Our guest is a true change maker, small business owner and what he does is something unique and impactful and just plain cool. Chris English is a small business owner, educator, and farmer. He owns and operates Edible Homescapes where he designs and installs customized edible gardens, offers workshops and grows food on his one-acre market garden with a mission to help secure local food systems and improve the health of our society and environment. Chris is a co-founder of the NPO Revive the Roots, which just celebrated its 10 year anniversary. During his time at Revive the Roots, he initiated the Food for Thought program, which resulted in the establishment of two educational gardens at Smithfield Public Schools in Rhode Island. He also managed the community gardens and facilitated community workshops. Chris holds four certifications in permaculture design and was part of the Providence Zen Center Permaculture Project in Cumberland, Rhode Island.

In this fantastic conversation, you’ll get inspired to try your hand at growing your own garden - whether you have a tiny patch on a porch or a big backyard. Chris wants everyone to feel empowered to get back in touch with the earth and to get in on the movement to stop just consuming and maybe get producing. A charming interview, Chris is part farmer, part philosopher.

Highlights include:
“Some people live on second apartments with nothing but a balcony. And some people might have large, sprawling backyards, with forests or water features. So there's a huge amount of diversity in the way that it can take shape. Essentially, the idea is trying to incorporate some kind of edible or productive element into your home scape into your home setting.”

“Environmental destruction, in the name of farming, loss of topsoil shifts the sheer amount of fossil fuels; it's necessary to support our agricultural infrastructure, transportation, synthetics, all those things really are having a huge toll on the environment and significantly contributing to climate change, and just the overall health of the environment. In general, when you shift our practices - to a form that's more localized, and more regenerative in proving environments and ecosystems, rather than drawing them down, you are directly impacting and helping to mitigate climate change, and making a healthier society for everybody. It's immediately affected by it.”

“I have my one small farm, it's about one acre. I'm trying to make that a great example, a great demonstration of what a one-acre kind of miniature homestead could sort of look like  - how to make it hyper efficient on the small scale that it is and still viable for the market and profitable. And what I really want to do is start to go more heavily to some agroforestry practices on a larger acreage. So I would love to do tree crops with intermittent grazing animals, I'm keeping my eye out for land and trying to find places that I could rent or create partnerships relationships with to take that experience of regenerative farming to the next scale up and where I'm actually at right now, that seems so thrilling and exciting. But it's hard. It's hard to find land and places where you can really do it.”

To find out about Chris and Edible Homescapes visit:
https://www.ediblehomescapes.com/