that you're going to provide food that in a very sustainable way, like then it's absolutely okay using, you know, getting a digger that's running on gas to create that, because the long term benefits is far going to outweigh the short term. And so if you're setting up a homestead and it's really poor quality land, I see nothing wrong with say, like a really good one is to get kind of organic or natural chicken manure pellets. They're like fertility bombs. So what I'd maybe suggest doing is applying those, growing some kind of covercrop or green manure to start to build up the biomass, and then your soil the following year will be in a much better state, to then start producing food. So, yeah, anywhere where you can think okay, yes, I'm going to have, because nothing can be perfect.

Speaker 2: 21:17

So it's a case of looking at what is the most effective for like the least impact, and I like to look at my community to see what is available, and so I collect a lot of kind of vegetable scraps from local cafes and restaurants. I think used coffee grounds are fantastic as well. A lot of people worry about them being high in acidic, but they lose all of their acidity during the process of extracting the coffee. So it's a pH of about 6.7, which is fine for the vast majority of things that you grow. And then, if you're trying to get kind of, if you're just looking at your own family scale, the next stage I would look at in terms of fertility building would be introducing chickens Chickens as a tool for composting, transferring all of that waste into manure compost. You're going to be adding dry leaves or grass or whatever for the bedding, and then you start to get that bulk material Plus. As a side effect, you start getting protein into your diet in the form of eggs.

Speaker 1: 22:29

Yeah and then. So I think two good takeaways there. One that look at what you have available in your area and take advantage of it. In my case, I've actually literally been harvesting moose droppings.

Speaker 2: 22:41

Oh, wow, that's great, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 22:44

Yeah, I mean, that's the resource I have. I have plentiful moose. I don't have other animals nearby. But the other thing is to really focus that energy. So if you have pellets, for example, or if you have chickens, it's going to create a certain amount of manure. People always were looking for my compost piles. For example, from my kitchen scraps I've got like half an acre garden. A few kitchen scraps are not creating enough compost to make much of a difference in the increasing of the fertility of this land. But I'm surrounded by forests. From trees I'm cutting down and improving the habitat by making wildlife clearings and allowing sunlight to reach the forest floor, which is causing regeneration. As I'm cutting up that wood, I'm creating sawdust and wood chips and that's my main resource. I can build a lot of bulk. Put a lot of carbon in the soil.

Speaker 1: 23:40

But if I also chip the green stuff, like the saplings and the leaves and all that and the ferns and all those other things, I have almost a perfect mix of carbon and nitrogen in order to create that compost. And then everything else I put into that system, like fish, remains actual bones from the animals that I harvest and the blood from the animals, the urine that we collect, because we don't put it down a septic system or into a sewer system. We use that urine which is really higher in nitrogen. So we have lots of inputs, but then we concentrate that. So instead of spreading that evenly across a quarter acre about two quarter acre gardens, plus another probably half an acre of orchard and berry bushes and so on, each plant, just feed that plant directly. First, get lots of nutrients to that plant and that becomes robust. And even that plant, as it's growing especially if it's perennial bushes and trees they're dropping leaves and adding their own organic material over time. So again, instead of broadcasting your nutrients, really focus them, if you can.

Speaker 2: 24:49

Yeah, I do kind of a scaled down version with some of the annuals as well. Instead of worrying about adding fertility like a layer to the whole bed, if my resources are quite stretched, I can just add fertility to the base of every seedling that I transplant. And the other thing as well is looking at kind of certain weeds that are growing in your area or utilizing techniques such as Korean natural farming, where you can harvest a bunch of grass. You put it in a bucket, add some water, add a bit of leaf mold or something, and you can leave it for six to 12 months. Then you strain it.

Speaker 2: 25:26

A lot of people get caught up because it's oh it's anaerobic, but I don't actually believe anaerobic is always bad narrative. I've seen really powerful effects from it and what you get is a fantastic liquid feed that you can supplement your plants if they're struggling a bit. And you mentioned wood chip as well. Wood chip is incredibly exciting as a resource. There's a farmer here in the UK, a guy called Ian Tolhurst, and he's been farming I think it's like 20, 30 years, maybe more, and his only input is wood chip and he's just growing annual crops and his soil is fantastic. He says he gets around his livestock earthworms. He has around 10 to 15 million earthworms per acre and I think that's really interesting just using wood chip and getting a huge, huge amount of success from that.

Speaker 1: 26:28

Yeah, my best potatoes this year are the ones that I missed harvesting, that were in a compost pile. That was mainly wood chips and it's just unbelievable productivity out of that and I know I didn't get all the potatoes out of it again this year, so I know I'm going to get another crop there and they don't seem to get disease because it's just so rich in such a rich fungal and bacterial environment that it's just incredible how well everything grows there.

Speaker 2: 26:55

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 26:56

And leaves, of course. I've lived in a forest, so we have plenty of leaves as well Twin leaves and wood chips. Yeah, I mean, what I did discover, mind you, is that when I put the wood chips too thickly, too deeply on my raised beds, that they did steal the nitrogen and I got very poor growth. If I didn't plant the plants deep enough into what had already been composted, if they were too close to the surface, they just sat there, stagnant for most of the year.

