Good Growing

Chris Enroth: 00:07

Welcome to the Good Growing podcast. I am Chris Enroth, horticulture educator with the University of Illinois Extension coming at you from Macomb, Illinois, and we have got part two this week of our conversation with local foods and small farms educator, Zach Grant. He is located up in Southern Cook County, so the kind of the South Suburban Cook County. And we continue our conversation about dealing with soil contamination. Zach gets into the details of how he the the many different ways that you can go about cap and fill where we can kind of grow outside or on top of that contaminated soil.

Chris Enroth: 00:41

And then we dive into the importance of soil testing and the often overuse of compost. There is a lot of great information packed in today's show. So without further ado, enjoy.

Ken Johnson: 00:55

Alright. So we we've we've kind of mentioned this quite a bit, but, you know, because so because of soil contamination, a lot of times in urban soils, we're gonna be growing things differently, particularly edible crops because of that lead concern. And you've mentioned that that cap and fill. So when you're capping that, you're putting something down over that that contaminated potentially contaminated soil or less than ideal soils to grow in. Are you just using like a regular weed fabric, you know, plastic, or are you using some kind of special fabric when you're doing that?

Zack Grant: 01:27

Great question. And and it's something that I as much as I've used different types of landscape fabric, there's like a whole other realm of these what I call geotextile fabric barriers that, you know, some of them are used. There's this there's this classic one that I see a lot in urban agriculture in some of this in situ remediation. They call it the orange fabric. Like, you may have if you've seen road construction projects, they you sometimes see they lay this material down before they, you know, build other layers with their roadway.

Zack Grant: 01:56

And I don't know what differentiates that necessarily with, like, the you know, in the background here, you can see that yellow lined landscape, traditional kind of woven, kind of more heavy duty, kind of five year UV resistant landscape fabric. The difference between that and, like, the orange geotextile fabric you see, like, in construction usage. I I don't I'm not enough of a material expert to know the exact difference, but I will say that I mean, I think if you can any sort of longer term landscape fabric that, you know, roots, when they hit it, are likely not gonna go through it or it's gonna kinda prevent or discourage roots from growing any further down. So in general, like this landscape fabric behind me for these sites that don't have a lot of contamination where it's kinda borderline, we just kind of recommend that. Again, there are some specific geotextile fabrics that might be used for these applications, but it's it's sometimes hard to find and source those, whereas these, you know, landscape fabrics are pretty easy to find in different sizes and different applications.

Zack Grant: 03:02

So yeah, typically it it would be the case where we evaluate the site first, figure out what the can maybe, let's say lead in particular, the contamination level is. And if it's not too crazy high but the soil isn't really that great to work with for other reasons, quality reasons, yeah, we would just recommend, you know, throwing down landscape fabric like that. And then you have some options. You could, depending on your budget or your comfort level, you could just throw a raised bed on top of that or like a berm bed on top of that and just grow directly in that. What we did at our site is we we did landscape fabric at first, but then we put a big old pile of wood chips on top of that, like an 18 inch wood chip layer.

Zack Grant: 03:45

And then on top of that wood chip layer, we we built the beds out on top of that. And there's I've seen all sorts of different variations of this, and and there isn't I don't necessarily know that there's, like, one proper, like, engineered way to do it because it's kind of a a new area of of study in terms of production. So we've seen all sorts of different ways of of doing it. But it's usually some sort of combination of, you know, capping the potential contaminated layer and then bringing in different imported organic biomass kind of base material on top of that to grow in. You know, I I typically recommend, and we can talk about this too, is growers try to find and a lot of landscape company or, you know, landscape centers have this or some, you know, compost suppliers specialize in this.

Zack Grant: 04:33

You can get like a fifty fifty compost topsoil blend. And usually the reputable ones, right, they test the compost so you can get the the compost test results. And they're they're hopefully sourcing and testing the topsoil too, right, so they can know they're giving you an uncontaminated product. Hopefully.

Chris Enroth: 04:52

So they're

Zack Grant: 04:53

kinda starting from scratch. Right? Oh, yeah. Hopefully. I did this over in where I'm at, actually, live in Kankakee County.

Zack Grant: 05:00

We built a berm bed around our front yard, and I use this one landscape company all the time, and they have this, like, sand mushroom compost topsoil mix. And I, you know, I called the guy up and I said, hey, you know, what's where do you sow your topsoil from? Do it does do you get tested? And he he gave me without giving me the actual test results, which I would prefer, he gave me enough, you know, information where I was satisfied. I I actually tested it myself too and found that it was it was pretty good quality and not contaminated.

