What Informative Tools Would Actually Help You?

Do you wrestle with soil, plants, and animals? I want the next guides to meet you where you are?

From Balcony to Back Forty: The Steward’s Survey

After fifteen years of growing grapes and making wine, I’m selling the farm and turning toward the coast. The sea and the islands have been calling louder than the cellar. What I’m taking with me isn’t racks or barrels, it’s a different way of seeing.

The land taught me more than viticulture.
It taught me how living systems heal when we stop over-managing.
How weeds are soil’s handwriting.
How to read compaction, imbalance, and fatigue without a lab slip.

Most of all, it taught me a stubborn truth: you can’t input your way out of a systemic problem.

Sick soil isn’t saved by more product, it’s healed by a new environment:
stop grinding it up, stop poisoning what wants to live, reintroduce diversity, feed the soil instead of the crop, and give it time to remember what it knows.

People aren’t so different. Many of us live like barren beds, overstimulated, undernourished, compacted by stress. We add more inputs and call it “self-care,” then wonder why we’re still depleted.

I didn’t get into wine to sell bottles; I got in to understand how nature composes. As I chased this balance, I learned something simple and profound: the land knows how to heal. Our job is to listen and collaborate.

Now I’m stepping into a new chapter, sharing what I’ve learned and offering ways to test these natural methods against your own. I’ve been writing about plants for nearly a year, not knowing who would gather, and more than 9000 of you already have.

That’s why I want to take this opportunity to see if I can truly be of service with this perspective on nature.

To serve you better, I need to hear your real life; what’s messy, what’s working, what’s not, and what kind of help would actually make a difference in your days.

This isn’t about “engagement.” It’s about relevance. I don’t want to write guides that sit on a digital shelf. I want to build practical, affordable tools that reduce your costs, your confusion, and your compaction, of soil and spirit.

So if you have ten minutes, I’m asking you to fill this out.

Tell me what’s true when the weeds are winning, the chickens are getting more expensive, or the weather breaks your plan.

Drop your responses in the comments or email me directly: farmingholistic@pm.me

Anonymity is fine.
Rambling is welcome.
Bullet points welcome.
Take your time.
There’s no single right way to answer.

---

The Steward’s Survey

How to reply: answer in the comments or email me directly. Bullet points are perfect.

---

Part 1 — You & Your Land

1. What’s your relationship to land right now? (Balcony, backyard, market garden, orchard, vineyard, small farm, “just observing.” How many years in?)

2. Describe your soil in three words. (Not scientific: feel words: stubborn, generous, dusty, dense…)

3. Which plant or weed “haunts” you? Name it if you can; describe it if you can’t.

4. What’s thriving on your land without any help from you?

5. Which animal is either saving your system or breaking it? (Chickens, bees, lack of livestock, predators…)

6. What’s your relationship to that plant—or animal: rage, curiosity, resignation, grudging respect?

---

Part 2 — The Daily Grind

7. What’s the most frustrating fifteen minutes of your week outside?

8. What question do you Google or ask most? (“How to kill X?” “Why won’t X grow?” “Is X edible?”)

9. What pest or disease makes you want to walk away?

10. When a method doesn’t work, what’s your default move; switch, research spiral, keep forcing it, or walk away?

---

Part 3 — What You Actually Want

11. If I handed you one guide tomorrow that solved one problem, what would it be? (Be specific.)

12. What’s your biggest monthly expense that feels like a leak?

13. Right now, which do you want more:

• A) Deep understanding (why it’s happening)

• B) Quick protocol (step 1-2-3)

• C) Both, but in separate, short formats

14. Do you want me to teach how to remove weeds or how to read and use weeds? (I can write both, but not in the same piece.)

---

Part 4 — How You Learn

15. When you’re stuck, what format do you actually finish?

• 30,000-word deep dive

• 1-page cheat sheet

• Audio while you work

• 1,000-word summary

• IG carousel you can save

16. Would you pay $12 for a guide that saves you money, spares a season of trial and error, and helps connect you more deeply to what you stewardship?
    If not, what would make it worth it?

---

Part 5 — The Stuff That Might Sound Weird

17. Do you talk to plants? (Not judging, do you connect?)

18. What story do you tell yourself about why things aren’t working? (Time, money, climate, “I’m not real,” “my soil is cursed”…)

---

Part 6 — Editorial Compass

20. How did you find Weeds of Wisdom?

21. What topics or plants should come next?

22. If I only made one thing this year, what should it be?
    (For example: “Reading Weeds as Soil Indicators,” “Closed-loop homestead systems,” “Regenerative spray programs,” or something else.)

---

What’s Coming

Years in the vineyard, and with animals, taught me that spray calendars written for someone else’s soil don’t work, nor do protocols built around products you can’t afford or don’t want to use.

What does work: fermented plant teas, mineral sprays you can make for pennies, and compost extracts that feed what’s already trying to help you. Not because they’re romantic, but because they’re effective, repeatable, and cheaper than a bag of amendments.

Over the next year, I’m building guides for natural spray programs you can test on a corner of your garden, orchard, or vineyard. Track what changes and share what you learn.
Simple A/B trials you can test. No lab required, just observation, a notebook, and a willingness to report what actually happens.

If everything goes as planned, the goal is to reduce your input costs and help you steward in a way that builds a healthier future, for you and the soil.

Healing isn’t about adding more; it’s about removing what’s in the way so the system can remember how to regulate itself.
Soil. Plants. People.

I left conventional viticulture because I watched us poison the ground while calling it stewardship, and saw people (myself included) do the same with our bodies and routines. The pattern is identical: diagnose the symptom, add an input, ignore the system.

This path is about science serving regeneration instead of extraction, about continuing natural science when mainstream science drifts toward politics over truth and transparency.

It’s about bridging what science we do have into something understandable, right in the middle of your land.

It’s about building tools that don’t require you to spend more, learn a new language, or wait for an expert to confirm what your land already knows.

Your answers will shape what I write next: the questions that keep you up at night, the problems that won’t let go, the plants that keep showing up.

Let’s see if we can turn the challenge into an ally.

Thank you,
Jay
📧 farmingholistic@pm.me