The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Ryan Blosser. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Ryan Blosser. Ryan is a farmer, an educator, a writer, a mental health professional and co-founder of Shenandoah Permaculture Institute. And he’s the owner-operator of Dancing Star Farm. The intersection of his passion for growing food and helping people fuels perspective on building community resilience through permaculture design. Good stuff. And we’re going to be talking about his new book, which he wrote with his co-author, Trevor Pearsall, called “Mulberries in the Rain: Growing Permaculture Plants for Food and Friendship.” I’ve got to tell you a little bit about Trevor here. We don’t want Ryan to get all the credit. Trevor Pearsall is a farmer, permaculture designer and educator, co-founder of the Shenandoah Permaculture Institute, and he has his own farm, Wild Rose Orchard. Trevor is dedicated to the advancement of regenerative agriculture with particular focus on perennial fruits, medicinal herbs and easy-care native plants. Welcome, Ryan.
Ryan: Thank you, Jim. I’m excited to be here.
Jim: Yeah. And in full disclosure, Ryan and I have been friends for years, and Trevor also – my wife actually took the photographs for the book. So this is kind of a family kind of event today. So if I don’t beat the hell out of them like I do some of my guests, you’ll know why.
Ryan: I told Trevor I was nervous to be on the podcast with a brain as big as yours. Although, I wanted to say I’m working on a new book, Jim, that has a story about killing a deer at the Rutt farm.
Jim: Oh, that would be cool. You’ve killed a few here. I still tell the tough story about this sort of half-hippie dude comes over there to kill two does on Doe Day and ends up with a 6.8 buck, and I go, “Shit.”
Ryan: I still don’t know if to feel happy or bad about that.
Jim: I think it’s just it is what it is. Right? That’s what the hunting gods wanted that day. Yeah. That’s true. That was a great story. And I also have a picture too – these two deer on slabs of cardboard in a Prius. Right? Which I showed to my redneck buddies. I go, “What the fuck?”
Ryan: That’s a great day. What a great day.
Jim: That was a whole lot of fun. Right? Remember tramping around looking for one of them, and we finally did find it and all that. Anyway, let’s get into this book, and then let’s talk more generally about the topic of permaculture. So let’s start with kind of a cliche question. What motivated you and Trevor to write this book?
Ryan: I think the most simple explanation for it is in our courses. So Trevor and I, along with Emily Tewerty, founded Chandel Permaculture, and we teach permaculture design courses. I think we’ve done 20 in the last ten years. And in our courses, a lot of students come hungry for building their plant knowledge and also are overwhelmed by it. And for the first few years, we would describe, you know, the plant nerd thing of falling asleep memorizing a nursery catalog or seed catalog. And that did not feel robust enough. It felt kinda surface. It was just rote memory like you would do in high school. And as our students continue to be hungry for this and want more and not satisfied by that explanation or that “go do this” direction, we landed on the idea of story and building your plant knowledge one by one. And through that, we started to see connections around relationship to each other, relationship to plants, and the idea that plants are characters in our own lives. We started teaching a lot of our plant sessions and courses through stories and encouraging folks to start with one plant at a time, learn how to use that plant, learn how to grow that plant, and eventually, those plants become stories and characters in your own lives. And at that point, you know that plant well.
Jim: And I make the point for the audience. I’m not much of a gardener myself, but my wife is pretty big time. Right? And so I’ve gotten a fair bit of garden knowledge secondhand. Though I am a tree person, I can probably name 90% of the trees on my property, and there’s a lot of them. Right? And so I’ve always been a tree person, but not so much a gardening person. And that’s why when I committed to read the book, I go, I wonder how much fun this will be. But it turns out it was a shitload of fun. So even if you’re not a garden person per se, the way that Ryan and Trevor have woven their quite amazing and outrageous personal stories around each chapter – the book’s worth reading just for that. And then it’s a bunch of very practical. It’s something that goes from these outrageous tales to very practical, very clearly written advice. Hell, makes me want to start a permaculture farm or a permaculture forest orchard or whatever the hell it is you call it out here. It was great. So even if you’re not a super gardener, consider reading the book for the stories. They are really quite excellent.
Ryan: Yeah. I appreciate hearing that. Trevor and I, we’re nerds in permaculture, so we bought all the permaculture books. We also make fun of the permaculture books because it also feels like everybody wants to write a permaculture book. And in class, we’ll often roll our eyes, “not another permaculture book.” And when we started threatening each other to write one, we just really decided it had to be unique and it had to be our individual voices, and it had to be entertaining. It couldn’t just be another permaculture book.
Jim: And as you know, not just permaculture books, but many gardening books are just earnest as hell. Do they hurt your teeth just to read the prose. Right?
Ryan: You know what? The minute you said hurt your teeth…
Jim: I know exactly what you were talking about. This ain’t one of those, which is great. So let’s start out where you start out, which is the human sector. Initially, you want to say, wait a minute, we’re about gardening here. What the hell is the human sector? So why don’t you sort of lay out how you came to appreciate how crucial the human sector is? What is it that you mean by that term?
Ryan: That’s a big question. In fact, that’s the topic of a second book I’m working on with Dr. Laura Mentor, an anthropologist out of University of Mary Washington. And this idea integrated into permaculture came out of conversations that myself, Trevor, and Emily were having during the courses. The human sector – sectors in permaculture are really simply energies that impact a design site. And one of Trevor’s permaculture teachers, Dave Jackie, has a great quote: “98% of the permaculture projects that fail, fail due to poor design in the human sector.” And so we knew this, but we hadn’t experienced, up until a few years ago, a robust integration of what that human sector concept and how to design it might look like. And so using my background in counseling and experience working as a child and family therapist, we started to try and bring it into our courses and designing the community experience of the learning community itself. And then starting to look for ways to expand that beyond just the learning community. We’re not there yet. We’re still very much working on it. But what we decided was that human sector was every bit as hard to influence and change as something like climate. And so we put it high up in a priority and something that everyone should be focusing on if we’re designing and trying to live sustainable lives and sustainable communities.
Jim: Could you give an example, kind of like a nice little homey example of when you’re actually trying to do permaculture farming where the salience of the human sector comes in?
Ryan: When you asked that question, what I landed on was the idea of “always connect.” And so what we’re looking for in permaculture systems with plants and trees and maybe farm animals, we want to create opportunities for those to connect and occupy different niches. And so you may have a guild planting where a tree is being fed by comfrey, for example, that you plant near that, and you create a connection between those two plants rather than just diversity for diversity’s sake. What that might look like in the human sector might be, for example, I may have on my property at Churchville – this is a good example for that. I’ve got on my four-acre property all that I need for my family to survive. I’ve got food for days. Not exactly a crazy corner of bean cans, but we’ve got all the tomatoes we need. We do all the canning we’ve got to do. Freezers full of meat and very little need for other things. What I don’t have is an ability to plow my hundred-yard driveway. And I’ve got a neighbor that has an ability to do that. In that human sector scenario, if I don’t – if I’m not in the right relationship with my neighbor, if we don’t get along, if I’m not making connections, for example, bringing over a garlic braid every year for him, for his family to have garlic all year, or showing up with 10 quarts of canned tomatoes, then he may not show up to my site when we get 12 inches of rain or 12 inches of snow dumped on that driveway and plow our driveway. That’s just a really quick example for those that important piece of human sector. We have to design in opportunities for relationship, for connection, or the idea of self-sufficiency becomes quite fragile.
Jim: Yeah. I warn people all the time who claim that they’re preppers or something. I go, “Dude, you can have all the shit you want in your warehouse, but your neighbors are gonna come and kill you and take it.” What you really need is relationships in the community, being considered to be an honored and full player in your community who everybody else treasures and wants to be in relationship with. That will get you through hard times far better than a backroom full of canned beans and .22 ammo. Exactly. We are our relationships. I don’t provide for my family. My relationships do. And that idea of that network or I…
Ryan: I think in anthropology, this idea of the meshwork – we are relationships.
Jim: Alright. Well, let’s use this as a pivot point because you talk about how you started out with Dave Jacke’s scale of permanence, and you’ve updated it a little bit to include some of the human aspects. I think it would be very helpful for our listeners, almost none of whom probably know what permaculture even is. Why don’t you give us your brief definition of permaculture? There was actually a good short definition in the book, but I unfortunately forgot to copy it out.
Ryan: Absolutely. It’s quite simple. It’s using nature as a model to create and to design sustainable human habitats.
Jim: I think that was pretty close to the one I had in mind from the book. That resonated about right. So now let’s go to the human-centered scale of permanence list that you guys have created, where you updated previous lists to include some of the human and social elements.
Ryan: Yes. So they’re ordered. I think what’s important is, I think a guy named Yeomans developed the first scale of permanence that Dave Jacke then added to. And then Trevor, myself, and Emily have added to it further. And they’re ordered from the least amount of resource that it takes to change in a landscape or on a site up to the most amount of resource it takes to change.
Jim: The list seems to be ordered in the opposite of the least to most. It seems like it’s the most to least, because on the list that came out of the book was climate first.
Ryan: Mhmm.
