I'd like to welcome David the Good.
So David has a YouTube channel where
he talks about permaculture and gardening
and how to grow in the Florida sand,
all kinds of fun stuff like that.
He's written like a gazillion books.
We'll talk about that later on.
So why don't you tell us, David, a little bit about yourself,
where you are, what you grow.
Well, currently I live in Lower Alabama.
I'm just a couple of minutes north of the Florida border.
I grew up in Florida.
I'm a native Floridian.
I garden in South Florida.
I garden in North Central Florida.
And then I moved to Alabama after having lived overseas
for a few years.
Came back to the States and moved to Alabama
because it was affordable.
And there's still land here in Florida is about full.
And so I've got a little homestead here.
I have been experimenting with crops
that fit this climate zone from around the world
rather than taking northern crops
and trying to adapt them down here.
What I've tried to do is look more to the tropics
and to the Mediterranean and to Southeast Asia
and other places where it would have the heat and humidity.
And then, of course, there's that balance between sometimes
it's going to freeze here, so the tropical stuff
doesn't go all the way through.
And sometimes it's not cold enough for the temperate stuff.
We're on this edge and the climate
seems to shift a little bit from year to year too.
Sometimes you get a really late frost.
Sometimes it's six weeks of clear, beautiful, warm weather
and then it freezes.
And so I have been experimenting with trying
to figure out which crops can you just throw at the ground
and have them work here.
So I have been doing that basically by finding species
and finding different cultivars and then
trying to get different seed lines of things that
had been grown locally or go to the local farmers market.
And when a guy has a pumpkin, I'm like, oh,
where did you grow that?
Oh, I grew that over here.
OK, good.
I'm going to buy that pumpkin.
Not because I even care to eat it,
but just because I want to grow it.
And so when I came across your land-raised gardening,
I was like, there's the final piece
of taking all these genetics instead of just going,
OK, I know longevity spinach grows here
or I know that there are a few varieties of Jerusalem artichokes
that can grow this far south.
Now I can kind of look at it and go,
I could maybe get it even better by taking
that big Swiss Army knife of genetics
and putting it into the system.
So as soon as I, I mean, I had seen your name before.
I'd seen you at permies.com.
I knew there was this guy out west somewhere
that had some seeds and stuff like that.
But somebody said, you really need to look him up.
And so then I read land-raised gardening.
I was like, this is it.
This is the simplicity that I was really close to grasping.
And then I found it.
But then immediately, I was like, OK, I'm
just going to tell everybody, you've
got to check out this guy and check out
the land-raised gardening because it's really
the final piece of adjusting to your climate.
So what are some of those tropical crops
that you found to really do good down where you are?
OK, in Florida and lower Alabama,
I have found that de-ascoria yams, the de-ascoria a-lata
in particular, is just unbelievably good.
As a matter of fact, it's so good
that Florida put it on the invasive species
list, which bugs me to no end.
Oh, it's food that grows so well.
It just escapes and grows more food.
I love that.
But apparently, they didn't take very kindly to it.
And it also has a very aggressive cousin
called the air potato.
It makes all these little aerial bullbills,
and it drops them everywhere.
And kids pick them up and throw them at each other
and play stickball with them.
Anywhere where one of these things lands,
it starts a new vine that will grow 60 feet the next year.
So they cover all the trees.
It's kind of like a kudzu type of a thing.
And so I think they looked at the cousin, and they're like,
you know what?
Yeah, let's just get rid of that too.
But the true yams have done well for me.
I've had good luck with de-ascoria pentafilla,
which is not as productive.
De-ascoria a-lata, particularly the white and yellow type
versions, or the wilder forms, are just really super
productive.
Like a 30 pound root in the second year,
and maybe four to six pounds in the first year.
If you leave it in the ground, it perennializes.
It eats the first root, and then it makes another root.
It's like that big.
So you just leave it in the ground.
It's kind of like your survival food supply.
And when we grow white potatoes down here,
we often have issues with the bugs, and with the blight,
and with the heat, and with fire ants getting into the hills
and actually chewing the roots of the potatoes up.
So one day, they'll just wilt.
And you go over there and go, what's wrong with that thing?
And you bump the plant, and fire ants will swarm out of it.
It's just like that sort of thing where it's like,
potatoes are the stuff of life, man.
And then they just don't really like it.
So that was one.
Cassava, I have found, will push up easily through zone nine.
It just takes longer because it freezes down
and then grows back.
So cassava, AKA yuca, manioc, manahot, escalenta,
great crop.
And here, it's a little tougher because we're in zone 8b.
We lose some of them, and we get tiny little roots.
And sometimes they freeze to death.
And so what I did is I took 10 different cultivars
and I threw them into my garden two years ago.
And two of them made good-sized roots by the frost.
And of the one of them, unfortunately, I
can't land-raise breed them because there's not
a long enough cycle for seeds to mature on them for me
to just start planting seed from them.
So I'm stuck with clonal propagation.
Taro does well here.
Mulberries are really easy to grow here.
We've got a lot of chestnut varieties that do well here.
We're marginal for some of the other nut trees,
but chestnuts do well.
Black walnut, we can get a few here and there.
Pecans do well here.
And in the garden, seminal pumpkins,
the old seminal pumpkin variety, they're
a long season, really vigorous.
And there's a ton of genetic diversity inside of it.
Some of the lines have gotten inbred
until they're just the little tiny ones.
But they seem to keep their vigor even with the inbreeding.
I've experimented with yacan.
I haven't had great root success on it.
Unless it's in a really moist, high organic matter
environment.
Some people have said it's done well in drought.
And I think I just have the wrong cultivar.
And as for tomatoes, the Everglades tomato
does really well here.
Cherry tomatoes do well here in general.
But the Everglades is like a weed here.
But it's almost just a wild tomato.
It's itty bitty.
So it's hard to.
If we grow big tomatoes, they tend to get split, rot,
and all kinds of things.
It gets hot too fast.
So what we need is basically to get those calorie crops first.
So we saw our yams and cassavas and stuff like that.
And then we have some vegetables that do really well.
