When you look at the incredible landscape on planet Earth, all the different terrains,
the varying soil conditions, the awesome water features, oceans, lakes, rivers, streams,
the waterfalls, the different climates, the huge amounts of plants and ground covers,
the requirements are so varied.
Can one fathom how big a project that was?
When God designed the Landscape Project for planet Earth, he was so genius, he designed
it in such a way he would never have to show up to work.
It is completely self-sustained.
My name is Paul Gauci, and I was raised as a gardener.
My parents grew all of our food in Los Angeles as I grew up, and I remember as a five-year-old
kid, my dad on Saturday morning waking us up and saying, well, we've got to head off
into the horse stables and get some horse manure today.
So we went down to a rental yard and got a trailer and went to the horse stables and
loaded up manure and came home and spread it out in the garden and spaded it in.
And as kids, we wore shovels out, spading in heavy clay ground, you know, mixing soil
and having a garden.
It was wonderful growing up, because is there ever any time we were hungry, we could go
outside and pick fresh vegetables and fruit all the time, and just down in California
there's nothing you couldn't grow, so we had it all year long, so it was really great.
And so as I started to, you know, grow up and I got married and I had some children
and I decided, you know, Los Angeles is no longer a place fit for human habitation as
far as I was concerned.
It was getting really crowded and smoggy and just not safe.
And so I thought, I want to go move to a place where I can continue to do this and grow fresh
food for my family, have clean water, clean air.
So we came up here to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, we have a beautiful place.
But we built a house and we faced a real challenge.
We drilled a well at 213 feet and got half a gallon a minute.
If you're doing the math and thinking about that, that's not enough water to do a garden.
I'll never forget as long as I live, it was August 1979, you know, it was a great year
to build a house, didn't rain all summer, but boy in August, all this grass was totally
dead, the road coming in was all dust.
I'm looking at that and saying, God, how am I going to grow fruits without water?
And it was so incredible.
I hear inside, he says, well, you're looking at the wrong thing, turn around and look at
your trees.
And I pushed enough out when I built the house that I knew they had shallow roots.
And I says, you know, God, you really have my attention.
If you can show me how you do these without irrigation, I can do an orchard.
So I went out to the woods of the fork and I started moving this material underneath
the trees and I was totally amazed.
This beautiful, soft, black, damp, incredible compost.
When I saw that, I says, well, I can do this.
This makes sense.
So I started planting the trees out there and at that time I had, you know, straw and
sheep manure.
Now I'm using wood chips and it's been amazing.
This orchard has been here 31 years now, it's never been water fertilized once.
It goes through droughts or whatever and it's just every year it gets better.
As I was doing this orchard, experiencing these incredible results, because I was a
creature of habit and because our nature is to do things as we're taught and not to inquire
from God, I says, okay, God, thanks for the help, but I can handle this on my own.
And so for, I think, probably 17 years, I was out here diligently rototilling, hauling
in organic material.
You can see a place over here, my major rock pile, this is my altar.
This is where all the rocks that came out of my garden over here.
And I'm just doing this stuff and I'm feeling, I'm on this treadmill, just running in place
going nowhere, feeling like, how am I going to keep up with this?
You know, every spring the ground is totally muddy and wet.
When I tilled it, it turned to weeds in five to seven days, solid green with weeds.
I planted things three feet apart so I can rototill with it, you know, do the weeding
with the tiller.
And it was just labor-intensive.
And one day I got out of my orchard, I don't know what motivated me, I got on my knees
and I started moving these wood chips.
And I'm down to my elbow in this beautiful black compost.
And I got up and started screaming I was so angry.
I said, there's something wrong with this picture, I have been killing myself to get
this in my garden, I don't have it.
I didn't do anything here.
And I hear inside, well, it works in your garden the same way, he didn't ask.
I was so angry.
I threw that tiller away and I started covering my garden with wood chips.
I always say to people, the greatest gift God would give me was that lousy well, because
it opened me up to Him and to show me His incredible work in creation.
I've been a gardener for 55 years, and I've done tilling, done all that stuff.
And it's so amazing now, my only tool is a rake.
And it's just so easy and so simple, and the production is so superior to what I ever had.
Every tire of searching, oh, there's got to be a better way, so you lift your hands
up and pray.
Father, can you hear me?
I'm listening to you now.
I'm ready to trust you, to lead and guide you somehow.
The Creator of the universe concerns Himself with me.
He's passionately revealing His culture of love and of peace.
To Eden, Eden, Eden is the place of freedom.
Your yoke is easy, your burden is light.
Help me to lean on you the rest of my life.
To Eden, Eden, Eden, Eden is the place of freedom.
When I saw how easy and simple this was, I says, God, where do we lose it?
Why are we doing this?
And it was so interesting.
It took me right back to Genesis in the beginning.
And if you look in the beginning when Adam and Eve were in the garden, they had this
beautiful, relaxing day in the garden.
And every afternoon and evening, God would come down and walk with them to the garden.
And I'm sure as He walked through the garden, He would just share with them things that
they saw in the garden that day about Himself.
Did you notice this?
This is my character.
This is all about me, kind of thing.
And I'm sure they just had this incredible time, totally relaxed, no stress, every day.
But when man sinned, the Scriptures said things are going to change.
And the wording is, by the sweat of your brow, you're going to raise food.
Thistles and thorns and weeds are going to compete with you.
And the next verse says, and man began to till the soil.
You see, man never cultivated in the garden.
He tended the garden, but he never disturbed the ground.
And when man got disconnected from God, he began to till the soil.
The whole issue is so very simple.
It's all about cover.
Nowhere in nature where man has not been do you ever see exposed dirt.
That only happens when man comes and takes the cover.
Everywhere in nature where man has not been is either covered with needles and leaves
or grasses, but the ground is covered.
And the reason is because the ground is a living organism.
And as all living organisms, such as ourselves, we have skin to protect us.
The animals have fur.
Fish have scales.
Birds have feathers.
And the soil is a living organism.
And God has designed it and made it so it's always covered with something.
And when you take the cover off, it becomes vulnerable and it gets lost.
This is the thing that amazes me about us as intelligent human beings, how we don't see it,
because we've been experiencing it for thousands of years in a negative way.
We're all around us, all through creation.
Everything's just growing beautifully with no work.
And we work hard to fail.
When we came to the Midwest here 200 years ago, there was 8 to 12 feet of beautiful topsoil.
I mean, gorgeous stuff.
And if you've ever flown across the Midwest and you look down at the ground, it's almost scary.
It's just parched, cracked, hard, totally desolate.
It almost looks like desert.
There's 8 inches of topsoil today because it's all blown and washed away.
And they're so cultivating.
This is not working and we're losing topsoil.
And topsoil in nature, it takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil.
I mean, it is criminal and incredibly devastating, what we've done to the planet.
The soil conservation people in the Midwest will tell you that it's okay to lose around 4 tons of soil per acre per year.
I don't believe, I may be wrong, I don't believe that soil is forming at the rate of 4 tons per acre per year.
When the soil erodes, the organic matter erodes and all the nutrients that were in the soil erode, and that's just gone.
It's just a resource that isn't there anymore.
I found that if I try to help nature at any level, I mess it up.
My approach now is just to look what it does and just talk to me.
Show me what you're doing because I want to copy it because it does it the best.
I have two properties that I'm doing this on.
This one here, the ground is clay and rock.
It would be impossible to farm. It would be considered from the agriculture point of view as marginal soil.
The other place I have is 80% rock, totally gravel pit.
You couldn't possibly till it. You couldn't possibly cultivate it.
And in both of those places, I'm experiencing the most incredible, beautiful gardens.
I love that scripture where it says,
As we behold the Lord, we're being changed from glory to glory.
And I find that anything that comes in contact with God gets changed, including clay and rock and rock.
It's just so awesome to take people and take them back and show them my incredible ground.
You can't even break with a pick and walk on this stuff. It's totally buoyant.
Everything's just growing great, you know.
And I didn't do anything. I just put the cover down and God does it all.
Whatever organic, natural thing you have at your disposal, it will work.
And I've used everything from straw, grass clippings, leaves, animal manures, rocks.
But having used them all, I come back to wood chips and I see where it's been for a while and what it's done.
It is my favorite. It just is the nicest thing to use.
First of all, when I speak of wood chips, I want to delineate between wood chips
and other things that people put in the same category, such as bark or shavings or sawdust.
Wood chips, when I say wood chips, I'm referring to branches that have been chipped.
Branches of trees, which is about 90% needles and leaves, that have gone through a chip or a tub grinder.
You want to get it from the source, you know, either a tree server or someplace that has a good amount of it.
Because the bags are just too small and too expensive.
If you live in an area where you have local tree services, people that are trimming trees or taking them down,
I would just get in the phone book and look for those kind of people and that would be a great source.
In most cases, to them, it's something they've got to get rid of and so they're looking for places to get rid of it.
So it shouldn't be a problem.
Just this whole area gets filled. Just pack it in tight.
As much as you can bring, man, I'll use it.
In the local area here, we remove hazard trees and trimming and view removals and different things to enhance views.
So this is a byproduct of that operation.
We've dumped chips here for Paul for a lot of years.
About 12.
12? Okay, 12 years.
In Paul's case, this is so handy for us because the location, it actually saves us time.
So we give it to Paul.
It's handy for us to get rid of the material.
