Lazy Ass Acres

Today I'm talking with Kendra and Louis at Lazy Ass Acres. You can also follow on Facebook.

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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 Kendra and Louis at Lazy Ass Acres. Good morning, guys. How are you? Good morning. We're doing well. How are you? I'm great. Where are you? We are in Noonan, Georgia.

00:25
Thank you. I'm in Minnesota. It is a bright sunny day here. What's it like in Georgia? It's warm. I saw that you saw the northern lights last night. How was that? It was amazing. I've never seen them in real time before. We didn't know anything about it, so we didn't make it outside to look. So we don't know if they'll be visible tonight, but we'll definitely try to check it out. I know some people...

00:53
south of us, they saw it too. So yeah, it's unheard of to see it that far south. So I hope you get a chance to see it. The thing we learned last night is that our eyes don't see all the colors of them, but if you take a photo with your cell phone or with a camera, the colors you don't see show up in the photos. So that was really neat. That's cool. That's, oh.

01:19
Yeah, really, really beautiful. And Facebook is filled with photos this morning from all over the place. It was so neat to see it all. All right. So tell me about yourselves and what you do at Lazy Ass Acres. So, um, just a little bit about us. We've been married for 34 years. We have two kids, we have two daughters. One is 27 and one's 30, both grown professionals doing their thing.

01:49
We have always had a small-ish garden, even if it was just tomato plants and pots, we've always grown something. But we just decided, like, over time, to grow, I guess. We started out with a small garden, then we got a few chickens, then we got a few more chickens, then the garden got a little bigger, and then we've added. So, just continuing to grow our homestead and continuing to...

02:17
do everything we can to be as self-sufficient as possible. And how is that going for you? Like what percentage would you say you're at on self-sufficient? We're pretty high. I would say, based on how little we bought from the grocery store, I would say we're about 80, 85%. So I guess just before

02:46
COVID, we became empty nesters. And so we started applying our free time, our family time to the garden expanding. And we just live on a small lot here, about just over five acres. And it was all wooded when we first moved here. And so if you looked at it from Google Earth, it pretty much looked like the Unabomber lived out here. It's just, all you could see was a rooftop and just trees everywhere.

03:15
So we've just been etching out more and more ground space and the soil over here is just horrible. It's just Georgia red clay and rocks. So we started on just raised bed containers and just making our own soil using a horticulture method. And then we just

03:40
realized we could put that stuff on the ground and amend the soil there and it worked out great. We had moved our chickens around on top of the last year's garden bed and they fertilized and turned it and we just kept doing that. And we make our own compost. We bring in about, I'd say about 10,000 pounds of manure and hay and straw a month and then we turn that with some fresh greens that

04:10
local organic market. They give us our scraps every week. And it can be between one to 300 pounds of fresh greens, lettuce, and all those leafy greens. And so we feed that to our animals, and then we add some to the compost and turn it about every week, get all those nutrients in the soil. And that's really been a game changer for us.

04:37
Yeah, you can't grow anything in clay. It doesn't matter if it's the gray clay that we have here in Minnesota or the red clay you guys have in Georgia. Clay does not grow anything. So yes, composting and amending the soil and chickens are a miracle creature. I do not love chickens. I'm going to say it loud and clear. I don't love chickens, but I love what chickens do and what they provide for us.

05:07
Yeah, they do a lot for us because we grow, we harvest our own meat birds once or twice a year and we get the eggs and everything is used on our chickens because like I said, we harvest the meat. When we do that, all the feathers go to a compost pile. The innards and stuff, they go to a compost pile. The dogs get the chicken feet.

05:37
When we're done with the meat birds as a meal, we use the bones to make bone broth out of it and then we take the bones out of that, dehydrate it, and then crunch that up and blend that with egg shells so we make our own bone meal that we give to our birds and use as fertilizer. So it's zero waste.

