Tour a Tropical Off Grid Nursery Rare Crops You MUST Grow

Alright, this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, today we have another exciting episode for you. Today I'm back again at one of my favorite places here in Puerto Rico, it's the Caribbean Agroforestry Institute here in Puerto Rico, and the first thing I'm going to do in this episode is show you guys the update of how Stephanie planted the tree with me last time, which is the proper way to plant a fruit tree so that you will be more successful. I'll put a link down below to that video if you haven't seen that, so you could see about six months ago when I was here last, and we planted this very fruit tree that I'll show you guys how it looks like today. So let's head in to the farm and check it out. Alright guys, so first up in this episode we're going to show you guys the tree that I planted with Stephanie last trip, which is this tree, it's a Mamesa planted right here, and we planted it with friends. In the video, once again, link down below, you guys all want to watch it, we planted this along with comfrey that is coming up right here, we put comfrey root in like a circle around it. Next up we also put the Siso or Brazilian spinach around it, which is all growing as well. We also, in another outer ring, we planted the turmeric around it. In addition, she also gives this tree a lot of love, she just recently lawn mowed and she put all the grass, the mulch around here, and she doesn't string trim near this tree, she string trims around it, but you can see we do have some random grasses and whatnot growing in here, but it's not a big deal. But you can see this tree is looking really nice, has lots of leaves on it, growing really good. Of course, you could also come here and dig up turmeric, which actually we dug up turmeric earlier and we're eating it, as well as have the Siso spinach and have the comfrey right here below it, as well. Oh, and check it out, man, you can see even the turmeric is popping out of the ground. It's like so abundant right here, the turmeric is popping out of the ground right there. Anyways, this is how abundant and how amazing fruit trees can grow if you plant them right and treat them with a little care, and actually that's what we're going to get into in this episode in a little bit. But the next thing I want to show you is really cool because Stephanie didn't experiment, she planted this mamey here and then just over there she planted another one where she planted it how they normally plant fruit trees, like maybe at your home or your yard or whatever, they plant them by themselves. So let's check that one out over here. Alright guys, so this is another mamey that got planted at the same time and it basically just got mulched around it, nothing else happened. And you can see this one is really not doing as well with all its plant friends. Once again, when you plant plant friends, the plants send roots into the ground and they basically, the plants through the mycorrhizal network can talk to each other. And so this one is definitely not doing as well. So you always want to plant your plants, your fruit trees with friends and they're going to produce and do a lot better. So on this visit to the Caribbean Agroforestry Institute, what I want to share with you guys is their amazing plant nursery. Their plant nursery is used for the installs that the institute does here for people that want to hire them to put in installations and have a ready to go food forest at your home. In addition, part of their non-profit is involved with using the same plants that they grow here at the nursery to put in public food forests that are going to be centers of like genetic diversity of all the edible leafy greens, vegetables, herbs and fruit trees that will grow amazing in this area. Mostly to teach actually the kids and adults that want to learn about growing food and how you can do it literally at your house in a small space. You can have lots of food growing. So they have genetics from all over the world that will grow great here in Puerto Rico. So that Puerto Rico can be more food independent because most of the food that is eaten and consumed here in Puerto Rico unfortunately is basically brought in from off island, whereas they could grow a significant portion of their food including all their leafy greens easily in your yard. And so that's the amazing work Stephanie and the team here has been doing to make all these plants available for people whether they get hired to put them in or whether one of the three public food forests that they will be putting in soon. Alright guys so now we're with Stephanie from Caribbean Agroforestry Institute and we're going to share with you guys her nursery that is right behind us that actually has overgrown her nursery because this is her nursery, she has nursery plants here, nursery plants here and actually she's starting a new nursery because every good gardener will always outgrow their nursery. I mean since I've had property here in Puerto Rico, we've expanded the nursery like by two already, like in a short amount of time because you will always get new plants cultivating new and propagating new different things that you want to grow and share with other people. So Stephanie what's the goal of your nursery here because I know a lot of people watching this they may want to call you, Stephanie I want to get that rare