Shades of Green Permaculture

Today I'm talking with Brandy at Shades of Green Permaculture.

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00:00
Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year?  Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months.  So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com  Lang calendar.

00:26
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00:56
You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Brandy Hall at Shades of Green Permaculture. Good morning, Brandy. How are you? I'm good. Are you in Georgia? Yeah, I'm in the Atlanta area. Okay. And is Shades of Green Permaculture based there? Yes, ma'am. We are based in the side of Atlanta.

01:24
in the metro area indicator, which is to reduce the sun. Okay, cool. Is it nice there this morning? Oh, it's gorgeous. We had a nice rain and now the sun is shining. It's about 70 degrees. Thank goodness. Cause we had a bout of like 95 degree weather in the beginning of April. So I was excited about summer coming early. Yeah, that's a little much for April. And we had a really warm day in Minnesota a couple of weeks ago and I was like, this is so wrong.

01:54
Yeah, there's something, it's like a cognitive dissonance because on one hand you're like, this feels so nice, the sun, and then you're like, wait, but it's too early.  Exactly. And  for the second morning in a row, we've got rain showers happening here. yeah, I'm just hoping that this remains a pattern of just a day or two of a light rain showers and then three or four days of sunshine. Cause I can't face another spring like last year where we got six weeks of rain in a row.  Oh my goodness.

02:24
Yeah. And there comes a point where it's like, if you have the rain and then you've got the intermittent sun, the plants just love it so much versus just getting sun. Yeah. I really wondered if I had teleported to Washington state or Oregon last May and June, because I swear to you, I thought everything was going to mold. It was terrible.  So tell me about yourself  and Shades of Green permaculture.  So my name's Brandy Hall and I'm the founder and CEO of Shades of Green.

02:54
firmaculture. I started the company in 2008. So we just celebrated our 17 year anniversary and we are a regenerative design, installation, maintenance and education firm based here in the Atlanta area. offer processes for our clients going everything from consultation through design and implementation and ongoing maintenance services, both

03:23
horticulture services like bed maintenance and perennial plantings and organic all-electric solar powered lawn care. Really encouraging people to move toward polyculture lawns. And then we also offer digital education. So we've got a few thousand students located around the country and some international students that participate in our online design program called the regenerative backyard blueprint.

03:53
Okay, so I have a few questions for you.  Number one, how did you get into this? What prompted you to start this business? I think there were a few things, know, some like early childhood experiences definitely set the course for me on this. And then, you know, when I started the company, I was looking for  work in this  arena.

04:19
And there wasn't anything available. So I sort of just started my own thing so that I could do what I loved to do. But as a child, I grew up part-time in South Florida and part-time in Western North Carolina. My parents divorced when I was really young. And my mom and my stepdad had a nursery in South Florida, an ornamental plant nursery and a seed farm. And over the course of

04:45
maybe 10 years or so in the nursery business, they became really, really allergic to and chemically sensitive to the kind of quote unquote, innocuous pesticides and pesticides that were spraying on the farm to the point where my stepdad was in a wheelchair, you know, swollen joints  for  a good part of maybe two years and having nosebleeds that were inexplicable that would last for an hour to two hours.

05:14
He put up walks, my mom took over the nursery business and she had sort of escalating allergic reactions to  the  pesticides and herbicides that were sprayed. We lived in an agricultural area of South Florida.  So even though they stopped spraying, you long before their reactions started getting terrible,  it was just ambient, you know, it was environmental. So  Palm Beach County is where we lived in South Florida. They would do aerial spraying of the mosquitoes.

05:44
all of the neighbors, you know, spraying for termites, all the neighboring farms spraying, you know,  crop dusting basically with herbicides and pesticides. And so, one of the final straws, my mom was, she had done a delivery of a neighboring farm and they had recently, you know, sprayed  the houses and she got out of the car, smelled it immediately, got back in, took Benadryl, went home, they,

06:13
came to get me from school on the way to the hospital. And by the time we got to the hospital, she was convulsing so hard that she shook the door panel off of the inside of the car. Her hands were drawing up like she's in a stroke. So  very quickly, we moved to North Florida. They went through long detents, all organic, everything, no nail polish in the house, kind of level of  detent.

