Rev Left Radio - Restorative Agriculture: Gardening, Homesteading, & Permaculture

Episode Date: September 14, 2021

Tim Holland (aka Sole) is a hip hop artist and host of Propaganda by the Seed and The Solecast. He joins Breht to discuss gardening, food forests, permaculture, restorative agriculture, perennials, trees, climate change, being a father, and much more!  Check out Tim's work: https://www.soleone.org/ https://propagandabytheseed.com/ Follow him here: https://twitter.com/mcsole Outro Music: "Plague Days" by Sole & DJ Pain 1 ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have my good friend and comrade, Tim Holland, aka Soul, on the show to talk about his love of plants. We talk about permaculture, homesteading. He moved from Denver, Colorado to Maine over the last few years, bought an old farmhouse on an acre and a half or so. of land and has really been putting his knowledge to work and I've been able to follow along with that progress and it's fascinating and it's a huge inspiration. I'm somebody that is just now trying to get into the world of gardening and permaculture and understanding ecosystems more broadly and investigating the native plant life and tree life that I'm surrounded with and learning

how to work with nature as opposed to against it, composting, harvesting rainwater, stuff like that. Tim is a great resource, a fountain of knowledge, and a great inspiration on that front. So this is a wide-ranging conversation, but if you're somebody who is interested in permaculture, in ecology, in actively using whatever little patch of land you might have, whether that's a rooftop space in a city, that's a community garden, or that's a backyard, or something even bigger, and you want to utilize that, and you're sick of this fucking monoculture mentality and these stupid fucking lawns and you want to do something different. This is a great place to start and this is a conversation you will absolutely be interested in.

And sprinkled throughout the conversation is a bunch of recommendations for books and websites and organizations that are also interested in this stuff that you can pick up and pursue as well. So without further ado, here's my conversation with my good friend Tim on a bunch of topics from homesteading, permaculture, ecology, trees, climate change. much more enjoy what up it's uh my name is tim holland i go by the rap moniker of soul i'm host of the soul cast uh podcast about art and theory and shit like that and um another podcast which is my main project these days as far as media projects go called propaganda by the seed which is a monthly podcast that I do with Aaron Parker of Edgewood Nursery,

who is a, I guess what you would call a permaculture plant breeder. And we just go in depth on rare and unusual crops and practices that we're excited about to kind of give people an in-depth dive into, you know, lesser-known perennial plants that are used in like permaculture and food forestry, just because there aren't really good resources on this. stuff. And we wanted to, and people have to pay a lot of money to learn about this stuff. And so we wanted to put it out there for the world for free. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I'm glad to have you on the show. It's been a while since we've been able to do a collaboration together. It's always worth mentioning that my first introduction to you was through underground hip hop in the early 2000s.

Me and my friends had your CDs and shit. And so as things developed and we got to know each other through political work. It was sort of fascinating that that history had already existed and then I visited you in Denver, saw your backyard, which is the craziest backyard I've ever seen, just edible everything and loved it.

And then, yeah, lately I've been sort of doom spiraling about the climate crisis and thus getting into resiliency and gardening and, you know, water recycling and composting and all that shit, but I'm still fairly new to it. And I was like, you know,

he would be the perfect person to have on the show to discuss this. So let's just kind of dive into that topic broadly. And for those that don't know, maybe we can start by you talking about how you got interested in permaculture and homesteading and while you moved out to Maine to pursue this interest on a new scale. Yeah, man. I, you know, I always, I'm a vegan and I guess you could say I'm a foodie.

I just love food. You know, cooking has always been a huge part of my life and food. And, you know, I've always. never had very much money. I've been a self-employed artist for 20 years. And one of the ways that I've made myself feel rich is to always like eat like a baller, you know, and like I couldn't always necessarily afford that stuff. And so I would have to like make my own satan from scratch. And, you know, we've lived all over the world. And so some of the places we've lived like Arizona or Barcelona, we weren't able to find very good vegan food. And so we just had to learn to cook.

And through that, we started growing our own herbs and growing our own herbs and growing our own greens and growing our own tomatoes and like doing making stupid mistakes and um but through that process i just really fell in love with uh just watching food grow and just being around it and participating in the process um and so when we moved to denver you know we had this huge yard or or i thought it was huge you know it was like one whatever one 30 second of an acre or something really quite small um and uh i just started you know i started off just just growing things like tomatoes and eggplants and just all the stuff that I would buy in the store. And then there were certain things that just went crazy and that fascinated me like arugula.

The arugula I planted went perennial and then it became a weed in my yard. And so any time of the year, I could go in my yard and pick arugula and same with mint. You know, I had one little plant of mint and it just spread everywhere. And I had just mint tea for a year. And I was like, oh shit. You know, I've mint tea. And then, like, I bought lemon balm one day. And it's like a plant I've never even heard of.

And it just went crazy. And then I started becoming really interested in perennial plants and how these sort of, like, really hardy perennial plants, they come back bigger and stronger every year. And it's less and less work. Around that time in Denver, I had met a lot of friends who were into, you know, quote unquote, permaculture. And I did an interview with one of, like, the main. permaculture teachers in Denver and Adam Brock and he just blew my mind with the stuff he was talking about. Yeah, you know, you can plant a fruit tree and then have a vine growing up and then strawberries all along the bottom and, you know, and this and that. And so I just, I went home and I, when I go on,

I was still touring in this time. And so I was like on a big European tour with Payne One for our album, I think Death Drive. And I was just reading this book that he recommended called Guy's Garden. And in Guy's Garden, it's like, that's like the permaculture Bible, I guess. Like that is the one book that everyone getting into permaculture should read, Guy's Garden. He instills such a sense of wonder and poetry into the practice of permaculture and food forestry and just talking about the natural flows of how plants in the forest work and how every

grassland tends towards a forest and if you leave a parking lot alone for long enough it'll turn into a forest and I just thought that was beautiful and I wanted to learn about that at the time it was really difficult to find like I'd never been in a food forest I didn't know anyone who did it

when you look at there weren't a lot of evidence of it actually working and so I just wanted to try it and so when we bought our house I just planted a bunch of fruit trees and just started trying to grow all these things and I grew them all unsuccessfully for a while

they didn't grow well a lot of the stuff that I read about in the books like Turkish Rocket or Good King Henry and these were like staple crops of the food forest that I was very interested in the way that they were described in the book like, you know, a perennial broccoli that comes up every year and, you know, a perennial asparagus slash a spinach, good King Henry, a perennial asparagus slash spinach that my ancestors

in Europe lived off of, you know, sorrel. Like, all these things are, you know, things that European peasants ate and peasants, you know, all over the world have eaten for thousands of years. And so, you know, I was just really interested in all this stuff, but I had trouble growing all this stuff. I was really only successful at growing tomatoes and kale, which is worth noting. Those are two of my favorite things to eat and two of the plants that I think everyone should grow. And then, you know, from there, I would say, I don't know, around that, or before that, I became friends with some folks from Iraq Veterans Against the War, this guy Graham Klumpner, who's like a really awesome dude. And he,

was really big on like climate change stuff and so he shared with me a bush administration defense department document um from like the year 2000 it's a i think it's called the quadrennial whatever um but it like it was like looking at the year the over the next century this century that we're in and looking at waning u.s influence over the next hundred years in the face of global warming in multiple outcomes and one of the the things that really stuck with me in that that document was Colorado, where I was living at the time, would only be capable of sustaining 100,000 people. There wouldn't be enough water in Colorado. That was before people really started talking about the Oglala aquifer depleting. And that was really when these, the predictions of

global warming seemed really far away. They seemed like it was going to be way far off and things wouldn't be accelerating at the pace that they were. And so that like started like setting off a time bomb in my head like I don't know if I want to stay here I like it here I'm organizing here I'm fighting here I'm in the streets I'm doing all this shit to like make this place you know like my battleground or whatever where I'm fighting on these these grounds but are the grounds I'm fighting on are they are they a stable ground and then again like many people I read this book desert desert by anonymous I don't know if you've read that book I've just heard about it recently and I've been meaning to read it yeah

