We already know that it's good to eat greens, to eat lots of vegetables,
but if these vegetables were produced in an industrial system with lots of chemicals
where they're actually growing unhealthy plants, then you eating that is not actually going
to improve your health. You're listening to the Plant Based Diet podcast where we
talk about all things plant based. I'm mister Garfrom, the host of this
show and founder of Alternative Food Network. Join me in my amazing array of
guests who are a mix of healthcare professionals, industry executives, and people with
an interesting story to tell about their plant based journey. Let us help you
with your journey wherever you're at to learn the what, why, and how
to eat plant based. Hello, plant Based Diet friends. I just happened
to check some metrics about the show and saw that Plant Based Diet is a
top two and a half percent show across all podcasts. So thanks to all
of you for listening. You have helped make this happen. In today's episode,
we're going to be talking about gardening with a focus on soil quality and
mulch because they are crucial building blocks of a garden and Frankly, there are
two things I don't know much about. So my guest, Matthew Mahoys,
is coming to the rescue to help me and hopefully you, so we can
learn a little bit more about this. He's an award winning author and passionate
landscape architect who crafts environments that mary esthetics with positive environmental impact. Before we
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purchase. Welcome to the show, Matthew. It's so nice to meet you.
You're all the way in Belgium. Right, yes, exactly. Thank
you for having me on your show. I'm very excited about this interview.
I love the work that you're doing, so really cool to be on this
show. Thank you. So you're a landscape architect. Tell me a little
how you got into that. I grew up on a family farm, so
my brother and my fathers are still active farmers today, and somewhere between the
age of three to five years old, I got extremely fascinated about how it
is even possible that if you have a little seed and you put it in
contact with the soil, that it can grow into a plant, in some
cases even into a huge tree. Like between that age from three to five,
I started to realize that and I was just completely amazed by it.
And that amazement because I'd see my father go out on the fields, we'd
see how the crops grow. I kind of grew up with that. Right
at that time, I also had a school teacher and we were doing a
lot with seeding plants in the classroom. She's very knowledgeable about this, and
I came home from school and said to my mother, I want to start
my own vegetable garden on the farm. At that time, we didn't have
any vegetables growing actively growing, because most was cash crops and cattle. So
I said, I want to start growing vegetables out of the blue, and
my parents were like, yeah, but we don't have space in the garden.
But I kept asking about it, and eventually I got a piece of
the garden and I started my gardening journey. And the amazing success that I
had was with radishes. So I started off with radishes, and this is
something that I can highly recommend to anybody who wants to start a vegetable garden.
Just start with radishes. It's the easiest thing ever to grow. After
a couple of weeks, you already have something that you can eat. Now.
I had that early success and then I thought like, okay, I
have things figured out here. It's so easy to be a vegetable gardener.
I'm just gonna buy all of these seeds. Got it. Like my father
went to the shop, tomatoes, lattice, carrots, everything. I bought
it all, and I thought like, okay, now I'm just going to
spread this in my newly designed garden. Because at that time I was also
fascinated about like making a shape and putting tiles in the garden and making all
the bats. So I had everything prepared, prepared the soil, and then
I just started spreading all the seeds everywhere, and I was like, this
is amazing. I'll come back in a couple of weeks. It'll be full
of vegetables, full of produce, and I can enjoy everything. But I
think aster you already feel what's coming next. After a couple of weeks,
I returned to the garden. It's just overgrown by wheats, and like big
nasty wheats. Because also the type of soil that the farm is on,
it's heavy clay soil, which is a very rich soil, but it's hard
to work with. So we also added a lot of composts to kind of
make it softer. That was with the help of my grandmother. So we
did that and it was overgrown by wheats, and from that day on,
I actually, well, it took obviously some more time, but from that
moment on, I really wanted to understand, like, why is nature not
giving me vegetables, Why is all these wheats growing? So I went on
in my later life to study landscape architecture to understand more about nature. I
did permaculture courses, I started to learn about regenerative farming because I'm also working
with farmers in my day to day business. And from that, Yeah,
this was really like the thread in my life to know that once you understand
how nature works, because it's been working in a specific way for over millions
of years. Once you have that knowledge, you can become a way more
successful and way more low maintenance gardner because there's no way, like you can
try and fight against nature, but it's going to be very hard and it's
very bad for your back, so there's other ways of doing it. In
your bio, I read that you aim to empower people to transform their gardens
into spaces that foster biodiversity and restore ecosystems. That sounds amazing, but my
question is can this be done while still being low maintenance. Yes, definitely.
