Make Your Own Soil & KILL YOUR LAWN

Okay, welcome to another episode of the crime Pace about and he doesn't podcast.
I'm here with Jeremy Tidd. I pronounce your name right? You did?
Okay? I fuck it up on every like every other episode, depending
on who I'm I am doing. So you know that one's simple. You
got it. I'm preparing to be a geriatric Italian a little earlier here,
but uh but anyway, so, uh Bonat he runs Bona Terra nursery or
there in the DC Baltimore area. We met during the filming of Kill Your
Lawn. Uh, the four episodes we shot in that region, and uh,
I was so impressed with some of the stuff he does and some of
those things we talked about, I decided to have him on the podcast.
So that's what we're doing here. Jeremy, how are you? Oh?
I'm great, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to get my voice out there.
And you are talking to me from a top a large hill. Is
that correct? Because you were like you are in the cut, I am
I if the service cuts in and out or if the wind comes, it's
just because my hands are dirty. I'm out here in the nursery. Okay.
Sometimes sometimes satellites aren't right above me. So it so it's a it's
a so, so what's you're on a satellite phone or just a regular cell
phone. I'm just on a regular cell phone tower that sometimes tower reception isn't
perfect. Okay, I thought it. I thought you had like a like
a like a satellite phone. I was like, oh, ship, that's
my friend Miguel's got one of those. But he lives in Tasmania. So
maybe one day I would love to have some Bluetooth on my irrigation system.
Yeah. Yeah, once once Elon Musk has thoroughly fucked us. And you
know there's there's a satellites every fucking where anyway anyway. So but to get
so to talk about where you are right now, I mean, you had
just said something earlier before I started recording, that you're still I mean DC,
that whole area, of course, has had more development and more time
to be developed by European settlement than any other place. Uh in North America.
It seems like it's you know, it's got like five hundred years or
so, but there's but there's still remote areas like you said that the count
I'm in a bit of a special area. And in fact, I didn't
even know really how special this was until I happened to have an opportunity to
move out here. But yeah, the southern half of an Arundo County has
like subdivision restrictions, and I'm on a rather large conservation agiment. And it's
kind of incredible because like every direction you drive out of DC, it's suburbs
forever for at least an hour, And this place is only forty minutes outside
of the city and and you get about thirty minutes away and all of a
sudden, like all the strip malls disappear, and really, what what's going
on? And yeah, there's there's just a lot of preservation of old tobacco
farms, a lot of entrenched farming communities out here that don't want to give
it up. And it's awesome. And it gives me the real opportunity to
you know, get some dew on my plants and get the good air flow
without without all of that pollution. And yeah, got access to a lot
more local genetics out here then I always thought I would have to move two
hours out in order to get to like a real, you know, semi
wild place, because most of the development there. Yeah, most of the
development. I was amazed, man. I mean I I have not spent
that much time in a car. I mean, it feels like so many
plays in the United States, you know. I mean Texas is like that.
From Dallas all the way south of the border on I thirty five corridor.
It's just what I call a car slum, you know, like endless
suburbs. Yeah, with little Yeah, it's like sprawling out in like La
some of the other places I considered moving when I was younger, and and
and the sprawl here is is starting to contend with some of that. Like
I know people that are commuting over an hour just to get to DC and
do goverment job. You know. Yeah, that's it's insane. I mean
when you're when you have to spend that much time in a car, Like
if you're on a subway, a train or something, it's different. Your
time is your own. But when you're forced to be in that car,
it's just it's never mind the impracticality of it either. I mean, every
person sitting in this giant fucking I mean the amount of space it takes for
all the fucking cars and the car thing in America isn't saying, but god
damn it, it's hard to live a life like that. I can see
how it's got to be unfulfilling if you have to spend that much time commuting
in a vehicle. You know, well, and it's it's so relevant to
you to the killer lawn makes so much. So much of the reason people
are driving so far is for lawns. It's like all this waste and time
to like, you know, so you can have a little green patch of
dead zone. Yeah, well that's I mean, that's what what's crazy is
that's all people really have. That's all that's been offered, you know,
the suburban lifestyle. It hasn't been planned for. It hasn't been planned for
density or public transit or you know. That's why it's like, God,
I just I to travel outside of America and see what other options are available
in terms of public transit, other living situations, density, but still having
parks and like open spaces, you know, not having to sit in a
fucking car, having walkable you know, places to live. It's so nuts.
So but anyway, all that is said, so tell me how you
got in the native plants because you run a huge nursery and you, I
mean you make you mix your own soil, you make your own biochar,
which takes the place of pearlite, which I thought was really fucking cool.
How did you get into all this stuff? Well, I guess how far
back you want me to go, because it really started when I was I
was still in single digits. I'm trying to make a living for myself.
But uh uh, I suppose really, really the synthesis of the nursery all
started with, uh, you know, my roots as an artist and wanting
to make art. And I found the traditional route to making a living on
art kind of materialistic, and you know, I wanted I work. I
wanted to work more in four dimensions. I wanted to work, and with
time, I wanted to work with living things, plants, plants and being
outdoors like really thrilled me. So kind of just got got a couple jobs
right out of high school and started working on it. And it wasn't long.
I mean I started at a golf course of all places, and a
plant nursery and it wasn't long before, like you know, my passion for
plants really blossomed at that nursery, and like learning more as much as they
could about plants. And you know, they never once mentioned were native plants
while I was I was at that place for a good three or four years.
No, I imagine, yeah, it's got to be a foreign concept.
Yeah, totally, you know, you know, it was. It
was an aha moment, like the moment you know, there's a lot of
things in my life where you know, I just never thought about it.
And then the moment someone was like native plants support native ecosystems, it was
like a sea change. Suddenly, you know, I wanted nothing to do
with these foreign plants that aren't you know, because I'm I'm in love with
the ecosystem and I want to support it, you know. And and it
was it was a sea change moment for me when I when I heard the
word native plants and thought about the consequences of non native ones like it.
It didn't it didn't take any pushing or shoven to get me to think,
like, you know, this is what's important, this is what I want
to do. Yeah. I think that's what's required is viewing things differently.
Like when I I used to you know, scoff at the native plant thing,
I thought it was like this elitist, fucking annoying you know, no,
was not native. Uh yeah, well the fucking freeways not native either,
jack off, Like it doesn't you know, like don't fucking give me
this, Like we live in a disturbed time, like I didn't, but
I didn't grasp I was an idiot. I had no context that like,
oh, there's all these things are connected. There's this is basically ecology,
like if growing Nandina domestica or some other shit that that is just frivolously found
attractive whatever that means, like talk about an area of subjectivity. You know,
it's just whimsical something, you know, that doesn't support all these other
cool things that grow with it, whether it's fungi or the microbes or the
pollinators or the caterpillars or other things that use these as a host plant,
the beatles that use these as a host plant, et cetera. So it
was really this ignorant thing. And I still see people, you know,
denying that, and I don't want to get mad at them, but it's
just like, fuck, this fucking this idiot just doesn't know, not even
this idiot, but like this this bonehead, well yeah, you know,
it's it's it's not knowing. It's okay, but being so arrogant to like
not know that you don't know what is what frustrates me. You know.
Yep. No. And I've been pleased because I've gotten a lot of chances
to reach out to the public and get more interactions with people. And I've
just been like blown away with the number of people that have come to me
and said things like, hey, like I I just thought I was doing
the right thing by going to the local plant store, like that was that
was where you know, I just assumed, like, oh, it's time
to do native plants, will go there, whatever's there. And I've had
a lot of people connect with me in the last year or two who were
like, oh my god, I didn't realize. You know, there's so
much more to the ecology of a plant nursery and how like, you know,
the retail system how it's set up now, is not focused on what's
best for the environment. Like if you want to do what's best for the
environment, you might have to do a little bit of legwork to find that
smaller grower, you know. Yeah, yeah, and just just having an
ecological mindset too. And I can forgive people for not having that because everything's
been destroyed. I mean, especially where you are, you know, there's
nothing left. Well I'm yeah, I'm kind of like, it's not your
fault. And and I see it more and more that it's not their fault
when they run into me and they you know, I see the light bulb
go off and they're like, you're right, I'm going to change my approach,
like of course, this corporate shit isn't the best thing for the planet,
like you know, like, ah, yeah, so yeah, it's
it's uh, I don't know, man. I I think people eventually come
around, but it just takes it takes a minute to get through to them
as all. But it's some are more resistant than others. And I'm lucky
enough to you know, run in have a little bubble of like only the
people that are willing to incorporate new ideas tend to interact with me. Yeah,
or at least listen, that's been pleasant. The most annoying shit that
I hear, though, is that humans are invasive. Well, man,
not really, and it's not really. The definition of the term invasive specifically
means brought somewhere by humans, not did it migrate naturally. Well it wasn't
everything. You know, things have been moving around the planet forever. Well,
yeah, it was actually a pretty rare event that things would move across
the fucking Atlantic Ocean normally, you know, in the plumage of a bird
or on it, maybe on a raft like a debris raft, and it
wouldn't happen that much. We can, you know, it's a philosophical time
machine, you know, our use of carbon resources and the way we move
around this planet, like we are moving into the future every time you jump
into a car, and the world hasn't functioned like this ever, and and
you know, I think a lot of people don't realize that cars are time
machines into the future. Like it used to take two weeks to get halfway
across the country. Now you can get halfway across the country in two days.
