The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - Rerun: e.16 Steve Solomon on Intelligent Gardening Part 2

Episode Date: May 21, 2015

Here's a past episode that, until now, hasn't been included in this podcast feed. I've added a new intro, as well as a brand new segment at the end of the episode. In this long-form interview with gardening writer Steve Solomon, we discuss his new book, The Intelligent Gardener, which he co-wrote with Erica Reinheimer. In it, Steve argues that the key to growing healthy crops is to combine the return of organic matter to the soil with a practice called remineralization, which involves assessing the mineral content of your soil and then adding the right mix of amendments to ensure they are in proper balance (Steve's contention: few soils are). Along the way, Steve provides an excellent beginner's entry into soil science, and challenges some of the organic movement's tightly held assumptions about sustainable crop production. This is part 2 of our conversation. In this segment we focus on the assertions Steve makes in his book regarding healthy vegetables, how to achieve a nutrient-balanced soil, and why organic gardeners should be open to the idea of using certain synthetic fertilizers.

This is the Ruminant Podcast. I'm Jordan Marr. The Ruminant is a website devoted to sharing good ideas for farmers and gardeners. There are photo-based blog posts with great ideas for your farm or garden, essays, book reviews, and of course, this podcast. You can find it all at theruminant.ca. You can email me, editor at theruminant.ca, and I'm on Twitter, at ruminantblog. Alright, let's do a show. Hey everybody, happy Wednesday. So look, I don't have a new episode for you this week. I wasn't able to get an interview done in time, although the good news is that I have some great interviews booked coming up soon. So in the coming weeks, we're going to talk to a woman I met at one of the conferences I was at this year

who is doing some really interesting stuff with livestock breeding, particularly or specifically with cattle. As well, there's a woman who has been leading the charge in opposing the Arctic apple, which is the first GMO apple. And we're going to talk about some of the implications for organic farmers if this apple is released into the wild, I suppose. So that'll be coming up as well. And in addition, I've had an offer that I have gratefully accepted from friend of the show and fellow farmer Dan Brisbois. He was on the show previously a year or two ago and he's going to come on and talk about how to effectively run a cooperative farm. Today what I thought I would do, since I don't have all of my back catalog uploaded onto this newest podcast feed, is I figured I'd just I'd play a rerun of an episode that you if you're

subscribed to this feed you can't you don't as yet have access to so I looked up my podcast feed and realized that it starts around episode 15 that's as far back as you can access right now and that was the first part of a two-part conversation with Steve Solomon and for some reason or another I failed to upload the the second part of the conversation with Steve Solomon. And for some reason or another, I failed to upload the second part of the conversation with Steve. So today's going to feature that second part, which is episode 16. And then I think realistically, folks, I'm going to be playing a few reruns this summer. And what I'll do is I'll continue to feature stuff that you don't otherwise have access to. So for you newer listeners, it'll just give you a chance to hear some of the older episodes that you otherwise haven't been able to choose to listen to yet. So hopefully you newer listeners, it'll just give you a chance to hear some of the older episodes that you otherwise haven't been able to choose to listen to yet.

So hopefully you all find that acceptable. Well, you have no choice. You're going to have to find that acceptable. I'm doing my best to get fresh content out every week. But with things on the farm being so busy, it has been difficult. And this week particularly, you know, we're in that bottleneck time of year. We had to get all the rest of the outdoor nightshades out and corn had to go out and I had to get beans out and just that real crazy bottleneck time of planting. So in a few minutes,

you're going to hear my the second part of my two part original conversation with Steve Solomon, not to be mistaken with a later episode I did with Steve again, number three, Not to be mistaken with a later episode I did with Steve again, number three, which featured the topic of composting. That is accessible currently on this podcast feed. So what else can I tell you? I have got my full staff here now. That is really exciting. On this farm, I have essentially two people filling a total of 60 hours of work on the farm.

I've got one live on the farm, full-time staff member slash apprentice. And she arrived about 10 days ago. Her name is Samantha. And I also have a part-time helper who's coming just from down the road a little bit here in the Okanagan. So she's coming two to three days a week. Her name is Debra. And in telling you Debra's name, Debra would want me to tell you that she is not a 53-year-old woman called Debra. And in telling you Debra's name, Debra would want me to tell you that she is not a 53 year old woman called Debra. She's just a 29 year old woman called Debra with a, with an anachronistic old timey name, I suppose. Older timey, I guess. I think she's right. I think Debra is not that common a name for people who are age 29. Anyway, the reason I bring Sam and Debra up is because last year I had two guys working for me,

Ryan and Ian. They were great, but as most of the kind of apprentices do, they move on to other things. But now I've swung hard towards the other end of the gender spectrum, and I've got two women working for me. And it's already come up in the short time that Sam's been here where I want to address them both collectively. And I don't know how to do that. And I'm sure many people listening are in the same kind of position sometimes where, where you want to address a couple of women without using either of their names. And that situation is just fraught. Uh, because just the natural thing that wants to roll off my tongue is guys. And you know, that's problematic. I probably don't need to explain that. Um, and I wish it wasn't problematic, but it is. And I don't, I don't really resent that. Uh, equally, almost equally problematic or fraught is, is girls.

Uh, even though that also comes free and easy through the mouth. Uh, Hey girls, do you want to go down and weed those, those beds while I am making lunch? Uh, that's just gonna, that's just caught. That's just awkward. So we're not, I'm not going to go with that. So at coffee break today, I asked Sam and Deb how they wanted me to deal with this situation. And they kind of chuckled about it. And we all had a laugh. And we went over the various options.

Women, it just doesn't really work. Hey, you women, no. Folks works. Folks is, and I'll cut to the chase and say that folks is probably going to be uh you know the leading contender uh but folks just sounds folksy and kind of forced so it has its um drawbacks and then we talked about ladies and immediately agreed that ladies it just feels wrong and awkward uh and almost as condescending as girls or guys. And then Sam told me about this Dimitri Martin bit.

If you want to sound like a creep, just add the word ladies to the end of things that you say. You could be saying something harmless too, like, thanks for coming to the show, ladies. Help, I've fallen into a well and I'm trapped. Ladies. Come on, ladies. It's like a jacuzzi with really high walls. So we had a laugh about that and then we talked about whether we could, I think it was Sam that suggested maybe we could use words from other languages

and we thought maybe amigas was not too bad. But that makes me think, like, I could just say friends or friendos. I like friendos. That's from No Country for Old Men. Or then we stayed within the Spanish language, and I suggested, like, banditas because, like, it sounds kind of badass. So those are some options uh we never really solved the situation but uh anyway it sucks it's just like it's just a a sucky stupid thing uh that

shouldn't really need to be talked about but um kind of has to be so anyway that's what's going on on the farm really busy which is why you're getting a rerun this week wow i don't usually like to bore you with ramblings like this but what the hell uh the other thing that's going to happen so so look you're listening to new rather mundane content right now and then uh that's like a piece of bread uh and then you're going to get sandwiched uh in between that piece of bread and another piece of bread at the end that's like a piece of bread. And then you're going to get sandwiched in between that piece of bread and another piece of bread at the end that's also new. You're going to get this great interview with Steve Solomon, author Steve Solomon. And that other piece of bread is going to be a

new segment that I'm going to try out for the podcast. What I figured is, I have had the odd person write in to me and say that they don't hate listening to me talk. So, and I notice on a lot of podcasts I like, there's a little bit of chatter from the host, either at the front of the episode or at the end. But I favor the end because that allows all of you who really don't want to just hear me vomit words out of my mouth for a bunch and be kind of narcissistic at the start of an episode. It allows you to just hear me vomit words out of my mouth for a bunch and be kind of narcissistic at the start of an episode. It allows you to just get straight to the interview, the main attraction, and then for those who actually want to hear me talk a little bit, they can do that at the end.

