448-The Self-Fed Garden, with Eliot Coleman

Hi everybody, I'm Joe Lampel, the Joe behind Joe Gardener, and welcome to the Joe Gardener show. Some people don't just teach you how to garden, they change how you think about what really makes your garden grow. My guest today is one of those people. Elliott Coleman is internationally respected as a market farmer, author, and quiet pioneer whose work is shaped generations of growers, often without fanfare, but always with lasting impact. I've had the good fortune to spend time with Elliott over my career and reconnecting for this conversation felt a bit like sitting down with an old friend who's still asking the most important questions and literally working himself to discover those answers. Over the decades, his books have become staples for serious market farmers and gardeners alike, books that don't chase trends, but instead return us to first principles, healthy soil, thoughtful systems, and a deep respect for the power of local inputs. His newest book, The Self-Fed Farm and Garden, really distills that lifetime of experience. At its core, it's about looking inward to build the foundation for everything growing under your watch, hyper-locally. Creating productive farms and gardens is not about looking for the latest new product, it's about working with what you already have and continuing to build from that to make it better year after year. So in this conversation, we talk about what the Self-Fed Farm and Garden really means and how learning to appreciate the resources you already have, whether in a backyard garden or on a farm can be both practical and incredibly productive. So let's get started. And as we do, just the heads up here is we begin the conversation together. Elliott and I go way back and we're pretty comfortable with each other and we got right into it before we even had a chance to properly introduce him. So you might feel like you're just jumping right into the middle of a conversation which kind of you are, but that's just the way it is. And so roll with it and enjoy it because it's a fun conversation and there is a lot of wisdom here. So I am sure you will enjoy this conversation. Here we go. There you are. Here you are. I remember what a great job you did when we did a show before. It was just, it was so nice to be interviewed by somebody who know what they were talking about. Thank you. I'm going to save that and put it into our conversation. Thank you so much. You know what I remember, Elliott, that I really love and sitting around after our filming days enjoying your homemade blueberry wine in your carrots, I think. You remember that? Yeah. Yeah. I think about that all the time. I think I may even have a little left somewhere. We want to talk about the new book. We do. We want to talk about the new book. It was so nice being temporarily tired from market gardening when I was writing the book. Yes. You did that almost a year ago, right? When you just, you and Barbara decided to let the young guns come in and... Yeah. This is a great young couple. They're energetic. They're doing a spectacular job, running the farm. So... Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good. It's good that you... I'm sure you were very picky and deciding who was going to run that farm for you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we couldn't be happier at the moment. That's great. So let's get going. You ready? Yeah. Okay. So I'll get right into it. What I would thought would be fun to do. We know your background and I'll recap that separately. But I really enjoyed learning that in your younger days, right when you were getting started and I think at the time you were maybe living in New Hampshire if I got that right. But anyway, you had access to a lot of organic gardening magazines and you spent your time really reading through all of those. And I noted that you noted and recalled how many of the advertisements in those magazines because it was mostly geared towards home gardeners was touting organic fertilizers and organic options that were not from your garden but purchased items. At the time, my question I guess is were you thinking then, huh, why aren't they sourcing some of that just from their own inputs or had you really gotten hold of the beauty of the self-fed farm and garden by that point since it was early in your career? Well, when we started all of those store-bought inputs like soybean, mail and everything were pretty expensive and we had no money. We were the most poverty-stretching beginning farmers I know of. And also, not only that, we didn't really have any farmland because the land I'd started on, we cleared from spruce for forest. And we were still grubbing out stumps and pulling out roots and everything. So the idea of using it was available locally was very appealing. And one thing that was easily available locally was mowing of old abandoned hay fields. And a lot of the once farms around here were owned by summer people and they had no use for any of that and they used to hire a contractor to mow the fields every year to maintain the farm look. Yeah. I'm a smart boy whenever I