A Tiny Homestead

Sunnyland Farms

Today I'm talking with Staci at Sunnyland Farms. You can follow on Facebook as well.
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
00:00This 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 Staci at Sunnyland Farms in Georgia. Good morning, Staci. How are you? Good morning. I'm great. Thank you. Good. Is it lovely in Georgia? Because it's really chilly here in Minnesota. You know, it's...
00:28cold for Georgia actually, not normally this cold. So I'm kind of enjoying it actually. Well, I would be enjoying the cold and except for the fact that I've had some kind of upper respiratory things since Saturday. And when I go outside, I start coughing because the cold hits me and I'm like, Oh, okay. So sorry. Sorry.
00:51Sorry listeners, people out there, my voice is not the best it could be today, but that's okay, because Staci's gonna tell us all about what she does and about Sunnyland Farms. Yeah.
01:02Well, my name is Staci Wilson and I am from Sunnyland Farms, a Georgia pecan farm. We're way down here in southwest Georgia in the city of Albany. And we do say pecan many different ways down here. You will hear pecan, you will hear pecan, and it's truly tomato, tomato.
01:29And our farm actually started and was planted in the 1920s. And my connection to the farm is actually my husband's great grandfather planted the farm, planted the groves and the trees. And then his grandparents started to mail the pecans to their friends. And then the catalog mail order business grew from there.
01:58His dad began, moved back in the 70s to join the family. And I'll talk about him in a little while, but he had some pretty awesome innovations for the industry. And then Alex and I moved back about 10 and a half years ago. And I've been in the hospitality baking industry. So it really coincided with.
02:24a desire to live a simpler life and also join the family business. So that's just a little rundown. I love it when there's co-ink-a-dinks when your background matches up with the thing you're doing now too. And I always kind of disliked pecan pie when I was a kid because it was so incredibly sweet. And then
02:52I had some, um, couple of years back that someone made from scratch and they were like, you have to try it. It's not like the store bought super sweet kind. And I said, okay. And I took a bite and I was like, this is not pecan pie. And she said, well, yes, it is. And I said, no, no, no, you don't understand. This is wonderful. Right. So, so I'm a convert now as long as it's made in a way that's not super, super sticky, sweet. Just, that's the only, uh,
03:21It's the only pecan story I have. Right. And that's interesting because the industry itself is known for the pecan pie. And it's tried in the last because pecans are indigenous and it's something that Americans can be very proud of that this is one of our native nuts and has more antioxidants than most nuts. So
03:50The industry itself is really trying to get that nutritional information. Even the American Pecan Council, their marketing motto is beyond the pie, right? So anyway, using high quality pecans is always the key, in my opinion, especially for the pies. But anyway.
04:15What else would you like to know about we I can get into the To the planting and the different varieties and and all of that Well, we can start there and then you can tell me a little bit about the the history of the farm Yeah, absolutely Yeah, it is fascinating and it's the history of it is just the the pecans themselves are indigenous to the southeast native and it was a
04:45staple in Native American diets. Georgia actually is the top producer pretty much in the world. We are normally outproduced sometimes by Mexico. Pecans love heat and they love humidity. So, you know, Louisiana, Texas, all of those places, Georgia, obviously. But Georgia, I feel like, you know, just the
05:13The growing conditions are even better because of our humidity. Pecans themselves love humidity and heat. So anyway, our particular farm sits on about, it's about 1,700 acres of groves. And the farm was planted in the 1920s. And what a lot of people aren't aware of is that pecans are more than just one variety and the different.
05:43just like a, you know, a grape for wine or whatnot. And the different varieties have different oil contents and the higher the oil content, the better tasting the pecan. And just a little side note, because of the high oil content, you should definitely store your pecans or any nut really in your freezer.
06:09A lot of people don't know that because you freeze that oil content, whereas if it's sitting at room temperature, the oils are evaporating. So there's a little tip for you and your listeners. So the original acreage was planted with three different varieties, which were Stewart, Slice, and Moors. So those were the original pecan variety that were planted in our orchards.
06:38And when my husband's father moved back in the 70s, they pulled some of the moors out of the groves and replanted with a variety you might be familiar with, which is the desirable variety. And so if you see some of the larger pecan halves, not like the small ones, the very, pretty much the really large ones, it's most likely a desirable.
07:08somewhat developed into what it was because it was somewhat disease resistant and also big. That's what differentiates a Georgia pecan really or even a Southeastern pecan versus its Western cousins grown in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico. Nothing wrong with those either. It's just that the different varieties of course, just like a wine variety.
07:38you know, just develops better in different growing conditions. So our orchards are now mostly desirables. We do have some Elliot's and Elliot's are considered in the industry, they're considered junior halves. And they're really, really small and cute. That's what I love to make pecan pie with Elliot's because they're really small. You don't have to like cut them up into pieces.
08:06And a little insider trick too, is if you can get your hand on junior halves, use those for your Thanksgiving pies because Elliot's have the highest oil content of any pecan. And of course, again, oil equals flavor. So they're kindy, but they're the best. So if you can ever get your hands on junior halves, they're the best. So most of our orchards now are desirable in Elliot's haves.
08:36and something that a lot of people don't know about pecans is that of course they're trees and they're grown in orchards and how we harvest the pecan we harvest. Harvest normally starts from around in you know October, mid-October through pretty much Christmas we're harvesting and
08:59We harvest by a machine called a shaker and it looks like a giant tractor with a claw on it. That's the only way I can describe it. And it really, it just gently, it holds the base of the pecan tree and shakes it gently. And there are videos of this online, of course, if anybody wants to look it up. It's pretty cool because you see just this gentle vibration at the base of the tree and the nuts.
09:29just fall to the ground. And then we leave the nuts on the ground for just two or three days, just to let them rest for a minute, which is kind of a scary part of the harvesting process because of course squirrels and all other kinds of creatures love nuts. So anyway, so we, about two days into the process, we go through with what we call a sweeper and we sweep all of the pecans into nice little neat rows.
09:57And then we come through and picks the nuts up and they go into a processing plant where we, you know, of course pick out the branches and things like that. And then one thing about Sunnyland that's a little different than other pecan farmers is that a lot of pecan farmers would stop in that process. Like once they get the whole nut, because a nut, you know, it's in shell. So you have two halves in a pecan. You get two halves out of a pecan.
10:27But a lot of growers stop right there in the process and then shift their nuts off to be shelled because it's not a full product yet unless you wanna sell and shell. But Sunnyland actually has a shelling plant on site. And so our nuts go over to our shelling plant. And we just like that because, you know, we've always been extremely committed to high, high quality and we can keep our hands, we can truly say that, you know.
10:55our pecans, we have our hands in the entire process from tree to table really, you know? And so when we go into the shelling plant, the nut is then cracked into a half and then sometimes we go into, we grade them down. Like, you know, if we wanna do halves with a particular lot, we break it down into large pieces, small pieces, the things you see that people buy for smoothies and shakes and things like that, all the way down to pecan meal.
11:24which is also a very nutritious alternative to flour, if you wanna use it in baking and whatnot. But anyway, so that's a little bit of the process of how we move into just selling even our haves, which is our main business still. We sell a lot of baked goods now that we make in-house and handmade candies and things like that. And of course we sell other nuts as well now, but pecans are.
11:53are what we, our original nuts. So that's a little bit about the growing portion. One thing I will say that we're proud of too is that pecans really only flourish and grow to standard when they have enough water and something that we learned in Georgia is they really need 40 to 50 inches of rain.
12:23per year to fill out appropriately. And Alex's dad, Larry Wilson, I call him the farmer aficionado because he just knows everything about pecans, but he implemented one of the leading technologies for irrigation systems for the orchards. So he was one of the first farmers in the Southeast at least to implement that.
12:50irrigation system to make sure those pecans were filling out properly and getting being able to get to market The way they they did in like the 80s. So anyway, that's a little bit a little bit of pecan growing history if you will Okay that that left me with a couple of questions When when you put a baby pecans? Sapling in the ground. Mm-hmm. How long till it produces nuts?
13:17That's the hardest part. It normally will not produce until year five to seven. So five to seven is you might get a small harvest between year five and seven. You really probably aren't gonna be up until like top production to 10 years. Wow. Yeah. So when you lose the, we really suffered through Hurricane Michael. We lost a lot of trees. It was heartbreaking.
13:45And it gave us an opportunity though, we tried to look at the silver lining and to replant with some of the newer varietals that are even more disease resistant that some of the scientists have been able to craft. But those trees, I mean, Michael wasn't that long ago, those trees aren't producing yet. And a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of Georgia farmers that were hit.
14:11this past hurricane and in Hurricane Michael were really affected because we're very susceptible to weather because of that reason, because it takes so long for them to produce anything. Okay. And how big is a mature pecan tree? Oh gosh, it really varies. It really varies. But I mean, if you think of a very mature oak tree, that's probably a comparable size.
14:39Holy crap, I didn't realize they got that big. Oh yeah, no they're huge. They're huge. They're very, very big. A very mature 100 year old. I mean they can, and they, we have some 100 year old trees. Yeah, we do have some, but yeah, they last, they will grow very, very large. Okay, and then the other question I have is, we have wild plum that grows here in Minnesota. Is there wild?
15:06Are there wild pecan trees in the south? Yes, there are. Okay, and are they any good or are they just... Yeah, some people will say they are. I mean, some people definitely do, definitely still eat their, you know, in their yard pecans. I mean, they might not be particularly large or tasty, but yeah, I know a lot of people that collect in their yards, especially down here, and sit outside and crack their own pecans for sure. Okay, I was just curious because...
15:35The wild plums here in Minnesota are about the size of, just full the size of a golf ball. And they're really yummy if you get them at the right time. They're super sweet. But if you don't get them at exactly the right point of ripeness, they're very sour. I was going to say, I was going to think they would be sour, but yeah. Or they've just tipped into the beginning of the fermenting process that happens with fruit.
16:05And so if you don't get them right when they're perfect, you really don't want to eat them. They're kind of yucky. But they make fabulous jam. I bet. We have a mayhaw berry here in Georgia. I don't know if you've heard of mayhaw jelly. No. It's a very tart berry. It makes an excellent jelly. We actually sell some of it in our catalog as well. Just trying to keep it native to Georgia. Yeah. OK. So.
16:33When this started, boy, I hate the way my voice sounds right now. When this started, you guys were giving Peekhands away and now you're a fully fledged business. Correct. So my husband's grandparents met post World War II. And of course, his father already had the farm down here and they lived in Atlanta.
17:03And they moved down here and decided, they tried a couple of different things, to be honest with you. They tried to grow cattle, et cetera. And they started to ship some pecans as gifts and add to their college friends and whatnot in the Northeast. And they figured out, wait a second, a lot of people in the North and other parts of the country do not have access to these fresh pecans. And this was in 1948.
17:32So they figured that out. Like their friends were like, these are amazing. So they started to mail order just pecans, just pecans, just Sunnyland pecans. And that's where Sunnyland Farms was born. And they started to, that's where the business started. And then they morphed into, you know, creating a catalog yearly. And in the catalog they sold, of course, I think originally they sold halves.
17:59pieces and then in-shell. And we still do sell in-shell. A lot of people still like to crack their own. I prefer to buy them completely processed because it's like a tradition to sit around and crack pecans down here. But anyway, so then they started to, well, if they like pecans, then we're gonna start selling pecan pie.
18:22and pecan brittle and pecan pralines and all of those wonderful old-fashioned candies. We're going to make them the candies that we make on the farm just as delicious as our pecans. We're going to use real butter and fresh eggs and all that. It just continued to flourish from there. They started to, like I said before, replanting the groves with better pecans.
18:50really flushing out the shelling and keeping industry standard really. But yeah, they started to sell to my grandmother-in-law, her college buddies in New York. So that's really how it started. Okay. So now you guys, people can order pecans from you on your website, number one, right? Correct.
19:19Are you like selling bagged pecans to grocery stores and stuff too? We tend to not sell to grocery stores and I'll tell you why. Grocery stores really tend to buy the, you know, because pecans are a commodity, like they tend to buy the cheapest of the cheap and they do not shelve them properly. They don't keep them at proper temperature.
19:47And I mean, we would sell anything wholesale, like if you, you know, but even our wholesale is pretty high quality. So I just looked at the back of a Publix pecan bag and those Publix pecans, they're buying from Mexico. So they're trying to buy the, and there's nothing wrong with them. They're just not like the largest highest oil content and they haven't kept them at proper temperature again, which keeps the oil evaporates. So anyway.
20:16We sell wholesale, if you think, we sell our wholesale pecans to other candy companies that want like the best of the best, other food providers. And we've even sold internationally. We've sold our latest. We used to sell a lot to China actually. And then now recently we've sold other places in Europe.
20:44And so we've really fleshed out that wholesale side of the business as well. And especially people nowadays really want high quality things that, that, you know, are cared for from top to bottom. And that's how we sell our pecans. And we actually just opened, this is something that my husband and I've done, opened our first satellite retail store in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
21:11and introducing our pecans to a wider market. And really truly, if you try like a supermarket pecan and you try one of our pecans, you really will see the difference. Okay. That's what I was wondering about because I've bought pecans at grocery stores and I've bitten into them and been like, yeah. Yeah.
21:33Well, they're rancid because they've most likely been, any pecan sitting out in like the fruit section that's not even being refrigerated, they have them by like the croutons really. Yeah. They're rancid because all of the oil is evaporated and they're stale and rancid. Yeah, this may be why I haven't ever been a fan of eating them. Right. Once in a while they're okay, but I'm not getting them all the time. Right.
21:58And honestly, I can say the same thing about any nut. I really love honey roasted peanuts. And I think the only reason I love them is because of the honey roasting, not because of the peanut itself. So I need to get a better quality peanut and pecan, obviously. You have to send me some and you'll be sold for life. I'll be a converse. Not to mention, like pecans have more antioxidants than like a cup of pecans versus a cup of blueberries.
22:26They have more antioxidants than even blueberries. Crazy. Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. So, so on this podcast, I talked to a lot of people who grow produce and we're always talking about how store-bought produce isn't as good as, as like, you know, the stuff that the neighbors grow in their gardens or I grow in my garden. And it hadn't occurred to me that peanuts or I'm sorry, any nut would fall under the same thing that you guys are putting your heart and soul into this. So.
22:56course your product is better. Right. And I think that that is something that's missing, particularly on the American market. I think it's one of the last like really ingredient, farm-grown ingredients that you still just walk by, you know, the grocery store. They have like, you know, the nut plastic thing where you can get like a cup of nuts, you know? And like all of those nuts are like dark, like a real fresh pecan is going to be like light golden brown, not dark, not it's going to be really, really light.
23:26Fresh looking and not like dried up at all. Yeah so it must be really pretty when you have like a bucket of Shell be of very much so very much so for sure Cool. Um, and the other thing I wanted to say is that you sound so I Don't know so warm immersed and so happy in what you're doing when you're talking about this there's a joy in your voice and
23:54I don't think I'm misreading that. I think you're actually enjoying this thing that you're doing. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I grew up, you know, I grew up in mostly cities and my husband's down from here. And when I met him, I just really appreciated the roots that he spoke about this place. And I just think it kind of goes back to a simpler time. And
24:22We're connected to the community in a way that I just, you know, you don't see that often, especially being multi-generational. You know, we're really connected to this community. We really try to give back and we really try to, I mean, usually when we have an employee, we have a really high employee tenure, you know, usually a lifetime employee. So we have, you know, we really are a family, a family business.
24:50And we mean that like from employees to Wilson's whatever, and it's just a different lifestyle. And it is really fulfilling for sure, for sure. We're really glad. I'm really glad that we, and when I met my husband, he was actually in, he was often his 20s doing his own thing. And I asked him, he was in the financial business, and I asked him, will you ever go back? Will you ever move back to the farm? Will you ever?
25:19And he could never say no. He could never say, absolutely not, I'm not going to do that. Like he always had this like look in his eye, like, you know what, you know, after, you know, I've kind of proven myself, because he wanted to get out there, of course, and you know, prove himself, but he would never rule it out. And one thing that he did say was, you know, there's just a connection to the land and the people. And I think that that's, you know, that route, you know, having those routes is so important, especially in this day and age, you know? So yeah, for sure.
25:49Okay, good. I was afraid that I was hearing things, but I didn't think I was because you sounded so happy. Yeah. Okay. So I have probably two more questions. Okay. When do the pecan trees bloom? They bloom in the spring. Yeah. They bloom in the spring and they're beautiful blooms. They bloom in the spring, but then we don't harvest until October normally. And summer is such an important time.
26:18you know, they desperately need that those 40 to 50 inches coming in, you know, of rain. And so if we have a dry summer, we pretty much know what the crop is going to look like. But again, like because of the irrigation that was that was placed, we can, you know, somewhat control it. But, you know, it's you can't control the weather. And, you know, fresh rain will, you know, outproduce irrigation any day. So in the summers when we're really like, we know what we're
26:47we're getting into in the fall by July, normally. Yeah. So what month are you saying for spring that they bloom? Because spring is relative here. Very much so, yeah. I mean, probably like late March. Okay. Yeah. So it's coming. It's coming in a couple months for you guys. It's coming. It is. Okay. Yeah. Our apple trees don't bloom until, oh, at the earliest mid-May. Oh, yeah. And they can...
27:15There's been years where apples don't bloom until June in Minnesota. So that's why I wanted to get an idea because it must be really nice to have spring hit in March. It is, but it means that summer comes so quickly and it's so hot quickly. Yeah. Which they love the pecans, love the heat, so I can't complain. I will say my favorite time in the pecan groves, and if you're ever down in this area of the country, please come because the groves are just beautiful.
27:44Um, is winter. I love walking through the groves when the trees are resting, you know, they're resting and you can just, I don't know, there's just something very peaceful about it in the winter time. Do they lose their leaves at all? Or do they keep them? Okay. So it's just, you can see them, you can see the real mistletoes up in the, you know, the real mistletoes up in the trees. Oh, awesome. They're beautiful. I love that people like try to buy them from us. Can we go out in your groves and cut down some mistletoes in the winter time? You know,
28:14Okay, and then what do the blooms smell like? I mean, clearly if you have 1700 acres, it must smell amazing when they bloom. Yeah, just really, really sweet and grassy, you know, really earthy. They don't smell like particularly fruity or perfumey, but they're very just earthy and grassy and a little bit mossy, I would say. Okay, and are they white? Are they white? Yes.
28:41I know nothing about pecan trees. I know about almond trees a little bit, because I've read about it, but I don't know, pecan trees have been under the radar for me for some reason, probably because they don't grow here. Right. Okay, so what's the future look like for you guys? Are you just going to keep it on, or do you have a plan? Yeah, just really, we're really involved nationwide with the American Pecan Association, and really, like what you just said,
29:11really educating Americans to this indigenous nut. It's one of, it's our pride and joy, and it's something that, just educating more Americans as to what a quality pecan looks like, and more awareness around, again, outside of the, using it as a snacking food, because it's such a healthy food. So it's just really increasing that awareness across the board, for sure. And then,
29:40for us specifically, using that freshness to, you know, just really develop our product line of candies and cakes and things like that, that people are looking for, you know, that homegrown goodness, you know? So that's what we're focused on for the future. Nice. And my last question, which is gonna probably be six different answers for you, is what can pecans be used for? You said you could grind them for flour. What else?
30:06Okay, so pecans can be used, pecans can be used. I love to use them in smoothies. They add just this nutty freshness and they actually really up the nutritional content in any smoothie. I love to use small pecan pieces on chicken. I like to bake chicken and crust it with like a nice pecan crust mixed with a little bit of flour.
30:34And if you really want to up the ante, we use an indigenous gallberry honey, and I like to finish the pecan breasts, the pecan chicken breasts with a little drizzle of honey. So you have that crunch, that saltiness and that sweet. And then again, of course, in baking, I mean, who I just this morning, I'm developed, I develop a lot of our recipes. And just this morning, I'm making a pull apart, like breakfast bread with some pecan pieces.
31:02um, pecans really are so versatile in baking in general. I mean, any kind of cookie or cake adding some pecans just adds like a really nice salty crunch. And one suggestion I would make, um, you know, a lot of people go too sweet in their pecan pies, just back to the, you know, back to the beginning. Um, just make sure you're using the freshest you can find. And also, um, my biggest thing is to make sure you're using salt in your baked goods because
31:29It will, it just, I mean, your baked goods need that season as well. And we use, I just use salted butter in our pecan pie that we sell in our catalog. And people are just like, oh, this pecan pie is so good. And I always tell people it's because we use salted butter in our pecan pie, because you need that flavor contrast with the custard and the pie to make it, you know, if it's too sweet, it's only hitting one note on your palate, right? So.
31:55That's my biggest. So yeah, we get we started with pecan pie. We're finishing with pecan pie, right? Yeah, absolutely. And what most people don't know is that salt tempers sugar, right? Sugar sugar isn't meant to be kick you in the face It's supposed to be a flavor and salt Salt brings out the flavor of sugar, but it kills the overkill right right interesting
32:24Yeah, I don't know why it doesn't. That's why I like it then. Yeah, I don't know how it works. It's science. I know what it is. I just haven't. It just works. Yep. All right, Stacey. Thank you so much for your time tonight. Well, thank you so much. It was such a pleasure and we'll have to send you some of those fresh pecans. I would love that. Yes, ma'am. We'll get on it. All right. You have a great day. All right. Thanks. You too.
 

