Welcome to this episode of Parallel Times.
Today I'll be interviewing Brianne Bernsen.
Am I pronouncing your last name correctly, Brianne?
You are.
It's Brianne.
It's a hard name.
Brianne.
I don't think I've known of Brianne before.
So I'll be interviewing Brianne Bernsen, who's the founder of Plum Fabulous Foods, which
is a micro-farm on a homestead in Plum, Texas.
And at Plum Fabulous Foods, they grow 3,000 pounds of food a year.
On a tenth of an acre, it's actually a little less than a tenth of an acre, isn't it?
And Brianne also homeschools for six children while she's doing all of this.
So welcome, Brianne, and thank you so much for being with us today.
I'm really excited to chat with you.
So I met Brianne when she presented at John and Rebecca Bush's Exit and Build Land Conference
in Bastrop, Texas, in May of 2023.
And Breanne, I really wanted to talk to you because this is what so many people are feeling
that they need to do or want to do, what you and your husband have done.
And so they can learn from your experience because you've been doing this for, I understand,
about 15 years now.
And Brianne started this process in 2009.
Is that right?
I think so, yeah.
Okay, great.
Probably 2007.
2007, wow, okay.
And then she's learned through trial and error and she's poured a lot of what she knows into
this book, which I purchased at, let's see, make sure that you can see it, which I purchased
at the Exit and Build Land seminar, which is called the Plum Fabulous Guide to Gardening,
which is just amazing.
It's like she's giving you those 15 years of experience so that we don't all have to
learn as much by trial and error as she did.
So it's quite gracious of her actually to hand over that much information.
And in this book, she shares generously to expedite everyone's learning curve.
And we're going to be talking today about Brianne's experiences and some tips for others
who want to grow bountiful, healthy food.
Because Brianne, will you say and spell your website for us for the folks who are just
listening to an audio tape?
Sure.
It's www.plumfabulousfoods.com
So plum, p-l-u-m, fabulous, f-a-b-u-l-o-u-s, and foods, f-o-o-d-s, dot com.
Great.
And you can find all kinds of articles on there or links to our YouTube.
Yeah, I was impressed that you have so much free information, education.
You have that whole series on preserving and fermenting, and it's all free.
So I definitely encourage people to go and look at what's on the website because it's
a great resource.
And you can also buy the book there, correct?
Is that right, Brianne?
You can't.
We're very small scale, and if you go to the contact me page on the website and just shoot
me a message, then we take care of handling the book.
We still snail mail them, and we accept payment online.
So we take care of it through there.
Great.
Thank you.
And I think you mentioned something about wanting to publish with a publisher, but I have
to say I love this format because the spiral bound makes it easy.
Like if you wanted to have this in your garden.
And actually, it's all printed on a laser jet so that if the pages get wet, if you have
it in the garden and the pages get wet, they're not going to run.
And so that's an extra cost to the printing.
We do all the printing and binding ourselves.
My printing crew is six and 11 and 14.
They do a great job.
And throughout this interview as well, I'm going to be dropping in some photos from Brianne's
book as well as some other images that she just provided to me.
So that'll be a little eye candy.
So you know what we're talking about as we go.
I'm going to jump in.
I understand you can grow year round where you live in Texas, which is uncommon in many
parts of the US.
But fall is typically an important harvest season.
I imagine that's true for you too, even though you grow year round.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you and your family grew this year and what
you're most excited about in terms of your results and your yield?
Sure.
So we do harvest year round.
You asked earlier what we're harvesting right now.
I can tell you I picked over 100 pounds of squash in the last two weeks.
So there's a lot of things.
We just had our first little micro freeze.
And so we lost a lot of our, we have two summer plantings and two fall plantings really.
So we lost a lot of our spring stuff.
But just real quick, I'm going to read the list of the 33 different crops we grow a year
year round here.
So bush beans, beets, broccoli, bok choy, cabbage, cauliflower, carrots, corn, cucumber,
kale, oak, eggplant, all kinds of herbs, garlic, leeks, kale, kohlrabi, onions, okra, peas,
lettuce, peanuts, peppers, potatoes, radishes, sweet potatoes, summer squash, strawberries,
Swiss chard, tomatoes, turnip, watermelon, winter squash, and spinach.
And that is in addition to any of the fruit trees that we have.
And then we also raised 150 meat birds a year and we have about 30 lang hens that we have
year round as well.
So I always try to encourage people in the idea of food resiliency.
You don't have to be the person that does everything.
But you have to pick a couple key areas and then know people that do.
And so we don't do bees and we don't do cows, but I know lots of people that do.
And so it's really easy to barter with them because not very many people do the vegetables.
And chickens are also something that not a whole lot of people do.
So in Texas, everybody has cows.
So it's really easy to find somebody that's raising beef and trade with them.
That's really interesting about what's common down there and what's not as common down there.
But that seems like, that's real.
I want to underscore these key points for people as you mentioned them because they
drop like gold.
