A Tiny Homestead

Wilson Dairy Farm MD

Today I'm talking with Haley at Wilson Dairy Farm MD. You can also follow on Facebook.
 
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Haley at Wilson Dairy Farm in Maryland, I think it is.  Good afternoon, Hayley, how are you? Good afternoon, I'm great. And yes, you're right, we are in Maryland here, Baltimore County. All right,  and you guys  are a dairy farm and
00:27I've actually been really looking forward to this because I don't talk to people who do dairy. I talk to people who do  cattle for  eating the meat more often. So, uh number one, how's the weather in Maryland today?  Today is absolutely gorgeous. We hit 50 degrees and it's been sunny and just a light breeze and it feels like a nice spring day in January.  Yeah, oh in Minnesota it is pushing 40 degrees. Everything is melting. There's no wind.
00:56It's sunny, it's gorgeous. It feels like April, not January. Yes, I'll take it though. Yeah, me too, because I figure two weeks from now it'll be minus 20 with a wind chill of minus 40. Exactly, we don't quite get that cold, but anything under 30 degrees is cold for me. Yeah, it definitely gets cold here in Minnesota for sure.
01:21We had a night last winter that was pushing minus 50 windchill and I thought you know, maybe the northern tier states aren't as much fun as I as I think they are so I bet All right. So tell me about yourself and about your dairy farm because I am so excited to hear your story Sure. So my name is Haley Wilson. I grew up on a commercial dairy farm My dad milked around 220 Holsteins at our biggest
01:50So we were a small commercial dairy farm because there are a thousand head dairy farms out west. There's much bigger farms than that. for us, that was a lot. We milked 200 cows a day. It was about three hours in the morning and three hours in the evening. We had some family trouble over the property about six years ago. My dad's siblings had all left the farm when they were young.
02:15like a lot of small family farm disputes go, they came back and they wanted their inheritance. we were in a lawsuit during the COVID timeframe between 2018 and 2021. And um because of COVID, we actually never got to see a jury trial. We had a judge who just decided everything. And because my grandfather's notes that said what he wanted to happen with the land were not notarized, he said none of them could be
02:43admitted as evidence. So we actually ended up losing everything. had around 350 acres. it was all, yeah, it was all gone to my aunt and uncle who live in Virginia. They're not even local. So that was something we went through a couple of years ago that was really heartbreaking. And there were a lot of emotions surrounding the lawsuit, know, anger, frustration, just disappointment all around. My dad really took it hard.
03:09And  my sister and I kind of felt the weight of the family and we kind of had to figure out how to keep things moving. As far as the dairy cows go, I was able to keep a couple of my nice show animals.  I just kind of took them to different dairy farms around the state of Maryland, actually. People were very generous and would house them for me. Just last year, I found this farm  about 10 minutes away from my home farm where I grew up.
03:33and the people who own it were renting it out to a family who were moving and I reached out and everything worked out perfectly. I was able to move in last fall. I brought all of my young animals, so like my little calves and my breeding age heifers, no one who's in milk yet. I brought all them home here about a year ago.  And for the last year, I've been working on fixing up the farm  and getting a parlor built.
03:58When you're going to milk more than just two or three cows, you've really got to have the facility for it. And since I planned on shipping milk grade A to a cooperative, like my dad did, I had to have the facility to match their standards. So I just accomplished that here in November, and I'm shipping milk for 25 cows for the last 60 days. So that's catch up to where I'm at. Is it just you? It's just me.
04:24Yeah, it's just me. My parents live in a house that they rent down the road. My sister has a little farm she does ag tourism business  with, but I'm the only one that lives here. So whenever I say we, I mean me and the dogs, me  and the animals. We is a me and my animals concept. I um don't have anybody that lives with me or helps me. It's just me. Wow. Haley,  I am so impressed and so proud of you. Thank you.
04:53That is a lot to take on as one person.  It is definitely a lot. Once I got a routine, know, things have, it's like anything, you know, once you get a system down, it becomes a little bit easier, but there, you know, there's definitely tasks out there that I have to wait until I can call my dad or somebody to swing by and help me. It's just not possible to do some jobs by yourself. So I do my best,  but I do have an intern that sometimes will come down from Penn State when she's on her breaks and she'll help me occasionally.  So.
05:21People are very generous. Our community being in Baltimore, it is a big city below us, but ultimately the area that I'm in in the county, the community members are great. If I need help  fixing the manure spreader or fixing the tractor, there's people I can call that'll run over and just do me a favor and they'll help me out, which has been life-changing. Yeah, community is so important, especially when it's just one person trying to do what you're doing. Yes,  absolutely, yes.
05:51I mean, community is important anyway, but boy, you are really fortunate that you have people around you who are more than willing to help. That is fantastic. So how many cows do you have? So I'm currently milking 25. Now with the whole community concept, they're not all my milk cows. I only owned about 13 milk cows. So the other cows are actually from three other neighboring farms who said, hey, this young girl is trying to get started.
06:19go ahead, you can take a couple of our cows because I have to have enough milk to reach the agitator in my tank. They were willing to give me their money producing asset because they believed in helping a young person get started in the dairy industry. So I actually only own 12, I think it's 13 now, I just had one calf, 13 of my 25. I own them, they're registered in my name, but the other half of my milk cows are actually belonging to neighborhood farms who are trying to help me.
06:47get my feet under me and get started here. Because the rule is when the milk goes in the tank, you have to have enough milk in it to reach the little agitation stick that's in the tank. And if I didn't ship enough milk, it wouldn't stir and it would create bacteria. So there's lots of regulations around that. So  I own about 13 of my milk cows and then I actually have another 13 of the younger stock, which would be the calves and heifers that are not milking yet. So I own about 30.
07:17Wow. Oh my God, Haley.  I'm so blown away by everything you've just said. There's a  lot to it and it can be very overwhelming. It should throw at you all at once. So if I have to repeat anything, if you have further questions, feel free to stop me.  No, I just, can't believe how everything is coming together for you to do this. Yes. Nope. I don't believe it some days either, but I have to say I have faith.
07:44And not just religious faith, but faith in myself, faith in the goodness of the world, faith in just things working out. And I hate to say it, but if I wanted to get this far or to even go further, I have to have that kind of just belief that things will work out because there are days, there are really cold days when equipment won't start or the days where maybe a cow is sick or if I lose a calf, they're really tough. And the only way to get through them for me is to have faith that things will  work out the way they're supposed to.
08:14Yes,  and things do work out the way they're supposed to. The problem is sometimes the supposed to part isn't the way you wanted it to work out. Very true, very true.  I understand that completely. I've had a lot of those moments in my life, but I'm 56 years old.  I have lived a great life so far and it all does kind of come out in the wash. There's some really terrible things that happen.
08:42And there's some really fabulous things that happen that offset the terrible things. yeah. Just keep moving. Just keep going. It's all perspective. It really is. Yes, exactly. Wow.  I am just sitting here dumbfounded. I cannot believe all the stars that had to align for you to get where you are.
09:03Me as well. definitely, this fall as things were coming together, I, you things fell together and people offered, whether it's a manure spreader to borrow or coming to chop the corn. So I'd have feed in my trench for this winter to milk the cows, all those little things. I say little, they're big things, but like you said, everything just fell together so great. I will forever be in debt to lots of people around here. Well, I'm sure that if they needed something, you would be right there for them too.
09:32Yes, absolutely. Yep, because that's how this works.  You don't receive the kind of blessings that you're receiving on this without giving some back.  Correct. And if you own animals, if there's people who have  homesteads and they have any type of sick livestock where they need medication and it's nine o'clock at night, you're calling your neighbor who maybe also has animals and has something in stock. So that's just how it works when you have animals and have to take care of everybody.
10:00So if it's just you, do you manage to get any sleep at any point in time? I do. So I try to go to bed by 9.30 and I get up around five. So I do get  some hours of sleep. uh I do work a day job also away from the farm. And as sad as that sounds, I can't afford to pay my bills if I don't do it. So I wake up at five and I'm usually working outside until about eight or 8.30, depending if anybody needs to be bedded up or if I have to restock any hay or feed.
10:29and then I'll eat breakfast and I'll go to a day job from about nine to one. And then from one to three, I either run some errands or I come home and just try to relax. And then I'll feed the cows and do some afternoon projects and start my feedings again. And I'm usually finished by about six, 30 or seven at night. And then I have about two hours to do  whatever inside I might want to do. Sometimes it's just hanging out, but.
10:55Sitting still is not something I do well. So it's almost good that I'm this busy. Okay, tell me again how old you are, Hayley. I'm 29. Okay, so you're still in the, the, I'll sleep when I'm dead, 20s phase. Yes, yes.  Yeah, I was raising kids in that timeframe  and uh I was busy from,  oh my God, two o'clock in the morning until 11 o'clock at night because, because kids, you know. Yeah.
11:25Kids don't necessarily sleep from  eight o'clock at night until six o'clock in the morning.  And I had four kids.  And my youngest didn't sleep through the night until he hit kindergarten. So  that was a rough five and a half years.  bet.  I can't imagine.  So when  you're talking about all the stuff that you're doing, I am absolutely blown away.
11:52But I also know what I was doing when I was your age and people were like, I don't know how you do it.
11:59Yes, yes. It has its perks. I do  feel tired more so than others other days, but that's usually in response to like mental exhaustion.  Like you said, the physical exhaustion, I can get through it, can  push through it. But usually if I'm very stressed, if something  takes a toll on me mentally, those are the days that it can get to me and get caught up on it. Yeah, for sure.
12:29brain is good when your mental health is good, you can go without sleep for a while.  But you get that mental health thing dragging you down and you're not sleeping, it's not gonna go well.  Exactly, and I think that's very important to mention. In the dairy industry in general,  they talk about dairy farmers having a suicide rate higher than any other occupation, even above veterans. And that's one of those things that it speaks to you, just about how much of a toll that these people go through. uh
12:58you know, and there's nobody there speaking for them and the number of dairy farms is shrinking and there's so many people who just don't relate to what they go through.  And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to do this as well is having a social media presence and sharing the  problems and  the challenges with the dairy industry. I love what I do, but  even in the last 60 days, I have learned so much of how much these industry
13:25cooperatives that I am tied to, you I'm under their thumb because they are the ones hauling my milk. They're the ones finding a market for my milk. So I'm at their mercy when they want to change prices, when they want to change my hauling price, ah the  flexibility of their hauler or lack of thereof.  I've had to take buildings down. I've had to move my driveway. I have no choice. And most industries are not like that. You have some say or at least you get a day or two off here or there.
13:54As a dairy farmer, you don't have a say and you don't get a day off. So it does become exhausting.  absolutely.  Okay. So I have a question for you that might be touchy.  Is raw milk illegal in Maryland? It is. Raw milk is illegal for human consumption in the state of Maryland. It can only be sold from a farm if it's labeled as pet consumption only. That's correct. So if somebody buys it under that  label,
14:22and they choose to use it for themselves to drink. Is that  okay? Yes. Yep.  I know lots of farms who have said, know what, forget the co-op that I'm signed with. They're not doing anything to help me. Instead of getting 40 cents per gallon of milk from the grocery store, I'm going to sell directly to the customer, whether that's listed as raw milk or actually getting a grade A permit to process their own milk, either way.
14:47They'll sell directly to the customer and get three, four, five dollars per gallon in their pocket. So people can do what they wish with whatever they buy as long as the label meets the standards of the state and the federal government, the farmers in the clear. Good. I haven't had raw milk in Minnesota in  years, and part of that is because  I can't afford it anymore.  I looked the other day.
15:14I was just curious to see what some of the local farms were selling raw milk  at.  Over $10  for a half gallon. Oh my gosh. I was like, yeah, that's too rich for my blood. That champagne taste on a beer budget. I can't do it.  That's very true. And I think maybe some farms have gotten a little aggressive with it.  I have not gone down that route yet, but...
15:39I know around here people will pay double digits for a good raw gallon of milk. And maybe that's because where we live, cost of living in Maryland is extremely high, but their incomes is reflective of that for the most part, so they can swing it. But most parts in the country are not gonna pay 10, 12, $14 for a gallon or even a half gallon. That's crazy to me to hear as a farmer who produces milk. Yeah, I...
16:08I want to be able to pay it because I think that anyone who takes care of cows  earns every penny. But I just can't. I just can't do it.  Of course, of course. So, and I love raw milk. It is one of my favorite, favorite things for coffee in the morning because it is so good. Yes, I love raw milk. I have been drinking raw milk my whole life and I'm  happy to  share it with people who ask. It's just one of those things that I just do it quietly.
16:37If people ask, we're like, yeah, bring a container over, I'll get you what you need. But it's not one of those things I'm allowed to sell for a profit. Right, yes. And I'm going to tell the story again. I've told it like five times in two years on the podcast. We drove home  to Maine. I grew up in Maine.  And  milk is actually allowed to be sold  in grocery stores in Maine. That's raw milk. And I didn't know that. That was not the case when I lived there.
17:06And we went to the little general store down the road from my parents and they had glass bottles of raw milk.  And  I took a bottle up to the counter and the girl behind the counter, said,  how long has it been legal to sell raw milk? And she was like, I don't know where you from. I said, well, my parents live up the road. I grew up in Steep Falls, Maine.
17:30I said, but I live in Minnesota now and it's, don't find raw milk in a store. You have to get it from the farmer at the farm. And usually you have to bring your own container. And she was like, oh man, I knew you weren't from Maine, but I didn't know you grew up here. I said, yes, I did. She said, I don't know how long it's been legal to sell it in Maine, but it's been a while. She said, cause we've been doing it for a while. She said, we're not allowed.
17:58She said, it is frowned upon to advertise that you're doing it.  And I said, frowned upon. And she said, yeah, the state of Maine doesn't really like us to promote it.  And I said, okay, so every state has different laws about this. She said, they absolutely do.
18:21Yep, yes, that's correct.  So yeah, it's crazy.  I... People drink raw milk for  a very long time before we've got into the pasteurizing and  putting parameters on what we as humans get to choose to drink.  it bothers me to no end, but I always have to ask if somebody's in the industry. Sure, absolutely.
18:48And two, with pasteurization, know, back 100, 150 years ago, 200 years ago, when people were getting sick from raw milk, they did not have the regulations that we have now with the stainless material of the pipeline,  the cleaning regimen, whatever it is that the state requires. Each state's a little bit different. But I know the crucial testing that I had to go through, and I get test results every single week from my co-op. And I will tell you that our milk, whether it's, I say our milk, the girls' milk, my milk here,
19:17is cleaner than anything else you're ever going to get. I believe it. And the other thing that a lot of people don't know is that if you  sell your milk to whoever the hauler comes and your milk is tested, the whole truck gets thrown out if something's wrong with the milk, right? Correct. Yeah. If you test positive for antibiotics, if a cow is sick and I have to treat her just like we would treat our children or ourselves, you go to the doctor and you get antibiotics because you have to kill.
19:47that bacteria, whatever's growing, you've got to get ahead of it or it could kill you. It's the same with the animals. They have to be treated.  And then that milk has to be dumped appropriately for the right amount of time. And I have snap tests here. If anybody works in a vet office or even a doctor's office, they might've heard of a snap test. You can test milk, you can test blood with them. And my test specifically tests for antibiotics. And if I mess it up and I ship it,  I have to pay for the whole truckload. Yeah.
20:13does that whole truckload get dumped? It's useless? that's I thought. that's correct. They can't do anything with it and they don't want us to contaminate any other milk at the processing plant. Yeah, that's what I thought because that's how it is here too. Yep. And it's really important that that's the way it is because, you know, we've got to have safe food. It's just really unfortunate that things like that happen. And I'm guessing it hasn't happened to you yet.
20:42Not yet. Knock on wood. I am very adamant. I try to use leg bands to mark the cows if they need to be treated. I put it in my phone as constant reminders as to when was the last treatment date. I will test once in the morning and if it's questionable, I'll test again in the evening. It's just one of those things I'd rather be safe than sorry.  I can't afford to make the mistake. So fingers crossed I never have to do that, but I know new accidents happen  and it's just a good thing there's so many checks along the way to catch it.
21:11Yes, exactly. And I'm going to say this too. I was talking with Joel Salatin back a year ago for the podcast. You know who he is, right?  The name sounds familiar, but place him for me. Okay. He has Polyphase Farm in, I think it's Virginia or West Virginia. And he's big in the homesteading uh realm.  And he raises cattle and pigs and chickens and
21:40He's just really famous in  this circle.  And  he was saying that when he went to college, he went to college for becoming a journalist.  And uh when he told somebody he was going back to the family farm, they said to him, you're way too smart to just go be a farmer.  And the reason I share this is because  from what you just told me, you are incredibly smart.  You have to be.
22:10to be doing what you're doing. Farmers are smart. They have to be. I agree with that. And I feel like farmers are smart in a funny sense. And when it comes to troubleshooting and trying to solve problems, a lot of people think, well, I'll just call the plumber to fix it. I'll just call the electrician. As a farmer, can afford $180 emergency call for the plumber. So guess who's just going to figure it out? You know, we're smart along the sense of being, I don't know, personal,
22:41as troubleshooters. You know, we're always trying to find solutions. So we're forced to think outside the box when it comes to solving things. Well, the other reason I said that you're smart is because you have a lot of things you have to keep track of. And you have to be organized and you have to understand why you're doing the things that you're doing. That's correct. Yes, that's true. So I bet you're smart as a whip.
23:05Ma'am?  try to be pretty quick. You know, you to stay on my toes. And I think a lot of dairy farmers are like that. So that's a good uh analogy. Dairy farmers are pretty quick. And if they're not, you'll see which farms maybe struggle.  You've got to be able to stay on top of it. And you've got six million things going on at once, just like a mom, just like a parent. You've got so many things moving at once.  You've got to stay on top of it or things get dropped. Yeah,  absolutely. So are your cows Holsteins? Because you mentioned Holsteins in the beginning.
23:34I do have a couple Holsteins, that's what we milked growing up. So I kept a couple from my original family line. My dad did buy me a Brown Swiss when I was eight years old. So I have actually transitioned primarily to my Brown Swiss. So my herd of my 13 or 30, if you want to look comprehensively, is probably 80 % Brown Swiss. And then the last couple will be my Holsteins. Okay, I've never heard of a Brown Swiss. Tell me what's special about that breed.
24:02So the Brown Swiss are from Switzerland. They are one of the  main seven dairy breeds in the world.  They have the high butterfat content similar to a Jersey or a Guernsey. So they're a color breed is what they're called.  They have big white fluffy ears and a nice dark gray coat. I just I love my Swiss. They're like big puppy dogs and they are a bigger breed. So they're going to grow to be some of the biggest in my herd.
24:27but they're so docile and so slow moving.  I just love the personality of my swiss. They're super sweet and loving and like a lot of animals,  any breed can be that, but every single one of my swiss has been great to deal with.  I can hear the love in your voice and I am like that about the Jersey cows. I love them so much. Yep.  They are my favorite cow to look at. They are my favorite cow.
24:56to actually go up to and pet if I'm allowed to. Yep.  They're gorgeous. So I get it.  Everyone has their own favorite animal. Yes, that speaks to you. It speaks to you in a way that just touches your heart. And my Swiss,  I love them to death. They're great.  Uh-huh, absolutely. um So how many gallons of milk does a um brown Swiss? Is that what you said? That's correct, yep.
25:24How many gallons of milk on average does a brown Swiss give a day? So it depends on what stage of lactation she's in. Most of my brown Swiss are going to peak around 70 or 80 pounds a day. And when I say pounds, that's what we get paid in. So we're looking at pounds as a dairy farmer. Now, a gallon of milk weighs 8.6 pounds. So if she's milking 80 pounds in a day, that's about nine gallons. So she's not
25:51white as high of a producer as some of my Holsteins who could milk 100, 120 pounds a day. But ultimately the Swiss will have your higher butter fat and protein content. And those creamy, those creamy factors are actually a higher pay scale for the co-op because the co-op is going to pull that butter fat and protein out to make your cheese and your butter and your ice cream. So they,  what they lack in quantity, they make up in quality. uh Absolutely.  You've got this down, ma'am.
26:21I'm so impressed with you. Well,  I've done a lot of studying and I told myself if I'm going to do it, I've got to at least be somewhat prepared. em I understand I'm still learning every single day and I'm still calling my neighbor and saying, hey, this cow doesn't look right. This is when she calved. Her eyes are little sunken in though and she's not really milking right. You know, what would you recommend I give her?
26:45and we'll go through the list of medications and treatment options. So there's still things I'm learning every single day.  ultimately my goal is to have happy and healthy cows. Obviously I want them to milk as much as they can because that affects my milk check,  but I do not push them beyond what their body is capable of. I'm a competitive person. I want to do well,  but ultimately I love my animals and I want them to do the best that their health can allow. Yep. That's exactly the reason to do it.
27:15You don't get into raising dairy cows for  grins and giggles. That's correct. That's very correct. Okay. I don't really want to end this on a bad note, but  I know that dairy farmers in America  do not make a lot of money in their chosen profession. That's correct.  So you guys do it because you love it. And that is fabulous. But I really, really hope that
27:45The love of it makes up for the lack of income because I worry about you guys. We need milk and I worry that a lot of dairy farmers are just gonna go away because they just can't afford to stay in it. That's correct. And a lot of legislation, a lot of the rules and like I said, the co-ops, the bigger dog people don't care about the small farmer. They're always looking at the dollar and unfortunately the small farms are not being taken care of. So your options are get bigger.
28:13or sell direct to the consumer or be done. I have to weigh my options as well moving forward and see what I can sustain. I love what I do. I will always milk cows. I just have to figure out what would be the best for both them and myself right now. Yeah. And it's a very fine line. And I really hope that you get to continue to do what you love with the cows. And if you don't, don't
28:41look at it as a failure, please, because you are doing the best you possibly can. Thank you. Thank you. Like I said, I didn't want to end this on a bummer, but people need to know it's really hard being in agriculture and it's doubly hard being a woman in agriculture. Yes, that is 100 % true. I know this year they've delegated 2026 as the year of the woman in ag.
29:09So I'm curious to see what programs and what they're able to provide for women in ag this upcoming season. Yeah,  I'm just thrilled that there's finally a  year  of the woman farmer. Yes, yes. It's only taken till 2026 to make it happen. I know,  I know people. We're a very reactive country. We are not proactive. And that is one of the things that's driving these small dairy farms into the dirt as well.
29:39But unfortunately we cannot change the mentality of the masses, but those who see it, know, those are the people who can step up and make a difference for some of these small farms. Yep, absolutely. And I'm always saying on my podcast,  know your local farmer,  know your local  producer, you know, gardener. Because if the shit hits the fan and our grocery system goes down,
30:08it's gonna be really important.  And it's important either way, but it's gonna be really important then. Correct. Everybody should have some type of garden and even like a goat or a sheep.  That is a huge thing that I would love to see 90 % of the country, which I know populated cities isn't ideal, but I would love to see a higher percentage of the country have some type of animal more than just a dog or a cat  to raise their kids to take care of.
30:35It just teaches so much responsibility and caring for life and understanding death and everything that comes with it. Like you said, even just having that relationship with your local farmer or producer is golden for people now. It really is. It's so incredibly important. And  important has become trite. That word has become so overused.  And I don't have another one. So it's the one I'm going to use.  All right, Haley, I tried to get these to half an hour. Where can people find you?
31:05Sure, so you can find me on Facebook or Instagram. I post on both.  Facebook is Wilton Dairy Farm MD.  Right now  I'm growing steadily, so hopefully I'll see some people's new faces here soon.  Nice, okay, awesome.  As always, people can find me at AtinyHolmsteadPodcast.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can go to AtinyHolmstead.com slash support.  And there's a new podcast.
31:32that I am doing with a co-host. Her name is Leah  and she's from Clear Creek Ranch Mom on Facebook.  And um there's two episodes out already, third one on Monday and the website's being built right now  and the first three pages are up. oh The website  is Grit and Grace in the Heartland and the podcast is Grit and Grace in the Heartland Women in Agriculture.
31:59Haley, this was great. Thank you for filling me in on dairy and cows and how hard it is and how much you love it. I so appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on today. Thank you. Bye.
 

Mystic Roots Homestead - Herbal Simples & Apothecary

Today I'm talking with Corey at Mystic Roots Homestead - Herbal Simples & Apothecary.
 