Like that's a literal time machine, right, everything's happening at a faster
pace. Well yeah, that too. And also like the worst invasives always
come from, you know, the ecosystems that have been separated from this one
for so long, which is normally across the Atlantic Ocean three thousand miles of
ocean is a formidable fucking barrier of course, or the equator, you know,
and so gone right, right, and so now that and now we
can bring we can bring things overnight, but we don't bring all the fungi
or insects that keep them in check at least if we're talking about plants.
And so that's why things behave and some of our most beloved natives here are
invasive as hell in Australia and Europe and other places, you know. Yeah,
that's why I was just doing stories on that. While I was traveling
in Japan, I was photographing all the evening primros, the broom sedge and
get a golden rod, like all this stuff that like here, it's great
here, and then like it's it's a nightmare over there. Yeah, and
you can see it too, because some of those natives are the ones that
are able to compete in the disturbed, fucked up areas here, you know,
like railroad tracks and power line easements, and you know you can pion
air plants. Yeah. So but anyway, so so you got you got
into native I mean when you when it was put forth to the idea of
what a native plant is and the concept of ecology. That's when it took
off. Yeah, it kind of took off, and I was I was
doing a little bit of installation work, kind of trans transitioning away from being
an employee to being self employed, which I guess I'd always been working on.
And yeah, I was doing a lot of installations, and I was
having a whole lot of trouble, uh seeing eye to eye with clients.
Uh, you know, people want me to round up me, want me
to plant a lot of annuals like and and you know, I was just
sick of it. And I was also sick of not being able to source
plants from ethical sources. Like all my plants were coming with like petrochemical fertilizers
on them, they were sprayed with other chemicals and pristine conditions. They were
coming from other eco regions, bringing all kinds of microbes that weren't native to
the area. And I was just like, this has got to end,
Like I can't ethically continue making a living this way unless I grow these plants
myself. So that's that's what I did. For roughly like ten years.
I was growing myself and my little twenty by forty foot concrete pad in the
backyard of my city Rowhouse in DC, and I did that for a while,
installing rain gardens and conservation plantings for the city and residential sites. And
I really got seasoned there, like I really understand understood more like what it
took to maintain, what it took to communicate with clients to have them have
success, what sort of signs were successful, which ones were failures. You
know, your normal designer might you know, kick out like twenty thirty one
hundred designs a year, and every year I was I was going through one
hundred and fifty to two hundred these designs and installations and following up with the
clients and talking to them and learning and throughout all of that, I kind
of just the more I learned, the more I realized, like, the
way I can really make a difference is by growing these plants and providing all
the information that I've learned from the last ten years of doing maintenance and installations.
So you were one of so you you started growing everything from sea basically
because you realized you had to. There was no you couldn't get this stuff.
Well, I made a transition, so initially in the nursery in my
backyard because I was doing maintenance at the same time. Usually my maintenance practice
resulted in like thousands of extra see things of native plants in my client's yard.
So I was digging those up, putting potting them up, and slinging
them like six weeks later in installations. And that's how I, like,
you know, made money off that little tiny space. Was like, that's
amazing. You see all my maintenance clients as a seed factory. No,
that's fucking smart. So you were going back and digging these up and then
repotting them and then using those basically from that's a that's amazing, So they
would just pop up. Yeah, through that maintenance, I learned all about
like you know, propagating. And you know, it wasn't until I started
the nursery and I really started looking into nursery practices and the genetics plants and
really thinking about like what it means to to breed planets like and and one
analogy I frequently present to customers or people that are asking me about it.
It's like, you know, you wouldn't start a breeding colony of or you
wouldn't start a new dog breed two dogs. You know you're gonna end up
with some some some fucked up overbites and some hip dysplasia and all this other
stuff, And the same is true plants, Like you want nice genetic diversity
of plants that are locally evolved to the local soil and that. You know,
That's what I've been picking up and learning the last like six years and
incorporating into everything I do, is like this good genetic stability and the plants
that I'm not bringing to right. Yeah. Yeah, it's the same thing
of inbreeding. You know, you get those recessive alleles stucking up. You
don't have as much in the genetic toolbox that enables you know, an organism
to to survive or you know, survive whatever adversity comes at it, whether
it's disease or environmental diversity, et cetera. So you don't want those genetic
bottlenecks, you know exactly. Yeah, I'm trying to avoid that. I'm
trying to get you know, the most diverse you know colonies to people.
I'm trying to inform them when you know, I have no minimum among the
number of plants and people who vive. But you know, when anytime they
give me a foot in the door and ask me about like the health of
their colony. I'm like, well, you need at least twenty of the
Lobilia syphiliticas because you know they're highly dependent on receding and you want the most
genetic diversity in your colony. So like, you're gonna want at least twenty
of these, you know, but not everyone can fit twenty of something in
their yard too. That's why I don't have the minimum, and you know,
not something is better than nothing. Yeah, So I'm always trying to
guide people towards thinking about it, like is this a long lived plant that
like doesn't require you know, making babies to have a healthy colony, or
or is this is this short lived perennial that you know you're gonna need a
lot of to develop to have enough guenetic diversity to make a healthy colony.
Do you so, do you have you been getting a lot of people,
you know, killing their lawns wanting to plant native plants lately or what do
you What are the majority of your contracts you end up with. I would
say, like the people that are killing their lawns and trying to like,
you know, make new space that could be somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty
to thirty percent of my clientele. I'd say another decent portion of that is
contractors. I do a lot of selling to contractors, and yet frequently they
are killing lawn spaces and installing gardens. So for like landscape landscape contractors,
you mean like, yeah, yeah, they're they're they definitely keep me stable.
They probably represent you know, another twenty to thirty percent of the clientele.
But I've also been getting like some local parks and stuff, people doing
restoration projects. I do that, like, ay, fifteen to twenty percent
of my inventory right now is a local ecotype that should be pumping up to
like thirty to forty percent in the next year or two. So definitely,
like if people are working in restoration, are doing parks, I'm trying to
guide them towards the things that are locally produced. But that was my focus
is on urban gardening. You know, there's all these micro climates that if
people are dealing with, and also maintenance concerns, Like a lot of people
don't know how to properly maintain lants. So for those you got to kind
of think like, oh, well, you're gonna have a blow and go
operation coming that's gonna blow everything. Often lay down the layer of multi Well,
we can't have plants there that are going to be highly dependent on receding
because they're not going to reced in your multi bed. So let's let's get
your baptizes in their hibiscus and some of these longer liferennials that aren't as dependent
on receding, or maybe some some rhizomal stuff in there. Yeah, yeah,
well yeah, I was well, I want to ask you about that,
like what kind of maintenance maintenances require. But but but before that,
I just I mean, we're just talking about the general region of d C
because I'm sure there's you know, a lot of people listening that aren't from
that region or know much about it. I mean, there's still a lot
of just horticultural garbage out there, you know that the then Dina domesticas in
the fucking box woods and the Japanese barberriers. I mean, all this shit.
These plants that I look at and it's not the plant's fault. I'm
sure are really important where the native but I look at these fucking things and
I feel nauseous, like it's it's like a feeling of being figuratively carsick,
you know, even though I'm not in a car, it's like that same
feeling. Oh God, Like I think of these places where I see these
you know, these neatly, neatly trimmed beds with the edged grass around them
in front of a fucking bank or a strip mall or some government building.
Uh, and you know, all lined up evenly spaced. I mean,
it's this fucking really specific landscaping style that reminds me of places that traumatize,
places that traumatize me as a kid, or like authority figures, or just
these really bland, like mothball smelling fucking people. I don't know, man,
I I really I go somewhere it's like a roshuch that are associated with
that. When I see them, I also see like the core of where
this comes from. It's corporate interest. It's massive grow operations that are you
know, using you know, poverty wage labor to produce factory produce large numbers
of these non ave plants because that's what's easy to grow and that's what's easy
to market. They all got these fancy little names that make people think like
oh, pink, Princess plan whatever, you know, like I want that,
Like it sounds it's a it's all marketing, and it's not. It's
not backed on you know, what's good for the environment. And that's why
it's so ubiquitous is because it was easy to communicate to people like this has
a keeps you little name, you want it and uh, you know uh.
And I think that's been a big effort in my business and it definitely
takes a lot of my time is to like write this stuff down and communicate
these ideas like hey, maybe you don't want you know, a garden that's
that is presented based on corporate interests or you know, these large scale growers
interests like these that's what these gardens benefit. They don't benefit you, they
don't benefit the ecosystem, they don't benefit the pollina. I mean for me,
for me, it's it's it's like all that shit is important. But
I don't even say like environment because it's over the environment, because because this
this country is just at such a like intellectually stupid point right now, like
just so divided. There's so many people, you know, especially in the
right, who would be like, oh, good for the environment, Like
they don't get it, Like it's you know, they're just like, ah,
what you goddamn krey hugger. It's like, no, man, it's
the fucking ecosystem. You know, all these cool like this shouldn't be a
political thing, all these cool relationships that exist between these organisms that have evolved,
and these relationships have evolved over millions of years. You fucking don't like
this shouldn't be a political thing, Like why would you be against this?
You know? But you see people, and I mean I've seen people,
at least especially I'm in Texas, so no surprise, actually be against it.
It's like why would you be against like having a cool species a month?
