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Well, Thio family podcast where we believe you all fallible and what you do matters. This is

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episode number 36. I am Justin Wood

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and I am Sean would

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How are you, honey?

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I'm good. How are you?

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I'm good. I'm excited about today's topic.

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I know you like this.

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I do. What is it? We're

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talking about gardening. We're

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talking about gardening. Um, I have extremely fun memories. Both both of my grandparents. Both sides. Um, they garden a lot. So my grandma and grandma, Eileen and couple, They had a huge garden, and I remember it just like you know, You think it's normal? They had I don't know how many feet of strawberries. It seemed like a football field. Little like three rows or so of strawberries over the top of the garden. It was just an awesome time. Now, obviously, when I was little, I didn't say I'd like to be out working in the garden all the time, but to go pick, I mean, fresh foods, we go down her cellar, and it was like you had just shelves. It seemed like just And of course what? I don't know. I don't know how big. It was right because it was a big Yeah, but they she grew up in the Great Depression, you know? And so it's like they knew howto farm and preserve and just do all that stuff. So also on the other side Grandma, June and Granddaddy, they had a big garden, too. And I remember they used to do a farmer's market. They would go and sell at a farmers market, remember? Like, barely remember going with them. But it was like that was just what you did. Everybody even well, where we live. Still everybody gardens, right? Everybody has at least some tomatoes out or something. So it's just very fond memories and even to our marriage. Right? Remember when we first got married?

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Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Let me tell you all this story

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we hadn't planned on telling this

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story. So we were living in Houston, in the middle of this apartment complex where everything is concrete all around us and our we have this little balcony that weaken sit on, which is concrete with, like, metal railing, right? And this guy, I fix supper one night with corn, and he was like, Where'd you get this corn? It came from a can, didn't it? I grew up a city girl. I'm like, I was so ticked off. I was like, Yes, it came from a can. Do you see me growing any corn on the cement balcony? Right there? Where do you think I got it? I got it from the store. Oh, my God. Is that I was going, you

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know, thinking about that time. Yeah, that was probably not wise move by me, But it was just, like, even our but it passed it on to our kids. Right.

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I know. So then we move. We're starting out

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the mirror. Our friends Brad and Cristian Houston, Yes. We start exploring how to eat healthy foods, even

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hold for us

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like I grew up farm, you know, kind of farm background, gardening, background. But even your mom, right, you'll grew,

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write some stuff like flowers, Even that

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city. Yeah, you still have that. So, But like with brand Christie, we kind of started exploring. Like, how do you eat healthy? At least we're gonna ask those kind of questions that we hadn't really up to that point.

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Rights made from process.

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Yeah, so Yeah, so

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I know kids first kid way with that in Houston, whenever he

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started eating food, whatever there was any way

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the 1st 1 was fine. It was the second.

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Okay, I'm confused.

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Way lived in Houston. He ate baby food when it came to be that time from a jar like a like a normal kid. And then we moved back to where you grew up and everybody grows everything and cans everything. It was all foreign to me, but I you know, it wasn't very hard to take whatever I had cooked for us and throw it in the blender and puree it. So our second born had all like, homemade baby food stuff, and we were it

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fresh from the garden

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fresh from the garden. And we were somewhere where someone had with hosting us and they had bought a jar of baby food trying to show great hospitality. And so I tried to feed it to, said, second born baby, who proceeded to spit it all out because he would not take it. He did not like it at all

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about a boy.

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And I realized in that moment that I had created is high maintenance of a male as you are in that time.

