If you're someone who has a pressure for cut flowers, our environment and wants to make
the world more beautiful, you're in the right place.
Whether you're growing flowers for pleasure or profit, I'm on a mission to empower flower
enthusiasts and professionals to help change the world around me.
If you're just starting out and need to help me hand, or looking to scale a substantial
flower business, I'm your cut flower woman.
Welcome to the Cut Flower Pods.
So, I'd love you to introduce my guest to you today, Michael Kennard, and I'm no further
ado, I'm going to let Michael introduce himself.
So Michael, tell us a little bit about you and who you are, what you do.
Cool, yeah, well, yeah, Michael Kennard.
I'm the founder of Compost Club, down near, we're just outside Brighton.
And yeah, we've set up this sort of social enterprise to kind of regenerate soil with
really good living, biologically abundant and diverse compost.
And then to make that, the most obvious thing was to get food waste from residents and businesses,
because we don't have that kind of accommodated by the council down here in Brighton.
So that seemed like an obvious thing.
So it was almost like saving all these emissions from food waste.
It's like a really nice byproduct from me doing my kind of activism, if you like.
So that's kind of what I do, I guess.
I mean, I came into it as a grower, so I'd been setting up a community, not a community
garden, at that point it was just a sort of little mini market garden.
But I guess I don't know if that's for the intro, or whether you want me to speak about
that a little later on.
Yeah.
We'll come back to that.
I noticed you've got a football shirt, but behind you, we'll come back to that as well.
Lewis, Lewis, Lewis FC community garden, is that your football team?
Well, they wouldn't forgive me if I didn't say it's Lewis.
It's a common mispronunciation.
Lewis, right.
Well, yeah, that's an interesting story.
So I was, I won't go on about it too much, because it's just football, and we're not
here for football, but I was a Chelsea fan as a little boy.
And then when they got bought by a big Russian millionaire, I didn't like, there was something
in me that like just didn't get on with that as like a very young boy.
So I just had a year off football.
And then a friend of mine said, come and watch Brighton, like our local team.
They're really, they're, they're really fun.
They weren't really good at the time.
They were, they were potentially going out of business, but I started going there and
I just fell in love with it.
And I had a season ticket there for years, and I followed them from like league two right
up to the Premier League.
And I was going all the time.
I've actually got a little paving slab out there that sort of is sort of dedicated to
me and my little boy.
We got it done for his like first game when they opened the new stadium.
And so really involved in that.
But then it became this sort of beer moth that it is today.
And that kind of engagement and connection was lost somewhat.
And for the last few seasons, I was saying, I don't think I'm going to go anymore.
And my season ticket would auto renew.
And I thought, well, obviously don't want to not go enough to stop going.
So I carried on.
But then I finally did it and stopped going.
And then I got, I kind of, yeah, had like another year off football.
And then it was this beautiful thing where growing and football joined.
And I didn't know whether that would ever happen.
I didn't think that was possible to happen unless I became a groundsman or something.
But one of the players who just signed for Lewis in that summer or leading up to that
summer, he said he wanted to, in order to sort of come down to the level that the level
that the Lewis team are at.
They needed to be something else other than sort of part-time football.
And so they said that he could have a corner of the stadium to set up a community garden.
So he was calling me about compost.
And he said, you know, I've been aware of your compost club work for about a year, but
I've been up in London.
So it was kind of too far away to get engaged with.
But now I'm around the corner, you know, come and have a chance of anything we can do.
And I got, I went in to go meet him and I got halfway alongside the pitch.
And I looked out and the heads stood up on my neck.
There was some sort of thing, like, I felt something.
And I think what it was, it was probably an astalgia to when Brighton used to play in
an old athletic stadium that was kind of, it was actually capacity-wise bigger than that.
Although this feels bigger, I don't know, I was smaller back then.
I don't know if that would have the opposite effect.
But it just, yeah, I basically have been fully engaged.
And the club's like amazing there.
The only team in the world, the club team that pays the budgets equally, men's and women's
teams.
The thing is like a quality FC, obviously we've got the community garden now.
And they just do so much kind of campaigning outside of football for the kind of greater
good.
It's completely out of your own.
So I'm a part owner.
No one can own more than one share.
So fully engaged.
So all the board are elected.
They have like a fixed term and then they can stand for re-election as a maximum term
you can do.
You know, so you can be as engaged or not as you like.
And I found myself really engaging in women's football and then that led up to the women's
euros.
I ended up going to the final at Wembley and watching England win a major trophy.
It's just kind of amazing.
So I was crying.
It was kind of amazing.
So it's kind of, yeah.
Now one of them, one of their players, women's players, trained in my town.
Oh, it is.
So I was on a plane today in Malia.
Came to Newport Padma, which is where I come from.
And so it was quite good for women's football.
So that's a step forward.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, what I'd noticed immediately when going to my first Lewis women's game was that
they, there's this kind of, having gone to football since I remember, there's this sort
of sense, like this carnival feel.
Like, you know, I noticed in the women's euros game, the first one that they played
down in Brighton, the first game and one of the England players, the ball, like smacked
her in the face and she went down and everything just went silent.
Like, oh, she okay.
Like at the men's game, there just be abuse being hurled at the person for being down.
And it was, it's just a real different feel, a much kind of nicer energy, just generally
at the women's football games.
I mean, I still go to the men's games as well.
It's just a different, different thing.
So tell me about the community gardener, Lewis, then what's that all about?
