Ep 015 - Regenerative Garden Therapy Featuring Stephanie Rose

In this episode, Averill and Bernadette chat with accomplished author Stephanie Rose.  After becoming suddenly and severely disabled, Stephanie learned to heal her body through gardening.  Stephanie is passionate about organic, regenerative gardening and natural living.  This is a truly inspiring episode where we discuss how Stephanie has always made the most of what she can do, including lots of approachable and fun projects to try in your home garden. Stephanie's step by step approach makes understanding permaculture principals easy, offering logical guides for beginner and advanced gardeners alike. 

Transcript

Before we start today, SeedyChats would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri country. Recognising their continued connection to this land, traditional custodians of our lands from the water running through our creeks, the air we breathe in our mountains, and the stars that shine brightly in the sky. We pay our respects to Elders past, present, and emerging. Hello and welcome. Welcome to Seedy Chats. Hello and welcome back. Welcome to Seedy Chats, the podcast where imperfect gardeners Avril, that's me, and Bernadette. Hi, that's me. Chat about our favorite topics, gardening and life. So whether you're new to gardening, a seasoned pro, or somewhere in between, join us on our journey to be mindful in gardening and life in general. Bernadette, when was it when you met Andrew that you? knew what a shillelagh was. Did he show you? I'd never heard of a shillelagh. It's a shillelagh that I thought, you know what, that's a nice shillelagh. Lock it down Eddie. So a shillelagh I actually forgot, but living out of Ireland so long I forgot what a shillelagh is. What is a shillelagh? Well it's a wooden thing, like a walking stick or sometimes tourists will buy them, like they're only this size and it'll say, you know, the shillelagh. and people sort of kind of has like a handle on one end. So Andrew's shillelagh is like a walking stick. It's an heirloom. Yeah, so it's kind of like a bit of wood and a lot of people in Ireland will keep their shillelagh under the bed. I like that. And then if there's an intruder. I've often thought I don't have enough weapons in the bedroom. If there's an intruder, you take your shillelagh out and you hit them across the head. Done. Any strange leprechauns that come into your house, shillel-y them. But yeah, I had forgotten about that word. It's a great word, shillel-y. Shillel-y. We'll have to share a picture for our Seedy chums on our Seedy chats Instagram. Seedychats. All right, here we go. Look, it's like a walking stick. Shillel-y is a wooden walking stick and with a club on the end, typically made from a stout, That's interesting because his one was a knotted, that's exactly what it is. Yeah, yeah. So these are all visuals of chileis. So actually the two that he's got, he thought one of them with the handle was more genuine. The knotted one is actually... Is, well, this is what I would consider like a traditional chilei. Actually, when you see a picture of a leprechaun, I feel like they might be holding one now. They hold a chilei. Yeah. Yes. Yes, actually this one looks a bit violent. This one's got a chain on the end. What's that? That's shit, Leila. Very good. Yeah, anyway, a shillelagh. It just brought back very fun memories. Okay, Avril. So today we're talking to Stephanie Rose about her book, The Regenerative Garden. So a little bit for our listeners about Stephanie. So after becoming severely and suddenly disabled, Stephanie learned to garden to heal her body. And then she found a lifelong love of plants. More than 15 years later, she aims to encourage joy and healing. through gardening, through her work as an author, a permaculture designer, a herbalist, and she lives in Vancouver, Canada. Stephanie loves working with the youngest gardeners and she volunteers to develop children's gardens as a Vancouver master gardener. She's passionate about organic gardening, natural healing, art as a part of life. She lives with her kiddo, her cat, her dog. and her 500 worms. She shares stories, recipes and projects on her website, gardentherapy.ca. She's very inspiring, Bernadette. Very inspiring. So, I mean, her whole journey was self-directed recovery, basically. And that I was completely blown away by. I was glued when she was talking about those parts of her journey and how she's got this beautifully optimistic disposition that served her through that time. But how... You know, for something as beautiful as this book to come out of, you know, something as trying as that, it's really... Very special. And there was a story actually that I did want to talk to her about, but she's probably, you know, there's probably a lot that she talks about all the time, but it was about having a lawn. Have you read about having a lawn? Yes. Is this where she's converted sort of from lawns that die to clovers and alternatives? That's right. Yes. And so she talks about how we... cut our lawn and so blades of grass, they're little plants, they grow up, they want to be fed and then we come along and we cut it, right? And it struggles, it struggles and so then we have a patchy lawn and then along comes a dandelion, a dandelion flower. And a lawn because we walk on it and we trod on it, it's really dead, it's not getting fed, the poor plant, nothing's happening. But these dandelions come along and they have a taproot. So the grass roots are quite shallow. And a dandelion root will come along and it's a tap root. So it goes the whole way down. So these dandelions come along to feed the lawn. But then we come along and we cut the dandelion out. And the dandelion is such a beautiful plant. Like it's completely medicinal, completely edible. Edible. I saw on Gardening Australia recently that you can, you know, dehydrate the roots even and turn it into a tea. Into a tea. That's right. Yes. So. So I found that quite an interesting story and especially relating it to my dad, because my dad would always have a beautiful lawn. Now, for him, it was therapy to get out and mow it. And it was a beautiful lined lawn. But I kind of I liked her story on the whole concept of the dandelion coming along. But, you know, just get rid of the lawn. It's work and. And yeah, she or think of some lawn alternatives like I think the clover. The clover is a great one, actually, you know, have flowers that then attract the beneficials and things like that. And they're green all of the time. So what you want is that green underfoot space, you know, a wonderful alternative to consider. Yeah, I'm definitely going to put some clover. I've got a little bit of lawn. I'm going to put clover there. You know what I've done in my lawn out the front? I think you've seen it. Andrew's lawn is sort of his pride and joy, but I put all my daffodil meadow underneath. Oh yes and he's not like Moish. So for two or three months he's not allowed to moan and it grows into this whole aisle crazy. But bless him he puts up with it and you know what I love it. So that's all that matters. Is he not out with like a little tiny little strimmers or scissors cutting him between in his slippers? show Stephanie I'm so excited to talk to you. Okay who is who though? Yes very good question we sometimes wear our names as well but it's hard even to see across the the camera so I'm Avril hello. Hi Avril. How are you? I'm Bernadette. That's me. Hi Bernadette. And Bernadette is such a such a girl fan she's