What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. We are here with our final

episode with the Epic Darryl Chang, founder of House Plant Journal, author of The New Plant Parent.

So this week has really been about a rethinking of the way to think about House Plant Care

indoors, and it does sort of pull a lot from foundational principles type of thinking, systems type of thinking, and even just pulling from maybe a bit of the edible world of, okay, these plants actually do grow outdoors in variable environments and they do

go through a life cycle they do live and they do die right and so lots of different topics

we've talked about one that I think has sort of at least in my view taking

the indoor house point world a little bit by storm was Darrell's idea to just

remember to aerate your soil you know as outdoor growers a lot of the times if you're

cultivating that soil food web the microbial life the worms the nematodes the

the beetles etc they're doing that work for you indoors hopefully actually you don't have a lot of that going on and so you have to do it yourself so

Darrell could you kind of explain I don't know I'll actually be curious as to when you first sort of started doing this.

Yeah well the story would go back to even before I had any plants and you know I would visit I would go to different friends houses and these aunties and uncles that

like in Chinese we like to call any elder auntie and uncle so I would

see chopsticks sticking out of their plant soils and I asked I one day I asked like

what is this for right and you know she told me well you know you're your worms and stuff are always

burrowing and and creating good soil structure but inside there the plants are

kind of like they're kind of bored with the soil there's nothing going on in there right so you kind of have to loosen a little bit before you water and it helps the water get through it also

teaches you to feel the soil and understand what dry soil feels like, what wet

soil feels like and so that's kind of how it started and yeah and you know

when you think about ecology, it makes perfect sense, right?

Where at least from a purely structural perspective,

the fact that worms and insects are moving around around your plants, you know, does create

...