Zack Grant: 05:30

And yeah, and we bring that in. And and so, you know, it really depends on your budget too, like, and the size of your site, what how you're gonna do that. Right? I think for a lot of the audience that the HORT team works with, you think about building these structured raised beds, right, where you build like a box some sort of box dimensional raised bed, and then you fill that with something, right, like we're talking about in imported media. But if you're doing it on an acre, you know, the the cost in wood alone is gonna be really expensive.

Zack Grant: 06:00

So that's where these kind of berm bed systems come in where you kinda just mound the the imported media and kinda make a raised bed. So it looks like a traditional market, maybe in soil, kind of slightly raised bed, but you're you're building it out of imported soil. So we've experimented that with at our site and a few other sites, and a lot lot of different farmers do that. And that that seems to work well. People often ask, well, how do you keep the material on-site?

Zack Grant: 06:29

Doesn't it just wash away? And and that's a great question for a lot of different reasons. Well, one of them is because, yeah, you don't want the material to to move away, you know, off-site. But two, that actually opens up this whole other topic we can talk about, which is the potential overuse of compost in some settings because compost, especially manure based compost, has a lot of nitrogen, has a lot of phosphorus in it, and not all of it's immediately plant available that season. So if if any of that's moving off-site, whether leachate or the material itself, that that can create a problem in some, you know, eutrophication downstream problem.

Zack Grant: 07:04

So we wanna kinda factor all this together and consider that when we're putting these cap and fill raised bed systems in. And I'll just go ahead and share just really quickly so we can get a visual on this too. This is a fun little PowerPoint slide I put together to kind of illustrate this and different many different options that you can look at where that kinda what we're looking at is three different colored layers. The brown layer on top is kinda the clean media soil compost. That orange line is that fabric barrier, whatever you use, and then that kind of checkered white layer is the contaminated soil or maybe even in some cases it might be like a blacktop or parking lot that rather than removing that, people are just growing right on top of that.

Zack Grant: 07:50

So either way, you can see different combinations for what you could do. You could either just kinda bring a bunch of soil in and on top of a fabric barrier and and try to grow in that. You could form some beds out of it. You could have maybe wood chip paths between that, or you could have, like, a wood chip barrier that you build the beds on top of. The one thing that this last little picture you're seeing in for listeners, I'll try to describe it, is the runoff and percolation.

Zack Grant: 08:18

This is actually kind of an unresearched area. It's starting to become more researched is what what I should say. Because when we think about infiltration into the soil and kind of that groundwater moving its or the leachate moving its way through the soil down towards the water table, In a rural soil that whether it's well drained or not, like, that's moving down. There aren't many restrictions other than maybe plow pans and compaction, but eventually that material is moving down. However, in urban areas, we're growing on a compacted soil or on a parking lot or impervious service, you know, once that leachate hits that impervious service, where's that water go?

Zack Grant: 08:59

Right? You know, it's gonna it's gonna move horizontally at some point. So there's an issue with that with, you know, the storm drain runoff and all these potential nutrients leaching off into that. So there's there's a whole sub issue with the use of compost in urban settings as it relates to, like, the nutrient loss reduction program, which in talking to our colleagues in that space, the urban my understanding is that urban runoff only accounts for I think I think it's like seven to 10% of the nutrient loading concerns for like the the dead zone in the Gulf Of Mexico. But I've seen some new research out there, and it's kinda staggering.

Zack Grant: 09:36

It's it's a little bit of modeling, a little bit of field research that suggests that some of the compost application rates that are seen in urban farms and gardens could account for as much as 30% of the phosphorus budget for that runoff of that seven to 10%. Right? Again, this isn't it's I'm not saying that using compost is bad because it's not. I love compost. We all use compost.

Zack Grant: 10:01

But we might just need to be a little more careful about how we're using compost, especially in these urban areas where we're kind of importing a lot of it, and that runoff may not have a place to go if it's hitting a hard surface. Right? So there's a few issues with that, with kind of building these imported systems that, you know, we're doing it potentially to avoid the lead contamination, but we may be creating this other inadvertent runoff problem and nutrient loading problem if if we're not careful about it. So, you know, again, it's not to say I'm not trying to say compost is bad because I'm I'm a big fan of compost, and rightfully so. There it has its place in a major way.

