A Tiny Homestead

Farmgirl Farmstead

Today I'm talking with Regina at Farmgirl Farmstead.
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00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Regina at Farm Girl Farmstead. Good morning, Regina. How are you? Good morning. I'm excellent yourself. I'm good. I keep doing this thing where I introduce people and then I stutter through the rest of it and I don't know what is going on with me, but that's okay.
00:29So tell me about yourself and Farm Girl Farmstead. All right. Well, I am 65 and a half years old. About three years ago before I retired, I decided I wanted to have a farmstead. I spent most of my life raising four kids and I raised three kids and I raised two tiny grandkids for about a year and a half. And I was like, when I get out of the classroom of learning and I actually have time to have a farmstead,
00:58I'm going to start one. So three years ago I started, but I was still working full time as a supervisor, so I didn't have a lot of time to commit. But then I retired in December. I just worked two days a week remote, and now the Farmstead Dream is coming true. I mean, it's happening, it's happening fast because I did a lot of research prior to get into the full time. And it's almost self-sustaining with the products that I sell.
01:27But my goal is next year, because it would be my, this year was my first real year of running a full time. Next year I hope to make a profit. Awesome, congratulations on retiring and starting your next season of life. That's amazing. So I have many questions. I was looking at your Facebook page and it looks like you're located in a neighborhood. Is that correct? Absolutely, I'm an urban farmer.
01:55I have a tenth of an acre and I'm surrounded by the medical field right across the alley from me is ear, nose and throat within a block is a hospital, four blocks is another hospital. So I have a big population of buyers because I'm so visual where I am. Okay. So tell me and tell the listeners how you are.
02:22utilizing what little space you have to produce lots. Okay, I gotcha. Well, the way that the homestead pays for itself is I start vegetable plants downstairs in the basement. I think I have 38 grow lights, we pot breakers like four times a day. And so this year I grew 5,000 plants from seed. Last year just like 500, just cause I wasn't retired yet. I sell those for $2 each. And I think I have about
02:51150 left. So that's how the farmstead pays for itself. And I plant everything that we eat. We have dwarf apple trees, dwarf plum trees, a ton of grapes, strawberries, and I sell strawberry plants too. Every vegetable that we like to eat I plant. And that way we can be self-sustaining. I have a friend who has 55 hens, so she provides me eggs,
03:22like three or four hens and see if something I want to do. I grew up, we raised chickens grown up in California and San Diego. Cause I don't want to jump in and then be like some people who are like, no, let's get rid of them. So I make sure it's something I can and I do want to do. And then also we planted mulberry trees too cause my 29 year old granddaughter loves mulberries but we plant everything that we love.
03:49I'm hoping to do a beehive next year. There's classes locally and none of my neighbors spray. Nobody sprays anything. I don't use any chemicals. So I wouldn't have to worry about a loss of a beehive due to neighbors. Well, that's helpful. That's great. Yes. Okay, so when you started growing stuff, you grew 5,000 seedlings in your basement with grow light this spring.
04:18Yep, yep, this spring. I started in January. As soon as I got back from Georgia visiting grandkids, I started in January because I knew with only 38 grow lights, I have to do succession after succession. So some went to the big greenhouse. It's only like 8 by 12, the small ones, 6 by 8. And I'd have a heater in there if the weather dipped, but they would rotate to the big greenhouse or the small greenhouse. And yeah, successfully 5,000. My goal was 8,000.
04:48But with just me, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't do 8,000. That's a lot to handle, yes. So do you grow anything outside? Like you have the fruit trees and stuff. But when you, okay, I asked that whole thing wrong. Let me start again. When you started growing things outside on your property, did you have to amend the soil because you were in the city? Absolutely, yeah. And when we first moved here, and I would say we, but I'm single.
05:18When I first moved here, I rented the house. That was nine years ago. And the first spring, my landlord said, hey, what do you think about ornamental grasses in the front? And I said, hold on, let me grab my sketch pad. He's like, you drew something up. And in the backyard, I drew all these raised beds. And he's like, oh. I said, I just want permission to do it. If you say no, I'm fine with it. This is your house. And I will take care of everything. I don't expect you to pay for it.
05:47He looked at it and he said, you can do it. He came the next weekend, brought a rototiller and tilled everything, came the next weekend, built all the beds, came the next weekend, filled in all the dirt. And he would not let me pay him for anything. But we have both. I build an outdoor compost and we have an electric indoor composter. And we bring all the coffee grounds. My granddaughter brings coffee grounds from work. And I pick them up at Dylan's from Starbucks.
06:17And I mean, we compost everything that's organic so we can put it into our soil. I did buy five cubic yards of compost from a local place last fall. That was a lot of compost, but my soil now is amazing. It used to be so compacted. There was no life in it. You could not find a worm. Now, anytime I try to dig something up, I'm like,
06:42Sorry, worm, sorry, didn't mean to bother you. It's just, it's the healthiest soil, it's just beautiful. Awesome. Regina, I have to say it. I love you. You are proving my point about the fact that anyone can do this on a small piece of property. Exactly. And you can make it go. Yes, yes. And you know, I'm 65 and a half. I would say a half because I'm almost at 66 and I've always had a high level of energy, but I have...
07:12visions and they're written down in goals and I make new goals every day and Sometimes I don't make some of those goals but a ton of them I do and that's the ones I celebrate not what I didn't get Done, but what I did accomplish and that's Yeah Absolutely, that that's how you should do it because then you have hope that you can get some more things accomplished later Yes, it's it's plans for the future. It's great. Yeah
07:39The other reason I'm excited about talking with you is because we had a tenth of an acre as well where we used to live and we made our entire backyard gardens. And so I understand completely what you're talking about. And we now have a hard-sided greenhouse that just was finished a couple of weekends ago. And it's 18 by 40, I think, are the measurements. And so...
