540: Grow your Joy: Troy Smothermon’s Guide to Organic Happiness

Gardening isn’t just about growing food — it’s about reconnecting with nature, boosting your mental and physical health, and cultivating a sense of community and wellness.

Today, we’re diving into the simple yet powerful world of organic gardening with Troy from StartOrganic.org. Troy shares insights that might surprise you about how location, watering, and even the very air around your garden can impact your success and wellbeing. Whether you’re a seasoned gardener or just thinking about planting your first seed, this conversation is packed with practical tips, inspiration, and encouragement to help you grow not only your garden but your health.

Stay tuned as we explore how gardening can be a true path to healing — one tomato at a time.

Highlights:

• Gardening has proven therapeutic effects, enhancing joy, reducing stress, and grounding us emotionally and spiritually.
• Eating just-harvested produce introduces beneficial microbes to your gut, improving digestion and overall immunity.
• Growing your own vegetables builds appreciation for fresh food and reconnects us to natural rhythms and nourishment.
• Whether you live in an apartment or house, you can grow food using containers, small planters, or even just kitchen sprouts. 
• Produce begins to lose nutrients 72 hours after harvest—fresh-from-the-garden veggies can be up to 50% more nutritious.
• Gardening empowers you to be less dependent on long supply chains and grocery stores, especially during emergencies.
• Children who help in gardening are more likely to eat vegetables and enjoy hands-on learning about nature and nutrition.
• Mulching and proper planning can reduce water use compared to traditional lawns, making gardening sustainable.
• Excess harvest can be shared with neighbors or food banks, creating abundance and connection
• Even growing herbs, lettuce, or radishes in a window box can deliver satisfaction, flavor, and health benefits with minimal effort.

Intro:

Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This one is fun and light and informative and inspiring. I really enjoyed this interview that I did, and when we did it, it was actually at the end of fall. I timed publishing this because we talked about gardening zones and when certain zones fall into the appropriate time to plant certain crops.

Now's the time that most of the United States—well, there's a big cold snap happening next week—but because people will listen to this a week from now, a year from now, 10 years from now, just know that you have, surprisingly, a larger window for gardening than you imagined, than you thought, especially if you're new to gardening.

I was quite surprised that in my zone—and I live very close to the Canadian border, just north of Seattle—I found out that in the late fall I could grow fresh greens, fresh delicious salad greens. Right now in my area, I can plant fresh salad greens and kale, and there are even certain winter crops that you can grow. Really interesting to get to know your zone.

Most people that are listening to this probably don't garden, but there's something incredibly healthy and beneficial to starting even a small garden. If you have an apartment and you have just an indoor space, we talk about how you can do some form of growing food that increases those live enzymes and those beautiful vitamins in you.

There's something emotional, something spiritual to gardening that increases our joy and happiness. It's proven, it's scientifically sound. If you've had a garden—maybe you have a yard and you have some flowers or some bushes—you can grow it easily. For example, potatoes.

Potatoes are so easy to grow that I accidentally grew a bunch of potatoes once in my compost pile. It was kind of hilarious. I was like, what the heck is this? It turned out I, for free, made 12 beautiful potatoes out of half a potato I'd thrown out six months before. I got really excited and started growing potatoes.

It's so easy to grow potatoes. You just go to the store, get organic potatoes, and then put them in the ground. Put one potato—spread them out, don't throw a bunch in the same area. One potato is going to make 12 to 15 more potatoes. It's so easy. It's so beautiful. They grow beautiful flowers, and you can even cook. The greens are edible.

A lot of the foods that you make—for example, you can take garlic, a big head of garlic, break it up into little cloves, and pop them in the ground. This is now the perfect time. Spring is the perfect time to do that. Your bulbs should go in the ground in fall or spring. So now is the perfect time.

People might be listening to this in the summer, in the winter—really, just get in, dive in, pick an area. After you listen to this episode, he gives some great advice for exactly where in your yard—if you do have a yard—where in your yard you should pick.

If, let's say, you don't have a big yard, you can get a planter pot, grow something in that planter pot. You can actually grow amazing vegetables right there in a planter pot, or some herbs, and just have that healthy, emotional experience of doing it.

If you have kids, it's amazing. When kids participate in growing food, they will eat that food. They have a much, much more strong connection with that food. They want to eat it. So it's a very healthy experience.

But in this episode you'll learn where to garden and where. Where would be an optimal place to put your garden, if you have a yard, a front yard or a backyard. For those garlic, little garlic cloves that you plant, a few weeks or months later they have these beautiful big green shoots. You can trim those shoots and chop them up and put them in a stir fry. It is so delicious. It's like cooking with spinach, but it's garlicky, it's delicious. You could do the same with chives and the onion greens. So there's many ways of growing that become fun, delicious, nutritious.

Out of all that, all those things are good and my most important point is to get that emotional, mental, and spiritual healing that comes from cultivating your food. That comes from start to finish. Farm to table experience in your own yard or in your own patio or in your own kitchen if you're growing sprouts or microgreens. But that experience and your hands-on experience, your hands-on being in the soil. It doesn't take that much work.

If you haven't done it before, I just highly recommend checking out the obviously all the information that my guest shares today. He's got a free weekly webinar. He invites you to come hang out with him. They're not charging you for it. They just want to invite you and they share and they teach. They're really giving back to the community and wanting to help, especially people who maybe have had a bad experience with gardening and they're like oh, everything I plant dies, and they want to help you. They want to help you to overcome that. So they have a wonderful free community of weekly Zoom calls you can join.

Then I also highly recommend checking out on YouTube. It's a free documentary and it is so beautiful. It's called Back to Eden Gardening Documentary and the man lives not far from me and I actually talked to him for 90 minutes on the phone once. He's incredible. He doesn't have any technology. I wanted to do an interview with him and I'd like to go drive out to swim. It's a ferry ride but it's not that far away, but I'd like to go drive out and bring a mic to him basically because he has a landline. He doesn't even have a cell phone. The whole documentary is about how he created this amazing garden that requires almost no weeding, almost no maintenance at all and no watering, and he shares the science behind it and so it's a beautiful documentary.

Then in the documentary, people around the United States in different gardening zones recreated his system and showed different ways of troubleshooting it.

I did it in our old house that we lived in for seven years and we had a huge garden and it was amazing. It was such a cool experience and my son, who was a toddler at the time, walked into the garden. The first thing that had a fruit on it was this zucchini plant and my son had never seen anyone pick a zucchini plant and he walked out and he grabbed the zucchini, he twisted it off the plant. He just intuitively knew to twist it, pull it and immediately started eating it.

I was just standing there. I wish I had recorded it. I just didn't know he was going to do that and he would just sit there in the garden munching on the food and it was the coolest thing to watch. Children love it, but adults love it too. So I know you're going to love today's interview and share this with a friend who would be benefited by increasing their joy.

There is something that happens when we garden. It increases our joy. It actually helps with our microbial health in our gut, eating freshly literally seconds before you pick it from the garden and immediately eat it. You are getting a tremendous amount of healthy probiotics from the garden that inoculate your gut in a good way and bring microbial diversity to your gut.

I have several interviews about this. You can listen to, for example, the two interviews I did with Sarica Cernohous. But if you type in probiotics, for example, go to learntruehealth.com, search probiotic, you're going to have dozens of really cool interviews with gut doctors, naturopaths, and experts on gut health where we dive in and talk about this phenomenon.

We've lost this as a society. We used to do this. Think about how your grandparents or great-grandparents had access to fresh food. Everyone had gardens. In World War I, everyone had victory gardens. We all had access to fresh food. You don't have to eat 100% of your food from your garden, but just inoculating your gut and having that experience with something you grow with your own hands in your own soil makes such a huge difference on a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual level.

So please share this episode with a friend who would appreciate this boost to their mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health, and I want you to know that on my website. I don't know, if you've been listening for a long time, you may have noticed my website's been over time evolving. We've been investing a lot of time and energy into evolving the website learntruehealth.com, and at the very bottom there's a new banner and I have a brand new newsletter.

So you may have joined my newsletter in the past and this is a brand new newsletter. A lot of people who think they're still on my newsletter are actually not anymore because we had to switch systems. Point being, come join the newsletter.

I have been spending the last several weeks researching and writing newsletters designed to support your optimal health and I know you, my listener, are listening because you want to achieve optimal health, because you're sick of being sick or you want to take your health to the next level.

So I've dug deep into these topics of what it takes. What are the very quick things that give you the biggest bang for your buck? The activities or the foods and the nutrition that is going to take your health to the next level and that's what's coming out in my new newsletter.

I won't spam you. You're going to receive one to maximum three emails a week, probably more like one or two emails a week.

To get on it, go to learntruehealth.com. Scroll to the bottom. You'll see a banner that says join the newsletter and I also give you some freebies, some really cool videos. So check it out. Let me know what you think. You can always reply to those emails. If you reply, it goes straight to me so you can say hey, Ashley, I love your podcast. If you have any feedback or questions, just let me know.

Enjoy today's episode. I know you will.

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James.

This is Episode 540. 

Ashley James (0:11:13.768)

I'm so excited for today's guest. I have Troy Smothermon from Start Organic. You can go to his Instagram and Facebook at Start Organic or his website, StartOrganic.org. If you've been a listener for a while, I'm a big fan of eating organic, but you might not know that I absolutely am obsessed with gardening and growing my own food.