Who's in it?
Yeah, so that initially was one of the players who's there.
He played at kind of quite high level.
I probably saw him play actually against Brighton when they're in the championship.
He was at Charlton.
He's same age as me.
So I guess we're both 36, 87 now.
So he's sort of coming to the end.
He's dropped down the levels and he's at Lewis and he's, he's really into growing and he's
been involved in community growing projects and he does work with children as well at
after school clubs and things up in London, like in Lewis and where he lives.
And so yeah, I went and met him initially just to sort of talk about compost, but just
became like fell in love with the place.
And we kind of just co-created this space.
We've got like a whole corner of the stadium where there's no stand.
It's just kind of like a grass verge and then it goes down a slope.
So we got some funding, we put up a fence to make it kind of safe for people.
Created bed beds, some higher sort of edge trucks, what sort of accessible for people
that can't necessarily bend down.
Got some compost humblers there.
The idea is to sort of bring people together who wouldn't normally, so to kind of engage
some football fans who wouldn't normally get into the soil and then to bring some people
from outside from who would be involved in community gardens who would never think of
setting foot into a football club.
And kind of having that, I'm a big believer in kind of just well biodiversity obviously,
but just diversity in general.
The more diverse anything, whether that's our soil, our crops, our social structures,
everything, the planet as a whole, the more diverse any system, the more resilient and
certainly the more interesting it is.
So it was kind of just bringing that into that space.
And because the club has this very much outward approach, I mean, I had a really good
meeting recently with Blumpton College, which is a big kind of agricultural college and
Horticultural College down here.
And they want to look at maybe having students come every week as part of their ongoing learning
and just what we would get is people helping us manage the space and another diversity
in the space and other energy.
And then they're coming to learn these young students in a very different setting.
They'll be in a football stadium.
So it's just kind of, yeah, it's just very emergent.
So it's kind of unfolding all the time.
So I partnered with direct plants and they've sent us some perennials.
So I want to start down one side, then the other side of the corner, the far end that
we hadn't yet cultivated.
I basically want to create like a kind of multi-story biodiverse edible mini food forest.
Because we often joked about being the only football club with a veg car, a community
garden in stadium, but I said, well, even if we're not that, we're definitely going
to be the only one with a food forest, you know, kind of within a stone store with a
pitch.
Yeah, forget the burger vans to see.
Exactly.
From the hatch, brilliant.
So Horticulture, where did your Horticulture said you were going to grow?
And where did it all mean that?
It's one of my kind of foundational memories is going into my granddad's greenhouse and
sewing with him a sunflower seed.
And obviously, you know, the next time I went over, I mean, that whole process, that kind
of tactile, he was like a big guy, deep.
He smoked all the time.
He had a very particular smell about him.
Like, yeah, like rolled everything was tactile with this guy.
rolled them up, like licking the paper, like deep husky voice, big hands.
It was like a big guy, like, and I've always, I mean, I'm a small person now, but when I
was a kid, I was tiny.
And just being with this guy and this energy and him, like showing me and like, you know,
getting my little hand and getting soil and putting the seed and watering, all that stuff
was just very, even now, it's a very visceral memory.
And I must have been totally like really young.
And then the next time I went, you know, there's a seed, there's a plant sprouted up.
And then the next time I went, you know, and that whole year, like this massive sunflower,
and it was like, every time I went, it was like, there's your sunflower, you know.
And so I really got the bug early for growing.
It probably laid somewhat dormant up until I moved out of home quite young, about 19.
And I would always get somewhere with a garden, even if it was tiny, I lived on in Brighton
with some real steep hills.
And I had the upstairs flat, but the space out front, it was probably a metre deep and
about two and a half metres wide.
And then there was a pavement on a big slope in front of it.
So I had to, it was almost like it was a truck height.
Like, you know, one bit of it was sort of belly button height.
And the further along I went, it was almost like chest height.
And I was growing all sorts of stuff there.
There were just these, it was just all stones and these horrible, spiky things.
So I pulled it all out and I was on the waiting list for an allotment in Brighton.
That can take some time.
And yeah, just started growing had onions and peas and all sorts of little carrots, just
a whole different variety of stuff, some tomatoes.
And like, I'd be out every time I'd come home from work, I'd be tending to it and people
would be walking up the hill going, oh, this is nice.
Yeah, you could do this.
Nobody did it.
And then eventually I got my allotment and then it grew and it became a, something I
really connected with, just not just on a kind of, on a real kind of, I used to call
my allotment my healing space.
It didn't matter what had gone on that day or what I was in the midst of.
As soon as I got there, it was like everything evaporated off me.
And I felt light and present.
And you know, there's, you know, they know now there's that, that chemical relationship
with the soil as well that we're actually like, that is increasing our mood.
I wasn't aware of any of that at the time, but I certainly felt it.
Yeah.
Definitely.
And some flowers and children, I've just donated 750 sunflower seeds to a local primary school
and they're going to grow them.
Little pots and none of them have really done any growing before.
So they're going to hope you have the experience you have and they're doing it to create awareness
for Ukraine.
So I was well on board for that.
So they're all going to grow them and we're going to take photographs and they're going
to, obviously the thing about sunflower is for a child, because it grows really quickly
and then it's really tall, like taller than them.
And that's much more attractive than a calendula or cornflower.
It's kind of like, wow, that's just magic.
It's just magic.
It's magical.
I mean, that's what got me.
