Homegrown Show with Ben & Nicole

Today I'm talking with Ben at the Homegrown Show with Ben & Nicole. 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 Ben at the Homegrown Show with Ben and Nicole. Good morning, Ben. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing great. Awesome. So we were just talking. You are in Canada.

00:25
And you are in New Brunswick, which is north of Maine, which I knew, but I didn't know for sure. And what do you do? Goodness, I do a lot of different things. I guess you could call us influencers, homesteaders, farmers. I don't like the term influencer, but we do a lot of different things with regards to education from farming content. And we just, in 2020, we decided we wanted to live and try a simpler life. So.

00:53
We've been documenting that journey and been able to share it with others ever since. Isn't it fun? Oh, we have, I never grew up on a farm and neither did Nicole. So it's been a crazy whirlwind of a journey. We were fortunate enough in 2020 to be picked up for a small TV show here locally. And it's been able to fund a lot of my antics to be able to buy things like a ton of chickens or goats before we're ready. So being able to document that and film our journey to

01:22
learning how to figure that all out has been just chaos and hilarious. Yeah, I'm sure you're entertained every moment of every single day. And I don't do videos because I don't, I don't, I'm not good at it. Number one, I don't like being on video. Number two, but, uh, my husband takes videos here and there of the barn kittens when they're little or the greenhouse construction, when that was happening and he sends them to me and I'm like, I don't know what to do with these. I like.

01:51
They're cute, but what do I do with them? So I commend you on your videos because it's hard work to make them. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun being able to document it properly. That's something I even spoke about in a recent YouTube video is just any type of documentation like what you're doing or writing it down is huge for being able to go back and reference because year over year, you don't really feel like you've done very much. But then when you can look back and see whether you've written it down or had a podcast about it.

02:17
It's cool to be able to see, oh, I did grow from last year. I did grow from two years ago. And seeing that is just more beneficial to us. Yes, I have to sit down sometime this afternoon and do our end of year recap. I try to do it and have it posted on the first of the year. But I got up yesterday morning to the terrible news from New Orleans about a guy who ran his truck into a crowd of people at a market.

02:44
New Year's celebration and I just lost all steam to say anything positive. So I apologized on my Facebook page and said, I'm just not in the right head space, maybe tomorrow. Understandably. So yeah, I just, I felt really weird about being like, so this is all the silly shit we did this year and this happened today, you know? So it was kind of a rough, quiet day here. I don't know why it hit me the way it did, but I'm just real tired of people getting hurt for no reason. It's really hard here in the United States sometimes.

03:14
So anyway, I don't want to be a bummer. So I looked at your Facebook page and you do tons of stuff. And if you're above Maine, how far above Maine are you? So we're pretty close to Holton, basically. It'd be about a half hour from our place here to Holton, Maine. Oh, so you're over the border, not by much. Okay. So your growing zone must be like what? Three B or four? I think it's

03:43
Four, Nicole is better. I'm more the animal guy. Nicole is better with the vegetables. I just do the labor for her. Oh, well, she's a very lucky woman. Okay, so is it easy? I mean, I know she's the one in charge of that, but is it pretty easy for you guys to keep yourselves stocked in produce?

04:03
Yeah, we've been very fortunate, like I said, over the last few years to learn how to do this stuff. So it's this past year, recognize the biggest downfall was our short season. So we built a couple of greenhouses. We were originally just going to build one, but we decided to build two to be able to have basically a seed house to be able to use in the spring. And then to be able to have a secondary tomato house because we've learned that the best thing for

04:28
for us is to have as much food as possible and to figure out what grows here as well. But to be able to can and preserve, you really need to have that longer growing season, especially for things like tomatoes and peppers, which don't really grow terribly well here. You can grow them, but to grow them great, you really need the greenhouse. So for us over the past few years, we've really recognized, okay, with our very short growing season, like our last frost is...