You know, I'm like tell you a little anecdotical story about uh So,
this past spring, I was working on a native plant bill and we
had to wait for like hours to testify. And the other people that were
waiting to testify before us were a bunch of hunters that were trying to like
extend the season of goose shooting. And you know, these these were you
know, hardcore Republicans. They're like, you know, and they want they
want to hunt, and uh you know, I and I've had this own
experience, this similar experience with you know my own family, and and you
know, all these these uh you know and tranch Republicans I don't care about
the environment, do care about like hunting. They do care. Like a
lot of these guys were even talking to me about like invasive plants, you
know, ruining the feed for the animals they want to hunt. And it
was they were they were stoked that we were working on the native plant build
because to them, all they heard was like more ship to kill. And
I'm like, well, if that's what it takes, like you know,
yeah, well, and to be fair, the deer, the deer situation
out there is fucking insane, Like do you need hunting, Like the predators
are gone? You need you gotta hunt those things their tick farms and they're
they're dangerous on the roads. And but yeah, and I with them and
what they do, maybe not one hundred percent in every aspect of what they
want to do, but you know, I think I think hunters and a
lot of these you know Republicans that may not be so concerned about global warming
or species diversity, they they do have things that you know, bring them
to the table when it comes to native plants, and I think it's important
to you know, recognize that and listen to them and tell them, you
know, you know, find the things that are important to them and give
them a reason why they should care. Yeah. Yeah. And also it's
just you know, I think there's just for me too. It's just just
stylistically, like I see butterfly bush, that invasive budleya, I see these
other plants, and I'm like, god, that's like that's like I feel
like I'm waiting in the fucking waiting room of the DMV. Someone's jamming a
hot poker in my ass and I'm being forced to listen to like Michael Bolton
songs on repeat like that is like, it's just it's such a fucking vibe,
you know it is. I don't know, but yeah, I guess
that's either here nor there. But so either way though, So you so
when did you get into you were when? I guess I'm just really curious
about your nursery operation, how you grow these things. You know, I
want to talk about making your own soil all that, because I found that
to be really fascinating. Well, you know, when I got into it,
everything was like ecosystem first, Like, you know, I just kind
of believe that if I focus on what's best for the environment and what's best
for people, people are going to recognize that, and they're going to come
and they're going to support what I'm doing. And so every aspect of the
business has been booked at through an ecological lens, whether it's the amount of
fertilizer I'm putting on the plants, the way I'm sourcing them, the plastic
flow through the business, like is it new plastic coming in? Is it
recycled? Is it soil full of microbes from another ecoregion. Is it soil
was harvested from the permafrost, releasing tons of carbon on the way, packed
in plastic bags, shipped on trucks. You know, it's all, it's
all been considered and and I you know, I I work every moment.
I have to do this in the most environmentally friendly way possible. And that's
you know, it's just it's just I can't. I can't feel good at
night going to sleep knowing you know that what I'm doing is taking more from
the planet then then it's giving back. So that's that's why, you know,
that's that's my hobby. Making soil making biojar. Well it's it's just
impractical tool. You know. The soil thing is just impractical too, Like
some of the soil you buy. I mean, it gets really expensive.
It's not optimal. It's like if you could make you if I could make
my own soil and huge batches where I live, I would totally do it.
Like it's you you save money and it's just easier. You have to
get all these fucking bags. And you know, I thought I would say,
you know, it was the biggest expense of money going out, but
you know, I had time to replace that, and I'm hoping that in
time, I will you know, get some efficiency to this this system so
that it's eventually less than buying soil. But there's a reason everyone buys soil,
and it's not you know, the soils. Its fucking expensive, but
it is a lot more expensive time wise to make it yourself. So if
I had to pay somebody, if I had to pay someone to do what
I do, I would be bankrupt. Ye in like three months. Well
let's talk about what you do. So what how do you go about this?
Like and how did you figure it out? How did I figure it
out? Uh, you know, I got a I got a really smart
wife that uh that when when I present her problems like this, she finds
me uh the information to solve it. And I spent a lot of time
listening to podcasts, lectures from great courses, all these different streams of knowledge
to kind of incorporate it. And I spent a lot of my free time
just trying to look up and see what other people are doing. You know,
it's a you can't harvest peak the way you used to in Europe,
so they're going to have solutions to soil. So I looked into that,
and you found that they are using woodships that are decomposed and it may not
hold quite the same amount of water. And I think a lot of their
applications were agricultural based, and I saw a lot of their limitations from from
the decomposed woodships. It didn't really apply to growing native plants because they're a
bit more flexible than growing things from an agricultural perspective, you know. So
yeah, I just I started experimenting and trying. I did a bunch of
trial batches and I was like blown away with the results. I actually had
better growth coming out of my plants that were in my decomposed chips than I
was from the So let's let's talk about that decomposed woodship based because I noticed
this at my old illegal garden in Mandela in Oakland, was that I get
these you know, chip companies to make these huge dump truck drops of wood
chips. They do it for free, and then after six months, at
the bottom of those chip piles, I would see that it wasn't wood chips
anymore. It was like almost a not a fine powder, but like a
mealy brown powder, like it had been decomposed. And that was amusing.
Yeah, that's the good ship. So how long does it take? So
it takes it takes roughly four to five years to take a wood chip pile
to a decent amount of soil for the whole thing. Yeah, right,
for the whole from start to finish. Yeah. So a lot of my
soil was based off of like taking down and base of plants all around the
farm and running in through the chipper. And I started that process like four
years ago, so I was just getting my first I only started claiming like
hey, we're we've got reduced peat, We've got we've got no peat plants.
It was just this year because it took that long to make it.
But all so this year, as I watched, you know, the business
kind of starting to scale up, I'm like, oh shit, I need
to like really quickly find another source of this decomposed wood chips because I can't
make enough just to sustain what I'm doing. So I went to dozens of
different you know, tree to arborous and all these different places, and I
finally found a guy that actually he was he's peddling it as mulch, but
it's decomposed wood chips. So I've got that, and it really only takes
me a year to take it from what he was doing to soil ready.
But yeah, once it's ready, it gets run through a half inch stream,
so that pulls out all the big chunks. And those big chunks aren't
really a problem except they shrink. So when you go to sell the plant
and at the plant volumes like half of what it was when you started,
you know, people are like, hey, I thought this was a three
gallon plant, but there's only eight gallon. Half the soil at the bottom
of the pot. Yeah, so I had to start sipping it and running
it through and yeah, I get that and then I'll add like ten percent
biochar to it. And then I've got about five or six different mixes that
I'm making now, depending on you know, what I'm growing, whether it's
burns or perennials. Right, because because you can't just grow it in the
wood the decomposed chip mix, right, I mean you get that wood that
wood fluff, because I mean you could. It's just like not very nutrient
I mean, it's got pretty diverse set of nutrients because all the micros.
Yeah, but like you can't quickly bring a plant to market in a viable
amount of time without subsidizing some of the nutrients in it. Well where the
catfish comes in, Okay, Okay, so that way I want to talk
about that. So, yeah, you're making your own fish meal. But
I mean, as far as drainage goes in like a pod of just decomposed
wood chips, I mean, isn't it that's going to be lacking in drainage
and texture? And yeah, I mean it's great if you want to grow
some some you know, virus or hibiscus or some other swampy plant. Yeah,
you don't have add anything to it, but the moment you need something
that's you know, growing in in uh you know, the first soil to
as some mineral content. Yeah, you got to add that drainage, you
gotta, you know, you've got to add something to fluff it up.
And so what do you do? What do you add for the drainage.
Then that's the biochart. That's the biochar does most of the drainage. I
have found that it's not quite enough. That was something I learned this year.
But like you know, sometimes even with like if I just do a
mix of like ten percent compost, ten percent biochar and eighty percent decomposed wood
chips, that sometimes it was clogging up and going a little bit anaerobic.
But I'll be addressing that by adding some more sand to the mix u next
year. So tell me, tell me what the tell me about the biochart.
How do you do the biochart, because that's really interesting, is the
r This is taking a place in silite, right, it's taking the place
of parl Yeah, yeah, it's taking the place of paralyite. It's it's
a hotel for microbes. Basically. You know, when you burn it down,
you're left with just like the cell walls. Because that's what the that's
what it's made out of is you know, that's where all the carbon goes
in the plant, is to make the cell walls. So all those are
you know, it's void space. So it can hold the air, it
can hold the microbes, it can hold water, it can provide a path
for infiltration and water to flow. So from start to finish, I mean,
but what do you do? I mean you woul because you would mentioned
use a fifty five gallon drum and tell everyone like what you're doing, you're
taking fucking would preferably low density, would right? You want softer woods like
poplar or something. Yeah, yeah, the best the best woods for it
are gonna be woods that you know, while they're growing, they're full of
water, like all their cells are very fluffy. Yeah, that's gonna be
like you know, you're fast growing pioneer plants and you know your your your
trees ideally, so that's gonna be willows, that's gonna be poplars, it's
gonna be your sweet goums, and you can even get away with like cherries
and pine means. But yeah, the best things are going to be,
you know, being cut down that princess tree and turn that into bioshar it
makes excellent and the tree of Heaven, both of those. You know,
if you're if you're looking to get a double bang for your buck, cut
down an invasive and turn it into what is princess? Oh that's that's uh
oh god, polonia. Yeah, that's so weird. That is that's a
bad invasive out there. Huh. It can be in some places, particularly
in urban areas, not so much, and like you know, second generation
or second growth forests is not so bad. But yeah, in urban areas
you'll you'll find a fair amount of it, and it's pretty easy to do.
