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Hide a Survival Garden in Plain Sight with Rick Austin and Patrick Poole – Episode 154

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Secret GardenImagine a food garden that you only have to plant once in your lifetime, that takes up very little space, and that will provide food for you and your family for the next 30 years. This garden can grow five times more food per square foot than traditional or commercial gardening and never has to be weeded, never has to be fertilized, and never sees the first pesticide—ever.

And the whole garden is disguised to look like overgrown underbrush so that anyone passing by would not even dream that you had food growing there! Interested? Our first guest today, Rick Austin, author of The Secret Garden of Survival, shares all this and more.

Then to wrap up the show, Bill sits down to talk with his friend and counter-terrorism specialist, Patrick Poole. Poole is on his way to speak on the Glen Beck show and he has just finished an interview with Washington Free Beacon’s, Bill Gertz.

Poole sheds light on what the FBI knew before the bombings at the Boston Marathon. Listen to the show to understand why Poole says: “The (FBI) policies established by the current administration are getting Americans killed,” and, “The media and the political parties [are] working together to keep the world blind.”


Off The Grid Radio
Ep 154
Release Date April 25, 2013

Bill:      Imagine a food garden that you only have to plant once in your lifetime, it takes up very little space, provides food for you and your family for the next 30 years, grows five times more food per square foot than traditional, commercial gardens, you’ve never got to weed it, you’ve never got to use fertilizers, pesticides ever. Today’s guest is going to talk about a garden like that. And a garden also, that’s a little bit disguised, maybe camouflaged even, so that not everybody knows what you’re up to. Our guest today is Rick Austin. Rick thanks for joining us.

Rick:    Hey, thanks for having me.

Bill:      It’s great to have you and talk about gardening, as we were mentioning before the show started. Here we are. It’s… We’re getting close to May and we’re… It’s still snowing in a lot of places. It snowed on us not too long ago, as we were talking about. You almost need an ice pick to get your garden started. But inevitable, Rick, what we know is spring comes and with it, it’s a great time to have you here because it is time to plant gardens and if you… You know what? If we’re going to take the time to plant a garden, why not take the time and plant a garden the right way? And I think your book talks a lot about how to do that. What was the motivation for this thing?

Rick:    Well, I used to be a traditional apple farmer and like every other apple farmer, I had row after row of apple trees and the trees’ branches touched each other and there was grass growing in between and I spent a fortune on pesticide and fertilizer and used pesticide every ten days and after every rain. And little did I know at that time that the grass that was growing between the apple trees actually sucked up the same nutrients that the apple trees needed and lo and behold, after all of that money and all of that effort, I still had scabby and wormy apples just like every other apple farmer had. So I spent a lot of time studying nature and experimented and did a lot of research and found a much better way to do this than the traditional, sort of conventional, commercial thought.

And I’ve also been a so-called survivalist and prepper long before they coined the terms. I grew up in New Hampshire, so I had to live through New Hampshire winters, where you would have a snow or an ice storm and not have electricity for five to seven days at a time. So you learn how to cook with wood and heat with wood and how to preserve your stuff out in the snow. And I also spent the other part of my life in Florida, in the hurricane and the lightning capitol of the world, where you could lose power for five to seven days at a time, but there you’re dealing with 90 degrees and 90% humidity, so you’re kind of the other end of the spectrum.

Bill:      Sure. Sure. Why do you think having a camouflaged garden or sort of a… maybe more of a little bit of a secret garden is so important now?

Rick:    Well, with things the way they are in the world and if you are a so-called prepper or just concerned about disaster preparedness in general, let’s say you survive the end of the world as we know it. I mean let’s say you survive for a year. What are you and your livestock going to eat when the food stores run out and how are you going to replenish that year’s food storage and feed yourself year after year after that? And then the biggest thing is how do you keep others from stealing it? Because if you’ve got a sort of traditional row garden, anybody that walks by your house or along the road and sees that is going to know that you have food and even if that stuff isn’t ripe yet, they’re going to pretty much assume that you’ve got food stored in your home, whereas if you’ve got a food forest or a theme garden, it’s really disguised and it looks natural because it is natural. It’s the way nature grows stuff. So it kind of looks like an overgrown thicket, but if you look closely, you can… There’s a lot of food growing there. And like I said, that’s the way nature grows stuff so…

Bill:      Sure. So as you… As you kind of tried to figure out how to do this, I mean you sort of dug into it more and more, this idea of how nature does it. I mean what did you find out as you kind of dug into that in the process of maybe learning this in your life or in the process of writing the book? What did you find out?