Yeah, yeah, it would be a good, it would be a good one for you. And it's considered like a nihilist text, but I don't really see it that way. It's just like they took a real, you know, these were people who were land defenders and people who were engaged in environmental activism over the years and just looking at the raw data. Like, this is what all the struggles thus far have produced as far as, like, stopping this shit and looking at what people are doing now and how things are doing. going, we need to be realistic about what's possible. After reading that and looking at like, what is the role of like an anarchist behind the wall of where, you know, the global warming is going to be hitting other places much worse. And we're seeing it now. And it made sense to me to, well, I guess the other thing I would say is I had a kid. And once I had a kid, I found living in

the city just less and less appealing. I went to visit a commune in. in France called Tarnack. It's a small town, which is settled by people who are into, you know, disdituent power slash communism theory. And I saw just sprawling farmlands and, you know, amazing libraries where like every philosophy text is like categorized. And like, and I was just like just seeing that, you know, people cutting down trees themselves and with having the material means to like turn the trees that were cutting down into houses, into town squares. like selling books and honey and using all these things to fund buying more land to build more houses and building like an actual community in out there you know and like realizing like whoa

I can be a radical who loves all this crazy theory shit and I can be living out in the woods and still materially participating in struggle and like building autonomy and just blew my mind I was like this is I don't want to live in the city anymore and so you know having a kid I was just like I had an opportunity to sell my house in Denver and buy a farmhouse in Maine. And so I did it. You know, I couldn't afford like some crazy farmland. I didn't want to live too far out. And so we settled for an acre and a half in a, in a college town, Brunswick, in a farmhouse. But it's like, it's not really farmland. It's a, there's a swamp running the river stream running through it with a pond. It's very wet. It's a, you know, it's wooded, overgrown. It's a, it's a, you know, it's a,

It's a lot of work to grow food here. And so, you know, it's been a huge challenge, like learning how to, you know, compete with nature. And so I stopped competing with nature and tried learning how to work with it to get what I needed and to do what I needed to do. So it's been a hell of a ride. It hasn't been easy. But I just love learning about this stuff. I'm fascinated with it. I'm like a kid.

And life is just too short to not be excited about what we're learning about. Absolutely. Yeah. And dude, the interest and the fascination you have is absolutely contagious. I've, you know, been lucky enough to be a friend of yours and be able to follow you on Instagram and see how the move went and how you've developed your acre and a half or whatever. And it inspires me to like, you know, get up and try to learn these things and follow in your footsteps. So I absolutely love what you're doing. And there's a lot of directions we could take this in. But let's kind of focus on climate change for a second because that is the impetus to, um me getting really into it and trying to learn more about it and i at your recommendation i got a guy's garden and i'm i'm going to read it this winter in preparation and make a little garden in my backyard i rent right now luckily my landlord said i can i can dig up part of the backyard to do a garden so i'm going to try to build those skills while i can and maybe hopefully have a home in the future but who fucking knows about that but you know i'll just cut you off

real quick and i'll just say you know renting while you're renting and like like that's great because it's like you know you're not like like thinking about it and planning it and doing it it is like part of the most fun of doing it and like you learn so much through doing it that um like the stakes are lower like you can fuck it up and uh you know it's not like here where i had like analysis paralysis when i got here i was like oh my god now it's this is real what the fuck am i supposed to do somebody tell me what i'm supposed to do yeah sorry sorry to cut you off no yeah Absolutely, yeah. I just wanted to, I just wanted to, you know, make lemons out of the renting lemonade.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, no, definitely. I'm definitely going to take advantage of it. And the trial and error is a crucial part of this whole process. And I've internalized and accepted that. And, you know, just climate change and thinking about specifically on the individual level, because, you know, of course we can talk about the communal, the collective, the national, the international level. But on the individual level, I think it's important to try to make yourself more of an asset.

set for others when the climate crisis comes to your front door, which is only a matter of time. And so one aspect of this has been me learning, teaching myself how to fish, and I've become really proficient at that, gardening as well. I'm interested in beekeeping, although I'm not there yet, just sort of theoretically interested in it. But how do you think about this idea of being an asset or making yourself an asset to others? And what specific skill sets have you consciously developed over the past several years? Yeah, I mean, you know, the thing is, is I do like that idea of becoming an asset because at the end of the day we live in like this hyper individualized society and people are kind of opportunistic and you know when shit hits the fan

despite everybody yearning to like work together like people are people who have things to offer are going to be better off in that situation skills etc i mean i'm more drawn to as an artist which is what i am at my core um i'm more drawn towards the things that like fill me up you know um i've seen like this chart before of like you know what you can do what you love to do what you can get paid to do and what you're good at you know and like whatever's in the middle of that and like i kind of like don't like that chart um because it's like you can get good at anything you love i think and you know fuck if you make money off it or not but i don't know um i just think that's kind of a shitty way to look at it but it's like uh you know the things that i've

learned that I've been interested in the most is learning to propagate trees. Like I said, I'm lucky enough to have kind of been mentored or to learn from this guy, Aaron Parker, who, you know, when I moved out here, I went to his homestead. And I was shocked to find out that like all these books I'd been reading, well, these plants I'd been reading about in Guy's Garden, he was one of the primary seed distributor or seed breeder of in North America, Caucasian mountain spinach, perennial spinach that vines and gets to be six feet tall. And it's like producing greens all year round and Turkish rocket and good King Henry and things like that. And so I wanted to learn how to propagate trees.

I learned how to grow chestnuts from seed. I learned how to grow hazelnuts from seed. I'm growing all these cold, hearty persimmons from seed. So I'm learning how learning how really I have like hundreds of blueberries in a nursery bed that at blueberry plants that I'm just learning to grow and learning to do these things in mass has been really important to me because I think that specifically like we can talk more about that later but like tree crops in general I think are very important for climate change but also for you know homesteading because it's easier to man to pick things off of a tree and manage a tree than it is to like weed and bend over and weed especially in the summer when it's so hot that you don't want to be fucking around and sweating all the time and shit um so that but i mean the other thing is i'll say is like just being an artist and a writer is something that i have that can lend that can be good in the world like you don't have to just throw away all the things that are natural to you you might think oh i'm a podcaster you know the mad max future has no use for me but it's like

actually actually like the ability to get people talking and to get people to talk about big ideas and to look at things from multiple perspectives in a public setting, I think people will always yearn for that. And so I think like there's an idea that like we have to be like, we're not going to like wake up in this new world and it's just going to be totally different. Like it's going to happen over time. And so, you know, the like other things that that I love are cooking. I always thought that you couldn't be a vegan.

when the economy collapses and there's not a lot of like vegan permaculture shit and so like that's something I'm working to develop because I don't want to have to fish I don't want to have to eat eggs unless I'm forced to and so you know things like that

like art or other great skills I mean I hate to say it but like you know self-defense you know knowing how to shoot a gun and I'm not like a marksman you know but all these skills that like projects like inhabit put forth like learn to bandage a wound learn to build a house it's good to be at least competent with a chainsaw to be competent with hammer and nails um but it's just there's not enough time in the day to get good at everything so the things i'm focusing on is food

absolutely yeah i love that answer i think everybody has a diverse skill set and they bring already existing interest to the table that they can develop in a direction that is other oriented and and can become an asset. And just the process of continue, like, even if the best case scenario of climate change turns out, and there isn't any collapse, and the world gets its shit together, and we even stay below 1.5 or whatever, highly optimistic, but, you know, let's just say it happens. Yeah, Bernie could win, dude. Bernie can still win. He's going to be reinstalled, I swear.

The process of learning, though, especially with nature and learning how nature works, is in and of itself incredibly gratifying and elevating. to the individual. So, you know, learn what you can for sure. CPR classes. Pretty cheap, locally run. You can go through your community college and get that skill set down. Stuff like that. But, you know, we are here to talk about permaculture specifically. So let's dive deeper into that. And maybe, because I think a lot of people might not even know what it is, what is perma culture and why is it important? You know, I don't even, Permaculture is like is this idea of creating self-sustaining regenerative systems that like, you know, are using like the natural flows of nature.

