So, let’s take a look at “planting simplified” through a little bit different lens. You know, one of the first things that I remember my mentor saying is that you can study an area, take a look at what’s growing as far as native vegetation, natural vegetation take note to, to what’s grown around there. And that’s your first indicator about what you can raise out there.

And, you know, today there’s, there’s lots of charts. You tip a bag of seed over and there’s there’s charts on the back side of it and whatever for different growing zones. Nope. It won’t work for this one, but it’ll work here and that’s all well, and good. That’s part of the traditional gardening practices.

Quite frankly, I haven’t paid a lot of attention to ’em because I developed a skill of study.  what’s growing in the area. You know, whenever I drive today, whenever I go somewhere, I’m always looking around what’s what’s growing, you know, um, always just kind of moving a little bit of the, the Duff layer, the armor layer out of the way and studying what’s underneath what’s going on underneath it, cuz it it’s always interesting to me.

So, if this is your first time here and you don’t know me, my name’s Steve Szudera. I’m founder of tabletop farmer. I’ve been doing this for going on eight years now. Taking my 40 plus years of regenerative growing practices on a large scale. And I’m breaking ’em down, putting ’em into vegetable gardening to help you to grow the best nutrient dense vegetables.

So the last time that I talked or, or the last email I told you, I was gonna give you a tip in the next one. And the biggest tip I can give. Is just to, well, first I have a little story I’m gonna tell you. And I lost my accountant or retired. So I had to go looking for a new one. And in that process, I’m sitting around the kitchen table with this lady.

That’s been an accountant for a long time. She works out of her home and we were talking and I, I told her, I said, Debbie, I can kind of tell what’s going on out front and that you’ve got good soil. Can tell that by your grass. And she kinda looks at me and I said, there’s a little bit going on over that one corner and whatever, cuz I get, I can see it.

You know, I’ve done this for 40 years. So I, I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on beneath the surface of the soil. And she said, you know, she said, when I moved here like four years ago, she said, and I was in the back, working in my soil. I could tell that it. Very good soil. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.

She said working in the soil, you know, that’s, that’s the number one tip to “planting simplified”. The number one tip is no more working in the soil. No more backbreaking, no more having a compost and bins. Although, you know, it’s, you can do it, but you don’t have to. We can compost. Within the garden, you know, there’s, there’s watering things and there’s a whole host of things that we can do, but most of all set things up so that planting is simplified going into the next year.

So the other thing that I told you about is I was gonna tell you a little short story or tell you, hopefully it stays short about my grandpa and it it’s a real interesting story. My mom. Tell it every once in a while. And she told about how he slid a plank underneath a rail car in Wisconsin and rode out to Western North Dakota in Wisconsin, from Wisconsin.

Why did he leave Wisconsin? Well, you know, they’d wore out the soil. They couldn’t grow over there anymore. And there was abundant lands going west. Everybody heard about it, how fertile this oil was. So, you know, they, they went, he was a young lad at that time. I’m guessing. And didn’t have anything holding him back and.

Took off and slid that plank underneath the rail car. I can just imagine, you know, and I’ve thought about this quite a bit, laying underneath that rail car. What, what prompted him to get off where he got off? Because he got off, you know, around us is Rocky and Hills and everything. Did he know that there weren’t any maps or anything at that time?

He, I, my idea is that he was studying the landscape laying underneath that rail car. And when he saw the landscape, he. Boom. He got off. He went to the land office and at that time they were given 160 acres to settle. There could be part of the incentive, but yet I think he saw because if he’d kept going actually Northwest of there, there’s better land yet up in central, Northern central Montana.

It’s it’s the Lewis town valley. It used to be pretty good. They’ve they’ve worked it to death now, but at, at that point being is that you. He didn’t have a chart on the back of a seed bag to study. He did it with what he knew with the knowledge he had. He studied. He, he knew how to study the, the growing cycle of vegetation and look across and tell what was going on in the soil and by the study and the vegetation he went.

Yep. That’s that’s good ground. That’s good. You can tell and as farmers, you know, it, it, it actually comes pretty natural to us. Now you’re saying, but I live in the city, you know, how am I gonna do that? I, you know, even if you live in a high rise apartment with concrete, all around you, there’s something growing out there.

When you leave that building, there’s something, there might be a seed in the crack of the sidewalk or something, you know, learn to look for that stuff and study that. And that’ll. That’ll serve you with a wealth of knowledge on how you can grow plants, even indoors. So with that, I hope this is helpful.

And I look forward to talking to you in the next email. I’m gonna give you some more tips in the next one about “planting simplified” on what we can do in order to make that process simpler for you. So I look forward to talking to you soon.