A Tiny Homestead

Homesteading with BeckyJ

Today I'm talking with Becky at Homesteading with BeckyJ. 
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. At Green Bush Twins and Company, we believe in the power of creativity, imagination, and art to bring people together.  Our mission is to inspire connection across all ages, encouraging understanding, individuality,  and a true sense of belonging. We're building more than a brand. We're growing a mindful community rooted in kindness, intention, and shared purpose.
00:29At our core, it's about real people sharing real stories, ideas, and products that make everyday life more meaningful.  If you believe in living with purpose and supporting brands that care,  you'll feel right at home with Greenbush Twins. A tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Greenbush Twins and Company. Today I'm talking with Becky at Homesteading with Becky J in Oregon. How are you this morning, Becky?  I am fabulous. How about you? I'm good. What's the weather doing in Oregon?
00:57We're actually really overcast today.
01:02Is it raining or is it just overcast? Just overcast. It looks like it wants to try, but nothing's happening.  Yeah. And rain is not, it's not anything unusual in Oregon or Washington state. So I'm sure you're ready for it to sprinkle whenever, right? Yeah. Well, and I'm in Eastern Oregon. So we actually, lot of the storms tend to go around us. We're usually pretty dry. So yeah, we definitely take all the rain that we can get.
01:30Yeah, I'm in Minnesota. It is yet another really lovely morning. It's  the reason I sound weird about that is because this winter has been the longest, grayest,  wettest we've had in probably four years. Oh, geez. But the sun is coming in the bedroom window. There's no wind  and it's just really pretty outside. I'm like, hmm, another good morning. Yay.  So. ah
01:59I have to tell you when I saw the name of your page, Homesteading with Becky J, for some reason it made me think of a pop star and I can't for the life of me think of who it is right now. But I was like, that sounds like a rock star homesteader. I want to talk to her. Easy to remember then. Yes. So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do. Well, I am 37 years old. have
02:28Three children, a whole full-fledged homestead now. I literally have animals all over, but it was not like that. You know, six, seven years ago, I was living in a trailer park. So, I mean, we made some major changes for the better, obviously. There was a lot of work to get here, but...
02:51Still grilling.  So when you were in the trailer park, were you already like practicing homesteading skills though? you already learning? I mean, I've always been a meal prepper, baker, cooker. So I kind of had that going for me, but honestly, no. And I wish that I would have been practicing some of these basic skills. You know, like I could have been gardening on my porch. I could have been utilizing container gardening or
03:19you know, worm composting or learning how to sow, but I was so oblivious to all of it. And I guess I just thought that like the property had to come first. So I'm a big advocate for people. Like it doesn't matter where you're at. Like you can literally do this anywhere. And I wish I would have started sooner, you know? Well, I would say, okay, listener, you heard it here first, but I say it all the time. So, okay, listener, you're hearing it again. Learn to cook, grow a plant,  learn to
03:49crochet or sew,  just  learn some basic skills of do-it-yourself things because that way you're not caught flat-footed. Yeah. Yup.
04:01Okay, so  when did you move into, when did you acquire your land? We have been here about seven years now. it  just slowly but surely we started getting some animals and the first year I tried to garden it was a complete flop because I didn't know what I was doing.  That's okay, at least you tried.  Yeah.
04:31Yep. Okay. So tried gardening. Yeah. The people that had lived here before us, she had a big, big garden  and I know them personally. So like I seen what it looked like in full bloom and everything that she had been growing. like, Oh, I could totally do that. And so of course I just planted everything in the ground with no idea of like weed control or how I was going to water or anything. And then of course,
04:58everything started sprouting. It looked fabulous, but then I couldn't tell what were like weeds and what were the plants.  By the time it was big enough for me to tell, I'm like, oh yeah, I'm not pulling all these. I just gave up.  I just let it grow wild that year. I'm like, yeah, no.  Did you get anything out of it though, even though it was crowded? Some lettuce.
05:26I did get some lettuce, but that was about it.  Well, it's better than nothing. Yeah. Yeah, you're right.  It's definitely a learning lesson.  Are you plant, are you, so have you gotten better at gardening over the years? Oh yes. I now know like what works for me and because I do work full time still. So I definitely have to have some major systems in place in order for me to  make it work growing as much as I do.  Um,
05:53but I have some weed barriers down. have an automatic watering system now. I grow certain things in raised beds, certain things in the ground. And so I have a system now.  Yeah. Systems are really  very, very, I would could say very a hundred times. It wouldn't be enough  important to making a homestead run where you don't feel like you're putting out fires all the time.  Definitely. Yup. And you said you have animals. So what do you have for animals and what animal did you get first?
06:23Um, so funny enough, we got cows first, which seems backwards in my head. Yeah. But there, we already had a fence pasture and my husband always wanted cows, you know, raise our own beef. And we started with cows and that also obviously was a learning experience. Um, the first cow we had his name was Houdini given for a very good reason, because even though it was a fenced pasture, the fence needed some work.
06:52And so he got out constantly. So I don't know how many times I, we had to walk that guy home. Like he would end up at the neighbors, you know, half a mile down the road and someone else's pasture. And it was like, oh my gosh, this animal is huge. I'm going to get ran over.  And I got chickens and chickens obviously were a little bit easier to manage.  Yeah. They say chickens are the gateway animal for homesteaders. Cows is not.
07:21Cows is not the animal they say is the gateway animal. Yeah. Really quick. I'm going to jump in our neighbors to our west, our Northwest. They have cows and they have at least one donkey.  And we've lived here. We've lived here for a little over five years and I keep, I keep waiting to get up in the morning and find a cow or a donkey in my yard and they've never shown up. So they must have really good fences.  And what's really dumb, Becky is that
07:51I would not be terribly offended if I woke up to a cow or a donkey standing in my yard. It would be definitely has their own personalities. Yeah. As long as I could get hold of the owner and say, you need to come get your critter because I can't do it. I would be fine with it. Cause I think that we don't have livestock here. We have chickens, we have a dog, we have barn cats. And I
08:18We have three acres. We don't have enough room for anybody to graze and feeding livestock right now is real expensive if you're not grazing them. Yeah. So the idea of waking up to a cow or a donkey in my yard would be highly entertaining  once.  Yeah. Let me just visit. Okay. Like babysit them a couple hours, maybe once a week and then take them back. Yeah. Their beautiful dog came over one day and she's,  I think her name is shy or sky.
08:48And she's the red  golden retriever. Like she's not the yellow golden. She's the reddish kind and friendly as all get out. I was just like, Oh my God, she can stay. And my husband was like, we have a dog. She's going home. oh So we've met their dog and she's wonderful, but  have not met any of their other livestock yet. And I wait for the morning where I do. Do you have like, I don't want to say.
09:19There's a word. I hate this.  Do you have average chickens or do you have special chickens? Let's put it that way. Do you have like a bunch of different kinds or just have egg producers? em We honestly have a really big variety in our flock. I'm not really particular on certain breeds. I don't care if they're pretty. Yeah. We're dual purpose. So like I'll raise them and I incubate them and then, you know,
09:45There tends to always be a ton of roosters when you incubate them, seems like.  so,  you know, those will go to freezer camp generally. So then that way it's kind of a full circle and it's less I'm having to buy from the hot trees like to fill my freezer. Yes,  absolutely. Especially right now. I mean, you've been doing it for a while, but right now it's really important to have that.
10:08Yes. I'm real excited.  We just did.  So we've had cows for a while  and we do the chickens and we raised pigs and which I probably will never do again. They are so destructive. I mean, I love pigs. Don't get me wrong.  But we just picked up our butcher pigs yesterday and filled our freezer. So now I literally don't have to go to the store for any kind of meat.  How does that feel, Rebecca? Fabulous. It's fabulous.
10:38Like I said, they're really destructive and they got really big. And I mean, they were super docile, the breed that I got, we got a Mangalitza red wattle cross. Oh, nice. Yeah, they were not mean like at all. I there's a few times my legs got squished, but they didn't, they didn't realize they were hurting me. You know, they just want food.  But yeah, they definitely tore up that section of the pasture and it's going to need a lot of work.
11:06Yeah, I keep hearing people either be  very pro pig or very, I did it once, I'm not doing it again pig. Yeah, you know, I feel like if you have enough property or a lot of wooded area, they're really good at clearing land, but I just have a grassy pasture, you know, so like that whole section is just all dirt now.  Yeah.  Yeah. And trying to get it back to where you want it to be is going to take some time and probably some money.
11:35Yeah.  Do you have goats or lamb or sheep? do.  I have goats, but I just have a dwarf variety because I'm  not a large person  and I wanted to be able to handle them. I did have goats, like regular,  full-size goats for like three months when we first got this property and it just did not work out. We got them from someone else when they were already full grown.
12:01They were skittish of people. didn't want anything to do with me. And then when they did get out, it was so hard trying to get them back in.  And at least with a dwarf, like I can pick them up if I need to,  you know, I can actually handle them.  Yeah, absolutely.  Do one of the things that I would tell anybody looking to get any kind of livestock  is  really consider  what you can handle.
12:27Because if you can't handle them you will sell them or you will process them within months of getting them. Yep I've been doing pretty good with the ones we have now  and we have it like they have a nice little fenced in area now So they're not getting out constantly even though they're dwarfs. They still got some hops on them. They can still jump.  Oh, Yeah, how many do you have? Let's see. How many do I have now? um
12:56And then I have two babies right now in my backyard. I'm just weaning off and they're going to be going to new homes this weekend. So much fun. you, are you like an in love with baby goats person?  Yes, they're so cute and it's to get rid of them, but  you only get so much milk off them when they're dwarf size, you know? So it's like, I don't want to have like 20 goats  have to get rid of them.
13:25While you're talking about that, have a question because we're very, very lightly flirting with the idea of uh dwarf goats at some point in the next couple of years. And I read that they're good for meat and for milk. So how much milk can you get from a dwarf mama goat? So it depends. So I have a dwarf Nigerian and a dwarf Lamontia, and I definitely get more milk off my Lamontia.
13:55but it's still like maybe a  pint a day if I'm milking twice a day.  Okay. It's still like, it's not a whole lot compared to like, you know, a dairy cow or a full size goat. But I mean, if it's just you and your husband, it would be enough, you know, like it's really good in your morning coffee.  Oh, I know. And that's part of the reason we're even remotely thinking about this. Cause when we moved here, we were like, we are not getting goats.
14:24We're not getting goats because we don't have enough room for them to graze.  And then I saw that there were mini goats, pygmy goats as it were.  And I was like, they wouldn't eat much. That would, that might work. Maybe. So I've been doing research on that and I've been doing research on quail and we have not decided on anything yet because  it's spring in Minnesota. My husband has been every weekend outside because he's been stuck in the house all winter.
14:53He's been chopping wood for this winter and he's been planting seeds in the greenhouse and he's been checking out the fruit trees and the lilac bushes and the rhubarb and the peonies and I can't keep this man in the house from sun up to sun down. So he's been very, very busy and we're probably not going to do any major changes this year.
15:19partly because we don't know what this year is going to bring with everything going on in the world. we're like, you know, the gardens and the chickens are pretty stable. Let's just stick with that for 2026. Yeah. Cause I would hate to get into something new and then  have to give it up because money just gets too tight because prices have gone up so much. Yeah. Well, and that's what, where I was kind of at, um,  cause I, I'd melt last year and I'm
15:49will probably start milking again here soon. But getting them up on the milk stand, like after they finally get used to sitting there, you know, you typically give them like some kind of a treat or give them grain to like eat on while you're milking. And the grain here at where I buy it is really expensive. So I'm like, you know, I could probably just take this $30 and give it to another farmer that has a bunch of goats and just buy their milk instead.
16:18That too, yes. And I'm always saying if you can't produce the thing that you want yourself, find somebody local who's already producing it and support them. Yeah. So it's a good plan. Yeah. So what do you, I'm just going to sound really dumb. What do you love most about homesteading? Possibilities, I guess. There is just so much  to it when you...
16:45finally dip a toe in and then you're like, oh, well, I could do this, but then I could do that and I can collect my rainwater and I can sell my own clothes and I guess it just opens, opens your, your mind up a little bit more or, you know, we've been raised our whole life. Like, Oh, do this, do that, get a job, go to college, have kids. it's like, they don't teach you how to be self-sufficient or to.
17:11you know, care for your family in the ways that you may want to versus just going to the store to buy dinner, you know what I mean? So it's kind of like, oh, well, I can do all these things. Like what do I want to do?  And so I think that's my  favorite part.  absolutely. And you bring up a good point. We are brought up in the last, let's say, 50 years, we've been brought up to be  do what we're told.
17:39Instead of brought up to be functioning humans who know how to cook a meal, who know how to start a fire outside if you need to for, for, um, whatever you need it for.  Um,  we, we were not brought up taught how to know how to do a stitch in clothing, you know, how to hem pants, how to darn socks. We, didn't need to do that anymore, but.
18:08I don't think that's true. I think that we all need to know how to do this stuff. Yes. And I was actually thinking the other day and I haven't said anything to my husband yet because he's got a lot going on his plate and he's also ADD.  So if I bring it up, he's going to want to talk about it for three hours. And I'm like, I don't have three hours.  But I was thinking about the fact that we now have a little thing that we carry around in our pockets called a cell phone.
18:37most everybody does, smartphone, that lets us take video and photos whenever we want. And I'm 56, so I remember having to take film to the pharmacy or the Kodak, whatever, and get pictures developed, actual pictures you hold onto.  You can hold in your hand. And it was expensive to get film developed. When you chose to take a picture, you were making a choice.
19:08And I mean, there hardly anybody I knew had a video camera when I was in my teens, because they were brand new. Isn't that scary? I'm only 56.  And  I couldn't just pick up the phone and call somebody. I had to ask my mom if it was okay if I called my friend  and we had to keep the conversation to under 60 seconds because  it was a dollar a minute.
19:39That's funny. can't freaking believe that I have been alive for 56 years and what has changed since I was born and what changed from the time that my parents were born till now. You know, it's insane. And it's made it so easy. Everything has been become so very convenient, but we have lost the soul of creation.
20:07human creation in all of this stuff. Yep, you can pretty much get anything you want delivered to your door, whether it's in days or hours.  Yeah, and I don't know about you, but I really do like cooking.  I really do. And when I talk to people who like, I can't believe you make soup from scratch, you can get it in a can.
20:33It doesn't taste the same though. Like I don't want my soup to taste like aluminum. I want it to taste like soup. Yeah. It doesn't taste like aluminum. I'm like, um, yes it does. And if you want soup that doesn't taste like aluminum, I will make you soup. I had friends, we lived up at the old house. We moved half an hour away, so I still have friends up there. But if my friends were sick.
20:59They would call me and say, do you happen to have any of your chicken soup in your freezer? My, the stuff I make, chicken soup. And I would be like, I do or I don't. And usually I did. And I would say yes. And they'd be like, could I, could I please have some? Cause I'm really not great. I've got a cold, I'm miserable. Your soup is like medicine.  And I would let them have a little container of soup. I couldn't give them all of it. Obviously I had a family of six, but I was happy to share.
21:28And my next door neighbor, she was so funny. She had a really bad head cold and about three days after she ate my soup, she came over and she was like, I'm all better. It's all thanks to you.  That made me feel  so good inside and I helped her and it was no skin off my nose because the soup was already made. Yeah. oh
21:52So not only do I feel like I'm accomplished, I feel like I'm helping other people. And I swear that's why people get into homesteading, because they're trying to do something for themselves.  And then their friends find out about it and you end up helping your friends and it's really fun. Yeah. Well, food really is fuel. Oh, know, it is medicine, you know, for our bodies. So it's I feel like it makes a big difference. Yeah. And I feel like I'm constantly talking about food.
22:21on these episodes. And homesteading isn't just about food.  It's about getting outside and touching grass and getting your hands dirty.  It's about being responsible for other lives, even if it's just a barn cat. It doesn't matter.  And it's about being part of nature because humans are nature. We are.  And people have forgotten that too. Yeah.
22:52So I just,  I don't want to beat a dead horse because it doesn't do any good, Beats your soul. Yes. Homesteading is not about having land. It's about the way you live your life.  And  if you have made chocolate chip cookies from scratch, or if you have made, I don't know, bacon and eggs, you've practiced a homestead skill. Yeah. I've had a few people, um,
23:21You always, I don't know what you call them, trolls online. just, people just aren't nice sometimes. And then you get them behind a computer or a phone and then they just say really not nice things. But I've had a few people be like, I thought homesteading was working the land. What are you talking about? like, well, yeah, originally it was about working the land, but it's not the same as it was back then. No, it's not.
23:50And if we can encourage, you know, your average  Joe that lives in apartment to have a tomato plant in the corner of their house with a sunny window and to start baking from scratch, even though they don't have any land, why wouldn't you? m
24:08Hang on one second.
24:14I was going to cough and I didn't want to cough in your ear. uh No, I'm good. That's fine. It's an echo.  It's an, it's an invisible echo. It was awesome.  Um,  the other thing is, is that I feel like people started looking down their noses at actual work a long time ago. Yeah. The trades are just dying for people to come to work for them. Plumbers, electricians.
24:44construction. And the fact is, if we don't have people go into those trades, we're not going to have houses to live in.  Or a toilet to flush or water to drink or  where, where did everybody go? It's like there were so many people,  but I feel like the workforce is like diminished. Like there's no one out there actually working. It's like everyone just stuck at home behind a computer screen.
25:12I think what happened is that back 20, 25 years ago when computers became quote unquote easier, and I'm not saying coding is easy. It is not. I've tried it. I don't like it. It's not my thing. My daughter learned and she's great at it. But when people learn that you can make a lot of money working in the computer field, they were like, oh, well, I can make more than being a plumber. So I'm going to go into computers. think that's what happened.
25:42And don't get me wrong, you can make a lot of money if you're really good at in the computer field. But we still need people to, you know,  use a wrench or a hammer  or take down trees that might land on your house. I mean, that's a really important thing too.
26:03So  I don't, I don't know.  And I didn't expect to go down this trail this morning, but it's interesting.  I think that, I think that to be a functioning human these days, it would be good if you knew how to cook a couple of meals from scratch. I mean, if you want to buy food from somebody else five nights a week,  just make a meal on Sunday, you know, learn on meal. Cause it's so,
26:33Amazing when flour and butter and salt and milk turn into a biscuit. Yeah. Like a little experiment. Yeah, a nice fluffy biscuit that you can put star bot jam on if you want and butter and eat it because at least you made the biscuit.
26:56Yeah.
26:58And the gratitude that you feel or just the pure, what's the word I'm looking for? Being proud of yourself. Eating the food that you made. You're like, oh my gosh, I made this whole meal from scratch. it's so gratifying.  Oh yes. I have uh a drop biscuit recipe that I use all the time for, for just biscuits or for sausage and gravy and biscuits or for butter and jam biscuits, whatever.  And.
27:28We had gotten strawberries a couple of years ago.  We did not grow them. We bought them and we made strawberry jam out of those strawberries. And we did not have a cow. We will probably never have a cow. But I was so excited to have our strawberry jam on biscuits that I made with butter from the store because two of those things we made. Yeah. Awesome. was super cool. I love it. um
27:57The other thing that I will tell you, and obviously I will tell the listener as well, is that when we lived in town, we lived in town. We lived in a town of 6,000 people and we lived in the old part of town. Our neighbors were very, very close. And the main reason I wanted to move out to the country was for the quiet.  if you are a person who is shy and really likes quiet,
28:27Living in town is not going to be your jam. It's just not. Definitely not.  People ask me why I moved,  why we moved to home. I'm like, because I needed quiet. And they're like, not because you wanted animals or more space to garden. I'm like, oh no, no, I wanted that too. But the main priority was  quiet.  More nature, less people, please.
28:54Yeah. And I was so sick of having  our bedroom fronted on the street that we lived on and we had the windows open, all that smell from the cars going by and all the dust on the road would get kicked up and my bedroom was always dusty.  And I was like, this is so gross.  I sweep this floor twice a day and it's still dusty.  Oh my God. And we don't have that problem here because we're back from the road.
29:23We still live off of a busy road, but we are way further back from it.  So there are many, many reasons that people choose to move to a quote unquote homestead and homestead can be a half an acre. It can be a hundred acres, but typically it is not just a little tiny lot city lot. Yeah. I have seen some people do some amazing things with their backyards though.
29:53Like  their whole backyard will be like a garden oasis. Like it's amazing what people can do when they really put their mind to it. That's exactly what we did at the old house. We lived on a 10th of an acre lot with a house and a four car garage on it.
30:12And we grew up, we put up trellises and we grew everything up instead of out. And it was really beautiful. I mean, it was crowded and it was a lot, but it was beautiful.  You make it work. Yeah, it was so fun. We  had the kids then, we have four kids. And the youngest was  born. He wasn't born in that house, but we were living in that house when he was born. And he knew no different than to have
30:42a little tiny  piece of land covered in vegetable plants.  And he, he and his brother, older brother came home from school when they were in, I think Kent was a freshman in high school and Cameron was in fourth or fifth grade.  And  they came home from school and I guess they had talked to each other about this and they were like, we should talk to mom.
31:11And they said, can we talk to you? And when your boys walk up to you and say, can we talk to you? And they're very serious. You're like, Oh God, what's wrong? Yeah. was like, yes, what's going on? they were, Cameron looked at Kent cause Kent's the older one and Kent said, can we start taking leftovers from dinner for lunch to school in a, in a pale, a lunch pail? And I said, why? he said, because school lunch isn't food.
31:40I mean, he's not wrong, but.  Yep. And I looked at, I looked at Cameron who was in, you know, fourth grade, fifth grade, whatever it was. I said, do you want to do the same thing? And he was like, yeah. He said, mom, the school lunches just suck.
31:56I was like,  sure. So I just started making more of whatever it was we were gonna have for dinner so that they could take it for lunch the next day. And luckily they both had  microwaves that they could use at school to warm up. Oh, very cool. Yeah, I was so impressed with these kids that they recognized that they were eating stuff that wasn't good for them.
32:20Yep, you can definitely taste the difference.  Yes, but there is nothing scarier than your kids walking up to you and saying,  can we talk to you for a minute? I'm like, what did I do now? You know? And then it was just that. like, oh, well, absolutely.  Oh, definitely. easy, yes. Yeah. And they both really wanted soups, you know, like three, days a week. They wanted to take soups for lunch.
32:44And I didn't have any little thermoses for them to take. So we literally went out and bought the little thermoses that are like a pint. You know,  like the  Stanley thermoses, the small ones, and got the little lunch bags that are soft.  we would just, they would just scoop the soup into the thermoses, put the lid on and take it to school. they'd warm, and it was still warm when they ate. So they loved it. It was great.
33:13So that's another thing that happens is that you try things and then it surprises you at how well things work out. Yeah. So I haven't told that story before because I had forgotten about it. Thank you for giving me an opening.  All right. I try to keep these to half an hour. Becky, I appreciate your time so much. Where can people find you? um
33:38Facebook. I'm on Facebook quite frequently. I do have a YouTube channel, but I don't know what I'm doing with it yet. So, but it's  all of them are home studying with Becky J. I have a blogs all connected, but I try to keep it all uniform. So it was easy to locate me.  Fantastic. I so appreciate your time as always people can find me. Sorry.
34:05People can find me at AtidyHolmsteadPodcast.com.  Becky, thank you again. Have a great day. You as well. Thank you for having me.
 

