A Tiny Homestead

The Wegener Farm

Today I'm talking with Rob at The Wegener Farm.
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprises entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. Today I'm talking with Rob at the Wegner Farm. Good morning, Rob, how are you? Good morning, Mary, I'm good. How are you doing? Good, how are things in Michigan? That's a beautiful day here in Michigan, finally. We had a little snow yesterday morning, which always sets you back mentally a bit here, but it's beautiful this morning, so.
00:29We're loving it. Yeah, it's April. Spring is coming. It's going to get here sooner than we think. It's beautiful here today in Minnesota too. So tell me about what you guys do at the farm. Okay, so at the Waggoner Farm, we're an organic, certified organic regenerative farm. We focus really on, you know, you've heard it called probably dirt, farming the dirt.
00:57uh... move away from the idea of uh... feeding plants and rather uh... think about feeding the food web in the in the soil itself so we've been very big since the beginning on treating treating the soil right and it'll grow the plants and uh... and they'll be great and uh... so far so good that we've been at this now this will be our fourth year uh... we started the first year on this property which was new to us
01:24with only 10 CSA customers, just to see, and mostly, by the way, friends and family who were fairly low risk, in case it didn't work. And year two, we went to 50. Year three, we went to 120. And this year, we'll be 130 CSA members, as well as some wholesale relationships and possibly a couple of restaurants. Wow. That is, that's huge.
01:54Um, yeah, anyone who's never run a CSA does not have any idea the work that goes into it. We did it for two years, three years, and we only had nine people at our highest number. And it's a lot of work and it's a lot of pressure because you want things to go right. Yeah, you've, uh, you're right about the pressure because basically, you know, the model.
02:22is such that the people, you know, they've paid you and now you better deliver, you know, and deliver well or the model falls down. Sorry about the dogs. Okay. I have one too. She does the same thing. Yeah. But our CSA members are great. They're people that are like-minded about looking for quality food.
02:51Excuse me, let me just close this. Yeah.
02:58at looking for quality food and not being, let's say satisfied or comfortable, but with the way the food system works and the way commercial farming works. We have a lot of visitors to the farm who I think also realize that USDA organic labeling is nice, but really transparency into seeing how things work is really where it's at.
03:27And we love to have people at the farm. We have some chickens that free range around the house. Kids love them. They're friendly, and they can feed them. And it really is an interesting, at CSA Pickup, a real interesting sense of community as people come to get their boxes every week. Yeah, we had baby bunnies two springs ago. And they were just big enough that the people who came to pick up their CSAs could hold them and pet them.
03:57That was a big hit here. We don't do rabbits anymore. I've already talked about this a billion times, but our rabbits were stupid. They did not understand that they were supposed to make babies. So we weren't going to let them. Rabbits that didn't make babies, I didn't think that it was possible. They were broken. There's something wrong with these rabbits. So we decided that feeding them with no return was not a good investment. So we no longer have rabbits, and that's OK. You were saying feeding the dirt. So.
04:26when you take care of the soil, the soil is fantastic. It grows fantastic food. So the soil is great. It feeds the plants. The plants are great. And then the plants feed us, which is great. Yeah, and I think this is what gets lost in the commercial food system, honestly, now. Two things, I think, make a world of difference. Actually, probably three. One is.
04:55When you are not trying to feed plants directly with synthetically produced fertilizers, plants get what they should be in terms of all of the micro and macro nutrients that the food web creates. These vegetables are just different. They're better for you. They taste better.
05:22We also use varieties that are not bred to be trucked from Mexico. And those varieties that are bred to be trucked from Mexico have been hybridized through the years to be tough. You know, and the result is that the flavor and the nutrition has been bred out of these plants and vegetables. And it's just unfortunate. And
05:51I would say to anybody listening, if you're not already connected with a local farmer, get connected. What you will learn about how things are supposed to taste, and just blow your doors off. Yeah, absolutely. And I am right there with you because we used to wait and wait and wait in the summertime for the tomatoes to come in at the farmer's market.
06:17We grew tomatoes, but our tomatoes were usually later coming in than the farmer's market tomatoes. So about the end of June, we would go over to the farmer's market every Saturday morning and be like, do you have tomatoes yet? Sometimes we got the first ripe tomato out of our little garden, but usually we bought them from the farmer's market because buying tomatoes at the store is something that I only want to do, and I really don't even want to do it, in January and February because they just...
06:45don't taste like anything. It's the reason people don't like tomatoes, I'm convinced. Anybody who doesn't like tomatoes, if I ask them, have you ever had one from a farm, they would tell you, no, I get them from the supermarket. That's because those orange plasticky things in the supermarket are not really, they don't taste like tomatoes. No, and I would pick cherry tomatoes out of a salad if I got a salad at a restaurant because I knew they would be terrible. And I thought I hated cherry tomatoes now.
07:16And then we started growing our own and I tried one and I was like, oh, I can finally have them in my salad again. Yay. Exactly. And you know, I thought I've known that about tomatoes since I was a little kid because my mom always grew a garden. My grandparents always grew gardens with tomatoes. What I didn't realize is it's also true of eggs. It's also true of basically anything that we produce.
07:45intended to live the what they give you in terms of food is just a different it's just a different thing. Yeah. So did you always want to do what you're doing or was was it new? Were you working on it before? Oh, man. So, let's see the the genesis story of the Wagner farm. So by my family generations ago actually came here as German immigrants and they were farmers, potato farmers and
08:14later on, row crop farmers. When I was 12, I was driving massive farm equipment, helping on my uncle's farm and my grandpa's farm, where I worked the summers. But it was never something that people aspired to be. It was the thing you thought of as what you could do if you couldn't do anything else. And I think that's really, really unfortunate. So I spent my life in corporate America, where I still am, by the way. I still work at...
08:43farm career, which I'm approaching hopefully retirement age here before too long. But after years of that, in the year 2020, my 14-year-old daughter passed away from complications from a very, from a rare disease. In January, and then in March in 2020, the world shut down because of COVID.
09:09And the grocery store shelves, you know, started to be empty. And it was really, really, if anyone can recall that time, it was really quite a shock to our, you know, to our thinking about food and health and both spiritual and physical. And at the same time, the business that I'm in also was, became more and more challenging to the point where I thought I just don't, I don't want to do this anymore.
09:36You know, my basically my day job is helping people finance cars that they don't really need. And is that a legacy that I want to leave behind? And I stumbled across actually JM Fortier's book, The Market Gardener, and started to watch some YouTube videos. People like Connor Crickmore and the NeverSink Farm in New York. And a few other examples of farmers that were able to create.
10:06actually a nice living and a nice community around this method of farming, which they basically got from Europe. These 30 inch beds and human scale without a lot of heavy equipment and without a lot of huge capital investment. I just thought that was the coolest thing. So I took some master courses and we started to build up the farm. We started the first shop for property.
10:33We found the property here. We started to build the farm up. There was nothing here. Um, it was, it was an 18 acre lawn basically. So, um, yeah, so that's how we got started. And, and man, it was so much fun that first year I was, uh, we still lived in our, in our other house. So it was a 20 minute drive to the farm, um, every morning and evening to take care of things and I just loved it.
11:00We moved now to the farmhouse which we renovated since. It's a significantly smaller house than we lived in before and made quite a lifestyle change to live out here on the farm. And it's just, it's really been quite fantastic. That is a beautiful story. And I'm sorry about your loss. That's sad, I'm sorry. So yeah, COVID again.
11:26COVID keeps coming up because a lot of the people I've talked to made changes right around when COVID hit. And it really did change how a lot of people viewed their world, not necessarily the world, but their little part of the world. And I know that we were still living in our little house in Jordan, Minnesota in town when everything kind of got shut down.
11:56We had always been kind of aware that it was smart to keep at least two weeks of food, you know, ready to have in case for some reason we had a massive ice storm and could not drive to the store. And so when things kind of got shut down, we were okay. I was definitely anxious about what
12:25My husband actually worked as a, he was outsourced from his job to an account that was a bunch of hospitals. And so he couldn't work from home. So he was still going out into the world, into hospitals every day while all that was going on. Yeah. And he was so worried he was going to bring COVID home to me and the kid. And so he was constantly stressed.
12:55And he said, honey, he said, I'm so glad that we have always lived as if there might be a problem around the corner that we're not foreseeing. He said, because if I had to worry about you running to the store to get stuff and being exposed, he said, I don't know how I would be functioning right now. And I didn't realize how stressed he was until like a month after.
13:21whatever the date was that the government said, okay, everybody started masking up. Don't go, you don't have to, blah, blah, blah. And he was just getting quieter and quieter and quieter with every week that passed. And I finally said, what's up with you? And he said, I just, he said, I don't know what's going to happen.
13:41And I said, oh, that's why you're being so quiet. And he said, yeah, he said, I'm trying really hard to not be panicked by this. He said, but this is a real thing. This is scary. He said, yeah, it really is. So for us, it basically cemented that we wanted to be more capable of growing our own stuff. And we had a small garden at the old house, but...
14:09It wasn't enough to put away stuff for the winter, you know? So we ended up buying a place in August of 2020. And we were really lucky because we were on the beginning swing of the housing boom that happened. So if we'd waited even six months, we would not have been able to go. So yeah, COVID was weird. Well, it certainly changed things.
14:38I don't really want to do it again anytime soon. It was... No, no, hopefully not in our lifetime, right? It's kind of a statistical inevitability. It will happen. So I think it's, I hope that people start to change a little bit the way they live as you mentioned, not thinking about being able to or needing to be able to run out to program or whatever for dinner tonight.
15:08Instead, have enough to sustain for a while. It's good for all of us. Yeah. And don't get me wrong, I do appreciate a Subway sandwich now and then because Subway makes them differently than I would. And I'm not saying everyone has to cook every meal that they eat every day from scratch all the time, but it's really good to know how to do those things. Right.
15:38All right. So what else do you guys do? So you grow produce, you have a CSA. Do you have anything except chickens? We do have chickens. Yeah, we have got, so we have 400 layers. Actually, I had to euthanize our entire flock last year because we got a contracted a disease. No, I'm not going to remember the name of it. It's a very long name. Not, not bird flu, not. And interestingly enough, the state of Michigan.
16:08because of how contagious this particular disease was, we had to euthanize the flock, which was a bummer for sure. We have no idea how it got on the farm. So just a lesson for anyone who might be listening, I think the only way we can sort it is that we bought six hens from a local farmer that was not necessarily a certified hatchery.
16:36you do take a risk. You know, so the only thing, this particular disease only affects chickens, pheasants, and peacocks. So it didn't come in on a wild bird or something like that. So we're pretty certain it must have come in on those chickens. And because some of these diseases that affect poultry can be sort of without any symptoms for a very long time. And then suddenly for whatever reason, they
17:06manifest themselves. Anyway, long story, but we had to euthanize our flock and we just got 400 new hens this year from a place in Fort Wayne that we deal with. So shout out to it's Wayne Trace Farms, by the way, in Fort Wayne. Tracy's great. And she supplies us with all of our hens other than those that I mentioned that we bought that I'm sure was a source for the problem.
17:33She's great and we, so now we have 400 hens that are just starting to lay, which is nice. It was a very quiet period on the farm when we didn't have chickens and it was really a bummer. Now we got them back, it feels right. And also my wife is, she's the crazy chicken lady, so she's turned into this because this is her connection to the farm. She loves to buy exotic breeds.
18:00and raise them. So we're going to get our first batch of those exotic new exotic chicks now here next week. It's not insanity. It's passion. She calls herself the crazy chicken lady so I can call her that. Okay, good. Yeah, I have a hard time with the whole crazy chicken lady, crazy cat lady, crazy horse lady thing.
18:30I love cats and I love dogs and if I had my way I would have kittens around all the time, I would have puppies around all the time because I love them. So I don't have kittens and puppies around all the time because that becomes expensive and takes up a ton of time. And kittens and puppies don't really give back anything except love.
18:56And love's great, but I don't need to be loved by 25 pups and a thousand kittens. I'm good. So, so yes, I think that there are people who might go slightly overboard. I think it becomes overboard when you can no longer handle it and you're never, you're not taking care of the animals in the way that they deserve anymore. That's, that's where it becomes the crazy part. Yeah, for sure. So I, I just.
19:23Every time somebody says crazy cat lady, I'm like, but are they crazy? Really? Well, I'll just give you an example. She's out wallpapering their coop right now. They have to have a pretty place to live. Yeah. I'm sure she thinks I'm the crazy vegetable guy, so maybe that's fair. Yeah. I don't call my husband the crazy gardening dude, but it's close. He loves it.
19:53And right now he and the kid are out putting up the framing for the walls on our heated winter greenhouse that we're building right now. Oh, very nice. Yes, I'm very excited. We've been excited since we found out we were going to do it. And we have baby plants on our kitchen table right now. And as soon as that greenhouse is done, the baby plants are going outside early this year, which is great. Yeah, very good.
20:22We're excited. Congratulations. Yeah, it's a lovely project and it's gonna allow us to extend our growing season this fall. So, don't have enough words and I don't actually have all, I don't think words have been invented yet for how excited we are about this project. It does change the game for sure. We started here in year one with a 30 by 72 hoop house, you know, we went with.
20:50basically full automation. So there's climate control inside and the rest. We bought a speckin' one in year two, so that first one was 70 by 30, the second one's 120 by 30. Last year we added a heated propagation house, so that one's 26 by 36. And now actually I just came in from building our second caterpillar tunnel.
21:18So we keep, you know, there's really, it makes a huge difference to be able to put things under cover even if they're not heated. The sun does a whole lot in terms of keeping things warm. As long as you can keep them from freezing, the sun will keep it warm there during the day. So that's, it makes all the difference in the world. Yeah, last spring, I'm sorry, last fall, our barn cat had kittens and
21:47once they were big enough to be out wandering around, she would direct them into the small hoop house greenhouse that we had up because it was warm in there. And we'd go in there and they'd just be playing because it was so warm. It was really cute. Okay. So do you have any other animals or is it just the chickens in your gardens? We don't. We want to. But...
22:17My wife and I both work full-time jobs, so there is a certain limitation when it comes to time. I was fortunate enough here, which this is something else I'm really proud of, that the first second year actually that we did this, I found an intern, a young lady who was a sustainability major at Grand Valley State University, one of the local Michigan colleges. And
22:44She started year one on the farm and just kind of found a passion for farming. So she came back in our, in last year and ran the farm. She was a production manager, you know, 23 year old college graduate, um, starting farming. And, you know, just looking back at what it was like when I was a young, a young guy working on my, um, uncle's farm, you know, and basically being told this isn't what you want to do for a living. I think it's really.
23:11fantastic to try and close that loop and show Riley that, yeah, you can actually make quite a nice living doing this and have a different lifestyle than just heading into the corporate jungle every day. So Riley's back again this year, again, managing production and learning a little bit more about the business side of things. So...
23:36I'm pretty excited about that. I'm looking for Riley 2.0 because I'm sure Riley at some point is on her way to owning her own farm and I'd love to have another Riley at this point to try and help develop their passion. Riley will be ready to run her own farm pretty soon. She understands what needs to happen and how it all works. I'm pretty proud of that actually.
24:03She's part of the group of kids that I refer to as the light and the hope of the future. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Our son is 22 and he still lives with us and he is, he's getting a very nice education in how to build buildings and how to grow food and how to take care of chickens. And we call him the intern who gets paid with room and board right now. There you go. Yeah, it's a paid internship.
24:32Yep. And he loves it. I mean, he'll say that he doesn't. He'll say that he would really like to, I don't know, do something else eventually. But every morning when he gets up and he actually slept, because he's got some insomnia issues going on right now, he gets up and he's like, did dad check the wood stove before he left? And it's a yes or a no. And if it's a no, he's like, okay. And he goes up and
25:01puts on his shoes and jacket and stuff and heads out and makes sure the wood stove is fed. And that's important too on the homestead. So he chips in all the time. And I'm so proud of him because I don't know that he really, really wanted to move here. He had a job at a comic book store that he really loved. It was within walking distance of where we lived.
25:31He loved his job. And sometimes I feel bad that we left because it's half an hour away and he can't drive right now. Whole bunch of stuff about the kid that I'm not allowed to say. There's a reason he's not allowed to drive and it's beyond his control. So sometimes I'm afraid that he feels trapped, but.
25:56He seems to have adjusted well and he really does like helping dad out on the quote unquote farm. So it's working out okay. So do you have other kids? While we had just the two and as I mentioned, my daughter passed away in 2020. I have Matthew who's now 15 who is actually out making sandbags as we speak. So he's maybe not so enthusiastic about it.
26:25Which is, I am hoping that he grows into it still, I guess. And my hope was when we bought the farm that he would, you know, he was enthusiastic when we bought it. And I think he's, well, he's 15. He'd rather play video games than work. So. That sounds about right. Yeah. Makes him, I think, pretty normal. Even though we hope for more, you know? Yeah, but you never know who he's gonna become. I have, I have four kids.
26:55and they all have turned out to be really, really good people.
27:02There's nothing bad I can really say about them, so they're good people. I'm also their mommy, I'm going to say they're good people, but you know how that goes. Okay, so you mentioned video games and stuff here. One of the things that's most interesting to me about this wave of folks who decided to move out of the cities and...
27:30start growing their own food and raising animals and stuff is that every time I talk with them, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos to learn what I didn't know. And it is so incredibly interesting to me that we are using this pretty, I don't have a word, intense is the wrong word, this technology that is so high.
28:00tech to learn about old school things and then implement those old school things. Because it sounds like you've done the same thing. You've watched videos and stuff to learn how to do things. Yeah. And I guess I never thought about it that way, but it is interesting how the circle closes, right? And I think it's just I view these channels like YouTube as...
28:29really just democratizing education. And there's a whole lot of people out there willing to contribute because they also have a passion for what they're doing. I think it goes farther. I mean, I think, for example, both JM Fortier who's in Conor Crickmore, who are both kind of pioneers in their own right about this sort of farm approach.
28:53definitely have a passion and want to teach other people. You know, and JM is actually now working on a big research farm, you know, as to try and help find better ways to do some of this stuff. But you can also connect with these folks personally and in exchange.
29:15they make a living doing it, right? So both JM and Connor have master classes, which by the way, I highly, highly recommend. Because if you're going to try and do this farming gig, the systems that you need to have in place to be efficient are absolutely the key. Because it's the whole thing is based on intensive use of space and
29:40and lots and growing lots of stuff. You know, like for example, we grew 50,000 pounds of food last year on our little 1.3 acres. And this year, this year we'll grow another 30% more in the same space. So it is it is a little bit democratizing education, you don't have to go to university anymore to learn this, you can learn it directly from the practitioner, which I think is really great. Yeah, and not end up with them.
30:09hundreds of thousand dollars student loans to pay back to. Right. Right. My basic, I love Elon Musk's approach to it. If this, he says, uh, if you can't learn it on YouTube, it's probably not worth knowing. So, yeah, my daughter has a two year degree in something, just the basic beginner degree, you know, and I had asked her a couple of years ago if she was going to go back to continue and
30:39There she didn't even miss a beat. She was crying immediately and I was like what is wrong and she said mom She said I'm still paying my student loans from the two-year degree that I'm never actually going to use She said I'm never going to spend money to go back to a college class in my life that's that's how much it bothered her and I felt so bad for her and
31:07I don't have the money to pay her student loans off. If I did, I'd do it. She did end up taking an online course to learn computer coding, and she loves it. And she's been doing like freelance stuff with that for the last few years. And that didn't cost her nearly as much money, and it was an accelerated course, and she loved it. So maybe, maybe the idea is that we don't have to spend.
31:36hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education anymore. We just need to know where to learn the information from. Right, right. So. Right. Agreed. Yeah, it was a rough patch for her and she is incredibly bright. And I think that she just felt like she had wasted her time and her money on that degree because she thought she was supposed to get it. So yeah, it's really hard.
32:06when the world tells you go to school, get straight A's, and then go to college and get straight A's and then try to find a job in the field you went to school for because it's not as easy as it sounds. For sure not. So anyway, I could talk about that for months. I have had long conversations with other friends who have kids who have been through the college path and we're pretty much all on the same page.
32:36So anyway, Rob, I'm really, I don't know, I got a lot going on today, so I'm gonna keep this short. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. I appreciate it. Thank you, Mary. Appreciate it, appreciate you too. Appreciate what you're doing. I'm trying to get you guys' information out to the world as much as I can. Thank you. All right, have a great day. Thank you. Bye.
 

