14. Employee Gardens by StartOrganic | Troy Smothermon

Hear how Troy Smothermon, co-founder of Start Organic, turned a passion for gardening into transformative corporate programs for companies like PayPal, Apple, and Tesla. Discover how growing food isn’t just about plants—it’s about reconnecting with nature, reducing stress, and building community in unexpected places.

Topics
00:00 — Introduction: Start Organic's mission
03:16 — Founding Start Organic
05:41 — Raised beds and setting up for success
10:19 — Adapting to your environment
12:46 — Tips for year-round success
14:54 — Organic pest control
22:10 — Composting 101
26:43 — Bringing gardens to the workplace

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Transcript

Troy Smothermon (00:00.248)
PayPal has the longest running organic gardening program for employees in the country. We started the program there. Intuit, you might've heard of them. TurboTax and QuickBooks. Apple, if you've never heard of Apple. You've been under a rock for a long time. have a garden installation at Apple's corporate garden. Tesla. These are all companies in the Bay Area. And again, you know, can only say so much negativity about Silicon Valley. It is a place of innovation. And in some ways these big companies are.

investing in employees and they're investing in sustainable systems of composting on site. And they do have initiatives to be more responsible in the way that they produce their products and the kinds of employee culture that they put out there.

Bill Jollie (00:52.014)
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Hey everyone, it's Jolly here with Interrupt Hunger. We got Troy Smotherman with Start Organic all the way from San Jose, California coming to us today. Troy, thanks so much for joining us.

Troy Smothermon
Hey, thank you so much. This is great. Why don't you talk to us about that beautiful valley you live in? Because I think this is a cool place to start. Yeah, most people

refer to where I live as the Silicon Valley. And that's a relatively new name. know, the Silicon Valley, years ago, changed at a big rebrand, right? My dad was raised in this valley. was called the Valley of the Heart's Delight. It was full of orchards. know, San Jose, California actually in the 80s was the capital of California. It was an agricultural Mecca. was the meeting place, the birthplace of the agricultural

business way, and I guess in that way it's been on the forefront of the human movement out West ever since, you know, the gold rush. People come for the gold, but then they go, well, crap, we need food. So the Silicon Valley really is a relatively new thing. I don't, I have nothing against that. I really don't. I don't have anything against that because humans grow, change, innovate.

Bill Jollie (03:16.813)
And a lot of good things come from technology as well. We just can't rely solely on what tech does for the situation. With that, start us from the beginning. I always love a good origin story. Yeah, start organic. are, my partner Josh Levine and I came up with this concept in 2009, kind of winter 2009 into, the beginning of 2010. We had both.

graduated college, we'd both had a couple of years in the real world, right? Both of us working for real jobs. I became a contractor as a general contractor in California building homes. He was working for brand marketing at CBS in San Francisco. So we both had our shot at a couple of years of what the real world looked like. And both of us were like, I would much rather do my own thing. And I'd much rather...

express myself, put an idea out there and follow our dreams or follow our passions and do this. So in 2009, winter going into 2010, my folks had bought a house on foreclosure. Thanks, housing crisis. You have to kind of roll with these punches and recognize when downturns or bad things, quote unquote bad things that are happening.

really work in your favor, my folks bought a house, a second home in Lake Tahoe. And they're not people of means either. They found a foreclosure and bought this house for a super reasonable price. And so they said, Hey, would you want to go live in this house because we don't want it to go over a winter? You know, we want it, we don't want to have to winterize it. Would you be willing to go there? And I said, you know, twist my arm, have me go to Lake Tahoe and live in this house for a winter with my best friend.

So I said, Hey Josh, you know, you want to come to Tahoe with me and we can explore business ideas. can go snowboard and do whatever we want out there. So we did. We did. spent that winter. You know, I got 50 days snowboarding on my season pass. I loved it. I'm a huge snowboard fan. And we came up with a bunch of concepts for a business and Start Organic is the one that stuck. We were like, yeah, well, we're really passionate about this. We want this idea. We're going to start one garden at a time.