Okra, obviously.
And yardlong beans, those Asian noodle beans,
they do really well here.
And I can actually grow them through the summer, which
is out of the ordinary.
What I'm trying to do now is to land
raise some corn by taking a bunch of different grain corns
and just mixing them all up and letting them cross.
And last year, we had such a horrible year
that I only got a few kernels.
And I put them aside.
And we had to move.
We moved to our new homestead.
I put them aside somewhere.
And then when I got into them, they
were all eaten with weevils.
So I was like, no, there goes my year.
So I'm starting again.
I still got the original jar where
I mixed all varieties, like 20 varieties of corn.
And I'm throwing them out there again.
And some people think the idea is great.
And some people, it just absolutely
horrifies them that like granny's corn from Missouri
that was passed down for 13 generations or something,
some guy's just going to mix it up with like a governmental
selection from Cuba.
Like, why would you do that?
What's wrong with you?
Like washing your car with granny's doilies.
Yeah, I get a lot of pushback from mixing up the heirlooms.
So tell me about that Florida sand and how to deal with it.
Because that's the number one thing
that people tell me about Florida is all I have is sand.
Yes, I'll tell you the best thing for the sand
is to just simply plant perennials and trees
and mulch them heavily.
Like Florida really wants to be forest, particularly
the middle and then down through the south part of it
where it's not very heavy and where it's less heavy in pines.
You can look and see this beautiful green,
like thick hardwoods, oaks, plums, hickories, wild bays,
and all kinds of different species.
But then they'll clear it and put in grass.
And then the grass is like patchy and weedy
and it's got stickers in it and little bits of sand
start showing up.
Because in this sort of a soil, a lot of the soil,
as I've heard said by the permaculturists,
it's bound up in the plants themselves.
A lot of the fertility is in the plants.
So they work really hard to get a lot of carbon together.
If you clear cut it and you try to grow annuals
and you try to grow grass, it's frustrating.
And so people come with this idea
of they're just going to till an area up
and do like they did in upstate New York where they had
glacial soil and cool seasons.
And just plant, I'm going to just plant a row garden.
And then just every pest in the world
just comes and shreds the stuff and diseases come in.
And you think you've done everything,
you can go out and throw out your triple 13.
You can go do all the gardening stuff they did up north.
And it still just looks horrible.
So one hand is plant the stuff that will actually go with it.
The yams don't care.
The cassava doesn't care.
The roots will push all over the place in that sand.
They barely care.
It's when you try to grow something like lettuces
or beefsteak tomatoes or anything
that's a little bit touchy, there are some issues there.
So on the one hand, it's like just plant,
particularly if you plant food forests.
Food forests do great in Florida.
And they start to get stronger as after you get
for the first two or three years,
you've got to dump a lot of organic matter in the soil
and do a lot of chop and drop and use some of your invasive
trees and just chop them to chunks
and throw them on the ground.
That was the best form of gardening
that I found in Florida.
But secondarily, we've experimented
with trying to fix the sand.
And some people swear by deep mulching.
And deep mulching will really fix the sand.
The problem is that it also attracts a lot of pest issues
sometimes, like you get the slug buildups.
And somebody was like, pill bugs are just eating everything
that I put in my garden.
Like pill bugs?
Pill bugs don't normally ever do anything.
But yeah, the pill bugs are like getting hungry for lettuce.
And so if you've got this big mound of organic matter,
suddenly it just breeds up and it fills full of bugs.
And you get all kinds of cutworms and beetle grubs
and stuff in that material because they're
all starving in the sand.
So they move to your garden.
And then next thing you know, you can't.
I talked to a friend and she said,
I can't plant seeds directly in my garden.
I've got to get transplants and get them about that big
and put them in so the bugs won't shred them in the mulch.
And so the mulch works really good for your perennials.
But how do you actually fix the sand?
So we've been experimenting with crushing up charcoal
and soaking it with nutrients and then putting in.
Mixing in organic matter.
If you can get a source of manure that's good
and mix it with the sand to keep the organic matter, that's great.
But nothing really lasts very long term.
Even if you deep mulch here, you have to perpetually deep mulch
because the climate just eats it.
And even your compost here, because there's not clay
to make the compost sticky.
Steve Solomon told me about this.
He's like, if you put clay in your compost,
it makes the humic acid molecules stick.
The humus will actually get stickier and last
and the cation exchange is better and all that stuff.
So I started getting clay.
I would go places where I could dig clay
or have a friend from North Carolina
bring me buckets when he came down
and then spread that over the compost pile.
And it seems to make the compost stickier
and actually makes it last a little better.
The sand is a problem, but the sand
is also really fun to dig in.
Like it's super easy.
If you want to pull something up,
you just grab the entire cassava plant, start pulling it,
and these huge roots will just come out of the ground.
It's not bad.
And up here, I do plant breeding so
that I can not break off my plants
when I try to dig them in the hard clay soil.
Hey, can we for a second?
I wanted to introduce you really quick,
if you don't mind, to my son Ezekiel,
who has been land racing watermelons
after reading your book.
Here, come up here.
Hello, Ezekiel.
So he has, tell him how many years
you've been on the watermelon project.
Probably been about five years now.
I started growing watermelons
and I didn't have very good luck the first year.
I only got a couple that were very good.
And I started doing a couple of years after that
and I found your book.
My dad introduced it to you, sorry, to me.
And I read it and it took me like two days and I loved it.
It was very informative.
And I've been using that for two years.
And it is so much easier to grow watermelons
and any other crop, like by those methods.
Like you don't have to water or mulch every day.
You just breed the right-
Breed for survival.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
So like we had really bad soil
and he put all these watermelon seeds out
and it was like the march of death.
And he had all these mountains
and he fed the mountains a little bit and watered them.
And it was like too cold and too hot and too dry.
And so a lot of the melons were like rotting
and splitting and popping or not making melons.
But then he saved from them.
And then some of them started
to just get a little invasive almost.
Like they made smaller melons, but they started to recede.
And so we saved from some of the ones that recede.
