 Good morning and welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. My name is Kendra Sakamoto, and I am a librarian here at West Vancouver Memorial Library. All right. Well, I recognize that we are all in different places this morning. I would like to acknowledge that for those of us on the North Shore, we are on the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Squamish, Pleewa Tooth, and Musqueam Nations. If you are uncertain as to which ancestral territory you live on, I encourage you to visit who's.land to learn more about the traditional lands on which you reside. Gardening and growing your own food are fundamentally rooted in having a close relationship with the land. The Coast Salish peoples have been the careful caretakers of these lands since time immemorial. I personally am incredibly grateful to those people who have always lived in harmony with the land. And when I'm out in my own garden, I strive to follow their principles, and to also be a careful steward. Today, we are absolutely delighted to welcome Joanna Wilkie. Joanna has been foraging gardening and cooking from a young age. These skills have woven together with a career in music and teaching. Homeschooling her own children aided her in curriculum planning when she developed a gardening and nutrition program at a local elementary school. Alongside teaching music and the garden buddy program, Joanna teaches online gardening and nutrition classes entitled Return to Roots through the BC Brain Wellness Program at UBC. She and her family continue to enjoy hundreds of kilos of fresh produce each year, grown on their 33 by 122 Vancouver lots. I would like to welcome Joanna to today's presentation. Okay, so without further ado, let's get started. I'm just going to turn on my screen share for a moment here, hang tight. Okay. You should be seeing a very pink screen. Hopefully we're good. Okay, so I'm just going to move my little camera window. So it's out of the way. All right. Good. So it's an honor to be invited to speak to today on a subject that I'm absolutely passionate about. And that is critically thinking about the food we're purchasing and putting into our bodies and linking that to the benefits that gardening brings to our physical and mental health. So I hope you're all sitting in a comfortable chair and have a cup of tea or coffee beside you. Cheers. It's going to be a fun hour plus of diving into garden goodness together. We're going to look at a variety of things today, starting with some of the reasons why I and so many other people choose to garden it and grow our own food. We'll also look at some of the important benefits that gardening brings to every age group. And interest first throughout will be tidbits about my gardening history and how I got to where I am today. Lastly, I'll offer 10 of my top gardening tips to help you grow your own food or increase your chances of being successful. I'll be referring to several books, websites and articles in my talk today and a list of resources will be made available after my presentation. It's important to know that my talk today is a personal journey. So it's a journey that I've taken with my family, my friends and community, and it's one that continues. So the story is not finished, nor do I have all the answers. I continue to learn, fail, succeed and grow. And my hope is that I might inspire some people to take the journey to. So let's get started. I'm hoping you all know how to open your chat window because like Kendra said, this window there, this is going to be an interactive presentation and I'd love your input as we go along. Neighbors think we're crazy. Well, maybe not our immediate neighbors, but certainly people passing by our front yard give it a quizzical look. I wonder, does a kind of madness come with gardening passion? Margaret Atwood seems to think so when she said, gardening is not a rational act. I would have to tend to agree. Hi, I'm Joanna Wilkie, garden enthusiast, musician, teacher, artist, mother of three constantly ravenous teenagers and wife of a wonderful husband who digs, prunes, builds things for me and generally puts up with my rational gardening ideas. Our Vancouver yard started out 25 years ago, rather unremarkably with some poorly sauded lawn on heavy clay soil with a few perennial shrubs scattered around the perimeter. We purchased the house in 1997, back in the days when you actually had to use film and get your photos developed at a shop in order to view them. That kind of dates me, doesn't it? The photos on the left, the photo on the left was taken soon after we purchased the house in 1997 and between 1997 and the photo on the right, taken in 2005. We'd added in a few fruit trees, a clematis up the front of the house, some berries, some nice flowering perennials. But it wasn't until 2010 when the yard really started to change shape. The first act of a rational gardening madness was to dig up part of our north-facing front lawn to put in two pear-shaped vegetable plots. It became a family joke that I asked for cow manure as a birthday present that year. These pear-shaped plots, along with many planter boxes, grow bags and pots over the years, have provided us with almost all the food we've needed as a family and they've been a source of much joy and excitement. However, the head scratching from the neighborhood residents increased this year as those plots were dug up. Actually, we dug up our whole front yard in mid-February, leaving a giant plot of mud and roots. Over the next few weeks of heavy labor, six cement pads appeared, then six raised beds, some arches, and finally some stone and pebble walkways. Today the common joke we hear is, well, those are gonna be the best tasting $200 per pound made as you've ever had. So the question remains, why would we go to this expense in backbreaking effort? I wanna explore with you today some of the rationale behind the madness. I know there are going to be lots of gardeners in our audience today. So let's start by collecting some of the reasons why we garden. If you're able, type into the chat some of your own personal reasons for gardening. I think Kendra's gonna help us out with this. Okay, so here's what I'm seeing. One of my friends, beauty, yes, food. It makes me calm, me too. Joy, peacefulness, experienced, love it. Makes me proud of myself, local fresh food, immediacy of food. I garden for food and to teach my children where their food comes from. Me too. I like touching dirt. Yes, we like getting your hands dirty. These are great. Thank you very much. Oh, I think I just, sorry about that. Let's try that again. There we go. Just close my screen share and start the chat. Oops. Okay, thank you for sharing. We can clearly see that the benefits of gardening are enormous and wide ranging. Covering all aspects of our lives from physical to mental to emotional to spiritual to artistic to social. One night sitting around the dinner table, I asked her family to think of something that combines so many of these aspects together like gardening does. We weren't able to come up with anything else that even came close. I'm not a scientist nor am I armed with flashy data and tables to illustrate my point, but the health benefits that gardening and being in nature provide us with having well studied and documented. Studies have shown that just being in nature for a few hours per week brings better immune function, reduced heart rate, cortisol and stress levels. It creates a better mood with greater self-esteem, less anxiety, depression and irritability. It's also known to restore capacity for concentration and attention. Other studies look into the effects on children who grew up near green spaces and found that regardless of the socioeconomic factors, it reduced the risk of many psychiatric disorders and dementia later in life. There have even been studies that found positive effects on the brain simply by looking at photos of nature or listening to sounds from nature. In fact, we can try this for ourselves right now. Have a look at this photo I took during one of our walks through Pacific Spirit Park. Now type into the chat words that come to mind when viewing this photo. Majesty, patience, calm, quiet, life, peace, pristine, serenity, tranquility. Yes, I agree. What's interesting to me is to consider why upon viewing this photo, we would come up with descriptive words that clearly affect our senses, such as relaxation, clean fresh air, tranquility, refreshment, calmness, rejuvenation and invigoration. If we were viewing this photo for the first time with no past experiences of being in a forest, so just imagine that, would we have the same words to describe what we're seeing? Are we drawing upon past positive experiences of being in nature? And being reminded of how good it felt to be there? Or are our bodies wired to have a deeper connection with the natural world? And if this is so, what does this mean for future generations who may experience a very different natural world than ours, such as one without ancient forests or great coral reefs? As a person who thrives and depends upon being in nature, I often ponder the importance of helping the next generation form a connection to the natural world. This pondering had a great impact on how we chose to spend our time as a family when homeschooling our own children and what curriculum we chose. Much time was spent out of doors, playing in the park, going for walks in the neighborhood, collecting