A Tiny Homestead

Annie's Homestead

Today I'm talking with Annie at Annie's Homestead. You can follow on Instagram as well.
 
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00:00You'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 with Annie, Annie's Homestead in Idaho. Good afternoon, Annie, how are you?  Hi, Mary, I'm doing so well. How are you? I'm all right.  What's the weather like in Idaho this today? It's actually very beautiful today. We're  sitting at about 90 degrees,  so it's warm.
00:29Our skies are clear, thank goodness,  and it's just a beautiful, bright, sunny day. So I have no complaints over here yet.  Well, give it time. My dad used to say, you don't like the weather, wait five minutes, it'll change. He sounds right. Yeah, and I'm in Minnesota and it is about 70 degrees out. It is bright and sunny and big, puffy marshmallow clouds.  It's really lovely.  Those are my favorite. I love those. We don't get those too often.
00:59No.  love them. We  are really hazy. Our skies have been just like the sun, you know, has just having a hard time come through all the haze that we've had lately. So it's nice when we have clear skies and it's even better when we have puffy clouds.  I love those. Yeah, I remember laying on my back as a kid finding shapes in the clouds. I haven't done it in years. That might be something I have to do this fall. I don't know yet.  It's a good exercise.
01:29Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so tell me a little bit about yourself and about what you do. So  I  am  a homesteader. I'm actually off grid  in the mountains in Idaho where  my husband and I, we are in the Sawtooth mountain range  and we  love, love, love being out in the middle of nowhere. So we got really lucky when we were searching for land. We found
01:57a 40 acre property. It's  all undeveloped when we bought it  and two sides of the property border at the Boise National Forest. So  we  are just secluded and we love it. We have elk and turkey and mule deer, little baby quails running through the property all the time. And it's just, it's heaven on earth. It's amazing. So we actually bought our property in 2021.
02:27and started developing it very soon after. My husband is just a mastermind. Like this property would be nothing without him. He helped design all of the infrastructure. So we've got our solar panels. We've got really large solar panels. I'm not sure exactly what the size of them are. I just know that they're really big.
02:53We've got a lot of those. We have about six of those. And so that's where we get all of our solar power to run our electricity. And we are on a well. Our well is probably dug about 150 to 200 feet down. Most of our neighbors, they were having to drill down about 400 feet. So we feel really fortunate to have the very strong well that we have. We've got a really strong stream.
03:22down under all of the rocks, which is just a blessing. So... Let me jump in really quick for anyone who doesn't know,  the deeper you have to dig a well, the more expensive it gets. Yeah. Thank you for pointing that out.  I know. have just, we spent so much money homesteading, you know, and it's everybody's dream, but it's almost so hard to do it because it's so expensive. And we live out in the mountains.
03:51So we always joke, you know, it's not a funny joke, it's kind of a painful joke, but we always say that we have to pay the mountain tax  to any of our contractors coming out there because  everybody  is always more expensive  when of course you have to, you know, go through the back country and drive on roads,  you know, that are full of ruts. So it's been a really fun adventure.  got occupancy  on the home that we built.
04:21last May. So we've been living full time out there for about a year.  And oh my gosh, it's amazing. So we've got a garden, a greenhouse,  we built an indoor grow room, because for those weird people who  are always watching the aerials spraying and the chem trails and we're like, oh my God,  how can I grow produce that isn't covered  and all of these chemicals falling from the sky?
04:50So we did that. I do outdoor garden as well, just because of space. And then we've got our small flock  of about 70 birds. We do chickens, geese,  and ducks,  and we use them all for meat and eggs. I love goose meat, so I think we'll always have geese.  As much of a pain as they can be, they're very delicious. So I think we'll keep them around for a little while.  Okay.
05:20Number one, I'm a very live and let live kind of lady. And so if you want to have, if you want to grow plants inside so that the stuff in the air outside doesn't get on them,  I am all for that.  I love that. It has been a challenge.  I am kind of new to gardening. I've, you know, I've had houseplants, you know, for about, you know, 10 years, but gardening is so different. I mean, I'm sure you know.
05:49and trying to grow indoors where I'm responsible for controlling the humidity  and  the moisture,  the soil temperature and all of these things. You know, there's a lot of variables. So  I definitely flopped my first round  of seedlings  and I had too high humidity in my grow room.  And I think it was sitting at maybe 70 % humidity inside, which is high.
06:17I had a mold problem. So I took everything out  and I just aired it out. I let it breathe.  And I think we're down to 30 % humidity for the most part now. And I'm starting to see things grow that's not mold and fungus,  which is really nice.  But it's a lot. I'm learning how to manage everything.  And it's a lot of fun, but it's exhausting all in the same.
06:45as every farm and homestead is? In one way or another or another, yes. Yeah.  Okay, so I have questions. Number one, I'm guessing you guys do not have children. We don't, not yet. We're working on adding those.  That's next year's plan. Okay, well good luck with that. I wish you all the best.  And number two,  how big is the home that you built?
07:15Our home is 1200 square feet in the living space and 1600 square feet in the shop or the garage section. Okay, so you didn't go the tiny house route, so that's good. Yeah, I need a little bit of space. We came from a rental home in the city that was, I think it was 2200 square feet and we had an indoor gym.
07:42One of the bedrooms was a little art studio that I had so I could go in and I could paint, I could do my watercolors.  So we had a lot of space  and I think 1200 was  probably like the smallest that we were comfortable going. So we have two bedrooms  and the second bedroom is our office and our gym and our guest bedroom. It is like so multifunction, but we spend most of our time outside so we don't notice.
08:11a small space too much.  And then how far is the nearest big city to you?  One hour. It's a hour drive. So that's not terrible, but you want to make sure you take a list and hit everything all in that one trip.  Absolutely. Yeah. Our city days are usually like a full work day and then some we'll leave the property sometimes  at like 8 a.m. and then we'll get
08:40back home about six or seven, just in time for evening chores. Okay, so that leads me to my next question. Do you, I don't even know how to ask this without sounding like a jerk. Do you stock up when you go shopping? Do you have room in your home for storing things? We do. We stock up big time. So we have multiple freezers and we buy
09:10one cow a year and we'll pick it up in town. We have some friends who they don't live in the nearest big city. They live a little bit just beyond that. So that is a whole trip in itself. And so we stock up on beef and then I love, love, love to buy produce at the end of the season. So I'll go to the farmer's markets or I will go to the farms directly.
09:37and  I will place orders for like 50 pounds of tomatoes and those will be all the tomatoes that I can.  Or I'll do a big order for potatoes or onions, because those always store really well.  So we do a lot of bulk orders, but I like to buy at the end of the season because a lot of these farmers will slash prices because they're looking to offload everything. So it's kind of a win-win for both parties.  Definitely. I wish you lived closer, Annie.
10:06We have 250 tomato plants in our garden right now and they are all going to be producing. We're going to be swimming in tomatoes in about three weeks. Oh my God, what kind of tomatoes are you growing? Early girls, some variety of cherry tomato, San Marzano tomatoes, which are amazing. And I think my husband put in some heirloom varieties too, but I don't know the names of them.
10:34Yum. Do you guys do any sun dried tomatoes?  No, because we don't have any place to do it. We have, we have roasted tomatoes in the oven. Ooh, those are so good. So we don't dry them. just roast them and then freeze them. That's cool. I think that would be my problem too. That's why we've never done them because we have bugs everywhere. So as soon as I put anything outside, I mean, I've got wasps and bugs and
11:02flies and everything just right to the food. Because in Idaho, we're actually in high desert. So  anytime there's any moisture anywhere, like the bugs are immediately right there. Yeah, they need water too. Yeah, so it makes it hard too, you know, when we go to dispatch birds, we  usually try to do it in the fall when it's a little bit cooler. And a lot of the bugs,  you know, have gone away.
11:31for the season. Otherwise, we're just swarmed by wasps. Wasps, especially, we have a lot of those because we do live in the forest. It's really hard to mitigate all of them because they just, they're everywhere. So we have a pretty easy time getting rid of them  near the house. I just do some water wasp traps, but oh my gosh, there's so many.  It feels so silly trying to get those under control.
12:02Yeah. And the thing is it's all  nature. Everything in nature has a purpose and I hate wasps too,  but they are pollinators. So you got to pick and choose your battles, I think. Yeah.  I struggle with that.  Yeah. So I know nothing about Idaho other than the fact that it gets really cold and really snowy in the winter time.  What kind of trees grow in your forest? We have Douglas fir.
12:32and ponderosa pine specifically in our forest. Those are our two main pine trees. And of course we have a lot of choke cherries  on our property as well that I'm working on getting rid of. I really want to replace them with a different variety, you know, that I enjoy to eat a little bit more. We also have a lot of elderberry trees growing on our property specifically. There's a lot of elderberry around the area, but
13:00Our property has a lot, a lot of those. So we feel really fortunate because we've got a lot of medicine just hanging out and growing. Have you made elderberry syrup yet? I have. Yeah. It's so good. Awesome. And tea? Yes. A lot of tea. I have a friend in town who makes elderflower soda  and she ferments the elderflower  and
13:29that's something that I really want to give a shot  at because it just sounds so delicious. It's light and floral and bubbly and because it's fermented, you know, it's gut friendly too. So  a  lot of good check marks there. Definitely.  Do you have to put the bird netting over your trees so you can actually get the berries? Because here we have two  elderberry trees. They're fairly young. I think they're probably 10 years old and the birds get to  the
13:59to the berries before I can get to them. We actually are so fortunate. Like we have so many trees that we have berries like everywhere.  And a lot of our trees, I don't know how old they are, but they're very large. So I'll pick the low hanging fruit  and the birds will usually grab the ones up top,  but I've noticed, you know, that they don't even clean the trees all the way through. And so
14:28going into the fall and winter, like there will still be berries on the tree that have dried up and shriveled up a little bit that they're still chomping on. So we're lucky. We have honey. Yeah, I've been wanting to do elderberry syrup since we moved here in August of 2020. And I never get to the berries in time. By the time I remember they're probably ripe, they're gone. Dang it. So I'm gonna have to wait.
14:57Have you put the net on your trees? No, I forgot to ask my husband to get some  this year, but I'm going to go out to Amazon in February, actually the next Prime Day, which is in  what, November, October, and get some netting. I'm going to order it and I'm going to put it right by where he would go  to walk toward the trees and be like, when you have them in it next spring, put this netting over these trees, please.  I love that.
15:27Please  save the berries. Well,  we have a very special resource in the elderberry trees that we don't use. And we have black raspberries growing wild in the tree line that we use every summer. Well, every other summer, because they're every other year thing. OK.  And so I'm like, we can remember to pick the black raspberries, but we can't remember to put the netting over the elderberry trees. What is wrong with us?  Well, one's a little bit easier than the other.
15:57Yup, we're really lucky we have wild plum growing in our tree line too and we're going to make  wild plum jelly here in November.
16:07Oh my gosh, that sounds amazing. We have a lot of wild roses growing. So we get a lot of rose hips in the fall  and those are always super fun.  Rose hip tea is so yummy. It's so yummy. I found a recipe just recently for rose hip wine  and I thought that was super cool. I'm like, okay, I might have to get that a shot this fall.
16:36Isn't it fun, finding out all the things you can do with the things that you have growing? Oh my God, it's so fun and so exhausting. I want to do it all. I just don't have the time to do that. So it's hard to cherry pick what I have time for and what I want to do.
16:57Well, once you have kids and they get to be about 10, 12, and 14, you will have more time because you're going to teach them all the things and then they will do some of the work too. That'll be awesome. Do you guys have kids? I have grown kids. I have a 35-year-old daughter, a 33-year-old stepson, a 27-year-old son, and a 23-year-old son. And the 23-year-old still lives with us, so he helps out a lot.
17:26Oh, that's good. Maybe she can go put those netting on those elder trees.  If mom can remember to remind him, yes, I'm sure he'd be happy to. It's mostly my fault. I just forget. Dang it. I know. It's not like, you know, you don't have many other things to be doing. Yes, but the reason that I said,  wait until you have kids,  is my son just put together meatballs from scratch to have with our spaghetti and  sauce and meatball dinner tonight. And he makes the most
17:56fabulous homemade meatballs and it makes the most wonderful dinner. So  you have so many cool things to look forward to.  my gosh, you're getting me so excited. I just now have to wait 23 years.  Yes, and enjoy every freaking second of it when you're in it because it gets really hard and you get really tired.  And then they're grown and they move out and you're like, oh my God, I worked myself out of a job.  Isn't that just crazy?
18:24And now, you you're almost an empty nester, but you still sound like you got a lot of work. 250 tomato plants.  that's a lot. That's a gargantuan amount of tomatoes we're looking at in about a month. And  luckily, there is a food shelf not six miles from us, and we give our tomatoes to the food shelf.  We sell them in the farm stand. We sell them at the farmer's market.
18:51and we can at least 100 pints every winter. So they'll get used, but I suspect we're probably going to be throwing away some tomatoes this year because there's just going to be so many of them. Yeah. Dang it. Do you guys have livestock?  We have chickens. Okay. They like tomatoes, right?  Eh,  not a lot. Dang it. What else are you guys growing?  Um, cabbages.
19:21And zucchini, of course. Of course.  And we were growing lettuces, but  they've bolted because it got so hot, so the lettuces are done.  Winter squash. Yum. Yep, that's my favorite. Out of everything, that's my favorite.  And part of the reason it's my favorite is if our dog gets sick,  I cook up, I roast up squash and smash it and mix it with
19:49them fried up burger and some rice and it makes her tummy feel better.  my god, that sounds like it would make my tummy feel better.  Uh huh.  Yep. And she loves it. She didn't get sick this year at all. This past year, like 12 months in a row, her tummy has been fine. But when she was younger, she had a really sensitive stomach and the vet was like, do you have any ground beef? And I said, yeah. She said, can you afford to cook it for your dog? And I was like, no, but I will.
20:16And she said, okay, do that and cook up some rice with no seasoning. Just cook it up with water. And I was like, okay. She said, mix those together and give it to her. And I said, I heard pumpkin is good too in this. And she said, it is. I said, I don't have pumpkin, but I have butternut squash. She said, yes, mix that in there. Our dog lost her mind. Like she was turning her nose up at everything. I was mixing that together in a bowl and she was sitting at my feet looking at me like, can I please try it?
20:48I love that. So yeah, if you have a dog with a sick tummy and it's not anything major, their stomach needs a break, that's a good thing to make for them. That's so good to know. We do a lot of sweet potato with our dog. She loves sweet potato.  I notice, I don't know if you have a tip for this, but our dog loves to eat chicken poop. We'll go up to the chicken coop  and...
21:16grab eggs and check on everybody.  And every single time I turn around, Noah's on the ground and she's licking poo.  Did your dog do it?  No, because she can't get anywhere near the chicken run.  But when she was younger, she did the same thing. So  I don't have a tip for you because dogs are just gross and they like things like that. Great. Okay. told him like, oh my God, gross.
21:44coming to me and now she's gonna lick my face. I'm like, Yeah, the one tip I will give you is if you can break her of licking your face, do it. Because I didn't let Maggie lick my face when she was a puppy, killed me. But I didn't let her do it. I let her lick my hands, but not my face. Okay, that's a fair trade. I can do that. Yup, and I hate it. I mean, I would love to be able to let her lick my face, but.
22:13She's outside with the barn cats and I don't want her licking my face. Yeah, we just had a new litter last Thursday of barn cats on our homestead and I was getting ready to leave the property and I noticed our cat, she was going into labor. So I was just checking on her and hanging out with her for a little bit. I watched her birth two kittens before I took off.
22:42And  she had just birthed her placenta after the second kitten  and immediately started eating it.  And I took that as my sign, okay,  I'm going to go home now. I'm going to leave.  She's got it, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I was on a dairy farm doing a farm tour  and  the same thing happened. know, as soon as that cow birthed her placenta, I mean, she just went right for it. Just started eating it like it was nothing.
23:13So I found that really interesting. Yeah, it really makes me wonder if women way, way, way back in time, like caveman time,  did the same thing. I wonder if we did it too. Yeah, you know, we were really a primal species at one time. We're pretty domesticated now. Yeah, I just, I wonder because it's such a thing with all mama animals. Right. Yeah.  And
23:40there's a huge market now to get your placenta encapsulated.  And I know some people who  have taken theirs, put it in the freezer for a year and didn't quite know exactly what to do with it. So  I had one friend who actually buried her placenta and then planted a tree on top of it. And I thought that was sweet.
24:05I had a friend who did that and she actually had a plaque made with her baby's name and date of birth on it.  Oh, that's so cute. Yep. So she had a tree and she had a little sign that stood in front of the tree in the ground. Oh, I love sentimental things.  I like sentimental things that are really long lasting. Like they don't break. I don't like scrapbooks because scrapbooks can burn or they can get ruined.
24:35but like a plaque outside, may fade, but it's not gonna get broken. Yeah. Oh, I love that.
24:46So I wanted to talk to you about the fact that you guys are off-grid, because off-grid has a whole new meaning and feeling now compared to even 50 years ago because of the solar power that we have access to. do  you feel like you're off-grid or you just feel like you're camping?  We feel like we  are just living  in a regular home.
25:14Uh, our solar power powers,  all of our electricity,  our, you know, washer, dryer, our dishwasher, um, we're very comfortable in our home  as well, like, like temperature wise. So  we, we actually don't  notice that we're off grid probably until about the winter time when we don't have as much solar power because our days are shorter. And that.
25:43It doesn't really change  a lot. We just are a lot more cognizant on how much energy we are using to make sure that it will last us all day. We do have a backup propane generator that we can turn on in the wintertime if we don't have enough charge throughout the day or if it's a particularly cloudy day, maybe it's snowing that day. My husband, again, he's mastermind. He has a backup for a backup.
26:12for backup. His backups have backups. It's crazy.  So we do have a wood boiler as well that we haven't had to use, but that is our backup to our propane generator.  And that would heat all of our water and heat our home in the case where we didn't have any solar power or we didn't have access to propane. And limited forest, we have almost unlimited
26:42wood. So that is that's our fail save. So if the grid goes down, they don't have any propane, solar panels get hit with an EMP attack, at least we've got a wood boiler to keep us comfortable.  That is so funny, Annie, because we have a wood boiler as well. And that is our heating for the winter. And our backup  is a propane fueled generator.
27:10for electricity to the house if the power goes out. So we're kind of backwards to you. Yeah, we're just a little different. Our issue is, was the glycol was so expensive to get it filled up. And then how often do you have to drain the glycol? Not very. Like maybe, maybe once every five years. We haven't done it yet. Oh, wow. That's awesome. We filled ours up with water one time just to give it a
27:39nice test run and it was really awesome. It heated everything up so fast.
27:47Yeah, the reason that we use it is because we have someone that we get  a big old dump truck full of wood from  for like 150 bucks and it's at least two cords of wood,  at least when it's split. Oh my God, that's amazing. And so we're heating our house for about 300 bucks a winter and winter starts here.  We start the wood stove about October  and  run it through usually end of March, 1st of April.
28:18Yeah, that's about us too. And propane  is like, I think my husband checked it the other day and when it's not on the summer pricing sale number, I think it's going for $279 a gallon right now. I think that's about close to what we are. I think we're just under  or around $2. Yeah,  so we would much rather get the big old logs and put the sweat equity into it.
28:48and only spend about $300 for the winter, then have to  rely on the propane. Yeah.
28:57You guys got that nailed down. Yeah, it was kind of a surprise when we found this place.  Five Augusts ago, this August will be our fifth year here.  We did not realize that the place had a generator to run the house.  And when the realtor explained to us how it works and what it does, I said, you're kidding me, it will run the entire house?
29:26the electricity. And she said, oh yeah, she said that's one of those permanent things that  it just kicks on when the power goes out. And I said,  we need to buy this house. That would be fabulous. I love that. They did a good job on that construction.  Yes, yes. I love this place so much. I have raved about this place so many times on the podcast that I'm not going to do it again today.
29:56But you can hear it, I  love our home. It is my favorite place on earth.  Oh, I love that. So how big is your home? It's a little over 1,400 square feet. Okay.  And a lot of that is kitchen and living room downstairs and there's two bedrooms upstairs. Yeah, a lot of our space is kitchen and living room too. I mean, that's where we spend the most time. So it just makes the most sense for those,  you know, to be the biggest.
30:25Yep, absolutely. So do you have plans on getting like goats or mini cows or anything like that? I think goats are definitely more feasible for our future. The only issue that we have is housing for them. right now our chicken coop is on top of a mountain. Everything that we build is on top of a mountain. And it's so silly.
30:54We had a couple contractors out not too long ago  and they were doing road work for us  and  they were driving skid steers, but they were mentioning, they're like, everywhere I turn, like I'm on an edge.  And it's very true. Our house is set back about 12 feet from the edge of the cliff and then we're tucked back up against rock. So the chicken coop is almost situated uphill  on the city situation.
31:22So if we did want to add any livestock, we'd have to cut into a mountain somewhere, flatten some land and add like an outbuilding for them. So I think that's part of, you know, the next five to 10 year plan, because I would love to have some goats on the property. I love goat cheese.  I would love a milk cow. But I think for right now, goats make more sense for us. OK, I didn't realize that you were in that situation with
31:52with your topographical, is that how you say it? Yeah. Layout. Yeah, it is very mountainous. And it's so hard for me to show that, you know, just with my phone on the internet when I'm talking about interior homestead. And, you know, we just need to bust out a drone and get some drone footage to get people some perspective because our driveway is a 17 % grade.
32:22And we actually  had to get approval from our volunteer fire department when we were building our home.  Because they would be the ones to  come out with their equipment if we were to ever  have a fire close to home  and they would need to be able to get up our driveway.  And they have an  old jalopy  fire engine. I mean, this thing.
32:51is so old. It's so loud inside the engine that like you're wearing headphones with a microphone to like talk to the person right next to you.  So I don't know when this thing was built. I need to ask my husband, but it's old.  So they just had to come out and make sure that they could get up our driveway in an emergency. And thank goodness they did  because otherwise we would have had to spend quite a bit more money, you know, bringing in more material and bringing that up. But we
33:20are situated on top of a mountain  on our property. So it's beautiful  and  I love the view, but it does get a little scary in the winter time  when we have snow and ice and slush. But in the summertime, I love it. Yeah, I feel like off-grid is a trade-off on a lot of things. And  if you love it and you want to be there, you will figure out how to make it work.
33:48Absolutely, know, like freedom, having the freedom that we do is so good. Like I would trade it and do it all over again. You know, I love that we're just out in the middle of nowhere. You know, I told my husband, he thought I was joking, but I was like, when you are looking at land or looking at a house, if I can't walk out my front door and be butt naked, I don't wanna buy it. I wanna be.
34:16in the middle of nowhere. I don't want to see neighbors. I don't want to know that they're there.  And  he delivered. Awesome.  Okay, Annie.  I try to keep these to half an hour.  Where can people find you? You guys can find me at annieshomestead on Instagram and annieshomestead.com.
34:39Fantastic. I really appreciate your time and I loved chatting with you.  And thank you to the people who listened to the podcast. I always forget to say that, but I appreciate everyone who listens.  And you can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com.  Annie, I hope you have a wonderful evening. Thank you so much for having me, Mary. This was so fun.
 

Mulberry Hill Microfarm

Today I'm talking with Lara at Mulberry Hill Microfarm.
 
