TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: John Dromgoole (JD)
INTERVIEWER: David Todd (DT)
DATE: November 15, 2018
LOCATION: Austin, Texas
TRANSCRIBER: Robin Johnson
MEDIA: HD video
REEL: 3474

[Please note that the numbers given below mark time codes for the interview recording.]

DT: My name is David Todd. I’m here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. It’s November 15, 2018. And we’re in Austin and we have the good fortune to be visiting with John Dromgoole, who has been involved with the organic gardening scene in many respects, for running the Natural Gardener’s Store, from the broadcasting on KOBJ, Gardening Naturally, running a—a TV show, New Gardener on PBS as well as Central Texas Gardener, and Weekend Gardener on other affiliates. And—and then also publishing articles in Texas Gardener and—and other outlets. And so, in many respects, he’s—he’s helped educate many people in Texas and beyond about organic gardening and horticulture and reduced pesticide—pest management and many, many topics. So I want to take this chance to thank you for sta—spending time with us.

00:01:12
JD: Thank you very much for spending time with me.

DT: It’s nice of you. So we usually start these interviews by asking if there were some childhood experiences or mentors—teachers, parents, friends—that might have gotten you interested in the natural world—outdoors, in your case, gardening?

00:01:30
JD: Well my parents had a hardscape. You know, it was the greens, the ligustrums, the ash trees, the St. Augustine lawn, no flowers really. We had a big mesquite tree in the backyard, which I thought was—these are the main trees of the planet but they weren’t after I came to Austin. But—so we didn’t have too much as far as gardening go—went. And they didn’t discuss it or need it, you know. All we had was mesquite wood for barbecues on the weekends. But my neighbors did and the lady up front grew geraniums and other folks around there did have their flowers.
00:02:07
And I did work with her geraniums one time by running through them as a kid until they were all butchered and then working with them meant go clean up what you did over there, Johnny. And so that was one of my first real experiences with flowers is destroying them.

DT: Okay. So your first gardening experience might have been sort of anti-gardener des—destroying some gardenias but—but tell us about future escapades that might have gotten you interested in—in the natural world.

00:02:41
JD: Well I think it was later than that. You know, there was no encouragement at home and so I didn’t really find the early days at least with—with gardening to be anything other than mowing the lawn with an electric mower. And it had a long cord on it. And if I wasn’t feeling like mowing the lawn that day, I’d run over the cord and then call my dad and say, “Look, I can’t mow anymore. We have to fix the cord.” That was about as near home experience that I had. And then I think many years passed before anything happened again.
00:03:17
Might have—not even through junior high school do I remember anything except corsages for the girls at the prom, you know, that kind of stuff. But, outside of that, no real flowering activity or—or gardening activities. All—well no—let me back up a second, now that I think about it. A Molino is a place where they grind corn, making tortillas, making Mexican sweet bread. And after church on Sundays, I would go down to the Molino to bring back some sweet bread to the house. And so when I was there, there were huge bags of corn just covering the wall they used so much of it, and there was some spilled on the ground.
00:04:02
So I would take some handfuls, put them in my pocket and go home. And I had a good friend named Jimmy Drury, and we lived not too far from there either. And so my other seeds were pinto beans from the kitchen. They were dried. They were sitting in jars up there so there was another seed for us. And so we, just for fun, im—imitated gardening. And so we’d grow corn and we’d grow beans and a lot of corn. And it was just beginner’s luck that they produced very well. Didn’t have any problems of any kind.
00:04:41
And now that I remember, that was my first gardening experience. Along the way though, with my friends at their houses, I remember one time at my friend, Billy Wise’s house—they were in the old part of Laredo—and so when we were outside in the yard or something, I remember—roses do very well down there—and I remember in the rose garden a—one of the gardener’s—a Mexican gardener—all the gardeners were Mexican folks down there because they’re the good ones.
00:05:14
And so here was a guy on his knees in the rose garden and I remember him throwing dust up on the roses and I thought that was the strangest thing but didn’t think much more about it until later. One day I discovered what he was doing but we’ll probably get there as we get further down the road in organic gardening. So that was a—something I witnessed in the garden that seemed to be unusual enough to get my attention. So the other thing that was very attractive was the cactus at the ranches.
00:05:54
My friend, Billy Wise, had a big ranch, great big thing that the King of Spain gave his family. Everybody got something from the King of Spain at some point in Laredo. And so they had these big ranches. So we’d go out there, you know, and they had an old town there. And this little town was—just been abandoned for a long time—Santa Ana on his way to Cali—to San Antonio stopped there for water because they had Artesian wells. I—I can see them stopped there right now. And so we’d go out there and spend the weekends.
00:06:29
When Billy joined the—and we’d collect and look at cactus and, you know, just admire them. We’d spend time walking around, especially in the spring when everything was in bloom. The fragrance on a South Texas ranch in the springtime—it’s so unique that you’ll only get it there. You won’t find it anywhere else. And nobody’s been able to bottle it either. But that was kind of one of those experiences to—it—it was an odor—I can remember it right now, as a matter of fact—the mesquites in bloom and the little flowers everywhere.
00:07:04
And the birds that accompanied them because down in South Texas, a lot of birds came from Mexico and other areas to winter. So that was another one of the good experiences out there. Walking around on the ranch and just spending some good time. But we would see things like a horse crippler. This is a big cactus—about that big—and it would have these huge thorns. I mean, if a horse ran into one of those while walking on the ranch, it was—the name came from that—from running into one. It was a horse crippler. And there were many others.
00:07:40
And the flowers on them were just gorgeous also. It—that’s the beauty of a cactus is they don’t look like too much, you know. They don’t look all that attractive. They’re okay, but they’re, you know, they just seem to be part of the environment. And then they bloom one day and they’re like orchids. Here’s an orchid that never does look like much and then one day it blooms and you’re shocked at what it does. It’s the same thing with the cactus. And we’d play games with them too though, the flowers. The pistil inside of it, if you took it out, it looked like a little, tiny rocket.
00:08:15
And then we’d take one of the big thorns off and we’d stick it in the front of the little rocket there and we had darts and we would throw the darts at the pads on the cactus and we would—and we would just spend time doing that. We didn’t have much money so we had to make darts out of cactus. But anyway, so that was another one of those little experiences out there with them.

DT: Well, did you have any neighbors who were gardeners? I think you mentioned that roses grow well down there. Did you have any neighbors that might have had a small fruit garden or vegetable garden or an arbor or an orchard?

00:08:53
JD: If—if there were, I—I don’t recall them right away. But I do remember Dr. Sigaroa down the street from us on the other corner— very well-known doctor from that area and his family—did have a nice backyard. And it was landscaped and I think they had gardeners. And I do remember going down there with the big banana plants—just beautiful pl—bananas—that produced bananas. And there must have been gardenias and other things out there for them. So I do remember a lush garden on the opposite end of the street.
00:09:26
And they had the money to hire a gardener that—to come out there and get it the way they wanted it to. So their roses and things like that that were just—th—got—the quality of light down there is spectacular. A rose that grows like this here, grows like that down there [holding hands in circle]. So it—it has to do with the quality of light. And the humidity’s not so bad so we don’t have leaf diseases. But these are things that, in retrospect, I realized. The soil down there’s like sandstone. It is sandstone. But it could be loosened up.
00:09:59
And whether or not they had compost, I don’t remember, but I was in Nuevo Laredo for a while and lived over there. And I remember—everybody gardens in—in cans—Folgers or any of these other cans and they’d hang them on the wall—oil cans, you know, whatever it was. And the wall would be pretty with all of these pass-along plants. The neighbors would root them, give their neighbor one.
00:10:25
And so I remember probably once a week a wagon would come down the street and—and the guy—you could hear him in the distance like the—like the ice cream man, he would go, “[speaking Spanish]” and “[speaking Spanish]” and the old ladies would come out with their cans. And he’d stop—he had a burro pulling it—and in the back was compost, kind of a blend actually that you could grow in. And they would come out with their cans and fill them up and he would charge them a little bit and he’d get back on there and get that thing going.
00:10:58
And for the next block, “[speaking Spanish]” and you could hear him in the distance. So that was kind of an observation of the soils. You know, you never think about those things. The other half of the plant’s in the soil, but, as a youngster, I didn’t ever think about that part. So amending the soils in Laredo, I don’t remember what they did, but I do, in Nuevo Laredo, remember the guy coming down the street with his little wagon and everybody running out with—waiting for him to get down to their place and fill up the new oil can that they had.

DT: So you lived in Laredo and—and I was wondering if you ever maybe with your family, visited the Winter Gardens that I guess would have been east of there, down in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, to see the—the citrus orchards or the other agriculture there?

00:11:52
JD: I do remember going down there but it was mainly my dad going fishing and going with him. So we weren’t—I mean, I was impressed by the giant palms and the huge orange and grapefruit orchards down there, but we didn’t stop nor did he say, “Oh those are avocados son.” You know, that didn’t happen. But I did remember all of those things seeing them. So—but I—there—I knew better than ask questions because I don’t think there were any answers for them.
00:12:22
But it was a good observation and we caught some nice fish while we were there too, which later on I learned was a fertilizer too from Squanto. So I did see all of that. And in Laredo though, at the head of the valley really were the orange orchards down by the Rio Grande where there was water. And, of course, all of the flowers and—and the Mexican ladies with their cans and whatever kind of container they could get, they grew in them. And the beauty of it all was the pass-along plant th—idea.
00:12:59
Giving them to the [speaking Spanish] and bring over whatever it was that she had growing, whether it was bougainvillea cuttings, you know, all of that. You know, another thing I remember about Mexico, all this was—I’ll jump around a little bit, but they’re part of the same story. And that is how they made potting soil down there. Now I was already a—a bit of a gardener. Now this is later. But I’d go down to Mexico with my partner now and then and—and he would—he was in the music business, but he would take me around just to show me Mexico.
00:13:30
And so what I found out was that when a Palm Tree had fallen, not knocked down on purpose but ones that were down, th—the inside of it was very fibrous. And so they would take that fiber out of there, almost like peat moss, and blend it with little rocks. And you got the little rocks by going to the Red Ant Mountains. All of the rocks were the same size. The red ants would bring them in there and every one was the exact same size. I don’t know how they did that but they did. And then they would take and get a shovel full of those rocks, blend it with the—the fiber and make a potting soil, you know.
00:14:10
So that was another way that—you know, there—they’re so creative down there. They make do with what they have and we don’t do that. We go get a bag of something now and hope that somebody will tell us how to use it. But down there, that was one of the other sources of potting mix. There’s a lot of gardening down there. You can see the bougainvilleas climbing the walls and covering the houses in those areas. Things just grew, but it was the quality of light and the intention of growing these flowers by the people that were there.
00:14:47
So, in Mexico, I was inspired more than anywhere else in—in Laredo. But we did have those orchards. I think one of them was run by the nuns. So they had their big source of income and—and they were down by the Rio Grande. That was the only real commercial one I remember, although I do remember the trucks coming up from the valley full of cabbage or full of broccoli on the back of the truck, or full of carrots or watermelons, whatever it was. And when they would get stuck, me and Billy, my friend from earlier, when would they would get stopped at a red light, one of us would jump on the truck and throw watermelons down to the other guy.
00:15:29
So I remember some of the valley crops, but in a vicarious way of taking them off the truck. And the driver wasn’t going to get out of the truck and chase us, you know. So we—we’d get a couple of watermelons that way and some broccoli. Well it was mainly watermelons and cantaloupes that we liked the most. So there was more experiences with plants right there, but they were more fun ideas of eating them. But in—in—and in Laredo, there was the Cactus Corral down on San Bernardo Street. Now this was a unique place that was the only one there.
00:16:07
It was a café and in the back was this botanical garden of regional and I guess other cactus. And you followed this little trail and you would get to see all of these things while you were there. The tourists loved it. You can—you go to one place and it was like you were on somebody’s ranch but not really. And—but it was very interesting and beautiful place. I remember oh, people pointing out the peyote plants. That’s peyote right there, you know, and—and we would go off but we would recognize it and other people would come up and—near us say, “That’s that peyote plant,” you know.
00:16:49
So we did see something like that in there, but that was low on the list of what we were looking at. There were Saguaros and other things. So it was a nice place—The Cactus Corral. I still have one of the glasses from there fifty years or more, maybe later. I just saved one. It was—it’s such a pretty little glass.