Speaker 2: 27:24

Yeah, so in that situation if you come across rameal chip wood? No, I don't think so. So ramulchip wood is super cool. It originates from France, and ramulchip wood is woodchip made only from kind of the smaller branches of trees, so anything under around two, two and a half inches in diameter, because this is where the greatest concentration of nutrients are in a tree. You do it in the off season, so you do it in the dormant season, and so you're not taking the stemwood, which is more like a carbon to nitrogen ratio of 500 to one. You're chipping the smaller branches and what you find? The carbon to nitrogen ratio goes anywhere from around 70 to one, and the smaller chips can even be 30 to one, which is perfect for composting. And so if you use ramulchip woods for your applications for growing annual plants, you're going to see a lot less issues from nitrogen robbery. But nitrogen robbery mainly happens where the woodchip is touching the surface of the soil, so try not to incorporate it. But if you are creating ramulchip wood, devote that just to your annuals. It's really, really going to help. And then you can use more of the stemwood woodchip elsewhere, be it for pathways that you can then compost down and after two years, pick it up, mulch your beds with it and anything else.

Speaker 2: 28:57

So, yeah, I found ramulchip wood is also great for generating heat for creating hot beds out of season. I created one in it. It's around five by five foot three foot high. Just adding ramulchip wood, a little bit of duck bedding just in the middle is like a nitrogen core and some used coffee grounds and it generated heat for four months. You just put a cold frame on top and a bit of compost and you can grow in it, and that's something that I'm very excited about in the future, because I'm looking at my climate. What grows really well in my climate? Two things grass and trees, and so that is what my food system in terms of when I get my own homestead or farm in the future that's my focus is kind of a tree and grass-centric food system, and everything else is designed around that.

Speaker 1: 29:54

So season extension, like the hotbed and cold frame you mentioned, and you have hoopos as well. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 30:04

Yeah, a really useful thing. Just to know, for anyone who's maybe listening to this and is thinking about gardening, there's a saying that, like a layer of plastic, will extend your season by a month on either side. So if you've got a really short season, then extending it four weeks on either side of the year is quite valuable.

Speaker 1: 30:27

It's amazing that you I think you're probably maybe at a higher latitude than I am. I've got to look at that. But it is amazing because you hear these different zones and you assume that your zone eight is going to be able to grow more food than my zone four. But it really comes a lot of times down to that first and last frost dates and, as you mentioned, they're very similar to where I am here. So the zone just means that I have plants that might not survive the winter, that would survive there because of the depth of the cold, not the length of the cold.

Speaker 2: 31:00

It's really funny because obviously I get a lot of comments on my YouTube and Instagram and I very often get comments of people saying, oh well, it's all good for you, I only have five months of growing season. I'm like, yeah, me too. It's so funny. And yeah, it's interesting because there is a funny joke. Please don't take offense.

Speaker 2: 31:26

But it's like how do you know that someone's a gardener's North American and they tell you what zone they are? Because it's not really a thing in the UK, because obviously it's a much smaller geographical region, but it is important to look at. But I think, rather than especially with an annual setup, the only things that I overwin to are annuals that are really hardy. So, like kale, certain varieties of kale, without protection, might survive down to minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit. If you're growing it, then under a polytunnel, that really does make a difference. So, yeah, the only difference in terms of my gardening is I can probably overwinter more than I'll be able to overwinter more than you in an annual setup.

Speaker 2: 32:16

But, on the converse, you guys get warmer summers and more sunlight. We're in a very kind of you know. If it goes above, oh, I don't. Actually I can't do the conversion. But I see, like someone I've watched, james Progioni, based in New Jersey, so not too dissimilar with the climate than me. However, someone's a very long, he can grow amazing tomatoes outside. Like I am very lucky to get a tomato harvest outside because it's very wet, it's very grey and it's quite cool, and so it's interesting just having an open discussion where at first people make assumptions about an environment and then suddenly realize, oh, maybe they've actually, maybe it's actually not that bad.

Speaker 1: 33:07

Yeah, it might be in the Goldilocks zone, even though you wouldn't think it, because you look outside or you see my content in the winter and it's quite cold and quite snowy. But then you look at David the Good who down in the south and there's lots of things you can't grow there that we can grow here. You know like there's limitations everywhere and for us here a lot of times the snow load, the depth of the snow makes a difference and actually extends the zone. So I have some zone six and above perennials that I can grow here because they're covered in two or three feet of snow all winter so that we get minus 30 or 40, but that doesn't hit the roots of that plant.

Speaker 2: 33:45

Yeah, yeah, the insulation is great. And also a lot of people have been asking about if hotbeds are suitable for such cold temperatures and provided that you make them slightly wider mine like six by six foot and still three foot deep. You know, you can, you could even, I think you get, because if you're under a lot of snowfall, the problem that we have, we can't do it in the ground because we get so much rain that it's always going to be soaked, or if you can dig a hole and it's dry, and then you can use the snow to act as an insulation.

Speaker 1: 34:21

What bears a fantastic yeah, it's common here not common but they're used here within a greenhouse because you can get that. Well, that can go both ways too. You need to insulate in a lot of cases because you don't have that snow. Then if you're inside a greenhouse or a polytunnel that you keep up for the winter, if you can keep it up through the winter with the snow loads, but so you're letting that cold get directly to it. But we get in a typical year we'll get fall rains or we'll get that transition where you get rain and some wet snow and that freezes, then it thaws. Some years like this, the El Niño year, where we have I just got a couple more inches of snow, but we were down to bare ground a few days ago and then we got some intense cold. So ironically it looks like, okay, we have a mild winter, but what that is doing is not insulating the ground so the frost can go deeper.

Speaker 1: 35:12

I remember back in the be the early 90s I was working down in Toronto and working on this, some specialty copper and lead work that I was doing as a sheet metal worker and we had a specialist from the UK over teaching and me apprenticing under him to install lead on these historic buildings. And that year we hardly had any snow but we had intense cold. And he kept saying to me he's coming from Britain. He says why are your roads, why are they so bad, like so pothold and rough? Because he was riding his bike around and it's like that particular year that frost went down seven feet because it was so cold and we had no snow.