04:56
early June, generally. I think even last year, our last frost was like middle of June. So being able to recognize when we can actually plant things and get things out and figuring out this year, our biggest plan is to figure out our cropping system. So how to sow things to be able to sow on top of them later in the seasons, so growing peas and beans early, early to be able to have a second production of them as well. So it's just been quite

05:25
Difficult it sort of really is because this isn't our background We started back a number of years ago just because we want to know where our food comes from Nicole was a vegan for 10 years I back in college would have been 2016 2017 had a bad experience with some store-bought meat and from then my gut just can't handle it So we've really really just wanted to know where our food comes from. And so part of that is having to learn. Okay, how do we

05:52
grow these things ourselves? How do we learn from other people to be able to figure out, okay, in our local area, how easy is it and is it easy? And I tell a lot of people that growing food is pretty easy. Growing a lot of food can be difficult. So it's learning how to grow certain things and how long they take, but throwing seeds in the ground and watching lettuce grow or watching tomatoes and carrots can be relatively non-trivial.

06:19
It's when you want to grow a lot and be able to sustain yourself over the wintertime that it gets a little harder. Absolutely. When is the last frost date on average for you? Last? Our first frost in the fall is probably about...

06:37
October, first heavy frost, it'd probably be about the first of November. But October is when things would start to get a little bit of frost and that, that way you'd lose some of your more delicate greens and stuff. And some greenhouses. Yeah. Basil and tomatoes really don't like it on that first light frost. They're like, um, excuse me. No. And they try really hard to hang on, but they don't do well. So we are, I'm in Minnesota and we are zone trying to think.

07:07
five, might be five B now, I can't remember. And our last frost day is typically anywhere from May 1st to June 1st, it just depends on the season. And in the fall, it could be September for the first light frost, we never know. And so we put in a greenhouse this spring, a hard-sided greenhouse. And we would love to be able to heat it in the wintertime and

07:37
the least expensive, most, what's the word I want? Sun powered heating source and it's not necessarily solar panels. Right now we have six IBC totes that are painted black and they're full of water. We got them in too late this year for them to really do their job but they definitely extended our growing season in the greenhouse till November, till mid November which was great. And then

08:06
We're hoping to be able to get seeds started in mid February out there because it does get warm as long as it's sunny. So that was the objective, but I would love to be growing tomatoes in January in the greenhouse. I think that would be really cool. And what you were saying about trying to grow a lot of food to sustain yourself for the winter.

08:26
It is, it's a lot. It's a lot of work and a lot of planning and a lot of looking at the forecast for a month ahead of time and being like, okay, so what are we doing? And we've tried to do it too. And we did pretty well up until this year. This summer was bad here. And so we did not put away our 80 or 90 pints tomato sauce like we did the last two years. We put away maybe 30 because our tomatoes did not do well at all. So I understand what you're saying.

08:55
So tell me about your animals since you're the one that handles them. Oh goodness. Uh, we started with rabbits. Like we sort of went through all of the typical homesteadery animals that you kind of decide that it's super easy. You can be self-sufficient on rabbit meat and chickens with eggs. And we discovered that the rabbits weren't as fun or as easy to take care of. As we really thought, um, rabbits, if you're not terribly aware or anybody listening, they will die basically at the drop of a hat.

09:24
So we were pretty devastated our first year and we had, I think we had a weasel break in, but I was away for work and Nicole called me and said, you need to come home because there's a lot of dead rabbits. And it's just a lot of needless killing. We've dealt with predators over the past few years, but we've really tried to discover what works best for us and our land, because we don't have very much land here. We've got three quarters of an acre, but we're able to use about another quarter acre from my uncle across the street.

09:51
And that's largely where we keep our animals. So we've wished we could get into having a cow, having a dairy cow, and then maybe some beef. But for us, what we've been able to do is we have chickens and ducks. We have two goats now, and we have five sheep that I was supposed to butcher. And then we just decided that we kind of like them. So they've survived thus far. And we have four, five pigs.

10:20
that we got two, I don't know how this continues to happen to us, the sort of chaos that just we attract, but in the spring of last year, of 24, I guess, we got two female pigs and then three months, three weeks and three days later, we had one give birth and we were very confused because we got two female pigs and we had a litter of five figlets pop out. Come to find out she was pregnant, even though she was quite young.