DT: Well it sounds like you knew people who—who grew things for beauty, you know, roses or bougainvillea or people who grew it for produce, the—the nuns who were growing their—their citrus.

00:17:22
JD: That was how—that was their income, yeah.

DT: I was wondering if you knew any folks who were curanderos who might have been…

00:17:28
JD: Curanderos, oh sure. That was one of the—one of the things that always got my attention down there. There were a couple of theaters in downtown Laredo—the Plaza and the Tivoli. And next to the Plaza was a—a little store that had accordions and saddles and other ranch supplies, and a whole section of products for the curanderos. And if the curandero said go down there and get some John the Conqueror and—and start using it, then it was all in that shop. It was the only one that I remember in Laredo. There may have been others.
00:18:05
But when I was waiting for the movie end and so we could go in, Davy Crockett, for example, I—I’d spend all that time in that window looking at stuff. But that really caught my attention. I said there’s something magic right here. And I remember that, and met as I grew up then, other friends whose father or mother was a curandero or curandera. And so you hear the word again. You know that they are the folks that help with healing. You know, there’s a certain cost that it takes to go to a doctor besides just a few chickens.
00:18:43
And so everybody would go to the curandero, whether you lost your wife to some guy or you just had a bad cold, whatever it is, the curandero, which is what the name says—I can cure you in a way—was the place you go.

DT: So they could fix both broken hearts and—and a runny nose.

00:19:06
JD: You could get rid of the runny nose easier than you could fix the—the broken heart I’ll betcha. But all those things were there and they always got my attention. They really did. I don’t know why but it was magic. It was something that I never heard about unless I was down at the movie.

DT: So these were things that you were noticing around yourself as a child?

00:19:29
JD: Yeah, yes, yes. Uh-huh. So that one—it was just an automatic attraction versus somebody else talking about it and then I found it down there or standing with me at—at the window waiting to—for the movie to end and the new one to start, which was a great thing to do because it was air conditioned in there. It was one of the few things downtown that was air conditioned. So I did get to see that sometimes for extended periods. I’d go into the big building—the store itself was nice and long and the stuff was in there too.
00:20:06
And there were other places in Laredo that were the distributor or the maker of some of these things. And I’d been by there. Don Pedrito Jaramillo was one of these kind of like a patron saint in the valley, but he wasn’t really ever made into a saint, but he was a curandero that was very famous, one of the most famous ones that I know about. And so he was a tequila smuggler from Mexico as a young man. And he had decided to stay in the United States, once he got through with the Tequila business. He said I’m staying here near Falfurrias down in the valley.
00:20:48
And so one day while riding his burro, he ran into a tree and it hit him right in the face like that and knocked him to the ground. He was unconscious. And then some angels appeared to him and said, “Take some of that mud and put it on your nose there and you’ll be healed.” And so he did that and he became healed and he became a believer. He was a true believer at that time. Anybody who sees an angel becomes a true believer. And then the mud was helpful in healing. So he became very well known as a healer and other people started going to him from Mexico and from California, and from all over.
00:21:32
And, at that time, they would pay with stamps. Nobody carried a lot of money, but carried the stamps that had a certain value to them. And he had barrels of stamps inside of his—his place. He didn’t know what to do with them or cash them or didn’t want to. And so that was Don Pedrito Jaramillo. And so he became a saint-like person and in Laredo. So that’s in Falfurrias.
00:22:00
And you can go down there today and see his little chapel that’s on his property and go inside and visit and see pictures of soldiers and children on the walls and crutches over here on the walls—soldiers that had gone to war and the family wanted protection, prayer, whatever it was or they had passed away and he brought them in there for the same particular reasons. And the wall was full of these pictures.
00:22:29
And so that’s probably still standing down there. And when you see a place full of crutches where people wore crutches going in and walked out normal, whatever normal is, then you knew that miracles happened or at least you believed that miracles happened there and it was because of Don Pedrito Jaramillo. Another connection for me and this world of spirit, you know, it wasn’t just the Holy Ghost who I never met but I heard about him quite a bit, start hearing about ghosts in the church. So these were types of door-openers.
00:23:09
And one day, Don Pedrito sits in a chair all the time, and the—you always see the gash on his nose, the little plaster ones that they sell in the stores to take home and make a little altar out of—those are for sale in every place, including that place at—that I was talking about in downtown Laredo. But, at this one particular place, they had a huge life sized one in a chair. And that’s where they made the oils and the—packaged up the—the different herbs that were being used, whether it was Rosemary.
00:23:43
Rosemary and Rue don’t—romero y ruda—were used for cleansing. And they would burn them. And it’s called a barrida. And so they would use that in the way that people smudge today, but they would lay them on the floor and barrida means with a broom, you’re sweeping. So they would use that combination to clear the spirit, to do or well remove spells, whatever it was. And so that was for sale in there too, you know. And you begin to learn from some of the curandero friends of yours. I remember—I’ll jump to Austin with this story—down there on I think South First, there was a herbaria down there.
00:24:32
And I went to him one time and I said, “I want to be an apprentice. I want to learn about this.” And he said, “I don’t take apprentices,” and it was about that—“I’ll see you later. Thank you.” But it was very clear that you had to grow up in it. You didn’t just join the club one day. As curious as you might be, you didn’t just go join up. I think if he would have seen something special, he might have then said, “Come back on Wednesday and I’ll show you something or another.” But there weren’t classes. It was something that was special.
00:25:13
So—so I pursued all of that. I kept—I got so interested as a kid, I—I wanted to know more about it. My friends that had parents, I would talk to them and ask if I could go meet them, you know. And this is in, you know, early days of high school, maybe late junior high school, somewhere in there. It was just a—I mean, I wrote to the Rosicrucians—I found in the back of one of the papers their address in California. And so I wrote t them because they sounded mysterious and they had something going on also.
00:25:48
And then a letter came back from them and my mother found it. She kn—she—she got out in the mail. She said, “What the hell are you doing here? Who—who are you writing to these people about?” So I had—continued to pursue it even when it came out of the back of a comic book. So later on, we might get to the spirituality in plants today and—and my connection to that. That still is the continuing part of the story of me getting deeper into the natural world and beginning to try to understand. I remember one time I was—someone said, you’ve been—somebody put a spell on you, man.
00:26:34
Look at you. Look at the way you’ve been. You—somebody put a spell on you. So I go to one of the curanderas and as—ask if she can help. And she had these incense of—five incenses—and you would get something like the lid of a trashcan, upside down, and you would put the coal down there. They sold these little coals and you took this and you put it on the coal and it would smoke. And she would say, “Stand over the smoke. You get both legs on it, stand over the smoke.” And then you take a lemon if you wanted to know who put the spell on you.
00:27:12
And you would go “[speaking Spanish 00:27:13] and you would cover your body. [speaking Spanish] means lemon you are, lemon you’ll be, give me the luck that you have. And so after that was done, then you would put the oth—the—the lemon the stovetop and cook it until it shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and you were supposed to see the face of the person that had put the spell on you on that. I just saw seeds, you know. [laughter] But these were these little interesting things that were going on down there. They’re very common.
00:27:52
And a lot of people do that, lot of well-to-do people, people—respectable people there, but they don’t talk about it. You know, it’s not a real popular thing to talk about, yet it happens down there. Tt’s like psychiatry down there. We never talk about a psychiatrist. Nobody does. Even if you need some help, you got to San Antonio and then come back but never say anything. So it’s—it’s kind of like that.

DT: So it sounds like there’s just a rich world of—of plants in—in Laredo and down in the valley and—and along Mexico, you know, whether it’s plants grown for beauty or for medicine or for produce. And—and I—I gather you really have a close connection with that. I’m curious how you eventually found—found the way to leave that area that’s meant so much to you?

00:28:48
JD: Well, I had been in business down there. I think I need to say this before arriving in Austin because I couldn’t find bell bottoms and I couldn’t find wide belts and I couldn’t find shirts that had big collars. And I looked and looked and looked. And so there was something missing there in Laredo that I, you know, didn’t know where to go get it. So I said, “I’ll just make my own.” And I made a Nehru jacket. And Nuevo Laredo had tailors. Measured it and went over there. And then somebody saw me we—wearing it and they said, “I want one of those.”
00:29:27
And so I measured them and went to Nuevo Laredo and sold another one. And so that got me into the clothing business—slowly. Village boys had stuff from India in the back wholesale. And so I slowly got into the business because I was trying to fill the niche. Well I had a car wreck and it broke my back. And when you have a, how do you say, a personality-run business like that one was and you’re not there, then it goes downhill. And it did. It took a year to recuperate kind of and I just couldn’t do—make it work anymore. So that’s when I left to come to Austin.
00:30:05
And something funny for me—I went to Texas A&I in Kingsville, but when I was coming to Austin—in both directions, I would use a guitar case as my suitcase and put underwear or socks in the neck of it and pants and shirts in the bottom of it. And I did that because, if you wanted to hitchhike, anybody will pick up somebody with an instrument. It’s—and they thought I had a guitar in there. I—I didn’t stay anywhere for ten minutes on the journey back and forth to these places.
00:30:37
But a good friend of mine, Meg Guerra from Laredo, somebody we’d been—we’d been—I’d been friends with her forever—and so she had moved up to Austin and was a—a student here. And sh—she married a fellow by the name of George Altgelt and they had a little store called The Jungle Store near the campus, supplying house plants to the students. Terrariums were popular at the time. So that’s what their business was. They made their own potting soil in a big bathtub there.
00:31:11
So Meg was pregnant and asked, because she knew I had run a business before, if I would step in there during the time that she was pregnant and had the child and that period after. So I, of course, I did. And now I started learning about plants. Now I started learning first about house plants. But I didn’t know anything but I started learning. I had to teach myself. And when students would come in there and ask me about something or another, I didn’t know so I made signs for everything in there. And I would put the common name and the botanical name.
00:31:47
And because I was a Catholic and we were doing the Latin masses at the time, when I said the botanical name in Latin, it sounded good. They said this guy knows what he’s talking about. And so that’s how I became oh, more confident that people would listen to me and talk. And we were an organic gardening nursery, one of the first ones, maybe the first one in Austin. And s—and so, we made potting soil there. And George Altgelt was still there during the time his wife was pregnant.
00:32:25
And I’d go out to their place and they had a big vegetable garden and he would show me how they grew—how to make compost, how they grew in the garden, things like that—tasting things. Here taste that. You know, everything was better out of the garden directly. And so—but I really worked at the store more than anything else. I lived right behind the store and learned a tremendous amount. Meg finally came back. And it was time to go. You couldn’t have that many employees in this place. So I went on again and now I was hooked on the plant thing.
00:32:59
And, at the same time, the terrarium craze was going on back then. And so I went back to Laredo to the glass company that blew terrariums, they would blew ornamental things out of glass and I’d say, “Blow me this big terrariums,” and I’d box them up and I’d drive to Houston and to Dallas and to Austin and sell terrariums, the big, glass globes during that time that they were popular.

DT: What would go inside these terrariums?

00:33:26
JD: The little, tiny plants, the same ones that grew up to be bigger than—the Neanthe Bella Palm, the smallest palm in the world would go in there. And the peperomias and the aluminum plants, and pileas and these little plants that fit in there. Except terrariums, at that time, were a challenge. You had to put them in with a long stick. Today there’s a big hole and you just stick your hand in there and go for it. But then you had to be more delicate. And so—and the little, you know, it’s—it’s a—an enclosed environment. You put the cap back on it.
00:34:00
It would rain in there, water the plants. You didn’t have to do anything anymore. And so here was this little ecological environment in a—in a container. Easy to grow at your apartment or at your dorm, whatever it was. And so that lasted for a while. And I did that part. And then macramé’s came in, but I didn’t’ sell macramé’s. But it was at—that gives you a—an image of the time that I was active in this. And so from that I—I continued to import things out of Mexico, whether they were for relaxing on the patio like these little lawn chair type things or similar items to that.
00:34:52
That was called Lizard Enterprise. That was my little business name there. But—and so I wanted to know more, now I was hooked. And I wanted to learn more. And so went to San Antonio, because all the big growers around San Antonio—Bordier’s Nursery out of California, Diedert Wholesale—there were many places that grew for the market there. So that was going to be my education to work here and to work at another one.