08:06So my husband and I have big, big, big plans and dreams for next year because it's going to be heated. So we're going to try doing bedding plants too for people. Oh, I love, oh my gosh. And they just sell themselves. I market them on the marketplace and then have a sign on the corner and word of mouth gets people, they come back from last year or the year before, they send friends, they're like, hey, Darcy sent me. And I mean, it's just, it's...
08:34growing itself with me putting like maybe $10 a week into marketing during my busy season and that's it. Yeah, yeah. And I don't know if the city that you live in is a food desert, but a lot of cities end up being food deserts. So is it? Yeah, absolutely. And we don't even have a grocery store close. There's a committee trying to build one about four blocks away where one used to be.
09:03and they asked if I would help provide vegetables to sell in it. And I told them if I can fit it into my yard, I sure will. I won't be able to, you know, be the only supplier because I never want to be big like that, but I will absolutely be a part of that. Yeah. And yeah, not a lot of people garden here. There's a couple of community gardens, people, I don't know. I don't know why. I think maybe they think they can't do it.
09:30Yeah, and I mean, if you've never done it before, it can be really daunting. Oh, yeah. There's a large, steep learning curve if you're starting from scratch on how to grow food. Absolutely. Yeah. And I don't want to discourage anybody. It's a really fun learning curve, but you've got to want to do it and you've got to have the time to put into it. Yeah. And it's like anything we're going to, if it's something new.
09:58We're always gonna be learning with gardening. We're always learning and we're always gonna have our failures, but if we look at what we did and did well, that's what keeps us motivated, keeps us going. Cause I've already made my list of things that I did well this year and things that I have not. And we'll learn from that next year, take those have nots and put them on. We got it. Got it done. Yeah, for sure. It's really funny.
10:25We live about four and a half miles from the nearest town, which isn't that far. And we are surrounded by cornfield right now. And the corn's coming up. It's about, I would bet it's about eight inches, 10 inches tall right now. And we put in some stuff before all the rain hit weeks ago. I'm in Minnesota. I don't know if you know what the weather's been in our area, but we've just been pounded with rain. But...
10:54A volunteer lettuce plant came up and we're having grilled ham and cheese sandwiches tonight. I was thinking about it. I was like, what can we have with grilled ham and cheese? I'm going to have my son go out and grab that lettuce because it's big enough to have as a salad. Yes. We're just going to have a basic lettuce salad from the garden with our sandwiches. I love it. This is the first year I actually grew lettuce.
11:21and spinach and it grew so well. I'm like begging my grown kids, please, please cut it, take some, please. Because before I'd get like one lettuce, because I didn't have time to focus, but this year I had so much. I'm like, please, please, this is so expensive at the store and it's so good, it's organic. Then I take my granddaughter, she's 29. We, when we bought the house, we cohabitate, we share everything. I raised her, put her through college, so, and we get along so well.
11:51But she's a vegetarian. I'm like, if I see you buy bagelettes one more time while we have all this lettuce, she's like, I know, I keep forgetting. So, first ever growing so much lettuce and because we eat a lot of vegetables, we eat a lot of fruits, we try to grow or I try to grow everything that we'll eat. Yeah. And I mean, you're already doing it. You might as well reap the benefits of it. Exactly. Yeah.
12:18Because I didn't start with the idea of selling plants to other people. I wanted to give us healthy foods and to reduce our, because I only spend $40 a week on my groceries. I buy my own groceries. I spend $40 a week. And I was like, I'm going to garden because gardening is going to be a big part of keeping that bill at a minimum and eating as healthy as I can. Yes. And with the inflation prices that have happened in the last year, that's a great plan. Yes.
12:46three grandkids here for three weeks from Georgia. There was six, eight, and 14. And we went shopping the day after they got here. So we went shopping Monday. I was like, good Lord. Grocery bill is like, good night nurse. That's crazy. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I am, I'm offended at the fact that we live in America and it's the land of milk and honey. I said this the other day too on a podcast.
13:16interview and a lot of people quite literally cannot afford to eat now in the last year and a half. Agreed. Absolutely agreed. And actually, it's been that way for a long time. When I was middle management at Boys and Girls Club, probably 30 years ago, we'd have kids on Friday night who are like, Mr. Regina, do you have anything I can eat? I'm like, did you eat? Did you eat lunch at school?
13:42On the weekends, they'd be like, I haven't eaten anything all day. So we started a program where we cooked real meals every weekend for every kid who showed up. So it's been that way for so long, but I think people are just realizing it. I mean, for some people, it's always been like that. It's been a hardship just to feed your kids or to eat. But now it's for everybody now. Yeah.
14:04Now I love you even more because of what you just said. And yes, I knew that there were lots of people who couldn't afford to eat before the last year and a half. But like people who are making okay money at their job are having to make choices about where they spend their money more than they did before because it's a choice of whether the car payment gets made or they eat. Exactly. Absolutely.
14:33It's ridiculous. I hate everything about this situation as it stands right now. Me too. I thought after COVID was over and through and the trucking crisis, I thought that prices would go down kind of where they need to be, but that just didn't happen. Yeah, we'll be donating produce to our local food shelf this summer. And we did last summer, and we did the year before that, and we did the year before that. We moved here almost four years ago.
15:02So every summer we've had the big garden, we've donated zucchini and tomatoes and cucumbers and stuff to the food shelf because we have so much and we're so blessed that I'm like, we need to take that big old box down the food shelf right now. Yep. Yeah. In the front yard, we, we changed that to a growing area. So I always plant tomatoes and peppers out there. So anybody, any neighbor, anybody walk them by who wants them, they can just pick them.
15:31So it's kind of like a little community food station.
15:40Yep. Awesome.