having a... I don't know if you can see but I've got it. A few tabs in your book. I've never put so many tabs in a book since I studied law at university. That means so much to me. That's what I want to see. I seeing my book have like, shirt on it. Yes. Dog ears. Tabs. You're very organized. I think there's actually, um, spinach and ricotta cannelloni on one of the pages. That's awesome. I would love. if you could introduce for our audience, just a brief overview of your journey from, how you started into gardening, and through to where you've come with the book, because it is a really inspiring story. Yeah, it's been quite a process. I didn't grow up as a gardener. I grew up in the city in a very urban environment. I didn't, my parents worked for the oil and gas industry. They worked in corporate jobs. and there wasn't really sort of this attachment to gardening or nature that, you know, I grew up experiencing. But I felt like it was really missing. It was something that I was drawn to. And so when I bought my own home in 2003, I had this little yard out front, a little yard up back, it's a standard size house, a standard size lot in urban East Vancouver where I live here in Canada. And I was working at my corporate job in marketing as marketing director for a sort of like an ad agency. And I got sick overnight. I got a headache and within a few weeks of getting that headache, I wasn't able to get out of bed. And I was confined to bed for almost two years. And I, as you can imagine, in that period of time, I was very, very weak because I had you know, wasn't able to get out of bed. And so my whole body was weak. My mind was weak. And I, when I started to sort of, you know, wake up and get a little bit more energy, I knew that the place for me to rehabilitate was in my own back and front yard. So I went outside and I looked at the yards and I went, okay, this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna start gardening. I'm gonna garden and it's gonna be the way I heal myself. Cause I couldn't go far. I figured I'd just go out the front door, scratching the soil a little bit. So I got every single book on gardening from the library. We have a great program where I could order the books and then either have them picked up or delivered to me. And I would sit in bed and I would read, I read about everything from growing perennials to annuals to trees and shrubs, to soap making, to how to make your own sourdough. Actually, it's quite funny because it's a lot of the back to basic stuff that people started doing when they were, when COVID shut the world down. you got back into their houses and went, okay, how do I get back to basics? I did that exact thing, but mine was in 2006. So I spent this time sort of absorbing all of these things. And then I would go out and practice because they didn't have a lot of strength or energy. I would start with just five minutes a week. And then I've done it's a week. Yeah, that's it. Isn't it? It's such a small amount of time, but getting all the benefit from it was it's a testament. It made the world of difference. I mean, back then I was so severely disabled that I couldn't do much of anything. I had to choose in a week the things that I did. If I went to a doctor's appointment, that was my week. I wanted to take a shower and wash my hair. That was like a big part of the week. Because it took so much. It took so much energy to do. You might be asking what what you were diagnosed with. Is is that OK? Yeah, absolutely. They don't have an answer. I you know, we're great doctors here in Canada. Yeah. and we sort of landed on it could have been a virus, could have been a tick-borne illness or some sort of insect-borne illness, not Lyme, but some sort of insect-borne illness, could have been a form of chemical poisoning. There is just no good answer except that now people who have long COVID, some of the more severe cases have some similar characteristics to what I went through back then and the 10 years it took me to recover. So it's really interesting, but a lot of what's gone on with this virus has shown up. I have a lot of experiences that could be considered similar, although we don't have any evidence that I got a virus. But I had traveled to Italy and then Ontario before I came back to Vancouver. And it was after Italy and when I hit Ontario that I got the headache, and within five weeks, then I was no longer able to work. It had just taken up my whole system. Wow. And it showed up as extreme fatigue where I couldn't get up out of bed. I had pain all over my body and a lot of nerve damage. So I had a peripheral neuropathy in both my arms and my legs, which meant they would turn blue. I wasn't getting enough oxygen to them. I couldn't use my arms and my legs very well. Sometimes they would just, my legs would go up from underneath me and I'd fall or I would drop things. And so all of these things together just took some time for me to heal. And so I, I removed everything from my life, not knowing what it was, what was the thing that was causing me to get sick. And I, like I said, I went back to basics and I just started nourishing myself, uh, and developing my own rehabilitation program through reaching, you know, reaching out into plants and the connection with the earth. And so I went outside this five minutes a week, cause that's all I could do. And There's a, on my website, on the about page, it shows the transformation of that first garden in five years because, you know, I truly believe that if you can start anything for just five minutes in a week, then you can make huge transformations in your life. So for me, I started with that because I knew I could do it. It was achievable, it was attainable and every day was a push, but I did it. Then I worked up to five minutes a day, then 10 minutes a day, and then there was a point near the end of five years where I was spending five hours a day outside gardening. And as you can imagine in that time period, I learned so much. I had this master's type education and all of these things, but I was only experimenting in my yard. So I joined a community garden. I joined the Vancouver Master Gardeners Program and started working, I've been doing 13 years now with the Vancouver Master Gardeners. And I worked with Children's Gardens at one of our university farms where there was an intergenerational land and learning program, meaning they had gardeners of all ages teaching school children so that we're bringing those connections of education. Yeah, wonderful. I started a charity garden in my front yard for people living with addiction to give them landscaping and nursery care work. So I started getting involved in all of these projects and just sort of reaching out and finding the community. Because back then, most of the people who I met that were gardeners were sort of those retired folks living in neighborhoods where they had land, right? It wasn't sort of urban folks. It wasn't people living in apartments. It wasn't younger people. It was, you know, it was primarily men and women who were retired middle class or upper class. who had yards to garden in. And not a little age gap, quite a big age gap. Yeah. Yeah, it was an age gap, but it was also like where we were in our life, you know? Like it's a different kind of gardening. It wasn't about building sort of these immaculate insect-free. Formal, landscaped, like, yeah. Perfect landscaped yards. Yeah, it was about connecting with the plants. finding how they're medicinal, how they feed