The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Zach Buchel: Farm Table West

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

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You're listening to P.B.N. You're going to have back the stability here. Welcome in PBN family we are we are live with the show formerly known as preppers live. I don't know if we're going to change the show name or not I really don't know. I think I like it just the way that it is to be honest with you and I think we're gonna go with it We're just gonna name these shows the title of the the incredible person that comes on every week We got Zack buko bukkel with us tonight. I hope I didn't butcher that Zack. I apologize in advance. You could correct me tonight show brought to you by

the Preppers Medical Handbook, Dr. William Forgy MD, the Preppers Medical Handbook. You got to have the Preppers Medical Handbook folks. Do I have it in arms reach? Of course I do. It's the handheld Pre a resource for for medical right This guy right i'm not going to go too deep in detail because you know you hear about it all the time but highly affordable small effective it's not a like a You know a medical bible you got to search 20 minutes through to find anything Preppers medical handbook. It's been with us a long time. You guys know the deal

Uh without further ado, let's get our guest on. Zach, thanks so much for joining us tonight, my man. I appreciate it. Did I pronounce the name wrong? Just a tad. It's buckle like... Oh dude, that's way cooler. I gave it like the French connotation, I wasn't sure. No, no, you did great. It's actually better than the French way because that's how they usually pronounce it the first day of school and it always kind of annoyed me. So you did it better. The last name Buckle is an awesome name for a guy who is farming essentially, right? That's pretty good.

I think so. I think it fits well. I think you need a buckle with the name buckle on it like that Yeah, I need one that says Buckle so that would be pretty good. That would be pretty good so why don't you give us the the rundown on Zack buckle and how you wind up on the prepper broadcasting network because you're You're doing a lot of cool stuff, you know, and I think growing food is kind of the high point of it, but why don't you break it down

for us a little? Maybe how you got started and all that kind of stuff. Sure. So I'm Zach Buckle. I own a one-third acre vegetable farm in Cote, Wyoming. And we harvest fresh vegetables pretty much year round in our zone 4B climate. So we only have 120 frost free days to grow food here. So it's pretty short season. We get a nice negative 20 Fahrenheit blasts every, like a couple of times every winter. So we have some

pretty crazy cold. And I got into it. It's kind of a long story, but I'll give you the short version. I got into it, believe it or not, in Chicago. I'm from Chicago area. And I have always been interested in growing vegetables and farming. And I visited some farms in the city of Chicago on the south side and really rough neighborhoods where there really isn't any food or things to do other than deal drugs and shoot people where they're left. These are like urban farms. Yes. They're pretty cool though, man.

I've been to some of those that are set up really well. They're really cool And what I found fascinating with that whole system was they were growing on parking lots. There's no soil there So they're oh wow Yeah Like the back to Eden kind of thing. They were laying down cardboard and wood chips Was it like a Mac to Eden kind of thing? Like they were laying down cardboard and wood chips? Yeah, they were making just truckloads of compost from all the restaurant waste.

And then they were bringing people to work the farm that were just kids in the neighborhood that would have been dealing drugs otherwise. So the whole impact of making the community better was really inspiring to me. And on top of producing something that actually provides value to people other than just something made from China, you know, that was really inspiring. So long story short, I ended up my family's got property out in Wyoming

and it has for about 20 years. And I wanted to get out of Chicago and it has for about 20 years and I wanted to get out of Chicago and they told me about this farm that's right across the street from our property out here and ended up calling him, working on his farm and just that was the first time I actually worked on a vegetable farm and it was actually kind of similar to the Chicago style but it was just in three acres in Wyoming but he has like two feet of black topsoil. Just phenomenal stuff and I just fell in love with it immediately and he had, I've never seen that many vegetables growing in one place at one

time before and it's the first time I actually got exposed to like a real homegrown tomato and celery and the difference between the flavor of that versus the store. It was the first time I'd ever been exposed to it. And... So that opened your eyes to what was possible on a certain plot of land.

Yeah, yeah. And I ended up starting a business shortly after working there to sell his food because I saw there was a big problem with access. He was doing five farmer's markets a week, which is really hard on your body, your mental stress. It's just a lot of work to sell that much food. And so I tried selling it online, which is actually my website. You're probably going to show later, but that actually was the that's still the same website that I used back then to sell his food. But now I just sell my own. And I started to work with other farms in Wyoming and trying to connect them with bigger

markets like Yellowstone National Park. We did that for a while. Let's pop it in now. There you go. That's actually, that photo was taken right around the time I'm talking about. That's like eight years old, that photo. Ah. But yeah, we deliver our stuff online to retail customers in Cody. There's a home delivery part of that website. That's sweet man. That's a game changer. Yeah it is.