10:47
And so we've been able to keep those over the last couple of months and we'll probably end up butchering those and selling off some of the meat, but it's been fun to learn about all of those animals. My, my favorite currently is probably our goat just for the possibility of having the milk and meat of being able to make cheese and yogurts and other dairy has been huge and really beneficial for us because the price of.

11:11
milk here has been outlandish. And so being able to have that for the boys for their smoothies and for other foods has just been such a huge blessing for us. How much is a gallon of milk in Canada? Oh, I haven't bought milk in ages. It is $8, $10 ish. Canadian dollars? Yeah. So that what the Canadian dollar is.

11:39
69 cents US so it would be almost half that but still it's been pretty ridiculous and especially the wages here Don't really keep up and then taxation and that's a whole other political issue. We could dive into but Uh-huh, we're not going to because I don't talk about politics on the podcast because it just makes things less crazy Here in in Minnesota our milk is going anywhere from five to seven dollars a gallon At the grocery store, that's about comparable then

12:08
Mm-hmm, which is ridiculous considering we could get it for about three dollars and fifty cents a year and a half ago Yeah I'm I'm so over it like I wish that things would just ease up a little bit on this inflation kick because it's killing everybody It doesn't matter where in the world you are

12:27
So, and that's about as far as I want to get on that topic because I have so many swear words that I'm not allowing myself to say on my podcast ever. And there's a whole lot wrapped around the inflation issue right now. Okay. So are you going to have baby goats? Are you just going to have the two and keep those? Yeah. We started originally with Nigerian dwarves. We started, oh goodness, last year, year before last with

12:54
four Nigerian dwarves. We butchered one that was the boy for meat and he impregnated three girls that we brought into the spring of 2024. They all had babies. One had triplets, one had twins, and one had a single. It was a new experience for us. Animal husbandry is not something that we're well versed in. It was really cool to be able to see the babies being born and experience that with those moms. Then we sold those girls and the babies

13:24
upgrade, I guess you could say, into some bigger goats. We wanted more milk for less work with one bigger goat. And then just having fewer animals around just made it easy. So we have a La Mancha right now that is our milk goat, and then a baby boar that was born this spring. And he, his mom unfortunately passed shortly after a childbirth due to some complications. So we've been keeping him sort of as breeding stock. He's a beautiful boy. And so we're hoping to have some babies pop out here in the next

13:54
month or two from the La Mancha potentially. And we'll see, depends on whether or not he was actually able to get the job done. Uh huh. Yes, it's always a crapshoot, isn't it? Whether the boy did his job or not. The reason I asked about the babies is because I don't know if you've listened to the podcast at all, but I love baby goats more than any animal on earth. And don't tell my dog because she thinks she's my favorite, but I love baby goats.

14:20
And we do not have any livestock here right now. We have two barn cats and a dog. That is it. We got rid of our chickens months ago because they were lazy and we were getting three eggs from nine chickens. And my husband said, I don't want to feed these chickens through the winter if they're not giving us eggs. And I said, that's fine. Cause I don't know what feed prices are like where you are, but they've gone up too. It's not great. So I would love to have goats, but my husband is not so into it. And he's like,

14:50
don't want to and I asked him why and he said honey I love your heart. He said but if we get goats you're gonna want to have baby goats from the mama goats and invariably some of those baby goats are gonna die and it's gonna break your heart and I can't watch it and I was like I love you too and you're right so we're not gonna have any goats we're done.

15:12
We're not ever going to have goats because he's right. I will lose my mind if a baby goat dies. I can't handle it. Yeah. Death has been one of the hardest parts that we've had to learn to deal with. Fortunately, Nicole and I are both versed in the reality of that now after the first couple of years. But I remember I even was talking about it recently that the first rooster I had to kill, which roosters are such a regular cull animal on a farm that I just remember how brutal that was.

15:42
a life for no reason. But yeah, when it comes to baby animals, they just, they pass so easily. We lost one baby this spring, but I think personally I'd be more apt to have baby lambs because they're so fuzzy as opposed to little goats. But you're right. Having those little guys running around and trotting around about four to six weeks is when they start to get the, the really the cutest. And they're a lot more mobile.