Jim: That’s the hardest to change. You got a damn thing you can-
Ryan: It’s the hardest. One way to think about it is it requires a lot of resources. And so one way to change the climate is a greenhouse and propane, or other kind of hardscape designs. But it takes a lot of effort to do that.
Jim: Okay. And talk about how does climate impact ideas about permaculture design? It’s a limiting factor, just like water.
Ryan: And so you’re not gonna be able to grow lemons where I live in the Shenandoah Valley, unless you pour a bunch of resources into growing those lemons, like creating a heated greenhouse for them.
Jim: Yep. And I know my wife, as I mentioned, was a very avid gardener. For ten years, we lived in Santa Fe, and she found that very annoying to be living in the desert, where the kind of plants she wanted to grow just weren’t gonna grow unless you wanted to pay a $300 a month water bill, and water is really expensive out there.
Ryan: Exactly. And in looking at this order of intervention of hardest to least, it also gives you an idea of what to start looking for. So I can’t – I’m in a very arid New Mexico climate. I can’t grow maybe an apple tree as well, but I can look for a plant that’s gonna do really well in this environment. And so start to work with nature rather than try to spend the resources to change it.
Jim: Yeah. And I think that’s probably the clearest takeaway. Hey, you’re in zone 4. You know, don’t grow marginal shit that sometimes will make it in zone 4 and sometimes won’t. Understand what you got and work with it, not against it to the degree possible.
Ryan: Yeah. Or if you do know it’s a gamble, just do a little percentage of that and do the rest of the thing you know is gonna work.
Jim: Yep. You see that mistake all the time. People don’t quite understand where they are, and they’re trying to force their love into a climate that isn’t right for their love. And instead just find something else-
Ryan: To love, because there’s a lot of great plants out there.
Jim: Exactly. Now, next one on your list is the human and social level. Again, that ain’t easy to change. In fact, I sometimes say 50% of human unhappiness is the mistaken belief by a woman that she can change a man, and the other 50% is the opposite.
Ryan: The deep into a long marriage, I can vibe with that.
Jim: Yeah. We’ll be, believe it or not, 44 in June.
Ryan: Whoa. You guys are my heroes. That’s admirable. Joy and I are, I believe, almost at 25 years.
Jim: That’s also amazing in this day and age.
Ryan: Yeah. We met as babies. I think I was 20 years old when I first met her. She bought me beer illegally when I first met her.
Jim: Class. You gotta love a girl like that.
Ryan: You’re 21, you go get it. But yeah, human sector, it includes relationships. It includes the interpersonal. It includes the intrapersonal, so how we relate to ourselves, which is very much that psychological or psychosocial realm. It includes the transpersonal, some of that woo-woo shit I know you love, Jim. And it includes other more concrete things like zoning laws.
Jim: I was gonna ask that question. I thought it must, right? I remember in the book, it did. And in this part of the country, those things are trifling as fuck sometimes.
Ryan: They are. And they require tons of preparation, tons of knowledge, lots of persuasion, and meeting with your county leaders.
Jim: And so when you’re starting to think about holistic plan about your property, you better consider those kinds of things. And also, don’t want to piss off your neighbors unnecessarily. Right? If you’re living in suburbia, probably don’t want to have a pig farm even if it was legal.
Ryan: Exactly. Because they’re gonna show up at the zoning meeting, and they’re gonna have thoughts.
Jim: Exactly. That makes a lot of sense. And then next, and again, this is in some sense, the canvas on which you work. You guys talk about the landform.
Ryan: Yes. And I like the idea of canvas on which you work. Because when you’re thinking about landform, there’s a lot of decisions to make. What is the shape of the land? What’s the slope of the land? How much intervention you wanna put into that? So where to put ponds, whether to dig swales, to manage water, lots of different decisions to be made with that.
Jim: And I noticed a fair bit of thinking in the book about contours, how to work with the land. Because you know, one of nice things about contour farming is the water doesn’t run off as rapidly. Runs through each cascade row, and so the water tends to be more preserved on the land. But if you’re flat, that’s not going to work, right?
Ryan: Yep. And Ben Falk, another permaculture thinker, likes to talk about the ideas of when you have a lot of water and you got a lot of landform, how do you use that landform to slow and sink and store that water?
Jim: That is indeed your next topic is water. And in much of the world, water is a limiting factor. Right? And even here in Virginia, we have more droughts than we’d like here in the mountains and more where I am up in the mountains, a little bit less so down where you are. But you gotta think through not only the average water, but the variance. Talk about that a little bit.
Ryan: Oh, man. This is where I could get a little teary eyed. I don’t know how much you know my story at Danestar Farm in February 2018. Do you remember February 2018 where you are?
Jim: It rained all summer. We had 100 inches of rain. Which is, you know, the typical rainfall here is about 35, a little bit less than in the valley because we’re in the rain shadow of Alleghenies. And both Cilliers and our neighbor’s next farmer, real serious farmer, both we both thought we were hallucinating, but both of their rain records showed a hundred inches.
Ryan: It was amazing. And so whenever I talk about limiting factors, often folks go right to drought. And so we added a fourth of what to do: slow, sink, or spread that water. We also wanna figure out how to send it. So Dancing Star Farm in 02/2018, I averaged about 37 inches of rain a year. I had 83 on that site. My neighbor, not to any fault of his own, he has a conventional farming practice, and he sprung a spring because the groundwater got so high that it started flooding my fields. I lost my organic certification because his chemicals flooded my field, and then it was underwater for eighteen months. And so that’s a year that I shudder when I think about because it completely crushed the business at Dancing Star Farm and our ability to operate. So water is a very limiting factor, whether it’s not enough or too much, and it needs to be designed for.
Jim: Yeah. In fact, every farmer tells you it’s either too little, too much, or in the wrong place. Right? And what guidance would you give people to think about? Because one of the things that I talk about in my other work in complexity science and stuff is you got to pay attention to the variance, even as much or more than the average, how much do things change. So maybe give the audience a little idea how you might think about dealing with the variance of rain, let’s say over there in Augusta County so that you can survive an 83 inch year and you can also survive a 25 inch year?
Ryan: Unfortunately, the 25 inch year or the five inch year right now feels a little easier than the 86 inch year in terms of planning for. And so it’s not a simple answer, but the answer for that is redundancy in your water systems. So I’ve got a well. I’ve got a 30,000 gallon pond, and I’m developing a cistern, a ferrocement cistern that catches my roof water. It’s 10,000 gallons. And so if something goes in my system – I love that phrase, “two is one and one is none.” If something goes, I always have a backup that’ll keep resilience in the system. In terms of that moment, the 86 inches, I think I didn’t do it. I had a course – a class of students did research and looked at my site, and they had found information, I think, a hundred and fifty years ago, something similar had happened on my site and had flooded it, and it was underwater for over a year and a half. I’m not sure where or how they got the information. But the lesson I took away from it is, a, I do not need – I cannot count on keeping my annuals there every year. But, b, I need to skew more towards perennials in that system. And so when I say perennials, I mean tree crops, specifically nut crops. So right now, I’m planting that field out rather than tomatoes and peppers. I’m running Chinese chestnuts and other tree crops down there.
Jim: Cool. Yep. And it’s something that you always gotta think about. It is interesting to make the point that too much water is even more devastating than too little.
Ryan: Yeah. I feel almost bashful saying this, but I learned that year that it’s easier to put water in than it is to take it out.
Jim: Yeah. That summer was nuts. I mean, we’d go right around our property, and woods, it’s just normally woods, would be four inches of water, like going through the Everglades. It was crazy. The only crop that did well that year was mushrooms in September when it dried out a bit. It was like, I’ve never seen so many mushrooms in my life.
Ryan: Yeah. I mean, not to get all squishy on you, but I have a distinct memory. Because Danstar Farm, my farm vegetable operation last year, we were crushing it. We were having huge farmers markets, and it was the year we were gonna do really well. And then when that rain started – I don’t know if it was June, early July – I saw the wall of water come from, like, 50 acres away to my field. And I remember just sitting on my driveway, head in my hands, just crying, like, “Here it goes. Fuck. I’m not gonna survive this.”
Jim: Fuck. Terrible. Yeah. Yep. Anyway, let’s move on to our next topic, which is access and circulation.
Ryan: Yeah. This is something that needs to be considered when designing your farm, not just foot traffic, but also vehicle traffic. So how are you gonna get your materials in and out? How are you going to get your vegetables from pack out to house or from pack out to market? Another way to think about it would be diagramming the movement in a day. So on a homestead or on a farm, if it takes you five minutes to walk to and from a field and you do that, let’s say 10 times, you’ve almost lost an hour of the day walking. And you don’t always have to design for efficiency. I’ve got a good friend. He’s in his seventies right now. And he actually designed access and circulation on his property so he has to walk past three acres of woods just to go to the back of his property to wash his clothes. And I was like, “Why did you do that?” And he said, because he wants to make sure he constantly exercises. And so he designed that in, that access in, and inefficiency on purpose to create the necessity for him to stay moving on into his later ages.
Jim: So it sounds like the takeaway is mindfulness about what it is you’re trying to achieve. But, you know, you and I both know farmers, you are a farmer. For the average farmer, there ain’t enough minutes in the day, not even close. And, you know, they just go from thing to thing to thing to thing. So picking up 10% efficiency would be huge.
