The Garden Kit: Grow Nutrient Dense Food at Home

In this episode, Lisa Stokke interviews Dan Kittredge of the Bionutrient Food Association on using the Next7 Garden Kit to grow nutrient-dense food at home.

To get the kit, visit:
https://www.next7.org/next-7-garden-kit/p/next7-garden-kit

Thank you for listening and sharing!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hi and welcome. I'm Lisa Stokey, and I'm here today in Central Massachusetts with Dan Kittredge, founder and executive director of the Bio Nutrient Food Association. Thanks for joining us, Dan.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Glad to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

What I really wanted to talk to you about today was something that I've been really excited about introducing to the NextSeven community, is our NextSeven garden kit. Why don't you tell us a little bit what you would use these things for? This is our mineral blend, our inoculant, and the liquid feed. I'd love to get your insight on how you use these different things and why. What do you think we should start with?

SPEAKER_01 0:55

The thing to start with is the understanding that healthy plants occur when they have a well-functioning microbiome. When that symbiotic relationship between the plants and their, I like to call it their gut flora, is flourishing. What we have here in these different containers is I like to call it cheating because it's so easy to get plants that grow well if you have the basic key ingredients present. So this container here is the inoculant. A suite of different uh microbe spores, bacterial and fungal, which are like the gut flora of the plant. And so planting you can put this on the seed. At transplanting, you can put it in the hole you're about to transplant into. In season, you can put it in a watering can and just water it into the soil, and that will broaden the diversity of microbes in the environment. Really very powerful.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

And why do people want a variety of microbes in the environment?

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Well, like animals, plants have a microbiome, which basically means they've got a symbiotic relationship with a whole suite of different bacteria and fungi and things like that. And depending on where you got your seed or where you got your seedlings or historically what's happened in your garden, that full suite of microbes may not be present. And so this is really ensuring that diversity is there.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

That sounds really important.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

I tell people when I give courses, if you just do one thing, inoculate.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

Beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

There's more things I would suggest you do, but if you just do one thing, inoculate.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Nice inoculation. So one thing that's really fascinated me is that you've told me these are like ancient microbes. What does that mean?

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Ancient? They've been around a lot longer than animals have been, or plants. It's the foundational core microbiome that we're talking about here. We've got scientists at this point have figured out a few things, and that is that there's this b breadth of diversity that is really foundational to having a healthy ecosystem. It's certainly not everything, it's not perfect, and it is something you buy in a jar, it doesn't harvested from your ecosystem, which is also a possibility. But it's a really good simple thing to do, which generally brings a positive effect.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

So people do like things like compost and ferments and biodynamic preps and things. Is that kind of like in a similar vein as this?

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Sure, biodynamic preps are inoculants. Uh worm castings are a great inoculant worm worm juice. Compost tea, people may have heard about. There's weed teas, there's indigenous microorganisms, Korean natural farming, there's Japan Japanese natural farming, there's a whole suite of different things that can be done to help stimulate that breadth of diversity of microbiome. And this would be a supplement to any of those. It wouldn't be counterproductive to use them both.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

So hence the cheating part.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

Yeah, well, just like eating cheating is all of them together. If you do if you do the one, two, three on the regular basis, things generally turn out quite well. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

And so these work together. This is the mineral blend.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Right. In the same way that you may not have the full suite of microbes in your ecosystem, you also may not have the full suite of minerals in your ecosystem. Here in New England, it rains a lot. This past three weeks now we've probably gotten about 15 inches of rain, which is enough to wash some things through. And that's been going on for 10,000 years, as long as we've since the last glaciation, we've had a pretty heavy rain environment. There are a suite of different minerals that are needed for life to be healthy: copper and zinc and calcium and potassium and boron and sulfur. And based on how the soil has been treated recently by humans and other previous historical dynamics, in many cases, people don't have the full suite of elements in their gardens or in their fields. And so this is designed to be a broad spectrum mineral amendment. It's not a fertilizer in that things are soluble. It's just a suite of different minerals in their raw parent rock form that are finely ground and easily digested by the microbes. I generally recommend this be used when you're planting, either broadcasting it across the entire bed or if you're making a hole, putting some in the hole or the row, working it in. This is, I think, five pounds, and the application is for about 200 square feet.

SPEAKER_00 5:00

So 10 by 20 or and is this something that let's say the because so here it is like midsummer. And ideally this would go, you c actually call this the spring blend, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:10

We have historically called it spring blend, garden blend, whatever.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Right. So at back at our next seven garden at home in Boulder, Colorado, we did this last year and we got an amazing functioning system going and growing food in some very compact soil. So I've seen firsthand how well this combination works unsoiled that I can't even imagine taking just regular seeds, locally adapted seeds in the whole different.

SPEAKER_01 5:38

Your neighbor said you couldn't grow a garden.