16:08
Yeah, my only real interaction with baby goats was within the first week of their life because my friend's parents raised goats. And she would call me and say, there's baby goats. Will your mom bring you over? And I'm like, yep. And we'd go over and they would be at that age where they're very small and you can just hold them in your arms like a baby and pet them. And they don't, they don't really fight you because they're not afraid.

16:31
I would just sit and hold a baby goat for an hour in my lap and just pet it and kiss its nose and talk to it and play with its ears. And my friend was used to having goats around all the time and she's like, why are you so in love? And I'm like, I can't explain it. I just am.

16:49
So that was my favorite thing to do in the spring from the time I was about 15 until I was about 18 was go see her baby goats. Yeah, there's really nothing better than seeing life be born. And we've been trying to be really strategic about us keeping animals because they can be, like that can be heartbreaking when you lose the babies, but then it's also the ability, like you say, for feed costs can get outlandish. And we've been fortunate that there's a program here called LOOP.

17:18
that they take salvaged food from the grocery stores that's gone off that they can't either give it to the food bank or they can't sell. And so there's a farm every day that goes up to our grocery store and collects all the produce and all the food scraps that's able to feed our animals. So they eat lettuce and pineapple and from goats to pigs to everybody gets a little piece of stuff from the grocery store. So it's been huge in being able to cut down on the feed bill. That's fantastic. I'm so glad that

17:46
that they do that. I'm sure that if we really wanted to dig and scrape and figure out how to make it cost, there's a word, make it worth spending the money to get animals, we probably could do it. But my husband has a full time job and I'm really not into mucking stalls and stuff. So we've just made the decision that we'll get chickens in the spring and we might try getting rabbits again. We tried rabbits.

18:15
the second year we were here. We've been in our new place for four years. And our rabbits didn't get the memo they were supposed to procreate. So we were feeding rabbits for no reason. And that was the end of that. We were like, no, we're not feeding animals that don't earn their keep. So we don't have rabbits anymore. But we will get chickens again, because I really missed the eggs. The store bought eggs are not great compared to the eggs we were getting from our chickens. So

18:43
So I'm stuck. What am I, what else can I ask you? Oh, so you said that you guys got into this because you had some, you had some health issues because of some bad meat. Is that right? Yeah. Uh, back in, what was I saying? It was 2016, 2015, 16, 17, somewhere in there. I bought meat from Walmart and it was just one of those simple things that you just.

19:07
Kind of, I was in college and bought a pack of hamburger and then I ate it and it just ruined my stomach. And I was like, that's weird. And I tried to eat some more and it's still like, it was cooked well. It was fine. Seasoned well, tasted good, but it sat like a rock in my gut. And then I tried again. And since then I have not been able to eat any store bought meat. Like it's been crazy that any store bought meat that I consume, uh, will just ruin my gut.

19:33
So we've started to go, whether it's our own meat or with a local butcher, to be able to get local meat because that just sits a lot better. And then it's just knowing where our food comes from. I think it's really no secret that our food system is kind of messed up. And we've really tried to take notice of how much we can grow, where we can grow it. And Nicole was vegan for 10 years,

20:03
over the last few years that she was vegan, that her body was starting to change and she was starting to have troubles too. So she wanted to change in her diet. And we just really wanted to discover where all of our food comes from. And for us, that is largely knowing that we can grow it and we can figure this out. Thankfully that given my job and what we're able to do, we're able to do this full time. But that is where we found that community really comes in handy.