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00:00You'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 with Lara  at Mulberry Hill Microfarm.  Good morning, Lara. How are you? Good morning. I'm fantastic. Thank you so much for inviting me to chat with you guys. I appreciate that. Oh, you're welcome. I'm so happy when people say yes, because without you, I don't have a podcast.
00:29That just helps.  Where are you located, Laura? I'm in Northwest Arkansas  in a tiny little bump in the road called Evansville. Okay, how's the weather there this morning? Hot.  Hot and very sticky.  Actually, for us, it's been a fairly mild summer.  We've had a lot of rain.
00:56And typically this time of year, we're sitting at 97, 98 degrees. Sometimes we're over a hundred. And really it's just been this week that we're getting into  the nineties  solidly.  And for us,  that's a nice break. Yes, we're having a break today too. It's supposed to only be 71 degrees for the high and it's supposed to rain all day.
01:25Oh, that sounds  heavenly. Yeah, I think there's probably a short nap in my future this afternoon because this is very good sleeping weather. Oh, excellent.  Be bold. Make it a long nap.  I can't. I've got too much to do, but I might crawl into a book for a few minutes and see if my eyes close. We'll see what happens.  That's what happens when you get over 40 years old. You realize that naps are a gift.  Right. Remember when we used to fight those?
01:54Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. Now that was silly.  Now I now I want them badly. Yes.  Yeah. Okay. So tell me about yourself and what you  Well,  I've been an educator  for almost 20 years now,  and I think that's something that's run  in  the family when we get together for  holidays and reunions. It feels more like.
02:20teacher professional development as much as it does,  just seeing each other and catching up on family news.  But there's also been  a strong presence for conservation in our family.  My  grandfather  worked  in  Southeast  Arkansas  conservation efforts.
02:46Water purity, he did a lot for Felsenthal Wildlife Preserve in South Arkansas to work with them and make sure that chicken plants weren't dumping water into the system and  things like that. And so  they were avid hunters and fishermen on the Saline River  for a very long time.
03:11And so  even though I wasn't terribly close to my grandparents, there was still that  thread  that was always present  about conservation efforts  and ecosystem health  and whatnot. And I think I carried that with me for a long time,  kind of dormant.  There were marriages, there were children, there was the career in education that was very successful, but there was always this sort of
03:41little nagging in the back of my soul that said, a little land, just a few trees here and there, just a few birds here and there. And so I started that journey kind of late in life. I did not start until I was 48. I am 52 now and I am loving it.
04:05I feel like there is a fulfillment here in some of the things that I'm doing on  my tiny acreage. We're only just over an acre and a half.  But there is a sense of purpose and meaning  here that I have finally sort of plugged into and it's made my life  very rich, very wealthy.
04:33Fantastic.  I figured that you didn't have a lot of land because you are a micro farm, right?  Right.  I think that's probably still a generous  labeling for us.  I started out here 150 years ago.  My tiny little patch of land was hardwood forest, hickory,
05:02Elm ash, hackberry, black walnut, black locust, and it was cleared for cattle grazing. Uh, but there have not been cows on my part of the property for probably 60 years. Uh, so it was just mowed as a lawn. The trees had been cleared long ago and so the topsoil had completely degraded. I don't know.
05:32sort of slid downhill into the creek and is probably sitting at the bottom of Lake Tenkiller right now.  And I just felt like I wanted to  regenerate this  little piece of nature. And so that's been my focus for four years. When I first came out and started planting trees again,
05:57There's a layer of  grass and grass roots and then there was just slabs of clay. No root systems,  no organic material. There were places where there weren't even worms present and that kind of thing. And I've been working  for the last four years to change that. And I have been,  I think truly gobsmacked at just how  quickly
06:26the ecosystem  is changing,  even though the acreage is very small. Yes, I'm not surprised at all at how fast it's changing for you because nature wants to do what nature wants to do.  So if you just take away the things that are preventing nature from doing what nature does,  she's going to have at it and she's going to have at it fast.  Absolutely. And being able to
06:54You know, I've done a lot of reading, I've done a lot of research, but this was finally getting to do this hands on and seeing those changes. And there's not a place on my property now that I can dig a hole where there's not worms. Watching that ecosystem really flourish and come to life and how it changes just year to year has been.
07:23Fascinating  and truly joyful. Yes.  I can't agree with you more, Lara. We are called a tiny homestead. That's name of our place.  And we have a little over three acres. And it's always been a farm kind of place. mean, it started out as a big acreage with a farmhouse on it and a barn, an actual barn, not a pole barn. Oh, nice. A red barn.
07:52The red barn is long gone. I'm so sad about it. But there had been nothing grown where we grow our garden for 40 years. The last thing grown there was pumpkins. And so we've been fighting the weed battle for four and a half years now. And my husband is so frustrated with it because he's the gardener, which means that when those weeds come out, he's the one that's going to have to fight with them.
08:20So he said to me the other day, said, I have to find something to knock these weeds down that isn't going to ruin the dirt. Yes. And said, I am on it and I  am going to be digging tomorrow  when I have time to find something that will make the weeds not come up, but the plants be good. Good luck with that. It is a challenge.  I know  he's tried so many things and  it works short term, but
08:48What most people don't realize is that there are layers and layers and layers of seeds in the grouse. And so when you get rid of that first layer, there's another layer behind it and the next one down and the next one down. so basically to get rid of that first layer, you're just making room for the second layer to grow. I've seen the same thing. I'm out here and I took it little bit different approach.
09:16I didn't fight it. I am letting it happen.  My neighbors probably hate me because they're used to this property being  mowed like a lawn.  And I let the weeds take it over.  And then  it's creating a huge amount  of biomass.  And then I go and sometimes it's my riding lawnmower and sometimes it's the car  because it's so thick.
09:44And I run over it and just lay it all down flat. So the soil is never bare.  And  when I started doing that,  the fungal content of the soil  grew exponentially.  And so I've created a mulch  there  and  those, those weeds that I just push over in the fall.
10:11protect my soil and that's breaking down. in four years, we've gone from most of the property had between two and a half and 3 % organic material. adding all of this biomass every year now to the top, our organic content in our soil is now 5 % in four years.
10:42That's impressive. That's  right.  I'm not  trying to brag, but like I said, this is happening so much faster. I thought that would be a 15 year project and it's happening in  four.  Now I've  added some animals to the system that are helping that.  I got into rabbits two years ago  because I was buying  rabbit manure.
11:13But what comes out, what goes into your rabbit determines what comes out of your rabbit. So I was buying that manure and I was putting it places and I was noticing that I was propagating mulberries and they were coming out, but the leaves were shriveled and whatnot because the hay that had been fed to the rabbits had been treated with Grazon. And that's just one of those things that you can compost it for a year.
11:43break it down, put it in your garden, and it's going to kill plants for two or three years.  So I finally said, okay, if I'm going to do this and I have to  add this organic material to get these results, need to be  in control of the inputs  all the way through the system.  And so I bought a few rabbits and a few rabbits became a few more rabbits.  As they are supposed to. As they are supposed to.
12:11And then this year I added poultry to the system.  So I expect that organic material percentage to go up even more and I will retest our soil in probably another two years.  Okay, so you're talking a lot about regenerating your soil. Yes. So do you grow produce or anything?
12:40Tiny bits here and there. have  found  frustratingly that it seems to  rate raising protein seems to be a whole lot easier than raising produce.  And I wanted to get the soil healthy everywhere  before I commit to produce in a larger way. I planted trees and berry shrubs.
13:10fairly quickly on the property. But you know, that takes time for trees to mature. And I'm getting my first peaches from the property this year. And I was able to harvest enough black raspberries to make my own jam for the first time in my life. Isn't that the best? It really is.
13:40And there are a few little jars there in my pantry, but they're jars that are, you know, I know where that food came from. I know the quality of the health. I know that I can pass those on to my grandkids and I know what they're eating. know, so I have just a variety of trees that I'm waiting on their maturity. There were, there was one.
14:10apple on  the property.  And so I added a few apples. I've added peaches. There are plum trees. There are pear trees. There are hazelnut trees. There are  cherry trees and bush cherries. And now there are the black raspberries and there are blackberries. Now I've planted asparagus just about anywhere that I can  poke it next to something else.
14:35so that it'll break through that clay layer because asparagus roots are crazy. They  go up to 13 feet deep.  They're going to help  mine that clay  and leave a path  for  the baby fruit trees to be able to grow roots.  I'm doing everything that I can.  I can see the produce coming. I can see that being the part of the system.
15:04that as it matures,  that'll be a larger part of the farm.  You mentioned pumpkins,  and I have my first few pumpkins out on the property now that have actually grown because the soil now holds enough moisture that the plants aren't dying in the summer. Yep. So it's progress.
15:33That's all you can ask for. And I'm so impressed with what you're doing, Lara. You are. You're amazing. mean,  it sounds it sounds really dumb to say it that way, because anybody can do this. But you but you are doing the work and you are putting your heart and soul into it. And so that's amazing. Well, it's it's joyful work. And between this and then being able to,  you know, have that
16:03have still have that career in education where I can go and then  share these things  with my high school kids because the majority of my students are are 12th graders. They're seniors. They're just about to take those steps out into the adult world.  And many of them are fearful. Many of them are fearful about the political  climate, but they are fearful.
16:31for climate change. They  genuinely worry,  where is my food gonna come from? How are we gonna feed ourselves? What if things get so hot and so dry that the hay doesn't grow  and there are no pumpkins? And so being able to take my little nook and cranny farming techniques and being able to say, well,
16:58let me show you what can be done. And it's not just a theory. It's not just something you've researched on the internet or read about. It's,  wow, my English teacher's really doing this and it really does work. And  she brings in  pickled Jerusalem artichokes for us to try. And she brings  in  bunny street tacos for us to try.  And, you know, they look at it and they say, okay,
17:26I think I could make this work. And some of them  over the last few years have come to me and said, hey, would you mind, you know,  giving me a, a,  Kuka melon start, or could you bring in some more of those Jerusalem artichokes? I want to plant those in a, in a corner of my uncle's yard or, hey, if you end up with some extra mulberry trees, let me know. And I'm going to, I've got a place to plant those and seeing that is
17:55very encouraging to me. You are converting them  one student at a time. Yes, keep doing that.  Well, and it's so  simple because so many people think, well, I don't have a lot of land. I can't do this.  And I mean, I have a deck  where I have  mineral tubs that were used for cattle  and I'm growing all kinds of food just on my deck.
18:25So even if you're apartment bound, even if you have a little  patio and you can find a place for two really large  planters,  there's a way to still create your own produce and be part of it.
18:42Absolutely. I'm so glad I got to talk to you today. We're not done yet. But you are cementing the thing I always say on the podcast, which is do what you can with what you have, where you are. That's right. That's right. Absolutely. Because you can. I I had a friend years ago, I think I was in my 30s, and she lived in an apartment and she had a small balcony. She was on the second floor.
19:12And she filled that balcony with containers full of soil and she grew herbs and flowers and I think she did radishes and carrots and stuff.  she  had the greenest thumb I've ever seen.  And I was just like, someday you're gonna have a yard, you're gonna an actual yard and you're not gonna be able to walk through it without touching a plant. And she's like, that's my hope. That's awesome, yeah.
19:41Lawns don't feed you.  Can't eat grass. No.  I mean, it's nice and tidy looking  and that's great if you want to  have that sort of appearance  of the old English manners and whatnot. But  when,  you know, when things  get harder, I'd rather have the food forest than  the estate. Me too.
20:07We're working on our own food forest here in Minnesota on our property. Oh, yay.  We have,  um,  I think we have 16 apple trees that we've put in over the last four and a half years. Oh, wonderful. We have wild plum. We have two alderman plum. That's the, the variety that we've got. We have, we have wild black raspberries.  Oh, nice.
20:34We put in some peaches and we actually got peaches last fall. We won't have any this year because  the trees did not bloom or the windstorm that came through took the petals off. not sure which.  What else? We have two honey berry plants that someone gave me last year that  we're trying to keep alive. We're not very good at it, but they're still alive. Maybe next year.  And we just keep putting things in.
21:02that will, you know, five years from now, produce enough to feed us and for us to sell in our farm stand and at the farmers market. Absolutely. So I'm right there with you, sister. It's a wonderful job. That's wonderful. It's good work if you can get it and keep it. Absolutely.  I plant things  randomly through the yard. I'll stop and,  you know,  other people impulse buy, I guess,
21:31clothing and electronics and I impulse by seeds and I'll just walk through and say, well, let me just put some here and let me put some here and let me put some here.  And I don't keep up with it.  I don't write it down and said,  if it will work here, it will thrive on its own. And if it doesn't, it'll just add to those layers of dormant seeds sitting here.  And maybe in 60 years, the conditions will be right and it'll come up then.
22:01You know, I'm just,  I put out potential and then I see what responds.  That's a great way to do it. It's like chaos gardening. It is, it is.  So sometimes things I'll think, oh man, that didn't come up. And then a year later I go, oh, I do have gladiolas over there on the fence line. Interesting.  And you live in a state where you can let them stay in the ground over the wintertime. I do. I can't do that here. I'm sorry.
22:32But at the same time, then I can't grow tulips. They won't grow here.  It doesn't get cold enough. Yeah, they need that cold weather.  It's a trade off.  we put in gladiola bulbs three springs ago, I think,  and they bloomed and they were pretty. And my husband said, you want me to dig the bulbs up and store them in the barn? And I was like, nope. And he said, why? And I said, because I don't want you to have to do it every year.
23:02I have successfully grown gladiolas.  They were pretty. I don't love them enough to keep growing them. He's like, okay, good.  He's grateful. Yes, absolutely.  You said you have rabbits. You have chickens. You have quail. Is quail one of those animals? I I have quail. I also added ducks and turkeys this year. Oh my.  Well,
23:31It's been interesting.  I think in my little local community, as my students kind of get out and talk about the crazy things that I do,  people  want  to contribute to that. They want to help. So  I had  one student's father who gave me a pair of Narragansett turkeys,  a two-year-old Tom and a year old hen.
24:00I had another lady that I had given a rooster to.  She had gotten turkeys. It wasn't for her. So I got a second juvenile pair of Narragansett turkeys. I had another student whose mom sent me four quail.  I thought chicken math was when you went to the store and you bought too many chickens on your own. I didn't realize it was because
24:25You know, all of these people who also raise things and get excited, they want to see you succeed. You know, they want to contribute to that. They want to help you on the same journey that they've found joy in. And it's just been a surprise,  just an, and looked for absolute joy. So  I have,  I have poultry I did not expect this year  and  I love them.
24:54That was so much fun.  I'm starting to think it's not chicken math, it's livestock math.  I think you're probably right.  And I contribute too. Uh-huh.  My husband will shoot me if I actually bring this up to him. But I've been in my head for about a week debating getting  a  livestock guardian dog. We have a small dog.
25:24We have a mini Australian shepherd and she is not a  livestock guardian dog by any stretch. She is a pet and she's lovely and I love her beyond life itself. But we had a raccoon show up here a little over a week ago. They come to find out it was a mama and she had at least three babies with her that are half her size already.  And those little boogers got four of our chickens. Yes,  and they will be back.
25:51Um, we have not seen them in three days since my husband and my son shored up the run and the coop. So we're kind of hoping all the noise and activity might've gotten them to go. I hope so. But, but I keep thinking we should get a livestock guardian dog that is already, you know, over six months old and neutered because we would probably get a male and that can be outside. They can live in the barn because I can't have another dog in the house. We don't have room. Right.
26:20And I keep wanting to float this to my husband and he's just going to be like, I don't want any more animals. And I'll be like, I know, but do you want to keep the animals you have?  That's a fair point.  And  I've considered the same thing here because I also have,  I have a standard Aussie  and  he does like,  it's been interesting because he too was, was a pet  and he still wants to herd.
26:48the ducks more than he wants to guard the ducks. But having the poultry out and for him to just sit on the deck and be able to watch, even my dog is happier now because I feel like he has a job now.  And so if we have turkey poults  or if we have quail hatchlings, you know, he wants to smell them.  He wants to keep an eye on everybody.
27:15If a bunny gets out of a cage,  he becomes sort of distraught and he's just like, you're not where you're supposed to be. Mom, I'm going to whine about this. You know, we need to do something. And so he's,  he has taken on a very active role  in,  what we're doing here. So I've been pleased, but at the same time, he's just one pup.  And I think our biggest threat is coyotes  here.  And.
27:44He'll bark, but you can tell that he doesn't want to engage. And I don't blame him being one dog. But if he had a companion who was larger, I think that might change things a little bit. So  we're also considering that.  I can't say we're considering it because I haven't actually floated the concept yet. so, I don't know, hesitant to even bring it up with him right now. But
28:13We can't get a Pyrenees because Pyrenees roam.  We don't want him roaming. So I'm trying to figure out what we would get that wouldn't roam. So I have to do some research because I need to be forearmed here on this one.  Better  have those questions answered because he's going to ask.  Yes.  And we can't really afford a very expensive dog right now.  And so I need to figure out if there are livestock guardian dogs that need homes.
28:42in shelters because we would be happy to adopt one. That would be fine. Yeah. If you contacted your shelters, I'm sure they'd keep an eye out for, surely there are rescues. Oh yes, there are. Awesome. And I just, I need to get past the, don't think he's going to want to do it. Therefore, I haven't looked deep into it deeply enough. So I have to start looking deeper into it before I bring it up. That's fair.
29:09But either way, I would really rather not lose any more chickens to  juvenile raccoons that are adorable  and that we're going to end up killing because they can't keep taking our chickens. It's a very mixed feeling, very mixed emotion, isn't it? I hate it. Yep. Yeah. Because as nature lovers and as people who want to preserve that and work with it, you hate to kill something that  is just
29:39minding its own business, living its life, doing its thing.  But if you want to preserve what you're working on, yeah, you have to, you have to make some hard decisions there. first line of defense is deterrence.  Our last line of defense is shooting it. That's fair. Cause I don't want to kill those babies if we don't have to, you know, they were here before. Well, they,  particular raccoons weren't here before we were,  but
30:09nature was here before we were and I don't want to destroy nature. want to work with her, you know?  It does work out better that way.  Exactly.  Okay, Lara, I try to keep these to half an hour. We're at 30 minutes and 30 seconds. So where can people find you?  Facebook's probably the best place right now. My farm page is Mulberry Hill Microfarm  and our email is
30:38Mulberry Hill micro farm at gmail.com. So feel free if you have questions or if if our farm can help your farm in any way We're uh, we're down for that  Awesome,  lara. Thank you so much for your time and your thoughts and I appreciate you  so much  and As always people can find me at a tiny homestead podcast.com. Have a great day. Lara. Thank you. Thank you so much
 

New Frontier Farms LLC

Today I'm talking with Maggie at New Frontier Farms LLC. You can follow on Facebook as well.
 
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00:00You'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 with Maggie at New Frontier Farms LLC in Lonsdale, Minnesota. Good morning, Maggie. How are you? Good morning. I'm good. How are you? I'm good. I would ask how the weather is, but since I'm only about 15 miles away from you, it's gray and cloudy and may might rain, right? Yes. That seems to be the theme this summer.
00:29Yes, and thank God it's not just constant pouring rain like it was last year. I don't know how you guys did, but our garden did really poorly last year.
00:40Yeah, so I actually had a baby in March and I really underestimated how having a March baby would impact the farm compared to a September baby.  And so we didn't plant a garden.  But oh,  because I had the baby and it was just it was a lot between kidding and camming and farrowing and the baby.  The garden did not get planted. But everyone told me my garden did terrible this year. And I was like, you know, maybe this was a good year to not not plant a garden.
01:08Yes, we, my husband's the gardener. I've talked about this a lot on the podcast and he planted tomatoes three different times. And I think we got our first tomato at the end of August last year. Oh goodness, that's crazy. Yeah. I like to joke. Um, I grew bacon seeds instead, cause I have to put my piglets on my garden. Um, things are growing great this year. So I think they did a good job of fertilizing, but it was all we could manage last year was bacon seeds. Well, you're only one person.
01:37and you were growing a human and then birthing a human, so that is completely understandable.  Okay, so I'm really excited to chat with you this morning because I looked at your Facebook page and you have so many things going on, so tell me about yourself  and your farm. Yeah, so  my husband and I have wanted to be farmers our entire life. We both grew up  one generation removed from production agriculture, and so our grandparents farmed, but our parents had chosen to not.
02:05And my mom had always wanted to be a farmer, but she was  turning 18 during the 80s farm crisis and my grandpa just didn't want that. It was not a  lucrative career at the time. And so my mom has always worked in agriculture.  And then we always had beef cattle on our farm.  was my grandpa's retirement gig. And so he retired from dairy cattle and got a hundred beef cows.  So I grew up spending my summers in the pasture with the cows and fell in love with.
02:34with everything to do with farming. I was very involved in 4-H,  which just kind of fostered that love. And  I went to South Dakota State University and I studied dairy production and speech communication  with a minor in animal science,  all with the goal of someday owning my own farm.  While I was there, I met a man in a similar situation.  He wanted to have his own farm someday too. And  so we fell in love and that's my husband, Nick.
03:02We got married in 2017.  And right after college, we actually worked on a ranch  and it was a really good experience.  We were kind of thrown to the wolves and had to care for 600 head of beef cows  on 20,000 acres in western South Dakota.  It was  a cool experience. We gained a lot of  knowledge in a very short amount of time. And then we worked various in town jobs after that.  Our oldest son came a little early.
03:31Um, and that kind of whole experience really pushed us back home to Minnesota. So we moved back home with the entire intent of buying a farm. Um, we moved in late 2019. Um, and by the time we were working on selling our house in South Dakota, COVID had hit, um, and it had really, you know, changed the landscape of people at the beginning of COVID people weren't buying houses. Um, so it stalled things out, but we finally found our farm here.
04:00in May of 2020 in Lonsdale. So we purchased that. We have 36 acres. 18 of those acres were in cropland when we purchased it, but it's all highly erodible land. And so we turned it all into pasture. It's not very good cropland. So it's been quite a few years process turning all that into grassland and it was very eroded. So a lot of our topsoil is in our swamp.
04:30And so it will be many, many, many years until  much of it is really fertile again.  But we are seeing a lot of progress. It's made between our chickens, our pigs and our cows.  It's getting there, but it's been a process. So  we milk a herd of dairy goats.  We milk about  eight right now.  We have a herd of cooney cooney pigs.  They're kind of our primary product. So we sell a lot of pork. We do a lot of haves and holes, and then we do individual cuts.
05:00And then we have  a very small herd of beef cows. It's a pretty hard time to get into beef right now.  So we just have a small  herd.  And then we raise meat chickens every summer and we have a small egg laying herd, a flock as well. Awesome. That's a lot, Maggie. You're doing  amazing things. Thank you  for regenerating your crop land because it's really important.
05:26Luckily, that was kind of my husband's thing. My husband has always really enjoyed soil. He likes that crop piece.  His family's got some ties to agriculture through the crop side. And he had an internship at a really cool ranch in South Dakota during college that they're really at the forefront of trying out cover crops and trying different grazing patterns and really doing a lot of things to regenerate the soil while also  growing really nice cows on it.
05:55So that experience was really helpful in helping him prepare our land.  So that's, been. And I  always say I'm the cow manager and he just makes sure they have food. he really.  Okay.  Awesome. I'm so glad that younger people are starting to do this stuff because we need you. We need people like you  to do these things.
06:21because so many farmers, ranchers, homesteaders are aging out. And I want to have hope that people are going to keep doing this. Yeah, I hope so. It's really hard to get into, especially as first generation. There's a lot of things that we miss out on. We don't have that generational knowledge that, oh, well, back in 1995, this is what the weather did, and this is how we adapted, or this is what fluke thing happened to this one cow one time.
06:51And that generational knowledge is really something that we're missing.  We also don't have that equipment piece that can be handed down. so we're scouring actions and getting what we can at our price point.  We operate a debt-free operation, so we don't take out operating loans,  which makes it  very slow growing.  But  I don't have a banker breathing down my neck, so I appreciate that. So  my  sister married into a  multi-generational farm. And sometimes I look at that and I see,
07:20you I really wish we could have that.  You know, and then you hear about all the family drama that everybody has and I'm like, you know, maybe some days it's good to be a first generation.
07:33Well, you set the rules and  then people can follow in your footsteps later.  And I was going to say slow growing is better than bankruptcy.  Yeah, hopefully.  So keep growing slow and it'll happen.
07:52Okay, so  I was looking at your Facebook page, like I said, because every time I talk to somebody, go  do my research.  Are you having a book sale at your farm in July? Yeah, so it's been my goal this year to host one event that is in a farm market on our farm.  Over the last year, we have renovated the upstairs of our late 1800 barn to be kind of an event space.
08:17And so I started looking into what events we could host. So last month we hosted a barn dance.  Um,  and  I, over the last decade have gotten really back into reading  and there's a couple of Minnesota authors that I was like, Oh, it would be so cool to have them out to the farm. And so I started kind of working with other businesses. I found a mobile bookstore and I was like, Hey, I have this idea. Do you want to come out to the farm? And she was like, yeah, that'd be great. And so I reached out to these authors and.
08:47Two of them said yes,  and I could not believe it.  One of them, especially as my favorite author of all time, Jess Lowry,  she has a book coming out four days before our event and she still said yes. So I'm super excited to have them come out.  So it'll be kind of my goal is like the book fair when you were a kid, only now for grownups.  So we'll have the book vendor and then we have a couple other vendors  that just sell bookish things.  And then we'll have the author come out for a Q &A.
09:16And  then book signing and then we're also going to have some spots throughout our goat pasture so people can buy a book and read and hang out with our goats. And  I joke that I'm putting on this event for me because I really want it and I hope other people are excited about it too.  That is so much fun.  I saw it and I was like a book fair on a farm. I freaking love it. That's brilliant.  Yeah, yeah, I'm really excited. We've had a lot of people be really excited about it too.
09:45You know, and  summer, it's really hard because all the weekends are busy. So hopefully we'll have a good turnout, but  it'll be a fun day.  hope it goes really well for you. And it's so,  I'm going to make a pun,  novel. What a novel idea, Maggie.  Thank you. Thank you. I'm surprised my dog didn't just bark because her name is Maggie. And I said your name really loud. She must not be upstairs right now.  Okay.  So  what else can I ask you?
10:15I had all kinds of questions and then I yelled Maggie's name and got totally distracted with the fact that I yelled the dog's name because I'm crazy like that. So tell me about the pork sale because we bought a whole hog a couple years back, well probably 70 years back from people in Wisconsin and we ended up butchering
10:42both halves because we bought a half and a friend of ours bought a half. So we butchered the pig in our garage. And so when you sell your halves and wholes, do you sell them to people and then they're butchered and then people just pick up the butchered meat in freezer paper? Yeah, so we work with a local processor, Odenthal Meats. We really like them because they're a state-inspected facility, state equal to.
11:11So we can sell haves and holes where people can get kind of that state exempt where they're just picking up in white packages.  And so we're technically selling the live animal to the person they're paying for the processing.  That or if I don't have it sold, I can get it state inspected and put it in my freezer to be able to sell on our farm for individual cuts.  So I really enjoy working with them because we do have that flexibility.  We have not sold it to anybody yet to butcher themselves.
11:39We don't get a lot of interest in that.  Well, we probably wouldn't have been interested in it either, except that my husband hunts and he's butchered deer before. So it's like, can't be that hard to butcher a pig. I was like, no, probably not.  Plus we don't really care if the cuts are  pretty. We care that they're going to taste good. Yes. Yeah. Oh, and it saves you a ton.  And that's really been the biggest struggle for us is the processing costs. It's just...
12:08When we started, it was 89 cents a pound. That was four years ago, and now it's $1.39 a pound. It's gone up astronomical. Trying to be able to keep up with that and try to make money, it's been pretty tough. Yeah. Everything to do with money right now is really tough, and I hate that.
12:34I hate that you guys are busting your asses to do this for the community.  And  I'm sure that you're hurting and feeling the pinch just like everybody else is.  Yeah, for sure. And that's why we started looking into events. I said,  what's a way we could bring in money to the farm that we don't have a big upfront cost? Because in animal agriculture, we have so much upfront cost. We have so much upfront risk in everything we do.
13:02And so if we were looking to add another one of those products, know, just like the cows, you know, you're spending a thousand dollars on calves right now,  but you don't get that return for another two years.  And so we started doing the events because it was like, Hey, I could plan it today. could have it in a month and have that direct return on investment right away.  Yep. And it's a really good idea, Maggie. mean,
13:25I would never have thought to have a book fair at a farm. just, I love that so much, but I'm also a book fan. I love to read and I have since I was in first grade. So, so for me, it's a no brainer. What a great combination of things. Thank you. Yeah. It's, and I think with book talk, it's really starting to pick back up. You know, you're getting a lot of people that are getting back into it with the accessibility of audio books and everything. So I think.
13:55Now is a good time  to be promoting books because people are excited about it.  Yeah.  If I had more time and if I had more money, which none of us have right now, would start a... I have two podcasts. One is kind of on hiatus right now.  I would start a third and it would be about reviewing books and talking to the authors of the books. I just can't do it right now, but it's still percolating in the back of my brain for next year.
14:24I haven't decided yet, but I'm thinking about it.  That would be something I wouldn't try something like that. I love talking about books. I started our local book club and I'm  in two book clubs now because I love being able to talk to people about books and get other people's thoughts. I think that's kind of the coolest part of book club is  you have this mind and this idea in your head of what this book was and then you go in and you're wait,
14:50You thought it was that? And I think it's just really cool to hear other people's thoughts on it. Yeah. And it's really funny because when you read a book, you may get a description of the main character in words, but your brain processes that word description differently than someone else's brain does. Yeah. Yeah. Or it impacts them in different ways because of their experiences. Like I remember I was in a book club a few years ago and we had read a self-help book.
15:19And  I personally just didn't like it.  It seemed  like a lot of fluff, but not actual advice. And  I thought the people in a book club also would feel the same way. And I got there and they all loved it. And I was like, wow, wow, I did not expect that. But you know, I think it's just cool to hear other people's thoughts on things. And the other thing is, is I think that certain books are  not readable at certain times  for you or for me. I have picked up a book.
15:49I don't know the name of I picked up a book 20 years ago, sat down to read it, got two chapters in and went, no,  and never finished it.  And then I picked it up again five years ago and started reading it and was completely engrossed.  I couldn't put it down. So I think that there are seasons for books, just like there are seasons for gardening and raising animals. Yes.  Yeah, for sure. And I think that the book at that time was a big hit.  And now
16:18you know, this is probably seven years later.  It's had a huge backlash, you know, so I think it's interesting over time how books age and how people's thoughts on it change, personally and as a society too.
16:32Yeah. And with self-help books, your mileage may vary every single time. Yeah. Yeah.  So, but I don't really want to talk about books. still need to start that podcast so I can talk about books.  Do you guys have dogs?  Yeah. we have,  Deesil is,  oh my gosh, she's almost 11.  She's been,  we got her in college, so she's been through every important point.
17:02point in my life so far.  So she is our kind of wherever we are dog. So if we're on the house, she's in the house. If we're outside, she's outside.  She's the protector of my kids. She was a rescue,  but we believe she is a lab border collie.  And then we have Mabel who is our farm dog. She is a fox red lab. She is  very, very pretty. And she is my go with the flow, just very chill. She's only three.
17:32And I always joke that when people come to the farm, they would assume Mabel was the 10 year old dog and Diesel was the puppy because they have exact opposite personalities to where they should be in life. Diesel is a very high, high energy. She's a border collie. She's very high energy, even at 11, almost 11. Good. I mean, she's going to be around for a while. I hope so. She injured her back last year, so she has slowed down a little bit. But she's.
18:01We worked with a  dog chiropractor, which I didn't think I would do, but  the vet's option was just pain meds every single day, and I just didn't think that was good long term.  So we looked into a dog chiropractor, and that actually helped a lot.  She made a lot of improvement. She's still not jumping up on the bed anymore,  but she's comfortable going upstairs and walking all around and running and playing.  Awesome. Good.  I love my dog more than life itself.
18:30Anything to prolong a dog's life as long as they are happy and have quality of life. I am all for  So do you sell stuff at the farmers markets in your area? So we did we were doing  Like our first couple years of business.  I was doing like two to four markets a week  And it was a lot  it it got to be a lot And we just weren't finding the profitability that we needed
19:00You know, we were up in the Twin Cities, you know, so we were paying anywhere between $50 and $60 every market. And then, you know, when you're only selling $400 a day, just doesn't get, you know, it's just not price. It just wasn't where we needed to be price-wise. And just, you know, I'd have to pack all my kids in the car. I would have to drive there and then say, hey, this is this 10-foot box you have to stand in.
19:28So it was just, it was really tough on us. And so we took a step back.  We started only doing our local markets. And then I would do once a month delivery to the Twin Cities. So we could still support those customers that we had already established.  But we didn't have to stand there for a whole day. I could just drive up for a few hours, get things delivered and drive back.  And then last year, we started doing on  farm markets. I think we did  three of them last year,  opening up
19:58our farm to have people come out so they can see where their food is coming from.  And that was  fairly successful,  nothing too crazy. And then this year we really pushed the marketing  and we're doing one market a month  on our farm and then in addition to one of those events.  We also have started doing horseback rides with our horses  and make it more of  a family focused event. And so  we have a play place  kind of thing in our barn.
20:28We have lots of things for your kids to come and play while you shop.  And now we even have local vendors come. So we have a sourdough,  a cookie, and then we always have some sort of like craft or sewer.  And this month we're having a coffee shop. So I'm really excited about that.  Just kind of making it a destination place for people to come and let their kids have fun and experience that farm life  that a lot of people are striving for right now that want to get closer to the land. And we can kind of offer that.
20:57Awesome. So you're basically doing a version of agritourism. Yeah. Yeah. And that was always my dream. You know, I have a background as a dairy princess way back in the day. And I also competed in the Miss America system and my platform was all about promoting dairy. And so with that background, I've always wanted to be able to open the barn doors to people and have them, you know, get their hands dirty and know where their food comes and be able to ask the questions and
21:26And I think we provide a unique perspective.  We're  trained in conventional agriculture, but we can't afford conventional agriculture.  And so we are farming different than conventional.  And I think we can  provide unique answers to those questions because we do have  a unique background that kind of covers the landscape of agriculture. Yeah. And listening to you talk,
21:53I'm sure that when people ask you about the differences between the two, you make it so that people can understand that the differences, you're not all science terms and Latin names. Yeah, yeah, I think it's important for them to be able to answer those questions. And I think it's also important as farmers to understand that not everybody can afford our type of agriculture. And that's why I think it's important that we have all types of agriculture is because
22:20There needs to be agriculture at every price point. There needs to be food at every price point.  And I think that's important that we never do slander marketing.  I think we see that a lot  in farms our size that they're scaring people away from other types of  agriculture. And it's always in my goal that people align with me  and they trust me to raise their agriculture. That's why they're buying with me.  They trust me to raise their pork or their beef.
22:49that we raise a really delicious product.  And so I never want to scare people away from other people to come to us.  I always want them to choose us because our food tastes great  and they align with us.  Absolutely. It's the no like trust thing.  And that's true in any business. If people don't know you, like you and trust you,  they're not going to come back. Yeah.  Yeah, absolutely.
23:19And  I've been learning a lot about marketing over the last two years since I started the podcast and I had heard somebody say  no like trust before and I didn't  understand what they were talking about regarding business. got it as a person,  but I didn't realize that if you are the business, then people have to know like and trust the business as well as no like and trust you. Absolutely.  And I think that has always
23:48been something that I've really enjoyed. I've always really enjoyed storytelling. I've always really enjoyed  connecting with people. That's why I enjoyed being a dairy princess and things like that, because I got to connect and make those  interactions and  be able  to talk to people. And so being able to offer that now  has been really enjoyable.
24:09I am really happy that you enjoy people. I am an introvert. really, really, really don't like a lot of people in my space. It really makes me anxious.  And part of the reason I started the podcast is because I wanted to talk to people, but I didn't want to have to be around a lot of people in person. And it has worked out so great, Tell it.  The other thing that we do here, because I am here with my son during the day, my husband works full time.
24:38is we have a farm stand and people can just  pull in the driveway,  get what they want out of the farm stand, pay for it and take off. And  we have our phone number on the whiteboard in the farm stand if they have a question, but basically it's a self-serve thing.  And I love it and people love it. I mean, we have people stop by every day all summer long.  Yeah, that's awesome. So it really...
25:05It's a really good way to move all our excess produce because my husband is a fanatic about gardening.  And so we always have way too much, even though we sell at the farmer's market, we still have way too much.  what's your favorite part about your life besides your husband and your kids? What's your favorite part about the life you've chosen?
25:28That's a really good question.
25:33I think my favorite is this time of year when it starts to cool down at night and it stays lighter later and just being outside. I think especially in the livestock game, you can get burned out really fast. And I found that to cure my burnout, I need to spend more time with my animals, which seems counterintuitive. But I found that
26:03I need to just be with them because that's why I enjoy it. That's why, you know, growing up, I would just  be in the pasture for hours and hours and hours and I wouldn't do anything. I would just spend the time with the cows and  you know, now we have checklists and things we need to get done and I think we sometimes forget  to slow down and enjoy it. But this is why, this is why we did it. This is why we wanted to be farmers. And so I've been trying to be more intentional over the last year of just stopping and being  and enjoying the animals.
26:33for who they are and for why we love them and why we enjoy it. I think that's amazing. We had meat rabbits a couple of years ago and it was a big fail. Our rabbits didn't get the memo they were supposed to reproduce blah, blah, blah. I've talked about a lot on the podcast. But my favorite part of those rabbits was we ended up bringing in a mama and her babies because it was so hot in June when she had her babies that we lost some of the babies to the heat.
27:03And so for a month I had baby rabbit in a container on my table in my kitchen. And I got to hang out with those baby rabbits and watch them grow and change. And the mama trusted me completely. It was so  fun.
27:19And it was just so like I would get up in the morning, grab my cup of coffee, get half of it down me and then sit in a chair  and hang out with those baby rabbits for half an hour. And I just loved every second of it.  Yeah. And we do that with our baby goats. And when they kid,  you know, in February, March, we start them out for the first few days in the  house.  And it's always really fun. The boys love it. And this year, my youngest was
27:47just turning one when we had baby goats in the house. And so he was thrilled that  he could pet them and touch them. And so it's always a really fun time when you can have them in the house. And  we've brought piglets in the house and  all that. And it's nice when they can be. My mom always shakes her head because  my mom had a very strict no animals in the house rule.  And so  she always laughs and is like, oh, of course, Maggie has a piglet on the couch hanging out with her kids.
28:13It's nice when you can have those moments to slow down and enjoy them. Yeah, and the joy of being a grown-up with your own life is to make those choices for yourself. Yeah, I always joke with my, you got to be careful what you tell your kids they can't have because my parents had two very strict rules. We couldn't have a horse and we couldn't have pigs. And now I have three horses and I've raised over 150 pigs.
28:41So be careful what you tell your kids you can't have.  Yeah, just like be careful what you wish for. You might just get it.  Exactly. Okay, well, I try to keep you to half an hour, Maggie, and we're almost there. can people find you?  So we're on social media at New Frontier Farms, LLC. I'm a little bit more active on Instagram than Facebook just because it works a little bit better with my phone.
29:08You can also check out our website, newfrontierfrontrooms.org. That's kind of everywhere.  Awesome.  And if you want to see some beautiful pictures of Maggie's place, you should check out her Instagram and her Facebook because there are some beautiful photos there. Well, thank you. Photography is a little hobby of mine that I really enjoy. So thank you.  You're welcome. As always, people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com.  Maggie, I hope you have a fantastic day.
29:38Thank you, you too. Thank you.
 

