- [Madeline] I'm Madeline Hooper.

I've been gardening for over 20 years.

And of course, with gardening comes a lot of aches and pains.

So, I finally decided that maybe I should find a fitness trainer to see if I could fix my problems.

And a fellow gardener introduced me to Jeff Hughes.

After working with Jeff it dawned on me, what would be more exciting than to travel all over America, visiting a wide variety of gardens, and helping their gardeners get garden fit.

[light music] Taking care of your body while taking care of your garden, that's our mission.

- Madeline, this is gorgeous.

The vineyards, and the lake, and the mountains, and the blue sky.

This is what Northern California's all about.

- It's so beautiful.

- So, I have one question.

- Yes, Jeff?

- Where we going?

- We're going to Peace and Plenty Farm.

- Oh, that sounds very peaceful and plentiful.

And who are we meeting at Peace and Plenty?

- We're gonna meet Melinda Price and her husband, Simon Avery.

- Melinda and Simon at Peace and Plenty.

Tell me a little more about Melinda and Simon.

- Well.

- Oh boy, here we go.

The bag.

What have you got in the bag today, Madeline?

Oh, good Lord.

- Do you know what this is?

- I had to ask.

I know what that is.

That's a felony.

You can't go to Fort Knox and steal gold bricks.

- [Madeline] No, I mean this.

- Saffron.

- Saffron.

Saffron is, as we know, a spice that is actually worth its weight in gold.

- Oh, I get it.

You go to great lengths.

- It's the most expensive spice on the planet.

So fortunately, when you cook with it, you only need a pinch.

- That's a very pricey spice.

- It is.

- That's great, but what does that have to do with Simon and Melinda?

- So, Simon and Melinda have actually created a saffron farm and they have the largest saffron farm in North America.

- [Jeff] No kidding?

- Yeah, it's pretty impressive.

- That's pretty impressive.

- Yes.

- Yeah.

- And when we go there, they're gonna teach us how they grow the saffron and how they harvest the saffron, which I think is quite a special process.

- You know, I love learning new things.

That's the best part of this job.

I can't wait.

- [Madeline] Me too.

There's their farm stand.

- Yeah, look at that.

[rooster crowing] Oh, did you hear that?

They got roosters roosters.

- Roosters.

- [Jeff] Roosters in the morning.

We are definitely at a farm.

- [Madeline] That's perfect.

[light music] - Hey.

- Hey.

- [Madeline] It's so nice to see you in person.

- Nice to see you.

- How are you?

- Nice to meet you, Simon.

- Simon.

- Oh, hello.

- Sorry.

Nice to meet you.

- Hi, I'm Melinda.

- nice to meet you.

- Nice to meet you.

- So, we've made it here.

- Welcome, welcome to Peace and Plenty.

- So, we knew how we got here.

How did you guys get here?

- Yeah, so a few years ago, about five years ago or so we were really ready for a change life and we wanted to work outside, work for ourselves.

- That's always good.

- Farming was kind of the natural fit for that.

- So, how'd you get to the crop you're growing.

- I was driving around for work in my previous career and I had a program of farmers in Vermont growing saffron.

So, that made my ears perk up and we just did some research and that was our aha moment, yeah.

- Wow, so did you have a place to actually grow the saffron at that point?

- Well, that's the thing, no, we didn't.

So, we actually placed an order for 11,000 corms.

They're called corms, the little bulbs, before we owned a property.

[people laughing] - It was kind of a race to find a place.

And we were really lucky that we came across this place so easily.

- I have to tell you when we were looking for farms, we would go with a bucket and a shovel 'cause we were looking at the soil, we weren't looking at the structures at all.

So yeah, it had a roof.

I think there was, you know, some walls.

Great, but what we were really looking- - So, you weren't like the normal people.

- No.

- That care about the kitchen and the tile in the bathroom.

- Exactly.

- It was the dirt.

- It was the soil.

And the soil and the whole property was just absolutely covered yeah high and start the soul.

