A Tiny Homestead

Home In The Pines

Today I'm talking with Lindsay at Home In The Pines.
A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org.
 
Muck Boots 
Calendars.Com
If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee 
https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year?  Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months.  So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com  Lang calendar.
00:26because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.  A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system.
00:56You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Lindsay at Home in the Pines. Good morning, Lindsay. How are you? Good morning. I'm good. How are you doing? I'm good. Where are you located? We are in East Texas. Okay, cool. Is it sunny there? Because it's gray here in Minnesota. Same here. We've had a lot of rain lately. I mean, honestly, it's just the humidity. I feel like we're just one big
01:26ball of humidity. It's just like walking through steam all the time.  Yeah. Yeah. I keep waiting for the first really nice moderate spring day and it just hasn't happened yet, but we're supposed to have a gorgeous weekend here. I'm so excited. good.  Yeah. So tell me about yourself and what you do. And  I have one quick question. Your Instagram page shows you as home in the pines, but it also shows you as something else. What's that something else again?
01:57Um, Homestead Hustlers in Progress. Yes, that. So tell me, tell me about yourself and Homestead Hustlers in Progress. Okay. Um, well, my husband and I are actually originally from Minnesota. So we get through this stand. Yeah. We know what you're going through this time of year. Um, we both grew up in the city. My husband really inner city and I was, you know, more on the outskirts suburbs. And, um, when we first got married, I was teaching. He is a basketball coach, now teacher and.
02:27Um,  we were led to go to Iowa a couple of years after we were married  and, um, he was coaching at a Christian college there. We adopted our two older boys while we were there and we were in a neighborhood, but we had about an acre of land. It was a super big yard for, for the neighborhood. And we  absolutely loved it, especially both coming from the city.  Um, my husband will say like, I never want to live on top of anybody ever again. And, um, so we just really got like that.
02:58it to like, oh, this is nice. This is kind of nice having a little bit of space, you know.  After a few years, we moved to West Texas where we worked in a  facility for at-risk youth. We were both teachers, both coaches.  Again,  we had our two older boys and then we had a baby while we were there. And we lived  on,  was like a working ranch. We lived on the ranch there.
03:25but we also bought some property about 15 minutes away. So we would go there on the weekends. My husband liked doing projects, being out there, bringing the kids, you know, just having some freedom and fresh air, that kind of thing.  Excuse me.  So then just two years ago, we moved over here to East Texas where we purchased a major fixer upper. it  had been abandoned for a few years  besides all the critters.  And
03:55had another baby, so we four kids,  three boys and a little girl.  And  I work part time from home. My husband still teaches and coaches. And we just, we have about 13 acres here in the middle of the woods and  we love it. It's just, it's like been a gradual progression from like where we started to now kind of just like fully immersed in this like own land,  you know, work it, that kind of thing.
04:23Okay, that's a fabulous story. I have to know, was your husband living in Minneapolis? Is that the big city? Yes. Yep, right there in South Minneapolis. Okay, cool. Yeah, I had no idea that you were from Minnesota, but the minute you said no, no, I heard the big O and I was like, oh, I would have known either way. everyone's like, where are you from? What accent is that? I was like, I'm the one with the accent. But it's funny. Uh-huh. Yep.
04:50It's really interesting to me and I swear I should just start a podcast about people's accents and the way they talk because it's so  amazingly intriguing to me.  I grew up in Maine and I moved to Minnesota when I was 22, I think.  And I had a Maine accent. I didn't have the real thick down east accent, but I definitely had a Maine accent. It was not well received in Minnesota. Every time I would open my mouth, people were like, you're not from here, are you?
05:20No,  no, not.  And so I adopted a generic Southern drawl because apparently it's better to be from the South than the Northeast if you're moving to Minnesota.  And spent years just trying to eradicate any accent that I could possibly get out of the way I speak.  And when people ask me where I'm from, it's with that absolutely open faced dumbfounded look of I cannot figure out where you're from.  You got all of it.
05:49And I'm really proud of that because I've worked really hard to dump anything that would indicate where I'm from.  But  that big O in snow here,  it slips out all the time and I never had it before I moved to Minnesota. That's funny. People  usually get us on bag instead of bag. feel like, it right. We are bag.  That's the big one. My husband is born and bred Minnesotan and he says big.
06:19And he says bagel for bagel. And every time he does it, I just want to be like, it's not big, it's bag.  And I learned a long time ago to not do that because number one, it's how he grew up saying it and it's how he knows it to be said. I cannot change it. Also, it's really rude  to comment on people's accents as I learned moving here.
06:47So I try really hard to just appreciate all the different accents and they're beautiful. They're incredibly beautiful. That's fun. So that's my dissertation on accents for the morning. And typically I don't get too deep into it, but I just love it so much, you know?  So thank you for letting me get that off my chest.  For sure. That's great.  Okay. So what do you think of Texas? Do you love it? Yeah, we love Texas. We'll probably...
07:16We'll probably be here forever. So  we kind of have family all over the place now, like in Utah, Minnesota, still Minnesota. So  we really love it down here. Cool.  I think if I moved to Texas, the thing that I would love most coming from Northern tier States is that my growing season would be a little bit longer. That is true. I know I keep telling them, I loved the weather in West Texas, the dry heat.
07:42We would have snow like once a year just for a couple days and I'm like, okay, this is good. Two days, we're done. So I'm kind of struggling with the humidity, but you're right, like the growing season, I'm like, wow, we actually get to plant things in the fall too. That's cool.  Yeah.  And Minnesota gets really freaking humid these days too, just so you know.  That's  comforting. It's gross. Oh my God. The last two summers, we've had a couple of weeks in July.
08:11where you didn't want to go outside because it was over 90 degrees and it was tropical humidity. It was gross.  So  at this point, I'm not sure it matters where you live unless you live in  Australia  or one of the two  poles, the southern pole and the northern pole.  You're going to get everything. Yeah, it's just the way it is, right? Yeah, it's  so weird. I don't know what happened.  Okay, so
08:41Tell me  about what you actually do  at your place. I know you have chickens.  Yeah,  again, we're in progress, right? So we  were learning so much. We didn't grow up like learning any of these skills. So it's been fun, too, to think, OK, we can teach our kids this and this and that kind of thing.  We did have chickens. Unfortunately, something got in there.  So  yeah, so we're  working on.
09:10fixing that up.  And  then got the garden going. We're starting small this year and hopefully adding on, you know, each each season.  And yeah,  our dog had puppies. So that's been really fun for the little kids to play with those. And  like I said, we have we're in the woods. So my husband's created like a path so can like walk the circle, which is  really awesome.
09:38Yeah, like I said,  the home needed a lot of work. The land needed a lot of work. So we spent a lot of time, especially my husband, just outside cleaning up, fixing things,  you know,  making it nice.  Hence the in progress part of your name. Yes,  exactly.  Little steps. I knew that your dog had puppies. Is your dog a Pyrenees?  No,  the neighbor dog is. Okay, so what's your dog?
10:07It's Pepper Healer Mix. Oh my, that's a very high energy dog. Yes, yes she is. She owns the place.  Well the puppies are gorgeous. They are, they're precious. Yes, the thing I love about Instagram and Facebook is when I ask people to be a guest, I get to go see what they're up to and see all the photos.  And this time of year there's always babies, whether it's puppies or kittens or calves or kids or...
10:34Whatever, there's always babies. So I love this time of year because I'm just innately entertained by all the  pictures. Yeah. Our dog, her  mom just had a litter of eight babies  at a place where we got her  and her. I don't even know how to say it right.  I call the other set of puppies cousins because they're not actually related to Maggie. the other
11:02Australian Shepherd dog just had five or six, like a couple weeks ago. So I'm getting to see all those Australian Shepherd puppies on my friend's Facebook page. And I remember Maggie at that age because I met Maggie when she was two weeks old. So it's really fun. And I always mentioned to my parents when Maggie has new siblings or cousins, because my parents have a border colleague. And I told my dad that Maggie had new
11:31siblings and cousins and he said are you getting one and I said  absolutely not one dog is more than enough.  Australian Shepherds though they're cute.  Yeah she's a good looking dog. I swear to God I should just do an episode about Maggie like a solo episode just me raving about this dog because I talk about her all the time.  She is beautiful like you know the  Australian Shepherd you see on commercials on TV.
12:01how they're always the perfect specimen. She's like that. could  be an advertisement dog. model dog?  Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. And I'm so in love with her that it is sickening and I'm going to stop right now. Hopefully she won't bark because she's been really good lately about settling down when I'm recording.  All right. So you said you have four kids and you said that you
12:29You adopted two and then you had one  that's a boy and then you just had another one a little while ago. It's a girl.  And  younger two were adopted as embryos. Oh,  okay. Cool. Yeah. So I birthed them, but all four of our kids, Cam,  family of adoption. So it's really sweet. They have awesome stories. That is fantastic.  I  have a question. If I'm being nosy, just tell me and I will edit this out. Does it cost a lot?
12:58to do the embryo adoption?  And I'm an open book about it. no, that's totally fine.  It depends on the route you go.  A lot of adoption agencies now have an embryo adoption branch. And so that would tend to be more expensive just because you're working with an agency.  Some clinics do it here in the States. And then we actually went to Mexico, worked with an awesome clinic.
13:27Being out of country, was a little bit cheaper. yeah, it's just crazy, the cost of adoption in general. Okay.  I was just wondering, because I know nothing about it.  I'm one of those very fortunate women that get pregnant when somebody sneezes.  And I'm not a baby factory. I have four kids. One is  a stepchild.  And there's...
13:53Oh God, my daughter was born in 89, next son was born in 97, and next son was born in 2001. So it's not like I've had 10,000 children. But it's very hard for me when friends say that they're trying to get pregnant and they just can't. I have this weird guilt about the fact that I didn't have an issue with being pregnant. Yeah, you shouldn't.
14:23I mean, that is nice of you to like understand or feel empathy for people because, you know, some people if they don't understand  that pain, like, you know, but the fact that you  understand and can empathize with them or sympathize, it's  nice. Nothing to feel guilty about though. Yeah, one of the grandest joys of my life has been being a mom.
14:47And my kids would probably be like, bullshit. And no, is. They are the best things I have ever done. Totally agree. Produced, created, whatever word you want to use. Yeah. Okay. So what else can I ask you? Because I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole on adoption. Because if this was an adoption podcast, we would spend two hours talking. Yes. There's lots. Yes. Congratulations though on being a mom of four.
15:17And you absolutely are a mom. I do not think that anyone has  any say in whether people have biological children or adopted children. I don't think it makes you any less of a mom if you adopt. Thank you.  Yeah, totally agree. Thank you. My stepson is the child of my heart.  He's the one that I didn't have to carry, but he still feels like I did. Yeah. Yeah, it's just a different  carry.
15:46Yep, exactly.  And I didn't meet him until he was six. I didn't get to see him as a baby. I didn't even know his dad when he was born.  yeah,  that's cool.  Yeah. Okay, so  off the mom  soap box, back onto the homesteading soap box.  How  are you feeling about all the work that you're doing? Are you excited? you at the frustration point? Both? I guess it depends on the day.
16:16I really try to focus  on  how far we come. I probably get more frustrated with just the home still needs a lot of work, you know,  and I'm home with the littles all day. And so sometimes I can get like, oh, we to do this, we got to do this, we got to do this. Oh, I feel like I'm living in a construction zone still. But then I just have to remind myself, you know what contentment we've come so far.  There's no rush. Like, this is not what what life is about the perfect home. It's it's it's the journey, you know, little steps.
16:45Um, and I'm just super thankful. Like I'm excited that my kids get to run through the woods free and they're not focused on the mess. They're not focused on, know,  if there's a baseboard that's not put in yet, you know, that kind of thing. So  really trying to, we're really trying to focus on their childhood, giving them the best that we possibly can and seeing it through their eyes.  And  you're right. They don't care as long as they have.
17:11good food in their bellies, a place to sleep at night and parents that love them, they're good. Yep, exactly. One thing that we've been trying to focus on too is, and shoot, I mean, I know a lot of people are probably since maybe COVID is, you know, our food. So like, I'm trying to learn more like skills like canning and, you know, like we had these flowers in our yard the other day. I was like, huh, I wonder if these can be used for anything. So I'm like Googling and I like.
17:38I'm out there with my little bucket collecting flowers and  drying them for tea. You know what mean? Like, I just love it. I love learning all these things.
17:49Yeah, absolutely. Do you guys have catnip? Do you have catnip that grows wild in Texas? I don't know. We might. I'm not sure I know what it looks like. It looks... I don't know how to explain it. Google it. You'll find pictures of it. But you can make tea out of catnip that is safe for humans. And apparently it has really good...
18:16There's a word, qualities. It's not the word I was looking for, but it's okay to make tea out of it. And I guess it tastes pretty good too. I have not done it, but I was reading the other day about it and I was like, I  hope our catnip comes back this year. We didn't have any last year because of the drought.  Oh yeah, I'll look it up.  Yeah.  And there's another thing that grows here called pineapple weed and it's wild chamomile basically.
18:44I want to make our whole yard that so when we mow the whole yard smells like chamomile. Oh, nice.  That's a great idea.  We're not going to do it because it would require taking everything out and putting that in.  I just, every time my husband mows the lawn, well,  the yard, we don't really have a lawn.  It smells really good because the people that lived here before put in some really nice grass in the yard part of the property.
19:12and he mows and it smells like sweet hay and I'm just like, you can mow every day if you want. He's like, I don't have enough diesel. He says, I don't have enough diesel. I can't afford the diesel to mow every day. I'm like, okay. Well, then you do. Yeah. Mow every day. That's fine. And I wish that people grew the sweet smelling hay here in Minnesota, but I don't think it's a thing anymore. I can remember growing up in Maine and we would drive up to see my grandparents about an hour and a half north of where we live.
19:41And we would drive by these fields where they'd been mowed and it was hay. And it just smelled so sweet. I don't think that people in Minnesota grow that kind of hay anymore. mean, I can't think of what the smell would be. So probably don't, right? Yeah, I wish they did because it smells amazing. And we are surrounded by corn fields here where I live.
20:07That's the last two summers. was alfalfa fields, but they changed over to corn. corn smells really weird when it's cut. Like when they harvest the corn, it smells strange outside. I can't quite put my finger on it. Yeah. think, I think I know what you mean living in Iowa. think  I know that smell.  Yeah. It's really weird. It's, it's,  I'm, this is going to sound really weird.  It's  wet. Like it smells wet. Like any cut plant smells,  but it's this.
20:36very specific scent and it's not sweet, it's not bitter, it's not sour, but I just know it when I smell it. It's weird. Yeah, the things you learn when you move to the country, who knew? The city, you know, different smells there, So are your kidlets into what you're doing, the ones who are old enough to be doing things? Our second son, they're both in high school.
21:05He definitely loves the garden. Well, one thing he's always been interested, probably since we moved to West Texas, was horses. He got to work at the horse barn there and he just, he loves it. yeah, he's really into the garden. He loves the animals. It's been good. Our oldest is such a hard worker. So anytime my husband needs like, here, help me carry this big old branch or tree around, he'll...
21:33And he's always barefoot.  We just laugh at him all the time. He's walking through the woods, just barefoot, carrying these heavy things around. Just, you he's definitely a man of the woods.  yeah. our littles, our littles love it because, you know, they get to run around with the puppies right now and hopefully chickens again and help dad out and you know, all that fun stuff. So they do. They seem to enjoy it.
21:59You love this so much. can hear it in your voice. I do. I do. It's just funny. I,  I told, I tell my husband when I was little, like I always wanted to live on a farm. I always wanted a cow. Like I, I would put, we lived in a neighborhood. Like I'd go in my backyard and put on like a long dress and pretend I was like Laura Ingalls Wilder  in the prairies.  So it's just, just, it's just cool to look back and see kind of like.
22:25the process of where we're at  now. Like I said, we have so much to learn, but we're just enjoying it while we do it.
22:34Nice.  Did you read the the Laura Ingalls Wilder books?  Yes.
22:42Okay. I I read all of them when
22:49Okay. I read all of them when I was growing up in Steep Falls, Maine. That's where I grew up with no inkling that I would end up living in Minnesota. Oh yeah. And when I ended up moving to Minnesota, I found out there are all these places that you can actually visit where Laurie Ingalls Wilder grew up. And would you believe I have not made it to a single one? I think I've only met a couple, but that is really cool. Especially if you like the book and the story and...
23:18and everything.  Yeah, I can remember reading about Mankato. I can remember reading about  Plum Creek. And in my head, you know, when I was 12, I was like, oh, that's really cool.  I'll never see that.  And I've been to Mankato at this point. You know, I know what Mankato looks like. It sure as hell doesn't look like it did when she was there. A  little different.
23:49Very different, yes. Mankato has been built up huge in the last 20 years, let alone the last 100 years.  It's been a while since I've been there. It's just weird when...
24:02Yeah, it's just weird when you're growing up as a kid and you read about places and you think you're going to stay in the same place your whole life that you are in then.  then life happens and you end up living in a place you read about and you're like, oh my God, this is so surreal. Yeah. And like you never would have thought back then, you know, here you are.
24:26No! I had no intention of ever leaving the state of Maine. I freaking loved Maine.  I still do. I just can't afford to live there. It's so very expensive.
24:38I will, yeah. of living. Go ahead. Oh no, you're okay. I've only been as out east as far as New York, but I was like, man, I would love to visit like way up, you know, Maine, all the way up there. It looks beautiful. It is unbelievably beautiful from about mid-May until about mid-October.
25:02The other months, nah, it's not so much. It's kind of like Minnesota. The weather kind of goes to crap and it stays cold and nasty for five months and then all the beauty happens again.
25:15worth it maybe those few months, right? Oh yeah, it's the same thing as Minnesota. I'm sure you heard growing up here that we suffer the winters to enjoy the spring, summer, and fall. Yes. I'm so excited. It's spring, Lindsay. I cannot. I don't have enough words. We had sleet more than snow. Okay.
25:44Yeah, this last these two but I cannot talk these last two winters we've gotten less than a foot of snow  Where I really use or yep. Yeah the whole winter. It's been the weirdest thing and we've had stretches of cold like I've never  Seen and I've lived here for lived in Minnesota for over 30 years. It's been  a week at a time of like minus 15 minus 20 over my goodness
26:15Yeah, I loved the snow. Like, I miss the snow,  yeah, just the like half the year of the cold, just not so much. The snow is beautiful though.  Well, while we're talking about different states, and  we're digressing, but we only have like four minutes to go. Yeah.  Was it weird for you when you moved to Texas, the different foods? Because I'm guessing that the food culture in Texas is different than the food culture in Minnesota.  Yeah.
26:44Yeah, it is.  I love it. Like the Tex-Mex. I mean, I would eat probably at a Mexican restaurant every day of the week if I could. And there's plenty to choose from. So  yeah,  not as much casserole based maybe.  Not as much like meat and potatoes, more like barbecue, Tex-Mex kind of thing, which I prefer.  Yeah. You said casserole. It's not a casserole in Minnesota. It's a hot dish.
27:14Oh, see, I've just been gone way too long. I'm just going to wrap it up because you're having connection issues and I really do want to get this in. Thank you so much for your time, Lindsay. I appreciate it. For sure. Thank you so much for having me. It's been fun. All right. Have a great day. You too. Bye. Bye.
 

Plotting To Plate - The people on plot 11 & 5

Today I'm talking with Matt and Deb at Plotting To Plate - The people on plot 11 & 5.
A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org.
 