Haggard Mountain Homestead

Today I'm talking with Casey at Haggard Mountain Homestead. You can follow on Facebook as well.
 
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00:00You'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 with Casey at Haggard Mountain Homestead. Good morning, Casey. How are you? Good morning. I'm great. How are you doing? I'm good. Where are you located?  We are in Western Pennsylvania, a little bit outside of Pittsburgh, PA. Is it raining?  Not today, but apparently it's supposed to,  I think tomorrow.
00:30Have you been going through what my parents have been going through in Maine where it's rained all every day for the last 10 years, it seems like? Basically, yeah. Every single weekend it's been raining. So a lot of our projects have gotten pushed back, for sure. But now we're having a heat wave, so opposite. Great. That helps a whole lot, doesn't it? Yeah, it's literally the exact opposite, though. We went from cold and rainy to now, I think it's supposed to be like 95, 96 today. Yeah.
00:59talked to my dad the other day. Whoops, I talked to my dad the other day and he said, honey, he said, I swear, it feels like I have been trying to get my summer garden in since two summers ago for this year. I'm like, yeah, we went through this last year too. So, all right, so tell me about yourself and what you do at the Homestead. So how much of a backstory do you want here? Cause I can talk, trust me.
01:26Tell me what led you to having the homestead. All right. So my husband and I got married in 2016 and started looking for a house.  And we knew that we wanted a little bit of property.  And at that point, I just wanted a garden, some chickens,  all of that.  And  we ended up purchasing our property. have a little bit under two acres in 2018.
01:55Got our chickens, got our garden in,  and it's like we can't stop. It's honestly been addicting.  We started with a garden and the chickens  and we put in fruit trees.  He's gotten into honeybees. Now we're doing flowers.  We've done meat chickens  and  now I'm doing the social media stuff too.  You are cementing my belief that once you get into this,  the questions that come up are  why not?
02:25And what's the worst that could happen? And I'm very, very careful about the second question. I try not to say that outside where the universe can hear me. Oh yeah. If you put it out there, it might actually happen. Well, if I'm going to say it outside, I say what's the best that could happen instead of the worst? That's fair. I like that too. And that way the universe is like, what do I do with that?
02:51hopefully give you the best that can happen because that's what we want to put out there, manifest it. Exactly. And that's what I'm kind of getting at is that  if you try, the worst thing that happens is it doesn't go quite the way you wanted it to. But if you don't try,  nothing happens. Yeah, that's very true.  We actually, we have a five-year-old son now  and teaching him to emotionally
03:18regulate himself and trying to like give him these life lessons and how to cope with things. That's actually, he's, I'm a perfectionist and he's very much a perfectionist as well. And that's, I'm trying to tell him, I'm like, what happens if it, if you fail, you just learn a lesson and you move on. Yeah, I used to be a perfectionist and then I realized that it was stopping me. Like if I couldn't do it right the first time, I didn't want to do it at all. And
03:46I finally just was like, okay, start something that you don't have to tell people about. Just try something  and see if it fails. If it fails and you want to share about what you learned, cool. If you don't, no one has to know about it. Yeah, I like that too. I think  I'm 34 now and honestly, through all of high school, was  scared to try new things because  I was so much of a perfectionist. And I think at this point in my life,
04:14Not that I stopped caring, but I stopped caring what other people think. And now especially I make silly videos for the internet. Sometimes I act a fool and I just, don't care what they think. If they think I'm an idiot, so be it. There's a really good saying that what other people think is none of my or your business. What they think about me or you. And it's true.  What other people think about me is not my business. It's in their head. Yeah, I like that.
04:42So I try to hang on to that and I try to realize that if I screwed something up,  other people probably have too. And if I keep trying and share it, people will learn from that. So I'm trying to be very positive about my failures. And when you're home studying, I feel like you kind of have to be, because there's a lot of failures and a lot of learning. It's the best part. The learning is the best part. I have perpetual curiosity. And so for me,
05:10living on three acres and we have chickens, we have two barn cats, we have a dog. That's it  for animals right now.  And we have a garden and we every year try to put in a new plant, something we haven't grown before,  because we're curious and we want to figure out how it goes. my husband, every  December, January, he says, what new plant are we putting in this year? And I go, hmm, I hadn't thought about it yet. Let me look.
05:38One of the ones we tried was kohlrabi. I don't know if you know what that is. I know what it is. I haven't tried to grow it here. Yeah, it's the weirdest looking plant and we weren't sure that we had the right growing conditions to grow it and come to find out it's super easy to grow. And it tastes like a cross between a cabbage and a radish. And I love cabbage and I love radish. So I was very happy with the outcome because we actually had edible kohlrabi vegetables to have in our salad.
06:08Yeah, maybe I'll have to put that on our list. Yeah, it grows. It grows in the same conditions as broccoli or cabbage. So if you can grow those two things, you can grow Colorado. Yeah, we try and do a similar thing every single year. We try and like add something to our homestead. This year is a little bit. I don't know. This year is kind of different. We raised meat chickens for the first time to sell this year and we did one round of those. We're going to take a little bit of a break now during the summer just
06:38I'm working a lot more than I normally do currently  and I think we're going to like pick that back up in the fall. But that's kind of like our new project this year is like actually raising them to sell for profit. Nice. And that leads me to my next question.  Do you, do you,  again, I always butcher this question. I'm so sorry.  Do you have things that you do  or sell that support?
07:04homestead itself?  The meat chickens are the first thing that we've actually sold. We've given a lot away, obviously.  But, or no, I take that back. I did sell, we sold eggs last year to a local CSA farm  and then they sold the same eggs back to their CSA members.  They have a little bit of a, they have a farm stand as well, like a little shop that they open on the weekends.
07:33I have so many dreams and ideas  for what I want to do  and  making that happen is a little bit difficult right now.  I don't know if you've deep dived in our social media at all, but we've been trying to buy a bigger farm for a couple years now. don't know. Did you see that at all? I did not see that. I saw a bunch of stuff, but I did not happen to see that. Okay. So  do you want that story? Yes.
08:02So we, in adding new projects every year, one of the things we figured out is that two acres really isn't all that much.  Quickly, we are running out of room  and we have a lot of big trees here, lots of hills  and just  usable space we started lacking in. So  we started looking for  bigger property.
08:27to expand, want to actually start, our dream is to have a beef cattle farm with a big farm stand, be able to sell stuff that we raise and grow from our own property.  And the real estate market around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is  insane right now.  They're putting up so many developments that anybody who has land is selling it for millions of dollars.  So yeah, it's bad right now.
08:57We, I think it was a year and a half to two years ago now, we heard of an organization called Pennsylvania FarmLink and PA FarmLink. They have a website, they have social media accounts too. And their purpose, they want to link new and beginning farmers with farmers that are looking to retire and get out of farming to basically
09:26bridge the gap there so that people can get into farming and they can have their farms continue and not sell  to developers. So we actually found a property  through that website, got in contact with the current owners  and  the plan was to do a lease to own situation. We talked to them for about a year and then they
09:53came back and said, we don't want to do lease to own anymore. We just want to sell outright.  that break your heart? Absolutely. Because at that point we had stopped looking for anything else  and we were not like, we were kind of betting on this,  like hopeful that it was going to happen, but also a little bit hesitant. And we had told them from the get-go, we said, we can't afford to purchase. It was a 70 acre farm.
10:19I said, we can't afford to purchase this with the way that interest rates are right now. And that was like the whole point why we wanted to do lease to own.  And  yeah, it was, it was a little bit of a stomp on the old heart.  Um,  I'm so you haven't found a new place yet. Correct. Yes or no. We have not.  After that happened, we kind of started looking again, putting some feelers out.
10:48We're also, my husband and I are both veterans. So we're involved with the Pennsylvania veteran farmers organization too.  And I've gone to a couple events through them. I've gone to some PA farm link events. I went to, we're in Washington County in Pennsylvania. I've gone to some of our counties farm bureau meetings, just trying to like network and see if there's anybody who is in the situation like.
11:14Are you looking to get out of farming and you want somebody to take over or do you have any land that we can lease?  And I have not been very lucky in that yet. Okay. So I have a couple things for you. Number one, keep networking. You never know what you're going to find. Number two, we started looking back in 2015 for a place and it took us until  2020 to find it.  And I'm in Minnesota.
11:41And the housing market here is crazy too. It is still on fire. Properties come on the market and they're gone within 24 hours. So it's not just Pennsylvania. But when we were looking back in 2015, we found this adorable house. I fell in love with the minute I saw it and it was within our price range. My realtor said, why don't you try writing them a love letter? And I said, what do you mean a love letter? And she said,
12:09send them a letter and say, we viewed your property, it's beautiful.  This is our plans for  it if you sell it to us and  tell them what you're thinking of doing. And so I did that.  And  the day that I sent that to my realtor through email  was the day that people decided they wanted to keep it and stay.
12:35So I understand your heartbreak because I really, really wanted that house on that property. Yeah. At this point, like I, I understand that it wasn't meant to be. It seemed like all of the pieces were lining up for us.  Um, we even, my husband  would have had to switch jobs  and within a week of us meeting with them the first time he had secured a job in that area.  we were like lining everything up for us and then they started kind of pushing back.
13:04Yeah, it just it wasn't meant to be and  if it is meant to be for us, I know that we'll find that perfect place. It will. You will find it. I know you will because it's the thing that you want and  you're going to manifest that just like you've manifested other things in your life. It's how it works. It's just that there's  there's God's time and there's your time. You know,  and maybe maybe God has something better for you. I mean, I'm not a God girl, but.
13:31It feels like one of the God things that people talk about. Yeah, I can definitely see that. We actually, it's not like a super good lead, but, um, did you, did you see how I went out to Hershey to meet up with another homesteader recently? Yes. Tell me about that. Okay. So I'll, I'll give you the whole backstory too. Okay. That's fine. So I have been friends with Kristen Norley and
14:00By default, Hank, like Hank and I never really talked, but Kristen and I are at the point where we talk daily. And they are up in Northeastern Pennsylvania. So we had never met in person, but we are now at the point where we talk daily. We've been friends for like two years. And I, at one of these events that I went to, I found out about this new and beginning farmer grant. That is through our local farm credit. It's Horizon Farm Credit.
14:30And  it is for $10,000. So  everyone was encouraging us to apply because we were going to be starting our meat chicken business.  There's a plan for next year to get bees again  and get into like making honey and hopefully selling that too. And some cut flowers, all of that. So I wrote up a business plan, applied for that, and I sent her the information and I said, you have to apply for this.
15:00She was a little bit more hesitant than I was. I was like, no, you have to apply for this. I texted her daily asking if she submitted yet. And at one point she's like, I don't even think I'm going to submit it. I was like, you have to submit this. Well, good thing I like tormented the crap out of her because she won. She won the $10,000 grant. Great. Yeah. And so they're using that money now. I'm sad I didn't win, but again, it wasn't meant to be.
15:28And I'm super happy that my friend won. So they're using that to  jumpstart their maple syrup business.  And I went out to see them awarded this grant.  Um, and while I was there, I talked to another person from PA Farm Link and she said that she might have some leads for me of people in my area that are looking to retire.  So.
15:54I'm now in touch with her hoping to get more leads. Yes, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And like I said, keep reaching out, keep doing the networking. Someone will have an answer for you at some point. And you sound like you're young enough that you have time. I don't feel very young some of these days. Well, you don't sound like you're 65. You sound like you're probably what, late 20s, early 30s? I'm 34. So you were close. So you've got time.
16:24I, we didn't buy our place until- Mentally I feel like I'm about like 84. Uh huh, I understand completely. We didn't buy our homestead until we were both 50. So, so you got some time, honey, I promise. Um, okay, cool, awesome stories. And you are a very good friend to be supporting your friend in, in that, that do it, apply for the grant. You need to apply for the grant. Please apply for the grant, you know? Yeah, absolutely.
16:54We have to lift people up, you know, it shouldn't be a competition. It should be a, a gathering in. And one of things I love about the people I talked to on the podcast is everyone understands that a rising tide raises all ships. And if we make it a community and we make it where we're all trying to help each other, everything changes. Everything gets better. And even when things go to shit, at least you have people.
17:23that you can rely on to help you get back up again. Absolutely. I agree. And I, it's hard this day and age. feel like we went from being  very social creatures  to once technology started getting bigger, everybody started isolating. They just stay in their houses and watch TV. Maybe you'll like text people. People don't talk on the phone anymore. People don't meet up and actually do things in person. And one of the things I started noticing is, especially like in the social media sphere,
17:53Everybody's looking out for themselves. They want, they'll only be friends with you if they think they can get followers from you  or stuff like that.  I just, me personally, and a lot of the people that I'm close with, we want to help teach other people and we want to lift each other up, not just look out for ourselves and what we can get out of situations. Yes, absolutely. That's part of the reason that I started the podcast because I wanted to give you guys
18:22a place where you could talk about what you do and why you do it and how you do it  so that the kids that are coming up behind you and me have a place to go to learn about this. Yeah, that's a really good point too. And I think at least now like my generation, we're having kids and raising kids in this environment. Like my, my son is five.  He doesn't really know how to use a phone or a tablet yet.
18:51And I feel like even just like 10 years ago, that would have been seen as a negative, but I'm kind of proud of that now because he hasn't been on it playing games and stuff. Yes. The only thing that your five-year-old kid needs a phone for is to dial 911 if there is an emergency, like mommy fell down and is not responding to me. Oh, I absolutely agree. And that's he's, um, he's starting kindergarten this year and they were
19:20He  knows a lot of things  about, like, he can count and he recognizes letter sounds and stuff like that, but they did an evaluation and they were like, oh, you need to work on his letter and number recognition. I'm like, yes, I probably do. But he also knows how to weed a garden. He knows where his food comes from. He knows the life stages of meat chickens, like all of these things that.
19:49Other kids don't know, but they're like so focused on letters and numbers. Okay, Casey, if it makes you feel any better. My youngest son went to kindergarten  and they called me like three weeks after he started kindergarten. And they said,  he's really behind his classmates.  And I said, how so? And they said, well, he doesn't,  he knows his alphabet, but he doesn't know how to read. And he knows numbers, but he doesn't know how to do.
20:18math and I said well isn't that what kindergarten is for and they said well no kindergarten is more like first and second grade now because preschool is taking the place of kindergarten.  I was like well I'm sorry that I chose to raise my kid and not put him in preschool  and how can I help make this easier for you? I was really really offended and I was I was pretty upset because  when I went to kindergarten
20:47I learned how to read and I learned how to do math because that's what kindergarten was for. So I think that we have
20:59This sound terrible.  I think that as a general rule, we have our priorities backwards. And yes, would it have been nice if he could have read a primer when he started kindergarten?  Would it have been nice if he had been able to see a picture of four eggs and plus  sign and four more eggs and know that that's eight eggs?  Sure. But that's what kindergarten is for. So
21:28I haven't told that story on the podcast and I've been wanting to, so thank you for giving me an opening.  no problem. So yeah, priorities are a little screwy right now.  I was just listening to a Farmerish Kind of Life podcast, a lady that hosted, her name is Amy Dingman. I listened to her this morning, she's friend of mine.  And she was talking  a lot about how convenience is nice, but doing the actual work to get the thing that you want.
21:57has real satisfaction in it and it fills you up.  And so  I think maybe that's sort of what we're both getting at that this lifestyle  makes you  satisfied in a way that other things don't. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. just raising your kid up, knowing how like where their food comes from, the life cycle of plants and all of that.
22:27Like how to grow your own food. A lot of people don't know that. even, it's not like funny, but I posted some  videos about us raising our meat chickens and like  one of the most popular ones we did was showing them on butcher day. I didn't show the actual like butchering of them, but I just talked about like, okay, they're old enough. We're taking them to the butcher.
22:52There were so many angry people, so many angry people that had like nasty things to say. But honestly, like, and I was talking to some other homesteaders about it who have had similar reactions when they talk about that.  And  there was another woman, she was talking about some lady was like in her face yelling at her because she butchers her own animals. And she was asking the lady, she was like, do you eat meat from the grocery store? And the lady said yes. And she was like, well, what do you think? How do you think it got there?
23:21And when you raise it on your own property, like they're out in the sunshine on fresh grass in a chicken tractor. That's how we raise our meat chickens versus a warehouse where they're all crammed together, not treated nicely by  random people. It's just, yeah. And so that's what my son knows now where we get our chicken from versus the grocery store where it's just plastic wrapped. Yes. And that is awesome.
23:48I love that he knows where his food comes from. It's really important.  There is a real cognitive dissonance  in the United States, especially  about where food comes from and how it becomes food. You know, we go to zoos, we go to petting zoos, we go to farms and we see  the beautiful Jersey cow.
24:16with a really pretty face  and we humanize them. We see them through human eyes and we're like, oh, what a pretty face. And we see them  as,  there's a word, I can't think of the word right now.  There's a thing that we do as humans where we transfer or project our feelings onto an animal and  animals are animals, they're not humans.  And people forget that
24:46animals are what produce the meat that we eat and that  at some point that beautiful cow or steer  is going to be killed and it's going to be butchered and it's going to become  steak that we buy and we eat.  And the cognitive dissonance just drives me insane. I have known since I was probably four years old  that the cute little calf that was sucking on my thumb  at my grandpa's neighbor's house
25:15was going to become the steak that I ate two years later. I've known that forever. And I had to reconcile that because I loved that calf that I spent time with.  And I loved the steak that I ate that came from that cow or steer. So  I just feel like people don't  quite understand the process here. Yeah, they don't at all. Um, there is definitely that disconnect. And then they also
25:44I think they mistake like small scale farming where I  not like we didn't like love on our meat chickens every day. Like I wasn't out there cuddling them or whatever, but they were treated really well. I never pushed them, kicked them. They had plenty of space. had food and water, fresh grass, bugs, all of that. And people not saying all factory farming is bad. Like we need food.
26:14to survive. But like if I had a choice between how I raise our animals versus buying it from the store where I don't know how they were treated, like you'd think that they would be happy that we're doing what we're doing. would think, but it's not always true. Again, part of the reason I started the podcast is to educate people about all of these things. And the other thing about chicken from the grocery store, I don't know if you've bought
26:43chicken at like a Walmart or Target lately. But we got chicken from a Walmart a couple months ago and it was not good. Like it was really stringy and it just wasn't right. And I thought, what is wrong with the chicken that people are buying at the store these days? Cause this is not good. Yeah. I don't know what brand you got, but if you look on, and I'm not trying to like fear monger here. Um, I don't think it's
27:11super unsafe and people are gonna die if they eat grocery store meat. But a lot of the stuff in grocery stores, sometimes I've, I have heard that they like rinse them in bleach.  And then I've also heard, and you can see on the packaging, it'll usually say that it's like injected with  XYZ to like maintain flavor. Yeah.
27:34although it probably doesn't need to be injected with anything if it's good chicken.  these are the things  that come up in these conversations. And  I don't want to fear monger anybody or anything either. I want to educate and I want to invite people in.  But either way, if you can get chicken from a local grower where you can actually go see their farm, see their chickens, see how they're raised, get to know them.
28:03Then you can kind of feel rest assured that you're getting a good product that isn't going to hurt you and that is going to taste good. So anyway, I try to keep these to half an hour Casey and we're there. I feel like we talked about a lot of stuff. I don't know that we talked about a lot of what you're doing,  but it also sounds like you have big plans and we did talk about that. So where can people find you online? am currently on Instagram,  on YouTube and then
28:32I have a Facebook account, but I'm not on there. I just have everything from Instagram kind of cross post over. But I do post a lot of stories on Instagram and then Instagram and YouTube are where I post all of our newest stuff. And YouTube, once our son is in school this fall, I plan on  posting a lot more on YouTube, like long form style videos. And people can find you at Haggard Mountain Homestead for YouTube as well? Yes, Haggard Mountain Homestead.
29:01Um, for Instagram and YouTube, it's at Haggard mountain. And then for Facebook, it's Haggard mountain homestead. That's like our page name. Okay.  Awesome. And as always, people can find me at a tiny homestead podcast.com.  Thank you, Casey, for your time. appreciate it. No problem. Thank you for having me. Have a fantastic day. You too. Bye.
 