So if you make it through this long interview with Steve, there'll be a new segment I'm trying at the end. So you can either look forward to that or look forward to quickly turning the podcast off once Steve says goodbye. All right, so I just want to set up this interview with Steve. I don't need to do much because I have a little intro that goes along with the rerun. But essentially a few years ago, Steve Solomon, with another writer and farmer and soil scientist called Erica Reinheimer, wrote a book called and farmer and soil scientist called Erica Reinheimer wrote a book called The Intelligent Gardener. And it's a really great book. It contains a great primer on soil science and also makes the argument for why we need to spend more time properly balancing our soils via very specific amendment plans in order to produce healthier vegetables and ultimately healthier

humans. If you want to listen to the first part of that conversation, that's episode 15. And this is episode 16, which constitutes part two with my conversation with Steve Solomon. Hope you enjoy. I should note, by the way, folks, this goes back to where before I'd figured out some of my audio challenges as a new podcaster. So sound is pretty good, but not as good as you've been enjoying lately. Thanks. Steve is the author of numerous books on gardening, but it's his most recent one, The Intelligent Gardener, that we focus on in this conversation. In the last episode, Steve and I delved into his history as a gardener and how he came to the conclusions that he shares in this most recent book. In this conversation, we focus a lot more on the book itself.

We talk about the relationship between a soil with well-balanced nutrient content, nutrient-dense veggies, and healthy people. We also discuss the sustainability of bringing in amendments to your soil from far away, as well as some of the overlooked merits of synthetic fertilizers. Steve is very articulate, thoughtful, and frank, which made for a great conversation. So here it is. I hope you enjoy it. Steve Solomon, thanks a lot for coming back on the Ruminant Podcast. Oh, you're welcome. It's a pleasure to speak with you, Jordan.

So, kind of like in the last episode, I'll provide another kind of quick summary just to get us going here. You know, the meat and potatoes of your book, The Intelligent Gardener, is about how you discovered that to grow really healthy, nutrient dense vegetables that are healthy themselves and kind of better able to withstand pests and diseases. One needs to conduct regular soil tests on their soil, figure out the nutrient density in their soil and what minerals are out of balance, and then start adding various mineral amendments to achieve a balance in the soil. Yes.

Yes. So you call this process remineralization. Yes. So maybe, let's see, where do we want to start? Maybe you could start, Steve, by just like telling us how, if a gardener wants to try this out, and I really recommend they read your book first, because not only does it contain what I just described, but it has a few chapters on soil science that were the most accessible that I've seen in terms of books on soil science. So I was really appreciative of that. Thank you for that. I worked really hard to try to make that as simple as I could. You really, you nailed it, Steve.

It was really accessible and you used really simple analogies that really helped me understand or I now think I understand a lot better what's going on in the soil. So suffice to say, I really recommend that listeners read this book. I think it's a really important book. But assuming someone has read it, it sounds like the first thing they need to do, Steve, is to get a soil test for their garden, correct? That's right. There's no way that I know to work out what you've got in your soil for most of the elements without a soil test.

work out what you've got in your soil for most of the elements without a soil test. You could work out the calcium-magnesium ratio, I think, without a soil test. The rest of it, I don't know how you would. You know, when soil is acidic, it tastes sour. If you taste it, it tastes sour. When it stops being acidic, it tastes sour. If you taste it, it tastes sour. When it stops being acidic, it tastes sweet. So you could put calcium lime in the soil until it started to taste just ever so slightly sweet. And then if the soil seemed a bit loose, you could add a bit of magnesium to the soil very cautiously. Anyway, I think we could work that balance out without a soil test.

But the rest of them, you just can't tell. So you've got to get a soil test. I mean, you can get a soil test from Logan Labs for $20. Right, and so you go into a lot of detail in the book about where you've done some research on good places to sell to send your soil tests like logan labs in the states as well as what they cost and how to go about preparing a soil sample properly all of that is is in there um so now what you've because a major part of your book or your argument is that most soils are out of balance, and in many cases, quite severely out of balance. Is that right? Yes, that's right, as far as I know. I think a really balanced soil would be a rare thing.

thing. So can you talk, Steve, a little bit, you touched on this in the last conversation, but can you talk about two or three of the major ways, the major problems people have, like the major imbalances people have and what kinds of problems those cause? So maybe I'll start you off by asking you to talk about too much magnesium in the soil and too much potassium. Oh, that's a good pair, yeah. Magnesium has an effect on clay. It makes clay become sticky. When the magnesium level relative to the calcium level is too high, the clay becomes tight and airless. It holds more water. It holds less air. It holds less air.

It draws on itself. It wants to form clods and get compacted. There's nothing more important when growing crops than reducing, especially vegetable crops, than reducing the bulk density of the soil. You've got to lighten it up. Get more air into it. And organic growers have been told over and over that the way to do that the bulk density of the soil. You've got to lighten it up. Get more air into it. Organic growers have been told over and over that the way to do that is to add tons and tons of compost

or more specifically organic matter. But what you discovered is that in cases where you have way too much magnesium and you have a clay soil, organic matter isn't likely to cut it. Well, it does cut it. It's just that you put yourself on a treadmill. You can reduce the bulk density of the soil with organic matter if you put in enough and

keep putting in enough. But unfortunately, that organic matter brings with it minerals, and they may not be the minerals you want. And so you can induce other imbalances in the soil. Now, it depends a little bit on, or a lot, actually, on where you are as to what the organic matter in your area is going to be bringing in for you. If you live in Cascadia, I don't think this is going to apply to the Okanagan. I think where you live, you've got a whole different series of rocks, and I know nothing about them. So I don't know, 60, 80, 100 million years ago, that made the old Cascade Mountains, which ran all the way up through Washington State. All those rocks are just loaded with potassium. And they also carry a fair amount of magnesium.

They have plenty of magnesium, maybe a bit too much, but they've got way excesses of potassium. When you bring organic matter that grew on those soils and make compost with it, or just spread it and till it in, or whatever you do with it, or get manure from animals that grazed on the land around you, you're bringing in enormous quantities of potassium. So that leads us into the next thing you said, what happens when potassium gets out of balance? Well, if potassium is short,

and that's, by the way, my problem here in Tasmania. The soils that I'm looking at, especially the one I'm actually growing on, has got very little potassium in it at all. And no matter how much organic matter I bring in, I don't seem to get adequate potassium level, you see. It's the opposite problem. But when you've got inadequate potassium, your plants, a lot of them don't grow very well. You get disease problems.

You get structure problems. I'll give you an example. For a lot of years, I told people in my local book here, I write a garden book for Tasmania that's just a lot like growing vegetables west of the Cascades, and I call it Growing Vegetables South of Australia. And I publish it myself and I sell it cheap. Uh, and it's basically a charitable project to help my neighbors. Uh, uh, there's no way you can make much money when you're dealing with a population base of a half a million people. But, uh, anyway, uh, in that book, I used to tell people, and the book still says that until I modify it again, that peppers, capsicums, need to be supported when they get a big fruit load or else they're going to break their branches, especially if it rains or whatever. And I had that experience for years here, you know, and when the first sets of peppers started ripening up, I'd get out there and drive a whole bunch of bamboo stakes in the ground

and tie the major branches onto these bamboo stakes, and then I'd be all right. This year, I finally got my potassium up high enough in the soil, and my pepper plants are strong and wiry, and they don't break their branches. Potassium is what the plant uses to build structure with, Potassium is what the plant uses to build structure with, so all that fiber and stuff that creates the strength in the joints and whatever is affected strongly by having enough potassium for the plant. But let's look at what happens when you go the other way. Suppose you get too much potassium.

