Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast, everyone. Kevin Espiritu here, we have an amazing

week with Zach Locke, who is a farmer and educator and an author. He's the founder of

Edible Ecosystem Design, and he does installs for farms, homesteads, public spaces. He also has

his own farm and used to also run a commercial market garden, though these days it's more about

trialing fruit trees, berries and cold climates, figuring out what's works well, and then sort of

propagating that both literally and figuratively. So Zach, it's great to have you on.

Hey Kevin, it's a pleasure to be here. Hey, so I figured maybe we should start out with a bit of your

background and also the overall concept of Edible Ecosystem Design if we want to start us off

there. Yeah, for sure. There's so many terms that float around in this farming, homesteading, land

management world that we have, and so Edible Ecosystem Design is how I encapsulate that in my own

work as really taking the basis of the ecosystem, that wild mixture of different organisms, plants,

animals, fungi, bacteria, whatever, and understanding what ecosystems you have in your area,

wild, and then how you can mimic those ecosystems with primarily Edible and useful plants.

Some might be wild varieties, some might be domesticated varieties, but how do we create really

functional landscapes for farms, for homesteads, for public spaces? Like you said, a lot of that

the design work that I do is in those spheres, and how do we bring that model of looking at that

wild ecosystem in my area? I could look at, say, a temperate woodland and then say, all right,

how do I create something that is like a temperate woodland in its its functionality to sequester

carbon to create a good leafy mulch layer over the winter, like a temperate woodland does,

to be layered in its plant structures, larger overstory trees like maples, but then there's

understory trees to have nitrogen fixers. A lot of these things that we see in agriculture and

permaculture, but with Edible ecosystem design, the focus is really on designing efficient,

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