Minnesota Gardening Podcast

The EFSS Framework and Minnesota Gardening's Landscape Wellness Stages

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In this episode of the Minnesota Gardening Podcast, host Brad Tabke reflects on personal challenges and the importance of community in gardening. He introduces the Minnesota Gardening EFSS's Framework, which focuses on eliminating chemicals, feeding pollinators, saving water, and storing carbon. Brad discusses the Landscape Wellness Stages, guiding listeners from standard maintenance to thriving landscapes. He emphasizes the significance of community involvement and announces a membership drive aimed at fostering healthy landscapes and environmental stewardship.

Minnesota Gardening is holding a membership drive in the month of October to gain 100 new members. This week only - you can join with an annual membership of just $197.

--> Click here to save 56% off our monthly membership at MinnesotaGardening.com.

With just 100 Minnesota Gardening Members moving from standard landscape practices to a healthy, thriving landscape, together in ten years we could:

  • Eliminate 7,500 gallons of herbicide used (!)
  • Support 90,000 birds (!!)
  • Provide habitat for over a million pollinators (!!!)

--> Click here to save 56% off our monthly membership at MinnesotaGardening.com.


SPEAKER_00:

All right, hello and welcome, my friend, to the Minnesota Gardening Podcast. It is my honor to have you here with us today. My name is Brad Tadke, and I'm the host of the Minnesota Gardening Podcast, where we work together for healthy landscapes. And so we've been making uh a lot of changes here at Minnesota Gardening over the last two months, really. It's uh it's been a rough year, and as I've mentioned before, we've been going through a lot of struggles in uh family and business and all those kinds of things. And I just want to say thank you so very much to everyone who has been continuing to support us here at Minnesota Gardening and here to work together on things about a uh year ago, a little over a year ago, my father passed away, and so that was obviously hard. And then my good friend was assassinated, um, and her husband and their dog were assassinated in June, and that was really, really hard. I'm all for those who don't know, I'm uh member of the Minnesota State House. I represent Shakapee at the legislature, and uh that was really hard for our family and for me and for everything. So we had a lot of uh a lot of work to do in healing over this summer, and uh it has been actually going great of late. So uh it has been really uplifting and welcoming for everyone who has been reaching out and checking in and uh all our friends and family who've been taking care of us, and so I just wanna A be extremely thankful for all of that work. And so, with that, uh over the course, like I said, last couple months, we've really been taking a deep dive into what makes sense with Minnesota gardening and what makes sense to what makes sense for the future and how we can best impact and make a difference and hold each other accountable for what we are doing and how we are doing our landscape. And so I'll get into the how of that in just a little bit. But I have two two main points that I want to uh talk about today, and they're two different frameworks that I think really, really work well for what we are collectively trying to accomplish here at Minnesota Gardening. And I would love, love, love your feedback. So make sure to leave a comment, make sure to shoot me an email at Brad at MinnesotaGardening.com and would love to chat with everybody about what you really, really care about and what you really, really want to accomplish. And what I want to accomplish is healthy landscapes. I want to make sure that we are working together as a community to help eliminate chemical use. I want to make sure that we are working together to feed pollinators. I want to make sure that we are working together to save our clean, precious, precious water that we have here in the upper Midwest. I also want to make sure that we're mitigating climate change by making sure that we are storing carbon on our properties. And I think the best way that individual homeowners and people can do this, so there's obviously larger scale government actions and different things that have to happen that way, but everybody needs something to do to help contribute to this problem. And little actions will add up to big actions. And I want to make sure that we are helping people switch to healthy landscapes in their home, at the properties, wherever they can, that accomplishes those four things. And so those four things are what we now at Minnesota Gardening call the Minnesota Garden F's framework. So EFSS. Eliminate chemicals, feed pollinators, save water, store carbon. EFSS. And we want to do that together. We want to make sure that we are working together, that collectively, over the hundreds of people who are members of Minnesota Gardening can literally reduce thousands of gallons of chemicals that are put on our properties for killing pesticides, pesticides, for killing, you know, weeds, for killing insects, and those kinds of things. We want to make sure that those are there. We want to plant thousands of plants together that will support pollinators, will support native bees, will support songbirds, will support other wildlife and local ecosystems from, you know, lizards and caterpillars and salamanders and all those things that if you're a solid Gen Xer like me, you you had growing up that just don't exist in nature any longer in our local ecosystems. And so we want to make sure that we are providing those types of resources to help people get to those next steps where we're able to have healthy, thriving landscapes at each and every one of our homes for people who want to care about it, because there's a lot of people who don't. And it is not a judgment, it's just the fact that a lot of people are too busy. A lot of people have different priorities for what they want to get done. And I want to make sure here at Minnesota Gardening that we are providing as much as we possibly can for people to