In fact, you have to do it to be truly low maintenance because
and obviously you have to kind of you have to be thoughtful of your design
process of your garden, like if you want to do it more vegetables,
or if you want to grow more flowers, but generally, if you focus
on creating more biodiversity, what you'll do is you basically start to mimicing how
nature works. And once you start mimicking how nature works, there's a system
that starts to get into place. And obviously it's not an overnight thing.
It does need some work in the beginning, especially in the first couple of
years. But once you get a system that starts to run more like how
nature works, you will get of all sorts of beneficial insects that will help
you to mitigate the pest on your produce, Like if you really focus on
improving the health of your soil, which is in my opinion, it's the
start of everything. But once you start applying all of these things, things
start to get in a start to work in a system to your advantage.
I also tell everybody that wants to start a vegetable garden or any type of
a garden, put up a lot of bird houses, like try to attract
as many birds as possible into your garden, because they'll be actually eating all
the insects, they will be mitigating the pests. So there's all sorts of
things that you can do to improve the biodiversity and improve the ecology of your
garden. And on the medium to long term, this will actually make you
a way more efficient, low maintenance gardener. So when you're saying the first
thing to think about is the soil, how does one approach that and how
does it vary based on climate for example? Yeah, that's a really good
question, and I'll start by answering the first part of your question, which
is really about the soil, because this is universal on the whole planet.
And this is, by the way, it's also covered in my upcoming award
winning book Twelve Universal Laws of Nature, how to get the most potential out
of your land, because what happens is or how it turns out, and
this is really mind blowing once I started to understand this is that the soil
actually is basically like our gut. Like if you have a healthy gut,
that's when you are a healthy person. And the soil is exactly the same.
Because what happens in a healthy gut, there's a lot of micro organisms
that are improving the health of your gut. It's exactly the same with the
soil. It's amazing, so even just for people to start understanding how because
it's a very complex system, the soil, like one of healthy soil,
can contain more microorganisms than there are people on the whole planet. So just
for you to understand how many microorganisms there are and how complex this system is.
In fact, up until today, we know more about what's happening in
out of space in the universe than what we know what's happening under our feet.
It's a highly complex system. But what we do know is that the
how plants and microorganisms and the soil interact is that when you have a healthy
soil, you have lots of microorganisms. And what the microorganisms do is they
take nutrients that are already in the soil, such as phosphorus, nitrogen,
other minerals as well, and they make them available for the plants. So
in that way, the microorganisms give the nutrients to the roots, and in
return, the roots give the microorganisms sugar because the plants are doing photosynthesis.
So there's this beautiful sembi between the soil, the micro organisms, and the
plants that are benefiting everybody. And it's even proven just for a health perspective,
that if you put your hands in the soil and you work in your
garden, that you will actually absorb these microorganisms, so you'll be healthier in
terms of your gut health, and also the brain health apparently has a lot
of microorganisms. So it's truly amazing how we as humans are actually connected to
the soil, or how we can be connected to live healthier. And then
just to take it a step further, once you've done ways to improve the
health of your soils, such as composting, lots of other ways, melching,
there's a variety of things you can or should do to improve the health
of your soil. But once you do that, you actually start to grow
plants that are far more healthier. And what happens is that plants that are
healthier they vibrate on a way higher frequency, and insects they are very good
at sensing waves, even bees. I just saw a video from somebody explaining
that a flower will have a certain frequency that will attract bees, and once
the bee flies into the flower and takes the nectar, the frequency of the
flower changes, so the next bee that would come around knows, oh,
there's no nectar anymore. Just to understand how amazing this whole plant world is.
