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Use less compost, make less money & follow your passion 100% with Steve Solomon
1.1k Plays6 days ago
BYO wheelbarrow to load up on Solomon’s wisdom, cos today we’re chatting with the grandaddy of beyond-organic gardening himself, Steve Solomon! If you don’t know Steve, he’s a bit of cult hero in food growing circles thanks to his deep research into soil remineralisation and why it is absolutely critical for human health.
In this convo:
How pre-industrial communities ate 4 x more nutrient-dense food
Why MINERALS are the key to healthy soil and healthy humans
Better nutrition… lower libido?
Why compost is really bloody complicated
…and how compost can ruin your soil if you’re not careful
How to calculate how much organic matter your soil actually needs
The ugly truth about commercial compost
COF ~ Complete Organic Fertiliser
Why Steve doesn’t recommend soil testing for everyone
EVIL GOVERNMENT EDICTS
Steve’s pact to intentionally follow his interests 100%
“THE PURPOSE OF MY LIFE IS TO DO WHATEVER IT IS I’M INTERESTED IN”
LINKY POOS 🧙♀️
[book] The Intelligent Gardener ~ Steve Solomon
[just released!] Growing Nutrient-Dense Vegetables: A Cool Climate Guide~ Steve Solomon
Google: Steve Solomon gardening books
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration ~ Weston A. Price
Soil fertility and Animal Health ~ William Albrecht
🧡🧡🧡 Support Reskillience on Patreon 🧡🧡🧡
Words in Winter ~ Live podcast with Mara Ripani & Natasha Morgan
Return to the Village ~ Australasian Permaculture Convergence.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Theme
00:00:03
Speaker
race scal end Hey there, this is Katie, back from the dead, and you're listening to Riskillians, a podcast about how to live well at the 11th hour.
Setting the Scene: Recording in Southern Australia
00:00:14
Speaker
Whether or not you think the world is crumbling, or you just want to grab this one wild and precious life by the prairie oysters, I am gratefully recording in Jyra country, in southern Australia, where we've been haunted by days and days of heavy fog that doesn't clear until after lunchtime, only to creep back in at dusk.
00:00:35
Speaker
It
Gardening and Spring Planning
00:00:36
Speaker
is all pretty gloomy at this time of year. But amidst the drear, there's wattle and jonquils and yellow robins and lightbulb moments like, oh shit, it is time to think about spring seeds already.
00:00:50
Speaker
I know some organised humans who have sown their first tomatoes safely indoors, which is giving me seed-raising anxiety. Now I realise that many of you listening don't necessarily share my climate zone, and you might be sunning your legs in the tropics, or knee-deep in zucchinis in the northern hemisphere, but I am pretty sure that most of you share my enthusiasm for plants, and soil, and growing food, whatever the season.
Introducing Guest Steve Solomon
00:01:16
Speaker
And that's my way of telling you that the next handful of Ruskillian's episodes will have a cheeky little gardening twist to celebrate the first inklings of spring here in Southern Australia and the universal joy of growing things no matter where you are in the world.
00:01:31
Speaker
Our first illustrious guest is the grandfather of Beyond Organic Gardening himself, a man who has challenged our collective fetish for compost and championed soil remineralisation, who at 83 and a half years old is more fired up than ever about helping people grow and eat truly nutrient-dense food.
00:01:52
Speaker
It is indeed Steve Solomon, author of cult favourite gardening guides such as The Intelligent Gardener and Growing Vegetables South of Australia, which has just had a glow up by Meliodora Publishing and will be available as Growing Nutrient-Dense Vegetables very, very soon.
00:02:11
Speaker
Steve is also the founder of the Soil and Health Library, a huge and ever-expanding repository of digital books and resources on radical agriculture and rebellious living.
00:02:22
Speaker
He lives in the Meander Valley in Tasmania. tending a thriving veggie patch, and some farm animals, and community sufficiency, and he assures me he can still touch his toes. Listen right to the end for some epic advice on following your passions.
Support and Announcements
00:02:38
Speaker
Plus, I've also included outtakes, or more accurately, hot takes, from Steve, which happened after we'd wrapped up the more formal part of the conversation, and and I thought were too good not to share, so stick around for those.
00:02:50
Speaker
It's bloody awesome to be back with you this week after an unplanned yet ultra-appreciated podcast breather. Thank you for your patience. If you love this episode, please spread it around like turnip seeds. Happy National Turnip Day for those in the United States. And if you love the podcast, consider becoming a supporter on Patreon.
00:03:10
Speaker
Every small donation helps me cover some of the 20 or more hours I spend producing each episode and brings me closer to a community-supported livelihood, which is honestly my wildest dream.
Discovering Nutrient Density
00:03:22
Speaker
Big thanks to new patrons Alistair, Helen, Jan, Phoebe, Sophie and Tina. I am so grateful for your goodwill.
00:03:32
Speaker
I also have three little announcements that I will share in the outro to this episode. Well, here is a croaking chorus of frogs recorded near Ben Lomond National Park in Luchawita, Tasmania to sing in the very special Steve Solomon.
00:03:48
Speaker
Enjoy.
00:03:52
Speaker
I couldn't have imagined having this conversation nearly 10 years ago when I discovered and became completely obsessed with your book, Growing Vegetables South of Australia.
00:04:02
Speaker
i was in Tasmania at the time working on a market garden and it inspired me to become a market gardener, but you can obviously see where that ended up. I'm now talking about gardening less, so doing it commercially. Yeah, I wish you could see the grims on face right now.
00:04:20
Speaker
I really appreciate having the time to spend with you today and to hear where you're at and a bit of Solomon's wisdom about all things gardening. Well, you got me. say you You've written so many books and I would say um for me a common thread is cultivation of a healthy independence from civilizational enslavement through things like growing our own food. But you do share a word of caution, which is before you go crazy growing and eating backyard veggies, you really have to pay attention to nutrient density. Otherwise, you can cripple your health, basically. In fact, you say that pretty much all vegetables, whether you're growing them, buying them from the farmer's market or, heaven forbid, moles and bullies, are pretty nutritionally poor. And this is wreaking havoc on our well-being. So, Steve, can you help us understand what you mean by nutrient density, just how important it is and why we're probably not getting enough, even if we're diligently growing our own produce like good and noble homesteaders?
00:05:24
Speaker
Well, I'm going to have to concoct um a little essay or right now on the spot, put all those pieces together nicely. um Let's start with what nutrient density is.
00:05:36
Speaker
Best way I know to understand this is with arithmetic um and ah with a simple mathematical formula that goes health equals nutrition divided by calories.
00:05:50
Speaker
So um let's suppose you've got an item of food that's got a thousand units of nutrition in it and a thousand units of cal and a thousand calories in it.
00:06:01
Speaker
And you divided the nutrition by the calories and it comes out one. But if there were only 500 units of nutrition in that thousand calories, it would nutritionally be one half.
00:06:15
Speaker
okay You see that? Gotcha. The basic thing on that is that calories are not nutrition. Carbohydrates are not nutrition.
00:06:26
Speaker
Sugar is not nutrition. Starch isn't nutrition. are um All that is energy. And ah the body burns energy, but it needs nutrition to rebuild the tissues and to process the food and and to form itself and maintain itself.
00:06:44
Speaker
um And if it lacks nutrition, um it doesn't either go well or even as a young young body, doesn't develop properly. I've always felt that that more important than telling somebody how to grow a cabbage ah is to get them to grasp why they want to grow food.
