Legacy Farms

Today I'm talking with Janet at Legacy Farms.
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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 Janet at Legacy Farms. How are you, Janet? I'm doing well, Mary. And you're in New York, right? I am. I'm just south of Buffalo, New York. Okay. So I'm going to ask my usual question. How is the weather in New York?

00:29
Well, right now it's hot and muggy, but true to form, Buffalo is known for its snowy winters. So anytime I say I'm from Buffalo, people go, oh, you get a lot of snow. Yeah, yeah, we do. It's lake effect snow, right? Right. So there's been multiple times where.

00:59
We've opened the door and there's six feet of snow out there, seven feet. Blizzards that take power out. Um, yeah, there's, there's been a lot of fun times in snowmen. Yeah. I'm in Minnesota. I feel your pain. And I'm going to say it again. We didn't get a lot of snow last year. We got a foot total for the entire winter, which is highly unusual. Uh, us too. In fact, I think it had.

01:28
something to do with it wasn't cold enough to kind of kill off the bad bugs. So right now we're in like a very buggy kind of season. And it's so the weather does play an effect on crops and how many flies I have to swat. And yeah, so I almost wish it was a colder winter.

01:58
We would be. We would have a lot less bugs. Yes. And part of the reason that I ask about the weather when I talk to people is because weather impacts everything we do when we grow produce. So it's kind of a way for me to gauge where we were at at this time when I listen to it back next year. Yep. And I mean, I'm not going to post on my Facebook wall every day what the weather is when I get up because that would get real old real quick.

02:27
And I'm not sure that Facebook would feed me back that particular memory anyway. So, so it's just a good running tally on what the weather has been doing all over the U S so that's why I ask if anybody's curious. Um, so tell me about yourself and what you guys do at legacy farms. Well, I, um, that's a great question. I decided that I want to leave a legacy behind. I have four wonderful children. Um,

02:56
They're 22, 15, 10, and 11. And I realized a while ago that my children did not have the upbringing and background and work ethic and all of the little nuances that my grandparents raised me with. I was able, I grew up canning and sewing and knitting.

03:26
spinning wool and it was a really nice family dynamic and I wanted to bring that back for my children and try to educate them on homesteading and permaculture and self-sufficiency. They, especially with COVID, video games became

03:56
Hmm, a really, for lack of a better term, just an obnoxious thing for them to spend their time with when we couldn't go out or do things. And I, for the past several years, I made it my life's mission to just buy a farm on my own, a single mom, and try to get my children these ethics and morals that

04:25
I grew up with and I wanted to instill that education onto them. I want to leave behind a legacy so that my children and my community can be better off homesteading, knowing the homesteading basics, understanding some basic principles of farming and self-reliance. There's a lot of kiddos in the community.

04:55
I mean, we know that there's drugs out there. It happens in the city. It happens in the country too. We know that there's kiddos that come from broken homes that might not have a mom and or dad. And I don't know about you, but there's been days, weekends where I've like, okay, kiddos, what do you wanna do today? And we can only go to the splash pad so often or the park, but I wanted to be on the map.

05:24
is something, a place where moms or dads could check and say, Oh, well, Legacy Farms is open to the public. Why don't we go there and ride a horse or milk a cow or have a, you know, pet the chickens or pick some flowers or learn what classes are open for what days and I want I wanted to give the community something too.

05:53
And that's really where it started. And I will tell you, my 15 year old really kind of started it. And I'll tell you how, because he is, first of all, I think he's gonna be a salesman or he's so personable. But Bradley and I were watching YouTube videos and he and I were watching how,

06:23
young woman and she goes Garlic is the mortgage lifter crop And he goes mom, you know if we just buy some garlic and plant it you can take those bulbs pick them Pick them apart every clove turns into another bulb. He goes mom. This is a no-brainer We could sell this even if it's 20 30 plus dollars a pound This could this could be what we do and I go Brad

06:51
That's brilliant. I said, well, you know what? Let's try it. Let's see where it goes. And I leased a bit of property. And we started with like 400 pounds of garlic, which I think in retrospect, three, four years ago, that was four years ago, that was probably more than I probably should have bought. But I went all in. And.

07:20
bread's like, we're gonna market this, we're gonna sell it, we're gonna do it. And there was a lot of learning curves, but we decided we're gonna use the garlic as our bread and butter cash crop, and then build off of that. So two years ago, we bought a old farmhouse on 10 acres. This farmhouse was built in 1840.