It is. So that's kind of the point of it but it's it's evolved from that point to now I just kind of use it to sell my subscription vegetables for the whole summer the CSA. Yeah Basically, I call it a veggie box. But yeah, same thing I talked to our audience a lot about the CSA as a Sort of a backup to the backup garden, you know what I mean? Yeah, like you're having your own garden but then signing up for something like a CSA for other things you can't grow or but then signing up for something like a CSA for either things you can't grow or

I don't know if you run into this because you have it looks like a lot of your stuff is protected by Greenhouses, so I don't know the ins and outs of green housing very well But you know, sometimes you lose things that you're depending on and Yeah, that's why I always promoted that we have a pretty cool I don't know if this is something that would work up in your neck of the woods, but we have a pretty cool business down here called seasonal roots and seasonal roots is taking the CSA idea and delivery idea and like grabbed a bunch of farms and artisans so they have like farms and artisans so they have like

Bakeries and they do dairy they do produce they do meat and then they deliver you a box of like and you shop it Which is weird right? CSAs are typically like you get what our share, right? We're gonna send you our share of what we grow you get to shop and then they bring you that and it's all local farmers I always loved it. It's really cool. We've been using them for probably two years, three years, something like that now and it's probably the realistically the most effective and consistent way I can support local farmers. You know what I mean? Because I'm not always gonna make it out to farmers market and stuff like that. So this is, you know, delivery is a. It's just this that level of convenience is cool but I love your guys site man. Your guys site really and I guess you should so people can understand

why it's such cool thing is that you're doing all this off of your 1 third acre plot, right? And in all in greenhouses, is it? Mostly greenhouses just because we're in Wyoming. So we got, you know, 120 days is pretty hard to make money on that small of a land base. Oh yeah. So yeah, going forward that's pretty much what we're going to be doing is just producing in greenhouses. We've got a little bit of field space is just producing in greenhouses. We've got a little bit of field space and we'll do a little bit more later but it's there's only so many plants you could start ahead of time in a nursery to make it worth it. Having the greenhouses means you got potential of 12 months of harvesting which is a big deal for Wyoming. And it's kind of like what I was what I was telling you at the head of the show that kind of blew my mind about it was so many of us, you know, the prepping homesteading community, we talk about like growing food and selling food, you know, maybe setting a table up at the farmers market, maybe selling the extra eggs if we have a bunch of chickens. farmers market, maybe selling the extra eggs if we have a bunch of chickens. But you have, you're not only selling it, but you've set up the website that kind of

got it like streamlined. You know, how did you, how did you get, go from the mentality, was it because of the first farm? The mentality of, you know, running around and killing yourself at farmers markets to deliver in a box and drive and produce around instead box and driving produce around instead of lugging produce around. Yeah, it was exactly that. I mean, when you, if you work closely with somebody who's working like that, you start to ask yourself some questions like, is this really how you want the rest of your life to look like? You know, you want to, you want to work 70 hours a week, just barely making it for the rest of your life, look like. You know, you want to work 70 hours a week, just barely making it for

the rest of your life, you know. So I kind of saw the writing and I'm still friends with this guy. Really love him to death. We're family friends and his life's gotten a lot better since then. Oh, that's good. Because of that website or? No, actually it's just the markets changed., having, that was why I started it. And it's still pretty handy for, for certain things like right now, just being able to send an email and have, you know, 20 people send me $300 is pretty nice. You know, that saves a lot of, you know, phone calls and emails and stuff. It makes things really convenient.

But yeah, having the biggest thing I've found with customers that they have a problem buying it is not necessarily the price or you know, the quality or anything like that. It's really just access. You know, this is how you can kind of compete with the grocery store because the grocery store's got 24-7 access to customers basically, right? And we only have, at the farmers market, it's three hours a week. So it's not, it's really hard for a lot of, you know, busy families to make it to the farmers market. So this allows you to, you know, make your purchasing decision anytime and then you just go pick it up whenever you want. There's a lot of potential in it. I'll be honest I have not mastered it. Most of my sales are still farmers market but yeah I think there's a lot of potential in bigger

populated areas for sure. It's exciting. I think the next five ten years that whole model is going to explode. Do you promote it at the farmers market? A little bit. I live in a really small town, so I'm still kind of like figuring out my markets. I'm starting to sell into a much bigger town that's like 200,000 people, but I live in a town of 10,000. I gotcha. Yeah, that's where I heard about the seasonal roots place actually was at a farmers market. Yeah. And that was like the death of my farmers market visiting was once we started