So but if your plants vibrate on a higher frequency because they have a
healthier soil and they're healthier, then the insects will not attack them because the
thing is how nature This is again how nature works, is that nature will
always be recycling energy. So plants that are not in a healthy state because
of various reasons, nature will be ah, we'll need to recycle that plant.
So the insects will eat it and they will digest it and basically produce
more healthy soil by killing the plants. So that's why this is instrumental to
having a healthy guard. And moreover, it's even proven that if you,
like I'm at a farmer who even said that if you're eating produce that is
not healthy or not vibrating at that higher frequency, it's also not healthy for
you. Like obviously, in our modern science, we already know that it's
good to eat greens, to eat lots of vegetables, But if these vegetables
were produced in an industrial system with lots of chemicals where they're actually growing unhealthy
plants, then you eating that is not actually going to improve your your health.
So it's just we can actually absorb that higher frequency plants. If plants
are healthy, they will help you to be more healthy. I met somebody
who's actually developing a system that on our smartphones. They will add a new
scan system that you can actually go to produce and scan the frequency of the
plant, so you will know how healthy it is. So imagine this new
thing coming out. You'd go to the supermarket and you will be you know,
like, is there actually a healthy product or not? Because as it
turns out, like there's certain oranges that don't have any vitamin C because they're
just grown it's purely sugar because they're on unhealthy plant with a lot of pesticide,
a lot of chemicals, so they don't actually have that vitamins. So
they would know like if the orange is vibrating on a higher frequency, it'd
be way healthier. So that would actually transform the whole food industry. I
think when is that app coming out? I don't know. I've heard about
it a couple of years ago and I haven't seen any movement around it.
I need to do some more research on it. Wow, that would be
incredible. I'd use that, yeah, because yeah, why would you buy
an orange if it doesn't have vitamin C? Right? Yeah, for sure.
So getting back to soil, if you want to plant a vegetable garden
versus a flower garden, are you using different soil or is it more a
climate thing. Like, if I go to a garden center and I'm buying
soil, give me some tips on what I should be looking for. Well,
yeah, first of all, the compost that you buy in the garden
centers is not actually quality composts, or some people will not even refer to
it as compost. It's just nitrogen carbon. It's more of a chemical thing
rather than actual good compost. And we actually work with local farmers that are
organic here that produce high quality compost. And even the way you can see
it is that a high quality compost will actually not be dark. People.
Most people think like, oh, if it's really dark, it's really good
compost, But it actually has more brown color and once you look at it,
you should be able to see lots of white threads in the compost.
That means that there's a lot of microbiological activity. So, first of all,
like what I would do or suggest to listeners is try and find any
organic, regenerative farmer in your area who's actually doing high quality composting, because
that's the kind of goal that you want to get into your garden. Because
mostly doesn't really matter what type of soil that you have. Once you can
improve it and make the soil healthy, you can basically grow anything. Obviously,
if if your soil is very wet or very acidic or in the high
extremes, it will be difficult. But in the in the in the normal
range of most of the soils in the world, the higher the health is,
the more variety of plants you can grow, because there's also a signs
like you need to be aware of if your soil is acidic or alkali and
all this. But this is actually starting to be debunked because that's purely looking
at it as soil as if it were a chemical component. But they don't
consider the microbiology. So when you have a high MicroB biological soil, you
can plant basically anything. Okay, part of my ignorance, just to make
sure that I'm clear. Yeah, you can use whatever soil, But the
key is the compost that you're going to add to the soil to make it
the best possible soil. Yes, yes, well, compost is one way
of improving the health of the soil, and you don't once you have that
high quality compost, you don't even need to put a lot of it inside
because what that compost is. It's more like an incubator. It will in
that high quality compost, it's full of micro organisms, so it will help
to restore the health of your soil. But then once you do that,
you also have to do other measures so that it actually works for your soils,
such as like if you start out on a new guarden, you have
to decompact the soil because in far too often situations, the soils have been
maintained in a certain way or there's been spraying of chemicals, so it's in
a bad state. And then what happens is if there's no microbiogical activity,
it kind of tends to collapse and it smashes down and it gets compacted.
