Shady Lane Farm

Today I'm talking with Martin at Shady Lane Farm.

A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org.

 

Muck Boots 

Calendars.Com

If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee 

https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes

00:00
You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.  A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups and help us grow a new food system.  You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Martin at Shady Lane  something.

00:29
and the computer just like blanked out your name, Shady Lane something  in Illinois. Martin, tell me the name of your place again.  It is Shady Lane Farm. Thank you.  Once I hit record, it like cuts off half the people's names of their places. And if I haven't memorized it, I don't know what it is. So thank you.

00:51
So what's the weather like in Illinois today, Mark? It  is cooler. It is only going to be 86 after about four days of  90s.  And we have occasional thunderstorms, but it's cloudy, not a bad day. We were out doing chores this morning. So not a horrible day to do chores. Yeah. Was the weekend rough on you guys? Cause it was really hot here in Minnesota. Yeah, it was. We...

01:19
Mostly because I made everybody get up early to do chores before it got too hot. So it was, it was pretty rough, but we got through it. Yeah. The secret to homesteading and farming is get everything done before 10 AM that you have to do outside. Yes. We had a triathlon that came through our neighborhood here on Sunday and it was a heat index over 100. Yeah, it was gross.

01:50
I think it's supposed to be 82 here today at like three, four o'clock and 82 is better than a heat indices of 105. Yes. So thankful times have come down. So tell me about what you do at your place. So what we do and we bought this five acre property in 2023, my wife, Lisa and I, I have been an urban homesteader.

02:18
for many years  and finally it got to a point where  I had rented all the garden plots I could from the local park district and they had started to take plots back from us, which I understood to  because more people wanted to vegetable garden after COVID, which I totally support. I had failed in an attempt to get chickens allowed in the city.

02:48
So  I went to Lisa and I said, you know, we just redid this beautiful colonial house here in Rockford. And we love it. Let's sell it and buy a rundown five acre  property  and do it all again  and  add animals and fencing  and  new garden and building all these scoops. And she said, okay. That's a good woman. And she had,  um,

03:18
There were farms in her past,  but she herself had no homesteading experience. I had just taught her the vegetable garden  and  she was completely interested in doing it.  And she took a year off from her second master's degree  and was the general contractor for all the work on the house  and has really adapted to it.

03:47
And now  is full on farm girl. Her cousins and relatives can't believe it. Has she raised a bottle lamb this spring all on her own  and  just has totally adapted to it. She's embraced it. Yes.  Awesome. I love her. That's great.  So why did you want to do this? Did you,  was it, was it just because you couldn't have chickens or did

04:17
were you brought up around farming or what? Well, my mom's family  out in Western Kansas had a tradition  of farming  and she spent part of her childhood  on a small farm, very small by Kansas standards. They milked a few cattle, very, very rural. They made their own electricity with an AC Delco

04:46
windmill generator.  Once they had milk, they would shut down the power to the house from the windmill and they'd power radio off the batteries because they had to use all the power to chill the milk. So she grew up very, very rural,  processing their own food, canning.

05:10
They had a root cellar. So she grew up with all of that homesteading. In fact, that side of the family arrived in Western Kansas in 1887 and took up a homestead claim. So literally they were homesteaders. Wow. Yeah. She brought that ethos to even our very suburban upbringing. She would can things. She would

05:39
very much make things from scratch. I grew up making my own egg noodles  that she taught me to make.  We didn't have a big garden because many of our government houses, you just didn't have the space for it.  But all of that ethos was very much there.  And I spent time in Kansas in summers and when my dad was in Vietnam. So

06:07
it really impacted me. And then when I was earning my PhD in American history, my dissertation was  on the settlement of the far Western counties of Kansas between 1890 and 1929. And that transitional period where the railroad and real estate companies were pushing people to do  self-reliant homesteading.

