Welcome back everyone to the Epic Gardening podcast. I hope you are doing awesome. I hope you're

staying warm wherever you are. Kevin Espiritu here. We're back with Zach Locke's a farmer and

educator and an author. Yesterday we talked about some of his experience both running the research

nursery he has now, but also the small farm, the commercial market garden that he used to run,

which kind of brings us to this idea, Zach, of you know, one of the things that these small market

gardens are doing are providing food closer to the homes of all the people that are consuming them

and ideally like deleting the food miles, increasing the nutritive quality of these foods. And so

when we think about that and maybe even just someone on a homestead, how do you think about food

security given your background? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, it's very super important for all

of us these days, you know, like when we talk about climate change and we talk about, you know,

the natural disasters that were, you know, facing more and more and more and more and more aware of

and and I just it always food security comes home to me with the concept of getting more edible

biodiversity in people's communities, having, you know, what I like to call it high impact tree.

So a tree that is really beneficial, you know, if you have a fruit tree growing in the middle

of a forest far away from where people are living, it's having an impact, but if that same tree

is right in a community garden, it's right in someone's backyard, it's a question of carbon,

it's producing, you know, oxygen, it's yielding fruit, but it's very accessible and access

is a big part of food security. If there's a natural disaster like we're seeing right now in

British Columbia and people can't get, you know, across a flooded river or there's a broken bridge

and they can't get to a grocery store and if they get there, the grocery store is empty because,

you know, everyone's sort of freaking out, right? But if we have food where people live,

then there's more food available in a disaster and people can rely more on it, you know,

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