Red Tool House Farm

Today I'm talking with Troy at the Red Tool House Farm. 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 Troy at Red Tool House Farm. Good morning, Troy, how are you? Good morning, how are you? I'm good, it's nice to talk with you again. Last time we talked, we were talking about the Homesteading-ish Conference, but today we're talking about you. Yes.

00:29
So tell me about yourself and what you do at the Red Toolhouse farm. Well, Red Toolhouse is the name of the place that we've been on for the last 24 years. It is about a hundred acres and we're in the southwestern portion of West Virginia, what I consider the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. It was a piece of property in major disrepair when we bought it.

00:57
had lots of garbage on it, old house, old trailer, just had been abandoned for so long or unused for so long that it had just accumulated a lot of the neighborhood garbage. So we bought it knowing that we were going to have to put a lot of sweat equity into it. We had a lot of potential with the property. We knew.

01:22
We knew there was a lot of potential there, but just, just going to have to get through a lot of that work. Got a great deal on the property. Um, so young and dumb, didn't know any better. So just dove head first into it. So over the last 24 years, just kind of embraced more of a regenerative agricultural elements, you know, the homesteading, we kind of picked up the homesteading vibe about 14 years ago and started pursuing that more kind of knowing where food comes from, producing our own food.

01:51
raising livestock and then just managing the forest on this 100 acres is kind of where we've landed. Okay. So where did you live before? Okay. So I, my wife and I, we dated through high school and we were West Virginians. So we were, well, she's a transplant. She was from Florida originally, but we went to high school together. We went to college together. We went to Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia.

02:16
And after college, we decided, hey, we can't stay in West Virginia. We want to get a job. All the things that went along with that. So we moved to Orlando for a couple of years. And Orlando is okay, but there's a lot of humanity in Orlando. So we kind of felt the call to come back home. We always joke that West Virginians are like boomerangs. They keep coming back. So we moved back in.

02:44
1998, I believe, eight or nine. And moved back, actually stayed in a little cabin that was just over the mountain from where I grew up and spent a year trying to find property. I told Kelly, my wife, I said, if we're gonna move back to West Virginia, I don't wanna live in town, I don't wanna live around people. Orlando had really turned me off from even liking people anymore. I just didn't like people. So I...

03:10
I said, we need to live as rural as we possibly can, but we both still work full-time jobs in the city of Charleston. So we knew we still had to be a reasonable commutable drive from Charleston. So we looked about an hour out, just drew a circle around the city of Charleston and said, let's look for land.

03:31
This land wasn't even on the market. It was actually just a piece of land lying here and we had to go door to door. As before, the internet was really a thing where you could search all that stuff. So we just went door to door, finally found out who owned it and made an offer on it and they accepted our first offer. Okay, so you had a plan for sure to do this. This isn't like you were living in town and went, eh, I want to try something completely different and just chose this. You had a plan.

04:00
Well, I grew up rural in West Virginia. My folks, we just call it rural life. I mean, mom and dad did a garden. We didn't have any livestock. I think we did a garden. We lived on a bigger tract of land. So we cut firewood. We provided our own fuel source for heat and that type of stuff. So I thought, well, if I'm moving back to West Virginia, I want to go back to the things I miss and Orlando really made me realize how much I missed not being surrounded by humanity.

04:30
And there's just some beautiful land in Western, just a gorgeous state. And I thought, well, I want to be able to have something I can call my own and be able to carve out whatever I want, have enough acreage that I can do, do the little piddly things that I like to do. So that was, that was probably really the only goal. We weren't, I wasn't thinking self-reliant. I wasn't thinking prepper. I wasn't thinking homestead. I was just thinking, I don't like people and I don't want to be near them. And of course that, that changed the good Lord changed my heart in the first.

04:59
first 10 years and, and, uh, and it kind of had me refocus on what was important and what wasn't. Yeah. I'm going to jump on the, I don't like people part. I, I keep saying that I don't like people. I like persons. Yeah. Like I can deal with one person at a time. Just fine. It's when I have to be around a lot of people that I get real twitchy and it's because people are unpredictable critters. I have no idea. If I go.