We had ones like in the fall where they had receded
and then came into the fall, which never happens.
Usually watermelons are just done.
So he's got a patch now and we're on,
we have a little better soil now.
So we might be short-circuiting the process, but.
So how many varieties did you mix?
Probably about 15 to 20.
And I said, is there a type
that you're finding you really like?
Let me think.
I can't think of any now.
The Congo.
I really like Congo watermelons.
Yeah.
They're the ones with the dark,
they were the really dark skin ones.
I think so.
Yeah. Yeah.
And they were pretty big, like usually 20 pounds or so.
But the orange ones were the ones that really.
Yeah.
Like the orange ones are like weeds now.
Right. Yeah.
Who knows?
Maybe the orange gene is linked to survival in this area.
Right.
Yeah.
They didn't taste quite as good I thought,
but like they grew a lot better.
So when I crossed those, then I get like a better tasting
and just very good survival melon.
So you breathe the flavor.
I love combining the traits of two different varieties,
one that grows well and one that tastes good.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's great.
So we've got about two years of selecting for survival
and this year probably select for survival again,
because you mixed in new genes.
And then I know you'll be looking at, from that point,
probably you'll select out, that one tastes good.
Yeah.
It survived and it tastes good.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
I'm glad you came in.
Yeah. He picked it.
I was like, look it, you've already been saving
your watermelon seeds to replant.
And I was like, you've got to read this book.
And he's like, okay.
And he's a bookworm anyway.
So he read the book and he just absorbed all of it.
He's like, all right, yeah, that makes a lot more sense.
And then he went out and he's just gotten
every variety of watermelon.
He's like using his pocket money
and hitting the seed rack for all small ones,
big ones, large ones.
And then every time I was ordering seeds online,
he's like, did you look at the watermelons?
I'm like, all right, I'll look at the watermelons.
You caught me.
Then we ended up with a couple more watermelons in there.
Sweet.
But you got a generational legacy now.
That makes me really happy. Thank you.
So didn't you write a book about foods forests, David?
Yes, I did.
I read a book- Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, it's called Create Your Own Florida Food Forest.
It's for zones eight to 11, focused on Florida, obviously.
I had a volunteer artist for this one.
I just put out an email like anybody who wants to volunteer,
if you can draw,
I'm gonna give you some plant species to draw.
So we have 54 different artists end up volunteering
and we have 200 illustrations.
So it's very interesting
because you've got these really cartoony ones.
And then there was this woman that was an architect
and everything is like super measured out and square.
And then there's this other people with like incredible,
like wrapping around 1920s style,
anime style and everything.
So each plant has its own illustration in the back of it.
There's about 150 plants I cover
for your canopies, sub-canopies, shrubs, herbaceous vines.
And so people all covered these different plants.
So we've got to go to this like book of illustrations
as well as a resource on Florida.
And so the plants that I hadn't grown myself,
I tried to track people down and talk to them
who had grown it.
And I wrote emails to nursery guys and other stuff.
I even called, I was trying to figure out
about sapodilla growing in Florida
because it's very tropical.
And I thought, I know that it grows.
And I've seen them before,
but I found online a picture of a great big one
at the hotel down in the Keys.
And so I called the hotel
and the guy there was like really annoyed at me.
I'm like, tell me about that trees, excuse me, what tree?
And I'm like, there's a sapodilla tree.
And he goes, all I know is that it drops fruit
all over the place, okay?
And I'm like, yes, but I said,
that tree's like over a hundred years old.
You think, I don't know, we just acquired this.
I said, I'm writing a book on fruit trees.
I'm trying to just like tell me any histories.
I don't know, I don't know.
Somebody bought the hotel and I'm like, ah.
I'm like, give me some information.
So I basically put like a short transcript
where I didn't make him look as annoying as he was,
but he was obviously like,
why are you calling me about a tree?
But another guy I called him, I was like, okay,
so you're growing allspice in Florida.
I said, have you got it to bloom?
What uses have you found for this tree?
And he was like halfway up through the state
where I didn't think it would pull it off,
you could pull it off.
And he was getting it to bloom and set sometimes.
And that was just really cool.
I just hug people down and interview them.
But the project took two years.
I started writing it when I was still overseas.
And then I came back to the States
and I finished it during the pandemic
and a little bit afterwards.
And I was like, if we only had one in 10 people in Florida
that would make a food forest in their yard,
it would transform the state.
Everybody is doing the same thing, right?
You move to this incredible tropical climate
where you can grow coconuts and mangoes.
And then what do you do?
You put in St. Augustine grass and a few poisonous oleanders
and like an ornamental spiky palm tree
that you have to mow around.
And I'm like, you paid $500,000 for your house
and you don't even get mangoes out of it.
It just drives me nuts.
And you get up to the center of the state, okay,
it's gotten a little cooler.
You can grow some low chill peaches,
you could grow all kinds of blueberries.
The early strawberry production is coming out of South,
Central Florida.
You can grow, you've got a growing season that's 350 days.
And then in the middle of the state, they're like a big set
and they've got a big grass,
maybe it's Bahia this time or Bermuda.
And then they've got, or Zoysia.
And then they've got some azaleas
because they're at the range
where they can actually put azaleas in.
So you get toxic, non-edible, boring.
I'm like, where's your peach tree?
Or grow some sand pears or something, you can make some pie.
It's like perfect for formless blackberries,
gummy berries.
If you look through the book,
it's just like species after species.
And these are things that grow great in Florida.
And people are just obsessed with like irrigating
and caring for grass,
which doesn't even wanna grow there.
It's literally easier to grow a food forest
after a couple of years than it is to maintain a lawn.
You just go around with a machete every once in a while
and knock a few limbs off to open the light up.
It's, I don't know.
It seems like it's just so simple,
but people are very scared.
So I wanna give people like the idea,
like you don't have to have this huge permaculture design.
This is not a book that's got like lots of little circles
in it and arrows and energy flow charts
and like snakes coming out of things.
I didn't do any of that stuff.
Right, so it's,
Bill Mollison would probably just be like,
well, whatever.