Yeah, disturbed areas where the where the landscape has already been the you
know, original plant cover, native plant cover has already been removed, right
yep. Yeah, but you know, fast growing pioneer species, you know,
you can be able to harvest them, and fast growing pioneer species habitat.
Yeah, it's huge leaves, huge leaves. I didn't really there are
there in lamy Alas. They're in the the mint order they yeah, yeah,
but they huge fucking leaves. I saw some coming up in a friend's
yard in Brooklyn, and I was like, what the fuck is this because
you know when they grow so fast. Yeah, I've never I had never.
That was a new one for me. But ye. So I'll dry
the wood out and I'll chop it down. I try to keep all the
chumps like, you know, more no more than four to six inches,
so that they can you know, get to the center of the burn pretty
quickly. And I'll start it, you know, I'll start a small fire
in the bottom of the burn barrel and uh, you know, the first
thing that burns off of it is all the gases and all the other elements.
The last thing to burn on it is the carbon. And you'll you'll
see when the carbon starts to form CO two because you'll get that white layer
of ash and that's just you know, everything left over that doesn't burn.
And once you start to see that white layer building up on the outside,
then I'll put it in a low oxygen environment by cutting off the oxygen and
putting more wood on top, so you smother it. Basically, you dump
more wood on it smother. Yeah, I cut off the oxygen. I
put some freshed up to burn on top so that can keep burning off all
the other elements above it while cutting off the oxygen to the stuff below.
And this is in a fifty five gallon steel drum, and you're just hanging
out there, you're drinking a couple of beers. In my case, I'd
be drinking na beers, maybe having a stogy on like a nice beautiful fall
day. Yeah, and the whole process can take four to six hours,
but throughout that four to six hours, it maybe only takes like forty five
minutes of your attention. So I'll usually I'll grab, you know, a
little community of seedlings I've got that needs to go in the nursery. I'll
sit at the potting bench and I'll be slamming seedlings in the plugs and courts
and gallons while I'm watching it, waiting for it to for the flames that
die down. When the flames die down, then I'll start checking on it,
waiting for that that ash to start building up, and I'll just throw
another layer on it, and you know, it's a nice, nice little
We'll have a nice relaxing day where like all I got to do is sit
there and you know, maybe I'll listen to a podcast or or watch some
videos or whatever, watch a movie while I'm potting stuff up and make the
bio chart at the same time. So yeah, out it sounds nice so
at the end, but basically, you know, you let it burn,
you smother it. You let that layer burn, you smother that. Eventually
you've got these levels of how many levels do you have in a fifty five
gallon drum man up with like four or five? Well, I'll probably I'll
probably go back and add another layer onto it, maybe up to like ten
to twenty times. Oh wow, depending on how thick the wood is.
Yeah, I mean you do it over and over again. Takes like,
you know, fifteen to thirty minutes for each layer to burn down. You
kind of like break it up and consolidate it and put a new layer on
top to get everything like kind of evenly smothered in there. And so are
how big of a are you put You're putting logs in there or like cut
up stuff from it. So I'll take logs, I'll dry them out,
and then I'll split them to like usually I try to get each piece split
to like two to three inches, But depending on the density of the wood,
like the denser of the wood, then the smaller I want the chunks
and and the more porous and and spongy and fast growing. The wood is
the bigger the chunks that I can put in there are, yeah, because
there's less resistance to burning to the center. But you know, the goal
is to have all the wood like burnt to the center, but to not
release the carbon. Right. So, and that's so you got this like
ten layer layer cake built up in a fifty five gallon drama, this load
density soft wood. And then when you get to the top, you basically
let it burn. You're washing those coals and when they start to get white
around the edges, that's when they're turning to powder, right, Like the
margin starts to turn the powder, that's when you douse it with water.
Yeah, and it takes a you know, I think some people are kind
of taking aback by how much water it takes to put it out. I
don't know. I've had a lot of campfires, so I wasn't really surprised,
but like, yeah, a fifty five callon drum might take you know,
twenty to forty gallons of water to like be certain that it's out.
You want to be certain that it's out, right, you walk away and
there's still a little bit smoldering in the bottom. You come out the next
morning and all you got is a little white powder in the bottom of Yeah.
Now it's wasted and all that carbon is yeah yeah. And so whatever
amount of water you think it will take to put it out, just go
ahead and put a little more on there. But you're you're basically creating like
a like a crunchy popcorn. You know I was when you told me this,
I was like, no shit, of course you could use this like
prolite. It's got drainage in it, you know. I think of like
little chunks of charcoal I've you know, found in a fire pit that I've
put out because you know, again, don't let it burn all the way
through. You let it burn overnight, it's it's gone. The next day
it's powder. But you know, you crunch them and they feel like perlite.
Like that would be a perfect And I love telling people you can use
this, like you can do this at your own fire pit, like you
know, instead of letting it all burn out, or putting it out before
all the wood is burned, get that bed of coals, put it out,
and then use that in your garden. And you know, I've looked
into those varying reports on how long this carbon is inert in the soil,
But I've read everything from one thousand years to some people suspect up to four
thousand years that this carbon will be sequestored and inert in your soil, which
is a hell of a lot longer than say like a tree log. You
know, like that's that's got your carbon locked up until until some fungus decomposes
it and releases it. So, you know, like you might have a
tree, but that might only you know, a tree might almost questure its
carbon for you know, eight hundred years to you know, maybe maybe eighteen
hundred years at most if it lives long enough. But this this stuff transforms
it into you know, the biocharge transforms it into an inert form where it's
locked up and it is trapped in the soil. It's not going back in
the apiosophe But so how does it How does that actually affect the soil though,
because it both kind of retains water but also makes it less dense so
that it can drain. How does that work? Yeah, Well, the
biggest thing that I've read that it benefits the soil is by being like a
hiding spot for microbes. You know, it's like a it's like a safe
place for them to sleep, free of a lot of the other you know,
predators that might be in the soil. And it's just like it's a
little hotel, a place for diversity in your soil to exist and and you
know do his job of breaking down organic material and feeding your plants. Yeah,
okay, so but but then but also like the drainage and the areation
factors all seem to be kind of like bonus from everything I've read. Yeah,
because I think about you know, you think like you know, soils
that don't drain and that don't get a lot of oxygen, like a clay
soil, which is just you know, many many millions of very tiny particles
that are charged and you know don't let don't basically have any space. I
mean, you think about a piece of a little tiny piece of charcoal that's
porous, It's got a lot of surface area, it's very lightweight, it's
not that dense, but it provides you know, texture and surface area,
uh for roots as well. I mean it's yeah, it seems like it
would do it'd be a great medium to add to soil. So now you've
got You've got these decomposed woodchips, and you only use ten percent biochart,
do you ever find yourself using more than that? I haven't. I'm going
to run some experiments on that. But everything I've read is that you start
getting diminishing returns when you when you get more than ten percent. But again,
most of the stuff I was reading was focused around agriculture, so I
think there might be some more flexibility when it comes to growing native plants that
haven't been you know, babied and designed by domesticated by humans for for the
last two games. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay,
So so you got the biocheur in there, you got these decomposed chips,
and then you got what else do you end up using in there? Composts?
I'll use composts. Some of it I make here. The majority of
it I get from local producers because they tend to have stuff that has a
lot less weed seeds than what I'm able to produce on my little with my
little farm tractor. So but yeah, the composts will go into it.
Sand goes into it. I still have, you know, I used to
buy a ton of peat and pine fines for my UH production practices, and
I still have like a decent stockpile because when I switched to using the UH,
the the decomposed wood chips, I still had enough soil for like an
entire year, enough enough peat based soil for entire year. So now that
I'm using it at like a ten ten percent of the rate as before,
I think I'll probably be you know, cutting a little bit of it in
every year for another five or six years. But we'll see, yeah,
when when that's gone, there'll be no more peat in the nursery. I
mean, the whole the whole idea of making your own soil is just so
fucking I mean, it's so it's so it's so cool, it's so fucking
innovative. It's really uh you know, I don't know. I mean,
yeah, it is cheaper to buy, but but I mean you've basically,
once you've done that and you've done it to scale, you could save so
much time. And I think, I think, yeah, if the production
is large enough, I should be able to save money because you know,
frankly, people, the reason you can get free chips is because the other
option for these guys is to pay money to dump it. So if I'm
able to scale up in the future, I you know, want to close
all my loops. And one of the ways I'm going to close the loop
is by accepting compostables from people and composting them to make the soil. So
I think when it comes to that, and especially I've been considering making enough
soil to sell to people. If I'm selling it at potting soil prices,
there's definitely enough money there to scale up the soil making practices. And really,
you know, I think it's good to make because because right now,
the only thing that you can get on the market, I at any hardware
store or nursery is all stuff that's been shipped from you know, a quarter
of the way around the world. Yeah. And also just the fucking peat
thing is insane, and I mean using you know, we need a solution.