15:45Are you still with me? Yeah, I'm still here. Okay. It just got really quiet. And usually when it does that, I think that it's cut out on me. We have a farm stand on our property where we sell produce as well. And we don't have cameras. We don't monitor it hard because our theory is if somebody takes produce without paying for it, they need it more than we do. Yeah. And I shouldn't broadcast the fact that we don't monitor it because now people just come and take stuff.
16:14It's an honor system and we just hope that people who can afford to pay for what they take do. Yeah. And if they need it, then they can have it. Yeah. I do that too. I do a lot of self-service. I was out there nine to five or 96 every day, but then when it started slowing down, I started doing the self-service Venmo cash app. I have a cash box. And I think I only had one person who didn't actually pay for their stuff. And that was my whole idea too.
16:43They must need it more than me. And one guy hit me up on Marketplace. He's like, I don't have any money. Do you think I get plans? I'm like, absolutely. I said, let me know what you want and let's meet. And you can absolutely have him. He's like, I really don't have any place to plan them. I'm homeless. But I'll find a place. I said, let's do it. Nice. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. He doesn't have a home, but he has this want or this need to grow food.
17:10And I'm just like, that's where it all starts. That's where everything starts to pivot and change for somebody. When they have these little grains of ideas and put those into motion, then it grows and it grows. And then all of a sudden, his whole life has changed because he wants to do this one thing that's going to move him forward and provide food for him. You're literally planting seeds, literally and figuratively planting seeds for his life. Oh, thank you. Yeah.
17:39So what's your favorite favorite thing about what you're doing? Do you have one favorite thing or is it just all your favorite? I think it's that I get to wear overalls all the time.
17:52When I picked up my grandkids in Georgia, my six-year-old granddaughter who's very, very fancy, she's like, Nana, are you wearing overalls? I'm like, yes, ma'am. I said I brought a pair for tomorrow, a pair for the next day. So every day when she gets up, she's like, you have overalls. I'm like, this is what I wear. I call it my pants purse because I always got people on one side for squirrels that eat out of our hands. Then everything I need is in my pockets. And I don't have to worry about what.
18:20what I'm wearing, how I present myself, that's just who I am. And when people come to buy things and they have overalls on, we talk about overalls, it's just so sweet and just so simple. What's your favorite brand of overalls? Cause I need a pair. I like the old Navy ones because they have some slouch in them, they have some give in them, and they have the boyfriend cut, so they're just a little bit higher and they have a lot of pockets. But when I'm down in the dirt,
18:48I don't wear those, any of those. I wear the key, K-E-Y, they're older ones. Just because they have all the pockets to hang your tools in. If I get mud on them, and I will, then I'm not worried, because I have a lot of overalls. So I wear all the, let's see, other ones I have. I got them from the grain store. Found one pair at a yard sale. I was like, what? A bag of clothes for $5? Yes, ma'am. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I like the ones from the Sparm store because they're just built better.
19:18But then my city, I say going to town ones, even though I live in the city, right in the middle, those are my old Navy ones because they're a little bit more feminine and not so muddy. Well, you got to spruce up a little bit now and then just to feel better. So your farm girl farmstead uniform is overalls. I love that. Exactly. Yeah. And one time a guy came and he's like, my friend said you always wear overalls.
19:44I'd been out there from nine in the morning to six at night. He came at seven and I had just changed. I went out and he's like, where's your overalls? I'm like, I'm so sorry. I said, I just changed. I was just exhausted and dirty. He's like, they said you always wear overalls. He said like eight times. I knew that that was gonna be my image. That was gonna be my uniform because that's what people expected. And they, I don't know, it just makes them happy when I have overalls on. Great. Do you have different color overalls or are they just denim? All denim.
20:14because you know, yeah, you know, I'm retired. I'm on a budget. I'm gonna have to find out your size and find some really crazy looking overalls and ship them to you from Amazon. That has some, but I'm like, oh, I can't pay that much for overalls. I've been looking at. Yeah. Yeah, you should get some with flowers on them. Oh, I see those and I'm like, oh, I'm gonna have to wait because you know, when I knew my grandkids were coming, I'm spending a lot of money this month.
20:43Yeah, so that's where my budget's being thrown to. But yeah, well, I wear the same size as my age, 18. I'm 18, so that's a giveaway. I'll have to look and see what I can find. I'm so tempted to buy you some really fun overalls just for Grins and Giggles. I bought some off a big blue box store. I bought them online and they got here and they were a whole different size than what they should be.
21:08and you had to put your own clasp on them. Like, what is this? This is worse than math trying to figure that out. Yeah. No, they need to be ready to wear. Yes, yes, exactly. See, I wear Levi's jeans and tank top and a t-shirt over the tank top and really cute socks. I bought these socks a year and a half ago. They're little ankle socks and they look like the rag wool socks, but they're not. And calaboutes all the time. That's my...
21:38That's my uniform here at our place. And mostly because I really like being comfy and I don't have to like pack away winter clothes and bring out summer clothes and pack away summer clothes and bring out winter clothes because it all works. It's all year round. Yes, yeah. That's my big thing is being comfortable. It's always been, I've never been into fashion. I've never cared about my nails just because I was always in dirt. Anywhere I can be in dirt, I'd be in dirt. I just don't care about that. I just wanna be comfortable.
22:08And, you know, I want to look clean, of course, I share every day, but I just want to be comfortable. I don't want to wear what I want to wear. You know, I had to wear when I worked for the state of Kansas, I had to wear what I needed to wear, but now I just want to wear what I want to wear. Yeah, there's a woman on Facebook, her name is Casey. I think her last name is Heister, H-E-I-S-T-E-R. And she's a girly girl. She wears the most beautiful dresses.
22:36and she gardens in them and she shoots guns in them and she actually has like videos and photos of herself in these really beautiful dresses. That's so cool. I love that. And she's beautiful. Yeah. I love it too. But I really don't move as easily in a dress as I do in jeans and I am always doing something. I'm cooking or I'm chasing after the dog or I'm outside.
