Today's conversation is with Julie Martin, primitive skills practitioner.

Julie teaches ancestral skills ranging from fire-starting to herbal medicine at Practical Primitive, a school in Great Meadows, NJ run by Julie and her husband Eddie Starnater. It's a fantastic place to go for workshops in a vast array of different skills.

I hope you enjoy today's conversation immersing in the forgotten fundamentals of human survival. Julie and I start the conversation by talking about processing acorns for food. We also discuss fire and its elemental place in human life, communicating with plants, building community and nature connection through primitive skills, and a whole lot more.

This podcast is brought to you by Wild Ridge Plants. We started Wild Ridge to offer a toolkit for the restoration of native plant communities, including a native plant nursery, botanical surveys and stewardship planning, as well as classes, hikes, presentations and publications. Check us out online at wildridgeplants.com

Julie and Eddie have a number of great books and DVDs, including Acorn: Recipes for the Forgotten Food, mentioned in the podcast. Check out PracticalPrimitive.com for books, DVDs, and their workshop offerings.

If you're looking for a holiday gift for a kid, take a look at my book The Puddle Garden. It's an illustrated children's story about native plants and wildlife, an early start on the idea of habitat restoration featuring an adorable young bear as well as cardinal flower, hummingbird, and many others. You can find it online at wildridgeplants.com or on thepuddlegarden.com.

Thanks for all the feedback, questions, and comments, and for the iTunes ratings too. Please keep it coming, and give me a holler at [email protected] with comments, suggestions for upcoming guests, and just to chat.

Today's theme music was a first sketch of a piece called Fish Hawk. I'll probably take the bones of it and make it into a real song someday, meanwhile it was fun to pull together a few instruments and make a quick recording.