Hedgerow Collective

Today I'm talking with Anya at the Hedgerow Collective. 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 Anya at the Hedgerow Collective. Good afternoon. Well, I guess it's afternoon for you, but it's still morning for me. So good morning, afternoon, Anya. How are you? Good morning and afternoon to you as well. I am well today.

00:27
Pennsylvania, Southeast Pennsylvania where I live. It is a overcast day and it smells and feels like snow. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's not an overcast day here in Minnesota. It is just as bright as it could possibly be and it's very cold. I don't think we've come up zero yet today. Oof. Yeah. So that's exciting.

00:53
And I'm glad you opened with the weather because I usually do because like I've said, it's how I express my esteem for the people that I'm talking to. I always try to find out the weather where you guys are. So, all right. So I'm going to open this up with the fact that you're not really a homesteader, but reading your bio on your website, you are definitely a nature girl. So I figured they tie in pretty well. So tell me about yourself and what you do.

01:18
I agree, they tie in so well and I actually do a little bit of homesteading but I'm very, very new at it. But I am a nature girl, I am a gardener, I am a photographer and I also do horse massage which is really delightful. And I live on a little...

01:45
property in a town called Marietta, Pennsylvania. It is ancient Susquehannaq land. And we moved here about three years ago. And at the time, my husband said, we're not gonna have any big trees. We're not going to do anything wild like that. We don't want the maintenance of trees falling on the house or the leaves or anything.

02:15
And over, you know, these past three years, we've compromised and we now have 11 trees on the property. Yay. Yes, and more to come. There's apple trees that are sitting in my sunroom. I have serviceberry trees that are being shipped to me. So we've created a really wonderful little habitat here that I

02:45
Um, really, it feels really magical here, even though we're in, you know, we have neighbors on all sides and a road in front of our house. And, you know, I think, I think part of my goal is that you don't need to have, you know, 10 acres, 50 acres to be able to do this type of, of work and grow your own food or grow, create habitats or anything like that. You know, you can work with what you have and it's...

03:13
absolutely possible. I mean, it's great if you do have 10 acres or 60 acres or 500 acres, but you don't have to have those things in order to grow some really amazing flowers or food or both. Yeah. Yep. That's one of the things that I'm trying to promote on this podcast is that you can do this stuff in a little tiny house on a tenth of an acre, or you can do it on lots of acres. But the point is you can do it.

03:43
Absolutely. I mean, you can find cheap things like baby pools or old, like food grade buckets on Facebook Marketplace for super cheap and you can grow things. Yeah. You mentioned apple trees. My husband actually went out and pruned our peach trees and our apple trees this past weekend and brought in the stems and he's rooting them.

04:09
so that we can have saplings because if it works, they'll turn into more trees. Absolutely. Yeah. That's great. Really excited. I have a sapling. Well, I'm trying, not quite a sapling yet. I'm manifesting that it will become a sapling of a witch hazel cutting. So that's my little project. I have it sitting next to me here and I just, I talk to her every day. I'm like, come on, you can do it.

04:38
Spread those roots. Do your thing. Yeah, I was going to say talk to it and sing to it. It'll come up every day. Yeah. OK. You mentioned Susquehanna land. Is that Native American land? That is Native American land. They were. Marietta is situated along the Susquehanna River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay, and it's one of the largest watersheds in Pennsylvania. The Susquehanna River.

05:07
is this is some fun facts here. It's 444 miles long and it is the longest unnavigable river in the United States. Because the Susquehanna goes from 200 feet deep to two inches deep so quickly, it's impossible to navigate it.

05:36
with any type of boat. And historically, they fixed, fixed, quote unquote, that by using canals, the remnants of which are still litter the sides of the river. But yes, the Sesquihana people were on these shores. They were part of the Lena Lenape tribes of the Northeast.

06:04
I try to acknowledge that they were here far, far longer and well before any of us were here. And it feels like it's always the right thing to do to acknowledge how they tended and stewarded this land for centuries before white folks came in. It is the right thing to do. And I'm glad that you said that. There is a rumor and I've tried to...

