Today I'm talking with Kayla at The Wild Midwest: Heritage Livestock and Native Plants. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee - https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Kayla at the Wild Midwest Heritage Livestock and Native Plants. Good afternoon, Kayla. Hi, how are you doing? I'm okay. A little crazy, but good. 00:26 I'm excited to talk to you because you're in Illinois and I'm in Minnesota and we're going to talk about native plants. We put in some native plants to Minnesota last summer in the middle of a drought and we forgot that we needed to pay attention to them and they died. I'm very excited to talk about native plants today. Tell me about yourself and what you do. 00:54 the Wild Midwest, that is the business that I own and operate. And so it's currently a side hustle. And I also have a full-time job with a company called Canopy Farm Management, where I work in regenerative and restorative agriculture, especially as it pertains to tree crops and agroforestry. So my two gigs are kind of, they go together well. 01:24 I actually love that I've talked to a couple people in the last two months that have the same kind of symbiotic relationship with their jobby job or their career and their side hustle as it were. Yeah. I mean, do you want me to expand on like the business a little bit? The business that is your side thing, not your job? Yeah. I want to know how you came to doing this actually. 01:54 Okay. So I have my undergraduate degree in animal sciences and I knew that I wanted to do something that was helpful in terms of like conservation of biodiversity and like creating healthy habitats. So I ended up pursuing my master's degree in landscape architecture and during that time 02:24 studying more and more with the intention of trying to figure out how we can live in the world a little bit more harmoniously with the other species that are here as well. I stumbled upon how important native plants were to that whole process. So it became... 02:46 sort of a huge passion of mine, I started attending the Illinois Native Plant Society gatherings and hikes. And I had a seasonal position at the Champaign County Forest Preserve where I got to meet a lovely botanist who helped me learn a ton about the native plants to specifically Champaign County. And it just sort of became... 03:15 I just sort of became completely consumed by it. I started growing my own plants when I was still in grad school. And I think it was 2018 when I grew my first couple hundred plants and had a couple of design projects on the side with some acquaintances and friends. And then it's kind of just grown from there. I graduated in 2020 and 03:43 Due to COVID, it was pretty difficult to find another job. So I did have about close to a year of just working on this business and getting it spun up before I did get other full-time jobs. My full-time job I've been in now for not quite a year yet. So, I mean, I would love to. 04:10 work on the nursery full time and that is the eventual goal. But it's pretty, nurseries in particular are pretty high overhead businesses to run and they're pretty difficult to get off the ground because they just take so much infrastructure and investment. So yeah, we're still very much in the building phase of the business to try to give it some legs. 04:39 you put yourself into starting a business. And many, many people did. 04:48 Yeah, absolutely. And kind of out of necessity for a lot of us. Yeah. We moved in 2020 so we could start our farm to market garden and see what we could do with that. That's what we did. And my husband has a jobby job and he comes home and he putters in the garden and he does the farmer's market on Saturday and we sell stuff in the farm stand on the property. We did the same thing too. And it was time. It was time for that to happen. 05:19 I keep saying that COVID was terrible, horrible for so many people, but amazing for people who didn't lose anyone they loved and who didn't get sick themselves because it gave us time that we didn't have before to think about what we were doing and how we were doing it. Yeah. It was definitely bittersweet in that regard because for me personally, it certainly gave me some challenges. 05:48 debt burden and not having a full-time job was pretty challenging. And thankfully I have my husband who supported me during that time. But yeah, I don't think I, the business would not be as far as it is today if I hadn't have had that time to just solely focus on it. Yep, exactly. So I'm guessing you're probably in your 20s? I'm actually, I mean, my... 06:16 30s. ...