Zack Grant: 10:45

But I don't think compost is a silver bullet. Right? We often talk about in horticulture and farming, there are no silver bullet solutions. I don't think that we can rely on it for that, especially when we see the rates that some some farms add it. In in the popular media, see in these no till systems, compost, mulch systems where people are adding six, eight inches of compost every single year to these beds, and it's just it's it's likely overkill.

Zack Grant: 11:13

And I understand why they're doing it. There actually is a stoichiometric chemical reason why they're inadvertently doing it, but what they don't realize is that they're pea loading their soils, and if that phosphorus makes its way off-site, could be could be some problems. In fact, I've heard people make analogies to the European nutrient loading standards that where they see some of the rates that urban farms and market farms apply compost at, they would be, you know, fined like large amounts of euros for the amount of, you know, manure or compost they're adding just, you know, just based on nothing. Right? A lot of times you now, like, I'm sure some of guys are familiar with this where like with lawn lawn fertilization for instance, like rather than just saying, oh, I'm gonna apply my Scotts, you know, twenty twenty twenty, you now have to you're supposed to do a soil test first to see where your phosphorus levels are.

Zack Grant: 12:09

And if your phosphorus levels are above where they need to be or optimum, you shouldn't be adding phosphorus in your lawn care program. So there's a lot of research and education around that for lawns, right, which makes up a huge acreage in in in the country. I'm not downplaying the issue potentially with lawns, but certainly, we don't wanna overuse compost and, you know, all these really well intentioned horticulturists, you know, we don't want to misuse a great resource like compost and get some of the same outcomes potentially.

Chris Enroth: 12:43

Zach, it sounds like you're saying that everything in moderation is is the way to go. And and I I feel myself, I I will have a special penance later in life for with early in my career when I was just like, oh, you got a horticultural problem? Throw compost at it. You got this issue? Compost.

Chris Enroth: 13:02

Compost. Compost. So I wish I could go back in time and and tell myself or the audience at that time like, hey, no compost. You can overdo it. Yeah.

Chris Enroth: 13:14

Yeah. Everything in moderation.

Zack Grant: 13:16

Yeah. I I agree with that. Everything in moderation, and maybe it's a transition to another thing we can talk about is using data. Right? Using soil testing and and metrics you can actually visibly look at to help guide the what you're actually applying versus like, oh, no.

Zack Grant: 13:31

I've I've applied six inches every year, and it works for me. And I'm just gonna continue. Mhmm.

Chris Enroth: 13:36

Yeah. And my neighbor does it, and it works for them, so I'm just gonna do it. Yeah.

Zack Grant: 13:41

Yeah. And and I can't blame them because, I mean, there is a kinda culture and ethos around using compost that, you know, I think feels right and actually physically is really gratifying to work in because if you've ever grown in these kind of imported mixes with high levels of compost in them, they're such a joy to work with in terms of ease of planting, ease of cultivation. It's you kind of create this almost instantly productive growing oasis instantly with these high compost systems. But again, there right. There could be some downsides with that if we don't we don't moderate it.

Ken Johnson: 14:16

So you mentioned soil testing. So real quick. Yeah. How can people where can people go? How can they find out about testing soils?

Ken Johnson: 14:25

If they haven't listened

Zack Grant: 14:27

to us

Ken Johnson: 14:27

in the

Chris Enroth: 14:27

past,

Chris Enroth: 14:28

maybe they'll listen to

Ken Johnson: 14:27

Our

Zack Grant: 14:29

well developed soils website that we that we have where we've been a part of and putting together. That's one resource that we can definitely link them towards. It's a bit of a challenge, Ken, because, you know, as we all know, in Extension, as a land grant, Illinois Extension, we don't have a kind of public facing soil testing lab that we can reliably send people to. So we we kinda have to give them a bunch of commercial options or other land grant options, and then we can kinda provide those interpretive services potentially for them. So so yeah, I would definitely recommend linking them to the labs that we link to on our website.

Zack Grant: 15:07

You know, you definitely wanna find a lab that's easy to work with. That's kinda a low pretty low hanging fruit thing to mention without recommending a specific lab. You know, I work with a lab that has a really excellent online portal where I can kinda create an account. I can do anything from, you know, getting the free soil sampling bags from them to printing shipping labels, anything that makes it convenient. Right?

Zack Grant: 15:33

And then, you know, you send it off to them and then they they give you the physical result like in a PDF. Right? That's great. That's old school. But now they also put it in your account and you have a whole electronic database of of all your your soil data over multiple years whether that's, you know, lead contamination, you know, your traditional soil test results.