The Old Farmers Almanac

Today I'm talking with Carol at The Old Farmers Almanac about gardening by the phases of the moon, frost dates, and the history of the almanac. You can follow on Facebook, as well.
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. Today I'm talking with Carol at the Old Farmer's Almanac. Hi, Carol. How are you doing today? I'm good. How are you doing, Mary? I'm great. Thank you for being here. Tell me about yourself and about what the Old Farmer's Almanac is.
00:23Well, the Almanac is ultimately really a calendar and a calendar of the heavens. And so, you know, old farmers or new farmers tend to need calendars because we like to know what's going on and what we need to be planning ahead for. But yeah, the greatest thing about the Almanac, I think, is that it's 232 going on 233 years old. So I'm the newest editor. I'm the 14th editor. I'm the second female editor.
00:51of the almanac in all those years. So it's quite an honor and a responsibility. But I think we just see that there's such a resurgence and an interest in all of the things that the almanac is about, whether it's gardening and farming or astronomy or folklore or home remedies, those sorts of things. People are really paying more attention to those. So it's a great place to be.
01:18Yankee Publishing is our home publisher and I worked here 20 years ago on a different publication for Yankee Magazine. So it's a bit of a homecoming for me. I've always been a fan of the Almanac. So it's great to be here. Very nice. So can you tell me where the Almanacs, actually before we even get there, there are two farmers' Almanacs. The old farmers' Almanac is the original? Yes.
01:45So who puts out the other one? Not that I want to give them any press, but I don't know. We don't know a lot about them either, honestly. They are out of Maine. We are out of Dublin, New Hampshire. And the farmer, not the old farmers, the other one is, I think it started in the 80s or 90s. It's not that old. I think distribution-wise, they are pretty much in New England, whereas we are...
02:13you know, all of North America. And I think they sell about, maybe their publication is about 300,000, you know, and we sell almost 3 million. So it's a little different, you know, I think, but again, like almanacs, when we started our almanac, there was many almanacs and really ours just kind of, well, we know that the weather was more accurate and we know that we were more entertaining. That's why we stuck around. So.
02:42Honestly, there was always almanacs. So it's really kind of great that there are more than less, because some are regional, some are really specific to a certain aspect of almanacs typically. So good competition to have, I guess. So you guys are the old farmer's almanac, and you've been around for over 200 years, you said? Yes, 1792, first year. All right. So I have a little tiny story to share about your publication.
03:12I think that the old farmer's almanac was probably one of the first things I read when I was six years old. I think. Cool. So, yeah, my dad bought it every year because he grew a garden and he needed to know when the safe time to plant was and when the full moon was going to be and all those things that are in there. You mentioned weather.
03:40the coming weather is going to be. Are you at liberty to share that? Of course. And so yes, that's really what has been, I think, anybody who plants things in the ground, we're always pretty obsessed with the weather. What's it going to do? And so that's true for since, really, if you think back, people that are now homesteaders like yourself or farmers or if they aren't, it's only a couple of generations back that all of us were farmers.
04:10The weather is of key importance. And as we have weirder weather too, we get a lot of more interest in it. And so from the beginning, it's been about data. It's been about this special formula. And so our founder, Robert B. Thomas, whose birthday is coming up, he really believed in and studied astronomy and planet science and pinned his algorithms and his data.
04:40data at that time, of course, what he had to three sciences. And sunspot, sun science, sunspot activity is really the one that I think sets us apart in terms of our long range forecasting. We also use climate science and meteorology, but it's really that idea of layering the data that we have in those three science areas, one on top of each other and looking at patterns across...
05:08that very large data set. And of course, in those days, we do have Robert B. Thomas' hand calculations. And these days we can crunch even more data, even more data is available. But to be more nuanced about it, for sun science, the sun is in its 25th cycle that it's been recorded and these cycles are 12, 13.
05:35more, sometimes years old, years. And so this worth the very end of the 25th cycle, and it's quite a crazy cycle. It's been tons of sunspot activity, which does impact our weather. And so yeah, that's from the, from time beginning, that's how it's been done. And now we, we work with, you know, premier weather forecasters who use our same formula from the beginning. But of course, like I said, so much more data to go by.
06:04At the same time, we are finding lots of aberrations. There was three La Niña years and now we're in El Niño. And because they don't typically come that many in a row, that's had some differences and not as predictable, I think. So we've had to do some art and science. Yeah, this winter in Minnesota,
06:32was the strangest winter I have ever seen. Tell me what happened. Nothing. Nothing happened. Basically, last winter, we got piled with snow. Two winters ago. This winter, I think if we got a foot of snow, we were lucky. And it rained like crazy yesterday. Yesterday, the winds were almost tornado.
07:01number wind gusts and it poured all day. It would have been two and a half feet of snow if it had been snow. It's just been the craziest, weirdest winter of my entire life. And I grew up in Maine. I've lived in Minnesota for over 25 years now. And there were some crazy winters in Maine, but this was not the winter we were expecting this 23, 24.
07:29It's same here. We thought it was, we had, we probably predicted the right amount of precipitation. Um, I'm guessing in a lot of places this year, but not the right kind of precipitation. It was definitely less cold than we predicted. And so, um, many places where we predicted, you know, crazy white outs, it was really a wet out. The idea being, and you know, a lot of that is that, that the jet stream is when it's slow, it does, it does kind of crazy things.
07:59And that's what we're seeing. It's been a slower, wavier jet stream for a while. And so that affects different, different teleconnections is the word. Yeah. And you can't win them all. It's a prediction. It's not set in stone. So I appreciate what you guys try to do. And when you get it dead on, that's awesome. Yeah. But what's the prediction for the summer? Do you know that off the top of your head? Because I haven't actually looked yet.
08:29Um, for Minnesota. Sure. Um, and I kind of think of you, let me just look at my farmers. I'm like, well, I have it because I was on the phone with Canada and really you, you're kind of, it depends on where you are in Minnesota. Are you, I was trying to figure out if you're in Northern Minnesota? No, we are about an hour Southwest of the twin cities. So you're not quite in the prairies, I guess I would say. And it's, it's pretty flat and there's a lot of cornfields. So my, my idea of a prairie, it fits it pretty well.
08:59So I'm going to, I think what you're describing is what we are seeing, especially even in Southern Canada, which is, you know, just really north of you and also where you are, is that it's a bit of an aberration. So that there's kind of what our weather forecasters have been talking to us about our winter and fall hangovers. So winter's hanging on a little bit more where you are and going a little bit later, whether that's rain or snow. And then you're getting a drier, warmer fall.
09:29Okay. So that's what we're predicting for that area. And then, you know, like everywhere, probably a little bit warmer than average temperatures this summer. Great. I'm very excited about this. Last summer, we had rain from mid-May until I think the end of June. How did your garden grow? Our garden did okay.
09:57Our potatoes did not do great because we had them in raised beds. And I don't know what you know about gardening, but when you have raised beds, sometimes they don't get watered as often as say the big old open garden does. And it was very, very dry from the end of June until September. So our potatoes did not do well, but the rest of the garden did pretty good.
10:27I just was trying to figure out what we're looking at for this year because I have tomato babies on my kitchen table right now. I have basil babies on my kitchen table right now. And my husband is just dying to get things in the ground. And I told him, I said, it's only April 17th, hun. I said, we never plant anything until at least May 15th, so just relax. And you know, at almanac.com, you can just...
10:53punch in your zip code and then it'll tell you by plant, you know, what is your frost date and your best moon by the moon planting date. Yeah. And what does the moon have to do with all of this? Because I figure that's a good question that most people won't know about. It's my favorite topic. What's the moon got to do with it? It's got everything to do with it though. We were just...
11:17talking among the editors yesterday and how there was a new study that also shows that Mars affects our tides, but I can't tell you about that just yet. Okay. But the moon, so you live in the landlocked area, so you don't maybe see it as much, but if you're on the coast, a tide is going to be higher during the full moon. And so-
11:41what moon gardening or gardening by the phases of the moon takes into account is saying the water that the moon moves, just like it moves the ocean, water is in the ground. We are, what are we, 60, 70 percent water? Plants are 90 percent water. And so it's this idea that there is a tide, you know, even the earth and the water underneath the earth.
12:10is subject to being influenced by the moon's effect. And so how that operates is it's saying that when the moon is waxing, when the moon is growing in its light in the sky, that water is drawn up and out. And so that's a time to plant certain crops. You know, it's a time to plant things that you want to grow up and out. So, but we would say then during a waning phase,
12:39as the light is retreating, that means the water is also being drawn back into the earth. So root crops would be the best thing to be planted at that time to just take advantage of that natural essentially tide that's in all water. So that's a very basic way of thinking about it. And then there are, in terms of astronomically...
13:07you know, the zodiac has an astronomical as well as a, um, astrology component, but the astronomical one is also something that people tend to layer over, um, this idea of the moon phases and get even more intricate with their, with their planting. But that's the idea. And it's also, you know, applies to kind of the tasks of gardening is where, you know, those first two weeks of a new moon, um, it's a time to be planting and starting. And then as the new, as the full moon passes.
13:37That's a time to be cleaning up and revisiting that cycle. So it's really just about that cycle. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah. So it's no different really than the whole planning for the seasons. You're planning for the moon cycle as well. Yes. Okay. Cool. So is the Old Farmer's Almanac still in print? Because I think I saw it for sale at Fleet Farm a couple years ago.
14:05But I haven't actually noticed lately because I've been busy doing other things and my husband will look things up online instead of going and buying a copy because we're terrible people. So, is it still in print? Yes, we print almost three million copies a year. Yes, it's about 10 bucks, so it's still a great bargain. But it's great. You can find awesome information on almanac.com. And we have hundreds and hundreds and thousands of pages. And really for...
14:35particular plants. If it's like, okay, I want to plant hydrangea. Okay, I want hot peppers. We have just wonderful grow guides for each and every vegetable and flower that we have up there. So great resource. We don't duplicate much online that we have in the issue. We don't give away our whole forecast, for instance, online. We have people buy that and there's reference sections that you could find in different places, but wouldn't be sort of
15:04There's a whole set of features that doesn't go online. And I'm trying to think what other pieces of it. Oh, the farmer's calendars and the calendar itself, you know, so that piece isn't online. But lots of the growing resources are and a lot of sky-watching resources and planetary resources are online. Okay. The reason I asked is because there's so many print publications that have gone...
15:32away from print, but you can find them online instead. And I love that you guys still have one you can actually hold in your hand and flip the pages with your fingers. Yeah, totally. People love it. And you know, it's, the newsstand has gone away, just to speak a little bit about the business. You know, it's like if you go to your grocery store, say, you know, there's very few magazines or there's not maybe even like a periodical section anymore. So we've done a lot of creative things.
15:59and to be in different marketplaces. And it's really been a success that way so that people can find us in a lot of different spots. Yeah, I'm gonna go out on a little bit of a limb again. I try not to go too far out because I don't wanna make anybody really angry, but I was late to the e-reader.
16:21I really did not want to read things on a tablet or on a computer screen. I loved books. I loved libraries. I loved bookstores. And ever since I finally caved and bought my first Nook e-reader, and I don't even know if Barnes & Noble is still doing that, but I don't spend a lot of time with an actual book or magazine or newspaper in my hand anymore because I just read it on my tablet.
16:51I feel like a traitor because I really did love hard copy words. So I guess it's okay because it doesn't necessarily matter how you're getting the words into your brain to get the ideas flowing. But I kind of miss the smell of a good library and a good bookstore. That's funny. I used to work at a library before this job, so I get your drift. Yeah.
17:20But we do offer an e-version for your Nook or your Kindle. So that's definitely doable for people. But yeah, lots of people really like the print. I think that we've been thinking about the newer audience and younger readers and thinking about it'd be kind of fun to do a little video. I think we'll do one in the fall about how to use the Almanac because it's got some really quirky stuff in it that you don't find online. That's just pretty neat. How you...
17:49kind of walk through the days of the year and what symbols and stuff we have. So we've been thinking about that just to refresh, you know. That would be fun. Yeah. So, okay, so do you, are you familiar with the beginning history of the old farmer's almanac? Yes. I mean, pretty much so, you know, I can tell you what I know. How did it start?
18:17Robert B. Thomas was our founder. In fact, I was just reading about him the other day. He's an interesting fellow. He was really self, well, the time, you know, in 1780s, 1770, I think he started the Almanac, well, he started in 1792, and I wanna say he was maybe 25. He was the editor for 40-something more years, which he lived a good long life for those times. And so his father, he wrote that his father,
18:46really was their main educator and that he was very educated and that they were lucky in that they had a lot of books in their home. Back in those days, you might have the Bible and an almanac, maybe one of the earliest ones, but Benjamin Franklin was an almanac editor slash creator. So at the time, this was the next piece of information that people really needed after the
19:16You know, as Robert B. Thomas was gaining his own education, he was fascinated by astronomy. And he kept seeing, if you read his writing, he'd see these almanacs and he's like, I can do better. You know, I can do better. And so he was really quite a go-getter. And so he did. He got his almanac off the ground. And as I said, I think really, when we look back, he committed himself to that science about the long range forecasting.
19:45And he did have a lot of successes and a lot of right things that happened. But also he wanted his Almanac to be entertaining because, okay, you know, it's an early, it's an early homestead. And, you know, this book gives you something to look at every single day of the year. There's information, many pieces of it really. So, so he was really an innovator.
20:13I think when it came to Almanacs, there were Almanacs, but he committed himself to his being really great and different. So those are the beginnings. It's fun. I don't think that we're really, we're not doing pictures, but we have the old Almanacs here in the office and it's just so interesting to me how some of the same things, like we've done green manure stories since the beginning. And how to grow. Of course, we started as a New England.
20:42product and your main person from your origins, but the idea of growing wheat or hay in New England, how to do it, who had to feed their livestock. So yeah, I think it's kind of interesting to me when I even go back 200 years, 150 years, how relevant that information is still. It's amazing. Yeah, absolutely. It's... Okay.
21:08Again, I'm going to say something that people are probably going to get yelled at about. If you're doing it the way that it was done 200 years ago, it's probably good.
21:20Yeah, I don't know if you know, I think permaculture is a word we use these days. And to me, you know, having experience with biodynamic farming and organic farming and these different ideas, permaculture really describes to me what was happening here, you know, when people became and came to settle this country. So yeah, that idea of
21:46having things locally available and sharing knowledge with your neighbors is really, it's really, it's something that hasn't grown old. No, it's where it's at, as my daughter would say jokingly because she thinks that's a very old fashioned phrase. Okay, so in the Old Farmer's Almanac, it's about the phases of the moon and how to...
22:14use those to plant. It's about growing things. It's about weather. Are there any like stories in it at all? Totally. Totally. Yes? Okay. So this year we've got, well it's the year of the grain. And so we talk about how to grow grains. So you know there's that. We do farmer profiles all over North America. So we talk to farmers whether they're date farmers or dairy farmers or small
22:43We really have a smattering across Canada and the US. So those are really interesting to see again, how farming at different levels is taking old ways and refreshing them. We always have a ton of food stories. So we've got a great pancake story in the 2024 issue. And fishing is another area where we have a big following. And so we have a cool story on just...
23:11having a fun fishing outing. We always have our maps and our calendars. This year we had a great story on leap day because it was a leap year and the eclipse because of the eclipse. And then, you know, sometimes you'll just see, like I said, okay, green manure. Well, this, we always have tons of growing stories, but we do, we have like the perfect seed germination recipe because we all know if you don't get that right, you're really in trouble. You never do enough tomatoes. Like we don't, you know, we...
23:41We have a great story on toast, how to make the best bread for toast. But I think tomatoes is almost something you'll find always in our issue, either that or the garden guide. So people always want homegrown tomatoes, so there's always tips there. And then we have recipe and essay contests. So we have reader recipes and essays, and those are really fun and usually delicious recipes. Cool. Yeah. The germination thing. My kid wanted to do.
24:11the baby lettuces, because he likes to eat them when they're just a little tiny. And he got a flat bucket. I think it was probably supposed to be a cat litter box, but it's clean. So he threw some compost from our compost pile in there and he spread the lettuce seeds in and he got one lettuce plant out of like 40 seeds. And I think that it was probably a package of seeds from four or five years ago. And maybe it's just not good.
24:41So I asked him the other day if he wanted to replant them and he was like, nah, he said, I was waiting until dad plants the garden. I was to get him out of the garden. I was like, okay, that's fine. And the kid is 22. It's not like he's five. It wasn't like this was a new concept to him. He was like, I'm going to try to grow some. I was like, you do that. That's fine. So yeah. It's the first step and it's the hardest sometimes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
25:11my husband put in the tomato seeds and basil seeds. The basil seeds took like two and a half weeks to pop up. I was like, they're supposed to be up at 10 days. And he says, I don't know what's going on. And now they're basil. You know, I could kill the baby plants by pulling the two leaves off of every one, but I'm not gonna do that. But they look like basil plants, so. Did you do, do you have any grow lights? Or are you using like a just sunny window?
25:40Oh no, we have a grow light. We have a long grow light that's hung from the kitchen light fixture above the table and everything's coming in great. Tomatoes are like five inches tall and they've only been in for three weeks. So, they're doing great. And boy, life really, really changed the game. Even the small one, like I've been seeing them for sale, you know, whatever, discounters and you know, for people that...
26:07It's just such a jump on the season. It's just, and it's also, I feel like having that light on and around and seeing little baby things grow is just the perfect antidote to a late spring. Yeah, it saves us from our winter depression because by the end of February in Minnesota, we're like, oh my God, I need green plants. This is terrible help. So we just put them in and they grow. It's amazing.
26:31Okay, so I have one more thing that I would like to share from our experience. And you can tell me what you think about it. When we bought this place back in 2020, we moved in August. So it was way too late to start a garden. And that does not mean that my husband did not start prepping for the following spring. He's the gardener. He loves it. But, uh,
26:56It was really hard because there was nothing here. It was a blank slate. So that was great because we could make it we wanted it to be. But that first spring was rough because there were no flowers coming up because the person that owned it before wasn't a flower gardener and it killed me. Cause I had flowers at the old place like crazy and having nothing coming up in May was heartbreaking. So, so I guess.
27:25As someone who's very steeped in all of this, if someone was looking for, I don't know, a bigger property, like say, going from a tenth of an acre to an acre, going from five acres to 10 or 20, when is a good time to make that jump during the year? Because I think we did it right because we moved in August, we knew the first year was going to be building it up.
27:55And so August seemed like a good timeframe, not that we planned it that way. But do you have any suggestions? Oh gosh. And I mean, in this market, it's kind of like, can you pick when you do anything? Well, the planning part. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's such an interesting question. I guess because you don't know what's there. You know, I actually, the last place I've been, I'm moving to be closer to my job, which is great, but.
28:24I also purchased in August and so I could see that some things were coming up or had been up earlier in the year, but it really wasn't until the following spring that I got a good sense of what was there and was able to plan. So the biggest plan I could really make was for a vegetable garden because there hadn't been one. So that from scratch gave me time, which was nice. There was an herb garden and an herb space there, so I was able to do that right away.
28:52but I did take the time to really think about and plan my vegetable garden and get it set up well. So that was one, I think, advantage to having it from scratch. But yeah, it's so many factors, Mary. Like I think like if you're gonna add a greenhouse, like, you know, needing to plan and really wanting to know where does the shade fall all year long before I put up a structure? Yeah. You know, so I think there's a lot of factors that go into it.
29:20I guess ideally my feeling would be January's when we all start to really want to plan. So it'd be nice to move in the late fall or winter, even though it's not a great place, time to move, but then have all that time to settle in and plan so that at least your house on the inside is okay so when you're ready to step out.
29:44Yeah, yeah, that too. Our realtor is actually a family friend now. We love her. She told me back years ago that September is the most popular month for people to be moving into a new place because the school year is starting in September. Right. And I feel like it's not just the school year. I feel like it's the time where
30:12where summer's pretty much over and you're getting into your fall routine and then the holiday routine and then January hits and you have time to breathe again. Yes. So, maybe we did it at exactly the right time because it worked out perfectly. We had all the time in the world to get everything moved in, to get things put away, to get through the holiday season. And then January hit and my husband said, so.
30:40we now have room for a humongous garden. What are we going to do? I was like, I think you're going to garden. He said, yes, I understand that. And this is a relationship we have. He does not call me a smart ass when I say things like that. And when he asks me obvious questions, I don't say, thank you Captain Obvious. So, but we think it real loud. It's very funny. But he had time, and I had time to sit down.
31:04and draw up the plan and figure out what we wanted to grow and what we needed to do to get those things started. One other thing that might be nice about that time of year too is if you do know or there aren't flowers, you can put in bulbs. So you have something when the spring wakes up. Yeah, we did not do that. We actually put in bulbs the following fall, I think.
31:32No, maybe we did. Maybe we put in tulips that first fall because I knew it was going to destroy me come spring when there were no peonies. But yeah, right now we've got daffodils blooming and we've got tulips that should be blooming in a week and we have many, many peonies that will be coming in June. I'm very excited about my peonies because we had tons where we used to live and now we don't have tons, we have many.
32:02Well, I bet with the lack of flowers when you first got there, it really makes a difference for the pollinators. I think I've been to lots of places that are food focused and I think, oh, just put in some butterfly bush or some echinacea or coneflower, get some pollinators. Yeah. We tried putting in echinacea and prairie fireweed or whatever it is that grows native to Minnesota and flots.
32:32and some other things. And then the drought hit and because we put them where they weren't obvious, they didn't get watered. So we spent probably $120 on native plants and they all died. I was so sad. Those expensive lessons. Yeah, we're not going to do that again. Next time I'm going to be like, okay, so we're putting them where we remember where they are so we remember to water them. But
32:58There is a man who lives a mile and a half away, maybe two miles away, who keeps honeybees. So we are never without honeybees, which is wonderful. It's good to know your neighbors and then you know what resources they're gonna share by accident. But yeah, it's, I don't know. The reason I asked about the when is the best time of year to make the jump is because
33:26We had already been gardening at our old place. We had already been making things from scratch. We had already been freezing produce, and now we can produce, because we can, can produce. And we knew enough that it wasn't that hard to shift from a 10th of an acre lot in town to a three acre lot five miles outside of town. It was a natural progression for us. But...
33:52I feel like there's probably people who are watching this homesteading movement that started back when COVID happened, who don't necessarily have the experience where it would be a natural progression for them to make the jump. So I was hoping that maybe by saying, is there a good time for that jump, that that would help them.
34:18Well, that is a great time, as you know, as you described. And, but I also think, like I see, like you said, this, this movement, I see, I see a lot more people just adding raised beds in their yard for starters. Like when I drive around, I see that. And are we just, um, we just, uh, issued our third book in our handbook series, the container gardeners handbook and that, and container gardening is really. Just soaring because people can do that anywhere on a patio or on a balcony, you know, but there's this.
34:47just really desire to be growing our own food and herbs and things like that. So, so, you know, yes, I think that it's wonderful for people to think now if they want to make that leap, you know, now's the time to plan that for the fall. But there's also opportunities, you know, all around the year for people that, that want to, you know, that don't have the means, more the desire to move that can still have things at their fingertips, you know, that we know that it's just not, it's beyond.
35:16It's beyond growing your own food. We know that, you know, touching the earth is like an antidepressant and flowers and scents and tastes are as well. Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. You don't have to live. You don't have to live in a certain place to grow things. You can grow things on your kitchen window sill if you want to. Absolutely. So. All right. Well, um.
35:43I tell me the old farmers almanac website address, please. Yes, it's simply almanac.com. Nice, simple, really simple. Good. All right. And are you guys on Facebook? Do you have a Facebook page or group or something? Yes, we're on Instagram and we're on Pinterest and Facebook as the old farmers almanac and did I say Instagram and YouTube also we have a wonderful grow veg is our partner in our garden planner. And there's
36:12great videos, growing videos that are also on almanac.com. Fantastic. All right, Carol, thank you so much for talking with me today. I really wanted to talk to someone at your place about this, because my podcast is called A Tiny Homestead, and I knew about the almanac. And I was like, not everybody knows about the almanac. I need to get somebody from them to talk to me about it. Thanks for having me, Mary. You're welcome. Have a great day. You too.
36:41Alright, bye.
 

Short Stack Ranch

Today I'm talking with Therese at Short Stack Ranch.
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. Today I'm talking with Therese at Shortstack Ranch. Good morning, Therese. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing very well. Thank you. Good. You're in California? I am. We are in Northern California, just a little bit north of Sacramento. Okay. Well, tell me about yourself in Shortstack Ranch.
00:26So the short stack ranch, I retired from 25 years with the California Department of Corrections about two years ago, and it had always been my dream to have comfort care minis, you know? And I never really thought it would happen, but I've also been heavily involved since I was in college with Special Olympics.
00:50And everything just kind of fell together. I was gifted two beautiful miniature horses by a wonderful woman, Sharon Mariam, who had had them both for 15 and 30 years, but she's been involved in the mini world for about 35 years. And I had asked her to mentor me and she is luckily was just trying to get out of the mini world because of age and other commitments and things like that.
01:18So she mentored me, very special to me. So it just kind of grew. We ended up getting Kenny and Kevin, and then we got two goats that were supposedly pregnant, and they were supposed to be due any minute, and 58 days later, my one goat was not pregnant at all, and the other goat had four, which is...
01:46incredibly unusual. You know, they only have two teats and really can only, you know, manage about two. Well, we ended up bottle feeding three of them, which is just like a newborn baby every three hours. Bottle feeding those guys. And then in that process, we got kind of every a whole bunch of stuff happened at once. Kevin suffered a pretty bad.
02:15well, a very bad injury. He had fallen and he suffered a spinal cord injury to his neck. And we did not think that he would make it. He did not stand for almost 10 days. He was completely paralyzed from the neck down. And he was such a fighter. Limus Basin Medical Equine Facility was amazing because he was so little. He was under 200 pounds. We could
02:45It took us about, he got out of the intensive care about 58 days later and was walking with a limp, but we worked on his physical therapy. And in the meantime, we ended up getting two donkeys from a kill pen that were very badly neglected, could barely walk, one had one eye. So that was Bailey and Baxter.
03:14And then we had heard about a gentleman who had passed away and left five minis behind with nobody to take them. And over the course of the next two months, we ended up getting four of those. One had passed while it was still at the sanctuary. And so that was Sophia and Rose. And goodness gracious, I'm kind of spacing out. Chandler.
03:41his, which we changed his name to Wyatt and Jesse. So we had those four. Yes. And so we now had this zoo basically. And we also have two great Danes that are very, very large, a silver lab that was rescued and a cat that came with the house that we rent. Very nice. That's the short back ranch
04:11We sadly did end up losing Kevin. He just succumbed to his injuries. Just wasn't strong enough a couple months ago. And Wyatt, who was 32, also passed. But they both had wonderful end of life here with all of their buddies around. And we've had, you know, I have friends and family and just people that I know and my Special Olympic athletes come by and
04:41Everybody loves on them. They're just incredible. We've taken some of them to memory care facilities. I'm learning how to do that. It's a process. Everything is every day is a learning process. A couple of them starred in a in a manger scene at one of the local churches and were part of a play. So it's been it's been crazy.
05:10Not at all what I had thought would happen when I ventured into this. You know, we, we, it is a financial burden, that's for sure. But it is one that, you know, I look at my life and I'm like, Oh my gosh, this, it couldn't be any better. You know, it's just happy. I have, I have so many questions.
05:36So is it, are you registered as a 501c3 nonprofit or how are you doing that? I am working on that. I'm not super good with that kind of stuff. I'm that likes hanging out with the horses and doesn't like paperwork, I'll admit it. But we are in the process of doing that.
05:59It is, we kind of had to take a break. We had some pretty bad storms out here and it was about a month after we finished building everything, my poor husband built everything. We had a really bad storm of hurricane level winds and it took away all of our barns and all of our fencing. So we are literally in the process, if anybody's been following us on Facebook and Instagram of rebuilding. And it's, you know, everything happens for a reason. We've met so many wonderful people along the way.
06:29We did have a friend of mine set up a GoFundMe for Kevin's expenses, because they were upwards of 20,000. Yeah. But, you know, God provides. We certainly feel that God provides. And it's just, you know, we're working on that. I'm trying to find the right way to go about it, you know? But there's been, right now, it's just get themselves and get their homes back.
06:56to where they're back in stalls and all of that. And then that's gonna be my next adventure of getting that squared down. Cause it's all, this has happened literally, it's almost a year on May 26th is when I took Kenny and Kevin. And so we're not even in 365 days into this. So it's a lot has happened in that short period of time.
07:22Yeah, I'm guessing that the name Shortstack Ranch is because all of your rescues are minis. Yes, my dog came up with that and did a logo for me. So we got that done. And yeah, so and it's funny because our Great Danes are actually larger than our horses and our donkeys. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Great Danes are moose dogs. They're humongous.
07:51Danes, so they're even bigger. We have one that's close to 200 pounds. Wow. I can't even imagine. Our dog weighs 35 pounds. So they're, they're like seven times bigger than she is. That would be crazy. When we got the great Danes, we had a little Boston and they were all so close. I mean, it's every, all of our animals just.
08:19just cuddle and are just wonderful together to see their interaction from all sizes. The Danes love the horses. Anytime they're out, that's where they're heading. And it's funny because they're runners. They like to run, so we don't let them out off leash. We have a pretty large, almost an acre fenced in for just the dogs. And they do happen to sneak away. We just go out to the barn and there they are. They want to be with their buddies.
08:49Yeah, yeah, they think they can play with them, but I don't know how that would go because they play rough. Yeah. Yeah. So how big is a mini horse on average? On the average, so there's some standards from the AMH, which is the American Miniature Horse Registry, AMHR. And it's 27 inches, there's different, different ones. My smallest one was 27 inches. That was Wyatt. He was barely 150 pounds.
09:19Up to 38 inches, I have one that would be Jesse that's on the tallest side. And then the rest are all within the 30 inch, 31 inch range. So they're short guys. They're short guys. They are. Okay. I got hooked on watching Katie Van Slyke on Facebook and her mini horse just had a baby like three days ago.
09:49That's kind of how I started. I started following her and with Poppy and Petunia. Yes, yes. And it's like my guilty pleasure. I get up in the morning early and it's still dark out and the house is quiet. And I have my coffee and I flip on the local news and I'll pull up Katie and see what she's posted overnight. It's terrible. I feel like a stalker.
10:18West Coast, it's later. So I get like in the middle of the night, I'll wake up and I look and I see has she posted, you know, and it's like, it's happened. And by the time I get up and I do the same thing, when I'm getting ready, I have my coffee and I just put the horses out. But I, that's the first place I go is who was born? What's up? But yes, her little guy with Karen, it is incredible how tiny they really are. And it's, it's
10:46very hard to tell until you actually see them, you know, standing up. And Katie's a tall, she's a tall girl. So yeah. Yeah. I think that that that new baby squirt is about the same size as my dog. That's what I'm guessing. He's taller, but I'm assuming he's probably 35 pounds. Yeah. I mean, he barely, he comes up to her knees and the other.
11:15up to her waist. So yeah. Yeah. Wyatt, if you look at the pictures at the short stack ranch, Wyatt, when we brought him home, he was, he's below my waist. I mean, his, literally his, his back is to my thigh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes me want one, but then I think he probably, they probably eat a lot and feed is expensive. So I'm probably not ever going to have a mini horse. I just
11:45they don't. They are very manageable. They don't eat a lot. No, they don't. They, you know, they eat one to two percent of their body weight in hay and then they get some supplements in grain. But, you know, Kenny is my chunky dunk. He's, I call him my king. He looks at food and he gets fat.
12:08And the rest, the rest get kind of normal. They're, they're a little bit harder keepers, which means that they don't put on weight as fast. Kimmy gets a quarter cup of grain and a, and a quarter pound of hay morning and night. Wow. Okay. Nothing. Now the others get, um, about a quarter of a flake, but a flake, if you just, you want to, they need, they need a partner. Um, and, uh,
12:36Yeah, it is. And the vet bills and the farrier bills are much lower because they're tiny. They do have some other specific needs, you know, as far as how they work and what they can eat and how you manage them. But they're there. You could easily do to. Yeah. Fine. And you can decide.
13:00My husband would not be happy with me if I was like, I think we should get too many horses and we should get them as babies. He would be like, you are out of your mind. No. No, but that's how it starts. Maybe start with some baby goats. The miniature goats are pretty cute too.
13:23Yeah, I don't know. I am so on the fence about any more critters. We have the dog, we have three barn cats, and we have like 18 or 19 chickens. And we have a 3.1 acre property. You have plenty of them. With house and big pole barn and the whole bit. And I'm not letting you off the hook. Yeah, I don't know. We...
13:48We have a lot going on right now. So I think I'm going to wait until this winter to float any more new ideas to him, cause he's going to be like, no, no, no, no, no. And now my husband has literally almost every day for a year. I've been a farm boy. Yup. But it is, it is very, um, very fulfilling and heartwarming, but you know, but it is a commitment. Um, you know, you, you can't.
14:17go anywhere past five o'clock, you can't go anywhere early in the morning. You know, I mean, you have to have some kind of a backup system. You know, we don't vacation. I mean, we have, you know, 14 animals. Where are we going to go that somebody's going to come and watch 14 animals? Yeah. If you have a high school near you, maybe a high school student who's interested in animal husbandry and ag might want to come.
14:43We've actually talked about that. We have a couple people who say that, you know, we have a great friend that does it, but we like people to spend the night at the house. And then then that puts you into the 18 and over age. And it's funny because everybody has a dog or everybody, you know, think, well, you can't bring your dogs, but we do have options and we have we have gone away. It's just one of those things to where I will admit, I just want to get back home. I miss them so much. They are definitely I am still obsessed.
15:14with them. I go out and I just sit out there with a glass of wine in my chair and I sit in the pasture and they snuggle and nuzzle and kiss and my donkeys literally sit on my lap. Yeah, their donkeys are like the most Velcro dogs you've ever seen. They're amazing. But yeah, it's certainly been a wonderful thing that I never thought I would do.
15:42until I started watching Katie, because she is literally my inspiration. I was retiring and I started having a little bit more time because working for corrections, you don't have your phone with you a lot, things like that. And it was like, oh, well, and I started following her and I'm like, oh my gosh, I want this. And I was going to get the mini cows, but to find them in a rescue situation, because that was something that was very important
16:11to rescue is fault. And then it's going to sound kind of funny, but I don't really like cow manure. No problem with horse and goat. It's just easy. I don't mind picking it up. I don't mind dealing with it. But cow patties are not my favorite thing. And so we ended up going with more horses and no cow.
16:41Well, maybe the perfect mini cow who needs to be saved will find you. That could be, you know, I find that if you open the doors, things happen. And what's happened here with this whole crazy thing. Yeah. Well, I think it's wonderful that you're doing this. I don't know that I have.
17:07the energy or the patience to do anything like that. So I'm glad there's people in the world like you who do. Well, thank you. Yeah, it is.
17:17We I'm 60 and so it's kind of funny literally in my will I have set up for them because I don't want them to be in the situation to how I got them. You know, so the other thing about rescuing older like my youngest is 15 is their life expectancy is about 30 to 35. So it's a huge commitment. It's much bigger than getting a dog, you know, and the minis, they live longer than normal horses.
17:45I should say not normal, but standard size horses. Yeah. And it is a big commitment. And that was one of the things that was very important to my husband and I is to ensure that they have a place to go and they are financially able to be taken care of as well as our family, if anything happens to us, because we don't want them just left on property like we found many of our.
18:13Yeah, that kind of defeats the purpose of all the work that you've done. So I can understand why you want to make sure that they're taken care of. Yeah. So, yep. Okay. So what's the plan for short stack ranch long term? Long term is to get everything rebuilt. We are getting close. We just literally yesterday finished fencing the perimeter.
18:39and got the grass mowed because you can't put them just straight out on the grass. It's too rich. So there today, they are going to go out for their first time for a couple hours on the grass and have some, you know, back to instead of the temporary pasture that I had for them, which was more of a pen, get that room to move, get everything rebuilt, and then start, you know, I've been working with them and Sharon comes out, she'll be out here later today. And we
19:09are working with some of these rescues to see what their mannerisms are even more.
19:21I only take two that I'm more comfortable with, but get the others a little bit more accustomed to different environments and possibly have them do different things such as driving, you know, which is pulling a cart and just getting it more set up to where people can come and visit and get their hearts warmed by just having them love on them.
19:50and visit, not just necessarily the people you talked about before. That's what we would like. We don't want to make a business out of it. We're very, very blessed. We rent our property. Our landlord, when we were looking, his ad said, small dogs considered.
20:20photo and just said, if this is a deal breaker, just let us know and we won't bother you anymore. And they said, well, come on out. And then a year later, like I said, they agreed to this. So we do want to keep things manageable, you know, as far as not just have this be, you know, like just a ton of people all the time. But people that need it, it's a very small town. Lincoln is a very small town, so I don't see it being anything crazy. But
20:49We've had a couple Girl Scout troops come by. That's been wonderful. We've had a home school group from here in Lincoln. They've come by. So it's more of that trust factor and I've got to get the liability insurance and all of those things are business side of it. Yeah, that's really important. Yeah. So that's why we've mostly stuck with people that we know so far. But that's...
21:18The hope for the future is to expand that, to have it to where, you know, by appointment, people can come by and spend some time with these wonderful animals. That's awesome. So are there other mini animals that you're considering getting? No, I'm good right now. That was the agreement with the lovely landlord that, you know, we are, we're at our max. And financially.
21:47It's perfect. It's a manageable. This is very manageable versus getting a lot more. And I'd really more like to just work on having this group be the best that they can be. There's a long ways to go with one of them. We literally couldn't even, like he wouldn't even let you touch him. And now he snuggles up to me. Jesse is quite, he was very, very skittish. We would have to sedate him to do his farrier work.
22:15And he's just, he's just come so far in just a couple months. And so I'm really looking forward to just expanding what these guys can do and, and fully exploring that. Yeah, it's amazing what love and feeding an animal will do to turn them around. Um, we have, I've sort of mentioned the cat before, but we have a black barn cat. He's a male and we got him from, yep. We got him from the Humane Society.
22:46Yes. And he, they told us flat out when we adopted him that he was a feral stray cat and that people at the Humane Society were afraid to touch him, get near him because he would scratch and hiss. And they said that he will never be friendly when you take him home, put some water and some food in something. And we made him like a box, a wood box that was big enough for him to have a food bowl and a water bowl.
23:16And they said, put him in the box, let's keep him in the box, wherever his house is going to be, wherever he's going to live for like two days, and then let him go. And if he stays, great. And if he doesn't, you're out of luck. Because he was just not, not friendly at all. And our son bonded with him. And now Satan will come up to me and ask for pets and rub against my ankles. And we just tried to let him.
23:45make the moves and we made sure that he had food every morning. We don't feed him at night because we want him to hunt. We want him to hunt the mice in the barn. Yeah, we have Oreo. We give him a little bit, but he came with the house and yeah, we just give him a little bit of food and he brings me a present every day. Yeah, so they told us we would never be able to pet this cat.
24:14to give him a wide berth and just let him be a barn cat. And he is the loveliest kitty. He's really nice.
24:24So love goes a long way. Yeah, and that's the rules that I follow. If they don't wanna do something unless it's going to harm them, it'd be a danger. I don't force anything. When we in the storm, we were trying to move them and it was literally 10 o'clock at night and it was horrible rain and wind. And we were trying to get them out of where they were to a secure area.
24:50And one of them didn't want to go. And it was the only time I've had to, you know, like, come on, you're going to, you're going to do this. And I, I twitched him a little bit with the rope on his bottom to get him moving because he was just, he was afraid, but I didn't have time to coax him through it. And we just don't believe in that. And I will, with Jesse, he's my skittish one that he would not come to you at all. And.
25:15And now it's, I just ask him, you know, I'm like, I hold the rope and I hold his halter and, and he'll, if he turns his back to me, I just go do something else and wait until he looks at me. And then it's some easiest pie and he gives me permission. And, you know, luckily we have the time and the pain, the time and the patients, and there's no rush to do that. You know, unlike when, you know, if there's an emergency or you, or you have to have a horse or any animal do anything,
25:45That's our philosophy is listen to them, look at them and reward good behavior and just take everything slow and stop. Be prepared to just stop. I mean, he's half clipped right now because he was great about letting us clip most of his body and then it was like, okay, I'm done. I've never had this done before. I think I've been really good, but I'm done now. And we're like, all right, and we just stopped. And so he's running around looking kind of awkward, but...
26:15you know, we're going to work on it again today and take it nice and slow. And it's, but it's so cool when they connect with you and go, I trust you. It's not like he has to be, um, informal where to be on the ranch. So he's good. Exactly. So, you know, it's like, you don't want to get groomed today. Well, we won't force it. Uh-huh. Exactly. Yeah. I try to post at least once a day.
26:44so that people can see, you know, we just, we just, the last couple months or a couple weeks opened up the short stack ranch Facebook page instead of having it on my own personal page where I have about 1200 friends, but trying to get, you know, it's hard to work with sometimes with Facebook. I'm still, I'm not super tech savvy. So I'm like, well, how do I make this? So what you see me,
27:11video tapering, I fall, I, you know, every, it's pretty funny. I've sat on a, I was sitting on a salt block one time and they, you know, they were being so cuddly that I fell over and you know, and you can just see the phone flying through the air and you know, but people get a kick out of it. They just, you know, there's, there's no editing. Those are the best videos. Yeah. Yeah. But so it's, I try to let everybody know at least once a day we...
27:40We took a little bit of a break when we were doing the rebuilding because there's not a whole lot when I'm just taking them from their stalls to this outdoor pen. It's just not super exciting. All day long, instead of playing with them, which is what I usually do, we were working and rebuilding. There wasn't a lot of content, so I went back and did some of the history of the short stack ranch and how it started to get new people on the same page, up to speed.
28:09Yeah, so, you know, follow along anybody who wants to know what's going on in the crazy place out here in in northern California.
28:22rewarding. I can't even express how blessed we are. Yeah, I have one more question. The mini horses and the mini donkeys, do they actually hang out in the same space and do they get along? Yes, they do. I mean, it just depends on the attitudes. I have a true mare and you know mares can be mares. It's kind of that bad word. I had the...
28:49I have the two females, one is very, very docile and my oldest, she's 30, that's Sophia. She rules the roost. If she comes, she'll turn around and she's got teeth bared, but then she's the snuggle. So she manages the herd, which is pretty funny. But we did take our time and introduced through fencing and then just short periods of time with observation, all of that. But they all...
29:17The only time that there's an issue is for attention or for treats, you know, and we're working on it. Yeah. So we're... Just like kids. Yes. They are, and they're all toddlers. No matter what their age, they're all toddlers. Yeah. Okay. Well, Therese, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me and Hodge. You're welcome. Bye.
 

