The Canny Couple

Today I'm talking with Aaron and Julia at The Canny Couple.
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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. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. 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 Aaron and Julia at The Candy Couple. Good afternoon, guys. Hello. Thanks for having us. Yeah.

00:26
So tell me about what you do because from your Facebook page and your website, it looks like you're very much content creators. So tell me what about what you do. Yeah, we, we do content creation. We do podcasting. Um, it's really all comes to how we live a homesteading, frugal lifestyle. Yeah. And it all we've considered all underneath the candy couple. Like we have different.

00:55
side hustles things we do on the side, but in our mind, everything falls underneath the candy. It does. So the candy couple is the umbrella that covers everything you do. Okay, cool. We do a little bit of everything. Okay, so do you have a homestead or how does it work? Yes. Yeah, so we do. We have a small, we're a small homestead family. We have 25 acres.

01:23
Most of it is wood and mountainous areas. So we, we, we, we considered a small homestead because we don't have much real usable land unless we were to clear some of the forest out, which we don't have any plans of doing. Right. So, but we do have a small homestead. We do a lot of gardening, animals, poultry, mostly is what we focus on, on our homestead. And

01:52
Where it's really working every single day to be more self-reliant, self-sufficient. We do have a pretty extensive orchard. I guess you would call it. Most people call it an orchard that we are cultivating and working through. Okay. Tell me again where you guys are. So we are in rural Southwest Virginia. We're closer to the Tennessee line than anywhere else. So, um, like most of our trips.

02:20
involves going into Tennessee. And I know there's a lot of homesteaders in Tennessee areas. So we're always at least there usually at least every other week. Yeah, I was going to say you sounded more Tennessee than West Virginia. So it's mountain. It's a mountain accent. It's what somebody told me once and it made sense. It's just one of those, but it's not West Virginia where we live in Virginia, not West Virginia. We're just like in the south.

02:49
western part of Virginia. Oh, okay. Sorry, I misheard you. That's okay. Yeah, your accent is beautiful. There are some southern accents and I'm like, I can't understand it. And you guys is just gorgeous. Oh, thank you. I'm big on accents. Part of the reason I love doing the podcast is I get to hear a different accent almost every day. It makes me so happy. That is true. It is. Yeah. So do you guys...

03:18
I asked this of everybody homesteads don't be offended. Do you guys try to make what you do on the homestead support the homestead financially? Are you just more about being self-sufficient? So our goal is to have the homestead help support us financially. Um, with our tree crops, because that's kind of where our big focus was at the beginning of our journey was to work on our perennial systems. We look at everything through the lens of we are going to get older.

03:48
And everything takes a lot of really good systems take a long time to put into place. And we have experience on our property of these six apple trees and they produce a great crop for us. We eat them, we use them, we can them. And we wanted to have a lot more of that, but we're also hoping to eventually sell a lot of that produce and things like that. But that's a ways down the road. If I had it to do over again, I would probably put in more.

04:18
um, berry crops because it has a faster turnaround. Mm-hmm. Yep. And that could also still happen. We do have some property we could cultivate. Um, but it's just, that is like a five year plan, not a right now plan. Okay. You said apple trees. How, how did the apples do in the South? Because I'm up North in Minnesota. I'm a Yankee and, uh, our apple trees go dormant about October.

04:46
And they're asleep until at least April. So how does that work in Virginia? I'm sorry. That's the same one. So ours, usually we have, so we got, it's an old red delicious, old yellow delicious that we had. Um, these trees have been here almost, I guess, 40 years now. So they're older trees, that's for sure. And, um, they usually bloom in late April, first of May. And then we get our.

05:15
apples from them at the usually first of August, middle of August. And through September. Yeah. I'll have Erin go and get me boxes and I'll can them up in the in the evenings. Okay, that's what we would call an early apple here in Minnesota. And we don't have very many early apples in Minnesota. Most of our apples are harvested.

05:41
toward the end of September through first of November. Well, I guess you would have to worry about your blooms getting, getting a bit. Crossed. Yeah. Yep, or in our case, we have high winds and so we lost almost every single blossom this spring. I think we have a total of 12 apples on 20 trees out there. Oh, God. Oh, wow. Oh, that's awful.

