 I'd like to introduce ourselves. My name is Greg Lolley. My wife Carol. We own Mayan Farm We're basically a medicinal plant farm. We started out doing more vegetables and Doing market type vegetable stuff, but in the last few years We've kind of shifted a little bit and started leaning more toward the specialty crop medicinal plant market We sell here at the farm store and we sell at the East Chase in Montgomery And then we go to Wittonka once a month on Thursdays for their market day We started this whole thing as a vehicle to in retirement. I retired in 2017 I graduated high school in 1975. There was a lot of greening of America and I was I was into it But the thing about it was at the time I didn't think I could make any money at it So I ended up going to college and got a degree in electronics and then went into aviation But in reality, it's took me 40 something years to get back to where I probably was the most happiest in my whole life So I'm back doing what I think I was started to do at the very beginning I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Meringa today It's one of our main items that we grow here as far as medicinal plants and and it being food So we try to concentrate on Having our food as medicine instead of having to take a medicine Let's just have our food be our medicine. And so Meringa is one of those kinds of things and as you can see the stops here are from where I cut them down last year. They are actually a Tropical type plant, so they can't take pretty much below about I don't know maybe 45 degrees or so They'll start dropping their leaves off So what I do is I come in here in the fall and I'll cut it off Just like you saw right there and this is new growth that's come up from the bottom the root that's still there So this comes up like this during the During the spring and then as it goes You'll see it'll get taller and taller But these are the leaves and we eat the leaves off of and this will actually grow to be 25 to 30 feet Tall by November, so I usually will leave Maybe a quarter of these two rows right here. I'll leave them to go to seed Basically, and then we take those seeds and we sell them and you can see they They come out like that with about maybe eight or ten or twelve different kinds of Stops that come out, but they do that every year and that you can cut them right back to the ground and they just come right back Known a lot of places as the never die tree Another thing that we do around here is we plant a lot of country This is a country plant right here. This is one we planted in and generally there's some all along in this row with the Moringa Country is a good Accumulator type plant has a deep tap root goes down real deep brings up a lot of Nutrients up to the top. Of course the Moringa does the same thing. It has extremely long tap root So we really don't have to do a whole lot of watering or anything to them Once they get established, you don't really have to worry about it a whole lot But we plant a lot of the country around it's another one of those Those plants that are that are good to be planted around your other stuff Another thing too is if you look right here, this is actually elderberry. This is the elderberry right here also something we do here that that most of your Permaculture type people will understand and that is that we have a hugel pile right here This is a hugel culture. But basically what it is a dug a big hole. We actually cut down a big oak tree over by the barn and so we didn't want the wood to just rot away So we took that and buried it here and then piled the soil back on top of it So we grow herbs and things on top of this, but there's a lot of medicinal type plants and a lot of them You know, it's like when people say they they talk about weeds. They are weeds, you know, but weeds are Are a useful thing. I don't think there's any non useful plants on the earth I think God made every plant to have a use and so Even though these weeds aren't doing exactly what we think they ought to One of the premises that we operate on is that, you know, I'll let a weed grow To the point to where it's about the seed and even sometimes if I want more of that weed To let it go. I'll let it go to seed But there's a function that that weed is taking place. It's doing a function for me So, you know, I don't have Where with all the knowledge to be able to understand what all is going on in this system here but I do know that There are no Junk plants. They're only plants that are Successional and they're trying to do something to your soil They're trying to mediate or fix some kind of an action that's that's happened on the soil whether it be compaction or whether it be you know, some chemical or or I mean any number of different things, but all these weeds are nothing but successional plants I try to work within that system whatever it is in that system so that I can reap the best benefit that I can Okay, so what we've done here we we've kind of made a little bit of a transition I'm trying to do some different things inside the tunnel house Not so much just regular vegetables with more to this specialty crop. So this is all Ginger right here that are in bags So I'm experimenting with the bags because what I've noticed is that a lot of times it's it's really hard to Get the soil off of the the ginger so you spend a lot of time So I'm hoping that with the bag and my mixture that I'll be able to wash the ginger real easy and it be able to Be a better product for me and I can get a premium price for it so the same kind of thing here is These are turmeric here. These are all turmeric except for this. This is actually a Avocado that was in the in the Compost pile that sprouted Girls that pulled it up and to here plant that so I put it in here We'll see how it does but anyway, we're just kind of trying to transition some of this tunnel house over to more I'm probably going to plant some ginger in the ground just to see how it does too So I wanted to talk a little bit about the turmeric that I was talking about these are actually ones that I have started in these little bags and You can see They're beginning to sprout there. That's that's a black turmeric right there So I have about four different kinds of turmeric that that I grow I'm trying to really Concentrate and grow more of the Other types of turmeric because they all have medicinal value. Everybody knows about