 Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Today, we're going to talk about a healthy, convenient way to get fresh, delicious quality produce without ever leaving your house. And no, we're not going to have a mail-in subscription service. This episode of the Dr. Gundry podcast is all about home gardening. In just a moment, I'll be speaking with the biologist and plant expert Charles Mulkey. Charles is the founder of IV Organic and the author of Saving the World with a Home Garden, a book about environmentally conscious gardening. During this episode, we'll discuss the incredible health benefits of harvesting and growing your own food. You'll also learn tips for starting a successful home garden even if you don't have a yard. I got to hear this. So don't go anywhere. I think you're going to be very inspired by what you hear. Charles, welcome to the program. Thank you so very much, Dr. Gundry, and it's such an honor and privilege to be sharing this platform with you today. Thank you. Well, it's great to have you on, and later on, I have a home garden. So I'm going to ask you a tip for me, but not yet. Okay, now, before dedicating your career to gardening, you spent years researching cardiothoracic science. You also had a law firm. Come on. How did all this come about? And now you're a gardener. So I really feel like it's all finally, you know, after 40 years, four decades of my passion truly being in gardening and the plant sciences, and it was with it that took me into medicine. As you know, anywhere research will support 40 to 75 percent of all pharmaceutical drugs are derived mostly from the plant world. So it's like, why not capitalize it? And most of my education was in the botany and the plant sciences. But unfortunately 20 years ago, it didn't really have the directions that exist today in horticulture and in farming, and there's so many opportunities for our youngest to get involved with at the college level. But I started off on a pre-med path. I love to become just like you, a cardiologist, cardiothoracic surgeon. And I surrounded myself by a lot of educated doctors in the UCI Medical Center where I performed and worked on three different research projects, specifically one in cardiothoracic surgery relating to encapsulating amic acid in these lipids to offer the human body a longer antibiotic protection than would otherwise occur by just taking it orally, where it's typically gone an amount of hours, encapsulated amic acid for weeks. And I've kind of grabbed some of these concepts. My law background helped me with the patents and the trademarks and the licensing. And we work very closely with three different law firms to make sure that we're doing everything perfectly and affordably. And now we've got these products that don't exist in the gardening world to help people grow plants more effectively than ever before. And I can't wait to share that with you. All right. So, you know, the title, explain that title, how'd that come about? So saving the world with the home garden, I've been teaching now gardening for close to ten years. I, with even my legal background, and I did a lot of real estate law background, I'd want to get in people's gardens. And that was my way to get to know them and their properties and so forth. And I noticed that when I taught people how to grow things right. And when I talk about right, there's a book that inspired me over ten years ago called The Secret. And somewhere in chapter four or five, one of those early chapters, it talks about it doesn't matter if you're a good person or a bad person. If you jump off the roof, you're going to hurt yourself. And there's certain principles that are just so obviously right and wrong. And it's not up for discussion. And I teach these people, and then they go to the garden centers, the big box stores, and they pick up the wrong stuff, and they're like, is this what I should be using on my plan? I'm like, did you not understand anything I just taught you over the last hour? It's from there that I continuously taught, started a YouTube channel, continued teaching and explaining things and just growing an audience that has like been a huge positive way impacted every aspect of what we do today. So that's how it came about. But how are you going to save the world doing this? So saving the world is basically doing again the right thing on your property. And by doing the right thing on your property, I'm actually just going to read right off of like page one of this book here. And it basically reads, do unto your garden as you would want others to do unto our world. And the point is there's farmers out there, which is obviously dominating the majority of the American landscape, and they're doing the wrong thing on the properties. And if we could learn how simple it is to do things organically, naturally, sustainably, using permaculture and all of these principles that are available to us and at our fingertips through podcasts such as yours, through education available on the internet books. I mean, there's tons and tons of literature on how to do the right thing. Yet the majority of the country is still doing the wrong thing. And the goal is with doing things organically and naturally, we're planting things that are cleaning the air, purifying, oxygenating. And there's a lot of research out there. And this is relatively new. I'd say in the last like five years, definitely, I mean, very little I've seen that we go out, I'd say even 10 years is the idea that plants offer life and you'll there's a lot of studies out there that'll say that cities with more plants have people that live longer and healthier, disease-free life. And that's a lot of value. And it's like, you know, would you want to live in a city with more trees or less trees? And it should be kind of no brainer. There's a right answer and a wrong answer. You should want to live in the city with more trees because trees offer life and health. And and that's where saving the world with the home garden is inspired, is to create your own, in essence, garden of Eden and creating health and natural and beauty and things that will bring you and your