Nicole Johnsey Burke covers what to eat during summer, from plant families to gardening tips. She emphasizes buying from local farmers and supporting Black Sanctuary Gardens.
Welcome to the Grow youw Self podcast. Surprising stories about the food we eat and inspiring conversations about what it really takes to live the whole and happy life we're all craving. My name's Nicole John C. Burke and I'm the owner of Rooted Garden and Gardenary Incorporated and author of the upcoming book Garden Kitchen Garden Revival. Is it obvious I'm kind of obsessed with the kitchen garden?
Each week here on the Grow youw.
Self podcast, you're going to be shocked at the things you'll learn about foods you eat every single day. And you'll feel encouraged to take little steps in your own busy schedule to create a more whole and happy life for yourself. So turn up the volume and let's take a walk, go on a drive, or just hang out in the kitchen garden together. Every time you listen, I promise you'll learn something that will help you grow yourself in a new and exciting way. Sound good? I think so. Now let's dig in.
You know, summer is the time of bounty when farmers and gardeners are pulling the most from their fields and gardens. But what should you prioritize when you head to the market, to the farmer's market, to the grocery store, or even your own backyard this summer? That's the question we'll dive into on today's Grow Yourself podcast. Today's podcast is brought to you by a very important initiative called Black Sanctuary Gardens. Black Sanctuary Gardens is a project started by my friend and a leader in the edible landscape design field, Leslie Bennett. Leslie Bennett's book Beautiful Edible Gardens is one of the first books I ever read that talked and taught me all about edible gardening. Her work in Oakland, California through her business Pine House Edible Gardens is stunning. I highlighted her previously on my Instagram page a couple times and did it in light of the George Floyd killing and all of the anti racism work that we're all trying to do. Leslie has created a beautiful and amazing project called Black Sanctuary Gardens in her hometown of Oakland, California and I want to help raise money for her efforts. So on the show notes for Today's podcast@gardenary.com blog you'll find a link to give to Black Sanctuary Garden Gardens and I'll be matching your donations up to $500 today. So please go and donate to this important effort. What Leslie is going to be doing is creating gardens for Black women in her community at low or no cost. She highlights how the garden is a place of healing and sanctuary and wants to create spaces like this for black women in her area. I love this initiative and I Would love to see it echoed around our country. And I want you to go read about and know that your donation will be matched by us at Gardenary. So there's instructions at the blog, so go check it out@gardenary.com blog now let's get into what you should eat all summer long. Happy summer. I guess it's not officially the first day of summer yet, but oh my goodness, we are so close. My kids are out of school. The sun is up for so many hours now here in the Chicago area and is truly feeling like summer has arrived. Now at the very beginning, one of the first, I think it was the first episode of the Grow youw Self podcast. I challenged you to do three things, three things that will change everything. The first is to eat seasonally, the second is to buy locally, and the third is to grow naturally. So I've been highlighting each season what you can eat to be eating locally and seasonally and maybe even grow in your own backyard. So if you scroll back in the podcast, you can listen to the Eat this All Winter long episode and the Eat this All Spring long episode. And today, finally, we're gonna be talking about summer. Now in my book, I highlight the different seasons of the garden. The cold season, cool season, warm season, and hot season. So I'm gonna begin this episode by admitting that it's clear that all of us are in a variety of seasons depending on live. So if I was in Houston, Texas, where my business Rooted Garden is based, I would be focusing more on the hot season plants. As I talk about what's available locally. Those would be things like okra, eggplant and tons and tons of basil, along with some sweet potatoes. But I'm currently in the Chicago area, so I'm going to focus on the warm season plants mostly because this is what's available probably in the majority of the areas where you guys are listening in. So if you're in Texas, if you're in a super hot place where the daily temperatures are over, say 90, 95 degrees during the summer, then you're gonna be eating these at the beginning and the end of the summer season. And in the middle there, there may be a little shortage of this locally. So just listen, knowing that you can apply this, you just may not apply it right in the middle of like July 4th or something. I wanted to