Bill Jollie (05:41.441)
We're not going to take on any loans. I'm just going to take my pickup truck and the things that we've learned from personally gardening on our own time. And we're going to just go back to the Silicon Valley and we're going to teach people how to grow. We're going to start one garden at a time. So we started a nursery, a plant nursery in my laundry room. Right. So we, we went to the, you know, the local

DIY store and we picked up organic gardening soil and we started these seeds indoors. We got some grow lights and we were the only people, as far as I know, we're the only people growing plants indoors in that area that weren't growing weed starts. So we used those plants to start our first gardens when we came back to the Silicon Valley in the spring of 2010. So business just gradually...

kept growing and growing over the years and honing your craft. Organically, you could say. So then you had a shift over the years and it helped folks build raised bed gardens. Why raised bed versus growing stuff in the ground? Well, if you're new to gardening, you want to make sure that you can be successful your first time. And that's probably the-

biggest challenge that people face is they start something and they kind of don't think about the setup of their garden enough. And when you start with a raised bed, you are providing excellent soils, right? You're putting a food source for your plants there. If you're trying to transform soil,

It really takes, it can take you a couple of years to take an unproductive soil path, something just around your house to build the nutrient value that you want, the life, the living microbial mass that you need in soil to feed your plants. So we always started with raised beds because we wanted people to be wildly successful their first time. And so we would build up on the soil surface. We would.

Bill Jollie (07:57.697)
tear apart and kind of turn up the really hard soil underneath, the material that has maybe some mineral content, but not a lot of organic material. And then we would build up, add that, add that. You don't need to add that much. would say eight inches is about a minimum for a raised bed height that you would want to go with. But that new material that we would bring in was rich with life. mean, billions of microbes has.

plenty of NPK, the nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium that you would need in the form of organic composted chicken manure. And that is only one of the many factors that make for a successful first time garden. So the raised bed is only one little piece of that puzzle. does, it does at least ensure that your plants are going to have a happy place to be growing and they're going to have a food source.

You know, the rest of them, I mean, there's all kinds of other stuff. You know, we were, were setting up automatic irrigation systems. And you mentioned that you, you you, your, concept of, you know, that we're, that we've relied too much on technology that we're, that we're, I guess, using technology in place of our old ancestral skills of growing food. And I would say, I would challenge and say that technology can

really assist in that process. mean, for example, my organic vegetable garden, most days, I mean, I'm transitioning in the season right now and I'm about to plant my winter vegetables. So I don't have my irrigation system set up, but the day that I plant, I'm going to set that irrigation system to water my plants for me at 5 a.m. every morning for the first six weeks or so. that, that is a real, that's a saving grace for me. You know, that's I'm a

I'm a business person. I also like my life. I'm not just a farmer gardener. So I do rely a lot on technology, but in the ways that I'm sort of replacing myself, automating some of that process. So raised bed gardening just gives you a little bit better of a chance for success. Let's go to the USDA growing zones. Cause you're in like such a fertile, beautiful weather climate in Northern California, but.

Bill Jollie (10:19.949)
You know, there's going be people that are in New England and South Texas, North Carolina, and everywhere in between. How much harder is it going to be for somebody that's brand new getting started? And because I don't want somebody to say like, well, he's got the perfect situation for growing, you know, wherever I live, it's harder. I wouldn't necessarily equate the growing zone number that you have with the degree of difficulty for growing. It is important to know the rules.

Right? Every growing situation, like, mean, I, and I mean the difference between my house and my neighbor's house. There are different sets of pest problems, different movement of the sun, maybe bigger blockages of the sun in one part, and they don't give it as much sun as I do. So what the growing zone tells you is really your available plant list. It tells you.

which plants you can plant and when you should be planting them. It's more about timing and plant selections than anything, right? So I'm in, and this, these, by the way, this is a changing, this is a moving target. In 2023, just a year ago, the USDA came out with a new USDA hardiness zone map. They basically redid their own map and they said, well, the numbers are changing. I used to be in a zone eight.

like 8A or 8B and now I'm considered a zone nine and they're attributing that to global warming. They're saying that, you know, where there might've been people in zones five or six are now six or seven, right? So there's kind of a shifting number. Well, the important thing to know is if you are in a zone, if you go on, it's really easy to go online and just type in, in any Google search, you know, USDA hardiness zone.

and then type in your zip code, it will spit a number out. What's important to know is if you are in zone six and below, you are going to have a hard time growing plants through the winter outside. Right? So that's that kind of a big one. If you're in zones seven and above, you can grow year round outdoor gardens without having to have a greenhouse or any kind of protection in that way.

