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Gentry's Journey
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Gentry's Journey
From Corporate to Cultivator: Sarah’s Garden of Giving
Can gardening change lives? Join us as we welcome the inspiring Sarah Faison, a dedicated community gardener from Fayetteville, North Carolina, who transformed her life by turning an acre-and-a-quarter of inherited land into a thriving community garden. Learn how Sarah’s passion for planting native ornamental plants supports local wildlife and brings joy to hospice patients through her flower donation initiative. Sarah’s journey from corporate America to community gardening after her retirement in 2022 is a testament to the power of reconnecting with nature and giving back to the community.
Wondering how to start a community garden? Sarah shares the practical steps and challenges of land preparation, from removing trees to navigating permits and regulations, all amidst a global pandemic. Discover the importance of growing heirloom foods, the superior taste of fresh produce, and the cultural nostalgia of shucking homegrown vegetables. Sarah’s insights on soil health, natural pest management, and the benefits of seasonal harvests offer invaluable tips for anyone looking to get their hands dirty and grow their own food.
Community gardens foster unity and resilience, and Sarah’s story is a shining example. Listen in as she discusses collaborating with local churches and organizations to ensure no produce goes to waste, using her business acumen to help others start their own gardens. Reflecting on the spiritual and therapeutic benefits of gardening, Sarah highlights the lessons of collaboration and humility we can learn from nature. Tune in for an enriching conversation that might just inspire you to plant the seeds for a vibrant community garden in your own neighborhood.
Hello everyone. This is Carolyn Coleman and welcome to Gentry's Journey. We have our great guest today is Sarah Feinshaw, and she is a community gardener. She's going to tell us all about that. It is scriptures coming from Ephesians 2 and 8. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not of your own doing. It is the gift of God. Sarah, thank you so much for coming on. Would you please introduce yourself to the audience? Yes, we'll get started.
Speaker 2:My name is Sarah Faison like raisin with an F Faison and I have been gardening I guess most of my life and I am in my 60s, so I got some experience with gardening and I worked in corporate America. You know, of course, I grew up, got my education and I worked in corporate America. You know, of course, I grew up, got my education and I worked in corporate America and I took a retirement several years ago, in 2022, early 2022. And at that time it allowed me to really be able to think about what did I want to do with the next chapter of my life, about what did I want to do with the next chapter of my life. And I thought, wouldn't it be nice to just do what you love doing? Because we always talk about that, especially with younger people. We would say, hey, when they say I don't know my purpose, I don't know what I want to do, often I would find myself saying do what you love doing and it won't feel like work and you'll, you know, be great at it and everything. And so when I took my retirement, after working many years in corporate America, I decided to take my own advice and to do what I really love doing and that was gardening for me, and it started off with me volunteering with our local botanical gardens in North Carolina.
Speaker 2:I'm based out of Fayetteville, north Carolina, so in 2022, no, 2020, yeah, 2022, early 2022, I began as a volunteer working in the vegetable garden there, and from there I learned so much and I loved just absolutely loved being in the botanical gardens.
Speaker 2:It's 87 acres of just nature and beautiful plants and trees, and it just really was a place that I felt like really connected with my soul. And so it was then that I was smitten by the gardening bug even more. And I had relocated once I retired to North Carolina. So once I relocated, I also had purchased some legacy land and with that legacy land it had been sitting for 30 years unoccupied, so it was full of trees, it looked like a little mini forest, and when I went there I thought, god, the botanical gardens are so beautiful and that's 87 acres. I don't have that, but an acre and a quarter. I can really beautify this acre and a quarter and just grow lots of plants and foods to be able to do so many beautiful things to help the community. And so that was my dream and I decided to start pursuing it.
Speaker 1:Well, that's great, and you already, you basically already had the land, yes, the land.
Speaker 2:The land was my grandparents' land, the original land that they lived on when they got married. You know, many years ago. My grandparents are no longer here and then, once they moved on, transitioned, then it was passed on to my mother, and then from my, then it was passed on to my mother, and then from my mother it was passed on to my sister, and then my sister it got passed on to me and so, yeah, the land was there but it was unoccupied, and so the overgrowth was, the result was a little mini forest. Okay, so the overgrowth was, the result was a little mini forest.
Speaker 1:Okay, now, when you spoke regarding the botanical garden, I know it's. Fruits and vegetables, yes, along with flowers, yes. What exactly do you plant in your community garden?
Speaker 2:I plant. We refer to flowers, non-edible plants, as ornamental plants. So I plant ornamental plants and I plant flowers that are to attract different birds like the hummingbirds. A classic one would be like the trumpet vine is a plant that will attract the hummingbirds, because hummingbirds like to be able to fly in and get the nectar outside, like deep inside the plant, and they got the pointy beaks. So therefore there's lots of plants that you want to plant, like for butterflies. I plant bee balm, I plant lantana plants, so I try to get mostly all native plants native, which means that they're from this area. They have learned to adapt to the North Carolina area and so they got a high survival rate. So native plants are really good because then, as well as the insects, they have all learned to kind of coexist together. So my goal is to try to always plant native plants in my garden.
Speaker 2:And then, in terms of food, we grow a lot of different food depending on the season. So we just got through finishing up a hot season, and so we're still getting, of course, tomatoes, cucumbers. You know, lettuce doesn't really like it really, really hot, and so we're growing spinach right now and we're still finishing up. We just had okra. We had corn, but it was a very hot season here in North Carolina and Fayetteville, so a lot of the crop did not do that well because of the excessive heat. Sure, yeah, we had eggplant, I mean you name it, we probably had it Because we really tried to grow diverse, you know, diverse types of fruits and vegetables, because most people don't just eat one.
Speaker 2:They want a variety of different things, and I like to have fruits and vegetables in my part of my daily routine and I like to have many of them in a given day. Okay, with our ornamental flowers, there's a goal for what we're doing. Of course, we like to help nature out, and then we also are looking to partner with hospice organizations that are local to our area, because we want to be able to donate flowers to hospice patients. So that's one of the things that we'll be doing with our ornamental plants. But in terms of the food, we have relatives that are living right on the near the garden because, like I said, the garden is my grandparents' land, so across from the garden are relatives living, you know, because their parents passed the land down to them. So we have probably like eight families living around the garden.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's great. Now do they assist with the gardening?