You know, these key takeaways and so that idea that you don't have to do everything
could reduce some of the overwhelm and the idea that you want to find a niche that's
really needed in your area so that you can barter.
Those are both so helpful.
Thank you.
Yeah.
And it's always easier to do something that you're passionate about.
And so I'm really passionate about vegetables.
We eat a mostly vegetarian diet with meat added.
I say we're like meat eating vegetarians.
And it's because vegetables are the easiest to produce year round with this few outside
inputs.
If I could grow my own corn feed, I mean a chicken feed, which maybe I could if I really
tried.
I've tried and I haven't been successful.
But if I could do that, then maybe I would focus so much on the vegetables.
I would just do chickens.
But really vegetables is the easiest thing to learn how to do.
And it produces year round and you get such a variety.
I mean, I couldn't just, we couldn't just live on chickens.
You know, if we couldn't find somebody to barter with.
And so I love the diversity of the fruits and vegetables.
That's wonderful and great, great tip.
And I like that idea of being vegetarians that eats some meat.
Yeah.
Seems very practical.
So I love the story in your book about how and why you started growing food.
So can you give us sort of a nutshell version of that story so that I'm sure people can
relate?
Yeah.
So one of the things I always try to convince people is that they don't have to grow up
gardening because so many things you feel like you have to have this background knowledge
in it.
And you really don't with gardening.
We decided to be a stay at home.
I was going to be a stay at home mom and start raising our children and homeschooling
them.
And from two incomes to one income overnight.
And in that process, I was looking for ways to reduce our grocery bill.
And at the same time, we live in a very small rural Texas town.
We didn't have a whole lot of organic offerings that the grocery store.
And I wanted to make all of our own baby food.
And so I went to the library and I got a book.
And unfortunately, I got a great book to get me started in gardening.
It was organic based methods.
It's called the vegetable gardener's Bible.
We started with two little beds in our city backyard.
And I started just raising vegetables in those two little beds.
And I just had no idea how much I was going to love it.
But there's no better feeling.
I really feel like we were created to grow our own food because I don't think there's
many things in life that will bring you as much joy as producing your own food.
It's just, it's hard to explain.
So you've had the opportunity to do it.
And I had no idea I would enjoy it so much.
And we started having more children and we knew we were going to have to move to the
country.
And when we did, the first thing we did was build a bigger garden.
And so I didn't have any background in it.
Everything I've learned, I've learned from reading books and just applying it.
I am a student of gardening.
And so I am always keeping notes and looking for ways to improve it.
It's all trial and error, 100%.
Okay, that's great.
And that's kind of a lead in.
I saw a theme in your book, if you will, which was about soil, like all the iterations and
the evolution of how you have created, accessed, purchased, you know, transformed soil.
So can you tell us, I mean, and maybe this sounds like the obvious, but I think it's,
it bears repeating.
I've heard people say that the earth biome is like, like the human biome, our gut is
like the earth biome is the soil.
And so can you tell us a little bit about the importance of having good soil to being
successful as a gardener or farmer and also what good soil is?
Sure.
I'll try to keep it a simple answer, but you say it may seem obvious, but I don't think
it is.
I don't think it is enough to people that it is so obvious.
Like I said, I was very lucky to get started in an organic approach.
So it was a no till approach.
And it was all about building good soil from the beginning.
And after we, when we moved here to Plum, I read another book, the New Square Foot
Gardening Book by Mel Bartholomew.
And in it, he had this theory that he wanted to develop a system that he could bring anywhere
in the world, like Africa or India or someplace that had these terrible soil conditions and
have a successful garden.
And unbeknownst to me, when we moved to Plum, we moved to an area that had terrible soil.
It is thick black gumbo clay.
It's so hard that when we had our fiber line put in, the dish digger couldn't dig through
the clay.
It was too hard.
It's like our Kaleichi in Mexico.
Yeah.
And so just hearing that idea of building the system that could be used anywhere was so
appealing to me.
And so we started, we've never tilled ever since we've been here because in reading the
vegetable gardens Bible, I understood that there was this world going on underneath the
soil, even though I didn't understand much about it.
So we always knew to go up and to build healthy soil above the ground.
And so everybody knows, there's all sorts of methods and theories out there in gardening.
And so gardening's been around for a really long time, right?
Like a long time.
And you would think in all those years that we would have this best practices system identified.
And we really don't.
We really have all these various things that people can do.
And one of the trends now is to have like hydroponics or the grow life systems and the
things that you are growing plants where you just have the light and you have the water
and then you're adding chemicals and nutrients into it.
So plants obviously need water and sunlight.
Okay.
So what is it that they're getting from the soil that's so important?
And what they're getting is all these micronutrients.
So nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, all these micronutrients and minerals that the plants
need to grow.
And if you grow something on a piece of land, those plants are going to take all those micronutrients
and minerals out of the soil and you have to be able to put it back in the soil in order
for it to produce a crop the next year.
Because the next plants you put on that soil are going to have to take up these nutrients.
Well, how do you put that back?
In conventional agriculture, you use chemical fertilizers because they're cheap and easy
to produce.
