Alternative Roots Farm

Today I'm talking with Brooke at Alternative Roots Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Brooke at Alternative Roots Farm. Good morning, Brooke. How are you? Good morning. I'm good. The season's off to a great start. Good. Tell me about what you do.

00:25
Yeah, well, our focus at Alternative Roots Farm is on certified organic apples and other perennial fruits. Well, we have about 1,500 apple trees. We also have apricots, raspberries, cherries, plums, blackberries. And when I'm thinking spring in the orchard here, also asparagus and rhubarb. We have some pastured heritage breed hogs, some purebred Gloucester old spots.

00:55
And I do some herbal wellness products and grow greens in my deep winter greenhouse, which is a passive solar structure, and bedding plants in there as well, which it's the season for that. It certainly is. We are doing the same thing right now. I have, I think, 30 basil seedlings sitting on my kitchen table right now that need to go out to the greenhouse.

01:24
But I was worried that the cold would burn them. Because our greenhouse is not heated yet. It will be in the fall, but it's not heated yet. Yay. Yup. So I have a couple of questions for you right off the top of my head. If you're growing all that fruit and you're trying to be sustainable, and I assume not use terrible things on your trees or your plants.

01:53
What are you using for your apples to keep the bugs off of them? Yeah. So that's a big, huge question. And we've definitely evolved over the years. This is our 13th season and we expanded our orchard seven years ago. Um, so from the get-go, we transitioned to be being certified organic. And so we follow all, all organic practices, but what does that mean?

02:22
You know, that doesn't mean that we don't spray anything, but we are selective about what we use in the orchard. Now, at the very beginning, we tried to be, I want to say just like too organic. Um, we tried to just do nothing and that does not work if you want to make a living. Um, so we really focus on.

02:45
kind of a permaculture take in the orchard. We want a diverse understory. We've got comfrey planted and we're trying to continue to build that. But we do use organic sprays. My husband John does degree day monitoring, which is a... I'm not going to explain the whole thing, but it's tracking the high and low temperatures to monitor pest.

03:15
life cycles or like the life cycle of scab and other bacteria and fungus that might be an issue in the apple orchard. So we're making sure with what sprays we do use that we're targeting it at a very specific time to maximize the benefit and not spray anything additional that doesn't need to be sprayed on there. So we do use some organic insecticides.

03:44
We, for certain pests, but then like for coddling moth, we use a virus that is specific to that pest. So, we're being very specific as to which things we're trying to target. Some people like to spray like copper in the orchards. For scab, we prefer to stick with a sulfur. You know, that's a naturally occurring element. We just try to minimize as much as possible.

04:17
Okay, you mentioned comfrey. What does comfrey do? Oh, great question. This is one of the biggest questions I get when people come out to the farm, because you'll walk out to the farm, you'll see all these big, beautiful plants with these big purple flowers underneath the apple tree rose. And that was kind of the start of our diverse plantings in the understory, which we're kind of kicking back into gear now. Comfrey has a diameter of like...

04:46
three-ish feet. And it is a big hairy leaf, large-leaved plant that's basically like a living mulch under the apple trees. So I grow a variety that is not self-seeding, which is important. And basically it flushes up with these big nutrient-dense leaves. It's a very nutritive plant several times throughout the season. And then that mats down and just creates

05:15
a green mulch. It outcompetes all the grasses and everything. So it acts as a living mulch. It breaks down and feeds the soil and feeds the apple trees. And then it has a very deep taproot, like 20 feet. So it brings up water and nutrients that the trees can't access. I also use it to dry it for teas and infusions for myself. And I make herbal infused oils out of it and use it in my herbal salves.

05:45
Um, so it, uh, it feeds, feeds us and the trees.

05:54
I had no idea. I'm so glad that I'm talking with you. We have apple trees. We have, I think, 20. There's like eight in a row on the right-hand side of our house and there's a bunch over on the far left part of our property. We spray neem oil on the baby apples when they come and they start.

06:22
And we did that last year and we actually got apples. But I'm going to have to look into the comfrey idea because I didn't even know that that was a thing. It's really fun. And I completely forgot to mention that bees and bumblebees and everything love it. So yeah, it's great for that. And we've started transplanting other flowers, even like extra onion plants, violets. And we're looking at putting more like herbs underneath the trees and stuff as well.