Morning Sun Homestead

Today I'm talking with Maryann at Morning Sun Homestead. 
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00:00Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. At Green Bush Twins and Company, we believe in the power of creativity, imagination, and art to bring people together.  Our mission is to inspire connection across all ages, encouraging understanding, individuality,  and a true sense of belonging. We're building more than a brand. We're growing a mindful community rooted in kindness, intention, and shared purpose.
00:28At our core, it's about real people sharing real stories, ideas, and products that make everyday life more meaningful.  If you believe in living with purpose and supporting brands that care,  you'll feel right at home with Green Bush Twins. That Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Green Bush Twins and Company. Today I'm talking with Mary Ann at Morning Sun Homestead in West Virginia. Good morning, Mary Ann. How are you? We're doing well. Thank you for having us on your podcast.
00:55Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for taking the time. I appreciate it.  I was just going to close Facebook, your Facebook page because it was still open.  Do you have an Australian Shepherd? We actually have two of them puppies.  We got them the first weekend in January.  Two males.  One is Remington, one's Winchester and we love them. They are wonderful dogs.
01:21Yeah, I happen to see the always on guard even if it's watching a pesky cat post and I was like that looks just like my Maggie because we have one too.
01:32We are in the process of trying to train them to herd cows and chickens. uh One is more  relaxed. He likes just to stay  on the porch and watch, but the other one has the instinct and the drive to really herd.  So we have to watch him a lot. He's very good about keeping the chickens across the fence where they belong, but  he likes to nip a little bit. And that is okay for a cow,  but a chicken is much more tender. So we're working on that right now.
02:04I wish you all the luck in the world with that. Our Maggie doesn't really have a farm job. Her job is watchdogging for the home. And uh the thing we've learned in the five years we've had her is that she is not a dog that knows how to fetch. She loves to chase things, but if we say bring it back, she will not bring it back.
02:28That sounds very familiar. Yup. And are yours full size Australian Shepherds or are they the smaller ones?
02:39They are full size. Once they're grown, they'll be full size. Okay, Maggie's a small standard. weighs like 36 pounds.
02:53Okay, so how is the weather in West Virginia this morning? It is sunny and cold in Minnesota.
03:01We are supposed to have 78 degrees today. We had rain last night, a thunderstorm moved through. It rained really, really hard. Then this morning it was 52 degrees and we had a little bit more rain. It stopped, a few more showers. Right now it's 66. We're supposed to have 78. But this is a roller coaster. We've had some nice weather and now tonight it is supposed to be 37 and tomorrow we're supposed to have snow.
03:30And then it's supposed to shoot back up to the 50s, 60s.  And then next week on Tuesday, we are supposed to have 17 at night. So we are just up and down with the weather. But this is a small taste of spring and we want to get out and do all kinds of things, but we have a lot of mud, which is okay because we needed the moisture. We are very dry. So that worked out to get more rain. um We're really anxious for spring to come when you have warm days like this and you get out and you're able to work a little bit. And then
03:58you have snow again. So that's a let down,  but we are on a roller coaster ride.  Yeah, we're supposed to get a little bit of snow every day through Sunday this week here. And I'm like, okay,  um, I guess I can handle it because hopefully it'll be the last of it for the  winter. Hopefully.  Um, so tell me a little bit about yourself  and morning  sun homestead.
04:28So my husband and I, um well when we got married of course we ate like everyone else.  You know, was fast food and quick dinners and things like that.  And then over time once we had our children we realized that that wasn't the life we wanted to continue. So we started to dig in  and um grow in our own food. And we have branched off from that and now we do our own meats. You know, of course we have our own eggs.  The girls are a tremendous help.
04:58They  all are on the bandwagon with us, so to speak. So it really helps to have their help. They know how to do everything, which is a huge help now that as we're getting older, you just don't have as much energy. And uh when I look back, I wonder how I did it all when they were small. I guess it was just all willpower and grit. But that's how we got started. We just got tired of eating all the processed stuff, feeling bad, waking up with inflammation, you know,
05:28bags under our eyes and that sort of thing and decided to pick a healthier path  and it's worked out well and we are so glad that we decided to do that. It has made a major difference in our lives.
05:43Awesome, and I'm glad you just said all that because I'm gonna do my my public service announcement early in the podcast episode today  if you live in America right now, and you don't know how to cook  learn and If you don't grow anything to eat start a plant this year  try growing something even if it's herbs on your windowsill  and
06:08get to know your local producers, your local farmers, because if the supply chain should happen to go down again,  it's good to be able to know who to buy from locally. That's my public service announcement.  And there is so much truth in that.  know, local is best. If you can't grow it yourself, the next level would be local. That way, the way I look at it,  have, we milk cows, so we have raw milk and it's became legal now to sell raw milk in West Virginia.
06:37And I would never sell a gallon of milk that I felt my family wouldn't drink. And I think that a lot of people that are local feel the same way about their produce or their meat, their eggs, whatever they may be selling. I feel that if they wouldn't feed it to their family, they're probably not going to try to sell it to you. I know I wouldn't. Hopefully that's how most producers are.  But the big corporations really don't care. They will send us whatever.
07:04And because it doesn't matter to them, it's all one big connection with pharmaceuticals and big farms and our health.
07:14Absolutely yes.  Yes, yes, yes, you are absolutely right. uh I,  how do I say this?  We grow a garden and we have chickens, partly because it's fun,  but we're not doing it for funsies. We're doing it to feed ourselves and feed our community, if that makes sense at all.
07:39Yes, it most certainly does. um I'm assuming from the comment that you made, must also sell any additional eggs that you have and uh garden produce you give away. Right, and we do that if we have extra produce to older people. um There's a lot of older people that used to eat healthy. This was not...
08:02like a trend, this was the normal way of life, this is how they always did it, and now they're just not able to get out there and do it, and we will give them produce from our garden em just because  that's what we want to do. If we can help someone out, that's what we do, but it sounds like your family does the same thing, and that's wonderful. uh We need more of that in America.
08:23Yes, we do. need everybody who has a talent. And by the way, everyone has a talent.  It doesn't matter what it is. If you sing, then sing to your kids or sing to your friends. It makes them feel good. um If you're good at writing, write a story. It makes people feel good. If you're good at growing things, feed people. Everyone has a talent. You just have to figure out what it is.
08:50Yes,  you're exactly right. God gave us all a talent. We're all here on a purpose.  We just have to sometime research and dig deep to find it, but it's  Yes,  and uh yes, we grow a hundred foot by fifty foot or 150 by a hundred foot.  I don't know the dimensions. My husband does. He's the one that does it.  Produce garden, farm to market garden, and we sell at our farm stand and we sell at the farmer's market in town in the summertime.
09:21And we mostly have chickens because we don't want to buy eggs at the store, but because we always have more chickens than we can keep up with. We sell the eggs too, because when the bird flu comes through, people are very happy to get their eggs at $5 a dozen from our farm stand. Yes. Yes, I'm sure they are.
09:43So  I found you on Facebook and I am absolutely smitten with your Facebook page. I am thinking of you in my head. Your nickname is the Homestead Hack Queen because you have all the tips and tricks on your Facebook page. People, if you want to learn about homesteading,  go look at Mary Ann's Facebook page. Why are you doing a Facebook page full of homestead hacks? What's your motivation?
10:12Well, I like to teach people what I know. uh I feel that knowledge is power.  And if we can teach more people how to do dry mixes or how to can, how to provide for their self more and for their family, they're less reliant on the system.  And therefore, we have more power as people for our nation. And when you can take care of yourself, you're much better off.  And with my hacks and things that I'm trying to teach people,
10:40I feel that a good stock pantry is so important. And if you're able to do that, then you're able to survive a lot of things. And when we think of rainy days, we think of maybe a nuclear attack or something to that extent. It doesn't have to be like that. It can be a blizzard. It can be you lose your job. It can just be that a sickness has come through your home  and  the flu this year is really bad. A lot of people in our community are sick. But you know, if you just have a jar of soup to open,
11:09That is going to be so convenient when you're so sick you can hardly stand up but your children still needs to be fed.  So, you know, there's a lot of different scenarios that we can look at and that's why it's so important to be able to have all these hacks and know a knowledge of how to can, how to preserve, how to grow.  Eventually, that is a complete circle and it comes back and you're able to provide your family with nutrition meals on the table.
11:38Yes.  Amen, sister.  I  mentioned to you before we started recording that I saw your post about the homemade cough drops.  I have a story you might get a kick out of. Back when my youngest was probably eight or 10, I don't know, he was young. uh I had gone to the store because he was sick and I'd gone and gotten orange juice and cold medicine and I didn't get cough drops on the list. Therefore, I didn't buy any.
12:08And I realized it the minute I unpacked the groceries and I was like, what do I have? How can I make cough drops? I had honey, I had sugar and I had the other things the recipe called for. And I was like, I'm going to make homemade cough drops. It'll probably be better for him. And he'll probably think it's candy, which means that he will like them. And I made homemade cough drops. I was so disappointed in myself that I didn't put cough drops on the list, but I was so proud of myself for making them.
12:38Yes, because I can relate to them.
12:44Yup, I couldn't believe it. He was standing there waiting for the cough drop package to come out of the bag. And I was like, I completely forgot. And he was like, Mom, you know how when kids are actually disappointed in you, it just breaks your heart? It was that kind of mom. And I was just like, I'm a better mom than this. I am going to do something I've never done. I'm going to make a curative for my kids.
13:15And that's great that you went out of your comfort zone. I just think a lot more people need to do that because  a lot have the I can't attitude. You can't. It's just the willpower to do it.  And does everything I make turn out? Absolutely not. That was my second batch of cough drops. The first ones failed miserably. They would not harden.  So I just dug through, found a different recipe, and this one worked. This was an Amish recipe  with blackberry. uh They called for a juice. So
13:44just made my own juice. had frozen blackberries in the freezer. I took them out  and I poured boiling water over it, let them set in that for 10 minutes, and then I strained them really well and squeezed it all through cheesecloth.  So sometimes you just have to make do with what you have.  I know many during the depression, there was a saying of make do, wear it out, use it up or do without. And that's kind of what I try to stick with. We have to use what we have.
14:10We just can't say can't. We gotta do it. And that's great that you took the initiative and you did it. And that's what we all need to do.
14:20Yes.  And  I have been kind of pushing my husband about eating leftovers because  he's the kind of guy who would like a different dinner every night. And I'm the kind of girl who likes to cook big and  money just keeps getting tighter and tighter with inflation. So I finally have him convinced that leftovers taste better or the dinner tastes better the second night.
14:48And we have literally been eating the same thing two nights in a row.  And he said to me the other day, said, you know, this is actually better the second day. So I'm winning the fight here at my house. That's great.  That's great. And yes, mean, leftovers are important. But you know, another thing you could do is  one thing I did a lot when the girls were younger was at the end of the week, I just made a whatever stew.
15:12Sometimes it didn't turn out so well, but sometimes it was really good. So whatever was leftover, I put in there. But yes, leftovers, that's a great idea of what you're doing.
15:24Yeah, and  I have always been a leftovers girl because I was raised that way. And my mom used to make this fabulous  venison stew. And I swear to you, it tasted better the second day. I don't know why, but it did.
15:41think that's the way with chili also. That's how we feel. If chili sets a couple days, it just gets better. But there's a lot of soup and stews that are like that. And it's just trying to get people to try them. And then once they do, they  realize, yes, it does taste better the second day.
16:01Yeah, it's really weird. think it's because the flavors have a chance to hang out and get to know each other. That's how I see it in my head. That's a great explanation.
16:13So what do you have for animals on your homestead? You said you have animals. We do. We have numerous chickens, uh well 25 chickens that lay eggs and then we have ducks. uh We think that we might be leaving that market just because  they're not real productive in the winter. We have muskogees and they were supposed to lay throughout the winter.  This year they haven't.
16:38Now they do breed  very rapidly and we also butchered the duck meat. We wasn't crazy about it. We love chicken, but the duck was kind of, it was different.  We also have two milk cows.  And of course, when they calve, we usually butcher the calves or we sell a calf and then butcher the other one once it's raised up so far. uh The girls have a horse  and we raise our own pigs.
17:07not from birth. We buy them  usually at 50 pounds and then we raise them into feeder hogs and butcher them in the fall.  And we also do meat chickens that we get  and they're supposed to come this year the first of May. We have a chicken tractor that we move around the yard and then  usually about 12 weeks we butcher them.  They're on a  grass diet  so they take a little bit longer but  even
17:34You know people say they butchered in eight weeks. Ours would not be ready in eight weeks and I think factory farms do it in four to six weeks.  So without the hormones they just don't grow like that. So ours is longer and then we butcher them as well  and we have four dogs  and we have three cats  and I think that's the end of the zoo.
17:58I have a question. Do you coach people on homesteading because you are  a  great source of information? No, I mean, a lot of people ask us questions and I'm very willing to give information but as to and a lot of people have said, you know, you should do classes and that sort of thing. But no, I don't. I don't. I'm always willing.  But I  don't do that. If someone asked, I would be helpful. But as a side gig, no, I don't.
18:31Well, if you ever decide you want to, you're gonna be fantastic at it, because you have  all the skills, ma'am.
18:39Thank you, that was a kind compliment.
18:45I don't lie. So it was more than a compliment. was truth. You are brilliant. I love what you're doing. um You have girls. How many girls do you have and how old are they?  We have four.  The oldest one is 19  and she is a CNA  and she doesn't live at home anymore. She has moved on to a city. I'm not sure how she adjusts to that, but that's what she does.  And then we have
19:12an 18 year old, she babysits  and she still lives at home.  And then we have a 16 year old  and she works at a local diner  washing dishes and that sort of thing. now remember they've all been homeschooled as well.  And then we have a 14 year old and she stays at home and gets to help mom with all the boring things.  But anyway, they've all been homeschooled, they're all doing very well and we are proud of the young ladies that they have become and are becoming.
19:43Okay. So did they ever know anything other than homesteading and homeschooling growing up? No, they were homeschooled from kindergarten  on. They've never been to public school and we have homeschooled.  the older two, weren't  into the homesteading as much uh as the later two. They don't know any other life other than homesteading. The older two,  yeah, they, you know,
20:12We ate the processed food and did all that when they were littler, but they were so young I'm not sure they remembered.
20:19So  most other labs, I'm sorry.
20:25No, go ahead, most of their lives? Most of their lives they've been raised on the homestead, all of them. And I'm guessing they're pretty healthy young ladies. Yes, they are. They are. you know, no sickness. Occasionally they get a snuffle or a cold or the flu. Our daughter that works at the diner, she just got the flu and the rest of us didn't get it, thank goodness. And that's who the cough drops was for, but...
20:54You know with lots of liquids and herbal teas and things like that she's made it through except for her energy level but she continued to work because she's a little bit of a miser. So they are relatively healthy no one has any problems. They do great.
21:13I'm also guessing, correct me if I'm wrong, that they can hold their own in pretty much any situation, especially with boys. Yes,  yes, they don't seem to have any trouble with that at all. I  know from an early age, they went hunting, so we eat a lot of venison, and  if we can get a wild turkey, that sort of thing. So they're very proficient with guns and that sort of thing.
21:41But yes, they can hold their own with just about anything because once you wrangle calves and you know, you're chasing chickens,  so you've got muscles in your arms, you've got muscles in your legs, and overall you're pretty tough.
21:56Yes.  One of the things I love the most about girls that are raised on homesteads or farms or ranches  is that they believe in themselves. They have been through hard things and they don't take any shit off anybody. You know? They don't. They don't. They, you know, they always have a comment. As a matter of fact, our youngest,  I was telling my husband that, you know, she has this mouth that, um
22:24It's probably going to get her in trouble one day, but I don't really know what to say. That's just an issue that I'm kind of letting ride.  She doesn't have it with us  as she does other people, but it just, I don't know. She doesn't mind to tell people what she thinks, which is what we've always taught them, that you need to think for yourself and it's okay to swim upstream when everybody else is swimming down and, you know, staying for what you believe in.  But yeah, they do okay. They're  good.
22:53good mom, I'm so glad because it is so hard raising kids. And I was raised in the golden age of the  1980s. I'm 56.  1980s were great. And then I raised my kids  in  the  1990s and the early  2000s. That wasn't quite as easy, I don't think, as it was for my mom to raise myself and my siblings.  And I don't envy anyone.
23:21who's raising little kids right now. It is such a hard world for people to be raising kids and make the kids believe that there's hope that they're gonna have a good life, you know? I agree. I think it's a very difficult time.  Not only is everything so expensive, but we have all kind of propaganda that's trying to be constantly pressed at our children that we don't agree with.  One thing that we've always based our family on is God.
23:49We feel that if God's in the center, everything else comes together. So we've worked with that. Not saying, you know, my husband and I, sometimes we really get into arguments because he's got to have the last word and I've got to have the last word  and we end up in that kind of tangle. But  yes,  if without God, I'm not sure how everything would come together,  but it is a difficult time. It's very expensive.  And you know, if you're just starting out, it's even worse, but it's possible and we need good children.
24:19and we need good parents  to raise good children because that's our future of our country and our lives. So it's so important for good people to continue to have good children.
24:32Absolutely. All right. I have one more question for you because I try to keep this to half an hour.  If somebody  is considering getting into the homestead lifestyle, we'll call it,  what would you suggest that they learn first before they jump in whole hog both feet? What would you suggest that they take unto themselves to learn to start the process?
24:58think the first thing that they would need to do  is, of course, plan, but if we step past that,  the first thing to do would be to start in the kitchen and just learn how to make bread. I know that sounds very simple, but if you can get your family and you can learn how to make bread and you can get your family to consume that bread,  that's going to make it open for the whole family to want to go deeper. And when you have your family on board, that makes it so much easier for everybody involved.
25:28Bread is a simple thing and once people taste homemade bread, they're on board to homestead.  I was expecting you to say get chickens, but I like make bread better because make bread,  if you screw it up,  nothing dies.  Right,  Chickens are a great thing, but you know, that takes room. It takes a building. It takes time.
25:52Bread you can do even if you live in a suburb or  if you haven't bought your land, if you don't have your homestead yet.  That's something that you can test the waters. You're not going to kill anything. You're not going to kill anybody. uh It's just a yeast. So that's why I would suggest bread.
26:10I love it. MaryAnn, this has been so much fun and I'm going to be looking at your Facebook page every morning. I'm adding it into the rotation so that I can smile  every single morning. um Where can people find you? Well, we're on Facebook, obviously. We're also on TikTok and we have a YouTube that we post there. We try to post once a week. It doesn't always happen. So we're at all three social medias that you can find us under Morning Sun Homestead.
26:39Fantastic.  As always, you can find me at a tinyhomesteadpodcast.com.  MaryAnn,  no joke, this was a joy. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you for having us. We were glad to be invited. All right. You have a great rest of your day. Thank you. also.
 

Faithful Harvest MN

Today I'm talking with Abigail and Christian at Faithful Harvest MN. 
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. At Green Bush Twins and Company, we believe in the power of creativity, imagination, and art to bring people together.  Our mission is to inspire connection across all ages, encouraging understanding, individuality,  and a true sense of belonging. We're building more than a brand. We're growing a mindful community rooted in kindness, intention, and shared purpose.
00:29At our core, it's about real people sharing real stories, ideas, and products that make everyday life more meaningful.  If you believe in living with purpose and supporting brands that care,  you'll feel right at home with Green Bush Twins. That tiny homestead podcast is sponsored by Green Bush Twins and Company. Today I'm talking with Abigail and Christian at Faithful Harvest Minnesota in Dexter, Minnesota. Good afternoon, guys. How are you? Good. How are you doing? Good.
00:54So I'm in LaSore, Minnesota and it's overcast here and it's like 57 degrees. Is that what it's doing where you are? Yeah, it's about that here. It's really windy today, but the sun is out. So we're happy about it. Yeah, the sun is not out here. It's kind of great.  Oh.
01:15But that's okay, because at least it's warm and it's not snowing. Finally, yeah. You get all cooked up over the winter and then finally like the nice days, you just want to break out and do clean everything all at once.
01:33Oh yes, my husband spent most of Easter day outside and he was either riding the tractor and watering chickens or he was in the greenhouse planting seeds. yeah,  perfect timing to start doing this stuff. It gets exciting when the weather finally starts getting nice and  itching to get outside and get all that stuff done.  Absolutely. So do you guys consider yourselves homesteaders or farmers?
02:01Uh, we consider ourselves homesteaders,  um, just because  whenever I think of farm, I kind of think of the large scale industrial farming and  our homestead is  very small batch and homemade and we have it smaller right now.  yeah. Okay. So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do as homesteaders. Yeah. So,  um,  I'm right now I'm an ER nurse,  um, and I'm
02:31part time with that right now. And uh that's kind of a new transition for me personally. And  we've been doing the homestead for about four years now.  And uh recently over the last year, we've gotten much more into the business side of the homestead and just starting to share what we do on the homestead and our daily life and everything. So that's kind of where we're at right now and what we do.
03:01I'm just spending a lot more time doing stuff for marketing and just getting ready for the planting season here. Yeah. When starting the homestead, I do have a drywall business.
03:21other than doing the homestead.
03:26so you both have outside income.
03:30Yeah, yeah, we both have our jobs outside of this.  And then, you know, we're considering this a really fun job.  The homestead is the job you want to be doing. The other two jobs are the jobby jobs.  Yeah, exactly.  The goal is to maybe one day we both do this full time and that's kind of our long term dream one day. But for now, just paying the bills with that and then in our free time we...
03:59do everything we can for the homestead just to be out there and just working together on it. sounds very familiar after talking with people over 500 episodes in the last two and a half years. You're not alone in that guys. That's how it's done. So did you always want to be homesteaders? Were you raised by people who grew things? How did it work? Yeah. on
04:27My side, I did grow up on a small hobby farm is what we called it. And my parents just raised cows, pigs, and sometimes chickens just to feed the family and some friends.  And my mom always had a garden growing up. So it's kind of been in my blood. And when we finally got together and we've been, Christian and I have been together for five years and just got married last year. And in that five years we've
04:54learned a lot about each other that we both would love to get back to our roots of making things homemade and growing our own things, growing our own produce and livestock and just being able to be self-sustaining more. And that was kind of our biggest goal. So I do have a background in farming, I guess, but I learned a lot more in the last five years of Christian than I ever had growing up. Yeah, I would I would agree with that in the last five years.
05:23I've learned more than I ever have in my life. Growing up, I grew up on a small acreage and the extent of that was  what we would do was have a small garden and it was basics, tomatoes, peppers, onion. No, not onions,  just oh pretty basic garden plots, small garden plots. We didn't have any  livestock or anything like that, but
05:51always grew up just being outside and either working  or just  playing mow the lawn, stuff like that. But yeah, it wasn't until Abby and I met and... uh
06:11to start getting into this learning little by little. Yeah, it's a whole different ball game when it's just you guys and it's not family doing it.  Mm For sure. Yeah. There's a lot more that  I didn't realize that my parents know so much more that I never even learned that I find myself going back to them like, what did you do with this when we were younger and all this stuff and now when it's just us, it's fun learning the little things that maybe we didn't know in the past.
06:41Yes. And honestly, I think one of the best things about getting into homesteading is the learning curve because it's not, it's not necessarily a steep learning curve. is a consistent learning curve. Yeah, that's a really good way to put it. Yeah, I agree. Everything we've done over the years has just come little by little. Reading here, watching, you know, watching this or then trial and error that and
07:12At the beginning projects, it seemed a little daunting, but just getting into it, it's always been a steady, steady incline.  Yes.  And once you know it, you know it. You don't forget it. It's like riding a bike. It's true. I love that part because if I had to relearn everything every day, I would just throw in the towel. It would be too much. Groundhog Day is not an appealing concept to me.
07:41Um, Abigail, I saw your video on your Facebook page of your soap, making your soap. Yeah. Yes. And you were saying that it makes your skin so much softer and that I can't remember the rest of it, but just you were kind of raving in the commentary about how much you love it. Is that cold process, Lysow? Yeah. So that is, I guess I'm...
08:10not a connoisseur of making soap. And I, when I first learned how to make it, I actually learned it from a guy that makes it in Minneapolis and he had a YouTube video out there. I was, and I had always wanted to start making soap eventually. And so we just pulled the trigger and pulled up this YouTube video. Like let's just buy the exact ingredients. Let's do it. And yeah, it is a cold process soap. ever since then, we've been using that same exact recipe just because we, we love it so much and it
08:40changed how our skin feels and everything. So yeah. Yeah. Well,  let me tell you, girly, I am, am 56 years old. We started making our own cold process Lysol a good 15 years ago, mostly because mostly because the store bought soap that I could get made my skin dry and it made me itchy. And I got a bar of cold process Lysol.
09:10at the Renaissance Festival from,  I can't remember the name of the company, I don't think they're even out there anymore, but they had an oatmeal almond soap. And I fell in love with it and  I had the same reaction. I did not have itchy skin anymore. My skin was soft and it didn't smell like the soap at all.  And I said to my husband, said, can we please try making cold processed lye soap?
09:36I cannot afford to spend five or six dollars a bar per soap and it will cost us like less than a dollar if we make it ourselves. So he took it upon himself to deal with the scary lie because I don't like dealing with it. And we still to this day make soap and we sell it in the farm stand that we have on our property and people really like it. They really like the coffee scented one and they really like the leather scented one.
10:04Oh, that sounds really nice. I feel like I'd really like the coffee one too. It sounds waking up in the morning and taking a shower and just like that coffee smell. It's like, okay, I'm not gonna drink a cup of coffee now. It's fabulous. I actually love the lemon.
10:24I can't remember the oil we used first. We use a straight lemon oil now and we have a lemon soap and that one's my favorite in the morning because it smells  so bright and sunshiny  and it wakes you up.  Oh, I love that. You might have to try a lemon one.  Sounds really nice.  Yeah, the unscented ones work just as good.  My wife makes like a forest one that I really enjoy. That's the one I use right now.
10:53Yeah, it's like I ended up finding an Old Spice copycat mix and was able to kind of get that same smell. That's a lot of the people's favorites right now on the guys' side. Oh yeah, absolutely. The other thing that we did do, I don't know if we're going to keep doing, is we use the same oils to make candles. And so our candles mirror our soap scents.
11:22And so at the farmer's market, people come up and smell the candles and then they look over and they see the soaps and they see the same names on the soaps and they're like, are you kidding? The soap smells like the candles. Yes. Yes, it does. That's awesome. I love that. It's really fun. Okay. So you guys have a garden now. You do a garden now.
11:48Yeah, right now  we're getting ready. We're getting ready to start making more beds, but yeah, we have a raise. What we do is raise beds.  That's kind of what's kicked off everything. But. Yeah, we have a garden that we started indoors. I'm playing, sowing seeds and then we'll eventually be. Putting him outside to harden them off. Yeah, we ended up starting with raised beds when we started.
12:18gardening about three years ago, just because we wanted to kind of keep it simple. We weren't sure if we wanted to do the tilling yet. We're just like, let's just start with five raised beds and see how it goes. And now we're up to 27 raised beds and planning to expand more this year. So we try to get enough produce to last ourselves for the year. That was kind of why we started gardening in the first place is we wanted to preserve and whatever we needed to do between canning, freezing, drying.
12:47to save on the grocery bill every year. So being able to start that, and then it just kind of expanded into, okay, maybe we can start selling at markets. But yeah, our garden is one of our favorite times of year just to be able to see all the green out there and start getting the produce and eating what we  grow by seeds inside months and months ago. It's exciting. So is your kitchen table covered with seed trays right now?  Basement. Yeah, our basement is our...
13:16We call it like the factory down there because we have tables of  seedlings growing down there. Racks, racks  and  LED lights. uh every morning  when our neighbors are driving by, they're like, your basement oh looks like a spaceship  down there.  Do you have the pink lights or just the white lights? White lights right now. And then eventually they're going to turn into pink lights when we start moving.
13:47We start moving the tomatoes over to the other  table. Yeah, once the seedlings get bigger, we have to move them to a different table because they get  so tall when they're just in the basement. So we got more industrial lights on another side and those ones are pink and then it kind of looks like we're yeah. Yeah. Why? Like tabletops? Yeah. Doors and whatnot. Yeah.
14:11Yeah, I made the mistake of getting the pink lights. I didn't realize I had ordered pink lights. I thought I had ordered white lights and those pink lights are really creepy in the middle of the night. They are. They were. What's going on over there? This is the first year in forever. And that's a that's a big overstatement, but whatever. This is the first year since we moved in here in August of 2020 that I do not have ceiling trays on my kitchen table right now.
14:40because we started every single seed in our hard-sided greenhouse this year. Wow, that is awesome. So you have greenhouses outside right now? Yeah, we have a big, we have a, I always screw up the measurements. I thought it was 20 feet by 40 feet, but it's actually smaller than that, but not by much. So we have a hard-sided greenhouse, yes. That is cool. That's  another goal, but how...
15:10How did you go about building that? I well, I applied for a grant, number one, and got it amazingly enough. I didn't think we had a chance in hell of getting it.  And then that paid for the supplies and my husband and my son and a neighbor helped us build it, helped us put it up.  Congratulations. That's awesome.
15:37I feel like that's a big weight lifted  off your shoulders. You can just keep production going and be able to use that space all year round. Well, it gives us an extra couple months in the fall and it gives us a couple extra months in the spring. It is not great for growing anything past December and until March.
16:02Okay. I suppose that makes sense here in Minnesota. I would need a heater if you had to want it to grow anything indoors and there's probably not enough sun either. Yeah, that's the thing. We would either have to use one of those, I don't know what they're called, they're a great big heating unit and they're heated with propane, I think. You hang them up. Or we'd have to use
16:29electricity, which we don't want to do because it's too expensive,  or we would have to get solar panels and a generator. And all of those options aren't really worth it for just three months in the winter time. Yeah, that's true.  It would build a lot of costs up for,  and then I'm sure in the greenhouse, you can't grow much more than like greens and things that are more fragile that don't need a ton of sunlight.  So I suppose it might not be worth  the cost it would take to do that.
17:00Yeah. And then the other thing is, that where would we sell them? Cause there aren't really a whole lot of winter markets.  Yeah, that's true too. So we decided that gaining that two  months in the fall and that two months in the spring  really was a good idea because getting our plants started in March and 1st of April means that we actually have stuff to sell at the first farmers market in June. Oh yeah. It's very smart. Yeah.
17:30And we just wanted we just wanted a greenhouse. Darn it. That was part of the reason.
17:41Yeah. One day we'll be building up to it. Hopefully. Well, you guys are young yet. Yes. Are you in your late 20s? Yeah, I'm 26. Yeah, 32.
17:59You have lots of time to grow and stretch and decide what works for you for your homestead, which is amazing. Yeah, that is true. And you put it like that. I appreciate that. Yeah, it was just, at the feels of, you know, still trying to figure out what's the next step for us. And you will be until you leave the homestead for good. I swear to you, we bought our place five years ago, five and a half years ago. And, uh,
18:29We're still not sure what we're doing and we're like fully fledged adult people. Our kids are grown. So it's always going to be what's next. It's always going to be what should we do? What do you want to do? Yeah.
18:45I like that part that  we've felt  really creative since starting this, at least  just from all the ideas that have been coming up and the what ifs, like maybe we can do this and that and  how do we get there? that's, you  know, being creative is just what homesteading has allowed us to do.
19:09And it's fun.  Yeah.
19:14That's my favorite part. It's fun.
19:18My wife and I were just talking the other day about that.  When you get home from a long day  of just being out there, whether it's  working on a project that you had no idea  how  to start it, ah being in the garden, hands  dirty, tired,  how satisfying it is when you get inside and the laughs you had throughout just working throughout the day, how goofy you can get.
19:48We get really goofy out there. Yeah. Some of the some of the best memories we've made have been out outside working and being creative, as he said, and at the end of the day. And I still think back to last year, I still remember those memories out there working hard and until the moon comes out and we got blood lights out there just trying to keep working, trying to get plants in before it rains the next day. And yeah, I remember. Yeah, I remember we remember that time when we exactly we took out
20:18the shop lights and I took out the drywall lights and we just started hooking everything up and planting in the middle of the night.  It looked like a basketball court out there. bet it did. You guys don't have kids, do you? Not yet, no.  it's going to be harder to do those kinds of things once you have babies. So enjoy the silliness now  because the silliness that comes with kids is a whole different animal.
20:46Oh, I suppose. That's something to look forward to, Absolutely. So do you guys have any animals on the homestead yet? Do have chickens? Yeah, we do have chickens. have right now we have 19 hens that we get eggs from for ourselves and then to sell at markets. And then every year we do 75 broiler chickens to be able to we butcher them ourselves come when they're.
21:16eight weeks old  and we have a whole family day of it, butcher the chickens. And then when we're done, we have our freezer full for the year. And then we're able to fill our parents' freezers and a couple friends. um So yeah, just have chickens, but no other livestock right now. um Potentially maybe work into getting pigs this year. that's in the plan this year. Nice.
21:44If money was no object and time  wasn't a real object, and it is because you guys both have jobby jobs, what would you like to have for animals on the homestead?
21:55Oh, that's a really good question. Yeah. I would like a whole zoo out there if I could. But Christian would probably stop me. I love all animals, but I think specifically for thinking for the homestead. Yeah. Yeah. I would like for as far as an exotic animal, I was like if money was no option, it gets a couple of peacocks out there for sure. That'd be the fun. That'd be the fun bird. But I would go.
22:25I would go beef  and a lot of beef, lot of pigs, chickens, those basic ones, which I don't think  there was. Yeah, I think  we've always kind of, we've talked about goats in the past, but I think that we're kind of leaning more towards beef, pork and chicken just because those can have the most yield. And we kind of want animals that will.
22:53give back to us in the long run. know,  we do we do love pets and everything, but I guess if money was no object, then we'd get all of the fun animals to like goats, and stuff. get like fish because we have like a little bit of a pond back there. You can start getting like you can start farming fish, trout, stuff like that. mean, just imagine getting into that. Yeah.  You start farming trout. I'm coming to see you and I'm bringing money.  Bring it over.
23:21Come on, on.  It's sitting there.  You could just see at one point it was a pond and has water backed up.
23:39Well, I've started asking that question now and then because the answers are always interesting. I asked them the other day and she said,  I think I would like kangaroos. And I was like, okay, that would be great.  Oh, would be a fine fence.  Yeah. My husband and I have been talking about getting into quail. And I mentioned this a couple of episodes ago and we haven't actually decided yet because
24:07Money's a little tight with the way everything keeps going up in price. So we're waiting until we have at least an extra, literally extra, $200 before we do anything. Because we know we have to get an incubator. We know who we're getting the eggs from, and that's probably not going to cost us anything right now. But we still have to make the coop. We have to get the brooder. We have to get things to make this happen. So we're working on
24:37putting $200 aside that is not allocated for anything for Quail. And that would be awesome. Yeah, it's amazing to when you think about you want to get an animal and then you start think like when it's a dream, it's like, oh yeah, we can do that. And then when you start thinking seriously about it, then you remember all the little things that will add up. that. But I think that's a really cool idea that you set aside. You're waiting to set aside that money.
25:04to be able to do that. Cause then it's like, know that you are for sure. Like you have a really good plan going forward and everything. Oh, that's what it helps to us. I feel too, like it's always helped  like, well, not always, but I should say it started more  responsibility with money and really thinking about, right, what's, you know, let's sit down, let's write it out. Let's see, let's make a plan. I've always enjoyed that part of it too. Yeah, for sure.
25:32Well, it's either feed the quail or feed us and we need to eat to be able to do the things to be able to feed the quail. So the quail comes  second. other thing that  I haven't said anything to my husband yet because I'm still chewing on it, but  I made the mistake of watching a video about pygmy goats the other day. The little tiny goats, they're only about two feet tall and the biggest they get.
25:57The biggest they get is 70 pounds. And I was like, oh my God, I could have goats. We could handle those. Those are small. And then I was like, but they're probably going to cost $500 a piece and we have to have a fenced in area for them, which means you got to buy the wood to make the fence. And my brain just started spinning. And I was like, yeah, I'm going to keep this to myself until I figure it out.  Then I will be like, Hey, there's somebody that has two pigmy goats. We could have baby goats. And he'll be like,  um.
26:27Lay out the full plan. What? Yeah. He's going to be like, we need a plan. I already got it. Yes, I am trying really hard to keep my bright ideas to myself right now because he has ADD or ADHD. And if I even so much as breathe the word goat with any kind of intention near him, he's going to be like, goats. And he'll do he'll do the he'll do the deep dive into how we can make it happen. I
26:55don't want to do a deep dive. want to take it slow on this.  quail is much more doable. Pygmy goats  are  a pipe dream right this second, but I suspect there might be little goats here within two years. So we'll see. Oh, I love that. It's exciting.  Yes, and uh it's only him and I, and we like goat milk and pygmy goats are just as good for milk as regular goats.
27:24but they produce less of it, which means we wouldn't be wasting any. Oh, there you go. That's a smart way of going about it.
27:33Yes, and I could probably handle a small goat. I don't think I can handle a big 150 pound goat. That's not my idea of fun. So.  It is so much fun talking to homesteaders because you guys get it. I said, pig me goats and both of your voices just went up like, oh.  We'll have to come visit them when you can come to the trout farm, then we'll go visit the goats.
28:04We'll trade visiting rights. It'll be great. Yeah, there you go. I remember my, was just thinking back to when my buddy had a Billy goat and that, uh, I see way bigger than pigmen goats, but this thing, this thing was named Bob and it was just a nuisance, man. It was, it would stand on cars. It would stand everywhere. I was, I don't know, that came to my head. thought those goats, man.
28:33Goats are either a huge pain in the ass or they are a blessing. And if I get little tiny goats, maybe there'll be blessings. Maybe.  We'll see.  We will see how that plays out eventually.  But it's fun to think about and it's fun to do the research and I am a big lifelong learner. really like learning new things. So studying up on pygmy goats is no skin off my nose.  All right, guys, I try to keep these to half an hour. Where can people find you?
29:02Yeah, so we're um on Facebook at Faithful Harvest MN and we're also on Instagram with this same uh username. And then  maybe in the future we're working on a website so you can keep an eye out for that. But yeah, I've been trying to post on social media a lot more so you can keep up with us on there and see some fun videos and content.  And that will be in the show notes so people can find you.
29:30All right, as always, people can find me at tinyhomesteadpodcast.com.  This was really fun, you guys. And Christian, thank you for making the time too, because Abigail said you were going to join us, and I was like, yes.  Thank you. Yeah, thank you for reaching out to us. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you for giving us a platform to be able to share about homesteads and other people get to share different things going on with their tiny homestead. It's a good platform that you've created for everyone. Yeah,  it's so.
30:00We've never done anything like this before. So  we're excited. We really were to be able to talk to you.  Good. And it's so fun for me.  You guys say thank you. All the people I've interviewed, you're all like, thank you so much. And you have no idea how this lights up my days too. So thank you.  All right. You guys have a great day.  Thank you.
 

