I think welcome to the pure light project podcast my name is Andrea Mai and this podcast is really about uh two things I do what I can to help people shine their light and I have conversations with people who are really shining beautifully in the world and doing things that I feel are impactful for Humanity in some way and So today my guest is David Dennis and David and I met in Dallas at an event and I've just had such a great time getting to know him more and as the uh tragically failed Gardener in
a long line of uh gardeners including family who made their living from it and uh hearing about his product extra grow and the the whole like way it came about it's like it's given me hope that I can live up to my family Legacy this year this year so so David welcome Uh to the pure light project podcast well thank you Andrea I appreciate it and it's been wonderful getting to know you since Dallas as well and uh obviously I look forward to many other opportunities to spread the light and the love and and get
as much nutrition into the dirt as possible that's that's really our premise and our mission because um of my concept nutrient stacking where the more nutrition you put into the dirt The more nutrition the plants can bring up out of the dirt into the animals or the humans that eat them so I believe it helps with uh um the old philosophy food is medicine and with that ancient philosophy of quality food makes for Quality medicine so the higher the quality you put in the hotter the quality you get out and that's that's the main premise
behind extra growth yeah and that's so beautiful too because uh You know the the way our bodies feel just a couple days ago I had the first meal in a long time where I actually felt nourished I actually felt satisfied you know it felt I felt complete and when I got done eating it and you know there's other reasons behind why that was but I know that it was so fascinating to recognize that I haven't been like I really haven't been feeling that and didn't realize it until I did have that Deep awareness in my
body of oh I can I can feel differently because I growing up right my family like I said we we raised all of our own uh food they they I I felt nourished as a kid it was only as an adult that I started like I I started to gain a lot of weight because I just kept eating and eating and eating you know and all of these things never felt satisfied never felt really optimal and recognizing moving from like I grew up In a very rural area and then moving to the city and starting
to buy everything at at the grocery stores and man you just it doesn't matter how good it is it doesn't matter how clean it is there's never a real deep satisfaction in my body and so when I met you and heard you talking about this I was like wow this isn't just a product this is a product with a lot of care and consideration into it and so I would really like you to share Um where did it start Ed why why did it even come into existence well um that's that's that's a bit of
a story but it really boils down to in 2007 uh I recognized that most of our food products were being offshore or outsourced and that the quality of the average food product was declining so I decided to refocus my efforts onto bringing back nutrition density and the bioavailability for foods and feeds Literally for plants animals and humans and that's the term while you see on our bags the term premium organic and so premium organic stands for a hundred percent plant-based non-chemical non-waste product non-minners it's truly the highest quality we know how to produce and we're
seeking to improve our quality at all times because being quality focused in nutrient density focused bioavailability focused we're speaking to what you did Which is that sense of fulfillment when you we it's it's kind of funny um I because we grow a lot obviously here in our own home but most people think I I mean just yesterday I had a a five-star Chef wanting to come to our house and and work in our fields to understand the the quality of the food that we grow because he can taste the difference immediately he could smell the
difference and he's like this is Amazing I want to come work for you and learn from you and I and I laughed and he was like well I really mean it I'll work hard and I'm like I understand but what you don't understand is that for my house I grow on a third of an acre and I grow about 125 plants and pots in my backyard and we're covered with trees so I'm constantly moving these little one and two gallon pots around to follow the sunlight and yeah we do Harvest enough to make our own
Pepper powder and we Make we grow our own lettuce Gardens and we grow our own Rosemary and parsley and sage and Thyme and oregano and and and uh butter pie plie flour and and our own squashes and we've got all these things going but it's small little amount it's enough for the five or six of us to eat off of and enjoy the quality and the flavor but it's not enough for you know the true you know turn into a market Community grow and so that's really where it started I was growing our own Medicinal
herbs and teas and spices because I couldn't get the quality I wanted I had trained before in as in five star fine dining and I know a lot of escoffier chefs and the flavor that I grew up with as a child just wasn't there anymore through the depletion of our soils and so I came at it from a different approach I was like well if we had depleted soils that created a lower quality plant what if we improved the quality of the soil To get a higher quality plant so I started thinking of a plant
as a parasite and I started thinking of soil as a living creature so if we took the dirt and we fed it the highest quality product we possibly could we'd create a super healthy soil and then the plants that were the parasites so to speak would thrive on a healthy soil and then the idea of the nutrition stacking came in because most of the plants that we then Harvest that become extra grow are Grains and seeds and other legumes and such so it's that higher quality grain and Seed the embryo of the plant would be
healthier once it's grown on extra growth so growing extra grow using extra grow as our goal we get to about 250 000 bags a year of production we'll be able to actually incorporate that so so we should see a constantly improving product over the years so I highly recommend that the more we get going the more you'll be able to see us improve as We start growing extra grow using extra grow so it's truly regenerative a bag of extra bro should be able to grow about 100 bags of extra ground I think I was missing
