LIVE Q&A : No Dig Market Gardening

Okay, welcome to the second live YouTube Ask Me Anything in the series. This is going to be specifically focused about market gardening and about no dig market gardening specifically. And I want to speak a little bit before I take questions. If you're watching live, you're welcome to start asking questions, but I thought it'd be good to set some context in terms of how I approach market gardening and where I see market gardening fitting in the plethora of enterprises that are available to us in the, in the spectrum of regenerative agriculture. Because I feel like that's something I can speak to that relatively few farmers, especially on YouTube, etc. Can. And so firstly, I'd like to just say in terms of housekeeping, my intention with this series, I'm considering running a regular series of questions and answers. And what I would like to do is address specific topics and get into detail with people and open that up to anyone anywhere for free. So I'm not gonna ever try and monetize these things and do super chats and all that stuff. If you want to support us, you can support us by buying our book or going into more granular detail on all these things through our online training. And that's a mutually beneficial way to support us. That gives you a lot of benefit and that's the way I would like to do things. And let me just see what's going on here with maybe if anyone is listening in, they can just let me know if the audio is okay. And I would like to start by saying yes, I came into organic agriculture through organic crop production and horticulture. So I've been growing vegetables over 20 years now. That's been on all different scales. And probably in the second half of that I've been doing no dig gardening. So I've been doing a lot of veg production before I arrived at this farm. And something more unique to my sort of pathway in mixed farming, I'm a big advocate of mixed farming is that I've noticed the massive rise in market gardening in the last years. And I would guess that to do with the low barrier to entries, you don't need a lot of land to get a good income from market gardening. You don't need so many investments. It's a low investment startup and it's got low running costs compared to most other farm enterprises. It's also, you don't need so many skills to get started in growing. Now obviously there's lots of nuances with different crops, etc. And that's develops over time, but it's there's not things trying to bite your leg off or kick you in the face. And you can walk away from a garden for the weekend and it's okay. So it's a lot less intimidating than something like livestock or whatever. But whilst I've seen the popularity of market gardening grow, a lot of people don't really realize that it's probably or is or amongst the lowest paid of all farm enterprises. Now I'm imagining. Well, in my perspective, I think the future relies a lot on entrepreneurial young folk coming into farming. But a lot of the people I meet aren't coming from a farming background and that's a steep learning curve. And I think if you look at the popular channels on YouTube, for example, where a lot of people get their information, you'll find a lot of the channels are homesteaders who are not engaged in professional farming, professional production, or market gardeners who often don't come from farming backgrounds. And therefore you see a real lack of comparative data about different farming enterprises. And that's something that I truly specialize in. Now I just want to show you this sheet. This is something we've been discussing. I've just come back from Germany from our friend Jasper's beautiful little farm. He's doing no dig vegetables and pasture poultry. We just did a four day regenerative ag training there with people from all over Europe. I just got back today and something we've been talking a lot is about comparative analysis, about how to help people get started. If you've got this much land, you've got this much money to invest, you need to make this much money to live the quality of life you want. Then which enterprises fit? And I just want to show you this for context. So I hope you'll be able to make this out on the screen. But starting right over the left, this is addressing what I call enterprise profit. Now to be clear, enterprise profit as a way to compare these enterprises is specifically about the value of sales created by the enterprise minus the running costs, assuming you're doing the work and it's not contributing towards any costs of running a business or having a farm or whatever. Just as a way of simply analyzing like how do these different enterprises compare? And I think it's very interesting. Now you'll see intensive indoor oyster mushroom production and market gardening are right down at the far side with about €20 per square meter. And at the other end you've got pastured turkeys up at €90 a square meter and everything in between. So the reason I'm showing That is just because it's great that all these people getting into market gardening, it's fantastic. I've got, I fully support that. But I think an issue that strikes me is that a lot of people don't know that there are far better ways to earn money on a farm with far less input. Market gardening is super input intensive and it locks you down. It's a full time job now, it's only for X amounts of the year. Does suit modern lifestyles where you get a few months off to go travel or whatever it is you love to do. Some other enterprises that are much better paid are every day, seven days a week having livestock. They don't turn off at any point. But I think it's interesting to keep pointing this out as a lot of people coming into farming don't have a farming background to be able to navigate where they're at with that. Now I'm aware that I don't actually see anyone's comments and so I would like to just see what's going on with that in case there's something going wrong. I'm quite unfamiliar. Okay, so I've got a little pop out chat with all of your comments. Okay, so I'm not jumping into questions yet. As I said, I want to just speak about a few things, so bear with me. I think, yeah, that comparative bit is a big contextual piece and one of my roles is supporting people to find recipes and approaches to their specific time and place and circumstance. And I think it's really important to consider that it's a big part of what the book Regenerative Agriculture is about to try and get more people into farming, which is what I'm up for doing. So I want to start by just clarifying my context of like why no dig? And I just want to talk for maybe five, ten minutes about that before I jump into questions because I think for it will reiterate what some of you who follow us know. And for new viewers I'd just like to share my context and it might answer a bunch of your questions before I jump into answering them. I endeavor to just sit here and then answer questions as long as I'm able. I'm pretty tired out after a long trip and I'm still recovering from a bit of a cold, but I'm happy to go until we feel done. So why no dig? Well, firstly I want to look at why dig and some of the negative consequences of digging. And we've been told for decades and decades and decades you must till it's so ingrained in people's minds that it beggars belief that nobody is really tried extensively without digging. I see a trend in a lot of market gardeners is to minimize tilling. But my question is, why till at all? Like, it's absolutely unnecessary. And the downsides of tillage are that it compacts soil. It absolutely obliterates soil structure. And nature knows how to build soil structure in your time and soil circumstances way better than you do now. We use rotovators. You can use these to smash up the structure of clay soils to seal dams. That gives you a very clear picture of how deleterious they are to soil structure. But it's creating also, when you till, you create a layer of compaction under the ground. That's exactly what happens with a plough pulled over a field multiple years in a row. You create a plow pan, which is what I use my keyline plow to smash up. Because plants can't penetrate through heavily compacted ground. But you also compact the top of the soil when you leave bare soil. So bare soil exposed to raindrops. When a raindrops hits the top of the soil, it shoots little particles up in. In the air, and it's clay particles. Do you remember the little soil test you did at school? And you get sand and then silt, then clay. Clay is flat platelets. It's the smallest particles in the soil, and they're flat, so they can pack. That's why they make beautiful mud plasters. But when you drop rain on bare soil, it caps the surface. Now, that's absolutely catastrophic in dry lands. True, brittle landscapes where evapotranspiration exceeds precipitation. But it's showing itself in all of our humid continental climates too. And you see it in mass flooding the country I grew up in as well as here. It's creating catastrophic problems in water cycling and soil runoff. One millimeter of topsoil running off your. Your farm is the equivalent of 10 tons per hectare. And that's deemed okay, even in organic agriculture. And that's simply not okay. Soil needs armoring. Just like the skin of our body protects us from infection and disease as well as the microbes on it. That skin needs to be there on the soil. And bare soil is not something you find in nature unless there's been a catastrophe like a flood of fire, etc. And then nature covers it up very quickly in our humid landscapes through pioneers, weeds, etc. That's what they're designed to do. So we compact soil, but we also burn organic matter off when you till soil and oxidize it, like too much oxygen. Nature doesn't need that much oxygen. Oxygen in the atmosphere is bonding with carbon in the atmosphere, in the soil, and flying off as CO2. Farmers create most of their problems, right, like we all create most of our problems when you think about it. So burning off organic matter is no good. It leads to climate change. But it also is like organic matter is the engine for vegetable production. Vegetables are purely extractive. You've got these things that are bred to be stupidly extractive, and it's organic matter that feeds that system. So burning it off is no way to go. What's more, when you till ground, you wake up weed seeds. In England, where I grew up, we say one year's weeding. Sorry, one year's digging, seven years weeding. And that's because all of these beautiful little pioneer species, their sole function in ecology is to wake up when soil is disturbed and feed. Fix it all for the benefit of the whole system. Everything in nature is patent to look after its own needs in the service of the whole. And weeds are rapid carbon pathways. They're earth repair mechanisms. Their only function in life is to fix damaged soil. And they will out compete your sappy inbred vegetables that have a hard time just staying alive. So if you've got a weed problem, it's probably because you're tilling and you made that problem. A big problem as well, of tillage is that you wake up plant pathogens. Nearly all the pathogens of our vegetable crops are highly aerobic, that is even oxidative, because in nature, pathogens exist as recycling agents. That's their only function. A pathogen is saying, hey, this thing is not optimal anymore. We're going to recycle it into liquid soluble, readily available nutrients to recycle it into the environment as quickly as possible for the benefit of the whole. And so, A, we're growing crops that are relatively very weak compared to wild perennial relatives, and B, we're creating the soil conditions that pathogens are awake in. So pathogens are extremely, like pretty much all vegetable pathogens in the soil, are extremely sensitive to ethylene and they're basically doped the hell out and sleeping all the time until you oxidize the system, which you can do by tillage and