Montana Country Homesteading

Today I'm talking with Diane at Montana Country Homesteading. You can also follow on Facebook.
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. At Green Bush Twins and Company, we believe in the power of creativity, imagination, and art to bring people together.  Our mission is to inspire connection across all ages, encouraging understanding, individuality,  and a true sense of belonging. We're building more than a brand. We're growing a mindful community rooted in kindness, intention, and shared purpose.
00:29At our core, it's about real people sharing real stories, ideas, and products that make everyday life more meaningful.  If you believe in living with purpose and supporting brands that care,  you'll feel right at home with Green Bush Twins. That tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Green Bush Twins and Company. Today I'm talking with Diane at Montana Country something  homesteading  in Montana because it's Montana country homesteading. Good morning, Diane. How are you?  Good morning. I'm wonderful. How are you this morning?  I'm good. How's the weather there?
00:59Actually yesterday for Easter was just about as perfect as it could be. And this morning it's a little overcast, but it's going to be a nice day. Unusual weather in Montana, to be honest. Yeah. It was a lovely day in Minnesota here yesterday too. Yesterday was beautiful. Sunny 50s light breeze. was, it was really good. All right. So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do at Montana country home study. Well, um,
01:28Let's see a little bit about us.  I've been married to my husband who was my high school sweetheart for 47 years now. um We came to Montana exactly 30 years ago in just a couple of weeks, the first weekend of May.  And um we came with our three kids, two dogs,  a motor home,  a U-Haul carrying a pickup truck full of all my husband's construction tools and away we went.
01:57and  came out onto a bare piece of property that quite honestly, my husband found in the back of a Field and Stream magazine  in a one inch by two inch ad and said, honey, let's go to Montana.  And  so we did, we packed up everything 30 years ago and came onto this 20 acre parcel that  we actually bought it with a couple of Polaroid, the shake pictures, you know, that you shake to develop them.
02:26And  away we went  and it's  been a whirlwind since we actually did homestead this property.  It was set up in 20 acre tracks out here with quite honestly, no roads, no development, no nothing. They had just subdivided the land. um When we moved on the property, there was literally a two lane dirt path that came down to our 20 acres. And that I looked at.
02:52dirt path up by the way. And it is actually considered um a stage coach line road from Billings, Montana to Park City, Montana back in the day. So that was of interesting. Yeah, we live on a stage coach road. uh It's now been a little better developed than it used to be, but it's still just a gravel road coming in here. uh But yeah, 30 years ago, we came onto this property with just a dream and an idea. uh
03:21We were uh building contractors in the Bay Area and were just on complete overload and did not want to raise our kids in that environment.  And so we made a pact with each other to get the heck out of there before our kids got uh in middle school and away we went. And we've been here since. That is amazing. I love that.  Okay. So  did you...
03:47Did you grow up with people who did homesteading or gardening or farming or ranching at all? My grandparents um on my dad's side had a farm, but we didn't go there very often. uh My other grandma was the most incredible gardener that you had ever seen. She lived in a  little town in Pemberville, Ohio.  And um quite honestly, that woman could grow anything. And what was really amazing to me is she would
04:15pull all of her flowers in from her flower beds and put them in what she called her breezeway  in the winter months in Ohio. And she would hold those flowers over till next year and put them all back out in the beds. It was amazing to me.  I don't have that gift that grandma had, but  I can grow a thing or two.  So what are the  thing or twos that you grow?  We grow a lot of our own food. um I think it's really important that you grow your own food, especially today.
04:45with what's going on with the food chain and the modified foods and all the sprays and such that they're putting on our foods. think it's wildly important that you grow your own food today.  So I actually have,  one of the first things we did on this homestead was we built some raised beds, started some gardens with my kids.  And then of course the deer came and ate everything. I didn't realize  that I was dealing with some serious
05:15predation with animals and such around here, but we were. uh Then we decided to put a hoop house over the raised beds and got wise and kept the animals out and started growing food there. uh If you look on my social media page right now,  my husband finally finished uh our main greenhouse that we're going to be growing and I actually just started putting plants in there on Saturday afternoon.
05:39That's exciting. It's super exciting. It's like over the top greenhouse, of course, my husband's that go bigger, go home kind of guy. um But the first greenhouse that we we grew food in  was just a little  raised bed area that we put  literally sheet panels that we hooped over it and uh buttoned them down to both sides of the  of the raised bed and then put um plastic over top of it. And that's what we grew and put a wall in the front.
06:07some mesh in the back and away we went.  And I grew in that for  20 some years. So  it doesn't need to be elaborate, but you need to grow your own food.  And now we've just stepped up the game to grow into this uh major greenhouse.  And  years ago, I took a horse barn that we had when we were actually raising paints back in the day.  I took that horse barn and I rented it to somebody who cultivated. uh
06:34inside of that and they have since moved out. So now I have an area where I can actually grow indoor produce all year long. So we're working on that next. That's our next big project. We've had one project after another here on this piece of land. Again, we drove up, there was nothing here, like literally nothing.  No water, no power, no phones, no driveways, uh just a piece of land with some pin markers so that you knew what was yours and what wasn't and
07:04We laid it out from there and it's been  quite interesting. Okay. After everything you just told me, I have a couple of thoughts.  I'm going do my public service announcement now because it plays into what you just said.  I do this on every episode lately.  If you live in America right now and you don't know how to cook from scratch,  learn because you will save yourself a lot of money if you're buying ingredients instead of finished foods.  Number two, if you
07:30can't grow a garden, get to know your local producers and growers because they can grow a garden  and you're feeding yourself really good food and you're supporting your neighbors.  Love all of that. That's incredible. Yep. And then number two, I have been trying to figure out a way to explain the feeling  that we homesteaders get when we have a project and we get it finished. And the only thing I can liken it to
07:57is if you were in Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts or you took art class in elementary school and you learned a new skill, whether it was building a homemade birdhouse or Girl Scouts, they used to have you make an apron  or in art class, did, I don't know what it was called, but we took a chisel and we chiseled out  a design on a piece of vinyl board and then we would make stamps with that vinyl board.
08:26When,  if you've ever done those kinds of things as a kid, if you have the, I don't know, luck to end up having property and having some of your own choices be your choices, not the city planner's choices, and you can put in a greenhouse or you can put in a garden or you put in a raised bed and you see success with that.  It's the same feeling as when you took on a project when you were a kid.
08:57Boy, and to add to that, Mary,  if you do have the property and you do have the means to do it, do some kids classes.  One of the other things that we did on this property, we actually started it in 2023,  is we built out an area on the west side of our property, which is called Montana Country Pines. um
09:18Montana Country Pines is eight short-term rentals that we built over there that consists of teepees and a really cool 100-year-old sheep wagon and some  vintage RVs. But one of the other things that I do with Montana Country Pines is I put a sign out at the road  and the kids know that it's Craft Day at Montana Country Pines. And we have all the stuff here ready for them.
09:42So all they gotta do is show up at noon on a Saturday when the signs out and they can come make something and take it back to their properties. So that's been really, really awesome to do those sort of things and teach kids that, you know, you can do things other than be in front of screens all the time. We can find things in nature and turn them into art. And I just love doing stuff like that with kids because when I was a kid, we used to ride our bicycles to a place called the
10:11Miami Valley Rec Center, and there were volunteer moms that showed up with  stuff in boxes that you could make something and take it home.  And that was one of the most  biggest highlights of my childhood is going and making stuff at the Rec Center.  So that's why I do that. put a street sign out there, a little sandwich sign, and the kids know that tomorrow it's Craft Day at Montana Country Pines. So they show up, make something, and take it home.
10:40That is so amazing, Diane. love it. uh Summer rec saved my mother's sanity. That's not bad. Mine too, I'm sure.
10:53Yeah. And the same thing we would go and I mean, they were minor crafts. was like, I don't know. It's been so long. I'm 56. It's been forever since I went to summer rec. I remember having fun. I remember being outside for part of the day because it was at a school building. So we would play on the playground or play soccer or whatever. And then the other part of the day was indoor crafts. And I seem to remember having like little one foot by one foot boards and nails and we put nails in the wood.
11:23And then we took colored strings and made really pretty designs on it. But I don't remember what  the art form was called. String art, some kind of string art. was really fun and it was really Zen. I loved that because you couldn't focus on anything except getting strings right.  And I think that's what's missing with kids today because with social media, it isn't Zen. It's just feeding your brain constantly in all different directions.
11:54Yeah, that's why I grab my grandsons up and I say, let's go paint some rocks and leave them around.  We're that family too, that paints a rock and leaves it and picks up a rock and leaves a rock.  We're those people.  But yeah, my grandkids, they paint rocks and they leave them out here in our park. And uh it's fun. You you walk by and you see a rock that looks like a Volkswagen itself. It's pretty cool. yeah, have all sorts of stuff like that.  you do little rocks with them?
12:22encouraging words like joy and kindness. yeah. Hippie rocks. That's what I call it. Hippie rocks. Hey, again, I'm 65. I grew up in the seventies. I am that old hippie at heart, but you we use it. We use that hippie spirit to do good things for kids and people today. I love it. I told you when we talked on the phone that I was so excited to talk to you for the interview, cause I knew it was going to be fun. And so far you have not disappointed me. And in the least.
12:52So do you guys have chickens or goats or anything? We do, okay. So we used to raise horses, um got a little older and decided that maybe we'd let the younger people raise horses. um And um we do have a couple of goats. They are cashmere goats that we just use them for the fiber, um which is something else that we've got coming up here pretty soon. We're going to have a couple of gals come out here with a couple of spinning wheels and
13:19bring a group of homeschool kids out here and show them how to actually take fiber and turn it into uh spinnable wool  and then show them some finished products that these ladies have done.  just to kind of plant that idea in some young kids' heads that, you  you look at that animal and it's not just the animal, it's the fiber and the garments and such that can come from it.  So we do have a couple of cashmere goats. Yeah, I have a flock of chickens. I've always had chickens. um
13:48And a couple of Dobermans right now. Other than that,  we normally get em a little bum steer that comes in every year that we'll raise up. We don't have one right at the moment.  We do have a pig pen out there waiting for a couple of little pigs again, which I'm not overly excited about, but we'll deal with.  Their food. Their food. Yeah.  So when you say a bum calf,  would you define that for me?
14:17We usually find somebody that's got a calf that the  mom didn't make it or ignored it or it got left when people rounded up the cows and what have you and they find a bum calf somewhere.  We got a couple of  local ranchers that we always tell them when you got something that needs a home and needs fed up and we'll just put it in this pen over here, but we usually get one every year.
14:42And then one of my dearest friends in the world has a bison ranch just about an hour and a half from here that  we always have fresh bison meat here. And we go and help on the ranch and that sort of thing and barter for m boxes of wonderful meat from the ranch.  there a big difference between how cattle beef and bison beef tastes or is it pretty much the same?
15:09It depends on how you cook it, but yeah, it's pretty close to the same, but bison meat is much better for you cholesterol wise. It's the good cholesterol that you want.  It's just a better protein source.  At one point on this homestead,  we actually had a USDA certified organic meat facility that my husband built out of a,  he put up a hundred by 80 foot pole barn and we actually built inside of it.
15:38a certified organic meat plant. actually produced a bison jerky product for several years. We took it then from that particular plant that we built here on our place and took it to a co-packer because we kind of outgrew our space here.  And then COVID pretty much took care of that. COVID pretty much took care of a lot of things.  COVID took care of a really good business there.
16:04But it was awesome that we were able to create it right here from our own homestead. uh We got uh certified trim that came in from Bison facilities and actually produced the product right here on our property.  I'll tell you that that was one of the learning curves that uh took me a minute.  Learning uh nutritional labeling, um recipes that.
16:29actually produce the nutrition that you were looking for that didn't have too much sodium or too much fat or too much whatever. um I actually formulated the recipes. My husband did the cook  and um smoked everything and then we put it into the marketplace for years. It was pretty incredible right here from our homestead.  Very cool. I didn't even know you could do that.  Yep.  We had to have certified inspectors come out here every week. We had inspections and
16:59um Yeah, it was quite the process, but we built it from the ground up, bought every piece of machinery,  put it all together,  did the packaging, the labeling, the production, and then actually put it into the marketplace. uh I want to touch on the labeling because uh we  have a farm stand here at our property and we sell cold processed lye soap.
17:26and we sell candles and we sell roller balls with with essential oils in them and things like that.  And as soon as I renew my cottage food registration, which I haven't done yet, we can sell breads and cookies and things too. Nice. And  what I didn't realize when we decided that we wanted to do this is that it was going to cost money for the labels and for the ink to print the labels.
17:51God forbid we actually get the labels printed for us by ordering them because even it's even more expensive then. So so what I would like the listener to know is that when you're paying I don't know ten dollars for a loaf of sourdough bread not only are you paying for the bread you are paying for the work that it took to make the bread you are paying for the bag that the bread is in you're paying for the paper
18:20that the label is printed on because without the label, we can't sell you that bread because the state of Minnesota won't allow us to. Correct. Correct. So it's not that we want to gouge anybody as producers, but we have to make it worth the time to do the thing. Yeah. And the consumer needs to understand the fact that they are paying for all of those things,  but they're also paying for a better quality product.
18:48rather than buying something that's  jam-packed full of preservatives that you're going to feed your family.  So there's a cost to all of that.  What was really surprising to me when we went organic with our product, uh well, there's two sets of inspectors that would come out. There was the USDA would come out and inspect us just based on the fact we were meat, we were a meat product,  but then we'd have the organic  inspectors come out.
19:16And the first time that she came out, she said, I need to see all of your ingredients that you've bought over the past six months. And I need to see your production runs for six months because we need to see that they match. And it just kind of struck me funny. I said, what do you mean see that they match? Of course they'd have to match. Well, she kind of filled me in on the fact that there's a lot of fraud in certified organic labeling that they have found massive fraud that, you know, it,
19:45The label says it's certified organic, but you haven't bought enough organic materials to create  that amount of product. it just struck me. oh I didn't realize that people would defraud that system as well, but apparently they do.  So for me, buying local, buying from a farm stand, if I don't have that particular vegetable in my garden.
20:09is important. Buying meat from my local ranchers and so forth is important because I don't want to buy meat from the counters that are full of formaldehyde and  funky stuff to make them stay pink for a while so that they look good for you to pick up. I'd rather have it wrapped in paper in my freezer knowing that my neighbor took it to the butcher that I know. They processed it the right way and  it's  what I think it is rather than what's all in everything else you're buying today.
20:39So it is important. I agree with you wholeheartedly. Yeah. And the other thing is that if you spend your money locally, it tends to stay local. True. Very true. Very true.  I was reading something on Facebook because everybody reads something on Facebook every day at this point. But it was a story about how a guy went to the local dude who sold
21:06And he bought a box of steaks from the farmer. And the farmer then took that money and he ended up going to the local barber for a haircut. He donated some of that money to the tithing thing at church. He put some of that money in his local bank and he spent some of it at the local grocery store.  And by the time he had done all that, he had spent money  locally, not outside of a 15-mile radius.
21:36And I was like, you know, that's how it used to be. Yeah, that is true. And it's important, you know, if we don't, if we don't keep our, our own towns funded, they die. True. Community is everything.  And that's one of the things that I have specialized in for years and years and years is creating communities of people.  I've been in the network marketing space  in the background of everything that my husband and I have done for 35 years.
22:06Our first child was born autistic. We could not do the daycare thing, nor did I want to for that matter. So uh when our first boy was born,  I quit my job as a pediatric dental assistant  and became that stay at home mom and did the books for my husband's construction company for years.  And I was the one that was kind of filling in in the background.  Cause if you've ever done construction, it's feast or famine. It's either really good or it's really bad. uh
22:34So I was kind of that buffer for all those years um until, uh oh, about 10 years ago, I was able to step up my game in that space  and uh create a really, really good network of people  and create that leveraged and residual income that my husband  tells everybody now that I'm his sugar mama and  have taken over to the point where he does not have to build.
23:02homes any longer. He doesn't have to do projects he doesn't want to do. can pick and choose what he'd like to do. He's been doing a lot of volunteer stuff is what he's done. ah He can't sit still.  We figured that one out. So uh there's always a project around here on the homestead he can deal with, but he does not have to travel and go build someone's homes any longer, which I'm pretty excited about.  take it that you really love each other because you've been together for quite a long time.
23:31Oh yeah, 47 years. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, my parents were married in 1965. They've never been married to anyone else. My mom was 19. My dad was 22, I think, when they got married. Yeah. And they are still just smitten with each other this many years later. And I'm just like, how in the heck does that work? Well, you either grow together or you grow apart. And we grew together.
24:00and raised three incredible boys into nice young Ben. And it's been a whirlwind, I can tell you that. um I followed him from Ohio to Florida to California and now to Montana. So yeah, I think I'd follow the boy over a cliff, but um needless to say, Montana is where we really fell in love with the people, the surroundings, the opportunity um and a way to
24:30to create a really nice lifestyle for our family. And that's why we've been here for 30 years. This is home for us now. Congratulations on knowing what you wanted, going after it and making it a success. That is fabulous.  We are pretty driven people, I must say.  We're that go bigger, go home.  That's kind of been our attitude forever. So we kind of overdo it when we do it.
24:56just like  the meat plant, you know, we started out, that started out with us taking our buffalo jerky that we normally made to hunting camp. And everybody kept saying, you guys should sell this stuff. You guys should sell this stuff. Well, he heard it one too many times and took the building that he had just built that he didn't know he was gonna do with and said, let's just put a meat plant in there.  And we did it.  And it was crazy.
25:24Okay, well, you've been doing this for a long time. So  I'm gonna ask you the question that's always really weird for people to answer. What would you tell a young couple who wanna get into homesteading? How would you tell them to get started?  Plan well first,  okay? Do the planning,  figure out what it is that you really want from your homestead. Do you want it to produce food?
25:51And is that in the source of animals and vegetables or one or the other? um Figure out what your own gifts and talents are that you have. Because here's the thing, if you  can live on a homestead and you can take your own gifts and talents and monetize them,  and today there's  hundreds of ways to monetize your talents via the internet. um So if you can take your gifts and talents and figure out a way to monetize those from your homestead.
26:20For example, if you have goats and you like making cheese, that should be something that you figure out how to monetize. Or if you're that person that wants to make soaps and candles and that sort of thing, then you need to hone in on that craft and that talent and figure out where on your homestead will you be doing that. uh Create the space so that the space is for that. We have so many buildings on this homestead, it's insane.  It looks like a village around here, it really does. uh
26:51But at the same token, each one of those spaces has its own purpose on the homestead.  And I think that would be one of the first things I would tell somebody. Figure out what you want from it. Make a good plan to go after it  and know that you're gonna work your little butt off for a while.  Yes. Living doesn't come easy. If you want...
27:12If you want to live well and you want to be in a place where you're not breathing smog and everybody's exhaust from their cars or hearing all the sirens and  all the stuff in big cities, um it takes a  little extra work to live in an area like we live in. um So plan on that. That would be my first advice.
27:37That is really good advice because that's what I would have said too.  You have to...
27:44You have to have a plan. It's just the way it is. And  when we bought our place five and a half years ago, our plan was to start with a clean slate. And boy, did we, we started with a clean slate and we had to put in a garden and the field where the garden is had not been grown on or in for 50, think 40 or 50 years.  last thing that anyone grew on it was a big old field of  pumpkins.
28:14So it was all grass and weeds and my husband played hell getting that garden plot dug out to plant produce in.  I bet.  And uh this year  we now have our hard side of greenhouse that we put in three maize ago  and every single seed that's planted so far is planted in trays in the greenhouse for the first time ever.  Doesn't that feel wonderful?
28:41Oh, I'm so happy to not have my kitchen table and my desk in my living room covered with seat dress.  But uh the garden went from like, I think it was 50 by  20 feet. And now it's, I think it's a hundred feet by 150 feet. Awesome. Nice garden. So we have been here for five, well, six years this August. And it took until last year to really feel like we maybe had
29:10some kind of a handle sort of kinda on our plans. And that's the other thing is that if you're on a homestead, plans constantly change and grow and morph. Yes, absolutely. That's what happened with the west side of our property. There was an area over on the west side that I said, honey, one of these days we should build a little cabin over here because when our grandson Mason gets old enough, he may want to be out here.
29:38And if we had a little cabin over there for him, that would be great. Which by the way, my husband was a log home builder for a year. So when I put him to task with stuff, he usually can just get her done. So I may mention that we should probably put a cabin there for him. Well, the space that we were going to put the cabin actually is what houses a 14 by 20 wall tent. That's part of Montana country pines, which is.
30:06Our business, operate from the west side of our property, the short-term rentals.  We set up what is  an Airbnb style camping trip for people where you just bring your clothes and your food and we've got everything else handled for you.  But again, those plans changed  because I was just going put a little cabin over there for my grandson. And as it is now,  there's a whole village there in that area. Actually on that top side where I wanted to put that cabin.
30:35there's the two hand painted teepees, the tent, and then the sheep wagon, which is kind of like a frontier area up top.  And then we put a road that goes in down below where we've got the vintage RVs at. ah yeah, those plans changed dramatically and they changed because we got into vintage RVs.  We started refurbishing some vintage RVs and flipping them and then.
30:59We kept one and went to a show, went to a vintage RV show and got ribbons and was like, okay, we love this. uh And then  again, that go bigger, go home attitude. My husband said, well, we just create a little RV, you know, like a little Airbnb thing. Well, here we are now, uh three years later. And uh it's pretty exciting to be able to host people from all over. We had people here last year from Sweden, which was really awesome.
31:29but to host people from all over the world now uh here at our place and share a little piece of paradise with them has been pretty awesome.  I bet it has. I love what you're doing, Diane. Where can people find you online?  The park itself is under MontanaCountryPines.com.  We have Facebook page, but we also have a website page for Montana Country Pines for the booking engine and such. uh You can see pictures of
31:58The inside of the a hundred year old sheep wagon is just, it's all original. It's epic. uh It came off of the largest sheep ranch, which was in Martinsdale, Montana, just up the road about  an hour or so. uh It came off of the largest sheep ranch in Northwestern America.  And  that particular sheep wagon, someone lived in it and actually
32:25tended to the sheep of that ranch for years. It's pretty incredible.  So yeah, we've got  some interesting things going on out here. I'm a firm believer  in taking your property and  utilizing it for  what it can produce for you uh income wise.  And uh my biggest thing I must say for the last several years uh has been on a little mission to empower women, just women in general.
32:53Not that I don't like working with men, but I really enjoy working with women more so. I was raised back in the 60s by a single mom, which back then was not the norm. You were frowned upon if you didn't have a father in the household back in the 60s and 70s, which was my era. And I realized that if my mom would have had the skill sets that I have today and the knowledge that I have today, my life would have been really different as a kid, like real different.
33:23And here's the cold raw statistic.  One  in four women survive either being divorced or widowed without having to change all the circumstances around them, like leave their homestead or drive a different vehicle or a lot of circumstances change for women. So I have been on this mission for the last 10, 15 years to empower as many women as I can to be that  one.
33:53Right? To be the one that can survive whatever comes at you, that you know how to create income, you know how to handle the income, you know how to invest the income,  you know how to take care of yourself.  And I realized that  real wholeheartedly  when my father-in-law passed away and I realized the situation that my mother-in-law was in, she had always had dad taking care of  everything financially for her.
34:23quite honestly, she was 72 and did not know how to balance a checkbook.  Didn't know how to get the bills paid because dad did it all the time. So that's when I really realized she became a project person for me there for a while. But uh that's when I really realized that, my mom was one of those  three women, she wasn't the one in four that survived a divorce, right? She worked really, really hard to take care of four kids and keep a  roof over our heads.
34:52Um, but that one in four really just struck me. And I thought, you know, I need to help other women. I am that one in four. I've, I've created businesses for myself. I've created businesses for our family. Um, and I've made sure that, um,  everything's in order that if by any chance I'm the one that's left behind, which I keep  joking with my husband that I'm going first and there's going to be a casserole line down our driveway.
35:22which is about 300 feet or so,  300 yards or so.  Anyways, I keep joking with him that I need to go first and he needs a casserole line because I don't want to be a widow. But uh again, you gotta be that one in four. So you gotta know how to take care of yourself, how to create income for yourself, how to monetize your gifts, your skills, your talents, because everybody has something, right? Everybody's got something that they have a passion for, um something they enjoy that they can monetize.
35:52And so I've been helping women do that for a long, time.  I'm so glad that you took that upon yourself because it's really important. Thank you for  doing that, Diane. Yeah, it's a big deal. Really, it is. It is.
36:07All right, as always, people can find me at tinyhomesteadpodcast.com. Diane, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it. You are certainly welcome. And  here's one other thing I wanna make sure everybody does. So Montana Country Pines is  our park over here, the Airbnb.  But at Montana Country Homesteading on the Facebook page of Montana Country Homesteading, we're doing a drawing for a  trip here to Montana Country Pines. You get a consultation with us on
36:36on your home setting plans.  We're going to make a really great meal for you out of our chuck wagon that we've got.  So there's a drawing there. There's no purchase required. We just want to get uh people aware of the fact that this is here.  And we want to give away a weekend to somebody so that they could come here,  maybe learn a little bit off of our homestead that they can go take back to theirs. But we're offering that to our home setting community.  So go register for that. It's free. uh
37:05And you just might end up here for a couple of days hanging out with my crazy husband and I. That sounds like fun. What's the deadline for that? What's the last day? The drawing is actually going to be live on a Facebook live on May 2nd. any by May 1st, by May 1st, get in the drawing. So go to Montana country homesteadings Facebook page. The drawing is on there. The link to that's there.
37:30Fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. All right, Diane, I hope you have a great day. Thanks. You as well. And this was really fun, Mary. It's really good to get to know you and I'm sure we'll do more things in the future. I hope so.  All right. That's just going on it. Thanks, Mike. All right. All right. Bye. Bye.
 