The degenerate generations that have followed me.
But I've told people,
start a bunch of stuff from seed and cuttings,
beg and borrow, don't steal,
but beg and borrow from people like go be in your plant
clubs and stuff like that.
Start a bunch of cuttings.
Start some Mexican tree spinach,
start some cassava, start some pigeon peas,
start some peach trees from pits.
You could get a peach tree from pit to fruit in Florida
in two to three years.
They're so fast.
Nice.
We planted them, stratified them, put them in the ground.
We got all kinds of great peaches.
So you got all this wonderful stuff.
And they're like,
people get paralyzed cause they go,
ah, I gotta buy, I bought a tree.
Where do I plant it?
And he'll walk around his yard for an hour and go,
oh man, it might be too close to that foundation.
Or maybe it'll get into this.
Or maybe I might wanna move it there.
Or maybe at some point I'll put chickens over there
or whatever.
So look, learn how to propagate your own plants.
Plant a whole ton of stuff.
And if you don't like it,
just chop it up and feed it to the other plants later.
Do it like nature does.
Throw 10,000 things out there.
And then if it's not supposed to grow there,
you'll know it.
If it's not happy, yank it out.
If you get a,
if you go to your big peach place down the road
and you start 30 peach pits
and you stick them all over your yard in two or three years,
you'll be like, I don't like that one.
Or that one's in the way,
or that one doesn't look happy.
And you just chop it down.
And you got no loss.
But there's like this analysis paralysis.
And people were like,
would you draw a plan for my yard?
I'm like, I can give you some basics.
If you walk through this area,
obviously don't plant something right in the middle of it.
Don't plant a mulberry directly over your front porch
where it's gonna turn your porch purple every year.
Don't stick bamboo right next to your vinyl pool.
That kind of thing.
But really, Florida wants to be a forest.
So if you plant a whole bunch of species in there
and let them select themselves out,
I call it machete gardening.
You don't like it, you chop it down.
You use it for firewood,
use it for your rocket stove,
use it to feed the other stuff.
But you just let nature be abundant
and then just hack paths through it.
So that's my approach
and create your own Florida food forest.
I just am like totally excited
about all the different species
and different things you could try.
And I give people like a half a dozen different ways
to get started with a food forest.
That's fun.
So Holly's added some links to your books in the chat.
And I wondered if you could tell us
what is your most popular book?
My most popular book is totally crazy easy,
Florida Gardening,
which was the first book on Florida Gardening I wrote
where I basically just threw a bunch of species
at my backyard, the ones that lived.
And those became, I planned my next gardens
around those key species.
So the yams and the yard long beans and collards
and okra and things that really did well in the state
and some of those varieties.
Now, if I was to rewrite it,
I would have a bunch more on the seed saving side of it
and on breeding your own.
But basically it's an overview of if you grow these plants,
you will not fail.
Like you may have some bad years,
but you're not gonna fail.
If you have these plants, they're so close to being weeds
that you can just expect that you're going to get food.
And people that have come down to Florida
and they're absolutely shell shocked by,
they can't grow anything.
It's every trick they have doesn't work.
It's the genetics of the plants.
It's the species of the plants
and the adaptation of the plants.
It's not you.
It's just that your plants don't know how to live there.
They just die.
Look, if you're from Canada and you go down to Cancun
and you lay on the beach, you will burn
because you're not used to it.
You're just totally not used to it.
And so we always have, we have family members
that would come down from up North and we'd be like,
okay, we're gonna go to the beach.
We're not gonna go to the beach in the middle of the day.
We're gonna take them to the beach in the late afternoon
and the morning so they can adjust to it.
But there are people that live right near the equator
that are super, super comfortable.
It got the skin for it.
It got the genetics to just be in the sun, no problem.
But like my friends down in the islands, man,
if it gets like below 70 degrees,
they're gonna freeze to death.
They're like almost hypothermia when it's 60.
It takes a long time to readjust if you go up North.
So it's not the plants problems.
So totally crazy, easy Florida gardening.
And then after that, I'd say probably the two neck and neck
would be books that I did not write
just for the Florida market.
And that is a complex to everything.
The good guide to extreme composting.
Take the approach of how nature composts
by throwing things on the ground.
Instead of making it super, super complex,
I try to make it really simple and tell people,
this is how you just don't throw away
your food scraps anymore.
Really don't worry about it
if you're not getting exact results.
Like the 5,000 rules.
Throw out that rule book from the extension office.
Here's how you compost everything.
And then the other book is Grow or Die,
The Good Guide to Survival Gardening,
which is basically how do you do a stripped down garden?
If things get rougher, what would you wanna have?
What would you wanna plant?
And how would you do it?
What's your basic philosophy of gardening?
If you can't just go down to Home Depot
and buy a sack of fertility.
So that would probably be them.
So do you follow permaculture principles in your work?
I follow most of them.
Like the zones, I follow the zones.
I do a lot of chop and drop.
I find that permaculture has expanded to such a point
that any kind of traditional gardening
is now called permaculture.
So it's almost hard to figure out where permaculture is.
This is my permaculture garden.
I was like, yeah, but that's,
there were people doing that 300 years ago too.
It just didn't have that name.
Permaculture, like the idea of cycling nutrients, right?
We're gonna go out to the field,
haul a bunch of manure in
and put it into the gardens and then plant in between it.
And you chop this down and you let this rot.
And a lot of these things,
I knew islanders that were practicing permaculture
and they'd never heard of it.
Like this one guy would take all this brush that he,
he would cut all this brush
when he cleared out field to plant his yams.
And he would put it underneath a tree.
And then he would tie his donkey to the tree.
And the donkey would just go around that tree
and crush and manure the stuff.
And he would bring forage to the donkey.
And the donkey was like stomping and peeing
and maneuvering all this brush
and just walking through it and churning it up.
And then he would let it rot down.
And then that was his food for the yams later.
But it was like, that's like a permaculture thing.
I'm gonna find the energy of the donkey
and then join it up with the energy of,
to increase the agitation, whatever.