Well, then plants have a way of responding to excess potassium. Sometimes it's called luxury consumption of potassium. The plant will start intaking potassium and substituting it for other minerals all over the place. When it does this, it produces a lot more fiber and a lot more carbohydrates and a lot less protein and a lot less enzymes and other really complex molecules that that are kind of hard for the plant to make because a lot of the things that the plant manufactures requires all the other minerals but you know it needs sulfur it needs phosphorus it needs boron and but, to make various substances.

But when it comes to just making structural fiber and starch or sugar or other carbohydrates, it basically needs potassium. And when you supply too much of it, it just makes a whole lot of it at the expense of the other things. So when you up potassium levels, you actually increase your yield, but you decrease the nutrient density of the food proportionately. As much as the yield goes up, the nutrient density goes down. So you end up with food that the farmer ends up with, say, 25% more bushels of whatever he's growing,

ends up with, say, 25% more bushels of whatever he's growing. But that 25% more bushels has 25% less nutrition in it. Right, right. And I'm sure that we could go through different nutrients and you could describe the effects of too much or too little in soils, but I think the general point that you make in the book, and that's really important, and that you kind of touched on before, is that everyone's soils are going to be at least out of balance in terms of certain minerals. And when they rely just on, say, compost or other organic matter that's sourced locally, either on the farm or nearby, and then maybe perhaps also add various kinds of lime to the soil, and then maybe perhaps also add various kinds of lime to the soil, the stuff they're adding to the soil is going to tend to be either in excess or deficient of the same things that their soils are if they're sourcing it locally.

So it's just going to exacerbate or certainly not solve their problems. That's right. Yes, if the land that they're growing on and the land that's the source of the organic matter that they're importing happens to be in good balance, then the organic matter will be in good balance. And you can put a bunch of it in the soil and the soil will remain in reasonably good balance. But if they're out of balance, the more you bring it in, the more you accentuate the imbalances. Right, right. There's no way to know this until you do a soil test. out of balance the more you bring it in the more you accentuate the imbalances right right so this is no way there's no way to know this until you do a soil test right so that's when your major points is get a soil test do it properly and you explain how to do it properly but then the other

half of this is okay let's remineralize and we do that by sourcing a whole bunch of different kinds of whatever minerals or nutrients or whatever that that you are deficient in that's right right so so this is this is what's probably i think the most interesting and in some cases in some aspects the most controversial about your book because um you know anyone who is really into the idea of sustainable agriculture, I know are going to perhaps ask themselves, well, is it really sustainable if you've got to be sourcing, constantly sourcing these minerals or nutrients from other areas? And in many cases, they're being mined or they're being manufactured.

So, however, well, maybe i'll stop there and just let you respond to that okay well actually you see there's two there's two aspects to this dilemma uh when people when people uh flinch or resist the idea of importing nutrients um usually they got one or two one of two concerns one of as you say, is the sustainability of doing it. The other one is the incorrectness of doing it. They have an opinion that artificials or bringing in chemicals is a bad thing. Okay, well, I want to talk about chemicals as a second topic in a bit. Let's focus on sustainability.

Yeah, let's talk about the sustainability okay all right all right imagine we're in a world where you may not where everything that you use is brought in by horse and wagon and you can't really bring uh tons of anything in from more than a few miles away. Okay. You know, so we can probably, most of us use lime. That's a very low-tech thing that can be quarried out and even can be, you know, processed without steel. You can cook lime in an oven. Okay. And powder it and make various kinds of lime preparations that you could add calcium to the soil.

But suppose there isn't anything else around you, and you're basically limited to what's in the immediate vicinity. Well, the consequence of that is going to be that every part of North America is going to have a different health profile. And there are going to be some places where people are healthy and live a long time and have good teeth and so forth. And there's other places where people are going to be unhealthy and live a short time and have very poor teeth and so forth and not breed very well. And they're totally going to reflect the mineral content of the soil. That's how it used to be. You talk to the English. We have an awful lot of people

here in Australia who came from the United Kingdom, and that place is interesting. The west coast of Britain has very heavy rainfall. It's just like the west coast of Cascadia. They get 60, 70, 80 inches of rain and cornwall and whales. And the people who lived there in the old days were little people. The Welsh were real short. The little horses were little tiny things. I don't think the Welsh had a particularly long lifespan. Now, there's a couple of islands off the coast of Scotland where the people out there are known to be generally 6 feet 6 and more. And they're big people, and they live a long time,

and they're really strong and healthy. And they're big people, and they live a long time, and they're really strong and healthy. And the people who eat, who grew up on the soils south of London, in Kent and Sussex, where they have limestone soils and chalk soils, and these people are known for having really good teeth and very good health. My wife, Annie, grew up there, and she's still got a gob full of beautiful teeth at 72, and real strong bones, because she was born in 1940 at the beginning of the Blitz,

and her family lived out of a veggie garden for her first five or six years, and made an enormous difference. Even the milk that came from that area was you know the dairy products were better because the cows were grazing on limestone soils so anyway i hope i hope that's enough to make that point yeah so i mean it just i guess guess two two uh two things it seems like you're saying one is we haven't touched on a whole lot it's just that you strongly believe that our that human health is directly related to the nutrient density of the food we're eating absolutely okay and people can

read all about your your uh your coverage of that in in your book uh and then the other is it just what you're saying it seems like is that people have to they face a choice either you can have a more sustainable agriculture that where all of you're doing, you know, you're trying to keep your nutrient cycling as locally as possible. Maybe with the ideal being a closed system agriculture where you just cycle nutrients through the soils just from just on your farm. There's a choice to do that or to accept that if we want to be healthy and we want to have if we want to be healthy by eating really healthy food then we need to import the minerals that are missing from our soils well listen it's not quite that black and white okay i mean you can take a soil that's not perfect and you can manage it intelligently and you can improve it to the point that there is a greater degree of health

on your farm then there might be on the neighboring farm where it wasn't done like that. Biodynamics attempts to do something like that. And it works. I mean, you can do better. But if you want to approach the ideal, if you want the best, then you have to bring in nutrients. And maybe from there, before we get on to the debate over the use of synthetics, maybe you could talk another fascinating subject in your book.

It was all about how you really think that your kind of approach is really much better suited to small-scale gardening and often home gardening because most commercial farmers and gardeners have no incentive to remineralize in this way. Can you talk a bit about that? It's not that they have no incentive. They actually have an enormous disincentive, the farmer. You see, the farmer is basically a business person. There are no sustainable farmers anymore to speak of. Farmers are trying to make money, and they're

in a marketplace where the prices are determined in a sort of free market, sort of, except that the big retailers are bending the market in their favor, the disadvantage of the farmer, which makes it even worse. So look at the situation that a farmer faces. Whatever crop they're growing, the price of the crop is determined by all the other farmers, and all the other farmers are mining their fields. They're putting in as little as possible while trying to get the most bulk yield as possible with no concern about the nutrient density of it at all.