An Enchanted Homestead

Today I'm talking with Lydia at An Enchanted Homestead.
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. At Green Bush Twins and Company, we believe in the power of creativity, imagination, and art to bring people together.  Our mission is to inspire connection across all ages, encouraging understanding, individuality,  and a true sense of belonging. We're building more than a brand. We're growing a mindful community rooted in kindness, intention, and shared purpose.
00:29At our core, it's about real people sharing real stories, ideas, and products that make everyday life more meaningful.  If you believe in living with purpose and supporting brands that care,  you'll feel right at home with Greenbush Twins. That tiny homestead podcast is sponsored by Greenbush Twins and Company. Today I'm talking with Lydia at an enchanted homestead. I love that name in Idaho. Good afternoon, Lydia. How are you? Hi, I'm well. How are you?  I'm good. How's the weather in your neck of the woods today? oh
00:58windy and rainy. Us too. In Minnesota, same thing. It is gross outside. Yes. It's like we can't make up our minds here. One day it's like a warm spring. Now it's like kind of reverting to winter. It's so funny. Every time, every time I talk with somebody about the weather and it just keeps flipping, they all have the same sigh and I do the same thing. I did it two days ago.
01:27We just need spring to get here and stay here. That would be great. Yes. And it's unusually warm.  Um, cause I feel like winter skipped us here in Southern Idaho. We got snow like only three times and it melted the same day. And so  it got pretty warm. Like we were having a pretty warm  spring, um, which I was kind of excited about. And then this week it was like, psych.  So it's like cold and wet.  Yup.
01:56I... There's that noise again. I hate this. Alrighty. So why is it called an enchanted homestead? Do you have magic on your homestead? Oh, gosh. I'm just always... love all things like magical and just like finding gratitude even in the mundane boring stuff and like turning it into something... Well, magical.
02:21Enchanting and so I don't know it just it's stuck with me and we decided to name it that  Well, you'll be happy to know that one of my good friends gave me a fairy weather vane when we moved here five years ago, that's awesome  And it only took a year and a half to put up, but it's really pretty so
02:45Yep, I can see it out my living room windows and every time I look at it, I think of her and I'm like, I hope you're looking down from heaven smiling at the weather rain.  Oh, that's awesome. That is awesome. I love adding all kinds of stuff. Like I have like  my courts around the garden, like sun catchers, wind chimes. just I love putting stuff everywhere. I'm like,  I don't know, like adding that little magical umph to like otherwise  boring places around the property.
03:15And so I just, love that. Yes, because when things aren't blooming, you need something to look like it's blooming. Oh my goodness. Yes. Yes, indeed. Make it somewhat pretty. Yeah, I get it. I really do. I was talking to somebody about the fact that peonies are my favorite flower the other day and I realized I still have at least two months before my peonies bloom. Oh yeah? Well, I want to add more flowers around the property, but I
03:43suck. I don't know. cannot  get flowers to bloom hardly at all.  just, I don't know. Is it shady?  Some parts, but our house  faces west and so the sun does like, whoo.  Um,  but I don't know. just, I have wildflowers though that have taken off and they come back every year, thankfully. So I'm trying to get more going.  Um,
04:12So we'll see this year.  We'll see.  Okay.  I have a question. Did you grow up in Idaho? No, actually in Puerto Rico. Oh, okay.  I was listening to you talk and I'm like, there's some accent there, but I can't place it. Yeah, no. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, moved to Hawaii and then came to Idaho. Okay. It's really subtle. I don't think anybody else would have noticed it, but I am like a fanatic about it because I listened to everything really closely. um Okay. So.
04:42Tell me about your homestead. Well, we have a little bit over 50 chickens, I would say,  give or take.  We have four goats. We have  nine cats, five dogs. Five dogs, yeah. And we are just on, I think about three and a half acres here. um Yeah, we do gardening.
05:11We do obviously the farm fresh eggs, all the stuff. Nice. Because I'm a dog fanatic, I never was until we got our dog five years ago. My husband is the same. What breed, what breed, what breeds are your dogs or is it one breed? Oh, so we had, we started with one Shih Tzu and then she got pregnant. And she had five puppies that were mixed.
05:41one passed away early on and so I could not part with the other puppies. And so we were in town at first and so that is what led us to then have to find somewhere out of town limits because I think it was a three dog maximum rule  and we had a little bit more than that. And of course they're little dogs so they yap. They are quite the little yappers. um And so then when we moved out here  we had a dog
06:10that randomly showed up. His name was Jax. He  passed um two or three years ago. But then we had another dog show up, Bruno. He's still with us. He's  a  lab mix, a black lab mix. And then our son  brought another dog home and she is a border collie lab mix. And so  we currently, yeah, one, two.
06:40three, four, five, because we've had a few that have passed away. yeah. Yep. My husband and I are  of  the mind that one dog is more than enough for us. We adore our dog.  her mama has a litter every year.  And friends of ours own the mama. And I'm like, man, those puppies are so cute. My husband's like,  our dog is so cute. We don't need to give her a sister or a brother. What breed is she?
07:10She's a she's an Australian shepherd.  Oh,  okay.  And they need they need to be played with. Yeah, they have energy. Yeah. So  having more than one would probably kill both of us. Yeah, that's how it is with ours. That's a border Collie mix. Nova. Oh my goodness. She has energy for days and we have her kind of like on a routine. So like they get breakfast every morning and then she gets like after breakfast playtime. Then at around three o'clock she gets another playtime.
07:39Then after dinner, they get playtime and it's like, she will, and she knows, like she will sit by the area where her toys are at and just look like the saddest abused dog. Like, please play. Oh my goodness. I calm down.  But she loves, thought she wants to be outside playing all day long. cannot for the life of me figure out if border collies and um Australian shepherds just know how to communicate better than other dogs do.
08:08Mm-hmm. would say so. Maggie's the same way. She has all kinds of expressions for what she wants.  They're super smart.  Yeah, it's crazy. And my mom and dad have a purebred border collie and  her name is Duchess and she was aptly named and she has all kinds of faces for what she wants to according to my dad. So  I think that those two breeds are very expressive and very clear.
08:36when they want your attention for whatever it is that they want you to do. oh absolutely. And I could talk about dogs all day. Like  I am an absolute convert. I go to the church of dog. I swear to you. uh I've always been a dog person, but my husband,  for his whole life was scared of dogs. Like it is the funniest thing. Like even the littlest dog, he'd be like, Nope. And I'm like, come on. Like it's not going to eat you. Like really?
09:05and he will just walk the other way. And so then when we got our first dog together, Harley,  he started coming around and his family to this day, they're like, we would have never thought you would end up with five dogs. Like of all people, like you were so scared and they sleep in bed with us. Like they are so spoiled  and people like, man, you've come a long way.  Yeah, I always loved other people's dogs. I just didn't want one of my own. Oh, that's funny.
09:34And then we got this cute little puppy at seven weeks and six days old and I fell in love and I went off the deep end. So,  all right. So you said you would think you have about 50 chickens.  you, and you have a farm stand, right? Yes, ma'am. Yup.  Yeah. So are the girls laying? Oh my gosh, a lot. get like  around 30 a day, 30 eggs. So it's like, we stock the farm stand. So we started opening every day.
10:04except this week, I  do announce, like, hey, it's weather permitting. Because our house faces west and across the street, like, there's a field. So there's nothing blocking the winds or anything. So the farm stand um obviously gets affected. oh And we had an upgrade. We started the farm stand, I think it was two years ago,  and my husband built it, like, literally a little stand. He built it. My dad was living with us at the time, and my dad helped paint it. So it was, like, really special.
10:34Um, but then the wins, like she went belly up several times, several times. Thankfully it was like when she wasn't open. we didn't have stuff in it. Cause we also have like apothecary items that I make and stuff. Um, so thankfully we never experienced like damage in that sense. And anytime like my husband was able to fix her up and just, would set her back up. But then we were like, okay, we got to figure something out. And so.
11:03we had a shed in our backyard that was just full of junk. Like  it needed cleaned out. And so  we pulled that out and that's the farm stand. So it's like a green shed that has tables in it. And that's what we're using. And thankfully it's sturdy enough to where the winds don't affect it, but still like when you open the doors, like the wind is just like blasting it. So  we keep her closed. Yeah.
11:30We have a farm stand too and it's got like a  one door. It's got one door that opens to the left and it's a big door. And I worry when people come to get their eggs because I'm so afraid that door is going to smack somebody when they go in when the wind's blowing, but everybody's been okay so far.  And we have insurance that will cover that.  But I still don't want anyone to get hurt. I mean, I assume that they're coming to a quote unquote
11:59farm or homestead, they know to be careful. Right. mean, normally you would, yeah, I think that's a pretty safe assumption, but yeah, it's common sense.  Yeah. It's also, it's also probably not safe for people who have mobility issues and people know that too,  because you have to step up about four inches to get into it. And  I said to my husband, we should probably put a ramp on that. And he was like, it's on the list. This was, this was three years ago.
12:28Oh, we have a list going on stuff too. Yeah, there's still no ramp, but maybe this summer there'll be a ramp on it. I don't know yet. Yeah, I want to turn ours just a little bit because I want it to still face the road,  but kind of angled so the winds don't necessarily just like slap her inside.  But also I want to paint because right now it's just a dark green shed. So I want to get her painted.  Yeah, there's a list.
12:56There's always a list on a homestead.  never ends either. You get like six things crossed out and then seven more things show up.  Yeah, that's true.  So you do apothecary things. What do you do? We do elderberry syrup,  herbal salves. It's just stuff that  we use personally. I just make more.  We are big on essential oils, so I have rollers out there that we use. ah
13:23And so it's very important though with like herbal remedies. I have a disclaimer like, hey, this is what we use. This is how we use it and why. But, you know, do your research. Your mileage may vary. Yeah. I'm like, these are the ingredients, you know, because for allergy reasons, I don't want anybody. But yeah, so I have essential oil rollers. I have herbal salves. I love plantain, calendula, lavender.
13:53Dandelion we are big on dandelions here. We're probably the only property on this road that doesn't spray.  Oh uh I swear because everybody has all the pretty green yards and then there's our house with all the dandelions and which I think is prettier  Personally same I had to get my husband on board. He's like come  on and I'm like, nope, like they're just so good So we use it for like tinctures salves.  I feed them to our goats or chickens
14:24They're so good.  and so have you,  have you done dandelion root tea yet?  No,  I did. I have the roots. I, but I want to do,  um, this local lady was talking to me about it and it just, it got me curious, but I have not done it yet. It's like a dandelion latte. So basically you do that the tea, but then to that you add milk and then honey and it's basically like coffee, instead of coffee, it's the dandelion root.
14:53Yes, I bought dandelion root tea at the store at the co-op. Yeah. And tried it and it does it tastes like coffee. is wonderful. I just I have it. I just I've not been brave enough. Do it. Put those roots in the oven at the lowest temperature and let them dry out. OK, deal. That's good to know. She loved it too. She was like, no, it's so delicious. I'm like, OK, we'll see. And I have it. I just I've not done it.
15:22Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it.  I will definitely report back. Yes, please. um I love my rollerball bottle that has  lemon, lavender and peppermint in it. And I put it on my like right behind my ears  and right under my nose and on my wrist when I have a migraine headache and it literally takes the migraine headache down by half.  Oh my gosh. Yes, we have a migraine roller.
15:50Funnily enough, I had never added lemon to it. I do lemon, peppermint, and lavender as an allergy blend though. So that's awesome. killing two birds with one stone. Yes, for sure. Like it's so good. Yeah. And it smells good.  Yep. And I looked up the thieves oil recipe and I have thieves oil roller rollerball bottles too. I love these. We love thieves in this house.  Yep. I didn't know anything about it until I saw a former neighbor of mine was talking about it.
16:20And I was like, what is Steve's oil? And I looked it up and I was like, oh, I can do that. I can make that. have all the oils for it.  Mm hmm. Yep. It's really good. And it smells good. It's almost like Christmas. Yeah, because of the clove, right? Yeah. Clove and cinnamon.  Yes. m We didn't really do much for Christmas this year and I'm kind of sad about it. We were just busy and  my youngest had some stuff going on and we just didn't do it. And my youngest is an adult.
16:49Let's just make that clear. He's not little.  And ah we just kind of had a very quiet Christmas and we didn't really do cookies and we didn't do pumpkin pie.  And now I'm thinking about it. like, you know, we should pull some squash out of the  freezer and do pumpkin pie this weekend. Oh, that sounds so good. And nothing beats homemade. Yeah, and it's going to be chilly on Saturday. Maybe I can do that. Maybe that'll be perfect. That sounds so cozy. Maybe that'll
17:17raise the spirits around here, who knows. If that doesn't.  And that's one of the great things about homesteading is that the stuff that people do at Thanksgiving and Christmas,  you can do anytime.  doesn't matter. Yeah, that is true. Yeah. I just baked  zucchini bread, I think it was like two weeks ago, and it was using zucchini from our garden last year that I had frozen. Did it work? Yeah.
17:44Yes, it did. I always worry that it'll make it dry, but actually turned out so yummy. Oh, I thought it would make it really wet.  Oh, no, no, no, it did not. Huh. Okay. Mm hmm. Do you shred your zucchini before you freeze it? Yeah. Yes, I do. That's probably why it wouldn't make it wet.  Okay, cool. We grow winter squashes more than we eat zucchinis of the garden as they're coming in. So there's very little to go in the freezer because what we don't eat, we sell at the farmer's market.
18:14But we grow winter squash and the winter squash gets roasted and put in the freezer. So that's what will be in the pumpkin pie. It'll be butternut squash pie. Oh, that sounds so good. Yeah, because pumpkins are actually squash. So it doesn't matter what winter squash you use for your pumpkin pie. It's all pumpkin pie. Really? Yep. Huh, I was now years old. OK, that's cool, Yep. I was this many years old when I discovered that pumpkin is squash.
18:43I was like, has to be just pumpkin. Well, that's good to know. I don't think I would ever know the difference though. Yeah. I would not recommend using a Hubbard or a Delicata squash because they're not sweet. Oh, yeah. You would be able to be like, yeah, no, this is not traditionally made. But the joy of using butternut squash is if the butternut squash has had a good season, it's naturally sweet. It's so good. You can cut the sugar down in your recipe if you want.
19:13Oh God, butternut swatch is so good. We have some planted. I'm waiting for it to start sprouting because I'm excited because they're so good.  am. I'm trying so hard to not wish the next six months away because last year's garden was not  overly successful. Let's put it that way. And the year before that, it was not overly successful either. had really terrible weather. We had a lot of rain and then a lot of heat and then a lot of rain.
19:42which causes the blight, which kills plants. And I've got everything I have crossed that we have a successful growing season this year. Yeah.  I think it's going to be warm here. I'm nervous because we had a really warm winter. We're having an unusually warm spring. Yeah. So I'm nervous that we're going to have a really hot summer. So I'm trying to prepare for that. I hope with everything I have.
20:12that everyone who wants to grow produce this year  has a good shot at it because the last couple of years have just been hellish. The bugs, the bugs got us last year and  so we don't, we don't use like toxic chemicals on anything. So like I make our own sprays and stuff. um But my goodness, last year I was like, holy cow,  squash bugs. I had never  known what they were and  oh,  yeah.
20:41They give me the ick. They legit gave me the ick.  They're disgusting.  I was like, stop. I would stay on top of them, like trying to like, oh my God, was, nope. Zero out of 10.  Zero out of 10. Do you want to know a natural repellent?  What?  Neem  oil.  N as in Nancy, E-E-M as in Mary. Neem  oil. Okay. Okay. They don't like it. Good to know. I'll be able.
21:10You bet I'm going to get some now because after last year, like, oh my goodness. I could not, like, I could not get rid of them. I had to like constantly, once I thought, okay, I got this last like hatch because you could see the eggs on the leaves and stuff. I would cut the leaves. But then I was like, okay, we're good. And then they would come back. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, where are you coming from? And once they get into the main part of the plant, you're done for.
21:39Ugh, they just, no. Bugs in general just give me the ick.  And we've started finding ticks already.  Uh huh. I'm like, thankfully they're not on our animals, but I'm already spraying everything down. I'm like, nope. Like, no, no. They literally just, I start feeling them on me and I just, get the ick.  I cannot. Yup.  I hate that. It's so...
22:04It's so hard to get rid of it too, because you know there's no tick on you, but you still have the creepy crawlies. Oh yes, it's so bad. The other thing that I was thinking of when you were talking about the squash bugs, back before we moved here, we were growing squashes or something, very broad leaf plants at a neighbor's house. And they got the mildew, I can't think what it's called, downy mildew on the leaves.
22:33looked all over Google to figure out what we could do to treat it before it killed the plants. And it said milk and water, half water, half milk in a spray bottle. Really? And you wait till like 10 o'clock in the morning  and you spray the leaves and the milk somehow kills the mildew. Huh? So if you ever have downy mildew, and there's another name for it too, but again, think of it right now, spray it with a mix of milk and water.
23:03That's  wicked. Like how interesting. I wonder what's in the milk.  I have  no idea, but it worked. We had the most beautiful squash from those plants.  Well, hey,  and it's natural. So that's a double win. Yeah, there are so many things that  people did before we had all this not natural stuff.  And they did just fine. Yeah, that's what I like. That's the whole.
23:32thing here, like I always tell my husband like we like to turn to nature like for answers because that's how our ancestors did it. Like they didn't have all these fancy things that ironically are to make our lives easier.  But in reality, like, is it?  Um, in some ways, I'm really, really thankful for some advances we've made because because antibiotics kill strep throat.
23:59and I used to strep throat all the time and no natural remedy  gets rid of that. So really thankful for that.  But the stuff that we can do that  is fixable with nature, think that we should do that first. Yes. Oh, absolutely. Same.  I had one time it was strep throat and ah an issue with my tonsils at the same time.  Oh my goodness. On the plus side, I lost weight.
24:28I could not eat. So very thankful for the medicine for sure.  Yeah, I mean if I'm coming down with a head cold my go-to is orange juice and chicken soup, homemade chicken soup. And it usually does help.  But if I've got a sore throat and I've got white spots on the back of my throat, I'm going in for the prescription for antibiotics. Yeah, know. At the sign of anything here we start chugging Algaeberry syrup. I make our rollers. I diffuse oils.
24:58Like also if it gets worse, like, okay, you know, let's get medicine. Yeah. So, so again, it's, it's one of those  six of one half dozen of another things.  I don't think it has to be an either or. think it's a yes and yes.  Yep. um I agree. I would do elderberry syrup, except that our two elderberry plant trees, sorry, not plants, they're trees.  Um, get.
25:28eaten by the birds before we can get to the berries. Oh, so we have one here  and I didn't know what it was. It came with a property. I'm like, okay, because I wasn't into like homesteading. I didn't have that mentality when we bought our house. We literally came across it one morning and it was just like a good deal. Like, so we ended up moving in.  Plus we needed to be out of town because of the dogs. Yes. So it was like, okay. And it was the middle of winter. So it wasn't the ideal time.
25:59But then this was  going on 10 years ago. um Then like we got chickens and like, like they say chickens, it's the gateway to everything homesteading wise. so  I started getting into essential oils, which is like the gateway to like a natural life. It's like the chickens of a natural living of sorts.  And so  all that while here, but I think like
26:28We were like a year into the property and so like we had raspberry bushes out back that I trimmed at the wrong time and that's the end of that. um Come to find out we have an elderberry tree here on the side and I didn't know. So it got neglected for a minute  and  once I figured out what it was and I started learning about elderberry like the flowers, the berries and
26:55how the leaves, everything is medicinal, I started babying it. Well, for the last few years, it's been like my pride and joy.  Last year, finally, it was at a place where  I could have harvested the berries. ah Except the birds.  They were like, nope, dead. I'm like, well, okay. So we go to the mountains here, we can forage them pretty locally. It's like a 45 minute drive, so I don't mind.
27:25Worth it. Yes. Y'all,  absolutely. So I was like, okay, I guess I'll share with the birds this year.  So we just went up to the mountains and we forage. And so I've been very blessed in that sense that I still have them kind of close  and we're able to get them that way.  Yeah. Let's take a beat here on elderberry.  If you think you have an elderberry bush or tree growing on your property and you're not sure,
27:52make sure you know somebody who can identify it for you. There's two kinds and I guess the one with thorns, you're not supposed to eat the berries. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, either way you have to cook the berries for at least 20 to 30 minutes. Yeah. Cause otherwise it'll send you to the bathroom. Yeah. But I think the one with thorns is actually poisonous. I think it can really make you sick sick. Yeah. I identify it properly. Yeah. And on foraging,
28:21Definitely. Yeah, because  there's also another, I don't know the name of it, but it's very similar, but the berries are bigger. But they're the same shade of purple and everything, but they're bigger. I don't know the name of it, but it's also like one of those, okay, that's not elderberry. Like, no, don't do that one.  Yeah. If you want to get into foraging, find somebody who knows what they're doing and take all the notes you possibly can as they're walking through the forest with you.
28:50Yes, and don't over harvest because I've seen also people they're just they take everything. I'm like, OK, like the tree has to be able to come back next year. Like, hello.  Let's share with nature since nature shares with us. Yes, and share with everybody.  Mm hmm. Right. Because other people would like some of those elderberries,  Oh, yeah. Like we've um we've been times where it's like you see that people have already harvested.
29:20And it's like, come on.  Like you can tell they over-harvested. Yeah.  And  I'm going  to give them a little bit of grace.  Maybe they didn't know that they weren't supposed to.  Maybe they weren't greedy. Maybe they were just overzealous.  Maybe. Okay. But yes, try to consider the fact that we need to share. Yeah. Just like we were taught in kindergarten.
29:50Exactly. All the things I need to know I learned in kindergarten, I swear. Yeah, for real. Be nice, share, be kind. All those good things that the world really needs right now. Oh, and that's the truth. Yes, it is. So I have one more thing about the elderberries. We are thinking about putting netting over the trees this year so the birds can't get to the berries.
30:18The thing is, we did that with our strawberries a couple of years ago.  as the baby robins started showing up, we caught a couple of baby robins in the bird netting because they couldn't get loose. So  I'm thinking maybe we just say, screw it and let the birds get as many berries as they want. Because  I don't want baby robins dying in the  I know. think I would be like, it's fine. I'll share.  Yeah.
30:46That's my thing here like much to my husband's dismay like I don't think I'm the typical like homesteader Because I say the goats they're just very expensive dogs. Yes um Our plan of breeding and selling babies that went out the window like I fell in love with our first baby Denver and he's very much still here. Uh-huh. Oh, I  Same with our chickens like we have raised meat birds
31:14We raised a steer, we raised a pig, but everything that is raised for food is done so at my brother-in-law's property. Him and my sister-in-law. don't bond? Yes, literally. When we got the steer, my husband's like, no, like you're not allowed to name him. And I'm like, but why? And he's like, because otherwise he's going to die of old age. Uh-huh. Like, like he is going to feed our family when the time comes. And I'm like, so.
31:43We would help, obviously, like they would live on their property, but we help with feed, like with chores. Like if they went out of town, like we were on duty. And so there were a few times where obviously like I went over and I was like, I like feeding him. And my husband's like, no, like, come on. No, no, no. Like, no,  you cannot fall in love with him. Same with the pig. Same with the meat birds. They were all at my brother-in-law's house.  And so he had  animals that I'll be able to love on.
32:13That's really smart.  My husband's life is hard. He's like, well, like he's trying to figure out ways around this. Yeah, it's it's so hard. And I think all the time  we had our first litter of kittens two summers ago here.  And we knew that we were going to be finding them new barns to go be barn cats at.  And this family came and adopted two of them.
32:42And I was so excited because it was the last two of the litter. There were like seven kittens. Oh, wow.  And I was thrilled. And the mom and dad showed up and like a three year old and a six year old got out of the car with them. And they, these little kids were so excited  and I couldn't be out there with them. I couldn't, I just would have cried. And I thought I had a handle on it. I really did. And I saw these little kids just light up like Christmas trees at these kittens.
33:12And it was so good. Like my heart was so big and they pulled out of the driveway with those kittens and went home and I just cried. That would be me. Yup. That's why we just end up keeping them all.  And my husband, my husband came in and he said, is something actually wrong? And I said, no.  And he said, you're sobbing. And I said, they were so, those kids were so cute.  And
33:39They took the last two babies away and he was like, oh, so it's, it's happy and sad. I said, yeah, the worst kind.  Yes. Yup. That's, yup. That's how we have nine cats. Mostly people just dump animals here.  every July, I swear for the last like three years, we've gotten a cat every July.  Um,  last year we ended up getting two and then already there's one showing up an orange cat and we have one that's orange.
34:09And this one just looks just like him. And so one morning, my husband comes in and he's like, Hey, babe, I'm like, Yeah. He's like, there's an orange cat in the cat room. Okay, so we have an extra room that we have a little gate,  the dogs can go in it. Yeah, and eat their food. So we call it the cat room, but it's like just an extra room.  And, and I'm like, um our orange cat is in bed with us. And he's like, Yep.
34:36That's my point. There's an orange cat in the room and it's not ours. This cat came in through the little pet door that we have in the window.  He came in, he was eating, he was on the bookshelf, obviously scared at that point because our cat had noticed him. He noticed my husband and I'm like, oh good God. So we're kind of working on him. He's come back a few times and I told my husband as soon as he lets me love on him, that's cat number 10.
35:01And he's like, no, we already have nine. I'm like, you won't even notice. I'll just tell you it's tangerine. You won't even know the difference.  I swear people love homesteading because you have so much more. I don't know. Let's use the word freedom or autonomy. Yeah. To be able to do the things you'd like to do. Yeah. And regarding pet doors. Friend of mine, when we lived in the old house.
35:30Again, my life is old house versus new house. We've been in the new house for over five years now.  Oh, right.  When we lived in the old house, I had a friend and they had a pet door and  one of their cats caught a pheasant and brought it in through the pet door alive.  Oh, no. They had a pheasant in their house.  That's happened to us with a pigeon. I'm like, open and they brought it in.
36:00and they ran into the bathroom and I just heard like commotion in the bathtub. And so I opened the curtain and I see one of our cats with the bird and I'm like,  oh, like girl, like what are you doing? And then the bird just started flapping and it was alive and like this bird flying in, I'm like, oh my God. So I'm shutting off all the fans. I'm trying to keep the cats away from me. Cause then all the other cats were like,  game. Oh yeah. So, oh yeah. Yep.
36:29The things that they bring in. Thankfully they have not brought in a snake. Well, no, that's a lie. They did bring in a snake once and I'm terrified of snakes, like petrified of snakes.  And  I was making coffee and I see like this little snake curled like in the corner. I started screaming. I called my husband and he couldn't understand what I was saying. And I'm like, there's a snake.
36:58in our house. And he's like, okay, FaceTime me. Okay, so I FaceTime him and he's like, Oh, yeah, it is a snake. What did you think I was saying? Like, are you kidding me? Like he had to come home. Like he left work. He had to come home, get the snake out. And then go back to work. I could not I could I told him we're moving. We are moving. We are posting our house for sale. The house now belongs to the snake. Like nope.
37:29I cannot deal with snakes. Well, luckily it got removed and you still got to keep your house. Yeah, otherwise we have been homeless. I cannot. I could see that. We don't have a pet door here because our dog is on lead all the time, so we have to hook her up. So having a pet door wouldn't help. But my biggest fear, like I've had nightmares about her not being on lead.
37:56and having a pet door and she brings a live skunk into my house.  Oh, skunks. Oh my God. That's a whole other thing here because we had the tiniest skunks  actually kill a few of our chickens.  And so we had to dispatch them.  I am I love all animals except insects and reptiles. I cannot deal. But I love all animals. So I was like, oh, but at the same time, it's like my chickens or you, you're going.
38:24So my husband would handle it, but anytime I would like smell it, I'm like, oh God, our chickens. And so I run out, I'm like checking, no, skunks, my husband's actually just last night, I smelled and I ran out. I was like, there's a skunk. And he's like, you have like skunk PTSD? I'm like, yes. Like it literally got rid of, I think it was  nine out of 11 chicks and a mom. It decapitated a hen.
38:53Yeah, skunks and raccoons are the worst when it comes to chickens. We lost chickens last year to a mama raccoon and her four babies.  Oh no. See, I would be like,  ah, but also like, aw.  Yeah, it was really difficult because we didn't realize that she was a mama raccoon. My husband had actually tried to shoot her  and I stepped out on the porch at like five o'clock in the morning, the sun was just coming up  and
39:22As I shut the door to the house, I heard little screech noises and we have a cement pad outside the door. And I looked and four little baby raccoons out there. I'm like, oh my God, here we go. Oh, how'd you handle it? She left. I don't know. My husband went out and fixed the chicken run so they couldn't get in it. So they couldn't get near the chickens. And once the food source was no longer there, the buffet had been shut down. They left.
39:52Yeah, we had a raccoon once and my husband put a live trap and I swear it's like she saw the trap and just never came back. Mm-hmm. And I was like, okay with that. Yeah, if we don't have to dispatch wild animals on our property, we go out of our way not to. Same. It's because of me. Otherwise my husband would be like, he was raised very like country boy, like you do what you need to do, blah, blah, blah. But I'm like, but also how about we don't?
40:22Yes, and we have coyotes around here and I'm telling you, a coyote is in the yard, it's going to get shot at because that's not safe. Oh, same here. And I'm terrified of coyotes. Like in my head, you know, like a werewolf in a movie. That's what I see in my head whenever I hear a coyote. It is like the dumbest thing I know, but I cannot help it. I'm terrified. But we've never, knock on wood, had issues with them and our chickens.
40:50but we did lose a kitten two years ago.  she was half blind. I was getting her in. I brought her in and she got out again. And then I'm like, I hear the coyotes. I'm gonna go back and look for her. And I was out there and I could not find her. And it was mating season for coyotes. So it's when they're most aggressive. And so,  yeah, they took her. And so since then, I told my husband no. I,  that will be the one animal that I...
41:18No, like he took our little Freya, like, uh-uh, that's it. You do what you need to do.  Yeah, and the thing that's so tough with coyotes is that they are a beautiful animal,  but they will catch and eat almost anything that is smaller than them or injured. Yeah, yeah, so, uh-uh. No, I'm just, terrified of them to begin with. I've never seen one in real life. Oh, I have. So I'm like,  uh...
41:46So in my head, all I'm thinking is like this werewolf from a movie. So it it terrifies me and we hear them so loud. And my husband thinks, because behind our property, there's a field and there's like a little creek and everything. And there's like a section with a bunch of trees that he thinks there, there might be a coyote den. so he thinks that that's where they're coming from. I'm like, fantastic. Like I love that for us. Like why?
42:14And he's like, so like, we're just going to have to stay diligent. I'm like,  you mean you, cause let's be real.  But yeah, no. Yup.  And again, homesteading is a great thing to do, but there are some real things that come with it, like predators,  like losing animals.
42:35Oh yeah. having people steal money out of the farm stand. We haven't had that happen. really Oh God, knock on wood, us either. And everybody always  tells us like, you guys are very trusting because like we just, I don't know, it's the honor system. even like it's a self-serve stand. So like even if somebody just wants to take the eggs, my husband's like, listen, if somebody needs eggs  to feed their family that badly. They can have them.
43:02And I'm like, okay, cool. But also like at least  leave us a note like, hey, I needed the eggs. Thank you. And it would be really sweet if people would do that. But I think that they feel ashamed. They shouldn't. But they probably do. um I have one last thing for you. I hope it will help if you haven't already done it.  Did you know that Venmo and PayPal, the online apps that people can pay through,  they usually have a QR code that you can actually print out and put up in the arm stand?
43:32Yep, I have those. have that one. have Venmo, PayPal, Cash App.  And I also have the Apple thing to where I could run cards because we did farmers market two years. And so I had the credit card stuff, but I just cover that with the cash box.  Yeah. I get it as easy as possible for everybody. Yeah, I just didn't know if you knew and I wanted to let you know if you didn't know because it really helps because it does. Yeah.
44:01Because sometimes people just don't have cash on them, but they see the sign and they're like, I'm going to stop in and see what they have. And if you happen to have the QR codes, they can pay right there with their phone. I was impressed with how much cash we've also gotten,  two dollar bills. I had never seen a two dollar bill.  Like our boys had some like they were collecting them when they were little, but
44:28I got paid with $2 bills. This one lady came over and she did, I think it was $12 in $2 bills. And I was like, this is so cool. Like I'm keeping like all the $2 bills we get, I keep. And we've gotten quite a few. Like to me, that's so cool. I didn't know that was even a thing. Yeah. And they're not in print anymore. They don't make those anymore. My husband has a $2 bill folded up in his billfold from his grandpa. Oh, see, that's so cool. Like I had never seen one of my...
44:58The first time I got one, I even posted it. I'm like, thank you. Like, this is like, I'm geeking out something fierce. And so I keep them all like they're all folded in my  little money thing. And I'm like, nope, these are just like a keepsake that I hopefully will pass on.  It's so funny. The little things that just make your heart sing. Oh my God. Yes. Like I color code my eggs. Like they're always like  very specifically set up in their egg.
45:26containers, like even stuff like I feel so dumb because as I'm setting the eggs, I'm smiling like a fool. I'm like, oh my gosh, like it's yeah, definitely. It's the little things that bring joy  and everybody needs the little things to bring joy. swear to you, it's so good for the soul. Yeah. All right, Lydia, this was a joy. Where can people find you? Well, we are on Facebook, Instagram  and Tik Tok.
45:54at an Enchanted Homestead.  Fantastic. I feel like this conversation was enchanted. Thank you for your time.  Thank you for having me.  As always, people can find me at a tinyhomesteadpodcast.com.  Lydia, I hope you have a great rest of your day. Same. You too. Thank you. All right. Bye.
 

