WWIII Victory Garden: 5 Water Conservation Strategies with Jim Phillips

Are you worried about how you're going to be able to water your garden in this drought season? Well today we've got a special guest for you. He's going to show us five strategies to make sure that you make the very best use of the water that you have. Hey Provident Preppers! I'm Kyleen and I'm Jonathan and today we want to introduce Jim Phillips. For those of you who know Jim, you know that he has an extensive background in doing great things. He is very enthusiastic about the topics of preparedness and making sure that you are resilient and self-reliant. He has done massive amounts of research on everything from it started in cold weather survival and he has I love what he has to say about sanitation and so many other topics. I love listening to Jim because he's a wealth of knowledge and he's got a passion for what he's doing. He has a passion to teach us how we can be more resilient and and that's what we're here about today. Now today's topic is low water gardening because so many of us are in drought situations right now that this becomes critical and as I look out, I spent my career in water and as I look out at the landscape, I don't mean to be a pessimist because I'm very much an optimist but we have some really serious water challenges coming our way. The drought has just been extensive here in our area and there's just so many issues coming up with water that we have to be efficient with our water and that's what we're talking about today. So Mama? So I'm going to tell you the five things that we're beginning to be covering but before we do that, I just want to tell you that for those of you who know our story when I married John like 23 years ago and I started getting into prepping because of him, I started going to a whole bunch of classes and there was a lot of information out there that was quite frankly just not right and I would travel long distances actually to hear Jim speak and I was always like taking notes like crazy so you guys are really blessed that you could just watch him here on our channel instead of having to drive. But if you ever have a chance to see him in person, he's really good. He's a great speaker. So the five techniques or the strategies that Jim's going to talk about today is one, limit your watering area so that you reduce your need. Two, taking advantage of discarded water or kind of gray water. Number three, improve the soil's ability to take up and hold water. Four, improve the soil with biochar which I am really excited to learn about because I've been studying some and I have some questions about that. And number five, the use of ground crops or cover crops to improve soil and all of these I think are really good strategies. So Jim, teach us. Tell us some more. I'll be glad to. Thanks very much for having me come on with you here because you're doing such a great service to other people too and it helps me to reach more people because that is kind of my mission. You know, this drought which we have in the west, which really is not just the west, in the whole western half of the country is very, very serious. We have wells that are going dry, strings that are going dry, water restrictions and things like that. And that certainly motivated me several years ago to figure out what I can do so I use less water so that I help preserve the water. One of those things that you mentioned is how do we limit the amount of water that we need, limit the area that we're watering. Of course, one of the common ways of doing that that I would encourage everybody to do no matter how you're gardening and that is use drip irrigation. Now, drip irrigation you can buy different tapes and you can buy the hose with emitters and things like that and I encourage you to do that and there's lots of different choices that you can learn about and you can get instructions on how to do that. Now, one of my specialties is figuring out how to do things with not very much money because in my teaching career as I've had for many years here, budget is a restraint and sometimes I hear people say, well, I can't get prepared because I don't have money because I can't buy all this stuff. Okay, do you want to get prepared or not? Think outside the box. And so when it came to drip irrigation on my budget, the way that it was here a couple of years ago when I was starting, I looked around and said, I can't buy those things, but I must use drip irrigation. So I had a neighbor, he had a piece of property across from me that he wanted to get cleaned up and so he hired me to clean it up and there was a whole bunch of PVC pipe, I mean gobs of it, miles of this stuff over there. And he said, clean it up, get rid of it. Well, I looked at it and I said, I'll get it off your property, but I'll move it to mine, you know, throw away the real junk. And I've got this pipe that's really kind of squirrely. Now I can show you pictures of this real quickly what I do, but what I did was I took the, that was a bunch of one-inch pipe. It was used both for watering and for greenhouses and things like that. It's all kind of crookedy and bent and what have you, but I took that and I've drilled holes in it. You hear people, you know, drill holes in it, but what I see that happens when people drill holes in it, it sprays out this little jet and if you turn it down to the ground, it bores a hole in it and things like that. So I took the one inch and then over top of the one inch, one and a quarter inch just fits with a little bit of space and then using over this hole, which is an eighth inch hole, then I could slip these little short pieces like an inch and a half long over where those holes are and then use a screw to hold it in place, not putting the screw in the hole that's in the pipe, but just to hold it in place and hold it away from it. And then the water will drip out and it doesn't spray all over the place. So the first year I did that, that's three years ago, 2020, I