Whiterock Homestead

Today I'm talking with Jason and Tara at Whiterock Homestead. You can also follow on Facebook.

 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
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Jason and Tara at White Rock Homestead. Good morning, guys. How are you? Good morning. We are doing great. Is it a nice day there? Oh, yeah. It's a beautiful morning. In Arkansas, you said?

00:29
Yes, ma'am. Okay. I am not in Arkansas. I am in Minnesota and it's actually really nice here today too. Thank God. We have had the worst spring ever. So tell me about yourselves and what you guys do. So yeah, well, I'm Jason. Obviously this is my wife, Tara. We actually sold our property about a year and a half ago in Michigan.

00:59
and we moved south here to north central Arkansas and I retired from the Marine Corps. She's retired from nursing and we looked at life and said we need to do things for ourselves. Grow our own food, raise our own animals and just have something that is ours that nobody else can tell us what we're going to do and how we're going to do it.

01:29
So we spent a few years researching, driving around, searching different areas to finally settle and we're building, we're running a homestead while we're still trying to build a homestead.

01:43
I understand completely we're doing the same thing. We've been here for almost four years and we're still building on it. Oh yeah, it's not gonna take an overnight thing. It's always a work in progress. Yes, absolutely. And Jason, thank you for your service. My stepson is a former Marine, although he says once a Marine, always a Marine. So he's always a Marine. So thank you. Yeah. Absolutely. And he is very correct in that statement.

02:12
Yeah, our sons and Maureen as well. Yep, it was the hardest eight years of my life waiting for him to be done with active duty.

02:23
Cause that boy has my heart and every time he was like, I'm getting moved here. I'm like, no, I want you to go home. I appreciate what you're doing, but please don't die. Yeah. I mean, there's always that chance or option, I guess. Uh, but for the most part, we try to go where we're going to go and come back and experiences that we couldn't have gotten had we not joined, um, and you know, of course the protection of our nation and, you know,

02:53
all that that lovely gig of a role but loved every minute of it. I mean there was moments that I could have questioned myself but definitely a great choice and it and honestly has been a good stepping stone. I remember early on in my career and I think even before I fully enlisted and left for bootcamp was somebody had told me they said if we gave you the best advice about joining the military was get a job that translates when you get out.

03:22
Um, and I said, okay, great. So I went in as a mechanic and I'm like, Hey, you know, there's always mechanics needed and you know, lo and behold, I'm not, well, I do a little bit of mechanic and around the homestead, but a little bit. Yeah. You fix everything, which I think as a homesteading family, you have to have that resourcefulness. So I'm, I'm very blessed to have a husband with those skills that we don't have to farm out, you know, every single thing that breaks her.

03:52
Um, you know, he's, he's able to, to fix it all. Yep. It's a good thing. Um, my stepson went into, I think it was like computer stuff. I don't know exactly what his, his MOS was, but, uh, he is now basically he would call it on effing problems with servers. I will not use the word cause I don't use that word on the podcast, but I think you know what I'm saying.

04:20
And he loves it and he's doing great. So he went into a field that translated after he got out as well. Okay. So enough about the Marines. And again, I really do appreciate our service to people and I feel for their families when they're deployed, cause it's really hard. So what do you guys do? I mean, do you have livestock? Do you grow gardens? What do you do? Oh, yes. So one of the first things that we put up.

04:49
on the homestead was a greenhouse and a chicken coop. We had those where we even had a structure. Well, I guess the well house, but prior to Jason and I getting together, I'd had a homestead in Ohio for 10 years. And so I had a really good start on what it took to build certain things, what worked, what didn't work and was able to kind of dial in for this homestead, things that I felt would work. Although it is a different,

05:19
climate in a whole host of different ways you have to learn the garden. But the greenhouse was definitely a pillar to getting us food sustainable. And we added chickens, we do meat rabbits, we have goats, and a sawmill, which provides us the ability to do all of those things relatively inextensively with just our time.

05:49
like an actual sawmill or is it one of the ones that you use on a on a chainsaw? No it's real. No it's a woodland mills it's a legit full-on band you know I guess it could be portable I didn't buy the trailer option but it's a full-on sawmill. Very nice. So did you know how to use it before you bought it?

