Shell Smart - Australian Homesteader

Today I'm talking with Shell. If you've ever wondered what it's like to homestead in Australia, this will give you a small taste.

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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. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe.

00:29
share it with a friend or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Shell Smart and she is  in Australia and it's actually morning in Australia right now, whereas it's six o'clock in the evening here in Minnesota.  Good morning, Shell. How are you? Good morning, Mary  Ann. Good evening to you.  Thank you.  And the other thing's different is you are in the middle of autumn and we are in the middle of a spring, right? That's correct. Yes.

00:58
Okay, so based on all of that, your growing situation is very different from ours, so I wanna touch on that. But first, tell me about yourself and what you do. Well, I am a wife to Stuart. We've been married for nearly 33 years. And we have five children and they range from 28 down to 15. We're homeschooling.

01:27
still got two homeschooling or sort of one and a half homeschooling at the moment. So we're nearly finished with being homeschooling. think this is our  22nd year of homeschooling.  And we're homestead as well. So we have three acres right within the town limits, but a very small town of a thousand people here in  the snowy valleys of New South Wales  and in Australia. And yeah, we have three acres and we have a little homestead here.

01:58
Very nice and  congratulations on making your marriage work for that long with five children to boot  That's that's  I'm one grandchild. Okay  Yeah,  well you have outdone yourselves. I'm impressed. I I've been married three times. I'm keeping the third one. He's great

02:27
And  I can't imagine  being with someone for that long with that many kids because kids are a huge stressor on relationships sometimes. Yeah, they can be. But I think they can also really make you work better as a team because you've got something bigger than yourself to work for as well within your marriage.  True enough. Yes, absolutely. But you also have to be willing to do that.

02:55
You both have to be willing to work together.  And  my first two,  I don't want to say anything bad, but the third one is more than willing to work with me to make this work. Let's put it that way.  That's the big difference.  It sure does. Okay. So  what do you do on your homestead? Do have animals? Do you grow gardens? What do you do? Yeah, we generally do grow gardens. At the moment, we haven't got any luck.

03:24
this season because we're just finishing our harvest season.  So we haven't done gardens this last year, this last summer,  because we are moving and we just didn't have the time and energy to into that.  But  we do normally grow gardens with, you know, not a huge vegetable garden,  but we do have, you know, herbs and veggies and tomatoes.

03:53
Well, I'm not very good at tomatoes. I like to plant lots of tomatoes.  And I get a few every season that actually grow. So that's something I need to work on. And one day I'll work on that when I've got more time and energy.  But we do grow a lot and have grown at the, again, at the moment we've downsized, but we have been in the past growing.  Between growing  and we have friends that hunt, we've been able to raise most of our meat.

04:22
that we eat as a family. So  that's been good. So we currently have  our chooks, oh sorry, in Australia we call chickens chooks. So if I revert to that I apologize.  So chickens are laying chickens at the moment, laying hens.  And we have goats.  They have in the past been milked, but at the moment we don't have any babies and they're not milking.

04:49
And we have had  meat chickens as well  and we just sent back some milking cows that we had on our property  that our friend  had lent to us over the summer.  A,  it  benefited her because she needed to reduce her load on her pasture and B, we needed to get some big animals on our pasture.

05:17
We were able to be blessed by having two milking cows and two calves on our  pasture over the last four months, I think five months maybe.  So we're very quiet at the moment. Our poor livestock guardian dog, Chief, he doesn't have a lot to do. I we're down to about 15 hens and three roosters and a  small clutch of chicks  and two goats. That's all he's got to look after other than us in the household.

05:46
He does a great job of that and we have, yeah, captain, inside captain, outside captain, inside dog and, yeah, children.  So it's  a menagerie whether that we're working farm or not at the moment.  Do you have  kittens right now? No, we have chicks. So we have cats.  We just have an inside cat at the moment and we have a barn cat.