Bill Jollie (12:46.411)
So you're choosing your seasonality. What are you really going to grow? Like right now in my zone nine, currently I want to call them a nine. always thought I was an eight, but now I'm apparently a nine with this new map. I'm about to be planting my whole winter garden. Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, salad greens, onions, garlic. These are on my winter list. I'm starting those right now.

And I'm going to be able to grow all the way. I'm going to get a lot of production all the way until March of next year when I will turn my garden over and I'll be planting my spring and summer vegetables that will get me all the way through that summer season. Summer vegetables, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, squash, eggplant, cucumbers, all the root vegetable stuff, carrots, beets, radishes, huge list, really productive time. So what the important thing is with this hardiness zone is

You are choosing plants specifically for your growing zone and your timing is very important. If you're in zone six, you're on that border of being able to grow winter vegetables. That means, all that really means is that your season starts later in the spring than my season starts. You're talking about last frost dates, right?

and first frost dates. And once you find out your first and last frost dates for the season, you can start to plan your crops. All right, so just plug and play. Go from there. Pretty much, yeah. Once you know that number, you can choose the right plants. So a couple other things to be successful. Folks are paying attention to...

organics, trying to get away from pesticides. What are some tips for, trying to control insects more naturally? And this is where innovation has come in, in such a crazy way. I mean, you can, for example, organic. You're never as a gardener, you're never going to be certified organic. You're not going to have the company come in and certify your crop. would be inexpensive.

Bill Jollie (14:54.293)
and timely endeavor, and it really won't give you anything. You're going to just know that you haven't sprayed any kind of herbicides, pesticides. You've provided some organic soil blends. You're trying to find some organic seeds and starts, and you're going to grow and you're not going to spray anything on these. Farming is tough. know, these people that are producing farms and they're certified organic. I mean, I've heard of guys that had to create their own giant, like giant car size, bigger than a car size vacuum cleaner.

to drive over their crops. They were specifically growing strawberries in the Watsonville area. This is a nearby coastal area to me that produced a lot of berries. To get insects off of his plants at the right time, he would drive a giant gigantic vacuum cleaner over the top and literally suck the bugs off of everything. So you, you gotta be creative with the process. A couple of things that you can do at home, right? If you've got little birds.

little finches that like to come and they eat things when they're just barely planted and they're only an inch tall, right? They're just coming out of the ground. Little birds will come and pull that out of the ground because they want to eat the seed that's underneath. Birds are really afraid of anything that moves, especially shiny things. So I'll go to my dollar store and I'll pick up pinwheels, you know, little plastic pinwheels that you make yourself. You plant them in the ground.

They spin around as long as there's any wind at all. The birds will not land in that area and you have protected your plants and it costs you 99 cents for five of them. You know, so yeah, so there, I mean, there's something like that for all of it. Most of what we suggest at Start Organic, we try to teach people observation is the game. If you go out to your garden on a regular basis, every morning I try to go out and have my coffee in my garden. I like to.

try to play a game in my mind, what looks different on my plants today that wasn't there yesterday? If I have a new hole on a broccoli leaf, I got to get really close to that particular hole and go, ooh, is the pest still on the plant? Is it on the underside of the leaf somewhere? Most of the time we suggest bringing just a little, like think of like a Windex bottle, like a spray bottle that never had Windex in it, just a water bottle with spray.