you can do by adding nitrates, like water soluble nitrates, NPK fertilizer. If you do that, you wake up pathogens and it's a downhill spiral that you can only stop at the beginning. It's also using depreciative technology that requires fuel and oil and fixing all the time. So we chose to go a very different direction with investing in organic matter and improving soil. And we're microbe farmers. If you're a vegetable grower, you're farming microbes and tending soil. Vegetables are a happy corollary, a byproduct. If you focus on vegetables, you're asking the right questions in the wrong places, as it were. We're not growing vegetables, they grow themselves. We're supporting soil to flourish, and that takes care of the soil system. And most tillage growers use a lot of compost anyway. We're just using that compost on top and it's got a lot of benefits. So what are those benefits? Well, the biggest one is virtually no weeds. We spend very little time weeding at our farm. And that's a. Because we smothered them out. And you've got to do that properly. The biggest failure I see with no dig is people just don't put the amount of resources down to begin with. It's a massive amount of resources in the beginning, and then naturally that goes down over time. We can now supply that fully on farm, but in the beginning we bought it in because time versus money and it was cheaper to buy than make. But we can talk about compost and some of those things, but no weeds is a big one. So one thing is smothering weeds and the other is you're tricking the system in succession. So succession is the pattern of change in ecological communities over time. It's exactly the same pattern language all over the world. It happens at different speeds due to temperature and climate, etc. But basically everything follows a similar pattern and order of sequence of organisms. And you just trick that system. Fast forward. Because you're covering the soil from above now. And so some of those weeds that you're waging war on, they're just not stimulated to grow anymore. Everything responds to climatic triggers, and we're in control of orchestrating plants and animals to kickstart certain ecological processes. That's what a farmer is. We're managing ecological processes. And in a way, you could say gardening is, you know, it would be hard to describe vegetable growing as regenerative, full stop. And I think no dig is the only way that that would qualify. Most vegetable growing is soil depleting and extractive. And it, you know, it's hard to picture it as regenerative. It's very easy to look at Facebook memes and think vegetable growing good, meat production bad. But that's Based on current industrial models, regenerative ag is the absolute total opposite. So that's an important point. We're using organic matter to feed the ground, to cover and protect the ground, to surface, mulch out weeds and drive the soil food web system, which is driven by organic matter. That's the starting point of the soil food web. Primarily bacteria and fungi and going through the trophic orders, through nematodes, arthropods and earthworms, etc, etc, and they are becoming our allies. If you've seen how earthworms can dig organic matter down several feet in the ground, they are far more effective and beneficial than any mechanical means that we can use. And our farm and many other farms are testimony to that. So we also build soil food web by keeping densely planted living plants in the ground as long as possible and then leaving their roots to decompose in the ground. We always harvest and leave the roots in the ground anywhere possible, which is the majority of our crops. Adding a lot of carbon also holds a lot of water. Now one particle of humus holds four particles of water to it. And so carbon is the sponge. Increasing your soil organic carbon by 1%, that means you can hold 144,000 liters of water per hectare in the living topsoil where plants will want it. And if you're an organic market gardener putting down a lot of organic matter, you're going 10, 20% soil organic carbon. So it's a sponge. And the beauty of no Dig is you can have these beautiful wood chip pathways which also act like a sponge and also give a lot of beneficial nutrients as they break down. Some of our beds in the north, if you know our farm in those contexts, the northern beds, they would be underwater. Generally we get a lot of rainfall here. It's quite evenly distributed throughout the year generally. And those beds are usable all year round. And they soak up all that excess water and they release it again when it's needed. We just came back from Jasper's and he said the village was underwater and he could. After a 50mil rainfall event, he was able to be out in the garden as soon as the rain stopped and the whole fields around it just underwater. So that's a very important point of water use. You've heard of Singing Frogs Farm in California. They're using 1/20 of the water of surrounding farms in a very dry climate through using similar compost application rates that we have here. And another element of wood chip pathways that's really exciting is the potential to be growing things like King's Triferia as an edible mushroom in the pathways. Because what you do when you inoculate the pathways, basically if you have a wood pathway that's breaking down and you inoculate with King Straferia, the wine cap mushroom, you can buy a 3 kilo bag of mycelium spawn for like €15. You can make a mother pile with a big wood chip pile and then you can spread that all around your gardens and put a new layer of wood chip. I like to keep the wood chip level with the beds because if your beds are higher than your pathway and knocking down compost into the path. So I like to keep it all level. But I estimated this year I could produce between at least 2 tons of King's trefarian mushroom on the five year cycle that I replaced my wood chip. And that's high protein, nutrient dense, medicinal foods. Beautiful. And the thing is, those mushrooms don't pop up in the pathway, they pop up on the edge between the pathway and the bed because you're walking on the path or they spread out and pop up into the actual bed. That's awesome. They don't get in the way of the crops. They're only there for two or three days. You harvest them. And mushrooms are a missing thing in market gardens. Most people till market gardens and so they don't see many mushrooms. But all no dig gardens, you go to a full of mushrooms and 95% of all plants studied have endophytic mycelium running up between the cell walls of the plant to help with nutrient cycling and water cycling. So that's a big thing. Tillage selects for bacteria and kills mycorrhizal fungi straight away. So that's a big thing to be aware of. I've heard tillage farmers trying out mycorrhizal fungi products and saying, yeah, they don't work well. It's like, no, of course they don't work if you till because you smash them up. It's like they take time, they're sensitive, they do not like being tilled up. So that's important. And another big point that I think is really worth noting is that with these beautiful wood chip pathways and clean gardens, you have clean boots, you're working in a clean environment. And this is a really, it's important for us to work in clean environments. And not only that, it's a marketing point. Like our market garden is the first thing you see when you come into the farm. And if we put that level of care into our veg, then we obviously put that level of care into our eggs and our pork and our beef, etc. So it's a big selling point, I think, but a really big time saver is that when you have compost as the surface of beds and wood chippers surpassed, there's no mud exposed anywhere, there's no soil bouncing up on crops. So we virtually wash nothing. We wash root crops, carrots, et cetera, but we don't wash any salads. And anytime you wash, even if you dry your crops, you have cut the shelf life, period. And so not washing anything possible is the strategy we take. Now, I know some of you might have regulations where you have to wash, but here there's regulations at the other end where the restaurants have to. So there's no point washing it twice. And we will try and avoid washing anything we can. Bed turnover is much quicker. It's very simple. Once you put the work in and you've kept on top of it for a year for any straggling weeds that come out, it's way less work. And market gardening takes so much work anyway compared to any other farm enterprise that anything you can do to save time is a big one. So downsides of no dig. It is a lot of work in the beginning to put all that matter down, but it's at a time of year when you're not doing anything much anyway and it's only once that you do this mega job. Other downsides would be like crops like mescaline, like high density greens, we don't, we're not tilling them in, so we have to pull them out. So that takes a little bit of time. It doesn't take very long at all, but that would be a downside until farmer would just till it in sow again. But we will take that out. It doesn't take so long, but that's one perceived downside that I see. And the other downside would be that because you're using compost as a surface mulch in the hot summer in the drought conditions because it's so dark it will dry a lot. And so newly seeded crops and paper pot transplanted seedlings need a lot more attention because they will dry out very quickly. That's fine if you're observant and monitoring, but there's some downsides. And so that's just a little bit of context from my perspective of what, you know, what my feelings are with no dig and why I do it. And I, you know, I don't have many friends left that do till, but that's the way it is. So I'm going to just go up to the top of the questions and roll away, see how we go. So thanks for joining us. You can let us know where you are listening in from. That's always fun for people to see and connect to each other. What's been influencing our market gardening? Well, I got brought back to market gardening through, I would say Jean Martin was a very big influence to get me back into gardening. And basically I left like when I first designed the farm. If you look back at designs of the farm when we first moved here, which are probably floating around online, we didn't intend to have a market garden at all. We're going to have a kitchen garden. I've always had kitchen gardens since I was a teenager. But I worked so hard for so many years for so bad pay. I was, you know, I left on a learning journey to find out about real farming and I think Jean Martin was a big trigger to get me back into it. And so I wanted to take all the best planning and strategy stuff and then apply the best soil care to it because I feel like in that sense nothing had moved on at all. And so I give thanks to Jean Martin. Other than that, I think, yeah, I don't really. I haven't taken influence from anyone specifically I can think of. What would I do if I was doing no dig in a really hot, dry climate? If it was really hot and dry, I think I would do the same. But then I might be tempted to use drip and I might be tempted to do additional surface mulching like straw, if slugs weren't a problem, things like that. But dry straw over the top of drip irrigated compost, I can't see that being a slug problem. You know, that needs some careful thinking. But if I was in a climate where waters my. If I'm in a dry climate where I've got unlimited water, then I would still try and aerially water because it saves some. Like drip irrigation is a nightmare with rapid crop rotations because you've got to have, you know, I have crops that a single row, double row, triple row, four rows, six rows, 12 rows. You've got to have drip set up for all these different spacings. You've got to pull it on and off all the time. You've got to have header pipes everywhere. I mean, it depends on the layout of the garden, obviously. But if I'm in a hot, hot, dry