Homegrown Show with Ben & Nicole

Today I'm talking with Ben at the Homegrown Show with Ben & Nicole. You can follow on Facebook as well.
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
00:00This 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 Ben at the Homegrown Show with Ben and Nicole. Good morning, Ben. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing great. Awesome. So we were just talking. You are in Canada.
00:25And you are in New Brunswick, which is north of Maine, which I knew, but I didn't know for sure. And what do you do? Goodness, I do a lot of different things. I guess you could call us influencers, homesteaders, farmers. I don't like the term influencer, but we do a lot of different things with regards to education from farming content. And we just, in 2020, we decided we wanted to live and try a simpler life. So.
00:53We've been documenting that journey and been able to share it with others ever since. Isn't it fun? Oh, we have, I never grew up on a farm and neither did Nicole. So it's been a crazy whirlwind of a journey. We were fortunate enough in 2020 to be picked up for a small TV show here locally. And it's been able to fund a lot of my antics to be able to buy things like a ton of chickens or goats before we're ready. So being able to document that and film our journey to
01:22learning how to figure that all out has been just chaos and hilarious. Yeah, I'm sure you're entertained every moment of every single day. And I don't do videos because I don't, I don't, I'm not good at it. Number one, I don't like being on video. Number two, but, uh, my husband takes videos here and there of the barn kittens when they're little or the greenhouse construction, when that was happening and he sends them to me and I'm like, I don't know what to do with these. I like.
01:51They're cute, but what do I do with them? So I commend you on your videos because it's hard work to make them. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun being able to document it properly. That's something I even spoke about in a recent YouTube video is just any type of documentation like what you're doing or writing it down is huge for being able to go back and reference because year over year, you don't really feel like you've done very much. But then when you can look back and see whether you've written it down or had a podcast about it.
02:17It's cool to be able to see, oh, I did grow from last year. I did grow from two years ago. And seeing that is just more beneficial to us. Yes, I have to sit down sometime this afternoon and do our end of year recap. I try to do it and have it posted on the first of the year. But I got up yesterday morning to the terrible news from New Orleans about a guy who ran his truck into a crowd of people at a market.
02:44New Year's celebration and I just lost all steam to say anything positive. So I apologized on my Facebook page and said, I'm just not in the right head space, maybe tomorrow. Understandably. So yeah, I just, I felt really weird about being like, so this is all the silly shit we did this year and this happened today, you know? So it was kind of a rough, quiet day here. I don't know why it hit me the way it did, but I'm just real tired of people getting hurt for no reason. It's really hard here in the United States sometimes.
03:14So anyway, I don't want to be a bummer. So I looked at your Facebook page and you do tons of stuff. And if you're above Maine, how far above Maine are you? So we're pretty close to Holton, basically. It'd be about a half hour from our place here to Holton, Maine. Oh, so you're over the border, not by much. Okay. So your growing zone must be like what? Three B or four? I think it's
03:43Four, Nicole is better. I'm more the animal guy. Nicole is better with the vegetables. I just do the labor for her. Oh, well, she's a very lucky woman. Okay, so is it easy? I mean, I know she's the one in charge of that, but is it pretty easy for you guys to keep yourselves stocked in produce?
04:03Yeah, we've been very fortunate, like I said, over the last few years to learn how to do this stuff. So it's this past year, recognize the biggest downfall was our short season. So we built a couple of greenhouses. We were originally just going to build one, but we decided to build two to be able to have basically a seed house to be able to use in the spring. And then to be able to have a secondary tomato house because we've learned that the best thing for
04:28for us is to have as much food as possible and to figure out what grows here as well. But to be able to can and preserve, you really need to have that longer growing season, especially for things like tomatoes and peppers, which don't really grow terribly well here. You can grow them, but to grow them great, you really need the greenhouse. So for us over the past few years, we've really recognized, okay, with our very short growing season, like our last frost is...
04:56early June, generally. I think even last year, our last frost was like middle of June. So being able to recognize when we can actually plant things and get things out and figuring out this year, our biggest plan is to figure out our cropping system. So how to sow things to be able to sow on top of them later in the seasons, so growing peas and beans early, early to be able to have a second production of them as well. So it's just been quite
05:25Difficult it sort of really is because this isn't our background We started back a number of years ago just because we want to know where our food comes from Nicole was a vegan for 10 years I back in college would have been 2016 2017 had a bad experience with some store-bought meat and from then my gut just can't handle it So we've really really just wanted to know where our food comes from. And so part of that is having to learn. Okay, how do we
05:52grow these things ourselves? How do we learn from other people to be able to figure out, okay, in our local area, how easy is it and is it easy? And I tell a lot of people that growing food is pretty easy. Growing a lot of food can be difficult. So it's learning how to grow certain things and how long they take, but throwing seeds in the ground and watching lettuce grow or watching tomatoes and carrots can be relatively non-trivial.
06:19It's when you want to grow a lot and be able to sustain yourself over the wintertime that it gets a little harder. Absolutely. When is the last frost date on average for you? Last? Our first frost in the fall is probably about...
06:37October, first heavy frost, it'd probably be about the first of November. But October is when things would start to get a little bit of frost and that, that way you'd lose some of your more delicate greens and stuff. And some greenhouses. Yeah. Basil and tomatoes really don't like it on that first light frost. They're like, um, excuse me. No. And they try really hard to hang on, but they don't do well. So we are, I'm in Minnesota and we are zone trying to think.
07:07five, might be five B now, I can't remember. And our last frost day is typically anywhere from May 1st to June 1st, it just depends on the season. And in the fall, it could be September for the first light frost, we never know. And so we put in a greenhouse this spring, a hard-sided greenhouse. And we would love to be able to heat it in the wintertime and
07:37the least expensive, most, what's the word I want? Sun powered heating source and it's not necessarily solar panels. Right now we have six IBC totes that are painted black and they're full of water. We got them in too late this year for them to really do their job but they definitely extended our growing season in the greenhouse till November, till mid November which was great. And then
08:06We're hoping to be able to get seeds started in mid February out there because it does get warm as long as it's sunny. So that was the objective, but I would love to be growing tomatoes in January in the greenhouse. I think that would be really cool. And what you were saying about trying to grow a lot of food to sustain yourself for the winter.
08:26It is, it's a lot. It's a lot of work and a lot of planning and a lot of looking at the forecast for a month ahead of time and being like, okay, so what are we doing? And we've tried to do it too. And we did pretty well up until this year. This summer was bad here. And so we did not put away our 80 or 90 pints tomato sauce like we did the last two years. We put away maybe 30 because our tomatoes did not do well at all. So I understand what you're saying.
08:55So tell me about your animals since you're the one that handles them. Oh goodness. Uh, we started with rabbits. Like we sort of went through all of the typical homesteadery animals that you kind of decide that it's super easy. You can be self-sufficient on rabbit meat and chickens with eggs. And we discovered that the rabbits weren't as fun or as easy to take care of. As we really thought, um, rabbits, if you're not terribly aware or anybody listening, they will die basically at the drop of a hat.
09:24So we were pretty devastated our first year and we had, I think we had a weasel break in, but I was away for work and Nicole called me and said, you need to come home because there's a lot of dead rabbits. And it's just a lot of needless killing. We've dealt with predators over the past few years, but we've really tried to discover what works best for us and our land, because we don't have very much land here. We've got three quarters of an acre, but we're able to use about another quarter acre from my uncle across the street.
09:51And that's largely where we keep our animals. So we've wished we could get into having a cow, having a dairy cow, and then maybe some beef. But for us, what we've been able to do is we have chickens and ducks. We have two goats now, and we have five sheep that I was supposed to butcher. And then we just decided that we kind of like them. So they've survived thus far. And we have four, five pigs.
10:20that we got two, I don't know how this continues to happen to us, the sort of chaos that just we attract, but in the spring of last year, of 24, I guess, we got two female pigs and then three months, three weeks and three days later, we had one give birth and we were very confused because we got two female pigs and we had a litter of five figlets pop out. Come to find out she was pregnant, even though she was quite young.
10:47And so we've been able to keep those over the last couple of months and we'll probably end up butchering those and selling off some of the meat, but it's been fun to learn about all of those animals. My, my favorite currently is probably our goat just for the possibility of having the milk and meat of being able to make cheese and yogurts and other dairy has been huge and really beneficial for us because the price of.
11:11milk here has been outlandish. And so being able to have that for the boys for their smoothies and for other foods has just been such a huge blessing for us. How much is a gallon of milk in Canada? Oh, I haven't bought milk in ages. It is $8, $10 ish. Canadian dollars? Yeah. So that what the Canadian dollar is.
11:3969 cents US so it would be almost half that but still it's been pretty ridiculous and especially the wages here Don't really keep up and then taxation and that's a whole other political issue. We could dive into but Uh-huh, we're not going to because I don't talk about politics on the podcast because it just makes things less crazy Here in in Minnesota our milk is going anywhere from five to seven dollars a gallon At the grocery store, that's about comparable then
12:08Mm-hmm, which is ridiculous considering we could get it for about three dollars and fifty cents a year and a half ago Yeah I'm I'm so over it like I wish that things would just ease up a little bit on this inflation kick because it's killing everybody It doesn't matter where in the world you are
12:27So, and that's about as far as I want to get on that topic because I have so many swear words that I'm not allowing myself to say on my podcast ever. And there's a whole lot wrapped around the inflation issue right now. Okay. So are you going to have baby goats? Are you just going to have the two and keep those? Yeah. We started originally with Nigerian dwarves. We started, oh goodness, last year, year before last with
12:54four Nigerian dwarves. We butchered one that was the boy for meat and he impregnated three girls that we brought into the spring of 2024. They all had babies. One had triplets, one had twins, and one had a single. It was a new experience for us. Animal husbandry is not something that we're well versed in. It was really cool to be able to see the babies being born and experience that with those moms. Then we sold those girls and the babies
13:24upgrade, I guess you could say, into some bigger goats. We wanted more milk for less work with one bigger goat. And then just having fewer animals around just made it easy. So we have a La Mancha right now that is our milk goat, and then a baby boar that was born this spring. And he, his mom unfortunately passed shortly after a childbirth due to some complications. So we've been keeping him sort of as breeding stock. He's a beautiful boy. And so we're hoping to have some babies pop out here in the next
13:54month or two from the La Mancha potentially. And we'll see, depends on whether or not he was actually able to get the job done. Uh huh. Yes, it's always a crapshoot, isn't it? Whether the boy did his job or not. The reason I asked about the babies is because I don't know if you've listened to the podcast at all, but I love baby goats more than any animal on earth. And don't tell my dog because she thinks she's my favorite, but I love baby goats.
14:20And we do not have any livestock here right now. We have two barn cats and a dog. That is it. We got rid of our chickens months ago because they were lazy and we were getting three eggs from nine chickens. And my husband said, I don't want to feed these chickens through the winter if they're not giving us eggs. And I said, that's fine. Cause I don't know what feed prices are like where you are, but they've gone up too. It's not great. So I would love to have goats, but my husband is not so into it. And he's like,
14:50don't want to and I asked him why and he said honey I love your heart. He said but if we get goats you're gonna want to have baby goats from the mama goats and invariably some of those baby goats are gonna die and it's gonna break your heart and I can't watch it and I was like I love you too and you're right so we're not gonna have any goats we're done.
15:12We're not ever going to have goats because he's right. I will lose my mind if a baby goat dies. I can't handle it. Yeah. Death has been one of the hardest parts that we've had to learn to deal with. Fortunately, Nicole and I are both versed in the reality of that now after the first couple of years. But I remember I even was talking about it recently that the first rooster I had to kill, which roosters are such a regular cull animal on a farm that I just remember how brutal that was.
15:42a life for no reason. But yeah, when it comes to baby animals, they just, they pass so easily. We lost one baby this spring, but I think personally I'd be more apt to have baby lambs because they're so fuzzy as opposed to little goats. But you're right. Having those little guys running around and trotting around about four to six weeks is when they start to get the, the really the cutest. And they're a lot more mobile.
16:08Yeah, my only real interaction with baby goats was within the first week of their life because my friend's parents raised goats. And she would call me and say, there's baby goats. Will your mom bring you over? And I'm like, yep. And we'd go over and they would be at that age where they're very small and you can just hold them in your arms like a baby and pet them. And they don't, they don't really fight you because they're not afraid.
16:31I would just sit and hold a baby goat for an hour in my lap and just pet it and kiss its nose and talk to it and play with its ears. And my friend was used to having goats around all the time and she's like, why are you so in love? And I'm like, I can't explain it. I just am.
16:49So that was my favorite thing to do in the spring from the time I was about 15 until I was about 18 was go see her baby goats. Yeah, there's really nothing better than seeing life be born. And we've been trying to be really strategic about us keeping animals because they can be, like that can be heartbreaking when you lose the babies, but then it's also the ability, like you say, for feed costs can get outlandish. And we've been fortunate that there's a program here called LOOP.
17:18that they take salvaged food from the grocery stores that's gone off that they can't either give it to the food bank or they can't sell. And so there's a farm every day that goes up to our grocery store and collects all the produce and all the food scraps that's able to feed our animals. So they eat lettuce and pineapple and from goats to pigs to everybody gets a little piece of stuff from the grocery store. So it's been huge in being able to cut down on the feed bill. That's fantastic. I'm so glad that
17:46that they do that. I'm sure that if we really wanted to dig and scrape and figure out how to make it cost, there's a word, make it worth spending the money to get animals, we probably could do it. But my husband has a full time job and I'm really not into mucking stalls and stuff. So we've just made the decision that we'll get chickens in the spring and we might try getting rabbits again. We tried rabbits.
18:15the second year we were here. We've been in our new place for four years. And our rabbits didn't get the memo they were supposed to procreate. So we were feeding rabbits for no reason. And that was the end of that. We were like, no, we're not feeding animals that don't earn their keep. So we don't have rabbits anymore. But we will get chickens again, because I really missed the eggs. The store bought eggs are not great compared to the eggs we were getting from our chickens. So
18:43So I'm stuck. What am I, what else can I ask you? Oh, so you said that you guys got into this because you had some, you had some health issues because of some bad meat. Is that right? Yeah. Uh, back in, what was I saying? It was 2016, 2015, 16, 17, somewhere in there. I bought meat from Walmart and it was just one of those simple things that you just.
19:07Kind of, I was in college and bought a pack of hamburger and then I ate it and it just ruined my stomach. And I was like, that's weird. And I tried to eat some more and it's still like, it was cooked well. It was fine. Seasoned well, tasted good, but it sat like a rock in my gut. And then I tried again. And since then I have not been able to eat any store bought meat. Like it's been crazy that any store bought meat that I consume, uh, will just ruin my gut.
19:33So we've started to go, whether it's our own meat or with a local butcher, to be able to get local meat because that just sits a lot better. And then it's just knowing where our food comes from. I think it's really no secret that our food system is kind of messed up. And we've really tried to take notice of how much we can grow, where we can grow it. And Nicole was vegan for 10 years,
20:03over the last few years that she was vegan, that her body was starting to change and she was starting to have troubles too. So she wanted to change in her diet. And we just really wanted to discover where all of our food comes from. And for us, that is largely knowing that we can grow it and we can figure this out. Thankfully that given my job and what we're able to do, we're able to do this full time. But that is where we found that community really comes in handy.
20:32people have only the grocery store to be able to go to. Like you say, there's really sub-par food, unfortunately, sub-par eggs and meat. And so we've really been keen on trying to educate people on knowing where your farmers are, knowing who your farmers are, and being able to have that community where you can either barter with somebody or you're able to find somebody that, hey, I don't have chickens anymore. Do you have eggs or do you have meat or do you have tomatoes? Because mine didn't do well. So whether it's you can't afford to grow something
21:02able to, don't know how. It's being able to have an awesome community of people together that you don't have to be a one-man island or a one-family island. You can really rely on your community around you to be able to help you out. Yeah. And in them helping you out, you're helping them out too. It's such a beautiful exchange of support and resources. Oh, absolutely. And
21:28As far as I really struggle to talk about sort of the factory farming grocery store thing versus your small scale family farms and stuff, because everybody kind of gets upset with regards to whenever you speak ill of a farmer. But I think it's really no secret that factory farming practices and modern agriculture is really detrimental to our ecosystems. It's really detrimental to our food systems. There's been a lot of studies that have come out over the last number of years that speak to the benefits of organic produce and, and how.
21:58whether animals are raised different or whether your produce is raised different and grown differently. Um, you're getting less nutrition in your factory farmed food than you would in food that you're able to either grow yourself or grow organically, uh, just based on the different cultivars. And so the more that you're able to eat real and good food, and the more that you're able to, uh, eat locally, the better your
22:25going to be off and the better you're going to feel as well. And I think that people really struggle because over the last 20 to 30 years, the grocery store has become so ubiquitous that that is where your food comes from. I'm working on a documentary right now called Eat Real Food. And I went out and interviewed a number of people just really quickly on the street to ask, do you know where your food comes from? And so many people either would say no, or would just say the store. And they don't know they're farmers anymore. There's that disconnect.
22:54There's the middle men in the middle that, you got to be careful here to not to go political, but the middle men are making a ton of money and making a lot of profits while the farms are suffering and they're having to cut corners and they're having to use a lot of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to be able to get the yields that they need to be able to pay their bills. If farmers had their say and the food was able to be sold at the price that it was valued at.
23:22It would be much better off for our farmers, but I think that more and more people, if farmers were in charge, would be better off because they'd have the potential to actually create something and grow something that farmers really have a passion for rather being told by these multinational conglomerates that it's not being told what they need to do, if that makes sense. Yes, absolutely. Yes. And that's not political. It's just truth. It's just the way it is right now.
23:52I think I missed something in the beginning or I didn't ask. Is this your job? Is what you're doing your job or do you have a job off farm as it were? Yeah, so I was very fortunate in 2020 to pitch our first television program. We were able to get a little bit of money for that. So I started out as a commercial videographer, did a lot of video work for TV programs and social media for some companies and over the past few years
24:21We've been able to generate enough revenue via our social media and TV to be able to do really projects that I want to do. We've got a couple of TV shows that I work on that are still passion projects, but mostly the farm and our content that we produce on social media is paying our bills. We've really pared down what we do over the past few years and really, uh, taking our bills as low as they can be so that we're able to go forward with whatever we want to do. And this year it's trying to grow as much food for.
24:51us and our community to be able to sell a little bit because we've discovered our passion for farming and gardening to be able to produce good high quality food for people. Awesome. So when you say TV shows, is that like local to Canada TV shows or is that TV shows that people everywhere can watch? There are a lot of TV shows that people can watch.
25:12Local to Canada for one of them. So we've really tried to broad spectrum scatter shot, get as many people as we can. We've distributed through Justin Rhodes, Abundance Plus. We've distributed through Canada's Wild TV, which they have a streaming app now. So with the internet, you can basically get anything anywhere. But through television, the way we get paid is through
25:40They don't have exclusive rights, so we're always looking to expand our knowledge and share with other people more places, whether it's Patreon or YouTube, a little bit where we share as well. And so for television specifically, it depends on what it means to some people because TV now means Netflix or Amazon to some people, whereas traditional television, which is largely what we're on with commercials and everything, is what pays the bills for now. Okay. That's what I was wondering about.
26:10And Justin Rhodes is one person I've been trying to get hold of to see if he would talk to me on the podcast. And I cannot figure out how to get hold of him. I've emailed, I've Facebook messaged, I've everything and have not gotten a single response from any of it. He must be terribly busy in his life. Oh, he's got so much going on. And especially with the last year with what happened in North Carolina has just been crazy. Yeah. Didn't his place get hit real bad?
26:38From the videos he shared, it looked like it pretty, not as terrible as some of the places, but definitely he lost quite a bit there. Yeah. Yeah, it's been a rough year in the States. I'm telling you, the weather's been insane. People have been doing crazy things. I don't know what's going on in the world right now. Okay, so I had no idea that you were so deep into the broadcasting of stuff. It's been a weird week here.
27:08I had a terrible migraine over the weekend, so I was down for two days. Then got up this morning and my husband came down and I said, are you okay? Because he coughed and he said, no. In this really weird voice and I was like, are you okay? He said, I'm sick. He said, I've got a fever of 101. I was like, oh, okay. So I spent the morning making orange juice and figuring out like.
27:35like chicken stock for him so that he has stuff to drink is even feel like eating. I was like, Well, there goes my time to dig into Ben and, and Nicole in Canada this morning. But either way, this has worked out great because I just was able to wing it and ask what I wanted to ask when I wanted to ask it. So what's your plan? Because we have like three minutes left. So what's your plan for the future? We really want to continue to
28:00I mean, I think everybody's plan is they want to make as much money as they can doing what they love, which is what our goal really is rather than I have no ideas. I don't want to get rich. I want to be able to pay my bills and be able to grow a ton of food. People say to follow your passion and the money will follow. We've really tried to do that with what we grow and what we do here, whether it's entertaining or educating people, we love being able to share what we do and being able to share our food and the discovery of real good.
28:29food. Like the peppers you buy at the grocery store don't taste anywhere near what our farms locally or what we're able to grow. So to be able to share that with people has been so incredible over the past few years. So we're hoping to be able to scale that up and do more of it and educate and teach more people. Nice. And I'm so glad that I'm not the only one who thinks the stuff we grow in our garden tastes better than what we buy at the store because at first I was just like, maybe it's just pride of ownership.
28:57Maybe I'm just assuming and projecting that my lettuce tastes better than the lettuce from the store or my basil tastes better. But I bought basil from the store this summer because we didn't have any ready to pick yet and it tasted like pepper, like black pepper. And I was like, basil doesn't taste like black pepper. What is this? And then our basil finally was big enough to cut some and I was like, oh.
29:23Yes, that's what basil is supposed to taste like. So I'm really glad that it's not just me thinking that the stuff that we grow tastes better. Well, there's some really interesting studies that have come out over the last couple of years. I have a bachelor's degree in biology too. And so I've been keen on researching why. I was one of those kids that would just say, why, why, why to every question or to every sort of response for people. And so I've...
29:47just been so curious as to why those things are the way they do. The reason in large part is quantifiable is because the stuff that is grown from the store is largely, like I mentioned, a different cultivar. It's a different type of basil, maybe even just slightly genetically dissimilar. What it means is that the micronutrients and phytonutrients, those plants are being able to suck up, whether it's the fruit, whether it's your grapes or tomatoes, that they're able to suck up and be able to have in different amounts.
30:16So one study I was looking at showed that the broccoli of years ago would have a, at least 40% reduction of the amount of nutrients, uh, then their counterparts that were grown on factory farms or large farms, like you could grow, or like you could buy in a grocery store. So similar for that, that basil, the stuff that you're able to grow yourself is likely not grown with artificial nitrogen or fertilizers, not grown with pesticide, not sprayed. Uh, and so you're able to have
30:44Quantifiably better tasting, probably more sugars coming up from your soil because it hasn't been terribly used year after year. So there's a reason for those things. And it's really cool to be able to discover and like I've said, educate other people on why this really is. Why does food taste different than it used to? Because some people, if you're old enough to remember what actual food at the grocery store tasted like, it used to taste like real basil. That's why you remember what basil tastes like other than your homegrown stuff.
31:14But it's just not the same anymore. And I feel bad for this next generation of people that have only tasted store-bought grocery store foods because that is truly not what tomatoes or peppers or basil tastes like at all. Yeah. They're going to be really confused when they get slammed in the face with what a tomato actually tastes like. I do want to say though, there is a place in Minnesota that grows tomatoes and they are the closest tasting tomato I can get.
31:43tomatoes in the wintertime. And they do a fabulous job. And they are a big tomato growing company. They grow them in the winter? Yeah. Yeah. It's big boy or something. Can't remember the name of the place right now. But I actually am going to send them an email and be like, thank God for you because you're the only tomato place that sells tomatoes I can stand to eat in the wintertime.
32:11They're really, really good. They taste like a tomato is supposed to taste because the tomato is supposed to have some sweet to it and some acid to it. And most Sorobot tomatoes, even in the summertime, suck. They don't taste like anything. And these guys that grow these at their greenhouses do a fabulous job. I don't know what kind of alchemy or magic they're working, but they do a great job. So there are some big companies
32:40job and don't destroy things in the process. So I got to throw that in there. Yeah, absolutely. I'd be really curious to know what their process is for fertilization. I wonder if it's a lot of organic compost. It would not surprise me at all because compost is magic. Compost is wonderful. We have three compost bins at our place that are big. Like my husband can use our small tractor bucket to flip the compost, you know, to stir it.
33:10And we use that in our garden every year and it just does amazingly well. And especially when we have the chicken poop thrown in the compost, because for anyone who doesn't know, chicken poop is the best fertilizer ever. It's great. High in nitrogen content. Have you thought about adding your compost to your greenhouse? I saw somebody recently that they were able to do a little bit of plumbing.
33:34to bring the water like the water you'd have in your IBC totes to be able to bring the water through the compost pile as it's decomposing to be able to heat those totes for more heating mass. I don't know because like the veggies and stuff are your wife's thing, the greenhouse and the heating the greenhouse is my husband's thing, but I will mention that to him because he'll wanna think about it.
33:58Because that's something we've noticed this year, just having the greenhouse with birds and stuff is we have one greenhouse that has the birds in them because, like you said, chicken poo is amazing for the garden. So we're going to scoop out most of that. Some of that latent nitrogen is still going to stay there, but we're going to take the birds out, put them in their chicken coop after that and plant the tomatoes there, but in our naked greenhouse without any chickens in it, it is about five to 10 degrees colder basically at all times than the one with the deep litter method.
34:28chickens and that have their poo decomposing there sort of underneath. Which is really cool. Yeah. And you, it's so weird. Like I don't want to take too much of your time, but we had no idea that the fact that you have, um, wood shavings or straw or whatever in your, in your chicken coop and the chickens are going to the bathroom in it and then scrap, scratching it down into it. So it is decomposing.
34:54and turning into compost, we didn't know that that would throw heat until we started doing the deep, deep litter or whatever you said method for the greenhouse. I can't talk. For the chicken coop in the wintertime. And yeah, it was a good 10 degrees warmer in the chicken coop than it was outside all the time in the wintertime. So it's a really good way to throw heat. I will mention that to him when he's not feeling like crap because he's not going to want to talk about it today.
35:21But yes, I will definitely mention that to him because we're trying to figure out a way to do this so that we can have tomatoes in January in the greenhouse. This is very important to me. It's going to happen in the next five years if it kills us. So Ben, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. No, thank you. This has been awesome. We'll have to do this again at the end of the season to see if you're gonna be able to carry those tomatoes through. Yes, I'm really...
35:49From your lips to God's ears that this summer goes well because we did really bad this past summer. And I'm so happy that it's 2025 because we have hope for the next growing season. Farming is all about faith and hope, right? Oh yeah. You're beholden to a lot of the weather and the weather changes and the chaos that that entails. Yeah, I'm just hoping that chaos eases up this year because last year sucked. I'm so ready for it to not be bad.
36:19I'm ready for like my herb garden to go in that didn't get put in last year. I'm ready for the first tomato at the end of June. I'm ready for good cucumbers. I think I had three cucumbers last year. That was it. So, yes, very excited. We're already looking at seed buying here in the next month. So, all right, Ben, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it and you have a great rest of your day. Thank you. You too.
 
 

Acres U.S.A.