Bill Jollie (17:19.199)
If you can spray the areas, if you're finding pests on your plants and you can spray them literally with water, just spraying them off onto the ground is pest control because there's already other insects there that want to eat insects. And so that's another big part too, is companion planting. Right? So planting things like oregano, sage, rosemary.

that attract beneficial insects into your garden that like a ladybug is going to come because you have oregano. Ladybugs stay around in the garden and they eat aphids. So if you've ever had aphid problems on your broccoli and cauliflower, just planting your garden with at least 25 % of the garden should be planted with some kind of perennial companion plants. And now you're creating this ecosystem that makes life easier.

There's a million tips and tricks. mean, we could talk for days probably. This is, this is fascinating. So what about composting or what you're adding to the soil every year? It is, it is. I would say learning to compost. mean, it shouldn't be, it shouldn't be difficult. It shouldn't, it should be part of our daily lives. But composting is almost as hard, almost as many nuances and things to overcome and building a practical understanding.

as gardening is, right? So because what you're trying to do, and this is the way that I always teach composting. When you are composting, you're not recycling materials, you're not throwing things away, you're not turning it into soil. You are growing microorganisms. And if you can think of composting as, as a successful microorganism farm, then it might start to change your mentality a little bit. You know, these microbes need food.

water and air. And if you provide the right amount and the right kinds of food to them, AKA your veggie scraps or your degradable materials, if you're providing the right ratio of materials for them, you're keeping that pile wet enough that they have a water source and they have some airflow so they don't super overheat past a certain degree. You know, if they, if they get past 180 degrees, everything in that pile is dying and you're not composting anymore.

Bill Jollie (19:45.483)
So it really, it is a little bit more difficult than people let on. there's a lot of little like, there's technology starting to come out with home composting machines that you can just kind of throw anything you want in there and it does it for you. I'm not sure I like that either. still, I still want people to understand what they're trying to achieve by composting. But it is an extra step. And most of us have really busy lives to take and separate your food scraps from other garbage and recyclables.

is a whole nother thing and then getting that food scrap stuff outside into a compost bin before it starts to mold up in whatever container you've got. It can be a lot, you know, it's just a lifestyle choice, but it really, as far as humanity goes, we are not going to have a choice in the coming generations. We cannot continue producing as much trash as we do and just burying it or shipping it off to some other country to deal with. is not, it's not a sustainable way to do it.

Eventually it will have to be ingrained into our society from a young age. We will have to all know what composting is, why it produces what it does, what these microorganisms do for building soil and why building soil is important. I just, we're not there yet. And I think it's just because we're, we're instant gratification beings, you know, unless it makes big money, unless it's like winning the lotto.

You know, we're not into it, but this is the long play and we will all have to get into it. But if you look at compost as you're feeding the microbes in there, you know, that's not dissimilar from your own microbiome in your gut. If you feed the microbiome in your gut, you know, ultra processed foods, chemicals in a wrapper, you know, it's not going to be good. But if you feed your own microbiome, you know, a lot of healthy

fiber and nutrients, then it's going to benefit you. So same thing. That actually might be a really good way to introduce it to younger populations or even just adults and say, because everyone's very self-oriented. It's okay to be, we should all regulate our own health, but that's actually a really interesting concept. you said, think about yourself and what you eat. If you eat a bunch of junk foods, you get kind of a stomach ache and it's not happy. Your body's not happy. You're not happy with the way your body looks and feels.

Bill Jollie (22:10.547)
And that could be a cool, that actually is not a bad idea as far as like a teaching method to relate composting to your own body and really like humanize it. And that way maybe you can make a bit of a difference in how people consider doing it. We're trying to help with our school garden, elementary school with my-

my youngest daughter. So we'll definitely try that. And after we, we'll get the kids reactions. I'll let you know how it goes. Yeah. You shared a ton of knowledge there for your own backyard. Let's change gears and let's go from the backyard to, corporate America. Y'all are helping out some of the biggest names in America. So why don't you just name drop just, just a few of the gardens that you've helped with. All right. PayPal.

has the longest running organic gardening program for employees in the country. We started the program there. Intuit, you might've heard of them, TurboTax and QuickBooks. Apple, if you've never heard of Apple, you've been under a rock for a long time. have a garden installation at Apple's corporate garden. Tesla, these are all companies in the Bay Area. And again,

You know, I can only say so much negativity about Silicon Valley. is a place of innovation. And in some ways these big companies are investing in employees and they're investing in sustainable systems of composting on site. And they do have initiatives to be more responsible in the way that they produce their products and the kinds of employee culture that they put out there. So we...