plant you showed in John's video and you're going to have to say sorry I can't really sell it because she has some really rare things that she's not only using for her inner projects but Yeah so the plant nursery started as just something to collect all the edible, useful plants for genetics here at the farm and for use at the school for people to get to know and play with and eat and feed our students and that since has expanded that concept. Now that we do a lot of installs for private clients we want to feed those genetics there but this last year what we've initiated is a really cool program where we're helping people start community food forests, schools, churches, things like that, public parks and so we're assisting with providing different services for that program. One of the main ones being providing these low maintenance, high nutritional value, rare but awesome edible genetics for those programs and a lot of the genetics I have here I brought on the plane or ordered from far away with three cuttings for a bunch of money and slowly propagating more and more but we've got such a great climate here for it. My goal now is to just have enough of those that we can really share and spread around these genetics all around the island for these super nutritious, low maintenance, awesome perennial edible plants. Yeah I mean being here in Puerto Rico, I was actually at Sam's Club and a supermarket last night and people just buy their food there and it's really amazing to me on how few of the items sold the grocery store actually from and made here in Puerto Rico like pretty much like seemed like 90% or 95% maybe a few produce items were grown here on the island but Stephanie is growing all these on the island and eats these foods that you're going to see in this episode every single day and if you guys want to learn how Stephanie grows it well then link down below to the video where I made the original episode, my first visit to Caribbean Agroforestry Institute two years ago now, this is like about two years since I've been here. My second episode I walk around with Stephanie and we talk about all the amazing perennial leafy greens and vegetables you can grow year round that you can just grow as a landscape shrub and literally pick it and eat it so you don't have to go to the grocery store and like yesterday's, I kid you not, three pack of romaine hearts was $8.99 like organic romaine hearts. From wherever. From California, they looked terrible and they were probably at least a month old, I don't know. They were terrible. And so expensive. And so expensive when you could just pick actually better leafy greens that you could pick off the plant and eat and have much more nutrition, much more vibrancy, much more freshness and of course save tons of money so I mean, I mean both of our missions is to get more people in Puerto Rico to grow their own food and like go outside their door and harvest it every day. And those perennial greens like we've talked about in previous episodes and we both love them so much, so nutritious and easy for the struggling gardener that doesn't think they have a green thumb or the working mom who just doesn't have the time, they just make salad on a shrub with little to no effort for years and years and years from a cutting. And so we really just want to have space to make a lot of these edibles available in larger quantities so we can do a whole public landscape with an entire hedge of belay or a school garden so that all the kids can on their way home take a bundle of greens back to their house and not spend $9 on California spinach that's been in a shipping container for however many weeks losing any nutrition it even ever had. And not even to mention like they could take home the belay leaves to eat but also the kids and the adults could come and take cuttings from the plant and literally stick it in the ground and then it grows into a whole new plant like last time I was here I actually got cuttings from Stephanie of Chaya and I took the Chaya cuttings and stuck it in the ground and I come back and now they're actually about this tall now. And I didn't water them, I didn't do anything, the rain came and I mean some of them didn't make it but a lot of them did. And this was like no work. What did I have to do? I've like got up the cuttings and we're stuck in the ground, come back six months later and you know some of them are not alive but a lot of them are. And now I have like leafy greens I could eat and now I could take cuttings from that plant and give it to friends. And then you can propagate your whole neighborhood with Chaya. Exactly, exactly. I mean Chaya's already existing in my neighborhood to some extent but there's so many other plants as well. So Stephanie today let's learn about some of the amazing plants that you'll be putting into these public food forests that people can use for genetic material. You know whether they want to eat the fruits or the leaves especially for the kids. The kids can pick off, we're going to learn about blackberry jam fruits and all these other peanut butter fruits and hopefully maybe some other things. But they could also you know take cuttings and make, grow those plants at home now. Absolutely. Alright let's do it. Okay so we can start right here just because I'm playing with some new varieties of lower growing greens before we've talked about the Bailey and the Chaya