guess 19 when I did that. And then I had to make a way of holding the pipes. They're kind of crookedy. So I made these cross stakes that are in there and I laid it in it. So drip down on top of it. Well, that's the way you think of drip irrigation, dripping right in your row. Then the next year I thought, now that was a lot of work and I have a lot of weeds. It was getting the water where I wanted it, still a lot of weeds. So I thought, well, in these rows, what I'm going to do is use strips of four foot wide black plastic, six mil thick. I wish I could have got eight or 10, but I could get six. They're four foot wide and then make these rows about five feet apart or four and a half feet apart. And that'll give you about a foot of planting space in between that I can fill with the compost and then kind of hump the ground up just a little bit. So any rainfall or sprinklers that comes on that, it'll drain down into those troughs and it will water the plants in the valleys, but it won't water in between the valleys, which is covered up so the weeds don't grow. Boy, that was a joy because the weeds were smothered out. And here's one thing you learn about weeds is particularly the creeping things like the morning glory and some of those things we have here. As soon as one of them poked his head out underneath that plastic in there, you just cut it off. And now I'm weird. So I talked to the plants a little bit and I tell them, look, I grow elsewhere in my yard, it's okay, but you come up on my garden, I'm going to cut your head off. They get tired of getting their head cut off and they stop growing there. And so I had almost no weeds except right in that row. There's a little bit, but you just pick them out real easily. Very little weeding, very conservative of water because I was putting it right where the plants are in the rows. And so that worked very, very well using junk. And so I do programs called, Paradoxical on the Shoestring and somebody said, well, I don't have money. I can't buy this stuff. Well, get outside the box. Listen to other people maybe doing some things. So that's one of the things. The garden layout, which is still in rows and instead of raised beds, which is really nice, particularly for us old guys, it's getting further down to the ground. I have to conserve water. So I do these recessed rows where the plants are down low a little bit, not real low, just four or five inches down below. So the hot wind doesn't blow across the ground and dry it out. So the water goes right there. So that's a planting strategy that I use. Now you might think of a different way of doing it and that's fine, but I did it. It's worked exceptionally well. I'm into my third year of doing that and I'm thrilled with how it works. So you're going to conserve whatever water you have. If you have pressurized irrigation or if you're using culinary water, you just want to conserve it and not overuse it. One of the other ways that you conserve water, as you mentioned, is how do we repurpose some of this water? We're throwing away so much water, huge amounts of water that are going down the drain. Now we need a little bit for cooking and food preparation and drinking. You need it for that. So we've got to save that clean culinary water for that. But then we have all this water that's coming out of showers and washing machines and bathtubs and dishwashers. And most of that water is what we call gray water. Now you have two kinds of waters that come out of your house. One is black water that goes down the toilet, throw it away. You don't want that. Let it go where it's going to go. Although there's some water conserving things, we can talk about that at another time. But for right now, just flush it. It's gone. But then I'm going to take my bathtubs, my showers and my washing machines and my sinks and I'm going to drain them to where I can use them. Now this can be very complicated when you think about it, particularly have a house that's already built and I have one that's built and it's finished off. If you're building a new house, hallelujah, design it into it to take all of the gray water to run it to the outside. If you have a house that's finished off like mine, then you start looking for where can I get some of that water very easily, the easiest. The first place that's going to be, most people can go is going to be to the washing machine. That water that comes out of there, of course, now you want to choose your soaps and detergents very carefully, biodegradable, not a bunch of junk in them and don't add a lot of things to it. And then all the rinse water, of course, is really good and it'll dilute any of the soap you have. What you need to understand is that the phosphates, the nitrates and some of the other things that come out of the soaps, the plants go nuts for that stuff. They love it. As a matter of fact, we have a problem in some of our rivers and lakes and in the Gulf of Mexico, where you have all this nitrogen, so much nitrogen in the water that you have this overgrowth of things that's, you know, suffocating fish and all. Well, your plants will love that. I've done this for years. And when you get it out on your trees and your bushes, they're getting lots of water. They just love it. And there's ways that you can move that water around with hoses so it doesn't go in one place all the time. And even in the winter, I want to get it out there, even though things may not be growing, because I want the I want to saturate that soil as much as I can in our dry areas. So I let it run in the winter and understand that most of that water is warm or hot. And so it's not going to freeze real quickly if you have things set so that they will drain and it empties out your pipes and your hoses. They'll just drain out and then it may freeze out there on the ground. Fine. Spring comes, melt gets into the soil. Perfect. So gray water, recover that. Along with that is water that comes off your roof. Now, this has some, depending on where you