Feeding Feasible Feasts

Today I'm talking with Angel at Feeding Feasible Feasts. You can follow on Facebook as well.
 
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Angel at Feeding Feasible Feasts. And you're in Washington state, right, Angel? Yes, I am.  Okay. Awesome. How's the weather in Washington state? It is, well, where I am in Washington. It's beautiful today. Yeah.
00:26Good. was a very, it's very warm here in Minnesota. It's very muggy. Midwest. Yeah. It's going to be warm out there. Are you in the Midwest? Did you say Minnesota? Yes.
00:43Yes, it's really muggy. It's gross.  And that's par for the course for July 2nd. I don't know why I'm even saying it out loud. Everyone knows it's muggy in Minnesota in July.  So tell me about  yourself and Feeding Feasible Feasts, because I am so curious to know what you guys do. Well,  I'll give you a short version. I'm a little on the older side, so I've done quite a bit in my
01:11I guess in my world, in my life.  Uh, let's see here, uh, born in Chicago,  1961. So,  uh, here before women could vote and black folks to vote and all of that,  uh, moved here to the state of Washington, uh, Seattle, Washington. And let's see, that would have been 20 or no, 1989. We moved  here.  Uh, my husband and I, and  we have seven children that are all adults.
01:40Opened my first business here. Well, my second business.  First business here was a  promotional products company and had some pretty nice contracts with  large companies.  Developed a  transportation model where we  folks could get online and order their promotional products and have them delivered directly. So we did that with Labor Ready and  True Value and some of the large companies out here.
02:08I sold that company, moved on to real estate. My mother got very ill. So I had her here. So I went into real estate so I could control my schedule.  fairly well with that until the downturn in the economy at a time. So I sold my book of business and moved  into another arena here in Washington state at the time was a pretty hot topic, which was recreational cannabis. My husband  in his years growing up.
02:37enjoyed recreational cannabis. I myself never and still haven't tried it,  but  really felt  that the medical part of that unit to be examined and supported. I became an advocate,  joined our liquor control board  as a board member to help with  oversight for that particular industry.  We still, we actually have at this point two retail cannabis licenses.
03:05that we have in another county, not where we live.  And  I sit on  the board here for the Washington Food Coalition, which is a coalition  designed by congressional districts. And I am the representative here for that.  As well as I had a chair with our city here  for economic development on their advisory board,  as well as  I was a political delegate this year during the
03:35the political race.  And now we are  feeding feasible feasts. It came about because I am a heavy gardener. garden,  we have a pretty good swath of property here. I garden my entire  portion of my house  yard is a garden. So I produce quite a bit of food. And one of the things we do with feeding feasible feasts is we do teach folks how to  can, freeze,  hydrate,
04:05You know, how to preserve food.  I have about 16 fruit and nut trees in my backyard and two in my front yard.  During the time of COVID, well, before all of that, I discovered that my neighbors didn't actually like zucchini as much as I thought they did. So I had to come up with a better method of,  you know, finding a home for all of the food and found a national organization. I don't know if you know about it. It's called Food is Free.
04:35And it is built for people like me, gardeners like me, who just produce way more food than they're ever going to eat.  And you, it's a simple concept. You just put a card table on a corner with a  sign, handwritten, if you like, that says food is free. Put the food on the table and people who drive by can take whatever they like.  Awesome. I didn't know about that. It's a national movement. It's actually,  we have several pods  of that movement here in Washington state.
05:04part of the effort during Kovac to rescue, had a  potato onion problem at the top of Kovac when the schools closed down and restaurants closed down. Our farmers  were not able to sell all of the produce. And so we did a huge rescue  movement at that time. Several of the large food agencies here and  lots of small ones  like mine at the time  drove over to Eastern Washington and we brought over,  I don't know how many thousands of tons
05:34potatoes and onions,  but we were able to do to because he come from rotting in the  field and in arms.  Awesome. Who does free played a pivotal role in that as well as most of the folks who are participating in that with potatoes and onions, put them on the corner and we'll just wrap.
05:52So, but that is food is free is a precursor to feeding feasible piece.  As COVID kicked in  at the top of that year,  we live in an area where there's a large immigrant population of Russian and Ukrainian folks.  And I noticed  as things were closing down that a small line  began to form across the street from where the table was.
06:22early spring. So the only thing I was really harvesting were herbs and they were lining up herbs. And I remember thinking to myself, Oh my gosh, do you have a problem? Because people are lining up for simple herbs, rosemary, thyme, things like that. Um, reached back into some friends who were in the grocery industry and said, Hey, what are you doing with your returns? And they didn't have an answer. And I said, well, you can send them to me. And so, um, I began getting food by the pallet load.
06:50and would line them up in my driveway and along my private road and  developed a small free market on my neighbor's corner because he has a cross street  for people to just come and shop for free for food that normally would have just gone into the landfill.  So that was our beginning.  Neighbors really played a large role in this.  Many of our neighbors donated marine coolers  and the neighbor  to the north of us
07:19saw ice every single morning for all of those coolers. And we were able to have milk and meat, cheese and butter, things like that that needed to be refrigerated and could not just sit on a table. And it was summer. So that went along swimmingly until the health department came by and said, hey, we love what you're doing, but if you're going to use marine coolers, you will have to come out here and take a temperature every hour.
07:46And the look on my face told her that I was not going to come out there every hour and take a temperature and all those marine coolers that just wasn't feasible. So  I drew plans for  a  small shed-like building that had a  carve out in it for a refrigerator. And we placed that  unit on top of some pallets,  again in my neighbor's yard against our common fence.
08:14It became the first food hub. And so people come anytime day or night and pick up food. And I had run this extension cord up my driveway, have a 150 foot driveway. So I ran an extension cord up to keep the refrigerator and the lights running for that first hub. And it was extremely popular and it's undergone several reiterations, several redesigns over the last five years. We have some that are solar powered.
08:44You have some that are, well, all of them have all, think that solar power is probably the only differentiation truly to find all of them at this point. But they all have self closing doors are available 24 seven. You don't have to register. just show up. The signage on the, on the units illustrates the communities that will most likely take advantage of that hub. So for example,
09:10Our hub in Renton is English, Spanish and Chinese, our hub in Tukwila is English,  Ukrainian  and Russian.  it just depends on where the... Okay, Angel, I'm going to stop you just for a minute.  Number one, I love your heart. Your heart is so big, you are a giver.
09:31Number two,  feeding Feasible Feasts is your baby. You started it. Yes. Okay. So I was looking at your Facebook page  and I saw a guy at a church talking about their food pantry.  Do you also provide stuff for food shelves and food pantries? We do. We do distribute food, especially when we get a lot of it.
10:00to other food banks, food pantries and other  several other types of school districts, nonprofits.  We distribute to quite a wide range. Yes.  Today, as a matter of fact, I got a call from a distributor who had  27 pallets of shredded bagged lettuce  that was rejected at a  outlet store  dock, nowhere for it to go. Of course, we don't want that in the landfill.
10:29So we had them delivered to us and we have already distributed all 27 pallets. We did it in under three hours.  Wow. Wow. Okay. So  how hard was this to get started and how expensive is it to keep it going?  It wasn't hard to get started.  We were lucky because I had so many ties and so many different stastes. So finding food was not an issue.
10:59Um, I know about warehousing, so I was able to locate a warehouse that wasn't overly extensive.  Um,  we were able to locate, um, just all of the infrastructure that's needed. That's where the expense really does come in.  Um, we have a fleet of vans and refrigerated troughs that we utilized. Uh, we are running routes, uh, seven days a week, upwards of,  uh, six different routes a day.  Uh, so we have to pay people. So there's, you know, there's that expense along with.
11:29Refrigeration is probably the biggest obstacle, I think, for all of the food banks because that stuff needs to be kept fresh. So as a result, a lot of my programs revolve around eliminating those needs. So even with the lettuce, for example, today that came in, rather than have it come to my warehouse and sit for any length of time, we just make sure that it goes directly to where we know it can go or we deliver it ourselves.
11:56We model that in our grocery store rescue as well. We rescue  food from Safeways and Albertsons, Pagans, Tovers. We pick up food from them, ideally.
12:09Fabulous.  I love you. You  are so important to Washington State.  I don't have words big enough to tell you how I'm feeling right now hearing your story. So not every state has a program like this, but there are lots of people growing food in their gardens and they can't possibly use all of the surplus.
12:34So what I would suggest, because I live in Minnesota, we have a big garden and we will have metric tons of tomatoes by August. I know we will. We have over 200 tomato plants planted right now. We're gonna donate to our local food shelf. So what I would suggest to people who are growing produce is that if they know of a local church, food pantry or a food shelf or whatever, get hold of them and ask them if they will take fresh farm
13:04grown produce in their programs because everybody deserves a really good tomato. Agree. And I would even take that a step further and have them investigate that food is free table. And the reason I say that is, unfortunately, food banks operate under very restrictive hours. And generally speaking, folks who need that type of assistance are working. And they miss those hours.
13:34most often.  There's food banks sometimes they're only open five hours a week.  If it's a really good food bank it's open maybe 20 hours a week. If you're working nights you're never going to make it. If you're working days or rather nights you're never going to make it to a food bank. So if you're growing it yourself and you do have a street where you can put it just a table that says food is free people will take it and you and the folks who will stop I promise you are the folks who need it.  Folks who don't need it don't stop.
14:03They don't have a need to right now. So they don't, but the folks who need it will stop. Yes, absolutely.  The other thing is this conversation is really timely because our situation in the United States right now  is getting kind of tenuous regarding the cost of food.
14:25We're really lucky in my home because my husband has a good job and we're really thankful for that and we have a really nice garden going and we're really thankful for that. And we have laying hens so we have eggs and we're really thankful for that because the grocery store prices are so ridiculously high right now. You are doing a huge service for your community because I feel like no one should have to choose between paying their electric bill and eating dinner.
14:56You're exactly right with that.  I think a lot gets lost in translation when things like this happen  and too often it becomes a political matter and this is not a political matter. I think that the lack of education for the general public  is  important to educate each other.
15:20When it comes to food insecurity, people hear food insecurity and they hear folks who just want it easy or want something free or  whatever, and that isn't what it is. No. insecurity is defined. has a definition. And the definition is  it represents people who have an income but are unable to stretch that income until the next time they receive a check. That's the definition of food insecurity.
15:46And so if you really think about it, how many times have you just talked to a regular neighbor, both are working, doing well, and they're thinking, huh, we got five more days. I need to go to the grocery store, but I really, you I don't have much money.  I don't know, you know, what I need to get some inextensive things like  ramen or something along those lines that isn't healthy and isn't good for them. If they have enough money to do that, that's the definition of food insecurity. And what we know in the United States is that seven out of 10
16:15suffer from food insecurity. Seven out of ten. So that means if you have ten neighbors, seven of them most likely have that issue often.  Yep, absolutely. And  we are going through a minor patch of that right now here.  I wouldn't say it's minor. We're headed, it's on an upward slant, it's at a  vertical  slant. No, no, I meant in my household. I didn't mean in general. We're going through.
16:45We're going through a minor patch of food insecurity because the gardens aren't quite producing yet. They're  almost there. I'm so excited.  But we have really been doing meal planning on the weekends and we're like, okay, we have 150 bucks to spend on food for the week to supplement what we have in the house.  What am I cooking this week? So we literally sit down on Saturday and make a plan and get groceries on Sunday.
17:13really looking forward to salads from the garden and zucchini and tomatoes and cucumbers because that's all really good healthy nutritional food for us. Right exactly and you find yourself  not as hungry as often when you're able to pack your body with nutrients like that. I am  astounded that the people lined up for herbs that you were talking about because herbs are great but they're not exactly
17:40a dinner, they will make a dinner better, but they're not dinner. Right. My feeling is that for those that were stopping on those days, on those early, early days, I think that knowing that fresh food, even if it's put in something like ramen would help, well, it helps it taste better, but also it would get more nutritional value. And I have a sneaky suspicion that's what that was about. Yeah, probably.
18:09The other thing is that people who aren't from America, like they move here from a different country, they know more about cooking than most Americans know. And they also know they could take those fresh herbs and dry them and put them in a jar and they would have them for longer. And most Americans think that you get herbs in a little tiny container at the store. No,  you can grow a basil plant. You can let it get big. You can strip the leaves off of it.
18:38dry those leaves, crunch them up and put them in a mason jar with a lid and you have basil for the winter. Exactly. We have, I have a sage bush that I've been growing for about seven years now. It's huge. And my husband keeps saying to cut it back. Well, first of all, when spring comes, it blooms just the prettiest turtled. And the entire plant is edible. You can fry sage with, can, you can batter them and fry them and they'd make a meal by themselves. They're delicious.
19:07Oh yeah, absolutely. My sage plant is dead. I had a really good one going and it died last summer because it was so, it was just so, it was terrible weather here last year. It was so wet and then it was so dry that the plant didn't know what to do. And it was just like, I give up and it died.
19:27that day.  This year I'm struggling with,  we will have an incredible overabundance. did not,  this year I didn't take the time to remove some of the like  starts of some of the fruits like the pears and the apples and  now I have branches that are back, they're just bowed and touching the ground and so heavy and so I've got to go through, either prop up the branches so they don't snap or pull some of those off of it.
19:56I have to give though.
20:00Yep, I was telling somebody the other day how spoiled I feel because we have apple trees here and they actually have apples on them now. We didn't get any last year because a windstorm came through and blew all the petals off. So the apples never got pollinated. And we're going to have like probably 200 honey  gold apples this fall to pick from our property. And I'm so excited.
20:24And every time I look at those trees, I'm like, we are so  lucky and I feel so spoiled about it.
20:32We, we, have so much, we actually have Gleaner, volunteer Gleaners that come and we have the gear, the hip baskets and the poles that reach out and grab them down. think right now we're at a pole. And, um, just on my property, just last year, the apple tree in the front gave us over 900 apples. It's incredible how much a tree can produce in food and the great thing about apples is they have a really long life. They have a great longevity if they're stored.
21:03Yep, exactly.  Yep. And I don't know if you grow winter squash in Washington state, but we do. And my favorite time of year is autumn because the winter squash is ready to come in.
21:19We have, you know, Washington state, we're lucky that we can grow pretty much all year round something.  Um, there's very little, um, I don't think there are very, there are very few days or where you wouldn't be able to grow something in this, in this state. So it's nice.
21:38Uh-huh, I didn't know that. I thought you guys had a cold enough winter that you had a couple of months where you couldn't grow anything. Oh, you can just hoop it. You just sort of it. Yeah, you just hoop that and keep the snow off. And you can grow all kinds of things. Nice. We had to put up a heated greenhouse to do that. I don't have a heated greenhouse. That sounds like luxury. We do have chickens here too, like you do. Uh-huh.
22:07I do keep the coop as it's actually built very close to our home and where I just run the dryer vent that way. Put a strain on it and it heats it up sometimes. Oh, that's smart. I can't do that. My chicken coop is way too far from the house.  Yeah, I my close by on purpose because I didn't ever some of the chicken, you we harvest a lot of chickens at the end of the season, but there are several that are left.
22:32that we carry over to the next year. And I don't want them to freeze. The other problem we have is, we have, I'm sure you have two raccoons and rats and things that want to get in there and do harm. And so building it up against the house, that was just one side of the poop I did not have to fortify. That's really smart, Angel. I never would have thought of that. I'm going to have to talk to my husband and be like, this lady told me a really cool hint about keeping chickens warm in the wintertime.
23:01Yeah, you just run that and then and you don't have to  heat it right you just run your dryer for a minute Yeah, exactly. Here. Where's there are a lot of us in my household? And so we we're running our dryer quite often so they take pretty warm That's brilliant. I would never have thought of that and I have not had anyone mention that on the podcast and I've been doing the podcast for 21 months now, so  um What breed of chickens do you have?
23:27We do the X brand, is just the regular white chicken that are meat chicken.  And then I have a plethora of chickens that I think they started off as certain breeds and made it and made more chicks. And so I don't know what they are anymore. They just lay eggs. They're moths. All different colors. Yes, they're all moths. They just lay eggs and run around and that's it.  That's the extent of it.
23:51As long as they're giving you eggs, they're good chickens. And they're great for, I mean, they're great to have if you have a garden. Like I'm sure you know, you can take all of the stuff that you pull and all the vegetation that you're preening and throw it all in there with them, they'll take care of it. Oh yeah. We threw in a whole bunch of basil plants last, I think it was October. Cause in Minnesota, if you grow basil outside,  the minute it gets below 40 degrees, the basil plants are done.
24:20They get black spots on the leaves and they're no longer good. And chickens freaking love basil. They love it. they had,  they their little. They eat a lot of the compost from the house  after the grandchildren finished eating  watermelon and, or whatever it is that we bought, we throw the rest in there with chickens. Yeah. Chickens  love watermelon. We used to take the rinds out to the chickens.
24:50And they would lose their minds. My husband would throw half a watermelon rind in and they would, they would fight over it. And I was just like, I can't believe they like watermelon. And if you watch them, if you actually scoop all the watermelon out of the watermelon, out of the rind, so it's still like a bowl and you put the, you put it out in the run, they will eat all of  the flesh out of it. So it's just a skin shaped bowl sitting there on the ground.
25:20They do that with pumpkin too. They love pumpkin and will fight over that. It's  really fun though to raise chickens. If you're able to watch them and you know, instead of having to run outside all the time when it's cold and just throw something in there and run away.  But they are fun to watch. there's a reason that chickens are the gateway to homesteading, you know. My daughter this year, she has ducks and I...
25:48She has too many ducks at this point. sounds like  one of the neighbors has ducks and gave her eggs from the ducks through food. They were trading  and  she picked the egg up and looked at it and  they were fertilized. So she put them under the lamp and now she has all these extra ducks. That's fabulous. That's great. I love that.  She said, do you want some ducks? Mom, said, no, I don't any ducks.
26:15Yeah, and ducks need water. I don't know if you have water on your property, but they need maybe more. But I do not produce.  Yeah, somebody asked me if I wanted ducks and I was like, no, because I don't have any water on my property. And they were like, we just you can just get a kid's.  They're like, you can just get a kid swimming pool and put water in it. I was like, yeah, but then you got to clean it out every day. Right.
26:43That's my, that would be my issue. Ducks, I mean, chickens are one thing to clean up after and you know, I'm pretty good at shoveling it often enough that I can compost it well. But ducks are a whole nother matter. They, I don't know why, but they seem much messier to me than chickens are. Because they are. They're much messier than chickens. No, chickens are great. Especially if you put down wood chips or straw, you just have to go in there and, and
27:12Take a shovel and shovel it out, put it in your compost pile. Yep. And that's pretty easy. Yep.  And chicken manure is  awesome for a garden, for fertilizer.  Once you  let it cure, do not ever put hot chicken manure on in your garden because it will ruin your plants.  Oh my gosh, and it smells so bad anyway.  It sure does. It's gross. But.
27:39We grew the most beautiful garden at our old house one year because we got some chicken manure and  the tomatoes and cucumbers that year, were huge. They were yummy. And I was like, chicken manure is the best ever. It is the best composted stuff.  absolutely. We are gardens. have all my gardens are in braised, all of my  vegetables out front are in raised beds. And so every year I pull from the compost bin, everything that I've composted  and usually, um,
28:08The dirt does shrink down about half, guess, almost half. And I fill every bed with compost. And then I use my little, I have a little tiny rototiller that I can handle myself. And I just rototiller it in and my garden comes up so amazing every year. Yeah, again, I feel really spoiled that we get to do gardening here. And I bet you sometimes have the same feeling. I, I, when I discovered that I could garden up here,
28:35as opposed to where  I came from. thought, oh my gosh, I'm in heaven.  And so I have not not garden since I grew up here. Yeah, there's magic in it. And I can't explain it to people who haven't tried it.  I do not have the words to explain to them the miraculous things that gardening does for people. Well, the other thing too, is if you have children or grandchildren and  the learning moments, teaching moments,
29:04in gardening are vast. Almost every lesson  we hold  is a good word and we had here. And we were able to teach them so much just through the gardening.  mean, math, you know,  percentages  and just all kinds of things that you never would have, you know, really put to, you know, coming from a garden. Yeah.
29:33Biology, chemistry?  All of it, yes.  is nothing.  Even root words with some of the vegetables, you where does this word come from and how, you know, why is it called this? And just, mean, pretty much everything.  You can teach through a garden. know the children here, the grandchildren here, every year in my garden, there's the first bed, which is right in front of our  stairs as you come out of our home.
30:04And there's a little sidewalk there.  And when you cross the sidewalk, you hit the garden.  And in the first bed, the first row are all cherry tomatoes. And the reason is because  I let those get really big. I don't ruin them back.  They probably would make more tomatoes than I did, but I don't. They get really bushy, really big. And the children spend the summer eating, walking around handfuls of cherry tomatoes all summer. Because
30:31That's their snack. That's what they choose for a snack. They go out there and pick cherry tomatoes and eat them. It's actually going to be on our, I'm going to do a Facebook post video about that. huh. Fabulous. Oh my God, Angel, this has been so fun talking with you. I try to keep these to half an hour and we're at 31 minutes. So thank you for your time and where can people find feeding feasible fees?
30:58You can find us on Facebook. It's just feeding feasible feasts.  Same with Instagram.  You can email us  at www.fffeaststs.org. And those are the best ways to find us in churches. Okay. Awesome. Angel, I loved it. This was great. Thank you so much.  hope you have a wonderful night and as always- you for having me. Thank you for inviting.
31:28Absolutely. And as always, people can find me at ATinyHomesteadPodcast.com. Have a good night.
 

Mother Nature's Apprentice

Today I'm talking with Pam at Mother Nature's Apprentice. You can follow on Facebook as well.
Pam's new book, Wonder and Joy for the Wired and Tired: A Guide to Finding Inspiration and Well-Being in a Wonder-Filled World, releases in August 2025.
 