06:10
Yeah, luckily we don't rely on the apples to support the homestead. So it's okay. But it was very sad when we thought we were in the clear and then we had a really nasty thunderstorm come through and really high winds. And I was like, there goes the blooms. We're done with apples for the year. Oh, wow. Yeah. It's growing produce is such a crap shoot. It's so hard. It is. That's the struggle we've had this year with our garden, the heat. We.

06:40
Haven't like we've had 90 degree days and we have we we do get hot here. We can get really, really warm, but never in June. Like net we're never in, you know, a hundred degrees almost in June. Um, it's very, very rare for us. So it's, it's killed our garden. I mean, yeah, it's, we can tell it's going to hurt for this year's, what we put up, um, what we have from winter squash perspective, especially.

07:10
Cause that's one of our big, that's something I rely on very heavily. Um, because we eat a lot of winter squash. We, uh, I thought put away a lot of winter squash, um, for pumpkin bread, pumpkin pies, things like that. Cause it's one of our favorite things. See it. It's, uh, we can definitely see that we don't have near as many as we have last year from this heat. Yep. We love winter squash here too. And, uh, we had exactly the opposite of what you had.

07:39
We had tons and tons and tons of rain this spring. And so a lot of our stuff that we got planted, stalled out, it didn't die, but stalled out. And it's just now starting to really grow. So I don't know how we're gonna do on winter squashes this year either. And we're like you, we really like winter squash here. And I really like pumpkin pie, partly because I feel like it's probably one of the healthiest pies you can eat. Yes. And so,

08:10
In the summertime, one of our local grocery stores will occasionally have pumpkin pies in July. And if my husband sees one, he's like, do you want a pumpkin pie in July that you don't have to make? And I'm like, yes, please, please, pumpkin pie sounds wonderful. So I feel your pain, believe me. It's been, it has not been a great growing season for anybody in the United States this year because it's either been so hot, so dry, or so wet, depending on where everybody is.

08:40
It's been really hard to navigate it. It's been really hard to kind of manage, but with, I mean, it just seems like it's a cost to change every year, the year before we had a steady rain, the weather was perfect, we had a very mild start to our summer and we had God, I don't know how many hundreds of pounds of squash we ended up putting up, um, you know, and that was zucchini and everything, but this year it's been completely different.

09:10
And so for us, we really don't want to rely on the garden for income. That's not our income producer. I don't want to rely on the garden for income. Aaron would try it. That's not me. He's the, uh, he's the brains behind our enterprise. I'm sure that some of your brain gets used to, but I understand what you're saying. Um, yeah, I don't, I don't ever want to rely on our farm to market garden.

09:38
to be the income for the household because that's a really scary bet to make here. So we don't do that. My husband has what we call the jobby job, the job that he goes to to make money so that we eat. And if the garden produces really, really well, then we make a little bit of a supplemental income. If the garden does not do well, we don't starve to death. So that's our hedging, our bet plan.

10:07
We don't take anything to market, but, um, Aaron, he does work outside of the home and I focus on the house and raising the little one in the homestead. Do you guys have chickens? Do you say chickens? Yes, we do. Do you have lots of chickens or just a couple? So we, we, we hope so. We do it a little bit differently compared to what, like you see a lot of on social media, we're.

10:36
proponents on focusing on your family needs and you know, looking at it that way, but also with frugality of mind. For our family needs, we don't need a hundred chickens. We don't, but we wouldn't need all those eggs. We could sell them, but there's a lot of people in our area who sell eggs. A lot of people. I mean, this is just what you do out here. If you, it's nothing to see people selling eggs.

11:03
So it would be a very hard competitive market to get into in our area. So for us, our laying flock is just really enough to get us, you know, get our egg needs taken care of. Now we do plan on doing meat birds and we will be focusing on our yearly needs on meat birds. So we really do focus on looking at it with, you know, a cost analysis sort of frugal mindset

11:33
you know, come into our home set to make sure we're making the most efficient use of our time, our resources and everything else. But we do have like a smaller laying block. We wouldn't have more than 10 chickens at a laying block at a time. That's good for our family size. Yep, that's we've got nine or ten chickens and we did have like 25 last year and 25 chickens was way too many chickens because we're in the same boat that you're in.

12:00
A lot of people either have backyard blocks, so they have their own chickens, their own eggs, or there's a lady at the farmer's market that we sell at. She has many, many chickens and she's been selling eggs at the farmer's market for years. So there's no market for us to sell our eggs. So now that we're down to nine or 10, it's perfect for what we need. We're going to stick with nine or 10. Nine or 10 is a good number.