climate, probably I will choose drip because the beauty of drip, when you drip water on the surface, it goes Underground, so deep and wide it penetrates, which encourages roots to go much deeper. It, you know, on a hot day, spraying water onto dry landscapes that are hot, will you lose 70% of that water to evaporation? So it's a pain in the ass. But if water is your limiting factor, then use drip because it's way more effective. And in that sort of dry climate, you want to get plants close enough that they are shading the ground. But I would probably want a layer of straw or something or, you know, whatever you can do to stop sunlight hitting the ground. That's your limiting factors. So, yeah, you know, that could work down in that region. Our farm, we are not into using drugs and we will use insect nets. So the biggest problems we have for context are flea beetle and Spanish murder slugs. And they're a major problem in Sweden. We're just beginning to get them. They're kind of like we're at the top of a valley and so they're coming up the valley. They made it to the neighbors a few years ago and they're just making it to us now. But insect net goes a long way. We will use Bt bacillus thuringiensis for different things. We will use nematodes for some things. And we do use iron phosphate for slug control, but we tend to use it on the perimeters around the farm to stop them coming in the garden. Now, iron phosphate is an organic, certified poison. But it is a poison. It's really important that people look these up like, it sucks. It's definitely harmful to other organisms. And we use it carefully because just because something's organic, it doesn't mean it's good. And so iron phosphate is as far as we go, and we'll use that very conscientiously. We use yellow sticky traps that you hang, like, particularly in caterpillar tunnel, stuff like that. We'll hang them like 20, 30 centimeters above the crop. And we use that for observation, primarily just to see what things are coming. But yes, stay off nasty chemicals. Not good. No one wants it. And, you know, what can be done by management is a good question, like timing of certain crops and elimination of certain crops or sacrificial crops and things like that. And generally, you know, having healthy plants in very healthy soil, if your focus is on healthy soil, that does help to mitigate crops. Like, one thing I can say off the bat to all of you listening in is that something I've been very cautious to talk about publicly. I'm very aware of my position and careful to say things that people will take blindly. And you know, I feel very responsible. And so something I haven't spoken about much, but I mentioned last year a little is I have stopped all crop rotation. I have no interest in crop rotation. I feel like when your focus is healthy soil and microbes and you put the critical amount of resources there, crop rotation doesn't really mean anything anymore. Now that flies in the face of nearly everything you read about vegetable growing. But I spoke with Charles Dowding last year and he was like, I haven't done that for 20 years. And I was like, okay, cool. And I told him like, I feel like very cautious speaking about that. And he was like, no, no, it's fine to speak about that. So I tell you that. And I'll also tell you that I no longer, you know, for the last three years I haven't grafted tomatoes and I'm growing them intensively on 20 centimeter spacings in the same spot. So I would say, you know, I'm happy to share what I'm doing, but I would say proceed with caution. But I am putting all my resources in microbes, not vegetables. And yeah, it's interesting to speak out loud about that. Yeah, let me just, I'm just gonna read a few questions in. How would you grow pumpkin, sweet potato, onions profitably? Well, they're all low value crops like onion, sweet potato, pumpkin, they're all low value. It depends on. To be honest, I don't know the scale that you're working on. You know, there's a need for some field grown crops. But I'm. My perspective is I would love to see a thousand farms of 10 hectares around a town rather than 10 farms of a thousand hectares. We are growing 40 times more intensive than the famous organic growers in Sweden who attractor base because they're on fixed width growing carrots this far apart. We're doing 12 rows of carrots on that and then six main crops. You know, it's. There's no need to grow a lot of veg on field space. We need a lot more young farmers. And that's partly why I'm so bent on trying to get more people started in farming. It's like we need a lot of people doing it. We know all the solutions to all the problems we face on the planet. We just need a lot more people getting out and getting engaged in this kind of thing. I can't speak much more about that tractor crimp base. I personally, I would never grow veg on that scale again. And I'm not into cover crops because I don't till. I don't need to do cover crops because compost is my covering. It's like I'm putting down so much good organic matter, I don't need to add a cover crop to it. It's, you know, in the winter here. I can't grow anything over the winter anyway. But if you're growing cover crops, it's to replace a deficiency you're making by tilling. Pretty much. What is the greatest reason small scale farms are unprofitable? What's your advice for me? Well, this is Aaron87. Look, I'm not out to try and sell you stuff. I, I can sell you stuff, but I am up for just getting people going. You're welcome to come here in open days and talk. And we're here showing up for free. I'll help in whatever way I can. What are the common reasons small scale farms are unprofitable? People do not define their context. And I'm referring specifically to Alan Savory and his work Holistic Management. The word context is bounded around all over the place. I'm talking about holistic context. Sitting down and writing your holistic context, what are you shooting for in life? If you don't know what I'm referring to, go look it up and go write it before you do anything. You know, we have people coming here wanting to be market gardeners. They write their holistic context, they go away after a few months here and they start a chicken farm. You've got to get crystal clear what you're actually trying to do and why you're trying to do it. You might think vegetables are the answer, but it's nothing about that. What we're shooting for deep down in life has got nothing to do with farming. And that might be a vehicle for it and that's fine. And for me it's a vehicle for that right now. But all of my core values could be met living in a 16 story apartment in Bangkok or probably even if I was in prison in Dubai. If you really get down to your deepest values, you see they've got nothing to do with external circumstances. And maybe that's a little deep, but that's where it's at. And I'm saying that because if you're not clear, then it's going to be difficult. So getting clear about what it is you're actually trying to do in life and then making a business plan. Why do most farms fail? Because they don't make good plans and they don't Sit down and monitor them, plans, and they usually just wing it. If you wing it in business, you fail. Like 95% of all businesses fail. Small businesses, and they're just like, buy coffee beans, make coffee, sell coffee, pay the overhead for the shop. That's easy. But this is complex. Farming is complex. What do I mean by complex? Well, you have complicated and you have complex systems. Complicated is things that are made up of lots of simple things that are easy to define. Like a computer. A computer is complicated. I press a button, it goes bing or something like that. If it stops working, someone that knows about computers can diagnose the problem and fix it. But complex systems, soft systems in system science, they evolve in ways you can't predict. Economy is complex, society complex, ecology is complex. Everything you do as a farmer is complex. And when you make decisions in the face of complexity, unintended consequences are the norm, right? It's very easy to watch a video on YouTube and see, like, make a hundred thousand dollars off your window sill doing, like, whatever. It's like, no, this isn't reality. Like, growing veg is easy. Making a business work and being fulfilled and having a relationship at the same time, that's challenging. And all of us find challenges in that. No one's having it super easy. You know, if they paint it like that, it's because they probably trying to sell you things. So my advice to you is you study hard and you get very clear about what it is you shooting for in life and you make a really bloody good business plan. And then try and find some mentors to connect with to look at that business plan and try and get them rip it apart for you and see, is it a good business plan? I mean, that's what I do with our interns here. It's like, hey, what are you wanting to do in life? And like, hey, let's find a way that's doable and then let's make an action plan, a business plan, a land design and cost it all out and see, is this doable? And usually it is in the end, but it's got to be doable. So that's my advice for you. Why have we transitioned from CSA to Ricoh? Because Ricoh makes CSA obsolete. Because, look, if I was a consumer, right, I expect what I pay for. So you are telling me, okay, you can grow veg, right? I don't know if you can grow veg, but you want me to give you €20 for 20 weeks and you want to give it, I got to give it to you. In advance. That's quite a big ask, you know, that's quite a big ask for any business. And obviously the type of people supporting this business are lovely people and they're the exact type of customers you want to keep. But I've seen CSAs just shoot themselves in the foot, especially in England where I grew up, where there's like six courgettes in the box. Who the hell eats six courgettes in a week? Or like a moldy thing of carrots in the bottom. It's like, nah, that's not good enough. Like a lot of CSA shot themselves in the foot in the early days where I grew up. And a lot do an amazing job. But it's like, hey, why would you sign up and pay all this money up front when you've got a four week holiday planned in the summer anyway, when you could turn up at RICO and buy exactly what you want when you want and not buy anything when you don't want, you know? And so I think this is a better model because, like the whole intention of CSA in the beginning was everyone shares the risk. And that's a lovely notion. Like, hey, you all invest in the farmer and if the farmer has a bad crop, everyone loses a tiny bit rather than the farmer go bankrupt. That's lovely. But people expect what they pay for, you know. And so my way of running a CSA is like, hey, if you pay €20 for the box, you're getting €24 of value every time. And if I'm down, I'll go and buy potatoes in and make it up to you because you're putting your money out and putting your neck on the line for me. So I'm gonna bloody well honor that. Right? And yeah, I like Ricoh better. It drives everyone to excellence. It's better, it's way more efficient and it's better for the customer. And customers, you know, they should have it good too. Okay, climate zones and microclimates, is it better? Yes, it's good to be on the conservative side with cold hardiness for sure. So what do you do? You put up windbreaks. Don't underestimate windbreaks. You've probably seen on photos of our farm. We use like, what's it called, shade cloth as a windbreak. And it's only like 1.2 meters high, but that's fine for vegetables. They're only 30 centimeters high, so it doesn't have to be big. But my recommendation is get a windbreak up immediately and then plant a living hedgerow. Could be A cropping hedgerow. Could be a hedgerow hedgerow. But get immediate wind breakup. Use row covers. They're the cheapest, quickest way to improve your microclimate. They can raise the temperature inside by several