23:04I don't own a dress. I haven't owned a dress in forever. So I watch her and I'm like, I love her for what she's chosen for her life. And you were mentioning pockets and the overalls. I don't carry a purse ever. I always wear some kind of jacket. It doesn't matter if it's 90 degrees out. I have a light jacket that has pockets because my jacket is my purse.
23:32Partly because I don't ever forget my jacket, but I have literally walked out of places without the bag that I brought with me. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I just slide my debit card in the top pocket if we're going somewhere, my ID if I'm driving, and off we go. Yeah, I have a wallet. I actually carry a wallet just like a man and it's always in my back pocket because it's just easier and I know where everything is. Absolutely. I wish that I could wear dresses because I like long flowy garden dresses.
24:03the medical center that butts up to the alley. Their break room is right there. And every time they come over, they're like, oh my gosh, we watch you all the time. It's just so awesome over here. We wanna be over here. So it's like I'm being watched for 10 hours a day. So if I was wearing a dress, I'd probably, I don't know, it wouldn't be pretty. Yep. And like you said, you have earned the right to make your choices to be comfortable in your clothing choices and what you're wearing.
24:33Absolutely. Yeah, now I have to donate a ton of clothes because I haven't touched most of it since I retired. Well, someone will benefit who needs them. So that's great. Absolutely. Okay, so what's your least favorite thing about what you do? That the time is limited every day. Because if I could be out there for like 30 hours in a row, I would do it. I love being outside. I love being in the dirt. I love
25:02Starting a seat. I love deadheading. I love everything. I just hate that Time is so limited Yeah, there's never enough hours in the day. I don't think it matters what you're doing There's just not enough and you have to sleep at some point. Yeah. Oh and I hate aphids I'm again this week. We every week we're at war somewhere different in the yard with aphids Okay, tell me
25:29We don't really have trouble with aphids and we never really have even at the old house. What is it that aphids are a problem for? Right now they're on the calendulum. Last week they were on the grapevines. We have a ton of grapes. And then they were on the daisies first. And so we use neem oil and I've listened to your podcast. You use neem oil too. Yep. And that takes care of them. But I'm like, good night. Every time I turn around there's somewhere else. I'm like, I thought I got rid of you guys. I hate aphids.
25:59But do they eat the plants? Is that the problem? Yeah, they suck the juice out of the plants. And last year I was like, oh, there's ants on there. The ants are going to take care of those aphids and eat them. Well, my granddaughter, the one I spoke about, she's a biology major. She's like, no, they're harvesting the sugar off the aphids. They are profiting from the aphids. They're not going to kill them. They're going to try to keep them alive. So I had to start using neem oil.
26:24Yeah, it seems like a lot of insects do not appreciate neem oil at all. I like that. Yeah, it works. I saw it on something on a YouTube video years ago and I was like, huh, it's not going to hurt my dog. It's not going to hurt the barn cats. It's not going to hurt the chickens if by chance they get into it and it doesn't hurt the plants. So let's try that.
26:51if you do it in the morning or after they all go to bed. That was my big thing, the pollinators. But yeah, and I think you had mentioned on one of the podcasts that you used it on the apple trees. Like, oh, I never heard that because we have two dwarf apple trees. So I started using it on the apple trees too. Yeah, we started that last year because we had little, we had a couple of tiny little apples developed two falls ago on one of the trees.
27:20They're fairly new trees. We just put them in three and a half, four years ago. And they had the, the yuck on the inside from the moth larva that get into apples. Yes. And I was trying to find a way to not have that happen again. And I saw something about that you could use neem oil once that the little baby apples developed from the blooms. And I said to my husband, I said, do we have any neem oil left in the spray bottle thing? And he was like, yeah. I said,
27:50Can we try spraying the apples with that and see if it helps? Like spray the base of the tree and spray the actual apples. And he's like, I will try anything at this point. I was like, okay. So we did. And we ended up with probably a hundred honey gold apples last fall. That's amazing. That is amazing. And they were small, but they're dwarf stock trees and they were young trees. We didn't expect them to be big apples. Yeah.
28:17And I don't like them. I don't like Golden Delicious Apples and Honey Gold's taste a lot like Golden Delicious Apples to me. But my husband loves Golden Delicious Apples. So he was thrilled that we got them. That's funny. I think we planted one Gala and one Fuji because those are our favorites. And how are they, you don't know how they're doing yet. You won't know for a while. This is their second full year.
28:44So you're supposed to get apples within two, three years. So we should have apples next year. Okay. One of them bloom this year, but I don't see any apples on there. Yeah. It's after the blooms. Cause that's when I heard you say to use the email. I'm like, man. So next year. Yep. Um, we don't, I don't know if, uh, Gayle's or the other one you said would grow here because we're further north than you. Oh yeah. You're a little north.
29:14Yeah, but the ones that we have are the honey golds. We have two honeycrisp trees that are, they were saplings when we bought them two years ago. So they're finally starting to branch out. So we're hoping to have apples next, not this coming, but fall of 2025 from those. And we have Regents and we have Harrelson.
29:39And we have a couple old varieties that I can't think of the names of right now. We have like 16 or 18 trees. Wow. That's so, so hopefully within a couple of years, we'll actually have enough apples that we can sell them and we can donate some of those to the food shelf. I love that. I love your heart. I'm trying. I I'm trying so hard to figure out ways to make this place support itself. And also without.
30:07without charging any money to people, support the community as well. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a balance. It is. Absolutely. Like my prices on my vegetable plants, three years ago, was $2. Last year, $2. This year, $2. And I told everybody, and that's even my perennial flowers that I grow, I told everybody next year I plan on keeping it at $2, but I said I need y'all to return your pots though, because my goal is not to put any money out for pots and...