kick it off by reading the chap for my plan chapter, chapter five from my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. If you have not ordered my book yet, you gotta do it. What are you waiting on? Kitchen Garden Revival has been so fun to share and see in so many of your hands this summer. And this book will guide you year in and year out in your own beautiful kitchen garden. So let's read from chapter five, the chapter opener. Repeat after me. I will not go to the plant store until I have a plan. Say it again. I promise I'm making this pledge right alongside you. Too many times My first instinct in starting my garden was to buy plants and it didn't go well. There is a form of shopping you should do before planting your garden though. At the farmer's market. One of the best ways to plan your priorities for your own kitchen garden is to regularly visit a farmer's market or join a local CSA for a few seasons. Warning. Once you start, your taste buds will not let you stop. Although I may be able to help you set up and start planting your kitchen garden, it's your local farmer who really knows the specifics of your particular seasons. It's kind of hard to say the word specifics. Have you ever noticed that the specifics of your particular seasons how to get the timing right and how to make the most of your climate. When I move to a new town and somehow I seem to do that a lot, the farmers market is the first place I visit. Local farmers are a wealth of information. If the farmer has beans, lean in and kindly say, wow, these beans look great. When did you plant them? Or if she has the best looking tomatoes, you can ask, hey, when did you plant these? These look amazing. Snag a quick photo each week to document what's on the farmer's tables. Before you know it, you'll have created your own planting calendar. If you see something on the table, you know it was planted two or three months earlier, depending on the size and maturity. To ME, farmers markets, CSAs and kitchen gardens, they all go hand in hand. Although you'll get to enjoy a lot from your garden, there'll still be fruits and vegetables that you'll need to buy to fill your plate each day. As you start to taste what local and seasonal food is like, you'll be more willing to take a special trip and support your local farmer. After shopping with the farmers not at the plant store, it's time to make a planting plan. Now, that chapter applies as I help you start to plan out your kitchen garden, but it also applies as we start to plan out what we're going to eat this season. So again, I'm going to be talking mostly about the warm season. Those are the plant families I'm going to be highlighting in today's episode. So, as you'll learn in chapter five, we do talk through the plant families. And so that's how I'm going to present the information for what to eat today to you as well. So we'll go through the different plant families, and I'll highlight a couple of tips on our favorites, how you can grow a few of them and how to find them locally. All right, so let's start with the crown jewel of the kitchen garden of the farmer's market. That would be the Solanaceae family, otherwise known as the Nightshade family. Inside the nightshade family, you've got tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes, and tomatillos. And now, the nightshade family used to be thought of as a poisonous family. And I talked some about tomatoes, or actually a lot about tomatoes in the previous episode, episode 22, where you learned the truth about tomatoes. So I won't go into too much detail. If you missed that episode, you gotta scroll back and listen to it, of course. So tomatoes grow in the warm season. All these plants do, and they really have to be planted out, either under cover and protection or after the threat of frost has passed, I. E. They grow in the summer. So it's such a great time to enjoy tomatoes, especially to enjoy fresh peppers, tomatoes, and eggplant, because having them fresh is just, you know, light years ahead in terms of taste of the preserved varieties. Now, if you listen to last week's episode, you'll hear how tomatoes are preserved and how really, the majority of the tomatoes grown in the US Are mostly grown to be preserved in things like tomato sauce and tomato soup and pizza sauce and ketchup. And so it's so much better to get to enjoy the tomatoes fresh. So this is a wonderful time. First of all, if you're not growing your own tomatoes to try your hand at it, and if you are not growing your own, or even if you are, but you want more, to head to the farmer's market. They are going to have the freshest, best tasting tomatoes you've ever, ever tried. Tomatoes that are coming to you, that are at the grocery store unless otherwise labeled, they most likely have traveled a far, far away, either from farmers in Florida or in California. Unless you, of course, live in Florida or California, then maybe they didn't travel that far. But in