And obviously in the organic world, we don't want to do that.
So what do we have to do?
We put compost on the soil.
It's all about compost.
And what is compost?
Compost is plants and animals that have broken down and when they break down, what you're
left with are those micronutrients and minerals that your plants are going to need to grow
again.
Okay.
All the nutrients we have in the world right now is the same.
We started with thousands and thousands of years ago.
It's not like the world's creating new nutrients and stuff.
We have a set of limited amounts.
And so you're constantly recycling them.
And so when you take plants out of your garden, when you take grass clippings and leaves and
mulch and all those things and you put it together in a compost bin and it breaks down
and it makes compost, you take that and you put it back into your soil and that's what
grows healthy plants.
And so it's all about the soil.
Well, thank you.
I know you could probably do like a whole 20 hour course just on soil with what your
experiences have been.
So thank you for attempting to consolidate that a little bit for us.
And so that first garden that you had back in 2007, 2009, that was based on the New Square
Foot Gardener, that book you just mentioned by Mel Bartholomew, I believe.
And that soil, it looks like you started with a third compost, a third vermiculite and a
third topsoil.
And it's, I believe, peat moss.
Okay.
And compost.
Peat moss, vermiculite and compost.
Okay.
And you purchased those items, correct?
I did, yeah.
And so how many beds did you have for that first garden?
You know, like how much, what was the square footage at first?
And do you have a rough sense of what the cost of that was for that approach?
We do, yeah.
So I've always kept really good notes through all my gardening, just like I said, I'm a student
at gardening.
And so when we started that first garden, we had four beds and it cost over $700 to build
these four beds.
And we had each about four foot by eight foot, and then we had, we had two beds that were
four by eight, two beds that were four by 16.
So four by 12 on average.
And it cost over $750 to fill those four beds.
Okay.
Yeah.
So a lot of that was the soil cost then.
Oh, a huge part of it.
And then at that time also, we were building the frames on the beds.
And so when we did a raised bed, we had the wooden frames around as well.
So that was quite a bit of an added cost.
Yeah.
Great.
So what were the benefits and the challenges of that approach?
Because I know a lot of people talk about doing raised beds.
And it's interesting to me that you started with that and then you've gone away from that.
So pros and cons, curious.
Sure.
So some of the pros are that you can plant in it right away, like that day.
Another pro is that you can go buy all the components.
And for some people, that's a blessing.
So they want to be able to go to the store and buy all this stuff instead of waiting
to create it themselves.
Some of the cons, it was very light.
And so because of the vermiculite and the peat moss, it was a very light soil.
And I feel like we lost some of it due to lint erosion.
And we get these great big cracks in our clay soil.
And I swear some of it's gone away into these cracks.
And it's really funny because they always say that you can amend soils.
If you're there long enough and you put all this organic matter onto your soil that you
can amend it.
And that has not been true in my case.
Because if you dig down six inches in our garden, you hit solid clay.
And it has not changed at all in the 12 years that we've been gardening here in Plum.
So I really am a firm believer in going up, no matter where you're at, just build up with
good soil.
So it sounds like some of the, that's interesting that you invested all this money in it.
And then you felt like you lost some of your precious soil because it blew away.
If you live somewhere like in Albuquerque, where I live or anywhere in this area, we
have these huge winds in the spring.
And so you could literally like watch all that money blow up.
So you wouldn't want to do that.
Okay.
So good to know.
What was your harvest like with that soil, with that system, in terms of quantity and
quality?
It was beautiful soil.
It really did produce great plants.
And so the compost is what's feeding the plants.
The peat moss and the vermiculite, their function is just to retain water.
And so it was a soil that had a consistent moisture content.
It really did grow great stuff.
I don't have, I mean, I could go through my books and tell you the exact amount that we
were growing at that time, but it's comparable to what we're doing now.
And what we have discovered now is that we get, if you take overall garden square footage,
so if you had a garden that was 30 by 50, if you take that overall square footage and
multiply it, so you'd have 1500 square feet, then you'll get about 1500 pounds of vegetables
a year.
So that's what we're doing now, following our methods and planted intention.
Okay.
So it's about a pound per square foot.
That's correct.
But in that calculation, you're taking into account not just where you're planting, but
your walkways as well.
Right.
And so it's not exactly a one to one, it's not exactly a one pound per square foot.
So much, it's actually more like two pounds per square foot because after garden is going
to be walkways.
To figure out the, okay.
But it's important to know those statistics because when I consult with people a lot of
times, you know, they're starting with a blank slate and they want to get started.
I work with people all the time, also on, they've already built a garden and I come
in and try to help them make it more manageable.
And they've always overbuilt it.
And one of the things I'm very passionate about is building a garden that fits your needs.
Because having enough is a blessing, but having too much as a burden as well.
Because you feel this need to do something with it.
I don't grow all this food out here so I can feed it to my chickens if I have too much.
It's very intentional.
Everything we do is very intentional.