the curfew milonga But now some of these other ones that green and the black and some of the others are for other different kinds of things so they Are just used for different things, but as you can see they're just beginning to Sprout there and I'll put that in one of those bags in there and They'll come along and by September or so they will have drawn enough to where I can harvest those These are IBC totes that we have bought For thinking that we do some kind of a rainwater catchment system But when we got the grant or the equipped cost share for the well We kind of shifted a little bit and we didn't have to Do the rainwater harvesting we didn't think we wanted to anymore because we had a well So I had all these totes that I had bought so I said well I could go ahead and get some soil and fill them up And these are actually open on the bottom so they go all the way through the soil So they're not any kind of a bottom in them or anything like that They're just cut out on the top and the bottom of it and then I took the IBC tote and cut it in half and the reason why I put this it's actually signed material for my Signs on the side of the road that I bought and Take that and put it over the white plastic or because it has no UV protection in it hardly at all So it really deteriorates really really fast. So if you have a access to some IBC totes they make great beds But you just have to put a little bit of something over the plastic to make sure they don't Detiorate because of the UV These are elderberries that are flowers and this is just one that started from a stick That I just stuck in the ground. I went to a friend of mine's house And I like the way it looked because it was a big plant Some people don't like the big plants. There are plants that they need to be big and some of them need to be small because of where you put them But but this one I thought would go good here because it was like my primary place And like I was talking about if I have if I have vegetables or something planted there And I took that away then those mycelium will be able to migrate to the roots of the of the elderberry more elderberries flowers Of course the twist jar doesn't like the heat You see it's it's kind of unhappy but Kale we like to grow kale These are some Chinese Chinese vegetables we like the bok choy and tatsoi and we like to stir fry those and we have patty pan squash there and on the other end of that we have going up that way is Roselle Roselle is a I'm sure you probably have heard of hibiscus tea. It's where you get your calyx is a hibiscus tea comes from But we grow a lot of those because the meringa and the hibiscus go really well together because of the properties that both of them have for helping with blood sugar and blood pressure So a lot of people will take hibiscus flowers and put them with the meringa and make a tea out of it So we wanted to be able to grow our own Hibiscus also so that whenever somebody bought it they knew that it came from us and it was all totally grown here So these are winter huckleberries here They're coming along are not winter huckleberries. They're black huckleberries winter huckleberries the tree These are black huckleberries and and basically you don't eat them off of the bush We make uh jams and jellies and things like that. It's value-added type stuff But uh, it's a good good one for around here But uh, those are all the rest of the patty pans now these This is a stinging nettle. So don't touch that Uh, we use it in a lot of our salves and creams and stuff like that So a lot of these things that have the flowers in them and stuff like that You know mother nature doesn't like to be uncovered. So mother nature like all moms like to be covered So, uh, she doesn't like to have uh her Her skin which is a soil Uncovered so we try to cover everything up and I'm I'm very I'm okay with A few weeds here and there until they start You know causing a problem because I know that they're they're having a function. They're they're performing a function And uh, they're part of the system and uh, I'm the alien So I'm just trying to work within the system um We had grown last year we grew all Uh, plantain. This is plantain right here and you probably see that all along and the way you can tell plantain is it has five veins In the leaf you see that right there has five veins So if you see that that five vein leaf pretty much that's going to be a plantain of some type Far as I know I've not seen anything else add to five distinct ridges in it like that but um This is good for a lot of different things good for sabs and things like that and um I mentioned a while ago. I mentioned metamucil and metamucil is actually made from the seed From the plantain plant is psyllium That is where psyllium comes from it comes from the plantain plant So, uh, we grow a lot of these for our medicinal type stuff So a lot of these things though are about to be transitioned over into turmeric So I have a lot of turmeric as you saw a while ago that'll be coming along so we'll be planting those out so A lot of this stuff will will become all turmeric And this is another type of plantain. This is it's still plantain It's just a different variety and you can still see the same see the same vein pattern Just like we did before It's got those high ridges on the veins there And it'll have five or or maybe even seven Sometimes but uh, you can see that's a little bit different than the other one makes a real wide leaf So if you wanted a poultice to be made out of plantain, then you'd want the wide leaf So there's some of its wide leaf some of its Never leaf But you can see the bee the bee is really working on that right there on that plantain flower That's one of the things about having all these type of Flowers and and different kinds of plants that bloom at different times You can see there. We don't have a whole lot of other things, but Different bees like different things so You know, we want to provide as much natural Environment for these insects that we can So we want to look at our our system as a whole And not just as an isolated Incident or whatever This is one of our bug hotels is what we call them. It basically is just a place for animals insects We've had we have birds going in there the birds know that the bugs live in there, too So we actually have birds that come in and and raid the nests of the bugs that are living inside the