What is going on everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. Today I'm joined by actually

Ashley Mariano of Pitt Moss itself. So again Pitt Moss is a new sustainable growing media made from organic recycled paper.

We've talked about some of the applications of it.

As I mentioned, I'm using it in my verma composting bin right now, but certainly over

the course of this past week we've been talking about soil and there's definitely ways to use it in the

soil but what I thought we do actually if it's cool with you is really go

back down to the why first and then talk about how

Pippmas is made. So I guess my first question is maybe give me a little bit of the

history. What prompted the creation of of Pitt Moss as a product and

maybe could you give us a little bit more on what it is besides what I just said?

Yeah thank you so much for having me so

so Pitt Moss really was born from our founder, Mont.

He was working in garden centers and saw truckloads

and truckloads of Pete Moss coming through

and happened across the Sierra magazine article and was concerned with just the

environmental degradation of peat lands and his grandma used to

was on your garden back in the day. So she layered newsprint in her tomato garden and that kind of sparked a little light bulb and he considered grinding the newsprint up and making growing media out of it.

And he actually took a Cuisinart mixer of like food mixer and processor and started tinkering around with it.

A couple years later, we were able to secure

a grant through the EPA, which really allowed us

to start studying newsprint to make sure and confirm there's nothing toxic or any of the

in there are a problem and that was really gave us a little bit of a jump start to figure out how to start producing this stuff on a on a commercial scale and really it's over the course of 10 years and a since on Shark Tank.

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