Turnbull Clan Homestead

Today I'm talking with Brandy at Turnbull Clan Homestead.
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. Today I'm talking with Brandy at Turnbull Clan Homestead. Good morning, Brandy. How are you? I am doing good, Mary. How are you? I'm great. I'm so curious about your place because I looked at your Facebook page and there's lots about bees. So I'm assuming that honeybees are your main thing that you do?
00:28Yes, ma'am. So long story short, my husband is active duty military. We were stationed out in Hawaii. And in 2020, during the height of COVID, we ended up buying our home sight unseen. And we got very lucky, bought the house and it was big enough that we were able to do all of the things. So being very pregnant at the time, I got home and started getting to work.
00:56started clearing off land. We've got now honey bees up until I got bit by a tick and contracted alpagel. We had meat rabbits and we have a greenhouse going up right now. And then we've also got a bunch of like bushes and plants and things like that. Rather than invasive species that were planted here, I went through and I dug everything up.
01:23and I planted more native species like elderberry and blueberries, the blackberries and raspberries and strawberries and things. And you're in Maryland, right? Yes, ma'am. I am in the heart of Southern Maryland. Okay. I thought so. Blueberries. I miss blueberries. I grew up in Maine. Blueberries grew all over my parents one acre property. So when blueberries were in, we were eating blueberries every day for weeks on end. Yes, ma'am.
01:51Yeah, kind of miss it. We're too far south in Minnesota where I live to have them grow. We've tried. We've tried buying blueberry plants and they just don't do well at all. Okay, so were you military as well? I was. I did 12 years in the service before I got back from my last appointment and I was a little bit too beat up to continue to serve. So I was medically separated. Uh-huh.
02:18Well, thank you for your service. My stepson was a US Marine for eight years. And he says once a Marine, always a Marine. So I guess he's still a Marine, but he is no longer active duty. He is, he is always a Marine. Once a Marine, always a Marine is correct. Yep. So, okay. So I also saw something about Mission Believe on or Be Leave on your Facebook page. And I really wanna know what that's about cause I hadn't heard of it.
02:48So Mission Believe is a nonprofit up in Taney Town, Maryland, and their whole focus is offering different modes of therapies to like military first, military veterans and first responders, police officers and the like. And their whole premise is bee therapy. There's a lot of things that can be said about working with bees.
03:15there have been studies done to show that the vibrations that they create when they're buzzing is actually calming for like your neural cortex and can actually bring you down out of like panic attacks and anxiety attacks and things like that and help with like PTSD and coping mechanisms and that the vibrations themselves can actually be healing on a deeper level than we ever thought. I know personally for myself
03:45Bee stings actually help with my arthritis. And there's a lot of information right now that's been going around and a lot of research that's been done to support bee venom therapy for chronic pain sufferers like myself. And what they do is they set first responders, military veterans, whoever has served our community up with a mentor and allows them to work with that mentor for a year learning about bees.
04:14basic husbandry and then at the end of that season, their mentor will actually gift them their first hive of bees at no cost to the veteran. That is amazing. I love that. I had no idea such a thing existed. I had no idea until I got out here and it's been amazing. I actually raise honey bees for them and go out and catch swarms whenever the opportunity arises and then I donate the bees back to them.
04:43Okay, so it's mission BEE as in A B leave. So it's BEE leave, but it's BEE leave. Is it national or is it just local to you? It's stationed here local to me. I believe that they are trying to get a larger footprint. There are several other operations that are similar to them in other parts of the country. I don't know if they have grown big enough to operate nationwide, but they are definitely working on it.
05:11That's fabulous. I hope that they get it to be nationwide because that would help so many people. It probably would not help me because bees raise my anxiety. I'm still mildly afraid of anything that stings. So for me, it would just raise my anxiety, but I also don't have PTSD and I'm not former military and I'm not former law enforcement or fire department or anything. So, so yay, I'm glad that the bees have a different job than just making honey. That's fantastic.
05:41Yes ma'am, that they do. Okay, so what else do you do at your homestead? As of right now, it's been kind of a mishmash. I decided that I was going to go back to college, so I'm doing the full-time college student right now and raising my kids. And outside of that, it's been getting ready for, you know, crops to go in the ground. I finally got my asparagus in the ground after three years of himing and hawing on it.
06:08And we've been working trying to get the property cleaned up because we've got a lot of invasive species that have been growing on the property just from the way things were set up in the neighborhood that we bought in. So it's been a lot of project reclamation working with the Maryland Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. There was one gentleman who came out last year. We have a beautiful chestnut oak tree as well as a couple white oaks here on the property.
06:38And every fall, this gentleman has been coming out and getting, we're talking like hundreds of pounds of chestnut acorns and white oak acorns. And he takes those back to the nursery, their Maryland Department of Natural Resources, to help with woodland reclamation projects around the state. Wow. You are set up for wonderful things. That's great.
07:08I was so smitten with the bee stuff that I was very focused on that. And I did talk to a lady who has kept honeybees for like eight years and her episode has already been released. So I can't really get into the bee stuff because I already did it not long ago. Already talked with someone. So was this your dream to have a homestead or is this new to you? So it was a dream.
07:37It was a pipe dream. I was like there, there was no way, you know, growing up the way that I grew up that I would ever live in, you know, the nice house with the creek running through the property and a big old garden and honeybees and flowers and plants. It was definitely, definitely a pipe dream of mine since I was little. And my husband and I, we've been working hard and finally paid off. We finally achieved our end goal and
08:06The fact that we've achieved it and we did it before we were 35 is just absolutely amazing. Yeah, that's fantastic because my husband and I had the same kind of dream and it took us until we were 50. So you're 15 years ahead of the game on us. Yes, ma'am. Do you love it? Does it make your soul sing? I absolutely love it. It definitely helps with my bad days. The bad days that I have, you know, they...
08:34absolutely cripple me between the chronic pain and the PTSD from, you know, 12 years in the military and doing multiple deployments overseas. It kind of helps me be at ease. It gives me that happy, safe feeling that even when I get into a panic attack and I'm like, oh my God, what is going on in my life? I can just look outside and I can see my flowering cherry tree in bloom and I can see the honey bees buzzing around.
09:04and that inner peace and that feeling of, you know, everything's okay in my life. That's lovely. I'm so glad that you have that because I know that you need it. It's really important for you. Yes ma'am, it is. Yeah. So is it full-blown spring in Maryland? Because it's not even close to full-blown spring here. Yes. Oh my gosh, it is definitely full-blown spring.
09:32flowering cherry tree has already put on all of its blooms and the blooms are starting to fall off and my tulips are in bloom. The calipair tree out in our front yard, which I desperately want to get rid of just because of how invasive they are, has already bloomed and then had the blooms fall off. The laurels are getting ready to start putting on and some of like the two blows and the tulip poplars and things like that are coming into bloom and...
10:02Hullin' is everywhere. People outside in our cars are green. Yeah, but does it smell good outside because everything's blooming? It smells amazing. Okay. It absolutely smells amazing. We're probably two weeks away from things starting to green up and put blossoms on. We have apple trees and we have peach trees. We actually put in peach trees that are cold hardy last year. So we're hoping to get maybe.
10:30Maybe some really pretty blooms this year and maybe peaches next year. Maybe. Yeah. Let's see what happens. Minnesota is a rough on peaches. Well, we'll see how they do. Yeah. If I had any guests, you probably got the Alberta peach cause they are definitely one of the more cold hardies, either that or the Havana, I believe. Is what it is. I have. Either Havana or Alberta's. I have no idea. My husband bought them at.
10:56someplace when he was out and was like, peach trees would be great. And I said, oh my God, okay, we'll see how that goes. And I don't remember what variety it was. He also bought cherry trees. I think it was last year. And he bought a cold, hardy, sweet cherry tree. And he bought two, actually. And it's really hard to find a cold, hardy, sweet cherry. They're usually sour, tart cherries that do well here.
11:25So he brought them home and he was telling me about it. And I said, can you bring me the tag? And he said, sure. So he went out and grabbed the tag that was on the branch of the tree, brought it in. And I said, you're gonna have to get a different variety to go with these. And he said, why? And I said, because they won't pollinate without a different variety. I said, they're like apple trees, they're related. And he said, okay, what should I get? And I said, I don't know, let me do some research.
11:54Come to find out the only other sweet cherry tree that is good for pollinating the ones we have is a Rainier cherry. Rainiers are very expensive cherry trees. That they are. I spent a lot of time out in Washington growing up and cherries are a big deal out there. You've got the pie cherries, the bean cherries, the Rainiers, the black cherries. Yup.
12:23So I said, you want to spend $60 on one reindeer cherry tree seedling whatever, sprout, I don't know what they're called, baby trees, to make the other cherries actually produce cherries? And he was like, yes, yes I do. I said okay. And I ordered one and it was shipped to us and it was healthy and fine and that got put in too. So we'll see how the cherries do as well.
12:50That is one thing that I want to get desperately for my homestead is cherry trees that actually produce cherries because all we have is the flowering cherry tree. And while it is absolutely beautiful and provides great food for my honey bees, like I would love to have some actual cherries. Uh huh. Yeah, we love cherries when it's cherry season here and that's coming soon for Minnesota when cherry season is as in when we can buy cherries at the grocery store.
13:19pounds and pounds of them. And we make cherry preserves, we make cherry pie. And there's only so much money we can put into buying cherries from the store. So when we hit our mark on how much money we can spend, then we try to make sure we use every single good cherry that we buy. And our cherry preserves are so good. I had had cherry preserves from the store and I was like, eh, it's okay.
13:49When you make it yourself, all that cherry flavor comes through and it's like eating cherries off the tree, but it's in a jam or jelly form. It's so yummy. I love it. Yeah. That is one big thing that we do a lot of here at home is we've got a dehydrator and we also do a lot of canning. And we are very blessed to be where we are because everything that we grow here, from the chicken eggs to...
14:18the meat birds that we raise, even the meat rabbits, because as soon as my allergy levels come back down, because when I got bit by that tick, I became allergic to everything mammal. I was having reactions to people cooking bacon. And it was full-blown anaphylaxis, like throat closing up the whole nine, haven't had a steak in probably about six months. I am so sorry. Yeah. It was heartbreaking.
14:48Messing with the rabbits going out to check on I'm doing health checks things like that You know the daily, you know going out and oh, you're such a cute little buddy And you know giving them all the love in the pets and everything like I was reacting and having Really really really bad anaphylaxis from it. So As soon as my allergy level comes back down, I'm fully fully planning to get back into the meat rabbits Yeah So I don't on what kind of tick was it?
15:18It was a Lone Star Tick. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yep. You can call me a conspiracy theorist, but back in 2002, this brand new mystery illness came out of nowhere called Alpha Gal. And it was like this mysterious illness that started out here on the Eastern Seaboard where people were getting bit by a tick and developing an allergy to meat. Now if you go back and you look back to 2002.
15:48during that time period, they were all about the global warming and blaming global warming on cow farts. I have my theories that maybe someone got up to something and maybe that's why we have this as a problem now because essentially right now there's close to a million people who have this allergy. If you start thinking about what that would do.
16:15to the global market on mammal meat. Because looking at greenhouse gas emissions far as vehicles to truck animals and this, that, and the other, meat is one of the higher CO2 emissions. Yeah, absolutely. So I have my theories and speculations. But.
16:39Yeah, as we all do about all kinds of things and I can't let you get into it on this and I can't get into it either. And if you want to talk about it another time over the phone, we can yak it up all you want because I have theories about COVID and I'm not going to share them in a public forum. So yeah, I'm trying to keep people interested, not mad. So let's not make my listeners angry today. Let's avoid that. I want them to be happy.
17:07Well, I'm really sorry that that happened to you. That's no fun. And I can relate because I developed an allergy two years ago to capsaicin, the thing that, that makes hot peppers hot. Yep. Yeah. I am also allergic to that. Yeah. All of a sudden I was eating something with chili powder in it and my lips got cold and then they went numb and then all of a sudden my throat felt really tight. And I was like, what the hell is going on here?
17:36And so the only thing I could think of was something in the chili. So I got some cornbread and ate that and drank some water and it got better, but I didn't eat the rest of the chili. And I asked my husband and my son if they were having any issues and they were like, no, it's great. It's a great chili. I'm like, okay. And then my husband put some hot pepper thing in something else he was making that I've eaten a million times like two weeks later, same thing.
18:04And I was like, I can't breathe. You know, to my husband, I was like, I can't breathe. And he said, are you kidding? I was like, no, I'm not kidding. And he says, oh, oh, okay. And he said, stop eating whatever you're eating. Stop eating dinner. I was like, yeah. He said, put your head down and see if you can take any kind of good breath in. And I could breathe, but it was really tight. And I pulled in as much as I could get. And he was like, okay, blow it out. And I did.
18:34do it again. And as I breathe in more, it was okay. But he said, I think you have an allergy to hot peppers. I was like, why in the hell would I have an allergy to hot peppers now? He's like, adults can develop allergies. I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want this one. So it happens. I absolutely love spicy food.
19:02And I have figured out that I can get away with jalapenos if I Cut them in half and I scoop out the inner skin where all the oil is and I do okay with that I know if you were itching for spicy food You might want to give jalapenos a try cuz I I have carry capsaicin as much as other things No, even the littlest bit of jalapeno does it to me too. I've tried I feel so bad for you because like my allergy to capsaicin is bad
19:30But not that bad and it's an allergy that I've dealt with since I was like itty-bitty. Yeah, whenever we would have spicy food growing up, I'd go, my mouth hurts, my mouth hurts. And you know, my mom, you know being part of the generation that she was in was like, oh, you know, shut up, eat your food. And come to find out here just a couple months ago, they did a full allergy panel when I was having all those bad reactions not knowing that I had alpha-yell.
19:58And as it turns out, I am allergic to capsaicin. And I love spicy food. I just have to dose myself on Benadryl before I eat anything. Yeah, it's the most bizarre thing that I have ever had happen to me. You know, just out of the blue, no more peppers. I'm like, OK, sweet peppers are good. The one I can do, as long as I do it in moderation, is smoked paprika. That doesn't kick it. And I have no idea why.
20:27Have you tried cumin? Yep, cumin's okay. Cumin's okay. Nothing. But I can't do habaneros, I can't do jalapenos, I can't do any of the ones that make food taste good. It's very sad. But I'm sure I'll live. I'm sure there are way worse things that could have happened to me. I'm good on this one, it's okay. But the reason I mention it is because
20:56A lot of people don't know that you can develop a fast onset allergy as an adult. Oh yeah. Yep, it definitely happens. And that tick allergy, it was different. Like I had no idea what was causing it and it was causing all kinds of weird reactions. Everything from my skin like crawling and itching to like full on like...
21:23I was angry. Like I was big time angry and I don't get angry. Weird. So bizarre. Okay. All right. So I'm going to ask you the same question I ask every homesteader most of the time. Are you guys taking what you produce on your homestead and just using it to sustain yourselves or are you selling it, sharing it, whatever?
21:53So here in Maryland, as lovely as it is, you cannot sell eggs unless you have a permit. Okay. So we don't sell our eggs. We have a couple of close friends that we do give eggs to and there are a couple of families that we do barter our goods that we raise here with. Sure. So like the honey, we barter for milk, which has been amazing.
22:21And we also use it to pay debts occasionally. Like if we go and we pick up, like I've got a friend that I get beef from. Yeah. As a thank you of, Hey, well, thanks for giving me beef at like a super discount. Here's some honey as a thank you. So we'll do a lot of bargaining and trading, but most of what we raise here, just because we've been trying to keep it small and manageable because we have three really young kids.
22:50we keep most of it for ourselves except for that which we barter with. Okay, and I'm sort of stepping away from that question because that was a perfect answer. Thank you. How did your bees do this past winter? Because in Minnesota a lot of beekeepers lose hives in the winter because they just don't survive the cold. So I went into the winter with a very short-fused hive. So back in August,
23:18I was trying to go completely treatment free with my bees as in like no kind of like pesticide treatment for like Varroa or anything like that. And I was trying to see how it was going to go. And both of my hives that I had decided that they did not like that kind of life and I was deemed a negligent beekeeper because they just like up and left. They were gone. So I got back from my trip.
23:45down to Arizona and I had left with two hives worth of bees and came back and there was zero bees. Oh no. So I had to get a nucleus colony and it wasn't even really a nucleus colony. It was more like a package of bees, which the difference between a package and a nucleus is a nucleus will have babies like the actual honeybee brood and some food. What I had was not that.
24:15So I ended up having to feed them a bunch and luckily we had a late bloom of some of the hibiscus flowers that we have here on the homestead. So they were able to put back enough food to make it through the winter. But I went into the winter with one hive and I can probably say I had a hundred percent success rate in making it through the winter because I only had one hive to manage. Well that's helpful.
24:42I was wondering if the honeybees do better being kept in a hive in Maryland because you guys don't get as cold as we do, I would assume. Yeah, we had a couple like weird cold snaps where it went from, you know, 60, 70 degrees in the middle of wintertime down to like, we're talking like single digits and negatives with a windchill. But I had a thermal blanket on their hive, so they did okay. As far as
25:12because I went into the box earlier than I was expecting to need to go into the box this year. Just as like a quick little pop it open, see how much brood they had, see how many bees actually made it through the winter, see how the queen was doing. And at the beginning of this month, they already had full frames of brood. There was eggs and larva everywhere. I was super excited about that. They were what honey beekeepers will say, going gangbuster. Basically, they're about to explode.
25:42And it looked like they had decided that their queen was not up to par and they were going to dethrone her because I had some supersedure cells in the middle of my frames where they have decided that they don't like the current queen so they're about to crown a new queen. Nice. So it's a healthy, thriving hive. It is. It is very, very healthy. Good.
26:09I'm getting ready to go to Florida. So as a precaution, I put up some swarm traps. So they stay put. Yeah. Okay. So Varroa. Varroa is a mite, right? Yes, ma'am. Varroa is a small mite that lives on the honeybees and they will actually get down into the drone cells because the drone cells are bigger. So when the honeybees are growing those drones are the male bees.
26:37And the Varroa absolutely love going down into those cells and just kind of hanging out and reproducing. And then when the drone emerges, it carries with it the mites and then it affects all the other bees and it's a nightmare. Okay. So I keep, I've been hearing about Varroa mites for, oh my goodness, probably 15 years is when it, 15 years ago when I was, when it showed up on
27:05my radar, like when I noticed the stories about it, I think. Are there other things that can harm a hive? Are there bacteria or anything like that? Yeah, there's a bunch of different pathogens that can get into hives, like American fowl brood. If you get that in any of your hives, it's pretty much a death sentence for every hive you have on your property. And in some cases, every hive within about three to five miles of your home, because it's so infectious.
27:34And basically what it does is it gets in there and it just wreaks havoc and you end up with basically soured bees and they will develop this bacterial growth on them and It just it infects everything once you get it you have to burn all of your equipment replace anything that you had come in contact with those bees and There's no coming back from it. Oh Okay
28:02I thought there was something, but I just didn't know what the answer was. Yeah, American fowl brood. And are there other stinging insects that will ruin a hive? Yes. So we have a big problem with European hornets out here in Maryland. And anyone from this area can tell you that they are not pleasant creatures to deal with. And last year I lost two different hives.
28:31At the beginning of the spring, I had nine hives. I made some splits and donated a couple, sold a couple. The European Hornets decided that while I was in there doing this, they saw one of my weaker hives that I had made a split from. They wanted what they had in there because they had a pretty good stockpile of honey and some pollen and nectars and things like that in there. They completely decimated that hive.
28:59Because the size of a honeybee versus a European hornet is about a 10 to 1 size ratio in favor of the European hornet Those are the great big scary looking dudes, right? Yeah. Yeah, I don't want ever Quite as big as the Asian hornets, but they're they're pretty big like yeah Size comparison they're about two-thirds the size of an average adult thumb. Oh
29:26No, you can keep them in Maryland. I don't want them coming here. Yeah, some people will argue that they're pollinators. I mean, when you get down to it, the nitty-gritty of it, all bees are pollinators in one way or another. But these things are so big and so aggressive that my kids, when they're playing out in the front yard, if they see one, they will literally pick up a wiffle ball bat and swing at it.
29:55and you can hear it make contact. It's so harsh. Yeah, I'm... It's like, holy moly, man. Yeah, I'm getting the creepy crawlies up my back just thinking about it. I really, I am okay with honey bees because I love honey and I know that honey bees don't want to cause me harm. If I get stung, it's my own fault because I did something stupid. And bumblebees, same thing. They have a job. They pollinate my squash blossoms and my...
30:25They try on the tomato and the cucumber, but they're very big bumblebees here, so the honeybees actually do a better job of getting in there. I'm okay with honeybees and bumblebees. I hate paper wasps. I hate hornets. Little hornets, big hornets, doesn't matter. Hate them. I don't want anything to do with them. Yeah, as long as they're over doing their own thing and not bothering me, I'm fine with them. They're going to do what they're going to do.
30:54I am like super duper allergic to bee stings, which is funny because honey bees, I don't react nearly as bad to like when I get stung, I still kind of look like elephant man for a couple days. But I have not been stung by a wasp or a hornet yet since I developed my bee allergy and I am absolutely terrified that if I get stung by one, I'm going to end up in the hospital from it. Yeah. Yeah, it's.
31:20It's scary and you don't want to walk around being afraid to walk around outside, but you definitely have to be aware. So okay, well, Brandy, number one, I love your name. Number two, I assume that Turnbull Clan is a reference to your family and Homestead is Homestead? Yes. Yeah, Turnbull Clan, my husband's family is heavily Scottish and they actually have their own...
31:49little castle out in Scotland called Fatlip Castle. So the Turnbull Clan is homage to my husband's family being Scottish. Okay I always try to remember to ask and I try to ask the beginning about people's names for their places but I didn't do it this time. I'm gonna cut you loose because I know you're busy and you got kids to take care of and stuff to do. Thank you so much for your time and your knowledge about bees because that was really fun.
32:17Yes ma'am, I still have a ton more to learn. Like I'm only three years into my beekeeping journey. Honey bees was one of those things when we decided to do it. We were like, it's Thursday night, let's get bees, you know. And come, you know, Friday that next week we had bees. So nice. All right. Well, enjoy them and keep doing what you're doing because you're doing a good thing. All right. Well, thank you, Mary. I appreciate your time.
32:47and thank you for the invitation. Yeah absolutely have a great day. You too. Bye. Bye.
 