05:29
someplace where those people I haven't met, who those people are, what they're gonna do, or what they're gonna say, or how they're gonna act. That's the part that makes me not like people. Now, as a general rule, I do enjoy people. I just don't like being in confined spaces with more than one or two at a time. Right, yeah, Orlando traffic really affected me negatively, and you're exactly right, the crowds.

05:55
And in West Virginia, we're only 1.8 million people. So even in a state our size, it's just usually not around a whole bunch of people, even when you're in urban areas. So it was quite an adjustment for us. And when I got home, I was like, man, I really need one. I wanna stretch my legs. Those several years in Orlando really, really kind of cramped me. Yeah, that happens. Okay, so tell me about your farm. What do you guys do on the farm? Well, so.

06:23
So the 100 Acres is, since it's West Virginia topography, it obviously has a lot of pitch and roll to it. And I joke that with 100 Acres, I only have two places where I can turn my truck and trailer around easily. So it's very hilly. It's out of the 100 Acres, probably 95 of it is wooded. So it's Appalachian hardwood forest, which is just absolutely gorgeous all year long.

06:51
So it provides for us a lot of natural resources. So when we bought the property, I, uh, to help fund our initial expenses, I had the property selectively timbered, which was a very, um, it was a very detailed process. So the timber broker that I use, he went through and of course, itemized and inventoried everything. So point being that, that not every, it wasn't a clear cut. It wasn't a slash and burn. The forest was maintained nicely.

07:18
And it gave us quite a bit of revenue to be able to help do some startup stuff. So we built a small garage apartment to live out of until we could afford to build a main house. And took, took all these projects on for myself. I was in my mid twenties. Again, too young to know any better. Um, so, uh, took those projects on. So as, as it developed, we started, as most homesitters do, we, we started by adding chickens because, uh, we thought, well, we, we want to be more.

07:45
responsible for our food that we eat. Our first child was born at that point and that was kind of that catalyst. It's like, well, we want our son to eat better than we do or did at his age. So we got chickens for eggs. And then I realized that, Hey, I could, I could put pigs on this property very easily because pigs on pasture and woodlot are easy to do and they won't have a huge expense and fence and I really like bacon and that really.

08:13
really started my love affair with pigs. I just absolutely love those animals. And so we still raise pigs to this day. We still have our egg laying chickens. In fact, we have multiple flocks that we're doing different things with. And then we do broiler chickens during the season. We have some in our brooder right now. That'll be our final run of broiler chickens. And up until, actually up until the last couple months, we decided we were gonna do all of this at retail scale. So...

08:42
I'm self-employed, so it just seemed like kind of a fit to say, well, if I'm going to raise one pig or two pigs or three pigs for me, why not raise 15 or 20 or 30 and try to make some revenue from that. We've had retail sales with the pork and with the eggs and with the broiler chickens and just here recently, but my youngest son, I have two boys, my youngest son graduated from high school, so I lost my labor.

09:10
So we're deciding now to kind of scale back to the homesteading level. We're going to raise just enough food for ourselves and some friends and family. Um, but we're, we're constantly experimenting with things. We're experimenting with the land and, and how to, how to improve it, how to improve soil, how to manage the forest, how to have a good symbiotic relationship with our, our pigs in forest, uh, we're creating Silva pasture.

09:36
because we do want to introduce, hopefully within the next five years, get enough land open up that we can introduce beef so we can raise some of our own beef. And then just, we really like, I like a permaculture aspect to a lot of things. So I try to do things on the homestead that allow me to do function stacking or just have a little bit more responsible approach to stuff. I do have a tractor. I do burn fossil fuels and do those types of things.

10:05
be a little more deliberate on how I do it and maybe when I'm burning those things, I'm maximizing that potential as much as possible. Okay. The experimentation part, I have a thing about that too. We put in two peach trees last year, you know, just saplings, and my youngest walked in the house last night with four peaches in his hand from one of our two trees. Yeah.

