A Tiny Homestead

The Farm at Prophetstown

Today I'm talking with Sunshine at The Farm at Prophetstown. You can follow on Facebook as well.
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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 Sunshine at the farm at Prophetstown. Good afternoon, Sunshine. How are you? Hello. Hi. I'm doing wonderful here in Indiana. Good. It's really funny because I call my kids.
00:29Well, I used to call my kids or grownups now, but when I would wake them up, I would say, good morning sunshine. So the minute I saw your name, I was like, oh. Yes, I get a lot of people who go, that's cute, but what's your real name? I'm like, well, it is, but it is unique. People do remember me. Oh, I would imagine so. Is it because your parents were of the hippie generation or what's the story? Yes.
00:58Yes, that's it. Okay. I think it's beautiful. I think that being called sunshine all the time would be a lovely way to live my life. Okay, so tell me about what you do at the farm and then tell me about the farm. Sure. The farm at Prophetstown is a 1920s living history museum located inside of Prophetstown State Park.
01:27I at the farm am in charge of our marketing, our website, our social media, our school tours, any kind of regular tour, anything public facing. I kind of consider myself an experience enhancer in a way. What a wonderful job, yes.
01:52Yes, it's super fun. My previous job I did the same things, but I worked at a university. I worked at Purdue. So this was a totally different environment for me. I did not grow up on a farm. So everything I do here is kind of first for me in a way, even though my day-to-day job and what I'm doing as far as event planning and
02:20tours and interacting with people. I'm very familiar with the course, but the farm itself and everything's a little different. Example, today it was our first snow here. So it's the very first time I'm seeing snow on the farm, but now we have a little bit of a mini, I don't know, it's not a blizzard, but it looks like a blizzard outside the window. I bet it's absolutely beautiful.
02:50It really is. When I first pulled into the drive this morning, the sun just came up and to see that snow on the barn, just beautiful and the horses out. Our farm is six on a hundred acres. We operate on about 25 acres and the rest we use for our feed alfalfa.
03:16We have several animals that we take care of year round. So our farm is open year round every day, seven days a week from 10 in the morning to 5 PM. We have three horses, three goats, three cows, six pigs, three sheep. We have a bunch of chickens, about 65 chickens, two turkeys, 11 ducks.
03:45two farm cats. I'm thinking if I missed anyone out of all them animals. Is there a dog? No, we do not have a dog. Okay. We do have a mini horse and a donkey. Okay, well that's a pass little animals right there. Yes, and so we care for those animals every day. We have a staff of about six part-time farm hands.
04:11And so our day begins, I come in in the morning, I open the farm, and then from there, the farm hands will start doing their, letting the animals out, feeding them, doing all the morning chores about 9 a.m. And then we will repeat it again about 4 p.m. in the afternoon and we button up the farm by 5 o'clock and we all leave. Okay, so.
04:39It might seem weird that I'm talking to Sunshine about this place in Indiana, but I really love places like yours because I, when I was in school, we went on a field trip to a farm in Maine called Norland's Farm, N-O-R-L-A-N-D-S. And I don't know if that's what it's still called now cause I'm older now. It was quite a while ago, but it was a living history place and kids would go there for field trips.
05:08and everybody on the farm was in character from like the late 1800s. And it was really fun, partly because one of the girls in my class, I think it was middle school, junior high, she had nail polish on. And nail polish wasn't a thing they did in the late 1800s. And the woman who was taking us through the experience of what we were doing.
05:35She saw her hands and she said, did you damage your fingernails? And the girl looked at her and said, no. And she said, oh, well, they're all red. I thought they might be sore. And she stayed right in character. And at the time, all of us girls were just like, oh, yeah, okay, yeah, that makes sense. There wouldn't have been red nail polish in the late 1800s, especially not on a kid that age. But as an adult,
06:03that could have gone one of two ways. We all could have taken it in stride and then like that makes sense, or that kid could have gotten picked on for the next five years in school because she was the one that stuck out. So I'm sharing the story because I thought it was interesting. And then there's a place here in Minnesota where I am, and it used to be called Murphy's Landing. It is now called The Landing. And they take people on tours through
06:31acreage that is basically a small town and they've brought in buildings that are from the late 1800s, early 1900s. And they have cows and they have chickens and they have goats and I think they have sheep. And basically if you go on a guided tour, you get to go in the houses that are set up the way they were in the past. You get to see the cook stoves and things and you get to interact with the animals. So in saying all that, I
07:00Are you guys, when you do events, are you in character or are you just kind of walking people through and explaining things? We are not in character every day. We do have a special day that we designate and make it our living history day and we do get into some outfits. But it's very more fun, loose. I have visited other places where they are in character like that. I actually...
07:29just went to Ohio for a work trip just to kind of experience another living history farm. And they did that. They were in character through the whole time. We're not quite to that level, although we do think that that's neat. We, our property, we have two Sears and Robuck houses, and one of those was moved in from the town that's not far from us. And it was actually
07:59And so we moved it in and we made it a museum home. And then our big farmhouse was a replica of one from the Sears catalog. And both homes are open to everybody every day so you can come in. And we don't really have anything like roped off. Like you do step back in time when you come in. It feels like a 1920s home, but you can actually touch everything, move around.
08:29do pretty much anything you would like to do. We try to kind of make it feel like you could even sit down and have a conversation with your family and we do box lunches. You could eat a lunch and sit and just enjoy the space. We also do have our barnyard area. And so you can come through the homes, you can go out the back, interact with the animals. It depends on how much time you have, how much you wanna learn.
08:59but we try to kind of focus more on self-guided tours for people so that they can do it at their own time and pace. Nice. Okay, so what's the history on this? How did this place come to be? Sure. The farm itself started with a group of individuals that really wanted to not lose the history of Indiana agriculture.
09:29And so they looked and they thought, well, if we were to make a museum of some place that kind of connected agriculture along with, in this area, we have a very big Native American history with Prophetstown and the Battle of Tippecanoe. So there's a lot of that history. So they decided to kind of make it.
09:55more of like an event center where it would have a museum, it would have a Native American facet to it, an event center, a farmhouse, you know the early plans I saw it. But over time, you know it became a little bit too big for the group to handle and then the state was at the same time looking to acquire a new state park and so they kind of both met and
10:24work together and decided to kind of scale down what the group was really wanting to do with the museum and focus just on 1920s agriculture and then they let the park take over the prairie lands and the Native American side of it and they came in and they bought you know the land and started developing it for a state park and all of this happened around 1999.
10:52and the farm opened in 2000. And it was just one farmhouse and a barn. And then over the years it grew, you know, farm animals were added, the other home was brought in, outbuildings were built, things just started kind of growing. And then the park itself grew around us. So we have prairie lands and they do have the Native American structures.
11:21They have tours they do. So we kind of work in unison with the park, even though we're not really a park employee. We kind of sit in the middle of the park. Wow, huh, that's unusual. So I'm impressed that that's happening that way. Yes, it is. We're very unique. From my understanding, we are the only working kind of nonprofit of the size that we are inside of a state park.
11:51in the entire United States. And I think that they might have a couple satellite, smaller things in, I think in California they have one and I heard of somewhere else, but nothing to the scale of what we do. So our visitors mainly come from the campground. They have a big campground here of about 220 campsites.
12:17So all of those people, our audience is constantly changing from May to, you know, through Labor Day. We will have people from all over the United States visit us. But then we also have from our local community of people wanting to enjoy the park and then come in and enjoy the farm because we are free. Everything here that we do is, you know, we're a nonprofit. So we want to make it accessible for everybody.
12:45Okay, so if you're a non-profit, how do you fund it? Because you can't fund it without money. Yes, so we sell our beef and our pork, and that provides us some financial gains there. We have a small gift shop inside, and we do farm-to-table meals. We have a full kitchen in the basement. We sell box lunches on the weekends, and then we have a lot of donations.
13:15A lot of people support us and they feel that we are a very important educational place for our schools and people to learn and hang on to the history. Shout out to your supporters because we need people to support places like yours. Absolutely. Yeah. I kind of, we like to say here that the farm is our third, is
13:42is somebody's third place. Have you ever heard about a third place? No. So a third place would be, you know, your home is your first place. That's where your family lives and where you feel comfortable and you live and do everything you do. Your second place, then when you leave your home is your work. That's, you know, you're providing, you have your friends. You know, it takes up most of your time away from home. But then most people have a third place.
14:12And we want to be that. We want to be that third place where you go outside of your home, outside of work, to unwind, to just relax, to feel a part of something. And that's what we like to say. We're everybody's third place. Huh, I had never heard that phrasing before. And you're right. I think almost everyone has a third place.
14:39Yeah, mine used to be a library. You know, that used to be my third place I would go and I made it a point in my week to go there. And so now, you know, my third place of course is a farm, but that's what I try to tell people is, you know, when you come here and you first drive down our lane and you see that barn and you come around the bend and you see the farmhouse, you're already kind of feeling peaceful. You're already getting away from
15:08town and from your notifications, you know, even though we do have internet, it's not very good out here. So you really are disconnected. My third place when I was growing up was either the library, just like you, or being in the woods in the forest because in Maine, there's lots of forests, there's lots of trees. Yes.
15:35And as a grown up, it didn't change much. In Minnesota, it was a library or being out on the public trails, those state-owned land trails. So, yeah, I think that if I lived anywhere near the farm that you're at, I would probably see you as a third place now that I know what that means. That's super cool. I didn't know that phrasing existed. Yeah.
15:58And you know, I hope that anybody that might be listening to this podcast and maybe is a camper. Yeah. And they're traveling through, you know, Prophetstown State Park Campground is one of the top campgrounds in the entire United States. So hopefully, if it's not on their bucket list, they add it now. And then while they're here, they come over here and they visit the farm. Because it's really a treasure. Yes. What's the biggest city near you?
16:28That would be West Lafayette. Okay. And that's Purdue University. So Purdue is very large. So anybody coming in maybe to see a sports game at Purdue, we are about five miles from Purdue. Wow. Okay. And what's the major highway nearby? 65. So that we, 65, if you were to get on there, would take you of course to the farm. But if you went...
16:57An hour and a half north you would be in Chicago, and if you went an hour south, you would be in Indianapolis. Okay, that helps me. Like I said, I grew up in Maine, I live in Minnesota, and my parents still live in Maine. So when we go home, we do road trips from Minnesota to Maine, and we go through Illinois and Indiana. So I was trying to get a picture in my head of where you're at on the map. Okay, cool. What else can I ask you? Oh, when...
17:26I'm assuming that schools come to visit you guys as a field trip. How does that go? How are the kids, what are they like? What are their reactions to stuff if they've never been to a place like yours? It's interesting. We do ages from pre-kindergarten all the way up through high school. But I would say the bread and butter of most are between first grade and fourth grade. And they...
17:54This farm has been a part of their school typically every year they'll come. So they'll start with first grade and all the way up. So, you know, when a trip comes in, I'm like, who's been to the farm before? And, you know, I love to see all the hands because, you know, they've been here. And the ones that haven't been, they've heard from their classmates about it. But basically, we will do a
18:21We'll kind of bring them into the big farmhouse. We'll sit down. We'll talk about, you know, what does this room look like that's different from your home? You know, what are you noticing? You know, what right away? And you know, like there's no television. Because in the 1920s, they didn't have that. And we have a radio going with old timey 1920 radio shows. So we'll talk about that. We'll talk about the Sears catalog, that it was the Amazon of the day.
18:51and you know, I'll pull out some antiques and show them. I try not to do too much of the old timey stuff in the house, because kids get bored with that. They really want to see the animals, but I try to give them a little bit of history and then get them outside and get them around those animals and let, you know, we'll pull out some of the animals like our donkey and let them pet them and teach them a little bit about.
19:19how things used to be on a farm and show them, you know, we have old cars here, we have a Model T, a 1926 Model T, and, you know, old tractors and, you know, I'll show them, I'll go look at this picture, look at this tractor, and this is how we farm. But here's how we farm now, kind of show that history. So I think it's good, I think they really enjoy it.
19:47Okay, so in the classroom situation, in the 1920s, would it have been still like the little chalkboards and chalk that you had at your desk and the primer books? Is that right? Yes. Okay. So do you guys have that to show them? No, we don't have a schoolhouse. We have talked about it. It is something that we want, but that would have to come from a donor and from donations and we just haven't got there yet.
20:16There's a lot of things that we look for and we would love to have. We would love to have a mercantile, a building where we could actually sell things out of. These are all goals and things as we grow, we hope to have one day. Okay. I misunderstood. For some reason, I was picturing a classroom and you were talking about them being in the house. No, they come right inside the house. Gotcha. Okay. I bring them right into the living room.
20:45We have a living room, a dining room, a kitchen. We have a bedroom. I'm actually sitting in a bedroom right now just because my internet's a little better here. But it's really just a big farmhouse that kind of feels like grandma's farmhouse. Does the kitchen have a cook stove in it? It does. It is wood burning. It has water in it and we'll fire that up and we'll cook things on it.
21:14And we'll have events around that. Now we won't do that for a school tour. They're on a limited time. They got an hour with me, but we do events every weekend through our busy season. And so we'll make cornbread, we'll make homemade butter. We'll have iced tea on the front porch. We'll have homemade ice cream. We try to capture those 1920s things. Even the breeds of our animals are 1920s.
21:43Fun. So awesome sunshine. I love it. Okay, so here's the thing I wanna say about these places like yours. You guys do a fantastic job of showing what it was like and a lot of fun and cool things. But back in the 1920s or the late 1800s, like the places that I've been to, the world was a very different place in a lot of ways. And...
22:11Being on a farm was hard back then. It's hard now, but it was really hard back then because if you got hurt, you didn't have as many things to help you as you do now. And if your animals got sick, you didn't necessarily have a vet that you could take them to or they could have, they could come out to see your animal right away. So I feel like that timeframe has been very romanticized and for a good reason, because it's very romantic. It's a very...
22:41pretty picture that we have been sold. And I'm okay with that. I want kids to enjoy themselves. I want them to learn how things used to be done. But I also want people to understand that that late 1850s, early 1900s was a rough time of life for people sometimes. Yes, it is. And when we have tours come through or we are talking with children, we try to...
23:08Of course, we're not going to say, oh, our pigs are going to go off and be processed. So they may not be here the next time that you come through, but we want them to know where their food comes from. And so we try to, the best way we can, depending on their age, is explain to them, these animals may be here for your enjoyment, but these were food and this is food and this is where your food that you're eating is coming from.
23:38And you know the best way that we can to capture that and share it. We do have a blacksmith on site also and so we will talk to the kids about how the blacksmith was a vet and he would care for the horses, things like that. So they could kind of understand but we don't go too deep there because yes it does take away that romanticizing.
24:08the living on a farm. And we try to kind of stay period time. Some things we know we're out of like, you know, a 1920s farm wouldn't have 65 chickens and tons of breeds, but the kids really liked that. So some things we kind of were a little loose on and other things were not. Cool.
24:33So tell me, tell me what a 1920s farm in Indiana would have been like, because I have no idea what it would have been like. Yeah, well, we do have a windmill and we actually got it working and a windmill was a very big part of a farmer's life. And an Indiana farmer typically, he would have, he would live in this home that is our museum home, our bigger one. And then he would have a smaller home.
25:02which would be the tenant farmhouse. And that would be where his kind of farm, his lead farmhand would live with his family. And they really would save their money because they wouldn't have to pay rent of any sort, just work the land. And they would have one or two choices, kind of save that money to buy their own farm if that was their dream. Or sometimes tenant farmers really just enjoyed living on the farm and like...
25:32how they lived and not go and get a bigger farm. It could be a headache. But most of the time they would save up and move on. In Indiana, I think that there was about, I wanna say a hundred thousand Sears homes that were sold. Most of those were on farms. And I think that windmills providing that
25:59that water and not having to be near a water source helped Indiana's agriculture. And they could have, you know, hundreds and hundreds of farms. I think probably at this time in the 1920s everywhere were farms that looked just like ours. But now, you know, it's hard for us to find any that look like us nowadays. Yeah, they look very different now. You mentioned the Sears and Roebuck homes that people used to be able to order.
26:29Not everyone knows about that. I know about that, because my parents told me about it a long time ago. So can you explain a little bit about the Sears and Roebuck homes and how that worked? Yes, they were very popular in Indiana and I believe Illinois also, probably other states, but that's really all I know. And the catalogs themselves had everything from bullets to underwear. You could get everything you wanted, just like Amazon today. But the big thing was the house.
27:00and they would arrive on a rail car that the particular house I'm sitting in right now would have needed four complete rail cars to build this home. And they would arrive, the walls would be built, they would even have wallpaper on them. He would pick out everything from the catalog. And then it would arrive and then they would go around to the local farms around them and say, oh, my house is arriving this day.
27:29And they would, okay, and the farm wives would start prepping food and the men would get ready and they would all get together and work with their neighbors and put the houses together for each other. And the farm wives would cook a big feast and it was kind of a family farming event that was done across Indiana. So it was like a house raising, not a barn raising. Correct. Okay. And how much
27:59on average would a home like that cost? Do you know? This particular house was $3,176 and it's about 2,000 square feet. Wow. Okay. And what would that equate to in dollars today? Do you have any idea? Oh goodness. No, Mary. I'm sorry. I don't. No, that's okay. Don't worry about it. It would equate to a lot today is what it would equate to. Yes. Yes, it would.
28:29So I wanna compare it to like the prefab homes that you can have built for you now. My parents, when they bought their land, there was no house on it, like 12 years ago. And they decided to have the house put together for them and brought in in two halves. And they basically picked out exactly the home that they wanted. And my mom has video.
28:58from their phone, I think, of the two halves of the house being brought in on flatbed trucks. And the first one was placed, and then the second half was placed, and it was lengthwise. So the back of the house was placed on the foundation. The front of the house was placed against the back of the house. And then they went in and sealed everything up. It is so cool.
29:23And that's not how it worked in the 1920s. I mean, you had to build the framework and the whole bit. You had to build the house from the supplies, right? Yes. Yeah. So I think the Sears catalogs gave people a more affordable way to have a home that looked nice. Yeah. But it also, I think it gave them a way to raise it quickly.
29:51because it was hard work living on a farm. And the farm didn't stop because you are putting up a home. So it took a lot of work. I mean, every member of the family is working every day to survive. And you're bringing in other people to help you put this house up, but you're still having to take care of the farm and getting things ready for feeding the animals and all that's going on. So...
30:20I think it gave them a way to kind of move stuff forward quickly. And I think people today look for that quick, quick house too. You see that with the prefab homes, like what you're talking about. Sometimes people build them out of shipping containers I see now. Yes. Homes and tiny homes you can buy on Amazon. So maybe we're going back in a way to those pre early homesteading days and realizing, you know, these things worked. Why?
30:49Why go away from it? Yeah, or you can be like us and buy a remodeled home. Which is what we did. And we love it. We love it here. We've been here over four years now and we love it. Okay, so the Sears and Roebuck company that you're talking about became the Sears Department Stores that are basically not around anymore, right? That's correct. And they were the first radio station too. I don't know if you've heard of WLS out of Chicago.
31:19I have not, no. Well, it was a Sears radio station. They were very similar to Amazon of today, if you really look at it in that way, because here they're selling everything out of a catalog, but then they're like, well, they didn't know about TVs, of course, but radios are everywhere. Okay, we need our own radio station. So let's build a radio station and then talk about our catalog. So that...
31:48That's really what they did. But Chicago, and then from there, they were like, okay, let's just now we have department stores. And they're Sears department store. So they were really an entrepreneur. They were very, very good at marketing is what they were. So Christmas, well Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming up. Do you guys decorate the farmhouse? We do. It's decorated right now. We are on top of it.
32:16We got our Christmas tree up last week and we're prepping last-minute things. We have breakfast with Santa Claus That we will have and everybody will come into the farmhouse with their kids and sit down at tables and then we'll have Santa near the tree and Then we will have Christmas on the farm Where actually Santa will be outside in the barn people can walk and would would dress up the animals and some Christmas
32:45attire and people love to see that and we'll have Christmas caroling, hot cocoa, just all that magic that comes with Christmas on a farm. I am so envious because I freaking love Christmas and I love everything that goes with it. So the Christmas tree, I am a huge fan of Christmas trees. I don't care what kind of tree it is as long as it's alive and it smells good.
33:15when back in the 20s, they didn't have electric Christmas lights for the tree, right? No, no, they had candles. Yeah. Actually, and that, that now, yeah, we of course do have a tree and we don't, we don't do that, of course, that'd just be too dangerous. But yeah, they, they had a lot of different slimmed down festivities. Yeah. But most of their stuff
33:45revolved around making things and so we try to still capture that and so we have an event coming up That will be where we will make Garland for your Christmas tree. Yep, and that's really what they did and they strung up popcorn and cranberries and that's what we will do here Yeah, and I I may be wrong, but I swear I read a book at one point where they use dried
34:13orange peels too for that garland, but that might not be true because oranges were probably hard to come by. Yeah, I would think so. It would be really pretty though. Yes, yes, I think so. And you know, the 1920s was an innovation, you know, that was horsepower to engine. You know, that's the time period right there. You know, the car came out along with the tractors. And so, you know, a farmer had to choose. Do I want to get a car?
34:43Or do I want to get a tractor? And most of the time they would get a car because they still had horses and horses could pull that plow. So a lot of times they, they didn't have the money for both. Um, but I think in cities that might be more progressive, they might've had that. They might've had the oranges and they might've had a lot different festivities and somebody in Indiana rural limited supplies. Yeah.
35:12Yep, absolutely. And did were paper chains a garland then too? Yes, paper chains. We make those and we put those around. Anything homemade pretty much we try to do. Yeah, a friend of mine gave me a handmade garland that is it's like a cross between tatting and crochet.
35:39And it's really pretty. I don't know what it's made of, but it's a like a light beige color um yarn and it has these little gold beads that are in the middle of each stitch. And I use that on my tree every year because it's just so gorgeous and I know the work that went into making it. Yes, I my granddaughter just turned one and she lives about five hours from me and so she'll get to experience a farm for the first time.
36:09um, next week. And so she'll get to, to see Santa here on the farm. And then we are in the Christmas parade with the horse, the horse is pulling us. We have a Christmas sleigh. And so, I mean, it's just magical. And the kids just light up when they see us, cause they know the farm. Does the sleigh have sleigh bells on it? Yes. I love it. Oh my God. If I was.
36:38If I was a little bit richer, I would be begging my husband to drive me to Indiana for one of these weekends. It sounds so fun. You said your granddaughter? Is that? Yes. How old? She's one years old. Oh man. She's going to be just so excited and overwhelmed at the same time. I know. I'm so excited to see her. So she arrives next week and so it's all perfect timing.
37:06She's gone sleep really good that night. Yes, she is. Well, how fun for you. That'll be awesome. All right, well, Sunshine, we've been talking for 37 minutes, and I try to keep these to half an hour. So I'm going to let you go. But thank you for your time today and entertaining me with your stories, because I had a blast talking with you. Oh, wonderful. Well, absolutely. Follow us on Facebook. See our pictures. We're very good about sharing pictures.
37:35We have a professional photographer who goes to every one of our events and captures every moment. So take a peek at our photo albums. And I enjoyed talking with you. Thank you for your interest in our farm. You are so welcome. And if anybody is local who wants to go to these events in the next coming weekend, go, go see the farm. Yes, absolutely. Our next event will be December 6th.
38:02which would be our popcorn Christmas tree garland day. And then our breakfast with Santa is December 7th. And then we'll be in the Christmas parade December 7th in the evening. So keep an eye out for us and think of us for your third place. Yes, absolutely. All right, thank you, Sunshine so much. Have a great afternoon. You too, bye bye.
 