Girlypop Acres

Today I'm talking with Lily at Girlypop Acres. You can also follow on Facebook.
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. At Green Bush Twins and Company, we believe in the power of creativity, imagination, and art to bring people together.  Our mission is to inspire connection across all ages, encouraging understanding, individuality,  and a true sense of belonging. We're building more than a brand. We're growing a mindful community rooted in kindness, intention, and shared purpose.
00:29At our core, it's about real people sharing real stories, ideas, and products that make everyday life more meaningful.  If you believe in living with purpose and supporting brands that care,  you'll feel right at home with Greenbush Twins. That tiny homestead podcast is sponsored by Greenbush Twins and Company. Today I'm talking with Lily at Gurley Pop Far- Acres  in New York. How are you, Lily? I'm how are you doing today? I'm good. I almost messed up the introduction yet again. I'm telling you, I-
00:56I know what I'm going to say and the brain does not translate to my tongue to come out of my face. So how is the weather in New York this morning? Oh, it's actually decent for once.  We've been hit hard by snow lately, but it's sunny and shiny and everyone, all the critters are walking around happy. Good. It is March 30th, I think. And I'm in Minnesota and the sun is pouring through my bedroom window, which is the room I do my recording in.
01:26And it's supposed to hit 75 degrees today. Oh, goodness. I'm jealous. think we're probably in like the 40s and I'm celebrating. Yeah, the weather's been so weird. We had 81 degrees two Sundays ago for the high. Oh my goodness. And then it was cold, colder all week. And then it was really nice yesterday. I it got up to 63. It's supposed to be 75 today and it's supposed to drop down again this week. So.
01:51I'm gonna be real happy when we get a stretch of seven days where it is moderate and spring-like. It would be great. Oh, same here. Same here. It was snowing just two days ago here.  Yeah, it's nuts. So tell me,  I wanna know  about you and what you do, but tell me why your place is called Girlie Pop Acres. So I have four dogs, three great Pyrenees and one beagle.  And back when it was just the great Pyrenees,
02:20um I had two of them puppies  and you know, great Pyrenees puppies don't listen to anything at all.  And it was just easier to yell girly pops at them instead of being like, over here.  So I would yell girly pops and I accidentally trained all three of them to only respond to girly pop. uh And now the beagle does So I just named it after my dogs.  That is so cute.
02:50I call my dog girly all the time. Oh, I love it. I'm sure my neighbors know that we're girly pup acres because my dogs used to break out of the fence before we had our fences as good as we do. I'd be outside yelling girly pups, girly pups. Oh, Funny. You know what would be funny? It would you made cake pops and took them to your neighbors and were like, I'm so sorry that I'm always yelling girly pop. Here's some cake pops for you.
03:19I should. I don't know if they can even hear me because my neighbors are pretty far away, but if they do. Yeah, I think that would be really cute. If you ever get an inkling or hear a rumor that they're upset, just throw together some cake pops and I don't know, put cute little dog faces on them and take them over to them.  Oh, that's a great idea. That's what I would do because I really like turning messes into messages. That's such a cute like motto. I love that.
03:49Uh huh. have gained so many sayings from this podcast over two and a half years from people I've talked to.
03:57and they're all relevant. So I just, have a whole rolling lexicon in the back of my head of things that I can do or say. I love that. Yeah. It's been great. Okay. So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do,  Um,  so  I'm a homesteader as you can guess, since I'm here.  Um, I raised Nigerian dwarf goats. We have eight goats right now.  Uh, we got the four dogs.  Uh, we got a goose named Boopers.
04:26walking around  next to me right now. I got a bunch of ducks, a bunch of silkies,  and  I raised two feral farm children and a potbelly pig named Big Bertha.  sounds like Homestead.  Yep.  Very  full life over here.  I consider myself a Lyme's disease advocate because I have Lyme's disease and so does my husband.
04:56um I'm a disabled farmer. I have two leg braces because my knees are all messed up.  I'm either always in a cane or a walker, which  is a challenge  with farming, but we make it work.  Yes, yes. And I'm glad you said that because  I'm not saying that you are over 50. I have no idea how old you are. I am over 50.
05:21You can do homesteading at any age as long as you feel safe in what you're doing. That is an amazing thing to call out because ah I'm only 28.  My husband is 25,  but we've been doing it for a couple of years and it was pretty much the second we could get a piece of land. We're like, okay, let's get back to farming. ah I was raised on a cattle farm when I was a kid and he grew up  at this lake.
05:50semi-famous bed and breakfast in Arkansas, where they had like 100 acres. But there's definitely times where your safety is like, goodness, like people don't think about how much goes into homesteading. Oh, there are so many ways to get hurt on a homestead. husband was splitting wood over the weekend with our wood splitter, you know, the actual
06:19motorized one. And I was sitting on the porch because I don't do  wood, he does it. And I kept going out and  kind of keeping an eye on him because he's out there by himself. And I'm like, please don't let him get sidetracked and leave his hand in the way. Because if you get your hand caught between the wood and the metal piece that splits the wood, you're going to have a broken hand for sure.  Oh, goodness, I couldn't imagine.  So he was fine. He's got it down to a science and he's very good at it. And it's kind of fun watching your husband do
06:48manly work, you  but  But there are so many ways I mean The first time we came to see this place over five years ago before we bought it  it's it's 3.1 acres and it is a flat it's a piece of flat land and uh There were divots or whatever. They're called trenches. I don't know  but all over the yard from where the the tractors had gone through or been moved or whatever on the property
07:18and I caught my boot toe on one the edges and went down. In the first five minutes, I was walking this property and I was like, well, that bodes well. I'll probably break a leg before it's over. So you can do the dumbest things and get hurt or you can be the most careful ever and still get hurt. So  it's something to consider. Yeah, I'm on the dumber end of it  with my first goat. He was a little baby.
07:44And he loved jumping up onto my shoulders to get  piggyback rides.  And I just let him because I was like, this is cute. This is adorable. This isn't going to backfire on me someday.  And now that he's a full grown goat and still tries to do it  so swell. uh I also got attacked by an emu once on our farm when we tried to raise emu. So  yes,  they are big birds and they're not
08:13I mean, I'm sure someone in their experience has raised an emu chick and it's the friendliest, sweetest bird ever and would never hurt a fly. But I don't think that's the usual course of events. I have no idea. We got one as a baby. It was given to us by a friend as a housewarming gift and it was in our living room and it would sit around and whistle at us all day long. I loved it.
08:41And then one day he just  snapped  and like went at me  against a tree. And I'm like, nope, you are not staying on the farm anymore. Wow. Okay. Well,  he was a he and I don't... Well, he wasn't a DNA sex. I'm not a thousand percent sure. We just called him a he because his name was Betty Sneemu the emu. So, eh I was going to say roosters of any fowl breed tend to be more aggressive than the  females. So...
09:12Apparently in emus, it's the girls usually who are the aggressors.  Oh really? Well, maybe it was a girl maybe  You did something that made her mad  apparently Okay Yeah, go ahead.  I just thought I'd say when you were mentioned in like your property and like how the like divots  you wouldn't imagine we bought seven acres  and  the previous owners,  don't know any of this like
09:41it's like rumors, but they were rumored to be like dog fighters that were breeding pit bulls in the forest portion of our property. And there's just like barbed wire everywhere and all sorts of hazards. We bought the property and there was a five foot tall trash pile just filled with junk. So we've had to be like,
10:07revamping the property since day one. We're two years in and we're still removing stuff. Yep. You inherit whatever the former people  left for you. welcome to this place was a dead skunk in the back of the barn. freshly dead, so freshly smelly.
10:30That was exciting. ah dogs,  when they used to go  into the forest area before we  fenced it off so they couldn't get back there,  they came out once with a fully intact deer skull.  Yeah, the joys of living in the country,  Yeah.  So you said you have Nigerian, is it Nigerian dwarf goats or is it Nigerian goats? Nigerian dwarf goats.
10:59Okay, anyone who's listened to the podcast over the last two and a half years knows that goats are my nemesis. I love them so much. I don't have any because we don't have any place for them to graze. And I say nemesis as in my weakness. I love baby goats. Grown goats? Not as much of a fan. Like I see a grown goat and I'm like, oh, that's a nice animal. But I see baby goats and I melt inside.
11:28We're planning on getting a baby buck sometime next week because I want to breed all my girls. have like six girls and I have two weathers. And I kind of want to raise them from a baby just so could get the baby. huh. And they are very cuddly. I don't know. Do you have experience with baby goats? Just with the one. Cause everyone else I've got as an adult.
11:53I have one goat that was bred on our farm. delivered her. Her name's Adalia. She's standing right in front of me trying to climb up a slide and failing. But she's about a year old now. Okay. Yeah, I talked a lot about baby goats at the beginning of when I started the podcast back two and a half years ago, because my friend, her parents raised goats and they had the long eared
12:21goats? they newbies or lemonges maybe or both?  And those little babies with those long ears were the sweetest things ever. I will have to send you  some photos of my goats after because I love all my babies.  I have this one tri-color goat that I just had over heels for. She looks like she's a baby but she's not. She's like two years old.  Her name's Feather.
12:48and she has this cute little collar with bumblebees on it.  I just adore her.  Nice.  Okay, so  you sound so  happy. Like your happiness, what you're doing is just rolling through my  headphones. Cannot talk today, geez. um So  are you just doing the homesteading for yourself or are you doing like a small business with it?  So  goal is both.
13:17I've only been doing the homestead for about two years. um So I feel like I haven't really got to the businessy portion of it yet, except for like Facebook monetization from sharing  photos of the animals online. ah But I hope to eventually get into more businessy selling and stuff.  And beyond the animals, do you grow any produce? ah Yeah, we grow some, but it's very minimal.
13:46Mostly because last year we had 28 ducks  and they were very destructive. So this year when we got ducks, we built them a run. We stopped free-ranging them. Okay, if you have 20 or you had,  I mean, I assume you still have a few ducks, you must have eggs in the summertime. So are you using them? Are you giving them away? Are you starting to sell them?  son would eat eggs for every meal.
14:16every day if he could. And  when we had like 80 chickens, we've downsized since then, ah we had like 80 chickens, he was going through the eggs like, wow.  Yeah. So yeah, mostly you're going to my side. I also have my dog Penelope who we found out was stealing eggs out of the nesting boxes. Uh huh.
14:43Yeah, I have seen dogs do that. My dog doesn't because she doesn't go anywhere near the coop.  We're really lucky.  So did you tease your son that he was going to turn into a chicken if he kept eating all the chicken eggs? uh I haven't. No, I'm just glad he's eating. He's a skinny butt, so I like to get some weight on him.  Uh huh. Yeah. The whole thing with your dog  eating the chicken eggs or taking the chicken eggs.
15:08um I don't know if you know who Millennial Farmer is. He's a guy that lives in Minnesota. has a YouTube channel. Oh, I have not heard of him. Okay. Well, he has a German shepherd named Anna and he has a chicken coop that she can go into.  he just out of the blue finds chicken eggs on his property. it's because Anna goes in and steals a chicken egg and walks around in her mouth  and then puts it down somewhere.
15:36Penelope, uh she was inside the house the other day and my daughter had found one of the concrete eggs that we had for the nesting boxes  and she had brought it inside and I looked over and I'm like what you got in your mouth and she was trying to eat the concrete  eggs.  Yeah that's a good way to have broken teeth doggo.  Yeah I took that away so quick. Yeah our dog when she was a puppy we had the uh
16:03It's like river rock, but it's not river rock.  It's the ugly rock that you put around your house.  And she would go out and  she would come in the house with a piece of river rock in her mouth. And I'm like,  you cannot chew on rocks. I cannot afford to get your teeth fixed. She finally outgrew it. think it was two years ago that she finally stopped doing it. But I was like, why are you doing that?  Oh, these dogs will keep you on your toes.
16:31Yeah, it's such a bad plan. Do not chew on rocks. Your teeth are not stronger than rocks. I promise you. And I loved her so much that I was like, I don't want her to her teeth. Oh my goodness. I was such a sucker. Okay. So you have a son. Is that your only child? No, I have a daughter too. She is obsessed with our ducklings that we got. So she will just sit down in the duck pond and quack.
17:03She's only three. She just turned three. Okay, so how old is your son again? He's seven. So have they ever known any other kind of life other than this homestead life? My daughter not really. My son, yes, but he doesn't remember it. So we were living in our friend's attic.
17:29before we got to this place and Isla was just crawling. She like just started and Isaiah, I don't have much to say about him. was, you know, it was he five. And then we were saving, we got this place and it's all they really know now. So I of course am a convert. I love the fact that we live on a homestead.
17:57I'm really excited for your kids because your kids are going to have such... My son's finally starting to see  the possibilities of what he could do now that he has land.  And he's starting to build his own little playhouse um out of cob. He's using pallets and cob. And yesterday,  my daughter and him came in.
18:20all just completely covered in mud. They showed me that they were mixing in like the hay and stomping it, trying to build their little playhouse.  love that.  And before you, before you jumped in, I was going to say they're going to have so many opportunities that most kids just don't have these days.  Your kids are not going to be  noses in tablets and cell phones. Your kids are going to be outside.
18:50with the goats and the ducks and chickens and I don't know whatever else you add in over the next 20 years. We're saving now to get a horse. That is the big goal. Next week someone is coming in to finally finish the seven acre property fence and we'll have that ready so that we can get our horse soon. Awesome. Do you have a preference on what kind of horse you're going to get?
19:17Oh, I still am in the research stages. I need to learn more about horses, but I've wanted one since I was a kid.  Like I said, I grew up on this cattle farm and my grandpa, he was like, if you can get your mama to stop smoking cigarettes, I'll buy you a horse.  And little five-year-old me took that as my life mission. And every single day I'd be like, Hey, what you doing in there?  You're going outside? What are you doing out there?  And eventually  she got.
19:46tired of me being up her rear 24-7 and she quit. And my grandpa forgot that he had said that because he didn't think it would actually happen. So I didn't get my dang horse. Well, you gave your mother many, many years of her life. I did. The more important thing. Good job. I hear really good things about quarter horses because quarter horses are like the horse that can do everything.
20:17I'll definitely have to do my research on those.  Yeah, but the best horse is the horse that  is a good horse that listens to you, that is calm with your children and isn't huge. A huge horse,  it's really hard to mount up a huge horse. It's really hard to get on them. Just me with me being as broken as I am, I would imagine it. Uh-huh. So.
20:40But no, just, literally just had a conversation with somebody about quarter horses a couple of weeks ago on one of the podcast episodes. And I was like, so what is special about quarter horses? And she was like many, many things. And then she told me, and I was like, wow,  I, if we had room, we'd have a quarter horse.  Oh, I'm excited someday. It's going to be true, but you know, got to start with like the preparing.  Yeah. I learned that the hard way. Don't get an animal before you.
21:09have all the fences and all the things ready because, you know, it doesn't go well. Yeah, it comes back to that safety thing. You want to be safe on your homestead and you want your animals that you care for to be safe too. Okay, so you are living on a homestead. Are you getting into the whole preserving, canning, I don't know, doing sourdough, any of that stuff? Yes. So my grandma was canned my whole life and she still does.
21:39um Every year she makes this big trip up from Illinois to bring me her canned goods because she cans way too much for just herself  and completely fills my ah now canning room.  I just got into it myself about last year and  definitely got quickly obsessed.  We just planted some blackberry  plants, some strawberries, some blueberries.  So I'm hoping to be able to can up some jam soon.
22:09Very nice. I'm so excited for you.  We put in apple trees the first fall we were here. So we moved in in August of 2020  and we had six apple trees in the ground in October of 2020. And we just got our first decent harvest of honey gold apples this past fall. So it took four years.  Well, gives me a timeline  because we did the same thing. So  hopefully two more years to go.
22:38You might luck out. It's anywhere from three to five, depending on the variety and how old the trees are once you put them in. When you put them in. I don't know. My husband works at tractor supplies. So every now and then I'm just like, hey, while you're at work, get a fruit tree. Hey, while you're at work, get this. Yep. We bought alder or alden plum trees last year and we have no idea how long it'll take for them to produce fruit. have to look it up. My husband asked me the other day and I was like, I don't know.
23:08I will put it on the list of things to Google.  But I'm kind of hoping that at least we get blooms on them this year because they always smell good.  I'm kind of a uh chaos homesteader and I just  throw things in the ground, throw  water and hope for the best.  We are too. And the apple trees that we got were actually a housewarming present from a guy that owns an orchard up near where we used to live.
23:39That's very cool. Yeah, so six apple trees because he liked us. I was just like that is the sweetest thing ever. Thank you. And my husband is always like, you he's always going to Tractor Supply or Fleet Farm or Menards or Home Depot for something. And if he sees a fruit tree that he thinks will work, he'll call me or text me and be like, I can get a couple more fruit trees for $7 apiece. Do you want them? And I'm like, if you're going to plant them, sure.
24:07So it seems  like every year we're putting in a new tree. We just have no idea when we will see fruit on it. That's so cool.  The plants I'm most excited about right now is last time my grandpa came up from Illinois, they're getting up there in age um and they're like, I think this might be our last trip. I don't know. um But they gave me a bunch of blackberry plants.
24:36that they brought from their farm.  So I'm very excited for those so that I can have a little piece of their farm here.  Yes, and that I'm so glad you brought that up because that is so important. History is not just in books,  it is in plants and animals. And it sounds really funny saying it about animals. But when you think about racing horses, people are so
25:04I don't know, bent on getting particular foals from grandparents or great grandparents or great great grandparents that won races. Like Secretariat the horse, he, if you have a horse from his line, you're golden. Yeah, for sure. And it's history. And when you end up bringing plants from your family's gardens from 50 to 100 years ago,
25:32That's their spirit in those plants. That's how we remember them.
25:38You made me smile so much at that.  like my grandparents  mean everything to me.  And I'm definitely super happy that they did that for me. I cried when they brought those up. Oh yeah. Absolutely. I would have too. My grandma on my mom's side loved peony plants. P-E-O-N-Y.  Those are my mama's favorite.  Uh huh. And she grew them in her garden behind her little house in Oakwood, Illinois, of all places.  And I
26:08I didn't really know much about peony plants because we were never visiting them when they were blooming. So I didn't ever see them bloom. I just saw the leaves.  And when I moved to Minnesota from Maine, everybody in Minnesota has peony plants everywhere and they're gorgeous. And so I have become a peony addict. have over a hundred plants outside right I love that. I love that. That's why I have a bunch of hostas because they were at my grandma's house.
26:35And they're not her hostas. But the second I got property, was like, honey, you are going to scavenge the internet. And if you see hostas, you are grabbing them for me.  So I'd send him links on Marketplace, like free hostas, free hostas. Yeah, absolutely. And I wish that I had known that my grandma, her favorite flower was peonies. I didn't understand because I was too young to understand.  I wish that I had known enough to ask her if I could take some home.
27:06Because I could nobody thinks I would have asked from for the original farm. Yeah. Yeah. I wish I'd known because I would love to have peonies for my grandma in my my peony garden. And I do not. But I have like 10 different colors growing and they will be blooming in  two months, two months. And every time I cut peonies, I'm like, oh, my grandma in heaven is probably just grinning. She's like, yes, Mary Edlin. Good job.  Oh, so sweet.
27:37Yep, my favorite is the baby pink ones. They are so pretty and they smell so heavenly.
27:44gonna make me need to get some peonies here.  We do plan on doing beekeeping. We have the bee boxes, we're getting set up. uh So I'm starting to plant a bunch of plants around the bee boxes  so I could probably get some peonies around them. Well the good good and bad news on that is the best time to plant peonies is now.
28:08And I don't mean now, but I mean when you want to do it, do it. This fall is probably the best time because you plant them in the fall. But it takes three years for them to bloom. ah So if you want to have flowers for your bees ahead of time, ahead of three years from now, um Bee Balm is really good. They love that. Hence the name Bee Balm.  And they also really like um basil when it's flowering.
28:38Ooh, we have that planted in the duck area already.  Yeah, they love basil. They love thyme. T-H-Y-M-E thyme.  And uh I can't think of what else. Oh, they love them. ah Zucchini squash blossoms. They love those. And they love winter squash blossoms. So if you wanted to, you could put up a trellis and grow like butternut squash. be so much fun. Yeah.
29:07And it would give them  nectar to play with and make honey. So you can do a whole bunch of stuff because bees are great.  I am not going to lie. I'm being very honest. I'm not a fan of bees. I don't want to keep bees. I love what they do. I think that the wild bees can do just as good as the ones that we might keep. And I would just assume the wild ones do the job.  Yeah. My husband, the homestead is very much more my thing.
29:37uh Like, he likes it. He likes being able to see all the cool stuff that I've done.  He comes out and helps me with fences.  But that's the one thing that he really wants to do is bees. So I really want to get that for him so that he has his little passion project. Well, he needs one because you guys have to be aligned. That's important in a marriage. Yes.  Plus you'll get honey and you can be like, honey, I love the honey that your bees produced.
30:06Well, if you met my husband, he can go through honey like no one's business. His favorite thing to do is go to like little farm stands nearby and get those little like honey sticks that are just straight honey. I don't see the appeal in those, but he'll just drink them all the time. My kids loved those.
30:27When they were little, they loved them and I hated them because they always ended up dripping it on their clothes. They're messy. I don't know. Just too sweet for me, but he loves them. So well, anything that is easy to keep the spouse happy is always a good thing. All right. easy now. Just now that we have this little piece of quietness, you know, if I didn't want to get stressed, it's like, OK, go sit by the duck pond.
30:58Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's why we did it. That's why we moved too, because I just couldn't handle living in town anymore.  We had the opportunity to jump and we jumped to a 3.1 acre from a one tenth of an acre lot. That's amazing. We were ready. We were so ready. We were high from the minute the house, the offer was accepted  until we moved in a month later. And I was just like, oh my God, I'm actually home. It feels like home.
31:28We told the guy who was selling this place, we'll pay whatever you want. It doesn't matter.  We'll pay whatever it is. just went in.  Yep.  Absolutely.  All right, Lily, I try to keep these to half an hour. We're there.  Where can people find you?  I'm  at girlypupacres on Facebook and Instagram.  Awesome. Fantastic. As always, people can find me at a tinyhomesteadpodcast.com.  Lily?
31:53You told me at the beginning that you woke up feeling like you might be getting the flu. Thank you for  sucking it up and taking the time to talk to me. This was really fun.  I'm glad. It was fun for me too. Thank you for having me. All Have a great day. You too. Bye.
 

Cole Canyon Farms - Doin' The Damn Things!

