i it's very kartel was the condit diet lifestyle show and today we are talking about food or again take farming which is a very dear to my heart and to my h and in princeton we are really blessed because we are surrounded by a lot of those small farms that are really really working hard to bring us amazing proje spirit of staying close to the earth's respecting the earth and giving love to it is q cumbered i will end up on my table and my  guest today is caroline finney who is the founder and owner of orchard farm organics in princeton and i visited her farm not so long ago and i was absolutely in all t thank you for being here today caroline so caroline tell us a little bit about yourself and what is the life you lead that brought you to princeton and to phone the orchard farm organics well i was born in india and my father took this little picture of me as a child and on the back you wrote caroline our future gardner so that might have had something to do with it but as a child we grew up on the edge of toronto in canada and there were still some  pear trees and we sure can prepare down from the pear trees and did them down and we had a compost pile in the backyard so there was always this feeling that we should be using the earth in the right way and  later after i graduated from college i went to burundi and taught there for two years and it was a country very very very subsistence living and the students they had their own school garden where they were had their hoes and they were cultivating the earth and also i worked with the world health organization to create another kind of a school garden but i had some experiences there that that i think shaped my life and one of them was walking to the market and i had to go down a valley and cross over a stream and come up the other side and i heard the thud of this hoe in the earth and then all of a sudden the valley just filled with song and the woman who had her baby strapped to her back was working the earth and singing and it it just it that was something about it that was so very thrilling and deeply moving for me then later in life you know you have these were mantic it ventures and you hope to work out but they don't always work out and i found myself in england going to meet a flame that was a rhodes scholar and the flame had gone out on his part and i found myself in england and i went to a training center for world of teachers in the south of england where a friend was doing her training there and they always they have farms associated with the training colleges and i said to my friend well you're in class what can i do she said oh go up go and asked the farmer if he'll tell you something to do and i was told that i could go and we the onions and i was up on this hill clouds going across the blue sky blowing weeding those onions and feeling terribly happy and said what is going on who i am i so happy and i think this is a lesson for us all that this the earth is really where we can be both have happy and in nature yes and doing something meaningful and productive so fast forward  then there were other parcels around it and somebody had to get those lovely parcels because the goal of the world of education is that children should have this deep deep connection and love for nature and the work in the world and so when it became available we were able to buy property around the school so we now have sixty one acres of land that wraps around the twenty acres of the world or school and then what  at the waldorf school well we're very lucky too and so what you do with the land we we want to grow food and not lawns and all around the house it was already there lot lawns and lawns and lawns and so of course we immediately started to prepare the beds for planting and how you do that is you you look for the runoff where is the the direction of the water running down in them perpendicular to that you build your beds and so we've built these raised beds that were made in such a way that the there wouldn't be erosion and runoff and then they were to be raised beds permanent raised beds because why do you have permanent raised beds so you can continue to build them up with good compost and nutrients and you have this deep deep possibility of the roots to go into the earth as much as possible to access the deepest  that's where we grow vegetables and we have two flocks of chickens and every year we get a new flock and with first go to the wilder school and they say have you got new baby chicks yet and the children come over one by one one class by class to see the baby chicks and we have a huge pasture twenty four acre pasture that has goats and four cows and we get our nutrients from our manures from the cows and the chickens yeah i have admired your composting beds yes we are in so in your name you have or again ix so this is a certified organic farm what what all the major principles of organic farming well the first thing is that we don't use it's a negative that we don't have a good one and yes we don't use any pesticides insecticides any herbicides and we are just using our own will as much as possible our own inputs but that's not necessarily or the definition of organic it's really that we don't use these poisons but we also are required to go through an inspection every year and and i'm never afraid because we don't really do anything wrong it's only that you you know if you're if you're friends are coming to your house you want your house to look good so you always want them to be a garden to the garden  up for five months of the year so that's quite a commitment and you can see if you go to for what the customers are getting these days this tuesday they're going to get green means and a little cherry tomatoes and some some squashes some carrots some dancing carrots too some of our carrots are very creative some leaks nice carrots and squashes of course and they always get flowers but that's basically the principles are the principles so when i visited your farm you spoke about also biodynamic yes what is this well i'm glad you asked that because i think i mentioned the the training college for walter of teachers in the world of school movement was founded by rudolf steiner and rudolf steiner gave a course of lectures to farmers in thousand twenty four on agriculture the farmers came to and said why is it that that are the food stone seem as nutritious as before what's going on what can be done about it and for many steiner is here and he would acknowledge ruta and so many spiritual streams but also this great love of nature so what is biden amec so it's so hard to describe it in a few words but it's basically that the farm organism is a totality rudolph steiner said that