Speaker 1: 35:53

And typical here, like the building code, requires us to go down at least 42 inches, so that's the standard. So that's where you get into those zones. So, and I just go back to that quickly so the zone zone four I'm not sure if it's minus 30 Celsius or minus 35 Celsius is what they would call that, the limitations that that zone causes. But what that means is that a plant that has a root system and a stock, if it's above ground, can withstand cold down to that temperature before it dies. So in an annual system like you're talking, like we were talking about, like you mentioned, annual vegetables doesn't matter. It's really just about the length of the growing season, but those perennials and I focus on fruit trees and nut trees and berry trees or bushes. So I have to be aware of the zones in that regard, because I want these plants to live for 20 years or more.

Speaker 2: 36:49

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's. It's kind of like the idea of with with annuals you're trying to grow as much as possible during the good season and then preserve it for then the winter season. My, my colleague, sam, he is amazing at fermentation. That's his specialty and so he's always showing me all of these fantastic different fermentation methods. He's now even making it. He's making his own soy sauce and stuff. Now. It's amazing and and from from just different beans that you can. You can grow in the garden. So it's really cool to to see. I think. I think we're a little bit behind in the UK about with fermentation, but it's really catching on, I think, in terms of a tool in the future. That's one of the most exciting ones in in in improving resilience.

Speaker 2: 37:45

The other thing that I think is perhaps the most underrated skill if you're looking to be more self-sufficient from a garden is actually about how you cook with things in the kitchen.

Speaker 2: 37:58

A lot of people kind of have to follow recipes and they'll look at a recipe and they think, oh no, I don't, I don't have enough carrots to do this, so I'll just do something else completely different. But I think one of the best things that you can do is is looking at things, starting to work out and learn things like flavor theory and look at what goes well together and what can substitute each other. So most of the cooking that I do at home I'd say about 80, 90% of the cooking that I do I don't follow a recipe. I just go to a garden, I harvest what I want and I've got a load of different spices and stuff and I just make something up and I test it as I go nine times out of 10, it tastes absolutely delicious. Sometimes it's like, yeah, it's all right. But kind of Starting to practice with that in the kitchen to look at how you can be flexible and not be so dependent on recipes has really been quite a seismic shift in terms of my own approach to being more resilient.

Speaker 1: 39:06

Well, and that comes down to the quality ingredients too. The better the food, the less you have to do to it. It's been a bit of a disservice, I think, to the wild food, not going to call it an industry but hobby or whatever you would call it. It seems to be always just a supplement. So, yes, you can harvest forage berries from the woods but then get it home and add equal parts of white sugar into something palatable. So, learning to use the ingredients as natural as possible, but also knowing the substitutions, as you mentioned, how do you get the best flavor out of that category of food instead of that specific one? And I'm assuming that's all in your book then, is it like your?

Speaker 2: 39:52

Yeah. So that's a chapter that Sam explores. It's more formulaic-based cooking and he's got a chart which is every single vegetable and every single way to cook it. So if you're like trying to cook a new vegetable, you can look at how do you roast it, oil it, ferment it, all of these different things just to make it as easy as possible. And the thing is, we have to understand what are vegetables, all vegetables, they used to just be what we call weeds or wild plants that have been, over thousands of years, domesticated, selected for providing taste.

Speaker 2: 40:31

There's a really, really good book I love by Dan Barber called the Third Plate. Dan Barber is a chef and he has a fantastic attitude to food, and one of the things that really struck out to me is he's part of a project. I think it's about saving and creating new varieties, all just open-pollinated early varieties. One of the things that he said I think it was some project. It could be wrong, but it was along the lines of he was trying to create a new variety of butternut squash and he asked the plant breeder. He said look, what we're selecting for is we want it to taste better. We want a butternut squash that tastes really good.

Speaker 2: 41:20

And the plant breeder was stumped and was like well, in all of my years I've never been asked to grow something based on the characteristic of flavor, which is quite amazing. His whole life he's been asked to grow things that are higher, yielding better, bigger and forgetting about the flavor side of things. So yeah, I just I know that was a slight tangent, but I think it shows how our attitude has become so detached from where we started off with trying to select things that are more palatable, more flavorful, easier to digest, and it's now we've overshot that, and I was at the. In Oxford in England there's an annual farming conference called the Oxford Real Farming Conference and there's a beautiful quote that I heard there. I only just got back from it a couple of days ago, but a beautiful quote I heard is there's no such thing as junk food. There's either junk or food, and I think that that's a really nice way of kind of saying that.

Speaker 1: 42:32

now, you mentioned. Yeah, I like that growing for and focusing more on flavor which, as you mentioned earlier, that also the flavor profile typically comes, I was going to say, results in, but actually comes from the higher nutrient level. So that's where that flavor lies. But our focus as a species, I guess, on getting the most productivity, the most efficiency out of everything. First of all, I mean, obviously you have to feed the masses, but again, I think you can feed the masses on with smaller scale farming. But when you look around, I don't know what it's like there and it's not like this everywhere, but I'm always appalled at the amount of fellow land I'm talking about even the ditches between the roads or the, you know, the front yard of people's homes and so on.