are, it may have some political connotations to it because there may be some regulations on it. So know your regulations of your area. Now, my attitude is it's on my roof. I want it on my garden. So I'm going to take all that water and put it on my garden. So rain barrels. And I'm not storing the water. I'm getting it out to where I want it. So my rain barrels, they have a hose that runs over to trees that just drains in there. The barrel is a surge tank and it immediately drains out on my trees rather than right around my foundation, which is not good for the house. So I'm just redirecting that water. And you can also buy downspout things that'll take the water away from the house. And if you can get it over by a tree, you want to do that because all of that precious water, you need to get it on the soil rather than into a gutter. So gray water recovery, rainwater recovery really helps a huge amount in taking care of reducing your water needs. Now, the other things you want to consider doing, and by the way, you can get on YouTube and other places or on my website and I do classes on those things. I know I've seen the backyard that the Joneses have and it's like, oh yeah, that's nice. I mean, I love the tour of your place, what you've done and your drip irrigation, your raised beds and everything. Perfect. Do that. But here again, the thing I want to emphasize is some people say, well, I don't have the money to what the Joneses have done or my neighbor's done or what Jim does. Don't let that stop you. Think outside the box. Use junk. The barrels that I have, these are all barrels that were being thrown away. Blue plastic barrels. Yeah, they're blue. They're ugly. Well, paint them then. You have to do so that I can capture that water, put it where I want it. So don't let the lack of money say I can't do it because I don't have money. Find ways to do that. Ask questions of people. Can I say something about that really quick? You bet. So the whole money thing, people like look at us now and they look and they say, wow, this is spectacular. They don't realize that we've been doing it for years and years. And like my kitchen garden, that was all some, I can't remember what the woods called, but you put it around garage doors. It's like this plastic coated kind of composite wood. That was all free, right? We've done for years trying to just use free and get plant starts from other people and all that. So they actually see what's a composite of years and years of work and accumulation and we all start somewhere, right? We all start somewhere. Yeah, I began doing these things, well 1972 is when it began with me, which just the concept of food storage, that's where it all was. And so I'll store food. Okay, good idea. So you look at somebody that's been setting aside food for years and you say, wow, look at all that. I can't afford to do that yet. Well, I've done it over 30 years I've been doing those things and learning along the way and developing both my skills and also through teaching people, I get a lot of questions. I get like, I never thought about that. I'll go find out. That's one of the advantages of teaching. You get questions that causes you to think about new things. So yeah, you're absolutely right. You take a look at where somebody is now in time. You say, well, I can't do that. I can't afford it. No, you can't afford to not get started today because next week you'll be better off than you were last week and the next week and the next week. Just be consistent and persistent and learning and asking all the time. So yeah, very true. Very true. Very good point. Now compost, we talk about how do we hold water in the soil. Now my soil here has a lot of what you'd call caliche. It's a very hard, very dense in places and when it gets wet, it'll turn into literally blood to blood. Boot sucking mud. I'm glad we can always edit things out because when we moved here 18 years ago and this raw ground that was in the back in there, when it melted in the spring, I go out there in irrigation boots and I could just step out of my boots and just suck the, you know, my boots off my feet. So what I allowed to happen was because I want to both build the soil with organics and so you let the grass just grow just wild grasses in there and we water and sprinkle it and everything. Now I have a lawn all over in there of mixed varieties of things. That's kind of a cover crop that we'll be talking about, but also the way that I'm composting things is when I mow that, I let the clippings fall right where they are and they build the soil. So what you'll see on my lawn is where they have these sprinklers in there, fortunately our yard was sprinkled, had these big rain bird things that pop up and they were level with the soil. But they are now, some of them are two and three inches down, sunken down in there because I'm building topsoil by leaving everything in place. And then when I prune my trees, the fruit trees that I'm pruning, I just leave the clippings on, I chop them up into smaller pieces, I just mow them. Those things break down because it turns out the wood chips are very good for around fruit trees, you even want to import some of those. So you're doing things like that, you're sort of composting in the soil, but now then any organic material that you have that comes out of the kitchen, out of the garden, the corn stalks and everything, chop them up and then they go into bins, barrels or somehow and you compost those. All of the trimmings that come out of the kitchen, any of the waste food that comes out of the refrigerator you didn't get around to eating, it goes into the compost. If you have access to some manure, cow, horse, pig, whatever it is you got, some of that goes in there. So that you can be building this organics because the thing you're wanting to get into the soil are the nutrients, yes, but the other thing you're looking for is the carbon. You know when you see soil that looks dark and rich and some of it's almost