And so they're all low-cost producers. The minute you start remineralizing, you have to spend a lot more money on your fertility than the average farmer. And there go your profits. Right, right. So they're concerned about maximizing yield and making the stuff look, appear really nice, but there's no big incentive to pack it full of nutrients beyond that. That's right. And until the public starts buying their food on the basis of what it tastes like, which is the natural

method that human beings have to determine nutrient density, because you see, nutrition in the food is the taste of the food. And when the food doesn't have much taste, it doesn't have much nutrient in it. That's what you're tasting. I'm not really optimistic for that, Steve, because here's the thing. Even if you take the really small-scale commercial growers like me, I'm certified organic. I'm really small-scale.

We're just growing on about an acre, acre and a half in a given season. We base a lot of our marketing on the notion that our stuff is going to taste better. But if one is to buy into what you're arguing, then there's not at all any guarantee that my stuff tastes better. Yet, I would say a lot of my customers are going to be believing that my stuff tastes better, you know. And I say believing because i guess what i'm saying is i i uh there's always the potential that people are going to it's almost like a placebo effect or something you know they are going to believe it tastes better because

they're told that small-scale organic food is going to taste better does that make sense yeah well listen jordan first of all your stuff has to taste better because the customer is probably buying it within a day or so of when you harvest it. True, yeah, yeah. All right, so there's nothing in the supermarket that's less than five or six days away from harvest. Right, right, and that is going to give me a taste advantage for sure. Huge. Second of all, you're an organic certified grower, so you're going to be putting organic matter in the soil.

True, true again. Having adequate organic matter is an essential part of growing nutrient-dense food. It's just not the only thing you've got to do, but you still have to maintain enough organic matter that the plants access the kind of nutritional elements that come from the organic process in the soil. This is a conversation, by the way, that leads into one about hydroponics, for example. So I assure you that if whatever you're doing produces a decent-looking vegetable that in any way closely resembles in any way what's in the supermarket,

if it gets a reasonable size and looks reasonably good and you grow it organically, it's going to be a lot more nutritious. Right, right. I have seen organically grown food in the Willamette Valley, in the Saturday markets and things like that, that is absolute rubbish. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't even taste good, but it's grown organically. But it's grown on extremely infertile soil with no idea at all of properly building it up. They've got a lot of growing problems they don't recognize.

But a lot of people only see the idea. They don't actually see reality. So they see organic, but they don't even see the pepper that's in front of them. Yeah, well, I guess that's all I'm getting at is sometimes I think it's more powerful just to know that it's grown organically than it is to actually ask yourself how it tastes or whatever. And I put myself in that category too. I'm not just picking on my customers. But Jordan, about your business, can you charge supermarket prices for your food?

Supermarket organic prices? No, even just supermarket regular prices. Oh no, I charge more than what, yeah if if uh so we a lot of our business comes from a box program like a csa type program steve yes i understand i do that myself yeah right so so um if someone's going to compare what they pay for a box full of our vegetables in a given week to what they pay for conventional vegetables at the grocery store it's way cheaper at the grocery store well then you have plenty of markup in your in your business to be able to afford any remineralization oh yeah no i agree no no i'm i'm not i don't put

myself in the category of the farmer you were talking about in your book you even you point out you're talking about kind of large-scale agriculture in particular right that that i mean if you think of a farmer with hundreds of acres to have to remineralize, the cost would just be prohibitive given that their competitors aren't going to be doing that. So the fact that, you see, this is the hope that I have for my book, The Intelligent Gardener. If I can get a lot of home gardeners aware of the fact that they can make their food taste a whole lot better,

and then their family and their neighbors who also garden want to make their food taste a whole lot better, and then their family and their neighbors who also garden want to make their food taste a whole lot better because they've tasted this better food, right? There may start to become a demand for better tasting food, and a whole lot of people raising produce on an acre or two acres in suburban neighborhoods or right near suburban neighborhoods and supplying the people right around them, you see and that that's another system altogether i'd love to see that system you know mushroom and get really big and and so so would i just for i mean if you're right about the health benefits that we can all realize by eating this stuff i'm totally into it and i can't wait to get started applying the concepts in your book to to our farm um but one question i have that

seems like i can't figure out you you make a good argument for for why larger scale gardeners and farmers can't really do this you've just you've just explained it to me right now but you you also in another part of the book you argue that if you if you balance your soil properly your plants are going to be extremely healthy and you're not going to have the pest problems and the disease problems. So isn't that an incentive for farmers and gardeners? Wouldn't that make it more likely that they're going to be able to afford to spend the money to rebalance if they'll save money by not having as much pest damage and disease and that sort of thing? Well, first of all, Jordan, anybody who's growing on less than a half an acre

can't afford to remineralize. You're not talking about that much money. Oh, yeah, and that's why I'm asking more specifically about larger scale, where you're getting into the range of they don't have that financial incentive to do this, but all I'm asking is don't they, through savings because of lower pest and disease damage

and that sort of thing? Oh, yes. Actually, the net result is probably going to cost you near as much as it seems. But I can't talk about this with any real expertise because I'm not in that situation. Right, right. See, I have a quarter-acre garden. And by the way, on an honor box refrigerator, when we first started doing this, we got two large refrigerators. We put them in sort of like a little school bus shelter where kids would, you know, wait for the bus. And there was an honor box there.

And in those two refrigerators, Annie put all kinds of little bags uh for two dollars or three dollars with with stuff all nicely washed and people just came in the gate we called the business the back gate because we created a back gate on our block and there was access to it from from like an alley access and uh the first year we did that, no, the second year, we took in $18,000. Wow, no kidding. On a quarter acre, that's impressive. On a quarter acre. The third year, after we really learned how to do it good and I learned what to grow better,

kind of like I was producing what was selling, we were heading for $24,000. We were heading for $24,000 when a property developer nailed our gate shut and began to develop that area into a new subdivision. And so we had to go to a CSA type scheme where we took six or seven of our best customers and started to supply them with a weekly food box. Yeah. And we've been doing that ever since. them with a weekly food box. Yeah. And we've been doing that ever since. It's not quite as profitable, but it's a lot easier. Right, right.

Okay. Yeah. So I'm just watching the time here, Steve. Moving on, can you tell me why the organic community needs to reconsider the use of synthetic fertilizers? Oh, yes, I sure can. This leads us back to the conversation we had before about J.I. Rodale. J.I. Rodale established the idea that the distinction that you use to determine whether some product should be used in your garden or not

is on the basis of its either syntheticness or artificialness or its naturalness. Yeah. Now, that distinction, that dichotomy, artificial versus natural, sort of runs through our culture. It's called a cultural meme. And he keyed in on that, and he really reinforced it. The trouble is, it's a false, useless distinction. Under that distinction, J.I. Rodale used to recommend the use of sodium nitrate and potassium chloride. Because those are naturally occurring salts that you mine in the desert very much like

borax is mined in in the dead in death valley okay they come from they come from chile uh and you know you just dig it up grind it a bit and put it in a bag and spread it out potassium you know potassium chloride two of the absolutely worst fertilizers you could ever use i mean these are chemicals that i would tell people to avoid like poison. So, okay, really quickly, can you explain why? Like what makes a fertilizer, whether synthetic or natural, really terrible to use versus one that is fairly benign? Well, they're different. They have different reasons for being terrible.

Okay. Sodium nitrate. Okay. Okay. Sodium nitrate. When you use it to supply enough nitrogen and keep using it, you start putting so much sodium into the land that eventually you build high levels of sodium in the soil. And what sodium does to clay is 100 times worse than what magnesium does to clay. Right, okay.