It was just, it felt like this sense of magic, especially at the end when we bashed up the
sort of dried up sunflower and he was like, what, what the real magic was when he was
like, remember that little seed that we sewed?
And he's like, yeah, and he's like, look what we're going to do.
And we cut it, bashed it all, collected all the seeds onto like this load of cart, like
laid out a bit of cardboard on the floor.
And there was all these, it felt like hundreds, thousands to me, like just handfuls of seeds
from this one giant sunflower head.
It probably wasn't hundreds, but it felt like that, like my little hands.
It was handfuls, you know, and I was just like, this is magic, you know, we can have one
and we can, we can enjoy growing it and then we can have hundreds.
And it was just like, oh, wow, I guess without having the language or the understanding for
it, it was just that tapping into like nature's abundance, which is a really beautiful thing.
Yeah, well, yeah, you plant that hundred and then you've got hundreds and then you've
got thousands of seeds, you know, potentially, you know, you can grow exponentially if we
allow it.
Yeah, if we allow it.
So tell me about the compost club.
Tell me all about it.
What is it?
Where is it?
What's your aim with it?
It's a pretty big challenge.
I mean, in Milton Keynes, we do have our food waste collected.
But, and but we can't buy green waste.
We can't, you know, in the old days you used to be able to go to the jungle and buy municipal
waste that had been, you know, heated.
So in order that you could put it back on the land again, that doesn't happen.
So we either choice producing our own compost, which obviously I do, or we've got a choice
of buying it, but we haven't got a choice of a compost club.
That would be nice.
You could start a compost club.
Where it goes, I'm just thinking, is it going to like a kind of biogas plant or something
then?
Maybe they're not actually made.
Maybe.
I would assume if they're making compost with it, they would want to find somewhere for that
compost to go.
Yeah, unless they are making it.
I mean, I think Milton Keynes has the most green space as any city in the UK.
So maybe they have a massive parks trust.
So maybe they're using it themselves.
That would make sense.
Don't know.
I don't know how much you can produce, I don't know.
I know that the UK produces like two million tonnes per year of green waste compost every
year of that stuff.
So there's a lot of it nationally, but I don't know about regionally.
So compost club was essentially, I mean, my background is kind of varied, but I trained
as an electrician.
My dad was an electrician.
I was his apprentice when I was younger.
I did various things.
I was a work with musicians.
I used to promote shows and released a record one time and I used to manage a couple of
artists and went to Glastonbury.
I had loads of cool stuff.
That was one of the things I did.
But anyway, I digress compost club was I kind of, I was transitioning in the kind of,
I guess, into the winter, into the spring before all the COVID lockdowns.
And what I was doing was setting up.
I'd moved out to Haosham, which like a little town or Helen line north of Lewis and Brighton
and Eastbourne.
And I'd found this little bit of land.
This guy had eight acres and he had some horses and he agreed to let me have a little
patch of it and had a little polytunnel.
And I thought, well, what I'll do, I want to, I've been growing on a lot of years and
I've been learning about no dig.
And I basically had gone through this kind of, this kind of, like sort of spiritual change
and all this stuff.
And I kind of, I basically, for a long time, I lived in a world where the best we could
do was the least bad.
It was like, I believe that we were inherently destructive and the best, the most responsible
thing I could do as an individual was try and not be as destructive.
So I converted a loot and removal truck and I lived in that for almost three years.
Had like solar panels and it was really comfortable.
Like being a tradesman, I had a gas boiler, a little gas bottle, but the one bottle lasted
over a year.
It had a shower, toilet, a little L-shaped kitchen, it had like a solid oak worktop, it was left
over from the kitchen, it had engineered oak flooring, had a nice double bed, a cymbal
mattress thing.
It was really comfortable, really nice little home.
But anyway, what I kind of, I discovered sort of permaculture and then like the possibility
to be regenerative.
And it was really kind of like a paradigm shift because it was instead of feeling like I had
to live doing the least bad, it was like, how can I do the most good?
How can I make this place better?
I mean, I believe that they figured out that the Amazon was essentially probably a human-created
landscape in the beginning.
So if you imagine that as being exemplary of what we could do, it's just really inspiring.
I'm very positive now, I used to be like real climate anxiety and just we're doomed.
And now I'm like, wow, we can fix this, you know?
So I kind of, I was basically set up this little market garden.
I wanted to demonstrate that you could produce an abundance all the while, boosting biodiversity,
building soil, it doesn't have to be extractive.
And just thought, if I can demonstrate that and make a thing of it on social media and
show it to the world, this will be great.
And then the first lockdown hit, so I was doing that alongside my trade work.
And then it was like, all the jobs I was doing stopped, everything stopped.
And so I was just doing the garden and it was great.
And I asked a few different grower friends online, like, where do I get?
I need a lot of compost, I want to set up no dig beds.
The three different places I was told were like the really good compost to get.
It was all, hadn't studied the soil food web at this point, but I just knew intuitively
that the stuff I'd got, I was just like, this can't be it.
This can't be it.
Like it was black, it smelled burnt, it was very woody, it was still steaming, it was
still hot, it was still, I was like, this can't be right.
This can't be the best stuff.
So yeah, I tried three different big bulk loads and it was all basically much of the
same.
One of them was just a green waste.
One of them was a manure base one, one of them was a spent mushroom.
They're all different, but they were all, I mean, what I know now is basically dead.
They were just kind of, it was all organic matter, but there was no life in it.
