** Welcome to Unlock Your Wellbeing, the podcast that teaches you the simple keys to health and happiness so that you can grow as a human being into a well-being.
Alisha Leytem Now here's your host, author, certified wellness coach, mother, and wife, Alicia Liedem. Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Unlock Your Wellbeing. I'm your host, Alicia Liedem, and today we have a really special guest. His name is Wayne Liedem, and he happens to be my father-in-law. Welcome to the show, Wayne. Well, thank you. Pleasure to be here. He goes by Harley. Thank you so much. He actually goes by Harley, so I'll be referring to him as Harley for the rest of the show. And before we dive into today's content, fun fact, this is actually our second time recording this episode, right? Yes, it is. Yeah, Harley came all the way over to my house yesterday. We had this beautiful setup where we sat outside in my son room and we recorded the show and then we had some really beautiful technical difficulties afterwards, like the recording, half of it was just not showing up. So luckily it's still fresh in our mind, so we are going to re-record this even if we aren't right next to each other, sitting there next to each other. But I think it's going to be great, and based on what we did yesterday, it's going to be a really awesome episode. So Harley is basically the master gardener. He knows pretty much everything there is to know about gardening. He's been doing it for a very long time, and he's going to tell us a little bit more about his background on that in just a second. But the reason why I wanted to bring Harley on to share with us some wisdom about gardening is because gardening is actually a really beneficial thing that you can do to improve your mental health. And I pulled up some really beautiful stats and studies on why and how gardening does improve and help your mental health. And this is all from WebMD, okay? So the first thing that gardening does is it improves your mood. So gardening can make you feel more peaceful and content, and one of the ways that it does this is when you're gardening, you have to be super focused on the one thing that you're doing. So it's really hard to be thinking about something else when you are using your hands and actively doing the one thing. So it can help you to feel better in the moment. For those of you who are familiar with my book or have read my book, The Six Gold Keys to Well-Being, A Guide to Unlocking a Happy and Healthy Life, the fourth key in my well-being framework is the key of nature. And being in nature is really, really important for your overall well-being, and one of the ways that you can be in nature is by gardening. And it's just so important to be outside and touching and having direct contact with the earth, which is what's happening when you're gardening. The other way that it's helpful is it boosts your self-esteem. So probably you can share more about how this is for you, but when you see your hard work
Harley Leytem pay off with the things that you're growing are healthy and they work, that has to feel good. Yeah, it does. Do you notice that when you do it? Oh, yes. The fresh vegetables are the greatest, and eating them yourself is one thing, but when you're giving them to other people and sharing them, you know, your abundance of your harvest, it's gratifying to see how much they enjoy them and they ask for more of them and thank you and stuff. But you're doing them good, and you're doing yourself good, and you're feeling good about
Alisha Leytem it. So it's a win-win for everybody. Awesome. I love that. So the other thing it can do is it helps you to improve your attention span. So gardening can really basically train your brain to stay focused on a single task, and studies are actually showing that outdoor activities such as gardening can reduce similar symptoms to ADD. So just being outside and doing something like that can really help you to retrain and be really focused in the moment. Of course, it provides exercise, so getting out there, getting into the dirt, you know, moving around, it can be strenuous, and you're moving your body, which is really beneficial for your mental health as well. Just like you said, Harley, when you're sharing the veggies and things that you've grown, you feel like you are giving back and working with others in a way.
Harley Leytem So in some way, it's also like a social activity that you can do. Yeah, that's correct. You build relationships, you talk to other gardeners, you share with your neighbors. Some of our neighbors don't have gardens, but they love fresh vegetables and stuff, and some of our neighbors are more elderly and stuff, and they can't do it. So I know what their favorites are and stuff like that, and I make sure I give them some
Alisha Leytem of them throughout the year. Yeah. Oh, I just love it. I think, you know, I love when you bring over, you know, starting a few weeks into summer, you always have veggies for us every week, and it makes me feel really good, so that has to make you feel good too, knowing that all the work you're doing, you're giving out
Harley Leytem to everyone. Yeah. You always plan extra, because you never know how it's going to turn out, so you always plan a little extra, you know.
