WoodFlower Farm

Today I'm talking with Emily and Clayton at WoodFlower Farm.

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 Emily and Clayton at WoodFlower Farm. Good morning, guys. How are you? Good morning. We're having kind of a terribly gray yucky day here in Le Sueur, huh? Yes, yes we are. It's that snow sleet.

00:29
kind of mix today. It's really gross. My husband and son would normally be outside doing anything to not be inside and they actually decided to clean out our closet and our pantry this morning. I was like, oh, please do that. That would be great. That's a good task for today. I would love that because I have things I need to do. So you guys find something to keep yourselves busy and do something really productive. That would be great.

00:54
So Emily and Clayton live not even a mile from me, I don't think. And I didn't even know about you guys until I saw you on Instagram, which is crazy. I should have known, but I didn't. So tell me about yourselves and what you do. Yeah, well, you probably didn't hear about us because we're pretty small and this is, I think, our first official year. We're just a small husband and wife farm and homestead, and we are in Le Sueur, Minnesota.

01:24
And we started our farm with the goal to grow flowers and also some veggies, maybe pasture raised meat and farm products for our local community. Okay. And have you lived there long as well or is that new too? Yeah, that is, that's kind of a story. We so I grew up in Le Sueur. That's where I'm from. My parents still live here.

01:54
but we have only lived here for, I think this is our second year. Yeah, our second year, yep. Okay, cool. And I don't wanna ask a rude question, but do you have like an acre or do you have acres? Yeah, we have technically right here where we are. This is my parents' land. So we moved back.

02:21
to Minnesota, well, back for me, first time for Clayton. He's from Wisconsin. We moved here after living in Colorado for a little while. And when we moved back, we thought we would move into this house because my parents own the house and that it would be very temporary. But after living here, I think it was about a year that we decided that we like it here. We were really struggling to find

02:51
a house, it's a very competitive market. We were also struggling to find a house in Denver. So when we weren't really able to find a house, like with some land here, we thought, well, why don't we just settle in? And there's a, so the land that we're on is about 40 acres. That's my parents' area. And then there's little woods.

03:18
And then on the other side of that woods, there's another like 36, 40 some acres. And that was also in the family. And we bought that land. So technically, we're landowners now. Nice. That's awesome. And you're young. I assume you're in your late 20s, early 30s, or even that old. Yeah, exactly. Okay. All right, cool. And what I want to say about where we, in quotations, live.

03:47
because we live on the same road. This highway that we live on, this area is so pretty. And it's also so flat. The further you go out highway eight, the flatter the land gets. Yeah, the further west. Yeah. Funny that you say it's so flat because actually what separates our land from her parents' land is this really deep ravine that has a little creek running through it that leads into the Minnesota River. So we actually have some

04:17
topography differences between the lands. So that adds a little bit of something unique, which is kind of fun. Yeah. We feel pretty lucky that of the acreage that we own, I think it's 12 acres is wooded. And that woods is really pretty. And the whole Minnesota River Valley really is a gorgeous area.

04:40
Yes, Minnesota is a really beautiful state. And part of the reason that it's so beautiful is that it does have so many changes in topography. I grew up in Maine and I've been living here for over 30 in Minnesota for more than 30 years now. And I went kicking and screaming from my home state to here. And after 20 years, I was like, oh my God, I actually love it here. It's really pretty and it's not that different.

05:09
You know, the land isn't that different. The things that grow here aren't that different. The only big difference is no mountains, no ocean. Well, I can travel, it's fine. And so I came to really love it here. And I really love spring. I'm not a huge fan of high summer. High summer is way too hot for me. Really love fall and winter's okay. Like it's the break that we need as people who grow things to regroup and plan for the following growing season. So.

05:37
So Minnesota's not a bad place to land. Right, yeah, and we came from Colorado. So I mean, the competition, you're competing with the Rocky Mountains, right? But there's something about Minnesota. And the part of Colorado that we were, we were living in Denver, it felt like there was not as much of the seasonal change. And I think we are just seasonal people. We love the shift from spring to summer, from summer to.

06:06
fall and then fall into that quiet winter time where we get some time off and we love the snow and all of that. So I think Minnesota, we're Minnesota people too. I'm Northern Tier State people. If it hadn't been Minnesota or Maine, it would have been Wisconsin or Pennsylvania as it were. Pennsylvania is not really a Northern Tier State, but Pennsylvania, New York, that area. Anything in the top states would have been fine with me. Yeah.

