444-Home Permaculture: Turn Your Yard Into a Thriving Ecosystem

Hi everybody, this is Joe Lample, the Joe Behind Joe Gardener, and welcome to the Joe Gardener Show. Today's podcast conversation is with Brandy Hall. She wrote a book recently that I had the pleasure of reading. The title is The Complete Guide to Home Permaculture, How to Transform Your Yard into a Thriving and Productive Ecosystem. How's that for a subtitle? Who wouldn't want that? I love that relevance to the urban and suburban market, for sure. Brandy started her very successful landscape design and installation firm Shades of Green Permaculture about 20 years ago using her extensive knowledge of permaculture practices and her core business serves the urban and suburban Metro Atlanta, Georgia area. And what I found so appealing about Brandy's book is the relevance to urban and suburbanites with average size yards. I also really gravitated towards her three pillars of permaculture design and practice, which is what she strives to apply with every project she and her team takes on. And that's where we will spend most of our time today, because I think you will really relate to Brandy's approach, applying a concept that may have been a little muddy to get your head around, and it was for Brandy initially, and myself also. And one more thing, Brandy's path to her professional career as a designer and land steward has a very interesting story that started when she was just a child. And it is clear to me at least that it had a very significant role in how she uses her time and effort with her career and life today. And I think you'll pick up on that too in the first part of this conversation. And by the way, after this conversation, during the wrap up, I'm going to share some news with you that's a pretty big deal. If you've been following me for a while and you are familiar with my raised bed garden and all that goes on there. Well, there are some big changes currently in process that you're going to want to hear about and see. And I will share more of the details in the wrap up part of this episode. So stick around for that. But let's get started with the main part of this episode. And as we do, thanks to our sponsor for this episode, the Ultimate Gardening Sheet. You know how sometimes you don't realize how much you've been missing something until you finally have it? For me, it was knowing how much I was missing something even before I finally had it. In fact, before it even existed. It's true when they say necessity is the mother of invention, because that's how the Ultimate Gardening Sheet came to be. I was finally able to make it a reality when I teamed up with a North Carolina leather craftsman to co-create it. And after years of being frustrated with not having a comfortable and secure way to carry the three tools I use every day in the garden, my pruners, soil knife, and micro snips, I finally have what I had been missing for a very long time. Handcrafted from beautiful leather, it's sleek, comfortable, and built to last. Nothing bulky or awkward, just a smart triple stack low profile design that works. Make this the time you realize how much you've been missing your own Ultimate Gardening Sheet once you finally have it. You can find it exclusively and learn more at joegardner.com slash UGS. That's joegardner.com slash UGS. Hey Brandy, I love your book and I think this is such a great platform for us to have this incredible conversation. And you're titled your book, by the way, the Complete Guide to Home Permaculture. How to Transform Your Yard into a Thriving and Protective Ecosystem. So first of all, welcome. I already have a bunch of things I want to talk to you about related to your book and your main topic. Thank you so much for having me. This is really wonderful. It's great to spend an afternoon together virtually. Well, we'll see how you feel when we finish this. Yeah. No, I think it'll be fun. And I'm looking forward to this conversation and your introduction was so rich with information and it really set the stage for what was to come with the book. And there was so much meat right there in the very beginning. I think we could do the whole podcast on the intro, but it really sets itself up for a lot of good discussion. But first things first, I love to know your backstory and you shared a little bit of that in your book. And as I read that, I was pleased to know that you, part of your younger life, you grew up in South Florida with your mom and stepdad and your plant nursery. I'm from Miami. So my first 21 years of my life were growing up in South Florida too. So tell us about your origin story and how you ended up down this path towards what you're doing today. Great question. I love to talk about this. Yeah. So my mom and my dad got divorced when I was really young. So I grew up kind of between South Florida and Western North Carolina. The juxtaposition of worlds, of growing up in the nursery business, endless fields of agriculture, all ornamental plants. So, you know, in the humidity and the subtropics of South Florida, lots of pests, lots of diseases, lots of herbicides, lots of pesticides, fungicides, all the things. The farm where I grew up, we think of as 15 acres or so of hot houses and shade houses and field plants and lots of just canals as most of South Florida has. You're familiar. Yes. The literal swamp. And they were kind of just like, this pools, you know, I remember them smelling funny and always having this like green scum on them. I wasn't allowed to play in the water, obviously, by herds. Thank goodness. So that was sort of the setting of growing up on the farm. And then in Western North Carolina, my father's a builder and grew up in, it's a temperate rainforest and just beautiful creeks and spraying, you know, drinking out of spring and going on woodland horseback rides and all the things. So just the swimming and freshwater. So sort of this like early inquiry into