06:33
confirm it, but I can't get any hard facts because ancestry is weird. I am supposedly descended from the Abenaki tribe in Maine, New England. I am very, very white, very pale. I used to have really bright blue eyes, now they're green. I had really dark brown hair, almost black and extremely high cheekbones.

07:02
and very long fingers and very long feet and I'm tall. And the Abenaki's are very, very pale. You know, they're not dark skinned native Americans. And they were very long and lean too. So the rumor is, and I say rumor because I can't make it, I can't find out for sure. But supposedly I am descended from an Abenaki woman

07:31
generations back. And it's really funny because I've been told that I would look just like a Dublin girl if I got off the plane in Ireland. And I have been told by people who are Native American who were really good friends that, yeah, I definitely could be Abenaki Indian. And I'm just like, okay, well, I'm me. But in the meantime, I try to honor all cultures I know about and then learn about the other ones. And that way, I feel like I'm doing something.

08:00
productive instead of tearing things down. I totally understand that. And I wish you so much luck on that journey of finding that ancestry because I think ancestry.com is particularly good at if you're European descendant, but I think it does get a little squirrely with anything else. Well, the problem I'm having is that my dad's mom

08:30
died when he was two years old. And we have basically no family history on her side of the family. And I know her dad's surname and I have traced that name back all the way to William the Conqueror in England. That's so cool. Before England was England. Correct. That's right. But in that lineage that have moved over from England across the hundreds and hundreds of years.

08:59
multiple hundreds of years, someone married a Native American woman and I'm descended from that clan. Interesting. So, so I can't, the problem we have is that back in the old days, you couldn't know who fathered children. You knew who gave birth to children, but you can't know for sure who actually fathered that child. Yeah.

09:25
There's missing data. Yeah, so I'm a little leery to claim anything about my ancestry, but I really kind of hope it's true. I hope so as well. So anyway, I didn't mean to go down that rabbit hole quite that far, but it's always a neat story to tell. So you're a very nature-based girly and I love that because so am I. And I always say in the springtime that my fairy, my inner fairy, you know, the little

09:54
a little woodland nymph kind of fairies. It's just dancing because the light gets brighter and changes and then the green leaves come out and I know spring is coming. And I feel like you probably have an inner fairy as well. Absolutely, and February is when she starts stretching and yawning and waking up and she's like, it's almost time. Yeah. And I start some seeds. And I feel like February is this really liminal month where we're in between

10:24
the deep dark of winter and the bright freshness of spring. Yes. And I can get overly eager for that springtime, but then, you know, I'm sure this happens in Minnesota too, but where I live here, you know, February is like, not so quickly, and then we get a snowstorm. Yes. So I'm like, okay, all right, calm down, be patient, but it's hard.

10:53
Yeah, that's why my husband went out and pruned the trees and got the stems started rooting because he was like, I can't take it anymore. We need to be growing something. Right. Exactly. So I have the most beautiful peach branches downstairs on my, what I call my desk, but it's actually just a little console table under the window, right underneath the window frame in our living room. And the peach branches are actually starting to green up. And I'm like, oh my God, there's green, the big things in my house already. Yay.

11:24
how that feeds that inner fairy. Oh, she's very happy right now. Yes. She wasn't very happy when I had to go out and drag the dog in this morning, not even zero degrees, but she's definitely starting to bop and whistle and sing in the head. Yes. Definitely waking up, huh? Yeah, absolutely. I love spring. Me too. I love spring.

11:48
But I love fall more because fall is really pretty in Minnesota and it's when we're harvesting our squashes and I love winter squash. So I those that's my order of favorites as well. Fall and then spring and then winter and then summer. I am of Scots, Irish and Lithuanian descent. So my skin is basically translucent and I burn on the drop of a dime.

12:17
So the summer is not my favorite time, but I get through it, seeing the beauty and the growth and everything else is so happy. So I'm like, all right. Got to have it to get to home. Exactly. Yep. And I'm going to be even more definitive on my choice of words. I despise high summer. I cannot. I hate it. Amen, sister. Will you just skip high summer? I would be thrilled. But you can't.