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Pam, at Mother Nature's Apprentice in Kentucky. Good morning, Pam. How are you? I'm very well. How are you today? I'm good. How's the weather? It actually  is nicer today. It's a bit overcast here in beautiful Northern Kentucky.  We've been having
00:28like most of the country, some hot weather, but we did get some rain and I think we may get a bit more today. How about you?  It is lovely in Minnesota right now. The sun is shining.  There's big puffy clouds in the sky, bright blue, and it's about eighty to seventy five degrees, I think, if that it's the first really nice morning we've had in  just under a week because it's been really muggy here. So.
00:56I was very happy to drink my coffee sitting on the porch with the window open and see the  rogue raccoon we have visiting us.  Oh, the rogue raccoon. Yes, we have one of those. How often does that little critter visit?
01:14Yeah, our little guy looks like he has a leg that is maybe hurt because he looks like he's hopping a little bit. I've been calling him hop along in my head. And  we don't have a live trap big enough to catch him. Plus our cats would get caught instead of him.  And my husband wants to  end his suffering with a firearm. And I am okay with that. The problem is he's never where we can get to him.
01:43They are smart. They're very smart.  Yep. And I saw him actually  face on toward me the other morning and the sun was coming up.  He's so beautiful. I'm like, God damn it. I don't want to kill this animal. He's gorgeous. Yeah. Those are tough calls, aren't they? I hate it. I absolutely hate it. And I know it's part of the life that we have chosen, but I hate it so much. Pam, it makes me sad. Yeah.
02:10Yeah, I know we've been there a couple times. don't have the beautiful weather. You have, but  we get things off the pond and whatnot and it just breaks my heart every time.
02:23Yeah, it's hard, but if we don't put him down,  a car is going to hit him. And I don't know which is worse. So we'll see what happens.  Okay. So tell me about yourself and about Mother Nature's apprentice.  Ah, well,  I'm,  I was born and raised in Indiana.  And actually I'm a dual citizen. I'm a Canadian and a U S citizen.  Lived here in
02:52until my early twenties and then found my way actually to Western Canada, the beautiful province of British Columbia, which is just north of Washington state  and  lived there for quite a while.  But you know, as beautiful  as Canada was, I mean, I've always loved nature and backpacking and an incredible geography there. You know, when you're born somewhere, that's still where you consider home.
03:22So  I found my way back to the Midwest  and not Indiana though, my husband and I, you know, live as I said in Northern Kentucky and we have  sort of three acres that we've reclaimed.  I'm  a  wife obviously, a mom, a grandma. Our kids are grown. We've got  a bunch of little ones running around  and we love  nature.
03:50Professionally, I guess that's the other hat I wear. I have a  PhD and earned PhD and I'm  a nurse practitioner clinician and an epidemiologist where I'm also an adjunct prof here  at Northern Kentucky University where I investigate winter joy, wellbeing  and  nature, how nature has such a wonderful, powerful impact on our health and wellbeing.
04:20And you're an author too, right?  Yes, that was unexpected.  As an offshoot of a research study I did,  which talked about wellness versus well-being and nature and extraordinary ornery, cetera, I decided to  indulge in my  passion for creative writing. So I started the blog, Leather Nature's Apprentice, and it talks about nature and
04:49all the things I just mentioned and some funky kind of nature, quirky things too, because I am a science nut. But that kind of dovetailed into a book, which I can't believe I did. That's been a journey. You people were very, thankfully, very kind about the blog and developed a bit of a following. And I said, you should write a book. And I guess even more than that, at the same time when I was
05:18presenting some of my research findings on well-being at conferences,  it really resonated with people and I got asked to talk more and more. And I initially thought, you know, I'll publish this in an academic journal like most academics do.  But I realized that's, you know, that's not where most people are going to see this. This is information that will help all of us.  So I guess that gave me the final.
05:44Courage, that's the right word, to write the book. So yeah, it's my first book. It's  coming out August 12th.
05:55And what's it called? Well, I guess I should share that shouldn't it's called. It's called Wonder and Joy for the Wired and Tired, a guide to finding inspiration and well-being in our wonder filled world. What a gorgeous title. Oh my God. Oh, thank you. Wow. It has little animals and plants on it. People say it looks quite joyous. So I thought, that's
06:25That's nice too.  I looked at the cover on your Facebook page and it looks like a children's book cover. And I was like, this is not a children's book, but it's so cute.  Well, it's whimsical, isn't it? I mean, I guess that was  joyous. I wanted it to be uplifting and kind of Wonderworld-like. And  yeah, thank you.  I'm glad you liked it.  Is it self-published or is it through a publisher?
06:51Well, it's through a very new press called Bear Paw Press. And that tumor was,  have you published before? Like a book or anything? No, I have not. Wow. Journey again is an understatement. I didn't know anything about this.  And so I went to a writer's conference and thankfully  I did have some more mainstream publishers in an ancient express interest. But
07:19there's just all kinds of  pitfalls and challenges to that. And so I thought, you know, I'm going to go this route.  It's been a  great experience. working with  Carrie Barnum at New Shell Books, who's a wizard and wonderful to work with.  So it's  it's sort of  hybrid, I guess. And but it gives me so much more control. And plus, it
07:46It allowed me to get the book out sooner. Oftentimes with mainstream publishers, I didn't know this. You can wait a year to two years to get your book out there because you're just in a queue.  And I thought, no, you know, I don't want to wait that long. So I'm going to  jump into the deep end and see what happens.  This is where I am.
08:11Isn't it amazing how technology has opened up so many doors to so many people on so many things? It's incredible. And I think that's part of what's been fascinating about this. As you found this morning with my delay with my computer, I have a love-hate relationship with technology. mean, obviously I have to use it when I'm teaching and giving talks, but I'm certainly not
08:41proficient in it, but I'm learning. I'm learning so many new skills  and I'm learning more about, you know, things for the blog and obviously for the book. It's just, it's been a  real learning curve and wonderful.
08:57Awesome. Fantastic. I love it when people take what they're good at or what they're really passionate about and write about it and then teach other people with that because I am a lifelong reader and learner and books have been my best friends my entire freaking life. So thank you for writing a appreciate it. I will be picking it up.  Oh, thank you. That's even better. Well, you know, because that's the other thing with technology, we're  reading less.
09:26Fewer people are actually picking up a book, whether it's  even on Kindle, but definitely something that's hard print in their hands. And that really is quite sad, isn't it? But I  guess  we'll change with the times and we'll adjust in a damp. But that's nice to hear that you enjoy reading.  I do. And  the only reason I have  a tablet with the Kindle app on it is because  I like to read before I go to bed.
09:55and I don't have a light by my bed. I have to get up out of bed to shut the light off. And with the Kindle,  it's backlit. You know, it's a black screen with white letters. And so I can read and that's like all asleep. I just put the book down on the side table and go to sleep. Plus I used to read and my husband would come to bed and he'd be like, can we shut the light off now? And I'd be like, yes, because I had an actual book, you know, you can't read in the dark. You have a book book.  So that's the best thing about it.
10:25You you sound like my husband.  He kids me because he is  a rabid reader. He loves to read  and he does the same thing. He loves his Kindle and he also reads before bed  and makes fun of me probably because of my poor technology skills.  But I  just, I'm one of those people who loves the paperback or hardback. I love the smell of the books  and  I'm, I
10:52still like to read in that way. But I think  I'm finding the conveniences, just as you said, of why a Kindle is so darn good. Yep. I love, love, love my tablet. It's small.  I don't have to, I can just prop it up against the pillow in front of my face and read it until my eyes slam shut. It's great.  Okay. So  you,  I'm not sure where to start on the rest of the questions.  You grow plants, right?
11:21do.  I do. I  love nature. I love gardening. And I guess  I always have.  My mom  was a wonderful gardener. I we just had a little backyard garden in Hammond, Indiana, but I have incredibly fond memories of having  time spent with her growing morning glories  and suspended along  a chain link fence. was just a sea of blue.
11:50collecting four o'clock seeds and it was just wonderful. And  I actually remember, I think the first time that I realized I resonated or rather nature resonated with me.  And I was six years old.  I can remember this clearly and long story short, there was,  it happened to be a total eclipse that day of the sun. And I was sitting outside and my mom had made one of those pinhole cameras and
12:18We were waiting for it and I was sitting on the grass next to some beautiful milkweed plants and we had been watching  the monarch butterflies  with the eggs and the larvae maturing into pupa and they're about to hatch. And I got so excited and I went to go and tell my mom that and wouldn't you know it,  I tripped and fell on  a rusty lid  of a bird feeder  and cut my hand open, believe it or not.
12:48This has related to nature because it also made me love the body and biology and instinctively even at six years old for some reason I didn't freak out because I  grabbed my hand, put pressure on the cut,  not knowing anything about it, right?  And the bleeding of course stopped, right? Because you occlude the arteries. But I ran to my mom to tell her of my excitement. And of course she saw this blood and looked like a murder scene, I'm sure.  But anyway.
13:15the gentleman next door was a physician, stitched me up, I was fine. But later that day, I  can still see this just like yesterday. I'm sitting with my bandaged hand on the grass  next to these  monarch butterflies. And my mom comes out with two popsicles  and the pinhole cameras. And she sits next to me and we watch this incredible eclipse together. was  nothing, Steven Spielberg could not have
13:44scripted this better. The eclipse ended  and slowly but surely all these monarch butterflies hatched. They emerged and there was this beautiful sea of orange and black.  And I remember feeling just  such incredible joy and wonder  at the human body and the eclipse and nature and, you know, my relationship and love for my mom. it
14:10No doubt, it propelled me to  go into science and nursing.  And I love nature. And so, yeah,  I've been a plant grower  probably since age six.
14:25Very nice. So do you have gardens at your place? I do. do. I don't know if you got a chance to see it, I sort of, my husband and bought this Charlie Brown neglected lot. Actually, it was called a garbage lot, believe it or not. But I loved the position of it. It was next to a pond and I love the area. It was very safe and green and all the good things you want in a home. But it was a disaster. Mary, it was horrible.
14:55Developers had dumped all their unused material and  other garbage there and weeds had overgrown it. was full of clay. But  I'm sure you've had this. think every listener out there has had this who is a farmer or a gardener. You have this vision. You  see the potential of that barren undeveloped property. And I guess I had that gestaltish moment where I...
15:21I saw this barren piece of land with no plants or trees and I saw this  garden that  had mature trees and it supported wildlife  and  it  nurtured our souls.  And I said, heck with it. I'm buying this quote unquote garbage lot and the two next to it where all the garbage was. And my husband and I over the course of the last few years have  far too many blisters  or bad.
15:50But anyway, yeah, we  created this garden on three acres and now thankfully it's full of life  and beautiful perennials that come and go and raccoons.  You  know, all kinds of critters.
16:08Yeah, the critters keep it interesting. That's what I'm going with.  That's good word for it. It keeps us on our toes, doesn't it?  You know, it's always an experiment, isn't it? You  you try to figure out what's going to grow this here or what's going to eat what, but  it's nice. That's what nature's about, right?  Yeah, the second summer we were here, we had a doe that showed up  just after my husband planted seedlings.
16:36And she ate the tops, just the very, very tippy tops of the seedlings all along the row. And my husband came in and he was like,  there's deer prints in the garden. And I said, are there any plants left?  And he said, yes. said, that witch, and he used a different word,  ate the very tippy tops off of every single seedling in the back row.
17:02And I said, well, will they come back? He said, yeah. He said, if she doesn't eat the rest of them.  And don't you find too,  if I don't know if they come back, but some years they'll eat, like go through my petunias or whatever. And the next year they don't touch them. And it's so interesting because I think I'm able to at least sometimes outsmart the deer because I know which ones tend, which plants rather, tend to be, you know, more deer resistant. And it's like,
17:31Uh, no, just like humans have our personalities. I find the rabbits and the deers and the chipmunks, you everybody has their own taste. So it's like, it's always, it's always hidden. Yeah. Well, we think the same doe came back the next spring, but she had a fawn with her and I got to see it.  And I was like, you can eat everything in the garden as long as you bring that baby back every morning. I don't care.  That's right. I know. I know. And
17:59I mean, how can you resist that, right? I mean, if you truly love nature, you have to realize that's nature. So you have to be flexible and just know it's all good. Just all good.
18:15Yeah, and you said you've listened to some of my episodes. If you have, you know that I am a sucker for babies. Baby animals are my favorite thing on the earth.  I know  it's the eyes. Well, it's not just the eyes. It's their little bodies. But when they look at you with those  eyes,  it just melts me every time.  I hear you. Yeah, we have a picture of our dog  at
18:44she was exactly eight weeks old. So she was the little puppy  and she's sitting on the couch and she was only five pounds  and she's looking directly into the camera lens  and  she is the cutest, sweetest, most adorable thing I've seen in forever in that picture.  She's almost five now  and there are times when she lays in a certain position where she's facing me  and I see that little puppy face still and I'm like,
19:13Oh my God, you're never going to lose this. It's your eyes. It's her eyes that give me that thing. So you're right.  Oh,  that's right. And the love,  always  have to bite my tongue sometimes when I  speak with colleagues or some other scientists  and they talk about how some animals,  not some animals, animals don't feel love in the same way humans do, or they don't express emotion or  don't feel depression, et cetera, et cetera.
19:43I bite my tongue because I, you know, it's been proven more and more that that's just false.  And  I think anybody who is an animal lover wants to sit here and go,  no,  that's absolutely categorically not true. Yes, in very clear layman's terms for me, if someone said that to me, I'd be like, my ass, they don't love like humans do.
20:09Thank you. You said it far more eloquently than me. wanted to say something much stronger, but you, that was perfect.  Uh-huh. My, my dad taught me really well. He is a very educated man. is  very bright  and has every word known to man stocked in his brain.  But he always says that sometimes his fair word is the correct word. Well, you're absolutely right. And you know, have studies now that have proven that people
20:36who occasionally swear, whatever occasionally means,  have better mental health  and have less anger, anxiety, et cetera, than people who don't utter the odd colorful word. And I thought, well,  I should be pretty healthy.  Oh, me too, darling. I'm right there with you.  And  I'm actually worse with inflection than I am with swearing. Like, if I am really angry,
21:03I am going to find exactly the right word. It will not be a cuss word. And the inflection on it will make it sound like worse than any swear word I've ever uttered in my entire life. Oh, that's right. And I'm trying to, oh, it's escaping me, I wasn't there a show or it was a book, something, but they talked exactly about that. They, I think it was a woman and she was from the South. And of course, growing up, you know, her, her upbringing was very proper and she was not allowed to swear.
21:33But boy, could she say like butterfingers in a way that you knew that that meant that  F off was there.  It was just perfect. And I thought, how wonderful is that? Yeah, I love the Southern God bless her heart thing that they say. It just makes me giggle every time someone says it.  that can mean so many things, right? mean, it's perfect.  Yeah, I'm really actually thankful I did not grow up in the South because
22:03I feel like Southern bells are  the best at the sarcastic insult without ever saying anything technically wrong.  agree. I agree. And that's been actually something that I have learned about Kentucky. And it's been wonderful where we live here in Northern Kentucky. We're right at the intersection of Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio,  and really about
22:2925  minutes away from Cincinnati.  So  it's a very sort of Midwest accent, so to speak. But if you go like even half an hour, 40 minutes south toward Louisville, Lexington,  that lovely, lovely Southern drawl kicks in with a lot of the sayings that you're talking about. And I'm always,  I'm always delighted to go down there because it's like kind of a whole other world. I'm always smiling and learning all kinds of new.
22:59new phrases.  Yes. And let's not imply that Southern bells only say cutting things. They don't. I'm sure that there are lovely women who live in the South who say flattering, wonderful things that they mean too.  Well, of course, of course. But that's one of the beauties of our country, I think, is when you  travel to the various areas and you see these marvelous cultures and  these  traditions. It just is  so rich.
23:28And I just think it makes our life  so much more full.  It's lovely.  It really is. And since we're talking about things being said certain ways and picking up on ways people talk,  the name of your place is Mother Nature's Apprentice.  And when I saw that, was like,  ooh, I love that.  And the reason that I love that is because I refer to myself as a kitchen witch because I love to cook.
23:56I could just as easily be a kitchen apprentice. mean, you know, same dip.  But when I was a kid,  I used to love to spend time in the woods because I grew up in the pine woods of Maine.  And  my mother would say, what did you do all day? And I would be like, oh, I just woodwitched it all day.  And she's like, what does that mean? And I'm like,  I'm a woodwitch. I spend all my time hiking.
24:22dubbing around in the creeks and walking out the lake. I said, I'm just a Woodwich. And she was like, I think you might be. That is, I love that. I've not heard Woodwich before. So if you don't mind, I may actually coin that. would attribute to you, of course, but that's perfect. You know, I got to tell you, you may be in Minnesota, but we should hang out because I think I think we would.
24:50Best friends, because you're right. mean, that's  my happy place. You put me out in the garden or the woods and just want her. Want her, want her. I mean, I would love it. I love it. Yep. I was really lucky. grew up in basically  they have a thing called the pine barrens in Maine.  And we weren't in the pine barrens, but we were surrounded by white pine trees everywhere.
25:18And we had a beautiful lake about a mile and a half behind my house. So you could either walk out through the woods or you could take a dirt road that went out to the lake. And I did both all the time. And we also had a really beautiful creek about half a mile from our house. So I had the best of all worlds growing up. It was fabulous.  Oh, so did you grow up in, in Maine? take it. that how you did? Yes.
25:45Wow, good for you.  Marty and I went to Bar Harbor  and I had to a talk up in that area. We just drove around and  my gosh, I  fell in love with the Northeast. It was just, it's almost a  spiritual place. I loved it. And I meant to ask you, listening to you, have you been out to the West Coast with  the Redwoods yet?  No, and probably won't ever because I don't love to travel.
26:15I love where I live.  Well, I can relate to that because it's crazy traveling today.  Oh my gosh, the airports don't get me started. But Marty and I did.  I had never been there.  And  we flew to San Francisco and then rented a car.  I have to tell you, Mary, it was spiritual. I don't even know if I can articulate.
26:40I mean, we've all seen the photos of these beautiful giant trees and you know, how massive they are when you're standing next to them. But to actually witness that and to stand there was, I  cried.  It literally brought me to tears.  I actually, I think I posted it on the website. I'm hugging  one of these massive trees. And of course it's dwarfing me, but  the thing that struck me was not only their beauty,
27:10and their height, but the quiet was  stunning.  And as big as these trees are, apparently they're close together because their root systems are shallow and they intersect with each other and it strengthens them right as they're rooted in the ground, which I didn't know. But  it  was something. So there's any way I could just transport you with Star Trek technology, I will send you there.
27:41Uh huh.  Yup. And I don't know if you know about this, but there are trees in Maine called, well, there used to be, I don't know if there are any left, but there used to be pine trees  called the King's Pines.  And they were, you were forbidden to cut these pine trees because they used them for the, the mast posts in the King's ships back before America was America. And
28:07I've seen one in my lifetime. My dad knew where they are and they have like a symbol carved into their trunk that shows that they're a king's pine.  Whoa. Okay. I'm marking this down. It's called a king's pine. King's pine. I'll have to look that up. I have never heard that, but good. And so there are still trees that are marked and you can't hurt them. Is that what you're saying?  You can't cut them. You are not allowed to cut them. You will be fined.
28:37Lots of money.  But  I don't know if there's any still standing because it's been a good 25 years since I saw one. So I don't know.  But I feel like, I feel like, yes, you and I could be best friends forever. That would be great. But I feel like I was meant to talk to you today because the, the love and the appreciation that I hear in your voice for the earth is just ringing.
29:04And part of the reason I started the podcast is because I wanted to give people a platform  to talk about the things that they do,  why and how they do them and what they love. And you are fitting right in because  you are doing things to promote, protect the earth.  And  we homesteaders and farmers are all trying to do that too in our own ways.  Well, that's very kind. And you know what?
29:33I'm glad that came through because I  do.  I don't know how to describe it. I just feel probably like you and probably most of your listeners out there have this deep, innate love  and connection with the natural world.  And  it's something  difficult to share, but you know it because you  can feel it  and  we need more of it. And I love, I meant to tell you too, I love...
30:02the name of your podcast and blog because I thought about the word homesteader.  And I thought, you know, I know in the traditional sense,  it  brings up this image of  pioneers and  the American West, et cetera,  and people living off the land, which is of course what homesteading is all about. But I think the beauty of that word is that it has evolved.
30:29And, you know, homesteaders, you're right, can be someone who maybe even has a small plotter, is trying  to live sustainably with  a balcony  full of  plants or food for their families or for  their well-being.  And  I think it's more a mindset than  sort of a place because it  has to do with, think, I hope I'm saying this right, sort of our mindful connection and our place within.
30:58the natural world and appreciation for  life.  And I think what you're doing is great. And thank you. Thank you so much for giving me and others a platform.  We need  to help each other and get the word out and do what we can to protect this  incredible, wondrous world that we live in. Yes, absolutely.
31:22don't for one second think that I'm that selfless. I also wanted to talk to people who were doing some of the things that we're doing here because I was lonely.  But that's okay and that's beautiful, right? Because  it is really at the end all about connection, isn't it? With each other and with other living things and well,  something bigger, however you define that.  that's actually nice to hear. was great that you're honest about that.
31:53Yeah, I needed to be able to be like, we got chickens and we got our first little tiny egg and have other people get it. Because you say that to somebody who lives in the city and buys their eggs at Whole Foods and they're like, what do you mean a little tiny egg? Yes, yes. And we've all been there. I'm sure we have all been there. People look at you like, you're one of those, what is it called? Woo woo, those crazy, you know, out there people. And it's like, no, no, that's not what we're.
32:23talking about it  and it's hard to explain. If you don't get it, you're not going to get it, right? Yep. I say that all the time. Oh good. And I try to be patient with people, know, not,  I didn't know half the stuff I know right now, 25 years ago about how all this stuff works. I had no idea. Cause you can only know what you know at the time with what you've experienced. And so
32:51When I talked to my, well, it's okay. I'm on tell a story because I need to tell a story. My best friend in high school, when we graduated, she went on to become a business major in college. That's what she wanted to do. And we were best friends. Like we were at each other's houses all the time. And I went on to move in with a guy that I probably shouldn't have married and have a daughter. And I called my best friend.
33:19a week or so after my daughter was born and I was high, you know, you have kids and you're in love and  y'all want to tell the world about this wonderful thing you created like no one's ever done it before. And  she politely listened and she was like, I'm so happy you're happy, blah, blah, blah. I gotta go. And I'm like, okay, good. Love you. Bye.  When she had her daughter, she called me about a week after she had her daughter and she said,  Mary, she said,
33:46I am so sorry that I was so  short with you when you had your daughter.  And I'd forgotten about it.  And I said, okay.  She said, I had no idea how in love I was going to be when I had my first baby and I didn't understand. And that's the biggest, I don't know, example I can come up with with you can't know what you don't know until you know it.
34:16That's right. That's right. And you know, I'm, wish you could see me now because I'm smiling and I'm nodding as you're speaking because I agree the same thing happened to me with, with kids. Um, but even with the study I did, I, I, I was getting just disillusioned, guess is a good word with the wellness model, so to speak, because so many people are still so depressed, so sad, you know, chronic diseases are still a problem. So I.
34:46You know,  I researched all this stuff and then I thought, okay, I'm going to find out  what's going on. What are we missing? Where are the gaps in the literature?  And so I did the study and the results were great. But you know, Mary,  what hit me was what came back that those individuals and it was international, was across, you know, gender and demographics of, you know, country boundaries and age  and, you know,  economic status.  And those people had scored highest in wellbeing.
35:16were those that spent the most time and most frequency in nature.  They appreciated this extraordinary ordinary, I guess,  that we're talking about, you know,  the feeling of holding your baby for the first time  or even the hand of someone you love for the last time, the power of that and all these things that we're talking about and they get it. You know, they understand how powerful the emotion of wonder.
35:45is in the notion of joy, not happiness, right? Joy. And  so I get these results and I thought, yes,  you know, this is what I had hoped. But you know, as a researcher,  you can't bias the study, right? So you just have to report the facts. So  I thought, oh my gosh, am I doing the statistics wrong?  So I sent them out. I sent them out to independent statisticians.
36:13who know far more than I did. And I said, could you crunch these numbers? And can you tell me what I'm finding? Is that what's really going on here? And they went, yeah, this is what we're missing. People,  we're not connecting with nature like we did even 10 years ago, get alone 50.  Technology, we're sitting at computers and  social media.  don't get me started on how dangerous and negative that can be,  And on and on, but you hit it right on the head.
36:43It's  we need to get back to well-being  and  the joy and the wonder of common sense  and what really matters, right, for a wholehearted joyful life.
36:59I agree completely with what you just said and I'm going to add to it.  I feel like we have gotten so far away from feeling our feelings. I understand that you don't want your child to throw a tantrum in the middle of Target because they didn't get a toy. But the feeling that your child is feeling is valid. And even as an adult, you know, if something goes wrong, you and it hurts you, you are allowed to sit down and cry about
37:29It is fine.  Absolutely.  And I, again, I'm going to give you a big hug over the phone right now, because that was another huge thing about  the wellness problem. Why it's not serving us right now.  For things I don't even have to go into next. But wellness and happiness have sort of co-opted into one big thing. This whole  search for happiness, chase happiness.
37:57has  actually made us sick.  And it's making us unhappy because what it's doing is exactly what you're saying. It's blunting  the natural  spectrum, I guess, of being able to express and feel the full spectrum of emotion, right? Because we're supposed to be happy all the time. And  if you can't do that, if you can't be angry, if you can't be sad when you really need to be sad, you feel guilt.
38:27And then this whole toxic positivity thing starts to go on and it's very difficult to break.  And I actually talk about that in the book, how we have to kind of jump off that hamster wheel. This whole happiness wellness hamster wheel is  not healthy and we need to stop it. Yes. And maybe your book can help people figure out how to stop  the hamster wheel from spinning in that direction. I  haven't read it yet because it's not out till next month.
38:57But I hope it does. And I understand that people have jobs and they need to go to work and they need to behave like quote unquote normal human beings and do their job  and not let their feelings interfere. I get all that. It's fine. But I also feel like if you spend your whole life stuffing your feelings, what happens is that you get stuffed to full and then you explode in some way. That's not good either.
39:27You're absolutely right.  You're absolutely right.  And the whole key of course is to,  well, again, don't get me started, but it also dovetails into resilience. When you talked about, you know, the kids, when we tell our kids to not feel this or you have to feel that, you know, it's okay to fall down. You know, it's okay to be disappointed and it's okay to lose whatever that means because, you know, what that does is it teaches us how to bounce back and
39:56And a great analogy is like, again, going back in nature, mean, trees  get stronger from thunderstorms and being  in heat and wind. You know, they grow stronger roots and they grow taller when they're in difficult and various environmental situations.  You can apply that same adage to humans in many ways. We need those to learn so our brain can develop new ways to figure out how the heck to get around that, should we encounter that again.
40:26Yes, exactly. And part of the reason that I  love the choice that we've made or we made five years ago, almost today,  to move to our homestead, to  buy land and have a homestead, is that  here  we have the opportunity to embrace nature and grow a garden and have chickens and have home,  farm fresh eggs, basically.
40:53If I need to go outside and yell because something is wrong, I can step outside and yell and no one gets mad at me.  I love it. But you're right. Right? I mean, that is, that's your little piece of heaven and  it's, oh my gosh, I wish I could see your place. It sounds gorgeous.  It just sounds so healthy and so peaceful. And I can hear it in your voice too. You clearly love what you're doing  and  you love where you're living and it's
41:22It's wonderful when you hear that,  when anybody hears that in  someone's voice. So good for you. I'm very happy for you. Thank you. I'm really happy for me too. You have no idea how long  we planned and thought and dreamed for this place.  My husband and I have been together 22 years, 23 years this fall. And I think within the first three years of being together, we were like, okay, someday we're going to have
41:51acreage and we're going to have chickens and we're going to have a big garden and we're going to have apple trees and we have apple trees, Pam. Oh my God, we have apple trees.  Oh my God.  So this was manifested  long before it came to be. And I probably sound like a fanatic when I talk about it, but we are so happy here. Like  never been happier in a location in my life other than the house I grew up in.
42:19It's not fanatical. All what I'm hearing is joy. I'm hearing joy in your voice and that's that is obvious. And, know, again, when you're when you're in that place where you're in a healthy relationship and a healthy environment, it everything truly does fall into fall into place. And that doesn't mean that your life is perfect. I mean, there are bumps in the road. Crap happens. You know, it it it happens. It's life. But
42:50You know,  the joy part of it is what sustains us. And that's why it's different than happiness, right? Because when those mountains, those bumps in the road come, you you go, this  stinks, this really stinks. But you know,  I'm gonna make it through this,  whatever that means, and it's gonna be okay. And you feel, I think the word is blessed, maybe because, you know, of...
43:16religion or spirituality, however you want to define it. But I say that to Marty too. I feel blessed  and  joyful. And I hear that in you. I just love it. Yeah, I always say whatever doesn't kill us, it's going to make us stronger even though we might want to die. That's right.  Yep.
43:39Yeah, I've been there, done that. I hear you. And I think everybody out there, you know, they can relate. I mean, no one has a charmed life. Everybody, no matter how wonderful it is, you know, you're going to wake up the next morning and God forbid, you're going to find a breast mass or someone you love is going to get sick or pass on and, you know, you're going to lose your job, whatever. But, you know, that's life. That's the journey, right? And you have to embrace it. And that's what wholehearted living is, I believe, right?
44:10Yes. And that's,  that's exactly what's missing in a lot of people's lives. They're not living wholeheartedly. They're just getting through each day. And  I don't want to sound Pollyanna-ish, even though I always do, but it would be really cool if people would get to live  their lives, like really fully live. That's right. That's right.  And that's, that's the
44:36The problem though, I think, we  are, you hit it in the head, we're surviving often, but we're not thriving. I  was given a  quote recently, and if you can indulge me, I want to read it because it resonates with exactly what you said.  And it was a quote from the Dalai Lama, and I may misquote it, so forgive me a little bit. But  he was asked  what surprised him most about humanity.
45:04And he responded quickly and said, man. And when asked why, he said, well, because he sacrifices health in order to make money. And then he sacrifices money to race after health. And then he is so  anxious about the future that he doesn't enjoy the present. And sadly, the result is that we neither live in the present or the future.  But then he dies never having ever really lived.
45:35And I probably butchered that because I'm certainly not the Dalai Lama,  but I thought, isn't that the truth? We just don't get it until it's too late.
45:48Yes, I think I've read that before and went, yup, exactly. That is exactly what people do. Yep. Yep. All right, Pam, we're at like 45 minutes. try to keep you my gosh. But that's fine. Where can people find you? Okay. My blog is mothernaturesapprentice.com. It has a Facebook site and a website.
46:18I guess my  author's side, suppose I should give that now. It's just  pamstevenslanebauer.com and that's Stevens with a P-H.  Do I have to spell the name because it's kind of hard to pronounce? I can spell it for you. It's L-E-H-E-N-B-A-U-E-R. Yes, thank you.com.  And yeah, I'm listening to you and
46:45all this wonderful stuff you're inspiring me to do a podcast. So I may start to do that a bit more, but  thank you.  I can't thank you enough for this opportunity,  lovely to talk with and I love your voice as I told you before we started and I love your podcast. So thank you. Well, thank you for all that. You're making me blush  and  thank you for your time, Pam. I appreciate it. And as always, people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com.
47:15Pam, I hope you have a great day. You too. Thanks, Mary. Bye.
 