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Yeah, thank you very much. So gardening. There's lots of different things. A gardening. Whether you have a ton of land or just a bucket, a five gallon bucket. It's amazing what you can do with the five gallon bucket just to garden. Yeah, right. So even if you're in the desert, there's gardening stuff that happens in the desert. There's gardening stuff that happens on the mountains everywhere, anywhere that you're at. You can learn to garden something. Yes, so it's important. I think it's also spiritually importance because if you look in the book of Genesis, it starts in the Garden, and the Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible ends in the garden, right? So it's from beginning to end. Um, you have trees. You have perennial garden systems that are just part of such a spiritual application. Also, write the right word. I won't. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, it's important

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it is. And I started looking at What are the mental benefits? Because I have to say, even though I a little bit came into this whole gardening thing kicking and screaming because I did not understand. And for the record, I now tastes a huge difference. Fresh corn and wrote of canned corn. So I have been won over. But even, you know, like I looked up a psychology today article and it was talking about there, actually 10 different mental health benefits to gardening. It said Number one you practice. Acceptance is what it is in the garden to you move beyond perfectionism. Three. You develop a growth mindset like I am learning how to do this. You know, even if it's not, the best is better than the one I did last year. Number four. You connect with others, which has been really good for us with the kid's science,

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science. We do all talk about science. We talk about all the hard work and sweat. And when I say I like to garden, I just didn't clarify. Like I'm not a master gardener. Lots of things die and honestly, by like July, it's so hot, and I'm just like, man, let it die

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done So they didn't connecting with the world, which again ties in with the science part, but also like, you know, we kind of have Ah, a sharing mentality with some of the insects and stuff that are out there like we don't want it to devastate the crops. You

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don't spray a bunch of talk,

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right? Right? Right. We'll share some amount with the bugs, bathing and green, which is just being out into a natural landscape being present, you know, even just feeling the wind on your face or the breeze, feeling the dirt and your hands just beautifully. President that the physical exercise Because you can, you know, definitely pull some muscles on, get into it, reducing stress just by being in your garden and then finally eating healthy phone, which does tie back in with how our emotions are in our stress levels.

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Right, right. And I think this quote Jeff Leighton is one of my heroes. Um, he's out of Australia now, the permaculture guru, but he says all the world's problems can be solved in a garden e. I love it all. The world's problems could be solved in the garden. I think the gardening is so good because a lot of things just die, you know, you work and you do all this work and it still doesn't turn out the way that you hoped it would at least the way I hope that

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which made me feel warm and fuzzy. No stress level to think about. So I keep

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you out of guards just like you just go away. Go somewhere else

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is saying, but

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it does. You know it gives you gives you a tuning almost to the seasons and to the weather, like you pay attention to all these different things that if you don't garden, you don't pay attention to you know what I mean? Like, my schedule revolves around rain or not rain, you know, like those kind of things. So, yeah, there's different ways to garden. Also, you could do the traditional what we like the European, like annuals like meaning crops that you plant every spring or summer. And then you harvest them before the winter. That's the, uh, you know, annual gardening. Right? Or you can also do perennial guarding. What is that? Which is like trees or bushes or shrubs that produce every year, Right, So, like we do so annual said, Yeah, we do man a meddler. Annual gardening right with

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like, what do you think about of a summer garden.

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Yeah, we have beans, and this year we have potatoes and onions and we have lots of stuffed

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tomato cucumbers and all that kind of thing.

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And then we also do. We just got the land we have. There's lots of blackberries, wild blackberries so the kids will fight through the briars and Thorne to come out bloody. But what was buckets? Victorious? Victorious, Right. We have blueberries, too. We have, like, 300 blueberry plants, right? So it's a mix of perennials and annuals and there's times when I'm so happy aren't, aren't

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I know. I know.

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I'm just it's therapeutic. And there's other times I'm, like, fresh. Yeah, very frustrating, because things didn't go like they were supposed to write. But I think the key word gardening is you just gotta get started,

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right? So even if you were in said small apartment with Onley, a cement balcony in the middle of a major metropolitan area, right, what can someone do?