Rick:    Well, like I said, I knew there had to be a better way and so I studied how people all over the world survived without fertilizer or pesticide or mechanized petrochemically run farm equipment. And what I found out is it… They did studies of native, indigenous people all over the world and those are people who lived off the land for generations without electricity, without refrigeration, without commercial agriculture, without pesticides and insecticides and it showed… These studies showed that these people have lived primarily on perennials, which are plants that grow year after year without replanting, as opposed to the annuals that are your typical sort of grocery store vegetables and crops that you must replant every single year and aside from living off perennial fruits and nuts, these indigenous people also lived on small animal protein. So in other words, these people who survived for generations without modern-day comforts of consumer society did so by eating fruits and nuts from the land, as well as small animals like rabbits, birds, fish, etc.

So I really looked at trying to go back to the land and trying to do things the way that we used to do things. Now what if we didn’t have electricity? What if we couldn’t get the petrochemical fertilizers and couldn’t use mechanized farming? And in a world where there is potentially no electricity and no refrigeration and no supermarkets, no seed stores and no fertilizers and no feed source for your domestic animals, it just… It makes sense to look at those people who managed to live successfully for generations without those conveniences that are then… Since these people were primarily hunter-gatherers and they didn’t spend their time planting or tending crops, they spent the majority of their time harvesting their food without all the work that you would typically think of with traditional gardens. And these people, likewise, didn’t plant in rows. They didn’t plant year after year. They didn’t weed. They didn’t fertilize. They didn’t water plants in order for them to survive long enough to bear fruit, yet they managed to survive for hundreds, if not thousands of years this way.

So when I set out to use my garden or create my garden concept, I used those concepts and it’s been amazingly successful. I have been growing every fruit tree, berry bush, herb, nut tree that’ll grow in my region using these concepts and we’ve had amazing success. For example, in the first year… First season that we planted, we had more food than we could eat and less than half an acre and in a year we had gone from literally barren, red clay to 12-foot high blackberries.

Bill:      Wow. So what do you think, as you kind of drill this down, what’s the makeup of a sort of secret survival garden?

Rick:    Well, it’s… And in a nutshell, it’s what they call permaculture and I kind of like to say it’s really permaculture on steroids because there are a lot of different definitions of permaculture. But ultimately, permaculture stands for permanent agriculture. So you plant once and then harvest for a lifetime. And you let nature do what nature does best. Time and time again we’ve seen that man screws it up when he thinks he can do it better and I’ve got lots of stories I could talk about in that regard, but…

Bill:      Well, just stop… Stop for a second because I think there’s going to be people really call you on that, Rick, just… I concur with you. I think there’s something sort of amazing about just how it just is supposed to be and there’s less… It’s almost like what you’ve got is the zero resistance garden. In other words, it’s just you’re going with the flow of the way it’s supposed to be and you’re not doing a lot of fighting, but I mean a lot of people are going to say, “Hey, all I know is rows,” right? I mean that’s… My grandpa planted rows of things and I planted rows and rows, rows, rows your boat. So what’s your response?

Rick:    Well, in nature, nature doesn’t plant in rows, you know? It doesn’t. If you ever look at the edge of a forest where you’ve got maybe a field going into the forest, if you look at it you see that there is sort of a succession of plants and that’s what nature naturally does. So in a field you’ve got your grasses and you’ve got your groundcovers and you’ve got your “weeds,” which actually help the soil become richer so that other plants can succeed them and move into that space. And that’s where you get your herbs, so they start there. And then if you go a little closer to the forest you find your bushes, like your blueberries, your fruit bearing shrubs like blackberries and then you start getting into your fruit trees, which are a little bit shorter and then you eventually get to—when you’re finally at a mature forest—you’ve got your oaks and your pines and that sort of stuff.

In this concept, you’re really planting in what are concentric circles so that everything can get light, everything can get sun, air and so instead of planting in rows, you have a central tree and they call these things guilds, so this guild included the central tree, which is… that could be a nut tree or a fruit tree, which is going to grow out and taller than everything else. And then around that, outside the drip line of that tree, you plant your fruit bearing shrubs like your blueberries and blackberries. Then around them you plant your herbs—everything from your medicinal herbs to your cooking herbs. And then around that you’re planting groundcovers, which can be everything from dandelions to clover to strawberries. And that’s the way nature grows things.

And the fact that you’re planting these things together, you’ve got a symbiotic relationship going on where everything benefits from being together as they do in nature. So you have some of your herbs like… I think most of your herbs have little florets on them all the time and they attract predatory wasps that kill the bad bugs you don’t want to have on your trees. So your… And nature is actually handling the pesticide and since 90% of the bugs out there are actually beneficial or good bugs, they’ll kill the bad bugs that you don’t want to have if you’re planting the right stuff together. So there’s a lot of that symbiotic relationship planting. I don’t know if you ever read the book Carrots Love Tomatoes but it’s kind of like that except much bigger. And there are different types of guilds for different types of trees. For example, I don’t know if you have black walnut trees where you are…

Bill:      We definitely do.

Rick:    Okay. And when I ask the question usually and I’m standing up making a presentation and I ask people what grows underneath a black walnut tree, most people say, “Nothing grows under a black walnut tree.”