Today I'm talking with Taylor at Acres U.S.A. You can follow on Facebook as well.
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
00:00This 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 Taylor at Acres USA. Good morning, Taylor. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing well. How are you doing? I'm great. You're in Wisconsin? Yes. Did Acres USA start in Wisconsin? No. It's...
00:28It started in Kansas City and then moved to Austin, Texas. And then the company that acquired it from the founders had moved it to Colorado and that's where we ended up buying it from and then moved it to Wisconsin. Okay, cool. All right. So, tell me about yourself and Acres USA because no one who hasn't heard about it probably knows what it is. So, tell me all about it.
00:56Yeah, well, Acres USA was founded back in 1971 and the founder was Charles Walters, who truly was a visionary and he was inspired by his youth when he was a farmer in Kansas and then he ended up becoming an economist. So he believed from early on that farming had become disconnected from nature and it was becoming destructive to the soil and human health and the environment.
01:25So through Acres USA, he began to champion the principles of ecological agriculture and published some groundbreaking research by soil scientists, farmers, and thought leaders like Dr. William Albrecht. And then over the decades, Acres USA grew from just a magazine into a full movement. And we published books, host conferences, have digital resources. And the goal is to...
01:53empower farmers to work with nature and also profit from it. So today we remain committed to Charles Walter's original mission and that's to prove that ecological farming is not only sustainable but also economically sound. And I think that's always kind of a key part of Acres USA is, you know, we talk about ecological principles but we also focus on the economics behind it.
02:23Is that right? Correct. Okay. How did that happen? Well, that's kind of a long story. That's okay. We've owned it for just over a year now. I grew up in southwest Wisconsin and did not have much agricultural background at all. I always liked land though. My first introduction to land was through hunting.
02:51And I kind of have a little bit of an obsessive personality. So I was kind of obsessed with hunting and interacting with the land. I became a police officer when I was 20 and that was the first career that I jumped into. I knew, you know, shortly into that, that it probably wasn't going to be able to get me into a position to actually buy my own farm or have my own land to manage myself. So.
03:21I jumped into the entrepreneurship world, learned about business. When I was 25, I moved back in with my parents and said I was going to make a go of it in the business world. And then two years later, we were able to buy a farm. And while we had that farm under contract, the initial idea was still revolved around farming or revolved around hunting. And I knew I kind of wanted to create a.
03:49a media company that talked about managing land and interacting with land because I did love – I've always loved just interacting with land and manipulating it and doing different things with it. I found Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown and Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shepard and I got bit by the regenerative agriculture movement and I realized Mark was actually just 20 minutes from me.
04:19So I started, I probably listened to his book that winter five different times and I would just drive by his farm and try to figure out what all he was talking about in that book. And finally, I just knocked on his door and Mark and I have been working together ever since and Mark is, you know, like I said, the author of Restoration Agriculture which is probably the highest selling book that Acres USA has.
04:49So I got introduced to Acres USA, bought a ton of books, and that's how I began my journey into regenerative agriculture. My business world from the side had kind of morphed into marketing agencies and working with tech to help business owners create books and courses and events, but it was completely separated from agriculture.
05:17COVID happened, that business kind of took a little bit of a hit just because the majority of our clients were pretty affected by COVID. So I jumped into real estate, took our agency and began doing more of a local type marketing services and then became a realtor specializing in working with land and helping people find regenerative.
05:46or find conventional type farms with the plan of transitioning into organic or regenerative type practices. And Mark was always kind of in my ear because I had the experience with books and courses and different things that, you know, he kept pushing me towards this Acres USA idea. So it took about two years and of back and forth and negotiations and we finally acquired it last December. So we've been running it for about a year now.
06:16And that's how we landed with Acres USA. Wow. That is a lot of pivoting going on there. And I'm assuming you're in your 30s? Yeah, I'm 31. Yeah. That's a lot of things in 10 years. Sorry, not 20 years. Yeah, it's kind of like every different little pivot has led to these different things and put me in a position to...
06:44where I'm confident we can run a business like this. So every little thing throughout my life has given me either different experiences or perspective to be in a position to do this. Well, I think that's awesome. Not very many people your age have the, I don't know, luck, insight, brilliance to make those pivots to get to the situation that you're in.
07:14My dog is yelling at me. She'll it doesn't matter. She's always in the background. Um, So I have questions about the actual magazine because as I'm sure you've heard Print is dead, but print is not actually dead. So how there is a print version of the magazine. Yes, correct. Yep, and
07:37How is it doing? Because I looked at your website and I see that you share some of the articles on the website, but not everything. So how is the print magazine doing? Yeah, the first thing that we did last year was actually get the articles online. So anyone who has a print subscription gets access to the website. It's similar to newspapers that have articles and there is a paywall function. We release four to five articles a month that are free to anyone.
08:07and then the rest of them are reserved for our subscribers. So we have a digital option along with the print option. If we weren't in this specific niche, I would probably be a little bit more concerned about the print just because yes, in general, the print magazine world is struggling. The paper world is struggling. All of our printers and folks that are in that world, they don't seem to be having a very fun time.
08:36But we also have a little bit of a unique audience in the sense that our folks do tend to stay a little bit more disconnected from technology. And we have a plain community that is the fastest growing population in our country that only consumes information through print still. So that's part of our big plan to expand that audience.
09:04while also then giving all the digital offers that come from the magazine. Because the magazine is really a content-making machine, and you're forced to, you know, find these articles, find these stories on a monthly basis. So our goal is just to make sure that we offer those on digital avenues, but then also continue to support the folks who consume things in print. Okay. And how do you find your writers? Are you...
09:33Are you open to freelance writers or do you have staff writers or how does it work? We have a main editor who works with us, Paul Meyer. And he, well luckily that was a thing that we inherited that was actually moving pretty well. It's a good system. So we have a Rolodex of writers that have written for Acres USA for a long time. So we kind of rotate through them.
10:03four to five writers that will put a monthly piece together in specific type of areas that we're talking about. But yeah, we have freelance writers that if you ever have an article idea or something you'd like to submit, you can submit it to Paul. His email is editor at acresusa.com. He sifts through those ideas, matches them into the specific months of what we're talking about in the magazine. And if it doesn't...
10:32hit the actual print. That's also the good thing about the online articles is we end up publishing any type of overflow that doesn't hit the print online. Nice. You have just made every freelance writer's day in saying that because it's really difficult to break into writing for magazines. I have done it. I don't write right now, but I have written for some magazines and trying to get your foot in the door as a freelance writer.
11:00is a lot of work and a lot of patience and a lot of sad. So I'm really happy that you shared that because one of the things I've learned this past year about homesteaders and farmers and ranchers is they have stories and experience to share. And they don't quite realize that they could share it in a magazine if they knew how to get to it. So hopefully... Yeah. And that's something that we're trying to bring.
11:30a lot of just farmer type stories. I'd say right now we're publishing a lot more agronomy type columns and we do have a little bit of the high level science where a lot of these articles are even way over my head. But we do want to find those farmers that have a story and also if you mean if you're a freelance writer and you know some of these farmers too, a lot of the time they just need help getting their ideas out of their head and onto paper.
11:59That's where our editing team comes in handy too, because myself included, I'm no special writer, but I will kind of throw up ideas on a paper and it turns into a nice article. That's because of our editing team. Editors are the miracle of every print, everywhere. Yes. I should have gone to school to be an editor. I am.
12:23terrible about reading and just being thrown out of what I'm reading because there's something not right in what I'm reading. It drives me insane. Okay. So my podcast is about homesteaders and farmers and ranchers and people who grow things, whether it's plants or animals. And I try to throw in a topic that is adjacent to that now and then because I think it keeps it interesting. And I just, I don't know, I saw Acres USA and I was like, huh.
12:53That's something I haven't really delved into is a magazine that puts out stories about this stuff that I'm hearing about every day. But it sounds like you're also a publishing company. So what books have been put out? Yeah, we have 127 books that we've published. Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shepard is probably one of the most widely known ones. We also published...
13:22the Albrecht series, which Albrecht is kind of the first person that talked about mineral optimization in soil where if we optimize our minerals in the soil, you know, we can accomplish a lot of the same things that we end up doing with synthetic fertilizers without the chemicals. From that, people like Gary Zimmer, the biological farmer, is one of our books that we've published
13:52a form that's easier for folks to consume in today's age. And we have a laundry list of them. Charles Walters, our founder, obviously was an exceptional writer. I think if anyone sees some clips from our conferences past year, you had Joel Salton breaking down into the tiers just talking about how moved he would be by Charles Walters writing. So his name is on...
14:21I think 18 to 20 different book titles where he ended up just speaking with some of these farmers and people that were in the ag world doing these things and help them get a book written. So, we publish a broad spectrum of things. Most of it's evolved around ecological farming practices, but we're in the biodynamic world, radionic world, homesteading world.
14:51you know, 350 titles from either self-published authors or other publications. So our Rolodex of books is pretty large on our site and it's all in the name of organic and ecological farming. Okay. You mentioned radio, radionomic, is that how you said that? Radionics. What is that? I have not heard that one yet. It's kind of a...
15:20It's a parallel idea, similar to biodynamics. I'm not the person to give you the lowdown on it. We just have these subsets of practices. I think anybody in this world usually finds an avenue that they find themselves in. We try to carry all those different types of ideas.
15:49Some people might call it a little bit of witchcraft, but I think it's important that if people are getting results from things to allow their ideas to flourish and allow the people who consume that information to try it for themselves, you never know what people can get results with. It's another sub-segment of it's similar to biodynamics. Okay. I'll have to Google it. That's what I'll do.
16:15at later today. It was a rough weekend around here. I had a terrible migraine all weekend. So I'm just getting my brain back today because when that happens, I have no brain. I'm just like honey, honey, honey, don't talk to me. My husband, it's not going to go well. Just I'm going to go lay down, leave me alone. So later today or tomorrow, I will look up
16:41It's amazing to me how often Joel Salatin's name comes up with people I talked to on this podcast. I interviewed him back months ago. Fantastic guy. He's, he's so kind, but he's also a wealth of knowledge. And it's so fun to hear other people say that he's been part of whatever they're doing. Yeah. I'm, I mean, he, Acres was the first place that Joel got a start.
17:09So he was one of our keynotes at the conference. He talked about how the pinnacle for him was, I think it was in 1988, he finally got a chance to speak at an Acres conference. And that's kind of what Acres has been for a lot of these people. They're super well known. They took different paths. Like Joel self-published all of his books, but he always has been a big part of the Acres community. And we kind of brought him back into it once we purchased it.
17:39Because Joel has a little bit of controversy that surrounds him and, you know, it's not always the worst thing in the world. But his experience and the things that he's done for this movement, you know, it's hard to find someone who's done more. So he's an important part of this movement and he has an important history. He sure does, more important than I think he even wants to claim. He's very humble in a lot of ways.
18:09When I talked to him, I said, did you ever expect to become this famous? And there was this very self-deprecating chuckle out of him. And he was like, well, no, no, I did not. So I don't think, I don't think any of them did, you know, no one, because we are, we are in a time, you know, for me to have this company now it's easy because these topics are the cool topics to talk about. Well, when these guys came up, they were like the back room secretive type meetings that everyone sucked their nose up at and thought they were crazy.
18:39So they weren't exactly like the cool thing to talk about all through the 70s, 80s and 90s. Yeah, they were rabble rousers. Yeah, yeah. So we have it easy and I don't think any of these guys thought they would become what they are, but they are. They're in the centerpiece of one of the most important movements we have as civilization. Yes, absolutely. And it's always...
19:04Like I knew about a lot of this stuff before I started this podcast. I knew a little bit about a lot of this. And as I've talked to people and learned things from them, because it's the best part about having a podcast is I learned so much from everyone who talks with me, is it's so obvious to me that this all makes sense. Because if you work with nature and not against nature, nature is going to provide for you. And
19:31How we got away from it is just beyond me.
19:36Well, it was in the name of industrialization and efficiency. People went into the industrial movement in the 40s and 50s. As a society, we went to more of high production driving the economy. In order for us to feed the world without having a large percentage of the people making their own food, this is kind of what came of it.
20:05And you, you know, if you look at it from the perspective of these farmers is when someone walks up to you after farming for 25 years and they hand you this bottle of magic potion that you pour over your land and all of a sudden your corn crop turns into, you know, double what it used to produce without any information on really the effects of what that is coming from that. You know, any person probably would be easily sucked into that.
20:35And, you know, I think that's what happened is we pushed – we pushed – well, it became science. It became, you know, chemistry type farming. And, you know, we pushed more yields, more yields, more yields. Unfortunately, the profit thing never got drug with the yields thing. And that cut out a lot of small time farmers and it drove them away from the farm. And it's drove…
21:03you know, just higher production, lower margin. And you have these giant corporations that are part of that, that are really the ones that are making a lot of the money. Yes, and one of the things that I've been told more than once is that if you wanna be a rich farmer, you need to start rich. Yeah, I...
21:30Yeah, it's, I mean, that kind of is the way that things are going. But you know, you have to define rich, like what is rich, having a bunch of money in a bank account or actually being, you know, because I feel pretty rich every day when I go out and move my cattle and feel pretty connected to exactly, you know, how our foods are being produced. You know, our family consumes probably about 60% of the food, definitely 90% of the protein.
21:59that we eat because we have cattle, hogs, and chickens. So I feel pretty rich when I crack open an egg from our chickens versus buying store bought eggs and seeing the difference. I mean, even the high end organic, so to speak, free range eggs, crack one of those open and then crack one that you have on your homestead and it's, you know, I feel pretty rich.
22:24Yeah, we're feeling kind of poor right now. We got rid of our chickens a couple months ago because they were being lazy and they were getting old and the eggs were not coming in the way they should have been. And my husband was like, I don't want to feed the chickens through the winter if we're getting like three eggs from 12 birds. And I said, that's fine. It's fine. We just get more chickens in the spring. That's why you always have to plan a year ahead. So you get that new flock in the spring and then they start laying.
22:51right about the right time when your older flock start taking vacation. Uh-huh. Yes. And we didn't do that. And I'm kind of regretting our choice, our life choice regarding the chickens because we hadn't bought store-bought eggs in forever. And I'm sure there are people who really think that store-bought eggs are fine and they're just as good as eggs from your own chickens, but they're not as good. And I'm kind of angry. Not once you get exposed to that.
23:19Kind of angry about it. We bought four dozen brown eggs from the grocery store and I haven't eaten a single one. I'm just like, no, you guys can have them. I don't want them. I'll go without eggs for a little bit. It's okay. So yeah, eggs come up a lot. Chickens come up a lot on this podcast, clearly, obviously, because chickens are the gateway drug to everything else.
23:45Chickens are really important. The other thing that's going on right now, as I'm sure you're well aware of, is the bird flu thing that's happening. And I can't believe how expensive eggs are at the grocery store right now too. Yeah, I think my wife had to buy some around Christmas too, just because our chickens weren't producing enough. I think she made some egg bakes. And yeah, I think what organic eggs right now are $6, $7.
24:15or six dollars a dozen and conventional is like four. So we're not so crazy now asking the prices that the homestead type egg producers ask. Yes, and that's my other life choice regret right now is that we got rid of our chickens just when egg prices spiked. So that was kind of dumb too. But it's okay. We'll get more in the spring. Yeah.
24:44Chickens are a tough thing to, I mean, you can see it. Chickens are the easiest thing to test out in a type of business model where then you see that you really do need scale to then get in the positive. So I, you know, we've reduced our flock as well just to make sure that we have eggs, but it is a difficult thing to actually create a profitable income from.
25:14If you're buying all the feed. Yes. The feed was the other reason we got rid of them is because feed has gone up in price so much as well. I hadn't bought chicken food. I hadn't gone and actually bought it in over a year because my husband or my son had gotten it. And the last time I went in to get chicken feed, the guy was like, that'll be $30 for a bag. And I said, excuse me. And he looked at me like I was crazy.
25:40And I said, the last time I bought a bag of this, it was $20. And he said, when was that? And I said, over a year ago. He said, oh, well, there's your answer. And he wasn't being smart ass. He was just like, things have really gone up in price over the last year. So yeah. Really makes sense because the people who grew that grain have not been having fun because grain prices have tanked in the last two years. So how, how those prices fluctuate.
26:08That kind of comes back to the example that somebody is making money and unfortunately it's not the farmer. Yes, and that brings me to the dairy farmers who don't make any money compared to what milk costs either. Yeah.
26:28Yeah, it's a... we're just talking about depressing stuff all this whole episode. That's okay because it's okay though because most people who aren't in the business don't know how all this works. So yeah, dairy is definitely an issue because you have conventional producers. And if you think about a dairy business, I have some firsthand knowledge
26:59this thing that happens every two weeks or every month where you get paid for the milk. So you have this constant inflow of cash, which any farmer, you know, they're a little bit jealous of because most people who are, you know, if you do beef or hogs or chickens, you know, when you're in the protein world, a lot of the time you have big months of sales and then months without any income coming in. So I can see it from the dairy producer's perspective where it's difficult to give up that constant income that's coming in.
27:29Even though every time they get paid, if they actually sat down and did the math, you probably paid yourself about $3 an hour. They have such an overhead involved with that, that it's so difficult to get out of that rat race because you've invested a ton of money into the infrastructure and it's not easy just to walk away from that.
27:57Yes, exactly. And the thing that's, that just drives me baddie is without dairy farmers, without farmer farmers who grow produce without, without these people. We don't eat. And yet all these farmers are, are just getting by. I mean, if they're lucky, then yeah, they're making a profit and they're happy. But from the stories I've heard, that's not really the case all the time. And.
28:27I suppose that my husband and I could continue growing our 100 foot by 150 foot garden and we could have 20 chickens and we could get a milk cow. I don't really want one, but we can get one and we would eat, but the variety of eating probably wouldn't be very diverse and we would be fine, but it would probably be boring. So it makes me, it makes me bothered that.
28:55Most people don't understand what is happening behind the scenes of their food. And most people don't care. And that's part of the reason I started the podcast is because I want people to know the behind the scenes stories and how much work it is and how important farmers are. So that was part of the reason I wanted to talk to you because clearly Acres USA is very behind the scenes and very supportive of people who are trying to do this right.
29:26Yeah, I think it comes down to this. A lot of the financial issues come from not having a say in what you're able to sell your product for. If you think about any other business in the world, it's unlikely that people are creating a business where they essentially have all of this operating type of overhead and then they are not able to name their price at the end to make sure that the business makes money.
29:54You know, their prices are controlled by something that they have essentially no control over. And that's where Acres has always been in the position where if you do start farming more in the image of nature, then a lot of those things, a lot of that overhead cost then will be reduced. So if you can get 80% of the yield, but your overhead expenses are cut by 80%, you know, what is the actual...
30:23main goal in the end of the day. It's actually having a profit versus having a yield without a profit. That's what we've always preached and I think that is the future. As fertilizer costs go up, as people become more aware of what that is doing, farming this way is a value-added thing. The more that consumers become educated on it and actually go out and seek and want that value.
30:52It gives the farmers an opportunity then to start naming their prices and name them at a premium because they deserve a premium. But the cool thing about that is that they're unique in the sense that how they're raising it but they are also then able to charge more with having a little bit of less expenses if they farm within nature's image. So that at the end of the day, then they have bigger profit margins and may actually have successful farms.
31:23Yes, exactly. Thank you for saying all that in a much better way than I ever could. So you were saying that we were kind of talking about depressing things. Tell me something fantastic about what you love, about what you do, and we'll end it on a really good note. Well, I think technology and consumer knowledge is moving in the right direction for our industry. We have people designing tools.
31:49where I think in the next five years, people are gonna have an app on their smartphone where they can take pictures of produce and take pictures of meat and actually get a nutrient density profile sent back to them so you'd be able to tell the difference in the food before you actually eat it. And you'd be able to take that to the grocery store or take it on farm, wherever farm where you're buying stuff from, and actually see the difference. That's never been done before. I mean, that would be an enormous marketing.
32:18tool for not only farmers, but then it's an amazing tool for consumers. So technology like that is, that gives me a lot of hope. And consumer education. So we've seen in the last year this type of agriculture and people talking about these topics actually enter the mainstream. People are talking about it in the biggest stages where that really hasn't ever happened before.
32:48So I'm seeing it all the time. When people come out and buy meat or eggs from us, all you have to do is have a conversation with them and they're sold on it and they're willing to spend that extra money to do this. So I have to buy that food. So I think those are the positives. I think we're moving in the right direction as far as just societal information and education basis. I really hope so. And if that app comes out, I want it on my phone.
33:18Well, I think everybody will. Yeah, absolutely. I think that that would be amazing, other than people who don't really care about what they're eating. People who don't care about what they're eating aren't going to care, but people who want to know will love it. So we're at 33 minutes and 25 seconds. Taylor, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. And I am so looking forward to seeing what happens in the future for Acres USA. All right. Thank you a lot.
33:47Thanks a lot, Mary. You can find all of our information at acresusa.com too. Yep. I will put the links to that and your Facebook page and your Instagram page and all the things in the show notes. All right? All right. Thanks, Mary. Thank you. Have a great day. You too.
 

