C&M Homestead

Today I'm talking with Morgan at C&M Homestead. 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 Morgan at C&M Homestead. Good morning, Morgan. How are you? Good morning. I'm good. How are you? I'm good. Is it still super cold in South Dakota? You know what's warming up? The last couple of days have been bitterly cold, but today...

00:27
The sun is shining and the temperatures are warming up. So hopefully we're done with that little cold snap. Well, considering I'm your neighbor to the east in Minnesota, we're in the same boat. The sun is so bright this morning and I think it's actually above zero right now. I think it is here as well. I think we're maybe at like four degrees maybe. So not far above, but it's above zero. So that's good.

00:52
Yeah, last I looked at my phone, my weather bug app was telling me it was minus two, but that was at like five o'clock this morning. So I don't know what it is right now. Okay. So we've done the obligatory weather check-in because that's what I do with all the podcasts and tell me about yourself and what you guys do. So I am the C or I guess the M of C and M Homestead. My husband would be the C, Corey. So probably about two years ago, we...

01:21
decided that we wanted to do better for ourselves and kind of that's where the whole bread, baking bread started. I started kind of taking the deep dive into sourdough and it's just kind of transformed since those two years ago. But about a year and a half ago, we moved out to my grandma's farm. And so we rent now from my mom and dad, a house and two.

01:48
two acres and we've kind of just turned it into our own little paradise out here. We started with some chickens and it grew to ducks and turkeys and we had a couple of friends who could no longer take care of some of their animals. So we inherited some geese and it just kind of seems to keep growing out here. And it's just fun to watch our boys. We have a

02:14
nine-month-old, a four-year-old and a 16-year-old. It's his birthday today. And it's just fun watching them be involved in caring for the animals and seeing the four-year-old come into the house with a handful of eggs. And he's like, Mom, look what these chickens did. So it's just fun. We kind of just wanted a slower lifestyle for ourselves from in town in Aberdeen. And so we moved out here.

02:43
We're just slowly kind of making transitions to being able to be more self-sustaining. Awesome. Happy birthday, 16-year-old. Yeah. And boy, do I know what it's like to be a boy mom. My first child was a girl, but the next three were boys. So it was basically a boy household once she moved out. Yes. And it's a lot. It's a lot to be the only girl in the household. It is.

03:10
They are like, what do you mean you want to paint your nails? Like, let's go outside and like play trucks in the dirt. And I'm like, oh, all right, we'll do that. Let's go. Yeah, mom, just run a brush through your hair, pull it back in a barrette or a ponytail holder and let's go. Yes, I understand completely. Yes, they are all about being outside in the dirt with the chickens, in the duck pond with the ducks. You name it, they want to do it outside. Yes.

03:39
Yes, I have a husband who's like that too and he is chomping at the bit for this weekend because it's actually supposed to be not freezing tomorrow and Sunday. And when he got up this morning after he got his coffee, I said, so should I just plan on you being outside all weekend? And he said, yep. Didn't even bat an eye. So it's a male thing. It's not a kid boy thing. It's not an adult male thing. It's just a male thing. Boys and men like to be outside. Most of them.

04:09
And if they don't, then they like to be in a room with a desk and a computer playing video games or coding things. So they sure do. So when you started making sourdough bread, I need to know, did you kill your starter when you first started it at least once? Did you burn a loaf? I got to know the failures and the successes. So no, I did not kill my starter. I made my own starter. Okay.

04:37
I had great success with it. I didn't have any issues kind of going through that process. I have a couple of friends in my mother-in-law who've made starters multiple times and they're like, it died and I just, I don't know how, but it's very common. So I must have been very grateful and I'm very grateful and I was very lucky that I didn't have that problem. But have I burnt a loaf? 100%.

05:08
have quite the following for our Facebook page and we do some drop-offs for bread. And last week I was just struggling with my sourdough. It wasn't rising the way I wanted it to. I had to push back some orders because they weren't rising and they were like two inch pancakes. So I just took a little bit to like kind of figure out like what was changing. I don't know if it was the temps. I don't know if it was just that it wasn't.

05:38
The starter was more hungry than what it usually is, and so I needed to adjust the feeding ratios, but we did some adjusting and I got it figured out and it's now making beautifully risen loaves. Awesome. I always joke that cooking is better living through chemistry because all the reactions that happen in cooking are chemistry.