20:32
people have only the grocery store to be able to go to. Like you say, there's really sub-par food, unfortunately, sub-par eggs and meat. And so we've really been keen on trying to educate people on knowing where your farmers are, knowing who your farmers are, and being able to have that community where you can either barter with somebody or you're able to find somebody that, hey, I don't have chickens anymore. Do you have eggs or do you have meat or do you have tomatoes? Because mine didn't do well. So whether it's you can't afford to grow something

21:02
able to, don't know how. It's being able to have an awesome community of people together that you don't have to be a one-man island or a one-family island. You can really rely on your community around you to be able to help you out. Yeah. And in them helping you out, you're helping them out too. It's such a beautiful exchange of support and resources. Oh, absolutely. And

21:28
As far as I really struggle to talk about sort of the factory farming grocery store thing versus your small scale family farms and stuff, because everybody kind of gets upset with regards to whenever you speak ill of a farmer. But I think it's really no secret that factory farming practices and modern agriculture is really detrimental to our ecosystems. It's really detrimental to our food systems. There's been a lot of studies that have come out over the last number of years that speak to the benefits of organic produce and, and how.

21:58
whether animals are raised different or whether your produce is raised different and grown differently. Um, you're getting less nutrition in your factory farmed food than you would in food that you're able to either grow yourself or grow organically, uh, just based on the different cultivars. And so the more that you're able to eat real and good food, and the more that you're able to, uh, eat locally, the better your

22:25
going to be off and the better you're going to feel as well. And I think that people really struggle because over the last 20 to 30 years, the grocery store has become so ubiquitous that that is where your food comes from. I'm working on a documentary right now called Eat Real Food. And I went out and interviewed a number of people just really quickly on the street to ask, do you know where your food comes from? And so many people either would say no, or would just say the store. And they don't know they're farmers anymore. There's that disconnect.

22:54
There's the middle men in the middle that, you got to be careful here to not to go political, but the middle men are making a ton of money and making a lot of profits while the farms are suffering and they're having to cut corners and they're having to use a lot of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to be able to get the yields that they need to be able to pay their bills. If farmers had their say and the food was able to be sold at the price that it was valued at.

23:22
It would be much better off for our farmers, but I think that more and more people, if farmers were in charge, would be better off because they'd have the potential to actually create something and grow something that farmers really have a passion for rather being told by these multinational conglomerates that it's not being told what they need to do, if that makes sense. Yes, absolutely. Yes. And that's not political. It's just truth. It's just the way it is right now.

23:52
I think I missed something in the beginning or I didn't ask. Is this your job? Is what you're doing your job or do you have a job off farm as it were? Yeah, so I was very fortunate in 2020 to pitch our first television program. We were able to get a little bit of money for that. So I started out as a commercial videographer, did a lot of video work for TV programs and social media for some companies and over the past few years

24:21
We've been able to generate enough revenue via our social media and TV to be able to do really projects that I want to do. We've got a couple of TV shows that I work on that are still passion projects, but mostly the farm and our content that we produce on social media is paying our bills. We've really pared down what we do over the past few years and really, uh, taking our bills as low as they can be so that we're able to go forward with whatever we want to do. And this year it's trying to grow as much food for.

24:51
us and our community to be able to sell a little bit because we've discovered our passion for farming and gardening to be able to produce good high quality food for people. Awesome. So when you say TV shows, is that like local to Canada TV shows or is that TV shows that people everywhere can watch? There are a lot of TV shows that people can watch.

25:12
Local to Canada for one of them. So we've really tried to broad spectrum scatter shot, get as many people as we can. We've distributed through Justin Rhodes, Abundance Plus. We've distributed through Canada's Wild TV, which they have a streaming app now. So with the internet, you can basically get anything anywhere. But through television, the way we get paid is through

25:40
They don't have exclusive rights, so we're always looking to expand our knowledge and share with other people more places, whether it's Patreon or YouTube, a little bit where we share as well. And so for television specifically, it depends on what it means to some people because TV now means Netflix or Amazon to some people, whereas traditional television, which is largely what we're on with commercials and everything, is what pays the bills for now. Okay. That's what I was wondering about.

26:10
And Justin Rhodes is one person I've been trying to get hold of to see if he would talk to me on the podcast. And I cannot figure out how to get hold of him. I've emailed, I've Facebook messaged, I've everything and have not gotten a single response from any of it. He must be terribly busy in his life. Oh, he's got so much going on. And especially with the last year with what happened in North Carolina has just been crazy. Yeah. Didn't his place get hit real bad?