06:53
Okay, so it's to bring in the pollinators, it's to make a natural mulch, so that's awesome. Okay, I had a question at the beginning too because you said something and now I can't remember what my question was. Because again, you guys get talking and I listen really intently because we are baby homesteaders. I keep saying baby as an adjective to what we're doing because...

07:20
We know just enough to get started, but we're not that far down the road. We've been here almost four years and we knew a little bit about a lot and a lot about a little bit. So every time I talk with you guys, whoever I'm interviewing, I'm trying to make notes in my head from my husband, who is the avid gardener, because he's always like, what do I do about this? What do I do about that? And I'm like, I don't know. I'm not the gardener. I don't do this. You do this. So.

07:50
Whenever people share information with me, I turn around and share it with him and then he goes and studies. So Yeah, yeah Here like John could give you a lot more details about all the sprays and stuff like that cuz that's like his department But I know like the general outline and some of the details but Yeah Yeah, so how did you guys come to be doing this? No, it's a it's a fun story. So

08:19
We went in college a billion years ago and we were living up in Bemidji, which is where we went to college. We moved back there and we were both, we both went to school for environmental things. We were working in the conservation field. We had a big garden. We had some great friends who had an organic CSA, vegetable CSA, and we thought, you know, it'd be really cool if we did this in like 10 years.

08:46
Uh, 10 months later, uh, John got a call about his old job opening up. We moved back down here and started the farm. Um, so sometimes you just got to put it out there in the universe, I think. Uh, so that was 13 years ago. We started as a organic vegetable CSA farm and transitioned to focusing on our apples seven years ago. And we've just kind of evolved since then. We added the passive solar winter greenhouse. Um.

09:16
in partnership with the U of M. And I started doing winter farmers markets. And over the last few years, I've really expanded on my herbal wellness items. That's kind of a passion of mine. And that ties into the holistic care of our orchard and taking care of, you know, we wanted to get into this because we were in the conservation field, but we wanted to actively put conservation on the land. We want our land to, you know,

09:46
be better than we found it and be a habitat for all sorts of critters and um, birds and all that. And, um, yeah, here we are today. And it's been quite an evolution.

10:03
Yeah, it's amazing how that happens. Where are you guys again? Sure, yeah. So we are in- What time? Technically we're in Medelia. We're kind of like halfway in between New Ulm and Medelia. We have an on-farm store located at our farm. And we do that all year round. And then we do the Mankato Farmers Market starting in August when apple season kicks up. And we do that, I do that all winter with the winter greens.

10:32
Um, and I should mention five years ago, we started a second business because we have a lot of apples. Um, so we also make hard cider with our brand tall grass cider, and that's kind of available in the, in the region here, not a single apple goes to waste. I, I bet it doesn't. I love hard cider and I love mead. They, they are the only two things that I drink that are a treat.

11:02
and that I can't get my hands on very often when they're made really well. There's a guy in Prior Lake, I can't think of his business right now, Gluey something, G-L-E-W-W-E. He has a thing every summer, like one Saturday a month they open up their place and he makes mead as a hobby. He doesn't sell it because he doesn't have the liquor license to sell it.

11:30
Yeah. But he let us try some of his blackberry mead and oh, I wish that he had a liquor license because we would be buying it in the summer. But hard cider is wonderful because it's like fizzy apple cider that can get you drunk if you drink enough of it. And I don't enjoy being drunk. I haven't enjoyed being drunk in a very long time.

11:56
But I do like the first glass because it makes you very warm and fuzzy and relaxed. I like that part. Yeah. So hard cider is a wonderful drink. Yeah. And for those who are gluten-free like myself, it's a fantastic option. And we use all of our organic apples and some other select local apples. We forage for...

12:21
Forge, for and grow some of the other fruits that go in like aronia berries and raspberries and wild black caps. So it's fun to bring all that together.