Bill:      That’s what I… That’s my first response because I’ve tried planting things around black walnuts and we all know what’s going on underneath the soil.

Rick:    Well, yeah, they… Black walnuts have… give off a toxin in their roots because they don’t like competition. But if you plant the nightshades, like peppers, tomatoes, currents and that sort of stuff underneath a black walnut tree, those plants love that stuff. So they do extremely well under a black walnut tree. If you do some other things, like if you plant onions or garlic or any of the alliums around the base of a fruit tree, mice won’t go near it in the wintertime and gird it because they don’t like the smell of that stuff. If you plant daffodils around the drip line of your fruit trees deer won’t go near it. So there’s just a lot of those things that occur in nature that if you apply it to your own garden, keep it from having to use pesticides. You’re not planting in rows and you’re not digging up the soil, which is really not good for the microorganisms and it just… It’s amazing but when you let nature do what it wants to do, it works.

Bill:      And it sounds like you’ve got… Now I just am kind of borrowing a phrase here from you, but it sounds like it’s almost three-dimensional. You’re kind of attacking it… attacking life… It’s kind of… It’s non-linear from the traditional concept, so it’s kind of like 3-D gardening, isn’t it?

Rick:    It is in a lot of ways because that’s the way nature grows. You’ve got these concentric circles and you’ve got these different layers and everything is going to get sun and light and you actually can grow five times more food in the same amount of space. Plus with everything growing together and everything growing on top of each other, it’s camouflaged, so you don’t really see that it’s a garden like you would in a row garden.

Bill:      Yeah, it doesn’t… Nothing sticks out. So it’s kind of…

Rick:    Right.

Bill:      It looks, like you said earlier, overgrown and I think people tend to think, “Well, why stop there? It’s… This isn’t anything that we can harvest because it just looks like a bramble.” But speaking of which, you like blackberries a lot but you also like… I was reading in here and you like the idea of growing grapes in a little different way. Do you want to tell us about that?

Rick:    Oh yeah, sure. Well, in nature there are no trellises, you know? Things don’t grow on trellises because there aren’t any trellises, but vines grow on trees. They climb up trees and that’s what happens in nature. And we planted grapes right next to our apple trees, for example, and the grapes grew up the trees and a traditional thought would be “Oh, it’s not going to get enough light and it’s not going to grow well and they’re going to choke each other out.” Well, exactly the opposite happens. They both help each other. We had grapes growing on trees and I show this in my book and I show it, I think, in my website, but we planted muscadine grapes on these trees and we also planted them on trellises because I wanted to try and see what it looked like. And I will tell you that unequivocally, the grapes that we planted on trees produced five to seven times more fruit than the grapes that were on trellises.

Bill:      Why do you think that is?

Rick:    You know, I’m not really sure why it is. It’s just… Maybe it’s the mottled sun instead of the direct, full sun that the grapes are getting or maybe it’s because the apple trees or the other fruit trees just bring in the good bugs that also help the grapes too. But it’s… It’s amazing. The pictures I’ve got are just absolutely flabbergasting when you show people the grapes that we grew on trellises and after two years how little growth there was compared to grapes that we grew on apple trees, which absolutely just swallow up the apple tree, but they both really do well together.

Bill:      That’s remarkable. Maybe it has something to do with… too is sort of you’re not… Maybe there is a level sort of a symbiotic relationship there that just hasn’t been documented by science. I mean we’re a young people, right—civilization-wise? There is a lot we just plain don’t know. And a lot of universities… What university is going to do a study on that, because who is going to pay for the study? It’s not some big company, right? What would you gain from doing that study if you were at Clemson University, you know?

Rick:    A lot of those universities that do ag studies unfortunately are paid by the… paid by people that get money from sources that really aren’t interested in proving something that they don’t sell as correct so…

Bill:      Yeah.

Rick:    There’s just a lot of stuff out there that just smacks of payola and it’s unfortunate but you’re not… You’re not seeing a lot of that kind of research that’s going on out there.

Bill:      Well, tell us a little bit about… I have a sort of a German… nervous German heritage, so I kind of like… You know how like a lot of weightlifters like to go in and lift weights and they even do it at their own…? They overdo it because they have a nervous disposition that wants to say, “No pain, no gain,” and even if it’s not true. In other words, you can train way too much, Rick, and not get the benefits of your lifting or your training by not resting and allowing yourself to recuperate. A lot of people workout every day. That’s not necessarily true. Let’s look at how sort of that model applies to gardening a little bit. Should I be a little lazier about my weeding? Should I kind of try to…? I kind of like weeding, in a way. It makes me feel like I’m doing something. But you’re saying, “Hey, maybe here’s what this sort of secret survival garden is not about” and it’s not necessarily about spending all your time pulling weeds, among other things.