06:03
And I did really well in chemistry in school. I was miserable at physics. So I'm really glad that I like to cook, not like do rocket science, because I would fail. But yeah, the ratios and the temperatures and the time all impact how things work. So sometimes it happens. But I mostly wanted you to tell me that you had burned a loafer too, because people think that excellent cooks were born excellent cooks.

06:33
And that's not true. You have to learn and you have to practice and sometimes things go wrong. They do and that's one thing that I really struggle with. I very much so like wanna produce a good loaf of bread or whatever I'm making, bagels, to my customer. But I also would maybe say I'm a little bit on the perfectionist side where if it doesn't look perfectly like I want it to, I'm like, I can't do that, nope. And my husband has been like, Morgan, there's nothing wrong with that loaf.

07:03
There might be a little crack in it where you didn't want it to crack, but it is fine. It'll taste just as good as if that crack wasn't there. So I've had to adjust a little bit of my expectations of you can't have a perfect loaf and what is a perfect loaf? But I've also had some very imperfect loafs where I've, the timers went off and I got busy with the kids and forgot the loaf in the oven. So had to restart.

07:29
Yes, and the perfect loaf is the loaf that somebody bites into and just hums as they taste it. Yes. That's the perfect loaf right there. Okay, so I've said this on the podcast a billion times, but I'm going to say it again because you and I have never talked. I don't make bread. My husband makes the breads. He is excellent at yeast breads. I am terrible at them. I have attempted to do it like two or three times in my...

07:56
in the last 30 years and I have screwed it up all three times and he's really good at it so he's the one who makes the bread. I make quick breads like dessert breads and cakes and cookies and brownies. I make a killer brownie like he will never attempt the brownies I make because he's like you do it perfectly and like good you make the breads I'll make the brownies recover. But not everybody bakes the same things not everybody loves to bake the same things. So do you do other things besides sourdough?

08:27
I do not. I sourdough is kind of my realm. My husband though will bake bread with the like yeast and he will do he'll do a little bit of like the baking if it uses something other than sourdough. I usually stick to the sourdough. It's what I know. And he told me he's like, you should try just making some like regular bread. And I get intimidated by it because I'm like, I don't.

08:57
I don't know how to do that. Well, the big difference between making a sourdough loaf and a yeast bread, like, I don't know, a honey oat bread, is that the sourdough, you've already got the yeast. And with the yeasted breads, you have to bloom the yeast. And that's my downfall because I always kill it. No matter how careful I am at following directions, I always kill the yeast and I do not know why. So

09:26
It's a different process and I get it because I have not tried doing sourdough yet and I keep saying I should, but I haven't. I suspect that if I did a sourdough starter and tried making bread with that, I would probably be fine. But I can't keep the dry yeast in the packets alive to save my life when I try to use it. I would say you should give it a shot. I feel like sourdough is very forgiving. Whether depending, I mean for...

09:52
I feel like for the most part, depending, no matter what stage you're in, I feel like there's usually a way to bring it back. I mean, maybe not after you've burnt a loaf, but like the inside might, the inside is still probably good. But I've had our 16 year old help a couple of times with the bread or like mixing it and he doesn't always pay attention to what he's doing. And so we'll have a very hydrated.

10:21
low for a mix of bread and water and it's like, buddy, this is going to be, well, let's add some more flour because this is going to be a soupy mess if we leave it this way. So I feel like with sourdough, it's very forgiving. It's just, you know, kind of figuring out consistencies as well. Yeah. Okay. So on that note, tell me how to make, how to do the starter, how to get it started. Oh, so I would start with...

10:50
maybe a half a cup of water and a half a cup of flour and you mix it together and then you let it sit for 24 hours and then you'll take half of it out and you'll just feed it that much again. Half a cup of water and a half a cup of flour, mix it all together and let it sit again. And you do that for about, I think seven days and then on day seven, you start doing like double feeding. So you'll feed

11:18
that ratio in the morning and then that ratio again at night and you take out half every time you feed it. So that's how I started and it seemed to work really well. I started with bread flour. There's a higher protein in the bread flour than in all purpose flour. But now I've kind of used it interchangeably. Some of it I have bread flour I use and sometimes I just use all purpose flour.

11:48
Bread flour is a hot commodity here in town. I have a couple of other friends who also bake sourdough. So if they're out of bread flour at our local grocery store at Kessler's, I know who's got the bread flour. So can you do it with all purpose flour? You can. Okay. Yep. Does it change it? Does it make it slower or anything?

