Fresh Take
Fresh Take is your roundup of all things related to organic and sustainable living. Join Florida Organic Growers staff and guest experts as we discuss everything you need to know about sustainable living, organic agriculture, and how to make the best lifestyle choices that benefit you and the environment. So if you’re an eco-warrior, a dedicated farmer, or just someone looking to make more conscious decisions, tune in to get your Fresh Take.
Fresh Take
From Classroom to Cultivation: Lauren Daniels-Judge on Sustainable Farming and Plant Propagation
Join us for an insightful episode with Lauren Daniels-Judge, Propagation Manager at ECHO, as she takes us through her journey from teaching in Chicago to promoting small-scale farming in North Fort Myers. Lauren shares how ECHO empowers communities with crucial resources and training to enhance food security and agricultural education. Dive into the world of plant propagation, where Lauren offers expert knowledge on seed saving, grafting, and other methods to help plants thrive in Florida’s challenging climate.
Key highlights:
- Lauren’s transition from education to small-scale farming advocacy.
- The importance of seed saving and propagation techniques
- Grafting to blend resilience with desirable plant traits for better growth in unpredictable weather.
- Understanding orthodox vs. recalcitrant seeds and the significance of true-to-seed knowledge.
- How ECHO supports communities with agricultural education and resources.
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Speaker 2:Welcome to our latest episode of Fresh Take. Today we're really excited to be talking to Lauren Daniels-Judge, who is a Propagation Manager at ECHO, and today we are going to be talking about plant propagation, and so we're just really eager to get started in finding more about what Lauren does at ECHO and also, you know, sort of the day-to-day work and some of the things that everybody listening can perhaps you know, learn and benefit from all of our knowledge. Thank you for being with us today, lauren.
Speaker 3:Thanks, it's an honor to be here.
Speaker 2:So we typically start by just getting to know our guests and finding out what led you to get involved in this particular case plant propagation. I know that you work for ECHO and maybe you can also tell us a little bit about what ECHO is, but why don't we just maybe you know start by you telling us a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 3:Yeah for sure. So I came to agriculture growing food from maybe a little non-traditional route. My background is in education, actually, so I was teaching, I got my degree in secondary education and I was up there in Chicago teaching and I loved that work, I loved the city, I loved the neighborhood that I was living in really felt a discrepancy, perhaps, between the priorities of, you know, making sure that my kids are learning the academic side of education as a teacher, but realizing that if maybe there's not food security in their home or there's a lack of nutrition, things like memorizing your math facts to me felt very secondary to making sure that my students had enough food on the table or were eating adequate breakfast. And so I started getting interested in what food security would look like or should look like within an urban area. So, as COVID hit, I had an opportunity to come down an intern at Echo, which is a farm in North Fort Myers and they study sustainable, small-scale ways to help farmers or communities grow food in different environments, one of those being urban areas, and so I was able to support their community garden there and have different learning opportunities while I was there, and that just really opened my eyes to the dynamics of growing food for at-risk communities or low-income areas, and so that's really where my heart for agriculture came from.
Speaker 3:I know a lot of people who get from agriculture, from maybe growing up on large scale farms, and the large scale farming systems are maybe a big interest for a lot of people. But I came from the side of, like what would school gardens look like that were thriving and feeding their communities? What do community gardens look like that are thriving and feeding their communities? So that's my heart, I think, coming from that background, of what this community look like when, um, you're supporting folks through adequate nutrition and combating loneliness or different things, um, through through community gardening right.
Speaker 2:Uh, that's great, it's, it's so interesting. Like yourself, I often say that I that's great, it's so interesting. Like yourself, I often say that I just kind of stumble into, you know, this world of agriculture. I did not grow up in a farm either, or family farms, but somehow ended up studying agronomy and horticulture, and the one thing, similar to you as well, that I've always been very interested in, and passionate even, is education.