30:36no more plastic out into the world, that's new. I just want to reuse. And so everybody's been fantastic about returning pots, pots that didn't come from me. But because people are like, we went to this store, it was this much for one tomato plant? They're like, that's why we always come back to you. You're organic, it's $2. You did all the work. We don't know where the seeds came from, what they were sprayed with. We know what yours were sprayed with, nothing. Uh-huh, yep. You're doing a good thing.
31:05Regarding the pots and the baskets and things, the plastic, somebody on Facebook Marketplace last week had a whole bunch of nursery pots, the plastic ones, one and two gallon ones, for free. She got them from the nursery and she was like, I need these gone, come get them. And I was like, pick us, we'll take them. So my husband and my son drove down and brought home like 30.
31:34of these pots. And because we now have the greenhouse, we need those size pots for plants. And I put out the call on Facebook, you know, on my friend page. I was like, if anyone has hanging plant pots from their, the stuff that they got this year that they want to get rid of, let us know. And one of my good friends who lives nearby, she's like, I have three, we'll bring them all over. And I said, okay, great.
32:00So I'm putting out the call for the ones that people are just going to throw away because we need them. We want to grow hanging potted plants in the greenhouse next spring. And the landfill does not need them. That's my whole... I don't want to buy any more new ones. And when we put that call out, all of a sudden we start getting what we need. Last weekend, I have a friend who works on the weekends at an auction house. They had an old greenhouse that they wouldn't let anybody go into because it was in bad repair.
32:30Tell me what you want. She got me, I think, 2,000 pots. She got me 12 of the real heavy, heavy plastic trays that have the drain holes in it. These are trays that will never, ever break. She got me a ton, probably about 40 hanging hooks to hang plants in the greenhouses. And she's like, $2. I'm like, I am not paying you just $2. I said, it was your time, your wear, and these are valuable to me. So I over, over, overpaid her.
32:58but I didn't overpay her for, you know, I made sure it wasn't too much for my budget, but I gave her a lot more than she wanted. But when you put that call out, all of a sudden, everybody's showing up and dropping off stuff at your porch or your greenhouse. Yes, because if you don't open your mouth, nobody knows what you need. Exactly, or they think she probably has plenty, she's been doing this for a while, I'm just gonna throw it away, nope. Everybody shows up, they'll be like, hey, I just dropped something at your greenhouse. I'm like, yes, or the medical center next door,
33:28they walk over when they see me out there like, where was I come when you're out? Cause you like talk about plants and boy, do I like to talk about plants. You're educating the medical field. Good for you. Yeah. Yeah. They're, they're just, they're a blessing. They're just so sweet. One of my plants, when I saw last week, one of the ladies over there sent an email to everybody in the building and said, Hey, Farm Girl Farm said this is a price this week. And a ton of people came over. So I sent her, I walked over.
33:56bouquet of flowers for her from the garden. Awesome. We're doing that, yeah. I was gonna say before before I cut you loose because we're at we're over half an hour now but I still have questions. Do you, what do you grow for flowers? You said calendula, what else? Well this is the first year I've ever grown flowers that weren't just for me so I grew dahlias from seed. First year I ever did it.
34:25I think about 40 for me and then I sold the rest and I started Status and oh my gosh, that was probably 100% germination rate. Planted what I needed because I want to try bouquets this year just because when the vegetable plant season ends, it gives me something else to sell. Oh gosh, I started Black Eyed Susan's, yarrow from the seeds that I saved and purple cone flower because I like perennials. I don't like to waste money. Everything came up except for rosemary.
34:54I hate rosemary. It hates me back. I tried a lot of fashion plantings and everyone did not make it, not one. But yeah, I started so many flowers, but I put on my list for next year not to plant as many flowers, Regina. We should have planted more vegetables and herbs in all that flower space, but I love flowers. I just think they're beautiful.
35:19Well, don't eradicate the flower growing. Just grow slightly less and you'll be good. Yeah, but I also did a lot of research this winter because I wanted to learn about dahlias. I've never grown them. And I didn't want to buy them, the tubers, because they weren't in my budget. So I bought the seeds and wow. And then I learned that when you pull up that tuber or tubers in the fall, it's going to be whatever the color of that flower was, that's going to be the color of your next flower.
35:47But the seeds will be so many different colors. And that's how they come up with all these new varieties. When they plant seeds, all of a sudden they have this one. They take it and they breed just that one. So I said, so, you know, I always educate people, this is what you're gonna get. When you dig it up, make sure you dig it up, save those seeds, same, I mean, zinnias, every, zinnias are my favorite. I always have so many seeds every year. But I love, I love flowers. Yeah, zinnias are really fun because they're easy. Yes, yes.
36:17And there's so many different colors and they're great for bouquets. Mm-hmm. They have a long base life. Yeah. We have, we have some growing. Yeah. They're so forgiving. If you forget to water them for a couple of days or a week, they're like, we're still here. We're not going anywhere. They grow like a weed. Exactly. A pretty weed. Absolutely. All right. Well, Regina, I am so excited that you took the time to chat with me today because you proved.
36:47My thing I've been saying on the podcast for almost 10 months now, I think, that anyone can grow produce and flowers and herbs on a small city lot. Yes, ma'am. And you can get that soil amended. Oh, and I forgot to tell you, I did buy this house five years ago. I told you I was renting it initially. Yep. Then I ended up buying it. So it's mine. Yay. Yeah. That's awesome.
37:16Thank you. And I bought it before, excuse me, before the housing market went crazy. Oh, even better. Yes. Good. All right. Regina, thank you so much for your time. I really do appreciate it. You're welcome, Mary. And thank you. You have a wonderful day. Okay. Have a great, have a great day. Thank you. Bye bye.
 

Red Dragonfly Animal Rescue

Today I'm talking with Terry at Red Dragonfly Animal Rescue. You can follow on Facebook as well.