And so if we're consulting with a family of four, then you have to look at like what
the average person eats per pound of vegetables per year, which is about a two to 400 pounds.
And then you do the math and that's the size of garden you built.
Because you want to keep it small enough that you can manage it.
So I want to anchor these points because they seem like more like golden or whatever pearls
of wisdom that you want to start with a number of people that you have.
And you said people typically, this is an adult, I would guess eats, did you say 400
to 800 pounds?
It's two to 400 pounds per year.
And so that would be maximum 400 square feet, including the walkways per person.
That's right.
So if you had a family of four and you used, let's say we used the average of 300 pounds
per person, maybe you have two adults and two children or something, then you would
have to build a garden that was 1200 square feet to feed them for the entire year.
And so that's a 30 by 40 garden.
Okay.
So this is really important to know.
And of course, people in the beginning might not be getting that yield, but once you get
going along.
And then also the other thing I, you said that I think is so important is the importance
of having sufficient pathways.
So I want to move on down to your next garden because I think that one was the one where
you started to build in bigger pathways.
Is that right?
The second garden that you had?
That was based on the documentary or the teachings in the documentary back to Eden
by Paul Gouchi.
Gouchi.
Gouchi, is that how you say it?
That's correct.
Okay.
And so that garden, you started using more mulch, right?
To retain the soil and the water in the, in the garden.
And so can you tell us about that one?
Cause that, that was like your next big iteration.
And so when we moved from town to plum, we went from two beds to four beds.
And then the next year we went from four beds to eight beds.
And then we went from eight to 16.
And when we were getting to ready to go from that eight to 16, and we weren't building
separate gardens, we were expanding our current garden.
Cause when we got to our property, we, my husband and I are both land surveyors.
And so we map everything.
We designed our garden in a way that we could start in one part of the art and expand in
the future.
And I do encourage people to keep that in mind as well.
Cause I've helped people who they'll build their gardens, some little back corner of
their yard, and they can expand it.
And I always tell people to start small, get excited, decide if this is your passion or
not.
Like, is this your thing that you want to hone in on and then expand after that.
And so when we were ready to expand, we were going to double what we had.
And it was too cost prohibitive to continue with the Mel's mix method.
And so right about that time we discovered this fabulous documentary and we incorporated
that when we expanded our garden.
And so a couple of key things that we did.
One, we didn't build any more sides to our beds.
We decided that instead of spending all that money on the infrastructure to keep our raised
beds, to keep that good soil contains, we would just raise the whole garden.
And so I want to point out that it only takes six inches of good soil to grow anything.
And I'm talking anything.
Another pearl of wisdom here.
Yeah.
And so people think they need all this soil and you really don't, you really need six
inches of good soil.
And so it was actually cheaper to, so that the area that we were expanding was 36 feet
by about 40 feet.
And it was cheaper to just raise that whole area than it was to buy all the wood to build
the beds and then fill the beds and then fill in the walkways in between.
And so that's when we decided to, again, we didn't till we had this great big patch of
grass that we were going to turn into garden.
And my kids were helping me and because we were going to till we had to do something about
the grass.
So because we live in Texas, we do get to garden year round, which is a huge blessing.
But the biggest burden we ever had to deal with is grass.
We have this grass that these ridiculously deep, 12 to 13 foot deep roots that is so
difficult to get rid of.
And when we had built our original garden, we had all these beautiful raised beds, but
we had this grass growing between them and it was constantly getting in the beds and
it was so much work.
I spent more time dealing with my walkways than I ever did reading my beds or doing anything
else in the garden.
And it was because of this grass.
And so when we expanded the second time, we put down a newspaper and then cardboard and
then we covered it with a third.
And when I say a third, we went, we went at nine inches because we knew as the soil broke
down, it would contact down to the six inches.
So we did three inches of topsoil, three inches of compost and three inches of mulch.
And we started growing in that.
And so I bet you're going to want to know the pros and cons of that method.
I would love to know.
And also part of what I thought was really important when I looked at your book was a
lot of people use cardboard, but the fact that you use the wet newspaper under the cardboard
seems like this is a, you know, another like golden tip.
Yeah, we call them light bulb moments at our house.
Yeah.
They're really, they're so simple.
And so I do want to touch on that real quick because this is something that's really pivotal.
I mean, pivotal.
So a lot of people think they just gonna, they're just going to put cardboard down because
they, they're just thinking about smothering that grass or whatever's underneath the cardboard.
And that's true.
If you're dealing with Bermuda grass, like we have here in Texas, that Bermuda grass
is just going to sit there and hibernate until that cardboard breaks down and then it's
going to start growing again.
So what's really key is, is we go out there with a wheat eater and we get the grass as
low of the ground as we possibly can.
And then we put the newspaper on top of that and we get it soaking wet because when you
do that, then the newspaper collapses and it adheres to the ground and you've taken
out all those air pockets so the grass is going to suffocate.
Then you put your cardboard on top of that and really that's just more, it's really
protecting the newspaper from breaking down rather than smothering anything.