So now what I don't,
the thing that will get me in trouble with some people
is that I will till if I need a big space,
I will till it up and I will put in food
because I have 10 children.
So gardening for us is really, it's part of our budget.
It's important for us to garden well.
And when we move to a new property,
first thing I do is like that big area
is getting tilled and planted.
Trying to get a dump truck full of wood chips
or straw or something that I know hasn't been sprayed.
I'm better off just tilling the area up, making the beds.
And then over time, I move more and more organic matter in
and I get my compost systems up and you build up.
But I think that like we lose sight sometimes,
we get on a cultish, I will never till the ground.
Like I will never break the earth.
And so some of the no-till people were really,
they get angry at me occasionally
and occasionally I bug them.
I agree in principle with much of what the no-till people do
but I also think that there's a place for just getting food
out of the ground as you grow.
Because even if I'm doing extractive farming,
extracting food from the soil,
like in a way that like, wow, that's harsh.
Like my neighbors, right?
They'll till the ground up and they'll use triple 13
and they'll grow their own vegetables.
And you'd be like, I can't believe they grow them that way.
Yeah, but you know what?
Them doing that with that triple 13 and their tiller
is still better than buying food from around the world
from 5000 miles or 3000 miles.
And you don't know how that was sprayed.
You don't know how that was used.
All the responsibility has been offshored.
And you're like, look at how wonderful and green I am
that I have one pot of herbs
and I've never turned the soil in it.
But they're actually probably doing better than you.
So sometimes it's these subtleties where I'm like,
I'm not gonna get on their case.
They're gardening for goodness sakes.
Most people aren't even gardening.
And if you come over there,
I can't believe you're tilling.
You should quit, kill yourself.
Holy cow, man.
No, wait, calm down.
Like people get really cultish about it.
Another thing that I've done is if I need magnesium,
I'll go get the Epsom salts out.
For some reason Epsom salts are okay.
But like triple 13, that's beyond the pale.
Like it's, I guess it's something you could soak
in a bath with, then it's okay to use in the garden.
I have some salts, that's good.
Triple 13, definitely not.
I've done some soil nutrient balancing
with Steve Solomon where I bought some of the original,
the individual like manganese and phosphorus
in different forms that would be considered elemental,
which you could say that's chemical fertilizing.
But if I see that I have a deficiency sometimes,
I'll just treat it that way.
But I don't ever use pesticides.
I can't stand the pesticides.
I'm like, I don't care if the plant got a little bit
of phosphorus or nitrogen or something,
but I don't wanna eat malathion.
So there's this wall where I'm like, I don't like that.
And I think that it's more ultimately destructive.
And I also think that the more that you intervene,
the more you play God, the less God's design
of all the checks and balances, you've removed that.
And now you've got to be all the checks and balances.
So once you start fertilizing heavily and spraying
and picking everything and doing all this stuff,
like to try and make your garden super, super duper perfect.
But the more you have to do because you've just killed,
like if you go in my garden,
there's holes in all the leaves of plants.
I'm like, I don't care because I could turn the leaves over
and I see the ladybug.
I'm like, there's the answer to the holes.
If I had sprayed for that thing,
then I would have killed that thing.
So generally, yeah, I've read a lot
of the permaculture literature.
I'm a huge book junkie.
And I would hold mostly to permaculture principles,
but some things like that.
I think that as I develop garden systems
that I'm in the same place for longer,
I have less and less where I need to get anything out.
Now that we have enough space for cows, for instance,
we've got dairy cows.
So the dairy cows, I can use the dairy cow manure
and I can feed all the gardens
and I could build awesome compost piles now.
But before, when I was living more in suburbia,
we couldn't do that.
And most of the manure had long-term persistent herbicide
in it, so we couldn't trust
that it wouldn't kill the garden.
So it's really great to talk about permaculture principles,
but practically speaking,
for somebody in a suburban backyard,
a lot of it works, but some of it,
like to get enough materials.
Even if you're reading these books,
it's go and get a wheel of,
if you can get hay or if you can get wood chips or something,
but you can't sometimes.
So that person may just be like,
look, it's still better if you grow food.
It's not ideal and we all work towards the ideal.
It's like sanctification.
You're working towards sanctification over time.
Like progressive holiness,
rather than like where you started, it looks like a failure,
but you're going to be getting better
if you keep working at it.
So yeah, so I'd be 98% permaculture on the scale probably.
I get a lot of flack from the permaculturists
about tilling my garden,
but it's like I'm feeding 20 families
and you grew a rosemary plant without.
That's right.
That's right, that's exactly it.
Okay, so this couple I was talking about,
they were using triple 13
and they use some pesticides,
but they grew like these 100 foot rows of green beans.
And I was like trying to do the lasagna gardening thing
in these little beds and struggling along.
Meanwhile, they had tons of food
and they took baskets and baskets of food
to the local food bank in town,
which is still going to be way better
than beans that have been shipped in from overseas, et cetera.
Plus they're directly giving back to the community with that.
So if I'm feeding 12 people and I'm like,
I don't know if I'm going to get food
if I didn't throw out fertilizer.
Now this is not normally the case
because I've usually got something I can feed with.
I feed with everything.
But if I really didn't know what to do
and I threw out 10, 10, 10,
it's not like you're going to just be banned
to outer darkness or permaculture forever.
You're a terrible person.
There's levels.
It's like if you throw out a plastic bottle,
first of all, you shouldn't have had a plastic bottle.
That's terrible.
You had a plastic bottle.
Somebody gives you a bottle of water.
You throw it out.
Somebody will say, you should have recycled that.
But if you do the research,
sometimes it actually costs more energy
to recycle the plastic than it does to landfill it.
Now what are you going to do?
There are no good options.
There's no good options.
And you can't undrink the water.
What are you going to do?
There's subtleties that people don't get sometimes.
So can you tell us about your YouTube channel?
Yes.
I was a writer first.
And then I ended up a YouTuber
because people kept saying, I wish you'd do more videos.
You should do videos on that and this and that
and the other thing.
So I started to push it and I said, okay,
I'll do the YouTube thing.