Alisha Leytem You can always get rid of them, you know, throughout the season. Somebody's always looking for some fresh vegetables. Yes. That's all good. Harley, I have a bunch of Q&A that I'm going to ask you some questions so we can learn more about your expertise.
Harley Leytem So the first thing I want to ask you is how did you learn to garden? Oh, probably from my dad, basically. It's a school of hard knocks. We used to have 13 kids in our family, so we had a garden, a very big garden. It's probably the size of a football field, and it provided for our family throughout the winter even. I mean, dad, he'd plant a big garden. We'd go out and help him with the harvest and some of the weeding, and sometimes some insects picking off here and there or whatever, but mom would can, and dad would plant a lot of potatoes. We'd eat them throughout the winter. He planted corn, melons, lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes. I mean, he planted a lot of stuff, and it took a lot of stuff for all of us. I watched and learned, and then when I got married, I decided, well, I'm going to have a garden too. I started planting my own garden, and that was 43 years ago, and I've just built on it ever since and tried different things. You never really know it all. You're always learning and trying new things and finding new ways of doing things that are easier ways or hopefully better ways. It's adventurous, and it's rewarding.
Alisha Leytem It's a good way to be outside, and it's a good way to connect with nature. You basically just learned growing up and watching your dad do it.
Harley Leytem You didn't even … Yeah. And talking to other partners. I didn't know the garden was the size of a football field. Well, it was a better part of a football field. It was probably … Yeah, it was long. Like I said, he would sell whatever. People come by and ask to buy some. He would sell some of it too if he had extra potatoes or sweet corn or melons or whatever, peas, beans, just because some people don't have room for a garden or they are not able to grow a garden, their health or whatever.
Alisha Leytem But yeah, that's the way we grew up, and then mom found a use for it all. So we probably do not … Pardon? So with the potatoes that you guys would have, would you be able to store them throughout the winter?
Harley Leytem How long would they last for? Oh yeah. Well, we'd dig the potatoes and take them in in probably September, somewhere in there. They would keep all winter. I mean, most of them would be still hard yet throughout the winter. We had a cellar underneath our house and it was cool down there. We'd probably have, I don't know, four or five hundred pounds of potatoes by the time we got them all in the house or dug. Later on in the winter and towards early spring, they start sprouting a little bit, but you're still able to eat them. You just knock sprouts off and stuff. Yeah, same thing with onions. We had a lot of onions and stuff they'd use throughout the winter. Tomatoes, mom canned tomatoes by the courts. We'd use that in soups and whatever she used it for cooking. Strawberries she'd freeze them, peas, beans. So a lot less trips to the grocery store and we had home fresh vegetables to eat throughout the winter. It's a pretty good savings too. I mean, when you go buy in fresh produce and stuff like that, it can get kind of expensive.
Alisha Leytem So a little dollar pack of seeds or whatever goes a long ways to make a lot of produce. Absolutely. I'm so glad that you have continued the tradition and I think it's just so important that more people continue it as well because otherwise it could become easily like a lost art. I'm just trying to soak in everything I can from you because for you, when I watch you garden, you're just so natural and it's just so effortless. You just know almost exactly what to do. Every year you ask what we want in the garden and sometimes I'll say, oh, something new that you haven't grown before and you always figure it out.
Harley Leytem It's just so cool to watch. And that's a lot of what gardening is. If you don't know the answer, you can go on YouTube, you can talk to your neighbors, you can find people who have had that experience to grow on that vegetable or fruit or whatever. And that's the way you communicate with your neighbors and build friendships and end up
Alisha Leytem with a nice harvest of something in the end of the year. Yeah. I think that's something that is almost a lost benefit that people see in gardening is the community side of it. So even if you don't have a community garden, you have your own garden, but it's still very much like a community effort, just like you said, your neighbors, you give to them or they give to you from their garden and you learn from each other. Yeah, I think and you know, there's so much research now about how loneliness is like almost worse for you than smoking and community and connections and social relationships are one of the most important things that you can do for your mental health.