It was lifeless.
It was nothing moving.
And so I thought there's got to be something better.
I'll have to make my own.
That's what I'm going to have to do here.
If I want this to regenerate as quickly as I like.
So I started asking people for input, so I'd always made my own compost with my own waste.
So I started asking it like when my mum's got my food waste and my dad's and then it
was my mother-in-law and different people.
And it was like, more people started asking me to take their food waste than I could actually
deal with.
And I just thought, oh, maybe this could be a thing.
Like I know there are places in America where they have compost clubs, it's quite a common
thing over there.
I've got lots of plants in Europe, I've heard about doing it and I just thought, well, maybe
that could be a thing, you know?
And in that bawls as well, it's coincided with trying to think of like, is like, we're
here for such a relatively short amount of time.
Could I be doing something better with the time that I have here?
I'd not long had a little boy born.
And I thought like, I did this deep dive into like brain development and child psychology
and this guy was saying that, you know, we come into the world innately wild, empowered
and connected and as a parent, your job is to kind of nurture that.
And it was kind of weird because at the time I felt a little bit more that way but I'd
grown up disconnected from all of that.
I was very dis-empowered.
I used to be cripplingly shy at real social anxiety.
I couldn't even back when there weren't apps and you had to pick up the phone.
I couldn't telephone for a pizza because I wouldn't know who was going to be on the
end of the phone.
That's how bad.
I just couldn't speak to people.
And I thought, well, if I want, because we were sort of in that position that a lot of
young people, I guess, I mean, I was young then I'm not in warm, but you know, people
sort of saying, I don't think we're going to have children.
There's too many people already and the climate's going south and, you know, but somebody said,
a lady said to me, you know, no, you're like engaged and we, where's the next generation
of activists coming from?
We need some positive impact people.
It was the term she used, positive impact people.
And I thought, so where are the next ones coming from?
If all you people stop having children, everybody else's.
And so me and my partner discussed it for a while and we're like, maybe we should have
a little positive impact person.
So I couldn't once I'd learn about this stuff.
I really like one of the things that was told to me was you can tell children all you like
in trying to teach them things, but they're really learning by observing what he calls
their tribe of influence, which is primarily their parents.
We don't have village raising of children anymore and commune also much.
It's your parents.
So he was like, you have to exemplify that.
They're learning from watching you, how you interact and what you do.
That's the real behavioral patterns that will be established in those first few years and
echo throughout their lives.
So I thought like, oh, wow, that's a lot of pressure.
If I want my kids to be like, positive impact people, I'm going to have to demonstrate,
I'm going to have to be that.
That's the best way to influence that.
And so I thought, how can I make a form of activism, my work in this window?
I didn't know how long this COVID thing was going to be.
I knew I couldn't, you couldn't go and exercise, but I could go to my garden.
And so I thought, well, now's the perfect time I can do this.
I just set up this thing.
People can leave their buckets outside and I can collect it, leave them a clean one.
I've not got to see people.
And so I thought, well, if ever I'm going to try and do something like this, now is the
time.
So it just kind of emerged as a possibility.
And I guess I had this thing of like, you know, if you couldn't do it in Brighton, you
couldn't do it anywhere.
Because Brighton is, you know, not necessarily in terms of what council does, they're stuck
in like awful waste management contracts that still have far too long to go on.
But the perception of Brighton is it's very green.
We've got a green MP and green council.
The people are really kind of up for it.
And so I thought, well, let's try it.
And yeah, from the off, I still always have more people wanting me to take their food
waste than I can do.
So it kind of grew from like six members up to like, I collect up to about 180, 30 litre
food waste buckets every three weeks now.
And collect it with an electric band.
So we did a crowd funner to get that so that there's no emissions from actually doing the
collections.
We've got a green energy supplier to charge it up.
And then on site that I don't have gas or electricity, it's just an outdoor space in
the middle of this old industrial estate at the moment.
But there's an amazing property developer called Human Nature and their X Greenpeace execs
and they're going to make that they've just submitted the planning to the South Downs
National Park for what will probably be the green.
Well, I would say it will definitely be the greenest development of its kind in the UK
and potentially or at least among the best ones in Europe.
It's kind of amazing that reusing stuff that's already there.
They're using like lots of timber frame, hempcrete, green spaces, very few car spaces.
Because on a floodplain in Lewis, they're putting in rain gardens, they're just kind
of thinking of everything.
And it just so happened that the universe put me there.
I was in a community garden there by this time doing compost club.
I'd moved a bit closer to Brighton.
And this guy came around and he was like, what are you doing?
So I told him what I was doing.
And he said, oh, we're about to buy this industrial estate and explain who they were
and what they're about.
And he said, I think I had 60 members at the time.
And he said, in theory, if you had 10 times the space, 10 times the stuff, you could compost
for 600 households.
And so we asked him, theory.
And he said, great, we hadn't thought of composting.
Maybe we could compost for all the houses we're going to build here.
So I mean, that remains to be seen whether that's going to come to fruition.
But there's already talk of setting up composting there.
And there's going to be loads of green roofs and community growing.
I think there's going to be 1,000 square meters of growing space dotted around.
Just really, really cool project to just happily be in the middle of.
Wow.
So they gave me some more space and help me grow to the scale that I'm at now next to
the river, which is really nice as well.
So yeah, that's essentially what I do.
I collect food waste from people who become members.
How do you make the compost?
So you've got some food waste.