10:33
They are delicious and we didn't expect the peach trees to produce anything for three years. So we were very excited that we now have another food source on our homestead that we didn't expect to have for at least three years. Yeah. Peaches are fantastic. I keep forgetting how much I love them because they're also expensive, which means we don't buy them very often. Yeah. And they're not just a Southern tree. A lot of people just assume that peaches are only the Georgia.

11:01
You know, the, the south, uh, part of the United States region, but yeah, you can get peaches to grow real far north. I think they grow them in New England. So, yeah, I think you can grow them in Southern Canada, but it has to be a specific variety. I mean, the peach tree you're going to grow in Georgia is not the peach tree we're going to grow in Minnesota. Exactly. But I was so excited and it's like the highlight of my summer, which seems like a really low bar to reach.

11:31
But it rained here all springs or our garden did not do well. So seeing those beautiful peaches on my island was just fabulous. Like I went to bed just smiling. Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's a perfect example of you kind of experimenting with. Can, can we raise, I really like the perennial plants. My wife's more of the annual, she does the annual side of the garden. And I really like the perennials. So an example of experimentation in line with your peaches was

12:02
We have an apple, a cherry, and then I cultivate some wild plum here that just occurred naturally on the property. And so we have that in a small little orchard area. And around June, the Japanese beetles come out in full force and they were just skeletonizing our fruit trees, just wearing them out and really stunting the growth and I thought, man, I tried the traps, the traps just seemed to bring in more.

12:27
I tried all these different things and then realized, well, I just hate to use all these chemical processes of eliminating this pest. There's got to be something more natural. And then do a little bit of research and just trial and error. I have a mobile chicken coop, so it's a trailer that I can pull behind my ATV. I call it the coop de ville. We move it in May. I move it.

12:54
around the fruit trees. And of course, we use the poultry netting so I can move that wherever I need to. So I ring in all of the fruit trees with the poultry netting and have the Coupe de Ville park there. And the chickens, we let them stay there for about a month and a half. So they are a little bit hard on the grass in that area, which I don't mind, but they eradicate the Japanese beetle larvae as they come out of the ground. And so

13:22
that has been able to completely eliminate damage from the Japanese beetle. We may see one or two that have flown in from the outskirt type of thing, but we don't have that high concentration that we've had for years. And so this year was the first year that I got a decent amount of apple production off the apple tree because they weren't stunted by the Japanese beetle activity. Very nice. The other thing that you could have done.

13:50
because I talked to a lady who taught me about trap crops, T-R-A-P, is Japanese beetles really, really love rose bushes, rose leaves. And we had rose bushes at our old house that went up a trellis. And our garden was small in our small backyard where we used to live. And the Japanese beetles showed up back 10, 12 years ago when we still lived there. And they were eating the rose leaves.

14:18
And I was like, I will sacrifice the roses for the stuff we can eat in the garden. Right. So I was talking to this lady. She's, I can't remember her name right now, but I interviewed her and her episode was released weeks ago. She said, you had a trap crop. I had never heard of a trap crop. And she said, so did you sacrifice your roses every year? And I said, well, yeah, cause they would bloom in a big lush bloom phase before the Japanese beetles showed up.

14:46
So I got my one really pretty moment and then the Japanese bees would eat the roses and they wouldn't eat my garden. And she was like, you did something you didn't even know you were doing. I was like, yeah, huh, weird. So a trap crop works as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's a lot of different options to explore more natural methods of pest management. And again, with the permaculture aspect, not if I would...

15:14
If I would redo it, I wouldn't even plant my fruit trees together in a small orchard. I would mix them up in guilds and that way that pressure in one area doesn't spill over easily into the other. So definitely things you learn as you go along. Yeah, because you can't know everything when you start. I keep saying on this podcast, everybody has to start at the beginning. Absolutely. That's where the beginning is. It's at the start. You can't know until you know. You can't experience things until you do the thing.