seeds, leaves and other nature samples, inspecting bugs and their homes, enjoying the beauty of the changing of seasons, having fun puddle-jumping and floating boats down alleyway rivers, experimenting with wind through bubbles and windmills, and of course planting seeds in our garden, watching them grow and harvesting our produce. As the children grew, so did the depth and complexity of their studies. You can see how starting with just noticing the magical fairy-like beauty of mushrooms could eventually grow into an adult passion for studies in mycology or taking walks in the woods and appreciating the structure of barren tree branches could eventually lead to forestry or environmental studies. On a much simpler level, of course, learning to observe and notice the beauty and complexity of nature from a young age can lead to a greater appreciation, respect and love and concern for nature as an adult. And if you think about the environmental issues our world is facing today, that's imperative. In the book, Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louvre, he talks about this importance of simply enjoying nature and learning together, child and adult, when he says, we have such a brief opportunity to pass on to our children, our love for this earth and to tell our stories. These are the moments when the world is made whole. In my children's memories, the adventures we've had together in nature will always exist. So if you were a parent or grandparent or have the opportunity to nurture a child, I'd encourage you to spend as much time as you can together, exploring the great outdoors. It doesn't have to be complicated or costly. You can stay in your own neighborhood or even in your own backyard or a local park. Look under rocks and see what's living there. The beach is a great place for this. Our children spent hours looking under rocks for crabs or finding seashells along the shore. We're so lucky in Vancouver and along the West Coast to have the beaches that we do. Children are naturally fascinated by things that move and they love to collect things that can fit into their small hands like acorns or chestnuts. I strongly feel that establishing these happy exploratory outdoors moments in childhood create pathways in the brain that will last for a lifetime. Our eldest child was diagnosed at a young age with ADHD and anxiety. And it quickly became obvious that being out of doors not only calmed him down but also excited him in a good way. As an adult, he's able to articulate the benefits to his brain of forest bathing or going on his favorite walk up to commotion bog. Richard Leive obviously experienced exact same feelings because he wrote in his book, the woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me and yet excited my senses. Coincidentally, in our son's first year of English at university, the professor had the class studying articles which were mostly based upon the importance of human interaction with nature and the growing loss of these connections. One of the articles entitled, Extinction of Experience, the loss of human nature interactions by Soga and Gaston summarized, consequences of the loss of interaction with nature include deteriorating public health and wellbeing, reduced emotional affinity toward nature and a decline in pro-environmental attitudes and behavior, implying a cycle of disaffection toward nature. David Suzuki is another very active voice in showing concern for the growing disassociation between nature and our youth. His research has shown that getting involved with nature is vital to our entire population and especially so for children who will be the next generation living on our planet. Honestly, I couldn't agree more. I've taught gardening and nutrition in an elementary school now for eight years and I'm constantly witnessing this disassociation and increasing dependence and addiction to video games and social media. David Suzuki Foundation research has found that spending time outdoors can reduce stress and in symptoms of attention deficit disorders. It can boost immunity, energy levels and creativity. It can increase curiosity and problem-solving ability. It improves physical fitness and coordination and it can reduce the likelihood of needing glasses for near-sightedness. I come back to my own life experiences of spending time outdoors and a lifetime of gardening and the impact they've had upon me. My family spent a great deal of time throughout my childhood doing all sorts of outdoor activities such as camping, going in hikes, picking berries, gardening and harvesting and picnicking at parks and beaches. Many of my fondest childhood memories come from this wealth of experience and caused me to want to recreate similar experiences for my own children. It's a part of why I have such a passion for gardening today. However, there was also an instinctual drive that caused me to obsessively pick berries as a child or form my own garden as a teen by collecting flowering weeds and other volunteer alleyway plants. I learned through doing and was also allowed the opportunity to try. In my later teenage years as the intensity and stress of music competitions, concerts and exams ramped up, I found repose in gardening, cooking and creating. They allowed my mind to calm down and focus on the task at hand rather than worrying. In a sense, they were my medication or my yoga moment and they continue to be that to this day. I find it fascinating that music and gardening have coexisted in my life right from the get go and continue to work together to bless my life and those around me even now. Upon receiving a piano performance degree in 1996, I discovered that my personality was better suited for teaching which I continue to do today in both gardening and music. For almost two years now, I've taught an online gardening class called Return to Roots through the BC Brain Wellness Program at the University of British Columbia. It's an amazing one of a kind program that offers free resources such as clinical care, lifestyle programs, education and research with a mission of designing a comprehensive and integrated approach to brain wellness for people with chronic brain conditions, their care partners and healthy ages. The program's goal is to improve and sustain the quality of life and function for its participants while pursuing rigorous research into lifestyle interventions for brain health. They offer a wide variety of classes most of which are currently offered online due to COVID, ranging in topics from gardening to music, exercise, art, crafts, photography, yoga, artful living, mindfulness, dance, improv for brain health and so many more. If you don't know about it, I'd highly recommend that you check it out. You can view and register for the current programs at the address you see at the bottom right. And of course, a list of resources will be made available after my presentation. Whoops. Our Return to Roots classes largely follow the seasons and whatever gardening activities pertain to that season. So in our fall classes, these are some of the subjects we were looking into. You'll notice there's a heavy emphasis on understanding and building soil. So you can see we've covered composting, cover crops, mulching, improving our soil, what lives in it and what are its components? Verma composting, thus the worms on the right. We also looked into other seasonal activities like planting garlic and bulbs, growing microgreens and sprouts, which is the perfect thing for winter and fall. And eating in season by creating our own healthy soups and stews from root crops and other hardy greens. In our winter session, we looked at inspirational gardeners to get us excited about the upcoming spring session. We talked about planting a garden, saving, testing and ordering seeds. Oh, and Mason Bees and the fantastic bee lending program at West Vancouver Memorial Library run by Taryn Irkhart. And one of our participants was interested, could she grow lemon tree in BC? And yes, you can on our BC West Coast. And another one was dealing with molds. So we looked into that. And as the bulbs and blossoms emerged, we learned about how to naturalize bulbs and grow hellebores for the best display. We are constantly running out of time in our spring sessions as there's an endless supply of material for us to cover. But these are some of the topics that we've covered during our spring sessions. The emphasis is on, of course, on growing seeds and seedlings and planting. So you're going to see a lot of things like how to seed indoors and outdoors. And what are the advantages to growing your own seedlings and then transplanting versus just a rep seeding? Also, if you're seeding indoors, you're gonna be looking at potting up and hardening off and dealing maybe with cold frames or all that sort of stuff. One of the problems in spring with early seedlings is rodent damage or insect damage. So we looked a bit at that and how to protect them. We also looked at, I've been experimenting a lot with worm castings and finding that they really produce awesome seedlings and really give your plants a strong immunity boost. So we've been talking a bit about that. We've also been talking about creating unique trellises and being creative in how and where you plant so that you can maximize your small gardening space, which is a reality for most of us living in the city. We look at the benefits of intercropping and mixing perennials in with your