DT: The—these growers, excuse me, they were—they were growing?

00:35:27
JD: Trees, shrubs.

DT: Trees, shrubs, indoor plants as well as outdoor?

00:35:31
JD: Yes, yes. Dieffenbachias from cuttings.

DT: And then they were shipping…?

00:35:34
JD: I learned how to propagate there. That was the part—and—and identify a disease. If something was going wrong, one of the people in charge would come back and point it out and give me the chemical treatment for it. So I learned to identify leaf disease or other problems that a plant might run into. So that was this combination of things. Learning to propagate, recognizing diseases, and knowing how they treated them for the marketplace. Diedert Wholesale was a place that I wanted to work in.
00:36:09
And one day I saw an ad that said we need a delivery guy to take the flowers and stuff around. And they grew the poinsettias for the holidays and they grew the lilies for the holidays and they grew chrysanthemums for the holidays and azaleas for the holidays. They had all of these very holiday oriented plants that had a specific science to them. You don’t want your poinsettia in January and you don’t want it much earlier than November. You had to have it ready at the end of November and sold all through the month.
00:36:42
Well there’s planning and timing and all of these different aspects of getting that to your home, including what I was doing was sleeving them up and taking them to the different flower shops. HEB would buy a lot. You ever notice that the mums in a place are all the same size. Every one of them’s identical. So there’s a growth hormone that is sprayed onto them and they keep them all the same size. That’s how that’s done. Poinsettias are all that size of a certain type, you know. And so that’s part of that science of doing that, plus the growth hormone stimulated more blooms on these things.
00:37:24
I kept notes on all of this stuff—timing and everything because—and the time the chemicals would change. We would go from one to the other, depending on the phase of the plants and how to propagate cuttings in there. Putting them on these big benches, taking them from the different plants and then having a mist system keep them going until it would strike a root and then we’d pot them up again. And finally, I became the mum man. The guy that was in charge of the mum houses quit.
00:37:55
And I’d been working in there and there was a bunch of ladies in there that would work down each side of the bench pinching. You have to pinch them in order to get multiple flowers. So there was a specific week that you would get—do the pinching so that they would fill out. A poinsettia, for example, that has three flowers, if you look under it has one stem but it was pinched at one time and created these other flowers on there. So that was a real introduction to science. And disease, once again, but more prevention.
00:38:28
You didn’t want disease on your mum leaves or poinsettia leaves or anything. So there was a lot of treatments to prevent that or bugs. But I learned to use the drip systems in each of the plants and drew the chrysanthemum that the—the cheerleaders wear—that tall one. And we had a special area where the stems were cleaned all the time so that we grew that great big pom-pom. And that had to be ready at graduation. That had to be ready in the—the football season also. So there was this timing going on. And that was a very interesting part.
00:39:05
We would take the lily bulbs and put them in this railroad car and it was refrigerated. It was taken off of—on its wheels now—it was sitting on a platform but it still had the refrigeration unit and we had built these shelves in there. And we would take the lily bulbs into that at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time. And, as soon as you took them out, they’d sprout. They’d been dormant for just the right amount of time. So now here come the lilies on time for Easter, not too much before and not too much after but right on time.
00:39:39
That was another one of the experiences that—that I had over there. There was a big company called Los Patios. They were really fancy landscape company down by the river there with restaurants and ju—grounds that were beautiful. And I saw another ad one time that said they were looking for a crew chief that spoke Spanish. I said, “Ah, I speak Spanish.” And so I went down there and I got the job and I had a truck with a bunch of guys and we went out to projects. And the architects would come out to the project and we would have the plants there and they would show me how to place them.
00:40:17
They have a face, you know. So they would make sure that the face was out in doing these designs and how to put the edging on there. And anyhow, they taught me everything I needed to know about doing a landscape, but these were the high level professionals. So it was really nice to work with them.

DT: And this was at homes and stores and…

00:40:40
JD: The landscaping?

DT: Yeah.

00:40:41
JD: Yeah, yeah. Anybody who could afford them. It was mainly homes though. It was a lot of homes. Fine houses.

DT: What kind of plants were you putting out typically?

00:40:51
JD: Well shrubs and trees, things of that nature. You know, the—the basic groundwork of a landscape—we would do the hard work.

DT: [overlapping conversation] perennials?

00:41:00
JD: Perennials, all of that, yeah. That was a secondary level. There’s the groundwork that’s done where the anchoring plants are put in. And then someone comes in and does the flowers and all. And we would be off at the next place. And the ground around there is tough like in Austin, the limestone. So you had to take your air hammer with you every day too, you know. And you sit there doing that all day long.

00:41:27
At night, when it was all over, you’d sit around the house going [shaking motion]—you’d still be—it’s like when you’re on the boat and you come back into shore for the day and you’re still doing this [rocking motion] even though you’re off the boat. It was that way with that air hammer. So that was learning about landscaping, learning about design, learning that plants had a face on them and to put them in a certain way and not to put them too close to the building, et cetera. They had the spacing, you know, laid out, but we would prepare the beds, learn how to make a bed for the plants.
00:42:02
That was a very good experience. And then a company called The Crystal Baking Company, a big restaurant, wanted somebody and they’d heard about me and wanted me to run their little flower shop next door. So here’s this big, fancy restaurant with a crystal wall and through it on the other side, I was selling tropicals—big palms, Chinese evergreens, Spathiphyllums, all of these wonderful house plants. And in there, I had put mulch everywhere, on the floor, on the cement, and then made trails though in the mulch. So you—it was kind of a tropical experience in there.
00:42:44
Those people—the Frezenhans—flew me to California because there was one place that they really liked—St. Marie’s Garden. And they wanted me to see that before we started. So I went out there with them, saw this beautiful place, understood what they wanted, and came back and did it next to the restaurant. But it turned into a—a waiting room for your table. So people were in there with their cocktail glass standing in there in the evenings enjoying the space, but not buying anything. It was the waiting room. So that wasn’t working very well.
00:43:21
So those plants and another lady who was a friend of theirs—this is all complicated—but she and—she said, “We’re not going to do the nursery in here anymore.” So I went to her place—her name was Bonnie Batchelder over on West Avenue—and we started a little retail nursery. There’s a quilt shop up front but they owned all this property. Well, during that time, bromeliads and tillandsias and these other plants that are pretty nice little collectible plants were popular. Lithops—these living stones that come from Africa—they’re these little—they match the stones but they’re little plants, little cacti in the succulent family were nice and collectible—herbs, things of that nature.
00:44:13
Tried to supply what you weren’t finding out there. But, along the way with that one, the people that would co—wanted to round up would come in there and find out that this guy didn’t have certain things. I didn’t have the blue powder that you made fertilizer out of, which is Peter’s fertilizer. But this is where I got on the radio. Bonnie had started something that I picked up on while there. And that is I’ve always known how to get publicity without money. And one of the things was to go and we did Tupperware parties but with plants. And so we’d go to some lady’s house.
00:44:55
She’d have her friends over. She’d put the wine and the cheese out there and I would come in and explain house plants to them—what kind of light, what kind of watering, what kind of needs they had. And I was always giving the lady of the house a plant that was probably six to ten dollars, you know, but she would do this party thing. And then I would say to the other ladies, “If any of you do this at your house, I will also give you one of these six dollar plants and bring your friends over.” And it would happen at other places.
00:45:27
And then there was a WAI Radio in San Antonio—there was something called “Morning Magazine” and Carl Wiglesworth and Mary Denman were the hosts. That was their show of Morning Magazine. And so they asked me to come down there one day because of this novelty of a guy going around doing Tupperware parties with plants. So I went down there—it was a Wednesday—and sat down and they were, you know, they were just kind of—it was an interesting conversation about this idea.
00:46:01
But boy, did I get publicity from that. WAI is a 50,000 watt station. And so some of the callers had different types of questions and I was able to answer them. And so Carl and Mary said, “Can you come back next Wednesday at the same time?” And pretty soon I was a regular. I was the garden guy on—on that station.

DT: What kind of questions would people call in with? Was it mostly a call in show or did you have a script or?

00:46:29
JD: Yeah, yeah. No. It—it was—no, it’s never been a script really. But it would be like black spot on roses. Well I had experienced that at some of the growers so I knew that it was a—a fungal disease and that there were natural fungicides like a sulphur spray and would suggest these things. And they were always—there were two things going on. I had experienced it with some of the plant problems and then I gave an alternative answer which was somewhat of a novelty. I mean, people used to laugh if I said manure, you know.
00:47:05
But that was how I got on the air and how I started talking about organic gardening.

DT: So some of your earliest advice that you would give on these radio shows was—was already, you know, towards organic ad—natural kinds of remedies, rather than chemicals?

00:47:26
JD: Yes. Yes. Right, because I recognized the problems that I’d experienced out there. And—but I had been applying—besides learning the disease—the organic technique to it. Okay, that’s how they do it. Here’s what I would do. You know, here’s what we would do. I would get this information actually from a—a magazine called Organic Gardening and Farming by Rodale Press. Little tiny book like that and I would read in there all of this stuff about products that would control diseases.
00:47:59
Found out along the way though that many of the things that were suggested were more toxic than some of the chemicals, but they were plant oriented so they were acceptable. But not really. One of the things that was a very strong insecticide, did its job all the time, was called Red Devil. It was nicotine sulphate. The nicotine was so powerful that it killed everything in the garden, which wasn’t the goal of the organic gardener. Just very specific wa—was what we were looking for. And sabadilla, which is a seed from the center of Mexico ground up—was an insecticide.

00:48:38
And so rotenone, you probably saw a long time ago rotenone being used. And in one of those special documentaries from South America, you would see the men in the river with these root type things and they would all stand across and they would do this. They would thrash the water with these plants. And the women downstream a little bit would pick the dead fish up out of the water for—for eating. That was their way. And so rotenone, which we used as an insecticide, in reality, was something you didn’t use near waterways, things like that.
00:49:13
So we dropped that one too. So there were several natural things that were much too potent, but we found our way through chrysanthemums, the pyrethrum, you know, this one. But, in the past few years, we found out that that was much too toxic, even though we used it for twenty, thirty years easily.

DT: I’m curious what—what turned you towards some of these natural solutions when I guess some of your education had been at these commercial growers in San Antonio that were probably using more conventional kind of remedies.

00:49:47
JD: Well, the start over at the Jungle Store initiated me. That got the engine running. So when I left there, I was primed. And after the terrarium thing and all, I went to San Antonio and started learning there. And that’s kind of how I got back into the cycle again. But that was my first radio experience related to gardening. I’d been in radio since high school. Someone from a radio station came to the speech teacher and said, “I need two guys with good voices.” And so I was one of them and Richard Goodman was the other one.
00:50:24
And so we had weekend jobs at the station. It was pretty automated. We had to go get licenses at the time to do this kind of work. But I began to develop more experience and confidence. And even when I was in college at Texas A&I, I mainly took speech and acting and some of these other things and the other courses were fine, but I didn’t know anything and I couldn’t learn anything. And so—but those primed me for public speaking. Those are the ones that gave me this confidence to get on the stage.
00:51:01
The thing about public speaking I found out in—the hard way was if you knew the topic, it was fine, but if you were kind of faulty on the topic, you just fell apart up there. You know, you just—it was a horrible experience. But, as I learned better, it was easier to talk about these things. And so one day I started thinking but what’s—this whole plant thing—what’s the more important thing about plants? What can I find besides organic gardening to be more important? And I had invited a guest—Meg Guerra suggested this guy to come up to San Antonio and be a guest with me—and his name was Mark Blumenthal.
00:51:49
And he had a little company called Sweetheart Herbs. And at Sweetheart Herbs, they packaged up different herbs from around the world, would take the big m—m—bulk bags and then make them into pounds and stuff and we’d deliver them to the herb stores that were everywhere. You would bring in ginseng and the ginseng was part of that. You brought in certain hand creams, all kinds of natural stuff. And I decided to go up to Austin and try to work with him because I felt herbs are the more important of the plants because they heal people.
00:52:27
And so I worked with them for a while and learned about different things, became a salesman on the road, delivering herbs to the different health food stores. Health food stores, at that time, were a little bit strange because the people that ran them, for the most part, were thin and a little bit older, and wore white—white shirt and white pants. It would seem to be a characteristic of these stores and I guess that kind of gave a—a—a look of a doctor or somebody who knew what they were doing.
00:53:03
But they—there was like that real gaunt and dressed in white, but they knew their herbs, they knew their vitamins, they knew their stuff. But it was just this kind of, I don’t know, characteristic of what I was witnessing there.