Getting that stuff dropped off at the house. It was like, you know, we can go once in a while But yeah, that was that was like I said a game changer But I see what you're doing a man, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is how the hell are you heating the? greenhouses? Oh, heating. Okay, I thought you said heating. Well, I don't know. Hopefully it doesn't get that bad for you. Yeah. So I have a, I have one greenhouse that's sort of heated with a climate battery, which is like, trying to in between, it's sort of a geothermal thing, but it's not really geothermal geothermal it's it's really just warming the ground under and then

releasing the heat at night so the ground during the day and then keeps the greenhouse warm overnight yeah it in when I say warm it bumps up the temperature like 15 degrees so it's not like bomb proof at all like when it's negative 20 it's still really cold but it's really cheap to run it costs like 50 bucks a month less than that probably 20 bucks a month to run so it's a nice climate battery I have a actually have a YouTube video explaining it but oh do you yeah I was gonna put it in our chat here yeah it's a climate battery in it's basically just like each there's like 28 links of pipe each one of the pipes has a fan on it and it pumps air six

feet underground releases it on the other side and it warms up during the day releases a heat at night and like right now at this time of year it's really valuable. There's enough light to warm up the greenhouse a lot in the day and it stays 10-15 degrees warmer than outside which is a big deal and it'll be a really big deal for me for like early tomatoes and stuff like that. Oh yeah. Is there a lot of gambling with that?

Oh god yeah. Is there a lot of gambling with that? Oh, god, yeah. It's very stressful. Well, I've gotten a little better at it. I'm actually still pretty new at growing, believe it or not. I actually really didn't start growing until basically 2020. Most of the time, I was trying to do that other business, and that didn't really work. But I took a farm course to learn how to grow basically.

But that's shaped a lot of years off my learning curve. But yeah, that's the main heated greenhouse but the rest of them are all unheated. So we just do really cold hardy crops and protect them. So it makes it profitable, you know, so you don't have to spend tons of money on heating stuff. We're like right now we're selling spinach, carrots. I just harvested carrots like a week ago.

And then all of the, in like arugula, lots of salad greens right now. And then as the season progresses we'll start adding a little bit more root vegetables and quick growing crops but for the winter. So you're growing salad greens in Wyoming in February? Yeah. In the unheated greenhouse? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's just daily sunlight. Yep, Does daily sunlight. It's just getting the crop to mature At your last 10 hour day and then you just keep it alive through the winter and harvest it We were harvesting fresh in january was spectacular. Absolutely. It is the best flavor

You it's the best tasting spinach and salad greens you've ever tasted in your life. Because everything gets sweeter the colder it gets. Yeah. Ah, how about that? Yeah, we just throw them things up and just hope and pray. We had a guy, I think it was Dave Jones actually, who had, he was running a wood stove in his, to try and keep it warm in there. Yeah. You know, we did, I guess the courses, tell us about that course. One of the things that we don't do enough, I think, in our community is

take legitimate farming and growing courses. You know, we do a lot of different trainings and stuff, first aid and shooting and tactical stuff, but like, we were were like we could figure out Gardens, you know what? I mean, and maybe like what you're telling me right now is really got my ears perked up And I'm thinking maybe garden courses are probably the way to go Was it greenhouse based or was it just like soil and you know? Planting and all that kind of stuff. So the course I took Was from a guy. It's called Never Sink Farm.

He's on YouTube, Instagram. He's pretty big deal in the market farming space, but he's in upstate New York, which is very similar climate to here. He's like his own 5A, I'm his own 4B, so it's almost the same. And so he's doing exactly this, but on like one and a half acres. So he's doing three, four times the volume of me.

But he's been at it quite a bit longer also. I got you, yeah. But yeah, he's- So it's online then? You didn't fly to New York? No, it's online. Yeah. OK.

I mean, that's important because then we can justify it even better You know, I mean we can say oh we can take an online course We don't have to go to you know somewhere and go do a thing Yeah Well, it is really handy for this topic because I constantly go back to that course now And then still look at the video of him explaining how to do something, you know It's really handy because like I don't really learn well from one workshop or a book or something.

Sure, same way. And so having the, especially for gardening and growing food, having videos explaining it is really valuable. Because I don't know how you can explain how to graft tomatoes in a book. That would be ridiculously hard. That is that's a whole rabble I want to go into it, but yeah That's that's that's a really hard thing to do and I still have hard time understanding from these videos