like, how are these worlds so different? I think it different. I think it shaped my subconscious more than my conscious mind to start. But then as an early, you know, like elementary age, my mom and my stepdad started to develop some allergies and they got more severe as the years went on, sensitivities to chemicals. So it started with my stepdad spraying in, you know, they were doing all of the spraying with minimally regulated chemicals. Diasenon was the main one that they were using, which used to be sold in the hardware store before it became a minimally regulated EPA chemical. And they were using these suits that are the protective suits, but then when they would get wet from being wetty, you know, it's 100 degrees, it's 100% humidity. They would work more like a semi permeable membrane. So it was actually trapping the fumes against their skin and our skin is our biggest absorption organ. So they're, they're both of them developed really quick sensitivities to the chemicals that they were spraying. First manifested actually my mom, she would have kind of like an anaphylactic response when she would smell chemicals being sprayed. And you know, the setting is we're in just endless ag. So even when they started controlling it in their own 15 acres, 13, 15 acres, all of the fields around us were constantly being sprayed. We're in South Florida where overhead, they're constantly spraying for mosquitoes just by airplane. I know, you know, crop dusting. You know, the crop dust are just going down the street spraying, whatever it was spraying. When we finally moved off farm and, you know, shut the windows really quick, my parents eventually got on a no spray list. So the county would notify us and we would go to the next county, but that was very disruptive. As you can imagine. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, back to my mom, she started having kind of like an anaphylactic response and could control it with Benadryl. And my stepdad started getting really swollen joints is how it started. And they thought it was gout. And then he started developing nosebleeds that would last like an hour, two hours long. And they thought it was lupus. There was a whole rheumatoid arthritis, all these things, but it was very much linked to, you know, there was like a moment, both of them would be like, oh, I experienced this. I smelled the thing. And then within like 10 minutes, I started developing these symptoms and they just got more and more severe. So eventually my stepdad was in a wheelchair because he couldn't walk. His joints were so swollen. He kind of came out of operations for the company and my mom took over and the she went to make a delivery at a nearby nursery and pulled into their greenhouse and got out of the truck immediately smelled. Oh, they sprayed, got back in the truck, took a bunch of Benadryl, got my stepdad, picked me up on the way to school. And by that time my stepdad was driving and she, after they picked me up on the way to the hospital, she was convulsing so hard that she shook the door panels off of the door and her hands were curling up and her tongue was swelling. And after that, you can imagine, you know, they got it under control, but after that we're like, we're off the farm, we're moving. And they went, they started going through like a long detox to try to get, get through that experience. And now, you know, I can paint my nails at the house and they can use mild cleaners and things like that. But it was a long road for them to, to heal. But as you can imagine, going back to the origin story, it was very formative experience witnessing that in my parents. And then, you know, really early on going, you know, back to the juxtaposition of being in the pristine wilderness. And then, wow, we're just spraying and doing all these things that are crazy and causing a lot of damage and health problems and water problems and all the things. It would be easy to assume to think that that influenced your path to where you ultimately landed or at least to this point in it. Is that the case or? You know, I think it wasn't until later that I realized that it did, you know, but it made a lot of sense and retrospect like, oh, yeah, no wonder. You know, I was always drawn to plants and farming because I grew up around that in both beddings. And you know, much later after I started Shades of Green Permaculture, my company, I realized, oh, this makes so much sense that growing up in that it started, it started, it jump-started this whole inquiry into organic living and healthy habitats and healthy soil and healthy water and the things that I loved so much as a kid when I was in the wilderness. The experience of drinking from the spring and just the smell of like rich forest soil, those are the things that, you know, really came to influence how we're working with land. I think it's really interesting to hear your answer to that because fast forward to where you are now and all the things that you talk about and write about and the way you walk your talk seems to be whether you were conscious about it or not. Actually, you were carrying it internally and it is manifesting itself. It seems to me in how I read your book because your approach to it is refreshing from the topics I've had in past conversations with permaculture. I think it's a fascinating practice and a lot of good merit to that. But you seem to put a unique spin on it and in talking with you just now, it seems like I'm hearing how that could very much have come from some of those earlier experiences. I think it definitely influenced it. I think at the heart of the work for me, it's less about growing all your own food and living completely off grid and all of that. It's really about nurturing our connection to life. And, you know, 58% of people by 2050 or 68% according to the UN will live in city centers by 2050. So the connection we have to nature and the life we can nurture really is in our