12:47
We can't see a plant summer because the plants need that. They do. So it's a thing, but... It is a thing. Anyway, you said you do equine massage, like you go massage horses? I do. Keep telling me about that. It's really, really interesting. Growing up, I was a horsey girl. I spent all my time at the barn. I worked there. My friends were there. I mean, that was my safe space.

13:17
My horse at the time, his name was Mystic, and he, gosh, one day he just didn't quite feel right. I got on him and it just, it didn't feel right. And I knew this horse. I knew this horse as well as I knew myself. And I was like, something is just not right. We did a bunch of tests. He came back.

13:44
positive for limes, the negative for limes, but testing for limes in horses is very difficult because there's so many false positives and false negatives. So it's almost impossible to pin down if that's the issue. But I did hear about a local horse massager and I was like, all right, well, let's just see maybe he's tight. Like, I don't know, he has big muscles.

14:11
You know, he has all the same issues that we could have. He has bone structure. He has, you know, he's an athlete. He's working his body. So I called her up. She came out and she did a couple, she did a couple things with Mystic. And the next day when I rode him, he felt like a different horse. And at that moment I was like, yeah, you know what?

14:40
I can do this. So it took me some years, took me a marriage, a divorce, a child, two houses, you know, et cetera, et cetera, life happened. And finally I'm settling into kind of my new groove. And part of that is working with horses in this way. And I never thought that I would be the horse massage lady. I always thought I'd be the crazy horse lady.

15:09
But I'm fine switching out hats like that. And it's close enough. It's adjacent. So I can still be the crazy horse massage lady. Yes. Yeah. And you get to visit with horses all the time. Exactly. And they are so majestic. And I just feel like massage is a overlooked.

15:35
of healing, overlooked modality of healing. And part of what I do at the Hedge Row Collective is I want to make this stuff accessible. People think horses and they think, oh, well, that's really expensive. They're not wrong. But there's plenty of people who own horses who...

16:04
are not wealthy, who aren't coming from, you know, trillions of dollars in backing or sponsors or anything like that. And those animals also deserve healing touch and care and all these things. Same thing with photography, you know, I mean, gosh, however much you wanna pay for a photographer, you can find, and it can be astronomical. And I don't believe that good quality

16:33
photos and memories or good quality horse care or good quality garden consulting has to be astronomical. I want it to be accessible. I want people to understand that, you know, with garden consulting, like you said at the beginning of this, it's possible. Even if you just have a balcony, it's possible to grow some of your own stuff. So part of my goal in all this is making

17:03
these things accessible to everyone. And I'm so passionate about that. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Okay. So I want to talk about your photography stuff and I want to talk about your garden design stuff. So let's start with photography. I looked at your Facebook page, you have a sum of samples of your photos that you've done. And there's one of a lady who looks, I'm going to use the word goth, but her hair is dark and she's like a side profile and it's kind of a dark picture. Yes.

17:32
Beautiful. Thank you. You have some really, really nice photos and you have real talent. Thank you, I appreciate that. My photography journey officially started when I was like seven and my grandparents took me to Longwood Gardens, which is like a ginormous botanical garden outside of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. And it is stunning.

18:01
You know, this place has been endowed with millions and millions of dollars, so they have the best of the best, the perfect environment for any plant that they're growing. I mean, it's just gorgeous. And I remember my taking my grandma's Canon camera and I said, can I can I take a picture with that? And she was like, absolutely. And from that moment, I was like, oh, yeah, this is it.

18:30
This is where it's at. So obviously it took me many years to get my own Canon camera, but I did and I've always been the one who's documenting with pictures, you know, in friend groups, on trips, family events, you know, I'm always the one with the camera. I mean, it's become easier now with these really good cameras in our phones.

18:58
But at the time, back in the day, I was the one who carried the camera around and documented all the things. And I love it. I think it's so important. I've watched some of my clients are, they have young children and I've watched these children grow up and it's beautiful. And to capture these moments, it's such an honor. Every time that these people trust me to...

19:26
capture these moments and this snapshot in time. I recently did a session where the father-in-law of my client is sick and they don't know how much more time they have with him. And so this photo shoot was really to capture him with all of his grandchildren, him with all of his children, him with his wife.