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Well, there's lots of different things you can do, but even starting out with a five gallon bucket and, uh, I'm gonna go on all the details, but you can look up like, uh, we put notes in the crack cracking method is out of Hawaii. You can use it. Just you put Ah, well, it's a hydroponics type system based on water. So you can do that if you want to. Ah, that works really well. It's an enclosed system. You don't have to keep watering or pumps or anything like that. Very simple. Very easy to do. Nothing you do in the city, in the urban areas, what we do have Brad Christie as we started seeking out places that sold, um, produce, we couldn't. We couldn't, you know,

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Right. But you could do, like container gardener gardening, even on your porch. Oh, yeah, for sure, for

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sure. And we started to just think about our journey, Like when we were a long time ago in Houston. We started going Well, well, we can't grow this working. Where's a farm nearby or some kind of market nearby? That does. We can support. So that's something you can do if you have. I mean, you could just go go look online. Just google. Um, like what? You can grow in just a few feet of dirt, right just out in your yard or somewhere,

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and even you can do like I've seen all kinds of things in mason jars and all kinds of, like, little tiny herb things thatyou canoe in your kitchen window, so for sure, like grim on Juno, we start her tomato plants and egg cartons in the window in the house that gets the most sunlight.

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Right? Right, Right. So, yeah, you can just do basic basic things like that. So I think right now, because the Corona virus shut down is going on. I have spent a lot more done gardening, right? Because I needed to for my own therapy, right? You know what I mean? So it's like even if everything died the work that I got done just in my own head and listening to stuff I wanted to listen to a podcast or just whatever I wanted That has been awesome for me. Yeah, it's probably saved our marriage this week,

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and it's been good for the kids too, you know? I mean, they can mess things up, but, I mean, for the most part, you're talking about dirt and seeds, and kids can do that.

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Yeah. They can definitely mess up dirt and seeds too.

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I mean, they could miss it up, but they can also do well, and it's been so exciting for them. Now that we have stuff sprouting, they want to go check on it almost every day.

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Right? Right? Yeah. They definitely taken ownership, and part of it is for parenting. It's just like, Okay, my point here is we're gonna try to grow some seeds, but the point is also teach and be with my kids. Right? So that's a lot. That's I have to slow myself down. Sometimes I'd be like, Okay, what's the point of this thing? The point is not just to get this job done, right? Right. And I think

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anything you do with your kids, it's probably not gonna be the fastest. But

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I say that and we got so much work done the other morning, we got carrots planted. We got kale planted. We got potatoes and onions. Um, I had to do some work there. We got we got a bunch of stuff done. We got seedling started. All then, like less than two hours. Awesome. It was awesome.

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Very cool. So we'll put some links in the show notes of you know if you don't know where to start some impossible starting places.

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Yeah, I think. I think especially like I say with this Cronus stuff going on. It's good to know where your food, because that I heard somebody say this. The 2000 mile way salad is probably dead right, meaning the supply chain and whatever it took to get you a salad that grew in some other country. Basically, he was like, That's just that's probably not gonna happen for a while. Maybe it'll a year or two from now. Maybe so. You can grow a ton of food, you'll be surprised, and you'll be surprised how great a taste. When you did the work, you were

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like, This is the best, Whatever ever. Yeah, and that is kind of a life hack that we found for getting Children to eat new vegetables. If they participate in, have ownership of growing them. They're a lot more likely to eat those bad boys,

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and it kind of goes back to beginning just the huge disconnect. People don't know where their food came from. That thing came from a package right on the shelf in the grocery store. And if you can get them to that next level of understanding at least something about where your food comes from and start to get. I mean, they'll be so much healthier, too, because I don't know what healthy tastes like. Yeah, And here's my final suggestion. Start small. Whatever you think you can do or want to do. Do like half of that, right? Because I've had some years when I'm like, Oh, I'm gonna do this This and this. And I just did too much, and it was, like, overwhelmed. It was kind of burn out, you know? Right, So smaller is better.

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Awesome. Very cool. Thank you so much for taking time to tune in and hang out with us. Remember, you are valuable and what you do matters. You're also not alone. We would love for you to connect with us and the rest of the less stress family podcast community on our website. L s f podcast dot com on Facebook or even on our personal instagram accounts. I am Shauna Cherie. Would

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Justin Ray would

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have a blessed day, guys.

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Thank you.