06:14
as well that lives outside although he's currently inside comes in for a morning cuddle  on the call of mornings.  But we also have my daughter who's between homes at the moment so she's renting a room at a friend's house and she couldn't take her cat with her so he is also at our place at the moment. So  yeah right now inside I have three cats at this very moment inside and I'm not an inside cat person normally but anyway.

06:44
I  used to be and then  we got a dog  and I have decided that the dog is actually better than the inside cat so we don't intend to have any inside cats anymore.  We have two barn cats that we love to pet outside. They're great outside.  We have always had a cat that's generally been like you know

07:11
inside when they want to be but outside most of the time.  currently she's getting old.  We worked it out the other day. She's just turned 10 and she's just not really all that interested in going outside on a nice day that's not too hot or not too cold or not too wet. In the middle of the day when she feels like she's up to it she might go outside for a little bit. She's an old lady. She has to take it in her time.

07:41
Exactly, exactly. She has a nickname on here as Cranky Cat because she gets very cranky that one. Okay. So what kind of dog is your livestock guardian dog? He's a Maremma. Okay, I don't know what that is. Oh, it's the big white, pure white, furry dog. Looks like a sheep when they're laying in the body with a sheep. Like a Great Pyrenees sort of?

08:08
Yeah, very similar but the Great Pyrenees are a more of a gold color and then they can also have brown in them. a Maremma.  So  the Great Pyrenees, I think they were bred in the French Alps and the Maremmas were bred in the Italian Alps to chase the bears and things off. So very, very similar dogs. All right, big dog, big boy. Yeah, big boy. He's a big boy.

08:36
Yeah, my dog is a little girl. She's 36 pounds. Oh, wow. Yeah, she's not. She's maybe a fifth of your dog. Yes, yes, probably. We also have a New Zealand Hunaway. So she's officially a sheepdog in her breed, named Lola. But she was a rescue dog.

09:04
and she's never been trained to the sheep. You can see the instincts there. She likes to chase the goats around and try and do something with them.  And the chickens, she's not very well trained from that perspective, but she's my precious. She's my inside dog. The kids tell me that she's the favorite child.  Yeah, Maggie's my favorite child too. I have four adult children and  they all think that Maggie is the special spoiled baby dog.

09:34
I love that you call the chickens chooks. I'm going to start calling my chickens chooks.  You're welcome. I love it. It's better than chicken. Chicken, such a dumb word, chook is so much fancier, I think.  Oh, there you go. We always think it's more  redneck. We call it bogun. So, yeah.

09:56
it would be wickedness to see this, right? I think actually in England, I think some of those people, some of the people in England call it chooks too, because I was chatting to an English lady a little while ago and I said something online and I said something about chooks. Oh, I'm sorry, chicken. And she said, oh no, no, no, we call them chooks too here. I was like, oh, great. I'm going to tell my husband and my son to start calling the chickens chooks because it's so much more fun to say than chicken.

10:23
Chicken sounds so very in your nose and American and plain but chook sounds much better. Yeah. Okay.  So let me think. What else? Oh, I know what I wanted to ask you. What kind of predators do you deal with where you are? Any? Yeah, yeah. We have foxes.  That's the main one. So we are, I think I said that earlier, in the town limits of our town, village.

10:51
So we don't have any major wild dogs or anything like that, but we do have foxes. Foxes will come straight into the middle of our cities. Here in Australia, they're quite a big predator. So they're our main predator. So Chief, we had some pretty devastating wildfires, we call them bushfires, here at the end of 2019, beginning of 2020.

11:20
and we lost all of our bush in the mountains just nearby and the foxes moved down into the valleys which was we have a valley right next door to our property and all day and all night you could hear them calling and screaming and we would lose 10-15  in one day or one night or they'd be gone  and we just couldn't do anything to keep them. You'd be standing there and foxes would just come in and

11:51
take stuff, take children's chickens. And it was so frustrating and we tried everything and over the year of 2020, amongst all the other things that were happening, I lost count and I stopped counting at 100 chickens that we'd And I gave up and I said, that's it, I'm not having any more chickens, no more, I can't do this anymore. And then, know, early 21, I was like,

12:19
can't live without my chooks, I need more chooks. So we started researching it and we decided to get a meremma as a protector for the chickens. He's not great with the chickens in the sense of, know, I mean, him purely being here has reduced our losses significantly even before 2020. But he's...