Muck Boots 
Calendars.Com
If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee 
https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year?  Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months.  So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com  Lang calendar.
00:26because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.  A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system.
00:56You can find them at HomegrownCollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Matt and I think you said Debbie. I might have screwed that up. At Plotting To Plate. Hi guys, how are you? We're good. Thank Very good. Thank you. Did I get the name right? Yes, it's Deb. Okay, good. I blanked for a second. I was like, what is her name?
01:24Okay.  You guys are in Staffordshire or Staffordshire, England, right?  Yeah, we're in Stafford, which is in Staffordshire. It's a market town,  about 71,000 people. So it's quite a big town these days. It's so medium to large.  And it's in the Midlands. Okay, cool.  And how is the weather in England today?  It's  lovely.
01:52It's really nice. So if you're wanting to go outside and get some time and sit and have a cup of tea and read books, it's great.  If you're growing vegetables, not so good because  this has been the driest spring that we've had since the records began.  So obviously we have two hats on these.  Oh, no.
02:19Unseasonably warm and dry for the UK at the moment.  I really wish that Mother Nature would get her act together. Well, just give us more warning about what she's going to be because we've got seedlings and things we need to look after.  So, you know, you need to be able to plan for that, don't you? Yes. And we went through this last year here in my town  because we had six weeks of rain straight in May and June. Yeah.
02:49And it was bad. Our garden was terrible.  And I've talked about it a lot, so I'm not going to talk about it anymore right now.  tell me about what you guys do, because I  know in England you can either have plants growing where you live or you can have allotments. And I'm not quite sure I understand what allotments mean. So tell me about it.  Yeah. So an allotment  is  a large piece of land.
03:17that's often owned by either a council or an association.  And then it's subdivided into plots.  And  the sole purpose of the plot is to grow  fruit and veg. And you rent that land from either the association or the council.  So we rent  two plots  on our site.  There's plot five and plot 11.  And there's about 150 plots on the site. So it is a massive site.
03:47But it's urban, so it's completely surrounded by housing. There's nothing rural about it  outside of the gates until you get in the gates and then there's all  the small plots that are put over to fruit, veg, flowers  or whatever you want to grow there.  Allotments,  it's quite an old tradition in the UK.
04:15the 1970s became popular and then it died off again. Then it came back to life in the 1990s and has sort of grown ever since. We found that we actually took ours on in just after lockdown in 2021 because during lockdown, know, we love food, we love eating well and we love eating organically. So lockdown gave us the time to think and consider about having.
04:43a more sustainable and simpler life and part of that was to get these two allotment plots. We haven't looked back since actually, just absolutely love it. So as far as allotments for the third, as quite large. So normally in the UK they're about 300 yards, but as a bigger, so with the two together, I think we have about a quarter of a plot, something like that, isn't it?
05:13A quarter of an acre. Not a quarter of a plot. That wouldn't feed us. It's about a quarter of an acre, which it's not too big. It's just about as much as we can manage because Matt still works. I'm retired but he works. But it does sustain us to be able to eat seasonally, to eat organically and to also grow just enough to keep some for through the winter.
05:43basically everything that we cook has got something that we've grown in it  or something that we've preserved with it.  That's so beautiful. I love it.  So when do you guys grow? When does growing season start?  We  tend to do it based on temperature.  because,  well, so you can see from plotting to play, it's our diary.
06:10and it shows what we decided to do with it was to keep a diary on how things progressed. But what it has shown us is every single year is different. So the first year we planted straight away, which was kind of February, we started seedlings off in a unheated greenhouse. But then the following year we could see from the posts that everything was a month later. So.
06:37We kind of stick with the 15 degrees thing now. So as soon as the temperature is regularly at 15 degrees, we know that the seedlings will be all right in the unheated greenhouse that's on the plot. yeah, so it depends on the year. So sometimes we can start things off February, March. Other times it's a little later. OK, is there a greenhouse for the whole?
07:08set of plots or are there greenhouses for every few or how does that work? Well  when we took the plots then they were completely derelict  so it was just  a piece of land that was covered in weeds and brambles and  we had to build everything so fortunately I married a man who's very handy  so  there's the first thing the first plot we had was 11 and
07:34We cleared it all and then Matt built a shed. And then the shed wasn't quite enough for what we wanted to do, so we then designed and built a greenhouse. But you can't use glass on the site. Obviously, there's rules on the site as to equipment and things that you can do. So yeah, he designed and built a greenhouse, which has just been brilliant for, and big enough to do all of our seedlings.
08:03And then on the second plot, which was number five, again, had to build a shared clear it.  But on there, we've got a huge polytunnel  so that we find that with the greenhouse and with polytunnel,  we can get enough seedlings going  for the whole of the two plots.  OK, what's the second thing that you're saying?  Polytunnel.  So you describe the polytunnel in that.  I know you definitely have them.
08:33stateside. It's  a hoop tray covered in plastic  shikoo. We've got  a large  semi-agricultural one.  It's just over 20 foot by 10 foot, which we've  got  tomatoes and chilies.  We're trying  sweet potatoes.
09:02this year because we can get a consistent temperature.  We've built an irrigation system which is  driven off solar panels. So we haven't got to be there every day to water. So we've brought an element of  automation into it.  it's  because it's  because you're out
09:31in the public, our site's got public right away. You have to be wary of  the potential.  We don't have massive vandalism,  but you don't have anything too valuable there because  it can get damaged or stolen.  everything we do is an element of a compromise associated with it. Okay. That makes sense.
10:01So  I know  that smaller towns or cities in England have this allotment system, but do the big cities have it too? Yeah, they do. So there were some laws that were brought out  so that  every council has to offer allotments where there's demand for them.  And you find that in the larger towns and cities  that the waiting lists for allotments are years, years and years and years.
10:30Yeah, it's quite shocking really. There's a few sites in some of the big cities, London and Oxford, places like that, where the waiting list is like 15 to 20 years to get on. You're literally waiting for people to die before... Or give up. give up. Predominantly it's...
10:58There's a huge demand these days for allotments. We're very lucky to have  two  plots on the site where we've got one in my name and one in Debbie's name. That's fabulous. I love that there is such a demand because  here in the States,  not as much demand. We definitely have cities that have community gardens. That's what we would call an allotment here.
11:27And I've talked to on the podcast a couple of places that do this and a lot of the lots go empty.  They  just don't have people who want to use them. That's such a shame, it?  You know,  you find that  in a foodie culture as well these days, which is getting more popular,  the chance to get organic vegetables that you know exactly where it's come from.
11:56is growing. So you think why do people not just want to try and do it themselves? I think they think they're too busy.  I I don't know what the culture is like where you are, but here a lot of people  work a lot of hours during the week. They're gone a lot. Yeah. To afford these big fancy houses and boats and fancy cars  and
12:24They are not, they don't have the time to actually enjoy the time that they have off. Yeah.  And you're right, you know, because  we were able to do this now because I have retired.  So Matt still works.  I don't.  And it was  a conscious decision to really simplify because I've come from that, you know, for 30 years, I've got very corporate life  where I was not at home very much. And,  you know, I'd sort of.
12:53leave on a Monday, come back on a Thursday night.  So the chance to do this actually felt like quite a dream at the time. And  now that we are able to do it, it's do feel really, really lucky.  So the plus side is that, you you're out and about,  you know, enjoying doing something that's completely natural, but the bounty of it,  because you're able to eat and produce great food.
13:21from your labors, if you like.  So it's a shame that you can't  get that balance with  both things. I know we couldn't, when I worked and we were both working, we couldn't do it.  I suppose  a lot of people on our sites,  do both work,  but you find that they're  not getting quite as much out of it or able to do  as much, but they get little bits of it, you know?
13:51Yeah.  it's also, I think it's an incredible way to decompress.  Even if you're,  I am not by nature a gardener, but  I  just, just for being outside and doing,  it's cheaper than a gym and it's more rewarding  digging.
14:19building, but just being outside and seeing other people. There's  hundreds of people on our site with the plots. We're from all different backgrounds, different cultures,  different opinions,  ages. It's a massive cross section, but we've all got the one thing in common, that we've got an allotment and we're all trying to do our best.
14:50Just the talking to people, getting advice, sharing opinions and forgetting about your corporate life, forgetting about work, being immersed in something natural. It's just a fantastic way of... Cleansing the clutter from your life.
15:18Do the other people that have allotments as well, do you and they end up helping each other sometimes? Yeah, it's brilliant for that. There's all sorts of things. So ours is quite  a  social allotment. So there's lots of things that  bring people together as well. So we have like  cake days where we sell cakes to make some money for  other social events like barbecues, bonfire nights,  things like that.
15:46So there's a social aspect to it. But we also share produce. So we've got some, obviously we've got neighbours either side on our plots and our friends, all share what we grow. So if we have a surplus of something, then we share it with them and they do with us. But it's not just the physical, know, like swapping your strawberries and your packed choy, but it's also advice and knowledge.
16:15So there's a real character next door to Matt on plot number five. And he knows everything. He's gardened on the site for over 20 years, know, on various bits of the site. And he knows every single pest, every single problem that you're going to come across. But the funny thing is it makes him a little bit paranoid as well. And Matt was harvesting onions.
16:44last year and Steve came over and said oh my goodness you've got some onion pest and you know because that's all flat and Matt just said no that's where I fell over  so  you know it's  sort of every week there's some kind of conversation where  you laugh just laughing about something.
17:08So it is great, it's a nice community, really is good.  Everybody's got time for each other as well.  And as far as help's concerned,  yeah,  we've helped people  like, motivate their plots if they're struggling and, you  know, others have given us slabs where we want to put paths down and  segment the plots out. So  it really is a nice culture there.
17:37I love it. I love it. love it. I'm so glad this goes on in other countries too.  Okay. So what do you grow in your plot?  Well, take  two different views on this. So  Matt's plot is all about potatoes  and onions.  And his mission this year is he wants to grow a huge onion. That's all he's interested in this year.
18:05Then my, and so Matt's plots got, you know, huge beds for potatoes and the onions. Whereas my plot is lots and lots of fruit. we do, but it's things that we, so on my plot on 11, we tend to try and grow things that you can't get in the supermarkets or are really expensive in supermarkets. So we've got a little orchard there, which is apples, pears.
18:36green gauges, cherries.  We grow strawberries, but we grow white strawberries.  So they're white with a red seed.  Then we've got a fruit cage which has blueberries, red currants,  white currants,  raspberries, gooseberries. Oh, we grow lots of blackberries.  Then the next  bit of the plot is all down to
19:04vegetables.  we have permanent beds for asparagus.  always grow bulotti beans. We always  grow  globe  and Jerusalem artichokes.  But then lots of beetroots  and salads, squashes,  kale, anything that we like to eat  and anything that's a little bit unusual.  things like we've grown tromboncino, which you don't get in
19:33supermarkets, which is a really long squash. Yeah, grow, if we grow courgette, we'll grow round ones. You know, just things that are a little bit different. Is courgette eggplant? No, it's zucchini. Zucchini. sorry. There's a word for eggplant in Europe and I can't think of it right now. What is it?
20:02Aubergine. Aubergine, yes, I love that word. I don't know why I couldn't come up with it right now. Oh, we grow those too. So on the polytunnel, on my foot we grow aubergines. We've actually started to grow a kiwi, which is a hairless kiwi, but we haven't rooted yet, so I don't know how that's going to go. And we've grown watermelons and things like that in there as well. it's quite
20:27diverse, but it's always based around what we like to eat. Yeah, because why grow it you're not going to eat it? Exactly. How far are you from your allotments? Five minutes in the car. Yeah, it's round about a mile. think within Stafford, think there's a total of about six or seven allotment sites within
20:57our time and so forth. So we're quite lucky though. It's a five, 10 minute drive to get there. So it's a hopscape and a jump really? Exactly, yeah. Okay, good. I started watching Clarkson's Farm on Netflix. Oh, it's A year ago, maybe a year ago. And I never really liked Jeremy. I thought he was kind of snotty.
21:26I watched the first season and he was  all, I got this, this is easy, it's all going to be great, I'm going make money, it's going be great.  And then they got the sheep and then they had babies, had lambs. And I watched that man melt and I went, okay, there's a heart in there. Yeah. Did you see him with the pigs when you... Yes, yes.  And when he was so distraught about what happened to the piglets that he redesigned the thing.
21:55that he, you know, so that  they wouldn't get crushed.  Honestly, I was crying.  I could not stop crying at that one. And like you, I never really liked him very much  when he was doing all Top Gear and  Grand Tour, but  saw him in a completely different light in that program. Yeah. And I love his farm shop. I love that  Diddley Squat farm shop as well. We must go, Matt.  Yes, I just...
22:22I always thought that he was terribly arrogant and arrogant is one of my least favorite qualities in a person. Yeah. And I think the thing that he learned and we all learn when we grow things or have a farm or a homestead or whatever is that it will humble you in ways you could not have imagined. Absolutely. Yeah. Because you go in with loads of confidence, don't you? Thinking this is all going to be great. And then it just takes a couple of weeks of bad weather and you've lost your crop.
22:52or something's too hot.  We planted, got a real thing for wild garlic, so we planted some  a couple of weeks ago and because of this sustained dry weather it looks like we've lost it.  That's what you have to try and get your head around, isn't it? That  not everything you try will work, but you've just got to keep trying  because it's worth it. About two years ago  we were growing  sweet corn.
23:22I was going up daily and I knew the sweet corn was going to be ready any day soon and kept checking and I was thinking tomorrow this sweet corn is going to be perfect. So I went up there to harvest the sweet corn. We've got badges on the site and the badges are just totally, they've eaten all the sweet corn but they're also
23:50destroyed the sweet corn bed and just scattered about it.  I stood there and I just didn't, literally didn't know if to laugh or cry. And I couldn't believe I was  that emotionally moved by a vegetable and  losing a vegetable. But I took comfort in that I'd contributed to the wellbeing of badgers  and
24:18The badgers had been fed well  and they were happy. But  I'm  mentally scarred and I can't grow sweet corn. And I struggle to eat sweet corn now because the badgers ate my sweet corn. But that's how you know and it's right. Badgers come for it.  That's how you know you care about that sweet corn.  Oh my.  Isn't there something about you can't kill badgers?
24:48They're protected. Yeah,  are protected.  But  they're big. They are magnificent creatures  and they're beautiful to see. But I was mildly upset when they ate my sweet corn.  Are they protected because they got hunted down to almost extinction? Is that why they're protected? Yeah, there's a big...
25:16controversy about badgers in the UK at the moment because some of the dairy farmers believe that they spread tuberculosis. So in certain parts of the country, the farmers are licensed to shoot badgers, but there's a lot of pro and anti badger things. Apart from the fact they
25:46at the sweet corn.  I like to see them. think they're beautiful creatures.  I  understand the  resentment.  I've  got to be very careful because I don't think it's been 100 % proven  that they do spread tuberculosis. But I think there's enough suspicion.  I understand that the farmers who lose their dairy
26:15um, yields due to the TB, why, why they're so anti badgers, but personally, I think they're beautiful creatures. Okay, cool.  Um, since you brought up tuberculosis, which leads me to bird flu over here in the States, have you guys had any issues with bird flu with chickens? The, on  our allotment, you're not allowed to keep chickens, but with,  within the UK, a friend of mine, um,
26:43does keep chickens on is  on a different allotment site.  And it's only the, it's about six  weeks, two months ago that the restrictions have been  lifted on the  birds being allowed to be outside. There's been quite a impact on some of the commercial  poultry.
27:11establishments with the bird flu.  Once again, there's a lot of  people believing possibly there's been overreaction. I don't know enough about it, but there's been a lot of restrictions in place.  Yeah, we've been  kind of going through it here in the States with that.
27:36We have our chickens here. have 12. We're getting 12 more on Saturday because we can't keep eggs in stock because people buy them in our community from us.  And thank you community for buying our eggs. We appreciate that.  But when my husband said he wanted to get 12 more chickens so that we'd have  eggs for ourselves,  I said, realize you're going to have to put them in different coop for at least a week or so, right? And he said, why? And I said, because if they happen to be sick, we don't want the birds we already have to get sick.
28:06And he said, oh, well, it's a good thing we have that other shed ready to go. I was like, okay,  we're good.  So  I had other questions about England that aren't necessarily about you growing things.  But I'm going to ask one about you growing things.  Do you do canning? Do you can your produce? Yeah. So we tend to  do, cause we always have massive gluts of
28:35tomatoes, lots of pasta sauces which are canned.  Then we do lots of preserves, chutneys and jams,  lots of those.  There's a great book called  The Modern  Preserver. you  know, there's like  blackberry and gin jam and  lovely flavours, so I'll get a lot of recipes from there.  Don't tend to do
29:05anything that hasn't got masses of vinegar or sugar in  just because the worry is,  you know, not just going off but  botulism isn't it? Yeah. I would want that as well.  Yeah, so I do do it but tend to be quite safe,  you know, about what I do and what I preserve. But we give lots away as well so,  you know, we are that mad old  couple that
29:30turn up at your house with a string of onions  saying, you need these. Please take my produce. Yeah. Exactly right.  And the other thing that I've really enjoyed  started last year was starting to do fruit, gins and vodkas. So  rhubarb and strawberry was one.  Blackberry was another one.  And  they have been  lovely. I want to read current one.  And they have been lovely.
29:58We don't like waste, you  put all the fruit into the gin or the vodka, leave it for a few months and then bottle it.  And I actually made  a conserve out of the fruit that had been marinating  in the alcohol.  Oh my goodness, you cannot have it for breakfast. But it's  really good. it does go with that, don't waste anything. Kind of ethos.
30:27It's an after dinner compote, yes?  Have you ever heard of anything like that?  I think it's a brilliant idea. Yeah,  you'd lose the day though if you had it on your toast.  Oh my goodness. Yeah, that would not be  advised, I don't think.  No.  Okay.  All right. So.
30:51I added a question into the end of my interviews like a week or so ago and I'm asking everybody this question and we're at almost 30 minutes. So here's the question. How would you describe  your experience with this,  with what you're doing? One word.  For me, it's joyous. Yeah,  I'd go for joyous or  I find it relaxing.
31:17You can have both at the same time. Awesome. And I don't need you to explain it because I've been listening to how happy you guys are  with what you're doing through the sounds of your voices for the whole 30 minutes because you love what you're doing. can hear it.  Yeah, we do. It's special. But yeah, we enjoy it a lot.  And it's something that we actually do together,  which is quite unusual  really. So yeah, we do. We do it together without arguing too often.
31:47Well, that's good. That helps. All right, Matt and Debbie, thank you so much for your time and what a pleasure to talk to my, my probably relatives in England. Who knows? It's been great to talk to you. Thank you. Have a great day. You too. Bye. Bye.
 

CT Farms Mobile Processing

Today I'm talking with Ty at CT Farms Mobile Processing. You can follow on Facebook as well.
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00:00Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year?  Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months.  So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com  Lang calendar.
00:26because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.  A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system.
00:56You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Ty at CT Farms Mobile Processing in Le Sueur, Minnesota. Good morning, Ty. How are you? Good. Hang on one second. My computer is doing something weird. Okay. Nevermind. We're good. Okay. So, um, Ty is not far from me. Where are you in LaSore, Ty?
01:26Uh, right outside we live over by the Cambria plant. Oh, okay. Yep. And we live over by Michael Foods on Highway 8.  you're maybe  five miles away from me, I think. Yeah, not terribly far. Yeah. So it's a hyper local episode today, guys. I'm very excited about this.  What does CT stand for?  Uh, stands for Chad and Ty. So  I'm Ty, the son of the operation and then Chad is my dad.
01:57Okay, awesome. That makes sense.  I would normally I would ask how the weather is where you are, but we have been having the most  glorious streak of beautiful weather here in Lesor. Oh, God, yes.  Today is just beautiful.  My husband and my son have been outside all morning watering plants and getting our plant sale set up and  all kinds of things. And I've been taking
02:22I've been taking care of stuff in the house and doing dishes and the stuff that the girls do so So tell me about yourself and what you guys do, please um So kind of just all started, you know I was Wasn't having fun really doing concrete breaking my back for a whole lot of money, you know processing pretty easy money We've been doing it
02:49I've been doing it for a very long time now. My dad used to do it when he was younger. So it was kinda like in our family. You know, we knew what we had to do. We knew that it would provide everything for us. You know, it cost us less money if we just butchered the animals ourselves. Saved us money and it provided food for our family. So you know, it was kind of a big plus to it. There's one guy getting out of
03:18mobile processing for chickens  and we just kinda started questioning if we could do it.  We were gonna go buy that trailer  but it sold so we were like alright well we can kinda base our trailer off of that. So we did, we tried our best and it turned out pretty good.  As a business getting into something  obviously there's some stuff that needs to adjust.
03:47which we are slowly  working towards.  Our business is definitely getting better and better every year.  Our customers love our birds that we do for them. They love us. And we love having them come to us.  So yeah, I mean, it's pretty fun.  Awesome. So  is it only chickens that you guys butcher or do you do other things as well?
04:16Uh, we mainly stick to chickens.  Um, we do butcher our own animals at home. have a little hobby farm per se. So.  Yeah. Cause,  a friend of ours was looking at getting into mobile butchering and discovered that, um, the state of Minnesota does not really smile upon much else except chickens for mobile butchering. Yeah. They don't really like you doing everything else really because
04:45You know, there's just a lot of stuff going on in the government. Uh huh. Yeah. All the rules and regs that you have to follow and,  something about that, that the USDA inspector person has to come out and  be there  for butchering of anything other than a chicken or a rabbit, think. Yep. Yeah. And that's, that's difficult to schedule and they don't really like to do it from what I've heard. So.
05:14Yeah, that's a big thing.  If you're  approved, they kind of just got to come out there,  just have a little office, you know, cornered off or something. Just always checking in, making sure everything's going as planned and whatnot.  Kind of just making sure everything's legal. You know, nothing's getting infected with anything such. because cleanliness is next to godliness when
05:44when you're butchering animals for sure. Like  you want to make positive that everything is clean, everything is followed to the letter because otherwise  people do  have issues with it and we don't want that to happen for you or anybody else. Yes.  Yes.  So what,  the reason I wanted to talk to you about the mobile processing stuff is because how, how does it work? Like somebody calls you and says, I have chickens, I need
06:15Dispatched butchered whatever and then what happens on your end? All right, so they'll text us through we mainly go through Facebook Me and my dad have a joint account So we both get the messages we can both respond to them, you know If I don't know the question to it, you know, I'll text him. Hey, can you answer this? I don't really know You know the process of it. So he's like, yeah, that's fine. I'll text them
06:44So once they do that, we get a date set out with a range of price,  kinda. We'll get their address, we'll put it in our calendar to make sure we have it down for good. Then we'll be like, hey, we got a job coming up, let's prep the trailer, get it all cleaned up, shiny,  and we'll prep everything the day before.  And then kinda we go from there as we go to their house, butcher for them.
07:13Obviously if they're not there, that's fine. We can we grab everything ourselves  And then if they need it put in the freezer, we'll do that too. So I Love that your chicken wranglers because I freaking hate chasing my chickens. I hate it It's not my  thing to do  I used to be pretty scared of chickens, but it just kind of They're not gonna do anything to me when I'm You know ten times bigger than them or something. I
07:43Yeah, they're just they're just crazy. You think you're right on top of them. You go to grab them and they take off out from under you. I'm like, um, I was right here. I had you and you're gone again. Exactly.  They're sneaky. I don't like them.  Um, okay. So how,  how do you guys base price on,  on when you take a job, how do you do it? Do you do it by number of chickens? How do you, how do you do that? So from the years prior, we have
08:12Like based ourselves  off of everyone else. So we have a couple competitors.  We talked to one of our main competitors.  They have a really big company  and we kind of went off of them. They're at a higher price. So we went a little bit lower, you know, since  they're USDA approved and whatnot.  But we kind of just went a little lower, make sure.
08:40You know, we can maybe get a little bit more customers, hopefully. You know, show them what we can do. But other than that, we have like a spreadsheet for all of our prices and everything. They'll tell us  like the range of chickens because you never know when one's gonna die or not. So they'll just give us a range.  So that's kind of how we base it off.  We have the spreadsheet, like I said.
09:09So at the end of the day, we'll write up everything on a receipt, price all out, and then we'll give them a receipt and they'll pay it from there. Okay, so say this is just a ballpark idea and don't anybody quote Ty or me on the numbers,  but say I had 40 chickens that I needed butchered.  How much ballpark would that cost? All right.
09:37I do believe it'd be like 200 bucks.  And then if you wanted like hearts, livered, gizzards and such that would add onto your price.  If you wanted the feet, necks  and everything like that. I mean, that also add onto your price too. Okay. And then  we do charge for like mileage. You know, we don't drive the most gas efficient vehicles. So.
10:07You know, a little something for that too. Okay. So it's not exorbitantly expensive. mean,  we've butchered our own chickens and it's not the most fun job, especially when you're just learning how to do it. So I would be happy to have somebody else do it for that kind of money. That would make me ecstatically happy.  So do you guys have your own chickens? Do you butcher your own chickens and sell them or is it just that you
10:36We do have a bunch of chickens growing so every time we butcher chickens we do expect chickens in the next week.  So right now I believe we have roughly 40, 46 turkeys roughly and then  about 20 or 30 chickens.  So  we have some moving in, we have some moving out. That's kind of just how we do it.
11:06always have some stuff moving in and out which is what we like. Okay so if somebody wanted to buy a turkey or a chicken butchered from you do they just contact you or do you sell them anywhere else?  So do you know about the farmers market in Leesore? Oh yes we do my husband has sold there for the last two years his name is Kyle.  Oh well  I believe last year
11:34or two years ago is when we started selling at the farmers market.  This year we're going to get back and we're going really try and boost our business because we're going to have my sister and my dad doing that. I'll be running the business.  So that'd be awesome. That's kind of how we do our business. Other than that, we do  Facebook too. We're really big into that. That's how we get all of our customers.  So yeah.
12:04Awesome. I'm sorry my dog is barking in the background. That's our mascot, Maggie. Oh no, that's all right. I posted on Facebook and Nextdoor and stuff this morning because we have a plant sale going on here today at our place.  And  she's a watchdog. So anyone who pulls in the driveway, she's going to do this. So I'm really sorry, guys, if you can hear her. OK, so  she's distracting me so my brain is frying.
12:33You said you guys have a hobby farm. So what else do you do on the hobby farm? Right now we have probably about 20 cows, just mini cows.  They're a lot easier to probably handle around here. You know, they can't really wreck a bunch of stuff.  We have about 20 of them. Some of them are mini size and some of them are close to full grown size.  So those get pretty...
13:02Decently big we have a couple over a thousand which is pretty well kind of what we want For minis because that's pretty darn good  We have rabbits  We used to show rabbits actually that's kind of what we have for county fair  We do show county fair so we show turkeys  chickens rabbits my sister likes to show cows so that's kind of what we kind of focus on is
13:32All of them. What breed are the mini cows?  Uh, Herefords.  Really?  Yes. What do they look like? I don't know what a Hereford looks like.  Uh, they'd be,  uh, red and white with like either like a red little spot around the eyes. It was kind of what is like a good show cow kind of for Herefords. You know, I mean.
13:59So do they look kind of like Holsteins only they're red not black and white?  Yes. Okay, cool.  I don't know if I've ever seen one. I mean in real life. I might have seen pictures, but I don't think I've ever been introduced to one. Yeah. Okay, cool.  And do you guys grow any produce or is it just animals?  We don't really,  we just grow the animals and then eventually butcher them after so long, but we don't really grow the produce.
14:29Okay, well we're doing that for you. We got you covered.  We're going to have so much stuff this year if the weather holds that we're going to be swimming in produce. So if you need anything, let me know, Ty. We'll have it. All right. Yes, because local shopping, local bartering, local supporting each other is really important right now. It always has been, but it's really important right now. Yes, it is  very important. Yes, we purposely grew more.
14:57plants than we needed this year because we wanted to make sure that people could buy bedding plants to start their own little backyard or raised bed gardens because  I have this sinking feeling that the tariffs are not going to help us out a lot this year and people are going to need local food. Yes,  very much so. And I don't talk politics on the podcast, so that's as close as I'm going to get to that. But I keep encouraging people that if they have any room at all to grow something.
15:27that's edible, do it and support your local meat producers because not only are you helping them but you're helping yourself to not have to pay the exorbitant prices at the store. Yes. For a lesser quality meat, you know? Yup. So this dog, I didn't think she was going to do this. Okay, so we're 15 minutes in.
15:55You said that you guys have been doing this as a family for a very long time. When did it start? So we kind of got into rabbits when my mom got diagnosed with cancer. Rabbits is supposed to be like the number one food cancer patients can eat. Oh, okay. So we tried that. It worked out really well. We started growing probably
16:23100 rabbits to about 150.  then as my mom passed away, we still kept going, you know, into it. We were still really big into it. And then we kind of slow it. Once we got all like the bigger animals  and stuff, we kind of slowed down on rabbits  because we always wanted cows and stuff, you know, really big breed takes up a lot of room. So we got to focus on them a lot. we started cutting down on our rabbits.
16:53Then we started focusing on chickens and cows. So that's kind of what got us all started.  But, but when, how long ago did it get started? At a rough estimate, probably around.
17:10Six years when we started buying them. Oh, so it hasn't been that long. No, it hasn't been. And you're doing pretty well from what I can tell, so that's awesome. Yes.
17:25It's so exciting to me when people start a new endeavor, whatever it is. I don't care if it's ag or I don't know, knitting sweaters and they're starting it as a small business and six years later they're like, look what we've done. I know that that is definitely the cool part of, you know, watching the business grow and you know, putting more money into making your business better. That is definitely like the fun part of it.  Yeah.
17:54I don't know. Like for us, this is the summer we've been waiting for. We moved here four and a half years ago and it was a blank slate. It's three acres and there was a house, a pole barn  and a one car garage and a useless two car garage here. That was it.  And now we have a greenhouse. We have a farm stand. We have a high tunnel that comes down in the fall. You know, we don't leave it up. And this is the summer that we have been building.
18:24Ford for four and a half years. And I woke up the other day, grabbed my coffee, looked outside. It was gorgeous outside and looked at everything we've done since we moved in and almost cried because I was just so full of happy at what we've done. And so I get it. It's, it's amazing when things finally start to click and come together. Yes. So other than my dog barking in the background.
18:55She's usually much more well behaved than this. Okay, so what's the future look like for you guys? Are you going to expand or you just going to try to maintain for a little while? Oh, we're definitely looking forward to trying to expand our business. I would love to become a full time in the summertime. know, I really don't like working, working terribly hard in the heat, getting
19:22killing my body, processing, I'm running it myself. I don't have to really listen to anyone. I can kind of do myself as I please. I mean, I think it's gonna work out good as long as we can keep our business growing. Yeah, so this is gonna be a weird question. I don't know how to phrase it correctly. The people that you have done the mobile processing for.
19:48What did they say? Are they like, wow, that didn't take long or wow, that was easier than I thought it was going to be,  you know, because people have a real, I don't know, trepidation fear about having people come in and do something like that. You know, there's been a couple of people where they've been really,  really skeptical about us coming there and butchering their chickens. So they, you know, my dad would be there talking with them. I'd start butchering.
20:17You  know, it really eased them into it. And they really were like perfectly fine with us doing it afterwards.  You know, I mean, we're not there to try and ruin nothing. We will do our job and try and help the customer out.  But they really been happy with it afterwards.  And then I know a bunch of people we have  returning customers. They are really happy to help us.  And we've had a couple.
20:46Couple customers help us in the last year,  kind of help us get it moving faster.  I mean, yeah, they've been really happy with it. So we try and make them happy. Okay. And what do you need from the customer? saw something about that you need to have an electric hookup somehow  and a garden hose, right? Is there anything else? No, that'd be all. mean, other than a
21:15probably a spot where maybe your grass or your gravel will get little wet and whatnot. I mean, we have water going in and out of the trailer. Other than that, that's about all we need. Awesome. And is it just a regular electricity hookup or do you need a certain voltage? No, regular 110 hookup would be fine. We have a generator or 20. Okay.
21:43mean, anything bigger than 110 we have covered.  Okay, awesome. Fantastic. I would love to make this episode 30 minutes, but she's not going to stop barking and I keep getting distracted. So Ty, I'm going to cut it short a little bit today. Thank you so much for coming and sharing the information with me and your time. And  I will let my husband know that you're going to be at the farmer's market again this year and maybe we can get you some more business. All right. Thank you.
22:13Okay, because I really love what you're doing. It's really important. Thank you. All right. Have a great day. You too.  Bye.
 

