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Bonus Care Bellamy\'s informative Permaculture garden tour of her food forest and pollinator beds:

https://youtu.be/C6SQUlsQq8w

 and then listen to my interview with her last January while you\'re waiting for me to publish this great interview I did with Heather Wood yesterday!

I\\u2019m so excited I have a listener on the line who is going to share a ton of golden seeds! I talked to her before from Florida and she is going to share with us about her Sustainability Project!

1. Tell us a little about yourself.

By day, I\\u2019m a REALTOR\\xae and beekeeper.

I\\u2019m also a 3rd generation farmer. 

My grandparents owned a 100 acre wheat farm on the prairie in rural Dufresne, Manitoba. My family lived off the land, they grew their food seasonally in a 1 acre vegetable garden. After the local community collectively brought in the fall harvest, they would busily preserve and can their produce for storage in their root cellar.

These people were a hardy bunch, they managed to survive the brutually harsh winters with minimal resources using a wood burning stove for heat, crude electric and no running water or indoor plumbing. They kept and cared for livestock and only took what they needed to survive, my ancestors practiced \\u201cThe Tragedy of the Commons\\u201d method. That\\u2019s how they managed to raise a family of 8 in rural Manitoba.

And Manitoba is where people go to see the polar bears right?

Yes Churchill Manitoba is where the polar bears are.

Then you went to the opposite end of the continent practically to Florida.

Yes I did I got hired to work for Disney at the Epcot Center back in the early 80s and that\\u2019s where I met my husband two weeks later and we\\u2019ve been here ever since!

That\\u2019s so romantic! I always wanted to work for Disney, I tried to get a job or get into art school at the California Institute of Arts in LA.

Well, they must have liked me! I managed to beat out 64 other people fro the job! So yay for me!

And you worked there for a long time right?

Yes 35 years!

2. Tell me about your first gardening experience?

We used to visit the farm in the summer time every two years, however my mom! When my mother moved to the big city of Toronto, Ontario, she became a backyard farmer and composter carrying on her family farming tradition. I began helping my mother garden as a young child, she taught me valuable lessons in planting, harvesting and food preservation skills. All these years later I\\u2019ve been utilizing this and it\\u2019s been working out fantastic for me. Luckily for me, both my parents were award winning gardeners so pulling weeds or fresh carrots comes naturally.

So then is it challenging down in Florida? Do you have to learn different practices to grow in that climate?

Well, gardening is pretty much the same wherever you go. IT\\u2019s just the conditions and the climate. In Florida there is a sandy soil, where my parents lived it was a deep rich soil. You have to plant things things that grow well

I\\u2019m in climate zone 9b, it\\u2019s way different climate. They get snow and here we don\\u2019t get any snow, we hardly get any freezes?

3. How did you learn how to garden organically?

My mother taught me, she was a big time composter of our organic kitchen waste. In fact, she had 3 bins under the...'