Hey guys, welcome back to the Roots and Refuge podcast. I am your host, Jessica Sourdes. My friends call me Jess, and I hope you will too. I'm so happy to have you here today listening to my podcast where we talk about all things homesteading, growing food by gardening, raising animals, as well as preserving it, enjoying it,

sharing it, being in relationship mindfully with each other and with the earth.

And this topic today that I want to discuss with you guys really leans heavily into the last

part of what we hope to share here on this podcast. So obviously sometimes I, in the content that I create,

I'm going to just teach you really basic information.

Like here's how you prune a tomato.

You know, here's what we're doing as far as incubating chickens

or here's what you need to know about owning a dairy animal.

And I love sharing information like that.

Education is massively important, especially if you're

diving off into a lifestyle that involves so many forgotten skills that are just simply not taught

anymore. The number of people that I interact with now as an adult who are wanting to start

gardening and they don't know anything at all

about the gardening process. Well, how would they? We don't actively teach that in our schools.

Many, many people have never had any hands-on experience with gardening. In fact, what is normal

for most people in our culture is to go buy fruits and veggies in the store,

maybe in the fresh produce section, or in a lot of cases in the frozen food section in the

canned aisle. And many people don't even have any experience with handling food in the form

that it comes. And that is just the nature of the culture that we live in.

With that being the reality that we're dealing with, with so many people feeling this like deep

urge in this call to go back to the land, we have to be willing to educate. Education is massively

important. And in fact, this is just a little sprinkle,

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