What's going on everyone? Welcome back to the podcast. Today I'm doing a more free form

episode because I met someone in San Diego here who is running an urban farm

on a quarter acre in the backyard of a home that he rents.

So he actually lives in a granny flat in the backyard of, I think a family friend and he has a quarter acre in this backyard that he has improved and now just as of last week is getting his certificate so he can go ahead and start farming and selling at farmers markets.

So this is really cool. He lives maybe 10, 15 minutes away from me and it's a model that I think would be attractive to many different people if you're someone who either wants to farm yourself or maybe you just like hearing these stories or maybe you want to take some of the lessons that he has learned and he's implementing on his farm and use them in your own

garden just as a home gardener. So his name is Stephen Cornette and his farm is

called Nature's Always Right. He calls it that because he believes that if you study natural systems and work with them and not against them, you will probably have more success in the long run.

And the way that this farm works is it's very similar to the Curtis Stone Urban Farming

model where you're using 30 inch beds and you are going extremely bio-intensive

with the way that you're planting and harvesting. The interesting thing about Stephen's farm though is that he has, I believe,

18 30 inch beds and then he also has implemented his own fertility methods in the backyard.

So he has, I believe, 16 or 17 chickens

that he has a very unique coop design for

that provide almost all the fertility for the system.

Now of course when he first started on this property

it wasn't quite this simple he had to improve that soil in the backyard so what

he did is he bought in a bit of compost, I think two cubic

yards, mixed that into the existing soil, de rocked that soil, made sure that it was somewhat okay, and then he planted a sheet mulch of wood chips, I believe,

and then a cover crop of a bunch of different things, vetch, yarrow, etc. to add some fertility into that soil. And he let that grow for five to six months.

It got maybe to about four or five feet high, quite high. Then he chopped it all down, and the only time he will ever till that land is when he

tilled that cover crop under to provide all of that organic matter to the soil, so he could sort of kick-start that property.

And then what he did is he went ahead and installed a pretty intense and effective drip system

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