12:32
That's very nice. I'm so impressed with what you do. I wish that when my husband and I had been in our 20s, we had known each other. We didn't really meet each other until we were 26, I think. And I was married to somebody or I was going to be married to somebody else. I can't remember now. But it doesn't matter. We just were not at the stage where we were going to be ending up together at that point. And I wish we had known where we would end up.

13:01
because if we'd known we would have ended up, maybe we would have done things differently and gotten there sooner, if that makes sense. Yeah.

13:10
Yeah, it's kind of a bummer. We missed out on the best years of our lives because we hadn't hadn't found each other yet. So, Well, as a fruit farmer, we continue to ripen well every year. Yeah, like fine wine. Yes, exactly. Um, okay. So do you have people come in to the

13:37
to your property and visit and do you give them tours or is it just they can buy things at your property? We give tours on occasion, organized tours and we are going to have a farm tour coming up in June. We have another event here in July, sowing seeds, celebrating local foods and lost skills, which is super cool. This is our second year doing that event.

14:03
And, you know, sometimes when groups contact us, we arrange tours, but it's all arranged ahead of time, but our farm store is open five days a week and people can come there on their own. And there's usually chickens wandering around and pigs on pasture and, um, you know, whatever else is going on seasonally. So that's kind of how we do that.

14:29
Okay, so I have a question because a lot of people who are doing what you're doing offer events or tours or whatever to get people to come in and visit and see what you're doing. And so my question is, when people come and they don't really know about farming or gardening or homesteading or anything, is there a light bulb that you see go on with them when they've been there a while?

14:57
Yeah, I mean, I've definitely experienced that over and over again. It's neat to see, you know, they didn't say, oh, I didn't know that grew that way. Or I didn't know we could grow apricots here or just seeing pastured animals, you know, in a different system or whatnot. Or with that event I mentioned, we did, we had a lot of homesteader type folk.

15:26
attend and be part of the farm tour and say like, Oh, I didn't know you could do so much on such a small space. Because we only at our home farm here have 4.6 acres. And we have over 400 fruit trees here. And then we have another 10 acres that we manage, which is where the remainder of our apple trees are. But we do a lot on our little postage stamp here.

15:52
I love seeing that happen and I love seeing that with adults and with kids, you know, getting to experience that stuff. Okay. Well the reason I ask is my brother is an English professor in Massachusetts of all places and we were talking a while back, like maybe five years ago, and I said as a professor

16:22
teach and see that that light come on when someone gets a concept or realizes that they wrote something really beautiful that they thought was just mediocre. And there was like a good 30 second pause and he said, that doesn't happen. No. And I said, what do you mean it doesn't happen? And he said, he said, sis, it's, it's college. He said,

16:46
He said, it's not the same as elementary school when kids are learning things for the very first time. He said, he said college people tend to be slightly more jaded because they're adults. And, and I felt so bad for him because he just, he sounded so sad that there isn't that light bulb moment. And I don't know about you, but I live for watching people grow and learn. And so I said that my

17:16
I said to my brother, I said, you might want to find a different profession. I said, because it's making you this sad. Are you going to be able to sustain this career? He was like, it's paycheck. He said, and I actually love what I do. So yes. And I said, okay. Well, that's important. There is something, yeah, there's something amazing when something that you're doing sparks an idea or joy or happiness in somebody else. Yeah.

17:46
Yeah, you know, I really am passionate about like teaching people about preservation and just some of these lost skills, some home setting skills, whatnot, you know, making tinctures, making salves, gardening, that builds a resiliency in our community and gets us engaged with working with our hands.

18:15
because I think that's something that is kind of lost in our society today. Is that like a deeper sense of purpose or whatnot that comes with doing some of those things? And I just think those are the kind of things people, I see people craving, especially just more so in the last number of years that they want that experience. And I think

18:41
that leads to light bulb moments and exciting feelings.

18:51
Just those human connections. Yeah, and it leads to wanting to learn more. Yes. When I started cooking from scratch, I didn't know what I was doing. I made cookies from scratch. I was like, oh, these are pretty good. What else can I make? Then I did cake. I was like, huh, that's pretty cool. As I got...