Homestead Harvest of Delano

Today I'm talking with Ellen at Homestead Harvest of Delano. 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 
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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 Ellen at Homestead Harvest of Delano. Good afternoon, Ellen. How are you? I'm all right. How are you? I'm good. Are you looking forward to the snowflakes we're supposed to get tomorrow? Tomorrow?
00:29Yeah. No, I did not know that. My weather reporter did not tell me that. Oh, yeah. We're supposed to get like a trace to an inch of snow. I'm in LaSore and you're in Delano, so I'm assuming you're probably looking at a little bit of snowflakes tomorrow. Okay. I will let him know that he has, you know, got a demerit for failing to keep me apprised.
00:57Well, it is after mid-November. It's time. It's time for things to start looking holiday-ish, you know. All right, so tell me about yourself and what you do. I know you make jams. Uh, yep, I do. I started because my mom used to make wild plum jam jelly from our plums on our property and then she died and we had to sell the place and
01:27I decided I wanted to make jelly like she did because it was so good. And so I started making it and I had a good time doing it. Thought it was a lot of fun. So I then decided that I wanted to try other kinds of jellies and or jams. And that's where it started. But my nephew, my great nephew really, really likes the wild plum.
01:57So he kind of, you know, encouraged me as only a child can do. Yep. I've got four kids and they all are my biggest fans when it comes to trying out new foods, because they figure the worst it's going to be is edible. Yeah. It helps when you have somebody who will eat your practice sessions. Yes. We call it eating the evidence. Yeah.
02:27Okay, good. Yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah, my husband makes Christmas cookies every December and invariably some of them burn a little and none of us care because you just break off the burnt piece and the rest of it's yummy and he calls that eating the evidence. Yeah, that's, he's got a great point there. Uh-huh. And you can't waste food right now. I mean, you should never waste food, but right now don't waste food. It's so expensive to eat right now. It is. It's crazy.
02:57I have chickens, so they can also eat the evidence. Yes. Chickens will eat anything. So will pigs. Pigs will eat anything too. Um, so I, I knew that jams and jellies didn't always have to be just sweet. I knew that they could be spicy or they could be even salty or minty. But a lot of people don't realize that the jams and jellies can be of.
03:23a food that goes with like dinner, not just toast and jam. Right. Right. So over the past summer, I was asked by several people if I had any pepper jellies. And so I started making pepper jellies using my sister-in-law's peppers from her garden. And I've had good luck with those. I've had a lot of people.
03:53enjoy them and buy multiple, you know, come back and buy more. Mm hmm. And, um, that is gratifying because I had never thought of jelly or jam except for mint, mint jelly, you know, you, you know about that. Cause it goes on lamb. Yeah. But, um, also I've had people put it on their fish and their chicken.
04:22Your jams or mint jelly? Jams. Like, yeah, I have a pineapple variations and peach variations that are used on their meat, whatever, you know, chicken or fish or like that. And then I made, I had a boatload of tomatoes last year.
04:50So I started making tomato jam and that is so good on like your, um, it's a savory jam. So you put it on your hamburger or your meatloaf or your ribs. And it, um, you get the tomato, but you also get all the, the spices, depending on which spices are used, it brings out the taste of the meat more.
05:19Yeah, we tried a blackberry jelly and balsamic vinegar glaze on steak one time and that was really good. Oh yeah, that does sound good. Yeah, it was sweet. It was almost like a barbecue by the time it was cooked, but it was very blackberry-y but it had the zing of the balsamic vinegar. It was really nice. Yeah, that sounds good. Yeah, and years ago.
05:49I used to do roast chickens and I would mix apple cider vinegar and apricot jam and something else. I can't remember what the other thing was. Like whisk it together in a bowl and put that over the top of the chicken like you would put butter over on a turkey. Yeah. And then- Yeah, baste it with it. And that's really good too. My mom still uses my recipe because I sent it to her. I was like, you should try this. And-
06:17She's like, we make an apricot glazed chicken once a month since you sent me that recipe. I'm like, well, good, I'm glad you enjoy it. Yeah, no kidding. So yeah, you can use- That was a good idea. You can use jams in a lot of things. My, probably my favorite is my, I think it was my grandma on my dad's side, used to have leftover pie dough when she would make pies. And so she had this little, it was almost like a-
06:46muffin tin but they were smaller sized muffins for the opening and she would put the dough in there and just squish it so it was just like a little tiny pie shell and she'd put her her homemade preserves in there and bake it and oh my goodness those were so yummy. So more like a tart. Yes, yep just little baby pies is what she called them. That's cute.
07:12She'd be like, yeah, I just want to make baby pies. And I was like, yes, yes, we do. Please, let's make baby pies. So what a great memory for you. Oh, yes, absolutely. I can still remember the table in her kitchen. It was one of the Formica topped ones with the metal legs, the rounded metal legs. Yeah, I still remember. And she had the enamel sink that had the.
07:42I don't know what it's called, but the old fashioned ones where there's the sink, but then there's like divots in the sideboard so that if you put dishes there, the water would run in the sink. Oh, a dish strainer. That, yeah. She had one of those. Yeah. Those are handy. Yeah. So she had the old fashioned farmhouse kitchen. It was really cool. I'd love to have a sink like that. I would too, but I would want it to not be up.
08:11because enamel is a pain in the butt to keep clean. My kit, my sink is a white enamel sink. It was brand new when we moved in over four years ago and trying to keep that thing clean is the bane of my existence. Comment. Comment. Yeah, no you can't. You'd have to use like a soft soap, soft scrub. Okay. Not comment, not on enamel. Yeah.
08:39Yeah, had I realized how hard it was going to be, I think I would just replace the sink with a stainless steel sink right away, but I had no idea. Are you drinking porcelain? No, it's not. It's enamel. Oh, okay. Baking soda is a movie. Okay, I'll try that. I don't know. Oh, I'll try anything at this point because it's just, it's clinging when I clean it, but it has like little scuff marks on it.
09:09Yeah. That I can't get out. Yeah, in that bug show. Yep, I get that. Well, it's white. It's white. With scuff marks. I'm like, it's not marble. It should not have gray marks on it. Damn it. And my husband said to me one time, he's like, do you not clean the sink completely when you clean it? I was like, you do it. You try it. You try to get that off of there. You're welcome, I can do it.
09:34He was like, okay. And he grabbed a magic eraser and tried it and that didn't even get rid of it. He was like, what is it? I said, I don't know. I don't know why it does it. He said, when this sink needs to be replaced, we are getting a stainless steel sink. I said, okay, anytime, whenever you're ready, let's get one. Great, that sounds good. Yeah, yesterday would have been great. So anyway, it's fine. No big deal. Just bitching, cause I can bitch about it. Cause it's my podcast, why not? Yep, that's right. The wild plums.
10:04I grew up in Maine and we didn't have wild plums in Maine for some reason. You'd think we would have, but we didn't. And when I used to go hiking here, not even 10 years ago in Minnesota, wild plums grow everywhere in Minnesota. They do. So even if you don't have them growing on your property, did you know that you can harvest wild plums from state land as long as you don't cut the tree?
10:34I did know that I hesitate to do that simply because I don't know what's been on those plants, those trees. You know, I don't know if somebody has gone by and sprayed whatever and I'm just like, I don't want to take that chance. You know, the fact that I'm selling these products makes me extra special, careful. Yes. Of what?
11:02I use and how I do things. Yes, I hadn't thought of that. Sorry. But for anybody who just wants, anybody who just wants to try making wild plum jam, if you go for a hike out in the woods, like way out in the woods, and you pick some wild plums and wash them, it's probably fine. I would not, I wouldn't bat an eye about it if you're just doing it for yourself. So personal use, you bet. You go for it. Yep. And
11:31The other thing with wild plums, we haven't made wild plum jam because wild plums are not very big. And I feel like, I feel like they're kind of a pain in the butt to process. Is that incorrect? It is. All you do is wash them, sort out the bad ones, stick them in a crop pot. Or you can do it on the stove too, but, um, add a little bit of water, put a top on, put it on low.
12:00and let them start softening. And after they're soft, then you just run them through a food mill. And that takes the skins and the. Oh, slick. Okay. Yeah. Well, we have, we have a big old wild plum tree on our property. I appreciate it because we have a big wild plum tree on our property. We may have two actually.
12:28And it put out a ton of plums this year. And I said to my husband, I said, we really should use those. Yeah. He said, do you want to screw around with them right now? And I was like, no. He said, neither do I. He said, maybe we can ask somebody about how to do this and we can do it next year. I was like, okay. So I found my somebody it's Ellen. Ellen knows what to do. Here I am. Thank you. If you have extras next year, let me know because.
13:00Like I said, that kid loves the wild plum jam. Yes, I will let you know. I will make a note in my calendar for like, what is it, July? Yeah, you can, they harvest the end of August, generally, into September. Okay, then I will put a note in my phone, in my calendar that says, tell Ellen if the plums are ripe in August. Yeah, yeah.
13:30And the great thing about them is that you can.
13:35You can use them in so many different ways, like you were talking about using the meat, putting jelly or jam on meat. Yeah. The wild plum is great that way too. Uh huh. You can use it on.
13:53everything. Ham is particularly good as a glaze instead of using the pineapple rings. Yeah. Yeah, I bet it would be delicious.
14:07I am a huge fan of plum jam. I had never had plum jam in my whole life until a couple years ago and somebody, some brand was selling it, you know, like at the store. And I don't remember what the brand was. I think it might have been a store brand actually. And I was like, let's get plum jam. I've never tried it. And we had some really nice bread that my husband had made.
14:34And I slapped some soft butter on there and some of that plum jam on took a bite. And I was like, Oh my God, this is heaven on earth right here in my face right now. Okay. Now store plums, the domestic ones are very different tasting than wild plums. Uh-huh. So don't expect, I had one lady that, uh, she wanted my jam, my gel.
15:02It was, it's a jelly more than a jam. Okay. She wanted the plum because, um, you know, she thought it tasted good. And I said, I want you to taste it first because from her direction or her description, she was talking about a sweet plum from the store. And so she tasted the wild plum and she said, it is a different taste.
15:30Is it sharper or more sour? Um, tartar, I think is what.
15:39how you would describe it. I would be totally okay with that. That would be fine. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure, but I just wanted you to know that. Uh-huh. What other flavors of jams do you make? Well, we have the carrot cake, which is made with carrots and pineapple and pears, and tastes like a carrot cake.
16:06Um, nice. Pina colada, which is pineapple. It's a pina colada in a jar. Uh huh. And this year I've made some pumpkin butter, spiced pumpkin butter. That is a lot like eating a piece of pumpkin pie. In fact, I took some of it the other day and swirled a spoonful into Katie's
16:36Katie Hoker's yogurt, her goat yogurt, and it was so good. Yeah, before we go any further, Katie is your niece. I interviewed Katie months ago, and her place is Freedom Rain Farm, right? Correct. Yeah, Katie's fantastic, you guys. If you need goat stuff, go find Katie's Facebook page and get ahold of her, because she is great. She is, and she is very helpful,
17:06We'll do so much to help you.
17:11She's got eggs, goat milk, and soaps, shev, and the yogurt, like I just said. Uh-huh, yep. No, I love Katie. I actually have not met Katie, but I want to meet her at some point. I'm gonna have to take a drive up to Elano and meet you guys at some point. Yeah. Okay, so keep going. You said pina colada jelly? Pina colada jelly.
17:41jelly. So it's yum. Yeah, it is. It's got pineapple, rum, wine. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Coconut. Can't remember off top my head if it has anything else, but it tastes very like a pina colada drink. Yep. Then I have the regular strawberry rhubarb and rhubarb and black forest.
18:10preserves, which is if you're a fan of chocolate cake with cherry filling, that's it for you. I've had that on angel food cake, put it as like a drizzle on it, if you know what I mean. Yeah. And let all that chocolate goodness and cherry juice seep into the cake.
18:39It's also good on ice cream. Yeah, I bet it is. I bet it's amazing on ice cream. It is so very good. And then I'm right now making Christmas jam, which is several different berries and cranberries. And is a very rich tasting jam.
19:08Okay, does it have like, like, um, spices in it? Like, I don't know, pumpkin pie spice and things like that. Uh, cinnamon, ginger, cloves. Like that. Yep. Okay. And what are the berries in it? Uh, cranberries, strawberries and blueberries. And then there's orange juice, lemon juice, you know, give it some.
19:37a little bit of tart. Mm-hmm. I bet your kitchen smells amazing when you're making that. I think it smells good. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yep. So, so are you doing this as a cottage food producer or do you have a commercial license? No. Cottage food. It's a cottage food. Yep. Okay. So you can't ship your stuff just like all us cottage food producers can ship our stuff. Rant, rant, rant.
20:07Yeah, I don't know why that is. But nobody does. I don't know. Uh huh. That was the rules is right. Okay. I just, I feel like it's a cry and shame because I have talked to so many people over the last year who make amazing food things, they're doing it as Scottish food producers and they can't ship it. And I'm like, it sucks that you can't ship it. It's not fair. Yeah. I don't know why.
20:36I suppose it has something to do with regulations and, you know, you can't control how it's shipped. So you can't do this and you can't do that. It makes no sense. But by going to markets and by going to different, like farm stands, you know, you can, you can do something about it that to get your product out.
21:06And then you can always meet somebody if somebody contacts me on Facebook and says, hey, can we meet in wherever? I can do that. I can bring them the product. Yes. However, it just popped into my head that this whole not shipping stuff is silly because everything that is shipped is shipped with a tracking number now.
21:35Yes, I know. So why in the heck can't we ship stuff if we're shipping it from the post office in our town that we took the stuff to, to the person that's receiving it. It's, we know where it's coming from. Right. It's, it's so weird. I hadn't even, I hadn't even thought about it at all in that terms until I talked to you today. Hmm.
22:03good that I gave you that idea. Now you can research it and figure it out for all of us and let us know. I'm going to email my rep and be like, uh, my state rep and be like, um, explain this to me because hello, it's going from my kitchen to my vehicle to the post office in my town where it receives a tracking number and that tracking number traces it all the way to where it's going. What is the freaking problem here? Yeah.
22:31Oh, it makes me so frustrated. It's fine. I'm not making anything right now any way to ship, so it's not a big deal for me, but it frustrates me for people like you who are very talented and make things that are unusual and yummy and only people who are in the area can get it from you. It's not right. You're right, it isn't. So, I'm gonna stop, because otherwise it's gonna be a 20 minute rant. I'm not doing that today.
22:58So how did your event go this weekend that you had going on? Oh, well, we had one in Mound and we had one in Hutchinson. And did pretty well in Hutchinson, not too much in Mound, because the Mound one, I don't think, was advertised very well. I don't know.
23:26And it just could be that so much was going on that people didn't know where to come. The vendor did tell, or the organizer did tell us that some of his signs had disappeared. Oh no. Yeah. So that, you know, I don't know. I don't know why people take things that aren't theirs, but. Me either.
23:56Me either, because it's a mad, mad world, Ellen. That's why, because people are crazy. So do people buy your jams for Christmas presents? Yes, I have four ounce. I typically make eight ounce jars, because that's a good size for people to try. But I've been making some four ounce, too, for stocking stuffers.
24:25Yeah, yeah. Or perhaps buy two or three or four different varieties to try them. Do like a gift basket. Yeah, yep. And that seems to be a very popular idea right now. Yeah. For example, the Christmas Jam. Yeah. Is the Christmas Jam the Harvest Gold?
24:55pepper and maybe the strawberry pineapple jam, you know, and stick it in a box and wrap it up and give it to somebody for Christmas or a holiday of whatever sort that you want to do. Or bring it to Thanksgiving dinner. Yep. The the apple pie spice jam is
25:23great right now because there are so many, you know, with the apple harvest and I'm able to get apples from the orchards or from, um, like Joy. I don't know if you know Joy Gullings? Nope. Um, she gave me a whole bunch that I turned into apple pie spice jam. And again, it tastes like a piece of apple pie, but without the pastry.
25:53Mm-hmm. So I tell people that, you know, they get all the fruit goodness out of that, whatever pie it is like. Without the carbs. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep. And all of my jams, jellies are gluten-free and dairy-free.
26:21I don't put some recipes because of the foaming issues with the fruit. For example, the peaches and, um, strawberries are very frothy during the cooking process. Yep. Some people you can put butter into it and that cuts the frothiness down. And I don't do that because of the dairy allergies.
26:52I just deal with the frothiness. Yes, and for anybody who doesn't know, the frothiness is not anything bad. It's not going to hurt you if you eat it. It just makes you look funny. Well, it's kind of like the froth on a beer. Some people really like the frothiness. It's tingly on your tongue.
27:22I think it's good, but I scoop it all off and stick it in a jar and save that for me. Yeah, my mom used to do the same thing. She'd scoop it off and throw it away. And I was like, why are you throwing it away? That's the best tart. She's like, it's gross. I said, no, it's not. It's delicious. She's like, well, you can eat it if you want. It's very pretty. When I make the strawberry rhubarb, it gets very frothy.
27:50And I put that in a jar and it's pretty pink with the strawberry rhubarb portion jam underneath it. Yeah. It's so pretty. Yeah. The other thing that you can do is I make a strawberry rhubarb compote to put over ice cream in the springtime from the first cutting of the rhubarb. Oh yeah. And I always end up pulling off some of the juice because there's so much juice in strawberries and rhubarb.
28:19and I take that juice and I put it in a jar and I stick it in the fridge. And if you get like fizzy water, plain fizzy water, soda water, and you add some of that juice, that soda water, it's like strawberry rhubarb pop. It is amazing. Yes, yes. My mom used to make something called rum pot. And she would take a jar and put all kinds of different fruits in it, stick it on top of the refrigerator, and put it on ice cream.
28:50Uh-huh. Was quite good. I hadn't thought about in a long time. Yeah. I have to do that. This is the beauty of these conversations. Cause I have that happen to me all the time too. Somebody would be like, my mom used to, and I'm like, oh my God, so did mine. I hadn't thought about that in 40 years. Wow. Mom's so great. Yeah. I love talking to you guys. Cause you just make me think of all kinds of things that have been stuck in the back of my brain.
29:19Forever and not access and I'm like, oh I got to dig that out. I need to dig that recipe out or I got to Try that again Whatever it is. So All right, Ellen. We're almost at 30 minutes Um, do you have anything else you'd like to share or do you have a website you want to talk about or anything? Well, I'm on Facebook as Homestead harvest of Delano Mm-hmm, and I would love for people to come and visit me there
29:47Okay. I'm just getting started with this project and I accept all kinds of advice and ideas. And I really like it when people try some of my jam and let me know what they think of it.
30:10Well, yes, because if it's fantastic, you get to glow in that. And if it needs something, you know what to do with it. Yeah. Yeah, like the wild plum. Some people like spices in it, so I started putting the warm spices in. And that's really good too. Uh-huh. Yes, you get all kinds of creative feedback, which means you get to play.
30:39Yes, and well, and that's why the carrot cake. That's how I started that with the carrot cake. I, I'm like, carrot cake jam. Hmm. This I have to try and it tastes like a carrot cake, a piece of carrot cake. Um, and the same with the black forest. It tastes or the pumpkin or the apple pie or, you know,
31:07Those I call those my dessert jellies. Yeah, you're not just making straight strawberry, straight grape, straight orange. You're doing things that are fancy and fun. Although I did make a strawberry grape. I had leftover strawberries and some grapes. And so I decided to combine them. And a little at this last event, little boy, oh, I don't know, six, seven years old,
31:36He tried the grape strawberry and he was like, oh, so his dad had to buy some for him. Well, yes. It's, you know, the kids, when they, they're very honest. If they like something, they tell you. If they don't like it, they tell you, you know? It's great that way. Yeah, and you can't get mad because you need that honesty. You need that kind of forthrightness. Right.
32:07You can't take a fancy to something like that. So whatever. Not from a little one. No. Little ones tell you the truth and we need them too. So. Yeah. All right. Ellen, thank you so much for your time today. I am so excited that you're doing this because I think the world needs more fun jams and more fun ways to cook with it. So thank you. Oh, thank you. You have a great day. Thank you for inviting me. Absolutely. All right. Thanks.
 

Waddle and Cluck

Today I'm talking with Lindsay at Waddle and Cluck. You can follow on Facebook as well. You can visit Nature Notes, as mentioned in the episode.
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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 Lindsay at Waddle and Cluck. Good morning, Lindsay, how are you? Good morning, I'm doing good, how are you? Good, wanted to make sure I pronounced the cluck with the C-L because it could have been misconstrued, and that would be really bad on my podcast.
00:28Yes, it's Waddle and Cluck, an old English pub for birds. Oh, okay. Cool. I was going to ask you the story behind it. So is there an actual story behind it? Yes and no. We started off with chickens and ducks and so Waddle and Cluck. And I just, I thought it sounded like when I went to London and I was visiting some of the places around there.
00:56I just like the way it sounded. So that's what we went with. Yeah. I feel like if you go to the UK, you can't throw a stone without hitting a pub. Is that about right? Yeah. Yes. I've never been, but every time I read a book about it or see a story about it, there's always a pub somewhere involved. So all right. So tell me about yourself and what you guys do. Well, we are a family of six. We're a blended family.
01:24We have four kids, three boys and a girl ranging from 14 to 19. The oldest is in college. And we have a little hobby farm. So we have chickens, ducks, geese, guineas, quail, and turkeys. And we plan to expand that once we can finish off fencing.
01:52I think fencing is the bane of existence for anyone who has animals. And then we also do a lot of gardening. I am also a business owner in addition to that. So we also, there's a couple of local markets around here, indoor markets that are geared towards local products that we sell eggs and baked goods and some handmade goods.
02:21And so we do a lot of things. Yes. I was looking at your, uh, your Instagram page and your Facebook page. And I was like, does this woman ever actually sleep for more than an hour at a time? Yeah, three. Yeah. You know, it's, it's one of those things when you want to have your dream life. Um, you're willing to work harder for it.
02:51Absolutely. And sometimes if you're lucky that dream life happens and you realize you don't have to keep pushing so hard, that's kind of what happened with us which was really nice because my husband and I are in our mid-50s and we worked really, really, really hard until we moved in here four years ago. And we still work hard but we're not quite as stressed about it as we used to be.
03:21Yep. And you know, once you really get the hang of things and you get systems in place, it does become a lot easier to do all of the things. I am intensely organized and we have all of our farm stuff on a pretty good schedule. And so other than getting up at sunrise, things flow pretty smoothly around here.
03:50Yes, and there is a huge benefit to getting up at sunrise. I have a kitchen sink that has a picture window above it. And so when I get up in the morning and get my coffee, I try to get up before the sun comes up because I didn't have the luxury, I guess, of seeing the sunrise from where we used to live. And now there's an open field out that window and it looks due east. And every morning if there's a sunrise, I get to see it and it just makes my day. It starts my day. So.
04:20peacefully and beautifully that the rest of the day can't go wrong even though there's a chance it will. That's a great way to start your day. Our daughter is currently obsessed with sunsets. Every time there's a sunset, it's prettier than the last one and her phone is filled with pictures of sunsets.
04:45So is mine because my husband does the same thing. He goes out in the morning if it's a pretty sunrise, he's taking six or seven pictures, and he's always out in the evening at sunset. It doesn't matter what time it is, but he's outside. So I have thousands of pictures of sunrises and sunsets in my phone. I told him we should make calendars every year. You should, you should. Yeah.
05:09My thing is that in the house that we lived in before this one, there was no window in the kitchen. There was a window out the back door that was in, you know, it walked, it entered onto the kitchen, but it looked north. So you could not see a sunrise or sunset from the kitchen. And when I did dishes, I was looking at a blank wall. So I'm so incredibly thankful for having a window over my sink.
05:36And that sounds really, really stupid and small, but it's not, it's huge to me. It is. And you know, there's, I have in my office here at the house, I have three big windows, or two big windows and then a window in the door. And then we have a window over the sink as well. So all day long, I can kind of look out over the pasture where the.
06:01Birds are free roaming and see our fruit trees and see the birds and it really makes a difference in your mindset and in your thinking when you take time to really appreciate nature and appreciate the things that are less focused on being busy and achieving the end goal.
06:27Yes, I think that things like that give us a reason to pause. And the world is so incredibly busy and driven right now that people miss those moments. They really do. And we had a similar situation to you guys in that we moved here about three years ago and the house that we lived in before was in a neighborhood.
06:55Um, it was really not big enough for all of us. We were constantly right on top of each other. And now that we have room to sort of spread out and have space, both indoors and outdoors that we can call our own or to take those moments to really just be, it's made a big, huge difference, I think for everyone. Yeah.
07:24And I don't want to get too far into this because I don't want to do a philosophy class on why calm and peace and quiet is good for you. But take my word for it, it really can be good for you. So why fowl? Why birds? You know, my husband grew up on a hobby farm with birds and things like that. And we love animals.
07:48In addition to all the birds that we have, we also have five dogs and a saltwater fish tank. That was something that we were just naturally drawn to. We all really like to eat eggs. We figured that that was a really great place to start with our hobby farm because we felt confident there. We felt that.
08:18You know, we were very good at taking care of animals. We had both done it for most of our lives, you know, with different types of animals. And we fully understood the care and the housing, the feed and all those things that they would need. Now our birds are strictly egg birds. So they're kind of like pets.
08:46and get treated as such, they are spoiled rotten. I have one little chicken that, she was much littler than the other ones and so she wouldn't get her turn at the feed. And so I started feeding her out of my hand and now that she's full grown, she fully expects to be hand fed at every meal. So it's just, you know, there's a connection that
09:15we feel with those animals and we enjoy spending time with them and learning their personalities and watching the dynamics and just enjoy spending time with them and laughing at them and with them. Yeah. I was told a long time ago that you can't train birds and you can't train cats and I don't believe it for a second.
09:42Number one, you train your little bird to eat out of your hand, and she's very happy doing that. We have two barn kittens right now, and they like to jump up on the railing by the door to our house. And we have a porch, so we sit on a bench on the porch and look out, and there's a window. And the male kitten, who looks like a little lion, he's a long-haired yellow cat.
10:07wants to jump up on the rail, the sill of the window, but if he does, he falls because it's real slippery and it's angled. And so he's fallen like three times. And I finally caught him getting ready to jump the other day and I said, no, really loudly at him. And he looked at who's going to do it. And I said, no. And he has not jumped since up on the window sill. So you can train a cat. It's possible.
10:35trained birds. You know, I always joke that I will never have all my ducks in a row. Because trust me when I tell you that herding ducks is ridiculously difficult. We moved them from they had a home that they were living in that we had built. And then last year we expanded and gave them a bigger home. And it took
11:04three days to train them to go to the new location. And so they're, it's so funny because they're kind of my signal now to know when to go out to secure all the birds at night because they will literally go stand right in front of the door to their shelter and then just line up and go in. So you absolutely can train them.
11:33Um, we've never tried to train them doing tricks, but I have seen on Tik TOK, uh, people training chickens to do tricks similar to dogs. Um, we've never tried that, but certainly. You know, with forcing habit, um, they've learned, you know, they know where they're going to be fed. Um, they know where to go at night. They know, you know, where is safe and where is not safe on our property.
12:03And so they definitely, they're a lot smarter than people give them credit for. I think animals are smarter than people sometimes. I think my dog is absolutely smarter than we are. She knows exactly when it's time for her routine, everything in her routine. She knows exactly when it starts. And if it doesn't happen, she gets really yippy and she doesn't bite, but she does this
12:32Yes, it's time for that. You're right. She, she has an internal clock. It's amazing. Yes. So on every day, you know, we have, we have a three part system. You know, the birds get let out and fed in the morning and then they get, you know, fed and watered again in the afternoon and then put up in the evening. And in the afternoon, you know, they know the gate that I'm coming through and they know which bucket, you know, if I'm carrying the green bucket, they know. And they all gather.
13:01at the gate at the appropriate feeding time. And they're ready. And then, you know, you spend 10 or 15 minutes trying not to step on birds because they want to be just right there with you when you have the food bucket. Yes. And honestly, what it is, is that food and kindness will get you really good results almost all the time. So that's how we're training our animals is with food and kindness.
13:31Exactly, exactly. And that's why Biddy, you know, she's, she will walk next to me the whole time until we get to her designated feeding spot. And then she starts jumping and hopping. And if I don't get to her quick enough, she jumps up on the bucket. Yeah, it's really fun, but it's also very predictable. And what I didn't know before we had chickens is that
13:59Animals as long as you you treat them well and you feed them things they like they're incredibly predictable And so are we as humans so it's a very symbiotic relationship that happens there Absolutely, and you know like I said we treat all of our animals as pets, but we also You know we do understand that they are wild animals all of our birds free range so while they are
14:27safe and secure at night. They have free range of the property during the day. And, you know, giving them all of the things that they need, you know, food, water, shelter, and a good place to live where they can be safe and healthy and happy really goes a long way into fostering relationships.
14:57those that are possible with these animals. My geese will not give me the time of day, and I just really want to pet their soft, fluffy feathers. But you know, it's important when you expand the type of animals that you have to realize that, you know, they're not always going to.
15:22have the same relationship with you depending on the types of personalities of those birds. You know, we've had everything from ball pythons and and bearded dragons to guinea pigs and turtles and every animal has a different level of comfort with humans. And my geese are probably better guard dogs than my dogs. I believe it.
15:52I believe it. Geese are scary, man. They will charge people and animals and just make tons of noise and whip their wings at the thing they're trying to get away. It's just, it's a frightening experience. It is. It is. And you know, our geese, we have African geese, not Canadian geese, but the area that I live in does have a lot of Canadian geese. And so they will...
16:20They will come very close to me, but they will not. They just don't want to be pet. From time to time, we do have to catch them to check them over and make sure that they're healthy and their webbing on their feet is healthy and all of that. And they don't attack us in those instances, but we have a system for doing that.
16:47where we do that at evening when they're going to roost. But yeah, I mean, and the guineas, they just don't wanna have anything to do with you either. They will just yell at you. But then, you know, the chickens are much more likely to form a relationship with you, especially if you go out and you sit and you spend time. My husband's mother, she still has, you know,
17:16all kinds of animals at her farm and she'll go sit on the porch back there and her chickens will just come sit in her lap. Mm-hmm. Yup. And I love that, except that I don't want a chicken to sit in my lap. I've mentioned it before on the episodes. I hate the way the quills and their fur or their feathers feel. And so if I just brush my hand across the back of a chicken, that's fine. But you're never going to catch me sliding my fingers in their feathers because it just freaks me out. I don't like it.
17:45Well, and it's real funny because, you know, I used to not kind of dig into their feathers and stuff like that. And with Biddy out there, I discovered that right up underneath her wings, if I rub her there, it makes her the happiest little chicken on the planet. And she does this little happy dance. Thank you. Oh, that's nice.
18:12I think, you know, when you scratch a dog at their favorite spot and they do that kind of happy wiggle, she does the exact same thing. Yeah, my dog, her spot is her booty, booty scratches. And the thing that we always say when we do that is, that's the spot, that's the spot. And she just, I don't know, she does a wiggle and she...
18:34She like arcs, or arches her neck back to look at us, like thank you, that's it. That's where you need to be right now. I think that's a requirement that when you scratch their favorite spot, you're supposed to say, that's the spot. But you know, just like you're supposed to say, oh, big stretch. Yes, the downward dog thing, yes. Yes, she does that all the time. And I'm like, doesn't that hurt?
18:59Every time she does it, I say, doesn't that hurt? And she looks at me like, no, it's great. No, this is the best ever. This is lovely. Thank you. Yes. And then they do the one with their back legs too. I'm like, I would die. I would be broken. I don't know how you do that. And the other thing that I didn't know before we moved to our homestead, cause we'd never had a dog, is that dogs after they go potty outside will like kick.
19:29the dirt back toward where they went to the bathroom. Yes. And so when she was a puppy, she started doing it. She's like, I don't know, nine weeks old and she did these kickies. And I was like, um, is she okay? And my husband was like, yeah, dogs do the same thing. Cats do. They try to cover their scent. I was like, I had no idea. I said, so not only will she do zoomies, she's going to do kickies. And he's like, yes, she's going to do kickies, honey. And.
19:58So the reason I bring this up is what I found out yesterday. I was that many days old when I found this out yesterday that dogs have scent glands between their toes. And that's the other reason that they do it. Yes. So they're not just trying to cover what they left on the ground. They're trying to mark their territory too. I was like, huh, there is still something new to learn. Okay, good. So yes, animals are.
20:27actually pretty complex creatures. And once you start paying attention to their habits and the things that they do and really taking a deep dive to learn about them, they're just absolutely fascinating. There's a gentleman who if you haven't visited the Waddle and Cluck yet, I highly recommend visiting our nature notes section. There's a gentleman here named
20:53David and he's in his early 80s. We've been friends for about 15 years. He started writing a nature note for the local newspaper. I used to be the editor there. David is absolutely fascinating. He grew up in West Africa and then he moved to the United States and his property is
21:24He is so fascinated by animals and wildlife and nature. And so in the paper stopped publishing his column, there's newspapers are dying. That's a whole different subject. They are. But the, you know, essentially the newspaper got bought, transferred to a larger
21:50publication and they no longer wanted to publish the nature notes. And it was about the time that I was starting Waddle and Cluck, I said, well, come write for me. And so every week he sends me a brilliant look at some aspect of nature, and whether that be wildflowers or a certain kind of herb or, you know, a different animal.
22:19and his insights and the things that he learns are just absolutely fascinating. And he spends a lot of time on his property trying to get pictures of all of these animals. So we have some amazing photography of the life cycle of a butterfly from a first person perspective. And it's just really fascinating because there are things that I will have never noticed.
22:48And he sends in his nature note and, you know, we spend the rest of the day chatting back and forth as I'm outside looking for the things that he's seeing because we only live about a mile and a half apart. Yep. That's super cool. So is that on your website? Yes, it's on the website. It's one of the main headers. It's nature note. Okay, cool. I will point it out in the show notes so that people can go check out what he does.
23:18because I think it's amazing that he's that old and doing his thing still, that's fantastic. Oh, he's still pushmo's. He has 20 acres and he spends a lot of time out there working on his property and they're not really homesteading anymore. They don't have animals. They do a little bit of gardening, but mostly he's just taking care of the property and enjoying his retirement with photography.
23:47and learning more about nature. Very nice. Okay, well my dad is 81 and he still acts like he's 50. So it gives me hope that I might see 80. Maybe, we'll see what happens. So when I was looking at your Facebook page, it's a lot. There's a lot of stuff on your Facebook page. I feel like you have the same curiosity about life that I have. Do you have the got to know itis bug? Yes.
24:16Yes, I also have the, I can do that, I just bug. Mm-hmm. Yep. I used to get teased all the time when I was in my teens. I don't know if you went through this. Because people would say something and I would say, what's that? Because I hadn't heard of it yet. And they would tell me and I would say, how does it work? And they would tell me and I would say, why does it work? And they were like, I am not spending the next six hours having a dissertation on this with you.
24:44And I would look at them and say, but why? And I just would get teased about being the girl who wanted to know everything. Did you get that too? Yes, I did get that too. And then, you know, when I went to college and we would have social gatherings, you know, all the different activities and stuff that they plan and the dorms, you know, the get to know yous and all that. And I had made...
25:13you know, new friend with my roommate, she would always say, well, if you're looking for Lindsay, you know, go find the philosophical discussion or the religious discussion or the politics discussion or the architectural discussion, she'll be, she'll be wherever people are talking about something serious. And still to this day, I probably read about, you know, 70 to 80 books a year. Me too. So
25:43You know, I'm always trying to learn something new. I'm always trying something new. Um, you know, the last few weeks I've been learning to crochet. So my daughter set found these, uh, turtle costumes, turtle shell costumes on the internet and they were not inexpensive. And I looked at it and I thought, well, I could do that.
26:12I've been trying to learn how to do that. I do the same thing in my kitchen. You know, I'll just pick up a spice one day and think, I can make that. Or, you know, I'll see a recipe on Instagram or TikTok and think, I can make that. You would not believe how many freaking things I have saved for recipes from Facebook in the, you know, where it says save this post. Yes.
26:41I have like 18 recipes I've saved in the last week that I want to try this winter because they're all desserts and winter time is dessert time. It is. It very much is. And yeah, I'm, you know, I'm always trying to learn something new to develop a new skill, you know, and especially I think in today's world where things do move so fast and things have gotten more expensive.
27:11Taking the time to break something down into its smaller pieces and then learning how to provide that on your own is amazing. There's nothing more satisfying, I think, than seeing something that you enjoy and then learning how to produce that for yourself. We love what we do.
27:40not everybody in the house, but I love apple butter. And I've made, you know, so many things with apples throughout the year. And a couple of weeks ago, I thought it's fall. Apple butter sounds really good. I know how to make applesauce and I know how to make apple pies. You know, I know how to why can't I make apple butter? So, you know, I did some research and broke it down and figured it out. Uh-huh. And it's so much.
28:10you know, less expensive than buying it already made at the store. And you don't have to have an apple tree, you know, in order to do that. It's cheaper to buy apples than it is to buy something that's already pre-made and pre-packaged. And, you know, one of the benefits to that too, is I know everything that went into it. So, absolutely. Yes, sister, you're singing my song.
28:36It's funny you bring up apple butter because I hate apple butter mostly because my mom made a metric butt ton of it when we were kids. I like apple jelly. Apple jelly is okay, but apple butter, if I never see apple butter again, it'll be too soon. I understand that it's really good for you and I'm glad that you're learning to make it and I'm glad that you love it. I personally don't ever need to try it again. And see, that's the same way. That's the way I feel about apple juice.
29:06My mother always, always gave us apple juice and now I just, I'm not a fan. Yup. But, I mean that can... What about cider? Do you like cider? I like hot cider sometimes when it's really cold. Okay. So it's not, it's just apple juice that you're like, I can't do it again. I just can't do it again. I had way too much of it. But you know, that applies for...
29:35Just about anything, if you like, you know, strawberry jam, strawberry jelly, visit your local farmer's market, buy some strawberries or strawberries are extremely easy to grow. Oh, yeah. And you can grow them. You know, we, I grow my strawberries in the front yard in what used to be a flower bed. So, you know, it's, they're very easy to grow. Even if you don't have a lot of space. We actually
30:02My sons and I, we started gardening for the first time when we were living in an apartment. And we put some pots on the balcony and grew some tomatoes and some bell peppers. So it's not really, I think one of the questions that people ask me all the time is, I really want to.
30:30try homesteading, but I don't have a lot of space. I don't have the space to have chickens or ducks. I don't have a pond. I don't have definitely the space for turkeys. It really doesn't matter. You can start where you are and use the space that you have. If you don't have space for chickens, try quail. Quail are much quieter.
30:58They take up a lot less space, like one square foot per bird. Try gardening in pots. There are all kinds of things that you can grow in pots. There are all kinds of ways that you can start to learn to make things from scratch, even if you're buying the pieces at the store, because you don't have the space to grow them. There's
31:26there's all sorts of ways that you can homestead with very little space and with a whole lot of space and everywhere in between. Yes, and I feel like homesteading is a lifestyle. It's not about having land and having cows and horses. When we lived in our smaller house on our 10th of an acre lot, we had a small garden, we had flowers.
31:53And we grew enough food to put some away for the winter for our four kids and my husband and myself. And we actually had enough to give to the neighbors. So you can start where you are with what you have. And I've done it. I know you've done it. And the other thing is you can grow herbs in your house. If you have a table that you can put a couple of pots on.
32:21buy used or buy new, if you can get it on sale, a grow light, you can grow the most beautiful fresh herbs. We've done it. And they're great. They taste just as good as if they were grown outside. So there are things you can do inside as easily as you can outside. Absolutely. And, you know, if you don't have the space to grow larger vegetables, you know, look around and see if there is a farmer's market near you.
32:49Yeah, the first time that I ever canned anything, I was not at a place where I was growing much yet, and I definitely wasn't growing enough to have things to save for later. But we would visit farmers markets and especially towards the end of the season for a fruit or a vegetable, we would buy in bulk and then we would eat what we could and can the rest.
33:19and all you really need to can is a stove top. So, there's all sorts of ways that you can participate in a homesteading lifestyle and slow down and appreciate the fruits of your labor without having a whole lot of space. Homesteading, I think is one of those things that can very easily get out of hand and very easily become
33:49extremely expensive and that's something that we've really had to consider, you know, now that we've moved to our forever home with the larger property is not trying to do all of the things all at once. And you know, just take them step by step. I've been blessed with a very handy husband. And so there's a lot of things that we've been able to, again, break down into smaller parts and build.
34:18I mentioned earlier that our docs used to live in a different home and then we moved them. Their first shelter was built out of old pallets. And then we moved them to a larger shelter now that's a little bit more open, has some hard cloth on there so they're safe and secure. But they have lots of...
34:46air and breeziness. And so, you know, it's not something that you have to think, oh, I need to make this very large investment. You know, all of those pallets we got by just calling around and asking if people had any pallets that we could come pick up. So, you know, as, as I think, you know, people I've, I've seen it said a whole bunch of times, I'm in my grandma era.
35:16where younger people are learning some of these Techniques that weren't necessarily passed down to all of us I know and they weren't necessarily passed down to me, but my husband did learn a lot because he grew up more in that Lifestyle But you know just looking around you and thinking what are the areas where you would feel
35:44satisfaction and accomplished if you were to learn that task. I try to learn something new every week and I think the first introduction that I had to homesteading was me and my boys, we were kind of on our own for a little while and money was tight and they had a sale on
36:14washcloth yarn at Walmart. You get those little bundles of washcloth yarn. And I thought, you know, I will just pick up a couple of knitting needles and a few of these skeins of yarn and figure this out. And jumped on YouTube and learned how to make washcloths. And you know, that I think that was where I was bitten by the bug.
36:43to really slow down and think about the creation of things and the way that I can participate in that versus just purchasing things and constantly sending money out. And especially for those of us that have jobs that don't necessarily produce a product, we're in.
37:11the information sector or we're in the service sector, taking the time to actually produce something with your own hands, I think is very satisfying for a lot of people. I agree completely. And I totally understand what you were saying about what got you into this because when we really got into it is we're a blinded family too. And our kids were small.
37:39And money was tight because we had four kids and it was one income. And that was a choice because we wanted one of us to be home with these kids to actually raise them ourselves. And so I learned to cook because cooking for six people is way less expensive than buying already made food for six people. Yes, it is. And once I got into that, I was like, Oh, I should learn to crochet. I should learn to sew. I should learn. And I learned a whole lot.
38:08in the 20 years that we lived at the other house, which we raised the kids in. So yeah, it doesn't necessarily have to be lack of money that causes you to be like, oh, there's got to be a cheaper way to do this. But I feel like lack of money sometimes really is the thing that kicks people into this. Yes.
38:32You know, with a lot of the people that I talk to, lack of money seems to be a prime motivator for learning how to do things less expensively. I think another thing that really kicks people off is health. Wanting to know where your food comes from and what is going into it.
38:56Again, being able to cook for your family and provides me. I know if we go out to eat, it's a couple hundred dollars if we're going cheap. I can make a meal for six of us for 10 or 15 bucks. There's something so satisfying. I remember when I was first really learning how to cook properly.
39:25My youngest son was pretty young at the time and he was obsessed with MasterChef. I made lamb. We had no idea what we were doing, but he had seen it on MasterChef. I thought, well, I've been learning to cook. I've been learning to put flavors together. Definitely don't think I can rise to
39:54know, the level of master chef, but sure, let's try it. And so we bought a couple and cooked them up and he said, Mom, Gordon Ramsay would be proud of you. He would say yes. And, you know, from that point on, it was just like, yes, I definitely want to cook. And he still says stuff like that, even though he's a teenager. So, you know, there's definitely a satisfaction there when you learn how to do something well.
40:24And then you're able to take those concepts that you've learned and apply them to other things. I think one of the most fun things that I do with Waddle and Cluck right now is coming up with new recipes because I'm always looking for ways to incorporate different flavors and ways to experience spices and things from around the world in ways that I can make in my own kitchen.
40:52versus trying, you know, because I live in Oklahoma, we don't have an abundance of worldly flavors here. Right. So it's very fun to experiment with, you know, those different flavors and different ways of eating the same foods. Absolutely. And do your kids, are your kids cooks? Are they learning to cook too? Not necessarily.
41:22There's been a couple of them that have gone through a phase where they've wanted to learn to cook, but they're all teenagers right now. I think friends is kind of the most important thing in their life right now. They all have expressed some sort of interest. At this point, they've been around long enough and they've been asked to cook.
41:50to help enough times that if they get hungry, they can just go in the kitchen and make something. Okay, so they cook. They cook stuff. They're just not cooks. They're just not cooks. My stepson the other night, he saw something on TikTok that he wanted to try. So he went to Walmart and bought the ingredients and cooked it up. And you often wonder, did they learn that from me?
42:20you know, did they learn that from seeing me do the same thing? And, and I hope that they did not just from TikTok, right? Um, but you know, he said it was, it was successful and it was great. So, you know, sometimes I think just, even if your kids aren't interested in what you're doing, they're still noticing and they're still paying attention and you're still teaching them skills, even if they're not right there next to you participating.
42:50Oh yeah, because kids are sponges. They soak up everything they see and hear. It's a great way to teach them and it's a really great way for them to learn swear words too. Because that happens when you screw something up and you're grown up. You will definitely let fly a word you shouldn't have said in front of your kids. The reason I asked if they cook is because one of the rules in my house as my kids were growing up is that they couldn't move out until they could cook a dinner.
43:18and a dessert that they would be proud to share with their friends. And all four of them, all four of them can and they really like cooking. So that was the rule in my house. Yeah, that's awesome. I definitely had rules like that, like at a certain point. And I think, you know, I still talk to people and they're amazed by this. You know, my kids do their own laundry. Yep. And, you know, they've, we've taught them.
43:47all sorts of skills as they go on. My oldest, who is in college right now, I would tell him all the time, you would be amazed when you get to college, the number of people who aren't going to know how to clean something or wash dishes or do their laundry. He grew up in a house where we've expected participation, help with cleaning, help around the property, do your own laundry, things like that.
44:18He called me a couple of weeks after he'd been at college and he was like, you know, you're absolutely right. He said, I've had to show no less than five people how to use the washing machine. Yep. It's crazy to me that that's true, but I believe it. Um, my stepson was actually in the Marines and he was so frustrated that there was no place for him to go cook. That.
44:44He broke a couple little rules and actually cooked on base in his assigned living quarters with his coffee pot.
44:56That was a no-no and he got away with it a couple of times, but you really shouldn't do that if you're in the Marines. They don't really appreciate it at all. And he also had a microwave, so he managed to do some things in the microwave that worked. But he was real happy to get out and be able to cook in a kitchen again because he really loves to cook. Yes. Well, and I think...
45:21You know, dorms are evolving a little bit, at least in my son's college. They have an entire kitchen area. The dorm that he lived in last year, they had an entire kitchen area down on the first floor where pots and pans and everything were provided. And so they, you know, they would go down there and they would cook things. And
45:46You know, he said it was kind of amazing the number of people that would kind of gather around and be like, Oh, you know, what are you making? What are you cooking? How are you doing that? Um, and he's in an apartment now. Um, but yeah, I mean, those are important skills to teach your kids before they. Fly the coop. Yeah. Yup. That's phenomenal. I had no idea that the colleges might be.
46:16actually understanding that people would want to make food for their friends. That's great. Yeah. So I think that was really beneficial for them, especially because it's dorm food. When you go to the cafeteria and stuff is not always the best food and not always available at the time when you need it. So yeah, teaching those skills is essential. And
46:44is that I'm still teaching myself skills all the time and always learning. That's something that I've talked to people quite a lot about with the homesteading lifestyle is they say, well, I don't know how to do all that stuff. That's fine. Take it one thing at a time. Just learn one skill. For every skill that you learn, it's going to help you learn the next skill.
47:14And the next skill, and we're not always successful. Anybody who's ever planted anything knows that failure is part of the game. When you have animals, you're going to lose some. That's just the way that nature goes. And I think in addition to learning those practical skills, you're also learning resiliency. You're learning
47:44you know, how to tackle failure. You're learning how to, you know, rise above and keep trying. You know, the first year that I planted carrots, it went just miserably wrong and they were about, you know, one inch long. They were not the best, you know, and so.
48:12You start trying to figure out, okay, what went wrong? Well, the soil didn't have the proper nutrients. Okay, how do I fix that? What do I need to do? You know, and you just start developing more and more skills and you start to find ways to creatively get things done. You know, even at our old house where we didn't have a whole lot of space, we had compost piles.
48:42that we fed all year long so that when it came time to plant, we had that rich, nutrient-dense compost to add to our garden bed. So just each little skill that you learn moves you forward so that you can continue to learn other skills, combine them, apply that knowledge.
49:10You know, I don't think I've ever tackled quite as much failure in life as I have as a gardener. But you know, we're getting better at it every single time that we plant something. And our crops just get a little bit better and a little bit better. And you know, we're hoping that by this next spring, we will be at this new place producing enough for providing for all of our needs.
49:40Yep, I think you'll definitely be there because you sound like you're absorbing every piece of knowledge you can get your hands on right now. So we've been talking for almost 50 minutes, so I'm gonna let you go, but I appreciate your time, Lindsay, so much. And I think as you start ending, every episode would do what you can with what you have where you are. Yes, absolutely. I think that's a great motto to have. Uh-huh.
50:08All right, thank you again, Lindsay. Have a great day. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. Bye.
 