And so I'm on YouTube as David the Good.
I don't like to take sponsors.
And I don't really like to,
I don't like to follow the rules all that much.
So you'll see, if you go to the channel,
sometimes video by its nature is not as an intelligent,
it's not as an intelligent medium as writing.
If I write, I feel like I can get the entire thought across.
But when you're on camera, you got to see my ugly face.
You see my garden, see all that stuff.
And you're kind of like, this guy,
do I like this guy's personality or whatever.
If I read somebody's writing,
I'm just getting the pure ideas.
But there's a rhetorical side to YouTube.
And if you don't keep it entertaining,
if you don't do any click bait type of stuff or whatever,
your channel does not grow.
And that's what's hard to get across sometimes.
I would rather just put information off.
So go read my books.
But with YouTube, I'm like, you know what?
It's a rhetorical medium.
People are gonna have to look at me anyways.
So let's make it as entertaining as possible.
And hopefully some people will go read my books
and they'll see that I'm not actually
that insanely goofy all the time.
But if it was not fun for me to do YouTube, I would quit it.
And so when people say, I wish you would do this
or I wish you would do this.
You'll, the amount of comments that I get
and the amount of emails and everything
gets to be completely overwhelming.
And what I've also realized is that people
that are not doing it, who have not figured out
how to make YouTube work,
they don't understand why you have to do
some things that you do.
Like I did this experiment, right?
I did a video called, Comfrey is Terrible.
Talking about how comfrey is not the best plant
for my climate, it doesn't work that great.
Comfrey is Terrible got like 44,000 views.
They were like, oh, comfrey doesn't like comfrey.
How can he be into permaculture and not like comfrey?
Comfrey is like the holy grail of permaculture.
You don't like comfrey,
it's like saying you don't like Sep Holzer.
So comfrey is terrible, tons of views.
I'm like, okay, so three days later I had this plan.
I'm gonna do a video from the opposite angle
on why comfrey is amazing.
And so I talk about back when I lived in Tennessee,
comfrey was an excellent accumulator.
Talked about how I had healed cuts with comfrey
and some of the various uses for it.
First I talked about all the negatives,
how it's not great for our climate
and how it got better options.
Then I talked about if you were in a great climate,
here's why it's an amazing plant.
The one where it's like comfrey is amazing
got like 17,000 views compared to 44,000.
And so then after that, when people didn't expect it
and they didn't realize I was running a joke series,
I did a video called Comfrey.
And so I went out in the garden and just started singing
this song about how ambivalent I am about comfrey.
And then it's interspersed with me arguing with my wife
about how I'm really not gonna destroy my YouTube channel.
I'm definitely not.
She's like, sweetheart, how many people are watching you?
You're gonna just make yourself like,
and it's like the camera's pointed at the ground,
shaking around and like looking at nothing.
And it's, we're having this argument.
And it just keeps, it's this really painful video.
You're like, what in the world?
So the Comfrey is so, so got 11,000 views,
but it was an interesting experiment to see people
gravitate towards the negative.
Comfrey is terrible rather than Comfrey is amazing.
Everybody knows, oh, Comfrey is amazing.
But if soon, if you're like,
if you're like, I love Joe Biden, people will be like,
oh, okay.
You're like, I hate Joe Biden.
People are like, oh, why does he hate Joe Biden?
So like, it's, you just, you could be something polarizing,
but the way you approach that polarizing thing,
of like why I love land race gardening,
probably won't do as well as why there's no way
land race gardening would work for me.
People are like, oh, why?
It's like they pursue that negative.
And it's frustrating because when you're writing
and you're really enthusiastic and you love something
and you tell people, and then you put it on YouTube
and people are like, oh, yeah, that's cool.
You've almost got a couch at, if I say,
here's how I turn everything into liquid compost,
doesn't do as well as this ancient secret
will transform your garden.
Oh, you type it out and you're like,
I feel like I'm selling vacuum cleaners.
But it's true though, so the information gets across,
but by its very nature, that's the way video works.
And so I just try to be who I am.
And I met somebody in person and they said to me like,
you're just the same in person.
Like you're as goofy in person as you're on your videos.
I was like, yeah, except when I'm writing,
I'm dead serious when I'm writing.
Totally not really, I have one of the books too.
One of your favorite videos that our community liked
was the one about, I am going to destroy
50 varieties of corn now.
This man with the corn, like, yeah,
I love that sort of thing.
And what I like to do too with the videos
is to give people things to think about
that they are not hearing.
Like a lot of what I notice,
which you probably notice as well,
is you've got this like Wikipedia approach to gardening
where everybody passes the same information on
over and over again, right?
Like composting, don't put meat in your compost pile.
Make sure your carbon and nitrogen ratio is 25 to one.
Make sure that you don't add bread or oils
or bones or whatever.
And so what are you going to do?
You're going to make, and then it says make a cubic yards.
What are you going to do?
How are you going to get enough lettuce scraps
and make a pile that big?
And what are you supposed to do with your meat and your bones?
You're going to throw them away?
So you're telling me, these rules are telling me
that I should throw away the rest of that chicken meal,
but I should compost the parsley.
But then you go down to the garden center
and it's like one of the best organic amendments
you can add to your garden for a quick boost of nitrogen
is blood meal.
And if you need phosphorus, add bone meal.
Bone meal is blood meal or byproducts
of the slaughter waste in the slaughter industry.
And I'm like, but we're not allowed to do that?
Why not?
What happens if a raccoon dies in the woods?
Does God send angels down to carry that raccoon away
and dump it in the landfill?
It doesn't work that way.
It's like it gets recycled.
The trees eat the raccoons.
And so what I spent like a long time doing
is trying to figure out what's the basic thing behind this.
What would happen to this thing
if I didn't throw it in the landfill?
What's the worst that could happen
if I throw a chicken in my compost pile?
The neighbors complain maybe
because the dog got in it
and dragged a dead chicken over the yard.
Yeah, they probably wouldn't even know
unless they put it on YouTube.
But yeah, so to try and look and go,
why are we saving heirlooms and 200 individuals of corn?