Harley Leytem So I love that gardening is a way that you do that. You get out in the fresh air, you use your muscles, your body, your mind to plan things and I know it's just you're intact with nature, you know, you're in touch with nature and you rely on the rain, the sunshine. So you keep an eye on the weather too, you know, throughout the summer. It isn't like you're sitting around the wintertime hoping it turns spring and warm pretty soon. You're watching things grow and you're nurturing them along. Yeah. So if someone wants to start a garden, what's the easiest way to start one? Well, it depends how big a garden they want. There's lots of people who live in cities or whatever. You can have a garden on your patio, you know, if you got a sunny deck or a patio or porch or whatever, just with little boxes or buckets, they can grow tomato plant in the bucket. As long as it gets enough water and sunshine and nutrients, it'll grow there. But then, you know, if you want to explore with bigger things, you know, like melons or potatoes or whatever, you want to find if you've got a yard that's got sun, full sun, and the right type of soil, you don't want a real hard rocky soil. You want like a loose sand, black humus type sand or type soil. And it's something that they can get their roots out in and stuff and get nutrients. If you plant them in hard and rocky and clay like they won't do as well. So we're pretty fortunate in this part of the country to have a nice, you know, Iowa's known for its crop ground and we live right in the middle of the cornfield. So we have good soil all around us and we get ample rains and, you know, if we don't have a frost, too soon we'll have a harvest. But, you know, we have a long enough growing season where it's able to grow a certain, you know, a lot of the foods that we like.
Alisha Leytem So when you garden each year, do you always start from a seed or do you buy them kind of grown a little bit already from the store and then you plant them or what's your process? A little of both.
Harley Leytem Sometimes if I find something that worked out well the year before, I will save some seeds out of it like we have these rose tomatoes that are hard to find when you go looking for a plant. So I keep some seeds out of the tomato from the following year or the previous year and use it the following year. You know, I let it dry out and then I'll plant it and start it in the house like in March and it'll grow and pretty soon I just planted them here last week and they're about six inches tall and they're taking root and they're shaping up now. But I also buy some bigger plants and stuff so all my tomatoes don't come in the same place. So we get a little bit of a different stages. But yeah, that's and like melons, I do that with the watermelons too and I know you guys enjoy them. I always tell your husband to save some seeds out of the nicest melons if he likes them and he did and this year I planted them again. So that's the third year for that that I haven't bought seeds and as long as we keep having good melons and good turnout we'll continue to do the same thing. But it's interesting the way a little seed, the size of the tip of a pin can turn out to be a five-foot plant producing 50 tomatoes or something like that. It's incredible how that little seed can turn into such a well-provided plant or well-providing plant and it's the same thing with potatoes or anything like that. You know you can just cut one seed potato up in about six pieces and have six plants. So you know you'd probably get about I don't know three four pounds of potatoes off each plant from one little section of the potato seeds. You know it's it turns into an abundance you know with a little bit of seed. Wow. The green beans that I did that with the green beans too for the last couple years. I probably haven't bought bean seeds in I don't know seven eight years something like that. Just the end of the year comes around and you're kind of sick of eating beans and stuff and you leave the last pickin on there and then when the freeze comes the plant will die and the pods will dry out and I just pick the pods and I throw them in a in a dry place and then later in the winter I'll go just peel the hulls off them and I'll have bean seeds for the next year. Wow. So far the only thing I bought this year from my garden is a couple of Yeah it is it's kind of it's not it's not that the seeds cost that much I just like doing it because it kind of makes you look like you know you're you can survive you know on
Alisha Leytem on the seeds and what's there in front of you know it's kind of providing. Yeah and that's kind of the benefit of you having had a garden for 40 some years is you can just recycle what you have and isn't that the point of you know the veggies and the earth it just like keeps giving and you just take a part of it and it keeps growing for the next however many years.