It comes in.
What do you do with it?
So I get tree surgeons to drop off wood chips.
I've got food waste, nitrogen, carbon wood chips.
You also get biochar as well.
Yeah.
And then I've got there's a thing called a Rhydan food waste composter, which looks
like an old, I would describe it as looking like an old central heating cylinder,
hot water cylinder with the jacket on.
But on its side, food waste and wood chips go in the top at one end.
And it's got a big crank turn.
And it's really kind of tap, tap, tap.
Oh, it's really, it's really fun.
And it actually moves it on the vessel.
And it's in there gets to like, because of the microbes, it gets to like 60 degrees
in there.
And so it hot composts.
So, you know, hot compostings are up to 32 times quicker than cold composting.
And it also means you can put food, meat, dairy, anything.
So it could be any food waste.
And then it's in there like up to three weeks.
And then it drops out every time you add to it and turn it, the oldest stuff drops
out at the other end.
And it's like well broken down.
It's not like food waste anymore.
It's it's sort of pre compost, if you like.
I also add bakashi into everybody's bucket.
So it's sort of pre digest while they've got their bucket as well, while it's still at
home.
And then what comes out of there I put into like a Johnson 2 bioreactor, which is like
a massive compost bay, but it's on a pallet and it's a big wire mesh cage like a cylinder
lined with weed membrane.
So it's breathable, but it retains moisture and you fill it around pipes so that then
once it's filled, you remove the pipes.
You've got these these hollow chambers all the way through it so that it's passively
oxygenated.
The oxygen there's there's basically no area that's more than 12 inches away from oxygen,
which means you don't need to turn it.
Oxygen will be able to penetrate that far, which allows for the fungi to develop with
undisturbed.
So you're not chopping it up all the time.
It just grows.
You end up with much more fungi.
So the bacterial to fungal ratio is really important with composting, particularly in
soil, depending on what you want to grow.
So if you've got way more bacteria, it will select.
So your soil will select four against weeds.
So if it's really bacterially dominated, that's when nature puts its like pioneering plants
there, which are the weeds to keep get things going.
And then the more bad luck succession you go, the more fungally dominant soil becomes.
So you're kind of most veg growing is about 0.75 fungal to bacterial.
So it's almost one to one.
It's almost half and half.
Brassicas is bacterially dominated.
But you kind of it's one of my things like the idea of multipurpose compost is kind of
insane to me.
It can't be good for brassicas and a fruit tree.
So what is it?
And I know what it is because I've taken a sample and put them under microscope.
I know that there's little more than any bacteria in any of it.
It's pretty sterile commercial compost, sadly.
So yeah, so my thing is like making living compost.
So it's using no fossil fuels, making really good compost by basically stewarding the process
that allows for the microbes to do the breakdown.
They're the ones that get to these temperatures, the kills weed seeds and pathogens.
And then the fungi come along and the protozoa and nematodes and microedipods.
I add worms in there and it just kind of becomes more and more diverse and more and more abundant
because it's them doing the breakdown.
It's kind of not really me.
It's really nice.
It sort of takes the ego out.
I just let it happen.
I just sort of choreograph it.
And then yeah, we end up with a beautiful compost.
So then members get some back every spring and then we donate some to community gardens.
A lot goes to the football club garden.
And then the surplus, we actually sell it online as well to hopefully kind of grow the
scheme.
I've found out recently that we have got some funding to open up another site.
So now it's like, I never set out to do what I'm doing.
It was kind of very much emergent again.
It was just, could I do it?
Let's see.
And now it's like the idea, like the vision, I call it like multi-local nutrient cycling
towns and cities.
So it's like, we could have these everywhere.
We could have compost clubs everywhere capturing what some people call waste.
I call nutrients that are just getting lost because we're not being responsibly.
We're not responsibly cycling our nutrients.
Like for me, like observable reality, like the natural world of which we're a part of.
There is no waste.
There's just this movement of energy from one thing to another thing.
It's not made and it's not destroyed.
It just moves and something is food for something else.
I always say like composting is the best evidence that death is the source of life.
We need the plants to die back, to put the organic matter and feed the biology in the
soil so that the new plants can grow.
It's just the site, everything's on the cycle and the idea of waste and I say to people
when they say we're going to throw it away.
There is no way.
There's only here.
So we've got to sort of, I think, we've got to reintegrate into a natural nutrient cycling
system.
And so I'm trying to create something that lends itself to us doing that.
Consciously or not, like I'll do it.
I'll just take your food waste.
You don't need to worry about it, but I'll do it for you.
And so now, like creating new sites, I can create meaningful, decent living wage, paying
green jobs, purposeful jobs for people, train them to do what I do and then stop popping
them up.
I was going to say, would your plan be to have compost club nationwide?
I mean, I get people from other countries asking me about how they can do what I do now.
So I think it just needs to happen everywhere, whether that's just teaching people how to
do it and they do it on their own or whether I can grow what I'm doing and start setting
them up more myself, whatever.
I just want to see it happening.
Get rid of what I call compost miles.
So we've not got diesel trucks, carting compost around.
All the buckets that I collect food waste in are all reclaimed by virgin plastics.
When I package it, I put it in Hessian bags, tie it up with a little bit of twine and there's
a little paper bookmark with instructions on different ways you can apply it and use
it.
So there's no plastic.
So we lose all this horrible plastic packaging that maybe all of us comes in.