Rick:    Well, I’ll tell you… Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you. One of the things that I hated about gardening—traditional gardening—was the fact that it was a lot of work. A lot of work, you know? And you had to till the soil. You had to set up the rows. You had to plant the seeds, you know? You had to be constantly weeding the stuff, looking out for pests, spraying pesticide, putting down fertilizer. It was just a tremendous amount of work for the return that you got. And what I absolutely love about this whole concept of secret garden survival is that it’s not work. All you do—after you’ve planted everything—it’s just permaculture, so it’s all perennials. It just keeps growing all the time and just gets bigger and better each year. And all you do is harvest. And that’s where you go out there and that, to me, is rewarding because we’ve got various different plants that come into season at different times and thank God that that’s the case because if they all came in at once, you could never pick everything that was becoming ripe. So early in the season you get strawberries that are starting to ripen and we’ve got those going right now. And then your blueberries and your blackberries and your peaches. And then you kind of go through the progression and toward the end of the season you get your figs, which are almost the last thing to be picked.

And it… You’re just going out there and… I’m bringing in three gallon buckets to six gallons worth of fruit every single day and last year I was doing that and I was bringing in grapes and my wife has been frantically trying to can everything and just looked at me finally and said, “Stop. Stop. I cannot keep up.” So we ended up freezing our fruit and then being able to do it kind of in the off-season because it was just so much stuff coming due and so much stuff…  But that’s the beauty of it, you know? You’re just harvesting.

And you asked about the weeding thing and I like to say that weeds are just misunderstood plants, you know? They are pioneer plants and nature hates a vacuum, so weeds are usually the first thing to go in and weeds will take soil that nothing else can grow in and they will essentially break up that soil, allow water to be able to drain in there, allow air to be able to get in so it aerates the soil and then microorganisms start to grow in that area, which allows the nutrients to be absorbed by the plants. So what you’ve got with weeds is they are actually helping make that soil better for your next generation of plants. And when people pull those out, they basically stop nature in its tracks. And so not only is it a lot extra work for the gardener, but you are making a lot more work for your plants to survive and succeed too.

Bill:      Sure. So people want to get rid of weeds and then they also want to get rid of bugs, but you’re saying most bugs are good bugs.

Rick:    Yep. Absolutely. As I said, 90% of the bugs are good bugs and if you kill the bugs… If you use pesticides, you’re killing the good bugs and you’re usually killing them first. And just understanding nature, there are usually fewer predators than there are prey because the predators have to feed on a lot of prey at one time. So you end up killing those good bugs and suddenly you have the bad bugs are able to procreate at an exponential rate and now you have a bigger problem than you had before. And not only does that, but those pesticides also kill the soil organisms that allow all your plants to live. So all that little ecosystem you’ve got going on in the ground, in the dirt ends up dying as well and that’s just… That’s just killing your opportunity for your plant growth.

Bill:      Sure, Rick. And then the other thing that people want to do… They obviously want to get rid of the weeds and they want to get rid of the bugs and then they want to get out the chemical fertilizers, you know? So what’s your remedy for that part?

Rick:    Well, if you let nature do what it wants to do, you don’t need it. And my… Unfortunately, when you’re using fertilizer, I like to say it’s… It’s like a drug, you know? It’s like creating drug addicts of your plants and they become dependent on it and if you take that away, they start to wither and die and go through withdrawal. And the other thing to think about is where are you going to get fertilizer and pesticide after the end of the world as we know it? I mean if we ever have that kind of a disaster scenario, if you start your plants that way, they’re all going to wither and die. So if you let nature do what it wants to do, you won’t have to worry about acquiring that stuff or having it.

Bill:      So what are some of the benefits—the sort of macro-benefits—from this whole approach to permaculture and sort of just letting things go with the way that they’re naturally developed the way they’re supposed to go?

Rick:    Well, selfishly, it provides all the fruit and veggies and nuts and berries that you and your family can consume in very little space. If you set things up right there’s really no need for watering once you get the plants established and the best place to store water for your plants is actually in the ground. We use berms, which are kind of like terraces and swales, on the end to store water and what happens is you get water that runs downhill and that water seeps into the ground and you’ve got your plants on those terraces and the water actually creates sort of like a lens-shaped pool under that berm and your plants are able to reach that and get the water that they need. Even after there has been a drought there is still plenty of water in the ground. So last year we had the… Let me think. Just about six weeks without rain at all. Not one drop. And everybody around me—we sit up on top of a hill and I can look out and see my neighbors—and all of their row crops were turning brown and everything we had was still just beautiful green.

Bill:      That’s remarkable. I was one of those guys, Rick. I was one of those waterers because I’m a little bit untraditional in my gardening because I agree with some of your premises, but I… I don’t have this part of it down so this is fascinating, that you were able to do that, just create hardier plants and a longer growing season. What else do you like…? We talked about the blackberries. I think that’s really… Why do you like blackberries so much?