Harley Leytem Yeah I'm taking care of the earth yeah replenishing the earth too because you know some people use fertilizers and stuff like that once in a while I will do that but not chemical fertilizers. I throw mulch and stuff into the garden leaves and stuff like that and then when we till up the garden in the spring it blends it into the soil and keeps the soil real fertile and loose and stuff like that so you know we have good gardens long as we get the rain and if we don't get the rain I can water some to cure it on till we do but we're we're in a hose reach away from the what's that what would you say are the most what would you say are the most common gardening mistakes that someone might make? The ones I still make you don't realize how big the the plant is going to grow when you plant a little bitty seed or a little bitty plant so if you get it too crowded and those things get huge they start growing together and then you got a hedge you know you got a tomato hedge or potato hedge or whatever you got planted and they don't do as well because they need air to go through them and keep them from getting diseases and stuff they need they need watering but they need to stay dry to it you know they can't be soaking wet all the time because they'll get blights and funguses and insects and whatnot so I every year I tell myself I got to space these out a little more I got the room let's do it but then you'll see hey there's a space here and I got a volunteer plant over here I'm going to pick him now he grew up because I left the tomatoes in the garden so I'll pop him up I said he's healthy looking I stick him in the ground he turns out to be a monster too so you know I got to say no to them with little orphans that are there and just say we need the room we need the room how do you know how much space to leave in between uh usually if you buy plants or seeds it'll have directions on how to plant them the depth and the type of soil and the amount of sunlight it needs and uh and go and they're pretty accurate so if it says it's going to get two feet wide and five feet tall it's probably going to get that big and I do I plant pole beans and I they start out with a little seed and they grow over five feet tall they grow out of the baskets that I have and they're coming down the outside of it so but they're handy because you can pick them without bending over so it's nice that way
Alisha Leytem so once you have your garden set up because you said it the most work is just planting everything at the beginning of the season what is your daily gardening routine then throughout throughout the
Harley Leytem summer what do you have to do every day uh usually I just check on it and make sure that you know you don't have animals getting in it or I mean we have a problem with rabbits around here and they will eat little plants up to a certain stage and they don't bother them anymore but right now I our beans are just starting to come up so I put chicken wire around the plants just to keep the rabbits out and after the plants get about a foot tall I can take the fence down they won't bother them anymore but other than that weeding you don't want the weeds to get ahead of you because they could put down pretty deep roots and if you don't weed it the weed goes to seed and it's like lawn it'll just get thicker and thicker and thicker and pretty soon you'll be really fighting a battle so stay at the weed pulling and and hoeing and aerating the soil and stuff and made it all pays off and you don't have to do it all one day you know if you got a big garden or if you're not able to just you'll do one row a day or whatever it it'll it'll work out I mean just keep at it and uh the garden will reward you I mean it's just from tilling the garden and in the aerating the soil and pulling the weeds you'll double what your yield would be in your garden because it's not your your plants aren't fighting for nutrients and for moisture especially if it gets dry because the weeds thrive in the heat and they they'll rub the plants of all the moisture that they can the plants will die first Really? So how often do you have to weed? Um well uh we tilled our garden probably like three weeks ago and my wife just planted some flowers in the one end of it and then the weeds were probably just coming up like a couple inches tall but at that stage and the ground is loose yet they pull right out or you can go out and till them you know with a hole or whatever and that'll be good now for a couple weeks probably and there might be some there then but it won't be as bad as the first time but there's things that pop up in the garden you wonder how I mean you'll have a squirrel a little berry a nut out there and pretty soon you got a tree grown in your garden so you have to see anything and you got birds that land and do their droppings and you'll have mulberry trees grown in your gardens and stuff like that it's part of nature. So how often do you have to water your garden? Hopefully none. I water the plants when I first transplant them just to get them going and get their roots established in the new soil but so far this spring especially