12:25
That's what we thought too. We, we looked at that cause you know, I told Erin, I said the most all over one is 20 like at any given time, but I think 20 would still be too much for us because there's just three of us. Um, with, um, Erin, myself and the little one, we don't, we don't need that many eggs, Erin could do without the eggs. It's me, the little one who eat more of them and more me than anybody else. So, so when did you guys get into doing this, this homesteading thing?

12:55
Eight years ago. Yeah. I guess it was eight years ago. So we originally didn't have any intention of doing homesteading. Had no, I did not want to garden. I didn't want to do any of this. And I was like, okay, we have these old established, uh, apple trees. I was like, we're going to get to a point where these are not producing anymore. Let's talk about some more trees, some more berries, cause we had some.

13:25
established blueberries as well that had done good for many years. And we had some fresher ones that I had just planted on the side. And we were like, okay, let's buy some trees. Let's buy some berries. And it turned into... Era went a little crazy. I put in hundreds of trees and berries and that at the time...

13:52
We weren't familiar with the permaculture aspect and we sort of ruined a few of our zones, but thankfully we had a couple areas that didn't actually turn out or didn't take off in those areas, thankfully. And so now we can transition those over to other infrastructure needs. Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot of trial and error when you get into this because you're like, hey, there's dirt. Let's put a dirt. Let's put a plant in the dirt and see what happens. But.

14:19
There's a little more to it. And sometimes that, that chaos thing that people end up doing works, but sometimes it's better to maybe, maybe make a couple of mistakes and be like, Oh, research is good. We should probably look things up. We've had that happen here. We like the slow build. Um, the slow build has actually led us to really look at our property.

14:44
I'm going to use our front yard and example. It's a great example to use here. It's really allowed us to look at our property and determine future needs. So right now we have a really big, big front yard, a good size one, and it's on a hill and it doesn't serve a purpose for us. And we really need to make this more usable. So we're actually planning on terracing this out and making it into a food for us.

15:08
that will produce for us, but also something that we don't have to manage when we get older. So we're not going to have to mow this area or what little bit of maintenance going to be much, much less compared to what it actually is right now. So we've really learned the slow build and actually looking through thinking, really, really thinking about what we want to do with the spot. Yep. We, we put in apple trees.

15:37
when we first moved in and then the following year we put in more because when my husband and I were younger when we talked about our eventual place that we would live, which we didn't think we had a hope in hell getting, we wanted apple trees just because we love apple trees. And we've gotten maybe 30, 40 apples since we moved in four years ago. And it's because of the winds and the rain and the thunderstorms every spring. So...

16:03
We have to talk about putting in more apple trees so that they are actually protecting each other because we have two, we have one row that goes north south and one row that goes east west on different sides of the property. And neither one of them are doing great because they're not protected from the wind. So we have to research this and figure out how to make this work better because we don't want to have to take the trees out. We also have, we planted peach trees and cherry trees, I think last year.

16:33
And we actually have peaches growing that are about the size of a baseball right now. Oh, that's awesome. In Minnesota, we have peaches growing and they're obviously a winter hardy tree that we purposely decided to get so that we would have peaches. But I wasn't sure that that would work. And we have peaches and they're not all bug eaten. So I guess the peaches are probably going to do okay. And we also got some honey berry plants. I don't know if you guys know what honey berries are.

17:02
We've got honey berries as well. Yeah. We have two plants. We just, we just received those in the mail a month ago and they got put in right away and they're doing great. So I don't know if it takes a year or two for those to start producing. It will. And they are spreaders. So they're going to bush out like really kind of a low bush. It's not quite as tall as a blueberry. They're more low kind of almost shrubby looking.

17:28
Um, and when you start to get berries, they are hard to see. Cause they come up underneath the leaves. And they're like velvety feeling. Um, but we do have several, they like honeysuckles. If you have a place where honeysuckle grows, um, I don't know if you all have anything like that in Michigan, but honey, Minnesota, sorry. Um, but we do, we honeysuckles like should be the state flair.

17:55
in this area, almost the state, the state mines, the state weed. And it's one of those things that it will, it will compete with the honeysuckle and it loves that kind of an area. Okay. Well, yeah, honeysuckle grows wild in Minnesota, but where we put the, the honey berry plants, there isn't any. So we, we purposely put it there to try to out compete with the honeysuckle. It has helped. It has helped a lot. Not completely.

