- Thank you all for attending. It's something that I'm extremely passionate about, and I'm pretty sure you'll gather that as we work our way through the talk here. So without further ado, we'll just get started. So why organic maintenance? We're starting to find that many things are becoming polluted. Our waters are becoming polluted. There's a lot more risk of cancer and things like that happening to our family members, and we're really at a point where we need to start considering what things we need to start doing differently. I attended a talk last week, actually, that talked a lot about the soil erosion, and you wonder, "Well, how does soil erosion really impact this?" What's happening is the soil erosion is then causing soil degradation. So the quality of our soil is actually reducing immensely, and that's becoming a huge problem with, us being able to grow things. We have to had so many amendments. So we're I'm going to talk a lot about today is really just different things we can do that are more organic-themed or more natural themed that will help you to be able to start improving at least what's immediately around you. This is a fun little slide that I thought I would input. My grandparents would eat one orange back in the day, and they would get a certain amount of nutrients from that orange. Well, today I would have to eat eight oranges to get that same amount of nutrients. So I think it's really important that we start making changes in what we're doing out there. So I'm going to start, basically I'm going to walk through lawns, what things we're doing, things you can do, and then we'll go to beds and then we'll start talking about some other miscellaneous pieces. So when it comes to your lawn, that's usually anywhere from 75% to 90% of our properties. Very few of us have large beds. Most of us have lawns. So this is our biggest impact to the soil. And a lot of things I like to recommend people are some other options. Doing compost applications, recycling leaf mulch, aerating, overseeding, doing fertilizers but the organic ones that are more natural elements. And then we'll talk a little bit about weed control, mowing, and then watering the cultural elements, as well. First thing that I started doing, I piloted this program about seven years ago. We started going through and doing compost applications. I buy a very high grade of compost from Purple Cow, and we apply this to the lawns. And after research, we have learned that this is actually improving the overall root depths of the lawns, which makes them better so they can tolerate drought. It improves the health of the roots, which then, you know, they can sustain drought better. And, also, we started noticing that there's some significant difference in the amount of diseases that our lawns have, especially coming out of winter. So we have the pink snow mold, white snow mold. Those are things that we're really starting to notice a significant difference. Oh, I should also mention Purple Cow is a local company, so if you're from the Madison area, they're material is carried by a lot of local vendors so you can actually do this yourself. Leaf mulch, the contamination, the high nitrogen levels that are going into our lakes are polluting our lakes. So it's really important that we start keeping those leaves. Those leaves are valuable, valuable nutrients that we can keep on our lawns rather than putting them on the curb and letting the city take them away. Also, aerating, another very practical cultural application that's really important. It just improves the ability to have moisture infiltration and then also nutrient infiltration when you're applying compost and other organic fertilizers. Another thing you can do is say, "Well, I have a lawn that's a little on the thin side." Doing some aerating, some overseeding in the fall, I like to do this stuff all together at the same time so I'm not multi doing activities constantly. This is another great activity that you can do. I have a really strong opinion that I believe rather than trying to kill all the we