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00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Terry at Red Dragon Fly Animal Rescue. How are you, Terry? I am doing great, Mary. Good. Tell me about yourself and what you do. So we have a large animal rescue in the Panhandle of Florida.
00:28Um, we rescue horses, donkeys, cows. Um, every, every single rescue has a different story of how they wound up on our, on our farm. Um, we also have Muscovy ducks and roosters that have been dropped off because people have found them in their front yard and don't know what to do with them. Um, we're trying to provide a service for animals that have been neglected, abandoned. Um, the equine that have been put into the slaughter pipeline.
00:58which is just devastating. So I know people ask me, you know you can't save them all and I know I can't, but I feel like if I can just make a difference in a few lives and save what I can that I think I found my purpose. Okay, so what brought you to this? So in 2021, we purchased a small five acre lot in Southwest Florida. And we have...
01:27We had a business up in New England and we thought, okay, so this is where we kind of want our last chapter to be. I'm originally from Florida. My husband's originally from Connecticut, but he was on board to relocate. And at the end of 2021, we didn't know what we wanted to do with this piece of land. We know we thought a farm, we thought animals, we thought, you know, we had somewhat of a vision, but it wasn't clear to be, you know, fully transparent.
01:56So my husband called me, I think it was like November, December of 2021 and said, listen, I met this rancher and he's got these baby cows that he's gonna take to slaughter. And I was like, why? And he said, well, he has too many cows and too many males and he's, one's a male, one's a female. Female, he doesn't even know who the mom is. So I said, no, let's bring them to the farm. So I learned how to do barbed wire for the first time in my life.
02:25Um, we fenced in two and a half acres and we had six week old calves. Mary, they cried for their moms on that. Oh yeah. Oh, it broke my heart and we weren't living there, but I was there. I was there every hour. Um, and then six months, not even six months, I'm going to say maybe a couple months later, we got a call that a petting zoo was closing and they had this donkey and, um, that's the story that we were given.
02:55I'm still not 100% sure. I think he was a displaced donkey that nobody wanted. So we transported him to the farm and we thought, oh, donkeys are pasture mates. They're gonna protect the cows. Not this donkey. This donkey wanted to attack the cows. So we had to separate them. They each got their own pasture, their own pole barn, their feed stations, their hay. And I thought, okay, I could do this. And I started doing research. I signed up for
03:25FEMA classes that have, and this is all free, and a lot of folks don't know this, they're available online. They bring teachers to, it's usually like community centers. I was the only lay person in the room. We did a two or three day course. I flew up to Long Island, and it was all first responders on how to deal with animals in a disaster, whether it's a natural disaster or unnatural disaster. So you know, the fires in...
03:54wildfires in California and I didn't know Hurricane Ian was coming to southwest Florida, but what do you do with animals in these situations? What do you, you know, who, who's there to help you? Who has transportation? Where can we relocate them to? So I started to reach out to folks in southwest Florida. I think they kind of had their own established network, and then Hurricane Ian came. We were super lucky, Mary, super lucky that the animals survived.
04:21And the house that we also had near them survived, but not much else survived. I'm sure you saw pictures of, of post-hurricane and the devastation and the, the loss of lives. And it was just, we thought better of maybe not staying there. Um, my husband rides dirt bikes as his mental therapy, and he found some trails up in the Panhandle of Florida. So we came up here on a weekend and he was like, this is gorgeous. Um, and better yet.
04:51affordable. So I said, I will relocate. Here's my thing. I need to live where the animals are. And I want to do this full time as much as we can full time. So I got our 501 C3, which was no easy feat. We transported the animals. We bought a 25 acre. We went from a 2400 square foot house to a 900 square foot barnaminium.
05:21and we promised each other that 80% of our time will be spent outside with the animals. And it is. Since 20, we bought this property last year. Since then, we've rescued two female donkeys that were in the auction cycle. They were both pregnant. We did not know when we brought them here. They came up last year.
05:47Coffee delivered April 21st, a healthy baby. We think she may be a henny, the vet's coming out next month maybe to do some blood work. What is that? What's a henny? It's a cross between a female donkey and a male horse. So when they're thrown into these auctions, and a lot of folks don't know what happens in these auctions, but these equine are put into these horrible situations. They're put in these lots that are very, very small, confined.
06:17They're not fed good feed, they're given poor hay, and then they're paraded in front of people because it's all to make money. At the end of the day, Mary, it's all to make money. And these horses are in horrible, horrible conditions. These donkeys are in horrible condition. You know, they're not, they're not taken care of because it's, nobody's going to keep them on an auction cycle or in one of these fold-over laws for any extended period of time. So it was a kill pen up in North Carolina.
06:46that I reached out to and I brought them home on August 8th. They delivered April 21st and April 30th. We don't know if she was exposed to a horse or a donkey. She just, the baby seems really big to me compared to the other baby donkey. So I was like, I want blood work. Not that it matters. They are sterile. She won't be able to reproduce and that's the, you know, the only thing. Mules or hinnies.
07:14sized by the same size as a horse. They're much stronger. They're much durable. They're super smart. So I'm excited. We'll see what we have. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's funny when mules happen because sometimes they're absolutely gorgeous and sometimes the funniest looking thing you've ever seen. My husband says, so this is going to date us. I think it was a kazoo.
07:43the cartoon when we were younger that had that helmet on. He's like, she looks like she's wearing a helmet. So, we'll see. And then January, the most recent rescues, besides the ducks and the roosters, were five horses from a kill pen in Tennessee that were in horrible, horrible condition. We signed up for two blind horses. The blind horses will never be sold at auction. You know that they're-
08:13They're going to be loaded on that cattle trailer and they're going to be hauled, you know, across the border, um, to slaughter. And it's a very inhumane, very brutal way that they transport them. I do want to mention, I'd love for the audience to look it up. It's called the SAFE Act. It's HR 3475. And, um, it's to, uh, it's to stop the transportation of equine.