Nourish and Nestle

Today I'm talking with Lynn at Nourish and Nestle. You can follow on Facebook as well.
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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 Lynn at Nourish and Nestle. How are you, Lynn? I'm well, thank you. Awesome. I have to tell you, my nickname is Lynn. My given name is Mary Evelyn. Oh, okay. And my...
00:28and my parents couldn't decide which name was going to come first, and they settled on Mary. And by the time I was like a week old, they were calling me Lynn. So I grew up not knowing that my name wasn't technically Lynn. So when I saw yours, I was like, oh, a real Lynn. Okay. A real Lynn. Yep. All right. So tell me all about yourself and what you do. So this like
00:57stocks me when I say this, but I've been blogging for about nine years, which is like a lifetime. And I, you know, so my blog is Nurture Nestle, obviously, and it's a basically everything I like to do, you know, I kind of ignored the advice to niche down and I kind of niche out. So
01:21I like to cook, so I cook. I like to garden, so there's gardening. I like to knit, so there's knit. So whatever I like to do is kind of on there. So yeah, that's pretty much it. In a nutshell, I've enjoyed this blogging journey. I got to a point earlier this year where I was like, gosh, do I really wanna keep doing this? And what I did is I just kind of slowed down and just.
01:49focused on the stuff I wanted to do. And I really kind of stepped back from all the crazy stuff that, you know, make Facebook happy and Google happy and Pinterest happy. And I'm really blessed that I have a great email, active large email list. So I just started really kind of focusing on them and I'm in a happy place right now. You did all the hard work at the beginning and now you get to make the rules. I think that's great. Yes. Awesome.
02:19Okay, well, I have been doing my podcast for a little over a year. And at a year, I went through the same thing. I was like, do I want to keep doing this? Because it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work to be a creative and put yourself out there and put the time into it. And I talked to my husband about it and I was like, this five days a week thing is a lot.
02:47And he said, cut back to three days a week again. He said, when you first started, it was once a week. And then you moved to three a week and then you did months of five episodes released a week. He said, drop back down to three. He said, you have a following now. See what happens. And that's what I've done for the last week or so. And it's fine. So no one's your limits and slowing down is not a terrible thing. And, and there's a, there's a lesson for us all there.
03:16You know, we're not doing our best when we're not enjoying it and when we're feeling like under the pressure and we're feeling like, you know, I must do this, I must do this. And we're at our best, especially creatives, when, you know, we listen to our heart on that, you know. And luckily, you know, I am and hopefully you are in a position too where
03:42you know, we don't have to go to the daily grind. I know not everybody is lucky enough to do that. And I'm lucky enough to kind of step back and say, okay, this is what I want to do. And I don't want to do all the other things. So yes. And I'm in the same boat. So whatever it is that catches my eye and the person I want to talk to, if they say yes, I am all over it. And it can be anytime between 8 a.m. Central time and 6 p.m. Central time.
04:09After that or before that, I'm asleep. I'm done. I'm exactly. I need sleep. I am 55 years old. I spent years not sleeping, raised four kids. And sleep is like my favorite thing next to talking to people on the podcast. You and me both girls. Sleep is my happy place too. Uh huh. Yep. And I have to get in some reading just for me. I'm an avid reader. And if I don't read something for me.
04:36at least an hour a day, I feel like my life is off kilter. So that's kind of my thing. So we could talk about all that stuff all day, but we're not going to. So I wanted to talk to you basically, because you're all about home and design and creating things and I love it. First question for you is what is your particular style when it comes to decorating?
05:05I think I would be called eclectic. I don't, and I don't, so with not offending anybody, I don't buy decorations. I haven't really bought furniture in forever. I have hand-me-down furniture and I have, the furniture my husband and I bought when we were married 35 years ago.
05:32is the furniture that I still have today that I've recovered, obviously. But I'm kind of a... I don't want to say I'm a traditionalist. My poem's not traditional in any sense, but I like to use... I thought of getting rid of perfectly good furniture and buying new furniture. I have my grandparents' dining room table. I have my parents' sofa that I've recovered. I have...
05:58So, I would say I'm eclectic because nothing like I don't have a colonial. I don't have a contemporary home. I have a home that is really mixed with what was given to me. And then I've accumulated. We've bought a few pieces of furniture, but most of the furniture we've purchased has been like antiques other than our sofa that we bought when we first got married 35 years ago.
06:25we've bought a few antiques. I like artwork a lot, so I would prefer to spend money on art than furniture. So I would have to say I'm eclectic. I like bright light colors. I don't have curtains on my windows. I like the light to come in. I don't know. I don't know that I'm easily kind of pigeonholed because all my decor, when I look at my bookshelves, art, with books,
06:55But, you know, family heirlooms, I don't buy decorations other than original artwork. That's kind of my one weakness. So that's kind of what I would call if that explains it. Yes. And I'm going to tell you, older furniture is the best furniture because it lasts forever. Yes. And it has character and it doesn't look like everybody else's. Right. Yeah. And, I mean...
07:25We did buy a brand new kitchen table, like seven years ago, because one we had was old and it was just not repairable. It was old, old, like over 100 years old and it was just falling apart. My husband, yeah, my husband was like, why don't we buy that one that you saw, that you love, that needs to be finished and I will put it together and you can polyurethane it and then we...
07:53We sort of made it our own and I said, that's totally fine. So that's what we did. And honestly, had he had time, he probably would have made us a table because he's really good at woodworking. And I've said it before on the podcast that our bed frame, my son's bed frame, and a couple of our desks are made by my husband. He made those pieces of furniture. So if you can't inherit it and you can't get it,
08:23from thrifting, you might find somebody who's really good at woodworking who can make you furniture, which is always lovely. We've made a few things actually. You can buy legs, you know, turned legs. We bought some turned legs and bought a piece of wood for the top of the table. Anyway.
08:46For those of us who aren't as skilled as your husband. I picked the right one. He's really good at woodworking, and he's really good at bread baking. So I won. I won the lottery. Well, I don't hope my husband isn't listening, because he's really good at duct taping. That's OK, too. I mean, whatever gets the job done, I suppose. So I'm going to share my decorating style, because I asked you. So I'm going to share mine.
09:15Mine is very classic and functional and old fashioned things. That's what I love. And we have a desk that is made out of an old Tradle sewing machine base. And then my husband put a maple top on it. And it is my favorite thing he's made. It's so beautiful. And it honors that time frame. Yeah. And I also really, really love beach things because I grew up on the East Coast.
09:45And so I have like almost like a cartoonish painting of a lighthouse in my kitchen. And I have two small prints of like a beach scene. They're almost exactly the same. And I accidentally decorated my bathroom in our old house like Cape Cod and didn't even realize I had done it. Well, it was it was subliminal, right?
10:13It was very blue and white and bright and clean. And my neighbors knew we were redoing our bathroom and they came over. And the wife of the couple stepped in and I of course had a sand smelling, you know, suntan lotion smelling candle burning in there. And she was like, I swear I just walked into a Cape Cod house and I know your house is not a Cape Cod. And I said, oh no, no, it's not.
10:43She said, did you do this on purpose? And I said, no, no, I did not. But I think I might've been quite influenced by where I grew up. So I like, I really like old fashioned classic things and functional things. I also like things that no one would think of. I was in a public building and they rotate their artwork on their walls every six months.
11:14And there was this like shadow box frame and it had birch branches that were all about the same height, maybe five inches tall. And it was in the colors of a winter sky, the background. And it had like glitter on that background. So it looked like a birch forest where it was snowing. I wanted to buy it and I could not find anybody who could tell me where it came from. And so-
11:43stems painted or were they actually pieces of birch? They were natural. So you could probably make that. Yes it's on my list. I haven't done it yet but it's been on my list for five years so I'm hoping that maybe this winter I can I can get a frame or a shadow box frame and get some birch stems and some paints and just kind of play and see if I can come up with something like it. You just reminded
12:13My grandfather was more than just a handyman. He was a builder and he had a tool and die company back in the day. Anyway, so when he passed away, my parents were given and then I was given his old wooden toolbox. It was about the size of a good size toolbox, not one you would carry by a
12:43few feet tall with all the drawers and everything, but it's just a gorgeous wooden thing. I didn't want to – what do I do with the toolbox? I took it to a metal worker and I had him build a base. Now, this is an end table. I built the base so that literally my grandfather's toolbox is now an end table in our living room. Just like you said, finding unusual ways to use everyday items.
13:11Yeah, so they don't end up in the landfill. Right! Right, right, right. Yes. So, since we're talking about the fact that you can make things out of things, the whole purpose of chatting with you that we decided on was to talk about how to make our homes cozy and welcoming for the holidays. And you had suggested talking about homemade gifts, too. Right.
13:36So let's talk about how to make homes cozy and welcoming for the holidays. You go first. Well, you know, I think, and everybody's definition of cozy is different, right? So, you know, my idea of cozy might not be anyone else's, but in general, I'm not a clutter person. I don't like a lot of clutter. But during Christmas, we are like clutter-centric. And I am also somebody who, I reuse my same ornaments every year.
14:06get a new color scheme, I don't buy new decorations. These are the ones that we've had. So to my family and to me, there's a sense of cozy in that continuity of what we've seen for the last forever. But once again, that's just my definition of cozy.
14:30I'd love to have a fire going. That's my definition of cozy. I mean, I live in North Carolina on the coast and it's not really cold, but having a fire going is cozy to me. I bake a lot. To me, there's nothing more cozy than hanging out in my kitchen baking for us to give. That to me is a really cozy thing with music going on or football, whatever the case may be.
14:57So I think that everyone needs to define their definition of cozy, but that's what cozy is to us. I always have a puzzle at Christmas time, laying out on the dining room table or a table that we're not using. To me, that's sitting there and just working on it a couple pieces a day. That's a cozy thing. What about you? Okay. I've been thinking about this for a week now.
15:24is how things smell and how they sound. And part of that is that the olfactory scents and the auditory scents are two of the strongest of our six senses. Okay. And so if you're hearing a song when you're experiencing something, you'll always associate that song with that memory. And if there's a strong smell, like gingerbread cookies,
15:51You're going to associate gingerbread smell with Christmas if that's when you're making it. So for me, Christmas and Thanksgiving are very much about the food and having like either classical music or Christmas music on in the background quietly. Right. Because the other thing that's very cozy about holidays is getting together and just having conversations with your favorite people.
16:19Oh, absolutely. Having your kids, neither of my kids are at home. So when they come home, you know, they're not even in the same town. So when they came home, everything changes. It automatically becomes cozy when your family comes in. Yes. Yes. And it's about slowing down, if you can, being able to be in the moment with those people. And for the sense, I was thinking about this a lot.
16:44yesterday because it's getting to be that time. I mean, Thanksgiving is 10 days away, I think. And I was like, I don't know how to make my house cozy for Thanksgiving right now. Because my house is kind of a mess. So number one, I need to get it cleaned up. First thing. And then how do I want to make it look fall-ish? And then I was like, you know, I don't need to make it look fall-ish. I need to make it feel fall-ish.
17:13So what I used to do is we have a very specific old pan that never gets cooked in. It is only for water and dried onion, not onion, dried orange peels and cloves and cinnamon. And we make basically a pot of good smelling steam. And I was like, I need to find that pan. That's the second thing on the list because I wanna get that happening too.
17:44imagery of just that one pan with all that stuff in it. That's only used for that. That's great. Well, the other reason why is because if I don't have orange peels and cinnamon and cloves on hand, I usually have sweet orange essential oil and clove oil and cinnamon oil. So I just put that in the water. It does the same thing. So one way or another, my kitchen will smell lovely whether I'm cooking or not.
18:13And I was also thinking about cookies because, you know, cookies make every house smell good. So the thing I love and hate about the holidays is the food because I want to eat everything that is in my kitchen and I'm not fat because I can't eat everything in my kitchen. Like I eat half of my plate of food and I'm like, I'm good. I, you know, my brain is saying.
18:42Yeah, my eyes are saying keep going, but my brain is like, no, you're no longer hungry. You may stop. So I love cooking. I get full on the smells and the sense of cooking. So for me, food is not the enemy right now. And it's wonderful because for a long time it was the enemy. And the holidays can be really hard for people around food. It's very difficult. So cozy and welcoming.
19:12You want your house to be warm. If it's wintertime in Minnesota, if you want it to be welcoming, you want it to be warm. Not hot, not cold. Warm. 100%. Yeah, like 72 degrees on a 20-degree day in Minnesota. 72 degrees in the house is lovely for company. Are you in Minnesota? Yes, I am. Wow. Okay. Yeah. But I don't know what North Carolina's like.
19:41on Thanksgiving Day. It could be 80 degrees here. And for music, lots of people like lots of different music. I really like classical. I like bluegrass instrumental. I obviously like instrumental Christmas music. I don't like lyric Christmas music. I don't want words when people are around. Really?
20:08I sing, so if there's stuff that has words and I can hear the words, I'm going to start singing along and I don't want to be singing along. I want to be talking with my family. So for me, instrumental music is better. Interesting. Well, I love, I have to have certain, those certain songs with lyrics, but then when I'm working, you know, working, working on the computer, then I just need instrumental. But I have to, you know, there's certain songs we have to hear that...
20:35certain, you know, all the old ones. Like if I never hear Mariah Carey again, it'll be too soon. But, I'm sorry. Yeah, there's a lot of people in that camp. Yeah, like I want the old, you know, I'm looking for like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby kind of music and the... Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. But if we're, if we're sitting around after Thanksgiving dinner with family and talking...
21:02we're probably going to have instrumental music on so that I'm not. So none of us are really distracted. If we're like cooking, then the lyric ones are fine. Cause we're all going to sing. Right. Do you have a favorite instrumentalist that you listen to for Christmas music? No, no, I just pull up the instrumental Christmas song thing on Pandora and just let it go. I think that's what I do. Yeah. Yep.
21:29It's just easier and I hear new versions that I haven't heard before too. So it's kind of fun. Okay. So we've talked about how to make your home warm and welcoming and cozy for the holidays. Let's talk about making things because I have been making things for people for Christmas since I was probably 10. Right. And people, if you haven't actually made something with your own hands and given it to somebody for a Christmas present, try it.
21:56because the look on their face when they realize that you made it is just precious. Oh, without a doubt. Yeah, and you know, I've had this thing where, you know, DIY that doesn't look DIY. And I think, you know, calling it, their, DIY has such a bad denotation, right? I think that handmade sounds so much better. Yeah. So, yeah, 100%. I'm all about.
22:25you know, giving handmade gifts. I knit. I used to knit sweaters for people for Christmas, but then my feelings would get hurt when like the styles, like they didn't wear them after a couple of years. And I'm like, you know how much work I put into that thing? So now I give blankets or, you know, washcloths are huge. Everybody needs a washcloth, dishcloths, pot holders, you know, and nobody who has a kitchen doesn't need a pot holder.
22:55So yeah, anyone who cooks in their kitchen, right? The pot holder. I don't know. Recently, I rediscovered. Do you remember those loom pot holders that we all used to make in like third grade? They come with new colors of those little loops. And they've also come out with a book, like pattern books, to make really cool looking patterns. And those are the best pot holders. They're not too thick.
23:23And the size I have, the little loom I got is a little bigger. I want to say it's 10 by 10 or eight by eight, and the other one maybe six by six. But I have a long finger, so I like a big pot holder. And those make the greatest gifts. I mean, you can just whip out a bunch of pot holders in pretty colors and pretty patterns with the loom thing that you could get on Amazon now. That's going to be a lot of people in their stocking this year.
23:53Well, good. You can send me one if you like. Here's the thing though. A lot of people right now are two-income families with kids. And time is a commodity. Time is short. And so what I would say, and you can jump in if you want, is if you want to make something for somebody for Christmas and you're short on time,
24:22There are things that you can do that are very much of your making that you don't have to sink a lot of time into. And one of the things I've seen is if you know somebody who you care about has a particular hobby that they love, let's say they love playing cards, you know, Texas Hold'em or something, you can get a Christmas bulb, whether it's plastic and it's in two pieces so you can snap it together.
24:51or you can get a glass one if you really want to screw around a glass. And you can put like crinkly paper in it and you can fold a card, whatever their, their favorite playing card is. I mean, it could be a joker, ha ha. And you put it inside the Christmas ornament and then you snap the plastic back together if that's what it is. And you can write on it and glitter something to do with their favorite hobby. I mean, it can be that simple.
25:20And it means something to them. Absolutely. And it would take five minutes. Right. Oh, that's a great idea. And I don't know why I chose, I don't know why I chose Texas Hold'em, but I was just kind of trying to come up with something. Right. But it doesn't have to be, you know, a month long project of making a baby blanket. It doesn't have to be that extreme.
25:49No, make some vanilla extract, make some salt, put together your favorite taco seasoning, put it in a cute jar. That takes no time. You can whip out a whole bunch of them. Those are things that everybody will use. They appreciate that every time they have taco seasoning, they think, hey, so-and-so thought of me and made this for me. There are so many things you can do.
26:17Yeah, the kids and I, I have four kids. And when they were small, they wanted to make something for the grandparents. And I was like, what am I going to have these kids make when they're all different ages, you know, my youngest was five at the time and my daughter was 17. And I thought, okay, well, I saw a thing where we could make candy cane Christmas ornaments out of beads and pipe cleaners.
26:46And I thought, well, that's safe enough for the five-year-old and my oldest, who was the only girl, will get a kick out of it. And so we printed out the instructions and we learned how to make candy cane ornaments for the Christmas tree. Would you believe that their grandparents still put those freaking candy canes on their trees? Sure they do. So it can be something so easy and so not time consuming, but it means so much more than that.
27:15So many things, you know, get some potpourri and sew a little sachet, you know, there's so many things like that that everybody can use. There's so many things you can do. Yes, and if you don't have the stuff on hand, if you have a Joanne's fabric store within half an hour or a Michael's, there's all kinds of things there that you can get that aren't going to cost you thousands of dollars.
27:45love it and appreciate the work that went into it. And they're not going to think, oh, this is stupid. They're going to think, oh my god, you really put thought into this and time into this. I mean, you poke purine stuff that you put on your stove. I don't know if you use dried oranges, but to me, like a bag of your homemade potpourri, that would make my day to have something like that. That just would make my kitchen smell good.
28:13Yeah, and the wonderful thing is, is if you like oranges, if you like to eat oranges or the little halos or cuties, what the heck they're called? I don't know, little mandarins, yes. Yes, if you buy those fresh, all you have to do to get dried orange rind is to peel them and then break that rind up, throw it on a cookie sheet and stick it in your oven at the lowest temperature you have on your oven and just let them dry for an hour, hour and a half.
28:42dried orange peels and they're not going in the trash. Exactly. I mean, that's amazing. I guess today is all about sustainability too. Who knew? It all wraps up, right? It all ties up. It really does. So I know you make a lot of things because I went and looked at your Facebook page and I want to live in the Facebook world on that page.
29:11Oh, thanks. Mm-hmm. So tell me about some of the things that you've made. I know you said washcloths. So for gifts, oh my God. Well, I've made napkins. You know, making napkins was something that I enjoyed doing. Well, you could just make napkins and then, or if you crochet, you can just add a little crochet edge to them. You know, little, my mom had given me a sachet once. She went to Italy and brought home this,
29:41somebody had taken like a fabric, put some lavender in it and then put a wooden bead with this and then painted the face of the stalls face on it. And that was just a little sachet. So I've made, I kind of took that idea and made my own for like that. And you've put me on the spot. I got to pull up my boat. Oh, you know, you can not things, you know, T like coasters and stuff like that, you know.
30:10You can go to, like you said, Joanne's and buy like goat's milk soap and not have to do the whole lie, LYE lie thing. You know, avoid all that and just pour soaps and add pretty flavors to them, pretty scents. You know, crochet book, for anybody who crochets, crochet bookmarks. Everybody can use bookmarks.
30:34So those are just some to get you started. Let's see, well, dog treats. Like we have a dog, we love dogs and we have lots of friends who love dogs, make a batch of dog treats and put them in a little cute little bag and share them. And dog treats are super easy to make. They're so easy to make. And people with a dog, I mean, that's like such a great gift. They all think they died and went to heaven. So those are just some of the things that we've done.
31:04Since you said dog, one of the things that is pretty easy to make is the bandanas that go on their collars. Yeah. Because you're just cutting it in, you find material that you like, you buy some, and you cut it into like a triangle, right? Yeah. And use pink and gray so it doesn't ravel. Yeah. And yeah, you have some cute bandanas. Oh, see, now that's a cute idea. You could even like do...
31:32tie up your little dog goodies in a bandana. That's brilliant. We should market that. Isn't that cute? Yeah, that's a cute idea. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, you don't have to spend a lot of money to do thoughtful things. And then there's the whole time is such a gift for so many people. I gave one year my sister-in-law.
31:57Just needed help decluttering. So I just went up. I didn't you know, her gift was she had me for a weekend and we decluttered You know Just it which was fun too, you know, so given the gift of time is another Great gift that people Would can really appreciate Yeah, and if you love to cook cooking dinner for somebody or if you're big on kids You can babysit their kids for right on Friday or Saturday night
32:24Yeah, access service is a great gift. 100%. And we are here in my house, we're really lucky because we're always making things because we're always curious and we want to try stuff. And we started making, um, cold process lye soap years ago. Okay. So that, okay. And so we were trying to do that. Oh, it's, it's really okay.
32:50I shouldn't say it's really easy because I don't do it. I am really nervous about the lye in the water, but my husband is not. So we talk about how we want to make it and what scents we want it to have. And I'm the one who puts the scents in after he mixes the water, the lye and the oil. So it's already at trace where it's like pudding texture. So I add the essential oils or the fragrance oils because that doesn't scare me. But
33:19It's really easy. You just got to make sure that you have goggles and that you're really careful when you put the lye in the water together. Just the fact that I have to wear goggles and be that. I mean, you know, the thing is like I can, you know, I water bathed in a pressure can. So I'm like, well, if that doesn't scare me, why does lye make it? But it does. Yeah, and you don't even actually have to wear goggles. It's just a safety measure just in case, you know, on the very small percentage that it splashes, it doesn't get in your eyes.
33:49And I think those are one, did you give him as gifts? Yes, and I was gonna say, he's gotten, my husband's gotten lye on his skin before, and as long as you spray it with vinegar and then rinse it off, it's fine. It doesn't hurt, it's fine. Okay. So in case you really do wanna try making soap, those are the things I can tell you. So when we first started making soap, we wanted people to try it and see if they liked it, because we loved it. And so we gave our family
34:18bars of these soaps the first year we made them. And we actually had a couple of people come back and say, do you have more? And so one year we had made a whole bunch of different kinds and we went to the Christmas gathering and we brought just a box of all the different soaps and we brought Ziploc bags and we were like, guys, we didn't know which ones you want. So there's the box. Take turns.
34:48take a Ziploc bag, put your name on it, pick out like four bars of soap that you would like to take home with you. They had such a ball. They had such a good time picking out what they wanted. Oh, I'm making fun of the wonderful. Yep, it was really fun. And we needed to get it out of our house because we were big into the soap making at that point and we gave it to everybody. So, and we also make lip balms. So I have like, I have 150 lip balms in a box right now that we made last summer.
35:18And they last forever because I know what they're made of. They're good for at least four years. If they're kept in a temperate place and they don't get too hot or too cold. So people will probably be getting lip balms this year, too. And everybody needs lip balm, especially in Minnesota, I would imagine. But even here in North Carolina, we use a lot of lip balm. That always ends up in my kid's stocking. That's a staple for us.
35:47little tube of lip balm. So yeah, there's so many things you can do. And the lip balm and like hand balm and foot balm, those are super easy to make. Probably along the same, you know, if you probably know that if you're making lip balm, once you buy all the, you know, the beeswax, whatever you're using, you can make so many different things. Yes, it's kind of wonderful because you can't just buy a little bit of beeswax. No.
36:17or coconut oil or olive oil or any other things. My next learning project is how to make natural Neosporin. I talked to a lady yesterday, her episode came out this morning and she has beehives. And I was telling her that I need to get a new tube of Neosporin because the one we have is almost gone. And I said, you know about bees, can I use honey and beeswax and olive oil and whatever to make?
36:46Sav that will do what Neosporin does because Neosporin has Vaseline and it has stuff you really don't want on your skin All right, and she said well, yeah, I have a recipe. I will I will message it to you. I was like yes She sent it to me I'm working on that this winter because I'm really natural antibiotic antibiotic antimicrobial the whole bit. Yes Okay, so that's my next
37:14Yeah, I love that. Yup. It's so fun and people used to look at me like I was crazy when I was like, I'm gonna try making lip balm. My neighbors were like, what? Right. And then I would give them the results and they would be like, oh my God, it's great. Thank you. So I just don't even bother recognizing that the you're crazy look on people's faces anymore. I just do it. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Same kind of.
37:44When people ask me what I'm doing, I typically don't tell them. Well, I used to be so excited about it. You know, when I was younger, I was like, oh, I'm doing grandma stuff in my, in my twenties, and it's not grandma stuff. It's everybody's stuff. But that was how I looked at it. And they were like, but why you can just buy a tubalip bomb at the store? And I'm like, because I want to see if I can do it.
38:11Exactly. Which can, like, there is that point at which you're like, you know, you spend a hundred dollars on supplies for a $5 tube, you know, but I, which I've done and, you know, I fully own that, but I had fun doing it. So. Yeah. Yep. Okay. So we're already over 30 minutes, but I'm having a really, I'm having a really good time talking with you. I was so looking forward to this conversation. Oh, thanks. I'm looking forward to it.
38:38The one thing that I do want to bring up before I let you go is making a turkey. I got myself in a world of hurt talking about how to make a turkey one time. And I won't mention names, but the girl whose feelings were hurt, she was a single mom and busting her ever loving ass taking care of her kid and was very busy and was not a cook. And I
39:07said something about I don't understand why they're selling turkey breast in a bag to throw in the stove these days. It's not that hard to make a turkey. Okay. And I was like, you buy a whole turkey and you take the wrapper off of it and you pull the neck and the giblets out. You put it in a roasting pan. You put an onion, a cut up onion and a cut up apple in the... There's a word in the turkey.
39:36And then you melt a stick of butter, you pour it over the top of the turkey, you put some sage, some salt, some pepper, and whatever else you want to put on it. And yeah, put a lid on it. We put water in it. You put a lid on it, you stick in the oven for like two and a half hours. And her back went up and she was like, well, not all of us have time to perfect it. And I went, oh, I just stepped in it. I didn't mean to. So here's what I want to say about making a turkey. Making a turkey is not hard.
40:06It is not real science. It's just, it's just what I said. And you're probably going to screw up the first one because you don't know what to look for. And again, the olfactory sense is one of the strongest ones. And a lot of people know when food is ready by how it smells. So if you want to learn to, to roast a turkey,
40:31you should do it because turkey is fairly inexpensive meat and it can be really good at other times besides the holidays. Okay, so I wanted to get that thing about turkeys in because Thanksgiving's coming up, Christmas is coming up, and really if you want to learn to cook, all you have to do is find a recipe book and jump in and try it. That very true. Yeah, everybody was a first time turkey baker at some point. Everybody was a first time something at some point. Yeah.
41:01No one is born knowing how to do all these things. That's why we have parents who take care of us when we're little babies. We have to learn, we have to grow and when you stop learning and growing, you might as well be dead. So don't be dead. Enjoy your life. Try new things. That's it, girl. That's it. That's what life's all about. Yes it is. So real quick, do you, I don't know, you're a blogger. Do you have a book? Have you done a book yet?
41:30I have not. Okay. All right. Just checking. If you had, I was going to promote it, but you're not there yet. No. Okay. All right. Cool. Well, Lynn, this was so fun. I have been dying to have a conversation like this since last year. I enjoyed it very much. All right. You have a great rest of the afternoon and enjoy your holidays. And enjoy your Thanksgiving. Bye-bye now. All right. Thanks.
 