Aussie Rescue of Minnesota

Today I'm talking with Laura at Aussie Rescue of Minnesota. You can follow on Facebook as well.
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
00:00This 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 Laura at Aussie Rescue of Minnesota. Good morning, Laura, how are you? Good morning, I'm good, how are you? I'm good, it's a really grody day in Minnesota this morning. It is. For anyone who doesn't live in our area,
00:29It is very, very gray and the fog in LaSour is like pea soup. I don't know what it's like where you are, Laura. It's raining here, which is always miserable in the winter.
00:41Yeah, it's really weird. I'm not loving this winter so far because it reminds me an awful lot of last year. Yup. All right, so tell me about yourself and about what you do. So I joined Aussie Rescue of Minnesota in 2012 because I had heard such great things about Nancy and the organization, Nancy Anderson, and the organization that she had started with another person like 30 years ago.
01:09And so she had started, she saw the need for Aussies to find Aussie appropriate homes, because Australian Shepherds can be special. They can be high energy, definitely, but also they're very smart. So sometimes smart isn't easy to live with, because they find lots of things to get into and to do, and if you don't give them a job, they find their own job, which is generally something you didn't want them to do.
01:36And so she saw a lot of Aussies being re-homed because of that. She saw a lot of Aussies being re-homed because people, maybe their lives had changed. The dog didn't get along with a new baby or they'd lost their home or, I mean, there's so many reasons that people's lives can kind of go topsy turvy. So she started rescuing and a few years later made it into a formal nonprofit.
02:04and she's been sailing this ship ever since. And I was looking for a way I could help and had heard so many good things about the reputation of Aussie Rescue of Minnesota. So I got on board and kind of got sucked in pretty heavy. I went from just fostering one dog to fostering multiple dogs, to being on the board, to adding roles as I went. So...
02:34Aussie Rescue of Minnesota has been around for a long time, 30 years. And they pride, we pride ourselves on good matches with people, not just finding a good home for the dog, but finding a dog that really fits that family. And then we are with our dogs for the rest of their lives. So if anything happens, they come back to us. If the new owners have
03:00behavioral issues or, you know, vet issues or anything like that, we're there to help them or assist them in any way we can. So that's what we pride ourselves on is the long relationship and the quality of our adoptions. Wow. Okay. This is why I wanted to talk to you because I need to know more. Number one,
03:30because sirens were the mermaids that would suck the sailors in to basically dying. And Aussies suck you in. There's something about her little faces that you're just like, oh, I am yours forever now. I am your human. You are not my dog. And I know this because we have one and we've had her for a little over four years and I love her to pieces. And I've talked about her endlessly on the podcast. So.
03:58I may throw in a couple things about Maggie today, but I want to know more about the process here because as you said, Aussies are a very special breed and they will get into trouble and they do need a job. And they also bond really, really tightly with their owners. So it must be incredibly hard when they're surrendered to you guys. Yeah, it can be. Although, you know, dogs live in the moment.
04:26So as much as we'd like to believe that our dogs would shine away for us forever, if given up, they do tend to just bond with the next person, unfortunately for our egos. They really live in the moment and they're looking for that bond, like you said. Having an Aussie is more like having a partnership than having a pet. And I work with my dogs a lot, my own personal dogs.
04:53I do a lot of competitions with herding and agility and obedience. And so that bond becomes even stronger since we spend so much time training together. But even a dog coming in that's just met me within a couple days, they'll pick the person in the house and it might be myself, it might be my husband, it might be one of my kids. But they actually have an opinion on that. They don't, you know, you can't get an Aussie and say, well, this one's going to be my dog because it's really up to them. They pick their person.
05:23and you can't change their minds. So yeah, that bond is very strong. Yes, and they will pick the person that is not at home all the time. I am at home all the time. My husband works seven days, well, not seven days a week, five days a week, and he leaves the house about 7.15 and he gets home anywhere between four and 5.30. And Maggie is very sad by four o'clock if he's not here yet. She thinks that he's her person,
05:53when he's been out of town for more than a day or two, she pouts on the back of the couch looking out the window for him. And then within a day or two, she's right back, to mom, will you feed me? Mom, will you play with me? Mom, I love you. So, so yeah, they are very much, they very much want to be with a human, but as long as the human they're with is kind of them, they adapt pretty quick. Yeah, and the breed was bred to be very adaptable, right? The breed was developed in the Western United States.
06:23and they were used for like everything you needed on a farm. So they were sheep dogs, they were cow dogs, they were, you know, the dog that was supposed to get rid of the rodents on the farm. They were playing with the kids, they were, you know, jumping in the truck to go to town to protect the trucks so nobody could approach it. So they were a little bit of guard dogs, so we see some of that guardy behavior in them sometimes.
06:49They were really the all-purpose dog on the ranch out west. And so there's good things and bad things to that also. I mean, when a breed has been developed for certain tasks like that, sometimes putting them in suburbia doesn't work if they have some of those strong instincts. Sometimes it does. You know, the aloof with strangers is right in their breed standard. And we see a lot of that.
07:17but we just adopted a dog named Boone up to a YMCA camp in Northern Minnesota where he's going to greet, you know, hundreds of people every summer. And he will love that because he was a little bit more golden retriever in an Aussie body type of dog, which isn't something we see a lot, but that was him. So he is adopted to a home that is perfect for him.
07:45Yeah, they're incredibly smart. I just got Maggie to learn shake. I've been trying to get her to do shake, shake her paw for four years. And the other day she was trying to get me to pet her and I took her paw because she was pawing at me. And she let me hang onto her paw for the first time ever without pulling it away. And I was like, shake, good job. And she put her paw down and that was it. And the next day she came over to me and she wanted me to pet her
08:14pawing at my arm and I didn't touch her, I just said shake and she picked her paw up and let me take it and I was like oh so it took four years for you to learn shake but you learned everything else really fast. Right. Had to be her idea. Yep and now if we can just find her off switch for barking when people pull in our driveway that would be great. Yeah yeah I'd love to give you that off switch but I don't have it myself. Yes and on that note these dogs.
08:43I would love an Aussie that was actually friendly with strangers. We did not get one. She must make her opinion known that there is someone she does not know on the property or in our house for at least five minutes. And then all of a sudden she's like, well, maybe I'll go sniff them and see if they pass the sniff test. And then if they do, she's fine. She's their best friend the entire time they're here. And so...
09:11One of the things that I would tell people who are considering getting one of these dogs, whether it's a toy or a mini or a standard or whatever size you want, you really have to commit to this. You do with any dog, but these dogs are really a lot. I mean, she's wonderful. We love our Aussie, but they have things that are also important to note, like they can be prone to epilepsy.
09:41And the flea and tick and heart guard, or not heart guard, heartworm medicines can cause them to have seizures too. So there's a gene that these dogs can have that makes them prone to having seizures. And that's no fun. Our dog didn't get it, thank God, because I would be heartbroken. Yeah, and so it's called the MDR1 mutation. And so all dogs have the genes. There's two genes.
10:09But Aussies tend to have a mutation that's passed down genetically in one or both of the genes. So if it's a fairly simple genetic transmission, so if one of the parents has both mutations on both, a mutation on both genes, then they will for sure pass one down to the puppy. And if the other parent is clear, we call it clear if they don't have the mutation, then
10:38that puppy will have one mutation on the two genes. And so if they have one mutation, they can have reactions to certain drugs. And those are drugs that would enter, that would cross the blood brain barrier. So they get into the brain tissue. And the dog, because of the mutation, has trouble clearing that drug back out. So that same drug in a different dog, say a lab, would still cross the blood brain barrier. Sorry, that's hard to say.
11:06And would, but then the dog would be able to clear that drug out of the brain easily because of those two genes. And in the Aussie, they can't, so it builds up. And that's why they have not necessarily seizures, but neurological issues when those certain drugs, ivermectin being a common one that we see a lot build up in that dog. It's...
11:30Fairly easily managed. There's a list of drugs on the University of Washington State on their website and they were the ones that discovered it and described it and they have a list, very complete list of drugs that you would avoid with dogs that have that mutation. They also have a blood test. It also is in all the genetic testing that a good quality breeder would do anyway on a dog.
11:56And so you know whether your dog has it or not if you buy from a quality breeder. Um, so, you know, cause oh, I have, um, you know, multiple Aussies in my house. They're clear. I can treat them like any other dog. They can have the same drugs as any other dog because they don't have those mutations. Yeah. Maggie does not either. Thank goodness. I swear to you, Laura, if anything was wrong with my dog, I would be heartbroken. Like she.
12:22She was out playing frisbee with my husband yesterday, the day before, and she got a snoot full of snow. Like she must have inhaled a whole bunch. Yeah. And she was coughing and coughing and coughing. And I was like, please don't let her get pneumonia. Please don't let her get pneumonia because that happens when you inhale water or food into your lungs. It can make you sick. And so I watched her like a hawk all day yesterday. My husband got home. He was like, did she cough today? I was like, not a peep. She's good. He's like, you look...
12:50He said, you look so relieved. I said, honey, I said, I'm telling you, anything happens to this dog, I'm gonna be a disaster for a month. I love her so much. So that's how sick I am about this dog. We never should have gotten her, it's terrible. Yeah, I hear that a lot. And I know, I've had other breeds too, but yeah, there's something about the bond between an Aussie and their owner that's just so strong. It's ridiculous.
13:17If anyone had told me I would be this obsessed with her, I would have just laughed myself stupid. And now I just laugh myself stupid because I am this obsessed with her. So the other thing I was gonna say about getting any dog is that you can't just go get a dog and do nothing. You have to really want to take care of a dog to be a good dog owner. And right now, the care for dogs or cats or any animal is exceedingly expensive.
13:47We just took her for her well checkup thing back in October and it ran us almost $260 just for the checkup and her shots. And I was like, it was $160 a year ago and the vet tech was like, yeah, inflation hit us too. And I was like, wow, okay. Everything is more expensive. And also, pet medicine has become more like human medicine and that we have access to
14:14ultrasounds and MRI machines and all the, you know, which is all great. I mean, I've used some of that stuff, right? And when you have a dog that you're looking for what's wrong with them, to be able to have access to all those tools is awesome. But it's also increased the cost, just like human medicine, because they have access to all that stuff. So you have to pay for it. Yeah. So what I'm, what I'm getting at is that these days, if you want a pet, it's like adopting a child.
14:41because you are going to have to do the things to take care of that pet. Almost like you are adopting a child. It's not cheap, guys. It's money. And if you're not in a position to have a kid, you're not in a position to have a pet, is my take on it. Yeah. Well, I see a lot of young couples getting a dog or something, you know. And you know, I love those adoptions because they have all the time in the world for that dog, right? They don't have...
15:09kids to run to school or to soccer practice or whatever. And, you know, I mean, we can all look back in our early years and think, oh my gosh, look at all the free time I had and I didn't even realize it, you know. Yeah. So, yeah, I have a, you know, so we adopt two apartments. If the dog is suitable, obviously, if you have a big barker who doesn't like people walking by in the hallway outside, that might not be the best for that dog.
15:36But if it's suitable for the dog that we're adapting, we adapt to apartments. We just make sure that, yeah, they're getting adequate physical exercise and even more so mental. So a lot of people when they have an Aussie who's out of control and crazy like this new little foster I just brought in last week, she's just exploding with energy. She's young, she's been in a kennel at an animal, local animal control, and she's just exploding with energy.
16:06And she gets adequate exercise, but mostly what she needs is mental stimulation because that's what she's been missing. And so we're doing things like stuffing Kongs for her. So when she's in her crate, she has a Kong that she can, you know, unstuff and get all the goodies out of. We're letting her play with other dogs, which is great mental stimulation while they figure out the social aspect of it, which she's not that great at. So I've got her with one of my own dogs.
16:35loose in the house together so that they can, she can learn a few social niceties and the other dog can teach her that they can play without her getting offended by, you know, whatever the dog just did. And so when we go on walks, I put her on a long line, she gets to sniff. So sniffing is a great mental stimulation. So instead of just, you know, if you're a runner, maybe running a dog miles.
17:00They'll actually be more tired if you take a slower walk and let them sniff a lot because that uses so much of their brain. So anything you can do, like you were talking teaching tricks with your dog earlier, that's a great mental stimulation and it's fun for the dog and for the owner. Yes, and one of the things you can do is, my husband does this all the time in the evening for her dinner time. He will take her kibble and we have a blanket that is just hers.
17:30and he will toss the kibble in the folds of the blanket, like crinkle it up. And then he just puts blanket on the floor and she has to figure out where her food is. She loves this game. She thinks this is great. So that makes her think about, oh, I still can smell it. Where is it? Yeah. And hunting for food is a very instinctual thing for them. So yeah, they enjoy that a lot.
17:54Yep, and she's a sucker. She finds every piece, but there's always one that's buried in the middle somewhere. And she'll stand there and like paw at the blanket and cock her head like, I know it's in there. Where is it? Right. She finds it eventually, but it's very fun to watch her because you can just see the wheels turning in her head. Yeah, I always recommend to people who have wild and crazy, especially young dogs.
18:17There's a couple toys that you can put kibble in and then they knock it around. The Buster Cube is one that I've had around for years and years. The Dog Pyramid, which is very similar to the Kong Wobbler. But the Kong Wobbler has a bigger hole, so it doesn't take them as long, where the Dog Pyramid has a smaller hole in it. It's like a, it's one of those Weeble Wobbles, like we had when we were kids, that you could put it and it'd pop back up. It's built like that. You put kibble in it. It's a little, you know.
18:46eight inch tall little toy plastic and then they knock it around and the kibble comes out one or two pieces at a time and so it'll take them like 45 minutes to eat their supper or breakfast out of that instead of you know three and a half seconds to gulp it out of a bowl. So similar to your blanket trick it's just slowing them down making them work making their brain work and it just leads to a more contented dog.
19:12Yes, and they sleep a lot better at night when their brain is not spinning constantly. Oh my God. Yep. When she was a puppy, she did not sleep well at all. And as she got older and her grown-up teeth came in, she wasn't teething on everything. And she grew into her crazy, I think is how I would put it. Yep. So, yeah. And we were warned. We were warned. Our friends are the owners of Maggie's parents.
19:41Mrs. Bratz told me, she said, she said, she's a, they're Velcro dogs and your dog is a very licky puppy. And I thought, well, all puppies are licky. That's not news. Well, no, this dog is still a very licky puppy at four years old. So, right. Yeah. So I was warned, but I did not understand. I had no concept of what we were, we were stepping into and that's fine. We love her. We're not getting rid of her.
20:11So how many dogs do you guys rescue a year do you think? Is it an average? Do you have an average number? Yeah, so 70 to 80. Um, and We're around there. We've done more we've gotten closer to a hundred in some years Um, it really depends on how many foster homes we have because we can only rescue as many as we can put into foster homes and um, I have four dogs of my own and then I try and limit myself to one or two fosters at a time But you know, that doesn't work so well. So right now I have three
20:40Oh, wow. And so we try not to, you know, put too many, you just can't put too many dogs in one house. You can't take adequate care of them if you do that. So I get to seven and I'm still okay. I get to eight and I'm like, all right, this is too much. And I have acreage to walk the dogs on and I have ways to separate dogs in my house a little bit. Not everyone has that. So most of our foster homes, you know, have the one foster with their own dogs.
21:10And so yeah, it just depends on how many foster homes. And then, you know, some dogs stay with us for a long time. I've got Marty here, he's on our Facebook and our website, and he has been with us for a year and a half. It'll be two years in March, actually. And, you know, he's just, he came from a hoarding situation. He's very skittish about being touched. And so I've slowly been able to touch him, pet him more and more.
21:38And so now he's comfortable, very comfortable with me touching his head, his chest, his back. But I still, you know, can't like slide down his leg or, you know, trim his nails or that kind of stuff. It's just been a very slow process because he's just been very, very damaged by his fast. And he probably came out of a puppy mill. And then he went into a hoarding situation and it's, you know, sometimes it takes him a long time to recover from that.
22:08Other dogs, we just had a dog last couple weeks ago named Mac, came in, delightful dog, friendly. The only reason he was being turned in was because his owner was moving out of his country home and into a small apartment in town. Physically, couldn't take care of the dog anymore. So we got him in and he was adopted. We had an approved application that was already waiting for a dog.
22:35And we asked, are you interested in this dog? And they said, yes. And he was with us for only five days and then off he went to his new home. So it really depends on the dog and what kind of work they need, what kind of vet work they need. Some of them need a lot of recovery if they come in in poor condition before we even list them. So we have a couple of dogs sitting in foster right now that we don't even have listed yet because they need more training or more recovery time before they're listed.
23:05Yeah, so last year we did 80 dogs. That's one of the things that I love about what you guys are doing is that you aren't just getting a dog in, getting them up to date on their vaccinations, making sure that they're physically okay and then sending them out the door. You are actually taking the time to get them prepared to go be with another family. Yes. Well, we want to get to know them.
23:31We want to know that the family that we're placing them with is a good match, both for the dog and for the person in the family, because we don't believe that a family should, you know, change their entire life around a dog. You should place a dog in that family that fits with their lifestyle. So if the, you know, one of the people like to run marathons and they want to take the dog on a four or five mile run every day, we're not going to place, you know, a couch potato.
24:01dog with them. And if we have a person that likes to come home from work and curl up on the couch and watch Netflix, then we're going to put the couch potato dog with them. So getting to know them is key so that we can make those good matches. Awesome. So we got all messed up on timing here because your phone got messed up. So we have like, I'd guess maybe eight more minutes to make this a 30 minute interview. So
24:29I had questions and I just said all that and now they're gone. So does it have to be an Aussie breed dog for you guys to take it in or just have like part Aussie? So we do take Aussie mixes. People are very visual. We're a very visual species ourselves. So we try and get the dogs if they're an Aussie mix that look like an Aussie a little bit.
24:54at least. Some of the times they come in and they probably do have some Aussie in them, but if they don't look Aussie, they tend to linger people. When people come looking to us, they're looking for something that looks like an Aussie. And so it's not that we don't take them. It's just that we recognize they're going to be with us longer because we're looking for that certain person that doesn't care what the dog looks like, which is more rare than you would think. And so...
25:20Even though we try and tell everyone, you know, as you're living with the dog's temperament and the personality more than you are, what they look like, that's just a human trait, you know? So we do take, you know, obviously Aussies and then Aussie mixes. And that leads into, I know the minis and what people call the toys are getting more common. You know, we try and educate people that those are not Aussies. Some of them have a little bit of Aussie in them, but they're definitely mixes.
25:48The breed doesn't have a size difference like, you know, like for instance, poodles. They have different size poodles and schnauzers, they have different size, but they actually don't in Aussies. The breed is an Aussie. And then when people are making the small ones, they're mixing them with small other breeds to make those. And so we would just list them as mixes, but we also take them.
26:13But we do have a under 20 pound rule that I try and stand by. Once in a while, we get one that's smaller than that anyway. We're suckers. That's why we're in this business. And so we take the dog that needs help. But we've genetic tested enough of them to know that they generally don't even have any Aussie in them. We had one little guy. He was so cute. He was black tri. He had his tail docked just like an Aussie.
26:41And he was a toy Aussie supposedly, he was like 16 pounds. And we had him genetic tested and he had like three different kinds of terrier and a couple spaniels in him. He was all little dog breeds and he didn't have any herding dogs in him at all, any breeds in him at all. So, you know, but you see a picture of him, you're like, oh yeah, he looks like an Aussie because his coloring was right and his tail was docked. So there's a lot of scamming going on by puppy mills, that kind of thing. So I guess, you know.
27:10The big thing to tell people is get a puppy from a reputable breeder who does genetic testing, does hips, elbows, and eyes, and get a rescue dog from a reputable rescue that's willing to take their dog back if it doesn't work out. And that they're there for the purpose of placing dogs in good homes and helping the dogs and not there for the money because there are disreputable rescues just like there are
27:39reputable breeders. And so yeah, we are also willing to help people with that aspect of it. If people are looking for a dog and we don't have the dog that they want, we refer them to other rescues that we trust and we work with. And we'll help them find a good breeder too. We are 100% supported by our breeders in the area. They do fundraisers for us. A couple of them do grooming
28:09dog that needs to come in to rescue right now and we don't have a spot for it. We've used them and they don't even charge us. So yeah, we are very lucky that the local Aussie breeders are behind us and helping us and we're actually gonna have a big fundraiser put on by the Upper Midwest Australian Shepherd Club, which is a lot of breeders are part of that. They do a big raffle for us in March. That's one of our big fundraisers for the year.
28:38We are very, very lucky how supported we are by the quality breeders we have in this area. That's fabulous. I love that. I didn't know that you guys were supported by the breeders too. Yup, yup. So if anyone wanted to donate to you guys, is there a thing on your website that they can just, I don't know, send money? They do, yeah. Yup, we have our address for if you have, we wanna send a check or else we have PayPal on our website and that's www.ossierescuemn, as in Minnesota,.com.
29:09And then obviously our Facebook is pretty active. We try and share if someone's adopted from us We always encourage them to send in pictures and updates and we share that and we always have our adoption photos and our new dogs That are coming in that are available for adoption On our Facebook Yes, I was I was actually looking at your page yesterday evening And I showed my husband a couple pictures of the dogs that are available and he was like we are not getting another dog One is enough
29:39I said, oh, but honey, honey, I want that one and I want that one and I want that one. And he said, no, no, no. And I'm like, okay, fine. But they are very- Aussies are like potato chips. You can't have just one. Yeah, we're trying to buck that. We really are good with one. She definitely takes up our time and our energy. The last thing that I would say regarding these dogs is that if you get one, be prepared to lose your heart. It'll be gone.
30:08I swear to you, had no idea, but it will be gone. It's like having kids, you know, they say that having children is like taking your heart out of your chest and letting it walk around in the world without you. And I swear it's the same with these dogs too. Yeah. Like I said, they're more of a partnership than a pet ownership. Yeah. You don't own an Aussie and Aussie owns you. And I think that's pretty much it. I just...
30:37The reason I wanted to talk to you is because Aussies tend to be farm dogs and my podcast is about homesteading and stuff. So I was like, there's a tie in there. It's okay. Yup. They're great dogs. They're great dogs for farms. They're great dogs as pets. They're just all around. They're a good dog. But like you said, they all have very different personalities. So if you...
31:01If you want a couch potato, you kind of need to know that it's a couch potato. It can't be a dog that wants to go herd sheep and you don't have sheep. Yep. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, mine are spend a lot of time with my, I have sheep and so I rotationally graze and so I move my sheep from spot to spot. And so I have two of my four that I own that are trained to move the sheep and put them where I want them. And they're very calm in the house, but they're emotionally.
31:30mentally and physically satisfied dogs too. So that's always the difference. They have a job and they do their job. And then they come in and they're like, I'm tired. I'm gonna take a nap now. Yep. Uh-huh. And the other thing I was gonna mention is you were saying that you kind of like the dogs that you guys take in to look like Aussies. The biggest thing that I have seen with looking like an Aussie is a border collie. My parents have one.
31:59And she's like four years older than our dog, I think. And she's a black tri border collie. She has the pretty brown markings. Yep, yep. That an Aussie would have, a classic black tri. And when we got our dog, my dad was like, you got the same dog as we have. And I said, no, yours is a border collie and mine's an Aussie. And he's like, they're the same damn dog. And I was like, I don't think they are. No, they're not.
32:29And he said, okay, well, they look very much like they could be border litter mates. And I was like, yes, yes, they look a lot alike, but they're not the same breed. Yeah. We got into kind of a, I don't want to say piss and match about it, but we got into kind of a little debate about it. So, yeah. So, and they act different. I have a half border collie, half Aussie foster right now, Nico. I'm about to post him actually. He's been with me about a month and a half because he needed some.
32:57needed some training before we could post him. Probably still need some more, but we're going to try and find the home that can help finish that training. And he, they act different. So when when they come in, even if they look like an Aussie, my husband will say that one acts really border collie. And I'll be like, yeah, he kind of does. And you start watching them move. So they move different definitely. When the two breeds heard, they heard very different. The Aussie is
33:27So they don't do that direct border collie stare. Most of them, there is some of that in there. And that, you know, there's probably common ancestries, maybe some breeding of border collie into the Aussie at some point in their lineage. You know, we don't know for sure. Back then people were breeding the good cowdog to the good cowdog to get more good cowdogs, right? They weren't really concerned about papers or there weren't any papers back then when they were developing it. And so,
33:56There's, you know, all breeds came from somewhere. But the, and the, you know, the border collie was developed over in northern Europe and the Australian shepherd's parentage, well, that's not the right word, ancestry came from like Spain and that area. So those aren't too far away. So there was probably some intersection back there somewhere also.
34:22But definitely the border collie when they heard you can see the difference. They're more crouchy That's not the right term, but they crouch down and and they have this very intense lots of eye contact with the sheep Controlling with a lot of presence And then the Aussie is more up close and personal They'll go in and do more close-up work, and that's what they were bred to do Also, they were bred to be in the chutes and the corrals at the ranch
34:49and do a lot of the close work where the border collie was bred to be out in big open fields with the sheep. And there's plenty of people that use border collies now on cattle also, but those are very different looking border collies than the ones you'll see working sheep. Even in the breed, you'll see the differences. So it's very interesting. Yeah. And I mean, this is going to sound dumb, but...
35:12What you were just saying is all very accurate. I did some research. I believe everything you're saying. I sent the research to my dad and he was like, okay, fine. Yes, they're different. But the other thing I've really noticed is that with my parents' dog, when she barks, when she's on alert, she sounds like an 80 pound German shepherd. When my dog barks, she has that high pitch yipe that the Aussies have. Okay. And, and, um,
35:41I was saying to my dad something a while ago about how big his dog is. And he's like, she only weighs like 35 pounds. I said, oh, I thought she weighed like 60. He said, no, she's not a German Shepherd. And I said, she's the same size as our dog. I said, and our dog goes, hi, hi. And your dog goes woof, woof. And he was like, yeah. He said, you said they're not the same dog. He said, I believe you now. They are not the same dog.
36:11I was like, okay, good, and she's barking right now. God love you, Maggie, you're a good girl. All right, so anyway, I think we're good. Laura, thank you for talking with me about your rescue because, well, it's not your rescue, but the rescue, because I worry about my dog. If anything happened to us, I would want her to go to somebody like you. Yep, that's what we do. I hope we give people peace of mind.
36:39when life goes horrible and they don't have any other choices because we get a lot of that. And I hope we give them peace of mind that we will, you know, we'll follow that dog for the rest of their lives and make sure that they're safe. I think you will. And I think you're doing a fabulous thing. Thank you so much, Laura. Have a great day. Thank you. All right. Bye.
 

Brookhaven Mill Farm-North Carolina

Today I'm talking with Cheryl at Brookhaven Mill Farm-North Carolina. You can follow on Facebook as well.
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
00:00This 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 Cheryl at Brookhaven Mill Farm, North Carolina. Hello Cheryl, how are you? Hi, I'm doing well. How are you doing? I'm great. I was looking at your website and your story is so cool, so tell me about yourself and what you do.
00:29Okay, so let's see, I'll just give you the brief rundown. At age 60, I purchased a farm, my first farm, and I am now 66. So I have been running this farm for the past five and a half, almost six years. I am in central North Carolina, right outside of Greensboro, and I diversify a bit as far as the farm model goes. Because I...
00:58physically do not grow crops. I decided to grow livestock, and I am now centralized around growing sheep. I started with East Friesian sheep, and now I've diversified into a different breed that's a little more parasite resistant in this part of the country. And it's a Catawdin-Dorpor cross. Right now, I have about 30 head. But raising sheep is kind of boring. It's like golf. If you don't do it, it's kind of boring.
01:29So what I do on the weekends is I open my farm for an agritourism destination. So I get locals from Greensboro and visiting to come out to the farm and not only see the sheep, but to see some of the other animals I've added. Sheep get along really well with goats. So I've added some goats and a couple of donkeys for a guardian, a couple of...
01:57dogs, a lot of cats, and chickens, ducks, and geese. And it just makes for a wild menagerie of animals for people to feed and just get excited about learning. Awesome. I have two questions. I'm gonna forget one of them if I don't ask both at the same time. One is about the cross-breed of your sheep and one is about the fact that you started this at 60. So we'll start with the sheep one. The cross-breed that you have. Catodin is a hair sheep, right?
02:26Yes, that's correct. Is the other one also a hair sheep? Yes, Dorpher is also a hair sheep. And you know, it's really just a bunch of mutts out there, but they have had four lambing seasons coming up on my fifth lambing season, Valentine's Day. We're expecting lambs. And each lambing season is getting more and more specific to the Katahdin look, the fine features, the sweet face, the little smile.
02:56and just easy to handle, very docile, very good choice for meat. And not so much milk that I can tell. I'm going to try to milk some of my ewes in February. I morphed into this mutt breed of mostly Katahdin now, but some dorper, because the sire, the ram, is a dorper. But he's also a cross.
03:26So he's a Dorper St. Roy cross. So these girls have all been lambing.
03:36Some have been lambing for four years, some have been lambing for three. This year I've got a couple of first time moms, so it's gonna be interesting to see what they're offering exhibit as far as the traits that I'm trying to get to, which is worm resistant, hair, completely hair, because the original seven sheep I started with six years ago when I bought the farm were all German breed, East region, and they were wool.
04:04So I've just about bred the wool out of the lands now. Okay, that was what I was gonna ask you about because I haven't actually talked to anybody who's bred a hair sheep and a wool sheep and how that works, because I have no idea. Is it just like any other animal that you breed with a different variety? That's why it's.
04:27And then you get wool sheep or hair sheep or like maybe a wool hair sheep. I don't know. Yeah, you get a wool hair sheep and that's what's so funny is because it's taken a couple of generations now of lambing to get to the point where all the lambs are now starting to look like hair lambs. The first experiment, the first lambing when I crossed the dad with the, you know, the
04:57lambs. Some of the lambs had the nubby, woolly texture. Some had sort of a half and half fill. And now they've been bred back to their father. And their offspring now exhibits very little wool nubby. But sometimes you'll get one that looks like it's... Where did this one come from? It's got almost like Velcro.
05:26fleece, which is really hard to shear. So not only have I saved money for the farm by going to hair sheep, because it's quite expensive to shear, have a shearer come and shear 30 head of sheep. So this year, the shearer is only going to have to shear six sheep, which are the half and halves, but they still need that wool taken off.
05:55how to be comfortable in the summertime. Okay, that's what I was wondering about. And the only experience I have with breeding anything, and it wasn't like on purpose because we're dumb, is our female barn cat wasn't spayed. And she was an incredibly long haired cat, like ridiculously long haired. We called her Floof because she was so long haired. And her last litter, she had seven babies, and three of them
06:24were long haired and four of them were really short haired. Like, not hairless cats, but really short haired. And we capped one male from Malitter and he is a dilute orange. So he's like beige colored. And his hair is as long as his mama's. And he's gorgeous. And we adore him. And I call him fluffy butt because he's so fluffy. But.
06:52I've never actually bred an animal on purpose because that's not my job. I don't do that. But it's weird how genetics work and it's always really interesting to see what happens when you do cross different lines. Yeah. And unfortunately, that's the adventurous and exciting part of breeding sheep is what am I going to come out with because you're putting some thought into it. It's not just willy-nilly. I keep one ram because I know he's proven.
07:21I do sell my other ram lambs once they've been weaned from their mom. But the downside of it is you also have to be very conscientious not to keep sheep that are going to be genetically flawed. And like they get worms, they have prolapsed uteruses, they have toes that constantly have to be trimmed.
07:48It's just me that runs this farm. And so I have learned, and it's been a very hard lesson, that I don't want those moms breeding again, because they're passing on a trait that's high maintenance for me. Yes, undesirable traits are called undesirable traits for a reason. Yeah, that's right. OK, so that leads me back to my second question five minutes ago. So you said you did this at 60, and now you're saying that it's just you.
08:17You must be in fabulous shape. I'm not, my cardiologist will tell you that I am 60 pounds overweight. I'm morbidly obese according to the medical definition, but I feel great. I live a healthy lifestyle. I don't smoke. Of course I drink wine, but you know, I have a healthy outlook on life. I've been widowed for 18 years. My husband passed away unfortunately.
08:47Um, three years into our marriage, he was my second husband. And so he would have loved this place. Um, but I just decided I've always been a risk taker. I've, I've grown up working in aerospace and department of defense, uh, as my career hat, and I just retired after 43 years of working, um, as a contractor for the government, I was in the Navy for a short time, but my, my day.
09:17job for the last 43 years has been very technical. And I've always had a side hustle. And this farm allows me to let my creative juices and my business acumen come out because I also run a bed and breakfast. And so I get, and I have a farm store. So I get a chance to do a little retail, do a little hospitality, do some animal husbandry. And I just love it.
09:45So it's taken me, I'm sorry that it took me so long to figure all this out. But I think everything happens for a reason and at 60, it just all fell together. I'm right there with you on, sorry that it took so long to figure it out because I have been doing this podcast for a little over a year and I love it. And I wish I had started it when I was in my forties, not when I was 54. I hear you. Or 53 or whatever it was. So yeah, but you never know.
10:13all the things that you spend your life doing become the next thing you're going to do, I feel like. Absolutely. Dead straight on that Mary, dead straight. Yeah. So do you have a great perinase? Because I hear a dog in the background. Yeah, I have. So I've partnered with a food bank and so it's taken me time to do that. Let me see if I can shut him. Oh, no, no, it's fine. I don't mind. He's barking. I just hear him.
10:41Well, I, so this food bank gives me, you know, we have a lot of food waste in our country. It's, it sounds like a good problem to have, but all this food goes into the landfill. And I've been able to partner with the local food bank that gives me boxes and boxes of food that is not for human consumption. Maybe it's gone past the expiration date at the grocery store. And so they, they give me a truckload of food and I just came in from my pickup.
11:11I have a pickup every week at this food bank and I share it with my neighbors because a lot of this food is actually very good food. Like if you can imagine a bag of lemons and maybe one lemon is bad, they throw the whole bag into my pickup. And so it's ridiculous not to share that with my neighbors and that's a neighbor that's just pulled up, which is why my dog's barking.
11:36Ah, I see. Okay. And was I right on the breed? Is he a great Pyrenees? No, I chose not to go with a great Pyrenees because they have a terrible habit of wandering. They sure do. Helps to find their boundaries. This is a Romanian sheep dog. He is bred to protect his flock from bears and wolves, which we don't luckily have a lot of here in North Carolina, but we do have coyotes.
12:06Thankfully, I have not suffered any losses from coyotes or neighbors dogs with him around. Nice. Is he big? He's huge. He's 120 pounds and their breed will get up to 200 pounds. He won't reach his full weight limit because he had some challenges with his hips and bone structure when he was born. So, he has a bit of a handicap, but he's topping the scales at 120.
12:35And he looks a lot like a St. Bernard, but if you're curious or anybody's out there curious, it's a bucovina shepherd dog. Okay. The reason I thought it was a great Pyrenees is because friends of ours, hi Tracy and Paul, Tracy listens to the podcast all the time. They have two great Pyrenees and the bark on your dog sounds very much like the bark on their dogs. So that's why I asked. Oh yeah. Well, I hope their Pyrenees stick close to home. I was just afraid to take a chance and have mine wandering.
13:03Um, they've told me that they do wander, but they don't wander far because the neighbors send them home. They tell them go home and they do. So, okay. So it's, it's okay. I don't think the dogs have been lost for any real amount of time. So I think it's fine. I think that, I think that the dogs, um, Lagatha and I can't remember the male dog name, male dog's name.
13:28But anyway, I think that they know where they belong and they find their way back pretty quick. And the other thing is that as I say all the time, we have a dog, but she's more like a person in a dog suit. She's a mini Australian shepherd. And so when she barks, it's this very arf noise, not the big woof noise that yours is doing. Interesting. I'm always curious because I am very sound driven and thank God I have a podcast because I get to hear all kinds of different tones and tenors.
13:58voices all the time, but I also do it with animals. And it's always very interesting to me how you can recognize certain animals' sizes by the sounds that they make. You would have made a great sonar person on a nuclear sub because one of the traits they look for is someone who can identify a school of shrimp versus a ship. Oh, funny. Funny. Yeah, I have been told so many things that I missed my calling on. I could have been at least a hundred different things at this point in my life.
14:29But this is where I've ended up. So, okay, so I can't believe it's just you doing all of this. You must have like a huge wall calendar that you have stuff on so you can keep track. Yeah, so one of the, in my professional life, part of my job was managing and organizing documents and software. And so I think that that is the skill that I put to use here at the farm. I do keep a calendar.
14:59I have a lot of bookings for kids' birthday parties. I have to make sure, and my biggest fear is I'm going to overbook. That's just, you know, same with the B&B. I have to make sure that I'm managing these reservations very carefully and giving everybody the experience what they're looking for. So that's a lot of PR involved, but a lot of behind the scenes stuff as well. So I've had to wear a lot of hats, just like any entrepreneur out there, especially in agritourism.
15:28You are the bookkeeper, the financier, the marketer, everything. You're the face the public sees. And, and so it's the biggest challenge I've had doing this for six years now is. Setting boundaries, you know, just now, right before this podcast, uh, earlier this morning, I had opened up our little snack bar and I have a set time on Tuesdays where people can come and pick up fresh milk and.
15:56I have to adhere to these schedules very strictly because I've got other things on my plate to do, which was being this podcast. And so I closed up the snack bar at the time. And just before I came online with you, somebody pulled up and wanted some milk. Now they were 35 minutes late. And it's been the biggest challenge is when is the customer always dry and when is this is a farm and I have to keep a schedule.
16:26And a lot of times I find the latter works better. If people really want the milk, they have to come when I'm available. And it's a terrible thing to say when you're dealing with the public, but it is just me and I can't, I can't be constantly stopping what I'm doing and running out and helping somebody because maybe they heard I had fresh eggs. So I do open just on the weekends to the public to come and shop for things at our farm store or at the snack bar.
16:57or go into the petting zoo, but I absolutely keep the gates closed during the week, unless it is a private appointment, like a milk pickup.
17:08Yes, and don't feel bad that you have a schedule that you need to keep because your time is as valuable as anyone else's. Yeah. That's been a hard lesson because I am now supported. The farm is supporting me now. I don't get a paycheck. So it is hard to remember that I am still an employee and ambassador of the farm. And it's just, it's going to be interesting at tax time. That's all I could say.
17:36There is no W-2 to show my accountant, so it'll be fun. Yes, we actually had to do that last, well, this year in 2024 for 2023, because we had a CSA in 2023. We were selling things at the farmers market and just stuff. And my husband was like, I'm bringing our tax person this file folder of all my spreadsheets. Do you think it'll be right? And I'm like, I think that he will be very happy to see that.
18:06And when we walked in and the guy was like, okay, so what's the deal? And he took my husband's W2 from the job that my husband had for like three months of 2023. And then he was like, what else you got? And my husband was like, well, here's what we've been doing. Here's all those spreadsheets and handed them to him. And the guy looked through them and he said, I am so impressed with you. You would not believe how many people start businesses and bring me every receipt from the year.
18:36And it's like a box. Yeah. No, I go through my box and put it on a spreadsheet as well. I just don't have any W-2s. So how do you, maybe we can talk offline, but yeah, it's going to be a challenge because I don't pay myself. So this is going to be an interesting tax year. Yeah. Gotta love it. Taxes are hard. I think even if you are rich, taxes are hard. It's just how it is.
19:06But anyway, I wish you all the luck in the world with that. And yes, we can talk about that afterward. We're done with the recording. Because I don't know if I can help you, but I will try. OK. So tell me about the history of the place that you own. Yeah, so this is my dream property. I thought my last property in Lake Lure, North Carolina was my dream property. My husband and I purchased that in 2004. And it was a vineyard.
19:36He was from California. It was just an amazing piece of property. Lake Lure is such an amazing place. It's so sad, the devastation that it's just gone through with the storm. But we were living four miles from the lake and had 10 acres and a guest cottage. And it was gonna be our retirement home. And unfortunately he passed the following year. So I kept the home as a Verbo for 12 years while I worked on different contracts for the government around the country. And
20:04And the Verbo was a great thing to have, tax-wise, but it kept me from feeling grounded. And so I finally came upon North Carolina, the central part of North Carolina, and saw a farm that was an 1800s historic farm. It was just incredibly beautiful. The house sits upon a hill and it's 23 acres and it had the barn. It had all the infrastructure. I wouldn't have to do anything.
20:34because I'm winging it at this point. My husband's not here to build stuff and fix stuff for me. So I found that it was on the market for 200 days with nobody putting in an offer. I figured it was either haunted or it was just in such bad shape. Nobody wanted to deal with it. But when I took a tour of the house, there were renters living here. I was so impressed with how it was already set up where it would be a perfect B&B. It was just...
21:03It was just the house of my dreams, two story, 1882. It's just incredible, the architecture inside, the original wood floors, everything was just beautiful. I just kept pinching myself. So I got it at the price I needed to have it at. And from that point on, it was just learning about the house. Old houses have noises in the night. It certainly is not haunted.
21:31If anything, there are very good ghosts here. There's been a very long history of a family passing it on to its generation. And so I have some really good provenance with this house. Three doors down is a 93 year old lady who was born in this house. And she can tell me all sorts of stories about what her father and his father did growing up here. Both were born here.
21:58So she was the third generation to be born here. And it's just so incredible to hear history coming from her lips. I mean, so I have a lot of provenance with the house. I've got a real spiritual connection to the house. And it's just so funny because I don't know any of these people. But I have their pictures in the hallways. It's like when you come in, everyone always asks, oh, are these your ancestors? And it's like, no, it's the ancestors who built this house.
22:28So people who stay here really all seem to enjoy stepping back in the past because I do serve a traditional breakfast on China and the house is furnished in 1930s and before turn of the century type furniture. So it's just been like living in a doll house. I just love it. You sound like you just love it. The joy is coming through the headphones.
22:56Yeah, it's really interesting when you buy a house that old, or property that old, because back when that house was built, it probably wasn't as big as it is right now. I'm sure that they added on to it. And back then, I'm pretty sure there wasn't electricity. Yeah, you are absolutely right in remnants of how life was back then. I discovered the outhouse my first year living here. Someone had parked it.
23:24behind an old shed and it is certainly an outhouse. But yeah, you're right. It has become modern with each generation that has lived here. You know, it's funny that you bring up the outhouse. Back, oh my goodness, it's gotta be at least 10 years ago. My husband and my youngest son and I went for a hike and there's this beautiful hiking trail.
23:52about at least half an hour from where we live now. But back then, we lived about 15 minutes from this trail. And there was an old, old, old brick house. And it was like a, I would call it a mansion for the time it was built, because it was probably built about the same time as your house. And red brick, and it had a brick outhouse. Oh, no kidding.
24:22that horse or that bull is built like a brick shithouse. And I had never actually understood that they made those, that a brick outhouse actually existed. And we came around the corner of the house after wandering around the outside of the house and yep, brick outhouse. And I just laughed myself stupid for like 15 minutes. My husband's like, why are you so tickled?
24:48And I said, because brick shit houses actually exist, honey. I had no idea. Oh my gosh. It, you know, I guess that was the way you could show your wealth back then, you know, because I've never heard of a brick, Johnny, Johnny house. That's what they call it here in North Carolina, Johnny house. Yeah. So it was just funny. And I was actually thinking about it the other day, cause I have photos from that, that hike and we took a picture of the brick outhouse. So.
25:18But either way, very funny to me, probably no one else will giggle, but I thought it was a riot. And the other thing is that I'm assuming that your home went through the whole transition from hurricane oil lamps, whatever you want to call them, and candles, to gas lamps, to electricity, to where we're at now. And you write on about the original structure I learned, again, from my 93-year-old neighbor.
25:47who learned from her father that the original structure was pre-1880s. It was just a two-room farmhouse that her grandfather grew up in. And you can feel the transition when you're walking from that part of the house into the addition that was built in the 1930s. When the family was expanding.
26:16And they needed additional bedrooms and living quarters. And so that's what I love about this house is because, you know, you can put an egg on the floor and it'll roll. It's just crazy. Not very fun when you're trying to retile a kitchen though, because they did have to level my kitchen because it was so off kilter. Then, you know, so that's not fun when you're in that type of remodeling, but gosh, the
26:44the little nooks and crannies where they put, they actually took the original house and attached another structure to it. And you know, nothing matches up perfectly, but that's what I love about it. Character. Absolutely. It oozes character. Yeah. Our home that we live in now, that we moved into a little over four years ago, was completely remodeled before we ever set foot in it.
27:14And there used to be a bedroom downstairs and it was probably just a small bedroom. It was big enough for a twin bed and maybe a side table and possibly a small dresser, but I doubt it. And the house now is a two bedroom and both bedrooms are upstairs. And what they did is they opened up that bedroom and it's part of our living room. And then a side of that bedroom is a walk-in closet for coats and things. And.
27:42At first I was like, this is great. It's, they set it up almost like open concept. It's really pretty. And now having lived here, I kind of wish they'd left that bedroom downstairs alone. Because number one, it would have been a great place to have as a guest room for my kids when they come home.
28:04And number two, my husband snores and it would have been a great place for me to go at night if he's keeping me awake, but no, the bedroom is no longer downstairs. So it's interesting how people change the inside of a home, but the outside tends to look the same for a long time. Yeah, the parlor, what I use to serve breakfast in, it has the only working fireplace in the house. There were four fireplaces in the house.
28:33four flues where a parlor stove might have been hooked up to it. And three are non-working and one downstairs is working. And I learned from my neighbor that that was her parents' bedroom, that they had the heat and they all used to gather in the parents' bedroom when they needed extra heat. But they had working fireplaces or working stoves. And she said that the fireplace was always the warmest spot in the house.
29:03That is now my parlor. So the only thing you can tell that it could have been a bedroom at one time is there is a closet, which I'm turning into a powder room. I just need a place for guests to wash up when they're downstairs before I serve breakfast. Normally, they're upstairs in the bedroom, and that's where the bathroom is. But you're right. Every time a generation has been here, they've added something to it. Also, I learned that.
29:32With their family, they only had one bathroom, which was an unusual back in the early days. But the bathroom was upstairs when she was growing up, which would have been in the thirties. And so they had indoor plumbing then by then she said she never used the outhouse. But in the thirties upstairs was the bathroom. They added a bathroom downstairs. So I actually have two bathrooms now, but I want to add a third, a half that just to have.
30:00guests be able to go in and wash up downstairs. I love that we're talking about this because this isn't about growing plants or growing animals. This is about growing a house. I think that's amazing. You brought it up. No, I think it's great and and you're using that home as part of your agritourism business. So it fits. Yes, and I have to watch when people come out to the farm that they don't wander inside because they know it's a bed and
30:30So sometimes, you know, there are strangers, complete strangers walking around, which is a little unnerving, but I guess it's to be expected when you come across a house like this. Yes. And I mean, there's a lot of history there. And I think that you probably are a history buff and so am I. And we are not the only ones on the earth that love historical buildings. So I'm not surprised to be like, I wonder if I can just go take a peek.
31:01So, all right, well, Cheryl, we have been talking for 30 minutes and, oh, actually almost 31 minutes and I tried to keep this to half an hour. So I appreciate your time so much. Thank you. It's been very, very rewarding to be able to talk to you and share about not only the house but the farm as well. And I appreciate the exposure and the time you took as well, Mary. Thank you. Oh, for sure. I love doing this. You have a great day, Cheryl.
31:30You too. Bye-bye. Thanks again.
 