Even when you don't have space for a garden, there's a lot of fun things you could do inside your home. I teach that in my workshop, the Learn True Health Home Kitchen, where we even grow our own sprouts on your own. That's why I'm growing downstairs now. I'm growing sprouts. I'm eating living food. I just love the idea of eating living food.

Troy has been doing for what, 14 years now or 14 years now teaching people. Also teaching businesses how to have amazing gardens to support health, but it's not just physical health. There's something emotional, mental, and spiritual about getting in the dirt and being part of the process of growing your own food.

So I'm really excited to talk about that today with you, Troy. Welcome to the show.

Troy Smothermon (0:12:24.374)

Hey Ashley, thanks. Good to be here.

Ashley James (0:12:26.250)

Absolutely. I guess mutual contacts told us that we should hook up and chat. So this is fun to have you on the show. When I saw what you do at StartOrganic.org, I was pouring through your website and you've got some fun stuff for regular folk who want to learn—a free starter course—and you're going to be launching more courses in the spring.

You also right now focus on something really unique. I was surprised to see that you have a B2B. I'm really curious to get into that. But before we do, tell us about Start Organic in the last 14 years. What have you guys been doing and how did this come to be?

I also want to know the kind of impact that your business has had on people's lives and their health.

Troy Smothermon (0:13:18.856)

Absolutely. Thanks. So I was raised in San Jose, California, and for most people out there, they don't know that this area used to be called the Valley of the Heart's Delight. It was the agricultural capital of California. It was full of orchards. Then a couple of guys in their backyard started making computers in their garages. It became the Silicon Valley. Kind of overnight. Really big transformation for the area.

I was raised with the idea that you could grow your own food. We had gardens and stuff growing up, but really this idea took shape with my college friend. My friend Josh Levine is co-founder of Start Organic. We went to college together at UC Santa Barbara and we really didn't become friends until we went and studied abroad in Spain. We just really bonded over there, we're soccer buddies.

Both of us came back into the real world after graduating college and we both kind of had these ideas of just bigger things and our own thing and we always wanted to start our own business. So in the summer of 2010, my folks had a house in Lake Tahoe and we got this opportunity. We got this really cool opportunity. It was a foreclosure house, needed a bunch of work and I said, I'll go live there. I'll bring my friend Josh and we're going to hash out ideas for a business. We went out there and we came up with this idea pretty quickly.

Another friend had kind of posed the idea, hey, what happens if we start gardens in people's backyards? So we thought through the idea, we started doing all the background stuff, getting the LLC, and we started our first round of plants in the laundry room. We were one of the only people, probably the only people in that area growing plants indoors that weren't growing pot plants. So we had all of our tomato starts and some peppers and things, and those plants became the first plants that we planted at clients' places back in the Silicon Valley, back in the San Jose area. I had a lot of connections growing up there, so we thought that would be a perfect place, because it's really a big kind of suburban sprawl. 

There's a lot of potential houses to work with. I had some connection through my mom's athletic club she worked at. So those were our first rounds of clients, just word of mouth, hey, would you want a garden in your backyard? So Josh and I took my pickup truck and we started building gardens and then we developed a whole range of services from those. For the first 10 years from 2010 to 2020, we did nothing but backyard vegetable gardens.

One client at a time, one family at a time, picking the right locations and getting people on the path to grow their own food. Then along that way, with the pandemic and some changes that happened before then as well, we wanted to branch out. So we really started shifting towards being an educational company instead of just a garden installation company. So we got online and we started making online courses. Then we found our first corporate client.

We started working with eBay and they just celebrated 10 years. There was a lot of overlap there. They just celebrated 10 years. The program is now with PayPal. They have a garden on their campus and we've got a couple hundred people that come out on a daily basis. They harvest their own produce, they learn from us with our classes, and they take home everything they grow. It really kind of changes the way that they act at work.

That's kind of the abbreviated story of the origin story of Start Organic. Just two guys in a house in Tahoe with a grow room in the laundry room.

Ashley James (0:17:16.468)

My gosh. So how many years have you been helping eBay with their garden?

Troy Smothermon (0:17:22.274)

So eBay and PayPal, eBay was created as the commerce and trade, then PayPal was the payment portal. We started with them over 10 years now.

Ashley James (0:17:35.146)

Nice. OK, so you were working with them for over 10 years. I know eBay and PayPal split, but they originally started as one. My husband and I, just a little side story, we used to live off of an eBay business. We ran an eBay business and that was 100% of our income. This is ages ago. I think three and a half years or close to four years, we were like 100% of our income from eBay and it was a lot of fun. It was crazy. It was wild. It was the wild days before being a parent and before getting into holistic health stuff, before discovering it.

While I was posting on eBay, I listened to a podcast with the naturopath that had me go, oh, my gosh, this is what I need. This is what I've been searching for and had me do 180 degrees and get my health back and then start this podcast. It was while we were doing the business that it all kind of took off for us.

I love imagining eBay workers and PayPal workers going out there to their garden at work and bringing home dinner, bringing home fresh, organic, still living foods. You just pulled it out of the ground as a good, healthy gut bacteria attached to that food because it was freshly picked, and there's no chemicals. That's amazing.

How long does each person on average spend out in the garden there at work?

Troy Smothermon (0:19:07.552)

We aren't asking for a lot of their time, because it is a professional workplace. So we ask that they come out there just between five and ten minutes twice a week. That's really it. For all the home listeners that are wanting to get into gardening, if you set up a garden properly, you can get away with just a few minutes twice a week, maybe that third time a week if you want to do more harvesting, but really we're asking them to come out on a lunch break.

Just kind of interact with the plants, observe a little bit, see if there are new pest problems happening, or what's your next harvest going to be, or did the garden get water, which is a big one. We do automatic irrigation in all of our corporate garden setups to make things a little easier for people. Sometimes those systems malfunction or there's some sort of work being done and that system is turned off. So there are eyes and ears there.

We're kind of all working together as this collective where we all just want each other to be able to harvest the best produce.

If one person's having a problem in the corner of the garden with a squirrel, they let the whole group know, then more people come out and say, I'm going to take this time slot to get out there and clap and chase this squirrel out of here. So we can make this group effort. Really not a lot of time—five to ten minutes, two to three times a week is really all you need to be a successful gardener.

Ashley James (0:20:33.588)

I love it. I love it. Can you give any other examples of businesses that you've helped successfully set up a wonderful garden for the employees?

Which is just this weird concept. How can you actually get there and help people grow their own food? It turns out if you can give people the background, that gardening 101 information that is so important to setting up a successful garden, if you're armed with that and then you have someone kind of there to just hold your hand or even just answer questions on a regular basis, you'd be surprised at how much success people have.

Ashley James (0:21:58.603)

Right. We're so disconnected in society from our food. It's kind of odd to think about. There have been times when our food supply has been threatened. So think of natural disasters or even early 2020 when transportation was challenged or we've had maybe truckers go on strike or others. Some kind of transportation goes on strike or something.

To think about — I hold my kale and I think about how many hands had to touch this. I think about the farmer. I think about the person cutting the kale and putting the band on it and throwing it in the crate. Then the distribution does this middleman role between the farmer and the grocery store, sitting in a warehouse somewhere, and then getting distributed to my grocery store. Then the employees at the grocer handling it and stocking the shelves.

We're just very disconnected. How many days ago was that cut from the ground? When I grew my own kale, you don't even have to pick it. You could just lean down and start eating like a deer. You could just start nibbling on the plant while it's still attached to the earth. You don’t even have to pick it.  How fresh can you get with your own garden?

It's that relationship we used to have, and it's only broken in the last three generations. I used to be super into canning and preserving our food and studying it.

This was years ago. I started when I came across the Victory Gardens. I think it was mandatory. It was super encouraged. It was really frowned upon if you didn't have a garden in your front yard or your backyard during the war because so much of the resources needed to go overseas. It was called a Victory Garden.

We were wanting victory for our troops. To support our troops, we would be growing our own food at home so we could be self-sustainable. Where has that gone? Where is that urge? Even the government encouraging us to be self-sustainable has really disappeared.

What now we are encouraged to be is completely reliant. Being completely reliant is the most vulnerable we could ever be.

Troy Smothermon (0:24:50.777)

It is so strange because you just don't think about all those moving parts until disaster strikes and you're like, oh crap. The whole world had a oh crap moment during the pandemic.

Going back to what you said about food and the freshness of being picked, we always have to have our finger on the pulse of what's happening. We happened to cross this Harvard study, this was a number of years ago, that said produce that was picked up to 72 hours ago has lost up to 50% of its nutritional value.

That's massive when you're talking about the difference between a freshly picked item that you're going out there harvesting, putting in your food that day, eating, versus something that was picked potentially longer than a week ago, had to go through many hands, even sometimes some weird sterilization stuff that you don't think of.

Some items are sprayed with an antifungal. Even though they're organic items, they're arriving at your grocery store and they're sprayed with something to make them not sprout, for example, potatoes. They don't want them to be sprouting in the stores and they might spray something on them even after the fact.

So there's really not a lot of truth there. Taking it into your own hands is a big deal. It is really something that. Then you mentioned the Victory Gardens. We actually went through kind of a few years, and again, when you have your own business and if you're a self-made business person, it seems you are, and you've gone through the eBay days and stuff too, you have to recreate yourself constantly. You've got to be trying new things and seeing which one works.