Ryan: It’s a huge thing. And, you know, one of my favorite quotes is from Emily, our co-owner at Shandell Permaculture. Her quote to interns was always, “You should be running.”
Jim: Hurry the fuck up. Hurry the fuck up. Yes. Well, my brother was a construction company owner and one year – and he’s famous for getting on the job, jumping out of his truck, and yelling, “Hurry the fuck up.” And so one year for Christmas, I had some very elegant business cards made up with his company logo and name on it. And then in italic script underneath, it said, “Hurry the fuck up.”
Ryan: Oh, man. That would be a great t-shirt design for a business.
Jim: But it’s the truth. I mean, there’s not enough hours in the day, and the sun, you know, is only gonna shine so many hours, and anytime you’re dawdling, you’re losing. Right? Losing ground. Second law of thermodynamics, as us nerds would say. Right? Shit’s always falling apart.
Ryan: And you could – yeah. It’s so many – once you start thinking in this way and you can just start designing your property with these principles and these methods, some really interesting things can come out of that work.
Jim: I read in the book that there were some very interesting things, particularly about your guilding so that they would come together at a similar time so you could harvest one little pod at a time. But we’ll get to guilds later. Let’s talk quickly about vegetation and wildlife. Again, that’s you.
Ryan: You know, it’s below access in terms of resources to change. And for me, this bottom part of the scale of permanence is really some of the more easier elements that impact your design. And so, again, it’s all about choice and observation and whether you want a forest there or not. It’s not resource-free because, for example, if you want to clear cut a forest, that’s gonna take a lot of effort. But in that scenario, rather than clear cut a forest, I would figure out how to work with that forest. So what are some forest crops you can work with in there?
Jim: Well, of course, a lot of it depends on the forest you got. Right? I mean, we’ve all seen scabby, nasty fourth-growth forests full of Virginia pine and, you know, just twisted remnant left behind chestnut oaks and stuff. And sometimes the right answer is just kill them all. Let God sort them out. Right?
Ryan: Yeah. Or at least thin it. I love that phrase, “more forest, less trees.”
Jim: Interesting. And it is true that kind of the math of how much sun falls on how many leaves is actually the math of the local productivity of your forest. You know, here in our place, we had some poorly thought through white pine plantations that were a little too heavy etc. and produces very sterile soil underneath and all that, but they got to the point where they were marketable timber, so we clear cut about five acres and then we put in a whole – but we left a few, very few hardwood trees over there as pioneers to provide seeds and we also planted about 100 things. And over time it came in and it’s so bushy and so productive, it’s amazing. Right? The chinkapin oaks that we put in there – oh, it’s crazy. It’s, you know, deer paradise at this point when it was just the sterile corridors under the white pines.
Ryan: Yeah. What a joy it is to see a project like that start to succession, start to happen too.
Jim: I’m gonna skip over microclimate and buildings and infrastructure, but here’s this next one, real important one: soil fertility and management. You know, you think about what are the bad things Game A has done is basically not paid suitable attention to our topsoil and to our microbiomes in the soil. And you know, when history looks back, they’re gonna look back on this epoch and say, “Jesus, you stupid fucks, why did you do that?” But permaculture is not about that. So, talk about how you guys think about soil fertility and the management of the soil.
Ryan: There’s a metaphor we use of the three-legged stool: chemical, physical, and then biological. What’s really interesting – and I’m not a scientist, I think about this like a poet – and what’s really interesting for me is we focused for the last fifty years, gardeners have or more on the chemical and the physical aspects of the soil. But what’s not as well known and is more exciting is the biological aspects of the soil and how increasing soil life, which is so easy to do, increasing soil life can actually increase the plant’s ability to take up nutrients. And sometimes, not always, it’s as simple as adding organic matter.
Jim: And of course, smaller scale, composting is a way to get some great microbiomes going and some macro stuff too, bugs and worms of all sorts, not just earthworms, etcetera. And Ocelia gets great mileage out of her compost heap.
Ryan: And so one of the reasons why it’s some folks get really curious why it’s so low on that ordered list is because often it takes less resources and less effort to change that soil pretty quickly with compost, with organic matter. We often get asked by people “Let’s go find the best soil on my 10 acres where I’m gonna put the garden.” And then the garden might be 10 acres away from the house. No. No. No. No. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. Instead, use that resource and effort to change the soil right next to the house so you’re not walking, you know, a half hour or more every day just to get to your tomatoes because then you’re not gonna grow any tomatoes.
Jim: It is manageable, unlike landform. Unless you got a D9, you know, you’re not gonna change the shape of the land too much. But you can change the nature of the soil over time, but not overnight, unless you’re going to be Chemical Joe or Chemical Ali, the chemistry farmer, which I presume you guys reject.
Ryan: Yes. But for example, the organic matter in my soil, over five years of farming, it went from 2% up to 9%.
Jim: That’s quite good. Alright. Final one. Let’s keep this short because we’ve got a lot to cover here. It’s so much fun. Right? Aesthetics and experience of place.
Ryan: Yeah. Unfortunately, to much of the frustration of my wife, and I think Trevor took a different tact, him and Jenna, I ignored this aesthetics. Now we have Dude, what a guy. Right? I know. Right? I didn’t even find out, Jim, that my wife liked yellow flowers until two years ago. We’ve been married for twenty-five years.
Jim: Yeah. I read that story, and I go, “Oh, okay.” Yeah. Now what’s Silly’s favorite color of flower? I don’t know.
Ryan: Well, yeah. Right? You miss that sometimes.
Jim: I know she likes flowers.
Ryan: But it is an easier one to manipulate or to intervene in. And it also depends on the context you’re farming in. But, yeah, the sense of place has become very important for me. And I know for Trevor and Jenna from the start, that’s something they’ve thought about as they built their farm up.
Jim: Yeah. It is a beautiful place over there. But so all you dudes, particularly the early doody dudes, you know, listen to the wife and pay some attention to the aesthetics and ask her what kind of flowers, what color flowers she likes, please.
Ryan: Otherwise, you might get a phrase. My wife said some version the other couple years of, “If this doesn’t change, I’m leaving. You can come with me, but I’m leaving.” Okay.
Jim: Yeah. And we all know how, you know, especially part-time farms can get…
Ryan: A little on the junky side, right?
Jim: Yes. Alright. Let’s move on here toward the end of the… we’re gonna skip over some other cool stuff, but the human sectors part. And this is, of course, the bane of many people trying to make it in permaculture or other kinds of local honorable soil-honoring farming is money. Right? And more broadly, as you guys put it, eight different kinds of capital. So but let’s start with the first one on your list, which is the money game. You know, we know a lot of local producers, Vacilius off right now, getting stuff that I laugh and call it the hundred-miles lettuce, right? It comes from Poplar Ridge Farm, right? Very great diversified family farm, but man, that stuff moves a while, always around here. But I sometimes calculate what these people are making per hour. And it’s like, alright, plus or minus the federal minimum wage. These are hardworking, smart people. Talk to…
Ryan: Let me tell you about the financial aspects of trying to play this game. I think you just said it. It’s hard as hell. It’s hard as hell. Margins are thin and hustle and hours are high. And sometimes you don’t know how much money’s gonna come in. You could do $3,000 on one Saturday at market, and then the next Saturday it rains and you do $500. And you need that extra $2,500 for your cash flow. And it’s really tricky. Not to mention some of us, myself is one of them, have student loans. You got mortgages. And so for first generation farmers, the financial game of homesteading or market farming or a you-pick orchard like Trevor and Jenna are doing are really challenging when you gotta factor in all the other, honestly, game of shit that we’ve all accumulated over the years.
Jim: And, you know, to be utterly frank, both you and Trevor and both of your spouses have day jobs, right?
Ryan: Yeah. We do now. Ever since 2018, I have a day job now, and my wife has a day job, and so does Trevor and Jenna. And it’s the only way we figured out how to make this hustle work because we’re first generation farmers, because we have a mortgage, because we have student loans that we’ve gotta pay off, and kids.
Jim: Yes. And how to square this circle is actually a very interesting question. And I say the first generation part is significant because the ones I’ve seen most successful at trying to do diversified family farming direct to consumer tend to have been people who inherited family farms.
Ryan: Yes. Yeah. And I don’t wanna be bitter when I talk about it. It’s something I’m happy for them to have that advantage. But often, it takes that advantage. Or just there are folks like Radical Roots in Harrisonburg that have done it, and I’m amazed. They’re our heroes. And so the folks that pull it off are really incredible. They also work probably a hundred and twenty hours a week.
Jim: That’s my experience with successful farmers. This is not a lazy man’s job by any means, right?
Ryan: Nope. And that’s why most of the bucolic hippies back to the land failed miserably. Right? Sitting around smoking dope all day ain’t a way to make it as a farmer. There’s been many a night that my wife has come home on a Friday night after a long day’s work, put a headlamp on, and help me bag lettuce.