06:16
I had a little bit of experience with one. Tara's uncle in Tennessee has one. And I was able a couple times that we had went and visited, I was able to go out there and run it with him and get the basic idea of what it was. And then I literally just ended up watching a lot of YouTube videos, tips and tricks and that kind of stuff to...

06:44
be a little more effective on it. And it's a daily learning curve with that. Yeah, my husband really, really, really wants one. And luckily we can't afford to buy one right now because I am scared of it. I'm afraid that he's not gonna do something correctly and like take an arm off. And I tend to be the more conservative, more cautious of the two of us on a lot of things like that. So.

07:13
he's all, I want a sawmill and I'm like, uh-huh, okay, let me know when you wanna do that. It's actually not really, I run it all the time myself also. Yeah, okay. And it definitely is paid for itself. When you sell everything and move, you've got your profits and your savings and your investments or whatever it is, whatever you're coming out of, wherever you're moving from. Yeah. And so you have a chunk of money, right?

07:42
And you have to play it smart because I will tell you, and any homesteader that's done what you've done will tell you the money goes way faster than what you think it's going to. And so we had sat down for several years and determined what the core equipment would be needed on our future homestead. And so we were both in line with the sawmill and a nice tractor. And...

08:11
Short of that, honestly, those were the two largest ticket items, but they have saved us double back what we would have spent to pay somebody to do what the tractor's done and to do what the sawmill has done. So, for us, we chose to go that route with putting what money we had into the land to be debt free and the equipment that would be needed for that versus just spending the money on, you know.

08:39
end up in a large structure or a big home or whatever. For sure. I interviewed our realtor three, four weeks ago who helped us find this place. And one of the things that we talked about was when people start looking for a place to make into a homestead or buying an already established homestead, people don't realize if you're starting from scratch. Like if there's no

09:06
equipment or tractors or anything that comes with the purchase, you have to take into account that you're going to need a tractor because you've got to be able to move heavy things and that you will probably need a pickup because you need to go get things to bring back to the homestead to build it up. You're absolutely correct. I forgot that. We did end up with a truck kind of pooper out on us and we did have to buy another truck. So between the truck, the land, the tractor and the sawmill, you know.

09:35
That was a big chunk, but you're absolutely correct. You don't, some people don't take those things into account. Um, you know, that unless you want to break your back, uh, and do it all manually, those things are a necessity to, to get it up and going if you're buying raw land and even if you're not sometimes. Yep. And the other thing I'll say is buy, buy the thing that you can afford to buy that you really love.

10:01
whatever that means, whether you like how it looks, whether it's the functionality, whatever it is that you love about it. Because when we bought our pickup truck, there were two pickup trucks. One was an older model, it was about $4,000 less than the one that I actually wanted, which was a newer model, and had the bells and whistles that I wanted, and we ended up buying the less expensive one. And to this day, I have buyer's remorse because...

10:29
can't hook my phone up to the truck and have music play from my phone. And I love music and I love, I love having music on when I'm driving. So I'm kind of stuck with the radio and I don't know if you guys have listened to radio lately, but it's not great. So buy the thing that you can afford because I wish we had bought the other truck. My husband actually now wishes we bought the other truck too. So I'm not alone in my buyer's remorse. Yeah. And we were in that situation when we have the

10:57
truck that we currently have now because we had drove the truck that got us here and moved all of our stuff and got us started. We had gotten a great deal on that truck and we drove it from Michigan clear to Texas and back and Tennessee. I mean we made multiple trips and it moved. I mean we spent two years riding around in that truck. Didn't have all the bells and whistles. Was not the most comfortable truck.

11:24
But it was something that we said, hey, when we get our major structures and expenses covered on the Homestead, we'll look at upgrading the vehicle. And it just so happened that truck started getting a little too finicky and we bought an upgrade of a truck. And it's been, yes, a night and day difference too. And it's funny, you mentioned the whole stereo. I've, I've bounced through the trucks in the last.

11:53
you know, seven, eight years. And when I end up having to step back a little bit and get one that doesn't have the Bluetooth through the stereo, it's uh, you guys are bougie. I got the bougiest husband ever. There's those comforts though, especially for us, we travel a lot and, um, having some of those comforts that it provides makes those trips less horrible.

12:20
Yeah. And we, we were able to take the other one ton truck and even in its condition mechanically and trade it for a side by side, which is something that I really wanted. That was, I wanted two things when we started the homestead, a wood chipper and a side by side. And I got, I got my wood chipper and I got my side by side. Very nice. Yeah. I feel like.