life and your family and your community health as well. So a home garden is necessarily growing fruits and vegetables. You can have a garden garden. Even a single small plant like I know we're going to get to, you know, apartment and no real estate at all and how can you still have plants? But even a single small plant offers value. And obviously, the more you have, the better. And I just encourage people to just get growing. And OK, so everybody's going to say, well, that's easy for you to say, Charles, but I have a brown thumb. Everything I touch turns brown. And yes, give me go. Let's start there. Go go with that. What what what are they doing wrong? Fair enough. So I've interviewed a lot of experts in the gardening world. I've got to sit with geneticists and all of these, you know, people that are accomplishing tomorrow's, you know, food. And even the best of best growers fail. So even though you've got that brown thumb, my advice is keep growing. And if you have any success, you won. And the goal with each year and again, what inspires me from year to year. And, you know, I hope I have another hundred years to go. But the goal is every year to make it better than the last. And that's the inspiration and the motivation to just keep on growing. And again, with, for example, if you plant fruit trees and stuff, probably not going to get to enjoy much in the first year. Some trees such as avocados peak at 10 years. Olives don't peak until 50 years after planting. So the goal is to just wait and be patient. There's other things that are faster return, such as planting tomatoes or basil and oregano, which have an annual, you know, you planted within a year, you reap, you reap the investment. So kind of mix and diversify your plantings with annuals and perennials, which last, you know, several years to several decades. And, and accept the fact and know that you will fail. And that's actually part of gardening is to know that not everything is going to work and to accept those losses and accept them as opportunities out of a lot of the experts and senior growers would say that that creates more real estate for planting something else, something that might thrive in that location that maybe didn't make it as you were hoping. OK, all right. I've read some books and I'm actually a fan of saying this, that we all ought to take our front yards and tear out the grass. If that's what we've got there and plant a vegetable garden in our front yard. And what say you about that? Well, I actually did that if you take a look at some old pictures of my property that was a lawn and now it supports, you know, a lot of landscapes will have, for example, an ornamental olive tree, my olive tree on my property. I've got one, but I've grafted it with three varieties of olives from three different countries. So that as they offer their fruits, I've got three different flavors in the landscape of just the footprint of a single tree. And that's actually the value of grafting and something I also love teaching. And one of the hooks that got me into gardening at a very young age. But the point is with your front yard is to use it. And a lawn is actually one of the most costly things to maintain, both in fertilizer, pest control and in lost water. It's it's it's extremely wasteful. And the reason that most cities will encourage you and even pay you to remove your lawn and plant more reasonable, drought tolerant, for example, plants and trees, as I did, for example, for the olive. And I've got some pomegranates and you can obviously do, you know, other vegetables as well and beautifully landscape your property with something you and your family can enjoy. So, you know, I mentioned this before and you're probably aware of this. In World War Two, everybody had a victory garden and 40 percent of all the food eaten in the United States came from home victory gardens. And I recently wrote an editorial that, you know, everybody's home now. Nobody can go anywhere. I mean, what what a perfect time to to start a garden. So somebody's going to say, well, you know, it's paying the neck to start a garden in my house and I can go down to Whole Foods and get an organic head of radicchio. And that'll be great. What why bother to do this? So that's huge. And so again, you can pick up the radicchio or I brought over here an example of an apple that, you know, we pick, you know, we purchase at the grocery stores. We don't have apples until our apple tree ripens in the next month or two. But with all of the orchards that I visited over the last several years, the goal with farming is to pick produce while it's still firm and something that can transport very well. And this is actually one of the criteria. It doesn't matter what it tastes like, and especially peaches, plums, apricots, like things that you really want, you know, good, you know, sugar to acid, you know, flavors and peak ripeness and stuff. That is never the farmer's concern. It's a factor. But the primary thing is how am I going to get it from the orchard to the grocery store without it bruising and looking terrible and and they're looking at shape and size and all these other factors aside from flavor. And what's happening is ever since the farmer picked that apple and now it's taking on average two to three weeks to get to a grocery store. And by the time you got in your hand and plus the days that it's in your home, that fruit has been dying. And that is the primary reason, in my opinion, for growing your own food. And especially as we started with, you know, medicines being derived, you know, in a huge part, whether it be 40 or 75 percent, depending on the research you're looking at with that kind of value coming from food, why would you not want to grow something that's been I like calling a sun kiss being you picked it the same hour it was out in the sun and driving all of those, not just sugars. Everybody confuses the leaf as just making sugar, but it's also making the proteins and the vitamins and the minerals and all of the health benefits and the antioxidants that are really going to promote a lot of life. And if it was picked two to three weeks ago, chances