00:07:05
Speaker
Can I interrupt your essay here? Yeah, yeah, anytime. So I think a lot of people listening will maybe be at a similar stage to me where when I'm growing that food, I'm thinking, okay, I'm i'm doing enough. This is good enough. Even if I haven't dug down into the nitty gritty of paying attention to my soil and the minerals that might be contained in that cabbage, because my brain is just getting the signal, Katie, like you're doing the best that you can.
00:07:32
Speaker
i suppose the easiest way to get at this is to inform you about a book. that that I read a long time ago the first time. I think I was in my, around age 40.
00:07:46
Speaker
It's called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price. um This book's had a lot of effect on people. In fact, there's the Weston Price Nutritional Foundation right now, which still publishes the book, oh even though ah Price wrote the book in the nineteen thirty s You should read the book. Everyone should read the book. It's a free download on the Soil and Health Library.
00:08:10
Speaker
If a person's not interested in doing a lot of reading, there's 100 photographs in that book. And you know how a picture's worth a thousand words. if If someone just looked at the photographs and read the caption underneath the photographs, they would get 90% of what the book is about.
00:08:28
Speaker
Let me summarize it for you. ah Weston Price was a research dentist at the University of Ohio in Cleveland in the 1920s. Highly regarded research do person, wrote journal articles.
00:08:42
Speaker
um His interest was preventative dentistry. How do you stop people from having tooth decay and loss of bone density around the jaw and all that stuff. um After an entire lifetime of work, he admitted that he completely failed.
00:09:00
Speaker
That there was no way that that he could work that out because He didn't have what they call a control group. When you're doing this kind of research, you, you need a control group.
00:09:12
Speaker
You need a ah group of animals that are on the standard feed, the usual normal thing. And then you take a part of that group and you give them something else or take something away from them and then see what happens and compare the two groups.
00:09:26
Speaker
And that's what allows you to know what the effect was of whatever you're adding or subtracting. Um, But without a control group, especially with humans, um if you ask a human, what have you eaten all your life? They can't tell you.
00:09:40
Speaker
If they tell you, they're probably forgetting. They're probably not really telling you the truth. And why is it that you're looking at hundreds of people with bad tooth decay and troubled mouths, and then this guy appears from Alaska, and he's 97 years old. He has all his teeth. He looks like he's 60, and he spent his whole life living on black coffee, brandy, and moose meat.
00:10:03
Speaker
You know, how come? So um anyway, there was a price he was kind of stuck. And then he realized that there actually were control groups. And he merely had to go and document them.
00:10:16
Speaker
And what they were is very isolated, remote communities that were still on this planet before the Second World War, before roads got put in almost everywhere.
00:10:27
Speaker
um There were little communities um that had no shop. They had got a tin of sardines. They'd never heard of anything called spam. They don't have any white flour from the mill. They don't have anything to eat except what comes out of their ground and their environment.
00:10:43
Speaker
And um these communities had a reputation for having extraordinarily good health. So using his contacts, he got himself invited by the local health authorities to be conducted into these very remote places and look at all the people, look in all their mouths, take photographs of them, inquire about what they ate and how they lived.
00:11:05
Speaker
or And ah he made three globe-spanning journeys in the 1930s, one to Europe, um one to the Pacific, and are one to Canada.
00:11:20
Speaker
And I know also he called on some villages in coastal Peru, Anyway, he took all these photographs. He took samples of their food. He assayed the nutritional quality of their food um as best he could with the rather primitive lamatory techniques that were available in the 1930s, especially with a portable lab.
Solomon's Journey to Mineral-Rich Soil
00:11:43
Speaker
Basically, what he found was um a large number of communities with every racial group on the planet eating very different diets. Each community had its own dietary regimen.
00:11:56
Speaker
They all had perfect teeth. they are and Unless they got hit in the face, I guess. by um um they They died with all their teeth.
00:12:06
Speaker
They lived a long time. They lived to be 80, 90 years old, and then some sometimes. um They had very good health. The degenerative diseases that we know about, they didn't know a thing about. They didn't know anything about Arthritis, they didn't know anything about it um ah cancer or diabetes or tuberculosis. or um It just didn't happen.
00:12:30
Speaker
And they died of old age mostly. Their food had something like four times the nutrient density of the average diet of the working class in the United States.
00:12:43
Speaker
Now all he was measuring was minerals. That's all they can measure. He took a piece of food and and ashed it. You know, he put it in an oven and cooked it to powder and then analyzed the powder and ah came up with how much calcium and magnesium and potassium basically there was in it.
00:12:59
Speaker
That's what he was able to look at. So just on that basis, they had four times the minerals in their food. In the book, there's photographs also of other people that he met along the way who weren't on that diet. And when you compare the faces, the differences are incredibly different.
00:13:16
Speaker
The healthy people had very wide faces. um Their jaw was wide and big enough to hold all their teeth straight without them being crooked. Their eyes were far apart.
00:13:28
Speaker
ah Their skin was clear. um ah They were pretty, all of them. um And then ah there'd be like a photograph of the kids in the town, you know, that you had to go to. of There was several days walk away ah where civilization started. And you look at the people in that town and they have narrow pinched faces with crooked teeth and poor skin and eyes closer together. That's what nutrient density is all about.
00:13:55
Speaker
You're describing my year 12 school photo. the The most incredible photo of all of that um is, I think it was his first place that he visited, which was, no, the second. It was the Island of Harris off the coast of Scotland.
00:14:11
Speaker
um And there's a photograph there where the top of it is a group of kids from the Island of Harris and the bottom is a group of kids from the town on the mainland there in Scotland. And the kids on the Isle of Harris are dirty, and their clothes are a bit tatty, and they're a bit grubby because they've been rolling around in the dirt all the time having fun. um And they're sturdy and stocky and healthy looking. And then you look at the kids from town, and they have narrow pinched faces and missing teeth.
00:14:41
Speaker
They just don't look very well. And um after you see a bunch of those photographs and then get the concept of what the result of poor nutrition is on a human body, you you can't even look at yourself in the mirror or your friends and people you know on the street the same way.
00:14:58
Speaker
Yeah, you came across Price's work in your 40s. And at that point, were you homesteading? ah Yes. Okay. And had you become aware that your health wasn't at the point that you hoped it might be after growing your own, a majority of your own food and kind of living this good life? is that Was that helping you make a connection between the food that you were consuming and growing yourself and your state of health?
00:15:23
Speaker
Well, i read that book a couple of years before I began to realize that my food wasn't so good. I was under the illusion that because I was growing it organically, um it would be good.
00:15:35
Speaker
um There's a story I always tell about this when I lecture. I just recount Woody Allen's first movie. It was called Sleeper. I think it was in black and white.
00:15:47
Speaker
So the movie starts, Woody Allen is in a hospital bed, and he opens his eyes. He's just come to consciousness after surgery, and there's a doctor there in the room waiting for him to wake up.
00:15:59
Speaker
and He looks around, sees the doctor and says, what are you doing here, doc? I thought there might be a nurse, but ah is everything okay? Well, Mr. Eleanor, I have something I have to tell you, says the doctor. It's kind of important, he said.
00:16:14
Speaker
When we did your tonsillectomy, you died on the table. And we didn't know what to do about it at that time, but we had a brand new chirogenic unit in the hospital. So we froze your body. until such time as we can figure out how to fix the problem that caused your demise. ah And now we have figured it out and we unthawed you and we fixed you and here you are.
00:16:41
Speaker
Only it's 175 years later and Woody looks at him incredulously and he says, oh, come on, doc. um My friends must have just hired you to put me on. I think you're just an actor. Where are my clothes? I want to go home And the doctor says, Mr. Allen,
00:16:59
Speaker
I'm sorry to tell you that, first of all, you don't have a home and you don't have any friends. All your friends are dead.