I mean, this is how I think about it because I'm thinking about it mostly with food. And so food that is like perennial and, you know, and that is, you know, ideally not wasting anything and using, you know, using the organic. natural processes to develop systems that we can cohabit with animals and insects and all life. And I think the best things about permaculture are concepts of food forestry. I think my problem with permaculture is that it lends itself to sort of like a life hack kind of TED talk sort of mentality where like it's like a cult kind of

and people just I don't know it's like you could know everything about permaculture and nothing about how to actually grow food you know and so I felt like I was one of those people who like really bought all the shit about permaculture but then when it came down

to it I didn't really know how to grow a potato you know but like the concepts of food forestry are I think the most important things in permaculture and that is like you know having like multiple layers of plants so you have like your tree layer you have your you know smaller trees you have your tall you know canopy layer of trees you have your herbaceous shrub layer which is like you know herbs like lavender or whatever but it could also be plants like turkish rocket or arugula or oregano and so you're

creating these systems where the insects are happy and they're pollinating the plants around them and the birds are interacting and you know you're able as a human being to like walk in these these places and you know i can like walk around and it's like poetry you know i can walk around my yard and with a basket and i can just fill it with food anytime and it's you know herbs it's edible flowers it's fruits and you know just like nature is you know in constant competent and constant flux and competition. You know, you have, you know, plants that are doing well one year and make up the loss for the other or something takes over.

And so you're kind of like, you know, tending to this wildness. And I just love that. I love doing it. It's a really fun way to garden. It's not, you know, backbreaking in the sun all day, picking carrots and shit. It's, you know, having a multitude.

of different things so that, you know, you're not fully reliant on a monoculture. You're not fully reliant on having an apple orchard because one year it could be a bad year for apples, but a great year for apricots. Like in Maine this year, they're saying it's a shitty year for apples, but peaches are crushing it this year in Maine, which is like you wouldn't think of it being a great place to grow peaches, but all of a sudden, like, with climate change and like the way the rains were this year, it was a good year for peaches. And so, you know, permaculture tells us to have as many species as possible in our, in our, in our gardens or our farms so that there's all these interactions happening and all these, you know, magical things happening.

And, you know, when they're working well, you'll have, like, you know, a chipmunk will take one thing and run it over here and plant it over here. And then, like, you'll start seeing things pop up in your garden that you never even plant it. And, yeah, I mean, you know, the other thing that permaculture, like in Colorado, permaculture was all about water and all about how to, like, utilize your surroundings in permaculture. You think about zones. And so you think about like zone one is like your kitchen, your house. And so you plant like your herbs and your salad garden in your zone one so that it's like kind of feng shui. And so you're like, you're able to infuse these things directly into your life. So it's like, oh, I'm cooking right now.

I need to go get some oregano and some first. fresh mint of dice on top and some whatever lettuce and so i'll just run out there and then you have your zone two which is like things that are like less you know important things you need to keep your eye on maybe you have like you're that's where my nursery beds are that's where my blueberries are growing so that i can keep my eye on them that's where tomatoes are you know and then you just keep growing out and then like my zone three would be um my greenhouse you know where i have where I'm doing the four seasons harvest, where I'm like trying to have vegetables going year round in an unheated greenhouse, which is another incredible, incredible concept.

And I think it's like one of the most important things where climate change and global warming is learning to grow in controlled environments. And because Maine, it could be so rainy that we're not really able to grow foods outside some years and it just might get too wet. And so to be able to control the amount of. water that goes in there. And also if you're having like crazy fluctuations in temperature to be able to grow things in a greenhouse, you're able to like stabilize things a little bit more. And so like growing things in greenhouses and also cold frames, which are basically

raised beds with windows on top of them. When I first moved here, my cold frames were my most productive part of the yard and they were 20 feet long by three feet across and they produced more than uh whatever an eighth or quarter acre of annual beds um and so you know one of the main one of the things they say with permaculture was like obtain a yield you know extend the growing season um and so those are two things that i think are super important i think when you get into like the cult of permaculture there's all this other shit that i don't really find that useful um that are like wrapped up in the culture of it and so i just stick to the plant stuff and trapping water, you know, using mulch, using leaves, using what's around you, you know,

knowing where, okay, over here there's a smoothie shop, and I know I can go there on Tuesdays and Thursdays and get their rinds and add them to my compost. I know I can go to the coffee shop and get coffee rinds that I can sterilize and use to grow oyster mushrooms. I can go, I don't do that, by the way, but I have friends who do. you know and shit like that like not not taking shit for granted like knowing like there's fucking acorns all in the woods behind my house like i've mapped out all the native plants around me that i can that i can use and like knowing how to use those things yeah that is that is utterly fascinating and we'll get to cold storage and greenhouses in a bit because i was introduced

to the concept of cold storage through you um but first just to talk a little bit more about permaculture there's the obvious the benefit of providing food learning and seeing and working with the interdependence of nature and species plant and animal alike but also there's like this restorative element to it like you're you're bringing balance and harmony back into the world through this cultivation of really an ecosystem and that that goes against the logic of monoculture it goes against the logic of lawns and all of the absurd wasteful extractive and detrimental things that we do to produce food and devastate ecosystems. I am wondering, though, about the native element here, because some of what I've learned is

trying to learn how to plant crops, trees, and plants that are native to a region, and obviously learning from the indigenous communities that lived on that land for millennia, in balance and harmony with their natural world. So could you talk a little bit about that native aspect and what you learn and are inspired by from indigenous communities specifically like i was saying earlier um you know there were a lot of things i tried to grow here that didn't work out so well my soil is acidic my soil is clay and it's wet in a lot of places and so i started looking around at what what is doing well in my area um elderberries uh grow all around grow around me um stinging nettle uh that's a it's not something that in the people

in the US are very familiar with but this is a native plant um and you know we did a huge podcast on it that has been eaten by uh indigenous people all over the world from europe to asia to north america um super high in nutrients and the good thing about is is it grows like mint and so finding finding like the wild shit um around me and like bringing it back into my yard um another plant that they talk lot about in permaculture is ground nuts and ground nuts are um a perennial tuber like a potato but it's 25% protein it tastes like cassava or or taro um and for years i'd buy these online i'd have them sent to me i'd plant them and then they would just die they wouldn't do anything and i was like fuck this sucks and one day me and my wife were canoeing on the androscoggin

River, which is a, you know, an indigenous waterway historically. And all along the river behind my house, like I'd been walking past this place so many times was covered, covered with ground nuts. I could see the vine everywhere. I took photos and sent it to other like forage or friends from Maine and they were just like, holy shit, you know, I've never seen that many ground nuts before. And so I started just taking, you know, taking little samples out and bringing them into my property and they're crushing it here. And so like you just

keep your fucking eyes open. You know, see what's growing around you like acorns. You know, I've learned to eat acorns. I've learned to grow acorn. I've learned not grow them. They're already growing. You know, I've learned to collect acorns, how to process them into flour, then use them to make pancakes, muffins.

I want to, you know, my friend who makes acorn cheese. And you know, these are practices that are you know, it's the most plentiful source of protein all around us, and we just completely ignore it. You know, that's another reason why I am focused on chestnuts and hazelnuts. Chestnuts once covered North America, but were wiped out by the chestnut blight. It was an important staple crop for indigenous peoples of North America, and settlers, like many other things, came here and destroyed that crop.

And so now people are breeding hybrid chestnuts that are like a hybrid of, you know Chinese chestnut Japanese maybe some European some American and reintroducing them you know I think that might be controversial to some people who you know are holding out for the American chestnut

to be a perfect thing like that you know I'm not I've never really but for me I just like chestnuts we sing about chestnuts around to open fire but like we've never actually had that you know and when I've toured music. In Europe, I would just constantly be eating chestnuts when they would sell roasted chestnuts. I'm like, this is fucking delicious. Like, why don't we eat this? As far as, you know, learning from

indigenous peoples, I think one of the best resources, one of the best books I've ever read, and I would say almost to read it before you read Guy's Garden, because again, it like helps instill that sense of wonder is Robin Kimmerer's braiding sweetgrass. You know, I feel like I cried more reading that book than anything I'd read. I just felt like such a tremendous, felt like the whole world had just been stolen from everyone. You know, and we are really just alienated from nature and from our natural state of being.

And, yeah, and, you know, and other things I can say is like another plant that's really interesting as far as, like, for indigenous communities is, you know, the sunchoke, aka Jerusalem artichoke. It's a plant that I grow in my yard. I don't know if it was indigenous to hear, but I know that, I believe, like, the Apaches used them when they were at war with the colonizers, and they would, like, plant them in one place, and, you know, you come back later and you can harvest it, and because they are so, and same in, like, the Spanish Civil War, the Jerusalem Artichoke was used that way. You'd have, like, a bag of them. You'd throw them in a place.