Speaker 2:um somewhat not heavy because a lot of them are a little bit older and physical limitations. Gardening work is a lot in the where we are with um building the garden, because the garden is only two years old. There was a lot of physical um strength that was needed to do a lot of building and things and so they did contribute in many ways. But by and large a lot of that was left to. Some of it was contracted out to men to help build the garden.
Speaker 1:Okay Now you mentioned it was a hot summer and I think a lot of us experienced the heat from the summer. Yes, how do you go about basically watering your garden?
Speaker 2:Yes, I have rain barrels in my garden, so I like to take advantage of nature providing me with water, and so I have rain barrels, and then I have drip irrigation, and then I had the garden, before we even really started the gardening project contractor that came and installed irrigation throughout the different areas because we knew we wanted to be able to access water all throughout the garden. So they installed in-ground piping so that we could have irrigation. So we do have access to the city water and we do have a well that is on the land that has water in it that is not fully functional at this time because we need to get someone to come and we got to get a pumping system to get the water from the well, but we do have irrigation all throughout the garden okay, um, how does that work?
Speaker 1:is it? Is there an on and off switch? Because I I I just do flowers, I just do flowers and I, you know, I take my little, my little watering uh jug out or my hose pipe. So how does that work?
Speaker 2:well, watering is one of my biggest challenge challenges as a gardener, because the amount of space is so big that I do have um. I'm now using retractable hoses, because dragging the hose was like a lot. To be dragging it 100 feet For trying to water everything in the garden, it was a lot. And so now in the vegetable garden we have a system set up that's right near the garden, have a system set up that's right near the garden, and then we have a rain barrel that's right in the spot, right near the beds where the food is growing and in ground, so we're able to take advantage of easily using that system. But it is a real challenge trying to keep everything um properly watered. So, no, I don't have like an on off switch because we um we don't live on the land, because it is a community garden and is open where um anyone could basically walk up on the land. When we leave for the day, we cut the water off, because we had an experience where we left the water on and um a pipe burst and it w it was in a winter time and so we didn't know for like a week that the water was running nonstop, and so that was a teachable moment for us. So we basically kind of control everything by cutting it on off main switch and then, once we turn that on, it allow us to go to the different areas and then be able to turn them on when we want them on. And so we are trying to figure out the best way to manage our watering of the full garden.
Speaker 2:The garden again is two years old. The first year we didn't just you couldn't just jump right into gardening. The first year was excavating the trees because you had to get rid of all of the trees. That and if you want to create a garden so that took time you have to get permits for almost everything that you do. So if you want a driveway, you have to get a permit for a driveway, which we wanted. Electricity on the land, we had to get a permit. To have a building on the land, you have to get a permit and go through the process. We wanted a bathroom in the garden and you have to get a permit to get the soil and everything tested so that it can handle the waste. There's so many permits to put a sign up Does even just say Ida's Community Garden. You have to get a permit and there are rules that you have to follow for something as simple as that. Everything basically was a learning curve, so we really didn't get into really full gardening until this year 2024.
Speaker 1:Okay and I can see that being a work in progress. I mean, like you say, it's it's just two years old, so you basically had to lay the foundation, even though you had exactly you know you, you had the area, but need to make a foundation to make it workable, and most people don't realize like we were still kind of coming out of the pandemic and so we didn't have the labor force that we did before the pandemic.
Speaker 2:So, trying to get something as simple as contractors there were so many contractors that projects were delayed, that a lot of things took months that I thought would have been like really quickly, like to get a driveway. Well, they were playing catch up on so many projects that we found that something so simple was taking so long as well, as you heard so many people talk about, staffing was an issue everywhere. You couldn't get good workers, blah, blah, blah. Well, we were impacted by that and trying to move from one and some things were chronological, like you can't get a building on a land until you get a building permit. Then, until you get a building permit, then if you get it built once you get your building, you can't move forward with getting electricity until you get this done and you can't turn your lights on until you get a total project um sign off.
Speaker 2:So it was um a full year at least that we, that we were dealing with the county and navigating through all the different steps of what we needed to actually be able to turn the lights on on the land and be able to begin gardening a massive amount of trees. You're pulling up a lot of roots from the earth and then you just can't move into that space. You have to bring lots and lots of soil and fill those holes and get it all smoothed out and you got to give the land a little time to adjust to just being, you know, totally, almost mangled when you remove, all you know, most of the trees from it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because you know, since it's new, even though the dirt is the same, but, like you say, the roots had to come up, so it's kind of like lots of holes, and so I had to get thousands of dollars worth of soil brought back in.
Speaker 2:And then you have to hire someone to come and kind of like smooth that all out. That's not like you're going to get your shovel and go out there and do it yourself. You really need equipment that's going to come and kind of like flatten the land and pack it all in. So it was a pretty in-depth process getting the foundation ready to create the garden.
Speaker 1:And that's a lot of heavy duty equipment.
Speaker 2:Yes, and it came at a big price.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm sure it did. When I see that type of equipment in and around my community or my city, my mind immediately goes to they're getting ready to build another community, because it has been trees and basically weeds forever in a day and then we see them excavating. It's like, okay, here comes a community, somebody's building something, and with that it just comes a lot of heavy equipment and it still takes a lot of time.
Speaker 2:And labor.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then you're going to see, see the deers come out, you're going to see where these deers come from. I'm like you invaded them. They didn't invade you Absolutely. That exactly where these tears come from. I'm like you invaded them. They didn't invade you absolutely that's where they're coming from. So, like I say, it's a little you, for lack of a better term it's a little bit of newness to all of that. Um, basically, you're rearranging so that you don't have what you have, right? Yeah, you're trying to.
Speaker 2:For me, it was a decision that I made for a multitude of factors. One did I just want to have land that was just sitting unoccupied? I asked myself that question and I was like, what is the real value of land that is just sitting unoccupied, like you may own it, but do you get to enjoy it? Or do anybody get to enjoy it other than the animals and wildlife? When you have land that is just sitting like that, you have no way of going in there and really enjoying it because you have I mean, I had no entryway. I'm going to walk into a forest that I don't even really know what's in there. No, I'm not going to do that. I'm a city girl at heart, and so I thought about that. And then I thought how could I maximize the benefit of this land that I do not live on Because I relocated to North Carolina but that was not where I had placed my home.