In the 14 years that we've had, we've gone through so many iterations of services for Start Organic. One of the items that we offer and one of the products that we sold, you could say, was a Victory Garden. It was our lowest cost garden setup. It was transforming any area of your yard into a productive garden — just adding soils, tilling, getting some water to that area.

We were talking about unused side yards, small planter areas, in the front porch areas. We called them Victory Gardens, and we charged a square foot amount. So it was — I can't ever remember now, there's so many years back — but it was, I don't know, $5 a square foot for us to add soil amendments, till up that soil, and get you some plants in there.

Trying to kind of recapture that essence, really those Victory Gardens, the reason they were so popular was they were mandated. That was the government's decision to say, hey, let's do that. The government's done a complete 180 since those days and put a ton of money into strange ways of farming. Conventional farming is almost the norm now. It is spraying something with pesticides or even genetic modifications, stuff like that.

Ashley James (0:27:57.725)
I'm a linguist. The Orwellian concept of listening to language and how manipulative it is—to just take the word conventional, just to accept it into the norm—is such a blasphemy to nature because the word conventional, think about what the word conventional means.

What they're actually doing is poisoning. It's not conventional. Conventional means it's the way we've been doing it for a long time. It's the gold standard. It's the way it's always been. That's conventional. That's what the word means.

But when they say this is conventional, what's the opposite of conventional? Organic. Organic is how we've been growing our food for 10,000 plus years or whatever.

Whenever we start taking seeds and going, I'm going to plant this myself instead of letting nature do it. I'm going to, on purpose, grow food. They say we started doing that about 10,000 years ago, but we don't have any proof other than theories. So I'm not going to get into whether it was 7,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago, but they say they think around 10,000 years ago we started to farm and cultivate our own food. Might've been 20,000 years ago.

Point being, it's only been in the last three generations that we've completely disconnected, fully disconnected from food. This concept of conventional is less than 100 years old. It makes you think just with going to a doctor, oh well, there's the MD and that's conventional. Then there's the alternative. So alternative is, well, that's sort of less than the word alternative. So you have to listen to the linguistics because actually all those “alternative doctors” were here long before drug-based, petroleum drug-based allopathic medicine even existed. So the conventional, the word conventional means you're eating poison.

Troy Smothermon (0:30:17.770)

That’s an impressive shift. That’s the power of money and the power of propaganda. 

Ashley James (0:30:26.911)

Absolutely. It's PR. But who doesn't like the convenience of just bloop, bloop, bloop, the buttons on your phone and having groceries delivered? Or just go to the grocery store, pick up a few things. Or go to a restaurant or just get some takeout. There's even further disconnect from your food when we do that. There's more hands that have to be touched. 

There's more cogs in the wheel and it complicates things more. So when things break down, a natural disaster, an example being it wasn't really a natural disaster, but when I lived on the East Coast around 20 years ago, Niagara Falls, which powers most of the East Coast and up into Canada for electricity, shut down for about a week or so. We didn't have power.

I don't know if you remember that, but we did not have electricity. Luckily, my friends and I were super into camping. So we had camping supplies, we had a generator, we had canned food, and all of our friends came together, found each other, and we all just huddled together for a week. But those kinds of things can happen. We can have an earthquake, we can have giant hurricanes. We've seen it.

But there's so many ways our food supply can be harmed. What if there was, God forbid— not to be a fear monger—but we're coming into a more intense cycle for the sun. There are solar cycles. We're coming into a very hot solar cycle, so we're going to see more and more activity coming from the sun. If it hits the earth just right, it can blow out the electrical grid. It can disrupt. It's an EMP almost. It can disrupt electronics. Imagine, imagine if we get hit with a solar flare in one region and maybe it's not even your region, but that region is what's between the farmer and where the food comes from or something. So there's so many ways that we could have our food chain disrupted. That's why I think knowing how to, just even have the knowledge to grow food,

even especially having a garden is so important. Even if you're just growing potatoes, for example, potatoes are so easy to grow. I accidentally grew potatoes in my compost pile. I'm , what is growing out of my compost pile? It was some half-rotten potato I'd thrown out the year before. It suddenly made 24 more potatoes in my compost pile. So you can accidentally grow potatoes. They're so great. They're a really, really good source of energy.

Just thinking from the survival standpoint. Then there's that, I talked about, the mental and spiritual aspect of just getting in the dirt. It's earthing or grounding. Maybe you want to talk a bit about this, but there's something that happens when we inhale the scent of plants. They've seen this. It's called forest bathing, but in Japan, they're really into it. Actually, doctors will prescribe it. Because something happens when we inhale the particles, I don't want to say pollen, some people go, I don't want to inhale pollen, but the scent of plants calms the nervous system and decreases stress.

But really what gets us is we're still avid gardeners ourselves. I went out to my garden today to check on things. I have new rounds of things coming because we're having kind of a very warm late summer. So I'm like, wow, my delay of changing my season is over, which I could have totally planted my winter crops already, but because I got lazy and I just decided to wait, I've got a whole new big round of sprouts coming out. More zucchini, more squash, more cucumber, peppers. And that feeling and seeing, especially for us, this is why we're still doing this—seeing people's first reaction to getting to kind of have a small journey with them. 

The shortest journey you can do is a radish. If someone's never grown any food before, you could plant a radish seed in the ground in the middle of summer, early summer, springtime. It's 30 days. You can plant a radish seed and 30 days later you can get that full-size radish to pull, cut up, and eat inside of a salad or however you want to do it. But that's a short journey, and so we normally do obviously a bit wider range. Not everybody likes radishes, but things like tomatoes. Tomatoes are a little bit of a longer journey, more like a hundred days, at least that three-month period, even for things like early girls and stuff. So seeing people who have labeled themselves a brown thumb—they had one bad experience.

They probably just had something along the way of how they set up the garden, or their crop selection, or the way that they were watering, or something in that fundamental understanding was tweaked, was off just a little bit. They go, well, I'm a brown thumb. I'm never doing this again.

So it was really important to us to make sure that people had success their first time, even if that's just a radish or just an indoor basil plant. Whatever it is, to make sure that you are successful that first time so you have something to build on, so you have this positive reinforcement. You did it, I did it. You get this—it's more than just accomplishment because it's accomplishment with this natural connection. That's why I say it's indescribable. It's this word that no one's made up yet.

Ashley James (0:37:15.510)

You know what it is? It's pure dopamine, baby. I get a pure dopamine hit. I'm ADHD, just high off of gardening. I don't know whether it's serotonin or dopamine or whatever kind of endorphins you're getting, but there's some neurotransmitter. You get filled with a tingly happy sensation, and it definitely becomes a good addiction.

It's a lot like parenting, or maybe if you don't have kids, raising a puppy and then training it. There are times when there's frustration, and then you go online and you learn stuff, and then you implement that, and then you see the puppy taking on the training. Then you go, wow. You get proud of both the puppy and yourself for accomplishing and working through those challenges together. It's a relationship you have with your garden. I talk to my plants.

There's been so many studies about how plants listen. A really good book—you probably know this one. I love the audiobook version of this because I listen to it on walks—The Secret Life of Plants. Yep. That is a really good book. There are a lot of scientific studies showing that plants perceive you, that they actually know you're talking to them. They perceive you.

They even get excited when you're with them, if you're the person that comes and hangs out. Plants can differentiate between people. There's something cool about building that relationship with your garden. I'm all about the health aspect, so I'm seeing the mental health aspect.

Troy Smothermon (0:39:02.228)

Scientifically too, I mean, if you're talking fungi? It's tangible, that connectivity. One mycelium network is literally connecting plants to other plants and sometimes into other sources of nutritional abundance. This entire forest.

I’m not far from where you are, supposedly not that long ago, they discovered the world's largest living organism, which is a fungal mass underneath a forest in Washington. They're saying that there's indistinguishable genetic material from the forest or this fungal thing connecting all of the trees underneath the forest. So all of that is literally one organism, and they had to upgrade that from the whale.

They're saying that this living organism is the largest living thing on Earth because it's connecting an entire forest floor.

Ashley James (0:40:03.708)

So cool. I love getting into studying fungi and how they will actually deliver nutrients from one area to another, that they are the go-between for plants. They talk to each other, and they have this wonderful relationship with plants. It's so cool.

Then to talk about the microbiome of the soil, that's another thing. Our garden represents our gut health. We have about three to four pounds of bacteria kicking around in our gut. Could be good bacteria, could be bacteria we don't want it, depending on how we eat. That is a direct reflection of the food we eat and the health of the garden.

Then in the soil, there's healthy bacteria that have a relationship with the garden. You ever get into the science of the microbiome of the garden?

Troy Smothermon (0:41:05.714)

Nerd out pretty good. I've taken myself, I've dived into some higher learning. Dr. Elaine Ingham has these soil biology courses, but it's about, because that's probably the most misunderstood part of organic gardening—how to build healthy soil. People just kind of go, yep, I threw some chicken manure down or I turned the soil up.

But the reality is you're growing bacteria. If you can grow bacteria and fungi—you want to grow fungi in your soil as well—if you have the right ratios of those living organisms and you have a diverse variety of bacteria in your soil, it will produce excellent food. Not only that, your plants will have this natural immunity to pathogens and diseases because they're pulling from this diverse, really rich bed of nutrition.