So it's getting more and more common for people to call us wanting chips.
The thing about mulch is pretty much in every municipality, there's mulch available.
Because someone's chopping a tree down, somebody's cutting trees, somebody's shredding leaves.
If we can try and get things that are as close as possible to us, maybe it's your neighbor that's chipping up a tree next door,
then that's the best product for you.
I'm an arborist. I prune trees for a living.
And for me, it's an art for me, and I'm so thankful to be able to do it because it's a gift that I have
and it's just something that's just so pleasing and so pleasurable.
You know, it's interesting that the scripture talks about pruning.
In John 15, Jesus is saying that,
I am the vine and you are the branches.
My father is the husband and he's the one who maintains and cares for it all.
And it goes on to say that he prunes the trees for what purpose?
So they'll bear more fruit.
And I love these things about God because they're so much bigger than I.
When I try to figure that out, it makes no sense.
If I'm cutting a tree, taking branches off, it would make sense to me from a mathematical point of view,
I'm reducing its capacity to bear fruit.
But God's saying he prunes so it'll bear more fruit.
And it's just this incredible, beautiful illustration of God, how his whole principle is in giving you receive.
And so with a tree, when you're taking stuff out of it and it's giving of itself,
that process develops it and strengthens it and encourages it to produce more fruit.
And in my experience, I totally see it.
People will come to my orchard here this time of year and you can't even walk through it.
And they'll come after I prune it in January and they'll say,
what happened to your tree? Is there a naked?
I mean, what did you do to them?
I say, well, come back in September.
They'll be all touching.
And I'm just basically making room for them to fill in.
And they just produce so heavily every year.
And it's amazing how much comes out.
But they come right back and produce tremendously.
And I'm finding, I always tell people, if you want to treat a girl,
the most similar thing you can do to it is cut it.
Cutting it will way surpass fertilizing, watering, anything else.
Nothing compares to the effect of pruning.
Every time I prune, I've got all these nice, always good branches to chip up and put back.
And every year it happens over again.
And it's just endless and it's totally free provided by God.
Again, it's such a beautiful picture of His character.
My name is Steve Johnson. I run what's called the Lazy Jay Tree Farm.
Most of the farm is in Christmas trees, fruit orchards, vegetable operation,
and then the compost facility here.
I only do yard waste through my facility.
So yard waste that comes in, as long as you've got fairly good green coming in with yard waste,
has the right carbon-nitrogen ratio to compost properly.
I ran a chipper for years.
And you have to pick up the material and put it into the chipper.
And after a while, it's just too much labor and energy for what you're getting out of it.
And so the tub grinder is really a good way to put the material through fast
and you never handle it by hand.
It takes a lot of material to farm with it.
You know what's so interesting about this? Track with me.
I came across this revelation the other day.
These wood chips, when the wind blows, don't move.
And they're lighter than dirt.
Exactly.
You track with that. That's bigger than me.
And I love it. It's nature. It's so awesome how the Creator designed this.
I mean, there's no tilling. There's no digging. This is it.
This is the only tool I need.
Man, it is awesome.
My roses love it.
Everything loves it.
Well, I just went to the place where they make all this good compost and got a nice load of it.
The last time I put this here was about three years ago.
And I think with this application it'll probably go maybe four or five years.
I'm finding that this stuff is like compounding interest.
It gains in time and you have to put less and less down as time goes on.
Look at all the leaves. I just love the color of them and just how succulent and healthy they are.
There it is.
There's two words I want you to think about when you come here.
Sustainable permaculture.
Everything you see here was created in nature for free and it's renewable.
It was for liberty Christ came to set us free.
Everything about God is free and sets free.
And I love that about his character.
And it's so beautifully exemplified and shown in nature.
This is just so freeing.
And I love that scripture where he says,
Come unto me all you labor and are heavy laden and I'll give you rest.
Now you have to ask the question, why do we labor and why are we heavy laden?
It's because of the fall.
He says, Take my yoke upon you.
And what do we use the yoke for?
That's how we attach the oxen or the animals to some device to cultivate the ground.
And Jesus says, I don't do things like you.
Follow me around and learn from me.
My yoke is easy and my burden is light.
And in this incredible environment, in this thing that God has created,
he shows his magnanimous, awesome, giving, generous nature.
And it is so beautiful in comparison to the man approach of tilling and putting back,
constantly being on a treadmill, running, never getting on top of it.
All these wood chips just sit here.
I don't do a thing.
Anytime I choose to plant, put a seed in, it totally thrives.
If I don't use it, it just waits for me and develops richer qualities.
And in the meantime, it doesn't blow away.
It doesn't turn to weeds.
And it just stays.
Conversely, anything that I do, if I don't stay right on it, maintain it, I lose it.
I'm a slave to it.
And again, it's just this incredible quality of God that's just setting us free.
What I find quite interesting is that the issues we have in agriculture,
and I'll just list them, soil preparation, fertilization, irrigation, weed control,
pest issues, crop rotation, pH issues, none of those issues exist in nature.
And what I'm finding at my place, none of them exist here either.
I'm still just so thankful to be set free from that.
Soil preparation, when you put the wood chips down, they never compact.
They're always soft.
Every year I come out to my garden, all I need is my rake and just grate it out,
make a little groove and plant my seeds.
Because the air is always present and because it never compacts, it never has to be repaired.
You come to a place where you've got your garden,
and your garden at the end of the year is all hard again.
So you bring in this really nice organic material, fertilizers, manures, whatever.
You till it in, you've got this really fluffy, nice, aerated material.
You're so happy.
Oh, what a nice garden.
You get out from your rake and you plant, your stuff comes up.
As the year progresses, when you get to the end of the growing season,
that ground is right back to where you started.
It's all compacted and hard again.
And here's what happens.
I use the example of a fire.
To get a fire to go, you have to have three ingredients, ignition, fuel, and oxygen.
In the soil, nitrogen is always present.
That's the igniter.
When you bring in raw material, the fuel, and to get it there, air follows, it all burns up.
You don't see smoke, but it all burns up.
There's a number of different ways to use a material.
If you take the raw grindings and mix it in with your soil,
it'll rob all the nitrogen out of the soil to rot the wood or rot the material.
So you don't really want to do that.
So I tilled in these beautiful potato chip wood-colored orange wood chips into my garden last spring.
And I wasn't too successful.
My soil test says that I'm way down in nitrogen.
And because I tilled those wood chips in, I tied up all the nitrogen in my soil.
But now I know you never till this stuff.
You just add to it, which was the mistake I made.
So by getting the faith back and going back to what Paul has taught me,
I think this is going to work because it just is simpler, right?
Basically, what soil needs to survive is the same as us.
It needs air, it needs water, and it needs food.
That's the basic principle for all life.
And so when you take mulch, for example, which is true in the forest,
because there's not just one grade, like someone didn't go through and sift it
and it wasn't always all coarse material or it wasn't all fine material,
there's all what they have like macropores.
So there's all these different air pockets through the soil.
And so what that does is it keeps the top part of the soil and even further down oxygenated.
There's that oxygen that's available.
The microbes and the earthworms come up into the soil,
and then they can actually deal with that material and break it down.
Normally when people think about mulch, they might think about what they call bark nuggets,
which are just big chunks.
It has to have different sizes of actual material.
You have to have small grades. You've got to have things like needles.
You've got to have things like chips.
You have to have just one standardized size and expect that to do the same.
If we look at what Paul's got here and I dig down,
there's probably, I don't know how many different sizes of chips
all the way down to what the finished product is, which is soil,
or organic material to the point where it's...
I mean, that's what you're going for.
Now, if I took and I multiplied this by a couple hundred times
that's what I was using, it would break down,
but it would take a lot longer,
and the ability right away for it to help out diminishes.
I started off with alderwood chips,
which are kind of big potato chip-sized chunks of wood.
This has been here a year, and it's still...
it hasn't broken down yet,
so I don't think this is what Paul's talking about.
It would have taken too long to break down.
And the other main thing that they're finding with a lot of different trees,
grasses, plants, vegetables, compaction levels,
a true healthy soil is not compacted,
and when it does get compacted it loses the oxygen,
like those macropores we were talking about,
and you get an area where it becomes what they call anaerobic,
which means the oxygen level is too low for the microorganisms to live.
We're dealing, as I said earlier, with compaction here on our farm,
and certainly we're growing root crops to help alleviate that problem.
What we're also doing is adding wood chips on top,
knowing that they're going to break down slowly over time,
create fines, and also work into this compacted soil,
so it's kind of like a passive tilling almost that's occurring,
which is a really exciting prospect to think that we don't need the heavy machinery,
or the heavy disturbance.
We can just keep adding, and it'll work itself out.
I have used the raw grindings, and there's a number of people that do this,
is just keep it on the surface.
You're basically sheet composting, and it's more of a mulch than an additive to your soil.
I have a tendency to compost between ten months and a year.
The compost itself, once it's composted, and then it's a screen material,
you can use that several different ways.
You can plant straight in it, which there's a lot of people that do that,
or you can just leave it on the surface as a mulch.
Compost does a lot of wonderful things besides just nutrient,
benefits in your soil, worms, and beneficial fungus that's in there.
You'll just see the plants just love it.
Fertilization, because of the compost material, every time it rains or you water,
compost tea is being deposited into the soil,
so you have a constant input of fertilization going on.