It's so nuts. But okay, so anyway, well let's talk tell
everybody about the catfish. What do you do with the catfi You're putting catfish
in there as a fertilizer, right, that sounds fucking pretty cool. Yeah,
So it starts with right now, I'm using some incinerated chicken shit to
start the process out. Just because it's granular and it takes a little bit
of time for the plants to heal in before they can really start observing the
nutrients. So that's that's our first little little kiss when they get started.
But uh, but after that, I switched to a compost T that's based
off of fish fertilizer. So the compost t is made with sugar and molasses
to kind of get the bacteria going, and the fish emulsion is used to
grow the fungal community. Plus wait for a while, weren't you going?
You were going? That's because I remember Al was really blown away by that.
He was like, and this guy's getting you know, catfish the like
he's making his own was it catfish or carp? Well? Yeah, so
the catfish is is fifty percent or a third of the components of my compost
team and is there to feed the fungus. But also there's some excess nitrogen
there that's available for the plants. So yeah, but that's coming from local
waterways and I'm specifically targeting a really pervasive, invasive catfish that is uh,
you know, destroying a lot of the Atlantic spawning ground and our waterways.
Where does thing come from? Where? Where'd the cat Where does catfish come
from? This is this is an Asian catfish. I'm not sure where in
Asia, but I know it's an Asian cat God, someone should do that.
With carp there's so many fucking invasive carp in the Chicago River. No,
I've been I've been looking at it because I have been thinking like,
oh, maybe at some point in the future I will uh, you know,
find a way to make this and and sell it, because you know,
there's all these signs up at all these fishing docks and stuff like hey,
you can't put these catfish or you can't put these invasion fish back in
the water. It's illegal to catch and release them. You actually have to
kill them. And so I've definitely been, you know, dreaming up schemes
to like get some some fifty five gallon drums there that are better smell proof.
And it's like, hey, when you catch one of these invasive fish,
if you ain't taken it home, drop it in this barrel. And
because it because it really doesn't take much for me to make enough emulsion for
the nursery, Like I can go out and like one or two weekends in
the summer and catch enough catch enough fish to make enough fertilizer for a year
and a half, and you would be fishing anyway, like you're a fisher,
you're an angler. No, I'm a vegan really no, I'm just
no, I'm just literally out there. You really do it. But no,
but you really do the vegan thing. Yeah, well you're not.
You're not like a lecture vegan. I mean it's obvious. Yeah, I'm
an environmental vegan. Yeah, okay, a health conscious like you know,
I don't want all the heavy metals. Oh yeah, fish in the ocean,
and I'm well aware of the cost on our aquifers and our water systems
to produce meat. And uh no, vegan, vegan is righteous. I
think vegan is righteous. I tend not to want to kill things just as
a general policy. But if the thing I'm killing is doing more damage to
the ecosystem than than me killing it, then then I you know, I
give myself a little righteous pass. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's you
know, I am by no means against hunting or fishing or any of that.
I just thought and I'm not against I'm not against vegans at all.
I was supported I don't eat red meat I try to eat red meat.
I mean, you know, I'm a dietary choices, and vegan is certainly
fucking healthier in a lot of ways. I mean the way that some Americans
eat meat, you know, every fucking day when they're sitting in traffic for
two hours. You know, there, what are these guys, These people
running fucking marathimes every day? You don't need that. Yeah, it's very
you may as well be smoking thirty cigarettes. But also I'm aware that some
some vegans, like the proselytizing ones. Oh my god, they fucking meanwhile,
but they're some of the most insufferable people when it comes to the comment
section. Yeah, they're as bad as any other proselytizer, you know.
Yeah, I won't listen to you, right, Yeah, yeah, you
know, I'm not not much of a proselytizer, but when you know people,
when it comes up in conversation, I'll definitely but you go get them
catfish though. You Sometimes people ask me how I get all the things done
that I'm getting done, and it would be dishonest to not say it's because
I eat a diet that gives me a buck ton of energy, and that
diet's vegan. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I
get that now. But but you're but you you do go out there,
so you'll fish and you'll get these catfish, these invasive catfish, and then
use them as fertilizer. Yeah. Yeah. It takes about, you know,
sixteen eighteen months for for the microbes to really break them down and turn
turn them into that brown sludge. It's amazing, it is. It is
not for anyone with a weak stomach. I wish someone would do that.
I wish someone would do that with the feral cats on my block, you
know, make it, make a nice fertilizer out of them. Mix it
with some hay or sawdust or something. No offense to coming after you,
but yeah, that would actually work great, I do. So there's there's
some there's some hunters on the property that hunt deer, and I've so I've
been experimenting with deer guts. I think my first batch should be ready next
summer. I'm not you know, I'm not so competent and and I'm gonna
put it on the plants I have for sale. But I am in an
experiment with it with some of my field grown stuff and see what that does.
But it's looking it's looking like it's just gonna be good, just as
good as a fish, if not better. Yeah, so we'll see,
yeah, yeah, yeah see mammals. Mammals. Seems like it would be
a little hotter maybe, But who knows. I don't know. I don't
know anything about that. I just think it's amazing what you what you're doing.
I mean, I don't know either, but I'm gonna find out.
I just think it's amazing what you're doing. You learned all this and then
you're growing. How many native plants do you have in your nursery. I
mean, you said you would given away about fifty right now, but you
said you what did you You said you'd given you'd planted seven hundred and fifty
thousand at some point. Yeah, So last I'll tell I'll just tell you
from the beginning last winter, I was looking at some of my seated trays.
That's how I was producing. How I produce plants for the nursery is
I make community pots and put a ton of seeds in a tray, let
them Germany, and then I divide them and pot them up. And what
that does is conserve a lot of water. It conserves a lot of space
in the nursery, and it just made sense from a production point of point
of view. But I had all these leftovers. I had like eight thousand
seedlings just sitting on the ground. They'd been sitting there for like three years,
and I was like getting ready to put them in the compost pile because
I didn't know what else to do with them. But at the same time,
I was, you know, struggling to connect with my customers, and
like I you know, I'd made this the largest inventory in the DC area
and like nobody knew it existed. So I was I was looking for ways
to advertise and get my name out there. And I was like, well,
how about I'll just give away these eight thousand seedlings. And so I
did that and I started like a competition on social media and gave them all
out. But I got such a positive response from it, and I got
all this attention and people were so happy about it. I was like,
wait a second, Like at the time, I had just finished up my
contracts the city and I had about three months to spare on my hands for
you know, twenty twenty three, and I was like, well, I
wonder how many how many plants can I grow and in three months time and
give out. And I kind of sat down about five minutes, you know,
had a back of the envelope calculation of eight hundred thousand plants that I
thought I could grow and distribute. And I thought to myself, like,
you know, that's not quite a round number like a million is, Like
why don't I just say I'm gonna do a million? So so that's what
I did. I got to work right away, I started writing, so
it was all funded by me, and I sat down I wrote all the
application process. So there's a few different ways people can get plants. Now,
there's a group plant grants, So like if you have a group or
an organization and you have a plan for planting out a native space like a
demonstration garden, if you have a library or some other Lots of schools applied
for that, and basically, you know, they could apply. They had
to describe what their maintenance was, to describe their group and what their plan
was, and then based on like their application answers and like how competent they
seemed, then I would give them seedlings from these community pots. So each
one of the community pots had between like thirty and three hundred plants in it.
Yeah, even had as much as like five hundred plants in them,
and so then they would request them and uh yeah, I you know some
groups that got only like a thousand plants. I think one one group walked
away with twenty thousand seats. So these but they were but they were in
bulk, right, they were like they were just little guys. But still,
yeah, like even the group that walked away with the most plants,
I mean they had twenty thousand plants in like inside of like maybe eighty cork
trays. Yeah, like like twenty thousand plants fit in the back of a
pickup truck, right, But still, I mean, it's it's fucking it's
pretty impressive. It's pretty cool. I mean it's you know, when you
when you think about it compared to like some of the other they're like governy
grants that are going on and how many plants they're getting in the ground.
Like you know, some of these organizations are spending millions of dollars to like
put in all these conservation plantings. But I recognize this untapped resource of all
this enthusiasm of people in the community who all they needed was like a little
bit of information in the seedlings and they would do the rest of the work.
So that's what that's what I tapped into. I mean, there's been
thousands of people that have come and gotten hundreds or thousands of plants, and
I just give them. You know, it's pretty easy for me to start
these little seedlings, and the hardest part is just like connecting with the people
and putting them in the hands because there's a lot of plants. Yeah,
you know, if we say switch in, I want to ask you more
about the nursery thing. But also I want to I want to talk about
this because I'm curious what you have to say and asking all the native plant
people. I'm about to fucking interview Doug telling me next week or the week
after. And this is this is a thing I always hear people say this
shit people who don't know anything about natives yet and are afraid of it.
You know, they, Oh, if you're gonna have a yard like this,
it's gonna be full of ticks and mosquitos. You mostly hear this on
the East coast because you don't get the ticks aren't that bad? The further
west you get, you know, it depends. I mean, California's got
some tick issues, but you know it's and for me, it's frustrating because
like, well, you're not gonna have ticks unless you've got posses of deer
hang out in your yard or a bad mouse problem, and those are easy
to you know, you have a dog, chase the deer away, you
fence whatever, you shoot them. Ticks are a symptom of a sick ecosystem,
exactly exactly. So how do or mosquitos too? The same thing.
They're insects that eat mosquitos. You know. Doug telling me had something he
put on a presentation about basically creating mosquito traps with for you know, water
with like hay in it, some organic material that they lay eggs in it.