Zack Grant: 15:53

So if you can find a a lab that kinda does that, that's kinda the new low hanging fruit in terms of public interfacing, public or customer engagement, customer service. The other thing you definitely wanna look for is one, and, you know, I'm sure you've heard this before, maybe some in our audience have heard this, that you wanna find a lab that, particularly for fertility nutrient testing, that does the testing that's applicable to soils in your area. Right? So some of us heard of the Mehlich three versus Bray versus ammonium acetate versus there's lots of different types of soil testing for different cations and anions. You wanna find a lab that's closest to what you have in kinda your local area and kinda stick with that lab.

Zack Grant: 16:42

Right? There's nothing wrong with, like, going to different labs, but sometimes they have slightly different analyzing you know, extracting procedures, so it can be an apples to oranges comparison. You know? We we like to say stick with the same lab. You know, a lot of times people ask, well, what about the season, spring versus fall?

Zack Grant: 17:00

A lot of times fall soil gets testing gets recommended because that's a a time when you can see what the drawdown might be and maybe changes you can make over the the winter. You know, like it was particularly with liming. Like that's a big thing. Like if you need to lime your soils to bring pH back up to where it needs to be, if you apply that lime in the fall, you're probably guaranteeing some soil reaction to happen by the time planting comes around in the spring. I actually have a database of all my soil samples that I download from the lab that I use, and I just I just kinda track it all.

Zack Grant: 17:36

So I do it in the fall and spring, but I just kinda track it all, the different management units, just to kinda look for trends in in general. So, you know, soil testing is one of those things that I at the Specialty Growers Conference that we're all just that, I was in a session, doctor Melanie Stock from Utah State, she was giving this great presentation on cut flower fertility management, which there isn't a lot of good resources for that out there other than I think North Carolina and now her. She had this great analogy that I'm gonna use from now on, and and feel free to to use this widely because I think it's applicable. Soil testing gets a little bit of a bad rap because it's like, oh, it's it's more art than science. It's not very accurate.

Zack Grant: 18:18

But what I would say is it's it's as an analogy, it's like, you know, say you have a rec room in your basement and you have a dartboard. Right? You go down to your dartboard in the basement and try to throw some darts at at the dartboard with the lights off and you might hit the dartboard every once in a while, right, but you're gonna scatter it everywhere. You turn that light on, right, you're gonna hit that dartboard more often than not. Right?

Zack Grant: 18:42

You might not be very good at darts, but you're still gonna hit that dartboard more than with the lights off. And soil testing is essentially turning the lights on. That's all it is. So we're not we're not saying you're going to get an exact recipe for what you need to do with your soil, but it's gonna it's gonna put put put you in the right direction potentially. And certainly one thing soil testing is gonna do is it's gonna save you time and money.

Zack Grant: 19:06

Because what you might find out is you have your soil nutrient levels and pH might be exactly where it needs to be, so you don't need to do anything at all. Right? And that might be, you know, $35 a year well spent versus trying to track down all these inputs and fertility plan you need to put in place. Typically, what what I'm seeing with my soil results and some of this data we're collecting from urban farmers, with Midwestern soils, a lot of times you you really just need to manage nitrogen. Mhmm.

Zack Grant: 19:36

Like, you you have everything's in place. I mean, might be some micronutrient deficiencies, maybe some cation imbalances, which we can talk about. But a lot of times, nitrogen is all you need to manage for. And and that can be a good thing because that that's essentially something you can focus on, you can target, and you can if you do it right and you set up a good plan, you can see good demonstratable results. I mean, I certainly get it for the home gardening set how soil testing might be a little complicated, and in terms of actionable information, it might be confusing.

Zack Grant: 20:11

But if anything, just to confirm that you might not need to do anything at all, like, think that's again, if you're doing it once a year for $35 on average, I would say, with shipping, that's I think that's money well spent. Certainly, as you with the commercial farmers we work with, we try to encourage a little bit more rigorous testing, involves other things like, you know, tissue testing and saturated media tests, some different more extensive types of testing. But even for, like, even just a backyard grower, think, especially for vegetables, doing a soil test once per year isn't too much to ask.

Chris Enroth: 20:49

And and when you do that soil test Mhmm. 90% of the people listening, watching, your phosphorus levels are gonna be high or way more than you need. You can tell your lawn care company, stop putting phosphorus on my lawn. So say, give me a discount now that you're not putting all this phosphorus and probably potassium too. So Mhmm.