since we planted the garden we've been fortunate enough we've had some nice gentle soft soaking rains and that is you just see a perk right up I mean they just the difference between tap water and city water and rain water it's just like miracle juice I mean there's no chlorine or nothing in that rain water and it just they love it my wife uses it on her all outside plants we got rain barrels with the rain water and stuff it works nice for that. So it rains enough that you don't actually have to water it yourself? Yeah usually but there's been years where I've had to take a hose out there and you know you know you want tomatoes bad enough or beans you'll but I just water the plant itself I don't soak all the soil just keep the roots going and sooner or later it's going to rain I mean we're pretty fortunate we've been dodging the drought for a couple years where north and south of us had droughts and stuff but we were lucky enough to get you know substantial
Alisha Leytem range throughout the year. Yeah wow I think that's one of the benefits of the Midwest is the weather is just really conducive for gardening just like helps you out you don't have to do as much extra
Harley Leytem work. Right but that's another thing in gardening too you got to realize what grows in your zone what grows in your area I love sweet potatoes and I'd love to grow on but our season up in here isn't long enough I mean we get frost too soon and they wouldn't be mature enough that's why that's more of a southern vegetable or it's a tuber but yeah they grow them in the salt more that's they got a longer growing season. I know some people have tried they've had a little bit of success but it's not you know I would rather eat sweet potatoes and regular potatoes myself and but they just don't work up here you know it's like having an orange tree up here you know in Iowa that isn't going to produce oranges you might have it for one season they'll die in the wintertime it's so yeah whatever your desire is put in your garden make sure it grows in this zone and you know this has the right season for it the heat and the sunshine and whatnot
Alisha Leytem and the type of soil. That makes so much sense why certain things just grow better in other areas and why you can't just grow whatever you want wherever you are because they don't grow there
Harley Leytem naturally like the weather just can't sustain it. Right well if you if they don't grow naturally like in California that it's a big produce state but they irrigate everything so California is basically a part of the desert but they irrigate all the gardening and stuff and they grow great vegetables you know so it can be done but we can't control how long our growing season is going to be here.
Alisha Leytem Yeah that makes sense so for the Midwest what are the easiest vegetables that you can grow?
Harley Leytem Okay if you're just starting a garden and you like radishes there you can plant them early you don't have to worry about them getting frosted off peas snow peas or snap peas anything like that carrots potatoes that's another early thing you put in a lot of people plant those around Good Friday and stuff they always say in the full of the moon or whatever I plant them when I get time so it's it's not it's a little folklore or whatever to plant those in the full moon but um what else would be sweet corn if you like that that kind of takes up a little more room and it gets kind of tall too and what else beans I don't know if you like tomatoes a few tomato plants they'll do you a lot I mean they give you a lot of produce so I would say that but they're really a sensitive plant and you got to make sure it's warm enough and you're not going to have a freeze because they'll freeze real easy but uh they grow when it gets hot they grow fast um what else they got uh radishes I said what about uh we're trying zucchini uh zucchini grows very easy too I mean one plant will do the whole neighborhood usually you got if somebody's got a zucchini plant they got zucchini for the neighborhood um we're trying eggplant this year for something new I've never planted eggplant before but we did this year so we'll see how that works out and uh peppers you know you can plant bell peppers you can plant jalapenos or whatever they usually do pretty good in Iowa um pretty much all your basic vegetables can be grown here you know we get all types of lettuce and cabbage and stuff like that growing so and if you don't grow it you can always find it at the farmer's market uh they have all kinds of farmers markets around throughout the summer where people who grow gardens or for a business or whatever grow you know uh nice vegetables and they're most of them are organic vegetables too so you know they haven't been sprayed on and stuff
Alisha Leytem like that so lots of use of chemicals yeah so if someone were to start a garden or they just want to grow something this summer what would you say um they should they should start with or they could