08:43for slaughter. So we used to have slaughters statewide or stateside. I'm sorry. It was legal to slaughter horses and donkeys here. And then I want to say 2017, they abolished that. But they didn't abolish the fact that we can still throw them on trailers, drive them pregnant babies, it doesn't matter, shove them into these cattle trailers and and
09:08put them on the road for 20 hours, 24 hours, whatever it takes to get them across the border to Canada or Mexico. I think that if we can ever pass that bill, that would be amazing. So the horses came very sick. They had something called strangles, which is a very highly contagious upper respiratory infection. Our farm was put under quarantine by the state. We had the state inspector come every week.
09:35We had to keep them away from the rest of the rescues. And I had to suit up to give them their medicine, to feed them, to three times a day. It was a very, very long two months. I would do it over again in a heartbeat because there's two blind horses that we promised to rescue turned into five when the driver showed up with 13. And some of the other rescues didn't show up to take what they.
10:04committed to taking my husband. And this is one of the reasons I love him so much. I kept saying, he kept saying, we don't have room. We don't have room. And I said, there, he's not gonna take him back to Tennessee. He's not. So he just untied them and I'm sorry, I get emotional. That's okay. They are the best horses ever. We have.
10:32One, unfortunately, after two months passed away, and that was harder than I expected. And then two have, one's a thoroughbred. Actually, the vet's assistant, we had them at halters, and she noticed right away, she said, I think she's a thoroughbred. They tattooed them on their upper lip so you don't have any markings on them. And sure enough, Maggie has her tattoo, but she has an injured eye. So who's going to buy her at auction?
11:02Um, Winston also has an injured eye and a huge, beautiful gelding protects the mares and then the other two blind girls. We think it was ovidus, which is a common, unfortunately, bacteria that horses get. And eventually to lose their vision. I had the farrier out here the other day and they all stood for him like perfect. So, you know, they were somebody's horse. I just don't think folks know what happens.
11:30when they take their horses to auction. I, you know, they just really, Mary, they have no idea what these horses are gonna go through. Yeah, yep. I don't wanna cut you off, but I have a couple questions out of all of that. Number one, you said that it was, well, I don't know what you said, but it sounds like it was rough getting the 501C3 thing.
12:00Is that because you have to, how does it work? Is it that you have to justify why you want to become that? So you have to have a purpose or a reason or a vision or a mission, whatever you want to call it. I was super worried because everything I read, and I've tried to self-educate as much as I can. In a previous life, I was a pharmaceutical rep and I'm used to studying and learning and I think it's what keeps my head going.
12:29My focus now is animals, so, and how am I going to help them? So I like dove in, how am I going to get this 501c3? Because that's how we're going to get donations when folks could write them off, when, you know, the grants, what can I apply for? And everything I read, Mary, scared me because it said if you don't get it right the first time, the IRS could tell you we're not going to honor the 501c3 for a year or for however long.
12:56So I reached out to a law firm in Fort Myers that specialized in it. Not inexpensive at all. So it took- Not inexpensive, is that what you said? Not inexpensive, very, very inexpensive. So I made payments. I got on a payment plan and I said, this is what I can afford. Each month, can we progress? And it took us a year. And in July of 2023,
13:26I got the official 501C3 and then I registered for my number in the state of Florida. So if you look us up under any charity, Red Dragonfly Animal Rescue is completely legit. We have our vendor credentials, so I can go to Tractor Supply, I can go to the feed store, Ace and I don't have to pay taxes. So there's a lot of benefits to it that folks may not know.
13:52And I just finished, I did a very detailed business plan of where I see us, you know, for the rest of this year. And then where I see us in 24 months and 36 months and 48 months. Um, and now that I have that complete, my next step is to get a grant writer. Um, which I'm now just starting to investigate, but I feel like that will be. We have 25 acres, not all of it is cleared.
14:21We've started to clear on our own and it's time and it's expensive. Fences are expensive, no climb is expensive, and then you're trying to do all this while still maintaining the rescues, you know, still giving them veterinarian care, obviously good feed, everything that they need. And I think grants will definitely help us.
14:48that you have to have to do this. And I was like, oh my God, that's got to get really expensive, really fast. It does. And I, um, I always say my animals will eat before I do. Um, I still work remotely because there it's, it's just such an expense to keep it going that it, I don't. I don't foresee that changing until we can get into this grant world. And, and, um, and I know there's a lot of grants out there because I've researched it. Um,
15:16And I know like tractors, even, you know, private companies have grants. I just need to expand that more, focus more on that and get my applications out, my business plan out and grow that part of it. Yes, the great thing about grants is there are lots of them. The bad part about grants is there's lots of people who would like to get their hands on the lots of grants. Right.
15:42Exactly. Everything I read says be detailed, be detailed. So I'm trying to be as detailed as I can. And I can talk about this Mary all day long. Like I, this is when, you know, I told you I was a pharmaceutical rep when I was young, I was a flight attendant, I worked with my husband's business. You know when you find your purpose, you really, it's in your heart. It's not, I tell people it's the hardest job I've ever done physically and emotionally.
16:12And I've raised kids, I've done all that. But the fulfillment you get out of all that hard work, I've never, there's nothing you can compare it to. Yeah, you found your passion. This is what you want to be doing and what you think that you were meant to be doing. This is your calling. Absolutely, absolutely. And on that note, I think that what you're doing is amazing.
16:40and I think that there's a reason for it. But I'm sure that you get pushback from people about why are you doing this?
16:49Okay, so what I was saying is I think that what you're doing is amazing and I think it's important, but I'm sure that you probably get pushback from people about why are you doing this? Oh yes. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Why am I doing this? Besides my own purpose and my own goals? I think these animals need it. I think people need to be educated. I think people just don't know.