We started one garden at a time, right? We've, pick up that origin story and kind of continue this on. So we started in Lake Tahoe. We came right back to Silicon Valley. We used all the plants that we started in that laundry room plant nursery to start our first gardens. We started one garden at a time. For 10 years, I went to, I went to 10,000 people's homes. I met individuals at their homes. went and talked to just thousands and thousands of people.

Bill Jollie (24:16.287)
And I'd say, I don't know, 20 % of them started gardens. So we went around building vegetable gardens for people in their yards, getting one family at a time onto this sustainable lifestyle. Right. But I kind of get tired of saying the same things over and over again. I would rather say them to a bigger audience and say them once and then have everybody listen and then I can move on and do something else. So we found.

Kind of just, again, organically, growing very organically. eBay reached out to us. They found us through one of the local newspapers we were featured in and Josh had talked to their green team. They had an organic garden on site, but they were having problems with organizing the employees and they said, hey, can you come in here and sort of help us build a program for our employees? And we said, yeah, absolutely we could do that. So, we helped them.

Organize their garden differently. We built a curriculum for employees that would work around an adult work schedule and eBay's program turned into PayPal's program. So that was the first one that we started eBay and PayPal. I don't know if you know they were they were together PayPal is a payment portal for what what eBay was was that online e-commerce and So we still have that program. This is our 11th year planting actually expanding the garden again for PayPal

And what I really like about it is we get these new classes of employees, people who have not been exposed to growing food ever in their lives, and they get to come out on their lunch breaks and plant organic vegetables, care for their food at our direction. We're there doing these little classes at lunch. We'll do a 10 minute gardening demo before their lunch break. And they'll come out and learn pest control for broccoli or

how to plant seeds for beets and radishes that day. Right? And then we'll hold their hand, we'll hold their hand through one good growing season or a whole year of growing. And these people are transforming their whole lives. You know, they'll say, hey, I've had so much success here at work and I see how little work I've needed to put in to make it work that I'm going to start a home garden. You know, so they're taking this knowledge home.

Bill Jollie (26:43.181)
They're teaching their kids, they have enough extra produce that they're sharing out produce with their communities, their immediate neighbors. Their neighbors are saying, how do you do this? They're teaching their neighbors. And we've seen this really cool, I know trickle-down economics didn't work, but trickle-down grownomics seems to work really well. know? really well. That's gotta make you feel so good. I can't imagine when, yeah, somebody that you taught.

to garden goes out and just multiplies that, multiplies the knowledge and all the benefits that come along with it. That's pretty amazing. parents, these, some of the, mean, a lot of these people that work at these companies are parents and they're taking that to the schools. They're saying, okay, I feel confident enough in my ability to grow food that I think I can go be a volunteer parent at my kid's school. And they'll tap us and say, Hey, would you guys help me start a school garden over here?

going to be, I'm going to step up and say, I can be the leader because we're teaching our goal now with school gardens is teaching teachers. So we want the teachers, faculty, and a parent population to be the teachers for the kids. And so that is another kind of big trickle down. Cause the hardest part with dealing with schools is there's just really no budget. know, schools are not coming up with bigger budgets every year. Schools are cutting budgets constantly, but if you have

enough volunteers, this is one of those really cool activities where just a lot of hands can do quite a lot to start a garden, but it's about consistency. know? So yeah, that's another really cool trickle down is into this school atmosphere. And I would really love to personally help build a curriculum for kids to learn this from as a class. should be, I mean, if you had a, you know, if you have math class and English class and

growing up and you have all these, you should absolutely have an earth sciences or gardening 101 type class that helps you just at least understand where food comes from. By the time you graduate high school, you should know how all food is produced, how you could produce your own food. I'm not saying everyone's going to be a home gardener, but at least you would understand what is good and what is not good from the world of agriculture these days.