12:44
complaining about the fact that the radio isn't what I want in my truck is a very first world privileged problem to have. So sorry guys, but when you love music as much as I do and you love to sing as much as I do and not in front of people, but in the truck and in the shower, music coming through the speakers on my truck is really important to me. Well, that's an easy upgrade. I think it's fairly simple to put in a new stereo.

13:13
Quality is what the factory ones are. I really wasn't even so much the music as it was if I'm on a long drive We typically that's that's when we have time to sit and talk to people Yeah, so it's the Bluetooth function of being able to use the phone, you know while driving And you know meeting all the laws and requirements so Definitely, like you said first world problems I mean we're struggling now because my air conditioning is out in the truck and I'm like no

13:43
Um, but we're just, we roll the windows down and, um, but circling back to what you had said, I think that that is a very, for anybody listening that is looking at wanting to get into the home setting is you need to set yourself some realistic goals of what you want your home set in a timeline, but also financially. Um, I think.

14:10
at least for our friend group and the circle of friends that we've been surrounded around is we don't have that keeping up with the Joneses mentality which you know Tara and I both have lived those lifestyles you know previous to us getting together was like oh this new thing came out we want to go get that because you know Joe the neighbor got one or you know

14:38
whatever that case might be. And if you're gonna be realistic in homesteading, you need to lose that mentality and be okay with what you have. But then also surround yourself by friends that have equipment to where you don't go brofying at all. Yeah. Yes. I have a saying that I always say, that alone we can't do everything, but as a community, we can do it all. And that means a lot when you're looking at,

15:08
sharing of your resources, knowledge and time. Those are things that our great grandparents did, our grandparents did, you know, a hundred years ago and beyond. And it worked for them and it worked for the communities and it, it worked for humanity. And we love the homesteading community because we're all trying to bring back that feeling of being surrounded by people who are actually genuinely interested in you.

15:37
and interested in what you're doing and extend a real friendship through their time, their knowledge and your own resources. Absolutely. Friends are good to have and if they're into the things that you're into, they're even better. Absolutely. Yep. We had, we, it wasn't me. I didn't do anything. My husband and my son built a greenhouse, a hard-sided greenhouse this spring. And they pretty much did it.

16:07
themselves and it's I think it's 40 by 20 feet I think. Oh nice. And neither one of them really like heights so they had to be on a ladder for yeah probably eight ten hours total you know not not all in a row but that was a total amount of ladder time and there was a Saturday when it was nice and they were out there and my husband was on the ladder for

16:35
you know, on and off the ladder for about half an hour, hour. And I would looked out and my son was then up on the ladder half an hour, hour, and then they were done with that for the day. And they came in and I said, I said, you guys done for today? Cause it's only two o'clock in the afternoon. And they were like, yeah, we can't face that ladder anymore today. And so they did other stuff that needed to be done. And then they went out the next morning and got the rest of the roof done.

17:02
so they didn't have to be on the ladder anymore because that's how much they hate climbing on a ladder and being on heights. So they sucked it up and they got it done and that greenhouse has been wonderful this year because it's been terrible weather here and it's been very wet. So a lot of our stuff that's growing is growing in the greenhouse in buckets. Yep. And that's really important because I've actually gotten to have a couple cucumbers and if I was waiting on the garden, I probably wouldn't have very many right now.

17:32
Right, and that's the beauty of having the greenhouse. Eventually I would love a hard-sided greenhouse, but honestly I'm fine. I'm not bougie like my husband. I'm good with, you know, we did a cattle panel greenhouse. I would have done it up north, but as you know, with being up north, the snow loads are too great on anything but with cattle panels. But that's kind of the beauty of being in North Central Arkansas is we don't have that snow load.

18:00
And it allows me to take the plastic off in the summer and actually trellis, you know, use the structure as a trellis too. So it's kind of a double dip in type of situation. They actually have cattle panel ones. Honestly, when I started looking on YouTube for building one, most of the ones that I found were out of Alaska. I don't know. When I was researching them, I just...

18:28
seeing failures from snow load. And I'm like, goodness, this is why I didn't do it up north. But I mean, I'm sure it's anywhere. And I think a lot to do also would be how wide you make it. Because the wider you make those cattle panels, the less structural integrity it would have from a heavy weight on top. So if it was a real narrow tunnel, yeah, I think that would work.