06:36
So, okay, so I was looking at your Facebook page and your Instagram page, and I saw the photos of the tulips and the peonies, and I was just like, oh my God, they're so pretty, and it's a wrong time of year to be wanting them. Yes, yeah, so we did do, our first year was really full of trying everything. So of course we tried the tulips. We were lucky enough that there were, I think like 50 year old.

07:04
peonies here that my great grandmother planted. So we had some well-established productive peonies to play with. But after trying a little bit of everything, we kind of thought this year we're gonna focus more on the summer flowers and we're not gonna do tulips because I would be doing tulips right now. If we had planned on doing tulips, I would have already planted them, but.

07:31
I think we just want to put more of our time and our money into the summer flowers because that's what really sells well. Perhaps we'll explore tulips when we actually have a high tunnel and kind of force them to come up a little bit earlier. We found that they kind of came up later than we wanted to and at the end of the day they don't necessarily bring in as much money as you necessarily want them to. Well, because they're a one time.

08:01
You know you pay if you're not buying huge amounts you're paying almost a dollar a bulb and then wholesale You can't really get much for him So it it's not a it's not a great option for us with the size we are and then yeah like Clayton said without a high tunnel They're they're blooming pretty fast and they they blow out like they start to crack and then it's like you know Less than a day before they're all the way past picking

08:30
Um, scrambling a little on the sustainability side, which is kind of the road that I'm starting to go down and learn more about, uh, tulips in general, just don't seem like a very sustainable product to me because you have to, you purchase them. They're probably coming from Holland or somewhere overseas and then they have to cross the ocean and get to you. And so, you know, you're looking at the emissions that come off from trying to get these bulbs in the ground. It just doesn't seem.

08:59
Doesn't seem very friendly to the earth to me. So if we can move towards the things that grow native here, that we can focus on, you know, keeping in this closed loop circle in Minnesota, then that's definitely more of the direction we'd like to push. So, yeah, awesome. I love it. Um, and if you're like us, you probably have critters that are under the ground that eat the bulbs too, because we planted 150 tulip bulbs the second year we were here, we've been here for.

09:28
And there are not 150 bulbs in that ground anymore. Not even close. I think we must've got lucky because we did not lose a lot of stuffed predators. I think what partly helped was that we planted our tulips like in our backyard in a pretty big garden area and our dogs definitely patrol the area. So I'm sure that our livestock herd dogs that we have.

09:58
that aren't actually livestock or dogs, but they might have helped. Yes. And the peony thing, anyone who's listened to the podcast that I've been doing for over a year now knows that I am in love with peonies. I think peonies are the most beautiful flower ever created by God or the universe or nature, whoever made them. I love them. And we put in a whole bunch over the last few years because when we got here,

10:26
There were no flowers except hostas and hostas are not my favorite thing. So, so last year, last spring we had tons of peonies bloom and I was talking to my husband about it and I was like, can we put in more? And he said, well, yes, if you find them for free. Oh, sure. Well, okay. Facebook marketplace is an incredible thing. People are getting rid of stuff all the time and separating their peonies or like.

10:56
My dad, he's landscapes and often they rip out peonies and they move them to new spots and sometimes they have extras. So we'll bring them home for us. Yup. It's much less expensive to do it that way because peonies are very expensive if you buy them at a nursery. For anyone who doesn't know, they used to be about 25 bucks a pot, but I haven't bought any.

11:22
in over a year, they might be closer to 50 to 60 a pot with inflation now. I don't know. Yeah. And if you're buying them just the root, which is how you would buy them if you were planning on starting them, the root itself is like $15 wholesale. So yeah. And then you have to wait three years before it actually produces anything of size. You're supposed to prune them back their first couple years so they can focus on growing their root.

11:51
Which I never do. I never do it. If there's a flower, it's going to grow, it's going to bloom, and I'm going to cut it. And if it takes another year past that three years to really produce, I don't care. That's how much I love the blooms. And it's really funny because people think that all peonies smell the same. They don't. No, we only have, I think we've got Sarah Bernhardt

12:20
I mean, that is an incredibly fragrant. It's an older variety. They're amazing, but I have seen some wildly different, and I assume they smell different too, peony bags. They do. Sarah Bernhardt is my absolute favorite, and it's because it smells so pretty, but it's not like in your face overwhelming. And the purpley ones, the magenta colored peonies.