You got 200 individuals of hickory king
that you have to have in your yard every year
to try and fight off inbreeding depression.
But even if you do that,
what happens after you saved it for 10 years?
Why is it that when you look at hybrid corn,
it's like you've got this gigantic ear,
but the parents were like these little weenie things.
Why is it that they can make hybrids, but we can't?
Why is it that for some reason,
Granny Smith was able to breed one of the best apples
that was ever invented for pies
and one of the most beautiful apples in all of history.
She could actually breed that apple by saving,
she was throwing crab apple waste out from making pies.
She was using sour apples and making pies,
throwing the waste down into her yard
and a seedling grew, she didn't cut it down.
But if you go to the extension office
or you go to almost any YouTube channel,
they're like, don't grow trees from seed.
What you're gonna wanna do is graft on
and establish variety so you can make sure
that you maintain something good.
Because if you plant apples from seed,
you're gonna get horrible fruit.
Everybody will tell you that.
Our ancestors, how long ago was it
that we had 2000 varieties of apple
commonly available across the United States
and now we're down to what, like eight?
Like eight in the store?
You went to a different town,
you would get different apples.
We've lost all of that regional cool stuff.
And so when I'm on YouTube, I'm like,
why do you have this assumption?
Here, we're gonna plant fruit trees from seed
and then I'll have somebody write me
the long scribe inside, no.
The reason the commercial guys never do this
is because you don't know what you're gonna get
and blah, blah, blah.
I know that, I know why commercial guys do it.
I know why there's one million navel oranges
all planted across groves in the center of Florida.
It's because they want exactly the same thing
over and over again.
But you'll often see such and such variety
was a chance sport that showed up at the edge of orchard
and it was analyzed by the University of Florida
and found to have profound disease resistance
to blah, blah, blah.
But don't you do that.
Definitely don't you do that.
Like the cognitive dissonance there is it's like,
everybody has the rules following
and they also want me to make rules for them.
Tell me how to do this and tell me how to do this
and tell me how to do this.
And I'd rather say here,
I wanna tell you how to think about it.
So then you can answer the questions yourself.
If you have an underlying philosophy of let's experiment,
let's try it.
Somebody said, will this variety of avocado grow in my area?
I said, I don't know, plant a bunch of pits
and then if any of them lives, then yes.
That's the fun way.
Now I could go and I could check the frost tolerances
and stuff and I'll give people that information.
It says that this variety has survived 12 degrees.
But if you really want something awesome,
you gotta do it yourself and you gotta stop fearing.
It's the same thing with the Shetty gardening,
just plant stuff all over the place to see what lives
and then you'll have success.
Thank you, so we have about nine minutes left.
Does anyone have a question for David?
Logan.
I have two that I hope are quick.
I'm also in Florida.
So my two is one, did you have to modify light requirements
for any of your crops?
Ones that normally you have to put in full sun,
for instance, like tomatoes or corn,
did you end up in Florida putting them under shade
a lot of times and did they grow better that way?
And then do you think that using land rice gardening,
genetics can make up for Florida's sand
rather than trying to modify the soil?
Like just leave it the crappy sand that it is
and then maybe they eventually can find
that there can be maybe deeper roots
or ones that are better able to absorb nutrients
deeper down?
Yes, yes.
So on the sand side of things,
I do think that probably repeated and ongoing exploration
would find us stuff.
I started the process by just going to the ethnic markets
and just buying up all the seeds and bulbs
and stuff that I could find and then planted them out.
And now after having done that, I thought, you know what,
if I had been saving seeds back when I was doing
that exploration more, I would save seeds instantly.
Like some of those yard beans, oh yeah,
we put some aside and that sort of thing.
Oh, there's some dry ones, I'll just leave a few.
But it was so easy to just go down to the local market
and get it.
But those were probably better adapted to India or Korea
or wherever that variety had originally come from.
Yeah, I think there are probably some plants
that just may not have the genetic ability
to adapt to Florida and some things that it's,
that they don't wanna set seed in Florida,
but they, because they have a tropical life to them.
And then like they'll grow in Florida,
they don't wanna reproduce in Florida.
And then some things when they bring it to Florida,
you know, like way over reproduced,
like the Malaleuca trees that they planted
to try and drain the Everglades
ended up being a massive invasive problem
because they made 10 times the seeds.
They were like, thank you for taking us
out of Australia, we're glad to be here.
But so yeah, quite possibly,
and I wish I had done more with it when I was still there.
But secondarily on light requirements,
yeah, if it says full sun for Florida,
you really probably only need about,
if it says full sun on the seed packet or something,
and you probably only need four hours.
And I did experiments with like how far into the shade
could I plant things.
And I found that like citruses,
I could get the frost protection
for the occasional cold night
by putting them underneath the canopy of another tree,
but they would still produce fruit.
They might not produce exactly as much fruit,
but they still produce fruit.
And that's better than having to go out there
and cover them with frost blankets.
And then I found that if my vegetable garden,
particularly in the morning,
if you get the morning like sun from the East,
that's the best for your vegetable garden.
That early morning sun in Florida is the best
because by the time it gets to the West,
usually the temperatures are up to the 90s.
Sometimes if you're in the middle of the state,
it's a little more moderate near the coast.
But the Western sun, like if I have sunlight until noon,
I would count that as full sun for sure.
And then if something looks like it's struggling,
I will chop some branches down above it
and let some light in and often that fixes it.
But thank you, Logan.
Thank you.
Anyone else?
Oh, yes, I have two questions for David The Wood.
Yes, sir.
All right, I'm glad that you guys can hear me.
First question I got is,
I went to all those random Latin stores,
they had all sorts of dried peppers
and all kinds of land raised a whole crap ton of peppers.
They were like dried Mirosol peppers,
which are actually ajiamurrios.
Then there were also poblano peppers,
which are ancha peppers.
And I'm glad like a whole crap ton of seeds,
everything I can possibly think of, everything.
As long as it tasted good, I saved the seeds from it.
Oh yeah.
What would happen if I just start land raising all of those
and letting them all hybridize?