06:03
Yup, exactly. That's why I said chickens are a miracle critter. They give back more than they take, I think, sometimes. And I'm going to say this again, it is not necessarily inexpensive to raise chickens, but if you can make the return go as far as it can, it takes some of the sting out of keeping chickens. Exactly. You're 100% right.

06:33
say something about it and then I forgot it because this is what I do. I get listening and I forget what I was going to say because what you guys tell me is so interesting. We have chickens and we don't utilize them as much as we should because we're actually way lazy ass farmers. We just don't and we should but we don't and I have to think about that and talk to my husband about it because I'm like that is really smart. And our chickens are not meat chickens. They are laying hens.

07:02
So they're probably not going to be real good to eat, but they probably might make really good chicken stock. So I need to talk to him about that when we can narrow down which ones are giving up on laying eggs because we've got 18 chickens and we've been getting like 10 eggs a day for the last two months. So. Well, that's good. I couldn't tell you exactly what our headcount are on the chickens. I'd have to say.

07:29
Probably about, well, there's probably 35 outside between three chicken pens. And then we have some in brooder we just moved outside. And we have some turkeys and we have some ducks. We have some guineas. We actually just had one guinea hatch about 10 minutes ago. So we're in panic mode trying to get that one in the brooder and get the other ones off the eight turners before. We had a two-bar here. Yep.

07:57
They hatched a few days earlier than we expected or started hatching a few days earlier than we expected. So we had to figure out what, you know, just switch gears a little bit there and get them, get the breeder ready. I would say we probably have 50 chickens, 50, 55 chickens. But we still have three incubators going right now. We do actually really like chickens. Yeah. Isn't it great when nature surprises you and the babies come early?

08:25
Yes, I love it. I just would like to snuggle and like hold a little tiny babies when they can come out of the incubator and they're so cute. Are they really soft once they dry out from the wet? They are very soft. And fluffy. But most of our birds are egg layers. So we just special order some Cornish Cross from Hatchery.

08:54
once or twice a year, grow them out for eight weeks, and they go to Camp Kenmore. They end up in the freezer. Yep. Yep, that's a good place for them. So are you guys doing this just for yourselves, or are you sharing or selling with your community? Well, mostly for ourselves. We share with the family. We do have customers, regular customers for our eggs, and we occasionally sell.

09:22
some of our birds, whether they're the guineas or some chickens and quail and rabbits also. We just had a small litter of rabbits born last week. So we do sell them mostly as pets. Yeah, I saw the pictures of the babies. They're very, very sweet. Yeah, they just opened their eyes a couple of days ago. Yeah. There is little cuter than...

09:52
There is almost nothing cuter than a baby bunny. I know, that's so cute. We have learned. Mostly for ourselves. And we just, you know, we talk to people or they ask us questions on social media or in person about what we're doing. And we just don't realize how deep we are into being so self-sufficient.

10:20
because I had a coworker ask me about bone meal. He saw the video of us making bone meal and used that as fertilizer. So I had to back up and explain to him where the bones come from that we harvest our own chickens and we crush up our egg shells from our chickens and then the compost is our compost that we make here on site. And so it's all, I don't wanna say it's a closed circle just yet.

10:49
But we're trying to get there. Yeah, we are not. We are not even close to a closed circle. We need to work so much harder at this. OK, so do you guys have any other animals besides the chickens and the guineas? We have two, I would say, pigs, but I think they're hogs now. They're about 450 pounds. I'm trying to think in our feeding order. We have two hogs, Dottie and Daisy.

11:18
I think we have three, no we have four turkeys. We're trying to breed, in the turkey pen we have about three that we're trying to breed. Like Kendra said, we may have between 40 and 50 chickens. We have a couple of pecan duck and we have I think about five rabbits and probably about 20 quail.

11:45
and about eight guineas. I think the guineas are our favorites. I love the guineas. Everybody complains they're so noisy, they're so noisy. And they are, but they also have just like crazy personalities. And when they're not squawking and being really loud, they make this really sweet little peep that I don't think is precious. But they are so fun to watch because they just have, they're like little clowns.

