Flower growing is artistic and thoughtful. With invested time you can learn skills and knowledge to bless others with beauty.

AdAgrA 2018: Something Better

<p>Flower growing is artistic and thoughtful. With invested time you can learn skills and knowledge to bless others with beauty.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Session 1

Paul Dysinger

Help! I’ve Never Had a Garden!

Yeah, so I'm excited to be here with you this morning.

How many of you all are excited to be learning about gardening?

And as we get started, How many of you have literally never had a garden?

Well, hey, that's better than nothing at all.

But yeah, so I just wanted to get like a little feel for the room of the gardening experience, because I know you might be coming here, but you might have a little bit of gardening experience, but you just want to go a little bit deeper.

Some of you haven't ever had a garden before so we are approaching this from more of a beginning standpoint and there is yeah yeah So there is so much when it comes to gardening.

I feel like this post is in the way here.

There is so much when it comes to gardening that can be covered.

Here's my goal for us this morning before we jump into it.

And that is to break it down into to give you a framework so that by the time that you leave you feel like okay I have a framework that I can work from in my garden and we're gonna be talking about real practical things that you can do when it comes to dealing with weeds and pests and things like that, but even deeper is that you have this framework that you can work from because otherwise sometimes it can be a little overwhelming to even know where to start when you're putting in a garden.

So let's start and if you all don't mind if we just have a quick word of prayer before we begin.

Heavenly Father, I pray that your spirit would be with us as we talk and share together this morning, as we talk about growing food.

It's 1 of the, it is the first occupation that you gave to man, and what a privilege, and I pray that you would guide and that you would be with us during this time in Jesus' name.

So first of all, just a quick little background on myself, and very shortly my wife Natasha will be here.

I don't think she's here right now, but she's just grabbing something, and she'll be in.

Natasha and I currently live in Virginia, but backing up a little bit, I live with my fam- we have a home on our family farm in Tennessee.

And so if any of you have heard of Bountiful Blessings Farm, My dad and my uncle partnered together for many years.

I worked with the family commercial farm for many years.

And then kind of branched off from the commercial side and started teaching people how to grow their own food more on a home scale.

So that's perfect for what we're going to be talking about here today.

And so I started an online training program where I take people step by step through the whole process of growing your own food.

And that's something that we continue to date.

Natasha and I just recently moved up to Virginia.

We don't know exactly how long we're going to be there.

But we've been working with the Finleys have an Evangelism school there.

We've been working with them there and it's kind of forced us into learning a whole new side of gardening because we're living in a basement apartment and we only have a very small space to grow like patio gardening and container gardening.

So we used to have the whole farm Now we're in this little tiny space and so we've learned a whole other side to the gardening area, gardening world with our patio garden.

And we'll have another session after this 1 talking about patio gardening.

But Today, this morning in this session, like I said, I want to take you through this framework that I guide people through when they're putting in their own garden.

So let's just go over a quick overview of what we'll talk about.

First of all, we're going to talk about the big picture when it comes to the garden.

We'll start from the big picture and then we'll come back down into the specifics for our garden.

I want to get you thinking about what's your dreams for your own garden.

Can kind of cast that vision for yourself.

And then we'll spend most of our time talking about your garden game plan.

And this is the game plan that I lead people through and we'll talk a little bit more about it.

It's divided into 4 sections, and it just helps with knowing what to focus on and when to focus on it.

And that can take a lot of stress right off of your plate right there, just having that knowledge.

And then we'll touch on growing an abundance of food.

And then at the end, I'm hoping to save enough time that we can do some question and answers as well.

You might have questions that I don't address in this specific seminar, cause there's so much that can be talked about so we'll try and save some time for that.

But starting out with the big picture, I'll talk just very briefly about the organic approach.

We come to gardening from an organic approach, an organic perspective.

And there's a couple of specific things that are surrounded in that.

Number 1, when you come to gardening from an organic perspective, you're looking at how can you work with nature as much as possible versus working against nature.

Now conventional gardening, most conventional gardeners don't necessarily just look at themselves as working against nature.

But unfortunately, what they do often does work against nature.

And part of that is understanding the whole, Am I blocking the screen for some of you?

Part of that is understanding the whole ecosystems that are in nature.

So you have, you know, if you've ever gardened before, you've probably seen bugs in your garden.