I basically have tried to, rather than, I do a lot of net zero business stuff now and
people are always trying to retrofit circular economy principles to existing businesses.
So what's really fun is that I got to make this social enterprise with a circularity.
In mind, it was like, I want to make this a circular thing.
So I did a carbon scoping thing and it was pretty mad.
We basically have no scope one or two emissions and scope three is pretty minimal because
the delivery guys I use are carbon neutral for the packaging is as I say, it's all impossible.
You could use it again.
The cleaning products I use I get from a local refill shop that I already go to to collect
their food waste anyway.
It's eco products and I refill it.
It's just, I've just tried to make it as holistic as possible.
And if you factor in the emissions we're saving from if the food waste went to landfill, we're
massively regenerative with very carbon negative, if you factor that in them, which is wonderful
because it's like, I've been asked to speak at this thing, the Sussex Business Show and
present what I'm this talk that I'm going to give, which is basically like, I call it
just beyond net zero and it's like, I just want to kind of demonstrate that you can be
regenerative as a business.
You can have something, it's like another side of the activism to say, you can have something
that is economically viable, it works, but it's ecologically not just sustainable but
regenerative.
I worry about the kind of goal setting where we're sort of like, oh, we'll get to net zero,
we'll get to sustainable.
And often we don't reach the targets that we set, but we give ourselves a little pat on
the back for having a good old try.
And if we don't get to at least sustainable, then we're destructive.
You're either sustainable, regenerative or you're destructive.
And so what I'm basically going to be saying to these businesses is like, you've got to
be like, for me, it's pretty radical, but every activity that we're doing, every business,
you need to be at least sustainable.
Because if you're not, as I say, you're by definition destructive and we just don't
have time for that.
So you've either got to be a bit more creative.
And if it's just inherently wasteful, inherently destructive, you know, if it's a fossil fuel
business, sorry, you've got to go back to the drawing board and do something else.
Because we just don't have time.
Well, it's very interesting because probably when you were born, I was doing a degree in
environmental science.
So oh, wow, which was quite very novel, very novel.
Sorry, how do you spell environment was really the biggest thing?
And I think then, even when I graduated, you could go and get a job, but you were really
going to work for an oil company and be putting the corner and pretend it was environmental.
And they kind of ticked the box.
And that was kind of it.
There were no jobs, absolutely no jobs.
So it was just like you were there to do the green washing.
And I wasn't up there.
So it's kind of come full circle, really, because it's sort of like the environment,
but it was a bit, I did.
And then I went off and did loads of other stuff.
And now I'm back with the environment, obviously growing again.
So something obviously keeps pulling me back.
And it's the sustainability, like you say, is like the lowest you've got to be, but how
you can regenerate.
So I'd love to have compost club in milk games.
I'd love to have this.
They need to write a book, Michael, so people can understand how they do it.
Yeah.
And yeah, I've toyed just recently.
The ideas have been flowing for that.
The trouble is like the way my brain works, it's not just one book I've ever seen.
I'm having to like just put these little notes all over the place.
Like there's so much, but it, yeah, it's all to come.
I mean, I do all sorts of things.
I've just got some funding.
I'm setting up a campaign called compost in schools.
And so the idea is schools compost as much, ideally all of their food waste.
And so that they're not paying ongoing for this to be carted away and releasing these
emissions in a diesel truck.
We can just deal with it on site.
We can engage the kids in doing it using no fossil fuels, saving them, give them all
the calculations, the emissions they're saving.
They'll be upfront cost, but if I can get it funded, then there isn't.
Then they're losing that ongoing cost for their waste being taken away.
We engage the kids in doing it and making the compost so that that becomes something
that they're all, it's like a curricular thing.
That compost will not only be lots of compost, but it will be really good compost.
It will necessitate a garden if they don't already have one.
And then we engage the kids in the garden and then they're producing food and then
that anything wasted, they've just got this circular system.
And my thinking is they'll, yeah, and that's it.
For me, it's easier to do that with young people when their minds are being formed rather
than trying to change the mind of someone who's older, who's sort of set in, well, this is
how it is.
It's nothing worse than this is how it is.
Just change it.
A book is an absolute must, honestly, Michael, I think you self-publish it on Amazon fairly.
I mean, writing a book I've done too is not that easy, but it is something to be able
to get the word out there and listen to people understand it a bit more.
And then they even decide that they could do it themselves on a small scale, whatever
that looks like.
So can people individually compost their own food waste and what can they get and what
could they do with it and how do they do it?
I think usually they don't know.
It's the honest problem.
Yeah, well, I've started doing, I did one the other week, like these webinar, I did
a webinar for Great Dix, there are a couple, but I'm going to start doing it as an ongoing
thing.
I basically talk about the soil food web briefly, how that works as briefly as you can, just
to give an idea of what it does and building structure, sequestering carbon, absorbing and
retaining moisture, naturally nutrient cycling, you don't need fertilizers, all this, all
the stuff and the basic kind of groups of organisms that do that and how they do it.
And then looking at practical ways of composting, like really efficient ways that you can do
in any space, you know, you could be doing what I'm doing on a large scale.
But if you don't, if you live in a flat, you could have a bakashi bin or, you know, on
a balcony, you could have a wormery or something.
There are ways you can do it in any certain setting, basically.
If you want to engage with it, there is a way.
Yeah.
Oh, I'll have to get you to come and talk to, I'll run a number of different things and
I'll run courses online for Cupflower Farmers, I'll run courses online, people who just want
to go a couple hours for pleasure.