19:54
It was so beautiful and it was, it's just heartwarming. You know, everyone's on their best behavior and it's just, it's really, really special. And I feel so honored to be able to do this, this work. Yep. Well, then you do actually fit my three things for my podcast because one of my topics is crafters and photography as a craft. So hey, we found the thing that ties everything together.

20:24
There you go. There you go. But you also design gardens. Now, when you say design gardens, are you saying that you sit down with someone and they're like, I have this much space and I don't know what I'm doing, help me? That's certainly part of it. Okay. Sometimes it looks like that. Sometimes, you know, it's a blank canvas and a piece of earth and people are like, I want, let's just use an example. I want butterflies.

20:53
in my garden. So I'll plan depending on where they are, you know, native plants, depending on, you know, I'll take into account the water situation at their house, whether it's really wet, whether it's really dry, what the wind is like, how many barriers they have or not. And we kind of plan out their garden that way. Other times people will come to me with a really specific need. Like, hey,

21:22
I have some really established gardens and I really like them and I don't wanna do anything with them, but I would like to add food to my property, more of a permaculture mindset. And so I can help them plant, decide on which cultivars to use or not, depending on what type of food they wanna grow. So we kind of go through all that and at the end, sometimes, and sometimes it's even broader than that. People are like, I'm having runoff issues.

21:52
and I don't know how to slow down this water and I need help. So, you know, either way I'm going to their property, I'm looking around, I'm taking pictures, I'm observing. You know, and then at the end of our time together, people, they get a full consultation report of everything we talked about, you know, plant recommendations, erosion control,

22:21
depending on whether their soils dry or needs more compost or whether they want to incorporate a compost, you know? So it really, it can take any number of turns throughout the time there and depending on what their needs are. But it's something that really lights my soul on fire. And I really, really enjoy doing that. Well.

22:47
I was going to say back in the beginning, but I wanted to hear all the parts first. What I find in doing this podcast and talking to people all over the place is that the happiest people I've talked to are the ones who just took something they were really interested in or they were really talented at and made that into their job. Yes. And you are like an example of three things that just light you on fire and you've turned them into careers, basically.

23:17
Totally. And it's really refreshing to have that joy in my life. Yeah. And there's a saying about if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life. And it sounds really trite. But it's true. It is true. And it does sound like, oh, what a cliche. But

23:45
Sometimes those cliches are the most accurate. Yep. My husband worked for a company. I'm not going to say the name of the company for almost 30 years, corporate America, and he basically worked on printers and fax machines and, and copiers, you know, that kind of stuff. Yeah. And he decided he did not want to continue with them too. Well, almost a year ago now.

24:15
And he basically took a hiatus and spent the summer gardening and selling stuff at the farmer's market. And that was a little weird and a lot of it was a big stretch for us because he's always worked for that company. And then we realized that the farmer's market wasn't going to support our lifestyle because we got to pay the bills. So he found a new job in the same arena.

24:43
but it's a much smaller company that does work for much smaller businesses. And he's actually wrenching on the machines now. He's not doing so much computer time, sitting at the computer. And he loves it. He said to me the other day- That's great. He said, I love my job. Just out of the blue. And I was like- That's so great. How special is that? Yeah, I said, do you?

25:10
And he said, yeah, he said, I love working on all these different kinds of machines. He said it just, he said, I just get such a charge out of figuring out what the problem is and knowing how to fix it and fixing it. And I was so thrilled to hear this because he was so miserable the last couple of years of the other job. Not only that, but on the weekends, he's the gardener. He loves to garden.

25:36
That's so great. And we're rolling into gardening season. So he's on a minor high right now with how great he feels with his job and the fact that we're rolling into spring. His inner fairy is also very excited. Yes. And it's been so nice seeing this man smile and come up with ideas and actually talk to me about them. It's been amazing. Oh, that's so beautiful too. Like what a beautiful season of life to celebrate. Yeah.

26:04
So really, I guess the reason I'm kind of pounding on this topic is for the listeners, if you had something that you wanted to do when you were a kid, or if you are a kid and there's something you love to do, you can keep going with that. You don't have to not do it just because you're not a kid anymore. Yes. I feel like we lose a lot of magic the minute we hit 18 and it really makes me mad. Absolutely. And it's, it's, I think.