12:49
He is very beautiful, but he's a little bit dumb.  He's a little bit dopey. And he plays, he has no idea how big he is. And he wants to play with the chicks when they are, you know, that scrawny teenage age,  like around about 10 to 16 weeks.  He likes to play with them. And he's got this massive paw and he puts that,  he'll play with them and he'll put his paw on the mentions.

13:19
We've lost very few to predators since we've had sheep, but we have lost a few to him. Whoops. Yeah, but that's pretty common. I have another friend that has a Marama and she was suddenly, her chooks were off the line and she couldn't work out why they seemed to be doing everything. And finally one day she went out to check for the chicken coop and there's her Marama puppy with his head in the nesting box eating all the eggs. And she went, ah, blocked.

13:48
Oh those damn dogs, geez. They're so cute, right?  foxes are our main predators here,  certainly in this area.  Okay, well  we have something like that here in America with coyotes. Coyotes have been

14:15
coming into the big cities because that's where the food source is.  Yeah. Yeah. the trash, all the garbage.  I live in the country. So we have coyotes that we hear howling at night, but they don't come on our property because of my dog.  She's outside all the time. They know there's another dog here. So they don't want to come anywhere near our property, which is really good. That's right. Yeah.

14:43
That's good. you can hear them.  Yeah. In the springtime when they have their puppies, you can hear the puppies talking to the parents. Like they do these little yip barks. And it's the same as any puppy. They're just babies. And the first time I heard them yip, I was like, oh my God, there's puppies out there. And my husband looked at me like I was dumb and said,

15:08
Those are coyote puppies. They are not friendly. I was like, no, but they sound cute. He's like, they sound adorable. We're not getting one. I said, yeah, no, I don't want them.  I don't need a baby coyote. have my own baby coyote. Her name is Maggie and she's an Australian shepherd and she doesn't, she's not going to hurt me. So.  Oh,  they're beautiful Australian shepherds.

15:31
I'm in love with her. I've talked so much on the podcast about her. It's ridiculous. So I'm going to stop right now. But yes, I love her and she is very beautiful. Oh, that's so beautiful. Um, we foxes, I don't, you have any foxes or any foxes where you are? We do. We have the red foxes. Yep. don't know that was what you guys have. Yeah. Yep. There's a reason they say a sly as a fox or a cunning as a fox.

16:01
We have friends, had friends years ago who had dogs chained up next to their chook sheds to keep the foxes away.  And this darn fox worked out. was one about a foot between where the chain ended and the fence line.  And this fox would actually walk like stroll, they got it on a video, stroll past this dog.

16:31
because he knew, this fox knew that there was a foot that he couldn't get him in and he just walked through there and took chickens and went past him again.  Oh my gosh. When they said, and we're like, no way. And they said, yeah, look, watch this. They've got it on trail cam. And we're like, far out. Oh my goodness. Do you guys have coyotes in Australia or is that not a thing? No, no, we don't have.

17:00
any large predators,  anything bigger than a fox really that's native. We have wild dogs that have, well we have dingoes  which are bigger than a fox. They're probably a small coyote kind of size on the smaller side  but they're almost extinct now. There's very few of them.

17:29
and what they've ended up breeding because they are a dog. They've interbred with just dogs that have gotten out and  gone wild.  So we have very, very few pure dingoes in the wild anymore.  But they  are  much more wary of people so they wouldn't come into towns or cities or anything like that anyway. we do have some that one of the last

17:58
who have bred dingo sections in Australia is not far from here. But yeah,  I don't know that.  I've never seen dingoes in the town  or even Canberra, our capital city is just on the edge of that national park. And we used to live there on that edge of town and we've never ever seen them in town. But yeah, I mean, they would come in and take chickens, but they're very, very shy of people.