Today I'm talking with Morgan at Cole Canyon Farms. You can also follow on Facebook.
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Morgan at Cole Canyon Farms in Montana again. I think for like the fifth time maybe.  Good afternoon, Morgan. How are you? Good afternoon, good afternoon. Yeah, we've gotten to chat quite a bit since we met a few years ago over those little groovy goats. So I'm excited to be back on.
00:27It's funny how podcasting can create friendships, real friendships.  Yeah. Yeah. It's  actually really honestly the digital age. It's crazy how we can create friends that we don't even see in person, but they, they're a real friend. It's I, mean, there's pros and cons to digital, but that is one of the things I love about it. Like the community I've made and met and the people like you I've gotten to meet have really shaped Cole Canyon farm.
00:55to what it is today, honestly.  Oh, well, I'm glad to hear that. How is the weather in Montana today? It's hot.  We've been in the 70s. I'm not even kidding you. Like, I had shorts on and this is like unbelievable for Montana  to be this warm. So I think it's like 70 today with light breeze. So it's a good, you know, a good day to start spring cleaning and getting all of the, you know, future projects we have done. How's your weather?
01:24It is partly sunny. is 68 degrees. Feels like 68 degrees. I'm looking at my weather app right now and there's hardly any wind today. So that's a nice change from Saturday. Saturday, the wind was blowing so hard. was making the house creek. man. Yeah, it does that to our house. We've had like, so it's windy where I'm at, right? So I'm not ever shocked by wind, but in the last few years, we were seeing more and more gusts. I remember when like
01:5075 mile per hour gusts were huge a few years ago and now this is the second time in the last six months we've had 90 plus mile per hour gusts here. Yeah,  I,  this, I don't even know what to say. I've talked, I talk about the weather on every single episode and I am literally out of things to say except that it's just weird. It is the apps never correct. Like we had rain last night. We could hear it cause we live in a middle, like a metal tin boot.
02:20like 10 house, you Yeah. And I could hear it and my husband, it was like, I don't know, we got in a bed kind of late last night because I went to the auction, the horse auction. So I had a lot to film in on about.  Did not come home with anything, side note, good thing on that. But, you know, we heard just this light pattering and I was like, is that hail? Because like that would normally like snow hail season as this season, right? Yeah. And we were like, no.
02:46No, actually that it's sprinkling outside and the app never updated never said we had precipitation nothing. So I bought uh I think it's a hydrometer or whatever where you stick it outside. I need to figure out the real name for it, but I just called the rain catcher,  but it will tell me how much rain we're getting because I think to be honest with you, they're not they're not as accurately recording what's going on and being a farmer. That's super important. So
03:13because the digital age has changed and we can't rely on these apps anymore as much as we did for weather, I'm having to learn  the old ways, which is always good, right? Like if the electricity goes out, you need to know how to do this. But I've started turning rain myself, so it'll be interesting. I need to look at what we got last night, but I don't think it was enough to even register, honestly, Mary. But yeah, we've had  strange weather here too.
03:37Yeah, I'm at the point where if I want to get kind of an idea of what the weather is going to be in a few days, I will catch the morning news.  Yeah. They seem to be more accurate than the weather apps.  And if I want to know what the weather is right now, I literally step outside.  Yeah, that's how I am too. Like we live kind of on an outlook, right? So the storms whip around us because we're on the top. We're kind of on like it's called a rim out here, but it's like a fat uh kind of a flat  plane that's in the middle of
04:07Some canyons right there's canyons in the middle of it where it popped up. Well, you know it'll if it goes around us left  If it goes around us left then Will sometimes get rain but if it goes right which is into Laurel the city Yeah, then we don't ever see it So you can almost stand on the flat and it'll say that it's you know, hailstorming and it's not where we're at
04:35We don't even have any hail or snow, nothing coming. But in town, they're getting like beaten with golf ball size, literally golf ball size pieces of hail. So I'm, I'm like you, I just walk outside and I try to look, you know, and see if there's any storms blowing in. But you just, don't know. I pack enough clothes, I guess, with me for any type of weather. I've got bibs, I've got jackets, I've got shorts, I've got t-shirts in the truck, right? Like, yeah.
05:01just changes often, so you just go with the flow, but it is gonna make farming interesting this year. So I think having,  like you said, just some idea of where to look for reliable stuff is important. It is, and it's so funny because  I listen to a lot of podcasts about podcasting and everybody's like, don't talk about the weather, it's boring. But anytime I ask someone who is farming, homesteading, ranching, it's not boring.
05:30It's really interesting to hear everybody's take on what they've got going on and what it's doing. Yeah, it literally, I mean your whole life as a farmer is based on an amount of rain that's going to come down if you don't have irrigated land. And  we sadly have to haul every drop of water on and off this property, know, like there's, it's not an option for us. My leach field is green with three or four inches of grass already, which is crazy. The horses love it, you know? So
05:57I think it's going to be great for the animals. They've had a rough swing this year. know my animals really need some extra TLC after going from 70, not even kidding you, down to one degree in less than 24 hours. That's really a big swing. So I think, you know, it's important to watch the weather because of that, but just knowing how to adapt to it. that's something that I'm actually planning my whole life around is all these weather changes, like building more greenhouses this year.
06:27Yeah. Trying to  make more wind blocks. Like that's a whole thing. We've been looking up the Texas Ys.  They're like in Texas, they're known for it. You get a lot of wind there, right? So it's like a Y shape, but they use it for cattle and horses. We've been trying to plan how many of those we're going to need because if not, my poor horses, it doesn't matter where they stand in a shelter, they're going to get, you know, soaked.
06:53with how much wind we have in the unpredictability. can't go put sheets on them, you know, because I don't know when it's going to rain.  exactly.  All right. So let's let's go back to when you and I first talked. When you and I first talked, you were Groovy Grazies, Grazies Montana, and you were raising  goats and taking the goats to parties and things. And the last time we talked in January, end of January,  you had gotten a couple of horses. So
07:23What I'm wondering about is how you got into horses because that really wasn't on the radar for a while. Yeah. So I'm a horse girl. I'm a I'm a covert horse girl. That's what my husband calls me. Right. Because  Andy made fun of horse girls growing up. It's actually funny. One of the girls that I'm going to buy hay from this year, she knew Andy growing up and I was like, I turned him into a horse girl.  So he's like almost completely also turned into a horse girl himself. uh
07:52But I was writing when I was nine actually, ah wild fact about me.  When I was little, ah Mike Baumgartner was my trainer out in Texas and he was like an Olympic  candidate. He actually taught the first girl ever  who was legally blind in death back in like the  1980s or  90s. I'd have to look it up, I haven't in a while to do dressage. So  I did weekly lessons and work.
08:21my hind end off for Mike Baumgartner so I could do extra lessons with him and  I fell in love with horses. My mom gets bit by horses. When she comes out here, she's gonna get bit by every single horse I guarantee you I have on this property.  Not because my mom does anything weird, it's just her energy. I think they know she's scared of her, right?  But yeah, I've been writing since I was nine and then, so Mike Baumgartner, then uh I got into hippotherapy.
08:50um Hippo, sorry, hippotherapy with the horses. um It's uh working with kids and adults on the spectrum,  nonverbal, some kids didn't move. ah And we were using horses to be a form of therapy. And I did that, uh she's almost like kind of like my mom, Tara, actually, out in Texas. And I was going to become an instructor for that. And then we moved to Arizona. So right, like my whole childhood, I was just immersed.
09:18emerged into riding and being around horses. They were kind of my calm spot. then Arizona, I got really, really sick. January 11th, I can tell you the day of 2020. was riding before that, I was riding some Western Pleasures out there with Heather Meyer. So people are horse people, they'll know her. She won some world competitions in Western Pleasure and I was riding some really high end horses and just learning the ropes of that after being in the military. So the military was my big like kind of Hades on.
09:47on writing because in Japan they don't have anything but ponies out there and on the island. So,  you know, I came back uh after my divorce, went to Arizona, wrote for Heather Meyer for a little bit, um learned a lot from her. And then I got sick and stopped writing literally for six years. Just Mary woke up one day and couldn't do the thing that kept me sane.  Oh, yeah, it was rough. So that's why I didn't even talk about it. That's why I wasn't even on the radar. So that's why I'm giving you that backstory. Like, yeah, that's fine.
10:17I never thought I was gonna ride again.  I had a hysterectomy at a young age and I'm very open about that ah because it's a lot of things, a lot of women are having to deal with that. And honestly, it has to do with the chemicals that we're exposed to. So like that's a whole nother tinfoil hat thing we could go down to, but right. So I had a hysterectomy  and didn't ride. And then I got cleared a year ago. So actually it's coming up.
10:42I didn't really talk about the one horse I had because he wasn't on the property a bunch and he wasn't really involved in the business. But  I've had horses my own for about a year now, but I've changed out obviously quite a bit  when I've had as we're trying to figure out the direction of them. But horses are my hobby. So they will never pay for themselves.  They will. I mean, they can. Later on, I'm going to breed.
11:09I've got to throw a bread  off the track. I'm going to breed to my friend Shire that's registered and I'll get a registered baby and that'll move us down the path. like, eventually maybe they'll kind of cover themselves, but they are truly a hobby. So I always tell people like,  you got to decide on your items if it's a hobby or if it's a farm, right? And horses are a hobby for right now. um We do want to get into driving and stuff, but yeah, so that's kind of my background. um I'm a covert horse girl, not your typical horse girl.
11:38and I'm turning Andy into a horse girl himself. He's doing so good with training the babies and gentling him up. And he's seeing the quietness that you have in your brain. Have you ever been around a horse, Mary? Have you ever been? I have. Yes, I have. OK, so are you a horse girl? I got to know now. I am not a horse girl. I would have loved to have been a horse girl, but no one I knew when I was growing up had horses. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was a city girl, right? So it's funny. A lot of people don't know that about me.
12:08Well, I mean, like people that listen to this do, but like a lot of people just assume, you know, that I came from the country and everyone had them, but no, we drove like, I want to say it was like 30 or 45 minutes, one way to Mike Baumgartner's place. And I did that once or twice a week. And that was the only way I could ride. then I, mean, Texas, everyone rides out there or has a horse at a stable. So because I was a horse girl already riding, I just kind of found the rest of the horse girls. So that was really.
12:38of my thing. yeah, so my program right now  is my son's paint,  Liberty. She was born on 4th of July, which is really cool. But he  wanted a really bad so I was bidding at the auction house, which is now my new favorite. uh It's the cheapest thing I can, well, if I don't bring anything home Mary, it's the cheapest. But um you know, I go, take coffee, I buy a drink and a little snack and I go and I'll sit there all day and
13:08And just watch, I mean, it's interesting to understand the horse market, especially if I want to make this not a hobby. I need to understand that. But yeah, I'm going to be offering weaning startings.  I'm going to work with my friend, Hannah Jones, ah to start understanding how to do the missing link. I've ridden,  I've never had a baby this young or ever really, right? Baby horses, never. I've never gotten experiences. So this is all first. And I've done basic groundwork on horses that have been trained.
13:38but never like started. So Hannah's gonna kinda help me start them. But I do plan  on being able to help friends consign their horses and ride them and stuff. Cause not everyone wants to go ride in the auction house. Me personally,  it doesn't bother me, right? um So that's kinda like how that'll play in a coal canyon farm. And eventually we do plan on having some like horse driven, my husband's obsessed with it, horse driven like a...
14:06hay balers, swathers, things like that. He's gone down a whole thing because how diesel's like five bucks here almost. he's going down this whole path because we believe everything here at Cole Canyon Farm has to work for itself. So I still do goat parties, by the way. It's called  agri tourism, by the way. I didn't know that. So like I'm so behind on the time. So I caught up to that wording. was like, all right, cool. But um we're only dedicating
14:35Friday, like Fridays and Saturdays, I have an employee that I've hired. Not an employee, like kind of like a subcontractor. She'll come and help me. And then if she wants to host her own parties, she can use the name and stuff. I got to look into it, right? Like I'm still in the works of like getting insurance fully done because of our expansion, making sure my employee is under there or she has to be a 1099 contractor, making sure I do the right thing for her. And then...
15:04we have the sheep, so we've expanded. So we're still doing groovy grazers that helps the goats pay for themselves. I'm still milking them. I'm about to start milking today actually, because I've had some babies  and they're past their two week stage where I don't really want to milk them. So I've got some does I'm going to milk finally, and I'll sell my milk for that.  I'll have to get tested. Everyone needs to know that if you buy goat milk, you need to ask them. It's not the...
15:31It's not a requirement in every state and it's not really even a requirement in Montana, but a good breeder should have biosecurity screening  down to CL. And if you don't know what CL is, you can totally look at my page. I'm going to put together some courses for that, like basics of buying that'll just be free  information for people.  But CL can be zoonotic and then like making sure if tuberculosis,  fever, mastitis rate. So I'll send off my pathogens.
15:59My stuff for pathogen testing it'll come back. I'll start selling I do sell at 30 a gallon I encourage all of your listeners to do the cost if you were selling it ten fifteen dollars a gallon You are not breaking even it may feel like it but in the long run you are not Yep I believe it.  Yeah people undervalue it. That's a hobby. If you want to be a hobbyist do that. I'm not a hobby
16:27I am a cottage farm that are selling the extras and if I'm going to sell them and my family's not going to consume it, then it needs to be worth my time, right? Because cottage farms, you're allowed to sell your excess. So the goats are still milking. We had sheep. I had  every you drop a baby.  My first year breeding. I'm so proud of myself because sheep is a learning curve.  How many babies? Okay, so tragic story.
16:55But Betty, the one I talked about, because she's like kind of the most important horse here um because of her like role in our whole program eventually. But she's going to make painted pretty mules eventually.  which is our gold mules. I have Betty hits the sheep two weeks before she's due. They're like playing in the field and we're throwing hay, right? So like I'm setting the stage so you understand. So they she runs her over the sheep  and we like checked out the sheep. She seemed fine. Betty was fine.
17:25But like Betty stepped on it and like with the wool kind of like rolled it and it's because they were staring at me with the hay, but super excited, right?  So that  one did have a dead on arrival uh ram. And it was really kind of sad because it had crushed parts of the baby when she stepped on it. I'm glad my U is okay.  And I didn't even like, there's nothing you can do at that point, right? So sad part of farming, that's the reality of it. One of them was born dead. I do know why, which is important when you farm too.
17:55So one ram, then we had two healthy rams born and then two ewes. So I've had five babies, four alive, one dead. So that's a really good ratio because these are first time moms. So I think we talked about it  two episodes ago where we were talking about the changes and why we're moving to sheep. So these sheep  were bred  at nine months old. They have now dropped after a year. So it's five months, right? So they're about a year.
18:24year and a half. They have now  had their babies.  So now these babies will grow up and then they will then be bred this year. All of them will be re-bred. So now next year I'm moving in with seven ewes into breeding season, the end of the season, right? So next year I'll drop seven different ewes. I will butcher one of the lambs,  one of the rams. I have to pick the two because my current ram is a shy eater. I did not know this was a thing about sheep.
18:53that some sheep are shy and they don't want to eat in front of  other animals. So he like literally was withering away. I, because I never saw him eat. I just didn't ever think anything of it because I would catch him kind of by the pile. But because we've been outside a lot more, he wasn't eating.  So I had to move him in with like a really tiny little buck that I have. He weighs like  seriously no more than 30 pounds. So I've got my ram.
19:17in there with this little Nigerian dwarf buck and their best buds and that goat taught him to eat. But because he has this like undesirable trait shy eating, we will process him also. So I'll process two lambs this year, which we will probably put honestly, both of them into our freezer because of the fact that food, right, food scarcity, diesel going up, just kind of the writing on the walls. I'd rather have some meat in there and not the excess.  lamb is really yummy.
19:47Oh my goodness, I breed cheviyat and I encourage people to look at them. They're such an under underrated sheep because they only get up to like 120 pounds as a you, maybe 160 as a ram. they were they're from England and they are meant to graze. They're specifically made to grass grass finish. And I don't want anything that needs to be corns or fed really heavily because I'm I that's more input.
20:15It's not even because of like how unhealthy it is that you eat all the soy and stuff through the animals, but literally because it's more input, right? So that's why I picked these cheviyats. So they're really interesting breed, even though they're smaller. I am getting them sheared this Thursday. So I'm gonna, I'll get to learn about the wool. We'll eventually process that, right? So the sheep really are just kind of coming along as the backbone because Groovy Grazers doesn't pay for itself. And that's where I had to decide.
20:43are we gonna continue down the road, which you and I had kind of talked about on the, a few episodes ago about changes and when we came out with Cole Canyon Farm. Graziers is great. Pivot was a big word in that one, Yeah, exactly. We pivoted, right? So Groovy Graziers is great, but to make it sustainable, it's only got a six month season. It's not really worth it because it's a lot of work and time off the farm for myself. Each visit, if it's an hour long, it's a minimum of three hours off the farm.  If it's a two hour visit,
21:12now you're talking four hours off the farm, right? So it was becoming like a job where nothing was getting done at home, but now we have a lot going on. So another pivot that my son wanted to do was we got pigs. So not only are we now doing sheep, we've got the Nigerian dwarf for milk and parties. We have pigs. My son bottle fed a pig, which was really a good thing for him.  And he decided he wanted to get into them. So we're making a pig pen because I didn't know this, but pigs are like called mortgage lifters.
21:42Yes. Have you ever heard that? Yes. I have never heard that, Mary. Yeah, they're they can be the backbone of a homestead or a farm too, just like the sheep can.  Yeah. So like we got those guys now. Get it.  My friend gifted us those New Zealand rabbits. I think we might have maybe talked about them, but they've had their first litter. And  one, people want to buy them because you can breed them in the backyard. I'm going to do a whole course on how to feed your family.
22:11supplementing with like the rabbits. You can't eat just rabbits. There's a whole syndrome because they have no fat on them.  But there's a way that people can produce beyond chicken at their home and use that as fertilizer. So that's something we're kind of getting into. I had done rabbits before, but I can't eat chicken. you  know, the year just, we're kind of in cute coming to the end of Q1 after April. And so, well, we're into
22:36We were, you know, Q1, whatever. I'm just like kind of lost on the Qs. I've got to look back through them. But I know that Q1, I think ends in April or something.  And I sat down proactively and I was trying to get together what we spent the most money on.  And it was obviously beef, right? Even though I'm buying locally from somebody, which I recommend someone trying to find that or buy a half a beef or something. I buy it by the month. Butcher boxes for my friend here locally.  so beef was such a big number. Well, I did the math on rabbits, right? So I did how much feed?
23:06how much space, how much to build the cages. And I was like, well, with how much I'm buying beef, I can cut that out by half, because I used to have chicken in there. And then it got replaced by beef and raised these New Zealand rabbits. And people are buying them for trios for a hundred plus here, non-paper, just meat rabbits.  That's income. That's good income, actually, like really good compared to the output of a rabbit. So we're also doing that. So I'm really focusing on items that are going to produce for the farm.
23:36that are smaller scale. Like I don't have grass puppy money. That's what I call cows, the grass puppies. I do too. Yep. Yeah, I don't have that kind of money. I'm sorry. For a bottle calf out here, Mary, they're going for over a thousand, a thousand five hundred. Yeah. And a year or two ago, they were going for what? Four or five hundred.  They would take them out back at the auction house, the bum calves, if they couldn't get rid of them. Like if you want to be really like very stark and serious on this podcast, that's the reality of it.
24:04They were begging people to take them.  Now they're little cash cows, literally cash cows, you know, like,  so I don't have that kind of money, but that's okay. Neither do I have that kind of water, cause I have to haul it, nor do I have that kind of like workhorse with the horses. You've got to have horses if you're moving cattle or doing anything with them and any source of like making money off of them.  It's just the reality of it or four wheelers.  So Montana can't really use four wheelers.  We're pretty rugged out here.
24:33That's what we've been up to, right? Like I just launched my website. That's another big thing that happened. We're going to start doing courses. I have to change the date because I just realized I'm going to be the key speaker,  a keynote speaker. So one of the ones that are listed at Earth Day and it's like not in a big auditorium. It's just outside, but I'm going to get to make posters and talk about it. So and have like a set time. So because I got invited to do that.
24:58I'm going to be moving the mini garden course that I'm doing. It's called Garden versus Grocery Bill because let's  be honest, that's how we all feel. ah Right now, yes, we do.  Yeah, so I'm going to move it. It was going to be March 18th, but I'll probably move it, um you know, like one weekend back or move it to a different day. I was going to do it on Saturday, but that's coming up. You can  sign up for free. It's just a free course I'm putting on. um
25:24online and I'll have like a printout. mean, my very own printouts lately, like how I plan my garden, like deconstructing my own ways. like, since we last spoke in January, I don't think I've actually pulled my head up to breathe at all.  was going to say you've taken on a lot in just the last two months. Yeah, but I've worked less. Like, I mean, I haven't like taken a breath as in like leaving for vacation or like
25:53taking a lot of time off of social media or posting or reaching out to people.  But I've taken days off. I take Saturday and Sunday off every week now. I'm a farmer, I can pick my time. Monday through Friday is great, right? We're still doing things on Saturday and Sunday, but it's family time and Sunday is a rest day. So  I wasn't doing that before. You and I talked about Melanie being my coach. She's still my coach, which is awesome. uh
26:21and has been helping a lot, but her biggest thing was like, rest when you need to rest and work when you're inspired. And lately, like I've been doing that. So I just feel really inspired lately to get all these things done. And like some of it,  it's  more aimed at the farm. So having somebody that can help me means that I don't always have to leave, but then like bartering, right? I can barter with my employee for time on the farm too. Like, hey, you know, can I?
26:50have you help me here and then you can take these goats for this party and I don't need a fee at all. Like there's, don't know if that's, you can do that. I don't know, I'd have to check right with a tax person, but  that's kind of our plan is to be spending more time on the farm and then we see the food scarcity. So I think I just feel really inspired lately because of that right there. Like  that's a main driver for me, especially being a veteran. Like Americans not eating and going hungry is like,
27:21I could stand on a soapbox for hours on that one. Like it's really, it's really disappointing to me that we have that um catastrophe in America. So if I can feed people and make some money off and make some scratch, you know, to feed my animals and feed my family, then I'm absolutely going to do it. So that's why I think we've just expanded into just meat animals. It's there's a market for it. There sure is. And Morgan, this is my podcast and I get to say this because I am the one will get in trouble  for it.
27:51Not you. Yeah. People going hungry in this country is absolute bullshit. It  is. I am upsetting. I am  livid  about what is happening in our country right now. And I don't want to get into politics. I don't want to blame anybody in particular, but we all need to stop and look at our lives and figure out what the heck we're doing.  Absolutely. There's no left and right here.
28:20This is Americans helping Americans guys. Like I have the chills saying that, but like my mom's not from this country. My mom's from Iraq,  right? Like I grew up with a very realistic like view that there were kids in this world not eating. If there's  one single person going to sleep at night in America that is starving because they've been denied help, not the ones that don't want help, but denied help makes me as a veteran.
28:50Question what did  I  serve for? Yeah, and I will stand on that soapbox and some people don't like it They tell me that I shouldn't have that view that I should know better as a veteran. Well, yeah, I do know better and that's why I'm upset Yeah, I think there's an awful lot of upset in the world right now and I eat not just in America, but in the world and It's so  hard
29:18And I had a day last week, I didn't do a whole lot of interviews last week, I just didn't. And I had a day where I was like, do I want to keep doing this because I feel like I'm just screaming into the void. Yeah, but you're not.  then I decided that yes, I still want to keep doing this. And I just want to keep pounding on the fact that we all have the right to grow our own food. We have the right to get to know our local growers and producers and support them.
29:48uh And my husband and I, as long as the garden does well this summer,  we'll be donating food to the food shelf. So yes, we are going keep going. Yeah, and you can get tax write-offs, by the way, for donating by pounds.  And like if you want to go become a master gardener, like that's one way that you can donate your time. I recommend Master Gardening course. I went through my local extension office and I did it. I didn't take the test because I know that we want to consult.
30:15people across America and having  that title kind of I Couldn't use it as like a talking point, right? And then it also makes things more conflicting  and I would have to donate hours So for me, it just didn't make sense to get the Master Gardener title But I think for folks that are just looking for a way to help their community Like you can donate food and keep the Master Gardening title and then you're a part of a really cool group or organization without having to search far
30:45or trying to find something to do that you can do in a group, can garden alone, but having access to the books that they hand out. Like my book is specifically for Montana down to when to plant and when to start harvesting.  Nice. That is fabulous. That helps. Yeah. So like,  I think for me and my focus on my farm that like I wanted to talk about was just expansion and how we're securing our animals, how we're securing our food. Like  I'm worried about food.
31:15I will  not have my family go hungry by choice, if that makes sense, right? Like if there's catastrophes, you know, that happened, then it is what it is. But like having to report every year how many head of sheep I have and horses and then get charged for them locally, like for my property taxes is unacceptable.  Having to notify people when I put in a well.
31:42Okay, like I can understand some of it, but like having to have your water tested or them like I've heard of people getting in trouble for not testing their water, you know enough times or whatever and it's expensive Like we shouldn't it's not why is it a pay to play in America? Like it's a pay to live in America like it's  uh The boys describe it my husband and son describe it as like a video game. That's free to play But all the upgrades you have to pay for so like if you want to harvest your water in some states you can
32:10You got to do it illegally. That's not okay. Yeah. You know, like, and then all these data centers, Montana has 11 coming. am pissed about that. Yeah.  I,  I have all kinds of  opposing opinions about AI. Yeah. Because  some of what AI does is really good. Some of it is really terrible. Yeah. Like  I personally don't.
32:41Yeah, I there are some of it. It's built into everything. I'm so tired of everything I used by force having AI somewhere in the background and it not being announced. But then there are some great things that you can use AI for. Like my website builder, I typed in what type of website I needed help with, and it just is going to pull and it did pulled from basics that were like that. Now I went in and had to adjust every single thing in there to be custom.
33:11But that AI usage, okay, whatever. Like I don't have money for a web designer. If I had money for a web designer, I'd go pay somebody, but I just don't, right? As a small business that's trying to help people. So that's where like, I have leniency, but when there's big companies using AI posters, get out of here. They can afford an artist. exactly. You know, so I don't want to, I don't want to make this an hour long episode. already at 33 minutes. Yeah, you're good. But
33:40What I wanted to tell you is I am really freaking proud of you. Thank you. For all the things that you're working on just in the last two months. I mean, I knew you were a go-getter because your catchphrases do the damn thing. Yeah. But, darlin', my god, you are, you are kicking ass and taking names. Yeah, I just want to leave a mark on this world. I'm going to leave this world with only my name. Nothing, none of my worldly possessions, just my name.
34:09So I want everyone to know that like when they hear, right, like my name, they're like, oh, Morgan Cole. Yeah, she did this. Oh, yeah, I learned this from her and it did this for my family. Right. Like, yeah, I'm not here. I could care less about money. I'll be honest. Like, I know I need it. I know I do. But like at the end of the day,  I want to do the thing that I wanted to do in the military, which was make Americans lives better and not even just Americans, anyone's life better. Right. Like I just wanted.
34:39there to be  a world that could coexist. And if me being on this platform doing what I'm doing right now is what I'm supposed to do, I am so here for it. Like I will always do the damn thing. And that has been my thing. And so I'm seeing such a huge gap online with needing information that's correct, not AI generated  and full of crap that doesn't mean anything actual real world experience.
35:07because we used to all sit around and do it, then that's what I'm gonna do. And I'm proud of you too, because I know there are days where I wanna give up farming, but then I remember it and like your podcast does matter. I mean, it  does help people. Like I like the new podcast. I love everything that you're doing, but I think it's so hard for everybody like goes through this where they lose sight of what they're doing because they don't feel that they're making a big enough wave.
35:34just because they don't see it. Like I guarantee you, like you found out today, you're a huge reason why I've shifted the way I have. I've listened to podcasts that you've personally hosted and been like, oh yeah, actually if I did things this way, or listen, they're doing it this way and they're getting really good success, let me try that. Like having that community that you build has been priceless. And like, I have met some of the followers on here. Some of them have messaged me, right?
36:02So connecting people I think is your skill and I think you're really, really damn good at it. And I think you're really good at getting your word out there. Even if the people are silently listening to you, I think you just don't realize, Mary, how many people depend on listening to your episode. Like when you post them, they used to barely get 120 views after a week. You have 100 plus views on some of these episodes the first day you post them. Uh-huh, it's crazy, isn't it?
36:30Yeah, I've seen it grow. So I'm proud of you too. But like also know that I'm sure there's more people that you've touched their lives or changed their lives in a way that you have no idea. And like me personally, I think it would be really cool if people under this episode could post like, what have you learned off of Mary's episodes? What have you learned from another homesteader? Because I want to learn, I want to learn what they may have picked up on that I missed. So like,  I think that
36:56Continuing to do what you're doing, even if you keep interviewing some of us over and over again, there's so much. And I mean over and over again, like, but through time, right? To see the changes, the literal changes that we make as farmers is also very important. So like, I never mind clearing an hour of my day to come on here and answer questions that you have or tell you about what we're doing. Because I think this is like the reality of how we're all going to learn if we want to learn real information. Yeah.
37:24Thank you for saying all of that. And I actually love sitting down to chat with you  every six months. is very short turnaround on this one, but  I love talking with you because  I  know  when we did the first episode where you were at. Yeah. And I've had four times now to see where you're going to through what you're doing now.
37:53And I feel like it's a series. It's not just one episode. It's five episodes. It's a series. Yeah. Maybe you should like group it out in that. Maybe people you interview a bunch, because then people can like tune into this episode, but then they may not realize that was Groovy Grazers before. If they listen to Groovy Grazers that we turned into Cole Canyon. Like that may be even something for you to like expand on, you know, because you're good at that. You're good at showing the changes and showing the like evolving of us as
38:23cottage farmers and homesteaders because there is so much involving pivoting, changing. These are all key words we've talked about.  And I think that's why people are drawn to farming and homesteading and ranching because it's never boring.  mean,  it may hurt like hell when things go wrong. It may make you higher than a kite when things go right, but it's never boring.
38:47No, no, no, there's like literally nothing ever boring in my life. Like if someone asked me what I'm doing, I probably have some crazy story or they're catching me at a horse auction. I'm like, yeah, can't text right now. I'm watching horses go through at, you know, a minute, 30 seconds a piece here at BLS auction, right? Like  never do I have a boring day in my life. There are some days where I'm cussing at the sky, really pissed at my life because of some things that have popped up, you know, but then there are days like today where I'm like,
39:16I walk around, things are a lot cleaner, we're getting things finished, we're buttoning up some projects, and I'm like, damn. Three years ago, there wasn't crap out here. There was literally a tin-like building that my husband lived in with a studio and a little horseshoe dirt mound, and now I have four horses and a pony, and I'm breeding a mare this year, and I've got pack goats, and I've got a pig for...
39:44goodness sake, I've got baby sheep, they're so cute. Oh my god, they're so cute. You're gonna have to include that on the preview. I'll send you specifically the picture. It's smiling. Sheep are so cute, right? But like, had I given up when I wanted to, I would never get to experience this life. I wouldn't get to experience my kid riding around on a horse. You know, I wouldn't get to experience all these things that I wanted in my childhood, but now I'm able to give them. And my parents just, they didn't want to the country life. Fine.
40:12but I wanted to live this life, so I'm gonna do the damn thing. like, everyone listening, you can farm, and I call it farming, right? Because you're producing stuff. You can actually profit off of an acre or less, and that's something else I'm gonna be going into on a whole fricking course because too many people think because they're in town on a quarter acre or less, they can't produce their own food. But there are ways, and I think...
40:37that these types of podcasts are going to be the way that Americans will continue to feed themselves. And I think you got to remember that. Like you're helping people actually feed themselves. Yeah, I'm trying and I'm, I'm so thankful for all the people that have talked with me to share how they're doing it.  Um, real quick. Yeah. I understand what you're saying about when you first moved there, there was nothing cause, uh, you knew about how we put up the hard side of greenhouse. Yeah, I remember. Yeah.
41:07or we're planting seed, we have planted seeds in there this year. We have no  seedling trays on our kitchen table this year. Everything is being planted in greenhouse. way. I remember that being like a huge stress for you too. You're like, there's everything everywhere  in my house.  like,  I remember when you got to eat some strawberries out of the greenhouse. Last spring, yep. Yeah, you were so excited about that. We're going to be building some tunnel greenhouses where
41:35you know, winter, you'll winter it normally, we get a lot of snowfall. like, well, and you've been getting snow too. So everywhere, everywhere has been getting snow. But you know, like that's something I'm going to be working on. So I can't wait because I was telling my husband, I was like, oh, I can't wait to tell Mary when  I eat my first strawberries out of my greenhouse, because my husband builds them. That's something he like professionally has done um for dispensaries and stuff. yeah, I'm it's gonna be exciting. I think we should definitely check back in at least six months.
42:04This fall.  Yeah, this fall. See where we're at. I'm like fully booked for May already with goat parties. Yeah.  So in April is filling up. So I think like it'll be really cool to see what changes are next. You never know. Maybe I'll find a unicorn.  If you do, I want pictures.  Oh, I will totally send you pictures. Maybe if it has wings, it's a Pegasus. Maybe I'll fly and come see you. That'll be my new transport with gas these days.
42:33Wouldn't that be great?  Yeah. Thanks for having us on. I appreciate you so much. And  if any of the listeners feel like compelled um to reach out to me or if you have questions, like please do. Like that's that's my favorite thing to do is answer questions or help people get started on their journey or try and find hang ups, you know, that they're having because I think that human connection is so precious  and we don't I mean, we all take it for granted. So like, please reach out, ask questions like I encourage you.
43:02to connect with us. Yep, absolutely. Your website is coalcanyonfarms.com. Yep, .com. has an S on it. So Farms with an S, because we will eventually be buying more. So it's Farms. And then Facebook is Coal Canyon. And then Instagram is Coal Canyon Farms. OK, awesome. As always, you can find me at a tinyhomesteadpodcast.com. Morgan, I love you.
43:31Keep up the good work. proud of you. I love you too. I'm so proud of you. I'll see you in, well, we'll say six months, but let's see where  we're at next time we meet up, okay? All right. Thank you. Bye.
 