Acres Away

Today I'm talking with Jackie at Acres Away.
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. Today I'm talking with Jackie at Acres Away. Good afternoon, Jackie, how are you? Good afternoon, good, how are you doing? Good, so tell me about yourself and what you guys do at Acres Away. So we're just kind of a family hobby farm. My husband and I have always wanted animals. I grew up with animals, he did too.
00:27And when we had kids and moved to the country, we decided we were gonna, that's what we were going to do. So we bought, um, a house with 10 acres and a barn. And first thing we got was the horses. I grew up with horses, so that was a mandatory, um, and we just kind of expanded from there, had three daughters, and now we've got, um, just about everything you could have on a farm. We've had the horses, we've had pigs, all the birds, turkeys, chickens, ducks, quails. Um.
00:57goats, we have cows, and I also raise rabbits. Very nice, you have the whole menagerie. The whole thing, I think the only thing we haven't had are alpacas and sheep. And are you interested in doing those or is that just stuff you haven't done? Maybe the alpacas, I do like to crochet, so it would be neat to learn how to spin their fur, their wool, and make my own yarn.
01:24Same with the sheep, but I haven't heard from some friends that have sheep. I've heard they can be kind of temperamental. So I think for now we'll stick with what we've got and figured, you know, if we don't like something, we'll move on to a new animal. Yeah, that's what we did. We tried doing rabbits and it did not work out very well. So we did that for a year and then decided it really wasn't for us. Yeah. Yeah. I figure you got to try it. You know, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but you got to give it a shot. Yeah. It's funny in the over
01:5450 interviews I've done since the end of August, the word crochet has not come up and I'm kind of surprised because I like to crochet much better than I like to knit. I hate the sound of knitting needles clicking. And so that's interesting that the word crochet has not come up. That's it's something my aunt, I started crocheting when my aunt was crocheting. I was pregnant with my first daughter. So this would have been
02:2215 years ago, almost 15 years ago now. And I thought, well, if I can make some cute baby stuff, blankets and whatnot, and then it'd be a good thing to give as gifts, and it kind of took up my time because at the time I was able to stay at home, my husband was full-time in the army, so I was basically at home kind of twiddling my thumbs. And I thought, well, I can learn how to do this, and I'll make stuff, and I've made stuff for friends and sold a little bit, and it's kind of gone by the wayside.
02:48my husband retired from the army and then I went to work so once I went to work extra time for stuff like that with the animals kind of went away but once in a while I'll still pick up and you know make somebody a hat or make some mittens or a baby blanket if I've got a friend that's having a baby or family so yeah I definitely I could never get quite the hang of knitting my grandmother uh... was she knitted everything she would make hundreds of hats and mittens for
03:14like local hospitals and churches and things, but I never quite got the hang of the knitting. The crocheting is much easier for me. Yes, I agree. I tried knitting when I was a kid, like maybe 10 years old, because my mom knit, and I could never understand the knit one, purl two thing. I always messed it up. Yep. And with crocheting, once you have it down, once you have the basic stitches down,
03:42It's really simple and I think it's a great thing to do in the wintertime when it's cold outside and it's dark outside. Yep. I got into it because my kids were small and they would lose their scarves. Yep. And I was like, you know, I could probably just crochet them scarves and that way they have extras when they lose the ones they have. And then I can just make more as they lose those too. And it worked out great. Yep. You always have some extra.
04:09Yep, and they were little kids, so they loved all of the crazy variegated yarn colors. Mm-hmm, yep. So that made it fun.
04:19So I just I want to hit on crochet because I hadn't even thought about it until you mentioned it. Okay, so to support your hobby farm, do you guys sell anything that you produce? Not really. I wish we could. It's but it being we're in New York State and they have a lot of regulations about selling meat and and being like USDA certified and
04:47Even if you're an animal breeder, there's things I was just reading actually yesterday about having some kind of domestic animal permit and the taxes and things. It's really complicated. If I hooked up with somebody who's already doing it, maybe it would be less complicated, but I haven't really found anybody local to me that is either like kind of willing to share what they do. Actually where we are, there's a lot of Mennonites and they kind of have the corner.
05:14on a lot of those things. They have their bulk food stands and they do a lot of their sales. So without a mentor in that area, I don't really foresee us doing it. Although we are actually moving. We're moving to a larger property with bigger barns and I would really like for that property to pay for itself, at least a little bit.
05:41Hopefully I can find a mentor out in that area that's willing to say, you know, this is how you fill out this and these are the forms you're going to need. Um, this is who you have to talk to, to get something like that started and, and just see, just see what that process is going to be like, what startup costs are going to be like, but for now my husband's retired, so he gets a pension from the army, but we also, um, both work for the local school district. So that's how we, that's how we pay for stuff here.
06:07Yeah, and I wasn't being nosy. I just sometimes people do hobby farms as literally a hobby. They just really enjoy it. And then sometimes they do hobby farms or farms because they're trying to make some money from it. In Minnesota, we don't have a whole lot of restrictions. I mean, there are definitely regulations that are in place. But if we had those kind of restrictions that you're talking about, we probably wouldn't be living on three acres.
06:36and selling produce and eggs and all the things that we do because it wouldn't be worth it. It wouldn't be worth it for us to do it. We'll have people comment on Facebook or any other thing and say, oh, I'm glad you're a certified egg seller and you have your USDA inspection or you have your NPIP and things like that.
06:56And I know that there's ways to get around it. You know, you sell the eggs as not for human consumption and things like that. But you're always kind of watching. You're, you know, you never really know who's going to say something about. What you're trying to sell or whatever kind of trade you're trying to make. And so, you know, we try to be cautious and I generally only do like animal deals, like with the rabbits. If I sell a live rabbit, you know, it's, it's sold as a pet, even though our meat animals.
07:26I generally say like, oh yeah, this is going to be a freezer pet. And then they kind of, yep, yep, sure. And yeah, there's different ways to kind of word things so it sounds a little different. But you just have to be smart about it. I don't want to get in trouble. I don't want to get anybody else in trouble. But I'm originally from New Hampshire. To live for your die state. So I'm watching rules come down and listening to things. It kind of makes me go, huh.
07:55because I could have done it at home and I can't do it here. Yeah, I'm originally from Maine, so I was a neighbor for a while. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, and Maine has less restrictions as well. So in Maine, you can sell raw milk in a public venue. That would be cool. Yeah, there's none of that here. Not here either. No. No, we have to go to the farm where the cow lives, where the cow was milked, and where the cow's milk is in a cooler.
08:24on that property. We have to go get the from the farmer. So it's amazing how many things are regulated now that were an everyday occurrence not even a hundred years ago. Exactly. Exactly. I know there's some things we've learned things health wise, but how much of that really, how much of that decision gets to be left up to us and not somebody else?
08:52Yeah. And again, I think that we do need government. I think there are some very good reasons to have a government. Yeah. But I think that it gets in the way sometimes of really good things. So, and again, that's all I want to say on it because I do not want, I do not want anyone knocking on my door saying, why are you disparaging the United States government? I'm not. Yeah. I'm not. I'm just frustrated. It's okay. Relax. Yep. So.
09:21That would be really scary. I can't even imagine having that happen. That would be uncomfortable. Oh, I don't even want to. Nope. Nope, nope, nope. The government is great. I just don't want them telling me what socks to put on in the morning. If we're doing that, we're good. So anyway, um, you said you have horses. How many horses do you have? Uh, we have two and they, they're just riding horses.
09:46My kids, I grew up loving it. My kids don't so much, and I wonder if it's, because they've had access to the horses all their lives. I didn't, I had to go to lessons and I can only go once a week. And during the summers, we'd have our riding camps and things like that. So I had to work to get to be with the horses. My kids don't, so I'll ride. And it's more or less just for fun. We've done a couple of shows.
10:14And I always thought I would do more with them. But, you know, along the way you get married, you have the kids, you realize the kids take up more of your time than you initially thought they would. And those things kind of go by the wayside. I still like to go and take my horse's name is Shadow Facts. And I take Shadow Facts and we go for a nice trot around. And he still does a little bit of jumping and he'll chase cows. So he'll when I take him out now and we go into our pastures, you know, he'll walk around with the cows and that's kind of fun. But he's just now they're just backyard ponies.
10:44Yep. I have a little tiny story about horses. When I was in Girl Scouts a long time ago, we went somewhere on a Girl Scout field trip to someplace that had horses and we got to ride horses. And I was all good with getting on the horse and riding the horse. I was nervous because it's the first time I've been around horses. And I think I was probably eight, ten years old. I can't remember now. And my best friend was also in the same troop.
11:13And she got on the horse and she was doing everything right and something spoke the horse and I watched her get bucked off the horse. And that pretty much cemented the fact that I really didn't need to ride a horse again at that point in time. You know, I was just like, wow, my friend could have died and my best friend was my best friend. I loved her. And so I didn't really have the opportunity to try riding horses ever again.
11:42and I don't have it now either. I think that if I did have the opportunity to go somewhere where I knew the owners and I knew the horse was calm, I might try it again. But it's really interesting to me that when a traumatic event happens when you're a kid, and it didn't happen to me, but it happened to someone I loved very much, you get put off of the thing. You don't wanna do it again. So. Absolutely.
12:10I think it's a very brave thing for you to ride horses. And I understand that you grew up with it, but I still think it's a very brave thing. Yeah. He's my, the one I have, I used to be, my trainer used to call me the crash test dummy because he would put me on the ones that showed up at the barn. If it was a new purchase for him or somebody's new purchase, he'd be like, Jackie, I'll ride it. Let's see what happens. So I got so used to being tossed off. And I will say that is, that is one thing I can, I can ride a horse. I'm not.
12:39always pretty about it, but I can ride a horse and I've seen, I've fallen off more times than I can even remember. Probably sometimes I don't remember because I'm not being smart, not wearing a helmet if I wasn't. That's probably the one thing in my life that's been around since I was a kid and that stuck is I love the horses. I've been in some bad spills and my daughter actually got sent to the hospital. She got stomped on by a horse and it hurt her foot real bad.
13:08But through it all, that's been the sticker for me is having the horses. Yeah, and the thing is I love horses. We have friends who live about half an hour away and they have, but I think they still have two. I haven't talked to her in a while. One of them's name is Ginger and she is the friendliest, loveliest, most beautiful horse. And Ginger and I are friends. I like it when Ginger comes over and says hello and wants me to scratch her nose and scratch her neck. That's fine.
13:38But I just don't really have any huge desire to get on her back and tell her to go. So I also have no desire to get on a motorcycle either. I did that as a 16 year old and friend of a friend had a motorcycle and he was like, do you want to go on a ride? Have you ever been on a motorcycle? And I was like, sure. No, I haven't been. Hopped on behind him. He took me for like a three mile ride on the motorcycle. Got back. I got off, took the helmet off. And he was like,
14:06So what'd you think? And I was like, I think I like cars better. I think you have agreed. So maybe I'm just not a daredevil kind of girl. And I know that I'm not. I am a calculated risk girl and it's gonna take me some time to decide what it is I wanna risk myself over. And I'm good with that. Okay, so how many cows do you have?
14:31We just have three. So it was kind of, I hate to say impulse buy because we had spoken about it before. But there is a livestock auction not too far, just the next town over from us and we had the day off together. So we went to the livestock auction. We watched for a couple of weeks and then one week we went back and picked up two bull calves.
14:55One I thought was a heifer when they ran it through. Turned out it was not. A jersey bull calf and an Angus cross whatever bull calf. My jersey only cost us $25. Very nice. So I was like absolutely, I'm buying that jersey. So mine has since been steered and he is going into the freezer. My husband loves his bull calf. So he is still intact.
15:24much to my chagrin. He bought also a couple of heifer calves. Now we had kind of an incident with the one heifer calf and she passed away. Yeah, it was a bummer. The best thing we could come up with was she had an encapsulated infection and it burst because there was a scab on her leg. Actually, I'm friends with a...
15:51younger farm guy, his family's been in the dairy business for years and I said, would you come look at this calf because her leg swelled up real bad and the vet's not able to come out. So would you come and just see what you think? He reached down on her leg and found a plug and pulled it out and it was abscess and draining. So pumped her as full of antibiotics as we thought we should. She just went so fast. She probably was septic before we even knew what to do. So she passed, but we still have the one. Her name is Hella and she's—
16:21So in the wild, we have Stormbreaker and Hella. So we'll see. When we move to the bigger property, my steer, his name is Waldo, my steer is going in the freezer and we have the goats too and the buck for the goats, he's going to go because he's just not really a fit with our does. So they're going to go and we'll bring the bull calf and the heifer calf. And I'm hoping we can find some reasonably priced.
16:51two-year-old heifers that have maybe been bred before and freshened and done the whole thing so that there can be some experienced and maybe more friendly heifers around because I worry that that hella might be kind of wild. Yeah. So I don't know, I want to I want to experience it with an experienced heifer before before she goes. I want to know what I'm getting into. Yeah, that's a good plan. Um,
17:18I have a question about the jerseys. Are the jerseys the one that are kind of like rust colored with white? So my jersey is kind of a deer color. That's like the best way to describe it. And he's got kind of white around his eyes and a little brown nose. They look like a stuffed animal, but they're not fuzzy. Yeah. Yeah. He looks like a stuffed animal. Yeah. I love those ones. I just want to kiss their faces anytime I see them.
17:45the cutest little things. But my husband, see he was really, cause I kind of do everything, his critters are like the cows and the goats. And so even though I did help him with the bottle feeding, I didn't do it as often as he did it, cause usually I was taking care of my own critters at four o'clock in the morning. Yeah. So they love him. They don't love me. They tolerate me. But like if I go into the pasture, they walk up behind me and I'm sure they know, just like a horse would know, I'm sure they know that I'm.
18:13highly uncomfortable with them when they're like right up behind me and I'm not sure what they're doing. But they'll go play with my husband and everybody's fine. So I just, I don't go in the pasture by myself just in case somebody decides they don't like me. Yeah, animals are really funny. Our dog is, okay, I'm not going to get too far into this because I talk about the dog all the time, but this is relevant. I promise. She is a mini Australian shepherd.
18:40And Australian Shepherds and Border Collies are notorious for being very, their people focused. Like they love their people, their pack. And then they're very wary of anyone who's not part of their pack. And they're not mean, they're just very aware that that's a new person we need to find out if they're okay. And Maggie has been around all three of the people who live here since we brought her home. It's my husband and I and our 22-year-old son.
19:10And she adores my husband. Like if she has to pick one of us and he's home, she's going to pick dad to go love on or sit with or be next to. And I do not understand this because I'm the one who's been with her the most since we brought her home, but he's her favorite person. And I think it's because he leaves. He leaves for eight hours a day. So she misses him. So I think that's why.
19:39But I always think, why do you love him so much? I'm the one who's been with you your whole life. I don't get it. But my kids were the same with him too, with dad. Oh, OK. Yeah. He was their favorite person because he was gone eight hours a day. Yeah. And then they show up and they get to do all the fun stuff. Yeah, I'm familiar. Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. Oh, dad's home, so mom doesn't exist now. Yeah, unless you need a snack or something like that, then we're back into existence. Uh-huh.
20:08Exactly. So, okay, so did you say at the beginning of this, this is what you always wanted to do? Yes. When I was a kid, you know, my dad actually got me chickens and ducks when I was a kid and and I knew like, you know, I want to take care of animals. I want to have animals. I thought I was going to be a veterinarian, but that didn't quite work out. So, you know, I wanted to have
20:37animals in my life more than just a cat and a dog. I always knew that was something that was going to be, I was going to, I was going to need, you know, it probably sounds weird to people that don't, don't have the same connection with animals, but like I've, I've got to get up and, and take care of them. Like I go out and I feed my ducks and I just sit there with them and I go out and take care of the horses and I just, you know, stand there with them, watch them eat. It just, just got to have it. You are illustrating the
21:05difference between have to and get to for me. You get to. You wake up in the morning and I'm sure you're like, I get to go see the cows. I get to go see the goats and the ducks and whatever animal it is that you're gonna go take care of. I get to, not, oh, I have to go do this. Unless it's five degrees out and then it's just a have to. Yeah. When it's blowing snow in five degrees, I go, oh man, I have to. But.
21:32But yeah, days like today, you know, it's raining, it's not that nice out. But yeah, I get to go outside and I get to feed them and I get to see them and be there with them. So. Yeah. And you know, I know that you know that it is an honor and luxury to be able to do what you're doing and that you love it. Yep. Absolutely. Good. I love that. So tell me how you decided to name it Acres Away because I think anchor away or anchors away.
21:59Yep. So if you're familiar with the Finger Lakes area of New York, there's, I think it's like seven, I forget exactly. But there's like, it looks like scratch marks across the face of New York state. And they're called the Finger Lakes and we're like 10 miles from one of them. So I thought, you know, if we're ever going to, if we're going to market this place, if we ever do, whether we're doing horse stuff or if we're selling things or we have some kind of market, then.
22:27you know, instead of it being anchors away, because there's so many people that use the lake and have boats and things like that. And it's a double A. So thinking of like back when we had telephone books still, double A would be listed first in the phone book and acres away. Just like you said, it sounds like that anchors away. And so, you know, when somebody thinks of that, they would, oh yeah, that's a funny, it's just a funny connection. So that was my thought process. I used to work at a place called Aberus Arabians.
22:55And I always I asked the owner like why like I get it like friendly horses like I get what you're saying But she's like no think about it. You're first in the phone book and it sounds funny So it's gonna stick in your head better than it would if it was you know, Arabians are us or something You know, it just the sound of it would would attract attention and keep it kind of in your mind Yeah, it's amazing how the alphabet used to be really important the order of the alphabet and now nobody cares. No, no sure don't
23:22The good old days, I'm telling you, when there were library card, I don't know what they're called now, the cabinets that had the drawers that had the directory for the books and library. Yes, the card catalog. That's it. Thank you. Yes. You're welcome. Yes. And we still have library cards, but they're little plastic credit card-shaped things that we scan when we take out books. It's so weird. It is.
23:50I found one of my old library cards a couple of years ago and I was like, Oh, I didn't even know I still had this. And I showed it to my kid and he was like, what is that? I said, that's what library cards look like in the 1970s and early 1980s. He's like, Jesus, your old mom. I'm like, yeah, I know. 54 is ancient. It's terrible. No, it's not old. It's what is it? Like cars? It's like.
24:18Classic, I think. Classic, yes. Yes. And he's so funny too because I'm learning all about how to do a podcast. I have been learning about this for the last six, seven months because I just started it back in August. And at first I was like, how do I do this? How do I do that? And he's like, oh, this, do this, do that, do this. I'm like, okay, cool. And then I got into it after about four months and I had a question for him about what one of my statistic things meant on my...
24:47tracking stuff on my podcast. And I said, what does this mean? He said, I have no idea. Google it. There you go. He said, you are now ahead of me on what I know about this internet situation with the podcast. And I was like, Oh, okay. So I went and looked it up and I was like, this is what it says it means. And he's like, I don't even want to talk to you that fantastic.
25:13He said, keep doing what you're doing. He said, and I don't want to hear about it. He said, you are so far ahead of me on this that he said, this is ridiculous. I was like, okay, well, your mom, you can teach an old dog new tricks, apparently. Oh yeah. And he gave me the I, you know, the what. Yep. I don't like you right now. I was like, go play your games. I'm going to do some dishes. It has nothing to do with podcasts. He's like, okay, fine. So yeah, it's, it's funny how.
25:42technology has changed so incredibly just in the last 30 years. Yeah, yeah. And it makes it easier for everybody. I mean, I wouldn't be talking to you without this situation.
25:57Okay, so what's the plan for your acres away? Is it just gonna stay a hobby farm, or are you gonna try to look into the rules and regs and maybe make it try to support itself a little bit? I definitely wanna look into it supporting itself a bit. I'm not sure how. We have our own implements to cut hay, and we do that for ourselves now. We have a hay field and we bale our own hay.
26:25where we're going, we're going to have more acreage and probably the ability to sell some of our hay if we don't expand either our goats or the cows very much. So selling hay is a big thing. Every year, everybody needs hay. Everybody that's got a farm has got to have some hay, whether they're using it to feed something or they're using kind of the poorer quality or straw to bed down stuff.
26:49And it seems like every year, there's a shortage somewhere, whether it's because there's a drought in this part of the country or there's fire up in Canada or something, somebody's having a hard time getting a hold of hay. So if we can put in for that and help out there, that would be excellent. And then, you know, I just don't know, I do other little crafty things, but, you know, you find the crafts that yeah, you can make kind of a side hustle with crafts. Like I make jewelry.
27:18and kind of charm things with chicken eggshells and quail eggshells and feathers and the occasional rabbit poop because it's cute. It's funny and it makes people talk about it. You make a pair of earrings for $10. I'd have to sell a lot of $10 earrings to make any kind of money. It's just something I do because it's fun. I don't know. I just really need to think about it and see what...
27:45see what we can figure out once we're settled in the new place, see what's allowed, see where I can actually make money and if it's even worth it. Because if I'm paying taxes left and right and having to pay for this, that and the other kind of permit, is it even worth it at the end of the year to try to turn a profit? Or am I just better off feeding my family, which is just what we do now, feeding the family and maybe selling eggs to my neighbors instead of somebody I don't know?
28:13Yeah, and I don't think that any homestead has to be selling to the outside public. I just, I was just curious about what the plan is. So, the new place, is that on the near future radar or are you guys just getting started on looking? We're under contract where we're at right now and by summer, by the time it turns summer, we'll be in the new place. Yay!
28:40That's awesome. Congratulations. I'm trying not to be excited because we're like a Murphy's Law family. Like if it can go wrong, it does. So I'm excited. I am excited, but I am also, boy, I can't think of a good word for it, but. Anxious? Not so much anxious, but I'm glasses half, the glasses half something. I'm not sure if it's full or if it's half empty. But I'm just.
29:09I'm just going to wait before I get too excited. As long as everything goes the way it should and the way it's looking, we'll be there by summertime. But I just, I'll reserve my excitement for when we've unloaded the last box of items into the house. Yeah, when we bought this place three and a half years ago, we paid for the inspection ourselves because we didn't want that to be on the seller.
29:37I was really worried that something was going to pop up that made it a no-go, that we were not going to be able to buy it. The inspection man was really, really awesome. He showed up before we did and did his inspection of the property and the house. Then we showed up and I walked in and I said, so what's the bad news? He said, wow, way to be optimistic. I said, look.
30:03I said, this is important to me and I'm trying not to get my hopes up. So I had to come in that way. He said, the bad news is you got yourself a fine little house here. I said, really? He said, yep. He said, they did a fantastic job. He said, the wiring is great. They did a lovely job remodeling it. Everything looks solid. I hadn't been breathing deeply since we had made the offer and I was accepted until.
30:33after that. And then he said, but, and I went, uh-huh, here it comes. He says, I'm doing the radon test because in Minnesota, like seven out of 10 homes have a radon gas problem in their basements. And he said, I don't think it's going to be a problem. He said, but you might want to not quite exhale all the way until you get that. He said, if that's the kind of person you are. And I said, I am. He said, okay. He said, don't, don't, don't
31:03put all your eggs in that basket just yet. He said, put like 11 of the 12 dozen, 11 of the 12 in the dozen in the basket. He said, that's where I'm at. I said, okay. And we got the results from that back. And I thought that the radon levels were too high because every basement has some level of radon. Right. And I almost cried.
31:26And my realtor called shortly after I'd gotten the results. And she was like, so, did you see the radon results? And I said, yes. And she said, why do you sound sad? And I said, because it's bad, right? And she was like, no, you're good. I said, oh, okay. She said, you're good. You're gonna get the house of your dreams. I said, okay, fantastic. Now I can breathe. She said, yep. She said, go ahead and blow it all out. And I blew into the phone. She just laughed.
31:57But yeah, it's really hard because you can't get so excited that if something goes wrong, your heart is so broken, you can't function. Right, right. Yep. And that's how it would have been. So I'm right there with you. I did it. I lived it. You did. This is our second go around on this. We bought our first property 12 years ago where we are now. So now we're doing it again. And it's the same process, but we weren't homeowners before.
32:27and before the military was moving us. So it wasn't, you know, it wasn't kind of scary because we knew the military was gonna move us up. Now it's just us. Now it's just the family. So, and of course with the animals, it's even more, but I think we're making the right decision, you know, and even if it's not the right decision, we'll find a way to make it work. Yeah, as I was growing up, all I wanted to do was be a grownup.
32:53And then I got to be a grownup and I was like, wow, it's really hard being an adult. Yeah. I didn't sign up for all this, but okay. And it never ends. I mean, I look at things now and I'm like, we have to make what decision about what, where are the parents here? Yeah. My husband laughed. He said, honey, we are the parents now. I said, well, yes, I understand that, but isn't there a higher authority than
33:20than us who can make this decision. And he's like, no, we're it. I'm like, no, I don't want to do it. And we don't have one of those. So yeah, when an adult ear adult, yes, I'm going to put that in the lexicon of funny things that I'm going to say from now on. Um, jobby job is one of the funny things. Um, adult ear adult is now added and grins and giggles.
33:44I heard somebody say four grins and giggles the other day and I thought, wow, that's a much politer way than the way I usually say it. So, yep, yep. Grins and giggles now instead of the other one. I learned so much on this podcast. It's great. It's good. Yes, and I love words. So anytime I get a new word to add in, I'm very happy. Okay. Well, it's been about half an hour, Jackie. I really, really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me.
34:12And I hope that whatever your dreams are for your hobby farm, I hope they all come true. Okay, thank you. Thanks for having me. Yep. Thanks. Bye. Bye.
 

