What is up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. We are at our final

episode for now with Dr. Mark Merriweather Vordobrugan. He is the creator

again of Foraging Texas. He's the author of Idiot's guide Foraging, and then in his real life, he is a formulation chemist for consumer products like Orkman's friend. So today with Dr Mark we're talking about social foraging

for a better neighborhood and I think I have an inkling of what this might mean but I feel like Dr Mark it's it's going to be best to have you drop some knowledge on us about this

Easy enough. Let's let's talk about this first with the law, in most cities and states,

foraging is actually banned from public property.

They don't want people going in and basically vandalizing the park

by taking all the plants out.

So you're really limited as an ethical forager for harvesting on private property

where you have the owner's permission.

So I live in a fairly small neighborhood. where you have the owner's permission.

So I live in a fairly small neighborhood.

It's about 800 houses and one of the things over the years I've done is set up basically

a deal with all my neighbors that I will go in and I will take their, you know, I will weed their yards and I'll take this food home with me.

In return, they don't put down any poisons. No ant killers no herbicide no grub killers

Anything like that because obviously I don't want these you know poisons into my food

It got to the point when some new person would show up in the neighborhood and I go up and knock on their door with this big

feel about how I'm not a crazy person. I'm actually this person that eats weeds and here's my book and I'll teach you.

They'll say, oh yeah, I've been waiting for for you I was told you would show up right right

so the crazy forager is on his way exactly but the end result there's a couple of

really good and results from this first off the

overhaul or overall use of pesticides and herbicides and fungicides in our

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