But so I don't we don't have to go into that but is that an essential practice where you're at? Oh, okay All right. No, it just bumps up your yield 30% Oh, okay. All right. No, it just bumps up your yield 30% Trees same deal with the apple trees, right? Yep. Yeah, it's the same idea. Yep. Wow, man. You'd like this My father-in-law before he passed away really went deep into gardening and and I just had no idea how seriously and how like all-encompassing gardening and soil can become. You know, the amending of soil with certain things and I remember he had like his own recipe, he was bringing in coconut coir, it was every year that was a thing that he was

adding to the soil and he had different... He had this stuff called Boogie brew do you ever hear that no boogie brew was another youtube farmer thing that he found and it was just this uh you know collection of minerals and stuff like that that you put in a bucket with an aerated water sort of like compost tea you know what i? Do you ever do like a compost tea? Like an aerated anaerobic I think it is, right? Or anaerobic? Is that the one that needs oxygen? Or is that aerobic? I think it's aerobic. But whatever, you know, it he boiled this stuff up, not boil it, but you know run air through it in a five

gallon bucket and feed the plants with it like every day. And it was just a whole world I didn't know about. The guy grew up and it was like put the miracle grow in the garden bed my dad would and he'd have great plants you know what I mean all the time. So yeah it's it's a deep world out there man and you're just telling us about another level of it I didn't know about grafting tomatoes. Wow Yeah Yeah, so what was the guy's name with the course again? Never sink farm never sink farm PB and family. Check it out. Yeah, it sounds like it's worth the money Oh, yeah, this is like, I don't know two grand or something Yeah, but by far the best I've ever spent in my life and you still go back to it Yep. Yeah, I mean it otherwise I would have probably quit growing because farming is ridiculously hard, you know gardening's hard but farming

Doing this for like 300 people is really hard. So why do we take it for granted Zack? What is the deal with that? What is your what is your diagnosis? I know a bunch of farmers. Why do we take you guys for granted so much? It's just like, yeah, they're farmers. They grow the food. There's no holiday, nothing. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's a deep topic, man. I've thought a lot about that one. I mean, the simple answer is just convenience, right? That's why the website is a big deal because it's a convenient way for people to buy this kind of stuff. The way that the grocery store works is just too convenient. It's just way easier.

It doesn't really, it costs a lot more to buy from somebody like me, although that's changing every day. It seems like my prices are almost the same as a store now. It's getting there. Yeah. But yeah, it's just been a slow, convenient way to consume food and also just the whole direction of Health of America, I think, has gone to process foods over the past sure 50 years you know so it's all podcast in itself that question you were just

spoiled and we we grow up in a world where produce is at our arms length anytime we want it yeah just a weird disconnect to me always seems like a weird thing you know it's like there's these guys they wake up Insanely early they're on combines and all that kind of stuff for hours at a time They listen to the podcast too. They love the prepper broadcasting network gives them something to do how they drive them combines and Yeah, and we just ho hum, you know, the farmers are doing what the farmers do. They run out of water. Nobody cares I'm in California. They like wouldn't give them water Whatever, you know weird until it touches us

The average person doesn't even really think about farmers that much But we appreciate you here because we go out in our backyards and we're like record check record, you know things aren't going well So we get it. But yeah, yeah, I seen you with the thing that got me was you Carrying out them trays of seedlings and laying them down laying them down I think it was in the Instagram video and I was like, oh this guy's doing it. He's doing the real thing let me see what he's do all about and so one of the things we wanted to talk about was sort of like how you keep the produce flowing all year, you know, with succession planning and whatever other techniques you use because I always

promised myself I'm gonna do succession planning and that never works, you know what I mean? Yeah, but yeah I's it's probably the number one secret to my farm being a business because otherwise with a third of an acre it's pretty hard to produce enough food to you know make a decent amount of money. Sure. We actually sold 80 just shy of 86,000 of vegetables. Wow. And it's it's actually could be a lot better than that. There was a lot of things that still went wrong, but that this succession planting thing is how that happens. So congratulations on that. That's great. Yeah, it's been it's been a hard couple years to get there, but it's pretty cool. I'm not gonna lie. But yeah succession planting planting is the key.

It's how you can make, grow a lot of food in a short growing season or even without a short growing season. It's just how you can basically grow, two to three crops on your existing land per season. That unlocks a lot more food you can produce on your own land, especially with land prices going through the roof everywhere. So you can make a lot more out of a small land base, especially in a short growing season.

Well, it's huge for us because the majority of people don't have tons of land. You know what I mean? The most populated areas don't come with an acre backyard, you know? And my mentality is always like, the people, like I feel like those who have the land can garden and will garden. The people who we want gardening and growing their own food and finding a little more self-sufficiency are the people who are in the suburbs and cities, you know what I mean? Who are completely dependent on everything being trucked in. Exactly. And that's why your story was so intriguing to me because it was like third of an acre.

I know a lot of people with third of an acre backyard, you know what I mean? They could pull something off. And you don't got to pull off $86,000 in sales on vegetables to feed your family, you know, so that's yeah. That's the only reason I bring that number up. It's not really the brag. It's just be like, Oh, I love it. You could do a thousand.