black, what's the black from? Carbon. And so most of the things you're throwing away have a lot of carbon in them. Now you need to have the nitrogen that goes with it and the other things, that's where as much green as you can get. I don't, you know, pick up my grass clippings, I leave them lay there, but when I get other things that are green, I want them in there because that's nitrogen rich. Also leaves, don't let me catch anybody throwing leaves away. Don't you dare throw leaves away. If I may be threatening you and go to your neighbors. I have a people down the road here in this last fall, they were, no, the spring, they were raking up all their leaves, you know, that fall in the winter and putting them in bags. And I went by and I said, what are you gonna do with the leaves? I don't know. I'm gonna have to haul them up. I said, I'll take them. And I got 30 some bags, giant lawn and leaf bags full of leaves that I came over and put them in my compost. Now what's magic about leaves after they fall is trees send roots down deep into the soil and they mine the minerals from the soil. They bring them up into the tree. That's some of the things that works in the photosynthesis. And then when you see the trees changing color in the fall, what you're seeing is some of the minerals that are showing up in those leaves that give them the different colors. You want those minerals in your soil. And since they have gone through a living plant, they're now organic minerals. They're now no longer the zinc or the iodine or the calcium that is just a mineral. They are now what you could call kind of chelated, so that they're more bioavailable. So that's the kind of minerals that you want to put in. So look for those things and get them. I get wood chips that are being thrown away and or I gather up wood and then I will chip it periodically and that'll go into the compost. So any way that you can get organic stuff into the soil is what you want to do. And you're looking for the carbon because the carbon holds nutrients within the little carbon particles that has a charge on it that wants to pick up some of the nitrogen and some of the phosphorus and the other minerals. But it's not a really strong charge. And so what happens is it may be picking up those things and holding them down in the root zone. But then when the plant comes along and the bacteria that's in the soil, it'll release those nutrients to the plant. So now then the plant can grow. So dark rich soil is full of carbon and so you're wanting to get all the carbon you can in there plus the other nutrients. So compost anything that you can find and get it in there. And this is another topic for another time, but you may want to think about composting all of the waste that you might be producing. When I say you, I'm talking about how about what goes through the human body. Done carefully and done right. That is very powerful, but you've got to do it right. You have to do it carefully because we can, as a sanitation issue I talk about, we can spread disease through human waste. It's really not a waste, it's actually a resource. And another topic for another time to dig into, but just start with all the easy things first. Leaves, twigs, branches, scrapings off the plate, anything that you can get in there. Get it into the compost. There was a book written that's called Let It Rot. That's it. Let it rot. Let it break down. And there's some strategies to that. You want things to be just a little bit damp in there. You don't want it to get dry, but you don't want it really wet because if it gets wet, it'll go in at where it's soggy wet. Now it goes into an anaerobic process where it will stink. So if you keep the oxygen going to it by not having too much water and you can stir it and you can do all kinds of things. I don't do that. I just put enough organics in there and I leave it loose enough and keep it damp. I don't have any smell coming out of my compost and I literally compost hundreds of pounds of things a year. So very valuable. And that's one of the things that you can do. Somebody says, well, I don't have space or time to do gardening right now. Okay, fine. Build your soil. Get the compost going. Don't waste any of that organic stuff. Get it breaking down and you can at least get it into the soil so the earthworms will be happy. And then when you have to grow something, now you can. So do what you can with the resources that you have. So that composting is valuable. Some other things you can do to buy. Vermiculite is a nice thing to move into the soil. Now I'll say it's kind of expensive, but if you can buy bags of vermiculite, stir it in because those little flakes in between them, they will pull in some of those minerals and water because we're really after water in this case, talking about it. It'll help hold those things in the soil. So vermiculite you can add, or you can also add the perlite and things like that. It'll break up soil. As I said, I have this caliche soil, very heavy clay soil. And so I need organics in it. And some of these other things added to it, even a little sand is good or a little pea gravel to help break it up. So I don't have this, this boot sucking mud in my yard and in my garden in particular. I'm not worried about where the grass grows. It's taking care of that. But I'm expanding my gardening area all the time into where I was growing grass to keep the mud down. Now that's becoming garden. So grow everything you can grow is what it comes down to. Then we come to biochar. This is one of those things. Now, not everybody can make biochar. You can buy it, but it's kind of expensive. And when I say biochar, and I'll use the word using virgin wood by that, I mean, you don't want wood that is pressure treated, chemically treated in any way. Now, a little bit of paint or a little bit of varnish on some scrap wood is okay, as long as it's a little bit. And then what you're going to do with that, and it's a real simple process. I just finished a class on