So just really mean, thick, giant weeds because it had sat vacant for quite a while.

And we only had a couple months to do it.

So, it was a real race against the clock.

- Sure, that's a lot of work.

So, was this like a heavy equipment and get it in moment for you?

- I wish.

- No, we don't have any heavy machinery on the farm.

- Really?

- No mechanization.

- This was the heavy equipment?

- [Melinda] And this.

- So, have you done other gardens too besides just growing saffron?

- Yeah, and so now we revisited our original idea of doing a market garden and we started that about a year ago and then this year we started a flower garden as well.

There's that.

- You just perked right up when you said that.

- I'd love to show you.

- Oh, I'd love to see that.

- Yeah, sure.

- Flower garden, that would be great.

- Okay, well I'm gonna go and do some work in the market garden.

- [Madeline] Okay, we'll come and find you then.

- [Jeff] We'll see you later.

- This a big flower bed.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- It's beautiful.

- Thank you.

- So, what made you decide to put in flowers?

- Well, it was a big goal for us when we started the farm to really create a nectar and pollen-rich environment for all the pollinators that live here and then just create as much biodiversity as we can.

- So, this is still a lot of work.

You come out in deadhead every day.

- Oh my gosh, no.

I wish, I would love to, but I do see some zinnias right there that need some clipping.

- Ah.

- Do you mind?

- [Madeline] Not at all.

I almost want my own clippers to get in there with you.

- I know, it's fun.

And it encourages more blooms.

- It certainly does.

There you go.

- [Melinda] I think Simon's waiting for you in the market garden.

- Okay, let's go find him.

Thank you.

- All right.

- See you later, Melinda.

Bye.

Simon.

- Hey Simon.

- Hi.

- We don't mean to interrupt, but we'd love to- - No worries.

- Sort of learn a little bit more about your market garden.

- Sure, absolutely.

- What is it that you produce here?

- We grow a lot of stuff in here.

It's about an eighth of an acre tomatoes.

We've got sweet peppers here, hot peppers over there.

Basil, cherry tomatoes behind us here, and more tomatoes.

- Lots of tomatoes.

- Lots of tomatoes.

People love tomatoes.

And we also turn a lot of our vegetables into value-added products as well.

Like Melinda's, she can turn tomatoes into fantastic tomato sauce and our cucumbers into pickles.

And that's a fantastic way to get extra value from it, from our produce as well.

- Yeah.

- Is one of the reasons you named your farm Piece and Plenty because you have so plenty of vegetables to sell?

- We actually came up with name Peace and Plenty because we have a quilt pattern on the front of our barn, which is an old Amish quilt pattern design.

And it's actually named Peace and Plenty.

So when we discovered that, we were looking for how to name our farm and that's it.

We kind of joke that we should call our farm, Hey, Google Farm because we're newbies at this and we are always asking Google like what space and ow far apart should you space them apart?

And things like that,.

- That's funny.

- Yeah, without the internet, we wouldn't be quite where we are right now.

- But there's one thing that you're not growing, weeds.

How is that possible that there are no weeds here?

- Well, yeah, I wouldn't say we don't have any weeds, but not too many.

When we built this market garden, we started off with a very weedy horse paddock.

And the first thing we did was lay down this layer of cardboard to cover the weeds.

It's called the lasagna method because you're layering cardboard and compost.

- How cool.

- Like lasagna.

- Like lasagna, yeah.

And then we just planted straight into that and the cardboard and the compost act to suppress the weeds.

- That's fantastic.

I'm gonna go back and change all my vegetable beds.

- Yeah, that's a great idea.

- I mean, that's such a great idea 'cause it really looks beautiful.

- Absolutely.

- And your back really appreciates it too 'cause you're not weeding.

- 'Cause we're not bending and weeding.

- Most of my fixes have been from weeding.

- Weeding.

- Yeah.

- A lot of bending to harvest, but not so much bending to weed here.

- So, how do you actually harvest these?