Speaker 1: 43:26

There's so much bare ground, or so much ground that's that bear nature abores a vacuum, so it gets filled by something. But when we try to fill it with manmade items like concrete pavement, formal landscaping, grass, in particular here in North America, probably there as well those are just opportunities to grow food, that that squash that you're talking about, instead of trying to plant it in a massive field and getting highest yield, highest productivity out of it, that would just stick a little pile of chicken manure on a lawn and put a seed in that, or a couple of squash seeds, because that's all it takes. A little tiny pockets of nutrient, dense nutrients, and it grows, this mass of vine full of food, and it could be everywhere.

Speaker 2: 44:09

Yeah, that's what got me excited about gardening as a kid. You plant this tiny little seed and then in a few months later, you have tomatoes. And it's funny because when I'm when I'm my garden beds, I want to grow what I want to grow, and sometimes people get offended that I've harvest, that I pull out a dandelion because I don't want it and I chuck it on my compost and like, oh, did you know you could have eaten that dandelion? I'm like I could have, but it's disgusting and I'd rather go to that that I want to eat instead. And with regards to the like, the phylograph, like there is, there's more than enough space in terms of growing what we want to go, and I think I think this is something just that's important to be aware of.

Speaker 2: 44:54

I think, with large scale farming there and like looking at GMOs and all of these things, that they're too focused on the detail they're trying to find, like they're trying to find the whatever the word is, I forgot but they're trying to find that one thing that that's going to like solve everything.

Speaker 2: 45:13

And it's like part of the issue with with science or the science of nutrition, that they look at like one particular thing and then they'll create like a tablet for that and forget about, like nature is going to almost have something that provides that naturally in a food that also will happen to have the enzyme that actually makes it more bioavailable. And I think, in terms of the focus of like large scale farming, they're trying to like find like small, like this one variety that's going to make amazing productivity. I'm like, yeah, but my experience is, if you actually turn your focus to the soil rather than the variety, like look at the soil first, that is what makes the most positive impact in terms of in terms of that, the yields and also the nutritional quality, because who cares? Even if the yields are equal, you still probably got twice or three times as many nutrients.

Speaker 1: 46:12

Well, just look at the. You know the obesity pandemic and the epidemic. Epidemic. Yeah, it's kind of well, it is an epidemic, but it's become a pandemic because it spreads like a virus.

Speaker 1: 46:27

Yeah, yeah, you know you look at there's just so many flaws.

Speaker 1: 46:34

But if you look at the entire system, you look at where we're sort of headed as a species and all the restrictions that are down looking where there's more and more laws coming into effect and more mandates that we're forced to follow and less freedoms, and I think the ultimate goal is, you know the right thing to do. We need to kind of save the planet. We need to stop extracting to the point of no return. But the solution to me is at the individual level, and I think guys like yourself and I'm trying to be this as well is that taking responsibility for your own food, but also looking at your plot of land and doing as much as you can to make that as healthful and productive and satisfying and ecologically sustainable. To me, that's the savior of the world. That's the savior of the planet and humanity Like. Let's focus on that instead of having to have it come from top down. Let's be the people at the bottom for setting a good example and increasing the abundance of our space and then of the planet.

Speaker 2: 47:45

I'm just curious, what got you into self-reliance?

Speaker 1: 47:52

Well, it's such a long story. Everything is always more complex than what it looks like from the outside. I explained it in multiple forms over, in different videos and different platforms. But if you could pinpoint one thing, that kind of turning point, Well, that's the part that's difficult, because calling it a turning point implies that it was an event that caused me to go down this path. But if I go all the way, back to my childhood, well back as a teenager, I was drawing the stars. What's that?

Speaker 2: 48:24

It was written at the stars.

Speaker 1: 48:28

Not so much. But I think some of us are just more natural. We're just more connected to the land innately, and not attracted to modernity. Maybe that's literally just like a social button that didn't get turned on in me when I'd rather be in nature. I'd rather interact with the natural environment than I would with a society of people. But anyway, to go back, I think if I look at the beginning of my gardening career, I was a teenager as well, but I also hunted and fished.

Speaker 1: 49:02

From a really young age I'd spent a lot of time in the woods. I saw everything as connected. I didn't see me as a gardener or a hunter or fisherman or a forager or shelter builder or whatever. I just saw myself as a community, member of this natural community. To me the gardening was the same as the hunting or the fishing. It was understanding life from a very basic level. Like you said, take that seed and what it becomes. To look in the water and see maybe the algae, and then seeing the tadpole feeding on the fish, the minnow feeding on the tadpole and the bigger fish feeding on that and then me feeding on the fish. I saw that a complete circle right from a young age. I wanted to fully participate in that. Myself reliance and self reliance in general, has been just a pushback on society. I'd rather live that, be part of that life cycle, be in the circle of life instead of just observing it from the outside.

Speaker 2: 50:03

I think if every child had a child like yours or mine, we'd have far fewer issues in society these days, because there's a lot coming out of just a pure disconnection from the natural world.

Speaker 1: 50:18

It's causing not just physical illness, it's causing mental illness on a massive scale and it's exponentially growing, it seems. I see that this divergence, this path that people are going down to more virtual living and to more urbanity, I think that's a real. I think we're going to realize the error of our ways generations from now, even though I think we're discovering it some of it now. But I think it's going to really impact the generations, even your age, my daughter's age, around your age. They're going to feel that impact and then we have to unwind it. I'd rather be an example of the unwinding now instead of waiting 15 years or 100 years.

Speaker 2: 51:01

That's why I like to just be in my garden, because I'm away from all that and I'm connected. It's fun because, in terms of gardening, I want to feed myself and it's an escape from society. But the thing that motivates me the most is curiosity. One of the things that I like telling people is that a garden, or even a homestead, can be an extension of your personality. You might see amazing examples online, but I think the danger that happens is that people end up copying without asking questions and one person's garden is going to be different to someone else's.