are you're not getting all of that value you'd otherwise get if you picked it from your home garden. Good point. I make the point that most people don't know that the plant wants to protect its fruit from being eaten until the perfect time. And it changes, uses color to tell its predators when the sugar content's high. But one of the things that it does, there are actually lectins in unripe fruit. And if the fruit is attached to the plant, then the fruit becomes ripe. The plant literally deactivates the lectins. But most fruit now you're right, is picked firm and unripe and then ripened when it arrives, you know, wherever it's going to go with ethylene dioxide and ethylene oxides are. And I think that's something that people are missing. And we never had that problem. Everything we got from either our home orchard or from the farmer down the street. Correct. And that doesn't happen anymore. Now, we've forgotten in our busy lives and we're all just working too hard. There's no time for gardening. And this year has really helped educate a lot of people across the country and around the world about the value of gardening and the way things were. If you go, you don't even have to go that far, like you said, I mean, just in the early 1900s and then the hundreds and thousands of years before that, whether or not you liked it or not, you farmed. And and I'm blessed that I kind of had that gene and that green thumb that I inherited from my mom and my mom from her father. And, you know, and there's always, in my opinion, I've noticed typically one person in the household, if not both, they have some interest or a passion in gardening. And, you know, in my family, it's me. And I truly enjoy spending the time in the garden and bringing that food and that nutrition and that help back into the home and also sharing it with my community as well. So my neighbors get to enjoy a lot of the benefits of the harvest that we get to reap here. So gardening has a lot of benefits besides the food you're going to eat. Talk to me about the mental health benefit and talk to me about gardening as exercise. Most people say, oh, come on. Yeah, yeah. So gardening, I mean, after all, for example, if you're planting a tree, you've got to dig the hole. You're excavating the soil. You're using your back muscles, your leg muscles. I'm typically, you know, I'm about 20 to 30 steps away from the lower street to the front door from the front door about another 50 feet to the backyard. And I'm hauling bags of dirt, compost, fertilizer, the trees. And it's not just one way. Plus I got to, you know, return all the things and put them back in storage back to the lower level. There's a lot of walking involved. Even if I'm planning something small, there's typically about an hour or two that's invested, if not more. So again, there's a lot of physical that's happening in regards to the mental. Something I picked just like an hour ago from my garden are, you know, a few of these, you know, examples. Over here, I've got a Mr. Lincoln Rose. Over here, a double Delight Rose. And flowers are there to bloom to attract the insects and the birds and the pollinators that are flying over your community. So there's the visual happiness that's happening and these release of endorphins that, you know, are enjoyed by people that appreciate the beauty of the color. For one, two, you smell it. And that's doing, again, something in your brain. You're getting happier. Back here, I've got, and my wife when she was in here earlier, she was like, you should have this on your desk every single morning. But for me, I walk in the garden, I pass by some basil, I pass by some rosemary, I've got some oregano, and these are obviously some beginning ingredients for a salad I'm probably gonna end up making later today. But all of that triggers happiness. If you're in a bad mood and you brush up against your rosemary, you come a little closer to your fig tree, that releases another scent. And there's a lot of experts, again, that are out there, and again, it's more recent. I would say in the last five years, not even 10, that people are saying, there's a lot of value of being in the garden, kind of similar to going out in the woods and surrounding yourself by trees. There's something that's happening, that's life-giving, that's happening to our bodies that some people are trying to explain, but I feel like there's still a lot more that is still to be learned in regards to the value that plants can offer both ourselves as well as our planet. Yeah, you know, there's actually a lot of exciting research since you pointed to the rosemary. Rosemary has been shown to actually improve cognition, and there's even a study with college students taking a test with and without the presence of rosemary sprigs in the cubicles where they were taking the test. And the college students who had the rosemary sprigs actually did better on the test than the students that didn't have the rosemary sprigs. And it was statistically significant. And so you're right, just these smells, just smelling basil besides eating it or smelling rosemary besides eating it. You're right, we're now beginning to realize that these guys are doing unbelievable things that we would have poo-pooed a while back. For sure. There's actually one more important thing in regards to mental health as well is I love animals. I grew up again in the city that doesn't allow chickens, but I've had chickens and ducks and turtles with my dogs, cats and other pets. And there's value, as I'm sure a lot of viewers right now are watching, they know the value in having a pet. It calms you, it soothes you, it gives you responsibility. Something to look forward to every morning. Your plants, and I know a lot of my gardening enthusiasts friends, their plants are their buddies. It's their pet, you have to feed them, which is fertilizing, you've got to water them, you've got to prune them just as you groom your pets. There's care that's involved. And the more you frequent them, which again, you're getting the mental health benefits of smelling and seeing and hopefully a sense of accomplishment as they're growing and