Raised Bed & Container Gardening with Mark

Today I'm talking with Mark at Raised Bed & Container Gardening with Mark. 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 to Mark at the Raised Bed and Container Gardening with Mark.  And Mark is in North Carolina. Good afternoon, Mark. How are you?  Good afternoon, Mary. It's good to be with you. It's good to have you. I love talking to people in North Carolina because you guys have the sweetest Southern drawl.

00:28 Well, sometimes I, my kids tell me I talk pretty country sometimes. It's really sweet and it's very easy to understand. Sometimes the drawl is so thick that I'm like, excuse me, what did you say? So it's great when I get somebody who sounds like sweet tea and a rocking chair on a front porch. makes me very happy. You said the weather has been raining there. Yeah, we've had a good bit of rain. We've had.

00:56 We had a really hot stretch during the summer and then some rains came in and it's kind of been cool for the last couple of weeks.  as my grandfather would say, we had a zizzly zazzly this morning.  It was, you could hear the rain just sizzling as it hit the ground.  yes.  I remember being a kid in Maine and we had a dirt road for a while and then they tarred it.

01:22 The first time it rained after they tired it in like August, it was so hot. I could hear it steam. I could hear that noise you're talking about, but I never heard it called a Zizzle Zazzle before. That's great. So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do. Well, I am a, I'm a newspaper editor is my day job. I'm a sportscaster, which is one of the things I do for fun. And I, I'm a gardener pretty much, I guess it's in, it's kind of in the blood and

01:52 I particularly enjoy growing tomatoes. That's my big thing. My favorite food in the world is tomatoes. So a good tomato right off the vine is just the best thing in the world. So I stay really busy. Okay. How's your tomato season been? We had a really good season, but it came all at once and it was just...

02:20 Within two weeks and everything was done. don't recall having a season like that in the last few years, but it just, everything produced. They all ripened almost at the same time. We had some  smaller like black cherry tomatoes that  they lasted a little bit longer, but when the rains hit, it kind of ruined them. whatever was left there, they were done.  Just got too much rain at one time.  you know, sometimes those little tomatoes will

02:50 If they're near full grown, they'll pop open if you get too much rain. split. Yeah. Yeah. Our tomato season just really kicked in about two weeks ago and my husband planted over 250 tomato plants in the spring. So we are going to be swimming in tomatoes in a week. Oh yeah. That's awesome. Now what kind of tomatoes do you like to grow? He grows. Of course you asked me this and usually I can reel them off top of my head and now I'm like, what does he grow?

03:19 He grows early girls. grows, he tries to get sweet one million cherry tomatoes, but I think he just got sweet 100s this year. And the San Marzano tomatoes. I love San Marzano's. I have trouble though. I don't ever get any size on them. I wind up with a lot of kind of maybe they'll grow in two and a half, three inches long.

03:48 and be almost hollow inside. And I'm not really sure what's happening with mine on those. They taste great.  They cook up well, but there's just not a lot of it.  I'm not the gardener, but what I can tell you that I've observed with ours is that if it rains moderately and it's sunny reasonably,  it seems to help them have more flesh on the inside. Okay. Because they need the water, but they need the heat too.

04:16 Yeah. The, uh, mean, San Marzano probably is my favorite tomato. It's such a good cooking tomato too, but it's got such a good taste because you just got all that flesh too. It's a, it's a good fleshy tomato. It makes something new. Go ahead. I'm sorry. It makes