Prairie Creek Farm and Apiary

Today I'm talking with Jane at Prairie Creek Farm and Apiary.
If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee 
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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 Jane at Prairie Creek Farm and Apiary. Good morning, Jane. How are you? I'm fine, thank you. Good morning. You're in Kansas, right? I am. I'm in South Central Kansas, just north of Wichita. Okay, awesome. So tell me about yourself and what you do at the...
00:29the apiary. Well, my name is Jane and I, I'm retired from federal government. I worked in the federal government for over 22 years in law enforcement. And back in 98, when I first was hired on, I bought this little farmstead in Harvey County. And after retirement,
00:58I continue to work it as just a small horse farm. We used to breed horses here, my daughter and I, but we've always had a garden. And then after my grandsons started being born, one of them had allergies and eczema, and the doctors wanted to put him on medication right away. And I said, well, why don't I just start keeping bees and see if honey really helps?
01:28And it did. And now 12 years later, I'm, I'm up to 25 hives and starting to do farmers markets on the weekends or during the week here locally. And then I started making goat cheese with a friend up in Park City, Kansas. And I made cheese for him for three years.
01:58and they purchase my honey and my byproducts to put in their little market shop. So that's kind of what I do. Fun. I love it. Okay. So I do want to get into a couple of things about the bees, but the first thing I want to ask you about is I was looking at your Facebook page and you have some kind of salt bar that you make. What is that? It is basically the base oil in it is
02:28olive oil, or sorry coconut oil with a little bit of olive oil and castor and then it has a couple grams or probably like a cup of Himalayan sea salt and it just lathers up and is so pleasant for your face and I do it with and without
02:58So, and it's just fun. It's fun to work with and it's really lovely on your face. And you can use it as a total body soap, but it's something I've started this summer more continuously. And I have people that just absolutely love it. And that's the first bar that they come to. Some of them I have with turmeric.
03:26So it has sort of an anti-inflammatory with the turmeric. And then I'm getting away from fragrance oils and using more essential oils now. So I have several different essential oils. I just made some with tea tree and then I have some with eucalyptus and thyme. So yeah, I'm just kind of experimenting. Okay, so my question is, it's a soap.
03:55bar but the salt bar. So why is the salt important in this? Um, it's fun because salt and sugars help with lathering but the salt also it can be used as
04:12Oh, it's like a scrub. So it just has nice lathering properties. And I wish I had a better answer. It's just a really beautiful salt bar. And I can go get some more documentation on it. But that's my best answer is because of the lathering and the scrubbing nature of the salt. Just like if you make salt.
04:38foot scrubs with honey and salt. It just helps with exfoliation and cleansing your face better. And then I'm just kind of experimenting different ways. I follow a lady, I believe it's the nerdy farmer's wife, and she has some really great books and series on soap making. And when I started making milk soaps, I followed a lot of her recipes.
05:08And then she had this series coming out with salt bars. And there was another group of people, because when you start doing one thing and you start researching, then all of a sudden you start getting these pop-ups and other people that make soap. And so I started looking at some of their recipes and putting things together. But mostly I would say that the salt itself is, getting back to the original question.
05:37um for exfoliation and help cleaning your skin and it helps with lather. Okay got two things off of everything you just said. The internet the internet is the most amazing rabbit hole to go down ever and the reason I asked about the salt bars is because I didn't know I'd never heard of a salt bar before and we make soap and I was like what is a salt bar I need to know more.
06:04Yeah, if you look up that nerdy farmer's wife, she has some great books. And then if you follow them, every once in a while you'll receive an email and she'll have a recipe in there and you can kind of look at the recipe and add things or take things away, you know, run it through a lie calculator and. Salt bars are just great. I find them to be one of my favorite soap bars. Okay.
06:34Awesome. I just I needed to know more. Thank you for sharing. So in looking at your Facebook page, it looks like it was a fabulous summer for growing for you. It was. We've had a little bit more rain this year in Kansas. Last year was a terrible drought and things just didn't produce as well. But this year is also the first year that I did decided to become an LLC.
07:03And luckily we had some beautiful rain and my tomatoes just went crazy. And I wasn't distracted and actually picked my corn at the exact right time it seems. The sugar was beautiful and my sweet corn. And our town started a Friday evening, midnight market or moonlight market. And so I was able to
07:32have a booth there and it was just fun because I had never really tried to sell produce before and I was able to go out into the community. I first time in 25 years really started meeting people in the community and sharing my produce and then paying off what I put into my farmstead. I was able to pay for all my seed and all my starting plants and
08:02hopefully can eventually get my own little greenhouse so I can start my own produce. Isn't it a wonderful feeling when the thing that you're making or producing or growing manages to pay for the things that you needed to start the project? Yes, I just lost my last great aunt. She was 99 years and three months. And my aunt Garnet lived up in Ohio and she said, well, Janie, if you're selling everything.
08:33Why aren't you putting some back for your family? I said, you will share. But you know, what I'm not using then I can share and sell with my neighbors. And it's been fun. And I really enjoy it. I enjoy meeting folks and I love seeing their faces when they see a tomato, you know, as big as a dessert plate.
08:59Yeah, we grow tomatoes. We haven't had a tomato that big yet. We're hoping next summer to have some humongous tomatoes. This year was terrible in Minnesota, where we live, growing. So. I'm sorry. I've been piling up my horse manure. I still have a couple of horses here on the farm. And I pile it up about midwinter and turn it.
09:29to get rid of the weed seeds and stuff in it and have been putting it back out on the garden. And boy, does that make a tremendous difference. I think anything grown in the dirt tastes so much better. You know, you can tell when you haven't, nothing against aquaponics or anything like that. I just don't have that kind of a setup. And I think that something grown in the dirt just tastes
09:58so much richer. It's like a beet, you know, I love beets. And that earthy flavor just really comes through. I love vegetables though. Me too. Speaking of things from the earth tasting better like stuff you grow. We don't have chickens right now and so we had to buy eggs. And my husband bought just plain old white eggs at the grocery store.
10:27a week or so ago. And we were down to the last one. So he bought some actual free range eggs at the grocery store. Yes. And that's a term that is not definitive, whether they're actually free range chickens or not. But he bought these eggs and they were in a clear container and you could see them and they're big. They're supposed to be large eggs, but they're huge and they're brown. My son cracked the last white egg and then cracked, I think, one of the brown eggs.
10:56and he knew which one was which. And he was like, mom, this is crazy. Look at this. And I walked over and he had cracked it into a white bowl. The yolk on the white egg was half as orange as the free range egg that we had bought. It's insanity. I just, it's astounding to me the difference that you can actually see in the different ways things are grown and produced. Yes. So just wanted to throw that in there. Yeah. You know, I'm sorry.
11:25I can't actually let my chickens roam freely. One I have four dogs and then two we have a big coyote and red fox population and the hawks and the prairie raptors that are out here. But they are in a hundred by fifty foot run and they're given all the scraps from the garden, they're given all the scraps from the kitchen. We do supplement them with a grain.
11:56But you can 100% tell the difference between a caged chicken and a non-caged or free roaming chicken. And what they're fed. What they're fed changes the color so much too. So you were saying moonlight market. Is that with the farmers market, is that when it's dark out or is it just an evening farmers market? It's an evening farmers market. So it's Friday in the summertime.
12:25I believe they started May and the last one was in September. And it's from like five to eight PM. Downtown and we have a really, it's a small town here. Yeah. And the outskirts of Wichita. So yeah, it was, it was great. We had a good time. Got to meet a lot of folks. Awesome.
12:51I just, I think it would be so cool to have a farmer's market when it's dark out and have one of the vendors be like a coffee, tea. Oh yeah. Something. Well, the folks that I work for, they own, it's a place called Eldersley Farm. The wife is actually a chef and they have an upscale restaurant there at the farmstead. It's where her husband, George,
13:18grew up on that farm and he had a goat herd there. And we were making artisan cheeses. And...
13:29In the fall, we have a farmer's market there, but he also has a big Blackberry Bramble. So in the spring, we have a bloom festival also. And they're fun. And they go in, especially Oktoberfest, it goes into the evening. So you have a chance to put lights on your awning and really jazz up your display. So it's great. It was much fun.
13:58the little lights on an awning or on a trailer or whatever that just make it so special. And it's part of the reason that I love this time of year because everybody's going to be putting out their Christmas lights soon if they haven't already because Thanksgiving is a week and a half away. And I just, I love it because you don't see it every day. And so it's this very unique, very special time of year and lights always make things better. That's my take. I love candles. I do too.
14:27everything. So it's very fun. And I have on the books with my husband to go do a, a light tour of our town and the town up from us because they do a really good job. Our neighbors go all out and I'm hoping that inflation doesn't stomp some of that because electric bills are probably high. I don't know. So, so anyway, um, I had a question. Oh, I want to talk about your bees. I have talked with a lady who,
14:55who was a beekeeper. She didn't take care of bees last year, but she did for eight years before that. So I have a whole episode about honeybees. But I had some questions. I know that bees will take care of things after you take the honey out of the hive, but most people don't know. So when you harvest your honey, you let the bees clean things up. So can you talk about that? Cause I saw your video about it. Yes.
15:23Well, you can put up your honey supers wet or dry. And then if you put them up wet, that just means that the honey that's in them goes into storage for the winter. A lot of beekeepers will put their honey supers out and let the bees clean them up after they've spun out the honey. For me, the area that I keep them in, it's a 40 by 60 foot shed.
15:50and the bees find their way in and they clean them up anyway. So, and then my different layers of screens that I filter the wax and bee bits and out of my honey before I bottle it. When I'm finished with that, with the wax cappings, because I try to spin out as much honey from my wax cappings as I can, but then I'll let the bees clean it up.
16:19I have a big trailer and I just set everything out on a trailer or underneath an awning and they're going to find it, especially if you're in a dearth when there's nothing else for them to eat, they're going to come and clean things up. So I put my hive tools out. A lot of people don't like it because then they think that, you know, you can spread different diseases that way.
16:43But I kind of have the thought that it's a waste to just wash that stuff off and let it go to nothing when they're already hungry and it gives them something else to do. Yes, yes. And honey is what the bees eat. It's the stuff they make so they have food during the winter. Right. And I, you know, I've not had a problem, knock on wood, with
17:12any diseases in my hives. I guess I've been fortunate or I just watch out and try to head things off before it becomes an issue. And I know there are probably some feral hives around here, there have to be, but I have 13 hives out behind my house and my farmyard and then I have some scattered throughout the county. But most of those bees are where I collected that honey from.
17:42and they're just cleaning up behind themselves. And of course they will fight a little bit over it and you're gonna lose a few bees that way. But I like them cleaning it up and they do such a good job. Yeah, and the reason I wanted you to tell me about it is because I feel like Mother Nature did a really good thing when she created honeybees, or if you're a God person, God created honeybees. Because honeybees are really efficient.
18:11at their lives. They, I don't know how to explain it, like I know just enough to kind of make a guess at this. Honey bees are amazing. Like I found out from somebody a couple months ago that in the fall that the female bees kick the male bees out of the hive for the winter. Is that, that's right, right?
18:39purpose in life is to meet a Virgin Queen. They go out on mating flights and they're still trying to figure out, they're called drone zones. And it's usually, I believe, don't quote me on this, but there is kind of usually in a low area, kind of like a draw. And the main, the Virgin Queen will go out on a flight. How she knows is another thing.
19:09greatness of nature. And she flies to these drone zones and she can made it with more than one drone on this flight. But drones do not have, they do not have stingers. Where their stinger would be is kind of like what we would assume to be a penis. And they, when they make the queen, they fall
19:35it releases or stays in the queen and instead of like pumping venom, their spermothica just starts pumping sperm into the abdomen of the queen. And she will, they think she may go on on multiple flights, but once she has finished mating, she does not go back out again unless she is on a swarm. So she goes back into the hive and within the week, she'll start laying a week
20:06to, you know, seven, oh, I guess seven to 12 days she'll start laying eggs. And then that's her job for the rest of her life. And she can live between, you know, three to five years in nature. Yeah. Yeah. And so the reason that the female bees kick the males out during the winter is because the males don't really have a job during the winter and they don't want them to eat all the food in the hive. So they just kick them out.
20:36The lazy SOBs have to go. Yeah. They're not allowed to just sit around and watch football. They, um, they do. They, uh, because they don't scavenge, like they're, their only job is to mate a queen and so in the late fall, um, early winter they're kicked out of the hive, you'll actually see the, the worker bees dragging them out on the porches of the hives and just booting them away. Yeah. Um.
21:05And then in the spring, you know, when it's time to watch for swarming and so forth, or that, you know, things are kicking a ramping up in the springtime because you'll start seeing drone cells, the drones are the males in the hive. And there are much bigger bee. So worker female bees have flat cappings on top of their cells, but a drone actually kind of looks like a bullet. It, it propels out a little bit.
21:32It rounds out. Yeah. Yes. And so once you start seeing those, you know that, you know, it's nature's warming up and spring is happening and you've got to start watching your hives. Yeah, it's just, it's so interesting watching the life cycle of honeybees. And I, I'm not going to lie. I was very afraid of anything that stung for years because I was stung on the bottom of my foot when I was like four years old and it made a very big impression.
22:02Yeah. And so I ended up writing an article about raising bumblebees because you can actually raise bumblebees. It's probably not the easiest thing ever, but you can do it. And I learned about the life cycle of the bumblebee and wrote an article about it for Bee Culture, the magazine. And then I was like, huh, I wonder what the life cycle of honeybees is. And I did a big deep dive into honeybees and how their lives go and what they do. And I was just so impressed at the effect.
22:31efficiency and the focus of these little tiny insects. It just, it blew my mind. I don't know why I'm so fascinated by it, but I am. Well, it's just the perfectness of nature. Everything has a purpose. In a bee colony, everybody has a purpose. Everybody has a job. And it's just, shows how wonderful nature really is. Yeah, there's such a beauty in it.
23:00And I'm gonna say this again, I've said it like seven times in the last year and a half on episodes on the podcast. People, if you're gonna buy honey, try to get it from a local person who raises bees, keeps beehives, and knows what they're doing. Because if you buy honey at the store, it might not actually be honey. It might be something that's supposed to be honey, but there's no honey in it and it's not great for you. Plus, if you buy it from a local person, you're supporting them.
23:29and they can keep having bees and they can keep producing beautiful honey. It's an expensive hobby. And you know, if you're, people are always concerned they think that their honey goes bad because it crystallizes. Well, if your honey is not crystallizing, it's not real honey. And it's so easy to decrystallize honey by just putting your jar into, you know, a warm bath. It will decrystallize.
23:58But real honey, because of the moisture content and because of the yeast and so forth, is going to crystallize. It never goes bad. No. It never goes bad. No, and honestly, crystallized honey is really great to spread on toast. It is. And spun honey is a wonderful byproduct of just regular honey.
24:25Clover honey usually has a very small crystallization content in it. So where I come from, like if you have a soft flower field or a soybean field, the moisture content or the crystals can be much larger. And so it is the only honey that I actually put through a fermentation or not a fermentation, I'm sorry. I put through a heated process to heat it up to.
24:53and then I cool it very quickly and that gets rid of those large crystals and it also takes away the yeast so that it doesn't ferment. And then I'll introduce a small crystallized honey, like a clover honey, into that. And then that's called spinning honey because you incorporate it. You use like a stirring process to incorporate that smaller crystallized honey into it.
25:22And then that makes it very spreadable. And you can also add flavorings into it. A lot of people will add cinnamon or they'll add different powdered fruits, flavors. And it just is another wonderful byproduct that beekeepers can have to sell to their customer base. Definitely. I don't know if you're gonna know the answer to my question, but I know you know a lot about bees. I was...
25:50Look, I was thinking the other day that I have to get some more neosporin, the antibacterial appointment that people use for, for owie. And I was like, I wonder if I can take some beeswax and some honey and coconut oil and make a salve and not have to use neosporin because coconut oil is an antibacterial and so is honey. Do you know, do you know if that's like nature's neosporin?
26:16It is. The inside of a bee hive is actually very sterile environment. They collect sap from different trees and make a propolis. That's what they use to seal cracks and so forth in their hive. And they kind of use it as their medicine chest. So if you can get some propolis and a little bit of honey and coconut and some beeswax, you can make some wonderful sabs. And there are several out.
26:43course on the internet because you can find everything on the internet now. Of course, yes. You can make some wonderful salves with honey and beeswax and propolis. You don't even have to have propolis, but it's always a nice additive to it. Yeah. I just, I was looking at the ingredients on the Neosporin tube and I was like, this can't be good. I mean, yes, it helps, but it can't be good for you. And I knew that, that, um,
27:12the manuka honey that people talk about can be used on wounds. And I was like, I bet I could make my own salve that would do the same thing that I needed to do that Neo's Soren does. So I'm going to have to work on that. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I have a little cookbook, the Kansas Honey Producers is a group and they have a cookbook that we sell at the state fair every year. And in the back of that cookbook are several different
27:43salves and hand lotions and so forth and I can send you a recipe. That would be awesome. I was trying to make a lotion for my son because he has dry skin and I wanted it to be lotion and it looks like lotion when I put it in jar and then it solidified and it became sap. And apparently I was missing an ingredient to keep it like a lotion. I don't know what the ingredient is. I have to look for it but I am.
28:11I am all for making my own stuff with natural ingredients because why wouldn't I? I have time. I'm smart. I can read a recipe. I can do things. So I had one more thing about all of this and now I can't remember what it was. Oh, it was a statement or question. That's why I can't remember it. Bees, honeybees are incredibly important and people make jokes about, oh yeah, everybody says save the bees.
28:41Well, number one, they are pollinators, and they pollinate our produce, and we need them to do that, or there are no tomatoes, there are no cucumbers. Nothing happens if these things don't get pollinated. Number two, they make honey, and honey is wonderful. If you like honey, you love honey. And I don't ever want there to be a world where there's not honey from my tea.
29:08the wintertime. I don't want there to be a world where there's not honey from my toast. And honey is not just tasty. It's something that can actually heal people like we were just talking about. And beeswax is a huge part of lots of things. So when somebody says don't kill that honeybee in your house, put it in a glass jar and take it outside and let it go, they're not crazy. They're just trying to keep them alive.
29:36Yes, and it's a little girl because only the little girls go out on foraging and she needs to get back to her hive because if you lose all the foragers that are out looking for these, it sets the hive out of balance because at different stages of the bee's life, they do different things. When they first attach out, they clean the hive.
30:03And then they start taking care of the babies that are under the cap cells. And they assist the queen or clean the queen. And then they, you know, guard the hive and then they become foragers. And if one part of that goes out of whack because all the bees are out in a field collecting and they get sprayed with a pesticide, then that sets the hive off
30:32you know, the next bee under them has to progress. They, I mean, they notice something is out of whack and it just, you know, it's like that perfect nature thing. It just sets everything off. So they are very important. They are important to the food we eat and the hive dish does so much more than what people really realize. Yes, and it's like the backbone.
31:00of farming and we don't want to lose that because we have enough issues with farmers going out of business, farmers losing their crops to weather. We need the bees to be the support and just I don't want to be a crazy save the bees woman, but I'm going to be a save the bees woman. If you know there's hives near your property, don't spray things near the hives. And if a bee gets in your house, if there's a way to get it out alive, you
31:30do it. And I am really still kind of afraid of bees. Like I have a huge appreciation for them, but I still get that that crinkle at my back when I hear a bee buzzing. And there was a bumblebee in our house a couple years ago and I managed to get it outside and I was very nervous about it, but I did it. So, so if you're afraid of bees, face your fears. And the fact is unless you're allergic to bee stings,
31:59A bee sting hurts for a minute and then it's better. You know, they had a little bit of ice and some, you know, Zequil, or not Zequil, Benadryl can't help, you know, fix. So yeah, and you know, people freak out when they see a swarm, you know, because that's how bees reproduce is once the colony becomes very, very populated.
32:27Those workers in the hive start putting out a pheromone for the queen and they start running her around the hive to have her lose weight so that she can fly further distance. And she will start laying certain eggs that will become a new queen. You'll end up with queen cells in your hive and that shows you that they're getting ready to swarm. And the older queen will fly off with a percentage of the colony and you'll see them, you know, like great...
32:57clump of grapes hanging from a limb or on the side of a building and people freak out over that. Normally, they will not sting you because they're not there protecting their colony. You may have a rogue bee sting from that, but for the most part, if you contact a local beekeeper, they will love to come and collect that swarm because that...
33:22increases the amount of hives you have and you're not paying for those bees, you're just helping them find a new home where they're wanted instead of in a tree or somebody's house. Bees normally only sting if you accidentally put your hand on them or step on them or sit on them.
33:51but when they're guarding their hive, they may sting. But for the most part, they don't want to because they know if they do, that's the end of their life. Yes, for people who don't know if a honeybee stings you, it's a one and done. They sting you and they die. Yes. We had a bunch of yellow jackets at our last Oktoberfest and people said, I think your bees are out. And I said, those are bees, those are yellow jackets. Because they were going into people's fruity drinks.
34:21We were serving a lot of hard apple cider and soft apple cider and of course they were attracted by that fragrance. Yes, and a good way to tell a yellow jacket from a honeybee, a honeybee is fuzzy. A yellow jacket is shiny. Yes. And they can sting multiple times. Uh-huh. They're mean. I hate them. I hate them so much. And they're pollinators too, but I still hate them. They're not as nice. They're not friendly, no. Okay.
34:50We could talk for hours about bees because I'm still terribly curious about all of it. But I told you 30 minutes. We're going to keep it 30 minutes, Jane. Thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it so much. I thank you. It was nice meeting you, Mary. You too. Have a great day. You too. All right.
 