It totally collapses the clay into an airless mess that's just like goo. And it's going to stay like that until you get the sodium out of the soil, which may be difficult if you don't have a lot of rain or the soil doesn't have good drainage naturally. You know, you can't even leach the sodium out. So a lot of farms have been ruined by using sodium nitrate. nitrate. Now, calcium nitrate, on the other hand, which is a synthetic fertilizer, it's made using electricity. It is a good fertilizer. It supplies calcium. It doesn't acidify the soil. You know, it doesn't do any damage at all unless you enormously over-apply it. It's good stuff. Now, let's take potassium chloride or muriated potash, a natural fertilizer.

Now, the trouble with that stuff is that when you put it in, the chloride ion attaches itself usually to the calcium that's in your soil. So, yes, you get potassium, but you also make calcium chloride. Now, calcium chloride is highly water-soluble, and it leaches. And so you could, to put it simply, for every pound of muriata potash you put on the topsoil, you're going to lose a pound of calcium out the subsoil going into the groundwater. Oh, okay.

And you use it out long enough, and you'll end up with a soil that for two or three or four feet down, you can hardly find any calcium. And yet, because you put in all that potassium, the pH of the soil is going to be over seven. potassium, the pH of the soil is going to be over seven. So, you know, in the old days when farm advisors thought that the reason that you put lime in soil was to correct acidity, when you tested a soil that had surplus, huge surplus of potassium and very little calcium, it actually had a high pH and didn't need any lime, right? But actually, it desperately needed lime. And if you'd add lime, you would actually bring the pH down. Oh, yeah, wow.

Because you'd be replacing the potassium with calcium. So let's try this out, though. Okay, so I've been, you know, I've come into gardening completely in the organic philosophy, and I have always maintained this, that in general, the reason that we don't use synthetic fertilizers or that we don't want to use synthetic fertilizers is that in general synthetics are more water soluble and so you're more likely to have stuff leaching out of your soil and into the water table compared to organic natural fertile uh fertilizers that are going to be in a more stable form

that are less likely to pollute our waterways. What's wrong? I agree. You do agree with that? Absolutely, especially on what they call light soils. Okay. You see? Yeah, if you have a lot of clay in your soil,

that soil has the capacity to hold on to a lot of plant nutrients. And even if you put water-soluble chemicals in there, as long as there's still room on the clay to hold nutrients, that stuff will attach to the clay and it won't leach. But if you don't have much clay, you're right. You put in soluble chemicals and then you get a bunch of rain and you lose a lot of your chemicals. But you don't see that as a reason to ban them. You see that, I'm assuming, as a reason to use them responsibly. Yes. Also, by the way, let's talk about some more about the misuse of

chemicals. One of the most common misuses of chemicals is to use chemicals to apply nitrates. Now, in this case, you mean synthetics. Synthetics. That's a huge mistake. Okay. Synthetics. Synthetics. That's a huge mistake. Okay. I mean, we should mostly be growing our nitrates in the soil by using green manure crops. Now we're talking about farming here, not about gardening.

Yeah, yeah. Vegetables is another matter. Vegetables, most of them require much higher levels of nitrogen in the soil than you can usually create by growing green manures. It depends a little bit on your climate. If you get good warm soil in the summer and you grow a good legume green crop and turn it under, you know, some people can grow good crops of tomatoes, for example, just growing broad beans and turning them under, and they get a nice tomato crop. But in cooler parts of the country, this doesn't work very well. I think that if we want to put in nitrogen, we're better off to use organic concentrates that have a high nitrogen level.

The cheapest and most common one being chicken manure. Right, okay. Yeah, and I prefer to use oil seed meal for that uh or meat meal uh what i think in north america they still call it tankage and probably people are afraid to use it now because of mad cow disease and all kinds of other things uh but it's actually pretty good fertilizer so if you could if you could change the the standards that a certified organic grower has to follow with regard to fertilizers, what do you think you would do? How would you structure the rules? Very little, actually. Now listen, as I understand the rules for certified organic growers,

and it probably varies a little bit according to which group of rabbis is doing the certification. I look upon organic certification a lot like rabbis certifying kosher food. And the rules of being kosher or the rules of being organic are just about as sensible. Each one is just about as much nonsense as the other. And they're very similar. Did you know that the rabbinate in Israel makes 90% of its income by certifying kosher food? I did not know that. They don't make it from doing bar mitzvahs and weddings and teaching children, you know, to read Hebrew and running seminaries and all that sort of stuff and counseling and doing religious services.

They make their money by running the kosher business. So the organic thing is very similar now what happened with organics as I understand it is that as really big commercial interest began raising organically grown vegetables in Baja California and in California it became a big industry they found that they had to use some substances to balance their soil.

And so it became okay to use some artificials if you got a soil test that says that you need it. If it's part of a program of remineralization that's intelligently done, of remineralization that's intelligently done, you're allowed to use potassium sulfate, iron sulfate, manganese sulfate, zinc sulfate, copper sulfate, borax, which actually is a natural mine substance. Anyway, you can use all those things.

And it's organic, and you're certified. Now, I don't know what your certification bureaucrats allow you to do. And on this topic, nor do I, because I haven't ever really approached it, my fertilization this way, so I wish I could help you, but I can't. Why don't you check with them, Jordan, and tell them you've done a soil test and it indicates you need zinc, and you want to apply zinc sulfate to your fields. Yeah, I may even have it.

I have a book full of the standards in the back that I should really check and see what's allowed. But, yeah, I was just trying to get a sense of what, you know, which class of fertilizers you would like to see permitted that aren't likely permitted at this point? I know of no way to effectively bring in manganese, zinc, boron, and copper without using artificials. Although there is a form of potassium sulfate that's natural. form of potassium sulfate that's natural. It's actually mined potassium sulfate, and it has a disadvantage of being not very water-soluble. It's got a lot of impurities in it, whereas the chemical potassium sulfate will dissolve nicely in water. You can even foliar feed it and things like that. But let me give you a couple of other examples of like a good fertilizer and a bad fertilizer. The bad fertilizer is diammonium phosphate. The good fertilizer is monoammonium phosphate. Both of these are made at a chemical Factory. They're made out of phosphate rock.

They're better than phosphate rock. Monoammonium phosphate is. Phosphate rock, hard rock phosphate contains a lot of heavy, serious impurities, including cadmium, uranium, etc. Lead. including cadmium, uranium, et cetera, lead. So when you start spreading hard rock phosphate several tons to the acre, you can bring in several pounds of uranium. You're 238.

Wow. I mean, yeah, you check the fine print on your hard rock phosphate. It may scare you. Now, when you refine the stuff, when you run it through a chemical factory and you make phosphoric acid out of it, even if it's not real pure phosphoric acid of the kind that you would use to make soft drinks, for example, or other food products, you know, food-grade phosphoric acid, but it's like technical-grade phosphoric acid,

you've left behind almost all this other stuff that you don't want. Well, then they take this phosphoric acid and they combine it either with one or with two ammonium atoms. And they make monoammonium phosphate or diammonium phosphate. Now, why is one good-bad? Because monoammonium phosphate. Now, why is one good bad? Because monoammonium phosphate makes an acidic reaction in the soil. It produces a pH around the granule that's around 3.5 or something like that, just in the immediate vicinity of the little granule of fertilizer for a month or six weeks while it's dissolving into the soil. If you've got alkaline soil,

if you've got a soil that has a natural pH of 7 or above, hard rock phosphate won't even break down. It's useless. You put it in soil, it does nothing. You put in monoammonium phosphate, you create little zones of acidity that not only release the phosphorus, but also make a whole lot of other minerals more available in those little zones of acidity. So in certain kinds of soil, that's the kind of phosphorus fertilizer

that works. Now we're talking about calcareous soils here, soils with huge amounts of calcium, desert soils, prairie soils that have, you know, so many minerals in them that the pH is up above seven. You want to use monolimonium phosphate if you need phosphorus. Or you could take ordinary rock phosphate or soft rock phosphate and put it into your composting heap and sort of make it bioavailable in the organic matter. And then when you put the organic matter in this alkaline soil, the organic matter creates little zones of acidity around itself.