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters.  I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Corey at Mystic Roots Homestead, Herbal, Simples, and Apothecary  in Kentucky. Good morning, Corey. How are you? Good morning, Mary. I'm good. Good. How's the weather there? It is sunny  and almost in the  50s in South Central Kentucky today. It's really kind of crazy for it being January.
00:29Yes, I'm in Minnesota. It is going to be 40 and it is sunny and we have about three or four inches of snow on the ground right now. my goodness. I would love for some snow. had a very, very dry Christmas this year. So does it snow in Kentucky? You guys are pretty south, right? It does. I think in 2015 we had, or no, 2014, we had about eight feet here and I'm closer to the Bowling Green area. I was working at
00:58I was a dispatcher then actually, and we had so much snow that we had to close the interstate down. It was rough that year,  but it does. It's not been bad or equated to a lot in the last few years, but we've kind of been waiting for it. The woolly worms have been telling us it's coming, but it's not showed up.  And the woolly worms lied to me this year. I saw seven different woolly worms and all of them had different stripes.
01:27different width stripes. And I was like, okay, I need some consistency here, guys. And see, we've been all of the  persimmons have been given a spoons shovels, but we've not seen  it'll probably be here in mid February is when we'll see it. Okay, so for the listener who doesn't understand what we are talking about,  woolly worm caterpillars are are black and like a reddish brown.  And the ends of the caterpillar are black and the middle is brown, I think. And
01:56The middle band of the caterpillar tells you how long and how hard the winter is going to be.  And all of them I've seen have been different. And the persimmon fruit, if you cut them open,  it looks like a spoon or it looks like a fork, right?  Or a knife. A knife, okay.  if it's  spoon, fork, or knife. Okay, so if it's a spoon, it indicates lots of snow. uh If it's a fork, it indicates what?
02:24It will, I think it's very mild and then the knife it's going to be frigid. It will like, the knife will be cold enough it'll cut through you. Yeah. So it's a very frigid winter. Fork is very mild, but a shovel, you're supposed to be shoveling through that stuff. And that's what we've had, but we've not had it yet. Yup. I understand the last two winters we've had, not counting this one, we had a foot of snow each winter. That was it.  And the reason that I wanted to clarify what we were talking about is because not everyone is up on their,
02:53their weather lore. And if you want to learn about it, the old farmer's almanac talks about this stuff all the time. It'll even tell you when to cut your hair. Yes, it will. It will tell you when to breed your cows. It will tell you everything. We do a lot of stuff based off of the almanac and the cycles. We like it and it works that way. They've been doing it that way for hundreds of years. Why would we change it? Yeah, if it works, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Don't fix it. Exactly.
03:22All right. So tell me about your homestead and what you do. We started full on homesteading  last year. I've been staying at home for about three years now with the girls  and  I got a few quail and then I got some ducks and I got some chickens  and I started a hatchery.  We wanted to gear more towards sustainability  and
03:51I had a lot of hormone issues and we had some fertility issues and I started falling in the rabbit hole of herbalism.  And that brought me closer to my spirituality because it allowed me to learn about the land and the things that are provided here that are local that I can forage,  but that also heal my body. And that led us into homesteading and it blew up.  You fell down the rabbit hole.
04:19Literally with everything Just right in like Alice  Mm-hmm. Yep. Absolutely. That's how it happens. You get sucked in and you and you learn things and you're like what else is there? Yes, and now my family I Usually they come to me for little things. We don't get sick in my house a lot  So they're always like what are you doing? What are you using and I'll be like, well, here's some tea and
04:46I say community herbalist because I just offer consultations to people now at this point and if they want product,  I just let them have it. And that gets them an entryway into this  and it's an amazing place. It really is. um I am trying so hard to remember  to this spring, get um bird netting over my elderberry plants. Yes. Because they're trees.
05:15Which means we're gonna have to figure out a way to throw it over the top of the trees and they're at least six feet tall.  I would just grab a ladder  and tie some rocks to the other end of your net so it's heavier when you toss it. Yep. And that will help.  I have a friend that I used to teach with and she has a farm that's about two  minutes from my house  and they have a light.
05:42Grove of elderberry that's wild and I made four gallons of syrup this summer. Wow. Okay. So  I'm going to ask you because I keep looking it up and I keep thinking I need to make a bookmark and I always forget and have to look it up again.  What do you do with the berries to make it into syrup? Do you put them through a juicer? How do do it?
06:02You boil them on the stove. There are some people that will make an oxymilk first with apple cider vinegar, which allows it to be more shelf stable.  But what I do is  I put all of the berries into a big pot and I boil that down on a slow cooker for like seven hours.  Some people boil it because you have to  use that heat to break down  the bad chemicals in the elderberry because they have cyanides in them.
06:32from the seeds. But when you do that, that breaks that down, that heat breaks that down and it makes it tolerable for you to use. Okay. So I don't even know what the inside of an elderberry looks like. Is it a little tiny seed or is it, is it like-  So you know how like blackberries, each blackberry little pod has a seed in it that's about the same size of the berry? Yes. It's about the same. Okay. And then  after it boils down, I run it through a fine mesh strainer, put
07:01equal part honey to it and refrigerate it. Okay. Can you  okay. So  we have a pressure canner and we have a water bath canner. Can you can it too? You can if you use I believe the shelf stable version. I don't make the shelf stable version so it needs to be refrigerated. So it's only good for about three to four weeks  on um outside of the refrigerator but then it lasts for about six months in refrigerator.
07:30Okay, so it might be easier just to put it in the refrigerator. Yes, and there are tons of recipes. uh There is the Appalachian Forager. She's from Eastern Kentucky. She's got a big following on Facebook as well. She has a wonderful shelf stable recipe for it.  I've just not tried it yet. Okay, I'll have to look her up too because she might be somebody I want to talk to on the podcast. she was the possum festival queen as well, I believe. She's cool. She is amazing. She's big into fungus and mushrooms.
08:00So she's, she's who  got me started. found her and I was like, if she can do this, I can do this. She's not far from me. And I, she's,  I, oh, she's amazing. I'm going to have to look her up. Okay. So  I didn't mean to go off on a tangent about elderberries, but every time somebody brings up um foraging, it's the first thing comes into my head and we have been here for five years.  I have not gotten a single elderberry yet because the birds get to them before we do. They are so quick.
08:30Yep. And they're so quick. And that's why if it's the minute you have to watch them about every single day, the minute that they start ripening, you got to grab them. Yeah. The minute that they're good, grab them. The birds will get them. Cause if you go back the next day, they'll be gone.  Uh huh. Oh yeah. The birds love them. Yes. And it's so funny because I didn't even know we had these two elderberry trees until the second summer we were here. And I was like, I swear that's elderberry.
08:56And my husband said, okay, we'll look up how to identify it. And I did. And I said, does it have thorns?  And he said,  no. And I said, that's elderberry.  I have a little bush that's growing in like my tree line. It's only ever had like three flowers on it. So it's not really worth breaking anything off of to use for myself. just leave it for the birds to carry around and hopefully they'll spread some more. Yeah. But, um, when I saw it, I saw the flowers and I was like, Oh, what is that?
09:26And then I learned that it is also  very easily mistaken for em nightshade  and also wild carrot.  like, not nightshade, hemlock. Yes. So hemlock and elderberry and wild carrot all favor a lot. So you have to be very particular, but they're  all larger plants than each other. Like wild carrot looks more like  a wild flower.
09:56And hemlock grows up to like 10 feet. Yeah. And hemlock has some, has some medicinal properties, but if you're not careful, it'll kill you. Yes,  it will. And it's spreading so much in our area that I've offered to come and pull it  and remove it for people so their kids don't get into it  and things like that. Cause it's dangerous even to touch if you're not careful. Cause it has that powder on it. Yeah.
10:27So,  yup. Do you guys have wild plum that grows in Kentucky?  We don't. have, um, pawpaw trees  and,  um, I've never found one, but those are common here. Well, we have wild plum all over Minnesota and it's one of the first trees that blooms in the spring.  I would love plum jam. Uh-huh. Oh my goodness. We have a, we have, uh
10:54It's really hard to explain. We have a wild plum tree, but it was actually five that grew right tight together.  it looks like a massive wild plum tree, but it's actually five different trunks. So you have a little grove. Yeah, it's really weird. It looks like one tree and then you walk up and you're like, oh, there's five trunks here. All together, like touching each other.  It's really bizarre. And my husband picked some and brought them in just for fun this fall. And I
11:22They have little spots on them because they're buggy. not going to spray a wild plum tree. And I basically like cut it in half, washed it, cut it in half, took the pit out and ate the plum. And it was so good. They're so good. So sweet. And I said to him, said, if you and the boys want to have a plum picking party this fall, I said, I will help you make wild plum jam. And he said,
11:48This year, 2026, that's what we're going to do. We're going to try to get enough Oh, that's so exciting. Yep. Oh, I wish you were closer to me. Well, maybe if we make it, I can let you know and I can ship you a jar. Yes, I would pay for it. You don't have to, and it's not allowed. We cannot. In Minnesota, we are not allowed to ship anything that is bought. Bought. Okay, got you. But I can send it to you as a gift and no one Absolutely. I would love that.
12:18Well, I will see what happens.  I'll have a little box together and send you some remedies as well. Because there's some I can say I can send things as long as it's not glass.  Yeah, and we can send a glass jar. It's fine. We just can't I just can't sell anything that I make  that I cannot ship it.  What are like,  I'm unfamiliar because of course, it states very but what are like your all's cottage laws there?  Okay.
12:45This is one of my favorite and not favorite subject to talk about ever.  In Minnesota, there is a cottage food  registration.  It's not a license. It's called a registration.  And you sign up, you register for this registration and you can sell things out of your home kitchen, but they have to be shelf stable products. Right. So  no cheesecake.  Um,  no oh
13:14No buttercream frosting. Right. No, no dairy that hasn't been cooked into something. Right. We, I think it's similar here. Nothing that has to be refrigerated or warmed up. Yes. Yep. And, uh, the other thing is that in, I think it said 2027 in the email that I got, we're going to be able to ship our products within Minnesota. Well, that
13:43opens up some new doors.  helps. Yes. But that's good. But it'd be really nice if we could ship anywhere. That would be great. Yeah, that would be. think I'm not real, I don't deal with food stuff. And when I talked to  my local health department about the herbal stuff that I was doing,  with Kentucky, you have to be careful because of the realm of cosmetics.  So if it can absorb into the skin,
14:13You have to be very careful with what you call things. That's why soaps are okay. Like goat milk soap and things, but you can't make lotion  and sell it because it falls in the realm of cosmetic. So you have to be really careful.  That's why I geared more towards, I'll give consultations. I don't really like to sell my products, but I'll teach you  how you could do this for yourself at home.  Do you make lotions, Corey?  No, I make some balms and salves, but I've never
14:42dabbled in lotion.  Yeah, I tried making a lotion for my kid. He had some really dry skin on his face and he  wanted a homemade remedy. And I used um cocoa butter and coconut oil and something else. Can't remember what it was now.  And I was trying to make a lotion and that was what the recipe that I pulled off the internet said it was, said it was a lotion.
15:06And  when I put it all together and stirred it, it was like a lotion. And the next day it had set up like a salve. And I'm like, missing an ingredient. I don't even know how to make it lotion. And I don't know the science behind That's why I like salves. I like something that I can like  dip my finger in. And  I  use beeswax.  And however much beeswax you use will determine the  stiffness of your salve, which just works better for me. m
15:34If I'm using anything for the face, I'm going with tallow. Yep. Yep. I didn't have any tallow at the time, so I ended up using the cocoa butter. Cocoa butter's great. Shea butter's great. I love  aloe butter.  Aloe butter's a good one too. Yeah. The thing that we discovered though when I made this for him is that cocoa butter smells like chocolate. Didn't realize that it would. And especially if it's raw cocoa butter.
16:04Yep. And so he went to use it and he said, my face smells like a of hot cocoa, hot cocoa. And I well, I said, it's too bad you don't have a girlfriend right now because she would be kissing your face all over because most women love hot cocoa. They do. We do like hot cocoa.  It smells, it's, just such a rich smell because of the cacao, but it's so  fresh.
16:33I like hazelnut for that reason too, because it smells rich. It's a really good fragrance. Oh, absolutely. I love hazelnut coffee. Yes. And you can smell it when it brews through the entire house. It's... Yeah, husband made coffee scented soap last weekend. I it was two weekends ago. And the whole house smelled like coffee all weekend. I was just like, can make coffee scented.
17:02Soap anytime you want. Does he make goat soap? Nope. He makes just the cold process. I gotcha.  Cause we have friends that have goats, but they actually sell their goat milk to people so that they can drink it. So they don't always have any extra. And well, it's a very lengthy process to do goat. My mom used to, we raised Nigerians at my mom's for a long time and we would milk them and make soaps with them. And the curing process is very
17:31lengthy comparative to like cold processing. But  we loved it. My mom, she loved making soap, but she  got busy. She started teaching and  the goats were not suffering, but she wasn't spending the time that she wanted to with them. So it was better for her to discontinue her herd. Yeah, it happens. It takes time and it takes energy to raise animals.
17:57It does the stewardship and it is a dedication that a lot of people don't have  and it's hard work and discipline. And even if you're sick or cold  or it's ugly outside, they still have to have care. Yes. I always say that when you take on animals, you're taking on another kid. Yes.  And we, have hundreds of chickens, goats, or not goats. have sheep, quail.
18:28I  have rabbits now, we have pigs. They all have care. They all have to be cared for, but they're all like my children. Yep. it's,  again, I'm going to say it again. It's so hard when you have animals because  you  love those animals. And my dog yesterday, no, two nights ago was acting off.
18:54She was acting like she was starting to not feel good and I was like, please don't make me worry about you right now. Everything is going okay.  Do not be the problem child. She's the only  dog. And I got up  the next morning and she was back to her normal self. But I looked at her I said, thank you for not making me worry about you today. Right. Yeah. Like I can't handle that today. I had a bunny that was acting funny the other day. We had moved some cages around because I had a bunch of grow outs and I was looking at them. was like, tricks dude.
19:24I don't know what's wrong with you, but like we can't be having this. And the next day he was fine. Yup. It's so, it's so  heart wrenching when you think something's wrong. And then if it turns out to be actually wrong, it's even worse. Yes. And I think  it bothers me in the world that we're in because people don't understand.
19:50the difference between that some of my animals are pets and some of them are not pets, but they still receive the same amount of care and love.  And I would not let anybody suffer and
20:07That care that we give to them doesn't differ just because we choose a different timeline for specific animals for the needs that they provide on our farms. Yeah, absolutely. We just lost a chicken yesterday and my husband came in from feeding the chickens and he was like, we're down a chicken. And  I said, you kind of thought maybe we might be down one sometime soon. And he said, yeah, he said, I, I wish there was a vet to take chickens to.
20:37And I said, if they didn't expect you to pay the cost of 50 chickens to take care of the chicken, that would help too. Yeah. And that's the thing is with you, you have to, as a homesteader or a farmer or animal steward, you have to make those decisions. Like, am I going to pay a thousand dollars to take one chicken to the vet?  Or  am I going to do everything that I have in my resources and power? There are things that I keep here on hand.
21:06I've spent a lot of time learning how to doctor the chickens through the seasons. So that way we stay ahead as a preventative maintenance. Anytime there's a shift in the air, they get oregano oil. Yep. And that cuts respiratory issues about like 75 % on my farm at least. We're going to have to try that. We put apple cider vinegar in their water.
21:34I like the oregano oil because  oregano actually acts as an antimicrobial.  And so it's  wonderful for your gut health, but it will also take care of any kind of bacteria that could be happening that doesn't need to. I'm going to have to add that to the list. Thank you, Corey. You're so welcome. love it. We,  um, I use Tygaard  if there needs to be treatment, of course, which is available on Amazon.
22:04but  I also get oregano oil in a dilute form and it's on Amazon too. Okay.  I will have to look that up and acquire some and add that. think,  I think we'll probably still do the apple cider vinegar because  it to help  too. Yeah. Our chickens have been laying humongous eggs lately because we have a light in the coop.  Yes. And that's
22:33People are like, it's cold. They're not like, it's not the cold that does that. It's the light. sun went away. Yep. They need 12 to 14 hours of sunlight a day to produce eggs. Yep.  And people don't understand that. And you can,  which a lot of people do do artificial. I have so many  birds that I don't have to, we still get enough that I have a plethora of eggs.  Um, but with my quail, I have to substitute light sometimes where I won't get anybody laying. Okay.
23:03Um, I have a question about your quail. Do you have a lot, do you have a lot of quail? Yes. Do you sell the eggs to restaurants? I have not ever had anybody inquire. We considered it, especially being so close to Nashville. Um, but I am not producing that many. Um, we just hatched a close to a hundred in September and I've been going through and regrouping everybody. So I've got four.
23:32No, five different coveys with at least 20 hens right now, but I've not been  supplementing light for the last month. Okay. So what do you do with all the eggs when they're producing full tilt? My dad pickles them. Okay. They either get pickles, he eats them, he likes them as well, or I feed them back out to the flocks or the dogs. Okay. And they're little tiny eggs, right? Yes. I can just toss them out to them and they just eat them.
24:03Okay. That makes sense.  Um, if you ever do have a chance to sell them to restaurants, you should look into it because restaurants really like quail eggs. Yes. And I thought we have some interesting restaurants here in Bowling Green, of course,  because it's like the third largest city in Kentucky, but there's just not a huge market for it right here.  For me, at least that I found, and I may not have done enough.
24:32digging, but maybe I need to, have some friends.  need to dig around more. Yeah. I mean, I'm not telling you, you have to do it. I'm just saying, there is a huge market for that. Yeah. And even like the duck eggs too. Yeah.  I was very surprised. We were selling our friends, duck eggs in our farm stand this summer. Could not keep them stocked in the farm. People love them. Yeah.
25:03And people, there are tons of people around here that like the quail eggs too because of the nutritional value that they offer compared to a chicken egg. Yep. hear that a lot. They've got, they're so nutritious.  I don't, I'm not an eggy person, which is so weird because I have so many birds that lay eggs, but  I usually  gift eggs. think in the last six months, my male lady has gotten a hundred dozen eggs.
25:33She's the best, so she gets all of the eggs.  Nice. I'm sure she appreciates it. She's wonderful. But we also raise button quail. Not just, I have catornix and buttons, which are like oriental to look at quail, and they're tiny. And when they hatch, they're about the size of a bumblebee. Oh my God. They are so little, but they're so fun.  And they whistle, and it's like,
26:03And it's so cute. I didn't even know there were button quail. I learned something new every day on this podcast. They're not really worth anything to a homestead, but somebody that would want maybe a little ornamental bird, but didn't want like a parakeet. They're great. They covey the same way. They are a little bit flighty, but they're so cute.
26:31Yeah, there's a lot of they're so cute on a homestead. swear. They will. there's because it's everything's so cute. How do you not like farm animals? Yeah, it's ridiculous. I am a sucker for a baby goat. My  husband's mom or my husband's mother-in-law  and his sister all or my mother-in-law and his sister all raise goats. We have hair sheep. Yeah,  I prefer the sheep to the goat. They
27:00behave a little bit better.  do. And it's funny because my husband and I have talked off and on for 20 years about how great it would be to get a couple of baby goats and raise them. We have been on a 3.1 acre homestead for five years. Do you think we've gotten any baby goats? No. Do you know why? Because they're a pain in the butt. Right. That's what I told Jared. We've only got about five acres right here, but we've got neighbors. And I was like,
27:28Honey, the pigs get out enough. don't need the goats getting out too.  which we have wonderful neighbors. They love all of the things that we have because the chickens and the roosters especially, they crow all day every day because there's so many of them. They just talk to each other and they're like, we love it. It's so funny. We get so tickled at it. And I'm like, I'm so glad you don't hate me. Yeah. Our neighbor, our closest neighbor is a quarter mile away and I wish we lived that for far.
27:58They are industrializing our area. We're hoping to move soon,  um, on further away from  Bowling Green. We're 30 minutes away from Bowling Green and it's still growing fast and fast.  So we can't get away from it fast enough. Well, I wish you all the luck in the world with that because the best thing we ever did was move out of the town that we lived in.
28:27So we were right in town. We were townies. And now we live in the middle of cornfields and soybean fields and we love it. And our neighbors have a rooster who crows every morning. I hear him at 4 a.m. and he's got the softest crow. Like if he's crowing hard, something's wrong. Right. And they have at least one donkey and I can hear it bray now and then.  We would love one. And they have they have at least one.
28:56bovine, I don't know if it's a steer or a cow. And every once in a while I will hear it doing the lowing sound that they do. The really low, soft moo. I grew up on a dairy, I love cows. Uh huh. And I just, when I get up in the morning, I sit on the porch with my coffee and I just listen to all the animals waking up at our neighbor's farm. And I'm like, hey, better them than us. Cause I get to hear it, but I don't have to take care of the critters.
29:22Well, like we're in one of the smallest counties in Kentucky  and I'm nestled right in Mammoth Caves back door. Like I'm five minutes from the whole entire park. We're from Edmondson County, which holds the majority of the park itself.  So you wouldn't think that it would be as populated,  it's Bowling Green is growing. So now Edmondson County is growing.
29:49And so on the side of the river that we're on, on the South side, it's just becoming more populated. I want to go to the other side where it's not, and there's not so many people. And so we wouldn't be going far, but far enough that it's not populated as bad. Yeah. Yep. I understand, Corey. I really do. Which is just, I think it's just happening everywhere now.
30:18It's at pop, people are moving.  There've been an influx  of people from California here, which is great. I love that. Come live, come live here. It's not a slow life. It's not simple either, but it's not as fast as the city. Yeah. Yep. Absolutely.  All right. I try to keep these to half an hour, Corey, and we are there. was an absolute joy talking with you. Where can people find you?
30:45They can find me on Facebook,  Mystic Roots Homestead,  Simples and Apothecary, Herbal Simples and Apothecary.  I have a TikTok page as well. TTS, Mystic Roots. I do TikTok shop, wellness stuff that  I align with and then of course the bunnies.  But that's the two places they can find me. You're not on Instagram yet?  I have a personal Instagram, but I don't use it.
31:14I don't know. I got so focused on TikTok and the farm page on Facebook. I was worried to take on too much at one time. That's probably smart. The best advice I've gotten since I started the podcast two years ago  is to pick a couple platforms and stick with them, the ones that work for you. Yes. And that's what they said. That's what I heard as well. And that's what I did. And so far it's working really well.  I would like to advance more in meta because I feel like
31:44There's more growth as a content creator, but as far as like, if you're doing anything with affiliate, it's TikTok right now. Yeah, I don't even, I have a TikTok account only because my daughter posts things and a friend of mine posts things and they're like, you should have a TikTok account so you can see what we're doing. It's fun over there sometimes that people can be mean because there's of course billions of people can be mean anywhere. I don't understand that. It's free to be kind to just go on about your day.
32:14I'm going to say this. I haven't said this on the podcast ever before. takes  less muscles to smile than it does to frown. And I feel like it takes less muscles to be nice than it does to be mean.  I agree. I agree wholeheartedly.
32:31I don't know why people have to be mean. It's one of my biggest pet peeves ever and I try not to talk about it it just makes me mad.  As always, people can find me at a tinyhomesteadpodcast.com. If you want to support the podcast, you can go to a tinyhomestead.com slash support.  And I've started a second podcast with  Leah from Clear Creek Ranch Mom on Facebook.  The podcast is called
32:59Grit and Grace in the Heartland, Women in Agriculture. There are two episodes posted. Love that. Yeah. And we have a website that is, building it. It's like three pages in right now. And that's gritandgracenheartland.com. I will run over there and give you a follow. Everybody else should too. Mary, this was such a wonderful experience for me. It was really fun and I learned new things. I love you guys because you teach me things every time.
33:29Well, I would love to chat with you another time. Anytime you let me know if you want to. Yeah, I would love to hear more and half an hour is not nearly enough time for everything I want to ask. So we'll do it again in about six months. Okay. Sounds good, Mary. We'll talk to you later. Thank you, Corey. Thank you.  Okay.
 