15:43
So that's why I really love doing this podcast because I get to learn things from people that I hadn't even known existed and get to try them or find out I've been doing a thing that people have been doing forever. And I'm like, oh, well, okay. Yeah, yeah. So I saw your video about how to tell a boar from a sow on Facebook and laugh myself stupid and thought, well, yeah. And then...

16:12
I was like, not everybody knows all these things about animals and I shouldn't laugh. But it was a very funny video. Yeah. I always say my spiritual gift is sarcasm. My wife disagrees that she doesn't think that's a spiritual gift. But I do. Yeah. So it was just, it was just funny simply because of, and there's actually a funny story behind this. We had some friends that came out with their young children, two young girls came out of

16:39
Last year to the farm and visited the farm for the first time and so I was taking them around and showing them We had piglets on the farm at the time So showing them piglets they want to see the chickens the baby chicks all of those type of things and then we when we got To our breed stock we had our boars. We had them at that point We had them sequestered in their own little little pasture area because we didn't want them breeding at that time and so the Boars are hanging out and these are good sized boys as you saw in the video and so they're

17:08
They're just big. They're big everywhere. They're, they're well endowed and the, um, the physiology of a bore, his, his reproductive organs, of course, hang out very prominent on the back end of him. And so the girls didn't say anything. They, you know, they was, oh yeah, bore. Okay. And no words, but, but our friends called us when they were on their way home. And they said, we have to tell you this. And we could tell they'd been laughing so hard that could barely breathe.

17:32
We have to tell you this and we got in the car, headed back, we asked them, you know, what was your favorite part of the farm? And they were talking about all these different things. And then one of the daughters said, it was just really strange. The boars with their, their, their little pig butts. And so they're like, what are you talking about? Their pig butts. And she, they both assumed that these, these large, this large appendage hanging off the back of the pig, which kind of looks like a butt cheek. Well, it was actually the butt cheeks of the pig and instead of its testicles.

18:02
So they got a good kick out of that. And we just laughed and laughed about that. And it's like, yeah, you kind of, you kind of, you're sexing a full grown pig is not difficult to do if he's intact. So that's why I did the video. It's like, let's do a little tongue in cheek here to say, if you're having a hard time figuring out which is a sow and which is a boar, then let's give you some tips. And of course, just go to some of the non-obvious things while showing the video of the very obvious thing right there in front of you. So, yeah.

18:32
Kids say the darndest things and I love kids. They make me laugh all the time. I was highly entertained for basically concurrently over a hundred years raising my kids. Not consecutively, but concurrently with all their years. So yeah, kids are fun. And kids are also a lot of work. I mean, I am happy that my children are adults and they're raised and I did a good job. And I'm pretty sure I did a good job.

19:01
So I'm at that point in my life where I get to kick back and watch them be grownups, which is almost more entertaining. Yes, yeah, it is. It is good to see them. Almost. Right, yeah. Yeah, it's good to see them make good choices. Yeah, the one knot of my body is actually starting a garden. He's my husband's son from a previous relationship. And he has the most beautiful produce coming in right now, and he keeps texting us pictures.

19:30
And then we send him pictures of our sad garden. And he's like, there's always next year guys, it's okay. So he's being our cheerleader this year. That's great. Yep, he's very excited. We did send him the pictures of the peaches though. And he was like, those look fantastic. I was like, yeah, the one thing we didn't expect is doing great. The things that we expected to do well are doing nothing. Go big. That's the way it goes. Yeah, nature is fickle. When she...

19:59
When she provides, she really provides. When she says no, there's nothing. It's not, it's not fair. Okay. So I don't, I, you also said you do timber stuff. So do you sell wood from your property? So, um, at one time I did, I've had a, I've had a mill for about, well, off and on, cause I sold one and then, uh,

20:28
got my other one, I got a new one. So yeah, probably 10, 15 years of being here, we we've had a mill or at least access to a mill. And with, with that, I, I, I like doing woodworking. The, the little garage apartment that we lived in for two years before you built the main house is now my wood shop. So I have, uh, finishing equipment. So, you know, what would you consider the standard equipment you'd see in a wood shop to make furniture and do that. So I was doing a lot of.