Speaker 2:So I completely agree that often and there's enough research out there to show that if people, and especially, you know, young minds and students are not eating properly and don't have an adequate diet, that's going to affect their learning for sure, especially at, you know, the neighborhoods and communities where there isn't, you know, those opportunities for people to eat well, right. So I like what you guys are doing, definitely and, you know, would want to encourage everybody listening to find more about ECHO and some of the work that you all do, echo, in some of the work that you all do. But how then, exactly your current work at echo and you know, plant propagation do you think relates to some of the things that we're talking about proper nutrition and some of the other things you know developing urban gardens and the like?
Speaker 3:yeah, definitely so. Um, now my role at echo is their plant propagation manager. So Echo runs a nursery where we sell tropical nutritious edible food. So that means that I'm getting to teach and train and produce grafted trees, we are doing cuttings, we're doing bamboo division, we're doing all different types of things for these tropical plants that you'll find here in Florida. We really want to emphasize and focus on things that are either native to the Florida context, being based in Florida, but also addressing maybe some of the gaps in education that farmers might find, when there's plenty of research on temperate growing cycles and temperate growing seasons.
Speaker 3:But what about the tropics here in Florida? They're unique to the rest of the United States, so there's a lot of research and demonstration that goes into what we do at ECHO. So we really are passionate about training and teaching small scale farmers, whether they're here in Florida or in other spaces, where they're just needing a little bit of support because maybe there's gaps in the education in tropical agriculture. So we really focus on that here at ECHO. And then I've also been able to do some consultation work on my own. I'm really passionate about starting community gardens and supporting nonprofits or organizations that really want to have food security within their organization, but maybe they don't have that skillset or they don't have the manpower to do that. So I've been honored to be able to teach and train folks on how to start their own gardens, how to start their own plant propagation systems. So I've been honored in the past couple of years to be able to transition a little bit of my role to teaching plant propagation specifically.
Speaker 2:So which my former advisor when I was in graduate school would love to probably hear what you're saying is he would often say I don't think those plants that you're growing look all that well, they don't look happy, and so he'd give me a hard time when he would walk into the greenhouse and I had my tray of tomatoes that were going to go into the greenhouse, because part of the work that I did when I was in school was to, you know, grow vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers and others, and greenhouse and using solar systems and other things. So it was very, very important. If you start with a healthy plant, it's very important to start with a healthy plant. You know water it well, provide the nutrients that it needs at that stage, so you can then move it to. You know where it's going to be, so you can you grow food, so, so important. So what are some of the things you think as it relates to taking care of plants, especially propagating plants, that it's important for people to remember?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that everyone's unique situation, context, environment is always going to be very different. If I'm talking to school teachers, they might have specific limitations versus someone who's doing this in their backyard or a farmer who is trying to explore propagating new species when they have infrastructure for other fruit trees or other crops that they're growing and now they're trying to expand to something new. So there's always so many variables that I really want to always ask questions first and farmers where they're at and what they need and maybe what their limitations are. I think, especially with agriculture, there's no you know what people say like there's no silver bullet. There's no one size fits all answer for every farmer in their unique context.
Speaker 3:But, that being said, I think that with plant propagation in general, a lot of it is just having time each day to learn and slow down and watch your plants, to observe your plants.
Speaker 3:What do you notice about the soil today? What do you notice about the plant material, the stems? What changes are you identifying each day? And so, if you're starting a new project or trying a new technique, do you have the capacity, do you have the time to really take a couple minutes each day and see how things are going, observe what changes you see, even in a 24-hour period. So, whether you're taking the time to adjust, maybe, the humidity level of your greenhouse or making a greenhouse environment from a plastic bag, if you're doing this on your countertop or your windowsill, being able to slow down and each day notice, hmm, maybe I think I'm going to try to give it a little more water today, but then maybe next week I'm going to see if it needs a little less water and see how that happens. So when you're trying new things, everybody's environment is so unique and different, and so being able to try and explore and observe every day can be really powerful when you're starting something new.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's so neat. I can completely agree with everything you just said. I read a book some years ago. It's actually a really nice, very short book for anyone who loves plants, and I believe the title of that book was you know what a Plant Knows, and this idea, as I think you were describing, that plants, if you just watch them, can actually tell you, you know what's going on with them and around their environment.
