So soil life. Let’s talk a little bit about soil life. You know, soil life is the life of vegetable gardening, which is quite obvious, but how do we get there? How, how do we build soil life? There’s, there’s lots of methods out there. There’s lots of books being sold, lots of online information. Everybody’s kind of got their own twist on it.

They sometimes watch a guy that has a lot of experience and then they go out and they experiment with stuff and, but they experiment, they implement a little bit what he did and it works. So they start teaching it. You know, soil life is, is a simple process. But it’s one of the most that I see mettled with people continue to mettle with the process of soil life.

My name’s Steve Szudera. I’m founder of tabletop farmer, and I’ve got 40 years of regenerative growing practices. I don’t know if you’ve met me before, but welcome. Welcome to the tabletop community, the tabletop farmer community. Thank you for, for coming into it. Here’s where I started some of my humble beginnings of my 40 years of production.

There’s a picture of me. I started at a real young age. So how do we build soil life? How, how do we do it? Well, first off we want to do it. So that it’s naturally organic. You noticed, I mentioned naturally not only organic, but naturally organic there’s there’s a big difference. There’s a wide difference between it and soil life.

Soil life is my, my favorite. I’m an expert at building and maintaining soil health. I really that’s what I consider myself as an and I’m consider myself pretty darn good at it. As you can see, you know, this, this is a result of trial and error and that’s what I do. I try things, but this, like I said, this is the river sand project it’s in its third growing year.

And this Regenerative elevated raised bed. We’ve got river sand on this side that we’re regenerating regenerating for ground level gardening. And so it it’s been quite a process. I always said you could garden in the desert. You could raise food in the desert. And I still believe that. Well, the big guy granted my wish and.

Go play with this one for a while. And the first year we had a, a pretty big struggle. Second year came along. We did this, the, the bed, the raised bed, the regenerative elevated one. And we did very well. We did very well and it was dry and it was hot. This year we had plenty of moisture. Every year isn’t there there’s no two years, you know, in 40 years of farming there wasn’t two years that repeated themselves.

And I believe that in vegetable gardening, but we can prepare ourselves for the unknowns. And we do that. You know, soil is always our backup plan. You know, it in production farming, if all else failed, the soil health, the soil life, we built, saved our bacon and. Actually the last five years of my farming, I retired that and do this full time.

But the last five years of my farming, they were amazing. Cuz I could, I was reaping the results of all them 35 years prior. See, when I started out, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I really didn’t. When you, in those pictures, I heard about what I should be doing. Sometimes that’s in vegetable gardening, you know, you go online, you, you hear things you get in Facebook groups and try this, do that, do this, you know, go buy this.

And some of it works. Some of it don’t then the thing I’ve learned is none of it that they teach is sustainable. There’s always a huge amount of labor. That’s connected with it going into the next season. How about if you could have your garden set? So that this fall it’s ready for next year. So all you gotta do is plant wouldn’t that be nice?

That’s what we do. That’s what we’ve done. That’s what I’ve spent the last eight years taking from the systems that I know out on a large scale, breaking them down, simplifying ’em, making ’em easy and being able to apply ’em to vegetable gardening, but I test them. My gardens are not always a beauty. As you get to know me, you’ll learn that, you know, I have a lot of junk sitting around, you know, I have grass that needs to be mowed and whatnot, but I’m always testing.

My focus is on what’s going on with the vegetable garden and how I can make it easier for you. So with that before this gets too long, I want to cut this off, be on the lookout for the next email coming in that one. We’re going to talk about how we can get started with soil life. Actually here’s what I’m going to do.

I’m going to share the number. One thing that I see most in all the, in, in the research that I do out other people, I, I watch a lot of people. Um, I watch a lot what they’re doing and I learn from it and I don’t watch it to condemn them or put them down. I just learn about their struggles. And then I go out and I try to correct them, so we don’t have to, so we don’t have to do that.

And I want to teach you that as well. So with that, thanks for watching. And I’ll look forward to talking to you again, watch for that next email. Be on the lookout for it.