Speaker 2:I had moved to Fayetteville, in more of a city, which I came from, a city I wanted to be part of, more of a city life, and the garden sits in a more country environment. And so when I thought about like okay, how can I maximize this If I'm going to create all of this, am I going to just do it for myself? Am I going to just do it for me and my immediate family, or am I want to create all of this? Am I going to just do it for myself? Am I going to just do it for me and my immediate family, or am I going to just do it for me, my immediate family and my friends and my cousins and my relatives, or do I want to open it up so that I can maximize it and be able to create something that more people can enjoy? And that's when I thought I want to maximize. I want to maximize what I'm creating, because community is so important.
Speaker 2:I grew up in a community.
Speaker 2:It was a city community and I love just the support system of a community, and when I thought about that, I said this is absolutely what I want to do. I thought about the benefits of being in the botanical gardens and how many people love just being able to go sit in nature and see the birds and the butterflies or whatever they may want to see, the fish or whatever but just being more in touch with nature as opposed to city life, and so I wanted to share that with many other people, and that was my choice to want to make it a community garden, and I wanted to honor my mother's life. Ida is my mother, and so I named it Ida's community garden, because if it had not been for my mother, I would not have had the land, and so I named it after my mother, and my mother was a woman who liked to help other people, and so I said I saw her live a life of giving to others, and so a community garden in her memory was just perfect, and so that's why this was created.
Speaker 1:Well, that's beautiful. Talk about leaving a legacy, because that is what that is your mom. You're dedicating that legacy to her. The garden is hers, so, yeah, talk about leaving a legacy for the future.
Speaker 2:It's so parallel when I think about I grew up, every summer leaving the urban city and traveling down to Sanford, north Carolina, and spending the summers with my grandparents and my grandparents. This is the land where the garden is and we have my grandfather. He grew tobacco and I worked in. I whipped tobacco and I saw the whole process and they put it in, they took it to the market to sell and everything. But we grew everything. We had all kinds of fruit trees, it was everything.
Speaker 2:My grandmother got up early in the morning and she was out in her garden and she would be humming and taking care of her flowers and picking. You know, people would be picking fruits and vegetables and that's what we all ate for the day and we ate well, and just all of those beautiful memories. And when I thought about the land being sold outside of the family, I said, oh no, we can't do that. My grandparents worked so hard to have that that to allow this to be divvied up and sold out of the family is not acceptable, and so that was a big part of my rationale for buying the land. I have since bought more of the land from another relative that was contemplating selling outside up to a non-family member. And I said, no, we cannot be selling this land to non-family members. We need to keep the land that our grandparents worked so diligently to provide a legacy for us. That we need to do the same thing pass it on to our children, I agree. I agree totally. Same thing, pass it on to our children. And so I agree totally for my daughter to see it as a garden.
Speaker 2:The thought of her wanting to say I'm going to sell this land now to the first person that went you know, something happened to my parents and then she inherits it and she's going to pass it on, you know or either to sell it outside of the family it's even we talk about it all the time. She loves what the land represents. She loves that I'm now passing knowledge to her about how to grow food, how to grow trees. That is what my grandmother passed on to me and it blesses me so much that now I can teach other people about the beauty of you can buy a tree for $30 that can produce food for you, maybe the rest of your life. You know, you go out and buy an apple tree, or you buy a grapevine and you pay less than $15 and then you got grapes for 20, 30 years. You know it's pretty amazing.
Speaker 2:You sow a seed, the harvest that you can get from it, and so the knowledge of learning how to grow your own food, I think, is so important in that we need to be passing that knowledge on to our kids, to our friends, to our family members. We need to be teaching people how to grow food, because I think we lost touch of how to do that and now we got all this genetic modified foods and stuff that we're eating. And then we wonder why we got all these medical issues. We need to get back to growing. You know heirloom food and have seeds and know that it has not been sprayed with all these pesticides and everything or gone through these artificial processes before we're eating it. But to know that you could go out to your yard or a yard like a garden, and you drive there and you're picking it right off of that vine and you can taste the difference between the food that you grow and the food that you get from a garden. You know local garden versus going to the supermarket.
Speaker 1:You can definitely taste the difference you know, um, one of my co-workers and I, a few years ago, were talking about fruit, fruit and vegetables and she was like I put some onions in the refrigerator and a couple of weeks later I went back they were all shriveled up and I was like, yeah, I know what you mean. I've had that happen to me. I thought I had done something and she said you know, when I was a little girl, that onion stayed, that onion, it stayed full, it stayed when you cut it, it smelled like an onion, it looked like an onion. I said, yeah, but I also did the same thing to a cabbage and I said I went to get the cabbage a couple of weeks later and it had more hair on its head than I had on mine. So we laughed it out.
Speaker 1:We don't know what people are doing to this food. Because I said a cabbage would stay forever in a day, whether you cut it or whether you did. And so she was like she thought it was funny as well. But I was. I didn't mean it for a joke, I mean, I was very serious. I said, so we have to hurry up and eat, but we don't know who is hurry up and growing what we have. You know, we go to market like we've always done um my parents when we were kids and I I think anybody from the south knows what I'm talking about shucking corn, you know, when they brought it by, and um, peeling the peas and the purple.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, you know, and it was uh, it was several, it was a day's work. I mean what we did because they didn't get a small amount. And you know, to this year I have not had any purple hulled peas or pink eyed peas and I want some, so I just haven't. But that tasted like summer to me, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yes, it tasted like summer. You associated it. Well, that was the season too. Yes, Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I mean.
Speaker 2:to me that marked that it was summertime and it had that summery taste to it and that the other thing was it's great when you can eat food in in the season that it is it really is it really is like.
Speaker 2:What was it about? A week ago one of my friends came over and, um, she was telling me how she loves fresh okra and she just eats it off the vine. And I said, oh my god, I've never had okra right off the vine. She said you need to try it. I said I don't know if it's for me. I said because you know, I'm not even a big okra person, because my mom used to make it with tomatoes and corn. And I said and heat it all up and it would be a little slimy to me. I didn't like the texture of the inside. I still don't, I'm not.