Jim: Yep. Indeed. Again, in the interest of time, I’m not going to have you go over all eight forms of capital that you talk to. I’m just going to read off the list. If you have anything you want to say about one of them or two of them, do so when I’m done. Started with financial, then social capital, and that’s this thing we talked about earlier. You know, better to have neighbors and ammo when the shit hits the fan. Living, intellectual, experiential. It’s like you have to know shit. Right? And that’s a hard hill to climb. It takes longer than people think to become an expert at anything. Right? Cultural, that’s an important one. What is the culture that not only are you embedded in, but what culture are you making? Right?
Ryan: Yeah. Recipes and music and, yep, what you’re passing on.
Jim: Spiritual, which I sometimes call the other s word. We’ll just skip over that one.
Ryan: For the Ruttean folks, we can call that purpose. How about that?
Jim: Yeah. And I like that you’ve called it purpose. I go, absolutely. Purpose is great. Just why do you need ghosts associated with your purpose? Right? I don’t need no stinking spirits lurking about. Right? That’s why I have Lysol for it – get rid of all those ghosts. Right? I think I got something good on the topic of spiritual. I created a meme recently. I’d circulated it a little bit. It’s just too good not to share. For Easter, it was a Zap Comics style. You know, remember Zap Comics, the crazed hippie kind of art? Showed a crazed Zap Comics dude with his legs bent, holding a cigarette above his head, and it was labeled “How does an atheist light a cigarette?” And then the tagline at the bottom was a speech balloon with the guy saying “God sucks.”
Ryan: Yes, gentlemen.
Jim: So let’s move on here. This is really more Trevor’s baby than yours. But you want to talk to the idea of food forests a little bit?
Ryan: Yes. Definitely. Food forests are – again, permaculture is using nature as a model to design sustainable human habitats. Right? So the idea of food forest, can also be considered or called forest gardening, is essentially gardening like the forest. And so you can think about a forest as having several different layers from canopy layers to shrub layers to herbaceous layers to vine layers. And each of those layers occupy different niches in the ecosystem. And then through clever design, you can create these very abundant landscapes in a small area by simply observing how forest works and then trying to mimic that in your own system.
Jim: Of course, you know, most current existing forests in the East, the region we both live in, aren’t exactly very productive for human purposes other than wood. They’re pretty good at producing hardwood or softwood, depending on the nature of forests. Like, you know, red oak acorns aren’t much use unless you really are dedicated to doing a whole lot of processing on them. White oak acorns you can make use of, not that many people do, but these aren’t really highly productive for humans. So how do you think about that? I mean, is this something you have to build from scratch, basically?
Ryan: Kind of. And it goes pretty quickly. So you observe succession, essentially. And you think through what that forest might look like in a hundred years. And then you do your plant selection and your planting in a way that can help speed up that succession. And sometimes it’s not a one-to-one model, and so you might not put a canopy layer in. You might just keep that mid-story layer and go with all fruit trees. You might not put a vining layer in. You might just go with a shrub layer. But essentially, you’re thinking through functions that you want. So it’s some of it’s food, some of it’s medicine, some of it is heat. Right? So you do want some wood. Some of it might be for furniture. And so you’re making those plantings rather than have nature plant through a bird shedding or a bear shedding. You’re choosing what you want and placing it there in a way that based on observing nature, you know it’s gonna thrive.
Jim: Now let’s move on to the next very important point. I don’t know if I’ve heard the term before, but it really resonated once I read it and compared it to traditional industrial agriculture, at least, should say traditional agri-industrial – it’s kind of an oxymoron, because traditional agriculture wasn’t like this, but the industrial agriculture we have today. And that’s the concept of permaculture plant guilds, you know, the idea that these are purposeful purposes when you had – you had some term where things served multiple functions, etcetera. Why don’t you give us a riff on what you guys mean when you talk about plant guilds? So there again, like permaculture, there’s a…
Ryan: A lot of different definitions that other people have. The one we go with is a plant guild has a series of plantings or a planting space with plants that serve five different functions. So we call one function an anchor plant. So that might be your fruit tree or your nut tree. Another one might be your beneficial attractor. So that’s gonna attract beneficial insects into the system. Another one might be your nitrogen fixer, which will fix the nitrogen in your system. Another one might be your barrier plant. And so that’s a plant that you plant in your drip line to keep the encroaching grass into your system or other plants you don’t want. And then the final one would be what’s called a dynamic accumulator, which would be a plant with a deep tap root that’s gonna pull all those minerals up to the surface and then drop them. And again, it’s about through observation, identifying plants that occupy different niches in the ecosystem, and then planting them together so that the whole is greater than the parts.
Jim: Yeah, that’s a – and of course, that’s nature does that through evolutionary processes. If something isn’t working with everything else, it goes extinct, typically, right? Unless it’s an invasive, then it just fucks up everything. But if it’s been coevolved with the rest of the system, they kinda are designed to work together, but most of our depleted landscapes aren’t like that today.
Ryan: Yeah. And so it takes at this point, it takes a little bit of intervention. If we just tried to live off the forest, like you mentioned, how a lot of your forests aren’t very productive anymore, that wouldn’t really work. So it takes a little bit of intelligent and intentional decision making with a goal in mind to create your own food forest.
Jim: Got it. And yeah, that’s very interesting. Alright. Let’s hop ahead a little bit here and talk about anchor plants. And I’m gonna specifically hop to a Ryan story about the persimmon, the American persimmon. So tell the story first, and then tell us about the persimmon as at least an afterthought.
Ryan: I knew you liked that story, Jim. Well, after our intro…
Jim: Had to do it, right?
Ryan: So yeah. So the persimmon story is a hunting story, much so. And I’m a convert to hunting. I grew up playing basketball in Waynesboro. Camouflage was something that usually meant trouble. And we grew up making fun of people who hunted. And later in life, I think around age 37, 38, I had a friend who said, stop making fun of hunting, come hunting with me. And that was all it took, and now I’m obsessed. Not only did I want to become a hunter, but I also wanted and became a bow hunter. Hours and hours of shooting arrows. Always wanted, and I know this is more of a West Coast style of hunting, wanted to do the spot and stalk on a deer and never had an opportunity to. Because over here on the East Coast, it’s really tough. The whitetails are really skittish. You’re often hunting close quarters, and we’re just more of an ambush style hunting culture here. But one morning, I’m heading to the stand with my bow. And I was late. I don’t know what I’d done the night before, but I’d gotten up late, took ate too much oatmeal, whatever it was, and as daybreak’s happening, on this ridge heading towards my stand, and I see a little piece of yellow move, not like grass, and it shouldn’t have been that color. And immediately, was like, oh, shit. Oh, shit. That was a horn. Uh-oh. What do I do now? Right? I didn’t wanna spook it. I was trying to make a decision. Do I keep going to the stand? And my heart was beating real fast. Anyone who’s hunting, Jim, you know that feeling.
Jim: When you’re a rookie in particular.
Ryan: Oh, man. Going nuts. Freaking Buck fever, as we call it.
Ryan: Yes, and the wind was just right. The deer was laying below the ridge, facing down the ridge. But for some reason, he had messed up the wind, and so the wind was blowing in my face, and he had no idea I was there. And I was like, alright, I wanna try this thing I’ve been reading about and hearing about. I think I took my shoes off. The grass was wet, and my socks got all wet, but I started to crawl. And it was one of those moments that was just taking too damn long – it probably was only twenty minutes, I don’t know how long it was.
Jim: Probably five minutes or…
Ryan: Every second embedded in that second probably felt like an hour. And I’m just crawling along the whole time saying to myself, “Please don’t please don’t see me, or please don’t smell me.” And I get to what felt like close enough, 20 yards or so, maybe it was 10 yards, and I start to stand up really slowly. And the whole time, I’m just begging, “Please don’t, please don’t.” And I get up, and I start to draw my bow. And at this point, he has no clue. Right? You know how a deer will turn their head, but not all the way around. I forget what I wrote about – I forget whether I grunted or he caught wind of me, but something happened. And he stood up right as I had drawn and boom, I let go real fast. When I let go, I was so nervous, the first thing I did is I just sat down real quick right in the grass. And he took off running. I heard the thump, the legs kicked, which sometimes means a heart shot. And I was like, alright, what’s gonna happen now?
Again, it’s probably twenty minutes, but it felt like five hours. I watched him run off and just stand, and I’m sitting in the grass. This was during 2018, in fact. All this tragedy was overcoming my family, and we’re going through all these tough times, but I was dialed in on what this buck was gonna do. And I remember just weeping there in the field as I started to see the blood spilling from the animal, and he falls. And that shudder of relief and joy and sadness was just this amazing kind of – if you haven’t hunted or killed a deer, much less stalked one, it’s something that’s hard to relate to, but it’s something I’ll never forget. Everything from going to the animal and gutting them and having the persimmon, that great fruit spill out everywhere – every movement after that, up until the moment we had dinner, was almost like so mindful of an experience that was its own separate moment. I’ve never captured that kind of ineffable experience of time quite like that ever since. And I remember sitting at dinner, feeling proud of the food the family was gonna eat, and just meditating on how without that persimmon in that forest, I would not have had this experience with this deer.
Jim: Tell me about the persimmons a little bit because that then is the meat of the rest of that chapter, or at least that section.