chatted with him. I would mention how dangerous it was to leave all of that flammable and dry hay around their house and would they mind if I came in and picked it up and I used to be able to get lots of that. And I would actually compost that just by itself by wetting down it, adding a little powdered clay to it and a few things like that. But that was the beginning of realizing that you could make soil with stuff that you didn't have to buy if you put your mind to it. And then obviously the more time I spent as an organic farmer, the more I realized that the best source of that would be green meneurs. Right. Because if I needed nitrogen, I would grow a leguminous green meneur or if I were interested in it. Just tons of bulk organic matter. If I grew rye and vetch over winter, I mean it was amazing how much I put in. In fact, if you have a copy of the book there, if you look at the first photographs in the book, I see tall rye behind beautiful lettuces. Yeah. So that is a six foot tall rye vetched grimole, though it was planted in early October, the fall before. And this is the following summer. You can imagine that is an awful lot of organic matter. You'll all say that is gorgeous. And that will be the future you'll cut that down and that will be the next place where you'll rotate into for growth. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Well, Ellie, you've mentioned green meneur and many of our listeners are familiar with green meneur. But since you mentioned it, I want to talk to you about that because I know that's very much kind of the heart of the system for you these days. And this term, the self-fed farm in garden, you've been practicing this technique for ten years or more. Yes. Yes. So green meneur, let's first define for those who may not be familiar with that. What is the difference between manure and green manure? Right. I, at one point in the book, I refer to them not as a form of compost or as a form of manure, but as soil fertilizing crops, crops that go specifically to till into the soil and add nutrients. And that's because the reason organic farming works is the soil is alive. It's really alive. There are more live creatures in just a handful of fertile soil than there are human beings on the planet. That's an amazing thing. And so if you till all that into the surface of the soil or all the micro organisms and other creatures can help break it down, Bingo, you have fertility for next year's crops. And everybody always looks upon tillage as, oh yeah, but you're adding oxygen and you're going to break down the organic matter. And I explain to people, well, yeah, if you don't break it down, it isn't available as nutrients for next year's crop. Right. So the idea that you would just, you know, sitting there and you're organic matter levels being like up and up, you wouldn't be able to join any with them. And it's because the life in the soil and its ability to break organic matter down into nutrients for new crops, that's how this whole system works. Yes. So that you brought that up because I had that here to talk to you about tilling versus the common practice these days of no dig or no till practices. I explained to people, Joe, saying as how we started here on Lyred spruce fur forest with very low pH, we had a pH of 4.3 when we started very low organic matter. We wouldn't have a farm here if we hadn't spent 50 years tilling. Right. Organic matter into that soil to create it. Right. So to speak. So anybody who tells me, oh my gosh, how can you justify telling? I say, come look at our soil. It explains everything. So Ellie, is there a point in your book where you can see XX tilling have an adverse consequence? I think you're very calculated in when and what you're tilling and how you're tilling. But I'm just wondering if you, I mean, can you over till, I guess, do you believe you can over till? Yeah. Well, back in the old days when I was starting out that company that made Troy-Bill Tillers. Yeah. They were always showing ads where people were using their Troy-Bill Tillers to keep everything looking so tidy out there. People wouldn't know. And there was anything about gardening other than making it look nice. And so those were all plenty of examples of overusing your tiller. To, you know, if you're only getting rid of weeds that are an inch toil, you're doing a lot more damage to the soil. But if you're turning under like that green one or in the picture, we were just talking about. So turning under a six foot tall, rye, vetch, green manure. And first you have flailed it with a flail mower. So everything is just shredded. And you tilled it with the soil. That's a serious improvement. Yes. Indeed. And what about the relation to your mention Faulkner wrote the book, Plowman's Folly? Yes. And the essence of that, that I forget what the connection was to bringing that up that you had pointed out in the book. Do you remember what he was saying about? Yeah. Well, I happened to think Faulkner was an absolute genius. And he was, I mean, he was a very well educated ex-County agent who had a lot of theories based on what he had played around with. And so the