us, how they nourish us, how we can work with them, how we can help support the regeneration of the earth. And so I started to come into this, this place where I learned so much from plants that I grew as a gardener and then I grew sort of beyond what gardening was described as at the time. So that's when I started looking into permaculture a little bit. Yes. I thought so you know I so a lot of what I started writing so I started my website garden therapy not long after I started I think you know 2006 I became sick 2009 I started garden therapy so now I'd started gardening a little bit more and I wanted to find people out there in the world that were kind of doing what I was doing. Find your people. Yeah and yeah and it was wonderful I still live meeting all these people. Yeah I've heard you mention too that there was quite a lot of isolation with your sickness as well. So there was also, you know, you wanted to connect with people. You were looking, you know, for that sense of community to help with your rehabilitation as well. You're absolutely right. So, I mean, we think about when things shut down for COVID, that we were really isolated and we were looking for ways that we could connect with others. And so many folks went out to their yards and their gardens. because instead of being in an office building where we would meet at the water cooler, now people were walking around the neighborhoods and meeting people outside, socially distant, physically distant, but socially finding these ways to connect with others. And when you weren't, the connecting with plants, because these are living beings, like plants are alive and full of energy and full of gifts and full of knowledge. So, a part of the loneliness and connecting with plants and the isolation. was looking for those people who also could be found those gifts in plants. And so that's beauty. Yeah, and so yeah, see the beauty, the healing, how it benefits us, but how when we really truly find our way to work together with nature, rather than against it, that we make great changes and great strides, you know, because so much of what we're doing is working against the earth, you know, and trying to build out our space in this earth without taking into account the damage that we're doing. And so when we truly try to work with nature, it's very fulfilling. It takes us back to the roots that, you know, some of us are really distant from. I was distant from it in my growing up. I was distant from it in my health. And I feel that through finding that I was able to just rebuild my wellness and, you know, in all aspects, emotional, physical, Yep. It ticked all those boxes. Yeah, all the boxes. And did you have, you've got this fantastically optimistic outlook, did you have that prior to this happening? It sounds like you've always, even in those really hard times, focused on what you could do instead of what you couldn't do. Did that develop out of necessity or have you always had that predisposition? I think it's naturally, I naturally have that. At the same time, as I'm very aware of... the power of sadness and grief and negative emotions that they're not something to be afraid of. I lean into them for sure. But at the same time, when my doctor said, because of my isolation, doctors had said, why don't you join a support group? So I did, I joined a group of folks and we did a little bit of walking, but it was a lot of sort of sitting around talking about how hard it was to be disabled and removed from the world. And that... didn't resonate with me. I found that this wasn't sort of the people that I felt were going to pull me into a positive place or were matching where I was. But when I joined the community garden, we didn't talk about how much our backs ached or how difficult things were, or the struggles of our economic circumstances, or being faced with any sort of challenges. We talked about the plant. It's like, oh my gosh, ever look this seed germinated. Yeah, it was like escaping. It was nearly escaping the negative. I want to word that correctly. I don't want to. But it was it was like a breath of fresh air for you to be with like minded people in the garden and and have that same interest, but not be negative. Nancy or. Yeah, truly. Yeah. Like less about escaping and more about taking a break. Yes. You know? Yes. And so you can't escape when your body is disabled and you know you're living in what the vessel that you're living in is not working the way you want it to. You have to find peace. Yeah. And some days you just need a break and you need to step away and that's what working in the gardens and working with people who loved plants in the same way was really fulfilling. And so I started that the website Garden Therapy in order to sort of like reach out a bit more and And it was, you know, before the Instagrams and that like, this is, this is when we, this is just, you know, old school blogging. Yep. Back in the day, back in the day, well, I had it, I lived in my house, I had a rental suite and the tenant was an OG, she was the OG blogger where she used to just write because she wrote beautifully. She went to school for writing. And so she wrote about, you know, what she had for lunch and that sort of thing. And she was, she told me how to set it up. So I set it up and I just started sharing pictures of the garden and the projects I was working on. And then I found some folks on Twitter back in the day. Twitter was the first social media. Was Twitter around back then? That's, that's. Twitter was around and then it sort of died out and then it came back. Yes. The last couple of years. So back in that day, there was a bunch of us that would do things like on Super Bowl Sunday, we would super sow Sunday. We would all sow our seeds together on Twitter while chatting with each other about what we were selling. That's so cool. That's so cool. Yeah, it was so fun. And I'm still friends with some of those people today. I mean, a lot of us, you know, like really deeply connected through this. And some of them I've never met in person. A lot of them I have now. But even when I just met like from, I just met. Yeah, a few months ago for the very first time in person. Oh, really? When I was speaking in Seattle. And it's so interesting to have that experience that we've known each other for so long, or known of each other even for so long, and then finally get to meet. So that was very connecting. I started doing that. And I was writing about projects that were easy and accessible for anybody to get into, no matter what the limitations were that they had. So they didn't have a big homestead or a large suburban yard. Maybe they just had a tiny little plot of land or a pot with some soil in it, or they didn't have a lot of time because they were really busy, didn't have a lot of money because they needed projects that were not gonna be super expensive. And maybe they had physical limitations or other limitations like I did that I tried to write projects that people could do that were really high reward and low effort. So that's where you got me, okay? That's where you got me because when I started reading your book, I just had my daughter. So I had a very fresh little baby and sometimes, yeah, I would only have five minutes but it got me outside, it got me in the sun. When she would have a little nap or whatever, I could do little things. And I do love that so much about your book, how approachable it is. Even now, I still use it all the time now. So even as my gardening. skills