18:52
Yeah, we had the high tunnel style ones the first two summers we were here. And we had, we have had such high winds in the spring and the summer that they would just go over. It didn't matter how secure we thought we had them with the stakes or whatever. The wind would take them and flip them over. And the last draw for me was two summers ago.

19:21
We had a whole bunch of seedlings that were growing in the greenhouse to go in the garden. And it was just whipping and it went over and took all those seedlings with it. So we had, we had like surprise gardens all over our property because we didn't know what the seedlings were. So we just planted them. And it, they did really well. But that was it. And I was like, next greenhouse that goes up, I want it to be a hard sided greenhouse because this is killing me.

19:50
This is making me so sad every time we lose a hoop style house. Yeah. We're actually interested in seeing, um, we've got friends that live close and they're, they're homesteading also. And he, um, he had a lot of, of good soil that was flat ground, which are two things that are very rare in Arkansas, um, especially in our area and he had planted several crops and some of them work, some of them didn't, but he had a,

20:19
very large chunk of two separate gardens he put in that didn't have anything planted. And they actually, a friend, neighbor of his had a couple bags of this, what they called chaos gardening seeds. Yep. And they just went and broadcast it. So he's like, I don't know what's going to come up and what's not going to come up and how well it's going to grow, but going to be a very large area of, hey, let's just see what works. But.

20:46
I think that's a big thing of homesteading though is also those experiments, you know, because what might work for your neighbor might not work for you. And so we just always call everything that we're doing at this point as an experiment. And we take the notes of, hey, this worked and then this didn't work. And what changes to make for the next season. Yep.

21:13
That's what we do too. I wanted to grow luffa gourds because I wanted to make soap around the actual sponges that come out of luffa gourds. And luffa gourds have a very long growing season and it gets too cold here. And so this fall I'm going to order luffa gourd seeds and we're going to start them in the house in like February and then move them out to the greenhouse in like...

21:43
end of March and that'll give us that extra growing time that we couldn't get if we just started them outside. Because these soaps that I want to make, we already make cold processed lye soap. And basically what you do is you pour the soap around the spongy things in the luffa gourds when they dry out and then you cut them and it's like a exfoliant kind of scrub thingy with the soap around it. Oh nice.

22:10
And we've bought some before and we love them. So we wanna try making them. So that's our experiment for 2025, not this year. Oh, that's fun. I wanna grow luffus too. That is something that's on my list, but like you said, everyone was about the day and all in time. My dog is losing her mind because there's a delivery truck in the driveway. I don't know if you guys can hear her barking. Oh, we got one of those too.

22:38
Yeah, she's an excellent watchdog, but she does this every time I'm recording. Something sets her off and she has to bark in the background. So that's Maggie's cameo appearance for the morning.

22:51
I love her. This is the worst thing she does. We're all good. Yeah, I know. That's the exact same position we're in. We get a lot of deliveries as well. She goes nuts, but she's a full pit. She can be intimidating and scary. There's no one that's going to be coming on the property for sure. Yeah, Maggie is a mini Australian Shepherd. She weighs 35 pounds. Our male delivery guy is afraid of dogs.

23:19
So we have to make sure that Maggie is in the house when he comes because he won't, if he's delivering something, he's really afraid to come up the house if she's outside. And she would never hurt him. She's never ever hurt anybody. She's almost four years old. She's never offered to bite anybody. So he has an actual phobia of dogs and he's already talked to me about this. So we go out of our way to make sure that she is not outside when he shows up. Right.

23:49
So anyway, what's the plan for the homestead? You guys have been there how long now?

23:56
A year and a half, maybe just over a year and a half. Okay. Obviously we wanna just keep building ourselves in the simplest version of saying it, is keep working towards the self sustainability as much as possible. We're aware that there's things, flour, sugar, those types of things that we're just gonna have to rely on.

24:26
the normal market to purchase. And, but yeah, we, we've got the tiny house done. We have plans in the next few years. It's kind of a three to five year plan to build a log cabin as our forever home on the property from trees off the property. And just keep developing.

24:53
Our animal structures, the garden area, that kind of thing to be more established. We bought pretty much raw land. There, there was electric already ran to the property. There was already a well established on the property and somebody had started to build a foundation to a very significant house, but then it went abandoned for probably 10 plus years and it's. The block is usable.