modernhomestead95

Today I'm talking with Westen and Taylor at modernhomestead95. You can also follow on Facebook.
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters.  I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Taylor and Westen at Modern Homestead 95, and I'm sure we'll find out what the 95 is about.  In Arkansas, did you say, Westen? Yes, we are. We're  in Northern Central Arkansas.  Awesome.
00:28I told you to shut your video off because it uploads better without the video. But from what I saw before you shut the video off, it looks beautiful in Arkansas. Is it gorgeous there today? It is. Yeah, it's a 55 degrees and it's spring's starting to show itself. So we got all the trees blooming and the grass is turning green and starting to grow. things are all coming alive. All the bugs are coming out. Yeah. favorite part. Homesteaders.
00:57Favorite time of year, I swear, is March and April. Yeah, it's a good time. Get everything going and just life seems to be waking back up. So yes, the long,  horrible winter is almost over.  I'm in Minnesota. It is sunny. is windy as hell this morning  and uh it's only about 35 degrees. So  I was going to say probably still cool up there.
01:22Yeah, we had a 90, not 90. I think it got to 81 last weekend. Okay. And then it cooled right back down. I was like, okay, that's the second fall spring. Maybe the next one will be the real one. You know, we've done that a couple of times down here too. We kind of warmed up. What was it the other day? 89? Yeah. Yeah, I think we might've even hit 90 and then it's, it was 35 last night. So. Yeah. 90 in March is just gross.
01:51Yeah, it's like we're not ready for summer yet. No, no, you cannot go from winter to summer overnight. We have to have spring. Yes, yeah, much nicer with them intermittent gradual incline. Yes. So the name of your place is Modern Homestead, Modern Homestead or 95. What's the 95 about? So my wife and I were both born in 1995. Okay.
02:19So, yeah, we... It's a good year. Yeah, it's a good year and Modern Homestead was taken and so this is Modern Homestead 95. Well, that is a brilliant thing to call it. My kids are 36 and 34 and 28 and 24. So my older two are
02:48are right around you guys' ages. yeah, yeah, it's perfect. Yep, it's so funny because I used to think that 30 was old. No, 30 is not old. Right. Yeah, I just realized that a little while ago. Yep. turning 30, we're like, no, we're still some spring chickens. Yes, and even at 56, you can be a spring chicken. Just make sure you take care of your health until you get there. I remember that. Yeah.
03:17Tim McGraw has a song called in my, I don't know the name of the song, but the chorus is in, or the verses start within my next 30 years. And in my next 30 years, I want to be 25 again. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. All right. So what do you guys do at the Homestead? And did I read that it's, you've been, the Homestead has been a hundred year in the family? Yeah. Well, it's not in the family. we bought,
03:46our property and house two years ago in 2023 and we moved out here to Arkansas from California. Oh wow. Yeah, so we were just just tired of all the the nonsense that California has going on with it. Just we don't need to get into politics and everything but we don't agree with a lot that the state has going on and the way they handled
04:15COVID and  everything, we just didn't feel like it was the right way to go about it. um we've been looking  for a place to move for already a year when  COVID started going on.  And we had traveled around a couple of different states and  looked. I've lived in Texas and Mississippi and driven from coast to coast and back.
04:45And we took a trip out to Florida and looked  and it was just getting pricey  and we couldn't really afford what we wanted.  And  one day we were sitting  in our apartment at the time. We had a little 600 square foot apartment or something.  And  my wife Taylor was like, have  you thought about Arkansas? And I was like, I don't know anything about Arkansas.
05:12We started just looking it up  and  researching and it's just kind of checking the boxes.  And we had a pretty good list of stuff we were looking for, wanted and needed and things like that. And  so we just kind of went down the list  and it seemed to align pretty well. And we were like, let's take a trip out there and see what it's all about. And we did. We spent two weeks  or a week,  one week driving around in the car.
05:42and just sleeping in the car and  fell in love with it. Trying to find where we wanted to be in the state. But yeah, we did. We  really liked just the landscape and the people are laid back and just down to earth.  you know, we'll help you if you need it.  just lots of God fearing people and beautiful country. And  the price was right. We found a spot. um
06:11not too far out of town and we  bought a house with seven acres  and we've just been... uh The house is what was 100 years old and just needed everything. um I mean, we've... Gosh, we've done so much in the last couple of years since we've been here. Gotten dropped by our homeowners insurance a couple of times for things and, you know, had to rush to fix stuff to get...
06:40our insurance back and yeah, actually last week we just got kind of to a stage where we're going to call it in quotes, let's say done. We've replumbed the whole house, redone all the sheetrock and texture and paint inside and move some walls around and tore down some walls and
07:07We completely redid the whole kitchen, reframed the floor in it and everything, new cabinets, all new appliances. Went through the outside of the house. We got a new roof. Just sealed everything up, painted the whole house. So it's been a journey. And along with all that, I work full time and we were pregnant when we moved out here.
07:38with our first kid  and had her  and then  got pregnant again and we just had our little boy, our second kid. um in the middle of all that, we decided  we,  you know, wanted to  do what we came out here for  and that was  just kind of be a little more, I don't want to say self-sufficient because self-sufficient is such a uh big encompassing uh umbrella.
08:08But I think we just wanted to be a little more, I guess, stable kind of in our own environment where  we know where our food's coming from a little bit and it doesn't have all  the chemicals and pesticides and everything that are on it from the store  and, you know, good,  healthy meat that's been  treated right and just free-ranged and um
08:37grass-fed and  and so we  built a chicken coop. I went down to the mill here in town. We have a redwood  cedar mill  and bought a bunch of first cuts which is just the like a half round log with one flat side and so I bought like four big bundles of those hauled them on our flatbed here and  and
09:06pressure wash them and ripped them all down and built this chicken coop we have out of red cedar.  And that was a really fun project that uh kind of got the  online presence started. I was just doing all this work and I was like, you know, I
09:27I  want our homestead  to  not only  generate good food and good things for our family, but I also,  if it can, you know, provide a little bit of, uh you know, monetary money for our family. uh The whole goal for me is to
09:55not be working full time  and  being able to have some more time with my kids as they grow  and my wife and just just
10:07That was another one of the reasons we moved out here is the cost of living is a little  less  than most places.  And  in the goal of all that, was hoping to set up the homestead so it can provide for our family in a way where we spend less money. And so we have to generate less money  and I can have more time. So the whole  goal in this thing is really freedom. um
10:36Good healthy food and freedom, I guess. That sounds like a lot of the people that I talk to on a weekly basis.  Very impressed that you guys managed to do this young, because not everybody who's young has what it takes to do it. Yeah, thank you. I'm going to just take that compliment and say thank you, because yeah, it's not easy. um
11:05just got up and worked hard every day to be here. Before my career has, I've been an elevator mechanic. so, and before that I was in the Air Force. And so, I did my Air Force career and then I jumped into the elevator mechanic thing, did that for about 10, 11 years.
11:36And then I actually broke my back in a motorcycle accident  and  got laid off and  got hired with another company and just kind of set the wheels in motion ah for this all to happen, I think. um
11:56So it can be done at any age. Like we were talking earlier, age is just a number on paper. And you just get up and make it happen.
12:14pray, pray  to God that His will be done in your life because it's really not up to us. We can do everything right, everything wrong, it doesn't matter. It's really what it comes down to is God's will in our life.  Yes.  So, number one, thank you for your service. Number two, congratulations on achieving the dream and
12:42I know that the dream isn't done because if you're a homesteader, you always have new ideas you want to try, right?  And congratulations on the new baby  and the fact that you guys are raising a little girl and a little boy. Kids are great. I miss my babies so much. Like I love that they are functioning adults. are good people, but man, there are days where I'm like, you know,
13:11They were very sweet when they were babies. I know. feel like we're already going through that because our daughter, she seems light years bigger and older now that we have this little baby. Oh yeah. we're just trying to soak up every moment we have because it does go quick. Yes. The minute you bring a newborn into the house, if you have an older child, that older child seems like they're already full grown to you. I swear. It's so weird.
13:41Okay, so I could hear your chickens squawking in the background. How many chickens you guys have? So we have 11 right now, which is the lowest number we've had in a while. We started with like 22 or something. And just nature kind of took its course. Chickens are good food for everything. And we have some neighbor dogs that were out roaming around. They got a couple. We had a
14:09a couple hawk attacks  and then  we had a couple guineas that were just  being mean. They were rooster uh guineas  and  so I actually processed them along with another  rooster  and so yeah, now we're down to 11. And then we had another two hawk attacks or something after that  down to 11.  But  I do have an incubator in the mail right now.
14:39and we're gonna put 20 eggs in there when it shows up.  Good plan.  Have you ever done that before? uh We have not. No, it'll be our first time hatching.  Okay. um I haven't done it before, but I watch a lot of videos about chickens and quail. We're looking into quail right now because my husband was like, we should look into quail. was like, okay.
15:09Yeah, the thing that I have been seeing a lot of is it's the humidity in the incubator that can be the problem. So be sure you watch that. Gotcha. Okay. Good to know.  And I guess that sometimes when the eggs hatch,  the chicks don't come out quick enough and the membrane in the egg can get wrapped around them and dry out. And there are two schools of thought.
15:39You either give them a little time to see if they figure it out and get out of the egg  or  you don't and use tweezers and you try to pull the egg off of them.  And I guess there's an amniotic sack that is attached to the chick when it first is hatching.  If you rip that amniotic sack, the chick will die. So you got to be really careful if you're going to try to heal m the membrane.  Help them. Yeah. So I hope that helps you.
16:09I don't know, I haven't done it.  And this is another thing that's kind of like on my mind  when  we  do this.  So we have uh a really mixed flock. I mean, we've got a couple of... I don't want to say everything, but... We've golden comets, blue sapphires,  cinnamon queens, a silky rooster,  and guinea hens. And some guineas. And so  it's...
16:38I don't even know if the guinea hens  eggs are fertilized. ah I'm going to have to crack a couple and see, but pretty much everyone else is it seems like, but they're all fertilized from our silky splash silky rooster. Uh huh. So is it good to  mix  silkies with all the other breeds? mean, is that, are we going to have like issues?
17:04or like  mutation issues or is it just gonna be fine? I wish I could tell you because I don't know the answer but what I can tell you is that people have been cross breeding creatures forever so  the worst thing you find out is that you shouldn't do it.
17:24You know? Yeah, that's kind of where we were at and we  just figured we'd give it a try, see what happens. Yep. And Google supposedly knows everything, so you could always Google it. Right. Yeah.  And at this point, it's like, you know, once you have chickens  and you look at the price chicks cost, it's, you know, five to eight dollars for one of them.  Nowadays, yeah. It's like, this is crazy.
17:54I have chickens, I have eggs. em You know, I'll just hatch my own. That's kind of where we're at. Yep. Try it. See what happens. I mean, again, the worst thing that happens is that you can't cross those, but you could probably find somebody who's got a rooster that would make sense. Yeah, exactly. So the next step in our kind of homestead journey, I think, is this year we're going to work on getting the garden going. em We had a couple planters on the porch last year.
18:24And we got some tomatoes and jalapenos and bell peppers and a lot of strawberries and some spinach and stuff like that. But  just want to expand and get some in-ground stuff going. I have an avocado tree that I need to transplant  that we started from seed and.
18:45Get a little, I'd love to get a little orchard going.  Probably gonna just start some stuff from seed and then obviously get some root cuttings.  So that'll be fun.  Yeah, that's kind of where we're at now. um And just sharing our  journey with everyone.
19:09Yeah, I saw that you started a YouTube channel in 2025 and you have a ton of videos already up. Yeah, so I was trying to do a couple a week there and I did for a good while. And I've tapered off recently just because of life and if I don't make any excuses, I just need to...
19:38start doing it again. But we have been busy just with the house and and the new baby and everything. Yeah. Yeah. Suck that baby up because it doesn't last long as we were saying. Just spend as much time with him as you possibly can. Yeah. That's what we've been doing whenever he's not in the wife's arms. I usually got him. So. Uh huh. So speaking of well two things. If you're going to plant are you going to plant apple trees?
20:09I do have some apple seeds and I was going to plant those and hopefully some root cuttings. Apple trees take at least three years from sapling stage to produce apples. And I know this because we put in saplings and it took almost four years for us to get apples. So don't count on apples the first year because there probably won't be any. Yeah, I was telling
20:38Telling Taylor, just don't count  on anything from  the orchard really.  Cause it's just gonna be  a long game. is. It's a long tail game and it's hard to wait. We just got our first really good harvest of  honey gold apples this past fall. Well, congratulations. That's great. That was fabulous, except I don't like them. They're like golden delicious apples.
21:08And I don't like Golden Delicious because they're kind of grainy. don't like them.  However, my husband loves them. So he was eating an apple a day until they were gone. Oh, that's great. Good. Yep. I'm waiting for our honey crisps to actually produce because I love those. Gotcha. Gotcha.  OK, so not that you aren't wonderful to talk to, Weston, but I would love to hear from Taylor about how she feels about  the experience that you've been going through for the last year. Absolutely.
21:37Absolutely. So Taylor, tell me what you're thinking. Yeah, I know it's been great. It's been such a fun journey to embark on with my husband and starting a family out here in Arkansas has truly just been,  it's been amazing. It's been filled with um a lot of growth as well.  I think that it was a  a very bold move  to do what we did,  especially in the midst of finding out that I was pregnant.
22:06But so so happy that we did because looking back we're just two people that  have really  grown so much and have accomplished so much together So it's been a really cool cool journey to go through I'm glad to hear that my second question for you Taylor is do you have a community of other women who help you because  I? Did not really have a community of women when my kids were babies, and I wish that I had so do you have one?
22:34So yeah, mean,  to be honest, that's actually been kind of hard to cultivate. I am proud to say that uh now that we're a couple years in, because I think we've been here for almost two and a half years,  I think over the last about eight months, I've really been able to kind of find my tribe  of other moms who have kids ah of similar ages um in the community and have really kind of bonded with several uh women.
23:04and moms. And so that's been really great because as you know, we moved from California. So we actually, we don't have any family out here. So it has been, it has been difficult. But yeah, I am, that's kind of the next phase now that the house is done and we have some more free time and  you know, cultivating friendships as an adult is, is a lot harder than it is when you're a child, just cause you don't have the time that it takes. So um
23:33I am starting to get that and I'm so thankful for the friendships I've made. Good, because I've said this a couple of times to a few people in the last month or so, especially brand new moms or brand new moms, but they also have older kids. You have to have other women to tell you stuff. Because no one hands you a freaking guidebook when you have a baby. I know. And what's funny is...
24:01You know, we talked to like our moms and it's been, you know, 30 something years since they've had babies. And so it's even hard for them to recall certain like, you know, nuances of what it's like and how they did this and things like that when the babies are young. So it's definitely important to have some, some other women to bounce some stuff off of. Yes. Wouldn't it be a lot easier if they did give you a guidebook when you went home with the new baby? I'm telling you. Yeah, it would be.
24:30The other thing that is hard is that things have changed so much since our mothers had babies. Right. I mean, funny is things have changed even from our first born. uh Like in the hospital, you know, they kind of go over a few things and there's even some guidelines that have changed just from two years ago.  Yeah, it's nuts. And the one guideline that is always a constant is just love them through everything.  Yep.
25:00If you can do that, you've got it beat by a mile. And Weston, I hope you have dad friends because men need friends that have kids too. Yeah. Yeah, that's something that I'm going to start putting some more energy towards. Plus, you miss out on all the dad jokes you need to learn if you don't have dad friends. He's pretty good at those, I have to say. Good. He's a natural. All right.
25:28A question for both of you and I want two different answers because I want  both of your perspectives. What is your favorite thing that has happened since you moved to the homestead?
25:41Well, for me, I mean, I don't know if I'm biased, but I mean our babies, our babies and having chickens. Having chickens has always been something that I've really wanted. And so just going through that and having them out in the yard and holding my babies and soaking up the sun, it's been like the most fulfilling experience. Okay. Weston, what about you? I think.
26:11just watching  Taylor and I's marriage grow  and  just become what it is because we've been out here um by ourselves. We've just kind of had to rely on each other. And I think that just cultivated a strong bond that we have that just can propel us through.
26:41trials  and  just showed us how much each of each other really care about one another and we're willing to  you know sacrifice  and and take care of each other no matter what's going on so  spoken like a man who adores his wife awesome ah okay so I know you guys have chickens do you have other animals too
27:10We don't right now. We used to have a little  dog when we moved out here and we sadly had to  put him down for some health reasons.  yeah. Thinking about sheep. oh Sheep is  potentially sheep or goats. We haven't really decided because both are fun, but both come with their own stuff. um I got to the yard fenced. Yeah. Yes.
27:37Yes, but good fences make good neighbors and that doesn't just apply to human neighbors. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Keep those dogs out.  Yeah. For sure.  And yeah, go ahead. We're right now,  the  incubator is coming and we're working  on,  I got a clear a bunch of trees for the garden area and I think we're just going to
28:08plant in the ground this year and just try and get something  and then next year  work on maybe some raised beds  and then probably getting the fence in and stuff like that. So.  Very nice. You guys have so  much to look forward to in the future.  I had another question and I forgot it because that's what happens when you get over 50. You forget things really easy. um
28:37Or just when you're pregnant. feel like my brain never recovered from the first child and then now having the second, it's like compounded. So I'm constantly like, what was I doing? What was I about to say? Maybe that's what it is. that maybe having all those kids just screwed up my brain forever. Who knows? So I don't know. don't know if I have any more questions for you. I am very
29:06excited for you both.  I  love it when young people get into this and I just remember my question. I knew as soon as I started making small talk it would happen. um Have you guys gotten into the food side of homesteading like preserving or canning or sourdough or any of that? Not yet. That's definitely going to be something we do get into though. Once I think the babies get a little older and I have some helpers,  that's definitely going to be um
29:35We're gonna be doing a lot of stuff in the kitchen  from scratch. Yes, and I just, have another podcast that I do with a co-host and we just recorded an episode about cooking from scratch and if you'd like I can send you the link when it's released. Yeah, that would be great. Okay, cool. The other podcast is called Grit and Grace in the Heartland and we have been having such a good time with it since January. We just started it in January.
30:04So other than that, I don't think I have any other questions and I try to keep these at 30 minutes and we just rolled to 30 minutes. That was perfect timing. Where can people find you guys? They can find us at Modern Homestead 95 on Facebook and Modern Homestead 95 on YouTube. That is the only two platforms we're on right now and we are just so thankful.
30:30that we were able to talk with you today and having us on. And hopefully we can do this again soon and maybe after we have a little bit more growth here. yeah, we just appreciate your time and hope you have a great rest of your Saturday. I would love to have you guys back. And as always, you can find me at AtinyHolmsteadPodcast.com.
30:54You guys, so proud of you. Keep doing the good work and bring those babies up in the Homestead Life cell. You're doing them a huge favor if you do.  Thank you so much. All right. Have a great Saturday. You too. Thank you. God bless you.
 

Redwood Seeds

Today I'm talking with Kalan at Redwood Seeds. You can also follow on Facebook.
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Kalan at Redwood Seeds in  California. Good morning, Kalan, because you're not in California right now.  Good morning. Yeah, it's 10 a.m. here  where I am in New Zealand. Tomorrow, for me, right? Yes. It's Tuesday for you.
00:28Yeah, that's right.  Yeah, I've interviewed a couple of people in Australia and New Zealand and  it's so confusing because for me it is  4.03 in the afternoon on  Monday.  Yeah, definitely. It's confusing for me as you've seen trying to um set up meetings with people, especially the states just went through the time change.
00:52Now it's a four hour difference for me. then when New Zealand goes through its time change in about another month, then it becomes a five hour difference the next day. Uh-huh. I, every time I talk to somebody who's that far away, I say that it's, it's actual time travel because it might as well be. Yeah. feels like it. Whenever we travel down here, we basically miss a day.  It's crazy. You lose an entire day. oh
01:19Okay, so I want to talk about redwood seeds, but I also would love to know why you're in Austria in New Zealand.  Yeah, definitely. Well, I married a man from New Zealand 20 years ago. So we come down here  a couple of months every year during our off season  and spend time with family. Well, that is a hardship to have to go to New Zealand, boy. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, it's different. We come down here or not really tourists, so we don't like.
01:49You know, it's less of a vacation and more just like my kids, go into the public school system when we're here and we  sort of just live normal life, you know, but we get to stay on the farm with em my in-laws. And that's really, really wonderful. That's really interesting. What do they farm?  They're both retired now, but my husband grew up on like a mixed em sheep  and cattle ranch. oh
02:17the kind with like 2000 sheep, they're shearing for wool and that kind of thing. Okay, cool. That you are a very interesting lady. I'm very glad that I asked to talk to you. so tell me all about Redwood Seeds and what you do. Okay, well, we are based in Northern California. We're about three or four hours north of San Francisco up in the foothills of Lassen Volcanic National Park, actually. So if you're looking at
02:47California, we are in the eastern slopes, the eastern foothills at about 2,500 feet. And we have a organic seed farm. We grow organic vegetable, herb, flower seeds, and sell them in packets, essentially. We started doing this in 2009. And then...
03:11have  now we're expanded into like about 70 different retail stores. So we have seed racks in those stores and send seeds to the stores, you know, a few times a year for customers. And then we also have a website where we sell our seeds.  It's redwoodseeds.net.  And  sometimes I sell at like different festivals and markets and things like that.  I would say that I call us a farm based seed seed company.
03:40grow the majority of the seed that we sell. I do  purchase some  extra seed  from other organic seed farms, mostly in the western states.
03:54Yeah, we usually offer about 150 different varieties. um All of our varieties are open pollinated, which means that you can, they're not hybrids, essentially is what that means. And you can  use traditional seed saving techniques  and uh save the seeds  and you'll get trutatite results. Most of, many of them are heirlooms,  which means that the variety is like pre 1950.
04:22but we also have a lot of really great varieties that have been bred using traditional plant breeding techniques  since 1950. Okay. So since you do this for a living, I have a question.  I bought a 60 day watermelon seed from, I want to say it was burpee, but I could be wrong  and I'm pretty sure it's a hybrid. Okay. So,
04:51If we were to save, if we get any melons out of it, I bought 12 seeds, we're praying we get watermelons out of it this year.  If we get watermelons, which means we get seeds, and we plant those seeds, if we save those seeds and plant them, is there any chance that  we'll get seeds producing 60 day watermelons  next summer? There's a chance, yeah.
05:15The way that it goes is that hybrid, it's called the F1 generation. Sometimes you see hybrids referred to as F1s. That's the first generation after the cross has been made.  That watermelon had two different parents that were crossed together to make the hybrid. Then when you save seeds  from the hybrid, the next generation is called the F2 generation.  That's when you start to see the genetic diversity come out. Seed breeders do this on purpose. A seed breeder
05:45would make the cross, get the F1, then save the seeds from it, and then plant them. You might plant 100 seeds from it, and you might see 20 or 30 different types of melons pop up, or however many, but you'll start to see genetic diversity. So you could theoretically plant out a lot of that F2 generation and look for the 60, whatever is closest
06:14to the 60 day melon that you loved and save seeds from that one and then do that again for like seven more years. And you might be able to stabilize that hybrid into an open pollinated variety. That's like backwards breeding, right? Yeah, that sounds like a really fun science project. may have to try that. Yeah, that's what seed breeders do. Okay. I just, knew there was something about hybrid seeds that it may not come back true.
06:44That's the thing. That's why when you're saving seeds, um that's just to start with open pollinated varieties. And so that's what we do. We only grow open pollinated varieties um so that we can save seeds from them and we know that they're going to be true to type. Okay. Thank you for  humoring me in my question because  I wanted to ask somebody who really, really knew and I figured you would really, really know.
07:12No, it's kind of a common question actually, or like people have this thought that you can only grow heirloom seeds if you want to save seeds, but it's really the term is open pollinated. Open pollinated means that basically it's not a hybrid. Okay. Thank you so much.  As I sit here with a big smile on my face, because now when my husband asks, I can be like,  yes, we can save the seeds. Yes, you can plant them, but,  but is the key word there.
07:41Okay, so do you have a background in this  or  how did you get into savings? Yeah. uh No, I don't. I mean, if you had asked me when I was a teenager,  if I thought I was going be a farmer, it would have been like the last thing on my mind. um And  I didn't really know what I was going to do. did go, um I went to UC Santa Cruz  and was a language studies major. So I learned to speak Spanish really well. um
08:11but and studied like linguistics and journalism. um But it was during  that time, like in my early  20s, I also became garden curious  and started taking, like I took a garden class in college. And then I um met my husband and he was traveling through Santa Cruz,  doing like a rock climbing tour of the Western States. um And  I went and visited him in New Zealand on my spring break.
08:40And he had a big garden going over there. so I remember we, we just sort of started gardening together really.  Um, and then we lived in New Zealand for nine months and  his parents let us  put in a garden, like, you know, in the back, couple acres of their property.  And, um, I don't know, we just, got really into it and we traveled back and forth between New Zealand and us for a few years. And then we ended up.
09:11buying some land in Northern California where we didn't really know what we were going to do, but we knew that we wanted a rural lifestyle. We ended up starting to grow seeds on contract for larger seed companies like Seeds of Change and Fedco Seeds. And we did that for a few years from like 2006, 2007. And it kind of quickly became obvious that
09:38to really make a living doing it, we needed to get our own label and start packaging seeds in packets rather than selling like a pound of seeds um for a relatively low price. um So we did that in 2009. We just kind of got some coin envelopes from Office Depot and had a stamp made and started stamping packets. And my husband started making wooden seed racks and we  literally like showed up at Chico Natural Foods
10:07with a seed rack and seeds in the back of our car and asked them if they wanted to  start carrying our seeds in their store. And  luckily somebody was in a good mood that day and they said yes. em And we're still in that store today. So. so that leads me to my next question. Are there regulations from the state of California about selling the seeds that  you produce?  Yeah, definitely. I mean, you have to register with the CDFA. em
10:37California Department of Food and Agriculture.  And we are registered seed sellers.  As a registered seed seller, you have to like adhere to their packaging requirements and their germination standards and all of that. And they have, you know, like the local county ag inspectors who can and do sometimes do inspections.
11:00So, okay. I figured the government would have their fingers in it. Yeah, definitely. It's not, it's not onerous. I mean, the, the  more difficult standard is the organic certification. You know, we are certified organic by CCOF California certified organic farmers and have been since 2007,  I think.  Um,  so that's a yearly inspection where an inspector comes out and they mostly want to look at our
11:29paperwork uh and then they tour around the farm as well. So how hard was it to get your certification because I keep hearing that getting certified organic is an utter pain in the ass with paperwork and it's expensive. It is expensive.  It's about a thousand dollars a year. uh California has, ah oh they did have, I mean I'm not sure how much of  a cost share they're gonna have this year. It's been kind of
11:57decreasing, but it used to be a 75 % cost share where  you would get reimbursed that much by the state of California for becoming organic. um Now that I know what to do for the certification, it's not that difficult. um when you start out and you just don't really know what they're looking for, and maybe you don't really know how to keep records, ah it can be much more difficult.
12:26I became certified organic when I had to like fill out a paper form, but now it's all digitized, you know.  So I don't know, I have a friend who's, who's signing up on it right now. And honestly, if you, if you know how to fill out applications and tick the boxes, then  it's not too, too difficult. If you're on a piece of land that has previously been farmed conventionally,  then it becomes more difficult um for sure.
12:55Okay. And then  since, since you're someone who sells seeds that you produce yourself,  um,  I assume that every state is different, but if you were,  if you  grew,  I don't know, some tomato variety and you save the seeds and you wanted to give some to a friend in California,  that's fine. Right? That's fine. Yeah. But
13:23If you wanted to sell it to a friend, can you do that on a small scale and not have to do all the bureaucratic stuff or is that a no-no?  Oh, I'm sure you can do it. Yeah. I mean, and I think that like you don't have to become a licensed seed seller in every single state to, my business is based out of California. I'm selling the seed from California. So that's where I have my seed selling license from. I mean, that would be.
13:52really a lot of paperwork if I needed to become a seed seller in every state. We definitely ship seeds all around the country. Yeah, it's so funny since I started the podcast over two and a half years ago, I have talked to people all over the country and many, many of them, I'm guessing at least 85%, maybe 90 % have started a business.
14:19around their homestead or the craft that they make or the food that they produce. And every single state has different laws regarding that kind of business. Yeah. And I'm like, could we maybe find a standard here for everybody? That would be cool. definitely. Yeah, know that. Yeah, definitely. There are also many different standards. It's true. It's true. Yeah, I don't know. It's it's
14:47That end of things, mean, there's always,  for me as a farmer, and I'm sure a lot of other farmers, it's like, we started because we just want to farm and we want to do agriculture, want to grow things or um work with animals. But the business side is always a steep learning curve.  And definitely for me too. mean,  if I could go back and do it all over again, I would have probably studied like plant biology and business or something, you know, or
15:16Kind of business major and when I had the chance to be in university, um I back in those days, I looked at business majors and I thought they were like selling out to the man or something. uh,  but now it's like, those are the skills that farmers also need to succeed in having your own business. So, um, I've had to like belatedly learn all of that.  And in fact, I'm, taking an accounting one-on-one class at my community college right now.
15:46Um, so. Well, that's good. mean, I, I  say that I have got to know itis, which means that I have an overactive need to know.  And I'm always taking some kind of course, whether it's a lady just sent me a course on raising quail.  Interesting.  Cause we're, looking into doing that on our place. Cool.
16:13I haven't had a chance to sit down look at it yet because I've been busy with podcast stuff and oh yeah, dishes. There's always washing dishes to do here. Definitely. And so I'm hoping to get a chance to sit down tomorrow afternoon and look at the course and see if it's videos or if it's written or how it works. But very excited about this. I don't need to know how to raise quail. I could probably just go get some quail. My husband will build the coop and we'll figure it out from there.
16:43But because it's interesting and because I have got to know it is I have to the course. There you go. Okay. have, I have questions about number one,  what kind of produce do you grow to save seeds from? And then number two, what's the process that you go through to save the seeds? Yeah. Um, you know, we really  save seeds from just about most crops.  Um, everything from corn and beans to lettuce and tomatoes and squash and onions and.
17:14Um, most of the major vegetable types we save seeds from and increasingly more and more, um, flowers too. Like I would say that flowers are, I don't know, 30 % of our seed sales now are 40%. Like it's more and more. When we first started, really, I don't know that I was anti flower, but I was definitely like, if I'm going to grow it, has to be something to eat, you know,
17:43But as we've progressed, I see more more uh value in growing things for pollinators and just for beauty.  so we have more flowers now  and a lot of herbs too,  medicinal herbs like yarrow and milkweed and  things like that.  I'm so happy to hear  milkweed because we need the monarchs to keep coming back. Yeah, definitely.  We have a really big patch of milkweed now. uh
18:13And the thing is, like, I never see monarchs. Like, rarely do we ever see a monarch.  Instead, we get that milkweed beetle that loves the milkweed, that red beetle. um But it's there in case they want to find us. So,  you know, we grow all the produce, but uh and my family eats from our gardens, but  we don't sell any produce. So it's really different than
18:40a regular mixed veg market garden operation. Our process is that we plant our main summer gardens usually about May 20th through June 15th. It takes me about three weeks to plant everything. And because we're up in the foothills, like our growing season, I don't bother getting things in the ground before then because we can have frost in mid-May.
19:07I will have all my spring crops in like lettuces and things that can take a light frost. um But that's our main planting season is the end of May.  And we basically like plant these really big gardens,  which  it really is like some like we're farming, but we're also like garden scale. Like we have five gardens spread out on our 40 acres.  So each plot is about, uh,
19:3860 feet by 60 feet or they're not huge. Like I did the calculations last year and we actually like grow all of our crops, like 60 to 80 seed crops a year on about only a half an acre. Like not a really big space. It's really intensive, like mixed production. You know, like I'll have like 30 tomato plants and maybe 200 lettuces and
20:08like 100 squash plants  of a variety. And so we plant everything and then we can basically just let it grow all summer  and do the weeding, but we're not like continuously harvesting the vegetables like you would for  a market garden. Instead, we just let everything ripen and go to seed. And then our main seed harvest  starts like kind of the end of August.
20:34through the end of October. So we like two or three months of intensive  seed harvesting and cleaning. the process for each variety is really different.  Okay, yeah. So what's the most difficult seed to save? ah
20:55They're all just really different. um Like for example, know, tomatoes, I'd go out and I pick tomatoes into five gallon buckets. And then we smash the tomatoes  up into like this pulp. And then you let them sit and ferment in the buckets for three or four days  and stir them daily. And that actually like um breaks down the enzyme coating around the seed to that inhibits germination. um And it also kind of
21:25breaks down all the tomato pulp um and then you add water to those buckets and pour off all the pulp and you're left with the seeds at the bottom of the bucket using water to clean them. So  that's not extremely difficult, but it's like a process, you know? um And um so there's the things that you  harvest and you process wet, like tomatoes and squashes or melons or cucumbers.
21:52Those,  all, there's a degree of like cutting open the fruit, scooping out the seeds.  And then you have to figure out how to separate all the pulp and the gunk from the seeds. And usually that involves water. It's kind of like gold panning, actually.  Often, often the good seed will sink to the bottom of your vessel and then you pour off everything else with water and then put it on a screen  and let it dry.  I would label the ones that you have to do wet as squick.
22:22That would be the squick,  squick, squack process. Yeah, definitely.  Um, yeah, I mean, it's kind of fun. It's,  it's really hands on.  Um,  and then everything that you process dry, uh, that's like most of your flower seeds, your lettuce seed, all the brassicas,  like kale or cabbage,  um, radishes, carrot seed, radishes. Radishes are actually very difficult because it.
22:51I don't know, have you seen a radish going to seed? Makes those like kind  of... Yeah, it's like, well, each of those pods only has like four seeds in it. They're not very,  and the pods are really difficult to shatter. It's different than like kale pods. Kale pods or arugula, they just shatter right away. But the radish, man,  you really have to bash them. And we don't have  really fancy threshing equipment.
23:18I have some equipment for winnowing, the threshing part, um so there's a lot of stomping and stuff that goes into radish seed. um But basically it's like you harvest the dry seeds and you have to thresh them. So you like break open the pods. um Same with beans.  And we often like
23:43just throw all the seed on like an old bed sheet and then literally stomp things with our feet  or  things like that. And then you have to winnow it. So you use air to blow away all of the chafe. And so we do have some equipment for that. We have this really cool  machine called a winnow wizard that was created by Mark Lutera up in Oregon.
24:08and it has a huge hopper that you can pour the seed into and a fan and an agitation tray. And so it's cool because I can like turn it on and get it set right and then walk away from it for a half an hour while it just continues to winnow the seed and the good seed falls into a bucket. yeah, I mean, there's a lot of like harvesting seeds, piling them up in bags.
24:36where they continue to kind of dry for a couple months and then cleaning them as we, as we get to it. So my house definitely like  in  this time period of two or three months, there's a corner of it that just gets like stacked full of bags of drying seeds. Well, I was going to ask you what kind, I mean, I don't want you to tell me exact numbers, but  what kind of space do you end up needing and  what's your inventory like? I mean, are we talking?
25:06hundreds of thousands of seed packets?  Yeah, well, I would say that  we maybe sell about 50,000 seed packets a year, but we have an office space. yeah, we used to have this whole thing would be in our house and then it moved to a back shed and it's moved around a lot over the years. uh There's definitely like now there's the farm production part of it and then we have an office uh at our
25:33It's our old elementary school was closed and now it's our community center. And so I rent the old teacher's lounge as my office space. So  all of our like cleaned seeds that are just in bags  live there in the office and we do all of our seed packaging in the office, um not in my home anymore. So um I don't, we don't like pack everything into hundreds of thousands of packets. Instead we pack.
26:02more like as we need. So we'll pack like 50 to 100 packets of a variety at a time and then sell through those or send those to stores  and then pack more as we need it. So the majority of our inventory is stored as bulk. um like on-demand printing? Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like that. Cool. Yeah. So, but we pack it all by hand.  We basically know how many
26:31Seeds are in these little spoons that we have. We have like these little teeny spoons, some like from tablespoon size down to like 1 64th of a teaspoon size. Maybe we even have a smaller one than that. And so we've counted, you know, over the years several times and we have that recorded. So we know that like a quarter teaspoon is about 25 cucumber seeds. So we pack, pack the packets like that.
27:00Nice. Okay. I try to keep these to half an hour or at like 27 minutes. So I want to say for the listener, anybody can save seeds. We do it with basil seeds every year and we haven't had to buy basil seeds in four or five years now. Awesome. Yeah, absolutely. Everybody should try to seeds. Yeah. And they come back beautifully.
27:28Yeah, I will say that if people want to hop on my website, I do have a pretty robust section about seed saving on there. So uh there's a lot of information  and I have a YouTube channel that has like two videos on it. But one of the videos is like an hour long seed saving uh Zoom class that I taught a couple of years ago that gives good info to. That's super to know. Thank you.
27:56And  I mean, if people don't want to save their own seeds, I'm sure that if you want to buy seeds that have been saved, Kaylyn  would be happy to sell them to you. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.  But there are things that everybody can do for themselves on a small scale that are really simple. And I feel like if I'm in Minnesota and I can save basil seeds from the basil we grow,
28:22probably smarter than buying it from Kaylin in California for me to do. Yeah, absolutely. The more people who are saving the seeds, the more secure our seed supply is. Yep. And with all the crazy that's going on in the world right now, I'm going to say it again. I say it almost every episode. If you don't know how to cook from scratch, learn. If you have any place to grow any kind of food, grow it. Learn how to do it and grow it.
28:51And if you don't know your local grower, your local producer, get to know them because shopping locally, supporting your local growers and producers will save your butt 100 % of the time.
29:06Absolutely. I will die on that freaking hill.  All right, Kaylin, where can people find you?  At redwoodseeds.net  and at redwoodseeds on Instagram. Okay. Are you on Facebook at all? I am on Facebook. Yep. Redwood seeds on Facebook. Okay. So if anybody has questions or if they want to go see the video about saving seeds that Kaylin put out,  that's where you find her. oh
29:36Thank you so much for your time, Kalen. I really appreciate it. Nice to chat, Mary. Thank you. As always, you can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com.  Kalen, I hope you have a great rest of the day because you have a whole day in front of you. Yeah, I do. Yeah, it's awesome.  Yep. Thank you. All right. Bye. Bye.
 

