So let’s look at “pests & disease” through a little bit different lens for just a little bit here. And with that, you know, my mentor of over 30 years, one of the first things I can remember him saying that I never forgot is that to study and, and just take a look at the native vegetation, the natural vegetation that’s growing in your area, and that’s the best indicator of what you can grow.

You know, it, I’m not saying weeds, grass, things like that. There’s the plant types in that native vegetation growing that that will help you. So, you know, and that’s kind of stuck with me for those of you that are new here. Don’t know me. My name’s Steve Sera. I’m founder of tabletop farmer. I’ve been doing this for going on eight years of regenerative vegetable gardening practices. And I’ve taken those practices from over 40 years of regenerative growing on a large farming production scale.

So I have a little short story for you. So this past winter, my accountant retired and I had to find a new one. And so I’m going through the process of looking for that.

And I find myself sitting at a kitchen table. This gal works out of her home and does accounting services and stuff. And I’m telling her, and it was. , you know, it was into this spring and I could tell her, you know, it, I could say Debbie, I can tell by your grass out in front of your house, that you have good soil here.

Cause she was interested in what I was doing and, and you know, more, I talked the more, she became interested in stuff and she looked at me and she said, yes, I, I do have good soil. You know, she said, when I was in the backyard, I’ve been here four years in the first year I got here, I was in the backyard and I was working in it.

And, you know, I could tell then that it was whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute here. Working in the soil. That’s what we don’t want to do. That’s one of the biggest things for pest and disease eliminating, not, I shouldn’t say eliminating, I should say a solution to helping to control the.  and that’s not working in the soil, not disturbing it by any means, not meddling with it.

So, you know, that, that whole thing, you know, if we look behind me, this, this thing’s really taken off, you know, it’s, it was eight weeks yesterday. This is the July 31st morning, but a little over about, about two weeks ago, this thing got hailed pretty good. Looked pretty sad,  and it has bounced back. It’s like it came back with a vengeance.

See, it’s surviving off the soil that we’ve built in it the last couple years, you know, we had to give it a little bit of a, there’s a certain method that we had to go through the first time when we built this bed and then it was sunken it settled. So we had to do that a little bit again this spring, but this fall, when this crop goes.

We will be ready for planting again. And we will be, we won’t be disease free. We won’t be pest free. You know, we had grasshoppers, you can see some of the leaves even chewed up and some of us from hail, but we had grasshoppers really bet. We still have grasshoppers and I’m still doing natural, safe control measures for the grasshoppers.

And like this morning we go out. I don’t think there’s a grasshopper in here. So we’re, we’re ridding those pests, those pests and, and disease by natural solutions by beneficial factors that we can create around it. So with that, um, I also told you, I was gonna tell you a little story about my grandfather and, you know, he ended up in Western North Dakota, which is west of here 160 miles, 170 miles, and where I spent 40 years.

But nonetheless, you know, He was out in Wisconsin and he slid a plank underneath the rail car and rode all the way out there underneath that rail car to Western North Dakota. And that’s where he got off. What prompted him to get off? Why did he do that? Why did he do it there? You know, there was land that was free all over, but, you know, and I’m, I’m just guessing here, but he knew by studying the, the per I can just picture him laying underneath that rail car, you know, as a young lad bouncing along on a plank, And looking out at the, the lay of the land and looking out at what’s going on out there.

And when he got to where he was at was yep. That train stopped in that town. And he said, this is where I get off. This is good for the land. He went down the land office and I don’t know if they had a map or whatever. You could get 160 acres if you promise to, to, to homestead on it. And he grabbed his steak pin, whatever it was and went out and staked out his 160 acres.

That land is in our family yet to this day. And my dad used to tell stories about it when I was young and we were farming and going by it and stuff, we had other land around it and almost every time went by it, he would tell the story about him and George or him and Joe or whoever, you know, and it was, it was pretty cool.

So, you know, I lived in that era for quite some time. It was, you know, some, some, some things that are just near and dear to me, but the whole point being. You know, there’s another story that follows that I’ll tell in the next email. And it was to a neighbor about eight miles south. That that homesteaded kind of did the same thing.

Can’t say he rode over on a rail, on a plank, on a rail car. Don’t know how he got there, but it’s the same scenario. So with that “pests & disease”, yeah, it’s, it’s a big issue, you know, after a hail. That’s when you’re gonna get disease to come in like crazy, because you’ve opened up that plant tissue and that disease can set in there.

You know, there’s disease all over in the natural vegetation, there’s disease everywhere. I I’ve got some, no dig potatoes that aren’t doing very well, and it didn’t Dawn on me till yesterday, what was going on with them. And it was like you dummy, you know, you knew. But there’s a carrier, there’s a host and I didn’t eliminate the host that was out there.

And, you know, it’s, it’s kind of late now because they’ve infected the potatoes, but it was a learning process that I went through. That’s pretty cool. And, you know, we, we just, we deal with, with grass in this type of gardening scenario, but there’s a way of controlling. It. I’ll be the first to admit I got behind kinda let things go a little bit and boom.

Came up and bit me, because everything’s always wanting to grow. That’s the nature of it. You know, if you have, like I said, a crack in the sidewalk where you can see stuff growing that they haven’t sprayed out if you’re in the city, but if you, if you leave whatever, however, you’re set up, you know, if you’re in a house or, or if you’re in an apartment or whatever, when you go out, you can study the natural things that are growing around.

You go out, take a, Well, and look at the natural things around you that are growing the native stuff. So before this gets too long, I’m gonna end it look for the next email. I’m gonna give you another tip about “pests & disease” that I think will help. So I will look forward to talking to you again soon.

Thanks for watching.