And I also run a membership group, which is all about Cupflowers and understanding the
soil.
And that's a big bit that's missing.
So I'll talk to you about that one.
Oh, yeah.
So they want everybody, I mean, all of our members and everything want to be regenerative,
but they don't know how to be.
So I think that's more a knowledge gap, you know, and I've been growing for 12 years
and I've got a knowledge gap.
So it's not like, and if you said to me, how do you compost your food waste now, I'd
say, oh, that's going to be quite difficult.
You know, I compost everything I've already got.
You know, we do carbon nitrogen and we do compost everything of course.
We don't compost food because then you think, well, I need lots of equipment because obviously
I don't want rats, you know, I'm on the farm.
You know, we have animals and so on already.
We don't have a lot of food waste, fortunately.
So yeah, we've made sure we don't have much food waste, but I still, it's an educational
piece that's still desperately needed.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, as I say, I went in and spoke to Plumpton College the other day and they're launching
this summer, like a kind of regenerative ag that they haven't done up until now.
But he was saying to me, I was just chatting to him like briefly and not well, I was there
for an hour or so, but just talking like when I'd start rambling on about the soil food,
whereby, you know, I'd get on my little, my little spheal and he was just like, you know,
we have people here like teaching, water culture and agriculture and he's like, I haven't heard
anyone talk about the soil the way that you're talking about it.
No, it's more, it's more a thing rather than, it's more like an object rather than a living
organism, like an enormously complex interrelated organism as well.
It's like, he was like, maybe you could put on this new course, you could come and like
be a lecturer here, like a guest lecturer for speak to the students.
I was like, yeah, well, like this is it.
I just want to get it out to be one of the things that's happened to me.
I think it's knowledge gap that I don't think it's, I think there was the desire, but I
don't think people know what to do.
So I think it was definitely, I mean, if someone,
Yeah, one of the,
And did it and set up compost, the same thing since you came in Michael, you spent a day
and you set it all up to me and said, right, well, says you're being and knows you this
and this is how you make it and this is what you do.
I'd go, go on then.
That's brilliant.
I will do that.
Yeah, I mean, I had a lady like some feedback and she said like she's been growing sort of
professionally in water culture for like 15 years, like studied RHS and everything and
she's like, I, you've just changed the way that I think about soil and it's like the
main, like it's the thing that I'm in all day, every day.
And I just changed, just changed my thinking about it.
It was kind of like, I mean, I had one person, they were kind of angry.
They're like, how have I done all this paid for this training?
And I don't know about this.
And I said, well, the thing is, it's like you say, there is a knowledge gap.
Yeah.
So it is relatively new stuff.
I mean, the lady that I learned from Dr. Laney and she discovered the soil food web at a
university the year before I was born.
So it's not that new, but to proliferate in the way that it's starting to, that's what's
new.
Yes.
So there are people learning it now, the soil food web school that she set up online.
And now that was the course that I did and it was just kind of mind blowing.
I get people reach out to me on Instagram now and they're saying, oh, did you?
Obviously looking and reading at my post and I think I had a couple yesterday or this
morning even saying, oh, did you study the soil food web?
I've just started that and it's blowing my mind.
And I remember that feeling of having my mind blown, like every lecture, it was just
like another level, like such a deeper understanding of what's going on.
Yeah.
And we grow a zammer grower.
I need to understand.
Yeah.
Without the soil, it's got nothing.
It might as well just.
I think 95% of our food globally is grown in soil.
So there's people doing hydroponics, aquaponics, that kind of stuff and there's other food,
but 95% globally is grown in the soil.
It's essential.
And I say to people, soil is literally the foundation of life on this planet, like literally, like
more than one sense.
And it's just everything.
I mean, there was again, in the beginning, like the kind of thinking about how compost
club came about, it was like, there's that quote of, you know, we owe our existence to
six inches of top soil and the fact that it rains.
And you know, I can't do much about the weather, but I just love that.
I can do something about the soil.
I can, you know, that's that basically underpins every if we, if we were, when we undermine
the soil, we're undermining ourselves, we're undermining everything.
Because if we, one of the things I say is like healthy soil means healthy plants, it
means healthy humans, which means healthy planet.
And it's that it's like a cascade.
You know, even in terms of like biodiversity, we think about butterflies and birds and spiders,
but those bigger things are eating the little things.
If we destroy the soil, I mean, you know, it's one of the hopeful things where we're
kind of, you know, they say we've got 60 worst estimates of 30 years and best are like 60,
70 years of top soil left.
In terms of how we're farming on a mass scale, you know, it's like the desertification,
but we can turn sand into soil.
If we apply biology and organic matter, it's just, it's the, what's the quote?
A soil, soil without biology is just geology.
So it's like sand, silken clay.
You know, that's what I thought soil was, sand, silken clay.
It's like, no, it's, it's life.
So Michael, how do we get involved?
We can obviously follow you on Instagram.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're Instagram in the show now.
It's we can get involved.
I will invite you to talk more.
Yeah.
It's just how do people get involved and how do people learn more and what can they do?
And it feels a bit, people feel a bit helpless because it's a lack of understanding.
So I think there is definitely something to be done.
And what you're doing is amazing, which is why I came across your Instagram and I reached
out because I thought, Oh, hold on a minute.
I mean, I know, you know, as a grow, I know what the soil does.