The Dorr Family Farm

Today I'm talking with Amy and James at The Dorr Family Farm.
 
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Amy at Dorr Family Farm in Whitefield, New Hampshire.  Good evening, Amy.  Again, I'm all confused on time. Sorry.  How are you?  I'm good. How are you? I'm good. You said your husband is there and I of course blanked his name already. Yeah, have James, my husband James with me.
00:29James is with us too. So we have a couple to talk to tonight.  Have you guys been getting a ton of rain? Yeah, way too much.  Today too?  A little bit. Okay. All right.  My folks live in Maine and they have done nothing but  tell me how much rain they have gotten this spring. So I assumed  with you being in New Hampshire that it would be the same thing. Yeah, it's been, the ground is really wet.
00:58We still have the remnants of vernal pools that are usually not still present this time of year.  A little bit. Trying to get into it a little more. Well, this year must be hard because it's taken my dad 10 plus years to put in  this garden this year. That's how it feels anyway.  Okay, so I looked at your Facebook page and Door Family Farm has been around for a long time.
01:28So tell me about yourself and what you guys do. So yeah, this place has been here for a really long time. We've been here 13 years. So the farm has been in my husband's family for now eight generations. And it started out in the 1800s. My husband's, let's see, great.
01:57Great. Many greats. Many great. Grandfather settled here from Canada and just started like a small, he was alone and he had a little shack and he just, you know, worked the land and the house that stands today was built in the 1800s as well as the barn. And we just kind of ended up here. It wasn't in the plans.
02:28That happens. hear that a lot. Yeah. Are you from New Hampshire? Well, I was born in Massachusetts, but I lived in New Hampshire most of my life. Moved here when I was about five years old. Okay. I'm just not picking up on any New England accent at all. And I was like, maybe she didn't grow up in New Hampshire, but okay.
02:54Okay, so what do you guys do at the farm? It's a farm, so I'm assuming it supports itself? Well, it definitely doesn't support itself. Oh, no. No. So we hold full-time jobs. I'm a nurse and James is an independent IT consultant. The farm once did support itself. It has gone...
03:22through many different changes over the years.  At one point it was a strawberry farm  and at another point it was a potato farm.  Before that it was a dairy farm.  So it's always been a farm of some sort.  And when we came here, it was not in the plans and we sort of ended up here  through happenstance. The house
03:52has been in the family for generations and it  was about to be sold.  We didn't want that to happen, so we bought it.  We moved here with no plan.  We've consistently  raised chickens the entire time we've been here. That's been the constant. At  one time, this place  provided all the food for the families that were here.
04:21And we'd like to  tap into that and get back to some of that. Okay. Awesome.  And I think I saw something about a hip camp. You guys offer that? Yes. Yep. So we rent campsites on the property in the field and woods area in the back.  And it's just kind of a little very minimal effort thing that we offer.  And we've been doing it for a few years now.  This year has started off kind of slow.
04:50I think things are weird, but  last year we were able to pay almost all of our property taxes with our hip camp income. So I feel like that's  a win.
05:02Okay. So for people who don't know,  hip camp is sort of like Airbnb only for camping, right? Exactly. Yeah. And it's like rustic, undeveloped camping. So  you're not going to get a fancy bath house or a pool.  We rent to a lot of people who arrive on bicycle, actually, traveling across the Cross New Hampshire Trail,  which starts in Woodsville, New Hampshire, goes to Bethel, Maine.  So we just hosted one the other night. We rarely ever see them.  It's kind of a...
05:33just a really private, rustic camping experience.  So  we came up with that as a way to kind of utilize the land because it's just kind of sitting here and it's very minimal effort. And sometimes we meet some really neat people, but a lot of times we never see them, which is great.  So it's easy. It's almost passive income. Exactly. Yeah, very much so. I'm a big fan of passive income.
06:02I am. think that  if you can provide a service that doesn't require a whole lot of effort on your part,  you should do it.  definitely. I agree. That's why we started it. I kind of talked my husband into it.  Yeah, the closest we have to passive income here is we have a farm stand on our property right off of the driveway. Yeah.  And I have a Venmo  QR code thing out on  the bulletin board out there.
06:31and we have a little container for cash  and people pull in, they get eggs, they get veggies, they get candles or soap or lip balms and they leave. Yeah. And I love it because it's like a little surprise at the end of the day when we go out to see who bought what, you know? Yeah. Yeah. We also have a little farm stand, mostly just eggs. So, but I would like to move into more things, but it takes time.  Yeah. Yes, it does.
07:00Speaking of time, my husband just  spent an hour, I can't talk tonight, don't know what's up,  spent an hour picking black raspberries in our tree line.  And  I'm going to be making a black raspberry pie tomorrow from wild black raspberry bushes that we didn't have to pay for. am so excited about this. That's That is excellent. Yeah, like  we have a blueberry patch that has been here forever and same thing. It's like you walk out the back door and it's just right there.
07:30It's awesome. It's not blueberry season yet, right?  No, not yet. Not yet. Another couple weeks? Yeah. Yeah.  Yup. I ate a lot of blueberry cake in my day when I was growing up in Maine because we had blueberries everywhere. Yeah.  Okay. So  I understand you both have full-time jobs,  but  do you have dreams for the farm? I mean, have you talked about what you would like to expand into?
08:00Yeah. So like my vision is I've always,  when we moved here,  first of all, there  used to be a lot more land here.  Over the years, a lot was subdivided and sold off.  So we have a remaining five acre parcel  with the original barn and farmhouse,  which five acres is still a pretty usable amount of land.  So my  thought since we arrived here is that I wanted to be able to
08:28use the land and kind of be home more  and try to find a way to make a living off of it.  Well, is it wooded or is it pasture or what is it? Yeah. So it's about,  it's probably,  yeah, it's about three quarters pasture and about  a quarter of it is wooded. Okay.  Well,
08:55Do you want some ideas from a lady who spends a lot of time talking to people who have farms and homesteads?  Sure.  Okay. If you have a lot of woods, I assume you have a lot of underbrush in your woods. We do. Yeah.  Goats are great for that. They will eat  all the low lying bushes  instead of grass. They don't love grass.  Goats are a great, great thing because you can use them for meat.
09:24You can use them for milk and the milk you can make cheese. You can drink the milk. You can make  goat butter from the  milk fat  and you can make goat milk. So they're like the perfect animal for the situation you're in. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely, know some people that have goats and I think that the time requirement and having to be home is kind of tough.  So Mary, this is James.
09:53So four legged, four legged farm animals are not in our future.  Oh no.  We like to go away and we like to do things. I think part of the vision of this farm is going to be,  you know, something that's a little more self-sustainable,  a little more intelligent. You know, there's a lot of small craft things you can do.  And,  and with animals,  they require that you're here, you know, all the time.
10:22And we have a little system set up for our chickens where they can sustain for a few days. you know, it's challenging running a farm in 2025 because you're not as necessary to the community. don't think as people fit, know, the perception of how necessary you are is different than it was, let's say, 100 years ago. So we're still trying to figure out where we fit in with this whole thing.
10:51And that's the challenge. Amy likes to  bring people here.  And I'm completely opposite.  I like people coming to my farm stand, and that's it.  Property.  But Amy brings people  and she's trying a bunch of different things as well. And I guess the point comes in that it's just to be innovative is the only way to really sustain something like this because the old models that we
11:20know of are gone  for a lot of us. including your farm where it's, you know, it's, difficult,  especially with, you know, her being a nurse and I'm a systems engineer.  And I hear quite a bit, but it's still, challenging to be here and, you know, deal with all the other nuances of life and your work. So those are our challenges in this farm.  And we're at some point, hopefully we're going to figure out what, that looks like for us.
11:50I understand completely. That's why I started a podcast so I could talk to people who were doing all the things that I would like to be doing, but we don't have room on our little homestead.  Oh, got it.  So we have a friend who drives around with a,  um,  Amy helps out with these events and the common. And one of them was there was a vendors. can't, I think it was a fall event  and this woman
12:14My daughter had to go to her house to get her goats because her car broke down and she had like a little petting station. So, my daughter had what? Six goats in her little Subaru. since then she's,  I think, raised her flock a little bit bigger. And  so she goes around and  she hires them out to eat patches of  sumac or poison ivy or whatever's out there.
12:44And that's just showing you how people have to be super innovative in 2025 to run a farm and actually make enough money to at least sustain it. You know, with those services. absolutely. And I wasn't saying you need to get goats because I would love to have goats. I shutter it for every time somebody says...
13:09Yeah, and with our farm, just, you know, every time somebody mentions four-legged animals, I'm just like, I panic inside because it makes me feel like I'd be just, I wouldn't be able to leave. I wouldn't be able to go away with my family, go to a music festival, go camping for a weekend, because of the animal. So that's our challenge with that. Yeah.
13:32Okay, then gardens are probably out too because you kind of can't leave a garden for a week at a time when it's high growing season.  Which is partially true. also, I'm  working on irrigation and learning about irrigation right now  because we got a lot of water on our property.  so that is partially true, but  it's also,  you know, we don't go away for that long.
14:00I don't like going away for that long. We usually go away for a couple, few days. You know, there's always somebody, one of my children here who can water.  and, and, as if we did bigger gardens,  um, and they started to evolve into just larger entities. Yeah, that would be, that would definitely be challenging. Uh, at that point we're kind of tied to the property of the summer.  Um, you know, just watching for pests or whatever. Um, you know, just have to be a part of it all the time. So absolutely.
14:30Yep.  We don't go anywhere here because  we're tied to the farm because of the chickens and the dog and the barn cats and the garden.  And luckily when we bought this place, one of the prerequisites when we were looking for our forever place was that it had to be a place we didn't want to leave.  And we found it and we love it and we just don't leave. mean,
14:55I, we went to my mom's 75th birthday party, like in 2021, and my son stayed here and took care of the chickens and the cats and the dog. And we were only gone for four days, like, like two, five days, four days of two days of hard driving a day and a half there and two days back from Minnesota to Maine. Wow. Yep.
15:22Yep. And I tried everything I could to get out of going to her birthday party because I knew it was going to be  nuts.  And then all of a sudden I was like, no, we need to go. Like in my heart, I knew we had to be there. so we went.  okay. So tell me about your  house because houses that old don't really last as long as yours have. So tell me about your 1800s. Yeah. So that's a really good question.  I
15:49I attribute the fact that the house is still standing  to the  strength and grit and perseverance of everyone who has lived here. We've been doing work on the house over the past 13 years and when you start peeling back the layers, you can see where people put a lot of care into things.  I think the fact that the same family has always been here  makes it really special.
16:19They don't make houses like this anymore.  On that note, when we purchased the house, when we first got here, we were just trying to wrap our heads around this kind of property, which took a long time.  There was a large pine tree off the back of the barn that was growing  and it was hanging over the backside of the barn and it had created some rot.
16:47Then we started to notice water coming in in the attic of our house. So we decided if we're going to keep this house and we're going to do this, we need to put new roofs on both structures. our first major construction  project was putting a metal roof on both buildings.  and,  but, you know, otherwise the house is really built well. There's there's it's good bones.  We've had to insulate it. There was no insulation in the house when we moved in.
17:16We've so we've been doing a little bit of work. We're upgrading the electric next next week  And just trying to move through and make our mark on it like the people before us Okay, yes, I have I have some specific questions about your house. I assume it's been built on to  um  it's so  The the house  is it's it's a Victorian
17:45like folk Victorian farmhouse style.  But there is a back  L that's more of a Cape.  James's aunt passed away a couple years ago and she was able to tell us a lot of stories because she grew up here. And apparently the back section was the original house, which had  been renovated. They added dormers, they raised the roof.  So there's been many different changes and renovations over the years. And it's kind of like
18:15kind of fun  to learn about it because it's sort of like an archaeological dig. can kind of  look at where the old roof line was on the back section.  right now, James is working on a project trying to  fix the sagging roof in the back section.  But all in all,  you know,  it's nice having the stories  from his aunt because we kind of have a picture of how things came to be.
18:42She told us the story about how the original house used to be down the hill by the river.  And apparently it was rolled up the hill on logs by Oxen.  Wow. Yeah. Like it's just neat. It's neat. But none of the house has been modernized. I think the most recent renovation was in the  1950s when there's a summer kitchen in the back L  and they built a 1950s Betty Crocker kitchen in the main house in the 50s.
19:12and a bathroom downstairs. So those are the last renovations or upgrades that have really been done.  Okay, cool.  My house is over 100 years old here in Minnesota  and they remodeled it completely the year before we saw it, we knew it was here.  You would never  know this house is that old. is so, I swear to God, every corner is plump.
19:41They remodeled it so beautifully. I keep trying to find someone who knows what it looked like before we moved in or before they did the remodel because  there used to be a bedroom downstairs and they remodeled it to where that bedroom is now part of the living room.  And they took some of the space from that little bedroom and made it into a walk-in closet, like storage closet with  hooks for hoes and things.
20:10It's so weird to me that I walk in and it looks like a brand new house and I know the house is over 100 years old. Yeah. So this place hasn't been altered.  It's in the same footprint and floor plan as it was when it was built,  which is kind of neat.  There's a butler's pantry in the summer kitchen. There's a  root cellar in the basement,  which  came complete with  canned goods dating back to the 60s when we moved.
20:39Oh my. Yeah, that was a fun cleaning project.  Yeah, it's pretty neat.  Yeah, it was back when people actually cooked and preserved food and did the things that you did then. Yeah, for sure.  It was a simpler way of life. It was not easier, but it was simpler. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so we hope that, I mean, we're...
21:03We're like around 50, the two of us. Our youngest kid is 14 and we kind of look to the future of like sort of retirement time when we can focus on just being here. And I think that is kind of what we're looking forward to as far as doing more farming kind of stuff. I love the fact that you're doing the hip camp thing because at least then people get to enjoy part of your land. Yeah. And that's why we do it. We get great people.
21:32It's, you know, it's carry in, carry out, leave no trace and people truly do not leave a trace.  Um,  it's nice. Yeah. All our guests have been very respectful.  Fabulous because you don't want disrespectful guests. would be  terrible. No,  no, no.  Um, I swear I read something on the listing for that, that you guys have bears in New Hampshire.
22:01Oh, yes.  Yeah, they're black bears. They're, they're, mostly harmless. Yeah, they're more afraid of you than you are, you know.  And we don't  often,  we have dogs, and that kind of deters them. But I did see one a couple weeks ago. I think he was just lost.  That happens.  Yeah, the, have you seen any baby bears at all? Sometimes when you're like driving down the street,  sometimes
22:28I've seen them, yeah, but not here, not in my place. There's a lot of dogs in this neighborhood, so you generally don't see, you'll see like a youth pass through and it's usually freaking out because the dogs are all barking everywhere.  And bears are terrified of dogs.  But  the problem with the bears is, you know, they might come around at night and you have people that are hip camping, a lot of them are not, and I'm not trying to generalize, but lot of them are usually not experienced campers.
22:55or experienced with the wilderness of New Hampshire. And so you will attract the black bear if you leave your food out. And that could lead to a potential engagement with an animal that, you know, could make a decision based on its dread on you and it could hurt you or it could damage your things. So we try to deter that. It's mostly to save the bear. mean, because a fed bear is a dead bear.
23:24Yeah, so I go into great detail in my hip camp listing about bear safety because we get a lot of travelers from the city who aren't quite acclimated to camping on undeveloped land.  So I just like to make sure they know what to expect.  Yes, you always want to hang your food in a bag from a tree branch that the bear can't get to. Exactly. And honestly, I'm not sure that matters because bears can climb trees.  can, yeah.
23:51Right now, this is a plentiful spring, so there's a lot of things growing in the woods. So bears generally are not looking for those easy meals unless it's just an opportunistic thing.  They're out in the woods, they're eating berries, they're eating the things they're supposed to be eating right now, and it's been such a wet spring that luckily they're not coming out of the woodwork. But if they were hungry, you know, that would bring...  We've had them on our porch before when we were  not putting our trash away properly. That invites them in.
24:21and we just want to protect them.  Good. I'm glad you want to protect the wildlife because those bears were there long before any humans showed up. So we should work. Definitely. All right, guys. Well, I'm going to actually cut this short because my dog is losing her mind outside. I don't know why.  So  I appreciate your time. Where can people find you?  So right now we just have a Facebook.  It's  the door family farm.
24:50D-O-R-R. Yeah, just on Facebook.  All right. Well, I really appreciate your time and thank you for talking with me about your old house because I love history and I love old houses. Thanks, And I wish you all the luck in pursuing whatever you want to do with this property because it has so much potential. Thank you so much.  As always, people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com.  You guys have a great night. Thank you. You too. Thanks, Mary. Bye-bye.
 

My Attempt At Homesteading

Today I'm talking with Jennifer at My Attempt At Homesteading.
 
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Jennifer at My Attempt at Homesteading in Missouri. Good evening, Jennifer. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. What's the weather like in Missouri today? Very warm. Yeah, here too. It's 81. I think you guys are hotter than we are though.
00:29Yeah, we've we've been in the  90s for the past week or so. Oh  I'm in Minnesota We had  four or five days of that a week or so ago and it was disgusting. I hated every second of it  Okay, so  I hate saying this because people get kind of  Miffed that we talked before the interview before before I started recording  You were saying you're a little bit nervous because you're new at this and I was trying to say but the connection was bad
00:58that you are exactly the kind of person I want to talk with because  the beginners are the ones that give the people who haven't even started yet  hope. So  tell me about yourself and your attempt at homesteading.
01:12Um, well, so I am a mother of two. my youngest just graduated last year. So, um, he still lives at home, but he's in, he's in college, so he's kind of doing his own thing. Um, my oldest, she just moved out earlier this year. Um, so it was one of those things that.
01:39You know, my kids are kind of grown up and doing their own thing. And I kind of didn't know what to do with myself.  So used to taking care of them and just,  you know, even though they were older, but them just being around and just, you know, doing stuff with them. And, you know, I kind of took a step back and realized that, you know, I was, you know, for so many years I'd been, you know, the band mom or the softball mom.
02:08the karate mom or the track mom or, you know, all those things.  when I kind of slowed down for a minute, I realized that I didn't know who I was anymore because,  you know, they weren't doing those things anymore.  And  I realized I had, you know, no hobbies or anything like that because  my life had revolved around my kids for so many years.  So basically I needed something to do something to occupy my time.
02:38So I don't know actually what specifically made me start looking at, you know, different things, but I think it was just one of those like on a whim, I was like, oh, this looks like fun. So I just started like looking at things and reading up on things and I started very simple, like.
03:06looking up different homemade spice mixes.  And I just kind of started with that.  And  basically over the winter was kind of when I started  trying to dabble with different things and trying to see what kind of mixes and things I could make from scratch.  because  at that point I'd never canned anything.
03:35Um, pressure canner scared me. I, you know, I thought I was going to blow up the house. So, um, it took me a couple months before I would even attempt to do that.  Um,  but yeah, I just started small and,  uh, mixes and that type of thing. Like,  uh, I had no idea. Like I was amazed, like, you know, brown sugar, you know, who even knew that that was sugar and molasses. Like I had no clue. I just thought brown sugar that it just.
04:05came like this. didn't know that. I didn't know you, you know, mix things together to make brown sugar. So, you know, it's definitely been a learning process and it's definitely, you know, I've discovered so many things and still, you every day learning something new. But baby steps, you know, every day just, I mean, I'm constantly Googling things and trying to figure out, know.
04:34How do I do this or how do I  turn this into something or how do I maximize? You know, if I have this ingredient, how do I, or this,  um,  you know, thing, how do I use up  the whole thing without any kind of waste? And, um, it's definitely been a fun process.  Um,  uh, I've definitely been using my family as guinea pigs.  Um, they've been there for.
05:04some of my successes and definitely a lot of my not so much successes.  But it's been fun. Yeah. You're not alone. I didn't know that brown sugar was just white sugar and molasses mixed together either until I found out about it on Google.  And  I'm not going to lie, I'm still afraid of our pressure canner and our pressure canner is still practically brand new. We bought it three years ago.
05:33My husband is not afraid of it. So when we're going to pressure can, he's the one that handles it. Because I just, every time I walk by that thing, I'm like, it's going to blow up. It's going to blow up.  So you're not alone. And we've been canning for four years now. So  we did the  water bath canning to begin with. And he was like,  we're going to do the pressure canner. And I was like,  And he's like, oh, yes, we are. I'm like, OK, fine. Fine. You're handling it. I want to do it. So.
06:02So you are not alone in that, Jennifer, I promise you.  Yeah, I did. I definitely started with the water bath canning first, and then I kept seeing other things that I wanted to can.  But I kept reading that, you know, oh, well, this needs a pressure canner.  So,  you know, too many things needed to be pressure canned. So I was like, OK, I'm going to have to eventually learn how to do this.
06:32Definitely the first several times, you know, I was, I probably looked ridiculous because, you know, decked out in like long sleeves and oven mitt, you know, cause I just knew it was going to like explode on me or something, you know, know, head turn, know, reaching as far,  you know, as I could to put the  valve thing on it. But, but yeah.  But it didn't explode.
07:02Not, not yet. We're here, but it's still a little daunting. Yeah. And I don't want to sound trite or silly, but we are capable of doing big things and overcoming fear is a big thing and you're working on it. So proud of you. also I feel like women are always told that we're not supposed to do big
07:30hard things we're supposed to let the men do them. And that's bullshit. We can do it too. Oh yeah.  We can do just as much if not more than guys can do. Yeah, especially when we're 25  and aren't afraid of anything.  I'm 55 now. I'm like, no, you can deal with the pressure canter, honey. I'm all good with that.  Okay. So are you urban, suburban, or rural?
07:59We're suburban, so you know, we live in a very populated area. We have a pretty good size backyard. They did just pass,  I would say within the last...
08:17within the past year,  they did say that we could have chickens,  which  intrigues me.  I, it's something that the thought of it sounds really fun, but chickens just low keys kind of scare me. So I don't know. Like I love the thought of having fresh eggs and I would love to have that, but
08:47I don't know, just the beaks and the feet and the flapping wings just kind of scare me. So I just don't know. I mean, that's another one of those fears that I just, I'm gonna have to overcome one day, I think, but maybe one day.
09:03Okay, for future reference, and I'm not saying you need to go get chickens today, but for future reference, if you want chickens,  there is a breed called  Issa Brown. They used to be Issa Red, I S as in Sam A Brown. And they're really gentle. They're really friendly. They only get to be about seven pounds full grown. And they give an egg a day if you have light in the coop in the wintertime. And
09:33I didn't want chickens either. I mean, I did, but I didn't. And we got four when we lived in town, in a small town. And they were great. They're quiet. They do this, I laid an egg call and it's crazy.  I can't replicate it.  I can do a hell of a rooster crow, but I can't do the I laid an egg call.  And  they talk to each other. It's like listening to a babbling brook. It's very sweet.
10:00So if you're looking for ones that aren't aggressive and like to be held and picked up and don't freak out, those are the ones you might want to look into. Okay. Yeah. I'll have to check that out because I just, yeah, they just kind of scare me.  it's funny because my parents actually have chickens, but they didn't start raising chickens until after I had moved out of the house. So my sister's
10:27kind of grew up with them  and so they're used to them but I'm not used to them so that's not something I was used to being around so even now when I go over there  I don't want to go into the chicken pen and play with the  chickens.  Well they're not bunnies they're chickens. Bunnies are fun to pet chickens are not fun to pet.  Yeah but I would love to have the eggs one day so like I said it's just
10:56It's one of those fears that I think I'm going to have to figure out one of these days, but  I'm still working on the canning stuff. you know, one, one thing at a time. Yes.  Baby steps.  Start small, think big. That's what I, what I keep hearing. Start small, think big. So you're, we're well on your way to being a homesteader. promise.  Um, do you have any gardens at all? Any gardening space?  Um, we do.
11:23So actually we have We have like an indoor indoor garden and we have an outdoor garden  Surprisingly enough our indoor garden was actually doing better than our outdoor garden We actually started a lot of plants inside and then we kind of just let them go
11:46And we had, cause we do have a lot of space downstairs and we have a whole room that we had set up with grow lights and everything. And I mean, we had cucumbers growing. I had picked like, I think five or six good sized cucumbers before we transplanted it outside. But yeah, we had cucumber plants growing. We had peppers. We had a tomato plant growing. All of our herbs and stuff.
12:16going inside. I had started a luffa plant just because it sounded fun. So yeah, we had actually quite a bit going inside. We took them outside. I think it kind of shocked them. I don't think they were very happy with us when we did that. So it took a little bit for it to, I don't know, I guess acclimate to the outside, but they're starting to come around.
12:45You know, the tomatoes are starting to produce  the cucumbers. We've gotten a couple off of it since  it's been outside.  So yeah, they're starting, it's starting to, it's starting to come around.  Is this your first time doing a garden?  No, we have done it in the past, but we hadn't really  started a lot inside.
13:12We usually would just  plant them outside. We usually would just buy the plants and then just plant them outside.  So this is our first time  starting them inside and then  bringing them outside.  So that part was new for us.  Good job. It's a trick. When you start stuff inside, you have to kind of harden the plants off before you put them out in the garden.
13:37We've been gardening for 20 years and my husband completely forgot about hardening off the tomato plants because he started them in the heated greenhouse. And so our tomato  plants almost died when we put them outside.  He came in like two days after he planted them, he said,  it's a good thing we still have tomato plants in the greenhouse. And I said, what ate our tomatoes? And he said, nothing. He said, I completely forgot. You're supposed to harden them off. He said, they're all brown. I was like, oh no.
14:06So even someone who's been doing it for 20 years can screw it up too, if that helps at all.  Yeah, we do have, um, this is our first year. We're starting to get some strawberries. Nice.  We do have strawberry plants. We've tried those for several years and, um, we would try those and just like planters and,  uh, you know, we'd get a few  like during the season and then they would always die off and then.
14:36We had read that if you plant them in the ground, they would come back. So we had planted some, but not realizing that  like the first year they don't really produce. So I was really disappointed that first year. But  now this is the first year that we're actually starting to get some actually produced. So it's been several years in the making, you several years of just trial and error, but I think this will be the year that we actually might get.
15:06you know, at least a good, you know, handful, probably not enough to, you know, have a, you know, a big batch of strawberry jelly or anything like that. But, you know, maybe a good basket full or so.
15:25More than just one bite maybe. It will be the best tasting strawberry you've ever had in your life. Yeah, we have gotten a couple already and yes, were very good. I always say grow it yourself. Every freaking time, yes, absolutely. And that's why we do this.
15:51The other thing that I will say to you and I will say to listeners is that patience is like the key quality or  as another word for it,  quality that people who are growing things need to have because  we planted asparagus crowns here four springs ago. It took until this spring to actually get enough asparagus picked from our  bed to have like three sides.
16:20of asparagus with three meals. So patience is a virtue and  I didn't used to be very patient.  am  now  and thank God because we put those crowns and I was like, yes, asparagus. And I was like, crap, it's going to be three years before we get any.  Yeah.  And I've heard that and  I need to, I need to just plant some, but that's why I have it. Cause I'm like, oh, it's going to be three years. But if I had just done that, you know,
16:50A couple years ago, we may have already had some by now, but every time I think about it, I'm like, oh, we won't even get any this year. It'll still be another, you know, three years, but I need to just do it though. Yeah. There's a saying about when's the best time to plant a tree a hundred years ago. When's the next best time to plant a tree yet now. And it's the same thing with asparagus. When's the best time to plant asparagus? Five years ago. When's the next best time? Right now. Yeah.
17:20And if you're gonna do it,  look on Google or ask someone who knows. I don't know if you're supposed to put them in in the spring or the fall. We put them in in the spring. So you'll have to ask somebody who knows more than I do about that one.
17:37Yeah, we did. I did say too, like we have a, we have a small garden. So, you know, I mean, enough to kind of get a few things here and there, but nothing like huge. I did say, you know, we may be just supporting some of our local, you know, our local farmers or some of our local, you know, um,
18:04What are they like produce stands that type of thing like  at the farmers market? Yeah  Absolutely, and if your garden really produces I bet there's somebody who has laying hens who has extra eggs and you can trade your produce for eggs Then you don't have to get any hens  Yeah, there you go  Because  as I'm always saying on the podcast if you're not gonna grow it or produce it
18:32Find someone local who is growing it and producing it and barter or give them your hard earned money because they're earning it.  Because a local economy is a good economy. Yes.  And I'm saying that to you, but I'm also saying it to anybody listening to the podcast. Anyone who isn't finding their local growers and producers right now  needs to be.  Absolutely.
19:02and there's a lot of reasons for that and I'm not going to get into it but just take my word for it. Go find out who makes things or grows things and get to know them  and support them because they're going to be really important over the next year or two. Yes, which is probably why I should be making a bigger garden but...
19:22You are starting out and you are learning things and you're doing a great job. Don't  do not sound like you're beating yourself up. You have nothing to beat yourself up about.  So I saw canning jars on your Instagram page and you said that you've been canning. So what have you tried your hand at canning?
19:43Um,  so  I've done a few different types of jellies.  Um, I've done different, different types of beans.  Um, I've done like,  um, like the different broths, like chicken broth, beef broth, vegetable broth,  um, which actually those come in, those come in handy and those definitely taste way better than, you know,
20:13store, store bought.  So much so too that, you know, my daughter, she'd even, she had called me and said, you know, hey, if I,  if I say this chicken carcass, will you,  will you make me some, some chicken broth? I was like,  yeah, that's sure. That's fine.  So she had saved like leftover chicken, chicken bones and stuff that they had had from, you know, a chicken that she had cut up and
20:43stuck it in the freezer just so I would make her some homemade chicken broth also. I love that. That's awesome. That's fantastic that she asked you because  my daughter lives in Florida and I live in Minnesota, so nothing like that is going to happen here. But when she lived in Minneapolis and was not far from home, she would
21:09she would come to visit and we would send her home with bags of tomatoes and cucumbers because she was vegetarian. I don't think she was vegan. I think she was vegetarian. And she always let me know  whether she called or she messaged that they were the best tomatoes and cucumbers ever because they were from our garden. So I love that your daughter asked you to do that. That's fantastic.  Yeah.
21:33Yeah, we've been trying to make a lot of things as much as as much as we can just trying to find different substitutes for trying to make things  more homemade if we can trying to cut out a lot of the process things  like my son, you know, he he's a sucker for those frozen
22:00Timmy Changas that you can get from Walmart. And so I started making them for him.  I  made his refried beans homemade and I made his tortillas homemade and wrapped them all up and  shaped them and froze them for him and stuck them in the freezer so he could have them homemade. And  for him to tell me that they taste way better than the store bought ones,  that just...
22:29makes you just feel  like all that time and effort is worth it because they're appreciative of it  and you know that they're getting way better quality stuff than  the frozen stuff that they're getting from the store.  Yes, and on top of that, they're getting the love that you add to the things that you make and that's what makes it special.
22:55Yeah, and sometimes some extra garlic too because sometimes I go a little overboard with the garlic.  Yup, and if you're anything like me, a couple swear words thrown in too.  Yeah, maybe a few here and there.  Yeah, and that leads me to my next question. Did I see that you've tried making sourdough bread or was that just  regular bread?  Oh, yes, I've tried.
23:19I've  made some sourdough bread and I think that's one of those things that I've said that I don't know that I'm going to be a sourdough baker.  It's it's one of those things that comes and goes and every time I think I got it, it just,  I don't know, it's just like, nope, try again. So I was like, I don't think I'm ever gonna be one of those people that is going to have, you know, a sourdough  bakery or a little
23:49you know, job sourdough bread stand, because I just can't seem to get the hang of it. So, and  I'm definitely not consistent enough to want to try to sell it. I'm just going to keep feeding it to my family.  They're just going to like it.  Yeah, there was a reason I asked. I have two sourdough starters on my counter downstairs that I need to feed when I'm done talking with you.  And I pulled them out of the fridge yesterday because they're established. And I was like,
24:19I really want to keep doing this because it's so much time involved in actually making the bread itself and I'm busy the only day I have where I have hours just to screw around with it is Sundays and I looked at my husband and I said  Sundays from for the next four Sundays I need the entire day without you guys in the kitchen under my feet
24:44And he was like, why? I said, because if I'm going to do this sourdough thing, it's going to have to be Sundays because Monday through Friday, I'm doing podcast interviews and I can't walk away from the process to go do that. And he was like, how many hours you need? said, eight. He said, he said, we can be out of the kitchen for eight hours. I said, okay. I said,
25:09I don't really  mind if you don't want me to do it. said, cause it's a lot of work for a couple loaves of bread. I said, but I said,  those loaves of bread cost me about 50 cents each. And the loaves of bread at the store, even the yucky store brand ones are about $2 a loaf. said, so  you've got the yay or the nay here. Do you want me to try doing it? And he was like, yeah. He said that first loaf tasted really good. I was like, okay.  And I'm never going to be the fancy sourdough bread lady. I don't care.
25:39I want a loaf of bread that tastes good. That's all I want.  Yeah.  So. I'm figuring out how I just, I don't know. Like sometimes they'll come out good and sometimes they won't. And I just can't figure out like why they do sometimes and why they don't. Well, I saw something on the sourdough for beginners Facebook group that said that you want the  internal temperature.
26:08of the bread to be like 218 degrees and I have an electric thermometer that I could actually check that with but I didn't know until the first loaf was made  and my first loaf came out dense because I under proofed it and I under cooked it by about five minutes. So now that I know I need to let it proof longer and I know the internal temperature it's supposed to be maybe the next one will turn out a little fluffier. Maybe. Yeah.  But.
26:37It's kind of putsy. It's kind of meticulous. And I really do love the zen  of it, like the process, but I don't love how much time it takes.  Yeah, it's, I mean,  I do like the fact that, you know, the sourdough is easier to digest and doesn't give you as much, like doesn't seem to give as much bloating and that type of stuff. And, you know, that great, but
27:07for  us,  know, the yeast type breads, like the homemade yeast breads and stuff, they taste just as good and they're just as,  well, they're quicker for me. And  for me, I usually get better,  more consistent results. I will still try sourdough bread,  but yeah,  that's just one of those things I just  haven't been able to figure out quite yet.
27:37It's practice and I just started mine like a month and a half ago and that's why I'm like, oh sourdough, yeah, I'm going through that now too.
27:48I did make a ginger bug though and that, like, you know, that's the whole fermentation thing and everything and like that was way easier. So I don't know why sourdough didn't work out, but the ginger bug was way easier. So  I don't know anything about that. you tell me what that is? Yeah. So that's, that's where you take like the water and you add sugar and fresh ginger. And basically it, it ferments also, it makes like bubbles and then you add it to.
28:17You can add it to like juices and that type of thing. And it basically gives you like, um,  the fizz. So you can make like your own, um, kind of fizzy drinks and you can,  know, your own  homemade sodas and that type of thing, but it's. You know, healthier and more, um, kind of like a probiotic type drinks. Cause it's again, easier for your,  um, for digestion and that type of thing. Um, so.
28:47You know, I just,  found a recipe that somebody had shared for making their own homemade Dr. Pepper, because I stopped drinking a lot of sodas, but they had been trying  to replicate the taste of Dr. Pepper. So I just made some of that and I'm going to add my ginger bug to it and try  to make like a healthier version for  Dr. Pepper's without, you know.
29:17without drinking the normal sugary version of it, I guess.  See, you're new to homesteading and you just taught me something I didn't even know about. So thank you for that.  And there's, well, I mean, and there's probably 50 million other things though that I haven't even come across yet because every time like people post so many different things that.
29:44Like every time I get on and look at recipes and stuff, people are always coming up with all kinds of neat things. that's, that I think is the fun thing about people sharing all their different recipes and things that they've tried. Um, and you can tweak them however you want, you know, you know, as far as like food allergies or that type of thing or, but that's been, that's been the fun thing too, is just trying the different things. Oh, absolutely. And.
30:14I love that the reason you got into this is because you basically needed a project because your kids didn't need you as much as they used to because I started the podcast for the same reason  two years ago.
30:28Yeah, I needed a hobby.  I realized  I didn't have any hobbies.  Yep.  I started the podcast because my youngest was going to be moving out. He's the youngest of four. And I was like, I need a project because I'm not going through emptiness syndrome  without a project because all I will do is cry. And so I was like, I'm going start a podcast. That'll be a good project. I know nothing about it.  and they say that, I'm going to screw this up.  Men.
30:57have midlife crisis and they buy a sports car and they get a young girlfriend.  Women have midlife crisis and they take on a new project or they start a business.
31:09Yeah, I believe it. We just, we just find more stuff to keep us busier.  Yeah. And cost less money and maybe be a little more productive. So I kind of like our version better.  All right, Jennifer, this was great. I tried to these to half an hour. We're there.  People can find you on Instagram  at myattempt at homesteading. that right? Yes. Are you on Facebook at all?
31:38Yes,  but I don't really have a homesteading account on Facebook though. Okay, all right, cool.  Thank you so much for your time and as always people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com.  Jennifer, I hope you have a really good night. Thank you, you too. Bye. Bye.
 

