 So I've just arrived at my friend Elise's house in St. Pete, Florida, and she has a place called the Urban Harvest. She's an urban homesteader. You can see her yard, what she's done in the last three and a half years, and the neighbor's yard. Just look at it around here. It's all grass, all yards. There's not food growing. She's gonna show you today how you can turn your lawn into an abundant garden right here in Florida and share the resources that she has to really help you along in this process. So Elise, you're telling me that three and a half years ago when you moved in, this looks just like all of the neighbors? Correct, yeah. We had this house and this yard were complete overhaul. It was so shady and so it was not even really grass growing. It was bad. So when we first moved in, I'm obviously gardener. So I jumped in on the outside. My husband started work on the inside and the day we moved in, we had our first harvest. I really focused in the beginning on the annual vegetables, so I wanted fast production. I actually made all the soil for this. So when we moved in, I started a nine-yard compost pile on the back. Turned it with a pitchfork manually myself. Every two weeks and in three months I had enough compost to fill the start of our beds. I planted. The day we moved in, we had our first harvest. So let's see a little of the annuals that we have growing here. Yeah, so I grow year-round here. I haven't purchased leafy greens in three and a half years. That's not a thing for me anymore. We need a lot of our other needs to, you know, all the herbs and this year I'm proud to say, this is my first year I've been kind of shooting for it and slowly creeping up at my tomatoes. We canned and put away enough for our needs for the year. Okay. Off my tin plants. So it's been a work in progress, but I've really learned over the years. My dad, I started gardening when I was a kid with him and he did conventional gardening. And so definitely taught me a lot about seasons here in Florida and stuff, but once I started gardening as adult I just didn't want to have some of those inputs and I learned a little bit more about, you know, the health implications. So when I started learning Florida gardening, it was a big change because I wanted to do everything organic. I wanted to, you know, work on soil biology. I had to figure out all the heirloom varieties. So when we plant, I, you know, I plant everything that actually does well here. So that's your focus, right? Yeah. Is planting the plants that do well in Florida? Yes. If I feel like the amount of effort that must be put forth to like squeak through those few things that you just really want. It just, I've learned over the years it's better to find the ones that are well adapted to the growing conditions and then you get higher yields, less pests. It's just more enjoyable gardening. So knowing not only the seasons, which is the first thing, but the seeds or what varieties you're choosing to plant it. It can really make or break your success in Florida. So that is rocket arugula and typical garden arugula is going to be a little bit broader leaf. But this one I planted three years ago and have not planted again since I allowed to reseed. It's got a little bit more bite to it, but it's just better suited to growing here. Yeah. So this is a variety of arugula that's really ideal for growing here in Florida. Yeah. New Zealand spinach is another one. You know, it's it's literally found on the dunes of beaches, but it can deal with extreme humidity, heat. It reseeds itself freely. I did not plant this, but this is something that grows so, so well here in Florida. The first time I learned about perennial spinach is I was 10 years ago and show them some just like this. It was like this is a patch of spinach that just will last for years. And that's what we've got here. New Zealand spinach, right? Yep. So this is New Zealand spinach. I tried it. I started with the annuals. It's stuff that's really familiar. It's quick production, but I also quickly moved into perennials. So we have stuff that will reseed itself. We also have true perennials. So things like Chaya and Moringa. All of these plants are there for if I slip up. So like the leafy greens, right? I don't want to purchase any of my leafy greens if I forgot to six sessions knit my lettuce or whatever. Like I always have these perennial vegetables. So let's hear about Chaya and your other name for it. Chaya is also tree spinach and Chaya is a very well known and highly utilized leafy green, a perennial leafy green that grows year round here in Florida. It's actually from Mexico. And a lot of people when they do a little research on Chaya, get a little intimidated because you have to cook it before you eat it. And so they question, you know, like, is it safe? Is it whatever? Perfectly safe, consumed all over the world. Doesn't need irrigation once it's established. Doesn't can grow in the shade or the sun. Doesn't need any sort of fancy compost or gardens. It just grows and put up trees and tons of leafy greens. Tree spinach, talk about something you want to grow in your garden here in Florida. Yeah, it is. I always, it's part of my trifecta, my survival garden trifecta. Yucca for root crop, Moringa for amazing nutrients and protein and then the Chaya. And there's so many others that you could totally throw into that like food forest mix. But those are some really solid choices. And we will see the Moringa on the way out. I'd love for people to see the African blue basil. Yeah. So that's another beautiful, well adapted plant for here in Florida. So basil in general is really susceptible to humidity. And so if it's, if it's dealing with humidity, then that means it's going to have constant problems here. But the African blue basil is done by cuttings and it's a lot more resilient to powdery mildew and all of that. So I grow that it's got a very, very similar flavor. Not quite the same, but I don't have the problems here. And it's perennial and you could go by cuttings. It's a pollinator plant, which is hugely important for organic and sustainable gardening