Then you throw a dunk in there and it kills them all. You
know. Well, I'll tell you I made a retention pond with the intention
of recycling my water this year I'll be a solar power And before I can
get all the pumps set up, I had like four billion mosquito larva in
there, and I was like, oh no, my wife's not gonna help
me in the nursery, like I'm screwed. There's gonna be so many mosquitoes,
nobody's gonna want to come here. And yeah, I threw those dunks
in and that took care of them. It was like a giant trap.
And then all the dragonflies moved in. And I haven't had to put any
dunks in since because there's so many dragonfly larva in there. They're gobbling them
up. Then, is because there's you know, there's enough diversity here to
bring that in. How'd you get the dragonflies in the balance? How you
get the dragonflies in there? You put a little sign up or something.
Water. No, they just you put water up and they come. You
got mosquito larva and water. Like, the dragonflies are coming as long as
it's like you know, I don't think they're gonna you know, they're not
gonna lay put their babies in a bucket of water. But you know,
you got I heard from from my brother in law that you know, I
think we just had like a hundred gallon pond in his backyard and he's got
dragonflies. Yeah, and they're taking care of the mosquitos for them. Yeah,
I just yeah, dragonflies are natural predators from mosquitoes, you know,
it's so sad that, I mean, we don't even know that, Like
so many people don't even know this stuff, Like we're so disconnected. You
know. I feel bad for anyone that looks at quote unquote nature. And
I don't even like that word because it's just the real living biosphere. It's
not nature. But you know, I feel, right, I just I
feel bad for someone who looks at that and is like, ooh, mosquitoes
and ticks, like they just see the worst in it, like something to
be afraid. Yeah, you don't want mosquitoes or ticks. Just pave everything,
Just nuke the fucking landscape around. You won't have any trees, you
won't have any plants, right, right, it's just God Jesus christ Man.
I mean, there's there's ways around these there's ways to deal with these
things, Like they don't exist in a vacuum. They have predators, there's
ways to control them. You know. The option is not just getting rid
of all the fucking plants. They're having a lawn, you know, I
mean where I live. It's it's mind blowing that people don't grasp the idea
of transpirational cooling. It is so fucking hot down here. It's where the
Gulf Coast transitions to desert, but we still get just enough rain for it
to technically be like a grassland and a misky woodland. And if you ride
by a parking lot on a fucking one hundred and five degree day, you
can feel that it's just a battery radiating heat late into the night. Whereas
if you ride by a field, all those stomates, those little microscopic gas
poars and the undersides of the leaves are emitting moisture and taken in co two
and you've got the swamp cooler effect, and it is like thirty degrees cooler,
you know, at night, at sundown. And people just don't know
what thinks about that. I mean, everything here is just increasingly becoming paved.
It's fucking mind blowing. Yeah, people get up in the morning and
they don't know about do Like do is a real thing in the world.
You know, if you're out in a world that's alive, you know,
you're in a city, there's no dew, there's not a stomotons right right.
Yeah, And and the heat island thing is real. I mean I
I there's more people talking about that, which is good. But the Heat
Island thing is I mean, that pavement, that concrete is just getting charged
by the sun, just the same way a battery does. And then once
that sun goes down, it never cools off because that fucking heat Island is
emitting infrared radiation late into the night, you know, two three am,
and then when it finally starts to cool off, the sun comes up again,
and it just it never cools off. And so you get like three
months of that and you've you've instantaneously made a region, you know, twenty
degrees hotter than it would be. Oh totally, yeah, No, I
definitely notice when I'm when I moved out to the nursery, it was like,
oh, it's it's fifteen degrees cooler here every night. Yeah, because
because of all these trees, because the bay's here, because there's an ecosystem,
but you know what's left of it, Yeah, it's still here.
It's not even that much, but enough to make a difference, right,
I mean. And just the idea of turning your your yard, your property
into like a classroom for the local ecology and ecosystem around you is so fucking
so enriching, you know, and it enriches people's lives. It really does.
It's like you know that little everyone becomes that little kid, look lifting
up rocks, looking for roly Polleys again. Yeah, well I don't,
I don't remember. But there's there's some there's a term for this effect where
like every generation is born into, you know, a new system and they're
they're used to it. They shifty shifting baseline. Yeah, there's this shifting
baseline of what is acceptable, and you know, everyone from this generation is
missing this baseline of what it could be. Yeah. Yeah, just total
total disconnection. But oh you said, Aaron, I lose you. No,
I'm still here, okay, but yeah, it's just it's just disconnection.
And that's what I I love getting people into it because it's getting people
into this more because it's you see it fucking risk their lives. You see
them, you know, you see them be like, wow, no way,
I didn't know that. That's so cool. What were you gonna say
about Doug? I love that guy? Oh, I know, I don't,
you know, I didn't. I'm surprised he was willing to come into
podcast because we have, you know, we have very different styles, and
I'm you know, he doesn't. I'm just glad he doesn't think I'm some
I heard you saying you wanted him on there on one of your previous podcasts,
and I was like, yeah, you should get on there. Yeah,
I'm just I'm glad he doesn't. You know, he doesn't do me
as too much of a degenerate to uh you know, but anyway, but
no, he's coming on next week and then he's trying to reach out to
people. Yeah, think about Doug. To think about Doug is that man
is like a fucking rock star to this, to to these like retired ladies
and like, you know, running a nursery. I gotta say that,
like that's a huge part of my customer basis. Like the these these women
that are they want to make a difference. They care about the environment,
and you know they've just retired and uh, you know, Doug makes them
swoon for the environment. Of those retired ladies are crime pay fans to do
that. A lot of those retired ladies are crime pays fans too. You'd
be surprised, man, they are. They're they're hit they're so cool,
they like, you know, they I wasn't expecting it when I got deeper
into the growing plants and and and more into the community of people that care
about this. And no, they're they're making stuff move. Those are the
people that are like coming out here to volunteer to help me. These are
the people that are like open minded. I'm just like you guys are blowing
me away. You're amazing. Yeah, And like Doug, Doug is like,
you know, a rock star to them, and uh, you know,
he's just he's all that generation and the ladies love him, you know.
Yeah, yeah, I just found a bunch of astro fight them seeds
on my desk. Where the fuck did that come from? That's cool.
Well they smell. I wonder if they rotted. Fuck anyway, But uh,
all right, well uh anyway. So, but regarding the nursery,
like so, I want to talk about more more things that are regionally connected,
you know, more impertinent to the region you live in, because let's
talk about that. Like DC, there's not much habitat left there is.
It's a lot of just it's basically like a giant suburb. Like the whole
area around there is a giant sun was it was turned to farm land when
when the colonists came because the Bay and all this Piedmont was like perfect for
farming. And then it's also an easy target. You know, it's on
the ninth Corridor, Like it's an easy target for suburbanization, and like,
yeah, it's it's run them up, it's a run away from us.
And but yeah, it's also an opportunity for people to change as they as
they you know, become aware of like the importance of supporting the ecosystem and
creating that balance. And oh, I love what what Sam Droghi said,
liking it to a brick house instead of a jinga block. And you know,
I think it's it's it's our chance to you know, support that brick
house. You know, some pieces don't start falling off of it. And
yeah, I mean that's that's why when you asked me, when your team
approached me about the you know, kill your law, like, yeah,
I'm your guy, you can count on me, you know, yeah,
well they they found you. I didn't even know. I mean I've I've
been like burning the candle at both ends here and you know, fucking they
mentioned it. They're like, oh, you're really gonna like this guy,
Jeremy. I was like, oh, okay, cool and I it turns
out, of course I did. But but getting into uh, I mean,
how did you get in to native plants? I guess like because there's
just it's so hard to encounter them in a lot of the areas there,
Like what would you say? I mean, I feel bad for kids that
grow up in the suburbs and there's there's so little even like you know,
you go to like a ditch, a drainage ditch or a road and bank,
man, it's like half natives and then half really bad invasives. How
did you encounter these plants? I think I think a lot of my first
experiences, I I got to thank my uh my boss at the golf court.
She recognized, like my my passion for learning, uh and and she
gave me the opportunity to be their head a culturist. And when she did
that, I thought I wanted to do with the budget, so I'd use
plants that were already growing around there. And uh, that's when I started,
like, you know, looking up native plants like that's when I and
that's when I started, you know, reading some of the rhetoric around it
just like this just makes sense. So that was that was really my first
native plant garden that I did was was using the native plants that were just
occurring in the wetlands around this golf course, and uh, you know,
from there, I just kind of got hoped, you know. I definitely
in the first few years was was, you know, looking more at continental
natives and and what the nurseries were providing as far as natives. But I
think after like two or three years of learning more and more I wanted.
I wanted more of the you know, regional natives and more of the local
you know. Yeah, I started finding out. Yeah, it took me
a while to find out about local ecotype. That was funny how the leco
type thing didn't click for a really long I was doing native plants for a
long time before I found anything out about that. And it was funny.
I was going to a mushroom growing class and we were inoculating some logs and
I was talking to it to a biologist there about like my growing practices,
and I told her, like I was bragging, saying, like, oh,
I've got this patch of b Ostegia in my tree space, my front
yard, and I produced thousands of plants from that, and like I was
so proud of it, and she was like, that's actually a bad thing.