How easy would it be to do $1,000 on like 600 square feet? Yeah. Oh, it's not a brag, man. Look, you invested two grand and you may you are doing something with it. That's awesome Yeah, that's the way it works. But well you invested more than that. I'm sure but yeah, yeah But so give us sort of a breakdown on how you do succession planning, I guess sure. Yeah, so Actually, can we show that? Yeah, let's bring the document up for sure that planting schedule Okay, so that's everybody can see that

Yeah, they can't that's live on the air now. Okay, cool chat Let us know if you could see that thing if it's zoomed up enough we can zoom in a little more if you need Okay, cool, I think you're good to go. All right, so this is like a gardening version of my annual planting schedule. So I use a little bit more complicated one for the farm because I'm doing all sorts of greenhouse plantings and that adds another layer of complications but this works really well for just planting in your backyard

in basically any climate. The way this works is you just need to find out your average last frost and your average first frost in your area. You just Google that exact phrase and usually the old farmers almanac will tell you what it is for your town or whatever. And then you plug those dates into this calendar and it'll cover about 17 different vegetables. And I kind of focus on, since I'm in Wyoming, I focus a lot on cold hardy crops because they just produce so much better here. I don't do a lot of peppers and okra and stuff like that just because it's too, it's just

impossible to get a crop here. But you know if you did do that in your climate you just kind of find the correct weeks before and after your first and last frost for that crop and you can do the same thing. But basically you just plug those two dates into this whole sheet and you can use this as a, every week throughout the season you come back to this schedule and you decide if you have space in your indoor nursery or window sill to start plants. And if there is room, you could start a plant that is on this schedule that is in the time window that will produce a crop in your growing season.

And so I just do this because it's a lot simpler than having like three different schedules for different greenhouse plantings or fall plantings or whatever. And I combine it with, because I don't look at gardening as like a spring job or a summer job or a fall job. It's like the whole season I'm planting things, right? So it's like to do succession planting to keep a

constant flow of something like green onions, you just all you do is you just keep planting your nursery space with green onion plants and keep it full all season. And then you keep eventually you keep your outdoor planting space full of the plants. And then if you just focus on those two things, you focus on keeping your nursery full of plants and then your actual land full of plants throughout the entire growing season, you kind of automatically have succession plantings for the whole season. And the cool thing about this one, this schedule is basically all the ones that are designed for fall planting, where it says before your first frost, they're all frost-hottie party crops, so you're going

to be able to harvest them past your average first frost. So that automatically gives you a nice, big, juicy fall garden filled with food. So you're basically running effectively you're running two gardens right? You're running the crops that are on their way to maturity or are mature for harvest and then you're running this other garden which is a nursery garden. Exactly. And the only other question is, how do you do quantity? Is it based on orders for the week for you? We're going to pull X amount of green onions, so I'm going to take X amount of green onions from that plot

and put them right back where I took them from? That's a good question. So quantity is something that I dial in the quantity after reviewing what I sold last year. So right now, I'm doing a lot of the little tweaks on my planting for this year based on what I sold last year. And you could take the same idea and use it in your garden. Like what did you eat last year? Sure. Yeah. You know, either bump up or in a month. You know, kind of percentage wise, you just bump up the amount of plants that you ate last year, you bump down. Yeah. And instead of, because I think a lot of people

freak out about like, oh, I need to have 20 tomato plants to get 100 pounds or something like that. And if you're a beginner, that's going to stress you out and you're going to, if you do that for every single one of these vegetables, you're going to just get stressed and probably not get a great result. I think you start with just focusing on keeping the garden in the nursery full of plants at all times as much as you possibly can. You'll eventually after a year or two, you'll get much better at dialing your yields up and down. And there's a whole plant spacing to get a certain yield. That's a little hard to explain here,

but we plant everything in grids on the farm. So I think, for example, celery will plant 10 inches by 10 inches. So to get 19 heads of celery or 18 heads of celery, you need to plant, what is that? Like five feet of celery in a bed. Okay, I gotcha. So there is some little recipe,

we have all sorts of yield calculations for the farm and you could do it in your garden too really easily especially for stuff like carrots It's really handy to do because that's a crop that you can harvest and eat all winter pretty easily Now you but your start so your nurseries inside Yeah, my nursery is in that fancy climate battery greenhouse But if you're a gardener, you could just get a real simple grow light setup. I actually have one I could show you real quick if you want, but there's a kit you can buy that's just three shelves and you put grow lights on each

one of those shelves and you're just worried about keeping those three shelves full of plants. I'm talking February through August. That's the part that I think most people miss is if you keep that thing full of plants all the way through August, you're going to really increase the amount of food you can produce, especially in a short growing season. But yeah, so you're starting this stuff, a lot of the stuff indoors and then about half of it will just grow seeds directly in the ground. It's like you're not starting carrots indoors. You start those always directly in the ground and stuff like that. So we do a little bit of both. What would your recommendation be Zach for one of the

things that I do that I think prevents me from getting into more consistent succession planning is, cause since we don't sell and since we also grow a lot of night shade stuff it feels like there's a certain time to pull the trigger on a plant and where like production is slowed yank it out put the new one in type of thing is there anything like that in your life or is it simply produce in produce out it was ordered it's going you know in other words like I can I can remember at one time having a kale plant