fruiting and flowering or whatever it is that plant's offering you. And you get a lot of satisfaction from also treating your plants as if, even though they are, your pets, you got to care for them. They're on your property and they're your responsibility every single morning, every single day to keep a watchful eye out on them and make sure that they're performing in the direction you want it to go. And as pseudoscience as it sounds, plants think and they do feel and they do have a memory. What say you about that? No, I remember something you said a while back about the plants were here before us. And I think it's just mind blowing. I think everybody thinks it was people and then maybe some plants and then a few animals, but it was the plants way before even the first insect and then the insects came and then there was the animals. And then people are, you hear this in school but we miss this. Like we were only, you know, if you want to look at some research it might go back a hundred thousand years. They're going to go really back early civilization, maybe 40,000, 20,000 years ago. So you're talking about the first people to farm and cultivate their land. 20,000 years compared to a fruit tree that has been here for over 200 million years. And I know that like in today's culture like we're scared about even surviving this year. I usually I'm like, you know, paranoid. I've got children. I'm like, I hope they're going to have a good, you know, 50 or 100 years on this planet. But I mean, there's major issues happening here on this planet. And the goal is like, and I think you've said this as well is like, what are we going to do to stay here for at least another thousand, you know? Whereas the plants have been here for millions and millions of years. So they figured out something and they've been here a lot longer and evolving a lot longer than we have. So hopefully we continue to educate ourselves and learn and learn what these plants have to offer us. Okay, so everybody doesn't have a backyard. Some people have a balcony or a porch, but a lot of people just have a window. So come help us out. Where do you start with all this? Somebody who never done this before but says, you know, I want to try this sounds interesting. So when it comes to food, and this is a general rule and applies to, you know, pretty much all fruit trees, blueberries, another healthy anti-oxidant, you know, anti-cancer, you know, delicious food to have, you know, incorporate into your garden, you can actually plant in a container. And in fact, and this doesn't matter if you have real estate or not, blueberries grow better in container than they do if they're in the ground. They hate having what's called soggy feet, which means if you put them in the ground and you're over water, especially going through the winter where it might rain, you know, seven days in a row, that can kill your blueberry plants. Whereas if they're in containers where you can control the drainage and you make sure that those roots remain relatively dry even during nonstop rains, those blueberries will perform better. So consider for your fruits to consider a blueberry and putting that in a container if you've got a balcony or a porch, and ideally morning sunlight. The reason for morning sunlight is it wakes up the plants faster. It will warm up the plant faster. It offers the light fastest to the plant than later afternoon and sunset sun. So morning light is most important. Other things to consider as well is dwarf and semi dwarf fruit trees as they're designed better for container. Also, and I know you're a huge advocate and we'll go into more detail on avocados, but there is an avocado known as the holiday avocado and there's a Hertz avocado and there's a few different varieties of avocados that only grow about eight to 10 feet. Ideal for a container, so never in its life feels stressed by the fact that it's in a container compared to being in the ground where the roots can spread out another 20 to 40 feet from the tree trunk. Other things to consider, as we mentioned earlier is annuals. Things that can grow real fast and you'll enjoy and reap the benefits early. Tomatoes, you can grow tomatoes on a balcony. You can grow your herbs, a whole bunch of vegetables, all in container. Number one tip and the huge mistake I see with a lot of growers is that they'll go to the local box store and they'll buy compost or they'll incorporate native soil into their potting mixes. When potting soil is for your potted plants, potting soil is strategically formulated to absorb a lot of water. It's got sphagnum moss, perlite, vermiculite, all things that absorb about 30 times, 20 times, more water content than it's weight. If you're using native soil or compost, it doesn't retain water as well and the plants will typically dry out and not perform as well or as long. And the goal is to obviously care for that plant, for the life of that plant, whether it be a year or many years. So it's important to start off with a potting soil for your potted plants. And that's my advice for the people that are growing in containers. For things that are growing indoors, consider sprouted plants and sprouted seeds and stuff which are highly nutritious as well. Another great way to get a lot of nutrition in your body and the harvest time is only seven or 14 days. So you plant it within a week or two, you're harvesting it. Another easy way to get food in your diet and be growing things fresher than you would ever get even from a whole foods grocery store. Any place for grow lights? I actually lived in Michigan and had over 200 orchids growing in my basement under grow lights. And interesting story, I chose orchids because as you know, they bloom once a year and you only find out once a year if you did everything right. If you controlled the light, if you controlled the water, if you controlled the temperature and if it didn't, then you go, okay, what am I changing this year? So I always found them challenging. Can people, modern grow lights are pretty useful. Yeah, so the grow lights, and now it's actually on my notes as well, is the grow lights, it'll open up a whole