I do find that two things happen with a more mature food forest.

You get a so much duff and leaf litter naturally from your larger trees, you know, losing

leaves or from if you're trimming for like height and things like that, you're cutting them

up, cutting them up, chipping them up or whatever you're doing on site.

So you're building soil with a lot of your excess from that.

Welcome to the Beat Podcast. I am your host, Jacques Glyakov. And today we are going to be speaking

to David Scanlon from Florida. He actually has practical plants, Florida. He grows a variety

of different plants. I'll let him explain because a lot of

stuff I actually don't recognize. And we're going to be talking about all things gardening Florida,

annuals, perennials, natives, food forests, and everything in between. So welcome, David. And why don't

you tell us a little bit about where you're at, what you like to grow, and everything in between.

Cool. Yeah. thanks for having me.

My growing in general kind of started out, living in an apartment in Orlando, Florida,

and having a balcony that was all of four by eight foot and tinkering around with herbs and,

you know, vegetables and stuff like that.

And we moved into a house after that, started growing a little bit more. And I got super into just, it was one of those things where we were just, we're walking through a flea market one day. And there was a fruit tree vendor there and they had starfruit. And like for some reason, like I lived in Florida for a couple of years. And I was like, oh, we can retrofical fruit here, even though we're in central Florida.

And I picked up a starfruit tree and grew that for years on a balcony. And then we moved into a house and that went in the ground there. And then

12 years ago, we bought our own property northwest of Orlando, about a half hour, specifically with the goal of growing tropical fruit in a slightly more sub-tropical area. So we purchased a property with the goals of having good microclimate. So we're in the one hilly part of the state. So we've got a lot of

elevation change. We've got right under an acre of land and then we're on a lake and stuff like that.

So it's a little warm pocket. And my focus was mostly growing tropical fruit trees for the first

while. And then after you kind of plan everything out and you realize okay i got i got more time and

more space to do stuff and you kind of i always just said like when i had a little bit extra money i

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