That had grown so enormous and was just putting off like a few Leaves every so often and what I should have done is uprooted it and put a new one in because it would have been more Prolific, but it was a plan it was alive It was one less thing to worry about in life Do you ever run into that or is it since you're moving vegetables so much, just not a problem for you? Oh, we run into that all the time. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, of course. I mean, crop, I don't even think what you said is a crop failure necessarily, but if the plant gets tired, it gets tired, you know? Yeah. Yeah, we do that a lot. It depends on what's going on. You know, like with diseases

and stuff, if we see disease on a bed of lettuce or something, we're going to rip that bed out and replant it. But that makes sense. Yeah. We replant all the time. Like that part of what this schedule is, when I say like two to three crops a year, when you pull out a spring crop, like say you planted beets in May and you harvest them in late July, we'll pull those beets out, we immediately replant to something else. So it's like an assembly line. And that goes for a crop that's looking like it's not going to do well. One common example is if you're doing like onions, onions take all season to grow. Yeah. And if it's like mid June and they just look terrible and there's something wrong

with them, I would just pull them and then replant because you still have time to get two crops in that same bed. So those are the, there's, they're tough decisions sometimes, but, um, if you really want to just focus on producing as much food as humanly possible, sometimes you got to make those decisions. And, you know, in general, the better your soil gets and the more experience you get, the less of those situations you're going to have. But everybody goes through those.

Okay. That's the thing. One problem with Instagram is it's a highlight reel. Yeah, that's a good point. And I'm guilty of it too, for sure. But I made some videos where I really explain all of the things that went wrong. And it seems like those are the ones that people resonate with the most. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we learned that here too, Zach. That kind of content is so undervalued. Yeah. The moment we start talking, are we, do you want me to keep this thing up? Yeah, no, you're good. Yeah. The moment we started talking about our failures is, is really, you know, it's just a game, it humanizes you.

You know what I mean? And then your audience is like, Oh, this guy's normal. Exactly. You know what I mean? Cause they, you know, when you do a podcast, it can be the same thing. If you're not careful, You know what I mean? Because they you know when you do a podcast it can be the same thing if you're not careful You know what I mean? This is what you should be doing. This is what I do. This is how I do it You're never like I really screwed this up today I mean we do it a lot but we had to kind of unlock that and understand like that's a that's it's valuable

People like that stuff. Yeah people like that stuff because that they don't feel like well everybody's doing it perfect And I'm just screwing everything up over here. You know, it's good deal So you're going into the same soil all the time as a gardener for me. I'm thinking third of an acre three green houses Eventually that soils like dude we've given all we can give. What is, what's the answer there? Do you guys fertilize in between plantings or something like that? Compost? Yeah, so that's, that's a whole, that's a rabbit hole. And I'll be honest, I am not an expert on soil in any way shape or form

Okay, I pay an expert to be the expert for me And so he comes out and tests oil and then says this is you need this much of this this and this yes Yeah, we just got our soil test back last week, and I take I'm starting to do it in four different places even in that small land base I'm doing it do it in four different places. Even in that smaller land base, I'm doing it at every single greenhouse because they've all had different amendments over the last years and each crop, the crops growing in there are different too. So I want to amend specifically for what's going on in each one of those. And I'm fairly new to that because it's complicated and I would never figure it out on my own. I got

this whole cement mixer that mixes all the amendments and stuff. Sure, yeah. I'm going to put a gas mask on to do it because some of it's so powdery that you will have an ammonia basically. It'll just cake up your nose and lungs. But yeah, we do a real serious amendment of stuff like calcium and boron and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, sure. This time of year.

And then we add an inch of compost every year and we add a mid-season amendment of stuff like a falfa meal and biochar and stuff. Oh, okay. Yeah. So there's a lot. We amend like three times, four times a year for things like tomatoes, we're side dressing them weekly, every single week. For those kinds of greenhouse crops,

we're side dressing all the time. So soil is a big thing. And I've found that it is by far, even for a garden, if you have a limited budget, invest in soil as soon as humanly possible because it will pay for itself faster than anything else. It's one of those things we compost here. This is one of those like ego things that probably the audience will benefit from failure. We compost here and like one of my goals, cause we got a lot of trees, they're a pain

in the ass, but you know, it's good to have trees too. They shade out the garden. You got to get them trimmed back and all. I don't, you probably, you have trees around you or you don't have to worry about it? You buy it open in Wyoming or what? We actually weirdly have a lot of trees on my property. So shade is actually something I do have to deal with. Yeah.