yards and in our green spaces. And I really like that about your book because it seems like it's more relevant to an audience that maybe hasn't been addressed for the discipline of permaculture the way that you have presented it, more in an urban setting or suburban setting versus farmland and so forth. And so before we maybe drill down into those three pillars that you really nicely wrote about, I would love to hear from you how you would differentiate or where they're similar. The terminology of permaculture versus regenerative versus ecological gardening because in many ways they're kind of intertwined. There's a lot of similarities there. But where's the difference that you can articulate with maybe the permaculture angle versus the others? That's a really great question. And I tend to use those interchangeably a lot of times because it really depends on the objective, I think, you know, I think how we arrive at those expressions of land management, whether it's permaculture or regenerative landscaping or ecological gardening, how we arrive at those might shift. And the end result is back to the idea of just like nurturing life. And so permaculture really puts an emphasis on permanent agriculture. So growing food and in our context, I like to extend that to think beyond just the human. So it's growing food for our human sustenance, but also for the wildlife and the pollinators and the non-human world that doesn't have as ready access in urban and suburban centers. They may have, you know, 50 years ago. From the regenerative component, I think that's really about closing all the loops, you know. So how do we cycle waste? How do we cycle water? How do we interact in a way that's going to continue to nurture the health of the landscape and create like a circular economy within our landscape and bring it to better health? And then from the ecological gardening, it's really thinking about the ecology of the site, whether it's the soil microbiome or, you know, the pollinators or the songbirds that your landscape supports. And I don't think, you know, it's we tend to want to, well, permaculture is this and, you know, there's this rush to differentiate the lumpers and the splitters of the world, you know, and I tend to be more of a lumper, I would say. Like, yes, and it's kind of all of those things. You're doing all of those through the pillars of regenerative landscape and in home permaculture in an urban and suburban context. It's kind of all of those three things woven together. I love that answer too. And kudos to you for coming up with that on the fly, because you didn't know that question was coming. You know what I love that you just said is that at the end of the day, it seems that even all three of these disciplines, although they have kind of unique application, they tend to arrive at many of the same points. And that's important. And that's, I'm so glad that we're evolving to that and we're finally recognizing it. But back to your book and the introduction, as I alluded to earlier in this conversation already, the three pillars, because I think they're so relevant and applicable to how we can practice being better stewards, whether we call it permaculture or regenerative or ecological gardening. So with that, your three pillars. I'll start with, I used to teach permaculture design certification courses, and it's a 72 plus hour curriculum. And they're 12 principles and all of these different tools and techniques and things that you have to do to do permaculture is a lot of what's out there in the world. And then I taught 14 permaculture design certification classes. And then right before COVID hit, decided to move it online so that we could have a little bit more reach, you know, because I'm located in Atlanta, Georgia. And it's really timely just in terms of where we are with climate chaos and change and all of those things. So as I was moving the permaculture design certification into an online platform, it's like, it's got to be digestible for just like a normal person who has a yard, you know, because how do you apply 12 principles or 17 or 20, depending on who you're looking at. And then you weave them in with these ethics and then you have to build an herb spiral and you have to do a swale and you have to do X, Y and Z. You're not doing permaculture. You know, it's like, that doesn't work. I don't want people to be bogged down in theory, you know, the analysis paralysis. That's how I felt after I did a PDC. I, you know, it took me probably five years of just sort of being like, I'm doing permaculture. What is that? I don't even, you know, I couldn't even explain it really, you know, I was trying to figure out like, what does this look like in an urban and suburban setting because I'm not growing all of my own food and I'm not doing key line swales because I have 6,000 square feet to work with, you know, things like that. So I distilled it down for the purpose of the online class to these three pillars, which are, you know, it doesn't really matter what the technique is, whether it's a swale or a ring garden or a dry creek bed or, you know, French drain or whatever. It doesn't really matter what the plant is. If it's part of a plant community, they're, you know, or exactly what the technique is for building soil. But if you're doing those three things, if you're working with water as a resource so that we can restore the water cycle, which is the first pillar. If you are creating, you're integrating waste as a resource and closing the loops to build soil in your landscape. And if you're thinking about plant communities that are diverse and serve many functions within a landscape, not just the aesthetic, you know, that's a pretty flower. Then it doesn't really matter what the techniques are, what you're planting exactly or exactly how you're building soil or exactly how you're sinking water in your, you're practicing the heart of regeneration as a land steward. So