DT: What were they selling mostly? Was it herbs and…?

00:53:20
JD: Raw milk. Grains. Maybe gr—peanut butter that they made there and then packaged up, the herbs themselves, the capsules of herbs, comfrey or whatever it was in capsules, that kind of stuff. And we also had a little thing called Ginseng Rush, which is a can of ginseng in a soda like flavor, and that was distributed at the same time by the case. So that was a—a very good experience. And so Meg and her husband, George, at the Jungle Store made potting soil in a big tub. And I would blend it some days and had a formula for it.
00:54:09
Well Meg and George one day got separated, went their own ways. But Meg ended up as part of the—the settlement with the potting soil company. And she tried to keep it going and did for a while, but she was working at Sweetheart Herbs with Mark—with Mark and all and was a very important component of that business. So she asked me, “Would you run the Amazon River Basin Potting Soil for us,” and Mark became a partner in that and we used his home that wasn’t too far from there to mix in the backyard.
00:54:45
And so I said, “Sure,” and I became one-third partners in that. Making the soil, blending it, getting compost from Malcolm Beck in San Antonio, little trailer full, but I needed the compost for the soils. We’d go down to the police station—I mean, near the police station where the ice house was—some people in Austin remember the ice house just a couple blocks away. They sold the big blocks and they would grind and bag up ice. Well I’d go in there and buy the bags and they were always willing to sell them. And so here was this ice bag.
00:55:22
We’d take it and turn it inside out so you couldn’t read the label, made our own label, and put it on the outside. Wh—mixed up our blend, poured them into the—the bag, put a twist ‘em and there we had another bag of potting soil and another bag. And then I would go try to sell them and did at many places like the Import House and Breed and so many places. Some resistance was there, but still there was some inroads. Red Barn used to be in Highland Mall where that is and so they bought from me too.

DT: You were mostly in the wholesale business then?

00:56:01
JD: Yes, yeah, which gives a little margin. You’re barely making anything with that. I mean, I would load up my—I had a ’68 Volkswagen Van, let’s just start there. And I would bag and put them in the van and put them in the van and get my day’s [inaudible 00:56:19]. Well it looked like a lowrider. I mean, I was just going down the road with that van just as low as can be and making the deliveries. I had two young ladies that helped me mix and bag. They were the patchouli sisters. And they were part of a little family of friends of theirs.
00:56:39
And anyhow, they came to help me bag all the time. And I could guarantee that every bag, when you opened it, you had a whiff of patchouli. But they were great. They were hard working. And patchouli never bothered me anyway. So they helped grow the company. We’d come down there and we’d bag and we’d use a Kool-Aid type container, put two of these quarts in there, twist it, set it aside. So…

DT: Did you have different kinds of soil mixes?

00:57:10
JD: No, no, just the one, just the potting soil. From the days of house plants and all, we just had the one. We weren’t selling gardeners anything. And so there was a guy named Paul Pryor that was a friend of Mark Blumenthal’s. Now Paul was on the air at KLBJ early in the morning, the early risers. From five to nine was his ho—were his hours. And Mark said, “This guy knows a little bit about plants.” And so Paul would come—invite me to come down there at 5 A.M.
00:57:45
And I was a—a consistent guest because not too many people would go down there at 5 A.M. But I knew how to get attention and would go down there all the time.

DT: How would you get attention?

00:57:58
JD: Well people heard my—my voice and my—my name on the air and this was the go-to guy, you know. The other—well go-to guy’s—the other thing I did in Austin was to make some business cards because I know that newspapers, radio, TV stations, magazines, they need an article every day. These people are—that’s their business—news story, whatever it is. Went down and gave everybody a business card. Nothing happened for a while, you know. And then a storm would come through and knock down trees and what’s that guy’s name right there and they’d pull—and a couple of stations would pull me up every time.
00:58:37
And so I began to be their go-to guy. And so that helped quite a bit in being established here. And so Paul Pryor had me come down to his show and he saw that I would come and he had me on there consistently. There was a garden show there though, but the lady quit at one point. And there was nobody hosting the show. And I moved from Paul Pryor’s over to the show. And I was then the—the show host. That was 38 years ago. I was with the Johnson family in the beginning. And then they sold out to Emmis Broadcasting. And so I just kind of went with it.

DT: This is KOBJ?

00:59:24
JD: KOBJ, the AM station—590 AM.

DT: And—and so you said you were the host of the show. Does that mean that you had guests or would you just…?

00:59:33
JD: I did have guests. Yeah. I would—I did. You know, if you have a radio show, I don’t care who you call, they want to be on with you. So I could call anybody, whether it was Robert Rodale or just anybody that I desired—Joel Salatin. There were so many people—Malcolm Beck. They would all be willing to come on and be there.

DT: Tell about some of these guests that you had on your show?

00:59:59
JD: Many times they were there to reinforce what I had been saying, that there were more people out in the country doing this—I’m not the only one, you know, screaming in the—the silence of the gardening world—there were many folks out there. And so I was able to get them on and tell their stories and their positive stories and the problems that they ran into. So that was kind of the experience. I had the nephew of Wallace Black Elk come on. And I wanted to talk to him about the—the earth, the spiritual nature of the earth, the way they treated the earth, the way they treated the animals on the earth.
01:00:47
That was a very important topic for me, you know. So it was a more of spiritual nature of what I was doing. You know, unfortunately, at the moment, I don’t remember the name of one of my other guests and he was one of the astronauts who went to the moon. And he stayed in the capsule while others went down. I tried to figure—find it but he—because I have a book of his, but I couldn’t in time.

DT: Buzz Aldrin?

DW: No, [inaudible] Michael Collins.

DT: Michael Collins?

DW: When—when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were down, Michael Collins stayed.

01:01:17
JD: Well he—Michael Collins—stayed in the capsule. And—and he was able to see the Earth all the time and it changed him. It changed him into somebody else besides the scientist that he was, the astronaut that he was, into a very spiritual person. Now he had a different respect for the planet from seeing it over here for days as they went around the moon. And I got to have him on the air the week before I had Black Elk. And so I had him talk about what he saw and what he felt about the planet.
01:01:59
And then I had Black Elk talk about the ancient ways of respecting the planet. I tried to put those two together in order to understand a little bit more what we were looking at, why this one planet was the only one that had a garden on it—the Earth. You look at all the other planets, they’re grey and red and whatever, but there’s nothing like this green one. And so that was what I—I wanted to hear from them, that we had to take care of this place with respect and—and the spiritual nature to it. Robert Rodale was somebody that I really respected.
01:02:38
He had a magazine and many, many books. So I thought he would be important. I learned about him through Malcolm Beck in a way. I used to get Organic Gardening magazine every month—small thing once again and—because it had information in there that I couldn’t find anywhere else so I was hungry. I was waiting for that thing to come in every month and read it. And people would say, “Well that’s information from the East Coast.” And I know that organic gardening is universal. I don’t care if you go to China or anywhere else, organic gardening is the same thing—about building a healthy soil.
01:03:21
So it wasn’t just the East. There were plants from over there but I ignore some of that and take out what’s appropriate for you. And so because I was on the air, there was a lady named Barbara Pleasant, and they had a garden calendar section in there and she did the South, the Southwest. And she had been moved up into the—into one of the Assistant Editors, but I had interviewed her and she—when she was leaving her position, she said to them, “I know a guy in Austin that knows his plants and, et cetera, and he’s well known around there.”
01:04:02
So they gave me the garden calendar for the Southwest. And I would write—and it went all the way to California—and so I would write every month, “It’s time to plant pansies and snapdragons and cabbage,” whatever else, and then they would print that up every month. Well if you’re an organic gardener and you see me in there, my name, you began to look for me, you know, try to find out who this guy was. And so I was doing—I did that for several years in the late ‘80s. And I had found the magazine through finding Malcolm Beck on the cover.
01:04:40
I said this man from San Antonio with—on a pile of compost. And so I went and found Malcolm Beck and he had a farm, big organic farm. He had a little health food store in the front as you came in the—drove up into the area. There was a health food store there that sold his produce. And that pile of compost was there too. And a lot of folks, including myself, would go out there and, of course, it was fine to good—get some good organic produce, but that compost looked appealing. And Malcolm found that more people wanted that compost than squash.
01:05:18
And so he started selling the compost. And that’s how his composting business grew. He continued to grow vegetables and all, but he was experimenting then. Now how much compost we grow how many tomatoes versus a little bit and then a large amount. He did all this experimenting and with other plants too. He would introduce peaches that not—were not known around here and we’d try them out. I did the same thing at my store. Rodale Press would send me seeds to see if they worked in this area.
01:05:52
The biggest problem with that was, over there, they start their tomatoes in April or May. Over here, we’re harvesting at that time. So when they sent me seeds at that time, I never could match that part of the East Coast. On occasion, there were some, but we did a lot of that and we found that this timing thing was just way off. So I met Malcolm. I had that Amazon Potting Soil thing still going. I needed compost. So I started getting compost from Malcolm in a little trailer. And we grew that little business out.
01:06:34
And finally, after I was selling enough, Malcolm said to me, “Why don’t we merge our businesses? You—you can come on with me and we’ll work together.” And he had a potting soil. I had a potting soil. And I said, “Malcolm, I can’t do it unless you get rid of that potting soil formula and you take mine and I’ll join you.” And he did because his was cedar flakes and these other things that, as a farmer and not a container gardener, he was making it work but they weren’t as good as what I had put together using his compost.

DT: So—so you—one of your main lines is—was more container growing while Malcolm was more soil, you know, row crops?

01:07:17
JD: That’s because of the house plant thing. You know, we were—we were doing that. That’s where I learned in the beginning everything. So that’s all container gardening at the time. But while working at the Jungle Store, I mentioned going to George Altgelt’s and Meg’s house seeing their big vegetable garden, also grown organically. So I started—now I said there was a bigger picture forming now, that you were able to grow food organically, an abundance of food—nice, healthy food in a soil rich with organic matter and minerals.
01:07:50
That was exciting to see that and to know that I could do that too. So they got me going in that direction also by going to their place and it wasn’t so much the business. But working with Malcolm and getting the soil blends agreeable, he wasn’t outside of San Antonio with his product line. It was a small one—bagged compost, the potting soil, maybe something else—mulch. And so when you—so I was on the radio at the time. I had just started. And, in order to—it just happened this way—that when I would talk about the potting soil on the air, people would go looking for it, but it wasn’t in too many places.
01:08:45
And I had been to many of the places saying, “Here, I’ll give you a bag and you can try it out.” And it was, “No, I’m not interested in it.” So that happened. And I said, you know, on the air about this wonderful mix and people started going into their favorite nursery looking for it and the nurseries that didn’t carry it, called me and said, “We want you to give us some of this” because the dollars kept walking back out the door when they were looking for this product. And so that’s how it got into the nurseries. And Malcolm saw that and he wanted his product line in there.
01:09:20
We changed out and I started distributing the Gardenville Potting Soil and the compost. You know, we worked on—on that kind of stuff. It was better that way because if you go into a store with one product and they say no, you have to leave. You can’t say well I also have this, but, you know, if you only had one, then it was bye-bye, back to the van. And so that merger really helped for me to switch on the air to say I had these Gardenville products now and you can find them.