Speaker 2: 51:47

Every single garden has its only list of opportunities but also challenges. Of course, take inspiration, but one of the most powerful things you can do and this goes beyond gardening, but one of the most important things that you can do is question things and always ask why and always find out, to try and find out what the actual truth is. That's what I do with my gardening. It's driven by curiosity. It's constantly asking questions, given that I can mold something that really fits my lifestyle. That is less of a practical tip, but that's probably been my main influence with the way that I approach growing to feed myself.

Speaker 1: 52:32

You said a curiosity in everything, not just gardening, is so important. If you're not seeking the truth, you're not seeking adventure, then you're really just stagnating. It's pretty boring. Life can be pretty boring. I can see how then you can be attracted to this virtuality, right? Not reality. The reality is there.

Speaker 2: 52:51

I just don't get how life can be boring.

Speaker 1: 52:56

Yeah, I guess.

Speaker 1: 52:57

Yeah, if you're that way, naturally, and I don't know if, maybe everybody is but I look at it from that perspective as well and I don't then appreciate somebody else's depression. I can't fully understand it because I'm not that way myself. I can see where that's just a privilege that I have, that I don't suffer from mental illness. I tend to then relate it back to the way that I am connected to the land and connected to the circle of life and fully participating. I see that as the solution, not as my deficiency or inefficiency, inability to see other people suffering, or the foundation of it.

Speaker 2: 53:36

I think the important thing for me that I'd also want to get across is I've been talking a lot about self-sufficiency and people like what is self-sufficiency and different definitions For me. My approach is how much I can reduce from the land for myself, but it's not like something like, oh, I can't share it. I also like the concept of co-sufficiency, so community sufficiency, it's the idea of look after yourself first and then you're in a better place to look after others. What I want to do, moving forward, is to engulf rate a little bit more of the co-sufficiency side of things. I want to grow as much food as possible and when I have an abundance, I want to share it.

Speaker 2: 54:25

My next step is to start a bit of a supper club or something to have friends, family and neighbors over, because I think another thing that definitely needs to be more present is in society, is people sitting round together at a table sharing a meal. I think that's what I think is missing from a lot of people is that connection, but it's so intrinsically connected to how we develop as humans. It was sat round the campfire. It's how communications start and then we start cooking on the campfire, and food would always be involved. That's the next thing that I need to do. Now I feel like cool, I've got this garden, I've got this project set up, I'm producing lots of food. Now it's time to start to share that abundance with the community, because it's all well and good caring for yourself, but it can also be you could end up becoming so in focus that then you become very isolated in your community. So finding your people even if they're not your next door neighbors, but finding your people is always something to bear in mind in the background.

Speaker 1: 55:50

Of course that's what the online community that's. One of the positive effects of the internet and social media, of course, is that you can connect with these communities, but of course it's the danger of the echo chamber and that's all you interact with. That's sort of become more isolated. Even though it feels like you're in a community, you still become more isolated.

Speaker 2: 56:11

You have to try to. Here's a question is it better to be in at least a community that might have an echo chamber than no community whatsoever, because nothing is perfect.

Speaker 1: 56:24

No, I agree, I think there is some value in it, I think it's possible and I see that maybe people they focus too much on that online community and then they don't know who their neighbor is.

Speaker 1: 56:39

That's it. I'm guilty of that myself. We belong to a local food co-op and that's sort of the way to connect, but they're struggling. We just basically donate financial money to them and we'll buy meals for the homeless. So they're just unfortunate, less fortunate, and so on. They've asked me to contribute some of the excess food, but I haven't had reached that point, especially organic potatoes that are very expensive and there's no real suppliers of it. It's struggling. They can barely stay afloat because the interest is not there on a scale that's actually commercially viable. They have rent and overhead costs and employees and so on. There's just not enough people that are even interested at that level. It is a groundswell. You have to do it yourself and be an example. I also always see it as this is my responsibility to do as much as I can for myself, because not only it's not really selfish and self-reliant as much as it's taking care of myself, my family, so I'm not at burden on the system or other people.

Speaker 1: 57:57

I'm not the one that has to go to the food bank, because I wasn't prepared for the shortages that we have periodically. I think this is going to be a drought year in North America, because it's not just here. All across the Midwest and even the East, there's no snow. Well, a lot of our groundwater comes from snow. It's not the rains that we get in the spring and the summer necessarily. That could be a shortage of many things, including hay for animals. I've seen this happen a few times over the years, where people have to sell their herds because they can't afford to feed them or it's just not available. The more you can be self-reliant on an individual scale and then share that experience, so you help other people achieve that and then you support each other. You're working your way out into these different circles. If you have a neighbor that can do something better than you can because they have better land or more time to do that thing, then that's who you can immediately barter with and share resources with. Then you just keep expanding it outwards.

Speaker 2: 59:01

Exactly. A prime example is saving seeds. Seed saving it does require a bit of land to do it, especially for certain crops. If it was just a small group of a few gardeners and you all were responsible for maybe two or three crops, you can save a huge amount of seed If you've gone through the steps of the pain of saving the seed. But the outcome is you've got a huge amount of seed. That's a nice way of doing it.

Speaker 1: 59:31

Yeah, it's true. Many people we should just mention that really quickly they don't understand cross pollination and cross breeding. You think you are going to grow five different squashes and you'll save the seeds from those. Then the next year you have some abomination that grows from the result of those. That's separation. If you're growing, maybe your neighbor that's far enough away, depending on the species, like carrots for example, or whatever that you don't have this cross pollination so you can get true seeds for that next generation. That's where that cooperation, even in seed saving, like you said, is really important.