and these are all really tall perennial greens that people can eat. But this is a kind of diverse smattering of perennial greens that are more small shrubs or ground covers or produce little tubers. So we've got a bunch of these leaves that are also edible and nutritious. So I'm trialing a lot of these to see which ones are going to be the most aggressively growing because I don't want to really spend a lot of time growing plants that don't want to be here that are going to be challenging for the home grower or for a school garden or something like that. So I'll test them out here, see what thrives, see how easy they are to propagate, see what really dominates and keeps the weeds back so that we don't end up in this kind of like laborious weeding cycle. And then the winners from here will be able to spread to other people. Great. So let's go over these. I'll name them because I know them. Jewels of Au Pair, but this is a special variegated version. This is known as the Vietnamese spinach is what I've heard of it called recently, but Hoang Ngoc. I really like this one. This one's really mild flavored. And then we have the what the African mint that makes, African potato mint makes little potato like tubers and are the leaves edible too? They are. I don't find them overly delicious, but they're not bad either. Then we have the special Siso spinach, but they're the long leaf. Normally they're like more rounded. So that's a special variety. And then we have the Okinawan spinach here that have the purple on the bottom. So this is experimental. If they really prove themselves well, then they'll get moved out to where she makes a lot of them next door. And I'm sure we're going to talk about some of these next. Yeah. So this is the more traditional Brazilian spinach with the round leaf. That one does really well. It does kind of get some pest pressure like a couple times during the year, but you just cut it back. And then it flushes new growth and it's a very vigorous understory. And once a school garden or a home garden has it, they have it forever. And you just stick that in the soil and it'll make a whole new plant and they can share it with their whole neighborhood. So that's what I'm really looking for. It doesn't always stay as pretty as I'd like it to, but it is always yummy. And if it's not very pretty, you can just grind it up in your smoothie and still enjoy it. And it's organic. Don't plant it. We're not spreading pesticides on this. So there may be some bug holes and I'd rather eat something with bug holes than something with pesticides that are going to kill your nervous system. Absolutely. So we like to also do this really beautiful vine, which is the butterfly pea. It makes these gorgeous blue flowers that are edible and medicinal, really good and calming to the nervous system. And they're quite beautiful. They can grow up different kinds of trees and things like that. And kids really love them because when you make a tea out of them, it turns bright, bright blue. And then if you add a little lemon juice, it turns fuchsia pink right before your eyes. And kids in school gardens and in little cooking programs and stuff, just like, it's so much fun. Adults like it too, but it's a real showstopper for the kids. So you can just see different flats of different cuttings. This is a perennial collard green that came from the Canary Islands from a friend's garden. This is a cranberry hibiscus, another one that kids really love. You can do them by seed or cutting. We've got lots of shrubs, lots of shrub berries. So kids and everybody really loves little sweet berries since we want to focus on things that fruit over a long period and have like lots of little daily things to eat. So you can have a whole hedge of Surinam cherry are what these are. You mentioned before the blackberry jamfruit. And a lot of these, while they can grow wonderfully from seed, which a lot of these are, they can also grow from cuttings too. But the Surinam cherry, every cherry then has a seed and they sprout really quickly. And so the kids can eat them, save their seeds, and then take them and spread them around their neighborhood. So these are cuttings of elderberry. So I have maybe five different varieties of elderberry and they fruit beautifully here. They're so delicious. They're very, very medicinal and great for colds and flus and super high in nutrients. And they grow from cuttings as you see. So then I've brought in, you know, one or two of every variety I can find that I think will do well here. And then I grow them out and then I chop them back and take the cuttings and try to make more out of them. So those guys are going. And then in this flat here, you can see the little baby mulberries coming on from the cuttings. So I have a lot of different varieties of mulberries, really looking for those winners that are easy to grow here. And they go from cuttings as well. And you can see they already, the cutting already wants to make its little mulberries. We've got some cuttings of some Malabar spinach in here, which is coming off of this from a neighbor. We do a lot of tea herbs and healthy herbs like Tulsi holy basil, which not only are great for us as a tea, but fill a valuable ecological role in the system, bringing in beneficial insects, feeding bees and all of our pollinators. So we like to have, and they have in a food forest, they're filling this like middle