And some of those bugs can cause a lot of harm.

But, and oh, I wish I had put a picture in here, there are insect and insect bugs that actually are extremely beneficial to the garden as well and Having both of them, so part of the whole organic approach is encouraging a biodiversity in your garden because having you when you have a harmful bug It's beneficial to have beneficial ones that will balance out the ecosystem.

I was just hearing about a situation, I think it was in either Yellowstone or Yosemite, I forget which.

It was 1 of our, Yellowstone, that's what it was.

In Yellowstone, you know, they had had, people had basically taken out all of the wolves, just hunting, farmers trying to protect themselves, etc.

Knocked out all of the wolf population and the authorities or whoever made the decision making process said, hey we need to bring wolves back in here.

So they brought wolves back in and it was amazing.

They said the result, the ecosystem changed on every level from not only the animal level because the wolves started balancing out the, there was a way massive load amount of deer that had built up because there was no wolves to balance them out.

So that balanced out, but because the deer balanced out, all of a sudden flora and fauna began growing that wouldn't, wasn't able to grow before because the deer was eating it all.

That, you know, changed the insect populations, like it will change the whole ecosystem just because it brought balance.

And so that's what we're wanting to do in our garden as well.

I'll tell you 1 very simple example of this is how, have any of you ever experienced tomato hornworms?

So they come in and they totally decimate your tomatoes and they can eat them in a matter of like 1 or 2 days.

But there is an, there's a wasp that is a parasitic wasp for those tomato hornworms and they will literally come and we just had tomato hornworms in our garden this year and we didn't do anything to them because we have this wasp in the area that came and it lays its larvae on the hornworm.

It's like this little white, I have pictures of it I can show you it later if you want to come up and talk to me, but it's just like this little white larva that lays on the worm and the larvae ends up eating the worm and kills the worm.

And so part of that, you know, encouraging biodiversity is if we had just gone in and killed off all the tomato hornworms, eventually there would be nothing for the wasp to live on and we'd lose the wasp and then if we ever had the tomato hornworm, it would never be able to balance out.

So this is part of the big picture organic approach.

We're approaching the garden saying, how can we work with nature as much as possible?

How can we encourage biodiversity so that we have a balanced system with the good and bad?

So when I see an insect, it doesn't mean that I immediately go out and attack that insect and try and destroy it, because I might destroy a good insect along with a bad insect and then I'm in a worse place off than I started.

Alright, so let's talk, let me ask you really quickly what your dream goal is.

Anybody have a dream goal of what they would like to do with their garden.

And it can be big, it can be small, it can be like, I wanna grow all my own food.

Anyone else have a goal with their garden?

In essence, grow our own salads at our house.

Yeah, be able to just grow your own salads.

Some of my sweetest memories are going out, especially in the winter, because salads do really well in the winter if you have it and we'll talk briefly about how you can protect them.

Jerry Wernick

Country Living: Making the Move

Kind Father in heaven, we are so thankful you made this beautiful world for us and that you gave each 1 of us life through your creative power.

We are so sorry, the mess we've made of our home in many ways and for the sin that has come about.

We want to give back as much as we can to the beautiful natural lifestyle that you intended for us in the beginning.

Help us today as we discuss things together, as we present what you've been able to do for some of your people.

Lord, help it to be instructive, to be helpful, especially to be an encouragement.

Help us to be an encouragement to each other.

Give us wisdom now we pray in your name, amen.

Yesterday we presented about 6 hours on how to have a fun, enjoyable, inexpensive country home.

We only have 1 hour to put 6 hours into, so we're going to have to go very quickly.

We had a bunch of handouts, but yesterday pretty well people cleaned us out.

But there's a few up here for, and I'll mention those if you want to get some of the things.

We, our place overlooks Glacier National Park, for those of you who are familiar with Montana.

It's, I think it's gorgeous, but it's also snowy.

From everything we could read in God's Word and the Spirit of Prophecy, we understood that God's people are to be, you need to connect with the world, but not absorb the whole worldly lifestyle.

And it's best for us if we have our own independent country homes, but within reach of being able to witness to people.

But our homes need to be not just in the country, they need to be completely independent in the basics of life.

I'm gonna buy, you know, mangoes as long as I can and bananas and so on.

I've tried to grow bananas, it wasn't successful.