Speaker 2:So when she so I was reflecting back she said try it off the vine. So I bit into a fresh okra and my goodness, it was so delicious like it did not taste anything like what I was expecting it to taste. Like it crunched, it was not slimy, it was just the freshness of it. I ate the whole thing so quickly. And then I thought, wow, I'm going to have this in my salads because it just was so tasty. And sometimes it's just a difference of getting it right when something is fresh in its peak of the season and it tastes different than if you catch it after the peak of the season, because now it's starting to lose nutritional value and I was really, really pleasantly happy that I decided to take that step and try fresh okra.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:Now I like okra.
Speaker 1:I'm not a fan. I love tomatoes, I love corn. You know, like I said, I love fresh peas and the green beans and things of that nature. I love fresh fruit. But I've never been an okra fan, Never been. And I would always ask my mom when she did you know greens or peas, or big potted dough? I was like please, please, get mine before the okra touches it.
Speaker 2:Right, I definitely did not like it.
Speaker 1:I couldn't swallow it, and so I'm good. It's so funny, though. My son loves okra any way it is prepared, except when it is in succotash. He doesn't like it. Oh, because that's, because it's probably the slimeliness no he's thinking that he said the tomato sauce turns it off for him. Oh, okay, yeah, the tomato sauce turns it off for him.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the tomato sauce turns it off. So, and I can get that, because when you like something a certain way, you just like it a certain way.
Speaker 2:Right, we're all different and I don't judge anybody oh, I don't either, because we all have.
Speaker 1:No, I'm not right.
Speaker 2:Like you know, somebody likes one thing and I don't like it. I mean, there's plenty of choices out there, so thankful for the many choices we have, that who are we to snub our nose as somebody because they don't like something we like, or vice versa, to each their own? That's what I say, and I agree. There's so many other things that we can. You know, maybe I want to put my energy in, but I definitely don't go through it with what people choose to eat and people you know at different stages of their life. If somebody told me I would be eating raw okra 20 years ago, I would have said no way, not me.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, I get that. I definitely get that. Now, sarah, how do you, or when do you decide that you need to handle any pests or diseases that come upon your flowers or your garden in general?
Speaker 2:You ask really good questions. Oh my goodness, that is a challenge for me because there are many. You do what you have to do. I have stepped my game up significantly, where I no longer just freak out over every insect and bug that I see. I find myself taking a picture of it and trying to quickly, you know, google and identify what kind of pest it is and determine if it's beneficial or not, and then, for those that I determine are not beneficial, I use a lot of artificial intelligence and while I'm gardening and I look for like what are the solutions that I try to do my work, which is like what are plants that are more susceptible to different types of insects and what, what kind would they be? So I kind of have a little bit of heads up as much as possible, and that is one of the reasons I picked the native plants, because they have learned to deal with the insects, usually from the area, because they are, you know, they've grown in the area and stuff. So native plants give me an edge up, but you become more resilient when you have to face things, and so this year was a big one for me with these green beetles.
Speaker 2:Some people call them June bugs Some people call them Japanese beetles and there I encountered that there were all tons of them all over my garden and I was just so freaked out in the beginning and then I found out that the best way to handle them, if I didn't want to be spraying my garden plants with a bunch of um, pesticides, chemicals I needed to hand pick them off and I was like no, I'm not doing that, I'm not doing that and draw the line I thought I drew the line and then I realized that I was, you know, because I do do business with, I'm a master gardener and so I have a relationship with many other master gardeners in my area.
Speaker 2:So as I was going to all of my different friends that are master gardeners, I would say like hey, what can?
Speaker 2:you do other than having to handpick these bugs off. And they would say, sarah, you need to pick them off. And so I said, okay, I'm going to just try this thing, I'm going to try to pick them off. And I, and so I said, okay, I'm gonna just try this thing, I'm gonna try to pick them off. And you have to. Most of the time is as simple as picking off the bugs and dropping them into um soapy water and they drown, and so most of them you put believe it or not, is this comes down to like dawn and just um water now dawn dish water with just popping the hitting like the branch, or picking them off and dropping them in and they drown.
Speaker 2:And so I'm now that is my thing. I don't mind picking off a insect that is non-beneficial and drowning it, so I have become resilient pretty much.
Speaker 1:We do get stronger. I mean, I never thought I'd be a nurse. I had no desires, didn't really like being around people just with minor stuff going on, going on with them when I was a kid I was like no, I got to avoid this situation and here I have been in a intensive care unit for over 20 years, so you know I've seen the bulk of it and I just jumped right on in and do what I have to do. But no, I never saw that coming. So we are stronger than we realize.
Speaker 2:Right, and then I do. I use neem oil. Neem oil is really good as well, and so I look for natural ways to protect my plants as much as possible, you know, because that is my go-to. And there's things that you could do called companion planting, where certain herbs and other plants they can offset. Like, like you you may already know this like marigold is a plant that you would plant with, like, um, your tomatoes and stuff, because it kind of like wards off the insects that well you know they don't like the smell, and so onions, garlic, are good to plant, chives, those are some of the things that you could do. And then lavender lots of plants that you can plant to help, kind of, with the insect population lemongrass. So I try to really spend a lot of time learning about interplanting so that I don't have as many problems.
Speaker 1:Now I've heard of lemongrass, you know, being similar to a repellent and it doesn't smell great. But I learned that on a trip to Jamaica. I was not seeking this information out, but I came back home and found me some lemongrass oil and it really does help with insects in and around the home as well.
Speaker 2:Right, the smell is, it deters them.
Speaker 1:Now, no, I never knew about the lavender or interplanting. I think I may have heard someone mention that a while.
Speaker 2:I think I may have heard someone mention that a while ago. Interplanting is what a lot of gardeners are doing that don't want to use pesticides is that they just simply plant different plants. That's going to deter certain insects. And I mean, you got to remember, not every insect is you want to kill. And that's the thing is, when you start using a lot of the chemicals, you may be killing beneficial insects because, think about it, when you're growing food, you need pollinators, and the bees are one of our number one pollinators. And so people think, oh, bees, I don't want to see the bees, I want to see the bees. As a matter of fact, I'm in the process of taking a series of beekeeping classes right now because I'm really thinking about maybe doing some hives because I want to have the honeybees.