06:34
with truck gardens and raising their own food and raising for the nearby, well, there weren't really any nearby market  communities, but to ship things out by railroad.  And I became fascinated by these trains, the Santa Fe Railroad ran that basically taught you how to do all this. You come from the city, you get a homestead claim.

07:00
Now this is how you make money on your homestead, doing these  various things. Oh, you can raise watermelons, you can raise this, you can  do small agricultural animal production. And so that planted a seed in my head and I like the idea of self-reliance  and  I like the idea of knowing where my food came from. Wow, okay. Now.

07:28
It cut out when you were describing the woman that you were talking about. That was your mom? That was my mom. Yes. My mom  came from that. My grandparents, her parents, had  survived the Dust Bowl in the  1930s. And  so  that also informed everything in our house.

07:54
that they had lived, sets of grandparents had lived through the Great Depression. So very much to be frugal  and to do those kinds of things.  My Irish grandparents who were fresh off the boat, my grandmother, I only found out later, kept  the traditional Irish market values. So  she would have my grandfather drive her out into the country.

08:23
outside of Boston and should buy bushels of potatoes, bushels of vegetables and keep them in their basement in Boston.  And because they were cheaper, she wasn't going to pay the grocery store prices  and she could process them herself into anything she wanted. You came from Hardy stock, sir.  Yes.  I love it.

08:52
And I love that you know all of this about your people because so many people don't know anything about their ancestors past their parents and possibly their grandparents. my dad's mom died when my dad was two years old. I never met her. He doesn't even remember her. And I so wish that there was a way to do, I don't know, a telephone to her so I could ask her about her life. know? Yeah.

09:21
It's funny because I'm a history professor, but my family picks on me because I don't actually ever want to do art history.  They're like, and I'm like, well, that's not history. That's genealogy. But I will go on and on about the place where we come from  and that. So, but yes, I am not interested in genealogy. I am a disappointment to them.

09:49
I feel like genealogy and history are very interwoven. So for me, I'm interested in both things.  And I have traced my lineage back to William the Conqueror in England on my mom's side. And I have traced my lineage back to the Salem witch trials on my dad's side. So  I got some weird, crazy things going on in my ancestry.

10:16
Anyway, so what do you have on your farm? Do you have critters? Do you have produce? Do you have D all of the above? D all of the above. Okay. If we start with the vegetable garden, we have a 6,000 square foot vegetable garden that we broke in last year, which was an adventure in itself. The land had never been gardened by the people who had previously owned it.

10:45
for 50 years.  And so we had to knock down a bunch of trees. It was a very typical rural story. Grandma built the house, daughter inherited it, daughter got  old and sick,  property got overgrown in trees, family dumped garbage  on the property. So we had abandoned boats, campers, tractors, yard tractors,  which we arranged for them all to take.

11:15
But we still had all these just little groupings of trees that had popped up. So we had that cleared. And then approaching the soil, we actually had to rent  a cold mold board plow.  And we plowed it all up with our tractor. And then we had to till it, till it again, disk it again, plow it again.

11:41
And so last year it was really intense trying to get it done  on time to get it planted. And it's turned out we have great soil. So we can grow anything. So  we grow, we have a big pumpkin patch. We usually do. We grow lots of watermelons, tomatoes, peppers,  all the brassicas.  So cabbage, lots of broccoli.

12:10
We're not canners were freezers. We have a lot of freezers. So we freeze all the broccoli lots of peas and beans. Radishes  leaf lettuce.  I just successfully grew my first head lettuce ever. Ornamental corn  and popcorn  and two kinds of sweet corn. Very nice. In fact, the sweet corn  last year.

12:40
kind of marked the beginning  of  us  selling things because  I planted a lot of sweet corn  and it came in really well and I said, hey, anybody want to buy some sweet corn?  And we completely sold out of sweet corn. So this year we're double the amount of sweet corn  because we didn't even get any sweet corn last year. We usually decurnal it and freeze it for the winter.