Heather's Homestead

Today I'm talking with Heather at Heather's Homestead.
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00:00Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year?  Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months.  So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com  Lang calendar.
00:26because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.  A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system.
00:56You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Heather Richards at Homestead from scratch. Good afternoon, sorry, good afternoon, Heather. How are you? Good, how are you?  I'm good. I have to keep reminding myself of what time it is  because I almost said good morning again, and it's not morning, it's afternoon.  So how's the weather in Montana?
01:23It's beautiful today. We're supposed to be expecting a lot of rain though this week. So we're trying to get things kind of ready for that and  things buckled up a little bit because it's going to be a rainy week. So  got a batten down the hatches. Yeah. Yeah. It is a beautiful sunny day here in Minnesota, but it's going to be really hot in about an hour and a half.  Nice. Well, I've actually been like waiting for it to get really nice and hot here. So I'm kind of jealous.
01:51Yeah, it's too hot for Minnesota right now. This is not beginning of May weather. This is end of July, 1st of August weather.  And actually  on,  oh, I can't remember what day it was. A couple days ago, my husband planted the tomato seedlings and  they got burned because it was so hot and sunny. I don't know if they're going to recover. They're still looking a little yellow today. So we're keeping our fingers crossed that they're going to.
02:21They're going to bounce back, I hope.  All right. So tell me about yourself and what you do at Homestead from scratch. Well, it's Heather's Homestead, technically. But I do say that's my little bit of a, I don't know what you would call it, my tagline, I guess.  But yes, Heather's Homestead.  We just started building this about  four years ago, but we've only been here about three. We're kind of building, I guess, what you could call a family compound. We have five children.
02:51And most of them are raised. have one at home that he's 18. But the goal is to someday hopefully have everybody want to build here and live here on the property. So we kind of gave each one of our kids a few acres apiece so that they can have. And just so we can kind of just live closer, I guess, as a family. And that's pretty much the goal. we have, like I said, I five children.
03:19ranging from almost 29 down to 18. Three of them are  married. Yeah, and one of them's about to get married, maybe this summer. That's the plan for him, maybe. So we might have a busy summer. But  yeah, we  are raw milk producers, I guess. We sell  raw milk  and  eggs and have a little bit of, I guess you could call a little mini homestead. We have all the animals.
03:47Actually, my husband's going to pick up some pigs today. So we'll be adding those to the farm this week. yeah, other than that, that's kind of been a little bit about me, but it's been a fun adventure for us. We started this place from scratch with nothing on it, and we've built everything ourselves. So it's been kind of quite the undertaking, but we've had a really good time and learning as we go.
04:17So  as we all do, yes, especially when we're not in our twenties and we have all the energy in the world to just dive in  and beat ourselves up. So  you said you sell raw milk. What are the regulations in Montana? And then I will tell you the ones here in Minnesota. So we have to get our animal disease tested once a year and we have to get the milk sent off twice a year to, you know, to a lab to make sure everything is good.
04:47The  counts are good. so yeah, we are actually pretty  low key here. It's really nice. We don't have too many restrictions, I guess, but  and we can sell from our, from our farms to anyone. We don't, can't sell in stores, but  anyway, gives people the opportunity to come out here and check us out and pick up their milk. So kind of nice.  Yeah. Can raw milk be sold in any grocery store in Montana or is it not allowed?
05:16Nope, it's farm pickup only. I mean,  I can deliver it to like a draw point, which I do. And  we were doing that this winter, but my cows have slowed down and we kind of just do this honestly to  sell the excess from what we aren't using because we had two cows in milk  and that was a lot. So we would sell the extra. And of course, you know, I  have it for my family and for us  specifically. And so
05:44If I have it, I sell it. If I don't, I don't. So just kind of one of those things. have a  customer list that pick up regularly here.  So it's someone who  I know who's picking up on what day and how much they get each week.  And it kind of keeps us still. It's not like a random pick up. So  I know who comes to the farm. Yes.  Right there with you.
06:11I don't like it when people pull in the driveway here and I don't know, I don't recognize the vehicle. Yeah.  I still get twitchy and we've been here five years in August. So. Oh wow.  It's like, who's beat up pickup truck is that? Cause I don't recognize it.  Um, okay. Here in Minnesota, it's only, you can only pick up milk, milk from the farm where the cow produced the milk.
06:38And it's not allowed to be sold in stores anywhere.  And I think that the, I don't know what the word is,  the owners of the milk cows, let's put it that way, have to be tested a certain amount of times a year, just like you do, I think.  So it sounds like Montana's a lot like Minnesota in the rules.
07:03I mean, honestly, I mean, I guess you don't want to get me started on what I really think. I think there should be more food sovereignty and people should have the choice and there shouldn't be so much,  you know, dictating on what we choose to consume. But also at the same time, I mean, I get it that people want to have  a peace of mind. But I think  also when you let the government get involved,  you know, it can get tricky.  I think.
07:33There's a fine line, I guess. So  yeah, what I say is that I come across in the nicest terms possible  is that government has a purpose, but I feel like they end up making us trip over our feet a lot for no reason.  agree. 100%. That's, that's the nicest, easiest way I can say it. Yes.  I agree.  So  what else do you have on your farm besides cows? We have goats. We have,  um,
08:02horses, horse chickens,  and the pigs are coming. And then obviously we have the cows. And actually this week we are adding some Highland cows.  We picked up a little Highland bull a week or so or two ago, and  we will be picking up some mama cow, a mama cow and her baby this week. That one's kind of exciting. So we decided we want to start  raising the Highland breed.
08:32We'll see where that goes.  Highland breed is the one that's like really fluffy and sort of burnt orange colored. Yeah, well they can come in different colors, but yes, I mean they have like really shaggy hair over their  eyes. They don't and they're just super, they're a heritage breed and very,  you know, from Scotland is where they originated. And yeah, so we're really excited about that. So,
08:59not very many people do raise them and so we're kind of excited to start on this adventure  and see how it goes. Yeah, I always see a muppet cow when I think of a Highland cow. Yes, that's good description  for sure.  Okay, do you grow produce too? We do. We have a very large garden.  It produces a lot. In fact, we're still eating carrots and beets.
09:26and squash from it and onions and garlic from last year. So yeah, it's  quite the garden.  We put a lot of effort into it. I have an orchard of fruit trees and that's something that we actually, when we first moved here or when we first started building, we put the garden in first  and the fruit trees in first because I knew the value of getting those started.  And I'm hoping this year is a good year.
09:54Last year wasn't a very good year. Sometimes, you know, your fruit trees do well and we had a late frost and Didn't didn't do too. Well, but hopefully this year will be a better year. So we will see Yeah, I'm so jealous of people who live in the southern states because that late frost thing doesn't happen quite as often Yeah, it's it's pretty discouraging. I'll be honest, but it's part of Montana.  We're kind of used to it We get our late we get late frost, know clearing to June and so
10:22I don't even really plant my garden until  usually Memorial Day weekend. You can put in a few cold hardy things like radishes, lettuce, few things like that, spinach. But I just kind of wait till the very end and then I just kind of put it all in. And so I haven't got mine ready yet. It's still kind of getting cleaned out  because what they say, fall me is not very happy with my spring me or my spring me is not very happy with my fall me, I guess that is.
10:51because I let it go, but now I got to just get it cleaned up and get it ready to put things in the ground. So yeah, for anyone who isn't living this particular lifestyle, there's a whole lot of planning that goes into doing all the things in the seasons you're doing them in. And it is a lot of planning. Yes, for sure. And I would say too, in the fall you have so much going on with
11:18Getting things buttoned up and ready for winter and all of the produce, you know, getting  canned and stored and put away. I think I just get a little bit burnt out. So I leave it  and then I regret it in the spring. So I wish it was ready for me to just get into, but  it's not. that's, I kind of do this to myself every year. So we're just kind of attacking it a little by little. Um, you know, when I can get in there for a few hours each day and
11:48kind of get it ready. hopefully we'll be ready to get it all in at the end of the  month.  I wish you  all the fortunate favor in that.  You sounded so giddy when you were talking about getting pigs and the Scottish Highland cow  here today and then soon.  And I just had like a 45 minute conversation with my daughter this morning. hadn't talked to her in a month.
12:15And a month ago, it was not really spring here yet. It was still kind of, it was kind of late winter, early spring a month ago, still here. And she says, so what's new on the homestead? Cause she lives in Florida. I said, well, the crab apple tree has bloomed and it's losing its petals as we speak. And we have apple trees that the petals are starting to fall off of. we think that maybe there might be some apples this year and the tulips have bloomed and they're almost done. And.
12:45We don't have any lilac blooms for some reason, they didn't bloom. And we have fresh asparagus in the fridge from our garden. And she went, you do? I said, oh yes, we're going to have like enough asparagus to sell in the farm stand for the first time this year. And just kept reeling off all the things that I absolutely love about spring since we moved to our place four and a half years ago. And I got done. And she said, it sounds.
13:13It sounds like you have built such a, a cute, lovely life there.  And I, I  had a little minute of  cute. It's work, you know, but I know, but I know exactly what she's saying because I was talking about everything blooming  and she knows how much I love flowers. So, so I realized how I had come across  and how she was perceiving it.  And I said, is a, a  cute and lovely life.  Yes.
13:44It's also a lot of work. It is. She said, I know. She said I was just going to follow it up with, you, are you tired? That's pretty much our middle name, I think sometimes. Yeah. There's a lot of, um, a lot to do, but also at the same time, it brings me so much joy. So, you know, you go to bed at night, exhausted, but happy. I think that's a good way to put it.
14:14Yes lifestyle. We love what we're building. We love what we can produce. We love that we can feed our families  and You know local people and It just feels good  Yeah, the thing I compare it to is when you were a kid  and You went to the lake or the swimming hole or whatever at 10 o'clock in the morning and you spent like four hours screwing around the beach and Swimming and hanging on the dock and sitting on the  beach and talking with friends
14:44And then you come home,  you get cleaned up, you eat some food, you hit the sack early because your body is tired and your brain is full.  And it's the most wonderful sleep ever.  will say we sleep quite well here. We are definitely, you know, when our heads hit the pillow, we're out. So  it's a good thing.  I wish I could say that my husband's my husband snores. So.
15:12Well, yeah, mine, I can relate to that.  Uh huh. Yeah. And I shouldn't say that on the podcast, but I've said it before and he knows I've said it, so it's fine.  Okay. So  what brought you to this? Because I don't think that you mentioned that at the beginning. So obviously, you know,  well, raising my family, I always wished I could do this. We lived in a home that we built and we'd lived there for 20 plus years  and raised our children there and
15:42And I just really wanted it, but you know, we just kind of were comfortable. lived on a little, I don't know, a two acre piece, had a garden, had an orchard, you know, had a few chickens, but it was never, you know, I always dreamed of the milk cow and the goats and the whole, you know, horses. And I just kind of wanted all of that. But it just never was the right time. And honestly, COVID came  and we kind of just felt this nudge that it was time to go.
16:10and it was time to do it. So it's  quite an interesting story how we found this land.  Obviously we're from Montana. My husband was born and raised here, but we've lived here for 30 years.  Most of 30 years, we had a little stint in Las Vegas for about a year and a half between that time.  anyways,  we just kind of were like, it's time  to find the land and start the you know, the life that we kind of dreamed of and get a little bit more
16:40you know, reliant on ourselves a little bit.  And we actually decided we were going to move to Idaho. And all of my family is there and we found a piece of property over there and  tried to buy it.  And we had cash in hand to do that and it would not close. And we were just, what is going on? Why is this not closing? It's so simple.  Um, and it was quite a few months and it just, you know, maybe the backup of COVID and all that kind of stuff just
17:11Anyway,  the day that we were supposed to close on that land, we had friends of ours that kind of lived out here where we live. And we kind of had told them that we were looking for land and they ever knew of anything to come up, you know, let us know. And this is kind of before we had put money down on this land in Idaho.  anyways, he, they called us the day we were supposed to  close on this land and said, our,  our farmer neighbor,
17:41wants to sell his land  and do you want to meet with him? So we were like, well, what the heck, let's go meet with him.  And we knew immediately that that was, we were supposed to come here and he didn't even have it on the market. And he wrote up his little first sale agreement or whatever, buy sale agreement. And next thing you know, we owned this land and we walked away from the land in Idaho. So it just felt right.  And just,  it was kind of a neat little
18:10how it all happened,  yeah, next thing you know, we're building on here and starting from scratch, I guess.  so yeah, all my kids said, you know,  when we were wanting to move to Idaho, they weren't gonna move to Idaho. And if, you know, and I had this dream of this little  family, you know,  homestead compound, I guess you could call it.
18:32And none of them wanted to move to Idaho. And when we, when this came about, everybody was like, we would do it if you're doing it here. So it just kind of worked out really well.  Um, yeah. So that's how we ended up here.  And we just kind of started within like probably a month or so.  And  then I guess the journey began. So yeah, that's kind of how it began, how it started.
18:58So that's phenomenal. love it. And yes, COVID really  pushed people who were debating about changing their lives to change their lives. Yes. Yes. I think, you know, and I look back on that and I think, you know, at the time I thought it was the worst thing that could ever have happened. mean, I have a very strong opinion on  on what it was really, I guess you could say  that there was more to it than what was really.
19:28Anyway, I don't know how to get into that, guess, but I was very passionate about getting away from everything and realizing that I don't want to be controlled, I guess. And this was one of those that I knew that if we could build a life, raise our own food, get a little bit away from that system, that we would be fine. And that's kind of what we did. And everything just kind of
19:57went into place and we just, we got right to it. So it was a, it was a really a blessing in disguise. So I always look at COVID being the worst thing that ever happened, but the best thing that happened as well.  That's how I look at it too, Heather. I really do.  And  we bought our place  in, I think we closed on it the last day of July of 2020  and we moved in,  technically moved in on August 7th.
20:25Um, we actually were just moving stuff from the house half an hour away to the new house for like a month  in basically an SUV, like a little Ford escape and  a Ford  something. What is it? Escape? Not escape. Um,  I can't think. Focus.  We didn't even rent a van to move stuff. We were just moving boxes in the back of the SUV for a month. And I can remember when we finally got everything here.
20:54and just crying because I felt so bad that I was so freaking happy  when there was so much sad going on. Yeah. Yeah. I felt that same  way, but new.  I felt like this, like I couldn't have been more at peace that we were making the right decision. You know, like it was time  and you know, I waited, I would say, you know, I dreamed of this my whole life.
21:24And, you know, just was never something my husband was super on board with. You know, he owns a business, he works hard. And I think that the thought of it was a little bit terrifying to him to  bring on the responsibilities of all the animals and starting over again after we'd, you know, built our first home by ourselves. And it was so much work doing that. And we were finally at a place where we were, we could say we were done.
21:55Like everything was built, everything was, you know, done. And I think starting over was a little bit, you know, a little bit scary for him. Do we really want to do this? But I think, you know, I mean, obviously no regrets. It's been a lot. I mean, cause my husband is a builder and he does most of it himself. And so running a business and doing all that at once, you know, can be a little bit overwhelming at times as well, but also.
22:24we have like zero regrets. Like it was the best thing that we ever, ever could have done. I love that you have zero regrets because that's so important when you make this kind of leap.  Um, one of the things I have not actually said on the podcast, when I tell the story of how we got to our place, I keep forgetting this because it doesn't matter anymore.  The house that we lived in was, was rough. Like we did everything we could to make it cute and
22:53livable and a nice place to visit when people came to visit. But we knew that there were foundation issues starting to happen.  It really needed to be  sheetrocked because it was plaster and lath. And I don't know if you know about plaster and lath, but plaster and lath gets old  and it cracks and it leaves dust everywhere.  And we didn't want to sink money into a house we didn't love anymore.  So that's the other reason that we moved.
23:23really COVID was the thing that kicked our butts into gear  because we lived in town. Like we were like a block and a half off Main Street  in a town of about 6,000 people.  And it was so hard being surrounded by people, not being able to be with people. Yes. Yes. And I was like, I don't really want to be with people anyway. Can we just finally get out of here? And my husband was like, start looking. Yeah.
23:52The blessings, so many of them. Yeah. Yup. And I was lucky enough to not lose anybody I love to COVID  and it hurts me that other people did. I hate that part.  And  I actually just came down with diagnosed COVID back in January  and the test came up positive. I was like, you have got to be kidding me now.  Yeah.
24:22No fun. don't wish it on anybody, but it's a lot less severe now than it used to be apparently.  So yeah, that was a rough four days, four days of misery. And then it took a month to get rid of the cough. Yeah. I kind of, I'm wondering if that maybe made its way through our family as well, but I don't know. We never did any testing and so we never know. But I figured, well, it's not going to do me any good to know. just going to.
24:51I'd hit it just like I would hit it any other way.  So we kind of never have done it that way, but I'm sure it's hit us, you know, once or twice in these last few years for sure, but we made it.  Yeah. I just, I knew that I was going to be miserable. Whatever bug I picked up  whenever I picked it up because I haven't been sick since December of 2019 until this past January.  Sick with nothing.
25:17Because I haven't been around anybody because we moved to the middle of nowhere. It's been wonderful. Yeah  So what part of Minnesota are you in? Are you in like close to any big cities like Or are you out way far we are an hour southwest of Minneapolis Okay. All right, and we are half an hour  northeast of Mankato. Okay  Yes, it's
25:44I could spend six hours telling you how thrilled I am with where I live, but I'm not going to do that because we don't want to spend six hours. What I can tell you is we live in the middle of cornfields. Our lot is completely flat, which is just bizarre to me because we're right up the hill from the river valley. you know how when you're coming into a river valley, you're driving on flat roads and all of a sudden you're going down a hill and there's the river?
26:13were on that flat part at the top.  And when we moved here, it was a blank slate. The only flowering plant that was here was hostas  and the crabapple tree. now we have a whole bunch of peonies coming up that we put in.  We have apple trees.  have  three peach trees, no, two peach trees,  four plump
26:43three or four plum trees,  a couple cherry trees, some honey berry plants.  Oh nice.  We have wild black raspberries growing in the tree line. That's nice.  And they think, oh we have a couple elderberry trees that we never get to the berries on because the birds get them before we do.  That's the fun part. Yeah, I'm thinking about getting some of the netting to put over them.  that's good idea.
27:12See if maybe that would help because I would love to try making some elderberry syrup and I wanted to do it last year and the year before.  And by the time I realized that, I should probably check the berries. They were gone.  Oh darn it.  Yeah. We have every bird known to man on our tree line. I swear to you there. They're all over the place and they really like those berries. They also get drunk on the crab apples that, that get left on the tree.  Oh, feeds them then. Huh?
27:42Well, that's good. mean, I know there's that part of, you know, the advantage of being out there, but then realizing you have to deal with a little bit of nature that is a little bit challenging. am all for sharing the produce with the animals. It's fine. We lost six peaches to deer last year, which was a bummer. We only had 12. It was the first year they put on peaches. And so we got six and the deer got the other six.
28:11Here we have a very big, big six foot fence that goes around the whole garden. If I didn't have that, I wouldn't have a garden. We did put that up. actually, like I said, built that first and made sure that I would get little bit of help with  protecting it. And it's been really nice until we make the mistake of leaving the garden fence open.
28:41Last year we got to, all my chickens got in there, so that wasn't very fun. They destroyed my garden while I was out of town. I had some farm hands that day, that week.  So we were kind of a little bummed about that, but it also was an exhausting year. And so it actually made my life a little bit easier because I didn't have to, you know, can as much.  So yeah, a little bit of another advantage, I guess, to an  unfortunate situation, but.
29:11It's all good. It's all good. Yeah, last summer was  rough for gardens. It doesn't matter whether your chickens ate your garden or whether it rained too much  or it didn't rain enough. I've  heard so many stories about last summer being really hard on gardeners.  It was. It was. We had things  that always grew, not grow. And it was very, very different than past years.  you know, like I said, we're still eating quite a bit from it.
29:40The things that really mattered to get us through the whole year,  you know, we they survived so we did okay, but It's it you know, we I have such a large garden that I  probably am one of those that overproduced You know  make too much and then I overwhelm myself at the end of the year When comes to taking care of it, but  I don't there might be some different, you know things we might do this year to make it a little bit easier and I actually might Since I sell milk
30:09I might have vegetables out there in the milk kitchen and sell more of those and things like that. So we'll see how this summer plays out. Well, let's see how the economy is doing by then too because people might actually need your produce this year. Yes, that's true. So although I saw on the news this morning, the tariff thing is starting to look like they might be dropping them a little lower. So we'll see how that plays out.
30:36Yeah, that is definitely interesting. I'm kind of just sitting back here and just waiting, right? Just  waiting it out. See how it's going to play out. is the most ridiculous ping pong match I've ever seen in my life. That is true.  So, all right. So, um, I'm going to ask you a question. It's kind of putting you on the spot, but please play the game. Okay. Um, tell me, tell me the one word you would use to describe your homestead.
31:08tough one, maybe I would say productive.  I think we really do  produce quite a bit and I just am super proud of that.  think that's,  we, know, all the bases are covered here. So,  you know, I think  my daughter is now down to doing bees. And so I feel like, you know, almost everything, you know, is able to be  done here.
31:37for the most part  to  live.  that's, so I guess maybe that would be my word. I love it. That's great.  All right, Heather, I so appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. Thank you. Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate that. And  this was really fun. Yeah, it was. Like I said, I don't do very many of these things, so it's kind of nice to be able to chat and tell a little bit about  our story. So thank you for having me.
32:08Oh, you are so welcome. And I love all of your stories, yours and everybody I've talked to and anybody I'm talking to in the future. So.  Well, thank you. I appreciate it. All right. You have a great day. Thank you so much. Bye bye.
 