thing he had noticed that if you used a plow, the classic plow, that was detrimental because you were burying all the surface organic matter in an airless pile at the bottom of the furrow. And that did you know good because it wasn't mixed with soil. And so when I see all these websites today and even articles celebrating, Faulkner as the father of No-Till, well, these people should be embarrassed. They didn't read past the title of Faulkner's book because he was actually 100% in favor of Tillage. And his theory, which he explained more in a sequel to Plowman's Folly called a second look, was that all a farmer had to do was to grow grimace. Cuminers or used cover crops and mix them into the top four inches of the soil. The benefit of that was if organic matter breaks down in your soil, it gives off carbon dioxide. Oh my gosh, you're destroying it. No, you're not because if it gives off carbon dioxide in your soil as it's breaking down, carbon dioxide then dissolves in soil moisture and creates a weak but very useful acid called carbonic acid. And carbonic acid in the soil then can etch nutrients out of the soil particles. Now the soil particles are just ground up raw. But that's where all the minerals are. So by mixing the organic matter into the top four inches and creating this carbonic acid, you were almost creating your own fertilizer factory. That was how Faulkner understood it. And it was pretty close to correct the recent understandings of carbonic acid say pretty much the same thing. There are many types of acid in the soil that would do the same thing. Interesting. And on that subject, this is a topic that doesn't get discussed very often at all because when we're talking about building soil health and we hit on compost a lot with my market, my audience is mostly home gardeners and so the focus is on what they can do and oftentimes that's really focusing on compost. But the mineral aspect which you address with just now with the rock and so forth in general but with the eye towards the home gardener, how can they make their soil better beyond compost when they incorporate minerals and when they do, how would they do that as a home gardener? Well, if you believe Faulkner and I think he was onto something, you have to look at how many minerals there are in the soil. And I have a quote in there from a Leonard Wicenden book. Wicenden wrote a couple of books. One was make friends with your land and the other was gardening with nature. And Wicenden, who was an early enthusiast for organic growing, is an interesting case because he was a professional chemist and he was a past president of the American Chemical Society in terstutten. He was an enthusiastic organic gardener in his own garden. And so he says in there, everybody says, well, if you do what Faulkner is doing and you just telling organic matter and you've grown there, eventually you're going to exhaust the soil. And Wicenden says, no way because let's say you put on a couple of hundred pounds of granite meals, popular organic fertilizer, he said that is only a minuscule amount of whatever mineral you are after compared to what is already in your soil because at present there's 30,000 pounds of that in the pop acre furrow slice, the top six and a half inches of an acre. And he says that trick is to figure out how to recycle all these nutrients in your soil rather than worrying about whether you're going to exhaust them. And then he goes on to say, maybe you would in 10,000 years, but that hardly seems like a pressing problem at the moment. I would say so. You just gave an example of using resident organic material versus buying it and bringing it in. And that's a big emphasis throughout your book. And I love that. But let's talk more about why. I mean, you gave an example why just now, but I know you know of others, but this emphasis on sourcing organic material from your own farm versus sourcing it elsewhere. Tell us. Yeah. And motivated that was my displeasure over the years at all of these hot shot new young organic experts, especially the ones who were saying, oh, all you have to do is buy enough municipal compost to cover your farm six inches deep. And if you do that, first off, you won't have any weeds because it's a weed seeds germinate in your soil. It can't come up through a six inch covering of something. And you, you know, you don't need to do anything else. Well, these people haven't been paying attention to what municipal compost might contain. And if you've ever read a study by a compost expert, how do you know when your compost is ready? The way they tell is because you can no longer distinguish what the ingredients were. Well, that's a little frightening since the people making commercial compost are paid to dispose of waste products. They aren't paid to make clean compost. And the quality of compost available for purchase today, especially the ones from confined animal feeding operations and municipal sources. If you've ever looked into it, it's embarrassing. No, much pollution. There is. Yeah. Didn't you have a scare? There was a time you were a big collector of seaweed, I believe, from the coast