07:50
Oh, wow. Okay. Uh, yeah, it was a part of the Underground Railroad. A lot of history, a lot of history. And I'm a big history buff. So it was exciting to me to look at all the history that was attached to this property and the people, um, that have lived there before us and realized that there was something kind of special about this. So here we are just crushing it.

08:19
You know. So I have a question. Was Bradley like 11 when he floated this idea? That was about right. Yeah. Wow. That's awesome. I love that. He is a very brilliant kiddo. I he he is something else. Like he this is the child that I want taking care of me for my retirement. He he and I.

08:45
go back and forth, he's already looking at investing and whatnot. So yeah, he's going to be a pretty good financial guy too, I think. Well that's great because with the state of the world, I'm glad somebody has a clue about money. Yeah, absolutely. Because man, oh no, this whole world with inflation and stuff right now is so hard on everybody. Okay, so garlic is your bread and butter crop.

09:15
This is great because we've tried to grow garlic like three years in a row now, and it just doesn't do well. So I'm hoping I can pick your brain about how I can get garlic to grow in Minnesota. Well, yeah, and you're in a cold weather climate too for these winters. So there are two varieties of garlic mainly. You have your soft neck varieties and your hard neck varieties.

09:43
A lot of what you see in the store is going to be the soft neck varieties that come from California or warm weather places. And I might be a little biased here, but the hard neck garlic that grows in the colder climates is now it is a lot to me better tasting. It does taste like real garlic to me. But the hard neck garlic is.

10:11
really what you want for those cold weather climates. And it does really good if you plant it during October, the late fall, you could plant it from October. We've done as late as November when it's crunch time and we run a little later than we could, but it does love the colder weather. And it's one of those crops that

10:40
Either people tell me it grows and it's like a bad weed, or they tell me that it doesn't work at all. My suggestion, I learned my mentor from Hugh Jick Farm out in Socrates.

11:10
There's more market to be, I'm not gonna look at you like competition. He's very didactic, he's teaching, he's very open to teach me. And he said, this is what I do, you don't have to do what I do, but this is what helped me, so you don't have to cross those pain points by trial and error. And one of the things that we do is,

11:39
when we're ready to plant, we try to test the soil, the pH, and try to supplement micronutrients. And there is a lot of research that says chicken manure is better. I noticed that the garlic that got watered, they say one inch of water a week on garlic. So the garlic that was watered better, grew better.

12:08
bigger. So they like water like onions like water. Right. Exactly. Yep. And the way that we plant is very particular. On legacyfarm.org, our website, we show like how we do the hand planting. And we do hand planting because the roots need to be root side down or else it kind of grows all funky and crooked.

12:38
But probably the biggest advice I would have for somebody is cover your garlic with about almost a foot of straw. It sounds silly, but cover it with a lot of straw and get as much natural fertilization you can in the fall. Cover it with straw and then when it comes up in the spring, cover it again with.

13:07
some straw because it keeps the weeds down and the moisture in. When we go to plant, we do like a double soak. We rinse all of our cloves with peroxide and that kills some of the nasties that could damage the garlic later. Then once we do like a quick soak in

13:36
and we also use, oh I hope I'm going to say it right, micro-risal powder, which people have used that a lot with trees and trying to help root growth, but it seems to really help the plants establish, the garlic bulbs establish that root growth so that they can get all the nutrients nutrients from the soil that we're putting in there.

14:04
Okay, so I have a quick question. We don't really have anywhere around here local to buy garlic starts, you know, the bulbs for planting in September or October. We would have to order them because they sell them in the springtime here. Can you plant them in the spring and still get good results or is that a bad plant? Garlic really loves the cold weather so...

14:32
I've heard people do start it in early spring. But so what happens is you have kind of like a window of opportunity to do this because the longer that it's in the ground, the better off you're gonna be when it comes to harvest time. I find that, because I thought about this as well. We had a bumper that we didn't sell, a bumper crop that we kind of didn't sell and we also didn't plan it. So.

15:01
I wanted to do this in March or April and there was just too much mud. It was too hard to get the soil ready. We had to talk about weather. We had a lot of rain this spring. So I thought, well, with covering it with straw to try to, I mean, it does help with the moisture control. But I never...

15:31
I never considered doing it in the spring for that reason. I didn't think it was going to get the best nutrient value and everything it was gonna need to do its best. Okay, because we've planted it in the spring and I'm glad that you mentioned that it really likes an inch of water a week because I didn't know that. And the last two summers, we've basically had a drought from end of June through the fall.