Narrow Gate Homestead

Today I'm talking with Rachel and Nick at Narrow Gate Homestead.
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00:00Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year?  Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months.  So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com  Lang calendar.
00:26because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.  A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system.
00:56You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Rachel and Nick at Narrowgate Homestead in Lebanon, Maine. Good afternoon, you guys. How are you? Good. Good afternoon. Top of the soggy day to you. Yeah. I'm so sorry. I usually open the podcast with How's the Weather? And I know how the weather is because I just talked to my parents yesterday morning  and
01:26They said you guys have had a ton of rain in last, what, three weeks? Oh gosh, yeah. A couple inches. I actually, think it just finally broke. So this afternoon, I think it's going to be without raindrops. Yeah.  Well, I'm happy for you. I am looking out my window and it is sunny. It's about 74 degrees with a light breeze here in Minnesota. Oh, nice. Well, that sounds nice. Much nicer. We have had the most beautiful week of just glorious.
01:56reasonable, beautiful, sunny, hardly any wind weather for the first time in weeks. So it's been, it's been the opening day or the opening week for May, for spring. can't talk. It's been amazing. I'm so excited about it. My words are falling all over themselves. anyway, go ahead. Anytime that there's no wind is Nick's favorite kind of day. Yeah.
02:26You know about the weather in Minnesota, how it can be just flat still or it can just be whipping through, right? Oh yeah. Yeah. huh. Yeah. Yep. We had, I think it was three weeks ago, we had thunderstorms and off and on during the day, but we had wind gusts of like 60 miles per hour that day. It was insanity. Well, that is a, that's crazy wind. Yeah.
02:54or the greenhouses. Yeah.  Our greenhouses survived, thank God, but  we  live on a very flat plain above the river valley. And so when the wind comes through, really comes through because there's hardly anything to break the wind.  So  it can get real iffy here sometimes, but so far we've been okay.  Okay. So you guys tell me about what you do at Narrowgate Homestead and about yourselves, please.
03:22Oh, yeah. Well, we started this journey in 2022. Before that, we're two Navy veterans with no farming background. That's true.
03:40We decided in 2022 that we wanted to be a part of our, knowing how our food was raised and where our food came from. I suppose it started, I'm sure most people that you podcast with are familiar with the documentary Food, Inc. Probably yes. Yes, so that's when we met Joel Salatin for the first time. Never actually physically met him, but that's when he...
04:10That's when we kind of first got involved with the idea that the way our food is produced and cared for and put on our grocery shelves might not necessarily be the most ethical and healthy manner that is  out there and available. And we marinated on those ideas for quite a few years and really didn't do a whole lot about it. But I think it was,  COVID was kind of like the catalyst for a lot of things,  for a lot of people. And one of those things for us was
04:39The fact that our food supply, I'm sure people remember going into the grocery stores  and something like chicken has never been a problem before, wasn't on the shelf.  So it kind of occurred to us that  maybe we should put action into words or words into action rather.  And, you know, now it's 2025 and we  have probably what?  chickens outside right now. Oh yeah.  600 here.
05:08hundred down the road on pasture. So we solved the chicken on the shelf problem.  Yeah. You sure did.  Yeah. I mean,  kind of going off of what Nick said, you know, we, very quickly and clearly saw just how weak the local food chains are  and  being the type of folks that we are besides wanting to know what exactly we were feeding our family. We wanted to be able to be a part of raising food.
05:36for other folks  and  be able to come home or come in at night and be confident about  what we know that we're being able to raise for folks and  helping to be another part of reviving the local food chains, which we can all clearly see are very weak across the United States.  So yeah, that has been just  one of our main drivers is to continue to
06:05be a part of this.  like to say, you  know, a local food revival in a way.  But we just keep plugging along.  We kind of like to operate on a motto called do search. Nick likes that term. My wife told me to do something and I do it.  no. So research can get you into a lot of
06:29just mind paralysis if all you do is the research, which is pretty much what we did for about 10 years, is talked about it, thought about it. At some point, you just gotta jump out of the nest and do it. And we find that we've been the most successful taking that first jump and just doing stuff. And I think  the further you get into it, the more comfortable you are with being uncomfortable.  And  realizing that failure is definitely real and there's actually something to be learned through your failures.
06:58I don't call it failure. call it a learning experience.  You would be in perfectly in line with Steve  Collins down at Belden Meadows. That's what he tells us all the time. Yeah, definitely. Well, failure seems so permanent and I feel like the only failure is death, you know?  Yeah, right. Yeah. Right. And that's our culture, right? We're very  achievement oriented. You failure is a bad thing. I, know, my personal history is chock full of failures.
07:27And as I think back over them, they were all, every single one of them, a learning experience and the product of who I am today. So you're right. They are an opportunity to grow if you want them to be. Yeah. I try to look at the world through opportunity colored glasses and not every day do I succeed at this, but every day when I wake up, I usually have something exciting planned, like talking with new people on the podcast that really helps. And
07:57When I have a day where I don't have anything planned, I don't feel great. Like, I'm like, where's my  opportunity today?  like I said, it's not always. It's not always. I came down with COVID back in January. Those four days of that,  I,  there was no opportunity. There was just get up,  get something, get some tea, get a trip to the bathroom and then go back to bed for four days. was  miserable.
08:26That's awful. I'm so sorry. Yeah, there was no opportunity in those days. There was just, is my bed? I'm going back to bed. And it was so weird because I'm not, I don't, I don't sleep easily during the day.  I swear to you, I slept probably 20 hours a day for four days straight. Oh, wow. Well, it was an opportunity for you to have rest.  But, but I really feel like you gotta grab life by the horns. And that sounds very cliche. Sorry. But
08:56We're only here for a little while. We should probably make the best of it. Absolutely. It's a good perspective. Yeah. I try. I try really hard all the time. And like I said, I don't always succeed, but I try every day.  Um, okay. So you have a lot of chickens. So  I'm assuming you're selling eggs. Yeah, we definitely, we do sell eggs.  Um,  we, that I relay our hands where
09:24the gateway to this whole  business here.  We started in 2022 with  the layer hints here and then  working with  another friend  raising our first flock of meat birds  over at his house, our friend Steve Becker,  and  came together with him and his wife and  got our first
09:53you know, experience processing chickens. And then we, you know, kind of graduated from there to raise in our own flock of meat birds here. Um, we did 25 and then we kind of jumped very quickly from 25. Did we go to 50 or was it? think, yeah, we went from 25 to 50 and then like from 50 to. We've been doubling it every time we do it. Yeah. So now we do about what? 200 at a time. Yeah. 200 in a batch. Yeah.
10:23Yeah, we also have turkeys and quails.  We also have, we do raise pigs  and we  just recently added ducks to the homestead here. Yeah. And then we have four children, so that counts too.  Well, happy Mother's Day early. Well, thank you.  Yes.  And Chicken Math got you in a big way. It did.
10:49Well, we do call chickens the gateway to homesteading.  The gateway drug right there is definitely chickens.  Well, I feel like it's the easiest thing to start with because I'm not going to say they're easy, but they're probably the easiest out of everything else.
11:10I do believe so and  know chicken especially depending on the breed that you raise can be can serve more than one purpose if  you are looking to be a sustainable  you know backyard homesteader you know you could either have them for eggs and then when the time comes then you have a meat source as well. Nothing essentially is very easy like the mundane task of feeding the chickens  on a normal day is  well that's a breeze but today with sideways rain and
11:38You know, inches of rain coming up and underneath and the birds are wet and they're looking at you.  You need to solve the problem and you can.  Then it becomes hard. Oh, yeah. That's kind of the thing with homesteading. There's a lot of things that I think people  mistake as something that's too hard for them to do. That if they just saw what it actually was  and kind of took  the mystery out of it, I think a lot of people would be more interested in doing some of these things. You don't have to have 600 birds in your back.
12:07Yeah,  but you could you could  But you could yeah  um so I have I have a question that's a little bit off center from from the animals that you're you're taking care of  um The homestead that you guys are on Did you have to like clear land to to get ready to have the chickens because Maine is very woody. It's very wooded  Um, we have done quite a bit of clearing but we when we first started no
12:35We just started doing it on our lawn, essentially.  Yeah,  the lawn that we spent quite a few years  prepping, hydro-seeding. Yeah.  Yeah. No, the back we did clearing  with both Nick bringing in equipment to clear it, but then we've also utilized the pigs.  And we should be clear. So when we say we have 600 birds here, they're in varying stages of their life. We brood the birds here.
13:04at the homestead.  We do have several layers that are normally confined to a run  and a chicken coop, but the predominant driver of what we do, the meat birds, the white rangers, we raise them at Belgium Meadow Farms once they're past the brooding stage. So  the prerequisite for a lot of grass isn't necessary, nor do we have it. So we had to figure out a way to solve that problem  and enter Steve and Alicia Collins into our life. And that's how we were able to solve that.
13:34Yeah, they definitely, it was a, an absolute answered prayer because to us,  a pasture raised bird,  know, pasture means a lot of different things to people. But for us, we kind of had this vision in mind of what pasture was. And we didn't know that that would, if that would ever be really achievable here, I mean, maybe to a small scale degree, because this home set is actually what two acres  and, um,
14:02you know, to do the volume of chickens that we do and to be able to do that responsibly on pasture,  we wouldn't be able to do that here. So,  you know, that answered prayer happened. Belgium Meadows Farm is  not maybe a quarter of a mile around the corner from where we live here. I mean, you could walk there  and there is an absolute beautiful pasture there that Steve and Alicia Collins allow for us to raise these birds out on.
14:32so that they have the space, they have the lush grass and the area for us to be able to move them frequently so that it's not only good for them, but it's also good for  the pasture, the soil, because we want to be responsible of that too.  OK. Are you saying Belgin, B-E-L-G-I-A-N or Beljum? Belgin.  I-A-N. OK, cool.
14:58I will look though, I will try to find them and I will put them in the show notes because we should shout them out too. Yeah, absolutely. Please do. mean, they are a big part of why we've been so successful and continue to be. they really, the only thing that Steve enjoys, I think more than, well, I think he's told me on many occasions and he just enjoys seeing the animals on the farm doing what they were meant to do. Absolutely. And that's what really drives him. They clearly don't worry about chicken.
15:26We take care of that for them, in turn they get,  well, they get their fields revitalized by the chickens themselves. And they, he is driven by seeing an active farm actually work together.  Very nice. love that. I,  we're,  we're kind of working together with another homestead here because our friends have ducks and  my, my friend Tracy texted me she was like, could we sell our duck eggs at your farm stand this summer?
15:56Oh, that's wonderful. And I was like, of course you can. Why wouldn't you? Yeah. So, so a quick little silly story.  They, we got the farm stand set up last Saturday and got it open on Sunday and I was like, you can bring your duck eggs over anytime you'd like. And she said, how about tomorrow afternoon after we pick up our new baby goat and that way you can see him.  Cause anyone who's listened to the podcast knows that I am a
16:21Fanatic about baby goats. I think they're amazing. I don't have any goats. It's always nice to see them So they show up here and they have a dog kennel in the back of their pickup with a eight week old  male Long-eared I assume new being I don't know  Goat and he's black but he's got like black and white speckled ears and he's a baby and I'm just like,  my god I'm so in love  and
16:49And I just thanked her up and down for stopping by after they picked him up. before, because I really, really wanted to see this go. Yeah. Uh huh. So it made my whole weekend and Tracy, I know you listen to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.  So,  um,  and the other thing that I will tell you is we cannot keep the farm stand stocked with eggs. We, we started out with like nine dozen out there last weekend.
17:18We have 12 chickens, so we get a dozen a day.  We blew through those nine dozen in the first two days  and  we had two dozen out there this morning and they were gone by 10 o'clock. That's awesome. I love hearing that. mean, it's just,  you know, it's good, but it's also not good when we have these incidences in our supply chain, like what's going on with the eggs in the store and it, you know, it drives more people back.
17:47to their local farmers. That should be the first place people go, but it's nice seeing folks coming back to getting the farm fresh eggs. That makes my heart so happy to hear. That's super cool. I think one of the other things about our culture is we're getting more more used to it, depending on the government, to solve all of our problems. You know what? We can solve our own problems too. We can put up a stand and we can sell eggs and we can raise chickens and we can raise pork.
18:17Bob over on the other side of town, he's got some really great wheat that he's growing. Just like you guys are working, collabing together to sell products at a farm stand, that's homesteading. think a lot of people, and I think this might be a New England thing too, because New England I think is, I'm going to be careful here, I'm not a native New Englander. Just be careful. My take on it is they're very independent minded.
18:45you know, that staunch New England independent minded thought process.  But and that's good because it makes them really stubborn and really tough to get through their tough winters and hard times. But it doesn't have to be that way all the time.  We could be collaborating together and that doesn't sacrifice your individuality. It just makes it better for everybody else. So.
19:11To get out of the isolation bubbles that we find ourselves in constantly turning to the experts to solve our problems, I think we can very easily just turn back the clock a little bit. And it doesn't mean we're going back to the Stone Age.  I don't think, we don't believe that life was intended to be  the commercialized concept that we have for it, especially in the food industry. And that's kind of what Narrowgate is one of the biggest things it's all about is trying to figure out what that...
19:40blend of homesteading is in the modern lifestyle that is sustainable and maintainable without going absolutely insane, which  is,  I don't succeed at that very well. Rachel will tell you I'm  grumpy and like, know, some days I'm wondering what I'm doing.  But then on other days we're sitting out in the field with the chickens running about.
20:03and just watching a chicken be a chicken in the setting sun and watching our kids play with the horses off in the distance.  I'm like, this is it. This is what we got.  I do want to make sure that I do bring up, because we had mentioned how we raise all of these chickens down  at the pasture, because  that was something that we were hoping for with the amount of birds that we're doing. But  I want to make sure that we stress that for the smaller homestead are looking to do this.
20:32They don't need acres upon acres of land to be able to grow food for them or their family or maybe some neighbors  alongside of them. We actually do a lot here, not even on the full two acres. So I just want to make sure for anybody that's listening, you don't have to always search out  acres of land to be able to grow food.  Well, that's the thing is getting used to the idea.
21:01Breaking, what if the model's wrong? What if high overhead, being a land baron, being  millions of dollars or tens of thousand dollars in debt because you have farm equipment that you gotta make, what if that concept is wrong? What if you go with a low overhead,  do it yourself type mentality and you collaborate with other folks in your nearby area to get what you want? Why do we all, we don't need to be, I'm not gonna be a millionaire. I mean, you don't change this lifestyle to become a millionaire.
21:31But we certainly have plenty of food,  or kids are plenty happy. Yeah,  I would say anybody can do this. You don't need two acres, you don't need an acre. You can find somebody that has a field, and I guarantee it's probably not being used, and you can sell them on ideas like, look, here's a batch of 10 chickens. We'd just like to raise chickens over here, and you're gonna benefit because now your land's gonna get used, it's gonna get revitalized, it's gonna get fertilized, and by the way, you're gonna get chicken out of
22:01deal. Who doesn't want that?  Yep,  absolutely. You have made like three of the points I try to make on every episode for me. I appreciate that.  I have been trying to say on every episode and I haven't gotten in on every one for the last three months, but I've been trying really hard that if you live in America today, you really  should consider growing some kind of your own food on  your property. And whether that's
22:30whether that's a bucket on a balcony at your apartment or whether that's a raised bed in your yard, because it's a good thing to do. It feeds you. And if things go to crap in the world, maybe you get to eat a little bit longer than you would normally.  And if you can't grow anything or you think you can't grow anything,  get to know your local gardeners, growers, animal  husbandry people.
22:58And as my son pointed out the other day, you're a local trades people because trades people are important too. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Now we 100 % agree with that concept. Even if you're just growing a couple plants on your balcony,  at a minimum, what it's going to teach you is to appreciate life and the life that you're growing.  That pays dividends not only in food, but just in an awareness of what you're doing and then what the farmer is doing across.
23:25across town on the other side of town that you're buying food from.  Absolutely.  all a big circle. And again, this sounds cliche, but it's a big circle. If you are a grower and you're selling what you grow, then the person buying it gets dividends, but so do you. It's a symbiotic relationship.  Oh yeah.  I have a cliche saying that I like to say where I said, we're also growing food.
23:54but I also like to say we're growing community. Cause with each interaction, you know, it just continues to build. yeah, so growing food, growing community is one of my cheesy lines that Nick just absolutely loves. I put on stuff. I'm going to start, I'm going to steal that. And the one that I say all the time is freaking buy local, damn it. Well, like you kind of touched on it, you know, for the folks that, you know, again, like,
24:22you realize, okay, I tried it, it's not for me. All right, well, again, that's why it's even more important that you do support your local, your farmers, because when everything else goes to crap, like you said, you can count on the local farmers that have been there all along, so. Yeah, and you're not, you're reducing your carbon footprint, because you're not buying stuff that's been shipped in from out of the country. Oh, yes, I mean, you'd be hard pressed to find
24:52Like especially the lamb in the grocery store that's not from, you know, overseas. Yeah. It's, I love you guys. Cause you're, you're literally barking up my favorite tree here. I, I just, I get so frustrated because I was talking to somebody for an episode of the podcast a year ago and I think he was a former Marine, think. And his, his take was that we've gotten awfully soft.
25:23You know, we have the  possibility of having  literally everything delivered to our door if we live in the suburbs or a city,  which means that we never get out, we never do anything, we never see anybody.  And  we don't have to do anything. And that doesn't mean that people aren't working hard. There are people who go to jobs  and work hard in whatever they're doing, 60 hours a week.
25:53But the life skill working is  not what it used to be. Yeah, and I think it and our values, I think it comes down to what you value.  It is the biggest thing. The values have changed of what Americans value these days. you  know, I'm not trying, I don't want that to sound negative, but,  you know, as far as valuing what we eat and how we nourish our bodies.
26:21That hasn't been at the forefront for a lot of people for a while now, just because of the convenience. We'd rather get either the food delivered to us or the ease of going to the grocery store or the easy boxed food.  And I think that's a part of that softness  to talk about too.  We like the convenience of everything  and convenience as great as it is, you're sacrificing something on the other end.
26:51Yeah, and boxed food just doesn't taste as good as stuff you make from scratch  or  stuff you get from your own garden  or animals that you raise and butcher for meat. Right, and you know, it's, your health is a lifelong investment. So you know, what you invest in while it might be harder and it may be a little bit more inconvenient,  depending on how you look at it, whether you have to grow it and prep it.
27:19that is a lifelong investment. you know, it may be more convenient to have, you know, the food delivered to you or to eat the boxed food,  but that does affect you lifelong.  so, yeah.  At some point, you know, the people, our culture needs to,  people need to start taking responsibility for themselves and what they consume.  We've known for a long time that there are dyes in our food.
27:44We've known for a long time that the way chicken quite often produced is  just not completely up to the par. It's horrible. Yeah, when you see it for what it is, when you see the reports and we're all aghast that it's going on, okay, then that's the point at which you have to do something.  Now, I don't mean that every person has to get a chicken coop and start raising chickens, but maybe the step is going and find the individual that does have a chicken coop. Maybe the step is,
28:13you know, maybe thinking about relocating somewhere else where  that food might be more  available. Maybe the step is, and we've seen this in some of the  cities where people are getting together and they're doing gardens on rooftops.  But those types of thought processes, there is a price for that.  And people have to, I think, figure out what it is  that they really want. Do they want  a life?
28:41in the end where the food that they have been eating for so many years has made them sick  or do they want to change that  and instead of waiting for some entity to do it for them I think folks need to realize you have that power you can change that for yourself it's not easy and I'm not saying that it is  but at the end of the day  we have to start taking responsibility for what's going into our own bodies I can't believe that we're all like agreeing with the Marine
29:10Oh. And you have to be careful with saying former Marines. They take that stuff seriously. Yeah, they're always a Marine. Still a Marine. He's still a Marine. I know my stepson. Well, my son, my stepson, he is, he told me after he got out that he would always be a Marine. Yes, there And I said, how does that work? And he said, I'm not, he said, I'm not active duty, but I will always be a Marine. And I went, okay. So I stumble over all the time because I don't,
29:40It's like every time I say he is a Marine, I feel weird because he's not still in the Marines, if that makes sense.  Oh, yeah.  And us Navy folks like to give the Marines a hard time. So, uh huh.  We love them.  I understand. And my dad was in the Air Force. So it's all, it's all an umbrella and you guys all wear different raincoats, I guess. I don't know.  Anyway.
30:06Do you guys have another 15 minutes? Cause we're almost at half an hour, but I have a couple more questions.  course. Yes, absolutely. Okay. I just didn't want to take up too much of your time.  How did you guys end up in Maine? Because you said that neither one of you are originally from Maine. Oh, the Navy.  We were both stationed at the shipyard in Kittery, Maine, their last duty station. And then  I got out in 2010 and Nick got out in 2011.
30:35And he was absolutely totally opposed to moving down south. And we definitely weren't going to move to the west coast. So we just stayed.  And was part of that that you loved Maine? Like had you already fallen in love with the state? So for me, I'm being from Washington state. I'm used to the wide open spaces and big trees and Maine has a lot of the same similarities minus the mountains.  I miss the fast water of the Pacific Northwest and the snow crested high peaks, but
31:04There are a lot of similarities in the seasons and it just seemed like a good fit for me as far as, mean, there's still some humidity, which Rachel really loves. I mean, I'm from West Virginia, so born and raised. So Maine is a lot like Washington state and West Virginia combined. be quite honest with you, I like the people.  Me too. I have some people I really love back there. My parents, my sister,  my brother actually lives in Massachusetts of all places.
31:34I'm so sorry.  Yeah. I just get it.  Yeah, no, um, he works at a college there. So,  okay. But, he does have a lake house in Maine that he visits in the summer because that's important.  Nice.  So,  no, I just thought it was interesting because I saw that you guys were in Lebanon, Maine when I found you on Instagram and I was like, Oh, that's cool.
31:59And then you told me before we started recording that neither one of you are from Maine. And I was like, hmm, that's interesting. Yeah. I mean, it really is a lot like both states. I mean, it's a good combination. Yeah. We... Go ahead. He's joking. I didn't catch what he said. I don't think it's like West Virginia at all, but I'm being... She tells me I'm wrong.
32:26It has a lot. The mountainous areas are like West Virginia, minus the poisonous snakes and yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's as far as I know, there's no poisonous snakes in Maine. If there are there, they've moved in since I left. Yeah. I think we're still good. I think it's still good. Yeah. Minnesota has timber, timber rattlers, but I think they're up north. I could have that wrong. They might be further south than I am too.
32:54Minnesota has timber rattlers. I don't know exactly where they are and they're not here. So that's all good.  Um, okay. I had another question and now I can't remember what it was because you know, talking about me and I get lost.  Uh, I don't know what it was. I forget. It doesn't matter.  I started a new thing on the podcast a week or so ago and I've asked this like three times. I should have done it six times by now,  but I want to end every episode with a question for you guys.
33:22What is the one word that you would use to describe your homestead?  Oh my. Yep.  would you say? Nick is better at articulating things than I am.
33:39I think the word would be love which is difficult for a man to probably say but I think that's it agreed Oh, I yeah, totally agree. Hopefully I won't tear up on that one. Yeah Uncharted territory here. I mean if you don't love this and all of its, you know glory and gory Then you shouldn't be doing it really so yeah, I think you know
34:07Rach and I obviously we have our story of how we came together and how we ended up with  four beautiful girls  and the trials  that  we both went through to get to that point.  And the  love that has kept us together through all of that. And then out of love,  you want to do better for your family.  So you start to consider things like this.  And one of the things that I think people need to understand about us is,
34:35We're Christians, we believe in Jesus Christ, and  God apparently loved us so much that he sent his son down here to die for us. And based off of that idea, we started to think, if he loves us so much to send his son down here, it stands to reason that his creation is equipped well enough to handle the  needs of humankind  to grow food, to provide for themselves.  And if that's true, then  where do we fit in?
35:05on all that, is there a place for us to fit into that?  And, you know, it started as a lark with  just chickens, but  it soon became a passion that neither Rachel or I could  push down or try to  suffocate even if we wanted to. you know,  people need to understand not every day homesteading is a great day.  There are a lot of bad days that are just really tough and you start to question
35:36the sacrifices that you made, the time that you've given up, the money that you've put in. But like we mentioned earlier, then you get to see your kids that are happy and they're eating good food that you know exactly where it came from. And then you have folks go out of their way to tell you, oh my goodness, I haven't tasted chicken like this in so long. you're like, oh, that's what I'm doing. And you're a part of that.  You're sitting at their dinner table,  Thanksgiving dinner.
36:01We raised a lot of turkeys for folks and  I'm  very fond of saying it's like, thanks for inviting me to your Thanksgiving dinner table because I'm there and I appreciate that. And I appreciate that you spent the money on the bird and you recognize the value in the animal and the time that we put into it to make sure that your memorable holiday is even better because you got something that's not injected with hormones or whatever. they were loved on  all of our children love every animal know how much.
36:31they're here.  yeah. So yeah, think love,  we think love characterizes it the most because if you don't love what you're doing,  your passion's not gonna come out for it. I think any artist or anybody, any tradesman, anybody that's skilled at anything, you gotta love it.  And if you don't, then you're probably, you might consider doing something else and finding something  that you do love.
36:57But,  know, and beyond that, you know, I have a full-time job outside of this. So  Rachel has two full, well, four full-time jobs in the form of children.  like  our primary vocations isn't necessarily homesteading. But we do farm on a full-time schedule. And yeah, Nick's a tugboat captain the other days of the week.  But, you we just love it so much that  we can't put it down.
37:25And we want to convey that love out into the community that we love what we do  and the food that we grow and we want to get better at it. We want to do more of it. And we would like to bring folks along for the ride. I think it seems like a weird business model, but I would rather that more people do exactly what we do. I don't think that there is ever a way that we would ever be able to satisfy the need for just talking chicken in just our local community.
37:53And if more people did what we did, then yes, you're right,  we would probably make less money on  the bottom end. But you know what else would get better? A lot of other people's health, right? A lot of people would be able to eat this way. And then the price of chicken overall would come down for everybody.  And there's other things to grow. I don't have to just grow chicken. That's the thing that  you don't have to be stuck in any one component. You can branch out and do other things. Rachel just started hatching eggs for
38:22for raising layers. We never considered doing that before this winter. So, and that's born out of love of what we do.  yeah,  I think unless Rachel disagrees, I think that's the word. already said that was great.  And now she's crying. She's a cry. I am.  I definitely, yeah. am too. And  I'm not gonna cry. I'm a little choked up, but I'm not gonna cry.  I love that you chose the word love because I feel like you guys.
38:51are hitting every note of that.
39:14perfect people, still are just like everybody else. put our pants on one leg at a time every day. So I say love coming out of my mouth right now and in 15 minutes I might be storming off to the corner because something else is going on. So there's another problem that just popped up that we didn't anticipate.  So Rachel's got to reel me back in before I start spiraling out of control, but that's because she loves me. That is true. Uh huh, exactly.
39:40Yep, and the thing is,  I have a dog that I love more than life itself. If she was going to get hit by a train, I would probably jump in front of the train to push her out of the way.  she was being ridiculously loud when I was trying to record an episode at 10 o'clock this morning. And I had some choice words go through my head because of course it was when I was trying to record that she was barking her head off.
40:03And the minute I was done with the recording and went downstairs to grab some coffee and saw her I was like, oh, I just love her so much  So, you know,  it just depends on what's going on  What the difficulty is what the happy  is,  you know associated with the thing you're doing and You guys seem to have found a great balance and I think that's what it's all about  Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. So anyway
40:31We're now at 39 minutes. I said we had about, I had about 15 minutes to go and we've managed to almost get there. So  I appreciate your time. I appreciate your enthusiasm for what you're doing.  And I hope that you just keep to  get to keep doing it. Oh, well, thank you so much for this opportunity. You know, we always like to be able to connect with folks and share our story. So  we really appreciate it.  Yes. Thank you. This is a, this is a nice, um,
40:58service that you're providing to inform people. So it's nice to have these types of conversations and kind of restores our hope that there are other folks that think likewise. You know, it's nice because the more we get into this, the more conversations we have with people, the more people that are coming out of the kind of the woodwork, so to speak, and say, Hey, I'd like to live like that, or I'd like to eat like that, or I'd like to talk about that more. So it's very nice. So thank you to you.  well, you're welcome. And I have over 250 episodes of people.
41:26telling me their stories about why they started doing whatever they're doing  and how they're doing it.  it's amazing to me how many people have just like jumped into this both feet. And some of them are like, this is a lot. I don't know if I did the right thing. And some of them are like you guys and they love it and they're just building every day on it.  Oh yeah. That's about right.  We definitely.
41:56jumped into the deep end first.  But it's been good. So,  yeah.  All right. You guys, I hope that the rain finally lets up for you and I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.  All right. Thank you. Have a good night. You too. Thanks.
 