And then on top of that, you put all your soil and I'm telling you that, that key thing
right there is probably the biggest takeaway I've learned since we started.
And we kind of learned it by accident because somebody wasn't following instructions from
my little crew of helpers and they did it like I thought it was supposed to be cardboard
first.
And we did that and somebody else did it.
And when we looked at it and when we analyzed it and we saw that the section they were doing
like was handling the grass better, we realized like you're really onto something.
And so like I said, student, a gardening, trial and error is everything that we do here.
That's really funny.
And now I have a very mundane question, but in this age of digital information, where
do you get all this newspapers?
Oh, you know, it's actually a very beautiful thing.
This gardening method is the best friend of the County Recycle Center.
I mean, our county, I can get everything I need to build my garden from the County Recycle
Center.
But if you don't have a County Recycle Center that takes newspaper, then you can call newspapers
and they often have unsold past issues that they're happy to unload.
So our county, our town newspaper takes all the bundles of their old papers to the Recycle
Center.
So I can literally go there and just get stacks and stacks of pre-bundled newspaper.
People always ask me about the chemicals in the newspaper.
It's from an organic approach.
It is an accepted organic approach.
And most chemicals, almost all chemicals now used in newspapers are soy based and not chemical
based.
And so they're still plant based.
So that's wonderful.
I did a garden once where we were teaching classes for the community and we had this
huge pallet of cardboard donated by Whole Foods at the time because they get all of their...
So this, if you don't have a County Recycle Center that has a lot of cardboard, you could
think about a big box store or big...
Reach out to any grocery store, any appliance store.
So I think it's beautiful that we can take these things that are looking to be recycled
and we can turn them into soil.
And guess what worms eat?
I mean, everybody knows that worms are an indication of your soil health.
Worms eat newspaper.
And so by having the newspaper there to smother the grass, you're also inviting all the worms.
Feeding your worms, that's wonderful.
Now another thing that I thought was very critical was that you've gone through an evolution
not just with your soil, not just with your types of beds, but also with your fencing.
And for anywhere that's rural especially, protecting against the predators becomes essential.
So could you describe that a little bit and maybe just for the sake of time with the method
that you ended up with and why?
Yeah.
So we started with Fast and Cheap and we really paid for it in the end.
Never use chicken wire to fence anything ever is all I'll say about that.
In the end, we ended up building a field wire fence that had two inch by three inch squares.
It's polycoated, so it's hopefully not going to break down as fast because we've really
had a bad experience with chicken wire breaking down and rusting and causing having holes
in it.
And we were really lucky.
Anytime you have to stretch field wire, you have to build H braces and it can become a
very complicated process.
I can drive a T-post all day long.
I cannot dig a four foot post hole in my clay soil.
It would be a lot of work.
And I do almost all of our gardening.
Me or my children.
And so I always wanted to develop methods that were female friendly because in a lot of times
in places, it's the women doing this work.
And I know a lot of people that got into home studying and they're so frustrating because
their husbands have other things that they're interested in doing and the garden is not
one of them.
And so I'm very happy to have found something that I could do myself.
And so we used T-posts and we found a system called the wedge lock system.
And it's just these little clips that you can put on a T-post and you can basically build
an H brace that way.
And it's very easy to use.
Once we had the H braces up, it was very easy.
We just took two 2x4s and clamped them together to make a fence stretcher.
And I put a chain around it and hook it to my band and hold it.
And we could tie off the fence to the T-post.
And so we were able to build a really nice six foot tall fence very easily, just my children
and I.
Do you already have a video on your website about your fence building?
We have the footage and we have the pictures.
I just haven't put it all together yet.
Yeah.
There's a lot of really great content for our website that we don't have up yet.
But the fence building is one also our compost area because like I said before, compost is
the key.
The best is the key to all of your garden success.
And we learned a lot about compost along the way.
And so we did have to go through last year and completely redesign and rebuild our compost
area.
And so I'd really like to get those pictures together to encapsulate all that we've learned
just on compost alone and the best ways to build it.
Well, even the pictures in your book, I had compost bin envy when I was...
Yeah.
You should see our new ones.
Yeah.
I can't wait to see those.
Yeah.
And one of the tips in your book that I liked about the fence posts was it's a whole lot
easier to whack a fence post down deeper than it is to pull it out if you hit it in too
far at first.
Yeah.
That's funny that you cut onto that just trying to get them all the same kind of stuff.
I really like a clean garden.
I like things looking clean and looking neat.
So all of those little things become important.
You don't want to look out there and see a fence with T-plos going all over the place.
Well, I imagine also if you're a land surveyor that you...
I do.
I have an affinity for straight lines.
It's a geometry.
You're a geometry person.
So in 2019, you expanded your garden again.
And this time it became 32 feet by 110 feet, I believe, which is...
I did the math, 3,520 square feet, which is just under a tenth of an acre.
And I understand that you decided to use 100% country mulch that you had delivered from
a local vendor.
And there's a great picture of your kid standing on top of that load, that delivery of mulch.