00:17:08
Speaker
And he says, my friends can't be dead. I ran a health food store. We all ate brown rice. fifty So that sort of defines the organic movement's belief at that time.
00:17:23
Speaker
as it Yeah, a lot of people thought that. If I just grow my food organically, it doesn't have pesticide residues in it, and I have enough compost in the ground, then the food will be as good as food can be, and I will live as long as a human being can possibly live, nutrition has anything to do with it.
00:17:38
Speaker
Yes. The only thing is, it's not true. Well, that's the belief I was getting at, and that's the illusion that I'd love your help in shattering for us today. Well, I was led to do that. Now, One of the ways that God inspires people to undertake a project like that is to kick them in the ass a few times and make them suffer.
00:18:00
Speaker
So there I was homesteading, bought five acres, put in about a 500 square meter ah vegetable garden, ah started growing as much of my own food as I could, planned to not work very much for money, i cut my own firewood, drive an old pickup truck. you Excuse me, but I'm speaking to Americans today also, so I may speak in both languages sometimes.
00:18:25
Speaker
oh and And there I was. i thought everything would be great. um And then, like every homesteader, I dreamed of having a homestead business because you've got to have some money.
00:18:38
Speaker
um So i after a couple of years, I was inspired to start a mail-order vegetable seed business. And being the kind of person that I am, i had to do it honestly.
00:18:49
Speaker
And an honest seed company grows a trial's ground where you actually look at the vegetables you're offering people and then ah describe them in your catalog the way they actually grow and taste.
00:19:02
Speaker
And better, you grow them organically without pesticides and with sort of ordinary soil like gardeners would use. There I was with a half an acre of vegetables in addition to my vegetable garden,
00:19:15
Speaker
And the only reason I grew them was for information. So I'd pull the carrot out of the ground, um wipe it off, take a taste, write down something about it on the clipboard and throw it on the ground. And if there wasn't somebody conveniently around when I was ready to terminate a trial, um um I would just pull all the carrots and throw them in the compost heap.
00:19:36
Speaker
Okay. My new seed business didn't do very well financially for the first two years because I didn't know how to run a seed business. And ah the first year I didn't make anything. The second year, I think I was able to take $4,000 out of the business.
00:19:51
Speaker
ah The third year was better. I think I took $7,000 out of the business and then 14 and then 30, you know, and I started to have money again. um But in those for First couple of years, um I had an unusual medical doctor um named Isabel Moser.
00:20:09
Speaker
And she ran the Great Oak School of Health. And she was, you might say, a natural hygienist. She had a PhD in counseling psychology. And she practiced medicine without a license and never went to prison for it.
00:20:20
Speaker
Anyway, I told Isabel about my problems with financially. And she said to me, you really don't have any worries. She said, you are ah got all this food. Why don't you just eat your vegetable garden?
00:20:33
Speaker
Stop going to the supermarket. Stop buying stuff. Just eat your vegetables. You'll only end up healthier. Oh, okay. So I did that. So the great majority of my food was coming off of one piece of soil that was grown by me.
00:20:47
Speaker
And then after about two years, one day, Isabel knocked on my door unsurprisingly in the middle of the summer and found a way to tell me that she really wanted to become Mrs. Solomon.
00:21:02
Speaker
And she moved in with me. Only after a couple of years, um Isabel's hair started to get brittle and fall out. Her teeth, ah her fingernails weren't good anymore. And that endless energy had she had started to disappear. She started to feel stressed about a lot of things.
00:21:20
Speaker
And I started to find that the seed business was growing. And I started to have employees and all the stuff that happens with that. And I started to find it stressful and and hard to deal with. So after a few years, 1984, we took a sabbatical.
00:21:36
Speaker
And I didn't grow a trial ground that summer. And ah Isabel and I went to Suva, Fiji. It's a very relaxed, pleasant place. And the Fijians are happy people. And we just moved in, lived daily life, went shopping every day in the Central Market, swam laps in the Olympic Lake outdoor pool in Suva, rode the bus back and forth sometimes for 16 cents.
00:21:58
Speaker
And it was a fun place. When I got on the bus, I could hand the driver my Bob Marley cassette and he'd stick it in the sound system and we'd go down the road listening to Bob Marley and the Wailers instead of what he had been playing. And then he'd give me my cassette back when I got off ah and put his own back on. This was sort of like Fiji.
00:22:16
Speaker
um And on that diet from the market there, my teeth tightened up. Isabel's hair got gray. Her fingernails got hard. Our energy came back.
00:22:26
Speaker
um And I didn't know what to ascribe that to. So I went for sure. So I went to the market and I asked the produce market merchants where we've been buying vegetables because we mostly ate vegetables there too.
00:22:40
Speaker
And um they I thought they'd tell me that the veggies came from little market gardens around Suva. But they didn't. They all came from one commercial district that produced the vegetables on Vidylevu. And there was about an hour and a quarter's drive out of c Suva in a river valley called the Singatoga River.
00:22:58
Speaker
And I found out there was a government experiment research station up there and a lot of vegetable farms. So I rang them up on the phone and introduced myself and invited myself over for a tour because I was in the seed business, of course, and I knew how to talk that way.
00:23:13
Speaker
So we rented a car one day and we drove up there. And as soon as I turned up the river valley, for the first time in my life, I fell into absolute lust. I wanted to own and live on some of that soil. It was so gorgeous.
00:23:26
Speaker
um And it was a narrow valley. It was only a couple of kilometers wide near the mouth and got narrow as you went up. There were no houses at all on the valley floor. It was perfectly flat. There were small houses on the slopes above the valley. I saw no sign of livestock.
00:23:43
Speaker
I saw no sign of cows. I saw no manure piles. I get to the experiment station and I say, how do you grow vegetables here? And he said, well, the first thing I can tell you is we've not used any fertilizer for the last 75 years.
00:23:59
Speaker
I said, how about manure? No, no manure, no compost. Well, what happens here? He says, well, we've got two seasons. There's a dry, cooler season and a very hot, rainy, humid season. And when the hot, humid weather comes, all the vegetables die because they can't deal with it.
00:24:14
Speaker
and And the whole place is taken over by grass and weeds. And by the end of the rainy season, it's chest high. And then we plow it under and it rots very rapidly in the warm moat soil. And then we grow vegetables.
00:24:28
Speaker
Repeat. And that's all we do. So they grow a green renard crop every winter and maintain some organic matter. Now what the guy didn't think to tell me was that they have cyclones in Fiji and about every two or three years the Singatoga River floods wildly, which is why nobody lived on the valley floor, um and it deposits silt.
00:24:49
Speaker
So I went back to the library in Suva and found the British Empire geologic survey of that island that was done, I think, in the 1960s and discovered that the whole watershed of the Singatoga River was something called ultra-basic igneous rock.
00:25:05
Speaker
Now, I remember from my university geology course that there's three basic kinds of igneous rock. I shouldn't use the word basic. Three kinds.
00:25:15
Speaker
There's acidic, basic, and ultra-basic. So acidic igneous rocks are like granite. A large part of the rock is quartz, and it's got a lot of silicon in it and some feldspar and not a lot of metal.
00:25:31
Speaker
and it tends to make soils that are very acidic and rather poor. Granite is the most typical kind of that rock that people know. um Then basic Cygnus rock would be basalt.
00:25:43
Speaker
um And it produces a soil that's only slightly acid and has a reasonable amount of minerals in it because the basalt has a reasonable amount of minerals in it. ah And we got a lot of that here in Tasmania.