The Homestead Farm at Fruit Hill Orchard

Today I'm talking with Emily at The Homestead Farm at Fruit Hill Orchard.
 
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00:00You'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. Today I'm talking with Emily  at the Homestead Farm at Fruit Hill Orchard  in Virginia. Good morning, Emily. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on today. Thank you for making the time. I know that you guys are all very, very busy people.  How is the weather there today?
00:28It is sunny. It's beautiful.  The past week or so we've had a thunderstorm every day.  So, um, I don't know what's coming up later, but right now it's just beautiful. Yeah, I'm in Minnesota and it is very sunny. There's a light breeze, but it's also like 80 degrees with heavy humidity. So  I'm to be spending the day working on my podcast inside. Cause that seems like a good idea. Nice.  Yep.
00:57have laptop, we'll get work done. That's good.  So tell me about yourself and what you do.  So  I am an owner of the Homestead Farm at Fruit Hill Orchard.  We opened in 2016.  I am a farmer,  a baker.  I do all the stuff behind the scenes. I manage our social media.  I plan our events. kind of the
01:28everything at the farm,  which is a lot, but  yeah, it's great.  we
01:40The farm has been in our family since right  after the Civil War.  My great-great-grandfather James Swate opened an apple and peach packing plant there.  And then my grandfather  carried on the tradition and has been farming there  since the 60s, I believe.  So the property has been in our family for a really long time.
02:08Kind of why we got our name the Homestead Farm, because it's on our family's homestead. And then the Fruit Hill Orchard part comes from my grandfather's orchard business, which is Fruit Hill Orchard. nice. So do you have old photos from from generations past? Yes, we do. We so my grandfather, his grandmother grew up there.
02:36And we have pictures of her out back with  the old windmill, which funny story, she  accidentally  rolled her car into the windmill and knocked it over in the  80s, I think.  And  we  have since put a new windmill up in her honor. But  yeah, we have old photos of the family. The building next door that was the Apple and Peach packing plant, that used to be a barn,  but now it is a
03:06warehouse type building,  but we have pictures of that before they enclosed the barn area and change that around.  Yeah, old pictures of the house. Our farm market was actually the carriage barn  where my grandmother stored her car and my great grandmother,  um, stored her car. So  yeah, lots of interesting history there for sure. And pictures.  I love it.  Um,
03:35the reason I asked is our house is over a hundred years old  and We've only been living here for almost five years and I keep trying to find someone who knows anything about the property because it's been here a long time  and Nobody lives around here that knows anything about it from a hundred years ago So I'm out of luck on the history Yeah, you'll have to do some diggings.  Yeah, there's a  Historical Society in the town up from us
04:05So they might have something I got to get up there this summer and  ask and be like, so what do you know about this address in  LaSore, Minnesota? Cause I need history. need it. I need it right now.  So I'm sure there's a ton of it too. So hopefully you can find it. I hope so. Cause I'm so curious. I've been told that there was a real barn here and it got torn down or a storm took it out years ago.
04:32And now we have this big ugly maroon and cream colored pole barn. And every time I look at the pole barn, I'm like, I wish the old barn was still here because that would have given this place so much more character. Yeah. Oh, but it's long gone. you know, what are you going to do? Okay. So what do you guys do at the farm? You have an art, you have an orchard.
04:57We have an orchard that has been there for many, many years.  That is part of Fruit Hill Orchards original orchard. That's apples and peaches. And then we also grow our garden produce there.  We do tomatoes, beans, peppers, squash, cornmelons, blackberries, and that is all chemical free. We don't use any  chemicals on our gardens or our berries at all.
05:27We also source local and organic produce whenever we don't have something or ours isn't ready yet. Because chemical free and organic is super important to me. And then same with the bakery.  We source local fruits,  local eggs, as many organic  ingredients as possible.  And those are all,  all of our baked goods are all homemade.
05:56From scratch in our bakery, we also raise cattle. I have chicken, so we have some of our own meat and eggs for sale. We also have a sugar shack, which has hand dipped and soft serve ice cream and all kinds of toppings and specials and things like that. Trying to think. We also have some events.
06:26Every  year our big Sunflower Festival is coming up on September 6th this year,  which is huge for us. Our little place gets thousands of attendees that day.  And then we have a Farm and Makers Market that comes up on  the last Saturday of every month.  So  we love to support other locals,  people that are maybe homesteading or doing something that they don't have.
06:54a farm stand or a place to sell, love to try to help them out and get some of their products in our store.  We also, a big one for us is Bluegrass on Thursday nights. We have a back porch jam,  live music. It's just a bunch of local musicians that come out  and play and we serve a dinner that night  and it's a lot of fun. So we are really busy. We've got a lot going on at the farm.
07:23all the time.  Wow. Yeah, that's a lot.  Okay.  So I have two questions. The sugar shack that's on your property. Okay. Yes. It is right beside our farm market. We  built it. We kind of connected the sugar shack that's there now to  the cooler we had  already existing.
07:51So it's just a small little building right beside our farm market. That's awesome. I love that. I bet it's adorable.  And then you don't have to tell me specifics, but do you have a lot of land for your farm? So the farm that we have at the market here, that the land is split up between my mom and her sister.
08:17And it is in total, it's 300 acres, but we are only farming about 10 of that ourselves  that's not orchard. And most of our fields are like sunflower. We do the Sunflower Festival. So we have a two acre sunflower field  and then we do a big pumpkin patch  and  then our produce is on the rest.
08:45Okay, so what do you do with the sunflowers? So we grow them,  let people come out and pick them, we sell them  per stem, but we  just let people come out and enjoy them. Mainly we don't charge entry. The  only time we do charge entry is to our sunflower festival,  but otherwise if our markets open,
09:12People are welcome to go out and enjoy the flowers, take photos. We had one lady,  her family spread her ashes out there because she loved sunflowers. So we had memorial services out there.  But yeah, the sunflowers are a huge draw. We're kind of known in Winchester as the sunflower farm.  That is so cool. Yeah.
09:37We grow sunflowers here, but we only grow like a row of them because we think that they're pretty. And they grow so easily. if anyone has a patch they just want to happiness in, throw in some sunflower seeds.
09:55Yes, exactly.  We don't have a way to really to water ours once the seeds are in. So we kind of just depend on  God and the weather to take care of it for us.  So yeah, they are really easy. We throw our seeds out and every year we have a pretty good crop.
10:17Do you grow different colored ones or are they just all that really kind of orange yellow?  All of the ones in the big field are that orange yellow. We grow some specialty ones in rows like we do the  ones with the white petals or we do like the black center with the orange petals or the red ones.  So we do grow a variety but they're not the variety of those colors are not in the big field.
10:45Yeah, we grow some cream colored ones that are absolutely gorgeous.  love them. Those are my favorite too. They're so pretty.
10:55Yeah, and if you put them with  the reddish brownish ones,  they remind me of autumn. If you put the cream ones with  the reddish brownish ones, they're really pretty together in a vase.  Oh, yeah. Yeah, and we grow those too.  My son actually started it because he was like, can we grow sunflowers? Not we have room. And I was like, yes. And he had us order like a variety pack of sunflower seeds. So they were all different colors.
11:24He said, so what colors will come up? And I was like, I don't know.  It's a waiting game. It'll be like Christmas when they bloom.  we had so many different colors. He was like, I love this. Can we do this every year? said, yes, yes, we can. Did you guys save your seeds from the sunflowers?  Some of them, yes. Yeah.  We tend to leave ours for the birds.  We buy a new seed every year just because it's so much that we need.
11:53But yeah, it's amazing to see like all the birds and wildlife out there enjoying the sunflowers once they've dried up and died. So it's a win-win to enjoy them and then also  be doing that.
12:10Yes, here in Minnesota, because we get snow in November, December, January, February, and March, for sure. We leave a lot of the heads on the plants so that the birds can have seed and that way we're not buying bird seed from the store. Yeah, that's great. They seem to appreciate it. Yeah, they do. So, okay. So, so is the, is the farm or the homestead or whatever, um, supporting itself or do you have an outside job?
12:42So, nope, that is my job. It is supporting itself. I have been, so I have two kids and I have been working, well, we opened the farm in 2016 and we're seasonal. So I don't technically have a job in the winter time when we're closed. We have a couple months of downtime and I bake cakes during that time for some extra income.
13:12So, yeah.  Congratulations on doing something you love and making it go. Thank you.  I do. This was a dream of mine. And I'm so happy that it's working out. We're on our ninth season, so that's pretty huge.  Every year gets a little better and better.  I've started sourcing a lot more  products for the market that are
13:40super healthy, like real food, nutrient dense food, clean ingredients, free of seed oils, all that kind of stuff. I've been on my own health journey since I had my daughter in 2020. So it inspired me to just clean up my life and also offer these kind of products in our store. And it's really working out well. So I'm super happy about that. Okay, so
14:11I hate to use the word competition because I feel like farmers and homesteaders aren't really in competition.  Are there people who are doing kind of the same thing as you are anywhere near you? Let's not call it competition. There are a lot of farms,  small homesteads in Frederick County,  farm markets.  There's a lot of them here.  And there's one that's like two miles down the road from us.
14:37but they don't grow their own stuff. It's very different.  I don't like the word competition. I don't feel like we're in competition  with them because we're so different, if that makes sense. And what we offer is very different.  But as far as like the other farms that would be doing stuff that's similar to us,  we  all support each other and I love it. It's just this community of
15:05people who  we really do work together. mean, I bake some baked goods for another farm that's down the road and I get some meat from them for what we don't have. And it's like that just with a lot of the other farms. I get eggs from another farm and we're all just kind of in this together. know,  people are waking up, they're wanting local food, they're wanting to know their farmer and
15:34I think that it's more important now than ever.  And  so there's room for all of us  to succeed. Yes. And I'm going to say this for probably at least a hundred time during the tenure of my podcast.  All are a rising tide raises all ships. And that's what you're doing.  And you're right.  Now is the time. It wasn't the time before.  Now is the time for  all these small communities.
16:04to get to know each other and work together and produce food and produce products because  things could get real, real chaotic here in the next six months, especially this winter. So if you grow anything, produce anything, make anything,  get to know the other people who are doing it too and start like a little community so that your bigger community has a place to go for things. Yes. Yes, I love that.
16:33do feel like that's what we're doing here  in Frederick County, that's for sure.  There is a group, one of my friends started, it's called Frederick County Homesteaders,  and she creates a shop local guide, and there's a farm crawl twice a year where  people buy a ticket and they go around and visit all the participating farms.  And  that's something that I think that a lot of counties and communities
17:02should start. think she's going to offer a course on how to start up  a local chapter, I guess, for people who really don't know where to start but want to start something like that in their community.  But it has brought me together with  so many  of these small farms  and connected us all. And it's really cool to be a part of that and to have that here in our community.
17:31Awesome.  The other thing that I wanted to work into the podcast today and now is a good time to do it  is over the next six to eight months,  if you have relatives that are having a hard time now,  make sure you keep tabs on them and you  check in and see where you can help because  my parents live in Maine. I live in Minnesota. I'm really lucky that my sister  lives a couple of miles down the road from my parents.
18:01Because right now, if she wasn't there, I would be very concerned about my parents. They are elderly people. So make sure you check in with your neighbors and  not just your friends, but your neighbors and make sure they're doing okay. Yeah,  that's very important.
18:22We've all got to look out for each other.
18:27Yes, and if you're growing a garden and you know your neighbor likes tomatoes and you have a bunch that you're not going to use, offer them up.
18:36Yes, I love that. And it doesn't even have to be tomatoes. could be peas. It could be lettuce. It could be cucumbers. It could be squash, whatever. But just if you have a lot, give it  to people who need it.
18:50Yeah. I'm a little worried about the world. Can you tell? Hey, I'm there with you, but I think that it's going to be okay. We all are working together and I do think the majority of people are looking out for one another. I really hope it's true. I really want that to be true.
19:20Okay, so  what do people tell you when they come to visit your place? What's the, I don't know, general consensus on their experience with your place?  I get a lot of positive feedback, which makes me so happy because we work really hard and to hear those kind of things makes all that hard work super worth it.  I get a lot of people that thank us for
19:46growing our produce the way that we do without chemicals  and for carrying some certified organic produce.  And  we are also a raw milk pickup location  for another farm in West Virginia that is able to sell pet milk. And so people thank us for being an outlet for that.  And I've been posting a lot on our social media stories.
20:16And it's brought a lot of new customers in and I hear often that people love my videos and  I'm blown away by all the love and support that we are receiving. So yeah, it's, all good stuff. It makes it so worth it when people  tell you stuff that's positive because then you have the gas in your tank to keep going, to keep working, even though sometimes you have a bad day.  Yeah.
20:46once had a lady tell me she comes every year and she said she traveled 2000 miles for the best peach pie she's ever had in her life and that the trip is totally worth it and I just couldn't believe that someone would want to travel that far for one of our peach pies.
21:10So that was really,  really flattering.  That's a hell of a commute, but if it's for the best peach pie ever, it's worth it.  Yeah, I don't know if she was coming to the area already, but she comes through Virginia once a year  and  stops for the peach pies. So that's really awesome. That's high praise, Emily. Take it when you can get it.
21:37Um, so you said you have peach trees. Do you have a lot of peach trees? We do. I don't know exactly how many, um, but we grow freestone yellow peaches. grow freestone white. And if you don't know, freestone means that they fall off the pit easily. Um, and they, probably peel easier too, if they're a freestone. We also grow some semi-freestones. Um, and then we grow some clings.
22:08The clings are a yellow peach and they cling to the pit so they don't fall off easily.  But a lot of people want the free stone and I just have to say the cling peaches are the best for canning if you want to can like peach slices  or  freeze them because unlike some of the other peaches, these cling peaches hold their shape and they hold up  and
22:37have like such a good flavor  whenever you open that can of  canned peaches and or frozen peaches.  And so  I always try to tell people that they should try the clings even though they're not as easy to  cut. They are totally worth all the work when you're processing them.  And yeah, so we have a variety of different kinds.
23:06on the farm,  but the most popular would be the yellow freestone peaches, which are what we're picking right now.  I am so jealous. We don't really have a lot of peach growers in Minnesota. We grew peaches last year. Our trees did not bloom this year for some reason.  So we have two peach trees here that are cold hardy. And we did get peaches last fall off of those trees and they were so good and we're not going to have any this year. I am so sad.
23:36We did lose a lot to frost this year. We had an early spring frost  and the peaches that we do have  are  really great. Like the size of them is even  bigger because there weren't as many on the trees.  But yeah, it just depends on the weather again with  the crop. Thankfully we have some though. We're super thankful for what we do have.
24:04Yes, I'm sure you are because man, it is just such a bummer when you think you're going to have trees loaded and there's not a single one.  Do you can? Do you can peaches yourself? do. Yes.  That's one of my favorite things to can. Okay. I have a question because we want it. We were talking about canning our own peaches this year.  We don't have any can, but if we had, we would have.  And we bought a whole bunch of peaches a couple of years ago from
24:32the My Fruit Truck company and they were lovely peaches and we canned them and they turned brown. They're fine, they're edible, but they're brown. Do you know how to keep the peaches from turning brown when they're canned? Did you just can them in water or did you do a simple syrup? I don't remember. Is the simple syrup the trick?
24:58That would be yeah, the sugar in the syrup would keep them from turning brown.  And then some in some cases you can add a little like splash of lemon juice or so, but  I don't ever do that. I just do I make the light syrup. I use the recipe in the ball canning  complete canning book. It's you know, the little one you can get at almost any store that sells the canning supplies.  There's a recipe in there for light syrup  and
25:28Yep, that's the one that I use. And I don't like a ton of sugar.  I personally don't even eat  refined sugar at all.  So last year I experimented making a honey syrup  and that actually worked out really well.  And the peaches didn't turn brown, but I do think that they have a  better flavor when they're canned in that light syrup versus the honey.  in the water.
25:55If it was just canned in water only, that would be  why they would turn brown. think.  Yeah. I do not remember. It was like three summers ago and I have slept many nights since then.  Yeah.  But thank you because I've been trying to figure it out and I have that, that canning book you're talking about. So will look for that recipe.  And if you, if anybody wants to go into canning,  the ball books, any of them, anything that was produced by ball company is good. They're a good book.
26:26Yeah, I look in there for almost everything. I do my green beans,  the recipe out of there for green beans. I do  pickles out of there.  I've done jam and jelly. So a lot of things I turn to the ball book for.  Yep, absolutely. It's like the Bible of canning.  So  you said you have a bakery.  Do you mean literally a bakery? you, you, um,
26:53licensed to sell commercially or are you talking like a home a home-based bakery? So we are inspected by the Virginia Department of Agriculture. So our kitchen is certified. We had to do that for our business to be able to sell meals on our bluegrass nights. So we typically have to take a serve safe course every five years.
27:19to maintain  certification to serve food. And then we have a yearly inspection in our kitchen.  It's a full kitchen. So we do our baking there, but we also do food prep there as well.
27:37Okay. Awesome. And you just proved my statement that I talk about all the time on the podcast, that every state has different rules and regulations  for cooking and selling what you cook. Because in Minnesota,  we have the cottage food producer registration, which makes it so you can  make baked goods and things in your kitchen and sell them as long as you are present.
28:02And then we have the commercial licensing that you can get where you have to take the big class, you have to pay for the class, you have to get  the piece of paper that says, yes, you took the classes, yes, you have the license to sell anywhere and you can ship your goods anywhere. Yeah. And we have that in Virginia too, the cottage food law. A lot of the small homesteads around are operating off of that because they can sell their baked goods  to the consumer.
28:31without a license. But for us, we, I mean, we could have done the same thing, but we were expanding into serving meals. And that's a whole nother  ball game with,  you know, the licensing and stuff. Plus  having the certified kitchen, it does give us the option to wholesale. And I do wholesale some baked goods elsewhere. So that is,  that gives us the ability to do that.
29:01But yeah, I think every state does do things a little bit differently.
29:07They sure do.  I have talked to a lot of people over the last 22 months and yes,  every state is different in some way and it's what makes it work. So I'm okay with that.  I should have asked you at the beginning. Did you start out small with all of this or did you just jump in with both feet and hope that you could swim?  Well, we did start out small. Every year we've gotten a little bit bigger and we're still pretty small.
29:36But  our first year,  we didn't hire anybody. Well, we hired one person to help in the gardens three days a week, but it was just my mom and I,  and we didn't have any fancy equipment.  The orchards had a tractor and my aunt had a disc.  And so  we would borrow that and disc our field because we didn't even have like a tiller or anything.
30:03And we would disc our field and then we would use a wheel plow, like a push behind, like you push it and it digs the ditch.  And so we would do that. We would hand weed, put straw down. And then about our fifth season in,  after, mean, we would hand water everything and it would take like two hours each day on the hottest days. So  we, um, eventually were like, you know,
30:31we need to buy some equipment to help us. So we purchased a tiller,  we got a  plastic mulch layer so we could do the rows with the plastics that we didn't have to  weed as much.  And then we got a water wheel planter that we could ride on and pop the plants in the ground with it.  And so that was a game changer for our gardens.  It's a huge deal for us.
30:59to have that and then,  we still are  doing things pretty simple though. I mean, we plant our rose in the plastic  and don't have to hand water of course, cause we do the drip irrigation now, but  we still have to maintain in between the rows and we just weedy and mow to make it look nice.  So yeah, we and.
31:27for like that's just the gardens but for the rest of the store I didn't hire a baker my mom looked at me she's like who's gonna bake for this and I was like I guess I am I always made cakes when I was a kid and I love baking so I just jumped right in and decided I would be the baker and I would make pies you should have seen the huge bowl of pie dough I was making up every week
31:55And, you know, making it by hand, rolling it out by hand.  I'm cutting up all the fruit for the fillings, making everything from scratch.  And so  probably our third year in, my stepfather gifted me a giant mixer, which that was a game changer for the kitchen and the baking. Cause then I could mix up large batches of cake. I could mix my pie dough in that.
32:22And so, yeah, I would say we definitely have taken baby steps and it's taken us  about this long to kind of get to where I feel super confident in everything that we're doing. I kind of know  the ropes of everything. I feel like I've finally got it,  got it down to know like, you know, that we're making it and  that I kind of just know what I'm doing now.
32:50If that makes sense.  It totally does. And you're proving the point that anything worth having is  worth waiting for  and that you don't start out an expert. Everything is a learning curve and you are now at  the far end of the learning curve. So  again, congratulations, Emily, for  having the courage and  whatever it took to get this started and get this far because it's a lot.
33:19Thank you. And my mom, she's a huge part of this with me.  We're business partners and  we have done everything together and she's amazing.  So I definitely have not done this all on my own.  We're a great team when it comes to the business and yeah, I'm so thankful for her  because it would not have been possible without her.  One thing to mention too is we also...
33:47on my mom's farm at her house, have a wedding venue.  so that,  my mom really focuses on that. She's the wedding manager  and gets everything ready.  And so having the weddings has really helped out our farm because it's all kind of falls under the same business, two different locations though.  But yeah, that's another.
34:14another thing that has really helped us to have extra income and be able to do more with everything.
34:23Fantastic. I love it. And shout out to mom. Good job, mom. Congratulations, mom too.  All right, Emily, I try to keep these to half an hour. We're almost 35 minutes. So where can people find you? You can find us  online  at the Homestead Farm, sorry, www.homesteadfarmmarket.com. We are on Facebook.
34:47the Homestead Farm at Fruit Hill Orchard. We are on Instagram at the Homestead Farm VA.  And then if you are traveling through Winchester, Virginia, you can find us  at 2502 North Frederick Pike, Winchester, Virginia 22603.  We are open with the farm market and the sugar shack. Typically April through November, we do a small Christmas shop and then we close up.
35:15January, February, March. But anyway, yes, thank you so much for having me on here and I look forward to hearing more of your podcasts and yeah, thank you. Thank you. And as always, people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com. Emily, I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Thank you. You too. Happy 4th of July. Yeah. Happy Independence Day. Thanks so much, Emily. a great day. Thanks. You too. Bye.
 