Olde Skye Farms

Today I'm talking with Katy at Olde Skye Farms. You can follow them on Facebook as well.
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. Today I'm talking with Katie at Old Sky Farms. Good morning, Katy. How are you? Good morning. I'm good. How are you? I'm great. Tell me about yourself and Old Sky Farms because I know you have a lot going on right now. We do have a lot going on, but I feel like we're just getting started and don't know where to start, but we're starting.
00:29Yup. So we have, we moved from Florida almost two years ago to North Carolina. So we went from like 0.26 acres to 23. Nice. And it's been a lot of cleanup and fixing structures and getting things ready for livestock and animals and all of those sorts of things. But we're just now getting into agritourism. Yeah.
00:58and figuring out how to make that work for us on the farm. We just had our first big event, which was an Easter egg hunt, and that turned out pretty good. We have currently nine Nigerian dwarf goats. Three of them are, well, they're kind of babies. They're almost like teenagers now. And about 30 something.
01:25adult chickens and then of course it's chick season so we have probably like 20 chicks right now. And the next thing we're adding are Highland cows in May which we're really excited about. How many? Two babies so they're half siblings. Fun. Yeah we're really looking forward to that and the experiences that we could you know open up to people with them.
01:53Sure. Agrotourism is basically using what you have at your farm to have people come in and see how the farm works or having events at the farm. Yes? Yes. Yeah, exactly. We're still new to it too, but I did join. North Carolina has something called the Agrotourism Networking Association.
02:21So it's basically farms from all over the state that do all sorts of things like hay rides you pick or just come visit the farm for camp or field trips, things like that. The fun stuff. Yeah, the fun stuff. Okay. Yeah, and that's been a really good resource, especially just starting out. And they had their annual conference in February. And one of the main things learning was just like,
02:51There can be so many farms, but a family can visit each farm a different weekend and see something like experience something different completely. And just that there's room enough for everybody to succeed. Yeah. Okay, so I know what you were doing this morning because you told me in messages and I saw on Facebook, but can you tell the listeners what you and your husband were up to this morning? Yeah. So we were working on.
03:19converting what was cropland into pasture. So my husband spent all week using a chain drag in our UTV because we don't have a tractor yet to prep the soil. And this morning we were seeding it also with our UTV and then a hand spreader. So it's going to be a long day. Yeah, so what time were you guys up and at them to do this this morning? Well, I have a
03:46almost two-year-old daughter. So once my mom came to watch her, we went out. So probably, I mean, we were up around six, but probably got out there around eight. Okay. The reason I ask is because farming and homesteading and ranching, whatever term you want to use, is real work. It's not just, oh, yay, we're having baby cows or we're getting baby cows or, oh, the chicks are cute.
04:12It's a lot of work when you're doing it. It is a lot of work and yeah, I'm just very thankful for my husband too because it would just be a lot harder. So those that are doing it by themselves, I give them a lot of props. Yeah, I'm not doing it by myself. My husband and my 22-year-old son right this second are outside putting in the, I don't know what they're called. They're like pavers, but they're actually tall and they have an X in the top so that
04:42put things in that X to make a foundation. Oh, okay, yeah. The wood goes into the Xs and they're beginning the build on our heated greenhouse. I'm so excited. That is exciting. I had listened to one of your previous ones and I heard that you got a grant, which we're also working to try and get a grant for a hoop house to do producing stuff.
05:05Yep. And hoop houses are great, but I really, really, really wanted a solid greenhouse, if that makes sense. Because we've lost one hoop house to the wind and I was just like, I can't watch another one blow over. I will just cry. And so when I saw that there was a grant available and I told my husband about it, he was like, you should apply for that. Yeah, I think that's awesome. I said, okay, I'm going to apply for it. I didn't have a hope in hell.
05:33of getting it. I didn't think that we were ready. And apparently they did think we were ready. So they're starting the build today and they were supposed to start it a month ago, but then we got snow. So my husband was like, we're going to be hitting the starting the greenhouse first thing in the morning. He was telling me this last night. That's awesome.
05:55And I said, great. And I said, I'm going to be hitting the podcast with old sky farms at 10 o'clock in the morning. And he said, okay, well, we'll let the dog out with us and it'll be quiet. You can record and we're going to go build a greenhouse. I was like, yes. So very exciting things happening here too. And it is the, well, tomorrow's the last day of March. So we are all rolling into busy season. Yes. Yeah. But that's awesome about the greenhouse and that you're going to have it heated cause I'm sure it's pretty cold.
06:23It's very well, I don't know if you've heard me talk about this on the podcast, but this winter has not been terrible. We had a week in January where it was very, very cold, like minus teens, minus twenties, overnight. And it was only a week. And other than that, it's been an extended fall. Basically, we got maybe, I mean, this last snow probably brought us to a little over a foot of snow total for the winter.
06:54So this winter has been lovely as far as winters go, but it still hasn't been warm enough to grow anything in the ground outside. So we're real excited to be able to get the babies into the greenhouse, you know, the seedlings that were started in the kitchen and then extend the growing season into November, December later this year. Yeah, that's gonna be great for you guys.
07:22So it's really, really, really cool. And we're really excited and I should probably stop because I could talk about it for an hour. It's fine. That's awesome. It's good to have things you're excited about. Yeah. We want to, we, I got asked in an email from a person that is principal of a private, I think it's a religious school, like a church school, if we could supply them with leafy greens and carrots and stuff for sale.
07:52during the school year and this was like a year ago, over a year ago now. And I was like, I am so honored that you asked, but we don't grow anything in the wintertime because it's Minnesota. And he was like, oh yeah, I said, if you want stuff in the summer, we could certainly do that. And so I think this year we probably are going to be providing some stuff for that school for a take-home program while they prepare our school.
08:21I have to email him like Monday and confirm that. And I'm hoping that we do because that would be really fun. Yeah, that's awesome. And then hopefully this fall we'll be able to put in fall, you know, fall cold crop that they can use. But I had to ask him to make sure that he checked with the Ag Department here in the state because I said, I don't want to tell you we can do it.
08:51the government saying you can't do that. Right. So he did and it's all good and I'm hoping that we're going to be able to do it because it'll be farm to school, not just farm to table. Yeah, that's great. That's one of the things I really want to work on here is getting the kids out here, especially the ones that don't get to see farm life every day, like that don't know eggs come from chickens or milk comes from cows. I think it's really important. Oh, me too. Yeah.
09:21Me too. I didn't realize that there were people who didn't know the eggs came from chickens and came from cows. And when I heard about it, like probably 15, 20 years ago, I don't remember how I heard this story. But I had a moment of, are you kidding me? Right.
09:44I know there are little golden books about chickens and cows that get read to kids when they're little. That's true, yeah. I don't know. Every time someone says something like that or I say it, I feel like I'm insulting people who don't know. Right, because I don't want to make them feel bad. Things happen, but I want maybe to be the segue for them to learn about them. Yeah, let's go with that.
10:13And Lord knows I don't know everything about everything. There are every single day, every single day I learned something new that I'm like, Oh, huh, that's where that came from. So we have a big old brain in our heads. We only use about 10% of it consciously. There's 90% left that makes all these little connections in the back all the time and you go, Oh, that's where that came from. Right. Yeah. But anyway, uh, how did the planting go?
10:43You guys are going to do it all day? Yeah, we're good. I thought we could only go so fast with the UTV just because, you know, he's using the crank seed spreader. So I can't go, you know, really fast. So it will probably be after we're done here. We got to go back out. Okay. So I saw that you have an event coming up in July. What's that event? The summer camp? I think so. Something about biologist Katie.
11:12Yeah, which is so weird for me to say because I have a BS in biology, but I'm just not the type of person that likes to talk about myself like that. But I am a biologist, so part of that, what we were talking about introducing kids that don't know about the eggs come from chicken, milk comes from cows. But my love is ornithology and birds.
11:41the natural things. So I really wanted to bring that to kids this year. I think it would be a really good camp. So that's what we're going to try to do. Okay. And how do people sign up for it on your website? Yeah. So I'm working, right, one of the things we're working on is finding a platform for tickets that doesn't charge a crazy amount for the consumer and also doesn't charge to take money from us as well.
12:10Once I think I found a few that I'm working the kinks out, but it will be through our website which you can get to at oldskyfarms.com or also on Facebook. We have a link there as well. Okay. And is it a stay overnight camp or is it a day camp? No, it's a day camp. I'm actually due to give birth in June. Oh my. So
12:36The newest one is a boy, so he'll be probably attached to me during these camps, but it'll be from 8 to 1 and then Monday through Friday. Okay, and are you comfortable telling how much it costs to be part of it? Sure. We're going to do $250 per kid or per child and a $100 sibling discount. So if they have multiple children coming, trying to help the parents out a little bit.
13:06And it's a week? Yes. And we're going to have two weeks, but a week at a time. Yeah. OK. Awesome. That sounds like fun. Do you have other children? Yeah. So my daughter will be two in May. Oh, you are going to be a busy, busy mama in July. I'm a little nervous, but hopefully I can do it. Don't forget to get some sleep, because you want to be able to remember the time.
13:35with your two-year-old and your newborn. Yes, I know. I'm going to try. Well, thankfully, Kyle's going to take off he works full time in Raleigh. And I'll probably have a helper with me as well because that'll be a lot. Yeah, your husband's name is Kyle? Yes, Kyle. Mine too. Oh, really? That's awesome. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, it's a family name. His grandparents on his mom's side is their last name.
14:04Oh, that's neat. Yeah, he's the only Kyle first name out of all the kids. There's also a cousin named Kylie She's a girl. Oh, that's cute Yeah, technically Kyle's first name is Brendan after his dad, but there was a lot of confusion So he went by his middle name Kyle. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I understand. You have no idea how much I understand And then at the summer camp, he's also he's a carpenter. So we're gonna spend
14:33a day doing building bluebird houses or some sort of wood project as well because I think that's super cool too. Nice. That's going to be fun for the kids. I hope so. Yeah. The reason I say I understand is because my name is Mary Evelyn, but I am actually known to my friends when I was younger and my family as Lynn because I was named after my both my grandmothers.
14:58Okay. My mom really wanted me to be Mary and my dad really wanted me to be Evelyn. And so they settled on Mary Evelyn, but within weeks they were calling me Lynn. Oh, that's cute. That's funny. And I kind of miss Lynn because that's the name I grew up being called. But I had so many times where I had to sign paperwork and I had to sign Mary E. Yeah. I finally was just like, nevermind. I'll still buy Mary. So.
15:26So one of these times I'm debating switching over to Lynn for personal stuff or like the podcast eventually. I don't know. It might be weird for people. But I totally get it. The whole name confusion thing. The name thing. Yeah. Yep. And there aren't very many people who are in that situation. So tell him I feel his pain about the nicknames and the other names.
15:51I will because he's told me many times his dad used to get mail and then he would get frustrated because it was actually for Kyle, not the dad. And then Kyle was always like, well, you named me. So what did you expect? So is he a Kyle Jr.? No, he's not a Kyle Jr. Sorry. No. Yeah. So it's Brendan Kyle. Okay. No Jr.
16:14I wander into the weirdest discussions with this podcast. Our names have nothing to do with homesteading, but here we are. Okay, so what else do you guys do? You said you have chickens and you're getting the Highlands, is that right? Yes, the Highland cows in May. So we have an egg stand out by the driveway that's self-serve. It's bright pink.
16:40so that people will hopefully stop and buy eggs because we have a surplus, which I'm sure almost everybody with chickens probably does right now. Oh, yeah. And then we are working on doing bees. We just signed up to do a bee class in our county to my husband built an elevated stand for the hive so that hopefully their flight path goes over people's heads instead of like.
17:08directly at them. That's helpful. Yeah, so that's one of the things and then we also want to do an apple orchard because around here you have to drive probably around an hour and a half to get to the closest you pick apple orchard. Yeah, so I think it would be really cool to have it'll be a high density apple orchard, so it's only going to be an acre, but a lot of trees. You can have a lot of trees on an acre. Yeah.
17:36I don't have you done any research into this yet? Yes. Yeah. Okay. We're still in the, you know, research planning, getting everything together stages. So we have like the types we want and you know, what goes, what can cross pollinate all those sorts of things. It's just getting to the final steps. Okay. We got apple trees when we moved here three and a half years ago.
18:03gave us six apple trees as a housewarming present. We've known him forever. And I had asked him if he had any babies for sale. And he was like, I've got Honey Golds and I've got Harrelson and I've got Regent. And I said, well, how much would you sell me some for to plant in our new place? And he was like, I'm not selling them to you. I'm giving them to you. That's really nice. I said, you don't have to do that. He was like, I want to.
18:30He said, I'm very excited for you guys. I was like, thank you. So my husband and my sons ran up and got them and we put them in the first fall. We were here. So we moved in in August, planted apple trees in October of 2020. We got our first edible apples last spring. So a year ago. So, and he said that we might get apples from the honey gold the following year, but, but they really do need time.
18:58activate to their new home and they need time to build up their reserves again. So I don't know if that holds true for all apple trees, but just keep in mind that you might not have apples for a couple of years. Oh yes, we know. Okay. Yeah, we've looked at it and we're going to have, I think he's calculated 210 apple trees and they're going to be the dwarf fruit apple trees. Good, yeah. But yeah, we know this.
19:28a few years at least to actually bear fruit. Yeah. Yeah, we were very happy to see the honey golds this spring, this fall, this past fall. Yeah, I'd be really excited too. And the other thing is that I'm assuming you've done the research on how to take care of the baby apples as they grow so that they don't get bug eaten. Yes. Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah, we're trying to make sure we kind of have...
19:55all of our bases covered, but I know once you start something, I'm sure something will come up that we didn't expect. Yeah, I rarely ever have advice for anyone I talk to on the podcast because you guys usually know more than I do, but having just gone through this over the last three years with these trees, and we're not growing an orchard, we just wanted apple trees. We've always wanted apple trees, so we've learned a couple things along the way.
20:19Yeah, no, we're completely, you know, noobs pretty much. So if any advice, I will take it. Okay. And bugs love baby apples. Okay. Good to know. It does not matter what kind of apple you plant. The bugs are going to find them. And the thing that we realized is that we had to spray them with something. Yeah. And so we looked into it and we found out that neem oil is actually pretty good at repelling the bugs.
20:48And neem oil is not a bad thing. I mean, I'd rather not put anything on them. But if we have to. Right, but sometimes you have to. And we've used the neem oil for, we have Japanese maple trees that got some bugs on them. So we use that for them too. Yeah, neem oil is a miracle thing. I didn't know about it until probably 10 years ago. And it seems to do the job on a lot of insects. Yeah.
21:18But anyway, whatever, we could we'd talk about that all day too, but we're not going to. So an apple orchard sounds absolutely wonderful. You guys are going to have the most lovely agri-tourism spot ever. I hope so. I mean, that's what we're, this is our forever dream. So we're hoping to make it self, you know, somewhat self-sufficient and make a little extra because I'm staying home with the babies. So we'll need it.
21:46That's amazing because not so many people have that. I don't want to use the word luxury, but I'm going to use it. I completely agree. I am privileged in that sense that I get to stay home. Yeah. And I feel like a lot of people choose this lifestyle because they can be with their kids. Right. Yeah. Like, I think everybody thinks their kids are probably the smartest kid in the world.
22:15And I'm not saying my daughter is, but I feel like if I hadn't had this time with her, I don't think she'd be where she is now, intelligence-wise. And just curiosity, like learning about the bugs and the trees and the birds and everything outside. Absolutely. My mom was a stay-at-home mom until I was 15, I think. And I'm the oldest of three. So my brother was probably 12. Yeah. He's the youngest. And...
22:44It was great because we left the house in the morning and she was home and we got home from school and she was home. We didn't end up doing that latchkey kid thing that people of my generation did. I'm 54 so you figured out 80. My mom was a single mom so I was often getting myself together on the bus and stuff. She's a nurse so it wasn't easy hours or anything.
23:12really happy and she's happy for me that I get to stay with my daughter. I bet she is. I bet she's elated for you because yeah it's such a special time from the time that they're born until they're about three. There's so much learning that's happening and yeah she's just a little sponge. I was just gonna say they're little sponges and they they soak up everything. They do. They really do. So the good things and the bad things.
23:41Oh yeah, of course. Of course. I remember the first time my daughter said a swear word. I think she was three, so that was pretty good. Yeah, you went longer than we have. Uh-huh. Because Teagan has already dropped some words. Yeah, I don't even remember what it was, but she said it and I looked at her. I was like, what? And she grinned at me and said it again. And I was like, let's not say that word. She said, but you say it. I was like, yes, I do. Okay.
24:09Maybe I should not say that word in front of you anymore ever again. That's cool. But parenting is an honor. I think for me it's an honor. And my kids are grown and I still just smile inside when my kids call and say, mom or mama or hey you, I did this thing or I have a problem or whatever and they want to talk it through with me.
24:39Yeah, that's amazing. I don't want to say I can't wait, but I am looking for, I'm just happy I get to be her mom and this other little one's mom. Yeah. Yep. How are you doing with having to do all the chores on the farm and being this close to do? Because I'm sure that you're feeling it. I am. Things are starting to get pretty sore now.
25:06I get I'm tired but you know most days when she goes down for a nap I end up napping too because that's just the only way I'm gonna get through the day. Good. Yeah. No, I'm doing okay. I'm good. Thank you. Yeah, you got to take care of yourself before you can take care of the other things. Yeah, that is that's a hard lesson to learn. You cannot do it all all the time. Right. Yeah. So. I think as women especially though we want to try.
25:36and just make everything happen, but it's not possible. There are only so many hours in the day and there are only so many energy reserves in your body. And if you add that up, you have to find a balance somewhere. Yeah, that's true. So been through it, been through three pregnancies, I remember. And I wasn't running a farm. I was growing a human and that was enough. That's enough.
26:04Yep, and I don't even say pregnant anymore. I say growing a human because when you put it in the terms of growing a human, the weight and the gravity of that... ..situation. ..feet is huge. It is, yes. Yeah. But anyway, okay, so what's the goal for the farm? I mean, I assume that you guys are trying to make it so that you live there forever and you raise your kids and you grow the farm while you grow your kids. Yeah.
26:33pretty much it. That's our ultimate goal just to be successful in creating enough income that hopefully Kyle can stay home and run the farm full time and not have to drive an hour to work every day and then come home and also do chores. So yeah, just to be successful and raise the kids here and learn about nature and farming and everything.
27:01I'm sure that you don't want this to run too long, so I've got one more big question for you and then we'll probably be good. How did you guys decide to do this? Because I didn't hear that when I asked you at the beginning. I probably didn't answer it. I don't know if I asked actually. No, I think you did. You told me how to start, but I probably went off in some random direction. That's okay. We always knew kind of that North Carolina was going to be our end state.
27:30because I'm originally from Southern Maryland. Kyle's originally from Prince Edward Island, Canada, and we lived in Florida for 13 years. So we definitely wanted to come North, but he wasn't willing to go all the way back North to PEI. And then North Carolina is only about three hours from where I'm from in Maryland. So that's how this ended up being.
27:58like the location we chose. As for like the farm, we knew we wanted acreage because in Florida, you're just where we were, you're just on top of each other and we wanted room to breathe and raise our children. And once we sold that house, we were able to purchase this with the land. So that's kind of how we had no idea where Wilson was or like what is here.
28:26But so far everybody's been very nice and welcoming. And our property, I mean, I think it's beautiful. It's something we just wanna keep working at. So is the entire area where you are really pretty? I think so. It's still a very large producer of tobacco. And we're in a rural part, but we're still like only an hour away from Raleigh, which is like the bigger,
28:56somewhat of a bigger city. But not everybody has the amount of land and I know we're very thankful to have what we have. Yeah. I've talked to a lot of people in North Carolina and South Carolina on this podcast because apparently that's where everybody goes to Homestead, who knows? Really? But it sounds like it's really beautiful. It sounds like the weather is pretty temperate, but winters aren't extremely cold, clearly.
29:26So one of the main things that we liked here was, excuse me, you can go, it kind of has everything. It has the farmland, it has a city, it has the coast, and then it also has the mountains. So if we wanted to do a weekend trip to any of those, we could do so in the same state. So I thought that was really cool. Yeah. I grew up in Maine and I was half an hour from the ocean and half an hour from the White
29:56That's awesome. So once I got a driver's license, I was like, I need to go see these places because that wasn't a thing we really, really did as a family because it costs money and everybody was doing different things when I was growing up. And now I live in Minnesota and the most exciting hill I know of doesn't exist in Minnesota. I haven't found it yet.
30:22And the biggest body of water is Lake Superior. And I think I've been there once and it's like looking out over the ocean, but it's not the ocean. So, so I kind of shifted from, from hilly ocean and mountains to flatlands and corn and alfalfa and I don't know, tree lines, I guess, cause there's not, where I live, there's not a whole lot of forest.
30:51as it were, its tree lines are on the farms. Okay. But anyway, Katy, I really appreciate you taking time out to talk with me and I know you got to get back to planting your field. So I'm going to let you go. Thanks so much. Thank you for having us. Yeah, have a great day. Thanks you too. Bye.
 

Homesteading and Hungry

Today I'm talking with Lisa at Homesteading and Hungry. You can follow her on Facebook as well.
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. Today I'm talking with Lisa at Homesteading in Hungary. Good morning, Lisa, how are you? Good morning, I'm doing well, how about you? I'm great, we have another sunny morning here. I think it's gonna rain tonight, but right now it's beautiful. So tell me about yourself and Homesteading and Hungry. So.
00:29We just got into homesteading. I mean, I guess it's going on three and a half years now. So I feel it's gone so fast. I feel like we just started, but really we've been doing it for a little bit now. But we first got into homesteading because my husband called me and said, hey, Lise, I bought a farm. Yay. So I decided to make my entire personality.
00:59And homesteading and Hungry came about because we are a military family. And I was a food blogger and I blogged on my site at the time was called the crunchy sailors wife. And so I would share my recipes there and, you know, just a little bit about our military life. And then when we, I found out we were moving to a farm, I was like, okay, I'm just going to really bloom where I'm planted and embrace this. And so.
01:28I changed our name to Homesteading and Hungry and started cataloging our adventures there. I love the name. Homesteading and Hungry just made me laugh when I saw it. I was like, that is such a great title. So what do you do? What do you guys do where you are? So we are in the Midlands of South Carolina and we started off with chickens as many do.
01:55I'd never had a garden before, so we just got started with chickens and gardening. I used to always say that I had a black thumb, and now if I hear anyone say that, I'm like, no, no, no. You don't have a black thumb. You have a green thumb. You just have to cultivate it. You have to find it, but you can do this. I love encouraging people who are like, oh no, I can't do it. One of my favorite things is to get local friends and be like, let's go get you your first plants and get your garden started.
02:21And I'm still very much a beginning gardener, but I really, really love it. Um, but so we started with chickens and then, um, that really, you know, we're bad at chicken math, so that's really, really fast. Yep. Um, and now we've got goats, we've got chickens, turkeys, goats. We got started with cattle.
02:46And we thought chicken math was bad, but calculus is a whole nother thing. And so, calculus, calculus. Yes. That, so now we have 11 cows. Oh, wow. And we raise both dairy and beef cows. And we have, I think I said goats, so goats, cows, chickens, turkeys. And we've got a beautiful, sweet, loving livestock guardian dog named Chester.
03:15And then we've got the worst homesteading dog ever. And his name is Deoshi. Okay, why is he the worst? He's so bad. So if anybody follows me anywhere on social media, they've seen my posts like free dog. I'll put his, you know, I'll just put free dog up there cause he just drives me up the wall. He's a hound. And we had him before we had a homestead. So because he's a hound, he wants to chase everything. He wants to bark at everything. And so...
03:45He is just like very, very, very obnoxious when it comes to being a homestead dog. And he also loves to just make us crazy. He likes to steal things off the counter. He's a professional counter surfer. He likes to, anything that I'm working on, whether it's inside or outside, he comes, he steals it, he runs away, he's obnoxious, but we love him.
04:10He's having a hard time growing where he's been planted, I think. Oh my gosh, he is. Yeah. Okay, so back to the black thumb thing. Yes. And when people say, I can't. To me, when I hear I can't, I hear I won't. And if you say I can't, you haven't tried yet. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, well, either that or they've tried and then like not, you know, tried like once.
04:39and got discouraged and felt bad because they killed the plant and they're just like, I can't do it. So yeah, I agree. Definitely either never tried or just tried once or twice and then gave up when, if they keep going, they'll get it. Yeah. And sometimes they don't. I keep trying to make yeast bread and I kill the yeast every
05:09is the one who makes the yeast breads, because he just has the magic touch with it. And so for me, I can't do yeast breads, is actually I won't try it again right now. So sometimes I can't, translates to I won't, because I don't really want to do it. Yeah. And other times I can't is I won't, because people are afraid to try. And I hate flying.
05:36Like I will never be on an airplane again in my life if I can help it. And I have tried, I've been on a plane like three times in my life and I hate it. I cannot get past the anxiety. So when I say I can't fly, I mean, I absolutely will not fly. So, so it's just the way that it's said and the intent behind it, I think. That makes sense. Yeah. Um, okay. So.
06:07Tell me about why you guys decided to do this because if you were military, I assume you were living all over the place. Yes. We were in South Carolina when he called me and said I bought a farm. He had retired from the military and my husband's name is Charlie, so he retired from the military and he got offered a job.
06:34in the Midlands of South Carolina. So he was looking, we were looking for a house. We knew we were going to be moving. You know, and to me that kind of, I was like, oh, that'd be cool. You know, if we move, we can just, you know, get like a little house in town where they allow chickens because I kind of wanted some chickens. So it wasn't super far off that we'd have a little bit of land. But when that turned into, you know, I bought a farm.
07:03I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Because I didn't really think beyond chickens. And I thought we'd be in town. I'm definitely an extrovert. And so I really like to be around people. And so when he first told me he bought a farm immediately, I was like, oh my gosh, we're not gonna be near people. We're gonna be too far away. But then when we came here and I first stepped in,
07:31out and remember he bought this told me he bought it like I never saw it. Wow. He just did it. But he knows me well enough to know that I would have been okay and this is after looking this is not a easy area to find housing. And this just kind of you know I would say that God just kind of brought this to him because everybody who sees this place is like how in the world did you guys get this place?
07:59Because it's just gorgeous. And so when I first got here, you know, we pulled up and I was like, okay, it's really pretty. And then I stepped into the house. And the house has this really cute little kitchen. But it's on the second floor. And right off the kitchen is a porch. And so when I first stepped out onto that porch, and the porch is incredibly gorgeous, the architecture of it.
08:28But when I first stepped out on the porch and saw all the land that we had just acquired, I just started seeing a bigger picture. And from then on, I was really, really excited about all of the possibilities. Now I didn't look out and imagine we'd have 11 cows, but I definitely felt that homestead vibe like, oh wow, I could really have an amazing garden out here. We can do chickens. Like I got really excited about the possibilities.
08:58Yeah, it's funny how when you step into the picture that you maybe had in your head or maybe did not in your case, everything starts to make sense. When we moved here three and a half years ago, I keep saying this, it'll be four years eventually, like in August it'll be four years. We had been wanting to buy land.
09:25And my husband really wanted to buy a lot of land and I was like, no, no, no, no, no. We can't afford it. Number one and number two, you have a full-time job. You are the breadwinner. That's how it's always been. I don't see that changing because I've been out of the workforce forever. And we just need something where we can stretch out, but it doesn't take over your life. And he was like, okay. I know, I know.
09:51I know your dream is like hundreds of acres, but that is not the reality. And so we found this view. Well, we didn't find it. Our realtor found it for us. We love her. We adore her. And she called me and said, I found your house. And I said, I said, did you? And she said, yeah. And we'd already looked at four places that were not great. And she said, you have to meet me at 630 tonight. And I said, that's not going to happen.
10:20because neither one of us had gotten any sleep the night before because there was a big storm and the weather radio was going off all night and we didn't dare shut it off because the tornado was blah blah blah. So I talked my husband into making the half an hour drive from where we used to live to where we live now. And she showed him the big old pole barn and the flat area where he could put in his huge garden because she knows us, she knew what we were looking for.
10:49And she said, all right, Mary, it's your turn. And she said, go ahead and go in the house. And I had no, I had a vague idea of what it looked like, but I had no idea how amazing it actually was. I walked into the kitchen. There is one door in and out of our house. That's it. I don't know why, but one door and it opens on the kitchen. The kitchen is like one of those kitchens you see in better homes and gardens and completely remodeled. It had a
11:18an actual huge island. It had brand new stainless steel appliances and I don't really care about stainless steel, but they're very pretty and they're very shiny. Yes. And easy to clean. Yeah. Yeah. Sort of easy to clean. I wouldn't say easy, but yeah. And it also had like a
11:48and took a big deep breath and she was like, I found your house. I hope you found my house. So I utterly understand what you're saying about when you step into it, everything starts to open up because the minute I saw that kitchen, I love to cook. And it doesn't have a lot of counter space, but the island makes up for it.
12:11And it also has a walk-in pantry closet, which, you know, if you love to cook, you want a place to store your ingredients. So the kitchen sold me. The rest of the house is okay, but that kitchen is just, it's just a showstopper. And right now it's not, right now it's dirty, but brand new, it was very, very pretty. That sounds amazing. I, um, that is the one thing. I love this kitchen. It's smaller than the last one I had.
12:40And it has no pantry though. And so I made a YouTube video about like my homestead pantry staples. And I'm like, in the video, I'm like, it's not really pantry, it's like a cupboard. So it's very organized because it has to be because it's such a small space. But that is the one thing that I really miss from my previous house is the pantry. Awesome that you have a great one.
13:08It's really great to have a pantry because you can put everything away and shut the door. And it's there, you know it's all there, but it isn't in your face. In the house we had before, we had many, many cabinets in our tiny galley kitchen, but we didn't have a pantry. And we bought one of those tall cabinets with the big doors on it. I don't know if you know what I mean, but it's a big cabinet, but it's tall.
13:36So it had like three cabinets on top of each other. Okay. And it was pretty and it matched the other cabinets. And that was my pantry cabinet set up. And it still didn't work great because it, when you're trying to build a pantry, you end up stacking things on top of each other. And the cabinets were a good 27, 28 inches deep. So.
14:03Half the time I couldn't find what I needed and I would think that we were out. So I would put it on the list and then I would clean out the pantry and realize I had six of the thing we just bought. So having a pantry closet is fantastic. And we ended up putting bookcases in it to be able to store things. And so about once every three months, I go in there and I pull everything out and I sweep the floor and I wipe off the shelves and then I put everything back and I make a list then.
14:30And that way I kind of know what we're low on. It just makes everything so much easier. Especially if you love to cook. Cause I don't, I don't want to eat food that I bought already made from somewhere else very often, we're doing it tonight. Cause I don't have a plan for dinner and my husband has a half day and he's got stuff to do this afternoon and I was like, can we just order out? And he was like, yes.
14:57But most of the time I really enjoy cooking. So when I'm like, I want to make chicken wild rice soup. And I find out that I don't have any chicken stock in the pantry. I'm like, well, I guess we're going to do something else. So you know what I'm talking about. Yes. Yeah. Okay. That was a very long winded, while we love to cook and while we love our kitchen discussion, I'm sorry. Um, okay. So what's the plan for the homestead? I mean, I'm assuming that the.
15:27the cattle are for your use. Are you doing that to sell any? Yeah, actually, we've got two of our dexter bull calves going to another family to help them get started with beef. And so that's really exciting. And we've got our, so we've got Angus.
15:57We've got Dexter and we've got Jerseys. Nice. So, um, so the Angus, once they have their calves, they're both females. Once they have their calves, which, you know, should be soon, we are going to wean them and then we'll be taking them to a butcher and those, that'll be the first beef we've raised for our farm grass bed.
16:23And then we are right now just like in the throes of learning how to manage two dairy cows. So we've got two jerseys and they've both calved within a month. Wow. So yes. And so we really it's my husband. He is the one who is doing all of the milking. I'm making things with milk. He's milking. I'm making things with the milk. But.
16:50That has been our most recent adventure, just trying to learn how to manage all that. But he's done, you know, he built a milking stanchion and he's got a really good system with both of the Jersey girls. And so it's been going really, really well. Cool. So are you selling any of the milk? Are you allowed to do that? In South Carolina, people can come to your farm.
17:19So, but we are not currently doing selling right now, cause we just kind of got into it. Okay. So, but in the future at some point in time, what we might do is we might look into that for the future, but for right now we're just making a lot of things with milk, like I'm making a lot of ricotta, butter, we've made ice cream.
17:46having a lot of fun with it. And we've definitely shared some with friends. Yeah, your calcium level will be really good. Yes. That's a lot of milk. It is. I don't know how many gallons a day you're getting from them. It's all, well, they're, I mean, they both have a calf on them. Okay. So definitely not as much as we would be if there were, if the calves weren't sharing, but the calves are on them. So, and another thing that,
18:15is really good is milk is an incredibly good fertilizer. So we're also using it around our homestead in places where we are trying to bring up the pasture and things like that. And we're giving some to the chickens. So it's definitely getting used for good purposes on the homestead. Awesome. We don't have room for a cow. We only have three acres.
18:42and we don't have anywhere for them to graze, and I'm not buying feed to feed a cow out for a year. Plus, cows are herd animals, they need friends, you can't just get one, you gotta get at least two. And the other reason why we're not getting cows, because we probably could push it and get a mini cow, is because I would want to have the cow have a baby, because I would want the milk, and I would lose...
19:09the first three months of that baby cow's life. Basically being out there and petting it and snuggling it and kissing its nose because they are so sweet. They're so adorable. They are adorable. That is for sure. We've got four calves right now and they are certainly adorable. Our most recent calf is a heifer calf and her name is Selah. So her mom's name is Hallelujah.
19:39And then our other, and we got her from Roots and Refuge Farms. So a lot of people who follow Roots and Refuge know that cow because Jess called her Hallie. And so she was the one that was, I think, the first heifer born on their farm. And so when she calved, we wanted to kind of keep up with a biblical name. So we came up with Salah.
20:06which is actually another friend of ours, that's her daughter's name. And I texted her and I said, we want to name our cow after your daughter. And she loved that. So, but she is a Belfair calf. So she is half Jersey and half Dexter. Okay. Because mom is Hallie, who's Jersey. And then dad is our Dexter bull. So she's Belfair and Belfair are really good dual purpose cows for meat and milk. And so are Dexter's for that matter.
20:36We will definitely be raising her as a dairy cow. We're keeping her. We're not selling her. And our other Jersey also had a bell fair and he was a bull calf. And we are keeping him as well. And he will be a beef cow for us. And then the two Dexter girls who just had babies, those are full Dexter babies. Those two are going together to another homestead. And as you said,
21:06You know, and we always stress this as well that if you're going to get a cow or a goat from us You've either got to take two or you've got to already have other animals because they are herd animals And they'll be really really sad if they don't have a companion. Yeah, they get lonely. They get sad. Um Okay, so you're the second person in the last week or so that has mentioned roots and refuge. I have to look them up
21:32Oh, they're fans. Yeah, they're they're wonderful, wonderful people. And they're they're in our local homesteading community. We happen to hang out with like a bunch of homesteading YouTubers, which I know is kind of interesting that we're all in the same area, but we are. And so they're they're they're awesome people and they've become really good friends. But yeah, they they've got really, really awesome YouTube content.
22:02Definitely you want to check them out. Okay, I will do that this afternoon because I thought about it the other day when the person I was talking to brought it up and I got sidetracked with my job, which is this podcast, which isn't making me any money yet. That's the key word, right? Yet. I'm growing it. And that was not the purpose for the podcast. The purpose for the podcast was to give me something to do that would keep my attention and give me something to get up for in the morning.
22:32And I really wanted to talk to people who were doing the things that we're doing, but differently. And I wanted to give all those people a chance to geek out about what they're doing. Because when I talk to people about our chickens, or when we did bunnies, our bunnies, or whatever we're doing, they're real interested for the first maybe five minutes.
22:58And then they start to kind of have their eyes glazed over because they don't really understand or they're not actually interested. And I needed people who were interested. So that was why I started the podcast and then people seemed to like it. So I was like, huh, I wonder if I can monetize this at some point and maybe, you know, earn a little bit of money doing something that I love doing. So long-winded way of saying we're not there yet.
23:29But very excited to keep doing this. Someone said to me the other day, they were like, how long are you going to do this? And I said, until I'm dead. I said, I'm in too deep now. This is so much fun. And there are so many creative, brilliant, fun, kind of good people in the world that I'm never going to run out of people to talk to. Yeah, that's awesome. I love that. And definitely just, you know, keep on going. We've been, we've had our YouTube channel now for
23:57a little over two years. And, you know, we kept saying that to, okay, eventually, you know, we're going to monetize this and it's going to be a good thing for us. But it seemed like it took forever, but that day finally came and it's just so exciting. And that's going to happen for you too. So and you, I can tell you're really consistent with your podcast and that is the key to any type of content creation. Yeah.
24:25If you're consistent, like I think that's the biggest battle. So yeah, so you're, you're well on your way. I'm, I'm busting my ever a love and hiney to stay on top of this. I, I love it so much. And my husband asked me the other day, he said, how many hours are you putting in working on the podcast a week? Cause he's, he's gone during the day. And I said, well, I said, actually working on it.
24:51I said, an episode probably takes anywhere from an hour and a half to three hours. From finding the person, to scheduling, to recording, to editing, to releasing the episode. I said, and I'm doing four to five interviews a week, so that's, let's say, three hours a piece. So that's five times three is 15 hours. I said, but that doesn't count all the scrolling and trying to find people who are interesting, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
25:22And he said, you're putting in a full workweek. I said, I am. He said, you're not making a penny. I said, I am not. He says, I'm kind of proud of you. He said, this could have just been a month long. I'll try it, see how it goes. And it died off. And I said, yes. I said, but I really thought about it for a year before I decided to do it. I just had to find the right topic. And this is it. I love this so much. And
25:50He said, you're so much happier. I said, yeah, I really love it. I said, I get high talking to these people because they're really, really good people. He says, you were lonely because we live in the middle of a cornfield. We don't see people very often. I was like, I was a little bit lonely. I said, but I really love where we live. So this, this helps. And I didn't really want to get into this deep part of this.
26:18discussion because no one really cares about how podcasts happen. That's not what this channel is about. But I think that there is a tie-in because homesteading doesn't make a lot of money. So many homesteaders are doing jobs outside of their homestead to make money. And then the homestead like supplements that. Yeah. And we have a big garden and we sell it at the farmer's market.
26:46and we sell on our homestead farm stand property. And that's pretty much it. So my husband has a jobby job, as we like to call them, the jobs that aren't what you really wanna put your heart and soul into, but you gotta have the jobby job to put your heart and soul into the thing on the side. So my contribution to the jobby job part of the homestead is trying to build this podcast.
27:14and promote the hell out of you guys, because I'm so impressed with you and everyone else I've talked to you so far. Well, I love it. I think that that's awesome. And I think you'd be surprised as to how many people actually do care about what it takes to start a podcast, or just because like what you just said, that you sat on this idea for a year. Think of how many other people that have these ideas, that they don't have the courage to jump on them.
27:43because they're just not sure what it would look like. And by you saying that, you're gonna encourage someone else and someone else is gonna start podcasting or start some other kind of content creation because they listen to this. Well, that's good. And I think anybody who really enjoys talking and sharing ideas is great for a podcast. The reason I sat on it for a year is because my son, a year or so back from
28:12from this past August was talking about doing a YouTube channel because he's a gamer and he wanted to try to do something with that. And the problem he's run into is that everyone else is doing that too. And he came to me one day and he said, he said, I was thinking we should do a podcast called Mother and Son Days, S-O-N-D-A-Y-S. And I said that would be really fun. I said, what are you going to do?
28:41He said, well, you know how we're just kind of shooting the shit during the day when I'm here and we just talk about everything. And I was like, yeah, that's called our life, honey. He says, I want to do that. And I said, okay, well we can try. So we did, we did two. And of course you have to pick a topic to talk about. So we picked a couple of things. We did the thing for half an hour. And after the second one, he was like, I don't think this is what I want it to be.
29:10And I said, okay. He said, he said, I wanted it to be spontaneous. I said, babe, the whole point of spontaneous is there's no plan. I said, I said, if you want to do a podcast, you have to have at least the framework of a plan. He said, yeah, this is not the right thing. And I'm like, okay, that's fine. But I really enjoyed the process going, you know, going through it with him. And so that's why it sat for a year because I had to come up with something that I would be interested in continuing to do.
29:41So having said I sat on it for a year, I sat on doing it. I just didn't have the idea yet.
29:50Gotcha. Yeah. Well that I'm glad you're doing it now Me too. I love it and I love love love talking to you and to everybody else and everyone is just so Helpful and so knowledgeable and so willing to share their knowledge with people who want to learn what they're doing So that helps a lot So I feel like we got way way off topic from what you're doing. So what's the plan for you guys?
30:18What are you what's I don't want to say end game because I don't think there is an end game when it comes to homesteading. But what are you planning for for 2024? Well, we so we've got, you know, we've got a lot going on with our cattle for sure. My husband used a jobby job. My husband and I both have full time jobby jobs. We are both full time high school teachers. Nice. So we were super busy. So with the all we have going on on our homestead.
30:48I like to say that we are, you know, we're full-time teachers and we're part-time content creators. So we've got a lot of plans, you know, for like where we want to take our YouTube channel, where we want to take our food blog, a lot of content creation plans. We're gonna be really doing a lot of content within the next couple of weeks because we're both on spring break. And we also have some really fun,
31:16DIY projects that we want to film. And so I think, you know, we're definitely, our son is still in high school. We've got two sons, one's in college, one's in high school. And so our son that's still in high school, he's a junior in high school. So we're definitely going to be working at least up until the day he graduates. And then, you know, we'll see what goes on from there. But as for homestead plans, you know, we definitely want to,
31:46get into making cheese. We just bought a cheese making book. And so we're super excited about that. Going back to Roots and Refuge, our friends Jess and Jeremiah just opened up a farmer's market. And so while we're working full time, we can't really do too much with the market, but we definitely want to have a table over the summer. And so I'm not exactly sure what we're going to do there yet. My husband and I are both pretty creative people.
32:15And so I've done things where I've sold different kinds of crafts that I've done with succulents and things like that. And then he can make any woodworking project. So we may do something like that. Um, we've got two goats that are pregnant. So once they have their babies, we will look into getting into doing some cool things with their milk, like maybe some soaps and things like that. So, um,
32:44just we're kind of all over the place, I guess, as a lot of homesteaders are, you know, just with all that we want to do. But my favorite thing is, I guess, just being a foodie is I just it makes me so happy. I get like euphoric when I make food that has come from our homestead. And so when I'm making things from scratch, and then I'm going outside and I'm picking fresh herbs, or like last year, I did a video where
33:13I got squash blossoms and then I made like gluten-free stuffed squash blossoms in my air fryer. Yeah. And they were so good. You know, and then I'm making sauce from scratch with our fresh tomatoes that we grew. We're to the point with our meat where the only thing that we're really buying from the store is seafood. Because we've raised everything.
33:41here on the homestead. We don't have beef yet, but my husband hunts, so we have a lot of venison. That's what we're using as beef until we have our own beef. I'm really excited to get to that point with cheese, where it's like, oh, I want this cheese for a recipe. I'm just going to go to my cheese cave and grab out a cheese that we made. I just think that that is going to be such a cool thing. That's definitely a goal.
34:09to get to the place where all of our dairy comes from home. I would love that here. I'm so jealous. I'm so jealous that you're doing it and that we don't have the room to do it. Yeah, the pride and the satisfaction in getting to that point where you don't really have to go to the grocery store is such a great goal. We.
34:37Part of the reason that we moved where we moved is because we lived in a house where if the power went out, we had no heat. And we had the power go out years ago and it was cold outside. And our youngest was, he was young, I think he was like eight at the time. And the other kids were with their other respective parents. And we ended up having grandpa come down and bring youngest to his place overnight.
35:07so that he would be able to be warm and sleep in a comfy bed and not be cold. And we stayed at the house and we had lots of blankets. It was fine. We had a couple of space heaters and that really scared me back then because I was like, what happens if something bad happens in January and the power's out for two weeks? This is not sustainable. So when we looked for a new place, we looked for a place that had alternative heat sources.
35:37And this place has, it has a wood burning boiler outside that pumps warm water into the furnace and then that is the heat source. And we also have a propane tank. So if the wood stove isn't going to propane tank, heat would kick in. And the first winter we were here, it was really, really cold and the power did go out, but we also have a generator that just kicks on.
36:06and shifts the power to the house by itself. Oh, that's awesome. And I'm telling you, the power went out and I was in that minor blip of anxiety. And then the generator kicked in and everything worked and we had alternative sources for heat. I can't tell you how relieved I was that it all worked. So, it's not the same thing as having your food come from your land, but
36:35The relief that comes from knowing that if something happens, you're covered is priceless. Yeah, because you're in, are you in Minnesota? Yeah. That's what I thought. So I am originally from Wisconsin. Okay. Yep. So, um, you know, I can't imagine, like I, I've been cold, as you know, because I mean, we, we share those super cold winters. Um.
37:03with you guys. And so that is just, I can't imagine that. So I think that that is amazing that, you know, that you wherever you find security and that your homestead brings you security like that, because I think that's what it's all about. Yeah. Yep. It's, this winter has been insane with it not being winter. We basically had an extended autumn.
37:30Spring is, I think, around the corner. I think we're going to be through the cold weather here by the end of next week. And when I say cold, I mean relatively cold. It has not been miserable this year. But back in January, we had a week where it was minus 30 real temperature two nights in a row. Yeah. I was just like, um, that's a little extreme mother nature. Minus 10 is fine. Minus 30 is a little ridiculous. Yeah.
37:59And I was like, okay, so now we finally hit the winter part of winter. And then it warmed up like crazy. It's like, okay, what the hell is going on here? And so this winter hasn't been really an issue with power going out or any of that stuff, but just knowing that if it does, we're okay, makes me breathe easier. And so.
38:25That's part of the reason that we decided to move to acreage and had a plan as to what we wanted out of that property. And we have chickens, we have eggs all the time. They are very prolific layers. And so that's our food source if we need to. We would eat if something happened. We would be real bored with eggs, but we would eat. So there is definitely a piece of that.
38:56just like you're doing the cows and your chickens and your turkeys and your goats. We won't be doing any of that. We don't have room and we don't have the money to pay for the feed because they're not going to graze. We don't have land for them to graze. But we do have a humongous garden in the summertime. My husband just loves the garden and so we always can now. We can tomatoes, we can pickles, we can salsa.
39:25So our put it away for the winter is produce. That's awesome. I've not gotten into canning yet. I have a lot of friends who we do a lot of bartering around here. So I'll give somebody something, and then they'll give me something. And so I get a lot of canned things that way from friends, which is great. But I've never done that myself.
39:55want to learn to do. I'm still like using my freezer to preserve all the time. Um, but yeah, canning is something that I want to get into for sure. Can I tell you a couple secrets from a lady who did not want to can up until two years ago? Sure. Number one, once you do it, you'll probably love it. It is work. It's, it's a lot of steps to get everything ready.
40:24The actual canning process in the canner is probably the smallest part of it. And you will probably never go back. You will probably love it. Yeah, I bet that I will. I do have a water bath canner. And so I will start there. And I am determined to use that this summer. And four jars.
40:52reached out and sent us some stuff to try. So I'm excited that I know I've got some really good jars and lids too. So I am going to definitely be delving into that this summer. So and that's what I've heard. Like my other friends that had not canned before are totally hooked. So I believe every word of what you're saying.
41:17Yeah, I, uh, we can't, I did not want to can. I've talked about this on the podcast before, so I'm not going to get into it. But my husband said two summers ago, can we finally can now that we have central air and I was like, yes, yes, we can try. And he, he did it first because he grew up with his grandma's and auntie's canning. So he sort of knew the process better than I did. And, uh, I really wanted relish and we had.
41:45perfect cucumbers for relish midweek in the middle of August to two summers ago. And I had watched him do the canning and I'd helped and I was like, I can make relish. I can do it. So my kid and I chopped up everything, got everything ready and we water bathed the relish. He helped me and it came out great. And I felt like I had actually done canning and it's not hard. It's just a lot of steps and it takes some time.
42:15Yeah. And I'll do it again this summer because that relish turned out great. So anyway, I'm going to wrap this up because I feel like we could talk all day and I don't have time and neither do you, I'm sure. But Lisa, thank you for taking the time to chat with me. I appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. Have a great day. Thank you. You too. All right.
 