00:25:57
Speaker
You got some of that up in the mainland too. um We call it volcanic soil usually in this country. um It's good soil. um But ultra-basic rock has got much more mineral content than basic rock. It's very heavy.
00:26:13
Speaker
It's usually black. um It's just chock-a-block with minerals. And when it breaks down and forms soil, that soil will be slightly alkaline. You know what that told me? That there was something I didn't know.
00:26:24
Speaker
oh these minerals had something to do with the quality of the food. Mm-hmm. And I'd never thought of that before. I always assumed that trace elements would be just naturally present if you put in compost.
00:26:39
Speaker
That's not true. And Steve, yeah, I'd love to get into the compost um story with you as well. But just on on this story of you and Isabel heading away and having this renewed vitality, how did you know that wasn't just from the alleviation ah of your day-to-day stresses back home?
00:26:58
Speaker
I wondered that myself. because food wasn't the only thing that happened. We also had a wonderful time. We didn't have any stress. The people around us were pleasant.
00:27:09
Speaker
or And then we came home. We were there for five and a half months and came home and resumed the seed business and resumed eating off of that soil. And within a year, my teeth were getting loose again. Isabel's hair was getting bad.
00:27:25
Speaker
Her fingernails were breaking. ah We were losing our vegetables. desard deie And know so it wasn't only for this reason, ah but I sold the seed business and retired. And we bought another piece of property after a couple of years of wandering about trying to figure out what we were going to do.
00:27:46
Speaker
And got some of the best soil that was available in Oregon and started growing our own food again. And my teeth got tighter and I felt better and we were doing really well.
00:27:58
Speaker
And I really knew there was something I had to learn. Okay, because that new place that you'd put down roots had a different soil type to where you had been previously growing. That's right. It was the best alluvial soil available in the state of Western, in Western Ormean.
00:28:13
Speaker
And just coming back to the Weston Price piece and his remarkable findings, like that is absolutely a cornerstone book for anyone interested in human health and flourishing and reaching our true potential, especially intergenerationally as well. But I'd just like to hear a bit more of an embellishment on you know his work and the food that he was seeing people eat in these more traditional settings or very traditional settings. that was vastly different. As you say, there wasn't actually ah a typical diet that any one of these peoples was adhering to that was common. It was, you know, people eating lots of carbohydrates and little protein versus lots of protein and fat and very little carbohydrates. And they were all over the place in terms of like the macronutrients and the types of food. see you've read the book.
00:29:07
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I studied health and nutrition back in the day and that was obviously – There were a lot of people following that kind of approach um around me, but I've never actually thought about the question of, you know, was he connecting it to the mineralisation of the soil? And if so, you know, I realise this is such a hilarious question, like what's different in our industrial society, but is it just like what are we doing to so dramatically deplete the this reserve of nutrition versus people's living... um
00:29:40
Speaker
You know, and obviously lots of templates too. There were nomadic or agriculturalists or this, that, and the other thing. You know, what what is so different with those those lifestyles? Well, if I had to guess, Price wasn't too specific about that.
00:29:54
Speaker
um The only thing he he said that I can relate to your question is that over many generations, the people in those communities had learned which particular foods that were available to them produced good health and which didn't.
00:30:09
Speaker
Hmm. So they concentrated on the most nutritious foods. I'm making another guess. He also mentions, he made suggestions that heavy focus on sexual activity is um ah derived from poor nutrition.
00:30:24
Speaker
Wow. And that people who feel better physically aren't as interested in fornication. I would feel it would be the opposite. Like that life force and desire to spread one's seed would be it exacerbated by health.
00:30:38
Speaker
by health I'll tell you, I sure have had trouble controlling those impulses in my life. oh But oh especially with a name like Solomon.
00:30:53
Speaker
you know I never had a thousand women at one time, but there have been a continuous string of them one after the other. oh It settled down as I got older.
00:31:05
Speaker
But anyway, i don't think Christ... really knew what made food more nutrient dense. He just knew that those foods had more nutrition in them.
00:31:18
Speaker
That he was sure of from ashing them and and measuring the the minerals, some of the minerals in them. I think he would have ascribed it to relatively lack of stress.
00:31:29
Speaker
um I don't think he was too concerned about toxins at this point because agricultural poisons hadn't become so predominant. um I think he had some focus on denatured food. I think he was concerned about things like white flour, you know, and removing the nutrients that were in the food for commercial convenience.
00:31:49
Speaker
or But I don't think he knew. so when did you start to become a mad soil scientist? Well, the first thing that happened was, is I came back and I started reading William Albrecht.
00:32:03
Speaker
I've got a book that Albrecht called when he first put it out, ah Soil Fertility and Animal Health, which is available for free download online at Soil and Health Library. or And he's looking at livestock and the results of nutrition on livestock.
Compost Myths and Soil Balance
00:32:20
Speaker
And um one of the most interesting studies that he talks about is he got some photographs of rabbits. And and um he brought in a load of hay from five different parts of the state of Missouri.
00:32:33
Speaker
ah five loads of hay, and then he had five batches of rabbits that he fed for multi-generations on these different hays. um And after four generations of feeding, um the rabbits on the best hay got considerably larger than they started out as, and um reproduced very well, and had beautiful livers when they were slaughtered, um and were in every way healthy.
00:33:00
Speaker
And the rabbits that were fed the poorest hay, they got smaller, considerably smaller than what they started out as, and their livers were often, looked pretty sick, and they were often pretty sick.
00:33:14
Speaker
Albrecht said the reason for that was rainfall. that The hay from the driest part of Missouri was what made the healthy rats um rabbits, and the hay from the more heavily rained on parts of Missouri made the least healthy animals.
00:33:29
Speaker
And to support that, he also pointed out that in 1940, the American government had just instituted a draft, a military draft, for all young men had to register and be examined for the possibility of doing military service.
00:33:48
Speaker
So every man in the United States between the ages of 17 and a half and i don't know, 25 or 26, had to go and visit the draft board and be examined by a doctor for basic fitness.
00:34:00
Speaker
And ah so this is a really interesting database. ah So in the state of Missouri, those parts of Missouri where the rainfall was the lowest, about 20 out of 100 were unfit for military service.
00:34:14
Speaker
And ah where are the rainfall was really heavy, something like 40 or 50 out of 100 were unfit for military service. And just like the rabbits.
00:34:26
Speaker
Okay. and And the difference in rainfall was huge. The northwest corner of Missouri is almost the prairie, grass prairie. And in inches, they get maybe 20 inches of rainfall.
00:34:37
Speaker
ah Whereas the southeastern corner of Missouri, right on the Mississippi River, um is 80 inches of rainfall. And the rain washes the minerals out of the soil. So you it's leaching. So as the soil becomes more and more leached, the food is less and less nutrient dense.
00:34:54
Speaker
So that's what I knew then. So I still didn't know anything about trace elements, but I was on a much better piece of soil and my food did a lot better. um And I worked out a sort of a fertilizer recipe um that using some of Albrecht's information and some guesses,
00:35:12
Speaker
um I worked up my first complete organic fertilizer. And it wasn't so good, actually, but it was better than anything anybody else was doing. And it produced lots of beautiful vegetables. It tasted pretty good, at least on that soil, um and was convenient and not expensive.
00:35:28
Speaker
and And that's what my books recommended for the longest time. And then I moved to Tasmania. I had started an online...
00:35:40
Speaker
email conversation group called Soil and Health. We mostly talked about gardening at that point. And or I think we had as many as 2,000 people on that forum back in those days.