general, unless your grocer is very careful to be bringing in tomatoes and peppers and eggplants from local farmers, then you're most likely even in the middle of the summer when those things are Growing literally outside your back door. They have been trucked across the country. So can I just say, please say no to grocery store tomatoes when they are locally available to you. This is the perfect time to support your local farmers. And honestly, most of those farmers, if you don't buy their tomatoes and peppers and eggplant, then they get either thrown out or plowed back into the ground, and the farmer literally loses on all their investment. So most local farmers are not selling to big grocers, and they really rely on us to show up at the farmer's market or order a CSA and buy those tomatoes, peppers and eggplant from them at their peak ripeness. Now, if you're not aware, most of these plants taste so much better if they are eaten within a few days of harvest. So this is another great reason to be getting them from the farmer's market or from your own backyard. Gard. So most of these are going to be large and long plants, with the exception possibly of a couple of pepper varieties, Potatoes, tomatillos, eggplants and tomatoes. They all like to grow for a long period of time in the garden, at least 90 days, and they're going to take up a good bit of space. So I usually commit at least one square foot of the garden to these plants whenever I'm growing them in my own space. So I'd like to plant them either in the center of the beds or the back of the beds if it's a border garden. So these plans wonderful to grow, but just know if you're listening to this in June and you haven't planted your tomatoes yet, you've got 90 days before they're gonna finish up. So you wanna kinda look at your calendar and see if 90 days from now. I guess some varieties will tell you that in 60 days, but that's because you're buying a plant. So let's say 60 days, 60 days from now, what your weather's gonna be like. And that will help you determine whether or not you can plant them out and still get some fruit from them. Hopefully you still have time caus June. So even if you bought a plant from the farmer's market or from the store, you could plant it out, say, 65, 70 days, because that plant's already probably 30 days old. You could be getting tomatoes by the end of August, which I think is pretty awesome. So the first up is the Solanaceae family, the Nightshade family. This is, I like to say, the crowning jewel in the kitchen garden. A great thing to grow and enjoy and also a wonderful thing to buy locally. You are literally going to be getting so much more for your money in terms of nutrition, vitamins, and it's just such a better thing to eat. Most tomatoes that are grown, like, on large scale and shipped. Those tomato types have to be. Have to have kind of a harder outer shell. What's that called? Like, the skin? It has to have a thicker skin so that it can endure being stacked on trucks with, like, you know, thousands of pounds of tomatoes on top of it. So it's so such a different variety and type of tomato than the one you're going to be able to grow yourself or be able to buy from a farmer who's literally probably just pick them the morning of the market or the night before and just place them in some boxes and baskets. So I know I am personally headed to the farmer's market tomorrow to buy tomatoes from the farmers who've been growing in greenhouses through the spring, and their tomatoes have just come ripe. I am so excited about my first caprese salad of the season. All right, so enjoy your tomatoes, your peppers, your eggplant, potatoes, and tomatillos. Super great plant family to be enjoying this season. Next up is another large and long family, and that is the Cucurbitaceae Cucurbit family. Let's just call it the cucumber family. Does that sound good? I'm gonna stick to English here. So did I tell you guys a story how when I writing my book, I sent in all the, like, slang names that I had given plant families and used for years, and my editor was like, we're gonna need the formal names of those plant families. So I was like, okay, so cucurbit is what I used to call it, but now I had to add that Latin ending. So inside here, we've got cucumbers, squash, zucchini, cucamelons, all the, you know, the Gordy type things. Now, we're still a ways off from more like those autumn gourds like pumpkins and butternut squash, but things like crookneck squash and just green zucchini and typical cucumbers, those are going to be coming out of the garden and the farm quite often over the next few months. And let me just tell you, this is the perfect time to be doing the same as we talked about with the Solanaceae family, to be growing your own and to be prioritizing getting these from the farmer's market or from a local csa. If you have never tasted a just harvested cucumber. Oh, my Goodness, you are in for a treat. Have you ever bought cucumbers