Cultinary Family Farms

Today I'm talking with Eric at Cultinary Family Farms. You can also follow on Facebook.
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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 Eric at Cultinary Family Farms. Good morning, Eric. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing great. And you? I'm good. You're in New Jersey? Yeah. While we're in Jersey, we have to say South Jersey, Central Jersey, or North Jersey. So we are in South Jersey, right by Philly.
00:30Okay, cool. I'm in Minnesota, if you didn't know, so I'm not going to sound like you and you're not going to sound like me and that's what makes the world go round. And I'm from Montreal, so I have a double accent. I'm not hearing a lot of the Montreal, I'm hearing more of the New Jersey, but either way it's all good with me. All right. So, tell me about yourself and what you guys do at the farm. Well, it all started in Quebec when we lived there. I have a passion with...
00:56garlic so I started garlic you know I said you know I'll try farming garlic for fun I started really small and I failed miserably and then that got me like a kick just to try again and and then you know I rented a little lot and then we started planning and it went really well so it got me you know what I'll do it bigger so we sold where we were we bought a little land with a house and we started
01:25farming there, starting getting animals and everything. So starting to do in like, you know, people would come to the house and buy her honey, buy her, you know, garlic, eggs and everything. And then when I moved here, since I was a brand new immigrant, it took me about 16 months to get my green card. So I didn't want to wait, you know, because it was, so I opened up my farm again here in Morristown.
01:51So I knocked on everybody's door. I was looking for vacant lot for farmland and everything. I got turned down for like six months and then someone answered one of our ads and said, hey, you know, I have a land. It's not ready, but hey, if you wanna rent it, go ahead. So I started with smaller tools. I pulled out all the tree. There was about 10,000 trees on it. So I started by myself and I removed all the trees, all the rocks, got a beat up tractor. We have a.
02:19hashtag that's called curse tractor because everything happens right now. I'm working on my tractor as we speak. And, uh, so we started with that, you know, so it's like a second year. We're heading into our third year. So we, last year we harvested about 45,000 cloves that I planted by hand. And, uh, you know, we do a fast farmers market, we do food expos, we do a few things and now we started a home delivery. So it's the farmers market delivered to your door.
02:48So that's what we're trying to do. And that's where we at today. If you put that in like a, in a ballpark real quick, that's pretty much what we do. That's awesome. And the more you talk, the more I'm hearing the French accent. You have a beautiful speaking voice. Thanks. Okay, so I had a couple of questions that are specific and then we can just kind of go from there. I saw that you sell black garlic. I freaking love black garlic. I had never tried it until a few years back. And...
03:17I tried making it and it was an epic fail. I tried making it in a rice cooker and it did not work. So is there a trick to, well, number one, tell people what it is and then number two, is there a trick to making it at home? Well, yeah, the black garlic is a fermented regular garlic. So what you do is you really in a slow heat, you slowly cook your garlic to, depending on
03:47what you use to cook it in. So it's you people try rice cooker, slow cooker, you can put it in your oven, you can bury it in the ground with you know, it's depending on where you at, you know, like so, so it becomes like a gummy bear in a way kind of like texture. And we actually cook it a little bit so it's harder and it's a bit drier so people can handle it with their hands and it's not sticky and you know, so that's what we do.
04:16And it becomes like, it's crazy, the antioxidant and everything, it's the benefits for your health and the flavor. It's like it becomes that umami flavor.
04:33I think it's like candy. Yeah, well, it's like a brain kind of tease in a way because you go through five steps. Well, the one we have, the one we make, I tried a few other ones that, you know, like we go to a store and it's really like watery and it's like mushy. It doesn't give you the same, but ours give you like five flavor steps. So it's kind of like for 10 seconds when you put the gummy in your, in your mouth, it becomes like a, like a brain teaser. Cause you go to like balsamic glaze flavoring.
05:03It changes into caramelized onion. Then it'll go to a smoky, barbequey flavor. Then it'll go back to being really bitter and then garlicky. So all that within the, like the first 10 seconds of chewing the gummy. So that's, you know, that's what the fun about it is you see people's faces and everybody goes like, wow, exactly what you described. That's what my brain went through. And, and so you see, you tell people, you know what, hey, try it in a sandwich. Try it. I saw it in mine.
05:32with my onions and I make cheese stick with them, you know, so it makes the cheese stick sweeter. But again, people put it in whatever they want, you know? So it's fun, you know, you see people, they come back. It's more expensive, but it takes so long to do it that, you know, it's kind of worth it. You know, it's a delicacy. It's like caviar, you know, so.
05:52Yes, and I feel like people are in two camps with black garlic. They either love it or they won't ever try it again. It's hit or miss. See, people like or people don't. And there's people that don't like garlic to begin with. So you can't please everyone. But if people don't like garlic, they'll most likely probably like that because it doesn't have that big garlic taste and you don't have the after bread also. So it's a special candy.
06:21Yeah, and it's really the way I used it was I made some well my husband makes french bread and so he made the the long baguette french breads and we put some actual fresh garlic on and some butter and then we smoosh some of the black garlic on top of that when it's warm and it was really yummy. Yeah it's good. So but if you don't want to give away the secrets on how to make it at home you don't have to but maybe you could tell me more.
06:48You can, like I said, I failed miserably about like 50 times because it's, it's a, you know, you ha if you, if you're using like a regular rice cooker, if you're, if you're using like a slow roast cooker, you have to put water in it in a bowl. You have to keep it like hydrated because the humidity won't leave the same way. So you have to kind of keep some humidity in it. So it's, it's more like you will, you'll have to hit or miss until you find your perfect.
07:17like a place to put it in. Because even if I tell you, well, I use this and that, you have to use your right temperature because it doesn't cook the same way as a rice cooker. You can try, a rice cooker works. I've succeeded with rice cookers, but it's, you know, you'll have to make sure you check every day, but then you can't open it every day. So you'll have to scrap a lot of garlic to see, you know, like the first day you see how it changed and then you keep it the next time you batch, you try for two days.
07:44And then you try until you do that for about seven to 15 days, depending on how your cooker like, cause it's, it has to be on a keep warm. You can't cook it, you know? So it has to like the keep warm button. If you have that, if you don't have that, I suggest not trying it. And then for about 10 to 15 days, you try until you see what you like about it. And you also, if you're using a conventional like slow cooker rice cooker, you have to put water in a little cup to make sure it keeps high or else.
08:13it'll become, you can make like black garlic powder because it's gonna burn it. So you won't have the sweetness to it, but you'll have the smoky barbecue flavor to it. So it's like to get the perfect ratio on it, it's really hard. So there's like different methods and then you can buy like really, really expensive tools to make it easier. But if you wanna do it at home, you can definitely do it. You can also put in your oven, but again, it's a lot of electricity.
08:44and then you're gonna put your oven on hold for almost two weeks. So like I said, in the small rice cooker that has a keep warm on it, try to have something that's bigger so you can put a couple more and a little bit of cup of water with aluminum foil on it. You put some little holes just so it doesn't dry out. And like I said, it's hit or miss until you succeed. So like I said, I don't know.
09:08all the brands of rice cookers, you know, like I bought maybe 17 just to try and then I found one that had that was cold enough. And then, you know, midway you can flip them all up and then you add some more water, you put it back, seal down, you put some towels on it so that it still breeds. So like I said, it's a you know, like it's not that I don't want to give the recipe that's it's just like I said, it's hit or miss just like planting garlic. Some people succeed every year, some people fail. And it's just put in the ground, you know, it's it's
09:38simple as that. Okay, so the easiest way to get really good black garlic is to order it from your website. That's what I'm going to do because I'm not spending 14 days screwing around with this. We ship with US coast anywhere you want United States and like I said, it's way easier that way. Yeah, it takes me a long time anyway myself still so like it's because I sell it all peeled and I don't sell it as bulbs, you know, so I check.
10:05every single last one of them, I peel every little last one of them just to make sure you have like when you open it up you don't have to work again. So what you do is you just you just eat it you know so it's all peeled it's already peeled for you and already put in the bag with our logos on it and we also sell pound bags for like usually restaurants and either that or four ounce bags. Okay cool.
10:30Well, if I get a hankering for black garlic, I know where I'm going to and it's not the grocery store. So I just, I tried it with a small rice cooker and it just didn't work and I, I let it go. I didn't know about the water trick. So it all ended up in the trash, but boy, it smelled really good. Yeah, it does smell awesome. Because it released the, I don't know what the word is in English, but like ice and it releases it and it's really, really strong. But if you like garlic, it's, it's a pleasure.
11:00to walk in the house to smell that. But not everybody likes that, but I love that. To me, when it smells that, it's like, wow, you know, it's success, you know? Oh yeah, I love walking into a house where people have been cooking. I just, it doesn't matter what it is they're cooking. It could be something I don't even like to eat, but the smell of people cooking from scratch is amazing. It's one of my favorite things on earth. Okay, so you said that you bought land and you grow garlic. What else do you use your land for?
11:29Well, we have chickens, we have two goats, we had about 300 chickens last month but some predator came and sadly we lost everything but now I have another 60 something 70 chickens at the farm. So we sell eggs, we sell some duck eggs, we don't do anything with the goats, they're supposed to be protecting the chickens which they're not really.
11:51But we grow watermelons, pumpkins, we have tomatoes, we have cherry tomatoes, we have a lot of different hot peppers, regular peppers. We also have some hybrid peppers that we tried this year. It's a brand new breed that doesn't exist. So a guy that I know in Pennsylvania is breeding new species. So they look like hot peppers. They look like they're going to throw you off your seat when you bite into them.
12:17and they'll have that little taste of when you bite into a ghost pepper but without the heat. So it's kind of like crazy it tastes like sweet like perfume so it's you know we're trying new stuff people ask us to grow stuff and we grow it for them and like I said we also have uh we we did some onions we did some uh zucchini we we do like I said we do pretty much every every vegetable we
12:47a lot of basil and some herbs. So that's pretty much it, decorative corn. We don't do edible corn. It's way too costly for a small farm like that to be able to succeed with that because you need a lot of electric fences, shotgun noises, and people like a lot of spray. So we don't use any spray or stuff like that. We grow organically
13:18organic like sticker on it. So we try to keep it clean, try to keep it without pesticides and anything. So we haven't used any of that. So if you want to grow regular corn, it's really hard. Yeah. And it's not worth the bang for the buck because the buck never comes if you're small. Yeah. And then again, like I said, it's going to be eaten like that. Raccoons know exactly they say, I don't know if it's the smell or if it's the look at it, but they won't touch decorative corn.
13:47but they will jump on the edible corn as soon as it starts growing. So like I said, deers, raccoons, rabbits, they know right away. So that's why if you don't have like trick fences and noises and, you know, like either pesticides or something that repels them, they won't last until they. So that's, that's what's really hard about it, you know? So, and then we don't want to start, you know, doing the sprays and stuff like that. So we, you know, we, we team up with Hunter Swarm and Cinnamon Sin and we
14:17the people with their corn, which is the best white Jersey corn ever. So you've learned that the networking situation helps. Yeah, like I said, yeah, we team up with other businesses for our farmers market and our delivery form that we do. So we also have ratios as a barbecue sauce, award winning sauces from Jersey. We have hot honey. We have
14:42some hot sauce rubs and we work with companies. We're going to be selling pork roll next week. Also, we're going to have some meat starting. We will be having pork roll hot dogs, pork roll kibalski and polished sausages. So, you know, people want to team up with us. You know, they, you know, we like to help out other small businesses and I think there's still enough room for everybody to grow.
15:09and we try not to put anybody behind us. We try to put them beside us so we can all go forward together. Yes, cross promotion for businesses is amazing because it makes everybody look good and it makes everybody win. You said hot honey. Does that mean spicy honey? It's kind of like spicy, but not crazy. So it's got a kick, you know, like a bit of a hot sauce, but mixed with honey. So you got the sweet and spicy taste to it. So
15:39Whatever you like, if you would just eat it like that on a toast, I don't think that would be anybody's personal best. But you put that on a pizza, you put that on a sandwich, you put that on a grilled cheese, it makes the food like better. Like it turns it into something that is like, wow, you know, like you have the sweetness, you have the hotness and the right balance into it with whatever you put it in, you know? So it's good, you know, like pepperoni pizza.
16:08Hot honey is like the best combo in the world. I like also chicken cutlet, you know, like when you wanna dip your nuggets or whatever, you put a hot honey. It's, you know, it's a brand new thing. It's crazy on the market right now. So it's fun, you know, it's fun to see that. That's the best thing about foods because everybody's been making food since humans began. And if someone comes up with something new, everybody wants to try it because we've been eating the same flavors for
16:38thousands of years. Yeah. The thing, the market is changing now and people, they want to try new things. They want to savor new stuff. It's fun. It's fun to see. I tried Caviar last year for the first time in my life and I was like, I never really got interested in trying because I figured I'm not a big fish person. And wow, I fell in love. I was like, damn, I missed out all my life.
17:05So today I'm gonna try everything that I can, even if it's something that I don't like, I will try it, you know, just to see and to be able to try everything that I can. So I was really happy that I tried it. I was sad that I'd never tried it before. So yes, and on that note, I was a very picky eater as a child. Like I didn't like anything. I was really skinny until I got to be about 19, like terribly skinny. And
17:34Part of the issue with not liking foods as a kid, I don't know if you know this, is that when you're little, you have way more taste buds in your mouth than you do when you're an adult. You actually lose taste buds as you grow up. And so the flavors of things are more intense when you're little, because you have so many more taste buds to taste with. And so what I would tell people is if you didn't like something as a kid, try it again as an adult, because you might actually like it now.
18:05Like I'm pretty sure we both gonna agree to that is when you're a kid, most of the kids hate mushroom and as adults you can't get enough of, you know, so it's, it's like probably the best example of, you know, not liking the food when you're a kid. And then when you start cooking mushroom and different mushroom as an adult, and you put that in sandwiches and your burgers and it's like, Oh my God, I missed out. You know? Yeah.
18:32And the other thing is that when you're little, sometimes you will OD on a food. My thing was cherry tomatoes. We grew cherry tomatoes in the garden. My parents did. And I loved them. I was like 10. And I ate way too many of them and I ended up being sick on them and hated cherry tomatoes for years because I had gotten myself sick from eating too many. And about maybe, I don't know, that was when I was 10.
19:02So when I was 30, there were cherry tomatoes in a salad that was given to me at a restaurant. And I was like, God, I don't like cherry tomatoes. And I bit into one and I was like, oh, oh, I do like them. So, so you can't just assume with foods that you still don't like something. So I would encourage everybody who has a particular food that they think they cannot stand to try it again. The worst thing that happens is you find out you still don't like it. Yeah.
19:29Yeah, like I said, it's it's you know, food is there enjoy, you know, like, I also understand if people have food restriction and or they don't want to eat food for personal reason. But you know, if it's because they think it's yucky and they haven't tried it, I would suggest to try it, you know. Yeah, exactly. Because all it is is an experience. Yeah, food is supposed to be an experience is supposed to be an event, I think. Yeah. Like I said, I respect the people are vegetarians.
19:58people decide not to eat this or that, like I respect that if it's for their own, you know, personal choice or reason. And it sucks if you can't get to try stuff. But you know, like I was a vegan, I was a vegetarian for many, many, many years. And you know, I started eating meat again, and I don't have the guilt as much, you know, I understand. And I only eat renewable meat.
20:28I don't eat meat that doesn't renew itself. So to me, I made my peace with stuff that I don't eat, which is delicious, but I'd rather make sure the species can survive because they don't make it. So we'll have pork, beef, chicken for the next thousands of years because we can remake it. So, you know, Panda probably tastes really good, but I'd rather people save them.
20:56It's just a personal thing with me. Some species I just refuse to tag along with that. Yeah. And you live in New Jersey, so I bet you can get fresh seafood pretty much whenever you want it. Yeah. Well, the crab game here is outstanding. People eat crab with the shell, without the shell. There's soft shell, blue shell. I still have to get more into the game.
21:22And I try I travel a lot from Jersey to Montreal and that's like alongside the 91 in Vermont and then right by New Hampshire and I stopped by Boston in the North Shore a lot. So I kind of go and get my lobster roll fix like quite a few times during a year and it's outstanding. It's so good. You know like and depending like lobster is just lobster but once you start mixing it up with the
21:52You know, I don't, it's crazy. And crab, crab meat, I love scallops, I love shrimps. I, you know, it's, it's, I love everything. So it's, it's, it's delicious. I, in Jersey, the, the seafood restaurant, it's like, it's a competition here. It's not just like the pizza, the hot dogs, the seafood here in Jersey. It's like people go nuts fighting to be the best. So you don't have like,
22:21regular just basic food. It's everything stands out when you eat here. It's crazy when you go down the shore It's it's nuts like there you won't go to a restaurant and be like, you know It wasn't like they're all fighting to be the best so it's nuts, you know So you'll have the best experience every time you go out here Is New Jersey a tourist state like Maine and New England are well, I would say way more in a way for
22:52like I guess mixed tourists because you have the shore, you have New York close by, people will travel around like when you go to Maine when you go it's specifically more to see the nature and like the lobster like the seafood game. So I would say here it's more of like a like a mixed tourist because you have the shore, you have the boardwalks, the amusement parks and and then you you get to go to Washington DC right by.
23:21It's more like, uh, I wouldn't say it's the same kind of tourists. Like if you go to Montreal or Quebec, you know, they're looking for something specific, I think here is more like a resort. Okay. You know what, you know what I mean? Cause you can stay in Jersey here and then go see Washington DC and come back in the same day, you can stay in Jersey and then go to New York, visit New York, come back the same day and then end up going to the beach the same day. So it's more like a big giant resort. Where, you know,
23:51Staying in New York City tonight might be like wow for a whole family. It's crazy, you know, so it's kind of like I don't know if you get what i'm saying. You know, like if you go to maine It's usually you stay in maine you get in bed and breakfast or you stay like in a cabin and you stay But in jersey you you get to go wherever you want you go to go see philly You get to go see baltimore you get to you know, you you go everywhere you want you go You can want to go visit the amish You want to go even you can go to boston. It's not that far
24:20So it's kind of like a resort, you know. So Jersey's like the hub on a bicycle wheel. I would say that because like, and you have like the Bennees, like there's got to have name for everybody, the tourists that comes here from the North Jersey goes to that beach, the Montreal people go to that beach, and then people from there, they go everywhere to go visit. So it's like, you know, if you want to go travel the Europe,
24:49you go like right in the middle and then you travel everywhere around so you can get to see so I guess Jersey is kind of that kind of state you know so you you get to go everywhere you want within you know from north to south Jersey it's like two hours yeah it's a little bitty state yeah it's a tiny state there's 10 million people which is populated but if you want to go to New York from my house it's an hour and a half
25:15You want to go to Washington, D.C. it's two hours. You want to go to Philly, it's 20 minutes. You want to go. So it's like you can go everywhere. You want to go to the shore, it's not even an hour. So you get to go everywhere you want and you get to see the ocean. And then you get turn around, you get to go see Philly, you get to go see New York. So it's kind of like, wow, you know, it's like the best of both worlds, you know? Okay, well the reason I asked, because clearly we're not talking homesteading if we're talking traveling, but.
25:44I was born in New Jersey. My parents moved to Maine when I was six months old. And so for me, New Jersey is technically my home state because it's where I was born, but I don't have any working memory or knowledge of the state because I was gone when I was six months old to Maine. So since you're from Jersey, I thought I would ask. Okay. So we have like six, well, four more minutes left to go here before we hit 30 minutes.
26:11What's the plan? Because I'm assuming that you are not in your 20s. I'm in my 40s. Yeah. So are you going to keep growing the business or do you have a plan for what you're going to do with it? Well, we have seven kids. So the plan is to at some point have all the kids working with the farm and have like a farmer's market on the road and people like next year, we're going to open up to the public, the farm too.
26:38So that's the plan is all the kids working with us and you know, we're going to have greenhouses next year and everything. So all the kids be working. I have my oldest son drives tractors and like he helps me out, but the plan is to get all the way down to the two year old twins to work with us at the farm and have a family business that they can have when they're older. And you know, if it's not their path, at least they'll know how to work land and they'll work with their hands and then they can do whatever they want. But that that's the goal.
27:06That's awesome. I love it. I love it when people plan for family farms because there aren't that many left. No. A lot of people are aging out and none of the kids in that family want to take it over.
27:21No, it's not fun to see everybody's trying to sell everything now for like real estate and quick money. And it hasn't been passed down to generations. So like parents owns farms or grandparents and it's been passed down to the next generation and they don't want nothing of it. They just want a quick buck and sell it. And you know, it's sad. You know, I understand it's their choices, but you know, I wish...
27:48government made something easier for people to want to keep doing that and keep it, you know? Yeah, I think there's a lot of people wishing that government would do things. Whatever those things are would do them differently right now. And I'm not talking about the election. I'm just talking about in general, the government doesn't, I don't know, encourage or support people doing things the way they used to be done. No, they don't.
28:16No, they don't. It's big businesses. Like I said, either party doesn't matter. It's the same thing at the end of the day. It's all about profits and big business. And farm lands for them, they see that as money wasted when they can make more money from real estate. It's not profitable for them. So they're not going to spend their time making plans for that. At least there's some part of the government that are still trying. But
28:45the big head of the offices, I don't think they really care about that. It's not taxes to be charged for income for people. It's just a big land that doesn't cost that much on taxes. Yes. And I also feel like, and I could be totally wrong. I'm going to admit that right now. I feel like people in government maybe don't quite understand the importance of farmers and people who grow things and raise animals. They don't quite get it.
29:15Well, I'm guessing they're being told that it's cheaper in a different country to import and then it makes them look good because they're trading with different countries. And that's awesome until there's a dock worker strike like there was a month or so ago and we can't get anything in. And then they should just be resourced from the inside. But like I said, again, it makes them look good to have the open button.
29:43boundaries of every country pitching in but It doesn't pay the other country to have their employees work for ten cents an hour to do stuff And then people think that's what fresh vegetables look like which they have been important. They have been you know Sprayed they have been they know everything is you know, there's nothing better than homegrown locally sourced farming To your and on your plate, you know, so It's a bad hole that we're trying to fight
30:13which not many people care, but I'm gonna still fight that battle for the rest of my life, you know. We're gonna die on that hill saying that homegrown food is better. Yes. Yep. Yep. We We had to buy tomatoes this year because our garden didn't do great. We had some really terrible weather. It was one of the worst year for gardening. Yeah, no rain. You know it rained last night for the first time since August 3rd that we could collect water and today was not even the day to collect water because we rely on water at the farm.
30:42We collect water from the rain, we don't have a well. So it was one of the worst for honey also. The plants didn't produce nectar, not the flowers did. So the honey was big, you know, it was really bad. So you know, we're hoping for next year to be better. That's why we want greenhouses so we can perfect the art. Yes, we just put in a greenhouse this spring and we're trying to figure out the best way to heat it in the wintertime so we can actually grow some stuff in the wintertime too.
31:12Yeah, it was just a terrible growing season across the country and some people lucked out huge. I've talked to a few people where the weather wasn't bad where they were. I don't know how they got to be so special, but it was okay. So yeah, it was rough and we're really looking forward to next spring. Really looking forward to this winter to kind of get a break from everything and reset because
31:37We walked around in July and August just down in the mouth because it was just so terrible. My husband is the one who grows the garden and I said, are you going to like blow a gasket in September when it's over? He was like, no. He said, honey. When he says honey, I know he's serious. He says, honey, this is part of growing things. When you're reliant on nature to do her thing, whatever that is, you're either going to have really good food or you're going to have no food. I'm like, great. That's awesome.
32:08So yeah, it's been tough, but there's always next year. Yeah, like I said, we're not gonna rely on Monsanto to do our stuff. We're gonna get the nature to do it itself. And, you know, that's why we believe in, you know, still real agriculture and not like made up Franken food. So. Yeah, that scares me. I keep seeing stuff about the, I don't know what the word is. GMO. The meat that isn't meat they're trying to develop.
32:37and the modified crops and I'm just like I don't want fake food. I want real food. Yeah well you know they changed the game you know you had 27-30% like production before when you were planning and now you have up to 97% success with the fake seeds. You know who's going to go back to losing 70% of their crops you know if they're paying for that company and now it's you're not allowed to buy any other way than that one so
33:07It's kind of like, it's sad that the government didn't stop it here compared to Europe where it's illegal. But in America, people are the guinea pigs of the corporations. So we can't do much about it. Yep. And it's a bummer and I hate ending the episodes on a bummer. So what I'm going to say to flip it, because it's what I do when I think it's going to end on a bummer.
33:31is that there's people like you and people like me and people like I've talked to for the last year or so on the podcast who are trying to do it the old fashioned way and grow really good, healthy food. So yay us. Yep. All right, Eric, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. It was a pleasure. Like I said, anytime you want to talk again, I know we haven't got all the subjects we wanted to talk about.
33:58But like I said, anytime you want, you know, we can do that again and be more than happy to talk again. That would be super fun and maybe we can make a list next time. Yeah, of course. I'm sorry for that. It's my fault. No, that's okay. This is a very organic conversation structure and I never know what we're actually going to talk about when I talk to someone on the episode, so it's fine. You have a fantastic day, Eric. Thank you so much. All right.
 

