SPEAKER_02 1:45

Good afternoon. Welcome to the Hilltop Glove Podcast. This is DJ and What with my brother Skip. Yep. Excellent. We are here live in Effect in Gastonia, North Carolina, with the Honeycomb Experience and our homeboy Reasons Brown. We're at the beautiful Bradley Community Center and Park. We're having a great day on this Sunday. It's beautiful out here. Everybody's looking lovely. We're having a great time working on wellness, whether it be mind, body, or spirit, and also doing a little bit of a give back for the community. Now, at the event today, we have a bunch of cool vendors out here, as well as artists and artisans from the community. We there have food, there's ways to exercise, there's things to do that you may want to pick up that you want to do at home in your free time that are just stress relievers. You have all those folks out here. There's art for sale and et cetera. However, we actually have the pleasure of speaking today with Hope. And I'm gonna let Hope introduce herself to you specifically with the name that I want to say, Maha Adachi. That is a cool name. Could you explain to our audience who you are and what it is that you do?

SPEAKER_00 2:51

What's up, y'all? I'm Hope, also known as Maha Adachi. And I am born and raised in the County of Dade. I'm from Miami, Florida, but I live I live in uh Mooresville, North Carolina. I love it here. I raised my kids here. I am a poet, a spoken word artist. I toured with my good friend Jill Scott on her 2018 tour. And then in May, she called me to come out and open for her in the MGM in DC. That's one aspect of what I do. That's who those who know me as Maha. That is what I do as a performing artist. I am a breast cancer survivor. Actually, I'm a breast cancer thriver. Yes. Yes. August 2019, I was diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer. It was in both breast and the lymph nodes. In December 2020, I had my final surgery. And when I had that final surgery, I had a, in my recovery, I had a moment where I decided that I wanted to do something different with my career. Had been a performing artist and working in arts, entertainment, and marketing for over 20 years, and I decided that I wanted to change careers and get into agriculture. So I am two classes away from getting a degree in agribusiness technology at Mitchell Community College, and I am cancer-free. And what I do with that education is one of the first things I do is I am an integrative pest management specialist, which means I help people to manage the pest, bugs, pathogens in their garden, in their home gardens without the use of harsh pesticides. Nice. By using nature to combat nature, by identifying beneficial bugs or beneficial plants to help you to keep your garden growing healthy without somebody else eating up all your crops. In addition to that, I study plant science. I work to help people create their own food freedom in their own backyards, in their front yards, in their small patios by understanding that you don't need a lot of space to supplement the food. Because food doesn't really come from the grocery store, it comes from the earth.

SPEAKER_01 4:46

True.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

So today we're out here planting seeds with the students and anybody who wants to plant a seed just to show you how easy it is to start something that can create a new life that can be a stress reliever, but can also be a supplement, can provide food, can provide medicine. I've even brought some sample plants from my front yard where it shows how we can grow a variety of herbs in a small space so that we can have all the herbs that you need for cooking right on your front porch or right on your small patio. And you can grow medicine for yourself, mint for mint tea, all those things just in little containers or small containers right in a small space that you live in. You don't need a huge field or a huge space to grow those things. But if you do have a lot of space, we might talk because I can come over and help you get that thing right. Excellent. And so I am very committed to sustainability, but not so much just landing at sustainability, but getting into regenerative agriculture, where not only do we sustain what we have, but we replenish the earth by growing things like legumes in the off-season, keeping the ground covered so that we can fix the nitrogen without the use of synthetic pesticides or synthetic, synthetic, uh, what's it called? Food fertilizers.

SPEAKER_02 6:02

Fertilizers, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Because I don't even use them.

SPEAKER_02 6:05

Really?

SPEAKER_00 6:05

I mean, I'm saying I use like a I would use, so in my off season, right? In my strawberry patch, we threw down a cover crop, which was like a combination of rye and peas and some other things. Just threw those seeds down. Those seeds kept the strawberries healthy through the whole winter. And I don't know if y'all had it down there in South Carolina, but up here in uh North Carolina that Christmas time, when we had that frost patch, everything was frozen. My strawberry plants were still green and beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 6:37

They were covered by the other plants.

SPEAKER_00 6:39

What the other plants do is those legumes fix the nitrogen in the soil. They keep the soil at a certain regulation. So they're adding nitrogen. The same thing that you would that they take the nitrogen from the atmosphere, which is all around us. And put it in the and they put it and put it into the soil.

SPEAKER_02 6:55

All right, so let me see if I can understand this. It seems like you're attempting to educate people on the power that they have to control their food sources.

SPEAKER_00 7:06

Yes. Now, what I get from people all the time is that, oh, I do not have a green thumb, I have a brown thumb, I can't grow plants. This is the thing that I tell people who feel like they can't grow plants. Everybody can grow plants, but you have to find your plant and your season. What's the season in your life that you just naturally just pop?