The Kitchen Mechanic

Today I'm talking with Kevin at The Kitchen Mechanic.
A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org.
 
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00:00Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year?  Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months.  So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com  Lang calendar.
00:26because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.  A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system.
00:56You can find them at HomegrownCollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Kevin at The Kitchen Mechanic. How are you, Kevin?  I'm Dandy. And where are you located? I'm located in Reno, Nevada. Oh, well, not quite Sin City, but close. What's Sin City? Which one? There's so many.
01:26The one near you. Okay. Is it hot there?  Not yet, but it's still early. It's so, it's so, I only moved here like eight months ago.  And so I'm still getting acclimated, but you know, where I moved from, had tomatoes in the ground in March. I'm still waiting to put tomatoes in the ground here. Cause I, they, the locals say you have to wait till the snow melts off of this certain mountain peak to know that you're going to have any more frost issues. So.
01:55I'm waiting for the snow to melt.  Okay, where did you move from? I moved from the Sacramento area.  Okay, yep, that makes sense.  I don't have you grow. Okay, I'm really garbling this. I'm sorry.  I didn't really know you could grow a lot in Nevada. Well, I'm still figuring it out. We'll see. But they have definitely have a shorter growing season.
02:24Yeah, so I'll know for next year, you know, get my hydroponics out and get them started early and be ready for them. Because right now I'm still waiting for seeds to emerge from my little starts. So we'll find out. Okay. Well, tell me about what you do at the kitchen mechanic. Well, I mean, I retired from the culinary world some time ago, but I've kept one foot in it.
02:52I do a lot pro bono stuff like, you know, schools do fundraising events  or like the city of Orangeville did a day of service for the city.  And  I ended up donating my time making breakfast for about 1200 people  for that event. And so just looking for opportunities to give back and, you know, do some teaching.  I started an online store. I've been off of it for a couple of years because of
03:22everything that's going on in my life.  So I just decided to  get back on it. So  I got a cookie sale going on. But  you know, I make stuff and I sell it people over the internet or locally or whatever.  Okay, so why did you call it the kitchen mechanic? Because I am very much  not mechanically inclined.
03:51Matter of fact, on the back of my calf, have a picture of two knives crossed with a sharpening steel going through the middle of them. I walk into Home Depot and I walk up to them and I say, see this? These are the only tools I know how to use. The only thing I know how to fix is dinner. So I need you to hold my hand. So that's kind of where it came from, the kitchen and candy, because the only thing I can fix is dinner.
04:17That is very funny. I did a TV cooking show in Phoenix back in the 90s. And I wore an oversized tool belt with big, huge kitchen tools in it for effect. And basically, we did the whole thing there based on the premise of the kitchen mechanic. It's kind of where it all grew from. That's fun. I love that. OK. So what's your favorite thing to cook?
04:47Well, if I had a dollar for every time I got asked that question.  And it's funny too, because a couple of chef sites that I'm on, not Facebook, people bring us,  what do you say when people like, what are your favorite thing is? It's like saying,  what's your favorite child?  The emphasis on my training is in pastries and chocolate. I was actually a senior chocolatier for Dub Chocolate Discoveries for a bit.
05:16That's the stuff I enjoy doing for other people.  I used to teach a class for Williams Sonoma on exotic cheesecakes and so  that's kind of one of my things I'm known for is my crazy cheesecakes.
05:32And  yeah, I lost my train of thought.  So anyways,  oh, so my passion is international cuisine.  I try to make iconic  dishes from different countries exactly the way they are supposed to be made according to  the culture. I don't try to Americanize it or make it my own or all that other stuff.
06:01And because I think it does a disservice and disrespect to the culture by taking one of their iconic dishes and then trying to make it into something that it really is. And I think the best compliment I ever got was an Indian lady from the office that I was at at the time telling me that my butter chicken was better than hers and she wanted my recipe. And it's like to me, that was like total validation that I accomplished exactly what I wanted.
06:30accomplished.  If your grandmother says it's good, then that means I  achieve success.  Uh-huh.  In the town that we used to live in, there was an authentic Mexican restaurant called Delia's.  And it was a Mexican family who made Mexican food the way that they were taught to make it by their parents, grandparents, great grandparents.
06:59I always thought I hated Mexican food until I had their tacos. Yeah. And they're fabulous. Yeah. There's a big difference  between gringo Mexican and real Mexican. Where I grew up at in my early years, town  had quite a large Mexican population because of the industry that was located there  and in its proximity  to Texas. It was in Kansas.  And back in the day, a lot  of
07:30Mexican people were coming over through Texas  back in the  70s. so their culture kind of got intertwined with the local Mexican culture.  And  from that point on, I never knew what gringo Mexican food was because nobody in town sold gringo Mexican.  And so I fell in love with fried flour tacos and  different relays,  authentic kind of stuff.
08:00Yeah.  All right. So you've mentioned like a bunch of things about what you've done in your lifetime of working in food.  Can you take me back to the beginning? What got you interested in food and then talk me through till now?  How much time is this segment? Half an hour.  I'll just kind of try to paraphrase as much. I started cooking very, very young, know, 12, I guess, maybe.
08:29at the elbow of my mom. First thing I ever learned how to make was fried chicken.  And that's always been my favorite meal, my birthday meal. Now it's my daughter's, you know, since then.  And it's funny because when I was a small child, even before that, we lived out in the country.  And again, I was very young. I found an old pan and
09:00there were some wild onions growing  out by the shed. And I cut some of those up  and  what was it? found worms. I made sauteed worms with chives, green onions. Okay. To me that was my gourmet meal. course, it didn't taste like a gourmet meal, but hey, I was too young to know better. So I got into college.
09:30And was cooking was kind of in the background, not really serious. And then you get into the dating scene and you know, I figured out that women responded more to think come over Saturday night and I'll make you a five course gourmet dinner versus, hey, come over Saturday night and I'll change your oil. Yeah. So, um, I just started.
09:57building a passion for cooking from there and started in the culinary world at a Holiday Inn Resort and went through a number of experiences from that time forward  and ended up in Phoenix, Arizona,  teaching classes at a Williams Sonoma there at War Shopping Center  and that led
10:24There was a TV producer that came by wasn't there at the time, but he said we're doing this new cooking show. It's featuring these two popular radio DJs, Beth and Bill,  and we need somebody to be the guest chef on the show. And their job is to teach Bill, who's a bona fide bachelor,  how to fit for himself in the kitchen.  And so that's where cooking with Beth and Bill  came about.  if you go to my
10:54page, there you scroll down, there's a  link there you can click on to see a clip from the pilot episode of the show. But it's real tongue in cheek and it's more humorous than serious.  know,  we're making fun of Bill because he doesn't know anything about cooking. You know,  he's making fun of me for whatever reasons. it was a lot of fun and I did that.  And then right after that I ended up
11:20getting recruited by a company in the corporate world and moved back to the Bay Area, Concord, California, and kind of left the the culinary world from there. Then fast forward years later, wasn't all that long ago, I got an opportunity to cook for a Greek restaurant. And I was making desserts
11:50from there like a...
11:54baklava, ice cream sandwiches,  fun,  stuff, but also some very traditional Greek desserts. And all my international skills, Greek is definitely in my top three. That's one of my  favorites. So I did that for little bit. And then I ended up  moving to Reno because my daughter wanted me to be closer. And I was originally two and a half hours away.
12:21So she wanted me to be closer to her while she finished school. So I'm here for the next less than two years. She finishes and I go live where I want to live. You're a good dad, Kevin. I know. Probably the only 66 year old that you know that has a 16 year old daughter. I think that's impressive, actually. I'm 55 and my son, my youngest is 23. So.
12:50She was the running joke is She was born the same year or same month that I got my AARP card. Uh-huh. So Rooster can still crow. Uh-huh. And when I used to you know, talk to audiences and stuff and do the usual, you know stick I would you know, would use being a geezer dad as an example and I'd say, you know, I love being a geezer dad, but it sucks for my wife because
13:18by the time my daughter gets out of diapers, I'll be going into diapers. Mm-hmm. Yep. That sounds right. So, yeah, so I left Kandorino and still trying to acclimate, but here I am. Okay. Thank you for doing that because you were mentioning all kinds of things and I'm like, I need a timeline here. so do you cook at home?
13:46for people and sell it or do you work at a restaurant? I do not do the restaurant thing anymore. One of reasons I retired for was because of back issues actually, guess back surgery. But I do, if you want me to come make a meal at your house, I've had people hire me to make their Thanksgiving dinners before. I've had people hire me to make a Christmas prime rib before because they were intimidated and didn't want to waste a hundred dollar prime rib.
14:16And I told you earlier, you know, I do the pro bono look for opportunities to give back  and  Yeah, that's pretty much it You know the guys always say hey  If you want to have a nice romantic Valentine's dinner for two hire me and I'll come over and fix it and serve it all romantic Reunion your day. Yeah, just fun stuff  Nothing too serious Okay, you brought up prime rib
14:45I have tried to do that once and it did not turn out really well. So what's the secret to a good prime rib? Low and slow. Uh huh. Ignore these recipes that say turn your oven up to 500 degrees and put it in there for 30 minutes and then do this and do that. Um, it's just, it's so silly. Um, there's a technique called reverse sear. It's gotten really popular, you know, for cooking large steaks and tri tip and stuff.
15:13And I apply the same principle to make a tri-tip. You put it in the oven, you cook it at 165 until it reaches the internal temperature that you're looking for, like 125 probably for rare. And when it reaches that point, let it sit until you're ready to get close to eat. And then put it in the oven under a broil and brown the top part, the fat cap and bada boom, beautiful.
15:43Okay, that's what I did wrong. I followed the directions on the recipe. should have just found you and talked to you first. Yeah, well, you know, going back to Mexican food, everybody has their version of tacos. One's not necessarily better than the other, but sometimes, you know, keeping it easy is the best solution.
16:05Yeah, I actually just went through this with our tacos. I hadn't made tacos in three years because I was sick to death of making them with ground beef.  And I understand that if you make a taco with really nice sliced thinly sliced steak, it's probably gonna be a lot better, but we had ground beef. So I was craving tacos and I looked up a recipe and it was like, oh, you just use a little bit of tomato paste and a little bit of water, some cumin, some garlic.
16:33and a little bit of salt and pepper and ta-da there's tacos and I was like that sounds way too easy.  And I made them and I was like  this is as close to what I understand a taco to be as I've had in years. And I was screwing it up before because I thought you were supposed to use tomato sauce and it was supposed to be  wetter I guess is the word I would use but no it's supposed to be more like a paste.
17:04So, we've now incorporated tacos into our meal plan like once every two weeks because everybody in the house is enjoying eating them again. Now, do you do yours with corn tortillas or do you flour tortillas? Flour. Yeah, I don't love corn tortillas. I like flour tortillas. I do not like the flavor of masa.
17:28But I do like  a good cornbread or a good corn muffin, but that's a totally different taste. Yeah. For the ones that you make with crema corn in them, it's so good. Yeah. So moist and it's really nice.  Mm-hmm. Yup.  And the other thing, I saw that you had a  series on your Facebook page for Thanksgiving turkey.
17:58Yes, I do. I've been doing that for decades because my passion is teaching. I love to teach people that are intimidated by cooking or unsure of themselves or whatever. I'm here for those people. it's kind of my favorite. The only celebrity chef that I like is Alton Brown because he teaches. The big thing people finally discovered
18:28Was brining brining your turkey brining this actually any protein you can grind And that was you know, that was became a big deal. I learned about it in 1993 from cooks illustrated Who I used to also test recipes for But you know, asked people, you know, do know what you're doing? You know why you're brining they say well supposed to make it juicier, you know why? And they don't know why and so just like Alton is like
18:56If you understand the science  and biology behind what you're doing, it helps you to better understand  your cooking.  so part of that  series is explaining why you brine and what brining means in the whole scientific breakdown. Because  so many these chefs, say, do this, do this, do this. And  no explanation why or what it
19:25does or anything so  I'm totally the opposite.  Okay well  I have made a lot of Thanksgiving Day turkeys in my lifetime and I have never brined a turkey so tell me why  why do you brine a turkey? You introduce a saline solution to a protein what it does is it causes the protein strands in the muscle to unravel
19:51And when they unravel, become loose, they attract water molecules and then those water molecules get trapped within the protein strands.  And so in the process  of cooking  very slow, low and slow,  that  moisture that's trapped in the protein strands gets redistributed throughout the meat  and helps it  become juicier.
20:17And of the big mistake that most people make when comes to turkeys, they're still cooking it to their mom's standards of like 180 degrees, know,  particle board white meat.  And it's like all the bad stuff, the capillobacter  and  all the bad stuff is  killed at 163. So  what I tell people is, okay, there's
20:42process called carryover cooking where you take the product out of the oven and because of the heat that's built up it will keep cooking. So it's like you take it out  at about 160 and the carryover cooking will take it as far as almost 170 because you always want to your turkey set for about 30 minutes before you carve it up and I guarantee it'll be the juiciest turkey you ever had. Might have to brine the next turkey I make in
21:11September we try to do a turkey every month from September through March Yeah,  and if you look up the recipes just ignore all those recipes that say adding all these herbs adding sugar I did just salt water just salt water And how long how long do you let it sit in the brine? It depends if you're using table salt or kosher salt  I like using kosher salt because it's not as harsh as table salt
21:38One cup of that to a gallon of water and I usually let it set overnight So if I'm cooking if I'm making it the turkey on Thursday, then I'll brine it Tuesday night And Wednesday morning, I'll take it out of the brine rinse it off real good dry it real good and put it on a rack in a pan in the refrigerator and what happens is the evaporative effect of being in the refrigerator pulls all the moisture out of the skin Yeah, and so it makes it crispier and also
22:07it makes it prettier after  you bake it.  Don't baste the outside with butter because it doesn't do anything for the meat. All it does is create brown splotches on the skin. Just baste it with either clarified butter that doesn't have any fat solids in it or any  milk solids in it  or peanut oil. But I'll have to send you a picture of my turkey when we get on.  It makes a picture perfect bon appétit turkey if you follow that.
22:37that process. Well, thank you for the science of why brining works with a turkey because I've always wondered and never looked it up in my life. Appreciate that.  And the other thing that I would add here is that anyone who thinks that it's hard to make a turkey, it really isn't hard. It's just time. You have to have time to devote to it. Right. If you put the time and effort into it, it's well worth it.
23:06You know, cause anything worth  doing is worth putting the time and effort into it.  Absolutely. Yes.  Yeah. And my God, do not use those stupid baster bags and whatever they call them, oven bags. my God. don't want a soggy turkey. want a crispy turkey.  Yeah. Soggy turkeys gross.  Um,  and I don't really want to disparage Butterball turkeys. If people like Butterball brand turkeys,  have at it.  I don't love them.
23:36at all. inject that  and you do not want to  brine a butterball turkey or any turkey that has  been injected with solution or whatever they want to call it because it's high sodium and you'll end up over salting your turkey if you brine it on top of that. Just buy a good old Foster Farms fresh turkey or if you like spending money you'll get one of the boutique turkeys like willy willybirds.
24:05you know, what you'll pay like three times the amount per pound for. Um,  but they're fresh.  They're everything free, you know, and they're just really, really good. But foster farms fresh, you know, Turkey with no injections, nothing. That's what you want.  I agree with you. Okay, good.  Um, so, um, we're rolling into summertime here in Minnesota. I mean, we, we just had our really
24:34first nice spring day on Sunday, like 74 degrees with the high, no real wind. It was just beautiful outside. And that means that it is, I hate to cook in the summertime season coming up. So, so what do you suggest for people who don't really want to spend a lot of time and heat up their kitchen in the summertime? Do you just suggest sandwiches and salads and things or  what would you say? Well, you know,  you asked me earlier what
25:03You know, I cook for myself at home. I don't cook for myself hardly ever unless I'm wanting to treat myself. I get up in the morning, I have a bowl of cereal with some blueberries and some yogurt. And then later midway in the day, know, I'm not going be a pervert yourself. I make myself a loaded salad, which is basically mixed greens with arugula and spinach and candied pecans and orange slices and gorgonzola cheese.
25:33You know, and that's my treat for my lunch or my dinner.  And of course I'm in a weight loss mode. So that helps with that. you know, a couple nights ago, I felt like treating myself. So I made some,  some beef short ribs on the grill and baked potato and some corn on the cob. And that was my treat meal for the day. So, you you cook for other people, don't really feel like cooking for yourself.
26:03Mm-hmm.  Yes, and you just reminded me I have to I have to start looking for a new grill our grill has died so  Cooking outside is the thing that saves us here in Minnesota from mid-june till end of August Yeah, a four burner char broil brand Home Depot has a blowhouse  I'm on my third one of those  And
26:32love it to death. Of course, I have the big five burner version, so it's like 70,000 BTUs. it's  called my Charb-A-Q.  Uh-huh. But their four burner version is really nice  and really, really good. And that's the key. Yeah. We have a fire pit with the ring, the rack that goes into it so you can actually cook on an open fire  the way God intended.
27:00And we can we can definitely do some stuff on that we have done a hobo dinner, do know what a hobo dinner is?  Yep, it does a Boy Scouts. Yeah, we've done that and they turn out great on that fire ring. I love it.  But I  actually  prefer cooking steak over coals.  So I'm with you on that. Yeah, and
27:27Really cooking is so much fun once you get into it and you get hooked onto it.  It's so fun because there are so many different techniques you can use. Right.
27:38like I learned how to make gravy  with cornstarch and that was the way my mom did it. And then I learned that, I can make gravy using flour and butter or flour and some kind of fat, whether it's pork fat or beef fat or whatever.  honestly, it's all gravy. know, a cornstarch gravy is a gravy. A roux gravy is a gravy, but it just depends on what you're trying to accomplish, I think.
28:08Right, yeah, I mean, there's a place for.
28:13cornstarch gravy and there's a place for flour gravy. know? But yeah, and that's another thing. Actually, I somebody that asked me to teach him how to make gravy because so many people are so intimidated by making gravy and it's really such an easy process, you know? So always feel bad when people talk about or are scared about making gravy. It's like, you can do it, you know? I always tell
28:43I always tell people when they ask me about how to do a roux, I always tell them you're probably going to burn it the first time. Throw it away. Do it again. Exactly. Don't give up. And like if I'm making chicken gravy, like, you know, my mom, she used all the pan drippings and you know, made from that. But I, I changed from that because it's just, it's grease. There's really not that much flavor in the grease. know, there is a little crumpley.
29:13But I started removing the oil and  using  clarified butter to make the roux. And then I just throw in a chicken bouillon  cube, pint of heavy cream and pint of half and half and good to go.
29:33I just made myself a great friend.
29:38What? I said I was craving biscuits and gravy last week so I made a batch of biscuits and gravy. Yeah, I've talked more about biscuits and gravy for dinner in the last six months than I have in my entire life. I finally figured out how to make it so that we all three like it. And we found some ground pork from a store that we really like. So I finally figured out how to make sausage gravy and biscuits.
30:04and we have it probably once a month in the winter time because it's not the least, it's not the most fattening thing you'll ever eat, but it's also not the least fattening thing you'll ever eat either. Yeah, that's definitely an adult indulgence thing, you know, and here's a really cool idea I ran across making miniature biscuits. We're talking about biscuits that like, you know, of silver dollar, small and then
30:32put those in a bowl and then pour the gravy over them. Kind of like eating biscuit cereal, you know, little small biscuits. It's little fun that way. It looks really cool. Yeah. And honestly, I, I don't eat a lot at a sitting. So for me, that would be great. Cause like I have one biscuit about the size of, I don't know, silver dollar. And I'm good. That's good.
31:01My husband however would eat like six of them. So if I made the smaller ones Maybe I could talk him in all eating three instead of six. I used to be this I used to be the same way as eating through my Weight loss journey. I have learned to significantly reduce my intake and it's made a world difference. Oh, Yep Absolutely. Okay. So the last two episodes I've recorded I've started a new thing and I'm asking people to describe
31:30their thing they're doing with one word. So how would you describe what you're doing?
31:37you
31:40turn
31:43Living. Living? Living, surviving. But is it just surviving or are you thriving?  What do you think? Well,  I've had a lot of challenges since moving here and it doesn't help that I'm not really fond of Reno.  But I'm here not for me, I'm here for my daughter and so that supersedes any complaints I have. But it's been tough. It's been tough.
32:14And so I'm just trying to get acclimated, trying to get situated. that's kind of where the surviving came from, I think. Are you enjoying the time you're getting to spend with your daughter, though? Oh, for sure. Yeah. Okay, good. It was very few and far between that I got to come up and see her. Okay.
32:34All right, well, Kevin, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me and keep doing the good work. And I love that you moved to be there so you could be with your daughter. That's fantastic. Yeah, I am. I'm glad I did, too.  Thank you for your time. All right. Have a great day. You too.
 