19:18
further and further into cooking, it branched out into like dinners or I don't know, just more, more and more and more. And I learned that cheesecake is not a gourmet specialty. Anyone can make a cheesecake. But I thought that it was a special magic thing. Up until I made one and I was like, oh, you put the ingredients together and you put them in the oven and you cook it. That's how you make cheesecake.

19:48
So, I think that people think that it's hard to learn how to do these things that you can just pay someone to do for you. But it's not hard, it's just you have to want to learn how to do it. Yeah, yeah, you just got to do it. And that can be a really hard thing to see depending on what place you're in. But then, kind of when you go over this hump sometimes, it's like, oh, yeah, you just have to try. And you just have to fail sometimes.

20:19
Um, have you ever heard the term limiting beliefs? Uh, I think we, we tend to put a lot of, yeah, we tend to put a lot of limiting beliefs on ourselves and you probably told yourself like, I can't make cheesecake or I would say to myself, like, I am not a baker. Well, you know, I'm going on three years making sourdough because I just like. Decided to throw that limiting belief in the trash and try and burn a few things and, you know, whatever, but like.

20:48
It feels good and you get somewhere. Um, and you just, yeah, you just gotta try and get your hands dirty. And not everything. I'm going to say something that. Go ahead. Oh, no, you go ahead. I was going to say, I'm going to say something that probably sounds counterintuitive, but there is actually something really satisfying about completely screwing up the thing you're trying to make and then throwing it in the trash.

21:17
and thinking, I can try again. Yeah, with a clean slate. Or when you do that and you try again and you go, oh, that's what I did wrong or something like that, you know, and it just like, you have these little clicks, those light bulb moments, right? Yeah, yeah, I made something like 15 years ago, I made something, I put it in the oven

21:47
one of the kids needed something and I completely got distracted from the thing in the oven. And they got my attention before I had set the timer on the stove. And so I never set the timer. So I was dealing with whatever emergency was going on with one of the kids and I could smell something cooking and I was like, I got to check that. And I didn't until it smelled like it was burning. And I was like, well, dinner's ruined.

22:13
And I went out in the kitchen and I pulled it out and I put it on the top of the stove and there was no salvaging it. And I was like, okay, this was not my fault this time. And I just let it cool down and I think we had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that night because there was just no other plan. And once whatever was in the pan cooled down, I literally scraped it into the trash and thought...

22:42
good riddance, it was not supposed to happen today. And I wasn't upset, I wasn't angry, it was just one of those things. And when I threw it in the trash, I was like, that's okay. Sometimes things just need to go in trash. So I tried, I failed. It wasn't necessarily because I did anything wrong, but kids come first, obviously. And so we just, we have to keep trying and we have to keep moving forward because if you don't...

23:11
and you don't move forward, you might as well not be alive.

23:18
At least that's what I think. That's so true. We feel that a lot in the farming universe. That's why we sit down every year and say, what worked? What didn't work? What do we need to throw in the trash? Where do we want to evolve? I think that's just a metaphor for life, but we find it really important on the farm as well.

23:46
Yeah, and who knew how important weather would be regarding growing things? I don't know how you guys did last summer, but boy, last summer was rough on everybody regarding weather. Yeah, you know, last year wasn't too bad for us. You know, there is something nice to having perennial crops. Um, and

24:13
Apples will start setting, fruit will start setting, fruiting buds in the fall. Weather in the fall is important too as far as moisture goes and whatnot for us. When we have dry years, things tend to be, the seasons tend to be a little compressed, which can sometimes, when four weeks of raspberries come in three weeks, it's like a bust in your bud.

24:38
Some things did not size up as much as they were, but like that's also something I guess I can say I enjoy about the job is every season's a little different. You are learning all of the time. I mean, sometimes it can be really difficult, but that's also what the human experience is about, I think is continuing to learn and grow. It doesn't feel good to be stagnant.

25:06
So I feel grateful that last year ended up okay, pretty decent. This spring was what made me more nervous but it all panned out.

25:19
Yeah, and this past winter was insane. I cannot believe we got through the winter with like a foot of snow. That was it. We didn't even get our snow blower out, which is ridiculous. But I mean, it kind of made up for the last winter because there was so much snow. It was ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. It was a lot two winters ago.