Then you'd come back, and, like, this plant goes fucking crazy. it is one of the most prolific growing plant and it can just you can just shit on it like it it doesn't uh it doesn't require any attention it just will crush it and it will outcompete whatever is around and and unfortunately um where i've planted it chint monks have also discovered it and decided to hide them all over my yard and so now i just have a whole row of jerusalem artichokes um but it's a delicious plant it's very healthy um and yeah and you know and you know and And I guess another thing I could say is, like, you know, people talk a lot about indigenous farming practices, and they talk about the three sisters, polyculture, which is growing corn, and then you grow beans up the corn, and then you grow squash around the bottom. And that's like an example of a, in permaculture that is often used as like one of the best examples of how plants can have these mutually beneficial.

relationships. And we wanted to do a podcast about the Three Sisters. And when we started reaching out to local indigenous groups, specifically the Eastern Rematriation Collective out here, they were basically like, you know, we're more interested in talking about the actual food practices of indigenous people. And I don't want to speak for anyone here, but, you know, permaculture, in a lot of ways what I don't like about it is it's very white and it's very kind of like repackaging like selected things from like

indigenous people of New Zealand and I mean Australia and other places and kind of like you know wrapping it up in a neat package and you know people have to be very careful with you know indigenous knowledge and respectful and tread lightly with that shit. And if you really want to learn those things from indigenous people,

the best way to do it is to build those relationships and develop relationships of solidarity with those communities. And maybe you'll learn something. Maybe you won't. But I think that that's where that information lies. It's not necessarily to be found in a podcast or, in a book yeah yeah absolutely well said well said for sure and i'm definitely gonna uh get braiding sweetgrass that's so good yeah that sounds fascinating and yeah like it's worth mentioning there's

that i think what you're saying like this white liberal even appropriative element in the permaculture culture and that that needs to be sort of worked against not internalized fully yeah you know but again what i would also say is like we're all here we're all here in north america and and uh you know the world is crumbling around us and we all have to, you know, figure out how we're going to survive. But if we do that, we have to figure out a way to do it that doesn't, you know, embody white supremacy and cis patriarchy. Yeah, absolutely.

So, like, going down trees a little bit, because I know this is something you're super interested in. What kind of plants or trees do you think are of particular importance, particularly in the context of more and more climate destabilization? So I'm thinking hearty, you know, plants and trees that can do well with the fluctuations that are inevitable from climate change. Well, I mean, the two that I've already mentioned, but I'll go back to, are hazelnuts and chestnuts. Again, I'm a vegan. So maybe I'm just standing for, you know, what I want to see in the world.

But hazelnuts in particular, you know, they were one of the first trees that, you know, popped up after. the ice age and you know a chestnut can live i mean a hazelnut will live 500 years maybe even a thousand years and hazelnut has a growth kind of like a shrubby kind of raspberry kind of thing where it comes up on canes and lots of tall branches it gets to be about 10 15 feet so it's like the perfect size tree for human beings and for human consumption and um and it you know it's very deep roots and we've it has already like survived the ice age it has already like been around through various climate swings and it has a very wide wide range and right now people are are breeding like neo hybrid hazelnuts to you know hybridize you know European hazelnuts the

beaked hazelnuts of like northern of Canada and the American hazelnut and so like by by planting these things together they've created like multiple mutations. and it's like every time you get a seed it's it's an individual and every single tree has the potential to be the next you know the next staple crop um and so breeding you know like i i have like a little hazelnut orchard of like 25 hazelnut plants and um you know over the summer about six of them died and i was fucking heartbroken uh i was like oh my god i grew them from seed it took me two years to get to this point and now six of them are dead and I was reading this book on hazelnut breeding and they're like you know you don't want a baby your hazelnuts if you're

growing them for resiliency because you want the you know on some fucking darwin shit you know you want the weak ones to fucking die um so that you're left with the strongest hazelnuts um and so i just they died and then i have a friend who's a hazelnut breeder out here and so i just bought something to replace them from him uh so i hazel nuts i think are very you know there's any plant that has deep roots um is is great like this year was a great year for hazel nuts last year was a good year for hazel nuts um also chestnuts um you know as we see wheat corn soy like all of our staple crops those could fail um and we're going to need a replacement crop for to replace corn and wheat in our diet and chestnut is that

crop. Hybrid chestnuts, hybrids of Chinese, Japanese, and American chestnuts have the potential to provide all of our flower needs, you know, and it's gluten-free. Shout out to my gluten-free. Absolutely. And, you know, and again, this is the same kind of thing. Like, people are growing multiple different kinds of chestnuts all in the same area, and they're all interacting with each other and we're breeding as we're like participating in this we're breeding the crops of the future any any tree any seed that emerges from my particular blend of different kinds of chestnuts and hazelnuts could be the next you know tree of the future and then once once you've got like the

you know the tree that is the one um you know you clone it and then all the sudden like that could be the next you know macintosh apple and it really depends on where you're you're living, right? Like if you're in the southwest, I don't know what to tell you to grow. You know, but if you're, you know, so you can kind of look to a hundred miles or a couple hundred miles south or like a zone down from you or zone up from you to see like, okay, what are people growing? Like a plant that we're very excited about or or I've learned to be excited about is persimmons. I found a, we have a persimmon grower in Vermont who

has been breeding cold hardy present persimmins. And so being able to grow persimmons here, peaches, paw paw, another, like the, the coolest indigenous fruit of North America, I would say, is the pawpaw. It's a tropical fruit that tastes like a mango or a banana. And, you know, they were once spread by

mega fauna like you know those big ass hairy woolly mammoths or giant sloths you know and these things were so big that you know

that's how they would spread is through that and also through in various indigenous people trading them around and that's an incredibly promising food crop for more northern growers like we're you know you're in the

north, I'm in the north, like temperate climates, I think should be really looking at pawpaws. And then also, again, like looking at things that are low maintenance and pest resistance. So, like, I don't, here in Maine, I don't grow regular pet, regular plums. I grow beach plums. It's an indigenous kind of plum here. They're a little smaller, but I don't have to, like, I don't want to spray pesticides on my shit and I don't want to, like, be fighting against. bugs um you know um trying to think like other i mean just stuff that i think i'm excited about like

also um sea berry is another very interesting um crop it's a and you will like this comrade because uh they were used in the soviet union uh in place of uh orange juice they would grow seed berries um and uh you know it's at this elevation north this is the most uh vitamin in sea and antioxidants that you can get in a fruit and it's a bright orange fruit. It's fucking beautiful. They're easy to grow from seed. They're easy to propagate from cuttings. Seaberry, I think, could potentially be a really cool crop for global warming just because, again, it's another one of these plants that, you know, they're growing it in fucking Saskatoon. They're growing it further south. It's a plant that can take cold. It can take hot. It can take

dry I think it's a little it's it's got its own challenges as far as like how you have to plant it we've done a podcast about it but again it's like you can it's they're awesome and that family of fruit I think it's elagnus has other fruits in it like autumn berry autumn olive which is are planted all over north America along highways they're fruiting right now they're bright red again high in antioxidants high in vitamin C but gomi is the one in that family G-O-U-M-I that is just fucking crushing it on my farm and I highly recommend that one as well because it's like this is not in these are not native plants and so that's the negative side of them local insects can't benefit from the from the leaves you know

there are no there aren't a lot of positive interactions with local stuff in autumn berries in particular have the potential to be invasive and so that's why like foragers love them because you can go around and pick them and forge them and not feel bad about it like it's almost like an active preservation to go around and harvest them and because you know birds spread them and they're not they're not good for local insects so you know I would say those ones um but you know I still love apples I'm still going to fucking grow apples no one's going to tell me not to grow apples, but also acorns. I think acorns are other really good crops for eating. Acorn flour. It tastes a lot like almond flour. And it's just a little bit of extra work.