And it works. But you put thiammonium phosphate inine soil, the organic matter creates little zones of acidity around itself. Yeah. And it works. Okay. But you put diammonium phosphate in the soil, and it creates a highly alkaline chemical reaction and actually makes your soil get more alkaline. So in a desert soil, that's the last thing you want to use, besides which there's twice as much nitrogen in it as there is in monoammonium phosphate. And to get enough phosphorus, you end up putting in way too much nitrogen. Or to put in the right amount of nitrogen, you can't put in enough phosphorus.

Right. It's a bad fertilizer. Right. So look, just to summarize then, it just seems like, you know, what you've kind of been saying is that the way we should be making decisions around what kind of fertilizers to put in our soil, that synthetic versus natural is a false dichotomy, and that what we need to do is evaluate each one individually, whether chemical or natural,

based on, first, what is it going to do in the soil? Is it going to confer good benefits on the soil or bad benefits? And then at the same time, is there anything terrible it's going to do to the water table or whatever? Okay? Exactly. Exactly. Right, right. same time is there anything terrible it's going to do for to the water table or whatever okay exactly exactly right right and then from there once you have a whole cab once you have a whole list of ones that are more or less going to be conferring good benefits on the soil with very little um you know with with with lower potential for polluting the water table or whatever from there you take that list and then maybe start saying, okay, which ones are more sustainably produced, which ones are closer to me, and the rest, so that the sustainability question kind of comes a little bit after.

Would that be about right? Exactly, exactly. I mean, whoever asks, for example, what is the entire actual ecological cost of digging up a shipload of hard rock phosphate in Morocco and sending it to the west coast of Canada and putting on rail cars, right, and then distributing it by the many tons, or taking that rock phosphate in Morocco and converting it into monoammonium phosphate and shipping that. And now we're dealing with, you know, shipping a tiny fraction of the weight and volume

and spreading a tiny fraction of the weight and volume and getting the same benefit and leaving a lot of the dross behind and not shipping that either. Yeah, no, it's a good point. What's better? Which is better? I don't know. I haven't actually done all the socially responsible addition on that question. But nobody hardly thinks of it

that way they all think about it in terms of ideal ideological terms right right right no i get i get you i get you okay so look i i i have not i don't have a ton of time left with you so i want to move on first to just really quickly i have a question it was like a one little point you made in your book you made it twice in your book and i I didn't understand it. You said that once you balance your soils, and as long as you're still maintaining your organic matter and all the rest, you can create soils that end up self-generating organic matter. Or you said something to that extent, and it really confused me. What do you mean by that?

Okay. Until I learned about all this stuff, my experience was that a veggie garden produced about one-third of its compost requirement. And, you know, I mean, if you composted carefully and expertly all the stuff that the garden produced, you'd have to import about two volumes of finished compost for every volume of finished compost that you made in order to maintain the soil. That was my experience. Then when I started the three mineralization program, several things began happening in my soil. The first one is when I got the calcium to magnesium ratio right and the bulk density

of my soil reduced a great deal, then all the biological processes in the soil multiplied many fold because they had a better air supply. So the soil itself started to make organic matter just from bacteria dying and fungi dying and the fact that crops could make bigger root systems with more air present which also decomposed in the soil so all this actually maintained the soil's organic matter better all right then when i did the soil testing i discovered that because i had been trying to deal with a soil that had excess magnesium and didn't realize it, I had built an organic matter content in excess of 10%. When actually, anything over 6 or 7% in my climate is a gracious plenty.

The plants do not need any more than that to supply all the biological benefits that go on in the soil from having organic matter there. The only additional benefit from having more organic matter is to lower the bulk density. But when you've got the calcium magnesium right in most soils, you don't need to particularly lower the bulk density. It's just fine. Yeah. You know, it's fine if you've got five or 6% organic matter in a relatively cool climate. Somewhere in the American Midwest, where it's a lot hotter in the summer, you might do fine with 4 or 5% organic matter and still have

perfectly workable soil. There is no flat rule about how much organic matter you need. It has to do with your climate and how fast it decomposes. In a hot climate, you cannot build a high level of organic matter. It's almost impossible. It just decomposes as fast as you put it in. So there's another part of that, too, and that is you have to learn how to make compost properly. All right. If you make compost that doesn't make stable humus as the end result, when you put that stuff in the soil, it just decomposes very rapidly and disappears. But when you humify your compost, then you've got something that's a lot more stable, and the soil will work with a lot lower levels of organic matter and this this was

a this was another fascinating chapter in your book you have a whole chapter on compost and you start by saying that the ideal compost is the one you don't have to make if you have the the if you have enough land to just instead grow uh green manure crops that you turn under and alternate your your plot your garden plot every few years. Yeah, in my opinion, that's the easiest way to do it if you've got the land. And then you also go on to make the claim that it sounds like, in your opinion, the vast majority of home gardeners are making terrible compost. That's right. They are.

Well, I certainly did for 30-some-odd years. They are. Well, I certainly did for 30-some-odd years. I didn't understand why it didn't work so well. It's sort of a funny joke, but from 1988 until 1994, I had a piece of ground that had enough clay content in it that I actually could have made really good compost with it. But I never made any compost in those years. I just had three or four gardens and tilled in the, you know, tilled in the sod every few years and started a new plot and put the other plot back in the grass. So I was practicing that other method that I told you about. So I never, so I never found out on that soil that I could have made good compost there

if I had bothered. And what you mean by that is you really, you on that soil that I could have made good compost there if I had bothered. And what you mean by that is you maintain that putting clay in your compost pile is really important. You've got to have 2% or 3% by volume clay by starting volume in the compost heap to make humus. Otherwise, you just make decomposed organic matter well steve i hesitate to get you to go into this because i honestly think i need to have you back on the podcast and do a whole episode just about making good compost because i know that this is there's a lot to be said about it well jordan you're such a good listener that i'll be happy to talk to you again anytime okay well then maybe we can finish off with something that is a little less related to your book.

But it's been coming up for me in a lot of different ways, and I really want to get your thoughts on it. And it's about hydroponics. Steve, I really believe that the sustainable farming movement is going to have to confront the – that hydroponics is going to need to play an important role in food security in the future. As our world population increases, it just seems like you can do hydroponics in a lot of places where you can't do traditional agriculture. I just had an episode that went up this week about rooftop agriculture and how you can do hydroponics on rooftops. But this is like really, it's a weird one for me because if I'm right about that,

if hydroponics has an important role to play, it's kind of counterintuitive, I think, for a lot of people in the sustainable food movement or food security movement, because it's always been seen as kind of a negative thing. So I'm just wondering what your take is on hydroponics and whether it can produce healthy vegetables and whether it has an important role to play in a food secure and a food secure world world and in the sustainable agriculture movement well this is a little catchy for me to talk about but i'm going to take a chance and and be very frank about this whole thing jordan uh about five years ago I began to experiment with growing large-sized herbs indoors in containers under artificial light. And most of the people who do this do it by hydroponics.