18:27
they don't tend  to. Do dingoes look like a small golden German Shepherd? I guess I could say that. Yeah. They're golden color normally. We also have the alpine which is white, almost a silver color.  But they're very, very rare.  But yeah, generally. Yeah, I guess that I'd never thought of them as I am.

18:57
smaller German Shepherd. But yeah, they've got that sort of tail long hairy fluffy tail on the end like a German Shepherd.  And yeah, much smaller.  Well, here in Minnesota, I don't know if you even know where Minnesota is, but here in Minnesota, is  mid northern tier state of the United States.

19:23
Um, we, have coyotes and foxes down where I am, cause I'm in the southern part of the state and there are actually gray wolves up north. and they were almost hunted to extinction and now they're bringing them back and they are so beautiful, Shell. They're a predator and they will take down moose and deer, but they are so gorgeous to look at. Yeah. Yeah. I've only ever seen them in.

19:52
you know, videos and movies, but they are beautiful.  We also have timber wolves, which look like  they look like a cross between a coyote and a wolf. So, so like a medium haired coyote  or a medium haired wolf, if that makes any sense at all. And they're really pretty too. They're really gorgeous. So  we're really lucky. We have some very beautiful animals here in our state. We also  have,  um,

20:22
Cougars.  Oh, wow. Yeah. And for the longest time, the Department of Natural Resources in Minnesota swore up and down that we did not have big cats in Minnesota.  And then people started catching them on trail cams. And I was like, huh, those prints I saw down by the river definitely looked like a cougar print 20 years ago. They were cougars. So we have  the golden, short-haired cougar cats.

20:52
here. And there you don't see them very often. They do not like people at all.  They will not come near a person unless they have to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. have really interesting animals in Australia. I don't know that I call most of them beautiful, like kangaroos.  They're interesting looking, but I don't know that I call them beautiful. When they're joey, they're very cute. When they're small, they're very cute.

21:23
You know, as large animals, they're not quite so cute.  I mean, they're beautiful in their own way, I guess, especially the wallaby. The wallaby is a smaller cousin of the kangaroo.  Yeah, wallabies are adorable. Kangaroos are impressive. Yeah, that's right. Yes, exactly. I mean, we have wombats and we have lots of very placid, I mean, kangaroos aren't placid, but lots of very placid, shy animals in Australia.

21:53
as our natives. know, platypus is beautiful.  Unless you  live in Tasmania,  their platypus are not shy. They are different, like a cousin to the mainland platypus.  But a mainland platypus is  very shy and you are very lucky if you see one.  And yeah, so I don't know, we just have lots of small

22:20
koala as well also very shy animals.  Yeah we have lots of  furry, fluffy, marsupial natives that are very shy but almost none of them like very few. Tasmania has a few actually Tasmania has some more predator animals we used to live in Tasmania years ago.  They have the Tasmanian devil

22:46
which is a predator,  mostly a scavenger animal,  but they will hunt if they have to, but mostly they'll just pick up something they find that's already dead. But then they have the southern quoll, and the quoll is very predatory, especially to chickens. You have to be very careful with those when you've got chooks. Yeah, they will break into anything. They've got,  we're pretty sure they've got opposable thumbs and can pick locks.

23:15
A bit like your, what is it, bandicoots, I think, is it? Or? Raccoon? Raccoons, thank you. Yes, they're a little bit like a raccoon that will get in pretty much anywhere if you're not careful.  What is it called again? It's called a quoll. Q-U-O-L-L. Okay.  It's a caution quoll, it's called.  But  there's a few of them.

23:42
On western part of Australia, in Western Australia, we have Poles  and they are around here in the southern states, but there's not many of them and they're not anything that we would ever consider to be concerned about.  But in Tasmania, yeah, they're quite a predator. In Tasmania, it's interesting.