18:24
Um, we still have to maintain the honey cycle, but it is not nearly as rampant as it was before. And I will say these plants, since we put them in, I mean, we have one, it's probably six feet wide, at least. I would say so. And we've had them four years now, I guess. I'd say five. Five. Okay. He knows better about it than I do. Um, he's the one who manages what we put, where we put it and, and why we set it up that way. Well, I think that's great.

18:53
I think that's just fine. So the honey berry plants, will they fruit? The ones we put in this year, will they fruit next year? They just won't fruit a lot or do we have to wait a couple years? I would treat it like a blueberry bush where you give it like the three years. They're not like an instant. They're not quite like a blueberry, but treat them like a blueberry. They work very similarly. Yeah. They're not as...

19:21
They don't have this sweetness as a, as I guess you could say a blueberry does. It's got a little bit more bitterness to them. Okay. And they don't need the, as the acidic dirt that we were, isn't it right? Right. Okay, good. Cause I was going to say if they do, we're screwed. Cause we don't have any acidic soil here. No, they don't. They do pretty decent. I mean, because

19:47
Where we put them, they just sort of took over the area. I mean, we actually probably need to prune ours back some because it's getting... Or start off new... Or propagate. ..applications off of it. Okay. So you can, can you do that? Can you propagate them? Do you do it from cuttings or from the roots or how do you do it? Well, we'll try it. I mean, honeyberries are kind of a newer species. But we, for us, but for me, I have found propagation. I could watch videos on it and...

20:17
You know, read books, but it kind of in learned the basics, but for me, it's all trial and error. So we can get through everything. It's, it's just sort of learning what works best for us. Yeah. And I ask people who start talking to me about stuff, what they know, and then I take it and steal it and use it. It's easier and less time consuming and way more fun, way more fun to talk to you guys and learn, I swear. I have such a ball talking with you and everybody else. Um,

20:45
Okay, so my whole point about this, and I said honey berries and you have experience and we got onto honey berries. We put in a whole bunch of different fruit plants because fruit plants tend to be perennial. We don't have to do a whole lot of crazy maintenance with them and we don't have to put them in every spring like we do with say green beans or basil plants or tomatoes. And like you said, you're planning for the fact that you're going to eventually get older.

21:12
We are eventually getting older faster than you. My husband is 55, I'm 54. And he is the one who gardens, he loves it. And he beats himself up gardening. He works really hard and he comes in, he's like, my back's sore, or I twisted my arm funny, or whatever it is. Because once you hit 40, you can turn over wrong in your sleep and hurt yourself. So we're there, we're at that point where it's like, okay, what's the best use of our time?

21:41
that doesn't beat us up so bad doing it. And perennial plants are amazing because you expend the energy to put them in the first time. And then you just kind of take care of them, but you don't have to do as much hard work as the annual plants. Absolutely. That's why what was our big focus when we first started moving towards this. We wanted to get as many perennials, especially things like apricots and plum cocks and things like that into the ground as possible.

22:11
Um, now we didn't completely do it the right way. Like we should have, we tried a lot of different exotic things that we might not have liked, um, and we really should have focused on things that we know grow well for us, and that was probably one of the big, big things I wish we would have changed, like focusing on gooseberries and they grow really well for us. We can get a lot of gooseberries. We would have focused on those as our perennials on their front end. I feel like we would have had.

22:40
more success and we would be a lot further along now. Um, but we, even our garden, we're looking at it like, okay, in a couple of years, we might have to change our main garden area to be more friendly from when we get older so we can do it slowly instead of having a large upfront costs because we are going to get, we are going to get older, it's going to be hard to bend over and you know, get things off of the ground and it's just things we have to think about. Yep.

23:08
Everybody does because you're not 20 years old forever and and I'm gonna say this even at 20 I can remember helping my mom weed her garden when I was 12 and We would sit out there from 7 in the morning until noon weeding rows of plants in the garden And I would feel it the next day and I was a teenager, you know, it's hard

23:32
work and it stretches your muscles in ways that they're not always stretched and your body will tell you to cut that out, stop doing that. So it's not just age, it's just work. Work makes you hurt and it also makes you tired and it makes you sleep really well.