have grown, you've got the levels with all of the chapters, right? So you've got sort of the easy, the intermediate and the more advanced options for all of these projects. So I've been able to grow with the book as well, but I, you know, for anyone out there, it's so, it does make gardening so approachable in a way, you know, that's really actually Avril and I's mission, is to make gardening approachable for all people, to make these mindful steps more practical and empower people to do these things. And to bring it into their life, to think that they can, that they can do it. And I mean, and you really can, you really can. I mean, there's a couple, yeah, there's so many projects in there which we can get into, but anyone in my life can do something out of this book. Yeah. Oh, well, thank you. I mean, that's really been my goal. And I, you know, I learned. Um, in one of my marketing jobs way back when I used to do a lot of sort of, um, staff development and human resources development. Um, one of the things that I learned about myself is that I, what I love to do is teach people how to do things in a way that makes them, it makes them feel joy or feel fulfilling to them. And so That means so much to me. It means so much to me to see the book with so many tabs and also all the pictures that you sent me of the projects. This is so good. Yeah, and so I've tackled a couple of the projects. I've done the Bee Border, which was a huge hit in the whole neighbourhood. I always had, I even had little kids come over. There's a festival that we do here in Canberra called Florillade, which is a flower, I think a flower festival. But I even had little kids that would stop by and say, oh, mum says I can ride my my bike as far as the. the Floriard house, you know, to come look at the flowers. And I've espaliered the fruit trees across the back, which seemed so daunting. And your book really just broke it down to, and you know what? It's so much easier than you think. Isn't it? Yeah, cause they look fancy. And it's one of my favorite things to do. It's like to espalier trees like that, because it's one of those, you can get out and do a little bit of pruning. and reach all of the, like I would hand pollinate the flowers. A couple of years, the bees weren't out early enough. And so I would hand pollinate the flowers because I had five different kinds of apples and I wanted to make sure that they crossed enough so that I got a lot of apples. And then I got on my own little... Did you have Barry White playing? No. Just some love making music. Some romantic music. I'm... Polly. I'm helping the flowers. No, I had a little paintbrush that I keep out there and I would pollinate them. And then no Berry white. And then I had. Hundreds and hundreds of apples on one tree because I was way too good at it. Yeah. I loved it. And I have too many apples. So then I had to go and call the apples. I had to pull off everywhere. I saw like three or five apples. I would pull it down to one so that I would get one larger apple instead of five smaller ones. And it is that instant. gratification, isn't it? You sort of let the tree grow, and then when you prune and it looks neat straight away, you're just like, oh, it's just so fulfilling. Yeah. It is. Well, you know, I see, I started with those projects that were really quick and easy. I started with those ones that you could do in less than an hour or a couple of minutes, because I really needed them to be very easy. And so my very first book, Garden Maid, had those kinds of projects in it. And then I started writing other books. And as I developed and grew as a gardener, that's when I started studying permaculture, which I know is very popular where you are, because this is where it was born. Permaculture is probably one of my favorite things because it really speaks to, you know, how I was wanting to follow the path of nature. And I felt the way that we were gardening was very out of touch. Um, that we would take everything away, buy new things, put it in, plant everything in rows. Everything that we were doing in gardening, it didn't look like how Mother Nature was doing it in a forest or a meadow. And in those places, there is so little human input. So people talk about gardening, when you talk to a new gardener, they say things like, oh, well, I can only do it on the weekend or I've got gardening chores too, or I just don't wanna get to it, or I can't keep anything alive, or I have a brown cut, like all these things that sound so negative because it's become a chore. And for me, I could never make it a chore. because I did not have the capacity to spend time draining myself through this activity. It had to be nourishing. So I looked at how like, well, Mother Nature is cycling through plans. There's, you know, the succession of how they all grow together. Why are we planting things in rows and making it so difficult for us? Why are we not storing water like the forest does? Why are we letting it all escape and then bringing in extra water? Why are we not protecting our plants by controlling the climate? You know, and instead of allowing, you know, creating big open spaces full of hot, hot sun that, you know, suck up that are too windy or too sunny and burn, you know, all these things. Yeah. And it's kind of like, it's kind of like a circular garden, isn't it? It's like that you're, you're trying to keep as much there as possible. Because I, I, I did notice that on on your website that, you know, like your compost and talking about worms and trying to keep as much in that garden as possible, like a circular economy within the garden. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, that's the thing. You create this ecosystem in your own yard. So when I read about permaculture, the permaculture books are like, yes, yeah, they're very in depth. Scientific, very, very in depth. So, yes. so much information in them. And I did a permaculture design certificate and then another one and then another one because I just, I loved it and I loved digging in but it was kind of complex to understand. And so the more I dug into it and I really got the feel of how the projects work, I thought, you know, I want to do the book that breaks these down for the home gardener so they can take these concepts of It's funny, but it's not complicated what Mother Nature is doing. We've made it more complicated because we've taught gardening or we've learned grow up gardening in a very different way. And so taking these concepts and saying, OK, here's these like really cool permaculture projects that are not that difficult to do. And you can scale them for your landscape at home. And I broke it into these chapters that really helped to round out your space. When you said circular, it's perfect that you said that because if you notice that the cover of the regenerative garden is a circle. I did that on purpose. And even the chapters. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. They're not in an order. And I always remember, Brittany, I always remember you saying like, it's a book you can pick up and you don't have to start at the beginning. I don't know whether that's that. Exactly. And I loved that theory because there was one other book that stuck in my mind. just before my little girl was born that I had read from cover to cover. But it was a dog training book. But the dog training book, you didn't have to read it from cover to cover. It was whatever stage you were at with your training. And it really resonated with me. And that was, I think, yeah, the one before knowing about this, that you didn't have to, you know, read it from cover to cover. And I was like, that makes sense, because I got so much out of training my dog. I think it is just a wonderful combination of your research. You know, when someone really understands something, they can explain it simply. And I do think that's your gift is that you've been able to simplify some of these very complex principles. And, you know, as you say, necessity is the invention is the mother of all invention. And you had a lot of necessity that drove you to have to have, you know, some of these simplified principles. But you've made something so beautiful out of that as well. There's even a project here that I wish I'd seen a bit earlier, which is where you make, you've got a keyhole garden bed. And so to describe an Avril, if you imagine a circle with a slice of cake cut out of it, and then Stephanie describes putting a worm tower sort of compost bin in the middle. Oh, in the middle, yeah. And you just throw all your scraps in the top of that. You don't have to worry about, you know, tumble. tumbling, there's all different ways. It's all going in and the worms are going to look after it. But I wish I had, see, I've made a garden bed that's three metres by four metres that I can't get to anything. I've sort of got to scrooge my duck, dive in, but it's such a practical way to look at it. I'm like, that's what I need, a little keyhole. And then to top it off, just putting the worm tower in the middle where you throw all your compost, it's just so practical. And I suppose you learn that skill as you're going along. Like you might have had a big bed like garden. Bernadette at one stage and you probably thought, you know what, I can do that better. And then you can share that. Yeah. Well, the keyhole bed is definitely not my design. That's a design that's, you know, it's been in, there's a bunch of different versions of keyhole beds that were created. And all of them are for accessibility. But you're right, difficult as it was when I first became disabled, and I've had relapses since, you know, I'm not, I'm definitely, I can still consider myself a disabled person. I consider myself a working disabled person. And I think one of the gifts of that is finding accessibility. It's finding the easiest way to do things. So, like I said, it's not just one physical limitations for me is what I struggle with. I also have space limitations because I still live in an urban area and have small garden. But there's lots of limitations that folks have thrown at them, and that shouldn't stop us from finding the path. One of my favorite projects on my website is how to start a garden from scratch, because so many folks who want to start a brand new garden will... think, oh my gosh, like I have to start building beds and then I have to bring in all this soil and then I have to buy all the plants and this is going to be so expensive. Paralysis by analysis. Our favorite thing. Yeah. And like you can start a garden from scratch by buying one pack of perennial wildflower seeds that, you know, for your neighbor that are good in your area, taking, you know, like whatever soil that you have, if you've got lawn there, you can dig up the turf and feed flip it over and then sprinkle those seeds in there. And as they start to grow, you pick out the plants and move them around and go, this one looks really good, but it should be back farther because it's so tall. And this one blooms at this time and this one blooms at this time. So we're gonna switch them so they're together so that they have succession plants, they have succession blooming. You know, there's just, and it's a great way to take one pack of seeds, which might cost you under $5, depending on the price of a pack of seeds in the area, to learn and grow a garden, like completely from scratch. The education that you get from that is invaluable. So you can find ways for gardens to become really accessible. It just, you know, it's just what is, you know, what is the motivation to get there and what, you know, Can you work through some of those things? That's I try to provide enough ideas to get people past some of those limitations. Now, I do have a limitation, a garden conundrum. I was thinking maybe I could talk to you, but you might be able to help me with. You often talk about if you've got a pest problem, think about what eats that pest. I don't know if you get these where you are. White cabbage butterflies. Yes, we do. And I think they produce like a mustard oil, so no one eats them. Why they taste, they're not very palatable. And I tried to plant some nasturtiums away from them because I'd heard that they would eat the nasturtiums, but actually all I've got is a brassica massacre on my hands where I'm losing, every day I go out there, I'm losing more of them. Any suggestions, what would you do? So what I always say for any specific pest question, and it's also, it's sort of similar for disease, with pests in particular, is you have to think about what eats it and what does it eat. So one of the things that you did was you looked at what it was eating and then said, okay, well, maybe I can feed it this. It sounds to me that you don't have a, you have a deficiency in your garden of the pest or the predator that's going to eat. Yes. And so it sounds like, yes, they may, something eats. something must eat some birds apparently. Yeah. So how do you get those birds in and how do you get enough of like support enough diversity so that there is enough predators in your garden to control the population for you. You can hand pick them. You know, you can try to plant resistant varieties. You can cover them in, you know, I covered them and I trapped all the caterpillars in the cover. Yeah. Right. She was farming, farming them. And what about you, like, do you go underneath the leaves and make sure you're getting rid of all the little babies and the... I do try a little bit, but there's so many that that's even really hard to keep on top of. You've probably planted them in the back as well of your plot that you can't get into. Um, yeah. I mean, so for me, this is how I deal with all of these things is I, I would include more diversity in my garden and probably remove the brassicas for a period of time in order to limit the population growth. So, right. So take no more brassicas. I wouldn't, I wouldn't keep playing because you got to remove, you got to bring in something that eats them. You got to break the cycle. So I would take them away and I would plant. I mean, you can spend a lot of time researching what are the predators to these and how to encourage them to come to your garden. Or you can continue to create a garden with enough diversity that you don't have a big... It sounds like what you've done is you've created the most heavenly location for these cabbage white butterfly caterpillars to- It is, because it's a whole bed. I've put them all in the one raised bed. So it's basically like an all you can eat smorgasbord in the one spot now that you say it. Yeah, amazing, right? So one of the things that I talked about in the book, which is actually from my editor and friend, Jessica Wallisor's book on companion planting called Plant Partners, she wrote about the theory of appropriate landings. One of the reasons why we would create a garden that is not a monoculture, so one kind of plant in our beds, but a polyculture where we've got multiple different kinds of plants, multiple