Murrell’s Fowl Play

Today I'm talking with Kristin at Murrell’s Fowl Play.
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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 Kristen at Merle's Foul Play. How are you this morning, Kristen? I'm good. How are you? I'm great. You're in Tennessee? East Tennessee, yes. Okay, cool. Another Southern accent. I love it.
00:27I talk to so many people in the South and I'm in the very, well not the very, I'm in the North, I'm in Minnesota so I don't hear a lot of Southern accents up here very often. I like to say that mine's not that bad but if you ask my husband he's going to disagree. Yes and most of us who have accents can't hear them at all because we're so used to it. Yeah. Okay so tell me about yourself and what you do.
00:53Uh, let's see. I used to breed, well, I used to show chickens when I was in 4-H in middle school. And for the last three years, I have been joking with my husband that I wanted to get chickens. And he thought I was not serious. And the next thing you know, we're going to, well, two, three hours away to buy a coop and bring it back. And I started with four birds that have now turned into 30. Oh my. Yes. So now we breed.
01:21Silky's and seramas and we just got some Rhode Island Reds and now we are working on our egg production and our incubation Okay, so I was looking at your Facebook page because that's what I do and I saw that you raised chickens for show for showing them Do you also raise chickens for eggs and meat eggs? Yes meat? No, I have not got into meat birds
01:49I have a couple friends who do that and they love it. And then I have a couple of friends who do that and they hate it. So we don't eat a lot of chicken here. We're more of a beef household. So I just couldn't justify the feed cost to meat cost. Uh-huh. Yeah. Um, chicken feed is very expensive right now. Yes. That's why we don't have chickens this winter. We called them a month and a half ago because they were being lazy and they're also getting old.
02:17And my husband said, I don't want to feed chickens all winter for no return. And I said, that's fine. Yes, exactly. And I could, I mean, we eat chicken maybe twice a month in this house. So I couldn't justify raising a ton of birds to just let them sit in the freezer for a while. Yeah. And we didn't raise meat birds. We had them for eggs and we can afford to buy a dozen eggs a week. Right now it's fine. So, and there's a really sweet woman who sells eggs at the farmer's market in the summertime. And my husband.
02:47works at the farmers market. He sells our stuff there. So he knows her and he's going to get ahold of her and be like, can we buy some of your eggs? That's probably going to be the cheaper route compared to chicken feed. Yeah. Your eggs are better than the store bought eggs and your eggs are cheaper than chicken feed. So we would like to buy eggs from you ma'am. So tell me how, how in the world did you go from, I don't know, taking care of chickens for 4-H when you were a kid
03:17to now being so invested in this? I'm not even sure how it happened. I just kind of got this idea one day and I ended up with those four birds. And I bought, I originally bought pet quality silkies, even though I knew that my goal was to breed show quality silkies. So I bought these four silkies and I was just like, I just want to see if I enjoy raising the chickens. Cause I can maintain four birds and if I don't like them, they'll just live and die here and I never have to get any more. And then I got those four.
03:44And they were so sweet and they're still really sweet birds. They're not as sweet as my seramas, but they're still incredibly sweet. And I enjoyed messing with them and I enjoyed hanging out with them. And then my grandfather had this coop at his house and he was like, I'm not raising chickens anymore. Why don't you take it? And I was like, well, if I get a coop, then I got to get more birds. So then I ended up with some egg laying birds and then my husband loves those birds. So he decided to get more egg laying birds and I was like, well, I got to go back to, you know, showing my birds. So I started getting.
04:14I won a contest for six free bread to standard silkies and I was like well that would be perfect because then I can separate them into their color pens and work on that. And then one thing led to another and now there's birds everywhere. Well I bet they're clucking happy birds. Very much so. Uh huh. Okay so I am not anywhere near an expert on chicken varieties so tell me about what silkies are and why those.
04:45Silky's are bantams, so they're a lot smaller than your regular standard size chicken, which I absolutely, I showed Brahmas, so I showed the big birds and I absolutely hated that and I swore that I would never go back to a full size bird. I say that as there's nine birds out there that are full size birds now, but I wanted Bantams and Bantams only. And I got three Silky's and one Sarama and I had that Sarama sold before I even got her home because I knew that I didn't want Saramas. And I got her here.
05:14and I got her in the coop and I fell in love with her. Like she's beautiful and she is the sweetest bird I have and I was like, you know, I can't, I can't sell her. So I canceled that sale and my husband was like, wow, we gotta have a Sarama pin now cause we don't want silkied Saramas. So we put her over there and I kept the sarama or the silkies down there where they are. And the silkies are a lot smaller, they're really docile. They're super fluffy. They have the beautiful feathered feet and the pretty beaks. However,
05:42I got them because I heard they were the most docile chicken breed and that is just not true. Are they Spitfires? Yes, I have a couple that are pretty rough, but my Saramas are probably the nicest breed I have. Even my Rooster is really gentle and my son can go in there and pick him up and play with him and like super nice birds. Okay, tell me about the Saramas because I've never even heard of them. They're a lot smaller than a Silkie. I mean they're very tiny.
06:09My rooster maybe weighs a pound and a half. Oh. Yes, very tiny. And I mean, he's still a juvenile. He's just now reached the age of maturity where he can start, you know, mounting my hens and producing that so that we can get fertilized eggs. But I mean, he's still incredibly small and he won't get much bigger than he is now. And the hens are also incredibly small, but I think the biggest they get is two pounds. I could be wrong on that. All of mine are under two pounds.
06:39So there's itty bitty chickens. Yes, they are very little. Okay, so do they have itty bitty crows? When the rooster crows, is it just a little tiny er, er, er, or is it just a loud one? No, it is very little. And I thought it was just because, you know, he's just learning to crow, so I figured he was just trying to find that voice. But he stayed pretty consistent at that volume. However, he doesn't understand he is only supposed to crow in the morning, and he crows consistently throughout the day.
07:07And if you walk outside, he thinks you have treats and he will immediately start crowing and not stop. At least he's not a donkey. Yes, that is true. Our neighbor across the way has a donkey and he doesn't bray all the time or she females and male donkeys. Yes. But boy, when that donkey starts yelling, you can hear it miles. And it's so- Growing up I had four.
07:33Yeah, it's so funny because it's obnoxious as all hell, but it's so cool to hear it. It's cool the first time and then it gets annoying. Yeah, and it sounds like a fake noise. Like it sounds like something AI produced and it's actually coming out of a real live donkey. It's so funny. He will pray now and then in the morning at like 4 35 o'clock in the morning.
08:00And I'm usually up by then I'm sitting outside drinking my coffee and he starts in and I'm like you stupid donkey So living in the country has its benefits and hearing crazy noises is definitely one of them. Yeah Okay, so When you say show your birds, are you showing them at fairs or how does it work? So I have not yet taking one of the birds to show I have a
08:29bird out there that I'm working on, I think I'm going to take, I'm not even sure if it's her or him at this moment, but I'm going to take that one to show. It's beautiful, all white, perfect feathering, great feet, all of it. I'm going to hopefully do the fair first. I think that would be great to get the birds, get my feet in the water again since I haven't showed in 10 years. And I think I want to start with the fair and then just see where it goes. There's a really nice website for silky breeders and silky showers.
08:59that will list all of the shows. Usually on the East Coast, I mean, you can separate it. Sometimes it's worldwide. And I want to look into doing that after I see how we do it a fair. Cause I don't wanna start breeding and go crazy and travel all these miles to show a bird that isn't worth it. Yeah, that makes sense. So what are the judges looking for when you take a bird to be shown?
09:24With seal keys, it is, seal keys is extreme because there's so many people that have decided to start breeding seal keys right now. And with seal keys, they're looking at proper toe spacing, the proper coloring of the beak and the legs and the skin. They wanna see how the feathers are when you spread their feathers out, if they're nice and tight and go straight up to the rear, or if they fall down, like they are looking for everything. The poof on the head, the poof on the tail, the way they stand, the way they walk, the way they are with humans.
09:55So confirmation and coordination and coloring and I assume temperament? Yes, yeah, all of it. Okay, cool. So that's what I'm working on with my white one right now. She's good with, I've got a really nice model and I've got a really nice white one and I'm working with both of those to get them more used to people. Because I mean, they're good and they'll come to you, they're just not as good as like my
10:22If you go to reach down to them, they'll back away and you don't want that in show. You want to be able to walk down there, pick them up and everything's good to go. Yeah. I'm assuming you're trying to get them to not be as easily startled. Yes. Plus they are still really young. Like seal keys don't mature for a really long time. So these compared to other birds, like I've got birds out there that'll start laying at 20 weeks. Seal keys can take almost a year to fully mature.
10:50Wow. Yes, so they've got plenty of time and that gives me until this, you know, the fair in the fall of next year. So that gives me plenty of time to get out there and get those birds handled and all of that. Okay, this may be a dumb question. I'm going to ask it anyway. How long do they live? Stilkies, let's see. I think they're at five to six years. Don't hold me to that.
11:12I have a couple birds that are specifically egg birds that will only live two years, two to three years, because they are specifically bred for egg production. They lay almost 320 eggs a year. Is that the ASA ones? It is. Yes, it is. Yeah, we had some of those when we first got chickens years ago. That was my goal. I was like, well, if they lay a lot of eggs, no, I'm not going to get super connected to them, not super attached, and we'll just do that. But I end up getting super attached to everything that comes through here.
11:43Of course, because you have a heart and you're taking care of those babies, whether they're babies or not. So the ASA chickens that you have that we started with, they are really, really sweet chickens. And I'm going to be honest, I don't love chickens. I don't like touching chickens. Their quills make me just, I don't know, it bothers me. But they were the sweetest girls. They are, yes.
12:10And they gave us an egg a day for two years and then stopped. Yep. And we knew that was going to happen. And when it was time to call them, I actually cried. Yes. I was like, it's just, doesn't seem fair that you guys only put out eggs for two years and then you're no longer useful. Yes. They are specifically bred for that purpose. And plus, you know, they're sex links. So you can tell the day they hatch based on their colors, what is a hen and what is a rooster. Yes.
12:39Yes, and they're very good for people who just want to do eggs. And that's why I said, you know, I wouldn't breed any of those because I don't want to take down those traits because those have already been bred. So when you start breeding those, then you get into the health issues and all of that faced with whatever rooster you decide to put in there. Yeah. And they breed and those chicks will have those issues. So I decided to just leave those just as eggs. They're in their own little coop down there. They're perfectly happy, perfectly fine. We're supposed to get the first egg from them because they're still, they're
13:09So we're supposed to get the first egg from them around December 20th. However, you know, we're facing the winter. So will we get that egg? I'm not entirely sure. Yeah. For anyone who doesn't know about this, chickens are reliant on sunlight to lay eggs. And they usually need about 12 hours of sunlight a day to produce an egg a day. And chickens only lay one egg in 24 hours. Usually.
13:35There's been, you know, those rare instances where people claim to have gotten two eggs in 24 hours. I'm not sure if they just, you know, caught it at the end of the day and then got it again the next day. And they just assumed it was in 24 hours. But most of the time it is one in 24 hours and daylight savings time absolutely kills your egg production. Unless you have a light in your coop. If you put light in your coop.
14:01And you extend that light for a couple hours past the time sunsets, they'll still lay. I have left. So we've got a couple birds kind of hanging out in the carport and coops and bedding and all of that. And I leave the light on in there. So they get light constantly. So it maybe that's why, cause we just recently bought the Rhode Island Reds. I mean, they've only been here for like three days and they're already, we've already got six eggs from those five.
14:27So I figured there would be an adjustment period, you know, when you bring in new birds. Sometimes they say it takes them eight weeks to start laying again. So these girls did not care. They have laid eggs consistently since we got them. Yes. The lady that we got our first chickens from said that they probably wouldn't lay that day or the day after because moving them, especially in a vehicle, stresses them and it screws them up. And we got them home at like noon.
14:55put them in the coop and there were two eggs waiting for us by five o'clock that afternoon. That is how we, yes, exactly how it happened. You're the most laid back chickens ever, ladies good. And we got them for a very good price because it's getting winter, the guy had hundreds of chickens and he wanted, he doesn't want to feed all through winter and I can't say I blame him. So I've started sprouting lentils to.
15:21make up for the fact that they're not, you know, being able to free range all of that out there. So we're going to work on fodder for them. That way we can help supplement some of that grass throughout the winter to see if we can keep egg production up as strong as it has been. And just as healthy for you to eat. Yes. Yes. Yep. I can't, I cannot get over how expensive chicken food has become in the last year and a half. It is insane. And when you get into show birds, so I've kind of got my show birds on the cheap.
15:48feed right now because you know they're not actively being shown. But when you get into show birds you want to with silkies especially you want to bump up their protein like you want 20% protein and the chicken feed for that I mean you're talking 30-40 dollars for a 50 pound bag. Uh huh. I know it's insane. It is. Um I went to get chicken feed two and a half months ago and I don't usually get it. My husband usually picks it up. Yes.
16:15The lady told me the price for two bags and I was like, excuse me? And I wasn't being snotty. I was just confused. And she looked at me like I was stupid and repeated it back to me. And I said, I'm sorry, last time I bought chicken feed, it was a quarter less than what you just told me at least. And she said, I know, she said, I feel so bad, but this is how it is. And I said, I see inflation hasn't just hit people food, it's hit animal food too. And she said, oh. Absolutely.
16:43She said, Oh my God, you have no idea. It's ridiculous. Yes. We're doing everything because I'm a stay at home mom. My husband works insane amount of hours and we have three kids. So I'm doing everything I can to not only cut food costs on us, but to cut it on them. So our chickens enjoy fridge clean out day. They enjoy the discount produce. They enjoy all the little snacks here because mealworms. I mean, you're talking $50 for a 10 pound bag of mealworms.
17:11I think on Amazon it's five pounds for $45. Jesus. Yes, that is insane. So if I can go and get some discount produce and they enjoy those treats, because happy chickens lay eggs. So I want to keep my chickens, you know, happy and fed and just like my kids, those things demand treats. Oh yeah, absolutely. Look, I cannot afford or justify $45 for five pounds of mealworms that these girls will eat in a week.
17:40Yes, they're super fast. Yes. They're fast eaters and they're fast hunters. Yes. When my husband was digging in the garden this spring, he found a bunch of earthworms, like maybe 10. And we had 20 something chickens then. Yes. And he threw those earthworms in the run and they had them eaten in like 30 seconds. Absolutely, yes. Gone. They are the best. I mean, everybody calls them, you know, the new age dinosaurs and it's true. They will eat anything. I mean, I saw a chicken kill a mouse.
18:10They will take care of anything. Well, the good news is that they don't eat kittens. We had kittens last year, no, last summer, two falls ago. And once the kittens were big enough to follow mom out of the barn, they went over to the chicken coop and they were small enough to get in the holes in the chicken wire and get in the coop. And my husband sent me a picture from his phone of one of the kittens in the coop with chickens.
18:39And I called him and I said, um, are they going to eat the kitten? And he said, no, he said, they're actually running away from her. Yes. So we got a cat, my son wanted a cat. So we got a little kitten and she is absolutely terrified of the birds. We had, at that time we had a broder inside with, uh, I guess they were about four weeks old, four week old silkies. She was terrified of them.
19:03Now she's grown up with them so she's more used to having birds around here so she's more curious than anything. But when we would get the silky out to look at it and to make sure everything was good, she would run. She was terrified of them or she would get real close and sniff it and the minute it would move she'd freak out. Uh huh. Yeah, I was just afraid that they were going to eat that kitten because that kitten wasn't much bigger than an adult mouse. Yes. And they love mice.
19:31And they love all of that. So I'm surprised it didn't try and peck at the kitten. Nope. It was totally fine. And the rest of the kittens would go out there and like chase the kitten, the chickens around once they got bigger. I was like, you guys are dumb. Get out of there. And they finally realized that it was boring and then they found other things to do. So that was fine. Um, yeah, one of the joys of being on a farm or a homestead or whatever it is that, that we want to call our places.
19:59is that you find out things are true that you thought were false and you find out that things are false that you thought were true. Yes. Like supposedly dogs and cats don't get along, which is not true. Our dog and whatever cat she's around in the yard, they're best friends. Yes. I think I really enjoy raising my kids the way that my grandparents raised me. And I enjoy watching my husband get into it because my husband absolutely hated the ideas of chickens.
20:28And now he'll be sitting on the couch on his phone and I'll be like, what are you doing? He'll be over there just scrolling the chicken groups on Facebook. So now he has like completely engulfed himself into these chickens that he claimed to hate. Like he'll go out there all the time and be like, I hate these birds. And then he'll be like, you think we need to buy these for the chickens? The world has gone topsy turvy when you move to a piece of land. Yes, like I enjoy watching him.
20:55get mess with his chickens because those seramas are all his and he'll tell you that too. He loves his seramas. That's why we that's what he got for his birthday was two new seramas. And then I enjoy watching my kids get out there and my daughter she is barely like she is she's 14 months old and absolutely loves her chickens. She will not say mama but she will say chicken. Oh funny really? Yes she will say chicken and she'll say kitty cat and she'll say dada but she will not say mama.
21:25She will. She'll get there. She'll eventually call you mama. She just knows I'm there so she doesn't have to ask for me. She just wants to yell at the birds. Uh huh. I remember when our youngest was starting to walk and talk and he had three older siblings and the older siblings adored him so much that all he had to do was point and then get him whatever he wanted. Yes. He said his first sentence.
21:51at like a little over a year old. He only had a couple of words that he'd actually said out loud. He said his first full sentence before he even had like 10 words he'd ever uttered because he knew how to talk, he just wasn't talking. Yep. Our son starts talking the minute he wakes up and he talks through his sleep. So he doesn't ever stop talking. And he's our little chicken wrangler. Like if we need one in the back of the coop and we don't wanna get in there and crawl around and get, he'll go right in there and grab it. And they love him.
22:21I love it. He's your helper. Yes. And at school, when they ask you, you know, they ask the kids like, draw, because he's in preschool. And they'll ask him, you know, draw what makes you happy. He always draws pictures of his chickens. That's so cute. He loves his chickens. He talks about them all day. The teachers say he never stops talking about them. Well, maybe he's going to be a politician when he gets older because he'll have all the words and all the ways of saying them. And he is very good at arguing. Yeah.
22:52Or he'll be a really good lawyer. That too, yes. Uh-huh, those are not terrible things to be. Or he'll be a chicken farmer, just like mom. Exactly, and that's also not a terrible thing to be. Exactly. So what's your, I mean, I think that chickens are just your favorite thing, but what's your favorite thing about the chickens? I love their personalities. Like, I know that the egg laying birds, they all look almost identical. I mean, a couple of them have
23:22maybe a different coloring pattern to their feathers or maybe some more white than brown. But you can tell them by their personalities. Like every chicken has a different personality. I know which birds are going to come to me. I know which birds are going to try to eat the rings off my fingers. Like you just, you get to learn them and they become like part of your kids. You know, before your kids can talk, you go off their personalities. You know, when they're sad or happy or upset, even if they're not speaking to you. And that's the same way the birds are. I can tell when one's getting sick. I can tell when they want something different.
23:51It's just, I enjoy being outside and learning the different personalities and characteristics of all of the birds on this farm. Okay. What's your least favorite thing about having chickens? Oh man. They can, we had one this morning, escaped from the coop and I'm not even sure how she did it and she was just wandering around staring at everything. Like they are so mischievous when they want to be. And then the coop clean out. Nobody enjoys that.
24:16Nope. I've tried coming up with like a hundred different ways to make it easier. Right now we're using, you know, the cheap, pelletized horse bedding, which has been great. I like it a lot better than I like straw because straw holds too much moisture. Yeah. But I mean, it is it's awful. And then I'm out there with like a pooper scooper, just scoping it out, trying to clean it. It is not fun. Nobody enjoys coop clean out and nobody enjoys the prices and the upkeep of show birds.
24:41It is astounding to me how beautiful birds are and how disgusting they are at the same time. It's like kids. Or your husband. Or my husband. Or any husband, yes. Yes. Yup. So, we have like five minutes left and I want to hear your take on if people want to start keeping any kind of chicken, you know, whether it's for meat or for eggs or for showing, what would you suggest to them?
25:09I'm always going to be pro getting your chickens and seeing if you like it. And if you don't come dump them at my house, because I will, but do extensive research like before we even went, I mean, I just, you know, I showed when I was a kid, but before I even went into it again, as an adult, I had researched everything about the breed I wanted, what I needed to buy for feed, what I needed for supplies. And I mean, no matter how much you research, something is still going to come up and you're going to be like, dang, I don't know what I'm going to do. And that's when, you know, the
25:38chicken groups on Facebook are really good, reaching out to people that you know who have chickens are really good. Like the breeder that I bought my first silky's off of, she probably hears from me once a week and I've been doing this for a while and there's still stuff that comes up and I'm like man I don't know what to do about this. And I'll message her and she's great about telling me what I need to do, how I need to fix it. So just make sure you have...
26:00those people that you can reach out to if something happens and start small so you know what to expect before you go into something like me and you've got chickens everywhere. Uh huh. Yeah. I'm going to jump in and say that I would recommend getting like three or four to start with because don't get one. They will die of loneliness. Yes. And chicken math is a real thing. So you will end up with four.
26:24and your friend down the road will drop off too. And then you'll need another friend for those two, so you'll end up with six. And then you'll go to the feed store and they're running a sale. And then you'll come home with 15 and it just never ends. Uh-huh. What I would say is when you get your first three or four, don't tell anybody until you've decided whether you enjoy it or not. Yes. And then the other thing that I would share and you can jump in whenever you would like is that there are things that happen with chickens. Chickens are flying birds. They actually fly.
26:54And they will fly out of the chicken run. So what you can do is you can take one of their wings, extend it out from their body and clip off like an inch of their flying feathers. Don't do any more than that because you can actually hurt them. Yes. And they can't fly if they're unbalanced. Unbalanced birds don't fly. And like you said, misconception. Do not clip both of their feathers. If you cut both sides, they will still fly.
27:24You have to just do one side. If you clip both, they're still gonna fly. And we've got all of our coupes have covered tops for that reason. Uh huh. Yeah, ours didn't. So they were escaping. My son would go out and grab one and bring it up. And I'd sit down with him and he'd hold the wing out and I'd clip the edge ends of the feathers. Because I was like, no. Like I said, you know, all of my coupes are covered. But I had one find a little hole in the chest. I've got one coupe that is covered in nothing but hardware cloth, which I...
27:52Absolutely loved but it is so expensive I have the other Coupes covered in chicken wire and that one bird this morning decided she was gonna find the one hole in that Coupe, I'm not even sure how she got out of it and flew right out of it Yep, I believe it. They're they're escape artists. They're they're as bad as goats sometimes
28:12The other thing is that chickens can get something called bumblefoot and it's basically a staph infection on the bottom of their foot. It is, and it is disgusting and you get to play surgeon and you get to pick it out and it is gross and it's like for people who watch all those pimple popping videos on Facebook that would be perfect for you. I do not like that. Thankfully and luckily I have not had any with bumblefoot and I hope I never do because that grosses me out and I will probably make my husband do it.
28:42Yeah, I can't. Nope, I'm not. Nope. That's a big nope. I'm not doing that. But anyway, you've got pasty butts in the chicks too. I can handle that. Yeah, that's I mean, if you've changed a diaper, you can deal with pasty butt. But the bumble foot and the digging it out. Yeah. And the thing that we noticed when a couple of ours had it is that they start walking funny or they they hop because they don't want to put pressure on it because it's like having a blister on the bottom of your foot. Yes, it is.
29:11So there are things you need to look out for, but if you're looking to get into livestock, chickens are the gateway drug to everything else. They're the easiest, most efficient way to start on livestock, I think. Yes, I would wholeheartedly agree with that. Yes. They used to be the least expensive, but uh...
29:34I don't think that's true anymore. Especially when you start because, you know, chicken math is real. Once you start adding up those numbers, you're like, oh, the eggs will pay for it. The eggs won't pay for it. It's just an ever-ending cycle of dumping money into your hobbies. And that's what I do. I like my show birds and, you know, I'm doing all this work and spending all this money to win a ribbon. You know? Well, I think the satisfaction will be will be worth it. Absolutely. The bragging rights would be nice as well. Yeah. And I mean, everybody has their hobbies. Yes. And
30:04Lots of people dump tons of money into them and don't see any actual monetary returns. Yes, just ask my husband about all of his vehicles. Yeah, exactly. And just ask me, I'm doing a podcast and have made like a hundred dollars so far in a year and a half.
30:19But it's not about the money, it's about talking to you guys and learning and having a platform so other people can learn about what it takes to do these things. Exactly. So that's another thing. If you decide to get into chickens, do not get into it because you think you're going to make money within the first couple years because it's not going to happen. No, and it may never happen. And again, I hate to end the episode on a bummer, so let's not stick with that last statement. Chickens can be really, really fun.
30:48They are highly entertaining to watch they're crazy and the eggs are really good. The eggs are yummy they are and they make amazing cakes and cookies and and German pancakes we call it Dutch. What is it a Dutch baby pancake? Oh, I'm not sure. I've never heard of this. It's cross between a crepe and a pancake and it's this really thin batter like a crepe and You pour it into a buttered heated a Dutch oven frying pan
31:17Mm-hmm. Not Dutch oven cast iron frying pan and it basically like blows up like a funnel cake It gets really light and fluffy. They are amazing and it's like eating a crepe only it's huge I have the fact that you know the the eggs that you have will last a lot longer than the eggs you have in the store Yes. Yes, they will and most people freak out when they see my egg cartons on my table Well, I do not refrigerate my eggs
31:46Yeah, not right now because I don't have any eggs, but all the time we've had chickens here People are like why you have eggs on your counter and I'm like because they have something called a bloom Yes, that is the code on the outside the egg outside of the egg from the chicken Yeah, and it basically protects it from bacteria getting in there So they last longer the minute I put them in the fridge. I have to leave them in the fridge Yes And as long as you do not mess with that cuticle or bloom you can leave those eggs on your counter for almost two months
32:16Yeah, absolutely. Or you can water glass them and store them for six months to a year. Yes, and we're not going to get into how water glassing happens because we don't have enough time. But if you're interested, you can Google it because it's all over the internet. Yes. The other thing is if you have a bad egg, you will know because bad eggs stink. 100%, yes. Yeah.
32:39We had a scent in the kitchen we could not place for about two weeks and it wasn't that the eggs had been sitting too long It was just a bad egg Yes, and sometimes happens. Uh-huh And I finally walked over by where the eggs were stacked and I was like well I now know where the icky smell is coming from. Let's figure out which carton it's in. Yeah, and Luckily, we didn't break the egg. So it went out to the trash and it was fine once you break it You're not getting that smell out for a hot minute
33:08If it's really, really bad, it's not gonna go away for a couple of days. No.
33:14Yes, so there are again, there are some things about chickens that are gross. That's one of them. But there's a lot of fun things about chickens, too. Thank you. The fun things outweigh the gross things. Yeah, absolutely. Kristin, thank you for taking the time to teach me more about chickens, because I am by no means an expert and I love learning new things. Thank you for having me. All right. Thanks. Have a great day, Kristin. You too. Bye.
 