degrees and grow things that do well. And don't try and stretch the seasons too much. Like it's fine to stretch your seasons and try and grow all year, but don't promise anyone crops that you don't know for sure you can give. You know, better to come and say, hey, I've got an extra two weeks of boxes rather than I didn't make your box. That's, you know, that's a great way to get rid of the best possible customers you could ask for. Something to bear in mind if you've got customers willing to pay you in advance. And for perspective, on our farm we got pre sales for our chickens, subscription sales for our eggs, pre sales for vegetables. We've sold everything up front, but we've been very confident that we could produce it. And we haven't come into this new. I've been in this field since I was 18 years old, so we knew what we new. But if you take money off people in advance, you better make it up to them even if that means a loss for you because they're the exact type of people you want to keep around. Right? Yeah. What further optimizations would I make to the market garden here? Well, we just did a big. We built. This is Josh. We built a cool box powered walking chiller at the end of the packing station that you might have seen Josh. And that's awesome. It's six times the size of our chiller that we had before. It's perfect. It's. Yeah. That's the game changer for us in terms of optimization. I think the only thing we need to do is have a few more. Like what? The things I would like to invest in are more we use like verticals with impact heads. And because we have a really high powered pump down at a pond, because it has such a lot of head pressure, it's got to push up. It has to be a big pump and therefore we need to use like quite big release impact heads because we've got to get the water out of there. But we've invested in more and more each season. But it would be nice to have a permanent setup of them everywhere so we just don't have to ever move them. And other than that, making our deep litter winter bedding compost better because it's, you know, it's time versus Money thing. I mean, we have peat moss layer manure and cow manure and that's the best ingredients for compost in my mind. But we don't put enough energy into. I don't put enough energy into making it because I'm just busy. You know, I could do a better job with that. And then the only other thing that I really consider is considering growing on bigger transplants. Like the only way to get more crops out the ground where we are because we have, for context, for people that don't know our farm is we have 110 days without frost and that can be plus or minus 30. So it's pretty extreme where we are. And that's nice because it means we shut down early. Like we shut down in October, end of October and then we're done till we'll start seeding again in March and then mainly in April, May. But one way to stack, like we can get two crops in most beds and then three and maybe four in some beds. But if we grew much bigger transplants then we would be able to get three or four in most beds. But you've got to bear in mind it's a lot of work and compost to pot on and you've got to have a lot of space for potting on. Now our lean to greenhouse is really small deliberately because space, heated space is an absolute premium. In March time when we start, it might be minus 25 and really frigid outside. For those of you further south, I highly recommend using heated benches in the polytunnel. That's a far more effective way to start, seed and water it. But up here, so far north, we couldn't possibly dream of that. There's no light and you can't heat. A tunnel like a heated bench is all right, but it's, you know, it's minus 25. It's not the way we can do it, but we can heat that with basically no supplemental heat, which is awesome. So I think they're the things I would focus on. And other than that, it's pretty dialed in. It's, you know, I'm not ever considering growing the garden because of all the other things we do. And gardening takes far too much time to consider growing it. I think Charles Dowding talks about it's okay to walk on no beds. And what do you think about creating wider beds to save pathway space? Well, they're different questions. It depends. I mean, I expect Charles is possibly on denser soil. There's nothing wrong with having dense soil. Some crops like it I personally wouldn't let anyone walk on my beds. I'd give you a little slap if you walked on my beds. I don't think it would be. It would only affect the top of the bed. Like, it wouldn't affect it deeper down. But we will put. We use a bed roller to make surface compaction for seed. But that's nothing like your footstep. I don't want that in my beds. And it seems to work fine with them, but they probably use quite different compost and they're on quite different soil. So I think that probably just fits within the variance of what works. But personally, I don't walk on the beds and I don't want people walking on the beds. What do you think about creating wider paths to save pathway space? I use a 30 centimeter path and that's because I can crouch down. I mean, I lived in Southeast Asia a lot. I'm happy sitting like this, like on my heels. I can sit like that for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. And I can work like that. But if you've got a big butt, you might need a bigger path. That's up to you. But I'm happy working with 30 centimeter paths. If you need them wider, make them wider. And you obviously want to think about access pathways, you know, to bring in carts and wheelbarrows and stuff like that. So you need some access pathways that are bigger and some kind of access space for a trailer or whatever to bring material in, you know, if you're putting compost on the beds or whatever. I would never make the beds bigger than 75 centimeters. Why? Because all the best tools are made for 75 centimeter beds. I know, like coming to England, you know, I feel like England is so far behind, like it. I was amazed when I came to Oxford last year. It's like, I'm not sure what bit of it people don't get, but you got to be doing 75 centimeter beds. It's like all the best tools are built for that and there's a reason why we're all using them. And so do it. Yeah. Hey, From Sacramento. Nice. Which books do I value most in my library? Dude, I got 35,000 books in my library. I can't recommend a book. I can recommend a few hundred book reading list. I did say I would get one up on my website. I'm going to make a note of it again because I did make a note of it before and life happened and I never, never put it up there. But I Am making a note right there. Yeah, that's too big. You know, I could give you 20 different topics and 20 different books for each of them. I think it's, it's impossible to recommend top books as too many. Have I grown potatoes? Yes, you can grow potatoes. In many ways I've done it. No, dig in a way where I put down like thick composted manure, then put potatoes, then covered it with like rotten silage or whatever. That's how they used to grow potato here for, you know, for ages. That works fine. Potatoes are low value crop that I don't grow and I haven't grown for years. I do love fresh grown potatoes and new potato is a good markets clincher here. But I think that if you look at the cost of potato from an organic farm down the road, hard to compete. And our garden is very small. We're only farming 1500 square meters of beds and so potato just doesn't fit our context. Cool. People checking in from all over. That's great to see. Okay, I've just got to the bit where you're saying the audio is working. That's good. I'm a bit behind these things. Maybe I need a little trained monkey to help you with the questions and stuff, but we'll see. Would I ever come and give a talk to young farmers in the uk? Yes, of course. I would love to have more contact with the uk. I feel like the UK is becoming really behind compared to continental Europe. I mean, I've just come back from Germany. There's a big groundswell going on. There's so many people doing epic stuff and I feel like the UK is like, well, who's doing epic stuff? I know of a few but like we need lots more. You know who's representing, I want to know. So I'm very happy coming to the UK and I'm going to be traveling the whole of Europe next summer and I'm going to be doing trainings where needed and I'm going to be visiting every single farm. I'm hoping to visit 100 farms next summer and document them. Long format YouTube so you can all learn and network together. And I reckon it's going to be epic. Is the blue fabric that borders your gardens a windbreak? It's green, but yes, yes it is and yes, it's effective. Get it. Put that up and then plant something natural that will take over it one day. I'm not talking about pastures. This is just about market gardening today. Yeah. Don't run on subsidies. Like if you run it like most farms run on subsidies, like big farms, right. But that's not, that's not farming. Like if you're running on subsidies, you're a technician, you're probably producing a commodity crop and you're not in control of your business. That's shitty business. Like we take about a hundred and something euros a year subsidy for our heritage cows. But like we're turning over a hell of a lot of money at high percentages. Like we do not need enterprise supported by subsidy. Like it's so much easier to keep your flexibility and control of management and just make business. I would never jump through hoops for someone like that. This type of farming is based on observation and timely interaction. And you can't have your management influenced in any way by a regulating body, by any certifying body or anyone else. You've got to remain in control of management because that's what makes it work. It's all in the details. And we don't need subsidies. You just don't need subsidies. Most big farms surely wouldn't exist without subsidies. You know, we've just had two farmers that have 3,000 hectares between them in Germany and they're lovely people and they're doing their best just like all other big farmers. But they wouldn't be there without subsidies. They lose money just like most big farms. And it's, it's crazy business. It's bad business. Yeah. Are there any risks of planting directly in compost? No, everything grows in compost. Now you want to make sure you have good compost, right? That's another question. But everything grows in compost. I can make compost in my back garden, take it up 18 stories, put it on the roof and grow a tree in it. You know, there's nothing, they don't grow in compost. And bear in mind it's rooting through and getting into the ground as well. But nothing, there's nothing that doesn't grow in compost. Bare mini minimum budget to after property purchase to start a meaningful homestead. I can't speak to that. I'm not a homesteader. I do homestead, but I'm a farmer and I like talking about profitable small scale farming and I have an extreme amount of knowledge about that subject. If you want to learn about homesteading, best to go to a homestead channel. It's very easy to grow your own food, but that's a massive question with no context and I'm not the best person to speak to it. It's, you know, growing food for yourself is easy. Growing food and Making a business and making a living growing food, that's tricky, and that's what I want to stick. Focus. Done. What are our top five veggies? Well, I reckon carrots, beets, Hacker. I turn it. Spring onions, lettuce and salad mixes. Beautiful radishes. Like, more unusual radishes. Yeah, Some of the herbs there are top ones. Okay. What pairs of enterprises work well? Well, that's an interesting question, but you see. All right, let's just talk in terms of market gardening, because that's what we focus on here. But laying hens is always a great one with market gardens because eggs are like a gateway product. You know, people come and buy eggs all the time. So