different bloom times, is because the theory of appropriate landings say that sometimes when pests land on plants with their little tasty feet, they land on them a couple of times in a garden and go... If they hit like perfect, Brassica, perfect, Brassica, perfect Brassica. They're like, okay, I've hit it three times. I'm going to go back and tell the crew. This is going to be our new haven. This is a place for us to move in. But they're putting an ad out. They're updating their social media. The first time, then the second time they hit something else and then something that they don't like something that they don't like again. And they're like, wow. Probably I'm not gonna tell everybody that this is the most supportive environment for us to grow up in. I might try and ache here, but I'm gonna look for the neighbors plot over there that's got a heck of a lot more. So you're creating the perfect environment for them to safely grow their population. Yes. Which is wonderful if you want that. So take it away from them and find more plants or things that... So I would, if I was going to then reintroduce Brascus to my garden, I would plop them individually around places. I mean, how many do you need? You can buy them at the grocery store for a little while at the farmer's market and grow some other things for a while and try to mix your garden so that it's all different things throughout. So that when you're, you've got a poly culture, right? Not everything's coming into flower. Yes, I feel like you've seen straight to my call because that is my issue, right? Yes. It's I section, I section, I section. Sorry. It's that trying to control nature thing again, isn't it? I think you're coming away from it though. You're not as lined like that perfect, like you're probably mono, you're mono. culturing that little area. Yes. You're mini farming, you're trying to mini farm whereas you probably should be, yeah, mixing it up. Yeah, well. Get messy. Watch this space, cabbage butterflies. That's the thing, like I see how organized you are even with the tabs in the book, right? Yeah. And I challenge you to walk out into nature space, natural spaces. I don't know why I couldn't figure out that one. That's okay. Natural spaces. like the forest or the meadow, like find places and see how everything is neat and organized, but it's also not, you know, it's not everything's can be in patterns, but not rows. They will be intermixed with each other because plants need to work together. And part of how they help each other is, you know, you're going to reduce the work that you have to do by letting go. Allowing plants to work together in a community. And do that work for me. And do the work for you. Yeah. There is a phrase that you use in your book, progress, not perfection. Yes. I should have worn that shirt today. Yeah. Did you do have that on the show? And I, I love that because that's exactly what it is. It is a progress and it's, you're not going to perfect it. You don't want to perfect it. Yeah. No, absolutely. And, and yeah, I mean, it's. It's really, really tough for folks when they have like pest problems. Like it's probably the biggest, the most frequent question that I get, especially I'll do a talk. We'll talk about through all these concepts. And, you know, like I could sit and spend some time with the specifics. There's great books out there that have specifics on how to deal with individual pests, or we can reframe our thinking and think about how do we become part of the ecosystem? How do we, how do we think through? how things are growing in nature and why it's, why is the population of this pest getting out of control in your garden specifically? You know, there's a macro perspective of having less predators probably, you know, introduce species. I don't know. I don't know if it's a native species. You know, it's obviously got great protection. I mean, we celebrate these wonderful cabbage white butterflies for their pollinating. You know, they really do some great things later on in the season. And I'm sure those, even though they're mustard flavored, you know, those big juicy caterpillars are probably feeding somebody out there. You're gonna have to. You need a lizard. Get yourself a lizard and... I can give you a snake. Oh, wonderful. I love this idea. In your book too, you've got a wonderful chapter. on ethics and I've heard you talk about that you truly believe, you know, with your son, that raising little gardeners will raise people that will protect the earth. And Avril and I couldn't agree with that statement more. But also in that ethics chapter, you talk a lot about reuse. I'm sure this isn't an Australian saying, but we have a saying here, reduce, reuse, recycle. And And that's the other part I really like about your book, about the idea of giving things a second life and reusing and just having what you've got to hand. And Averill's got an amazing garden that she built in COVID. Do you wanna talk about that, Averill? My garden, I've got a lot of wildlife where I am. So we've got rabbits, kangaroos, snakes, deer. I'm sure we've got wild boar around as well. And I was struggling. I was getting a lot of my produce eaten. And so my husband's a plumber and during COVID, he just built me a cover out of pipe, out of PVC piping, and we covered it over with a net, and I've had huge success with that. The cabbage moth's still getting there. I don't know how that bloody do it. But at least it kind of keeps those rabbits out and the kangaroos. And I mean, I'm very much for, if you grow something, nature still needs to be fed as well. So if you can give a little bit to nature, but also, you know, have some for yourself, win. But yeah, I and the other day he had some copper pipe in the carriage. I haven't told him this, but I had this this creeping native. It's a called a happy wanderer. Well, that's its nickname. What's its true name? The it's it's an Australian native. It gives out beautiful flowers. Anyway, it was on the ground and it just needed something to be propped up. So I went into the garage, got this beautiful copper pipe, and I just ran it up the copper pipe. So he'll probably look at that and go, it's a $5,000 support. But it's great. I completely use that theory that try and use what you have. I think that that is the way forward. And especially for me in gardening. Yeah. Yeah. And when I say progress, not perfection, it's also meant to not make us so overwhelmed with trying to be perfect that we don't start doing anything. And so, you know, that means sometimes we have to use unsustainable methods in order to have more sustainable results in order to make that progress. And it's also meant to be a release of the pressure because a lot of when we talk about these things, people can sort of wear the weight of the changes that we need to make in order to reconnect with the land. And it becomes so overwhelming that we can't make the steps forward that we really, that will benefit us and those little steps. And so again, a lot of what I write about is just the idea of just changing your perception a tiny bit. And so when I talk about reusing things, it's about thinking that, you know, it's fine for you to cut down that tree, you know, that... that beautiful old tree that's been on your property, but cut down that tree and take the wood and make a fence out of it. And when the fence has hit its end of life in 15 years, then take those pieces of the fence and make them into garden stakes or garden, something for your garden. Yeah, bug