Speaker 2:If there is, you know, not enough light, you start seeing that the plant starts sort of leaning towards you know the, you know light that there might be in the greenhouse or in your house even so. And also when we're talking about season, how you know the plants are now. You know flowering and all these other things, and it is really neat if we just pay attention. I think we can learn a lot from just you know watching the plants and sort of understanding maybe what it is that they're lacking or what it is that they need. That's really great. And I know again from we're talking to farmers that's one of the things at least that we sometimes encourage people to try as much as they can to use seedlings whenever possible if they're going to be growing vegetables and that sort of thing, as opposed to direct seeding. But again, some cases that's what you do. What are some of the things that you typically run into when you're talking to your audience in terms of propagating their plants?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think, to talk about seeds first. What I love to share with people here, especially in our tropical environment of Florida, is did you know that there's two different types of seeds? There's orthodox seeds and recalcitrant seeds, and what that means is orthodox seeds have a dormancy period. You can take your seeds and you can save them and you can store them over a winter period and when you plant them out the next season they're ready to go and they sprout. Those seeds have a dormancy period. But there's other seeds that are called recalcitrant.
Speaker 3:Those are more tropical seeds, things like avocados or mangoes or those tropical fruits that we have here, and those seeds don't have a dormancy period.
Speaker 3:So if you try to store them over months, they're not going to germinate. They don't have that dormancy period where they can stay and then just be fine to plant out the next season. You have to plant those right away. So, knowing the different types of seeds that there are and how to care for them, which ones will last for five years if you store them in a certain place and then they're great to go, or other ones where the minute you eat that fruit you need to plant that seed out or it is just going to die back and not have a germination rate.
Speaker 3:So that's just an interesting fact about seeds that I've learned recently and in general, kind of like a rule of thumb to know whether or not a plant whether you can save the seeds or not is this a plant that grows up north where there is a winter. So vegetables think tomatoes, eggplant, all of those vegetables that we would grow in our traditional gardens those seeds are going to save because they're used to that winter cycle where they need to be saved. However, down here in Florida, when we have our fruit, our cocoa plum, our peanut butter fruit, our dry whatever, whatever types of fruit we're talking about those seeds. They don't have that storage period and you need to plant them out right away.
Speaker 2:Which also in some cases, you, I'm imagining, running to people who are asking what are you know some of the ways that they can save that seed If they cannot plant that seed right away? What are some of the things you know that they can, techniques or things that they would need to know when saving seed? Do you get to talk to people about saving seeds and those things?
Speaker 3:Absolutely so knowing how to let your plant either dry out in the field and then harvest the seeds, shake them out, whatever that might look like for your individual plant, and storing them in an environment where it's not too humid, because those seeds of things Again, those types of questions are very dependent. Or I really like to know people's context. Do they have space to store seeds?
Speaker 2:Are they?
Speaker 3:going to be storing them in their fridge? Are they going to be storing them in a box in their closet? What are the options that they have? And is it better to store seeds or should we look at other propagation methods like taking cuttings or air layering or grafting? And so there's so many options for propagating plants, and seed saving is an awesome, incredible method. Those seeds are really beneficial in a lot of ways because let's think about it Well, they're mobile.
Speaker 3:It's a lot easier to. If you're transitioning from place to place for whatever reason, and you need to bring plants with you, well, seeds are probably the way to go. It's a lot easier to carry packs of seeds than it is to carry one gallon pots of plants, right? Also, if you're growing something from seed, it's going to have a taproot. If I take cuttings of a plant, I will never have a taproot growing from a cutting. So if I'm thinking about fruit trees or something like that, well, I'm probably here in Florida, knowing our hurricane season, going to want to have a tree that has a taproot, because it'll stand up against heavy weather events a lot easier than something that just has a fibrous root system from a cutting. So there's lots of variables and things to consider, but seed saving is an incredible tool to have in your back pocket, depending on your needs.