Rick:    They’re pretty much maintenance free. In fact, probably the most maintenance you have is just kind of trimming them back so they don’t end up blocking the sunlight for other plants around them because they become prolific. But if you’re smart about it, you can also use blackberries—the ones… If they start to grow beyond where you want them to, you can dig them up and you can move them and pretty successfully transplant them and they make a really great green fence and a hedge, which keeps four-legged animals out and two-legged animals too, for that matter, because nobody likes to walk through a blackberry patch. So if you use that around the borders of your garden, it’s harder to see in and out-of-sight-out-of-mind, you know? Especially for things like deer, which are as I like to say an appetite with four legs. So you’re keeping them out because they don’t want to go through that blackberry patch either and if we ever do have that grid-down scenario, you’re not going to be so visible to people walking by and they’ll probably go after something that seems a little more… a little easier to handle—the so-called “low-hanging fruit”—as opposed to trying to get on your property because they just don’t want to get all cut up.

Bill:      Yeah, that would be me. I don’t want to get all cut up. So your book is… And this show, a lot of times we talk about—one of the main focuses, Rick, we talk about—is offering people a different paradigm. We think that the contemporary paradigms are kind of messed up through traditions and laying blame about how we got to this point is pretty easy to do, but you’re truly offering a book that provides a different paradigm. Do you want to just run through the table of contents quickly, just for our listeners so they know what’s in the book? I think it’s really helpful.

Rick:    Yeah. Well, I want to show people how they can start like I did, with barren soil, if they need to. You can start this in a small area. You can start it an area that already has some good soil in it. But basically, I started with North Carolina red clay, which if you leave it out in the sun too long it just turns into a brick. So I show them how to start with a completely slate, from either barren or existing ground, what kind of exposure they need to the sun, what kind of slopes work best. I show them how to create gray water systems that can be as simple as tapping into the gray water from your laundry or as complex as creating a manmade wetland, which then can spill over into a pond, which you then can also use to irrigate your crops or keep your ducks and that kind of stuff in there or your fish.

I show how to do swales and microclimates by using exposed rocks. If you have a little exposed rock or something like that in your garden, that essentially collects heat during the day and gives off heat at night. So you’re creating these little micro-climates that essentially you’re allowing your plants to have a longer growing season so they can start earlier in the spring and stay active longer in the fall. We talk about the permaculture guilds. I talk about rainwater collection, which I think is important for people, not just for their garden but also for their livestock and for themselves because just about everybody has a roof and it’s a pretty simple scenario to be able to collect rainwater for you and your plants. And water is a pretty critical resource if we have an end of the world as we know it scenario.

I show how to do herbs and vegetable gardens, keyhole gardens, the entire infrastructure for the garden, so how to create berms and retention ponds and how to prepare the ground so that your microorganisms do well and they’re using some good, decomposed mulch and putting plants in place that are nitrogen-fixers, that actually bring nitrogen back to the soil. There are a lot of plants like that. Just simple clover does that. Your legumes, like peas and beans do that. And alfalfa is one of my favorites because that will germinate in three days. It is constantly flowering and if you plant that stuff in and amongst your other plants, it attracts those predatory wasps that kill the bad bugs you don’t want to have.

I talk about how to plant the food source, including how to… the proper way to plant a tree and the tools to use. And then just kind of observing and watching everything grow and looking at your wet spots, your dry spots, your hot, cold, windy spots and how to compensate for that, natural pest control—everything from deer and raccoons to rodents and fire ants—that kind of stuff, as well as what to do throughout the growing season. And I’ve even got one chapter at the very end, which is kind of a bonus chapter, with what to do after the harvest, which talks about preserving and canning and dehydrating.

Bill:      Rick, how would you summarize sort of what this whole thing’s about? I think it’s a great book for people and I think it’s something that everyone should just at least have access to, especially now. Really quickly, you can get this book on Amazon. You can get a Kindle version. If it ever does warm up and it’s time to plant, then you can sort of go grab this book or you can get a regular version of it. You can go to your website and get it, which we’ll mention in a second. But kind of what’s the big game? What’s the big picture for you in writing this book and for the listener?

Rick:    Well, the whole secret garden survival is based on years of research, experimentation, first hand experience on using these permaculture concepts in my own homestead, orchard, vineyard and berry farm and these techniques work and they work amazingly well because you simply let nature do what it wants to do instead of trying to force nature to do what man wants it to do, all without using fertilizer and without using pesticide or… Because of my success, I’ve had lots of people come visit us and look at this place, people in the agriculture area, preppers, and I was asked to speak at [inaudible 0:32:30.8] conferences about my success. And I’ve been teaching people how to do this on their own homestead.

So I ended up writing the book because everybody I talked to asked me to write a book and to show them how to do it. So I did. And I tried to make it easy to follow and easy to read. I had studied a lot of different permaculture texts and many of them were 400 pages long and confusing and just almost way too much information in them. So I tried to make it really simple and really straightforward, step-by-step. I used a lot of color pictures and illustrations, even though the publisher said, “Hey, this is going to be expensive.” I knew that it would be better for my readers to actually see how it’s done and to see it in full color. And we’ve got, I think, over 120 color pictures in there, so it’s true what they say about a picture being worth 1,000 words. I guess I saved my readers from reading over 120,000 additional words.