Just not having a fertilized feature to me is just so amazing,
and such an incredible gift in this kind of stuff.
Last year I had such an incredible experience, a real revelatory time.
I planted a row of spinach in the spring, and it came up really nice, and we enjoyed it.
I pulled it out and planted another one.
The next one came up bigger and nicer than the one before,
and then I was getting ready to pull it up, and one of my neighbors was talking about this black Spanish radish
that was so good, so I planted that for her.
That came up, and she couldn't believe the size and how beautiful that was.
I'm looking at this, and I'm just contemplating what's going on,
and she says, now, God, talk to me.
Every time I planted in the same row this year, each one was bigger and nicer than the one before,
and I didn't fertilize.
This is so opposite of what my experience is in garden.
Whenever I planted something, something was taken out of it, and I put something back.
Here I'm putting nothing back, and each planting is bigger and nicer than the one before.
I hear him say things that are so incredible.
In Romans 1, he says, the invisible attributes of God are clearly seen by the things he's made
so that no one has any excuse not to know God.
So I just started taking it in, and I said, God, what invisible attribute are you showing me here?
He took me to Philippians, where it says, and my God shall supply all your need
not from his riches, but according to his riches in Christ Jesus.
And what he's saying there is that when he gives, he makes no deduction.
He makes no withdrawal. He is the same.
And he says this compost is illustrating that quality of my character.
It gives, and it gives, and it gives, and there's no withdrawal.
There's no negative. It just continually gives, and that's who I am.
These leaves are falling down, and the idea is they're feeding the soil,
and the idea is they're doing, they're feeding the soil back.
So they're done, so at this stage, the chlorophyll is going out of them because they're going dormant.
They're going to drop these leaves that still have nutrients,
and the reason they're changing color is that green chlorophyll is gone, the pigment.
They drop down in, and they're feeding that soil, and they're mulching it by their own.
I mean, we're not coming over here and taking the leaves off and mulching below them.
And if we go over here or we go out in the forest, they're doing the same thing.
So, I mean, they've been developed over these eons to do it, and so, I mean, why question them?
Obviously, that's what wants to happen.
And when you go out, and someone might say, well, that's not true with grasses.
You go out into a grass field, let's say the prairie of the Midwest,
there was grasses that were over my head, but underneath it was mulch from the grass.
You know what I mean? It wasn't just green living grass with nothing out.
There was mulch that all those blades of grass that had broken down fed the grass.
There's nobody that goes out there and fertilizes that.
I mean, that's the thing that people, I say, well, you've got to have fertilizer.
You have to fertilize. I mean, if there is no, you're not taking it away, you know, it's all going back.
The animals were eating the grass, and it was still going back.
So if you can recreate that in the garden, it's the same exact thing.
The leaves come out, they do their purpose, they go back into the soil.
It's really simplistic, and sometimes the most simplistic things are what people don't like to accept as being the answer.
Whenever you buy fertilizers, there will be three numbers or three things that they're analyzing in the fertilizer.
It's nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.
Nitrogen is what gives the green, the good vigorous growth.
The phosphorus is what creates the budding and the flowers and the fruit production.
And the potassium is what gives hardiness and health and strength to resist disease.
And all those things are important to be in the soil for the health of the plant.
Chemical fertilizers, even though they have the numbers that say they're adequate in these features, do not have minerals.
And so the plants that are growing without minerals don't have those in them, so they don't have the nutrient qualities that plants that grow in organic soil do.
Minerals simply aren't there in the soil anymore.
And so it'll take up what it can get, but it isn't there to be gotten.
And so you end up with a fruit or a vegetable or whatever it is that simply isn't as nutritious as it once was when we had more fertile soils.
Just the sort of calcium, magnesium, potassium, iodine, those kinds of things, the things that aren't fertilized typically,
you know, as 30, 40 percent reduction in what they were getting 50 years ago.
That's pretty alarming, which is one that helps explain why food doesn't taste as good as it used to.
It isn't as good as it used to. It's not as nutritious.
I always go to that scripture where God says it's good for a man to bear the yolk in his youth.
God's saying up front, if you're going to have anything of value, you've got to work for it.
But he says if you do it the right way, you want to do it early on, do the work up front.
And if you've done it right, over time it'll produce for you.
And this is what I think is so neat about the wood chips in God's way.
You see, when they came with chemical fertilizers, they told the farmer, you're going to have this immediate lush growth now.
And they were right.
What they didn't tell you down the road using these chemical fertilizers is that every year you had to use more and more to get the same effect and your ground eventually became sterile.
When you use the organic approach up front, it's kind of a lot of work to bring in those wood chips because, you know, you've got to cover the ground.
It takes a lot of cover.
But over time, what I found at my place is that you start having this incredible gain.
Initially, you put a lot down and you have to, you know, in a few years you've got to put it back again.
But I'm finding that each time I put a layer on, it's a lot longer before I have to do it again because I have this incredible base built.
And it's like you have a foundation that's just growing and getting, you know, better and better.
So over time, you're getting a higher and higher yield with less and less input, which is how it should be.
Because you get older, you have less energy, and you want to get return for your effort, and that's God's way.
That's how He is.
I love that scripture.
It says, do not despise the days of small beginnings.
You know, I just encourage you to be patient.
Nothing happens of any value quickly.
Things that are of value take time.
And the beauty of this process is that as time goes on, it just becomes more and more valuable.
So, you know, don't expect miracles at first because it's just going to take a little bit of time.
And as you plant things and you feel they're not doing as well as you'd like, then you can use fertilizers to supplement.
Eventually you won't have to, but initially you might, and that's okay because you've used them anyway before this.
So you can continue to use them now.
Good organic manures, if they're clean, work well.
But as it goes, you'll find that you won't need to use those fertilizers.
And you really have an investment that cannot be compared to what the rest of you are doing in dirt.
You got horses, you get horse manure.
That's a given.
Not too many constants in life, but that's one of them.
You got to get rid of it.
Okay, so what do you do?
We clean the stalls, we take it out, we dump it in a pile.
People want to use it for mulch.
It has to be kind of a superior product.
So what we do is we feed eastern Washington hay.
It's professionally grown and there's no weeds in it.
And that's really important because weeds, the weed seeds will go from hay will go through a horse's body unhatched, undeveloped, and come out and you'll get weeds.
We use fern hemlock shavings so they decompose very rapid as opposed to using cedar, which decomposes or doesn't, you know, very slow.
And it's so simple even I can do it.
You just make a pile and then I don't haul anything unless it's at least six months to a year old.
And our garden up here, our experience has been you can plant right in it, you know, because it's chips that have dissolved as well as the manure and so on.
So we've had really good luck that way.
It would not be good in the garden without being decomposed with something else, you know.
That's a common complaint if you use straight horse manure.
I'll go get some and show you a sample of it.
You can see how there's no manure in there.
It's all decomposed.
And this is gradually decomposing also the same way.
And as you use it, you'll notice that each year the soil gets better, you know.
Especially if you, like Paul was saying, where you put down a ground up wood chips type thing and then cover with it.
It makes a sustainable program.
It's a recyclable thing and then of course the vegetables or the flowers or whatever you have grow.
They die for spring and winter.
You put more on.
It's just a circle type thing, yeah.
And it makes you feel kind of good because ecologically it's pretty darn sound, you know.
Our culture is so wasteful.
And so most people think, well, get rid of this wood chip stuff.
Get rid of it.
You cut stuff in your yard and stuff.
One of the things that you probably know about Paul now is that any waste out of his garden goes over into the chicken coop or into the chicken pan.
And then they eat it and munch it around and then poop.
And then he brings that back over here and addresses it.
I think one of the most beneficial parts of a garden is to have chickens around because the eggs are great.
But you see they deal with all your waste.
All of your yard waste, the expired stuff in the garden, my grass clippings, any weeds, all come to the chickens.
And those are really nice organic products for them that they eat and whatever they leave over turns into what we're going to be exposing here in a minute.
They're out here all day long just kicking.
You can see all these little grooves in here where they've been digging in.
And they're excavating.
They're constantly picking seeds out, any bug.
So they're always working this material.
And as you're going to see shortly, I'll tell you, I've never seen compost so nice.
This almost approaches topsoil.
Such beautiful stuff.
Anyway, I'll just show you how easy it is to get.
You can just see what beautiful stuff this is.
Look at this stuff.
It just won't compact.
I mean, this is the ultimate topsoil.
And it's all just good compost for my yard waste.
I always say that my chickens are my soil manufacturing plant.
The eggs are just a bonus.
Look at this beautiful, fine stuff.
There it is. Pretty quick.
Somewhere down there, there's a soil.
And that's good.
You know, presumably the soil has been protected.
And in the meantime, it's been breaking down and getting a little bit richer with time.
But this mulch that is on top is basically organic matter.
And that's one of the things that we're losing out of our soils around the United States is organic matter.
Organic matter is wonderful.
It holds the moisture up there.
It's like a sponge.
It just holds it there and it just sits there.
The plant can stick a little root hair in the water and it sucks it.
It's just like a straw about this big around.
You know, it just comes up real easy.
And plus, being in contact with that organic matter, it's got plenty of minerals, plenty of nutrients, lots of nitrogen and all that sort of thing.
It's quite interesting.
People always ask me, well, why don't your soils like they tested this?
Well, I never tested it.
I've already seen where I came from.