that piece of it um nutrient density and bioavailability meaning there's there's more amino acids by weight in a bag of extra grow than there is in sirloin steak it's super density of protein and that's why you'll see me play around once in a while and open a bag and say look it's Edible and I'll take a bite of it because it truly is a a high quality organic food for the soil now it tastes a little like somebody put grass in your granola cereal so I don't recommend it from that perspective but it is an
edible product because we start with the highest grade we can get and then we run it through a process that's exploding the the plant water itself that structured water within the plant biome we bring it to a high pressure at Low temperature and then explode it that creates the molecule molecular structure to be a bioavailable within the dirt so that microbes and earthworms and everything else are given the Las Vegas Buffet of a food supply so they all start to thrive at once and then it's designed to work in all fit my fave five of
the major biomes here in America to feed that microbiome the rhizome layer color the rhizome enhancer and then it will self-balance as the food Supply of extra grow runs out you've regenerated that rhizome layer to the function naturally in the biome that it's in so when Captain planet's growing heated collard green grow down in South Florida and he gets collard greens the size of his chest that's a different biome than growing oregano here in Texas or growing um uh what did Bob Larson grow up in Michigan uh president can have Partners USA he uh He
did a tomato grow up in Michigan with inoculated biochar mixed with extra grow and his tomato plants doubled in size overnight uh he posted a Facebook live on it and I was like oh if you hadn't done it on Facebook live I doubt anybody would have believed you um the results are amazing plants thrive on quality nutrition so the more we give them the more they Thrive yeah so let's break this down a little for people who Maybe aren't familiar with some of these terms um so the uh when we speak about the the way
basically what you're speaking of is the way that the the the dirt and the plants can actually receive it's you're creating something so that they can then it makes it receivable by by the plants you're you've created like you're blowing up the water molecules and your Um making the product itself so that it's easily digestible basically by what's that what's receiving it right that's the microbiome the bacteria uh the fungi the mushroom Network my psyllium networks uh earthworms pill bugs everything that's a vital part of making a full living soil has a food supply built
into extra graph so extra grow is designed to make gardening easy because I was growing in my own yard and I had I had found about All these um let's just say less than desirable pathogenic bacteria in the local chicken feeds and the local cow manures and so on that were then causing food problems in the garden and I like to literally eat out of my own garden I don't like to have to run into the house wash everything thoroughly and such I'll just reach down and pick it out of my garden so um I
don't want to then incorporate Pathogenic bacteria into the feed so I was just growing without and I was looking for ways to create a supply that would not introduce pathogenic bacteria so that's where extra growth basic Foundation came from is the ability to grow herbs in your own garden without using manure and without using chemical fertilizers or other forms of pesticides or or you know toxins so or or doing what I do which is just you know here's some water sweetheart please grow grow You know because all that stuff I don't want it on my
food you know and then it's everything's lacking the the whole system is fatigue before it even begins it's funny one of our our most common uh when we look at our customer base and every you know everybody these days has a handle right um one of our most common handles has something to do with black thumb Gardener yeah On our customer base I'd say probably six or seven percent of our customers have some form of black thumb Gardener or you know black Gardener or whatever in their in their but they're some of our favorite customers
and yeah uh people are now bragging on them and their channels are still black thumb Gardner and uh one of the local ones I won't mention her name but she had three harvested Tomatoes last year and was making tomato sauce for the entire Neighborhood yeah and uh I was just you know excited for she probably became very popular and uh you know it's so funny you say specifically tomato sauce right um I grew up with we we home canned our own Tomatoes right and then as an adult you know I haven't really had that ability
to I I wasn't growing them well myself a few for fresh eating and then nothing Home canned and this fall we found some I I think they're from an Amish farmer nearby some Jarred tomatoes and like the flavor is like what I remember you know as a kid like it is so good there's no taste of a can anywhere you know there's no metallic satisfying yeah oh and the smell the aroma of it right I used to be quite a foodie and then it's just become it's almost impossible to even create something satisfying for the
last decade You know and so to know that that you've had you cared enough first for your family you know and for your community and then you've extrapolated that to how can we get this into everybody's home that wants it you know that's a that's a big leap that's a big leap now what I know about you is you're a big leap sort of individual you know you have big visions I would love to hear you talk about that Vision you know about what you hope That this will do for for families and communities well
I'd really like to see a mindset shift between the scarcity mindset and abundance and I believe we can take lessons from our past uh for instance um when the crisis and Cuban Missile Crisis happened and President Kennedy enforced an embargo on the island of Cuba What happened was everyone started their own backyard gardens rooftop gardens and such again because of this of the incredible scarcity everybody started growing to not have that risk of starvation well even in Miami today you can see Cuban immigrants they all have Gardens because it hasn't been that long that their
parents or their grandparents had had that scarcity issue in the 60s and therefore they want to have that local Food supply I believe that an abundance mindset so that everybody can have their own herbs and medicine from their food you don't have to grow a bunch grow a little I get all my serrano peppers off of one one gallon pot per year because we go through maybe 55 or 60 peppers a year and that's what that one plant grows yeah um last year or two years ago we grew a pink girl tomato plant one plant