vegetables. Again, perfect for small spaces or small gardens. We look at succession planting for maximizing your growing season and also understanding plant families and how they help you deal with insects and diseases. Spring spills into summer as we move into the heat-loving plants such as tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, corn, squash, beans and eggplant. We continue to look into training and pruning tomato plants, how to successfully grow climbing vines over top of plants that will tolerate some shade to maximize our small plots, companion planting for flavor and to confuse those pesky insects, how to organically and effectively deal with insects and diseases, how to deal with drought through use of mulches and wise watering techniques. That seems to be a big one in Vancouver as we deal with more and more drought every summer and how to harvest our garlic and how to store it. And we also looked at bolting and replanting for a fall crop. Oh, and of course we mustn't leave out eating and cooking with our huge haul from our gardens. Best of all. Our classes are peppered with discussion amongst our participants as the exchange ideas and helpful tips. I've also added a resources link on the Return to Roots registration page that lists online links to some of the web articles or videos we viewed in the class. The link for registration to the Return to Roots class will be made available in cases of interest to you or someone you know, and we'd really love to have you join our group, so please come. Eating and season is an extremely important part of what we look at in our Return to Roots classes and learning to appreciate and enjoy what each season has to offer, not only benefits our own health, but also the health of our planet. So I've pointed a few things here. If you're eating and season, it means you're going to experience better taste, for sure. So the fresher the vegetable or fruit, the better it's gonna taste. The sugars are gonna be flowing in the juices and all that and it's just gonna be at its peak at its best in terms of flavor. Therefore it's also gonna be fresher. And it's also going to have a higher nutritional value. So those are three benefits right away from eating and season. And of course, the closer to home, the better. Therefore also, when things are in season, they will likely be cheaper because they'll be more plentiful. So it's like the contrast of buying corn in February versus buying corn in August. You can get them real cheap and at a farmer's market and they taste amazing. You could just eat it raw and it tastes amazing versus if you bought one in February, it's not gonna taste amazing and it's gonna be packaged. So therefore it's going to be more environmentally friendly to eat in season. And lastly, it also supports the body's natural and nutritional needs for the season. So just even as simply as looking at my pictures here on the left, I've got fall and winter. And you can see they're what we want in fall and winter. They're hearty, they're full of root veggies and really just they're warm, comforting, all that sort of stuff. Whereas in the summer and spring, we need things that are crispier and full of juice and all that sort of thing. So we're running around and it's hot and we need to be hydrated. So it's just on a very simple level. After having grown our own food now for many years, I firmly believe that gardening and nutrition walk hand in hand together. One has only to grow their own carrot and eat it to understand and appreciate this concept. I believe that as our societies have advanced in technology, as our cities have grown and as the rapid paces of our daily lives have increased, we've lost some important and vital connections to our natural world. And as a result, both our environment and our human health have greatly suffered. In her book, The Edible Balcony, Indira Nidu says, I think we've forgotten what real food tastes like. Proteus is no longer grown for flavor, but for how well it will store and survive transportation. What makes a tomato juicy and tasty is sometimes also the very quality that makes it highly perishable. When we select our produce at the supermarket, we often look for perfection. Apples that look like they've fallen from the pages of a toddler's alphabet book, not off the branch of a tree. Most of us know that apples are often polished with wax to make them super shiny, but how often do we remind ourselves of that? I was first introduced to this concept in so many others at a B&B that my husband and I stayed at on Salt Spring Island when we were first married. It was one of those shared table experiences that at first seemed a little awkward, you know, the ones, but in this case, right away, we and all the other guests knew this one was special. We were served a stewed fig compote with freshly made granola and yogurt as a starter, and we're promptly told that everything we were eating came from the farm. I didn't even know I liked figs up until then, never mind a stewed fig, but that changed my mind. Next came farm eggs poached in apple cider vinegar on top of home baked rye bread with a fresh garden salad decorated with edible flowers. Did you know you can eat salad for breakfast? I didn't. My average breakfast up until this point included, I don't know, a selection of dried cereals from a box and maybe a glass of processed orange juice or something sweet, some sweet yogurt laden with sugar. So I wondered my blood sugar dipped every day at around 11 a.m. and needed another sugar boost to keep me going. The couple who round the farm were named Michael Abelman and Jean Marie Herman. They have since sold that B&B and are now owners, caretakers and instructors at Foxcliff Farm in the Center for Arts, Ecology and Agriculture located on Maxwell on Salt Spring Island. It's a 120 acre organic farm that not only offers farms day accommodations, but also provides a plethora of fresh fruits and vegetables year round to two Salt Spring Island farmers markets, a CSA which is Community Supported Agriculture Program and several restaurants in Victoria and Vancouver such as the Farmers' Apprentice. Of the many people that have influenced the way I think about food and gardening, Michael Abelman has been the most profound and was the instigator in my life that turned me into wanting to grow my own food to feed my family. He has written numerous books and traveled the world as a farmer, writer, photographer, public speaker and pioneer of the organic and urban agricultural movement since the 1970s. He was talking about concepts such as eating and season, soil health and its biomes, water conservation, polycropping and cover crops and the importance of connecting to our land and food years before such ideas became popular. His four books you'll see here are as beautiful as they are thought provoking and I would say I must read for anyone who wants to grow their own food or who is concerned about the food that we eat. The work that Michael Abelman has done over his lifetime is inspirational and astonishing and I'd have a hard time pointing out what has had the most impact but perhaps what stands out to me is his founding work that continues today in Vancouver at Soul Foods. You can read about this story in his book, Street Farm which is the inspirational count of residents in the notorious low track in Vancouver, British Columbia, one of the worst urban slums in North America who joined together to create an urban farm as a means of addressing the chronic problems in their neighborhood. It's a story of recovery, of land and food, of people and of the power of farming and nourishing others as a way to heal our world and ourselves. You'll notice here in the background you can see Vancouver, the city and then you can see the Canby Street Bridge. So you can actually view this farm if you walk along Canby Bridge. It's located just outside of Olympic Village in that empty parking lot there and I'd recommend going to check it out, it's amazing. The restorative power of gardening is truly wonderful and I get to see this every week as I work with a class of nine and 10 year olds. I started the Garden Buddy program at a local elementary school eight years ago and it's been a truly delightful experience where I get to learn alongside the children as we discover the natural world together. The program was started with the intention of benefiting the children with all the things I've already mentioned in my talk but also as a way to form community within the school and form connections between generations. The name Garden Buddies refers to the bond that developed between the children and the adult volunteers that work together each week and often those volunteers were the grandparents of the children. The Garden Buddy program runs for the majority of the year with a short break from November to January. We meet every Tuesday afternoon and cover a wide variety of garden related topics. The students work in teams to plan, plant, tend and harvest from their garden beds. They design and build their own trellises and once we start harvesting in the spring we cook with the produce every week making delicious salads of all types, herb hummus and herb butter, regular pasta salad. We have a radish party where we make butter to eat with our radishes. We just did that last week. And at the end of the year we roast around 50 pounds of potatoes to feed the entire school. Garden Buddies isn't just about