Replay of interview 106 with Rockstar Millennial Regan Emmons | Terra Birds School Gardens & a Seedling CSA| Flagstaff, AZ

Terra BIRDS educates and empowers youth through gardening to help prepare them as the stewards of a sustainable future for humanity. Regan Emmons is here to share her story of teaching elementary and high school students how to garden as well as about her seedling CSA model!

Tell us a little about yourself.

My first podcast! So very exciting!

I live in Flagstaff, AZ, I have really awesome job very fortunate to work with elementary school students, high school students and I run a 100 member seedling CSA farm, that runs about Jan through the end 0f May. The rest of the year I’m doing a lot of planning and educating and so forth.

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

I am from Tennessee. One of my formative experiences of being in a garden, working in a garden, I was in high school and I was living with my mother. We had to move into s small apartment on the ground floor. And my mother being the tenacious woman she is, talked the landlord into tilling up the little space in the back of our apartment. She grew mostly tomatoes and peppers and if she grew other things I don’t remember, but the tomatoes were amazing and I just remember’d them for so long. They were big and juicy and ripe and a revelation! I just remember my friends would come over in summer and we would make these tomato sandwiches. I remember leaning over the sink was this beautiful memory that I have

that my mother grew in this tiny space

wasn’t mind blowing

I thought everyone did that and

later

amazing how productive wasn’t even, wasn’t even 10 square feet. And I didn’t really help her very much, I was one of those teenagers who didn’t really care about helping my mother.

I didn’t help my mom either, she’s still wondering how I ended up with a gardening podcast I’m sure. My husband wonders that too, but I definitely help him more then my mom.

What does organic gardening/earth friendly mean to you?

I believe in my realm it really means growing without adding a lot of things, pesticides and chemicals and really trying to work on soil amendments and soil health and to let that dictate the health of the plants. I feel like it really has to come with the soil and I’ve learned that through my work with the garden starts.

using fertilizers sparingly, and the fertilizers you do use need to be well sourced from natural sources, I really really dislike synthetic sources. I really don’t like to use them at all. To me, organic gardening is not using additives and working with the space that you have, definitely have some permaculture training, it’s all part of that gardening sensibility.

Who or what inspired you to start using organic techniques?

Back when I was living in Hawaii, and I met my husband there. I was working in Hawaii, on the island of Maui. I met my husband there and we were getting to know each other. He came from a place and a family where they really cared about what they put into their body. I grew up caring about what I put in my body, but not really thinking about the food and what was in the food that I was eating. I didn’t really think about additives in my meat, and things like that. And it really stemmed from that, learning about food system and our industrial food system, and that was a challenging place to eat anymore. If we weren’t trying to grow our own food or trying to eat more locally, it was really detrimental.

How did you learn how to garden organically?

I read a lot, I’m still learning, I consider myself a novice gardener and novice grower. But in my career, I have had a lot of jobs where I grew things. In Hawaii I grew a lot of native plants at my job at the park service. As a community gardener here in Flagstaff, working...