I was disinclined to do that. Instead, I worked out a way to make a soil-based grow mix. But the trouble with that is that in a container, when you have a restricted root zone, the plants run out of nutrients. And you've got to add more nutrients. and you've got to add more nutrients. And if you use organics to add those nutrients, it's nearly impossible to get a proper balance. All right? Fish emulsion is quite high in nitrogen and has some phosphorus.

Kelp has a little nitrogen and almost no phosphorus and a bit of potassium and all the trace minerals. You mix the two together, you do not get a balanced fertilizer. There's no calcium, for example. There's no attention to the trace minerals particularly. There's a company in Holland called Canna, C-A-N-N-A, and they make a whole lot of two-part hydroponic fertilizers that don't work in soil. If you try to use them, you build up various kinds of salts, and the plants get burned very easily.

But they make two fertilizers they call Canatera Vega and Canatera Flores. Now, these are designed for soil culture. And when you read the label, they've even found a way to solubilize calcium with all the others. It's very hard to have calcium in solution with most of the chemicals. Near impossible. Canna does it. Of course, they have to use some pretty expensive stuff to make that happen. And these also contain a complete balance of quantities of all the trace minerals.

They even put silicon in there, salacious acid, which is a very important plant nutrient that most people don't know about. It's rarely short in any soil that has any quartz in it, but it can be short. Anyway, you add this stuff in moderate amounts to a soil mix that has lime in it and plenty of organic matter and good compost and is pretty balanced to start with, that's lightened up with a whole lot of peat moss or core, coconut fiber, and compost so that it has a very low bulk density, and grow magnificent plants, far better than the ones that are being grown by the people who use hydroponics. And the local people around here, the knowledgeable people who use these herbs, usually avoid the hydroponic stuff, even though it's much more powerful than the stuff that's grown

in the dirt outdoors. But it gives them a bad headache and doesn't make them feel good. Now, when I've seen vegetables grown with hydroponics, they usually don't have tip-top flavor. And does this get back to your point that you've got to have microbial life and organic matter to have good flavor in your vegetables? Yes, absolutely. There's a relationship. See, plants develop a relationship with microorganisms in their root zone.

And these kind of symbiotic relationships depend on there being enough organic matter in the environment for these microbes to eat. So if you've got a soilless medium or a soil that's very short organic matter, the plants don't get these elements. My favorite soil microbiologist was a man named Krasilnikov, a Russian. And he wrote a book called Soil Microorganisms and Higher Plants,

which you can download and read off the Soil and Health Library if you want to. And Krasilnikov called these substances vitamins. So if a plant doesn't get its vitamins, it isn't healthy. Hydroponic growers sometimes try to give plants vitamins by putting into the hydroponic nutrient solution some kind of plant-based or fermented kinds of extracts that supposedly have them in them. Sometimes they even put vitamins in them, like the B vitamins and things like that. And this does help the plants, but it still isn't the same thing as growing in soil. isn't the same thing as growing in soil.

Okay, so in terms of the ability for hydroponics to provide healthy food to people, if you were told about a plan to take all the rooftops in the city and put hydroponic greenhouses on top of them, which is very, very efficient in terms of use of space and all the rest, and that's where the population is going to get the majority of its vegetables from, do you think that's a positive development, or are you concerned about aspects of what they're eating? I would think it could be a positive element. It would work good if, instead of using water-based hydroponics, they used a soil-based or soil- like grow medium that had a biological process in

it and an essential fertility and then used hydroponic nutrients as a supplement right and i think they gotta put they gotta put the plant into some kind of container to make roots to make roots and to interact with uh microbial life well instead of sitting there in a water mist or something like that that has no microbes, that's totally sterile, they could be grown in a soil-based mix. Now, this soil mix could be reused over and over and over. You know, I mean, you could have a big bin where you dumped all the empty containers

and then kind of restored the stuff, add some fresh compost, run a soil test on it and see what it is bring it back into balance add some lime if necessary you know and then just reuse it recycle it over and over and over um i i would go that way okay well that gives me i'm glad to get your opinion on it i just uh like i don't know how to feel i just coming from certified organic you know hydroponics aren't even allowed in certified organic, and that makes sense. I mean, organic turns around the microbial life in the soil

and maintaining and improving it. So it makes sense why hydroponics aren't currently allowed, but I do think that they're going to play an increasing role, at least in cities. Well, there's a shorthand way, you know, to sort of check nutrient density. It's using bricks. You know, you measure the bricks of the plant sap with an inexpensive testing device. You buy one of these for $20, $25, it'll measure bricks.

Anyway, I'd like to see how hydroponic vegetables bricks. My guess is they don't bricks very high. You've also discovered that many soils plants don't bricks very high just because they're out of balance. That's right. It's amazing the difference that you can have depending on how the soil balance works. Well, Steve, I could ask you more and more, but I think we're getting to the end of our time here. So I wanted to make sure I left a minute or so for you to plug whatever you want to plug to do with your book or soil and health library or the soil listserv or whatever. So go right ahead.

Well, okay. Thank you for that. Well, the most important thing I want to tell people about is that there's a free public library on the Internet. It's called the Soil and Health Library, and the URL of that library is SoilandHealth.org, and it's all one word, S-O-I-L-A-N-D-H-E-A-L-T-H dot org. L-A-N-D-H-E-A-L-T-H dot org. And on that library you can download and read full text of all the

foundational books of the organic gardening and farming movement and allied movements and a whole lot of other interesting material, at least material I think is interesting. And it doesn't necessarily have to cost you anything, although people who use the library every time they ask for a book,

they're going to get asked to make a contribution of 10 euro, and whether or not they contribute or not, they still get the book, and the only advantage to contributing is you no longer have to decline to give 10 euro, and you just have to no longer click the button that says, no, I won't donate. And so that's there for you. And if you really want to find out about all this stuff, you want to read Krasilnikov, you want to read everything J.I. Rodale ever wrote, you want to find out all about the Hunza and read almost all

the books that were ever written about healthy people, you want to find out about nutrient-dense food and what it does, you want to read a lot of interesting health books, they're all in that library. The Intelligent Gardener is a book that I've been trying to write in a way ever since I started that library, and I didn't know how to explain that stuff to people. So as a teacher, I just put all the original documents there and figured that some people would be moved to read all that stuff and figure it out for themselves. figured that some people would be moved to read all that stuff and figure it out for themselves.

The other thing is I think people should have a read of The Intelligent Gardener. It's not even very expensive. I think you can buy a copy of Amazon for less than $14. You're right, and I also second that. It's just such a great book. Yeah, and if you live in Cascadia, you want to get a copy of Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades. If you live in the rest of the country, I'm not as positive about this book as I used to be, and that's Gardening When It Counts.

And that was my attempt about six years ago to write a non-hemispheric biased, non-climate specific vegetable gardening book that would apply to anywhere that was a relatively temperate climate. And it's not a bad book. Unfortunately, the complete organic fertilizer recipe in it is out of date. I've really improved that fertilizer since I worked on the Intelligent Gardener. Well, they can get that recipe in the Intelligent Gardener. They can get the benefits of both books. Yep.