that and teaching about it. And I did a live class also for folks. The equipment is very simple to make it. And then there are several ways you can do it even without this equipment. But what I have is it's a 55-gallon barrel drum, an open head one. So it has a head that you can open up and you can put it back on. And then you want a 30-gallon barrel that's going to be inside that. That'll actually be your retort where you're going to bake the wood and cook all the lignans and the cellulose out of it, leaving the carbon behind. And then you're going to have a chimney on it. Now, obviously, if you live in certain places, you won't be able to do this because burning may be a problem or a little bit of the smoke or those things. But if you're out where you can, or if you have a relative who's out on a farm or a ranch where you can go make it, go make it. And then you're going to be using wood, scrap wood. That's all that I use. I use scrap wood. Either sometimes people are clearing out their excess wood around their house or some people were making a fire break or getting the ladder fuels out of trees to have all these branches and things. And in my area, a lot of those things is the scrub oak, nice hardwood because you like the hardwood is best. Or you go to cabinet shops because a lot of them, they will bring in these slabs of lumber that they're going to make their hardwood cabinets out of them. And they trim the sides off of them to get them square. And they have this hardwood that's left over. Sometimes they just give it away, haul this darn stuff off so we don't have to. Or they may sell it for, you know, $25 a pickup load. You know, hardwood, the oak, the, I can't even think of, some of the walnuts and ash and some of those things are nice hardwood. If you don't have hardwood, use softwood. It's okay. So what's going to go down inside of this, all these drums, let me tell you what you do to them. The 55 gallon drum has some large holes cut in the bottom. You're making a burn barrel basically. So you chop these holes in the bottom down there, lets in lots of air. Then up around the top, you'll cut in some additional slits around there so you can get secondary air because we want to burn things completely. So that's the outer barrel. Then the lid, I'm going to take and cut a hole in it. I'm going to add a chimney to it, a six or eight inch chimney to it. It'll be added onto it. And there's a simple process where you just cut little slits in it. And then one of them folds to the outside and one to the inside and set it down. You don't have to weld, just set it down on there and the chimney will stay on it. And then you should have a spark arrestor on the top if you're around where you can have any problem. So that's my oven, if you will. Now inside of that, I'm going to have this 30 gallon barrel. It's an open head. I have one with an open head on it, so I have a lid on it. And then in the bottom, the bottom only, I'm going to drill a bunch of holes in it. You know, 30, 40, 50 holes in the bottom. And then it's going to set down inside that 55 gallon drum on top of some fire brick. Just a few of them in there so it's held off the bottom. Because the way this works is I'm going to load the outside around that 30 gallon barrel. I'm going to load in all this really scrap wood, the stuff I don't want to use for the hardwood charcoal. I'm going to load it around those pieces of things. And I can have a little plywood or a little chipboard or things. That's okay in there. I'm still not going to have any pressure treated lumber in there because I want to use the ash that comes out in my garden and in my compost. I don't want to add those, the arsenic or the excess coppers or things like that. I don't want them in that ash. And then I'm going to fill this thing, the outer drum, fill the in drum with the hardwood pieces, the short little pieces. Then they're filled right to the top, put the top on it. And then I'm going to fill the whole drum around it with this other wood that I'm going to burn, put a little bit of some cardboard on top. And I have some of this waste vegetable oil that's, you know, gone rancid or we fried in. And I'll pour a little that on top, set this thing on fire, put the chimney on it, let her go. I'm lighting it on the top and you really want to have a damper in it. So this thing doesn't run too hot. I learned that because it was running so hot. I was really, I was burning my barrel. That's what I was burning. If that barrel is glowing a bright red down at the bottom, it's too hot. So you'll, what you'll do is you'll cut back the airflow out the chimney so that I'm going to, I'm going to not burn as fast. And then I do this in the afternoon, just let it set all night long and let it cool down until it gets cold in the morning. Open it up. You have a bunch of white ash down in the burn barrel. And then you take the lid off of the inner barrel and it is cooked down to where you have one third of the volume. It'll decrease by one third because you cooked out all the lignans and the cellulose and some of the other things that will gas. And what's happened is those gases is they're being driven out by this temperature that may be eight, 900 degrees in that barrel. There, since you have a lid on it, they just go down out the holes in the bottom, up around the side, and they burn. They're a part of the fuel that helps this thing heat. And when this thing is running right, there's just almost no smoke. I take pictures of that. There's no smoke. You get enough secondary air in there and it does fine. Now it's cool the next morning. You dump that out and then you're going to chop it up, break it up and what have you. That can go. There's several uses about water purification, about using it for biochar in your garden and some other uses. But right now we're talking about in the garden. So just crush up some of that stuff that goes in the compost. Now don't put it in your garden directly because the carbon, it has these