24:08
Well, for my listeners, if anybody  wants to see a baby platypus, go on YouTube and type in baby platypus when you have time because they are the most adorable baby critter I've ever seen. They are indeed. They're amazing. They're very beautiful. And echidna is another really cute one as well. They're actually mostly related to a platypus. The most related animal to a platypus is our echidna.

24:36
They look like a hedgehog, sort of, but they're nothing, they're not related to a hedgehog at all, they have,  yeah, but they're related to platypus. They're quite a beautiful little animal,  full of spikes, so you don't pick them up very easily.  My dad used to joke that the platypus was the animal that God put together with the leftovers of everybody else. We always say God's clearly got a sense of humor. Look at the platypus.

25:05
Uh-huh, exactly. Yes.  So  I don't want to get too far  much further afield here, but do you have poisonous snakes and poisonous spiders?  Oh, yes. Yes, we have plenty of them. Yes. We have,  I think we have seven of the top 10 world's most dangerous spiders in the world.

25:32
But  we don't have bears or hookahs  or... So yeah, and I think it's very similar for our spiders as well. Yeah. So we have some of the world's  most dangerous deadly spiders  as well.  So you have some of the world's most deadliest snakes and spiders.  Uh-huh.  Yeah. Wow.

25:59
There's a reason I live where the air hurts my face six months out of the year because we don't have poisonous snakes or poisonous spiders where I live. No, that's true. They would not survive.  And winter's a lot nicer because even our winter is cold enough that they hibernate. So we don't see them generally speaking in the winter. Okay. So that leads me into my next thing.

26:24
I said at the beginning of the episode that you are in the middle of autumn and we're in the middle of spring. So  when I talked to Kate, Kate is the one that suggested that you and I chat.  She was telling me about this because when I talked to her, she was rolling into summer and we were rolling into winter here. And she was saying that she tries growing things in the winter, but it doesn't always work. So do you try to grow anything in the winter time? Yeah.

26:54
Our climate's a little bit different to Kate's. So she's down near Melbourne and we're nearer Sydney or actually halfway between Melbourne and Sydney almost, but a bit nearer to Sydney. And we are up in the mountains. So we've got altitude. So summer here gets quite hot. So it gets to a hundred here most, like not most days, but you know, if it hits a hundred, we're like,

27:23
It's a hot one today. know, so it gets quite hot here. So there's lot, actually a lot of vegetables we can't grow here in the summer because it's too hot. So any of the lettuces and spinaches, any of that sort of category, we generally can't grow here in the winter, I mean in the summer.

27:48
So we actually would, I would normally plant those. They would be out, well, I've got some in little baskets on my background on my back deck.  And we will eat those right through the winter.  Because while we do get frosts, we don't get hard frosts. And so  we're not high enough for the soil to freeze,  but we're high enough that we do get some frosts regularly. Like most mornings we'll get a light frost.

28:18
Okay. In America, in the frost country, it's called a light frost. Here in Australia, we call it a good frost.  But it's not a hard frost, not a freeze. So it's only in the very, very highest parts of Australia that we actually get a frozen soil. And even then, it's only maybe at the most it would be like.

28:46
Maybe in the very, highest country where we've got snow for most of the year, it would be maybe a quarter, maybe. Most of our, know, where we live and stuff, certainly a couple inches deep, if it freezes. So yeah, so we actually do grow in the winter. So I will grow all the, I will often grow all the little wet.

29:12
winter things and stuff like that. And I might just put a cover over them to stop them getting frostbitten. But they certainly  keep growing and producing for us. Once they've got to be mature, so they need to be mature about now,  sort of by  certainly  late April. We'll be expecting a frost in the next couple of weeks.  And so they have to be at a mature stage by then. But then if

29:41
If they're mature, then we can grow them through the winter if we just protect them from the overnight frost with a bit of plastic or whatever, a bit of sea that extends or something. That is so awesome, Shell, because we can grow cold weather crops in our hard-sided greenhouse, but we can't grow that stuff outside. Not in the wintertime. no, you wouldn't find them, would you? They're too much to go on the ground.