So can you explain about mulch and this question about whether mulch then needs to become composted
and how long that takes and how you do that.
If you buy it and you set aside this bed somewhere on top of your wet newspaper and your cardboard
with your mulch on top and then you just leave it there for a year and water it, or how does
that work?
Yeah, okay.
So that's a lot to unpack.
You have a lot of questions there.
Yeah, sorry.
I'm going to back up to our second expansion real quick and talk about the benefits and
downsides to the mix that we used of the compost, topsoil and mulch.
Okay.
So mulch is really great at water retention.
And one of the things I mentioned before about how it's all about returning those micronutrients
and minerals to the soil.
So trees have this wonderful ability, these deep tap roots to reach way down in the soil
and pull up nutrients that we just can't access in the top layers of our soil.
And those people soils are very depleted.
So I'm sure you've heard like if you compared an apple now to an apple like 100 years ago,
it takes one apple from 100 years ago to equal a hundred from nowadays.
Wow.
Because the mineral content is just not there anymore.
And that two to 400 pound average that people eat, that's considering you're eating nutritious
food.
You know, if you're eating a bunch of vegetables that are nutritionally dead, you're going
to have to double that.
Right.
And so for us, it's always been about creating very nutrient dense food.
And so we want the most nutrients in our soil when we're growing our crops.
And so that second garden, we have the compost, which was feeding it.
We had the mulch, which was going to break down into compost because the only difference
between mulching compost is six months.
Oh, wow.
So mulch is going to become compost, but it's like a slow feeding.
It's like a, it's like a time released vitamin if you would.
Okay.
And then the other part that we had was top soil in that blend.
And I don't know why we did that.
We did that because we thought we needed to have soil.
I wouldn't do it again.
I wouldn't buy soil because typically when you're buying top soil, it's almost dead.
Okay.
Like it's already almost had most of its nutrients taken out of this.
Wow.
That's a good tip.
And I bet it's expensive.
It is.
Well, it's less expensive than compost for some reason.
Typically, just depending on where you are, we're close to several mushroom farms.
And so you can always get mushroom compost around here because when, when mushroom growers
grow on the strata that they use, they can only use it once and then they have to filter
out and get new.
So it's, it's actually really easy to get large amounts of compost around here, but
I wouldn't do that again.
And so the third time we expanded our garden, I was doing a giant experiment.
And so we went at the time that we expanded our garden was already about 30 by 60.
So we expanded again to create that 410 feet.
It was like 30 by 40 or 50.
I just can't remember the rough numbers, but it was basically taking what we've already
had and totally doubling it.
It was a large area.
So back up a second, when we did the first garden $750 for those four beds, $750 again
to double it.
Okay.
That's a lot of money.
$1,500.
When we did the second garden, we were able to do it for like $800.
Okay.
All the soil components that we bought.
When we did the third garden, which was double everything that we already had, we did $350
for the most that we used.
And so our county, again, our county recycling center has-
Wow.
So you doubled it and you doubled the size, but you halved the cost.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And so our county has this fabulous recycling program where the people in town, when they
trim trees and stuff, the city will go around and pick it up and they'll take it to the
county recycling center.
And then the recycling center grinds it into most.
And so it's very easy for us to get $5 a yard.
You'll just fill up your pickup truck, $5 a yard, all the mulch you want.
And what's really nice about that is that you're actually getting treats.
So if you buy bag mulch, you're probably getting chopped up pallets, chopped up furniture,
chopped up who knows what, that has all kinds of chemicals in it.
And then they dye it all to be the same color.
Yeah.
Male to hide especially.
And then they dye it all to be the same color.
You don't want any of that in your garden.
And so if you're able to source, like direct from the source, like if you see the pile
of tree branches and you see the mulch next to it because you can see the chippers out
there, or if you can get a tree company, a lot of places have tree, tree, many companies,
any of the power line companies, if you can call them and say, Hey, come dump your loads
at my house, then you could do this for free.
That's a great tip.
Another great tip, Perla wisdom.
Get tree mulch, get it from somebody who's chipping it.
That's right.
And I do want to say though, the only downside, so benefits and drawbacks to this third system
that we use for straight 100% mulch, nine inches of mulch on newspaper and cardboard.
That's it.
We had all the mulch delivered.
We rented a box cat and literally two and a half hours.
I did a farmer's market in the morning.
We came home, spread that whole garden two and a half hours and went to a wedding that
afternoon.
So it was amazing how fast it went.
The downside to it is that we couldn't plant in it for a year.
Okay.
And trust me, I try because I just had all this soil.
I just thought I had to put some seeds in it.
And my husband, he said, you know, it's not going to work.
And he was right because the difference between mulch and compost is time.
And so we had to allow that mulch to break down.
It took a year for it to break down.
And a year after that, it literally grew exactly the same as the millsmiths.
It's production wise.
It was, it's just beautiful, beautiful soil.
And so good to know.
And my sense is, and tell me if this is correct, that it also depends on how much water you
have in the area because water is required to break down compost or mulch or anything.