that's where they came from. Let's go ahead and unwrap each of these and starting with restoring the water cycle. This is a good one because in all of my years talking and teaching related to gardening and stewardship, as important as water resources are and conservation and stewardship of it. I think we tend to just not think a lot about stewardship of water. Maybe it's me, but I just feel like that doesn't get talked about enough on what we can do as individuals to manage it at a better level. Yeah. I mean, it's so easy when we can just turn on a spigot and, oh, we're in a drought, but I can turn on my hose. You know, you don't necessarily have to think about it that way. But if we zoom out a little bit and we look at the pattern of how water is within our larger watersheds and regionally, I happen to live in a place where we have an abundance of water. I'd like to keep it that way if we develop in ways that are similar to other climates that might not be that way. You know, we might have all of our water running away and then we deforest and we pave everything and, you know, all the things that we take it, we can easily take it for granted when you live in a climate that has a lot of water. I know that's not the case for people that live in arid climates, you know, they're probably thinking a lot about it, but that comes from the other side, which is how do we conserve it? How do we use it? You know, you might be more aware of that in an arid climate, but regardless of what kind of climate you're in, the main function when we think about restoring the water cycle is how do we accept the rain that we have and how do we sink it into our landscape so that we can build the soil's capacity to hold water, you know, through adding organic material, you know, we can slow it down. Brad Lancaster, who wrote Rainwater Hardesting for the Drylands and Beyond, he has a slogan, slow it, sink it, spread it. Yeah, brilliant. I love it. You know, just slow the water down, sink it into the soil and spread it out through the landscape where it's useful. And where we see on kind of like a broader scale, when we're talking about urban and suburban landscapes is the way the built environment is typically is we have our downspouts that come off of our gutters, off of our roof. Those go usually to some sort of paved surface, a sidewalk or a driveway, and then or maybe just through the yard, right? And then that water, it's usually treated as a nuisance. Like the builder is like, I want to get it away from the foundation. Obviously, that makes sense. But we're not really thinking much beyond that, right? So it goes to our driveway and the driveway drains to the street and the street drains to the stormwater drain and the stormwater drain goes to the creek and the creek goes, you know, to the river and so on and so forth. And then we have these big rain events where instead of taking the water and allowing it to sink into the soil, we've flushed it down the literal drain to the creeks. And then when we have in the southeast, we experience flash flooding like crazy because we've just let all the water go and the creeks aren't built to hold that much watershed. You know, if it were, you know, one of the the principles of permaculture is work like nature for nature. So if we were looking at water systems from a perspective of how does nature manage water, you know, the forest is breaking up and creating a mist out of the big raindrops. And then that's lowly hydrating the forest floor. And then there are lots of plants and there's organic material and there are all these things that are helping the water sink in before it's not just like going down the slope right to the river. Right. So we want to do that same thing in our yard. And then what we see is once we take those downspouts, you know, for most homeowners and we route them to a contoured swale or a rain garden or think about where can this water be useful in my landscape. Maybe it starts with a rain harvesting system, you know, a cistern above ground. And then that overflows and we kind of dance the water through the landscape. So it's thinking in where the plants actually can use it. And then through the soil pillar, we're building the organic material in the soil so it can hold as much water as possible when we do have rains, which minimizes the flood and drought kind of extremes that we experience. You know, and then we use plants to decompact our subsoil here. We have a ton of clay. So we like those deep taproot plants. They're going to break it up, you know, and harvest some of those minerals and things that are available from clay that are not usually accessible to other plants. And yeah, start to use plants as our ally too in building soil and the soil's capacity to hold the water. So it's all intertwined. Yeah. And I love when I read that in your book, you know, it was like, why is this an aha to me? Now, I should have known thought about this a long time ago, but when you wrote the fact talking about the built environment and how water is treated as a nuisance to get off the property rather than consciously keeping it on the property for the benefits that it can provide and to eliminate, you know, run off and things like that. When you are working with your clients as one of the three pillars and you're talking about this and designing with this in mind, are people receptive to that or does it take some convincing to get them to be on board with just trying to keep as much of it on property as possible? They're generally really receptive because the benefits of it are that, you know, if you're sinking it into the soil, you don't need to irrigate as much. Yeah. So it's lower maintenance. A lot of people come to us because they're like, I want something that's lower maintenance. They're like, well, we're creating living systems, maintenance is love. And, you know, the first couple of years, let's put some things in to get