What's going on everyone? Kevin from Epic Gardening here. We're back again with Nancy Hayden,

co-owner of the Farm Between up in Vermont, and she's the co-author of the book that's out now,

farming on the wild side.

We've been talking a lot this week about what that means, the wild side, letting things

not necessarily go, but letting them sort of return to an ecosystem's approach to gardening and

farming. So we've talked about native plants, we've talked about just the

general philosophy and today we're going to go under the soil and talk about why cultivating the soil

rather than the plants is is a fantastic approach and you guys have heard us talk

about this before on the podcast with a bunch of other guests as well as some solo episodes.

So Nancy, I thought what might be interesting is take us all the way back to when you guys

first came onto the property and maybe describe how it was back then?

Well, when we first moved in, there was a lot of what's called Reed Canary Grass

and that there's some debate on whether it's a true invasive or just a really aggressive native.

And that was the whole farm. It's not really good fodder for animals and it's hard to really establish anything

into it. It's pretty tough stuff. And we did a lot of telling in the old days when we were

vegetable farmers and we thought we used covercropping and things like that. But recently, more recently, since we've been into

perennials, we really don't want to disturb the soil because when you have an undisturbed soil you allow these

microrizzle fungi to really proliferate and those are what they believe to be a big part of sequestering carbon.

They provide a lot of health and resilience to plants,

a lot of niches for soil organisms and things like that.

So every time you till or dig it up, you're ripping this fungi and you're turning your soil into more of a bacterial type of system or there's a lot of bacteria and you're also burning off any organic matter every time you till you're

adding oxygen, the microorganisms start degrading the carbon and sending an office CO2.

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