The Seed to Spoon story — Organic Oklahoma 2018

The food part

In the recording: 2:17–2:48.

We started with the food part, and it was very expensive. We live on a pretty tight budget. I love cooking. I was spending five dollars a week on basil, and it just seemed silly.

It was a system

In the recording: 3:15–3:34 · 3:44–4:02.

Square Foot Gardening was our first book we bought related to gardening, and I really liked it because I come from the computer side of the world. This made sense to me. It was a system I could easily memorize. It was something I liked about it, and that was where we started.

Our first year we made a lot of mistakes. That's one thing I really appreciate about the book more than anything else, is it gave me a deep understanding and sense of how important the soil is. Compost was something that was really important to us.

Unique flavor

In the recording: 6:47–7:29 · 8:31–8:41.

I’ll never forget the first time I had spinach out of the garden. It was like, wow, this actually tastes good. I want this. I want more of this. Then every variety has its own unique flavor. Some of them are kind of almond like and sweet and crunchy, and it's different depending on the temperature.

That's what gardening does for me. Gardening helps me on a daily basis to go out there and appreciate things.

We were starting to innovate

In the recording: 9:44–10:03 · 10:19–10:38 · 11:07–11:34.

2016 for us was really about getting to that point with gardening where we were able to overcome some of the problems we had, and really we were starting to innovate. I was having fun. We're having a lot of success too. We're finally starting to get a lot of food.

We've since transitioned into the black irrigation tubing with the emitters. You can water more at a time. It's more efficient.

We were starting to learn a lot of things and do a lot of things. This is a cover that we built, the PVC cover, so that we can keep insects off of our plants. Then in the winter we switch it out with the plastic sheeting, so it's like a miniature greenhouse.

What are you doing to fix it

In the recording: 13:00–13:10 · 13:37–13:57.

I came home and we started building our website, and all of my energy that used to go into reading the news and caring about what was going on goes into this now. I can actually do something.

When I was waiting in line to vote, that question that was asked of me, what are you doing to fix it? Literally the next moment I'm introduced to people that are asking me about how to grow food. It was like the universe's aligned this together, and suddenly I'm showing pictures of my garden. There's like 10 people around us. I felt like I was shown in that moment, this is what you can do. That is when we started shooting videos.

We wanted to make an app

In the recording: 14:24–14:48 · 14:53–15:18.

I wanted an app to make this easier because I was carrying around all these books. I love reading the books.

I built up this pretty good database of pests, and so we wanted to make an app, but I didn't know how to code at the time because I've worked in software development, but I was a product manager. I was in testing. We built our app starting last July, and we released in January.

Based on where you live

In the recording: 15:33–16:19.

It'll calculate planting dates that are based on where you live anywhere in the country. Uses the nearest NOAA weather station to pull the last hundred years of freeze dates, and then it calculates based off of that. You can also go in and change the freeze date. You can pull the list of freeze date potentials from 10% to 100%, and you can choose how risky you want to play it. It'll do that for anywhere in the country and soon anywhere in the world.

The app is completely free. We made this app because we wanted to make a difference in the world. We wanted to make it easy for anyone to grow food, and if I charge for this that makes it harder for people. It was kind of a crazy idea. We spend a lot of time on this, but we feel like we can make money in other ways.

Companion plants

In the recording: 17:16–17:34 · 18:22–18:39.

It would give you the planting dates, and then it'll also give you all the information about how to grow it. It shows you companion planting information. It will give you the tab of the good companion plants that grow next to each vegetable, as well as the bad. You get a list of both.

We pull in videos from our YouTube automatically, so if you go to the carrots tab there, it'll pull in all the videos for carrots from our YouTube channel. If there's anything about that vegetable, it pulls in to that tab as well.