30:10
Um the last couple of years there's been hardly any snow where we live we have not even gotten a foot of snow this winter Wow Yeah, the climate is a little is a little screwed up right now  It ebbs and flows doesn't it?  You know I remember even just in my lifetime I've seen it ebbing and flowing  But yeah, okay, well there you go. Not even a foot  Yeah this winter

30:40
this winter and last winter. So two winters in a row now, we have had hardly any snow, but  we have definitely had very cold  stretches of weather in the winter. So it's still,  it's still cold and windy. It's just not snowing. And I guess, I guess that's good. don't know. Okay. So  it's really interesting to me when I talk to people in other countries that are so far away because

31:09
You know how it is, you grow up in one area  and  you think that the whole world is like where you live. And  it's so hard for my brain to flip to the fact that it's morning where you are and it's also autumn and we're talking to each other right now. know technology, right? It's amazing. I love it. I think it's great. I have  a bittersweet relationship with technology. I love it and hate it all at once.

31:39
I love it when it works. I hate it when it doesn't. Exactly. Yes.  But yeah, it's pretty amazing, isn't it? I know I'm  on an online Bible study once a week and there's some women in that, or most of the women in that are from right across the states. And so we have it again, we have it in the morning and they have it in the evening.  And it's just so funny because

32:07
I mean here in Australia, most of us are aware that we're the opposite to everyone else in the world  because there's so few of us down this area, us in New Zealand and a few little islands and that's basically  it. But  it's really interesting when we talk to people from America, but also from Europe as well and they're just like, what? I can't believe it.

32:35
That's the opposite. That's weird. can't. Yeah, like you. And my brain's not computing.  It's like time travel. It's like I'm talking to the future. It's amazing. Yes, because it's Thursday here.  it's still Wednesday for you. Yeah, I've still got five and a half hours before I get to Thursday.  Yeah.  And a good sleep between them.

33:02
I hope so. That would be lovely. Yeah. was funny when I got up this morning and found your message from last night to say, you still good for the morning? And I was like, yeah, well, I've had a whole night's sleep since you messaged me.  Oh, I knew. I knew you were probably asleep when I sent it, but just wanted to make sure because I wanted to talk with you because this is actually really exciting for me when I get to talk to people in other countries.

33:32
Yeah, no, well, it's exciting for me too. love it. It's really interesting.  Yeah, I talked to a lady in Canada  a  couple of weeks ago and she raises mini  horses.  And it was so fun talking to her because Canada is not a lot different than America. I mean, it is, but it isn't. And  she lives  like maybe, I don't know.

34:01
24 hours away from me.  it was just like talking to my buddy across the street on the phone, you know? She was great.  So  anyway, I try to keep these to half an hour and I,  didn't really talk a whole lot about homesteading, but we talked about some of the stuff that might hurt homesteading. So I think we covered the  draft here. So.

34:29
Thank  I mean, we could do this again another time if you wanted to. We could actually talk about homesteading more. Yeah, that would be great. But I also am always so curious about the differences between here and where the people I'm talking to are that this always happens. So yeah, you should come back and have a list of things that you're doing that are homesteading.  appreciate you taking the time to talk with Michelle. Thank you.  My pleasure. you for listening.

34:58
inviting me on it's been lovely and when I my podcast I I will invite you back to mine.  I think that would be amazing I love that because I don't get interviewed I do the interviewing so that would be fun. Lovely yeah well it's  it's in progress at the moment but you know okay planning stage.  Awesome let me know when you have it ready to go I will come back and visit.

35:27
Indeed we will. Thank you so much Mary, it's been a real blessing to talk to you today. It has been a pleasure, Michelle. Thank you so much.