growing vegetables though. We cover many other topics such as studies of seeds, leaves, how plants grow, plant parts, photosynthesis. There's a big word for grade fours. Organic gardening principles, composting, weeds, cover crops, herbs, insects, worms. Oh, that was always a favorite. Life cycles and plant families. The kids get to taste different microgreens. You'll see one on a little desk there in one of the photos. We look into food miles and the zero mile diet. They have no clue what that is. And we explore a healthy eating unit. That's an interesting one. You usually like to eat chips and candy and things like that. We study food preservation which leads us into looking into the First Nations and the pioneers. And in that unit we make fruit leather to take with us on our field trip into Pacific Spirit Park and Kamosan Baw where we study the ecosystems and learn about invasive species and forest fires and the webs of life. And we take a huge look into soil on which all life on earth depends. Garden Buddies has become the science program for the grade four class meeting the current BC requirements in dynamic, creative and engaging ways. And it's really fun. It provides a break from the usual school activities. I often find the squirmyest of boys humming as they're digging in the soil or building their cellices. It gives those children a chance to shine who might not otherwise do so with typical book work. And it builds perseverance, character and the ability to work cooperatively within a group. I'm gonna make sure you're not all falling asleep yet. And I'm going to ask you to write into the chat. This is the last time. What do you think is the most important skill you need to have as a gardener? So yes, I've put a little cheat sheet up here but yeah, let's see what you come up with. Patience, ha ha. Yeah, that's for sure. Curiosity, love it. Consistency, yes. Oh, these are great. Passion, oh, they're older than what I've said. Adaptability, unity. Yes, they're fantastic. Love the words. Mind everybody, you gotta get those fingers typing there. Engagement, great. Experimentation, yes. Yeah, we've really gotta come at it with love for family, more patience. Love it guys, love it, love it. Thank you, those are wonderful. And you can see like I've got all sorts of things here that we typically talk about like soil and fertilizing, mulching, cover crops, composting, seeding, germination, all this stuff. These are typical gardening talks, right? All super important skills and knowledge. And I actually love yours even more than what I put in my cheat sheet. But I think one of the things that maybe overrides them all, to be especially successful in gardening is the art of observation. The three things I always shine a light on within the Garden Body Program are observation, diversity, and using your senses. And I'll explain a little bit more about that. First one, Michael Abelman agrees with the concept of observation when he says beyond these skills, the thing that really defines good art and farming artistically is observation, really seeing the world, editing elements from that world and interpreting those observations into a melody, a poem, a painting, or a well-made box of beautiful and flavorful food. Nature is a wonderful teacher if you are paying attention. In the Garden Body Program, I teach the children to notice things, to take the time to stop and examine the world around them. If you're a beginner gardener, I can't stress this point enough. In a moment when I give you some practical gardening tips, you'll notice observation comes as my first few points. Secondly, I teach the children that diversity is not only helpful, but it's essential, both in our human world as well as in the plant and animal world. It's important for every human being to feel worthwhile and needed, to have a purpose and their own set of unique skills to offer. Plants are the same in some respects, and if you understand and appreciate this fact, it can go a long way in helping you garden successfully. Understanding that plants have families with similar growing habits and needs can help you when managing pests and diseases in your garden through use of intercropping and companion planting. And lastly, I'm constantly pushing the children to fully engage by using their senses. As humans, we very often derive our strongest pleasures from experiences that affect our five senses, experiences that involve our touch, our taste, our smell, our sight and our hearing. We're so blessed with these senses and they not only give us the information we need to learn, grow and stay safe, but they also bring us pleasure and satisfaction. Tapping into this connection and forming this information freeway between your senses and your brain is absolutely vital. And if you take away nothing else from my talk today, this would be enough. I'd encourage you to find ways to explore more deeply the senses you've been gifted with. And if you're missing a sense or two for various reasons, lean harder into the other ones that you have. One of the first activities I do with my grade four class is to study four different types of soil. Sandy soil, clay soil, forest and garden loam. And just by feeling, smelling and observing it, even though they are only nine years old, they can tell you immediately which two types of soil would be the most beneficial for plants to grow in. The world of gardening can seem overwhelming to a beginner. And sadly, this is often why people who want to try their hand at it end up getting lost and giving up in the process. It's also a world that involves some ability to face failure and to be doggedly determined to carry on, thus my blue sticky note in the middle there. However, there are some practical tips that can help you to not only ease into the world of gardening, but can also help you experience some success. So let's have a look at these now. I'm gonna give you my 10 top tips to help you in your gardening life. And let's see if you can remember what tip number one was going to be. Here it is. Slow down and observe. You got it. Learn to notice things and take the time to carefully observe. So just start by observing the sunlight. The way the sun shines into your growing space will determine the types of plants that you can grow. So for example, I have a little saying here in the middle. If you grow vegetables for the fruit or the root, you'll need a minimum of six to eight hours of sunlight. Whereas if you go for the leaves, four hours is often all you'll need. Observe other people's gardens in your neighborhood or at a local community garden. Look at how they've arranged their plants and what they've chosen to grow. Ask other gardeners questions. Find out what worked and what didn't. Gardens need to be carefully observed so you can troubleshoot along the way and learn as you go along. Another helpful tool in the observational department is to keep a journal. Journaling and planning is essential. It helps you remember from year to year what you've learned and done. I use my journal to draw garden plants, to brainstorm, to write down plants I've grown or bought, seeds I've chosen, the weather. It's been a big one this year. Soils and fertilizers I've used, pests I've dealt with and garden renovations we've done. I also keep a huge binder of recipes by ingredient. And by that, I mean fruit and vegetable ingredient. When you grow your own fruits and vegetables, they often ripen all at once, leaving you with pounds and pounds of beans or mammoth zucchini, enough to feed an army and you wonder what the heck you're gonna do with it all. It happens to me every year and I'm always grateful to have that binder that I can immediately go to, look up an ingredient and be inspired by all the things I can make out of that ingredient. You'll start to notice when you do this that certain fruits and vegetables have qualities that lend themselves to particular styles of cooking. Zucchini, for example, is a marvelously adaptable fruit. And yes, it's a fruit, which can be made into all sorts of baked goods, thrown into soups, stews, stir fries and omelets, and also canned into salsa, pickles or relish. So it's one that you can cook, bake, fry, freeze, dry and eat fresh. Lettuce, on the other hand, is mostly only eaten raw. So knowing what you can make out of an ingredient can determine if you want to grow it in your garden or not. I would also add to that, grow what you like to eat. I've decided, for example, that I'm not going to plant Swiss chard this year. Don't tell anybody, because even though it's super easy to grow and it's very hardy and colorful, it's like one of those workhorse plants in the garden. It's amazing. I will fully admit, it's a wonderful plant full of nutrition. Our family doesn't really like the taste of it and we much prefer beets, which are actually a little bit more adaptable in cooking because I can still can the root and that sort of thing. So for this year, that's what we're gonna do. We'll see if I change my mind for next year. Okay, gardening tip number three, keep it simple. This is really important. It's easy to get carried away, even for the experienced gardener, trust me. The endless selection of enticing seed packages and lush plants growing merrily in those nurseries are incredibly tempting, especially now, aren't they? Yeah, I'd recommend starting with just one pot of herbs. Herbs are a must-have plant for everyone because they are not only