lystn

I’m so excited I have a listener on the line who is going to share a ton of golden seeds! I talked to her before from Florida and she is going to share with us about her Sustainability Project! 1. Tell us a little about yourself. By day, I’m a REALTOR® and beekeeper. I’m also a 3rd generation farmer.  My grandparents owned a 100 acre wheat farm on the prairie in rural Dufresne, Manitoba. My family lived off the land, they grew their food seasonally in a 1 acre vegetable garden. After the local community collectively brought in the fall harvest, they would busily preserve and can their produce for storage in their root cellar. These people were a hardy bunch, they managed to survive the brutually harsh winters with minimal resources using a wood burning stove for heat, crude electric and no running water or indoor plumbing. They kept and cared for livestock and only took what they needed to survive, my ancestors practiced “The Tragedy of the Commons” method.  That’s how they managed to raise a family of 8 in rural Manitoba. And Manitoba is where people go to see the polar bears right? Yes Churchill Manitoba is where the polar bears are. Then you went to the opposite end of the continent practically to Florida. Yes I did I got hired to work for Disney at the Epcot Center back in the early 80s and that’s where I met my husband two weeks later and we’ve been here ever since! That’s so romantic! I always wanted to work for Disney, I tried to get a job or get into art school at the California Institute of Arts in LA. Well, they must have liked me! I managed to beat out 64 other people fro the job! So yay for me! And you worked there for a long time right? Yes 35 years! 2. Tell me about your first gardening experience? We used to visit the farm in the summer time every two years, however my mom! When my mother moved to the big city of Toronto, Ontario, she became a backyard farmer and composter carrying on her family farming tradition. I began helping my mother garden as a young child, she taught me valuable lessons in planting, harvesting and food preservation skills. All these years later I’ve been utilizing this and it’s been working out fantastic for me. Luckily for me, both my parents were award winning gardeners so pulling weeds or fresh carrots comes naturally. So then is it challenging down in Florida? Do you have to learn different practices to grow in that climate? Well, gardening is pretty much the same wherever you go. IT’s just the conditions and the climate. In Florida there is a sandy soil, where my parents lived it was a deep rich soil. You have to plant things things that grow well I’m in climate zone 9b, it’s way different climate. They get snow and here we don’t get any snow, we hardly get any freezes? 3. How did you learn how to garden organically? My mother taught me, she was a big time composter of our organic kitchen waste. In fact, she had 3 bins under the sink. one for regular trash recycables and strictly for organic waste She didn’t use toxic chemicals as there were few available when she grew up, instead she did pest control by hand and by natural methods. She would plant different plants with different vegetables using companion planting as well. They had to learn how to grow their own food and preserve it or they didn’t eat. So they had to learn quick! And probably some of it was passed on from generation to generation! Yes, of course. 4. Tell us about something that grew well this year. It is winter, but you can grow crops in Florida all year long. Adding 2 beehives to my garden mix was a huge plus this year. I grew delicious Beefsteak tomatoes just like my mother did. We also had great success growing a wide variety of herbs, including our own organic oregano and basil. We’ve grown cucumbers bananas sunflowers jalapenos salsa garden