16:00
And that might explain part of the reason we didn't get any good garlic. And we watered the garden, but it probably wasn't an inch a week by any stretch. So that might be part of our problem. And I don't know which variety we've planted. So I'm going to have to talk to my husband about the hard neck varieties when we do this again. And we'll probably just order some hard neck bulbs to plant in October, because that seems like a really good way to do it. Yeah.

16:29
Just let me know. I'll send you out a care package. Oh, okay. Well, yeah. We love garlic. I mean, there's not a week that goes by that we don't eat something with garlic in it. And it's funny because I have friends who also love garlic and they keep posting things on Facebook, little memes about the recipe called for one clove of garlic. That's like a drop of salt in 10 gallons of water.

16:59
it's not gonna do anything. And so you measure garlic with your heart, not with a number, you know? You have that right, yeah, absolutely. And it has a lot of health benefits and there's some things that I don't think are like really talked about as much. Everybody does like garlic, but every June, we harvest the garlic scapes, those little.

17:27
pigtails coming off the tops that are the seed pods. Yeah. And that makes an amazing pesto, a really awesome stir fry we've made. I made like a finishing steak sauce where you just whip up some, you know, a little butter, a little scapes, a little seasoning, pop that on a steak and it's amazing. So I really wanna...

17:55
I want to explore more recipes and see what restaurants would take that on a little bit more because I don't think it's as talked about as it is just the garlic plant, but there's actually a double harvest here. What I think is funny about garlic scapes is garlic scapes are kind of just an extra that comes with growing garlic.

18:23
But people see it as this very gourmet, fancy thing to use. And I'm like, it's gonna get tossed in the trash if you don't use it. It's not fancy, it's just food. Yeah, yeah. And believe me, I've had to throw some away because there've been too much or haven't been able to sell some, but they freeze really well. And it's such a great piece of

18:53
You know, I always look at the, when we sit down for dinner, I almost do it like, like make meals based on color. Okay, we have got meat, we have vegetables, you know, I, I hate a yellow plate. Usually it means it's all carbs, but, but you know, just to be able to take some dried or and add it to the meal. It just adds that nutrition and color.

19:22
It's nice to have on hand. It gives the plate a pop is what it does. I have not actually eaten garlic scapes mostly because I don't buy them and I haven't had access to them in the garden yet. Are they a milder garlic flavor or are they just as garlicky as the bulbs? No, they're actually much, they're more mild. They don't have that, you know, if you bit into raw garlic, it would have that bite to it.

19:50
The garlic scapes have more of like an onion, like a scallion type flavor, but instead of that onion, it's got a light garlic flavor. So they're almost interchangeable with scallions. So really good in a salad. Oh yeah. All right, cool. Well, you just helped me out immensely. You have no idea.

20:19
I'm going to be chatting my husband's ear off tonight about garlic again. Yeah, let me know one moment. Yeah, and he's going to be like, oh, you talked to the garlic lady today, didn't you? And I'll be like, yes, I did. I talked to Janet in New York and she told me all kinds of things. So I was looking at your Facebook page. Do you have a new foal yet? Oh my goodness. I probably, I know that there's other farmers that probably sleep in the barn.

20:49
I could probably sleep right next to her in her stall waiting for this baby to be born. She is ready any day and I am so excited. She has not had her full yet, but I can tell she's ready. She looks pretty round. Yeah, she is. She is. It's so hard waiting for babies. We have a barn cat and she was pregnant this spring.

21:19
And she has obviously had her babies by now. It's tomorrow's August 1st. But she got so big, she looked like a basketball. And she was so uncomfortable. And she's the friendliest kitty. And my son went out to pet her and she hissed at him. She never hisses at anybody. She's aggressively friendly. He says, I think we're gonna have kittens tomorrow. And I said, well, we'll see. I said, she's been laying around and she's.

21:48
pretty angry and she's pretty uncomfortable. And the next morning she had seven babies. But she looked, she looked due for like two weeks before that, she was huge. And I just kept waiting and waiting and waiting and I'm like, are you ever gonna pop? Are they ever gonna come out? So I feel your pain on waiting for babies cause babies are great. Well, my.