window of orchid, you can pretty much grow anything if you've got grow lights indoors. If you've got some room you want to dedicate, even in a garage, you can actually be growing pretty much anything you would grow, even in a tropical zone, controlling temperature and light. I have a friend in Canton, Illinois where it's freezing all winter, sub 10, 20 degrees. He's growing citrus successfully for close to five years. We've been monitoring and working closely with them in regards to fertilizer and feeding and watering and helping them successfully grow citrus in Canton, Illinois. So anything is possible truly with some education and expecting that you're gonna fail. Even that guy that's been growing citrus in Canton, Illinois had a couple of years of failure before, maybe start off with three more citrus and another one died, but those two as they get bigger and more sturdy and more mature, they're actually easier and longer lasting and easier to maintain and care for. Just, again, just like starting off with a kitten or a puppy. Those initial days, those initial weeks require more care than it will in the upcoming years to follow them. So is there any upside or downside of starting with seeds versus the little seedlings that you get at the garden store? Does it make a big difference? So I like kind of integrating a whole bunch of different ideas. This year in December or November, I started a wild native flower mix that I did on my front yard. So in between the grafted olive tree, I had an entire landscape instead of a lawn, close to a dozen different California wild native flowers blooming, including the California poppy. And those that started from seed, I simply, you know, scattered the seeds kind of lightly raked at the goals to cover the seed about an eighth of an inch, which is impossible to accomplish, but whatever gets covered gets covered in those that don't don't. And we had one of the most beautiful front yard landscapes, you know, for the first, you know, six months now that's going into a drying phase and we're collecting the seeds for next year's show. But so seeds are, you know, sometimes a great way to start also for your vegetables. If you see something that you ate, that you like, you can plant the seeds. And when it comes to seed, I would recommend if you're going to plant seeds to do more so when it comes to your annuals, but not to be planting seeds when it comes to like your fruit trees, unless you intend to graft it. And the reason being is planting a seed of a fruit tree and planting the seed of pretty much anything is like a child. And even though it's going to be related to the mom and dad, it's always different. And the seed generally of plants is similar in the sense that whatever you plant is going to be different than the mom and dad. So for example, going back to avocados, if you have a hostile avocado and you love it and you want more of it, you plant a seed, you're not going to have a hostile avocado. It was cross pollinated by other trees in the orchard. Even if it was self pollinated within itself, the genetics are different. And you're going to end up with something that might not yield as much fruit. It might be smaller fruit. It might not be as tasty. It might be better, but you don't know. And it's going to take you 10 years to find out. And the minimum is about five years to maturity. But on average about seven to 10 years before you're going to find out if that was even a good investment. So typically with trees, I would recommend starting off with grafted or something that's a clone off of something that is already proven to succeed and plant those when it comes to trees. All right. I actually, we have an organic garden, vegetable garden and flower garden. And I do, I get seeds. I do a lot of chicory family vegetables. So I have a lot of chicory's and radicchio's of different types. And a lot of the seeds I actually get from Italy and have them sent here. So yeah, I'm actually a big seed fan for annuals for vegetables. But you're right, waiting 10 years to see if your avocado pit is going to be a good fruit is probably a bad return on investment. Yeah. And a lot of things, I actually start a lot, I'm a huge fig fan. I grow a lot of different fig varieties. And I compete with my birds to figure out who gets it first. I think that's why I have a lot of them. But I start most of my figs from just cuttings that people have given me. And it's kind of fun to watch those kids grow. I'm glad you mentioned that. The plant that's right over my shoulder over here is a fig tree that I pulled out from outside. When it comes to container gardenings, again, with the people with limited landscape, even no landscape, I've got a lot of these fig forums as well, where people are growing 50, 100, hundreds of varieties of figs all in containers and it's actually the best way to enjoy a fig. I've never bought a fig from a grocery store just because it doesn't taste like figs. The best way to enjoy a fig is you pick it right off the tree and you eat it right then and there. It's a completely different experience than buying figs from the grocery store. And that's another important reason to plant figs. And they grow in pretty much all growing zones across the United States. One of the easiest for trees to grow. And one of those historically goes back thousands of years into our civilization is our reliance on figs and the nutrition and the value it offers the human body. So I love figs and I've got just to let you know close to 15 to 20 varieties of figs on my property. And one of them is grafted onto a tree where I've got 10 flavors. And again, this is the value of when you got limited space, how you can have a lot of flavors of figs in the footprint of one tree by the value of grafting. So I've got these 10 branches with 10 flavors of figs all on one tree trunk. Ah. Yeah. All right, so okay, so we planted all this stuff. Now what do I do? Do I go to the garden shop and I buy miracle grow and put it on there? Help us out. How are we gonna make our plants grow? So to get started, obviously you need a plant. And I don't wanna encourage necessarily buying shovels