12:13
just some of the silly things they do. And they're just entertaining. And they're also good watch pets, because they let us know if somebody's on the property before the dogs even know. Yeah, I keep hearing that. Our dog is like the most phenomenal watch dog ever created. So I'm not too worried about getting guineas. But my question is, the guineas lay eggs as well, yes? Yes. Correct.

12:40
And how big are they compared to like a chicken egg? They are just a tad smaller than a chicken egg. Their egg shells are harder. So like I said, we just had some hatch, started hatching today. But as far as eating them, they taste no different than chicken eggs to us. But they, Kenra said it, I think she nailed it right on the head when she said they're funny. They look like little clowns running around the yard.

13:08
And they're so fluffy and when they run, they look like they have little Flintstone feet underneath their big bodies. All fun. That's cute. Yeah, she said people complain that they're loud. Not our neighbors, I think general consensus. You either love them or you hate them. They can be noisy, but they make, like she said, good watchdogs. They alert when there's a hawk or a snake or something on the property that's not supposed to be here.

13:39
And, uh, but they're, ours are not skittish from us. They actually will follow me around the property to each feeding station, wanting something. They'll follow us to the pig pen. They want some pig feed. And they'll follow us to the turkey pen and see what we're feeding them. They don't want to miss out on anything. Well, no, that'd be terrible. Yeah. Spoiled rotten. So they know they're going to get a treat at every, every animal station we go to. Every, every time somebody gets fed, the guineas get a little bit too.

14:08
And they know this, so they just follow us around. And they're also not scared of our dogs, which the dogs don't bother them, but they'll kind of follow the dog around too, like just say, oh, what's he finding? Is he gonna find a treat for us too? Oh, funny. Huh, I didn't realize they would do that. Okay, so are you guys going through the cicada craziness that's going on in other states? We have some, it hasn't been an outbreak down here.

14:37
Um, but we have noticed some, and I was wondering, um, if the chickens have taken up on them, but, um, not, not so much, not, not crazy crazy. What about you guys? No, we don't, we, we're not in the right state for that. We're too far north this time. Oh, okay. And kind of glad we are too far north because I sort of remember a while back, we had some cicadas that, that came out. Not, not like it is right now, but.

15:07
but some. And I know that they're harmless and that they don't sting and they don't really bite but they're creepy looking little things. And my 22 year old son who still lives with us, he's like, I wish it was happening here. He said I would be collecting the shells. I said, for what? He said, I don't know. I'd figure out some way to make it into a sculpture. I was like, okay, I'm kind of glad they're not here. So yeah, it's, I've been, I have new friends that I made from.

15:35
interviewing them for the podcast and they have cicadas everywhere and they have a social media channel that they do on YouTube and one of the women is making things out of the cicada shells and I'm like, oh, it's really cool but gross, no. I was reading an article, they're actually edible too.

16:04
Yeah, I don't. A lot of things. I jog a lot of eating bugs. I'm sorry. Yeah, no, I'm good. I don't really need to try a new taste sensation. I'll pass on cicadas. Okay, so your adult children, are they in on the farming and stuff or are they off doing their own thing? One lives in state. One is out west and she's fixing to move this side of the world. But when...

16:32
When the youngest one is home, she's very hands-on. Last year, she helped butcher the hog. And also, I think last year, she helped, if not last year, the year before, with some of the meat birds. So they do like coming over and helping when they're around. I think when she gets a house that's under property, she will definitely be more.

17:01
Like she, right now they live in an apartment, but I think she will, she wants to have a garden. She tries to grow things in pots. I definitely think ideally she would love to have a small, if not a farm or a home set, at least a garden and a couple of chickens. And our oldest daughter who lives just a couple of minutes away from us, I think- She gardens. She pots. Yeah, she gardens and she like does, bakes homemade sourdough and things like that. But I don't know.

17:30
I don't know how she would feel about the chickens. She likes them when they're little babies, but I don't know that they would fool with like raising them, but definitely she gardens and I think eventually she'll garden more. Yeah. I feel like we pass this stuff down to our kids. My stepson lives in Nebraska and they just moved to Nebraska from Arizona back in December. And part of the reason they left Arizona is because he could not garden.