22:14
My daughter Ava, she's 11 and she has a visual impairment. She's like 95% blind, let's say. She's not a fan of animals and I always wanted her to be a fan of dogs. Maybe she will need a seeing eye dog someday. The only animal she has really taken an affinity to

22:43
is horses. So she has been, you know, checking on Betsy and she has been out to the barn and feeling her stomach and, mom, it feels bigger today than it does yesterday. And I'm like, I know we're gonna, we're really excited. But she's, you know, one of the things that is so funny about having horses and having a child with a disability is

23:12
She'll never be able to drive, but she told me that she could probably take that horse through the Tim Horton's drive-through or the Dunkin' Donuts drive-through and be just fine because the horse knows where she's going. And I said, true. I said, Ava, well, maybe you will be a fine girl after all. Mm-hmm. Has she felt the baby move in the horse's belly? She has.

23:41
So it was like a month ago, it was a lot more right now. She is so big. There's no room. There's just no room for that little fool to even, you know, just toss or turn. So we know that she's time. It's pretty much time. Uh-huh. Yeah, I halfway expected you to message me this morning and be like, I can't do it today because we're working on having a baby horse. I can't wait.

24:11
I really can't. I want to, it's the first foal I've ever experienced. I've had horses and this will be the first one for our farm, our family. It's a pretty exciting time. Yup. Your heart just must be beating out of your chest waiting for this baby. Absolutely. Absolutely.

24:36
It's funny, I was looking at your page and then Facebook reminded me I had memories to look back on because that's what Facebook does. And one of the first memories that came up in the list was that we closed on our new house four years ago today. And there's a picture of my son and I sitting in the bare nook in the kitchen eating our first meal, as it were, at the table in the kitchen.

25:01
And I was like, my God, it's been four years. I can't believe we've been here four years. Well, not technically. We've owned it for four years. We moved in on August 7th in 2020. So I can finally say four years instead of almost four years now. That's a really, that's that in 2020, that must've been a lot of chaos to be moving in that climate, that crazy COVID climate.

25:31
Well, we kind of did it ourselves because we didn't feel safe asking people to help because you know, we didn't want people to get sick and we didn't want to get sick. And it was my husband, myself, my youngest son because he still lives with us. And it was my older son. I have, okay, four kids. My daughter is the oldest. I have a stepson and then I have two sons that I birthed. So the two sons that I birthed helped us move in.

25:57
And so it was a lot of getting all the big stuff in the beds, the bookcases, the tables, the dressers, you know, that stuff. And then for two weeks after that, it was my youngest and I going back and forth because we moved half an hour away from where we used to live. So we would drive up, pack up the SUV, drive home, unload the SUV, drive back up, load the SUV. It was a very long, hot August of moving things. Wow. But.

26:27
I've been saying on the podcast basically since I started it last August, we've been here almost four years or we've been here three and a half years or whatever. So now I can change it to four, which is great because I'm tired of saying almost four. That's great. But in that four years since we're talking about it, when we moved in, there was basically a house, a huge pole barn.

26:52
an old one-car garage and a useless two-car garage. Like we've never been able to use the two-car garage. It really needs to come down. And that was it. That was what was here on a 3.1 acre lot. And since then, we have put in a huge farm-to-market garden. We have put in a farm stand off of our long driveway to sell produce from the garden. And we just put up a hard-sided greenhouse this spring.

27:21
So a lot of changes have happened in four years. Now, do you use your greenhouse year round? We will be, because it just went up in May. And my husband wants to put in a potbelly wood stove to heat it in the wintertime. And I'm trying to talk him out of it, because that means he's got to tend it. He's got to go out.

27:48
before bed at 10 o'clock at night and throw wood in it. And he's gotta go out when he gets up in the morning before work and throw wood in it because it's gotta maintain a certain temperature throughout the winter. And he seems to think that that will work. And I'm like, dude, I don't know, because if you're sick or you hurt yourself, I'm not going out there at 10 o'clock at night to tend that fire, it's not happening. So I'm trying to figure out a solar.

28:16
way, you know, solar panel way to heat it. And he's also got this idea of the, I don't know what they're called. They're these square plastic containers that hold gallons and gallons and gallons of water and they soak up the heat from the sun and that radiates out at night. So we're trying to figure out what the heating part of it is going to be. But the plan is that it will be a heated greenhouse in the wintertime.

28:45
I noticed that composting, obviously composting for us with the animals, it started off really small because we just needed to clean out the barn. But it's grown into a really big pile of... It actually, we have a three room chicken coop.