25:23
but as the foundation right now is not a usable thing and so we just a lot of starting fresh clearing the land to be able to make it usable for something um whether it be we can't really do a lot of pasture the soil here all of our gardening is in lick tubs so basically the equivalent of raised beds because in-ground growing around here it's not an option um and yeah just

25:53
We want to age in place. So the idea is we're going to build everything up to be able to spend the rest of our days here on the homestead and build it in a way that even when we can't move as well, we can still function just maybe slower. Yep. I understand when my husband and I were looking for our place, I said, the place that we find that we buy is where we're going to die.

26:21
I don't ever want to move again. And it's funny because it was remodeled a year or so before we bought it. And there used to be a bedroom on the first floor. And when they remodeled it, they changed it. So we have this really weird living room where the living room is almost a square. And then to the right of when you walk in the living room, there's like an L shape where the bedroom used to be. And so it's just an open room now.

26:50
I keep looking for ways to turn it back into a small bedroom because I would love to have a bedroom on the first floor for as we get older and can't come up the stairs to go to bed. And haven't quite figured it out yet, but I keep looking at plans going, would that work? Would that work? Yeah. We've not decided on a full out plan yet for the log cabin. But you know, that's several years away. So we are making adjustments to the tiny house.

27:19
What we're realizing living in a tiny house is it's extremely difficult to be full on homesteaders and full on self sustainable in such a small space because you have food storage to think about. You have mass production of processing vegetables to think about. Where do you put all that stuff? Where do you put your equipment? I have a beautifully large kitchen, it's for a tiny house, but it is half the house. But it's those things that

27:49
Realistically, you do need a little bit larger of a space, unless you have like an exterior reseller or something to store your stuff in. So we've got a lot of plans. We're actually gonna add on to the tiny house, a master bedroom downstairs, just for those reasons that we discussed. And we are adding an outside kitchen to the tiny house as well, which will be a little bit more functional in the summertime.

28:19
with canning and processing and everything. And well, right now we're working on our YouTube studio, which is another structure outside of the tiny house. And then we got a barn to put up. And yeah, there's never a shortage of projects. No, no, there isn't. And even when you're not starting from bare land, there's never a shortage. We always have stuff going on here. Right, yeah. Like,

28:48
Like, I don't, I am a bad homesteader, I'm going to admit it. I really, really love cooking, and I really love crocheting, and I really love podcasting, obviously. And so for me, when we talked about buying acreage, and we ended up with a little over three acres, I said to my husband, I said, the garden is going to be all yours. The outdoor stuff is going to be all yours, because that's not what I'm into.

29:17
I said, are you okay with that? And he said, yeah, he said, cause that's how I de-stress. He said, that's when it's quiet and I can just think and putter. And I was like, okay, good. And so for me, I, in my younger years, I loved to garden, but I'm 54 and like, I don't know, eight years ago, I was like, I'm kind of over it. I don't wanna sit in the garden in the dirt anymore. I just don't. And my husband loves it. He comes in sweaty and

29:46
dirty and he whips his shirt off and throws it in the washer in the bathroom and then gets in the shower. I'm like, yes, please do that. That's awesome. So for me, I'm not, if he came home tomorrow and said, I don't think I'm happy with this. I think that I would just like an acre closer to town and have a small garden and keep my job. I would be fine with that. That would be okay. As long as we got to keep the dog.

30:14
I can't give up the dog, she's my life. I can't give her up. But in the meantime, I love where we live and I love that I get to can tomato sauce for spaghetti sauce in the wintertime. I love that it's quiet. There are things about homesteading that aren't necessarily busting your body up that are just a benefit in and of themselves. The quiet is one of them. Right, yeah. We love the quiet as well. And I don't...

30:44
We rarely have ever watched TV. It's something we turn on at night before we go to sleep so I can turn my brain off. But short of that, we don't have music running. We don't have the TV going. We like the sounds of the homestead for the most part. I mean, while being YouTubers also, we, when you're filming your life, you get used to not being able to have the radio on because of copyright purposes. So.

31:14
We're kind of used to that aspect of it, but even outside of YouTube, we find peace in the silence and peace in the beauty of the homestead, even when the goats are being loud. Yeah, I can't see us. If we do anything, we do have a five year plan. The homesteaders are heading to the ocean and the river systems. We're going to do the great loop. And so.