Bill:      Yeah. Yeah, great. And that’s what we need. We need something that we can look at and then act upon because let’s face it—right now we don’t have too much time to get things going. It’s… And you know, Rick, it’s better to take baby steps than to not do anything at all, so don’t read—for our listeners—don’t read Rick’s book and say, “Well, I’m not going to do anything because I can’t do everything.” So I think this is one of those baby steps things. How would you kind of…? What do you have to say as we wrap up? How would you like to kind of summarize just this idea of taking this and putting this into practice?

Rick:    Well, I think people need to understand that you can do this… You can do one guild at a time, you know? And there are people who live in an urban or a suburban environment where they have restrictions on what they can do in their yard and a lot of people have seen my presentations and said, “Oh, this is perfect for what I need because we can’t plant a garden in our backyard,” but this doesn’t look like a garden if somebody’s planting a fruit tree and some berry bushes and that kind of stuff so… I guess what I’d like to leave people with is if you look at the way native, indigenous people from around the world survive, that’s really what this book is all about. And if you keep that thought in mind, you’ll understand that you can create your own “Garden of Eden,” which works with nature instead of against it. This garden can provide you with more and better food than you could ever imagine, with less work than any garden you’ve ever planted before and perhaps most important, your garden will be disguised to look like nature so that no one would ever assume you’ve got food planted there.

Bill:      Fantastic, Rick. And your website, of course, is SecretGardenOfSurvival.com and you can also go to Amazon and get the Kindle version. You’ve probably got some other stuff on your website, Rick, as I’ve looked through it, that folks would enjoy as they go there. So hey listen, thanks so much for spending time with us today. I know your time is valuable, as is our listeners’ time, so we just want to let you know how much we appreciate your time.

Rick:    I thank you for having me on.

Bill:      All right and for our listeners as well, thank you so much. And from Tom, Tony and Bill Heid here in the studio, thanks again for listening today.

[End of segment one]

 

[Beginning of segment two]

Bill:      Speaking also today with my good friend, Pat Poole. Pat, you’re in an airport. Where in the world are you?

Pat:      I’m in Phoenix going to Dallas to do the Glenn Beck Show.

Bill:      You’re on your way to doing the Glenn Beck Show? Fantastic. And you were quoted earlier in the week on Bill Gertz’s article. Do you want to tell me a little bit about that? And the reason I want you to sort of talk about it a bit, Patrick, is that you probably have been blowing the whistle on this Islamic thing longer than anybody I know and in a more articulate way and in a less inflammatory way than most people, so what’s happening?

Pat:      Well, I hate being right, but in this case of the Boston bombings, we see yet again that, as Bill Gertz talked about in his article in the Washington Free Beacon on Tuesday, that the FBI once again was notified that “Hey, this guy is of serious concern” by a foreign government, which in the case of Russia, was very unprecedented. And I think earlier in the case of Major Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter, the FBI was aware of his communications—his email communications—with Al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki but they said, “Oh, well he’s talking about religious matters so therefore, it’s not worth us opening an investigation.”

Well, here the FBI had been made aware by Russia that this was a bad guy, that he was associating with bad guys overseas and because of the FBI policies that say basically, “We can’t look at any religious dimension to the suspects,” they cleared him. And it’s just absolute insanity and these policies are literally—not figuratively—these policies established particularly by this administration are getting Americans killed, bombing on American streets. Where is the outrage? That remains to be seen.

Bill:      Well yeah, the outrage is localized in other places and the outrage is closely managed by mainstream media for the most part, Patrick, I think.

Pat:      Yes. And in this case of the bombing, I mean the media… This was certainly not their finest hour because they… Initially it was “Oh, this is right-wing terrorism” because that’s the narrative. It’s not Islamic terrorism and global jihad that’s the threat. It’s American citizens exercising their constitutional rights that are a threat to America.

Bill:      Yeah, it’s… Well, it’s not only that. It’s they’re exercising their right to can food with a pressure cooker, right? Remember the left media said, “Well, it’s got to be somebody that’s on the right because they’re the only people that can their own food.” I mean that’s just the craziest thing in the world for someone to say, yet… Well, it just goes into the black hole.

Pat:      Yeah, and it’s hard to overstate how bad the media was. I mean last week when Dina Temple-Raston from National Public Radio was just going on about the right-wing and you had Peter Bergen, the so-called counterterrorism expert on CNN immediately coming out with that, saying, “It’s right-wing terrorism” and then you have Southern Poverty Law Center, the fear merchants of… that the right-wing is in some kind of resurgency and the Tea Party are all wearing white hoods and burning crosses on the weekends. And at the end of the day, they were all wrong and there is no consequence for all these people being wrong and there’s no reward for people like myself who have been right all along.