I know I've gotten as far as looking into microscopes, counting bacteria in soil samples and stuff. Because I, at one point, and again, small business, thinking about branching out, we were talking about potentially offering compost tea. Compost tea is just water with compost in it that's agitated, and you feed the microorganisms, and after 72 hours they've duplicated so much that you have this trillions-of-organisms water. It's brown water—not for human consumption, don't drink compost tea—but if you water it onto your plants, they have the ability to unlock nutrients that were already in the soil.

So instead of having to add more soil or fertilizer or anything else, you can essentially boost your plants' immunity by watering on this tea. It's really easy to do at home with a compost tea brewer. So man, at one point I almost went out and bought this diesel truck with a 500-gallon compost tea brewer attached to it with a hose. You could go deliver this out into farms.

At the time, I almost did it, but California passed all these diesel laws outlawing diesel vehicles and stuff. So it just kind of squashed the idea because the vehicle was no longer going to be roadworthy. So it was, okay, maybe I'll skip that. That kind of petered out.

We're doing what we're doing and really happy doing it, but that was one of the offshoots we were thinking about doing at one point.

Ashley James (0:43:37.216)

My gosh. You've mentioned tilling a few times and I'm curious because a lot of gardeners I know are really anti-tilling. They're more into biodynamic, that concept of you don't disrupt the microbiome by tilling. What are your thoughts on that?

Troy Smothermon (0:43:54.352)

I think, and I always run everybody through this very simple test. If you go out into your garden and you can't dig in your garden with your bare hand or just with a glove on, if you can't dig past your knuckles or get down to your wrist with digging with your bare hand, you do need to soften that soil up. Roots need soft enough soil to grow wide enough to pick up more nutrition.

So if that soil is rock hard, you're not going to get there by planting a seed. You're going to have this tiny little root ball that just had nowhere to go. It's sitting in a clay pot. There's the simple test. If you can dig in your soil with your bare hand to your wrist, then don't bother tilling your soil, you're fine.

There's other ways to soften soil. If you have a really hard patch and you don't want to go digging as much, you can put six inches of mulch on top of it and wait a year and that mulch will start to degrade at that bottom level. It will soften up or maybe cardboard on top of the soil, then mulch. Now you'll start to see earthworms come up and they'll make the soil softer for you. But that does take a long time.

If you want to grow this season, it's September. You're going into the winter season. You want to plant your winter crops in the next few weeks. You should probably turn that soil up and maybe add some nutritional, just add some organic compost and organic composted chicken manure to it.

Ashley James (0:45:26.071)

Got it. When I started my garden, I had really lofty goals. It was a hundred feet by fifty feet. My husband begged me to just do fifty feet by twenty-five feet. I'm like, no, we have the space. We're doing it.

I had just watched the free documentary on YouTube called Back to Eden Gardening. That is a man local to us who started his garden, I think, thirty years ago. Now he hasn't been to a grocery store in over twelve years. He just eats off of his land, and it's awesome.

He recommends getting free wood chips from arborists and then mixing it with either cow or horse manure, whatever you can get access to for free. Depending on your area, kind of go around and see if you can find someone who has manure they want to give you. Then you mix it. A one-to-one ratio, you kind of mix it and you throw it on top of the newspaper. You put the newspaper or cardboard on top of the grass, and then you do eight or more inches of that.

For his first year, because anything decomposes really quickly, the mulch would suck nitrogen out of the soil, so you have to replace the nitrogen. Organic blood meal was great because it smells like death, and because it is just—it is death. It's pure nitrogen.

What's great about blood meal is that it scares off the animals because they think there's, I don't know, a predator feasting on death. That made all of the deer and the bunnies and everything not come near my garden for the first two years. It was wonderful.

Then I stopped using blood meal because I didn't need to. That's when I lost my garden. We didn't have a fence. 

Troy Smothermon (0:47:21.926)

We always say, first year's free because the animals, they're on a pattern. They do the same. If you track your animals going around, they do almost the exact same things every single day. So that's another reason why pattern disruption is so important. Why establishing a human presence in the garden is so important.

When I talk at our corporate gardens, I say, we are all in this together. I don't want all of you here for five minutes. I want you here for five minutes, and then you here for five minutes, and then you here for five minutes. If anything comes, you're disrupting that pattern. You could be the first person that that squirrel runs into. If you're sort of mean, if you charge it and clap or whatever, that squirrel is going to be, maybe I should go the other way next time. That pattern is disrupted.

So hey, you got your two years. Usually the first year is free, you get two. Okay, so you must be a lucky one.

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Ashley James (0:48:59.901)

I had some fun things happen. This was the old house we used to live in. We moved three years ago. We live in a house now that's a townhouse because we're taking care of family and we don't have a place to garden. So I've got this tiny little porch where I have some potted plants and growing some fun stuff in there— kale and potatoes. Then I've got my sprouts inside. So I'm still doing something.

But I yearn for the day that I get my giant garden back again. With fun, fun things that happened to the garden— potatoes, or sorry, tomatoes. I didn't plant seeds after year two. In year three, a good quarter of my garden was tomatoes. Tomato plants had seeded from the previous year and it just— boom, volunteers. It was amazing. It was so cool.

What's cool about that, the more you do that, the more the seeds are acclimated to your climate. So it's the best thing you can do—get seeds from a fellow gardener in your region so that they're acclimated. Have you seen that? That there's a difference between if you got seeds from Tennessee and you tried to plant them in California versus seeds that that plant for generations had been in California. There much of a difference that you notice?

Troy Smothermon (0:50:24.615)

It's all about growing zone, really. When you're talking about seeds, and I looked up your zip code or whatever I could find—public information—was, okay, she's up in Washington? So you're actually really lucky. You're in zone eight. I'm in zone eight, eight A or B. So even though we're far apart, also if you look over on the East Coast, South Carolina is going to be in the similar. North and South Carolina are going to be really close.

So it's really all about, you're picking these seeds based on—there's a USDA growing zone map. It's a hardiness zone. So anyone who wants to know, and this is a really good step for any first-time gardener, you go online and you just type in USDA hardiness zone, and then type in your zip code. It will spit a number out. That number is going to be between—if you're in the US, it's going to be somewhere between four and eleven.

Okay, and that tells you what seeds to be buying. If you're going to start your own seeds, which is already—I don't know, when I talk to a lot of beginner gardeners, I think starting things directly from seed is a second-level gardener's move. I typically say, let's get your garden prepared really well, get the soils prepared well, let's get you some starter plants your first year. Some nursery starts. Let that nursery grow them from seed until they're six weeks or two months old.

Then you buy those for really cheap and you bring them home and you plant those just to make sure you're successful that first time. But it really has to do with your zone. So you and I actually are in really similar zones. I was surprised to see that because I saw the Washington zip code and I was—there's no way she's going to be above six and a half, six B maybe, but you get some warmth. What it really means is you don't get snow. You don't really get snow.

You might get a frost or a couple of frosts through your winter, but you're not getting standing snow, which means, Ashley James, you can grow a winter garden out there and your kale—your kale is going to last year-round.

Ashley James (0:52:33.951)

It's true. This area is wonderful. Don't tell anyone. There's almost no mosquitoes. I get maybe three mosquito bites a year. The snow is super pretty here because it just falls and then it's gone by the next day. Every maybe five years, we might have two inches of snow that lasts for a day or two. But that's it. The ground doesn't freeze here.

It is so beautiful. It is more sunny than it is rainy. I know everyone thinks Seattle is rainy. It is so beautiful here and the air is so clean here and I love it. It's always green. It's the Evergreen State. It's wonderful for gardening.

But no matter where you are, there's ways to grow a garden. There are challenges, of course. But there's always a way around it to be able to grow your own food. I just really believe in that emotional healing aspect of growing your own food.

Also, kids love it. My son, when he was a toddler, would run out into the garden. I didn't even teach him how to do this. It was our very first zucchini. I was with him. He ran out. He grabbed the zucchini. He twisted it. He pulled it. He took a bite. I'm like, that is in his genetics, he knew how to harvest food. I didn't have to teach him. I thought that was super cool. 

Then he actually knew it was edible and he just started eating it. He loves—it would sit there. I grew him beans, different kinds of beans, snap peas and beans. He sat there. I should go see if I can find a picture of him, because I have it somewhere, of him just sitting there, just picking them and eating them, picking them, eating them, picking them, eating them.

Kids love it. They absolutely love being part of that process. He would run around, catch bugs, and he just wanted to be with me in that environment. So get off the screens and grow your food.

Troy Smothermon (0:54:41.357)

That is a big win for parents. A lot of parents are like, I can't get my kids to eat anything. Broccoli. But man, if you're growing it, it tastes completely different.

Broccoli is my favorite thing to grow. You get the kids out there, we're going to cut this little tree here and we're going to eat this part and you can eat it right here now. We don't have to take it inside or anything.

Ashley James (0:55:03.340)

You could eat the leaves too, right?

Troy Smothermon (0:55:06.067)

That's why broccoli is my favorite. You can literally eat, all the way down. I eat the leaves in between eating florets of broccoli pieces. You get that big head feeling too, that big harvest first. 