17:59
in Arizona the way that he can garden in the Midwest. Right. And he is so excited. He was weeding out a patch yesterday. He's got a spot for his garden set up. I think he's putting in seedlings and seeds today. And he's been talking his dad's ear off about his garden for this year. And it is so, I don't know, satisfying and amazing that he's so excited.

18:29
into this and he learned it from us. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, that's what and that's kind of like... What's on about Granny Grannity? The things with, you know, that we like to pass down and my grandparents who basically who I got the love of gardening and growing food from, they grew up in very in a very rural area and then in the 50s they moved to the city of Atlanta. Well, they were sure college. And they always had a garden.

18:58
And so growing up, they moved to Atlanta, but then they built a garden in the backyard. So they always had, they were always growing things, but they grew up, their parents were sharecroppers. So they have grown up farming, that was all they knew. So they passed along the love of growing food, even on a small scale, they always grew a huge garden. We always grew up eating fresh foods. And then my mom did it.

19:25
a little bit, but not as much. It kind of skipped a generation. She wasn't as interested in it. And then when Lewis and I bought a house, like that was one of the things that we were excited about was planting flowers and trees and growing food and having a garden. And then we've been fortunate enough that our girls have, to some degree, become interested in it as they've gotten older.

19:50
Yep, I think that it's a wonderful trait to pass down. My mom's parents had a beautiful garden in their little town, in their house, in Oakwood, Illinois, of all places. And I know for a fact that both of my grandparents' parents were farmers. So it's been passed down through my family from at least four generations ago. And uh...

20:19
I used to love to get my hands in the dirt and get my shoes dirty and plant stuff. And as I've gotten older, I'm not as into that part, but my husband is a gardening fanatic. So he grows the produce and I cook it. So I think we have a good split going on. That's how we are too, a little bit. I grow the garden, but Lewis is the cook in the family. All right. I grow it and he cooks it. And then

20:47
He's more hands-on with the meat processing than I am. So we kind of share the responsibilities and the chores. Yeah, I think it's really good when spouses or partners or whatever the relationship is, when you both know what you're good at and what you enjoy, and it's complimentary to the other person. Right. It really makes things easier.

21:15
Okay. So how come it's named lazy ass acres? That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know if I have a good answer for that. Okay. As a comedian and a jokester and like things quirky and funny. Yeah. I think it was a little bit of a smart aleck. Yeah. I think it was just a whimsical name I came up with. You know, a lot of people, they name their.

21:44
farm or their ranch and they have, you know, they have their brand where it's bar A or something. So I was just trying to use my initials, LA for something. And so I just saw a picture of a donkey and I said, well, let's go with lazy ass acres. I don't want to call it necessarily a farm. Everyone has a different definition of a farm or homestead or a ranch. We just call it acres. And I say we're on a homestead, not a farm.

22:14
feed ourselves and feed our family for the most part. But yeah, it's just a whimsical name and it's contradictory what we actually do. I mean, we really work our ass off here. There's never any idle time. Yeah, that's what happens when you have acreage and you decide you want to make it go. We discovered that when we moved to ours almost four years ago, because I was always busy.

22:43
in town in the little house that we had. And I was raising four kids and doing my thing. And I was always cooking or cleaning or helping with homework or kissing Owies or making sure people were bathed. And when we moved here, all the kids had full in the coop except one. And I'm still busy. I'm still making sure that there's dinner on the table and there's still clean laundry and that the kid who's still here hits the shower at least every other day because, you know, boys are stinky.

23:13
but we're always busy with something, but it's good busy. It's fun busy. Yeah, it's fun and productive. It's gotta be both. And a lot of times it's therapeutic to be outside. I just can't, I turn on the TV maybe on Saturday when we're sitting down to eat dinner. I don't watch TV during the week. I'm outside doing something with the animals or doing some more infrastructure with the homestead.