SPEAKER_00 5:39

Yeah, they were coming by and they couldn't believe that we had food growing there. And a lot of people in Colorado, as you and I have talked about a lot, but for our audience, people will grow in like raised beds. And when I first moved there, I'm from Iowa originally, where of course you could just pretty much store something in the backyard and it would sprout with the better soil than others. Without me having to do a whole lot. I felt like a really great gardener when I was in Iowa. But then Colorado, that was a whole different story. You know, I had to do a lot of different things. We had to we we I did do the raised bed thing. This was years ago, and we brought in soil and some I got from a farmer, some I got from like our local gardening store. And for me, I couldn't hardly believe that I was buying dirt in bags. Almost sacrilegious, I would say. But yes.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

I know I know some people do it.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

Yes. Um, but I'm glad that I had that experience because I got to kind of see the easiest avenue that people take, which is they feel like it's like an industrial model that's modified to be organic, if you will, or natural. So like I wasn't using any harmful chemicals, but I still was not plugging into those natural systems. And so that's the thing that I've been really excited about you and the VFA introducing this to us because it's totally changed our soil and where we grow and it's continuing to improve. So all of that is to say that we did this in the spring, of course. Do you recommend that people do it again in the fall? Could they do it in the fall? Should they do it in the fall? What if you didn't do it to begin with? Because we're not farmers, we didn't grow up being an organic farmer like you did. So it is common to have questions about how to use this. Let's say someone is listening to this in midsummer and they're like, gosh, I would like to start getting my ground ready. Is that something they can start to do in the fall?

SPEAKER_01 7:32

Getting your ground ready for next year, or just maybe my tomatoes aren't quite as doing as well as I'd like them to do right now, and I've got maybe a couple months left in the growing season.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

Oh, well, you could answer both, because I think if it were me, I probably would be asking both things.

SPEAKER_01 7:45

I think if if it's midsummer and your plants aren't doing as well as you'd like them to, um in many cases it's because the microbes aren't flourishing, and in some cases it's because the minerals aren't there.

SPEAKER_02 7:56

Right.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

The biggest problem, of course, is always understanding what the cause of the problem is.

SPEAKER_02 8:00

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 8:01

And if you if you diagnose it incorrectly, then you can put something down and you won't get a positive result. Certainly, this could be beneficial in season. I would say probably the liquid feed would be better because these are minerals that are micronized and you can dissolve them in water and water them into the soil or do a foliar spray onto the leaf surface, and they'll be much more bioavailable. And I would recommend that to be done through the season on a you know maybe a weekly basis or something.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Yeah, that's what we do.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

This is designed to sort of a one, two, three, inoculate the seeds or seedlings, make sure the soil has a spectrum of minerals in it. Okay. The baseline and then supplement through the year. I like to think of. We feed our chickens generally on a daily basis. We feed our cows, probably feed our children, but don't always think about feeding our plants. And in some cases, because the environment is not conducive, they're hungry. And I like to use the metaphor of a pregnant woman. If you've got a tomato plant that's full of fruit, that's a mother making babies, and you want her to have everything she needs to be healthy, otherwise she might sacrifice her body for her children and then become diseased or or whatever. This is designed to all work together, and that's the cheating part, is when you do one, two, three microbes, dry minerals, liquid. Usually there's a sufficiency of everything to have good results or much better results than people are used to. If you're talking about preparing soil in the fall for next year, certainly you can put these minerals down then and ideally with some sort of a cover crop or with mulch, and then they would be able to be more well digested by the microbes during the winter so that the soil would be in better shape in the spring.

SPEAKER_00 9:31

And then if you're doing a cover crop, inoculate your seed.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

Inoculate any seed you plant. I think it's about an ounce in here, and that's good for we say 50 pounds of seed. Wow, that's amazing. It's good if you've got a garden, it's it'll take some work to get through 50 pounds of seed. It doesn't take much. It just a little pinch in every in every packet.

SPEAKER_00 9:49

Yeah, that's beautiful. That's amazing. And is this something that you would use to grow food as a farmer also? It's not just for gardeners, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:56

I put this protocol together because I uh was making a living farming and some people use fertilizer, other people spray chemicals of organic or other nature, and I was trying to find a way to support a inherently weathered and worn down soil in as natural a way as possible. This is the basic ingredients that we sell as part of our garden kit for the BFA that I certainly used when I was farming much more full-time not too long ago. My experience is you don't have to be that good of a farmer to get good results. If you have a little bit of insight about what nature needs and you can support her in access to those things.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

Yeah, amazing. I'm really grateful for you introducing all of this to us. In another conversation, we're gonna talk about how using these things can potentially help you to have more nutrient-dense food, which is also another really exciting conversation. Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

One I'm quite passionate about.

unknown 10:49

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

All right, well, thank you so much for going through this with us. Dan gives a two-day course on this called Principles of Biological Systems. Not just this, but he talks about this and so much more. So if you get a chance to catch that, I would strongly recommend that you do that. It's definitely two days of your life well spent. To get information about that, you can go to bionutrient.org. And you can also go to the brand new website of the project that you started, Bionutrient Institute, which is about all about the lab work and that's a whole other rabbit hole video. So, all right, thanks again.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

My pleasure, thank you.