useful in cooking, but they also have lovely flowers and divine scents. They're relatively easy to grow and care for and many will come back year after year. So start by buying some good quality potting soil and a few herbs from a nursery rather than trying to grow them yourself from seed. You'll have quicker success that way and you'll be able to enjoy them for a greater amount of time. Gardening tip number four, grow things in pots or planters. Large pots and planters are wonderful because they offer greater flexibility for urban gardeners. You can move the pot where it will get the optimal amount of sunshine or you can grow up close to your kitchen where you'll be more likely to keep it under your observing eye. And of course, they're the only option if all you have is an apartment balcony. Because of the varied landscape in my garden and the surrounding trees and buildings, I've had to rely quite heavily on growing things in pots and planters. Having learned to adapt to these methods, I found that you can have an incredible success and a bountiful yield of fresh fruits and vegetables year round. And for some crops, I even prefer them. If you're interested in growing things in pots and only have an apartment balcony to grow on, I'd highly recommend checking out this website by Tuideo. I think that's how you pronounce your name and for YouTube videos. She's named her site, her 86 M squared because she and her husband started their journey in a small apartment in Germany which had 86 square meters, eight of which included the balcony where she plans her incredible garden. I'd recommend starting with the one entitled growing a small vegetable garden on my balcony, eight square meters, which is number 11 from 2020. I think the first year I showed my class, a few years ago, it had like one million hits and it's now up to some unreal number, I don't know, three, four million. It's quite astonishing. And honestly, any of her videos are beautiful. They're absolutely gorgeous. If you're new to growing vegetables or would like to grow something this year, I'd highly recommend growing carrots or radishes in a large pot or planter. And you still have time to plant some, especially for this cool weather we're having. It's actually a perfect time to plant some. So once again, get yourself some good quality potting soil, some seeds from a nursery, garden store or grocery store. Find a place that gets no less than six hours of sunshine each day. And then in fact, I'd go for more. If you can get more, do it. The more sun you've got, the better. And then you just plant your seeds. There are lots of videos online on how to do this, such as articles and videos from our local company, West Coast Seeds. So that brings me into my next gardening tip, which is number five, don't just wing it. It's really easier to do that. Just kind of throw some seeds in the garden and hope for the best, don't do it. Use your garden resources wisely. In my first year of really going full out growing vegetables, I used that free West Coast Seeds gardening guide until it was dog-eared and falling apart, literally. You can pick one up at many local hardware stores or nurseries. It has everything you'll need to get you started on growing vegetables, herbs and many flowers. It's also chock full of beautiful photos and practical tips, simplified and easy to understand gardening science. And the ever important timing charts for planting things in BC. And I think now they've even expanded their regions into like Ontario and places like that. West Coast Seeds also has an incredible website where you can find instructional articles, how-to videos, a garden wisdom blog, regional planting charts, recipes and of course a catalog of all their products and seeds. If you subscribe to their emails, and I'm not affiliated here, but I think they're an awesome company, you'll get access to wonderful lectures and newly posted articles and planting and timing reminders and all sorts of other useful information. All right, gardening tip number six. Grow something pretty, something edible, something that smells nice and grow something new. It's important to have something pretty that you're growing. And this doesn't just mean flowers. Leaves are pretty too. Even grasses and twigs have their own beauty. Grow something that inspires you. Like for example, I'm just always so inspired by the way ferns unfurl, I just think it's amazing. You go for a walk in the forest and look at those ferns on spiraling right now and it just, I'm astonished by it. Growing something edible is just as rewarding as growing something pretty, possibly more so if you actually get to eat it. The joy of eating something you've grown yourself and picked out of your garden is hard to describe. I think this photo of my two-year-old daughter who's just grown her first radish just about sums up that feeling. The taste you'll experience from freshly picked produce grow right outside your door, simply do not compare to any produce you'll ever buy anywhere else, even at a farmer's market, although that's the next best thing if you can't grow your own. The flavor and nutrients found in fruits and vegetables are at their peak when they've been freshly harvested. So the best way to capitalize on this is by growing your own. Growing your own produce will also inspire you to eat healthier and grow and preserve your own food. It will change the way you think about food, what you choose to put into your body, what food you choose to buy, and where you purchase it from. With rising food prices that we're experiencing right now and food shortages and environmental problems and other world concerns, I think we all bear a responsibility to help build resiliency into our cities and places that we live in. One of the ways we can do this is to help with food security by growing some of our own fresh produce. It's absolutely amazing what you can harvest out of a very small piece of land or even a pot. Our Vancouver lot of 33 by 122 feet feeds our family of five for most of the year. Sometimes the only produce we buy at the store are things we can't grow here in Vancouver, such as bananas, pineapples, and mangoes. Growing something that smells nice, such as a flower or a herb, is another way to tap into that tremendous pleasure that gardening brings us. Herbs like lemon balm, pineapple sage, chocolate mint or French lavender have the capability to transport us into another world. And finally, growing something new each year as a challenge is always a great learning experience, helping you to expand your gardening knowledge and confidence. Two years ago, because of my involvement in the Brain Wellness Program, I dove into the world of microgreens and spros. And what a joy they brought to me and my family during those dark, wet, rainy months of the pandemic. When fresh food was scarce and I didn't want to venture into the grocery store. Sorry, the feed seems to be quite slow here. Once again, there are tremendous resources online in any area of gardening interest. I found a wonderful family-run company located in Saskatchewan named Mum Seeds that not only supplies our Canadian microgreen and sprout growers, but also has videos and helpful growing advice for the home grower. If you don't have the option to garden outdoors and all you have is indoor apartment space, sprouts are an excellent and delicious way to get that farm fresh nutrients and taste into your diet. And they're just, they're packed full of nutrition and they're easy to digest as well. I actually feel everyone should grow them because they are so economical. They don't require any soil grow lights or heat mats. And you can do it right on your kitchen counter and get a fresh supply of nutritious food in only like three to five days. So if you're interested in learning how to sprout, head to Mum Seeds online and look in their growing section for their video gallery on how to do it. Gardening tip number seven, mulching is magic. Learn about the benefits of mulch in your garden, whether you're growing in the ground, planters or in pots. As our summer drought in Vancouver seems to be getting worse with the passing years, mulch is your ticket to growing healthy plants that can withstand higher temperatures, pests and diseases. And it also helps to conserve water. I've used a variety of mulches over the years but I've settled on leaves and bark mulch as my favorite around my perennials and straw and pet bedding wood shavings around my edibles. Just don't use treated wood chips or hay as your mulch. Hay has seeds in it that will give you a big headache. I don't want that. So you can see there, I've got lots of different types of mulch that you can use and there are others too but of course you don't want to put rubber on top of your veggies and rock is not a good mulch in that case. Mulches are often used for discouraging weeds. So you can see my benefits there. It discourages weed growth. It moderates the soil temperature. It helps to retain the soil moisture and I find that when I'm watering, water just easily goes through it rather than running off when, if you just have bare soil, the sun will bake it and then the water will just run off when you hose it and then you'll put your finger in and it's totally dry underneath. Mulch does not do that. It helps to, you know, the nutrients and all that to sort of decompose into the soil and it just builds your microbial life that's going on underneath the