from the grocery? I'm even thinking of these. They sell, like, they call them, I think, English cucumbers or Armenian cucumbers. And they're really long, and they're wrapped really tightly in plastic, and you pay, like, $3 for it. And then you get at home and you unwrap the plastic, and it's, like, gooey and mushy and yellow. Have you had that experience? I definitely have. I have pretty much given up on buying cucumbers from the grocery because, honestly, the taste is just not great. It kind of just tastes watery to me, like crunchy water with a little bit of rough on the skin. And then, yeah, it's just not my favorite, so. But fresh cucumbers, they're going to have a sweetness to them. So much more flavor, so much more juice. Juice. They're just amazing. So this is a great plant family to be prioritizing both in your garden and from the farmer's market. So these plants, like I said, are also large and long. The variety of these. So if you're growing cucumbers or cucamelons, and then if you're trying to grow winter squash, which we'll talk about that in the fall, those need to be growing on a trellis of some sort of. So most cucumbers, unless you've bought purposely a bush variety, they're gonna need to be trellised on, say, an obelisk trellis or a panel or a arch trellis. Cucumbers will do so much better on a trellis. This is gonna prevent those leaves from rubbing against one another when they get wet, prevent mold and mildew, and also support your plants so much better. We've grown cucumbers in all kinds of ways in our kitchen garden. One of the of a makeshift panel, we took some bamboo sticks and we put out some, like, white mesh netting, I guess, and planted the seeds all along that net. And, oh, my goodness, we had an overflow of cucumbers along that panel trellis. We've also grown them up. I had a little bamboo obelisk trellis. I'll see if I can share that with you all in the show. Notes. And I grew cucumbers of those a couple of summers. And then I've even grown cucumbers over an arch trell. Is just lovely. The leaves on the cucumber plant are just so, so pretty. And the little yellow flowers, it just makes for such a lovely covering over an arch trellis. So if you're wanting to try to grow something in an arch. Cucumbers are a wonderful thing to try out. Squash and zucchini are going to be grown more like a bush. So these are going to take up a good one foot, at least one to two feet in your kitchen garden. One to two square feet. And they are going to big, big. They need a lot of food, and they're also going to need just a lot of space. So you're going to want to make sure that you give them plenty of room to spread out in your kitchen garden and that you watch them carefully. Squash and zucchini are the plants where I have the most difficulty because of the squash vine borer. Our clients in Houston especially have challenges with that. So I like to say. I generally like to say that it's the squash and zucchini, even the cucurbit family, one of the most difficult plants to grow and be successful with, at least in my experience and watching my clients. So, you know, my continuum of growing leaves first, then roots, and then fruit. And I would say even in my own experience, I've had a lot more luck and success with growing, say, cherry tomatoes with new clients and gardeners versus growing, say, squash or zucchini. But a lot of that could be with climate. So maybe you're listening to this and you're thinking, nicole, you're so wrong. I have way more luck with cucumbers than I do with tomatoes. So, you know, take it for what it's worth. All right, so those are the first two families you can be eating from all summer long. The third plant family is the Fabaceae family, the legume family, or the bean family. There are so many beans that you can be enjoying all summer long. This is the most, the best time to be enjoying fresh green beans. Beans, oh, my goodness. If you've never gotten to harvest beans right from the bush and eat them up, it is just one of the most exciting and good things to do. And good news is, if you're listening to this in real time in the summer of 2020 or the summer of 21 or 22, whenever in the future, you can keep planting beans throughout the summer. So unlike something like a tomato plant or, or a pepper that needs to get well established and then you're kind of done, you can do what we call successive planting with your beans. So you can have one or two or five or 10 plants growing, come back two weeks later, plant some more bean seeds, and just continue to go throughout the summer. They're generally gonna take like 60 days to finish up and you'll get a big pile of beans at the end. You can grow beans both pole and bush varieties. I found the most success with pole bean varieties, but we also love to grow bush beans, like along the edge of a garden. That's a really fun way to grow them. They look beautiful and they can kind of hang over the side of the garden, which works