and we got 235 pounds of harvest Off of one plant so the beauty of the abundance of extra grow is we get we get customers that do what we call the extra growth challenge so hashtag extra growth Challenge and they'll post before and after pictures or their posts their harvests and they'll tell people about their story of how extra girl worked for them one of my favorites was Miss Teen Pennsylvania uh Miss Julia meckley she saw one of my posts about promoting Victory Gardens Back in October of uh I want to say it was 2018
2019 and I was promoting on our Facebook site start a victory garden please start a garden for yourself it doesn't have to be big it can be in an apartment complex in a few pots just start something so that you can feel comfortable about your ability to grow and we challenge folks to do a side by side with us versus anything else and she chose to do a side by side in Philadelphia no less this is not the Southern climb this is Philadelphia Pennsylvania okay yeah so she chose to do side by side grow with
extra grow versus a Sperma Garden Tome another organic fertilizer product versus extra grow premium organic and she did a side-by-side trial with eggplant and then she was very scientific very meticulous she's you know has a has a strong science background and so she weighed by Gram the produce on each Harvest and if I recall the first Harvest on the sloma garden Tome side was 377 grams of eggplant whereas on the extra growth side it was 1100 and I believe 32 grams of eggplant two fruits that weighed twice as much as the one fruit so the
percentage increase on first yield was 377 percent increased in production of produce yeah now that changes the metric of people thinking about growing in their backyard if you can actually grow abundance if you go scale that to Farmers if you Could get three to four times more yield for the same amount of grow we don't have a food supply issue yeah we have a scarcity mindset well and the other side of that too right you have these big beautiful plants in a smaller amount but the phrase you've said a couple of times right the nutrient
density of these products right so you're not only having a healthy healthy plant that's like a lot of fruit Or vegetable much larger output but also the nutritional impact of of the person for the person eating it is so much greater you know um like that's just all around beautiful have you guys done any measurement or testing on that yet or is that yes actually um we see quite a bit um there's been some white papers done by Third parties because we're a Commercial for-profit entity we it doesn't pay us in in my estimated it's
not the best idea for us to sponsor a study I'd rather a non-profit or a third party do it so for instance um let's see I can pull up uh let's see I think this will show here we go I'll get myself out of the picture here here's an example of a third party uh This was done by a woman in Denton that's up at the University of North Texas she calls herself the experiential Gardener and this is a side by side grow she did with Swiss chard and some pansies uh with her standard organic
medium versus extra grow and I want to say she used maybe two teaspoons of extra grow on a side by side and as you can see um quite a difference in result and the yield and the quality but there's also white papers of uh oh here's Julia meckley's grow here it is this is the espoma garden tone plant on The left versus the extra girl plan on the right and it's a little it's out of the frame you can't really see it how tall it gets but you can see another interesting thing see the espoma
garden comb there's little holes in the leaf yes or pests have feasted on it and if you look at the extrador side there's very few yes even side by side pastel chews the weaker plant so um as far as third party studies there's A study that I'm I'm currently reading whereby it's been proven that higher quality soil yields higher nutrition in plants so anytime you can improve the soil you can improve the nutritional density in the plant matter itself okay and I don't know of anyone yet that has been able to achieve a higher density
of soil nutrition than what we do so our goal is we take you know the highest quality organic components that are not touched By Industrial Waste manufacturing they haven't been through an animal they're not manures there's no chemical additives we don't extract oil with hexane or any of those things this is all mechanically based water-based plants legumes grains extracts and compressions mostly explosion technology or dehydration Technologies to concentrate because we're activated by water so we have to get the water out Otherwise we'd never be able to ship it anywhere uh some people also ask us
why we are so premium organic but yet we sell in this shiny mylar bag and it's because we haven't yet found a bag that can handle the airtight moisture tight uh that we need to qualify for selling it in retail stores because most of the uh retailers out there you know um nurseries and plant shops and so on have outdoor displays and um you get a couple of ounce you get even a few drops of Water into a bag of extra grow it'll start growing you'll get mushrooms starting to grow you'll get all kinds of
things happening uh molds all kinds of things that'll grow because it's got such high food and no matter what there's always a little Spore here or there in the atmosphere and we don't pack it in a clean room we pack it in a in a in a organic food production facility or you know some form of a clean you know using food Grade production techniques so you're going to have one or two spores of a mushroom floating around the air naturally so when you combine water in food with one of those spores you'll end up
with something growing and hence you need the right packaging you know and this is what's available at this time to right to make it so if you can find a nice bioplastic Pioneer that is working in and can create bags for us that would then degrade over time Instead of you know we'd like them to be able to be shelf stable for about two years once you open a bag of extra grow you should use it within six months because the humidity in your environment can then concentrate inside the bag through heat and cold cycles
of the humidity and then create growth within the bag so but once it's the way it's closed up and sealed dry as it is it's good for years you know it probably anywhere from five to ten years it could Sit on the Shelf until you open it that's amazing so I want to go back and touch on something um because you know I I'm getting ready to put my order in and I'm like how much of this do I need and you said something in one of the photos you you shared that there was two