SPEAKER_01 7:24

You glow.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

You know what I'm saying? You already don't need no motivation because you already like uh uh it's me. Yeah, that is the season. Now you find the plant that thrives in that season. Oh you already got the energy and the attention to detail, it's already in you. That's how you start. From there, you can maybe stay just with those plants. But from there, you may even grow. It might give birth to a whole new way of life for you. Something that you can regulate your own temperature, regulate your own energy. Get up in the morning, and before you scroll on your phone, you actually go out and check your plants.

SPEAKER_02 8:03

You got me. You got me. You got me sold. Go check your tomatoes and see if you got hornworms. See, that's what I'm doing. This one doing this. Look, I'm learning. I just learned about what hornworms are.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 8:11

I got my little tomatoes. I I have I got four of them on the vine now. I got four. I'm working on it. Oh, yeah, they're horns. Yeah, I didn't realize how bad they were.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Oh, yeah. And they'll tear a whole plant up real fast. Yeah, they be eating. They eat so quickly. When they feed in the morning. So if you want to manually pick them off, don't touch them because I don't like to touch caterpillars because you don't know, if you're not trained, you don't know which caterpillar could be poisonous or toxic or not. So I don't ever touch caterpillars. But if you go in the morning and you want to manually take them off, you can get a stick and put them on a stick, put them off. They feed in the morning. The hornworms.

SPEAKER_02 8:44

That's why you find them in oh man. All right. I found my first ones. I know where I was at there checked them one morning.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

I was about to do my water, and I said, Oh, look at a little guy just eating this having a good time. It'll just jip dich jipsy. Like it's like so jarring when you see it at first. It's like, oh, what is you?

SPEAKER_02 8:57

Yeah, what are you? And I was like, I told my wife, she said, Well, go ahead and take it off. I got a little stick, and I made it get on the stick, and then I took it all.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Yeah, yeah. And then the birds will tear it up.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:07

That was my point.

SPEAKER_02 9:08

I tell my wife all the time, let the birds live in the carport. And she said, Why? I said, because they eat bugs. Yeah. I just had to take two insect, I mean two hornets' nests out of our carport. And I said, see, we should just let the birds set up a nest.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

Yeah. Well, the birds probably, I don't know, the hornets, they're so gangster they burst. They are kind of gay. They fight the birds.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

You right? This thing's about this large. I was like, okay. What you trying to do? I'm like, I don't want any problems with you all.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

But um, those you gotta sneak up on them at the end.

SPEAKER_02 9:37

That's no, I had to sneak up on them during the day.

SPEAKER_00 9:39

No, see, when they're dormant at night, so that's the best time to mess with them, is when they dormant.

SPEAKER_02 9:45

So do you go and get them in their little cones?

SPEAKER_00 9:48

If you do, if you do, you take a plastic bag and you cover the whole thing.

SPEAKER_02 9:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

And then you tie it up and you keep it sealed. Do not open it. Just go ahead and toss that.

SPEAKER_02 9:57

Safety first. Y'all heard that on the Helltop Glove podcast first. When you're removing Hornets, please put them in that bag, seal it. Don't open it. Don't do what I did.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

When they're dormant.

SPEAKER_02 10:08

At night.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

It's like it's like a sucker punch.

SPEAKER_02 10:10

Oh, you're right. It's like a sucker punch. You've been right. Catch them off guard.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Right, right. You know, like if somebody sneak and punch somebody, you be like, oh, what's going on? A wasp, you can sneak a punch. Seriously. A hornet, you can sneak a punch. You can sucker punch.

SPEAKER_02 10:24

Yeah, because you don't want to get it.

SPEAKER_00 10:25

No, because while they're active, they're ready.

SPEAKER_02 10:28

And they'll attack you.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

They're ready, yeah. They'll chase you with vengeance. Yeah. So you want to catch them when they're gonna be.

SPEAKER_01 10:44

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 10:44

It just turned it. I was not smart, but I learned something today. You always learn something every day. Well, moving on from there, I must ask this. We keep hearing this all day about reasons, but how did you get in contact with reasons?

SPEAKER_00 10:58

So he just hit me up on Instagram. Wow. Yeah, because my Instagram is open. I get a lot of people sending me pictures of plants or pictures of insects. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:06

Oh, they just DM me the information and you drop.

SPEAKER_00 11:09

And I'll be like, oh, let me tell you what that is, or oh, what you doing?

SPEAKER_02 11:13

That doesn't look right.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

No, I'll be like, that one's dead. Go ahead and put it in a compost bin.

SPEAKER_02 11:17

Oh, you have to tell people that? You have to give them, hey, tooth on that one.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

Okay, plants die. Put them in a compost bin and let them have that life.

SPEAKER_02 11:24

Let it give life to something else.

SPEAKER_00 11:26

Go on to that great compost bin in the sky.

SPEAKER_02 11:28

Yes. And our compost bin is popping. I do need to turn it over. You're reminding me about a bunch of stuff today. Could you tell us about where about your Instagram, how people can find you online?