It's getting so much better that I've just been really happy with my results.
I think this is really neat.
They did a soil test and they were actually able to see that all this stuff in the soil completely is over the top as far as, you know, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium,
which is what the plants have always indicated, which is nice to see that scientifically this, you know, meets the criteria.
It's what it looks like.
Every year in the same place, I get a higher and better yield because the compost is being deposited into the soil via rain and water as a compost tea.
And it's just like the soil is the bank.
And it's real descriptive like compound interest just gets better and better and better.
And the beauty is I do nothing.
Irrigation.
Well, the rain does great as it does everything out there.
Nature does everything with rain.
And so it is here now in the summertime when I'm planting seeds out in my garden because it's dry on top, I'll water initially to get them up.
Once they're up, I stop watering.
When you go to plant and you pull them aside, if they're not wet, you want to water because, you know, seeds have to have damp ground just to sprout in.
And so this, you know, whatever state it's in when you go to plant will indicate whether you need to water or not.
Irrigation is a big issue these days, especially with places where there's not much water or places where there's too much.
Although we're in Washington, the Evergreen State, you know, it's known for having lots of water.
Here in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains, we're getting about 16 to 18 inches of rain a year, which is very dry.
And, of course, that dry season is the growing season as well.
And so, you know, the importance of efficient water use is just, you know, at a maximum.
There are a lot of problems with irrigation.
One is that it's a lot cheaper or easier.
It's a lot easier just to waste water.
Spray the water through the air or dump too much water on the ground and it'll infiltrate.
It'll sort of disappear and so you're not bothered by it.
But I think the last thing I heard was that irrigation on the whole is something like 50 percent efficient.
It's, you know, about 50 percent of the water is getting into the crops.
And now that water is getting scarce and we're running out of water in a number of places around the world,
or actually the North China Plain, for example, lots and lots of those farmers are going out of business every year.
The idea that we can use wood chips and reduce our water use by 95 to 99 percent is just really exciting.
That's something that my friend Paul has proven over the years and something that we're doing here as well now.
Even in the short time, we've certainly seen water holding capacity and growth attributable to the fact that we've heavily mulched a lot of our plants.
You see how it's damp down in here? These tomatoes have never been watered and won't be watered all summer.
You can drive a truck on it, it won't compact, and it just gets better and better and better.
Here, have some of these tomatoes. They're starting to get ripe.
This is what I get so blessed by. Look at this. Look how damp this is.
And this is August. And it's going to stay this way. This will never dry out.
This is why you don't have to water.
Where in dirt, you won't experience this. It's going to be compact on top, you dig down, it's dry.
Look at this beautiful material.
You know, I find this quite interesting. In my experience, you know, I have a place here where I have a pond and I plant my potatoes on them because they like to be watered.
And I find that things around there grow so much better than they do when I water from the top.
And I'm realizing that in the beginning, before the flood came, there was no rain.
Everything was water with water coming up from the ground as a mist.
And that is the ideal way to water. It's the ideal.
I think in Psalms it talks about a tree that's planted by the rivers of water that brings forth its fruits in its season.
Leaf also should not wither and whatever it does shall prosper.
Ever go along river beds or stream beds, you'll see the plants alongside the trees are just huge and lush and just gorgeous.
And that's the ideal way to water is to have sub-irrigation water coming up underneath.
And I think it's so interesting, you know, in nature, you know, the ground maintains and holds that water so it's always there.
It's always available to plants on a continuous basis because of the capacity to hold it, you know.
And watering from the top is so counterproductive in a garden situation because that's just, you know, not as effective as, you know, sub-irrigation or material that holds water so you can just live off the rain.
The rainwater is a superior water. Groundwater never compares to the benefit of good rainwater.
And if you've ever done a garden, you see after it rains, everything just grows great.
Nothing like when you water, you know, so if you can live on that, that's the best.
You'll find with woodchips the incredible advantage is there's no sponge that will hold water like woodchips.
I'm amazed at the water it holds.
And for example, we live in a place where just 70 miles down the road there's a rainforest that gets 15 feet, I'm not saying inches, 15 feet of rainwater a year.
And you walk in the woods, the forest there, there's no water near your feet.
It's not spongy, it's damp, but it's not soggy.
And it's amazing, those woodchips totally absorb that kind of water quantity.
And the other thing that's amazing about woodchips is when there's not enough, it's like, now if you look at my grass out in the front there, it's all brown.
But in the woodchips of my orchard, it maintains the moisture.
And here's the incredible thing about God and his design.
When there's too much water, the woodchips displace it.
And when there's not enough, it retains it.
And at that point, I'd have to check out because that's too big for me.
The idea is, with something like what Paul's got going here, is you're creating a layer over the soil that can act as almost like a blanket for the soil.
So that the moisture level in the soil is staying up to the levels it should be.
If this was blank and there was no mulch, at 9 or 10 there's a lot of runoff.
I mean, there's water, just normal rain is taking any of the nutrients that are above and either leaching them away or leaching them down into the soil.
Where this mulch, when the rain's hitting it, it's stopping right there, it's slowly working into the soil.
The microbes and everything, the bacteria, the earthworms, everything that's living under that is protected.
And then they are slowly decomposing that mulch down into the soil, which is the food for the plants.
You know, water is such an important thing and we couldn't live without it.
And I think it's quite interesting the ratio and how it is on the earth.
75% of the earth is water, our bodies are 75% water, and what I'm finding in my produce and fruit, it's 75% water.
And I'm seeing a real connection here and a real balance.
And what's interesting in plants that are growing in dirt that are irrigated with water, they don't have that water content.
And I've discovered the reason, as we see in dirt, because it's compacted and hard, roots can't develop like they would like to,
and so they're pretty compacted and not very spread out.
But in this environment, when there's so much air in the ground and it's so porous, the roots just spread everywhere.
And because you have this very large root system, it's able to take up all this water.
I've always said that the amount of water in the ground has nothing to do with what's going into the plant.
Because you could have, you know, heavy clay ground, which is what I have here, and I could be watering all day long.
And it's not going to go in the plant because the ground's so compacted, there's no root system.
But in this stuff, because the ground is so porous, I don't need the water at all because the roots are everywhere.
Drawing such a wide area, they're taking up such a huge amount of water, so it doesn't matter about, you know, how much water's in the ground.
It's because of their capacity to take up.
And that's what's so key, and that's what I just find, just such a pleasure.
Anything I pick, you break it off or you bite it and just juice and water just flows out of it, you know.
And that's how it's supposed to be. That's really the design.
And it's just so important for us to be hydrated with our food and to be getting enough water.
And like I say, the stuff you buy in the store just doesn't have that water content.
Oh, this fennel is like, I can't even describe it.
It explodes in your mouth. It's amazing.
But everything, you see all the water in that? It's all about roots.
You know, you've got to water two or three times a week depending on what the temperature is, what your soil is, and sometimes more if you have sandy soil.
And Paul never waters. Never waters. You go out there and it just blows your mind. Just blows your mind.
You see, because the compost holds the water so well in the ground, I don't need to irrigate.
And because I'm not irrigating, it just stays totally weed-free because when the weed seeds blow in on top of these dry wood chips on the top, they can't germinate.
And the other nice feature is when you go to pick vegetables, it's not muddy. It's not got dirt all over it.
It's totally clean because I wasn't watering.
And when you walk on it, it's nice and dry. There's no mud. It's just such an incredible benefit not having to irrigate continuously.
And they notice, like when we started getting some rains, all of a sudden these little weeds started popping up in places.
You see, those seeds were here all summer, but now that it's starting to rain, they're going to come up.
You know, I just take my rake and rake them out. It's not a problem. They don't have a lot of, you know, a huge amount, and they're very easy to control.
But it makes such a difference when you don't have to irrigate continuously as far as your weeding issues.
Weeds? Well, I have weeds. Weeds always happen, but because the ground is so soft and nice, I can just take my rake and just drag the rake through and it uproots all the weeds.
Or if I have to pull them, they pull out really easy. It's kind of fun pulling here because I enjoy seeing the great root systems and just how nice everything does.
And it's great. I call them salad greens for my chickens because they just love it. You know, it's good organic greens, so weeds aren't a problem.
Where in other soils, when it's got compacted, you've got to really work to get those roots out. This stuff, they just come right out, so it's much, much easier.
Weeds, I didn't say that weeds come up really good, too. If you have weeds, they just...
It's easy to weed.
Easy to weed, right?
Easy to pull the weeds once you have a lot of this material.
It's super easy to pull these things out. It makes your weeding a whole lot easier than what you're used to.
But yeah, I mean, look at all those roots, too. I'm used to things just breaking right off.
It's amazing. Revolutionize weeding your garden.
Isn't that great?
Look at that good old root.
So it just makes such a difference when I used to get down, I had to pull weeds and you had to get a tool to get underneath to get the root because they break off.
The blade goes straight down next to the dandelion, and then I just simply pull back like that.
You got that?
No, I got pretty much all of it.
When I used to till this, it was just solid weeds. It blows my mind, because it's just like, this was the same space.
So the same wind and the same seeds are blowing across here, but because of the cover, I don't have the issue.
This is one of the reasons why organic food is so expensive, because of the incredible labor-intensive weeding operation.
They have to get down and pull as easy because they can't use herbicides.