space of this understory shrub layer. And as we've talked about in other videos, the more we fill up the space with ground cover, low level, mid story and upper story, we're going to create a living family ecosystem that's healthier than one plant by itself, that takes care of more of its own needs and fills all that space with medicine and food and reduces our maintenance at the same time. So that's what I'm looking for. Win, win, win, more food in a smaller space with less maintenance. And when we do our systems like that, people who think that they don't have time to garden end up realizing, oh wait, if I put it in the right way with the right plants, I don't have that much maintenance and I have all of this nutrition to have with my family that's right outside my doorstep and doesn't even take that much space. So we're really looking for the plants that like win in that environment. So these are of course from you, well now they're from plants that grow here, but the original cuttings came from your place in Vegas and you've mentioned it many times. I don't know if you want to say anything about one of the plants that brought us together in friendship. Yeah, so one of my favorite plants of course is the belay, which actually I first learned about in Hawaii where my mom was born. And you can see literally all Stephanie did was she took a stick of the belay, like cut it off the tree basically and stuck it in the dirt and then it grew new roots. And now this is a new plant that she could plant in the ground and this will make a whole new tree. So I mean that's how easy it is. You don't even need seeds, like these are easier than seeds. Like seeds maybe they don't germinate, maybe they've been sitting in a bag or on the shelf too long. And but with this, like the plant's already started. I mean it just needs to grow new roots. And you can see it has a lot of leaves and you can keep doing this. That's the amazing thing about the belay. And you know this I call salad tree because literally you could eat these leaves just as you would lettuce. And to me these leaves are actually better than lettuce, especially when you got to buy lettuce for so expensive here in Puerto Rico. These literally grow out your door and after just a few years of propagating the belay it is all around, well Stephanie's property, my property, my friend's property next door and we have enough belay to eat every single day of the year if we wanted to. And that's what we want for you too. So hopefully you know Stephanie gets these out to the public food forest that she is creating through her non-profit and then you'll be able to take your own cuttings and even eat the leaves and try them and see how delicious they are, whether you want to eat them raw or even cooked. So we do all kinds of different layers like we were talking about with the food forest. This is going to be our vine layer. This is the Sasha Inchi nut, an amazing vine that if you're familiar at all with growing nuts, nut trees usually take many, many, many years to make nuts. This is a really special one. This is what it looks like when it's dry and ready for picking and then you de-shell it. You do have to cook this one so you have to roast it a little bit. But this vine produces nuts within a year of planting which is just crazy for the protein content and fat content in a plant like this. Oh, here's one of your favorites. Not that we're cultivating this one necessarily, but John loves these little wild cucumbers. These are wild cucumbers and they're delicious and they grow so easily. Actually Stephanie, when did you plant these? Never. Right. She didn't even plant these, they just show up on the wild. And we try to buy these English cucumbers at the store and here in Puerto Rico they are very expensive. The English cucumbers are imported. But everybody can literally take one of these, squeeze the seeds out and it's just going to grow on its own, you know, without doing anything. You don't even have to put it in garden soil, they just grow in the wild and they're delicious. Super yummy. We do a lot, like we were talking about, the berries. These are two little Suriname cherry plants that grow from seed. So we're tenderly loving these little babies until they get big enough to be on their own and become a big bush that has tons and tons of cherries for everyone to eat. So these ones take a little longer in the nursery to get to planting size, but they're well worth it and then they produce these cherries for decades to come. And what do the cherries taste like? Because they're not like traditional cherries that we would get in the states, obviously. Right. But they're a little more sour, maybe, I don't know if musty would be the word I would use, but they're very complex in their flavor. They're not like super sweet bing cherries and they're smaller. These are the black ones, so those are sweeter than the red ones. But in addition now I have, so Suriname's maybe becoming a little bit more common in places. Acerola is already common on the island, but then the cherry of the Rio Grande is one that I really, really like. And Grumichama, and that's another type of cherry-like shrub, small tree. And they're very expensive and rare to find, but once you get them fruiting, there's copious amounts of fruit and seed on them. So as our nursery grows and we get ours fruiting here in the farm, we can just expand and