have success in those that F's framework for eliminating chemicals, feeding pollinators, saving water, and storing carbon. And so I've been talking a little bit lately about kind of my my origin story on things. And so for those of you who don't know me, I grew up on a farm in Northwest Iowa. And so I'm a farm kid, and graduated from college at Iowa State with a horticulture and design degree and moved to Chicago, where I learned landscape maintenance. And so learned solid standard landscape maintenance from a wonderful, wonderful company who was doing really great work. And then a couple years after that, we moved to Minnesota, where my wife and I started a company here in Shacopee, and we did solid landscape maintenance. And so we tried really hard to move folks into more healthy landscapes. So we used, we spent a ton more money on organic fertilizer. So we used turkey manure-based fertilizers. We tried to plant as many helpful plants as we possibly could, but it was a little early and people weren't totally ready for that sort of environmental, local ecosystem kinds of things. They really, really wanted just lush green grass with not a single dandelion and that's what they wanted, especially on a commercial scale for things. And so, fast forward to COVID, we sold off the operations of the landscape company and just started doing consulting. And during COVID, we had a bunch of friends who were getting involved in gardening and started Minnesota gardening to help them know how to plant a tree correctly, help them know what kinds of perennials are great for their landscapes, help them know how to grow vegetables and how to grow healthy food and that kind of thing. So we have kind of through trial and error, struggle, back and forth, fits and starts here at Minnesota Gardening, come to the conclusion here that our goal and our charge here is to help grow, help people switch to healthy landscapes. And what I mean by that is making sure that we are giving people, meeting people where they're at, and finding a way for them to evaluate where they're at today, what things they care about, where they want to go, and kind of plug them into a continuum of processes and actions and tasks that they can do on a weekly, monthly, seasonal basis, whatever works best for them to make progress. That's what we care about is people making progress and being able to move forward along that continuum and which we call the landscape wellness stage. So we have Minnesota Gardenings, landscape wellness stages. And so with that, we identify where people are at. So we have four stages in the landscape wellness. And the first one is just standard maintenance, where you've got this quote unquote suburban type lawn where there are nothing but grass, maybe some mulch, a few shrubs, and tons of chemicals are used, tons of water is used to keep that lawn up and thriving and green and with no weeds and that kind of thing. So that's the that's the baseline where we do not want people to be. That is dangerous, that is unhealthy. It is really important for people to understand the number of cases of skyrocketing cases of cancer and carcinogenic uh chemicals being used are causing that cancer. And so there's just been uh over the course of the last year, which uh we firmly believe that that's what my uh dad passed away from, is uh cancer caused from pesticides. And uh he was he was taken from us way, way, way too fast. And we want to make sure that's kind of turned into my crusade and how I how I got to where I am today. And we want to make sure that we are minimizing exposure as much as possible. So we want to help people switch to more healthy landscape practices where they aren't using chemicals on their lawn, where they have ways of knowing what the best possible paths forward are, and that they don't need to uh kill every single weed and every single insect on their property, not just because that's bad for our local ecosystems and uh environment, but also because it's bad for us. It's bad for our pets, it's bad for our kids, it's bad for our grandkids, it's bad for our spouses and for us and our partners and whomever you have in your life, your neighbors, using chemicals is not healthy. And so we want to make sure that we are minimizing and eliminating that wherever we possibly can. So here at Minnesota Gardening, we are working to make sure that you know how to do that and people know how to do it because people just don't know where to start right now. They don't know where to go and what to do. And so that's what we are working on moving people from that standard landscape maintenance type of thing to the first stage, which is detox. And so we have a detox stage, which is the vast majority of people who really do actually care about these kinds of things and they want to make sure that they are reducing their chemical use. They want to make sure that they are supporting monarchs and supporting bees and having that work in their backyard and front yard. And so that detox stage is just the first steps on taking, dipping a toe into this world, which will uh result in healthy, thriving landscapes for uh our kids and for our future. And so we have that as the first stage, and then uh the next stage is nourish. And so that is continuing to build on those tasks and activities that we know. So making sure that year after year, month after month, we are making steps, we are making progress. It's not a wholesale, it doesn't have to be, it obviously could be, but it doesn't have to be a wholesale change overnight that you make. That's really too much. It is really hard to continue moving forward when you make giant changes like that. It is uh much better to take it, in my opinion, 50 square feet at a time and uh removing some lawn, adding some pollinator plants, uh, removing some more lawn and uh reducing some chemical use and those kinds of things, taking those steps. And so that's what we go through here at Minnesota Gardening is helping you switch to more healthy landscape practices. And so that nurse is the um the next stage, and then the final stage is thrive. And so our thriving stage is where we are not using any chemicals, where