Twin Creek Gardens, CSA

Today I'm talking with Beth at Twin Creek Gardens, CSA.
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. Today I'm talking with Beth at Twin Creek Garden CSA. Good morning, Beth. How are you today? Good morning. In this beautiful snowy weather, I am wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, have you guys not had a lot of snow this winter? No, it was crazy. Everything was awake. My gardens were beginning to bud, and now we just got a pile, I think almost 17.
00:2918 inches in the last three days. So I'm a little worried about my lilacs and my other little bushes out there, my blueberries, but hopefully they'll be protected and they'll come through it anyway. This is the first... You're in Superior? Yeah, we're south of Superior, about 10 miles. This is the first big snow we've had all year. Yeah, it feels like Christmas.
00:56Yeah, we were supposed to get six inches to a foot in this same storm that you guys are getting in Wisconsin. And we ended up with only like a couple inches here. Oh. So I don't know what happened to our Christmas snowstorm. It didn't happen. I'm kind of glad because we were in the same boat as you. Our maple tree has started to flower out and we had onion sprouting and stuff. So I don't know.
01:24Anyway, tell me about yourself and Twin Creek Gardens, CSA. Well, this is kind of amazing because this is a long dream, long time dream come true in a short amount of time. I actually, for 34 years, was a classroom teacher and a reading specialist in particular. And in working with kids and with literacy and with writing and reading, I always had, you know,
01:54the desire to have them learn more about who they are as people through what they were reading and writing, not just the ability to read and write. And so my passion for gardening and my love for people and helping the world become a better place, my son calls me the biggest liberal hippie in the world, which I wear as a badge of honor, by the way. You know, and so I've always had this desire to.
02:24help others find their goal, or reach their goals and find their path to the healthiest life, the best life that they could have. And so I've been having kids listen to podcasts and watch videos in middle school and then write about how that affects them in their thinking and their process of who they wanna become and that kind of thing. And so CSAs have been...
02:51Um, not very prevalent up here, but I love the idea because my father has always had a garden when I was young, I grew up digging in the dirt. My favorite thing of, of gardening was always the, the digging of the potatoes in October because I knew we were putting the garden to bed then, you know? And so, um, you know, I grew up south of Superior here, just about five miles from where I live right now. And my sweet husband grew up about.
03:19mile and a half from this house, and we grew up together. We were 10 when we met, and we both loved gardens, we both loved horses, and nature, and just being, we're both country kids, let's put it that way. And we grew up and went our separate ways when you go to school in Superior. If you go to the Catholic school, you kind of lose touch with your friends from the country school.
03:44And at least that's how it was. And so he went one way, I went the other. And then we met back at high school. We hardly had any friends in common, so we kind of went our separate paths. But he and his first wife loved gardening as well and raised three children in various country homes doing gardening and raising horses. And they had cows for a while. And so very much a farm family.
04:14after college moved down to the Green Bay, Manitowoc area where I married and had my son. And then when my marriage fell apart, I came running home to the northern woods of Wisconsin. And my parents were still here in Paterson Park at that time. And so cable is where I landed because the school that I found that needed me was Drummond.
04:44which all these sweet little towns up here are just, it's like going back in time. It's such a beautiful, fresh air. I'll never forget when I came home to do the interview in Drummond and I got out of the car, the air smelled different. I left Green Bay and the big city area, I came home and the trees up here, the air up here, I knew I had to come home.
05:13We had a kind of randomly meandering here, but we had a school garden at Drummond that I helped organize and participate in. It was actually a high tunnel. And so I fell in love with that kind of gardening because it extended our season so nicely. And so that's kind of building blocks. My cable house had a third of an acre right in town.
05:42I had a ring of cedar trees around my yard and so gardening in ground was really not possible. The cedar trees had taken over the ground and so it was more of a forest floor. So I learned to garden in raised beds and also in a lot of pots and green stock planters and such on my deck.
06:10And so my little third of an acre there, I dreamed of a greenhouse. And so when it's a 1930s house, so the original garage was a little bit dated. And so as the roof started to collapse, I started to see a skeleton of a greenhouse instead of another garage. And so we had been working on that for several years, trying to make that come true. And then, um, through the course of.
06:39the last 10 years when Rob and I found each other on Facebook, God bless Facebook Messenger, we became adult friends and kind of walked each other through a lot of really hard loss. And he lost an adult child, I lost an adult child, both of whom left little babies behind. And so
07:07You know, we just kind of went through grief and friendship online for several years. And I dreamed of gardening in a bigger place, but had no, I mean, I actually looked at, at different plots of land out near cable to buy, to put up a big greenhouse, because I've always wanted to be able to continue that work with kids and the community to find a way to locally source healthy food. And
07:37The work I did with students made me realize just how important nutrition is in terms of not just our bodies, but our brains and our education and being able to learn and live together in a healthy community has always been a goal of mine. And I collect people as well as lots of plants. And so I had a friend and her mother living with me at the cable house for a while.
08:07after her father passed and we were trying to garden there and build community. We had a neighbor who had a big green lawn and so we talked her into putting in the beginnings of what I wanted to make a food forest. That wasn't big enough, didn't pan out, but I've had these dreams. I used to listen to, well I still do, Roots and Refuge Farm. I don't know if you're familiar with that.
08:36Yeah. Oh, you've got to get into what Jess is amazing. She and Maya are awesome. I feel like I know them and I've obviously never met them. But what you know, what she talked about that resonated with me the most was this quote, she said, make your waiting room into a classroom. So you say that to a teacher who has the dreams that I've always had about growing a community of people working together to
09:06grow local healthy food and build community. And I've always wanted chickens, but cable wouldn't let me have them. And just this whole thing snowballed into what became a huge dream of mine to have a CSA. And meantime, my husband Rob was here on 10 acres of this beautiful land doing his thing with his family. And
09:36Um, shortly, it's been almost three years now, his first wife passed away. And I reached out, uh, you know, to comfort, provide comfort as we had to each other when our, our children passed. And.
09:53One thing led to another and we decided, what are we waiting for? We've cared about each other forever. And so we started spending time together. And at our 20th class reunion, we decided to spend our lives together. Aw. And, yeah, it's really, everybody says we have like a storybook, fairy tale love story, but the irony is that we've gone through the battlefield to get here, you know?
10:23That's another one of Jess's quotes from another one of her Roots in Refuge vlogs. It was, we were created for a garden, but are living in a battlefield. And I want to make a community of a community place for people to come together to make whatever dreams they have come true. So if it's planting flowers, wonderful, let's plant flowers. If it's raising food together.
10:52And, you know, we're getting some chickens. Finally, I get chickens. I want goats, but Robbie keeps saying no goats. But I know I can change his mind eventually. I hope he doesn't hear that part of this. I think he already knows you're working on it. So it's okay. Probably. So anyway, last summer we got married and we're selling my house in cable with the
11:22greenhouse still in the backyard looking at the house. So I'm having an emotionally challenging time letting go when I'm there. But the moment I'm here, I know I'm home. And this is where it's supposed to be. This is supposed to be a community of plant lovers, friends, family, just living life on 10 acres in the Northern woods of Wisconsin.
11:50What a wonderful story. Oh, and congratulations on your wedding. That's fantastic. Thank you. We had a big farm, you know, front yard party with tents, and it was incredible. It was everything I dreamed of. We drove a mile and a half down to the country church where we became members and got married and everybody followed us back here.
12:17We even had pictures taken at the Little Falls where we used to hang out when we were kids. Aw, that's so cute. I'm so in love with your love story. That's fantastic. Thank you. Okay, well, that was a very, very big about you. And I love it. Thank you for sharing all that. So tell me about the CSA. Has it already started? Are you doing the CSA now?
12:44We bought the greenhouse, the first, the big greenhouse, I should say, two years ago and have been trying to figure out how to be greenhouse farmers and we're getting pretty good at it. And he built me a little greenhouse, which we call the nursery. And so things are moving there. When we, I've incorporated or not incorporated, I'm sorry, we're a nonprofit. So whatever it is that that is, I guess it is incorporation.
13:14Um, so we're waiting on our tax number and we're, we're, um, signing up memberships and things are rolling. We have nine people so far who are our members, which is way more than I thought I'd have in the beginning. And only half of them are family. So that's kind of cool. Nice. Yep. So yes, we are right in the beginning. It is just being born and, um, for our, it all ties to.
13:44the wedding things too. Our store slash classroom is actually a gazebo in my front yard where we're going to then be building the cottage garden around it. My potagee kitchen garden is going to be in my front yard, which is interesting. But through that process, when Rob made the dance floor for our wedding, we just made it the floor that became our gazebo.
14:14I'm a really big, sappy romantic, as you can probably tell. I think so. I think you've got it down to a science. And I have married the perfect man who can build or do anything, and he can just imagine these things, you know? And so he has made this beautiful gazebo, which has a little propane furnace in it, and will have an air conditioner in it when needed this summer so that I can be in there all year.
14:42Nice. And so that is where I'll have classes. We want to do everything from, you know, like fairy garden plantings with kids to growing garden, you know, having classes where kids come and learn about seeds and seed planting and how to understand how to care for a garden, how to harvest and what to prepare. We're going to be doing in the fall, of course, we'll be doing lots of canning and
15:11preparations for winter and storing the food. In the meantime in the winter then I'm also going to be doing, I'm working with, I forgot this part, I'm working with the Superior Crafts School which is just also being born. It's been in the works for about a year and a half, maybe two years now, and we are becoming a part of that as a satellite classroom. Fun.
15:37You are so excited. Like, your joy is just screaming at me through my headphone. It's amazing. I'm so, I am. I'm just, I can't believe that this gets to be the second act of my life. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what an act. What a great act to follow the first act. So when you say non-profit for the CSA, does that mean that...
16:04that all the money you make goes back into the business or does that mean you're not charging? Okay. Yeah, no, all of the money that will come in from the membership shares and any sales of plants or whatever that we do, there's gonna be, through the craft school, we're having a farmers market and we're gonna be participating in that, which will allow us to disseminate information about the classes and the things that we do out here
16:34farm and allow people to get involved with the CSA to whatever level or degree they can and want to. And all of that profit will go back into classes and gardens and food for the community. Okay. So what's the benefit of it being a nonprofit only because I know nothing about it? Well...
17:00I sort of have a little bit of business experience in an LLC that we created when that friend of mine and her mother came to live with me in Cable. We created an in-care family home because her mother had dementia. And so we needed support from the community and from her family to provide her what she needed. And so we created an LLC, which had a whole bunch of...
17:29business stuff that I did not understand and did not care to learn about, quite frankly. I just wanted to be taking care of people. And so that experience, while it was wonderful, the business piece of it got overwhelming. And so a nonprofit, you have less regulation, not really, you have different regulations. And so
17:57Um, you know, we are, we do have a quote board of directors kind of thing, but it is the members right now it's the nine members plus Rob and I, and, um, you know, those kinds of, of elements are not as restrictive because everything goes back into the, to the CSA. So it's, it's more, I kind of liken it to a, um, like a PTA at school.
18:27or the women's club, the women's group at church that I'm involved in. You know, we have officers, we keep track of the money, we have fundraisers, but all of it is to go back to supporting the community and the church. So it's kind of the same idea here is how I'm approaching it. And so, yeah, it just makes more sense to me because we're not in this for the money. I'm retired, he's in what he calls his retirement job.
18:56which is a janitor at the school nearby here, which he loves and it's where our grandkids are, so that's so cool. So it's not about the money for us, it's about community and just growing gardens and being happy. Yeah, I was just curious because we did do a CSA last year and the year before, and the year before, I guess we're coming up on the fourth summer here. Wow. And...
19:25We decided last year to become an LLC because we had people coming onto the property and there are things that when you become an LLC, you want to have protections and we ended up getting insurance, farm insurance because if someone gets hurt, we wanted to make sure that people would be taken care of. And so when we did all that, we had to learn about what we were doing.
19:52And so I know about that side of it, but they didn't know about the nonprofit side of it, which is why I asked. Because if I don't know, I'm sure other people don't know either. I'm sure. And I'm still learning. I don't know hardly a lot about it that, you know, but I am doing, we are doing farm insurance, which is different from our, you know, homeowners insurance. It sure is. Yeah. So, um, that's just really, I wanted the nonprofit.
20:21status too because of the link to the craft school, because that is a nonprofit. And I think that it's good if we're affiliated to kind of be in the same category, the same mindset, I guess. So we're going to be doing farm to table for the chef and the cooking classes, which is exciting to me. So I'll get to it.
20:51plant some funky things. Rob says I have some weird taste in vegetables because I love things like kohlrabi. Me too. Me too. I love kohlrabi. And okra and eggplant. And he's like, these are weird. Where are the potatoes and tomatoes? I'm like, I'm growing them too. We're going to have them too. See, we kind of are like, I'm the, he's the hardscape and I'm the landscape.
21:20You know, I do the plantings and he does too. He waters them for me and takes care of everything and does the hard work of the digging of the big holes. But I do the choosing right now of what goes in them. That's the best place to be. That's what I do too in our marriage. I'm like, I would love to plant these things. And my husband says, okay, let's go get them or let's get them planted, you know, the seeds. So we're like in that way, Beth. Yeah.
21:47I kind of love that my husband does the dirty work of the gardening. I used to. I don't love it as much as I used to, but he still does. Well, I find that planting, like when I started my seed starts in here this year, instead of doing them in soil, I went completely soil-less with coccocore and perlite. And it's so much easier and lighter.
22:16to get them out and put them into the, you know, pot them up. And so, you know, I still love to get my hands dirty, but not as dirty. Yeah. I am, okay, I have said more weird things about myself in the last 50 interviews that I have put out than I'm comfortable with, but I'm gonna do it again. I really hate things on my hands because I'm always doing things with my hands. So I'm constantly having to wash my hands.
22:45to go to the next thing. And it makes me crazy. And I don't have OCD. It's not like I have to wash my hands six times. But when I'm cooking, if I'm cracking eggs, I have to wash my hands after I crack the eggs because I inevitably get the egg on my hands. If I'm using an oil, I end up spilling oils. I had to clean that up. It's just a thing. So when I say I don't like my hands dirty,
23:12I don't like my hands dirty because it gets in the way of moving on to the next task. Does that make sense? Yep. Oh, totally. Totally agree. Okay. Because sometimes people are like, do you have OCD? And I'm like, I don't think so. Because when I leave the house, I'm not wondering the entire time I'm gone, did I lock the doors? Did I turn off the coffee maker? I'm not. I'm not obsessing over the thing that I might have forgotten. So I don't think I have OCD.
23:38but I just don't like my hands to not be clean. I don't know why. It's a weird thing. I've discovered my hand washing, it's different now because I wear my rings. I never wore any rings and I never had nails. I just kept them short and whatever. And so now that I have this beautiful diamond ring on my hand, I don't wanna get anything on it. So I've started actually wearing gardening gloves.
24:07when I'm out in the greenhouse, like yesterday when I potted up a bunch of romaine lettuce and I put them in the green stock and that has soil. And so here I am with a glove on my hand and I'm thinking, who are you? Because that never was me, you know, but I did try to have like nice nails when I had my, you know, wedding and whatever. And it was hilarious because it didn't work. But I know what you mean. Yeah, I
24:36I thought about getting the press on nails for a while because my nails are always broken because I'm always cooking or typing or something. And I looked at the price of press on nails and I thought, you know, I'm going to spend the 10 bucks to get them.
24:53and they're going to look nice for about 10 minutes and then I'm going to be doing something and it's going to pop off anyway. So yeah, I just have pretty beat up nails all the time. And I think that's part of homesteading and CSA and growing absolutely, absolutely doing doing actual work with your hands. It is just inevitable. So I play the piano also. And so they have to be short for that. Because otherwise they click and click and sound like I believe it.
25:22So, yeah. Okay, so do you guys have like critters too? You have chickens? Well, we're getting chickens. We did have a chicken who survived through last winter, but is no longer around. We are free range, so they just kind of go and come and whatever. So we're actually going to put up a chicken coop with a chicken run over by the big barn.
25:52purchased one of those little sheds you can get that they just bring it and put it in your yard kind of thing. That's our farm stand. That's what we have for our farm stand, yeah. It's so awesome. I mean, it's taking me forever to pay it off, but it's this beautiful thing called, what I call the cottage, which everyone calls my she shed. And I wasn't about to leave it in cable. And so we took down a fence and dismantled my berry patch, which was a raised bed garden
26:22high posts and yeah, it was crazy. Because I put all that infrastructure in after the cottage got there, but I was taking it here. So it is over by the barn. And so eventually I'd like to have that be like a, a bunk house, I guess you'd call it. It's 28 by 12. So it's, there's room for a lot. I mean, right now, a lot of my craft stuff is stored there from cable house as I go through things.
26:52because we're working on selling my place. But we're gonna put a revive his chicken shed, or chicken coop, which was a snow ice fishing shack, I guess, at one point. So we're gonna give it another life again as a chicken, and then add a run to it over there. And that's where I think my goats need to be, is in that barn area with the chickens. And so,
27:23Right now, that's kind of where we're at. Over there, near that also, we have started a, what Rob calls the vineyard. We have six grapevines. And I hope that, yes, I hope that they're okay in this snowstorm. But the dream of Rob, since he bought this place, since they bought this place was,
27:50to have grapevines, because the house faces south. We have this gigantic two-acre yard in the front that was just grass. And then there was a cow shed, and he took that down. And so over in that area, on that side of the driveway, which kind of splits it in two, we have the cottage garden and the potage garden coming around the gazebo on the one side. And then over on the other side is going to be my sweetie's vineyard.
28:20Oh, I'm so excited for you guys. You're so happy. And it's so much fun planning these things. I mean, when we got ready to move here, it was a blank slate. The only flowers here were hostas and I'm not a fan. So we dug up a bunch of our peony plants from the old house and brought them down here. And down here is half an hour away from where we live. So we didn't live very far away.
28:48But we brought those and we brought some rhubarb and I think that was it for plants because I had a bunch of lilies at the old house, but I didn't think lilies would do great here. Plus we were going to get a dog and lilies are dangerous for dogs to eat and I figured why bother? Why bother? Yeah, for sure. And we did. We ended up getting lilies for free from someone and we put them away from where the dog is so she can't go over there and dig them up and eat them.
29:17And we put in lilac babies from a friend and we put in, oh my god, 150 tulip bulbs and 150 daffodil bulbs and crocuses, which I'd never grown before. The crocuses bloomed three weeks ago. Oh, yeah. They're now frozen, but they bloomed. They looked really pretty. But you know, sometimes if it's not too long, they will survive a snow. They'll go again maybe or continue.
29:47discontinue because it's almost like it's they're insulated. Yeah, they're so low to the ground that they don't really freeze as solid as other taller things do. Okay, good to know. They're so tiny. I had never seen a crocus in person until mine bloomed and my husband said, there's these little yellow flowers blooming where we put the crocuses and I said okay and I went out to look and I could not believe how dainty and how tiny they are. Yes, they are just delicate.
30:17And I love that they open like so early. They're like the first smell and whiff of spring coming, you know? Yeah, absolutely. I didn't know I had put in hibiscus at the old house. I think it's a little grapey looking. Yep. Plants and those smell amazing too. Who knew? Yeah. I love those, but I'm not spending any more money on bulb plants because out of that 150 tulip.
30:46bulbs and daffodil bulbs, I think we might get five tulips now because the voles eat them. Oh no. Mouse creatures. Yes. Oh, we had that in cable. We had a problem with them. I got those traps or not traps, but like you put the bulbs in a little box that almost is like mesh. And you have to bury that to keep them from eating the bulbs because they
31:16The bulbs can come up and the roots can go down, but the bulb itself is safe from those little monsters. Uh huh, yeah. So we're not buying any more bulb plants. If somebody has bulb roots that they want to give me, I will take them and I will put them in, but I'm just not investing any more money because it just costs too much to replace it. We also put in some irises, and the voles don't seem to like the iris bulbs. So I think they're the...
31:44rhizomes or whatever they're called. So maybe they'll be irises this spring. I don't know. Whole point of telling you all about my flowers is when we moved here I was very sad because there were no flowers that spring. Oh that's heartbreaking. And I cried like that spring when everything was starting to green up. I was crying. I was like we don't have any flowers honey. And he said we will next spring because we're gonna put in...
32:11bulbs this fall because I know this is killing you and I was like thank you. So the whole point of the story here is that when you are dreaming about your life and what you want to do down the road, when you finally get to that first step into the thing you want to do, it's amazing. It is. It's like watching a movie and having an actual happy ending.
32:40You know, but it's really a beginning. Yeah. Yep. Exactly. When we move here, I was like, we finally did it. We finally bought, you know, three acres has a house on it. That's nice. And it has a big old pole barn and has room to grow a big garden. We did it. We did the thing we said we're going to do. Yeah. And then I sat down a week later after we had moved in and I was like, Oh my God, we did it.
33:10now what? Now what are we doing? How do we make this go? You know, it's that that realization of, okay, so we took the first step. Now what comes next? Exactly. Yep. As we've been changing things here at the, you know, he we did a whole new kitchen plan. And we were really blessed with a whole new set of beautiful cabinets that, you know, Rob just reconfigured and
33:39you know, redid all of that this winter. I've been, you know, as he's doing that and he's putting things in and doing whatever, I've been planning all of the things he needs to do outside, you know, and all of the infrastructure that we need out there for garden beds and whatever. And he was doing the same thing, only he was looking out the back window, thinking about the backyard while I was dreaming and planning the front yard, you know? And then we'd share our thoughts and ideas at night and we'd be like, oh, I was...
34:07Yeah, that would work over there. And, you know, it's just so much fun to dream and plan with someone who thinks and feels, I mean, not exactly the same, but so similar. I've never experienced this in my life. Yeah. It's wonderful. It really is. It's incredible. It really is. I just, sometimes I wake up in the morning and he's next to me and I'm like, Oh my God, it wasn't a dream. This is my life. I get to play in the dirt with Rob Christman. Yeah.
34:37Exactly. So with the CSA, with the business that you're creating, it's basically going to be a nonprofit, interactive community of people doing the things. That would be my elevator speech and people would be like, what do you mean doing the things? And I'd be like, oh, that's why I say doing the things because it's everything. Yep. We're going to be planting. We're going to be making decisions.
35:05I sent out a document to everybody saying, you know, tell me what you want us to grow for you this year, the people who are members, and please feel free to share with others, you know, that you know, who are looking for, you know, healthy, locally grown produce. Let us know what they would be interested in, but here are the things that are so far in the greenhouse. And then I gave them a list. And I've gotten feedback from two people that,
35:35They love everything that's on the list, but could you also blah, blah, blah. And so that sends me on a seed hunt, which is fun. And so I'm right now the worker of the CSA. I'm with as far as the produce. But like, for example, I have a wonderful sister-in-law, shout out to Laura, who has a granddaughter who...
36:02was so helpful when we were planting things and doing stuff to get the yard ready for the wedding. And I'm thinking, man, I wonder if Peyton would like a job this summer. So she's gonna come out with Laura and they're gonna just work in the gardens, work in the greenhouse and putter and do stuff and then their pay will be their produce. And so that kind of an option is what we're also looking at doing.
36:31One of the things that I want people to know is, if they've never set foot on a garden or ever planted anything, or they think they have a black thumb, they don't have to worry because this place just, you can't hurt anything, nothing dies here. The plants that were here when I got here in the house, his first wife, Maria, was an incredibly gifted gardener. She had the most beautiful houseplants I've ever seen in my life.
36:59I walked in and I was intimidated, let me tell you. But they are so prolific still, and I have tons of those that I have learned how to, I never could handle houseplants because I had cats. And so I just have learned so much by growing and maintaining her houseplants. And so people can come and do whatever of the stuff they want to do, I guess is my point.
37:26If they want to be a part of helping Rob figure out and build some in-ground garden beds, great, let's do that. If you want to plant flowers, let's do that. Whatever people want to do, this can be their canvas. That's so fabulous. I'm so excited for you. I really am. I keep saying that, but I really am. My heart is swelling listening to you. It's great. So exciting. Okay.
37:55Beth, I appreciate your time today because we're running almost to an hour here. We're at 37 minutes. Oh my word. Yeah, because you're so excited. You have so many words that I'm like, I don't want to jump in, but we need to cut this off. So thank you for your time and I wish you so much luck in building this and I think it's a wonderful idea. Thank you so much and you'll have to come visit.
38:17I will. We'll have to get out there at some point and we are going to be doing all kinds of things this summer too. So it probably won't be this summer, but I'll be watching to see how it grows. Wonderful. We're on Facebook, Twin Creek Gardens, and we have a website coming that is twin creek gardens dot org. So look for that and you can email me my brand new email at Beth Chrisman at
38:45Twin I cannot believe I'm finally Beth Christman. Yeah. Ha ha ha ha ha. You are and you will be for a while. Yes, it's wonderful. All right. Thank you so much for this. You have a great day, Beth. You too, Mary. Bye bye. Bye.
 