Ryan: I mean, it’s a native fruit. There are cultivars that do really well. My favorite is Nikita’s Gift, but it’s one of these fruits that requires a hard frost to taste just right.
Jim: Yeah. I remember as a kid, we had some growing wild in our woods, and we thought we’d bite into them before the frost. We didn’t know. And talk about just drying your mouth out and alkaline as hell.
Ryan: Real cloying.
Jim: Yeah. Terrible. But then after, they’re very different.
Ryan: Yeah, if you… I found that you almost have to have them rotting. If you catch them turning a little bit black on the forest floor, that’s when they’re at their sweetest. They’re really hard to get, but man, it’s one of those… I think it’s considered the fruit of the gods. Once you taste a truly ripe persimmon, you never want another fruit again. You can make jellies and jams and breads out of it. It’s such a great fruit and such a great tree and quite easy to grow here.
Jim: Not that grow so well in Highland County, but probably grow fine over in Augusta.
Ryan: Oh, really? Oh, you guys are like almost Zone 4 up there, though.
Jim: Yeah. We can be considered Zone 4. It could get as cold… The times we’ve had this place, it’s been to 30 below twice. And it was 14 below just last winter, or was it the winter before last? So it can get pretty damn cold here. Things that aren’t deeply cold tolerant just don’t make it here. We did plant some, but they just didn’t make it.
Ryan: Oh, okay. And that’s not wind chill either.
Jim: No, that’s… we’re not talking wind chill here, none of that bullshit stuff they’d give you on the TV. We’re talking about thermometer temperature. That’s cold as shit.
Ryan: That’s like Minnesota, Jim.
Jim: Well, actually, my mother’s from Northern Minnesota. Got a bunch of cousins up there, and it gets a lot colder than that up there. 54 degrees below was the coldest my mother ever remembered growing up, and you’ll love this tale. I grew up in the DC suburbs, and there, if it snowed two inches, they’d close school. My mother gets so pissed off. She’d say, “In the twelve years I went to school, they only closed school once, and that was the day it was 54 degrees below zero ’cause the oil in the trucks and the buses froze. And that’s the only good reason to cancel school. Goddamn kids around here.”
Ryan: I love that story. And what’s interesting, the pattern of that story, as I’m aging myself and almost 50, like, that shit is true. Each generation gets softer and softer. And I know your buddy Turgeon. Right? Did I say his name right?
Jim: Yep. Peter Turgeon. Yep.
Ryan: Yeah. Apparently, we’re gonna have a reset or something. But that is observable. Like, it is a softer generation.
Jim: Yeah. I would say even my gen the boomers were definitely softer than the World War II generation. Those guys were tough. I mean, they may have been too smart, but they sure were tough.
Ryan: I don’t know. I claim Gen Xers to be tougher than boomers.
Jim: No. Hell no. We’ll have to have a rumble. Line up all the boomers and all the Xers, we’ll go at it. I think guile and experience will trump youth and athleticism.
Ryan: That would be… talk about, like, a young Capoeira talking about YouTube fight videos. That would be a hilarious fight video.
Jim: That would be hilarious. Right? Well, unfortunately, as boomers… I mean, I was still perfectly happy to take care of myself up to the time I got about 70, and then you get a little creaky. I can still probably whip your average… I know I can whip your average millennial. Anybody can whip a millennial, right? But, yeah, that might be a little more troublesome.
Ryan: All you gotta do is talk real loud and they’ll fall over, the millennials.
Jim: Well, millennials are great folks. And in fact, a lot of them see further than we do, you know, because they’ve been born into the shit storm and have had the shit storm their whole life. And so I really expect the ethical core of millennials, their way of trying to make their lives work. But unfortunately, us, their parents, spoilt them rotten to a significant degree, and they just aren’t as tough.
Ryan: I like that frame. So the funny part is we’re missing Trevor here because Trevor – I make fun of millennials and Trevor constantly. He gets mad at me all the time for being a Gen Xer.
Jim: I know. That’s true. Yeah. He is a classic millennial right in the middle there. Interesting. So yeah. And the persimmon tree is an interesting one. The other one, we’ll just talk about very briefly because one of my favorite trees is the willow. And I remember as a little kid being quite amazed, you could break the branch off a willow tree, stick it in the ground, and at least 50% of the time it had root and it would grow. And we had some – we had a big old black willow in our backyard in crappy suburbia. But that sucker was the scion for many a tree, not only in our yard, but around the neighborhood.
Ryan: It’s incredible. And there’s so many varieties and beautiful varieties of willow. And it’s something that a lot of us – Trevor, Emily, myself – have just started experimenting with. And so we’re now all harvesting cuttings for each other. And again, like that scion that gave to so many other properties, we’re sharing and starting to do things like weave willow domes and willow archways. And then it’s something that I always thought was a little bit greedy on the soil and the water for your forest. And it turns out that that’s not true.
Jim: And as you say, there’s many varieties. We have a variety in the back of our farm, where we call Poacher Hollow, where a cold spring-fed stream comes out and runs through a course, and relatively short. They don’t get any more than about six feet tall, and they’re quite thin and whippish. Right? Apparently, they’re the ones the Indians used to weave baskets with. And the things – there were just a few of them in there. We protected them a little bit. And then now they’ve gone nuts and just completely done both sides of that water course, which as you know, really improves the water course because it keeps the water shaded and cool and all that and retains water and all that. And these are very different than the black willows, can be 30 feet tall and big and round. These are completely different, and then there’s the weeping willows, I think it’s an Asian willow of some sort. They don’t live very long, though. They’re kind of a classic ornamental. They’re not really what I’d call of tremendous use. But, anyway, I’ve always had a great love for the willow tree. Always thought they were kind of cool. Let’s go on to another one of my favorites and probably the best story in the book, the redbud.
Ryan: Oh, you like that story? Oh, that was nuts.
Jim: You know, because I love intense stories. Right? The one things that you will never forget your whole life. So, we don’t – you know, again, times I wish we had five hours. This would be so much fun. We can go full two hours if you got the time. Tell the tale of your dad and Don and you, and then how you ended up under a redbud. And then talk about the redbuds.
Ryan: Well, I will – I will rather than bury the lead, I’ll lead with the ending. I was eight years old, and it was my first shot of bourbon.
Jim: I like that finale. Yeah. And your dad was there, and-
Ryan: He didn’t care. My dad gave it to me. Yep. It was so… my dad had a best friend, Don Johnson was his name. And they liked to fish together. Obsessed with it. A lot of bass fishing back in the day. And this was at Lake Anna. It was March, and it was one of those beautiful Marches where the redbuds are starting to come into bloom. And it was a beautiful day, and I thought I’d got – I was eight years old – I’d gotten to skip a day of school to go out on the johnboat with Don and Dad. And, of course, when Don and Dad go on the johnboat, they drank, and I had Yoo-hoos.
And I’m so grateful that they took me along on those trips, and it was a great trip. We were catching fish, having a great time. I’m hearing the boys talk, kinda like how when you and your brothers get together, and it’s definitely this camaraderie happening that was so great to be part of. And then the storm came, and that was scary as shit. And they, of course, ignored the beginnings of the storm because they had – it was a part of the day where I’d caught some fish. And whenever an eight-year-old outfishes you, you can’t let that happen. And the fish start biting, and they’re gonna stay and catching some fish.
And then lightning cracks, and I mean, it wasn’t obvious how dangerous it was to me until my dad yelled at me because my dad’s a calm man. He does not raise his voice. Very nurturing. And his buddy, Don, was just crazy, crazy as can be. And when Dad got nervous and said, “We gotta head back,” I knew it was bad. And so lightning’s cracking and trees are catching on fire. Hail is falling everywhere. And we get through a part of the lake where the storm calms down a little bit, and it seems like everything’s gonna be okay. And Dad’s still feeling nervous, so he tells Don to hug the bank. And what’d we do? He grounded the motor in the johnboat. And trying to fix it, he cut a tip of his finger off. And so then the motor’s in the boat, and the boat’s filling up with water.
Jim: Blood everywhere, no doubt.
Ryan: Blood’s everywhere. Mud everywhere. I’m eight years old, and I’m not holding it together. I’m losing my shit. I’m crying. And the storm starts up again. And then they – I have to – I’m furiously getting the water out of the boat and they start paddling back. We get to the ramp, get out, get the boat out, and they duck into a convenience store right next to the lake and kinda leave me alone by the boat. And I’m just recovering, hanging out there, and I remember fishing out this dirty bottle of bourbon because I’m like, oh, what can we salvage from this? I don’t know what my eight-year-old brain was thinking. But Don and Dad came out of the convenience store, and Dad was smoking a cigarette and looked over. And I remember just being proud as can be, holding up like this prize. We caught all these fish, but the fish are gone now. We survived, but I’ve got the bottle of bourbon. It’s bloody. It’s dirty now. It looks like it’s really old. And at that moment, like things do in our lives, the features of the landscape kinda start to brighten. And the red, the pink, the colors of the redbud are over right next to the lake. We go have a seat, and Dad says, “Here you go, boy. It’ll warm you up.”