Bill Jollie (29:04.811)
Yeah. Can you, can you imagine like the, the effect that we'd have on chronic disease if kids graduated high school, knowing how to plan a good, that's fantastic. And yeah, I've had, I had a guest on a few months ago, Kelly Douglas. was a, she worked at a, at a high school in just rural Oregon. And, man, it's just, you could hear the joy just like shouting from, from her heart and, seeing like kids and dirt and it's just magical.

So it's pretty cool. in our own neighborhood, just to see, when you see a little kid, like pull a carrot out of the ground and wash it off and eat it. Like that's just, you know, they're going to be hooked. Absolutely. For the rest of their life. If you can get them to wash it. Most kids, if they're in the garden, they pick something, they're just like, pick to the mouth. No, but the garden is a perfect living classroom for all the other subjects. I mean, you can do math.

problems about how many inches apart do these need to be planted and if a carrot is planted two inches apart, how many carrots can you put in a square foot that's 12 inches by 12 inches? That can be ingrained into any kind of, you can write poetry about the plants that you're seeing and improve your English skills. There's so many things that you can use for that living garden.

I just would love to see that as like a normal part of growing up, normal part of going to school. Yeah, that's cool. I've talked to a few people about this, but it's really neat to hear the passion come through in your voice. And I'm sure it won't be too much longer before you have that curriculum there for kids to pass on the next generation, which you know, that's pretty neat. Hey, let's get back to the employee gardens real quick. You mentioned, you know, just take a few minutes on their lunch break. What kind of time commitment?

do they need and then also like how often are you there or your people? Okay. So if you embrace technology a little bit, like all of our corporate gardens, we have organic, we have the soil blends with the, go in there and we turn them over, but we have automatic irrigation systems. So we're not asking people to be watering cans.

Bill Jollie (31:27.061)
I'm not trying to teach you how to water plants because we do have technology for that now. So we're really only asking for an employee to go into their garden two or three times a week for five to 10 minutes. So we're talking less than a half an hour a week for someone to be a successful gardener.

And that goes for home gardeners too, depending on how much space you have. At the corporate level, people are sharing garden beds. Really the intention of our programs is to teach them how to grow. It's really not how much food can I get out of this garden? Because a lot of times you're sharing that garden space with a team, right? It becomes like a cool alternative meeting space for teams. But, so let me break down what our corporate gardens look like, right?

We typically meet with a client. They want to change their culture. They want to offer something real, something tangible, something sustainable, a good wellness, health activity for their employees. So we look at the campus and we go, well, do you have a campus? That's the first thing. If you have a company that's all in the cloud, we do teaching online. We do zoom classes. We teach people, have Earth Day specials and we'll teach your whole, whole employee population, whether they're

in the US or out of the US, how to start a successful garden, how to grow that garden. And a lot of times we do the home gardening series where we actually follow along with regularly scheduled zoom classes. We take questions. We want people to grow food absolutely anywhere. So if you don't have a campus, like you can start with that. Even if you don't have a campus, you can still work with Start Organic. You can teach your employees something really tangible in a cool like half hour or one hour, like lunch specials.

Right? But if you do have a campus and you have any reasonable space, go, we go break that down. We go say, okay, this is your best place on campus to start a garden. and depending on the budget that they're willing to work with, say, Hey, you can start really small. You could start with a demonstration garden that's four or five raised garden beds. Like something, like something that you would install at a home.

Bill Jollie (33:48.641)
But it's with the intention of being a demonstration space where we're gonna go and we're gonna lead classes. You might have a small gardening club that works with that and we're gonna teach you in person and online how to maintain that garden. And we're gonna have this as like a living classroom. And then some of the companies go, well, we really want employees to have their own growing space. And that's when we start to get into our major programs, like the ones that we have.

at PayPal, at Tesla, at Apple, at Intuit over here. And again, we have those programs all over the U S we don't have to physically be there to start those programs for you. And in those circumstances, we do most of the heavy lifting and the dirty work. Start Organic comes in on every season. We just did that actually this, this week and last week, we are turning the gardens over and preparing for the new season. So we will go in there, pull all of your summertime plants.