Hart Farmstead

Today I'm talking with Salina at Hart Farmstead.
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
00:00This 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 Salina at Hart Farmstead LLC. Good morning, Salina, how are you? I'm good, how are you? I'm good, bet it's not snowing where you are. No ma'am, I think it's actually like in the low 50s so far.
00:29Well, I'm mildly jealous but not really. It is snowing here in Minnesota this morning. Oh, I bet it's beautiful. It really is and I would be perturbed except that last winter we only got like maybe six inches total for the whole winter and we've probably gotten about four this morning. So I'm very excited to see white stuff falling from the sky. That is awesome. We haven't had snow here and
00:58Almost three years until two weeks ago, we got like a little dusting. That's the first side of snow we've seen in three years. Wow. Okay. So you're in North Carolina. Where in North Carolina? We're in like the central area in North Carolina, just south of Winston-Salem. Okay. Cool. I just talked to a lady, uh, today's Thursday yesterday, who was from East North Carolina, and I don't remember where, but E-N-C is part of their.
01:28their business name. Okay. So, I get to talk to two people from North Carolina in 24 hours, it's kind of great. That's awesome. Yeah, so tell me about yourself and what you guys do. So, we have been homesteading for over a decade now. I was raised by my grandparents who grew everything and or hunted everything for our food.
01:57My Nana did a lot of preserving, whether it was dehydrating, pressure cannon or water bath cannon. So I got to kind of be hand in hand with that growing up as a kid. My dad and my grandfather both enjoyed hunting about anything that you could hunt. So I've eaten most different types of wild game. When I met my husband in 2009, he is a farmer.
02:26He does a lot of small grains. And I moved here a couple counties away when we got married. It used to be a dairy farm that started back in 1947. And they sold the dairy cows when he was five years old and his dad changed over to run in strictly beef cows at that point. When we got together, being able to live on a farm kind of...
02:56really pulled me to continue what I grew up doing, whether it was hunting or raising our food. So we have a really big garden, and I started with just that, but then over the years it has expelled to three really big gardens, multiple raised beds. We have a variety of animals. And about two years ago, we started milking our first dairy cow. It was supposed to...
03:24only be like for our family's milk. And we had my best friend who was currently buying raw milk down in the central part of the county. And so she started coming and getting some from us. And now we have 10 dairy cows. We currently are milking six. So our biggest thing now is raw milk products.
03:52and we still have beef cows. So I keep a lot of their beef fat and I render it into tallow and I make a variety of products and then some other organic clean products that I've used for years and people started asking me for them. And so we've just kind of continued to grow in that aspect. And then I've added, you know, I do the sourdough and the kombucha.
04:22and all the good fermenting. My husband calls them my science experiments. They are spread out around our home. We joined the Homestead community with Homesteaders of America about five years ago and started going to their conferences in Virginia every year. And we really have enjoyed meeting new folks that have the same passion as we do.
04:52And, you know, even though it's a state away, so many of my close friends and our family have grown to want to learn more, especially when COVID hit. When COVID hit, people started to reach out and they're like, hey, can you teach me how to can, can you teach me how to grow vegetables? And it's just continued to grow over the last few years.
05:20people wanting that knowledge of knowing where their food comes from, what's in their products that their family has in their home. And it's just kind of always been my passion and it's really all that I've ever known. We do both work off of our farmstead though with goals to eventually at least have me home probably in the next year or so.
05:47Um, running the, the farmstead with a little store. Um, you know, we, we have found our niche and we have found what truly brings us joy and, uh, the dairy cows are just a whole different level of happiness that I didn't even know that I had. Um, and so we just, uh, we continue to want to learn anything that we can. Um, not just
06:15for offering what we have to folks, but for our family. So it's been a big reward to share what we know with people. And we butchered some chickens recently with some friends. I'm growing some more pasture chickens for my best friend who's never gotten to do this before. And she does more like a apothecary side of things. And I do more of the gardening and the livestock.
06:46So that's kind of the quick gist about what we do. And with what we, our jobs off of the farmstead, I am a landscaper. I have a horticulture degree that I earn later in life. And so that really helps my job, but it also helps me what I do here in doing things more organic and safer for my family.
07:14Yes. Okay. Wow. You are deep in the trenches of homesteading. I love it. And if we don't have, we don't have livestock because we don't have room to have them right now. We have three acres, but we don't have any place for critters to graze. So if we did, and if we had a dairy cow, my husband would have a hell of a time pulling me away from that critter because I love cows.
07:43He would be coming to find me wherever the cow was and he would find me hugging the cow probably nine hours out of the day. Absolutely. I love cows. I think cows are beautiful and they're not beautiful in the same way as like a horse, but they're just, they're so pretty. Their eyes just, they make me happy. Yes. And we have a couple that...
08:09All of our cows are super friendly. They love to be loved on. And they weren't all that way when they came here. So it's been a lot of time of many hours out there, loving on them, getting them used to being, because a lot of them came from like commercial dairies. One of them I raised from a bottle. So I'm all she knows. So she thinks she is like a dog and not a cow. But their personalities are just amazing and they are beautiful.
08:38And their eyes, there's two of them, that when you look into their eyes, they're just like old souls. And you can just see their happiness and their passion. Like, it's hard to explain, but it's soothing, just to look deep into their eyes and see their personalities and their hearts. Yeah, and I think the only thing that is close to that feeling is when you have babies. Like when you have your first baby
09:08They really look into your eyes and you just fall. You just fall in forever and that's it. And cows' eyes are like that too and it's a really weird analogy to make, but it's the closest I've come. It's pretty, you're pretty correct there. Yeah, I have three kids that I birthed and I have a stepson. And my last baby is a boy. He's...
09:35He's not a baby anymore. He's only 23 at the end of this month. But he was born really, really fast. I got to the hospital at 10 minutes to seven and he was born at 712. So 22 minutes. Wow. And the doctor wasn't there. The nurse helped me birth him and she didn't even have time to break down the bed in the hospital. So basically he was born onto the bed.
10:02I sat up immediately because it was so fast and so easy. I felt fine. And I sat up because he was laying between my knees. And he was wide awake, eyes wide open, and just looked at me. And I just, I have never had that experience in my life, even though I've had two other babies. The other two, they were taken away from me right away because they had swallowed the
10:32but it was one of the most beautiful moments of my life and I always remember it. So there's something really important about connection with another being. Absolutely. So that's my story about my kid. So I have to tell you, I was looking at your Facebook page and your Instagram page and you have a video of one of your dogs.
11:01And you have the background music as that's just my baby dog. I love that. I saw that like last year and I have a dog I love too. And my parents also have a dog they love. And I sent them the clip of whatever it was that had that background song. And my dad called me. He's like, that's the dumbest thing, but it's so funny.
11:27I was like, yeah, he says, I'm gonna be singing that's just my baby dog for a month. I said, thank you so much for the earworm and I was like, you're welcome. So I knew we were gonna be fast buddies on the podcast because you had that as your background music for that video. Yes. And to think how fast from since I had video that she's grown and you know, she's full grown now. But when I'm playing with her out in the yard, sometimes I still sing that because
11:55It is pretty catchy. But when she was a puppy, she was, she just had a hilarious personality from day one and she doesn't come in the house, but I wish she would because her personality, it's, it was amazing. She would walk herself with her leash and you know, that was supposed to be our son's oldest dog, but you know, every, every one of them ends up becoming mom's dog.
12:22Yeah, I wish that that song had been out when we got our dog. She's a little over four years old now. And had that song been out when she was a puppy, oh my God, I would've been singing it to her all the time. Cause she was silly too. So it worked out great. But either way, I had a good giggle when I saw that you had it and I was like, Oh, I love her already. Um, okay. So you are.
12:49You are like born and steeped in homesteading from the sounds of it. Yes ma'am. Is it weird to you when people aren't in homesteading? Yes, because some people that I meet that aren't into homesteading, I feel like they look at me like, what is this lady talking about?
13:18I'm like, man, they'll start asking questions and they want to know more. And then a year later I received text messages with, we went down that rabbit hole. So I love it. I'll actually really do like meeting folks that don't have that background because they quickly get very intrigued by it. And I like being able to guide them and help them to grow into their own journey with it. And
13:44probably 90% of them end up doing some scale, even if it's just backyard gardening, you know. Everybody has to start somewhere and that gives them their happiness and their feeling of they're producing their own food with what they have available to them. So it's quite rewarding. Yes, I understand. And the other thing that I have found in what I've learned about homesteading over the last...
14:1220 years learning about it, doing it, is I know stuff that I don't realize that I know. A friend of mine has a very shady patch in her yard and she was like, I'm trying to figure out what I should put there because I want some kind of ground cover, but it's really shady. And I said, well, did you try hostas? And she's like, I'm so sick of hostas. And I said, okay. I said, what about wild violets?
14:39And she said, wild violets will grow in the shade. And I said, yeah, they grow in the woods all over Minnesota. I said, and I'm sure somebody you know probably has a patch. They'd be happy to split. And they spread like wildfire. I said, do you want to walk over whatever the ground cover is? And she said, no. And I said, well, with violets, you can walk on them. They won't die. You know, you may crush the blooms, but they won't die. She was like, I'm going to do that.
15:08I didn't even think about the fact that the reason I know this is because my husband's mother gave us some violets from her little patch of woods from her old house when she moved and we put them in and they just grow anywhere. Right. And I was like, wow, I know more than I think I know. This is kind of great. Oh, it is. I'm kind of like that with, my favorite one is Dandelions.
15:37And that's where it comes into, it's like at work where with being a landscaper and I work on state grounds, you know, when we are, we have to spray out pre-emergent to keep weeds from coming through in the grass on campus. And it breaks my heart because, you know, you're getting rid of all the dandelions that I could go pick the blooms and go home and make me some jelly. But yeah.
16:04Or, you know, I can make sabs with them. There's so many different things you can do with them. And people are like, how do you know this stuff? And I was like, it's just stuff that you learn over time. It's a weed. And I'm like, no, technically, you know, the, the definition of the term weed is anything planted where it's not supposed to be, I said, so grass is technically a weed as well, you know, so some people don't, they don't get that, but I love knowing little things like that.
16:30Yeah, and I'm glad you brought up dandelions because I read in two different places. Don't quote me. I don't know if it's true. That some woman brought dandelions over from Britain to America. Dandelions are not native to America, apparently. And the reason she brought them is because they're considered flowers over there, and she really loved them, and she brought some with her. That's interesting. Supposedly.
16:58I've read it in two different places. I need to read it in about three more before I believe it. But, but I kind of hope it's true because people are like dandelions suck. And I'm like, no, no, no. Dandelion leaves are great in salad if they're, you know, fresh brand new, almost baby dandelion leaves, they're yummy. You can eat them. You can make coffee, a coffee substitute out of the roots. And it's really good. Dandelion tea is really yummy. And like you said, you can make jellies out of it. So.
17:28They're not, they're not like the scourge of plants or anything.
17:35No, and I would probably, I would like to look more into where they came from like that because I could see that being true because over there, things that we consider weeds and stuff here are something they use every day in their life over there because they live, you know, over in Europe, they live a completely clean lifestyle. You know, there's stuff there.
18:01foods cleaner, their products are cleaner, they don't have all the fillers and fake stuff and they love teas and using herbs and I think that's pretty cool. Me too and I'm one of those weird people who absolutely loves coffee but I also love herbal teas. And when people are like coffee or tea, I'm like, what do you mean? And they're like, what do you like better? And I'm like, I don't like either better. I like both.
18:30Yeah. And I'm like, you're weird. And I'm like, yes, yes, I am. I'm very proud of being weird. Absolutely. And that is okay. Yep. My favorite tea on earth is mint chamomile with honey in it. That sounds good. Just thinking about it. It's really good if you're trying to get some sleep because the chamomile definitely will make you drowsy. It works great. So, okay. So you said you have animals. What do
19:00We have meat chickens and we have lane hens. We have dairy goats. I have Nubians. I used to have Nigerian dwarfs, but I recently changed over to Nubians in the last year, year and a half. We have beef cows, dairy cows. Let's see, we have guineas. We did have ducks. We no longer have ducks.
19:30They are messy, but I did love baking with their eggs. They would 100% make cornbread rise, your cakes rise better. We have pigs, we raise pigs. We normally grow out our hogs about four to six months at a time and butcher them for our family. And then we do offer it some to friends and other family members.
19:59Um, we had quail. We recently got rid of our quail. Um, it just wasn't suitable. And that's one thing when you go down the homestead path, you know, there's some people that prefer chickens over quail or quail over chickens. Um, some prefer ducks and they all have a different reason for being on the homestead. Um, some people prefer sheep over goats. I prefer goats over sheep, you know. Um.
20:28But we have a variety of things. We still have, we have donkeys and we still have a horse. We used to ride horses quite a bit before we started farming so heavily that we really just don't have the time to ride anymore. Um, and when our children were young, you know, they would ride some. And then, um, we just, we kept one. She's like 20 now. Um, but that's the variety. I don't think I missed anything.
20:56We did have rabbits. We had some meat rabbits. That was a trial and error. One thing that we realized we would prefer chicken over the rabbits. Yes, us too. We did the same thing. And what I want to say about what you just said about all those animals is number one, when you have to say um, and stop and think, when you're listing off your animals, you have many, many animals. And number two, when, when you try something new,
21:24on the homestead and it's not working for you, you don't have to keep doing it. You can change your mind. It is totally okay to be like, rabbits are not really working for us. Maybe we don't continue to raise rabbits. Absolutely. Or goats or sheep or whatever it is because all you're doing is shorting yourself and continuing to do something that isn't working. I agree 100%.
21:52You know, and some folks are like, 100% it's gotta be rabbits. I'm like, hey, whatever works for your homestead or your farm and your family is the way that each individual needs to be able to go through. You know, and we tried these different things and some worked and some didn't. It was fun. You know, it was fun to learn because it gave us different experiences that when we have friends that ask us.
22:21different questions or for guidance. You know, some, they actually raise quail to release into the wild for hunting purposes around here. And I think it's cool, you know, we'll be at the milk barn and they'll fly in and land on the ground and you know, that's cool and unique to watch. But it's what works for them. And so we've actually gone out there and butchered some quail with them and brought some home to eat. But it just wasn't something suitable for.
22:51for our farms, Ted. So it's been fun to learn and try new things. Yes, for anyone who doesn't know, quail are really small little birds and they're really pretty. So if you ever, you're saying that they'll come in and visit basically. And they're adorable. I don't wanna raise them, because I've heard horror stories about what a pain in the butt they are to raise, but they're really pretty.
23:21They're smaller than a chickadee, I think. And they have little peeps, right? You know, they just do a little tiny call. Yes. And it's a pretty cool sound too. Yeah. And it's, you know, when we actually, when we started with Quail, we had gotten some eggs from a friend and hatched them in our incubator. And it was more like an experiment for our boys. Yeah. And they are so tea tiny when they hatch.
23:48I mean, probably the tiniest animal I think I've ever held. I mean, they are just like the size of a quarter. And to watch them grow through their stages and raise their own, you know, and start having the eggs for you. And it was quite interesting, but they are, they're really small. They're really pretty. And I think it's fun to see their different colors, their different markings. And for them to feel comfortable enough to come around is, it's pretty cool. We had a.
24:18A white one, I think she was all white, that we released ours out whenever we realized, you know, this just wasn't working. We released ours out because we knew there was so many around here that they would be able to be on their own. And this white one continued to follow us in the yard. It was almost like a puppy and she didn't want to leave. Something eventually ate her because we never saw her again.
24:44But every time you went outside, she would come within a foot of you and she'd follow you wherever you went. It was, it was a pretty cool experience. That's so cool. Um, okay. So we've got like about five more minutes where we hit 30 minutes and I try to keep these 30 minutes. So because you have been doing this kind of stuff basically your whole life, what would you tell somebody who is just looking into getting started in Homestead?
25:13I would tell them to find somebody in there, if they aren't local to me, I would tell them to find somebody local to them and try to find a community where you can have your hands-on experience. But I would tell them to start small, start with one thing at a time. And resources such as books, YouTube videos, social media accounts.
25:42That is how I continue to grow all these years. You know, I didn't do social media, especially like not Instagram, until a few years ago. And you know, that's how we stumbled upon several different homesteaders all across the world. And you get to learn different things, but the biggest thing is to start with one task. But continue to want to grow your knowledge.
26:10and having somebody local to you to be a mentor, it's a big help because it does take community. I also feel like when you have a community and folks that have the same knowledge that you can help learn from one another, they bring different things to the table. Some may grow plants better, some may raise chickens better, you know, and in that if you can't do that on your home set at the
26:39You can barter what you are doing with those people to still get those products that you need for your family, even if you can't raise them. So even if you live in an apartment, you can still raise your own things best you can and what you can't do there, find somebody local that you can trust and in your community support by buying their items and being able to still have that on your table.
27:09Yes, and in doing that, you make connections with people who might become mentors. And mentors are so important. The thing that I have learned about having mentors is that it brings your frustration level down by 50% because you can always call them and be like, what am I doing wrong? Before it becomes, I don't want to do this because I suck at it. You know? Absolutely. You know, when you start something new, especially with the homestead.
27:39You know, everybody's gonna have heirs, we're humans. You know, we're gonna try things and it doesn't work. And if you have somebody that can help you with that, you know, they have tips and tricks and you learn along the way so that you're still gaining your knowledge, not just from your hands-on experience, but having those folks that can help and guide you. And a lot of these homesteaders that I have met at like the conferences, for example,
28:07and following them. I actually have reached out to a few of them if I learned something from one of their speeches or one of their posts and I have questions because we all live in different areas and everything's going to grow different or produce different. Even all the way to sourdough, how you keep your house, the humidity levels, everybody's places are different and there's so many different folks out there that can help you answer those questions to figure out.
28:35why something isn't working properly to help you succeed, to be able to continue wanting what you do because if you fail, you're not gonna wanna continue to grow. So don't give up is the biggest thing. Exactly. And the other thing is that if you do get to the point where you are so frustrated that you want to stop, it's okay to stop. Stopping is not necessarily giving up. Stopping is taking a break.
29:02But if it's something that you really, really wanted to learn how to do and you wanted to learn how to do it right, you can always come back to it and try it again. And stepping away from things gives your brain a chance to think without really thinking about thinking, if that makes sense. And so it's not giving up, it's taking a break. If you don't ever come back to it, then you've given it up. And if that's a conscious choice, that's way cool.
29:29But if you're just giving up because you're frustrated, that's not, you don't have to be in that forever. Right, take a step back and regroup. Mm-hmm, exactly. All right, Selena, thank you so much for your time today. I really enjoyed our conversation. Yes ma'am, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, thank you so much, have a great day. You too. All right, bye. Bye.
 