You'd have to use a tool which is common or not common in Europe,
but we use it quite a lot. It's like a garden fork, and
you just stick it in the soil and you decompact it. And that's really
another important aspect. Once you start to work with your soil in a different
that's called it a more regenerative way, is that you should stop turning it
around each and every year. Like this is some common practice from plowing,
and it's just because we've been doing it for thousands of years that we think
that it's good, but it's actually the worst thing to do for your soils
because what happened, or how it turns out, is that each and every
millimeter or centimeter of soil has different types of microorganisms based on the amount of
oxygen there is in the soil and the composition of so there'll be a lot
of different microagrams in all of these segments. So what happens is when you
then turn around the soil completely destroying that balance. And this is also one
of the well it's also what I talk about. If you look into nature,
you will hardly ever see bare soil or soil that is completely turned around.
It's only maybe after a landslide that there's like a soiled disturbance of such
scale. So we have to look at that how nature was intended to work,
to apply that in your own garden. And then other measures that I'm
very hopeful about is melching. So once you've now improved the soil, you
put the compost, you maybe plant your seeds or your carrots. Now try
and get the soil covered as much as possible, because like I said,
in nature, it will hardly happen that the soil is bare. So getting
the soil covered as much as possible is really important because it's the soil.
The top soil of our whole planet is basically like our skin, so our
skin is also a sensitive surface that is protecting us from infections and other things.
Now, when you scratch open your skin, it's it's open for infections
and other bad things to happen, So it's kind of the same with the
soil. So obviously, when you're doing vegetables, that's annual plants, so
you will have to do some kind of disturbance throughout the season to get your
plants in the ground. But just minimizing that as much as possible and melching
is really one of the key ways to do that. For example, if
you get into like in let's say in the northern hemisphere where we have four
seasons, what you could do when it's getting into autumn, you're harvesting your
last crops, maybe you have some winter crops still in, but then you
just cover all of your beds, all of your garden with leaves or with
other melch so it's protected for the whole winter. And then when the winter
is over and you say like okay, and now I want to start seeding
some carrots or other things. You just push the melch away a little bit,
you seed everything. You wait till the carrots grow and they're at a
decent size, and then you fill it up with melch. In all of
the in between spaces where I live, we have four seasons, and in
the fall, after the leaves fall, we typically blow away the leaves so
it's clean before the winter. But based on what you just said, is
that the wrong thing to be doing. Is it better to leave the leaves
on top of the soil for the winter. Yes, definitely for a vegetable
garden. But obviously if you have like a garden where you also want to
have some lawn some grass, then you have to blow away the leaves otherwise
the grass will not grow as good the next year. But anything that has
shrubs flowers, well, you have to be a little bit careful. With
perennial plants. They don't like too much of like the melch, because it
can become too humid. So but even if you just put a small layer
between your perennial flowers and then in your whole vegetable garden. Just keep all
of the leaves in place so the soil is covered throughout the winter. So
then you also have wayless wheats because the wheats when this is another thing that
I can shortly explain is that we're ultra as gardeners. We're all trying to
fight wheats. And this is actually what nature is trying to do to restore
itself. And this is what happens in nature after a landslide or after a
wildfire. The basically the biodiversity or the ecosystem is at level zero right there's
no activity, there's no plant growth. So what nature has developed to start
to restore the process to get back to a state of forest like the highest
succession is a forest. But the first step is annuals and we call them
wheats, but these are actually the plants that will come up first after a
soil is completely disturbed. And then even if you would have a gardener,
you let it overgrow by weats. If you wouldn't do anything, after a
couple of years, the weats would disappear. It would become more like grassland.