12:14
I think because of the lower protein in all-purpose flour, it could take a little bit longer, but I've had other people who've only used all-purpose flour and have no issue with it also. So I think what it comes down to is like, what kind of wild and active yeast is already in like the environment, and then the temperature, I think warm plays a huge role in the...

12:39
sourdough starter, just like the yeast when you make it. I mean, you don't want it too hot, but you also need it warm enough to where it rises. Yeah. Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna commit because I will if I come if I say I'm gonna commit, I'm not gonna do it, but I'm gonna try, try Sunday this weekend to get some started. And can I just use like a quart mason jar and doesn't have to be covered?

13:06
I would use, yeah, a court mason jar would be great. And what I started with is just a paper towel over the top of it. So there's some breathability, but also like nothing's fallen in it. Okay. Yeah, we have, we're really blessed here at our house. We have Asian beetles, you know, okay. And we have a, it's a finished, it's not a finished basement. The part where all of our, our gadgets, our water heater and stuff like that is a cement

13:36
but the other half is just dirt. So the Asian beetles have figured out how to get into our basement and they come up through the vents. And I really don't want an Asian beetle flying into my starter, that would be gross. So. I don't blame you. So that's why I asked about covering it. Yep, so I did the paper towel and then I usually put like a rubber band around it just to kind of keep the paper towel snug on there, but yet there was that breathability. Okay, awesome. Well.

14:05
I'm going to have to get a jar and grab some of my all purpose flour because I don't think we have any bread flour in the house right now. And I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it Sunday. I'm going to take a photo and I'm going to post it on Facebook and that way there's some accountability. There you go. Because I've been saying for six months I should do it and I keep saying we're never going to make enough bread to make this worth it. But what's the worst that happens? I do it. I make a loaf of bread and I'm like, this really isn't my thing. Yeah.

14:33
Well, there's so many other things that you can use sourdough starter for. My mom took a bread class or a sourdough class here in Aberdeen and she got sent home with the starter and the stuff to make the like a recipe on how to make bread. She's never made the bread, but she's found how to make discard crackers. And so her and my dad love making crackers, sourdough discard crackers.

15:03
So there's a lot of recipes that don't just, that aren't bread that you could use a starter for as well. Yeah, somebody was telling me they made sourdough starter cookies. Yes, I make some chocolate chip cookies. Yeah, I was blown away. I was like, you're using a yeast thing in cookies. Don't they like get huge? So depending on like where my starter is, because I've used it active and I've used it at where it should be fed.

15:32
And when it's active, it gets a little bit more, it's a little thicker, it doesn't spread out as nicely as it does with inactive starter. But the cookies are great, my kids love them, my husband loves them. I made some of our regular cookies without the sourdough and no one was interested in them. They wanted the sourdough ones.

15:58
Huh, in my house a cookie is a cookie is a cookie. As long as it's sweet, it's gonna be gone. The boys are gonna eat them, they'll be gone. Okay, so we've spent like 15 minutes on sourdough stuff, which is fine, but sourdough is a big thing right now. So I've talked a lot about sourdough on the podcast. So what else do you guys do? So the other things we do right now are, we raise our own chickens and sell eggs.

16:28
This was the first year we've had chickens and we did get some meat birds and so we butchered those in May of last year and we plan on doing that again. And we also raise our own turkeys and have butchered them. What kind? Do you know what kind? What breed? The turkeys were, I believe, broad-breasted turkeys. They were beautiful. They got really big.

16:58
when we butchered them, I think the biggest one was almost 40 pounds. Oh, that's a big bird. Yeah, yep. That was after everything was done. That was the... Dressed and got it. Yep. So that was... They've been very big birds. We have some ducks as well. We raised ducks.

17:26
But right now, I mean, the biggest thing that we are looking to do is we have a couple of friends who've reached out who want us to raise some birds for them as well, some meat birds for them and butcher them so they can have some fresh locally grown chickens instead of buying the chickens from the store. That's a good plan because the chickens from the store suck right now. They do. They definitely do.

17:51
Yeah, I'm totally off chicken. My husband and my son love chicken thighs. They like them baked or pan fried. Yep. I will eat something else that day. They make dinner for themselves and I buy something else. I want nothing to do with it right now. Yeah. That's how bad store-bought chicken is right now for me. Yeah, we haven't had to buy chicken in a while.