awesome. If you are not growing your own beans when you head to the farmer's market, definitely prioritize buying beans. They're so good for you, full of protein. And the great thing is they just really will add to the efforts you're taking to have more of a plant based diet. I for one, am aiming to do way more plant based meals this summer. And beans are going to be kind of at the center of that diet. So you can do that too by prioritizing eating beans all summer long. Now, if you're in a hotter climate or even in a warmer climate, the other thing you can be kind of thinking about, we'll talk more about eating this in the fall. But growing wise, especially if you're listening to this and you're in Texas or one of those hotter climates where your degrees are over 95 regularly during the summer, you could be growing legumes that are going to be dried on the plant and then stored and eaten later in the fall and winter. So things like crowder peas, purple hull peas, those, those plants that don't at all mind hanging on when the weather gets really hot. Beans are just one of those very, like, I just see beans as like, what would be a good metaphor. There's just like tough, like they don't mind taking a beating, you know what I mean? Like, they can just handle the beat down of the hot sun and they're okay if they get neglected a little bit. They just keep pushing out those seeds. Generally speaking, I think maybe this might be because the seed is just larger. So it's like it just came out of nature just stronger than some of the other plants. I don't know, I could be making this stuff up, but that's been my experience. Experience. So beans, beans, more beans. Enjoy your beans. All right. The next family that you can be enjoying all summer long is the herbs Lamiaceae family, the mint family. Oh my goodness. You better, better, better be eating a ton of herbs this summer and then keeping them for the rest of the year. If you're in the warm season where you live, where the high temperatures are around 80, 85 degrees, your herbs are producing at an incredible rate right now. And this is a time to be, to be eating as much from the plants as you can and then go ahead and storing them, drying them, preserving them for the future, because this means that you're gonna be able to have that flavor and that taste well into the fall and the winter of the year. So inside this plant family is rosemary, oregano, thyme, sage, mint, and of course, the quintessential summer herb, which I think is based on basil. So you can be enjoying all of these during the warm season. If you have not checked out yet my herb garden guide, I have a great ebook that you can purchase. It tells you all the step by steps to growing your own herbs. So if you're not growing herbs yet, that's a great way to start this summer. In fact, I set up that course and the ebook and built the whole thing last summer. In the middle of the summer, I planted it out July 15th, 5th. And I got so many herbs from that one bed, I was able to store them and use those herbs throughout the entirety of our long Chicago winter. So I'll put the notes, I'll put the link to that in the show notes, but you can check out my herb garden guide ebook, which will make sure that you start growing your own herbs right away this summer. If you're not growing your own, you have got to be buying them locally. Please, please don't buy those plastic things at the grocery of herbs. They are pretty much tasteless and they've traveled so far. Plus you have all the waste of the plastic packaging. So I highly recommend prioritizing this when you head to the farmer's market, even just talking to your friends and neighbors, like, send out some messages and be like, hey, does anyone have some basil? Because chances are if you have anybody who does any kind of gardening, most of those friends are going to have an abundance of herbs, like, more than they can handle right now. So I highly recommend reaching out to friends and neighbors asking if you can get some of their herbs. And even as you get some, what you can do is propagate them so you can take the harvest and use some in your kitchen and then cut the bottoms. You can root them in water or sand. I'll link to a few of my videos on propagating herbs because they're super easy to do. So make sure that you're not. Please don't, like, you have to make a pledge with me, okay? Like, no herbs, no grocery store herbs all summer long. All right? It's a deal between me and you. We're not gonna buy any herbs from the grocery. No, no, no. Okay. So we're gonna be eating herbs, fresh herbs, all summer. I don't know if you guys saw the spike. And I saw this, like, I was looking at Google trends, and oregano, like, took off during COVID The height of COVID Everybody was talking about oregano being. Being. I don't know, like, a cure for coronavirus or something like that. Anyway, it just reminded me, like, how important herbs are and how we should just have them