teaspoons used so this isn't like a potting soil this is more of an additive that you would what I put in my order it arrives and what do I do how how am I using extra Grow in my garden so that I can overcome the infamy of my black thumb you know how do I do this David can do um I'll see if I can pull up some instructions off of here because I know I've got some they're on the back of the bag uh but I believe I've also got some here I could load
up uh to answer and and load it as well so um the point of it is is that it turns dirt into soil Okay that's the easiest way to say it let's see if I can uh well kind of so um this isn't the whole thing it kind of cropped it off but one to two cups for 25 square foot heavily watered it in until you see the product mixing with the top layer of the soil and it noticed I was talking about mold or fungus develop just break it generally watered again you just want
to Get the nutrients deeper into the soil okay um the the purpose of extra grow is to enhance the the soil layer itself you're you're turning the dirt into a soil so it works with any kind of soil it worked it enhances the humic and fold the qualities it helps stabilize moisture it helps balance pH if your soil is too acidic it'll lower it if it's too alkaline it'll raise it it's designed to To be a harmonic balancer it'll improve variation of of clay soils it will hold moisture of dry soils but it'll only hold
so much and create aeration for wet soils if your soil is too wet it'll actually even start fermenting it'll start a fermentation process and eat up in the excess carbohydrates in the soil and such to that helps aerate your soil it does a lot of different things and that's why I don't give away the recipe is it's got a lot of different plant Matter in it but it's all plants grains and legumes and biochar that's designed to feed the fungal Network mycelium Network to provide aeration uh even it even has a little yellow warning on
the back it says not to be used with seedlings or to germinate and that's because we've Incorporated the ability for the top layer to be a desiccation mulching layer meaning the top one to two millimeters will actually dry out and Form a crust so if you're familiar with no-till farming that's what you want it helps prevent weed seed germination well if you're also trying to like get some carrot seeds to start it's not going to work so well because it's going to prevent the third seeds from starting so you can get around that just by
there's two techniques that have been very successful one is when you're doing the germination you just keep the watered twice a day real Misty so it Keeps it moist and you won't have that issue and the other is if you're growing a larger area you can add some topsoil that doesn't have extra grow right where you put the seed okay so you can create like a one inch circle of topsoil that doesn't have extra grow in it put your seed in that once it germinates and The Roots start to spread out it'll take advantage of
that extra grow rhizome layer but that one little square inch won't be desiccated the way it would be If everything had been treated equally interesting interesting so to answer your further question yeah the amount of extra grow is based on how heavily the plant feeds okay we've tested uh I've had inertia locally tested on like shrubs and shrubs are very low feeding they've used very little and he got extremely good results but it was pretty similar to another product that he had used because again it was very low feeding but when you try it on
a plant Like tomatoes or bell peppers or something that's a really heavy feeder you get exponential results so we don't Market the results we it depends on the plant it's very specific to what the plant can maximize at but you'll see other changes for instance my I have posts of trees in the backyard and the post oak the leaves on the Post Oak are now the size of my hand you know they're literally Leaf structure and the veins pop and you'll see extra curvature they Dump tons of acorns now we had a carpet of acorns
this last year when I say carpet I mean literally like every square inch was an acorn we've got about 20 oak trees in the back and they just you know launched a carpet of acorns um and and remembering you said all on a third of an acre or so is that yeah yeah you know that's a lot of tree coverage um that's actually really interesting because I have some so we've lived in Our home almost 18 years and we've got these beautiful dogwoods and some flowering trees that we lost almost about two-thirds of our shrubs
this year I don't know what happened we had to dig them out and a lot of the trees you're seeing a lot of they're just they're aged they need some love and so to hear that it could potentially be really beneficial for my beautiful Dogwood you know in my front yard and and keep her flourishing you Know um yeah you're gonna love that so that's what I say about how to treat the the most effective place where in my experience plants receive the best benefit of nutrition is in what I call the drip line you
know if you if you have a misting rainfall on the bush or the tree wherever that water drips off as the leaves pull it down to that outside drip line I scatter about a six to eight inch wide Um level of extra grow in that drip line and the plant thrives from that so almost like a circle around the that perimeter exactly yeah yep and then and the longer you want it to last The Wider your line would be so if you're doing just one season treatment do about an eight inch width if you want
it to be there for two three years do a two or three foot width around your tree line and as your tree grows it'll grow into the more extra Growth yeah because the leaves above kind of mirror The Roots below when they spread for nutrition now the deep water roots that are tapping that the water the moisture are are not what you're going for you're going for the fine hair roots that are on the top that are gathering the nutrition from the rhizome layer nice that's um as you I think as listeners and viewers can
see you know you've Experimented with a lot you you know this the outcome and the product um intimately you know like it this is uh I think a a passion project as much as anything um and that's beautiful like to we can know our product but like you the way you speak about it and the like there's definitely a love that comes through um for the for the outcome right and we all benefit When our plants and our trees and our our foliage around us is just so much juicier livelier bigger right bigger leaves mean