18:21
teen birds that we butchered and dressed. And I think we only have a couple left. So I'm getting a little nervous because obviously we're going to have to raise some more before we can butcher them. But I don't know that we'll buy chicken from the store. I think we'll just go without chicken for a while until we can get some more of our own. Or find somebody else who's raising chickens. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned us.

18:50
I've only had duck once in my life in a restaurant dish, and it was a rice pilaf with some shredded duck in it. So basically, I'd never had duck because you couldn't even taste the duck in it. And so a friend of ours gave us a duck, put it in our freezer, I don't know, it was past fall, and we finally pulled it out and thawed it out and cooked it. And I had asked my friend what duck tastes like.

19:19
And she said, it does not taste like chicken. And I said, okay. And she said, it's actually a much, much, much darker meat. I said, okay. I said, no, no promises. Cause I'm really not into any kind of foul meat right now. I'm just not. And she was like, okay. So we made it and I tasted it. And to me, it tasted like a really good steak. And I was surprised because that was not what I was, I was expecting to taste.

19:46
So for the listeners, duck is not the same as chicken or, or, um, I don't know, quail or any of those birds. It's just not. It's a totally different meat, totally different texture. Yes, agreed. It is not anything like chicken. No. Or turkey or yeah, it's, it's got its own, its own kind of flavor. Yeah. It's, it's like, it's like red meat.

20:12
It's really weird. I was just dumbfounded because I bit into it expecting I don't know what. And as I'm tasting it and chewing it, I was like, oh my god, this is like a steak. This is really weird. Okay. All right, we'll go with that. All right. So, um, you said you have three boys. Are the three boys into the whole homesteading thing? Um, I for the most part. Yes. Okay. They um,

20:42
The four-year-old loves it. The 16-year-old goes back and forth with his interest in it.

20:53
He was much older, obviously, when we moved out to the farm, since we've only been out here about a year and a half. So he definitely was more used to the city life, being able to go hang out with his friends, being great in town, not having to drive 30 minutes to get to town. So he's hit or miss. There's some days he loves it, and there's other days he would much rather be in town. Okay. Well.

21:21
The little ones, they're more into it. Well, the littlest one probably isn't, but the middle one is. Yeah, the four-year-old loves it. He is all about being outside, picking vegetables in our garden. This fall, he was all about that. Of course, he had to use some kind of truck to be able to pick the vegetable off of the plant and put it in another truck to get it up to the house.

21:51
He was outside in fresh air. He was eating stuff right off of the plants, which I just love to see. And the nine month old, he, we had a couple of nice days in, let's see, the end of January, beginning of February. And so we took him out in the stroller and we had the ducks and the birds out and he loved watching the chickens and the ducks just kind of roam around and do their thing. So I think he'll really enjoy it too as he gets more

22:22
able to move around by himself and as he gets older. Yeah, he's not going to know anything different. No, no. So it'll be interesting for you to see how he grows into it versus your 16 year old who got kind of thrown into it. Yeah, we've had kind of them in all different stages. I mean, Mason, the oldest one, he's kind of got thrown into it. Theodore, the four year old has.

22:48
had a little bit of like city living, but also was still like fairly young enough to like, not really, you know, he knows, cause he knows where we lived at in town and he talks about it, but yet like, so he's kind of like the in between and then all of our the youngest, this is all he'll know. Uh-huh. Yep. I sort of understand it because when we moved to our place over four years ago, we had been living literally in town. We were a block.

23:18
and a half from the main street in our little town. And my son, who's 23 now, he had a job at a comic book store and he loved it. And his boss loved him. And we had the opportunity to finally get out of town and, you know, have some acreage and a nice house. And we talked to our son and we were like, um, we really want to go now. We really want to jump. We're in the position to do it. Is this going to be a problem?

23:48
And he was like, absolutely not. Let's go. And that first couple of months we lived here, I think that he really missed his job at the comic book store because the comic book store was also an arcade. And so he was always seeing his friends there and he was getting the chance to check out different comic books for free and he just really enjoyed the job. And the reason I mentioned this situation is he just went a couple of weekends ago to that shop.

24:18
to hang out with a friend and he walked in and his old boss was there and he was like, hi, and my son said, I think he wants me to come back and work and I said, yeah, well, that's probably not gonna happen right now. So yeah, it's really, really hard when as the adults, you need to make a decision but your kids are old enough to have input into their opinions on that decision.