31:42
It'll be interesting to see how we transition from life on the homestead to take a year out to be on the loop. And being on water and I don't know I've got some ideas in my head on how to transition that but that's a dream of ours and it's something that we both want to do and it'll be fun to add that element of nature into what we love. Absolutely.

32:09
You were saying that you love the sound of the goats and that you can't have radio on because as YouTubers you can't because of copyright issues. I got up at about three o'clock in the morning a couple mornings ago because I couldn't sleep because I said this on another podcast recording last week. My husband snores so sometimes it's too loud and I just can't sleep so I get up and I went downstairs and I sat on the porch because I like to listen to the noises at night too. Oh yeah. And it was eerie because it was dead.

32:39
Silent no crickets. No nothing. I was like did a bomb go off. I don't know about It was silent. No trucks went by no cars went by I sat there for five minutes and I was like this is eerie I'm going in the house. I didn't like that. It was silent because usually You hear that the cow lowing a quarter mile away at the neighbor's place. You'll hear the crickets You'll hear a car go by

33:08
Something there was nothing it was the strangest thing in in the almost four years. I've been here has never been dead silent here Maybe that would be Sasquatch up You know, they say it all gets silent when Sasquatch comes out I don't know what it was, but it was bizarre and there was no wind either So there was nothing, you know, we have a tree line and there's a cornfield around it So, you know how it sounds when the wind blows through leaves and through the corn

33:35
That wasn't even happening. I was, it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I was like, yeah, I'm not going to stay out here by myself in the middle of the night right now. It's too quiet. Yeah. Most of the time, I mean, I'm notorious for waking up extremely early. It's all the years I've worked in for shift as a nurse. You know, I'm, well, this morning I was up at four. So a lot of times when I am outside in the middle of the night, I find peace in that. And there are different sounds at 4 a.m. than there are at 10 p.m.

34:04
And I know exactly what you're talking about on those mornings or in the middle of the night when it does go dead silent. And it is a creepy feeling. I'm, I'll agree with you on that. And I typically won't stay outside either. Yeah, I just couldn't figure it out. It has never been dead silent here. Ever. So it kind of made me nervous. I didn't like it. So I was like, okay, I'm going to go in the house. I'm not going back to bed, but I'm going in the house. Yep.

34:33
The dog's in the house. She may be 35 pounds, but she's going to protect me if something bad happens. I know she will. It'll be okay. So anyway, I feel like we've just talked about the things that people should consider when they're thinking about becoming homesteaders, and that is super cool. I just didn't know if you guys were gonna try to make anything.

34:57
support the homestead as you build it from the homestead like if you're going to sell wood or if you're going to sell produce or anything We've tossed that idea around And it's it's it's funny because we haven't got asked that question since we started YouTube And it was actually one of the first questions that we got asked was What is what's your business model? What's your business plan for your homestead because a lot of times?

35:25
And in most situations, people do homesteading with that intention. You've got to have some source of income, right? Homesteading is not a cheap way to live necessarily, especially starting out. I think as you get developed, you can make your expenses less, but irregardless, there's expenses out there that we have to cover. Even in an off-grid situation.

35:51
they're still paying for an internet service or they're still paying for a cell phone. And while we know you can't go anywhere and not pay car insurance. So there always needs to be a source of income. We honestly, we do not have a business model set up for our homestead because we didn't build it, we're not building it and our intentions coming in. We're not to make it a profitable

36:20
making it a sustainable. Now we have several friends that are close by that you know they're home setting, they're doing a lot of the same things we're doing, but they don't have an outside source of income coming in so it's like hey what do we do? So they prepped their land and their model was to do a market garden, grow a large garden and be able to take it to the markets and

36:49
and make their money that way. And for the most part, it's doing really well for them. They're on year two of doing that now. I think we both moved to Arkansas within just a couple months of each other. And so now, for anybody that's went and watched our YouTube channel, we did build a market stand that we wanna put out by the road. And that basically,

37:18
That's just some excess. Yeah, that's for excess. You know, when the chickens are really full laying and we're getting, you know, 20 plus eggs a day, you know, we can't eat that. We eat a lot of eggs, but not that many. And so what the behind the mart, that is to recoup our cost and feed, honestly. Well, plus I've also started getting into like, you know, team shows and

37:47
We've done a viral study on...