bitter coverage for the ground beneath like it's just so holistic is the word that comes to mind you know it's really affecting more than just oh I got one gorgeous tomato right and uh it's it's a much wider reach it has the potential for a wider reach than oh it does and it's and it's about you See it in the wildlife as well we have so many nesting pairs of birds now uh let's see we had last year we had three Cardinals two blue jay families I don't know five or six Finch families we've got
wild road runners running through we've got spiny lizards we've got chameleons we've got armadillos and skunks and possums now same we live in a little residential subdivision up on a Hilltop and yet we've got you know we've got dragonflies and damselflies and and It's interesting you'll see migrating birds they'll come flying over and then they'll kind of do a circle over us and then they'll move on but it's you can really watch you know you'll watch them and there's some something is attracted you know something that Wildlife is attracted to and they like to evaluate
uh the health of what's growing here I mean we haven't used any form of pesticide or chemical additive in close to a decade at this point and it it you See it you see the results yeah and uh that's good for us it's good for the pets in the area it's good for the Wildlife it's good for our children and I look at it as our children's Children's children's children I want what they grow to be healthy and nutritious and flavorful to have a better life than the path we were on before this yeah that's
the goal that's wonderful uh and So many have never even tasted really really good healthy nutritious food like I would say the vast majority of people I know have never even tasted it oh it's amazing I I used to say I hated arugula because all laborate with grocery store arugula I started growing it here at home and now it's so amazing um I actually one of the things we do is we'll go out and harvest the arugula blossoms and those arugulated flowers are so delicate they make an amazing tea You just take the blossom you
turn them into a tea and now you've got this really high noted almost peppery sweet tea it's it's amazing and the arugula leaves themselves have so much flavor they don't have any of the bitterness that you get or metallic bitterness that I was tasting in store grown arugula and our arugula grows to like three feet tall wow so it's not like you just cut it off because we just go out and harvest a few leaves and bring them in So you're constantly just I don't most most of our plants all I'm harvesting is the leaves
or the fruit or the flower because I don't they grow so healthy that the stalks are so strong that they get bark on so our basil gets bark on it or oregano in the time they get bark on it so it's not like you see at the grocery store where you get a strip of oregano six inches long and you throw the whole thing in the soup or it'd be like Throwing toothpicks in the soup for us the oregano leaves get oh about the size of my thumbnail so you know about half an inch wide
now and you can just strip the leaves off and the plant keeps growing so it's a whole different methodology behind gardening as well as you go out take a basket with you harvested a little oregano Harvest a little time grab some arugula a little bit of leaf lettuce Romaine a few onion scallions you walk back in you cook Dinner yeah that's a heck of a lot lower footprint on the environment than get in your car and go into the grocery store not to mention the trucks that it took to get there and then if we
all did it what you grew up in a farm community what happens when you harvested too many cucumbers um well you made pickles and and you probably gave some to the one person near you who didn't also have too many cucumbers there was just there was Abundance at some point you know if if it was a good season it would go back to the Earth and it would feed into the next year you know um but yeah you ate a lot of it and when did we stop taking the seed from that which we grow
and putting them back into the ground you know I I can't speak for others I still I direct so everything into my little garden plot that I've been trying for 17 Summers to bring back to health To any level of Health um and I get I get um volunteers from that and I eat the leaves I rarely get fruit but I eat a lot of the leaves over the last couple of years um I might get like one one squash or one pumpkin or one melon plant you know um the soil is heavy clay and
very depleted you know and it's taken a lot of love and so I am so gonna do the extra growth Challenge in those two boxes and see what we can do plus what's on my deck Plus what's you know yeah what when when I grew up we would harvest the seeds for the next year and maybe that's where you were going right we would harvest the best of the seeds and and then you would just go next season right except for the few things that maybe weren't prone to that um there were some things that
we still Would order seeds for the next year maybe you wanted to try a different variety or something you know but um yeah so where do people get extra grow th where do they get it well the best way for us is to get it from extragirl.com that way we don't have to pay somebody else to Market it But we are available retail um obviously we're on Amazon which means Amazon gets the profit we just get the volume we're on homedepot.com which means Home Depot gets the profit we just get the volume but the reason
we're on these other sites like Amazon and Home Depot even though we don't make a real margin from it but I mean shipping a bag of vectrica right now is costing 10.60 to ship it across the United States and um uh it's you know shipping is crazy I Mean our bag of extra girl we're selling for 24.95 so we just recently got rid of paying for shipping because we can no longer afford to do so it went it used to be it was six dollars and forty cents to ship a bag of extra around the
United States and now it's ten dollars and sixty cents change in a year yeah so yeah things are changing rapidly so extra girl will change along with it we want to keep our price as low as we possibly can in order to get as Much abundance into the ground as possible but that's why we say extragrow.com that's the best place to buy but if you want to see a bunch of really cool reviews go out to homedepot.com and there's close to 300 reviews and go read them take take a few minutes and and there's three
star four-star and five star reviews I think there's eleven three star and then 270 or something four and five star reviews yeah um and people love it They'll write paragraphs after paragraph or they'll be full Letters Out There of people I actually I did I went and looked at the site uh to see you know and he's not joking there's just rave reviews about this product but um it's that says a lot you know in a short period of time and that's just one one channel you know of where to find this all most people