24:46
So yeah, I really felt bad for a little while about pulling him from that town where his friends were and where his job was. But I was like, we're the grownups. We got to go. If you don't want to go, you can stay here with somebody. It's up to you. So it's tough, but he loves it here and he loves being outside with his dad. He loves helping with the gardens and the cutting the wood and all the things we do.

25:13
Yeah, and that's how Mason is as well. He definitely misses that in town life, being close, able to ride his bike over to his friend's house. He just got his driver's license a couple of months ago, so we're working on getting that taken care of because he's got to drive for so many hours with an adult. But yeah, he loved being able to ride his bike over, but also he definitely loves being able to go outside and just kind of that.

25:43
silence and peaceful quietness of being out in the country where he didn't get that in town. I feel like Mason is definitely sometimes like an old soul just wants peace and quiet and he's kind of my he's my old man child. So he just he's fun. It's fun to watch him kind of grow into an adult and help out here and he comes up with some really good ideas of

26:11
what we can do with chicken coops and how we can put them in the area that we have them. And so it's fun to watch that thought process kind of evolve too. Yeah, yep, absolutely. Watching your kids come up with new ideas or learn something new is one of the most beautiful moments of a parent's life, I swear. So.

26:38
Okay, so what's the plan for the future? Are you guys gonna make this more, bigger, stay the same? How's it gonna go? So for the future, what we would kind of like to do is, like I said in the beginning, right now we're renting from my mom and dad, and we're renting just two acres. So we weren't for sure if we were gonna like living out of town. So we actually have our house still in town that we use as a rental. And so we are...

27:05
Our future plan would be to sell the house in town and maybe look for something that's ours that we're not renting that has a couple more acres. Because we would like to expand. What that looks like, we're not 100% for sure yet, but we do have plans to expand and grow our business and our homestead lifestyle.

27:32
We're just not for sure what that all looks like yet, but we're definitely excited to see how it will evolve. Yes, and evolve it will. And it might evolve in ways you didn't expect because I feel like that's what happens to homesteaders. I definitely would agree. It all started with the sourdough bread in town. I'm telling you, that's where it started is I started baking bread in town and then we were like.

27:58
we need to move to the country and then we did and then we ended up with chickens, ducks, goats or not goats, geese and we just want more. Well our homesteading thing that we're doing now started because my husband's mom gave us some iris plants and some I think lilies back oh my god over 20 years ago from her house that she was selling.

28:27
We had like a tenth of an acre lot and we had this little space in front of our bedroom windows that were fronted between the windows and the sidewalk. And I was like, well, we can put lilies and irises in there. And my husband was like, okay. So we transplanted those and they did really well. And I was like, you know, we have a small backyard. We could actually dig that up and put in some food gardens. And he was like, okay.

28:52
And he dug him out and rented a tiller and tilled it and put stuff in and it did really well. And we were trying to raise four kids on one income. So saving money was important. There was a lot of cooking from scratch and a lot of learning how to make things instead of buying things. That's where our homestead stuff began. And I never really thought about how it would all culminate in this three acre.

29:18
property with a house and a pole barn and a garden, sorry, yeah, a farm stand and now a hard-sided greenhouse and there's going to be a high tunnel style greenhouse next to the shed. And I mean, it just bubbles up. It's like you blow up one balloon and there's 16,000 balloons that come off that one balloon. A hundred percent agreed. A hundred percent. We've talked about just several different things that we would like to do or like to see.

29:48
Um, as we kind of evolve, we've talked about doing, um, like, uh, like a little flower farm or like a little lavender farm. Yeah. Um, we've talked about maybe getting some pigs or some other animals, but for right now we're just kind of holding tight until we know what, how we want to evolve and what that looks like and what fits best for our family.

30:16
Yep, absolutely. And I'm going to end this podcast on a really weird note. I think that when you have success in the home studying things you're trying to do, it is the worst and best thing because the worst thing is that you gain confidence and you're like, we can do anything. And then you do anything and something fails and it really, really can destroy your confidence.

30:46
You feel like you can do anything, which means nothing can stop you from trying. It does. It gives you a whole different sense of self-confidence with just trying to figure it out whether it fails or not. You've learned a way not to do it, but there's how many other ways that you could do it. Yes. And the more confidence you have, the more self-sufficient you become, the less dependent you are on.

31:15
the outside world and the outside world is a lovely place and people are great and you know, good to have friends. But being kind of independent and knowing how to do things is terribly important. Yes. Yep. So that's where I think we're going to end it. Morgan, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. I appreciate it. Thank you. It was fun. Bye. Yep.