37:52
Uh, crap, I'm losing them. Was that Ruth? No. Or the frankincense and stuff? It was the frankincense. And then. Wasn't that in Ruth? No, that was Esther. Sorry. Oh yeah. Go back if you. And, uh, you know, it got me thinking if she spent six months, uh, getting treatments of oils, uh, being castor oils and frankincense, then if it was good enough for Esther, it's probably good enough for me too. And you'll be in 50. Uh.

38:21
I'm not getting any younger and so I noticed some crow's feet and stuff. And so I've started making my own lotions and base creams, kind of dwell them into that. I've got some oils marinating, tinctures marinating, and just kind of doing some of those more natural things. And if I sell some oils, I'll put it in the market stand.

38:48
I don't know, it's not something I'm going into to like make a bunch of money for. It's more I need to find out what works for me. And I, like anything else on a homestead, you want to be dependent on your own skills and what you can create for yourself and protect yourself. And face creams are one of them. When you look at the chemicals and everything inside what you're buying in the store, when the whole time, you know, you can make up.

39:18
something with castor oil, frankincense and tea tree oils and just all those different things. Weeds out of the yard, behind the mow. Yeah, so it goes along with just being self sustainable and yet having such a superior product. And so I've shared them with friends and everyone's loving it. And I don't know, I made for some of that in the market stand as well, but it's not for excess. Yeah, and there is potential. I mean, I guess if we go down that discussion,

39:47
We potentially could do things for profit. We have the availability of growing a larger garden and selling the produce off of that. Or selling the wood, you know, we could timber. We've got the, well, we've got timber, we could do firewood. We also have the saw mill. So I know that is, that's a big, I guess a big selling point for a lot of the

40:15
people that I've seen online or even talked to that buy a saw mill is they get to mill their own lumber, but when they're done milling what they need personally, then they can start doing it as a business and make that money back and be profitable. Especially with the price of lumber at the big box stores if somebody can do some rough sawing lumber. I mean, I think it would be something that we

40:44
if we were looking to make money off the homestead, it would be as a hobby, I believe, because you spend, I always knew I wanted to be a homesteader. I was always into Grizzly Adams and Laura Engel Wilder, and it always resonated with me. And so I always knew I wanted to be a homesteader. And through raising my kids and being a single mom, I worked and worked and worked hard.

41:12
so that I could retire early. And, you know, we have one little friend of our daughter's that he's always looking for the next business venture and wanting us to go in on it. And I'm just like, dude, I hustled for 40 years. I don't wanna hustle anymore. You know, 34 years. It was all about, you know, putting us in a position to be able to do this. And if the need be, I would go back to nursing. You know, I never say never, but I think at this stage in our life, we're just,

41:41
enjoying loving what we're doing for ourselves here and for our friends and you know if there becomes a situation where we got to make more money I'm not opposed. Right the options there but that's not our main our main goal is is sustainability of ourselves like making a dollar. Well I think you guys have it figured out you have a wonderful next 45-50 years to look forward to.

42:10
Yeah, we can only hope so. I would hate to know what my body's gonna feel like in 40 years. Yeah, well, I could have said 20 and then you die, but I don't think that's what's gonna happen. So well, and I think that that's a good reminder to a lot of people is, you know, I've even got family that have said, you know, man, I wish I could do it the way that you're doing it or, you know, I'd love to move there, but I'm just too old to do that. And.

42:36
I don't know. I'm a firm believer because I do have quite a few family members that have lived into their 80s and 90s and You know Age is a number and I mean obviously our body tells us what we can and can't do And we are doing it on the fairly younger spectrum, I guess But it is something that holds a lot of people back because it it's a very it is a very active lifestyle Yeah

43:06
You know, typically in your normal society where you're working a nine to five and you're not trying to homestead, maybe you have a little garden, right? But you're living in suburbia. You're going to your job every day. Your kids are going to school. You're doing that. So, you know, your weekends are always, Hey, I want to sit around and barbecue and relax and not do much, or you're hammering down on projects, but it's only for a couple of days, and then you're right back to your, you know, a lot of times, you know, an office job that. Um.

43:35
isn't typically a physically active lifestyle. So it can be a big change depending on what you're coming back from. And I know even, even for me coming out of the Marine Corps, um, and, and it was what five, six years, I think that I had been retired before we started homesteading. Um, but even then I w I had been in the Marine Corps so long that my job was to sit behind a desk.