Speaker 2:The honeybees populate, I mean, they pollinate our fruit trees and our vegetables and stuff. And then you have they pollinate our fruit trees and our vegetables and stuff, and then you have you need these insects and stuff. So you can't think of every insect as a pest that you want to kill. And so you really think about it because it's like, okay, who's going to eat the mosquitoes if I kill? You know, this particular bug over here. You know what's going to happen if I kill this bug. They all, you know, know they serve a purpose. Even people say, oh, the ants are so bad? Well, they aerate the the soil because they're traveling in the soil. So so it requires a little bit of um, sometimes just doing a little bit of homework, before you're so quick to just want to um kill a bug well, I hear you, sarah.
Speaker 1:I wasn't like this 10 years ago, I hear you, but I got to get used to that one.
Speaker 2:I think I might start planting lemongrass in with my flowers okay, I have lots of lemongrass, lots of herbs the herbs are really. And then the other thing is you want to start to plant plants that will come back every year on their own, which are referred to as perennial plants, because you don't want to constantly be having to do all of this work over and over and over again planting, planting, planting. You want your garden to be growing on its own, and so you want to. And lemongrass, you know I don't know in your zone, but in my zone it's a perennial, it'll come back automatically.
Speaker 2:And so, trying to find plants that are native plants that will come back on their own, especially plants that are edible, you know plants. You want them to come back so that you have food without having to work for it. So you want to say, okay, asparagus will probably last up to like 20 years. You know, after that asparagus plant gets established, for the next 20 years you don't have to do anything but just pretty much harvest it, you know, water it and then harvest your food. So you want to be in the mindset of what can I do once and kind of benefit as I continue on on this journey of gardening.
Speaker 1:And I get that. You know you don't want to keep repeating a cycle. You don't have to.
Speaker 2:Right, and I'm not against annual plants because they're very, very important, because one of the benefits with the annual plants is that they are normally very colorful and they give you lots of blooms in a short period of time. Their life cycle is short. However the power of the color that they present in a garden is absolutely amazing. So it's like you want the balance of finding some annuals and you want your perennials, and then you want your food and then you want your ornamental ones, so that if you want to cut some flowers and bring them indoors or have the beauty of them in the pots or outside in your garden. So you want a mixture, you want diversity.
Speaker 1:That's what you're looking for in your garden okay, sarah, I planted some tomatoes and I tried several times and everybody was giving me these tips oh, plant them in a bucket. You know, hang the bucket upside down. And I found out I had too much shade on my back because of the many trees that are in my backyard. Ok, so I decided to plant them in the front. Well, my husband was really opposed to that idea, but I was like I'm giving this a try because the other stuff is not working, because the squirrels are pulling up my plants, you know, in the back. They coming up on the deck and they just pulling my plants out. I said so. You know, I'm not gaining anything that year when I put them, because I have full sun on my front.
Speaker 2:They need six hours. They like six hours oh baby.
Speaker 1:I mean, when you go out on my front you're going to get that tan. It is there, it is full sun and. But my problem? Well, the, the tomatoes. Tomatoes did beautifully and I think I only plant two or three plants and they did beautifully. They were really really good. Um had such a great taste. People were asking for the green ones. But my problem was the little ground squirrels, not the, not the big squirrels, the tiny ones. They would take a bite out of my tomato and leave it and we were fighting me and the little ground squirrels. We were seeing who was going to get to the tomato first and I was like I need to find something to get rid of you because you're hurting me, even though I had a great harvest because I was giving tomatoes away. But what I learned? A second thing I learned it took so much nutrients out of the soil.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, you have to replenish it.
Speaker 2:I could not grow anything there for a while um, well, what you could do is, after you are finished with planting, you, some people, will now go and add compost, organic matter and everything to enrich it. Because, yes, the, the roots are going to be soaking up the nutrients that they need, and and that's their job is to get the nutrients that they need to produce. And so if they, if they've sucked it up, you have to replenish it. I mean, it's like we got to drink water or liquids and, you know, replenish our bodies. So the soil needs the same thing, and it's a matter of like.
Speaker 2:Most gardeners are fertilizing. They're either composting and using it in their gardens, but you have to replenish, or, again, you can be interplanting plants that are going to help each other, like, some plants will help provide the nutrients that are needed, like nitrogen for another plant. So once you really get into this gardening thing, you could really spend hours and hours just researching information on just one small topic like that, like what kind of deficiency is even happening with the soil, and the soil is the foundation. If you don't have good soil, then it's going to be really hard to grow really good plants. And so you can have a soil test done.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you're familiar with, if you have an extension in your area. But most counties have what's called a county extension and the county will provide you with soil kits so you can take a sample of your soil, they will run a test on it and they will come back and tell you what exactly needs to be added to balance that soil out, you know, and so that's a good, and they're normally free like in North Carolina is free most of the year with one small window where they're working mainly with the farmers and they're trying to deter people from doing it. So they charge a small fee, hoping that everybody that's not a farmer will just go during that, after that period Sure, before or after, but yeah providing the right nutrients.
Speaker 2:So, even based on what you're growing, you need to understand like what kind of plant is it and what is it going to be sucking up from the soil? Is it going to be sucking up a lot of calcium? That's why I saved my eggshells and I crushed them and I put them back into the earth. I've saved my scraps from my foods because they could be put back into the earth as a nutrient for the soil. So there's so many things that I found that I was wasting that now, as a gardener, I can use. I save my orange pills. I make a cleanser cleaning cleanser for my out of my orange pills, my lemon pills. I use them. I use my eggshells also to be able to grow my seeds, you know. So I am amazed at how my life has changed as a gardener.
Speaker 1:Okay, now, I've heard about the eggshells and I know a little bit about compost. I don't do a lot, but I was digging around in that spot where I felt all the nutrients had gone because nothing would grow and I was putting manure and other things like that in it and one of my neighbors gave me something that she mixes up was it auriculite or corolite, because that's often added to the soil to help aerate it, to make it nice and lighter so that, um, the roots can navigate around without you know as much I don't know exactly what it was.