After the grassland it will be you'll start to see shrubs. After the
shrubs are developed, you'll start to see the first pioneer tree like willows popular
and over a course of let's say it takes a long time, over one
hundred and fifty to two hundred years, you'll end up with the oak forest,
for example. So that's what happens. That's how nature is intended to
work, and it starts with the wheats. So we're trying to fight wheats,
but nature is just trying to restore itself. It's incredible. But then
again, you're not going to have people in their homes wanting a backyard full
of weeds, no, and that's why you have to do melching to minimize
that and actually grow as much. Because what it turns out as well is
that vegetables are mostly also annuals, and they are all derived from what we
call wheats or their family of the annual plants that we call wheats, so
they vegetables do very well in disturbed soil. It's just about this the in
between spaces between your crops and between your harvests, to keep the soil covered
as much as possible. And then one other really important and amazing measure to
do is to introduce cover crops. So once you've for example, harvested a
crop at any time in the in the year, rather than just leaving the
soil bear and think like, Okay, I'll just wait till next year or
leave it for a couple of months. You see it in a mix of
cover crops, and cover crops are also annuals. Sometimes there's some vegetables included,
but they are specifically picked seeds that will improve the health of your soil
and they are not as aggressive as wheats, so you're active. Basically,
you're actively growing weeds, but weeaeds that are not so potent as some of
the wheats that we that we know, so that's important to incorporate as well.
Would that work in a cold climate? Yeah, are you suggesting that
in the far all we plant cover crops? Yes, you could do that,
and even if you like, when you have a more diverse vegetable garden,
you'll have some produce that is already ready to be harvested in late spring
or early summer, and then you could seed a cover crop just to have
the soil to restore itself throughout the whole summer, and then next year in
that in that bat you can do another crop. So you kind of mix
it in the different crops. And then if you then combine that with melching
just before the winter, even before the snow comes, you put a good
layer of melch, then the soil is nicely protected. Once the snows start
to melt and you you you don't have any frost at night, you can
move away the leaves, seed or plant whatever you want a harvest and fill
fill in the caps again with the leaves, and the leaves will actually decompose
over time. And it's it's basically the same as compost. So we don't
really need to be cleaning leaves. No, not at all. There's no
need for that. Okay, this is all knowledge that everybody can learn.
Obviously in a twenty minute podcast interview, it's difficult to put everything out.
But I've actually developed a masterclass where people can learn it in nine weeks.
How to learn all this knowledge and how to apply it in their own garden.
What do you talk about in this master class? So, yeah,
it's a nine week program and we basically start really with a deeper understanding of
how nature works. Like what I said, like, once you start to
understand how nature works, you look at your garden in a whole different way.
So once you start to understand that, we will we spend quite a
bit of time on vision building, like what do you want to do with
your garden? Do you want flowers? Like what is your dream garden?
By the way, the program the master class is called the Garden of your
Dreams Masterclass, so we really dive deep, like, Okay, what is
the Garden of your dreams mean? Because it's different for everybody. So once
you've built that vision, you'll actually into the conceptualization of your new garden,
so you actually learn how to sketch it and design and fill in everything,
because in my opinion, that's instrumental for a successful garden is that it has
to be planned. If you don't plan it, you'll trial and error and
you start over and you just, yeah, you break her back literally because
you don't have a plan. So once you've then have your plan, we
go into plant planning. You learn all about the plans that will work for
your specific case. And I've actually incorporated the AI system into that so that
it becomes very simple and very easy to know what will definitely work for your
specific garden. And actually, just before that, we also spend some time
on analyzing, analyzing your soil, analyzing your climate, getting as much data
for your specific garden so that once you don't select the plants, you know
that it's going to work for that specific case. So once you've done that,
will go deeper into how to plant, how to prepare the soil,
soil healths, other measures that I shortly touched upon today, so that you'll
actually become a confident gardener in nine weeks. Well, if anyone listening tries
this masterclass, please let me know if it helps you transform your garden.
