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Plants Are People, Too!
Michael Olson’s Food Chain Radio Show #1305
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GUEST: Alessia Resta Author, Plants Are My Favorite People Host, Instagram’s “Apartment Botanist”
While driving a moving van filled with my daughter’s house plants through America’s South, I got to thinking about the late Gerd Schneider, who lived and worked back there in America’s Silicon Valley.
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Plants Are People, Too!
Gerd was a plant propagation specialist who hunted down very special and unique ornamental plants, propagated them by the tens of thousands, and sold them to wholesale and retail nurseries throughout California.
I spent a lot of time with Gerd learning about his business in order to use his business to teach others about the business of farming for the city visa vie a chapter length interview in my book MetroFarm, The Guide To Farming In or Near The City For The City.
During one conversation I blurted out a question that stopped Gerd in his tracks, and that might well have been the first time I had ever seen Gerd stand still. “Gerd,” I asked, “What is the substance-value of an ornamental plant. After all, you can’t eat it!”
Gerd’s reply, as quoted from MetroFarm, was as follows:
“If you looked around and found that all the vegetation had disappeared, it would be hell! In some of the subdivisions in East San Jose there was not enough money for vegetation. The only yard some of those people have is a garbage can and five cars. It’s ugly, and the people who live there will eventually turn ugly. They will respond to television and beer and driving in their car. But if you are surrounded by the beauty of plants it has an effect on you. It really does! Plants have a way of making our lives a little more human. Just think of this as a barren desert. It would be devastating.”
Then I got to thinking about what the plants in the moving van I was driving might be thinking about the conversation my wife Marlene and I were having while stuck in a two-hour traffic jam somewhere in South Carolina. They must have thought us to be very unhappy, and probably were very happy that they were mere plants instead of angry humans.
We did succeed in getting the plants moved across the South to their new home, where they instantly changed the new and strange into the old and familiar for our daughter and her husband.
That plants can bring such happiness leads us to ask…
Leave a comment below: Can a plant be one’s special someone?
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Michael Olson’s Three Laws of the Food Chain
#1 Agriculture is the foundation upon which we build all our sand castles.
#2 The farther we go from the source of our food, the less control we have over what’s in that food.
#3 Cheap food isn’t! READ MORE