everything established and set the stage. But then once we do that, you know, things can thrive with pretty minimal inputs, depending on your aesthetic, you know, that drives a lot of the way people do maintenance. I think what we're seeing at a broader level is, you know, so much of the built environment for a long time has just been like, oh, we'll build, we'll take out the trees, we'll do all the things, we'll run the water to the stormwater system. And it was really pretty unregulated. In the last decade, I would say municipalities have started to implement green infrastructure practices, bioretention areas and directing builders to keep the first inch of rain on site before, at least in our area. And a lot of municipalities are kind of going this direction more nationally. And that is really, I think municipalities have caught on. And so now it's becoming more mainstream because builders had to learn practices to do it, you know. And so there's less resistance. And people actually want that, I would say. You know, an example is with municipalities, if everything's going to the stormwater system, it ends up, the cost ends up coming back to taxpayers anyway, because the stormwater infrastructure needs to be constantly upgraded to manage an increasing flow of water. Yeah. You know, I use the example of the Sun Valley Water Authority and the Tree People Project in LA, I think, in the book, which is the, you know, the LA River, they were talking about, they had the Army Corps of Engineers proposed upsizing the LA River, and it was only going to be like 20 years worth of development that it would be able to accommodate. And it was billions of dollars, the project. And so this grassroots organization got together and they were like, hey, what if we managed the water in our own landscapes and found that we could spend a couple hundred thousand dollars and manage like a hundred year rain event over 8,000 homes. So it's not new information, but it's, you know, it's slow to catch on and people are more and more receptive. Yeah, the slow to catch on part is sad, but better to catch on eventually rather than never. Exactly. And I'm glad municipalities are getting on board because that will affect how the next 50 years unfolds in terms of how we manage water and how our landscapes stay hydrated and healthy. All right. Pillar number two. One of my favorite topics, and that is about soil and soil fertility and closing the loop and reducing the waste and building soil from what we would typically often throw away, et cetera. So you've got a lot to say about this. Yeah. You know, with soil, that is a whole world that is can be very technical. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And a little intimidating. Like, do I have the right pH balance? Do I have the right MPK balance? Yeah. You know, all the things. But I tried to approach soil from the perspective, not so much of what are the exact elements or the exact, you know, the exact pH or any of that. But really from the perspective of let's build the organic material. Like, all the ways you can build the organic material and the ecosystem will sort itself out. You know, you'll get feedback. Like this plant clearly doesn't like this, you know, the spot. Maybe it likes it over there. Oh, this is thriving over here. You know, it doesn't have to be so technical and it can be. Yeah. But I think, you know, to make it approachable for just an average person who's working in the yard, who's not going to be testing rigorously in all of those things. The main thing I want to hit home is that if we build the organic material in our soil, everything's going to be better off for it. Right. So it's going to stay more hydrated. There's going to be more fungi. There's going to be more beneficial bacteria. There's going to be more opportunities for all kinds of things to grow. So in the book, I lay out a lot of just techniques of how we can build organic material in the soil, whether it's through, you know, depends on what you're trying to do. If you're trying to remove yard, you know, lawn space and transition it to a meadow, you might scrape all that sod off and compost it or double dig or add compost and lasagna garden. You know, there's a million techniques. So that's really, you know, the heart of it is like, let's keep our waste on site. Let's meaning, you know, our food scraps and our leaves and all the things. And, you know, you could put it right in your beds or you could compost it first. That is kind of a personal choice in a lot of ways, you know, how camped going back to the maintenance question, like how kept do you want it to be? Do you mind putting the leaves just in your perennial beds? Or do you want to compost them first and then add them? And yeah. Adding wood chips, you know, and really knowing the difference. I think one big thing is just in terms of building the microbiome of the soil, what are the things that like more fungal rich soils like woodland species and shrubs typically versus more bacteria rich soils, which are going to be our vegetables and are a lot of our perennials, things like that are grasses. And then using different techniques to either cultivate more fungal rich soils, like adding wood chips and leaves and things like that, or more bacteria rich soils by adding compost tea and worm castings. Do you get to that level of depth with most of your clients? Are they just taking a higher level approach to it and buying into the, let's build our soil health and reduce the waste? I think most of our clients come to us because they have a sense that they want to participate in the earth's return to health. And they're all pretty much on board with like, you know, composting and, you know, to various degrees, we have a caretaking department, which is our maintenance department. And we do a lot of training alongside of our clients. So they're out there in the garden with us, you know, learning how to move