make those genetics available on island so people don't have to ship a $40 tree in or buy seeds. Some of the seeds of the stuff that I grow, it's like $5 for a single seed. But once that tree is fruiting, then you get many, many, many seeds off that fruit. But that's prohibitively expensive for a lot of people to do very many of. And so if we can make those genetics available a little closer so people don't have to ship them so far. And in addition, a lot of tropical fruit trees, the seeds are fresh seed germinators. So we're used to, a lot of times in the north, a lot of the seeds can be dried. And then you plant them and they can store for a long time. And that's not true for a lot of tropical seeds. They need to be planted fresh. And so right out of the fruit, they have to be planted, otherwise the seed dies. So we're really working with a time crunch there that having them already on the island to be available to people will help with that a lot. Alright, we're going to another area of the nursery. What are you going to show us now, Stephanie? Okay, so we make a lot of use out of all of our spaces. And this is a really, mostly you're a shady place, but we do have the shade cloth up for now to make it extra shady and gentle for all of our little seedlings. A lot of the things that are back here have just sprouted pretty recently or are trees that are meant to grow in the understory of a forest. So we're trying to mimic that with the trees around as well as the shade cloth. So we have a bunch of things in this area. We've got whenever I'm out and I find rare fruit at a market that does really good here. And again, it's like seeds that I would generally have to pay $10 for or $5 for a single seed. If you have the fruit on island one, you already know it's going to do well here. But a lot of these while they're here, they're not at a nursery, you can't go buy these trees. So we're trying to make them a little bit more available. So we have some rare stuff like the cupuaçu, which is related to cacao. It's another theobroma and it makes beautiful, beautiful fruit and beans that you can turn into different kinds of chocolate. We've got these amazing durian starts coming up. So durian, it's maybe more of a love it or hate it kind of fruit for a lot of people. It can be pretty strong, but a wonderful fruit that are just sprouting there. We've got the bacarea, which is a great fruit here that's in the mangosteen family. That's super sweet and yummy and prolific. It has so much fruit on it and kids love them. They're like sweet white pulp and just like tons and tons of fruit. So everybody walking by can enjoy some of the fruit. Lots of other stuff, the mamey, loquats, gosh, cacaos and rambutans and pulassans from my friend Juan, pomorosa. Just really as the pomorosa and the loquats are, loquats, shout out to Tim over at Eat Your Yard Jocks from one of the previous videos who sent me these seeds of a selected variety of loquat that is really, really yummy and prolific in Florida. So those are growing now and they just produce the pomorosa and the loquat so much fruit for so little effort. We're really excited about having those in the public food forest systems and in people's yards and here at our farm as well. Anonia squamosa, more bacarea, yeah, really anything that I think will thrive. We start here, we'll trial here and then if it proves really productive and easy to grow and goes through all of those parameters of being good for other people to grow depending on their context of what they want at their farm, then we'll spread them out and put them in the nursery and get them going. So then we've brought in from another farm a bunch of grafted mangoes of different varieties so that then as these grow we can take the scion wood and the grafts and graft them onto other seedling mangoes. I really like the nam doc mai, but then we have maybe 15 variety here that we'll be putting in some of them into the public food parks. And then as we were talking about the avocados, here in Puerto Rico a lot of the varieties are all very close to the same fruiting time and so we get this mountain of avocados all at one time and then the rest of the year there's barely any avocados and so we were able to get a hold of maybe 12 different varieties that should stretch the season to 9 months long or so. And utilizing those genetics because we could graft them all onto a single tree so if we're doing a small food park for a school, rather than them getting this mountain of avocados at one time for their kitchen to use or for the kids to eat, they can have a couple limbs of each variety so they get some early, mid season and late season avocados. And then also their genetics are available to the community as well. And it's like a backup for my farm and your farm and their farm and so if I lose it then the community food park might have it or my neighbor might have it and you know we've talked about before, John and I are pretty stoked on making sure and a lot of like really committed plant collectors understand that you know things happen and you lose plants for various reasons and keeping them all to yourself, one you don't get to share the joy of the plant with other people, that's amazing in and of itself. But how many times have I lost a plant that thank goodness I gave it to a friend of mine because then I can get that genetic back again and get it going again. So