O'Connor Family Acres - Surprise Piglets and a Soap Business Begins

Today I'm talking with Tracy at O'Connor Family Acres. 
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters.  I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Tracy at O'Connor Family Acres in Le Sueur, Minnesota. It's a hyper local episode. Welcome Tracy, how are you? Hi Mary, thanks for having me. I am doing well today. It seems like it's going to be a little warmer today here, so very excited. And we're supposed to get freezing rain later today too.
00:28I mean, why wouldn't we? It's Minnesota. So  yeah, it's very gray, but that's why we're warmer. so yeah,  Tracy's been on the show before. It was a little over a year ago. And we talked about that you had just gotten pigs,  mangalitas, mangalitas. Yep.  And um that was the newest thing then. And Tracy has been selling her duck eggs in the summertime, all this past summer.
00:58at our farm stand, at our place. So it's been kind of fun. Yeah, it's been a great collaboration. I really appreciated the opportunity and it's been nice because we,  springtime and summer, we are  overflowing with duck eggs and then they take the winter off  and  know, hunker down, I guess.  Yeah, about the time they stopped really laying, we had a couple of people stop in and ask if we had duck eggs and I was like, nope, they're on vacation until April.
01:27It's very true.  they yeah we and you can put heat and light in the coop But we kind of let them follow their natural cycle. That's just you know, the way we've we decided to do it. So Yeah,  when they lay they lay very proficiently and when they don't they don't so You know, so what else is new on the farm in 2025 because I didn't talk to you on the podcast since December of 2024
01:57Yeah, so we've really just been expanding the goats.  We've had some baby goats this past spring and so they've been doing really well. um Getting kind of a wrangle on what the ideal number of ducks are.  So we've been working on that. And then we had  baby piglets  unexpectedly this fall. I mean, kind of unexpectedly. We knew the boar was in there with her, but...
02:25We didn't realize she was pregnant. that was a fun uh adventure.  And thankfully, our mama pig, Fiona, her name's Fiona,  has been doing  really well with the piglets. So  we have six  gorgeous little baby piglets running around. How old are they now?  Oh,  they would be about two and a half months. OK. Yeah.
02:53They were right before Halloween. just, yeah, just over about almost two and a half months. And they are so adorable. Like so adorable. I saw the pictures on Facebook that you posted, but I couldn't tell from the pictures how big they were when they were born. Were they the size of your hand or were they bigger than that? Yeah, they were probably the size of two of my hands, I would say. But they were, I mean, they were teeny teeny.
03:23um And then of course it was October in Minnesota, so we got to pick them up and bring them in the barn and mama did great with that. She was  not overly thrilled but was not aggressive, which was great. And then  we were able to, after a bit of time, coax her into the barn. um And we had the heat lamp set up in there and  they have a big enough paddock where they can
03:49go to the other side or come back and be under the heat lamp if they want. And they are just, they're doing super great in there. So yeah, looking forward to figuring out what we're going to do with. So what'll be eight pigs now, two adults. We have the male boar and then the female. And then we have the six piglets and of the six, I think only one is male. So all the rest are female as well too.
04:19Oh wow. Mm-hmm. Yeah.  Okay. Well, you might be in the market to sell a couple sows in the spring.  Exactly.  Exactly. I don't think they're called sows until they have babies. don't know  what version Yeah, I'd have look. It's... guilt? Are they guilt maybe? Yeah. Yeah,  I think that's right. I don't know. I'd have to Google it and I don't...
04:46want to make the clicky clacky noises on the keyboard right now. So yeah, no, I feel you. Yes, exactly. And then I've been doing soap. Soap has been my new adventure this year. yeah, tell me the story on how that happened because I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, I kind of fell into it, which was awesome. So my neighbor has the soapies is the name of the business.
05:12um And the soap bees has been around for 20 years, over 20 years. So my neighbor, Anne, who is amazing, um was looking to retire and not do soap anymore. um And  she asked if I would be interested in taking over the business. And so we made some soap together and I was like, oh my gosh, I love this. Absolutely, I would do it. So I have a full time jobby job, um you know, so it's really more of a
05:41you know, a part-time  pay for my hobby kind of job.  You know, maybe make a little extra money, but not, you know, I'm not trying to do it full-time, full-time, but um so I do probably one,  one show a month or so  and um just, you know, direct sales then  and um
06:04She mentored me for about seven months. made soap together.  I have her recipes, so it's all the same recipes that she's been  using for the last 20 years. um And the soap is amazing. Absolutely love it. And then  I ventured into,  also do, we do a shaving soap puck.  And then  I also ventured into dish soap this year. So I've been making that bar of
06:33of dish soap. So that's new just in the last couple of months. um So yeah, I was really fortunate to have an amazing mentor  and um you know, she told me the do's and don'ts so I didn't have to learn those on my own through  trial and error, although I've made plenty of trial and error my own self once I was flying solo. So, but it's been good. It's been really good. Good. Have you had a batch Cs on you yet?
07:03Absolutely. Yes.  Yeah.  It's  not fun at all.  And I just had my first batch  I  made.  So the soap or the shaving soap recipe is less because I put them in the round molds instead of the big square loaf molds. Yeah. And so it's less butters and oils  and  I put in the fragrance for a one tray of the square ones.
07:33instead of the lesser. And so now I have this chalky,  crumbly soap and I'm like, oh great.  So that batch is  going to get tossed probably. But yeah. hate it when that happens. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I've had a few where, um, so the other thing too is the sense that she was using the company that she went through. I took over the business in January and
08:01end of January, they went out of business. I was like 90 % of the  sense that she had been using were from that company. And I was like,  okay. So now I've  been kind of trial and erroring, erroring, trial and erroring soaps,  our fragrances. And so that's been a whole process as well too. But I feel like I have a good core group now of
08:27sense and then I just kind of mix stuff in when I feel like something new. So that's been good. So what are your usual sense that you make? Yeah, the big sellers are, mean, oatmeal, milk and honey hands down is the like best seller and I put ground up oatmeal in there as well too. So it has a little bit of exfoliating action and also it's very soothing for the skin. So I have people who
08:56have sensitive skin that order, I mean, like 15 bars at a time.  They just love it. And then um Angel Smiles is another big seller for us.  Sweet Rain has been an amazing one.  But I have a lot of the tried and trues. I have a cotton,  I have a eucalyptus, uh lemongrass is my personal all-time favorite.  I love the lemon smell. That's a good one.
09:26Um, and then I tried a new one this fall called crackling birch. And that one has been a great seller. So that one smells really good too. Nice. Um, Kyle and I have had one batch of soap seized on us and it didn't all the way, but we just, we just went ahead and poured it because it was still pourable, but it was starting to get thick, thick. Yeah. One hadn't poured it and let it cure.
09:54And it turned out that it was usable, but it was ugly as sin. And so we didn't share it with anybody. We just used it till it was gone, because it was fine. It was just, it just looked wrong. When we sliced it, had like little air bubbles in it. Yeah. Which you're I actually had a batch of eucalyptus that did that.  And the best advice I ever got was  just...
10:19Basically just sell it. Don't worry about it because at the end of the day people understand that it's handmade and that You know, it's you're not a machine pumping it out. There's imperfections. It's gonna look a little different sometimes um and I was  Honestly, I mean there's times when I've been like, I'm gonna mix these colors and it doesn't work, know, or I'm gonna do I'm gonna make this. Oh, I did um
10:45I did one for Valentine's Day last year  that was going to be, was the, the fragrance was sensual. So I'm like, oh, that's perfect. I'll do red. It'll be great. Right.  Um, it turned brown.  So I was like, wow, that's  not very sensual.  Um,  so I ended up calling it Woodland Bouquet and it was one of my best sellers. What did it smell like?
11:14It smelled like woodland flowers basically when I first smelled it and that's the other thing too, which I'm sure you guys know from doing it.  Sometimes what you smell in the bottle when you get it is different  once it mixes with the oils and the lye and you know all the stuff. And so when I opened it, it smelled like, I mean, old lady perfume to me, honestly, like in a not good way.  And I was like, oh no.
11:43But once it cured through the soap, oh, it smelled so good. It was just like, yep, like walking in and picking a bouquet of woodland flowers. That's what it smelled like. So that's why I called it woodland bouquet. And I figured,  you know, brown woodland. That's okay.  Yep. And honestly, not everybody is hung up on the names.  They want whatever they want. And if it smells good and it does the job, they're going to buy it anyway. uh It's so true.
12:12Kyle made a batch of leather soap the other day, last weekend. eh That  leather scent that we get from Bramble Berry is  so strong when  you open the bottle em and it gives me a headache. So he told me he's going to make leather soap and I said, let me get some Tylenol on board before you start because it's going to make my head pound. And he was like, okay, I'm going to start in an hour. was like, okay, let me go grab two Tylenol right now.
12:41Yeah. Did not end up with a headache, which was great. But the reason I'm even sharing about the leather soap is that I would never want a soap bar that smelled like this stuff when you opened the bottle. It's very, very strong and it's very chemically smelling. Yeah. But the bars of soap when they're done, they smell just like walking into a Wilson's leather shop. It's so good. Yeah. It's so nice. Yeah. It is so true that there are some where you open the bottle and you're like,
13:11And there are some that are just not my cup of tea, but they sell well. So when I'm making them, I'm like, oh, I'm going to smell like this  all day.  But they sell really great. And someone had asked me that actually at the last show I was at. And they were like, are there any scents that you don't like? And I go, oh, absolutely. But I will not tell you which ones they are.  I'll never admit it.
13:40Yeah, and I actually told you wrong. made the leather ones two weekends ago.  He made coffee soaps last weekend and that's always a happy day in my house because everything smells like coffee  all day long when he makes that. And then as it's curing, the whole upstairs smells like coffee.  Oh, and that's got to be your absolute favorite because you are a coffee fanatic. I love it. I do. I love the coffee soaps when they're curing because
14:05It just permeates the whole house and it smells like there's brewing coffee even  though there isn't because I'm down to a,  we make a pot in the morning  and I only have about two cups a day now. Whereas I used to drink a pot and a half a day in my younger days. Yeah, I hear you. I feel like as,  as we get older, things affect us differently, especially caffeine and alcohol and you know, all the things, all the fun stuff, rude.
14:33Well, I used to say all the time I would sleep when I'm dead and now sleep is my favorite thing ever. So that has changed too. It's so true. I feel like that's a whole nother podcast though. Yeah, the one about peri, menopause and menopause. exactly. The minute you hit 40, 45, everything changes. It's so true. It's so true. Okay.
15:00So I just made back to sorry, back to soap. I just made a fresh batch of my first batch of coffee soap. So I'm going to have to bring it over and compare it with your, like do a smell comparison with yours. I'm not sure if I like it or not, but I got to wait for it to cure. So well, we can, we can trade. you like ours, we can give you a bar of ours. And if I like yours, we can take a bar of yours. Yeah, that'll be fun. That'll be so fun.  I love it. I love that you're doing so and
15:30Kyle said to me the other day, said, you know, he said, I think I just want to make the business a hobby. Because we don't live in an area where it's going to really make money. And I said, that's true. And he said, so we should probably fold the LLC. And I was like, before you do that, said, I've got a podcast and I've got a second podcast starting here.
15:54let's keep the LLC for a little bit because the podcasts might actually grow this year more than they have. And he was like, okay.  So, so we're basically gonna still sell at the farmer's market and still sell at the farm stand. But, his big dreams for being, you know,  rich off of our little business are  done.  Yeah, I don't, I feel like anybody that I talked to that does it, you know, on a smaller scale is.
16:24You have to have two jobs or you have to have a breadwinner and someone doing it, you know, separately because there's just with the cost of everything, there's just no way to, you know, unless you're like really hustling and really, I mean, you have to, you have to really dive in. And to your point, I mean, there's so much in the market that you have to kind of, you know, really
16:53I don't know, really hit a sweet spot  or, you know, travel a Yeah. Yeah. And it's hard. Yeah. There's got to be something unique because if you're just making the same thing everybody else is making, it doesn't matter. Yeah. Yep. Well, and I think like I've definitely been at shows where you can tell vendors when you can tell the vendors who are doing it for their sole income versus people who are not. mean, they're sometimes it feels there's like this
17:23energy where it's really like intense. went with a friend. I met a friend  who started doing charcuterie boards with the em acrylic inlay. ah And I was like, oh, bless your heart because I can't imagine working with acrylic, but  she does beautiful work. so we were chatting, you know, shows and things like that because she knew I had done some shows and you
17:52How do I figure out which shows I want to do and yada yada. And we were walking around this little vendor fair and we went to a soap booth and this lady had a laundry stick stain, which I love a good laundry stick stain. So I was like, oh, can you tell me what's in your laundry, you know, in your soap here, in your laundry soap, stain soap stick, I don't know, whatever. And she was like, no, I cannot tell you. And I'm like,
18:23okay.  It was just so she's like, and then she went into the, 12 reasons why she won't tell me what's in there. But we were walking away and I told my friend, I was like, mean, good luck trying to find the right ratio of those ingredients to get the exact same thing. said, I literally have my ingredients on my label. I was like, you know, but good luck trying to figure out how to mix those seven butters and oils together to get the exact recipe I have, you know.
18:52Um, so I just feel like sometimes people are really intense with it. Yeah. I have stopped asking people questions like that because, and if I do, I'm like, okay, I don't want the secret sauce thing. Just give me a basic idea of how you make the thing because people do get really testy and I'm like, I don't want to steal your idea. I just want to know what I'm going to be putting in my body or on my body.
19:20Yes, exactly. Like knowing what's in there, like knowing it has coconut oil or shea butter or whatever is one thing. But if you're like, oh, I need to know, do you have seven ounces of this or do you have like, that's a fully different question. But just knowing what's in there. I what if you're, I had a, had a lady who came up and I have coconut oil and she's extremely allergic to, one of the ingredients, maybe it wasn't coconut, it was something.
19:51And I was like, oh, yep, don't touch it. It's in there. oh It's important to know what you're  putting in there. then there's, people have  certain, um they want certain things in products or don't want certain things in products and that's your personal choice. if it doesn't align with what you want to utilize, then  you shouldn't have to.
20:20Yeah, it's kind of crazy, but  I've really been enjoying it. The shows are fun. It's nice, especially since I work from home. It's nice to be able to get out and  see people and interact with people. um And for the most part, everybody's been extremely supportive, extremely friendly. um You know, some shows are great successes and some not so much. uh that's, you just kind of take the good with the bad. And you know, I always look at it as an opportunity to get out and try new things.
20:49Yes, and you are a social butterfly, unlike me, who is basically a caterpillar still in the chrysalis. You're so sweet. I always say I'm an introvert that presents as an extrovert. I am great small group and great one-on-one. If you get me in a massive crowd of people, I'm like, ugh. I still force myself to do it, but I am...
21:17I'm much better one-on-one in small group, which is perfect for affairs and stuff because it's small, you  you're talking to individual people. You're not having to, you know, speak in front of large groups or that's not definitely. I can do it. I don't love it. You know, I'm sitting in my sunroom right now looking at the birds outside, which is perfect. um I love your sunroom. Your sunroom is so cool. Thank you.
21:45It is, it was a big selling point for their buying point for the house. guess it would be buying point. um Yeah, we were, I really love this room and it's my absolute favorite. Thank you, Mary.  Does it stay warm in the wintertime? It stays. Yeah, it does.  There's in floor heat, which is nice. um So it works out really well. um So the thank you to the people who developed this.
22:12end of the house before we bought it.  It's beautiful though, so it's great. And I just refilled the bird feeders this morning, so, I knew we were going to be chatting and I'm like, oh, you can sit out here and relax a little bit while we, while we, while I get to talk to my friend Mary. Yeah, I'm going to fill in the listener here. I, my husband and I have been over to Tracy and her husband Paul's house once. I have been there once and the sunroom she's talking about.
22:40It basically is uh windows on  one whole wall. And I can't remember if the other short wall is windows or not. Is it just one more? Yeah, it's got one like big sliding glass door basically. m Yep. uh behind their house is a ravine.  the glass wall looks out into the trees  that are at the top of the hill before the ravine.  And uh it's the most peaceful thing to sit there and
23:07have a cup of coffee and chat and just be looking outside at the birds and the bird feeder. It is my absolute favorite. Thank you so much. Yeah. And I, um, you know, I have house plants in there too, so you kind of get the oxygen and the greenery going. So yeah. Yeah. We need to have you guys over again soon. we do. And today is not it because I'm not going anywhere in freezing rain. That is fair. But, uh,
23:37Yeah, my favorite room in our house is my kitchen because  I've always had either an apartment with a kitchen, which is not fun.  And the house that Kyle and I had before had a galley style kitchen and it was very small and it wasn't a room that you could sit in and have a cup of coffee. And I love our little breakfast nook thing at the end of the kitchen because we didn't have that before. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and for the listeners, we've been to your house a couple of times and
24:05There's an amazing island in the middle of the kitchen where we get to sit and have coffee and chat a bit while the boys are out talking garden stuff. And uh we've had dinner over to where we've sat in  the nook and had dinner, which was great. It's great conversation and it's warm and  welcoming and I love it.  Thank you.
24:29And our little nook has windows that look outside into the trees too. So I think Tracy's going to have a running theme about wanting to look out into the trees and see the birds.  Exactly. Exactly.  All right. So  I wanted to share this too. Tracy gave us three beautiful kittens about what a month and a half ago, maybe less. That's about right. Yep.  Because we needed some more barn cats because we were down to two.
24:56and two is not enough for humongous pole barn and a 3.1 acre  lot. uh the kittens have decided that they are brave. They have finally come out of the pole barn  and they were up on the steps this morning and they are gorgeous. And anyone who has a ranch or a farm knows that barn cats have their place and they need to be here to do their job. But I also fall in love with them just a little bit.
25:21We were holding off on naming them because we were afraid that they would run away when we let them out of their carrier. They did not. They have stayed. And the long haired grayish,  blackish  one  is Smokey  and she's female. The one that looks just like her but is short haired  is named Shorty because she has short hair. And then there's a long haired orange one that we don't know the gender of yet.  And his name is Junior because he looks just like our other orange barn cat.
25:51And thank you, Tracy, for sharing the kittens with us because they are so special. thank you for taking the kittens because we,  anyone who knows who has a farmer ranch knows they multiply very quickly. So,  um, yeah, no, it's been great. We, I'm glad that they're doing so well and I'm glad they're venturing up to see you, which is good. So they're, they're great. The cats are the, you know, just.
26:20They're  to your point, they have a purpose, right? They're rodent control for sure. And they a really good job. A great job. Yeah. But they are also, you know, they're fun. They're fun to interact with and pet the kittens and, you know, watch the cats do funny things and  they're fun.  So I came out the other day, I went out to feed the goats and the pigs and I turn around and it's, you know, just like late.
26:48dusk so it's almost night but there's just enough light you know yeah um and i turn around and there's cats in the tree like up in the tree over  where the roof is and i'm like what are you doing like there's four cats up there what is happening right now  um and they just you know they were just chilling they went up there after something i'm sure but oh crazy um
27:17The kittens that you gave us, can't remember if was last weekend or the weekend before, whatever the last weekend was when it was actually sunny for an afternoon. We've only had a few of those lately. um All three of the kittens and the older orange cat were out in where the doors are to the pole barn, like where the track is.  They were just roughhousing and rolling each other and then they would be nice and groom each other and they go back to rolling each other.
27:44And I sat there and watched them for 15 minutes because it was just so entertaining to see them playing. Exactly. It's so fun. I know I'll always get caught up, but sometimes when the baby goats are running around, I'll watch them play with each other, have a good time. I sat out there, I threw some hay out for the pigs because they like to kind of burrow and make a nest. so I threw a couple of hay.
28:11pieces of hay over  and the pig was literally picking it up and throwing it and putting it everywhere, strewing it everywhere. And it was just really fun to watch him just love life. um And so that's always, you know, it's such joy. It brings such joy for sure, which is a lot of uh fun. Simple joy.  We humans think that we're the only ones that play.
28:38but almost every animal will play when they're young.  Oh yeah. So apparently it's something we actually all need is to play.  Yes. Yeah. Well, it brings joy for sure. And then seeing other animals, peoples, humans,  know,  laughter  is definitely the best medicine. Someone said that.  I don't know who said it, but I'm glad they said it. Yes.  Agreed.
29:06All right, Tracy, I tried to keep these to half an hour and we're almost there.  Where can people find you?  Yeah, so I have,  we have our farm pages, O'Connor Family Acres um on Facebook and I also have the Soap Bees, which is on Facebook as well. um So those are my two, my farm, you my homestead page and then my soap page.  So both of those are on Facebook and I...
29:36You know,  do so I do ship my soap. um I actually have a customer in Massachusetts I ship to and a customer in Florida that I ship to. So, ah you know, just I post  a list of my sense every now and again, and people just message me through Facebook to order. So very nice. So these on Instagram. ah It is not, but I was actually just looking the other day about setting up an Instagram account. Do you have an Instagram?
30:03I do. don't like Instagram because I still don't understand how the algorithm works. Yeah. Okay. I'm going have to, I'll do a little more research on that. Yes. And I have been asked by customers to set up a website for orders. So that's on my 2026 bucket list, but you know, there's an expense with that. So I also try to keep it as, you know, I try to keep my prices as low as possible. And some of that is, you know,
30:32considering those things, but um so eventually I'll probably get a website together, but right now I'm all on Facebook.  Well, it's free and it works for now.  That is true. That is true. Thank you so much. It was really great to chat with you today. It really was. And I will talk to you after I stop recording about the website thing because I have a couple of things for you. Okay.  Oh, perfect. Love that. Thank you. All right. As always, you can find me at a tinyhomesteadpodcast.com.
31:01And if you'd like to support the podcast, you can go to a tinyhomestead.com slash support.  And I have a new podcast,  the first long episode. I did a teaser on Friday, but the first long episodes is going to be dropped tomorrow morning.  And the new podcast is called Grit and Grace in the Heartland Women in Agriculture. Which was amazing.  The teaser.
31:24Anyway,  I did listen to it. You guys did a really nice job. It's I think it'll be  it'll mirror this nicely, but with a different focus, which will be awesome. um And you do an amazing job. So I'm excited to hear more about the women in agriculture.  Well, 2026 is the International Women in Agriculture,  sorry, International Year of the Women Farmer. So.
31:51Yeah, very cool. Yeah, I learned that on your podcast. So  women are starting to really step forward and we, Leah and I really wanted to die.  Cannot talk. Talk about it in more depth. There we go. Perfect. Another cup of coffee coming. That's what I hear.  Oh, for sure.  All right, Tracy, thanks for taking the time to chat with me. Yeah, thank you for taking the time. Have a great day.
32:21You, too.  Bye.
 

Cole Canyon Farm

Today I'm talking with Morgan at Cole Canyon Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well.
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters.  I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Morgan at Cole Canyon Farm in Montana.  Morgan's been on the podcast a few times under a different name. So hello, Morgan, how are you? Hello, I'm doing good. Yes, most of your viewers know me as Groovy Grazers, which we're still doing, but...
00:26We had talked about last time trying to come up with a farm name. And so we finally figured it out and it's coal Canyon farm. So we're super excited to finally have that done after two years.  That's a long time to settle on a permanent name.  Yeah. Yeah. It was hard to name the land. We live in a very unique area. We live in canyons, ah but there is  a Canyon battlefield. We were trying to take on like not your atypical Montana name, you know?
00:55It definitely fits. We're excited. We got to come up with our brand next. That's going to be a nightmare. guess trying to get your brand registered here can be really hard and there's not very many like single stick brands left. So that's man. I hope that doesn't take two years, but that's next on her on the chopping block. So  I don't know that we have that situation here. When we started our place, we just picked a name, registered it with the state and that was it.
01:21So the name's okay. I can pick my name without registering that with the state, but I mean, we don't have cattle right now. We have horses um and the sheep don't have to be branded. So it's not like a super big rush, but if I'm going to have horses, especially being in Montana,  going missing is not uncommon or they get out.  Brand, brand, brand. get it. Okay. Brand. It's okay. Yeah. I'm talking like iron brand and like,
01:51either freeze dry or hot iron brand um because that's like one of the next big things that you do in Montana. You pick a name and then you figure out your brand  and people sell some brands for thousands of dollars if they're a single easy one, but it's only 250 bucks to register with that, I think with the state here. So that's not bad. That's one of the less expensive things  to have to do. Okay. Okay. oh
02:19because I'm looking at a computer and because I know Facebook, was thinking brand as in brand like, Oh yeah. I mean, your brand is so important though when you're a farm, right? Like that's why I built it through Groovy Grazers, even though we didn't have a name because I was like, well, this is how we're going to operate anyways. Like having some type of grazing or deal going on, whether it be sheep or whatever, I just knew we were going to eventually be a farm face. And so I didn't want to wait on that. So yeah, like if you're a farm and you don't,
02:49have a Facebook page, you don't have an Instagram.  mean, TikTok is one of those where I'm back and forth on if you really need it, but Facebook and Instagram for sure, or a website. If you don't wanna do social media, it's really hard, you gotta do more advertising and word of mouth, but having a brand is so important, like your colors, the way your logo is, can you put it on items? Like these are all things that people don't even think about, and that's actually why we did Cold Canyon Farm, and we built our, oh
03:18Facebook group, it's called Built From Dirt Farm School. Because a lot of people, they don't know how to do this. Yeah, I was going to ask you about the farm page too. I didn't do my weather update. what's, I usually open it with how's the weather. So how's the weather in Montana today? Oh man. So I mean, it dropped from like 34 down to one degree last night and we have like a powder.
03:43that came so like not feet of snow which can happen here but it's just the swings are ridiculous this year it's not good for the animals how's your weather? we are in a blizzard we are officially under a blizzard warning and you can't see to the road from my house and that's about 200 feet whoa look at this dedication though this is what it takes to like do any type of business right to be honest Mary like the fact that you're here still trying to do this is awesome you don't want to get you down
04:11Oh no, no, no, no. It always makes me laugh when I see blizzard warning because we've had blizzard warnings before and it hasn't really been a blizzard. This is a blizzard. Like this is a for real Minnesota blizzard. And I'm like, this is great. Our house is warm. We're having roast chicken and winter squash and broccoli for dinner. The dog is fine. chickens are all nice and cozy in their coop. We're fine. We're going to ride out to No problem.
04:40Yeah, when you have that. we went without power like two weeks ago for 36 hours. Oh, I traded which this is awesome about farming to we bartered six goats for a frickin wood stove, dude, like nice. Wait, because we don't have any heat in the house. We just have radiant floor heat, which is propane fed through our instant water heater. But if the power goes out, guess what? It does not work at all.
05:10So,  you we went 36 hours without heat. Now, granted, was in the  50s, but like right now, it's, I mean, it's probably less than 10 degrees outside.  And  the floors are keeping the house warm and the oil heater is, but if we went without power again, our house would be cold.  So we traded for wood stove. Because then once you're in that position of being self-sufficient, like you guys are with your generator and stuff, then you're like, okay, it's okay.
05:38uh Everything can burn down outside, but I'm okay right now. It's warm. It's good. We're okay. Yup. I will tell you something funny though. I said to my husband yesterday, I said, if you, need anything from the store, you should probably go now because it is going to be impossible to drive by nine 30 tomorrow morning. And he said,  Oh no, we're fine.  And then he got up this morning, grabbed his coffee and he was like,  I'm going to need to go to the store. And I was like, for what? And he said, sugar, we're almost out. And I said, we have enough sugar.
06:07to last for at least a day and a half. I said, it's gonna be snowing by the time you're ready to get out. I said, do not, do not go anywhere. It's gonna be bad.  He's like, okay, we'll see. And then it was snowing by 9.30, I think. And  he looked outside and he said,  yeah, I think we have enough sugar to last us. I was like, yeah, I think so too. In that moment when you're like, I told you so.  I didn't say it. I tried really hard.
06:34to say that out loud because it's really insulting and he gets really offended so I don't say it but I think it really really loud.  Okay so that's the weather update it's blizzarding here it is not blizzarding where you are that's good yeah  and you have all kinds of things going on since I talked to you only like a month or two ago. Yeah pivots right?  Big pivots so tell me. So no more throwing spaghetti at the wall.
07:00that like, you know, we kind of talked about that last time we were like, we're just gonna kind of throw it and see what works there. And  really just spent like the last month since we talked, making some hard cuts, the goat market is down, sheep market is stable, the cattle market is insane, right? Like it's high, but it's dropping again. And so just trying to figure out like where
07:24Where do we fit? We're staying at the property. So that helps a lot to write. We know what's going on.  Um, I think the last time we spoke, we had one horse, maybe two horses.  had the fillies. Yeah, we just had, yeah. So we had the new Philly, which is a paint,  um, Betty. And then we had Bambi, my husband's $100 BLS  Philly. And then I traded my six year old gelding, um, with a gentleman who really needed a mount.
07:51This was before the horse herpes outbreak, EVH, which was turning neurological and killing a bunch of horses within 12 hours.  I traded because one of his horses had passed away, uh my six-year-old gelding for a Kiger Mustang. I have uh three young fillies. One is going to be two this upcoming year.  And then I have the two that are turning one on January 1st.
08:16Quite the young gang here, which is fine. That's why we were kind of talking about branding in the beginning because I want to make sure if I'm gonna put all this time and money into them I have a marked em as mine  and We came up with farm school. There's a lot of downtime in Montana  and We've thrown a lot of spaghetti at the wall. So one of the things about Cole Canyon farm is that you should know we're working  Actively on our farm as a family. We're diversified
08:44farm, so not all of our streams of income come from what we produce. And it's not a hobby farm.  when we last talked, Groovy Grazers is 100 % a hobby farm. It was not making hay. It made half the hay this year that it needed to. I was working my body to death. think  the hustle culture in farming and homesteading needs to stop. You need to work when you're rested and inspired, and you need to
09:14rest when you're tired, which is hard to say, but in the last month, I've taken three days off  and I have literally transformed our whole farm into what I've been dreaming and kind of alluding to in our last conversations over the few podcasts we've done is that this is what we wanted. We wanted to be able to educate the public ah and build systems from scratch. on  on very low income, I think we see too many Instagram farms where these people
09:44have made six figures doing something else, now they get to Hobby Farm. That's a Hobby Farm.  A real working farmer is very different. You know, we've talked about finances, we've talked about how do you decide what's working and what's not. And I think that Andy and I have thrown enough spaghetti at the wall that we can help others. uh My big girl job before  I became a fully disabled veteran was working at Intuit. I sold accounting software. So all I did for
10:1210 hours a day was pick apart other small businesses. And I really loved auditing the farms,  not auditing their numbers, but auditing their systems, figuring out what's working for them, what's not working for them, where might there be uh fat that they can trim off their bills, like all of these things are where my passion came from and why I was so good at selling QuickBooks accounting software.
10:37I mean, I was top 10 % in the first six months. It was almost unheard of what I was doing. And it was because I had such a passion for helping people figure it out. So was like, well, how can I take that passion and still help other people? And that's why we made Bill from Dirt Farm School. You know, it's practical education for new homesteaders, single income families, because I think that's an untouched area in our industry. Nobody wants to talk about one income.
11:04Women starting over that are trying to homestead by themselves on low income and really honestly just folks tired of working themselves broke like that's that's farm school Nice  nice Did you say that you you hired a coach did you tell me that yeah, so I actually hired a coach Which I think is a big thing. So that's what helped get me focused So like I'm not gonna sit here and say that I did
11:34all of this reorganizing on myself, what I did is I hired Melanie Greenenough.  She's been on multiple areas, you know, lots of different podcasts all over the world actually. And I got hooked up in one of her free trial classes and I sat down and it was all about how to brand, how to make sure that you're using your time wisely, all these things that I knew how to do, but I needed a system put in place.
12:04So  I thought about it and I was like, well, I can do this with farms. I may be not good at helping other people set up like a networking  or setting up. I mean, she is in the networking space, but that's not all she's doing. She's actually teaching me how to run my business and where to figure out when to hire like employees, when to. um
12:29Like when to have somebody that's more specialized because you could be doing other things. So a lot of this is us going back to the education because she's like, you guys have so much life experience. We have  Andy, my husband, who  is  absolutely an expert in living organic soil on the biomes of dirt and stuff. And she's like, why are you guys not spreading this information farther than just Billings, Montana?
12:57And was like, yeah, I guess I never thought about that. Like, do people really want to take online classes? Are they really doing that? And I guess because I'm so  adverse to being  online because I worked from home for many years, actually, way before COVID, I did  a little bit of online work that I was like, well, people want to get out and see people. But that's true.
13:22But there's not a lot of people educating others because it's like this gate kept secret. Like, yes, there's some knowledge that in farm school will charge for, but not everything has to be charged. It's all about making a community.  And so that's what Melanie brought us to is like Groovy Grazers is great. But when we do the ROIs and we do the projections, it's just not going to work when I can't sell a Nigerian dwarf that's clean tested  and could be papered for $50.
13:53Yeah. Yeah. There's no way, but I needed somebody  that was above me to say like, Hey, not above me, but somebody that worked in multiple business spaces to be able to say, this is just, here's some direction. like the coaching is definitely a huge part of why I've gotten focused because I needed that check of like, Hey, this is
14:19The way you're doing right now isn't sustainable for 15 years with my body. It's not. Like  I am disabled even though I don't look like it all the time. I have problems and I'm starting to slow down. My whole dream was to do goat milk, right? To milk the goats. Now we're doing sheep because sheep market is more level and it's multiple streams of income.
14:45So that's all I needed somebody was like Melanie to sit down and also inspire. So I think a lot of people forget how inspiring it is when you have a group of like-minded folks who all want the same thing. Like it's powerful, it's vibrational. If everything has a vibration to it, if you are low, you know, low hanging fruit that's vibrating low.
15:11your life is just gonna bring in chaos. But if you're around other people that are successful and trying to be successful, even if they're not in the same industry as you and if they are even better, but it brings in this like, okay, I can do this.  You don't feel so alone. And that was why I decided to do coaching this year is because we live rural Montana. If you can hear the ticking in the background, that's the one I apologize. It's making our vent go, but. uh
15:40We're in rural Montana. I don't get out of the house often. I'm a homeschooling mom, but there's ways that I can connect with other homeschooling moms. So that's why there's been so much change. And I think sometimes people need to understand that getting a coach doesn't mean that somebody is telling you how to run your job or how to become a brand. It's just direction. And that's what the farm school is built on. It's just trying to give people direction. Yes. And having a coach.
16:10It gives you direction, but it also lets you see what you're doing from someone else's point of view. Yeah. She can use strong points. didn't even think of Mary. Yeah. You can't see it the way somebody from the outside can see it. Yeah. She was like, Morgan, get online, start educating, make a Facebook group so you don't feel so alone out in the middle of nowhere, Montana.
16:36and connect with other homeschool moms that are in the same boat as you. Find other veterans, find other people that feel like they can't do this. That's why it's called built from dirt. We are built from dirt. There's not high revenue streams coming in on this farm. We are trying to do this as little debt as possible. I have less than $7,000 in debt other than my truck.
17:00which yes, that is 45. Everyone needs to understand trucks are not cheap anymore. That's an F-150. And then we have, of course, our house note, but those are have-tos to survive. You've got to have at least one working vehicle and a home. Yep, absolutely. To even homestead. Yeah, yep. I am so excited for you that you're going to go in this direction because you have the best energy. Like every time I've talked with you,
17:28You sound so full of positivity and good ideas and you're so willing to help. Of course you're going to teach. Yeah. And like that was her whole thing. She was like, Morgan, you are a little fire. Go light other people's fire. Essentially what she told me and like doing the consulting, the one-on-one and farm audits. Like we're going to help people with land, but no clear plan. Right? Like we've done it. We've,  I've done multiple.
17:55of places, I had a small micro farm with my ex-husband  and we were planning that. That was in Louisiana. I farmed a little bit in Texas. I grew up in Texas, ah you know, in the horse industry. I lived in Arizona trying to farm there  and then I've come to Montana. So I've been in a lot of different areas. ah You know, this is going to help people that are bleeding money on feed and animals because it's really hard to understand when you're just starting out.
18:23what goes into an animal. Like it's more than just the feed, the minerals, the medication. It goes into time. It goes into hoof trimming. It goes in to water if you have to haul it or owning a well and maintaining it. Like there's so many things that people don't realize and really just new farmers that are too overwhelmed with too many ideas. Cause like you said, when you have a coach, they stand back, they see all the good and
18:51And let's be honest, the bad that you may not see.  And they're able to gently tell you, in a very  polite way, this is what I'm seeing, and then directionally point you. And I think that comes from the way humans used to live, know, hundreds of years ago, there was always like, you know, the elders that would kind of help out the youngins and help point them in the right direction. And so most coaches are going to be older than you. Some might be younger, but you got to look at their life experience.
19:21You know, we're going to be able to help people with their livestock based on the acreage, the time, their physical ability, their cash flow, right? Like one of the things I'm really good at doing is looking at history, computing it into like some graphs and really taking a look at it and then also being able to understand grazing. OK, if you have this many head of cattle, this is where you live.
19:47take a picture of it, go cut me a one by one square and bundle that up. How much hay do you have in there? How much grassland do you have in there? I'm gonna be able to give you an idea.  I'm not saying that I'm gonna change somebody's life just by consulting them. I'm saying that I'm gonna give them the right tools and help them see the things they don't see. There's a lot of things, turning animals into meat, breeding stock, fiber.
20:15You can turn it into your own classes. I'm going to host a whole, like, probably a six month course on how to do a petting zoo. I did really well with Groovy Grazers. I do daycares for $2.50 an hour. There's nothing secret about it. You can go on my website. $2.50 an hour is what I was charging in the beginning  and I didn't do it with any employees. If you had employees that leaves room for it, right? So ethically,
20:42Treating yourself and your employees is a thing. Like you  are an employee of the farm.  Teaching people how to do tours of their property. I've had so many people out here. Now I haven't been charging for this because our property is a little crazy right now. We're overhauling completely, but I like having people come out here because it's helping hone in my skills. So then when we do tours, we're gonna have a whole plan. There's a farm, TNC Farms out here. I'm gonna have to try and see if...
21:12I can get you to interview Bridger because he is just, that young man is so brilliant,  absolutely brilliant on uh how to rotationally graze, but they do a wool festival  and they do  a pumpkin patch at the end of the year and they do tours and they have big homeschool groups come in and like there's so many things people don't realize that you can do without having to even sell an animal. There is income and you have to have multiple streams.
21:42when you're a farmer because it's not good enough if you just have a day job and then it brings in a few hundred bucks a month. I mean that's a hobby.  Yep. Absolutely. You  definitely get me his contact information because he would be really fun to talk with.  Okay. Well, it sounds like you have a lot going on. There's a couple of things I want to tell you about that  is here.  Number one, I am an award winning podcaster officially.  I saw that.
22:11Congratulations. I'm so excited because I've been on the show, what, two years now? Yeah. And like, I remember you're like, one day I'm going to get recognized for doing this and look at you. Like two years is awesome, Mary. Congrats.  Well, thank you. And I want to I want to tell you what it is because not everybody who's listening knows about this yet.  It's the Corporate Visions Media Innovator Awards 2025.
22:36And I got sustainable living podcasts of the year 2025 USA because they're based out of England. That's so cool. That's even cooler that you have like an English following like being worldwide. Like that is really cool. I'm so proud of you. Thank you. It's so crazy to me. I they emailed me and they were like, do you want to be part of the pool for this this prize? And I was like, what do need to do? And they were like, fill out this form.
23:05So I did and I told them about my podcast and I won this award and I was like,  I'm not even sure what this means, but I think it's really cool. No, it is cool. So what are your next steps with this award? you  going to do a different, like what  all is coming from getting this award that you're going to do? I have no idea. I just think it's super awesome, nifty that I want it. And then the second thing that I wanted to tell you.
23:32is I'm starting a second podcast for sure. Yeah.  It's called Grit and Grace in the Heartland Women in Agriculture. Oh, I love that.  And I will definitely talk to my co-host about having you come visit with us because I think that would be really fun.  Yeah. My co-host is a lady named Leah and she is Clear Creek Ranch Mom on Facebook. Okay. And she has the biggest heart. She is a fifth-generation
24:00fifth generation cattle rancher with her family. love that.  And she also had worked with the USDA, I think, for grants. Oh, that's awesome. People have no idea about grants.  Uh huh. And she's just fabulous. And we've talked like three or four times on the podcast episodes over last two years. And  I said, we never get to go deep enough. I said, do you want to be a cohost with me on a second podcast? And she said, give me a week to think about it. And I said, okay.  And I
24:30hit her up exactly a week to the day and said, did you think about it? She's like, I really want to do it. So that's going to be coming out the first full week of January.  Oh, I'm so excited for you. Like, I can't wait to just even listen to that podcast. it's just so cool to see women stepping into this place of like, yeah, we're here. We've been here the whole time helping people, know, helping our husband farm.
24:59And now we're going to talk about it because back in the day men were hunters and women sat around and got to socialize, right? And took care of the babies and made the food. Yeah, we did everything social, right? In a group and men had to go off and they were silent, right? Hunting in the woods  and to see women stepping into this like we're going to gather again, we're going to get women back together and we're going to make clear
25:28clear path for the next generation. know, Leah, right, is her name. She's a fifth generation farmer. Yep. She's like, guess what? I see so many I bet you she would even confirm it. She sees so many first generation farmers. And that's probably a lot of her drive is like, I want to help these new people. like, we're gonna have like words between humans is such a real thing, especially when you have, you know, artificial intelligence,  when you have people that just
25:58we'll kind of write whatever.  You know, it's hard to know  what's real and what's not anymore. So being able to discuss with other people, even by phone or by virtual video is so powerful. And then to have a podcast that's on the same vibrational as everyone else,  you're only gonna raise your listeners to be better farmers.
26:23but you're also gonna have all these people, women specifically, right? That are gonna come to you guys that are gonna say, hey, I wanna share my experience.  Exactly, yes. Yes, and what's even better is 2026 is the International Year of the Woman Farmer. Did you know that? Yes, that's why Melanie was like, you gotta step into this.  Like step into it.
26:46did not know about that until after Leah and I decided to do this together. And I saw it, I was like, yes, great timing.  Oh man, see your internal instincts are just so, they're spot on, right? Like you are empathic with your listeners. You can hear our woes and you can hear the women that are like, there's not a lot of support. When I go talk and I have nothing against male farmers in this sense, but sometimes when I go talk to them and I have a throat tattoo for the listeners that don't follow me on Facebook.
27:16Um, and it's flowers, it's dainty, Geo- like shapes, nothing crazy, right? No like skulls or anything on my throat. They look at me like I'm crazy. um I have to like almost win their trust over by like giving them like, oh, you know, this little insight tip about being a farmer. And then they're like, oh, she's cool. She can vibe. And it's like, I could vibe with you the whole time. I just had to win you over.  And
27:44When I speak to a woman farmer, they're like,  no, they just listen to you. They understand you. There's no question of who you are because they've experienced it themselves. And like, I get it. There's a lot of women that come into farming and they are, they think they're tough enough to do this.  And you know, farming is not, it's not for the weak. It is not for the weak.  It's really hard.  My friend Nicole, she's somebody else that I want you to interview. She's a farrier and works with the Amish.
28:13Um, in a horse breeding program, she had to deal with one of the old guys we had taken on. He's he choked the vets out there right now, putting him to sleep.  Um, and she was out there all night long with him in the middle of the blizzard. had, you know, they live an hour away from us. So where they are, there's like six foot plus feet of snow. I'm not even kidding you in Red Lodge right now.  Um, and she lives out there. And so she was out  all night with that horse. Just sitting there.
28:41because no vet could get to him until 12 o'clock today. That's the reality of farming though. And so I'm excited for this because I think that so many negativities happen in farming that it can get people really down. So if we can get a group of women on a podcast talking about the positives,  encouraging each other, not being Instagram fake where we act like everything's peachy on our farm, right? We talk about the reality of farming.
29:08then we're going to see some major breakthroughs in our industry and we need them. I'm actually a wholesale dealer for AgriBest. That was something else that happened. um They  do Redmond, Sweetlix products. Those are products  for horses, cattle, sheep.  It's all mineral based. um And being in that industry, I'm very far and few between. And so I think it's awesome because I am going to go listen to your podcast.
29:36with Leah, I can't wait. Like, sign me up. You couldn't sign me up any quicker to just listen to it because... it was already out, you'd be like, hold on, I'll come back in half an hour, Mary. Let me go listen to the first episode. No, seriously, because  I think women...  I don't think... I'm not going to say they're smarter than men because I don't speak like that, but I think women are able to  meticulate their words better.
30:05I don't even know or articulate. Sorry. I can't think it's been a long long night But like women are just able to use their words better to tell a story So women women are the communicators and I will tell you how I know this for sure  Did you know that  men  out? Outdo women in podcasting, but most of the men fall off  they suffer from podfade and the podcast disappear but
30:33Wow. tend to hang in longer because they are the communicators. That's cool. See, I wouldn't have known that. like, that's interesting because that is true. Like me and my girlfriends, when something goes wrong, we call each other. Yeah. But when something goes wrong with men, they just text. They don't even text each other. Like they're just like, it's OK. They'll they won't question why I'm even here. And you're like, what do you mean? Like  if that was another woman, we would absolutely question why we hadn't heard from them.
31:02Mm-hmm. Yeah, the only time a man will ask for help is if it's a dire emergency. Yeah, yeah, men are so stubborn  in that sense. so I think that next year being a women's agriculture,  I'm sure a lot of your demographic is women, right? Because like women attract women  in podcasting.  Actually, it's not.  Really? You are going to die on this statistic. I looked the other day  on my Facebook page, mine.
31:32and Tiny Homestead podcast one. 56 to 60 % men listeners. was like, are you kidding me? That's interesting. I guess I need to look on Cole Canyon farm and Groovy Grazers and see what my statistics are. I haven't in a while, but yeah, that's really interesting. I think because it's easier to listen. Maybe if you're a man to like women talking, cause we paint the full picture. Maybe I don't know what it is.
32:01So interesting. Maybe some of your listeners, if you're a man and you're listening, can you chime in on the homestead page on like, do you listen to more women or men podcasts? That would even be a cool poll for you to do. Yeah, it absolutely would. OK, Morgan, you know, I try to keep these to half an hour. Yeah. So the first episode of the new podcast will be out Monday of the first full week of January. So two Mondays from now.
32:31And it's only going to be a one week,  one a week release. So one episode a week  for a while. But yeah, very, very excited.  Where can people find you? Cole Canyon Farm on Facebook. Is that right? Yes, you can. And you can find us still Groovy Grazers MT  on Facebook. You can find Cole Canyon Farm on Instagram. And we still own  www.groovygrazors.com.  And
33:01We are doing a seed giveaway right now  on my built from dirt farm page  and some one-on-one consulting. So if you guys are looking for your group, then definitely add yourself in. We're going to be doing lots of freebie classes and courses, just getting the hive mind going. Okay. I will put the link to the new  group show notes for you so people can find the giveaway and get involved.  Thank you. As  always, people can find me at a tinyhomesteadpodcast.com.
33:29And if you want to support the podcast financially, cause I could use some help, um go to atanihomestead.com slash support.  Morgan, thank you for taking the time to catch me up on what's going on with you. Cause I saw stuff on Facebook and I was like, what is she doing now? I'm not sure about this.  Yeah. Thanks for having me. Thank you guys for listening.  I'm sure we'll chat in the spring sometime soon about all the new stuff we've been doing. We have to.
33:58That's all there is to it. We've got to make it happen. All right. Thank you, Morgan. Thank you.  Bye.
 