And then like that was another you know, aha click moment, like
oh my god, yeah, you're right. I've just been producing clone after
clone of this plant. And that's that's when I was like, oh god,
like, well, you were producing cuttings or taking seeds. Yeah,
no, I was taking clones of this Oh wow. I had made thousands
of them from like just a single patch that I had plant there, and
and you know, never thought twice about it. And then this biologists was
like, that's not good for genetic diversity. As soon as she said that,
it was like the next day I was like, you know, feverishly
collecting plants from seed to grow from seed, stop doing the clone production,
and like really got into, you know, learning more about the genetics of
it, because it was just like, you know, I'd never thought about
it, but when somebody brought put it in my face, it was so
obvious. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah,
it's shaking up that card deck of alleles again, and you know, all
the whole genetic recombination thing, you know, genetic diversity, et cetera.
And yeah, a lot of people don't think about that really that shit really
is important. You know. Well, you know, I'm just I'm excited
and you know, looking forward to my next aha moment, because it happens
every every few years, somebody says something and I'm like, wait, I've
been doing I've been doing something wrong, or I can be doing this so
much better than how I'm doing And you know, and you can ask my
office manager when I have these ideas, like we get to work right away
in implementing them and fixing the system. When did you start Bona Teri Bonatero?
When did you start Bonatera your nursery. The official LLC started in twenty
ten, but I had been working on that. I mean it really started
as like a snow shoveling business, then went to a lawnmowing business, then
went to a weeding business, then went to installation and maintenance business, and
then you know, through those installations. Around twenty ten, that's when I
started, like I was always growing some plants for myself, but that's when
I started getting serious like this, this is what I need to be doing.
It's growing my own plants. So now it's been it's been about thirteen
years of you know, every year I grew up. I think I started
at peak in like maybe twenty twelve in my little backyard. I think the
best year I did maybe thirteen to fifteen thousand plants. But yeah, as
sing as I had the opportunity to get out on this farm with the conservation,
he's man. I think it took me about two years and I had
grown over fifty thousand plants out here, and I didn't even realize it for
another year or two that I had made the largest inventory of all native plants.
It wasn't until I had a friend come out here and she saw it
and she was going to another like, oh, I thought was the largest
producer of native plants in the area and she was like, oh, you're
bigger than them. I was like, oh, let me count. I
was like, oh my god, I actually made the most at that point.
At that point, it was just me, Like I didn't even have
my assistant Allec until this spring. So are you how are you growing these?
You growing them in tubes like under a shade cloth or how do you
do it? So they'll start in those community pots? And I initially started
with rather large trays, but I found it easier to pull out a working
sized chunk when I put them in cork pots. So yeah, they go,
they go on those cork pots. They grow till they get to like,
you know, their second or sixth seed leaf whatever, whenever they're ready
to transplant, and then they go in there. And I think that's part
of the reason I'm able to maintain the largest inventory is because every time I
sell a bunch of plants, I'll go back to my seated quartz and a
lot of them, you know, they can hang they can hang out in
those pots for like, you know, six weeks or up to like two
or three years, depending on the species. So all kind of just have
this this reservoir plants ready to be potted up, and once they get potted
up, it only takes like, you know, six to twelve weeks for
the majority of them to be in a sellable condition. Yeah, okay,
so but you're you're growing them in mass and then separating them later, like
just gently. It doesn't I mean, how do you do that? Because
I know, you know, when you when you separate these things, that
messes up the roots or it can sensitize the role. You got to keep
them in shaved for two or three weeks or what. And that's I've got
I've actually got a video because because I was giving away all these seedlings in
these quarts, I actually wrote like a like a six page document about how
to separate them, and that goes into all the details. But then I
also have the video of me and it's on the website of me separating the
seed things. And that was in order to you know, teach other people
how to do this and uh, you know, get the most native plants
in the ground I could, because that's really ultimately been the goal with the
business is native plants in the ground. So but yeah, the process it
varies from species the species. The video is more center around the most difficult
ones to separate, which is your fibrous root ones. Yeah, and it
just kind of gives people tips on like when's the optimal moisture, like what
sort of temperature in lightning condition, and should you have them in how do
you heal them in? Right, because you're not gonna you're not gonna break
up a pot of a bunch of seedlings when it's one hundred degrees outside or
ninety degrees outside and it's you know, not going to rain for all you
want to do it like cool season moisture, I will, I will.
I can do it year round, depending on the species. But you know,
you when you get into the heat of the summer, you gotta follow
those rules, like you gotta. You can't do it, you know,
out in the sun. You have to do it in the shade. You
have to have uh, you know, adaptled like condition to heal them in
because if you damage the roots, you take them out of balance. You
reduce the amount of water they can absorb. I you reduce the amount of
water they can transpire, You reduce the amount of photosynthesis they can go through.
So bring them into balance by putting them in a low like condition where
they're not photosynthesizing as much, they're not getting as hot, and they don't
need as much water, right right, Yeah, it's put it's put them
in shade for a few weeks after you separate them, right so they can
recover. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah, shading humanity, Yeah,
yep, yeah, man, it's I mean, it's it's fucking great.
So how big is the nursery? I mean, how many plants do you
have? Right now? People can come come through there and check it out.
If they're in the region or what. Yeah, yeah, people can
come through here. It's all appointment only right now, because it's pretty much
just me out here. Part of my reduced plastic plan is, like it's
not set up as a place to come and browse. It's also part of
my plan to make sure people are getting the right plants for the right location.
You know. I feel like the typical stores are all kind of set
up for like these impulse bis like oh this is blooming, I'll buy this
and figure out where it goes after And I know it's a pain in the
butt for people, and it definitely hinders me from reaching all my customers.
But I kind of insist that people, you know, look up their plants
and make a plan that matches their site before they buy their plants. So
they got they got to show up, They got to show up knowing what
they want. Basically basically, yeah, you're going to do. And you
know, I could if I raise my prices and and you know, uh,
set up a store like I could set this up for the average person
to walk in and come out with plants, but that's not really my demographic
or my market. You know, the people I'm trying to reach. Are
the people that are willing to do the research and are willing to, you
know, make sure that their plants are well taken care of, and so
there are a bit there is a bit of a hurdle. It's not the
easiest thing to come buy from me, but people that do buy for me
are well informed. I provide plenty of information for them. They all have
access to consultation services and design services and if they need them. So I
go to great lengths to make sure that when somebody is buying a plant for
me, it's not going to its grave, because that's a waste of carbon
resources, that's a waste of soil, that's a waste of plastic. So
it's really important to me that my consumers are and formed well. Plus it's
fun, you know. I feel like that's the most environmentally friendly way for
people to get plans. Yeah, and you're not meant to be you know,
you don't want to be a fucking retail nursery. Like with that setup,
it's like people people come by. That's what I do it with.
My friend Mike keep over here in Olange, and I call him up a
Mike might be seven pm on a Sunday, But fuck it, I'll try.
He might be out there fucking around, you know. Anyway, So
I call him, Hey, can I come by grab some stuff? Oh
yeah, sure, And he knows I'm gonna come by. It's gonna take
ten minutes. I'm not gonna be browsing. I'm gonna I know what I
want. I'm gonna grab the ship then I'll leave. It's real simple,
you know. Yep. And I think you know, once people get into
my system and understand how it works and they know me, you know,
they I have people that you know, return customers. They come by all
the time and just pick stuff up, and I'll bill you a leader,
and like it's real, you know, it feels it feels like a country
store where like you know everyone, Yeah, that's sick. That's the way
to do it. That's nice. But but but yeah, and and yeah,
because I do it that way, I'm able to keep prices over,
I'm able to do it in the most environmentally friendly way possible. And you're
totally right. Like, when I think about my life and what I want
to do, you look at these retail stores and and their job isn't growing
plants. Their job is ordering materials, ordering, you know, ordering stuff
for resale, stocking shells, and like that is not what I want to
do, you know, yes, and all kinds of dovetails together with my
environmental plan and the way I just want to live my life, you know,
yeah, totally. I mean, you grow some really rare, rare
stuff too. I'm looking at your website now, has you got a ripario
sita? This this rare mallow? What is it? Virginia mallow, Virginia
fan pedals is the name of it? Is that still? Is that still
on there? Yeah? It's not supposed to be there. Oh you don't
grow that? No more? It's done. No, no, I'm not
selling. Well, you know, I'll tell you that that came to be
in a circuitous way and I didn't really think about it too much, but
but yeah, that was that was is bestowed. Some seeds were bestowed upon
me by a river keeper and yeah, I found out it was like,
uh, from a rare colony patch. And you know, I just kind
of feel like I don't know enough to set up a breeding colony of that
and do it right. I'd like to. I'd like to someday know enough
to be able to do that and work with some local ecologists and have like
a real breeding program for it. But yeah, for now, that one's
been taken off the shows. Okay, all right, but maybe there would
still be seeds somewhere if you had it, people would be I don't know,
there might there might there might be seeds somewhere for someone in the now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, god, there's Yeah, you're man,
you're your catalog's really really fucking great, man. So so how do people
get bold of you? I've got about thirty or forty new species to add
to it. I really, I've found a lot of new places this year
to get local ecotype stuff, and I might even be adding some some seeds
for sale this year of Calli Canthus. Say Calli Canthus Florida is I know
the western species. I think it's just Calcanthus accident tells. But one of
the it's one of those early branching angiosperm lineages. And the flowers smell like
port wine. It's fucking cool. I didn't know they would grow in Virginia.