26:32
If we kind of draw the lens out a little further, societally, you know, magic isn't gonna pay the bills. Magic isn't gonna do this. Feeling good doesn't matter. It's about money, it's about this, it's about this. Well, the good news is you can have both. You can do both. And even, you know, I have a day job, I'm a paralegal. Oh my, okay. But you know, that gets us, you know, that helps.

27:00
and everything else is supplementary and it's beautiful. And it works for me and my family. And so, yeah, I second that with what you're saying that just because life happens doesn't mean that you have to let go of those dreams that you had as a kid. No, and you shouldn't because life is meant to be lived. It's not supposed to be drudgery. Exactly.

27:30
I hate drudgery. Drudgery sucks. Yes. And then the other thing I was going to mention is I used to carry a little digital camera with me when we would hike in the woods. I love that. And I was very drawn to the little tiny things like the little wildflowers that come up in the springtime. Yes. Or the little runoff streams that go down through the ditch into the rocks and out into the woods. Yes. Or the ravine and the view across the ravine.

28:00
those little things that most people don't notice at all. Absolutely. And I have like tons of photos in my computer from 20 years ago from hiking around. And one of my favorite is there's a flower or a plant called bloodroot that grows here. Oh yes, here too. They're one of my favorite spring ephemerals. Yeah, and they have these really big fat leaves, but they have these little tiny white flowers.

28:26
Yes. And I have photos of those and I love those. And then there's another thing that grows here. It's called a marsh marigold. Yes. And they're gorgeous. I have only seen them once out in the wild and on the trail. Okay. I had no idea what it was. It was this really lush, beautiful, yellow flower. And I literally made my husband pull over on the side of the road because I saw it on the

28:55
Oh my gosh, I love that. And I said, please just let me get these photos. And he's like, okay. So I hopped out and I got photos. I wanted to be able to find out what kind of flowers they were. Got home, went to the Minnesota DNR website and typed in yellow flower and all the things I could see in the photo. And they're marsh marigolds. And I was like, what a fantastic name for plants. We have those here too. And they are beautiful. They are really stunning.

29:25
happen upon them like on a hike or something. Cause I find that they pop up in very unexpected places. Yeah, but it's gotta be wet. Yes, yes, yes. Their marsh is in the name for a reason, but they're really stunning. Yeah, they would make a beautiful potted plant, but I don't think that's what you can do with them. I don't think they would survive inside. I don't know. I don't think so either. They are meant to be observed in their native habitat.

29:54
And they're a gift from nature outside. They are. Yes, exactly. And the other one that I love is jewelweed. I don't know if you guys have jewelweed. Yes, we do. I love jewelweed. The little baby orchids. They're so pretty. Yes. I actually, I was doing a branding session for a friend of mine who's a farmer and he was teaching a class and I was there taking.

30:23
pictures and I got so distracted by the jewelweed, I had like, I ended up with like 10 images of jewelweed and I was like, well, I guess he's getting jewelweed pictures because they're beautiful. But they really are quite stunning. Yes. And they're really stunning if they still have dewdrops on them. Yes. Oh my gosh. Or any of those raindrops or anything like that. Absolutely. I agree with you 100%.

30:51
Yes, I think you and I are soul sisters who just haven't hadn't met yet. I think that's what's going on here. I think that's right. It's always fun when I get to talk to someone who's so interested in a couple of things that I'm also interested in, like the horse massage, not so much. I'm probably never going to do that. That's not my thing, but the photography and the garden planning. I actually love planning gardens. I just don't love doing the gardening part. Yes, that's...