You get florets until the end of the season. You're eating the leaves. You can then take the stock, cut the stalk off, boil it down, and make a broth out of the stalk. So the entire plant is edible.

Ashley James (0:55:31.947)

It would be wonderful, because I know that you're doing more online education for growing. I do online education for teaching people how to cook whole foods, whole plant-based whole foods.

It'd be wonderful to combine that here from garden to table. OK, you've got this stalk, the stalk of broccoli, you don't have to waste it. Let's go. Let's go make that broth. I'll peel the skin off of the stalks and get the nice insides. Chop them up, put them into stir fries, because they're delicious too.

Troy Smothermon (0:56:11.829)

I even just slice them really thin, the stalks, even just toward the top, not the bottom. The bottom gets really woody, but the tops, even after you cut your broccoli, no matter like deciding how low to cut it down, but you can slice that stalk really thin and they're chips. They're the perfect crunch for just eating them raw.

Ashley James (0:56:31.272)

My gosh, you're giving me an idea. I love it. That's great. Tell us a few more recipes from the garden.

Troy Smothermon (0:56:41.148)

Well, my favorite one because in the summertime, zucchini is the one that just goes nuts. Zucchini, there's a National Leave a Zucchini on Your Neighbor's Porch Day.

Ashley James (0:56:53.284)

Yes. Every single person that came to visit, they would leave with a bag of zucchini. Then my garden got so crazy that I started feeding my zucchini to the local food bank. I would just bring boxes of zucchini to the local food bank. I did summer squash too. I did a mixture. That felt really good. Here, have my produce.

Troy Smothermon (0:57:15.285)

That's another level of that dopamine you were talking about—when you find that you're not only successful, that you didn't just grow food for yourself and feed yourself or your family, you have this abundance that you can now share out. It's just a whole nother level of feel-goodness.

Those zucchinis. One, inevitably you're going to miss one and one of them is going to be the size of a baby. A monster. Most people are, I don't know what to do with this. So we just chop them in half long ways. You can split it long ways, scoop out the stuff in the middle, scoop out all the seeds, put some olive oil on there, and bake it.

While you're baking it, make any kind of stir fry with anything else. It could be a meat stir fry or anything else. Make that on the side. Get it all ready, almost toast, ready to eat. Maybe take it off two, three minutes before you would have to serve it. Scoop that into the middle of that half-baked zucchini and bake it again with cheese on top.

Then you can serve. You can serve 10 people these monster zucchini slices with this stir fry in the middle.

Ashley James (0:58:33.777)

I love that. This was 30 years ago I was introduced. I was in Mexico and I had a mutual friend or a friend of the family. We were hanging out—and she was like, let's go make zucchini boats. I’m like, what? She did. It was with regular zucchini sizes though. Then she would scoop out the seeds and put in mozzarella. Insane.

I'm not a dairy person anymore, but it stuck with me. I still remember it 30 years later. I could still taste it. It was amazing.

What I like to do with the giant zucchinis that take over the garden, without the shell being too hard really—I will cut them not long ways. You had mentioned the boat, the zucchini boat. I will cut them so they're rounds, an inch and a half, two inches, and I will bake them on parchment paper with some steak seasoning. Montreal steak spice. And we will eat them.

My husband—he's vegan. I'm whole food plant based, but he's vegan. He says it was like eating steak. It was just steak. It had that meatiness to it, that richness, perfect texture for vegan steak. It was so good.

Troy Smothermon (0:59:57.253)

There’s so many things you can use. It’s just getting those basics down so that you don’t label yourself a brown thumb. That’s the biggest part, just overcoming that first little hurdle.

I just wish I could take everyone out there who has this idea that they’re a brown thumb. I could just be like, no, just come to our free happy hours and I’ll show you how to do it. I want you to have that experience.

Ashley James (1:00:26.459)

Let's talk about that. How do people attend your free Zoom calls?

Troy Smothermon (1:00:32.995)

So, in this last year we decided to do kind of a give back and also just see what kind of people we can interact with because most of our services now are for big businesses. These are companies that want to give their employees a chance to grow food.

For the individual, we started out as an individual company—one garden at a time. I literally went to 10,000 people's houses. We built thousands of gardens, got families on track to growing food, and I kind of missed that experience of that one-on-one. The James family just grew this epic zucchini and they're making zucchini boats. This really cool individual feel.

So now this year we started playing around by doing just a Zoom call once a week. It's 4 p.m. Pacific time on Zoom. If you want the information, you have to join our newsletter. So you have to go to StartOrganic.org and join our newsletter. We send out the invites to everyone on the newsletter.

You come in there, we have a topic every week. We call it business thyme, as in the plant thyme. We really strip it down and make a lot of fun out of it. Usually we have a drink of some kind, we have a short topic that we present, and the rest is just Q&A and story time from anyone who attends. This is just our way of seeing what is happening. Also letting people know, hey, we just passed the fall equinox. You should be doing this in your garden. This is something to look out for in the next couple of weeks, depending on what growing zones you're in.

Until next spring, we don't have an offering. We're not going to have our online courses available for individuals. So we decided we still want that individual interaction, so we're doing it for free. For the rest of this season, throughout the whole wintertime, we'll be talking about broccoli and cauliflower and cabbage, kale, salad greens, how to prep your garden between the seasons.

We're going to do another one tomorrow. We'll be going every Wednesday just about and you'll see the invites on our newsletter list. But we love to hear everyone's stories. Share your triumphs and, most importantly, share your most embarrassing gardening moments, because then everyone gets to learn from your mistakes and they don't have to do the same mistakes.

Ashley James (1:02:50.537)

I love that. So it's every Wednesday, it's 4 p.m. Pacific, which is 5 p.m. Mountain, 6 p.m. Central. and 7 p.m. Eastern? I wanted everyone to get there at the right time, if they sign up for your newsletter.

Troy Smothermon (1:03:06.920

We send out the email and we just say, hey, we're going to do it this week. There's very rare occasions that we don't do them, but most of the time it's clockwork every 4 p.m. Pacific time, Wednesdays.

It’s like, the work week is over. We say over because it's hump day. You're at the end of the day. Duck out early, grab a drink, and just talk gardening with us to transition into the, we're calling it our extra long weekend. So yes. Wednesday afternoon.

Ashley James (1:03:36.636)

I love it. When I was delivering my excess zucchinis and summer squash to the local food bank, I would drive by, I don't know, at least three churches. I mean, there's so many churches with huge lawns. This is out in Snohomish County, just a little bit outside of Seattle. Everyone's got more space.

These churches have an acre or more and it's just monocrop, it's just green lawns. It really frustrates me because I look at how many churches, not so much in the city—it's a little harder in the city, they don't have giant lawns—but how many churches have a half acre to an acre or more that is someone's like mowing a lawn and watering a lawn and no one's using it. No one's… it's not the church is using it, not kids are running through the lawn. No one's using it. It's just for looks, but it could be feeding the homeless.

You think about all the trees and all the gardening that every single city, every single city, your tax dollars go to manicuring crops that don't produce. It's not a crop. It's just plants that don't produce crops.

I know they've talked about putting in more fruit trees to help the homeless in our region, but what if instead of just making bushes look pretty, we put in fruit and we put in fruit and vegetable gardens that we put in the work we're already doing?

I get that, that would just obviously need to take more money and new problems would come up. I understand. But just think about how many opportunities there are to help those in need. 

Troy Smothermon (1:05:38.816)

It's an excellent idea. It's about planning, really. The reality is that lawns are equal or more work than a veggie garden, and they are more water. So you can get it because you're not planting every square foot. You're making rows out of it. You have to have somewhere to walk in between the rows. So you're kind of cutting down that square footage. You're not trying to actually water every square foot. So you end up saving water.

If you do it we always do crowdsourcing. There's this idea where many hands make small work. If you empower people and you give them all of the educational parts, they just need to know what to go do.

People really want to go do it. They just are afraid to prune that tomato. I don't want to cut it. If I cut it, I might hurt it. But if they know what to do, when the right time is to do it and what to do, you can guide them through even just a season.

If I was able to guide some people through a season and show them all the things that can happen in the season and how to care for these plants, they can just duplicate that for the next season and the next season and the next season. Then the people who you taught can become the teachers, and it really can be that easy.

We're just locked in. We're in a drought zone, or California is constantly in drought and fires, and we're still putting new lawns in.

Ashley James (1:07:12.100)

That's just wild to me, especially if you do mulch, which locks in the moisture. That's what we learned from that free documentary, Back to Eden Gardening, is that it requires significantly less watering—almost no watering—when you do mulch.

There are ways that you can garden that preserve water. But also we are feeding people, come on, man, we're feeding people. We're not losing that 50% of our nutrients. I mean, 72 hours. Do you think my kale at my local grocery store was only picked 72 hours ago? Maybe, but it could have been more. It could have been more than that.

Troy Smothermon (1:07:58.462)

Maybe. Kale really doesn't transport that well. From your own kale—if you pick your kale and you just put it on your counter for three days, it's going to look non-edible. So they must have flash frozen it almost, or it goes immediately into a refrigerated truck or some way. You can even stick it in water again as it transports and then it won't lose its rigidity. But the whole best part of kale is that really fresh crunch.

Ashley James (1:08:26.868)

But anything that you're getting, especially if it comes from Mexico. I have no problem with produce from Mexico. It's just how—when was that picked? Was that picked over 72 hours ago or about 72 hours ago? Then we're getting 50 percent less nutrients we could have gotten if we just got it out of our own garden.