DT: What were you calling your store now?

01:09:58
JD: Well, I was still de—blending and distributing at a place in—after the Shady Lane store, I started looking for a bigger place all around the area. And out highway 290 and 71 is this old rock store, a two-story building that’s a pizza place now. And so they had a little produce stand inside and assortment of little businesses. And there was a Trudy’s Restaurant across the street. And Malcolm and I were sitting in there one day in the window and—well let me back up a second. When I was looking for a place, I saw a stable in the back of that place.
01:10:46
It had been there since the late 1800s. And so the stable was still up back there. So I go to the owner, James White—he owns the Broken Smoke—that was part of the Patton Ranch, the family ranch. And it was a source of food and other products for ranchers or it was the stop on your way to Fredericksburg from Austin. You’re already gone way out of town when you got there. So I rented the stable from him in the back. I mean, I got started like baby Jesus, just in this stable. And then it outgrew that fr—with the distribution.
01:11:23
And so I got a little building, a portable building next to it. The market, at that time, had blood meal and cottonseed meal in little bags and several other products. And so I put shelves in that little portable building and I’d put the blood meal here and the cottonseed. And there was a gap between them—the cottonseed mill and then the other—there weren’t a lot of organic gardening products. But there were some out there that were traditional. And so I got those and started the business. And then I kept reading the magazines and there was a company called Maxicrop out of Arlington Heights, Illinois.
01:12:01
They sold seaweed in a concentrate. Well I had read about seaweed from Dr. T. L. Sands’ research at I think Cornell. Showed me a bunch of really nice stuff that it did. So I started bringing in the seaweed. And I was starting to fill the gaps in there with products that I would research and then bring in. And pretty soon, I had a good little place to go to for the different things that one might need, whether it was rock phosphate or blood meal or an assort—bone meal, all of these things.
01:12:34
And the turning point in the world of organics, the one that got it really going was a company called Safer. And Safer made an insecticidal soap that, when sprayed onto aphids and other insects, would kill them, get rid of them. You know, I missed an opportunity there. Had I known that you could put soap in a bottle and sell it, I would have started doing that early on. But I didn’t. It was always one of those suggestions. Well take a couple tablespoons, put it in a gallon. It was so obvious that you could just use a little bit of a commercial liquid soap to do that.
01:13:15
And then they made that one and they—I could put it on the shelf, ready to use. You didn’t have to blend it. And so when that happened, more households were able to use it with ease. Didn’t have to blend things up. You know, early on, we would try to do botanicals, in other words, diseases that—th—which exist today like bacillus thuringiensis, a disease of the wor—caterpillars.
01:13:45
And we would try to come up with—let’s say grub worms. You collect a bunch of grub worms hoping that one of them was sick and you would put them in—I don’t—where—a blender and you’d grind them all up and make a liquid out of them, let it sit for a couple of days, hoping that the disease would spread through that. Then you spray the lawn and you have a disease that killed grub worms. And we were—we’re doing botanicals but we were doing them in our little kitchens. We had to have two blenders, one for doing that, and one for smoothies.
01:14:23
And you didn’t want to mix the two up. But we did, I mean, whether it was grasshoppers or things, we were trying to learn. We instinctively knew that something like that would work. Well now the diseases of grasshoppers are available in bags and you spray them out there or spread them and it works. All of these things were homemade ideas. I read a lot of them in—in the Organic Gardening magazine.

DT: So you were selling and experimenting pretty much at the same time.

01:14:55
JD: Yeah.

DT: Trying to develop new products and then sell them in turn.

01:14:59
JD: Trying to find what was missing in those gaps.

DT: Filling up your shelves.

01:15:03
JD: Well not so much—well the gaps in that, but the gaps in—related to—well how do I control grub worms. And so we tried to invent, create what that was, or, like I said the grasshoppers, things of that nature. Well now, for grasshoppers, there’s a product called nosema locustae, which is—there are different brand names—but it is a disease of grasshoppers that, when put out there, they would get sick from it. They di—they do. And they cannibalize each other continuing to spread it through the area, you know.
01:15:45
There were things like that that we were thinking about, but never had the science but we had the instinct to do it.

DT: Well was the—were some of the ideas coming from academics or were they coming from other amateur growers or farmers?

01:16:03
JD: On—on the ground research, you know, on the ground thinking. There were some thinkers at the time. During that period, there were a lot of people—I mean, before that really—that, after the war, there were so many patents made, there were so many creative people. And part of that was that world of organic gardening and farming. There weren’t a lot of chemicals until after the war. They had so much gas left over—toxic gases—that they would use, that they converted them into products that the homeowner could have.
01:16:37
Of course, it was from the chemical world. Malathion was a nerve gas. If you ever sprayed a roach with it, they would lay on their back and do this [waving arms] as the synapsis in their nervous system would short out, you know. So they converted a lot of those war chemicals into household pesticides. But there were also this other group who felt different, the Rachel Carson side of thinking that would study and—and come up with just—like these inventors and these patent guys, with their formulas that they said this is—this is something worth trying.
01:17:18
And so we all picked up on that through word of mouth or in the magazines.

DT: So—so I’m—I’m interested from the story of the two blenders of, you know, the smoothie blender and then the one where you were working with infected grub room—worms and crickets and grasshoppers and—and that there was this sort of kitchen scale investigation [inaudible 01:17:44] biological controls while, meanwhile, there’s the USDA and Texas Department of Agriculture that was developing in concert with chemical companies, these other solutions that were a very different track. And I was curious how that division came about and how do you explore these more natural solutions?

01:18:05
JD: Don’t bring up the extension service. They were so against us. They spent time writing articles—if you believe these guys, you’re going to starve, you know, things of that nature. Of course, lot of their money came from chemical companies, you know, when a new lab needed to be built, they stepped up and bought the new lab. And the extension agents then went out and were the disciples and promoted it everywhere. It was that business. It was that who—whole industry right there. I even think that some of those extension agents were closet organic gardeners.
01:18:41
They weren’t going to spray that on their stuff, but they weren’t going to talk about organics either, although the new ones—this generation—that the—that’s the old guard—the new ones are pretty well balanced. They can have both of the conversations with you. That’s pretty neat. I used to be mad at the extension service because of those things they said to use Dursban in the, let’s say the tomato garden or something, I went, “Oh my God, listen to these guys. You know, this is horrible stuff and they’re saying to spray it.”
01:19:13
And if you—and if you’d use soap, they’d laugh, you know, in the garden. But we knew it washed off the exoskeleton of insects and caused them to dry out just like soap does. But they didn’t want to recognize that because there was no money coming in anyway. Even if it worked, there was no money coming in for that. They had to do it. But they were mean about it too, you know, in a—in a way—in—in attacking us for saying things that, you know, the blender with the grub worms in it, you know, that stuff, they went [hands over face].
01:19:45
Universities have a different way of the research on these things. And we were—I was doing it in the university of my backyard is the best way I can say it. But I’m just one of many people. I’m not even—I’ve never invented anything. I’ve never created anything, but I’ve followed along and used the practices at least and developed things that worked for me better. So—but an example of this whole process is in—early in the last century in Japan, the silk industry was in trouble because a worm—I—I’m sorry—a caterpillar was eating the silk and doing a lot of damage and they couldn’t catch up with it.

01:20:34
But finally, the scientists of the time discovered that the caterpillar that was doing it had a disease—a bacterial disease—that we know today as bacillus thuringiensis or BT for many folks who don’t necessarily use a brand name. There are many. And so when that was figured out and they used it on them, they got control of the caterpillar problem and the silk industry went right back into operation easily. Well that product should have made its way to the market but it didn’t. And it was years later that it was brought back up as one of these biological controls and there’s probably a reason that it didn’t.
01:21:17
It was probably kept away. But that is a good example of this whole idea that we were practicing. How do we use something that is n—n—part of that insect’s life that is detrimental to them in our control of other problems? And they were very insect specific. It wouldn’t hurt the ladybugs or the green lacewings or the praying mantis. They’re not affected by the disease of a grub worm or a grasshopper. That was an important part of this whole deal because they’re—you could use natural products and kill all of them.
01:21:57
So we were always looking for that insect specific way of going about managing the problems.

DT: Can you give us some other examples of natural controls for insects that might be a—a problem in the garden?

01:22:13
JD: Let me go back to that yard where the gardener was throwing dirt up on the roses. At one time when the earth was covered with water, there were diatoms in the water and they settled everywhere on the planet. And when you see a horse rolling on its back in the dust or a donkey or the chickens kind of throwing dust under their wings, so many animals that can’t communicate with each other, they do this same thing. They roll in the dirt. Well the diatoms that are there—this ca—the—they scratch up the outside of the insect’s shell.
01:22:51
And the diatomaceous earth is very drying. If you get it on your hands, it just takes the oil out of them. Your hands dry if you’re working on it every much. And that’s what it does on the insects, the parasites on the animals. It scratches him up and it causes him to dry out. Work in the garden all day and you’ll find that your hands—when you’re working in the soil, get extremely dry. Most gardeners have to put a little lotion on later. So there’s an example of something that the indigenous people knew and did it and they would look and the aphids were no—gone.
01:23:28
But we took a while to do this. But, you know, the first time I heard about it was in reading an article about controlling intestinal parasites of sheep. And so they had this powder that they used. They would hold the sheep between their legs and had a method of pouring it down their throat. It was the same thing—it’s called diatomaceous earth. And, in some areas, there are large deposits of it. And so it was used in the same way to control internal parasites. And it was done periodically. Today they give it to horses, fine horses, two percent of their daily rations—to dogs and cats.
01:24:11
If you’re looking for a natural way to control parasites, you put some of that in there. So there’s an example, I think, of a product that is now on the market but was—I mean, animals were doing it before other—I bet you the indigenous people saw the animals doing that and all different kinds of animals and started thinking about this—what was going on or analyzing it in some way. But as we progressed, we found that the D.E. is silica and it’s what these little—it’s like broken pieces of glass. There’s a couple forms of it. One is very dangerous to breathe.
01:24:52
You can get silicosis, a disease. And there’s another one that doesn’t have the sharp edges and i—and isn’t as bad at all as the sharp one. That’s the one we tend to use. That’s the food grade one. And so I had kind of read about that. And other people were now beginning to use it as an insecticide. We knew it would dry them out. We knew it was safe enough to use. And so that observation as a kid actually came around to me like going, “Ah, that’s what he was doing back then.” I mean, this was years and years later.
01:25:35
So we began—a lot of people began to look at a natural way of managing this natural world when it got out of balance. But there’s a way to keep it from getting out of balance too. And that is building a healthy soil, where the other half of the plant lives. The biological activity of the soil is one of the more important parts of the organic technique. And that’s increased by the use of compost. Compost is the secret to a healthy soil. It holds moisture in place. It helps unlock, through microbial activity, nutrients that are there.
01:26:18
You see, the microorganism—you put an organic fertilizer down there. Well it doesn’t go to work right away. The microorganisms eat first at the table and then the available nutrients are there. Now the plant can take it up. So that’s all based on biological activity. There are some organisms that fight disease down there and we increase them with the—with the compost itself. So we didn’t have to always depend on something like that extra blender. We had to depend mainly on getting a good balanced soil using plants that were well adapted, planted in the right season.

DT: I—i—is there a—a balance between nutrients, you know, nitrogen and phosphorous and potassium or is it—is the balance between bacteria and fungus?

01:27:09
JD: There are ratios.

DT: Or what—what—what are you looking for?

01:27:12
JD: There are ratios of the balance that are there.

[misc.]