Moonlight Elk

Today I'm talking with Christie author of Moonlight Elk. You can follow on Facebook as well.
 
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Christie Green, the author  of  Moonlight Elk,  One Woman's Hunt for Food and Freedom.  Christie is in New Mexico this morning. How are you, Christie? Good morning. I'm wonderful. Thank you for having me.
00:25You are so welcome and thank you for visiting.  love it when I get to people who are  into nature and also write books about it. um What's the weather like in New Mexico this morning? Well, it's unfortunately very warm and sunny and dry. We've had unseasonably uh mild weather. It's been in the high fifties and we haven't had uh much snow for a number of weeks. So it's really precarious here. It's not good when we don't have snowpack.
00:54But we're hoping for some form of moisture, at least in the new year. We'll see. I will keep my fingers crossed for you. And I wish I could send you all the rain we got this morning. Oh, man. I do, too. I have a friend up in North Dakota, and they get snow and those cold temperatures. And I wish they could just push it down here. Yeah, it was so weird. I was looking at my Facebook memories, because I look at them every morning, because I sit down with my coffee and scroll through Facebook to find people to talk to.
01:23looked at my memories and a year or so ago it was raining on this date as well. I'm like, okay, so is December 18th a rain day? Hmm. Yeah, interesting. It seems like it would be too cold up there for rain, but moisture is moisture. Yeah, I'm, I have an appointment tomorrow at 9 45 in the morning, half an hour from here and it's all wet out there. The temps are supposed to drop.
01:50hard this afternoon and it's supposed to snow a little bit on top of whatever freezes.  And it's not supposed to warm back up until tomorrow afternoon. like, I may not make that appointment. We'll see how the roads are.  Go slow.  Yeah. Making appointments in the Northern tier States in December or January, February is a real  iffy game a lot of the time.
02:15But it's fine. I love winter. Winter is my favorite. Well, fall is my favorite season, but I love winter because it's when we all kind of cocoon and  get cozy and eat really good food. So that's right. That's right.  All right. So Christy, tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do.  Well,  I  am  55 years old  and  I am originally from Alaska and now I live in San Diego, New Mexico. I've been here for
02:44let's see, 28 years or so. And pretty much my whole career as I'm a landscape architect and I'm also an author and a designer and my work revolves around food and cultivating connection to each other and to place through the catalyst of food. And so in my work as a landscape architect, I focused on
03:10building soil, harvesting water, and growing heirloom varieties of food for  people, like in the homes, but also in larger kind of contexts like housing developments and public spaces. And then I also work with native plants  and um doing like passive water harvesting landform grading techniques like berms on swales and bio-swales and things like that. And then uh I am a hunter. uh
03:39As some people say, an adult onset hunter, started hunting when I was 40. And the original intent was to harvest my own meat, right? So I was growing all this food for myself and for other people. And I thought, well, what about, you know, meat? Why couldn't I hunt as well, you know, to fully round out this sort of self-sufficient way of gathering food.
04:08I thought I was going to get food, so to speak, and what I ended up finding was this revelatory new relationship to place  and to myself, really,  through the animals and through the hunt.  So I started writing about  those experiences with the animals here in New Mexico and other places too, but mostly here  in the West with elk and deer and turkey. And these  stories ended up
04:37becoming this compilation of braided essays and then a whole braid of a book,  which is Moonlight Up, which was published  last September. Very nice. um You said self-revelatory regarding hunting. give me a couple examples of that.  Well,  what I didn't realize, so I'm a mother and at the time my daughter was five  and  I was always, you know,
05:05responsible and on. Like had to be home, you know, make food, go pick up my daughter from school, you know, attend a business, you know, very scheduled,  loaded life in terms of obligations, you know, and all of those I loved, but em I didn't realize  how  off balance I was in terms of my own unscheduled time and the freedom that that uh
05:33affords like the feeling of being unencumbered.  And when I went hunting, it was the time I could be wholly  my own self without attending to anybody. And it was actually for lack of a better way of saying it, the time hunting was when I could become my own  animal, I could be as animal me as the animals were themselves. Because, you know, when hunting, you have to kind of become
06:02that animal and understand how they move, what their habits are, where they're spending time, where they're crossing, all of that. So it was like I got to shed  all of these layers  of the human world and become wholly immersed in the animal world. And when I got a taste of that, I just wanted more and more of it because then I got to actually listen to myself, my own desires, my own inclinations in a way,  you know, like follow my nose.
06:32And that's just become an essential part of my life that has translated into my regular sort of scheduled at home work life in  knowing how to listen to my body,  listen to my own instincts and follow my own way.
06:50That is amazing. That's beautiful.  And the one thing that I will say about being a parent, especially being a mom,  is for me, I've  raised four kids, birthed three, have a bonus child from my husband, which is great.  And uh my favorite moments of being a mom, and people are like, I don't know why I would be so bored, but I wasn't bored,  was from the moment I got home with that baby for the first three months when
07:20when you just cocoon in and you  focus on getting to know this little person that you brought into the world and you attend to them.  And you attend to yourself too, because if you can't be there for you, you can't be there for a baby. But  it's very baby focused and people come to visit  the baby. mean, they'd say they're coming to visit you, but they're coming to see the baby.  It's this very nurturing, very calming, very
07:49animalistic  experience because  animals are very attentive to their babies. I mean, you don't think that they are because  wild babies are born ready to go, most of them.  But if you watch a mama deer,  she is  very attentive with her fawn.  So the one thing that I will say though is once that baby becomes a toddler,  it is time for mom
08:17to take some time for her and hopefully sooner than that, but definitely once they start to walk  because you cannot lose yourself in your children.  It's not healthy.  No, it's true. We have to be our own individual selves. And it is interesting like that, those first moments  and days and weeks and months after the birth that
08:46I feel the same like what you're saying that the clock goes out the door.  It doesn't matter. Any sort of routine doesn't matter because everything revolves around the body and the bodily needs  of that baby. So it is like this  sort of whiplash,  yank into a different world, a different uh realm of that very animalistic child, because the child isn't operating from the mind of
09:16you know, a rationale of,  what time is it and what am I supposed to be doing? It's all driven by the visceral, by the needs. yeah. Yeah. And the other thing that I want to throw in here really quick, because you hit all the buttons for me with this, um is when you're a new mom, like when you have that first baby,  you have got to ask for help.  I didn't know that.
09:41I didn't ask for help. was really lucky. I lived in an apartment building and I knew my neighbors.  And my first child was a girl,  the only girl out of the four kids. I was 20 and she was teething and she was having a very hard time with teething and she would cry and scream and cry and scream.  And one of my neighbors knocked on the door and I opened the door and I hadn't slept in three days, you know, up with baby all night.  And she said, can I hold her?
10:11And I said, she bothering you? I'm really sorry. She was like, no. She said, you need sleep.  She said, she said, has she been fed? I said, yeah. She said, when was she last changed? I said, half an hour ago. She said, okay, I got it from here.  Go lay down, get some sleep.  Your daughter and I are going to get to know each other.  And I was so grateful because it had never occurred to me to ask for help. So anybody out there who's a brand new mom who is drowning, ask for help. People want to help.
10:41No, it's true. need that community, not respite.  Yes, absolutely. So, sorry, I didn't mean to get all weird about babies, but I don't know, you hit a button this morning for me and I was like, oh, there are things people don't know about having babies that are very important. oh Okay, so I am not a hunter, but my parents both hunt  and I got taught by osmosis how to hunt.
11:10One of my favorite memories  of the hunting season  is my dad would get up early in the morning and he would get all his stuff. He'd get all his stuff set out at night, but he would pack everything up the next morning really early.  And he would always clean his guns before hunting season started.  One of my favorite scents on earth is gun oil.  Oh, that's funny. Positive association, huh?  Oh yeah. Yep. Absolutely. And my mom hunted too.
11:39And I've told the story a couple times in the last six months. It's really weird. But she actually got a doe when she was very pregnant with my sister. And she's so proud of that. that she went when she was pregnant. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We were so able when we're pregnant. I I worked almost up to the day my daughter was born. I was out in the garden and hoisting and shoveling and all kinds of things. It's like for most of her human
12:09lineage, we were out working and hunting and doing all those things. weren't, you know, sitting on the couch waiting for the baby to be born. We had to survive, right? Yep, exactly.  So, so having said all that, I learned about hunting because my parents did all the things and talked about it ad nauseam for a month before hunting season started.  I cannot break down a gun. I will be honest, it's not my thing.  And  I don't hunt.
12:38I  love the process of looking for animals in the woods. Does that make sense? Yeah, for sure. That's the hunt. Hunting is more hunting than killing, that's for sure.  Yeah, that part I love and I'm really good at it. Like I can spot a deer before seasoned hunters spot a deer because I understand the shape of their body and how they move.
13:03And I just, love being in the woods, but the idea of taking a creature's life when I don't need to eat that food, I just can't do it. I cannot do it. It kills me. Just the idea of it. And I am all for people hunting. think it is an amazing, I don't want to say sport, I don't know, endeavor to hunt and kill and use an animal. It's not for me.
13:32No, that's,  there's a lot of feelings like that. think every, every feeling and response  around hunting is valid. don't, um, I don't need other people to hunt. I don't need other people to agree with how I hunt or to want to.  I feel like we all have our own ways. And I think the most important thing that any of us can do is to pay attention to and honor what we, um,
14:02desire and what we respect in our own ways. think m part of what's interesting to me in this book and Moonlight Elk and some of the traveling around doing book readings and events is uh the questions I've gotten from people. And some people  are hunters, of course, and want to talk about hunting stories and  the details of those hunts and the animals. Some people aren't hunters and feel strongly against it. ah Ask me things like that. Well, how could you do that? How could you take a life when
14:31We have plenty of domestic meat we could be eating. And some people want to say, wow, you really inspired me. I want to learn how to hunt. Will you take me? So there's, you know, every range of experience and response. And I feel what is  so critical right now is to be open to the conversation and to be open to the questions and the dialogue. feel like uh adhering to a particular polarized perspective or only one view or one side.
15:01is uh destructive, we have so much more in common than we don't. And I'm just really interested in learning how to make connections with people in all the ways that we do  share in common, like what values do we hold in common? And that there are more, I just so believe that there are so many more um connections than disconnects, you know? And it's just been  interesting that through hunting, is a,  people have very strong opinions about it.
15:31practice, you the animals, also like, you know, brought up guns. There's a whole lot of  feeling around guns. And I agree. I feel like we should be talking about those  points of view  and  options and perspectives. And that's one of the biggest gifts of having written this book  is the,  just right now we're having this conversation, being able to be in dialogue with people and, and, and allowing myself to be open  to hearing new perspectives.
15:59And I feel that for me, what's most important  is that there's respect. I mean, I don't expect anybody or need anybody to agree, ah but I do want respect going both ways  and  not even understanding. don't think that's one thing it seems like when people, you know, get in conversations like, I'm going to keep talking until you understand.  I don't actually feel that. I don't need that. think it's...
16:26I don't need to be understood. don't need to be agreed with, but I would like to be respected and vice versa. You know, it's just critical for who we are. We're all on this earth together. We have to get along. We just have to. Yeah. Right now, especially. My goodness. It's been a heavy, heavy six months. I talked to Joel Saliton, the renegade rebel farmer, whoever he is. The other day. Yeah. Yeah. He's such a nice man.
16:56And I was going to ask him about the cost of beef prices and the whole snap benefits fiasco that is going on. And just before I hopped on to talk to her, was like, I don't want to talk about those things.  It's too much. It's too heavy. Everybody is feeling this and we need to talk about something positive. And I asked him before we started talking, I said, can I just ask you where you've been this year,  what you've learned, what surprised you? Can we just talk about
17:25positive things just for a little bit. And he was like, absolutely.  And it was so good. I was so thrilled to just have something positive to chat about, you know? Yeah. No, he's, he's so inspiring. He's been in the, he's been like this pioneer in the, the food industry for decades.  And I remember years ago, I used to work for the Bioneers and he was one of the speakers at the conference  and
17:53just how revelatory his practices are with, you know, rotational grazing and cover crops and just honoring the animal.  as even raising them as a domestic food source, knowing full well, of course they're going to be killed and  eaten, but to  try to offer the best life possible and also the most healthy practice for the land. So yeah, he's always been one of my heroes.
18:18Well, you will be thrilled to know that he is working on a new book this week and next week.  Oh, good. What's it about? I asked him the working title and he said, I said, it have a working title? And he said, oh, yes, food emancipation. And I was in my head, I was just like, oh, thank God. Oh, good. Yes. So I'm very excited. It won't be out for,  oh my goodness. think he said a year,  but.
18:43He had just started writing the first two chapters two nights ago. And I'm just like, yes, please write another book.  Oh, good.  So I um was just going to ask you if it's okay. mean, in your practice as a homesteader and your offerings  of, you know, eggs and breads  and  goods from the garden, like, have you noticed  anything changing or shifts in your customers? oh
19:13points of view or what they're asking for, what they're  hungry for, both literally and metaphorically,  what is the attraction  to what you offer and has that changed over time?  don't think it's changed over time. Now bear in mind, we've only been doing this for five years because we didn't have a homestead until five years ago.  But  what really has stuck out to me over the last year is
19:41We have not been able to keep eggs in our farm stand for sale  for more than 24 hours. We have 19 chickens  and  the eggs are gone every day because people know we have them and they come in and pay their five bucks and go home with a dozen eggs.  And before all of this bird flu  stuff started and um before inflation really hit hard in the last year and a half,
20:08People would stop by and buy eggs, but it wasn't like we have to stop by and buy eggs. Yeah. Yeah. I see.  And  here at our farm and here in Minnesota, the last two years have been really hard growing seasons. It was really rainy  in the spring for a month, both summers.  And it's been really hard for people to grow anything  like they had been. mean,
20:36Four summers ago, we had so many tomatoes, we were giving them away.  These last two summers,  two summers ago, we had hardly any tomatoes. It was just so wet and then it was so dry that the tomato plants didn't stand a chance. And this summer, this past summer,  summer 2025 was better and we did sell tomatoes and people were like, oh, thank God you have tomatoes.
21:02Because the thing that people want to do around here is can tomato sauce for the winter. Yeah. Yes. And so other than those two things, I mean, I think that people really realize back during COVID that it's a really good thing to know your neighbors and know your producers in the local area because you can't always count on the grocery store having the thing you need. Yeah. I feel like that changed everything.
21:32Yes, yeah, I do too. It's also, I feel like when I, for example, if I host  a  dinner or something and offer the meat that I've hunted,  there's such a different experience  knowing  the person  and the place  where that food source came from and even hearing the story about it.
21:58people like even people who've lived here, let's say in New Mexico their whole lives and know about elk or maybe where elk live don't understand that much about the animal and may have never even tasted the animal. So it's like offering a taste of the meat, but then also, you know, like if I have the elk hide or the antler or ivory, you know, tooth or something, it's interesting how  drawn people are to learn more and
22:27The meaning behind the food makes the difference in how they are connecting, I think, to that source of food, but then also the experience of what I call, this isn't original, I know, but like the experience of communing, know, it's real communion with each other.  And I feel like our culture is  starving for that, literally, because we've become so individualized, we rely on
22:53uh sources of whether it's food or anything else, we push a button on Amazon, get it delivered to our door. We relate to our devices more to each than each other. And I believe that coming back together through something as simple as  the egg or the meat or the apple is just critical right now. And it's a way of feeling at home,  I think in ourselves and with each other through food.
23:20Absolutely. We have become so disconnected from where everything comes from.  Everything comes from the earth.  We've become so disconnected from the earth. We think that everything comes from the store  or a delivery truck  and it doesn't. Everything starts with the earth.  Absolutely. The ultimate provider.
23:53It's um, it's so weird to me.  I grew up in Maine and as a little kid, I spent a lot of time outside in the trees, in the woods. And I used to go out to the edge of the swamp because there was a swamp behind our house  and every spring there were tadpoles. uh
24:19I was always so excited to get a jar and have little tadpoles  that lived in the jar.  And it's probably not very nice, the tadpoles, but my dad wasn't going to tell me no. And  watching those tadpoles develop from these little  fishy looking things, two full-fledged frogs with  legs and a tail, actually. The tail  is still there, it's just very short. um And that was my exciting thing in the spring.
24:48And then the rest of the summer was playing in the woods and gathering pine cones and acorns and making things out of them. And there were no tablets. There were no cell phones. was no,  there was, there was no internet. now kids don't do that anymore.  No, I know they're on their devices. I was just talking to a friend the other day saying, Oh, it breaks my heart that so many people on the earth have no reference of life without a device.
25:19You know, they  were raised with them  and I think it's  really too bad. know, like how do you undo that kind of programming and go back to something that's tactile and visceral and sensory, exploratory, all of that, like direct relationship to the earth. know, something's definitely lost, I think.  Yes, absolutely. And the closest thing I can think of at this point for kids
25:47is having a pet, an actual pet like a kitten or a puppy  and raising that pet from baby to adult pet.  Because dogs and cats are not, they're technology,  they're biology. Yeah, for sure. And then, you know, of course some kids do  live on a farm or do have gardens or do have close proximity to the outdoors.
26:15There's more familiarity and comfort with that. then some, you know, so the majority of the world's population live in urban centers. And, um you know, and there is some access maybe to something that is soil or green or water, but a lot less. So  I don't know. It's, it's  how do we, how do we foster connection and remember,  you know, really, I feel like it's a remembering where we came from and what's  essential in our own selves and our own.
26:45beings, like where are we rooted and how can we be rooted to the earth now given  all of these changes in the world? Well, you're doing a good job by writing the book and I'm trying to do a good job by sharing on the podcast.  And really, I think that  you have to be the change you want to see in the world and that sounds very trite and that is not my line. I don't know who said  it, but you're being the change that you want to see in the world.
27:14Well, it's just,  I don't know, living in  what I believe in. It's my own sanity, actually.  In some ways, it's,  when I feel my best, then I can be my best outwardly too. So just learning as I make my way for sure and trying to share what I'm learning.  Plus, I have more questions. I don't really have answers. I have more questions. So em I'm open to  exploring those with people because I think we're all hopefully trying to discover and to be better.
27:44Yeah, absolutely. And if you aren't, you should be. And  I don't want to direct people's traffic, but really just be the best you you can be.  So oh is this your first published book, Kristy?  It is my first. I have another that I just finished the manuscript. It's called Salmon Dreaming, Coming Home to Alaska. And that will also be published by University of New Mexico Press. And that'll come out in summer 2027.
28:12And then there's a third that's published by UNN Press that's coming out two years after that. So  I'm deep in the writing and loving it  and looking forward to sharing the second book, which takes place in my home state of Alaska.  That's exciting. ah I'm going to tell the listeners that the hardest part of writing a book isn't the writing the book. It's the promoting, marketing, and selling the book. It's definitely its own.  It's, you know,  it's a
28:43Something that I'll speak for myself, well, other friends of mine who are authors,  we're not good at that part of it.  And I didn't know how much, ah how much that is a part of the whole process that, you know, getting it out there and sharing it. And, and I just am very thankful for opportunities like this  to share the book and to reach audiences, you know, beyond my immediate network here. And  thank you for, for having me and for being.
29:13uh, let's see, interested in and honoring that Moonlight Elk is in the world.  Oh, I do. I absolutely do honor it because I'm in the middle of trying to write a book myself  and  it is a hard thing to do.  It is, I don't know how to explain it.  When it's going well,  nothing else is happening.
29:38You're in the zone.  The house could explode around you and you'd be like, Oh, what was that? Yes, exactly. But when it's not going well and you're trying to find the right sentence to convey the thing that's important for you to convey,  that's when it's tough. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's that flow state. And sometimes it's easier to tap into that than others. um But I don't know. I don't know if this is your experience. I feel like
30:08If I can just stay open, basically what wants to come through, it's almost like using me as  as a, um, as a conduit or catalyst, vehicle to get the story on the page. And I feel like when I'm open enough and not resisting or not trying to force it, then it, then it can flow more easily.  Yes. And I always have to remind myself of that when it's, if it gets frustrating, I get up and go do something else for a while.  Because then I stopped trying to force it.
30:38Um, so have you been doing any book touring? Are you just doing the things like writing blog posts and doing podcasts and things like that? No, I've been so fortunate to do some touring and I really like reading with other authors. So I got to do  reading here and in Virginia with a dear friend of mine, Erica Hauser, and her book is called The Age of Deer  and it was shortlisted for the Penn Award. oh
31:07And  so she and I have done a couple of readings together. She was in Virginia and I was also in Vermont. I got to do a couple of readings in Vermont  and I did a reading with my friend who is an author, Gretchen Legler, and she's written a couple of books. Her most recent book is called Woods Queer and she's in Maine. And so we got to do a reading in Rockland this past spring  and I've done different readings here in New Mexico.
31:35Yeah, so I've gotten to travel around, I love. And then also being part of these kinds of conversations  online has been really fun. And to meet all kinds of people, it's just opened up amazing different connections with people I didn't even know were out there and people doing such amazing work like you.  Thank you.  All right, Kristy, where can people find you and where can they buy the book?  Anybody can find me at KristyGreen.net.
32:02And then the book is available. It's distributed by Simon & Schuster.  You can find it at the University of New Mexico Press online.  You can order it anywhere. You would order a hard copy.  There's hardback and paperback books. And then anywhere you find your audio books, it's available on an audiobook form anywhere you would go  to find your own audiobook and then on Kindle as well. So you can pretty much find it anywhere. Fantastic.
32:31As always, people can find me at a tinyhomesteadpodcast.com. And if you want to support the podcast, you can go to a tinyhomestead.com slash support. Christy, I loved this. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. Thank you so much, Mary. And I hope you enjoy the rest of the cozy season of dormancy. Yes. And Merry Christmas and happy new year, Christy. Merry Christmas. Thank you, Mary. You're welcome.
 

Polyface Farm - Joel Salatin on Food Emancipation

Today I'm talking with Joel Salatin at Polyface Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well.
 