and you'd haul that in over and over and over. And then you got wind of somebody, some a farm not too far from you that had to close down because they had pea fasts over the years from a landfill. Yeah. The pea fast in Maine was a case of the agriculture department encouraging farmers to spread sludge. Because sludge collects and they were looking for a way to get rid of it, you know, rather than burning it or something. Right. Well, that is why there are all these farms in Maine that have been condemned and are no longer in business because their soils were so totally contaminated with pea fast. Now, as I've researched this further, what's fascinating? I have a lot of friends in Europe. And I said, well, wow, okay, we get in great trouble over here, spreading a sludge on farm land. What do they do with it in Europe? They have always spread it on farm land, both in France, Holland, Germany and all over England. And so some of the emails I got back from these friends said, yeah, these are called forever chemicals, but it's probably going to be forever before anybody over here pays attention to this because they don't want to hear about it. And so I read that all of the sludge in Europe has spread on farm land and it always has been, it made me want to avoid a Parisian restaurant. I can understand that. Yeah. So there are, you know, there are problems like that. And a lot of today's young hotshot organic growers think they are correct. Organic matter in the soil is what makes all this work and we've known about that for years. But the quality of the organic matter definitely has an effect on the quality of the produce that you grow in that soil. And you know, we have a very strong sense of responsibility to the customers who come here and buy their produce from us. And we think it's our responsibility to make sure that we are growing as clean produce as we possibly can. Yeah. Again, that's all parts of the reasons I got concerned about this and wrote the book. Okay. So obviously making the most of your inputs on site, your green manoeuvers, your compost, your cover crops, all well and good. And we know that's phenomenal when you have the opportunity to do that. But back to the majority of the people listening to this podcast are not farmers, but they have smaller opportunities in their yard, maybe Irvin suburban spots. But help me help them in myself too, talk, understand a practical application of using cover crops and green manoeuvers to improve our soil. And we all just compost in kind of a home garden. Help us there. What thoughts come to mind? Yeah. I learned a lot from research was done in New Jersey back in the 50s. And this was an investigation of whether New Jersey soil fertility was running down. And what they found was if you planted a grass legium pasture mix and left it in there for that growing season you planted it and didn't motor, take any away or just left it there. The following year after you turned that in, that was worth making the soil more fertile for three years. So you got two good years after you turned it under. And you only lost one year to leave it in there for a year. This was a pretty amazing thing. So I am recommending to home gardeners now that they divide their garden in half and every spring put one half of it into a legium and grass mix. Same thing you planted in a pasture, you know, like planting along. And just sprinkle the seeds. And leave it there the whole summer while they're growing vegetables and the other half of the garden. Yeah. And then the following year just shift those back and forth. But according to this research and I'd love the phrase they use they called it land resting, land resting in a pasture mix basically gave you unused soil because the number of roots in there for that whole growl is just totally transformed into your ground. Following a lot of what I do on the farm where I have a different green manure for different timers of the year and you sense we're going vegetables in the soil. I have to have them in some of my soil in the winter and on the fall and everything. But for the home gardeners, when I keep it simple just divide the garden in half and have it in the unbelievably effective green manure that gives you virgin soil that following spring. Yes, indeed. And I can attest to that because the best soil I ever saw in my garden was the after I terminated the cover crops from the late summer early fall sowing and then in next spring. I couldn't believe how beautiful the soil was and the roots really as you said had a lot to do with that. But on that point in related to the home gardener too for those who have raised beds like me, Elliot, is this an application we can practically do in a raised bed situation and if so, what's the trick to terminating that or help us there? Yeah, I don't know if a raised bed situation where you have two by six walls around your raised beds. Yeah. But if this is just a regular garden, this basically a flat field and the area where you're growing the vegetables is slightly raised that gets killed three other year. Yeah. Yeah. So what? You can reform the beds and they're going to