hotel, like take those pieces and reclaim whatever you can use of it and use it in something else. And when... you know, that has sort of worn down, then you can take them, make plant markers or something. Like keep using the wood as many times as you can until you then, you know, toss the end of the pieces into the bottom of your hubal culture or your raised beds so that they're now going to break down. Wood in the bottom of those beds is so great because it acts like a sponge almost, it holds onto water, it adds fungal matter, which is so wonderful for supporting our soil. So it creates nice air spaces for the air, for the roots of the plants. So you know, then you can put the wood right in the bottom of some large beds or dig a hole and build a hulukulture. And that trees, you know. It's sad to think about bringing it down, but if you need to bring it down sort of for the greater good of the other things and you just can't work in your design for whatever reason, um, at least give it many multiple lives and thinking it through that way. Yeah. I wanted to ask you, Stephanie, um, if your gardening had changed when you had your little boy, when you had a family, like did it, did it change how you garden? Oh, that's a great question. No. But. sort of, I guess. I was doing it with him. So as I mean, I was gardening and not really in a place where I could start working again. And I got pregnant with him probably at a year before I would say I was going to be ready to go back to work. And so of course, pregnancy sort of threw me off totally completely like I traded in I felt better in some ways because parts of my disability sort of went away. And then other, yeah. And then other parts were just normal pregnancy stuff. And the pregnancy wasn't all that easy, but I'm so grateful that I had him. So it, I was, I signed the contract for my very first book when I was seven months pregnant with him. So I had him and it was a project based book. So I had him. like in a carrier on me. I was either pregnant with him or then he was born while I was doing all of these projects. So he's been gardening before he could like open his eyes before he was out in the world. And so then I would, yeah, I would go outside with him and we would build projects. I built more projects for him to get him engaged in the garden. So one of the things that I did, and I write about this project a little bit in the regenerative garden, is about how to build a children's garden. For him, I built a play garden. So I had the garden designed the same way, but instead of putting a plastic swing set in the backyard for him and sort of like a plastic kiddie pool or more sandbox, I put hopscotch stepping stones through the garden path to sort of draw him in. So I made stepping stones out of concrete and put... numbers in each one of them. There's one through nine and some I'd like dragonflies and things like that. And so it would be interesting in going through the garden. Then I took a big sort of wood tree stump that I found out somebody had taken out a tree and then two smaller ones and dug those into the garden as sort of a table and chairs or a climbing area. Yes. And I hung a little solar light chandelier off the thing and have a little tea party set and then digging pots full of plastic dinosaurs, but I got off our like free groups or, you know, community sharing groups. Beautiful. So, yeah. So he would just go out and dig. And I remember when I, I think I'm about 20, I forget what year it was, but one year I was sent a little kids gardening set to review because I was doing a seed collection at the time. And I was looking at these sets to see if they would be appropriate for children. And it came in the mail and it was winter. And he got up in his Spider-Man pajamas and put on his winter boots and a hat and grabbed the gardening set and went outside and just started digging. He immediately was like, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm gonna go out and dig in the garden. So I always made the garden a very sensory space for him. I planted things that were edible or soft to the touch or smelled nice. I had big alliums. you know, giant pom-pom flowers above his head and little tiny bunny tail grasses down near the ground. Beautiful. I had lots of edibles like little alpine strawberries tucked in as ground covers and pink blueberries and different colored fruits for him to pick. All of the ground cherries are great because they're like little packages of beautiful cherries that he could pick, kukamelons and... current tomatoes, all these things that engaged him in the garden. I had five different kinds of mints and I would pull off the chocolate mint and the orange mint and he would smell them and taste them and spit them out. Spicy. It's spicy. Exactly. I tried to allow him to engage in the garden and play with it. while also respecting it. So when we went out in public with other kids, even as a toddler, you would see our friends toddlers stomping on flowers out. Like they wouldn't notice the difference between a sidewalk and a garden, or a grass and a garden. They would watch mine and say, he doesn't stomp the flowers. And I'm like, that's because he's met them. He knows them. Averilll's done a wonderful job of that too with her kids. They'll even... know what a weed is, or they'll know the difference and know what they can do. But my daughter's too, so she's just at a pretty destructive age in general. But she knows that she can, you know, eat a lot of the stuff. I've often seen Bernadette put, you know, like organza bags around her fruit, and I'm thinking, oh, you're protecting them from, you know, the wildlife. And she's like, my daughter, I'm protecting it from my daughter. She won't pick it if the organza bag's on it. But yeah, I thought I thought that was funny. Yeah. We actually have a question that we normally ask our guests and it's your first gardening memory. What would be one of your first gardening memories? Because your son has beautiful gardening memories. He does. I love hearing what he has to say about it because he does have, he has so much connection. You know, the fact that he knows what a hellebore is versus a hydrangea and You know, he's so in touch with when the flowers, but I love hearing what he sees rather than what I see. You know, cause I see the design, I understand how things grow and then, you know, ask him what he likes in the garden and it's completely different. Right now we planted a boulevard garden. As I mentioned, we're in a rental right now. And so in the fall, we planted a whole bunch of bulbs to naturalize in the yards. in the very front boulevard of the public sort of land, the city land of the houses along our whole block. So I got together with the neighbors when I moved in and I said, I'm gonna get all these bulbs and we plant them so that our whole street becomes flowers when people walk by. And so since we've like they've grown in now, well, there's actually the blooms are quite, they're fading. And so, you know, he gets out of the car and there's just. flowers, our whole street is flowers right now, which is amazing. Spectacular. You can feel the power of that. Okay, so one of my first... Or your favorite gardening, you know. Yeah. Well, I like the idea of thinking of my first because it's a question that I haven't had before so it's making me really anxious. Because like I said, I didn't really grow up as a gardener. There's two that come to mind. One is... I somehow in my very first garden got