Then there's the way that when you get into gardening, you can really mineralize the soil. You can add minerals back to the soil—humic shale and fulvic acid. You can really get into that where now your plants are super mineral rich and giving you nutrients you wouldn't get from just grocery store-bought food.

Imagine if every church—I do know one church way up in Marysville that all the congregation gets together. They have a huge community garden and they're super into that.

Imagine if every single church—every single school—I know one school that has a community garden, but imagine if every single school had a community garden. Imagine if every single business had enough space, either roofed-off space or a big yard beside the business—if every single family, business, organization took this seriously, we would end hunger in our country. So we'd be exporting it to other countries. We'd be giving Canada our zucchinis.

Troy Smothermon (1:09:56.944)

Just keep going north. Keep passing those zucchinis up. My gosh. Our infrastructure is—it really is impressive though. It is impressive how you can have foods imported from all over the world, and you have avocados ripe every 365 days a year. You can go into your grocery store and that whole produce section just looks the same. It's amazing what we've done to cut off local gardening.

All of that effort, all that moving around, instead of just offering gardening in schools and making sure that kids from age, let's say fourth grade—even at high school, pre-high school—you had to learn how to tend a vegetable garden, then at least every person in the country would have that background information.

Then at least you'd have appreciation for what you're buying at the store. Then you would start to understand what you can do on your own too. We're working on that. We do school gardens as well. School gardens are a constant difficult one because funding is there and then it's not. Parent volunteers are there and then they're not.

It really needs to be in the curriculum. I'm pushing for that and that's a lifetime goal of mine. Start Organic is a business venture and I love it and I love what I'm doing. Our goal has been to keep it afloat and teach people to grow food. But if I can help be a part of building a school curriculum, I can replace myself. If I no longer, when I'm 80 years old, need to teach adults how to grow food because all of the kids had been learning for all those years, and I can say, good—everyone knows how to grow food—I could die in peace. Then that would be my life goal.

Ashley James (1:12:02.820)

I love that. I absolutely love that. What, given the average person that's listening, they have maybe some space in their yard that they could start playing with. Some people listening have hookups to corporations or to organizations or churches.

So speak to the person who is interested in taking action. What are some of the first steps that they should take?

Troy Smothermon (1:12:26.626)

Okay, well, I'll start with the business side. We're trying to normalize health and wellness and sustainability in the workplace in a very real, tangible way. We found that the best way is to give people a chance to grow food at work. There is a four-year waiting list for a community garden spot in the Bay Area, where I live. Four years. Your company can shortcut that list, provide employees with a chance to grow something, cutting them off from a four-year waiting period with an educational component. So you're promoting true wealth and health and wellness and sustainability at work.

So I guess my call to action for anybody listening is if you work for a company, if you're in a role in employee engagement or you're in an HR position or maybe you're a director and you want to see that kind of change on your campus, reach out to us. It's just a conversation. It doesn't work for all companies. Not all companies have the space. Sometimes companies are virtual only and we end up doing really cool monthly virtual classes for their countrywide employees. We coach everybody in all the growing zones how to grow with just Zoom classes. But start that conversation. Reach out to us. If it works, it works. You can only learn something cool by having a half an hour conversation with us.

If you're an individual, my call to action is to grow something. You have an apartment with a window that faces south, east, or west. As long as you don't have just a north-facing window and you're anywhere in the continental United States, you can grow something in your house. We can coach you through that starting for free by joining our newsletter, StartOrganic.org.

Come into our happy hours that we do for free at this point. But grow something. Don't label yourself a brown thumb. You're not. You had one bad experience. Maybe you had two bad experiences. But the reality is how you set up your gardening space is going to determine 90% of your success lifetime for your garden and I would be happy to walk you through what it takes to set up a successful garden. So no excuses, grow something.

Ashley James (1:14:55.438)

Grow something. I love it. What is the easiest? Give us the top five easiest foods to get started with for people who have never grown food before.

Troy Smothermon (1:15:07.174)

Okay, so seasonally, we're going into winter. So I'm going to go with winter selections then. Chives or green onions are a no-brainer for indoor or outdoor. You can get seeds, you can plant directly from seed, and as long as you are even remotely attentive, you can get green onions to chop up to put in your meals. You can have chives. That is a no-brainer, easy one.

Mint in a container, and I stress heavily in a container. Don't put mint in your vegetable garden unless you want a vegetable garden full of mint only because it does spread around. But mint in a container will be something that you can handle for sure your first time.

I always sing the Simon and Garfunkel song—parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. Any of those four will work just fine in containers inside or outside, assuming if you're going to go outside, you need to be in zones seven and above to be growing outdoor vegetables in the winter. Okay, so remember that USDA hardiness zone website. Type in your zip code, make sure you're in zone seven and up.

But any of those perennial herbs I just mentioned, as well as mint and green onions and things, those are your easiest ones. Then you start to get into probably salad greens as the next level. So if you wanted to grow your own salad, you could even do that in a windowsill with little gem romaine lettuce. They don't root particularly deep, so you don't need deep containers, minimal sunlight. As long as you don't super overwater them and keep them too saturated, you're bound to get some lettuce and usable salad greens.

Microgreens are the very first step. If you never tried doing microgreens just in a tray in your kitchen, that is an awesome thing to grow for kids too, because you get to just throw a thousand seeds down by the bulk seeds, throw them on there, keep them minimally wet, and you're going to get sprouts in under a week.

You are going to be harvesting them within the next three weeks or so. So there's a short list anyone can do and a really good branch point, launch point for becoming a home gardener.

Ashley James (1:17:47.805)

I love it. Since this episode is like all my podcasts—people listen to them year-round. So it's not necessarily winter or going into winter for those listening in the future. There's a few others I'd love for you to just share like, just give me a few for spring and for summer.

But I want to say, if you like garlic—and I love garlic—you can just go buy a bulb of garlic at the grocery store. You don't have to buy garlic seeds or something. It's just to get a bulb of garlic at the grocery store and pull off each clove, and pull the stuff off of the garlic clove and then push it into the ground with your finger. Just push it in, and then a few inches later, push another one in. Later, push another one.

I had a huge section of garlic, I had never grown garlic, but my friend had worked on a garlic farm and he told me about it. So I was like, I've got to do this. It took one bulb, just one bulb, and I had a whole section of garlic.

What's so cool about garlic is that you don't have to pull it up right away. You can just harvest the garlic greens. So the garlic greens got so tall. They were taller than my son at the time. So I chop them—not all the way—but just, I just chop them halfway so the garlic still had some greens.

Then I'd bring them in, rinse them, chop them up, and throw them into a stir fry like they were spinach. They were amazing. Then eventually I'd pull one up and I would have an entire new garlic bulb. So it's like this wonderful multiplication. Same with potatoes. You put one potato in, you get 12 more potatoes. It's multiplication. How much fun is that?

So there's certain things that are so easy to grow, that are so much fun, and that don't get pulled up right away. With lettuce leaves, you don't have to pull the whole thing up. You could just take a few leaves, and then it keeps growing, and then take a few leaves.

So what are some, just if someone's listening in the spring and in the summer, what are some other really, really easy crops to get started?

Troy Smothermon (1:20:06.017)

Okay, spring–summer crops. Well, I mentioned before, radishes because it's so fast. If you're like, I'm a brown thumb, I can't grow anything—you can grow a radish. You put the seeds in only about an inch apart and a quarter inch deep. Really important to read your seed packs. Everyone, look at the depth at which seeds should be planted. If you plant them too deep, they stay colder and they don't germinate as well.

A quarter inch is not even the depth of your pinky fingernail. So radishes are really easy for the quick—that's your instant gratification. That's as instant as you get for organic gardening is 30 days for a seed to harvest a radish. Radish is really easy.

I would go with zucchini and squash as a fairly easy one to grow. The most common mistake, though, is when people go out and buy starter plants from the nursery. Remember that those nurseries really have to sell you a plant. So they will plant three seeds—three zucchini seeds—in one four-inch pot, and they will sell you that four-inch pot. There's your zucchini. They don't tell you that you really can only have one plant coming out of that pot.

So after you plant it, give it a week or two and then thin it—cut the other ones away. You can only have one coming out of that pot. But zucchini should yield for you if you have even four hours of sunlight in that location. If you do even minimal soil prep, you should be able to get some zucchini going your first time.

So I'd say, kind of those two are your first round. Then tomatoes start to come in. I might skip things like peppers and stuff—they take a lot longer. Cucumbers could be a good one.

Then some sunflowers—who doesn't love that? Put some sunflower seeds in the ground and make sure you get to give yourselves this big decorative cool celebration by midsummer.

Ashley James (1:22:08.159)

I love that. I love learning about how some plants complement other plants. There are certain plants you want to put around the outside perimeter to ward off deer, for example, which was my big thing. But really smelly things—marigolds, and it's also beautiful—marigolds and lavender.

I'd plant around the outside, and then lavender is so much fun because you can make a tea out of it. You can make potpourri. It just smells so good. But there's edible flowers you can grow as well to put in your salads if you want. Or what I did this year is in my patio, I grew a lot of pollinator feeders. So a lot of wild, local-to-my-region wildflowers that fed the pollinators.