Sunset Creek Farm LLC

Today I'm talking with Katie at Sunset Creek Farm LLC.
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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. A Tiny Homestead is sponsored by the Homegrown Collective, the best option for organizing a responsible and regional food system for America.  You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Katie at Sunset Creek Farm LLC. Good,  well, I guess it's evening, Katie. How are you? I'm good. How are you?
00:27I am good. I usually record in the morning  and so I'm always saying good morning  and when I do them in the evening, I'm like, ah, it's not morning anymore.  Yes, it is a dreary afternoon here for sure. Yeah. And you're in Georgia, right? Yes, in Trine, Georgia. Yeah. It's not dreary here cause it's not raining, but it's been gray  all day. Yes. And I'm in Minnesota if you didn't know. So. Yes.  Okay.  So tell me all about yourself.
00:57and Sunset Creek Farm.  Okay,  so  like I said, we're located in Trine, Georgia.  We have been here about six years. So my family actually owns part of the land and then we took a little bit of it and then we had actually built a barn so that way we could get married in it. So it all started from there.
01:22And so then  last year, and we've always had, I rodeoed my whole life. And so I had, I've had horses and cows my whole life. But then whenever me and Caleb  got married, then of course we had planned to build here and everything.  And then last year we ended up getting Kiko goats. So that was really kind of how we got started.
01:47in having our own little farm.  It had always been a dream of ours to have our own farm.  And  luckily we had the acreage.  And so then from there,  of course, the goat supply just kept coming. So we ended up, we have about 13 nanny goats.  And so,  and we've got a couple of billies that we're keeping separate. That way we can keep the.
02:16the lines going and then  in December, I decided that I needed a milk cow.  So I  do a lot of research before I do anything. Me and my husband are both that way. And so I got to look in and you know, we didn't need a full size cow because we didn't need that much milk just for our family.
02:40And so I ended up doing a lot of research and discovered that the mini jersey was probably our best option. So we get anywhere from one to two gallons of milk a day,  just depending on how much I'm milker. So  I do have a full-time job. So this is our hobby on the side. And so  luckily we do have a bottle cap.
03:06that he helps me milk her during the week and then I milk on the weekends so that way we have enough milk to get us through the week and I like to you know make the different cheeses and I've made feta and mozzarella. I haven't tried hard cheeses yet.  I'm a little intimidated but I'm trying to build myself up to there but then we like to do butter and yogurt and you know different things that I can make with the milk.
03:34And so,  so that's one thing that, you know, the mini Jersey, we have loved having her. And so in the, the buttermilk or the, excuse me, the milk is very rich and has a lot of butterfat. And so that lets us that I don't have to have as much milk  or cream as I need to make the butter. So that makes it, it makes it easier for me to be able to produce butter when I want to.
04:04That's really enjoyed it. Yes, yes. you know, really, it's been nice to be able... So the main reason that we started... So I had breast cancer in 2023. So that made me start looking at what chemicals that are in our food, what chemicals are in the shampoo, the conditioner.
04:30the body washes, the even, you know, the different laundry detergents that you have, all the chemicals that are unnecessary to have and to put on your body. And so that was whenever we really started looking at what is the best way to be able to grow our own food  and to be able, you know, to have our own milk and, and take those chemicals that we can. Of course there's chemicals around us all the time, but to
05:00but to take what I could out of our lives for what I could.  Yeah, because your skin is your biggest organ. Not everyone knows that, but your skin is exposed to everything.  whatever you can  do to cut back on what you're putting on your skin that's going to get absorbed that's bad for you is a grand and glorious thing.  Yes. And that was one thing that got me started in the soap.
05:28making was because you know, I only have you know, five different ingredients in my soap. And if you look on the back of a body wash, I mean, there's all these ingredients, I can't pronounce. And so then that makes you think if I don't, if I can't pronounce it, I definitely don't know what it is. And so that's one  one thing that I started, you know, looking into making soap. And so I ended up taking a class.
05:53and she was actually doing goat milk soap. And I was like, oh, that is great because then I can incorporate our goats into making my soap. And of course  the goat milk soap has a lot of different  benefits to it. It's supposed to be good for your skin, good for people that have  different eczema and skin conditions.  And it's really soft. And one thing I love about the recipe that I
06:23do is it has a really good lather. I'm all about, you know, a good lather. If it just kind of like wipes on and wipes off, I don't feel like I'm clean. But if I get a good lather, then I love it. So that's one thing I've really enjoyed about being able to experiment with my own soap is what gives me the best feeling.  You know, and then I know it's just, you know, basic oils. So  I've really enjoyed it.  You are singing my song, lady.
06:51My husband makes  cold process soap and I've talked about this on the podcast a lot But  my question for you is do you use essential oils to make your soaps smell good?  Yes, so a lot of the soaps that I have  they don't have essential oils because I try to be very aware of people that  Can't handle smells and especially strong smells  because when I was going through chemo, I couldn't handle strong smells
07:20So I try to cater to that, but I do actually use essential oils. And I try to find the pure essential oils so then that way, I know that they are better for you than just the fragrance oils. If anybody had a request for a certain oil and I couldn't find it, then of course I would use what they wanted. But I try to use more of the pure oils so then that way,
07:47You know, you're not putting those harmful chemicals on you. Yeah, I really like using the pure essential oils because for that exact reason. And you're getting exactly what it is. Like my favorite one that we do is lemongrass. Yes, me too. And every time we put a new bar of soap in the shower, I want to eat the soap and obviously not going to eat the soap, but it smells just like a lemon bar. And
08:16I'm just so excited every time we put a new bar in the shower. like, oh my God, my bathroom is going to smell like lemon bars for a week.  Yes.  Yeah. And that's one thing I normally do before I put anything out there. Like we've used a bar of it to kind of see how it is, how it smells and make sure that, you know, it feels good. So I don't want to put anything out there that I wouldn't use for sure.  Yeah. And I'm telling you lemon.
08:43Lemon is the best thing in the morning to wake you up. I don't know what it is. I love lemon anything like lemon meringue pie. You put one in front of me. I want to eat the whole thing and I don't, but I really, really want to.  But there's something invigorating about that lemon scent first thing in the morning.  Yes. And actually,  I freeze dry things as well.  so  actually at Christmas we had an extra  lemon icebox pie.
09:13leftover. So I freeze dried it and  I actually had it at the meeting yesterday and people were tasting it and of course it tasted like I had just done it. So that's one way to get your  lemon, just a little bit of lemon hit and not have to eat a whole pie.  Well that's awesome and as an aside this whole thing about lemon.  I think everyone in my immediate family like my mom, my dad, my sister, my brother and I  all just love lemon.
09:43and come to find out both sets of my grandparents did too. So maybe there's a genetic coding thing in there. Maybe, maybe so because our family seems to like lemon as well. My grandmother, she actually would do a lemon icebox pie every Sunday when we would go eat dinner with her. And I always for  many, many years thought, oh my goodness, like she
10:09loves us so much. works around the clock and makes us these two lemon icebox pies. Years later, I was like, Mom, I would really like to make that recipe. She gave it to me and it took me five minutes to make it. And I thought,  Oh, now I see why she always made us two lemon icebox pies. They were simple and delicious.  I am so thrilled to be talking with you because you keep giving me all kinds of things to think about.  Cooking.
10:37You're saying that you thought that it took her all day to make those pies and it did not. It was simple. Very simple. funniest thing about cooking and people's perception of cooking is that it's hard and it takes a lot of time.  That may be true on some things, but I have an entire cookbook that I've put together like a binder.  I have printed out recipes that I love  and my husband works half an hour from home.
11:07And he'll call me and say I'm headed home and I will say  awesome drive safe I love you and then I start cooking right then  Usually dinner is ready within five minutes of him walking in the door. Yeah half an hour is  nothing it  You can spend half an hour staring at the TV and do nothing productive  Or you can spend half an hour whipping together dinner and having something wonderful. That's good for you.  Mm-hmm. Yes, so
11:37And I'm trying really hard not to be snarky about this because I don't expect everybody to be a fantastic  chef level cook. That's not necessarily what I'm saying.  But learning to cook some things that you really enjoy eating,  is satisfaction in cooking it, not just eating it. Right. Yes. And that's one thing going back to the freeze dryer  I have found is very
12:06beneficial is, you know, I have made a big batch of chicken enchiladas and it's just, you know, us three or four or five, ever how many is going to eat with us. And so I have a whole lot leftover. We're used to, we would eat on it a couple of days and then it would go bad where now I stick it in the freeze dryer. And then when that's done, I stick it in the Mylar bag and it's good for 25 years. So then whenever I'm ready to eat it again,
12:35Then we'll put out, put a little hot water in it, let it steam and it's back to what it was whenever you freeze dried it. So that's,  it has been a very well investment for us.  Awesome. I want one. I just can't afford one right now.  I did say, no, I don't work for harvest right at all, but I did say that they're having a big sale right now, starting in May. And that's actually how I ended up getting mine was they were having a big sale.
13:03And then tractor supply had a big sale. And so I managed to put everything together and  convince myself to get one. It took about a year  to decide. so  actually at the meeting yesterday, I was telling a lady that I was standing there, you I told my husband, let's go, let's look at one. I'm standing there just looking at it. I don't know what I expected to happen.
13:27But I was just staying in there and I had this lady walk up, I'd never seen her before and she said, are you looking at getting one? And I said, I am. And she said, oh, well we have one and we love it. And I said, well, can you tell me a little bit about it? So she was telling me about they mill prep and they do this and they do that.  And I said, do you love it? And she said, yes, I love it. The only thing I wished I would have done was gotten the bigger one.
13:52And I thought, okay, this lady was sent to me to tell me I need to do it. And so I took that as my sign.  And so that was, we made the investment that day just because I thought, okay, I can't just keep putting it  off  and keep saying, okay, well, maybe whenever I save up a little more, I save up a little more. And so there was the sale and there was the lady telling me to just do it.  Yep.  Awesome.
14:21Was a God thing. It was. It definitely was. Okay. I have one more question about that and then I want to get onto your meeting last night because I want to ask you questions about that too. Is the plug for the freeze dryer, is it just a normal plug into the wall plug? So the one that we ended up getting with the ladies advice, we ended up getting the large one instead of the medium. So the medium is the 110 plug and then the large one is the 220.
14:51So we did end up getting that one.  My husband actually works in construction. So  of course I get it and then realized that the plug was different. And so I was like, babe,  can you put me in a plug?  And of course he did his handiwork and got me a plug in within a  couple of days.  So,  but that is the only thing that the plug is different on the bigger one. What a great husband you have.
15:17Yes, he is very good. Anything I need, he makes happen. Well, that's fabulous. I have one of those too. For the most part, I keep saying, we get a mini cow? And he says, no, because we don't have any place to put it. And I'm like, okay, fine. Okay, so this meeting that you had last night, I saw on your Facebook page something about it, but tell me what that was about.
15:42Yeah, so we are actually members  of the Chattauka County Young Farmers  and we get together once a month or every two weeks and we have little programs.  A lot of times it'll be different people coming to sell, you know, different things like either software or we'll do classes. A lot of times they'll go to
16:06different places, know they have like a canon class and different things like that, that we  all get together and  it's a learning experience plus it's good fellowship and especially being able to connect with people that are in our community that do the same things we do.  And so usually everybody's running  in  different ways at all times, but it's nice to get together  every two weeks, once a month to be able to.
16:34you know, be together and we all have the same struggles and just to be able to see each other.  And so one of our really good friends is the vice president of it. And so he reached out to me in January and said, you know, you're doing all of these things and I would like for  you to host a meeting and be able to, you know, show what all you do.  And he said last night, it was nice to see that, you know,
17:02me and my husband were kind of doing things that the older generation had done, you know, with doing the canning and all of that and doing the garden. And he's helped me and gave me advice on the garden and, and really, really helped me. And so, so it was nice to be able to kind of show everybody what we've done and what we've been building the last few years and, and how we're trying to make the community, you know, make the community better with.
17:32you know, my soaps taking out the different chemicals and whatnot. So  it was, it was a really good meeting. was, it was funny because as it has rained today, it, was really nice yesterday. And then, um, as everybody was starting to get here at six o'clock, they, cooked hot dogs and hamburgers or they cook hot dogs and hamburgers out on the trailer.  And then as it started,  um, as everybody started to get here, it started to rain.
18:00So luckily we had somewhere to go. So we all got our food and went in  and  it stopped raining for a minute and then it would come and pour down. So  it did that off and on, you know, for a little bit. And then I was able, we started doing my presentation.  And so then by the end of it, it finally stopped raining and then everybody was able to get out and be able to visit with the goats and see them in New Jersey.
18:28and just be able to be around all the different animals and see the garden and the greenhouse and all that. And it was just nice to be able to  show them what we have been working  on and what we're working toward. So I did  talk about that  as well. So it was a lot of fun. It was.  And it's really nice because a lot since I grew up in Chattucket County.
18:55And so it's really nice to be able to, you know, see people I either grew up with or people's parents that I grew up with that we're all in the same community.  And,  you know, we're all,  it's really nice to see the support. felt so much support from  that community that just, you know, basically  helps lift me up that, you know, I'm, I'm doing, I feel like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing.
19:25You're fitting in your skin and you're fitting in your world and that is the best feeling ever. Okay, so how many people showed up? Do you know? Oh goodness, it was probably, I would say probably 25 people. I didn't get an exact head count, but usually I would say probably 25 to 35 people maybe. Nice, very nice.
19:48Well, I think it's amazing that you did that because I have social anxiety. If 25 people showed up at our place, I would be like,  Yes. And by day, I'm an accountant. So I kind of sit in my office and I'm not very social. So it took me out of my element, but I think it's  a good thing because I'm trying to branch out and trying not to be such an introvert that I am.  Yeah.
20:17I love the podcast because I get to talk to people, but I don't have to be in the presence of people. Right. So I get my social needs met that way. And it's really fabulous because I learned so many new things from you guys. just, I love it so much.  okay. So tell me about the, uh, the mini Jersey cows because  I didn't realize until today that such a thing existed.  Yeah.
20:41Yeah, so that was one thing when we  got to research in about this mini Jersey, you know, of course my first instinct was,  how did the mini part of the Jersey come about?  And so I got to research in and had, you know, listened to a podcast and done some research and actually, so the Jersey was crossed with the Dexter cow  and the Dexter is a shorter black cow.  And so that is why our Clairebale,
21:10has more  black in her than she does the you know the typical brown with a little bit of black on her. She has more black  and so that's where  we believe the black came in was from the Dexter. So that's where they got the hot from and so it was really funny because our bull Darius,  we got him from Oklahoma
21:34And he actually, he has a little more black in him than a typical Jersey, but he does have the typical lighter brown and a little bit of black look. we're excited. So hopefully she is bred and hopefully we'll have a baby about August, September we're hoping. So I'm excited to see what the baby's going to look like, but they're, so sweet.  I've really, really enjoyed it. And she comes  up.
22:03I took out my hip. She's not very, she's not very tall. And when the lady that we had gotten her from, they didn't know if she had ever been milked before. She had had a calf on her and they had pulled the calf off and had sold it when it was time.  And so luckily she was still in milk when we got her.  And, um,  and so the first night we put her in the stall  and I chased her around for two hours cause she wouldn't stand still.
22:33So then, of course I've told you about my marvelous husband. So the next day I show up from work and he has me a cow stanchion built. And so then  I was like, okay, so we put her in there and it took me about an hour and a half to milk her. And I thought, oh goodness, I can't do an hour and a half every day just milking. So I got on and ordered an  automatic milker.
22:58And so that has really been a lifesaver. can, I can normally milk her in  30, 45 minutes, just from start to finish cleaning up and everything.  And it has been, it has been fabulous, but she is so  friendly and gentle. She follows me around. I get a bucket of feed and she'll come running.  Um, I think I've actually got a video on Facebook where I just barely shake the bucket and her and her bottlecafs come running.
23:29And they'll love all over you and they're just, really sweet. I've really enjoyed being able to, you know, have her join the farm and just the, like, and my daughter is out there with her and, you know, she doesn't, she doesn't bother us at all. And she just wants to be the love owner.  So she's like a dog.  She  is. She  is. And she's so sweet. Well,
23:55I think all that's fabulous, but God bless that man of yours.  You got a winner. Yes,  he is all about building something to make our lives a little easier. And so  he saw how bad I was struggling that first night, so he knew something had to happen.  Yeah.  Okay. So if the mini jersey came from across with a Dexter, does that mean that they're actually good  as meat as well?
24:23So I have heard that they are actually, the Jersey is a very tender meat. don't know of anybody personally that has processed Jersey cows, but I've heard that the meat is very good. Okay. I was just wondering, because a dual purpose animal is always good on the homestead. Yes. Yes. And that's also segue into our goats. That is actually one of the great things about our Kikos.
24:52is that they are actually mainly,  they're meat goats  and milk goats.  So they do really good on the production of  their milk. And so I'm able, of course, once the babies are big enough, I'm able to get some of their milk and be able to make my soap. But then also there is a big market for them as a meat goat as well. So yes, we try to do  things that are gonna be the most beneficial.
25:22Yeah, I mean, if you're going to be a farmer or a homesteader or a rancher, and those are all  different things, but they all kind of fall into the same umbrella, you want everything to work together for the greater good of the  place that you have. Yes.  And we kind of suck at that, actually. We're working on it. Oh, yeah.
25:48It's hard to try to make everything jive on people or things that you want to do and things you need to do. So  yeah, I mean, I, I  don't want to talk about my podcast a lot, but I started this podcast over 18 months ago and,  and I really needed to make some money from it. And I really didn't want to put ads on it. I loved it the first year because it was very clean. It was just the podcast. It was just,
26:18me introducing it and you guys talking to me and it was great.  I loved it.  And then I was like, I'm sinking some real time into this. I kind of need it to make money and I put  ads on it and I hated it for the first month. And then I was like, you know what? It's okay. It's okay because I'm doing something important here that I love to do that is helping other people.  It's okay to put ads on it. Yes. And my husband was like,
26:46How much time are you thinking of the podcast? And I said a lot. And I told him the hours and he said,  do not feel bad about trying to monetize it. He said, you are earning any penny that you make. Right. And I was like, okay, yes, I know. I still miss the first year, Katie, of no ads, no nothing. It was so  clean, you know?  Yes.  But I'm not giving up. want to promote.
27:13you guys who are doing the hard work and improving your communities and sharing and learning too. Yes. So I want to add a new thing at the end of the interviews. I'm going to start with you. If you had to describe your farm with one word, what would it be? Oh, goodness.
27:41would probably say a dream.  dream? Yes. I think that's a great word because it is a dream. Yes, because it is definitely  what we have dreamed  of and what we have, what we've been trying to work towards.  And then just to see it come together just feels like a dream. And especially since I guess too that it's on
28:11my family's land. And so just to know that, you know, there's way more history than just six years  right here.  So that's, that's one thing that is,  um,  that is, I guess what I'm trying to think of even how to put it, but a dream. That's really what it is to me.  I love that. I think that's wonderful.  And maybe your kids, you have kids, right?
28:40Yes, I have one. Yeah, maybe maybe 20 years from now this will what you're doing now will be part of her history and maybe she'll be running it. Yes,  I hope so. That's one thing we always try to  make sure that she's involved in in everything and she tries to help so so much on the farm and we've we really enjoyed it. Yeah, I'm gonna say this again. I've said it a bunch of times on the podcast in the last 18 months. I think that  people who are in a position
29:10to have land and have animals and grow things and they have kids is the best thing for those kids because there is real accomplishment that the kids feel even from the littlest age like a year and a half old when they go out and grab the egg out of the nesting box.  They didn't put that egg there but they just think it's the coolest thing. They got to pick out the egg from the nesting box and bring it to the house. Yes.  Oh yes.
29:40She is all about picking up those eggs too and inspecting them. There's actually a video on  our Facebook page of her  inspecting the eggs and it was so funny because I just handed them to her and said, hey Lila, just put them in there. And so  she started looking and she was inspecting and putting them back in the bucket if she didn't like them. I love it. How old is she?  She's four.  Oh, she's a little one. She is. She's tiny.
30:09She's a little, as I call any kid under five. Yes. And when people have more than one, they're littles. Yeah.  So  all right, Katie, we're at half an hour. That was fast. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Yes. Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed it. Have a great night and a great weekend. Thank you. too. All right. Bye.
 

Guldan Family Farm

Today I'm talking with Tim at Guldan Family Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well.
A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org.
 
Muck Boots 
Calendars.Com
If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee 
https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year?  Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months.  So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com  Lang calendar.
00:26because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.  A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system.
00:56You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Tim at I think it's Guldan Family Farm, but I could be pronouncing it wrong, and he's in Newall, Minnesota. Good afternoon, Tim. How are you?  Good afternoon. It's pretty close. We say golden like the golden color, but you know what? We don't know for sure. So as long as it's close to the term, hey you, I answer to it. And it's too and well.
01:23Yeah, you must be a dad. You must get hey you.  I've been a hey you for a long time.  Between there was a day at the farmers market a few years ago my wife was actually saying  Tim, Tim and then it went to Mr. Golden, Mr. Golden because I was a teacher at the time and then finally she said hey you and I noticed and turned around and I said what do you need? It was a it's a joke that doesn't die anymore.
01:45Oh, I know.  mean, I've had four kids and if they can't get my attention, they're like, hey, and if that doesn't work, say, hey, you. And I turn around and like, why are you being rude?  So yeah.  I always ask about the weather  at the beginning of the episodes, but I don't really need to ask because you're in New Ulm, which is not far from me. And Minnesota is having the first most glorious spring day we've had since last spring.
02:12It is looking finally like it's here. We had a couple of tease days earlier on, but yeah, today I'm sitting at a beautiful 77 and sunny on a nice calm,  maybe two mile an hour breeze day. So I have no complaints in my end.  My husband's been outside almost all day and he just put out the open  farm fresh eggs farm stand farm stand signs about half an hour ago. Oh, Yep.
02:38We're very excited. This is the earliest we've had the farm stand open and we've had the farm stand for this is the third year. So this is great. We have we have bedding plants for sale this year.  And  this is probably the first year since we moved here four and a half years ago that we're going to have asparagus for sale before the farmers market opens. Very nice.  Always a happy good day when you have asparagus.  Oh my God. This is
03:07This is the summer we have been waiting for. moved here in August of 2020. And with grand plans to have a farm to market garden and do all the things. And what we didn't take into account is that when you start from scratch, you have to build infrastructure. So that's what the last three years have been spent on. Yeah, there's that minor detail.  So this is the summer that we have been.
03:33working toward for three and a half years. We're so excited. Okay, so this podcast is not about me, but I just had to get that out or a joke on it. Tell me about yourself and what you guys do at your farm. Well, my name is Tim Golden and I'm, we, I am now the proud owner operator of Golden Family Farm. I'm actually the second generation running the vegetable version of this farm. Although the farm itself, excuse me, has been the family since the Homestead Act one way or another.
04:02And so we're pushing close to 170 years in the family.  And as it sits now, I'm operating 25 acres of fruits and vegetables.  Very nice.  Do you have the,  I don't know what it's called. It's a thing they give you when you buy a home that lists the original plot and who signed the paperwork for it. Do you have that for your place?  I have, I believe it's.
04:28I don't know if you'd say it's original, if it's reproduction, but it is a certificate, you know, that has the President of the time, President Buchanan's signature on it, dedicating this, you know, the portion to the owner at the time, which would have been a, I believe it was a Joseph Reinhart was his name. So it's kind of cool. We've got that hanging in the hallway. Nice. Yeah. Our thingy, whatever it's called, there's a specific name for it, but I can't think of it right now. President Lincoln was the one who signed ours.
04:59Oh, nice. Yeah, I was reading back through it I was like,  honey, did you see this? And it was the very first owner. And I showed it to my husband and he was like, as in President Abraham Lincoln, I said, Yep.  My parents found the certificate  actually buried in the wall of the original house that was here. They had hoped to salvage it, but it was beyond, beyond  repair.
05:26And so they were trying to find things out. found all sorts of weird knickknacks in the walls and whatnot. And  that was one of the specialty items. Yeah, it's I love history and knowing that President Lincoln was the one that signed that piece paper is really cool to me. So I'm always thrilled when people know the history of their property.  OK, so so what  I don't even have to ask the question correctly.
05:53Are you having the farm support the farm or do you have a job outside of the farm? The farm supports the farm. However, I do have another job in my off season that works out enough that I need something to do, of course,  actually.  I for quite a few years, I juggled.  I was also a full time teacher  and tried to do this at the same time. So the months of September, October, and obviously, you know, April and May were just the end of me. I could not continue doing that.
06:22And so finally had things squared away enough that I made the plunge, put it all on the farm end with just thoughts of, you know, getting my CDL and driving school bus in the off season like my dad did. Well, as it turned out, they ended up having some full-time seasonal work where they could use help in the shop. And so it works out really nicely right now. I have a sort of an open end agreement that when the farm season winds down, I just sort of pick up working full-time in the shop, working on maintenance on school buses.
06:48And when the farm ramps up, I just sort of casually start disappearing from the shop to go back and focus on the farm again.  Well, that's good work if you can get it. It  works well.  So what do you grow at the farm?  Oh, gosh, that is the money question.  As it sits, I'm at about 50 different crops with about 150 different varieties within that.  So as we see everything from asparagus to zucchini. Oh, from A to Z, yeah. Yep.
07:15Okay. Like fennel. mean, I'm not growing fennel. Sorry. No.  Well, we grow fennel. we'll get that covered.  Apparently people love it for the base of the plant for stir fries. Stir. I didn't know this because fennel tastes like licorice to me. So I don't really eat it. I'm the same way.
07:38Oh, in the background, my dog is losing her mind because we put the open sign for the farm stand out today and I think somebody just pulled in and she is a very good watchdog. So for anybody listening, that would be Maggie, the mascot of a tiny homestead. Well, that's a positive.  Our  quote unquote guard dog is the worst one on planet earth. If you show up in any random vehicle and he sees you, Boomer will just simply smile and say, hi, welcome, make yourself at home. And that's about the extent of it.
08:07Well, you don't have a watch dog. You have a welcome dog. Exactly. Yeah, we specifically wanted a watch dog for our place and we got her at a day shy of eight weeks old. She discovered her bark at about six months old and she has never lost it again.  Fair enough. So and that's okay. It's not too bad on the recording. So it's fine. She's doing her job. I appreciate her very much.
08:34Yeah, exactly. There's always weird noises when I talk to people on the podcast because everybody has a farm or a homestead. So they have dogs or they have donkeys or they have cows. You never know what you're going to hear. So who do you sell your produce to? Do you send it out to a broker or do you sell it at farmers markets or what do you do? We are still the main outlet for it. So we go to farmers markets in Mankato three days a week once it opens.
09:03and then also in New Ulm two days a week. And then we also have a CSA program with around 150 members, give or take, depending on the season.  And then every now and then I've got a few restaurants that I like to support where I can. So we have a couple of little deals where  I trade food for their cooked food. So that works out pretty well in the end too. That's amazing. We don't have a deal like that yet, although you just gave me an idea. I'm going to have to look into that. Just got to have a little credit on the  refrigerator somewhere and say, hey,
09:32I'm here for breakfast. What can you make for me?  Yeah, absolutely. That's brilliant. I'm going to lose my mind because she's not usually this loud and it's driving me crazy.  Okay. So do you guys have animals on the farm too or is it just plants? It was just plants for quite a while and then about,  I want to say about close to seven years ago now,  I had the harebrained idea to bring cattle back here like there had been for many, many years ago.
10:01And so I started a small scale beef cattle operation where I max out at about, you know, 11 or 12 animals and just try to keep that rotation going, selling direct to the consumers on that end by the quarter. And it's been a nice, you know, little sideline business. Any more and it would become an ordeal. I try to stay away from those. I like to keep it as just nice little, if I can keep that side job to 15 minutes a day or less on shores, that's fine with me. Awesome. You sound like you love what you're doing.
10:29I feel like you are just tickled at what you've chosen to do. definitely enjoy it. You know, I grew up doing this. Actually, my parents started the vegetable version of this operation back in, I believe, was 1987. And I was only a hair over two years old when we planted the first few strawberry plants. And there was a lot of learning the hard way of figuring out what can you do? What can't you do with various equipment pieces? What are the losing battles? What are the winning ones? And so I like to say
10:57When people say we must really know what we're doing, that's not the case. We've just gotten lucky many, many times and kept a record of when we've gotten lucky and find the patterns to what works and what doesn't. And so it's, it's been on my mind for a long time that I wanted to take this over. And so when I had the opportunity to do it, jumped at it and really haven't looked back since. And I think you told me when, but I forget you told me at the beginning. When did you take it over?  I officially took over the operation. Oh gosh, I would say close to now.
11:27About eight or nine years ago,  my oldest daughter Olivia had  been born the previous year when I took over and I was still living in town. And so the first year that I was officially running it on my own, I was still living in town, heading out to the farm back and forth several times to make everything work out. Then thankfully the next year my dad said, you know what, how about we just trade?  And so  thankfully I was able to be around the family a lot more by actually living on the farm as opposed to having to run back and forth.
11:56Yeah, that gets to be a real grind because you're on the road so much and then you're spending so much time at the farm that you get home and the kids are like, who are you? Where'd you come  from? And the perk is now I can just stop in the house for a quick bite or eat and see them playing around in the yard. They'll come out and visit me when I'm working in the nearby or they'll run up to the field with me. So it's nice to have them having those same opportunities to play around outside and see things happening and be around me as much as they want to that I had when I was a kid.
12:25Yeah, one of the things that I really appreciate about this lifestyle, whether it's homesteading or farming or ranching or whatever, is that dads are around so much more and you can be so much more hands on and in the presence of the kids because my dad worked as a person who repairs medical equipment at hospitals and he worked, he left the house at like 530 in the morning and he didn't get home till 530 at night and
12:54When we were little, we didn't really see him. And then when we were in school, we were doing homework and then hanging out with friends. So weekends were like prime time to hang out with dad, but he was always working on something. So I would have really liked to have spent more time with my dad when I was a kid. And I love him. He's fantastic. But it would have been really nice to know him better when I was growing up, if that makes sense. I'm  really.
13:22I'm very excited about the fact that men are now more in the child raising part than just moms. And I can't say I'm taking any credit here because my wife definitely does.  She's around the kids way more than I am on her schedule as things go. you know, it's nice that we're both able to work together to make things happen. She has supported me in making that transition from careers to doing this. She knew it was on something I had wanted to do.
13:51And when we were even dating, even for a warner said, here's what I'm already doing, you know, when my parents were still running it.  my plan is to take it over. So we  were able to work together and make this still  make this dream still happen. And she's still able to follow her career path. And I'm still keep mine going. And the farm's still standing to this day. So I call that a win. Well, one of the things in your story that's amazing to me is that you're doing.
14:17You're doing big scale farming, but you're doing it in a small scale way for selling it.  Cause most people who have as much acreage as you have are doing, you know,  field crops like corn or soybeans or whatever. Yep. And that's what it's not good for the, for the earth to do that as I've been told.  Well, we've
14:41There was a book actually, I'm trying to think of the name of it, that my dad had that he showed me when I was in high school. And it's called, How to Make $100,000 Off of 25 Acres. I believe it's what it's called. It came out, I want to say in the early eighties, like 1983 or something like that is the year on it. And I remember I bought, I found it online a couple, a few years back. I remembered that my dad had it and I bought a few copies, gave it to some of friends of mine who were also, you know, in sort of similar lines of work, if you will. And it really just outlines what
15:11Another person's vision was on how to use that amount and utilize it to the best of its potential with still catering to alternative style farming, if you will.  And as much as I'm not following a lot of what that book proposes,  because their  big focus there was actually not on farmers markets.  A big piece is being located near suburbs and getting people to come to the farm. And we're actually
15:35I'm almost 180 degrees off of that. I don't want people coming out here  except for custom orders.  Cause I mean, the big difference that the book mentions and it's absolutely accurate is the labor end on the way that we operate. And so I'm very grateful  that I'm able to hire, um, depending on the year, anywhere from 12 to about 20, um,  youth, whether they be middle or high school, or even sometimes young adults, that'll work for a few mornings a week.
16:02And there's a few more that stick around for a few more hours and help with cleaning and sorting  and helping at farmers markets. And so  the biggest reason that I can give that we're able to be successful doing this is because I am able to find the help and that without the help that I have, if any of them are ever listening, I could not do this without them. And so I always have to make sure that I am  constantly being very appreciative and grateful and taking care of my workers to  keep them happy, to keep them out here. You are a good man, Tim. Good job.
16:32Thanks. Okay. Your voice is getting rougher and rougher as we go. So I think we're just going to make this a short one so your voice doesn't give out completely, I do have one more question. started a new thing on the last episode that I recorded two days ago. At the end of every episode from now on, I'm going to ask the person I'm talking to, to tell me a word that describes your place. What word would you use to describe your farm?
17:00Oh,  one word.  Mm-hmm.
17:08I'm going to go with legacy. All right.  Big piece of that was that this whole idea was my mom's  background of how are we going to survive the 80s farm crisis? And she threw out the idea, let's try strawberries. And that turned into let's try kohlrabi.  And before we knew it, we were able to transition completely out of  your commercial grains and able to keep this farm going.
17:33and turn it into the success that has managed to stay up until today and hopefully will be into the near future. think legacy is a fantastic word and it is entirely appropriate here. And I love that you're carrying it on. That is wonderful. Tim, thank you so much for your time and I would love to have you back when you're not just coming off laryngitis and we can talk more. I'd love to be back. All right, cool. We'll set it up for fall when you're not as busy.
18:01Sounds wonderful. Well, thank you again for the invite and you take care. All right, you too. Thanks so much. Yep. Bye bye. Bye.
 