01:27:42
JD: So it’s not a lack of insecticides that cause problems. It’s a plant that’s out of balance. And the insect’s job is to get rid of the weaker species. It happens with people—not eating properly, not exercising maybe. There are so many things that take you out of balance and here come the diseases and here come the colds and here come other problems. Same thing with the plants. Keep them healthy. Feed them well. The soil is the stomach of the plant. You feed the soil and it’ll feed the plant. And that’s how we look at it—a healthy soil, well adapted plants, planted in the right season.
01:28:23
Now it’s not a lack of pesticides, once again. It’s getting that balance back there. And that is one of the keys for the organic gardener to not depend on even natural products. I mean, we can wash insects off with a strong stream from a hose if they’re there. Aphids and things, you don’t really need too much to take that hose out there and wash them off with it. They’re not holding on to the plant when you come. So there are simple things like that. But it’s about the healthy soil. It’s about, you know, these companies that do soil testing, they’re very important. They’re there for a reason.
01:29:07
And they’re—the reason is it’s their road map. A lot of people keep throwing fertilizers and different things at the soil. It’s a guessing game. Throws the soil out of balance. They don’t know—they’re putting too much phosphorous where it locks up other minerals or it’s just not available and wasted. So the—the soil testing is the road map. Now the university soil testing is different than the ones in the private organizations. The university tells you how much nitrogen is there, how much phosphorous, how many other nutrients are there.
01:29:44
But the other companies like the ones that we use tell you that, but what’s available to the plant. It’s one thing to have all that there, but it’s another one for the plant to be able to access them. And that’s what some of these other companies tell us—how to make sure that those nutrients that are there, the plant can actually get to. That’s a big difference. And so that’s part of—well even commercial farming is beginning to learn about that. But that’s a road map that is created with the proper type of soil testing, telling you more about that nutrient than just that it’s there.

DT: You know, and what is the role for the—I guess the organic content of the soil? Why is that important?

01:30:33
JD: Well, it supplies those minerals that we’re talking about. It helps the plant stand up, of course. It is a—a place where the natural processes can take place, like bringing in air to the healthy soil. It can—the—can hold more water, more moisture is held in a good, healthy soil with organic matter, with rich matter. So I think that’s the role of a healthy soil. Let’s—let’s go to the forests in California and get under some of those giant, ancient trees. You’re not going to find somebody with a hose out there. There’s nobody with a shovel or a rake out there.
01:31:24
There’s nobody spraying anything out there. But if you—after you’re through crying from the awesome nature of where you stepped into, then you get down on your knees and you dig a little bit and it’s all organic matter. The leaves have taken the nutrients out of the soil into the plant and dropped them back on the soil once again. And there’s this perfect cycle right there. And then moisture is held better. The nutrients are more available because of the microbial activity of all these leaves. And there’s nothing better than a good leaf compost.
01:32:01
So that’s what you’re doing at home. You know, the oak trees ar—around here, for example, they shouldn’t need all of the care, other than the maintenance of dead branches and all that they get because we break the cycle. We don’t leave the leaves there. We have broken the cycle of the plant feeding itself, enriching the soil, increasing the organic matter, increasing this moisture retention, for cosmetic reasons. So we take them, we bag them, we put them in—on the corner Sunday evening, and we used to drive by in a little pickup and grab those bags because they were there.
01:32:41
It’s like it said free fertilizer on the side of the bag. So we would do that here in Austin. But they break the cycle when they do that. It’s not supposed to be that way. Many folks are very wise these days and have mulching mowers and the smaller blades—the smaller particles of leaves fall through the blades of grass onto the ground where they belong. The smaller the blade is—or the—the piece of organic matter is, the microorganisms can break it down more quickly and change it into this humus. So that is one way to solve that cosmetic problem and still build a healthy soil.

DT: You—you mentioned humus. Can you help us understand what that is?

01:33:27
JD: Basically it’s I think the organic matter in the soil that holds the nutrients and other minerals in place and moisture. And this can be mined sometimes and many times. And it’s sold as one of those products. And it comes out of ancient deposits of trees. You can see the—in the soil line these green areas that have this ancient plant material there that can—it’s a very highly concentrated composted material. No—now it’s really concentrated. And that can be applied out there in a powdered form or in a liquid form.
01:34:09
And this now builds the healthier soil that we’re talking about. So that’s basically the role that it plays out there. It changes those leaves into a rich humus, which is ending up being a compost. That forest does exactly that. The leaves break down there making a sponge out of it, increasing the availability of these nutrients by the microorganisms that you keep feeding every year down there. So th—that study of nature, that observation right there is one to take home. Now you’ve got a balance beginning to be in your yard too.
01:34:55
And when you reach that balance, there’ll be much less wo—water’s going to be scarce before too long. One of these years, it’ll be re—very scarce. It has been and it will be again. So whatever water lands on your property, you do not want it to leave. Water should not leave your property. And so you want that sponge-like condition all over the place, whether it’s the lawn or under the trees, or compost that you make in your backyard—and we—and we’ll get to that one—to keep nutrients and moisture on your land.
01:35:32
You’ve got to keep it on the land where it belongs, where it fell. So compost, these days, is commercial. It has grown—many of us have talked about it for many years and many people have learned about it and buy it. And from Malcolm Beck making his compost out of different types of manures and leaves and all, very find little product, to today’s composting. Today they take in a lot of waste material, whether it’s from construction companies or things like that. It might have some Masonite board in there that was ground up ca—I know that because I found it in there.
01:36:13
And it’s not the same like the manures and the leaves. It really isn’t. And they’re selling so much of it so fast that they don’t finish it. Unfinished compost smells like ammonia. It’s hot. You put your hand in there and it’s hot as can be. Malcolm Beck cooked a turkey in there one Thanksgiving. Wrapped it up mu—multiple times, stuck it into the compost pile, let it cook for I don’t know how many hours, took it out, and he had a cooked turkey entirely, showing how hot it gets in there. Well these guys, many of them, not all of them, sell it before it’s finished.
01:36:56
And the carbon material, the wood type leaves in there depends on a certain amount of nitrogen, the food scraps, to break down. Well when it’s sold hot and it’s not finished yet, it continues to use that nitrogen. So when you plant it up, the nitrogen is not quite available to the plant yet. It’s still being used to break it down. And so there is a failure to thrive with some of the plants that go in there because the nitrogen is just being held up. So the little transplants don’t do all that well sometimes. It should smell like earth. It should be cool to the touch. That’s good compost.
01:37:43
So if somebody was going to buy some bulk compost these days, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go see it to get a smell of it before it comes to your house and it’s in your yard and you go, “I don’t like this” and it’s too bad, it’s in your yard and there’s no tractor to load it back on the truck. Lot of people don’t do that but they should. But the very best compost of them all is the one you make at home. You know what’s in it. You’re recycling, you’re keeping organic matter at your house.
01:38:19
You’re protecting the landfill space of which it becomes—there’s less and less of it, but you can make one of the richest composts around at home. Let me see. I’m going to step right down here for a second. I brought some of my compost out of my pile a little bit earlier. It’s soil again. And these were tomatoes and peppers and squash and leaves of some kinds, you know, anything organic, I would put in there. Look what happens over a small amount of time. The microorganisms in there break that down back into what it was in the ground, and that is nutrients and minerals have come up and built the leaves and now they’re broken back down into the earth that they were.

DT: Dust to the dust.

01:39:16
JD: That’s right. And so look at this. This is prettier than anything you can buy.

DT: And how long did that process take?

01:39:25
JD: Well, this particular one, maybe four or five months. I—I use a three bin method. And so I have one compost bin where we’re putting stuff in every day. And if you go in there and you don’t have any food scraps for it, you can hear when you walk by, “Feed me,” and so you have to take something as a donation to the compost pile. And it breaks it down in a couple of weeks. You begin to see it—you—the banana peels are disappearing very quickly. They’re breaking down fast because there’s so much life in the soil.
01:40:06
They’re—they’re waiting—feed me—and so that they can break it down more quickly. Then, from that pile, the newer stuff that was there gets into the next pile over here. That’s turning it. You need air. A healthy soil has air. And so you turn it to get the air in there. You turn it to get the material that was on the outer edge, not in the middle—in the middle for a while. So this turning process does that, blends it back up. It actually heats it back up too. This is pretty much of a pasteurized medium right here. It gets hot. And so it’s like a fire that’s going out and you blow on it and it flares back up.
01:40:54
Well this compost is doing the same thing. It’s cooling down now, but when I turn it, it heats back up, tends to pasteurize any pathogens that might have been in there. And so we start on the other one again. And on the wires and everything else, there’s a little bit of compost. That’s the inoculant. It doesn’t take much. It’s like sour dough. And so that starts cooking pretty fast again. So now this one, it’s finishing off. It’s been turned in the second pile. Now it’s going through a little bit of the process again, but what was in the original pile like that now beco—it’s—it’s the same amount just smaller, is being broken down.
01:41:34
And so this—we—we start getting this guy pretty full again and it’s time to take that one into the last bin. And, as this one’s ready, now it goes in—so it’s this combination of things. And that last one is when you begin to use it. I have a screen that I put over mine. It’s a hardware cloth and a 2×4 frame that sits on the wheel barrow. So I will take that last one, pour it into that. If there are little chunks of things that didn’t break down, a corn cob, it stays on the screen. Maybe there’s a rock in there from some source. And so then it’s ready to use. It’s nice, earthy, it smells good.
01:42:15
You’ve got a tremendous compost there. You know what’s in it. You don’t know what’s in the other. And so it’s so good. It doesn’t leave the property. It’s like in the forest, once again. It stays under the trees there except you’re bringing in food so it goes back to what it should be. We’ve taken it way far from the farm to our house and we’re making that which should have been left out there—we’re taking that soil in the form of a plant and then breaking it back down into soil. Unfortunately, it’s coming from that farm. So they depend on more chemicals to keep it going.
01:42:56
They’re losing that ability to rebuild a healthy soil, but we do it at home. Any chemicals that might have been on some of these—you buy organic but you want to get—if you don’t want GMOs in your—your life or in your food, you buy organic. They’re not allowed in that. That’s just the simple way to control that if you are concerned about it. And so this is—this is as pure and organic product as you can get. This is nature at work.
01:43:29
Now we’re down to the basics of nature and that is building a healthy soil once again, even though you brought it in from elsewhere, any chemical residual that might have been on there is broken down through the biological activity once again. So that’s why I say there’s nothing better than homemade compost. It doesn’t leave—you want to be a conservationist, don’t let your organic matter leave the house, nor the water, and then you spread that through the city and you’ve made a big difference in that city.

DT: You know, I’m—I’m struck that—that you ran the Natural Gardener Store for many years and—and, you know, also were selling Lady Bug natural brands and—and, you know, having a business, selling products and services but—but that a lot of your role through life has been as an educator. And, you know, you mentioned the radio so—show that you were on. But I was wondering if you could also talk about the—the PBS TV program that you ran, New Gardener and—and some of the other programs that you had on TV. And what—what—what was the [overlapping conversation]?

01:44:38
JD: Let me—let me get past one more little hump here and then we’ll…

DT: Yes, please.

