Matt The Garden Guy

Today I'm talking with Matt at Matt The Garden Guy. You can follow on Facebook as well.

 

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00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters.  I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Matt at Matt  the Garden Guy in Wisconsin. Good morning, Matt. How are you? Hey, good. How you been? I'm good.  Is the weather any improved in Wisconsin today?  I mean, it's been raining like crazy. Fortunately, all that rain that hit Milwaukee and that flooding missed me, but

00:28 We've been getting rain like crazy every day and you know the bugs are destroying everything but I think the rain is holding off now. I woke up this morning and the sun was actually out and I was like, oh hello! Nice of you to stop in! It's not here yet, it's still cloudy and 70, I'm just still waiting for it to rain again but yeah we need the sun badly. Yeah, my husband dumped out the uh...

00:56 the rain gauge last night and he came in and he said, we got six and a half inches of rain from Saturday until yesterday. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. It's been terrible. I don't want to engage. Sorry. My range actually broke, so I got to try to fix it. So I'm like getting no nothing coming in, but yeah, you don't have any empirical data to work with.

01:22 I know. I'm kind of like, need to know how much rain I got, but it's a lot. That's all I got to say. Yeah. Last summer we had a terrible, horrible, no good growing season.  this year it started out pretty good, but with all the rain  and it's been so hot that we haven't been able to keep on.  Our garden is slowly giving up the ghost. And I'm like,  second year in a row, next year better.

01:50 We kind of, we kind of started out the same way.  um,  we, we, planted everything, but then we got some weird cold weather and then some really hot weather.  like, I planted a bunch of beets and carrots and all of that and it came up, but then didn't do anything.  but then like it started to, sorry, reseeded and then it started exploding. like I try to get.

02:18 I tried to do at least three harvests a year. So I started early as possible and, know, cover it up with frost blankets or things like that. And this year we're only going to get probably two. So, but that's okay. Um, my husband planted over 250 tomato plants. Whoa. And we thought we were going to be rolling in, in tomatoes by now, but because of all the rain and because it's so hot, we're starting to get the blight already.

02:47 And once that happens, we're screwed.  so,  and so, um, yeah, our hopes for raking in some money on tomato sales this year are now  kind of down the tubes too. And I'm like,  are you sure we're in the right gardening thing? You know, it's funny you say tomatoes. So like my wife looked at me, I think earlier, I know we were at our friend's house over the weekend and she's like, yeah, we don't have a lot of tomatoes. said, um,

03:13 We cut down our crop by half.  So last year we had 10 plants. only got, well, we got six this year. She's like, Oh, that makes sense. Because like  our, our like, I don't know, my, my, my dream or whatever last couple of years is really,  you know, know, canning my stuff and then going downstairs and getting it. like that's been consuming all of our.

03:37 tomatoes and all that. But I also want to sell stuff too, but we're not able to do that because we just don't have enough plants outside right now. yeah, it was funny when you say that, you you guys have that many and I'm like, yeah, we had the same conversation, but it was the opposite.  We didn't plant as many as we normally do. And then my wife is like, well, how can we not have any tomatoes? Well, because I cut it in half almost because you asked me to.  It's really hard gardening with your spouse.

04:07 And I use the term gardening loosely because I'm not the gardener.  husband. But I help him. I help him plan and I help him  with, you know, he'll say, I'm thinking about getting this variety. I look it up and find out what's required. And I tell him, and then we make a