23:51
So I agree with that. Yeah. So, um, so tell me about the whole social media content thing, because you guys have a lot going on with videos. How'd you get into that?

24:08
So I don't, I don't know if I actually remember how we got into that. So it was just one of those fervent moment things. I was like, Hey, let's do this. She's like, okay. But it's, it's what it was really done is we've, we started out mostly with the podcast first. And then from that we were like, okay, we can throw in videos.

24:37
short YouTube, stuff like that at the same time. So it's something that is, I mean, it's almost a full time job itself, just coming up with content and producing it on a weekly basis, as you know. Um, it, it can be where you, we plan ahead a lot for stuff, you know, we're like, okay, we constantly come up with ideas and like, okay, we're going to do this in a few months or we're going to do this this week.

25:05
We always have like a content creation calendar sort of going to think, okay, how about this this week? How about this another week, you know, or if something comes up in the news or something comes up, you know, about, oh, we need to get more tomato production because everybody else is having a bad year of tomato production. We'll come up with ideas around that, for example. So do you guys just use your cell phones to do video or do you have a video camera or how do you do it? Oh.

25:36
We have all. OK. So I will say most of our content is produced through a phone for video-wise. We actually bought a specific phone just for video content creation. We do have GoPros. And I did photography on the side before, so I have cameras that.

26:03
we can set up and do different things with as well. So this is sort of my creativity from photography moving over to content creation. Yeah, the reason I ask is because it's a lot of work to produce videos. We tried last year or the year before, I can't remember, to do some stuff with our canning, you know, to video some of our canning and our soap making.

26:32
processes and we bought the ring light and we bought the things to hold the cell phones they could be angled correctly and all that stuff. And after the first couple of times we tried doing videos I was like this is such a pain in the ass. I hate it. And my husband looked at me and you could just see the relief on him. He was like I don't want to do videos. I was like I don't either. I said this is ridiculous. We are, we're working.

27:01
with lye and water to make soap while we're trying to video stuff. This seems like a really dangerous plan here. And so we decided almost at the same moment that we really didn't wanna do videos of our homesteading endeavors because it's a time suck and it's a lot of work and half the time you have to redo it because it didn't work the right way the first time because we were new at it. So I'm really impressed that you guys do this because we...

27:29
Within a month we were like, nope. And now we have a ring light that we never use and we have the little holder thingies for the phones that we never use. But I guess it was worth finding out that that wasn't what we wanted to do, I guess.

27:45
It's a lot of work. Um, I have more issues with trial and error with it. It's not my favorite thing, but I'm probably in front of the camera more than Erin is just because of the nature of like what we're talking about or what we're doing, um, what we're trying to share with others, uh, whatever value we think we could bring, but.

28:07
Um, it is a lot of work. It is just learning the process for it. And I will say like the biggest issue I had when we first started doing, especially like if I was cooking, um, it was the prep work because I don't want to bore people to death. Yeah. That's like my thing. Like I don't want to bore you with you watching me cut all this stuff up. And it's a lot of work for Aaron to fast forward and find something to put.

28:35
Inside of those minutes that he's fast forwarding through and we have to add voiceovers and all this other stuff, that's a lot of extra work. So doing the prep work, um, off camera was probably one of the easiest things I did and it will cut out a lot of extra, just extra stuff because then you have to fill the space with talking and all of this other stuff, it was, it, you just kind of had to find the rhythm that works. Yeah. For us, it was just painful.

29:05
And the worst part of it is, is that the three of us who live here, my husband, myself, and our 22 year old son, we all tend to swear like pirates when there's no one around. And so invariably one of us would swear in chatting with each other about what we're doing while we're videoing. And I'm like, ah, we got to edit that. Oh no. It just, it was such a cluster clock, C L U C K that we just decided it. It was not our forte.

29:35
And it actually put me off doing anything with content creation for a good year and a half because I was like I suck at this. This is terrible. And then I realized that podcasting didn't require a video and it's fairly easy to edit. And I was like I can do podcasting instead of video and it'll all be good and has been wonderful.

29:58
I was the one who pushed for podcasting to get us started. I thought it would be easier because he, he was wanting to jump straight into videos and all of this other stuff. And I think this was right when we were starting our house remodels, we were doing all this other stuff and it was like, this is not the best time to jump into videos, we are packing, we're packing up the entire upstairs, we're doing all this other work, we have a newborn. We've got a different option right now, just for me to function. Yeah.