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Joel Salaton at Polyface Farms in Virginia in the United States. Good morning, Joel. How are you? Good morning. I'm very good. Thank you very much. What's the weather like there today? ah Well, last night it was down about
00:2915 degrees today. I think it's supposed to be a high of maybe 34, 35. And then drop down into 20s tonight. Tomorrow's going to be warm. It's going to be about a high of like 50 tomorrow. So. We're going to be warmer than you are in Minnesota today. It's supposed to hit 45 degrees today. Oh, wow. That's cool. That doesn't happen very often that we're warmer than Virginia.
00:58Yeah. Yeah. Well, it, uh, it, it's, we, we've been in a really, really cold, I mean, the river's frozen over. It's, uh, we've been in a really cold, uh, cold dip here lately. Yeah. I think the whole United States has been at some point in the last week and a half. It's been, it's been unbearably cold here. And I'm really looking forward to getting back into what we would consider to be temperate degrees here. Um.
01:27So I saw that Polyphase Farms is closed for the next week or so. Do you guys close for the holidays? Yeah, we do. We close for about two weeks. And that you got to realize much of many of our staff, we have a very, very young staff here. And so often they like to go to family over the holidays and things and New Year. we just, it's just the easiest thing is to just close for two weeks and
01:58Um, just keep a, you know, keep a kind of a core here to  do chores and feed cows and gather eggs and  kind of hold the ship together, uh, for, for a couple of weeks and let everybody,  uh, just enjoy. And then, and then those people that, put their hands up and say, I'll stay through Christmas. Then obviously they get there. They get there two weeks. One guy already took us two weeks back at Thanksgiving.  And, and then, you know, they, they, they,
02:28stagger out, you know, through January. you know, usually by the, by mid February, we're back at full staff and up and running, but these two weeks were pretty,  were pretty core. That's fabulous. And it gives you and your wife and your son a chance to maybe spend some time together as a family. Yeah,  some, although  I'm a bit of a scrooge, you know, we've done this all our lives and,  um, the, uh
02:58The holidays, you know, the work stays. So we end up picking up the slack because we live here. don't have to go  see family. know, we're here.  so we pick up a lot of extra work during the holidays. I'm actually,  what I've started doing in the last few years  is the holidays oh with the crew kind of down to core level.
03:26and not doing, not biting off any great big projects.  That's when I do my writing. So  yesterday I started on my next book and I'm almost  done with the third chapter. I got two chapters done yesterday. got, em I was trying to get my third one done this morning before this, but I didn't quite get it done. I have to finish after our call here, but  I'm hoping  to get this knocked out here in the next couple of weeks.
03:56And we'll be up and running. you have a working title yet? Oh yeah. The title is  food emancipation.  Oh,  awesome. Cause we need that real bad right now.  We do. We, we need it desperately.  And, you know, this,  I consider this, told Teresa this morning, this is probably going to be my, my single biggest contribution, I think to the culture.  And  of course she said, well,
04:26It's taking your whole life to get to this, you know, to get to this point.  but,  uh, this, this, the food freedom, the food freedom, I think is  the biggest issue we've got now agriculturally, oh uh, and, and in the food system.  And, um, so, um,
04:50I'm really digging into it. I'm excited about it. In fact, I couldn't even sleep last night. got two chapters done  and, um, um, I'm really excited about it and glad to be jumping in. The  big thing with a book, hard part, the hard part is starting.  And, uh, so yesterday when I got that first chapter done, I  was, I say, you know, I was on a roll  and, uh, and now I'm, I'm just really excited about.
05:20about knocking it out. Yeah, somebody told me a trick once that if you're stuck at the beginning, start in the middle. Like literally just get the words on paper and then you can move it around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's true. That's true. So, know, I have an outline, have an outline. And so I've got, you know, kind of the chapter, the chapter ideas, chapter titles,  and, know, they'll, they'll change and they'll morph and things. mean, a book kind of takes on its own.
05:49Uh, kind of takes on its own, uh,  uh, persona, you know, as you get into it and  new things come to mind and all that. But for me, I find that, that just sitting down and cranking on it and trying to get it knocked out on a couple of weeks, you know, a rough draft at least,  um, is the way to be the most efficient because it's often hard to leave it for a month and come back to it.
06:16You know, to know, what did I say this that I said, you got to go back and review. I can't remember where I put this in or that in. So, you know, if you just start and just, um, go through, you, it's a lot, it's a lot more efficient. Yeah. And if you stop and come back to it a month later, you've lost some of the momentum and the energy that you had for it. So that's right. So I, there's no, there's no energy like first energy.
06:44You know, if you've ever written something and then lost it on a computer, you know, hit a button and it all goes away. And you can never, you can never resurrect  the second  writing with the same energy as you did the first one.  No,  it's like new relationship energy. You know, when you meet somebody new and you're just learning about them and you're all excited.
07:09That's what happens with books and articles. It's amazing. I love it. I used to be a freelance writer and every time I would get into it, I'd start writing, come up for air two hours later and be like, oh, I was in the zone. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. That's exactly right. Zone.  Love that zone. And I actually would love to get back into writing, but I don't have time right now because I'm too busy  talking to amazing people like you every week. um So I was going to ask you about the whole
07:39cost of beef situation and the snap benefits fiasco and things are just so heavy right now. I would actually just rather ask you about what where you've been this year, what you've learned, what your favorite parts of the year were. So where have you been? Where have you traveled this year? Oh my goodness. I've been, I've been all over the place. Uh, yeah, I mean, I'm gone. I'm gone. don't know a third of it, a third of the time or more.
08:09Um,  I've,  I've,  I've do a lot of homestead homestead fairs.  Uh, so, you know, if you want to go around the country, you know, it's, it's, um,  it's a homestead festival in Columbia, Tennessee. That's about, you know, 6,000 people.  And then, uh, then you got,  um, Coeur d'Alene in Idaho. That's Melissa Norris's group. That'll be three or 4,000.
08:37And you got Ozarks, Ozarks  Homestead Conference with the  folks there. That's, you know, that's another whatever, three or 4,000. um Cheryl is the lady that does all that. Then you, you know, you have the Ohio Food Independence Summit. That's another three or 4,000. You got Homesteaders of America up in Front Royal, Virginia. That's  7,000.
09:07Uh, these, these homestead fairs are  huge. Then what's happening this year, for the first time, I really noticed it this year is I'm starting to do, um, 10 or 12 homeschooling conferences. It's like the homeschoolers have, have matured to, to move into the edu-, move into the food space beyond the education space. What I think there is that.
09:35You know, when you, when you try something alternative and you find it soul satisfying, you, you know, you come up from that experience and you say, wow, that was pretty cool. Uh, what else have I been missing? And so these homeschoolers, when they find, uh, homeschooling to be satisfying, uh, they start looking at food, at investment, at recreation, at
10:02uh, energy, you know, uh, all sorts of things.  And, uh, so I think it's a very, very natural permutation that the homeschoolers are coming to homesteading and, um they're just such a, such a fun bunch and, and I enjoy them a lot. So suddenly that, that has really blown open here in 2025  and,  and it's, it's pretty, it's pretty,  uh, it's pretty different. It's added a tremendous,  a whole new dimension.
10:31I have a question based off of that. um So are you going to homeschooling conferences or are you going to actually homeschools and talking to the kids too? Oh, no, no, no, no, these are conferences. Okay. I don't do this for free. No, no. uh I go to these conferences and these are state, you know, almost every state has some sort of state homeschool convention.  The biggest one in the nation is Florida.
11:00The Florida, and they all have different names, Florida Parent Educators, uh FPEA, Florida Parent Educators Association. ah You know, Virginia is a big one, but they're all over. And then there are, are uh overriding groups too. Like, ah they find it here, the great, great homeschool conventions. uh
11:28those they do about six a year around the country. so, you know, they're big, know, there are thousands and thousands of people and yeah, they're a lot of fun. Awesome. So what have you, what have you learned in 2025? Because you've learned a lot in your beautiful long life, but what surprised you this year?
11:58So this year, my epiphany was about halfway through the year.  And uh I've really become this voice of food freedom.  And  of course,  I've had the privilege uh of, for the first time in my life, being  seen by people in the political sphere, administration.
12:26Uh, as an asset, not a liability.  And so I've been able to  spend some time with, you know, RFK junior with people,  uh, you know,  close to him as well.  And, um,  and this whole, you know, food emancipation, this, this food freedom thing is, is such a, is such a big deal.  And, um, the thing that's  struck me about it.
12:54The epiphany I want to share  is all my life I've been. Whatever preaching, get in your kitchen. You know, if we want a different food system, get in your kitchen, get in your kitchen, buy whole foods. You know, don't buy processed, get in your kitchen and cook from scratch. It's never been easier. And you know, we've got Insta pot hot running, hot and cold water refrigeration,  uh, time bake  Insta pots, the bread makers, ice cream makers, you know,
13:24Um, get in your kitchen this summer. I realized after looking at what Americans spend on convenience food, 75 % of the retail dollar is convenience food. Um, and hearing RFK junior talk about ultra processed and, and all this, and this, the whole, the whole maha, I mean, the year started with Teresa and I being invited to go as guests to the, to the maha inaugural ball in DC.
13:54We'd never been to an inaugural ball. And so I had to go, you know, get a tuxedo and we had to, we had to go up there and froze our buns off. But, uh, we, you we went to that thing. And so what I've come to the conclusion is that I'm going to quit preaching, get in your kitchen. Now I still believe that I still think I'm not, you know, I haven't gone to the dark side, but what I'm suggesting is that that horse has left the stable.
14:23Americans,  until some catastrophe happens, Americans are not going to get in their kitchen. They're just not.  And so that leaves the convenience food option  as the single biggest category of food purchasing in the country. Now there's no reason why a convenience food, say, you know, a heat and eat
14:52frozen chicken pot pie needs to be junk. It can be good chicken, good carrots, good peas. It doesn't need monosodium  MSG in it. It doesn't need red dye 29. It doesn't need glycerin, antifreeze in it. know,  these 10,000 food additives that are in all these uh convenience foods that Europe only has 400 of them.
15:21They don't have to be there.  And so, so  I'm...
15:29And then you've got, you've got the farmers. There's  obviously you're watching these things too.  And, um, all the press on 2025 agriculture is negative. I'm the soybean farmers are going to lose a hundred dollars.  Uh, the tariff blowback is having this effect, that effect. Um, and of course, you know, when beef prices jumped, when they closed the border with Mexico and shut down a million, a million cattle coming into the country.
15:59That spiked the prices and then Trump blamed the farmers, cattle farmers for being greedy and selfish. Well, they didn't have anything to do with it. That only took him a week to backtrack from that. I think somebody got to him on that because they told him, look, Trump, you these farmers are the ones that got you in the White House. Don't you be bad mouthing the farmers. And so I am done.
16:29uh, trying to guilt people into getting in their kitchen. And instead I'm pivoting and saying, how can we get farmers  access to the convenience food market? That is, that is where the money is. That's where the food is. And there's no reason why it has to be junk food. It can be good food. And so hence food emancipation.
16:58Let's take the shackles  off our farmers and let farmers  access the food supply  and take the shackles off of the buyers who don't have choice. So both parties win if we take the shackles off. The only party that doesn't win  is the industrial commercial  food system that will be uh
17:28You know, that will have new competition in the marketplace. I love that you're pivoting and I do the same thing on my podcast. So I'm constantly telling people that if they want to save money, they should learn to cook from scratch and that it's better for them. And you're right. People don't want to take the time to cook. And it's so tragic. I love cooking.  spend, I spend an inordinate amount of time cooking and I enjoy it, but if you hate it, it's no fun. So.
17:58Or  if you're so far removed from it, you're intimidated by it. I'm meeting more and more people now who,  young,  you know,  twenties and thirties, who  are literally intimidated by the kitchen. I mean, they're scared of food. They've heard about, you know, whatever, uh disease and safety  and all this sanitation and all this stuff. And they're paranoid that they're going to...
18:25Um, make themselves sick or get some sort of disease because they didn't wipe the counter off well enough. mean, it  actually,  when ignorance, when ignorance finally hatches to its final uh destination, it turns from ignorance into paranoia.  And that's what we've got right now in the average,  uh, American home is literally food paranoia.
18:52They don't want to touch it. They want to open up a bag, stick it in the microwave  and, um, and eat it because they're literally paranoid of, of viscerally engaging in the food itself. And so unless and until that changes the desperate need, desperate need of both consumers  and farmers  is to enable us to easily transact food commerce.
19:22in that space without a million dollar facility and 10 bureaucrats breathing down our neck. oh That leads me to another question. I don't know what Virginia's laws are like regarding food production if you're not a business or a factory, but here in Minnesota, we're not allowed to sell anything from a home kitchen that requires cooling or heating. So
19:51We can sell cookies that have already been baked because you don't have to put cookies in a refrigerator or an oven for them to stay good. Shelf stable things are fine. But if I wanted to make a cheesecake, I cannot make it in my home kitchen and sell it. So what's Virginia's laws like? Yeah, identical, identical.  And most, most states are identical. There are now four states.
20:20that have  pretty effective cottage food laws. ah The best one is probably Maine. Second best is Wyoming. And in those states,  can uh produce any food in your home kitchen that you want to without inspection.  Now, the  ingredients in the food
20:49have to be legal. unfortunately, this means that if you make a  shepherd's pie, let's say with beef in it, the beef has to be from an inspected  source. Okay,  Once you have the beef,  you can open that package and make a shepherd's pie and sell it without inspection in Maine and Wyoming.
21:19So those  are huge wins  in this movement.  And  in fact, in this book I'm working on,  I'm going to oh put in the four states with these good  cottage food laws so that people can see the kind of language. So right now, the strategist that I'm working with, what
21:48the strategy seems to be, we, if we could get, you know, 30 or 40 states to adopt these, these food freedom laws, then, then what we could get, hopefully, would be a federal blanket. I mean, I'm, I'm after a, an amendment to the constitution of the bill of rights that basically
22:19Two consenting adults exercising freedom of choice to give their microbiome uh agency should be able to engage in a food transaction without asking the government's permission. Now,  I'm not saying that I should be able to sell it at Walmart  or export it to Sri Lanka and Vietnam. ah What I am saying is that  neighbor-to-neighbor food transactions
22:49among voluntary consenting adults exercising freedom of choice. And I know those are powerful phrases, but I use them on purpose.  It should not require a bureaucrat's permission to engage in a neighbor to neighbor food transaction, period.  When do you think this book is going to be available to buy? Because I can't wait to promote it.
23:15Yeah. So, uh, so I'm hoping to get it roughed out by the end, by, by the end of December. So I've got two weeks here and I'm cranking on it. mean, I'm, I'm every, I've got some other things I've got, you know, some podcasts I've got  a wood to cut and some other things to do tomorrow. We've got it. We've got a chip. So that Daniel wants me to go up and cut trees for him.  Uh, so, you know, I've got some things to do, but, basically,  uh, every spare minute I'm doing this, uh, I hope for this to be out.
23:44sometime late next summer, uh August, maybe something like that.  And, um, because I'm trying to, I'm trying to coincide it with some other fairly large,  um,  documentaries that are coming out on food freedom. There's a, there's a lot going on in Maha  and, and, and I can tell you, I was just up in DC on Monday night at, at, uh, at the Maha,  um,
24:14Gala.  And uh I mean, it was amazing. RFK Jr. was there and Lee Zeldin, uh Secretary of EPA  guy was there. uh Of course, you you had your regular uh group, know, CDC and  the new NIH administrator and all that.  that,  that
24:42basic movement, that basic movement um is a real catalyst, I think, for this issue because ah one of the big phrases that's  been used now is agency capture. And I think people are beginning to realize that the watchdogs,  people wanted the government to protect them.
25:10from those corporate interests that were hiding behind razor wire and guard towers in big industrial food complexes, whether they're,  know, canneries, uh know,  slaughter processing facilities or whatever. uh We didn't want a government bully big enough to look across the fence and protect our interests. And what they didn't realize was that  the government regulators  and the corporate interests were going to go to bed together.  That's what they didn't realize.
25:40And that reality  is really coming to light now  with, you know, Maha, with Moms Across Americas and Honeycutt. ah What these folks  are exposing  is pretty dramatic.  Well, I'm thrilled that this is going on.  This is a  movement now because it has been incredibly frustrating to me. I make a killer cheesecake,
26:09And I have my cottage food license or registration for Minnesota. can't sell cheesecake in Minnesota because it's cooked in my kitchen. I know that's minor. It's small. It's tiny scale. But if your book actually turns people to understanding that there's nothing wrong with what's cooked in a home kitchen, as long as that kitchen is like, you know, relatively clean and there's not dog and cat hair everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. Well.
26:40So here's,  so the difference is the expectations. So, you know, when a food chain, when a food chain is opaque,
26:54Uh, there are,  there, there's a trust issue,  but when a food chain is short and relational, the trust goes way up. See the butcher, baker and candlestick maker, or in your case, I'll say the cheesecake maker. Yeah. You used to be embedded in the village as artisans as craft and, and, and their kids played with other kids in the neighborhood. They went to the same churches.
27:23They lived above their shops.  They didn't have employees only hanging on the door. People could come in, wander around the kitchen, know, look in the garbage can.  I mean, there was a transparency and an accountability that created the  vetting  procedure. But as food industrialized and  started hiding behind
27:53you know, industrial  walls, the public became paranoid of the food. think I already said that. and,  and, and, here's the thing.  Let's take  another way to say this is the Uberization of food. You know, if 50 years ago, somebody had come to you and said, uh, you know what?
28:21Mary, um, you know what? In, um, next week, you're going to go to, uh, Calcutta, jump in a car with a guy that has no chauffeur's license. The car isn't registered with a chauffeur agency and he's going to pick you up and you're going to say, take me to, you know, the museum, uh, at D street. And you're going to trust him to take you there.
28:49You'd have said, what are you crazy? Calcutta? No,  I'm getting a cab. I'm getting a licensed, you know,  chauffeur service. I'm not jumping in the car with some, you Well, that's exactly what happened. It's called Uber. And what made it possible was that the internet with real time, uh real time,
29:17vetting, know, one star, two star, three star complaints, whatever,  has, has  re-embedded the butcher  and the cheesecake maker.  I love that. uh In, in the global village with real time vetting.  And this is brand new. This is brand new.
29:44And I mean, the same thing can be said of Airbnb. know, who would have thought that in 10 years, we would double the number of hospitality rooms worldwide without driving a nail, making another room. Just the power, the power  of a transparent transaction enabled by a renewed democratized voice called the internet.
30:14And so here we are with your cheesecakes.  And if your cheesecakes aren't good, somebody's going to say, you know, Mary's cheesecakes are horrible. I would never recommend them. And you know what? You'll be out of business.  That'll go viral. But if somebody says, wow, these cheesecakes are unbelievable. Everybody should go buy those. You could actually have a side hustle. You could actually start a little business and,  and, make some money. and.
30:43And the point is that the internet is its own protective vetting device because it has resurrected the transparent village voice of yesteryear. Crazy how that works, isn't it? Yes, it is. I love it. I love it. All right, Joel. And that's why people don't need to be scared. I mean, I can hear people.
31:13Oh no, what if, if Mary's, you know, what if they're not good? What if they're not? Well, you know,  are you, are you, do you really think that you can trust a bureaucrat more than, than an artisan, a craft person, a cheesecake maker that you know, that you've asked around, Hey, what do you think about her? You know, what do you think about her situation? You've been to her kitchen?
31:42uh You know, is she clean? she good?  And this  conversation we can now have so easily and cheaply, we don't have to  use snail mail, we don't have to put a stamp on it,  is revolutionary in uh creating  self-policing within commerce.
32:12Absolutely. All right, Joel, I try to keep these to half an hour and we are there. So thank you for taking time out of your time off as it were. Chat with me again. I appreciate it. People can find you at Polyface Farm on Facebook and the website is polyfacefarm.com. Yes? Yes. Okay. All right. And as always, people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com. Loved talking to you again, sir.
32:42Thank you, it's a real privilege and an honor, Mary. And Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.  Same to you and yours. Have a great day.  You too, take care.
 

Hellfire Homestead

Today I'm talking with Shannon and Allen at Hellfire Homestead. 
 