Honeycutt Hill Farms

Today I'm talking with Brie at Honeycutt Hill Farms. You can also follow them on Facebook.
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. Today I'm talking with Brie at Honeycutt Hill Farms. Good morning, Brie. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm great. Tell me about yourself and Honeycutt Hill Farms LLC. Yeah. Well, Honeycutt Hill Farms started in 2022 when we moved across country from Oregon to Tennessee.
00:30So we kind of moved up into the mountains and had a relative idea of what we wanted to do, what we wanted to provide the community. And we've just been kind of, I guess just moving forward ever since. We do registered kinder goats, poultry and soap. So we make the soap from the goat milk. So that's kind of what our niche has been lately. Nice, what made you go to Tennessee?
00:59My husband's from North Carolina, so it was a little bit closer to his family and where we were at the time, especially around the 2020, you know, stuff, it was just, it got really expensive, a little, a little crazy at times. And then we didn't really have a lot of family there. So nothing was really holding us there. And actually, my neighbor, we were in the army together and I've known him for about 12 or 13 years.
01:27He had told me that his neighbor was putting his property up for sale. And so we drove out here, we looked at it, we put in escrow and now we're here. So, um, it was definitely a bit cheaper for us to live and a little bit closer to more family. So it sounds like it was right place, right time. It was. So I think it was definitely, um, what you want to call it, whether it was divine intervention or, um,
01:53You know, if you manifested it, whatever you want to call it, it was definitely what we needed at the time we needed it. And it just kind of all fell into place. Yeah, we had that happen back in 2020 as well. That's why we now live where we live instead of where we used to live, because we were tired of being in town. So, yeah, like I said, it just kind of got crazy. Like I said, we had moved there. My husband and I met in the army.
02:21I had gotten out and I was waiting for him to finish his contract and he was trying to finish his bachelor's degree where we were. And that all was fine, but then like I said, once 2020 hit, things just shut down or skyrocketed and we were, you know, starting our family. You know, my son was born in 2016, my daughter in 18, and it just got wild and it just, it wasn't meshing with our way of life anymore.
02:49Yeah, it's really crazy how COVID changed so many people's lives in so many different ways. Yes, it definitely did. So, you know, whatever side of the fence people were on, I really had no problem with. But it definitely divided people. And, you know, it just really, it was an intense time. And it really, you know, took an emotional toll and a financial toll on a lot of families.
03:17But it really kind of opened our eyes to say, you know, we really need, you know, more family. We need more community involvement. We need, you know, to be around more like-minded people. And it just wasn't happening where we were. Yeah. And it opened a lot of eyes to the fact that we all needed to be just a little bit more self-sufficient than we were, I think. Yes. Yes, definitely. Yeah. So the first part of the farm was mainly so that we could survive as a family if something happened.
03:46You know, so I think chickens are the gateway to goats and goats to cows and cows to horses. But first and foremost, it was just making sure that we were self-sufficient enough to survive and help our neighbors and that kind of thing. And so we noticed a need in the community for other things, different types of chickens or meat birds or goat milk soap or a different kind of goat that, we noticed a lot of people moving here as well.
04:15but they needed something more dual purpose so that they could be self-sufficient. Yeah, so tell, okay, I've talked a lot with a lot of people about goats, but I have not heard about kinder goats yet. So explain to me what kinder goats are. Yeah, so kinder goats happened from a pygmy buck and a Nubian doe. And so when you have a pygmy buck, a registered pygmy buck and a registered Nubian doe, together they make a kinder goat.
04:42And the kinder is just a dual purpose goat. It is a meat goat and a milk goat. They don't get really tall or really like, you know, overbearing like a boar goat, you know, so they're not really intimidating, but they're good for both. So, you know, if you have a lot of bucks and they're meaty, then you know, you at least you're gonna get something good out of them. But you also, you know, would want enough milk and dairy for at least your family or maybe you and your neighbors. And so they're just a dual purpose goat. They get about...
05:11I would say no more than maybe 130 140 on the big end and They're easy to manage especially when you're on the farm or you have kids, you know, and They can kind of handle them when they're little and so we found that they're their perfect kind of like homestead goat You know to help you You not go to the grocery store as much or you know know where your meat is coming from or maybe you just want to Eat the brush off your lawn
05:39So that's all they are. So they're just a dual purpose. So you're not really getting a whole dairy's worth, but you're not just going into, you know, the all goat meat, nothing else business. Okay. I, for some reason, I was thinking kinder implied small, but 130 to 140 pound goat is not small. Thank you. That's a bit, that's a, I would have to say that's, that's pretty big. That's on the big end. Yeah. We have one kinder doe and I swear she is 40 pounds and she's a year, you know, and she's healthy.
06:06And on our biggest, our biggest one, I would say she's about 110. Um, so depending on, yeah. So depending on, you know, how they grow or how they, you know, fill out, I think it's kind of a wide range, uh, they shouldn't be, you know, very tall. They're more stocky. And then, um, you know, they, they do produce a lot of milk and they have a good butterfat content in their milk. If you wanted to make cheeses or, or caramels or things like that, or just have milk. Um.
06:33Yeah, so they're just not as big like a we had Kiko's before and I swear that Kiko she was you know, 300 pounds She was way bigger She was a big girl. She was she was a small cow is what she was She was gorgeous and I actually still miss her We had to give them to a neighbor's farm when we moved out here But yeah, so those are really big and my children at the time would not have been able to handle her
06:58and I want my children to be able to be involved. And so we just kind of went with a smaller side. So that's where those pygmies come in. They have a lot of pygmy jeans. They're shorter. We have one full-blooded pygmy buck and he's four years old and 40 pounds. And I swear, I think he's like 18 inches tall, 20 inches maybe at the withers. And so they're much easier for our kids to handle. Yeah. Yep, that makes sense. Cause if you're gonna have them, you wanna make sure that the kids know how to be around them and how to handle them. So yeah. Yeah, so that's what they are.
07:28People will move on to a bigger goat as their kids get older. But yeah. Okay. I was looking at your Facebook page and the first post I saw was your shampoo bars and oh my god, they're so pretty. How did you get that design on the bar? Oh, they're just, you just put them in the mold and then I just swirled them around with a long skewer. So yeah, so we, my grandma used to make soap. She had a craft store in Nevada.
07:57And she would do that a lot. So a lot of that stuff kind of, you know, passed on from her and what she liked to do. And then my husband had eczema a lot, especially out of the army. And so we switched to goat milk soap early on to help with those kind of inflammations of the skin. And so we've been kind of dabbling with shampoo bars. People, it's a little harder for people because they're not sure how to use them. But...
08:24Yeah, it's just yeah. So our shampoo bars we put in a mold. We just put a swirl on them so I can tell them apart sometimes. Um Yeah, so it's been it's been fun. It's been fun making those and then trying to teach people You know, like there's an alternative way to use this, you know, you can uh, they'll last a long time You don't have to buy a bunch of you know, head and shoulders from the store, you know, so on so forth Yeah, um back when my second son was
08:52still living with us and he was dating a girl. She was the loveliest girl and so beautiful, but she was very, very uncomfortable because she had acne on her face and it made her really insecure. And we made cold process Lysol and I knew that our soap was pretty good at helping out with acne and I'm not supposed to say that because the FDA says you're not supposed to say things like that.
09:20in my experience using it and my kids experience using it, it really helped with acne. It does, I think. Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, she, um, she, I don't remember how it came up, but she said something about something. And it was about her face, but it wasn't directly about the acne. And I said, honey, I said, I said, are you insecure because of your acne? And she's like, yeah. She was like 16, 17 at the time.
09:50And I said, I have this unscented cold process Lysol that we make. I said, and the kids use it and it helps. I said, do you want a bar of it? Try it. And she was like, anything, anything at this point. I was like, okay. So I gave her a couple of bars. She took them home. She came back a week later and her face was half cleared up. Took a week. Yeah. I think it's, I think it's very important. People don't realize, you know, your skin is a big.
10:18part of your body, you know, and what you put on it soaks in immediately. It gets, you know, sucked in and the, any toxins or any chemicals or whatever, you know, it automatically gets seeped into your skin, especially, you know, your face and through your scalp. In those products from stores, even though they, you know, they say they're going to do those things, they're going to help you with this or clear this up. They're full of preservatives. They're full of chemicals.
10:45So there may be a temporary solution, but it's not fixing the root cause. Yeah, and when she came back, she was like, look at my face, and she was smiling so big. Her smile reached ear to ear. And I was like, that's amazing. I'm so glad. She said, can I get one more bar just in case I wanted to keep using it? I was like, yeah, here, take five. So it is...
11:12I don't want to say this because I'm afraid the FDA is going to come down on me and I don't want that. But the point is that homemade soaps and shampoos and lotions and things actually do the job you need them to do. Yeah, I think once you can, you know, it's just like when you go to the store, if you can read the ingredients in the label, you know, then you're ahead of the game.
11:37But if there's things in there that are hard to pronounce, then you're not sure what it is, and I probably wouldn't be using it, you know, if you can help it or putting it on your body. Because like I said, when you're younger, you know, you can kind of get away with things, but it all catches up to you in the end. Yeah, and one of the things that I was just thinking about while you were saying that is, you know how they have the oils and the little capsules that you can put in your hair to moisturize your hair?
12:07that you can buy. Coconut oil does exactly the same thing. If you take coconut oil, rub it on your hands, rub it through your hair, it does exactly the same thing as the stuff you buy at the store. And coconut oil is less expensive too, which helps. Yeah, it's definitely one of the easier oils to find. It's right there with olive oil. You know, and it has a very, you know, massive amount of benefits for you. So we use coconut oil, I would have to say...
12:36in 95% of the recipe here. And so, you know, we've done sals, we've done tinctures. And like I said, we'll do it in the soap and it's, it creates a nice hard bar, but then it has so many benefits. And it's not hard, it's not too hard to find for people, you know, it's not such a crazy oil, even oil pulling in your mouth, things like that. So we use it a lot. Yeah.
13:03I wanted to give my mom some of our soaps and she was like, I can't use lye soap because it dries out my skin. And also I think the reason that she thought that is because her mom made lye soap way back when. Yeah. Way back when lye soap was a much harsher soap than what we make now.
13:25Yes, back then they used ashes, like potash and ashes from the fire and it was not as easily calculated as it is today. Yeah, and she still hasn't tried it. She probably never will. Yeah, so actually lye, I get that a lot about people with lye because I know when they see lye they see it like, oh, it's a drain cleaner. But all soap has lye. So whether you're...
13:52wherever you're buying it from, it's gonna have lye. It may not say lye on it, but there's lye. So it'll say sodium hydroxide on there. All soap needs lye or it's not soap. And so when the soap cures, the lye dissipates. What happens with like, so back then when they made soap, they probably had one ingredient. So let's say you just had coconut oil, that's all you had. And you just had coconut oil and lye in water. That's an extremely hard bar and it will be extremely drying.
14:20And so some of those soaps have so much hard oils to keep them preserved so they're not soft, they're easy to ship, they're not, that's why they're drying on your skin, but they will all have lye. Yeah, and what we put in ours is coconut oil, olive oil, I'm trying to think, I think that's it. Yeah, so olive oil is a soft oil, so it softens the bar. It's a little more nourishing for people, yeah. Yeah, this is one of those things like,
14:49We like so we do a lot of markets in the community and we're in a couple stores And it's one of the most common questions is about lie and I'm glad people ask it because yeah If I saw lie and I didn't know what it was, but I've seen it to clean drains You know, why am I gonna put on my skin and it has a warning label on it, you know all that stuff You know, why would you put that on your skin? But once it becomes with the oil, you know, it becomes soap and then once all our soap is cold process So it takes you know
15:15four to six weeks to cure, that lye is no longer there. It is now a new molecule, it's a new formation. Right, exactly. So that's why I wanted to talk about it because a lot of people like, I don't want to use lye soap because it'll dry my skin out, but that's not true. Right, that's not what it's doing. Yeah, no, we first did, we did an all-tallow soap and we did an all-coconut oil soap and just three ingredients and they were both very hard, but they're drying.
15:45They don't wash away as fast, but you will end up using a moisturizer or a lotion because it's dry. It's only got one hard oil. And so you need a soft oil to have the nourishing bar or the smooth, silky feeling, those kind of things. And people, I don't know, like I said, maybe people are just new to the idea, but yeah, the lie thing. We get it all the time and I understand.
16:14But if not, it will just be a bowl of oil, trying to put it on your body. Which you could do. That's not gonna work. You're gonna slide all over the shower. It's bad. It is not gonna work. It is definitely a chemical reaction that has to occur. It has to form. But I'm glad, I'm glad people kind of, take the time to look at those things now. Whereas, growing up, we never looked at the label. We just looked at the front.
16:44And that's just what it was. And so, you know, part of me is glad. I'm glad people kind of wake up to it and try to research what ingredients are in things and what are they going to put on their body and to make that choice, whether they want to do it or not. Yeah, exactly. And I'm not saying everybody should use cold processed lye soap. They don't have to, if they don't want to. They want to buy a bar of dial soap at the store, have at it. You know, and the funny thing is, you know, my dad, he's still, you know,
17:13He uses like the soaps we make, but he uses them more for like hands. And then he'll still use, you know, Irish Spring in the tub, uh, until this day. And, you know, I don't know if that's just, you know, set in your ways or that's just what works for you. And that's, you know, that's fine. Um, he knows we've told them all about it. So he's made a decision and he's an adult and that's just what it is.
17:34Yep, exactly. It's a losing battle right there. Don't even bother. You can lead them to water, but I can't make them drink. So that's okay. And that's fine. People have different things and that works for them. So this farm thing is fairly new. Were you guys doing any of this before you moved to Tennessee? Some things, like I said, we had chickens. We've always had chickens. And my husband, he...
18:02He had a lot of pigs and a lot of turkeys and things like that. Back where we were, we had two goats and then we were mainly to eat some of the blackberry brush that was going on. And I now realize that two was not enough for the amount of field I had them in. But so we, you know, we weren't farming on the scale that we are now, but we've always kind of had our hand in either farming or gardening or creating something or making something.
18:31And so now I just feel very blessed to be able to kind of do it more full-time, even though my husband works off-farm, to be able to put more into it to get more out. Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, so you... Okay, I just got stuck on questions again. 20 minutes in and I'm stuck. How has it been?
18:56been? Has it been everything you expected or has it been harder or easier or what's it? How has it been? It's not for the faint of heart. It's definitely hard. And anybody who says farming is easy is lying or, you know, they're not farming. You know, you can look on Pinterest all day and it looks beautiful and it looks gorgeous and, you know, all that jazz. But when it comes down to it, it is hard.
19:23It is very rewarding, but there are hard times. So things that you couldn't imagine happening are just very heartbreaking. They're going to happen. And you have to be prepared for that and know whether you can stick with it and keep going or if it's just not for you. So there are things that have happened that I didn't realize that were very hard, but we got through them. And thank God we did. And we prayed. And we were able to push forward. And it makes you stronger.
19:53Lots of things have gone differently, but lots of things have gone differently in a good way that I wouldn't have expected either. Do you guys grow plants or veggies or anything too? Here we live on Clinch Mountain and it's very, just like it sounds, it's a mountain. A lot of the properties are hills or they're rocky or they're full of limestone.
20:21We don't have the, you know, set up to grow vegetables and plants on a mass scale, like to produce, you know, onions and tomatoes and corn for people. I would love to. So we do plant starts. So we'll start the plants here and then, you know, we can sell them to you and you can grow, you know, in your garden bed. So we do do that. But given our current area, like I said, it's just we wouldn't be able to compete on that level. It's just not the right property here.
20:50And knowing what your property can give you is very important because it will be tiresome and expensive if you try to make it, you know, something it just can't do. So we do. So we'll have plants, you know, in the beginning of spring. So we'll do our starts. And then anything extra that was just, you know, a really good crop or something that we tried differently, you know, we have no problems, you know, whether, you know, giving it away or selling it to people or things like that, but also being so new to the area. There's been a lot of trial and error.
21:19the growing part is much different than when we were before. And so we're still trying to figure out the best method to grow something on a bigger scale, like let's say pumpkins and zucchini. They're not a problem really on the West Coast, but here there's a lot of vine borers. And so that just ruins a whole crop. And that wasn't something we expected. And so now it's just a challenge that we have to kind of get through here. So yeah, so we, and long story short, we do, but it's just not the most.
21:48I guess either profitable or easy to do here, given our land up on a hill. Yeah, you got to work with the nature that you're provided, I guess. Yes. So we have a lot of foraging capabilities, a lot of... It's on the hillside, but kind of like grassy areas. So having goats, even if you want larger animals later on, they can kind of take care of those areas for us better.
22:18It's more geared toward our goats and more of our poultry. We have a lot of like black walnut trees and so we harvest those. So we're just kind of work with what we have and, you know, not rape the land so hard to force it to be something it's not. That's a great plan. I love that because you're letting the land do what the land's supposed to do. That's great. Right. So we moved here because we, you know, fell in love with it. So we're trying not to.
22:48changes so much that it's not what it's intended to be. So I find that if you kind of work with nature as much as you can, it's easier on you and it's easier on everything else around. You're not pouring so much time trying to take care of a problem that you created really. It wasn't a problem before because it wasn't happening, but you've made it one.
23:14I always joke that humans are the only species that will work their asses off to make something easier. It's true. I feel like sometimes we spend so much time reinventing the wheel and then realizing we never had to do it. So. Right. I think you come to the point where, you know, what is your time worth? What is your labor worth?
23:41you know, is it worth your time trying to do all this? Because you could have just done it the same way and we would have been done already. And it would have probably been cheaper, you know. It might have taken maybe a day or two longer, but we'd be there already instead of, yeah, like either having to go buy a new brand new thing or make a new thing. I'm all for invention. I'm all for, you know, the, you know, necessity is the mother of invention, but sometimes it is,
24:09quite frankly, just a pain in the ass. And you just do it the way that they've been doing. There's a reason it's been done 100 years this way because that's why it's just the way to do it. Yeah, exactly. And as I sit here and talk with you about this, I'm chuckling in my head because we had supplies delivered on Thursday to build a winter greenhouse, a heated greenhouse. And that's because we live in Minnesota. And...
24:37our growing season stops when we get the first heavy frost. And we wanted to be able to get our seed starts out into the greenhouse earlier so that we can start them in our house sooner. And we also want to extend the growing season out into November. And we can't do that here without some heated greenhouse. And of course it snowed on Thursday and it didn't snow on Friday, but it was cold. And then, no, it did snow on Friday. Sorry.
25:06Um, and then Saturday was clear and then yesterday it snowed all day and today it is raining cats and dogs That's the kind of winter we've had in Minnesota And I looked outside and I saw the plastic sheet covered Mason block thingies for the foundation sitting outside and I was like Yeah, we jinxed it. We had had like no snow for months and as soon as that stuff came now, it's all gross again It knew I'm like
25:33I'm like, yeah, we're crazy. Yeah. I think, like you said, I think nature and they know like when something's about to happen, we raised guineas. And so my husband, he was down on a beekeeper's meeting and this gal came up to him and they got to talking and she wanted a guinea. She had one guinea and her was lonely and she wanted another one. And so we had one that we wanted, you know, to...
25:59to sell, it was just kind of being pushed out of our pack. And so it would still do better with another farm. And so the day that we knew we could catch it, because it was always crazy, it was always running around, was the day that it just went right back in and came part of the flock. And you couldn't even tell it apart. So it knew any other day we could tell it apart because it was always off by its own. But the day we went to sell the guinea.
26:27You know, we couldn't tell it apart because it had become part of the flock again. So they know it's, I don't know, it's some law, some Murphy's law. I don't know. I think when you make plans, God laughs. That's what I think. Yeah, it does. Yes. And then he says, Hey, nature, get on them, make them do something they didn't think they were going to do. Yeah. Yep. And so like I said, I still don't know if it's the one that we wanted to sell. I know, like I said, she wanted male or female and that was fine, but
26:56He's probably still out there because he knew something was up. I'm like, hmm, all right. Maybe he thought he was going to the butcher, not a new home. Yeah. Like, oh, it was hard to say, you know, and I get, yeah, it was just, it's always the way it happens. We, you know, um, we bought, uh, one of our goats last year from a farm and we had, you know, we're going to pick it up this weekend, we're going to pick it up this weekend, and then the farmer calls me and said, oh, you know, I did their fecals.
27:22And she's kind of got some running poop, you know, so you're gonna have to wait till next weekend so we can clear it up. And so you can make plans all day. But in reality, you know, God's in control and you better simmer down and it'll happen when it happens. And so we've just learned to like, okay, that's what we have to roll with. And you know, I'm not gonna fight it. I'm gonna simmer down and when it happens, it happens. Yep. And I've got one more example. I had found one of the bakeries that is...
27:50another town over had bought a display case for their donuts and it was too big for their space. And I was like, oh, we're looking for a thermostat controlled display case. And they wanted like $100 for this thing. And I talked to my husband and I was like, it's five feet long, three and a half feet tall and power deep. And he was like, oh yeah, that should fit the farm standard. And then I looked at the measurements again and I was like, you might want to go make sure.
28:18I said, because that shed is only 10 by 14, and that's going to take up some real estate in there. So he went and looked and he said, it's too big. It's just too big, just slightly too big. And I said, okay, I will message them and let them know that it's too big. We can't use it. And I was kind of sad because it was perfect for keeping the leafy greens not wilting and the eggs in the shed.
28:48I was kind of mad about it. And then I woke up the next morning and I was like, you know what? It's okay. We will get the right display case when we find it. It'll be okay. I guess it is not meant to be. Yeah. It was the first thing since we've moved in here three and a half years ago, where I was, I was actually kind of bent about it and I couldn't figure out why I was so bent and I think it was because I thought I had solved a minor.
29:16dilemma that we've been having with having the leafy greens in the farm stand. But I didn't solve it, so we're still going to have to work on it. Yeah, I do that a lot. And I think, like I said, whoever you want to call it, but he has his own plan and asking you shall receive, you just might not get it in the way you thought you would. Or when. Or you might not. Yeah, or when. I remember...
29:46being out west and then, you know, we know we needed a change, but we weren't sure quite sure. And so it was like, well, you know, we could, you know, live in the camper and travel around with our kids because we homescore our kids. And so I'm like, yeah, that sounds so great. Like, yeah, we could travel the country, you know, in a year. And we had thought about that. And, you know, obviously that didn't quite happen the way we thought. But when we moved here,
30:12You know, we had to live in a camper for a year before we set up our home up here on the pad. And you know, I was like, you know what, we got exactly what we asked for. It was just not in the way we thought. We did travel across the country to get here and we did live in a camper for a full year. Just it wasn't traveling in the camper, you know. So we did get those things. We did ask for those things, just not in the way that we thought we were going to get them. Yeah, it was a roundabout.
30:41cross-country camper trip. So in the hindsight after living in the camper for a year, and I'm like, I don't think I could have done that. There's only so many times you want to enter or exit or get rid of the gray tank, you know, it's no longer fun. But yeah, so you kind of got what you asked for eventually in a way that, you know, was I guess more fitting for you and you just didn't realize it. Yeah, it's funny how life just kind of
31:09does what it does and you just go with it. Yeah, I don't like I said, I would love to do all the things here, like you see online and oh, a milk cow and a this and horses and that. And then, you're like, well, if it's meant to happen, it will happen when it does. But in the meantime, I'm not gonna force it to happen. I'm just gonna work with what I have and just try to slowly make those small steps better.
31:37And in the meantime, you know, if we can help the community make their small steps better, because I'm sure they have the same kind of similar plan, you know, then that, you know, that is fulfilling enough. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Um, so, uh, we got slightly off topic just as I always do, but that's what makes it fun. Um, so you, do you sell it like markets, your, your soaps and your, your stuff? We do. So we first started selling at a trading post, um, about.
32:06I would say 10 miles from here, were friends with the local meat processors. They're called Overhome Meat Processing and Treadway or Thornhill. And so they started doing a market, a trading post, and they wanted to bring community together. But not just buy things, but if you wanted to barter, if you wanted to learn something new. And so that kind of got us into markets.
32:31And we were selling more of our salves and more of our kind of farm goods at that time. And then we had some soap. But then as the time went on, you know, it just became what people wanted the most. And so we just tried to fill that need. And so we started there and then we actually are in an antique store down in Rogersville. So we have a booth down there. And then so we've kind of expanded into some brick and mortar stores. So we're in three stores where we have our booth.
33:00And then we're actually in a bakery called Clinch Mountain Bakery. And then our last one, we're actually in a wellness center called the Holistic Wellness Center. And so we've kind of branched out a bit. So we still do like the doing the markets, but currently, you know, the farm still has to run. And I don't know if anyone knows that markets take a lot of energy and a lot of time for setup, you know, to do them. And then you're very, you know.
33:26the weather could be bad or, you know, there could be 10 other events going on on the same day. You know, all of those are big factors. And so I guess we're kind of pushing more toward, you know, doing events, you know, that we can prepare for way well in advance, but then also kind of putting our products in stores where people can, you know, get them at any time instead of just waiting for a market that may or may not have good weather or, you know, maybe we're too far up the mountain for some people and they, you know, they can't travel that far.
33:56So yeah, but I'm very excited. Like I said, we've gotten into three stores and you know, that's such a blessing. I had put that on a business plan earlier in the year and then next thing you know, you know, it kind of happened, so. Yeah, diversity in your business model is really important. So, yes, having those, having all those options, all those fingers out into the different places is great.
34:23Yeah, I think for yeah for anybody, you know, like I said, we just have to work with where we're at. So someone else might have, you know, more traffic, you know, or a flatter area, you know, they get more road coverage. So, you know, having a smaller stand outside your house might be the best option. Or, you know, you know, you just might like to do markets and you do really well. And, you know, you have a product like, let's say, you know, the bakery item that's limited and you work off scarcity. So people come to you because they know there's not a lot of it.
34:53So I think, yeah, I think it's just depending on, you know, where are you? Where are you in life? You know, what do you have time for? And what's going to be the best model for you? And also so that you don't get burnt out, you know, that you're just becoming another kind of drone, that you're still, you know, passionate about what you're making and then delivering it to people. Yeah, because when you're the one making it, you're putting yourself into whatever you're making.
35:22And the minute that good energy isn't there anymore when you're making it, it changes what you made. And I don't know why it does that, but it does. It does, it probably does. And so if you're just trying to whip out a bunch of product, whatever it is, as fast as you can to make the most money, I guess you might as well be Walmart or some product on their shelf. And then two, not everybody is your customer. Why is the person told me that the last market?
35:52And I asked her for some business advice. And I said, you know, some of these places already have, you know, soap. And she's like, don't worry, still try, because not everybody is your customer. So just because, you know, these persons are here, these people, doesn't mean that every customer wants to go there. And you need to realize that you cannot market to every single person in the world. You know, you are not Walmart. And so we put a hundred percent effort into what we make because I want people to enjoy them and know that, you know, when you shop with us or you come to our farm
36:21you do whatever that we're 100% committed into everything we do. Um, that's what makes the, you know, the handmade product handmade. That's what makes the farm, you know, what it is. You know, I'm not some, we're definitely not some giant, you know, Hillshire farm. Um, you know, but we're your neighbors, we're your part of your community. So you can come to me for whatever, if you want help with anything. And I want people to, you know, realize that, uh, when they see our stuff. Yeah.
36:50And people are interesting because when my husband was selling at the farmers market last year, he had tomatoes, I think before anybody else did, we were really lucky with our crop last year. And then like a week or so later, somebody else came as a vendor and they had tomatoes. And he came home and he was like, it was so funny. He said, because I had tomatoes, they had tomatoes. He said, I sold more tomatoes and I don't know why.
37:21And I just said, honey, I don't know, it's subjective. People are going to look at two of the same thing and have to make a choice. And they may just flip a coin in their head or they may find something they really like about yours or something they really like about the other person's, who knows? But choice is always subjective. It is. If you're trying to gather every single person, I think you'll be shooting yourself from the foot. The right audience will find you.
37:50You just have to be available. Yeah, and you have to be open to them. You have to, if they want a question answered before they make a choice, you need to be approachable and friendly and answer them so that they know what they're getting. Yeah, it's definitely, like I said, if anyone should know the most about your product, it's you.
38:13And to constantly kind of be researching, I get a lot of questions of like, well, what are like kinder goats just like you? Like, what are kinder goats? And so if I don't know, if I just say, oh, they're just goats, I'm not going to get very far. They're not going to get their question answered and they're probably not going to come back. They're not going to, well, she doesn't know. I'm just going to go back to Google. And so you really need to be knowledgeable in what you're presenting. And so we definitely try to.
38:43To do that, I don't know the answer to everybody's problem or every question, but I'll be honest, I'll just say I don't know. But to have enough to present someone and then I've given you all the information I possibly can, now it's up to you to make a choice. Do you want farmer A's tomato or farmer B tomato? This is how we make our tomatoes, this is how they make their tomatoes. You need to make a choice.
39:07Yeah, I was going to say honesty is a big part of it too. If you don't know the answer to their question, be honest. I mean, I've had people ask me about stuff and I'm like, I am going to be honest. I don't know, but give me a day and let me research it and I will have an answer for you. And then I email them or call them or when I see them next, I go, that thing you asked about, this is why. Yes. So. There's a big stigma about like.
39:36you not knowing and I don't know why like people don't want to say I don't know because maybe they think it makes them seem, you know, illiterate or dumb. But I think it takes a lot of gusto to say, you know, I'm not sure. I don't know. And that's definitely a challenge for me because if someone says, you know, this and I say, I don't know, you can bet I will research this till the end of time so that I know and you know and the next person who asked me this, I will know.
40:02And so that's how you, that's how you find new things out. You know, you have to have that person come up to you and give you a question you don't know, and then you never have that problem again.
40:13Because you know it. Yeah, exactly. And you'll never forget it ever. No, you won't. Yes. And I'm sure there's a bunch of questions still out there that haven't been presented to me yet that I don't know. But for anyone, if you want to ask me them, then we'll know. Yeah, my husband will ask me something once in a while and I'm like, I do not know the answer. I do not have the time to find out right now. And he doesn't either. And I'm like, okay, I'll look into it when I have time.
40:43And inevitably that same night at 2 a.m., I wake up at 2 a.m. and I'm like, I need to know. I need to know what that is that he asked me about. And I will open up my phone, Google it, get a basic answer so I can tell him in the morning. And it's relieving. Yeah, about the fifth time I did it, he said, I was gonna ask you how you were figuring this out. He said, are you waking up and looking it up? I said, yep. He said, you are.
41:11He said, you're crazy. I said, yeah, I know. I am absolutely insane with this because you asked me something I didn't know and I needed to know. It's definitely great. I love Google. Yeah. It's definitely, uh, it's the age of information and, uh, there's a lot of information and it's, it's good and it's bad. A lot of it can be very overwhelming and some, just then too, you have to make a choice whether you're going to believe this or you're not going to believe it. Um, and so.
41:41Yeah. So we'll do the same thing. Like I'll go on there. I need to know. I got to know what this is. I'll try my best. And sometimes I walk away, you know, totally triumphant and like, all right, I totally know. And then other times I'm very defeated and overwhelmed because the answers are so left and right. Yep. And whenever I Google something, I try to find five reputable sources that say the same thing before I tell anyone what I found out.
42:08Because I hate it when I think I know and then I talk to somebody who's smarter than I am and they go I'm really sorry, but that's not correct. I'm like, oh You're so sure there's what? Yeah, there's a lot of hubris in that answer and the next thing you know, you're kind of shot down Yeah, so I don't know like I said that for people, you know starting out or whatever they plan to do In reality, you can really plan so much
42:37It only takes so many conflicting ideas and information. And sometimes you just got to get your feet wet. And then, you know, you can narrow your search on what you're looking for. Um, inevitably, like you were just going to, you're going to cost money one way or the other, but, um, like I said, like the information is definitely one side or the other, so you need to pick one and, and shoot, you know, and go. Yeah. Um.
43:04We thought we were going to be raising rabbits for me and for the manure. And we got rabbits like two summers ago. And all my life, people had been using the phrase, I can't say the word, like bunnies. You know, bunnies make babies. That's it. That's what they do. Yep. Um, our rabbits did not really make babies. They did not get the memo that they were supposed to not say that. I'm not going to say the word like bunnies.
43:34And we kept them for a year. We bred them, I think, four times in that year and no babies. And they were absolutely the correct sex to be making babies. There was a buck and a doe. They just did not take. And after a year of feeding these guys, I was like, I don't want to do this. I don't know. Maybe we're just bad at rabbits, but I don't want to do this anymore. And so we stopped and we spent.
44:03probably three or 400 bucks total on that project. And we learned that we're not good at raising rabbits and I'm okay with that. That's fine. So sometimes you try to do something that seems like a good idea and you give it your all and you try to do all the research and do the right things and it just doesn't work out and that's okay. Yeah, I definitely think that, you know, that's how you find out. So, you know, sometimes you have to fall on your face.
44:32um, to find out and that's perfectly acceptable and that's perfectly okay. Because if you did it, you'd just be sitting there still wanting to do it, but never doing it. You never get past it, you know, so you, it would still be in the back of your mind. You would never move on to the next thing because you're either too afraid to try it or, you know, and you don't do it or, or you want to research it more and more and more. So half the time, you know, you just need to go in there and do it. Um, and that's.
45:01is just part of life. So, you know, we have a lot of, you know, Americana chickens that we breed, and we're part of the Americana Alliance. And, you know, we try to breed to standard for this Americana. And, you know, our whole premise was, you know, show worthy birds, you know, all the standard birds, these colors, you know, these kind of breedings, these things happen. And
45:23But then as we moved on, we realized like, well, our area doesn't really care about show birds. They care about meat birds. They care about eggs. And so, and if you're not shipping your birds and you're not going to all these shows and why are you doing that? And so we kind of had to take a step back and reevaluate. You're like, okay, now we know. And we still have them. I still love the breed. It's a perfect breed for here.
45:52But now they just have, you know, a different purpose than what we originally intended. And I never would have known that unless we got them, we did it, we know we're trying, and then we, you know, see, you know, if people are interested or not. So yeah, I think the themes for this particular episode are homesteading is not for the faint of heart, it's rewarding, and you've got to be willing to try new things and no one to stop when it doesn't work. Those are the themes for today.
46:20Yes. You know, yeah. You got to know when to quit. Sometimes you got to know when to quit. And like I said, I'm like, all right, you know, we got to quit with, you know, trying to force these people, you know, the people around us to want to do the same thing we want to do and realize like it's not working. So let's try something new. And that's okay. You know, like that's fine. You know, my husband, he's been taking beekeeping classes to do bees and, you know,
46:50It's either gonna work out well or it's not. But I think it takes a lot and it takes a lot of courage and confidence to just go out there and try something new and know you may or may not fail. You know, like that is awesome for people to try to do and I think they should do it. The hard part is because it costs money. And you know it costs a lot of money and you don't wanna screw it up and you don't wanna get an F on your test. You know, you don't wanna fail. But you learn a lot with failure.
47:20Yes, absolutely. You really do. And sometimes it's painful. Well, usually it's painful, but, but I really feel like, I feel like mistakes aren't failure. I feel like if you don't try, you, you don't ever get anywhere. So mistakes are learning opportunities. Okay. So Brie, it's been like 47 minutes and I didn't mean to make this go so long. I'm sorry. I appreciate your time and you have, you have a fantastic day.
47:49You too. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Yep. Bye. Bye.
 