20:56
of milling to the point of taking it to furniture building. I was getting into cabinetry a lot, like gun cabinets, that type of stuff, not kitchen cabinets, building small furniture, doing that for some extra income and just for the love of it. And then as we got more invested in the homestead and experimenting with doing more agriculture type stuff, then I kind of shifted and said, well, I'm going to do less woodworking and kind of come back to doing more general carpentry and construction.

21:26
The mill allows me to produce lumber to build, I build our farrowing barn, which is a decent size structure that our pigs hang out in when it's time to farrow. And then I built a fixed coop that we use for compost creation. And I call it the chicken church. It's built to resemble, even has a little steeple, it's built to resemble the old country churches that you don't see much of anymore. It's kind of my homage to those relics that are going away. But.

21:56
The mill allows us to provide that type of building material. So we're, we're constantly doing that. I'm actually sitting on a deck that I made for Kelly as a surprise for our anniversary this year that was all milled from white oak that, uh, that are harvested from the property. So I really haven't done much here in the last couple of years that, that I would resell the timber because every time I fire the mill up, I have a purpose or a use for the material that's going to come off of it. Okay.

22:25
That makes sense. And what a great present for your wife. Oh my God. How did you keep it a secret? Well, fortunately, she and the boys were on their way to her side of the family. They were just getting together for a niece's birthday. They were doing four or five days down in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. So they were going down, renting a cabin in the mountains and hanging out. So I had this idea brewing in my head, and this was a perfect opportunity to say, well, I need to stay home and take care of the farm.

22:55
They wanted me to go. I was like, well, if I take care of the farm, we don't have to put the dog in a boarding situation. So we'll save some money there. I just got so much work to do. I just can't do it right now. So they were disappointed that I didn't go, but all the while I was lying to them because I had this project in mind. So I had basically a four-day window to get it done. I'm 51 years old, but my mind still thinks I'm 25. It was tough.

23:21
But did get it done. In fact, the Sunday morning they were to return, I was cleaning up and attaching the last boards and doing all that type of stuff. So I was able to pull it off just in time. And we did a whole video about it. But when they showed up, I was sitting out here on the finished deck in the shade just enjoying a nice afternoon. And poor girl, she showed up. Everybody got the flu down there. That was their gift for going to the...

23:51
She came back and she was sick as a dog, but she was so excited about the deck. You know, actually was, was quite a blessing because, uh, being, she was sick all week and we, we had just a beautiful stretch of weather. It was about, it's about a way it is now 70 degrees during the day, low humidity. So she just stay out here on her hammock all week to just recover and, and just soak up, soak up that UV, get the sun, get the fresh air. And then it really helped her in her recovery process. But.

24:20
Yeah, it was fun. It was a fun project. I bet. Um, speaking of sickness, I'm a jinx myself. I have not been sick since the December before COVID hit. There you go. And that was four and a half years ago now, I think. And I don't, I like, I'm so afraid if I get a bug, I'm going to be so miserable and it's just going to be perception. Cause I haven't felt sick in over four years. And so long, right.

24:50
It's crazy and you know, in my, I don't wanna say in my defense, it doesn't really matter, I'm not defending anything. I don't really go anywhere or see anybody. If I go anywhere, it's to pick up groceries because I'm not gonna spend my time actually shopping. Right. Because why would I do that? And I love where I live, you know? We have three acres. If I wanna be outside, I just step out the door and I have three acres to be wandering on. Exactly, yep. So, yeah.

25:19
It's crazy. And I don't want to get what anybody else has gotten. I sure as heck don't want to share any germs I have with anybody else. So I just don't people. It's just easier. Yeah. Um, so speaking of people, you have a conference coming up here in a couple of weeks and I don't want to get too deep because we already talked about it, but how's that planning going? How's it coming? Do you know how many people are planning on attending that kind of stuff? Yeah. So it's, um,

25:49
Yeah, it's first time, so it's an inaugural conference and it's got a little bit of growing pains as we'd expected. So we're still working out some of the kinks, but you've got a good lineup of speakers coming and those have all been confirmed and so excited about that. Ticket sales, we still have tickets available. We're only selling 500 because of the venue. We wanted to try to keep it a little bit more intimate so people could interact more with the speakers and have more Q&A time.