Jim: That’s a good one. And I love the redbud. I mean, the redbud, when they’re in and we’ve just about finished the redbud season here in the Shenandoah Valley. But when you’re in the redbud season, if you’re not used to seeing redbuds, they’re just amazing. Some places, they’re just thick along the sides of the roads. The probably the best spot around here is going up Route 340 from Luray to Front Royal, one of the more amazing ones. Back in the days, I used to live in Lexington, Kentucky and traveled the roads as a traveling textbook salesman. I always looked forward to timing my drive from Lexington to Knoxville at the peak redbud season. They’re just so beautiful.
Ryan: And when you’re paying attention, the variation in color. I mean, it’s from reds to a deep dark purple and pinks. And then, the heart-shaped leaves are beautiful, and you can eat the flowers, of course, and they fix nitrogen in the soil.
Jim: Yeah. That’s the key part in your guild ensemble – it’s one of the nitrogen fixers. And we’ve tried to get them to grow here in Highland County. We got a couple of them that have made it, but again it’s marginal. We noticed it’s funny when you’re driving back from Pittsburgh a couple weeks ago, redbud season, but we noticed that the redbuds didn’t prosper above 2,000 feet. When we were above 2,000 feet up on the Allegheny Front up there in West Virginia and Maryland, no redbuds. Before and after, there were redbuds. Then we got above 2,000 feet, got into Highland County, and got no redbuds or very few. Just ones people had planted in their yards. But they are a great plant because they not only are they beautiful, not particularly useful for anything. They’re very spindly and grow every which way, but they do fix some nitrogen.
Ryan: Yeah. I want to learn more about that 2,000 feet phenomenon.
Jim: I don’t know, it’s just an observation. Have no idea if it’s a thing or just happened to be the combination of temperature and elevation. But I think 2,000 – I’m gonna guess something around 2,000 feet at this latitude is probably about the limit for them to naturally reproduce.
Ryan: Well, Trevor and I will dig into that now.
Jim: Yeah. Let me know. Oh, the other one, black locust.
Ryan: Oh, yeah.
Jim: When I was courting my wife, her stepdad worked me like a mule. Right? Because they had a little farm, 18 acres kinda deal. Most of it leased out to hippies to grow loofah gourds and stuff like that. But I also had a woodlot, and he heated with wood and all this. And the main woodlot was some pretty decrepit, and many of them dead, black locusts. Right? And I was not at that point an experienced timberman, and I barely knew what I was doing. He knew less what he was doing. He had crappy, lowest grade Homelite chainsaws. Right? And he didn’t even know you were supposed to sharpen the blades. And for the audience, the hardest wood – probably the hardest major wood in these parts – is black locust. It’s like cutting iron. And yeah, you’d see sparks come off the wood sometimes. It’s that hard. And I cut, I don’t think hundreds, but certainly dozens of black locust trees and split them with a maul. Right? And God almighty, talk about backbreaking labor. But the payoff is just about the best firewood you’re ever gonna find.
Ryan: Yeah. That sounds miserable, that work. There’s nothing worse than cutting black locust with a dulled saw blade.
Jim: Cheap ass 16-inch blade, Homelite from Montgomery Ward, right, to be precise.
Ryan: But what I discovered from my buddy – we’ll call him the Soul Valley Wizard because he’s allergic to fame – they’re really great to heat with. We have a little small cabin and a little Jøtul stove that heats it. And I can cut 13-inch logs that are three years old, and their thickness does not require seasoning or splitting. I can throw them right into the Jøtul. They’ll burn hot. And then, of course, through this method called coppicing, they grow right back. And so every three years, I can harvest the same tree for firewood. It’s fantastic.
Jim: Yeah, they are quite amazing, and the hot burning, and they produce an extremely dense coal also that holds its heat for quite a period of time. So that’s another – that’s the second one we’re gonna talk about, that we talked about here in your guild of the nitrogen fixers. Another one, now we’re going on to the next category, which is your barrier plants, shifts up to keep other things out. But the first example you give is actually also useful, and that’s the – one of my other ones I like a lot is…
Ryan: The rhubarb. Oh yeah. Oh, it’s a great plant. Yes.
Jim: Tell me a little bit about your relationship with the rhubarb. Your story in this case isn’t too dramatic, so you can skip over the story. And tell us why you like the rhubarb, and what are the kind of things that can be used for?
Ryan: Yeah, my allegiance to rhubarb has more to do with some of that cultural Lutheran upbringing than anything else. But it’s something that about a decade ago, came to really appreciate as a multifunctional plant that is really, really useful to cook with when you get creative. I always thought it was just strawberry rhubarb pie. But we threw a big party one year and made rhubarb margaritas and rhubarb barbecue sauce. And my daughter loves to eat the stalk raw, dipped in honey. It’s just a really amazing plant that a lot of folks overlook.
Jim: That’s the easiest damn thing in the world to grow. In fact, mostly, how do you…
Ryan: Keep it from taking over? You cannot kill it. One plant – I planted one plant and then divided it over the years, and a decade later, I had like 50 rhubarbs on my property. And it makes a great cold soup, and it’s just bomb proof.
Jim: Yeah. Very cool. And, you know, it does require a fair bit of sun, though, doesn’t it? I think it does.
Ryan: You know, it does to a point. So if you’re less concerned with high yield and use it as a barrier plant in the food forest, it’ll still produce quite well. In fact, this is interesting, it will actually produce deeper into the summer in the shade than if in full sun. So full sun, you’ll get that early spring, big, robust burst, but then it declines very quickly in the summertime. If you got them in the shade, that decline will hold off deeper into August and September.
Jim: That’s cool. I didn’t have any idea. I’ve always seen it grown in the sun, and when we grew it here, we grew it in the sun. Another one that I was surprised that you listed as a barrier plant, I guess it makes sense, are spring bulbs. So how do spring bulbs, tulips and your daffodils and your daylilies, how do those work as barriers?
Ryan: You really need to plant them thick, but around if you’ve got a mulched area and you worry about grass encroaching, by putting almost like a moat of spring bulbs around, it creates a barrier where the grass will not jump over it. It won’t throw the – if you’ve got crabgrass or wiregrass, it won’t throw rhizomes through it. And so it protects that encroaching invasive grasses around the mulched area really well.
Jim: And we have our whole yard surrounded by – well, on one side’s fabulous flower beds, many of which are bulbs. But then on the other side, the long run, it’s all tiger lilies, very dense now. And we rescued them from a dump. So I feel very good about having rescued some tiger lily rhizomes or whatever the hell they are from a dump, and we put them out fairly evenly spaced. Now they’ve grown into a solid wall of nice tiger lilies.
Ryan: There’s a type of permaculture person that does not like flowers and thinks along the lines of functions. A lot of writing about some of the flowers like we did was intentional to give folks permission to put some beautiful things in their design. It’s gonna attract insects, but it can also be functional as barrier plants. I love that tiger lily wall you got.
Jim: Yeah, I’ll show it to you next time you come out here. It’s pretty nice. And again, tiger lilies can get nipped by a late hard frost here. And this year they got nipped. Now it looks like they survived. I see some buds out there. I got my office window, and I’m looking into a, you know, a 30-foot run dense with tiger lily. And they’d be nice. Another one that you classified as a barrier plant is one of your more hair-raising stories, which is the garlic.
Ryan: The garlic. We’re out in Hawaii, and my wife’s six months pregnant. This was our last little gasp. We spent five years out there. And my wife’s a very tough Augusta County woman, athletic as all hell, and a great surfer, but she’s got a big belly on her and was not quite comfortable on the board. And she’s paddling out after catching a wave. The board picks the ball picks the wave puts picks the board up and smacks her in the nose, it breaks her nose, and she’s bleeding everywhere. And I got really scared. I paddled in. I found her, and we end up going to the hospital where we walk in, she’s six months pregnant, bleeding with two black eyes, gash across her nose, and we both had to get scolded by the doctor in that one. And man, she’s a tough woman.
Jim: So how does that tie into the garlic?
Ryan: For us, our experience of Hawaii was very much the smell of garlic. Everywhere you go, the beaches. Everyone’s cooking out, and it’s always garlicky shrimp or chicken with a garlic sauce on it. And we lived up the street from a restaurant called Niniku Yu. And that restaurant, everything from the water was infused with garlic. And so it was just this scent that just permeated our experience with Hawaii and that specific story. As our days waned, it became more and more obvious that we were probably never gonna go back as residents. And one of the things that we did in our homestead, the first thing we did was planted garlic. And it’s one of the easiest vegetables to grow. And we have an Appalachian garlic that we love growing called Music with very large bulbs, much to my daughter’s chagrin. I used to eat it raw in the mornings and she would hate to ride in the car to school with me. But it’s just a plant that I love.
Jim: You know, of course, here at where we are, we have a lot of the wild garlic called ramps.
Ryan: Oh, man.
Jim: The ramps are – man, they’re our early beds are starting to tail, but the ones we have deep in Morgue Hollow, those suckers will still be around for another week or two, and they could go out tomorrow if it doesn’t rain and dig some ramps. Do you guys ever use ramps in your permaculture?
Ryan: I try to. I’m so jealous, Jim. I cannot keep them. I always get folks to bring me roots. I cannot get them to take in Churchville where I live. I actually found ramps once in July in Highland County. It was amazing.