29:15
eggling chickens. Wow. Okay. Yeah, it's fun. They're my babies. I feel like the crazy chicken lady sometimes but the compost gives off a lot of heat. So what we did last winter and it actually worked really well was we turned one of the just regular run rooms of the chicken coop

29:43
into a compost pile. And we continued it and it was able to provide like enough heat to keep the chickens warm and happy, but also our water, chicken water from freezing. And I was actually really surprised, but we've, you know, a lot of that organic material that we were just disposing of going in there, the chickens scratched it up, the heat.

30:13
We turned it over, it stayed warm, it actually worked out really well. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because he had seen something on YouTube, I think, about someone actually using their compost bin as the heat source for their greenhouse. And we just don't know quite how that would work. We don't know how you would get the heat into the greenhouse because we don't want the compost in the greenhouse. That's right.

30:39
So he's thinking of cutting a hole in the back wall of the greenhouse and putting like some kind of fan in that hole in the greenhouse and then having the compost bin enclosed with a door on the back of it to add more stuff to it and then basically having the fan blow the heat from the compost pile that's composting into the greenhouse. But we don't quite know how that's going to work yet. Yeah. And you have to be careful with whatever gases are being.

31:08
know, expelled from the compile too. Yeah. So maybe, maybe some kind of fan with a filter on it or something. I don't know, but we're still looking into it and we have a couple of months to go before we really need to make a decision on how we're going to keep that thing warm. So, so we will figure it out. I like the word stove idea. I'm, I'm a Pennsylvania Dutch girl. So old fashioned, uh, slightly.

31:35
Amish ways are right up my alley and a wood stove to me sounds like a good idea. Yeah. I'm on his side though. You don't have to repeat it, but I think I would. You're team wood stove? I'm team wood stove for sure. Okay. All right. You can be team wood stove. My only concern about the wood stove is God forbid something got screwed up and it caught the greenhouse on fire. That's my biggest fear because we got a grant to build that greenhouse.

32:05
And so if it burned flat, we don't have the money to replace it. Right. So we have to do some, some discussing about what we want to do. And I'm a fan of the, the solar panel thing or the compost pile thing. Cause I think that would be very, very high techie interesting to talk about because yeah, we hit our wood stove or we heat our wood stove. Yeah. We heat our greenhouse.

32:32
where the wood stove isn't as interesting as we heat our greenhouse with a compost pile and people are like, how does that work? Yeah, yeah. So I don't know yet. We'll figure it out. But I'm just thankful that we have a hard sided greenhouse now because hopefully the winds won't take it down like they've taken down our normal high tunnel style ones last two summers. Right, right. We had a windstorm this spring. It took down our greenhouse, our chimney.

33:02
windows from our chicken coop. It was, it was pretty, I took a few shutters off the house. So yeah, we're, I'm, I'm really glad I didn't jump too fast to get a greenhouse in last year. Um, there, I, I really do have to, like, like you said, you need to put in the research and effort to make sure that you're getting the right, right thing for your climate. But

33:32
That's probably on our next, one of the things that we have to do down the line is come up with a high tunnel that's going to allow us some year-round production. Yeah, we have friends that live about half an hour away. They have high tunnels and they have for a very long time. They have a high tunnel that has apple trees growing in it. Oh my bird, that's amazing.

33:58
Mm-hmm. Yeah, we were over there a couple years ago and I looked in the door because it happened to be open And I said are those apple trees in the high tunnel? She was like, yeah I said don't they poke holes in the plastic? She said when we forget to prune the top branches, they sure do. I was like, okay Got it But it works. They have the most beautiful apples That is so awesome. They also have huge old apple trees in their backyard like the trees are

34:27
at least 40 feet tall. They're gorgeous. And I said, how do you pick the apples from those? And she said, we pick them till we can't reach them. I said, what about a ladder? She said, you can't get a ladder up in there. She said, the branches are so gnarled that there's no way to do it. I said, okay. She said, so the birds get the apples on the top and we get the apples on the bottom. I said, oh, that's good. That works. So.

34:54
Anyway, I could talk to you for another half an hour, but I have got to get done some things before I have my next interview at one today. So I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me about garlic because now I have all kinds of ideas to float to my husband about the garlic for next year. Yeah, and that's wonderful. And, you know, we do sell seed garlic so we can send you out some information and some garlic, you know, to get you started. If, if, um.

35:23
You can even do a taste test of a couple different varieties we have and see what you like. There's, yeah, there's a lot to it, but it's a work of heart. And I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today. I feel like I got more out of this today than you ever will. So thank you so much, Janet. You're welcome, Mary. Thank you for having me on the podcast. Absolutely. Have a great day. You too. Bye.