You just soak the, you blend the nuts, and then you soak them in water for a couple days and just drain them until they don't have the bitter tannin taste, and then you can eat them. But you don't want to just eat them plain because they have tannins. that fuck up your body's ability to absorb nutrients so you don't it's not something to take lightly and you know another thing i'll say just like on the on the kind of like global warming tip is chestnuts in particular people think are show a lot of promise for carbon sequestration because there the wood is so um the trees grow about three times faster than a lot of trees and the wood itself is really dense and holds a lot of carbon in it and the wood

is really high quality wood so even if you're making desks or whatever out of the wood like that that wood is staying in circulation for a long time and I don't necessarily advocate for carbon sequestration on some real shit but if it's a way for people to fund their land projects by getting some bullshit NGO money for carbon sequestration then I'm all for it you know especially if it lends itself to projects that are like cooperatively held as a sort of commons where people are able to benefit from eating these things for free and developing a culture around it. And who knows, you know, you plant a couple million chestnuts. Maybe it could help.

I mean, we don't, we should, we should be open to anything. Yeah, absolutely. With carbon sequestration, there's natural ways to do it working with. with the cycles of nature and the carbon cycle, and there are more unnatural or technological ways to do it. Certainly, like reforestation, kelp forests, things like that are certainly a good way to do it, and there are obviously bad ways as well.

How, I do wonder, go ahead. Can I cut you off? One other crop that I just want to shout out here, I don't know if we're going to talk about non-tree crops, but I just want to really shout out this kaleidoscopic, perennial kale that I get from the experimental farmers network. It's bred by this guy, Chris Homannics, and it's a truly perennial kale. And whether it's in the greenhouse or it's in my yard, it just fucking crushes it.

It doesn't, it's, it's the bugs don't fuck with it in the same way that they fuck with other kinds of kale. And I think like I'm, I just can't grow enough of it and I, I won't grow enough of it. I'll just, if I could cover my whole yard with this shit, I would. And I highly recommend it because whether it's in a greenhouse or whether it's outside, it's just an incredible source of greens. So I just want to shout that out as well. That's dope. I was just thinking, too, when I mentioned the kelp thing, I was in the Pacific Northwest recently, kayaking off the coast of the Pacific.

With dolphins. And with dolphins and shit. The kelp forest are amazing because, like, seals will go in there and hide out and they'll have. their babies in there and stuff and you can literally take the kelp out of the ocean and just eat it straight up um so it's just kind of an interesting way i guess it holds a lot of carbon it's a food product and it protects like you know seals dolphins even whales will go into kelp forests as a way to relax and get away from any threats so those are interesting things to think about yeah i was going to ask you though how easy it is to plant a tree because one of the actions

with climate change is like you know trees are really easy you can take the sea to kind of throw them out your window at places. And some percentage of them will take hold. And, you know, blah, blah, blah. It's good for nature. It pulls down carbon, et cetera. How easy is it generally to plant a tree? Because I'm just sort of wondering about that personally.

It's easy. I mean, you just, what I do is what I've learned from Aaron. Again, I've learned this guy is just so generous with his knowledge. You know, what I do is because I have problems with chipmunks and shit is you grow things in community pots. And so I'll take a pot and then I'll just fit as many chestnuts as I can in there. And then I'll put a screen over the top of it. Same with things like paw, paw.

Again, all these things just grow really great. Just put them all in a pot. And then the first year, and this is a great thing you can do while you're renting, you know. You can have community pots like, oh, I'm growing my future chestnut orchard, you know. And that's what I'm doing now. I haven't cleared all the land where I'm going to where someone put a fucking Christmas tree farm in our yard and just let it go. And so we have like, you know, five foot apart Christmas trees that are like, you know, 150 feet now and they're just dead. They're just waiting to catch on fire.

And so I'm, you know, I haven't cleared this, clearing that shit's a pain in the ass. And so I'm just like growing chestnuts and in pots. And what you do is you put them in a pot. You get a community pot. You can do this with any stone. fruit like plum, apricot, persimmin, you can do it with nuts, and you just put them all in a pot and then you just, what happens is like they're all competing for sunlight because they're so close together and so it forces them to grow straight up. And then next year or, you know, the year after, you can before they've unthawed when they're still like dormant, you just take them, you dip them in water and then they become bare root plants. And then you just can individually pot them in different pots or put them in the ground or, you know, wrap it up in some wet newspaper, put it in a plastic bag and send it to a friend. It's a fun thing.

You know, I've I've enjoyed sending some comrades, some trees. I think it's, I think like one of the one of my favorite gestures is giving a tree. I just love it. I love when I see, you know, I have more chestnuts and shit like that growing than I have need for. And so I just love giving them to people. you know there's other considerations with these things like you don't you want to protect them in the winter and so i'll put them in like cold storage um under my barn um and you know you can do the same thing like with other plants that propagate from um cuttings so like i'll go to the elderberry stand by my house and i'll make a bunch of cuttings um in the in the late fall or early spring i'll make a bunch of cuttings of berries, and then I'll root them, and then I'll put them all in a pot, and then I'll just let them grow. I did the same with sea berries. Some plants, this doesn't work so well with. You know,

another plant I want to shout out for global warming is mulberries. I think mulberries are going to be a very important crop for global warming. Like, they can put out so much food, like just a mass of weight um and again they get to be so tall that it's like everybody can get some the birds the deer the people the bugs the worms you know they're just a good all around uh plant but yeah i mean that's and the only other thing you want to consider with that stuff is cold stratification some of these plants require like some of these nuts will require some cold stratification so you know you'll want to put them in the fridge for 60 days or you'll want to leave them outside over the winter in a kind of shady place. And, you know, you can just Google that, like how long to cold stratify

chestnuts. But the truth is, most of the places that I buy chestnuts and hazelnuts from like basically local growers, they store them for the winter and then they'll send them to you in, you know, February. And so you can just have them on your own and do that, which I think even like burnt ridge nursery which is one of the um almost all the places i bought nuts from that weren't like some etzy ebay shit uh which you know sometimes you just got to do that um they come stratified and you can or and when you get them when you get the seeds you can just ask the the stupid questions of how do i do this you know and the thing is it's it sounds easy but it's not i mean you have to pay it's like a baby you have to pay attention to these things

you can't you can't just leave it in the sun on a really blasting hot day because you'll come you'll come home and they'll just be all fucking dead you know um and so you really you do have to pay attention it's not um it's not just set it and forget it you know you got to you got to really pay attention to what you're doing totally with with moldberries specifically you can just cut off branches and plant those and they regrow right yeah yeah that's awesome i know on uh i know you're not in you're vegan you're not into fishing but putting them on the banks of lakes they grow out over the water and they drop their mulberries into the water and the fish can come and eat them just kind of cool i learned that and so what what is that like

how you encourage them to stay close i'm a fan of i just don't do it yeah you know if you want to like the idea is you know you plan it the next year fish will come to that to feed and then if you want to you can you can catch them or just you know just feed them it doesn't matter but because it's so easily reproducible you know it's something that that that does happen in the fishing world. Well, see, there you go. There's like, I mean, if that's something you're already familiar with, that's a good place to start with cultivating mulberries, you know?

Build off that for sure. Yeah. Well, let's go, because we've mentioned it a few times throughout this conversation. You mentioned cold storage. You mentioned greenhouses. So what are some of these strategies for protecting crops from unpredictable weather or getting them through the winter? And what is cold storage, actually, too, if you want to go in that direction?

Well, you know, it's a, I have a root seller. it's probably not like a straight up root seller it's basically any um and that that in particular is not something i have feel like i have a huge expertise on that's a homesteading thing that i'm pretty green on um you know basically you want to i think you want to keep it you know so it never gets below 38 to i'm not really sure to be honest um i have places in my house where um where basically what you want to do is you don't want you want these things to stay cold so that they don't break dormancy. And so I know underneath my barn, it stays cold enough that if I put the plant like my pawpaws and hazelnuts and chestnuts that I'm growing from seed,

I know I can put those things under my barn and they won't break dormancy in the middle of the winter. Sometimes in February, you'll have a day where it gets really warm. And so if I put some some shit outside and everything's like covered in snow and then all of a sudden you have like that week of 60 degree weather in the middle of February and then like all your plants start popping up that could kill them and so you want to keep your nursery plants in a place where they're protected um and then underneath my pantry I have what could be called a root cellar um and it's basically like an old school refrigerator um and people people make these a bunch of different ways um to make them legit you know you install like a thermometer that tells you the humidity and

temperature that's down there and you can you know box it in with like sand and uh insulation but again that's not like cold storage is not something i have a lot of experience in because to be honest i haven't necessarily produced enough staple crops of potatoes and squash that i needed or carrots that i needed to to do that um so but as far as like other strategies for growing in the winter. I think like the easiest shit is like sprouting. That's something anyone can do. And that's like a really, again, like if you're not rich, it's a great way to just have nutritious food all winter. You just, you know, you can go to like Johnny's or wherever. And you can order a thing of alfalfa sprouts or it's like more fancy kind of sprouts. And you just put them in a jar with screen over the top or cheese cloth. And you just, you can keep it in a shady place. And just all winter you could be growing, you know, fresh sprouts or even microgreens, just growing things in your windowsill. You can do that all winter long, just have like, you know, little microcales growing. And like, you know, that's, I mean, that's fun.