23:41
So it's therapeutic to be outside and in the real world and not in this digital world that a lot of people choose to live in. Yeah, and with all the news that isn't great, you're probably better off not staring at the TV all day. Right, and that's the thing, because when COVID hit, everyone was trapped. They were trapped inside and they were restricted on what they could do or where we go. And I felt we were just in our little bubble. We just really...

24:10
didn't feel that effective. Now when we were in the public, we took our, you know, necessary precautions or what have you, but we still had, you know, our property here. We could go outside and garden and be with the animals and walk around and all that. We really didn't feel like we were restricted much. Yeah, we were still living in our little house in the little town before we moved here during COVID, and we were lucky enough to have a lot of state

24:39
parks and land near us. So my kid and I would get in the SUV and drive to the park and we would just go for long walks because no one was around. It was fine to be outside and not have to worry about masking up or any of that. And we did more walking during COVID than I think we'd done in five years because it just felt like we were trapped. So we just would go escape and hike.

25:09
My job closed down for either six or eight weeks and I was at home, but I still had animals to care for and garden to tend to and we stayed busy. And when I come home from work now, it's usually about seven when I get home. But because we have daylight for so long, I come inside at dark. For the most part, I come in, change shoes and clothes and go out and I'm in the garden until dark. And I like it that way.

25:39
It's like a decompression for me to just go work in the garden. Yeah, I don't know if you were aware, but yeah, we both still work full time, 15, 60 hours a week, respectively, and then still do what we do here on the homestead. Yep, my husband works 40 to 50 a week and he's just go-go when he gets home on the gardens right now because that's the time of year it is. Yes. So, yeah, I get it.

26:08
That was the thing I was gonna say. Oh, part of the reason that we moved when we did is because we were really packed in tight with our neighbors and during COVID, it was really hard being surrounded by people, but not being able to be around people. And we had planned on moving anyway when the opportunity presented itself and it just so happened.

26:36
that 2020 was when we could do it. The best part about living on acreage is that you can just do what you want to do and your neighbors aren't right there being like, what are you doing? Why are you doing that? And if you have people in and they say, what are you doing? They're probably actually curious. They're not like looking down their nose. Right. We have...

27:05
We're slowly opening up our property. We had over 200 trees cut down in our front yard just to try to gain some ground and grow some grass. And about the same in the backyard, but now you can see more of our property from the street view. Yeah. We sit back off the road. Yeah, we sit a good bit. And our neighbors who take a walk around the neighborhood, they can see.

27:32
some, not necessarily construction, but a lot of activity up here. And so they came up one time, it's like, wow, I didn't realize y'all had done so much to the property. It's really opened up and grown. And, you know, we see what a lot of activity up there with dozers and tractors and stuff. But yeah, like you said, you can do what you want on your property and, you know, have that freedom.

28:00
Yeah, that's the best part of this is that you don't have to deal with city codes and regulations and stuff. One of the things that we do have to deal with here is county stuff. We are in the end stages of getting a heated greenhouse built. My husband and my son are building it. It looks awesome.

28:25
Yeah, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully most of it will be done by tomorrow evening. But we got halfway into the build and I was like, oh, I didn't get ahold of the guy at the county about a permit for this because if you're putting up a structure and it's over a certain amount of square feet, you have to get like a setback thing and you might have to get a permit because it's too big and you have to have a permit for a certain size.

28:55
And I called the other day and I was like, we're halfway into the build and I just remembered to get hold of you He said that's okay. How big is it? And I told him he was like and where's it going? because we had had something we put in a shed for our farm stand a couple years ago and I said it's bigger than the shed and he said okay 50 bucks. Oh wow for the setback thing and he didn't have to come out there and do any inspection or anything just

29:23
No, no. And what really kind of tweaked me a little bit is he said, he said, I will email you the form and I will email you a photo of your property and you can just circle where it is printed out and circle it and email it, you know, scan it and send it back to me. And he sent me a photo, an aerial photo of our property that is within the last six months. I was like, holy crap.