Jim: Till July? That must have been at high elevation in a dark hollow. It was in fact so cold that July, the house had a wood stove going. Interesting. Those things don’t like too much heat and they have a relatively short season, but we got a ridiculous amount. We have, I don’t know if it’s probably not a full quarter acre, but maybe an eighth of an acre of ramps, pretty dense. It’s like, whoa.
Ryan: You can make a fortune selling those to hippies.
Jim: Yeah, that’s true. You see them $30 a pound, things like that. That’s interesting. But those are really good. And the thing that made me think about that was the daughter complaining about the garlic. Right? Because these things give you a breath for a while. But as Cilli and I will say, we’re frying up some ramps to put on our steak, we’ll say, “Good thing we’re married.” Nice. There you go. Ramps probably not a thing for people in the dating scene. Alright, let’s go on to our next category, beneficial attractors. The first one on your list is what I only know from tea. I sometimes will drink Tulsi tea. Did not realize it was such an interesting plant.
Ryan: Yeah. A lot of the really bold smelling plants operate as beneficial attractors or sometimes insect confusers or pest confusers. But the idea with that in your guild is you just want to create a part of that ecosystem that helps balance out and kind of keep some of your pests in check. And Tulsi is a great plant for that. And of course, we love it because of its use as a tea. It’s got a great taste, but it’s also adaptogenic. And for me, that’s another really scary powerful story in the book. That smell of Tulsi, that’s the summer we tried to grow it for market was the summer that my wife almost died from a what do you call it?
Jim: Ectopic pregnancy.
Ryan: Yeah. Bleeding internally. She almost lost half her body’s blood and was fine the next day. But that day was a tough moment. And one of the ways we nursed her back to health was through Tulsi tea because it helps your body adapt to stress and strain. And it’s something that we had grown in abundance because of my farm manager, Nick Fairclough. And so I always joke with him, it’s still never sold.
Jim: Is that tall Nick? Is he a real tall guy? Yep. Tall and skinny guy? I remember him from up at Allegheny Mountain Institute.
Ryan: Oh, yeah. He’s great. He’s great.
Jim: Is he still around these parts, or did he go back west?
Ryan: Oh, he’s still around. He’s teaching shop and gardening at Kate Collins Middle School in Waynesboro.
Jim: Cool. He was – I liked him. He’s a good guy. Alright, another one on your beneficial attractors list. Of course, we have to talk about your favorite and mine, cannabis. Oh man. I can tell you Ryan knows how to grow cannabis.
Ryan: Yes, I do. Yes, I do. And I love growing it.
Jim: You gotta tell the 2010 story. It’s too choice not to.
Ryan: Yeah. It was a long time ago. Cannabis at the time was illegal, and it is now legal. And I was committed, even as a young hippie, to adhering to the law, partly because I was so recognizable that if I was gonna do something illegal, I was gonna get caught. And we had just formed a little cooperative, started farming tomatoes and all kinds of mixed vegetables.
To fast forward to the exciting part, I’m out there one day, hoe in a row, and I see a helicopter. And that helicopter, it is hovering, and I am naive. I don’t know what’s going on. I look up, and it’s not going anywhere. And I keep working and it gets to a point, maybe about twenty minutes later, that I can’t ignore it, and I’m terrified, and I go inside. When I go inside, the helicopter seemingly flies away, and what it does, it goes to the top of the hill where the road I live on is.
I’m looking out the window, and I see it turn around. As it turned around, it’s flying low, and it comes flying down the road back towards my property. And this time behind it was a series of vehicles, most of them unmarked, spinning blue lights followed by a marked vehicle. And the whole time I’m watching this and I’m going, “Please don’t turn. Please don’t turn. Please don’t turn in my driveway.” Well, sure enough, they turn in my driveway.
They come up that driveway fast as can be. One of them even caught air. It was crazy, and I’m just terrified. And I step outside of the house at this point, hoe in hand. And man, they stopped fast and short and it’s all choreographed. Open their doors, step outside with weapons. I’m shitting myself. I always joke – I think I joked in the story – have you ever seen the movie “Goonies,” Jim?
Jim: No.
Ryan: Oh, you gotta see that movie. Well, in the movie, there’s a young character, a little kid named Chunk. And one of the evil characters says, “Start from the beginning. Tell me everything.” And Chunk starts telling him all the bad things he did when he was like three years old. At this moment, with those guns trained on me, I’m going through all the bad things I’ve ever done, wondering why in the hell they’re here. What did I do wrong?
And one of the plainclothes people steps up to me. He’s got those cool aviator sunglasses on. And then following him is a shorter guy in camouflage, and he’s ready to fight, man. And he says, “Mister Blosser, drop your weapon.”
Jim: Your hoe. Right?
Ryan: And I dropped the hoe, and I go, “I’m really scared.” He goes, “What do you have to be afraid of?” And I was like, “All those guns pointed at me.” It’s like 15 men in camouflage. And I don’t know what’s going on. And he says, “We’re here to get your marijuana.” And I say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And he goes, “It’s right back there.” And he points to the back of my property. And I go- he goes, “Can we look for it?” I go, “Sure.” And then he goes, “No. You first.” So he marches me with 15 men to the back of my-
Jim: You probably thought you might have had booby traps back there.
Ryan: I have no idea. I was just terrified. And I’m going, man. And I started thinking maybe some kids snuck it onto the property. So maybe they’re right. Oh, shit. And I’m worried. And we get back there and they fan out. And for fifteen, twenty minutes, they’re tearing up tufts of grass. They’re looking everywhere and they can’t find anything. And then I realized they’re wrong. I knew I didn’t plant anything. Obviously, some kid didn’t bring something onto the property. And at that point, they start yelling and cursing at each other. Chaos ensues. The helicopter guy – one of the guys in the helicopter is screaming, “It’s there, it’s there!” And the guys from the ground are yelling, “Stop looking through your infrared, dumbass! It’s 2:00!” I mean, they’re screaming. It’s nuts. And after about – the whole ordeal lasted about an hour, and it turned – I relaxed. It turned funny when I realized I didn’t have any. And that’s when the dude in the plain clothes, the suit, and the cool Rayban sunglasses said, “Alright, let’s leave.” And he turned to me. I think I offered him some okra and tomatoes. He said, “No, thank you. But we gave your neighbors a great story,” and they left.
Jim: What did your neighbors make out of all this? They could not have missed that show.
Ryan: No. I had one neighbor come over, was terrified, was like, “Man, I didn’t think you’d be here. What happened?” I told him what happened. And he’s like, “Okay. Okay. Well, do you need a lawyer?” And I was like, “No. I didn’t do anything wrong.” And he’s like, “You should get a lawyer anyway.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” And the whole neighborhood just talked about it for a while. And, of course, I kept retelling the story. The dark side of that is every time I had a helicopter overhead, still, I get this eerie feeling. And I’m like, man, if they come, there’s nothing I can do. Because it was a really terrifying moment. And the minute cannabis became legal to grow as an act of liberation, I was like, “I’m gonna grow this plant.” And I fell in love with it. It’s a beautiful plant. And nowadays, when I hear helicopters, even though there’s a little tinge of worry, I can always reassure myself, you know what? I’m following the law. They are not here for me.
Jim: Indeed. And funny, our farm up in Highland County was a hippie commune before we bought it. It was a failed hippie commune where all the hippies had dripped away, and the only one left was, guess what, the trust funder who provided the money. Right? And it was very marginal. And they tried sheep. They tried garlic, they couldn’t do shit because they, as I said, they weren’t willing to do the hard work. They did find one crop though that they could make money at, and that was reefer, and they apparently were growing and selling quite a bit of reefer out of the farm here for a while. And in fact there’s a story runs around the local area about the hippies had hired an old man and his grandson to I think maybe it was paint the metal roof or something – metal roofs up here need to be painted every twenty years, something like that. Anyway, they get up on their ladder and to get up to paint, they look in the attic, and there the whole attic is full of plants hanging, drying. And apparently, they were so shocked the old dude fell off the ladder.
Ryan: Oh, that’s crazy.
Jim: Yeah. But anyway, tie it back to your story – we bought the place, you know, we were relatively young married couple with a six-month-old baby, pretty vanilla at that time. But for ten years on Memorial Day, must have been a National Guard exercise day, a big old Apache helicopter would come over our farm and give it about 20 passes back and forth, and then it would hover there for a while. And we’d just come out and wave. Hey, you know, and then after about ten years, they finally figured out “Damn dirty stinking hippies done left,” right? Because they never found anything. Now let’s get back to the book. These kinds of wild stories are throughout this book, but don’t get the idea that’s all the book is, because he also, after telling the wild story, also goes into a whole bunch of very practical advice about how to grow cannabis. So maybe give the audience a little taste of your knowledge about how to grow cannabis and what to do and what not to do.
Ryan: I mean, it’s a flower, right? And so I like to treat it a lot like I grow tomatoes. You need really high quality soil, which you need for any vegetable. And then you also need strong genetics. And so a lot of folks where they fail with cannabis is they’re getting bad seed or plants that the genetics aren’t very strong. And then, I mean, it’s not magic from there. You gotta really pamper it like you would your tomatoes. You need to stake it and you need to trim it and prune it for airflow. Otherwise, you’re gonna get some disease pressure on that.