if you buy eggs, it's very easy to tag on a veg box or turkey or beef or whatever. You know, Joel Southton says a good thing. That is very true in my experience, and that is that it's far easier to find 100 customers that will spend $1,000 than 1,000 customers that will spend $100. And that's totally where it's at. And having a wide product portfolio that we do, selling anything helps to sell everything. Like, we see patterns in our sales where when fresh chicken comes online, we sell loads more vegetables, loads more. Everything else, there's something important in that. But I think in terms like market gardening takes up so much of your time that the only things that could fit in are like, tree and berry crops, things like pastured eggs at any meaningful scale. Do you know what I mean? You could do a few cows for your homestead, but, like, there's no other farm enterprise that would fit the time other than things like layers. You know, one egg mobile with 350 hens, that's another 30 grand. And it doesn't take much of your time. It structures your day in that you have to be there certain times. But it's laughable how small a part of the day it takes. You're going to spend all your time in the garden. So I'd say that's where I'll leave that for now. I mean, I could speak the rest of the evening about combinations of enterprises, but we'll keep it on the gardens. Well, someone's saying about chickens and lairs don't make profit. I don't know. I don't know about that. I mean, I live in Sweden, and fee costs and taxes are very high here. And everywhere I have been, you know, I can't speak for where you're at, but everywhere I've been, it makes good money and possibly it's down to your marketing and selling the product. How would you start a no dig market garden if compost was too expensive or not available? Well, then that's down to your business plan. Now if you're turning over 50, 60,000 Euros of vegetables, then spending 5, 6, 7,000 Euros on vegetables even every year is not a big expense. If you look at any other farming enterprise, market gardening has by far the lowest running costs. You know, my poultry enterprises are far more profitable per hour put in. They turn over far more though, for the, for the profit out. Like the running cost is half of the, like the feed cost is half of the enterprise market gardening, you're just buying compost, bit of seed, bit of this and that. Like it's, you know, we spend a thousand euros on seed, we now make all our own compost. But, you know, spending four or five thousand euros on compost, totally fine with that. Many countries you can get free compost and you work with that. But I don't know, people say compost not available, there's always compost available. You just got to go find it. I've never been anywhere where compost is not available. Now it might be better or worse compost, but then you can amend it with chicken manure or compost teas or whatever. There's always a way. We do get bowls under landscape fabrics. Okay. Don't put covers on them. Yep, just don't cover them up. Like if you've put thick compost on your soil, you don't need any more covering than that. That is like a thick forest floor. You know, if you go into an old growth forest, you got this bouncy, spongy floor that's, you know, 30 centimeters thick before you even get to the soil there. That's enough of an armoring for anything, you know. So don't put the covers on if you're getting voles. And if you've got a vole problem, try and find ways to deal with it now before it becomes episodic, because they're a nightmare. That means keeping grass trimmed around the outside. That's, you know, any other extreme is drastic means to get rid of them. I've researched voles a lot and the best way to get rid of them is to destroy their tunnels with propane and oxygen, blow them up. It might sound a bit intense, but if you, you can't poison them. And voles are sexually reproductive at 28 days or something stupid. And they can have two litters of 15 every like six minutes or something stupid. You can't afford for them to get out of control. So I have a tool that blows propane and oxygen and blows the hole up and just totally fills the hole in. Because if any get taken out by a predator, another one will come and live in its hole instantly. So you can't mess around. I've had episodic problems in my pasture and they're eating trees. So I know a lot about voles and I wouldn't recommend any, you know, any. There's no way other than brutal extermination. That's all I'll say. And just gonna catch up with some of these. Start. Okay, so joker here. When's the book available for sale? Not till I come back from holiday. I'm gonna, I'm getting the books. So anyone that's interested that's bought the book, I'm getting the hardcover books back apparently 20th of December. And they said be aware it may be a few days late because of Christmas. But I have basically between the 20th of December and 9th of January to post all of the Kickstarter sales out. And the ebooks are coming in the next week or two. Anyone that support the ebook, I'll be sending them out now. So the hardcover book will not be for sale till I get back from holiday or it won't be shipped at least until I get back from holiday. Ebook will come on sale once. I've sent out all ebooks that have come through Kickstarter so the ebook will be for sale sooner. And that's all I'll say about that. What are some of the key steps towards becoming self reliant on compost? Well, I think animals, you know, every ecosystem on the planet has its fertility cycle driven by animals. And here, especially when you have a long winter, you, you benefit from having a deep litter system to keep the animals on. And so we need to find bedding material for the animals to keep them hygienic and monitor the humidity levels in the winter. And so animal manure mixed with bedding, we like to use peat moss because that's what we have here, makes fantastic compost. Now you can make small scale compost different ways, but the volume needed for no dig market gardening is quite a lot. So you know, I think animals and mixed farming is why people did mixed farming throughout history. It's an opportunity to close the nutrient cycles. So that's, you know, if I didn't have animals in deep litter for the winter, I wouldn't ever make the volume of compost I needed and I would buy it in I think. We're starting a no dig market garden in Berlin. Do you think that four months of. Do you think that four months on covered beds for weed per passion and then you put paper under the wood chips? Yes. It could be like tarping before then putting cardboard and compost down. That could work. Well, like this is the time of year to make no dig bets, right. You don't want to be making them in the spring, you want them to sit over winter. I don't think you need to cover them first. One strategy you could do is put down a few layers of packaging cardboard. The beauty of packaging cardboard is it comes 75cm wide. So you could roll that out a couple of. Well, you need a few layers of that because it's quite thin. It's much easier to handle than like bits of cardboard. That's crazy business. I'd never do that. You could roll out several layers of cardboard and then put compost on. But you've got to put 15cm down the first time. You know, don't skimp. Like every time I go to a no dig garden that didn't put enough compost down, they just fertilized the grasses and pasture underneath. But if you put it down right, you wipe out everything. Like we, you know, we get the odd buttercup, odd bit of horsetail, odd bit of couch grass, but we do not spend much time weeding. We put enough material down. You know, you've got to like start. If you don't have enough compost, start small. It's much better to do a tiny amount properly and then spread over time than it is to spread yourself too thin. You'll regret it. You'll regret it for a long time. And that's the story. I don't think you need to tarp out the ground. I've got to say, like, you know, I don't think tarping is very good for the ground and I doubt flame weeding is very good for the ground either. In fact, of course it's not. You know, I would rather put the compost down now and then tarp it over the winter just to protect that, let it settle down. And it's got to be said that like we use a non woven geotextile so it's fully breathable and moisture goes through. But soil life is far more active under that for longer. Like I remember there's a video I think I put up at the start of this year on our channel where the gardens are covered in snow and I'm talking about in the distance, you can see it's about 20 meters elevation, lower than our farm and it's already. The snow has gone eight weeks before us. So I was just talking about microclimates, but the snow is still there on most of the beds and you could just see a couple of these geotextile row covers. And I peeled it back and it's just full of earthworms and the ground was basically zero degrees and they're fully active. And that was quite surprising for me. This year we didn't put row covers on. I don't know if you need to, you know, I've just always done it to sort of tuck things up for bed. But I do think biological activity, just like if you put, you know, cardboard on top of a compost pile, worms will be active under that much, you know, right to the surface. And I think that's a thing. But yeah, make your beds now and they'll be great for the spring. But just put enough down, like really put enough down and if you don't feel like you have enough, make less beds and do them properly. That's the way to go out. How do you know when compost is good? Heavy metals? Well, look, you've got to work with what you've got also. So look, I think the best compost is made with animal manures. Cow manure is wonderful. Chicken manure is wonderful. I have the benefit of having a hell of a lot of chickens here and a lot of cows here and a six month winter where I need to bed them. And by law I have to have like winter stabling with access, even if they want to be outside because they're mountain cows and they want to go up and live in the hill. So that's the bedding I get. And interestingly, before we made our own compost, we were buying in organic certified compost that was made of peat moss. Cow manure, chicken manure. And so it's the same as what we have now. So I would say if you're going to buy compost and it costs money, you're best putting that money into something with heart, like something that's got fertility, because you're buying nutrients. But you've got to juxtapose that against. If you can get municipal compost, like made of green waste from gardens for free, like is the case in a lot of parts of Europe, then it's free. And you could buy a pallet of chicken pellets and use that to boost fertility because organic matter is very important. But fertility is important too. I've heard people say that compost is not fertilizer. And I no, compost has got a lot of nutrients in it, especially if it's made of animal manures. So I can't buy that. Buy the best stuff you can get. It's what your whole enterprise runs on. Right? You know, if I'm doing chicken, I buy the best chicken food you can get. I'm not going to try and save money and give them rubbish because I'll get so much less value out the eggs. Everything's about performance. So you want the best compost you can buy. And don't be afraid to put like 10% of your revenue into compost. If you're buying a big load to start out, it's like that's what sets you up for the years to come. And like, for context, we're putting down like, you know, 15 centimeters to start, but then we're only putting down like 2 to 5 centimeters after that. We have enough to put 5 centimeters on the beds every year just from our own compost. But some years we've put 2cm down, it's not so much. And that's the driver for the entire enterprise. So don't skim. Not worth it. If you skimp, you pay elsewhere in terms