Do you just lop them off?

- Basically just a matter of getting down there and finding them in there, you know?

So, there is a lot of time bending down.

It's just a matter of hunting for them.

- Just spending time.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Well, if you wanna get on with picking a little more tomatoes, we'd love to go see the saffron beds.

- Okay, well I'll finish up here and I'll meet you guys over there if you want.

- Great.

- All right.

- See, in a few minutes.

- The wheels are turning with all the bending over for long periods of time.

- [Madeline] They can really use your fixes.

- Wow, this is something else.

- My goodness, how many rows do you have here?

Beds?

- Oh, we have about 65.

- [Madeline] Wow.

- Let's go look down this one and check it out.

- Okay.

So, how many of the corms have you actually planted in here?

- We started out with around 11,000 and they well multiply each year.

So we have about, we think like half a million now.

- A million?

Magic.

So, what gave you the idea to set up these beds?

- Originally, we just knew that they needed to be in some form of raised beds.

So, we just piled the soil up into long lines and planted the corm straight into that.

But after a few months, we realized that we have a lot of gophers here.

- Oh dear.

- So, and the gophers were destroying them.

They were eating them.

- They took about 30% of our first planting.

- Oh my.

- Wow.

- Yeah, so we found out- - Expensive.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Feeding the gopher gourmet saffron.

Yeah.

- So, we came up with this design of making a cage out of hardware cloth.

- [Madeline] Which seems so clever.

- [Simon] It goes all the way underneath so they can't borrow in from- - How deep do they go?

- The cages go down about 10 inches deep.

- Wow.

- So you trenched every one of these.

- We trenched.

- Hand tools.

- [Simon] We trenched just using shovels and rakes and our hands.

- I can't imagine that.

- Yeah.

- What did that do to their bodies?

- [Jeff] That's work.

- Well, we're excited to come back in four weeks because I know that the saffron will be up.

- Yep.

- And the flowers will be opening and we would love to come and help you and learn really how you harvest the saffron.

- [Jeff] That would be really fun.

We love learning things.

- [Simon] We would love that.

- You guys, this has been this such a great visit.

Just seeing what you do.

And you mentioned some of the trials and tribulations you had getting this thing started and everything else and you're still such a happy couple and you work together.

That's really, truly special.

- Yeah, we are a good team.

- It's really hot out here.

I'm just gonna throw my hair up real quick.

- Yeah, I think we're flexible in the business of farming.

- How's your flexibility otherwise?

- Not so good.

- Not so good.

- Yeah, especially me.

- Yeah.

- I'm really tight.

There isn't a joint from my ankles to my fingers, fingers that don't hurt.

- Anything else specific?

- Lower back of course, you know?

Lower back is always a sore point.

- And Melinda.

- Yeah, I'd say lower back as well.

Definitely.

I'm a tall person and so much of what we do is low.

- I did recognize both of you're very tall and I noticed both of you do a lot of bending over.

And so, I'm gonna give you a suggestion to ease the work of the back when you do that and you guys work so much, most likely, if I said, "When you go home at night, you need to do a stretching routine," you're gonna go, "Right, yeah, okay.

All right, I'll do that."

So, I'm gonna try to give you something that makes sense that you can fit in that you'll do.

So, I'm gonna just invite you to stand up here with me.

So first of all, I wanna work on hinges.

This is gonna help your lower back.

So, there's actually two hinges that get you from here to here.

You can bend in your stomach area where your naval is, that's your back.

It's bending you over and bringing you up.

Or you can start taking your hips with you and you can make your hips straighten up and that's what gets you up?

So, you have a little crease back here.

It's called the gluteal crease.

Go ahead and take your finger.

Just find that crease.

That's where the muscle is.

That's the muscle we're trying to get at.

So just emulate what you were doing in the garden.

Just kind of lean over like you're doing something.

Now, before you come up, go back there and find that crease with your finger.

Squeeze that crease and feel it pull you up.

- Oh yeah.