soil. It prevents soil erosion. It's easier to maintain. It protects your plants from diseases and damage and this is, it's essential to mulch if you are planting tomatoes because it gives that barrier between the leaves and the soil and it stops that disease cycle or at least helps with that. And it gives your gardens a uniform look. Yeah, I just like the look of it. Some of the cons are a few. It can attract rodents and bugs, especially if you apply like quite thickly. It has to be reapplied annually, usually, depending on the mulch and it can change the acidity of your soil. Again, depending on the mulch. You also have to watch out if you don't mulch too thickly or too thinly. Gardening tip number eight, you can see I'm using the alliteration here to help us remember, trellises are terrific. Many of us live in big cities today and don't typically have acres to plant on. So gardening space comes at a premium. So you're gonna learn to find creative ways to utilize that space by growing things upward and above other crops that can tolerate some light shade. I've constantly been inspired by the creative efforts I've seen at community gardens where the folks renting the small plots are forced to find solutions to increase their harvest. For example, if you can get them growing ahead of time, leafy crops, remember, which require only about four hours a sun, often don't mind being a little shaded out by cucumbers or beans growing overhead. Once again, watch Tuideo's video and see how she does this. She is an absolute trellis wizard, let me tell you. You can see from my slide that trellis materials are relatively easy to find and can be inexpensive to mix, but the benefits from using them are huge. So some of the benefits are that they increase the plant's exposure to sunlight because they're going upwards, right? And not just flopping all over the ground, which then increases the air circulation. That's really important to keeping your plant healthy. The fruit is not gonna rot on the ground. It's better for the pollinators that can easily access those flowers. It makes pruning and fertilizing easier, obviously, for all the same reasons. Makes harvesting easier. Interplanting is then an option. And of course, it's maximizing the space in our small growing area. And it's often a barrier for some ground critters as well. I find it very helpful because often things that might be on the ground won't climb up those trellises. So it can be useful that way. Number nine, compost is crucial. Honestly, of all the tricks in your gardening bag, when it comes to plant health and vigor, compost should be your first pick. All gardeners need some sort of access to compost. My smallest, most inexpensive compost lives in my basement year-round and it produces pure gold for my plants. I got it from City Farmer Vancouver and it's a verma compost. It was around $30. And it's just a modified rubber mate tote box into which we put our kitchen scraps, which are your nitrogen materials and worm bedding, which is the carbon materials, such as shredded paper and cardboard. So you can see up on the box on the left there, there's lots of different types of compost, obviously. Some of us are lucky and have a backyard composter, like a traditional compost, and into which we put our green waste and our leaves and all that. But a lot of us don't have that. So we have to rely on other things. And there are other things you could use, such as animal manure, like steer manure. You just kind of make sure it's well-aged. You can't just go out to a farm, shovel up a bunch of horse poop and pop it onto your garden. It's going to burn all your plants. So it's got to age. Sea soil is a great alternative. Tomatoes love sea soil, but it's quite rich, again. So you want to mix it in. It's not a soil, it's a soil nender. And it's also fairly pricey too, but I've used sea soil for many years and it's an excellent product. Mushroom manure is one, although you've got to watch it. It can be high in salts. So I've tended to steer away from that. Verma compost, I'm experimenting with that and I can't get enough of it. I'm just, I love it. I think it's amazing. And Bokashi compost is another very popular composting method that is growing in popularity these days. I have not done it myself. It uses a different process. It's anaerobic, so it doesn't use air and it uses fermentation. So the end product is quite different than what you would get from a traditional compost. But its benefits are that it's quicker, but then there's some other side things we'd have to talk about. But it's often hailed as something that's great for an apartment because it's small and quick. The benefits of compost in general though are obviously that they reduce the landfill waste, which is great. It retains water and soil and it helps to aerate the soil and it reduces soil erosion. So these, you can see the benefits are very similar to mulch in a lot of respects. It can help to sequester carbon, but that's another issue as well, which is being talked about in the composting world. It reduces the need for synthetic fertilizers, which is great. It increases that microbial activity in our soil, which is what we want. It increases plant disease resistance. It encourages better root development and it gives the plants a slow release of those key nutrients that they need. Here we are, our gardening tip number 10, you made it. And yes, there comes one of the words that you guys put into the chat. Gardening cultivates patience. It's important to remember that gardening is an instant. We become used to fast-paced everything. Fast food, high-speed internet, high-speed travel, efficiency in the workplace. Even our vacations are jam-packed with activity. It's no wonder we get tired. The natural world just doesn't work this way. Plants have their own time and although there are tricks to alter their timing a bit, patience is still a virtue in the world of gardening. There are cycles in nature and seasons and webs of life that should not be overlooked or ignored. Every single thing, whether animate or inanimate, is important and plays a part in those cycles. Take the soil alone. Did you know that just one teaspoon of healthy soil can contain more living organisms in it than there are people in the world? That's hard for us to fathom. Understanding how to build healthy soil and look after it is vital to growing anything. And all the life on our planet depends upon it. You simply cannot grow healthy, lush, productive plants if you have unhealthy soil to begin with. I read a poem to my students each year by Amy Nizuka-Mittatil, which is entitled The Secret of Soil. One of the verses in the poem goes like this. The secret of soil is that it is alive. A step in the forest means you are carried on the back of a thousand bugs. I think this beautifully sums up how intricately and we are all connected and how fragile and vital that connection is. So back to my question at the beginning, are we crazy? After a lifetime of enjoying gardening and benefiting from all it has to offer, I'd strongly say no. We may be a little obsessive about it or a lot, but I think the value that it offers far outweighs the drawbacks. It's fed our family, it's nourished our minds and bodies, calmed our spirits, provided entertainment, education and exercise. It's brought all the neighbors and sparked much conversation, forming community bonding. And more than anything, it brings about a renewed sense of hope, life and thankfulness. As I said before, it's a journey of discovery and exploration, trials and errors. We continually look for answers and solutions and try out new ideas. Some recent projects have included the use of grow tunnels to assist with cold spring planting. We sure have needed that this spring or extending our fall crops. Outdoor cold frames to ease in acclimatizing seedlings. Again, I've had to really rely on those this year. A more efficient grow light system for microgreens and seeding indoors and the startup of a mason bee houses for better pollination and two vermicomposts to add nutrients and beneficial microorganisms to our soil. An ongoing dilemma that we face is how to renew and reuse spent soil in planters and pots, especially when growing vegetables that need proper rotation. I don't profess to be anything more than a lifelong gardener, but I hope I've inspired you to try your hand at growing something with someone you love this year or at least to get outside, slow down and use your senses to observe and wonder. So these are my gardening resource pages. And I think for all of you who have registered, Kendra will be making these made available through email if I'm not correct. Yeah, so you can check them out. And thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. And my wish didn't get out of me, yay. I'm just gonna stop share here. Here we go. All right, that was absolutely amazing. Thank you so much. Okay, anyone who has questions for Joanna, please type them into the Q and A and we do have some time for her to answer all your questions. And while you work on that, yes, I will be sending out all of the resources that Joanna has provided today. So I will send that out in an email to everyone. And then your malt story reminded me the first time that we tried mulch in our garden, it was an epic fail, like nothing that we had experienced in our garden before. And our garden is not where we live because I live in an apartment. So we only