Well, I create something awesome.
That's what I'm wondering about.
There are all different species.
There capsicum, anem capsicum, bacanthum,
then there's also pubescence,
which is that like black seed.
Probably, yeah, you probably get some chinense.
Yeah.
So some of them will cross and some of them won't.
Like people know if you put your bell peppers
and your jalapeno peppers, they'll cross.
Yet what I think you're gonna end up with
is you will end up with good peppers,
but they are going to go towards the hot.
I think that the sweets are probably gonna be overwhelmed
and you're gonna end up with spicy hot peppers.
But what I have noticed is in Florida,
the smaller body peppers seem to be the most resistant
to the diseases and everything.
So like the Thai peppers do great.
Cayenne peppers did great for me.
The larger the peppers,
when I start to get up to bell peppers and stuff,
I had to really baby them.
But I had a friend from Puerto Rico
and he had this giant bush of cayennes in his backyard
that was like six feet tall.
And he said,
David, that thing's been there for three years
and it just keeps making them.
Wait, so that's winter there?
It will survive winter
if you are not in an area of Florida that frosts.
So this was down in South Florida zone 10 slash 11.
They will survive the winter.
Sometimes I had cayennes grow back from the roots
in North Central Florida
after temperatures that went down into the twenties.
If I mulched around the base of them,
like one in four or five of them would survive
and they would come back and they would grow pretty fast
and they would start bearing again.
And how thick was the mulch?
What's that?
How thick was the mulch?
Like, was it, what's that?
Oh, I just gave them like a couple of inches
around the bottom.
Usually if I could get like loose fall leaves
or dry grass clippings or something like that
and put it around the base,
I've kept a lot of stuff alive that way
that's not really supposed to be alive
because most of the frosts of Florida are very fast.
Like they happen overnight.
It's four hours, it goes below freezing.
And the next morning it's up to 40.
And so I got things like moringa trees
to live up in the North part of the state,
even though they would freeze all the way to the ground.
If I left them uncovered,
I could put a pile of leaves over it and.
Dang, that is awesome.
Yeah, you should be able to get perennial peppers
out of them.
And if you put your peppers in pots too,
give them big pots, like 20 gallon pots or something.
You can drag them in to a covered area
and probably get peppers for three, four, five years even.
I had a habanero that did three years for me, no problem.
Because peppers are already by default perennial,
just winter always kills them every time.
Except for the capsicum annual,
and some of the bells and the jalapenos
will just die on you and that's it in the first year.
But a lot of the other ones are definitely perennial.
And I don't know how much crossing they'll do inside a genus,
but I think they can hybridize.
Thank you.
I also had a second question if you don't mind.
Sure.
Yeah, I was looking at,
I wanna start gardening and going the whole permaculture
route, but I have no land.
I'm stuck in the suburbs,
none of my neighbors are interested in that shit.
Like, oh man, I was hoping.
I don't know how to get land, that's the thing.
At one point I asked a church,
oh, like if they were gonna use this back area that they had,
and I was attending the church,
I said, are you gonna use this back area?
And they said, no.
I said, could we put some gardens back there?
And they said, sure.
So if you have a community, like that's one option.
Another option is to just go around the neighborhood
and like be nice to people and strike up conversations.
Because at one point, another point I was renting
when we had moved overseas,
when we only had a balcony area,
we had an upstairs apartment with four bedrooms in it.
So it was big enough for us, barely.
And then we had this big balcony
and I grew some plants and pots on it.
But I talked to the landlady, I was like,
man, I really wish I had placed a garden.
She said, well, I don't have any room in my yard.
But like one of my cousins owns this building lot
in the neighborhood.
Maybe she would let you do a garden on it.
So she called the cousins, I don't care.
We're gonna clear it in a couple of years
and build a house there.
But if he wants to go and knock a couple of trees down
or something and put a garden in, fine.
So we did, we went over there and cleared it and used it.
And it really is like being really friendly
and making community connections and just tell people,
I'm looking for a little bit of land to garden on.
Hey, I don't mind sharing half the produce with you.
You can try some of my hot peppers.
Do you like hot peppers?
So you make the connections.
But first, if you're really,
if you're just friendly and trustworthy,
a lot of times people will open up and return
and you'll end up, if you bring somebody a gift,
that's like the biggest open door.
Bring somebody a potted plant who has a garden
and that person will be friends forever.
See anybody gardening?
Go over and say, hey, how are you?
I'm so excited.
It just be friendly.
I love your garden.
What are you growing?
Say, I'm Philip.
I'm into breeding peppers.
Oh, breeding peppers.
Really, how's that work?
Da-da-da-da-da.
Next thing you know, you got a friend
and then you say, look at, I'm looking for some land.
If you know anybody that's got a little bit of space
where I could garden, you never know.
So, you know.
That is pretty awesome.
People look for opportunities to be generous.
If you like, if you have open hands,
it's amazing how people will just open
their hands back sometimes.
Now some people are just jerks and they never will,
but that's their loss.
Most people are like- But they're not the majority.
Most people are blessed to give something away.
Ah, man.
Thank you, David.
That's good.
Thank you.
Yeah, thanks, Philip.
You're the good for a reason.
Thank you, David.
And thank you, everyone.
Thank you, Holly and Julia for facilitating
our meeting today.
And it's been a pleasure, David.
Thank you.
I really appreciate it.
I appreciate the work that you're doing.
And I'm honored to have a chance to talk to you in person
after having read your books and watched some of your videos.
And it was just a really great connection.
And it was interesting that you were over here
on this journey.
And I was over here on this journey.
And it was like, we hit this,
I was like, there it is.
He was working on the piece I was missing.
It's like the great invention happens
because somebody else finally invented this one piece
that finishes it.
They're like, yes, this is it.
So anyhow, you've been a great encouragement to me.
And thanks for having me on.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you for responding and being so willing to come on.
We really have enjoyed it today.
Oh, you bet.
Thank you for spending some of your Saturday on me.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, thank you.
Have a good weekend.
You too, God bless you.
Bye, everyone.
Bye.