 Hello everyone. I am at my friend Michelle's house here in central Florida just outside of Orlando and I met her about five years ago when she started to come to my beginner gardening classes. I'm here at her place five years later and I am just so joyous with seeing what's here, so hopeful for what can be done and so we came up with the idea of giving you a tour of this place so you can see what you can do with your place. So I hadn't really gardened at all. We moved from Wisconsin to Florida in 2013 and I tried a few things up north and failed miserably. All of our gardens failed and when I moved down here I just started slowly learning about all the food that you could grow and this growing season is year-round. So that's why I'm so excited to show you this place because hearing that and seeing what she's done here I'm like a little bit blown away and I think you will be too so let's start at the first bed you created. So this was the first bed we created and this was after I spent time with Robin. We created a whole front yard garden and I was working laying the cardboard. We went and dumpster died for cardboard so that was my first dumpster diving. We got the cardboard we laid it down and then you had mulch there and we started laying the mulch and I'm like this is it this is all you have to do. So and you said that you have brought it how many loads of mulch? It's well over a hundred truck loads. A hundred truck loads of mulch and you can see raised up we are right? Yeah. So why do you put the mulch down? I put the mulch down I've learned from Robin moisture so the number one problem in Florida Garden Sun is beating down on the soil kind of killing it and if you can put that nice mulch layer it keeps the moisture in and the plants are just happier. So Michelle was telling me and I didn't even know this part but this is an HOA right? Yeah we do we have an HOA. And so so many people say like you can't possibly grow food in an HOA. We're standing in the front yard in an HOA tell us what this is. This is a tuck I love a tuck. It's a wonderful green it tastes a lot like peas I think. We are have really built this as a little bit of a privacy hedge from the front. So this is an edible privacy hedge. That was really one of the main goals of our gardens here because we have an HOA. I wanted everything to just look like landscaping so I've included a lot of flowers and you'll see pollinator flowers. So we want to be honest that this HOA is not the strictest of all HOAs but it is indeed an HOA and this is a hedge of food in the front yard more a tuck than you could ever eat and right now I don't know if you can see but I'm almost like kind of bouncing because there's so much mulch here that it's built like this sponge that just sucks up all the rain and builds all this soil. So I did these raised beds because this is our best sun. We have a lot of trees here so watching this property I really spent the first couple years here before we did much really just watching where the sun is throughout different times of the year and I really found out that up front here was my best sun. So the trees in Florida can definitely be a challenge but she has made it work with the big oaks on site and one of the biggest lessons to follow is observe the land learn from the land you sound like a very wise master of the plants having listened to the land and found out where things work. This side yard is I I've never seen anything quite like it. You can see how high the mulch is here. What have we got like that's about a foot of mulch or something like that probably um actually let's pull this oh yeah oh yeah look at that you can see all of this the mycorrhizal fungi growing in here and that is all breaking down this mulch all this wood and turning it into soil and it's it's moist in here almost moist enough to not enough for drops to come out but like you're holding on to a lot of moisture there so all the rain that's falling down Michelle is trapping right here on site. So we have a mulberry growing right here along the sidewalk I see these little logs tell me about your inspiration with this mulberry. Mulberry trees that we have neighbors neighbor kids and it's one of the most magical things when we're sitting out back and we hear children running through the paths and picking mulberries really one of their daily walks where they come and they walk the whole neighborhood but they walk through our garden and eat mulberries. So anybody can come here and eat these mulberries. Yeah yeah nice. And how old is this tree? Three years I would estimate I think it's three years old. Right here we're on this giant hedge of katuk a food that can be considered a superfood and so I'd love to hear about how you ended up hearing about my first class and some of what you learned from it. Yes I believe I followed you on Facebook and I must have seen an event to come out and help at your front yard garden at Sarah's so that's when I first met you and then your central Florida guide that you created that was very helpful and just getting started and knowing what works well where to go who to ask and then also the Orlando permaculture that is a wealth of knowledge. Yes Orlando permaculture is basically like one of the main reasons I ended up moving to Orlando to do my year of growing and foraging all my food so you learned the things in class and then you went home and you did the things. I did the things. Yeah really seeing that front yard garden that you did seeing how easy it was to you don't even have to rip up the grass lay the cardboard down put the mulch on top and it's going to create soil and you can see how quickly it creates the soil. A lot of the plants that are thriving are the plants that are easy to grow and produce a lot of food. Yes. Have you been focusing on some of those plants? Yeah definitely focusing on things that I like to eat that our family likes to eat and then that are the easiest to eat the least amount of care sweet potatoes are definitely one of those here in Florida. It has inspired neighbors we do have neighbors that are planting things that are planting things. Nice so I just was so excited to share this example with all of you because I don't know if we really captured how much food there is here but like Michelle said they're eating from the garden every single day and positively impacting numbers of the community spreading the abundance and enjoying it and loving it and having fun like this is fun and it's something that my husband and I do together we really enjoy gardening together. So yeah I wanted to share that with you because you can do this too here in Florida a lot of people think you can't grow food which is just hard to imagine that that's a narrative that's out there but you absolutely can you can see Michelle's example of you know a handful of years ago not knowing how to do it having moved from Wisconsin and her producing a lot of abundance and one thing that I want to mention is we have just started a program called the food forest starter bundle and we will actually mail you a bundle of 30 of the easiest to grow foods from cutting and seed a lot of the plants that we've gone through today so if you are getting started and you want to plant a food forest or a survival garden you can get the food forest bundle from us so thank you so much for having all these people and of course me thank you