we are supporting literally in our backyards and front yards and our home landscapes, we are literally supporting millions of pollinators. We can do it. We are supporting hundreds of thousands of uh of trips for songbirds. It takes uh 6,000 caterpillars to grow a clutch of black capped chickadees. And so it's really important that we are providing that habitat for those things to be thriving in our home landscape. And so those are the stages of our landscape wellness that we work from as a standard to detox, to nourish, and to finally thriving. And so we helped everyone get through those stages and move forward in that uh continuum so that we are ending up with healthy, thriving landscapes that are safe for your kids and grandkids to roll around in the grass, that are safe for your pets to be outside, that are feeding pollinators, that are feeding bumblebees and having stems where bumblebees and stem-boring insects are able to grow their young and make sure that those are available for those that uh feed our songbird population, that are saving water and keeping water on our properties. And by having prairie plants and by adding trees and by doing this work and removing turf, we will be storing thousands of pounds of carbon in our soils and in our plant material that will help an ever-warming planet so that we are able to do our part in small doses that add up to really, really big progress. And so that's what we're working on here at Minnesota Gardening. So that is our goal, and that's where we're at on things. And those are some big changes that we have been making. And so we have A, the landscape wellness stages, and so there's standard to detox to nourishing and thriving. So those are working together to move forward people on switching to more healthy landscape practices and end up with healthy, thriving landscapes. And every single stage, we are working on eliminating chemicals, feeding pollinators, saving water, and storing carbon. And so you're free with me. I hope that those are things that you are really, really trying to work toward. And so here at Minnesota Gardening, we are working on those landscape wellness stages. We're also working on the F's framework every single day, week, month to help you move forward and make progress. And so we have an extra special deal for everyone that is only available this week. So the first week of October. October is our membership drive here at Minnesota Gardening. We are working to make sure that we are adding a hundred new members to Minnesota Gardening this month. And so we want to add in October, we want to add a hundred new members. And so uh with that hundred new members, what we think will happen is that we will eliminate 7,500, 7,500 gallons of herbicide used over 10 years. We will support 90,000 birds over 10 years, and we will provide habitat for well over a million pollinators. That's what having 100 members moving forward from a standard landscape practices to a thriving, healthy landscape will do for our local ecosystems. And that's huge, huge change with just 100 members. And so I hope you will join as a Minnesota Gardening member. It uh our annual membership for this week only uh is the cheapest you'll ever get uh moving forward. Our annual membership is only$197. So you can join Minnesota Gardening for$197 and help uh get weekly lessons, have uh seasonal challenges, making sure that we are working together. And the biggest part is just an awesome, awesome community of people who care about the same things that you care about, people who care about healthy landscapes, people who care about the fact that monarchs are on the endangered species list or on the cusp of the endangered species list, people who have experienced uh cancer in their families, who know that these kinds of things are contributing to our skyrocketing epidemic of cancer rates in Minnesota and across the upper Midwest. And so these are all things that we work on together and what members have as uh weekly lessons and ways that we are able to move forward together. And so I really hope um you join. Uh again, we are looking for 100 new members, and this week only an annual membership is$197. That saves 56% off of the normal monthly price of$37 a month. And so I uh hope you can join if you go to MinnesotaGardening.com. The first thing that shows up is uh our welcome page and uh how you can join and what we do together here at Minnesota Gardening. And so again,$197 for the first week of October, and I hope you join. We will have be having a big membership drive all through the month of October, and this is the cheapest you will ever get it. So if uh you want to uh spend the least amount of money, please join Minnesota Gardening for$197, and we will work together switching to make the world a better place. And we will switch away from unhealthy, standard landscape practices, exposing you and your family to cancer-causing chemicals, killing pollinators and songbirds, wasting our precious clean water, and contributing daily to a climate change and environmental disaster, and changing and switching to a thriving, healthy landscape that is safe for you and your family, that feeds pollinators, that saves water and stores carbon. So, again, I hope you can join. All you need to do is go to MinnesotaGardening.com, and that will first thing that shows up will be the annual membership for$197. And I hope you join us today. And so we uh have a new, again, way of delivering material here. I'll just get to that real quick. We have weekly lessons. Uh, so we have monthly themes, weekly lessons, and so those weekly lessons are put out at uh 6 a.m. every single Monday morning. And so last month, the month of September, was Fall Tasks, and so you can get the lessons on fall tasks in the month of October. It's all about soil and the healthy, thriving soils and what is living underground that is really important for making sure that we are having healthy, thriving landscapes above ground as well. So, again, head to MinnesotaGardening.com and join as an annual membership for$197. Thank you so much and have a wonderful day. I hope to see you soon as a member of Minnesota Garden.