Pumpkin Hill LLC

Today I'm talking with Mindy at Pumpkin Hill LLC.
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 Mindy at Pumpkin Hill LLC. Good morning, Mindy. How are you? Good morning. I'm good. Thank you. Good. You're in Wisconsin? I am. I am in the southern west portion of Wisconsin.
00:29Okay, what's the nearest big city? Um, La Crosse. Okay, so you're, I think you're like four hours from where I am in La Sour, Minnesota, I think. Yes, yeah, we're about, I mean, it takes me about three and a half hours to get to the Twin Cities. Okay. Well, every time I talk to somebody who's in a bordering state, I say, hey neighbor. So hey neighbor, nice to meet you. So tell me about yourself and what you do. So um.
00:58I have two children and a husband and we own a farm in rural fairyville. We just started at this year and we have a pumpkin patch in animals and we're really focusing on farm to table on our farm. We have homegrown eggs we're starting to produce and sell hoping that it gets a little bigger as we go. I also own assisted living facilities.
01:27more so group homes and then we also beef farm and green farm. Okay, when did you start doing this? Pumpkin Hill, I started a year ago. Okay. So we're really fresh. Well, that's good because fresh pumpkins are good pumpkins. Okay, so why did you start it? What brought you to doing this? Oh, so...
01:57I guess my dad and I have been in businesses together for a very long time. And we also do vacation rentals. And so we actually, my husband and I came over to the neighbor's house one day because we were going to build a house and we were asking about her sewer and it just kind of took off from there. She looked at us and said, I'm moving. Do you want to buy the farm? And we were like, whoa, what? I think we were in shock.
02:26And we were like, yeah, I guess. So we had talked and my dad and I chose to sell another property to buy this together. So he's part owner right now of the farm with me. And then it kind of snowballed from there. We're like, okay, we know that land prices are expensive. How can we still provide for our family, live on this beautiful land and pay our mortgage? And so it kind of came from an idea
02:56let's do something where we can get the community involved and we can share the beauty of this land with everybody. So let's come out snowball. Awesome. The reason I ask everybody why is because everybody's reason is different and no one buys land without wanting to do something with it or on it. Yes. We bought land and we thought we were going to raise
03:25rabbits for meat and we thought we were going to raise chickens for eggs and meat. And right now we have neither. Everything happens for a reason. I feel like we just kind of, we had different ideas in our minds at first and it just kind of went in this weird direction and here we are. Yeah. Our weird direction failed. We, we really wanted to try raising rabbits for meat and
03:54Our bunnies were stupid and did not understand that they were supposed to reproduce. Even though we did everything right, since getting rid of the rabbits, we've discovered that Timothy hay may have been the issue because they were too fat. The female rabbits were too fat. And fat rabbits don't breed. Who knew? So weird things happen. You can't know what you don't know. And if you don't know where to look, you can't find out.
04:24And so our rabbit enterprise was a very short-lived experiment that did not go well. But that's okay, because we got years to go and miles to go and lots of sleep to get, and we'll find a new thing. It'll be fine. So I was looking at your Facebook page and it looks like a wonderfully fun thing to do to visit your place. Yeah, we're focusing on family, I think, because my family's so close and
04:52we're always doing stuff together. I mean, my grandparents came over there in their eighties and God bless them because they put their sweat and tears into this too, so help me get going. And we just kind of creatively came up with games for people and animals for people to see and things for them to do. My cows are kind of my little babies. Um, and they'll come up and they'll kiss me and they'll lick me and they'll, you know, play with people. So we really wanted an interactive place for people also to learn.
05:21because we know that a lot of places around here don't have that. So people will ask us questions like about our Highland cows, like what different sizes do you have? Well, we just have a mid-size Highland cow. There are four different sizes and the breeds and all that fun stuff. So it's a good learning experience too. And we have schools coming out now too. Fun. And how, okay, I always ask the background stuff because I always am curious about what that.
05:48requires for you to have the kids come from schools. Do you have a waiver that they need to sign that basically says if something happens, we're not at fault or how does that work? We don't. We have them posted around the farm. We've been kind of going back and forth. We don't really let them in with the animals per se. We'll like hold the bunnies and like hold them so that they can hold them, but we won't let them like kind of like run around the farm with them.
06:15The same thing with feeding the animals, like we're right there because I just don't want somebody to get hurt. And I think that's part of our growing process, trying to figure out what works best so people can see the animals. And then we're not having to be like right there with them. I think that's kind of something that we were going to work on this year is just trying to figure out how we could make that work a little easier. Because we're kind of like running around the farm right now, like, hey, here's the cows, here's the, you know.
06:43I'm holding a goat in one hand, so people can pet the goat in a rabbit in another hand, standing down in front of my cow, so. Sometimes that's just crazy. Yes, and having a system and a plan is the best way to reduce your anxiety because you will get to the point where it's too much and the anxiety will be too high and you will be just, I don't wanna do this anymore. And I would hate to see that happen. Yes, yeah. So.
07:12Okay, I saw that you guys have a skeeball game that looks handmade. Who made the skeeball game? My dad. He is the handy man around here. My husband is too and so is my brother, but he has like, I'll tell him what I want and he'll like just envision it and build it for me. Like the skeeball, we had seen a friend's skeeball machine and he's like, that's awesome. I'm like, yeah, we need to build that. So.
07:41He was working on it for a few weeks and finally got one built. He's just, yeah, he's just an visionary. Well, I was tickled to see it because Skeeball is one of my favorite things to play at the arcades that may still exist. I don't know. I've been wanting forever. But as a teenager, we would go to the arcade at the mall and they had the fancy electronic Skeeball machine. Yeah. That was the only thing I wanted to play. I didn't want to play video games. I wanted to play Skeeball.
08:10So seeing an old fashioned handmade game, I was just like, that is so cool. I gotta get my husband on making one of those just so I can play. Yeah, it was totally amazing what he did with it. Uh-huh, it works. It looks really fun. And then your little shop is adorable. The video is of your shop. How long did it take to get that together?
08:36So funny you should ask. A week before, well actually two weeks before we opened, I told my dad, I said, I really kind of just want to shop. Like I want to have coffee. I want to have a few knickknacks when people come out. Like just something where, and then, you know, as I grow, I can sell my eggs in there. I had some Amish baked goods and he's like, uh, okay. So we have a friend in town that I kind of grew up watching his kids and we were just close.
09:03And he just cemented his own. So that was all dirt floor. Okay. So like two weeks before he opened, they were out pouring concrete. We were wiring the shop and then we were putting up the walls and it all came together. Like that Monday before we opened, it was finally put together. So it wasn't very long. It was a week. Very nice. I was just wondering because it's not easy to build a building and then.
09:31and then make it into the thing you want it to be. Also, I'm listening to you talk about this, and isn't it just frightening to you that you ended up buying a farm that you didn't necessarily know was even for sale, and then you got critters, and you made a shop, and you've now made this an agritourism business? Do you ever just lay in bed at night and go, wow, I can't believe we did this?
10:00Um, I think I'm still reeling. Um, my mother-in-law always says like, what are you going to do when you're off season? And I still, I don't know because I've been so busy cleaning up from the season. The, it hasn't really hit me yet. Um, but I'm like, I don't, I, I, I'm excited. I think it's, I just, I get excited about it because I truly enjoy this. I love my animals and I'm excited to have an opportunity to share it with the world. So.
10:29I think that there will be a time probably around Christmas when I'm like, whoa, it's like hitting me now, but I don't know. I'm just, I'm enjoying the ride. Good. Enjoy it for as long as it lasts because there will come a time that you will look back on this timeframe and just, just laugh, just laugh at yourself stupid at all the things that you did and things that happened and the things that went really right and the things that went really wrong. Yeah. Well.
10:57My dad, I have to like hand it to him because he was a huge part of this. But actually I got my animals on a fluke too. So my dad went to go get this people holler that I wanted to hook to the back of a tractor to take him around my farm. Yeah. And it was in Iowa and he happened to go down and get it. Well, when he was talking to this guy, this guy's like, what do you want it for? And he's telling him, Oh, my daughter's starting this pumpkin patch and she's really excited and we need a people holler. And he goes.
11:25funny you should say that right around the corner here's another pumpkin patch. So my dad ended up driving over there and his name is Landon and he has a whole farm and it's a pumpkin patch, it's animals, it's kind of like what I was envisioning only on a larger scale. And so my dad started talking to him and he's like, yeah, come on over. So I actually got my first alpaca from him and four of my goats.
11:51This is one of those meant to be things, I think, for your life. Yeah. You've had, you've had some real lucky streaks happening. Um, what's, I don't want to make you sad, but what's the hardest thing that's happened since you started pumpkin hill? Um, I think it's balance. So I wear many of hats and many different businesses that, um, I own with my dad and obviously my husband, but, uh, it's.
12:20trying to create time for each one of those. I feel like sometimes I have to focus on the farm more than I focus on my assisted living, and I feel guilty, and then vice versa. Sometimes I'm at my assisted livings just, you know, running the show, and I feel guilty because maybe I'm not spending as much time as I'd like to at home with my family or with my animals and doing that kind of stuff. So it's definitely the balance. Okay, and what's the best thing or things that have happened in the last year?
12:49I would say this experience. I love, I have loved every minute of it. I have loved the animals, you know, my kids get to be raised on a farm and get the experiences that not everybody else can. And that makes me very happy because, you know, it's just, you don't get an opportunity like this every day.
13:15Okay. Well, my third question in this string was going to be, what's the most surprising thing that's happened? But I think the fact that somebody sold you their farm when you didn't even know it was for sale was probably the first most surprising thing. Yeah. And she's amazing. She's still in our lives. The lady who sold us the farm, she's been my husband's neighbor forever. She comes out all the time. She's so supportive. She's like, just. Fantastic. So yeah, I think it's just all of it rolled into one. Okay.
13:45I'm just trying to figure out what stories you can tell me because if I say just tell me stories, you're going to go blank. Okay, so your cows, are they highlands? Is that right? They are highlands, yeah. They're miniature highlands, so they're not full size. But they're not the smallest. Are they just for entertainment or do they give milk or what do they do for a job? Well, so you can technically...
14:15eat Highland cows, they are my pets. So anything on this farm becomes my pet. Anything on the, we have another farm that my husband farms. Anything on that farm goes for the beef and you know, that kind of stuff. So primarily they're just for education and being my friends. We're going to breed some and eventually start selling some. I don't think it will ever be big scale, but I think it'll be enough for like, you know, people who actually want to enjoy them.
14:44because they're very friendly. You're going to have baby Highland cows? I am. I'm actually taking them to my friend Landon's house where we got the alpaca from. End of this month because he has miniature bulls. And so we're going to breed them. So next season, we will hopefully have babies running around the pasture. Yes, and I should know the answer to this question off the top of my head because I ask it all the time, but I never register it in my brain. How long are cows pregnant for? Nine months?
15:14Eww, I wanna say nine. Okay.
15:19Okay, so it's gonna be a while, but it'll be worth it at the end. Mm-hmm. Yeah. All right. So do you have barn cats and a dog? I do have one cat and his name is Buddy and he came with the farm. And otherwise we don't have any more cats. We have gone back and forth if we want more cats. And sometimes they're great. And sometimes they are.
15:49hard to do chores with because they will climb up your legs, they'll be in your face. I trip over my cat all the time. So as much as I love him, I think like one or two would be okay. I don't know if I want a whole plethora of them. And then dogs, we have, we do not have a dog on the farm yet. We are working on getting a farm dog, but I haven't found the right one.
16:15So the dog. So we would really like a Burma Doodle because they don't shed as much. And I really like the Burmese Mountain Dogs. So that's what we're waiting for, to find the perfect one. And you will, but do you want a puppy or do you want a dog? I would like to start with a puppy. My kids are young, so I would like the puppy to grow with my kids.
16:44Yes, that is a brilliant idea. And the other thing that's great about puppies is if something gets screwed up, you know that you screwed it up, somebody else didn't screw it up. And I don't mean to say it as a negative, it's just that if you adopt a dog, you adopt all the behaviors that dog has learned from the people in its life up until you, and it takes longer to train them again.
17:11and the Bernadoodles are gorgeous. I love them. And our dog is a mini Australian Shepherd and she looks like a small Bernadoodle, which is really funny. Does she have a good temperament? She's great. She was a velociraptor from about 10 weeks old until about nine months old. She tried to eat the baseboards in my house. She did not succeed, but she wanted to.
17:38And she hit about a year old and became the most wonderful, calm, friendly, loving creature I've ever had. She does not like people, but we got her during COVID, so we didn't socialize her enough. But she's a great dog, love her, but she does. People are like, is she a puppy Bernadoodle? I'm like, no, she's a four-year-old mini Australian Shepherd.
18:04But yeah, I was going to be surprised if you didn't have a dog because almost every person I've talked to who has a farm, a homestead or a ranch has dogs, plural. Yeah, we haven't decided on what, I think we're just very picky like what we're bringing into because I don't want to be overwhelmed with trying to have that balance between all the jobs that I have, you know. Yes. And you have to be there.
18:33to teach that puppy to be a decent, friendly, workable dog. People who get puppies and just put them in a crate eight hours a day do not end up with great dogs typically. So they want to please you, they want to be your friend, they want to do what you ask, but if you don't teach them what the thing you're looking for out of them is, they don't learn it. So you have to train dogs, that's how it goes.
19:04And I'm excited for you. Getting a puppy is amazing. I'm super excited. We looked at a few and then we kind of, I don't know, we're just going back and forth again. I want to make sure I have the time and you know, the energy. And I want to make sure it's the right dog for our family because every dog breed is different we're finding. My husband grew up with a lot of dogs. I grew up with outdoor dogs. So, we're just kind of trying to find that right mesh for us.
19:33Mm-hmm. Yes, do the research and make sure that it's what you want because the last thing you want to do is regret your choice. And again, not saying that to be negative. Actually, I'm trying to say it to be positive. If you do the work and you do the research and you find the right one, you will never regret it. Right. And a dog is a big undertaking because they live a long time. So you have that pet for a very long time.
20:04And it's really hard on dogs when you re-home them. Oh, absolutely. Because dogs bond with their owners. And they bond with bad owners, which just amazes me. There are dogs that were trained to be fighting dogs. And they've been treated really, really badly. And they bonded with their owners, even though they were treated badly. And they mourn their separation from the former owner. It's crazy.
20:32They just want to love you and they will take so much crap and still love you and it's so not fair. And I'm on soapbox and I shouldn't be. But if you get a dog, love your dog, treat your dog like your child, you know? Because they are, they're little kids in dog bodies. I love my dog so much and it like, it seeps out of me when I talk to people about her and about their dogs and about their future dogs. So.
21:00Let's get off of that for a minute. What's the plan? Are you gonna grow your farm for the next 20 years? Are you gonna try to make it support itself? What are you thinking of doing with it? So I think the biggest thing is, is I wanna grow to a healthy size. I don't wanna be super huge.
21:25but I also don't want to be super small. So I have this like medium idea of what it's like, but also creating in my head, I have a vision of having like a tree house rental somewhere on my property where people can come and stay on the farm and really experience it. So that's like a 10 year goal, I think we'll get there. It's just slowly and surely. And I also am learning from things that we've done throughout the year, this year, that aren't going to work for us next year.
21:51So I think it's going to be a learning process until we can get to that right size. I don't want to say it's going to be huge and amazing. It's probably going to be just a medium-sized farm with a corn pit and a corn maze and some wonderful animals and a few games. And an owner with a huge heart who wants to give to people. Yeah. I think I'm going to end this because it's going to take five minutes for you to comment on this.
22:21amazing when you buy land that's more than, I don't know, a city lot. All the things that you can do. I mean, I would never have thought of doing a tree house so that people would come and stay, but that's really fun. So I know you said you want to stay at medium size, but when, if you didn't have any restrictions on what it could be, what are the ideas that pop into your head? So my
22:50I would have the farm, but I would have like a tree house grove. Just really, I would turn the whole farm into a really fun family adventure, I guess, because it's hard to find that in places where you can go and enjoy and have activities for the kids all day long and go hiking and see things you don't see normally. That would be lovely. I think that sounds beautiful.
23:19Have you watched the TV show, I can't remember what it's called, the tree house show, the guy that built tree houses? Every time I watch that thing, I'm like, I wish I was about 30 years younger. I wish I was about 24. Because I would want to go see that being filmed and climb up in those tree houses. It seems like a lot of fun. And also, have you watched Clarkson's Farm by Enchants?
23:47Okay, it's on Prime or Netflix, I can't remember which. And it's Jeremy Clarkson. He's the guy that used to be on the show with all the cars, all the fancy cars. Okay. And he buys a farm in England. He's not a farmer, he just buys a farm. And he basically spends three years learning how to be a farmer. It is the funniest thing I've ever seen. And for people who haven't seen it, I highly recommend watching it.
24:14It's a little bit slow and dry first season, but then the second season, he gets into discovering just how hard it is to be a farmer. It's very funny. I will watch that now. Yeah, it's really funny. And he is, it's so crazy because he's very dry. He's English and he's very stoic. And once he gets sheep and the first lambs start being born.
24:43You see him go from being this very, I don't know, I don't give a rat's ass about anything, to being very, very gentle and humbled and loving to these lambs. And I'm just like, men are so funny. Men are so funny about this stuff. So yeah, it's really fun. It's interesting. It basically proves the point that if you want to get rich farming, you need to start out rich.
25:13Yeah. It takes a lot to put money into a farm to get it to go. Yeah. And it also points out the hard work and the feelings that come up when you're dealing with livestock, because as you probably know, when you have livestock, you're eventually going to have dead stock and it's really hard, but it's worth it. It is. We actually lost our baby alpaca this year. And it was, you know, my kids cried for probably about a week and a half.
25:44every night. Yeah, coming home. If you get attached to these animals and they become your family and it's hard to see them pass away or you know, have to bury them. It's hard. Yes, we're going through a thing right now with our barn cat. We haven't seen her in two and a half days. We don't know if she's dead. We don't know if she went to a neighboring farm. We don't know. And she has
26:11five kittens that are old enough to take care of themselves, but they were still occasionally nursing and they came up on the steps this morning and they were just like, where's mom? And I'm like, crap. So they're old enough to eat real food. They're like eight, nine weeks old. They're fine. But they went from having mom for comfort to mom's not here anymore.
26:37I don't know whether to just be matter of fact about it, this happens, or to be really sad about it. And I think I'm coming out somewhere in the middle because maybe we won't have kittens next year because maybe we won't have any more female cats. That was not the plan to begin with. So right. And cats multiply very quickly. It is frightening how quickly they figure it out and how many kittens they can produce. She had her first litter was last fall. She had five or six.
27:06and then she had a litter this April and she had seven and this litter she had seven and two of them were not thriving and they they just died, you know. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes kittens don't make it and that was really hard to figure out too. I really wanted to take kittens to the vet and my husband was like, they are barn cats. There is a reason that animals have more than one baby at a time because Mother Nature says that not all of them survive. And I'm like, damn it.
27:35Okay, fine. You're right. Yeah. It's it's hard, but it's also really fun when the ones that do thrive really thrive. Right. One of the kittens is like a real dilute orange. So it's basically a yellow long haired cat. And he is gorgeous. He looks like a little lion.
28:00and chubby and he beats on the other kittens and he's a bully and we're keeping him to hunt mice. So sometimes it's hard and sometimes it's really exciting and really fun. And I do not recommend to anyone that they take on this lifestyle if they're not good at regulating their feelings. If they can't feel them, get through them and move on. Because if you can't feel them, get through them and move on, you won't be able to live this life.
28:29Oh, absolutely. It's yeah, it can be tough at times. And again, because I don't want to end the podcast episode on a bummer. It can be really amazing too. And you hang on to the amazing parts and make them the biggest part. And you just handle the parts that suck. So that's how I look at it. Mindy, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. And I wish you all the luck with Pumpkin Hill LLC. Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
28:58Absolutely. Have a great day. You too. Thank you. Bye.
 
 

Spring Hill Tree Farm - Oh! Christmas tree...