00:35:52
Speaker
One day I made a post. I said, there's something funny happening in my garden. I don't know ah why it is. I've certainly put in plenty of compost and and and composted manure.
00:36:04
Speaker
And ah the organic matter content's good. But the soil is getting hard and it wants to form clods and it's sticky. didn't used to be that way. um I don't have any idea what's wrong.
00:36:17
Speaker
And then this guy puts his hand up named Michael Estera. And he says, hi, Steve, I read your post. I've been lurking on this group for a week a year. I haven't said anything. I said, I'm actually of trolling for business. He said, I'm a soil analyst.
00:36:31
Speaker
He said, I think I know what's wrong with your soil, but I'm not sure. If you'll please have a soil test done in Australia at this lab and ask for this test, I'll interpret it for you for free and tell you what to do.
00:36:42
Speaker
He said, this is just to make myself known to the people in your group. I said, fine. So I did it, and he did it. And he told me something that really shocked and surprised me. said, your soil is very short potassium. It's very short copper and zinc and boron and phosphorus.
00:36:57
Speaker
And I've been putting in phosphorus every year. I've been putting, you know, anyway, I've been putting in compost. It had a lot of potassium in it. He says, so I recommend this fertilizer recipe. And he worked out something um with oils, with canola seed meal, which was a nitrogen source, um and some lime. And he said, do not use dolomite lime. You have developed excess magnesium because your fertilizer recipe calls for some dolomite lime and some ordinary lime. And your soil already has enough or too much magnesium, and you've been adding more.
00:37:30
Speaker
And what's happened is you've just gone over the line, and now it's getting tight and sticky because of the magnesium. He said, I think if you just stop putting it in and put in a bit more ag lime regularly, that it it will fix itself.
00:37:42
Speaker
So I got some of these trace elements and I mixed up this fertilizer without dolomite lime in it. And what do you know? Next year, the soil was beautiful. So I set out to learn.
00:37:52
Speaker
And um the first thing I did was, well, Michael had a system. there was a simple mathematical system where you start with the soil test and based on one of the numbers that the soil test,
00:38:03
Speaker
comes up with called the cation exchange capacity, which is basically how large a storage battery does that soil have to to hold plant nutrients that the plants can use.
00:38:14
Speaker
um Based on that number, then you work out how much of all the different elements you want to have in the soil so that everything is in a kind of balance that he thought would produce nutrient-dense food and very vigorous plants.
00:38:27
Speaker
and i I want to linger on this compost theme or the mineralization theme, but the the compost that I think will be in people's minds as the panacea, the first port of core when you're trying to remediate soil in organic gardening circles is just add more compost, more, more, and more. You can't have too much. It balances things. It kind of does this magical alchemy to whatever kind of earth you're working with. And I know that you take issue with that and have extended our knowledge beyond just adding more compost. And I i wonder if you can really go into the limitations of compost, why to look at minerals first and the potential of balanced mineral balanced soil to actually, I think I've read from you, start generating its own organic matter.
00:39:16
Speaker
but Now, that's a really big essay to put together while I'm standing on one foot. Switch to the other leg and have a go. Yeah, let me talk about organic matter in the soil.
00:39:28
Speaker
um There is a belief in the organic system that there's no end to the amount of organic matter you can put in the soil. that The only limit is how much of it you're willing to find and haul and spread.
00:39:39
Speaker
ah And oh this is really not true. The best thing I could do, I think, is first tell you the principle that you might use to determine how much organic matter you want. This is a little bit tricky because the amount of organic matter that you want depends on how warm the soil is all year.
00:39:58
Speaker
it so It has to do with soil temperature oh and to some degree with humidity, but mostly soil temperature. and And the warmer the soil is,
00:40:08
Speaker
the faster organic matter rots. As it rots, it releases the nutrients in it. And so if you get ordinary compost and mix it into the soil, basically what it is is low-grade fertilizer that releases nutrients as it decays. And ah most of the stuff that you would get from the garden center or from the composting, you know, the municipal composting facility or that sort of thing, that sort of stuff, decomposes completely within three years and is gone and it's just mineralized. It's released the nutrients in itself.
00:40:45
Speaker
Um, um, so, um, like I said, it's hard to write this essay they standing on your feet. The way I, I found to guide myself is this. I, first I first observed this in the pastures, the paddocks that I was testing here in Tasmania.
00:41:02
Speaker
Um, And I found that if the soil is a sandy soil that doesn't have a high ah ability to hold onto water and plant nutrients, um and it's reasonable pasture, it'll have 5% organic matter.
00:41:15
Speaker
And if it's a real fertile pasture on you know this pretty well mineralized basic igneous rock soil, um it'll maybe have 7% organic matter. And what's important about this organic matter in terms of nourishing the plants, the most of it is, How quickly does it decompose?
00:41:34
Speaker
And every year, a certain amount of it decomposes, and every year, a certain amount of it has to be recreated, either by the growing plants or by you bringing some stuff in and spreading it out.
00:41:46
Speaker
of And I guesstimate, this is just a guess, that the appropriate target to use for organic matter would be about 1% more than what that pasture would achieve if it was a healthy paddock that was well-managed and productive.
00:42:02
Speaker
oh So anywhere from let's say 6 to 8% organic matter in a place like Tasmania. But if you were up in the Big Island up north, ah in say in New South Wales, where winters are warm and mild and there's no frost and summers are hot and the soil temperature is easily always 10 degrees or more warmer than it is in Tasmania, if not more than that.
00:42:26
Speaker
um Well, there's a there's a basic principle of of physics or soil, it says this, um the decomposition or and any chemical reaction, any organic chemical reaction, that especially when it runs on enzymes from bacteria, doubles in speed with every increase in 10 degrees Celsius.
00:42:49
Speaker
So if you've got a soil that's 10 degrees warmer on average all year than Tasmania, then you're going to or rot the organic matter in it twice as fast.
00:43:01
Speaker
But you only need to rot half as much of it to release the minerals that you need. You see? So you need to replace that some way or other to maintain it.
00:43:12
Speaker
So you actually have to put more organic matter into a warm soil than you do into a cool soil to maintain the same amount of organic matter. It decomposes quicker.
00:43:23
Speaker
So um your target as a gardener is really going to be about 1% more than... oh whatever it naturally would be in a pasture around here. And that provides all of the benefits that organic matter provides to the soil biology, to the health of the soil, to the health of the plants.
00:43:45
Speaker
That's enough. More than that is superfluous. Right. So that is, I think you've written just a dab, that that's maybe a lot less than what people are thinking they need to add but I mean, i'm I'm getting this image of compost as a bit of a shotgun approach in many ways if you're not paying attention because it is releasing nutrients back into the soil and it's providing lots of different, it's playing lots of different roles. But ah a lot of us lying blind because we're either buying it in bags from the garden centre, getting it from the council or making our own but really not bringing a lot of it intention to that and possibly adding too much. And Steve, would you say,
00:44:26
Speaker
Would you say that compost can entrench soil mineral imbalances? Oh, it can ruin soil. oh It happens here in Tasmania all the time.
00:44:37
Speaker
And ah let me tell you what happens here. Almost all the soils in Tasmania, except the ones that derive from the occasional outcrop of sandstone, oh ah Basically, um oversimplified, Tasmania had some sandstone mountains ah that um had volcanoes erupt amongst them and created lakes of basalt with bits of sandstone sticking up.
00:45:03
Speaker
And today, the sandstone is still sticking up, but not thousands of feet anymore, but's just hundreds of feet. And the basalt is makes that beautiful red volcanic soil. oh And except for the sandstone soils, all of the other soils in Tasmania have as much magnesium as they can possibly stand or too much.