This is a beet bed and highly intensive labor to weed it, just to pick out the weeds and thin them, because there are weeds out here.
We take about four hours per bed.
A three foot by thirty foot carat or beet bed takes about approximately four hours to weed.
I was for years in God's face trying to figure out what weeds are all about.
I said, how come I have weeds here? I've done my best to get under the earth. How come they're here?
And he came back so fast it almost scared me.
He says, they're not your weeds, they blew in for your neighbors.
They're cultivating and they're creating weeds and the seed blew into your place.
And you'll always have that as long as they do this kind of a thing, you know.
And I love that scripture, how it says that all of nature groans and travails, waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God.
You see, they know we're disconnected.
And they're trying, they're groaning and travailing, trying to save the earth because we're just totally disrupting it and losing it all.
And I think the answer is so beautifully described there in 1 John 3 where it says,
Beloved, now we are sons of God, but it does not appear we shall be.
But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
And everyone who has his hope in himself purifies himself as he is pure.
I think that's so key because nature is waiting for that day when we'll be all like Jesus.
We'll get reconnected with God and be taking care of the earth as he intended us to.
Occasionally, pests will come in nature and will defoliate a few trees every now and then, but not serious enough that it causes any great losses and nature always overcomes.
I think if you follow organic principles, you're less, it's very rarely that your insect population, your negative insect population gets out of control.
And of course, it doesn't matter if you spray organically, you're still going to kill beneficial insects.
So it's best to just deal with whatever damage you have and move on.
George Washington Carver, when people would ask him how to deal with a disease in their tree, he would say,
Well, you don't want to deal with a disease. You want to get the tree in good health and vigor, and it'll take out the disease.
I think that's such a true statement, and it's so true about everything.
If you'll get a real healthy plant, as I have here, I don't have any insect problems.
If a bug bites into my plant, he drowns because there's so much water there, he just is infused with it.
And he wants cellulose and fiber, so he goes somewhere else to find a stressed, dehydrated plant to eat on because he can't eat on mine because it's too much water.
So if you have a healthy, vigorous plant, insects are not a problem.
As plants became weaker because of chemical fertilizers, insects began to be very overpowering and would take out huge amounts of plants.
And so they stepped up to the plate and created insecticides.
What they didn't take into account was that the Creator designed everything in nature to be overcoming,
and as these insecticides would come in contact with these insects, they would mutate and develop opposition to it,
and the next generation, those insecticides didn't affect, and so it's not a problem.
So they have to keep improving and strengthening the insecticides.
Well, what has progressed to today is that the insecticides are so powerful, so potent, they're killing the plants.
And so what they've done to solve that problem is now they're using genetically modified organisms
where they're changing the DNA of the plant and putting the insecticide into the plant.
And I don't know if you're following this, but this is not going to end.
And it amazes me how people think these days, if something is in a plant that's going to kill insects,
it certainly can't be beneficial for my body.
We have to decide if it's acceptable to take any one piece of the puzzle out and it'll work.
Like GMO crops, that's my perfect analogy for that.
You can't take a DNA strand and start pulling pieces out and putting in different chromosomes
and expect for that to achieve just one thing.
Oh, it's just going to make it resistant to Roundup.
Well, guess what? When you do that, it changes something on the other side.
It's like a bubble. Pressing in the bubble, it distorts somewhere else.
So down the road, I mean, and so I guess what I'm going back to is
we have to keep thinking of a holistic approach on any of this.
You can't just take one piece out and think it's going to be okay.
And the mulching idea is just adding something back.
Several years ago, I read an article that really got my attention.
In Japan, the typical consumer would go to the store, the produce market,
and pay 30 to 50 percent more for vegetables with bug bites.
And their rationale was that this food is safe to eat.
The stuff without bug bites is so poisonous, the bug wouldn't eat it.
And they're right. This is what's so pathetic about our culture.
We're so cosmically oriented. We see a little bug bite, a little wilt.
Oh, don't touch that. That's not good. We want this really pretty good-looking stuff.
But we don't realize that those things are all part of nature.
They happen, and you can cut around it or you can get rid of it.
But, you know, to be so put off by a bug bite
and then to create food that's so poisonous that the bugs won't eat
and then you eat it is not very smart, not very good for our health.
My name is Edith, and I think living here in Sequim now for 22 years.
This is the most beautiful place so far
because you have always that fresh air, Sequim, you know, and then the mild winter.
Of course, the mild winter is also bringing along all the little pests that bother us, you know.
But Paul has found through the mulching you have much less problems with the insects.
Well, the thing about pesticides is that, you know, whenever you use a pesticide,
whether it's organic or inorganic, you're killing good insects as well as bad.
For instance, when you have aphids, ladybugs come in right after to control them.
And so my feeling is I don't want to kill them. I don't want to kill bees.
And so I'll just live with the pests, you know, for that period of time.
And it's not a problem.
Crop rotation. If you look at nature, plants go to seed and the seeds fall on the ground,
and they do it every year. Decade after decade, century after century, it's not a problem.
But when you cultivate and you have exposed ground, you've got to move crops from it
because you'll have disease issues and problems, you know.
I think I've got the classic example down here at my pond area, which is a nice, good, low, wet spot.
I've been growing potatoes now 16 years in a row in the same place,
and they come out nice and clean every year.
Today we're going to harvest the potatoes, and that's one of my favorite fun things to do
because it's such a pleasant, you know, surface to be on.
The potatoes come out so clean and nice, and it's just fun, you know.
And as I'm harvesting, I'll also plant, and my harvesting and planting is all done at the same time.
It makes it so simple and easy.
This is wood shavings and horsemen were mixed together.
And this guy is just looked at as you dig. This is how beautiful it gets.
It's just, oh, this is, you know, if any farmer or gardener would recognize it, this is like ultimate gold.
This is the most beautiful stuff he could ever, ever have.
Look at just how soft with my hands I can move it.
It's just never compacts. It's totally just the best.
See now, this is last year's seed. See how it's hollowed all inside?
See how much, you know, different that looks than that.
That was a seed I planted last year.
And if you know anything about growing potatoes, if you grow potatoes in dirt,
if you don't rotate them, after several years, they'll get scabby,
and that scab will increase to where you can't even use a potato.
This gets so bad.
But my potatoes down at the pond, the girls were here harvesting.
They're all clean and beautiful, no scab.
And I love it. It just makes it so convenient.
pH issues. You know, I have over here in my herb garden, I've got blueberries,
which everyone knows is a very acid-loving plant.
But right next to it, I can grow Swiss chard or cucumbers or anything else.
It's alkaline, and it does well too.
So here I see again all those things that we work so hard to correct.
Soil preparation, fertilization, irrigation, weed control, pest issues,
crop rotation, pH issues.
In nature, it's just all beautifully done by itself.
And so I just enjoy having the convenience, and it just makes it so much easier.
The reason that people don't grow their own food,
because if it's done traditionally, it's just a lot of hard work.
I mean, you become a slave.
I always tell people, when you do a garden, if you don't stay on top of it,
it turns to weeds and you lose it.
It's something that requires all your undivided attention,
so it's very labor-intensive.
People don't have the time or the energy or the desire to be so tied into something,
because it's just such a big...
Where this is just so opposite.
You know, it makes it so simple.
This is why I so want to get this out,
because in the past it's been so hard and so counterproductive and negative,
where this is just so awesome.
We're in Southern California, in the South Bay area of Los Angeles,
in a town called Palos Verdes.
Southern California only gets about 13 inches a year,
even in a normal rainfall year.
And we've had drought for the last four or five years.
What we've tried to do is find interesting California native plants
and plant them around the garden as much as possible,
and then more recently vegetables and see how they do in this area.
We've basically taken the existing soil, which is pretty dry,
a mixture of adobe and clay and a little rock,
and added mulch as much as we can to make it richer.
Certainly we hope that plants will grow more healthily
and more readily with less water, and so that's kind of an experiment.
This is actually soil that we've worked a little bit,
but has lots of hard particles and doesn't work very well for plant roots.
So definitely getting it more moist
and adding some compost on a regular basis is important.
In Southern California, it doesn't get terrifically cold in the winter,
but it can get quite hot in the summer,
and it's definitely a way to hold in the humidity
and to keep the soil from drying out so much during the hot months.
Just recently we learned about a source of covering
through the Los Angeles Sanitation Department.
They are taking the green recycled clippings and yard waste
and those kinds of things and grinding it up and making it available
at I think six or seven different sites around the L.A. basin
at different times during the week and just come and pick it up.
So we've done that a couple of times now,
and getting big barrels full of free mulch is great.
Music
And we're just adding it to the garden in different places.
Once we got our plants, we used both seeds and seedlings in four-inch pots.
We cleared away the wood chips we had laid down on the original soil
just in an area big enough to dig the hole into the existing soil.
Then we put the wood chips back once we'd gotten the plant established in the hole
and surrounded the plant right up to the edge of the stem with the wood mulch.
There's no climate in which using a mulch isn't a good idea.
It definitely enhances the soil, encourages worms and other beneficial insects,
and discourages the non-beneficial insects.
We've been pleased with the growth of worms in our garden.
We have lots more worms just in the last six months
because we've been also working on getting our own compost going,
and that's like a worm farm, so it's great to add those to the soil.
Easy to do, much easier than I thought it was going to be.
I work with middle school students, and it's a really good compliment to me
to go out and just kind of work with plants and be quiet and enjoy watching them grow.
