Welcome back, everyone, to the Epic Gardening podcast.

We have Ari Novi back on the show, President and CEO of the San Diego Botanic Garden.

I'm curious, do you do a lot of just home backyard gardening yourself, Ari?

Not as much as I would like. I do have a backyard and I mostly grow fruit trees.

I have kids and we grow a couple different varieties of tomatoes every year.

I have a couple other interesting things, but I'm very busy and I don't have as much time for

it as I would like. I don't like taking my work home with me too much.

That makes sense. I know for us here at Epic, our whole thing is teaching people to grow

mostly food crops. It's been an interesting year, at least here in San Diego myself,

and one of our creators, Jacques, who actually lives somewhat close by to me.

I mean, our rainfall this year is even less than we thought it would be and we knew it would be low.

And so, obviously, things are changing, right? In the climate and I'm curious if you guys have

seen that and what your thoughts are there? Yeah, I mean, it absolutely is. I mean, this this year

has been very little rain. It's so funny because we've overall had hardly any rain and then we've

had these little monsoonal spits this summer, which are kind of unusual for us, although exactly

what climate change has been, the climate change scientists have been predicting. I mean, these

monsoonal rains that we think of as more typical for the other side of the mountains,

out in the Sunor and Desert and into Arizona, they're stronger and so they can kind of push,

their systems can push through over the mountains and come to us, which historically has been

pretty unusual. So there's a lot of nervousness that some of the climate models predict that San Diego

area may develop a more bi-modal rain distribution in the future. So historically, our flora is

adapted to really just a wet winter and then very, very little rain through the summer. Typically,

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