Speaker 2: 1:00:07

My other attitude is at the moment we've got a really good it's almost like a community seed, but there's just this lovely kind of couple of people that run them. It's just down the road and this is where I'm happy to put my money in, because we need more seed producers like them. That's their job and they're not owned by like a corporate entity or something, and so by buying seeds from them, I'm supporting them and they're a key part of this kind of like my growing community, which is nice. But yeah, I was just wondering, like I've done this kind of experiment with growing food and stuff. I was wondering if there's any practical tips or anything in particular that your audience would find most helpful related to the annual gardening.

Speaker 1: 1:01:15

Well, I think from you, I guess, where to start and at what scale on that, because that's what's intimidating. What would you start with? And I'm going to preface that by saying you probably you're going to talk about soil, which you should what are the simplest ways? And you did mention most of the ways that you could do that, but what would be the steps? And I went through this transition at one point where I had moved into a small village and we had our half acre parcel and we were raising our kids, so they had the typical play areas and so on, but then it hit the fan and I had to convert that lawn to food production. So where do you start? In that case? You're sitting here with a typical residential lot and you need to grow some food. How do you start that?

Speaker 2: 1:02:10

So the well I forget. A top tip is if you ever feel overwhelmed like there's two, like your garden there's just too much to do. This is usually like maybe a year or two down the line when you might have all the excitement is slightly run over. If you feel too overwhelmed, there's nothing wrong with putting parts of your garden to sleep, just covering it with a few layers of cardboard or whatever for a year. It's not going to become weedy and disorientating when you start again. It's right just sometimes to scale back.

Speaker 2: 1:02:44

The other thing it's a really important question, but it's like it always comes down to finance. What is your budget? And so if you have a low budget, one of the things that I wouldn't recommend is growing staple crops like potatoes or onions are quite cheap to buy in bulk. I would instead look at things that are a lot more kind of high value or nutrient dense, so things like, and also thinking about things that if you have, if you create like a polytunnel or like a little low tunnel or something, what can you grow? That's kind of going to be either slightly out of season, so it'll have a higher value, or varieties that you can't get in shops. So one of the things that I always tell people to start with is, if you're new to gardening, you want to get that first harvest under your belt so you can think, okay, this is possible, I'm on the right journey, and so the best thing to do is to grow, I think, pea shoots on an inside window sill, because they take around two to three weeks to grow. You can do it right through the year and you can even from your local shop. You can even buy here in the UK. It's like dried peas or marrow fat peas. They're super cheap. You can grow them, get a couple of pea shoot crops and then you can transplant them outside to go on and get the pods. So that's the first thing get that first harvest under your belt. The second thing is to grow the things that you know you enjoy eating. If you don't like turnips, if you don't like radish, what's the point of growing them? I would argue that, obviously, home growing is going to taste better and it's going to blow your minds like home grown beets will completely change your minds. But it's important to. You've got to be very thoughtful about energy allocation and that's your energy, because energy is finite and I know modern life is very busy. There's so many pressures all around, and so if you just focus on maybe five to six different crops that you're excited about it could be tomatoes, it could be carrots, all of those different things then that is where I would start investing energy.

Speaker 2: 1:05:07

The first year should be about skills. Nothing is more powerful than having all of the skills, all of the knowledge in your brain, because the more knowledge and skills that you have in the brain, the better you can problem solve, and so giving yourself time to learn those skills is, I would say, probably the best harvest that you can get in that first year, because you know how to sow, you know how to look after plants, basic soil prep. In terms of one of the crops, that would save you a lot of money. It would definitely be down the lines of leafy greens. These have a short shelf life, but there's also a huge abundance of flavors that you can choose from, and so in my polytunnel at the moment, I'm overwintering all sorts of types of like oriental greens and mustards and lattices, and it's not the grain season, but I've got this fresh food that I can enjoy.

Speaker 2: 1:06:05

You can always double up or triple up your undercover grain space, so if it's colder, you could have a hoop house and then you could have a cold frame underneath and then, on particularly cold days, you could even save some bubble wrap. If you ever get bubble wrap from packaging or from an order, save it back, because that's like a great temporary insulation that you can then put over. I know, none of that was very succinct, but I was kind of just trying to splurge all of like the top things to think about when starting off. But I honestly believe, like you know, if something bad happens or whatever in two years of time, the thing that you'll regret the most is not having the knowledge or the skills. So, yeah, that's my priority.

Speaker 1: 1:06:54

Yeah, and for us. You know, people always think that there has to be some major crisis event in order to have been prepared, or you see preppers doing things that seeming it's like the next nuclear war, but we saw four years ago that that was an event that caused us all to, you know, not travel and so on. You know, if you had food, I didn't feel the impact of that. For example, and people in my position didn't feel much of an impact I had a financial crisis. I lost my business, so being able to grow food was a valuable skill and having the infrastructure and the knowledge in place prior to that event allowed me to be prepared.

Speaker 1: 1:07:32

So, as you said, it's like do little things, you need to do little things to repair. So, like, if you're getting into gardening and you have limited amount of space, you can grow in a bucket. The greens that you're talking about often don't need full sunlight or a shorter period of sunlight, because that's not just a limitation for food, it's all energy, like you know, the big push to go to renewable energies like solar panels. Well, a lot of times you don't have that south facing orientation or you have to literally cut some trees down to do some damage to the environment in order to put a solar panel up to collect the energy.

