Replay of interview 132 with The Permaculture Student | Matt Powers | Yosemite and Fresno, CA

Matt Powers is an experienced teacher, family guy, author, consultant, farmer, seed saver, plant breeder, musician, blogger, & permaculturist and creator of the permaculture student curriculum and online course.

Permaculture Student Online Curriculum

The Permaculture Student Curriculum is focused on starting resilient small businesses and homesteads from scratch. Students of all ages and families learn through weekly collections of videos, worksheets, coloring pages, projects, activities, & critical thinking with teacher’s guides, recipes, plant focus, seed saving, & Q&A.

Mike found a great guest on Facebook yesterday, we are having a bit of a tech issue, but he is dropping lots of “golden seeds” about everything from gardening to promoting an online business, and running a positive Kickstarter campaign! Plus he’s a fellow educator!
Interesting that you guys found me yesterday!!!

Tell us a little about yourself.

I’m a seed saver, a plant breeder, and an organic gardener, I’m also a teacher. I was an English teacher at high school for many years, a tenured teacher at a local district 15 minutes from my house. I live with my in-laws and my father -in -law’s parents on family land, 4 generations. My wife and I live here with our 2 sons. We have about 2-3 acres of garden area I’m heading towards becoming a farmer, a subsistence farmer.

I’m a teacher, before that I was a musician. I played with SNL house drummer, Shaun Pelton, their house drummer for 20 years now… but this was back in the day when I was a young man… I was just a traveling musician. It was my dream to do all that.

What kind of instrument?

I was a bass player. I played with Rachel Ray’s husband, John Kusimano for 7 years. I did lots of other things, my music is still on the Major league baseball channel everyday, I still get checks in the mail, it’s like pocket change…

It was a thing for young people to do. It was great and I loved it, but then I had a family! And I was like I can’t tour for 2 months, I got to be a dad!

That was like a generational moment for me. What happened was, I basically quit that band when I was in NYC and my wife got cancer the first time, and then when she got cancer for the second time we knew we needed to change a lot more because what the doctors were telling us wasn’t accurate, they were just reading from a list.

From there we went out west to recover from cancer, I didn’t know what else to do so I was still doing music, but I was trying to figure out someway to be more present to take care of my wife.

She wanted me to do substitute teaching, I hated school. I just hated school, I loved certain teachers and I loved certain classes.

But the framework, of compulsory education where I’m being held against my will for 8 hours a day for the purposes of tax dollars for funding that school district mostly the salary of administrators.

I didn’t agree with that.

I don’t want to go…

I just felt obligated, but as soon as I did, I fell in love with the kids, but I feel like we weren’t educating them.

I had this crazy education that my dad gave me, they’re amazing, ones a University Professor, one’s a financial advisor for people with incredible amounts of money they’re just unbelievable people. They were both were stellar athletes so they had coaches. I got a lot of that bleed over and that education stuff.

• I applied all that to my...