30:28
Yeah, exactly. And I needed some kind of creative outlet to feel like I was doing something good. And so I was like, podcasting is a great idea. I'm gonna try that. If I suck at it, it's not gonna cost me any money. It's gonna cost me very little time to discover that it sucks and I don't wanna do it. And surprise, surprise, I found it doesn't suck and I really do like it and I really do enjoy it. So I think that we all have things that we're good at.

30:56
and that we're talented in. And if you can figure out how to make that work for you, then you're off and running. And you guys clearly are good at doing the videos. I've watched a couple and they're very entertaining. I think it's great. Oh, well, thank you. You're welcome. And I don't wanna get too into all the techie stuff with this because really you are using that medium to promote and talk about what you do being frugal and living a homesteading lifestyle. So.

31:26
You fit my topic from my podcast, but I don't want to bore people with the detail-y stuff that I know about and you know about, but probably nobody else wants to know about. Yeah. So, um, so what's the plan? Is there a long-term plan? Is there a five-year plan for where you guys go from here? Yeah. So we had that sudden change last year. Um, so we weren't debt free last year. We.

31:55
changed last year. We decided to do a really hard push and we paid off almost six figures worth the debt in like six months. And this was when Erin and I were both working. And now that we are debt-free, I'm home. And the goal is for us to set up our side businesses to really start to function and work and help bring in some extra income and to just really focus on building up the homestead.

32:25
debt free the way we want it. Yeah. Not going back into it again. Not going back to again, build up the side hustles, um, to where they function and work for us every day. Um, and bring in some supplemental income and hopefully we can, you know, get Aaron to where he doesn't have to work as hard as he works now. That's a fantastic plan. And I wish you all the luck in the world with it because it is really hard.

32:55
It is really hard to run a homestead, try to raise kids, and have an outside the home job. My husband has been doing an outside the home job since we got together many, many years ago. And, like, he has always had a job. If he didn't have a job, I don't think he'd know what to do with himself. But if he could have the homestead be the job, I think that he would really, really love that. There's only so many hours in the day.

33:23
and there's only so much energy in one body, and it gets to be exhausting with trying to do everything all the time. And thank God for good husbands, because he works so hard, and when he gets home, I try to have dinner ready, and something that he is gonna enjoy eating, I don't always succeed, but I try. And I try really hard to make sure that he has the things that he needs that makes his life easier.

33:51
so that he doesn't hate his life with getting up in the morning and going to work. And men have gotten a bad rap. And there's a lot of men out there who might deserve that, but there's a lot of good men in the world who are fantastic providers, fantastic husbands, fantastic fathers. And I don't feel like you guys get the accolades you should get, if that makes any sense with what I just said. Yes, definitely. And I will say though.

34:21
Like getting Julia home here, for example, was one of our things that we knew we had to do to function day to day. It was either the homestead had to go or my job had to go. We couldn't, I couldn't do both. I couldn't do both. I couldn't manage both, but I will say what you were just saying that resonates with me and Aaron and I have been talking about this in the last few weeks because he struggles right now with feeling like he's not doing enough on the homestead.

34:51
It's been something he's been struggling with because I've been trying to help pull off as much as I can so he doesn't have to deal with it because he does work hard. He works extremely hard for us and it gives me the privilege to take care of our little one every day. Yep. I raised four and I was a stay-at-home mom and I know exactly how hard you work too, Julia. I know. I asked my dad a long time ago how he and my mom managed to stay together for so long.

35:20
And he said that the answer was pretty simple, but it wasn't necessarily how other people do it. And I said, okay. He said, every day we try to give 100% each. He said, in some days I can only give 50%, so your mom gives 150%. And some days she can only give 50%, so I give 150% that day. He said, we try to balance it so that everybody hits, the total is 100%. And I thought that was beautiful.

35:48
I thought it was a great way to work through your life with your spouse. And it's hard work. They've been married for over 50 years. Only to each other, no other spouses ever, no other children with anybody ever. Like they are goals when it comes to a long lasting marriage. So I guess what I'm trying to get at is if you're gonna be partnered with somebody, I

36:18
think, me, I think that you need to be on top of yourself and be okay in yourself and you have to want to make the partner's life better and hopefully the partner wants to make your life better as well. Absolutely. I don't want to talk, I don't want to give marriage advice or anything but I just, I keep hearing from people about how hard this homesteading thing is when it comes to relationships.