- Your back, oh, that's what I was looking for the, oh yeah.

Your back didn't work at all.

Your back was just going for the ride.

- Yeah.

- So, let's try that again.

Just lean over, do your work, try using your back.

Just use your back to come up and you see how it's struggling because it doesn't actually make your hip line up.

- Yeah.

- And if you have trouble at first, touch is one of the best ways I teach people something.

When you touch it, your brain goes, oh, here it is.

You're more dense there with muscle than anywhere else in your body, so use it.

And your back gets a free ride up, inject it in lifestyle.

I'm not gonna tell you to do 10 of these a day.

Do it every time you lean over and you get ready to stand up, try to remind yourself, and your body will start to do this because it feels better.

So, I happened to bring bands out.

I carry 'em everywhere.

There's so many things you can do with these.

And I wanna work on some of your hand stuff.

I just kind of noticed you're always grabbing and you're always pulling.

You're not working the backside of your hand.

You're working this side.

So, we wanna put a little balance in there.

And also, we just wanna open this up.

So make the band as light as possible by not having anything stick out past your pinky and then wrap it around your hand nice and tight.

So, go ahead and put 'em out here.

So, find your tension and then just start to let your wrist work on the back there and then just use your arms.

Keep your arms straight, so your back is very strong.

It'll get that out there, against your body.

There you go.

Now, we're gonna go up, all the way up.

Now, I want you to take one hand and take it out, down, and around and let it pull this arm back.

There's your stretch.

You feel that stretch?

- Oh yeah.

That's a good one.

- Now just bring this down like you're playing hide the hand, just where I can't see it and take it back up and keep that wrist nice and strong, straight.

Then we're gonna do about 10 of these.

We'll just do three for now.

One, two, and one more, and three.

And then we're gonna come up and then we're just gonna come down nice and gentle.

So, this is just a balance to what you do in the garden all day long.

We just did three of them.

So, I would ideally love for you to do 10 out to the side and 10 on each arm.

- Right, once a day?

- Once a day.

- Easy enough.

- Yeah.

So, here comes the hard part.

I have never done this with two people.

I'm not sure how I'm gonna handle this, but I need a promise that you're gonna do this for four weeks while I'm gone.

- Oh, yep.

We can promise you that.

We'll keep each other in check.

- Yeah.

- What we'll do.

It's like, come on, we gotta do our stretches.

- Ladies first.

- All right.

You got it.

- All right.

- You've got it.

- We got it.

- We should shake hands on that too.

- [Jeff] Oh, that's beautiful.

- [Madeline] So, lots to do till we come back.

- [Jeff] You guys are great.

- [Madeline] You are great.

- I feel like we could be friends.

- We all friends.

- Thank you so much.

Really.

- Thank you so much.

- You're very welcome.

- Thank you so much.

- And I have a little Peace and Plenty for you to take with you.

- Oh my goodness.

Some saffron to grow in your garden.

- Thank you.

- Four weeks.

- Oh yeah, four weeks.

You'll be flexible.

Opened up.

- Yeah.

- [Jeff] I know you guys are gonna knock it out.

- You know, Jeff, if you asked all gardeners what is their biggest physical problem?

They'd all say "my back," just like Melinda and Simon.

I thought it was great that you gave them back exercises.

- Well, it was for their back issue, but there's just an assortment of reasons why lower backs hurt people.

And the most common one is the tight hip flexor and that's the muscle that picks the leg up.

Let me ask you, do you spend much time sitting or kneeling in the garden?

- I do.

Actually, I would say I kneel in my garden about 50% of the time I'm out there.

And about 25% of the time, I'm actually sitting on the ground.

- Exactly, so that's exactly what's going on.

When you're kneeling it's in a shortened position.

- Right.

- Right?

So, you know what have a seat on that box.

Now, pretend you've been sitting for a long period of time.

We've all done this, whether you're in the office or whether you're in the garden.

And then when you get ready to stand up, what do you feel sometimes?