tiny little pores and holes in it and this charge on it wants to pick up some of the nitrogen and some of these minerals. So it'll actually rob them from the soil and your plants until it gets full and then it'll start releasing them. But at first it'll rob them. So I put in the compost so that when I have all these nitrogen things in there, it's picking it up, absorbing it. Then when that compost goes into the garden, I have that charcoal that's loaded up with nitrogen and things and it just really helps the garden and it breaks it up. But the other thing about the carbon and the biochar is it's a sponge. It picks up and holds some of the water that the plants can then later mine from those pores and it'll give it out into the soil. Plus it's made your soil more friable. So that's one that you really want to do if you can. Now this is different than charcoal briquettes. This is what I call virgin and you can buy that for, you know, barbecuing and things but it's kind of expensive. So it's much better to make your own, get to a place where you can do that with a friend or, you know, family member. Okay, the last thing we're going to talk about is the use of cover crops. Now in the very beginning I mentioned briefly on that about, you know, grass because grass is a cover crop and it's very useful. In fact, I want to explain how useful grass is on building soil and building biomass in the soil. I kind of hinted to that because I said since I'm leaving my grass clippings right where they are on the lawn, I have sprinklers that are, you know, recessed down in there two inches and the places where you get into the valves, you know, they're getting sunk down in there. I need to dig them up and raise them up to the surface so they don't disappear on me. So I'm building soil and a lot of what's going into the soil is the carbon. Now there's other nutrients that are going into it also but it's the carbon that's in the grass clippings and the wood chips and things like that. But you can also plant other, I'm going to say one more thing about grass because it's so important when people, when we have this thing we talk about, you know, we need to, you know, get carbon dioxide out of the air and all those things. Yeah, we've got a problem there. What's the best ways to do that? Well, a lot of times it's talked about trees and trees, by the way, are really good for that. But what's the life of a tree? 50, 60, 70, 80, 100 years, 200 years, whatever it is, it's a very slow process. So we store carbon in the soil and in the ocean. That's our two biggest carbon where we lock away some of this carbon if we want to get it in there and we like to have it in the soil because that will help to enrich in the soil so it produces better. Now in this country, you realize that you remember all the stories about in the Great Plains where the grasses were so deep and the buffalo and all these things and they talked about the grass being as high as a horse's shoulder, massive grass fields out there. And then the soil was so rich when they plowed the grasses, then they have 12 feet of topsoil, dark brown, rich topsoil. Where did it come from? There were no trees there. There wasn't a tree any place around there. What they had was they had grass and they had buffalo, herds of buffalo. So there's a whole process. You can look at what Alan Salvery teaches and what Joel Salatin and others do about how we get carbon into the soil, enriching our soil, and that's using of grasses that are then being grazed by herds. And what it is, is crowd herding where they're all crowded together like the buffalo was. They eat the grass and then since they've got the top off the grass, they have to move on because there's nothing to eat. And or also the wolves and mountain lions and things pushed them on so they moved on. They left that grass alone. They didn't stay there long enough to kill the they moved on. Now understand what grasses do. The amount of grass that you have above ground, you have a root mass to equal that under the ground, down in there in depth. So when you have grass that's very tall, you have actually roots that go very deep. When you clip off the top of that with a mower, or better yet with a buffalo or a cow or a sheep, and you clip that top off, but don't nip it right to the ground, then what happens is the root dies back because there isn't a top to support it. What's that root made mostly of? Carbon. It pumps carbon into the soil. So now what you have is a carbon pump that's operating on a very short cycle. It may be pumping carbon into the soil twice a year, maybe three times a year, depending on how it's grazed and managed at least once or twice a year versus a tree that will do that. But now the tree has to grow for 50, 100 years or what have you to get some of this into the soil. We can do it two or three times a year with grasses by mowing them, by grazing them in particular, because when the animal grazes it, it eats the grass, it converts it into something we can use, milk, flesh, whatever it is. And then what does it do? Well, it leaves something behind. It's urine, and it's cow flops that fall out there, the buffalo chips, they tromp on it, and they work it into the soil, they move on. Now you've just nourished the soil and we've pumped more carbon into the soil. So you want to consider doing that yourself on your property with the, I'll just say grasses. The grass will do that pretty good. Now, one of the things I do is when I show pictures on my lawn, I have fields of dandelions, all these nice little yellow things. And the common American thinks, oh, that's terrible, dandelions, look at those little yellow things. My neighbors are going to think I'm some kind of a slob. Okay, I'm a slob. I grow dandelions. Now, what you start to understand about dandelions is, don't poison them, because now you're poisoning the soil, you're poisoning the life in the soil. So when we're talking about cover crops, it's like, don't kill the soil with