What would your mom say today about all the progress you've done here?

She'd say, Sweetie, I'm really proud of you.

Yeah, I could just sit there with a cup of coffee on an edge of a raised bed and just watch bumblebees and listen to them.

Bumblebees are honey bees, or so I can tell.

It's kind of fun.

We're on a small plot of land that I've converted into a garden.

Heaven on earth.

Kodiak is a temperate rainforest.

So we're about 70 feet up from the ocean.

Sorry, guys.

The rain kind of got to you before I even go into the garden.

I have kind of a centering that I do, and I try and get really quiet and still, and then I just say hello to the plants.

So I got the greenhouse right.

Hey, everybody.

We got company.

We got company.

And introduce myself to them.

So I'll say.

Hi, it's Marion.

Good morning.

How you doing?

And sometimes I'll get a sense of how they might be doing.

And it's.

It's not a verbal thing, but it's pretty special.

Yeah.

These are tomatillos.

They will be up to the ceiling here soon.

And I get to play Cupid because paintbrush in hand.

I have to pollinate by hand.

And I'll go from one tomato to you, a plant flower, and I'll go over to another different plant.

And then I'll take it from pollen from here.

And then I'll transfer it back over to.

Let's see.

yeah, we got another one up here.

There we go.

And.

And sometimes I'll introduce myself and I'll visualize my.

My thoughts actually landing on the leaf.

Can you guys sing tonight?

I've really come to a crossroads.

I've been going to see working on tugboats and and research ships.

And I was pretty tired of missing the seasons going on at sea.

Come back and like, four months later, you go, I missed fall or I missed spring or something.

I just ask myself, what do I want to do?

And as clear as day.

Like we're talking.

Two things came to mind.

And the number one was gardening.

I didn't know a thing about it.

That was hard.

Well, they're self pollinators, and so if I tap them, they get pollinated.

The first time I started Seedlings and I planted them in our native soil, which archeologists call butter clay.

And I'll give you a clue.

Everything died.

I had to think like a plant.

I had to find out what they really, truly need to survive.

There's no such thing as perfect soil, no matter where you are on the planet.

But then if you amend it with compost, if you amend it with kelp and so on, you can improve wherever you are, whatever soil you have.

You know, 1912 went Novarupta erupted, about three feet of ash, descended on Kodiak.

Not much nutrients here.

Well, the soil is just so dense here and there's just no air pockets.

And I one of the clues was I would go hiking in our in our spruce forests and I go, well, blueberries grow there and ferns.

So I learned about peach sounds real scientific, but I learned that a real low or sour soil wasn't going to grow the variety of vegetables and flowers.

And I wanted.

So I tried my hand at composting.

So this is just the holding bin of compost leaves and scraps and kelp.

And I just think it's like the eighth wonder of the world.

I love making compost.

It's my upper body exercise.

Yes, I would say the easiest description of composting is to take what Mother Nature does anyway in breaking down materials, and we're just speeding it up.

I mean, I actually bury, you know, salmon that might be maybe past its prime whole salmon in the garden.

And the next next spring it's gone and it's fed the soil.

Maybe it took me a couple of years to learn how to compost, but I knew every time I tried, I was moving forward to getting it.

Well, one thing I do with composting is I gather up all my ingredients at one time.

I mean, we collect bags of leaves in the fall.

We put them under our deck.

It's like money in the bank, right?

But I collect all the ingredients all at once, and I make the compost pile all at once.

I don't do it in dribs and drabs.

And then within a day and a half, the temperature soars to 150 degrees.

Yeah, we're steaming.

And then I turn it on a very regular basis, and then in six weeks I've got finished composting.

It's pretty much your answer to all your woes is, is composting.

And I teach composting.

I do composting classes, which I started during COVID.

It's the it's a number one thing you can do for your garden.

I just harvested right here some lettuce.

And so on.

And I've already got more spinach seedlings going.

This is kale, which will get by the end of the summer, about maybe three feet tall, like little trees.

There are people here in Kodiak that recognize it's really important to have food security.

If the weather is really bad in the Gulf of Alaska or there's a longshoreman strike on the West Coast, then we don't get a container ship, we don't get our diapers and nails and milk and onions.

So that's why Kodiak kind of suffers from that.

We're not connected by road, so it's really a problem.

I don't want to depend on container ships and so on to bring me my food.

I would talk to old timers that remember being in Kodiak and ordering their groceries for an entire year.

Once.

And so I figured I want to be more self-sufficient.

Everybody needs a rhubarb beard.

Believe it or not, this has been harvested hard a couple of times.

Well, there's a lot of things that we can do as individuals within our household to even start a garden or even fix your soil.

Something as simple as having a little compost bucket in the kitchen and you don't need to have a compost pile.

You can just dig a hole in your in your soil and your dirt and pour the contents in there, cover it up.

The microbes are on it.

And it is it is broken down and it feeds the plants at the same time.

If I don't try, I won't know.

So I just keep trying.

Sometimes I screw up and.

But you don't really screw up.

You just put in the compost pile.

It's okay.

It's all right.

I don't beat myself up over it.

I think if a gardener really wants to find a solution or a way, they just will.

And, you know, my mom taught me that.

She died of pancreatic cancer.

Pretty young.

My mom, we had five kids in our family.

She was pretty busy, but she was also mentally ill, and her happy place was out in the garden and when we were all in bed as kids, she would go out into the driveway, keys in her hand, car keys.

She would start up her car and she would turn the car to a part in her landscape area, shine the headlights, and then she would leave for a couple hours.

So she would use that time, that space.

And that was kind of how she calmed down.

Pretty amazing.

And so she found a way to make it work, even though it would be dark outside, she'd shine our headlights and be able to put it in the garden and relax.

So maybe I learned that from Mom.

I mean, studies show that if somebody that's in a hospital bed has a view of the forest, they need less medication and they recoup faster.

What?

What else do you need for proof?

Right.

So we'll see you guys later.

Thanks a lot.

I just get out there, even if it's just for 10 minutes.

These are a little like when beaten.

It's quiet.

It's peaceful.

If I have any kind of stress, this is my happy place.

Just get outside.

Go for a walk.

Play in the garden.

I think it's all important.

Yeah.

There you go.

You do a good.

We're just bringing that back and realizing that this is truly the answer, not only to food security around the world.

Because I firmly believe that we can grow what we all need as a species here on this planet organically.

You know, your garden might only be a little tub of herbs on your deck.

That's enough.

It's enough.

There you go.

Yeah.

Alright.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

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