13:08
And we got no sweet corn last year for us. So the garden  is wonderful. We grow parrots, pak choi. People always ask me what I grow and I say name it and we're probably growing it.  Strawberries,  cut flowers is a new thing this year. We were asked by some people to grow cut flowers  and to sell  kind of make your own flower arrangement flowers. So we're trying that this year.

13:38
What  flowers are you growing? Because I love flowers you can bring in the house.  Lots of dahlias, poppies, dianthus, salacea,  daisies,  lots of cosmos because they're very popular for arranging. So  yes, we have just multiple varieties.

14:07
And they're doing pretty well, but we direct so. So that's always an F-E thing. It's better if you seed start, but I don't seed start.  I don't like to seed start. So.  Awesome. And what do you have for animals?  For animals, we have rabbits. The rabbits are not meat rabbits.  I have nothing against meat rabbits. I have raised meat rabbits before.

14:37
illegally in the city. But  for us, my wife has two granddaughters. And so knew immediately, and I had three sons that are between 23 and nine. And I knew the younger kids were going to request rabbits. So we built a rabbit tree. It's all enclosed so they can take them out of the cages one at a time, play with them. They all have their own rabbit.

15:05
And they're just pets.  We raise Havanna's,  which are super soft. They're black, brown, Holstein. You can get lilac colored Havanna's.  They're very sweet rabbits.  We have people who bring their kids over to play with them. So the rabbitry  is a thing unto itself. And it's turned out to be a very positive, even though it's

15:34
not a profit generator.  We have chickens.  We sell chicken eggs. We have ducks. We sell duck eggs. In fact, right now we have sex mature female ducks. We don't keep male ducks.  And we have five more in our basement brooder that are getting ready to come up.  And so we're going to increase  our number of ducks.

16:03
And then we have two pilgrim geese that belong to my youngest son. And then he has two brown Chinese geese he is raising this year to show in  4H.  And we have already informed them that they're going to the fur and feather sale. We do not need two breeding pairs of geese. So.

16:30
We're going to keep the pilgrim geese because they're his babies. He raised them  all on his own. We never wanted geese. It's one of those great homesteading stories. His mom who lived in the city bought him geese.  And we knew very quickly that the city man was going to discover these two very loud geese living in their backyard.  So.

16:54
My wife jokes, she looks out and says, why are you doing? It's like, I'm building the goose coop because they're going to come here. And sure enough, they did. He showed him in the fair last year in the older pair one in the open class. So he's pretty excited about showing his Chinese brown geese. And then in our front pasture, we have a heifer, which we're in the process of breeding. And we have

17:24
two steers we bought last fall that'll be processed this fall. One's a red Angus and one's a black Angus American white park mix. The heifer is a black Angus we actually got at a very good price from a failed homestead situation.  Kind of a relative of a friend, they bought her

17:53
in partnership with somebody to butcher and the people backed out. She was all alone with their alpacas. She wasn't doing well because cows are social animals.  And so we got her at a very cheap price  and she came and she was a much better quality animal we thought she was going to be. And so we're going to go ahead and breed her.

18:21
and we're going to do sex selected semen. So we'll get another heifer. And the idea  is instead of buying steers, we'll start breeding our own.  And  that will help insulate us against the cost. Many of your listeners are probably experiencing what we're experiencing.  Cattle prices are through the roof. I've heard that, yes.

18:50
Yeah, it is  absolutely crazy. In fact, there's four age kids around here who can't show cattle this year because they can't afford to buy your basic feeder steer to show.  They're upwards  of over three thousand dollars. Heifers that are in calf  are over four thousand dollars here in the Midwest. So

19:20
It really is crazy for us.  The other funny thing about us and cattle  is that  I sold the two steers  accidentally, all of them. We're basically only getting  probably an eighth of our own beef.  And we have an empty freezer because we had bought from a

19:48
faculty colleague of mine who had a homestead for many years and they retired to a beautiful large property on a lake near Brainerd, Minnesota. Oh, yep.  And yeah, and they  shut down their homestead.  And so I'm like, well, we'll have our own beef. And then I turned around and like the corn, I sold all the beef except for an eight.