get to the garden about once a week and a lot can change week to week. Yes. So we had put some mulch down around our cucumber seedlings. And within one week, we come to the garden and every single seedling was just wilted and moldy and rotting. We're like, what in the world has happened? So we pick up the straw malt, yeah, millions of little sow bugs, millions. It was amazing. It was the most amazing. The kids were so excited. They were letting the little dogs crawl over them. That was our epic most failure. Yeah, and that's like not mulching too thickly. It can definitely happen. And I definitely find that the straw and wood chips and things do attract those little pill bugs for sure. That's one of the downsides of them. Yeah. Yeah, it's always just learning how to balance that and balance the water with the mulch that you're putting on there. And yeah. Well, I was gonna say, I wondered if we put the mulch down too early and it was still too rainy. Maybe that too, yeah. Do you mulch, like is there a time period where you put your mulch down? You know, usually when I start, well, our weather is so unusual right now, I'm not mulching at all. Well, I shouldn't say that. I've mulched the perennial beds, but not my vegetable beds. I haven't had to water at all. It's just been so weird. Whereas last year, I was mulching much earlier. I tend to pull out that mulch once I plant my tomatoes. And of course, I haven't planted my tomatoes yet because it's been so cold. But as soon as I pull those tomatoes out, the mulch is gonna start going on, especially underneath them right away. Like, bang, you put your mulch down to give that barrier between the leaves and the ground. So, yeah, that makes sense. That's a good tip. Try more successfully this year. All right, so Ada asks, how do you keep all of this watered? Do you do any automation or do you do it all by hand? Oh no, oh my gosh. I'd be like out there all day if I had to do it by hand. That would be just like terrible. Yeah, no, we use the little rain drip system. So we found that a few years ago, it's a system that you can build yourself, which is very cool. So it's, you know, you can adapt it to all your pots and planters and you just have to be a little creative and learn how to do it. But basically it gives you like a main feeder pipe and then off of that are little epocoles into it. And then you push in like a little, it's a very thin kind of, I don't even know how thin, it's very thin. It's like less than a pencil thin, little tubes that go from that. And then you can do either drip, you can do micro spray. There's lots of different options with it. So you can really customize your watering. And then we also use timers. So most of our garden because there's, you know, yeah, if there's a lot going on, it's very complicated. The majority of the garden is on those sorts of timing methods. And so I find I sometimes do a little extra watering by hand just if I notice that plants are pots, especially they'll dry out much faster than your garden. So you've got to really watch those pots. Those are going to be the ones that are going to be more likely to dry out. But if you use mulch in your pots, it makes a world of difference. Again, it just retains that soil moisture and it moderates the temperature. Great, thank you. Good question. Yeah, all right. Susan asks, if you don't have access to composting at home, what is your suggestion for making used soil from the garden reusable? Yeah. So that was one thing that was in my, one of my last slides, like how do we reuse that soil? It's a really, it's a big dilemma because especially with veggies that just like suck out those nutrients and it's not like a rose or something that you might keep in a pot year after year after year, right? The veggie is going to finish, you're going to put in a new one and so you have to refresh those nutrients. So this is something that, it's a dilemma that I am facing for sure because you can't just, you know, you're wanting to just buy, like empty it out and get new soil, right? So then you'd have amazing growth but what are you going to do with all that soil? So yeah, you have to find ways of reusing it. So that is a challenge that I'm working on presently and one of the methods that I'm doing is using vermicompost because it's so rich in microbial activity and therefore you're reintroducing microbial activity into that pot that is not wicking up any of that from the soil. Like if you think of our regular soil, there's all sorts of stuff going on in there, under the ground whereas pots are relatively, there's not a lot going on in there. So that's a great way of doing that. You can take out, I've experimented with taking out part of it and then mixing in new and kind of mixing that up with, especially with compost of some sort. So you've got to add nutrients to that and have a way of kind of cycling your soil that way. Tougher if you're in an apartment because where are you going to put the soil, right? To do that cycling but if you can kind of move it around, mix it up, mix it up with some worm castings then that's a good way of introducing new nutrients into your soil. Anyways, that's what I'm working on because yeah, it's a dilemma for sure and that's something that I've been wanting to ask them at Soul Foods because they, you know, that's what they garden in containers. That's what they garden and they don't garden in a field and I would venture to guess they have probably a massive compost system going on and they probably use compost tea which is another option. And that's something you can get out of a Bokashi compost system. But again, I'm not super knowledgeable on that, but yeah. I'm right, Charlotte asks, when do you start growing your tomatoes this year? You mean by seed or outside? I'll say both. Yeah, okay. So that one's, okay. People often ask me that, when do I start all my tomatoes? And I probably have like, I have so many tomato plants, it's not even funny. I probably have like 150 actually which I'm not going to be planting all those. I usually give them all away but I usually plant like three of the same variety and I have a whole bunch of heirlooms and so I'll give them away to friends and try to keep those going so that we can save our seeds. So I love growing my own tomatoes by seed because you can grow varieties that you're not going to see in the stores, in the garden stores and stuff. It's such a treat. So I typically start my indoor seedlings often will go away during spring break. So you can't do indoor seeding when you're away. They require constant care. So I then would always wait until after we got back. So if we went away the first week, the second week of spring break was kind of an optimal time for me to start those seeds. That's usually when I end up starting my seeds indoors. There are some like flowers that require you starting them earlier, but if you're going away, that's not going to be an option. So that's when the indoor process starts and then the outdoor is really dependent upon the weather. So typically they will tell us, for a tomato to do well outside, it's got to be 10 degrees at night or more. And right now we're not hitting that here. It's been an unusually cold spring to the point that we haven't had one like this since 2008 was the last time. So it's very, it's cold, but I have been acclimatizing my seedlings for a while. And so they have been outside. So I might push it a little bit and get them out there just squeaking under the 10 degree mark. But that's typically when you'll plant them out, yep. Will you direct plant any tomato seeds outside ever or do you always start them? No, no. We just don't have that type of a time window with our weather here in the, at least in Vancouver, central, there's just not enough of a growing window. So yeah, don't bother with that. If you have not seeded indoors, which is quite a process, I would say. Seeding indoors is a whole nother ball of wax than just buying a seedling and putting it in into the ground. So for a beginner, I would highly recommend not going that route. It's a big learning curve and it's difficult, but you'd get there, it's not like you couldn't do it. But if your beginners start out with plants from a nursery because they're gonna be strong, they're gonna be ready. Generally nurseries will come out with them when you can plant them outdoors. Although I have to say, I was seeing tomatoes out there way earlier and I was telling my participants in my brain on this program, don't let them yet. It's not, it's way too early, it's too cold. So, yeah. Yeah, all right. Nicola asks, what does cover cropping mean? Okay, cover cropping is a very interesting concept. It's basically again, a way of feeding your soil organically. So you're always trying to, that you could see there was a heavy emphasis in my presentation on building your soil and what's in your soil, rather than just dumping on, fertilizers and synthetic stuff that's not, it's not alive. You want your soil to be alive. So a cover crop is basically a crop that you sow thickly and it's not meant to grow to fruition. So for example, one of the cover crops out there is fall rye. So if you think of rye, it's like a wheat. It would grow like very tall, typically when it's grown to maturity and then you'd harvest the seed heads, right? It's very pretty crop. It's kind of a bluish green. And I sometimes grow some of it for my kids in my school program, so that they can