Speaker 2: 1:08:11

But at least you'll get a lot of wood chips to improve your soil.

Speaker 1: 1:08:15

Yeah, I no longer look at it as a negative either. You can have the best of both worlds but, yeah, people just have these limitations and I understand that and I've been in those positions too. So, you know, the leafy greens and some other vegetables you can grow in sort of a shady spot or less than ideal spot and, again, if you don't have the in-ground growing location, a bucket tour, maybe it's a little tiny pocket of soil here and there because it doesn't people. Again, like you said, you see these big gardens, beautiful gardens online. You think that's that or nothing. Well, you can throw a little piece of a little bit, of a little bit of soil almost anywhere and you can grow something I mean be aware of, you know contamination and so on, but just little pockets here and there, or even within your normal formal landscape or between your sidewalk in your house or whatever.

Speaker 2: 1:09:08

It's really funny that last year I was walking down the street and it was this kind of as long as fence line it was all parmac and it was a fence between the path or sidewalk and the car park and there's a crack and it was next to where the locals put out their bins which would include food waste bags and what had obviously happened was a little piece of tomato fell out and there was a tomato plant growing and it was late in the season September but there were these little green tomatoes and they would never have got to anything, but it was like a demonstration that you know plants want to grow, they don't want to die.

Speaker 2: 1:09:51

So if you can utilize that and gently encourage them, yeah, you don't need a massive garden to start to make that impact and that transition. The other thing is I'm starting to see it more and more there's a lot of people who have gardens or have outdoor spaces but have no time to look after them and so they're like look, if you can, there's part of a local permaculture group and every now and then we get an email circulating from someone who's got in touch who says we have this land, we can't use it. It's so sad, but we'd love to see someone else use it. And so that's where, like then the community, go into your local bar or pub or cafe or whatever, and just don't be afraid to just ask. Like it's amazing what happens through word of mouth, and it doesn't have to just appear on Facebook marketplace for something to be available.

Speaker 1: 1:10:50

That's right. Yeah, I tell the story often about, you know, 10, 12 years ago that a local farm was, you know, left fallow for quite a number probably 50 years actually in a developer future developer just small scale guy bought it and was just parking it and it was 118 acres with 18 acres of pasture or field and it was still field because it was soil was so poor, nothing had grown on it Other than a few conifers and a bunch of moss and sedges. But I got that land for free, like he was just happy to have somebody working that land so it looked like it was occupied and to, you know, improve it. So that went on for three years. I grew crops, I raised cattle, I raised pigs, chickens, all kinds of stuff. So that was available and it's surprising how often that's available. And I found that because I had asked another farmer who was suggesting that I could use his land and he said, well, maybe this one would actually be better for you, and that was available. And if you ask around, I mean I would love to help on some level with some of what I'm doing. But just the way things are right now I just can't do that. But another time and place and maybe in the future I will actually be looking for somebody to sort of help caretake one of my homesteads, because it is overwhelming and people who think they don't have the time or the energy or the resources.

Speaker 1: 1:12:27

I started pretty cheaply and I know cheaply and from my perspective it's not the same as from a lot of people who don't have access to resources or don't have the income that I was able to generate. So I understand there's limitations, but I worked really, really hard and I think one thing I've always wanted to demonstrate on my platforms is the amount of work that one man can do, and there's a lot of disbelief even in the homesteading community that I have done all this alone. They think there must be some crew in the background. I get those comments all the time. But I literally have built these homesteads alone, completely alone. The one I'm sitting in right now has been more of a family affair, but between my wife and I we built this house, we built some of the other things and she maintains that she's making cheese, she's fermenting food, she's preserving food, she's making sourdough bread. She's doing all these things that are going on behind the scenes, but the infrastructure itself I've been able to create that.

Speaker 1: 1:13:31

And if I go back, say 14 years ago, 13 years ago, when we lost our business and I converted that lawn to garden again, I did it all myself. It was 35 feet by 35 feet, so it's at 10 meters by 10 meters and after the initial building of that. So what I did I said double dug it, made really intensive, high productive beds. So double dug it and filled it with manure, but also fish remains especially fish remains and straw, and then I got a bunch of wood chips and put it on top. That garden was super like. If you see the pictures from that period, the plants are like you can barely walk through this garden. It's just so abundant. And that year and the following year I literally I spent an hour a week maintaining it. So after the initial work, putting it in the maintenance of that garden over that year was minimal and then the harvest season was busier. But again, I just did that as we had time.

Speaker 2: 1:14:32

Yeah, there's a people have the same thing. They're like oh, there's no way that one person could do that garden and I've been overly conservative with this is what the book is based off, but overly conservative. So about four hours a week of time needed. It was less and there were a few times through the season where I might have done half an hour here and there, but part of that is because of the skill. It like not someone new coming into it isn't going to experience that first, but there is, it is.

Speaker 2: 1:15:06

It is a snowball effect. It definitely is a snowball effect in terms of In terms of how that, how that increases and that there's a slow. I can't remember where why I heard this from, but it's stuck with me ever since. It's really easy we will will over estimate what we can do in a day, but we'll always underestimate what we can do in a year. Well, like 10 years. It's that compounding nest. So all of the people like odd, there's no way you've done. It's like when you, when you just put your head down and the days start to roll into weeks and months. This is unbelievable what humans are capable of.