44:05
and I went to sleep at night out of boredom. And now I go to sleep out of exhaustion and it's such a better sleep. I feel better being more active. And we always say, if you don't use it, you lose it. And so we try to stay as active and no matter what it is, it's possible for as long as we can. If it makes you feel any better about 50 years from now.

44:34
My dad will be 81 years old next week. He and my mom live on a 14 acre property in Maine. They have a beautiful home that they had built eight or 10 years ago, I can't remember, on the property. They have a border collie. My dad has a wood stove that he uses for heat in the house. He chops all his own wood. He has a garden. My mom and dad both go down and work on it after he plants it.

45:04
and my mom just turned 78 two days ago. So they are busting their asses all the time too, and they are 78 and almost 81 right now. So it is possible. Yeah, very much so. And that's what we hope for ourselves. And we don't have all the answers and we don't do everything correct. We just do what feels right in our hearts and we go from there. And we are both finding so much love in what we're doing.

45:34
And it's kind of an awesome feeling like right now the goats aren't giving us milk, but when you only go to the store to buy dairy products, and that's literally what you're walking out buying, you know, I get frustrated that I am going to the store to buy those things. So eventually when the goats give us milk, then hopefully I can diminish my reliance even more. But it is, there's a beauty in that and there's challenges in that.

46:03
being outside and doing the chores and building things. Cause I, as much as I'd love to be in the kitchen all day, every day, my husband and I are a team and we build together. My dad was a contractor and so I grew up on work sites and have those knowledges as well as he does. So we work together on everything and you know, it not as efficiently as we did 20 years ago, but no, so keep going. Yep.

46:32
Okay, I have one thing about the beauty in being self-sufficient and then I'm gonna let you guys go because we've been talking for 46 minutes now. We canned a whole bunch of tomato sauce, summer 22, and then last summer. And we are down to maybe six jars of tomato sauce left. And I actually, I mistakenly bought tomato sauce from the store when I was trying to grab tomato paste. And we used some of it the other day. The store bought stuff.

47:01
and it was the store brand tomato sauce. As soon as the tomatoes start rolling in in August here, we will be canning tomato sauce because that tomato sauce from the store was terrible. So yes, there is satisfaction and beauty and thank God there is in doing your own thing because I don't wanna have to buy tomato sauce ever again. It was disgusting. And I think when, I wanna say it was one of our last trips

47:32
because we were there for an extended period of time. And we had taken several dozen of our own eggs with us. But then we had to go buy eggs at the store. And it was like, no, this is not acceptable. Do we need to do a, how do we hook a mobile chicken coop up to our camper to constantly have an egg supply? On a good note, we are gonna be within driving distance

48:02
my aunt and uncle who also have children. So they have a homestead. But we say it all the time, that same thing. It's refreshing, I guess, to know. I mean, we know we're not the only ones that have that same comment. But when you're used to eating your own homegrown food and products, and then you have to buy something because, hey, I'm in a pinch or I'm not in a place that my stuff's available, you clearly know the difference. Yeah.

48:29
Uh-huh. I was sad. I made spaghetti sauce and I was like, this is terrible. I hate this. I need my tomato sauce. Yeah, for sure. And, uh, you know, since we're wrapping up, if, if you are a subscriber of ours on our YouTube channel, there are going to be some changes coming up. Um, we've announced it on one of our channels on the coffee chat, but we are leaving back out Monday or Tennessee for an undetermined amount of time.

48:58
My father is not well. And so we are going to be in Tennessee, we're going to take our little camper we call it nugget and Be there to be able to spend some time with with my dad and So we're going to actually be filming and doing our best to homestead from Tennessee from Arkansas so if you if you're a subscriber and You're you've probably already

49:26
gotten wind of that, but if you're a new subscriber, just letting you know that we're gonna be in Tennessee, probably in the next couple of videos, and for an undetermined amount of time. So, hang with us because we're just doing what we have to do in our hearts to be there for family, and we will be coming back to the Ridge at some point and picking up where we left off. Awesome. Well, I'm sorry to hear about your dad, but at least you can go and be with him. That's amazing.

49:55
Yes, true. All right, guys. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you for having us. Yes. Thank you for the invite and having us. We love talking homestead if the time on this video doesn't show. Uh-huh. All right. You guys have a great day. Thank you. Thanks.