26:38
From the videos he shared, it looked like it pretty, not as terrible as some of the places, but definitely he lost quite a bit there. Yeah. Yeah, it's been a rough year in the States. I'm telling you, the weather's been insane. People have been doing crazy things. I don't know what's going on in the world right now. Okay, so I had no idea that you were so deep into the broadcasting of stuff. It's been a weird week here.

27:08
I had a terrible migraine over the weekend, so I was down for two days. Then got up this morning and my husband came down and I said, are you okay? Because he coughed and he said, no. In this really weird voice and I was like, are you okay? He said, I'm sick. He said, I've got a fever of 101. I was like, oh, okay. So I spent the morning making orange juice and figuring out like.

27:35
like chicken stock for him so that he has stuff to drink is even feel like eating. I was like, Well, there goes my time to dig into Ben and, and Nicole in Canada this morning. But either way, this has worked out great because I just was able to wing it and ask what I wanted to ask when I wanted to ask it. So what's your plan? Because we have like three minutes left. So what's your plan for the future? We really want to continue to

28:00
I mean, I think everybody's plan is they want to make as much money as they can doing what they love, which is what our goal really is rather than I have no ideas. I don't want to get rich. I want to be able to pay my bills and be able to grow a ton of food. People say to follow your passion and the money will follow. We've really tried to do that with what we grow and what we do here, whether it's entertaining or educating people, we love being able to share what we do and being able to share our food and the discovery of real good.

28:29
food. Like the peppers you buy at the grocery store don't taste anywhere near what our farms locally or what we're able to grow. So to be able to share that with people has been so incredible over the past few years. So we're hoping to be able to scale that up and do more of it and educate and teach more people. Nice. And I'm so glad that I'm not the only one who thinks the stuff we grow in our garden tastes better than what we buy at the store because at first I was just like, maybe it's just pride of ownership.

28:57
Maybe I'm just assuming and projecting that my lettuce tastes better than the lettuce from the store or my basil tastes better. But I bought basil from the store this summer because we didn't have any ready to pick yet and it tasted like pepper, like black pepper. And I was like, basil doesn't taste like black pepper. What is this? And then our basil finally was big enough to cut some and I was like, oh.

29:23
Yes, that's what basil is supposed to taste like. So I'm really glad that it's not just me thinking that the stuff that we grow tastes better. Well, there's some really interesting studies that have come out over the last couple of years. I have a bachelor's degree in biology too. And so I've been keen on researching why. I was one of those kids that would just say, why, why, why to every question or to every sort of response for people. And so I've...

29:47
just been so curious as to why those things are the way they do. The reason in large part is quantifiable is because the stuff that is grown from the store is largely, like I mentioned, a different cultivar. It's a different type of basil, maybe even just slightly genetically dissimilar. What it means is that the micronutrients and phytonutrients, those plants are being able to suck up, whether it's the fruit, whether it's your grapes or tomatoes, that they're able to suck up and be able to have in different amounts.

30:16
So one study I was looking at showed that the broccoli of years ago would have a, at least 40% reduction of the amount of nutrients, uh, then their counterparts that were grown on factory farms or large farms, like you could grow, or like you could buy in a grocery store. So similar for that, that basil, the stuff that you're able to grow yourself is likely not grown with artificial nitrogen or fertilizers, not grown with pesticide, not sprayed. Uh, and so you're able to have

30:44
Quantifiably better tasting, probably more sugars coming up from your soil because it hasn't been terribly used year after year. So there's a reason for those things. And it's really cool to be able to discover and like I've said, educate other people on why this really is. Why does food taste different than it used to? Because some people, if you're old enough to remember what actual food at the grocery store tasted like, it used to taste like real basil. That's why you remember what basil tastes like other than your homegrown stuff.

31:14
But it's just not the same anymore. And I feel bad for this next generation of people that have only tasted store-bought grocery store foods because that is truly not what tomatoes or peppers or basil tastes like at all. Yeah. They're going to be really confused when they get slammed in the face with what a tomato actually tastes like. I do want to say though, there is a place in Minnesota that grows tomatoes and they are the closest tasting tomato I can get.