Peaceful Pastures

Today I'm talking with Amanda at Peaceful Pastures.
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00:00You'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.  You can find them at homegrowncollective.org.
00:26Today I'm talking with Amanda at Peaceful Pastures in Michigan. Good afternoon, Amanda. How are you? Hi there. How are you?  I'm good.  You said the weather's really nice in Michigan? Yes, it's beautiful today. We finally broke that heat spell that we had last week and the humidity has gone down and it's just perfectly sunny. So it's great today.
00:50So you're having a top weather day in Michigan, just like we are in Minnesota. It's really nice here today too.  That sounds great. I'm glad it's just as nice for you. Yeah, the spring has been actually pretty moderate. I have been,  I dare say impressed with Mother Nature this year.  So tell me about yourself and what you do at Peaceful Pastures. Well, my name is Amanda. I'm a mother to two. I have an eight-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter.
01:19My husband is here with me too. His name is Andrew. We like to jokingly call him Goat Daddy.  We kind of jumped into Peaceful Pastures, kind of like an overnight deal.  We weren't really looking to sell our house and happened upon this property, just a little over seven acres, and we kind of jumped on it and looked, put it on offer, and right away it became ours.  And overnight I went and crazily
01:47purchased Nigerian Dwarf goats  and one of them was pregnant and so it began with our livestock. So we now have 13  and we have a mini Dexter cow. Her name is Betty and we have chickens.  Awesome. it is absolutely do a little bit of everything here. Yes.  Fantastic. So if your name is Amanda and your husband's name is Andrew,
02:17Do you ever get Mandy and Andy as nicknames?  Oh, yes, we do.  All the time.  I have this thing in my head that I do all the time and I rarely ever tell people about it because I think it'll freak them out. But I always end up having nicknames for people that I like. And  one of my friends on Facebook, and she was also in a writing group online with me,  her name is Janna.
02:46For the longest time when I would see her name, would think Jana Banana. Oh, and I never, I never told her that. And I was like, I got to stop doing this, but my brain just does all these weird associations with names. So,  so if you were friends with me, you would be Mandy and your husband would be Andy in my head. That's okay.  My husband always gets called Andy Pandy. So  it works.  Yep. Absolutely.  Um, okay. So do you guys have a garden as well?
03:16We do.  actually have a quite large garden this year.  Last year we had a great time with it and a perfect harvest. So I went ahead and jumped it up a little bit more this year. So we planted about five times as much as we did last year. So we're growing  and hopefully by the end of this week, early next week, we will start having some produce. We have a little standout front too. And  I like to fiddle around with that when I can. And we do lots of different things.
03:46tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, pretty much everything you can think of. We grow here right in our garden. So it's a lot of fun.  Keeps me busy.  Yeah. I call it the usual suspects. When people ask me what we grow in ours, I said the usual suspects, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces,  et cetera, et cetera. So all the good things. Yeah, exactly. All the things that people want to eat in June, July, and August. Right. And I don't know.
04:16I don't know how things are going in Michigan, but here in Minnesota, we've had the nicest weather for getting an early start on crops this year.  And we also  built a heated greenhouse two Mays ago. So we had  seedlings ready to go in the ground  first week in  May. We usually don't plant until May 15th because of the danger of frost.
04:45And so we looked at the extended forecast and it looked like it was going to be good. And my husband planted tomatoes like three weeks earlier than we usually do. And I said, if they die,  they're done. There's no coming back from that. He said, they're not going to die. He said, I have faith. was like, okay, I hope your faith works out.  Well, I'm glad it did work out.  I actually got a late start this year.
05:12because of the weather, just because we actually took our first vacation in the last 14 years. So  we were gone for that last week and a half. So it kind of pushed me back a little bit. So we didn't get started until the last week of May, but everything's in the ground now and seems to be doing well. So.
05:32I don't hear farmers say, I took a vacation very often. Where did you have the opportunity to go?  I know, right? It's really crazy. So we actually went to Disney. We took the kids to Disney for the first time  and it was a lot of fun, but my husband and I have never really taken a vacation by ourselves. So it was wonderful to have the opportunity to do that. And we were happy to be back home as well. So we really missed our animals and missed what was happening here.  So.
06:01Good. I'm glad that you did that because your kids are only little once. Trust me. I'm 55. My kids are all grown. They're all adults. And we weren't in a position to do the things that people do with their kids. We never went to Disney. We never went to Florida. We never went to any of the most people go. And the kids would all tell you that they don't have an issue with that. That was fine. We would go see the grandparents and that was really fun.
06:31But  the thing that I would tell people who are looking at getting into homesteading or farming or ranching is that if you can at all do it, take that week or so a year for yourself. Find people who you trust to come in and handle chores and the gardens and animals.  And preferably  do your vacation in like September or October when the gardens are done. And that way the only thing the person coming in has to do
07:01is feed the animals and muck the stalls. Yeah, we were very fortunate, very blessed to be able to take a week away and  kind of chill out and relax for a little bit. Like I said, it was our first time being able to do that and it was very much needed.  And  we're really, really happy that we were able to do that with the kids and they got to experience it. But they also love just being home to their kind of home body. So they'd rather be in their own element here and know exactly what we do every day. They kind of have a rhythm here.  So
07:34Did they get to meet any of their favorite Disney characters? They did. They did. Actually, my daughter is obsessed with Stitch. of course, it was the day that the new Stitch movie came out. So she was super excited to see him. They also got to see Belle and the Beast. And it was a lot of fun.
07:54Yeah, I see videos of little kids meeting their favorite Disney characters at Disneyland and it just makes me smile. I think it's so sweet.  Oh gosh, yes. The way they lit up was, it was  so priceless. Very much worth it, no matter what the cost was.  You know, my husband wasn't too thrilled with the price of everything, but you got to do it once in a while, right?  Absolutely. And that's really my point is if you have the opportunity to do something like that.
08:22and you can find people you trust to handle the things at home,  go do it. You only live once. Right. Yep. Yep. Very much would have actually said YOLO, but the last time I said YOLO, my 23- My 23-year-old son laughed his ass off at me when I said YOLO instead of you only live once.  Nice. You got to get with the lingo, right? You got to stay with it.
08:49He gets so squirrely because my husband and I both are people of the eighties. You know, we grew up in the eighties.  And as you know, we Gen Xers think that we're going to be young forever and  pick up the newest music, the newest slang really easily because things change every day when we were growing up. And so he's 23 and he just thinks that it's ridiculous when  we and our friends talk.
09:18like we're his age. It's funny. I know my son is always saying sigma this, sigma that, and I'm like, what in the world? You're like on a next level. You're totally out of here, dude. I have no idea what you're saying. Uh huh. Yeah. It's crazy all the slang that happens with the next generation of kids.
09:41I mean, my parents were not necessarily up on the latest music or the latest slang when I was a teenager.  And my dad  loved  old country music. He's still around. He's 81 years old. And  I really loved  George Michael and Prince. And I kind of liked Michael Jackson. I really loved Janet Jackson when she brought out music.  And my dad was not really impressed with the music I listened to.
10:10And because he loved music, we had a really nice stereo with a really nice speakers.  So the minute my parents would leave the house, I would be getting the records out, vinyl records,  and putting them on the record player and cranking out music that I grew up with, you know, listen to it constantly. And they would go for a walk around the block every night after dinner. So they left, I had music on and they could hear it halfway around the block. That's how loud I had it turned up.  that's so funny.
10:39Good memories.  You know, my husband and I were just saying how we're huge country fans and we like 80s and  90s country  and there is no good music like it used to be. So we were just talking about that yesterday, how good the music was in the  90s compared to now.
10:57I am so glad you said that because I actually flipped the radio on a week or so ago when I was driving somewhere, I don't where I was going, and put it on a country station, know, like, like top 40 country as it were. I was like, all of this is crap. And I thought, oh my God, am I getting old, old now? And so I'm glad to know that it is crap because you're not as old as I am. If you think it's crap, it's probably crap. No, it is garbage. It's just terrible.
11:26I don't even know how they can call it country music anymore. But  I'm glad we got to listen to the good music and we can still relive that every day.  Well, I'm really grateful for things like Pandora and Spotify because you can listen to anything you want to now and not have to be in a vehicle with a radio.  Right. So.
11:50We're getting a little far afield, but today has been that kind of day with nostalgia. I actually cried on the episode that I did earlier today.  So I'm not going to cry on this one, hopefully. Yeah, And I only do it about once every 50 episodes. So think I'm doing okay.  So tell me again, the animals you have. Well, we have Nigerian dwarfs. We have Stella, Luna,  and...
12:19Vega, which all are our mamas. They actually just had a birthing here a couple months ago. So they all had babies. We got rid of half of them  and then we retained a few. And then we also have their counterparts, Rocky  and  Oreo.  And then we also have Frankie, which is the buck that we have. And then we have a mini Dexter cow named Betty.
12:43And we have chickens. So I like to call them Smokey and the Bandits because Smokey is our rooster and then all of his ladies.  They're a lot of fun. They keep us entertained, pecking around and squawking all day long. So that's pretty much the gist of the animals. And then we also have two golden doodles as well. So you got to include them in the farm animals.  There's always a dog on the farm.
13:10Almost 99.9 % of the time there's always a dog on the farm. Okay, I have questions about all the things you just said. Let me mute my mic real quick. got a cough, hang on.
13:24I try not to cough in my guests' ears.  So you have Nigerian dwarf goats, dwarf goats, Yep. Okay. Do you use them for milk? Yes, actually. So  like I said, we came into this kind of overnight. So it's been almost two years now that we've been at the homesteading chain.  And when we first got Stella, which was one of our first goats that we got  right away,
13:51like four days after we got her, gave birth. So I kind of was around and tried to learn and teach myself on how to milk.  Um, so then this year when it came up, I had three, uh, mamas that delivered and we were able to start milking. So I do different things with that. Um, butter, I try to make my own soft cheese and then, um, also just for drinking as well.  Okay.  And
14:19I'm guessing you don't use the goats for meat.  No, no, we don't do that here. I know a lot of people have asked us and I just cannot bring myself to do it. Nothing against it, just not our thing. So they're more like a poop here. We truly love our animals and we get super close to them.
14:41Yeah, a lot of the people that I've talked to on the podcast who have goats only have them for dairy. And there are a lot of people in the United States who will eat goat meat. I have not tried it because I'm the same as you. Goats are friends and I don't want to eat them.
15:01So, dairy goats are fantastic and I did not, I've said this a few times, I did not like goat milk. The goat milk that I tried in previous years tasted to me like hay and a cow patty in the field. It just didn't taste, it didn't taste good. And then friends of ours who have goats let me try their cream for my coffee from their goats and I love it.
15:29So it just depends on what the goats eat, I guess. It does, yeah. So at first I was really reserved. I was kind of nervous to try it. And then once I did, I was like, oh my gosh, this is actually really good. So it has a lot sweeter taste than like a cow's milk would. And the fat content is actually higher. So there's a lot more cream  to milk than what a cow, like a regular cow's  milk would be. So we quite enjoy it. Yeah, the cream is fabulous.
15:57It is so yummy in coffee.  I need to get hold of my friend and be like, can I give you 10 bucks for like  just a little bit of cream? I will pay whatever you want. I just want some goat milk cream. It's so good.
16:14Yeah, it really is.  And then your cow, do you milk her or not? So we don't currently. She's about two years old. So  obviously in order to get milk from her, she would have to be bred.  So we keep her right now just more as like a pet. I hope to  IA her this fall if everything goes correctly, but we will see how that goes. See how much time we have on our hands.  Yeah.
16:43I wasn't sure how old she was, so I didn't know if she'd had a baby yet.  then the chickens, do you sell the eggs or do you just have them for yourself? We do. We sell eggs.  We get probably  between 20 and 30 eggs every single day.  We have 32 chickens right now, so they're laying quite well.  We have a little stand that we sell eggs and jams and that type of thing out front of our house. And then we also
17:10We like to give them away to our neighbors and that type of thing too. So we usually have an influx of them. So we're trying to get rid of them quickly.
17:23Yeah, we're kind of going through that too. Back when we only had 12 chickens, we couldn't even keep eggs in our house because people wanted to buy them. then we got 14 more chickens. And so now we actually have enough eggs in the house during the week for my husband to have a couple for breakfast before he goes to work.  So doubling up on the chickens was a very good plan this spring. Yes. Yeah, that's exactly what we did. So last year we had 10.
17:50And then we added another 22 to our account this year. So it's been a huge change to go from 10 to 32. Uh huh. So do you guys have jobs outside of the farm? Yeah. So I actually just stepped away. I had a meal prep business and I just stepped away from that to try to be more involved here on the homestead full time. And then my husband is an engineer, so he works for Stellantis.
18:18We actually joke because you were talking about eggs and every week he's toting eggs to work. So we always laugh at him because he's like my little pack mule taking stuff with him when he goes.  Yeah. My husband works for a company that repairs printers and fax machines and things. And he takes eggs to work because people know we have chickens. So they buy eggs from him at work. Yep. And then as soon as one does, they love them so much, they tell their friend and then the next person wants to get them.
18:49Luckily, my husband was smart enough to let everybody know that we only have so many eggs right now. So  you've got to get to him fast if you want the one or two dozen we might have on hand.  I would love to buy a hundred chickens and just  have our place to be a chicken business as it were, an egg business. But the problem is we would have to actually, you know, spend the money to get laying hens.
19:18or spend the money to get an incubator and hatching eggs, or spend the money to get little tiny pullets. And right now, the money just isn't there for any of it. So we're basically doing farmers markets and selling at our farm stand to put money away so that we can expand our business. we wanted to do this last summer, but we lost $5,000 in income because our garden
19:45couldn't get planted the way it should have been because it rained so much here. So we're a little behind the eight ball on the expanding the business plans,  but I still have the podcast. So I'm making that work for now. Oh, that's good. That's good. You got to do what you got to do, right?  Yeah, exactly. And  people think that when you, when you buy land and you start a homestead or a farm, you just do it, you know, you just jump in all the way into the pool.
20:14And that's not usually how it works. you start small and dream big, I think is how people put it. Right. Yep. You have to grow a little bit each day or a little bit each year and keep expanding on that. Yeah, because it's really expensive to outfit a homestead. Oh, You will drop, if you tried to do it all at once, you could easily drop $50,000 in six months.
20:47Like easily $50,000. Oh, if not more. Yeah. Everything is so darn expensive right now too. All the fencing alone and posts and everything are just crazy.  know we had to rebuild our whole chicken coop this year with adding more chickens. Obviously comes a larger coop  and we easily spent,  I don't know,  close to a thousand, if not more just by  buying materials and building it ourselves. So.
21:16It's pricey. It's not an easy feat, that's for sure. No, it's not. it's, I see it as a dream. You know, you start thinking about this when you start thinking about it. And then it usually takes a couple of years for that to really get stuck in your brain that you really want to do it. And then you have to do research and then you have to find a place and you have to be able to afford it. And then you have to actually, you know, buy the place.
21:45and then you have to make it what you want it to be. I don't feel like this is ever an overnight thing. No, and I think you're supposed to evolve with it every year as well. So you learn as you do things, you learn and grow and keep  adapting to what you need. And a lot of things you just make work too. You don't always have to go out and outdo yourself from the year before. Just keep maintaining the same rhythm and routine and ends up being so much greater than what you expect it to be.
22:16Yes,  and it's the only job you will ever have where you see the entire process of the job  from beginning to end. Oh, yes.  That's my favorite part. by doing that though, because you get to see it come to fruition and all the hard work that you put into it along the way. It's truly something to be  admirable.
22:44Yes, I have a question for you.  When you plant your garden, you when you put the seed in the ground and you put the dirt over it and you water it and you say,  please grow, because that's how we do it here.  We say please grow and hopefully it does.  When the plant comes up and it's got the actual leaves it's supposed to have,  not the beginning leaves, but  the real leaves, and it starts to grow,  do you just stand there and look at that thing and go, it's
23:13It's a miracle. Do you have that feeling? Oh yeah, about every single morning and night. That's where I get my zen. So every morning I have my coffee and I take a walk out to the garden and I could sit out there for hours and just sit out there and stare because dad's work is truly, truly amazing. And all the thought that he puts into every single little thing is just, it's miraculous. It truly is.
23:45Yeah, I don't know that I ever understood the word miracle like I do  now. We have sunflower plants growing out,  out sort of beside and behind our greenhouse.  you can see the plants from the window on the landing on the second floor.  And I was coming downstairs this morning from the first interview I did. And I looked outside and I could see one of the sunflower blooms through the window.
24:13and I dead stopped and I just stood there and looked at it for five minutes.  I never did that kind of stuff before I lived here.  Aw, well I'm glad that you get to enjoy it, because if you're not enjoying it, then it's all work for nothing. So it's definitely important to take the second and just kind of take it all in. Yeah, the simple joys of this just blow me away.
24:38I'm so glad that I get to talk to you and the other people I've talked to on the podcast because you guys understand it. When I talk to people who haven't done this or haven't had any interest in it, they're like, it's a plant. And I'm just like, no, you do not understand. And they're like, you're right. I don't understand. And there's no painting. There is no painting a picture for them. If they don't get it, they're not going to get it.
25:06Yeah, and it's sad when they don't get to experience all the joys and stuff too, because you, like I get super excited about everything that we do here. So down to, I mean, just the simple flower growing is so amazing. And so you want to share it with everybody. And when they don't see eye eye with you, it's kind of like,  ah, I just want you to get it. So they never will until they get to experience it themselves.
25:32Yes, the one thing that most people do understand though when they come to visit is the peace here. Yes. we have friends over and they just calm down. We had friends come and visit I think the second spring we were here. No, first spring we were here. And they're not, they don't grow a garden, they don't do any of this, they don't even have a pet. And they came to visit to see where we live.
26:01And I can remember them getting out of the car and looking around, like a good five minutes of just looking around, because it's three acres. And Cal, the guy that's the husband, he looked at me and he said,  you must be  so happy.  And I was like, oh, you have no idea, buddy.
26:29And his wife came over and hugged me. She's like, I am so excited for you. This is beautiful.  And  they got that part. You know, they understood that we had really wanted to get out of town and have some land  and  have a cornfield around us. Cause why not?  And it was so nice to get that reaction from them because I was like, they're going to think we're crazy. And they didn't think that.
26:56Well, that's good. I'm glad they were able to see how peaceful it was too. Yeah. And I mean, there are moments that are not peaceful. Like when the chicken got attacked by a raccoon two weeks ago, that was not fun to... Yeah. We've been lucky enough to not experience any  animal attacks or anything like that, thankfully. So hopefully we don't have that, but I know that it's quite crazy around here. We've lost quite a few sheep and goats just down the road to coyotes lately. So...
27:26I anticipate to have some type of run-in. Oh, you will. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry for what you're going to go through when you do, because it's very sad. And the fact is, I heard this  a year and a half ago, when you have livestock, you will have dead stock.  And  I can tell you right now, you're going to cry, and it's going to be sad,  and you're going to want to throw up. And it doesn't matter whether you see it happen or not.
27:55The next time, you're probably gonna be really mad. You won't be nearly as sad. You'll be just pissed off about it. Well, that's kinda how we felt. We had one of our  baby goats that was born actually on my birthday this year. It was kinda cool.  As soon as we got to a birthday party, I had to turn around and help deliver babies. So that was super fun.  But we poured all of our heart and soul into this little goat and we bottle fed him and he was just the sweetest thing.
28:22My daughter kind of took him on as her own  and at about four weeks he passed away and we think that maybe  he aspirated on one of his bottles while we were gone. So  it was really sad and we had a whole little funeral service for him, of course.  But I don't think it'll get easier as time goes on.  It does not. It does not get easier. You just get used to it.
28:49Right. That sounds terrible, but you do. get used to the fact that you have to enjoy everything you have now because it may not be here tomorrow. Right. And I still tear up. I mean, we had barn kittens that died at three weeks old and I definitely still teared up, but I was just like, okay, I need to shift from destroyed and sad to pissed off because pissed off is easier. I promise you.
29:16Yep, you're able to get up and keep moving and do the next job that you need to do instead of sitting there and just groveling. Yeah, sobbing doesn't change the fact that the thing that died died. If it did, everybody would live forever. Right.
29:35So yeah, there are hard things on the farm too, but the thing I always hang on to is the joy that comes with the good things that happen. Right. There's always joy to be found somewhere. I know my kids were heartbroken and I just tried to explain that's the circle of life. And at least we were able to witness him have a great life, the short time that he did. And we got to enjoy him and he gave us lots of laughs and hugs and love along the way. And we got to do the same for him. So. Yep.
30:04Exactly.  And  the thing that's really great about farm kids is they experience loss early so that when they end up losing a grandparent or a great auntie or uncle, they have already lost something that they have poured their heart and soul into and it is actually easier on them. Well, and I'm glad you mentioned that because that is actually kind of what shifted my whole mindset of a homestead or wanting to do this type of a lifestyle because we actually did go through
30:33quite some significant losses. lost my dad  and then a short few years later we lost my grandfather and then my stepdad as well. And  my kids were extremely close to all three of them.  And to lose so much,  you just really start to think about life and what's important to you. And that's why we decided to move here and see what we could actually put our hands into  and just live.
31:01because we weren't really doing that before. So it makes a huge difference, I think. It does. It really does. And honestly, I have had more conversations in the last six months about the fact that life is supposed to be  lived. It's not supposed to be survived. It's supposed to live, enjoy every freaking moment of it and feel all the feelings because that's why we're here.
31:28Absolutely. All the ups and downs and hard work poured into something and all of the joy that you get from seeing something come full circle is  there's just no words for it other than just it's great. It's phenomenal. Let's use phenomenal. Phenomenal is a great big happy word. Stellar is a good one too. I'm a word freak. I'm a word freak. love words. I have words for everything.
31:54All right, so Amanda, this was lovely. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me. Where can people find you? I'm glad we got to chit chat. So thank you so much for inviting me on here. And I look forward to sharing more  stories  and just enjoying all of the stories that you have along the way with everybody else that you interview. Awesome. I hope you come back and listen. Where can people find you, Amanda?  We are on Facebook under Peaceful Pastures.
32:23And we are also on TikTok, the same name, Peaceful Pastures. So we are located in Davison, Michigan, and we are about an hour north of Detroit.  We do some bookings and some private events here on our farm. And then  you'll find us on Facebook and you can just shoot me a message and I'd love to connect with you. Fantastic. All right. As always, people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com.  Amanda, thank you again for your time. appreciate it. Thank you so much. I had a wonderful time.
32:53All right.