don't understand that the big marketers like Amazon and Home Depot they're a pay to play environment yeah so if you try to buy us on homedepot.com you have to go to like page four because we don't have 15 other products that we sell under our brand and they automatically list whoever their biggest brand carriers are first yeah not by the reviews or any other way so if you don't pay to be on the front page you don't get there and of course that's not what we do we just wanted the exposure to get some independent
third Party reviews so that we could say refer them say look this is what other people think this isn't just Photoshop pictures this is the Real Results yeah so try it for yourself and and enjoy yeah and go to extragrow.com and and uh and put your actual order in and we'll ship Nationwide that's right beautiful um is there anything else I mean I know like I know we could cover a lot of grounds Um as I would love to ask one further question purely from my own situation because I know a lot of people by
the last few years so um I have been attempting to do the Back to Eden Wood chipping sort of approach right and so when you talk about the topsoil layer um if I bring in extra growth am I drawing the wood chips back and then you want to get it under your Mulch layer yeah and um and frankly have you ever heard of the technology technique called lasagna composting no but I think it's probably kind of like right now my garden consists of I'm guessing this is what you mean so tell me if I'm wrong
I've done chips for two or three years and then I'm like well we're still not there so I'm gonna put some dirt on top and maybe we'll do some more chips Because it seems to help and is that what you mean or something that's part of it and you could also add in um your vegetable scraps yeah uh lawn scraps and so on now of course if you end up with a lot of grass seed you're going to end up with a lot of grass growing so you have to be careful what kind of biologic
matter you're using but for instance for me I have a lot of oak leaves at the end of every season and I can mulch those and throw those in uh Into my beds and so I'll throw a for the winter time I'll throw a whole layer of you know leaves and into the beds and then cover those I throw a few handfuls of extra girl on top yeah and by Spring that's all extra grow is also a compost enhancer so if you do compost a compost bin or whatever and you throw a handful of extra
go in once in a while what it will do is it'll accelerate the microbial and fungal growth to break down the composting faster Uh for instance um one of the things I do is I I we we drink a lot of coffee around here so uh with you know four kids and the two of us and schedules that go all kinds of crazy Haywire uh we tend to drink a lot of coffee so um we always combine our eggshells and our coffee and a handful of extra grow and it just throw we throw it into
a little five gallon buckets or whatever and it'll just sit there and after a few Months it's topsoil we throw that into the into the the beds that go on top where those leaves were just so we're not wasting that biological Mass we just are accelerating it and so you're getting X in our area which is heavy clay we're always looking for more biomatter to break up the clay uh our yard is about 85 clay by weight so it's I mean I've literally with my my younger kids gone out harvested the clay and turned it
into a little hand-formed Earrings for the kids and stuff you literally can do that so it's very heavy thick clay like what you're dealing with yeah and the key is is you want to get that aeration into place you want to get the microbes going you're going to see heavy duty earthworms growing and you'll see life blossom so yeah that's the secret so lasagna composting can literally be scraping area you know four by four foot throw all your kitchen scraps and some Extra leaves throw some wood chips or topsoil over the top of that and
then and throw in a handful of extra grow move on and what will happen is uh you know like along my back bed of my uh of my house I'll do an area uh about four foot by four foot and then when that one's full I'll cover it over and I'll move to the next area and move to the next area so that's my form of composting I don't I don't spin it and everything else I just have a place that It's gonna go that's beautiful well I uh I think it's great I hope you
keep sharing and anything I can do to support this I think it's actually like my heart says oh this is the thing that's gonna let me get what I want in my own backyard do you have any I don't know what one last thing to say to just inspire people to to take some Action I know you've said like just a few Pots if you're just on a balcony but somebody who's Maybe um you know they're they have like this much experience they want to and then there's somebody who's been trying but unsuccessful those black
thumbs one word of advice or one one little bit of advice to each okay for the beginner I say start with your song herbs Parsley Sage Rosemary thyme I add in basil and oregano and the reason is is if you can just grow those fresh with extra grow and you add them to your meals regularly you're getting incredible doses of antivirals and antibiotics and your health will improve dramatically just with those herbs and they're very easy to grow oregano thyme are all perennials in almost all parts of America they're perennial herbs so you grow them
and once you get them Started you can chop them off for winter time take all those with you harvest them dehydrate them whatever you're going to do turn them into your own cooking herbs and they'll start back fresh the next season without any extra work just again a handful of vector grow non-chlorinated water the the there's a huge difference in chlorinated tap water versus water that's been just set outside into a pot for 24 hours before you water it it Allows the chlorine to evaporate or if you want to get into structured water with running
it through an RV filter to do activated charcoal to dechlorinate it or use a structured water free-form water like the grow Pro the Jason cells on voidspacetech.org those are all quality enhancements to the water itself that goes on to help the plants Thrive to the more experienced Gardener I highly recommend that you look at your light your timing Of your spacing plants on extra grow grow significantly taller and significantly wider and broader than you'll expect so if you're used to planting every two feet I would say at least plant double that every four feet uh