Higher Calling Homestead

Today I'm talking with Raquel at Higher Calling Homestead.
You can follow on Facebook as well.
A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org.
 
Muck Boots 
Calendars.Com
If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee 
https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year?  Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months.  So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com  Lang calendar.
00:26because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.  A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system.
00:56You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Raquel  at Higher Calling Homestead. Good afternoon, Raquel. How are you? Hey, how are you today?  I'm good. It's  gray and cloudy and rainy here and I'm kind  of in that very mellow, I could take a nap, but I can't take a nap space.
01:24I gotcha. It's the opposite here. It's warm and sunny. We were supposed to have storms today, but it turned out to be a beautiful day so far. So  I love you. I'm looking forward to the first really  moderate, beautiful spring day. I can understand that. Yeah, we've just started getting there. Really, really nice winds here in Tennessee within the last couple of weeks. It's heating up quick. I'm like, okay, it's not summer yet. So what's going on?
01:51Mother nature is absolutely insane and has been for about two and a half years now. That's what's going on. I'd have to agree. Okay. So you have a homestead, but you also have a rabbit tree. And usually I say, tell me about yourself and what you do, but I'm just going to dive in with my questions about rabbits because we tried a couple of years ago to raise rabbits for meat and we failed miserably. So.
02:20If I tell you what we did, can you tell me maybe an idea of where we went wrong? Yeah, I can definitely pray to help. I do want to preface this by saying that I started our rabbitry with the intention of  doing the meat rabbits.  We started back in, you know, like COVID times. And  that was the intention and do like chickens and rabbits for me because the world was shutting down. was like, want to become more self-sufficient just in case this happens. And I quickly realized
02:49that I loved raising rabbits, but I was not one of the people that was going to be able to do it for me.  Yeah. I, number one, I couldn't be part of the butchering.  I flat out told my husband and my son, said, if we do this,  I am, I am more than happy to help take care of them. I am more than happy to cook the meat once  it's just meat.  But I, but when you bring that rabbit to me, when it's dead, has to be footless, tailless.
03:18headless, skinless, because I'm going to fall in love with these things and it's going to kill me. It's hard, you know? it's like if I was in a position to have to feed my family, I definitely, definitely would be able to do it, but I'm not there. And I find it fascinating for people that can do that. And I follow some pages, you know, and I've watched the process and everything, and it's not like I shy away from seeing it, but it's just not for me. And I use the rabbits, you know,
03:47I use their manure for our gardens and I love them. They have a great life and I raise them for pets, but just the meat rabbit thing ended up not being my thing.  Yeah. And like I am just terrible about killing animals.  I,  I will stomp on a bug faster than you can say my name, but if it's fuzzy, I can't do it. It doesn't matter what the reason is. I can't do it.
04:14I can see that.  what ended up happening with your rabbitry? Like where did you think you went wrong with it? Well, we thought we were being smart. We got, we got two does and a buck proven buck. One of the does was proven. One of them was a new doe  and we bought them from people who were raising rabbits had had good luck with their rabbits  and brought them home and put them in the right size touches and gave them rabbit food. I can't remember what it was now, but you know,
04:43whatever it was that they needed, they got. the lady that we got the rabbits from said to give them Timothy hay.  And  I think Timothy hay is amazing. I love how it smells. And I was like, yay, Timothy hay. Okay, yes, that's great. And we put the doe with the buck, because you don't put the buck with the doe in her hutch, because she'll get mad and hurt him.  And they did the job  and that one got pregnant  and had babies.
05:13And those, there were nine, three of them died due to heat, because it was of course the hottest day at the very beginning of June and we didn't know that it was too hot. So ended up bringing the mama and the babies in the house. had, I think we ended up with five, two of them died that were left out of the nine. So I think we had five, four. And got to have baby rabbits in a container with mom in our house for like a month.
05:39That was amazing. Baby rabbits are very, very cute. And got to hold them every morning and talk to them and pet them. They loved being held because we did it every day.  Blah, blah, blah. Raised them. They were healthy. They did great. The other rabbit  never got pregnant.  I have no idea why  I really wanted her to. She looked like a wild rabbit, but she was not. She was a domestic rabbit.  She was very
06:09You know how  the wild rabbits are that  weird brown where they have like white and gold in their brown hair? Right. She was that color. was gorgeous and I really wanted babies from her and no babies. so we kept some of the babies and we actually got a couple more  males from a lady down the street who was also raising rabbits.  And we tried breeding  the new males with the two females.
06:39never got pregnant.  The only thing I can chalk this up to is that maybe the females were too fat because of the timid the hay because they ate a lot of it.  So we gave up, we butchered the rabbits that we had and they were meat and that was the end of us raising rabbits. So  that's my rabbit story. I'm sticking to it.  And  can you give me any idea what we could have done differently? Cause I'm like rabbits are supposed to um like bunnies.
07:08Right. Yeah, exactly. Like that's where the saying like rabbits come from what's going on here. So there could have been, you know, a couple things. So like in the heat of summer and things like that, you mentioned it was hot, the bucks can actually go sterile, but I know you got one litter from the other dough. So that's, you know, unlikely that if you bred them around the same time period, you would have been, you know, suddenly sterile.
07:33The weight, like you mentioned on the females, that can be an issue, but I don't think it would be from Timothy Hay because honestly,  we do,  excuse me, we do Timothy Hay from the time they're babies all through their life.  I'm not  one that likes to do the alfalfa because around four months of age,  the alfalfa is fine for them as babies, but it actually becomes to where it has too much calcium  and things for their body once they become adults. And it can actually be really bad for their kidneys.
08:03But the alfalfa is so sweet that a lot of times they get spoiled. And then when you need to take them off of that, they don't want to change and they don't want Timothy. So I do Timothy from the time, like I put it in their nest boxes so that when they start munching on hay, that's what they get a taste for. And I've never had any issues with Timothy hay.  Now, if you don't have a really complete feed, you know, if there's any kind of vitamin deficiency or anything like that going on,
08:30It could affect things, but maybe that one female just wasn't fertile or had something going on in her reproductive system or  something like that. I don't think it was a Timothy Hay issue. I heard your other podcast with that and I was thinking on that. I don't think that it would have been a Timothy Hay because I've never had any issues with that.
08:53Okay, so it probably wasn't the Timothy Hayes fault, which means it probably wasn't my fault, and I'm okay with that. I definitely wouldn't think it was anything that you were doing, for sure. mean, weather and environment and everything, you know, can come into play. And that's why it can be frustrating, because you hear like, oh, like rabbits, it's going to be easy. It's not always easy, you know?
09:13Yeah, a lot of this homesteading stuff seems like it's going to be easy. And then you're like, well, this is not as easy as I have been led to believe.  No, it's such a learning curve. Everything. It's just, you know, something else to learn all the time. Yeah. I just chalk it up to dumb bunnies, dumb bunnies. And we moved on to other things because I was like, I'm not spending  money on feed for these bunnies if they're not going to earn their keep. Yeah. Did you try a couple of times like to breed that same doe that didn't get pregnant? Yeah.
09:43Yeah. I don't know. It makes me think that something was just, you know, with her, maybe. Yeah. To the point that the second and I mean, sorry, third and fourth time we tried,  actually kind of stepped back and watched to see if they were even doing the deed as it were.  the black bunny, the male that got the white bunny that got pregnant, he
10:07He did what he was supposed to do and did the fall off and the whole thing. I'm like, well, he's clearly doing his job. Maybe he's broken. Yeah, it  very well could be, you know, something just with her that just, you know, she wasn't able to produce. Yeah. I work with him and sometimes, you know, that happens.  I was so sad because I really wanted to have bunnies out of those two that were like unusual looking because I figured with her, with her coloring and him being a black
10:36rabbit they would have some really pretty babies but it did not happen. That's too bad. Maybe try it again sometime when you  fill up to give it a shot again because I mean it is fun and rewarding and  it's really great  raising rabbits but it can be frustrating.  Well I don't regret trying it because I'm not going to lie it was pretty special having these little baby bunnies on my kitchen table in their container.
11:05every morning. Like I would get up, get my coffee, sit down and just watch them.  And the mom, the mom was used to us picking them up. So she'd come over and say hi too. And she was like, you're to pick me up and I don't pick up adult rabbits. They kick and they hurt. Yeah. A lot of people think, you know, like, the babies, the mom's going to eat them if I touch them. But you know, mama gets used to your scent  and taking care of her every day. So then when babies come along, it's usually not an issue to handle the babies.
11:34gets them, you know, tame and used to you. So yeah, and it's a lot easier to deal with them when it comes time to find them new homes or to turn them into freezer food.  If you can handle them. And that sounds really callous, but it's not  because the less you stress out an animal, the better it is for the animal and you.
11:57Absolutely. That's what it's all about, you know, giving them the best home while they're with you, whether you're raising them for food or for pets or whatever your goal is.  Yeah. Did you hear the part of the story about the fact that my dog wanted to meet one of the babies and I didn't even think about it and  baby, baby rabbits damn well know that dogs are prey animals. Yeah. Yeah. They, uh, they have that built in them very early. think. yeah. Yep. My dog is the sweetest, most gentle.
12:26loves it when the barn kittens come out of the barn for the first time is a mama to them while they're growing up. She wanted to see this baby rabbit so bad. And I didn't even think about it. put my hand down with the bunny cupped in my hand  and Maggie went to sniff it and that baby rabbit, it was probably three weeks old.  eee! And  I went, oh I was like, I'm an idiot.
12:50That's really dumb. I should not have done that. It didn't die. It didn't have a heart attack. But I was like, we're never doing that again, Mary Evelyn. That was a bad idea.  So anyway, I was just wondering if you had any idea what we did wrong. But I don't think we did anything wrong. just think that the rabbit didn't have the right biological makeup to reproduce. think that's what we're going to go with.  Wow, that was a lot. That was a lot of words.
13:19Okay, so now that I got that answered, let's get back to the original question.  Tell me about yourself and what you do, because I know you do stuff other than rabbits. Yeah, we do a little bit of everything. So we are a small hobby farm. are in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. It's just right outside of Nashville.  And we moved from Orlando, Florida almost 10 years ago now.  And  we had that dream just to kind of have a simpler way of life.
13:47you know, live on some property. So we got five acres.  We're still actually in a neighborhood. So we have the best of both worlds. We have our neighbors and, but yet we have five acres so that we're able to do a little bit of our homestaying journey. So we raised several breeds of chickens. We have the rabbits, of course we do Welsh harlequin ducks  and we've started mealworms, you know, for the chickens. And then we also have a little farm standout front where we just sell different.
14:14things depending on what season it is. So that's been fun as well. Very nice.  I have to ask, are you originally from the South? Cause you have very little Southern accent. I lived in Florida most of my life. So  mom and dad were split up early, so he kind of moved around.  So I picked up little bits of accents, I think from everywhere. It's very, very clean. It's a very clean speaking voice.  then mom was always home base in Florida.
14:44So that was where I spent most of my time growing up. Okay. I am hyper aware of people's accents and tones of how they speak because of the podcast and because I always have been,  And so when somebody's like, when I see somebody from Mississippi, I'm like,  huh, they're either going to sound like  really Southern, you know, real Southern draw or they're not going to have anything at all.
15:09And I'm always amazed when the person starts talking. I'm like, I'll be damned. They don't sound anything like I thought they were going to sound. Yeah. And Tennessee is funny because different parts of Tennessee, you know, they talk so different. You know, over in East Tennessee, there's a lot of twang and my sister lives over there and she's grown up over there. And if I'm on the phone with her for 10 minutes, I do get a little bit of twang going on. Uh huh. Yup. Okay.
15:38So you said harlequin ducks. What  are they?  So,  well, harlequin ducks, they're a  pretty large sized duck  and, you know, people use them for, you know, multipurposes. You can have them as pets, you can use them for meat, and of course you can use them for eggs. So we sell their eggs at our farm stand and we hatch eggs, you know, for people to be able to have their own ducklings.
16:04Um, so they're pretty cool breed. just got started with them last year. A friend of mine, Jennifer Bryant with Brian's Roost was raising them. And so I, um, had got some from her and just absolutely fell in love with them. So they are, um, they're pretty cool. And I mean, some people, you know, need the duck eggs because they have a egg allergy for some reason, the duck eggs might not affect them like chicken eggs, I guess. So a lot of people, you know, want them for that reason. So it's pretty interesting.
16:34Yeah, I keep hearing all kinds of good things about duck eggs and  it's really great to have friends in your community who are raising different things than you are and you get the chance to maybe get some of that and bring it to your farm.  That's something that's been really, really cool.  It's just meeting other people that do different things and  getting tidbits from them and learning other things, whether you...
17:00end up taking that on yourself and try it, you what they're doing or just kind of soak it all in and think, oh, that's not for me. You know, it's just like always, you know, people in a homesteading type of stuff are always willing to share, you know, their knowledge. Yeah, I freaking love it. I think it's so amazing and such a great community to be part of. And I don't have a whole lot of homesteading friends right now. have  one.
17:27She lives about five miles away and they have O'Connor Family Acres. O'Connor is their last name.  And she texted me the other day and she said, she says, is there any chance that we could sell our duck eggs in your farm stand this summer? And I hadn't even thought of it. I don't know why I didn't think to ask her she wanted to.  I said, I think it's fine. Let me check with the husband. And I asked Kyle, my husband,  if it was okay.  And he was like,  yeah. He said, I don't.
17:55think there's any laws that say we can't. He said, you want to look into that? And I was like, yeah, but I don't think there's any law that says we can't sell her duck eggs in our farm stand five miles away.  So we're going to be doing that. And that gives me the chance to throw five bucks into the.
18:15the money thing and buy some of her duck eggs and actually use them in my cakes. I'm all good with It's supposed to be like a baker's secret, know, like the duck eggs. A lot of people swear that it makes their baked goods so much richer  and, you know, just taste so much better. So a lot of people buy the duck eggs just for that reason that are really, you know, into baking. Yeah, exactly. And I've never used duck eggs in my whole life. And so I'm very much looking forward to her ducks starting to lay.  They haven't yet.
18:44and getting some in the farm stand because it's also a way to get people more interested in coming to see what's in the farm stand.  So this is a win-win-win all the way around for everybody involved and that's one of things I love about this community of people.  So  there was something else I saw on your Facebook page. You're doing all kinds of stuff. What do you want to tell me about what you're doing?
19:12Yeah, so we're just always learning, know, trying to try little tidbits and to find out if, you know, they're for us or not. And so I try to have this like two seasons rule. And that's where like out of two seasons of the year, I'm going to either add something or I'm going to learn something or I'm going to share something with somebody else and teach them, you know, I'm going to do something to grow like my homestead, not to overwhelm myself to where I have so much going on that I can't handle it. Cause we have to keep that perspective of course, but
19:42You know, like this year I want to learn more about like beef tallow and we have a local farm here that we get beef and you know, the kidney fat from to be able to make the tallow. And I haven't really dived into that yet, but that's something I'm learning and kind of researching because there's all these like body products out of the beef tallow that are supposed to be really good.  um, you know, I'm interested in adding goats. So eventually I would like to do that. It has been things I've lost my mind, but  he would like to do that. So, you know, just.
20:10I'm trying to always add just a little something. Right now, you know, we just added the farm stand a few months ago. So, you we do like the fresh eggs and sourdough and beeswax wraps. I still am looking for a homemade dishwashing liquid and I've tried a couple different recipes and they always fail.
20:35And so I keep digging and I keep trying and I keep digging and I keep trying and I keep failing. And so I always come back to Dawn dish soap because it seems to be the  best  one I can find. And I did try, I tried making a dish soap  and it called for vinegar and it called for something else that was an oil. And I'm like, this is never going to work because vinegar and oil don't mix.
21:01You don't make salad dressing where it stays mixed all the time if you have vinegar and an oil in it. And I knew, I knew it wasn't gonna work. And I tried it anyway and I ended up tossing it because it was useless. So sometimes  you can Google the hell out of the thing you're looking for and you will never find the solution. Yeah, absolutely. I've never tried homemade dish liquid. That's definitely something I haven't tried but I can't see how, like you said,
21:29vinegar and oil would go together. So that's interesting. No. And I read it and I was like, I'm going to try it because maybe this is some magic formula I don't understand. And maybe it actually works. And no, it did not. And for the longest time, for like two years, I made my own laundry detergent with the Borax and the stuff. There's all kinds of recipes for it online. And it worked for a while.
21:58And  what happens is it tends to clog up your washing machine. Yeah, that's what I've wondered about. Because I thought about that too,  about trying that. But I was worried, know, with all the HE washers and everything and you have to have HE special soap, like is it going to end up clogging it up? Yeah. And what it does is it gets in there and it doesn't like, it doesn't make your washing machine fill up with water and pour all over the place, but it just gets gunked in there.
22:27And it starts to stink. So after a year and a half, my  washer smelled funny and my husband took it apart.  the part in the middle, it twists underneath that was all gook. And I  thought to myself, why can't any of this work sometimes?  Sometimes stuff works, sometimes it doesn't. Yeah. And the thing is the clothes were fine.
22:56The clothes were clean, they didn't smell like perfume, they didn't smell stinky, they were fine. But after that year and a half, forget it, we had to clean the whole thing out and put it back together.  So that was unfortunate. And I don't mean to be a bummer, it's just that I want to make clear that sometimes solutions are not actually solutions, they are problems. Oh, absolutely. So we've definitely tried things that we ended up.
23:23you know, being like, this isn't for us, kind of like you with the rabbits, you know, like we tried quails and my friend, Rebecca Lynch, she raises amazing quail and I so badly want to get some from her and I see all the things you can do, you know, with the quail and it's just as it means for me, you know, sometimes you try things and it just doesn't work out. Like one could have heard. Yeah. And sometimes you really, really want to do something and you do the research and you think you got it covered.
23:52And then you look at how much it's going to cost you to start the new thing  and you go,  hmm, maybe not right now.  Yeah. Or time, know, so many things it's like,  you have to have the time to dedicate to it, you know, and like I work full time along with, you know, trying to do the whole homestead thing. So some things I really want to do and I just have to keep it in check and be like, you're not going to be able to do this.  Or at least not right now.  Exactly.
24:22And I always get frustrated with the not right now. And I have to remind myself that not right now doesn't mean never. Very true. And that keeps me sane because for a while there, I really wanted to get two goats. I wanted to two goat kids. I really did. When we were talking about buying this place five years ago, well, almost five years ago.
24:49I was like, and we can't get baby goats and we can get this and we can get that. And my husband went,  your excitement is overruling your sense. It's definitely  easy to do to get all excited and gung-ho about something. And  sometimes our husbands have to tell us no.  Yes. And sometimes he gets a little bit out of control and I'm like, are you sure you want to put 5,000 tomato plants in the garden this year?
25:18So yeah,  it's a give and take and it's a check and balance system in the best relationships and thank God it is. But when I said we can get baby goats and we can get a mini cow and we can get, we can get, said,  no, what we can do  is we can give our 10 or five chickens  more room to move and we can get more chickens. Let's start there.  So chicken math hasn't gotten you yet, then you've kept.
25:47five chickens and been able to stay with five chickens because we were starting with five. You're funny. You're very, very amusing. No, no, we had 30 chickens  at this time last year. Oh, wow.  And some of them, we  got to replace other chickens and we just hadn't gotten rid of the old chickens yet. So that's part of the reason we had 30 chickens.  And then some of them got sick and not from bird flu, but just
26:16chickens get sick and keel over and die for no apparent reason. This happens. I've heard from lots of people.  And so we ended up culling the last 10 last fall because they weren't giving us any eggs because they were just not. And it wasn't because of the change in light. They just were not laying.  And we were like, I don't want to feed chickens that aren't giving us eggs through the winter time. That's crazy.
26:40And then we got 12 more back a month and a half ago. Brand new chickens got the first eggs from these chickens ever.  And so thankful for them because as I keep saying in the last, I don't know,  25 episodes,  chicken eggs from the store suck lemons.  Yeah, they do. Once you've had the fresh eggs,  it's hard to go back to store bought eggs for sure.
27:05Yeah, and when you're paying $8 a dozen, I would rather feed my chickens and have yummy eggs than pay $8 a dozen for eggs that taste like nothing. with the egg prices have just been crazy lately. Uh-huh. And I talk about this ad nauseum like I just should, I should ban talking about chickens for the next month. But yeah, it's when you go from and
27:34850 square foot house on a tenth of an acre  to  a little over 1500 square foot house on 3.1 acres.  Your brain and your heart don't necessarily communicate well. And that's what happened with us. So. I completely understand that. And we moved from Orlando. That was the big thing is I was like, I want to have chickens. I've always had a fascination with them. I always  had a fascination with.
28:00farming and homesteading and I just I wanted my own chickens. And so we would look at houses and that was the one rule I told my realtor is if you know they have a HOA or you know they're in the city limits where I can't chickens I don't want to see the house and my husband you know would see this amazing house and I'm like I don't want to go look at it I can't chickens there I'm not gonna sell down there you know and so he's like really we're gonna give up this house because you can't chickens on my absolutely so we ended up finding
28:31you know, the perfect spot and five acres. And I went out and got my first four chickens, you know, from Tractor Supply and,  um, and it just, you know, grew and grew and my love for them grew. And now I have, you know, you want to know how many chickens I have. And I raised five different breeds and  shipped them all over the U S and so it's just become a whole thing.  um, but I can understand like all of a sudden you get overexcited about something. I have the space, I have, you know, the means to do it. And it's easy to kind of.
29:01just dive in head first.  Yeah, luckily my husband grabbed me by my feet and said, Whoa, there baby.  The thing about chickens that just, I don't know, I'm going to say it grosses me out is they look so soft and so nice. And then you get to their legs and their legs look like snakeskin and it just freaks me the hell out.  It's funny. It's not my favorite thing.
29:30and I have been very honest about this on the podcast with people I know, with little kids who want to see the chickens when they come. They will ask about it. They notice it. They're like, why are their legs like snakes? And I'm like, because that's how God made them. And I don't actually know the answer, so I can't tell them.
29:54Little bullies want to actually touch their legs because they think they're going to feel like a snake. And I've been told that they do. I don't want to touch chicken legs. think it's gross.  So there's, there's really silly things on the homestead that you never really think about until you're up close and personal with the thing that you thought you wanted.  Cause we got chickens back when we lived in the old house, the small house with the 10th of an acre.
30:24And I never even thought about like  really what chickens are  made up of, how they're built. Cause I would just go out and open the coop and grab eggs and come back in. And my husband and my sons would do the chores and that was all cool.  And then we had to move them here, which meant we had to bring them here and put them in a temporary fenced in area, move the coop, get it set up, put chickens back in. And I got to help with that.
30:52And I ended up brushing my hand against their legs. And I was like, that is gross. And my husband's like, you're so weird. I said,  well, yes, what was your first clue?  And he said, he said, you have been cooking your whole life. He said, you touch carcasses  all the time. A chicken, you touch steak, you touch, touch ground burger.  He said, chicken legs, like literally alive chickens legs are the thing that grosses you out.
31:23Like, yeah.  That's stunning. Yeah. He was like, I do not understand. said, well, you're the one who has ADD. I don't understand half the stuff you do.  And we just had a giggle fest over the whole thing. And he said, you like  running your hand down their back. I said, well, yeah, because the feathers are really soft. That's fine. But their legs just skeeve me out. And he was like,
31:52can understand. Conversations you never thought you would have with anyone, you know? Right.  So  anyway, I'm trying, we try,  we try, uh-huh.  I try  to keep the podcast a half an hour. We're there.  Thank you so much for your time. Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. All right. Thank you. Have a great evening, Raquel. I appreciate it. You too. Thank you.  Bye.
 