plants around and how to chop leaves or have what to do with them in the fall. And, you know, all these things, our goal is to, we like to say, we like to graduate our clients. So our goal is for us to be obsolete. Like you are now a steward of your land and that is wonderful. Working yourself out of a job. Exactly. There's more work to do. Yeah. Yeah, we got to get on to the next clients. That's right. But as you were talking about this subject in reducing waste, it's amazing as I learned a long time ago, and I talk about it in all my presentations in a commercial or I'm sorry, a community landfill, you know, wherever that landfill is, where you go to the trash service goes to, to dump everything. You know, two thirds of what is in that mountain of waste can be composted or recycled. And 40% of that can be composted or maybe it's the other way around. But anyway, the point is a lot of that waste doesn't need to be there because it can be repurposed or converted into compost and not to mention the reduction in the methane gas and all the other benefits of that. So many benefits, which, you know, Project Drawdown, which is the book edited. Are you familiar with Project Drawdown? A little bit. Amazing resource, but it's I think the top 88 solutions to addressing climate change. Paul Hawken is the editor of it, but it was a consortium of, you know, scientists from all over the world, putting their heads together and, and measuring the metric ton reduction of greenhouse gases based on different practices and compost is real high at the top of the list. It's really wild, but then there are a lot that fall under, you know, our land stewardship practices like composting, like keeping forests intact by replanting forests by organic agriculture practices, pesticide reduction, all these things. And we can contribute to those things in our little microcosms of, you know, a half acre, quarter acre landscapes by planting more trees and composting our waste. And that adds up to this beautiful tapestry of people that are also making an impact, you know? Yes. It's a hopeful thought. It is a hopeful thought and actionable too, because people can do something that's tangible. We have another pillar to talk about before we wrap up. So let's get there right now. And that is, if I have it right, it's preserve and restore biodiversity by building plant communities. That's the one. Okay. So yeah, so when we think about, you know, I have a teacher, Dave Jackie, who wrote Edible Forest Gardens, and he says, don't plant plants, plant ecosystems. So that's what this pillar is about. It's not, it's about not thinking about plants in isolation, but thinking about how plants build resilience in our landscape by serving many functions. So I lay out in the book 13 functions in a landscape within an urban or suburban context specifically that can be anything from adding nutrients to the soil, like dynamic accumulation. That's a term that's really popular in permaculture, deep taproded plants that pull nutrients up, accumulate them, assuming the nutrients are in the soil. You know, they're not pulling them out of thin air, but pulling what's there up into their leaves. Those leaves die in the winter. And then those are really those nutrients are released into the upper horizons of the soil for the more flat rooted plants to get. So you want, you know, varied root structure, different types of root structures, play a role in the soil health that can be like adding nitrogen fixers, like all of your legumes or, you know, clover to your yard. So every time you chop that back, the roots die back a little bit and release nitrogen. So you have a natural fertilizer source instead of adding synthetic nitrogen. It can be privacy, you know, function in the landscape of a plant can be a privacy hedge. So it can be edible, medicinal, you know, an insect nectary, a songbird habitat. There are so many. There's 13 that I've identified that I talk about. But then the idea behind first knowing the different functions within a landscape and beauty is one of them. And then when you build out a plant palette, picking at least for every plant, you want to identify at least three functions that it plays within that landscape. And if you start doing that, you start to build this really resilient and diverse palette, you know, you have things that are in permaculture, they call it stacking functions. So you have something that like a rosemary plant is a great example of this. It's aromatic. So it's considered an aromatic pest, confuser. It's an insect repellent, right? It's evergreen, so it can be seasonal interest. It's culinary herb. It's a medicinal herb. It's a pollinator habitat, you know, with its flowers. So when you start thinking about plants and all the different functions they can have within a landscape, you know, and you start to build your plant palette accordingly, then all of a sudden you have this robust and resilient and multifunctional landscape palette, which is pretty exciting. That's a plant community. And a new appreciation for plants, because a lot of people, generally speaking, maybe the non gardeners are the people that really haven't given thought to the value of a plant, they just see it as a landscape element that adds aesthetic appeal, right? But when you get to learn that, you know, some of these plants that we have the option to put have much more ecological value and many more functions and some of the wildlife specifically has co-evolved with that specific plant. And, you know, you could get super geeky on it if you cared to. And it would be incredibly fascinating. I'm raising my hand to that because I think that's the coolest thing ever. I agree. And, you know, you mentioned the privacy hedges as a function that people can consider too. And I love that one because, you know, oftentimes, and I just recently gave a talk on keystone species and connected corridors, wildlife corridors and the importance