06:41
and chemicals and we're able to recover, it kind of set the course of just seeing how toxic our environment and our landscape practices, our environmental practices in the US and then kind of juxtapose with growing up part-time in the Western North Carolina and spending so much time in the woods and on wagon trains and eating from the garden and drinking from the springs right around and one of the most biodiverse terrarium forests in the planet.

07:11
set this early inquiry in motion of there's got to be a. That'll that situation with your mom and your stepdad will definitely wake you up. Holy cow. In ways that I didn't even realize as like a seven year old, eight year old teenager, you know, it wasn't until later on as I, as I started to get into this work in my twenties. I realized, this is, this is kind of the early.

07:41
exposure that I had to when it doesn't go well really set it all in motion for me.  Wow. Wow. Well,  I'm  blown away by that story. That is not what I expected to hear.  Okay, so I was looking at your website and it says that your company is a B corporation. What is a B corporation? Letter B.

08:05
letter B. So it means beneficial corporation and it's a third party designation, which like an organic certification, that's super rigorous. It's a global designation and companies like Patagonia and, and Jerry's, are notable ones. think there's a few thousand B corps, maybe 10,000 B corps registered internationally. And the premise behind the B corp is that it's not just about outfits. It's about

08:35
you know, impact on the community, impact on employees, impact on the environment and those positive pieces are baked into both corporate laws and practices of perpetuity. So it's really about people and planet over profit. really, you know, kind of building on that besides people and planet over profit, seeing how profit is really impacted positively.

09:05
by valuing people and community.  Okay. Thank you.  I did not have time to dig for what a B Corp was. So that was a perfect explanation  for those of us who have no idea what any of that means.  Okay. So, so do you  work for  like  cities that need your services or do you work for just the average person who wants to

09:35
clean up and beautify their yard? We have a wide range of projects. So the bulk of our work is residential, I would say, but we also work with a lot of developers for new construction type projects. work with schools and nonprofits. We definitely have municipal clients. We've worked with several municipalities in the metro area  implementing productive urban landscapes.

10:02
Yeah, so I would say it  runs the gamut for sure. A lot of farm clients, homesteaders.

10:10
Basically, we're always looking for ways that we can say yes, because our goal is to empower people with the tools that they need to steward their land in good way. So I can look a lot of different ways.  Great. Productive urban landscape. Define that for me, for your own definition. What does that mean? Yeah. So when you think about just  our standard green spaces that we see within the city, you know, a lot of times they have ornamental plants, have,  you know, sod.

10:39
They require that kind of maintenance from public works departments,  know, just mowing and blowing basically in a productive urban landscape is really about rethinking public spaces to produce food and medicine and pollinator.  You know, so those can look like orchards. We've done a lot of public orchards. We've done a lot of human scale, stormwater projects where we're sinking the water into the soil and then using that water that is larger than the soils to grow.

11:09
native communities. So it's really just thinking about our green spaces beyond just ornamental, you know, the aesthetic,  mow and blow kind of approach that we tend to take.  Okay, great.  The small town that we used to live in, they used to have these big planters that they would put out in the springtime full of annual flowers, know, pansies or whatever.