29:52
Okay. Yeah. It's weird. Go ahead. We've I know we've like looked at just like Google Earth or whatever. And it's like so creepy that like anybody can just see what's on your property. Just by Googling it. Yeah. Yep. It just, I don't know. Like I am a terribly private person. If I am in my home or in my yard.

30:22
I expect a certain amount of privacy. I saw that photo come through and I was like, oh my God, we could have been outside naked. And not that we ever are, but we could have been. We could have been. Uh-uh, no, this is not cool. I don't like it. I don't like it, it bothers me. But it made it very convenient for my husband to circle on the picture where the greenhouse is going to be. So that worked out great.

30:52
losing and privacy we're gaining inconvenience, go fig. But anyway, so yeah, there are still regulations and rules that you have to follow as a citizen of the United States when you're going to do something on your property. But as you get bigger properties, the rules and regulations become less.

31:17
So that helps. Yeah, you're right. Yep. But anytime the city or county can make a few dollars off of you, though. So just for that permit, what have you. It's OK. $50 is doable, and it's totally worth it to us. Absolutely. I saw pictures of the greenhouse. It looked like it's going to be awesome. We will be sharing more photos on Facebook of it when it's done.

31:45
And the plan is to have some raised beds in there so we can grow radishes and leafy greens. And we're going to try carrots, but I don't know if it's going to work, starting in October and growing into December, hopefully, because it's going to be heated. Because we got asked by a school if we could provide leafy greens, radishes, and carrots for salads for their school lunches. That's awesome. That's great.

32:12
You can't grow that stuff here without a heated structure. So we ended up getting a grant and that's what has paid for the materials to build the greenhouse. That's awesome. Yeah so I'll be posting pictures and my husband wants to next spring do the hanging flower baskets. He wants to start them and we will sell hanging flower baskets at the local farmers market and we've never done that before. That's a great idea.

32:41
So all kinds of excitement going on here at the tiny homestead place. Yeah, we follow you. And I saw your little helper up on the rafters on the greenhouse. The kitty. Yeah, that's Chirp. Her name is Chirp. Yep. She, I met her for the first time when she was about four hours old. Cause she's the baby, she's from the first litter from our barn cat last September.

33:11
And the first noise I heard her make sounded like a bird chirping. And I was like, that's it. You're chirp. Your name is chirp. And her mama's name is floof. F is in Frank. L O F F floof. Cause she is a puffball. She has the longest hair I've ever seen on a calico cat. Really? So we have floof and we have chirp. And we have, and we have Satan. Satan is the black barn cat and he's mean.

33:40
He's mean. That's why his name is Satan. I hear you. We had two barncots. Sue, one is she's gypsy's old. She just showed up one day. Like I looked out the kitchen door and she's sitting on the door about like, would somebody let me in? So we tried to see if we knew if, you know, she belonged to any of the neighbors and she didn't. We live on a dead end street. And I think people probably dump animals more often than we realize around here. Yeah. We just started feeding her and she stayed. And then.

34:09
Um, our other barn cat is black and his name is just barn cat. He, um, he was a rescue. Somebody found him injured and sickly and got him healthy and the needed to rehome him and so I brought him home. And he's very, they're both sweet cats. They're, they're very friendly. Um, Gypsy's not so much of a barn cat anymore. She's very old and just kind of enjoying retirement laying in the sun, but barn cats still, he's a good mouser.

34:39
and still brings this little presence to the back door sometimes. Yep. I love barn cats. I love barn cats because they live outside, they do their job, and I don't have to have a cat box in my house. Exactly. You're right. I say Satan is mean. Satan was mean. Satan actually is very, very friendly compared to how he used to be.

35:05
The Humane Society told us when we got him from them that he was a feral stray. He would never let anyone pet him. And turns out that they were wrong. He will come up to me and do the winding in between my ankles and meow at me and he'll let me pet him. He hates being held. So if you pick him up, he fights to get down. And that's why I say that he's mean. And as for people dumping their pets, it happens.