Harley Leytem start with well depends how ambitious they are and where they're going to put the garden at um if you go real big with the garden you're gonna have to have somebody till it for you and you're gonna have to cut the sod up off your yard but always make sure you're planting it not under a tree because it it'll rob the sunlight and some of the nutrients from it but gardens need full sun and they also need soil that is fertile and loose and um well drained it can't they can't sit in water like a rice paddy you know if you put a garden at the bottom of the hill and there's nowhere for the water to go and it's always soggy it's not going to be a very good garden so water is good but too much water is bad um never plant near a walnut tree because they are i don't know they something about walnut trees and what they drop and whatever it doesn't do nothing any good under them that grows in a garden it uh i don't know if they're if it's their hulls they drop their walnuts or their leaves or whatever but that's just something i've always been told and i've never done but i take people's word for it because you don't want to spend all the time planting a garden and find out hey i shouldn't have planted underneath the walnut tree yeah but but as far as if you want to start small in a garden you can just do it with a shovel i mean you could till the dirt up with your shovel um take the sod off you feel like a six foot by six foot garden will grow you a lot of little vegetables if you want to plant you know a little row of beans a little row radish things a row of carrots you can get a lot in that little area and uh you don't have much invested in it you know if you got a shovel you can do it yourself and rake it smooth and bust up the clods and stuff like that and uh you'll be surprised you'll you'll take a liking to it and uh next year you'll probably expand
Alisha Leytem love it so harley one question that i like to ask every guest that comes on the show is the name of the podcast so how do you unlock your own well-being
Harley Leytem um with exercise and being outside this time of year i love it because i try getting out as much as i can in the winter time but this this type of year or time of year i have reason to go outside i'm going to go out and check the garden i'm going to go out and mow the yard i'm going to go out trim the bushes you know the more reasons i can find to get outside the better i feel and i do bicycling and walking and you know types of exercise like that walk with a dog but uh yeah you just feel better you feel better when you're in contact with nature i think and the fresh air and and you also see people and talk to people and you know communication is good for the soul too and you get a lot of people walking by and see your garden and they'll say hey to me it is i love tomatoes when will he be right i just say you can have all you want just drive by real slowly and i'll throw them to you i'll put you on the waiting list yeah no that's uh it's good it's good it's a good conversation people will stop by and start talking you know pretty soon you'll be leaning on the hole or the shell and you aren't really working you're just
Alisha Leytem bs and stuff and communicating with people right so that's good it's good for spirits definitely i am so grateful that you garden and that we can learn from you and we do learn from you it really is inspiring and i can see how when the weather gets nicer how um you're outside all the time and how it lifts your spirits and just being out there makes you feel good so um i think that's great and i'm just so grateful for you so thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom and inspiring other people yeah i think some people will be really inspired um whether they're gardening or not to just go outside or learning something new or even feeling more inspired to go to the farmer's market and talking with their farmer and learning more about like their process or learning about what will grow for them in their area too i think it's just really important to keep these traditions alive and um you're doing that for us so thank you and like i said when we recorded this the first time you're my favorite father-in-law and what did i say you're my favorite daughter-in-law but you're the only one yep you heard it here first everyone all right officially recorded i am the favorite daughter-in-law uh thank you so much this has been awesome and everyone here tuning in to the show if you enjoyed this episode feel free to leave us a five star review on itunes if you want to check us out you can head to alicia leatham.com that's ali s-h-a-l-e-y-t-e-m um michael my husband and i are co-hosting a well-being and leadership retreat together in southwest wisconsin uh june um 15th through the 17th and we have two spots left so if you're interested in joining us for a little getaway to help you um learn new leadership skills and mindfulness skills that you can really incorporate into your personal and professional life go um check out the link in the show notes and see if this would be a great fit for you we would love to have you if you have any questions just send me an email alicia at alicialeatham.com so thank you so much for joining us harley we'll see you guys next time all right goodbye thank you