instead of this like traditional seed bank concept of it's all like locked away in a static cold tomb somewhere, we have living seed banks and the more of them we have the more resilient we are because if a storm comes through and hits one area really bad but not another or your property because it's higher and more wind prone but mine was protected because I put it in a lower spot or a disease comes through or I just get busy with life and the vines eat my entire orchard, those genetics stay alive and in the hands of the people so that's the genetics that we get back but it's relationship, we're like in a living dynamic exchange relationship with each other and the plants and that to me is so much more rich and resilient when we do it together. Yeah resilience is very important especially after a hurricane when my friend the only food he could get was literally going to the sizzler steakhouse and eating at the salad bar because everything was down but if he had more of the plants maybe some of the things would get tore up but he'd still have other things that he could find to eat on his property instead of having to rely on things coming in to Puerto Rico. So I think the last part of this episode we're going to actually sit down with Stephanie for a little bit and ask her some more questions about her mission and her goals here at the institute. Alright Stephanie so tell us more about the Caribbean Agroforestry Institute, why did you and your partner start this amazing place? Well I love plants so that's the start of everything and plants have been such an important role in my healing and my path in life to find joy and health being connected to the soil and to the plants has been so significant to my life over I guess the last 25-30 years but I didn't grow up like this and I grew up in the city in Orlando just eating terrible fast food and TV dinners and not really making the connections between health and plants and nutrition and that's where it started was just oh well eat healthy plants and then you'll be healthier but then it becomes this slippery slope once you start actually interacting with the plants and realizing what a beneficial relationship it is and how nourishing it can be to be really connected to the soil and the plants and as I learned that for myself I just wanted to share it with as many people as possible and kind of just was teaching everywhere and anywhere I could worked with a lot of non-profits and in a lot of different places and a lot of schools and a lot of libraries pretty much anywhere I could anyone who wanted in any age group from kindergartners to retirement homes wanted to listen and learn about plants and talk to me about plants I think I like that meme like introverted but willing to talk about plants I'm not that great at a party unless it's a plant party and it's any way I can share this information so that people become closer to the land and and closer to plants and eat them more and spend more time with them so that they can feel part of the joy and and health that I got to feel is my my passion and my mission and so being down here in Puerto Rico it's it's plants but I've had the great opportunity with my partner to be off the grid here with the solar and the water and just a lot more of a full picture of self-sufficiency that we're able to do here and and offer those that learning and opportunity to come visit an off-grid permaculture farm here on the island it's you know been really great for us we've been on this site for two and a half years and to show people the abundance that can happen in a short period of time with not a lot of financial resources we're not coming in with millions of dollars and just tons of tractors and throwing all of this money at the project it's really a labor of love and effort and then also what are all the reasons that all these people over the years have told me that they don't do this a lot of its time a lot of its money so if we can help in any way to reduce those barriers for people I'm really passionate about doing that wonderful so what services do you offer people here in Puerto Rico I know you give classes I know you could do an install for somebody and like literally create what you've done here like the Garden of Eden here in Puerto Rico a food forest with all the amazing you know nursery plants that you saw you saw a fraction of all the ones that she that she showed me earlier off camera aside from putting in the public food for so that people have access to some of these rare plant genetics and even fruits and the vegetables to eat in the future but what else what else can somebody here in Puerto Rico you know how can you help them yeah so I mean those are our main avenues we do classes at a sliding scale so some people have a lot of financial resources and other people have other resources so we do all kinds of barters and trades and sliding scales so that anywhere from family-friendly kids classes to full adult classes a half a day to full for multi days with camping we host a lot of schools so we do it through the educational nonprofit through classes that we teach here and at other people's farms as well or in schools and then we do the private consultations so we've got a handful of private landowners that want systems like this installed and we help them achieve those goals and then also now the public food forest so can we take some of this abundance