of, you know, like, most compost makers will give you an analytic breakdown and there's probably also protocols on heavy metals and etc. So they should be able to tell you everything about their product. And if you're making compost, then you're going to be getting deliveries of like, cow manure with straw bedding or whatever. And you can just compost that down over 12 to 18 months or whatever. It'll be fine. It's no problem. Yes. I've got to say about. Someone's asking about our compost base, but I. I currently buy the peat moss in. Right. I've got to make that clear. I do have a peat swamp, but we can't access the peat swamp that we. We are like everyone in the village here has part of this peat swamp and we're obviously the only people actually want it anymore because nobody, you know, wants to go and cut peat moss anymore, but it's becoming a forest again because it's not been used for probably 60 years or something. But the elderly people want it cut back because they want the peat moss kept intact. So I've offered to cut the trees if I can have them, because I want to make a Jean Pain compost outside our house on the front lawn to power their hot water. Supply for our house. That's been the dream since we bought the farm. And this year, this winter, we are putting in the hot water system around the house to better evenly distribute the heat around the house. And once that's in place, then I'm putting up a jean pain compost because that will give me. I built a jean pan compost near Sweet, near Stockholm. Sorry. And I can make with about a 45 cubic meter pile of wood chip and water, I can get 2 winters heating 4 liters a minute of water to 60 Celsius, basically heat our house. So that's the plan for our front lawn. And it's been the plan since we moved in. And it's probably the year after next that we will build that in the spring, maybe in the autumn, just before the winter, it heats up pretty quick. But I can't get into the peat swamp to harvest my own peat to make my bedding. And peat moss was always used for bedding here because it's antibacterial and it's incredibly absorptive and it's highly local. You know, people say, ah, peat moss is not good, it's unsustainable. It's like. Yeah, compared to what? Straw? Like oil based, debt based soil destroying agriculture to get straw, which should be the carbon going back into that field that's trashed, you know. Yeah. I've got a. I must have 200 meters by 15 meters by 10 meters deep of peat months. I'm never going to use all that in my life. You know. This idea of what's sustainable or not is often not based on fact. It's often just based on very vague ideas Anyway, so I'm buying peat moss in. But once we get access because we need a vehicle like for context, it's a few hundred meters away from the road, so there's no way we could bring 30 cubic meters out without vehicle access. It just wouldn't be effect. Yeah. Do I have any thoughts about using city water with chlorine? Yes. Unfortunately many of you I guess live connected to city shitty water. I mean, one of the reasons I moved to Sweden is it's one of the few countries in the world where you can actually drink water out the lake and most streams. There aren't many places left on earth where you can drink the water. And water is more important than food, isn't it? Water is 70% of what makes you you and it's what makes plants and animals them too. Right. So it's a big issue and I have studied water very extensively. I think chlorine, you know, it can be dissipated by aeration and settlement. You know, like when you have a fish tank at home and you always had to let the fish water. When you were replacing the water, you had to sit on the windowsill, let the chlorine bubble out. You can get rid of chlorine. You can filter water. I mean, there's things you can do. But the main reason things like chlorine are obviously antibacterial. So for making compost teas or watering gardens, it's really not ideal. You know, for me, it's. I wouldn't do it because I'm trying to farm microbes, not lettuces. I mean, I don't really care about lettuces, to be honest. And so I would do what you can, but you're obviously limited, you know, but there's ways to bubble off chlorine and yeah, we got to be practical. At the same time, you know, if you've got municipal water, then you're going to use it. There's no point building something that costs money when you have a connection. It's very convenient to have a connection to pressurized water, too. I mean, out here, all small farms don't have mains water. We have a little. Well, and it wasn't big enough to supply the market garden because we have to supply a slaughtery which has very high water regulations, people, you know, like certified kitchen and field lines. So we had to build a pond and we happen to have very clean water in the stream. But you got to use what you got. But, you know, probably just spraying it aerially on the garden is going to have very minimal impact. But if you're putting it into a barrel and making biofertilizer, then it's obviously going to kill the organisms that you're shooting for. So then I would treat it differently. But it's got to be practical. Yeah, don't skimp on compost. There you go. What about your solution to snails and slugs? Well, look, we don't get so many snails and slugs. And by mulching with compost, we don't create the breeding ground for them. People always worry about wood chips and they will breed snails and slugs, but they're compact, right. You're walking on them all the time. And I don't see no snails and slugs on them or breeding in them, so I don't know about that. But we use slug poison around the outside of the garden because there are definitely a lot of Spanish murder slugs around. They Just aren't in our garden yet. Yeah, You should always start a small market garden. Don is asking. Yes, you should, like always smaller and build up over time rather than spreading yourself too thin and just collapsing inwards. It's no good. The best market gardeners, if you look at the best growers, it's like everyone is trying to get smaller and smaller. Like, how much don't you need to do, you know, And I see so many times where, you know, I think there was a video I made with our friends at Terra in Luxembourg. Beautiful place they've got. And they needed more money and they did the classical thing of we need to make more gardens to make more money. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Bad idea. Double down on your garden. And we worked out together. It's like change your crop spacings, change your bed intensities, change prices. It's like drive more revenue from even less. Because spreading yourself too thin is crazy idea. And it's so. It's so patent into it. Like, I need 10,000 more euros. I'll just make 20 more beds. Never a good idea. Like double down, get more intensive. We've just been going through this with Jasper at his place in Germany. It's like, don't grow. It doesn't need to grow. Nothing needs to grow. Just double down. And it's. It's way better to do the smallest thing possible. Like you should be able in Sweden. Up here you can do €40 a square meter in our tiny short season. Down in France, Germany, you can be doing 67. You would be exceptionally good. €75 a square meter. I know people doing that and that's exceptional. But you've got almost double the growing season there because of the bit in the middle that doesn't have. There isn't shoulder season. Right. That's good gardeners. Right? That's. People have dialed it in, but you don't need space like a family, a couple. You can do this on a very small space. You know, I think a really good grower should be able to keep 1500 square meters of beds immaculate, you know, And a competent grower can do that on a thousand square meters. I haven't met many that do that on 1500 square meters to the standard. I would like, I think too that have come through our farm. I mean, maybe three, but try and go small. If you can get old cow manure and it's really hard, it might need composting down again. Like you need machines, probably you'd need to Mix that in with other material. It's fairly hard to say without seeing it, but you got to use what you can get and there's probably people with machines around that can help you with it. But cow manure's got such good heart. It's the best animal manure. You know, cows are the most inefficient animals and that's what makes them great. Excuse me, I'm still coming over. This Dargis, the daycare colds, all the kids are just like. You've got tons of anaerobic animal manure. Nice. I wouldn't. No, I wouldn't. It's wet and stinking. I wouldn't stick it on the beds yet. I would put the work in, in windrows, add some carbon material and turn it a bit. You need to aerate. Like. The thing is about anaerobic digestion is it produces phenol, terpenes, alkaloids, alcohols, all things that are plant toxic. And they're all also air dispersed, which means if you turn it regularly and you could probably bring it back into better health. I wouldn't be putting it down straight away, I don't think. I wouldn't put it on my garden anyway. Okay. Lost my place there. Are we still using the paper pot planter and are the chains degrading properly? Yes. I love the paper part transplant. I'm happy to speak a little bit about it. I think it needs like any new tool, it needs getting used to. And I took it away from then I took it away from the people that we had because I don't feel like they were observing closely enough. Thing is with the paper pot is that the cell is two and a half or three centimeters, it's tiny. And you're putting. You've got to get plants out within two or three weeks. You're putting out plants in their cotyledon stage. They're babies. It's like putting a broiler chick out when it's four days old. It's like in this colder climate when the season can fluctuate 30 days each way. It's kind of crazy. So my reflections this year was the first 30 days of actual planting in the field. I will do with my old transplants that are big. Like for example, flea beetle is a big problem here with Brassicas. And if we had put out kale in a big transplant, you know, like 3 inch tall plant, it might get a few holes from flea beetle and then it would recover and it'd be fine in the paper pot. That gets Eaten. And that's one issue. The other issue is like, you've got to learn how to use it right? Like, the seeding tool is amazing. Seeding flats, 256 cells in a minute, you know, between one and two minutes for every single flat. And I'm doing all the seeding in the spring when there's no one else here. And that is fast. It's really good. It's a joy. And then the transplant is also a joy. But you've got to learn how to use it. Like, I could give it to 10 different people and, you know, the skill level is varied. It's like you have to learn and put the time in to get the feel. It's a feeling based thing. The pressure you put on that handle really affects it because what can happen if you don't put them in right is they're sitting up on the top of the soil and then because they're such a baby plant, they just dry out so easily. So you've got to pay real close attention. I would say the best way to relate to it is it's like direct seeding a crop. You know, every time we direct seed, we cover it with a row cover flat on the ground, and we water it every day in the summer. And you've got to do that with the transplants too because it's. They're just so young and so fragile and I just felt like the team we had earlier in the year, they just weren't on it and I couldn't, I just took it away from them. I don't have any bones using it. The ones I used it for were lovely. I think the speed, you know, we're putting out five or six onions per cell every five centimeters, putting 6,000 a bed. And it, wow. Just seeing that, you know, plant in the bed up in two and a half minutes, it's just like, that's beautiful. I would say it's a very expensive system. You know, by the time