herbicides, pesticides, and things like that. In the areas where my soil is getting to be very deep and getting to be very rich, I don't have very many dandelions, there's just a few. In the very poor soil, the dandelions are thick out there. Great. What are they doing? They're pumping carbon into the soil. They're also providing some leaves and some blossoms I can eat. And the other thing they're doing is, in the spring, what's so important about the dandelion line is, that's the first flower that's up to feed the bees that are hungry, the pollen and the nectar. So I leave them there, I let them go to bloom, look like some kind of a reprobate out there. I got bees all over my yard, because once they're used to coming to my yard, when my fruit trees are now in blossom, I'm going to go out there and mow the dandelions out there, and the bees are going to come looking around, what do I have to eat? Oh, I see trees over there. So they'll go over and pollinate my trees. So I do it as a way of using nature to, and not trying to fight against nature, let it do its job, because dandelions are actually a good cover crop, and there's some food and nutrition and things in them. They won't be there forever. So grass and all of its grass cycle is very useful. And if you're able to, I'll say, borrow a goat or a sheep and let them mow your lawn and eat it, and poop on it, and then move on, then that's better than mowing the lawn, quite frankly. Now, other cover crops, you might want to put in some of the legume type things in an area that you're going to expand your garden into. I talk about this natural grass that I left out there. Well, I came in and I just kind of tilled up the grass. Now, that won't kill it, but it'll give it enough to get, chew it up enough to let the other thing get started, like alfalfa, or like mung beans, or some other beans that are legumes, because they put, they are nitrogen fixing plants, they want to put nitrogen into the soil. So I'm converting a lawn area into a garden area, so I'm going to put in a legume type plant, let it grow for a year, maybe two, depending on how soon you want to get in there. And so it'll be building the soil, breaking the soil, getting nitrogen in the soil, and then I'm going to go in and I will convert that into plants that I will grow. So adding them in does several things, getting carbon into the soil, getting nutrients into the soil, killing out some of the weeds in there, because some of these are really good at choking out weeds, but it's all about building the soil. Everything that we've been talking about is all aimed at building the soil, because that's where your life comes from, in one form or another, it comes out of the soil. And if you really need to eat out of your garden, in other words, food is too expensive, because prices have gone up, energy or whatever, it is just too expensive, or you don't have as much income as you had, you need to be gardening and growing things, and also getting some animals in there, so that you can be producing the food that you need, so you don't have to go stand in a soup line, you know, just grow it yourself, take care of yourself, save the money, and then now you're preparing yourself. Because your future food is in the seeds that you store, and or the seeds that you harvest, that's your future food storage, in the form of a seed that multiplies itself. I did a little calculation one time on some of the corn that I was using, if I plant one kernel, and it grows, and I get this this plant that puts out four ears of different corn in there, I got a multiplication of approaching a thousand to one. That's a pretty good return on your investment. And you can do that with hundreds of things, with with amaranth and other kinds of things like this, those little seeds, they multiply themselves, but what you have to do is feed those seeds, provide them with the water, the nutrients that they need, not to plentish your soil, be building your soil, so that's the whole process, the whole discussion is about take care of your soil, nourish your soil, build your soil, because life comes out of the soil, it doesn't come from any place else, it's all in the soil. So that's some of these tips and hints, real quick, that I think are extremely important, and then you can dig into them real deeply into some other classes, and just go google biochar. You'll have 300 hours worth of stuff to watch there, and some of it's very very in-depth, and that's great. I just want people to understand how important it is to make it, if you can, be getting that into the soil, and some of the waste wood, the construction lumber that's around that you can find, turn it into something your plants can use, and get it into your soil, so your soil is richer, and it holds water better for us drought people here, so that whatever rain falls on it is going to be sucked up into the soil, and it'll be available for my plants. Then of course, lots of other topics about how do you come up with other nutrients that you need, where do you find things, what are some of the crops that you grow, and I'll just tell you, root crops are one of the best things you can grow, because most of them are very drought tolerant, and frost tolerant, and so there's lots of discussions about getting food out of the soil with the type of plants that you grow, how you grow them, where you grow them, how you save water, how you build the soil, all those things, so it's a wonderful topic, and I appreciate the opportunity to share some things that this old buzzer has learned over a few years, trying to understand how can I help myself, my household, and how can I help other people around me, because the one thing that I've known for years is I am not prepared until my neighbors are prepared. Exactly. I need to help them, I need to encourage them, I need to inspire them to get prepared, because I can't feed them. I can't do everything for them. I can't. Only they can do that. I can help them now, and in the future