Bill:      Well, obviously you’ve got some personal satisfaction, Patrick, as well as the fact that I’m sure there will be some of these alternative media sources, which are gaining in popularity. You’re on your way to doling the Beck Show. I’m sure you’re going to bring some of this stuff out. And I think it’s a groundswell where people more and more are starting to pay less attention to these crazies that control the media and more attention to sort of alternative sources. And I hope you’ve become one of the heroes of those alternative sources.

Pat:      Well, and I certainly hope that that’s the net effect of this particular incident is that people should not be soliciting the establishment media. I mean this is the Obama narrative’s media that they will put out whatever the establishment thinks, whatever the FBI wants. This whole incident with… And all of last week where you see the confluence of all the long term consequences of a particular way of thinking, not just in our government establish but in our media establishment and how the two were working together to basically keep the American people blind as to what was going on.

Bill:      And as you said earlier, Patrick, once… Now if someone… Let’s turn the tables on this nonsense. If the FBI was looking at someone and they were maybe a… they had some sort of right wing… I don’t know the sort of the theological philosophies of some of the groups of the right, but some of the guys who think that they are Israel now or something and the… What are some of those groups that think that this particular…?

Pat:      Christian Identity…

Bill:      The Christian Identity Movement. Let’s say, for example, you’re with Christian Identity Movement. You nailed it. And the plot was hatched. They were in the process of getting involved and the suspects that they interviewed had that motif. Certainly they wouldn’t have said, “Oh, we can’t chase this down because these people… There is a religious motif to this case so we’re going to drop it.” That’s not the case. It’s not religion. It’s the fact that Islam has a free… get out of jail free card, literally and figuratively.

Pat:      Well, and basically Islam has become the established religion now. It’s a protected class unto itself where if somebody ends up having attended a Tea Party rally five years ago, then the entire Tea Party is responsible and indicted. But when one of these terrors comes out of one of these radical mosques, which is… That’s exactly the case with the Boston bombings. These kids came out of the Islamic Society of Boston, which was founded by Al Qaeda fundraiser, Abdurrahman Alamoudi, currently in federal prison. Then the lone wolves… There’s nothing attached to the Islamic institutions that really bred the extremism in these kids.

Bill:      Yeah, and the trail just stops.

Pat:      And it’s really a double standard.

Bill:      It’s a complete double standard and in the process, as you said early on in the interview here, people are literally dead, including one of the terrorists. If you would have just arrested that guy earlier… Let’s take the position of the soft left and say, “We care about everybody’s lives and we like everybody. God loves everybody equally”—all this stuff that everyone says—wouldn’t it have been better off for the terrorist that’s now dead if someone would have intercepted him and said, “Yeah, he’s a Muslim but you know what? We’ve got to continue this case and perhaps arrest him”?

Pat:      Or send him back. Again, these…

Bill:      Yeah, whatever.

Pat:      Certainly in the case of the younger kid, Dzhokhar, you don’t give him US citizenship and the kid who is dead, the older brother, Tamerlan—his citizenship application was pending. It’s just… To say that it’s insanity is an understatement. It’s hard to believe anymore, looking at the evidence, that this is not malicious, that there is motive and intent behind this.

Bill:      From… Not from the terrorists, Patrick, although it’s malicious obviously there, but it’s malicious from other parts of this flow—our government. Something is allowing this to happen.

Pat:      Yes. Yes, certainly. Yeah. And repeatedly allowing… knowingly allowing these incidents to happen, like Major Hassan and Fort Hood, where the… Again, the FBI was aware of his email communications with an Al Qaeda cleric—a wanted Al Qaeda cleric—and they said, “Well, because they are discussing religious matters we can’t look into this.” And the fact is that the FBI has established these policies… Bill, it’s amazing. The FBI last year published this document called “The Touchstone Document”—it’s on the FBI’s website—where they said, “Look, if you’re a member of a terrorist organization and as long as that organization is doing legitimate things—and I think famously of Senator Patty Murray after 9/11 saying, “Well yeah, Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization, but they also build schools and roads.” So as long as that group is doing some kind of legitimate purpose, then the FBI says being a member of that organization can’t count against you for investigative purposes. They say it in writing. It’s in the very first paragraph of this Touchstone Document.

Bill:      Well, if you were…

Pat:      And these are the people who are supposed to protect us.        

Bill:      And again, double standard—if you were… I hate… I’m like… It’s like the Blues Brothers, right? I hate Illinois Nazis, but if…

Pat:      [inaudible 0:46:54.5]

Bill:      Yeah. If the Nazis—some white goofball group of crazies—did that, they would be… They couldn’t build enough schools to sort of overcome that. They couldn’t… And a lot of these groups should be, but I’m just saying there’s just… There’s a standard that’s… The river flows one direction with these guys and they have an agenda and I almost just wonder what’s…? I hate to even ask you. What do you think is moving and shaking at the core of this level? Once we scratch away at the surface and we see, are they trying to let some things happen in the world to cover other things? Are they trying to cover…? I mean are they letting these bombings happen? I know this sounds even more malicious. I sound like Alex Jones for a second. Excuse me if I do. I’m not trying to go that deep on it, but I’m saying is somebody allowing this stuff to cover for other things? Or to… as part of the gun thing? What’s going on?