Uh, well, as a crazy prepper, I was thinking I want to get to the point where I can use the chicken manure and the leaves and be self-sustaining on that, right? Like compost it all together with our food scraps grass clip, you know the deal and you know get to the point where we're filling beds with that and What I noticed is Be right before I did that. I got like a truckload of I think it was mushroom compost in and we had Really good year that year

You know what? I mean, and then I went on this tirade of like well if you can't get no more mushroom compost then you got to be able to do something else and it is different it's different like the the stuff you that I bought from a professional compost or whatever you know like a greenhouse around here that sells plants and different kinds of compost and soils and gravels and stuff um had a bit was better. It was just better for my plants than the stuff that I made and probably because of what you're talking about the refinement of you know all that kind of stuff. So we're I think we're gonna do truckload of compost again this year and see what a difference it makes after all these years

because like you said it's all about the soil. Everybody says it too, you know, everybody says it's all about the soil But you get excited about the plants. Oh, I got this heirloom thing. It's gonna be crazy It's so much fun to look at see catalogs It's a lot more fun to look at see catalogs than it is to look at compost under a microscope, right? Yeah, yeah, just how different can it be? So, Zach, you, oh, my camera's going crazy, you have something going on outside of all this stuff too, right? You got a, you're on a quest for information, you're on a quest for growing information from, particularly from people in the northern

tiers, right? Why don't you tell us a little bit about that yeah yeah so I'm doing research interviews right now with anybody in northern climates so like anywhere from like zone three to six I'd say I don't know about Arctic Circle that's a little different I don't know how I could talk to people from the Arctic Circle but but where PBN Canada needs to come in Volcana breezy can you guys know who you are maybe even the tool man if you're watching because we have some people up there in in Canada and I'm sure that that's the that zone right Alberta I don't know I don't know either I don't know either. I think so. The zones are actually a lot more confusing than I thought

until recently. But yeah, I'm doing research interviews for anybody who's struggling to grow really productive garden in those climates. And if you are somebody like that, I'd love to interview you for 20, 30 minutes or so just to learn about your challenges and your goals for your backyard because my context of growing on a farm is quite a bit different than growing on 600 feet in your backyard. So yeah, I'd love to chat with you because it's for me to help better serve people in my content going forward because I don't actually interact with a lot of people that watch my stuff until

recently I just started. So yeah, I'd love to interview people that are struggling to grow, to be the amount of self-sufficient that they want to be in their backyards. Okay. So that again tells the zones? Roughly three to six. I still don't even know if I should say that because the zones are kind of weird. Some zone threes are actually longer growing season than I am. Yeah, but it gives people something to cling on to. You know, I'm zone four. I can be part of that, you know, something like that. And those questions go direct to your email, right?

Yeah, yeah. If you would like to be interviewed, if you could email me at zb at farmtablewest.com, that would be awesome. As the letter Z, the letter B. I don't know how to do the cool military thing. Z for Zach, B for Z for Zeta. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. But at farmtablewest.com you said? Yes. Yes. Okay. You heard it, PBN family. If you got some, what are we talking? What kind of time commitment are we talking? Is it like a? 30 minutes? Okay. All right, cool Well might be something to consider guys, especially if you're struggling if you're struggling Zack wants to talk to you for 30 minutes on the house

It's probably well Yeah, I might be able to answer some questions for you and if you want I'll give you this you can have this Planting schedule. We just talked. Oh, there you go That's a good bonus. Yeah. Well, I'll be honest. I'm not really a prepper, but I kind of really interested in being self-sufficient growing vegetables. I don't know if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not exactly a prepper, I'll be honest. I'm not exactly a prepper, but I kind of really interested in being self-sufficient growing vegetables. I don't know if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not exactly a prepper, I'll be honest. I'm not exactly a prepper, but I kind of am really interested in being self-sufficient growing vegetables.