SPEAKER_00 11:39

Okay, so um, ironically, being a breast cancer survivor and having the name Hope.

SPEAKER_01 11:44

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Yeah, so and it's crazy because my surgery wasn't, my first surgery was in October, too. They was like, girl, can you do the most?

SPEAKER_02 11:52

Oh man. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

And my cancer was pretty bad. It was intense. It was in both breasts at the same damn time.

SPEAKER_02 11:58

When did you find it? What stage were you?

SPEAKER_00 11:59

Uh it was stage one in the right breast and stage two A in the left breast. And it was in the lymph nodes presence also. It had lymph node lymph node presence also. So that means it was at the airport, ready to take off to the rest of my body. Yes. And this was my very first screening mammogram.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_00 12:15

At age 40. So I do encourage everybody to get your screenings. And if you have family history, you know, make a plea with your doctor to get them earlier than the recommended times. And if you get the bracket testing, if you want to do the bracket testing, I say do the bracket testing too, but the bracket testing only really tests for about 10% of the types of breast cancer that you could get, or the 10% of the types of breast cancer that could be inherited, rather. So the bracket testing is helpful, but it's not the end all the be all.

SPEAKER_02 12:47

So make sure you have a comprehensive screening. Yeah, get your screening. Question, I must ask this since you're talking, since you're talking about that, why did you go and get your screening?

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Because I was 40.

SPEAKER_02 12:57

It was time.

SPEAKER_00 12:58

Yeah, I was 40, and it's time to get your and I breastfed all three of my kids. So my breast tissue, like most African-American women, it's very dense. And so the things that was found, even the doctor had a hard time feeling to do the feel test to find them. So just going to get my first screening mammogram, and here it was. And it was five masses in the first screening mammogram. So when I decided that I wanted to pursue agriculture, and I was just thinking about like what I wanted to brand myself as or brand this whole journey as, I thought about uh what it means to most cultures to feed somebody. Yeah. You feed them, you love them, right? So, and what I want to do is to teach people how to feed themselves, but how to feed each other. I want to be a person who feeds people. And well, it sounds very hippie, Hope's love garden. It's how very hippie.

SPEAKER_02 13:59

I like hippie stuff. That hippie stuff is.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

It's very hippie-zippy. I might still punch you, but it's Hope's Love Garden because I wanted to create a space that gave people optimism in the darkest moments. Yeah. Show people love through food and encourage gardening in all forms, whether it be on large-scale agricultural projects where you actually switch from conventional monoculture agriculture to something that is a little bit more friendly and caring to the earth. Or if you just growing eggplant on your front porch in a container.

SPEAKER_02 14:38

Yep. You're there for everybody.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 14:40

And so those people can contact you, correct? Yep, absolutely. Including the large monoculture people that need assistance to do better. Go ahead and somebody contact me. Excellent, excellent. Well, before we do finish and wrap up, I know you gave that plug. Is there anything else that you would like to plug in or anything that you have upcoming that you would like for our audience or others to know about?

SPEAKER_00 15:04

Well, we're doing a podcast through school, through my ad through the agriculture club. It's probably gonna be boring to people who aren't into agriculture. Tell us about it. Tell us, tell us, tell us. It is called Why Agriculture, and we're just talking with a someone who left the industry, and someone that was in the industry in the past that left the industry because of all of the problems in agriculture. Then we're gonna uh sit down with a farmer who is currently doing a pasture raised uh cow, uh pasture raised beef. And then we're gonna talk about the future of agriculture with some uh students who have just decided to become agriculture students in college. So this is a little three-series podcast, and it's coming up and it's called Why Ag I'm gonna tell you this.

SPEAKER_02 15:45

When we first sat down and I saw you over there waiting, I did not know what the conversation was gonna be about, right? Or how it was gonna go. I was pleasantly surprised.

SPEAKER_00 15:55

Oh, well, that's cool. I usually do that to people because I kind of got that mean face sometimes.

SPEAKER_02 16:00

No, I'm Steven, it was good. No, the mean face, uh, it was just I didn't expect to hear the things that I was gonna hear.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Yes. And I mean, of course, I will always promote my girl Jill. Y'all go to y'all check the J.il podcast and listen to my great podcast, my white gloves. It's very good. And go on her missjill scott.com, get some of that merch from her 23rd anniversary tour. Y'all. Go ahead, Javan.

SPEAKER_02 16:23

So well, I'm gonna sign us off today. This is DJ M. Well with the Hilltop Glove Podcast, my brother Skip.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

Yep, and Maha Adachi, aka.

SPEAKER_02 16:32

I love that. I love that. Excellent. We are here live in effect at the Bradley Community Center in beautiful Gastonia, North Carolina. Of course, with the honeycomb experience, my man Reasons Brown, he's actually over there playing ball right now. We're gonna catch him too before the end of the day. He ain't gonna escape the mic either. But man, we love y'all. We want to make sure that you tell somebody around you that you love them, that you appreciate them, and we will see you next time. Peace.