00:45:25
Speaker
Our basic magma that made this island back whenever ah had a lot of magnesium in it. They vary depending on what part of the planet you're looking at. People think they need a lot of compost.
00:45:36
Speaker
So because the soil here has a lot of magnesium in it, the organic matter has a lot of magnesium in it. And the compost has a lot of magnesium in it.
00:45:48
Speaker
To make it worse, composting, municipal composting or commercial composting operations are basically waste disposal businesses that make most of their money by charging to take the material away from whatever's generating it and bringing it to a composting yard and turning it into compost.
00:46:05
Speaker
And selling the compost and making income from it is the smallest part of their concern. Their major concern is getting rid of it so they have space to make some more. So the price will be low enough that everybody everybody will take it for some reason or other, um but mostly they want to get rid of it. So they're not concerned about the mineral content of it.
00:46:26
Speaker
And one of the things that they can put in their compost heap and charge to take away are waste products from the manufacturer of municipal water, drinking water, it's purification,
00:46:38
Speaker
And ah the purification of sewerage, which where you have to get the sludge out of it and then output the water back into the environment. So they have to purify the water in either case.
00:46:50
Speaker
oh So um the way that they get the particles in the water, either in the drinking water supply or in the sewerage disposal system, to get the solids out of it before they discharge it in the environment or before you drink it,
00:47:04
Speaker
um is they put it in a big settling pond and they add magnesium oxide to it. And magnesium oxide does the same thing to little particles floating in the in the water as it does when you put a lot of magnesium in the soil. It tends to make it get hard and cloudy and stick together.
00:47:20
Speaker
So all these little particles clump together and gain more mass and settle out more quickly. And then they have to get rid of that sediment. And that sediment has got a lot of magnesium oxide in it, which then goes into the composting.
00:47:33
Speaker
I've had conversations with one of them about that. They didn't want to know. They don't want even think about it. They don't want to be responsible for anything like that. Yeah. Yeah.
00:47:45
Speaker
So anyway, the more that stuff you put in the soil, the more you get magnesium. And the understanding beneath that is that the balance of minerals or the way the relationship between minerals really matters too, because some of them,
00:48:01
Speaker
don't get along very well and can antagonize each other and override each other. And so you actually do need to know um what levels they're at. And if one and one is dominating, that can have a really exaggerated kind of consequence for the other minerals. And then everything we eat is becoming is patterning our bodies and our nutritional status. So it can, I mean, Steve, when you're so when you're speaking to people about this, obviously it's it's beautiful to be able to write write this information in a book that someone can take their time to digest and apply. But when you're if you were to encounter someone who is starting out or planning their next round of gardening for the spring and summer, how do you help people not become overwhelmed by the kind of fiddliness of these things of this kind of approach as opposed to just the nice slap, you know, slap on the compost and go approach that so many of us take.
00:48:57
Speaker
Yeah, you just brought up the best reason to have a regional garden book. Yes. After hundreds of soil tests here in Tasmania, or I can see that there's this general simple, simple sort of fertilizer mix that you could use that will push almost all soils in Tasmania in direction of being in proper balance.
00:49:19
Speaker
ah And that's the complete organic fertilizer that you created. complete organic fertilizer recipe. um There was a business that started up making my complete organic fertilizer and insisting on calling it Solomon's Gold.
00:49:33
Speaker
I didn't really want it named after me, but they wouldn't listen to me. um And um so they they that recipe is very successful. More and more people in Tasmania are using it.
00:49:45
Speaker
So at least on this island, you can just go to the shop and buy I don't know, 25-kilogram bag of fertilizer and have enough in there to grow maybe 40 square meters of veggie garden in this one bag. And it will be balanced.
00:49:58
Speaker
It will push your soil in the right direction. um It's not so easy to write a for recipe like that. What if the soil already has enough copper?
00:50:09
Speaker
And my recipe has copper in it. So there's a risk of of creating an imbalanced excess copper will interfere with the uptake of molybdenum. for example. of So anyway, it's not so easy to make that recipe. That's why I say it'd be better if it was for regions or smaller areas rather than, you know, for the whole planet.
00:50:32
Speaker
So for everyone who isn't south of Australia, do you recommend soil testing as the first port of call and then devising an appropriate amendment for a specific no piece of land? No, I don't. Not for everybody.
00:50:45
Speaker
No. um Look, if a person's garden is 10 square meters of surface area and two stock watering tanks made out of galvanized steel filled with, um quote, soil, unquote, obtained from the landscape yard. And that's what you're growing in.
00:51:03
Speaker
First of all, the amount of food that you can possibly produce from that resource would not amount to 5% of your total food intake for the entire year.
00:51:14
Speaker
So if you made that 5% twice as nutritious, what difference would it make in your health? Just about none. So why bother with the expense of a soil test?
00:51:26
Speaker
And, you know, and all of that. and And trying to source all the ingredients when you need so little of them all. There's just no point in going to the trouble. Now, if your garden is 100 square meters of actual growing area or like mine, closer to 300,
00:51:41
Speaker
um well then $100 for a soil test ah is not a big deal. You might save that much on the fertilizer that you don't have to buy because you know it's already there.
00:51:52
Speaker
So I think your your need for a soil test and a a bespoke recipe for your soil or a program for your soil becomes more important as the garden gets
Personal Health and Passionate Living
00:52:03
Speaker
bigger. And the percentage that you're eating from it increases too.
00:52:08
Speaker
That's right. and And I don't know exactly how much it would take. You know, how much of your diet do you suppose it wouldn't be necessary to be really nutrient dense before you feel the difference? That's a good question. I don't know. Yeah, I don't mean i don't have an answer to that.
00:52:24
Speaker
What can you tell us about your health and your well-being before and after looking at the mineralization of your soil? Oh, God. That's a hard question to answer.
00:52:37
Speaker
Is it? Because just like you asked me about being in Fiji, if we didn't feel this uplift because we had a lot of free time and no stress and good climate you know oh and how much of it was due to the nutrition and the food we were eating, so it's hard to know.
00:52:53
Speaker
Well, I mean, you are 80. Are 84? 83. 83 years old and a half. And it sounds like you're very fit and active. You can sit and be interrogated here for over an hour and answer spectacularly. So I feel like there is something to be said for whatever it is you're doing behind the scenes to support yourself. but let me Let me brag a little bit. If we had the video on, I could stand up and bend over with my knees locked tight and curl my fingers under my toes.
00:53:23
Speaker
ah Do some Arnold Schwarzenegger flexing of the biceps. No, no, I don't have that kind of musculature anymore. No, I don't think I ever did, really. I never really wanted to have a beautiful body to show it off to people. I mean, that's that's what that is.
00:53:39
Speaker
oh But, yeah, i can I can put in maybe three hours in the garden in the morning still, almost every day. oh i can push a load of the wheelbarrow.
00:53:52
Speaker
with 100 liters of stuff in it. It's pretty heavy. oh I can dig for hours. oh I can walk up the hill. I have 11 acres here, and it's a slope. It's a northwest-facing slope. not that steep. but ah Anyway, I can walk up to the top of the hill without getting puffed.
00:54:10
Speaker
So I think that's pretty good for my age. um On the other hand, I'm at a point now where I have to nap every day, and if I don't have my nap, I really can't function afterwards. I need to sleep an hour or two. That's perfectly reasonable.
00:54:23
Speaker
Yeah. i'm I'm hoping that aging and death is really, for me, going to be needing to nap more and more often, more and more time, until eventually I just nap most of the time, and then one day I'm gone.
