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Adam is another intelligent student from https://wayne.edu (Wayne State University) who uses innovative techniques in their community garden to produce food for their weekly http://clas.wayne.edu/seedwayne/Wayne-State-Wednesday-Farmers-Market (Farmer’s Market) in an completely urban setting!  In http://wp.me/P4wau5-Lw (Episode 81) Tess Byzanski from the http://Detroit Spore Company (Detroit Spore Company) talked with us about mushrooms and their school garden in Detroit, Michigan! In today’s episode Adam shares secrets for producing a large amount of food in a small space, growing tomatoes and other plants vertically, creating a passion flower garden roof, and secrets for preventing powdery mildew! You won’t want to miss anything in this great conversation with this passionate gardener and amazing millennial! Tell us a little about yourself. I’ll be turning 25 this month. I’m a Biology Student at Wayne State Focusing my studies on plants, work in a plant molecular evolution lab for over a year. There was a green house there, so it was interesting to work with a botanist and what goes into botanical research. So  that kind of  informs my gardening philosophy now. I’ve been gardening since I can remember. Tell me about your first gardening experience? My dad was in the military and my mom worked a full time job so I spent a lot of time with my grandparents who had a large garden. Basically  my earliest memories are of being in the garden, being a kid digging in the dirt. I pretty much grew up in the garden. I think that has stuck with me, when I think back to my childhood some of my best memories are of being in a garden. I’m from Dearborn, which is right outside of Detroit, suburban. Nobody has a lot of land in the Detroit Metro area, it was a big enough backyard, they probably had a half acre, so the garden was probably a 1/4 acre. It wasn’t large, but it was decent. You can grow a lot of food on a 1/4 acre. My grandpa prided himself on growing the biggest heirloom tomatoes. he was meticulous about growing the tomatoes! He was into the organic compost, he didn’t spray fertilizers or pesticides or anything like that. He liked to smoke his pipe and sit in the garden. He just spent a lot of time out there and was eating things.  Tomatoes the big thing I remember dominating the garden. It was always a competition in my family who could grow the biggest tomatoes each year. What does organic gardening/earth friendly mean to you? So yeah, I kind of thought about that, one of my good friends works in horticulture in the greenhouse we sort of had this argument about what does it mean to be organic and in the laboratory too. To me organic gardening, when you walk into the garden, it’s kind of a measure, In my experience anyway, when walking into a garden where someone’s using chemicals, I seem to notice, that there is a different level of coherence in the garden. If you’re spraying a lot of chemical pesticides and fertilizer, watering with miracle grow, or this Jack’s Classic people use around here, you can just kind of tell looking at the soil, looking at the plants, there’s a lack of coherence, i realize it’s kind of an abstract term.  It seems like everything, there’s an overall sense of health and harmony in a small farm or greenhouse or a garden. To me organic is just a term that is a measure of how harmonious or coherent your ecosystem is, whether it’s a farm, or a forest or what ever it is. I think organic there is definitely a spectrum I would say, you talk to certain people in the green house, they would say using neem oil is not organic, because it’s a concentrated extract, some people say it’s fine it’s totally organic. So to me it’s really just about intention, realizing the consequences of what you’re doing, Is it acceptable to you, do you feel safe with it, for me I think would you feed your kids that! One of the biggest things I’ve... Support this podcast