Speaker 1:It was one of her homemade things and um, I just kind of dug a hole, um, you know like a little trench, and um poured it in, lined it out and put some dirt on it to see, and last year I noticed, you know that vine, the purple heart. You know where the hearts come out.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes um, well, it fell off one of my plants on the porch and I just let it fall. I didn't try to get it up and it's growing now and I'm like, okay, my soul's coming back in that spot where the tomatoes were. Now the rest of the rest of my flower garden is okay, um, but I was like it sure did take a while. So you know, just learning, you learn as you grow, learn as you grow. But that purple heart is looking really good out there.
Speaker 2:And that's an easy plant to grow. It really is.
Speaker 1:It really is and I don't do anything.
Speaker 2:I just let it fall and you can easily cut it and create another plant too, because all you have to do is just root it in a little bit of water.
Speaker 1:Well, you're right and I've done that, but this one, I just let it fall down on the ground, did not touch it, and it has taken root oh great yeah, so I was, and a friend of mine saw it. She said I mean, those purple hearts will grow anywhere and it's a perennial? Yes, and it is, it is, and I really do like them because they are um, they're, they're dependable, they're very dependable in the gardening world.
Speaker 2:we said if you um got an area where you can't grow anything, that's where where you put one. Okay, that's what they say.
Speaker 1:All right. Now let me ask you about this when it comes to community garden, when do you allow people to come out and harvest, or how do you go about harvesting and who gets the fruits of the labor? Is it true in the community or people outside the community?
Speaker 2:At this point, like I said, because the garden is only two years old, 2024 has really been the start of the actual food production. The other parts was just like I said getting the building, getting all the different parts of the garden, getting even the garden section where we were going to grow all the food, prepping the grounds, getting it all. We had to create gates around it because there was deers and there's wild animals and stuff. So we had to create all of that kind of environment. So the people that benefit are definitely number one the people that volunteer and come out and help and they are like the top priority. And then my relatives that live right around the garden, because they are the community, the immediate community, and then I do have friends and family and other people have friends and family that they often want to share with. So that's been my community for this year 2024.
Speaker 2:Going forward and probably 2025, there is a church that is diagonally across from the garden. That is diagonally across from the garden. The plan is to establish a relationship with them and to see if we can support some of the, if they have a desire to want to collaborate, to work with the church and then to keep expanding outside of there, looking for local organizations that we can support. But we're not at the level yet because we're only in the first year where we have like yields and yields and yields, where we need like mega churches and stuff to donate to. We have some local churches, like my grandmother and my grandfather's churches when they grew up. I do visit them and I plan to donate to them. Um, so it's been enough people it's been. You know, we we have not had to waste anything. That's where he said we don't have anybody that we can give it to between my relatives and the, the helpers.
Speaker 2:And then I live in a separate area 45 minutes away. I still have friends and family here. So I'm often calling my friends and family and say are you looking for carrots? Are you looking for okra? Or people that are even tied to me because we have a Facebook group.
Speaker 2:So if I'm posting I think it was last Sunday or maybe about a week and a half ago I was posting that we had Oprah and people would say, hey, can I come get some? Do you have some? I'll call up my brother or my sister who are outside of the community area, but I'll say do you want me to freeze somera for you, or whatever it may be, or carrots, Do you want me? So I make calls and just reach out to people to see who's interested in it, Because what I don't want to happen is I don't want people to just be taking food and then it's going to waste. I really would like to be able to give food to people who really would like to have the food I agree, and then to give to those who need the food.
Speaker 1:That's perfect. I mean, I agree with that ideology. If it's a community garden, sure you want people to enjoy the fruits of the labor that's out there, but to have it to waste is not helping.
Speaker 2:It takes a lot of work to grow food. It's a look for most items. It's a long period of time. It's a lot of caring that goes on to grow the food. There's a lot of um, fertilizing and just a lot of nutrients that you have. I have to buy a lot of different things to care for the plant, so I'm using fish fertilizer or slow lease fertilizer. There's many things you know, even the water bill. I mean a lot of that. So you don't really want to be wasteful. That's not the purpose of the garden. The garden is so it could be healthy food that people can enjoy, you know. And, of course, if those that are in need, I would definitely would not have an issue with donating to someone in need or a family's in need oh absolutely at this time we don't have like this long list that.
Speaker 2:You know that we've kind of like exhausted who to give stuff to, because I have large family members, so they, they, really they have accepted well, that's a beautiful thing though that's beautiful.
Speaker 2:I mean someone is is benefiting from the garden yes you know the products of the garden, so, and that's really what you want and another big part of the garden has to do with having a place for people to come and enjoy. Absolutely. It has many seating areas. We have a pergola area, we have arch areas. You know, with seating that people could sit down and relax.
Speaker 1:Do you collaborate and I know this is just your second year, but you still have. I know you've done some education on your own and you've been to some workshops. But what about other people with community gardens or other cities or communities with community gardens? Do you guys often collaborate Right?
Speaker 2:Well, I haven't really worked with any other leaders of other community gardens. Okay, I am a master gardener and as a master gardener I'm affiliated with a group, a large group of people, and our job is to go out and do volunteer gardening work. So I do talk to them and then some of them have other gardens that you know. We help them. I go and do work sometimes at other community gardens and my goal is, once this garden is up and running pretty pretty good, is to help other people who may want help in organizing and how to if they want to start one. Since I have a lot of business background, I would like to use my business background to help people to be able to manage projects such as this. And how do you economically be able to create something like this and be able to share my knowledge with people? These are some of the resources that are available. Should this be something that you want to do? Like something as simple as you need a lot of wood chips to manage a community garden or any garden.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:And to know that there's a resource called Chip Drop and how you can go and sign up and work with the arborist to be able to get free wood chips, is very beneficial to people that are starting a garden. So, just knowing, maybe, about the extension and what are some of the things that you could do, knowing that there are soil tests that you can get done that's free, nor that you can ask questions about grass, because there's a hotline associated with almost all of the county extensions. So, all of the resources, something as simple as beekeeping there's free courses on so many different things and being able to help people to know where to go. I would like to continuously share my knowledge to help people. Companion planting, things like that is what I would like to use my knowledge and experience to help other community gardeners that want to do something. But yeah, there's a lot that I'm looking forward to doing.