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. Did you also mention grafting? This is a topic that fascinates me in a way, because I also not too long ago learned, or was talking to a professor here at the University of Florida that most of us probably grew up or at least knew my dad is always liked roses and so he would, you know, graft his roses, different types of roses. He really enjoyed doing that. But so we would think, or I would think, that you know, typically you are grafting woody plants, but then learn that you can also graft vegetables, and this professor at the university of florida is actually doing a lot of work with grafting, uh, tomatoes and and some other vegetables. Do you run into that sort of thing sometimes when people, uh, when talking to people about you know grafting and other ways to propagate plants?
Speaker 3:Yes, 100%. Grafting is probably one of my favorite things. Just yesterday I was doing a workshop on grafting and it is so fun just to see people's eyes light up the benefits of grafting and how huge it is for any sort of production. Just to example, tomatoes grafting tomatoes is a huge practice here in Florida because lots of tomato varieties are not well adapted to our Florida climate. So if I can graft one of those unique, say, temperate varieties of tomatoes that maybe don't do super great in our soils or with our weather, well think about it. If I can have the base of a plant, the root system of a plant, be acclimated to my soil to be good for my Florida climate, and then I can graft on top of that root system something that's a little more finicky or needs babied a little bit more, and then I graft it on top of something that's sturdy and disease resistant, pest resistant. Well, now I'm getting the best of both worlds. I'm getting fruit production from maybe this beautiful heirloom tomato that really needs to be babied but it's been grafted on to a hearty you know disease resistant root system. Now I'm getting that the benefits of that root system and the benefits of that production. You see that also in fruit tree production all the time.
Speaker 3:Let's think. Let's think about mangoes. Here in Florida we have a mango variety called turpentine and it has an incredible disease resistance and ability to thrive in our sandy climate. So we love the root system of the turpentine mango but it's got these small, fibrous, don't taste very good fruits. Well, why don't we take that root system and graft on top of that root system our special pineapple, pleasure, orange, crisp varieties of mangoes? And then we're getting that fruit production of that unique cultivated mango on top of a root system that's going to allow that plant to be resilient year after year after year.
Speaker 2:So related to that, and you mentioned in fact you were talking, I think about a plant propagation grafting class that you had recently For everybody listening. How can they? Are these classes that people can enroll in? Do they have to go to ECHO? How does that work, and what are some of the ways, or maybe tips, that you can give us, you know, regarding how to learn more about this topic?
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely so. Echo will put on workshops and different events throughout the year. They can request speakers through Echo, and Echo or our staff here at Echo have a limited availability to go and do those workshops, but I'm also available to do workshops, whether it's a community center or a home garden meeting or whatever that looks like. I do workshops and I've been able to travel a little bit and do that. So you can reach out to me at plantrelationshipscom and we can set up a meeting. We can set up a workshop. Whatever you are interested in learning. I love talking about grafting or seed germination, division, all of those plant propagation techniques, as well as just garden management or permaculture design, food forest stuff. So you can reach out to me directly. Or if you're curious about the work that Echo does and their focus on small scale farmers and some of those techniques definitely reach out to Echo as well.
Speaker 2:Right, cool. So and of course you know there's so many things that we can talk about when it relates to plant propagation and one of the things that I just wanted to maybe ask you again, if you could give us some maybe some other examples or some maybe tips when it relates to grafting. For people who are novices or at least wanting to know more about grafting, what are some of the things that you think they should maybe keep in mind as they are trying to learn more about this particular topic?
Speaker 3:Yeah, 100%, the way that I describe it is. So why would I graft? Well, in the same way that, let's see, a mango tree would give you, in one growing season, let's say, maybe, 100 mango fruits, All of those mango fruits are going to have seeds in them, right. But if I plant out all of those seeds, they're are going to have seeds in them, right. But if I plant out all of those seeds, they're all going to have different genetics. In the same way that if I have 50 kids, they're all going to have different. They're going to look different, they're going to act different, they're going to have different personalities. Well, that's the same with fruit trees. So I can't just save all of the fruit from my tree, plant them out and then sell those fruits as the same as the mother plant, because they're going to be different. Their genetics are different.