Heaven On Earth Homestead

Today I'm talking with Sami at Heaven On Earth 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
00:00This 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 Sammy at Heaven on Earth Homestead. Hi, Sammy, how are you? I'm good. Thank you. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. So I was, I found you on Instagram.
00:27And I was looking at your Instagram page and your Facebook page and you and I could have been really good friends about 20 years ago. Oh, wow. Because, because 20 years ago, I was doing the same things that you're doing right now with all the preserving food and stuff. And I'm still doing it, but just not as heavily because my kids are grown and it's only a couple of people in the house now. Fair enough. So we could have gotten together and roasted squash and bagged it up and
00:57homesteading and preserving, it would have been really fun. So tell me about what you do. So we are on just about an acre of land. It's actually quite small, but we try to utilize it the best we can. So we started this journey maybe about 12 years ago, when our oldest was almost eight years old. And we're having a...
01:25They were having a bunch of health problems and we were seeing a ton of specialists and taking a ton of medicine. I work in healthcare. I'm a respiratory therapist by trade. And so I was just really concerned and we were at another gastroenterology appointment, I think, for reflux and all kinds of other things, autoimmune related. And I was just kind of airing my frustration and saying, you know, like, I don't understand why my eight-year-old is on eight medicines twice a day when...
01:54You know, my 80 year old grandmother is not even on this much. And he's, he kind of said, you know, well, the only thing I can really offer as a physician is to add another medication for these problems. And I was just so disheartened, but I just wanted them to feel better. So I said, well, you know, is there any
02:16anything non-traditional that we could try. And he said, well, I have a couple of patients who have Crohn's and IBS and other things that have tried an anti-inflammatory diet and they've seen great success with that. So he gave me the name of a book and we bought the book. I read it overnight and my husband went to work the next day when he came home. I had all the food in the house boxed up. He said, we're going to try this for 30 days. We're eating nothing.
02:46that could cause inflammation in the body, we're going to reset all of our immune systems, I bought into it a thousand percent." And he was like, okay, how are we going to do this? And I said, we'll figure it out. I don't, you know, it'll be fine. We'll figure it out. And so we, for 30 days, we ate very strictly anti-inflammatory, no sugar, no dairy, no gluten, no grains, you know, it was no beans. It was all kinds of things that we couldn't have anything of.
03:13And after 30 days, my child went from taking eight medications twice a day to taking an inhaler as needed for asthmatic symptoms.
03:23Good job, mama. And I realized I was inadvertently poisoning my kid with just regular standard food and I was so frustrated. And then it kind of, that's kind of where this journey began and it kind of spiraled into all this. So it's been a long time coming, but we finally, we relocated so we could have some more land and be in a better climate. So we had a longer growing season. And so where we are now.
03:51We have a very large garden. We have laying hens and we do meat birds in chicken tractors. And we have a very beautiful little community here where we live of friends that we've made who are kind of of like mindset. And so we have friends who do beef and friends who do pork and friends who do lamb and goat. And so we kind of all work together to make sure all of our families have what we need and support each other. And it's been just a...
04:20beautiful journey. So it's nice to meet other people who are of like mine because sometimes you kind of get the hairy eye when you explain things in public. Yes, absolutely you do. And we've gotten it too and I just ignore it now. I'm like, you don't have to do what we're doing. You keep doing what you're doing. We're all good. Absolutely. So I'm really impressed that you asked the doc for
04:48different solution and I'm really impressed that the doctor said hey you could you could look into this because a lot of our medical professionals don't don't give you answers like that. Absolutely. Absolutely. Which is why I said good job mama because you were a great advocate for your kid. I'm so proud of you because it takes a lot of guts and courage to stand up and say I am
05:15not okay with the answers I'm getting, I need a different answer to the question I'm asking. Absolutely. And then, you know, once you're on something, you get side effects, and then you're going, is that a symptom or a side effect? And, you know, they just kept saying, well, we could add this medicine or we could do this thing. And really, the only thing that really did help long term were allergy shots. And that was just because they were allergic to everything, grass, trees, pollen, you know, just every single thing.
05:46And we were just astounded when we got the allergy test back. So we did do that and that has seemed to help quite a bit. And so we're happy now they're at college. So it's a little, it's a little bit nerve wracking because we're trying to kind of, you know, we had to pick a college that had, um, you know, anti-allergen dining and you just kind of have to plan, but as long as you, you know, what you're up against, then you, you know, are just diligent about it.
06:15you can make it work. And you know, they wanted to go away to college. So we made that happen. Awesome. Awesome. I love that you've worked this hard for your child. And there's a reason that I say that, um, my parents and I were talking yesterday about the shooting in Madison, Wisconsin. That happened. My dad, my dad is 81. My mom is 78. Okay. I'm 55. They raised me and my two siblings. I've raised four kids.
06:45And we were talking about why this stuff keeps happening. And we came to the conclusion that a lot of parents don't parent, daycares parent. And my dad, he's a really smart man and he's very opinionated and I love him to pieces. And my mom is following in his footsteps. She was very shy when she was young, but she's gotten a lot more outspoken as she's gotten older.
07:13And I said to my parents, I said, you know, I said, when I was a teenager, I didn't appreciate you guys watching every move I made. I said, but having been a parent, now I really appreciate the fact that you parented me. So, so I'm going on a limb here, but I feel like if you're going to have kids, maybe you want, might want to actually spend some time with them and, and care for them and not put them in daycare and spend, you know, maybe 12 hours a week with them.
07:42And that may piss people off, but I'm sorry, it's how I feel. Well, I mean, I absolutely agree. I just feel like if you're going to have children, that's the biggest responsibility of your life is that's your legacy when you leave this earth. You know, and if you don't pour into them everything you can, you're you're missing the mark.
08:03Yeah, and kids are amazing. Like the joy of my life was watching my children learn and become functioning humans, you know? It still is. Absolutely. It still is. Absolutely. And my daughter is the oldest and she's 35 and she called me the other day and she was like, I love my job. She just got a new job like a couple months ago. And it's not a fancy job, it's a job. And she is having a ball.
08:31with this new job and her voice was ringing and she sounded so happy and she's learning new things that she's good at. She was already good at them, but now she's actually putting them into practice with her job. And I was just so filled with pride that she's really coming into her own, you know? Absolutely. And I think a big part of parenting, especially in today's climate is...
09:00Teaching your kids that happiness isn't keeping up with Joneses, happiness is finding happiness where you are with what you have, and that having it all really isn't having it all anymore. No, and the thing is, they used to say, especially about women, you can have it all, you know, when women finally got jobs and had the right to get divorced and to drive and to vote and all this stuff. And the big thing was, you can have it all. You can do it all. No.
09:30Not all at the same time. Not unless you want to be in an early grave from exhaustion and anxiety. Exactly. And I do think. So you're right. Absolutely. And I think that we find a lot of peace and joy in a slower lifestyle, in the homesteading lifestyle. Like I think if I didn't enjoy cooking and I didn't enjoy gardening as much as I do, this would be very difficult.
09:58but I find peace in it. The reason we're called Heaven on Earth Homestead is because when we moved here, my husband is phenomenal at carpentry. It's just a hobby of his. But he built my garden, he built our chicken coops, and he's kind of engineered this, so I tell him he's the engineer of my dreams. But the reason we call it Heaven on Earth is because he would say, what are you doing out here? I'm just hanging out in my little slice of Heaven on Earth.
10:26And that was just kind of our thing together, you know, and I find a deep connection religiously in the garden. Like when I'm struggling and I have questions, I go in there to kind of ruminate and it helps me really think and it gives me that kind of relaxing calm and I'm getting things done, but I, you know, when the beans aren't growing and I'm wondering why aren't the beans growing and I hear, you know, well, the beans aren't growing because you're not nurturing them. I'm like, one of my kids is struggling. I'm going, why is my kid struggling? Well, you're not.
10:56It's kind of the same thing, you know, you kind of get answers through the little things. And so that's kind of where heaven on earth came from. I'm glad you told me that because I was going to ask. I didn't even have to ask the question. You just volunteered the answer. Thank you. So I have questions because I have been where you're at with this whole homesteading thing because we started homesteading on a tenth of an acre. Oh, wow.
11:25over 20 years ago with a little garden and we had flowers and stuff and taught myself to crochet so I'd make my kids scarves and hats and things. And the first time I had something come out right that I did with my own brain and my own hands, I was so happy and high for like a week. And I told everybody, I told my mom, I told my kids, well my kids knew because they were there. I told my mom.
11:55told my mother-in-law, told my neighbors about, you know, oh, we put away, I don't know, 25 gallon bags of butternut squash that we grew from seeds, da da da. And everybody was like, oh, that's really nice. That's cool. And that was it. Right. But I was so excited about it. So when you first did something like that, did you have that same feeling about it? Absolutely.
12:24Absolutely. And I was so excited to talk about it. And I would go to work and at the hospital, and I'd be telling people, I got these seeds from the seed company, and they all germinated. And I was really worried because I wasn't sure if I got the seed mix right. And I would just start going off. And if somebody would ask a question, it was polite conversation. I would go off on a TG, you kind of see their eyes glaze over, like politely listening, but really not interested. And I would get so bummed out. So then when I found
12:50You know, you find your people, the people who are really interested in it and you can geek out together. It's just so rewarding. That's why I started this podcast because I don't have a whole lot of people to geek out over things with right now. And luckily we made some friends who are doing kind of the same thing we're doing and they live five miles away. So, so when they come to visit, it's really fun because they're like we got piglets and we're like what kind and what do you do?
13:17and what do they need and how big are they going to get? And they're like, oh, and they just talk and smile and laugh. And it's amazing. So yeah, having, I don't want to, I mean, I do want to use the word fellowship, but I'm not saying in a religious way, I'm saying in a commonality way is so important.
13:38Absolutely. And it really has, especially where we are now, we moved five hours away from our closest family member to be where we are, so we could have land and be in the right climate and all the things. And it was really hard because we both have very large families to kind of make that jump and just do it. And so when we got down here, we knew nobody. And then we had a baby as soon as we got here. So it was like, we don't have any family, we don't know anybody. And it was so great.
14:08to kind of have people come out of the woodwork and just cultivate a community of friends and kind of turn them into our local family here. And it's been a really cool journey to meet people of all different places in life, all different ages, all different backgrounds, and everyone's interested and we're all learning from each other. And did you see this and you should try this? And it's exciting and it's fun. I absolutely agree. It is.
14:35I don't know about you, but when I get talking homesteading or podcasting, because podcasting is my new baby. I've only been doing it for a little over a year, so it's still new. And I get talking with people who are into those things. It's so fun. And like, my heart gets too big for my chest. You know, I just, I feel like I'm swallowed up with happiness because, oh, somebody gets it. Exactly.
15:03So it's been really neat doing the podcast because I get to talk to people at least three times a week, if not five times a week for at least half an hour about things that I'm interested in, but to people who are doing it differently than I am, which was kind of the point of doing the podcast in the first place. Right. And I learned all kinds of things. And there are a million right ways. Uh-huh.
15:29Yeah. And I learned so much from everybody because I don't necessarily do things the way everybody else does. So they're like, we, we do this. And I'm like, I need to do that that way and see how it works because we're doing it a different way and it's not working great. So Right. I definitely understand that. When we first started doing our laying hens, my husband built this beautiful mobile chicken tractor that had a great nesting spot and it had
15:58like indoor perches and all these things. And we ran them on the grass, just thinking we really don't have enough space to put a stationary coop and, you know, just kind of making the most of what we had. And we realized very quickly that we were going to need chicken math. We were going to need way more. We were going to want way more chickens than we had. And that there was no way in a 32 square foot, two story, you know, mobile coop we were going to be able to get.
16:27the volume that we wanted for what we wanted to do. You know, we have to make our own pasta and we have to make, because what we found out was that our child was allergic to basically all food dyes and all food preservatives. And so we kind of, that's kind of how it all started and kind of how we got to where we are was we had to learn very quickly how to do it all ourselves. Because in 2009,
16:582010, there was really not a ton on the market that you could get that was organic and didn't have food dyes. And that kind of became trendy later. And so we needed more eggs. And so after it painstakingly took months to engineer and build this, we used it for a year and realized, oh, we could better utilize these chickens in a stationary coop with deep bedding to make compost for our ever growing garden and alleviate the middleman.
17:29We live in pine country, so we can get wood chips free at any point in time. They'll deliver them right to your driveway because they, you know, any of the leftovers when they're milling in an area, they just bring it to us. Nice. So it ended up working out, you know, for us to have a stationary coop. So we use the mobile tractors now for our meat birds. But so, you know,
17:51And we thought at first all, we'll just have a couple on the grass and it'll be fine. They'll get fresh grass every day. And they're very happy, but we needed more chickens than it could sustain. So I definitely understand you kind of sometimes you have to work through it and find out what works for you and you don't make it work. Yeah. I feel like homesteading is an ever evolving process. Yes. It's never done. It's, it's a, it's a running document of ideas. They get tried out when they need to get tried out. Yes.
18:22when it becomes a necessity to change the procedure, then you change the procedure. Yeah. Honestly, the way that you are doing your life is beautiful. I mean, we definitely don't eat the way that you eat because we're not in that situation. We don't have a child and we don't have any food aversions or allergies or reactions that would require us to do what you're doing.
18:50We definitely utilize the stuff that comes out of our garden in the summer because it's really good food and we're going to use it. Absolutely. So, I was also going to ask you about the little wreath ornament that you have the picture of on your social media. I made those when I was younger in Girl Scouts and I saw it and I was like, oh, I've made those. So, where did you find out about that?
19:20undiagnosed ADHD until I was 35. But hindsight is 2020. So I realized when I was about six years old, both sets of my grandparents, I spent a ton of time with both of them. I had two working parents and I was a latchkey kid. So I would, you know, my choice, I didn't want to be home alone. I'd spend a ton of time with my grandparents. And so I realized now that I'm older, I had so much energy and I was bouncing off the wall. So both of my
19:48needle craft. So I learned embroidery, I learned knitting, I learned crocheting at a very early age and it's just kind of been a passion throughout my life, you know, and it's easy to pick up and put down as you need it and I enjoy doing it, especially in the winter when there's not a ton to do outside. But
20:06Probably about the same time that we started doing all this, we started going on, I started going on medical missions trips with the church that we were at at the time. And so in order to fund that, I was making baby blankets anyway for the girls at work, but they said, you should make hats and scarves and fingerless gloves and all these things and sell them. So we started making hats and gloves and scarves and selling them. And that was how we would fund the missions trips.
20:34And so it kind of became a thing amongst all the people that knew me was, Hey, if you need something as Sam, she can make you a baby blanket or a hat or a scarf or a gift for someone. And so when I started doing this, I was kind of going, okay, well, at certain times of year, I don't really have much to post. We're not really doing a ton because the preservation is over and we're not quite ready to seed anything and there's not a ton going on. So.
20:59I was asking friends at work, you know, what do you want to see now? Like, because we started the page because especially during COVID, we had already been doing all of this. And so people were getting very nervous and scared and they were saying, you know, well, how do you do this and how do you do that? And how do you do this? And I was repeating myself at nauseam at work. And the one nurse practitioner at work was like, you should just start a YouTube page. And I was like, I don't know anything about YouTube. Like I watch YouTube, but I don't know how to.
21:26I don't have a fancy camera and I don't know how to edit. It just seemed like so much of an undertaking. And she said, what about photographic posts on Instagram or Facebook where you could kind of say how you do things or put up a recipe or however, information. So if people are interested, they can kind of get a bite of information every day. And I was like, oh, that's a great idea. So we kind of hemmed and hauled over it a little bit. And finally I said, all right, I'm going to do it. And so that's kind of how it all started. So I was saying, well, what do you want to see now? And they were like...
21:55You never post anything about your crochet. So I kind of take pictures of stuff as I do it. And on those days that I don't really have a ton to post, I'll pull one out and kind of put it out there. And so, um, one of my friends has a stall at a farmer's market. And, uh, she was saying, you know, this time of year, we don't, they don't have, they, they sell grains and beef and other things, but they don't really have a ton coming out either in their stall is year round. So she said, I know you make beautiful stuff. You know, if you have anything you want.
22:23to put up, I'm making hodgepodge and craft stuff right now for Christmas. So she said, if you want to, you know, add anything, let me know. And so I just kind of got a huge inspiration and I was like, Oh, let me look online and see anything I could find. And so I've been making all kinds of different baubles and things for the tree. And I found a picture of that and I was like, I could do that. I have a ton of old rusty canny lids that I have no nothing to use them for, but I've been holding onto them. So I'm like, this is
22:52a great way to utilize those and not waste them and then.
22:57someone else can enjoy them. Yeah, we made them with the actual rubber seals that they used to have for the canning jars. Oh yeah. That's how we did it. And it made them kind of bendy, which was nice. And the other difference in how we did it from what I saw on yours is my mom was co-leader. So she picked up some of those little tiny jingle bells. Yes. And she had us sew three jingle bells on the wreath so that when they got knocked, when you walked by the tree, they would ring.
23:27That's so cute. I love that idea. Yeah, and the minute I saw it I saw the picture. I was like, oh my god I remember making those I think I was 12 and It was the first time I'd held a crochet hook in my life was when we made those and girls to make those that's so neat Yeah, and they're so cute and they're so easy and yeah Grandparents love those kinds of ornaments Absolutely, absolutely
23:56So they're very old fashioned and very homesteadish. So I think it's just great. I do. I love that aesthetic. So we kind of, we didn't really buy into it for a while, but now I've just owned it. There's mason jars everywhere and braided garlic and the whole nine. Yes. Mason jars are the best thing ever invented. I swear to God, I use them for my peony bouquets in the springtime. I use them for spruce vows at Christmas time. They're just, they're just the most
24:27What's the word I want? I can't think of the word I want. Versatile. Versatile, yes. They are the most versatile container ever known to man. Absolutely. We just, well, my husband just canned 34 pint jars of tomato sauce from the tomatoes that we picked from our garden and froze. He just did that this weekend when I was working on podcast things. I was so impressed. I'm like...
24:55I'm like, you know, if you could just wait till next weekend, I can help you. And he was like, I got it. Go do the thing you love to do. I was like, okay, perfect. I'm going to go do podcast stuff. And I came downstairs and he had 34 jars. Well, I had, he had the sauce cooked down for 34 pint jars. And I was just like, Oh my God, I love you. You're the sexiest thing ever. Right. And he just laughed. I love language.
25:20He just laughed. He said, yeah, he said, we're both 55 years old and the sexy things are hard work. I'm like, yes, yes it is. That's exactly right. Absolutely. Absolutely. The other thing I was going to say about Christmas ornaments is one of the other things that we did in Girl Scouts, because I of course went down the memory train when I saw the wreath. We took Christmas cards and cut like a house shape out of the picture on the Christmas card. Oh yeah.
25:50And then we took little toothpicks and made a little roof and little walls around the edges. And those were really cute too for Christmas. That sounds adorable. My kids would love that actually. Yep, and they're really cute on the tree. And if you get one of the Christmas cards that has the metallic stuff on it, the glitter or the paint that is shiny, when the light hits it, it glows. So they're really pretty.
26:18That's cool. We're definitely gonna have to try that Yeah, and I swear we have lost so many neat things like that in the last I don't know 30 years I feel like it. Oh, I feel like kids don't get encouraged to be creative anymore No, they just sit in front of the TV and watch somebody else do it And it's so sad because I feel like
26:45You know, we were made for creation. Like, I just feel like that's, I think that's why I enjoy this so much because it's so cool to, you know, plant a seed and see it grow and come to fruition and make something out of it. And, you know, it just, it's very rewarding, but at the same time, when you're eight or 10 or 12 or whatever, you know, something as little as making something, it gives you fulfillment. It gives you that happy, joyful fulfillment. And at the same time, it gives you great memories for later.
27:14Your kids aren't going to remember watching YouTube or, you know, watching somebody else do something, but they're going to remember when you sat down and made shrinkadinks with them or, you know, made a wreath or something. Yeah, there's, I feel like kids are lacking a sense of personal accomplishment in the smallest ways these days. Absolutely. Like my youngest son still lives with us and he'll be 23 at the end of this month.
27:43And he and his dad, well, his dad was building a greenhouse this year, hard side of greenhouses past May. And he asked for our son's help. And my son was like, sure, of course. And they basically built this greenhouse. It's like 40 by 20 feet. They built it. We had a friend come over and help one day.
28:08And he was not very experienced. He was, the help was very much appreciated, but he was learning as he went. So he helped, but my son and my husband basically built this gorgeous greenhouse. And my son came in just smiling, you know, just like, wow, that was really hard work, but it was really great. Absolutely. And my husband came in and he was like, thank God we had that kid late in life because we need his back. I was like, yes, we do.
28:37It's very helpful, that is for sure. So even when they're young adults, just being involved in getting their hands on actual work and doing it and seeing the result, there's such a thing that happens inside their brain and their heart. Absolutely. My mother's parents had a farm, and so I spent a ton of time on their farm as a kid.
29:06primarily vegetable farming. And we would spend all day outside. We never went in the house. There was no air conditioning. And so you didn't wanna go in the stuffy house. And it was just an unconscious thing. You just went with them and did whatever they did. And you helped and you learned and you weren't in imposition. And at the end of the day, you were tired because you worked and you slept well and you woke up the next day refreshed and ready to go. And I feel like the...
29:35kids today don't really get that. They get kind of parked in front of something so we can get something accomplished fast. Because I feel like today is about efficiency and productivity and all these things where before it was pouring your knowledge into the next generation. And so I think we kind of have, my husband and I kind of have a unique, maybe not unique, but less road, less traveled kind of background. Because my husband spent a ton of time on his.
30:04sister's in-laws farm when he was a kid. He was a late baby in life too, so but his siblings are a lot older than him so he spent a ton of time with them. He was young doing work on the farm as well so I think we kind of both have that in common. Yes, and I realize that it sounds like we're trying to convert the world to doing it the way we're doing it and I don't necessarily think that. I just, I feel like if you have
30:33the capability to maybe slow down and think about what you really want out of life and then make a plan to get that, then maybe you're inclined to do homesteading or gardening or baking or whatever and make that a thing. If you're not inclined that way, that's okay too. You know? Absolutely. If you want to be a double income family and you want to have your kids be in daycare,
31:02and you want to try to give them things that you didn't have as a kid and you spend time with them on the weekends, that's fine. But that's not how we did it. It's not how you're doing it. And it's not how a lot of the people that I talked to on the podcast are doing it. So I don't want to alienate people, but I also want to be compassionate about everybody's place in their life, that they're doing things the way they do them. Absolutely.
31:32And it doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing. You know, if you don't have any desire to garden and you don't like bugs or heat, you know, because the reality of gardening is it's beautiful in the spring and it's great in the fall. But in the summer, when it's a heat index of one hundred and eight, you don't want to be out there. You know, you have to want to do it. You know, if you just want to do some sourdough in the house or you just, you know, you just want to try something, it's it's rewarding. Try it. You know, baking or.
31:58You know, whatever, you don't have to do it all. It's, you know, I have some friends at work who were talking this weekend and they were like, I just want to learn how to make butter. I'm like, okay, go to the store and buy some cream and here's the post. And here's how you can do it. It's so easy, you know, and they're like, wow, I didn't even realize that's how it was made or brown sugar or, you know, just something easy. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing, but it's very empowering to have that little bit of knowledge and just know I can do that if I wanted to.
32:27Yes, and the thing is anybody can try anything. And even if it fails, there's value in the trying. Because you learn from your mistakes. Absolutely. I didn't walk out of the gate gardening of 2,500 square foot garden without some losses. You know, the first year I guarded, I put all of my eggplants like eight inches apart, and then I put my zucchini like a foot apart and they were
32:55all over each other, they were riddled with disease. I couldn't find them. And then when I found the zucchini, they were like 10 pounds zucchini. You know, what if you do it? This, you know, it's just kind of, that's just life. And you kind of have to laugh at it and go, well, next year I'll play them further apart. There's always next year. That's the best part. There's always another try. So even if you fail, laugh at yourself and try again. You just, you just made me think of something. Back when I was in junior high and high school,
33:24I was pushed real hard to be perfect on my tests and my homework. Like if I got A on a test, like if I got 100%, I would get the question, why wasn't it 110%? And I don't think I'm the only kid in my generation or the next couple that got that. I wonder if we have been programmed that if we can't do it right the first time, it shouldn't be done.
33:53I feel like that is definitely a lesson I also learned later in life. I think there was a big shift in the 80s and 90s to, you know, where manual labor was kind of looked down upon and you have to go to college and you have to get a power job and you have to push yourself and, you know, kind of like you said, that was when women were two income families and everybody's working. And I feel like that was definitely a big, a big thing. Set yourself up for success. And you know,
34:22start out strong and all the things. And I think a lot of people kind of are accepting the slow down now as a result of burnout from that. And realizing that there is value in working with your hands and creating something or learning a skill and it's okay to be proud of yourself for making a mistake and learning from it.
34:46And I think that's just the symptom of society that I think a lot of people are finding joy in these simple things because they're tired of the difficult and the, I don't even know what the word would be, the competition. There was always competition. Everything was so much, you have to be the best and why aren't you the best or whatever it was. Even among my friends in high school, I remember it always kind of felt like a competition.
35:15And it never had to be. And I think that was a big lesson I learned having kids and raising them in the way that I wanted them to know that it was okay not to have a competition. And you're just running your own race. And as long as you're happy with where you're at, that's all that really matters. Yeah, exactly. And again, you're pointing out something else that I hadn't really thought about until I talked to you today. I don't feel like there's a whole lot of competition
35:44between people who are doing what we're doing. I think it's more lifting each other up and teaching each other and being there for each other. Absolutely. And the wonder of learning, you know, there's 25 ways to do every single thing that we do. And even more, if you think about all the different climates and the different places and altitudes, and you know, kind of all of that, there's so many different ways to do something. So there's always a cool, different way to see how someone does something and learn from them.
36:13or just get excited for them. Like you said, you're doing what you were doing, what we're doing 20 years ago, and you can be excited for what we're doing now. And I can look at you and say, man, in 20 years, my husband and my son might be building me a 20 by 40 greenhouse. And that would be so cool. And that's a joy. That's a cool part of this. Yeah, it's amazing, because I look back at the things that we were doing.
36:4020 something years ago and we were just doing them because it was interesting and because my husband's mother said, would you like some of the irises and the lilies from my yard because she was selling her house. And we didn't have a garden or anything at that point and we put them in the little area in front of our bedroom windows that run it on the sidewalk and they grew and they were beautiful and I was like, this gardening thing is kind of cool. Right? It is.
37:09And I said, could we maybe try growing some tomatoes and cucumbers next spring? And he's like, where? And I said, in the backyard. And he said, but it's all grass. And I said, can't eat grass. And he laughed. Right. And we ended up tilling up that whole backyard and growing basically in every square inch of dirt we had so that we had tomatoes and cucumbers and carrots. And I don't even know green beans and rhubarb and herbs.
37:37and stuff and we started out really small and really slow. But by the time we moved four years ago, we had enough food to give our neighbors garbage, not, not, not, grocery bags of produce because we had too much. Absolutely. So it's, it's really interesting how the things that we do are cumulative in impact.
38:05You know, you learn to do one thing and you have some success and then you're like, huh, I did that. Maybe I could do more or different or bigger or whatever a year from now. And you just keep growing, just like plants keep growing. Exactly. And there's always something new to learn or try. So you stay fresh, you know, it stays exciting. Yeah.
38:39I think that's one of the coolest, I just think that's one of the coolest things about it is that it stays exciting. You know, like I said, my grandparents had a vegetable farm. My other set of grandparents were first generation immigrants. My grandmother was from England and they met during World War II. And so she had a very unique way of doing things that seemed very alien to me when I was young. But I loved it. I thought it was super cool. You know,
39:07she always harvested rainwater because they didn't always have a hose. And she always composted because England was a small island and they weren't bringing a lot of things in. So if you didn't compost, you couldn't grow your victory garden. And she always had a victory garden, but she had this beautiful stair step flower garden.
39:33which was such a difference from my mother's parents who just had vegetable fields everywhere. There was no flowers in their yard. There was no, if you couldn't eat it, they couldn't grow it, which is what made me think of that. But my grandmother would grow, you know, she had berry bushes and she had, you know, she had a little greenhouse and all the things, but her primary joy was to flower garden and have just beautiful landscaping. And so it was cool, cause I kind of got both sides of it. My grandmother just did the things that she did
40:02my father's mother did things that she learned growing up in England during that time because that was just her normal. That was her comfort. And so I learned a lot of that as a kid just because that's what she did. Whereas my mother's parents were growing more for production and sales. They had a roadside stand and we sold produce. And so it was kind of nice to get both sides of that and see it.
40:32And so when I grew up, I, you know, we were in that Excel, Excel, Excel. I had no desire to garden or any of that. I was going to school and I was going to get a good job and I was going to work and I didn't have time for that. And I just kind of, we kind of hit that, that wall with our oldest. And I was like, you know what? I'm so stressed out and I feel like maybe if I just had a little bit of home with me, it would be cool. And I just put it in a little garden and that's kind of...
41:00where the piece of the garden came from for me. But I, so I never vegetable garden or I never flower garden until we moved down here. And it kind of started for me as there was a few flowers and bulbs in the landscaping when we bought our house here. But I really wanted to encourage pollinators cause we grow organically and we don't use any pesticides or herbicides or anything like that. And so
41:28I wanted to encourage pollinators. So I just started planning any, I would get wildflower mixes and I would get any kind of cheap seed packets I could find and just started throwing flowers all over the landscaping. And now the flowers are a must. Like if they, I might not have enough room to plant all the vegetables I want, but we're going to definitely have the flowers because they bring me so much joy and they're so nice to just have a little piece of them in your house and just smile at them when you walk by and you know, when the
41:57Sunflowers are eight feet tall and staring at you in the evening. It's just very cool. And it wasn't something that I, I set out to do, but it was, it just kind of evolved with the process, but something that small could just start. You know, you could just, like you said, just throw some bulbs in and, and enjoy cut flowers from them or, or whatever. Yeah, absolutely. We didn't have any flowers here when we moved here four years ago. There were hostas.
42:25And I keep saying this on the podcast episodes, but there were hostas here. I don't love hostas. They're fine, but they're not the prettiest flower I've ever seen. And as soon as, as soon as I realized that there were no flowers here, I was like, honey, we have got to get some kind of flowers here. We had brought peony roots from the old house. So I knew we would eventually have peonies. So we got those in and we got some, uh, lily bulbs from somebody for free. And we put those in and we bought tulip.
42:54and daffodil bulbs and those came up the following spring which made it a lot easier. But the thing is in the springtime nothing's really growing yet you know and we bought crocus bulbs too because they're the first thing that really comes through in Minnesota because it's cold here until April. Oh yes!
43:16And so when the crocuses came up, I had never seen a crocus in person. I thought that they were a bigger flower. They are the daintiest little flower I've ever seen. And my husband came in and like, I think it was the first part of May, very first part of May. And he was like, there's little tiny like lavender and yellow flowers out there. What did we put there? And I was like, I don't know. Did you take a picture with your phone? And he said, well, of course I did. And showed me, I said, those are the crocuses.
43:44He said, they're this big. And he showed me with his fingers. He said, they're tiny. And I said, yeah. I didn't know they'd be that small, but how cool is it that we have flowers first? Right. And the other thing is that when you garden, I had no idea that potato plants have the most beautiful blooms. Yes. They're gorgeous. They look like flowers you would cut and put in a vase, except they're really short.
44:14And the sunflowers. Oh my God, we planted sunflowers two summers ago. My son wanted to plant sunflowers. I was like, sure, we've got an acre of garden we can put in sunflowers. That's fine. And they are so joyful. Like people joke about, you know, sunflowers being happy. They are. They're a happy flower. They are. They really are. So I understand what you're saying about
44:41you know, even if you don't have enough room for everything that you want to put in that you can eat, you're still going to put in flowers. I can't not have flowers on my property. I have to have something homey. So I get it. All right, Sammy, we've been talking for almost 45 minutes. I try to keep these to half an hour. So I'm going to let you know. And thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I've had so much fun talking to you. It's been great to meet you. You too. Have a great day. Thank you. You too.
45:11Bye.
 