I've enjoyed doing that and I love having fresh food like that in the winter. I was talking earlier about cold frames. Cold frames are an old school method. They used to do it. I think it started in France where they would build raised beds and then they would put mica sheets. of mica over the top of them in the winter so that the sun could still get through. And, you know, this stuff is really, really broken down very well in Elliott Coleman's book, The Four Seasons Harvest, which is about how you can grow food year round in protected

environments. And I think, you know, it's helped me almost more than anything else I've read as far as like being able to stay productive with food. You know, we eat a lot of salads. So it's great for us. And so, you know, what you can do is, like, in August, in your cold frames, you plant, you know, spinach, arugula, some Asian greens like tatsoi, whatever, kale, machet, like, there's all these, like, crops that do that are cold, hearty, that can take a freeze, that can freeze, and then just be fine after, you know, it's like, if you've ever dug up your garden and found, like, spinach and spring onion, you know, growing it's like the same thing um and so i would love going out in the winter with my with my broom

after a good snow brushing off the uh my cold frames opening it up and then just seeing um it's just full of arugula and spinach and we've had fresh greens all year round that way um i'm not using my cold frames this year because vols just set up shop in there and just shit all over everything and i'm i'm just like i'm grossed out by it and uh so i have to like so I'm just focusing on the greenhouse and because we get so much food out of our greenhouse I'm just digging with that this year but again cold frames are just so easy it's just a raised bed with a fucking window on top and you can just by doing that you can grow so much food and just to have fresh greens all winter interested in that check out the four seasons harvest

by Elliott Coleman and yeah and the same the same practices the same plants apply in a greenhouse um but the cool thing about the greenhouse is i can take all my stuff out of cold storage in whatever march you know when it's still really cold here and put him in my greenhouse and just get a jump on the growing season um and it's a it's a fun uh you know fun man cave to have a fucking greenhouse to go blast some gangster rap and just be like hanging out with plants and it's it's it's fucking awesome having a greenhouse it's uh and i got really lucky like somebody was just giving one away. They were getting ready to just tear it down and throw it away.

And I, you know, like a rebel, I broke the quarantine. Went over to U-Haul, got the truck and just took that shit and set it up. And it's awesome. It's awesome to have a greenhouse. And like I was saying with that kale, it does so well outside. But even in my greenhouse all summer, it's just killing it. Um, and so I really, yeah, I love, I love working in a greenhouse. I think it's, um, and again for like, you know, I feel like I'm like training right now.

I don't feel, I'm not really in a position where I'm forced to produce, you know, enough food to feed my family and the people around us for a year at this stage. Um, and so I'm really just learning the skills to do it. Yeah, that's fucking awesome. I absolutely love that. Um, and also I think another method is like pickling. and canning to preserve things longer? Do you do that as well?

Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. I've got, yeah, you know, a couple different ways of doing that. You know, there's the lacto-fermentation style where you, you know, just use salt and things ferment on their own. They don't hold for as long that way, but they're healthier. So it's like a, I like, I'd prefer the lacto-fermentation style. It's healthier for us. It's better for our stomachs and it's literally just add salt. But yeah, you know, just had some pickled beets from our garden, such a treat.

You know, tomatoes, we grow a lot of tomatoes. So one thing I aim to do is at least have like enough tomato sauce for the year. And yeah, and I think it's good to just have a few things you focus on. all this shit is a lot of work, you know. And so learning to preserve things is super important. You know, we just make a big, big thing of tomato sauce. I make it kind of plain so that I can spice it up later. You know, also drying shit, you know, and drying shit is just so easy.

You just hang it. You know, you cut your herbs, you cut your mint. You know, a book that I've really liked reading is this guy. Pascal Balder the new wildcrafted cuisine and his stuff is mostly about like making crazy gourmet shit out of foraged stuff but

the techniques in there apply so well to just farming in general and just learning how like new and unique ways of preserving food and like a lot what a lot of like these wild crafty kind of people do is just working on different

mixes like dried dried mixes and you know I have a friend who dries dandelion greens because they taste better. I have like a nice jar of dried flowers and dried garlic scapes. But it is, it's work, you know, it's a couple days work to like really, you know, do a whole bunch of tomatoes. When I make my tomato sauce, I just sprinkle a little lemon on top that's supposed to

prevent botulism and then, you know, you boil it. I don't have like a canning set up. I just boil it in a thing and wait until. I hear the tops pop and then I put them in the pantry. Yeah, I mean, there's just so much shit you can do. There's so much, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, that I really like, that I think is important is, um, making elderberry syrup. Elderberries are one of the most medicinal wild things that you can ingest as far as like, you know,

they've said it's proven efficient against Ebola and so I feel like in the age of like this pandemic i've tried to always like make sure i have hell uh elderberry around um and so it's like right now around me elderberries are are our are fruiting and so you know i just take them pick them throw them in the freezer and then at the end i'll um there's a great recipe in um rosemary glad star uh i forget what the book is called whatever she's like the she's like the woman who's really like the Martha Stewart of herbalism you know herbalism 101 and so I just use her recipe for me and even though it's not vegan I make like a honey honey elderberry syrup so that like when you're sick any cold you just take that and I don't know I think it helps but then again

I haven't had a cold or a flu in like you know a year or something you know in a long time because I'm just wearing a fucking mask all the time so for sure yeah it's really really interesting um i've i've sort of been woken up recently to this the importance of fermented food in the diet in general um and how it helps the gut biome so you know not growing but just getting like stuff like kimchi and cambucha and even sauerkra anything that's fermented is is an important uh food staple for a for a healthy diet i think yeah well they say that it's like really good um like you know a huge chunk of our immune system is in our stomach and uh and that's Again, in the age of fucking pandemics, whatever probiotic shit we can eat, I think we should.

I want to, as far as probiotic stuff, I want to shout out kefir, K-E-F-F-I-R. It's like water kefir is like so much, it's so much, tastes so much better than kombucha. And it's so much easier. It only takes two days to make. And we've just been bawling off kefir all summer. And you can just order some crystals online for like 10 bucks. And it's a really, I, I, I think it's, I think kombucha is a pain in the ass.

You get this gross fucking flemmy mushroom thing and it's just like, it's just like, it's just a lot of work, whereas like the water cup here is, is much easier and taste better, I think. Nice. I'll look into that. Yeah. And with the gut biome as well, like a huge percentage of something like serotonin is produced in the stomach.

So like I've really, I've recently realized like mental health and depression issues can somewhat be mitigated or addressed through a healthy gut biome in conjunction with other things as well so it's really important and serotonin makes you happy is that is that what it is heretone sort of simplified is a chemical that makes you feel happy and satiated and satisfied in life so it's just important to do that you know and then there's also like wine you can make wine or mead out of a bunch of different types of things and is that not true oh yeah no i'm just like Hell yeah. Even like daisy flowers and shit.

You know, you can turn into wine. Yeah, no, we just, we did an interview with this guy. The place is called Beyond Beyond Vineyard. He's out of Milwaukee. McHale is his name, but he like spells it all. McHale and, it always just confuses me. But he, his whole shit is just about making crazy wines with crazy fruits and just listen to like the stuff he was talking about.

I was just like, when you were saying that, I was just like shaking my head thinking like, oh, man, I wish I could have tasted some of this guy's wine. It sounded so good. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. So I just want to ask a question, maybe one or two more before we leave and throw some recommendations out there. And this one is just like about being a father. So like sort of zooming out from from plants and stuff and just thinking about climate change. Both of us are fathers with young children. And, you know, a huge thing that we have to think about is our children's futures. So how do you deal with that psychologically, and do you see your interests in food self-sufficiency as something you can hand down to them for their own protection and flourishing? Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, definitely I see it and I know it to be true. Like an example I like to use is, you know, I've taught my kids to forage around us. And, you know, Winston, my older son is all about these winter berries, like winter green grows all around us.