So that's when, if you want a garden but you want some flowers, think about local pollinators and how we can support the butterflies and the bees. Those pollinators are really at risk. I don't know if you remember—so I'm 44—and back as a kid, when we drove, because we would drive up to the cottage every weekend up in Canada, that's the thing we do, we go to the cottage. The car would be covered in bugs. Just absolutely. The windshield would just be drenched in dead bugs because we were driving and it was the summertime.

Now when we drive around, although I'm in a different region, my husband agrees because he grew up in this region, that you almost never get a bug splat. Just think back to your childhood and how many bug splats there were on the car and how little there are now. Our ecosystem is very fragile, and I hate that I think politicians talk a lot about climate change. But actually, that is again a linguistic deviation from us focusing on what we should be focusing on, which is pollution and that intentional pollution being—we're spraying things that are killing the ecosystems, that are killing the insects, that are killing the pollinators.

When we don't have pollinators, we don't have food. So it's scary to think about that. That's why instead of focusing on the politics of this concept of climate change, that just desensitizes everyone to the personal responsibility we each all have, which is stopping pollution. By voting with our fork, voting with our wallet, and making choices that support the fragile ecosystem that we have. Also, the pollution is going into our air and our water and our soil and going into us and our children.

We are going down, very rapidly, down a very poor health path, making poor health choices. Very rapidly, we are declining as a species. So we want to make change, and we have to know that each individual can make a difference. By growing your own food, you are now not consuming those—even, there's over 2,000 chemicals. I think it's close to 3,000 chemicals that are approved for organic produce that we get exposed to. Organic is always better than not organic. Better than organic is growing your own food.

So I'm right there with you needing to support our health through growing—even if you could get together with neighbors. That's something I saw in another country. I can't remember which one it was at the moment, but I think it was Holland or Norway. Somewhere in that section of Europe.

Each person in the neighborhood would choose one thing to grow. So we say, you're really good at broccoli. You're growing broccoli. I'm growing potatoes. Susie over there is growing onions. Jim down the street is growing garlic. We all grow, and then we all share.

So if we got together—even got together with a few friends and said, okay, I'm going to grow these three things. You grow those three things, and we can get together in each other's gardens. We could help. There's ways we can get creative. We don't have to do this alone.

I did this interview a few years ago about depression, and it was fascinating that the author—he's a journalist and an author—talked about, they did studies where they took people who had suicide-level depression, and they had them, instead of therapy—they were doing an experiment—they had them as a group. Instead of group therapy, they had them go out into a garden and tend a garden together.

What they saw is that this community got built together, and being in the garden, which is very cathartic, as we've talked about, but that communal group—wasn't a huge group, maybe six or eight people, got together and they talked to each other and they supported each other.

Their depression lifted, as a result, which is one of the reasons we're so disconnected. We're disconnected from our food. We're disconnected from our community. So if there's anything we can do to bring us back to our roots, bring us back to the soil, to each other, to community, I think we can heal on so many levels.

So I love the work that you're doing. I think it's very exciting to see the impact you can have, especially because now you're aiming towards bigger businesses, which is just getting community. So now you have a common goal. How great is that for team building? Instead of it just being an office that you go to, now it's a community working towards this fun garden goal together. So I think it's so cool.

Troy Smothermon (1:28:43.367)

You’re absolutely right. I couldn't agree more. We have groups scheduling meetings in the garden for their team. So no, I couldn't agree more. You should come work with us. You seem to get the vision. But absolutely, absolutely. Bringing people together around this common goal and especially when we give like right around now we do orientation sessions for new people joining the program because we do big seasonal things. We have people sign on for the whole spring season, spring and summer. We want them to plant, care for, grow, and then consume or share the produce that they actually physically grew. Because that's the process that we're trying to duplicate and share with everybody.

So this is a new season. We're going to be doing our orientation sessions. Part of my speech every time for these orientation sessions is: yes, you'll be getting a garden plot. You and your team will have this plot. It's your plot. But as a group, this whole garden only works if we're all working together to do it.

So we do big events. Just finished kind of the heaviest harvest of the season toward the middle of August. You can't stop the garden then. There are pounds and pounds—I mean, hundreds of pounds—of tomatoes coming out of these corporate gardens. So much zucchini that it's sort of absurd.

We do these produce share or harvesting parties. We bring music and everybody comes out and then they're picking stuff and they're, “You have this other kind of tomato? Let me try that one. I'll trade you these.” We do a leave-it-on-the-table one that we donate all that produce or we have a chef come out and the chef will prepare something based on whatever ingredients we give.

It really does build this really interesting community. People that wouldn't normally communicate in a work setting. So it's forging these new connections and people are, “Maybe our teams can work together on something here. We can collaborate on a project next time” or “Your team and our team should join up and get a box together next time because you guys really like these kinds of tomatoes and we like these peppers and we're going to make salsa.”

I'm just happy to be a part of it. We set that stage. We make sure that people are successful and then we get to sit there and kind of listen on those party days and we get to go. Josh and I often just—we'll be off in the corner watching other people engage in the garden and just kind of high five and just hanging out.

Ashley James (1:31:24.964)

So cool. I have a Jewish friend, a wonderful woman. She was trying to get vegetables into her kid and she made latkes. I don't know if—do you know what a latke is? Okay, so a latke. I grew up just in a part of Toronto with a lot of Jewish friends and I went to—I'm raised Christian, but I'm cool, let's hang out. So I was invited to a lot of bat mitzvahs and bar mitzvahs and invited to synagogue and your shul and the Friday night dinner and all kinds of fun. Jewish food is so good. It's so delicious.

Latkes are these potato pancakes where you take a potato and you grate it and then you squeeze out some of the water and you smoosh it together and you fry it. Fried food isn't really healthy for you. You can probably do it in an air fryer now. But what she figured out was that she could do a one to one ratio of zucchini, shredded zucchini to potatoes, and her son didn't notice the difference.

She was like, I know zucchini is not a vegetable—technically it's a fruit—but let's just, it's high in water, high in hydration, good, healthy gut fiber, low in calories, and it fills you up. So volumetrics, it's wonderful for dieting also because it does fill you up and has lots of great vitamins.

So let's just not argue about whether it's a vegetable or fruit. What she would do is, when she harvested her garden, she would grate all the zucchinis that she couldn't eat, had excess, she would grate them and freeze them. So put it in Ziploc bags, frozen freezer bags. Then all year round, she could add that to soups because zucchini shredded is a great thickening agent for a soup or a stew. You can make a tomato sauce. You can thicken tomato sauce. When you cook it long enough, it just becomes very thick and actually has an oily, fatty, rich texture when you cook it long enough.

So there's a lot of fun you can do with that excess zucchini. But she would make her latkes out of—she would do half potato shredded, half zucchini shredded, and it was delicious. So there's a lot of fun things you can do by freezing and then saving it for later.

Just talking about the fruit in the garden that's actually—we consider a vegetable. If you think of a fruit salad, I invite you to think that you can make the weirdest fruit salad out of zucchini and tomato and avocado. So we can make a weird fruit salad that way. Have some fun in that garden.

You had brought up soil prep and that was one of my questions for super beginners—the gray thumb. I'm not a brown thumb, I'm a gray thumb. I used to kill everything that I grew until I learned just a few things, just a few things. Nature—pretty much you can't stop nature. You just got to get out of its way and just give it what it needs and stop giving it what it doesn't need. So that's just a little—get more in tune with nature and then nature takes care of itself.

But I thought it was a gray thumb until I learned a bit more about soil. So when someone is gardening, you suggested maybe growing radishes or growing some herbs in their windowsill and they don't have soil. What soil do you recommend they buy and what should they avoid or stay away from? Because of course they're buying soil out of plastic bags at whatever local store, hardware store or something.

Troy Smothermon (1:35:18.119)

This is a good one. I get this question a lot and it's a really good one. So we're not really brand promoters. Forget about what brand it is. I can go tell you, go buy this brand or go buy this brand. But what I can tell you is how to read ingredients on a bag of soil and get the right kind of thing.

If you are doing containers, let's call them containers, whether that's a big pot outside or a small pot inside, just remember that that pot is not connected to the earth underneath. It doesn't have this mycelium network. It doesn't have this ability to share nutrients with anything else. So you need to provide an all-around soil blend for anything that you're going to grow in containers.

That means you have kind of three main ingredients for a healthy soil. You have a mineral content, then you have compost, and then you have some sort of fertilizer. Those are your main three ingredients. So topsoil or just dirt, really, you could go grab dirt from outside with clay particles in it. Clay is mineral. So we want that clay, but we don't want a lot of it. Think 20%. Twenty percent of that mix is going to be your mineral content, and then the other two are your big ones. Compost is going to be 50 plus percent—just organic compost.

If you're going to a local nursery and you're going to buy a bag of soil, I'm going to make it really just super easy for the beginners. Read the ingredients on the bag of compost. The bag with the most ingredients is the bag you should get, straight up. Because more ingredients means more diversity or at least potential for diversity of life, living organisms in that compost.

You want to get a bag that hasn't been sitting there for two years on a back shelf. You want the most recent batch. So I would ask the store attendant, “Hey, where is your most recent delivery of organic compost in a bag?” That's the bag you want to buy.