Thistle Dew Acres

Today I'm talking with Sam at Thistle Dew Acres. You can also follow her on Facebook.
00:00This is Mary Lewis at a tiny homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. Today I'm talking with Sam. This'll do acres. Good morning, Sam. How are you? I'm doing well. How are you? I'm good. Yeah, I actually saw snowflakes. I know, I'm not ready for it. I think the fall spring came and went. Oh, go ahead. Yep, I was just gonna say that. Yep.
00:26It's you're only half an hour away from me. So you know what this winter has been like in Minnesota. So yes, yes. It's been wild. Yeah. It's been crazy. Um, our, our supplies are being delivered today for our reheated greenhouse that we're going to be building. Oh, that's exciting. So of course they picked the day it's going to snow to bring it. Yep. All right. So tell me about yourself and what you do.
00:52Yeah. Um, so, um, I live, um, on seven and a half acres right now with my husband and our two kiddos. And, um, I live in Jordan, Minnesota. And right now I made the transition to be full time. Um, we call it 10 99 or self-employed. Um, I have a couple of businesses that one is called, um, doll creations. And that's more of like eco-friendly.
01:21nature-inspired items, things like fabric paper towels or on paper towels as some people call them, crocheting dishcloths, that type of thing. And then I started up Thistle Dew Acres and that's really focused on the homestead that we have. And that one is a food cottage license that I recently got, so I'm making breads and things like that, along with selling our eggs. We have chickens and ducks.
01:50Then I also have a podcast as well. And that one is called Minnesota Crunchy. So that one's kind of similar to yours. The big difference is I just kind of talk about whatever I feel like talking about as it relates to either holistic approaches to life or foraging, all that fun stuff. So anything that someone might deem crunchy, which is the new word, or we always call it crunchy granola.
02:21Um, so that's kind of where I go with that. I'm trying to figure out just a work life balance right now with it all. So that's where I'm at right now. But in terms of our homestead, um, for this'll do acres last night, we celebrated the spring equinox by planting our seeds so that we can get them started for our garden this summer. Yeah. My husband planted seeds this past weekend and my kitchen table is covered now with seed starters.
02:50Yep. Yep. Um, we don't have a lot of great lighting in our house. It was, it's a 1970s house and they just, this, this house just the floor plan and everything is very weird. So I went and got some shelving and we have grow lights now. So I feel really official, finally like doing something like that. So we'll see how this goes for me. Yeah. Um, we have a.
03:16big long grow light that we hang from our light fixture over our kitchen table. Oh, and the light itself is pink. I didn't know when I ordered it, but it would be pink. So when I get up at four or five in the morning and come downstairs and pop that on, there's windows right behind our kitchen table. And I'm like, you know,
03:36a sheriff or a police officer is going to drive by and be like, are they growing pot in that house? Right? Well, and now it's legal, so they won't even care anymore. Yeah, it's just funny. And the paint is so creepy. It makes my kitchen look like it has alien lights in it. That's what mine is. It's supposed to be changing, but of course, when I was unpacking everything, I misplaced the remote to change the colors. So it's also, we have a nice bright pink light in our room too. Yeah, it's very bizarre.
04:03But I'm getting used to it every spring. It's things light in my kitchen for eight weeks. Yep. So yeah. Yeah. So does thistle, thistle, is it thistle dew? Yes. Thistle dew, like a thistle in the forest, and then dew like a dew drop. So we're very much so a honey type people. So we were looking up names. And of course, I had a list of 15 different names.
04:33start throwing them at my husband and he looks at me and he says, how about this'll do? And I'm like, this will do? And he's like, no, this'll do. And I'm like, I kind of like it. So that's what we did. Yep. We thought about naming our place last resort acres. Oh, I like that too. But we didn't. We kept with the A tiny homestead name. I cannot talk this morning. I'm sorry. It's okay.
05:02dip thongs today. Okay, so does Thistle Do Acres have a Facebook page or anything yet? Yes, it does. It has a Facebook page. I will slowly end up becoming a person that has TikTok. I have a TikTok for Thistle Do. I have not posted anything yet. So it will have TikTok, Instagram, and it does have a Facebook page. It's Thistle Do Acres.
05:32and the picture is a thistle. And then I also have my food cottage up in ready for ordering for that as well. And that's through Cast Iron, but the link is also on my Facebook page. Okay, awesome. I will link all the things. You can message me all the things you want me to link to and I'll link to it in the description. Perfect. So.
05:55There's going to be a directory for cottage food producers in Minnesota. Did you know about this? No, I did not. It's coming. Um, the guy that's putting it together, I interviewed him weeks ago. His, his, uh, episode is up and out for the public to listen to. And he sent me the link to the website because I'm one of the beta testers, which is awesome. Yeah. And it looks great so far. So I think it's going to be good.
06:22Oh, that's gonna be so nice just for everybody to have that resource. Yeah, absolutely. When I found out about it, I was like, would you please come talk on my podcast about this? Cause I'm so excited. I can't stand it. And he was like, yes, I would be happy to talk about it. Good. Yes. And I, oh yeah, go ahead. So if you want to know about it, uh, I can't remember Sergeant shortbread is the episode title. Okay. I will definitely look at that. Yeah. I'm just excited that they're talking about allowing us to have, um, free samples on at markets.
06:52Oh, are they? I didn't know. Yes. So right now how it works is you either have to have a hand washing station, a bathroom does not count. You have to have a hand washing station or everything has to be prepackaged. So some people don't want that because that's all the extra waste. And expense. That too. Yep. Yep. So they're talking about figuring, passing it, I don't know what it would look like, but some type of different criteria.
07:20to have free samples available for people, especially for, you know, people that are selling food. It's hard to get your samples out there if, and if you do do, if you do do that, then, you know, you could be dinged or cited. And I know there's lots of people that do that. And I'm like, I'm going to be a rule follower because I don't want to, you know, have this this permanent red mark on my, my business. And you know, I want to follow all the sanitary stuff that we have to follow.
07:45Yeah, the thing I don't understand is why we can't just have a spray bottle of hand sanitizer at the table and just have people do that. Yep. And I'm hoping that if it does officially pass right now, it's not for sure yet. It's just looking pretty good. That's what the requirement is, is that you either have to have some place that has a bathroom on the grounds or you can have...
08:13have the spray bottle of hand sanitizer. Because honestly, a lot of people touch a lot of grosser stuff than probably how, you know, and everywhere else than this. And I don't know. It's mind boggling to me because you put so much care into your products to make sure that they're healthy and sanitary and everything else. But yet we have this, and there's so many other companies that are bigger that they don't follow a lot of the sanitary things that we have to follow.
08:41Because we're special. That's why. Yep. Yep. That's one word for it. I was trying to be nice. I'm gonna stop because it makes me angry. And I also don't understand why if someone wants to sample your food, you can't just put on a pair of gloves and hand them a piece. Yep. It makes no sense.
09:04I also don't want to get myself in trouble, so I'm going to just leave it right there. Hopefully they'll pass it and hopefully at some point they'll pass the shipping thing too. That would be great. Yep. They did that for dog treats last year. So I know I hope, you know, and I know there's lots of people. I understand each state has a different food cottage requirement, which is also interesting to me that if you live across the border, you can cook with a lot of things in terms of like the border, like let's say South Dakota.
09:34or Wisconsin, it's so, they're so vastly different each state. I wish there was just one standard. Me too. So, yeah. But on the flip side of that, thank goodness we can sell our stuff in our state. So that's the one awesome thing about it. I actually have to renew my cottage food registration sometime this week because I haven't done it yet and I need to do it before I have to redo the whole thing. Yes. Yup.
10:05You were talking about the Minnesota Crunchy podcast. I listened to a couple of your episodes. I think it's great But on the subject of Minnesota Crunchy I made homemade Moisturizer two days ago because my son has dry skin and I gave him my birth bees stuff that I love Mm-hmm and looked up how much it would be to buy him a bottle and it's up to like $15 for an ounce or two ounces
10:34And I thought there's got to be a way to make this for him that I can just make it and it's going to cost me a lot less money because I already had coconut oil and I already had vitamin E oil. I just didn't know how to make it into a lotion. So I looked up a recipe and cocoa butter is the thing that makes it a lotion. So I ordered a pound of cocoa butter for $14.99, which is the price of one of the bottles of the Burt's Bees stuff. And I don't want to slam Burt's Bees. I love Burt's Bees.
11:03products I do. But I can't justify that for him right now. I'd rather make it myself. So made it and oh my god it actually turned into a lotion. It's wonderful. And it smells like cocoa. I didn't know raw cocoa butter actually smelled like cocoa. I should have known but I didn't. So his face gets to smell like cocoa for about 10 minutes. I was like is that going to bug you? He said no I can live with it. I said okay.
11:31So yeah, a little crunchy over here too. Yes. Well, and a lot of it, whether it's for the benefits because you don't want those added ingredients that you don't necessarily need, the big companies need for preservatives and everything because of how they're marketing. But the smaller people don't need. So if you want it for that reason or just to save money in general because it's expensive out here. I cannot believe how much prices have jumped.
12:00When I bought this bottle or container of Berksy's moisturizer two years ago, I think it was like five bucks. And now it's $14.99. I was like, I can't, I just, I can't do it. It's not worth it to me when I know I can make it for him. And a pound of cocoa butter is going to make me, I don't even know, eight of the containers of Berksy's stuff.
12:30I was just like, I've got to do it because that's what I used to do when I had four kids and my husband and I were living on one income. So I thought I can do it again. And it was so fun. It was kind of like when I made mayonnaise for the first time. I was like, how is this going to work? This is not going to do what it said it's going to do. They're liars. And then I watched it emulsify and I was like, oh, that is so cool.
12:57Speaking of mayonnaise, we started making our own as well. And after the second time I made it, my emulsion blender decided to go. So now I just make it in my little ninja. I have a single serve smoothie maker thing for it. I just do it in that and it takes just as, you know, way less time and I can just pour it out and be done. Yeah. It's amazing how fast it comes together in the ninja. That's how I did it too. Yep.
13:23No, it's amazing how easy and things can be if you just kind of take that time. Yeah, and speaking of costs for things, I mean, I think you have chickens as well. We do. And we have chickens too. And just looking at how much the cost, like I understand you have to pay for like food for the chickens and things like that. But like we put our extra like food scraps, we give that to the chickens, the stuff that's appropriate, like old bread and things like that.
13:53but also like how much the price of eggs has just gone up and down so much. Um, like it's every week, it's a, you know, a different dollar price. Totally. And I'm like, you know what? I'll keep it on here. I'll keep with my chickens. Cause at least I know how much my feed costs and I can price it out that way. Um, that I'm just saving money and chickens give me joy. So we'll stick with that. Yeah. And I'm going to say this for the billion time.
14:21I swear our eggs from our chickens taste better than the ones we get from the store. And I don't know if that's actually true because it's subjective, but I'm going to go with it. Um, I haven't heard. So I sell my eggs as well. And I have heard from everyone that's ever bought them is it's better than store bought. Um, and whether or not they like it because of the pricing of it or because, you know, friends and family type thing. But I think it's just.
14:49It is different because of the quality that you probably give them for feed. The, the fact that they're not stuck in a little tiny pen for their whole lives. And then also just the fact that, that they just get so much like sunlight and freedom, I think that that makes a world of difference and they're fresh versus being already two to three weeks old by the time consumers get them. That's probably the thing right there. Yeah.
15:16Anybody who has chickens and has tried to hard boil eggs from your chicken the day you get the egg It doesn't work very well. You want your eggs to be two weeks old I think before you hard boil them Yep, I learned that the hard way to Yeah, I actually grabbed the wrong carton the other day I looked at the numbers wrong and it was like two days old eggs and hard boiled five and tried to peel two of them for an egg-siled sandwich and they just
15:44ripped right apart. I was like, what was the date on that card? And I went look, I was like, damn it. Yep. So I figured it out and you know, lost a quarter of each egg, but that's okay. So whatever. Yep. The other thing I was going to say, how old are your kids? One's gonna be almost six and one's almost four. And did they help with cooking and stuff? Yes, they do. Um, so we have a dog as well. So right now, I'm teaching them.
16:13daily chores. So they have to, one has to feed the dog in the morning, one has to feed the dog in the evening. And then depending on who is home when I do it, they both help with picking eggs and feeding the chickens. We have a scratch mix like crack corn and wheat and stuff. So one of them will always toss out some, one likes to drop little pieces here and there while my older one just dumps it all and says it's good enough.
16:43Um, do they help you with cooking and stuff or not? Yeah. It depends on what it is. Um, they will, if it's something for them, um, specifically like if it's like cookies for them, um, but when it comes to making bread, cause we make our own bread, it's mom, can we just be done with this already? Um, so that part they're not too enthused with, but, um, they help with the cleaning up part, which I will take cause I hate cleaning the kitchen.
17:11Yeah, me too. I love cooking. I hate cleaning up after, but I usually am the one to do it. The reason I ask is because I am sitting in my room where my desk is with the computer and it's right above the kitchen. And my son, who is 22, put together a beef stew this morning to cook all day in the oven at 170 degrees. And when he was little, he was the youngest of four, still is the youngest of four.
17:40He wanted to try our food when he started getting interested in solid food. And so he would reach out toward our plate if he was sitting in our lap. And if it was something that was okay for him to have, he'd try it. And if he didn't like it, I would wipe his mouth because he spit it out. And by the time he hit two, he was old enough to ask if he could try something. And I just stopped waiting for him to ask. I would just be like, do you want to try it? And he would say, yes.
18:09And I would say, okay, here's the rule. You have to taste it. You have to bite into it. If you don't like it, you can go to the trash can and spit it out at home. Or if we're out with family or at a restaurant, grab your napkin and very nicely split it in a napkin and hold it up and put it aside. I said, I never expect you to eat something you really hate. This kid is the most adventurous out of the four kids.
18:38on what he'll try to eat and he loves to cook and the other three kids love to cook too. So the reason I'm sharing this is because number one, really excited to have beef stew tonight that I didn't make. And number two, if anyone who has little kids, don't make food a battle if you can avoid it. I was a really picky child and it was always a battle and it just left hard feelings and
19:05I didn't really eat a whole lot until I learned to cook. I was very, very skinny until I learned to cook. So try not to make food a battle because it's really not worth winning the battle but losing the war later. Yep, nope. Same boat is that's what we have our kids do. Whatever the meal is, I portion out just a little bit of everything and they have to at least taste each of the items. My son
19:32You still have eggs. He strongly dislikes eggs at this time. And for a while I was still having him just try it to see if it was a phase or if he truly didn't like eggs anymore. I would just tell him, just eat one bite, see if you like it. If you don't like it anymore, that's okay. You don't have to finish it. Or we do the same thing where if I portion out their food and they're full, they're full. Like I'm not going to make them finish their plate, especially when I was the one portioning it out for them.
20:02Um, I'm, I don't believe in, um, forcing the kids to eat all their food. If, if you're, especially if you're the one that's portioned out for them. Um, and I'm like trying to teach them, cause that's where I was is you have to clean your plate before you can leave. And when they're older, I can understand that they can portion out a little bit better. But until then I'm, I'm not going to force them to eat cause I don't want them to think that they always have to have a clean plate to be excused from the table.
20:30Yeah, I wish I had figured this trick out with the other three. But I didn't figure it out until a fourth baby. Weird. I don't know how that happened. And you would have thought that I would have concerning how picky I was and how much of a battle it was in when I was growing up. But either way, I've been meaning to try to get that into a conversation for, for months now, because we're always talking about food somehow on this podcast. Cause I guess we're all hungry. Um, but either way, yeah.
20:59Food is not a thing to battle over if you can avoid it. No. So, and the other thing I'll mention about this kid and food is his sister, who is the oldest, went to visit her dad because all four kids have different sets of parents in my family. I have one by first marriage, one by second marriage. My husband has a son from his previous relationship and then we have the youngest together. And so, youngest.
21:29Oldest sibling who's the only girl had to go visit her dad and youngest would not eat He went on a hunger strike because he missed her so much. She was really little and he was four and So he literally would not eat he would drink milk He would drink water, but he would not eat food And so we even tried to get him to eat ice cream and he wouldn't even ice eat ice cream He lost like five pounds in the first two weeks. She was gone. Oh my god for the summer
21:59And so I was like, okay, he'll drink things. So we ended up getting the carnation instant drink mixes to put in his milk. Cause at least then he was getting vitamins and protein. And he lived on that for like two more weeks after the two he wasn't eating. And finally he started to eat again. I was, when she got back, I said, um, your brother loves you.
22:25more than life itself. She was like, why? And I explained to her what happened. And she was like, Oh, no, mom. And I'm like, no, it's okay. We figured it out. But, but don't ever think for a minute this child does not adore you because you left and he wanted a hunger strike. Yup. Oh, gosh. So yeah, that was fun. No, thank you. No, I was really afraid for him. Yeah, scary. So anyway, long story short, I
22:54just thought I'd share because I think it's funny that he did that. So you have chickens, you have seven acres you said? Seven and a half, yep. Okay, remind me to ask you after we're done where you are in Jordan because I used to live in Jordan so I'm really curious. Oh yeah. So you have chickens, do you have other animals? Are you looking into getting other animals? So we have chickens, we have ducks, and then we have two...
23:22barn cats and a dog. And then next year, we'll start doing bees. Okay. And then hopefully in three to five years, because we have to we have a lot of it's a lot of woods, there's not any pasture land, it's all woods and ravine. So we have to clear out some area. And then we're gonna hopefully build a barn and then have a cow and a pig rotating so that we can
23:52uh, butcher our own, uh, pigs and cows. And then I'm thinking maybe about getting some sheep more for the wool portion of it, um, than anything else. Fun. Um, are you going to get them as sheep or are you going to get them as, as lambs? Um, I'm not sure yet. My, so my dad, um, I grew up with sheep my whole life. Um, my dad right now, I think he has three to 400 sheep. Oh wow.
24:21So depending on where he's at and what sheep he has, because I told him to look out for some good wool sheep for me. So depending on where he's at will depend on if he can, you know, give me a family discount on some sheep or lambs. Nice. Is he in Jordan too or is he somewhere? No, no, he lives way over by South Dakota. Oh, okay. Alrighty. What else? So if you're all woods, do you have a garden yet or are you going to put one in?
24:50No, we have a garden. That was the first thing we moved here in the fall. So the first spring we came here, I'm like, gardens going in. So we have a raised bed garden right now. It's a 20 by 20. About that it's just a U shaped one with the middle piece being just flat ground level. And then this year.
25:15with me becoming self-employed fully and then stay at home mom, we're gonna double if not triple our garden. But this time we're just going to till it up and use it as ground until we get more wood to make raised bed garden and also all the dirt that you need to get the raised bed garden. So yeah, so that's the plan for this year. Last year I tried doing loofah and it...
25:43I planted it directly because I was treating it more like a zucchini and that did not work well. It started to actually produce in October right before the frost hit. So this year we started indoors now and hopefully that will work. But I did do tomatoes directly into the garden last year. I did cherry tomatoes because for some reason we didn't plant any. So I pre-plant them indoors. So
26:12I put them directly in the garden. They grew better than our tomatoes that we had pregrown and the ones we had bought. Yeah, cherry tomatoes are weird. They either do really, really well and you are flooded with them or they do nothing. Yeah. Yep. They're pretty moody. They're like a teen. Yeah, they're finicky. We've been growing cherry tomatoes for years and some years we have just buckets of them.
26:39And other years we get like eight and I'm like, oh, that was nice on a salad. Thank you. Yep. So I don't know. Last summer was really hard on growing tomatoes from what I hear. We did really well, but a lot of people had a hard time with tomatoes because it was so dry. Yep. We had a hard time even though we watered them appropriately. We just didn't get very many at all, which is weird because we've always had no issues. And I had to get...
27:08um, tomatoes from my, um, brother-in-law and sister-in-law because we had none. Yeah, we were swamped. We had, we sold, I don't even know how many pounds is in a bushel. I looked it up last year, but I forget now, but I'm sure we sold at least four bushels of tomatoes in August. So it was a lot and made the most lovely canned tomato sauce for us and still have some jars left. So.
27:37That's the most wonderful thing about the homesteading lifestyle is that when you have an abundance of something, you have the skill to preserve it so it doesn't just go away. Exactly. Exactly. We do potatoes and last year we just had so many little ones, which I'm looking up ways to have them produce better, but we decided to just let them grow in our
28:06know, sprout. Well, now they already have like six inch roots. So I'm like chomping at the bit to like plant them quick here. Yeah. Um, I was going to say if you want to get them in something before you can get them in the ground outside, get like the five gallon buckets from, from, um, I don't know, Menards or home. We have like 20 of them right now. Yeah. And poke holes, drill holes in
28:36Like a drill bit hole and then put the dirt in and put your potatoes in and just let them grow because otherwise they're going to be so leggy by the time you get them in the ground that they're not going to do great. Obviously put something underneath the bucket for when you water it or you're going to have water everywhere. Duh. I'm saying that more because it was kind of stupid that I said it that way, but either way you could bucket them up for now. Yes, which that helps.
29:05I was trying to figure out like what to do with it and yeah, might as well just bucket them for now because I don't want to lose them. Yeah. And with this weather coming in today and tomorrow and Saturday and Sunday, it's going to be a bit before you can get them in the ground. But either way, yay to be a potatoes and you're not the only one who had little tiny tomatoes or potatoes, potatoes last year because we grew I think 20 potato plants.
29:34We got hardly any potatoes. It was just so dry. Nothing really produced well last year. Well, I was also hearing, because we have apple trees as well, that a lot of it when we started off early in the year, or spring year, that because of the Canadian fires, those affected also, because all the trees here and everything want to start preserving.
30:04So they probably also had a, all the plants probably also got affected from that because of the smoke and all the chemicals, like whatever, you know, chemicals make up a tree was coming down here. And that's how it also affected the trees. I didn't realize that until I was talking to someone last year about it. Yeah, it's amazing how the environment impacts everything. Who knew? Yeah, it's last summer was bananas for weather.
30:33and environmental impacts on things. It was rough. And I've said it before, I'm gonna say it again, I'm very concerned about this coming growing season, considering what this winter has been, who knows what this spring and summer and fall are gonna be. Yes, yep. Isn't it this year too, the cicadas? I don't know. It's this year or something, it's this year, next year.
31:01Whereas that 217, every 217 years or whatever it is, they sync up with their cycles. So all the cicadas will be out. Oh, yeah, it's gonna be loud. Yeah, so just slowly getting a garden play coming. Oh, I hope not. I really, really, really hope not. Let's cross our fingers. That's not the case. Yes. All the good vibes needs to be sent out because something's going on. Well, yeah, and it has been for,
31:31But that's all right, we're humans, we'll adapt until we die. It'll be okay. All right. Well, on that terrible morbid note, it's been 31 minutes and 35 seconds. And I try to keep these to half an hour. Sam, thank you so much for taking the time chat with me. You're so welcome. Thank you. Have a great day. You too. Thanks. Bye.