We'll add organic soil amendments. We'll make sure the irrigation system is working. We're setting the stage for that next planting season. And next week we're planting. mean, this podcast will come out a little bit different, but we're into, let's say mid-October, we're going to be planting all of those winter veggies. So we provide plants. So we source organic vegetable starts and seeds. We're bringing out a really good selection. Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, salad greens.

all of these items from starter plants and seeds. And really we just want you to show up with the attitude that you don't have a brown thumb and that you're ready to learn that you can be a green thumb, that you can have a green thumb. And then we're there. plant physically planting with you, coaching you along the way, making sure that you're aware of what's going to come next in your garden. And each person, whether they've grown food before or not, has a successful

experience, they are going to take home produce that they grew themselves and they're going to be able to just full circle plant, care for and eat from their own garden. And you would be amazed at the transformations that you get with people. And the workplace. you're doing all the hard work and you're sharing some knowledge and the employees just get to reap the benefits. Just curious.

Bill Jollie (36:14.209)
So PayPal over 10 years now, how many raised beds do you have there? Their garden has expanded five separate times and we now have 56 raised garden beds at that program.

Yeah, each with teams of people and those teams turn over so we get new people all the time in that program. And some of the gardens are a little bit smaller. 25 raised garden beds at the Intuit campus. I just started a program for a little smaller company named Zawara, with a Z-O-U-R-A in Redwood City. We just started with eight garden beds because that's what they had the budget for and they wanted to prove the concept.

And then there's already in the budget because they're having such a good time. They've transformed their whole company culture in six months. They have gardening hats, Z garden. They've got branded harvest bags. Now they're going to be expanding the garden next year. that's so neat. So, to finish off, why don't you talk about the things that you can't actually see, what the gardens...

do for them from like a mental health aspect and bonding and community and taking stress away. Share some of the thoughts that some employees have left with you. Yeah, absolutely. If you've ever grown food before, talking to the audience at home, if you've tried growing food, if you've ever been successful growing your own food, there's this indescribable feeling that comes from

planting, caring for, and then eating something that you did yourself. It's more than like a sense of accomplishment. It is a profound sense of accomplishment because it feels like you belong. It feels like you're suddenly like living up to what your human potential is supposed to have been. You're able to do this cycle. But also in addition to that profound sense of accomplishment, there's this connection with nature.

Bill Jollie (38:17.047)
that is tangible and real. You know, you're living the seasons, you're getting to see the seasonal changes and what comes into a garden in those seasonal changes in the form of different type types of animals and insects and how to then work with them and deal with them in organic ways. So you're combining that sense of accomplishment with that profound connection to nature, but also

You are exercising in a way. You're outside. You're getting away from the desk. You know, you're taking a few minutes to walk to your garden. You're taking a few minutes to just sit and try to be really still, still and observe your garden. Most of the time when we tell our gardeners, if this is your first time, bring a chair, bring a chair out into the garden and try to sit and try to not move at all.

and just breathe real slow and see in the five or 10 minutes that you're there, what comes into your garden. You will see something. You will see a butterfly come in. You'll see some bees. You'll see a new insect or you'll see the way that your plants move even just the wind, the way that they interact with your plants. And maybe you can figure out a way to stake them up better and really like to break up Silicon Valley is a rat race, man.

I mean, not just Silicon Valley, but the work day in general is growing longer. There's less and less breaks. A lot of us are working from home. We're still sitting there at our desk. So what our programs bring to these companies is a break, but not just like a smoke break, right? You're going into this natural zone where you're caring for something and you're ultimately going to be reaping these really cool benefits from the garden. And so.

It does all of those things. Plus our programs also build teamwork in a really cool way because most of our gardens, you're sharing your garden space with a teammate or a whole team of people. And so you can all say like, you know, I planted this thing. Can you go out there and watch out for it today? Or can't get to that produce. Can you harvest it? And you're really building this little like micro community around just this one season.