01:44:41
JD: We’ll go over there into teaching. This was all about teaching too. And so we were in the old Rock Store. Once we moved out of the stable into a little portable building, the Rock Store became available. And so we moved into that. Beautiful place. Wonderful place to—an honor to be working out of that. But I lived over here and I drove by this piece of property where my store is now all the time to get to the Rock Store. I drove by that place and never saw it, even though I drove by it all the time.
01:45:11
And an auction sign came up one day when the savings and loans were cratering and the government had taken back properties. And that auction sign was there. And I called the real estate guy, said, “What are you—how does this work?” He said, “You write them a letter. You tell them what you want to give them and that’s it.” So I figured out what I was paying. I said, “I—maybe with this much money, I can balance it and still pay this and not get in trouble.” So I put a figure on there, sent it in.
01:45:39
And the biggest blessing in my life came when I got that letter back and said, “You’ve got this property.” Eight acres. Now this was the chance to teach. I fixed the building up that was there—it was a house—and rebuilt it. It had pretty much cratered. If the city had seen it, they would have had me take it down, but we built it back up. And the first thing I did was go build a garden because I wanted the extension service to come out and put their hand in the soil and see the vegetables doing very well and producing quite a bit and showing that their statement that you can’t feed the world this way was incorrect.
01:46:20
You can feed the world this way. And that was part of the beginning of educating. That was the opportunity to start teaching [inaudible 01:46:31] where you can come out and see it yourself, whether it was landscape material, which we’ve done quite a bit—we use natives a lot—or the vegetable garden—we have a big herb garden, and several other display gardens out there—big butterfly garden, all grown organically so that you can come experience these things and see the beauty of it and go, “That’s what I want.” And so—so that’s one of the steps.
01:47:00
And writing for Organic Gardening magazine, that was another one of those steps, being on the air, the break that I got from Paul Pryor, being on his show and then ending up with a position on the actual garden show because the lady quit. That was it. And so that was a chance to educate more people than a group that came to them—twenty people that came to a meeting, which I will go talk to. I’ll go talk to five people or five hundred people. It doesn’t make any difference. I know the subject a bit. So this was the opportunity to show this at work.
01:47:44
This was the opportunity to show the public this. This was the connection between the radio show and gardening. Now you could see it. Otherwise, I could just talk about it, but now we could see it. That was a good lesson. People, classes, children, others came out there to see what we were doing. The city has a pesticide program. They have several programs and one of them is that you have to be registered to use pesticides. Well I was invited down to speak to them also and talk to them about—they call it IPM. I threw in the organic technique and all of the different problems that they run into.
01:48:34
This is the people who work in the business around town doing maintenance or the city themselves or whatever and have a chance to talk to them now because now I’m the—the go-to guy once again. And I’m down there talking to these people so that’s part of the education. And then these other great opportunities that came along like Central Texas Gardener, KXAN coming to me. I was on the very first morning show on KXAN with a guy named Russ Ray and some other hosts, sitting at a round table talking about organic gardening.
01:49:11
Now they come out, now they tape every weekend, you know, and so that was a great opportunity. You know, at first it started with three minutes and then they gave me two minutes, but I can do a lot in two minutes. It’s usually the tip of the week.

DT: And what—what are some of the topics that you might talk about on your TV show?

01:49:30
JD: Oh, one of them might be the use of compost. How to use it properly, how to use it on top of the soil and how to blend it into the top four inches. Compost never goes into the bottom of the hole. In nature, that doesn’t happen. It only builds on top. So you—people tell me oh I’m going to fill this up with some composted soil. No, it goes anaerobic down there and becomes a problem. It goes on the top. That was just now said in less than a minute. And so I now have another minute to kind of talk some more about the same topic and maybe even slower. That’s a hint.
01:50:10
The—another hint might be in—relating to that—would be when you’re digging a hole, put the top four inches of soil over here and put what’s in the bottom of the hole over here—excuse me—because I want them to go back into where they came out. So once the plant’s in there, we take that, put it back in the bottom of the hole, and then put on what—the different organisms, the ones that are able to tolerate less oxygen live down there. And the ones that live in the open, airy, healthy soil on top—not that the other one’s not healthy—are a different type of organism.
01:50:55
So we want to put them back the way they belong. Do we talk about that in landscaping? No, not really, but it makes sense once you hear about it. That’s, once again, like Malcolm Beck did so much of the observation of nature. Organic matter was never in the bottom of the hole. It couldn’t get down there except in a landslide. Now that could change things, but that’s one of the few ways I know of it actually happening. So that’s a lesson. Or, oh, the plant of the week, you know, something like that with companion plants maybe.
01:51:33
Spinach does very well with strawberries. We plant both of those at this time of the year. So leave space between the spinach for the strawberry plants. They’ll grow. You’ll harvest. You’ll be harvesting spinach too. And those are great companions in the garden.

DT: What makes them good companions?

01:51:50
JD: Part of it’s space, I think, that you can use the space properly. I don’t know of some other element that is being sent out by one of the plants to control insects or disease in that case, but there are many others that seem to have that property. So hints on planting, you know, what works well together. When it’s time to stop trying to grow—like you can’t keep the strawberries through the summer here. Some people do it. You—you can make a statement like that, a bunch of people would call me and say, “I do,” but overall, it’s too hot. They don’t produce anymore.
01:52:32
It’s taking up good garden space. So I say, “Take it out and put something else in there. Put some chard in there. Put something that is growing and producing instead of waiting till fall when the—the strawberries begin to grow again.” They have little babies and those can be planted in the fall, but all of that’s extra work. So mo—the hint is take them out of there. Some plants are beginning to flower. They bolt is what it’s called. If—you can describe that—if you’re—if your broccoli is starting to do this and the flower spike’s coming out, it’s pretty much over.
01:53:10
Take it out of there and let’s put the next crop in there. How to plant a tomato properly in the wintertime. Many people use different protective devices—you see you got to—you got to plant tomatoes early here because once it gets hot, they don’t get pollinated very easily. So there’s a rush to get that—to be the first guy on the block with the tomato means you got to get that early start. So we might show that you dig a hole in the ground, plant the tomato down in the hole.
01:53:42
The warmth of the earth around it as it grows protects it during that cool period, gives it the warmth it needs—it’s a tropical plant—gi—gives it the warmth it needs to grow vigorously through the cold. You can put a little plate on top of it on a cold night. Finally it begins to emerge and it’s near the time that it’s—the frosts are somewhat over. Tomatoes are the only one of these plants that produces roots all along the stem so it makes it that much hardier. But that’s a little hint. You can show that in a couple of minutes. You can have—it’s like Martha Stewart.
01:54:16
You have the hole already prepared. You don’t dig it when the camera goes on. But—so that’s an example of a hint.

DT: Did—did you have people asking for hints about sort of new themes in gardening, maybe about how to make a more drought tolerant xeric kind of garden or how to raise a butterfly garden, something that may not have been done in the past?

01:54:41
JD: I think, like I said earlier, and—and want to reemphasize, I—I use information from others. I haven’t developed anything. I’ve learned the size of plants and how big it’s going to be and when to plant it and things like that. But to say that I’ve come up with something unique, not really. But in the area of the butterfly garden, all of the plants in there are either nectar plants or host plants for the butterflies. And there are different types. The monarchs are coming through. And they have cer—eupatoriums that they like. These are native plants that were here in the early migrations.
01:55:22
So we keep them instead of introducing a whole bunch of new ones, although we do that too, we try to keep what was their historical food source. And so that’s an example, the eupatorium your boneset is another name for it—available to them and the monarchs come in. If you come into our butterfly garden, there’s—they’re focused on those plants. You can hardly see the plant anymore. And they’re—they’re in the rest of the garden, but not like that one that was here historically.
01:55:53
So when it gets down to it and you want to plant just a few for your butterfly garden, that’s one of the main ones right there, but you also have to have the other ones where they can feed, lay their eggs, things like that. One of the things that I think I should say now because I—I like to point this one out—don’t put your butterfly garden near the street. Don’t put the butterfly plants on the curb down there. Don’t make that a beautiful butterfly garden because the cars and the trucks are coming through there. You want to see monarchs, go look on the radiators, you know.
01:56:28
I don’t want to see that. And so I encourage them to put them further up into the yard, in the backyard or something, and leave the front alone. Put some other color out there. That’s the devil—that’s the hell strip out on the—between the sidewalk and the—and the—and the road. It’s a hard place to grow. But for—for the sake of the butterflies, let’s put it further away from the road itself.

DT: So—so we’ve talked about educating people and selling products and services that—that relate to organic and natural gardening. Could you talk a little bit about producing all these products? I think Lady Bug was one business that you started to work with these [overlapping conversation].

01:57:14
JD: What I was finding out was that the quality of the other products out there weren’t what I thought they should be. And without running them down, I decided, okay, I can do better than that and started putting formulas together like one I called Revitalizer and another one called the Sylvan. Sylvan is of the forest—Sylvester. And so I made a special blend that you would find like on the forest floor. Revitalizer was a blend of several types of compost with different organisms, that if you used it on the tree, it had the right organisms.
01:57:49
If you used it in the vegetable garden, in other words, it was a multi-purpose—I wanted to cover all the bases with that one so that the gardener would be successful. And the liquid fertilizer, the John’s Recipe, for example, I used to—on the air I’d say, “Now get yourself some fishing emulsion and get a little seaweed. Get some humates and put some” and I would go down the list. And I had this thought, and other people have mentioned it to me, that you walk out of there with all these bottles. And one day I said, “Wait a minute. That’s not right.
01:58:20
Let me put it all together for them,” and that’s what the recipe is. John’s Recipe was that and you didn’t have to buy all that stuff and it was premixed and all. That’s how that one came about. So the idea of Lady Bug brand was to bring a better quality product to the market and have the gardener be more successful. At my store, the Natural Gardener, if you go into the back room—I call it the Garden Pharmacy—you may bring in a problem plant, a leaf, whatever it is. You go over to the pharmacy desk. I’ve got two microscopes there.
01:58:57
And you can—we can put the leaf or whatever it is under that. We might show that the aphids are being parasitized already and we see some dry ones and some live ones. We tell the customer, “Well you don’t need to do anything.” I don’t have to sell something every time somebody walks in. I don’t have to reach back and do that. They respect us more when we don’t do that. And we go into the microscope, we show them the—the dead ones and we say, “Somebo—something is parasitizing these already. Don’t spray,” because when you kill the beneficial insect, you inherit their job.
01:59:30
Skip Richter, one of the extension agents mentioned that one time and I’ve never forgotten it. It’s—it’s a very important statement. And so we analyze disease, brown patch on lawns which is common take all, but we can look at it under the microscope and make darn sure that what we’re talking about is there, that they brought us a sample of something, I want to make sure that we identify it. Any of the staff can use those things. And so when we give them a product, it does the job. We got the right disease or insect. We have the right product.
02:00:07
But if we’re guessing at it and it doesn’t work, I just lost an organic gardener possibly. I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want them to lose faith in what we’re trying to talk about and do successfully and preach maybe. Now there isn’t the battle that there used to be. The battle was that some folks had learned through extension service and all of these things about the use of these chemicals that were very potent, but they also heard from people like me and others, Malcolm Beck, and others about another way of doing things.
02:00:44
And as they practiced them, they found out that they were successful, that they had as pretty a yard as they had before or maybe even bet—better. So they then wanted to protect their children from these chemical exposures and they used more organic products around them. Well they grew up and now they had the millennials, I guess. And they don’t know anything about Dursban or Malathion; they don’t even know those words. We now have organic gardeners from birth. This is a wonderful process.
02:01:19
This is an evolution once again in this whole industry, whether we have the right products for the problem, or we have these young gardeners coming along who know what to ask for or—or where to go. People hear about us and they come over there. People go by five nurseries or more to get to our place. They could have stopped anywhere, but they know we’re teaching. When they come in sometimes, they don’t have to get anything and—and they’ll say tha—they’ll say may—maybe thank you and I’ll say that’s why you came out here.
02:01:52
You didn’t need anything except for somebody to tell you everything’s okay. Don’t worry about it. That is—really is what’s happening right now except for, in my case after all these years, a more spiritual approach to this, new respect for the land. The—the environment around the plant sometimes I can see better than just oh, there’s a bunch of broccoli out there. I know—I thank a plant when I harvest it. I think that the only difference between us is I can get up and go get a drink of water, but they can’t, but the rest of it is that—tree huggers are a good example of getting something from the plant.
02:02:37
They believe that that plant gives them something back and they give something to it and it’s true. The plants recognize us. There’s some research that was done by a guy that was—he spent his whole life as a lie detector operator. Well he had two philodendrons, I think it was, and he put the lie detector on this one and he took a match to that other one. And boy this thing just registered. It felt that. So he leaves the room. He’s not there for a while. And when he comes back into the room, that one registers again. It recognized him coming back into the room.
02:03:14
You know, that’s the proof—that’s the evidence that when I harvest something, I say thank you for giving me this nutrient that you have for us. I do that a lot. I’ve also learned about why do they call us tree huggers, what’s the negative part? They call us that in a negative way. We’re not doing anything. The Treaty Oak was a good example of people coming from all over poisoned with enough herbicide to kill eight trees poured on there because of one of these curanderos giving instructions to—if you go and you kill that tree right there, she will come back to you.
02:03:56
Well, she didn’t come back because he was in jail, but everybody came out there and they sent crystals and letters and all this love came to that tree as part of the healing process. I believe that that played a huge role in the healing of a tree that was poisoned—oh, horribly poisoned. It should have died but it didn’t. Lots of other work took place. I was part of the analyzing of what—what’s wrong with this tree, you know, I’m going out there. But it was those kids and adults that came around there and—and put a lot of energy into it. It happens in my garden at—at the store.
02:04:39
I’ll be out there and not everybody recognizes me—may—maybe if I talk, they might—but otherwise. And so I’ve stood out there and I hear them, “Honey, I love this garden. I want a garden just like this one at home.” “Okay. We’ll—let’s do one.” And somebody else will come out and say, “Isn’t this lovely? This is a beautiful place. I love a garden like this. This is what we should have been doing.” And then again—some other time somebody else expresses the love of the garden. That’s going into that garden. I was looking for the missing ingredient one time.
02:05:13
I was saying we got good compost, we got good fertilizers, I got great gardeners out here. Th—there’s something I’m not seeing. And being at my store at night—it’s a very quiet, peaceful time to think. And one night it occurred to me, ah, that’s the missing ingredient…love. Not the missing—that’s the other ingredient. People are walking out there and sending their love into the garden, a living garden. The plants are alive in there and the—that’s the secret ingredient that I’ve discovered over time. A little bit of love goes a long way when it’s in a garden.
02:05:52
The other important thing in the garden is your shadow. If you don’t see your shadow out there, you’re not in the garden and you’re not doing the work you’re supposed to be doing and so other things happened out there that you didn’t expect. So an important part of that healthy garden is your shadow being with you out there. There’s a spiritual nature to all of these things—to trees. Many trees are at churches all around the country. Adam and Eve were at a tree in the very beginning. But the Hebrews, before that, talked about the same thing before Adam and Eve.
02:06:27
And there was—Odan meant earth, from what I understand, and Eva meant spirit. And so this kind of evolved into the Adam and Eve story. But there are churches all over. New—in Egypt, when you went to the next world, you passed through two sycamores and Isis and I think Hatch and Nut were in these trees and they gave you what you needed to go to the next world. The Shinko religion in Japan also—they’ve got their churches and all their temples, but the forest is set aside also for them. That is another place for prayer.

