The Punk Rock Farmer - Part 2

Today I'm talking with Jonathan Lawler at The Punk Rock Farmer. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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Muck Boots 

Calendars.Com

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00:00 Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year?  Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months.  So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com  Lang calendar.

00:26 because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.  A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system.

00:56 You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. That doesn't work here. mean, I said number one, said, when you have 12,000 tomato plants planted per acre, the pheromones that we're releasing to the hawk moths and the gypsy moths, everything that wants to come a beat on these, that's going out. Huge, huge signals.

01:26 And I said, we try to use, I mean,  I do integrated pest management where I try to incorporate insect predators and,  I encourage hawks here.  love the fact that I have hawks. My wife doesn't like it because of her chickens, but I like having hawks here because mice are such a problem for us as produce farmers. They are just the bane of our existence.

01:54 we're getting ready to install 27 miles of drip irrigation just here at this location. And when we install that, the mice in the middle of summer when it's dry will actually chew on that drip irrigation. To get to the water. To get to the water. so,  you know,  I've always told people, like, I'll have guys who work for me and they'll see a snake and they'll go to kill it. said, that's fine. But you kill a snake, you got to do his job for two weeks for free.

02:22 You know, because he's eaten the things I don't want him. We have bees and we're able to educate people. They're like, well, how can you use chemicals  and have bees? Well, because number one, the stuff I'm using, bees aren't chewing on the plants.  And these insects have to chew on the plants in order to ingest it. Number two,  we also spray in accordance with how the bees

02:52 Whether they're, you know, we don't like to, we really don't like to spray plants late in the evening, but, uh, we will, we won't spray before a big bloom, like a big bloom of watermelons. We don't spray.