332. Flower Farming • Bokashi Composting • Worms | Matt Arthur | BLH Farm | Missouri

My Garden Journal

Welcome to the GREEN Organic Garden podcast. It is Saturday, July 18, 2020, and I have an amazing guest on the line. You have to check out their website is so beautiful and just full of lots of great stuff.

And here to share with us today from B L H Farm is Matt Arthur. You can find BLH Farm on Facebook here.

So welcome to the show, Matt.

Hi, Jackie.

And we'll talk, I mean, I want to ask you about yourself, but I really want to know what B L H stands for.

1 (1m 41s):

Yeah, so it stands for Boone's Lake Heritage Farm. I grew up in central, Missouri on a family farm. It still had the wagon ruts from Daniel Boone's trail West from Missouri through to the Southwest. So I grew up playing on a Creek and in the field with those wagon trails so visable.

So we started our flower farm now on some of our land that wasn't being used for row crops. I wanted to let everybody know that this is just a real part of our, our history here is seeing these, this trail and thinking about people who came before us.

So how, so this is your family farm. So, you know, I guess if you said you listened to my podcast, that my first question is always about, like, what was your first gardening experience? Like, what'd you grow? Who were you with? I guess you were probably with your mom and dad?

1 (2m 32s):

Yeah, yeah. With my mom, mainly we always had an orchard and a garden and always had tomatoes and beans and apples and other stuff going. So I just have always grown flowers and vegetables at the house. And my mom grew a lot of things that her mom grew. And so I just always looked back and think about growing, you know, the flowers that she got from her mom or apples that she was trying out and I've always done it.

And is that how you learned how to grow organically? Were they organic too?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. My parents for our vegetable garden and an orchard, I've always been a hundred percent chemical free, a hundred percent organic, always heavy mulchers never, never spray for anything and, and always grew up just knowing that that was how, how one should farm and garden.

Well, awesome. So do you have any tips? Like I was just going through all the questions I've been asked in the Facebook group and somebody was asking about what do I do about apple scab, and just like any tips for growing an orchard?

Our orchard. The other problem we're having is the grass is full of this weird bind weed, which is totally irrelevant.

Bind weeds tough. Yeah. Bind weeds tough. I mean, I've two quick pieces of advice.

The first is that the, in the rows between your apple trees, you need to have a mix of species that you choose. A, you should have a grass, you should have a legume and then a forb to take the place of, of those weeds.

Weeds...