25:45
I'm hoping that this week of rain that we have coming and is raining now here, is going to be okay for the tomatoes and the cucumber babies we just put in. My husband planted over 150 tomato starts this past weekend. Wow, that's great. He also planted radish seeds and green bean seeds. I was like...

26:14
Are you going to be mad if those seeds rot out because it's going to be really wet this week? He said, nah, he said, I'll just put more in. I said, okay, good. At least the radishes have a quick turnaround.

26:28
Yeah, I put my tomatoes in, but I didn't fully mulch them. So hopefully they won't stay soggy because we have kind of like a clay loam, heavier soil. We'll just see. Yes, the battle cry of farmers everywhere. We just have to wait and see how it goes. I've said before on the podcast that I am...

26:57
I am absolutely not a gambling girl. I don't like to gamble with money or time or anything else. I really, really want to know what my odds are and I want to go for the best odds possible. And so when my husband was talking about us finding a place that wasn't in town to move to, he said, I want to have a big garden and I want to do this and I want to do that. I want to do that.

27:25
I want to do this." And I was like, you're talking about a huge gamble. And he said, well, yeah, but life's a gamble. I said, I hate gambling. He said, he said, the house will always win on this one. I said, I don't believe you. I don't believe you. And he said, okay, he said, let me, let me rephrase it. He said, it will be worth the risk. I was like, okay, I guess we can go with that. So.

27:52
What I'm trying to get at here is that anyone who gardens or farms, it is always a gamble. And you can't be afraid if you want to live this life. And I'm not afraid of it, I just don't enjoy the gambling part of it. I prefer to refer to it as an experiment. It sounds a little more exciting than a gamble.

28:19
All guard. And it is an experiment. Brand experiment. Yeah, yeah.

28:25
It's a grand and glorious thing no matter how it turns out. Well, and I just, I mean, it's so great that you are gardening and homesteading. I think I see more and more people.

28:39
you know, reaching to that or growing a garden or just trying to be a little bit more self sufficient and sustainable, whether it's out of a desire to, you know, get dirty, get their hands in the ground, just try to make something for themselves or if it's because of inflation or supply chain issues. I just see more and more people heading towards that experiment and it just makes me really encouraged.

29:08
Yeah, and I'm really happy that people who are living in towns who only have a little tiny bit of space to grow are at least trying to grow something because that's the gateway to, oh, I can try these things and these things and these things and they grow and they learn. So we're right back to the growing and learning thing again. There you go. Yeah. And if people want to get into foraging and...

29:36
preserving, canning, drying, freezing, whatever. They don't even have to have gardens, but to get connected to the farmer's market or a local farmer, there's many, many, that's what I love about it. No matter every single farm and every single homestead and everything, it's like thumb prints. We all have our unique way of doing it and you can do it however fits you. So if you really think gardening isn't your thing, you can still.

30:05
get your hands on all the fresh goodness or do preservation or do some sort of urban homesteading or something like that.

30:18
Yeah, and it's a good thing to keep our dollars local. And I say that as someone who used to go to the farmer's markets and buy from the local farmers because we didn't have room to grow as much as we needed. But I also say it as someone who now has a farm stand on property and someone who sells at the farmer's market because our bottom line relies on people buying our things as well.

30:46
So it's a really nice circle. And if you can't grow, you can support your local growers. And if you do grow, you can provide it to the people who need it. Exactly. So important. Right back to that resiliency and connection piece, because our communities are just really important.

31:14
Yeah, and our communities tend to be our friends and our neighbors, and we want everyone to thrive and rise with the tide. And apparently the tide right now is locally grown food, so that's awesome. Yes. I grew up on the East Coast, so anytime I think of a tide metaphor, I'm going to use it. All right, Brooke, well, I try to keep these to half an hour, and we're at 31 minutes and 30 seconds.

31:44
two seconds. So I am going to cut you loose because I'm sure you have lots to do considering it is springtime. And thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks for reaching out, Mary. If you ever, if you need anything in follow up, just holler.

31:59
Yep, and don't actually leave me because I need the file to upload. So don't go anywhere when I say goodbye. Thanks so much, Brooke. Have a great day. You too. Take care. Bye.