02:07:13
You know, and there were several forests saved in the 1700s and before that in India. When they were going to add additions to the palace by going out and harvesting trees, well this one group, the earliest of the environmentalists were not meat eaters. They didn’t cut down trees unnecessarily. They took care of the environment. And so they were going to come out and harvest their trees again to build on the palace. These people went out there and wrapped themselves around the trees. Well 360 of them were killed because of them.
02:07:51
That’s the first—I was looking backwards from where does tree hugger come from and I followed it backwards until I found that one, but it was an unsuccessful one. But it happened again in the last century when many of us, not myself so much, but were going to India to find our guru, to find ourselves. And earlier than that, m—m—maybe 1960, right around that time, the same thing happened about trees being harvested.
02:08:25
And so the Shinko went out there—both of these movements have been led by women—and so they went out there and hugged—grabbed the trees and they protected them and they weren’t harvested, the first successful time of hanging onto these trees and protecting them. At the UT campus, you know, they tried all—all kinds of places have tried to protect the trees. Julia Butterfly in the forest in California spent two years up there trying to teach about the redwoods and their importance.
02:08:56
And she successfully saved fifty acres of redwoods and the donation was made—a large donation was made—to the university to teach more sustainable harvesting. So it—she was successful at doing that. So there—whether it’s the Druids and the Egyptians, the Buddha received enlightenment sitting under a Ficus tree. Sat there until he was enlightened. This is what that tree provided for them. There were so many other stories like that of a spiritual nature of the trees. I think that’s why people hug the trees. They sense something beyond the wood.
02:09:40
They sense something that is given back to them from these trees. And so I believe it’s a good thing, but I guess developers and others want to get rid of the trees, have begun to call you names, and then everybody calls you that name. But—so by looking backwards, I found out that indeed it was a good thing that was happening but it got changed on us.

DT: Well from—from your experience with…

02:10:12
JD: And I’ve been taking care of the Treaty Oak now for about five years or so. The City had let it go to heck. It’s full of weeds and all kinds of stuff, Johnson grass under there because a friend of mine and I were driving down the road. He said, “I’ve never seen the Treaty Oak.” Well I turned the car around. We went right on over there. I hadn’t been there in a while. It was full of weeds, one of the top ten trees in the country not being taken care of. The City says I don’t have much money for the park so we didn’t do it. And so on the radio on Sunday morning,
02:10:44
I said on the air, “You should see the Treaty Oak. Go down there and see what kind of shape it’s in, in poor shape. It’s not being taken care of.” Monday morning, it had been mowed and was cleaned up and everything looked nice the way it should be. They heard at the City Hall somewhere that John was on the radio complaining about the maintenance. But I went down there a few days later and said, “Give it to me. I’ll take care of it, you know. I’ll go down there and do the maintenance and all. And you don’t have to worry about that and the financing.
02:11:16
I—I’ll do that.” And they said, “Well, okay, you have to sign here that you won’t use herbicide.” I said, “Okay, where do I sign?” And did that and they gave it to me for all of these years to take care of. I didn’t ever have to do much other than weed it. The tree fed itself. The leaves stayed on the ground right there. The ground was soft like a sponge down there. And so between the science of saving that tree and I think the positive, spiritual energy—you know who stepped up to the plate during that time? Ross Perot.
02:11:47
I never would have expected Ross to come up there with the money to help finance the saving of that tree. We put the soil in. When that happened, they dug all the soil and washed it out of there and I came and we brought in our soil to fill it back up. And Ross wanted to pay here and there, you know. I mean, I never would have expected it from Ross Perot, but he stepped up to the plate and did the right thing.

DT: Well speaking of doing the right thing, you’ve had a lot of experience trying to teach people about the—doing the right thing about their—the—the plants that are in their lives and soil systems that are part of their lives. I was wondering if—if you have advice for, you know, younger generations that are coming up about your attitude about conserving the natural world and—and passing on a better world?

02:12:39
JD: Stay away from the chemicals. Just start with that. Let’s say you bought a home and you have a yard, don’t go for the weed and feed with the atrazine in it. It’s hermaphroditing frogs where they’ve done the research. I mean, if you’re going to have children, you don’t want them playing, I don’t care what the bag has on the front—the dog, the kids and the happy parents—you know, it’s got atrazine in there. And, in California, it’s showing around some of the big farms to hermaphrodite the frogs. And it—and it’s water soluble. It ends up in our lakes and streams.
02:13:09
I mean, you got to protect the lakes and the streams. And it comes up—it’s—comes out of the yard, goes down the road, and ends up, in Austin especially, in the creeks and streams. The algae bloom is that runoff of nitrogen from these yards. Learn some of those things kids and you—you will be on the path of a nice balance. If dogs don’t have shoes on, they have bare feet; don’t let them run in this kind of stuff. I even—don’t even suggest the dillo dirt of the sewage sludge. I say stay away from that and I’m one of the people that started that thing.
02:13:45
But ol—al—along the way, when I kept asking for analysis of what’s in there now, I couldn’t get it. But I’d be in the hospital and some friends would be there and they’d throw the pills that were left over in the toilet. You know, lot of sick people using the bathrooms, going into that. There’s so many things being dumped into that that I don’t suggest anybody use it. You know, so there are things that seem to make logic, you know, that somebody might pick up on, be told that this is a good way to fertilize a lawn and it does grow. But what’s in it?
02:14:24
So these people should ask questions. If you can’t read the label, the chemicals that are in there, don’t get it. You should be able to read the label. So between saving the creeks and streams, protecting environment from the pets that might get in it or the birds that might drink the water going down the street, or your children getting into this mess. Those are the things that people could learn now, early on, and not put themselves in the position that they found out later on in their life that their children not growing up the way they’re supposed to be.
02:15:00
Something’s different about them. And it was that exposure when they were young to these chemicals. One last example right here because people that see this all the time. You go into some of the bigger stores and many of them have, during the season, their fertilizers outside—big pallets of fertilizers. You know what? When I see those, I think if somebody dumped all of those bags in a pile, we would be on national TV because it would be a national—oh a—a poisoning of the area.
02:15:34
On one parking lot at one of the stores, we would make national news because of all of the chemicals that are out there that are so toxic, yet they give them to us in small amounts, this is the solution that—of pollution by dilution idea, putting it out there everywhere. And now it’s claimed not to be such a problem. But if it was altogether, it would be a huge problem. And this is what’s going out into the community. I’ve tried to stop that. The lawyers always threaten.
02:16:05
We got more lawyers than the city so if they—if they stop it in your city, we will be down on them so fast you won’t know what happened to you. So the idea finally, is to be a good observer of nature, to understand what you’re seeing, to take another look at these things, to look at the beneficial insects. And the Lady Bug got her name from Our Lady because in France, the—the grape industry was having these insects on them that they could not control. So they prayed to Our Lady and then the contr—the beneficial insects came in.
02:16:46
And so they gave the name Lady Bug to them, you know. There are more beneficial insects than there are harmful insects out there, but you got to be an observer. Some of them look atrocious, but they’re the good bugs. So learning that part of it too. They’re not all bad, but if you kill the good bugs, you inherit their job.

DT: You told us this wonderful story about Treaty Oak, which is clearly a very special spot for you, a special creature for you. And—and I was wondering if you could answer a question that we often ask towards the end of an interview and that’s is—is there a favorite spot that—that you enjoy going to that gives you comfort and solace, that reminds you of why you—you work in—in this field?

02:17:45
JD: I can point at it.

DT: Please.

02:17:49
JD: It’s right there [pointing to heart]. Your favorite spot is to go to your heart and find out many things and answers to many things. So, for me, like this discovery of the spiritual nature of the trees, it came from here. But going to the forest and all and these different places are part of it. I can’t tell you the name of an—a spot with its address somewhere that I like to go to. But I do know that if you go here, the truth will be available to you. I—I think that’s it really.
02:18:29
I think that that’s where you go, you know, and learn something about—and be that observer. Study nature. That’s the answer to all of these questions is to study nature.

DT: Fair enough. Thank you so much. Do you have anything you’d like to add?

02:18:50
JD: I’ve got a Garden Center called the Natural Gardener and we do all of these things, and we have a labyrinth. If you think that you need some answers, you go into the labyrinth with a question, and then you come back out of the labyrinth with the answer. These are the subtle energies—dousing, the labyrinth, paramagnetic stones that bring energy from the cosmos. There’s so many subtle energies out there that if we studied more of them—biodynamic farming is another one of them—we would all benefit.
02:19:31
We would all benefit if we just studied these subtle energies that the planet has for us, whether they come from the cosmos or any of the oth—other places I mentioned, that’s the—the real study of nature. It—you lo—look at that too. A good example is looking up in a tree and the leaves are like this and the leaves are not covering each other. They have the wisdom to be separate so that they all get the light. But you don’t seem them on top of each other. There’s wisdom in that plant. There’s something that was created to make sure that they got all of the light that was available to them.

DT: We need to be a better student. I think that’s a good note to end on.

02:20:19
JD: We—we need to open our eyes and our heart.

DT: Thank you so much. This has been a wonderful visit.

02:20:25
JD: You’re welcome. Thank you. Good. I’m glad I was able to visit with you. I’m—I’m honored that you would come by and my house and talk this way and give me a chance to leave it for maybe my grandkids to know what their grandfather was thinking. The only question that they’re going to have is then why didn’t—why in the hell didn’t he do something about the environment when he had a chance, because, in a few years, we’re going to struggle. All of these things, all of a sudden, are going to become more and more irrelevant except for growing plants for fixing carbon in the soil.
02:21:04
That might be the one thing that helps us. More plants. So that’s the one question they’re going to have is if he was so smart, then why didn’t he do something to save the planet.

DT: I think you—you did as much as you could.

02:21:19
JD: I did what I could.

DT: All right. Good enough. Thank you.

02:21:22
JD: Thank you.

[End of Interview with John Dromgoole – November 15, 2018]