36:48
And I'm listening and it is hard. It's hard because some days one of you has a horrible day. And all you wanna do is kick a door or slam a cabinet. And you might do that. It wouldn't surprise me. I've slammed a couple of cabinet doors in my life. And it's not the other person's fault that you had a bad day. So as the person having the bad day,

37:17
If I'm having a bad day, I have to realize that it's not my husband's fault and try not to take it out on him. And what I expect out of him is some compassion for the fact that I had a bad day and I try to do the same for him. And so it's all a balance. Everything is a balance with this whole thing and you got to find it because if you don't find it, you're going to fall over. I agree completely. For us, it's more we know we have learned our strengths on our homestead.

37:46
We have learned who does what the best and if Aaron needs me to pick up for him and focus on something I will if I need Aaron to pick up for me. You know he might not do it the way I do it that's fine but he'll get the job done the way he you know what he'll get it done. And but for the most part we've sort of learned and that's helped we've we've got so we're very weird really don't argue.

38:14
We don't argue, we don't fight, we might get a little sleepy at each other, but we really try to manage that to the best of our ability. And it's more of a just kind of, you know, like you said, balance and just understanding that the other person is human and working through the difficulties together, talking through the difficulties together. Yep. My husband and I don't really argue. We may have words now and then.

38:42
And the one rule I learned in the first six months of living with him is that he does not appreciate being called names. And I understand that. That's not a good way to run a marriage or a relationship by calling people names. But he had said or done something and I was livid and I said something that I shouldn't have said and it involved calling him a name. He didn't talk to me for three days straight.

39:09
So the rule in our marriage is that no one calls the other one a name. We can say you are acting like you are angry about, but we can't say you're acting like a jackass. We just, we can't call names. We can't do that. It's not acceptable. So that's the one rule in our marriage that has probably made our marriage last. It's a good rule to have. It's a good, I mean, everybody kind of has to find what works for them. It's kind of like homesteading.

39:38
There's no like blueprint that works for every family, everyone. And I feel like that's part of the problem today, especially with social media, is something that we are constantly feeling like we're having to push up against and it's, you know, we don't look like the homesitters you're going to see on Instagram because that doesn't work for our family and it's.

40:02
probably not gonna work for your family either. So you need to find what is actually best for you and your family, not what Instagram is telling you is best for you and your family. Well, I think the best thing about Instagram and Facebook and everything is that if you're, if you're, what's the word I want? Of course I can't find it. It was right there, now it's gone. If you are a reasonable human being that doesn't buy everything you're sold,

40:32
you're probably going to figure out that a lot of it is smoke and mirrors and that it's very pretty. It's a very pretty life. The thing is life is not pretty. Life is beautiful and life is dirty. Beautiful and dirty and they can be, it can be the same in the same moment. And so if you are a reasonable human being who realizes that you can't judge a book by its cover and not everything is true,

41:01
Then glean what you need to glean from what you're taking in, and then use it to your advantage. And don't worry about the fact that this gorgeous woman is dressed in this beautiful dress and supposedly gardening in mud and still looks like an angel. Don't apply that, that's staged. And if it isn't, good on her, because I don't know how she does it. That's what I said, the woman wearing all white mucking stables from her goat.

41:28
This was one that I saw. I was like, you've got to be kidding me. But no, it's like, it's great for gathering ideas. And that's what I use social media for. I look for things that are going to help make us more functional ideas to better our home set. But for the most, I mean, it's just, it's just, we live in a very different world. Yes. Yes, we do. And you do. And everybody does. Everybody's experience is completely different from everybody else's.

41:58
And the term I was thinking of was critical thinker. If you're a critical thinker. I, okay, I made some gift baskets a couple of years ago for our realtor lady, because she wanted to buy some of our stuff that we make to give to her clients as closing gifts. And the baskets were beautiful. Like I put these together. I did the weird crinkly paper in the bottom, put our stuff in them,

42:27
the cellophane around them, put ribbons on them. They were gorgeous when they were done. I took photos on my island and it looked really professional. If you could have seen my kitchen an hour before they were done, you would have been like, she has no idea what she's doing. Because everything was everywhere. So I say that because an hour before I took the photos, it looked like a bomb went off on that island.