But the day will come when we can't do that and we still will need to be able to help other people.

So I just wanted you to know our philosophy.

Our philosophy is to have a home that's convenient, hopefully attractive, fun for the children and all of that, and yet it would continue to work just like it is if you couldn't buy anything.

That kind of guided us in what we were trying to do.

I had a whole talk prepared, but I think we should suspend with that.

We found out yesterday most people are more interested in pictures than what I'm having to say.

How to build your own home using as many native materials as possible and still have it attractive so it's inexpensive when you're done.

You should know we never had much money and that's partly because we quit working in regular society after well 5 years we saved our money and bought our land and I worked 3 more years as we were both teachers and teachers make a nice income but it's not usually you spend everything you make to keep life going.

And so it was hard to save money on that, to buy land.

Building your own home, independent utilities, how to have hot water, regular water, electricity, how to heat your home, all of those things without having to be connected to anything, without using any propane or natural gas or any of that.

Alpine gardening, we call it alpine gardening because we live in an area where it's really cold a lot of the year.

And finally, family businesses that you can do on your land so dad can stay home with the family as much as possible and you can still make a living.

You know, a lot of people, I grew up in the Midwest.

So the principles are the same, but it might be a little different.

We looked for places where the land was not abused, it was not overused.

There were people, but not too many people.

And we took 1 trip, 1 summer with friends, and you have to do that.

You gotta go on the ground to find the land.

For some reason or other, they were kind of forgotten.

The reason this valley was kind of like it was, Canada is to the left and it's kind of a boxed in canyon up there, a valley, and there was 1 Canadian family living in that whole valley up there and then it was over the mountains to something else.

And the originally there were 400 people living in this valley in the pioneer days which was early 1900s up to about 1935.

We talked to some of the original homesteaders.

They all thought they were going to be wealthy ranchers except they found out they couldn't grow anything, just easily.

And it kind of left the valley eventually in 1910, Glacier National Park was formed.

About where you see the little prairie out there, right in front of it this way is a river, beautiful river, and that is the border of the park.

So from there over, there'll never be any development, which is nice.

On this side, it's all national forest mixed in with some private land.

We're about 40 miles from the nearest town, but thousands of people come through our valley in the summer, a very short season.

So you still have all the witness and ministry opportunity you would want.

And most of the people that come are interested in the natural world, which is a lead towards the creator.

So we looked for land, a valley first, then we came back and looked around for a piece of property.

And we found when you're looking for land, the best piece of property are usually not on the market.

Not always, but we know 3 of us now in our valley, Adventist people, who have found their land when the land was not on the market.

You ask around, you may work with a realtor because he knows somebody, but the land isn't actually advertised.

Remember that, especially if you're looking for land that has resources on it.

So this is a picture from the top of the hill of the land we actually bought.

It has a beautiful view, And there was timber on it.

If you buy land that just has no woods, how you gonna heat your place?

This is just another view from the top of our place, looking out across it.

This is the river that goes between and we, the guy that we bought from wanted to sell this river property too, but it was more money of course.

Well, River water is always in the lowest spot, obviously, and you can't use it.

I mean, unless you have a big pump, you can't even make power with it unless you build a dam of some sort.

And it tends to be controlled because it's a fishery.

This 1 happens to be part of the National Wild and Scenic River Program, which is wonderful.

It won't be developed and we use it for recreation and rafting, canoeing, it's wonderful, but I wouldn't want to live on it because you can't build right next to it.

But we asked the guy, we want to have a deeded easement to the river so we can get there for recreation.

So it's like we own river, but we don't have to pay for it.

We're back just a quarter mile from the river on a little road is where our land is.

Town is down that road and then through that little canyon you see there 40 miles from our place.

It's a gravel road, some of it's paved as you get closer to town, and town isn't big.

It's about 3 or 4000 people, but that's the nearest town.

Carol Sikora

Behold the Beautiful

Something you didn't know about yesterday.

I'm getting into my 60s I'm going to try to share some of my victories and defeats with you And I'm really a small-scale farmer really small I Don't do a large garden, and I never have or farm But I've been really successful in what I've done, and I would encourage people not to get too big Try to stay small Because especially if you don't have a workforce, for those that have families, you got a little bit of a workforce, having children.

You're going to find out this afternoon more about that.

So they all helped me in everything that I did.