be there again for you. But once you see the unbelievable job it does on the fertility of the soil, you would never want to be without this system again. Yeah. And I agree with that too. Actually, after you called yourself retired from your market farming business, you still have your personal garden with Barbara and you're doing what you just said for other home gardeners to do is dividing your garden half, right? Yes. And when we leased off the farm to a nice young couple, all the grain houses and all the tractors went with the lease. So I didn't want to be too bored in my retirement. So I bought my own tractor and out back I'm running trials on grain manure. But when we started here, we had access to a reasonably good size horse manure pile at a neighboring farm. This is 40 years ago. But and that was really important in getting this farm off to a quick start. I have been asked, could you have brought your soil fertility to the level it's at now with just green manure is right from the start? And I found that a very interesting question. So I have two newly cleared acres outpine the house and I'm running trials now to see how many years of green manure, the same one or different ones. It takes to get that soil up to the standards that we consider for season farms in crotally fertile soil. And I've been doing it for three years now. I would say my hunches four years would do it easily and perfectly. Wow. So you're you're trialing different types of green manure. Is this on land that you haven't built up the soil by now? I've never done anything to it. Wow. I'm getting pulling the snubs out years ago. It's been in pasture out there. How about that? So one more year and then you'll have a good sense of what that is. Well, but you know, it's a worthwhile question for someone to ask me because it is interesting. And when we were first here, it was an enormous amount of work to haul in all the organic matter that we were using to turn this non-existent soil into a soil. If I hadn't done that, it would have been a while before we were producing. Yeah. So I needed the farm to produce way to way so we could get some income. And my results so far make me think, oh, yeah, we could have done it. Well, now you know. Yeah. So, Ellie, just a couple of points of clarification for those. It based will be a little foggy on the terminology. I want you to help me here too. And first, you mentioned cover cropping and green manure as though there are separate applications in the farming garden soil building system. Does cover cropping become a green manure? Always or depends on the situation. Yeah. Basically, a cover cropping and green manure are basically the same thing. The reason people today, especially the no-till people, prefer the term cover crop because it doesn't indicate you're going to turn it in. If it's a green manure, you're going to be tilling it in. And so there has been a tendency among these people to shift to the word cover crop. But the thing is a cover crop on a no-till farm, especially one that's using herbicides to kill it off, it's just going to sit there on top. And it isn't mixed enough with the top four inches of soil for any of the incredibly valuable processes that break all that organic matter down into nutrients for next crop. A nice thing about a cover crop, if you can put something like oats and peas in October, you have a lot of nutrients in the soil that may lead you out over water. And those crops are going to scavenge them, lock them up in themselves, and they'll still be there. And the nice thing about an oat and pea green manure is up here where we are in I suspect I would probably down to Northern New Jersey. It wetter kills. And it wetter kills. So come spring, you rake it off, put it in your compost heap, and you can plant this all right away. Okay, good. So this is an interesting segue into the next question I had for you. So winter-killed green manure could be left in place or put into your compost along with the other inputs that you would put into your compost. My question was going to be, can you just specify or clarify the difference between what you would call compost versus green manure? Yeah. What we do here on the commercial farm, we don't take the crops to a processing area. We process them right in the field. So I have a cart, a wooden flat top, and say we're out harvesting leeks. I can pull the leeks, peel any bad stuff off the sides of them, cut the tops off, cut the roots off, and then all I have to do is take those pre-prepared leeks in wash them off and create them and sell them. But all of those residues are left in the field where the leeks were grown. So when that leek field has been all harvested, I then till those residues in, and I put a green manure there, the nice thing about this is the residues are organic matter I already have. Right. So if I take them to a compost heap, no difference. But leaving them there and then growing a green manure on top of them, I have increased the amount of organic matter on that plot. Right there. And the other thing, compost doesn't make itself. You have to haul that off to a compost area. If