The Seed to Spoon story — Cleveland County Master Gardeners

I made so many mistakes

In the recording: 5:01–5:09 · 8:20–8:36.

I tried to just grow a little bit of each, the stuff that we bought from the store. I started with that, and I made so many mistakes.

I was tired of Bermuda. I just threw a blitzkrieg of cardboard and wood chips at the problem and started covering my entire backyard with cardboard and then wood chips.

The drip irrigation tubing

In the recording: 19:41–19:57 · 20:53–21:04.

I've started to switch over now to the drip irrigation tubing with the emitters. It's more expensive, but if you have a large garden it doesn't require many zones. It's just a better solution if you're definitely going to be doing this.

Everything I talk about in this presentation, I probably have a video or a blog post on my website that goes into detail on it.

I like efficiency

In the recording: 40:50–41:05 · 42:23–42:28.

I like efficiency. I wanted to write one blog post. That's really kind of what this started as. I want to just tell people how we did it and to share cool stuff, maybe shoot some videos. I feel pretty silly about doing that. I still do.

If I ran into a problem, I would shoot a video and say, here's the problem I had, here's how I solved it, things like that.

What can I do

In the recording: 43:19–43:44 · 43:52–44:10.

I think about how different my life would have been if I would have grown up around this. I try and do something to change someone else's life now, so I want kids to be exposed to this stuff.

In the past I spent a lot of time worrying about the world and complaining about the world. Now I try and every time I have that complaint, I put that into, okay, well, what can I do? That's what drives me to do all the stuff.

All of that information I wanted to put into an app

In the recording: 49:34–50:02 · 52:12–52:14 · 55:39–56:00.

Everything we learned I wanted to put into one place, because I was carrying around all these books. All of that information I wanted to put into an app because that's how I view the world. That's how I organize information, is in this type of format. Last year my wife and I started working on this, and then we released our first version in January. What it does now is it lets you choose whatever you want to grow.

We have harvesting and cooking information.

We have a critters tab that has all the pests in the app in one place, not just ones for a specific vegetable. Same with the beneficials tab. This about tab is kind of the story of how we started. It has links to some of my favorite books. These are all the books I used to make the app, basically, and then links to our favorite YouTube videos.

When your harvest window opens

In the recording: 56:32–56:53 · 58:25–58:38.

We're gonna have a system helping you know when your harvest window opens, based on when you planted it.

I'm gonna have a web version soon that will work on any computer or Kindle Fire or anything that has a browser. Right now it's only iOS, Android.