20:14
So for the first time in 10 years, we've had to buy commercially produced beef.  Oh no.  Yeah, it's kind of embarrassing when you have tattle grazing on your front pasture  and you're having to go to the store. But  I had broker deals for years for  friends and colleagues  with my sources for homesteader meat.

20:43
Now they're my customers, which is really nice.  So. Hey, can I, can I get you to backtrack to your son real quick with the, with the docs and the 4-H stuff? Sure.  You said he's nine?  Yes. Sam is nine.  And then I have George who is 15. And then  Ethan is 23.

21:11
He just graduated with his degree in English from Northern Illinois University. And then Lisa, my wife, has a daughter who's 33, who's married and has two daughters. So you're a grandpa. I'm a Martin  because her ex-husband is  still around. And I think people are nervous because Lisa and I  have been together for

21:40
five years, we've only been married for two years.  and when the babies were born, I think people are like, oh, how are we going to handle this?  And the little girls have handled it. I have a title, I'm Martin. That's it, which I'm, I'm completely happy with.  So I always joke,  I am the, I am the senior male without portfolios. So I have no responsibilities, but I get to enjoy the whole thing.

22:10
I was just going to try to say that in a way that made sense and you did it for me.  Okay. So your, your son who's, who's little, I mean, he's grade school. Yeah.  Um, he, number one, he's going to be so excited when that, when you, when you get your heifer bread and she has that baby.  Cause if he's into ducks, he's probably going to love a calf. Oh yeah. And number two, he was very excited by the lambs this year. Oh yeah. So.

22:39
So how long has he been involved in 4-H? This is his first year. Last year we just did  the open youth show  at the Fair one county over  and he kind of got the bug. It's funny because he's not a joiner. He  doesn't do a lot of group activities.

23:04
And so he likes 4-H because he can do its own individual project. He'll go to a meeting and then he's just on his own and he enjoys it. Yeah. Cool. So if he's only been in it for a year or he just started this year, whatever you said that. Yes. Have you seen like the benefits for him in it? I mean, is it, I don't know anything about 4-H. I just know that kids get involved in it and they

23:33
They raise something  and then they sell it and they have to part ways with the animal they raise and it's really hard at the end, blah, blah. But I keep hearing about all the good things that come from being involved in 4-H. So what have you seen change in him, if anything?  I have seen him grow more confident. He is willing to put himself out there. He's done speeches in front of the meeting.

24:02
where he's talked about  his raising of the geese and all of his knowledge of geese. So I've seen him grow in confidence. I've seen him enjoy interacting with other people,  gains in knowledge. And 4-H,  while there's a lot of focus  on agriculture and animals, it's also science.

24:32
It's geology, it's cooking, it's sewing, it's video production.  In fact, he  and his stepsister have kind of a band over at their mom, over at his mom's house, and they're actually going to perform in an entertainment show at the fair. Fun. Fun. So I've, I've seen just huge benefits. In fact, moving out here, there has just been

25:01
A lot of benefits. My oldest son is autistic. So  he relates really well to animals.  He was away at school for the last couple of years after he moved out here, but he  enjoys the peace and quiet. He enjoys the opportunity to be out in nature more. He  really enjoys the rhythm of farm life. As you wake up, you do chores.

25:30
In the evening you do chores  and he really enjoys that a great deal. So  I've seen a lot of those kind of benefits. They grow in confidence.  Sam, the nine year old took the front tires and wheels off of the small garden tractor he had bought himself just a couple of weeks ago because he needed new tires. So he did it this morning.

25:59
Nice. We took him off.  We took him to the tire shop.  He's not thrilled about the cost, which is very funny because every person who owns machinery has to face the financial reality of the cost.  he's like, that's going to be a lot of weeding, dad, to pay for those new tires. And I said, well, we'll find you some other projects too. Anything worth having is worth working for, right? Yes.