Okay, and then do you want to plug, I know you would love to have people read this book and thus create a small army of neighborhood soil analysts. Do you want to plug the listserv or just the idea of neighborhood soil analysts? Oh, yeah. Well, I guess I could mention the listserv also. I moderate a web forum, a Yahoo group. It's also called Soil and Health. And you can request membership in that.

I don't refuse anybody that seems to be a real human being. And I do try to keep spammers off the list as much as possible. And there's about 1,200 people or more that subscribe to this list, and we have some pretty interesting people that contribute regularly on this list, including some very successful soil analysts and farm advisors, and other farmers with a lot of experience, and a lot of gardeners, and real bright people. And what's Steve? I'm having a senior moment now.

Anyway, check it out. That's all I can tell you. You might enjoy the conversation. I've read The Intelligent Gardener, and I endorse it. I have been using the Soil and Health Library for a long long time and i actually donated at some point i i said yes to the 10 year old donation i endorse that i thank you for what you've done with that library steve it's incredible uh and i i recently joined the listserv as a result of reading your book and and i've already had some great responses to my first post so so that's another one I can completely support.

Oh, I want to say one other thing about the listserv. I moderate that thing very firmly. This is a safe place. Nobody is going to attack you personally. Nobody's going to make fun of you or ridicule you, and if they do, they get their head cut off. They're gone. Okay, so name callers need not apply. No. And trolls and troublemakers and professional problem makers who can't be satisfied with any answer and all those people, they're

gone. Okay. These are all positive people. Um, all right. Well, Steve Solomon, I have a feeling I'm going to be bothering you sometime soon to come back on. Cause I've so enjoyed, uh, you bother me anytime you like Jordan. I enjoy talking to you. Thanks a lot for coming on. Okay. Bye bye. All right.

So that concludes that little trip down memory lane. I hope you liked that a little bit longer than, than my most recent episodes. I realized that, you know, an hour is a long time. So anyway, I don't have any music for my new segment. I promised you a new segment. We're going to do a new segment right now. I don't have

any like music. I'm going to have to get my wife Vanessa to write another little piece of music for this segment that I'm going to try. Maybe it's better I don't have a new piece of music yet because maybe this segment is going to crash and burn and and it's maybe needs to earn some music we'll see so just picture some music happening right now uh something upbeat maybe with some some bass not sure okay here's the segment everybody here at the homestead farm i'm doing some things right and some things wrong this is the ruminant do's and don'ts okay for wrong. This is the ruminant do's and don'ts. Okay, for this first installment of the ruminant do's and don'ts, I have a do for you. I'm going to start on a positive note. I have all kinds of don'ts that I can choose to include in this

segment if I keep it up, but we're going to start it on a happy note. Folks, my life changed when I started wearing a fanny pack. Now hear me out. I know fanny packs are like, uh, they're, they're pretty dorky. Um, I guess they have like some sort of hipster appeal in some circles, but overall, like, uh, yeah, you kind of quickly become um either a pariah or you get accused of um being i guess a hipster if you wear one but here's the thing all of you out there who are farming for a living have to carry something with you on a daily basis i have to assume that certainly if you're a market gardener like me uh you probably have a bunch of stuff that you like to carry around or maybe you don't and you just don't realize how handy it is if you had a convenient pouch type object to hold a certain number of tools and other doohickeys so that you have them at your fingertips whenever you need. That's what I

started doing about three years ago and I haven't looked back. It is honestly the greatest thing. So I suggest that you wear a fanny pack when you farm. It might feel weird at first, but you'll, you'll just honestly, you'll ease right into it. And then you'll start to feel naked when you don't have it on. So then the question becomes, Jordan, where can I get a fanny pack? And my answer is, I don't know. They're really hard to get. They are so shunned, at least here in North America, or at least here in Canada, or at the very least here in Peachland, British Columbia, and the surrounding region, that I have really had to try hard to find them because I had one kicking around until the zipper fell apart and I had to go get another one.

And I had a real hard time. And I did end up finding one at Canadian Tire which for you Americans listening is the store to go to when you want to buy a spatula, a pair of hockey skates, some rope and like some shoo goo and a rubbermaid bin and some deck furniture and a tiller. That's Canadian Tire in a nutshell. Also tires that if you need some tires, you can buy tires there. But you can also apparently buy one type of fanny pack that six or eight months into its tenure is already falling apart. So I don't recommend you get a fanny pack at Canadian Tire unless your options are exhausted and you just don't have anywhere

else to go and get a fanny pack. I guess what I'm saying is that my Canadian Tire fanny pack is kind of like my placeholder fanny pack until I find my dream fanny pack. Because the thing is, I've been using a fanny pack for so long that I have like a really good sense of exactly what I want in a fanny pack. And one day I'm going to find it and I'm just going to be so much happier. Anyway, that's the first question. Where do I get one? Answer, I don't know. You're on your own. Question number two, what do you put in your fanny pack, Jordan?

Well, I am so glad you asked. You should go to theruminant.ca where I have done, I have just published a photo-based blog post all about the contents of my fanny pack. But since you're listening to me right now, I will say some of the key stuff. Jackknife, for sure. Jackknife just comes in handy. Although I this year found at a Lee Valley, which is like another Canadian weird gardening store, like a really micro pair of seculars, like our little garden shears, but like five inches long. And I have barely touched my jackknife since I bought those little shears. They're really light. They fit in the

fanny pack and I use them for cutting almost everything. They cut through irrigation line, they cut twine, all kinds of stuff. So maybe you don't need the jackknife, but only if you have found these garden shears. What else? I carry a piece of wire so that I can poke stuff that is lodged in my sprinkler heads because I use impact sprinklers for a lot of my irrigation. I carry a key to the shed where things are locked and I need to get into and a whole bunch of other really useful stuff. Not a whole bunch but a few things more. A few crucial items. So head over to the ruminant if you want to see what I'm carrying in my fanny pack, and of course on the fanny pack goes my cell phone holster, which into which goes my cell phone or smartphone on which can be found dozens and dozens of podcasts, which is how I amuse myself

as I go about my work day most days. With only one earphone in, one ear of course, because otherwise that would just be unsafe and rude to Sam and Debra and Joe and Jess and the other members of this farm community. Okay, so that caps off the first edition of Ruminant Do's and Don'ts with a do, and what I think is that you should definitely consider wearing a fanny pack when you're out and about on the farm. I hope that helps, folks. And check out the ruminant.ca to see a photo of the fanny pack. All right. We're finally done.

That is like the longest episode in ruminant podcast history. Thanks for sticking it out, if indeed you have stuck it out. And I should be back at you next week with a brand new episode. I'm going to be gunning hard for that. Depends if I can get stuck it out. And I should be back at you next week with a brand new episode. I'm going to be gunning hard for that. Depends if I can get these interviews booked. So here's hoping, folks. Have a great week and I'll talk to you soon. I've met a whole army of weasels, a legion of leeches, trying to give me the screw.

But if we bury ourselves in the woods in the country, we're no closer, we never have laundry. We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves. Live life like it was meant to be. Ah, don't fret honey, I've got a plan to make our final escape. All we'll need is each other a hundred dollars and maybe a roll of duct tape and we'll run right outside of the city's reaches. We'll live off chestnuts, spring water, and peaches. We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves and live life like it was meant to be. Because why would we live in a place that don't want us

A place that is trying to bleed us dry We could be happy with life in the country With salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands I've been doing a lot of thinking Some real soul searching And here's my final resolve I don't need a big old house or some

fancy car to keep my love going strong. So we'll run right out into the wilds and braces. We'll keep close quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees And live life like it was meant to be Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.