you buy the transplant, all the cells, the seeders, the plates, it's like you're looking at 1500, €2000. So it's only worth it because like, like think about how much time you actually spend transplant. Like, I can transplant by hand so freaking quick anyway. You know, when I was growing up, when I was 18, we were doing 40,000 leeks by before breakfast. And it's like, you're not hanging around. That little plant is worth nothing till it's grown. And so we don't treat them nice. We are moving our fingers so it's like, it's not exactly slow transplanting anyway, and it's not taking up a large proportion of our time, and it's mostly done in the spring when we're not doing much else anyway. I'm just saying that I sell the paper pot transplant from Japan, but I'm not trying to push anything on anyone either. It's like, yes, it's a valuable tool, but do you need it? No, definitely not. You know, there are some tools that I think you're crazy if you don't have, but the paper pot is definitely not one of them. I feel like it's good in its context, and if you transplant a lot, it's great. But I will only use it for two thirds of my season. I think I'll keep using it for sure, and I think it's a great tool, but I just don't, you know, for running out and spending two grand, it's like basically all the other market garden tools you need add up to two grand. So you got to weigh that up and ask if that fits in your context. Now, about the paper pots, do they break down? No, you pull them out. But I just got an email yesterday from Takai, who runs the. He's the guy that runs the Japanese paper pot company, and they're making hemp paper chains that will be certified organic. And he wants to work with us to make sure they, you know, working with organic standards in Europe. So that's all I know about that. They should be available next year. And, yeah, I'll be using it next year, but I will do all the first month's transplants by hand, I think. Yeah. Okay. There's a bunch of questions down there. Let's see. I've lost my space. Would I grow ginger? Yeah, I don't see why not. Like, ginger seems like a very profitable crop. And turmeric as well. Go for it, you know, like, how often do you find local ginger for sale? That's definitely a good idea, and I know it's very profitable for some people. I haven't been growing it in the market garden, but I would probably. How do you get rid of aphids? You might try soap sprays, stuff like that. I've never had aphid problems that I have much to say about that. Do I have any great farmer jokes? Well, only in context when you're here, I think. Starting on 500 square meters, I reckon, like, look, you know, 500 square meters of beds is small. I reckon you can do maybe, you know, €20,000 of sales max of that. Like, one thing to remember and just to reiterate, because I think context is everything is, like, one of the reasons our farm's interesting is that we're in the middle of bloody nowhere. Like, we have a town 20 minutes away with 5,000 people, and we have a bigger town we sell mostly to about just under an hour away. That's 70,000 people. But it depends on so many things. Like, 500 square meters of beds. I reckon I can drive 20 grand off in the good market. But it's like, what's a good market? Well, I don't know. Like, a lot of market gardeners you find online are living outside the city of a million people, or they're selling things at a price you could never sell for if you didn't live outside that particular place or whatever. Not saying that to be critical. That's great. Like, we've all got to leverage our market places, of course, but it's. But you need to think of that in terms of context, of, like, what is gonna fit for you? Like, 500 square meters of bed. Sounds like a really small market garden. And I would doubt one person in Europe would get a decent salary off that. Like, it's hard to get a salary of double that, you know, and then it's hard to manage triple that. So that's, you know, I'm just trying to contextualize it. Looking forward to meeting you in Croatia. Great. Looking forward to meeting you, too, Jelena. I hope I pronounce that right. Yeah. I've never been to Croatia, and I'm super excited to come over there and meet you. We had a few Croatians in the training in Germany, and. Yeah, super exciting. Do I add fish and seaweed to my compost? No. Well, they're full of nutrients. Fish has been a fertilizer for thousands of years in agriculture, and it's full of nutrient and nitrogen. Don't see why not. I make fish hydrolysate and add that to compost teas and things. Seaweed's good. Just make sure you wash the salt off it. It's full of trace minerals, you know, like, these are things to feed soil microbes. Not feeding the plants, we're feeding soil microbes. They release the nutrients. You know, a sugar. Sorry, a plant. All plants, they're photosynthesizing, releasing sugars out their roots. And they're doing that so that bacteria and fungi and other things get really biologically active outside the plant root. The area quickly goes anaerobic, and then when the soil goes anaerobic there's this switch with the particles, most soil particles, nutrients are locked up on clay, negatively charged particle, iron, positively charged particle. And a healthy soil we think of as aerobic is switching between aerobic and anaerobic all the time. Anaerobic switch releases nutrients where plants want them. So this is a design system. Plants put sugar in the ground to make biological active areas, so it goes anaerobic. So nutrients are released right outside their cell walls, exactly where they want them. That's the beauty of for the benefit the whole. Plants all leak sugar out their roots. They don't do that because they're inefficient, otherwise they'd be replaced by something more efficient. They do that to look after their own needs in the service of all. That's how nature works, right? Every level at every scope you look at, that's the way it works. So these are products to feed the soil life. So process them through biology first, as I've said before, everything you put in your soil, process it through biology, compost, biofertilizers, whatever it is, process it through biology and then it's in the plant available format ready to be taken up by the plants. How should beginning market gardeners sell their products? Well, that's a big question. We could dive down in there. It might take the rest of this time. How should you start selling your products? Well, let me just say a few things then. One thing is. Cash flow is an interesting thing with farming, right? Because nearly all your expenses are at the beginning of the year and a lot of your products don't start paying back straight away or take the rest of the year or the end of the year to pay back. That's where it's handy to pre sell. However, you've got to be really careful to pre sell. You need to know what you know and know what you don't know. Because if you offer something you can't deliver, you're going to burn and lose the very best type of customer you could possibly ask for. The type of customer who will give you money up front for something you haven't proved and meet you in a car park on Thursday at 5:30 for half an hour to pick up the the stuff, right? So be very careful. Now grand veg is fairly straightforward and you've got leeway, right? So if you're planning 50 boxes, just sell 30. Just know that you got a buffer. That's my advice. Now if you have things like Ricoh and other sales models, you don't need to necessarily sell in advance. And if You've got enough capital to get started, then you don't need to sell in advance either. But it's just a point that's worth making. We talked a lot about this recently. I'm going to put a video up with Jasper in Germany maybe in the next few days, but bring people into your farm like Jasper was aiming for. Jasper, there was a video of 15,000 Euro startup in Germany, a video I put up that some of you probably watched with vegetables and pastured eggs. So in his first year he was looking to do 50 boxes and he had sold like 35. And so he put on this open day and his friend came as a chef and put on a lovely buffet. There's a lot of young families there, so they had bouncy castles and face painting and he basically started running tours every hour and all these people were coming and coming, I think in a town of a thousand people and the town next door of like 10,000 people, between like five and a thousand five hundred and 1,000 people came and he was just doing back to back tours every hour. Next day he had sold 75 shares in this veg box. So there's many ways you can advertise a business and promote a business, but word of mouth is a powerful thing and inviting people into your farm is a powerful thing, you know, because that's where food resilience and trust gets built up. Like, you come and sit with me and we look in each other's eyes, we know where we're at with each other, you know, and so do not underestimate the power of that, bringing people into your space. And not, not that people are free to come in your space whenever, like, hey, I've got an open day. Like one thing we did is we noticed there's a lot of elderly people here and they all read this little like local newspaper that's in the hairdressers and the news agents, all that. So we put an ad in that and like our open day went from 50 to 250 the next year, you know, just from that little thing. And that's a place to get emails, you know, that's a place to connect with people, ask questions, see what they want, you know, ask people what they're wanting, what they're missing, etc. Advertising is really effective. And whilst perhaps we don't want to give our money to companies like Facebook, Facebook offers unparalleled marketing. Now, of course, you know, they're a dubious company, but so are the people that make the computer or phone you're watching this on, you know, it's all swings and roundabouts, but the beauty of Facebook targeting is you can say, okay, in my town of 20 people, I want to put this farm in front of who? Well, who are the people that buy organic, local food? Well, they're usually young professionals, and particularly women make purchasing decisions in a lot of households, statistically, especially young families. So you can target. Now, that might be different in some of your cultures, but I'm talking statistically where I live. So you can target people between 25 and 45 who have interests in what local food or cooking or outdoor lifestyle, whatever it is. You know what I mean? But, like, this granular advertising that you can do with Facebook is incredibly powerful. Now, I'm not promoting Facebook. I mean, you know, but most people are on it. That's why RICO rings have been so effective, is that everyone's on it, so there's no hassle. But I've done a lot of advertising in different areas in the last half of my life. And I can say that for every euro that I put into advertising, I reckon I earned €9. It works. That's why companies put hundreds of different billions of dollars into it. You might think you're immune to Coca Cola adverts. No, you're not. You know, even if you don't buy Coca Cola, I bet you buy some other product their company makes that's just called under a different brand name or whatever. Whatever. My point is, like, advertising works and we have access to analytics and data that is unprecedented and it works. So if you're starting up a CSA in the middle of nowhere and you don't have a marketplace, you can put your farm in front of exactly the right people that you want to immediately. And that's amazing. That's amazing. So don't underestimate that, is what I would say. Because it's, you know, you want everyone in your local towns to suddenly know who you are, and you have the tools right in front of you to do that and the analytics to really see what works. But that's also to be combined with inviting people into your space, offering talks in your community, making sure you wear a