26:18
But still, some of the vendors and sponsors are probably our biggest hurdle right now, still trying to get some of that taken care of. But we are, we're at least to the point where we're net neutral when it comes to expenses. So that's been a big relief to say, okay, we're at least, we're covering our expenses here, the nuts covered, so anything else, we get to reinvest for next year if we wanna do this. But it's gonna be a fun, fun event. We're partnering, so Red Tool House,

26:47
is partnering with our Capital Conservation District, which is a conservation entity. They have more ties to nonprofit organizations, academia, that type of stuff. And of course, what we bring to the table is more of the homestead or social media connections that we have. So I think it's going to be a neat mashup of practical homestead interaction. Of course, meet some of your favorite homesteaders with people like Joel Salaton and...

27:17
and Josh Draper and Nathan Elliott, those guys. But then they're going to bring in, hey, here's kind of the soup to nuts on how to take advantage of this type of process if you want to, like high tunnels, utilize NRCS money to help with a high tunnel, that type of thing. So it's kind of an interesting mashup. I really haven't seen a conference that's kind of doing it this way. So I'm hoping it's going to be successful. And

27:44
at least present information that we think people will find useful. I hope so too. And I actually don't have any doubt that it will. I think it think it's going to help a lot of people. Um, so this whole homesteading farming, growing produce, raising animals, whatever. People think that it's either really hard or it's really easy to the point that the dumb people do this. And.

28:14
It's not really hard and it's not really easy. It's really what you want to do with your life and what you want to do for yourself versus what you want to pay somebody to do for you. Yeah, yeah. And honestly, I don't think that this is for everybody. I think that if you are a person who wants things to be done for you and you want to pay money instead of time and effort, that's totally fine, do that. But I really...

28:43
love it when people learn how to do things themselves because there's such satisfaction in knowing that you took the time to learn how to do the thing, you tried to do the thing, you may have failed a couple of times trying to do the thing, and when you finally get it right, it's just amazing. Yeah. And I agree with you 100%. And I think the two biggest mistakes that I have seen people do is that they don't know

29:10
do or their attitudes towards homesteading when they want to do it, but don't necessarily want to embrace it. And I've got one friend, I'll leave his name out so I won't embarrass him in case he's listening. But when he first was looking into this, he was a doctor, so medical professional. His ability to earn income off the property, of course, was much, much higher than he could ever do on property. Very specialized doctor. So he had a lot of resources.

29:41
So what he would do is he would start to bankroll these things. He would, you know, bit these big seed caches together. He'd buy all this off grid equipment and have it just, just kind of squirreled away in these places. And I remember just having a conversation with him. He's like, yeah, if it hits the fan one of these days, then I'll be able to, we've got all these seeds, I can plant a garden. I'll be able to do this and provide for my family, do this and this. I'm like, but you've never done that before. And the fallacy of saying, well, I've got all the material and.

30:10
not having the experience. I mean, you know good and well, Mary, just as well as I do, that first time planting a garden, you take a handful of seeds, you take it out and throw it in the ground, you're not going to get a bounty of produce that's going to allow you to feed your family for another year. And that was kind of the fallacy. It's like, man, you need to be experiencing this seasonally every day. You need to be out here doing this so you have the experience. So when it does hit the fan, then you've got the experience. You can't just go to your cash of stores and say, bang, here's the money.

30:39
This is all going to work out for me now. So that was a big issue. And then, and then the second problem I've run into are people that will. That will, will approach us about, Hey, um, we're having trouble making ends meet, playing the game, you know, the rat race, working the nine to five, the, the, the car, the house payment, all that type of stuff. We want to scale back and save money. Uh, so we want to embrace the homesteading lifestyle because we think that's going to be cost effective.