Chris Enroth: 21:14

This as you said, for the most part, it's managing nitrogen. And and I'll say on the random cases, and you probably deal with this more, Zach, with commercial growing than than than that maybe Ken and I with with home growers is a lot of times calcium is also used in a lot of these fertilizers. And so Mhmm. Maybe in like a commercial setting, you see an excessive amount of calcium in some of the beds. But soil test, please.

Chris Enroth: 21:40

Don't throw your darts in the dark. Turn on the lights.

Zack Grant: 21:43

There you go. You're already using the analogy to perfection, Chris.

Chris Enroth: 21:47

Love it.

Zack Grant: 21:48

Love it. Yeah. That's a great point. I mean, you look at, yeah, managing for nitrogen, and I think there are some scenarios where, you know, as much as I hate to use the term, there with especially with the micronutrients and maybe even calcium in some cases, we set ourselves up for being able to kinda spoon feed the plants a little bit, which I know that gets a bad rap in terms of we don't we want the soil to feed our plants, which again is happening, I agree with, and is a major part of a sustainable growing system. But soil testing really reveals that in order to optimize, there are some scenarios where inputs are needed.

Zack Grant: 22:30

Right? You know, I think a great example this analogy of mimicking nature,

Chris Enroth: 22:37

I

Zack Grant: 22:37

I think is a great one. It's not to say that there isn't a role for mimicking wild ecology with agricultural systems, but but let let's face it. The culture part of agriculture means there's it's not natural. Right? It's Mhmm.

Zack Grant: 22:51

It's human influenced. And in order for us to optimize what we're doing with the limited amount of time and resources we have, there likely are gonna have to be some inputs involved. And and nitrogen is is the big one. So, you know, I I don't wanna disappoint your some of your listeners or or say something that that's controversial, but I I think that, you know, being a part of Extension and trying to be data based, right, we have to kind of look at all options. So I'm not against targeting nutrient inputs.

Zack Grant: 23:23

In fact, that's a big some of the push for the work moving forward is is looking at that specifically is looking at what's going on with urban growers and and their soil levels right now and what we can do to kinda make better recommendations moving forward. So yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, again, I I think there's it's really interesting. There's there's a great I don't know.

Zack Grant: 23:48

Yeah. I guess I can plug other extension folks. There's this wonderful blogger out there. His name's Andrew Maguire. He's a, you know, I think he's an extension specialist at Washington State University.

Zack Grant: 24:00

Check him out. He's got a really interesting blog that I I think is it's it's great because what he does is he's a great writer, but he takes research information, right, and translates it, right, the kind of the work of extension, in a really pretty easy to understand way. But he really is is gets down to the brass tacks. He's not he's not looking to go with one dogma or the other. You know, very conventional on one side or or, you know, super organic natural farming system.

Zack Grant: 24:28

He's just like, what does the research tell us? What's practical and applicable for farming systems, like, currently? Right? Because there's a lot of really interesting, what I call basic science research out there about, you know, looking at soil diversity and soil biota and and its role in ecology, right, in in natural ecosystems. But how that applies to agricultural systems is not super clear at this at this point, right?

Zack Grant: 24:56

So and there's a lot of overlap, right? There's in fact conventional agriculture is like, in a lot of ways has moved, you know, more towards the middle if not adopting some of these ecological practices that are very practical versus like what we might have thought twenty, thirty years ago where it's just like, you know, spray spray spray, urea urea urea. There there is a lot of adoption of, you know, good decent long rotations using cover crops, you know, supporting soil biology up to a point where we know it's applicable versus like, you know, only focusing on soil biology. Biology. Right?

Zack Grant: 25:34

As that that Compost.

Chris Enroth: 25:35

Only compost.

Zack Grant: 25:36

Only compost. Right? It's the the the three legged stool we teach in in soil quality. Right? It's not just physical, chemical, or bio biological.

Zack Grant: 25:44

It's all three kinda working together. So and I, you know, I think soil testing, traditional soil testing gets a bad rep because it kind of looks at primarily the chemical sphere. But that's I mean, there's just a a wealth of good data that backs that up. Right? If if we have nutrient limitations for crops and we can increase the nitrogen levels they're exposed to, we get higher yields.