I'm in a zone 6, if anybody knows zones, and sometimes 7.

Depending where I put them, I'm a south-facing hillside.

This is our third farm in the same valley and so it's Very warm, but I'm still only about zone 6.

With my greenhouses, I probably can get away with zone 8 at times, because I can overwinter some things in there like dahlias, dahlia bulbs.

I actually just leave them in there, because it's a bedded greenhouse.

And if you understand that, there's a lot of heat retained in those beds.

It hasn't grown much over the 35 years that we've lived there.

We only have 14 inches of rainfall in a year, including snow.

And I'm at 5, 800 feet in elevation above sea level.

The nights are very cool, and the days can be very hot during the summer.

So there's real extremes, whether it's winter, summer, spring, or fall.

There's real extremes on either end between morning and night.

1 thing I really want to highly recommend, if you can at all, And if you can hear my talk later, you'll see how I progressed on my greenhouses.

But I really highly recommend greenhouses, even if you can bend, get a bender, and make your own by conduit pipe, because there's lots of ways you can do it.

I've bought things because someone wasn't using it.

And so because you're going to enhance what you can grow.

Especially in my environment it's so extreme that greenhouse grown it cuts ultraviolet lights because we're at 55800 feet It's really hard on plants extremely hard on plants so Greenhouses I really encourage you to use if you're going to do flower production or even vegetables because they just regulate temperatures better.

And we actually have 2 greenhouses, and we don't have any heaters in them, no fans.

They're basically just tunnels that we use.

1 is a bedded greenhouse, but We were really really basic We are not high-tech at all what we do which makes it really nice for you all because you can do it I'm just encouraging you that you can do it You get you know early early season production and late season production when you have greenhouses, which extends the time that you can grow, which means it extends the time that you can actually make some money off of what you're doing if that's what you're going with this.

So there was a lot of footwork in what I did as far as selling flowers, because we're dealing with flowers right now in this session.

I strictly went by word of mouth in everything I did.

At that time, there was no computers, there was no news feed, there was no internet that we really used.

And a lot of the things I did was showers, baby showers, wedding showers, weddings.

I would just make bouquets and bring them or say, do you want someone to do your wedding?

Would you be interested in, you know, and because I got to know my neighbors and my, where I live a lot.

And so people knew I did that and so I would gift a lot of things to people so that they could know what I was doing And I actually really like doing that.

It sounds like it's a waste of time, but I don't believe it.

I believe everything's a ministry that I do.

And in a small town, it speaks volumes when you're doing some of these things for people.

And so I'm going to tell you some of the ways I marketed my flowers.

Relatives, farmer's market, my CSA, nurseries, local florist bought my dahlias.

I do all the flowers in the church every week, whether it's winter, summer, fall, spring.

Whether it's fake flowers or real flowers, I do all of those.

It's great practice to even work with dried flowers because they used to look awful.

Go to Hobby Lobby sometime and walk down the aisles.

It's just amazing what they're doing with fake flowers now.

I had a runner From telluride used to pick up my children and my both caves when they were really young we make about 30 or 40 bouquets and Resell them to a market there, and we made really good money I was really surprised and it was great for my daughters because I have 3 daughters and a son even my son kind of got into it He would go out and cut and stuff for us, but so we've done just about everything even edible flowers believe it or not There's a big market for edible flowers in the health food store lines So and I also have lately the last 2 years this would be my third season to do bedding plants I've even gone that extreme now where I'm doing some bedding plants.

I'm not huge, but I'm probably doing 500 to 700 bedding plants now for a local little nursery that actually hired me wanted me to be a part of their team between April and June right in town in my little town they wanted an organic line so I bring them organic tomatoes and any everything all vegetables and and some annuals that they can't get.

Back to Menu

Series

Session 1

Behold the Beautiful

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Specialty Crops

Taking Cut Flower Farming to the Next Level

1h 8m

Intensive: Growing and Selling Cut-Flowers

1. Growing and Selling Cut-Flowers: Why Flowers?

48m

Flower Farming

Flower Farming Basics

51m

Specialty Crops Track

Becoming a Flower Farmer

1h 1m

Flowers

Starting Out with Flower Farming

1h

Session 3

Sharing the Simple Life: My Journey

1h 11m

Growing Specialty Crops

Growing and Selling Cutflowers

1h

Sound Doctrine