31:08
And I would say, well, even though your intentions may be pure, your motivation and the actual results could be different. Homesteading doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be a cheaper way of living, especially if you don't have your land. And right now, post-COVID with land prices just going out of control, that's become the biggest obstacle. Somebody says, well, I want to move out of the suburbs, so I'd like a 10-acre tract. It's like, okay, are you ready to throw down?

31:35
anywhere from five to $10,000 an acre in some places. It's like, well, okay, now I've got a mortgage on that. So I got to work a job. So, and then try to buy all the equipment and the experiences of learning to homestead and raise your own food and do that type of stuff. They think, you know, the joke of, you know, when you grow your first tomato, this is the tastiest $100 tomato I've ever eaten type of thing. And they just don't see that.

32:01
Accumulatively, it's actually going to cost you more money to transition into that lifestyle. So you have to be a little bit more deliberate. It's not going to be a way to save you money immediately. It may have savings and other value added benefits in the long run. And that's the thing I always try to caution people. It's like, don't think you can make this change. Sell your house in the burbs, even if you sell it for way more money than what you're going to buy property for.

32:28
You still got to have a place to live and you still got to find a way to pay your property taxes and you still got to find a way to buy and acquire the supplies you need to have a homesteading lifestyle. Yeah, I've said a billion times in the last year doing this podcast that homesteading is not property. It's lifestyle. It's about learning skills piece by piece and then eventually moving into what you want to do with those skills.

32:58
home in the burbs and just have a little side garden and make your own stuff, that's homesteading too. So it's not about, we call our place a tiny homestead. It's 3.1 acres. We have a garden, we have chickens, we have barn cats, we have a dog, and we have a really nice home and we love our home. So for us, we call it a tiny homestead.

33:25
A lot of people would not call it tiny because it is three acres. It's not like a tenth of an acre like we used to have. Yeah. You can do a lot on three acres. Yeah. But we're not doing livestock or anything. We don't, we don't, we're not interested in doing growing animals. We're interested in growing produce. Yeah. So it's all choices and decisions about how you want to practice homesteading as a lifestyle. Yes. I agree. That's what, that's what I think anyway. Yeah.

33:54
Yeah, very eclectic options. Yeah, you can do anything. And that's the other thing that's funny is I hear from people all the time. Well, I can't do that. And I'm like, well, you probably could if you tried. Is it more that you don't want to do that? Yeah. And I'm like, well, yeah, I don't want to do that. And I'm like, okay, don't say I can't just say I'm not interested in doing that because they're two different mindsets. Right. Yeah.

34:21
Yeah, there's that initial apprehension to learn something new. And if you get over that, that's one thing I've tried to ingrain in my boys is like, you need to be learning every day. When you stop learning, it's time to start dying. And you just, you need to challenge yourself every day. And, and as you learn new things, you discover, well, I really enjoyed that. Or I didn't like that at all. I really don't want to do that again, but at least you have an educated opinion now of whether that's something worth your time and effort. Right.

34:50
And the other thing is it's a lot easier to get started on the homesteading stuff when you're younger and your body is younger, because you don't hurt half as bad when you work hard. Right, for sure. I would have loved to have started this when I was 25, but at 25, I was still married to the guy, the first husband that I am no longer married to, hadn't married the second one, and hadn't even met the third one. So...

35:19
So it's just life gives you choices and you make the choices with the information you have at the time. And so if you have the opportunity to do something you really want to do, jump on it. If it doesn't present itself and you think you really want to do something, I don't know, go make the opportunity. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Just, yeah, exactly. Take advantage of what you can take advantage of. Explore what...

35:47
what you feel is a challenge and then embrace the suck as they say, right? Yes, yes. And even if it's a great thing you're doing, there's always going to be some kind of suck that goes along with it because that's how life works. Right. All right, Troy. Thank you for coming back and talking with me. I really appreciate it. Well, I enjoyed it, Mary. It was a good conversation. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Thanks. Have a great afternoon. You too.