- You feel, oh, my back - Right.

Trying to stand and the more you stand your back hurts.

- Right.

- But there's nothing wrong with your back.

There's actually nothing to fix back there.

It's a tight hip flexor.

Now, I told you it attaches to the leg.

- Right.

- The other end of it attaches to your lumbar spine in like five different places.

So when you decide to straighten that leg down and pull on that muscle, it's pulling on your lumbar spine.

And as soon as it starts to stretch a little bit, it allows you to come up and a little bit more and it takes the pressure off your lower spine.

If you just simply take your leg back, there's a stretch.

You're stretching it.

So, that's a simple stretch.

- That is.

- You can take your leg back a little further.

So you keep going back and going back and you're in a lunge.

That's why they call this a lung stretch.

So, stay right there and feel that stretch.

- I feel that.

- Also recognize the fact that your body weight is holding you up with the same muscle that you're trying to stretch.

- Yes.

- It's not a really efficient way to stretch a muscle 'cause it's guarding itself.

So I'm gonna take the same box.

And what I want you to do now is use your arm on your leg and your arm on the box as arm chairs and just drop your weight onto your arm on the box.

Yeah.

- That feels great.

- It's much safer also 'cause you're not pulling on those tendons.

Now take your arm off just for fun.

- Whoa.

- Yeah, it doesn't wanna hold weight down there.

So, you're much safer doing it this way, using a little bit of an arm chair method.

There's more.

- Of course there's more.

- Okay, so when you're back here and you're doing that stretch, you don't wanna just pop out of it and snatch that muscle back up to a shorter place.

It'll tighten up and you'll lose all the benefit of your stretch.

So, if you take it back and on your way up, you just slowly drag that leg, drag that up and now because it came up nice and gently, it'll retain that stretch for a long time.

- No, I love the way that feels.

- Yeah, now that's a very dynamic stretch.

- So, about how many times a day should somebody do a stretch like this?

- If there's a stretch that you have identified that's really good for you, you should at least do it once a day and don't overdo it.

You can do it more, but once a day is really good.

- No that's simple, good advice.

- Yeah.

- Wow.

- Stars.

- It is so dark, Jeff.

- Yeah, it's 4:30, Madeline.

- It is 4:30, but you know, they invited us to harvest with them and it has to be in total darkness because I think as soon as the light comes up, the flowers start to open.

So, we should try to go find them.

- Let's go get those flowers.

- Yeah, let's get this going.

- Here we go, all right.

- Is that you guys?

- Yeah.

- Hey.

- Good morning.

- In the dark.

- We made it.

- You made it.

Are you frozen?

- Yes.

- Good to see you again.

- Nice to see you, Melinda.

Simon.

- So good to see you.

- [Melinda] Thanks for coming out.

You gonna pick some flowers?

- Yes, we are so excited.

- Show us how.

- Yeah.

- Show us how to harvest.

- We got some buckets for you.

- Oh good.

- And it's pretty easy.

The stems are right here.

You just pull it at the stem, holding the stem and you see, I just got a piece of grass, but that's okay if you do that.

They kind of snap nicely in the cold.

- Is that?

- Yeah, that looks good.

- You got it.

- Let's just do that a few thousand times now.

[people laughing] - So, we were talking on the way in.

You do like how many a day?

- We've had our biggest day today and yesterday.

Yesterday we picked, I think- - 60,000.

- 60,000 yesterday.

- Oh my goodness.

- That was big day.

- So, how many weeks do you actually spend harvesting these?

- About five.

- Wow.

That's a lot of work condensed in a small period of time.

- [Melinda] Sun's coming up.

- Oh, it looks so pretty.

Look at that.

Oh, that's gorgeous.

- Yeah.

- You get that every day.

- [Melinda] Yeah.

Yeah, it's one of the benefits being out here.

- That was a lot of work.

- That was fun though.

- Hey.

- Exciting.

Hi.

- Hi.

- That was, that was, that was some morning.