in our basic everyday diets, not, you know, I don't know about their curing properties, but I do know they're just so good for us. They have all kinds of antioxidants and vitamins, and the smell alone, I think, is worth enjoying them and bringing them to the table. Just last night for dinner, we have homemade pizzas like, once a week. We do, like, little. We have these little pizza pans, and everybody makes their own individual pizza. And that is one of my favorite times to use all the herbs. So I go and just grab tons of herbs from the backyard, and then we put them out on the island, and everybody can make their own fresh pizza with herbs and, of course, some cheese too. And, you know, it's bread. So who doesn't like that? But there's just so many ways to enjoy herbs this season, so you definitely gotta do it and plant. Please, no more grocery store herbs this summer. Okay. All right. The next family that you can be growing from is probably gonna be a little bit of a surprise to you is the Brassica family. So if you did not hear the episode about arugula, you can check that one out. Arugula, I think, is one of the great greens to grow during the summer. And even in Houston, we grow arugula year round. If you're growing in shade and you keep it well watered, you'll see a lot of success with your arugula. Plant plants. So I say arugula all summer long. Some people say it gets too hot for them, but my personal experience has been it's awesome. So try out growing some arugula in your own kitchen garden and then focus on buying it whenever you head to a farmer's market. Don't buy arugula from California. You know, that was shipped across the country, unless you live in California. But make sure you're growing, you're eating it locally. And kale is actually one of the Brassica family plant families that you can be enjoying in the summer as well. Again, this varies based on where you live, but in my Chicago garden. Oh, my goodness. I had a million tons of kale last summer, like all through the middle of the summer. Now they were attacked a bit by pests. But as I dealt with the pest, I found that I just, I was able to keep harvesting kale all summer long. It was wonderful. So you can have that experience, too. And I know that may come to a as a surprise because in general, the brassica family really only thrive, is known to thrive in the cool season. But those two plants, kale and arugula, I grow them in the warm season, too, even in the hot season, to be truthful. All right, next up is the Amaryllidaceae family, the Allium family, or the onion family. This is a great time to be harvesting your garlic. If you planted garlic in the fall, summer is the time to start slowly pulling it up. You can be enjoying garlic scapes right now. And then you can also start pulling garlic when it appears to be ready. It's also a wonderful thing to buy from the farmer's market. If you didn't grow your own, buy a ton of it and store it. Garlic stores really well. And if you're buying it from a local farmer, oh, my goodness, how good is that? You're supporting somebody who's done the hard work to grow it through the winter and the spring. And you're going to have the freshest, organic, natural, natural garlic possible. So onions, chives, garlic. I love growing chives. I've just been talking about chives recently. I talk about chives in my book, how it's one of the easiest things to grow. So if you're looking for a simple way to get started in a kitchen garden, you just want to grow one or two things that you know will be successful. I still highly recommend growing chives from a plant. So you want to buy a really high quality plant from a local store or maybe from a farmer at the farmer's market. And don't buy any more chives from the grocery. So the amaryllis family, and then I'm going to finish up with the amaranth family, the Amaranthaceae family. So you got spinach, beets, Swiss chard in this family. You cannot. You're probably not going to be eating spinach or beets. But the Swiss chard, my friend, my beautiful Swiss chard, keeps growing all summer long. So again, this is a plant I like to show off in my book. In fact, the back cover of my book is me holding giant Swiss chard. I'll put an image of that in the show notes Swiss chard is a biennial plant. So it is actually set up by nature to last more than 12 months in a garden. So in places where you don't get a hard frost or you're growing under cover, you'll find that your Swiss chard will last more than 12 months. So through one season and into it'll see a repeat of the same season the next year, which, which is amazing. I've had Swiss chard continue to grow well in my Houston kitchen gardens. We took photos for the book of Swiss chard that had been growing in my clients gardens for more than 18 months. So pretty amazing. Like it had lasted through the hot seasons of Houston, which I think is just phenomenal. I grew Swiss chard in my warm season here in the Chicago area in