And, you know, it's like what toothpaste is made of and shit. And so we find these little winter berries in the winter. And like it's a nice treat. And when my daughter, Daisy, when she was teething, barely even barely, like probably around one, maybe a little older, she noticed that Winston would chew on these leaves. And when she was teething, I noticed she would be, you know, picking these things up off the ground and would just be having a huge wad of these in her mouth just chewing on it because it would like numb her gums. but also is like you know satiating her as she chewed on it and you know that's what herbalists say

is like kids you know we co-evolved with these plants and kids have a you know that that knowledge hasn't been taken from them yet so they like they feel it like on a deep level and I love just seeing that like we never showed her

showed her that but yeah I mean basically you know I hope that my kids will be interested in these things I can't like force it down their throats or they won't like it so all i can do is like infuse these routines and rituals into our life so that like they enjoy going in harvesting autumn berries and elderberries and stinging nettle and you know acorns and like we have fun crushing the acorns together but it's like you know one year they love it the next year they don't and like that's cool um but as long as they're benefiting

from it hopefully they'll see the value in it um but as far as like having kids and global warming and all this stuff it's like you know moving here living in the north i feel like something I did so that I could hopefully pass something down to them. But nothing is guaranteed. You know, there could be a Christian militia that takes over Maine and takes everything from everyone, you know. There's no, the future is unwritten. And, you know, just as I imagine, I'm passing them down a farm,

they could just as easily want to go live in the, in New York City, you know, and be paddling around in canoes on Wall Street. you know living in this cyber tech future i mean um you know the future is so wide open you know all we can do is you know try to think about what everything we can do to empower them to be strong and resilient humans and you know they're going to be growing up in a world that's really fucked up um in ways we can't even imagine um and uh we can't let the assholes out breed us either you know We got to have kids. We got to keep good people circulating in the population.

So, yeah, I don't know. I don't, I don't choose to despair about anything. You know, when I see something, you know, terrible happen, I just think like, okay, well, this happened. Well, how do we overcome that? How do we work through it? How do we, this changes things. But how does it, what can we do? You know, that's always my question.

What can we do? or as your boy said, what is to be done? Absolutely. Yeah, no, I love that. And I really also resonate with that idea of parenting, which is if you impose, if you try to be an authoritarian, you're going to create resentment and backlash in your own children. There's no way to impose anything on a kid. You have to foster their own freedom and growth and development. And that's just a parenting technique broadly.

But also, I think what you're doing, and I think it's important for parents to attempt to do this, especially in the age of screens and smart. phones and hyperalienation from nature is to instill a love of nature in your kids by just engaging with nature when they're young and having that constant, you know, engagement with the beauty and the grandeur of nature. That in and of itself will go a long way in creating climate warriors that we're going to have to have in the future, you know. That's why I'm back here because I grew up, you know, playing with frogs and salamanders and picking raspberries in my grandmother's garden.

Here I am. I never thought I'd be back here doing this. back, you know, I was born in Maine. Here I am, I'm back here. You just never, you know, you never know, you never know. I've only been a parent for four years. So, you know, I haven't written my book on that yet. For sure.

Yeah, it's a process of learning for damn sure. And every single kid is so different. When my daughter compared to my son, it was just like two completely different worlds of parenting strategies that worked for one do not work for the other. So that's something I learned as well. But it's a great thing, I think, parenthood. I would never change it for the world, you know. Yeah, I mean, the only thing I will say is, like, the world's not going to end.

You know, human beings are going to be around, you know, I hate to say, but civilization will persist. You know, capitalism is not going to disappear. You know, it's just going to be a time of fragmentation, a time of, you know, collapse and, you know, just increased stratification and just all the things we're seeing, just multiplying and things happening we can't imagine. So it's like, you know, by building power, by building autonomy, by like getting these ideas out there and, you know, we're doing everything we can to make the world better, you know.

And hopefully our kids, you know, we'll pick that fight up and keep going with it because, I mean, what else is there, right? Absolutely. And as I always say, the children, the youth, I mean, as they grow up and become politically and globally aware, their futures are on the line. And, you know, they're not going to sit back and they don't have the luxury of denialism, like some 70-year-old rich CEO asshole or Republican politician. And as the crisis intensifies, it will also intensify the response from the people to it. And that does give me some hope.

Right. Totally. Totally. And, you know, like, I never went to a protest as a kid, you know, and so who knows what our influence on our kids will be. You know, this, like, it's so fascinating to think of how Zoomers. drove so much of the action in the George Floyd rebellions, like what will the next generation do? Right.

You know, you know, look out ruling class. You know, us fucking occupy, us lame occupy people are, you know. Or nothing for what's coming. Or a footnote or a footnote. Amen to that. All right. So last two questions are just helping people get started. So if someone wants to get started developing the skills,

us in this episode and I know you said it's a lot start small focus on a couple things and build out your skill set but let's say they have limited land or they have a tiny backyard or maybe they live in the city and they only have like access to a small rooftop space what advice would you give them and maybe what general plants and this is going to be region specific and condition specific but just some starting advice for people that want to get on this path really anything I've said that interests you go for anything that interests you go for it like grow the things you like. You know, I say kale, potatoes and tomatoes. Those are my three favorite things to grow in spring onions just because they're easy. They can, you know, I like, I like things that

are pest resistant, don't require a lot of care and do well. And those are three things that I just think everyone should do. It's so satisfying to grow tomatoes. It's so satisfying to be able to go and pick kale whenever you're hungry. It's so satisfying to pick potatoes and eat them. And, you know, If you only have a small amount of space, there's this book, Eric Tonsmeier, Backyard, Paradise Lot. It's all about how to grow a ton of, create a tiny food forest and a little bit of land. And, you know, link up with other people, you know, see what's out there. It doesn't have to be done in your yard. You know, you could do some wild, wild shit where you're squatting some land.

You can, there's a number of different ways that you can grow food. And, you know, I don't know, just do what moves you, really. I mean, that would be my advice is, you know, grow what you want to eat. Like, don't grow fucking colerobby and a bunch of weird shit that you're not going to want to eat. Like, grow the stuff that you're excited to eat. Like, I don't get, I don't really get that excited about picking carrots. You know, I do it. I do it.

And when I eat it, I'm like, oh, they're so good fresh. But it's like, eh, whatever. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And if you're in a city situation or you don't have any land, there are community gardens. They're becoming more and more popular on left-wing, like, mutual aid groups and to be able to grow your own food so you can engage with that. Foraging is also another option to just learn the plant life around you and go out to the sticks and figure it out. Hell yeah.

You don't even have to go out to the sticks. You'd be surprised what's just harvesting acorns in the park nearby your house, like purse lane, you know, lamb's quarter. These things are growing everywhere. Dandelion. I mean, you'd be shocked at how edible everything around us is, you know, especially those three crops I've listed. And, yeah, you know, and like on the permaculture tip, it's like stinging nettle in pots is another, it's like you can just keep cutting them and getting greens off of them.

And it's a great vegetable, you know, and like I was saying earlier, if you don't own land, well, it's a great time to, if you don't have a lot of money, to buy a bunch of like, fruit trees and nut trees from seed and just grow them all in pots and then just you know three or four years later you got some sizable trees and then when you finally do get some land you know put them in the ground if you never do give them to friends it was fun to learn how to do it um part of the joy is just watching these things grow totally do you fuck with mushrooms at all yeah i grow um shataki mushrooms oyster mushrooms and lions mane i'm not i'm not brave enough to forage i don't have the knowledge, but, you know, taking a log, drilling holes in it, and then putting the little, I forget

what they're called, the spores or whatever. Yeah, they're not called spores or whatever. They're little wooden pellets and you just hammer them in and then you put wax over them and you can get like a thousand of them for like 30 bucks, 40 bucks. And you just take fresh cut logs and put it in a shady place. That is definitely a smart thing to do in cities. Shataki mushrooms. They've got protein. Take about 16, 18 months to start really producing.

