Zavi Braun - Regenerative Gardening and Food Self-Sufficiency

Zavi Braun's end-of-season presentation as part of the 2025 Youth Environmental Stewardship Program.

(0:00:00) My name is Xavi Braun. I'm from a small farm near Morden, Manitoba. I've lived there since I was five years old. And at the start, didn't really like it. Wasn't interested in any type of permaculture, regenerative gardening, anything. Wanted to do other things, but in the past few years, I've realized how lucky I am and become more grateful for that experience. I want to share that with more people and hopefully get more people into it.

(0:00:30) Regenerative gardening and food self-sufficiency, some examples, and then what Dave has taught me about some more traditional ways of doing gardening, how the Ojibwe people would have done that and thought about that in the past, and then why I think you should get into it, and then some of the limits, because no matter how good it is, there are going to be some limits.

(0:00:55) So everyone is going to have a different way of thinking about this. These are just four principles that work very well for me and my family and that I've seen work in other gardens.

So first is going to be live roots in the ground. That's a cover crop there. The best color you want in your garden is green. That's live roots in the ground for as much of a year as possible. Roots don't want to be lonely. That's going to be the best you want.

(0:01:23) The second is brown, that's mulch which we'll get into later, and the worst is black, that is tilled soil we'll also get that later. So an example of cover crop is going to be this right here, this is a small orchard you have like seven or eight trees and it's a clover cover crop on the ground

(0:01:47) so other plants can't invade that, and so you don't have to till it or spray it to keep the weeds out.

So, second is soil cover. That's all the mulch you see there. That's going to be good for keeping water in the ground, moist and dry years, and muddling the weeds out of it. Less weed habitat, less disturbed ground for weeds to come and invade. So this is what a path would look like.

(0:02:16) This is flax straw. It's a lot tougher than some other extra straw or mulch you can use, and you don't have to change that as much. It doesn't be imposed quickly. You can also use animal manure, straw from animal pens, and that's going to get into the whole permaculture idea of it all being a system and using the stuff of your animals for your garden and eventually it feeds you.

(0:02:43) third is plant diversity that's going to be really good for soil health like all of this so that's the big trees along the side small trees shrubs and the huge plant diversity in there and even the power crop is a mix of many different plants and then the four is minimizing soil disturbance so that's little to no tilling and a good example of that is

(0:03:12) plastic laid out there (top of first slide). That's plastic from an ice rink. It laid out there, stays there for mostly a year, and then next year you can plant plants into there without tilling and without spraying. So these are a couple examples of good gardens I've seen over these past six weeks. This is Joe Gardner's garden near Clearwater. I'm very impressed.

(0:03:41) It was very heavy on the mulch and there was almost no weeds there. There was about six inches of mulch on these beds. And then there's the logs on the side of the beds on the quack grass from getting in. And I was very impressed by all of his experiments. Thought I was really interested in trying different plants together. It's all experiment on improving. And then the mesh tunnel there with the squash and the cucumber. I thought that was very cool. And then this is from...

(0:04:10) The Dog's Run farm, Katie and Colin. I think this is a very good example of what you want your dog to look like after a few years. So, this is what people are doing now. Good examples of that. How was it done in the past?

This is an area Dave showed me. It is a valley with beaver dams. It's down there, down there, and then...

(0:04:38) small dam there where I believe one little guy lives now but all of these are abandoned but it's still a very healthy ecosystem so Ojibwe people would have taken an area like this where a lot of the plants they need for medicinal purposes or for food purposes already are and they would have transplanted the plants that weren't there into this so in the wetlands you could have wika or rat root plant that there along the bank

(0:05:07) You put wild onions, wild ginger, stuff like that. So this looks like a whole natural area, but it's all managed. You can manage the water through the beaver dams and use the beavers to help you. And then you're keeping the whole ecosystem safe and controlling it. And then eventually it will feed you through winter and through dry times, long periods of times. This is a whole garden area.

(0:05:36) So, areas like this are few and far between now, and a lot of the plants in them are sapping out chemicals from the fields around there, and these areas have been pretty much worked out by colonialistic land practices, so one of the things I think I want to do more and learn more about what people should do.

(0:06:05) is take these practices of land management, water management, transplanting native plants, medicinal plants, and bring that to your own gardens in your backyard. And then before we get into some reasons why we can get into this, why it's a good idea, this is just a little example of something me and my brother are doing.

This was rye cover crop, which you can still see it popping up a little bit there last year.

(0:06:34) We crimped it down and then planted about 700 potato plants in there. And that's an example of how you can make a little bit of money on the side. We both work pretty much full-time, so we spend about half an hour a day picking a potato box. And that's a good example of a large-scale thing you can do. It's monocropping. It's all one crop, but it's in a healthier way and will feed many people.

(0:07:04) Some reasons why I think we should get into permaculture gardening, regenerative gardening. First is health. Anyone can tell the difference between farm-fresh vegetable or farm-bush, picked wild, and then something that's been watered, like raised and sprayed in then shipped all the way from California or Southern America or whatever. The second is creating an ecosystem. So we'll go back to the first one here.

(0:07:31) So as you can see, all around this, not all of this can be planted. There's trees there where birds nest. There's pastures where birds nest. There's huge plant diversity everywhere where birds, bugs, and bees can go. And you're also going to bring a lot of stuff like over here, which is going to kill everything. So it's not great for a huge game, big game, but for...

(0:07:58) Small bugs, animal life, birds. It's really impressive to observe everything that's going on. That's something Dave and Finn have taught me, and I didn't really notice before we go up there and realize this area is really, really healthy. And it would be nothing compared to an area like this. This is ideal. This is what I would want in my backyard, but it gets pretty hard. So try to mimic that in some way. And then the third reason why...

(0:08:26) I think you should get into this is the satisfaction and fulfillment in growing your own food. You plant the seed, you water it yourself, and then weed it, take care of it, and eventually it feeds you. So, while I think this is important and more people should start doing it, I'm not here to criticize good farmers. We rely on them every day, and that's not going to change anytime soon.

(0:08:53) Regenerative gardening is great for yourself and potentially making an income, but we need to be honest with ourselves that big farmers are feeding us most of the animals we eat. So I want to see more of it as people breaking out of the cycle of fast food, grocery stores, processed foods, and start taking their food production into their own hands. Thank you.