Speaker 1:Well, that's great. I mean, right now, I hey, it appears you have your hands full, but it is. It is about the growth of the project, right?
Speaker 2:and I mean I really love helping other people, sure, so someone was to ask for my assistance. I would definitely share because it was a. I didn't really know how to do this when I wanted to start this project, but thank God that I was able to. I was used to managing really big projects in my business you know career so I was not overwhelmed by this project. Career, so I was not overwhelmed by this project. I was able to know how to navigate, to get, to be able to move through, because in two years a lot has been done and I'm very proud of the garden where it is in two years, and so I really want to be able to see more people be able to take this, the steps of creating community gardens, if it's just for you and 10 other people, I mean constantly.
Speaker 2:Right now. We're in this political age and everybody's talking about like it's day and age right now, where food food being so expensive that is something that you can make a difference with. You can grow your own tomatoes, your own cucumbers, you can grow your lettuce, you can grow them all in containers. You don't even have to have a garden. You can grow so much food in containers and a five gallon buckets and so like in my community garden. I even even show that because I have like from tractor. Supply is a store that's big in North Carolina and we have five gallon buckets and we have holes in them and we fill them with soil that we make up our own soil and we show people. This is all the space you really need. If you want to grow eggplant, you can grow eggplant in one container. Say, you got 10 containers and they're all close together. You can have in one potatoes, you can have sweet potatoes. In another you can grow. So we need to get back to saying what can we do to help ourselves?
Speaker 1:True.
Speaker 2:Because people will say, oh, food is so hot. Yes, food is high. Everything. From my experience of living, I have found there's been nothing that has been going down in price. Everything has always been going up From the time I can recall when I graduated from college. Food has gone up, cars have gone up, gas has gone up, everything goes up. And people say, oh, you know what? It's been the same story over and over and over again. Everything is going up. But it's been the same story over and over and over again. Everything is going up.
Speaker 2:Well, what can you do to make a positive difference? Can you grow some of the food that you eat? Can you grow your own sweet potatoes? All you need is one sweet potato. Let that baby start, you know, growing slits in it and slicing it up and you can have a thousand sweet potatoes from one sweet potato. You really can. Same thing with white potatoes and red potatoes and stuff like in purple potatoes. There's so much that we can do to make a positive difference. And you just imagine if 20 people did that and they're helping a community of 20 more people and everybody is. And you can start with seeds and you can get free seeds. Most libraries now have free seed libraries. You just go to the library, you can get seeds and you can start growing food. People grow them in plastic bags. There's so many creative ways to do it. You have, like we have phones so we can just go Google up information. We got YouTube where you can watch and see what people are doing.
Speaker 2:There really is no excuse why people can't do gardening, unless physical. I'm talking about If they're physically able to get around and lift things and do things able to get around and lift things and do things. We all should be making a difference and growing some of our food, because what would happen Like the pandemic happened If you just had pots in your backyard that you were growing, you would feel a lot better as well as that would help you mentally, because during the pandemics, you know we talked about depression and all the stuff that people went through and the high number of people that were suicidal and stuff um, during the, during the pandemic. But you would have something to do. You would be connected to mother earth, number one, and that's just very mentally helpful for us. There's nutrients that are in the soil that are antidepressants, so that's beneficial for people. You're getting vitamin D from the sun. When you're out doing gardening, you're physically lifting things, your body is getting exercise, so there's so many positive things.
Speaker 2:When I think, think about gardening, I can't even imagine life without it, because of all the physical, the mental, the spiritual, because when I watch plants grow, I'm like this is god, like god makes stuff grow and the first thing that god gave us was a garden. When he created mankind, he gave us a garden to sustain us and then he created our bodies that are very similar to the garden. When you really look at all of this and how, in a single seed, everything that that seed needs to be successful is in a tiny seed, and to watch a tiny seed just blow out its body and just come into this growth of leaves and everything is magnificent, it really reminds me all the time about how magnificent God is and how we are magnificently made as well.
Speaker 2:We're just, we're one of his creations. But plants, they talk to each other, they provide so much. They are growing all day, all night. I mean it's just. The whole world of plants is so amazing to me. I know I sound like an addict.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, no. It shows your passion.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's so exciting to me to think about it, because when I think about the first gift god gave mankind was a garden and he said within that garden was everything that we needed. But you think about that and we went around worrying about all of this stuff, like how are we gonna we're on the treadmill of life, or how I'm gonna support myself, I'm gonna do all this. You get back to nature and you live a simple life and it changes you for the better, like when you really think about well, you know what I can throw my tomatoes and my cucumbers or whatever you want eggplant or watermelon and all of these things. He gave us seeds with them within that watermelon. That's why they now are selling seedless watermelon. They don't want you creating your own watermelons oh, that's so.
Speaker 2:I never thought of it that way before all this stuff is being modified and everything, and we're really supposed to eat fruit that has seeds in it and then, even like the papaya, it has, like the seeds, it will pull out antibiotic, it will help you with your system, with your gut system and everything. So, like we are getting away from like all of the stuff that nature already provided for us, like medicinal medicines like that we used to use. And when I grew up, I remember my grandmother going to the yard and coming back with something when she, when the babies were teething and it was it looked like little Brown little things that she was so so this little thing around their neck that had all these little. I don't know what sassafri or what it was, but there were many things like mullein plant is one of the plants that I grow and it's really good for the respiratory system. All of these things are from nature.
Speaker 2:Pharmaceuticals, you know they serve a purpose, but there's so much that God's given us already that is right at our fingertips to help us live better lives. He's given us birds to watch and to see the amazing beauty of them, as well as how they work together. You know, even when I think about the bees and how they work within the hive. You got the queen, and then you got the males drones and then you got the worker bees, and they all collaborate together for the success of the entire group of bees the hive of bees, as opposed to everybody trying to do their independent thing. So you can learn a lot from nature about how to live a better life.