But once they do, you get a couple runs each year. And it's like magic. It's awesome. Have you done it? I've looked into it. I'm going to do it this year. Super easy. Yeah. And they produced for like six, seven years in a row. Yeah. I mean, I have a friend who says she's had some for 10 years.

So until they've devoured the whole log, I guess. Fascinating. Yeah, looking to that, and that's a tiny space you could do that in. So that's an awesome option as well. Yeah, well, see, that's what I mean. Like, you know, whatever you're interested in, you know, that piqued your interest. So it's like, that's what you should do, you know. Like, you don't want to, like, that's what I do is I end up, like, doing shit that I'm not that interested in sometimes.

And then, like, no wonder I neglected it, you know. Absolutely. So you mentioned Paradise Lot, Gaya's Garden, Braiding Sweetgrass, Four Seasons's Harvest. Do you have any other resources that you would recommend to people? You can throw anything out at all. I know people can pick up whatever they find useful. But any recommendations? Yeah, and I also said Pascal Balder, Wildcrafted, the new wildcrafted cuisine.

Honestly, I would say like right now I'm, and I hate to say this, but I'm actually loving Instagram for this kind of content, especially for foraging kind of stuff. learning how to grow this stuff. There's a lot of great resources on Instagram for permaculture. And I find it to actually be better than YouTube because YouTube content tends to be really sprawling and just like too personality driven. You know, like, dude, I don't give a, I don't give a fuck about your schick. Like, I just want to, I just want to like learn about these plants here. And so I love how Instagram, because it's supposed to be short, you can get like bites

of information. But yeah, I mean, those would be the, that's where I would start. And then I would also just really, the best things that I have done were through, was to do a podcast about this stuff so that I could really fucking learn from these people and develop these relationships. But just going to visit the people who are doing this in your area. Find the local nurseries, the local plant breeders, the local people who are actually like doing this stuff.

and because not a lot of people are like hitting those people up and so if you go there to buy a plant and then you just you can just ask so many questions and these people because they're not in it for the money they're in it for their love of this shit they just want to talk about it and they just want to pass on what they know and anything like anything I'm anything I can do with those kinds of people to do work trades to learn from them to deepen relationships with people. who are like of a similar affinity maybe they're not anarchists but they're you know anti-siv or something like i um i'm i love i have loved meeting radical farmers i've loved meeting radical plant breeders and just um learning from them and so like and i wish i'd done it sooner when i moved here

um and so i think the best thing you can do really is try to like do the research about who's growing these things that you're interested in or who's got a food forest who look where are these things where do these things exist where you're at um you know like you got that guy in omaha who is growing like all this citrus in a uh oh yeah in a in a in a in a um you know a climate battery greenhouse like fucking go there go meet that dude you know like it just go see if he'll give you an orange you know an omaha orange um but yeah but yeah. Yeah, that's what I would recommend. And, you know, specifically for the plants I'm talking about,

the Edgewood Nursery, Instagram, Aaron's always posting awesome shit. Obviously, our podcast, propaganda by the seed. There's another podcast called Partisan Gardens, done by some comrades in Indiana. And these are people who are, you know, again, like people who are radically minded looking at alternatives and thinking about, you know, how we will, you know, survive, survive this shit and make it through. Absolutely.

Another, these are great ways in. Another great way in is if you have a local farmer's market, a lot of those people are interested in this stuff. If you can find the right sort of people in that area, create those networks, reach out to them. That can be very helpful. I recently started looking into like local beekeepers, but local like just organizations dedicated to the preservation of bees more broadly and like donating to them. I'm not at a place where I could do that, but you know, you could find what perhaps flowers that the local bee population use to pollinate in your area and just grow those flowers in your front yard, just give them a little, a little island for them to come to and be able to perpetuate those things are simple, easy and really fun ways to get involved. in helping restore nature as opposed to work against it. Yeah, totally.

And, you know, you had a question about bugs and birds and because I've rambled too much about plants. You know, bees get a lot of credit for as pollinators, but they're not the only pollinators out there. And there's a multitude of, like, weird little pollinators, like serpent flies and just these weird, just awesome, just so weird. And so when you grow a pollinator garden,

we just have a whole bunch of like perennial wild flowers and shit um you know it's not just about like bees aren't the only pollinators out there and uh and it's just incredible like all the weird alien creatures you see when you have like lots of flowers you know when you're it's uh it's like every time every time i go out i discover a new bug and i'm like what the fuck was that seriously you think you know like the basic bugs in your area if you've grown up there especially but i just yesterday on on my on my on my window. I saw a fucking bug I had never seen before. It looked like an absolute alien and I just sat there for like three minutes just like staring at it as close as I could. And if you have a

garden or anything and you really get down on your hands and knees and look, like it is an amazing, fascinating kaleidoscope of a fucking life. It's awesome. I mean, yeah, again, it's like and you know, the thing I, the word I kept thinking about before we started, before I was like preparing for this interview was a sense of wonder. You know, I just, you know, I just, you know, I just feel like as long as we approach this shit with a sense of wonder and respect and awe, you can't lose. 100%. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure.

I always love talking to you. I love learning from you. You really inspired me to get on this path and I'm going to continue down it. Before I let you go, though, can you just let listeners know where they can find you, your music, and your other work, including your podcasts online? You can't find me. I'm fucking hidden. You can, you know, I'm on Instagram.

young soul i'm on twitter mc soul i'm on fed book big soul i'm on um i'm on band camp um sold s o'le bandcamp dot com spotify same thing um and if you want you can listen to my podcast propaganda by the seed on all major platforms you can also listen to the soul cast i've kind of slowed down with that recently but i'll probably start it back up again in the winter. That's, again, on all the same things. And my website, which I barely update anymore, is s-o-e-o-n-e-o-n-e.org, and you can sign up for my newsletter, and that is the best way to stay in touch with me. And, you know, Brett, much respect. I, you know, I love interacting with you. It's been great getting to know you, and I consider you a real friend. And thanks for

having me on doing what you do. Absolutely, man. You keep doing what you do. We'll do this again some time for sure. Thank you so much, brother. All right, homie. In the days of the plague, I'm just trying to stay sane. I'm just trying to stay fed. Trying not to find a grave. Trying not to lose my mind. It's gone already.

Talking by the war is civil war already. Hell no, I ain't ready. Two kids locked inside with us. We barely got time to make spaghetti. The 1200 they gave me barely make up all the fact. It's a fucking fact that this thing you call America is dead already. I came in from the future on a missile told you, motherfucker. fuckers back in O five when Rome burned

Nero bleed the fiddle now it's 2020 they played violins against the violence the Anthropocene body count brought me out of my retirement Everyone is lying while the body backs are piling and I was crying Man asking where the fire went It came back in an instant on the wrong side

of the law to be burned out every precinct In the days of the plagues Cities up in flames Led by descendants and former slaves Bricking chains but many more remains Don't listen to the peace Police. They just want to stay dry and complain. You can keep your ultra wet, not-profit status blankets. We out here dancing in the rain. Stay dry if you want to while we dancing in the rain.

I'm sorry if you lost someone to a killer cop or coronavirus in the lungs. This is how the world was won. We're on my end sacrifice to the sun and it ain't done to we avenge every last one. In the days of the plague That gave you a dollar an hour More than minimum wage Thank you for your service Like you signed up to invade Enlisted for war

But all you wanted was paid day off in a raise And if the virus had anything to say About the workings of power It's that most of you motherfuckers Can't eat without peeps Make it 8, 25 an hour Don't get me started on the prisons Because I know liberals won't listen

No, they won't. But it ain't hard to imagine. Imagine. The kind of hell they've been trapped in. In the days of the plague, I learned the difference between a want and the need. If anything was clear in 2019, it's clearer now.

There ain't no society. All my hero's dead. All the gods have left. All they hand is dead. All they understand is force. So we give them that. Every epoch reels from the cut, which evolve from its own Achilles heels.

nights turn into days it was so easy to break tsunami on the way do you want to drown to ride the wave nights turn into days it was so easy to break tsunami on the way do you want to drown to ride the wave

and anything was clear in 2019 it's cool right now there ain't no sight All my heroes head Oh my god's a blast All the hand is dead All they understand is for

So we give that And anything was clear in 2019 There ain't no society Oh my heroes head Oh my god's up last All the hand is dead All they understand All they understand

All they understand is four Four Four Thank you.