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Shannon and Alan at Hellfire Homestead in New Hampshire. Good evening, you guys. How are you? Very good, actually, despite freezing. Is it super cold in New Hampshire right now? Yeah, we could kind of a little,
00:25cold snap going on so that makes for frozen water bottles and water buckets which is always a nightmare but yeah Minnesota's pretty cold too but not as cold as it's gonna be Saturday the high for Saturday where I live is gonna be minus one oh my gosh  and it's probably coming your way three or four days later so you I've given you a heads up oh
00:50Yeah, I know it's really hard with livestock because they've got to have fresh water whether you want to go out and break the ice and put water in or not. Yep. And we have quite a few different animals here. Okay. Well, tell me the first question I have is why is it called Hellfire Homestead? So, mean, oddly enough, it was sort of to weed out people that would be turned off by that name.
01:18I think, and feel free to interrupt me, dear. But I feel that like in recent years, you know, with the influx of TikTok and other various social media, not only is there a lot of information that's absolutely wrong about homesteading, survivalism, bushcraft, et cetera, but a lot of people into it are not multi-generational. And there's a lot of returning to sort of like bad
01:48Um, bad themes, I guess I should say as far as what we perceive to be gender roles in home setting and things like that on top of,  uh, just a lot of bad information in general, which I mean, as somebody who grew up in New Hampshire and  my family's been out here since the 1700s, um, ah I learned generationally how to can, um, how to keep meat clean.  Um, hunting was big in parts of my family. Um,
02:18And I just sort of like grew up in the woods, like a wild feral child. ah So,  you know, and then you, you know, you log on to like TikTok and you see like 25 year old kids like canning with, ah you know, jars they got, you know, spaghetti jars they got from the grocery store and saying this is viable. And it's like, no, that will kill you if not ruin your entire harvest. There's a reason our grandparents use ball jars. ah
02:46So that was part of it. And another part of it is that people are incredibly interested in what it is we do.
02:54just on the day to day, like they're interested in the farm, they're interested in the fact that we fill our own freezer with our own meat. They're interested in the fact that we do process the hides of the animals that we eat and kill. We have sheep. ah So, some of us being online was to satisfy the curiosity of our friends, but also to kind of counter some of these like...
03:20these ridiculous ideas that people who are not even generational farmers are starting to promote as good.  Uh huh. Good. I'm glad that you're, you're like standing up for that because you're right. There's a lot of crap  on the internet about what's safe, what isn't, what you can do, what you can't do. And I was grown up the same. I was brought up, sorry, not grown up,  brought up the same way you were Shannon. I spent so much time in the, uh, the woods and the swamp behind my house growing up in Maine.
03:50And  I'm 56, there were no computers, were no tablets, there were no cell phones.  Mom said, you ate a good breakfast, go play, don't come back till dark. And that's what we did. Yeah, was Gen X. So my parents were basically like, get outside, you're on your own until it starts getting dark. Yeah, me too.  And  I couldn't necessarily do that with my kids when I finally managed to find a husband who wasn't terrible and managed to stay with him.
04:19and lived in town because there weren't really any woods for them to go play in. So we would take them on the weekends and go hike trails in the area.
04:30Yeah, my son that way too. we, you know, when I was,  it took a while to get a farm in my first marriage. Um, and we lived in the city. We actually lived in Concord, New Hampshire.  Um, so like keeping that rural, that like, you know, that aspect of like self sustainability was a little bit harder.  Um, but you know, we did things like, you know, from a very young age, he was taught gun safety from a very young age. He was taught at least some of the basics of.
04:58killing and cleaning your own food.  And then as we got our own farm  with my ex-husband,  we started raising rabbits and doing things like that. So, I mean, that's definitely uh something that he's held onto. And hopefully I can pass on to my grandchildren one day on top of, know,  those future grandkids into 4-H as quickly as possible.  Yeah, I love where your heart is at. I really do. ah
05:26The other thing that's funny is I'm sitting here listening to you talk about how you grew up. And I didn't know that I was brought up under a homesteading umbrella because my dad heated his house for the wood. My mom and dad both hunted. They both fished. ate bass every summer or every spring.  My dad will not, he does not keep any bass these days. He's 83 years old. If he goes fishing and catches the bass, it's catch and release.
05:55And the last time I had baked bass, he makes it with stuffing. is amazing. Was when my kid was like six or seven, my youngest, he caught the bass with grandpa. And I said to him, I said, if you catch a bass, talk grampy and bring it home. Cause I want baked bass for dinner. And  my dad got home. We're having baked bass for dinner. And I said, Oh, did you catch one? He said, no, of course I didn't. Your kid caught it.  And I said, Oh, did you bring it home?
06:25He's like, yeah, cause he wouldn't let me put it back in the water cause mom wanted big baths for dinner.  So, um,  but seriously, I had no idea that my parents were doing anything unusual.  And as soon as I married my third husband, who happened to have a house in a small yard,  we started gardening because you can't eat grass. Yep. Very true.  And he was already a deer hunter. So we had that box checked.
06:54And we started putting food away and preserving. And I started crocheting and making hats and scarves for the kids. And it was all stuff I grew up with. And now in quotation marks, it's a movement. Yep. For good or ill, I think that the preservation of these homesteading skills and bushcraft and things like that is not only just, you're preserving your heritage as a human being.
07:22regardless of race, you we all came from the land. But you're also, you know, it's mental health. Because when you realistically look at it throughout human history, industrialization was what only the past, what since 1700, 1600, something like that. So you got to think how did we live for millions of years previously, well, we lived off the land and we lived side by side by animals. So there's a big mental health aspect to that, I think.
07:51Yeah. And when I, when I said now it's a movement, it might've sounded snarky and I didn't mean for it to sound snarky. I just find it really interesting that the old ways are now the new ways. Yeah. And I'm not against that idea. I mean, I have go.  And the problem that I have with it, I think is that,  um, these movements, because they are popular on social media and they do generate money is that some of the easiest things that you can do when you're, when you're creating these,
08:21this media is to slide backwards. And I've seen a lot of very detrimental, um, this toward women going back into the quote unquote, trad wife lifestyle. And I have watched a lot of these videos and they're, you know, on the surface, it's like, you know, this, this woman in a dress that looks like it's made out of a 1995, you know, kitchen curtain, you know, dancing around her kitchen, coop and cleaning it out in white sandals. And I'm like, this doesn't happen.
08:50Like good luck keeping your manicure when you've mucked a sheep stall for like four hours.  So yeah, those are the ones that make me mildly crazy. I'm like, I can't even imagine trying to do that. I mean,  I haven't actually mucked out our chicken coop ever because my husband does it. God love him.  But if I was going to go out there and uh scoop poop.
09:15I would be in the crappiest, holiest pants I have that I wouldn't be worried about throwing away.  my least favorite shirt, because you're going to get covered in straw or pine shavings  and poop. It's going to happen.  And spider webs and  dead bugs and beans. Of course, the dog is going to interrupt. Oh, that's okay. Maggie barked her head off this morning or yesterday morning when I did an interview with somebody and I was like, I'm sorry. And they were like, that's fine.
09:46But  I think that um at least what we're going to try to do, we are putting together  some media. We're hoping to get some  videos up by the end of the year. We're just sort of collecting it and doing it in the winter while we have a little bit more time.  It's also to talk about that there's a lot of mistakes that happen in homesteading. It's not all like, oh, I get to go out and play with my cute little sheep and my dogs are frolicking happy and...
10:13You know, like you do lose an entire litter of rabbits to a mother that, you know, knocks them out of the nest. Uh huh. You know, your sheep does split a hoof and then you have to figure out how to help, help that animal. yeah, break a horn on the wind. Oh my God. A broken horn on the sheet bleeds so terribly. So two of our sheep have four horns. Um, so, know, or, you know, a dog gets sprayed by a skunk or in the case of our.
10:42idiot dogs,  porcupines and what? Four times last year.  you know, it's not all about, um you know, canning goods in your kitchen  and,  you know, your beautiful little pet chickens, you know, flitting around. um It's  gross. It's a lot of poop and it's a lot of um dirt.  And  it's not this like clean sunny thing all the time.
11:10You're making it sound so incredibly attractive. Um,  um, but there is a lot of good to this and you know that, I know that.  And I think being real about it is really important. So like, when you look around, like, like what is, what is the pumpkin spice of the farmyard other than chickens, it's goats. I will tell you when Alan or probably chime in here,  goats are the most horrible animals you can ever have. And we say that from experience.
11:39Like, you can't have fruit trees. can't have, I used to have goats that would break out of their pen in order to eat the dirt, like, and start destroying my rabbit hutches to eat the dirty peat on hay from my rabbits. Despite the fact that the goats had like a good acre of fresh, they always had hay. They always had fresh everything. I mean, they were just flat out destructive. Um, so I would always recommend sheep.
12:05But you have a culture where homesteaders, the instant thought, and I fell into this too, which is why I'm mentioning this. The instant thought is, I'm gonna get goats. Don't get goats. Don't get goats.  It's so funny that you bring up goats because our friends have goats and they love their goats.  my friend loves her goats beyond probably loving her dogs. Wow.
12:32I'm okay with that because everybody has a different experience with every single animal. swear I've been doing this podcast for over two years  and I have heard goats are not naughty. I've heard goats are great. I've heard  goats are terrible. So I think your mileage varies on what kind of goat you get and what kind of person you are. But I do know that you have to make sure that you have a really good place for them to be corralled because they will escape if there's any chance.
13:00And our sheep basically, they just roam the yard. don't even fence them. We have a very small, I wouldn't even call it a neighborhood. We have a couple neighbors around us that are on a private dirt road and they just wander around and then about three o'clock in the morning, they start complaining because they want their pellets and to go to bed. So they're pretty easy. And we also have rabbits. We have two turkeys that I guess are pets now.
13:30I think their purpose is to scream when the UPS guy shows up. uh I didn't realize that we ended up with Blackhead on the property, which is going to limit us from really ever having turkeys here. Yep. bought don't know what that is. So it's a, it's not at all. It's a, what is it? A protozoan. That lives in worms. Yeah. And so what it is is that chickens will bring it in, but it,  it'll actually
14:01It's in the dirt now. So anytime, wherever the chickens have been,  and it doesn't even affect the chickens, but it does cause liver failure in turkeys.  the turkeys, any turkeys that eat like the worms and stuff, they come out of the ground because we've had chickens here for 20 years. Yeah. They, uh, yeah, it carries it with it. could have come in at any time during the last 20 years. It's hard to say.  So yeah, pretty much limited us to not having turkeys.
14:30Yeah, so we lost 80%. Yeah, we lost 80 % of our turkeys and I bought like heritage breed.  Again, thinking that I was losing turkeys because they were the white meat bird and they just weren't healthy. And then it turns out they they had this blackhead disease. And again, I think this is why it's very important to tell people about your failures. ah Because now we're not going to have any more turkeys other than these two that are ah living with us now. ah
15:00Because when you talk about your failures, things like blackhead disease or things about, you know, things, the realities of home study um are important to know because you also get into the situation where people think that they're going to come in and they're going to have this cute little farm and they go and they buy like uh a miniature cow and they go buy, you know, goats and rabbits and  a guardian dog. And then the next thing you know,
15:27they're completely overwhelmed and have no idea what they're doing when that cow becomes a bull or that guardian dog wants to work and they have no idea how to control that. um I think it's very important to put out a realistic idea of what homesteading is because ultimately, even if you're eating your animals, you are the steward and the guardian of those animals. So their quality of life is on you up until that time that you um use them for food.  Certainly is. uh
15:57Every time my husband floats an idea about what he would like to do next, I say,  we need to take six months and do the research and think about it before we make any decisions. And he looks at me like I'm cracked.  And I'm like,  no, seriously, we're not diving into anything until we know what we're doing. Because I'm one of those people who  when the animals die, it breaks my heart. We got, we got rabbits.  Um,  oh my God, three years ago now.
16:26Rabbits are not our thing. Just for the record, we don't do rabbits anymore.  And the rabbits were not getting pregnant. And we still to this day don't know why. And we had a confirmed buck and two confirmed does.  We got one litter of rabbits out  of one of  the does in a whole year.  So either they were bad at their job or we didn't know what the hell we were doing. And I want to say it was probably both. But I did all the research.
16:55I looked up everything. talked to the people that sold us the rabbits and it still didn't work. So, there's two schools of thought here. You can do all the research on earth and still fail or you can not do any research at all and for sure fail. And you can feel kind of strophically. Because I think people wonder. So both of us still work full time. I'm in school full time. And of course we have the friends that are like, how do you do it all? And it's like, well, you don't have a choice. So if you want to do home studying,
17:25it's very rare unless you are inheriting ah the infrastructure and an established farm to actually make a living wage out of homesteading. And that's something that I've tried to explain to people as well. Like we don't, we, if anything, kind of break even by the fact that we can fill our, um you know, fill our freezers full of meat. Like we don't really have to go meat shopping at all. um And our dogs, we,
17:54You know, I think that we avoid a lot of vet bills because our dogs eat a good raw diet. Um, for the most part that comes off of the animals that we process ourselves. Um, but I mean, are you going to make a complete living off it? I wouldn't quit your job. Yeah. Like don't, don't quit your day job until you're ready. You know, and that means you're going to be working yourself to the bone. Um, but that's again, that's the reality of the situation.
18:24Yeah, yeah, and you're making a really good distinction here because a small homestead is not a big farm. It's never gonna be And one to two people um There's only so much you can do in a day, you know It does make it a lot easier with two people like we can get a bunch of chickens done in a day We can get a bunch of rabbits done in a day But it is it's hard work and it's constant work and
18:53It's definitely, you know, a labor of love, but these are the realities of the situation. So again, like I talk about that on reality of things like tip-talk and stuff like that, where it shows these people, like one person doesn't have to work and one person doesn't have to do this. then I'm guaranteeing you that a lot of those people have landscapers. have, you know, people coming in and setting up the scene for them and things like that. So.
19:20When it comes to people who actually want to start doing this themselves, don't believe anything you hear in that realm. If it looks too good to be true, it is. I always tell people if they're interested, they need to go to a place where the people are actually walking the walk and talking the talk. Absolutely. And that's what we've tried to do, you know, to an extent with our friends. um Next year, we're going to start raising meat birds ah to  help.
19:49feed our friends and have them all come over and do a butchering party. I'm really excited for that. That will be very interesting on the psychology side. Yeah, well, it's kind of it's kind of interesting because once I think that people at least once in their life, if they're going to eat meat,  really should understand where it comes from. And at least on the homestead, you know that your you know, your meat, you know where it comes from, you know, it's not abused. You know, its final moments were not
20:19you know, on a factory line, was,  you know, just picked up and  in the case of chickens, you just kind of cut their throat and it's instant.  Um, but I think that that's really important to understand because part of what we get at the supermarket where everything is sterile and pre-packaged is a distance from honoring the animals that we eat.  Um, and when you stop honoring your food and you stop honoring the animal, well, you don't miss it until it's gone.
20:50And, you know, that's, that's part of a consumerist culture. That's part of a culture that just expects, well, when I need food on the grocery store in the grocery store, it's going to be there.  Um,  and part of homesteading and part of small time farming is to ensure that, or to understand that, no, it might not always be there.  And  you have to kind of provide for yourself, but it also connects you to that bridge between, um, you know, the wild.
21:18and your domestic life because you are living with animals, you're caring for animals, you're  killing animals in order that their body feeds yours. So to have respect for that circle, I think is very important and very humbling as a human.  Oh,  absolutely. The first time I watched a chicken get butchered that was my chicken, I was like,  oh, this is hard. And I didn't cry. I was more shocked than sad.
21:47And my husband said, are you okay? And I was like,  yeah, I said, but other people need to know this is how it's done. And he said, I think we're going to have that covered someday. And now I'm doing a podcast about all of this. So,  but yeah, it's really, really hard. The first time  you take the life of an animal to sustain your own life through eating it.
22:13Yep. we try, I think another thing that we try to do is use every possible part.  um, you know, in the, in, in rabbits,  um, nearly everything is usable other than sort of the awful, which is like the digestive system and all the feces and things like that. Like you can basically use everything. The chickens will eat it. The dogs will eat it. You can eat it.  Um, and then the fur is obviously usable as our, like, we just barely completed a entire batch of rabbits.
22:42cheek, our key chain, sorry.  Um, so we try to use absolutely everything we can. If we can't use it, we pass it on to somebody else. So we even save bones and skulls because these things are the ears even, um, because these are really big on the oddities market. Yep. So it's important for us that, you know, every part is used, everything is used and that the animal dies a very quick,  um, quick painless death.
23:10And it is hard. is hard with rabbits, especially when you, you know, you're the one raising them. So I kind of, I feel better by the fact that I have,  um, I do have a favorite rabbit who will live her life out here. name's October. She's very sweet and she's a very good mom. So I've decided that, you know, she will be one of the rabbits that stays.  Um, but I also think of it too, as you know, not only do we as humans eat
23:38horrifically processed food, but so do our pets.  And um that was another thing that I think that I had issues with on TikTok too, was that, you know, there's this big thing of like showing people feeding their dogs, like these vegetables and things like that. And I've been a,  I've worked in, I've worked with dogs most of my life. ah I was a groomer, a dog trainer, a behaviorist. um I've ran kennels, rescues. We have five dogs right now that are all rescues.
24:07They're obligate carnivores. So the idea that it's good or easy for them to digest vegetable matter is something that was promoted by pet food companies in order to sell you corn and soy and rice and things like that that dogs really should not be eating, same with cats. ah So another aspect of that was I wanted to start also talking about
24:34you know, Ron ancestral diets for dogs. And part of how we supplement that is through our rabbits and chickens.  Um, so it's,  uh, it's, it's, it's a whole thing, I guess, like when you do this, it becomes your life and it becomes,  um,  sort of a center,  not necessarily of your world because you're working on it, but like a center that centers you. Yes. Yep. You're grounded in it.
25:04Yes.  I love that. I think that's fabulous because a lot of people are like, yeah, we have chickens, we have goats, have cows, and they talk to me about it  and they're thrilled to have them and they take care of them and they do what they're going to do with them.  And that's  wonderful. Absolutely.  But you are grounded in this. Like you,  you were died and centered in this.  Absolutely.
25:33There's a line from a movie. can't think of it right now, but  I said it badly.  Go ahead. God, I'm trying to think of what I want to do. And so we're, we're always like adding projects too, which is crazy. He goes a little crazy cause I'm a little ADHD and I'm always doing things, but,  um, you know, we do maple syrup too. So that's pretty fun. Like we get, um, you know, we'd pop trees on our property.  Um,
25:58And every year we come up with big batches of syrup done the old way, quote unquote. We do use the aluminum buckets and we, you know, we cook it outside on a stove that we rebuild every year. That's for Gordon and Hames, sure.  And everything goes up and down at the same time and everything's made of rock out here. Yeah, that's true too. If  anybody out there is unfamiliar with the quote unquote granite state, well, it's aptly named.  Gardening is very hard here. It is, ah there's,
26:28There's a lot of rock in the ground, let's say, and our property is extremely rocky. It's hard to drive people. It is.  Fencing is an issue all the time. ah And we also heat the house using wood mostly sourced from our own property. Like we go out there and we cut it and drag it out with the Jeep and, uh you know, spend the warmer months kind of processing it and drying it and things like that. But again, it's work.
26:55Are you always a year ahead on your firewood? I would say no. We laxed last year, I think we did. But we made up for it because one of the things too to remember is people are always getting rid of things. Yeah, so we sort the tremendous amount because the emerald ash borer came through this area. It's filled all the ash trees and it's standing dead now.
27:25So they, we were helping out an older couple cleaning up trees that were coming down on their property. And that's where we got a lot of the stuff this year, which was nice because it's already dry. Yeah. The Emerald Ash borers found our tree line this past year or two and  the trees were hanging in. And my husband noticed this spring that there were a lot of holes in the ash trees, you know, the trunks. And he came in and he said, we have a problem. And I said, what's that? And he said, the, uh
27:54The woodpeckers are basically putting holes in our ash trees. And I said, well, yeah, that's what woodpeckers do. And he said, no, we have emerald ash doors. They're going after the bugs. I was like, great. I said, how many trees are almost dead? He said, at least half. And almost our entire tree line is all ash trees. I was like, what are we going to replace them with? He says, apple trees, peach trees, plum trees. I was like, go for it. Please do that.
28:22It's a good time. Is it south facing? Good time for like a food forest. You can see it.  It's actually  south. It is south. It's it runs north to south. And so we have plum trees and apple trees and pear and peach trees over there already. And they're doing great. So he's just going to keep adding some in every year. That's what I want to do. I want to do more like the permaculture aspect of things as opposed to  the annuals where you have to like
28:52them every year. So you're getting more out of a out of the permaculture state like plants as opposed to like your corn, which you have to put a ton of effort into planting every year, you know, where you could just go out there and pick fruit or berries or. Okay.  You know how Shannon is very uh adamant about homesteading is hard and TikTok sucks because people put happy.
29:21the lucky stuff on there. Yeah. I hate corn. Corn is not good for you. really is. It's a grain. It's not even vegetable. It's a starch. It really is not. Not gonna lie. The food quality is so poor in that. Yep. So I am going to die on that hill. Corn is not really good for you. And I mean, if you want to have an ear of sweet corn picked from the field down the road from you because it tastes good in August,
29:51Go for it, slather it in butter, enjoy it. But  corn every meal is really bad for you. Yeah. It is a dietary, you know, like  the amount that we eat it or the amount that we force it onto our pets is absurd. It's a sugar spike here. Yeah. And I think again, that's something that we have to be aware of when we are doing this homesteading thing. Like, why are we doing it? Because the food that we're being fed in the grocery store, 99 % of the time is just manufactured garbage.
30:20It's crap is what it is. My husband grew these beautiful cabbages, like an  old variety of cabbage this summer.  And uh I had told him to not bother growing cabbages because usually they're not very good and they take up a lot of room  and they're buggy. They get bugs really easy. Yeah, I the veracica as well.
30:43Yeah, and he picked this very old variety from some place and got the seeds and put them in and started them from little baby cabbages.  And they were like  dark green. They were sweet. They were crispy. I said, you can grow those cabbages every summer for the rest of our lives if you want. Cabbage is good for you.
31:06Yeah, we tried gardening. Our garden is a little, uh, was feral. We took off for a week in the river and came back and it just sort of took over. We went from the extreme water this year too. So it rained. I think it was like, you know, working full time made it really bad, but I think it was like 15 or 16 Saturdays in a row. Yep.
31:31Like every weekend for like 16 weekends, all spring, rain every weekend. We got so much rain this year from the beginning. And then all of a sudden July came and then it stopped raining. It didn't rain again until October. That was our summer two summers ago here in Minnesota. And these things are difficult. So the garden did okay. We're probably going to try to refurbish the whole thing this year. And we do it again, composting. like we make
32:01Rabbits make massive amounts of manure that you can literally just kind of throw in the garden. um But we have so much  poo production here that, you know, we definitely ah make enough compost, um which again is another thing that I think ah needs to be discussed too, because,  you know, rabbits are definitely a very sustainable way to raise meat for yourself. Supposing you can kill them. Caveat. um
32:30But  there's a lot of push like, you can raise rabbits in a small space. You can raise rabbits like right in your backyard. But what they don't tell you is how much poop they produce and that you have to find some method of disposing of that, whether it's giving it away or uh putting it in the corner of your house because  animals make a lot of poo. And anybody who has ever worked with animals  will tell you that like,
32:57Probably like 70 % of working with them is poop.  Oh yeah.  Even the dogs.  Yeah, for sure.  It's not a clean and shiny and roses and candy kind of lifestyle. No, and it's expensive too. know, like, I mean, when we have the egg shortages, I was trying to go get meat birds and everywhere I went, it's like, we're focusing on egg layers because people want to buy egg layers.
33:26And I tried so hard to tell people like by the time you get your eggs, you've put more money. You could buy eggs even at that extended price cheaper than you ever could by raising your own chickens. Yeah. There's a lot of people in our area that have a $2,000 dozen eggs this year. Yep.  Oh yeah. Those first eggs are expensive. Yeah. Between the feed and the chickens. You can get it layers all day long on Craigslist right now though, free.  Yep.
33:55give them a whole lot.  And the roosters were insane. mean, I even went to tractor supply looking for the meat birds and this woman was there like, Oh, we're get chickens, we're gonna get eggs. And I'm like, these are straight run.  So you might end up with roosters. And I told her flat out, said, I got a couple of Americanas. I got five just to sort of add the blue eggs to my flock. And I ended up with four roosters. ah So you also have what you know, another thing comes into home studying is responsibility.  And part of that is
34:25On a homestead, males are kind of useless. uh know, like, do you, I mean, if you have pets, that's one thing, but like, how many rams do you need? How many bulls do you need? How many roosters do you really need? How many bucks do you really need? Not that many. So what happens when,  you know, someone goes and buys a straight run of chickens  and they end up with mostly roosters. Well, what are you going to do that? Nobody wants a rooster. You might be able to rehome a few or send a few to rescue, but.
34:54for the most part, those roosts are gonna be culled. And that's another thing to consider that you have to be a part of. Even if you're not the one doing the culling, these animals that you're raising, responsibility-wise, they're most likely going to end up culled. And I think too that there's a lot of, there's a lot of rose colored glasses when it comes to how people perceive.
35:23homesteading, or even chickens in general. mean, I'm not, my dogs are being ridiculous right now. I've gotten a lot of flack for, you know, how can you butcher chickens? Well, they're so beautiful and wonderful and friendly. And I said, well, chickens will eat each other. I was like, as soon as I go to butcher my meat birds, my egg layers are out here. They're looking for the blood. They're looking for the entrails. They don't care. They're little dinosaurs. They are absolutely.
35:52And you see a lot of people's vision shattered by this sort of thing. And then again, you look on TikTok, like I saw some lady post this ridiculous ah post about she tried to make it out as her rooster was mourning a hen that died. And of course people in the comments were like, oh, those poor, you know, birds, were, they were, you ah meant to be together.  you know,  people were coming up with this entire love story of this hen and this rooster. When people who actually had chickens are like,
36:22The only reason he's looking at her is he's cause he's trying to peck feathers off her to eat the feathers. Cause they do that.  And  there's again, there's this like sort of blindsided disconnect of how these animals actually are. And I'm not trying to like, you know, I'm not trying to say that if you want to have a pet chicken and you love that chicken, we have one here.  Um, that there's anything wrong with that. But again, when I go back to like, you have to honor the animal.
36:49You have to honor the fact that yes, that chicken is a little dinosaur and they can be exceedingly cruel to each other. I mean, they will peck each other to death. So we don't honor these animals by giving them human feelings and emotions. We honor them by respecting the animal that they are. Yeah. It's like Joel Saliton says, the pigness of the pig. Yes. Okay. Well, this is not the conversation I thought I was going to have this evening, but I'm glad I'm having it.
37:20Well, I'm actually glad to hear that  Yeah, I want to have you guys back because who makes the the pens and the crochet hooks is it yours at oh out? Well, let's have Alan come back when you guys have time and talk to me about that because those crochet hooks look amazing Oh, no problem. I'm sure he would love to oh
37:50If  it was a hit or not. Yeah, he had, he really. look great. oh He would probably enjoy actually talking about that because he starts talking about wood stuff to me and I start glazing over. So.  We'll have to set it up for after the new year.  Excellent. All right. Shannon, Alan, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me.  Can people find you anywhere other than Hellfire Homestead on Facebook?  There's that and we've put up a YouTube.
38:20Currently, we don't have any media on that because we're still kind of putting that together. Again, like I said, like over the winter where we have slightly less time um in the summer and fall to do this. So we're trying to just sort of get that done now and probably put it out by spring um because we also have our paranormal group and things like that going. So  lots of stuff. I wish my podcast, I wish I could figure out a way to stretch it to paranormal stuff because I would love to hear about that.
38:50I don't think I can work Homestead and Paranormal into the same thing.  We could talk about how our rural history is very haunted.  Maybe we'll do that in the spring too.  All right. uh As always, people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com. And if you want to support the podcast, you can go to atinyhomestead.com slash support, because I'm really original like that.  Thank you guys so much for your time. I appreciate it.
39:19No problem. Have a good holiday. You too.
 