Bill Jollie (40:39.601)
Absolutely. Absolutely. So, I mean, the main benefits for a corporation, to me, it's such a no-brainer and I always find it's, it's like, I have to sell this concept. It feels a little weird to have to sell something like this, but not only are you improving your sustainability for your company by providing a place on site that is an organic space. You are, and you're, you're limiting waste, you're promoting eating better food. So actual health and wellness.

in a tangible form, you're de-stressing employees, you're creating an alternative and healthy space for them to go outside and move their feet, and you're building their minds, right? You're letting them explore a new topic with the direction of a company that cares that they succeed. So there's too many things to list, there's too many reasons to do this, and frankly, it's not expensive. It's really not that expensive.

when you get down into all the things that we're providing for these companies. So, can't say enough good about it, to be honest. That's cool. I mean, when I'm out like walking, running, trail running on my bike, whatever, like my mind is just, like it's just wandering. I get some of my best ideas, whether it's for interrupt hunger, or it's for my day job, or you know, just whatever. It's just so like calming and just these thoughts are coming in and out of your mind.

Like when you're talking about just sitting in a chair in the garden for like five, 10 minutes, like as you're talking, I'm thinking about that, I could just feel my stress like going down, just trying to picture it. That's really cool. And then the last thing is you were talking, I thought about when you're talking about exercise and gardening and whatnot, physical activity, know, Blue Zones, a lot of people heard about Blue Zones and doesn't matter what part of the world you're in, the folks that are getting to 100.

years old and over. Man, you know, they're all eating way more produce than the average American. They're almost all of them, these areas, they're, I mean, they garden well into their 80s, 90s and up to 100 and over and they're moving and they're just, you know, life is still vibrant for them. And that's just cool as heck. So I love this. Man, Troy, thank you so much, man. This has been really neat.

Bill Jollie (43:01.372)
Yeah, I'm really happy to have been here, man. It's great to get to know you. Yeah, you too, man. You too. Well, thank you so much. hey. So what did, what did you tell folks? Where, where's the easiest place to find you? yeah, that's a good thing. our website is start organic.org. So start organic.org. You can go there and learn all about the corporate programs. You can reach out to us there. You can join our newsletter there. If you're just an individual at all and you want to start gardening.

We do free happy hours via zoom every month. Wow. You can just join in on those. That's kind of cool. That's just a zoom way to connect to anywhere. and then the Instagram, we're really starting to be more, more active on Instagram and our handle is at start organic. All right. I got it. And then the last thing, so you've mentioned quite a bit about your, online classes. That's not just for employee gardens, right? Just.

Anybody listening here, if they want to learn about garden, could, they can go online and, and get your course. Right. Right. Right. We, we developed some courses that when COVID was hitting, we had some courses that were already almost finished. And so we were like, wow, this is the perfect opportunity to launch those. It was, it wasn't timing. Yeah. No, I get it. Yeah. We do have online courses by next spring. We're going to have them more refined.

for individuals to able to jump on there. But the best place to start is to come for free and just talk to us and get to know us and see what kind of information we're providing through those free happy hour events, those through our website. And then we'll be kind of promoting those courses as we get closer to spring because spring gardening is for everyone, right? Not quite, you we have people up in Northern Wisconsin, it's zone four, USDA zone five.

They're not going to be growing a winter garden probably. We're going to wait till spring and launch it for everybody at same time. I got you. All right. Well, this has been wonderful. You've shared a ton of knowledge and I think just showed folks a path forward to, you know, living a better life. So thank you so much. Right on, man. We love doing it or else it wouldn't still be going. This is year 15. Wow, that's cool. All right, Troy. Thanks a lot. Have a good one.

Bill Jollie (45:26.206)
Thanks so much for listening. Please rate and review the podcast on the platform of your choice so we can reach more people and more people are recommended this podcast. And if you really liked it, the single best way you can help us grow is by telling your friends. Now for all the legal stuff. The views and opinion expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent. For my day job, I'm an employee of ABB and appear on this podcast on my own accord and not in the professional capacity as an ABB employee.

All viewpoints provided are my personal opinions and not intended to reflect those of my employer. If you have any questions or comments, please shoot me an email at jolly at interrupt hunger.org. Let's go spread some joy people.