that we're creating and we've developed this grant program so that we can install them into schools and churches and public parks and then offer classes there in that community for communities that can't get out here to this part of the island or you know don't have an active field trip program or what have you we can bring this stuff right to where the kids are running around playing soccer and looking out their window of their classroom but instead of looking at a plain grass field that's super hot and sunny they get to look at a fruiting Suriname cherry and their mouth can water as they're like waiting for recess to go eat it all and then hopefully those bloom into the genetic resource for more gardens and those kids and parents take them home and put them in their yards and then I drive down the road and there's just food everywhere is you know however I can help facilitate that reality I want to be a part of and I think the other thing for me Stephanie with the important work you're doing is like creating that spark with the children right we need more farmers right Puerto Rico's farmers are aging out there's actually not many farmers anymore unfortunately and you know getting a kid excited about plants and growing plants and how easy they could grow you know and getting them into farming in their future careers instead of you know leaving the island and going to the mainland to you know get a regular job right and creating more diversity resilience and healthier foods for Puerto Rico yeah and my hope with some of these school gardens is that then the economics teacher can utilize it to take cuttings and they can have a little micro program of starting a nursery at the school and little you know micro businesses that the kids can learn how to integrate plants not only is it good for them to eat and fun but you know it could be a pathway like you said forward maybe they want to become a farmer they maybe they want to run a nursery you know bring the livelihood part of this back around so it's not just some like side hobby you do when you have extra time because we don't have a lot of that often so how can we integrate plant systems into all the aspects of our lives and and like you said bring the youth back into valuing farming but maybe in a little bit of a different way than a lot of like the mega farms are that that I that's all I knew of farming when I was young was like giant corn monocropped boring hot tractor farms that didn't look at all fun or interesting and my first permaculture farm I visited you know when I was 18 years old I was just blown away like oh wait this is a whole different kind of farming this is interesting and when kids run around a space that's magical and beautiful and shady and smells good but then also is just full of yummy things to eat and mysteries around every corner the way that they light up and and like break these kind of mental constructs of what farming is and can be I think can be really powerful wow so Stephanie one of the questions I have you because every time I come here this is like about two years since I came here first you're literally six months in when I came here the first time and made an episode you already had so many amazing things growing and now there's even more and I've eaten you know fruits off of your plants today and lots of leafy greens and herbs tried them what keeps you motivated to keep going and keep at this and keep the place maintained and continuing to develop out and plan out new areas that now you have to continue to maintain without I don't think you really have any help obsession I'm not sure passion well probably the thing that brought me to this in the beginning it's relationship it's I get wonderful relationships with plants which is which are quite nourishing and and challenging every time you think you have like mastered something in the gardening growing world nature's like oh let me show you something new or let me give you a surprise that you never expected so it's it's constant learning there's always something new to see in a garden if you look closely enough the relationships are so profound they make me so happy but then I used to meet the coolest people the coolest people farm and so then it's another layer of relationship and then students come in and the students that come in are the coolest people the clients that we have are just wonderful folks who have these similarities of interest in this even if it's like not quite as obsessive as I am about it just I guess relationships is what keeps me it's richness it's depth it's I feel like all of my relationships plant land people have depth and the roots get deeper all the time so I have a not a lot of superficial relationships in general and and so it's very nourishing in a world where we're increasingly like you know quick the shorts on YouTube everything's so fast and I want to just watch 10 seconds and then I'm off to the next thing off to the next thing I'm busy I gotta take a I don't even have time for a phone call it has to be a text and you know everything's just so fast and and superficial that I think we're missing the like richness like you have to keep filling up you eat a bunch of it's like fast food like you just have to keep eating it because there's nothing actually in it and so like the the short videos sometimes they're like interesting but you like have to get another one because