35:35
Farms a lot. Floof, the mama cat I was talking about, she showed up here two springs ago. She was about six months old and we didn't know where she came from. And we put a notice out on Facebook. I did all the channels of if anyone is missing their cat, we have her. And of course, nobody said anything. We think someone dumped her and we think that they dumped her because she was a long haired.

36:05
cat and she was all matted up and people were going to have trouble keeping her groomed. And she is aggressively friendly. She will climb you to get to your shoulder so you'll pet her. And she's been like that since she showed up. So I get kind of upset when people dump their pets because it's just so... Abandonment, yeah. Sad. Yeah. It really is. It's horrible, but you know, a lot of times things happen for a reason.

36:35
And so I don't condone dump your pets in somebody's yard or at the end of the street or whatever, but. Sometimes it works out. Yeah, I love Floof. I'm actually glad that if she had to be dumped, at least she was dumped here where we could take her, where we could take care of her. All right. What's some of the stuff you got in the garden this year? How much stuff you guys have in the garden? Yeah, he was just asking if I would want her to tell you about the garden. Go ahead. Please do.

37:05
So every year, you know, I plant similar things, but this year I have three different varieties of tomatoes, but I probably have 50 tomato plants total, so we can grow enough to can and make salsas and salsa and things like that. And then I'll probably have a dozen different varieties of peppers, mostly hot and some sweet. I have sweet corn, I have okra.

37:33
I have cucumbers, squash and zucchini, rattlesnake pole beans, which are my favorite beans to grow, potatoes, garlic and onions. Asparagus. Oh, and asparagus. Asparagus, this is coming up on year three with the asparagus, so hopefully we'll be able to harvest some before too long. It just takes a long time for that. I used to grow a lot of different, like I would try to grow cantaloupe and it never worked out very well.

38:04
Finally, it was like stop trying to grow things that are not working out and grow the things that do work out and that you know That you're gonna eat the most of You are going to be swamped in produce. Do you can we do we can and freeze and we make olive sauce and canned tomatoes for recipes for the winter and then Lewis makes his own hot sauce as well, so we

38:30
We use a lot of different varieties of peppers for the hot sauce. Yeah, we couldn't keep any of the hot sauce. It turned out really good. And we sampled it, wanted a bottle. And then we started doing jams and jellies. You know, it's nice to try something different, though, if you have room in your garden to try a different plant. Because last year, we tried some birdhouse gourds. And they took off. We had over 100 of them. And they just collapsed.

39:00
the trellis we had for it, we were not ready for how productive that plant was. Yeah, so how long does it take for those gourds to dry out enough to make them into birdhouses? I've seen it done. About six months, between four to six months. Yeah, four to six months. I mean, ideally a year would be best just to make sure, but four to six months, they're pretty dried out. They start getting where you can rattle them, the seeds are dried out.

39:29
we harvested last year are in my garden shed right now. So I've started cleaning them and because they get kind of splotchy and moldy looking. Yeah. So I just clean them, lightly sand them and then I'll have them ready to like turn into birdhouses and maybe sell at our Gypsy Junker Market in the fall. Super cool. I love that. Will you paint any of them or will you just, will you just...

39:58
sell them the way that they are. Roll experiment, we'll probably paint some. We'll probably paint some, but I also thought about just setting up a little table at the market and give them kids $5 by Gord and the kids can paint them their selves and take with them. So kind of make and take activity for kids out there. That's fun, I love that.

40:21
I understand what you're saying about trying something new in the garden. We've tried to do that every year for over the last at least 15 years. And the one we tried two years ago was Lufa. I want to do that this year. I just haven't started it yet. I probably should. How did that do for you? It did not. We don't have a long enough growing season for them. They're a really long time from seed to end result.