a volunteer pumpkin that grew. It grew all over my front yard. So I let this thing grow, nourished it, supported it, made everybody back away. I babied this thing so that... episode that I would get a pumpkin because I was pretty excited. I didn't even know what it was going to grow because you know squash plants they all look the same and I got a pumpkin. I have a picture of me in this orange sweatshirt holding my pumpkin and just the joy in my face like this pumpkin that grew from a volunteer. I didn't even do anything I just helped support it. That was a great memory. So that was one of my first gardening memories. One of my first sort of interesting memories about garden plants was my parents, even though my mother, even though, you know, she was corporate and she had a little garden in our place, but she did, like she started gardening a lot more when she retired as many folks did, but she had a little garden in our house. I never participated in it. She didn't really, I didn't really see her out there gardening, but at one point I remember I had a friend over and she served salads. to me and my friend, and I think we were like tween age, and she had put flower petals in it, like edible, probably violas or pansies or something like that, the petals. And I remember my friend and I looking at each other like, this is insanity. Your mother's flower, does she think we're rabbits? Like first of all, we don't eat salad. Second of all, she put flowers in it. And now... I grow more edible flowers and my kid, like I'll find him out in the garden just mowing down. I'm like, I'm gonna make those into like cupcakes. I want to decorate stuff with those. And he's just chowing down on all the flowers. Oh wow. Oh that's beautiful. That's beautiful. Definitely come 360 in this. Yeah, well, I think the 360 moment for all of us is when you realise, Mum wasn't crazy and I'm just like her. I know. Yeah, there you go. I have something I just wanted to let people know that so they can get you on all platforms. I like you're you are over them all. We've just joined Twitter. We haven't done. We haven't tweeted. We haven't tweeted yet. We're like, what? What's our first tweet going to be? And that is paralysis by analysis. Definitely. But if people so if they just pop into Google Stephanie Rose garden therapy, everything comes up. And I've just joined up to your five day mini course gardening mini course. So I'm very excited about that. That's some fantastic things. on your website. It's a beautiful website. You've got a big team as well, I noticed. I had a little look at your team, which is great. You've got a great support network. I do, especially, I mean, a lot of those folks came on to help me when I was writing a lot of books and also with COVID. And, you know, I spent a lot of time when things shut down, my disability flared up as a single parent. You know, there was a lot of stuff going on for me. that I needed some support, but I didn't want garden therapy to stop. And so I was able to bring on a couple of people that, you know, somebody who helps with me, right. So I'll do a lot of sort of, um, voice notes, cause it's hard for me also to sit at a computer sometimes. So I'll, I'll talk. I'm really good at talking. I'll talk through some of the ideas that I have and then I have somebody who helps to write it. Beautiful. Yeah. Does that mean, does that mean Stephanie that there's another book coming? I think right now, so I have my, my 12th book published at the end of last year. And I'm going to be, I have, you know, news that I've just chaired brand new news three weeks ago, I finalized an offer on my next house. So we had to sell our house, the regenerative garden was grown in. So that. is my memory book of that garden. And then my son and I have been in a rental now for a couple of months. And in July, we're moving into a new house. So I don't know, well, I have an idea for what I'm gonna do in that house, but I think I'm going to share it along the way rather than writing the book and then releasing it afterwards. Yes. I think you'll find a little bit more about me designing that garden on social media over the next couple of years. Fantastic. journey of both the inside and the outside. But it's going to have a lot of, the difference is going to be that it's going to be a regenerative garden but all the plants are going to have multiple purposes. So not just ornamental, not just edible, not just medicinal, but all of those things. Oh I can't wait and I'll keep tagging you the next project of yours I'm taking on is the seed sharing library little post out the front. So I'll keep you updated with any projects that we tackle of yours as well to just keep showing you how far your inspiration is spreading. That's right. Thank you so much. That means I'm blushing over here. You're making me blush. Thank you so much. It means the world to me that these ideas spark interest in other people and that, you know, that's all we ever want to do as gardeners is share. and be part of a community. So I think, you know, this, I'm getting to live a dream come true through being able to do this. How did you find that out? Oh, Bernadette. I mean, we're we're very lucky. Like all our guests are fantastic. Yeah. Stephanie was like, yeah. She's blushing. I'm blushing. I know. You're so fan girl. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it's it's a beautiful book, isn't it? I'm going to have to get dug into it. And it is one of those books that I do really recommend people to, you know, to get the physical hard copy book because What Stephanie does extremely well is photos, photos, photos. Oh, you know what I was meant to say to her on her website, what really resonated with me, she's out in her garden in her bare feet. I do that all the time. Like, you know, even though we have snakes around the place and I'm terrified of them, I love getting out and touching the ground in my bare feet. I do it all the time. Any, yeah, so any projects that you've... been inspired on her website to give a go? Well, I'm doing her five day mini garden course. I've signed up to that. So that's fantastic. It's just a kind of like a basic five day mini course. So I'm going to hop on there. You do, I think it's daily. I think I should have an email today. And that's all free, isn't it? It's all free. Amazing. Yeah. And she's got great little projects. Like she had some cleaning fizzers, like bath fizzers or shower fizzers. So she shows you how to make them for cleaning for the house, for your toilet. So I quite liked the idea of that because I, we've got a septic system, so I kind of keep everything pretty basic. So I thought, you know what? I could have like a jar of these little cleaning bowls just sitting on top of my toilet and just throw it in. I love that. Every so often, the use of essential oils. I love her whole concept of circular gardening, Bernadette. Like that really. Yes, it's so you. Yes. and her chop and drop. So she chops and drops, which I love too. And maybe getting a bird feeder for your garden. Yes. Bringing in the birds. Bringing in the birds. And feeding the birds. And if anyone else gives any of Stephanie's projects a go, make sure that you tag Stephanie on, but also tag us. You know, let us know or give us some pictures or share with us what you're doing at home. That's right. Hop onto our social platforms and give us a five star review. Yes, until next time, Avril. Slán le. Slán le. Garmunka. Garmunka. Oh, I thought you were getting better. Oh.