12:48
I can't stand how they smell. I think they're beautiful. But I don't like how they smell. Yeah. And my second favorite is the festive of Maximus. I don't know if I'm saying that right, but they're white. They're pure white with a little bit of yellow down in the middle, little stripes of yellow. Such a good bridal peony. Uh huh. Love those too. We also bought some yellow. Ito? I-T-O-H? Yeah. Yeah. I've seen that one.

13:18
I think it was Bartzella, but I'm not positive because it was like three or four different yellow ones that all pretty much look the same. And those actually bloomed last spring and they were gorgeous and they don't really smell like anything. They're not a really heavily scented peony. So I'm a fanatic. My grandma on my mom's side loved peonies. I didn't know that until I started talking about peonies with my mom and she was like, you're your grandmother's granddaughter.

13:48
And I said, well, yeah. And she said, no, no, no. She said, your grandma adored peonies. She grew them in her garden. I was like, why did I never see them? And she said, because we were never in where they lived at the time of year the peonies bloomed. Yeah, yeah, they're short, short season. Yeah, we would usually go end of June in the first part of July from Maine to Illinois. And so by then the peonies were done and I didn't know what peonies.

14:16
worse, I didn't know to look for the leaves at the time. So I get it honestly, that and my love of shoes. I don't love shoes as much as I used to because I can't wear high heels anymore because it makes my feet hurt. But apparently my grandmother really loved pretty high heels as well and so did I. So it's a thing. So anyway, you said you have dogs. What kind of dogs do you have? Yeah, they're both rescues. They're both mutts.

14:45
So they have a few different breeds and then they're they're big dogs Okay, God people All right. Well, I'm a small dog person I don't know if you've listened to the podcast but I have Maggie the the mini Australian Shepherd which We don't think she's actually a mini we think she's a small standard, but it doesn't really matter We love her and she is kind of a she's supposed to be a farm dog if we had she or goat She would probably hurt them, but we don't sure we don't have any animals right now. We have two cats and a dog

15:14
our chickens got culled a month and a half ago because they were getting old and it was time for them to go and we'll get chickens in the spring again. But right now we're down to two cats and a dog on 3.1 acres. How sad is that? Yeah. Yeah. So I, a lot of people I've talked to have chickens. Chickens are like the gateway animal into homesteading, right? They sure are. Most people have chickens. We have chickens.

15:43
We have just some laying hens for ourselves. And we call them the anniversary chickens because on the weekend of our second wedding anniversary and our first month of living back here in Minnesota, we got a gift of money that was intended to be spent on a romantic night out. And we spent it on pullets. So we got, we have three ISA Browns.

16:10
four Bef Orphanedons and a couple of Wyandots and a Bard Rock. And they were just about to start laying. Some of them were already laying and they were less than a year old. And we still have a few of those in our flock, but we have many additions. So it's quite the barnyard mix. We've had a lot of trouble with predators over the last couple of years. Um, our biggest one being our own dogs.

16:38
We do have a chicken killer. So, so much for the livestock guard animal. Yeah. Cause he does more damage than good, unfortunately. So that's been a pretty big challenge for us. And it, our chicken coop has kind of just turned into Fort Knox trying to keep him or the raccoons out. We had a raccoon that was really wreaking havoc for a while there until I was out. One day.

17:06
saw some beady eyes looking down at me from the tree. So took care of that problem, which was good. What you gotta do. Yep. We don't have raccoons because we don't really have any cover for them. We have a small tree line. We've never seen a raccoon here. Really? No. Well, let's go for your future chickens. Yeah. We have possums and we have skunks. We've seen, we had a skunk.

17:36
that was actually in the pole barn the day we moved in that was dead. That was fun. The pole barn smelled really nice that day. Yeah. And then this, this spring we had a skunk in the pole barn. My husband went out to get his van to go to work and he smelled skunk and he was like, uh-oh. And he walked toward the back of the pole barn and he has his cell phone with him and had the flashlight thing on.

18:05
And he saw two eyes and he was like, hello. And it moved and he could see it was a skunk. He didn't start startle it. So it didn't spray. And he came in before he went to work and he was like, um, we're going to have to make sure that if there's cat food left in the cat bowls out there to dump it before the end of the day, I was like, why? He said, cause we have a skunk visiting again. He's like.

18:30
So we got the cat food out of there. You know, as soon as the cats would finish eating in the morning, we take the cat food out and Skunk went on his way. Never had to shoot him. He just moseyed on and I just free his way. That was it. That's good. Yeah. I hate having to kill animals when they're just trying to survive, but if they are a pest, it's a problem. Yeah. So do you guys have any, I don't know, pigs or goats or sheep or anything?