And yeah, it looks like a chrysanthemum flower and it's fragrant, well
some of them are fragrant. Yeah, yeah, I love I love that
flower. And yeah I found it in a few I had like this old
school client and uh, she had this garden forever. She didn't even she
didn't know what it was, but it was like this giant, beautiful specimen
she had grown under magnolia that thing. Yeah, that's fucking cool. God
damn. Yeah, your your your catalog is great. Holy sh it.
So how do people they just go to the web? How if they want
what's the website if people want to look it up? Bonatara d C.
Yeah, the website's Bonatara DC dot com. Yeah. And also I only
sell exclusively to people within a two hundred mile radius of me. And that's
you know a lot of people have you know, kind of pressured me to
ship plants. I know there's there's some some native plant deserts throughout the country
where you really can't get them. But you know, I'm kinda I'm gonna
I'm gonna stick to my guns on not not being a part of, you
know, the horticultural cross country trade where we're but somebody could come to your
from but somebody could come to you from like two hundred and fifteen miles away,
and then just lie, right, Yeah, anyone can lie to me.
I'm just kidding. I'm just I'm sorry. Well, you've got some
cool So you've got some cool shit, you know. You know, I
don't have the time to check up on everyone, see right, right,
yeah, but you've got some cool stuff to me about where you live.
You know, you're the one that's going to sleep. They're like, yeah,
I lied, but at least I got that fucking Caliicanthus, yeah,
you know, if that's what, if that's what you want to do with
your life over the head. No, but but but I mean you've got
some well I think too. I understand and appreciate ecotypes. I think that's
cool. But also though if again, I think the worst invasives always come
from across oceans or the equator or you know, huge amountain learners. Maybe,
but but it's true. You know some Well, I've got my own
I've got my own set of invasives on the farm. Some of them are
not in other parts of the country. You know, I've got leopard slug
probably everyone has those. We've got hammerhead works, oh yeah, yeah,
I've got all these things that that are entrenched in this ecosystem and aren't going
anywhere, but they might not be somewhere else, and I don't know enough
they might hit you right on a plant. Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know enough to say like, hey, you have this in your
ecosystem already, and you know, our industry is responsible for the vast majority
of you know, transmission of invasive plants and insects and art cause whatever,
and yeah, I just don't want to be a part of that. Now.
Yeah, that's that's a respect definitely on that. But but you've definitely
got some cool stuff and it's a fucking great nursery. I hope that,
you know. That's why I love doing these pojects. I hope like more
people that are in the in the area because I want to cover all the
US, you know, I spent so much time on West and I'm trying
to do the East coast. You know, they hear these things like oh
wow, I didn't know about that, or they hear a species mentioned,
they're like, oh, I live, I live in the Baltimore area.
Maybe that's close. Maybe I can come by and check it out. That's
I didn't know about that, you know, And it's uh, it's it's
you know, I'm just getting started, and I'm not going to stop.
To every person who likes plants, knows my name or my business, I'm
going to change's going to be. They're all gonna be touched by my native
I sell stickers, you know, I sell these. I make these stickers
and fucking shirts. I just print these t shirts in my grass. They
kill your lawn, and and uh, I want to change it to just
say kill every lawn, like fuck it. Like I'm not you know,
it's a little extreme and it's taken with a great of salt, but like
that's what the times need. Like the the fucking lawn. There's a whole
ideology behind it. It's just it's so disconnected and sad, and this shit
is so fun and cool, you know, in Foster's life, it's like,
man, why the fuck not? You know, it just it blows
my mind. Like where I live, this is a foreign concept. Like
my yard's overgrown. The city hasn't fuck with me yet. I would love
for them to fuck with me. I could name every species in my yards
a fucking botanic garden, you know. But like my neighbor just put in
a sprinkler system for his lawn. I'm like, man, you realize what,
Like we just had our first month of June where it was one hundred
and ten degrees for three weeks straight. Never before in the courted history has
that happened. You get check temperature records, like what are you doing?
Like he cut down this huge tree that used to be in his yard that
gives shade, Like why you live in a desert, Why would you cut
down a shade tree. I just you know, yeah, you won't hear
heat, hear a she able to be higher. And it's this is how
you change culture. You know, you don't shame and shit on people.
I mean, I ship on the lawn, plinty, But I'm I'm not
shitting on anybody who's got a lawn. But I just I'm not shitting on
the people at a long I'm just shitting on the launch, you know,
figuratively right now, maybe literally I'll be shitting on the lawn at some point,
you know, we'll start a campaign, but uh, in there but
work outside long enough. But but you know, I think you just you
know, you you change things by showing them, and you show them like
how fucking nice and cool is something can look as you brought that up,
because that's the other that's the other aspect of what I'm working towards. You
know, a lot of you know, the materials I have are going to
only be available locally. But you go on my website and you find like
all this information and that's open source. Any one can use that. You
can copy and paste it and put it, put your name on it.
I don't really care. That information is there for everyone. So that's everything
from like my soil prep guides to my upcoming UH plant descriptions and and all
my my seed information and UH and my remote design services. It specifically says,
you know, hey, like if you're not from this region, you
want to use this remote design service to promote native plants? Like how that
is? Like you like what I do? Kick me two books every time
you use this form or don't. Yeah, it's it's great. It's great
work you're doing, man. And I think that, you know, eventually
things are starting to change. I mean I see I see it on the
horizon already. You know, we've been all over the country looking at this
stuff and people are realizing it's the best is when you see like like someone's
dad, like someone who's like like sixty year old man being like, oh,
this is so cool, you know, getting into it, Like didn't
get into it till he was fucking sixty. Now he's like all about these
different cool plants he's got in his yard and these different you know, different
different insects that are coming by, and it's like, fuck, I just
love going to hang out there and you know, enjoying off their new balances
for a pair of danners and throwing away those gas cans for pair of work
gloves, and you know, getting their microscope out looking at some flowers.
Are you going back before we end it? Are you going like what do
you say, because a lot of like especially their obasious pals, you take
them down at the end of the year or what you got to like or
just let them let them ride or the people burn or what do you do?
It depends. Like in the nursery, so since I don't use any
like pesticides or our press treatments, I'm trying to create like a symphony of
chaos and there, so I'll leave a lot of my stuff up, Like
you'll find all the stems and stuff still on my plants from like the previous
year because we've got stem nesting insects, we've got lost, we've got spiders,
we got it all. So I try to leave it up as much
as possible. But when it comes to my field production, I'm dealing with
a lot of invasive plants and like wood, he's trying to invade. So
I use various practices from like solarizing, you know, controlled burns, mowing.
You know, I'll mow down perennials. I try not to mow down
like an entire patch every year because it you know, bucks with the local
insects and stuff, and I'm trying to preserve. Yeah, but so I'll
use a lot of different system but primarily, you know, I'm trying to
saturate my soil seed bank with the natives that I want, and use,
you know, any means necessary to suppress the non natives, whether it's it's
burning, solarizing, mechanical weeding, or you know, just out competing them
with natives. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because just in the in the
realm of maintenance that a native plant garden is, like, it does need
some maintenance. It's much to me, it's much better than just mowing a
fucking long once a week in the summer. But but there is maintenance.
For quite a lot of people come at me and say they want a no
maintenance garden, and I tell them it takes about eight hundred years to get
an old growth forest started. And that's what you know. If you want
to know maintenance garden, we can go ahead and get started on it.
But you're not going to see the results of it. It's your great great
grandchildren, so right. But also that's fun. That's what you want if
you want to know maintenance garden, start and you know, if you're ready
to accept that, we transform our ecosystem so much that it will not become
a low maintenance situation without information and understanding on your part. If you're ready
to accept that, then on your guy, I can help you, all
right. But that's the thing though, too, is it's actually it's fun
to be out there, you know, gardening and fucking around, enjoying the
enjoying something you've created, you know, healthy cut microbiome. When you get
a little dirt in your mouth, it's good for you. Yeah, yeah,
totally. Man, Well thanks so much for being down to do.
Is where can people look up the nursery I know we mentioned the website.
It's Bonatera with two rs DC dot com And what else? Is there any
other any other shout outs you want to give places people can read about it.
Yeah, I mean, but the website is definitely the primary way to
get all your information if you want to, you know, get updates on
what's going on with me on a weeklier monthly basinis. My My instagram is
fun and it keeps you updated on what's going on, whether plant giveaways and
any any new updates as far as what we're trying to accomplish out here on
and some some good photos of flowers, some tips for maintenance and what's the
instagram? Is like that? So what's the what's the instagram? The instagram
is? What is it? It's Bonatara DC, I believe Let me we'll
pull it up. Make sure I remember the name of my own instagram.
Oh yeah, there we go, Bonatera DC. Yeah yeah, okay,
so ye Bonetara DC. Oh ship, I didn't even spend this isn't Yeah
I didn't even look at this yet. Wow, holy fuck. Check out
the cram. That's awesome. Yeah, there's some good stuff on it.
Man. All right, cool, well, all right man. Well,
thanks so much and uh, Jeremy, I appreciate it, my pleasure.
You give me a call anytime. I'm happy, all right, brother,
Okay, take care. Thanks. Let everybody else have a grocery day.
Go fucking somebody,