40:50
And so they didn't work. And I did some research after, because we just picked up a packet of luffa gourd seeds. Didn't even think about it. And yeah, Minnesota's not the best place to grow luffa gourds. I know people can, it's been done, but we're not where it's gonna work very well. Maybe with the greenhouse, maybe we can grow them. Yep, I was fixing a side babe with a greenhouse. Yeah, we'll try it. And the reason we wanted to do luffa gourds is because we make,

41:19
cold press, cold processed lye soap. I keep saying cold press, it's not cold press, it's cold processed lye soap. And we used to buy cold processed lye soaps from a lady that would do her soaps around the loofah sponges. So as you're using the soap, the sponge comes, or the, it comes through. And so we wanted to make some of those. And I was like, hey, we could grow loofah.

41:48
whatever they're called, gourds or squashes or whatever, and we could make our own. And so, yeah, that was why we tried it and it didn't work. So we're going to have to try growing them in the greenhouse and see if it works. Right. This year, we're trying something new with a mini fruit tree orchard. So we planted apples. We planted two varieties of apples, so three each, and then two. I think I planted four peach trees.

42:17
a pomegranate and then we have two paw paltries. And then we have all those figs. We have so many figs. Nice. And the blueberries are just overloaded right now. Yeah, figs and blueberries. So is everything blooming right now? Is that what you're saying when you say overloaded? Yeah, the blueberries have already like put on the actual berries, the fruit, and they, the blueberry bushes have so many berries on them like it's pulling them to the ground. They are so full.

42:46
Yeah, I think I posted some videos on our Facebook page on that. Yeah. So, and some of them are just starting to turn blue, but you have to let them stay for just a little bit so they'll be sweet. Yeah. Um, I don't know. I know nothing about Georgia's weather. How cold do you guys get in, in like January? Um, they just reclassified us to zone 8A. We were 7B. So we don't get.

43:14
Our winters don't get too bad and by our perspective, we may get in the 20s, maybe five to ten days out of the winter time. It rarely gets down to the teens. So it's cold enough for us. Yeah, we don't have too many days or too much time. January is our coldest month and we don't have too much time where we really get below freezing.

43:44
It happens, but not very often. Okay, so when... Okay, let's talk about blueberries because that's what we were talking about. When did they start blooming for you guys? Probably late March. Okay. We tried growing blueberry plants at our old house and they would bloom in May or June.

44:14
Yeah, because it's cold here in the wintertime. Yeah, you can have that cold. Nothing, nothing grows here in the wintertime outside. We have the opposite problem here. Like I have a really hard time growing like, um, leafy greens and carrots. I've tried Brussels sprouts multiple times and broccoli multiple times. And we go from blazing hot to winter. Um, like we don't have a long enough.

44:44
fall to really grow a good fall crop. Usually I can get a little bit, but we just go from hot to cold and then we don't have a long enough winter. I could do some cold things in the early spring, but there we go from really cold to 85 degrees in two weeks.

45:12
We kept going from winter to summer to winter to summer. We would just not have the long extended falls and springs that we used to have in Minnesota. And this past fall, we basically didn't even have a winter this winter. It was cold, but we didn't get a lot of snow. We didn't have the weeks of the minus twenties that we usually have. And this spring has been amazing. It's been just...

45:40
the slowest, gradualist lead-in to summer in years. That's perfect, y'all. And we had tulips and daffodils blooming for like two weeks straight. That doesn't happen here in the last 10 years. So I got to have the most beautiful spring flowers for two weeks on end. It was lovely. That's so nice. Yes, I had been saying to my husband the last two years we were here, I was like,

46:09
What happened to our extended falls and our extended springs? He's like, we're going to get one. We're going to get one. And as soon as I saw the tools bloom, I was like, yeah, they'll bloom and they'll be gone in two days. And this is today's the end of the two-week period from when they started blooming and the petals are falling off now. So really nice to see the flowers for more than two days this spring. It's been amazing.

46:34
All right, Kendra and Louis, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me and I try to keep these to half an hour and we're at like 46 minutes and 31 seconds. So I'm going to let you go. Thank you again and have a fantastic day. Thank you for having us. Thank you, Mary Lewis. All right. Bye.