Speaker 1:That's great and true, that really, when you broke it down the way it is, it is truly that way. And the statement regarding seed time and harvest the to sow, they're coming up again. You know, right, typically we think about, you know we're going to say so good seeds. You know we're going to treat people right, we're going to be respectful, you know, but you've turned it around and it's the seeds that we sow into the garden is going to reap. A harvest like one potato can really harvest out to 20 potatoes, and you know that is true. It's going to harvest out to 20 potatoes, and you know that is true.
Speaker 2:It's going to harvest out to thousands, really, if you think about it, because you're going to take your potato and now you're going to plant it again. You're not going to take all your harvests up and never, you know, save any of it. Just like even with the watermelon, when we had seeds, they would save the seeds because you want to save something, to have something to put back into the ground, sure, sure. But there's a good lesson, I think gardening keeps me grounded. It keeps me, um, connected to God.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it keeps you humble.
Speaker 2:Yes, definitely.
Speaker 1:It keeps me humble, you know, but I mean, I just admire the fact that you took on this project and it's going to be larger than life and it's going to help so many people. You've learned a lot larger than life, and it's going to help so many people.
Speaker 1:You've learned a lot. You're still learning a lot. So it's a beautiful thing. I've learned and I appreciate your time and your talent, your vision and your dream to not just sell the property away, never have it again. And I think sometimes we're too quick to sell away our heritage or our ancestry. We're too quick and then when we look around, we don't even have the money that we reaped from the sale and like what did I do? You did nothing. You did nothing, ma'am. You did nothing Because you can, and for so little is what they sold out for. That's my point, that's what I'm saying. You did nothing because you don't have the home to show for it, you don't have the land to show for and you now, you don't even have the money to show for it, you don't have the land to show for and you now, you don't even have the money to show for it.
Speaker 1:So you did nothing. So, and it's unfortunate, it really is unfortunate. But so there are so many nuggets you planted no pun intended, during this discussion today and I appreciate everything that you said um, some of it was really really eye-opening, a lot of it. You know I'm around doing plants, uh, but I'm going to intermingle some lemongrass and with my plant. I don't like the bees, but I don't chase them away because I know they're pollinating my plants. I know that much about it.
Speaker 2:I'm going to give you another nugget. Okay, go ahead. The bees that you see that are pollinating the plants. They are now close to the end of their life because they are going out at the last stage and that's their job is to just go get the you know, collect pollen and bring it back to the hive and then they're pretty much getting ready to just. You know, their life is they're going to transition at that point.
Speaker 1:They have done their job.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they have done their job and they're getting ready to make their sweet transition, you know so everything is like that's. The beauty that I love about gardening is that it's so filled with so many things that will blow your mind. Something as simple as like a bee, and then you see, like a hummingbird. I just saw a hummingbird today and it was like, oh my God, like look at how magnificently they can fly back and forth and at the speed, and how small they are and how cute they are and everything.
Speaker 2:There is always something to just like capture my attention and make me smile and just remind me of how awesome the world is that we live in, and this is for basically everyone. I mean all of us. Hopefully, we can enjoy vitamin D by getting some sun. Hopefully we all can just put our hands in the soil, and the plans that I have for this garden is so much bigger than just growing food. I would love to be able to do more teaching on how to eat healthy meals and to be able to work with autistic kids, to have them come to the garden and be able to to do, you know, working in a garden, because that will be their therapy. To be able to touch the soil and to be able to see stuff that they may not like the touch of, maybe other depending on where they are on the spectrum. They may not like the interaction of other humans touching them, but they may love being in control of touching the soil and watching plants and watering plants. So there's so many groups that can benefit from a garden.
Speaker 2:It does not have to be just like, oh, I'm just growing food and giving food away. No, there's the part of coming and sitting, having a spot that you can come sit in and just relax and look at nature, look at the trees, hear the wind blowing, listen to wind chimes, look at the different types of birds watching them, you know, fly over you and just watching some of the wildlife. You know, two foxes went flying by on the side of the garden and it was interesting Yesterday it was. Some cows got loose near us and some people were chasing the cows and one of the volunteers said I've never seen anything like this before People chasing cows, and so every day could be different. Like you said early, we were talking about the day. You just never know what's going to happen on a given day. Well, I didn't expect to see cows running loose yesterday.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm sure that's not what you woke up thinking was going to happen. Okay, you know, that's one thing about for lack of a better term wildlife. That's another thing about being in and near a large garden. Okay, you know, you can kind of control what happens in a very small patch of land, patch of a garden in the backyard. But yeah, I don't envision that. But if you got cows running through, wolves running through, coyotes running through, it's gonna happen, it's definitely gonna happen. Deer, you're gonna, you're gonna find some deers coming up soon. But uh, yeah, I mean, I see them here.
Speaker 1:So, and it's, I don't see a garden around, but I see a lot of forestry and but you know, they have cut some, some highways and some roads and so, yeah, they'd be trying to cross the interstate and they meet a semi truck and you know that's it. But you see them coming through. So, like I said, we're invading their habitat, they're not invading ours. So it's a lot to learn, it's a lot to see. It's interesting. I do appreciate your time, your passion for the community garden, your vision for how you would like for it to grow and how you would like for it to benefit so many others With the autistic children, the community of people that can truly be fed from the community garden. You don't want to see anything wasted and we you know some people don't mind seeing waste Me, I don't care for it. I don't like seeing things wasted when someone else can potentially enjoy it, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Thank you for having me on today and I've enjoyed your interesting questions and I hope that you can I can come again I think we're gonna get you on again in uh, maybe this time next year in 25, so you can tell us about some expansions and drop some more nuggets on us about what is going on, okay I will focus on just the food forest, because we didn't really even talk about that today, because that is one of my interesting projects.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we can definitely do that, because our garden encompasses more than flowers. It encompasses that, so we can definitely do that. It would be my pleasure to have you back on so that we can see how your garden grows. Okay, all right.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Enjoy the rest of your day, you as well. Thank you so much for being on Gentry's journey. I have enjoyed it and, like I said, you gave us more no pun intended, more food for thought, okay, thank you so much and you have a wonderful evening. Okay, okay, goodbye, goodbye.