if you need to bring in amendments from the outside fertilizers from the outside it is a sick farm ok so we need to italy self sufficient it should be self sufficient and so we try to do that as much as possible unfortunately i'm not a master at sea production i'm a little afraid to just collect my own seeds and plant them because i want to be sure that i have seeds that will be viable for my my customers the next year but that's really a stage that i'd like to work towards so you also you're buying a seeds i buy my they're all certified organic seeds and some of our seeds we we do gather ourselves being seeds for instance i've grown very very well and then we also take advantage of when  plant self so so we let certain crops grow up and then all of a sudden who a lot of the kale plant with it will bolt up and it'll turn to flower and the seeds will come down and then in the spring you can start digging up these little kale plants and transplant them about and lettuces one year i transplanted about three thousand little baby lettuces that it just spread on the ground like that so we do that but also diversity is another thing that we start or said the farm should be diverse not just you know ten acres of land but you should also have the fields the meadows the animals animals they all as use said before entering just a symbiotic relationship one with the other and the forests are very important for the insect life and the bird animals because animals if they're in a confined area they won't develop their own smell they won't develop the smell to sense a sense of what is needed for their health have a little protected area protected from so they can be in protection from the intense wind and cold rain and snow in the wintertime  break it and spread it over the working compost then we clean out the chicken houses and that's what we when we come you come to our farm that's the first thing somebody says to you especially if you're an elegant lady as you are grounded coffee yes and also some egg shells yeah well so you put two well neeraj plans yes we actually ask our customers and customers please bring back dried clean egg shells and we do use them in biodynamic preparations and then we we spread that on the earth there are special preparations that we can put in the compost piles to add to the earth we what do we use we basically use our own compost compost on our land and so how do we prepare the little seedlings oh yeah i was fascinated you have brought it was you get yes  the happy to tell you so what our winter work is is sifting compost we take great loads of compost we put a great pile inside the greenhouse so it's nice and dry and then we it and sift it and then we make a nice soil mix with it which is of our own compost mostly and peat moss which is has to be an make this wonderful slurry i think of it as being a little bit like the primal who's you know perfect prime aloof and then we put them in a kind of bin and we press down on this very well you press down this way actually like this and we trysted around a bit i think it will be days in the way it is in the way yeah we present down like this i don't want to hurt this and then turn it around lift it up carried over to a tray and press out the little cubes little cubes that are like little baby delicious brownies they look like brownies yeah so in these little cubes we put our seeds ok and we try to plant the little seeds right after we've made it so the primal ooze is still moist and lovely and welcoming continue to grow in the greenhouse so that you have a really good song was to grow with now why do we do this system it's because these are little blocks that are separated you see yeah so there's air around each block so as the little root hairs go down and grow they hit the edge of the block of soil and it's air there so that the little roots south prune and they keep sending out more and more and more roots you know create a stronger plant strong yes that's right stronger biomass so that they are they are really ready to access the larger soil in a better way you know so so what about i know you just always visitors and activities going on in the farm you are about it and but they come and they volunteer the eighth grade has to do their thirst service they always come and give us a lot of volunteer time the little children in the third grade are studying farming and they always spend time the little kindergarten children come and plant little peas sometimes as a fourth graders plant last year planted all our peas that we had this year they bring community and the wider world in a way that we welcome to come to the farm we have had a program with the university of tokyo for seven years now where we accept nine students a  year three at a time for two weeks each and they come and they they were very brilliant their kids the best university in tokyo and they're getting their hands dirty and it was really working on the land we have students from and around and i would love to do more of that and so this is an appeal use this show as an appeal right but i'm sorry because tut you are fascinating but time is really is running  and i wanted to ask you two more questions one is why is it so important to eat organic and do what you're doing ok we know the answer in a way but i would like to hear it from the difference in the nutrient content of inorganically farmed carrot versus a mass produced carriage well first of all we have the absence of these terrible talks and poisons that are really there are damaging the health of all people and also the water the well water even the runoff the air it goes up in the air all these pesticides and chemicals fertilizers so that's it we're doing a positive thing by not having those poisons but also i told you about roots to the ability for the roots to go deeper but also if you do not put ice in the earth but you let the lively biological activity continue on then you have what's called rising the fungus that continue these little filaments that continue the roots of the plants to access more and more nutrients so what we want to receive is much as many minerals vitor moons rich this from the soil as we possibly can and also what comes from the environment so what a healthy healthy environment up above healthy down below healthy of the people and human of organic farming thank you but this was a wonderful wonderful experience meeting with you carol i should say i love my organic carrots and you know some people say it's more expensive but when it's better you would eat less as well so this was the carbonated diet lifestyle show and what you put in your house and how you feel your body  impact on your house as well thank you so much