I can till it right in, this saves a lot of money, some out of work. And you're the genius of coming up with all kinds of systems that make work more efficient. Well, it's just, you know, I run an organic market partner for 50 years. And I refer to it as some of the most relentless work you can do because you can't stop paying attention. And we have a lot of greenhouses. And you know, if the power goes off and the roof fence starts open on a hot summer day, I'm in trouble. And whenever I come back from a trip to town, the minute I turn on the driveway, first I'm looking at all the roads up there. But I don't have to do that anymore because the farm is being run by other people. But that has become so part of my character when I drive in the driveway that I still continue to react like that. And when I say relentless, it's things like that that you almost get even forget about the farm when you're asleep. Gosh, no kidding. Yeah, I had a curiosity. Are you able to turn it off a little bit more now? Are you able to breathe a little bit? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Good. Yeah. And if a crop fails in our home garden, then nights, hopefully, lace the farm to bring vegetables over all the time. So it's good to know people. And they're probably saying the same thing about you. Yeah. And your home garden, is that, is that the area that's connected to your house that is basically glassed in greenhouses? No. So the glassed in area connected to our house is a movable glass greenhouse. And there is a rail on the ground on either side of it. And the greenhouse rolls on that rail so it can be moved from one site to another. And that's been great. So the site isn't under the greenhouse. I can either grow a green manure there or grow summer crops and such on that. So that's been pretty neat thing. But the original home garden, which is about 50 feet by 50 feet, that's more than big enough to feed us all the vegetables we'd ever want to eat. Especially the way you would barper grow them. Yeah. Yeah. I have no doubt about that. And I guess last question, I should have probably asked you this right up front. But was this your idea to write this book or did somebody pitch you this idea because it's, I just love the whole topic. I love the book. And I was curious about that. No, this, this was something I had long wanted to write because I was concerned about the quality of crops that people are producing with either KFO manure or municipal waste manure. Just because it's organic matter doesn't mean it's good and pure. And we really are very strict wanting the compost that we do make and we do make some compost to be the type of pure compost that Sir Albert Howard was 100% behind. And so on the cover of this book, it says a return to the roots of the organic method. And the organic method and you were right about the magazines that have ads on every page for fertilizers you can buy. And this is why that group, the Ombre, the organic material review institute review institute is so followed here. But I tell people, if you're not bringing outside products into your home or garden, you have no need for all those lists of things. And I suggest an alternative thing, I call it Oatrie, the organic techniques research. And the organic techniques are green manure, cover crops, crop rotation, all of these things that were the foundations of organic farming when it started. And those work as well as they ever did. And in two things, first of all, I stole the quote out of your book that you talked about in regards to why such an emphasis on sourcing organic material from your own farm versus sourcing to DelSwear. And this is what I had in quotes from you. And that is the self-fed organic farm avoids the accidental introduction of outside industrial contaminants, which is a perpetual risk to the purity and integrity to an independent system. Right? Yes. It's a risk to any system that is bringing in its fertility from outside. Yeah, absolutely. Yep. I'm going to let you go here with Jill. I just wanted to say it's always a pleasure to talk to you and be interviewed by you. Oh, because you do such a great job on this. Thank you. That means a lot to me, Elliot. Coming from you, that means more than you can imagine. And I will just see you're back to you two things that I will always remember about our time together. And one was the privilege of being able to spend some time with you and your home and with Barbara and drinking your homemade blueberry wine. That was one of the highlights of my life. We had a ball that night or two. And the other thing was just visiting your personal library upstairs and your collection of old classic incredible books that really have shaped a lot of what you stand for and what you continue to talk about today. Yes, they have been my best teachers. I have a library of about 2,500 volumes and just organic farming and organic farming history. And the brilliance of some of these old authors and the exceptionally clear way to express what they were doing. These are so valuable. And there are a couple of websites. One is the soil and health website. And another one