Muddy Roots

Today I'm talking with Jess at Muddy Roots.
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
00:00This 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 Jess at Muddy Roots in Boston, no, near about Boston, Massachusetts? Yes, Boston, Massachusetts, but located in Dorchester. Okay, cool. Yeah.
00:24Awesome. So what's the weather like in in Dorchester? Because it's really gray and overcast and kind of chilly in Minnesota today. Yeah, looking at my window, it's about the same. I mean, we had like a pretty delayed start to our winter. So that was great. But yeah, it's gloomy. It's cold. You know, we're probably get snow soon. And that's what it is until, you know, till March, April. Yeah, I understand.
00:50we're actually supposed to hopefully get a little bit of snow because really we haven't had any and we are coming up on Christmas next week. And I'm like, okay, if it's got to be gloomy, can we at least have pretty snow falling? You know? Well, that's what I said. I said to my kids at work, I was like, God, like, have you had like, have you had a snowy Christmas yet since you've been born? And they're like, no, you know? So, hopeful for that too.
01:13Which is insanity because I grew up in Maine and I don't remember not having a snowy Christmas in the entire time Until I moved out of the state when I was 21 22 So Just the fact that that new england is not having Consistently white christmas is so weird. Well, it's not and I moved here almost four years ago and since then like
01:41you know, the warmth of our winters and the fact that we really are like compared to what it used to be, barely getting any snow. I mean, we used to have 12 feet of snow, six feet of snow, and now we're lucky, you know, now we're lucky if we get a couple inches snow, you know, and I grew up in New York in Long Island, and I remember being little and small and going out into the snow and it coming up to my to my chest, you know, and growing up having these
02:10you know, massive snowstorms every year that you kind of got to look forward to. You get to take them from school and, you know, with the way the climate's going, that's just not happening anymore. Yeah. And there's lots of people who don't believe that climate change is a real thing, but I think that climate change is real. I think that it's definitely here and I think it might be a little too late to fix it, so I'm, I'm kind of worried about it, but
02:37I'm going to make the best of every day that I have alive on this planet. So that's where I'm at with that. So tell me about yourself and what you do. Sure. I mean, so we started or I started Muddy Roots. I mean, I started Instagram for myself to find an online community of what I was going through, which was chronic illness at the time that was undiagnosed and being a woman and just how long that was taking for me to understand what was happening. And so I sought.
03:06community and I found a bunch of young women going through similar things, right? Just being young and it taking so long to get where you need to be. So in that time I had started that for myself, but was also at my wits with you know medicine in general and I've always been a gardener. My last name is gardener. My dad always used to bring us outside to our yard, force us to garden every year and do a vegetable.
03:33Garden and plant all the flowers and just say, you know, your last name is Gardner and you will do this And you know, this is in Long Island, New York And I so I grew up like that right your parents Sometimes force you to do these things and you grow up and they just become part of who you are and you continue them You know, you don't start to stop doing them You learn to love them and appreciate them and you know, thank your parents for it later so when I was going through the midst of my illnesses and things like that and
03:59you know, there really was no medication from me to help my pain, I, out of pure desperation in order to function and have some semblance and quality of life, went to my garden. And I started going herb by herb for what I was growing. Sage, rosemary, oregano were like mainly the three things that I started with and noticed that like, they helped my pain significantly when other things weren't. And that kind of led me down this rabbit hole.
04:29Like if I was never taught about this, if I didn't know about this, if people don't talk about this, and this was almost 10 years ago, what else don't I know? What else can I find just by growing more, experimenting, being inquisitive, you know, and trial and error, really, you know? I wasn't like, I didn't go to school for this. It just was happenstance and desperation that I fell upon this. So yeah, muddy roots kinda.
04:57started as a way for me to treat myself and also connect with a community of women and help people advocate for themselves and their body as I was learning to do that for myself and help women gain access to not only Western medicine, but other holistic options that I saw effective, you know? And we would kind of piggyback off each other, you know, because all of us were young and wanted to have a life worth living, you know?
05:25Yes. And when you say oregano and sage and rosemary, do you mean eating them or do you mean teas or do you mean tinctures or all day above? I started with tincturing and now I, so yeah, it really depends like what I'm going to use it for, right? If I have a UTI, I'm going to use a tincture. If I have gastric upset, there's other herbs I'm going to use and I'm going to use that mainly like from a tea.
05:53Yes, or you can put these things in salves and use them as muscle rub. So it really depends how I'm going to make it for what part of my body I'm going to use it for. Okay. Yeah. I was just curious because we did not have an herb garden this year. We didn't even really have a garden this year. The weather was horrible. All of May and June, it rained and rained and rained, and our garden was just a sad mess this year. But up until this year...
06:21For three years straight, we had the most beautiful herb garden and we had rosemary growing, we had thyme, we had sage, we had, oh my God, I don't even know, all the usual suspects. And what I do with that is I cut them and dry them and put them in my pantry and we cook with all those things. Yes, yes. And so we eat a lot of our good for us herbs. For sure. We don't really do tinctures or teas. That's like such another way to just, an easy way to incorporate.
06:50these things into a daily diet, right? They're not just seasoning. Yes. So yeah, for sure. Yeah, we do that as well too. We dry, you know, we have our garden in the back and we're lucky we live in Boston and we have a yard and my husband made me a garden last year so I can start using. So what we try to do at Muddy Roots, or I try to do anyway, is we set up our garden, we grow everything and we
07:19shutdown shop for the most part when we're done with our garden for the year. That way we don't source out and unless somebody personally comes to me like, hey I like this product can you make it for me? Like you know then I'll do it but that's for the most part except for our skincare we keep that going. Fire cider I do all year round. But salves and tinctures normally stop probably by March and then start again come June. So it's a short window that it's not going on.
07:49Okay. Yeah. All right. So I have a very specific question for you because you live in Massachusetts and I live in Minnesota and every state is different when it comes to the rules and regulations about what we people who aren't factories or businesses, you know, big businesses, can make and sell. So what do you have to do to be legal to sell the things you make? I mean, mainly as far as skincare, it's all good as
08:18as far as you're accurately labeling, now it's tricky, you know, when it comes to fire cider and things like that. You know, that we can't sell at pop-up shops and things like that and I don't. You know, if people come to my house, they want a fire cider, I'll sure I'll make it for you and you can have it. But we don't sell that without a license. Okay. Yep. It's very tricky sometimes when you're trying to help people but the government is like putting handcuffs on you and saying,
08:47No, no, no, you have to pay for this license and you have to take this test to be sure you know what you're doing and blah, blah, blah. So. No, I read, you know, and obviously like for sure things need to be regulated, but you know what? You know, they also regulate, I mean, you know, it's also the Twinkie, you know what I mean? The FDA approves the Twinkie. So. Uh huh. No, I know. I know it's so. It does need to be regulated. People do need to stay safe and they do want, they do need to know what they are ingesting and they have the right to know and you know, all that, you know, so I get it.
09:17Yep, I just here in Minnesota, we don't really, we have to label everything. Like we make soaps, we make lip balms, we make candles, and even the candles sort of have to have a basic label that says what the candle was made with. And that's only because of fire hazard. But for sure, soaps and lip balms, we have to put every ingredient on them. Well definitely. And...
09:42If anything, I mean many reasons, but for one being allergy purposes, right? Like sometimes sunflower is used or other oils and there's lots of kids. I work with them with sunflower allergies, you know. So it all depends. Yep. It's just all part of having a business and playing by the rules and trying to honor and respect and have compassion for the people that are going to be using your products. Now anybody with that being said is a...
10:12welcome to come into my home, sit down, have a cup of tea and pick my brain and I'll give you any advice you want. I'll set you up with a plan, you know what I mean? And you know, go from there, you know. I, um, which is what I do for like most of the things that I sell, whether it be a T or tincture, you go home and I ask that you journal and you tell me like, how do you feel on this? What is your differences? And I want to know for like the next month, whether we continue or not, or do you need something else, you know?
10:40That's amazing. I love that. I can't say that everybody does it, but I do. But that's how I learned herbs, right? Because you think of, well, when you get to know herbs that are aside from your garden and your pantry, and you learn that there are thousands other out there to kind of experiment with and learn about, it's kind of like a daunting task, right? How am I gonna learn?
11:04all these things and I feel like I'm still pretty early in that even though I've been doing it for 10 years and researching and experimenting for 10 years there's always more to know and how the herbs interact with each other and all that and it's like just super daunting. So I read like about a couple of years ago you take one herb and you just try to really focus on that herb and you get to know that herb and experiment with that herb alone without adding it with other things and see how that makes you feel you jot it down before you start doing combinations and all that because then it's like you don't know.
11:33It kind of all gets muddled. Yeah. It's kind of like when you start, well, you don't have kids, but I do. It's like when babies start eating solid food, you start them on one new thing at a time so that you can see if there's any reaction to it. Right. Yep. Cool. I am impressed. I think that that is wonderful that you say that the people that you help should keep a journal of how they're feeling. Because number one, it makes it easier for them.
12:02but it gives you some feedback on what really works and what doesn't. And if they do have certain symptoms arise, I can probably find out why or what is it, are you someone who naturally runs low energy, high energy? If I'm going for an example of, or even heart rates, like if you're someone who is naturally a tired person and you don't tell me that and I give you Hawthorne.
12:28you're going to be sedated. So these are things I need to know so I can give you a different herb for maybe the same thing we're trying to treat that's just going to make you feel different while doing the same job. Yes, because someone who's naturally not high energy and you give them something that's going to make them sleepy, that's not really a great plan. It's not gonna work. And there's so many, there's so many herbs, luckily actually, that kind of do similar things, right? So if one doesn't work or you have this effect from this one.
12:58and we're trying to work on like blood pressure and things like that. So and you're taking it and you're sedating, there's a bunch of other words that we can use that's going to maybe even boost your energy, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm gonna throw this in because it's one of the things that I learned about an herb and it has nothing to do with people, it has to do with cats and dogs. Catnip, catnip. Oh yes, it grows wild in our yard and we've had like.
13:25stray cats coming and we have a dog but we've seen this stray cats in our yard. One of them I know from like a mile or two down the road and it's found my yard. So you know. Yes, catnip makes cats crazy. It makes them hyper and crazy and stoned and it's really fun to give some to your house cat. But did you know that it's a sedative for dogs? It calms them down.
13:51Yes, and it's great for their GI tract. I started using herbs on my dog, one of them being catnip too, when he was diagnosed with inflammatory bowel. I just started thinking, oh my God. And I asked my doctor in a holistic about what can I use and the things that were told to me I had in my cupboard, things I use on myself. Yes. But yeah, catnip is great and it's great for humans. And it grows wild here. I mean,
14:20Wild, I mean, when I plant it. I don't know if it's native to here at all, but it does grow crazy in my yard. It grows wild here when we're not in a drought. Yeah. If it's dry, it doesn't grow. But the reason I discovered this situation about the difference between how it affects cats and how it affects dogs is we had our beautiful favorite dog, Spade, three years ago. And she was...
14:48about three and a half years ago, she was about six months old. And they gave me some medicine to keep her calm because she's a mini Australian shepherd and they're freaking crazy. And the medicine they gave her, one of the side effects is hyperactivity. I'm like, you gave her something to calm her down and it might make her even worse. And so we gave it to her and she was, she was being her normal crazy self and she had a spay incision that was fresh. And she actually ripped a stitch.
15:17We had to take her back in and make sure that it was okay and they fixed the stitch. And so I looked up things that I might have in my home that she could eat or, I don't know, drink that would calm her down. And I found out that catnip would work. And we had catnip and she had tried it before because she got some from when we gave it to the cats. And I put some in my hand and she smelled it immediately, came over and licked it off my hand and ate it.
15:47And within 10 minutes she was laying on the floor, completely calm, tongue hanging out, just relaxed. I was like, huh, herbs are great. I love herbs. They're wonderful. And one thing I do notice, I mean, with some of them, you'll notice pretty immediately how it's going to make you feel. And I'm not anti-prescription or anything like that. But I know that if I take rosemary and I want to treat low energy brain fog, I know
16:17or ADHD symptoms or things like that, I know that within an hour, I'm good. You know, I can feel the difference from just a strong rosemary tea and how it affects my mental alertness and my energy and my brain. Yeah, peppermint and spearmint do that for me. Oh, interesting. Yeah, yeah, it clears my brain immediately.
16:45I don't know why. It just does. Well, that's the thing too, right? I mean, well, same with medications is like how it interacts and how your body metabolizes. It is so different. You know, I spent, I spent, I guess a little like brief, I'll get into it a little bit, but I spent like the majority of my childhood and young, a young adulthood on things like Ritalin, Biobans, Adderall.
17:09Prozac, Wellbutrin, like, you know, all these things, right? And then when I was 27, I decided actually the year before I got into herbs, you know, I decided I'm going to for like the first time since I'm like literally four years old, clear myself and get off all these things and like kind of see what happens for the first year. It was like super difficult. And, you know, literally the detoxing that went on with me from things I didn't even abuse was horrific.
17:37and I'm not gonna tell somebody not to take these things, but for me that was like my experience and it really freaked me out, you know? And I started looking into my herbs and thinking like, what can I do to replace this? Because it's crazy that we grow up. The issue that I find mainly is that Western medicine and things like this are not combined and they should be because it's opening so many other doors for people.
18:06to treat themselves, you know, and make choices for their body. And when one thing fails, you have a million others. And it's not like that when we're not educated, when we don't know that these things are available and may work for us. Yes, I think that they should go hand in hand. And I was just talking with someone else on a podcast episode a week or two ago about the fact that Western medicine and...
18:35our doctors don't like your general practitioner isn't going to say I think you should go visit an herbalist unless they've had experience with an herbalist. No and what led me well actually what I'm not sure I first seeked my first herbalist maybe like
19:00six years ago, I want to say. And it was such an eye-opening experience. And then years after that, like maybe four years ago, a couple years after that, I started getting really bad GI symptoms. And I was somebody who had IBS. It wasn't severe or anything. But what I was experiencing was like dropping weight.
19:26I couldn't eat anything, my stomach was in so much pain, and I kept running to my GI, and I kept saying, like, this is not normal for me, and I literally cannot function. I borderline almost have to leave my job to give time to myself to figure out why this is happening, because I can't do both, and to be in that position, not for the first time in my life, but to run and ask for help and have nothing to hold onto and no hope.
19:54you know, when your life is suffering. And I went and I saw a naturopath and it changed my life, right? He changed my life with food. He changed my life with the supplements and the herbs that I was taking. And in six months, you know, I was fine, you know? And in that time, it took also my doctor six months to believe me and to run, or no, eight months I was fine, but two months before that, it took him the six months to run a test I was begging for with upper GI scope. That's all I wanted. I wanted...
20:24And answer, of course, he kept telling me I was fine. And what did he find? Erosive gastritis, you know, with pre, like, you know, precancerous like things in my stomach. So I was just like, that really led to me to, I don't wanna say not trust because every practitioner is going to be different, but to be very open-minded to when you're not getting help, go seek it elsewhere, you know? You have to advocate for your body because not everybody's going to do that for you. Yes, absolutely.
20:54and especially as women. I have talked about this a couple of times in episodes. I'm not gonna get into it too far, but if you are a woman in this world, especially in America, if you're not getting, if you don't feel like you're being listened to, definitely look for a second opinion. For sure. And I had a, so after they found like the precancerous cells and the changing in the erosive gastritis, he's now, you know, then he's like, all right, now you need a scope every one and a half years.
21:22I go to my next scope, right? I had been on herbs this whole time, you know, and was pretty like non-symptomatic in my upper GI. Everything was good. They do my scope and they tell me everything's back to normal. There's nothing there. Nothing there, no pre-cancer, nothing. And they said, what did you do? I said, herbs and fire cider. And they said, what? And I said, herbs and fire cider. And they said, okay, we'll see you in a year.
21:50I mean, in a year and a half, right? We'll do it again just to make sure. And if you're clear then you don't have to come back unless you develop issues. And I said, is this normal for this to happen? And they said, no. I'm like, all right. So even if you tell them this is what you're using because they're not trained in it, there's nothing they can do. There's nothing they can say. They can't even say like, they can't even recommend it to somebody else, right? It's not regulated. So they, you know, it's to them, it's like, oh, you know.
22:17you know, good for her, but when the next person comes in and they're struggling like I was and they, you know, and you know, they don't have help. They need to be trained in both modalities. I stand by that. They have to be. Well, maybe in 50 years, that'll be the norm, but right now it's not. And isn't there a line, patient heal thyself? Yeah. And I think part of that comes from the fact that we know our own bodies.
22:45best of all, right? We may not understand what's going on or why it's going on, but we know when things are not normal. I should tell my doctors, I've lived in this body X amount of years. I know when something is not right. And it's so hard when you know that to be sent home and to be told constantly to come back in two weeks if it doesn't go away, you know? Like, especially now after COVID.
23:12I mean, I saw a drastic decrease in the level of care I was getting. Forget about wait times with specialists and things like that. I'm talking like being able to get tests. I'm talking the time I get in their office or anything like that. Like it's been really, really difficult, you know, for me to find proper PT and other things that I used to have that helped me, you know, a lot of things I do come out of pocket, unfortunately, now so I can receive.
23:40good care. But I really do think like the more people podcast about these things, the more women speak up, it's going to be forced to change somehow one day. Yep. And I, this is going to sound really dumb. My podcast isn't necessarily about health in particular, but it's about all the things that kind of support health, if that makes sense. Right. Yeah. So what you're saying is important.
24:09What can you do with the things that the earth gives you to help yourself? Right and there are so many things like Raspberry red raspberry leaf tea is one of the things that I heard about a lot when I was pregnant with my kids Yes, and elderberry for supporting your your respiratory system and
24:34There are so many simple things that don't really cost anything except your time to learn how to use them, how to prepare them, and the time it takes you to harvest them. I think because we're not raised to be like this, right, quote unquote, homesteaders, which is such a vast word in how you choose to go about what you do with your land and your time and your resources. You know what I mean?
24:59It does seem daunting. It seems daunting to me, and I'm sure it seems daunting to a lot of people who are not raised like this to go out from the way we are expected to live in society and go attempt that, right? It just seems even though making these things is, it's pretty easy once you learn and you know, it's not hard. But the idea of it seems like I can never do that. Yeah, but people go to college and spend
25:27hours and hours and hours cramming information into their brains to spit it back out on a test and find out they're never going to use that information again. For sure. I went to college and I dropped out after six years of like trying to get this degree and finishing 80% and leaving and moving to another country and living there and just trying to figure out, you know, this is not it for me. I need to, I need to figure something out. I need to, I need to.
25:56I need to do something else. You know, I didn't, it's funny too, because years ago in high school, they make you take those aptitude tests, right? And I went to college for fashion and on my aptitude test for like what career you'd be best at, it came back as nurse and a farmer. And I was really pissed off because I had just was getting about to spend all this money. And I had been interning for years even in the fashion industry before I got into college. And I was like, well, this is not correct, you know? And if you think about it, what I'm doing now is,
26:24Am I a farmer by any means? No. Do I garden? Yes. Am I a nurse? No. But do I help myself and try to help any woman who comes into my path asking for it? Sure. So in its own way, it was kind of correct. You were a caregiver and a nurturer and the tests showed that. Sure. Yeah. Great. I love it. I took those tests too. And for me, it was singer, writer.
26:53or broadcasting. And now you're broadcasting. Yeah, and I actually write too and have for years. You know, I've been publishing a couple magazines and... That's amazing. Stuff. So, the aptitude tests are sometimes they're pretty dead on even though you don't think so. It's crazy because, you know, I say like to myself personally, right, when I think of myself as an 18-year-old entering the world and you think sometimes. And maybe people, some people...
27:23know more about themselves than I did, right? But I decided to go to FIT. I went to school in big New York City and I was somebody who hated big cities and didn't like to be around a lot of people. And still, you know, there's so many times in my young adult life where I knew things about myself and I didn't listen to what I knew about myself and just did what I thought. I'd make money, give me some level of prestige.
27:53um, whatever that be. And then you grow up and you realize, man, like, it's hard, man, sending an 18 year old to college and telling them, what are you going to do for the rest of your life? You need to figure out within the next couple of years and hopefully stick to it. It's difficult. I don't advise it, right? You know, I don't know. Yeah, I did not go to college and my teachers were very upset with me. Really?
28:20Oh, I told my English teacher, my senior English teacher, that I was not going to college. And the teacher I'd had for two years in a row, the two years before in AP courses, advanced placement English courses, the lady that had been my teacher for two years in a row, she said, so where are you going to college? And she said, there's a school in Maine that you could go to that's really good for writers. I will write you a reference letter. And I said, I don't need one because I'm not going.
28:49I remember. Oh, yeah. She had tears in her eyes. She said, Mary, why you're so smart. And I said, because I know myself well enough to know that sitting in a lecture hall for the next four years is not where I want to be. Yeah. And I didn't know these things about myself. Like I knew certain things, right? But I didn't understand a bigger picture here of like many, many things.
29:17And it's interesting because so much of growing up, in my opinion, is kind of growing up, evolving, and then for me specifically, unevolving, right? And getting back to the root of who you are and the things you love. My garden. You know, being in just empty spaces, taking walks, and trying to, the best I can in this society, to slow everything down. Yes. I've been trying.
29:46And you know what is really hard? Like we live in Boston and I want so badly to get out of the city more than anything. And, and I have an Oasis where I live and I'm so lucky, but I know I'd be better off with. Space and land and less people and less noise and traffic and yeah, just a different type of life.
30:10Well, you don't sound like you're old, so you have time. Sure. Yes, I'm 37, so I've got time. I've got time. But sometimes, you know, when your jobs are here and this is here and that is here, it feels hard sometimes to just bite the bullet and leave. For us, it would mean like starting over in many ways. Yes, and that's really hard. And what I will tell you, because we sort of did it on a small scale four years ago.
30:39We left our cute little tiny house, not tiny house like tiny house, but our 850 square foot house, sold it and moved to a 3.1 acre place in the middle of corn fields and soybean fields about half an hour from where we used to live. And it wasn't a huge change because it was only half an hour away from where we used to live, but we don't have the option of having food delivered to where we live, no one delivers this far out of town.
31:09Um, if we want to go to a real place to go shopping, like a Sam's club to stock up, we have to drive half an hour one way or 40 minutes another way where it used to be 15 minutes away. Um, there are, there are big things that happen when you move in a big way. Like if you move across country, that's a huge change, but even half an hour away to a place where
31:35our nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away. That was a humongous change for us. Yeah, I mean, going from Long Island to Boston, I didn't think it would be such a big change, but I didn't grow up in the city. Yeah. You know, so.
31:51So it's been a big change.
31:56But yeah, yeah, it's, I'm ready to get out of land and, you know, make more herbs and make more things. And I think back to three years ago, and like even, yeah, three years ago, I didn't know how to make a single thing. I knew things about herbs, but I didn't know how to make a single thing. And I just randomly started experimenting. Not even for medicinal purposes, I started with soap.
32:23Oh my goodness, is the dog okay? Yeah, I see.
32:33He hates steps, so he cries. Is he a hound? No, he's a poodle. Oh my goodness. Yeah, I hope that's okay. No, I don't. I can always edit it out, it's fine. Oh, good, oh God, that's like not the first podcast that I've been on where he just like is quite loud. No, I love dogs. Anyone who has listened to the podcast knows that I adore dogs because my dog is my favorite thing on earth right now. Same, yeah, my dog's helped me through. He's just come with me everywhere he's helped me through.
33:03through so many things. Yeah, it's so silly because we have the most beautiful home. We are so happy where we live. And we got this dog like a month or so after, well, two months after we moved in. And she was eight weeks old. And she was the cutest, sweetest thing. And she has just continued to be the cutest, sweetest thing in my life. And I feel like the crazy dog lady, not the crazy cat lady.
33:30Yeah, I'm the crazy poodle lady. I always say this is going to be my last poodle and then I get another poodle. Well, this was the first puppy I've ever owned. So, so it's been a very big experience for me having a puppy that I have grown into the most wonderful dog ever. So it's a big thing for me. I love her and I talk about her way too much. So we have been talking for like half an hour and I really do try to keep these to half an hour. But.
33:59I want to go back to the college thing real quick. Yeah. I think that if you are really interested in becoming a doctor or a lawyer or something that requires a huge amount of education to acquire the dream, college and university are incredibly important. Totally. But I feel like if you're not going down that road, it costs a lot of money to get
34:28an education beyond high school. And if you can't ever pay back that money with the job you get, it's kind of pointless to do that. Yeah, and I think about, you know, when I was 18 and I went to college or 17 or over old, I couldn't see myself doing anything else but fashion and it was what I loved, you know, until I did it long enough and...
34:54It kind of hit me like when I decided like, listen, I've been in college six years and I'm not I'm 80% done. I'm not gonna finish this degree. For me, it was like, coming to this, I didn't know how I was going to do it. But I didn't want to be in an environment. And it's interesting how it ended up working out. But I didn't want to be an environment who where you help women by addressing their outer appearance. And that's like, what really hit me when I chose like
35:23I'm having such a hard time getting through this. And that was like the nail in the head for me to, and that started with like how I felt in the industry with myself and how difficult that was. And I saw how that was affecting me and my mental health and my body image and things like that. Like I can't sit here and be healthy and do this. I guess I can finish my degree, but if I do, I'm still gonna go elsewhere.
35:49So for sure, I think like, listen, if you have a passion and it involves college and you really wanna do it, do it. But okay, and I feel like many people don't, not many people say it's okay if you wanna take a break or you don't wanna go that route or you wanna try something else and see how that works for you. And there's no shame in that because you just never know what's going to happen. I didn't think that me saying that I wanna help women and myself by not focusing on their outer appearance.
36:17appearance would lead me 14 years later making, you know, tea from my garden, skin care from my garden, fire cider from my garden, helping women when they reached out to me with their diagnosis and, you know, finding them good doctors as I found them for myself. You know, like I didn't think that was where it would take me. I didn't know, you know, what would happen. Yeah, life is a wild ride. You never know where you're going to end up.
36:47I'm going to tell you, I have met some incredibly beautiful people doing this podcast. I see people, they show up and they're on camera and I tell them they shut the video off because video never see light of day. And I've met beautiful people in real life who do grow gardens or who are homesteaders or farmsteaders or farmers or whatever. And I'm not saying beautiful as in aesthetically pleasing. I'm saying they know who they are.
37:16They don't give a crap about what other people think unless those people are in their corner. That's right. Beauty is literally on the inside. And so I can see how with you trying to help yourself and other people, that outside beauty kind of lost its luster for you. Yeah, it really did because it's so interesting. Like, you know, we just got married in September and, you know, that was the first time in however long.
37:46that I dress up, that I put on makeup, that my hair is done, that I'm not in my sweats and my boots and, you know, just chilling where so many years ago, my sense of fashion and how I creatively portrayed my sense to the world was so wrapped up in my overall being. And now it's not that I don't love it, it's not that I don't have it inside or that I'm not a creative person, but I don't hold onto that and say, if I don't portray this to the world, right, I'm not good enough.
38:16Yeah. So you know, like planning my wedding for me really was like my everything I left behind in that way of being creative, right? With fashion and style and we didn't use a planner, you know, I did all that. You know, kind of giving that to the world and then that's over and going back, you know, to how I am. Sweatpants, sweatshirt, glasses, messy bun in my garden, making stuff in my kitchen. Uh-huh.
38:44I think that's gorgeous. I think that's absolutely wonderful. All right, well, I'm gonna let you go because we're in like 38 minutes. And Jess, keep doing you. Do what you love and do what you're good at. All right, thank you so much for your time, Eda. Oh, you're welcome. It was a pleasure. Thanks, have a great day. You too.
 