31:18
Yes, they are very labor intensive and it is certainly a labor of love. Yeah. When we first moved here a little over four years ago, my husband was like, so how big are we going to make the garden? And I said, well, how big do you want to make it? And he said, I was thinking maybe 30 by 50 to start with. And I was like, that's fine. And he was like, I was thinking doing this, this and this. And I took a look at where he had put the stakes to illustrate where the

31:46
the actual inside space of the garden would be. Sure. And I said, babe, I said, here's what I think. And it was only slightly off from his plan. And he was like, why that? And I said, because that part over there is low and when it rains, it's going to soak. It's going to hold water. Exactly. So unless you build it up, you can't really put anything that doesn't like what you eat over there. Exactly. He was like, see, this is why I married you because you know stuff I don't know. And

32:14
I know stuff you don't know, we make a good team and I was like, it's a good partnership. Yeah. So I really do know just enough to be kind of a help and sometimes a roadblock, but that's okay too. That is okay too. And we always are taking photos around here. It's ridiculous. We're always. I think it's really something that I have really tried to practice in this newer house of ours is taking before and after pictures. Yes.

32:44
I'm really good at after pictures, but I get so eager to start the project that I sometimes forget to take the before pictures. And then I'm like, ah, like halfway through, I'm like, ah, shoot. So I've been really trying hard on every project or even every plan that I plant. You know, here's what it looked like when I first put it in the soil. Here it is three weeks later. Here it is two months later. Here it is two years later.

33:15
And it's really amazing what happens in that time. Yep, absolutely. I don't want to ride this topic too hard either because I've talked about it a lot in the last six months, but we put in a new greenhouse this spring. Oh, please ride that topic so much. I'm going to live vicariously through you. Well, it got built last May. I think my husband and son started working on it at the end of April last year. And last spring.

33:44
And I said to him when they were working on it, I said, can you please take a quick photo with your cell phone at every step that's completed? Because I want to remember what it looked like before it was finished. And he was like, oh yeah. So every time they would go out and do something, he would text me photos when that part was done. Perfect. And so we have, we literally have a documentary of the steps of this greenhouse going up.

34:12
I love that though, because it's easy to forget. Yeah, it is. It's easy to be like, well, I remember what was there before, it was nothing. It was just, you know, grass or this or that, but it's not really sharp. It's not a sharp memory. And so to have those images, I think, is really, really special. Yes, and we also have a photo that is tacked to the wall.

34:42
that's in front of his desk downstairs of this property as it was the day we bought it. Beautiful. And now there's a little red farm stand shed that wasn't here then. There's now a greenhouse here. There will be a like a high tunnel style greenhouse next to the shed this spring. And so...

35:06
Every time I'm like, what did this place look like before we bought it? I go to that picture on the wall. I'm like, oh yeah, it was big. There was a lot of space here. Yes. Oh, I love that. And we just put it in. I love that. I recently looked at Google for this property. And that's what I used to be like, okay Anya, remember how far you've come. Like you just said, remember what the property looked like when you bought it.

35:36
And I went to Google to remind myself, and I went to our address, and they updated the pictures. Yep. And I was like, no. Now, luckily I had already saved the old pictures. Okay, good. But I was just like, oh no, it looks how it does now. What am I supposed to do now? Yep. But now I just have to search through my pictures to find it, but.

36:04
It is really amazing. Even, and again, this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, even in a short amount of time, even in one growing season, it's unbelievable what one can accomplish and change on the property, even just in a day or a few weeks. Yep. And I think that's like the instant satisfaction that I get from that.

36:32
Like that is a high that I am always willing to ride. For sure. And basically everything we've been talking about, I think we're illustrating that life is not about the destination, it's about the journey. 100%. Yep, because once your life's over, you can't go back and do it. So you gotta enjoy every single freaking moment of it. Yes, and fully.

36:57
You know, the good, the bad, the ugly, the blood, the sweat, the tears, it's all there for a reason. I firmly believe that even when the reason sometimes sucks or you can't see it right away. But it is, it's a, and it's really beautiful. You know, when you sit down and think about all that life that you've lived, it's really beautiful. It's, it hurts to do it, but it's really beautiful. Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

37:26
Okay, Anya, I feel like this was a very beautiful conversation this morning. I loved it. It was exactly what I needed for my Tuesday midday reset. Good. All right. Well, I try to give you this to half an hour and we're over that by about eight minutes now. So I'm going to let you go. But thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me. This has been so amazing. All right. Have a great day. Thank you. You too.