my pink girl tomato plant was an indeterminate variety of sauce tomatoes you know they grow really thick ours had no liquid in them at all they were pure meat and that one tomato plant grew to be nine feet Tall 20 feet wide and about six feet deep uh that's a single stock indeterminate tomato I was out in the backyard with burlap and running strings to keep it up off the ground to keep you know keep the tomato plant from picking up a fungus or something because it was growing so quickly we couldn't keep up um
and also the other thing I'd say is if you decide to do cucumbers or squash make sure you have an inordinate amount Of space my wife won't even let me grow cucumbers anymore um we I planted our cucumber we went on vacation for two weeks I came back and I'd had some guy lines in for the tomato plant well that cucumber went 19 feet vertical up into the oak tree and it went 60 feet wide into the shrubs into the neighbor's yard all the way down towards our driveway and she's like no more cucumbers wow
so You have to have cucumberland you know well the other thing is you'll see so much rhizome enhancement um cucumbers you need gloves to pick them um they get the rhizomes are so uh they're like cactus thorns um okay the prickly the pricklies yeah yeah it's beyond prickly they're like little needles so interesting uh Harvest early Yeah one thing we didn't touch on but I remember you saying and I was really encouraging my friend in Arizona to get it I mean we all need it but the fact that it is um that it retains the
water you kind of touched on that as the bag will expand but water retention you use a good water as much as you're able but the the fact that you probably need to water less at least for part of the process Well let me be clear on them differently I actually I've actually had a failure on that to where um I almost got myself in trouble um I used it on my wife's uh some of her Ivy and um our sprinkler system uh one of the zones went out and I walked out and was like
oh my gosh what happened it was like all drying up and it's true extra grow enhances water capability and improves drought tolerance it improves freeze tolerance As well um because the plants are so much stronger however plants also grow much more quickly than normal plants require a lot of water when they're growing quickly sure and her ivy in the back was growing about a foot a day and so the sprinkler system went out I didn't notice for a couple of days and I'm going out there and the whole thing was shriveling up and drying because
it was desiccating itself it was growing so Fast so the tips were still green but it was desiccating all the older leaves because it was trying to grow new gotcha so yeah I was able to fix the system and get it all back up and running but If plants are going to grow twice as quickly they need twice as much water yeah but it also is a desiccation of the top layer so it doesn't dehydrate as quickly and it holds more moisture in the in the soil than it would otherwise So it's a balance so
all I say is when you're growing with extra grow use your eyes pay attention notice that the leaf structure will get the more curvature in their relief I believe that helps it collect more light so it grows faster the soil behaves differently than what you're used to seeing you will see earthworms that well in my yard they can get to be somewhere around 12 inches and they can fool you into thinking they're baby snakes even though they're not Um I've had them as big as my pinky and I've actually went to move one out of
the way one time and it wrap itself around my wrist and slap me in the rest and I thought I'd been bitten by a snake and it was just a strong earthworm wow they can Thrive but you don't worry about pests because pests go for weak plants okay um my daughter kept the whole pill bug collection several thousand pill bugs growing a little box inside my Greenhouse so a weak plant would be eaten but a healthy plant they didn't touch but anytime a leaf would fall off or you'd Harvest some and part of it would
break and fall to the ground that next day it was gone because they were it was a healthy balanced ecosystem so watch nature Thrive allow nature to be nature and the healthy plants Will Survive and if they're not healthy they won't yeah so try to grow natives that's the other Thing try to grow native plants native for your biome they'll be more successful than that variety from Kansas trying to be grown in Florida right right yeah and and that takes a little bit of research and and connection but it's worth it it's worth making that
connection to to the place you live in um and you know if you start looking up Heirloom Seeds there's a great Facebook site that's coming popular now take a Plant leave a plant um there's several of those local they're starting to grow around or they're trading local plants with people there's also trading of Heirloom Seeds if you can trade heirloom Siege with local Growers that are successful with their seed in their garden and then so you can grow and trade with others I've probably got you know 100 different genome seed collection of Heirloom Seeds now
from other local Growers that are Successful and if you build that Network within a few years you'll have a seed bank of your own that you know grows locally and you'll meet a lot of friends that are have like-minded people and you'll find well it's like I got milk chocolate bell peppers last year from a friend of mine um never seen a milk chocolate bell pepper before but they're really interesting so um there's all kinds of cool things You'll meet and people you're meeting and you get to experience uh sorry you're getting experience the way
the Earth wants to grow hold on one second I got you all choked up didn't I there we go we're back um yeah I know even my local library they have started making seed exchange um what's excellent packets you know so there's this little box by the front Door that people can come and exchange seats um you know that makes me remember um uh there's a group here locally that's talked about making seed bombs for wildflower seeds and native plants and they're talked about incorporating extra grow into the seed bomb you know they're making them
out of like little uh eggshells and they put the seeds and the extra grow and a little bit of dirt into the eggshell and then They cover it with a little wax and they go around and they throw them out into the wildlands and it cracks open and and seeds the seeds wildflowers throughout Texas oh that's neat that's neat man yeah all the many things that we're gonna have fun uh learning about exploring you know the many ways and if somebody's listening and you know you get some extra grow and be sure to share it