Certainly, I feel that most of my students have never had the experience
of planting a tree or a plant, and they're very disconnected,
so I think that's part of the key and the kind of food
that most of the middle school students I see eat is heavily processed
without much nutritional value.
So I feel that schools and communities need to look at that seriously
as a health problem, as a lifestyle problem,
and deal with it certainly through garden projects.
That's one way so that people can potentially create a small garden.
If nothing else, it's meditative and kind of a deep satisfaction
knowing you've grown some of your own food, but there's a long-term need for that.
And Ron was right. The connection to the earth business is just completely lost.
Yeah, it's pretty sad.
It's important to re-establish.
Definitely need to get back to the Garden of Eden.
Hi, I'm Diane McComber.
Hi, I'm Han McComber.
And I'm Mark McComber, and we are in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
at the Back to Eden Film Demonstration Garden.
When we were asked to maybe help do a demonstration garden,
we had a slight problem. We don't have land. We live in town.
So we started seeking the Lord and praying.
We want to be a part of it and want to do it, but what do you do if you don't have land?
And we started the journey, the search of asking, and it was amazing.
We had four different people that actually offered us plots of land,
and one day Mark was talking to Jeff Wilson about we needed land and wood chips.
We needed a provision.
And we were seeking the Lord, and none of the things seemed right.
There were little glitches with each of them, and we kept waiting and listening,
and it was amazing. Jeff said, I have land. You can use the churches.
And that's how we actually got to have the demonstration garden here
at Heritage Assembly of God Church.
When I was talking with Jeff Wilson about he was asking how to do a garden,
I said, well, first you need wood chips or a covering.
And around here there are a lot of wood chips because a lot of tree service companies
and a lot of people have trees in their yards and woods around.
And the road crews are always cutting the trees for the power line,
so that's a good source for wood chips.
And he said, well, I have a pile of wood chips.
And I said, really? Maybe we ought to do the garden there.
He said, fine with me. So this is where we ended up doing it.
And he did have a pile of wood chips about two or three years old
that they were making a walking path around the property.
So we got permission and used those wood chips, and we laid the garden down.
More wood chips has been a little bit difficult because the tree service companies,
they're more than happy to deliver them if it's convenient for them.
And it just so happens that here, this site, is on the way home of a tree service company.
So if he's got chips, doesn't have another place that wants them,
if the homeowners don't want them, then they drop them off here.
To lay the garden down, the first thing is to go through and dig out all the thistles.
We found even dandelions and goldenrod and things like grapevine can be a problem.
So if you have those things, to dig them out is very helpful.
And then find a source for some newspaper.
We found a source for free newspaper at the local rescue mission.
It gave us all the newspaper that we needed, an abundance of newspaper.
And we laid it out, and we're blessed in that it's wetland down there
and everything just laid down, and that was to kill all the weeds
and the grass that was growing underneath.
And the newspaper, we put it down about two to four layers thick,
and it seems like it really needs to be three or four layers thick.
And where there wasn't newspaper, there were weeds coming through.
And the beauty of it, too, when we laid the newspaper down,
Grandma and Grandpa were here, and Hannah was here, and Sarah and Dana.
It became a whole community family thing. It was of laughter and fun.
We got the newspaper down, and while somebody held it,
somebody else would take a wheelbarrow full or back the truck around
and just take a fork or a shovel and sprinkle it on the wood chips
until we could get the wood chips on there heavy enough.
And once the light film was on of wood chips,
then we could put the covering on four to six inches deep.
The first year is really best.
Beyond that, it's going to make it difficult for your plants to grow.
For not being gardeners, our first garden is kind of rather big.
It's 100 foot by 40 feet.
And again, the Lord just provided a provision for us.
My brother owns a, what's it called?
Front end loader.
Front end loader, and he came, and he really helped us a lot.
Thanks, Steve.
When the sun with your heart
And when Steve started to dig into them with the front end loader,
then the steam just rose.
It was like a cool morning with the steam coming off a meadow or lake,
and it was really nice. It was beautiful.
Thank you!
When the sun with your heart
We were really blessed again because all of our seeds were donated to us
from Washington State, and that was an amazing gift.
In October, a box came from Washington.
Paul had given some potatoes for seed,
and Justin had given us a bag full of four types, I think, of garlic.
And we immediately, in the fall, planted the potatoes and the garlic.
Typically it would freeze at the depth that it was planted,
but the wood chips kept it warmer, kept it insulated.
Almost every single one of them came up.
So, yeah, it worked.
When we were planting the garden, and while things were germinating and coming up,
it was so exciting to see these plants come up,
because it's like we are going to have a garden full.
We're going to have a produce department full of harvest.
We're going to give vegetables all over the community.
And as time went on, it was a little bit discouraging
because things came up and then they stopped growing.
And I didn't know why, so that's when I put the fertilizer on.
And they grew a little bit more, but then they stopped growing
and actually went to seed.
And the reason for that was because we were growing in the wood chips
instead of in the soil underneath.
And we can tell in the places in our garden where the plants,
the roots actually got into the soil versus stayed in the wood chips,
because where they got into the soil, the plants did remarkably better.
It didn't take very long before we realized we needed to do some fertilizing.
One of the organic materials that's the best for nitrogen
and for fertilization with wood chips is dried blood.
And so we put a couple of 17-pound bags on at different times.
And that did remarkable things for the plants.
The dried blood worked better than anything for organic nitrogen fertilizer.
As far as this garden, I think what we would have done differently
would have been just to put about four inches,
four to six inches of wood chips down,
and then part the chips and plant in the ground beneath the wood chips.
And that soil really does get prepared pretty quickly by the wood chips.
It softens the ground up pretty quickly.
When I moved the wood chips off in one area,
I just took my finger and I began to dig.
And in no time, I was down two inches really easily.
And then in the yard, just off the wood chips,
I started to try to dig and I was really stressing my finger
to even break the grass, let alone break the soil.
So it really does make a big difference.
We have a friend that offered, they have half an acre
between their house and the neighbor's house that it's just empty.
There's nothing on it at all. All they do is mow it.
So he offered it, if we wanted to have a garden there
or anyone else wanted to have a garden there,
I have wood chips delivered there, that that would be a site that we could do.
So we set up another garden there,
and the first thing we did, of course, was check for the thistles.
And it has been mowed all along, and there were no thistles,
so we put the paper down.
Then we put about two or three inches of mushroom soil down on top of the paper.
And then once the mushroom soil was down,
we put about three or four inches of wood chips,
somewhat composted wood chips, on top of the mushroom soil.
And then over that, a dusting of less than an inch,
an inch or less, of cow manure that had been composted.
And then that was all that we put on that.
Newspaper, and then mushroom soil, about three or four inches,
and then three or four inches of wood chips,
and then just a dusting of an inch or less of cow manure on top of that.
And when we got done, we felt really good about this garden is done correctly.
It's got the nutrients, it's got the soil that it needs,
and then three days later we planted seeds.
And here it is, a week later they've all come up,
everything is germinated and we have things growing.
And so Father's Day, best Father's Day of my life,
we planted the new garden.
When we planted in that garden, we moved the wood chips out of the way.
We did not plant in the wood chips.
We planted in the mushroom soil that had the nutrients
and used the wood chips as the covering.
When you plant in the soil and they get big enough,
then you side dress them with the wood chips.
So that's what we'll be doing when they get big enough.
So it's looking really good, it's growing really well.
Something that I think it's more about, that honestly really is about the garden,
I think it is to take kids back for a generation.
I do think away from video games, away from TV, away from sitting,
take them back into nature, because God does display himself in nature.
You cannot look at a seed and see the miracle of something coming out of it.
We watched as the beans were coming through the ground
and the seed was still on the sides and the little green plant
was coming out through the middle and we watched it in amazement
and you cannot not not have a lesson about God at that moment for a generation.
Just to see God, I mean that's why I believe God started Adam and Eve in a garden.
We're back to eat an organic garden.
I'm Johnny and I'm five years old.
My name is Hannah and I'm nine years old.
I'm Natalie and I'm seven years old.
And we are the kids' garden patrol.
We've learned that ladybugs are, actually they eat other bugs and they're good for gardens.
What did you find?
A ladybug.
What's your favorite bug?
Ladybugs.
Why is ladybugs your favorite bug?
I don't know.
Because what do they do in the garden?
They eat other bugs.
Whoa.
There she goes.
And these are bad for gardens.
They eat the leaves.
Why do they eat the plants?
Because they're hungry, I guess.
Get off of them.
There's a fat one.
What I like about this garden is that whenever you're weeding it's very easy to weed.
All you have to do is just pull it out and it usually just comes out all the roots and everything.
And we have friends where they had a garden and it wasn't with wood chips or anything.
And they tilled the soil and stuff.
And it was really hard to pull their weeds out.
You hardly could pull them out at all.
And I think that's cool that I could pull the weeds out really easily.
I wish that all children could learn how to do a garden and teach their children when they get older.
I like coming to the garden.
I like coming to the garden too.
I like coming to the garden as well.
We like doing it together.
Bye.
I think that for the future, I mean absolutely, the health benefits of eating what comes out of the garden
is going to be immeasurable.
But also I think that times aren't going to get easier.
They're going to get harder.