Tryna Homestead

Today I'm talking with Kendra at Tryna Homestead. You can also follow on Facebook.
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Kendra at Tryna Homestead in Wisconsin. Good afternoon, Kendra, how are you? Good, how are you?  I'm good, and I'm not gonna lie.  When I looked at who I was talking to today, because I have it in my calendar,  I saw Tryna Homestead and I was like, you know,
00:28I hope that's trying to, you know, a play on trying to. if your name is Trina and I've been thinking it's Trina, I'm going to sound really dumb. How is the weather in Wisconsin? Did you guys get all the snow that we got on Sunday? We were supposed to get 12 to 18 inches, but we're right up against the river. And so it kind of buffered us and...
00:53I think we only got about eight. It's hard to tell though, because we had the blowing snow and the blizzard conditions. So we have spots where it's fair and then other spots where we have two feet there. we  definitely got snow.  Did it start for you Monday night? No, we, started Saturday night while we were actually outside boiling sap.  Oh. sitting in it as it started. And then  it went, it was still snowing through Sunday night. And then
01:23uh Yesterday and today have just been cold and sunny but cold. Okay. Where are you in Wisconsin? We're in Western Wisconsin,  Northwestern. We're right on the border with Minnesota.  Okay, because I'm in Minnesota and  it started for us about nine o'clock Saturday night. Yeah, think it ended about, it really ended about seven Sunday night. But
01:54The wind was so bad that you couldn't see anything. All day. insane. Yeah. Yeah. It was so loud. Like all Saturday night and Sunday night. was so loud. The wind was just whipping. Oh yeah. My Australian shepherd, she sleeps downstairs and my husband and I sleep upstairs. And about every couple hours Saturday night, I would hear, Arf! Just one Arf every couple of hours. She was barking at the wind.
02:23I believe it. I was just like, there's nothing you can do about it sweetie, go to sleep. It's all good really. The house is not going to collapse, I promise. So yeah, it was some wild weather and I don't know about you, but it's the first real snowstorm we've had all winter. Yeah, it's the first we've really had in the last three years, be honest. Yeah, it's been so bizarre and
02:49when I talk to people who don't live in the general Minnesota, Wisconsin area, they're like, oh, it's, been a real winter for you. I'm like, we're having a real winter at least five years. Right. Yeah. I,  I love winter. It's actually my favorite season  and I love the snow, but March snows are actually my favorite because at that point I'm done with winter. I'm focusing on spring.
03:15But when we get snow, I know it's not going to last, it covers the brown for a little bit. uh Saturday morning before the storm hit, we had green grass showing. Yeah. I was like,  we don't need a foot of snow. This is ridiculous.  So the reason I open the podcast every time with how is the weather or did you get the same weather we got is because weather is a big freaking deal for people who grow things.
03:46and you have a homestead. So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do. Yeah. So we,  my husband and I, we've been homesteading in a rental for seven years and we just bought our property last fall  in like middle of August and we're just on four acres. And so this is our first year really getting to do the things that we've done on a really small scale  in our apartment for the last
04:15seven years. um We raised chickens down at my parents place, but I'd have to drive 45 minutes to go take care of them. And I would garden in containers and fill our tiny little patio. And now I'm actually getting to have chickens right in our backyard and a large in-ground garden. So we're really excited.  And all the things that we have dreamed about  doing,  we're finally able to start putting those plans into action.
04:44now that we have our own space. You sound like me  five and a half years ago when we moved from our tenth of an acre lot with a house and a four car garage on it to a 3.1 acre property. That's about we are just shy of four acre. We have 3.98. They couldn't give us the point oh two.  Yes, exactly. em
05:09So I have a question. When you moved and you actually realized that you've done it, did you step outside and look around and go, oh my God, we did it? Oh, we walked around this property so many times and we're just looking at each other going, is this really ours?  Someone needs to pinch us. Is this real? we actually do this? Because with the way the housing market was every year,
05:37Our five-year plan turned into a six-year plan, turned into a seven-year plan and it was feeling less and less likely. And the day that we closed, we just stood in the backyard looking at everything going, is this really ours? Like, is it really, really what we have been dreaming of is actually here and happening. And it was such a surreal moment to realize that all those years of hoping and praying for this property is actually happening.
06:06Yep. I love it when I talk to somebody like you, who is like me five and a half years ago,  because  I,  my son and I had to come down and spend the first night in the new place by ourselves because my husband had to work. And where we lived at the time was an hour drive for him. And if he had had to stay here with us, it would have been an hour and a half drive for him to work.
06:33So he stayed up at the old house and we stayed at the new house. We had to be here overnight because early morning they were gonna be a brand new gas stove for cooking, because the house didn't have a stove. And we had to be here for the internet to get hooked up because Lord knows you need internet.  I made it a point to get up before sunrise, it was August of 2020.
06:59And I made it a point to get up before sunrise because there's a beautiful, huge window above the kitchen sink.  I did not have a window above the kitchen sink in the old house. And it looks out over, it was an alfalfa field and it's all wide open sky out that window. And I was like, I have to see the first sunrise the first morning I'm here. And I stood there and cried, Kendra, I cried. I believe it.  And I was like, oh my God, I have.
07:27hot coffee because the first thing you put in a new house is the coffee maker if you're a coffee drinker. And the sun is all cotton candy pink and coral orange. Beautiful. And I'm just standing there tears dripping off the end of my nose and I'm like, I'm so freaking happy. Yeah, it was ridiculous. And it was the best happy cry I think I've ever had except when my kids were born. Yeah, it it was such an overwhelming feeling. And it's funny because you mentioned having a
07:57big window over your sink. Yeah, we did not have one in our rental either. And that was one thing I always wanted.  And we have one now and it looks out over it has an eastern view.  And so I get to see the sunrise every morning from the kitchen as well. And it like, to this day, we've been here eight months now, almost nine.  And still every day, we just were like, is this really ours? And it's
08:25so overwhelming to know that what you've worked so hard for, what you've dreamed for, for so long is finally here.  Yes,  it's so hard to explain the feeling to someone who hasn't achieved a dream like that. I mean, you can say it a billion different ways, but until the person has something they want so badly come true, they don't understand  that big feeling in your chest and in your heart.
08:56Absolutely. know that  once we actually got everything moved in and we were done with the old house because we sold the  old house after we bought this place.  And I remember the last time being in the old house and it was just empty and I raised four kids in that house.
09:17And I was a little sad about, you know, leaving the place that I raised my kids.  But drove back here and there were boxes everywhere. And I just looked around and I was like, okay, I'm over it. I don't ever want to go back to the other house. I'm done.  Yeah. And I also remember  once we were completely moved in, sitting  on the bench that we had refinished to have on the patio, because we have a little cement pad  outside the front door.
09:45and sitting on that bench and looking around and looking at my husband and going, what do we do now? Yeah, it's kind of it's almost that feeling like when you get married and you're like, okay, now what? Like that's how I felt with like we purchased the place and then we still lived in our
10:13apartment for three more weeks because of when we could actually get our stuff up here. Yeah, because it's about 40 minutes or so. And so we were just I every day I was making two or three trips a day coming up here bringing stuff, unpacking coming up bringing stuff unpacking like for two weeks and or like two and half weeks until our big move. And then once we were all moved in, and you know, we got everything here, we were done with the apartment. I can't look at my husband. was like, now what?
10:42Like, you almost are like, this is really it. But now what do we do? Like we did the whole go through the move thing. It's like, okay. Yeah. And moving is exhausting. Oh, I don't ever want to do it again. I say that every time. I don't either. There are days where my husband and I are like, well, now we're nasty, nasty, uh-huh. Empty nesters.
11:11Do we really want to stay? You know, is this where we want to die basically? Yeah. And some days we're like, I need to sleep on it. And then other days we're like, nah, we would be nuts to move again. Yeah. I'm, I'm okay staying here for a very, very, very long time. It's not a curse. Yep. Well, it became real to us when we ended up buying, I think we had 40 chickens at one point and I was like, so are we chicken farmers now?
11:41And my husband was like,  no,  there. are a farm to market gardeners. And I was like, but we have 40 chickens. And he was like,  yeah, and that's probably the highest number we're going to have. I was like, don't say that out loud outside. You're going to jinx it. We're going to have 300 chickens.  Oh, but no, it's so lovely. Go ahead. Oh, no, I was just going to say the whole 40 chickens thing is making me laugh over here because
12:10uh We  tracked, I ordered 20 chickens or baby chicks that are coming in through April. Yeah, yeah. But Tractor Supply got us and we ended up with six turkeys. And then the next Wednesday Tractor Supply got us again and we ended up with six more chicks. uh And then the next day we went to a different feed store and we ended up with six more chicks. So we currently have six baby turkey poults and 12 chicks in our basement with 20 more chicks coming.
12:38Chicken math is real and they multiply before you even realize.  I think in your case, it's poultry math.  Right?  For sure.  That's okay. Those turkeys will come in real handy. Yes. We were hoping that we have a hen and a tom  in at least, we have two different breeds, three of each. And we're hoping we have a hen and a tom  in at least  one of those breeds, if not  both, so that we can
13:08have some  for meat this year, but then have longevity with our trippies. So that's the goal with those.  Yes, it's really nice when the livestock reproduce because it's basically free food. For sure. Very expensive free food, but it is definitely free food.  Well, to start with, but there are dividends. So.  But my husband and I, he's like, you know, we should put a lot of money into these  free eggs that we're going to get.  So we always joke that.
13:38It's very expensive free food because we didn't have go to the store to buy it, but we had to, you know, feed it and water it and care for it and it's expensive and all the other things. Uh-huh.  I asked my husband  if the chickens are paying for themselves because we sell eggs. Sure. And he said yes.  But there was kind of a  weird note to the yes. And I said, okay, what are you not saying? And he said,
14:08They're keeping us in milk and butter because we don't have a cow to make, you know, to have drinking milk and to make butter.  And I said, okay, I can, I can live with that.  He said, and he said, we are never without eggs for ourselves. And I said, I can absolutely live with that. So it works out great.  So when I was looking at your Facebook page and you were telling your story at the beginning of this,
14:33You were doing homesteading in an apartment. We were doing homesteading in an 800 square foot house and a tenth of an acre lot with a house and a four car garage on it. And the thing that I love when I talk to people who are doing homesteading, not on homesteads as people think of it, is it proves my point that homesteading is a state of mind. It is a way of being. It is not owning property. Totally.
15:02One of our big things is we always say a home setting is a mindset, not a location. Yeah. That I have it written on many shirts, actually, because it's so true. It's not about where you are. It's about what you're doing with what you currently have.  And when we were in the rental, we like I mentioned before, we raised chickens somewhere else and we had small little  container gardens everywhere we could put them. But we learned
15:31canning  and preserving  and we worked with other farmers and local gardeners to get the things that we didn't have and to make those relationships and we had we have met so many great people in our community that they were like hey I have a ton of apples on my apple tree and I don't have time to pick them or I've picked all I want does anyone else want them and we were able to go get them for free  and make applesauce with them and then I would give them some applesauce as a
16:01thank you and then year after year they would contact me first, hey, would you like apples this year? And we made so many  great connections with people,  just looking for other people that were like-minded and  trying to achieve the same thing or maybe had more than what they could handle with those things. Yeah,  absolutely. And there's a joke about chickens are the gateway to homesteading.
16:26But I beg to differ. I think that if you start learning to cook from scratch, that's the gateway to homesteading. For sure.  mean, when you start realizing, I mean, it's all connected in one big rabbit hole. But when you start looking at what's in the food, in the stores and on the shelves and all the preservatives and the things that are in there and you start realizing, I can make something fairly quick that tastes way better.
16:55that doesn't have all these extra things added to it that's much better for my health and my family's health. And you start doing that and then you start looking at all the other areas of things that you can do and okay, well now let's get chickens and now let's, you know, have a really large garden so I don't have to go buy the things that we eat. I can just make it all from scratch here as much as we can. We'll never be a hundred percent able to grow everything, but  we do what we can. Every little bit helps, yeah.
17:24For sure. Yep. We're trying to be really aware about what we spend for money at the grocery store right now, because we have food in the house. There's no need to go buy food that's already made. And we had a few containers of homemade sloppy Joe and homemade taco meat in the freezers. And we, Sunday, we're like, what do you want to eat? And my husband was like, I don't really want pot roast. That's what I was supposed to make.
17:54I said, I'll make the pot roast tomorrow. What do we have in the freezer? And he pulled out what he thought was the taco meat.
18:03I ate a sloppy Joe taco with taco sauce on it.  I don't recommend anyone do this. It really wasn't great. It was food and it was edible, but it was not great. And I looked at my husband afterwards and I was like, I must be taking this not buying already made food thing really seriously. And he said, why? I said, cause that was the most unsatisfactory filling meal I've ever had in my entire life. And I don't want to do it again. Oh, that's funny.
18:32It was not great. And luckily,  luckily he knew because I told him that one of the containers was sloppy. Joe me and he had already he had uh him. can't talk.  He had thought out an actual taco meat one as well. So he had a sloppy Joe in a rolled up tortilla and he had a taco in a rolled up tortilla. I was like,  I'm so mad. I wish I had known because I would have had you eat the sloppy Joe tacos and I would have had the taco taco.
19:03He's like, you're a good wife. I was like, yes, I am. Don't you forget it.  Oh, that's so funny. But point being is that even if it doesn't turn out the way you thought it was going to, it's probably still going to be okay. For sure. There's always things I feel like that you can, like you learn, like, okay, maybe we need a better label or organize things or.
19:32you learn of like, maybe if I, instead of adding taco sauce, if I added something else, maybe it would have been better.  And who knows? You can always change things around.  was hoping the taco sauce would make it taste like taco,  but a sweet taco is not a great thing. promise you. was about to say the sweetness of that poppy joke was probably a little much.  It was very funny and I did not vomit. So we're okay.
20:00But  I don't want to do it again. I just thought it was a funny story because sometimes we might take things a little too far.  And  if I had been sick on it, that would have been a little too far, but it was fine. So you have chickens, you have turkeys. What else do you have? So that's well, we have a golden retriever, but that's we have for right now. But we have  we have plans for adding some Gloucestershire old spot pigs at some point. Not sure if that'll be this year or next.
20:30year. I'm kind of hoping for this year but budget-wise it's probably going to be next year. So  there's so many things that we want to do but we're not in a hurry to  do it all right now. We want to thoughtfully plan it out and make sure that we're doing the best that we can with what we have  and doing the best for the animals. We don't want to get them and then risk them getting out because we didn't plan their structures out well enough.
21:00you know, any other scenario like that.  we're  my husband is going slow and plant thoughtfully planning things out. And I'm thinking of all the things that we should do.  So he balances me out in that way, thankfully.  Yes, that's what spouses are for.  I'm always saying start small, dream big. Yeah, that's actually our tagline, which is really funny.  So we say at the end of almost all of our videos.  Yep. Because if you dive in, m
21:28head-first, you better pray there's a lot of water or a lot of money in the bottom of that pool.  Right? oh And it's usually not money. No,  and if there's no water, you're gonna break your neck. yeah, starting small,  looking before you leap, thinking it through is all really good advice. But the worst advice  is don't dream.  Everybody needs a dream.
21:58Absolutely.  And the other thing is that a lot of people,  they're researching, they're planning, they're dreaming, but they don't ever take that first step.  we always say,  you just have to start at some point. Just do it, just try it.  This year, so this property that we moved on had five silver maple trees. And this spring, we're like, we've never tapped maple syrup or maple trees before.
22:26and made our own maple syrup, let's just try it. Let's just see how it goes. It is a lot of work. We spent the last two weekends, both Saturday and Sunday, each weekend, 12 to 14 hour days making maple syrup. Like it is a lot of work, but we have this beautiful golden maple syrup that tastes phenomenal that we made and we did it. And we wouldn't have had that if we hadn't done it and just tried it. Now there's a lot of things that we're going to
22:56change and do differently for next year knowing what we know now but we wouldn't have learned those things if we hadn't just done it. We did do  a little bit of research before but and I grew up around ah maple tapping and sugar bushes. The farm that I grew up on we own half of the woods and the other half is owned by a sugar bush that they tap they've always tapped my family's trees and so I grew up around all this but I've never actually done it and
23:26It was such a good learning process. But if we had just said, you know what, let's just hold off until we know everything. So you have to find that balance of don't just rush in  and do it all at once. Pick one thing. But at some point you do have to just start.  Yes. And sometimes your friends help you along the way. My friend brought me some sourdough starter that was very well established and beautiful. And she was like,
23:53Here's what you do. I wrote out the instructions, blah, blah. And I kept it alive for about a week and I went to move the jar and it hit the floor and shattered.  Oh no.  Yes, I was very sad.  And then I got over my sad and I was like, I can  make a new one. And I did the flower and water thing in another jar. And I actually made two loaves of sourdough bread out of that sourdough starter that I started. They both kind of turned out.
24:23um bagel-y like bagel texture. Yeah. They were good  and then it got the dreaded pink mold. I've talked about this a few times in the last  two it had to go in trash and I cried over that because that is not okay. That's not fun. Especially when you start it from yourself that is so hard to do. ah Yeah so I waited until about a month and a half ago to start a new one.
24:51They got the pink mold back in September, I think it was. So I started new one about a month and a half ago. And it's now at the point where I might actually be able to make some sourdough bread again. And it's got all the little bubbles on the side of the jar. And I'm like, oh my God, it's alive and it's working. That will never not make me giddy. When I wake up in the morning and I see those bubbles on the jar, I get so excited. Over bubbles.
25:21It's so dumb, but it's so smart at the same time. It's such a rewarding thing because it doesn't take much. It takes five, six minutes to feed your starter. And then it's just time. You're just waiting. You're not doing anything. And then you come back and check and it's alive and happy.  It's just, it brings me such joy.  I think the reason homesteaders like sourdough,  you know, the process is because it's keeping another thing alive. Right.
25:52There's lots of chaos in our life. Let's just keep something else alive.  I was gonna say it's not enough to grow plants and animals. We need to grow bacteria too. Right.  Well, let's grow it all.  But I'll tell you there is something  really special when you make your first loaf of sourdough bread. Out of sourdough starter,  you start it because it is literally all on you.  100%.
26:20I was so thrilled when I pulled the first loaf out and it was bagel-ish, bagel-y, however you say that, because I love bagels and I happened to have a brick of cream cheese that we had just bought in the fridge. I was like, I can't make a bagel to save my life, but I can make bagel sourdough bread. I love it.  Oh, I bet that was so good. Especially, like you said, when it's your first loaf that you did all of it from start to finish, there's,  it just...
26:46adds to the flavor. Like it'll taste good regardless because you did it all.  Yes and I feel like it's a true homesteading skill which probably sounds really dumb because all of it is homesteading skills but  I feel like it's what people associate homesteading with.  For sure there's a there's a few bigger things like there's like three or four things right we have sourdough, chicken,
27:13canning and gardening, those are the things that people really associate with.  Home setting.  There's so much more to it than that, but those seem to be the big things that people recognize as home setting. Yes, one of the first things that we did when we kind of got into this, and it was more me than my husband because he was the breadwinner. He was gone all the time.  We're raising four kids on one income and I was like,  the kids need scarves. I can learn to crochet. So I learned to crochet scars for the kids.
27:43And I was trying to be really  aware of our food expenses because kids eat a lot.  so  I to make oatmeal raisin cookies and chocolate chip cookies and any kind of cookie or banana bread kept them very happy and snacks. none of them were fat. They were always running around doing stuff. So they were like, can I have a cookie? Yes, please. Before you're too skinny to live, you know.
28:12And it was just all things that I was like, okay, if I make cookies, it's going to cost me less than buying cookies.  Absolutely.  So for us,  was a way, frugality was our gateway to homesteading. I know a lot of people that that's how they start because they don't have the option to  buy  the extras at the grocery store. They can buy the necessities and that's about it.
28:41flour, sugar, milk, bread, right? Those kinds of things. And then they start realizing, well, if I can buy those things, I can make the bread and then I can make the cookies and I can make all the other things. And it is a way for them to save money in the long run.  Yes. And I felt like I had to because
29:05I love my husband and I loved my kids. I still love my kids, but they're adults now. They make their own cookies.  And I felt like if I was going to be home with the kids, because I wanted to raise them myself, whatever I could do to save us money was making us money.  Oh, for sure. So it was a big deal. And my husband would get asked at his job, they'd like, they'd say, what does your wife do? And he would say, well, she is at home with the kids.
29:36And they would say, isn't she bored?  And he would just laugh. He was belly laugh.  He was like, okay, you understand that my kids are 13, 11, um six and one. And they're like, well, yeah, but three of them are in school. And my husband would be like, yes. And one of them is one year old. She's got four more years to go for the last one in school. No, she's not bored. And she's smart.
30:06she saves us more money than I make. And every time he would tell me this story, I would just feel such a sense of pride because I was like, I am earning  my keep and not that I was ever told I had to. Right. But I am, I am so lucky to be able to have my kids leave my house and I'm home. They come home, I'm home and I get to be here for them. Yeah, it's such a great feeling knowing that
30:35these short 18 years that you get to spend with them because those years, it's the smallest part of your life is when you're under 18.  So  bidding to have your kids in your home with you  and spending the life together and doing every single day in and day out together for those short 18 years  is, in my opinion, worth the sacrifice. um
31:05And then it takes because living on one income is hard. And we have so we homeschool our son. He's 13 and my husband works full time out of well, he works from home quite often, but he has to go in on surveys and things like that. But. I work two part time jobs that I get to work from home, so we're still able to homeschool and do I. I'm still able to be home with him and still make
31:34some money for the family and things like that. we made the sacrifices and the things that we gave up so that we could have that time with him because it goes so fast. It doesn't last very long. No, it does not. And that's all I have to say or I will cry. Also, every human being
32:04has the opportunity to make a choice about how they live their life. And some of us come  at it from a privileged place, some of us do not. I'm not saying that the homeless person in Minneapolis has a lot of choice right now, so don't get me wrong. But if you happen to be lucky enough to make choices about what you want to do with your life, you're one of the luckiest people on earth. And not everybody has to be a homesteader.
32:34I get that there are some people who want to be in an office building  as a CEO of a big company and that is totally fine. You do you. But  I love that we get to make these choices. I love that my husband and I are thinking about getting into raising quail, have not actually decided yet,  but it's a choice we get to make this year. I love it. My husband wants to raise quail.
33:03Yeah, we've been looking into that too. They're so cool. I've been diving deep on this for  a couple of weeks and hopefully  we can make a decision this weekend about what whether we're going to buy an incubator or not. That's that's the next thing on the list is to decide that. So  exciting.  It is. It's really fun. And  I just I looked up the little quail scissors that you use to clip the eggs open.
33:30I was like, oh my God,  I'm actually looking up quail scissors on Amazon. I've got to be out of my freaking mind. I love it.  A friend of mine raises them. And so she gave me some eggs, some quail eggs and eggs and the quail egg scissors uh in exchange. We were bartering. don't remember what  I had and we exchanged. And I love a good barter and trade, by the way.  Oh, yes, my favorite thing. And so
34:00my friend who raises quails, she loves to barter and trade as well. So we're constantly finding things that the other one wants or needs.  We're exchanging things and she keeps telling me, she's like, hey,  I'm going to have eggs  if you want to have quail. And I'm like, we do, but we might need to wait a year for that.  But oh, it's so tempting to do it this year because they're so cute. I love them.
34:29I'm,  I,  I am going to have a hard time spitting this out. I am very excited at the idea. I am very concerned about the actual doing it because where we live, I'm not sure there's a market for quail meat or quail eggs.  And they don't want to get deep into this until we know that we can move a quail meat and quail eggs.  So we're going to start small.
34:58we're only gonna get like 12 or 14. And that way if we can't move them, we just don't do it past butchering the quail that we have and having them in our freezer for ourselves. That's a good place to start when you're trying to figure out if this is something that's doable and starting with just a few because and that's kind of what we did with the turkeys. We have six and so we're like if this goes the way we want to go.
35:26and we get the breeding pair and things like that, then we do potentially have a future. If not, we have six that are going to our freezer. Yeah. And again, start small, dream big. 100%. Yup, exactly. I'm so excited to start a new project with the husband because like I said, empty nesters. And when we get snippy with each other, it's time to get aligned on a project again.
35:57But I'm like, okay, so we have chickens, have a dog, we have barn cats, and you're gonna be getting  into the gardens again this year.  Do we have time for a new project?
36:11That's the hard part.  Because like I see all these different things that we want to do. But each one of those will take a certain amount of time. It's like, how much do you want to put towards one thing? Because that's how much you're taking away from something else. So it's definitely a balancing act to try to figure out how much you actually want to do each year.  And it's okay to try something one year and then realize, hey, it wasn't worth the time and the effort.
36:40next year or you know we're kind of with that with the maple syrup because of all the time into it we were looking at each other as the snow was flying on saturday night and we're still not done  and we're like is this really what we're doing is this worth it and we're like do we really want to do this again next year but then you boil it down and you look at it and  we're like okay this was this is a short season it's
37:08on a great year, it's a month  from start to finish. Yeah. And there are some years where you're lucky if you get a run for three days because things warm up too fast  and the trees butt out. And so we're like,  what we get from it, the time spent outside,  we literally every day, every Saturday and Sunday for the last two weeks, my husband and I have spent outside together or in the house finishing it off.  And like,
37:37Just spending time outside together, just us around the fire while we're boiling saps. It was so fun.  those special moments, like, that makes it worth it for us, even though it's  really long hours and it's a lot of work, but it's only for a short time where there's other things that, you know, it's every day for a year, you're feeding an animal.
38:06two, sometimes three times a year, or a day for an entire year, and that might not be worth it depending on your schedule and other things you have going on. And it's okay to change from year to year what you put your focus and your time into.
38:26Certainly, absolutely. And again,  if you guys don't want a maple syrup next spring, you don't have to because  those trees don't care whether you get the sap out of them or not.  Right. We definitely will be.  But  there was a moment as we're sitting in the start of the snowstorm looking at each other going,  is this really worth it? But  it is. It really is worth it for us. Just the time we get to spend together and then the syrup.
38:56we go through because it's really the only sugar source that we use except for a tiny bit of raw cane sugar. And so for us, it was worth it because we go through two to three gallons a year. And that's a we have right now just over two gallons. So it's almost a year's worth of syrup in essentially two weekends worth of work. So for us, it was worth it at least.
39:21this year.  Another year if it only runs for three days and we only get you know a half a gallon it might not feel worth it. So it's okay to change from year to year. Exactly that's what I love about this particular life choice is that again you get to choose what you want to put your time into. And the other thing is that I feel like the halfway mark on anything is the hardest part.
39:47The beginning is exciting and fun and the end is satisfying. But the middle is the part where you're like, why did we start this? It drags on. It's just like when you decide to clean your closet and it feels like a really great idea in the beginning and you get everything pulled out and you look around and you're like, oh, I have to put it back. I like that feeling. Yep, exactly. It's new energy is amazing.
40:15Finished energy is amazing. Middle energy sucks.  100 % on almost every project I feel like it. m Yep, that's how it always is. I'll be feeling that way tomorrow or Saturday when I make my next sourdough loaf because anyone who's ever made a sourdough loaf knows  that it's not the actual making of it that's the pain in the ass, it's the waiting time.  100%. That's what takes forever.  Yep.
40:45I was like, you're kidding me. I do the pull, the stretch and pull four times and then I have to wait half an hour until I can do anything else. A lot  of it's very, it's very needy. Like  every 30 minutes you're doing something, but then you need to wait.  Like, can I just do it all and be done and move on?  Yeah. My husband is the, uh, the yeast bread maker. He's very good at it.
41:12And he was like, I can't believe you're going to do sourdough when you could just do yeast breads.  The issue is, that every time I try to make yeast bread, I kill the yeast. We cannot figure out how I do this. And he's really good at making yeast bread. And I was like, I just need to be able to say that I finally made a freaking loaf of bread from scratch. Give me the sourdough.  Yeah. I did sourdough for years and I did gluten-free sourdough for many years. then
41:41we found a flower that my son could tolerate. And so then I do regular sourdough and it wasn't until about, think it was January of this year, maybe early February that  I  tried yeast bread for the first time in probably 20 years.  And I don't know why I had never really made sandwich bread and I decided to try my sourdough sandwich bread. I didn't like how many holes were in it.
42:11It wasn't great for sandwich for me. And so decided to try yeast bread and now I'm hooked. And now I actually haven't been doing sourdough for a while because I've been making every week, I've been making two loaves of yeast bread and then pizza dough. I'm in my yeast era at the moment.  My husband is always in the yeast bread era. He's been making, he's been making four loaves of bread every other weekend.
42:41because he really likes bread with his eggs in the morning for toast.  the least expensive bread at the local grocery stores is terrible. The only really good tasting bread is like $7 a loaf right now.  At the least he was like, I'm just going to start making bread. I said, okay, how's the smell amazing every other weekend? And he was like, yes, will.
43:08So we've been reminded that frugality has lots of benefits. Oh, for sure. When you start looking at well, and so my son can't have gluten or dairy. so when we would go to the store and I'm looking and I'm gluten free, anything is a minimum of eight dollars, if not 15 for a tiny little package of this thing. I just like it.
43:37It's so expensive. Now  there are occasions, right, where we'll get it as a treat and then it's something I don't have to make for that week. But  I have started making so many things and it does come out of necessity because if I bought  everything that we eat just pre-made from the store that's organic and gluten-free and dairy-free, oh my goodness, I cannot imagine my grocery bill. It's already high enough that is it it?
44:04as it is just eating organic. It's maddening how expensive things have gotten. Yeah. And that's all I have to say on that too, because boy, we don't want that soap box coming out either right now. All right. This has been so much fun, Kendra. And I am not saying that everyone should become a homesteader.
44:29but I would be remiss if I didn't say this again. This is my public service announcement for every episode. You ready?  If you don't know how to cook from scratch,  learn. And please get to know your local growers and producers because  it's so important to have a local source because supply chains do  have problems  and things just keep getting more expensive. Please learn how to take care of yourself. Absolutely.
44:58Where can people find you? So we are on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram as Trina Homestead.  Fantastic. As always, people can find me at a tinyhomesteadpodcast.com.  Kendra, thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate it. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. All right. Have a great day. You too.