is called Journey to, for ever Journey to tomorrow or something like that. They have scanned a lot of these cool books. And you can without having to have a, you see some of the books behind me. You don't have anything to have a whole part of your house taken over by a library. Yeah, you can read them on the web. Well, your library is kind of iconic and to have all those old books up there on the shelf and be surrounded by old books like that. That's not a bad thing. And the last thing I'm going to say, and I promise I'm going to let you go after this, but many times, many times, I'll find myself not with extra time to spare, but with what am I going to do next? And I often envision you, this is no joke. This is the truth. Envision you reading from your library, one of those old books just to enrich your knowledge to just be a little bit smarter than you already are from all of that reading, which inspires me to decide to choose and read a book like that to do the same. So you're my inspiration for a lot of what I aspire to be. Thank you, Joe. You're welcome. Thank you, Elliot. And all the best to you. I'm glad you're with you here today. Same here. Same here. Thank you so much and all the best to you. And we'll pick up this conversation again. I hope soon. With more blueberry wine. Yo. Thank you. You're on. Well, that was such a joy to catch up, to reflect and to learn once again from someone whose work continues to guide so many of us. You can relisten to this podcast and check out the pictures from Elliot that he's provided, as well as one that I slipped in there of our evening together 15 years ago, sipping on Elliot's homemade blueberry wine. What a sight and what a great time. And you can find all of that from our website at Joe Gardiner dot com. Just look for the podcast tab. And this is episode number 448. Now if you would like to watch my conversation with Elliot, you can, and I think you would enjoy watching this one is Elliot converses with me from his home library surrounded by some of his 2500 classic books that greatly influenced the legend that he has become in our time. Just head over to our YouTube channel Joe Gardiner TV and look for the podcast episode 448 with the one and only Elliot Coleman. And while you're there, you may be very interested in two videos that we've posted this week, with around my big new raised bed garden rebuild project. One is a behind the scene story of how this project started from literally a demolition project of my existing raised bed garden. And you'll see that to a total rebuild and replacement of new beds and very different from the original ones. We take you through the steps of creating the new beds and the hurdles along the way. The bonus is we have a free download of the plans, which includes a spreadsheet that you can input some of your own information and it will calculate the cost for what you want to build and tell you everything you need from the amount and size of all the lumber, the quantity and size of the various screws and even how much soil you'll need to fill the number of beds that you're building. And a huge shout out to my friend David Park for creating this incredible resource. He's head over to our website to get it at joe gardener dot com slash raised bed plans. That's no spaces. It's joe gardener dot com slash raised bed plans all one word and this is totally free. The other video is related, but it is a YouTube live Q&A session that I did all about my new beds. Why I'm using treated wood and galvanized metal this time. A huge change from my previous garden. Why I chose these options, the pros and the cons, the details of the soil, the pathway material and much more. We got a lot of questions when I started talking about this on social media. So we decided to do this live Q&A and take live questions to. And so that's got a lot of information in it on the wise and the what and the science and the myth busting about some of the concerns that people still have that are more unfounded than truth. So that video is there for you to watch right now as well and it's right around the same place that you'll find this one because it was posted roughly the same time. And I think you'll get a lot of information out of that. We got some great feedback already and hopefully you'll feel the same way. But that's going to do it for today. And as we wrap up, thanks as always to Amy Prentice, Brendan O'Reilly and Christine LaFond. And thank you for joining me today. Of course, my goal for every episode is to help you take the guesswork out of gardening by teaching you the why do behind the how to so that you can become a better, smarter, more confident gardener. And I'll be back here again next Thursday for another episode of the Joe Gardner Show. And I look forward to having you right back here to join me for that. Until then, have a great week. Take care and I'll see you back here really soon. Thanks for listening to the Joe Gardner Show. The podcast where it's all about gardening and learning to grow like a pro. No experience required. For more information, podcasts and how to videos, visit us online at JoeGardner.com.