One of the things we’ve gotten – I’ve gotten into, myself and a couple other folks at Shandell Permaculture, is something called Korean Natural Farming, which is a technique where you compost banana peels, comfrey, and you ferment these mixes that you then pour into your soil as you’re watering your soil. Check out Korean Natural Farming as a great way to feed your soil and your cannabis plants. The hard part often in growing cannabis is not the growing, it’s the harvesting. And that’s when you’ve got some problems that can set in like mold, if you don’t dry it properly, or you can harvest it at the wrong time. Those are some of the detail moments you want to really look for. But the first several months, as long as you’re pruning for airflow and providing structure so your plant doesn’t get too big and split, you’re gonna be pretty good.
Jim: You also talked about some of the tricks that we knew about in the seventies, right? You want to have all female plants if possible. And if not, you gotta cull the male plants early.
Ryan: Oh yeah, I left that real important. It’s really fun. You can always tell what a male plant is – everyone says it’s hard to tell the difference between a male and a female plant. It actually isn’t if you think of what male genitalia looks like.
Jim: Hold that picture in your mind, folks, right?
Ryan: Oh, I know, right? But you can always tell a male plant because it grows little balls, a little set of balls. And the minute you have a hunch that’s happening, rip it out. Better safe than sorry.
Jim: Yeah. Talk about drying the plant – one time we were actually out in Minnesota, we came upon some ditch weed, which is essentially marijuana that grows wild, totally useless as it turns out. We thought we were in the shit – we filled two ice chests full of this stuff. And the way we dried it was we put it in pillowcases and put it in the dryer. Oh no, it worked. Did it really? Temperature off, just air dried it in the dryer. And well, it turned out the shit didn’t must have had no THC or so little. You know, I think we put half a quarter pound into a batch of spaghetti. It didn’t do a damn thing.
Ryan: Yeah. Well, that’s the thing I love about this plant is as we continue to study it. I mean, there’s some now – we’re finding THC is not as benign as we thought it was. And so as I age, it’s something that I need to be aware of with blood pressure, although I adore it. But things like CBD and CBG for prostate health are really interesting things that are being studied in terms of compounds the plant has. It’s a plant that I am really interested in seeing just how far the medicinal value will go. I don’t think it’s gonna be a wonder drug like many have claimed that it is, but it’s definitely one of those that can be in the home pharmacy kit and gently support aging adults quite well.
Jim: You don’t be looking at me when you say that.
Ryan: Oh, I remember – I’m the one that almost has AARP magazine. I’m counting myself in the club, Jim. I’m an old man.
Jim: And of course, the other thing about cannabis, and this is what the settlers used it for, it makes great rope. It can be used to make cloth. It can be used to make paper. It’s an excellent source of very high quality cellulose essentially.
Ryan: Yeah. And again, it doesn’t require – it’s gentle on the soil too. It’s not like corn, wheat, or soy.
Jim: Which just sucks the nutrients right out. Right? Then you’re caught in the damn chemical farming cycle, which is not so good. Yeah. Alright. Let’s go on to your last category of plants. And I do wanna remind people that while this book got all these great stories, there’s whole lot of sections about what cultivars to use where and just real practical stuff, and it’s written in plain understandable English. Even a computer nerd like me could understand it. So keep that in mind too when you think about possibly getting this book. So the last category is the dynamic accumulators. Let’s start out by what do they accumulate and how do they do it dynamically?
Ryan: You know, it’s funny. Permaculture is very heavy on metaphor, but often very light on scientific study.
Jim: That’s because it was invented by hippies.
Ryan: I know, right? And again, I’ll claim the mantle of a poet, not a scientist. And so the way I conceptualize, the way the plant, the way that idea of dynamic accumulator works is conceptually, it’s got a deep taproot. And so it’s going down deep into the soil through many layers of the soil and mining all those minerals at the bottom that are hard for plant roots to get to, many of them. And it pulls them up into the leaves of the plant where the leaves of the plant can then deposit them on the surface. So it creates this cycle of mineral deposits. As it gets pushed down, it pulls it back up. And so that’s the concept of the dynamic accumulator – it’s balancing out the micronutrients of the soil rather than the macronutrients.
Jim: Interesting. And you mentioned one that we’ve used here, and my wife has used is comfrey. She really loves comfrey to put under fruit trees and under ornamentals and things of that sort because it’s not like grass, which seems to compete with the trees. It actually seems to help the trees.
Ryan: Yeah. It’s great. And it’s easy. I mean, comfrey, once you plant it, you’re not getting rid of it, but it’s really easy to harvest and distribute, chop and drop. And I fell in love with it as a medicinal because of just – I’ve got that old creaking body of a basketball player. I feel like I must have broken every bone in my body. And making a poultice out of the comfrey and soaking whatever injury you have could be quite healing. I’ve never done this, but I’ve got a vision of one day taking a bath in comfrey.
Jim: Wow. That’s pretty bad. Shit grows like crazy, so you could do it if you wanted to. Right?
Ryan: It does. I figured it would probably be more gross than anything else, but I just want my body to feel like it’s 20 again.
Jim: It’d be worth it if it did that. Well, you could just use Viagra. That works just as well.
Ryan: Oh, that’s great.
Jim: Another one you talk about in this category is beets. It’s an interesting plant. I’m not much of a fan of eating beets myself, but the rest of my family loves them. But I have found that beets are about the best imaginable food plot item for deer hunting. You put in sugar beets – oh my god, you have to chase the deer away with a shovel.
Ryan: Nice. I didn’t even consider that. Yeah, I’ve heard turnips and other radishes.
Jim: Are amazing. They love turnips. They love the greens of radishes, not so much the plants themselves. They love – we used to run 13 food plots around the farm.
Ryan: Oh, yeah.
Jim: Don’t do any anymore, but we used to do all kinds of stuff. And the one we found that was just the most insane was beets.
Ryan: Yeah. I love that beet. That’s a good idea of the sugar beets as a food plot. I’ve fallen in love with it as an adult, and it’s so easy to grow and it’s so fast to grow as a crop. And of course, it entered into my life in that story through – I learned to hate meal trains despite how well-intentioned they were during my mom’s cancer when I was a kid. And all we got was lasagna. It was the eighties, right? And one of Mom’s Hungarian friends brought borscht, and it sat on the stove and never turned colors for I swear three months, it just stayed pink. And so my relationship with the beet was forged in that memory, in that experience. And as an adult, I love growing it. I love cooking it. I actually love borscht now.
Jim: I like borscht too. It’s one of the things that with beets, actually really like a lot, and Celia makes a great, more Hungarian style borscht than Russian style. Nice. It has more meat in it. Yeah, the Hungarian borscht got a lot of meat. The Russian borscht, less so.
Ryan: Yeah. Well, of course, and I love now you’re missing the Russian borscht. The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.
Jim: That’s yeah. I saw that quote. In fact, I actually posted it online today. I thought that was such a depraved quote of Tom Robbins from, what was the name of the book that was from? Jitterbug Perfume. Yeah, Jitterbug Perfume. One of my favorites. That was such a bizarre quote I had to share.
Ryan: Yeah. I love it. I love it. I also love Rasputin. You know?
Jim: Yeah. And who’s that woman that’s advising Trump that’s his Rasputin? The one who said he needed to fire this person and that person, and he did? Oh yeah. I forget what her name is, but people were saying, oh, this is Trump’s Rasputin. Apparently, she was a real whack job and got his ear. Right? And then okay – then the last one we’re gonna hit here before we wrap it up, we’re – we had a good time here, but it’s time for us to wrap it. I couldn’t believe you had said we should grow burdock, that goddamn shit. Right?
Ryan: I know. I hated it. I hated it. Of course, in the story, you hear about it. My daughter almost choked on it, and it’s one of those plants that the burs are just awful. They clump come into the house on your clothes.
Jim: Your dog, everything else.
Ryan: If you don’t get the birds before it’s too late, then it just spreads everywhere. And, of course, we bought our property, it had done that. But the elegant – I won’t call it intelligence because that feels too woo-woo – but it was one of those moments of, in terms of a medicinal spring tonic that my family was looking for to help us build our health against the occasional pesticide drift and herbicide drift from our neighbor’s property. And we had a naturopathic physician on the property one day, and he pointed to the plant and said, “That’s your answer. It’s as if it wants to be here and knows the spray is happening.” And I thought, really? And between that, combined with cleavers and a little bit of dandelion, it’s a nice spring tonic, a blood cleaner, and a little bit of a gentle liver cleaner. But it also – and digging into this more and growing it more – there’s a very popular variety of burdock that’s sold at market for the dinner table in Asian cultures called gobo. It is a plant that now I flag every spring so that when the leaves fall, I’ll go dig the root and make a medicine out of it. And slowly, I’m actually getting less of it by using it, less and less of it’s on our property, which is great.
Jim: Yeah, that’s wonderful.
Ryan: Great having you on, Jim. I appreciate it. This is a lot of fun. I always love talking to you.
Jim: Yeah, I always love talking to you too. We always have a good time.