or fertilizer or buying really anything. I mean, when I got started in gardening, I pretty much collected from my neighbors. You kind of walk up and down your street and you see what your neighbors are doing successfully. And one of the things I talk about in my book is also the value of free plants. Seeds is one thing. And as I mentioned with my native flowers that I planted earlier this year, and now they're all going in the seed and we're collecting the seeds and getting ready for another year. So there's free seeds that I'll be using from year to year in perpetuity. Another way is as you also mentioned again with figs every year, February 1st and for that month, we do an annual fig cutting giveaway where I basically collaborate with a lot of my fig enthusiast friends and they all have varieties such as raspberry latte, proven winner strawberry verite. There's the panache tiger fig, which is a green fig with the white stripes. It's so cool to look at and taste like strawberries. The traditional ones you'll find at the big box stores which are like the Codota and the black fig and the brown turkey fig. Those are what you'll always find at the big box stores. But the specialty ones, the ones that are smaller and maybe more flavorful, more sweeter, different colors, purple, reds. Like there's so many things that exist out there but you gotta make friends. And I know we're gonna talk about community hopefully shortly, but the goal is to make friends and see what they're doing and try to get some of that into your property. And a cutting is a free and easy way to plant something that'll be a genetically identical plant to that parent plant as well. And then the last thing is also grafting. You may have some plants on your property that might not taste good, such as a bad peach tree that you can graft with things from the prunus family. So a peach tree is related to almonds and apricots and cherries and nectarines. And you can have all of these flavors of plant on one tree trunk, again, grafting. And again, like my goal is to, like if you wanna start cheap, start easy, and obviously you can go to your big box or you can go to your local nursery. Another one I wanna encourage is also on native plants in the valley that native plants also bring to your landscape. By planning, and I got to interview here in Los Angeles, there's the Theodore Payne Foundation, which is one of the largest dedicated nurseries to growing native plants. And they, I got to interview the director there a few years ago, her name's Lisa Novick. And she taught me way back then, about five years ago, that in California oak tree supports close to 5,000 species of birds, insects, pollinators, like there's this whole interaction that's happening with the California oak tree. She said that same tree you put in Hawaii might support a dozen or two dozen trees or a dozen or two dozen species within that ecosystem because they don't rely on California oak trees in Hawaii. The goal by planning, and this is one of the things I also educate is, dedicate at least five or 10% of your landscape or your growing zone, even if you're in container, to planning whatever is native to your area to support that ecology that existed before we came in and invaded it and put our house in. And then ruined it. And when you go to the local box store or even your local nursery, 90, 99% of the plants that are growing there are not from your native landscape choices. For example, like citrus and avocados and peaches, plums, apricots, even your tomatoes and stuff. Most of the plants they're offering are not native to your specific areas. So the bees that are coming and the birds that are coming, see this all as foreign, inner genetics. This is all foreign territory. Whereas if you plant whatever is specific to your area, here I am in Los Angeles, growing specific to Southern California native plants. If I were in New York, I would find out what's native to New York and plant those native plants, at least dedicating five to 10%, creating these islands of habitat places where these birds and insects can visitate, lay their eggs and basically improve the community. You're creating what I like calling islands of hope at your house and hopefully other homes surrounding you and helping to support that ecology that existed before us. Well, speaking of native plants, what about a Haas avocado? Isn't that a Southern California native? Yeah, so the avocados are predominantly native. And the Haas, just to let you know, as you said, and I got to go to Rudolph Haas's home and I believe he's in Baldwin Park. Yeah. And I got to see some of the old pictures where that entire city was pretty much planted avocados. It was an amazing sight. And if you go there now, you can still pretty much almost off of every single street between the homes, there's avocados everywhere. It's mind-blowing. I've never seen more avocados than when I visited there a few years ago. But the avocado ancestry, so even though they successfully grow here in Southern California and across warmer climates, all across the country, but it's all based on good gardening practices. But the avocado is more native depending on the variety to Mexico, Guatemala, and so forth. So an avocado is not native to Southern California, but still an important plant to be planting for the nutritional health and enjoyment of food benefits that come with having, if you've got the space, even in container, here in that limited a condor or apartment living, you can still enjoy the benefits of having an avocado and still enjoy the benefits of what plants will do for, as we discuss, all the benefits plants have to offer. You mentioned community gardening. What do you think? Do you have any advice for people who are thinking of starting this? So I love teaching. And one of the first things I did in my community was to find out, as I also dug in the history, that our community and our community board, which is just a group of volunteer homeowners close to 70, 60 years ago, was founded as a gardening club. So it was basically homeowners getting together, talking about their gardens and their plants, and then talking