- Did you have fun?

- We did.

- Can you fill your fingers?

- Barely.

Here's our little contribution to your- - Thank you so much.

- Tens of thousands of- - Not so little, that's a lot of flowers there, Jeff?

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Good job.

- He was working hard.

- So, tell me about how you've been over the last four weeks.

How'd it work?

- It's been great.

Yeah, so the band exercise that you gave us, I found that really useful over time, I realized that it really was working to open me up and I've noticed a real genuine difference.

- Cool.

And you?

- Yeah, so I did it for a little while and then I injured my shoulder and had to put it aside for a while, but I have been using the- - The glute fix.

- That's fantastic.

Like we both, we've really taken that one up.

- Excellent.. - In fact, we've passed it on to the crew.

- Really?

- Oh no, really?

- That's so cool.

- Really?

- Yeah, definitely.

- You paid it forward.

- Yeah.

- Come here.

- Isn't that great.

I'm sorry, that's one of the nicest things I can hear.

- And it's become automatic for us now.

It's just become part of what we do.

- You created the habit.

- Yeah.

That's excellent.

- That's great.

- We want to learn.

- The next step.

- Yeah.

- You wanna get started on that?

- Heck yeah.

- Let's grab some.

[light music] What you wanna do, is I like to hold them with my non-dominant hand and I give them a little smoosh and twirl at the base of the flower and it kind of splays out the stigmas and it goes from white, to yellow, to orange, to red.

So you look for that spot on the stigma here, where it's turning from orange to red and just give it a little pull apart with your fingers and you discard the flower however you want to.

- What happens after this stage?

What comes next?

- So, next they get taken away and we dehydrate.

You want to take 80 to 90% of the moisture out of them.

- And then after drying, today's drying, then we put them in jars in a dark cool place and they cure for about three months and then it will be ready to use.

If we were to use the saffron we dry today in tonight's paella, we would be extremely disappointed 'cause there wouldn't be any flavor.

- Really?

- Yeah.

You really need the time for it to sit and intensify, kind of like wine.

- What's that?

- You look very serious.

- I am.

- Looking at him.

- I'm into this.

I'm gonna be good at this.

by the time I don't have to ever do it again.

- [Melinda] You can come back next year.

- [Madeline] I was gonna say, never say never.

- [Melinda] But in our modern world, you know, this isn't something you sit and do.

Like, what else would you do like this in our modern world?

- That's true.

- Wee!

[group laughing] - So our pile's getting really low, Jeff.

- Yeah, we're doing pretty good here.

- And I think, If we're gonna party tonight, maybe if you don't mind, we'll go and take a little siesta and freshen enough and come back.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- I'm looking forward to siesta.

- We can't wait to see you later.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

It'll be fun.

[light music] Melinda, maybe you could tell us the basics of how you cook with saffron.

- Yeah, sure.

I think there's a couple tips that I think are pretty important for the home chef.

One is to crumble up the saffron threads a bit and then bloom those crushed threads in a cooking liquid like how you would steep a tea.

- Oh, okay.

- But you can use cream or white wine, whatever cooking liquid you're putting into your recipe.

- I can't wait to taste.

- [Jeff] Is that what he's putting in right now?

- [Melinda] Yes.

- All right, cheers everybody.

- Cheers.

- Cheers.

- Cheers.

- So much.

- Cheers to saffron harvest.

- Cheers.

- Woo hoo.

- Cheers - Cheers.

That's nice at the end of the day.

- Oh my goodness.

- This is just terrific.

You know, the meal, the farm, the food, but just meeting you guys has been wonderful.

- To be so brave to change your life so dramatically is really impressive.

I mean, I think it takes a tremendous amount of energy and foresight to know that you could live another dream.

You thought you had your main life, but you had a bigger life.

- [Melinda] It was the appetizer and I didn't know it.

- [Madeline] It was the appetizer.

- [Jeff] That's very good, the appetizer before life.

[upbeat music]