my garden all summer and just had loads and loads and loads of it to enjoy. So Swiss chard is the final plant I'm going to talk about that you can eat all summer long. So let's do a recap. Are you ready? We started out with the crown jewel of the kitchen garden, the Solanaceae family. You got tomatoes, eggplants, potatoes, peppers and tomatillos. Then the cucarbit family, we've got cucumber squash and zucchini and cucamelons. Those are both going to your largest plants and they're going to take the longest to produce. Then we had the bean family, the legume family. You got green beans, purple beans, yellow beans, all the beans. And you can do those either as pole beans or bush beans. And those you can definitely for sure be planting even right now. Then in the Brassica family, we've got kale and arugula. In the mint family, the Lamiaceae family, we've got all the amazing herbs. And together we took the pledge to just say no to grocery store herbs this summer. Then we have the onion family, the allium family, where we've got onions, chives and garlic. And finally we have the gorgeous Swiss chard. So those are the things that you can be eating all summer long or growing all summer long, or buying all summer long. This is the way we can make a true difference, a simple difference in our communities and in our world. Listen, every time you choose to eat food that was grown locally, every time you choose to eat seasonally, you are literally doing good for the whole planet. You are decreasing your fuel footprint, whatever that's called. You know, where you use up fuel, by the way that you live. So you're putting, you're decreasing that. You're going to be using less fuel to fuel your body and you're going to be supporting your local economy, which I think is one of the best ways to make a big, long lasting difference in our food industry. So it's super simple. You just gotta change slightly the way that you eat, the way you think about food and the way that you source your food. Listen, I know that heading out to the farmer's market can sometimes be a pain and it can be easier to just like instacart it or you know, drive to some store that's open 24 hours a day. But every time you head to your farmer's market this summer, you are literally putting money right in your local economy. I want to encourage you too, in light of all that we're facing and thinking about in terms of anti racism, to be prioritizing black farmers, black gardeners and black CSAs. So if you can do some googling, even research, or check out at your farmer's market, be sure to support the amazing black entrepreneurs and leaders in our area. I'll be talking more about that on the blog and here at Gardenary. I've been reading on how how black people are just such an important part of our food system, but how they are often not, not treated as such. So make sure you prioritize them and at least give them 50% of your of your spend when you're at the farmer's market. All right. I hope that you are inspired to eat seasonally this summer. I really want you to fill up on the good stuff. In her book Animal, Vegetable Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver talks about the concept of filling, filling up so full of the food when it is in season that you literally don't crave it when it's not. So taking it in at such a large capacity that your body is kind of satisfied and satiated so that when you hit winter or spring and that food's no longer locally available, you're okay to wait because you know you're going to stuff your face with it when it comes in season. That's what I want to encourage you to do this summer is stuff your face with all the foods that are available to you seasonally in your summer and fill your body up with good stuff because it is literally growing right outside your back door. Thank you so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. I hope you feel inspired to grow yourself in a new way as a result of listening. I would love it if you would share this episode, if you would go and subscribe, and of course leave a review you you'll find more about this episode, beautiful photos and all the links@gardenary.com blog. Thanks for listening friend and I will see you next week. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. Don't forget that today's episode is brought to you by Leslie Bennett's effort with Black Sanctuary Gardens. I'm so excited to support this effort and wanna remind you that I'm matching your donations up to $500 when you give today so go check it out@gardenary.com blog. I'll have a link to her GoFundMe account and we can make a difference in Black women's lives in Oakland, California and hopefully turn this into something that can make a difference throughout our entire country. Thank you so much for listening. Go check it out at Gardenary do. And thank you to Leslie for letting me join you in this important effort. You guys have a great week. I love you and I'll see you next week. Bye.