smile and show up and offer better value than people pay for and all of that stuff, because word of mouth is the most powerful, Right? And then branding is important, you know, sticking your brand in front of people all the time. It might be corny and cliche, but it's true, you know, because word of mouth, it's like if you. If Mrs. Jones goes to someone Else's house for dinner and loves the salad and it's got your logo on and her best friend is buying your salad. Of course, you know, of course she's going to buy your salad and eggs and beef, whatever. You know, word of mouth is super powerful. It's super powerful. So branding, getting a good logo together, you know, if you don't know how to design a logo, then pay a professional. You've got all these website now where you can, you know, like we were just talking about this the other day but like things like Fiverr or I don't even know, I haven't used them but like you can say this is the outline of my business and, and you get all these graphic design students and professionals that will jostle to see who can make the best logo and then you can pick out of 50 and pay them and they will develop, you know, they'll take the copyright off it and they can develop your website or whatever. It's like these kind of things exist all over the place and we, you know, that totally changes the ease. You know, like you probably a lot of people don't want to spend time building a website, building logos, doing all that stuff, but there are professionals who love doing that stuff. So, you know, employ them and there's very cheap access to those kind of professionals now. People that can do SEO optimization in India for like $5 an hour and just, it's great, use it. You know, like within six months of landing in Sweden, I think everyone around here knew about our farm and we just put ourselves out and that's easy. It's easier and easier to do that and yeah, that's a few points on that. Yeah. I think I will do a dedicated Q and A about marketing and sales because that's obviously a huge topic, but there you go. Could you use spent hops from a brewery as a mulch? No, no, that just sounds wrong. Like we're not just mulching, right. We are feeding high productivity with compost, nutritious compost, and it just happens to be mulching out weeds and holding moisture at the same time. But don't use any weird stuff. Don't use any weird stuff. Seriously, don't do any of that. Just good quality compost all the way. You know, if you're tilling, you're still putting all that compost in anyway. We just don't till. Don't need a machine, don't need any of that stuff and just put it on top. But we're not putting any weird stuff on it's good compost. Yeah, Chicken bedding is hard, Granny. I'm just reading here about chicken bedding for the beds and put it below compost if you got compost. If it's not fully ready, you could put it below finished compost and seed straight into that and let it break down over the winter. It'll be fine. It's really hard to say without seeing it because you know, I don't want to say that. And you stick some horrible lumpy stuff down and can't run the cedar next year. That's not going to be good. We have composted directly on the beds and we did that. I think there's videos in the beginning of the spring you could have a look at. We, we actually used a tiltha, the battery powered little tiltha, just to smash up that compost because it had straw in it and so you'd never be able to pass a cedar through it or anything. But after sitting there over the winter and then tilting it, it was fine. We had to tilt over it twice and then it was good to go. So you've got flexibility there. But I wouldn't try, you know, it's all about having good compost. Do I have compost tea and other recipes in my book? Yes, loads of them. And there's videos on here about all that stuff too. Okay. Considering time spent in keeping the garden small, would it be worth investing in time saving tools when we're unsure of our market potential? We also do pastured pigs and 350 egg layers. Yes. Bear in mind your market garden will take you more time than the other things combined, probably by double. Anything you can do to save time is good. But look, tools you need are. I'm assuming everyone's working on 75 centimeter beds. If you're not, you're crazy. Right? Really? So what do you need? You need a rake like a glazier. 75 centimeter rake. Why do you need a 75 centimeter rake? Because if you've got a smaller rake, you're going twice. And if I can go twice as fast as you, it means I finish at lunch, you work till dinner. Right. So a 75 centimeter rake might cost you €50. You're getting a some kind of seeder. I recommend a six row seeder because I just think it's the cheapest, best all round. Ajang would be the other option. It's more fiddly and you'll have to change bits on it all the time. It's more accurate at singulating Seeds. But I only use the six row seeder. It's going to cost you like €600. If you're doing greens. You definitely want a greens cut Harvester. It's about €600 and you'll be crazy not to have it. You're going to put like €100 into harvest knives and different bits like that. You could get a bed roller but you don't need one. You need good trays and you know, for transplanting and all that stuff. But even the bed roll is like €250. Something like that. You can make one. There's videos on our channel of people have made them, stuff like that. Some of you might need weeding tools. We basically have a couple of hoes that cost €50. We don't need much more than that. And you need stuff for your washing and packing station. But basically I'm still well under two grand and I could build the wash station with that. So it's not a lot of money. And all those things can be sold if you decide you don't want to do market gardening because pastured livestock is just way better. But you could sell them all, you know, for sure. It's not hard to sell those things on. Again, like people, you know, most people have to ship those tools around and so it's helpful to have them locally. You know, other things that will include a walk in chiller. But I'm guessing you maybe have stuff like that on your farm. Food scraps from a local center to make compost. You got to be careful with that. There might be regulations with that. I don't know. I'm guessing you're in America. I might be way off and I don't know what I'm basing that guess on, but maybe recent conversations. But you could process it via animals like chickens. You know, if you've got space, you could compost it with carbon material and chicken manure. You could do slow piles with just carbon material. It's easy enough to turn it into compost. But it depends. You might, you know, you want to have uniform product. Compost making is about surface area and consistency. So it's very hard to give an answer without having a sort of visual sense of what it is. But you'd want to macerate it and make sure it's all uniform and look after it properly if you're trying to make compost. But I like, I would never do that to make compost for a market gun. I would buy compost. Like the only reason I'm willing to make compost for my market garden is because I'm using animal bedding and you know, I've got peat moss which makes up most commercial compost and animal manures. And so it's very uniform, it's very fine texture. I can run a cedar through it. It's like, it's beautiful stuff. But making compost out of like lumpy, decomposing marsh, like you got to be really careful. That's all I can say. It's impossible to answer that without knowing more details. But I'd be care, like cautious that you don't end up with anaerobic, sludgy stuff. Okay, coming to the end of these questions. I'm going to just, I'm going to wrap up and leave at 9. In 10 minutes, I'll just check these last questions. My thoughts on aquaponics. I'm sorry, Dean, I'm just not into aquaponics. I'm really into aquaculture and I'm just really not into aquaponics. I think I've lived in the rural countryside all my life and I just couldn't dream of such a reductionist system. Like, it's not a closed loop system. Don't care what anyone says. No, it's not. That's not the future I want and I don't want to eat food out of it. But I'm sure there's people who are expert in that who have a lot more stuff to say that would inspire you. But I, for me, I'm not into it. How about an orchard with interbedded block vegetables? Yes, Florent, this is where it's at, right? This is my. I'm not allowed to plant trees where I am. So perhaps we'll leave it with this today, what my ideal market garden is because I think we need to bring a lot more ecology and biological integrity back into market gardening. Because a lot of market gardening is just extractive and people, some of the proponents of it, just don't give a shit, obviously. And it's like, nah, that's not where I'm at. I'm into integrity farming and I mean that holistically. It's got to be good for the land as well as good for your pocket as well as good for consumers with high quality produce. Right. And so, yeah, I think it needs stepping up a bit because otherwise market gardening hasn't evolved in decades. Right. So what would my ideal version of a market garden look like? Well, I would love to see more integration with trees and perennials. So I would envisage like 10 block beds surrounded on each side with intensive trees and berry production like we see in our market in Silver Pasture. I'm just not allowed to plant trees and berries where our garden is because it's not our land. And then at the tops and bottoms, I'll be doing cut flowers and beneficial insect replants. And then in my pathways, I would be doing King Strife area inoculation. And I would just repeat that pattern over and over and it would be absolutely beautiful. There would be so much more functional interconnection between the perennial crops and the annual crops that could be then tailored for hotter and drier climates by just having a few vegetable rows between the tree rows. But that kind of pattern would be blissful in my mind. And a bunch of our past participants are going off doing that because this is something I really describe and draw and really highlight because I think that's what's. Yeah, that's the future of that. You know, using fungal inoculants and just getting the biology pumping. Because we are microbe farmers, we are not growing salad. You know, that's just a happy byproduct of the whole thing. So that's what I'd like to see more of. You'll see the sort of beginnings of that when I put up Jasper's video soon. And there's a few of our other participants who are setting up their gardens in that way. And I wish I could, but integration of perennials with it and that would be the way I would go. And don't forget the fungi like King's Rhea in your pathways is a beautiful way to go. I think that's it for now, folks. I've just been driving all day back from Germany, so please forgive me if I didn't get around to your questions, but I've been going out a couple of hours. I think that's good for now. I will be putting on different Q and A's. I'm not sure of the regularity, but I think I will be doing that on pasture poultry and larger livestock and business and advertising and marketing and all that stuff. So I think I'll just do a series throughout the winter and we see where we go. But yes, you can smash the thumbs up if you enjoy these things and leave comments in the actual video. I can read them and get feedback from you there. I hope you found it valuable. It's fun for me to turn up and think about these things and try and clarify some of my thoughts. And I will not forget the book list. I will put that up on our website somewhere. And I guess all I can say is I will. I can link it on the video here and on the Ridgedale Facebook page or something like that. So I'll leave you with that. I wish you the best of evenings or days if you've just woken up and look forward to connecting again.