00:54:36
Speaker
You take the nap of eternity. Yeah, the eternal nap. this I mean, you know, it's not the destination that worries me. And it's not the journey so much that worries me. It's the departure.
00:54:52
Speaker
The departure from this life can be kind of rocky sometimes. I agree. I do wonder what that will feel like. You'll find out. week I still think maybe I could be the exception to the rule.
00:55:06
Speaker
You mean you're going to do like Woody Allen and eat brown rice and live forever? Yeah, I already eat my brown rice, so things are looking things are looking good for me. Yeah, simple as brown rice is a carbohydrate food, and it's not very nutrient-dense no matter how well you grow it.
00:55:20
Speaker
But it's brown. It is. It hasn't been denatured. Vitamin brown. Yeah. I want to tell you something about rice. Go on. I was taken to Bali once 15 years ago by somebody who knew the island really well.
00:55:35
Speaker
And with four three other people, and we met some Balinese, some real people, saw the real Bali. and And the rice was awful. It was tasteless.
00:55:47
Speaker
It was disgusting. oh And i after a week on it, I didn't want to eat rice at all anyway. The young people I saw in Bali had narrow faces and crooked teeth and close between the eyes, and they didn't look very healthy.
00:56:02
Speaker
The old people that I saw on the street had wide faces and good straight teeth and a big smile and looked quite healthy. What happened? Well, um the government made a rule that said that all farmers on Bali had to grow this new, what call this, the green revolution hybrid rice.
00:56:24
Speaker
So they went from growing... oh Two crops a year of traditional open pollinated varieties, which tasted good and produced a good health in the and started to grow this hybrid rice, which was tasteless and ruined the physiology of the people that ate by government edict.
00:56:43
Speaker
That's what happened to the Balinese people, and it just destroyed their health having to eat that rice. So variety comes into play as well. All of it, yeah. Many, many things determine the nutrient density. That's right. It can be variety.
00:56:57
Speaker
yeah Also, by the way, that nutritionist rice requires fertilizer. Yes, of course. That's the business model. And herbicides and pesticides and fungicides and seed. You have to buy the seed every year instead of just planting some of your own from last year.
00:57:15
Speaker
Who do you suppose gets all that income? Javanese businessmen. That's just sort of typical of how things work on this planet. So. so Well, yeah. Steve, i there are just so many different things that I have written down that I'd love to hear from you about. Maybe some other time we could do a part two on the topic of, you know, cover crops and spacing and tools and raised beds versus in ground and there's just a wealth of knowledge that you've got. Katie, I'm offering you 10 hours of my time in the next year. Anytime you want.
00:57:53
Speaker
I would love to do a ah part two of this conversation. But I wonder, Steve, if you you're you're someone who retired ah at the age of 44, and I feel like you're the kind of guy that could offer some really solid advice for people listening to this podcast who are hoping to step further and further away from the madness of the machine world in which so many people are living.
00:58:20
Speaker
Do you have, going to put you on the spot again here, do you have a nugget of Solomon wisdom for someone who is looking to simply step or track in a more independent, more connected direction? Yeah, I can actually, because um there was a point in my life when I actually intentionally chose to live that way.
00:58:41
Speaker
oh And it happened when I was about 38 years old. ah And I had been recently divorced and I was depressed and are I couldn't seem to get another job. I was had been a school teacher.
00:58:56
Speaker
ah i I had to leave the school I was teaching at because my ex-wife and I were both teachers there. okay It was a private school for gifted children, a secondary school and a co-educational school.
00:59:10
Speaker
Anyway, I went across the country looking for a job. And couldn't get hired because, honestly, I didn't look very good. I didn't appreciate how sad I was. ah Eventually, i arrived at the Coast Highway in California, north of San Francisco, ah coming across the mountains there, 100 miles north of San Francisco.
00:59:29
Speaker
And I came to the ocean, and I had four directions to go. North, up to the coast, do south, down towards San Francisco, turn around and go back east, or get out of the car and walk into the ocean and swim as far as I could.
00:59:43
Speaker
Anyway, I remembered that there was a monastery in Big Sur. I remember I told you walked Big Sur. oh A monastery, Carmanont Monastery, that basically was a hotel for priests who were in trouble and needed a retreat.
00:59:57
Speaker
And I had visited that many years ago when I walked the the road. So I drove down there and introduced myself and said, I was a soul in distress and didn't know what to do. And he could I please stay there for a while until I sorted myself out? And they said, yes, you could.
01:00:11
Speaker
So it was a nice place. They kept me well and didn't bother me. And I stayed there for, I think, about 10 days. And I wasn't interested in anything. I didn't know what I was going to do. I was just completely lost. I didn't know what to do for any reason.
01:00:26
Speaker
And after I was there for about a week, I found myself thinking about Roman history. I was a history teacher. I was very interested in Roman history, Greek history, and the founders of the American Republic and the kind of education they had that allowed them to write the Constitution.
01:00:43
Speaker
And I started thinking about it again. And I realized I wanted to know more about it. I also realized that the purpose of my life is to do whatever it is I'm interested in.
01:00:57
Speaker
And I made a big decision. I decided that I was going to pursue my interest in and just about nothing else. And if that caused me to end up freezing and starving under a bridge somewhere, well, so be it.
01:01:10
Speaker
And if God made me into somebody that couldn't support themselves by being what I was, then it would be better if I died. So from that time on, I started doing my own thing as much as possible and earning money as little as possible.
01:01:25
Speaker
The most strange thing happened. Once I started doing that, within a year or so, i was starting to make a lot of money by doing what I was interested in. And I discovered I had a talent for being in business.
01:01:36
Speaker
And that running a business was so much easier than teaching school. Because when Johnny didn't want to learn, it was my fault for having failed to motivate him to want to learn. But when Johnny didn't want to work, I just fired him and hired Freddie.
01:01:52
Speaker
So anyway, if I could give anybody advice out there, is that follow your passions, follow your interests. Make as little money as possible. Work as little hours as possible for cash, unless they happen to align.
01:02:06
Speaker
And learn to survive simply. Learn how to live without needing as much money. We don't really need most of what people think they need. Can I ask you, Steve, how you rally yourself to do boring administrative shit like tax returns? Oh, I hire an accountant.
01:02:23
Speaker
Hey, that's a good move. I can't deal with it. It drives me mad I just want to grab somebody works for the government and squeeze their neck until their head turns purple.
01:02:35
Speaker
Is there anything that you do in your life that you find tedious that you feel obliged to do or like you should do and push through that um rule you have around following your interests and passion?
01:02:47
Speaker
Yeah, once a year I have to sit down and go over all my bank statements and organize the the numbers and give them my accountant. I usually postpone that to the last minute. I absolutely hate it. of oh It never amounts to very much anymore anyway because i I don't earn that much money. I'm mostly living on savings.
01:03:07
Speaker
oh But ah unfortunately, every time I want to use some of my savings, the government wants to call it a capital gain. Mm-hmm.
01:03:17
Speaker
So even that, I can't escape my taxes. But it's okay. of I suppose they're necessary. So this is the part where I thought we were going to jump off the call, but Steve kept chatting away in his wise old way about things that I suspect you will find just as interesting as I did. Welcome to the Solomon Outtakes Hot Takes.
01:03:38
Speaker
Which is why I spend most of my adult life trying to figure out somewhere to get out of the United States and go live somewhere else. Yeah, I bet you're happy with that decision now. Well, um Australia isn't any less evil than America.
01:03:53
Speaker
It's just that it's not nearly as powerful. So the evils that we do are so much smaller. That's all. oh Oh,
01:04:05
Speaker
ah God. Paraguay looks like a goodie pretty good place right now. Paraguay, okay, hot tip. Yeah, 10% total tax rate. Ah.