11:40
And every time I would walk by one, I would think, man, I wish that they would load those things up with herbs because people could just grab a sprig if they wanted to, you know?  And I kept meaning to say something to our neighbor who was on the city council. And every time I saw her, something else came up and I never mentioned it. But all I could see in my head  were these big old planters full of thyme and basil and

12:06
rosemary and stuff that people could just grab some, you know? Right. And then those are perennial too. So rather than spending the budget on, you know, materials and labor year after year to plant annuals, you know, do it one time and then oregano and the thyme and the chives and all of it just comes down. I was, I was going to say I'm in Minnesota. Yes, chives are perennial here. And thyme is a,

12:32
You never know whether it's going to come back  or not. We've had good luck with it, but  it gets freaking cold in January in Minnesota. Not everything survives. And rosemary does not overwinter here at all. Yeah. Rosemary even, you know, it will overwinter here until we get a hard winter.  Like a couple of years ago, was  seven degrees, which for us is insanely cold.  All the rosemary everywhere. But you know, the decade before that, was sliding.

13:02
Yeah, back this, I think it was in January, we had one night that actually hit minus 25 degrees real temperature. And I was like, I live in the wrong state.  mean, I mean, there's a big thing here in Minnesota about we suffer through the winters to enjoy spring, summer and fall because it's so gorgeous here.

13:24
That night I was like, thank God for my cozy, well insulated home because we would be freezing right now if we didn't have that. Yeah, it came with the Southern American, even memory, I don't know what it feels like. Yeah, and I've never been further south than Arlington. I think it's maybe Virginia. Yeah. So I don't have any experience with any...

13:51
I've never been below the Mason Dixon line, really. Yeah, it's really weird. My  parents live in Maine, so I grew up in Maine.  And my  grandparents from my mom  lived in Illinois,  and my grandparents from my dad lived in Maine. So, of course, family vacations were every other summer.

14:16
we'd go to Illinois and the grandparents in Illinois would come to Maine. So there was never any reason to go south of the Mason-Dixon line.  yeah,  I hear the South is beautiful.  I don't know that I would fit in very well because having been raised in Maine, I was brought up to be very, very direct and look people in the eye and do the firm handshake thing. And I don't think I would ever be very good at being a Southern belle. I think that I would probably suck at it.

14:47
That's good. Yes. So, okay. I don't want to get too far off track because I do that all the time. And I'm like, I talked way too much on that one. So when you go and help residential folks get their stuff together, do you, is it a thing where you can go and get them started and then they can take it from there? Or are there people who are just like, come and do this every week or whatever, and I don't have to do it.

15:17
are both? It's both. It's definitely both. So, you know, we take our clients through a pretty comprehensive design and installation  process. And then  at that point, they become sometimes they become caretaking clients, not always. So caretaking is our version of maintenance and that  covers both of our horticulture services and the lawn care.  And then within caretaking, offer

15:47
We have a wide variety. We have some clients that want us to come weekly. They have higher need landscapes. We have some clients that want us to monthly or seasonally. So we try to accommodate the whole range. And the end goal, we always celebrate when we've, quote unquote, graduated or clients. We've done work to train them in how to interact with their landscape. have an understanding of to read it, to move plants around, what to look

16:17
for, you know, and the types of landscapes that we do, are higher maintenance on the front end, you know, as plants are getting established for sure, than your typical just like mow and blow. But then once things are established and you really have an understanding of what you're looking for in the landscape and how to kind of interact with it on a seasonal basis, the maintenance needs really drop pretty significantly. So in terms of, you know, need for

16:44
fertilizing and irrigation  and  regular pruning and cutting things back and mowing and all of those things. So we have a lot of clients that choose to work with us during our caretaking visits. It's part of like a garden coaching, just  an addendum to the service that we offer. You know, because I would say most of the people that engage  in permaculture firm are excited about growing food and they want to  know about the plants that they've put into their yards.

17:14
Yeah, education was really a huge component.  Good.  Have you ever had someone call you or email you or however they contacted you  and say, just need somebody to do something with my property? And they have at the beginning, they have no interest in learning. And then they get converted over the course of the project. would say most of the time when people call us, they have a sense of what it is that we do and they're drawn to that.