31:43
tomatoes in the wintertime. And they do a fabulous job. And they are a big tomato growing company. They grow them in the winter? Yeah. Yeah. It's big boy or something. Can't remember the name of the place right now. But I actually am going to send them an email and be like, thank God for you because you're the only tomato place that sells tomatoes I can stand to eat in the wintertime.

32:11
They're really, really good. They taste like a tomato is supposed to taste because the tomato is supposed to have some sweet to it and some acid to it. And most Sorobot tomatoes, even in the summertime, suck. They don't taste like anything. And these guys that grow these at their greenhouses do a fabulous job. I don't know what kind of alchemy or magic they're working, but they do a great job. So there are some big companies

32:40
job and don't destroy things in the process. So I got to throw that in there. Yeah, absolutely. I'd be really curious to know what their process is for fertilization. I wonder if it's a lot of organic compost. It would not surprise me at all because compost is magic. Compost is wonderful. We have three compost bins at our place that are big. Like my husband can use our small tractor bucket to flip the compost, you know, to stir it.

33:10
And we use that in our garden every year and it just does amazingly well. And especially when we have the chicken poop thrown in the compost, because for anyone who doesn't know, chicken poop is the best fertilizer ever. It's great. High in nitrogen content. Have you thought about adding your compost to your greenhouse? I saw somebody recently that they were able to do a little bit of plumbing.

33:34
to bring the water like the water you'd have in your IBC totes to be able to bring the water through the compost pile as it's decomposing to be able to heat those totes for more heating mass. I don't know because like the veggies and stuff are your wife's thing, the greenhouse and the heating the greenhouse is my husband's thing, but I will mention that to him because he'll wanna think about it.

33:58
Because that's something we've noticed this year, just having the greenhouse with birds and stuff is we have one greenhouse that has the birds in them because, like you said, chicken poo is amazing for the garden. So we're going to scoop out most of that. Some of that latent nitrogen is still going to stay there, but we're going to take the birds out, put them in their chicken coop after that and plant the tomatoes there, but in our naked greenhouse without any chickens in it, it is about five to 10 degrees colder basically at all times than the one with the deep litter method.

34:28
chickens and that have their poo decomposing there sort of underneath. Which is really cool. Yeah. And you, it's so weird. Like I don't want to take too much of your time, but we had no idea that the fact that you have, um, wood shavings or straw or whatever in your, in your chicken coop and the chickens are going to the bathroom in it and then scrap, scratching it down into it. So it is decomposing.

34:54
and turning into compost, we didn't know that that would throw heat until we started doing the deep, deep litter or whatever you said method for the greenhouse. I can't talk. For the chicken coop in the wintertime. And yeah, it was a good 10 degrees warmer in the chicken coop than it was outside all the time in the wintertime. So it's a really good way to throw heat. I will mention that to him when he's not feeling like crap because he's not going to want to talk about it today.

35:21
But yes, I will definitely mention that to him because we're trying to figure out a way to do this so that we can have tomatoes in January in the greenhouse. This is very important to me. It's going to happen in the next five years if it kills us. So Ben, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. No, thank you. This has been awesome. We'll have to do this again at the end of the season to see if you're gonna be able to carry those tomatoes through. Yes, I'm really...

35:49
From your lips to God's ears that this summer goes well because we did really bad this past summer. And I'm so happy that it's 2025 because we have hope for the next growing season. Farming is all about faith and hope, right? Oh yeah. You're beholden to a lot of the weather and the weather changes and the chaos that that entails. Yeah, I'm just hoping that chaos eases up this year because last year sucked. I'm so ready for it to not be bad.

36:19
I'm ready for like my herb garden to go in that didn't get put in last year. I'm ready for the first tomato at the end of June. I'm ready for good cucumbers. I think I had three cucumbers last year. That was it. So, yes, very excited. We're already looking at seed buying here in the next month. So, all right, Ben, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it and you have a great rest of your day. Thank you. You too.