01:04:17
Speaker
You know, reasonably sized property, um um a civil government that works, a country that is focused on maintaining peace and stability for people to raise their families.
01:04:28
Speaker
You know, I mean, it's got its downsides, too. But anyway, I know some people have gone there just for that reason. Yeah. I don't know where else.
01:04:39
Speaker
We'll have to look into Paraguay. I don't really think there's anywhere to run to anymore. ah Yeah. I think. Yeah, and the thing the thing that's helping us the most is the Internet.
01:04:50
Speaker
um Back in 1500, this was the end of the term when the Catholic Church totally dominated Europe, and when everybody had to go to church every Sunday and listen to a man in a frock terrify them about the horrors of hell, which they could only avoid by obeying the man in the frock in every respect.
01:05:13
Speaker
That was Yeah.
01:05:16
Speaker
Then this guy named Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press. And for the first time, it became possible to produce a copy of the Holy Scriptures at a price that a middle class person could afford.
01:05:28
Speaker
And people actually started to read the Bible. They were never allowed to do that during the Dark Ages and Little Ages. Only the priests, some of them, could read the Bible. they discovered that what it said in the Bible was not at all what the Catholic creatures Church was telling them.
01:05:43
Speaker
And then you had the Protestant Reformation. And with that, you had not only did it destroy the power structure at that time, but it also allowed much for your communication. And now we started to get science and books and journals and newspapers and all of that.
01:06:01
Speaker
But all of that media of communication was still required capital investment to to create and print the paper. It tended to restrict access and leave it under the control of institutional authority to decide what was going to be disseminated and what wasn't.
01:06:16
Speaker
But it still was a lot freer. And then came the Internet. And now anybody can publish globally who owns a smartphone.
01:06:27
Speaker
And so human communications have so freed up that it's, you know, it's turning the established order upside down. And people are able to talk to each other and realize, you know, what's sensible and what isn't.
01:06:39
Speaker
of So I think things are going to continue to change very, very rapidly. one Yeah, well, I'm definitely grateful and proud to be able to publish a podcast with whomever I please, and I will be extra excited to disseminate this conversation next week.
Conclusion and Future Plans
01:06:58
Speaker
First cab off the rank for a new season with a gardening spin. And Steve, it's just an absolute pleasure to connect with a Tasmanian treasure. an intercontinental treasure, I will say. And I really hope that if people aren't already in touch with your work, this has inspired them to get their hands on a copy of one of your very many books. And I wonder which which books are your favourite? What would you point people towards?
01:07:24
Speaker
Well, the The Intelligent Gardener is probably the most important book I wrote. um um the The book that Meliodora just put on the market, which used to be Growing Vegetables South of Australia,
01:07:37
Speaker
Now it's called Growing Nutrient-Dense Vegetables in Cool Climates, I think. um Yeah, I think that's probably the best how to do it book I have. Yeah, it's an incredible manual. yeah Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, which is available in Oregon and Washington, um isn't near as good.
01:07:57
Speaker
We do have quite a lot of American listeners, so maybe they would like to have a look at that. Well, the reason that South of Australia, or but this one that we're talking about, the new one, is better is because since 2002, I've self-published it in batches of 400 copies, printed at home in my office copy center.
01:08:18
Speaker
So at least every eight months, I have the opportunity to make tweaks in the text, which I've done. So over the years, it's gotten better and better. And then from two times or three times now since 2002, I've There's been so many little inserts and deletions that it stops hanging together so well. So I just sit down and rewrite the whole thing.
01:08:40
Speaker
That must be such a blessing us for us.
01:08:45
Speaker
Yeah, I'm glad to be done with it. You know, that's one of the reasons I was happy to turn it over to you guys, because, you know, to write the same book, I wrote the first West of the, it's the same book as West of the Cascades, you understand, it's just standing on the table. Yeah, so I wrote that one the first time in 1979. Can you imagine somebody starting and writing a book in 1979 and finishing it in the year 2025? Yeah.
01:09:09
Speaker
That feels like me with every every article that I publish. I could keep tinkering on it for the next three decades. Yeah, well, I was told before I moved to Oregon and went into the seed business, I had a typesetting shop and we specialized in doing books for publishers.
01:09:26
Speaker
And I One of my publishers liked me, a nice bright young man, and wanted to educate me about things. And he told me about writing and publishing. And he said, the most important thing a writer has to realize, he says, is when it's time to stop writing it.
01:09:42
Speaker
That more books are ruined by keeping on fiddling with them and not just stopping than anything else. Yes, it's definitely an art.
01:09:53
Speaker
Yep. I will let you get on with your life, the living of your lovely life down in Tasmania. And thank you so much for your time today. You're so generous with with everything you've shared. and Katie, this is my job. I was assigned this job a long time ago. I lost my teeth so that I would be more motivated to do this job.
01:10:13
Speaker
you know I'm supposed to do this. It's great that you're so enthusiastic after all these years. I often wonder if people get sick of telling the same stories and repeating the same message and there's a point where you just want to retire.
01:10:28
Speaker
No, all I got to do is go to the supermarket and stand at the checkout counter and look at what people are putting on the thing to be recorded and paid for. And I realize how desperately they need me.
01:10:39
Speaker
That's it. And so we're spending an awful lot of money on medical care that It's mostly more harmful than helpful and and kills more people than it saves. Nobody realizes that.
01:10:54
Speaker
you know And there's all this suffering and and lowered awareness. and We spend so much money on mental health. We spend so much money on prisons and and on the medical system and on Medicare, et cetera, and so forth.
01:11:09
Speaker
All of that is a waste. It's not useful production. It's counted as g as is gross domestic product. But it's actually negative. Yeah, we all need to just get back out there en masse and start hoeing.
01:11:21
Speaker
Well, it isn't going to change until a whole lot of us decide to step out of the system and do differently. a And I don't think that any interaction with authority is going to bring about that change. I think it's all going to be very personal, one or two people at a time.
01:11:38
Speaker
That was Steve Solomon, whose how-to books on gardening will fundamentally shift the way you approach food growing. As I mentioned, Steve's classic Cool Climate Growing Guide, which has been a bestseller in Tassie for so many years, is being reprinted by Meliodora Publishing. And I was lucky enough to be a part of that project, which was a crazy full circle fangirl moment for me, I helped do the cover art and some of the cover um text.
01:12:05
Speaker
We didn't mess with a single word of Steve's text because it is magic and perfect. Highly recommend getting your hands on that reprint which is going to be called Growing Nutrient Dense Vegetables. If you're a cool climate grower,
01:12:20
Speaker
and you're fucking serious about it. So I will update the Linky Poo when that book is released. I think it's going to be really soon. Steve is also donating all proceeds of that book to the Permaculture Fund, which is pretty fucking radical too.
01:12:33
Speaker
So announcements. I have things to announce. One is that I'm recording a live podcast at the Words in Winter Festival, which is an annual writerly romp in Dalesford, my hometown. That's in August, on August 30th. I'll be on stage with Mara Rappani and Natasha Morgan, two more incredibly horticulturally gifted humans. So yeah, that's at the end of August. I'll chuck that in the Linky Poos too.
01:13:00
Speaker
And I have a 2027 save the date for you. ah Chuck the 20th to the 26th of April in your diaries because Raskillians will be hanging out in person at the Return to the Village Festival in Woodfordia. That's up in the Moreton Bay hinterland in Queensland.
01:13:18
Speaker
And the third announcement is I love you. Thanks for listening. nah