17:44
A lot of times, you know, when you have like a married couple, one might be more interested in the other is sort of like, well, I don't know, they my spouse wants to do it. So  just kind of  going along with it. And we've definitely seen some like major conversions happen in space where, you know, the, maybe the husband starts out, I don't know, I just like, she wants to be a great wife.  You know, and then by the end they've taken up the lawn and they're growing corn everywhere.

18:12
And how does, how does it make you feel when that happens? I mean, are you, are you at the point where it's like, yeah, I knew that was going to happen. Or do you still get that little bubble of happy in your chest? I mean, it's so exciting when people just  start understanding possibilities that our landscapes hold in terms of feeding ourselves and feeding, you know, the non-human stakeholders as well.  Um, yeah, it's super exciting. You know, I think that there's, there's something to be said about, you know, as you're

18:42
as you're interacting with your landscape  from an  ecological stewardship  perspective and see, oh, wow, the first time somebody harvests a strawberry or eats a fresh blueberry, there's these little micro moments that happen where  I think it opens up a whole world of possibility of what your landscape can do.  It can be a good steward, people get really excited.

19:12
It's meaning, I would say, especially for folks that, know, that name is a major metropolis, know, 7 million people in the metro area. So, you know, the  urban,  the challenge that we're having in like urban and suburban.

19:32
Lifestyle, I would say, is a lot of people would site, you know, 40 plus hours a week away from the landscape or garden, bringing kids and getting stuck in traffic and commuting and all of the things that kind of pull us out of our gardens. But I think there's something that's really helpful for people to find a reason to be in the area, to eat this food and to, you know, see a certain type of bird for the first time or.

19:59
you know, notice that your moment is covered with like 20 different kinds of pollinators and those little, those little moments of like, Oh, I don't have to just escape to the middle of nowhere in order to like, you know, be immersed in nature. know, nature can be in Yes, nature should be in our own backyards. you're the gateway drug person to food scaping is what you are.  Yeah, we, you we don't usually refer to it.

20:29
but  it's always part of it.  Permaculture can look very different depending on the goals of the particular client, but there's really three pillars that we talk about in the system. It's managing water as a resource,  building soil fertility by closing loops, waste streams on our site, and building communities that feed humans and wildlife.

20:57
work together to increase the soil fertility. So whether the planting palette that you craft is really about food production or it's pollinator habitat or sunbird habitat or we have herbalists that have  engaged us before where their entire yard is just  an account for their herbal business. So the plants can really,  they can emerge.

21:25
pillars of the regenerative landscape and they can really be crafted  in a that almost every landscape is going to have  some combination of producing food, medicine, beauty.  I absolutely love your enthusiasm for what you do. I mean, there's a saying that if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. And I know that you work.  I know.  But  it's, I'm guessing that sometimes it doesn't feel like work for you. Oh, I'm...

21:55
Absolutely. Yeah. And it's really fun. You know, when I got into this, was really because I wanted to do it and it wasn't really an option. And it's, you know, to like go out and get a job. So we're just gonna start referring this to clients and  we're company of 27 people, think. So it's really, you know, it's  really, to  just say, the company has grown and how other people get to do this.

22:25
Our staff is amazing. I'm really ashamed of the work that we do. There's just so many people out there, know, spreading the good word.  Getting people hooked on growing good things without using bad things to grow them.  Exactly.  Well, I could have used you like 25 years ago when we decided to take our little tiny tenth of an acre lot and turn it into food.

22:54
You're in Georgia and we were still in Minnesota, so that never would have happened. But we had to learn it on our own. And you might get a kick out of this. I've told the story a few times already on the podcast, but I will tell it again because I love it.  My husband's mom was going to be moving out of her house that she lived in for a very long time.  And she had gotten irises, these little, they're short irises. I don't think that the leaves get any more than six inches tall. And they put out these, these dark,

23:22
purple or lavendery blue purple blossoms. She was going to dig those out and she was going to dig out lilies for her to take where she was going and she wanted to know if we wanted any. And we hadn't really done anything with plants at our place. We had a crappy lawn and that was about it. And we had a, I don't know what they're called, a little pine tree that was