of that, especially in an urban environment, because, you know, one of the biggest risk we have to the continuation of healthy ecosystems and biodiversity is the degradation of connected corridors because wildlife can't do what it needs to do or get to the next place to have that contiguous flow. And we break it up with all this urban development. The obstacles which are referred to as matrix at the breakpoint between connected corridors. Anyway, all that to say, one of the solutions that people can put in place of a solid fence for privacy is a hedgerow or just some greenery that provides them privacy, but opens up through ways. For wildlife that may not be able to get to the other side because of a solid barrier, whereas, you know, a hedge can serve our purposes, but at the same time provide what the wildlife needs to do what it does as well. Anyway, that's a tip of the iceberg for a lot of what we could talk about. It's an important piece because the other thing that I think we encounter like resistance, we're so programmed to try to control our landscapes. I think, you know, every control the borders, literally, you know, that a lot of times we have clients that are like, well, what am I going to do? I plant all these things and then I'm going to have, you know, wildlife eating them. That's the point. You want your yard to be part of the food web. If something's not eating your yard, then it's not part of the food web. Like we want that, you know? So we try to reframe that. Yeah, that's the word I was thinking. Like, wow, look at the caterpillars eating your blueberry leaves. That's perfect, you know? I was at a symposium a while back and spoke at the same conference as Nancy Lawson, who's the author of a book called Humane Gardener. Her presentation was so amazing because she's showing pictures of people are like, they're eating everything and then she's like, send me photos and, you know, there'll be like one rose bush. And like, there's nothing else in the landscape but lawn, you know, maybe a boxwood or something. She's like, of course they're eating. That's the only thing they have to eat, like plant abundantly, you know? And that's exact same message we tell our clients. Like, let's, oh, they're eating all your blueberries. Well, you need more blueberries because birds haven't eaten enough yet, you know? She's the best ambassador for, well, she's known as the Humane Gardener and coincidentally you bring it up, but she and I are doing, she's doing, I'm hosting on her behalf for us. My audience, a webinar next week on, I can't remember the title, but it basically is ecological ways to cohabitate with the wildlife in your environment that you perceive as destructive, whether humane ways to find a balance, right? The world of plants is so immense and it's the part, I think most, it's the visible part of the three pillars. Yes. You know, it's the part that people get the most excited about. Yeah. The first two pillars are really about the work that's happening underground, like sinking the water in and building the soil so that the plants can flourish. Yeah. It's the part that is, think is the most accessible. And I think also, you know, we have a tendency to want to demonize plants in our yard. And when we're thinking about from an ecosystem perspective, asking like, what is the work this is doing and how do we replace that with something that's more functional, that's not going to out compete biodiversity. You know, the topic of native versus non-native, you know, versus invasive is a really hot topic in the plant world. I give a kind of a decision making framework that we use, I challenge people to not just immediately demonize like, oh, it's non-native, it's immediately out, you know. Right. But really understand like, why is that plant thriving? You know, why is it opportunistic in our landscape? What is it trying to repair? English Ivy is a great example of this. Like, where I live, there's English Ivy kind of takes over the forest floor. It outcompetes everything and climbs the trees. It threatens the biodiversity in our forests. It takes down large trees when left, you know, untended. But then if we kind of peel back a layer a little bit, what is Ivy doing within our landscapes? Like, you know, in the post-construction landscape, the practice in construction is just scrape all the topsoil off and sell it. And then you're riding your machines all over it and that's just getting compacted, compacted, compacted clay. And then you're making it inhospitable for a lot of the more tender-rooted native plants that might exist. And so Ivy does this amazing work of coming in and being really aggressive and trapping all of the, you know, dead animals and branches. And leaves that fall and water and all of these things that it builds soil rapidly, you know? So there's a repair aspect to the plant as well, you know, which is really not to say we should be out planting English Ivy, but I think just to check ourselves, like, how are we demonizing this versus seeing the ecological intelligence of the landscape beyond our own kind of like human perception of what's right and wrong. And, you know, not anthropomorphizing the plants. Like I always do. It's just doing what it's doing. Yeah. We should probably pull it out so we can make some space for other plants to come in, you know, and restore the biodiversity. But it's just an interesting kind of inquiry, like, okay, it's not, you know, it's not great. It's out competing everything. But what is it doing so that then we can make plant choices that are kind of helping, you know, to fill that same kind of niche when we start managing it? Yeah. And then when we are planting, is there a plant that would function better than this one? You know, that's the kind of plant decision making chart that I lay out. Like, okay, is it native? Is it not? Is there a plant that can replace it that is native that fills the same niche? If