with people you know I haven't even used it yet but I've seen The outcome and like I just have this innate like sense that this is gonna be good I've met David he's got such a heart for this he's um make sure that you're sharing it because our our soil needs all the love our bodies need the love you know we're ready for it this is a piece of the beautiful shift we're making in in humanity at this time it's right on time you know it's right on time and my hands up right Testify you
know and I know that I'll be coming back as I we're getting into gardening season here my goal has always been to have a year-round Garden of some sort even if it's just a few pots in the cold Seasons you know um and the and seeing now how this might actually help me sustain my own plants because we get such heat here it always kills everything they get to a point and then they no that doesn't matter what you do they just in my yard other people Are fine you know um I I look forward
to that and so share share the love when you start playing with this product um 25 35 sounds like with shipping-ish is that and that's going to go a long way that's gonna that's gonna one one or two bags of that will probably for the average Joe Yeah the cost of shipping actually goes down by the bag depending on how many bags you order most customers will buy one bag and then they turn around a couple of weeks later and buy about four so that's that's just our typical pattern well they want it takes anywhere
from three to ten days to see massive results using extra growth so people will try out a bag and then they'll turn around and they'll buy more so that's you know that's just our typical model I Do want to mention one more thing yes um we have created a foundation uh it's a IRS 501c3 recognized public charity called the extra grow Foundation Incorporated uh you can check out extra growfoundation.org and our goal is to teach children from fourth grade throughout College the premium organic agricultural methodology and we're planned to certify them as premium organic soil
engineers and then help them with USDA grants for local Farms and urban Farms is rural and urban Farms there's a whole new brand of the United States Department of Agriculture around Urban farming and believe it or not you can register as an urban farm with as little as 1 100th of an acre of land as long as your intent is to create a commercial marketable product then you open yourself up for U.S department of Agriculture grants to start your farm so you want to put a greenhouse you can get paid to put in a greenhouse
if you Plan to grow herbs for your local community and just sell them at a farmer's market once a year you qualify so something that simple could give your family abundance into agriculture there's lots of paperwork but that's what we're working towards is learning that paperwork teaching it to others helping children it's really not my model it's what Steve Jobs did for Apple he put an iPad in the hand of every child in America 20 years ago and now All the 20 year olds won't use anything except for I I you know Apple technology we'd
love to do the same with premium organic agriculture because when you grow spearmint or oregano or parsley or basil anything on extra grow the flavor is so much better than you can get anywhere else we want to put that flavor in the hands of mouth of children so when they're adults the expectation has been raised yeah how do we improve the quality nutrition to an America we Create a demand and so that's what our foundation is about well that's wonderful and so people can reach out to you at that email address if they want to
or that website and get you know in contact with you or find out what programs are happening exactly we're building the programs Now with uh areas in Texas and Colorado to do that and we're looking for others I've been in conversation with folks There in Tennessee as well up in Northern Tennessee up by the border of Kentucky we're looking at several opportunities throughout the country kind of hubs if you will of Premium organic to build the the grow to build the processing and then to build the end use uh product uh that'll be known as
premium organic yeah that's where we're headed all right well let's let's head there let's celebrate all along the way and Um you know and enjoy the the Bounty that comes from from our Gardens and the new friendships we're gonna make and thank you for your questions and I and I can't wait to see your pictures and and this and to uh watch you try to uh explain the flavors because um that'll be easy oh it tastes like something yeah it tastes like something yeah Wow you know what's really funny is when you give it to
somebody that's not used to eating vegetables at all yeah um I have a friend that I I think he thinks a vegetable is you know Skittles so um because they're colorful he thinks that's it so he ate some arugula out of my garden for the first time and and uh he was so shocked he couldn't understand he was like I can't I can't handle this much Flavor in one bite um you know so it's it's a retraining it just teaches you what a palette can be yeah and the more your tongue has been you know
obliterated by you know fake fake foods and you know chemical based stuff the longer the retraining probably is but there's and your body's wisdom will likely have an inherent curiosity that will take you one more bite at a time right because yeah your body's Gonna know that's that Kinesiology exactly we've you know seen expressions of asking your body if this is good for me or not um getting and waiting for that response and and uh you'll get overwhelming yeses so yes more beautiful well thank you so much for the opportunity yeah thank you all right
uh be sure to share this video or this podcast wherever you're watching or listening with someone we all have a black thumb Gardener in in our circles And share it with somebody who's gonna really be inspired to to take some action for themselves and whether it's learning how to grow from the very first for the very first time or giving them hope again you know uh and even even if you know very successful gardeners share this with them and see what see what they're curious about right yeah they're gardeners Master Gardeners are one of our
biggest you know that they love the Product you know that certified organic Master Gardeners at local agricultural extensions uh you'll see um there's a community garden project right now in Parsons Kansas and the uh the picture on the websites a gentleman uh showing a young child how to use extra grow and if you look at what his um his uh logo is on a shirt it's the Agricultural Extension for Kansas State University so we're getting the word out there it's just a case-by-case one person at a time Process so thank you again for the questions
and for sharing with your listeners all right well thank you David all right y'all have a good day blessings