And I really feel like the Lord has released this now worldwide,
wood chip gardening, in order to be able to provide for people that don't have the ability to do traditional gardening.
They don't have the equipment. Maybe they don't have the space.
They don't have the understanding of how to do traditional gardening.
And you can just lay down some wood chips this year,
and if it turns out that it's ten years down the road that you need to be able to grow your own food,
that you need to be able to grow your own food, like in the days of the Great Depression,
then your garden is ready.
And I really feel like that's a major aspect of the Lord releasing this at this time.
He's released it in enough time for people to get things ready that they need to get ready.
Don't have to be in a panic about it.
But to be intentional about it and to do it.
Some of the spiritual lessons I think that we learned from doing the garden,
or at least that I learned, was that God always speaks to you in the garden.
It's amazing, the dialogue.
And also being patient.
The garden I think just teaches that amazingly.
And to trust the Lord in the fullness of time.
The fullness of time He brings forth, His glory, His beauty.
Fun lessons like the seeds to trust.
Even when you're planting them.
One of the first dialogues I felt like the Lord had with me, with the seeds,
was that they might not all germinate, but you still plant.
And just trust Him.
There was beauty in that for me, with even just the spiritual connection with that,
was we live our lives, we just plant, and He does the rest.
I think one of the main things that I've learned from the garden
was that we really did receive a seed from the Lord about wood chip gardening,
the covering, and was very excited about it.
And then wanted to just move on it quickly,
and having to have patience to wait on His timing as to where it's going to be,
how it's going to be, and then things coming up.
He plants the seeds, but the things come forth in His time.
And He's put the seed in us with this,
and things have come forth only in His time.
You can't force it.
And every time I've tried to make something happen,
like getting wood chips or getting a vehicle or equipment to move the wood chips,
it's just you have to wait on the Lord because it's His time.
And He made such an emphasis over that,
that it became so clear that if you're working too hard,
you know you've stepped out of His rest.
So just let Him do it.
He puts the seed, it'll come forth.
I always come back, I love that statement of Jesus,
coming to me all you who labor and are heavy laden, I'll give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and come learn of me.
My yoke is easy, my burden's light.
And I find that if I'm doing something that's stressing me out and getting a lot of work,
I realize this is not God. This is not how He does things.
And I just love my harvesting approaches.
Whenever I get around to it, I do it.
If I don't, it's all right.
I have chickens that'll use it if it's gone too far.
And the advantage of harvesting when stuff is fresh and seasoned,
you're getting the ultimate food value.
I think it's interesting, too, how when God's explaining to us how He provides for us,
He says, consider the birds of the field.
It's how they don't toil, they don't sweat, and I provide for them.
Are you not of more value than them?
And then He says, seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness
and all these things will be added unto you.
And we look all through nature.
Everything in nature is not pressured, not under stress,
and they eat everything fresh in season.
It's all there for them.
And they do wonderful.
Where us, you know, the most sophisticated of all the creation, stress out.
And we don't eat good food.
And we buy all this processed stuff.
And we're thinking like, Jesus is trying to get our attention, consider them, pay attention.
This is how it's supposed to work and I care a lot more for you.
And it's just what I think is so sad is that God's made such an incredible provision for us.
He's given us land, He's given us seed, He's given us, you know, the sun, the rain.
It's so easy to grow food.
And it's so natural.
It's what everybody's always done from the beginning of time until the Industrial Revolution.
So we need to get back to the original and do it right.
Ever wonder what's this longing?
Whispering at your heart
For the thing that you were meant for
But you don't know where to start
Father, can you hear me?
I'm listening to you now
And I'm ready to trust you
To lead and guide me somehow
The creator of the universe
Concerns himself with me
He's passionately revealing his culture
Of love and of peace
To Eden, Eden
Eden is the place of freedom
To Eden, Eden
Eden is the place of freedom, yeah
The yoke is easy and your burden is light
Help me to lean on you the rest of my life
To Eden, Eden
Eden is the place of freedom
Apples, the enzymes that cause them to ripen don't happen until seven to ten days before they get ripe.
So all the apples that you're buying in the store, they're picked green and the enzymes aren't there.
They just don't show up. They look nice, they have nice color because they did the nitrogen fix and it looks good.
But the enzymes that cause them to digest are not present and so when you eat that apple, your body has to go salvage enzymes somewhere else in the body to digest the things.
So instead of this being a nutritional plus for you, it acts as a negative and it's not really good.
When the apple falls off the tree, it's usually pretty ripe.
That's what I love about this arrangement. The trees are pretty low to the ground and the ground is soft. When they fall, they don't bruise.
And the other advantage is that in harvesting, you see when they harvest apples all at once, not all apples on the same tree are ripe all at once.
They come on at different times and then some are in more of a shady place so they don't ripen as quick.
So if you pick them all, you're going to get some unripe ones. The advantage of coming out at your leisure when they fall off, they're always ripe.
And so you have all the enzymes present, the full nutritional benefit that was in the apple.
Depending on what it is that you're growing, the nutrition comes with the color.
And that's why it's always been known to eat a variety of colors and have a rainbow diet and all those kinds of things is because there's different nutrients that are more prevalent with all those different colors.
But the color doesn't ever come until it's ripe before it's ready to be picked.
Unfortunately, the society and the culture that we live in, they are picking those things much before that.
Nutrition is there, which is why I believe that a lot of the taste is not there.
The sweetness or whatever that particular plant is prolific in.
And I think that's really a big reason why people are not big fans of eating vegetables in particular is because of the taste.
I always say that plants that grow fast are sweet and tender.
Things that grow slow are tough and bitter.
When I used to grow stuff out here, they'd grow slow, they were tough and bitter.
Now I plant stuff, man, it's up in a week, you know, in just three weeks it's just totally huge and beautiful.
It's just amazing the difference.
You know, I haven't been formally educated and I don't have a nutritional background, but I do have taste buds.
And I notice other people do too.
When they come to my place, I just love to have them sample my food.
And the response of everybody is, that is so sweet.
And see, listen, everything that God created I believe is sweet.
Very sweet.
It was very sweet.
They're so sweet.
And taste so good.
This is good.
That's good.
It smells good.
These blueberries are really, really good.
And my gut feeling intuitively is that the nutritional value of food is relative to its flavor.
If it tastes good, it is good.
If it doesn't taste good, it's not good.
And I come back to this good God that we serve.
God is a good God and he gave all of us a sweet tooth.
We desire sweet.
It's just innate.
He didn't give us that to frustrate us and cause us to be, you know, put on edge and say you can't have this.
He gave it to us to satisfy and bless us because he's good.
And I'm finding that in my garden everything is sweet.
It is all sweet.
And it's so pleasing and satisfying.
And I think I'm just beginning.
I'm just basically on the edge, just approaching how God made food to taste.
And it's just so wonderful.
And I just tell you from experience, when you eat this, I eat this stuff all the time.
I just feel like you're grazing all day long.
You have this sense of just overall feeling good.
You have energy.
You're not stuffed.
You're not bloated.
You don't get tired.
I'm thinking like, this is how we're supposed to live.
This is just right.
And it's a result of eating this live food fresh in season.
And so I can't, you know, come from a scientific place to analyze why this is better than store-bought.
But I'm just telling you from how I feel and the flavor and the comments of everybody else's corn flavor,
that I know this is way over the top.
Everything I've been eating is just delicious.
It's amazing.
It's packed with flavor.
It just feels like it's the best food.
It's so great.
Sweet and juicy.
Delicious.
This is the advantage of not watering.
Amazing.
This is fennel.
Isn't it delicious?
Isn't that amazing?
How sweet it is?
I mean, if you could get that.
Well, what I have in my yard isn't like that.
No, because look what it's growing in.
This is my point.
It's minerals that give flavor to food.
And all of our soils today are so deficient because of chemical fertilizers, because of erosion, that minerals aren't present.
But this stuff is just totally rich in everything.
Well, this is the answer.
Everything, man.
It's like over the top, awesome.
What I find interesting, too, back in the 60s, when they would analyze potatoes, for example,
they had large amounts of vitamin A, vitamin D, all kinds of things that aren't in potatoes today.
And it's because the soil back then had minerals, micronutrients, things that God created,
which aren't in soils today because they're just fed chemicals.
And the organic material's not going back in, and so the soil is deplete from all these wonderful things.
And so the food is.
And we wonder today, you know, why we have all these autoimmune diseases and things that weren't even here 50 years ago.
It's not because our bodies forgot how to heal.
It's because our food is not good.
We're not getting proper nutrition.
And basically today, people are taking supplements because they're malnutrition.
They're not getting it in their food.
And God created all this food for our bodies.
I love Genesis, the first chapter, and I love the way it starts.
And God said, fruits, vegetables, seeds, and nuts, this is what I made for your food.
It is so good to have these vegetables and the fruit, especially the figs, that make you feel, oh, you don't need medicine or anything.
You just feed yourself with good stuff.
And like, it has even a better flavor.
You know, when I have tasted Paul's vegetables, and like so many people, it has a sweeter flavor because it's not under stress.
It grows with constant moisture, yeah.
And this is the beautiful thing about it.
You know, you not only help to make, again, a layer of fertile soil for the future generations.
They have good soil there.
It's not depleted.
But you have also a vegetable that will nourish you.
And it is published, you know, many, many places when you read.
The depleted soil isn't as good, so add your little vitamins and tablets.
Forget it.