a little bit, but I can't feed them. I have nine children, and 29 grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. They probably all won't show up, but that is my first and foremost responsibility is to them, my stewardship, then my stewardship is to my neighbors and my friends, so that's why I do what I do, why I teach the classes, why I have the website, and all those things. Well, this has been truly enlightening and exciting. It goes right along. We are encouraging everyone to grow a victory garden, whatever that looks like. For some people, that might be a pot on their patio or on a balcony, or others that can do more, but this is so important. This is an important topic right now, and this has really helped enlighten us and enlighten our audience about things that they can do, so thank you so much for being here, and now your website is jimsway.com. Yeah, jimsway.com. Tell us the resources that you have available there, and their options for getting good information. Okay, well, go to jimsway.com, j-i-m-s-w-a-y dot com, and you'll find, I have videos there. I have some of the classes. I have what's called library. Just look at the top library, and there are dozens of classes. When I'm doing my Zoom classes and live classes, as fast as I can, I get them edited, published, and put in there, so you can learn from them. The other thing that you can do is, I publish weekly a newsletter. It's called the Provident Living Times. Mostly, what I use the newsletter for is to tell people about the upcoming Wednesday night class, because I do a class every Wednesday, and usually for an hour, I'm doing kind of like two half-hour classes in there, so I can publish shorter classes, and get them on my website, and then Saturday mornings, I do a Q&A, just open forum Q&A. Come ask questions about the past classes, or anything else you want to know about, and if it's something I can answer, I'll do that, or I'll try and steer you to where you can get an answer, so twice a week, I'm online on Zoom, and there's no cost for any of those things. Now, to help pay for some of this, and some of the expenses of what I'm doing is, I have a, it's called Members Only right now. I want to change the name, because I don't like to exclude that one. It's Supporting Members. People want to support the work, and the cause that I'm doing, then they can subscribe to that, and that gives them another library, where there's some very, very, I'll say exclusive, or some very in-depth classes on cold weather clothing, and winter, and being prepared to deal with winter, because most people, what are you going to do when you have no utilities, and you don't have a wood-burning stove, and what have you, what are you going to do? Well, it's actually pretty easy, as long as you're prepared to deal with it, and you understand you can. And then, that's where I'm publishing my classes on sanitation. I used to sell DVDs. That's terribly expensive, and I just can't afford to do that, so I'm not publishing everything online. So, my four-hour DVD set on sanitation, I'm editing it, and putting it in there, so subscribers can get it. I've got five hours on water, on building community. There's some 30 hours of classes in there that go even deeper than what I'm doing in the library, and that is $5.99 a month. I wanted the cost to be so low that you go like, well, I'm not going to use it all that often, but hey, six bucks, I'll stay, and become a supporting member to help me do this, so I can afford what I really need to get it. I need some help to take care of the office work, because I spend most of my time in the office doing things that don't publish classes. I understand. But I love it. I mean, it's fun, and especially, I really enjoy my Saturdays when people come, ask their questions, and they're trying to learn. They're trying to understand, and even people who are brand new beginners, please come. People that have been doing this for 30 years, please come, because you'll probably teach me something. So, I want them to come. We're continually learning from our audience, so it is. It's a two-way process, so yeah, wonderful. Anyway, that's what I offer. The published classes that are online, the newsletter that'll bring people to the Wednesday class, and the Saturday class, and then my supporting members classes, where I have some other things that are just not going to be available anyplace else. So, I look forward to helping as many people as I can. I'd love to help you folks, because you're doing a wonderful service out there. Keep it up, please. Thank you. Thank you so much. We're so glad to be part of your supporting members. Yeah. Yeah, when we found out about it, I'm like, yeah, we got to do it. Absolutely. We appreciate it, and I appreciate when other people say, you know, go join, you know, just help, and so that's a big help. It's growing slowly, but it'll get to a point where it'll be really self-sustaining, and then I can hire some help and get more done faster. Yeah, well, thank you so much. We are so grateful that you were able to come and join us today and teach us some good stuff, and we would love to have you back. We will do that. I'd love any time. Tell me what you want to talk about. If it's something I know, I'll talk. Excellent. And if I don't know anything about it, I'll make something. No, I won't make anything. I don't believe in doing that, but I'd be glad to support any way that I can. Thank you for the opportunity very much. Thank you so much. And for our audience, the question of the day, what are you doing so that you can become a better gardener, so that you can produce your own food? Comment below, and thank you for being part of the solution. You know, I tell people what you need to do is go kill a bunch of plants. You need to make a bunch of mistakes. Yeah, that's how we are. Just make some mistakes. People say, I don't know how to do this. How do I garden that? And they all die. Well, keep killing them until you figure it out.