Today I'm talking with Dan at Spring Hill Tree Farm. 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 Dan at Spring Hill Tree Farm. Good morning, Dan. How are things in Georgia today? Good morning. Things are good, sunny, clear skies, and I just got done working in the strawberry field a few minutes ago.
00:30Nice. It is incredibly overcast and sprinkling here in Minnesota this morning. For the third day in a row. So strawberries, is that for next year? You're getting them ready for next year? Yeah. So in South Georgia, you grow, you plant strawberries in October, and then they fruit usually in March after that last frost, about 30 days after the last frost.
01:00Okay, cool. So tell me about yourself and what you guys do. Yeah, so I am a third generation specialty farmer, if you will. We do what you what you call agritourism. So we're here on Spring Hill Farm in Bainbridge, Georgia. And we've been doing agritourism for about 40 years now. Agritourism, simply put, is
01:29Really, I mean you can take the two words right so agriculture and tourism and sort of blend them together and It's anything that you can do on your farm whether it's an event or maybe like a you pick scenario Trail rides something of that sort right to get people to come out and enjoy your property and You know usually charge some some small fee for them to come and do that Okay, so you've been doing it for 40 years I know that
01:59Agritourism has been a thing, like a buzzword for the last few years, but it's always been a thing. I mean, I'm 55 and I remember my parents taking me to farms where they were like, let's go on a hayride and pick apples or let's go see cows or whatever it was that they were doing. So you're an OG, you're an OG agritourism dude. Yeah. It's funny because, you know, my dad and I, so I'm...
02:29I'm 28, I'm the younger person on the farm that's sort of starting to take over things a little bit more. My dad's been doing this for a long time. And I remember he and I would go on trips to Atlanta because we're in South Georgia. And a few years ago, man, it was longer than that, 10 years ago or so maybe, we were driving down Highway 27. And we saw this sign that says, you know, Georgia's first agritourism farm on the left.
02:57We're thinking, well, what's agritourism? That sounds like what we're doing. And we started to learn more about it and we said, well, they're not the first. And we don't, we don't claim that we're the first, but, but it is growing in the, in, it is a buzzword and I think it's the second largest or second fastest growing business in Georgia and has been for some, for some time.
03:22Yes, and I am a huge proponent for agritourism because so many people have never set foot on a farm. And I think that they thought that they couldn't like, call and ask if they come visit. So I love that people are opening up their properties to people to come see what they do. Yeah, that's, that's what my grandfather would have wanted when he bought the property. He, he worked his whole life, was in the military and
03:52sort of came across the US, started in Oklahoma, went to Texas, went to Atlanta, then came here and always wanted to buy some property with the end goal of being able to share it with people. And what's really cool about this property is he came down here and searched and searched and searched for some property and everything down here is flat, you know, peanut fields, corn fields.
04:19And he just wasn't interested in flat land. He had seen enough of that in Oklahoma and wanted to see more trees. And they found this property. We're on the highest elevation in Decatur County is where we're at. And we are 321 feet above sea level, which is not a crazy amount, but for here it is. And we're on what's called Curry Hill. So it's this ridge that runs through.
04:49um this area and it just it has you know springs on the farm creeks on the farm valleys um really beautiful property and i think when he and my dad found this place they kind of looked at each other like hey you know don't say anything let's let's go ahead and get this deal done um so and so 40 i think we got it they got it in 1982 and the next year uh my grandfather had
05:18you know, so many hundred Christmas trees and he and my dad were going to do that. And unfortunately my grandfather passed away before they, before they arrived. And so my dad just kind of had this, uh, you know, I guess he had a decision to make and when the Christmas trees showed up, um, he planted them and then the rest is kind of history. Sure. And that is a fantastic story. Um,
05:46So I want to get to the Christmas trees since we're now in November and it's getting to be that time. But I also want to know what you guys do from like spring through till now. Yeah. So spring is reserved for strawberry, you pick. But of course we do, we grow other things. We grow sweet onions. You can't call them Vidalia because you're not in Vidalia, Georgia, but they are.
06:14the same type of onion. And we grow bok choy, we grow lettuce, we grow all sorts of greens, kale, things that are companion plants to strawberries. Strawberries are our main bread and butter in the spring. And we usually sprinkle in some events with that. Our events are, you know, really family oriented. You can come out and you can pick. You can also do a hay
06:44We do these actually, you may have seen it like a state fair. We actually do a pig races. Those are one thing we do. We do horseback riding, all sorts of stuff that people just really enjoy. You don't run out of things to do. We do horse trail rides. We do 5Ks. So that's kind of what we do in the spring. Okay. The summertime, it's so hot.
07:13It's so hot here in the summer and it's so humid. We will try to, at the end of the spring, early summer, do like a watermelon sort of day. People can come out and pick watermelons, eat watermelons, and then we'll have like a summer splash pad thing going on. So really it's just something for the kids to come out and sort of cool off a little bit and enjoy some good fruit. But really once you get past that last...
07:43you know, May, really everybody in South Georgia is inside by the air conditioner. You don't go outside that time of year unless you can help it. So we really sort of just, we sort of hit a lull through the summer and just let the field sort of recuperate, you know? And so then we go from there and then we go into fall, which is our busiest season. We just got out of October.
08:12And we do fall family fun and we do a huge, huge event every weekend in October where we do a few of the similar things that I was mentioning in the spring. But we've got one of the only pumpkin chunkers, it's a trebuchet in Georgia and it's really neat. So it's one of those things that you would see like medieval, you know?
08:42Yes, yep. And basically you put the pumpkin in it and it flings it way off in the distance, is that how it works? Yeah, so it's a trebuchet. It's not a catapult, it's a trebuchet. It's got about 800 pounds of weights affixed to it and then we pull down the top of it with a winch and then you stick a lever through it, put the pumpkin in the net, you pull the lever, the weights drop and the pumpkin goes.
09:12Is there anything actually pumpkin looking by the time it hits the ground or is it just pumpkin pieces everywhere? It's just pieces everywhere but within a couple weeks or so, you see it's almost like a pumpkin patch at where that happened. Yeah. Yeah, fun. Okay. So, let's talk about Christmas trees. There is a Christmas tree grower here.
09:40where I live not far from where I actually live in my house. And I have to get ahold of them because I was supposed to talk to them last fall and things didn't work. But since you grow Christmas trees, I have questions. Number one, when you guys get new Christmas tree seedlings in, are they just little tiny or are they like a foot tall or how does it work? Yeah. They're about a foot tall and they're a plug.
10:10They've got the soil already on them. In most cases, you know, I should really preface all this with just letting you know the varieties that we can sort of plant down here. Yes, please. So down here, even though we are on the highest elevation, we are nowhere near the elevation we need to be to grow the type of hallmark Christmas tree you might envision. So that would be your Frasier fir.
10:39or your Douglas fir. And those are just beautiful trees. They can only be grown at above 3,000 foot sea level, that elevation. So clearly we are far from that. We do bring those trees in by the truckload because so many people want them. We get them from a farm in North Carolina. So we'll have those, but then to answer your question, the...
11:09What we can grow is Virginia Pines, Murray Cypresses, and Carolina Sapphire. And those all grow really well. The Virginia Pine, they're going to be like a bare root. No soil. The root is about a foot long and so is the tree when it comes in. We'll take a dibble and stick it in the ground. And then it's important to make sure that you plug the root into the ground straight down. You don't want it to...
11:39what you call J root where the root is sort of comes back up. And so that's how you plant a pine tree. The Carolina Sapphires and the Cypresses, they come in, um, they already have soil. They've already got great roots. We, uh, take a little post hole digger, dig a small hole and, uh, just put them right in the ground. Okay. So I have another question based off of your answer. Um, the, the balsam fir that you were talking about, that
12:05needs to grow at over 3000 feet elevation. Why is that? It's got something to do, and I'm not an expert with it, obviously because I can't grow them, but it's got something to do with the length of the day. And how much sunlight they get in certain seasons, if that makes sense. Okay. Yeah, that does make sense.
12:31I know that sunlight affects chickens. Chickens will not lay eggs if they don't get 12 hours of sunlight a day, typically. So the sun has a lot to do with how things grow or produce. Okay, cool. So you're not an expert necessarily on everything Christmas tree, but I have a question you might be able to answer. When I was a kid, my dad would go out and cut a Christmas tree from not private land.
13:01I grew up in Maine, so Maine's a little bit less pissy about people cutting Christmas trees or they used to be. And he would typically cut a spruce tree. And there was one year that he got what was called a skunk spruce. And there's a variety of spruce trees. That's not the actual name for it. But if you cut them and they warm up, they smell like a skunk. He didn't mean to cut that kind, but he did.
13:30And so that one went out in the woods and fed birds all winter because he put peanut butter and bird seed on it. And then he cut down a regular spruce tree and that was great. My question is, back when I was a kid, we had the big lights that threw heat on the strings that went around the tree. And people don't do that anymore. They do LED lights because LED lights don't get hot and don't cause fires. And I swear to you,
13:59The trees that I grew up with in my house at Christmas time smelled amazing. You could not walk in the house without knowing there was a live cut tree in our house. And for the last 10 years when we've gotten a tree at, oh, I don't know, Home Depot or Lowe's, they don't smell like anything. So my question is, is it the heat from the lights that made it smell so good? Is that why?
14:28Well, you're going to have different smells with different types of trees to your point, right? I've noticed that, you know, a cypress and a pine don't have as much of a smell versus a fir and a like a Carolina Sapphire. They're almost like what you would see people, you know, try to like block their neighbors with or, you know, like the trees that get really bushy. Those smell really good.
14:58And I really think it does come down to the variety. But also you brought up like Home Depot and Lowe's, they are not known to have the best quality trees. When we buy our trees from North Carolina, for instance, we have a conversation with the grower and it's very frank. And we say, he says, you know, do you want ones or do you want twos?
15:27and ones are going to cost a lot more than the twos are. And we go ahead and pay that premium so we can get trees that we know, one, don't have any holes, but also we're probably cut a lot closer to the delivery date versus the twos, right? And so when I say ones and twos, I mean like premium versus like, okay. And so that's what Home Depot and Lowe's are doing. You may say, well, I find a great tree there.
15:57Okay, but not all the time, right? They, from what I see, they are buying not as good of trees as we are. And so that also means that when you get that tree, it's probably almost dead. And that's gonna have a lot to do with the smell. One thing that we encourage our customers to do is when they come out here, and we go ahead and offer to do it for them, but when they come here and they get a tree from us,
16:26We will put a fresh cut on it. You've probably heard of that. And you need to put a fresh cut on every tree that you get unless of course you cut it fresh from the field. But if you're getting one that's already cut, say at your local store, you need to put at least an inch of a fresh cut on that stump and within the hour, you need to get it in lukewarm water. And that's going to open it up to be able to absorb that water and that's what's going to get your smell going again.
16:56Okay.
16:59Okay, awesome. I just, I didn't know and I wanted to ask because I've been trying to find out for years because it makes me so sad that we get a real tree in our house and I can't smell it. And I have a really good sniffer. My nose is great. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to smell a Christmas tree in my house. So, and I want to share that Christmas tends to be my favorite holiday ever and not because I'm particularly
17:25religious but because I feel like Christmas is a very cozy, very sensory full holiday, you know all the tastes, all the smells, all the sights. And I just freaking love Christmas time. And so when I saw that you guys grow Christmas trees, I was like, yes, finally someone who I can talk to about Christmas trees. And it's November. We are literally rolling into my favorite holiday time. Yeah.
17:51Yeah, we love Christmas obviously. I grew up pretty much looking forward to Christmas all the time. Not only because of like, you know, how great and cozy it is and all the things you said, but for me it meant I've got a job, right? I've got a job from the day we open until the day we close and then the day we close, my dad and I would be able to spend time together because he'd be done with for the year and...
18:20I look forward to that. So it means, I feel like to your point, you know, Christmas means a lot of different things to different people. For me, I think of the smells, I think of the music that we play under the barn. I think of hanging Christmas trees with my dad, cutting Christmas trees. And you know, it's just, it's a special, it is a special holiday.
18:49light, whether you're talking about the light of the world as in Jesus Christ, or if you're talking about light coming back into the world because Christmas usually falls around the solstice when the days start to get longer. But it's all about bringing light and peace back into your world. And it's such a beautiful thought. And right now, considering today's election day, I am all for bringing light and happiness and peace into the world.
19:16Yes, I'm sure a lot of people can appreciate that. Uh huh. Yes, I am. I'm going to go to bed tonight and be like, okay, if the person I want to win doesn't win, I won't be surprised. And if the person I don't want to win wins, I won't be surprised. And that way I don't have to cry my eyes out tomorrow morning either way. So yeah, there's a lot of feelings wrapped around today and tomorrow. And I don't talk politics on the
19:44the podcast so I will never say who or what but it's gonna be a very long day today and a very long night tonight for a lot of people waiting to find out what happens. So Christmas, let's see, what's your favorite Christmas food? I figured that's probably a good question if you love Christmas. Oh, it's hard to pick just one. I'd probably turkey.
20:12And if not the turkey, hmm. My grandmother always made these, she would take cucumbers and slice them up and make like this, like soak them in some sort of like cranberry sauce or something. I don't know if you ever had this before, like cranberry cucumbers. They're like pickled cucumbers. Yeah. And man, they're out of this world.
20:39So you should, you should Google that and get, and get the recipe. Cause if you, we, we always had fresh cucumbers and then she would jar these things up and they're tremendous. Nice. I would never have thought of cranberry sauce as a, a pickling agent, but that makes sense. Um, I make a homemade cranberry sauce with fruit, with fresh cranberries and orange peel and I don't even know what else goes in it, but it's a very.
21:08fallish tasting cranberry sauce. I think there's cloves and ginger in it too. And the first time I made it, I had no idea what I was doing and I thought this is going to turn out awful. And I did it to take to a family gathering where my husband and I were making the dinner for the whole family. And I'm like, I'm going to try something new and embarrass myself. Everybody raved about this cranberry sauce. And I was like, oh, I guess this is a new favorite. Okay.
21:38My favorite Christmas food is a tray of all different kinds of Christmas cookies. That's my favorite thing about Christmas is somebody handing me a little plate with like eight different kinds of Christmas cookies on it. Very nice. I live for Christmas cookies because I don't like making them because when you make them, you're stuck with one kind and there's like 50 cookies of the same kind.
22:07I want other people's Christmas cookies. I don't want my Christmas cookies. Well, you can have them. I've never been a big sweets person. What I just described with the cucumbers is probably about as far as I would go sweets-wise. For some reason, never cared for them. Well, everybody's different. Everybody's palate is completely different. So I'm okay with that. Yeah. So do people...
22:36I don't know how to ask this right. When you are selling your Christmas trees, you start selling them Thanksgiving Day or the day after Thanksgiving Day? Yeah. Thanksgiving Day at 2 p.m. our whole family will eat under the barn and then at 2 we'll all get ready to put our gloves on and people will start showing up. Okay. So you said you bring in spruce trees because you guys don't grow them.
23:05or furs, sorry. So- Fraser Furs, yeah, we bring those in and we hang them underneath the barn so people can sort of peruse through them. Okay. And I'm guessing that you have families come in to pick out a tree for their home. Oh, yeah. We have so many people come that have been, I mean, I remember kids that were my age coming with their family.
23:36you know, obviously we're older and now they're coming out here with their family. And so yeah, I've been seeing the same people my whole life. And then every now and then, you know, we start seeing a few new people that moved to the area and, you know, different Christmas tree operations shut down and they start coming to us. We see a lot of that. So, but yeah, you see a lot of the same people. It's a lot of, it's very family, family oriented.
24:04Okay, so the little kids like four to six years old when they come with their family to pick out their tree. Cause that's about the time kids start really remembering things and getting into the holidays, like starting to understand that it's exciting and fun. Are they, when they walk in and see all these trees, do their faces light up and are they bouncing up and down? Oh yeah. Yeah. They're, uh,
24:29I want this one, I want that one, you know, and usually they get their way or mama gets her way. But yeah, no, they're happy. But there's so many, most of the kids that come here are really familiar with our farm and so when they get here, they're like, you know, they're really interested in the Christmas tree for a few minutes and then they're like, oh, okay, they still have their corn maze up or they still got those horses over there, they've still got tire swings, they've still got mini golf.
24:56And so they start running all over the place because they know there's so many other things to do. They're just besides themselves, you know. Oh, yeah. I didn't even think about the fact that it's Georgia. It's probably not six feet of snow and freezing when they come to get their Christmas tree. No snow. I think I've seen snow here once in my life. I can't imagine a December without snow.
25:23I have always lived in a northern tier state, so there's usually at least a little bit of snow in December. It's so foreign to me to even consider the fact that you could have a warm day where you are on Christmas Day. I have seen many Christmases be 75 degrees and 100% humidity. Crazy. I can't, I have no concept.
25:51I know that my granddaughter saw her first snow in October here, four Octobers ago, five Octobers ago, something like that when we moved to our place, because she grew up in Arizona. And so her mom and she and her dad, her dad is my stepson, long story, not going to get into it, but they came to visit and she was like eight, I think.
26:18And at the very end of their visit, we had a day where it was very cold here in October. And it had been pouring rain and we were out running errands trying to get back before the temp dropped and it started to spit. And we rolled into the driveway just as it had started to snow and I still can't believe the look on her face. She was just looking up in the sky with her hands palm up. Like it's snowing and the grin on her face was just, I mean it ate her face.
26:46She was so excited. That's great. Yeah, she's never seen it in Arizona, that's for sure. No, not where she grew up. She'd seen it in Nebraska, because that's where her other grandparents live. But it was just like a gift. She didn't expect to see snow in October here. So it was really fun. OK, so when people come to get their treat, they can buy a pre-cut one, or can they go cut one as well? Yeah.
27:16We actually are what you would call a choose and cut farm. So directly behind the barn, there's about, I'll just say like give or take 10 acres of Christmas trees that they can walk through and pick out what they want. And we have all those different varieties. And we usually just tell people don't cut anything shorter than five foot. And you know, our prices are really actually,
27:44very, very, very reasonable. I don't think we've ever changed our prices since we've been open, like in the last 40 years. Our trees are $8 a foot. So if you got a six foot tree, a little bit under 50 bucks, you know. Wow, that's amazing. That's fantastic. The only ones that we have to change are the furs because...
28:12those, of course, the market continues to go up every year. But what we grow, I mean, it's very, very, very affordable, I would say, for someone that wants to get a nice, you know, I mean, and I don't want to brag, but I think, you know, after three generations of this, we've sort of figured out how to take care of a Christmas tree, you know, whether it's fertilizing, watering, or trimming.
28:42You know, you're supposed to trim at certain times of the year, and there's certain parts of a Christmas tree that you trim at different times of the year. And there's really a lot to that. I'm not sure I could voice it all over, but there's something to do with moon cycles. We usually try to trim before full moon. We usually leave the top growing for a while to let the tree have something to sort of
29:11reach out to, you know, to reach to the sun. And then at some point, we will cut that top and let it sort of fill out a little bit more, if that makes sense. Yes. And don't feel bad about feeling like you're bragging. My podcast is so that people can talk about the things that they love and that they're good at and that they are trying to do. So you want to brag, brag all you want. Okay. Thank you.
29:39Yeah, I mean, it's an art form and you are you are making it go and you're making people happy and you're leaving the trees that you can affordable to people and nobody is doing that right now. Nowhere in any business. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's the same thing with our fall festival. We opened up for our fall festival about 15 years ago.
30:06And our price for entry was $10 at that time. And our price for entry is $10 today. So really everything that we can, we'll try to leave it the same, you know? Super. I love that. Because there are lots of people right now who just don't have the extra money to take their families to do something fun.
30:35and your farm is fun and you're keeping it so that they can take their kids and do something that is a lifetime experience and memory. Yeah, and well, I mean, what we've noticed is that like, the more that we do that kind of thing, the more it pays off for us. So we may stay at the same price, but we see more people come and we grow more popular.
31:05And we don't get, sure we've gotten a bad review here, there every business does, but I'm really proud of what our reviews look like. We're very close to completely five stars, you know? And I think we get a really good rapport in the community because of how we treat people, not only, you know, money-wise, but just being a family business. You know, we're a family and you wanna bring your family here.
31:34And that's just the atmosphere that we tried. We're not trying to make a crazy amount of money doing this. This is just our lifestyle, you know? Yeah, and customer loyalty and word of mouth are the best ways for you to get more people to come. People to come back and then new people to come too. Oh, no doubt. Yeah, I mean, it's all about whether or not people have left here feeling like they got their money worth
32:04Is it something that they would want to do again? And if that's the case, if both of those answers are yes, then they're going to go and they're going to talk about it and they're going to tell other people. And that's what we've seen. We just sort of trusting in the process and that is, um, you know, and, and doing everything we can in between, you know, um, sometimes you just have to, you just have to have faith with it. You know, sometimes we don't know when we're starting a new venture with strawberries, we just started that four years ago.
32:32We had no clue if that would work. But all of a sudden we open up and then we see, whichever family has been coming to pick pumpkins with us or Christmas trees for the past however long, now they're coming out for strawberry season. So it's just a full circle thing. Very nice, I love that. I have one more question for you and then I'm gonna let you go. When people come out to do the events, to be at the events,
33:01Is it totally cool for them to take photos with their cell phones and, you know, are there like photo opportunities for them? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the farm has plenty of beautiful, you know, topography, rolling hills. The landscape out here is great for that. Obviously really big Christmas trees they can take photos in front of. We've got wild flowers on the farm, beautiful broom sage.
33:28We actually just had someone come out and do a session yesterday. So sometimes people will come into a session, which we only charge $25 an hour to do a session and usually no one needs more than an hour. But if someone comes to our festival to answer your question, no, there's no problem at all, they could even bring their camera and take photos. We wouldn't charge them for anything like that. They've already paid the entry fee. So as far as we're concerned, they can go anywhere on the farm they want to go.
33:59So it's a have-at-it policy is what you're saying. Yeah, it's a have-at-it policy. We definitely have insurance and we definitely try to take precaution and make sure people are as safe as they can because of course, you know, having a have-at-it policy does come with a little bit of, you know, maybe some safety measures. You just want to watch out for people. People that have never been on a farm may not realize, you know, the dangers of walking through very tall grass in the summer.
34:28in Georgia, right? Yes. So, you know, but yes, we want people to feel like they are free when they come here, you know, and can do whatever they want, you know, in a sense, right? And that's how we feel and that's what we want to share, that feeling. Awesome. All right, Dan, I try to keep these to half an hour. We're at almost 35 minutes. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.
34:59Thank you, Mary. We appreciate it. Have a great day. All right, you too. Bye.
 

Cassandra - the self-professed non-homesteader

Today I'm talking with my daughter, Cassandra, about how being raised by a mom with homesteading skills has impacted her life.
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 first born child and my only daughter, Cassandra. How are you? Hi, I'm good. How are you? I'm good. I don't know what the weather's like in Florida right now, but it's gray and misty and cold here today in Minnesota. What's it like in Florida?
00:29It's in the 80s and sunny and not a rain cloud in sight. Must be nice, although honestly, I'm real happy to see fall rolling in. So Sandra was nice enough to come and visit with me because she is a self-professed non-homesteader, at least that's how she told me or explained herself to me. But I think that there's some homesteading genes in there somewhere because
00:57You are taking care of your mother-in-law's citrus plants and avocado trees, right? Yeah, mango trees, avocado trees. We have a lychee tree and banana trees. I think that's it. I thought you had lemons or oranges or something. We have a baby lemon and a baby lime tree. They are making fruit, but they're very small. They're not making grocery store-sized fruit yet.
01:27So they look like toys? Yeah, it's really funny. Uh-huh. And how are all the plants doing? Well, so we just had two hurricanes. So the plants are not doing great right now, really anywhere near us. But right before the hurricane, the starfruit, that's what we have. We have a starfruit tree that just drops probably hundreds of fruit in October. So right before the hurricanes, that was producing like crazy.
01:56But now we just have a lot of trees that are twigs. Oh, no. Okay. So, I don't know what you know about all the fruits that are growing on that property, but did they all, are they all in season at the same time? Or is it just different? No, definitely not. I can't remember when the mangoes go, but it's like the mangoes have their season.
02:24And they're the kind of mangoes that like don't ripen until you take them off the tree. So they will stay, they'll stay good for like months as they're growing. And the lychee is a different season. And like I said, the starfruit is a different season as well. So you can't have a citrus lychee, starfruit salad all at once out of the garden as it was? Not from my yard, no, yeah. Okay.
02:50So tell me about getting prepared for the hurricanes that came through. Yeah, it was kind of crazy. We had another hurricane, not the most recent two, but another one earlier in the year. And I'm not from here, my husband is. And he was saying like, oh, the hurricanes are not a big deal. They haven't really hit St. Pete in like 10 years.
03:15So the first one was fine, we didn't do any prep. And then the second and third one, like people were predicting it to be so, so bad, we were like, okay, well, maybe let's go get some water. But, um, we talked about water. We have these big glass jugs that we always fill. My mother-in-law always fills before, um, hurricanes. We went.
03:38The joke in their family is that the only hurricane supplies you need is boxed wine and bananas. So we got boxed wine and bananas in addition to like ramen and batteries and candles. Okay. And you told me that Helene wasn't bad, but Milton was worse, right? No, Helene was bad. Helene is the one that brought the floodwater surges. Yeah.
04:08And that is what did most of the physical damage. Milton wasn't as like floodwater heavy, but the winds were crazy. So it took out like it took out trees, power, we were without power for like a week, I think here. No, I meant, I meant out of the two for you where you are. I thought Helene wasn't as bad as Milton. Because I live like on the only hill in St. Petersburg. So Helene didn't affect us as much. We're just we are not susceptible to flooding where we are.
04:38Okay, cool. So I don't even know what to ask you. You were saying about... Let me ask you. So what's your wake up in the morning homestead life routine? Okay. And then we can compare and contrast. Oh, well, my wake up in the morning is at like 430 in the morning because I can't stay asleep past four. My get up is 430, five o'clock in the morning. And it's go directly to...
05:08potty and then to the coffee maker and then to my phone to see if any new people have said yes to talking to me on the podcast. Sure. That's my get up routine. Yeah. What do you do throughout the day for home setting stuff? Meal planning? Do you do? Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. We do a weekly meal plan. We usually do it on Sunday.
05:34or Saturday and then shopping happens because sometimes you got to fill in on what you're going to need to make a thing. And we got rid of our chickens. We don't have chickens anymore. Oh, when did that happen? A month ago. We only had like nine or ten and we were only getting a couple eggs a day. They're old. Oh, okay. I see. So we called them and we're going to get new chickens in the spring because we didn't want to feed chickens that weren't producing over the winter.
06:03Right, that makes sense. Yep. I thought you meant like you stopped, you chose to stop having chickens on your homestead. Oh, no, no, no, no. We will have chickens again. But feeding chickens through the winter who are only giving us two eggs a day out of nine or ten chickens, that's not a sustainable thing to do. Everybody's got to pay their rent. Yes, exactly. They have to do their job or they have to go. Yep.
06:27Really a lot of the homesteading stuff this summer wasn't great because our weather was so terrible in the spring that the gardens really fizzled out. Yeah. So a lot of the homesteading stuff that we would have been doing didn't happen because there was nothing to can. Right, right. So it's been a very lackluster homesteading skills. Spring, summer and fall. Kyle has been...
06:55getting the insulation stuff up in the greenhouse over the last few weekends, so at least that's getting done. That's good. That's the other thing is like when you guys are working on projects on the homestead, like do you and your husband, Kyle, my stepdad, whatever, do you guys have like a weekly meeting or do you just kind of share information as it comes? It's usually a meeting before a project starts.
07:22And then it's just more updates of what's gotten done. Sure, yeah. So it's... Go ahead. Like, he was working on repotting some lemongrass out there today. And I was helping Cameron with something in here. And Kyle came in and he was like, so the lemongrass and the bottom part of the lemongrass plant, which is what you're going to cut to use as seasoning, is about as big...
07:51same diameter as his pinky finger. Okay. And he was like, so I repotted them in bigger pots so they can keep growing and get bigger. And I was like, that's awesome. So that's what he's working on today. And lemongrass is not a northern state kind of plant. You got to have some heat to grow it. So the greenhouse is great for that. Yeah, I was going to say like, I didn't know that you could grow lemongrass in Minnesota. You can, you can grow it outside. But it does much better if it's a really hot summer.
08:20Yep. And we don't want really hot summers here because hot summers are miserable. Tell me about it. As you know in Florida. Yeah. So what? It was like 100 plus degrees all summer every day here. Yeah. Global warming. Woo. So I wanted to ask you if you think that the way that you were brought up with us doing homesteading skills in the old house had an impact on you.
08:49Yeah, but not in the way that you would expect, I think. It's kind of like, you know, if you stylistically are like a very basic person, your kid is probably going to be over the top in personality or dress or whatever. And I feel like that really happened with me with the gardens at the house versus how I chose to like spring into just being a city dweller immediately after high school.
09:18I definitely was like beneficial. Like it was so nice to have like fresh produce in the house. And I remember you making a lot of rhubarb pies. Yep. Strawberry rhubarb. Mm hmm. Yep. And it was cool. Like we always had snacks like always cucumbers, whatever in the summer. But then I have like no skill in growing things. Like we talked less, we, you and I talked personally about permaculture.
09:47which is just like growing plants that are native to the area, essentially. Yes. Um, and like that is the only reason that anything in my Florida home has thrived. Like if I have to actually pay attention to it, it's over for me and the plant. But we do have, um, we have like a little herb garden and raised boxes. In addition to all the fruit, um, it's like basil chive sage. My husband does a lot of cooking.
10:17So he sure does. Yeah. So it's nice to have just like basically a live spice cabinet. Yeah. And do you help with that or does he grow it? So neither. We are staying with my mother-in-law. My husband's family's heritage is Guatemala and it's like pretty normal to have several generations in one home. So we are
10:45doing that and she is the one who planted the beds, the raised beds. But because it is so humid here, like they don't really require any maintenance. Like sometimes we have to go cut them back because they grow so aggressively with all the water that's available. Yeah. And I suppose your basil just grows all year round because it never freezes. Yeah. I think almost everything in the herb garden does grow all year round.
11:12Yeah, for us, if there's basil outside, minute it gets below 40 degrees, we're done. Yeah. It hates anything below 40 degrees. It gets a little black spots on the leaves. Yeah. We did have a problem for a little bit this summer where all the herbs were just burning. Um, like the sun was so hot and we had like a little dry spell, which is like a week for us. Um, and they just got scorched, like the basil leaves, the...
11:41the sage leaves, they're like too soft, too delicate, the sun kills them. Yeah. Don't feel bad about the fact that you went the opposite direction regarding the homesteading thing and going to a pool. I mean, I don't, but go on. Going to be a city dweller because I have talked to a lot of people on this podcast who basically left the family farm, went to college, swore they would never go back to farming and now they're farmers. So it happens. Yeah.
12:10Honestly, I'm sure homesteading is in my near future, just by way of like, the farther way you get from something, the closer you end up being to it at the end or whatever. It seems that way, doesn't it? Yeah, we have been talking about selling this house and getting a piece of land and inviting more of the family to live on the land with us. Kind of like communal living, like the plan, the loose plan is tiny houses and then one main like mess hall basically.
12:40This is the first I'm hearing of this. I don't know why. I don't know why I haven't mentioned this to you. It seems very like anyway. But if we do that, then we'll have like more reason to cultivate our own food. And like, you know, each person can take lead on whatever kind of product they want to like I want to have pigs. Like I love pigs. And I even told my husband,
13:10I do want pigs and I do love them, but you can also eat them. It's going to like, I've made peace with that. It's hard though. It's really hard, especially if you get them as piglets. Yeah, I definitely see a lot of TikToks of baby piglets and just lose my mind. Uh huh. Yeah, I'm not, I'm that way with baby goats, but we have decided we're not getting baby goats. They eat so much, right? Yes.
13:37The thing is people think that they eat the same stuff that cows eat, but they don't. They really like leaves and brush. So if you have a forest you need cleared, goats are great. But we don't have a forest, we have a tree line and we really don't want them to eat the black raspberries because we like the black raspberries. You want to eat the black raspberries. I damn right I do. Make fun. So anyway.
14:06So your husband is an amazing cook. Yeah, he really is. And your mom, it was, is an amazing cook. You were vegan for a while. Yeah, for like six years. Yeah. Go ahead, go ahead. No, you go ahead. Andre's cooking is what made me break, actually. Like, you know.
14:31I was very connected to my veganism, but also when you are in a marriage, there are battles that you can't win. And I got tired of having the same discussion. So I broke my veganism or whatever and literally put on like 60 pounds in the next like six months eating everything he makes. You do understand that cooking from scratch is a homesteading skill, right? Well, yeah. Yeah.
15:01And Andre does not just cook comfort food. He's very fancy sometimes with the stuff that he makes. Yeah. And he makes truly everything from scratch, like mayo he makes from scratch, which blew my mind. And he ordered citric acid and xanthan gum to do some gastro stuff. And truly, I was just like, I didn't even know that your average consumer could buy these things. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you can.
15:31If it's not illegal, you can buy it. Right, yeah. When he made the mayonnaise, did you actually watch it come together by chance? Yeah, I've seen it a couple times. Isn't it cool? Yeah, it's definitely interesting. Yes, I've made it once in the Ninja Blender thingy, and I didn't think it would work. Right, because it doesn't look like it would.
15:57No, I was fully convinced that I was going to do this and waste the entire thing of ingredients. And it came together and it was Mayo and I was like, I will be damned it works. Yeah, it sure does. I couldn't believe it. It's some magic. I mean, I know it's a scientific thing. It is chemistry. Science is magic. It's fine. Yeah. But I was just so impressed with myself. I was like, oh, I can do this now. Yay. Yeah. So...
16:27As you know, I recently got a job in a cold pressed juice shop and now I am having to cook not because of the juice, but we have little to go food or whatever. I don't cook, but my boss was like, do this and that's my job. So this week I made a mixed berry compote and overnight oats, which is nothing, very simple, but all day after I finished it I was like, I cooked something.
16:57I didn't even burn the compote. So did you, you did that at the shop? Yeah. So is there like a stove top at the shop? Yeah, we have like very nice hot plates basically. And like the shop that I work at, we used to have two locations. And now we're down to one, but the one location that is left where I work used to be the kitchen for the other location.
17:25So we have all of the like processing stuff there as well as like a small counter. Nice. Okay, so when you made the berry compote, how did you do it? Because I know how I do it, but I want to know how you do it. The instructions that were left for me were put the, it was like put however many cups of berries in and then sugar and I think that was it. You just put it on low and slow. And did you stir it a lot?
17:56Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's how we do it too. And we try to put very little sugar in it because usually what we're cooking has enough natural sugars that we don't have to do a lot of sugar into it. Yeah. I was pretty surprised when I saw that it like called for sugar. I understand like the chemistry of cooking, you have to have it or whatever for it to break down that way. But we use so little added sugar in everything at the shop. I had to be like, where even is that? Yeah. Okay. And then what was the other thing she asked you to make?
18:26Oh, the overnight oats. Yeah, so I had to make overnight oats also to like, make a parfait. But the overnight oats, it's not really cooking except that we also make our own cashew milk from scratch, which is also not cooking. But like, when I say from scratch, maybe from scratch, like I had to make cashew milk from literally cashews and water. And then we use the leftover cashew like goo, because you strain it through like a cheese
18:54We use that for vegan cheese making. And then the cashew milk goes into the oats with chia and then it sits overnight. That's overnight oats. But like, it makes me laugh that I went from like, can barely make a cup of coffee to having to hand make milk. Well, you're an intelligent young woman. I'm pretty sure you can follow directions.
19:24I mean, yeah, when she was like, can you cook? I was like, I can follow a recipe if you leave it for me. Yeah, most people can. Yeah. So the vegan cheese, are you going to have to make that too or does somebody else make that? I probably will at some point. Someone else is making it presently. But I think that it's just the cashew product with, what do you call it, nutritional yeast. Okay.
19:51And I remember for me, the nutritional yeast is the king. You put it on everything because it tastes kind of cheesy. It definitely has the umami taste that a lot of vegan foods are missing. Yeah.
20:06Okay, cool. Um, all right. So this is gonna be a short one, guys, because Sandra is really not a homesteader. Okay, here's the thing though, is I do have like a lot of homesteading related hobbies. Like I'm really into fiber arts, right? Like crocheting, cross stitch, like that's, that's kind of like adjacent field, no? Oh, it's it's homesteading. Yeah, totally.
20:35Yeah, like today I had, or not today, this week I had to patch the upholstery on my mother-in-law's couch because my cat ripped a hole in it. And like, I have like a darning kit and I busted it out and just took care of it. And it's so great to have those kinds of skills. And that's, that's definitely stuff I picked up growing up with you. Like when something is broken, you fix it. Like if you at all can.
21:03That's my girl. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And like I'm always like modifying clothes or whatever. Yeah. When you were a teenager, you were always taking clothes and changing them. Yeah. And I still do. I just post about it less now. And like, I'm really handy. Like when I first moved here, it made me laugh so hard. My mother-in-law was like, you're like if a man was a girl.
21:32I think because I had installed like a bidet and fixed like a porch door handle. So the, what do you call that? What is that? The like, not, it's not really stick-to-itiveness, but it's like a kin. Tenacious? Yeah, the tenacity of just like, it kind of doesn't matter what happens, like I'll just take care of it is very much like, I feel a homesteading attitude. Uh-huh. And it's also when you grow up with a family that doesn't have a lot of money and we need to make things work.
22:02Yeah, I was not saying that to be polite, but that is definitely where it comes from. Oh yeah, absolutely. And you know, I was raised in a home where there was one income, and my parents had a garden and we loved eating out of the garden and my mom canned. And my mom sewed clothes for us. She made clothes for us when we were little. So it does get passed down through the generations. Yeah, definitely. I have one more thing.
22:32Mm hmm. Handy, crafting, tenacity, I don't I don't know. My point is like, oh, I was gonna say, um, the the poverty aspect is definitely very real. And like, now I like, live comfortably. But there is still like, it's so ingrained, like, I could just go to the store and get a new whatever, like, I am literally across the street from a grocery store. But
23:01it never occurs to me to replace something when I could fix it. Yeah. And why would you? Why would I? Longevity is king. Yeah. Although I got to tell you, we replaced lights in our living room, living room last night. Yeah. Yes. The fixtures that were here when we moved in, neither Kyle nor I have ever really loved them. You walk in the living room and they're like, look at me, I'm a light fixture. And I'm like, I hate those things.
23:30So the plan was always eventually to replace them. One of them kept flickering and we couldn't figure out why. And Kyle was like, I'm done. We're gonna get new light fixtures. And I was like, yay. So he got these very low profile white rimmed lights. So they sit almost flat on the ceiling. They're only about, they're maybe three quarters of an inch deep. And they have the thing. Do they call them like canned lights or something?
23:59They're not. They're not because they're not up in the ceiling, but they're very slim. Yeah. Gotcha. And they have three settings. So you can do a low, a medium or a high. And he just set them on high because we're rolling in the winter and we just turned the clock back and he was like, you need that extra light. Having good light this winter would be good. And I was like, sure. So we didn't know how bright they were going to be until he turned the power back on.
24:27It's like two blazing suns in our living room. Incredible. But the thing is the light fixtures that we had, the globes for them were like a, almost like a brass glass, a brassy colored glass. So they were a very soft light, even with the, the daylight light bulbs in them. Yeah. And it made it really depressing in living room. And, uh,
24:57got up this morning and turned the lights on I was like oh my god it's like having the sunshine pour in the living room and it's dark out. So sometimes new is better. Yeah yeah. But but when it comes to clothes that might have a hole in them you can patch them and they're good for another year or two. Yeah. Or if you have a pan that gets dented. If it's dented and it doesn't impact how you're using it to cook you can keep using it. Right.
25:26So, yeah, I mean, frugal is a word associated with poor, but I think that frugal is actually a good way to not be poor. Yeah, I agree. And you know, people who have wealth are often described as like stingy or cheap or whatever. But that is how you stay wealthy is by not spending it. Yeah, it's called saving. Yeah. Mm hmm. Exactly.
25:55Okay, so we're at 25 minutes. I try to do these at 30 minutes, but I'm good if you're good. Yeah. Thank you for chatting with me, Sandra. I know it seems weird because you're not a homesteader, but you have homesteading skills and I'm really proud of you for using them. Thank you. I am happy that you instilled them in me. I am too, because it's important. It really is. All right, Sandra, thank you so much. I will talk to you soon. All right. Love you. Bye.
26:25Bye.