One last thing before we go. You talked about radishes in the beginning and
how that's possibly one of the easiest vegetables to plant. Can you suggest others
that are easy to grow? In terms of easiness to grow? Twukinis twukinis
so it's a family of the squash. It's very easy to grow, you
just because it also takes up quite a lot of space, so you only
need like, let's say, for roughly five square meters, you only need
five plants. So it's also very cheap to acquire, and they make huge
leaves, so they cover vast areas of the soil. And if you then
buy the plant at a small size, you melch every then you won't have
any maintenance for a couple of weeks or months even, And then once the
zucchini starts to produce produce. If you just keep harvesting it, it keeps
producing until the frost starts, so you'll have like at some moment in the
middle of the summer, you'll be sick of eating zucchinis. So that's another
vegetable. What about a flower good question. There's so many, honestly,
but a daily is really a good one. Dailylies are easy to grow.
They also like clay soils because clay soils sometimes are more difficult to choose.
Plants and dailylies love that soil. They also make like if you plant a
row of daily lies, they will actually form clumps and they will become one
area, and no wheats will actually be able to grow through them. You
have lots of flowers, and the flowers are addible. That's something amazing as
well that not too many people know about. You can just eat them.
It's delicious. You even taste the nectar of the flower. It's it's nice
and sweet. Gojiberry gojieberry is an amazing one, like everybody knows gojiberry you
or not, maybe not everybody knows it. But it's a very healthy berry
because it's full of anti oxidants and it grows fairly easy in all soil conditions.
Obviously it shouldn't be too cold, but once you have that one in
your garden, it's really so delicious to eat from. Yeah. And actually,
if people are interested to know more about like easy to grow plans,
on my website Garden of your Dreams dot com, you can actually see I
made a couple of videos that are available for free to to learn actually exactly
what you asked and also some tools that I talked about. So there's there's
some material there, all right. I'll put that in the show notes.
And if someone who wants to be in touch with you, should they go
through your website that you just mentioned. Yeah, exactly. So what I
actually want to offer your audience, because I really love your podcast and what
you're doing, is that I want to open my calendarly links to my calendar,
and I'll share that with you so people can actually book a thirty minute
free coaching with me. So we'll actually take thirty minutes to see like what
is the condition of their garden, where they want to go and what's needed
to actually become a successful gardener or have the garden of their dreams. So
that's one way. If they want to do direct action, that's wonderful and
it could be someone anywhere in the world. Yes, that's the beauty of
my program. Because I've incorporated AI, it now applies to anywhere in the
world and the program that I have built around it. Like, if I
would have wanted to do that, let's say, three years ago, before
AI became more common, it would have probably cost me in time and in
money ten times as much because I have to like investigate it for every specific
case. But with AI at the investment is substantially less because of that system.
Well it sounds great. I think I might avail myself. Yeah,
awesome. It was great to have you on the show. I know there's
so much to talk about. People probably have so many more questions, so
I encourage them to get in touch with you. Yes, definitely. They
can also watch me on Instagram on my personal profile or my company profile.
Well, my personal profile is more about tips and tricks for the garden,
and then the company is really we do one on one work where we completely
design the garden for people, so you can watch all of that. I'm
also now active on TikTok. I wanted to make shorter, even punch your
content of how gardeners can become more successful, so they can check that out
as well. And Yeah, always happy to receive a message or to reach
out if anybody has any question. It was a pleasure to meet you today.
Thank you for sharing your expert advice. And if you hear about that
app coming out that measures those plant vibrations, please let me know because I'm
super interested. Yes, exactly, I'll do some more research and I'll send
it to you. Esther. Okay, thank you very much. Awesome,
Well, thank you very much Esther for having me on your show. You're
a great host and I love the questions that you asked. I hope you
found this helpful. Please share, rate, leave a review, and follow
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