19:00
No, we do not. Well, okay. Yes. Yeah, I forget about Kevin. Okay. So yes, we do have, um, he's not really our goat. We help take care of her mom's goat and horse. That's literally, I can see them from my back window right now. Yeah. So I grew up with horses, um, here in this house and, um, my parents still have, they had

19:29
a couple of horses. We had an older horse that we had to put down. And then the other horse was lonely, of course. So my mom took on a goat, which was, it was my cousin's 4H Project goat. He's just a little Alpine goat. And he's been here for a few years now.

19:58
He broke his leg, actually. He shoved it. We think he shoved it in the fence gate, um, which has like vertical bars, shoved it in there and twisted it somehow and broke it, uh, because when we found him out in the pasture, he was limping really badly, but our vet, the Minnesota Valley vet is incredible. And she was like, I think I can probably, you know, cast this and he'll be okay. And so he walks with a limp now, but he is.

20:28
Still out there. And he's got a little bit of a bow in that leg. So he looks a little hobbly and pieced together, but he's still kicking. He's still a happy goat. So. Yeah, so we do have a goat on the farm. I wouldn't call him our goat and he's definitely not a productive goat. He's an inside goat. He would rather sit in the barn and be happy, just mowing on whatever haze right in front of his face and actually go be useful in the field. So.

20:57
He has a little jacket in the winter. He's got short hair and gets cold. Yep. I'm glad you brought up Minnesota Valley vet, because we take our dog and cats to them. They are fantastic people. They really are. Yeah. We took Maggie there for her first puppy checkup when she was, goodness, 12 weeks old. And she's four. And.

21:24
four years and a few months old now. And she's gone to see them for every checkup since. And she loves going to the vet because they have the squishy treats, squishy dog bone things. We don't buy those specifically because she knows she gets those at the friendly place where they give her her shots. Yeah, they really are incredible. They, for a small town vet, they're so friendly and they, you know, they're

21:54
They're busy, but they always make time for us. It feels like, and we've been taking our dogs there too. They've been taking care of the horses and everything. They're great. Yeah. They're a small animal and big animal. And that's great because trying to find a vet that does both is nigh on to impossible sometimes.

22:18
but I love them, the techs that they have, not the actual vet doctors, but the techs that they have are fantastic. Maggie loses her mind when she sees the techs. She wiggles, she's got the wiggle butt, obviously she's a wiggle butt dog, and she loves them. But the vet walks in and she knows, she knows that that is the actual doctor of veterinarian medicine.

22:46
And she growls in the back of her throat. She's, she has nose. And so this last time when we took her in for her checkup and to get her rabies shot, I asked if, uh, if maybe the vet could, if the tech could just take, take Maggie back in the back to the vet, get everything done and then come back. And that way she wouldn't feel like she had to protect me. And that's exactly what they did. And when they brought her back in, she, the vet and the tech walked in.

23:15
And Maggie came over and sat down and was smiling and wagging her tail like everything was great. I said, okay, we figured out the trick here. This is good. But no, they're, they're fantastic. I love them. And anyone in the area, our area who has animals need to be checked out by a vet. Minnesota Valley vet is the place to go. They are really, really good at what they do. Yeah.

23:39
And I don't, I don't, they don't sponsor me or anything. I haven't even asked, but I just want people to know it's a great place to take your critters. So just an honest plug for really. Yep. Absolutely. Okay. So you, I know that you sell your flowers to the co-op in St. Peter, but what else, how else do you sell your flowers? Yeah. So we, yes, we sell at the St. Peter food co-op.

24:07
and the local farmers market, primarily Lee's Sewer and St. Peter. We have been also selling wholesale to florists. And I did do a wedding last year, and I have room for one more wedding next year doing floral design with our locally grown flowers. We have been thinking about a CSA program. Yep. But we're

24:36
We haven't really jumped into that yet. We're also probably going to be starting a little farm stand on County Road 8, which would have some bouquets, maybe eggs when we have extra. Any leftover produce that we grow from our garden that we're not canning or eating ourselves. Yeah. And then in the near future, not sure when, we are planning on moving the flowers out to the land that we.

25:06
bought and starting a you pick. Oh fun. So that's the plan for the flowers. Very nice. The video that you took of the was it was it zinnias that had gotten frosted? Oh yeah. That is so cool. I had never even thought about the fact that taking video of the flowers when they're done would be would be that interesting, but it's really pretty.