Speaker 1: 1:15:43

Yeah, and I appreciate that most people aren't focused on what I'm able to folk amount of time and energy I'm focusing on. This particular thing that they're seeing a lot of is Exceptional because I don't have a job I have to go to anymore, so of course that's limitation, but that wasn't the case during most of my life and most of my career. I was working and raising a family and still doing those things. So it's not and I'm not. It's not. My point is I'm not doing this to brag. It's quite the opposite. I'm not exceptional. There's no, I have no skills or strength that other people don't have it coming.

Speaker 1: 1:16:14

Obviously, again, it what's with exceptions, but I'm not an exceptional human being. So if I can do it, you can do it too, and it really Comes down to just incremental steps and taking that step every day. As you mentioned, the Amazing what you underestimate what you can do. Any year I typically look back and think the hell was I doing like I barely got anything done the last year or five years compared to what I think I should have done. But but yeah, I think you'd be probably.

Speaker 2: 1:16:43

We're very self-critical creatures anyway. Looking ahead, like it's like okay, yeah, fine. Looking back, oh, we could have done this. But if you like, oh, what was I thinking this time? It's three years ago, yeah, it's, it's funny, that's like quality, but you know it keeps us occupied.

Speaker 1: 1:17:03

Well, that's the thing. So I think that's a Final message I would like to get across in this interview is that you know, life's been a passion by anyway. You may as well be doing something productive and meaningful, and that there's a lot of meaning in this life. It's not prepping To me. I'm just using this word prepping because I'm so, I'm feeling lately, I'm becoming more and more prepared, not just self-reliant or not just the wilderness living type guy, but the process itself is the reward. So I don't feel like I'm sacrificing things and I'm preparing for this major crisis, this major event. I'm living life to the fullest in every single moment of every day. I'm loving and and being feeling fulfilled, and that is the journey, that's the excitement to me.

Speaker 2: 1:17:52

There's a reason why a lot of golds winning Olympians fall into depression afterwards, and it's because they've reached the top. They're like what's next? And then they lose all sense of purpose and so you've got it. You got it bang on, and it's exactly. I resonate completely. It is. It is that journey. It's like always, you know, it's almost like an infinite goal, in the sense there's always something to be doing, and so I think that kind of protects your mindset in a way, to be able to get into Into that position, because it's constantly striving forward and not not reaching the top, and then you know giving up.

Speaker 1: 1:18:29

Well then, in my case, I know it can save. Every failure is an opportunity and I, like I had issues where I had to move my last homestead and even the audience is saying wow, that was the best thing that ever happened to you. Like I'd look at each failure as each replacement. Each thing I have to tear down and redo is like wow, I get to do it again, I get to do it better this time, like it's exciting. So I don't, I don't, I don't have that paralysis of analysis. I don't look at a project and then think I can't do this perfectly or I can't do it the way I want to, I'm not gonna do it at all, I just do it. And then, if it say it doesn't work out, then I start over again and and Just enjoy that process.

Speaker 2: 1:19:07

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 1:19:09

Well, I think. Is there anything else you would say, anything we missed that you'd like to share with the audience?

Speaker 2: 1:19:16

Um, I think the only thing for me to say is it's almost, it's slightly connected to the BQS, but it's to always spend a bit of time Experimenting, because I could list 50 ways of growing a potato, and so what I do every year is I'll choose two or three kind of important crops to me and I'll always just try a few new Elu varieties that haven't tried, or like two or three other methods of growing them, because what I'm constantly doing is I'm building up my bank of knowledge. You know, okay, but these are the Currently, what I know is the best way of doing each thing. Even if it doesn't work out, it doesn't matter. I'm not dedicating my whole crop to trying that new technical, that new variety, but I'm constantly striving, and so what I'd say is On your gardening journey, I can, you can create two lists.

Speaker 2: 1:20:10

You have one list, which is your hero crops. These are varieties one variety for each crop that you know, as a default, is going to do well for you, and the other one is like is like the special crops, so it's like one or two varieties that might not provide the same yields or the same, a kind of you know, constant hero in a sub, that hero crop but add something different. It might be a different flavor characteristic, it might be something that comes in in a different season and and those two documents, if you just keep those close and you always make sure you have have seeds for both, that that for me has has helped a huge amount over the years to to create a highly productive garden.

Speaker 1: 1:20:56

I think that's good advice and as far as your book and your content to encourage my viewers and listeners to, you know, go check out huge content because you know I've been watching and I'm in Canada. You would think like it's so unrelated that it's not transferable to here, but it's quite the opposite of that. I think that curiosity is part of it as you learn what somebody else is doing and you apply what you can. But you'd be surprised how much of it carries over, crosses over, and that it's valuable information from for everybody.

Speaker 2: 1:21:32

Yeah, I appreciate that, thank you.

Speaker 1: 1:21:34

Okay, well, just tell us again, just the audience, what one more time where they can find your, your cup coming book, and as well as the when they can find you online.

Speaker 2: 1:21:44

Yeah, so my coming book called the self-sufficiency garden you can get from in North America any any good book shop. You can get it from Amazon or you can order from us, for genitivepress is the website. And, yeah, come, come find me on Instagram and YouTube. My name is Hugh Richards. It's spelled the Welsh way, h-u-w, and say hello and let's chat vegetables.

Speaker 1: 1:22:12

That's great. Well, we'll talk again soon. I'd really like to continue the conversation on another podcast, so we'll have to set something up in the future.

Speaker 2: 1:22:21

Yeah, I could maybe invite Sam on as well, if you're interested.

Speaker 1: 1:22:24

Yeah, I would be interested. Yeah, absolutely if anybody else.

Speaker 2: 1:22:26

If you recommend anybody else too, Of course, yeah, and I'll send you a copy of the book as well. Great, I appreciate it. Thank you.