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I’m putting this replay up because tomorrow we are going to hear about the challenges of growing strawberries and Laura talked about the wonders of growing strawberries back in June 2015. Tell us a little about yourself. I feel like even after 30 years of growing gardens I’ve just barely scratched the surface. I grew up here in Kalispell from the time I was an infant, I attended the University of Montana and got a degree in print journalism, I also worked in the non-profit sector. One of those non-profit jobs was for an organization in Helena called AERO – http://www.aeromt.org (Alternative Energy Resources Organization) http://www.aeromt.org () I worked mainly with the program manager who promoted Organic Agriculture. Doing that job was so exciting!  I was already doing the organic gardening but I learned about doing Ag on both large and small scales. I have lived in numerous places from San Francisco and Seattle to London, and also Helena 8 years. I always dreamed of coming back to the Flathead here, so 8 years ago I moved back here and bought a little house here just a few block close to where I grew up. Tell me about your first gardening experience? Yours was probably in Kalispell huh? Yes it was, I can remember going back to when I was 4 years old, my father had a big garden in the backyard, I loved going back there and hanging out with him, and pulling a few weeds, and mostly I’d help myself to the produce, I’d pull out a carrot and knock off the dirt without even washing it. I love picking the raspberries and the asparagus, but mostly what I got out of that experience besides spending time with dad, I got to see how much peace and joy it gave him to grow things and see them grow from seedling to produce and being able to feed his family with this really fresh garden produce. That made a huge impression on me, and I admired that he kept on expanding the fence and doubling the size of it, so we didn’t need the garden as much to play in. Young Adult When I got to be a young adult, I thought I need a garden, it’s necessary for my physical and mental health. So for all for a very few years when I was either traveling or living in a place that didn’t have a garden space, I’ve gardened almost every year since then on some level even if it was small. What does organic gardening/earth friendly mean to you? To me, it just makes perfect sense, that we would cooperate hand in hand with nature, that we would observe what nature does with how things grow on it’s own, without any input from humans. Nature makes it’s own compost, trees drop their leaves and needles where they are, we can see what grows with the compost, underneath the trees out in fields and meadows. We learn how bees pollinate things, there’s just no end to lessons we can learn from what nature does. We humans we like to think we’re so smart and that we can do things better then nature, but we tend to get in a lot of trouble when we do that. Actually nature is a lot smarter then we are, and she’s been at it a lot longer, and she knows what she’s doing, we need to pay attention. Who or what inspired you to start using organic techniques? Well Dad, wasn’t an organic gardener, I don’t know who taught him to garden, but he did use conventional fertilizers, but when I was learning how to garden on my own. I would talk to dad on the phone sometimes, but mostly I got some books at the library and they just happened to be mostly on organic gardening. And I got Organic Gardening Magazine and got a lot of advice from that and I talked to lots of other gardeners and they were mostly organic gardeners and I learned a lot doing it myself and I made a lot of mistakes. And I still make a lot of mistakes, and it just makes sense to me, “I’m not about to outsmart Mother Nature, she knows what she’s doing.” How did you learn how to garden organically? Every year, I run some experiments, those could be as simple as planting a variety of potato that I... Support this podcast