here. It's just yet again one of those easier to grow crops. Yeah. Just look at this basil plant, African blue basil. It just has flowers constantly. You can see the bees buzzing around us. You know, everybody in Florida can be growing this plant basically, right? Yeah. So there's a lot more in the back. Yeah. We've done front to back sheet mulch on the property, building soil fertility. We have massive compost. We do backyard chickens. We have perennial fruit trees. We have over 20 fruit trees on the property. And this is just a 5,600th graphite lot. You know, we're not talking about a lot of space. What would that be in acreage? Is that 0.1? No. I think it was like, I calculated it out in my actual growing space once you take the house out of the equation was like a tenth of an acre. Okay. Tenth of an acre. Yeah. So not much space at all, but when it's done thoughtfully and planned out, I think you can really fit a lot of abundance. We have banana trees. We've got a rack forming. We've got papayas. We have all sorts of ground cover. We have pigeon pea. We have pollinator bushes. We have native plants, just a mix up of everything. So we get diversity and we get beauty. It's not an unkept ugly yard. It's still beautiful and functional and productive. Moringa is when I actually have two planted because it allows me to always have a huge tree in works without it getting too big, but Moringa, a tree of life, right? Yes. Or the vitamin tree. Yep. It is amazing the amount of nutrition you can get in these leaves. We eat them fresh. We dry them. We put them in everything. This is one of the easiest plants you could probably grow from seed. I would suggest seed when you do the cuttings. It'll take, but for me, they don't get as robust of a root system. I really recommend from seed for your Moringa trees, but incredibly well adapted, incredibly abundant plant. So tell us about your YouTube channel and what people can learn from it. Yeah. So all of the things that I've learned over the years I share on my YouTube channel. We have over a hundred videos all on urban homesteading, growing food here in Florida, whether it be annuals, perennials, food forest type stuff and everywhere in between. It's years of information I've been sharing just to try to get people growing food here in Florida as much as possible. So I think the YouTube has been wonderful for reaching as many folks as possible that are looking to grow, but we also have the seeds. Let's walk over here. Well, you sell plants, right? Yeah. So everything's been a natural evolution and there's no quality organic starts for people who aren't willing or ready or miss the window and a seed planting, and I didn't have a good place to send them. So I worked with a local connection, a local network of small scale urban homesteaders that grow out the plants and we act as a little cooperative or collective. And so people order plants on my website on the weekend. They pick them up from the house in the weekends. We also have a curated collection of seeds. Yeah. So we did it two ways. If you're looking for individual seeds and you just want to, you know, pick that one pack, you can get it off the website. But I also got feedback that people really wanted kind of like a helping hand, trying to get the seasons. And so I created the seed club and that is a quarterly seed shipment. It gets mailed to your door. It comes with seed success cards. So it shows you exactly what the plant is, how to plant it, tips that you might see, whether it needs trellising or it might be susceptible to this, gives you all the information. It gives you the seeds. You get nine each quarter. We have a little welcome box when it first goes out with my favorite fertilizer and my favorite pest repellent sprays, that kind of thing. But all of this also comes with a community, which I know you and I have talked so much about and the importance of community. And so we have a private online group that's off Facebook and all the other stuff. And it's just a way for us to communicate if you have questions. So like if you started the seeds and something didn't germinate, you go on there and you say, what's going on with my seedling? Or I just planted it out. There's this pest. Is it a good guy or a bad guy in my garden? All of that. So kids do that constant feedback and reassurance. And you could see other people's posts so that you know exactly you can learn with them and alongside them. So the seed club, quarterly, you'll get the seeds that you want to be growing now, right? So it's catered towards just the seeds you need to be growing right now. I never send out of season. So and it also does give you planting windows on it. But yeah, and that's, it's kind of helps get people the flow because a lot of people think, oh summer season, you can't grow anything. And then of course we have the seed library. Rob's seed library. Yeah, we actually created this together about two years ago. And this is, people can come here and pick up seeds for free, right? Yep. So this is a community outreach kind of a concept where we allow, we keep it stocked with stuff that grows well here. They're smaller packs. They're trials. They're enough to get your feet wet and get started growing. But this is, we keep it stock so that if you, if you aren't able to purchase the retail packs or if you just want to try it out and garden for you, stop by, pick up some seeds, get a little information to help you get growing. And hopefully that'll inspire you to keep on, keep on growing. Nice. Well, as you can see, Elise is super passionate about living out exactly what she shares with you. You can get seeds, you can get plants, and you can learn what you need to know in order to turn your yard into a garden. So if you're here in Florida, she's just an incredible resource to learn from. And I've learned a lot from her as well. She's also helped with developing a lot of the videos and the content for the free seed project. So she's been really helpful with that. So yeah, thanks for having me over. And definitely recommend subscribing to her channel if you're here in Florida.