42:52
And then I got the baskets together, cleaned the island off, wiped it down so it was pretty, put the basket on the thing with the vase of flowers behind it, and it looked like sheer perfection. So it is all manufacturing to make the thing that you're doing look attractive. Not everything is attractive. The getting to the attractive part is not attractive all the time. Absolutely. You guys know this, you do videos. It's not easy.

43:21
tried to for for me, as long as my kitchen is clean, that's like my biggest rule when I do videos inside. Um, and just to focus on, you know, just being as real as possible. Um, it might not get us a lot of views sometimes, but we really just try to focus on that cause I'll tell you, I'm like the least aesthetic person.

43:45
I'm the one who has nothing on the walls, who has nothing out because it's more for me to clean later. So it's just one of those things that I tend to focus on personally. But I completely understand you're looking for that perfect picture. To get that perfect picture, you're going to pull out a thousand different things and have a thousand different dishes to have to wash afterwards. Yeah, it's a lot. It is a lot of work.

44:13
I think that people who have never done it think that it's like, oh, they just had this really pretty dish and they put this really pretty piece of cake on it, took this really pretty picture. No, that is not how that went down, folks. A lot of time and thought went into that pretty picture, that pretty piece of cake. Plus what you're doing, you're sharing things that people can learn from. So it's not really necessarily, I mean, clearly you want to look presentable and you want things around you to look presentable.

44:43
The meat and potatoes of your videos is sharing information, yes? Yes, yeah. Yeah. We like to share like how, you know, we keep our grocery bill cost down, how we, you know, keep our frugality lifestyle as it is and how we, you know, look at our homes with a frugal mindset now compared to what we did eight years ago or even three years ago. So that's kind of what we share. We really...

45:10
have tried to merge our homesteading and frugality. Wouldn't you say, Eric? Yeah, and it's actually helped us more overall because we think about it more. We do. We are much more mindful and very thoughtful on how we spend money and how we approach our homestead. I mean, really, that frugality mindset has really taken over for us in all aspects.

45:39
Yep, that's what we, well, we still do it. We don't do it to the same extent that we did before when we had four kids at home on one income. But when my kids were little, there was a lot of hacks that we did that were frugal. And it's part of the reason we ended up where we are, because I used to make things from scratch all the time for the kids because it was too expensive to buy things new for them. And you have one little one. I had four little ones.

46:10
And kids cost money. It, there's no way around it. They cost money. It's all part of the game. So I understand the whole frugal thing. We, we still are frugal. I mean, we still can tomato sauce because we love doing it and it saves us money from the store in the wintertime. And it tastes better. Oh my God. Does it taste better? Yes. And we, we buy fruit from.

46:37
the fruit truck dot com place, because we don't have any fruit we can harvest yet, because we've only been here four years in August. And we can jam and jelly, because I'm not gonna buy jelly at the store. Why would I buy jelly at the store? That's craziness. So we do some of the same kinds of things. And we wear our clothes until they are so holy, you can't wear them in public anymore, because why would you throw out jeans that are not destroyed yet?

47:06
Absolutely. Or tournament rags. Yeah. I mean, there are so many things that I think about that I see people do. And I'm like, why? I don't want to rag on people. I'm not going to pick anybody in specific, but I know there are people out there who have walk-in closets full of clothing, shoes, and accessories that they bought five years ago that they haven't even worn yet. Yeah. I'm like, why?

47:35
Why would you do that? If you're going to buy something, wear it. Absolutely. Or don't, don't buy it and don't wear it. I mean, those are the two options in my house. If I'm going to buy it and not wear it, it's going to get sold or given to somebody. We agree. We've, uh, well, when I was working, I probably bought more because I would go into the office in a professional setting, but in the past,

48:01
seven months my my world has changed i've been doing massive purges yep i i buy a coat probably once every five years and when the zipper breaks because i am not a seamstress i end up buying i end up buying a new coat and that's terrible i should learn how to replace the zipper but i haven't figured it out yet but i figure five years out of a 20 dollar jacket is probably okay i think that works

48:29
I mean you you've got your money out of it at that point. Yeah, and someday Maybe I'll learn how to put a zipper in a coat and it'll last me till I die. Who knows? We'll see what happens. All right guys. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today and it's been really fun Yes, definitely. Absolutely. All right. You guys have a great afternoon You too. All right