see what it looks like when it's actually to fruition. But when you're growing it as a cover crop, it just grows like grass. So it basically you sow it in the fall. That's when you, when you sow cover crop. Well, you can sow them throughout the growing season as well, farmers do. But for me, I saw them at the end of, in fall when my garden beds are bare and then they grow throughout the winter. And then in spring, you'll just sort of mix it into your soil and let it decompose. So it's basically like a, it works like a living mulch. So again, it protects your soil from erosion. It keeps the microbial life going. It protects the organisms that are underneath there, provides better drainage, aeration. I never have troubles with any sort of flooding when I'm doing a cover crop. Cover cropping has become really important in the farming world as well because they're noticing that it's a way to cover the soil rather than leave it bare and keep the carbon within the soil rather than exposing it up into our atmosphere. There's different types of cover crops that you can get. So fall rye does have some, it has both advantages and disadvantages. Like if you get, sometimes it'll come in a mixture. So where it'll have like clover and vetch and fall rye stuff like that, they all bring with them different things. So any sort of legumes and clover will add nitrogen into your soil. So that's a really great thing as well. So I hope that answers the question. It's just a way to protect your soil and add nutrition to it. All right, Diane asks, do you use grass clippings for anything? Yes, yes, yes. Grass clippings are a great form of mulch. Yeah, I think I have them in my mulch there as well. So that's another thing you can do. Again, you just gotta be careful. It's not, you don't like heat them on too thick or too thin sort of thing. If you have it too thin, it doesn't really do much. If you get on too thick, you can get mold growing like Kendra's story with the straw, right? Yeah, so yeah, and they're fantastic. They're full of nitrogen. So it's, if you have a backyard composter, fantastic. Put them into it for sure because it just adds that nitrogen element into your compost. And a follow up to the cover crop question, Irene asks, can you plant your vegetables immediately after you dig under your fall rye or must you wait for the cover crop to decompose? Yeah, good question. So yes, you need to wait a bit for it to decompose. So traditionally when I will do it with the kids, because I always do this with the kids, we learn about cover cropping and the benefits of it and it gives them a chance to plant in the fall, which is really fun. They also plant garlic. So we do that in the fall and then in the spring and early spring in like February, kind of around there, we turn over that cover crop so that it's well rotted by the Tommy start plant, direct planting and transplanting after they come back in spring, after spring break. So when we start planting late March, early April kind of thing, it will already have decompose. And sometimes we have to like turn it a few more times because some of the grass or whatever will still peek through. Yeah. Actually having one thing I just want, sorry, one thing I just want to say with that. So that's the traditional method. However, you will find videos online and I don't know how they do this, but farmers who use cover crops do plant. So what they do is like cut it off with their mower, whatever, and then they have methods of like planting directly into that crop that has been mowed under. And I don't know how they do that. I don't understand that to me, it would regrow but I have seen that being done. So it's another kind of experimenting thing that's going on out there. Yeah, all right. Paris asks, do you know if your garden buddies program is offered in other schools? She craves for a day that all schools offer this program. I know, this was just one that a teacher, way back when my kids were at the school asked if I'd be involved in this little program she was starting up. Since she left quite a few years ago, and I just carried on that program and just developed it a lot more. So it's like very unique to the school that I'm at, but there are other ones out there. There's earth bites, there's a few others where schools actually can get a program that's similar. It's different, but it's similar, similar concepts. So earth bites is one of them. There's a couple out there, there's not a lot. And I agree. I think every school should have this element. I think it's just, there's so much that they can learn from it and just a way to connect children to nature and what they're eating and all that sort of stuff. I wish I could say yes. And I haven't really, I should have thought about expanding, but I don't know. We'll see, maybe in future years I'll be able to expand into other schools. Yeah, that would be great. All right, Ada asks, are there significant differences in plant needs between growing in raised beds and pots versus just growing in the ground? And do certain things fare better in one versus the other? Okay, so I had a little slide about saying, I don't, you probably noticed that there were some crops that I preferred to grow in a pot. I'll just expand on that idea. So carrots and radishes were one that I gave an example of. And if, like, if you're, okay, this is what I've experienced anyways. And I, you know, farmers all over the world have grown radishes and carrots in the ground. But there are certain pests that will eat those little things. We've got ants and we've got slugs and snails and rodents are a big one, right? And of course there's the carrot fly. So gardeners have to protect these crops from the critters that will eat them. There are ground critters that will come underneath and tunnel through them. So I find, I found that if I grow my carrots and radishes in a large pot on my decks, I'm not, I very rarely have those problems. Having said that, I can have problems with squirrels. Squirrels will eat everything, including your jalapeno leaves. So I basically have like a really large pot, a plastic pot I've found works well, it was a really big one. And then we built like kind of like a chicken wire, but it's much smaller. It's like a little, little tiny squares. And we just built a cage that I can pop on top of that. So, and I just kind of clip it on on the sides and that stops those rodents from getting into those developing carrots and radishes. And then I don't find I hardly get any carrot rust fly that way at all, like I just don't get them. I don't even have to cover them with the floating row cover as you would in a garden. So that's one, those are two crops that grow fantastically well in a pot. And there's probably other root crops that would do quite well in that way as well. Here's another one, lettuces and spinach, those sorts of things that would get attacked by slugs in the garden are fantastic in pots and planters. So you can have a beautiful clean crop that's easy to pick. It's on your, right outside your kitchen door if you have a little deck or patio and it's not affected by those. Whereas in the ground, it's going to be spattered by mud coming up on the leaves which means you have to wash it more. The slugs are going all over the place. So those are some great examples. Here's just one more, tomatoes. So tomatoes can do well in pots or in the ground. Sometimes they'll grow much taller in the ground and they just have more room to spread out. But certain tomato varieties, especially the determinate ones are fantastic in pots. They're great. As long as you give them enough nutrients to begin with and then throughout the season you're going to need to feed them a little bit more. But they're a really good option for growing in pots. I have not had as much access with things like squash or pumpkin or those sorts of things in pots. I find they grow a little bit better in the ground but it is doable. You can do it, but you got to have a bigger pot. So you think the bigger the plant, the bigger the pot, that's kind of how it works in that sense. Makes sense. Yeah. All right. Well, my slugs and I do a constant dance where they get all over my lettuce and kale and I lovingly take them and put them in the compost and the couple of weeks later they come back and we play this game all year long by them. I get enough to eat and I'm pretty sure they do too. So it seems weird. Yeah. That's what I always say to you. We feed or we share produce with the bugs and I always ask the kids that in garden buddies. I'm like, so this lettuce leaf has some bundles in it. Should we eat it? And they go, no. And I say, yes. So like if the bugs ate it, it's safe for us. So yes, it's fine. Yeah. That's a good way to teach it. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much. Thank you everyone for your fantastic questions. Joanna, this presentation was amazing. The rooftop garden at the library is open for the summer and into next fall. So please come by the library and visit it. We have plants, we have a pollinator garden. We have a back garden. We have lovely tables for sitting and enjoying being outside. We even have a tent outside. So on rainy days, you can sit and be from the rain. So please come by the library and check out our garden. And again, Joanna, thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome. Everyone have a really wonderful day. Great. Thank you, Kendra. Bye everyone. Bye everybody.