And so like where you live, it's a pretty moist area where I live.
It's really dry that you have to water your mulch also.
So there's different things that you could do to speed up that process.
You could put alfalfa pellets on top.
You want to, anything that has some source of nitrogen, if you had alfalfa hay, you
could put that on top.
You could put urine on top.
You could put all sorts of things that have nitrogen in it that would help speed up that
process if you wanted.
Water of course helps speed up that process as well.
We get about 40 inches on average a year of grain where I'm at.
But one of the things I want to point out about the mulch, it's so beautiful.
So mulch has this amazing ability to retain water.
And I have this great factual data about that.
So I have a neighbor behind me who had a garden half the size as me.
And I was talking to her once and she was telling me that her, her water bill was like
ridiculously high, hundreds of dollars.
And I was just shocked.
And I said, what are you doing to have such a high water bill?
There's two of them.
And she said, I'm watering my tomatoes.
And I know people all around me that water twice a day in the summertime to keep their
gardens alive.
And at that same time, I'm watering once a week.
And with a family of eight, our water bill was like $100 a month.
And at the same time period, the earth was like $600 a month.
And it's because of the mulch based garden.
It's because that mulch naturally has this great ability.
If it's too wet, it's going to hold on to the water.
If it's too dry, it's going to hold on to the water.
It's just amazing.
I can't explain it.
I can just tell you, I've not told it.
It's 100% work.
So with the garden that you have now that started with the mulch that stood for a year,
it's the one that's been the most water efficient, it sounds like.
Well, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
You water that melds mix and there's a component in it that holds water, the peat moss and
the vermiculite, that really helps it.
And then our middle garden is probably the worst at retaining water because it didn't
have as much mulch.
And I've amended it over the years.
I do add compost and mulch to my garden every year.
So you topped us since you're a no-till gardener.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I'm going to talk a little quick about the no-till thing.
I just want everybody to understand this because I have a lot of difficulty getting
people to understand why we don't till.
If you look at a community, a town that's taken hundreds of years to build, right?
And if you thought about a tornado coming through that town and destroying everything
overnight, that's what tilling is like.
Underneath the soil, we have this whole world, all these microorganisms and they have air
pockets and they have interconnections and you've got fungus size, fungus, fungal, my
zones, all kinds of things that are interconnected and talking to each other.
And when you come through with a tiller, you wipe all that out and the whole system has
to start building all over again.
And so sometimes I'll talk to people who are like, they want to know what they could do
different in their garden.
I just tell them the first thing to do is just stop tilling.
Right.
It would be like if you had a forest and you went through and just ripped up all the tree
roots and then expect the trees to survive.
Right.
Yeah.
And they actually feed each other too.
They pass nutrients back and forth through the roots.
Yeah.
Fast-nating studies coming out about that stuff now.
Yeah.
It is really incredible.
So and I understand that now you have such a great yield that you actually sell at farmers
markets, right?
So you have now like 3,000 pounds a year and for your eight people in your family, you
don't need that much.
It's a little bit more now that I have 14 years.
They're eating a lot more.
But what we eat about 1,500 pounds a year, 1,000 to 1,500 pounds a year ourselves.
And then so we have half of what we were able to sell to other people.
And so it totally pays for our whole grocery bill, you know, the things that we still have
to buy at the school of paper and the milk.
I have two kids that work at a raw milk dairy.
And so again, like you don't have to do all the things.
You just have to know some of the other people that do.
So it sounds like your garden is actually paying for itself with the extra.
Yeah.
And then so amazing.
That's really amazing.
Okay.
So we've talked, I want to just because we want to not take too much of your time and
make this too long.
But other than these pros of wisdom that you have already shared, which I think are incredibly
valuable and could save people at least a decade of trial and error.
But I mean, if you, if there were one thing or two things that you wish you had known
right from the beginning, is there anything else that we haven't stated that you wish
you had known right from the beginning?
Sure.
One right from the beginning, I wish I don't, I know when you move to a new piece of property
and you're going to homestead, you've got all these things that you have to do.
And I tell people, number one, start your garden.
Don't, don't even worry about fencing it.
Go out there with your cardboard and your newspaper in your mulch and just put it down
and then let it sit for a year while you go take care of all these other projects, because
that's going to be the cheapest, easiest way to start a great garden with this fabulous
soil.
And so use time to your advantage in that situation.
And I wish that I had known that because I would have done things differently.
It's also very important your order of operations.
And so if you don't put the newspaper and cardboard down first and you put your nine
inches of soil on top of it, that's going to break down and become six.
You just really made a lot of work for yourself.
And I know people that have done this, like they, they didn't follow the order of operations
that we really try to stress in the book.
And they just created way more work for ourselves, for themselves.
And the reason we put all that stuff in that book was because we did things wrong ourselves.
And then we had to go back and fix it.
And it's a lot more work to fix it rather than to do it in the right order.
Right.
And so it sounds like, and I'm, I'm soaking this all up because I'm, we're going to be
starting a new homestead in the next six months.