about community issues. And what I've done here in my community about six or seven years ago is do just that. I wanted to get in people's properties. I wanted to get to know people. And just to let you know, even with my attorney background, I'm a Florida attorney. So I practiced 10 years in Florida, still active in Florida, but here in California, my hands are tied. I can't talk law and I can't teach law. So, and then we're not talking about law, but here in California, my way to get to know people and know the real estate and get to know my neighbors was through plants. And so I taught what I know best through my education since I was a child, learned from mom, learned from grandfather, learned through my education at University of California, Irvine, learned from my decades of experience and interviews with a lot of the experts across, especially the state of California. But get involved in your community first. Another one that has been extremely powerful and valuable. And if you want a lot of free plants as well, California Rare Fruit Growers is another, I would say top organization you should get involved with membership is something like between 10 to 20 bucks approximately. And it's a great way to get to meet again, your neighbors within your city. There's about 2,000 members throughout California reaching out into Phoenix, Arizona, Texas, and around the world. So you'll find somebody that wants to give you something and it's another way to get connected. A third way I wanna share with you is just, you know, maybe go down to your city hall, find out if there's garden clubs. There's usually plots of land where again, people get together and share their ideas and share again their plants and another opportunity to get free plants so many ways. Last but not least, if they're watching this, they're obviously connected on social media. Go to Facebook, go to Instagram, go to Twitter. There's groups of people passionate about avocados and all they talk about is avocados. And same thing with figs and same thing with tomatoes and whatever it is that you love, there's an entire group of thousands of people backing it up and hopefully, and most of the gardening and in my opinion, and I've been in a lot of different work environments, but gardening people are the best people on the planet. They're generally the nicest, the most kindest, the most generous and it's such an excellent way to make friends. And another thing for mental health, right? You're just making more friends and it's another way to stay connected with your world and your community. You're right, I don't think I've ever met a mean, nasty gardener. Well, there was a lady next door when I was growing up but our dog would run in to her garden but that's another story. No, in fact, you know, they're in longevity studies. Gardening is actually one of those universal findings in the blue zones in the long-lived people that gardening is an integral part of their health, number one, but you're right. People in groups belonging to groups is one of the other real keys to longevity. And yeah, so join a gardening group, that's great advice. All right, well, Charles, before we wrap up, how do people find you? What is IV organic? And you read from your book, so tell, you know, how do we find all this? So my first and foremost is you can probably already tell, I love teaching and one of my favorite places to teach is right here on YouTube. So, you know, we've got over 300 educational lessons on how to care for a variety of different plants and a lot of the interviews with the experts. I got an interview over the last few years are all, you know, can be found there. YouTube's one, ivoreganics.com is our website and you know, and then also check us out on all the other social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. I'm here, I love helping people and again, I'm so thankful and grateful, Dr. Gundry, for having me on this platform with you and looking forward to, you know, what our future brings and looking forward to hopefully answering more questions, you know, for those watching with whatever comments that they leave below, I'll be here periodically to help answer those and help support our growing gardening communities. Great. And we're gonna put together a little contest when this airs and Charles has been nice enough to donate, I think about 10 kits from Ivy Organic and we're gonna put together a little contest for you to enter and we'll announce it, yeah, on Instagram and that'll be fun and we appreciate you doing that because I think the more we get people gardening, the healthier we're gonna get everybody. I know my garden is very important to me and I got a question for you, I mentioned I was gonna ask you. How the heck do I keep the slugs from eating my strawberries? You got a trick? I don't wanna kill them. So, just to let you know, slugs and snails on my property are welcome, just to let you know. I'm not gonna kill them. I'll tell you how to guard them, but just to let you know, they're part of the ecology and they're helping to break down a lot of the waste that's in your garden. So for organic gardening, they're breaking down and digesting and returning a lot of those minerals when you trance back into the soil. For your strawberries specifically, an old traditional way of controlling them is typically just putting a cup of beer. We'll typically attract them and pretty much for the ones that are in the area, you can naturally disposable them that way. One, two, there's products out there that are focused specifically on spinnissad, which is a bacteria, which you can put in the zone in your area. And just keep in mind when I say bacteria, it sounds bad. Why would you wanna put bacteria in your garden? The bacteria aside from the beneficial life that's in your soil and for organic gardening, this is huge again. You've got your earthworms in the soil that you wanna feed with your organic nutrients that you're putting in the soil. You've got beneficial bacteria, which you're also digesting and returning those minerals into the soil. And then you got your beneficial fungus or mycorrhizan, which a single mushroom, this