25:33
They're beautiful. Yeah, I think the designs that happen with the frosts are really pretty. So, some videos of that. It's a little sad, you know, cause you know it's the end, but it's also really beautiful. Yeah, when I saw it, I did a double take cause I was scrolling through when I was like, what is that? I stopped and clicked on it. I was like, oh my God, Zinnia's frosted. That's gorgeous. Yeah. And I had taken photos years ago.

26:03
of roses with snow on them here in Minnesota in Jordan. We lived in Jordan at the time and it had snowed and we still had a couple roses blooming. And I was like, okay, so we just went from summer to winter overnight. This is great. Yeah, yeah. And really pretty, really pretty photos. I bet, yeah. So, okay, what else can I ask you? We have like four minutes left.

26:29
What would you like to share if I haven't asked the questions that you needed me to ask? Yeah. Well, yeah. So we obviously are growing flowers and flowers are, they were kind of the start of our farm. But we're also doing, we're going to be trying to do some other stuff this year. Maybe chickens. Yeah. We recently went to a regenerative egg conference, Acres USA.

26:57
They hosted it in Madison, Wisconsin. It was about a week ago. And so from that conference, it kind of inspired us to look a little bit further beyond just flowers. Just doing flowers is great and we're really excited about it, but it doesn't necessarily leave room to give back to the soil, doesn't necessarily leave room to just grow in different directions. And so we're kind of looking.

27:26
at our farm and growing it more into a regenerative full circle integrating animals into what we're doing, doing a little bit more perhaps down the road of like a market garden, possibly turning that into a you pick. So we have a lot of ideas as far as where we want to grow our farm. I know that we want to get.

27:53
more than just chickens on our land. But the struggle with that is just infrastructure. We don't necessarily have all the money in the world to throw at fences and all that good stuff. So for now, we're just gonna take it slow and steady and pay off some debt so we can set ourselves up to succeed, because I mean, farming is a hard one to make money in, it's a hard one to be profitable in. And so as much as you can focus on, you know,

28:23
monthly expenses down so then you don't have to worry about money as much is kind of where we're at. So there's a lot of exciting things to come. It's just taking the time to let it happen.

28:38
Good. And you guys have so many doors that are open to you right now. You're young. You have land. You have ideas. You got to go to a conference that I would have gone to when I was your age. Did you meet Mr. Joel Salatin? We met him all. He signed our book. We gave him a You Can Farm book and he signed it. Yes, you can. So that further lit the fire under our butts.

29:05
get this going. We got to meet Will Harris as well and see Gabe Brown and all the big names were there. So, fun. Yeah, it was really cool to get to hear those leaders in the regenerative ag world speak and share their wisdom and we absorbed as much as we could. Awesome. I'm so excited that you got to go. That sounds like so much fun. And honestly,

29:34
The regenerative movement that's been going on makes so much sense if you actually look at it and read about it and learn about it, because why wouldn't you want to have nature do what nature does? Yes. Right. Yeah, and that's exactly what it's about. It's, you know, so many farmers right now are working against nature, and regenerative ag is really just about letting nature do the work, you know, and working with it.

30:04
you know, to succeed. Yeah, and it makes it easier on you. And that means that you'll have the energy to keep doing it. Exactly, yep, exactly. Because this lifestyle takes a lot of time, a lot of patience and a lot of energy and it's good work, but it's still work. Yeah, and the big focus of the conversation that we took away from the conference was to make regenerative farms profitable

30:33
you know, being regenerative, putting less into the land and letting nature do its work, that allows for you to save a little money in certain places. And also consumers are beginning to crave food and products that connect them with nature again. And words like organic and pasture-raised and sustainable, they're words that most consumers are aware of and there's definitely a hungry market out there and we just have to figure out how to tap into it.

31:03
Yep, exactly. Well guys, it was amazing talking with you. And since you only live down the road by about a mile, we should set up a time for you to stop by this spring. Because my husband is like big into the gardening and being outside. And we put up a hard sided greenhouse last spring. And we're going to actually have like a high tunnel style greenhouse also. And we're going to be growing bedding plants in the greenhouse this spring because

31:32
to do that. Yeah. And then once they're big enough and it's warm enough, they're going in the high tunnel so people can just come and buy bedding plants for their gardens. So you should, we should set up a time for you to come chat with him because I'm sure he would be thrilled to talk to you about the greenhouse and the high tunnel. Yeah, we absolutely need to do that. All right, awesome. Thank you so much for your time today. Yeah, thank you. Have a great day. You too. Bye.