Zack Grant: 26:08

And Mhmm. I mean, if we're if we're trying to grow more food for more people, then that's, you know we might have to adopt some of that is is is is all I'm saying. So I didn't wanna get too controversial, but I I get going down this path sometimes and it's

Chris Enroth: 26:25

I'll I'll just forward all of those emails to you that we get.

Zack Grant: 26:31

Certainly. And I I'd be open to the dialogue and having the conversation. You know, that's I think what what we try to do here. And that's and that's what science based, you know, kind of work is. We we know what we know currently.

Zack Grant: 26:42

And if if it changes with different results, then then that's part of it.

Chris Enroth: 26:47

Yeah. I I think kind of the amazing thing and every time I talk with, you know, experts in the field like you, Zach, and and entomologists, pathologists, I realize we are just kind of starting out in this scientific exploration. Like, people will you know, maybe our generation hasn't really had to think much about lead issues. Mhmm. But I mean, just a few years before I was born, they figured out, oh, lead's bad.

Chris Enroth: 27:14

You know? Let's take it out of stuff. So this is like this is new stuff. The the the the cap and fill demonstrations that you're showing, this is new science. This is new work that we're still figuring out.

Chris Enroth: 27:28

We know that it applies to, broadly to a lot of sites, but how does it apply to a specific, commercial farm, you know, home garden? That's that's kinda where extension comes in, and we figure out how that research and how that how that can apply more into those diverse real world situations. So it is a dialogue that needs to happen.

Zack Grant: 27:49

In terms of big take home messages with with urban soils is, you know, like we've already discussed, you know, do a site assessment first. Right? Figure out what's going on. Even if you're in a suburban area or you're not totally sure, kinda get out there, kinda dig in your soil profile. Not too deep.

Zack Grant: 28:06

You don't wanna you don't wanna have to call Julie. Right? Or maybe call Julie if if you if you need to dig a soil pit to figure this out. And just kind of figure out what's going on and figure out the history of your site. And then that's going to lead you down the path of, you know, do I need to do heavy metal testing?

Zack Grant: 28:23

And then certainly I'm definitely encouraging all farms to do the standard fertility soil testing to start, and there's another pathway of complexity there that that we in Extension can certainly help out with, right? So you're not in this journey alone, this is what we're here for is to help you with that. So definitely reach out to us who work with soils and and we can, you know, do our best to assist you with the time and resources we have. So so yeah. That thing I think that's kind of the big take home message with with all of it.

Chris Enroth: 28:55

But that was a perfect way just to sum that up. I loved how you we we just recapped that. So thank you very much. Yeah. I so that was a lot of great information about soil contamination, and we really dove into soil fertility and soil management there too there at the end.

Chris Enroth: 29:10

So this is delightful conversation. I think we need to well, part two coming up. Soil yeah. We're talking alright. Now we've we've established soil contamination levels.

Chris Enroth: 29:23

We've established what type of soil type you're gonna bring in or or work with. Now it's long term, so that's like part two podcast. We'll we'll put that in the works. Yeah. Well, the Good Growing podcast is a production of University of Illinois Extension, edited this week by me, Chris Enroth.

Chris Enroth: 29:38

A special thank you. Local food small farms educator, Zach Grant. Thank you so much for being on the show today. We really do appreciate chatting with you about your your work in soil contamination and and fertility. My pleasure.

Chris Enroth: 29:51

Anytime. And another special thank you. Ken Johnson, thanks for hanging out with me once again, as always, every single week and chatting about our our the dirt beneath our feet. You are the wind beneath my wings, Ken. Thank you very much.

Ken Johnson: 30:05

You're gonna get hate mail over the dirt now.

Chris Enroth: 30:08

I know. I know. It's it's not dirt. It's soil.

Ken Johnson: 30:12

And and thank you, Zach. I think we have another podcast on how do you wash soil. Anyway, listening does that as a job.

Zack Grant: 30:19

Let's let's look into that. It'll be like the dirty job show. We'll figure out who that is.

Chris Enroth: 30:24

Yes. We'll get them on. Mhmm. Yes.

Ken Johnson: 30:28

And let's do this again next week, Chris.

Chris Enroth: 30:31

Oh, we shall do this again next week. We're going to be chatting with Emily Swihart about a brand new project that we are gonna want our listeners and viewers to participate with us in. What is that? Well, we will announce it next week. It's gonna be a lot of fun.

Chris Enroth: 30:45

I'm excited to get that on, on the track here. So, listeners, thank you for doing what you do best, and that is listening, or if you're watching us on YouTube watching. And as always, keep on growing.