Shades of Green Permaculture

Today I'm talking with Brandy at Shades of Green Permaculture.
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00:00Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year?  Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months.  So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com  Lang calendar.
00:26because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.  A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups and help us grow a new food system.
00:56You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Brandy Hall at Shades of Green Permaculture. Good morning, Brandy. How are you? I'm good. Are you in Georgia? Yeah, I'm in the Atlanta area. Okay. And is Shades of Green Permaculture based there? Yes, ma'am. We are based in the side of Atlanta.
01:24in the metro area indicator, which is to reduce the sun. Okay, cool. Is it nice there this morning? Oh, it's gorgeous. We had a nice rain and now the sun is shining. It's about 70 degrees. Thank goodness. Cause we had a bout of like 95 degree weather in the beginning of April. So I was excited about summer coming early. Yeah, that's a little much for April. And we had a really warm day in Minnesota a couple of weeks ago and I was like, this is so wrong.
01:54Yeah, there's something, it's like a cognitive dissonance because on one hand you're like, this feels so nice, the sun, and then you're like, wait, but it's too early.  Exactly. And  for the second morning in a row, we've got rain showers happening here. yeah, I'm just hoping that this remains a pattern of just a day or two of a light rain showers and then three or four days of sunshine. Cause I can't face another spring like last year where we got six weeks of rain in a row.  Oh my goodness.
02:24Yeah. And there comes a point where it's like, if you have the rain and then you've got the intermittent sun, the plants just love it so much versus just getting sun. Yeah. I really wondered if I had teleported to Washington state or Oregon last May and June, because I swear to you, I thought everything was going to mold. It was terrible.  So tell me about yourself  and Shades of Green permaculture.  So my name's Brandy Hall and I'm the founder and CEO of Shades of Green.
02:54firmaculture. I started the company in 2008. So we just celebrated our 17 year anniversary and we are a regenerative design, installation, maintenance and education firm based here in the Atlanta area. offer processes for our clients going everything from consultation through design and implementation and ongoing maintenance services, both
03:23horticulture services like bed maintenance and perennial plantings and organic all-electric solar powered lawn care. Really encouraging people to move toward polyculture lawns. And then we also offer digital education. So we've got a few thousand students located around the country and some international students that participate in our online design program called the regenerative backyard blueprint.
03:53Okay, so I have a few questions for you.  Number one, how did you get into this? What prompted you to start this business? I think there were a few things, know, some like early childhood experiences definitely set the course for me on this. And then, you know, when I started the company, I was looking for  work in this  arena.
04:19And there wasn't anything available. So I sort of just started my own thing so that I could do what I loved to do. But as a child, I grew up part-time in South Florida and part-time in Western North Carolina. My parents divorced when I was really young. And my mom and my stepdad had a nursery in South Florida, an ornamental plant nursery and a seed farm. And over the course of
04:45maybe 10 years or so in the nursery business, they became really, really allergic to and chemically sensitive to the kind of quote unquote, innocuous pesticides and pesticides that were spraying on the farm to the point where my stepdad was in a wheelchair, you know, swollen joints  for  a good part of maybe two years and having nosebleeds that were inexplicable that would last for an hour to two hours.
05:14He put up walks, my mom took over the nursery business and she had sort of escalating allergic reactions to  the  pesticides and herbicides that were sprayed. We lived in an agricultural area of South Florida.  So even though they stopped spraying, you long before their reactions started getting terrible,  it was just ambient, you know, it was environmental. So  Palm Beach County is where we lived in South Florida. They would do aerial spraying of the mosquitoes.
05:44all of the neighbors, you know, spraying for termites, all the neighboring farms spraying, you know,  crop dusting basically with herbicides and pesticides. And so, one of the final straws, my mom was, she had done a delivery of a neighboring farm and they had recently, you know, sprayed  the houses and she got out of the car, smelled it immediately, got back in, took Benadryl, went home, they,
06:13came to get me from school on the way to the hospital. And by the time we got to the hospital, she was convulsing so hard that she shook the door panel off of the inside of the car. Her hands were drawing up like she's in a stroke. So  very quickly, we moved to North Florida. They went through long detents, all organic, everything, no nail polish in the house, kind of level of  detent.
06:41and chemicals and we're able to recover, it kind of set the course of just seeing how toxic our environment and our landscape practices, our environmental practices in the US and then kind of juxtapose with growing up part-time in the Western North Carolina and spending so much time in the woods and on wagon trains and eating from the garden and drinking from the springs right around and one of the most biodiverse terrarium forests in the planet.
07:11set this early inquiry in motion of there's got to be a. That'll that situation with your mom and your stepdad will definitely wake you up. Holy cow. In ways that I didn't even realize as like a seven year old, eight year old teenager, you know, it wasn't until later on as I, as I started to get into this work in my twenties. I realized, this is, this is kind of the early.
07:41exposure that I had to when it doesn't go well really set it all in motion for me.  Wow. Wow. Well,  I'm  blown away by that story. That is not what I expected to hear.  Okay, so I was looking at your website and it says that your company is a B corporation. What is a B corporation? Letter B.
08:05letter B. So it means beneficial corporation and it's a third party designation, which like an organic certification, that's super rigorous. It's a global designation and companies like Patagonia and, and Jerry's, are notable ones. think there's a few thousand B corps, maybe 10,000 B corps registered internationally. And the premise behind the B corp is that it's not just about outfits. It's about
08:35you know, impact on the community, impact on employees, impact on the environment and those positive pieces are baked into both corporate laws and practices of perpetuity. So it's really about people and planet over profit. really, you know, kind of building on that besides people and planet over profit, seeing how profit is really impacted positively.
09:05by valuing people and community.  Okay. Thank you.  I did not have time to dig for what a B Corp was. So that was a perfect explanation  for those of us who have no idea what any of that means.  Okay. So, so do you  work for  like  cities that need your services or do you work for just the average person who wants to
09:35clean up and beautify their yard? We have a wide range of projects. So the bulk of our work is residential, I would say, but we also work with a lot of developers for new construction type projects. work with schools and nonprofits. We definitely have municipal clients. We've worked with several municipalities in the metro area  implementing productive urban landscapes.
10:02Yeah, so I would say it  runs the gamut for sure. A lot of farm clients, homesteaders.
10:10Basically, we're always looking for ways that we can say yes, because our goal is to empower people with the tools that they need to steward their land in good way. So I can look a lot of different ways.  Great. Productive urban landscape. Define that for me, for your own definition. What does that mean? Yeah. So when you think about just  our standard green spaces that we see within the city, you know, a lot of times they have ornamental plants, have,  you know, sod.
10:39They require that kind of maintenance from public works departments,  know, just mowing and blowing basically in a productive urban landscape is really about rethinking public spaces to produce food and medicine and pollinator.  You know, so those can look like orchards. We've done a lot of public orchards. We've done a lot of human scale, stormwater projects where we're sinking the water into the soil and then using that water that is larger than the soils to grow.
11:09native communities. So it's really just thinking about our green spaces beyond just ornamental, you know, the aesthetic,  mow and blow kind of approach that we tend to take.  Okay, great.  The small town that we used to live in, they used to have these big planters that they would put out in the springtime full of annual flowers, know, pansies or whatever.
11:40And every time I would walk by one, I would think, man, I wish that they would load those things up with herbs because people could just grab a sprig if they wanted to, you know?  And I kept meaning to say something to our neighbor who was on the city council. And every time I saw her, something else came up and I never mentioned it. But all I could see in my head  were these big old planters full of thyme and basil and
12:06rosemary and stuff that people could just grab some, you know? Right. And then those are perennial too. So rather than spending the budget on, you know, materials and labor year after year to plant annuals, you know, do it one time and then oregano and the thyme and the chives and all of it just comes down. I was, I was going to say I'm in Minnesota. Yes, chives are perennial here. And thyme is a,
12:32You never know whether it's going to come back  or not. We've had good luck with it, but  it gets freaking cold in January in Minnesota. Not everything survives. And rosemary does not overwinter here at all. Yeah. Rosemary even, you know, it will overwinter here until we get a hard winter.  Like a couple of years ago, was  seven degrees, which for us is insanely cold.  All the rosemary everywhere. But you know, the decade before that, was sliding.
13:02Yeah, back this, I think it was in January, we had one night that actually hit minus 25 degrees real temperature. And I was like, I live in the wrong state.  mean, I mean, there's a big thing here in Minnesota about we suffer through the winters to enjoy spring, summer and fall because it's so gorgeous here.
13:24That night I was like, thank God for my cozy, well insulated home because we would be freezing right now if we didn't have that. Yeah, it came with the Southern American, even memory, I don't know what it feels like. Yeah, and I've never been further south than Arlington. I think it's maybe Virginia. Yeah. So I don't have any experience with any...
13:51I've never been below the Mason Dixon line, really. Yeah, it's really weird. My  parents live in Maine, so I grew up in Maine.  And my  grandparents from my mom  lived in Illinois,  and my grandparents from my dad lived in Maine. So, of course, family vacations were every other summer.
14:16we'd go to Illinois and the grandparents in Illinois would come to Maine. So there was never any reason to go south of the Mason-Dixon line.  yeah,  I hear the South is beautiful.  I don't know that I would fit in very well because having been raised in Maine, I was brought up to be very, very direct and look people in the eye and do the firm handshake thing. And I don't think I would ever be very good at being a Southern belle. I think that I would probably suck at it.
14:47That's good. Yes. So, okay. I don't want to get too far off track because I do that all the time. And I'm like, I talked way too much on that one. So when you go and help residential folks get their stuff together, do you, is it a thing where you can go and get them started and then they can take it from there? Or are there people who are just like, come and do this every week or whatever, and I don't have to do it.
15:17are both? It's both. It's definitely both. So, you know, we take our clients through a pretty comprehensive design and installation  process. And then  at that point, they become sometimes they become caretaking clients, not always. So caretaking is our version of maintenance and that  covers both of our horticulture services and the lawn care.  And then within caretaking, offer
15:47We have a wide variety. We have some clients that want us to come weekly. They have higher need landscapes. We have some clients that want us to monthly or seasonally. So we try to accommodate the whole range. And the end goal, we always celebrate when we've, quote unquote, graduated or clients. We've done work to train them in how to interact with their landscape. have an understanding of to read it, to move plants around, what to look
16:17for, you know, and the types of landscapes that we do, are higher maintenance on the front end, you know, as plants are getting established for sure, than your typical just like mow and blow. But then once things are established and you really have an understanding of what you're looking for in the landscape and how to kind of interact with it on a seasonal basis, the maintenance needs really drop pretty significantly. So in terms of, you know, need for
16:44fertilizing and irrigation  and  regular pruning and cutting things back and mowing and all of those things. So we have a lot of clients that choose to work with us during our caretaking visits. It's part of like a garden coaching, just  an addendum to the service that we offer. You know, because I would say most of the people that engage  in permaculture firm are excited about growing food and they want to  know about the plants that they've put into their yards.
17:14Yeah, education was really a huge component.  Good.  Have you ever had someone call you or email you or however they contacted you  and say, just need somebody to do something with my property? And they have at the beginning, they have no interest in learning. And then they get converted over the course of the project. would say most of the time when people call us, they have a sense of what it is that we do and they're drawn to that.
17:44A lot of times, you know, when you have like a married couple, one might be more interested in the other is sort of like, well, I don't know, they my spouse wants to do it. So  just kind of  going along with it. And we've definitely seen some like major conversions happen in space where, you know, the, maybe the husband starts out, I don't know, I just like, she wants to be a great wife.  You know, and then by the end they've taken up the lawn and they're growing corn everywhere.
18:12And how does, how does it make you feel when that happens? I mean, are you, are you at the point where it's like, yeah, I knew that was going to happen. Or do you still get that little bubble of happy in your chest? I mean, it's so exciting when people just  start understanding possibilities that our landscapes hold in terms of feeding ourselves and feeding, you know, the non-human stakeholders as well.  Um, yeah, it's super exciting. You know, I think that there's, there's something to be said about, you know, as you're
18:42as you're interacting with your landscape  from an  ecological stewardship  perspective and see, oh, wow, the first time somebody harvests a strawberry or eats a fresh blueberry, there's these little micro moments that happen where  I think it opens up a whole world of possibility of what your landscape can do.  It can be a good steward, people get really excited.
19:12It's meaning, I would say, especially for folks that, know, that name is a major metropolis, know, 7 million people in the metro area. So, you know, the  urban,  the challenge that we're having in like urban and suburban.
19:32Lifestyle, I would say, is a lot of people would site, you know, 40 plus hours a week away from the landscape or garden, bringing kids and getting stuck in traffic and commuting and all of the things that kind of pull us out of our gardens. But I think there's something that's really helpful for people to find a reason to be in the area, to eat this food and to, you know, see a certain type of bird for the first time or.
19:59you know, notice that your moment is covered with like 20 different kinds of pollinators and those little, those little moments of like, Oh, I don't have to just escape to the middle of nowhere in order to like, you know, be immersed in nature. know, nature can be in Yes, nature should be in our own backyards. you're the gateway drug person to food scaping is what you are.  Yeah, we, you we don't usually refer to it.
20:29but  it's always part of it.  Permaculture can look very different depending on the goals of the particular client, but there's really three pillars that we talk about in the system. It's managing water as a resource,  building soil fertility by closing loops, waste streams on our site, and building communities that feed humans and wildlife.
20:57work together to increase the soil fertility. So whether the planting palette that you craft is really about food production or it's pollinator habitat or sunbird habitat or we have herbalists that have  engaged us before where their entire yard is just  an account for their herbal business. So the plants can really,  they can emerge.
21:25pillars of the regenerative landscape and they can really be crafted  in a that almost every landscape is going to have  some combination of producing food, medicine, beauty.  I absolutely love your enthusiasm for what you do. I mean, there's a saying that if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. And I know that you work.  I know.  But  it's, I'm guessing that sometimes it doesn't feel like work for you. Oh, I'm...
21:55Absolutely. Yeah. And it's really fun. You know, when I got into this, was really because I wanted to do it and it wasn't really an option. And it's, you know, to like go out and get a job. So we're just gonna start referring this to clients and  we're company of 27 people, think. So it's really, you know, it's  really, to  just say, the company has grown and how other people get to do this.
22:25Our staff is amazing. I'm really ashamed of the work that we do. There's just so many people out there, know, spreading the good word.  Getting people hooked on growing good things without using bad things to grow them.  Exactly.  Well, I could have used you like 25 years ago when we decided to take our little tiny tenth of an acre lot and turn it into food.
22:54You're in Georgia and we were still in Minnesota, so that never would have happened. But we had to learn it on our own. And you might get a kick out of this. I've told the story a few times already on the podcast, but I will tell it again because I love it.  My husband's mom was going to be moving out of her house that she lived in for a very long time.  And she had gotten irises, these little, they're short irises. I don't think that the leaves get any more than six inches tall. And they put out these, these dark,
23:22purple or lavendery blue purple blossoms. She was going to dig those out and she was going to dig out lilies for her to take where she was going and she wanted to know if we wanted any. And we hadn't really done anything with plants at our place. We had a crappy lawn and that was about it. And we had a, I don't know what they're called, a little pine tree that was
23:49I called it the scrappy tree because it wasn't doing very well. was in front of our bedroom windows  outside.  And so we got these hand-me-down plants from her and put them in and they did really, really well. And I said to my husband, said, how do you feel about digging up the backyard and we grow food instead of crab grass?  And he was totally fine with it. And he discovered his love for  growing food  to the point that now where we live, have a
24:16I still don't have the exact numbers, but I think it's a hundred foot by 150 foot market garden every summer.  And so  my son just went to his girlfriend's grandma's house yesterday to help her dig up some plants and move them around because she wanted them switched.  And he came home with yellow and orange daylily roots for me.  And so I keep thinking that I am, we are the hand me down  farm.
24:45Cause we keep getting stuff from people cause they're like, I got all this stuff. don't want to throw it in the trash. I'm like, we'll put it in. Totally. Yeah. It's like the what? We always talk about how we have like an orphanage for all the lost plants in our, in our green space here. We're always constantly taking in plants. So yeah. We should have named, we should have named our place sanctuary farm and it would have been for plants, not for animals. Totally.
25:15But at least half of my peony plants that I have are hand-me-down peonies that we got from the old house, from neighbors,  from friends, from complete strangers on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace.  And this is our fourth spring here. And we put in  the first of the plants from the old house. First, that was all we had. So we put those in that first fall we were here. And this is the fourth spring.
25:44So we're going to have more peonies than we've ever had here in our new place  this year. I  am so excited because we have not, I'm going to jinx it, we have not had cold weather  and they haven't actually come up yet because we didn't take the stuff off of them. waiting so that when they do come up through, we're past the last frost date so they don't get tipped. Because for anyone who doesn't know,  if those little tiny bulbs get,  but not bulbs, buds.
26:14get bitten by frost they don't continue to grow so you get no flowers on that plant.  So I'm just keeping everything I have crossed that every freaking bud on all the peony plants blooms this year because I want it to be a sea of blooms.  I have white and coral and yellow and pink and burgundy.
26:39I'm so  excited, like I can't stand it. I hadn't really thought about it until we started talking. I'm like, oh my God, it's going to be a sea of beautiful flowers out there in June.  I will have to get out there and take pictures because they don't last long. It'll be a month.  It'll be a rolling month of different colors.
26:59I'm so excited. I can't stand it.  So anyway, my point being back 10 minutes ago, well, maybe, maybe two days ago, who knows?  Um, I was very excited to see my son show up with this bucket of lily roots because I can always use more lilies. That's  Always anything, anything that will we put in the ground  once and we just have to water it and pray it gets sun and it just takes care of itself.
27:29love the quality of plants that want to live. don't need a lot of food. Uh-huh. Yeah. We have some red Stelladora, I think is the name of the lily that we got from somebody and we threw them in over by the ditch. And they're not ditch lilies, but they're by a ditch. And we don't do anything with them. We don't even water them. And they have survived three years just through what nature has given them. They're beautiful.
27:59That's wild. Yep. Love it.  Absolutely love low maintenance, high beauty production plants. makes me so happy. I'm sure, I'm sure you are tickled when somebody's like, I would really like perennials. And you're like, let me tell you about what perennials grow in Georgia.  She's amazing woman.
28:28But you know, just like fruit trees, everything from hazelnut and tapioca, raspberry, fig, and cranberry, and bananas.  Avocados?  Yeah.  Oh, okay. Give it 10 years. I would like,  low-pot grows here, persimmons, Asian persimmons, and they're just so different from fruit, say. Fruit and nut trees, and then...
28:57know, you start getting into perennials. It's, you know, just a variety of native plants and, you know, perennial medges, kinds of things.  Can you, can you grow black raspberries in Georgia? Yeah, okay.
29:19any rubes seems to do.  Okay,  my mom in Illinois grew up picking black raspberries, wild ones. And we have them growing in our tree line on our property. And she lives in Maine. Black raspberries don't do very well in the area of Maine that she lives in.  And I brought her  black raspberries from our property. They were frozen.  And she made a black raspberry  pie.
29:47like a couple of weeks after we'd come back to Minnesota. And she called and she was like, thank you so much for bringing me black raspberries. I forgot how much I love them.
30:08Yeah, well, she'd been,  I don't know when I moved to Minnesota in, I don't even know now when it was over 30 years ago. I mentioned that there were black raspberries here on the hiking trails. And she was like, Oh, black raspberries are great. Da da da da da. And I said, they're really tart. And she's like, yeah, but if you make them into jam, they're no longer really tart. And I said, okay, well, I don't can and I don't make jam. So that doesn't help me.  And
30:36When we realized we had black raspberries here, we were so excited because they make a killer pie. Just really yummy pie. So I had to bring her black raspberries. There was no way I wasn't taking a cooler with frozen black raspberries home to visit.
30:54Yeah, and we're trying to start a  food forest in our tree line.  We just discovered that we have emerald ash borers in our trees for the first time  to the point that they're not leafing out. These trees are probably damn close to dead.  We have over 20 trees that are going to have to come out and some of them have been there for years and it's going to be expensive.  So.
31:22My husband has decided that he's going to accept any  fruit tree or plant that he can get and we're going to make the tree line for trees and  shrubs. Great. They have a to make lemonade out of lemons, right?  Yeah.  He was walking the tree line two weeks ago  and he saw a bunch of little holes in the trunks of the trees and only the  ash trees,  aspen, whatever, that family.
31:53And he took a closer look and the next morning he said, we have an expensive problem coming at us. And I was like, oh no, we are broke. We can't handle an expensive problem. He said, we have emerald ash forest. And I said, how do you know? And he said, because all those little holes are where the woodpeckers are using the trees for a food source. I was like, oh, that's fabulous. And I used a bad word in front of fabulous.
32:22And he said, nope, this is an opportunity. He said, you know those peach trees we put in two falls ago? I said, yes. He said, you know how we got peaches off of them the first fall after we put them in the previous fall? I said, yes, the one that equaled or were equal to Georgia peaches. He said, yes.  He said, we're going to put in more peaches.  He said, we're going to put in plums that are cold hardy.  He said, we're going to put in more apple trees.
32:51He said, our tree line is going to be an orchard. I said,  Oh,  okay.  He said, so if you see anybody giving away seedlings anywhere, say yes. So pray for me that we can, we can fill in our tree line to the point where it does what it's supposed to do, because we are surrounded by corn fields and soybean fields and alfalfa fields. We need that tree line for the break.  Yeah. I'm just introducing some diversity.
33:21Yes, and food because I really do like eating. Eating is a good thing.  Yes, it is.  So hopefully that'll all work and we already are lucky enough to have some elderberry.  I  call them bushes, but I guess they're trees. We have elderberry, we have black raspberry, we have apple trees, we have peach trees, we have wild plum and now cultivated plum.
33:51And we have honey berry plants that someone sent me.  So we're on our way, but it's going to be five years before it's really established.  Yeah. I mean, I think that's the downside. It's not a downside, but that's definitely, think, sometimes why people go for annual product balance because it's unstable. You know, he set it up in a good way, waiting for years to come.
34:17Yes, and whichever child inherits this place will be eating like a king 25, 30 years from now.
34:26So just thought I'd share that because you are a  permaculture person and that's what we're trying to do too. So.  All right, Brandy, I try to keep these to half an hour and we're there. So thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Mary. This was a wonderful conversation. Good luck with your orchard. Trying to see the sea of phoenix.  Trying really, really, really trying every day.
34:54All right, Brandy, you have a fantastic day. Oh, you too. Thanks. Bye.