And I'm really into it, but I think we could go that next.
We're probably, as a farm, we're probably sustainable.
We're definitely not regenerative.
We're genitiful.
We're definitely not.
How it is, how we move from here.
It's like, you've said, we're not a disruption for sure.
We're not using any pesticide, but we're just not.
But we're not regenerating anything.
So as a farm, it's going from how do you go from here to here?
Yeah.
And I think we've started to do a lot more about it.
Like I've talked to Mary Ann Boswell and that she does a lot of landscape design and so
on.
It's all about regeneration.
And so I think we're moving in that direction to see we've got a long way to go.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, I just say I'm going to be doing like a kind of maybe like a monthly webinar that
people would just be like a zoom thing at the moment.
It's not listed yet, but maybe by the time this goes out, I don't know when this is going
to go out.
A couple of weeks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just have on my website, which has just been like a holding page for I used to do like
once a month kind of tour and talk on site here in Lewis.
I'll probably start doing that again.
Once it kind of the weather's, you know, it's getting there now, but it's been pretty
good.
Yeah.
So I've not been doing it, but yes, I'll be doing that.
I'll be doing maybe a monthly webinar as well where I'll basically give the slide presentation
that I did the other day.
I mean, people can buy the compost if they want to get I did an amazing I posted this
morning.
You have to scroll down my timeline, I guess if this goes out in a couple of weeks, but
I've been doing growing trials using the compost.
So I've been buying like like premium like professional sewing compost and I've been
sewing two modules of different plants in there to next to it, which are 50 50 mixed
with my compost and that stuff and then 100% my compost and I wasn't expecting the compost.
I thought it'd be too active, but I did some amaranth and it's unbelievable.
I've got like one germinated in the in the it's only three days since I so I think, but
one's germinated in the professional premium stuff.
Three or four, maybe three in the 50 51 and then like 10 in the one that's just living
compost.
It's just beyond what I expected.
So I keep sharing that like I did some sunflowers.
Yeah.
One in each module and literally going up in size in terms of in terms of what the biology
was doing for them.
And I said it the one that was completely live the living compost had sprouted quicker
germinated quicker and then obviously just grown that much faster and it's just it's
just for me it's like, you know, at some point in evolution as animals, we elected
to do our digestion internally.
You know, they know that there are more more of the cells that make up the visible me that
you're looking at now are not human cells.
They're microorganisms and they're very similar groups to the ones in the soil.
We could get on to the gut, but we won't do that.
That's another whole issue about well, yeah, well, I won't go into it then, but yeah, it's
similar.
The soil microbiome around the plant is essentially where it does its by digestion.
And if we're eating food with all of that on it, it's beneficial for us.
So you can buy compost from you, but locally, presumably not nationally?
No, I've got so I've got I now ship with a with so I can send it anywhere in the UK
and they're certified carbon neutral delivery.
So I put it in a I can do a two and a half liter or a five liter bag in a Hessian sack
tied up in a cardboard box, paper tape that address label.
And they'll take it they'll bring it to you next day delivery.
Okay.
So so that anybody in the UK can get hold of that.
I've got a little how to hot compost guidebook like the basic fundamental principles and some
sort of different examples of ways you can do it.
You can get a tumbler or you can do bays or anything.
Just if you want, you know, say you've tried to do some hot composting, it's not getting
up the temperature or you maybe you've not even tried, you'd like to it's it's kind of
perfect for that.
So again, they're on the website.
I only printed a thousand.
I think we've maybe got half of them left.
Okay.
They're all individually numbered and they're on recycled car.
They're really not they're quite they're quite sturdy.
So you can just have it in your pocket little like pocket guide thing.
Anyone locally like it around Brighton, ho, Lewis, I could have a look at signing up for
their food way to collect it as they wreck capacity.
But as and when I open up a new site, there's going to be more space.
So I think we're going to be hearing my loads and loads more from you, Michael.
So I'm going to put it in the show notes and put you in the show notes.
I'm going to invite you over to our groups.
I'm going to go off and order some and then let you know how I get on.
I'm going to compare.
I'm going to do my own scientific study.
So I'll let you as a scientist, I like to chop some eye at all and I'll let you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I guess the other place that might be handy for people I've set up a Facebook group.
I think it's called like food waste composting mastery or something like that.
But if you search for that, like you can come, there's some people that have been composting
longer than I have in there as well as a mix of people that are just starting out.
And the idea is to just kind of, I just want to create a little community where people
can just questions and then I'll put these on.
I'm not sure it's going to be a little community, Michael, but we'll give it a go.
Well, I think there's about 100 people in or so now, and you did it a couple of weeks
ago, but yeah, I might just start doing little brief webinars on there as well, just as
well, like kind of you're in the group, this is on little subsections.
So it can just be little concise, but little nuggets for people and stuff.
Brilliant.
Well, thank you very much for coming over.
We could talk all afternoon.
I'm actually, but we probably need to do a part two once I've digested everything you've
said today.
So everything's in the show notes, but I want to thank you very much for coming over and
just opening up a discussion, even an education about how we can do more food composting, which
is amazing.
So thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
No, thank you.
It's a pleasure.
Take care.
I look forward to next week's episode.
Please don't forget to subscribe and rate and review on your podcast app.
We do have some wonderful free resources on our website at thecutflowcollective.co.uk.
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For farmers or those who want to be from our farmers, we have cut flower farming, growth
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I look forward to getting to know you all.
Bye.
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