bug hotel But it's all part of the system so These places that these bugs can go and hibernate and and raise their young and and do all these kinds of things That they would normally do out in the in the normal system We want to provide some habitat for that We want the whole complete system working here. We don't want to leave anybody out because Everybody is part of the system And all it is is just different Basically stuff like there's cardboard in a in a milk jug, you know and some pieces of metal And you know it could be pretty much anything but the only thing is you have to watch out because You are inviting wasp and wasp are a big part of our system Now and they generally won't mess with you unless they feel threatened and you're touched their House or something like that their nest But you always have to be careful because you are living with these things and we have lots of spiders We have lots of wasps. We have lots of All kinds of things that are trying to hurt you But we just try to stay out of their way and work within their system because you know, they were here a long long time before we were But one of the bug hotels This is called a bitter melon and bitter melon is one of those stall warts, I guess you'd say of our urethic medicine This is one of our big ones right here that we grow it goes right along with turmeric and ginger We have mullin here This is mullin it's Native to around here and this The way we got started with mullin was we went and and grabbed this will actually make a Big stalk that'll come up that'll have the seeds on it So we went and we collected the stalk and we kind of throw it out the seeds here And you can see there's another one over there and this one right here and there's several here and there So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about what we're going to do back here This actually was done last year and we grew one crop Or I say we grew one crop we we grew one crop for the deer is what we did last year They pretty much ate everything But I think what we're going to do and we did this because of the micro irrigation to get the equip cost share on micro irrigation So we got that and we've got the well house there I still don't have the irrigation run from The well house out to the tunnel house, but that's what that Pex pipe will be for there But the plan is back here on this back side that is actually a south facing hill So this is one of the reasons why we bought this place because it was on a east west pretty much north south Square sitting and so that hill was on the on the south side. So my plan is to have Some fruit tree guilds back there And so those fruit tree guilds will consist of A fruit tree or a nut tree one or the other and then it'll have associated trees that will be around it It would be something like maybe Of course, we would have elderberries there We would have different kinds of other berries like blueberries those kinds of things as bushes But basically what we want to do is we want to start off with the Some kind of a fruit tree or nut tree and then have associated trees around it and basically a permaculture fruit tree guild type of thing and actually have some vegetables down here in the bottom one of the things that we've found Is at the farmers market. We do really well with plants and a lot of them are And I guess maybe we're becoming a little bit more known for permaculture type plants and Regenerative type plants, I guess you'd say as a new and beginning farmer you got to look at different ways that you can make money and the ways that you can monetize what you're doing and Capture as much as you can whenever you go to the farmers market for your time that you're doing there So you don't want to go to the farmers market and sell a few vegetables and come back home and wish you'd been able to sell more So you want to have something like this. So if somebody's not buying vegetables They could be You know buy it a plan or something like that, you know we've had a lot of success with Being affiliated with the new and beginning farmer program whenever we first got started Had it not been for those words of wisdom that we got from farmers and and from People who were working with the beginning farmer program that kind of guided us through some of the I guess government bureaucracy and Not even knowing what question to ask when you go down to the nrcs of the fsa office They really helped us formulating the questions that we needed to ask to get the help that we needed We were able to secure a tunnel house Equip in 2015 we completed the tunnel house in 2016 right around july august of 2016 and then We also a couple of years later received through SAR and Auburn University They came down and put netting around our tunnel house so that we could participate in the Studies that they had on on bugs inside and outside the tunnel house and see how effective the The Netting was working into that kind of thing and then a little bit later than that We actually came up and got a micro irrigation Equip grant or cost share and we also received one for the well So those are the last two things that we've done, but like I said had it not been for the Alabama new and beginning farmer program We probably would be nowhere near where we are today Because of the the knowledge that they had already to kind of get us in the right direction and I think that's important to all new and beginning farmers to have a mentor Or someone who can help them as they navigate all these government agencies and Trying to ask the right question in the right office to get the help that you need Another one be open to changing midstream because you one of the things about being a new farmer and is being able to shift and to change And be able to go to where Where your niche is whatever your niche might be I think probably every new and beginning farmer needs to have that in their thought process of where they fit Into the overall Makeup of the farming community and and don't try to grow everything that somebody else is growing Find something that is it works on your land let your land dictate to you What you should grow on your land Just be willing to change and be willing to be a mentor a bit to have a mentor and to be able to listen and to Take from that experience as my Grandmother used to say take a page out of somebody else's book. You know, that would be one of the biggest things