Hope Hill Homestead

Today I'm talking with Marcus at Hope Hill Homestead. 
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Marcus at Hope Hill Homestead in New Hampshire. Good morning, Marcus. How are you? Good morning, Mary. How are you?  I'm good.  I'm very excited to find out what you do, but tell me how the weather is in New Hampshire this morning. Well, when I was dropping my kids off at their little
00:28uh school, little farm school, little private  Catholic farm school. It was two degrees.  Okay. Is it sunny? it cloudy? What?  It's partly sunny, cloudy. Okay. so, but there's some snow on the ground and everything is frozen here. um It is, I think it's 22 degrees outside here.
00:56In Minnesota, it's very overcast. Our yard light, we live on three acres, so we have a light that lights up the door yard at night. It was still on at 7.30 this morning and the sun was supposed to be up. I was like, oh, it is very overcast. And they are predicting rain this afternoon. Oh no. So you're going have some hard driving conditions pretty soon. Yes. And my husband actually has an appointment at two. So I was like, please be careful when you go.
01:26True. Yeah, I don't love it when the weather does this flip floppy thing because it's been really, really cold here and we've had snow at least a trace every day for over a week and now it's going to rain. Yeah, it just makes a big mess. yeah, we did the driveway and like, for example, I had an oil truck try to come deliver oil to me and we burn wood and we have like oil as a backup and sometimes if the fireplace goes out, the stove goes out in the night, then you...
01:55the heat kicks back on and I wanted to make sure I had the oil tank full because we live up on  a dirt road, a driveway is a dirt road  that goes up pretty  steep and uh at some points the oil company will say we  won't even attempt to go up your driveway because it's dangerous. uh yeah, yesterday he tried to, a few days ago they tried to get up, they couldn't make it up and I'm like, oh please God, please let them help him get up and then they came today and he delivered it. So now we're, hopefully we're set for the winter.
02:25because it's really important when you live on a homestead, as we all know who do. Okay, so tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do at your place. Yeah, so we live on, me and my wife and my four kids, live on 10 acres and we have some sheep and we have some chicken and I also from home, I'm a work at home parent here and I
02:54I make furniture, but I also make  like little A-frame cabins and greenhouses. That's primarily what I do now. I make these kind of these smaller concept cabin structures that people use for like Airbnb or just for,  you know, their backyard sleeping cabins or whatever. Yeah.  And as far as like the homesteading part, we just started milking some sheep this last spring, the first time we milked. um
03:24That's been interesting and we made cheese. We were in the process of trying to become more self-sufficient, but as you know, you got to take little steps and sometimes with every two steps you take, you take one step back. Yes, you do. Sometimes you don't even go forward again. We did that with rabbits.
03:48We're not doing rabbits again, I don't think. We keep talking about it, but I don't think we're gonna do it again. just not, it is not worth the return for us. So with the sheep, I already knew that you could milk sheep, but are they good with that or do you have to like train them to be okay Well, you know, there's a couple breeds that are very good milkers. So we have some East Phrasians and
04:14The East Fraser's sheeps, can produce up to a couple gallons each one a day.  And a lot of people don't know that about um sheep that you can  milk them.  we love our sheep and we've had sheep for the last,  well, we had to get rid of our herd a few years ago because we just didn't have enough pasture and it was getting too expensive  and we had young kids and it all together was hard. so we... um
04:43We got rid of our sheep and our goats for a little bit. And then we just had the chance to get back the same sheep that we got rid of, returned to us um because they had young children. They couldn't take care of them.  And luckily they were, one of them was in milk.  And uh so we just kept on milking and it was fantastic. And sheep's milk, if anybody has tried goat milk, there's a little bit of a taste with goat milk. It doesn't taste like cow's milk, but sheep's milk.
05:11actually taste just like cow's milk, I would say even better than cow's milk. And it's actually better for you. It has a higher protein content. It's got a higher fat content. It's a higher vitamin and mineral content. And yeah, they're easy. Awesome. I know nothing about it, so I thought I would take the opportunity to ask. So what brought you to this lifestyle? Oh, man. mean, the simple lifestyle in the country, even though it's
05:41It's simple, there's a lot of hard work, but there's a reward. right, so I think a lot of homesteaders do it because of what they get out of it. Not just because they think they're gonna be able to completely live off the land.  It's like you realize you're sacrificing some time, but the returns you get by the process of homesteading. So having like two young boys, I wanted them to uh kind of grow up.
06:11having farm chores, being around animals,  and choosing just  that lifestyle, which seems so nostalgic  to the modern busy life that we're kind of living now. It just allows you to be home more, um enjoy the company of animals,  and enjoy  that work that goes into it. um So I think this altogether is for, yes, to have kind of
06:40safety net if shit ever hits the fan, know, to be able to produce milk and have eggs. But also just for the experience of it and just for  the love  of the lifestyle.  Absolutely could not agree more. And sometimes you get to hang out with the neighbor's animals too. Just before we signed in to talk to each other,  our neighbor's dog showed up on our property. We have not actually met her before. Her name is Shy.
07:09She is some kind of  Labrador retriever and she's very, very red. She's almost the red of a deer. Yeah. And we have a mini Australian shepherd  and apparently Shy showed up and our shepherd decided to say hello  and uh my son brought our dog in and my dog was losing her mind. So it's a good thing that we couldn't get together till  the time we signed in because I wouldn't have been able to talk until she stopped barking. Right. Yeah. I love that. uh
07:38about getting the random visitors from the neighbors or other wild animals that  come around and the reactions of the animals are always fun. Yeah, she's a very friendly dog. I was like, hello, beautiful girl. And she came right over to the window because I was on my porch and put her paws up to say hi. That's funny because sometimes you hear them. You know you have the neighbor, the dog's neighbor. And then  every once in while, they come over to visit. you're like, OK, that's where the barking's coming from.
08:03Yes, and if it wasn't icy, it's all hell out there. I would have gone out and said hello, but I don't want to break a hip. I would really rather not.  But she said hello through the window. And when she shows up this spring, because she inevitably will, I will have to just love on her then when it's not so scary outside. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, I love dogs. I was not a dog person until we got our dog as a puppy.
08:26And now I'm like, oh, look at the good boy. Oh, look at the good girl. And my husband's like, oh my God, you are the most converted woman ever to dogs. It's so funny. Me and my wife, we've gone back and forth with having dogs. We've tried having a couple of dogs. And she says, oh, you're just not a dog person. I do love dogs. I love dogs. But they're also a lot of work. And it's like having another child.  It absolutely is. And it will break your heart when they're not feeling well.
08:53or if they die early, our dog has a very sensitive stomach and when she doesn't feel good, I just want to fix it and I can't. And it makes my heart hurt like it did when my kids were little. So yes, it's just like having another kid. And it's funny because like we just got this new cat and I was reluctantly holding off, but you know, we had, we want to get rid of, know, there's some mice around here and there. So I'm like, all right, so I can.
09:19I can go, my little boys really wanted to have a cat. I'm like, all right, we'll get the cat. And now I'm totally all in and now I understand. I see my friends who have their dogs, they love their dogs so much. And me and my wife would be sitting in our bed talking about our kids. I would always say her, I bet you our friends are just laying in bed talking about their pets before they go to bed. And now we do the same with the cat. And the cat sleeps between us and kind of.
09:47her's us to sleep, you know, and, and, no, it is, it is a wonderful symbiotic relationship, isn't it?  It really is.  I  don't know that I want another dog once ours is no longer with us. I don't know that I have the energy  for another one. I'm 56. We've probably got another six years with her. Yeah. And I'm like, you know, maybe a house cat next time.  It's a lot of work and responsibility and cost.
10:15And so you have to weigh it, right? Cost benefit.  so we tried this dog and it was just, was going to the road all the time and we're so far up the driveway.  have no neighbors around us, but um it would find a way to get to the road and it kept on, the police would have to come get it.  it just became,  everyone says in the beginning, like they're gonna do all the...
10:40taking care of the dog and the boys like, yeah, we'll do everything. And it always ends up just falling on me. And then it ends up being this stressful, it becomes this stressful use of your time sometimes. there's a lot of benefits to dogs. Also, if you wanna go places, sometimes you have to find a place for them to stay. So yeah, it's like having a young child and you have to weigh the cost benefit. And sometimes that...
11:06that benefit outweighs the cost and then sometimes it doesn't. So you have to figure that out.  Yes, absolutely. If we didn't live on three point, whatever it is, acres and we didn't need a watchdog, we probably would not have a dog. Right.  Because I really like the fact that if somebody pulls in the driveway, she lets me know. That is nice. So that's very important to me because I don't want surprises at my door.  I want to know somebody's going to be walking out the door.
11:34I know, very true. then sometimes you'll see those like, you know, now all the reels they have on like the YouTube shorts or whatever, and you see  all these dogs, you know, uh helping out the little kids or like chasing away a coyote or  preventing some attack.  And you're like, Oh, yeah. So I know you're looking like, Oh, that's a good reason to have a dog. Yep, absolutely. And with the cat thing, we have a huge pole barn and we moved here.
12:00There were many, many, many mice in the pole barn, to the point that they were having babies in the workbench drawers. Oh my goodness.  And so we acquired three barn cats. uh we've had many, barn cats over the last five or so years. And the cats do an excellent job of keeping the pole barn  free of vermin.  And they're not so good about keeping it free of possums, because possums like cat food. Ooh. But the great thing about possum is, you know, you know what?
12:30Oh wait, it possums? No, or is it, yeah, possums. They  eat a lot of They do. Yeah, so that's kind of good. I think they eat the most ticks out of anything, I think. And that's great, as long as they're actually in the tree line where the ticks are. If they're in the pole barn, they get dispatched.  That's true. Or are good eating? I don't know. I've never tried. Ah, no. I wouldn't. I don't know. I'm sure that other people probably do eat them. We've never tried it.
12:57But  wild games too, they call it, you know, just get a whole bunch of them and he's put it in a stew and.  I'll have to ask my husband the next time he has to dispatch a big one if he wants to try pasta.  But uh no, I agree with you on your  take on what brought you to this, because  I grew up  on a one acre lot with my parents  in Maine.
13:26And half that lot, the back half was swamp, woods and swamp. And I loved  where I grew up. We spent a lot of time, me and my sister, my brother, hanging out in the woods and making forts underneath the spruce tree boughs and  walking the creek and fishing and the whole bit.  Yeah. And now in Minnesota, I live on flat land  and I don't live near a creek, but we have a tree line.
13:51That tree line makes me so happy because there's a little path to get to the other side of the tree line. And I walk through there and it's not the same because Maine, Lanchester, Vermont, Massachusetts, lots and lots and lots of  conifer trees,  evergreen. Not so much here. Here it's hardwood. Really? Yeah. Oh, I thought there would be more ah softwood there too. I'm in south Minnesota. Up north there's a ton of pine trees.  Right.
14:19but not so much down here. Down here it's more astens and oak trees and maple trees. Oh, no kidding. But it's really interesting because trees are trees. And if you grew up amongst trees, any tree will do. It will. Yeah. Yeah. I love trees. Me too. I love trees.  I harvest trees out of my  woods too. I'll cut some down. It's always kind of bittersweet when I cut down like an oak and I mean,
14:48for firewood  and it's like, oh man, I'm getting rid of a tree, but I'm also heating my  house with it and it's, you know, it's good work, it's hard work, but it's good work too. It keeps you strong, keeps my boys strong. um But it's, that's what it's there for too. It's there to heat, you know, it's there for, that's what's special about trees. It  provides the food and it provides  the shade or provides the heat, all the things that you need.  So um yeah.
15:16I mean, being surrounded by trees is a gift. If you've never been surrounded by trees, you don't really know kind what you're missing, huh? Absolutely.  One of the prerequisites, all right, I said it right, finally.  The prerequisites for where we were gonna land five years ago was that there must be trees.  Must be trees.  Must be trees and must be a flat space to grow a big garden. And we found a place, oh Perfect.  Love it.
15:45We thought about moving back to New England and we looked at house prices and house prices were really reasonable five years ago. Yeah.  The cost of living has gone up so much for New England. was like, no, we're staying in Minnesota. I know we, we, um, we bought right before it was during the pandemic. We brought, we bought right before all the prices went up when the interest rates were still really low too.  we got lucky. We, we were renting.
16:14and we had a bad landlord and we're like, okay, we gotta figure, we gotta buy, we gotta buy now. And luckily we just went far enough into Western, Southern New Hampshire where we just gotta, we can't believe what we found. And we were so, I say not lucky, but blessed, because it does feel more like a blessing when you find a place like what we have. But now I couldn't imagine trying to find something.
16:43being like a younger couple, uh trying to find like  a homestead. Now you have to really, you know, look hard.  And you've got to have the money. Yeah, I know.  And the credit and the income and  that was always something I was never really good at the credit. And I was determined, actually, I was a traveler through my twenties and thirties. I backpacked all the time. And I, I'm a singer songwriter as well. And I figured out you can make money and travel while you're
17:12while you're backpacking if you have a guitar with you.  Then I bought some land, 10 acres of land up on Prince Edward Island in Canada.  I bought 10 acres, sight unseen, it was right on the water, it was beautiful. I didn't go through a bank, I didn't have to go through a bank, it was like a land company that if you just put some money down, they would hold the note, they would finance you at an interest for like a five or seven year term. uh
17:39And I was going up there, I spending like nine months out of the year, like up on Prince Edward Island. I was trying to live that simple, very simple life. And I did, and I had like a little cabin, just a wood stove, no electricity. And you know, that's when I really kind of like fell in love with the simple life. And it was almost giddy every day, just having everything be so simple. And it's funny, it's, we really...
18:07There's a part of us that really enjoys the nature and just having simpleness. And I feel like today we overcomplicate things. You know, we have so much going on, so much modern, you know, all the modern conveniences and the comforts. It hasn't seemed like it's made us more happy, you know? I think when we simplify our lives, I think, you know, we are nature more and homesteading.
18:37I think there's like an amount of satisfaction you just really can't get from the modern world. Well, I agree. And I have been thinking about this a lot because I hear this a lot from people on the podcast. And I feel like homesteading is genuine. And if you're just living in a box and going to work 40 to 80 hours a week,
19:02Home is where you might sit down to eat if not stand at the sink and eat and it's where you sleep. Right. And I don't want to say it's performative, but it's not, I don't feel like it's living. feel like it's a... think you're all the guests in your own home, know, I guess almost where? Yeah. Yeah. I get it. And honestly, I love where we live. I mean, I have talked about this ad nauseum with anyone who will listen.
19:33And when we first moved here,  I  really every day I would go outside in the morning with my coffee and sit on the steps and just  look out toward the trees and just breathe.  For the first, I don't know, a couple of months we lived here because I was just so dumbfounded that we did it, that we finally did it. uh I know it feels good.  And just being able to sit and have tea or coffee and just soak in that moment, huh?
20:02Makes it all worth it, doesn't it? Yes, absolutely. And my husband still has a job, a jobby job as we call it. But his favorite place to be is here at home. Yeah. And when we decided to make this leave, I said to him, I said, we need to find a place that we love so much that it's like being on vacation, even though we're home. Oh, yes. Me and my wife, we talked about the same thing. That's the exact same thing. When we first moved here.
20:31We did, we felt like we were on vacation. We were like, this is cool. It was very surreal for the first month. I was like, my house is clean because it was remodeled a year before we moved in and no one had lived here. And it was so clean and so perfect. And I kept going, this is way too fancy a home for us. And my husband laughed and he said, I'll just give it a year. It'll be not fancy. Oh, that's funny. I know.
20:57all my walls now they need a paint job because when you have younger kids, their hands with chocolate gets smear on the walls. Do we repaint all the walls now or wait until they get a few years older to make sure they're not doing that? then they'll be teenage boys and they'll probably still make a mess out of them. Well, I'll tell you secret. My youngest still lives here. He's 23. He'll be 24 this month. And I see his hand prints.
21:27not prints, not his hand prints, his fingerprints on the wall that goes toward the stairs  because he puts his hand on that side of the wall when he hits the stairs.  And uh we also have dings in our paint because the people that painted it painted it with a  latex paint on the inside. OK, if you ding latex, it peels.  Oh, boy.  So my husband went through and take and mudded those spots so they'll be paintable. Yeah.
21:57Now we're stuck with what color do we want to paint it? So it'll be a bit before we don't have white spots on our coffee painted walls. ah So I don't want to go too far into all the home stuff, but I do want to know about the structures that you build because I saw them on Facebook and I was like, those are super cool. So tell me about that. Yeah, thanks. So, you know, I'm a third generation furniture maker and so we were wholesalers and so I'd make everything from
22:25kitchen islands, to wall shelves, coffee tables, kitchen tables, small accessories, little garden signs, whatever was made of wood, we do.  We sell them to stores. And oh I did that  for  more than 20 years.  then having the homestead here,  I started building my own chicken coops, my own greenhouses. I'm like, oh, this is kind of fun to do. I'm like, kind of getting a little...
22:54with a board of the furniture,  with competing with the imports and ah it's hard to make money, make furniture nowadays because there's just so much competition from overseas. You have Ikea and things like that.  I'm like, you know what? I'm going  to start making these trucks. I'm going to try that. I'm going to try building a chicken coop or a greenhouse and then put it on marketplace and sell it. And they started selling and I'm like, oh, this is cool. And then  I have this signature
23:24I fire burn, instead of like staining, I'll fire burn all the wood first and I build it. And so now it has that protective fire burned stain on it, which protects from raw and from bugs and from, you know, this is from other, from wear and tear, lasts a long time with that fire burn technique that I use. so yeah, so now I'm, you know, I'll make a mini A-frames, you know, I'll make like outhouses.
23:54you know, any type of structure, know, like a fire shed, you know, for your firewood. And yeah, so now, but now it's, you know, it's almost Christmas and no one's really buying anything like, you know, right now, but now I'm coming up with different ideas of different structures that I'm going to do different designs. And I want to keep them kind of like unique because there's a lot of people who sell different like sheds and things. So you have to always try to make it a little different, you know.
24:20I do know my husband and son built a greenhouse two summers ago. Two summers ago. Yeah. And I got a grant for the supplies to make it. No way. Got a $5,000 grant and we spent I think a couple hundred dollars more than the $5,000 grant. Good for you guys.
24:44I forget how big the greenhouse is. thought it was 40 by 20, but my husband informed me that it's not as big as I think it is,  but it's not eight by eight. Let's say that. They built it from scratch and I love this thing. It's gained us two months in the spring to get the baby plants going. It has gained us two to three months in the fall to keep anything that's a cold weather crop going. That's fantastic.
25:13So I get it, I'm not a builder, my husband is the builder, he's really, really good at it. But I do absolutely appreciate the talent and the art that goes into it. There's a satisfaction at the end when you build something like that, know, really I think for man or woman, it's just that when you complete something like that and you step back and look at it, and you know can be used for such a practical purpose, and you're thinking, oh my God.
25:40person's going to have this greenhouse now that they're going to be able to grow their food in and  or like a chicken coop that they can raise their eggs in and it's like, oh, that's cool. And I want to be able to teach my sons that someday too. And to be able to work with the hands because it is, you know, it is very rewarding  to build something with the hands  and that's going to last. And  I am not a builder, but I am a cook.  And when I make dinner and I go all out for dinner about once
26:10once every six months, usually in the winter time. I do like a big from scratch meal and it's usually a turkey and it's not necessarily at Christmas or Thanksgiving. We like turkey other times too.  And  once I get that all on the table and we're sitting down to eat, I'm just like, I just spent six hours total putting all this together. We're gonna have it wiped out in half an hour, dinner will be over. And I just look at it and go, I don't care that it's gonna be gone because it was actually really satisfying to make it.
26:40You  know, that's one of the keys to life, to  happiness in life is enjoying the process as you're doing something and not to do it like begrudgingly  or feel like you have to, but to actually enjoy  your craft or your skill, like cooking, to enjoy it as you're doing it.  I love all that too. I'm primarily the dinner cooker here.  And the only thing I hate is the mess after. That's the part that I'm the dishes.
27:10Me too, right there with you.  I  don't mind the mess like when there's stuff on the counter, it's got to be wiped up. That's fine. It's the stacks of dishes that make me crazy. And I've learned, I've learned when I'm going to cook big to clean as I go, if there's time to wait for something, I try to get some of the dishes in those times and that way it's not so overwhelming. Yeah.
27:34That's true. I have learned to do that too, is to like try to put some stuff away as I'm cooking so you're not also dealing with all the cooked stuff, you know, all the things that you brought out to try to minimize that.  But yeah, you you're always trying to learn new ways of making that part a little more efficient, you know?  One of the most fabulous things I learned in my 20s was the theory of no wasted motion. I'm not.
28:01I'm not as good at it now as I used to be because I just don't care as much. don't have four little kids running under my feet.  But the theory is that if you're in the living room and you see something that needs to go to the kitchen and you're headed to the kitchen,  take the thing from the living room to the kitchen. No waste of motion. Oh, you're right. You're so right. eh You're right.  That is so true.  how  would you get your steps in in the day? If you're too efficient, you're not getting all your steps in. I'm just kidding.
28:31I don't know, eat less terrible food. Right, it's true. Okay, so how many of your little buildings have you sold, do know? I would say, because I've done this now a little bit more than two years, about two years, I would say probably at least a couple dozen. Yeah, like right around there, and it's kind of like supplemental.
28:59income because my wife works full time for a school district  and but yeah and so like you know the jobs are getting a little bit a little bit bigger the structures are getting a little bit bigger so now i don't have to do as many you know because i'm doing bigger so like the bigger they are you know the more money and i'm just trying to find that sweet price point where it's affordable for people but i'm also you know my labor i'm getting enough for my labor and um but uh yeah yeah so you know new
29:29new ideas, new projects, you know, in my mind all the time. and  so, but now this during winter time is when I'm going to kind of ah put together like an official catalog too, that I can like send out, you know, to people.  Yeah. So do you build the structures on your property and then like,  truck them to where they're going, or do you build them on site or how does it work? Well,
29:55It depends on the structure.  it's a small enough structure, I can build it completely here in my workshop and I can transport it assembles.  once they get to a certain size, I come up  with a way of  prefabbing.  can do like the whole, say like for an A-frame, I can build the front part of the A-frame by itself. I can build the back part of the A-frame and then that will fit on and I can build the floor and I can bring those three separate pieces. um
30:24to the site and then I can basically I'm assembling on site.  So I'm not building it from scratch on site. you know, like, so right, it might take me like four to six hours to assemble on sites. Well, I'll prefab a lot of it in my workshop here,  which is just  a double door garage attached to my home. So that way the, you know, the it's easier to heat  and  the overhead isn't as much, you know,  so.
30:53It's really the only way to make money when you're a builder is to have your overhead low pretty much.  know, yeah. So, um, always trying to keep, you know,  your overhead expenses cheap.  And, uh, that's part of the key of, you know, being able to do it.  Any small business try to keep your overhead low. It's true. I know. And there's always a, uh, a tendency to wanna cause I've seen it happen many times,  um, where you, want to get big.
31:22um And then you look for a bigger place and you increase your overhead, but then that means you need increased sales. And if you increase your overhead, then you have to increase your sales. And if your sales aren't there, but your overhead always is there. yeah. Yeah.  There's a lot of talented people who have created amazing products  and drowned in their success because they couldn't keep up.  Right. Yup.
31:52Yeah. And so I've seen this happen in the furniture business over the years. saw different times, m the rises and the falls of many different types of businesses like that.  And it's always been, you get to a point where you're successful and you grow. And then if there's a dip in sales, then you're kind of, you're, in trouble. And so, you know, just being happy, that's where like living a simple life comes into it. it's.
32:20People, we always tend to upgrade all our expenses too. We start making a little bit more money. You're like, oh, I can buy that upgraded car. I'll get a bigger TV package. I'll spend money on this, spend money on that. But if you try to keep the simple living in the beginning, then it's not as hard. You don't need to be huge to be successful. Yep, exactly.
32:46So do you market your buildings on Facebook or do you have other ways to let people know about them? know, do have like, uh it's primarily Facebook  and it's been good enough, you know, so far, but I'll probably have to, you know, venture out more. I mean, I do have like a small brochure that I made, you know, from Staples that I've given out. you know, marketplace is  just an efficient way  of, you can post to up to like 20 different groups.
33:16And that's like, you know, might be like this town, you know, certain towns area, you know, or, you know, so, you you post one thing on some of these Facebook marketplace groups and, you know, tens of thousands of people are able to see, you know, and then, then you can like hashtag, you can get a link to your own page, to your, to your page. then, so as you do more, you're adding products to your page. And now,
33:43It's like you have a catalog basically on your page so people can scroll down and they can see all the different things that I do. And then the algorithms, a lot of it has to do with algorithms.  sometimes it's a mystery how the algorithms work.  sometimes you'll see  a product that I have has  tens of thousands of views.  And then a similar product that I thought was just as good gets just like  a couple hundred views. I'm like, huh, wonder why? This is a mystery.
34:11Yeah, I have no idea how all that works. I wish I knew because I would be the richest person on earth if I knew that answer. You know, I know. now I see like there are some, you know, I see some things on  on, you know,  I get advertisements on Facebook about, about like, you know, like AI advertisers, like, you know, we'll advertise for you just upload it to our AI program and in the AI will find your exact niche.
34:38It probably would work because you figure, you know, like now it's funny because me and my wife joke about like, we were just talking about this and then we'll see an ad on the Facebook about the thing we were talking about. was like, is that listening to us? You know, is it?  But it does seem to know with pretty good consistency what you're interested in because you always see, you know, advertisements for the things that you've been talking about or you've been searching up on Google. It's so funny.  It's a little creepy.  It is. It is.  It really is.
35:08And I don't want there to be  too much surveillance.  It's crazy. I'm a little worried about, we're gonna become too dependent on technology and all that stuff. And we are now, but hopefully we can strike a balance. And I don't know if it's gonna be for, we gotta find that sweet spot, I think.  Yeah, I think that we homesteaders have the sweet spot. We're doing all the things with our hands and enjoying nature. m
35:37and we're using technology to get the word out. True. I think you're right. I think you're right. think  it is a great tool. It can be a great, fantastic tool. um Without it, you and I would not be talking this morning. That's right. And I wouldn't be selling my cabins. So you know, you can use it as a tool for good or you can use it to waste your time.  Exactly. I have one more question about your homestead and then I want to know where people can find you. um
36:05You said you have chickens. Do you have chickens for eggs or do you sell the meat too? Yeah, chickens for eggs. So we just have, we had more, but you know, we had a bobcat come in, in one afternoon, take out a whole bunch of them. Um, and the hawks to the hawks here, we're like on this migration of hawks. So, so now I just have to kind of keep them in my large coop that I made, that I made. Um, so, um, they're not even right now, actually they're not even producing eggs because
36:34some trauma they have. I don't know, trying to figure it out. So hopefully we'll get some eggs again soon.  Well, if they don't have any light in their coop, they're probably not going to give you eggs until there's at least 12 to 14 hours of light again. Really? Yeah. They are based on sunlight.  Oh, wow. See, I  didn't know that. Well, thanks for letting me know. Yeah. We have a light in our coop during the winter because our chickens are the ISA Browns.
37:01And they were bred to lay an egg a day as long as they have light in the coop in the wintertime. Really? Yep.  it's not that it's not trauma, Marcus. It's that there's not enough daylight.  I'll see if it can be something as simple as that. And when you talk to another homesteader, that they can tell you these things. Yeah. So if you want eggs in the winter, put a light in the coop. And if you want to give your chickens a break, don't put a light in the coop.  Well, it's good to know. Thank you very much.
37:28You're welcome. I know just enough to be dangerous.  That's great. All right, Marcus, this was fabulous. Where can people find you? Just on Facebook for now? Yeah, for now. Just go to Hope Hill Homestead and you can also listen to my music too because I have a band called Root 2 Revolution and we  sing songs about living simply and things like that. Is it R-O-O-T or  R-O-U-T-E? Yeah, like the road, like  R-O-U-T-E and then number two, Revolution.
37:57So like route, they say route.  like they would say written route, route to revolution. huh. Yeah. We're on Spotify and on YouTube and we have a song called live simply. You want to look that up?  Nice. I will have to, I'll have to go find your channels and put it in the show notes. Awesome. Thank you very much. All right. As always, people can find me at a tinyhomesteadpodcast.com and if you'd like to support the podcast, you can go to a tinyhomestead.com slash support.  Marcus.
38:27Thank you again, I really appreciate your time. Great talking to you. You too. Take care, peace.
 