not, is it aggressive? Okay. If it is aggressive, do you have a long term management plan that's going to outlive you? No. Okay. Don't plant it. Finds me. Yeah. And of those plants that, those do-gooder plants, are there plant choices that you could make that have even greater ecological function than the other ones? I mean, there's even a hierarchy among the good plants, you know, and the keystones that do 96% of the value. When you gave that example a second ago of, you know, celebrating the fact that the caterpillar's reading the blueberry leaves. And then to let people know that, well, do you realize that caterpillars, Ren, in her clutch needs 69,000 caterpillars from birth to fledging per nest? I mean, come on, you know, we, we need those caterpillars or whatever we need to do to support caterpillars. Our landscapes need to be caterpillar farms. Right, right, right. And just, I guess the closing thought here, and the reason I love this three, these three pillar concept is that it is a system. It's a system to build the soil and to be conscious of the value of what the water is doing on the land under our watch and then proper plant choices. And when those are all working together, as they should in a, in a healthy ecosystem, we're doing good and we can do better in, in just, we're, I feel like we're moving in that direction with the work like you are doing and the books that you are writing and others as well. And I wish it would happen a lot faster than it is, but I feel like we've come a long way in the last X number of years where we used to look at plants and all we cared about was that they be pretty for us. But now we're recognizing the responsibility that we have to be conscious of what we can do to help support a bigger system than just ourselves. Absolutely. And it's, you know, the same idea, like one, you know, small solution has big impact. And we're doing it and our neighbors are inspired by it. And then their family comes over and they're inspired by their landscape. But, you know, from a tiny ember, a huge fire rages. So that's the hope. Well, I hope you enjoyed that. And you can always go back and re listen to this episode again and check out the show notes, of course, and look for relevant links and pictures that Brandy has provided. And all of that is on our website at Joe Gardner.com. Just look for the podcast tab and this is episode number 444. And if you're curious to watch this episode, you can do that on our YouTube channel at Joe Gardner TV and check out the video of our conversation there. And whether or not you go to the YouTube channel to watch this episode, you may want to start checking out the YouTube channel now or very soon because I have some big news and we're documenting it all and putting it onto our YouTube channel. And that is a total makeover of my raised bed garden. Now, those of you who are following me on Instagram or Facebook, you've probably have seen a post or two recently. But the work has just begun starting with a demolition, knocking down all the raised beds and taking out all the soil and getting it all down to a clear blank slate. And let me tell you that was super hard work over the last four or five days. But that part is done. And at the time of this recording, the construction starts tomorrow. So we're rebuilding back with brand new raised beds. 16. We're not wasting anything. We're going to repurpose the wood that has rotted down. I held on as long as I could, but I couldn't wait any longer. And that is what instigated this whole process rather quickly. I knew it was coming. The writing was on the wall about three years ago. And I waited as long as I could before I didn't have any more time to put it off. So this is what's happening and it's happening in earnest. The soil is being repurposed and relocated, but I'm starting with new soil as well. And that is because basically the soil pathogens have just taken hold in my soil and they are not letting go because I didn't rotate as often as I should have with my tomato plants. I grow too many tomatoes and too many beds for too many years and it catches up with you. And that's what happened. So the only remedy at this point that's practical for me as hard as it is, is to take it all out and start fresh. So that's the plan. But we're documenting it all. That's the point of me telling you all of this and you're going to see the whole process from start to finish as well as all the helpful information, I think, will be applicable to many of you and why I'm doing what I'm doing. I really want this to be a very informational oriented series of videos as well as the culmination from start to finish. We're going to combine it all and put it into one long form video. It should be very interesting to see the whole transformation from the takedown to the rebuild to the finished new garden makeover. So again, you can be tracking that on YouTube and the channel again is Joe Gardner TV and a reminder about our other YouTube channel while I'm at it. GGW TV, that's for growing a greener world. That's my television series on PBS. And we have all of our episodes from 12 seasons and over 200 shows there for you to binge watch and coming into the holidays. That may be a great thing to do to get some good organic gardening TV quality episodes that you can watch as many as you'd like. And on Instagram, I mentioned that I'm at Joe Gardner. If you want to follow along, I'll be posting stories and reels there too, especially during this reconstruction time. So that will give you some real time updates if you're interested. So that's going to do it for today. And as we wrap up, thanks as always to Amy, Princess, Brendan O'Reilly and Christine Lafond for their help and expertise getting this podcast ready to go week after week. And thank you for joining me today. 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. 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 Joe Gardner dot com.