How self-sufficient are most preppers in growing vegetables? How big of a deal is that? Because you mentioned, sometimes people don't take gardening super seriously. They take livestock more seriously. How in general, how much do you guys want to grow vegetables? Well, I would say that it's pretty popular to dehydrate and freeze dry, freeze dry if you got the budget, things like that. Every prepper has their own constraints

in terms of where they live and what they can do. The people that I know, uh, well, the people that I know that do it the biggest, I guess we could start there, can become pretty much self-suffi- pretty much grow everything they need to eat vegetable-wise. I don't know too many people who meet all their fruit needs. I know one guy actually Rick Austin's probably the only guy that I know who was like Sorry some but my son just fell out of a chair upstairs or something. I don't know what that was but like

The to meet all the fruit needs is a different animal. You know what I mean, but I'm sure like One of our hosts Dave Jones. He grows all kinds of food all around this whole house I doubt he's shopping the supermarkets. I think that most preppers are probably supplementing some produce, you know Because of variety more than anything else right like like doing great on tomatoes doing great on peppers doing great on herbs But I didn't grow any eggplant We want eggplant parm for dinner something like that, you know, but a garden a garden is fundamental

I'd say for probably every prepper Well, yeah, I'd at least in our world, you know There are some people who are like buy it up preppers like I got the I got the dry food in the closet preppers But we're definitely more of the prepping homesteading kind of group. Sure Yeah, the reason I asked is because I don't know anybody that's really self-sufficient like that anybody who is self-sufficient on anything well self sufficiency is kind of It's far. So I know a great she's a great prepper writer good friend her name Sam Biggers and She lives on the mountains of North Carolina raises pigs has great

Vines and make I think she makes wine or sells it to wineries and all that kind of stuff She's got like she's been at it a while. You know what? I mean her and her husband out there and her two kids she's been at it a while. You know what I mean her and her husband out there and her two kids she's been at it a while and years ago, she said like Self-sufficiency is a myth in the modern age. You know what I mean? Like there's just there's too many things like unless you're planning on producing gasoline, you know Yeah, something like that. Like you're gonna need to go to town and get stuff It because it's just you know, but what I always tell people is it's a little goes

a long way, man, and it all improves your life so dramatically. Just today I was on Instagram just talking about what having six chickens can do for your just the feeling of self-sufficiency. And right now it's glaring because of what's going on with the prices. But there's something, too, just being in your house and knowing there's superior protein in the backyard that's just there.

Every morning, I wake up, I go out, you grab eggs, bring them in the house. And it's a thing that is so easy. And it's not like we're self-sufficient in any way on many other things. But like I said, a little goes a long way and it's, it's a constant reminder of like, well, we could do a little more with this. We could do a little more with the garden. We could do a little bit with the perennial foods. And I just think the, you know, when it's bad,

when things are going bad and preppers are like you see we Should do this stuff. It's a good thing and then when times are great. It's still a good thing It's like we got our own eggs. We've got a great garden. We you know all that kind of stuff It just it pays off both ways sure Sure. Yeah, yeah, and it counts for that counts for artisanal skills and stuff like that. One of our hosts is just a master of fiber work. You know what I mean? Like creating fibers. We do the blacksmithing series here. I do some blacksmithing. All those kinds of things that sort of like fit into the

self-sufficiency world. They're that sort of that two-way street too. If things get tough, money gets tight, whatever it is, we can take advantage of these skills too. But if not, it's just cool to make a knife. You know what I mean? It's just a better life, I think. Yeah, I mean, when everybody's addicted to this these days,

learning real skills, I mean, when everybody's addicted to this these days, learning real skills, that's one thing I've learned in the farming journey. Being able to know how to do blue collar things, where most of my friends just know how to type and click and stuff, that is so valuable above and beyond the actual skill itself, just being able to do things with your hands that are actually practical. I think it bleeds off into other parts of your life above and beyond just being able to do electrical or do blacksmithing and stuff. You could figure something else out easier because you know those skills.

Oh, definitely. Yeah, for sure. I love that. Yeah. Just, you know, what I always say, Zach, is we've overshot the goal with comfort and convenience. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like we just overshot it, which is a good problem.

We're fat, happy, you know what I mean? But we can't do anything. Right, we can't do anything. You know what I mean? So we just gotta walk it back a little. We walk it back like, you know 30 40 years whatever and you know, it's not that big of a challenge really so it's a good thing But people like you are opening other people's eyes to the fact that they're giving you're giving people that confidence You know what?

I mean when somebody says I grow all this food on a third of an acre and this is how I do it and it's doable and I Do it in Wyoming and greenhouses and you live in Tennessee get to work. You know what I mean? Like it's it Yeah, that's the idea. Yeah It definitely pushes people on man. Well, I appreciate you coming on tonight taking some time out of your day and It's been great and keep us in the loop. You release something, you do a book, you do a PDF or whatever it is, that kind of stuff. Let us know. We can have you back on and talk about it, get it out to the audience. I'm sure they'd be interested.

Cool. Thank you so much for having me, James. I really appreciate it. It was really fun. I enjoyed it. Yeah, definitely, man. Good luck with everything. hundred and sixty thousand dollars of vegetables this year, huh? Yeah, maybe Well, good luck man, and thanks again. All right PBN family. I will see you guys tomorrow morning We got some things to talk about I'm not sure exactly well you know me. I'll talk to you in the morning.