23:49
I called it the scrappy tree because it wasn't doing very well. was in front of our bedroom windows  outside.  And so we got these hand-me-down plants from her and put them in and they did really, really well. And I said to my husband, said, how do you feel about digging up the backyard and we grow food instead of crab grass?  And he was totally fine with it. And he discovered his love for  growing food  to the point that now where we live, have a

24:16
I still don't have the exact numbers, but I think it's a hundred foot by 150 foot market garden every summer.  And so  my son just went to his girlfriend's grandma's house yesterday to help her dig up some plants and move them around because she wanted them switched.  And he came home with yellow and orange daylily roots for me.  And so I keep thinking that I am, we are the hand me down  farm.

24:45
Cause we keep getting stuff from people cause they're like, I got all this stuff. don't want to throw it in the trash. I'm like, we'll put it in. Totally. Yeah. It's like the what? We always talk about how we have like an orphanage for all the lost plants in our, in our green space here. We're always constantly taking in plants. So yeah. We should have named, we should have named our place sanctuary farm and it would have been for plants, not for animals. Totally.

25:15
But at least half of my peony plants that I have are hand-me-down peonies that we got from the old house, from neighbors,  from friends, from complete strangers on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace.  And this is our fourth spring here. And we put in  the first of the plants from the old house. First, that was all we had. So we put those in that first fall we were here. And this is the fourth spring.

25:44
So we're going to have more peonies than we've ever had here in our new place  this year. I  am so excited because we have not, I'm going to jinx it, we have not had cold weather  and they haven't actually come up yet because we didn't take the stuff off of them. waiting so that when they do come up through, we're past the last frost date so they don't get tipped. Because for anyone who doesn't know,  if those little tiny bulbs get,  but not bulbs, buds.

26:14
get bitten by frost they don't continue to grow so you get no flowers on that plant.  So I'm just keeping everything I have crossed that every freaking bud on all the peony plants blooms this year because I want it to be a sea of blooms.  I have white and coral and yellow and pink and burgundy.

26:39
I'm so  excited, like I can't stand it. I hadn't really thought about it until we started talking. I'm like, oh my God, it's going to be a sea of beautiful flowers out there in June.  I will have to get out there and take pictures because they don't last long. It'll be a month.  It'll be a rolling month of different colors.

26:59
I'm so excited. I can't stand it.  So anyway, my point being back 10 minutes ago, well, maybe, maybe two days ago, who knows?  Um, I was very excited to see my son show up with this bucket of lily roots because I can always use more lilies. That's  Always anything, anything that will we put in the ground  once and we just have to water it and pray it gets sun and it just takes care of itself.

27:29
love the quality of plants that want to live. don't need a lot of food. Uh-huh. Yeah. We have some red Stelladora, I think is the name of the lily that we got from somebody and we threw them in over by the ditch. And they're not ditch lilies, but they're by a ditch. And we don't do anything with them. We don't even water them. And they have survived three years just through what nature has given them. They're beautiful.

27:59
That's wild. Yep. Love it.  Absolutely love low maintenance, high beauty production plants. makes me so happy. I'm sure, I'm sure you are tickled when somebody's like, I would really like perennials. And you're like, let me tell you about what perennials grow in Georgia.  She's amazing woman.

28:28
But you know, just like fruit trees, everything from hazelnut and tapioca, raspberry, fig, and cranberry, and bananas.  Avocados?  Yeah.  Oh, okay. Give it 10 years. I would like,  low-pot grows here, persimmons, Asian persimmons, and they're just so different from fruit, say. Fruit and nut trees, and then...

28:57
know, you start getting into perennials. It's, you know, just a variety of native plants and, you know, perennial medges, kinds of things.  Can you, can you grow black raspberries in Georgia? Yeah, okay.