26:29
So just all sorts of benefits, not just through 4-H, but it's always been living, even when we are  urban homesteaders, living a homesteading lifestyle, you just understand more about the world.  To backtrack to animals, we also raise  Dorper South African meat sheep, sheep,  and

26:56
One of the lessons we learned this year  is our first year to lamb was our smallest  and we had spent  all of her pregnancy worried she was going to have twins because she was very small. And we're like, please don't let Hanny have twins because it's going to be hard on her.  And she lambed and everything seemed to be OK. She gave us just a

27:25
beautiful new lamb, which we've named Helen. We're going to keep her.  And so she got a name and was a great mom.  And then we discovered that there was another lamb stuck in the birth canal. And we called the vet after three days  and we lost Hanny and the, well, the other lamb was already passed away. So Helen became

27:54
My wife's new baby,  the vital baby, we joke we're in our  50s and when we got married, we never thought we would be up every two hours feeding an infant together and have that experience. We've had it now.  But  it was really great.  It really kind of cemented my wife's attitude about the farm.  And Helen follows her around.

28:22
and calls for she and her half sister are being weaned in our neighbor's horse barn  because they don't keep horses anymore.  And that's just been a cool experience. But everybody learned that when you have livestock, things happen.  And it was sad. Hennie was a super sweet you. And we also had to deal with the fact that right there we lost thirteen hundred dollars.

28:52
Because Hanny was 650,  the ewe lamb we lost would have been 650.  And actually we lost more than that because we had about $300 in vet bills. Yeah. So there's lessons to be learned. But then our last ewe who lambed  almost two months after the first two  gave us a beautiful ram lamb, which we're keeping.

29:22
named Kiron and  the boys have now understand first thing we do we got to go down cut the umbilical cord,  iodine it, check everybody out. Sam  loves doing that.  Sam is not a big kid but he will pick up the lamb and kind of  he says I gotta he goes mom go away.

29:50
We got to do this. I know you don't like this. He talks to the use.  I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We're doing this to your baby, but it's for their own good. So yeah, he always does that.  And  I love Sam. want to meet Sam. He sounds adorable. He has a huge head of red hair too, and we're Irish. So he has very pale skin, red hair. And this year he has finally leaned into his leprechaun heritage.

30:20
Good, good. And redheads are feisty and they're smart and they're ingenious and I love them.  you tell him that the lady you talked to today on the podcast episode said that redheads are fantastic. Yes, he is a good one. All of the boys are. The middle one, George,  who's 15,  is  really less into the farming, but

30:49
He has a real sense of humanity  and he's a fierce protector of the animals. It's very interesting in that way.  He's not so much,  I love them, I love them, I love them. But when he does chores, he's very technician about it. It's gonna be done right.  And things are gonna be done correctly because their lives matter, which  I'm perfectly fine with.

31:19
He's not going to gush all over it. But he did, you know, in 15 year old fashion when the last lamb, the little ram lamb was born, he said, okay, he looked at him and said, I got to admit you're  I love it.  It sounds like you have a fantastic team of folks on your farm, Martin.

31:43
I try to keep these episodes to half an hour and we're there. I would love to talk to you for like eight hours because your stories are great, but no one can listen to an eight hour podcast.  Um, where can people find you on understand.  Um,  we have  a Facebook page called Shady Lane Farms.  I have an Instagram account called Rockford Homesteader. They can  look at two  and

32:11
Two of my younger friends, I'm also a volunteer firefighter from the fire department because I don't know if you saw any of the videos I posted on the Facebook page, but after that they're like, you got to start doing tech talks. So we're going to start with tech talk soon. Awesome. Good. Let me know when that happens and I will go back and add it to the show notes. Thank you so much. This was a blast.

32:37
Thank you so much for your time.  I  so appreciate it when you people take time out of your busy lives to talk to me for half an hour. You have  no idea how much I appreciate it.  as always, you can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com. And Martin, I hope you have a great rest of your day. You too. Thank you. Thank you.