O'Connor Family Acres

Today I'm talking with Tracy at O'Connor Family Acres.
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
00:00This 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 my friend Tracy at O'Connor Family Acres. Good morning Tracy, how are you? Good morning Mary. I'm doing well. Thanks. Thank you. How did you guys fare with all this crappy weather yesterday? Yeah, I stayed home.
00:28We were supposed to go somewhere and I was like, nope, I'm going to stay in the house. Paul went to work though, so he had to venture out, but he did well. He just took it slow as we do in Minnesota. Yeah, no doubt. So this is yet another hyper local episode. Tracy lives like maybe five miles from me, maybe in Le Sueur. So I have to tell you, we're doing homesteadish stuff today.
00:58Who? What are you doing? Well, I started that, that black garlic thing. That's the fermenting thing. And that's been going for three days. So my kitchen has smelled like garlic for three days. And it's got to go at least another couple before I can even open it to check it. And Kyle and Cameron are downstairs, um, basically heating up all the tomatoes that we froze to get ready to can them into sauce. So.
01:27My house smells like an Italian restaurant right now. Oh my gosh, I love it. I love canning tomatoes was new for me last year was the first year I did it and absolutely love the smell. And I'm excited to hear how your black garlic turns out because that sounds super interesting. I was listening to your episode where you talked to the guy about black garlic and I was very intrigued. So yeah. Yeah, I will have to give you some so you can try it.
01:57Awesome, I would love that. Yeah, I think there's 15 heads of garlic in that machine right now. So if it works, I'll have some to share. Nice, nice, nice. I will reciprocate with, you know, well, something. Goat milk in the spring would be awesome. Absolutely. That's a, well, that's a hopefully a for sure. We have a new buck this year. So.
02:22And he's pretty young, so hopefully he did what he needed to do so we have babies in the spring. And that would be wonderful. And on that note, tell me about yourself and what you guys do at O'Connor Family Acres. Yeah, thank you so much. So we are, you know, a small homestead. We have about almost six acres. And we moved here to the homestead. This is going on four years now.
02:51We started with ducks and we actually started with ducks in the city-ish. So city-ish. We were in Medina at the time on an acre and we started with maybe six ducks. And it was during COVID, of course, because we didn't have anything to do. And we're like, we had been talking about when we buy our forever home, getting
03:20you know, some animals and really kind of not completely being independent, but controlling at least some of our food and how it's being, you know, handled, processed, what goes into it, all the things. And so we started with ducks. And then when we moved to where we are now, O'Connor Family Acres, those ducks multiplied greatly. And we also got goats.
03:49And this year we added pigs. So we're kind of we're not really at a point where we're you know Consistently selling we'll sell something here or there But we're almost to the point I would say this next year if our buck did what he was supposed to do will be at kind of a tipping point where we can maybe start selling some stuff and the idea is to you know provide for us provide for our family and
04:18you know, maybe offset some of the feed costs and, you know, the money that we're putting into it by selling some of the abundance, if you will. So. Awesome. I'm glad that that's the case because I don't, it's fine if you just have a homestead or a farm or whatever and you're just doing it to provide for yourself. But that never quite works that way because some years you will have an overabundance and you're like, what do I do with all this?
04:47Oh, for sure. Absolutely. I mean, in the spring, because we do have so many ducks now, I'm literally trying to give eggs to people. I'm like, Oh, it is so nice to see you. Thank you for visiting. Would you like a dozen eggs? Yeah, we used to do that with the chicken eggs, because we just had so many we couldn't use them before they would go bad. Yeah, exactly. Duck eggs and zucchini. Zucchini is the other one I'm always having abundance of from the garden. We do have a garden too.
05:17I'm always like, oh, would you like some zucchini? It was actually amazing to me this past summer when Kyle was selling at the farmer's market in Lesour that people bought zucchini. I was like, are you serious? You don't have neighbors who are just putting it in your car or in your porch? Well, and not everybody does, right? So that's kind of the beauty of it. And you guys have amazing vegetables. So I always love coming in and seeing the...
05:47the garden and now the greenhouse and all the things. And of course seeing you guys too, but. Yeah, it's just the stuff. It's not. Kind of like when you have kids, right? And they're like, I come to see the kid. Well, also you too. But then when you have a homestead, it's like, I come to see all the animals in the garden. Oh, and you too. Yep, exactly.
06:12So our garden this year, you know, did not do real well. We had some zucchini for a while and we had tomatoes after the third planting. And I'm very excited about the fact that we actually did get some tomatoes to make sauce out of and we're doing that today. But keep your fingers crossed that next summer's better because man, this was a very depressing year for the garden. Yeah, it was a rough, it was a really rough spring.
06:41And I think our saving grace was that we had the raised beds, which can be a positive and a negative. It was nice that it wasn't white. I mean, we still had some stuff that struggled for sure, as we do every year. And part of that is just we're still learning too. I've always had at least containers. When I lived in the city, in the city, I had a little salsa garden with
07:08containers of tomatoes and peppers. And then when we moved to Medina, we added some raised beds and now we're here. We have two, four, six, eight, about 12 raised beds plus some space. I plant pumpkins on the side. There's some asparagus, rhubarb, some of the things that you definitely put directly in the ground.
07:36So long story longer, that was kind of our saving grace this year. It does limit you, I think, a little bit on the quantity because you leave space and there's only so much room. But for controlling drainage and things like that, it is definitely helpful. Yeah, my heart broke for you guys this spring for sure.
08:01Yeah, ours too. It was very sad. Like we shed some tears over that four or five weeks of rain. Yeah. So I have a question about your asparagus, but I also want to ask you another one after that that has nothing to do with asparagus. Yeah. Was there asparagus there when you moved in or did you guys put in crowns? Yes and yes. Okay. So this was actually kind of funny. So Paul tilled the garden.
08:31How did this go? He tilled the garden, said he had to buy a torch so he could burn the garden, tilled it again, and then I planted asparagus. And it's so funny because where I planted it is kind of, of course, on the edge of the garden because I know asparagus spreads like wildfire. Oh, yes. And just to the left of that was...
08:54asparagus coming up that spring. I'm like, first of all, how did that survive our garden Armageddon? And then also, yay, I have extra asparagus. So that was kind of cool. And so that asparagus that was there, were you able to harvest some right away? I think not the first year. And I don't know if that's because we went crazy on the garden or if it was because...
09:20Um, it was newer, like maybe the people before us just put it in. Um, but last, this last year was the first year we were able to really get some asparagus. So it took, it was the third year. Yeah. I keep hearing that it takes three years for it to get established. And I have the same experience. This is the first spring that we've been here that we've gotten more than like, you know, eight stems. So nice. Nice. It is though my, um,
09:49Grandma's, my grandma's place, which is now my aunt's place, has an asparagus patch that's been there probably 50 years. I mean, I remember getting asparagus as a kid and my aunt still gives the family asparagus every spring. So it's a, I mean, once it's established, kind of like rhubarb, I know you had a really awesome rhubarb plant. It stays.
10:18Yeah, we actually haven't gotten a whole lot of rhubarb from the stuff that we put in when we put it in the fall. We moved here for years ago, 2020. But the rhubarb plant that was here when we moved in, the one little rhubarb plant they'd put in, we got some this past spring from that. And it was pretty good. Cameron ate a bunch of it with the, you know, dip the stem in the sugar and bite it. Oh, yeah.
10:44Oh yeah, that was one thing we planted too a couple years ago when we moved in was the rhubarb plant. And the first year it did not do well. The rhubarb plant was like, no thank you. But then I replanted a different one the next year and that one came back last year. And I'm hoping this year we'll get to harvest some stuff from it. So fingers crossed because I love rhubarb.
11:10I do too and it's how I know string is actually here when there's enough rhubarb to cut and put with strawberries and boil with sugar and make a compote and have it either on toast or on ice cream. That's when I know string is officially for sure here. Oh yeah, so lovely. Yes, and we do it every spring. If I don't have rhubarb growing, I will buy rhubarb just to make it. Yeah, it is. Yes, yes, and all the yeses.
11:40Okay, so my other question is, and I ask this almost of everybody, were you, like, I don't know your upbringing, I should, we've been friends for like, two years now, but were you brought up around farming or gardening or whatever? So we, I grew up in the suburbs, so directly no, like our family didn't, we didn't even really have a garden, honestly.
12:10trying to think back, we grew up truly in the suburbs. Around, it was Hamline, so it was north suburbs and it was kind of a development that was built around farmland, if you will. So I've always been farm adjacent. And my grandparents on my dad's side were farmers. So we would go down to the farm.
12:36you know, a few times a year, a couple holidays, and then sometimes we'd go and stay with them for a week in the summer. So I did have exposure to farming from that. And then when I started my container gardens and growing tomatoes, I got more and more interested in it. And so it was kind of always, I had a childhood dream to have a small farm.
13:03at some point in my life and then, you know, life kind of does what it does and you know raised my child and then you know, I got married. Paul and I just celebrated our eight-year anniversary and then we moved to our forever home and that's really when it started to take place. We started to talk about it as we were, you know,
13:30talking about getting married, it was like, where do you wanna live? What does our life look like? And I had really started to get into understanding more about where our food comes from, sustainable farming, and just really eating healthier and being healthier. And so that's really what drove it. Okay, did Paul have any background in it beforehand? No, ma'am. Okay.
13:57He is from England, the northeast of England, so kind of a harbor area. And he played professional soccer from the age of 16. So he was very much playing and traveling and doing all the things and then coaching. He had small gardens as well too in his adult life, but nothing, no exposure to farming.
14:26you know, as we know it. Okay. Yeah. Um, so I'm going to poke a little bit of fun at Paul just for a second. Paul would have been part of this interview, but Paul has the thickest British accent ever known to man. And when he's excited, he talks really fast and it's hard to understand him. So that's why he's not talking. He's also working right now, but yes, he has an extra. Yes. He does have a very thick.
14:56British accent that he has kept for sure. And it's northeast, so it's not what people traditionally think of here in the U.S. when they think English accent, they think more south. South England, so more London area, the posh south, they would say. But no, he has very, very northern English accent for sure.
15:24Yes, when we were talking about this the other day, I told you he sounded like he had an English accent mixed with a Scottish brogue. Yes. And his voice is fairly deep. So it's really easy to listen to him when he's talking slowly, but when he's excited, he just runs all his words together. I'm like, what? Yeah. Well, and we have a, I mean, we would probably run over if I gave you the full story, but
15:52We met when we were kids. I mean, I was 17 and he was 19 and then had separate lives. And then through, you know, kismet, fate, whatever, reconnected probably about 10 years ago. And listening to him speak was, I've always just absolutely loved his accent, loved the, you know, tenor of his voice. So anyways. Yeah. Yeah. And he is
16:21He is a really nice man. And I think that his accent is really sexy, but that doesn't help me if I can't understand what he's saying. Yeah, you don't have to understand. You just have to listen. Yes, and if I was in the market and he was single, I would probably listen closer. But since he's not single and neither am I, and I love you and I love my husband, I'm not playing that game. So.
16:49Agreed and agreed. Love you and love my husband and love your husband. We're one, I mean, just really great people. It's always nice to connect with great people. Yeah. And I was so thankful to find you because when we moved here, it was during COVID. You guys, I don't think you guys were here in 2020. I think you moved to your place in 2021, right? I think that is correct. Yeah. I'd have to look back, but yeah, I think so. Yeah. And having moved from small town, Jordan,
17:17you know, half an hour northeast of us. Yeah. In town, that quiet and not really seeing anybody was very welcome for the first year or so. Yeah. Yeah, I listened to the episode about community and it's so true. We have amazing neighbors, which is just super wonderful. You know, and then also to have...
17:41Connected with you. I mean I consider you a neighbor even though we're you know five ish miles apart Yes, that's how you are in the country right my neighbor For my vegetable farmer neighbors is what I is when I do your full title what I said Yes, my friend Kathy who lives like two miles away calls me Csa Mary because that's how she's oh there you go. There's the full title, right?
18:07Yep. Yep. She has three Marys who are friends of hers. So she's like, I have CSA Mary, I have whatever Mary, I have the other Mary. And I'm like, okay, I'll take CSA Mary. That's fine. That is awesome. And I think you call me my friend with goats, right? Most of the time. Yeah. But it was funny because I was on Facebook and stumbled across your page and I was like, Conner Family Acres. Okay. And then I...
18:34you know, scrolled through the page and I was like, I need to meet this lady. I need to reach out and say hi. And I did. And here we are two years later. Yeah, I was so glad. It was really nice. It was nice to connect. And it's been nice because we're both, I think, you know, learning in our journey, which is awesome. So it's kind of like, Oh, did this work for you? This worked for me. What are you guys up to today? You know, what's new? And I know
19:02Paul and Kyle connect a lot and talk about structures and farming and how's this going to work out. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It's really nice for Kyle to have someone to talk to who is male and gets into that stuff because he talks to me about the wood burning furnace and I'm like, as long as it throws heat, I'm good. Exactly. Kind of like, why don't you give Kyle a call?
19:32Talk shop with somebody who has the same parts as you do. It'll go better, I promise. Exactly. Yes. So anyway, a big mutual admiration society going on here. Sorry listeners, but this is what happens when friends have a podcast episode recording. So I was looking at the description on your Facebook page and it says Nubian slash Kiko
20:00So does that mean that they're a crossbreed? Yes, we have. So we have some Nubian Sonins actually, and then we have a purebred Kiko. And so we have a little, kind of a little bit of both going on. Our buck had papers, but he passed this last summer. He was a purebred Nubian. And so his son is now our main breeder.
20:29um, and is a Nubian, he'd be two thirds, no, two, three quarters Nubian and a quarter Saanen. I had to do the math there. It's not my strong point. It's okay. So what's, so what's a Kiko goat? Yeah, the Kiko are more meat goats. Um, and honestly looking at her, you probably wouldn't, I mean, she just kind of looks like the other goats.
20:57I think we had her when you were over last. She's the all brown one with a little bit of black socks. Yep. And literally she looks just like the other goats, but she's more of a meat goat where the Nubian and the Saanens are more of our dairy goats. But we bred her this year, so I'm super interested to see how she does, with the birthing first of all, but then also what her offspring look like, and do we get...
21:26some decent milk from her. I'm interested to see all the things, which is kind of fun. That's the fun side of homesteading is getting to kind of go, how does this work? Yeah, absolutely. Homesteaders are incredibly innovative. You're like, what would happen if we did this? Absolutely. And we're certainly obviously not the first people to crossbreed.
21:53Nubians and Kiko by any means I think that's fairly common because you kind of Get you're supposed to get the best of both worlds, right? So you get dairy and you get meat And so it's kind of a good combo of goat But our Kiko Miss Mabel was a little bit of a runt and so I'm interested to see if her offspring are gonna be full-size
22:19you know, will they give good milk, which that we won't know for a few years yet. But it's kind of fun. It's kind of fun to think it all through. And then Paul and I had conversations about do we breed her, do we not breed her, because she was kind of a runt. But she's a good size runt, if that makes sense. She's not like 100, I wouldn't say she's 100 percent, but. And from what I've read, because I do a lot of research online, you know.
22:46Sometimes they can have full-sized babies and sometimes they produce other runts. So we'll see what happens. Well if you end up with a runt or two, maybe I can talk to Highland letting us buy them from you. Oh my gosh, that would be so fun. I don't think I can, but I would love to. Yeah. Okay, so I know you guys got piglets back.
23:12last spring was it? This spring, yeah, absolutely. So that and that was kind of the cool part, the goats, we were finally at a place where I'm like, okay, I think we can sell some of these goats. And we had been talking about getting turkeys and pigs were the next things we wanted to add to the homestead. And I was talking with a lady online about what I was talking to a guy about turkeys. And I was talking to a lady about pigs.
23:40and she wanted to trade some of the baby goats for the baby pigs. And so I was like, perfect. I love, love when we don't have to come out of pocket cash for buying new livestock. Barter is fabulous. Exactly, barter is definitely the way to go. So we bartered some baby goats for some baby pigs and we now have Magna Lista pigs, two of them. One male that has been
24:09no parts, and then we have a female. And so the plan is to keep the female for breeding and the male will be at some point processed. Food, he'll be food. Exactly, exactly. Okay, so how old were they when you got them? They were probably six to eight months. I'd have to look back at the dates, but they were about six to eight months and the goats were about the same age.
24:35Basically, at the age where you can, you know, where they no longer need the mama. Yeah. Okay. So, they weren't little baby tiny piglets when you got them. No, they weren't newborns by any means. Yeah, it was kind of funny because when I said we were bringing home pig, you know, baby pigs, they're big. These are big pigs. They should get up to upwards around 300-ish pounds. And, I mean, that's not...
25:00in the world of pigs, that's obviously not the biggest, but it's big for us on our little homestead. I'm like, oh, these guys are going to get huge. And we went to pick them up and we saw the mom, the mamas and the daddies. I was like, oh goodness, these are going to be, yeah, these are, these get big. Um, but they are so sweet. Like I have just been with the grand, we have a grand kid who is four and he was just in with them the other day, um, petting them and you know, kind of.
25:29checking them out and they're still at a size where he can do that. They're probably about the size of a lab right now, like a really gigantic, chubby lab, but you know, lab body size or height, I should say maybe. So he was still able to do that, which was kind of fun. Cool. So the reason I asked how old they were when you got them.
25:54is because it's really hard when it comes time to put down an animal for food. And if you need me to come and stand with you or hug you when it's done, I can do that because I know you're probably going to be sad. Thank you, Mary. That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely losing an animal, any animal, the ducks, the goats, it's not fun by any means,
26:24you know, it's part of the circle of life. And, you know, I always, people always ask me if I'm getting, you know, like an ostrich or something. And ostriches have their place, but you know, everything on our farm is, maybe ostrich isn't a good example, like mini, mini, you know, mini horses or something. And I'm like, everything on our farm has a purpose, right? They're either guarding, de,
26:51rodenting. The cats are little, you know, de-rodenters. They produce food or, you know, they have a job. Everybody has a job or a purpose on the homestead and that's why we're feeding them. So, but thank you. I would, I love that. It is hard to lose animals. It's especially hard when it's not planned and it's predators or something else that can be.
27:20challenging and difficult, you know, and frustrating because you feel like, you know, you're setting everything up for success and then, you know, there's always mini setbacks which are, you know, just an opportunity to learn and change the way you're doing things. So we've definitely pivoted a few times on the farm. Yeah. And it's hard even when you don't feel a particular connection to the animal. Yeah. We had...
27:48four or six, I can't remember, chickens at the old house years ago. And it was time for them to no longer be part of our yard. And we were going to eat them. We were going to call them and cook them, but they were not meat chickens, so they were not worth cooking. And we, I made myself go out when they were dispatched.
28:13I made myself go out and watch the process because I was like, if I'm expecting my husband and my sons to do this, I should probably at least be here for it. And I didn't cry, but man, that first chicken, I teared up. And I had that big thing in your chest where you feel like you're going to really sob, but you don't. And I don't even like chickens, Tracy. They're not my favorite creature on earth. So it's just...
28:41it's hard when you see something lose its life. It doesn't matter what it is. Yeah, no, I fully get it. The first few ducks that we dispatch are always a struggle and then you kind of get in the swing of it. But, you know, it is emotional and it's really hard when it's not planned. And you know, I think...
29:06to your point, even when there's not a connection, you know that those animals are in your care and you're responsible for those animals. You know, kind of like we talk about barn cats a lot, right? Even though we know that the, you know, the success rate of a barn cat is probably not as high as some other animals, you still are sad when something happens because those, they're in your care, you know? So yeah, it's interesting.
29:36the joy of baby kittens and baby goats and baby ducklings and hopefully one day baby piglets. It'll be a few years, but I'm kind of excited for that too. Well, you know, it definitely overshadows the trials and tribulations. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like living in Minnesota. We live it. We suffer the winters to enjoy the spring, summer and fall. I think it's the same kind of perspective.
30:03100%. Yeah, sweet. Yeah. Well, and there are, I mean, there are people who absolutely love the winter time in Minnesota for sure. But I am on your perspective there with I tolerate the winter because spring, summer and fall are great. Although Paul got me a pair of snow shoes two years ago, which was kind of not perfect timing because last year we had no snow and this year we're struggling a bit.
30:32Yeah, still waiting to get those snowshoes out there. Yeah, absolutely. So we're at 30 minutes, but I wanted to share a thing that I did yesterday for listeners. I made a designated website for the podcast yesterday. I love that. I'm so excited. Congratulations. I'm going to have to go check it out. Yeah, it's a tiny Very original.
31:00But I'm going to be doing blog posts about every episode. And that way people can get a little bit more background on the people, you know. And if there's stuff that gets mentioned like the Kiko Goats, I can do a little aside in the blog post about what a Kiko Goat is or whatever. So it just gives me a little leeway to play and to get back into writing a little bit. So if you guys wanna check it out, it's atin And it's got the whole list of episodes on the...
31:30the episode page, like it's all there. So you can just click and listen. Awesome. I'm so excited to go check it out. Thank you, Mary, for sharing. It's super cool. The particular website platform that I found is so user friendly. Oh, nice. I think it's Webador is the name of it. And I opened it up and looked at it and went, oh my god, this is easier than any other one I've ever used. I'm so excited to dig into this. Nice. I'll have to check it out because we do have
32:00I did a little of that with Paul's coaching to set up a website because he's an independent contractor and the one we used was also very user-friendly but had some limitations and so I'll definitely check out the Webador. That's very cool. Yeah, I'd never heard of it before. I think it's actually Weebly, W-E-E-B-L-Y, but it's Webador is the thing that shows up when you actually sign up for it. Okay.
32:28But I'm very much in love with the way it worked. And it only took me like an hour to get it set up. Nice, well congratulations, that's awesome. Yep, and I'm gonna be screwing around with Instagram over the next week to start promoting the podcast on Instagram because I'm bad at Instagram. I don't quite understand how to use it, but my daughter loves it. So I'm gonna hit her up for a couple hours this week and be like, can you show me how to do this?
32:56Yeah, I wish I could help you with that one, but I too am bad on the Insta. And I know, I know it's extremely popular and I know it's really good for your business. Um, and I, I need to, I need to get into it both for my jobby job and for my, my farm life. Yeah. I just, I don't know how people do all the fun things I see. And I'm like, how did they do that? I don't even know where to find how to do that. So.
33:21My daughter does all kinds of stuff with Instagram, so I'm just gonna be like, hey Sandra, I need your help. Can you help your old mommy with some new technology? Kids are the best. And once she shares with you, then I'll pick your brain. I do know, I do know there's a way to kind of tie some platforms together. So when you post on one, it posts on multiple, which is really nice. It's helpful, it sure is.
33:49Alright Tracy, I want to talk to you again this fall after the summer. Yeah. And oh yeah, we're going to be making the duck that you gave us next weekend. Good, good. Oh good, I hope you love it. It's yeah, it should be good. Let me know. Keep me posted and I would love to talk to you again and we can update how our respective gardening season was. Yes, and we can talk about the dispatching. No, we're not going to be dispatching the pigs for a while.
34:18The mail will be this coming fall. So yeah, if we talk again in the fall, it's about 18 months. And so we would have had them about 18 months. So I'll give you an update on whether that has happened or not happened. Yeah, exactly. I think that would be really good for people to learn about because it's a process. For sure. Thank you so much for your time, Tracy. I really appreciate it.
34:46Thanks for having me, Mary. It was great to talk to you. Have a great weekend. You too. All right, bye. Bye.
 

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
00:00This 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.
00:29kind 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.
00:54So 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.
01:24And 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.
01:54but 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.
02:21to 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
02:51a 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.
03:18And 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.
03:47because 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
04:17topography 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.
04:40Yes, 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.
05:09You 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.
05:37So 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.
06:06fall 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.
06:36So, 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.
07:04peonies 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.
07:31I 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.
08:01You 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
08:30Um, 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.
08:59Doesn'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.
09:28And 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.
09:58that 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,
10:26There 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.
10:56My 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.
11:22in 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.
11:51Which 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
12:20I 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.
12:48I 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.
13:18I 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.
13:48And 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.
14:16worse, 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.
14:45So 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
15:14our 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.
15:43We 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.
16:10four 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.
16:38We 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.
17:06saw 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.
17:36that 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.
18:05And 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.
18:30So 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?
19:00No, 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
19:29a 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.
19:58He 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.
20:28Still 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.
20:57He 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.
21:24four 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
21:54They'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.
22:18but 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.
22:46And 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.
23:15And 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.
23:39And 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.
24:07and 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
24:36We 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.
25:06bought 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.
25:33They'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.
26:03of 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.
26:29What 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.
26:57They 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.
27:26at 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.
27:53more 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,
28:23monthly 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.
28:38Good. 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.
29:05get 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,
29:34The 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.
30:04you 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
30:33you 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.
31:03Yep, 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
31:32to 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.