Pat:      Well, I think I was clear. I don’t believe in… that these things are false flags, but I know that on the other side, they’re prepared to roll out their narrative when incidents like the Newton shootings and these things happen. I don’t think it was accidental that Senator Harry Reed brought the gun bill to the floor last week because I thought that they were going to use the bombing tragedy to basically get… shake loose those couple extra votes. But because things didn’t pan out like they had wanted, the bill failed and Reed eventually pulled the bill.

But yeah, I think that they’re prepared in instances… After Newtown they had a whole anti-gun strategy, which they’ve implemented already in several states. They’ve passed a bunch of laws, Connecticut and other states, being examples. They’re prepared to roll out their agenda, which is not a constitutional pro-American agenda. It’s intended to limit our rights. So I don’t think that they’re… that the government’s out causing these incidents but I think there are certainly political forces who want… Just like the Trayvon Martin shooting last year. I mean it was weeks before the left jumped into that fray and it turned out not to be wrong. They wanted to use that instant. They kind of handpicked an incident where there were enough racial overtones. They just said, “Oh look, we can ride this.” But it all kind of fell apart rather quickly, but I think they’ll… They’ll try and resurrect it when they find a better example down the road. So…

Bill:      But it’s just a pounding drum. These narrative… The rolling out of the story—of the handpicked, hand selected story—is just… It’s like on Ben-Hur with the drumbeats as they’re getting ramming speed, you know? It’s just that drum over and over and over. It’s bound to have an effect on the populous at some point. Does it kind of wear us down?

Pat:      I think it’s wearing… It does have that wearing effect and people kind of get numb to it, but I also think that people are getting fed up. I think people are becoming… Even here in the past week, in light of this thing, I have seen some, I think, positive changes where people just aren’t buying what the administration and the establishment media are selling. They wanted to push this gun bill last week through the Senate and people just said, “No,” you know? And they called their senators and it was the Democratic senators that held out and voted no against the Toomey-Manchin amendment. They killed it. They were unable to move it forward, you know? And that was the compromise bill.

We’re seeing the Republicans again—this so-called gang of eight—and it’s always John McCain right in the middle of it saying, “Hey, we need immigration reform.” When we had these immigrants—in this case these two bombers who are legal immigrants—engaging in terrorism. Who is doing the thing? Who is doing the backgrounds? We have… We see Homeland Security back in January saying, “Look, we’re going to include Saudi Arabia in our fast-track visa program so they don’t have to go through additional screening.” And they’re joining Canada, Mexico and South Korea. I mean it’s a privileged status. There are only four countries and one of them is Saudi Arabia? Excuse me?

Bill:      Yeah, the country that sent the 9/11 bombers. People don’t… That wasn’t Iraq that sent them. It was Saudi Arabia or at least they were from Saudi Arabia.

Pat:      Yeah. Yeah, 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. So…

Bill:      And we’re fast-tracking that.

Pat:      And there is… And this is a matter of policy. It was done under [inaudible 0:52:03.2] State Department. It’s done even more so now under Carey at the State Department. Janet Napolitano at Homeland Security is beating this drum. You have Eric Holder. And the sad part of this is we’ve still got more than three years left of this. I mean there is really nothing going to change in terms of the administration in the next three years. What we need to do is we need to put the fire under Congress to begin to start asking questions because they’ve completely failed in their oversight duties and I’m talking about the Republicans here.

The Republican leadership has failed. John Boehner has failed and we need to put their feet to the fire and say, “Look, you need to get to the bottom of this.” They didn’t get to the bottom of Fast and Furious. They still haven’t gotten to the bottom of Benghazi and in fact, Boehner is going to roll out this bogus Benghazi report next week that’s whitewashing the fact that he knew that they were gunrunning out of Libya. So people need to be aware. People need to get fired up. I mean this is… These policies are literally getting Americans killed. If you don’t act now, what’s it going to take?

Bill:      So get a hold of your congressmen. Make a stink. Make some noise. Pound on that door in a polite but firm way. Email, write—do what you’ve got to do. Especially these guys, as Patrick’s saying, the Republican guys who should be really demanding the oversight—they’re sort of soft in this case and not really doing us the justice that needs to be done. So Patrick, I know you’ve got to catch a plane. Thanks so much for your insights, your time. I know you’re on your way to do the Beck Show, so say hi to Glenn for us and have a great flight.

Pat:      Will do. Thanks, Bill.

Bill:      You bet.

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