And I'm already thinking, well, do we truck in the soil?
Do we this, do we that?
And so I'm thinking that, okay, we can do two things in parallel.
We can start a big garden with the mulch and let it sit for when we can get to a larger
garden the subsequent year and start a smaller garden with a current mix and, you know, use
that as like a pilot project to work out our systems and then make it larger the next
year with her mulched garden.
Beautiful.
And then in the future, you can use those beds for herbs.
I really like keeping the herbs out of the garden because a lot of those are, they stay
there all year long.
And so it's really better to have those separate.
So in that, in that case, I would use that now for vegetables, use it later for herbs.
And so having a good plan is really important, but don't spend so much time planning that
you never get out and start planting.
And then the other thing I would really encourage people is to keep a journal.
And so the only reason we were able to ever write the book is because I had spent 15 years
keeping a journal of everything I've ever done.
And this is like, I keep all my notes in here every, literally every time I go out there,
I've got maps and sketches and calendars and all sorts of things.
And that's how you improve in your, your method from year to year because gardening is very
geographical.
And so what works for me, like my calendar and my varieties that work well for me here
may not work as well for you where you're at, but you'll have to develop that knowledge
yourself.
And the only way that you can harvest so much from such a small amount of space is to be
very intentional.
So I'm always looking at the calendar.
I'm always just doing a little bit consistently along the way so that my garden's always fully
planted and fully maximized, maximizing its yield.
That's great.
And it reminds me that my stepfather was a food scientist at Cornell.
That was his, his work.
And so I saw him for years in the home garden that he had with my mother.
He would document everything.
His notebooks were a thing of beauty.
His garden notebooks.
Yeah.
And that's really important information.
And just so you know, like the things that are really important are dates, when you plant
something and when you harvest something and how much you harvest.
If you realize that you're only harvesting a half a pound of peas every year, and I'll
tell you, these are the lowest producing plant there is.
If you, if you're not getting a huge yield, we won't grow to get, we're a high production
garden.
I need a lot of vegetables to feed a lot of people.
And that's what I'm concerned about.
I don't do crazy goofy niche things.
I do what everybody eats.
And if you, if you pay attention to those times that you're planting and harvesting,
then you'll know when that bed's going to become available to put something else in.
And so that's what I'm talking about, that intention, intention, this you always, you
just have to constantly be thinking about what can I do next in the garden?
I meet a lot of people who they, they build it and then they, they think they're done
and they walk away.
And like having a garden is kind of like having kids.
Like it's, it's just a continual investment of your time and energy and thought process
to reap all these beautiful benefits that we're so thankful for.
Right.
And if you don't track it, like I remember there was one year that I planted some kind
of an Asian green that was fantastic.
It was like it produced all summer.
It was pest resistant.
It was delicious.
You know, it kept reseeding into the fall.
And then I hadn't kept the seed packet of what it was.
And I've never known what it was.
I was like, you know, so for years I've been like, Oh, if I could just figure out what
that thing was that I planted.
So don't be like me, write it down.
So in closing, what would you say to someone who wants to grow some or maybe eventually
all of their own food, but they feel overwhelmed or they feel daunted by getting started?
What would you say to them?
I always tell people to start small because if you start too, too much, again, it's like
having children.
Nobody starts out with six children.
Right.
You have one child and you decide like, I can do this.
And you, you slowly add to it because your heart grows.
And that's how it is with gardening too.
Start small, decide if you're going to love it or not.
And I'm telling you, there is no better feeling than that salad you make with your own lettuce
and your own tomato.
I remember the joy we would have if we had a meal where we produced all parts of it.
Like this was a once a year, like it was just a huge occasion.
And now it's so weak.
I mean, everything we eat comes from our property and we don't even think about it anymore.
And we eat like kings.
I tell you farmers, farmers, what they lack in income from what they're doing is make
growing vegetables.
It's not the huge money making endeavor.
But you get to eat like a king.
You couldn't, I mean, the people that shop at the farmers market couldn't buy all the
vegetables enough to supplement their whole diet.
You know, they're buying things to have for a couple of meals, but nobody goes to the
farmers market and buys 100% of their vegetables for the week.
You couldn't afford it.
And so the people that take the time to do this, if you'll take the time to start small
and then just gradually increase your knowledge and increase what you're working on, you'll
love it.
And it will not feel overwhelming.
It will feel exciting and achievable.
And in the end, you'll have so much that you're thankful for.
And delicious.
Absolutely.
And your health is going to benefit.
Your physical is going to benefit.
I remember when I got into gardening and I read that it was great exercise and I remember
thinking like, how hard could it be to poke some seeds in the ground?
And let me tell you, it is amazing.
It is amazing exercise.
Well, thank you so much, Brianne.
This has been very inspiring and very informative and I learned a lot that's personally useful
for me.
So I appreciate your generosity and sharing all of your experience and hopefully we'll
be talking more again soon.
I look forward to getting this out to our viewers and listeners.
Great.
Thank you.
Take care, everyone.