is like mind blowing also, your avocado tree, let's go back to, if it's let's say 20 feet tall or even 10 feet tall, the roots are probably going to another 10 to 20 feet deep, predominantly wide and maybe even if it goes 40 feet, but that single mushroom has roots that'll span 100 to 1,000 feet. Transporting water between all the trees or plants in your orchard or in your garden, transporting all of these minerals and water, especially if it's in a zone where that tree is not getting water. I always like sharing the example, for example, the tree on top of the hill where there's no water. It's like, how's it getting water? And the answer is, again, the beneficial mycorrhizan fungus that has interacted with the roots, the tree gives the fungus some of the sugars that it's making in exchange for the mycorrhizan's offering water and keeping that plant green and healthy during the hottest summer months. So in general, I mean, the goal, going back to your snails, Spinosad is offered in products such as Captain Jacks and there's another one called Slugo Plus is another product. And just another thing I wanna, yeah, and another product I wanna share with you as well in regards to the giveaway. I've gone over here these fertilizers. I wanna make sure they're in the screen. So here's Ivory Organics. It's an all-purpose fertilizer. And here's the other label over here. So those are super in a premium blend fertilizer. What I wanna share with you is that most fertilizers focus on just NPK. And when I spoke to you a little earlier in regards to our companies founded on creating novel things that didn't really exist in the marketplace. So the Ivory Organics like Six Macros Plus, in the name, there's six macronutrients, yet almost every single fertilizer out there only focuses on nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Nitrogen for growth, phosphorus for fruits and flower, potassium for disease resistance and growth and strength. But plants have six macronutrients, they need an abundance, and yet most of the fertilizers overlook this. Ivory Organics Six Macros Plus and our all-purpose fertilizers offer plants an organic way to get not just nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, but also calcium, which is in all the cell walls of the plant, sulfur, which helps in the greening of the plant as well, and magnesium, which is in the heart of the chlorophyll molecules. So you got all the macronutrients and plus a lot of micronutrients that would be found in a product like this. And I know I shared at the beginning, kind of I guess we'll sum up in conclusion. Part of the giveaway is also going to include this product over here, which is the Ivy Organic 3-in-1 Plant Guard, and this offers protection against damaging summer sunburn and winter sunscald in addition to an insect and a rodent repellent protection. The concept of our product goes back again, thousands of years on a gardening word, and this is again something we've specialized in and brought a lot of education to the gardening community where a lot of people that have been practicing for decades, full-time jobs have never heard the word whitewashing, just as in real estate for example, and I see the wood behind you where it's been lightened or bricks that have been lightened. Similarly, farmers since before BC times would put mica, which is clay or limestone on their trees to lighten the tree trunks, and especially, and this is a helpful tip for the avocado growers, but this applies to all planted trees, that when you plant it, those tree trunks are exposed to too much light. Right now, summertime, there's 14 hours of daylight, and those trees will burn just as our own skin, and I've got a lot of examples with third-degree summer sunburns on plants or plants that are pruned too thin, allowing too much light in that bark will begin to crack. And it's always on the South and Southwest side of plants in the Northern Hemisphere. And the goal is again to whitewash and for the last 100 years or 50 years here in America, the predominant way of whitewashing trees has been simply to put paint on your plants. But as we're getting smarter and going into organic gardening, we basically came up with a product. And tying in, as I said at the beginning with the encapsulated amycasin, Iber organics encapsulate seven natural garden oils, which includes cinnamon, castor, cloves, garlic, peppermint, rosemary, and spearmint, all these oils that naturally repel insects and rodents from staying off your plant. So it basically comes with an organic-based powder with these encapsulated oils that offer now not just like oils typically put them on your plants and within a few days they're gone. This offers protection that lasts going on weeks and months from the time of application. And it's kind of been our beginning and our foundation or our company is the Iber Organics 301 product. And from there, we've expanded to close to a dozen products. And I'm excited to share those with your followers and your fans, as I'm one of them. All right, well, I can't wait to compete for these products. So please watch this episode and follow the directions. And I hope you guys are the winners because these sound great. All right, Charles, thanks again. This is exciting and we'll hope to talk to you again. Thank you again for the opportunity. It's been a pleasure. Okay, time for a review of the week. After a recent podcast I did with the psychiatrist, Dr. Jody Skillhorn, Chris Tripp on YouTube wrote, thank you for taking your time out of your busy schedule to devote to these podcasts. I look forward to the topics you bring to us. Well, thanks a lot. We try to bring you different experts, different areas that we think may be of use to you, particularly in these trying times. We've tried to bring out some mental health experts, some motivational experts. And it's not always, you know, food and that sort of things that we wanna cover because these are interesting times. And thanks for letting us know that this is appreciated. So that's it for the Dr. Gundry podcast. We'll see you next week. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you.