So you're going to get a little bit of the topsoil element. You're going to get some of the compost with the most ingredients. And then for your fertilizer, think relatively small. You don't need that much fertilizer. It goes quite a long way.

We usually use, for organic vegetables, organic composted chicken manure. Composted means it's not fresh manure. You cannot go get chicken poop from your neighbor and scoop it into your stuff. It will probably kill your veggies. It needs to go through that composting process—AKA mixed with other organic material, watered and turned for a two to three-month timeframe. So let those bag producers do that. Let them do that for you.

It's an organic composted chicken manure, and you really don't need more than 15% of that mixture. If you're going to add fertilizers into your mixes, everyone's heard of these NPK—nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium—numbers. They're always represented as NPK, three numbers on a bag. You want those three numbers to be below two.

2-2-2 is about the highest of anything that you would insert as a fertilizing element without diluting it down. So your mixture—and a lot of these places will sell a bag that already has compost, topsoil, and fertilizer in it—as long as the ingredient list is pretty robust, go ahead and get that bag and use that.

So you would get a raised bed planter mix. Try to avoid just potting mix. If you look at these mixes and you go to the store and it'll say “potting mix,” a lot of times potting mix does not have any of that mineral content. It doesn't have the thicker chunkier pieces of clay. So the mineral content is lower. So you would need to add that to a potting mix.

That's about the kind of quickest—I do hour-long classes on just soil prep for just the season. That information I think is a good start for anybody who wants to start their gardens right away.

Ashley James (1:39:39.995)

Cool. There's things we know we know, and there's things we know we don't know. But that makes up such a small percentage of human knowledge in general. So there's things I don't even know to ask, because there's things I don't know I don't know. Like most people listening, what don't we know that we don't even know we don't know that you know that we should know?

Troy Smothermon (1:40:09.547)

I don't know. I'm just kidding.

Ashley James (1:40:12.283)

I know it's so simple—throw the seeds in the ground, if nature's going to happen. But is there something that really surprises people, something you know that really surprises people that we should know?

Troy Smothermon (1:40:27.355)

There’s a few really important things that, if you are getting involved with gardening, the location is super important. How much sunlight you're giving your plants does matter. So picking the right place in your yard. Most people don't know to put the garden up next to your house. So instead of that far corner that no one’s ever done anything with, that far corner of the property over there, you actually want your garden to pretty much be touching the house because it is a defendable space. It is a space that you can observe passively and you're still gardening.

That's the very, very first step. I'm telling you because I literally went to 10,000 people's homes, and one of the most common things is, “I want to start a garden. I've got this area picked out. It's over the fence over here. It's in this area that no one's ever been, and no one's ever going.” You do that, and how are you supposed to disrupt the pest problem pattern of this squirrel that just happened across one day? You're not going to do that. But if your dog goes inside and outside, and your dog happens to disrupt the pattern because it's just walking in to go to the bathroom and back out the back door—that's gardening. That counts as gardening. Every second that you can look out your kitchen window and see your garden, that's gardening.

So picking that right location. I guess the other one that is really big is: water plants on their schedule, not yours.

So you can't just say, “I'm going to water my plants Tuesday, Thursday, afternoons at three o'clock,” because that's when I'm home. You plant these plants, you water it, and after a day or so, go put your finger in the ground. Everyone's got one of these moisture meters. I'm holding my index finger up now. You can't see it because we're on a microphone only, but my moisture meter is my index finger. If I go push that into the ground, down to the knuckle, and I feel moisture still at the tip of my finger, I do not need to water my plants yet.

Overwatering or underwatering is probably the biggest killer of an inexperienced gardener's first round of plants. It doesn't take very long for a plant to be killed by either one of those things. So use your moisture meter. Plant it, water it, give it a day, go feel—okay, I don't need to water yet. Go feel the next day. You might have really clay soil. You might have a lot of moisture-retaining quality in that soil. You might not need to water for almost a week, even for a young plant. But if you just keep that thing wet all the time, roots can drown. Roots need air too.

So that's probably the biggest two, I would say. The things that you don't know you don't know that you don't know is locating your garden in a very convenient and observable place from your house, and then only watering when your plants really need the water.

Ashley James (1:43:32.967)

I love it. How different is watering from rain? Because you can't prevent rain, especially in my area. But rain doesn't seem to hurt the garden as much as overwatering from a hose.

Troy Smothermon (1:43:46.703)

Definitely. Rain falls in a totally different way, you can’t even mimic the rain if you had the perfect sprinkler. Also rain has positively charged ions that helps to kickstart life. As long as your garden is situated in a way that there's any kind of drainage, and you didn't build it as a swimming pool, your garden's not at the bottom of a trough where it's just going to flood out. The drainage should be natural enough.

I've only seen a couple of times rain damage plants, and mostly it's because it got so wet that the plants kind of fell over. Because they weren't standing up anymore, that caused the problem. Typically, you're just not going to have your irrigation system on, and any good rain, you should have bought yourself at least a week, maybe longer, before you're watering again.

Ashley James (1:44:42.150)

I love it. Wonderful. There's something really uplifting about rain and rivers, lakes. These produce negative ions for decreasing depression. That's why I love smelling the fresh smell of rain, which we get here often.

But in California, the Santana winds create positive ions, and suicide rates go up, anxiety goes up, depression goes up when the Santana winds are blowing. So in nature, there are concentrations of negative ions and positive ions, and it's those negative ions that actually combat depression. So being around water and being in that soil is another reason, besides earthy and grounding and smelling and in the scent of plants. All these things come together, and there's studies that show all of these things combat depression.

You're burning calories being in the garden, just walking around the garden, bending down, picking up. You can do squats. I would feel sore the next day after a good day of gardening because of how many times I'd squat. So you get a nice, good passive workout. It's better than sitting on the couch.

Troy Smothermon (1:46:02.956)

Definitely. Plus, plus the problem-solving. I mean, you go outside and you go, I got this heavy wind that keeps happening, keeps knocking my plants over. I need to figure out something to prop these plants up. So you kind of have to be resourceful. You have to be observant.

So even more, you get exercise. You go out there, but you're also keeping your brain stimulated. If you look at any of the memes of all of the inventions that have happened just because farmers needed to do some kind of weird task, some of the strangest items have been created to keep pests off of things or plant easier or eliminate that bend over, bend over, bend over thing. It's amazing seeing just the innovation that has surrounded the world of agriculture.

Ashley James (1:46:50.892)

The guy in that movie, the Back to Eden Gardening, he was poisoned by Agent Orange. So he has that Agent Orange syndrome where sometimes he has to walk with a cane, sometimes it's worse. He lives 100% off of his land. He just walks out into the garden, he just picks an apple, starts eating it, goes over there, grabs a sweet potato, dusts it off, brings it inside, makes a sweet potato for lunch.

But his mobility is significantly challenged, and yet he has lived many, many years strictly off of eating from his garden. So it just goes to show that even people with mobility issues can garden. You just got to get creative and you can do it.

Troy, thank you so much for coming on the show. There anything else you want to make sure? I know we probably said everything, but there's what we don't know we don't know. Is there anything else you want to make sure we know to wrap up today's interview?

Troy Smothermon (1:47:52.768)

Honestly, we really said it all. But I just want to encourage people who, especially if you've had a bad experience, you're not a brown thumb, a gray thumb, you're not a black thumb. Okay, you can grow successfully and it is a really worthwhile experience. So I would just encourage you to give it a shot again. Try growing something if you've never tried. This is your season.

Depending on where you live, look up your growing zone. Figure out what you want to do or just start something indoors. Everyone's got a chance to grow a little pot inside of something. But with every plant and every growing circumstance, there is a new set of rules. If you know what those rules are, you will be successful as a gardener.

Ashley James (1:48:40.050)

Since we don't know what those rules are, we need to go to StartOrganic.org, get on your newsletter, come join your Wednesday Zoom calls, and start learning it.

Troy Smothermon (1:48:50.543)

That's a good start. If you're lucky enough to work for a company that's progressive and open-minded and wants your true wellness at work, maybe you can be that person that brings this idea up to your HR people and say, let's maybe think about starting a garden or at least having gardening classes offered for employees at this campus.

Ashley James (1:49:06.949)

Because you help these people to do that, you should reach out to Troy and get your organization in touch with Troy and the StartOrganic.org so that they can do that. I want to hear. I want to hear if any listener does that. Please reach out to me. I want to hear how it goes because I am so excited. I have this vision, this utopia where organizations, churches, schools, companies, and people turn their lawns into a garden and grow food.

It's just if we all grew food, how different this world would be. It'd be so cool. I'm not saying you never go to the grocery store, but it's augmenting, it's supplementing and something delicious. You will have a food orgasm in your mouth if you eat a tomato that you grow. It tastes totally different. Tomatoes in the grocery store taste like cardboard. Carrots in the grocery store taste like cardboard. But when you grow them, explosions of flavor. It is so cool.

I want to get people eating more plants because that is the key to health. I've interviewed so many doctors that say eat more plants, eat more plants, raw, cooked, eat more plants. This is the path to health and I'm excited that you're doing it. So please let me know if any listeners reach out with companies, with organizations. I want to hear about it. I want to hear about the success. It'd be so cool.

Troy Smothermon (1:50:32.841)

I will certainly share that. Awesome. Thanks so much.

Ashley James (1:50:35.577)

Thank you for coming on the show, this was great.

Outro:

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