29:19
any rubes seems to do.  Okay,  my mom in Illinois grew up picking black raspberries, wild ones. And we have them growing in our tree line on our property. And she lives in Maine. Black raspberries don't do very well in the area of Maine that she lives in.  And I brought her  black raspberries from our property. They were frozen.  And she made a black raspberry  pie.

29:47
like a couple of weeks after we'd come back to Minnesota. And she called and she was like, thank you so much for bringing me black raspberries. I forgot how much I love them.

30:08
Yeah, well, she'd been,  I don't know when I moved to Minnesota in, I don't even know now when it was over 30 years ago. I mentioned that there were black raspberries here on the hiking trails. And she was like, Oh, black raspberries are great. Da da da da da. And I said, they're really tart. And she's like, yeah, but if you make them into jam, they're no longer really tart. And I said, okay, well, I don't can and I don't make jam. So that doesn't help me.  And

30:36
When we realized we had black raspberries here, we were so excited because they make a killer pie. Just really yummy pie. So I had to bring her black raspberries. There was no way I wasn't taking a cooler with frozen black raspberries home to visit.

30:54
Yeah, and we're trying to start a  food forest in our tree line.  We just discovered that we have emerald ash borers in our trees for the first time  to the point that they're not leafing out. These trees are probably damn close to dead.  We have over 20 trees that are going to have to come out and some of them have been there for years and it's going to be expensive.  So.

31:22
My husband has decided that he's going to accept any  fruit tree or plant that he can get and we're going to make the tree line for trees and  shrubs. Great. They have a to make lemonade out of lemons, right?  Yeah.  He was walking the tree line two weeks ago  and he saw a bunch of little holes in the trunks of the trees and only the  ash trees,  aspen, whatever, that family.

31:53
And he took a closer look and the next morning he said, we have an expensive problem coming at us. And I was like, oh no, we are broke. We can't handle an expensive problem. He said, we have emerald ash forest. And I said, how do you know? And he said, because all those little holes are where the woodpeckers are using the trees for a food source. I was like, oh, that's fabulous. And I used a bad word in front of fabulous.

32:22
And he said, nope, this is an opportunity. He said, you know those peach trees we put in two falls ago? I said, yes. He said, you know how we got peaches off of them the first fall after we put them in the previous fall? I said, yes, the one that equaled or were equal to Georgia peaches. He said, yes.  He said, we're going to put in more peaches.  He said, we're going to put in plums that are cold hardy.  He said, we're going to put in more apple trees.

32:51
He said, our tree line is going to be an orchard. I said,  Oh,  okay.  He said, so if you see anybody giving away seedlings anywhere, say yes. So pray for me that we can, we can fill in our tree line to the point where it does what it's supposed to do, because we are surrounded by corn fields and soybean fields and alfalfa fields. We need that tree line for the break.  Yeah. I'm just introducing some diversity.

33:21
Yes, and food because I really do like eating. Eating is a good thing.  Yes, it is.  So hopefully that'll all work and we already are lucky enough to have some elderberry.  I  call them bushes, but I guess they're trees. We have elderberry, we have black raspberry, we have apple trees, we have peach trees, we have wild plum and now cultivated plum.

33:51
And we have honey berry plants that someone sent me.  So we're on our way, but it's going to be five years before it's really established.  Yeah. I mean, I think that's the downside. It's not a downside, but that's definitely, think, sometimes why people go for annual product balance because it's unstable. You know, he set it up in a good way, waiting for years to come.

34:17
Yes, and whichever child inherits this place will be eating like a king 25, 30 years from now.

34:26
So just thought I'd share that because you are a  permaculture person and that's what we're trying to do too. So.  All right, Brandy, I try to keep these to half an hour and we're there. So thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Mary. This was a wonderful conversation. Good luck with your orchard. Trying to see the sea of phoenix.  Trying really, really, really trying every day.

34:54
All right, Brandy, you have a fantastic day. Oh, you too. Thanks. Bye.