Speaker 3:So when you graft, that's a method of what you would call clonal propagation or asexual propagation. So you are ensuring that your propagated plant is the exact same genetic material as the mother plant. So I can sell a grafted mango with a hundred percent certainty, basically, that it is going to be the exact same fruit that its mother gave me, because, instead of having a seed that I just grew out and then I really don't know what those genetics are going to be exactly I've taken plant material from that mother plant, put it onto the rootstock of another mango and then I know that as that bud grows and as that graft takes and it grows out into its own tree, that tree material is going to be the same as the mother plant that I took the bud from. So obviously there's so much to get into that we. That's kind of a quick definition of grafting for folks. And so, yeah, there's.
Speaker 2:There's those main, two main different ways of propagation either using seeds, where there's going to be differences in the genetics and maybe that's preferable for what you have, but then there's other methods of propagation where you can get the exact same copy of the parent plant and in often cases that's more preferable for those who are producing on a larger scale correct, uh, but also I I think it's so important and I and I like the way that you define that because, uh and we were talking earlier maybe you had a really you know tasty tomato that you bought at the farmer's market or that you were going to save the seeds, and then you think that by planting those seeds you're going to get that same tomato that you had at the farmer's market, which often that might not be the case. And if you had an avocado we talked, I think you know fruit trees and other things and I love avocados and I believe the term is you know, true to seed, when you actually plant that seed and you're going to get that same fruit that you really enjoy it. And often that is not the case, as you were explaining. And so this is, when grafting, knowing the varieties, knowing you know that your rootstock and you know you'reion the plant that you're actually going to grow on that rootstock or on that plant that we were talking about earlier, is something that you're going to enjoy.
Speaker 2:So I do think that that's just important for everybody out there listening to us and those of you who know about plant propagation that it's often something that we often sort of don't remember. I say, oh, I'm just going to plant that. I'm going to save that seed and plant it. So it's really cool and, like I said, very fascinating. We can talk all day about plant propagation, but we really appreciate you taking the time and talking to us today. I was hoping that if there's anything else that you wanted to share with us, or at least maybe remind all of us how to get in touch with you or find out more about what Echo does, that you can tell us and just any other tips that you might have for us.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. I think that for anyone interested in getting started, whatever that looks like for your specific context, for your specific situation, people have been propagating plants. People have been growing their own food for millennia right Since the dawn of time. I think we can overcomplicate it and sure there's so much depth and learning that can go into, and should go into, growing food with the best possible practices, but at the end of the day, like, don't let the depth of information out there stop you from just starting, right.
Speaker 3:Like folks, growing food is for everyone.
Speaker 3:Everyone can grow their own food, no matter what your context is, no matter how small of a scale you have. That's beautiful and fine, and there's so much beauty in being able to grow something and learn from the way that plants survive and teach us and produce food in incredible ways, right? So, regardless of what folks' contexts are, I hope that this talk is encouraging to remind all of us that plants grow. That's just what they do. They love growing and we just get to participate in that and learn a little bit from them, as we support plants and their growth, right? So all of that to say.
Speaker 3:If folks are interested in learning more, they can always reach out to me through my website at plantrelationshipscom. Or if they're curious about the incredible work that Echo is doing, reach out to Echo or find us on our website at Echonetorg. And there's lots of resources. We have our farm here in North Fort Myers that does tours every week and have so many plants for sale and different options available. That's how they can reach me and that's how they can get in contact with Echo.
Speaker 2:Great. Thank you, lauren, and I think that that's sort of a great thing for all of us to remember. Plants grow and it is just something that if we just pay attention, you know, watch and try to learn from plants, you know we can continue to enjoy them. We really appreciate you taking the time and talking to us today. Thank you, and to everybody listening, please don't forget to check us out once again, check out Fresh Steaks and all of our episodes, and we look forward to talking to you very soon.
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