it wasn't that fulfilling there wasn't a lot of like like depth to it and farming this way and the relationships that I create with the people and the plants in this style they're rich and fulfilling and deep and it's gives everybody a chance to kind of slow it down so it's like it's just very valuable and nourishing to me so that's that's really why I do it it's totally selfish I share it with everyone because it makes me so happy well that's a good selfish trait I think so I think the word that comes to my mind is connected versus disconnected right I mean as you can see Stephanie is quite connected with not only the community the plants the the earth everything and most people live unfortunately we live in a disconnected society you're more connected to your phone than you're with real people because you're watching shorts and all these things and you're on your phone too much you don't have your phone turn off this youtube video now and go outside and start well actually wait till after this video is over yeah thumbs up and share first all right so but nonetheless Stephanie so if somebody wants to you know contact you and so they could you they could connect with you more and you can connect with them more to learn about the programs and what you're doing here in Puerto Rico how can they do that sure yeah there's no youtube shorts they can email me and they can go through the website at either caribbeanagroforestry.org or permaculturepuertorico.com if that's easier to remember they can come to a class which we have at the end of January we have kind of our flagship four-day off-grid homesteading class where we cover permaculture agroforestry there's talking but there's a lot of hands-on stuff as how it's meant to be we also do a half day of off-grid solar design and rainwater catchment design and this year we'll have a day of specialty crops being bamboo mushrooms and medicinal herbs where we'll get our hands dirty and there'll be some guest instructors coming in to do that and we have a few other workshops throughout the year we've got a cob building class coming in that'll be building a small kid's cob house so all of our classes are family friendly so you can bring your kids along and we camp out some people like to stay in airbnbs if you're not a camper that's fine too and yeah or you can reach out and we do consulting services and if you're interested in helping out with a food park either coming to help install one with us you're welcome to email and join us in that if you want to donate plants if you want to donate money to start one if you want to bring one to your school you can just find all of those links on the website and find out more information about what we're doing get on our newsletter i don't send it out very often so you won't be inundated i should probably send it out more but no instagram so you have to kind of go the old-fashioned way not totally old-fashioned but all right yeah so i'll put links down below for all those contact methods you can contact stephanie mostly through her website or through the email if you want to get a hold of her and stephanie final question to have for you today is what are the words of wisdom from a farmer gardener plant collector plant breeder mountain mama i don't know you're a lot of things what what words of wisdom you want to remember before we sign off um yeah just uh get to know one plant at a time like if all you can do today is one plant do it and do it today um i think people get overwhelmed by how like the scope of some of this stuff um and you can develop a deep relationship with one plant and then go from there um and if you do that well and you find success and like it nourishes you then you can build upon that success and the most important thing is just get started get your hands dirty be outside connect with a plant or a person who loves plants and um and get to know it a little bit and then you're off to the races and then you're going to be a crazy plant lady like me or plant guy one day all right yeah definitely wise words of wisdom i like that start with one plant and you just get to know that plant really well and get really good at growing it and once you know everything and you've got that mastered then go to the next one then go to the next one go to the next one and then you'll have as many plants in your nursery as stephanie does and even more you can thank me later you can thank her later all right guys so if you guys enjoyed this episode here at caribbean agroforestry institute please be sure to give this video a big thumbs up more importantly share this with other people in puerto rico and around the caribbean because all the plants we showed here at this nursery will grow great pretty much anywhere in the caribbean and even even other tropical islands around the world also be sure to click that subscribe button right down below so you know this is my new and upcoming episodes i've coming out every five to seven days you never know where i'll show up or you'll be learning on my youtube channel make sure you click the little bell so you're notified as many videos and finally be sure to check my past episodes the past episodes are over 1700 videos at this time on this channel dedicated to teach you guys how to grow your own food at home so with that my name is john kohler with growingyourgreens.com we'll see you next time until then remember keep on growing