If you can do this here, this mulching, with the whole tree gets, you know, chipped up, that's the only way to go.
Yeah.
In some rational future, people are going to wake up and say, this is not only a good way to eat, but it's a healthy way to live.
And ultimately, when you start thinking about quality of life, if your kids are healthy and you've got plenty to eat and you're leaving a healthy lifestyle, man, the rest is just gravy.
Whatever else you do.
So, yeah, I think this has a significant potential to be a big part of the human future.
A lot of people mistake this place as a farm.
It's not a farm.
This is a home where my family lives, where I raise my family, and I did this intentionally to have a place where we could have a wonderful place to live where we could grow all of our own food.
And I purposely, just because of how God's given me this really wonderful revelation of how to grow things, and His whole economy is in giving and receiving, I've just never been in a position where I wanted to sell anything.
I just have no desire to.
And I just have such pleasure in sharing and giving with people because I have such an abundance.
There's plenty for all of us, kind of thing.
It's just fun for me to watch people just randomly come to my place, pick things and walk off, and you can't even tell they were here.
And it's just such a wonderful feeling, you know.
And it's so much like God because it's just His nature to give, you know.
And if we just get connected with Him and start doing things His way, we have an abundance.
He provides us with all we need.
And we have excess to give away and to bless other people.
And it's just a great way to live.
I love it.
I heard about this garden today from my friend Marsha Breese and her brother, Mitch.
So we took a notion to come up here and it's been an incredible revelation.
The gardening techniques are a revelation.
As the owner was saying, they're so simple, so straightforward, so profound that many people overlook them.
Gardening with compost, not using any water, and this is the result, is just a revelation to me.
Do you think that you would ever try this at home?
Immediately.
In about three hours.
Every herb and vegetable that he's grown in this garden is so flavorful, so pungent,
so powerfully flavorful that I haven't tasted anything like it in a very long time.
Certainly not in the supermarket.
And you don't see it this big in the store?
This is my elephant garlic.
This is Italian red.
Thank you.
And I want you to notice when you use it just how moist and nice it is.
Oh, yeah.
Totally awesome.
Oh, it's, yeah.
Thank you.
You know where I grew that?
No.
Not in my orchard, underneath my trees.
Underneath the trees.
This is gigantic.
Garlic is the easiest thing in the world.
It's perfect.
Here's why.
Back in October.
We're amateur gardeners and we're going to implement this stuff.
It all tasted really good.
It's just all outrageous.
It's unbelievable.
I mean, when you drive up, that's why I put myself in front of this.
The whole front row of this orchard is these dwarf apple trees with the wood sticking out the top.
And it's just, it's magical.
It looks like it's right out of a movie.
It looks like, I expected Alice in Wonderland to come bopping out at any minute and say hello.
And I told my son we're going to see a garden.
He's, you know, 10 and a half, going on 15.
And like, oh, do we have to do that?
And he just came up to me a little bit ago and he said, I'm glad we're here.
He thinks it's cool.
If it passes the test with him, it's okay.
I've had, let's see, I've had the, I've had a carrot and I've had some cilantro.
And probably the most shocking thing was the anise.
It's literally sweet at the end of the stem.
The stem's good, which normally would be very tight.
And at the end, it's like eating piece of candy.
It's sweet.
It's amazing.
So he's turned me into a believer.
When I was studying sustainability, I was looking at what is it that makes,
would make a human ecosystem really sustainable?
And Paul has another, besides his farming techniques,
Paul has another quality that really is ultimately the ultimate sustainable value.
And that is he has a big heart and he's generous and he's helpful
and he's helping his neighbors out and anybody that comes in here help yourself.
And that's the sort of attitude, if you really want a sustainable human culture,
that's the kind of attitude that we really ought to be spreading.
If the human species is ever going to be sustainable,
it's going to be because of people like Paul,
not necessarily because of how he farms but because of his heart.
Paul is an incredible individual.
I mean, the things that he has been through and what he does
and his knowledge about the garden is just absolutely incredible.
And he's sent me quite a few people that have used our products
and not only that, he's very honest.
I mean, when he talks to people, it's from his heart.
It really is.
And that's one thing I've always admired about him.
I just think he's incredibly giving in his knowledge
and I love the way that he presents it.
You know, I tend to be a very low-key teacher, instructor,
whatever it is I am with the community garden,
and I kind of feel like I go rah, rah, rah, rah, you know,
and don't have the volume and the enthusiasm behind what I say that Paul does.
And he's just such a gift to all of us who meet him.
He truly is because of that enthusiasm.
It's just wonderful.
I would say Paul's evangelical in both definitions of the word
in terms of his religion and in terms of his expressiveness
about what he believes, both of those things.
He's an evangelist, a garden evangelist.
God is so there for us.
He so wants relationship.
I always thought God put man in the garden for his health's sake,
you know, get fresh food because it's closed kind of thing.
But it's way more than that.
It's about relationship.
And when you're out in creation,
if you're just semi-paying attention to your hearing and seeing God.
I love, you know, Psalm 19,
and the earth shows his hand.
They work day into day out of their speech
and night to night show of knowledge,
and there is no speech or language that that voice is not heard.
And I love it.
When I'm outside here, I just am amazed at the things God shows me.
The thing that I discovered about God is that he's a lot like us.
If you look in Genesis 1 or in the beginning when he created us,
he said, let us make man in our own image after our own likeness.
And if any of you who are artists,
you know how natural it is for you to want to share your art with people
because you're just really, you know that it's good
and you're proud of it and you want to show it to people.
Well, God is the ultimate artist.
He's the master artist.
And he's very proud of his artwork and he likes to talk about it.
And I find when I ask him questions about nature,
he just is right there, yeah.
And let me tell you this and let me show you this.
It's like it's just awesome.
What I find so interesting about God's creation
is so in line with the word of God
because he's the author of both
and the creation and the word are saying the same thing.
They're revealing the beautiful nature of God
and showing his handiwork and they're totally synonymous
and I love it because whenever I'm hearing from him,
the Holy Spirit always brings scripture
that verifies and validates what he's saying
and I know who I'm hearing from.
I love this scripture.
Jeremiah says, call unto me and I will answer you
and show you great and mighty things you don't know.
Then the verse in Proverbs I think is just so helpful.
It says, trust in the Lord with your whole heart
and he helps us to remember where our heart is.
It's not here.
He says, and lean not on your own understanding.
He says, do not try to figure it out
and in all of your ways, and what does all leave out?
In all of your ways, acknowledge God
and he'll direct your paths.
Very simply, God's saying, he says,
listen, when you have issues, ask me
and trust me in your heart.
Don't try to figure it out and I'll show you what to do.
When I come out here in the garden,
I'll have issues and stuff and I'll just ask God.
I'll just give you an example.
One day I had a bunch of people over here
and the guy noticed my potatoes over here
and he says, well, how come you don't heal your potatoes?
In a typical garden or farm where you have potatoes
because as potatoes grow, they expand
and they'll come to the surface
and when they surface, the light will hit them
and turn them green and make some toxic
so the farmers have to keep me healing up dirt
to keep them covered, you know?
I looked at my potatoes and this is,
well, the first answer that comes to mind
is I don't need to but I'm not sure why
so I'll go in tonight and I'll ask my mentor
and I'll get back with you.
So I go in the house and he says,
now God, how come I don't have to heal my potatoes?
It was just so beautiful.
It was like he took me underground
and showed me a potato develop.
He says, watch this potato
because the ground below it's compacted
and it can't move down.
As it expands, because dirt is heavy,
it falls off the potato and the potato comes to the surface
and for that reason, they have to keep healing dirt over it
to keep it covered.
But then your wood chips, because they're light
and they're totally intermeshed together,
when the potato expands, the wood chips just lift
and I love his responses.
And remember, I told you I did this
so I wouldn't have to show up to work.
Healing potatoes is work.
I just started laughing.
God, you're so awesome.
I always tell people when they question
whether this will work someplace
or it may work for you in a small place
which you couldn't do on a big scale.
I say, or they have questions that they can't fathom.
I say, you know what the issue is here?
You haven't taken into account
an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God
who holds all things together by the word of his power.
That's awesome.
When you take that into account, there's no issues
and he's demonstrated.
This is what I love.
All through creation, it's demonstrated.
It's not like this is hard to do.
He's showing us in everything in creation
how beautiful he does it because of his incredible
all powerful, all knowing, totally all present capability
and I love that word.
He holds everything together by the word of his power.
Awesome God.
Thank you.
So you lift your hands up and pray.
Father, can you hear me?
I'm listening to you now.
I'm ready to trust you, to lead and guide you somehow.
The creator of the universe concerns himself with me.
He's passionately revealing his culture of love and of peace
to Eden, Eden, Eden is the place of freedom
your yoke is easy, your burden is light
help me to lean on you the rest of my life
to Eden, Eden, Eden is the place of freedom
Ever wonder what's this longing
whispering at your heart
for the thing that you were meant for
but you don't know where to start
Father, can you hear me?
I'm listening to you now.
I'm ready to trust you, to lead and guide me somehow.
The creator of the universe concerns himself with me.
He's passionately revealing his culture of love and of peace
to Eden, Eden, Eden is the place of freedom
your yoke is easy, your burden is light
help me to lean on you the rest of my life
to Eden, Eden, Eden is the place of freedom
to Eden