Hi! This is Jason Tibbetts, the founder of Eden Institute.
My dad is a landscaper. I grew up spending many summer days doing landscaping with him- a hot, hard labor job in the Arizona heat. I hated it. Every summer my dad would take off work for a week and take our family camping in the mountains of Arizona. He would show us all the plants and tell us everything he knew.
I learned about edibles, medicinals, tannins, saponins, and fibers. I was always amazed by the abundance of the world and that a person could live off the land if they knew enough. I determined that I would someday have a huge piece of land somewhere and do just that
I also learned the value of growing food at an early age. When I was five years old my dad dug out the Bermuda grass on the West side of the house. He brought in a huge truckload of manure and tilled it into the whole yard and planted a garden. (From what I am told, that year my bean patch apparently did very well). For starting out as a picky eater, I sure ate a lot out of the garden. This being said, I never really cared for the aesthetics of a garden- neat little rows never appealed to me much, especially if I had to battle Bermuda grass. But I loved the apples, apricots, peaches, and pomegranates that we grew.
But I had other gardening influences at home as well. Both of my grandmothers always grew beautiful flower gardens. I learned at a young age to appreciate aesthetic landscapes and collected magazines and catalogs and poured over every image on every page
I started working with my dad on weekends and during the summer when I was 10 years old. With opportunities to learn every aspect of both traditional landscaping and experimental gardening, I eventually grew to have an intimate understanding of landscape microclimates and knowing where plants grew the best. I learned to love aesthetic landscape design. Though I have still never learned to relish digging the trenches, I have learned how to appreciate it.
Through years of digging, however, I did learn another very important lesson: why we grow landscapes. A beautiful landscape can be very healing. Despite developing an appreciation for elegant landscaping, I still loved the concept of self-sufficiency, and so one day it clicked. Every plant that we designed into the landscape could be substituted for an edible that could perform the same aesthetic function. Trees, shrubs, flowers, and ground covers- edibles provide all those options. It’s hardscaping that is the tapestry of the landscape; and plants are the lace.
And so I spent months and years of research, trial, and implementation. I developed a list of perennial edible plants that could potentially be used in edible landscaping in our local region of Arizona. In 2012, with more than 15 years of hands-on experience, I started a little business that primarily focused on edible landscape design, education and consulting. I wanted to help people get started, especially for those who wanted to do it themselves, but just needed some guidance.
New Zone 9 Ecological Gardening Plant Index 052317
In all my study there was one thing that has always stood out. While we know that plants need sunlight, water, nutrients, and healthy soil, it became apparent that these were harder to provide in Arizona. That’s because in many temperate climates in the United States the environment provides much of this for us. In Arizona, we have to create and supplement those systems in order to achieve any degree of landscape and garden success.
Watering is easy enough if you install an automated irrigation system. Sunlight is certainly much more available than desirable! Understanding nutrient cycles specific to Arizona does take some time (for example, ionized nitrogen vaporizes at 90 degrees), but soils seemed much more complex. Our soil pH is high, the texture is either powdery and hydrophobic, sandy and doesn’t hold nutrients or water, sticky and never dries out, or like concrete and requires a jackhammer for penetration. Fertility is hard to come by and fleeting. Compost often petrifies before it is complete. And the heat kills things.
I realized that the challenge was on a level that was invisible to the eye, smaller than what I could see. I became obsessed with understanding soil chemistry and microbes, and after a ton of research, trial, and error I learned some things about getting your soil right if you want a beautiful, productive landscape. Healthy soil produces a highly productive and healthy pest-free ecological landscape.
Microbes and their byproducts are the difference between dirt and soil. Organisms in your soil are what feed your plants, not N-P-K. Nobody fertilizes the forest, yet it thrives. If you have a healthy community of these microorganisms, you may hardly need to fertilize.
As a result of decades of effort to solve my own landscaping challenges, and the challenges of all of the people that I have helped through the years, we are now able you to offer you The Soil Fertility Accelerator. This product does what it says: It accelerates the natural process of turning dirt into healthy living soil.
We are not the only ones to seek understanding in the field of soil nutrition and microbiology. There is much information out there. But soil science is much more complex than I had ever realized. As a result, there is a lot of false information and inferior products out there.
The scientists with whom we have worked who have developed this product for us have more than 40 years of experience in the field of soil microorganisms and bio-stimulants. They focus on creating products that build a pathogen free soil microbiome that is powerful and stimulating without added fillers and temporary boosts in productivity in exchange for long-term fertility. I am so happy to be able to finally offer microbial products that are unlike any other microbial soil products on the market, in addition to our other products that are so marvelous.
Our mission at Eden Institute is to educate and help people heal the soil and design a paradise like the Garden of Eden so we can enjoy the results of growing our own abundant, healthy, healing food! We invite you to graze on our webpages and blog, and subscribe to our newsletter. Hopefully you will find inspiration here as you grow with us and help to restore the earth to the Garden of Eden that God intends it to be.
~Jason Tibbetts