Rustic Haven Homestead

Today I'm talking with Christeen at Rustic Haven Homestead.
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.
00:12Today I'm talking with Christine at Rustic Haven Homestead in Washington State. Good morning, Christine. How are you? Good morning. How are you? I'm doing great.  I'm good. I'm good.  I'm good. oh What is the weather like there?
00:30Right now  it's eight o'clock in the morning, so we're just getting our day started and it's super foggy and trying to rain.
00:40That sounds about right for Washington state.  Yes.  Well, in Minnesota, it is bright and sunshiny. We got a little bit of snow overnight on top of the snow we got over the weekend.  So it's very shiny outside because the snow is reflecting the sunlight. It's beautiful out. I love that. I can't wait for it to snow, but we still have a few more weeks of rain. Yeah, when.
01:05I don't know anything about Washington state's climate except that you guys get a lot of rain. So does it get cold, cold there? It does. um Depending on where you live in Washington,  that'll depend on how much snow you get. I have kind of been all over. So  up in Skagit County by like Mount Baker, you get a ton of snow.  And  down here by Olympia so far, we don't get a lot of snow, but there's a lot of ice.
01:36Okay. Yeah.  I don't love it when there's ice. My husband drives all over the place for his job and the days when it's freezing rain, I'm just like, please be careful.  Right.  I don't mind driving in the snow and stuff like that just because I'm used to it from living up in Skagit County, which I didn't  really grow up in.  For the most part, I was born and raised in North Carolina where they put ice  like
02:05um,  ice salt down  instead of  sand. Here they do sand. And so  it's a little bit different on  that front.  But I've noticed that in certain areas of Washington, the roads aren't kept as  well as others. So up in Skagit County, they worked  really hard to make sure everything was maintained. Down here, it's like they're very short staffed.
02:32And so the roads don't get cleared and when they do get cleared, it's clean cleared. So it's very scary. And if you don't grow up in an environment where you're actually driving in the snow and the ice, you become a danger to others. Yes. And that happens every fall here in Minnesota. That first snowstorm, there are more people who end up in the ditch than really should end up in the ditch. Yeah. And so...
03:02I work in the medical field. have  for  almost 20 years and so I'm just like, just stay home. It's okay. Just stay home.  If you can, don't be on the roads. Yes. Yep.  Okay. is more important than your life.  Oh, absolutely. You're, you're  absolutely a hundred percent right. And other people's lives too, while we're talking about it.  So tell me a little bit about yourself and your version of your homestead.  Okay. So.
03:32My name is Christine  and I have grown up with my grandparents canning and  baking everything and doing everything from scratch. My mama, she  lived to be almost 100 and had  a full-time garden, worked in the medical field. She worked in the hospital until she was in her 80s. And  so she taught me a lot about canning.
03:59vegetables and how to grow a garden and all of that aspect. And then whenever  I  was  probably 30,  I started getting into sourdough  and learning all of that process, which has been quite fascinating actually. um But I met my spouse and we have started our own little homestead.  We have all kinds of animals  and
04:30honestly all kinds of kids. uh Blended family  of seven, so we have five kids between the two of us  and they  love to ride our goats  like their horses. And it's fun to watch them get chased by chickens sometimes,  but we have kind of just moved everything into a very simple life and hopefully in the next couple of years we can start homeschooling as well.
04:59Very nice. That sounds like a beautiful life that you're building. We're trying really hard. We have a few acres  and em within that we are pretty self-sustainable for the most part.
05:15Okay, awesome.  So what animals do you have? Because I always ask that question.  So we have about 100 chickens.  We have turkeys and geese  and about 20 ducks. We have six pigs  and  four goats. And then  we have five dogs. And so  it all meshes well with our five children. I was going to say a dog for every kid. Yes.
05:45Are the other dogs all different breeds or do you guys have a favorite breed? They are all different. So we have a 50 50 split Shepski. So he's Siberian Husky and German Shepherd. And then we have a purebred German Shepherd. We have a purebred chocolate lab. We have a purebred Belgian Malmois. And then we have what I like to call a Belgian chocolate accident.
06:15because our chocolate lab got our Belgian and had babies. And so we have one of her babies. And so she is 50 50 Belgian Malinois and chocolate lab. Okay. I'm going to say something and don't get mad at me, but chocolate labs have always struck me as kind of dumb. They're very laid back and they're very lovey, but they're kind of dumb. Belgian Malinois is maybe one of the smartest dogs on the planet.
06:45Absolutely.  So you have turned  the mix, the pub. We have. And she is actually very different. em Our Belgian Malinois, everybody has this idea that they're super crazy and  just kind of all over the place.  And ours is not like that. She is very much,  guard mom and that's what I do. em And she's never been hyperactive like that. And then
07:15Like you said, our chocolate lab, he's our hunting dog and he would rather live in my skin than anything. And so he  has his job, but other than that, he's very much.
07:31just hanging out. He likes to lay down. He likes to just be around his family. And so  it's a very different  aspect. But to get them two together, um she is hilarious because she's got the derpiness of the chocolate lab, but she's also very smart and very quick to learn. Yeah, was Belgian. So
07:58What I was going to say is that you've taken the smartest dog and the dumbest dog on the planet and made the best dog ever. Yes.  She is hilarious.  And do not get me wrong. I think chocolate labs are beautiful. And  we have  a mini Australian shepherd right now who is five years old.  And my husband and I have both decided that when she is no longer on the earthly plane in about,  oh, hopefully
08:2514 years from now, probably not. She'll probably be out long before then.  We would like a lab.  And  I said to him, I said, if you want a uh chill, goofy dog,  we should get a chocolate lab. And he was like, yeah, but, and I'm like, no, no, I think we should look at chocolate labs.  Yes.  Definitely not a Belgian Malinois.  Get them together. It's fine. So our chocolate lab we use to duck hunt.
08:55And he knows how to track. Arshepsky,  he tracks too, but obviously that's not really in his  nature to hunt. um But we  hunt big game, we do waterfowl and all that stuff. We teach our kids  all of that as well. And so  we  really do embrace every single part of being self-sustainable and  really going back to our roots.
09:29Awesome. So the chocolate lab goes hunting with you. So is he trained to hunt? He is trained to hunt.  Awesome. Awesome. I love it. I love it when the dogs do the job that they that they're naturally inclined to. Yes. And then so I had some heart problems and my Shepski has been my baby for the last three years  and he has never been trained or anything like that, but he will alert.
09:59to  anything that's weird with me and he will go find  someone or he'll sit there and bark more like howl at me and be like, hey, something's wrong. Something's wrong. We don't like it. Something's wrong. And so he will make sure that you know one way or another that something's about to go  off sides. Uh huh. Sideways. Yep.
10:24That's amazing. love it. have two very useful dogs. assume the other three are probably useful too.
10:32Yes, they are. So when our German Shepherd  purebred girl was having babies, they were actually, he was the father to them. um And he was actually jumping our seven foot fence and going to try and find somebody to help her. And then he would come back and check on her. We have it on camera and everything. It's so cute. dogs don't actually have that like mentality for the most part.
11:01And so it was really cool to watch. Yeah, but daddy dogs aren't usually interested when mom goes into labor.  No.  And so we could tell that she went into labor and was having babies because he was panicking and trying to find help. Just like a human dad is like, oh my gosh, we got to get going. We got to do this. We got to do that. He was very much dad mode. I love it. Do you have that video on YouTube or anywhere? um
11:28currently, but we do have it on like our ring camera history.  You should put it on YouTube because people would love to see that.
11:39Yes.  People  meaning me, I would love to see that. Oh, absolutely.  Okay. So, um sorry,  I was looking at your Facebook page and there is a photo of,  assume your husband with a bobcat over his shoulders.  Yes, that was this year.  Tell me that story. So we were out hunting. We had the kids with us  and  we were looking for a buck. We were on a
12:08trail  and we saw a buck and we're trying to get in a better position for it. Well, we heard rustling  down below us and we're like, okay, maybe it's a bear or something like that. Just kind of avoid that area. But him and our son  go over and look and there's three bobcats playing right next to where it typically floods out in the wintertime.
12:36They're wrestling around like house cats, but  then they noticed that we were up there and started charging up the hill.  And so he had to dispatch it  to protect the kids. you keep the hide? We did.  We took it to a taxidermy and actually a lot of people don't know this, but Cougar is actually a very sweet meat.  And so
13:06We had talked about making like summer sausage or pepperoni out of it, but typically At least as much as I've ever had it It's mixed with deer or elk or bear or something along with it because it's also very lean Mm-hmm. So so you you saved the hide and you had meals out of it. Yeah,  very nice I didn't know you could eat Bobcat or cougar or whatever it is. It's cougar. Yeah, okay
13:34Here in Minnesota, we have bobcats and we have cougars and cougars look like a leopard that's just like tawny colored. Yeah. And bobcats look like big old house cats. Yes. So we have both here and  he has hunted bobcat before. So we do have one that is up on the wall, but  it was smaller  than the cougar itself.
14:04And so we have that, we have  all of our deer antlers and those sorts of things, ducks. It looks like a hunting paradise.
14:19I love that.  It's so funny because my dad hunted.  I think he still hunts occasionally now, but not as often as he used to because he's 83 years old now. uh He had a deer head mount that hung in our house for a long time. Eventually, it made its way downstairs. I don't know if it's because my mom was not comfortable with the
14:46amount being in, you know, in the main part of the house.  Yeah. Or if they just were bored with it and didn't want to have it up anymore. Hmm. Interesting.  I know when my kids were smaller,  we would go to my grandfather's house and he hunts  and they did not like the feel of the hide.  And  so the  bearskin rug and stuff like that. uh
15:14the elk skin that he had hanging on the wall, they were not a fan. The touch and feel of it for them,  they would freak out and  they did not like it. Oh, okay.  And so  they grew out of that. Obviously they were a lot younger then,  but it was interesting to kind of watch them just,  nope, I ain't doing that. No, thank you, sis. You keep that over there every time we went to his house.
15:44Funny. Now, Christine, do you hunt too? I do. Awesome. Because most women are not really into it. I know there are some, but men tend to be the hunters. Women tend to be the cookers, the ones who cook the food. And my mom hunted for years. My mom actually got a doe when she was very pregnant with my sister. Oh my goodness. I, this year,
16:14on opening day, about 30 minutes into opening day after like shooting light starts  is when I took down a three point.  So my season was very short because I just hurried up and got it done, which honestly never happens. em And so  I was very thankful for that, but we are starting to get the kids into it. Our son  hunted last year and he got a spike.
16:43And then this year our daughters got a chance to hunt, but we couldn't get anything for them this time, but next year.  I love that you're teaching your kids to hunt. And there's a reason why.  With all the stuff going on in the world right now,  I really think that we as parents should teach our kids  survival skills  and feed yourself skills. uh
17:12Hunting and fishing are just a dying art.  I live in Minnesota. We have tons of deer. And  the hunting population is shrinking  every year. So few people are still hunting. Yes. So we hunt, we fish. em I cook everything  and the kids get to help me. On my page, there's a lot of  things that I've made with game and everything like that.
17:42m Also, my spouse is a general contractor. And so  we  have kind of all of the aspects. I'm medical, he can build literally anything and it's just gorgeous. m And so  then we have incorporated hunting and being able to cook from scratch and not just out of a box.
18:08and making sure that our kids are involved with that kind of lifestyle as well. That way they have those skills. um Obviously living on a farm, there's a lot of times where  you get to bandage up everything. And so they get to see that as well.  Our hunting dog had ripped open part of his chest  and I...
18:34cleaned him up, got him all ready and stapled him back together because we called everywhere and all of the pet ERs around here were like, oh, we're at capacity. I was like, dude, I've worked in the ER. I don't even know what that means. We never got to be like, oh, sorry, we're at capacity. I don't know what to tell you. And you just take care of it. And so I was like, I can't let him just have this three inch open gash in his chest.
19:02that's going to get infected if I don't close it up. So  I did like I would do to a human and shaved the area, cleaned it up, made sure it was all pretty and  put about 10 staples in there.
19:18He healed up nice, you can't even tell that it ever happened. You are a superwoman, Christine. We just did it at home, it was fine. And so there's been times where I've had to do little procedures like that on our animals and take care of that. Obviously bandaging up kids as they get hurt as well.
19:42Yeah, and kids get hurt  all the time.  really do.  Especially when they're running from chickens. Yes. Yes, exactly.  We didn't have chickens when my kids were small.  they didn't get hurt running after chickens, our chickens running after them. But they definitely got hurt um riding their bikes and swinging and things like that.  My stepson actually broke  one arm  one summer  and the other arm
20:12the next summer. no. And during the summer, that's so hard. Yep. had, he had, um, can't think, casts on his forearms, opposite arms, two summers in a row. So we lived off grid for about a year. And so everything was like solar and all of that. and during that period of time, we had exposed beams for like in our ceiling.
20:41And  my  daughter  who  adores Spider-Man jumped off of the top bunk of her bed, tried to grab the beam  with her hands  and kind of like swing from it, much like Spider-Man. um She was wearing her Spider-Man costume  and she fell because it had gloves and she slipped and fell and
21:09broke her wrist like through a growth plate and I was like girlfriend what are you doing?  And she went to school and she goes yeah I fell I fell from the ceiling and I was like maybe don't say it like that.  You didn't fall from the ceiling. You  little weirdo.
21:29Oh my God, the things that kids do. uh My stepson actually broke one of his arms because he was swinging really, really high and he decided to jump off as it was going up. Of course.  And uh the second one was that he was riding his bike down an incline, which he'd done a billion times, caught a weird rock sticking out of the ground. The wheel turned sharp and he fell off his bike and broke the other arm. Oh my goodness.
21:58Yeah,  like totally a fluke thing. He had ridden that hill a billion times. So you never know what's going to happen. you just pray that they're going to be okay when they're grownups. um Okay. So you said you have a hundred chickens. Do you have chickens for eggs or do you have them for eggs and meat? So far just eggs. um But we are, well, most of our kids now like duck eggs better than
22:28chicken eggs. And so  we have both for the eggs itself,  but my spouse has actually got into incubating. And so we have babies all the time now.
22:46Yes. It's been  a treat because whenever everywhere stops selling baby chicks, we still have baby chicks and baby ducks and all of that. And so that's been special.  I wish Washington state wasn't so far away from Minnesota because we are going to be in the market for baby chicks here in February. Yes.
23:16It would be great. We would love to have you out.  Yeah, I'm not driving all the way to Washington state for chicks. I can't afford it. And that would be some really expensive eggs eventually. Yes. But that's OK. um I've been trying to find somebody in the area who sells chicks  locally. I don't. There's a few Facebook  pages that I am  on that  are in your
23:46area or have someone in your area or near your area  that are selling. Okay. So I will go try to find that because my husband wanted to order chicks from a hatchery and I  think I have him talked out of it because  the post office isn't very nice to box chicks. No. And I don't want to open up a box of chicks and find half of them dead.  Yeah.  No.
24:14That's not good. And there's been a lot of that lately. Yeah. And I think I have him convinced that if he really wants to get into it, we can get an incubator and we can order eggs because  the hatching eggs are actually taken better care of than the chicks are.  And there's a lot of like local  places too that I know in our area, if you're part of like a farm swap  group on Facebook or anything like that, you can usually find
24:43hatching eggs or chicks  locally? Yeah, I know we can,  but I also really,  when I talk to you guys, I'm like, God, I wish we lived closer because I would give you money. I would give you money for chicks. That would be fine. Do you have any like breed in Because want to support you guys too. Huh? Yeah. Do you have any breed in mind of chicks that you're looking for? Right now, the chickens we have are the ISA Browns.
25:13Uh-huh. And we really love them because they're friendly and they're calm. Okay. So I'm trying to find somebody that has those, but I don't know. I don't know if anybody does. I'm not sure. I know usually like tractor supply and places like that carry stuff like that. Another one that we have found to be really mellow is the buff Orbingtons. And they're pretty. And they're pretty. So we have
25:43a couple of those  and the first one that we got, we named her Blondie and she is just  so pretty  and  so nice. She  doesn't really like go after anybody or anything like that. She's actually just really mellow.
26:07A friend of mine who lives about half an hour away has the Bantam chickens. Mm-hmm. The little chickens. The little chickens are actually aggressive. They are, especially the roosters. Yeah, I had no idea. And they're also really good moms. They are. We had  some silkies and they're supposed to be like really good moms and really into that sort of scene. Ours  were not smart.
26:38So I don't really know.  We would find them like just hanging out. And I don't know if they couldn't see, but they would just stand next to the coop. Huh, weird. And they would try to roost like in the coop door and we would have to go out and like push them into the coop  at night  because they would just sit in the door. I'm like, dude, you got to go in. The owls are going to get you.  You know, um...
27:06I follow a Facebook page called Harry Farm Pit Girls, which is really fun to say.  And they have silkies and their silkies are really dumb. Yeah,  they are. Maybe it's a thing with silkies.  Yeah, silkies are known to be pretty dumb. They're pretty useless. They're just cute and fun to watch. Yeah, they're really pretty, just like the buff warpingtons are pretty. But the silkies are like really fluffy, right? Yes. Yeah.
27:34Whenever it rains, they look like they are drowned rats.  It kills me.  I mean, honestly, any chicken will look like a drowned rat if they're in the rain long enough. Our chickens look like drowned rats.  they're actually smart enough to go in their coop when it's pouring. I'm kind of impressed. Yep. All except for the silkies.  They just stay out there and hang out.  My dad would say they're dumb as a stump. Yes.  I agree.
28:03That's my favorite thing that my dad used to say about people. He'd be like, don't want to, I don't want to his version of throw shade. You know, I know what he said, but his, he would say, I don't want to his version of throw shade, but that one's dumb as a stump. he's from Maine and he has an accent, you know, the New England accent. So, so dumb as a stump always sounded very funny coming out of his mouth. Yes. So, little.
28:30tiny aside, I love my dad, love my mom.  They're still with us. They still live in Maine. They live on, I think 14 acres.
28:41and they have chickens too. But anyway, do you have more time? Do you have like 10 more minutes? I do. I do. Okay. So I saw that you make homemade soap. Do you make the cold process lye soap? I have previously. I don't let my kids do that because of the lye itself. It's a little too dangerous for them right now until they get a little bit older. But I have done it in the past.
29:09and right now we're just doing melt and pour to get them into it. So they  learn without having to handle lye immediately. um But I really like it. It's fun to do.  So how, I've never done that that way. We do the cold process lye soap. how does that work? So the melt and pour, you can actually buy a soap base that has already
29:36kind of gone through the process, it's already mixed and you  literally just melt it, put your colors in, put your fragrance in if you want any, anything like that that you wanna do  and mix it together and pour it in a, any kind of like silicone mold that you have  is what I use mostly just to make sure it comes out pretty easy. um But that's what I do with the kids, that way,
30:06It's an easier process for them and it's a little more instant since  with cold press or even hot press, it's a process and they're not that patient.  Yeah. So with the melt and pour, does it have to cure at all or is it ready to go once  it's all? It's  ready to go  once it's cooled down. Okay. And then
30:32I'm really curious about this because I haven't talked to anybody who does it, the you do it. Is the Melton Hore base, is it already soap? Yes. Okay. Yep. It's already soap. And I don't want to get into your finances or business, but  is the base expensive? It's not really expensive. You can usually get like, um depending on what you  are wanting, because you can get like an aloe base, you can get coconut milk, you can get, oh.
31:01You can get literally anything. So it depends on what you're looking for as  far as that goes. But you can usually get like five, 10 pounds of it, you know, for  20 to 40 bucks, depending on what kind. OK, where do you get it from?  You can actually get it from like Hobby Lobby or Amazon. I usually  if I'm just doing enough just to hang out with the kids and have something fun to do,  I'll just go to like Hobby Lobby.
31:31Okay. Otherwise, I will order it and let them make for, you know, family, friends, and that sort of thing. As far as that part goes, the rest of it, I do like a cold press. Okay, awesome. I knew that there that you could do it the way that you do it. my husband is very into doing stuff from from like zero to 100. Yes. And
31:58When  I asked him if we could try making it, he was like, let me look it up. And when he saw how to do it,  it's science. It's an experiment. really is. So he really wanted to do it. so when my kids get a little bit older,  I will. Yes.  Yes.  And like I was saying, when my kids get a little bit older, because  eight to 12, they don't have the capacity for that yet. It's a process.
32:26It's not instant gratification afterwards. When they get older, we'll go back to just doing the cold process. But while they're learning and still figuring it out, I just let them do the melt and pour. I think that's great. And so do they make like crazy colors? They do. um
32:49Their most recent  phase has been like blues and teals and purples.  And um so we have all sorts of like swirled soaps with those colors because you can still  do  some  of the  artistic parts. Not as much because I mean, it's not quite as technical as the cold press, but you can get colors, you can get
33:18some fun things out of it as far as designs go. And so we have swirls  of blues and purples and greens and teals throughout the house right now. So much fun.  Do you give them as gifts at Christmas time? We haven't yet. They are very  new starting out. So this has been the first year that they've really been interested in doing it.  So we've done it a few times and
33:49They like to take them for themselves, which I am fine with with those ones, because that's more of just  having fun while learning how to do it. em But they have taken them to their friends and  given them that way, not necessarily as like a birthday present or anything like that, but just  an anytime gift.
34:12That's fabulous. love it. Rainbow Swirl Soaps. have to try making some of those. Okay. And then I saw that you do a lot of  bread baking and cooking from scratch. the kids involved in that too? They are.  On my  Facebook page, there's actually pictures of us making jam and breads and they  love it.  I make pickled green beans  and
34:42they go crazy for them. I have to keep those stocked pretty regularly. That's one of their absolute favorite snacks.  Whenever I do  breads, they are like, nope, you have to make this one for us. This isn't a selling one. You have to make this one for us. And I said, okay. So  they really like the cinnamon loaf. like  the garlic parmesan loaf. Those are their favorites. And then just regular
35:10like sandwich style bread  and they'll go through about a pint and a half  of jam along with that and I'm like, okay guys, we need another snack.
35:26Yes. I told this story on the podcast months ago. had made a bunch with, we canned a bunch of strawberry jam  and I thought that we were out  and uh my son who still lives with us had grabbed a jar out of the pantry because he knew where they were. They were staffed.  And I still don't know where they are. I think there's four more jars. have to ask him where they are.  But he was having toast and
35:53I was totally fine with him finding the pint of strawberry jam.  Yeah. Or half pint, the jelly jar size. Yes. And he, I went to do something, probably a podcast and I  went to look for that strawberry jam in the fridge the next morning  and uh there was no strawberry jam in the fridge. And I said, what happened to the jar you opened yesterday? And he said, I ate it yesterday. Yeah. I was like, you are an adult man child.  Yep.
36:22Absolutely.  said, you ate an entire jar of strawberry jam on your toast. He said, yeah, it's really good. And I was like,  yeah, I know. Wish I had some.
36:34Yeah, same. I also enjoy it. That was a new one on me, but  I have to ask him where they are because I don't think he's eaten the other four jars. If he has, he's in big trouble.  Right. Yes, I turn around and the dilly beans and the jam go quick. And so I have to  continuously  be making those.  Yeah.  You make freezer jam, right?
37:01I do both.  The freezer jam I let the kids help with. It's a little easier process and so  it's a good starting point for them.  Okay, so when you make freezer jam, do you actually do that in  jars or do you do it in like a plastic container so it's not as breakable?  I do it in jars because we go through it really fast. Okay. And so  I just do the wide mouth  jars for uh
37:30pretty much  everything that has to do with um anything that'll go in the freezer. Those are the only ones that I use for that. And  I think almost everything has been converted just to wide mouth at this point because I  am doing soups and all of that. um But with those, I think I do  usually about 10 at a time.
38:00the kids will go through them within a month.
38:04What's the age range on your kids again? So I have five kiddos. Four of them are girls between the ages of eight and 10. So I have a kiddo, our youngest just turned eight and then I have an eight and a half year old. And then we have a nine year old and a 10 year old. And then our son is 12.
38:26Lots of drama.  They all fight over who's helping and who's doing what.  so everything takes a little bit longer, but they enjoy it a lot more.  Yes. And you are making memories. Yes. uh I listened to another podcast on Monday mornings. It's called best to the nest BST to the NST. uh one of the there's two women.
38:56One of the women is older, think she's 60. One of the women is younger and she's in her 40s. And the older woman has been going back to school.  And she was talking about the memories that we  make when we're children  versus how we remember those memories when we're adults. And  we actually, we actually like,
39:25construct  new things around the actual event that we're remembering. Yeah. It's really interesting. I wish I could say it better. But um the memories that kids make as children  influence everything they do until the day that they die. Yes. So keep doing the things with your kids because you are building amazing groundwork for them to build on.
39:54I know that whenever my first season hunting with  my spouse and everything after we hadn't really got together and blended and everything like that, every single kiddo, plus my spouse and I, were all there whenever I shot my deer.  And while it wasn't the biggest deer, it was a core memory for everyone. I'm pretty sure our son levitated up to where that deer was, because he...
40:22I think even beat me there. And I had to keep telling him, you got to wait. We got to make sure that he is completely dispatched before you go up there because he will be mad.  He will come at you  with his antlers. so  that was a core memory for all of them. And since then, it's kind of been tradition that we all go together regardless of who's hunting and not hunting yet. And so
40:52Our son shot his deer  and everyone was there. We all got to experience it with them. And so it's been  a lot of core memories made.
41:07I am sitting here  just like stuck, like there's a sob in my chest regarding this because that's so good.
41:17I would rather them be out in the woods and experiencing nature and playing in the dirt like we used to,  than sitting on phones and tablets and nonsense inside or getting into trouble at school. A hundred and fifty thousand percent agree with you, Christine.
41:39They always ask, what did you guys do as kids? And I was like, outside. That was it. We weren't allowed inside. Like in the summertime and stuff like that, your toys were outside.
41:51Yeah, and it wasn't toys that were bought. was sticks and rocks and rain and mud.  You had to go build a fort. You had to go ride your bikes. You had to go  play catch or whatever. But all of it was done outside. You weren't allowed inside until it was time for dinner.  The good old days. I  miss those days so much. We don't even hardly have streetlights anymore. So there's no
42:21time frame. It's just there. Yeah. Yeah. You are doing, you're doing it right.
42:30And so  we try to make sure that our kids are set up to succeed in life, matter what this world looks like.
42:39You're making me want to go back and do it all over again. And I can't. I'm too old to have babies anymore. can't do it all over again.
42:49That's why I like working in the medical field because I get to see babies and give them snuggles while they're in our clinic and then they go home. So it's like having them momentarily. Yeah. And the thing is that's awesome, except that I don't work in the medical field and none of my kids want babies. Yes. So I am out of the baby loop completely at this point.
43:16And it's okay because the last time I held a baby, was like, I think I might be past this because I don't know how to hold a baby anymore. It's weird. It's like riding a bike. You do it enough and you know it all over again. Yep. I just have to cock the hip out and do the thing that I did for years with mine. Okay. So we are 43 minutes and 30 seconds. I would love to know where people can find you, Christine.
43:43um So I am on Facebook. You can find me at Rustic Haven Homestead. It's got a cute picture of a coop  and everything about us is on there. And  then, yeah, just reach out, come find me.
44:00Okay. And you said, so you do or you don't have a YouTube channel? I don't currently. My daughter is  very forward on getting us to that point. She's 10 and she would love to be the star of that.  Okay. Well, let me know when you have it and I will add it to the show notes. How's that? Perfect. That sounds amazing.  Okay. As always, people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com. And if you would like to support
44:28the podcast, can go to  atinyhomestead.com slash support.  Christine, I loved this conversation. I feel like we were kind of all over the place, but that's how it goes.  And uh really glad to talk about hunting and the fact that you can eat cougar. didn't know that. That was amazing.  And I hope that you have a wonderful rest of your week. Yes, you as well. All right. Thank you. Bye.  Bye. Bye.
 

Santa Claus!

Today I'm talking with Santa Claus! Hope you enjoy our chat, and a small peek into the North Pole. Merry Christmas!
 
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00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I have the supreme pleasure of talking with Santa Claus at the North Pole. Good morning, Santa. How are you? Good morning, Mary. I'm doing very well. How are you? I'm good. Is it cold at the North Pole? Oh, it's always cold at the North Pole, but we adapt pretty well. Yeah, it's a-
00:27It's very cold in Minnesota where I am this morning. We are not even at freezing yet. True. We call that the South Pole. Exactly. So in our summers there, you need to come to Minnesota in June. It's beautiful. Yes, absolutely. All right. So tell me a little bit about the North Pole because I, my questions for, for
00:56the North Pole is, you always listening to Christmas music?  Oh, not necessarily. I enjoy a nice variety. mean, Christmas music certainly keeps us focused on what we're doing, but I like some jazz music every once in a while. Of course, there is a nice crossover with Vince Guaraldi. I love his stuff. Very nice.  And what I mean...
01:20I don't even know what to ask you. This is, this is crazy. I might actually, I might actually be nervous talking to Santa Claus.  So  is your, is your home decor, is it all Christmas stuff all the time? We have some areas that are off limits  to anything Christmas  because Mrs. Claus, she's very supportive, but sometimes she just needs to have something that is devoid of it.
01:47Just to have a variety, just to break things up a little bit. She enjoys her Coca-Cola room and she enjoys her shabby chic room and there's lots of rooms in the castle. So she has many options and I give her carte blanche because happy wife, happy life.  Absolutely. So is the home a castle? Does Santa Claus live in a castle?
02:13Oh, we, we have what you might call a compound actually. There's a whole village, not just the castle, but the ancillary areas where the reindeer live, where the elves have their home quarters, et cetera, et cetera. So just about any facility you might imagine that we need, we have, and it's protected by a great big dome so that we can't be seen by anybody who might want to find us.  I love it. I love it. That's amazing. um
02:43So tell me about your reindeer. Are they the same reindeer all the time? Are they immortal or do you have baby reindeer sometimes?
02:54Oh, we have a, we have the A team that everybody seems to know, although I do challenge the children to try and name them. Uh, they, they always miss two or three. The most famous example is Don Durr, not Don Ur. Uh, Don Ur is something else. Don Durr is the name of that reindeer. And then the B team and the C team. they, they are immortal, but we do have some grandparent reindeers and.
03:21The beyond the first famous nine, there are two more teams of reindeer right now. So two more, 16 more reindeer. And they have fun names like chat and Shlomo and all of, all of the other reindeer.  Shlomo. Okay. I hadn't heard that one before. Right. Well, and then they're all different, but they don't see a lot of action, but they're there just in case. I usually use them when I make visits down south.
03:50Uh, so that the A team stay in their peak strength.  Oh,  okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Cause I'm sure that even if you're an immortal reindeer, you probably do get tired. Oh, sure. They need their naps and they're, they're bedded by time and they're,  they're good diets and such. So you don't want to wear them out. They can still get sore hooves.  Oh my, we don't want that. That's not good.  Okay. So,  um,  what is your.
04:19Well, number one, does Santa Claus like eggnog? Sure. I enjoy eggnog. Definitely the virgin types. You don't need anything tipsy. I'm always driving. Yep. So maybe,  so maybe milk is better. Sure. You can put anything out. It's the thought that counts. And I really appreciate the children who think of us and the reindeer as well. It's nice to put out things for them. They love things.
04:49that make crunchy sounds. So red bell peppers,  maybe some zucchini, some cucumbers, things that crunch. They love making the crunching sounds. So those are always welcome and appreciated as well.  they like apples? Oh, sure. If it crunches, they munches. Okay.  And then,  so I'm assuming that you like all cookies, but you have a favorite.
05:14Oh yes,  again, it's the thought that counts. appreciate whatever the children put out for me, milk, eggnog, a glass of water. It's all fine. And I do have my favorite, it's white chocolate macadamia nut, but cookies are cookies. They're like pizza. Nothing can go wrong if you put out pizza and nothing can go wrong if you put out any kind of cookie for Santa.  Good to know. My favorite cookie is a snickerdoodle.  Oh, that's a good one too.
05:42Yeah, I'm probably going to make some over Christmas.  if you swing by, if you swing by the house in LaSore, Minnesota, where I live, there might be snickerdoodles for you. You can count on it.  Okay. So I know that you are the Santa, but there's all these Santas that people see at the malls where kids go to sit on Santa's lap and tell them their wishes for Christmas. Do you?
06:08Do you feel offended that there are so many impersonators or do you feel flattered? No, I love it. It takes a village so I can  use all the help I can get. It's all a network, you see. So they're doing the recon for me and they pass it on  as long as it's appropriate. I mean, sometimes
06:29children ask for the craziest nines or a whole house. So they filter it out really well for me. The elves on the shelves do a nice job too. So it's all part of my reconnaissance team all over the world. I have a little bone to pick with the elves on the shelves.  Oh, okay.  They are naughty. A lot of them are naughty elves and they do, they like, they personify silly naughtiness and.
06:57I didn't have the elf on the shelf for when I was a kid or when my kids were kids. And so when the elves on the shelves showed up and I saw some of the things that they do, I was almost grateful that I was not part of that. Well, that's a very valid point. And you should rest assured that it's actually a bit of a pilot program because normally the elves are making the toys year round, round the clock. But
07:22A few of them approached me  and wanted, guess what you could call a sabbatical where they come down south and they do a little field work, a little reconnaissance.
07:36Oh, it is a pilot program. Sometimes when they get a little bit ribaldry or a little bit incorrigible, we have to bring them back to the pole and circulate them out. So the elf on your shelf might actually be a different elf from year to year, especially if they're naughty. We want to keep them on the straight and narrow. They just seem to look alike. So  one year you might have an elf that's very cooperative and friendly and nice. And then maybe they get a little too big for their britches and we have to swap them out.
08:06keeping everybody humble. So even the elf on the shelf can be on the naughty list sometimes.  Oh, anybody can be on the naughty list. I try really hard to stay off of it myself. Sometimes Santa has a grumpy moment. Sometimes I get tired. And Mrs. Claus really helps me a lot to remind me of why I'm doing what I'm doing. Yes. And so tell me why you're doing what you're doing.  I just love making wonderful memories.
08:33I love the joy and the wonder in the children's eyes
08:40and it could be children of any age,  but so contagious that it drives me. I guess if you could say if Santa has a drug, it's the spirit of Christmas.  Okay. And tell me what the spirit of Christmas means to you, Santa. If I had one thing on my Christmas list and children of all ages ask me, what do I want for Christmas? I want peace on earth. And when we're all at peace, when we stop worrying about so many things,
09:08So many opinions we don't need to have. We're arguing about so many things these days. Oh my goodness, stay off of the social media. So many irrelevant and irreverent things on there. Peace. Let's get back to the basics of what we are. uh A herd, a pack, a tribe, a social creature. We're meant to be together and to support each other, not to tear each other down. So the spirit of Christmas is the
09:38perfect embodiment of peace and we're all striving to achieve that.  Right there with you. If you ask me what I want for Christmas, I want peace on earth really bad. I want it now. Yes, and we can all do our part. We don't have to worry about being like somebody else or how well or not well someone else is doing. If we mind our own business and do our part, everything works together perfectly. Yes, it sure does.
10:08um What's the craziest thing that a child has asked you for Christmas?
10:15Probably the most common requests I get are for living things and I have to set them straight. And honestly, the parents appreciate this. Santa doesn't fly with anything that can poop in the sleigh. So it goes for puppies and kitties and donkeys and boyfriends and girlfriends. don't do any of that. So  it's always adorable.
10:36And it's always something that I have to advise them.  I can bring a toy puppy or a toy kitty or maybe a Ken doll or a Barbie doll, but that's about it. Mm-hmm.  Yep.  I wanted a teddy bear for my  15th Christmas.  And I asked Santa because Santa is real.  And my mom said, what do you want for Christmas from Santa? And I said, I want a teddy bear. And she said, what kind of teddy bear? And I said, a gunned
11:04teddy bear G-U-N-D. Yes, very nice. Very, very nice teddy bear back in the  80s,  90s, 80s.  And I didn't think I'd get it because I thought that Santa might think that it was silly that a 15 year old girl wanted a teddy bear.  And there was a beautiful chocolate brown gun teddy bear under the tree Christmas morning that said, that said love Santa. So thank you, Santa.
11:32It's my pleasure. I love teddy bears and I love anything that a child can use their imagination to play with. Yeah. My daughter actually asked if she could take it with When we're spoon feeding too, it's not good for children.  Sorry.  I  over you. sorry.  She asked me if she could take it with her when she moved out when she was 18  and it had sat on my dresser for years.
12:01I took really good care of that bear, looked brand new. And I said, why do you want it? And she said, because you love it and I love it. And so she has it still and she's 36.
12:12That's beautiful. What a wonderful tradition to establish.  The thing is, she's never going to have kids. She doesn't want any. So it's going to be her bear until she dies.
12:23Well, and nothing is final. If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.  Yeah, I bet he laughs a lot. I he's entertained all the time. Yes. He has a great sense of humor.  He sure does.  I  say things out loud outside and I'm like, Ooh, I shouldn't have said that outside because now God is going to take that and run with it. And I'm going to be like, why did I say that?  Okay. So.
12:53Santa, you  are a jolly old elf. You are a uh round guy. Is that from all the cookies or is that just because you like to eat during the year? Well, I love the cookies. That's a lot of calories to burn off. So I do.
13:11to stay in shape. mean, you have to be to harness the reindeer and drive the sleigh and carry the toys and go up and down the chimneys. And I get a lot of steps in, but the cookies, oh, they're so good. Can't stop eating them. So that takes a little while to burn off. And usually year to year, there's always a little bit of a pooch. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard not to eat the cookies. agree. Yeah, they're so good. Speaking of up and down the chimneys.
13:40I don't know if it's just magic or if you can actually tell me how you do it, but there are places don't have chimneys. So  how do you get in the house if there's no chimney? Oh, that's a wonderful question.  I have a magic key that opens any door and I carry it with me on my belt  all the time. It's such a powerful tool  that you don't have to have a chimney. I'll find a way in and
14:08Sometimes there are some movies and I've seen some silly representations of me about what happens and if I shrink down or I magically create a chimney or things like that. But it's not so complicated as that. If I need to get in, if the house wants me to come in, that's very important. You have to believe to receive that the key will open any door that I need to use to get in. So sometimes it's the front door. Sometimes it's the back door.
14:37Sometimes it's a chimney and sometimes it's through the garage.  Or through a window maybe. Right. Whatever works. We have an understanding. The believers in me.  Yes. And I feel like Santa doesn't exist unless you believe in him. Absolutely. And I'm a gentleman. If you don't want to have me come over or you don't want me in your lives, then that's fine. I will find many millions more who are interested in
15:05Continuing a relationship with me and having a wonderful Christmas. I love it. I love it. Santa, you're a good guy. Thank you. So how old is Santa?
15:22Well, let me think here. I think they, will be celebrating 1743. Hmm. Yes, about right. Definitely over 1700. I've been doing this for a while. You sound fabulous for 1700. Really? Get good rest and I get my steps in. So those are two good things. Good. So how can little kids or even big kids
15:52Being your good graces and not end up on the naughty list. What are the three top things to be on the good list? Well, the first step, I think, and the easiest way to get your heart in the right way is to think of others before yourself, especially little things.
16:12do little things with great love, with  mediocrity or apathy or begrudgingly. You'd be amazed at how  easy everything can go and how  smoothly everything can run just in your own home. If you're going downstairs, maybe take the laundry with you. If you're going upstairs, maybe feed the cats on your way up. Whatever you can do, it's no skin off your nose and it  makes the house so much more peaceful. And that's what we want more of in this world.
16:42Mm-hmm. And then the second thing? The second thing  is ask yourself if things are a need or a want.  Oh my goodness, we're so addicted to more, more, more, more, bigger, faster, stronger. Be happy with what you've got. Sometimes what you really need is a wonderful experience and not stuff. You may not even remember who got it for you. Even if it's me, years later, you may not know.
17:12Where this thing came from and you just throw it away and what a tragedy. Okay, and is there a third? Well, if you've got your heart right and you're not thinking of yourself all the time and you're staying humble and you're trying to work for the good of  others, you would be amazed at how much more fruitful your life can become and when you're at peace, it's a great spot to dream from.
17:41And you might discover  wonderful abilities and talents and a calling to do something you never even knew you had in you. But you have to be at peace to have that frame of mind.  A hundred percent agree with you. And I'm on the nice list. I know I am because I got those three checked off already all the time. Oh, you're doing a wonderful job. Although dusting couldn't hurt.  It never ends. Right. Right.
18:10Never ends. I swear to goodness, my dog sheds and I dust and I dust and I dust and her little white hair show up everywhere anyway. Yes. It keeps you humble. Yeah. And keeps me busy. It's, it's a lot. She, she's, she's got like crimped hair. so when she shakes it goes everywhere, but she's a good dog. So we're going to keep her and I will dust so I can have my dog. And so that I stay on the good.
18:40the nice list. Absolutely, taking good care of what you're responsible for. Well, considering that I was the one who really, really wanted her, I have to be responsible for her. Well done.  And she was a want. She was a want.  I really wanted a puppy and we got a puppy. One of the best things we ever did. She's five years old now. She's still my puppy. That's beautiful. And she wanted a good home and you gave it to her.
19:06Yeah, she's very upset right now because I locked her out of my room so I could talk to Santa.  Oh, well, she'll understand.  She will. She'll be fine. um Does Santa have pets beyond the reindeer?  Oh, we have lots of pets up at the North Pole. Sometimes the elves want something to take care of besides toys. So we have  geese and chickens and ducks and pigs and goats and just about anything. I have a whole zoo.
19:34So Mrs. Claus's favorite animal is a giraffe. So you know we have a couple of those. You might be surprised at what you find up at the North Pole. If you are ever let in, again, we try to keep things private and quiet and invisible. Uh-huh.  And a partridge in a pear tree up there?
19:53Yes, we have a whole orchard of pear trees.  I love pears. We have apples and peaches and grapevines and all kinds of fruit.  Underneath the dome, we can control different climates. I actually have a little beach because I don't think anybody else wants to see me in uh a swimsuit. I have a private beach for when I want to go swimming.  Very nice. That is awesome.
20:21I love swimming. Swimming is a great exercise. That's how you get the calories down from all the cookies, right?
20:29I float pretty well too.  Yep. bet you do.  All right, Santa.  I don't know that I have any more questions right off the top of my head. I'm sure that I will think of a hundred when I'm going to sleep tonight,  but  thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. I appreciate it.  It's my pleasure. Anytime. I'm happy to make time in my schedule for you. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Merry Christmas, everyone. Merry Christmas.