I'm going to be here.

Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast everyone. We are joined again by Charles Malky.

He's the author of Saving the World with the Home Garden,

improve our planet's health with natural gardening lessons.

And also degree in biology and is the plant expert for Ivy Organics,

which is his company, and also a YouTube channel.

So Charles is very busy, as am I.

I think we both kind of understand the life of a busy gardener right Charles

Absolutely and thank you so much Kevin for having me on today. Hey I'm happy to and I'm happy also to talk about the topic that we're going to discuss today, which

should be our native plants and I really like, first of all, I just like growing them, but I will

confess that I haven't grown as many as either I could

or I should mostly because my space wasn't that large and I was trying to grow exactly the

plan I wanted to grow whether that be some annual vegetables or flowers or what have you but I would love to know

your approach or your philosophy on on planting natives

So the value of native plants I've really stumbled across this I'd say about only about five years ago and I was fortunate enough to meet with Lisa Novick who was the director at the time of one of the largest native plant nurseries here in Los Angeles which is called the Theodore Payne Foundation.

And there they've made it their mission to preserve the seeds and the plants of as many California species which are in the thousands and ranging from color spots to ground covers to giant trees such as the California oak.

And the goal and what I learned from Lisa Novick is by planting California native plants in your landscape, you can actually increase the number of

pollinators that visit your garden. We're talking about honey bees and butterflies and hummingbirds and just increasing the number of pollinators in your garden that will then thereby increase

the pollination of your desired plants such as, for example, your citrus citrus trees your avocados your

fruits and vegetables pretty much everything else you have in your

garden will actually bear higher yields and there's a lot of research that

support and stand behind this that by having native plants in your landscape,

...