17:19they don't realize, for example, where these donkeys could wind up. Oscar's Place is a great sanctuary in California that I've reached out to and I've communicated, and I've tried to learn from other sanctuaries and learning from other rescues. We've done some University of Florida veterinarians classes online on how to handle large animals and really get to learn more about them. I feel like if more people were aware,
17:48of what these animals go through, I think people would say, no, we're not going to do this. Let's stop this. Let's not transport them. Let's, you know, let's find them. There's one retirement home for horses in the state of Florida in Gainesville. They have 300 acres and they're full and they try to, you know, limit who they take only working horses. People buy a horse for their kids and they think we're going to have a trail horse and then they lose their sight.
18:17And that's it, we're done. I don't want them on my feed, Bill. It's still a living, breathing creature. I've had quite a few people visit the rescue. I try and do one-on-one. Like we had a little boy yesterday who's homeschooled, who came out. We did a special project. So I'm trying to do natural mosquito control in Florida. So we went and gathered gambusia fish from a retaining pond to put in the horse troughs that eat the mosquito larvae.
18:46But it was my opportunity at age nine, he's not gonna really understand what these horses go through and how he could make a difference. But his mom did and she was shocked. She was like, I had no idea. And these are folks that are professionals, are educated, consider themselves knowledgeable. It's just, for lack of a better word, a seedy or shady side of the horse business and the donkey business.
19:15the cattle industry that folks don't know. I'm never gonna tell anybody what to eat, what not to eat, that is not my place. There's humane ways to do it. There's ways that you're not, you know, putting 800 chickens in a 12 by 12 room, you know, feeding them antibiotics to get them to grow so you can sell more chickens. You could do it in a humane way. You could.
19:43you could have cattle in a humane way. You could have dairy farms in a humane way without dragging those babies away from mamas right away. I think it's all education and opening our eyes and maybe going back to simpler times when it wasn't more money, more things, more... I think that's my why, is to educate people. Okay. All right, that seems reasonable to me.
20:13Um, I have, I have another question. What's the, what's the insect that I'm hearing in the background? Um, so you hear crickets at night when the sun sets, you hear frogs, but you may hear roosters. Yeah. Okay. So we, yeah. So we, um, we just rescued cowboy, um, who's a beautiful, beautiful rooster who wound up in a very, um, in a historical district in a town nearby us. And.
20:42the lady found this on the internet, I guess, or somebody gave her her phone number and she called me and she's like, I have him in my bathroom and I don't think I can keep him in my bathroom. I'm like, yeah, I don't think that's a good idea. So she came out a couple of days later and she was so funny because she had gotten attached to the rooster and she was like, what if he doesn't get along? What if he runs away? I said, well, we have 25 acres and we're gonna feed him.
21:11I don't think he'll run away. And we have probably about, I don't know, how many Muscovy ducks and we have other roosters. He has taken the charge and I think he's part duck. He keeps all the ducks together every night and then the ducks will go down to the pond and he gets very upset and then he kind of hangs his head and goes inside the barn like he's done his job and can't help them anymore. So I think you hear cowboys, what I think you hear.
21:37Yeah, I just, it sounds like cicadas and I didn't know if you guys had the cicadas down there this year. And I know you guys had one of the years, right? We don't. Oh. No, we don't have it here in Minnesota, but we will at some point, but not this year. No, I think you hear the crickets, the frogs, and probably cowboy. Okay, I think it's crickets. We don't have any crickets here yet. They don't really start singing until end of June, usually. We have some big ones.
22:07I don't know the difference between crickets and grasshoppers, but we have a lot of them. Yeah, we'll have both soon. The mosquitoes just arrived yesterday, so that's lovely. So muskoby ducks are the best bug-eating ducks because I know you have a homestead, correct? We do. Okay. So your challenge is to keep them out of your produce or plants that they love to eat.
22:36and I'm trying to gambush a fish. I don't know if you have any standing water, but they'll eat the larvae. Yeah, we have. It's funny because last summer we had no standing water, therefore we had no mosquitoes. And it has rained for a week straight here off and on. And it's been a very wet spring. And so I stepped outside this morning to grab the dog and got bit twice by mosquitoes. I was like, oh, great.
23:05they're back. But we don't have any standing water on our property, but there's a wildlife preserve land piece down the road. And the Minnesota River is like three and a half miles from us. So I don't think that doing anything is really going to get rid of the mosquitoes that come to our place.
23:35vicious. They're just vicious. I did a walk around last night. I do a walk around and check all the gates and the donkeys are very bright and have figured out how to open the gates so we put chains on them too. Horseflies all of a sudden, like ginormous horseflies. So I went inside and I'm like, why? We too have had a lot of water and behind the property we have Florida swamp. And that's where they lay their eggs is in that marshy, you know,
24:04And I'm like, how do you even control that? Mm-hmm. You don't and bugs are bugs. There's always going to be bugs. Yep. And then there's great new dragonflies.
24:20Yes, yes. The dragonflies will help here in a couple of weeks. They'll be back too. Good. And we have really beautiful ones. We have like these blue, like cross between blue and green dragonflies. And every time I see them, I'm just like, I just have to watch you for a while. They're so pretty. I completely understand. And that's one of the joys of having a homestead or a farm is that...
24:47you get to stop and look at the things that are around you. It slows you down. I came from a very fast paced life and there's always gonna be work to be done on the farm. Like I've made my peace with that, but when I'm feeling stressed, I grab a brush and I just head out to one of the paddocks and I'm like, we're gonna brush you today, we're gonna spend some time and it just kinda slows you down.
25:16Yeah, and it's a one task thing. You're focused on that for the time that you're doing it. It's great. I love, I don't have any animals other than the dog and the barn cats and chickens. So I don't have a horse or a donkey to go brush out, but I do have two male adults who I need to keep fed in the house. And so...
25:41Cooking is my zen. It's where I have one task that I'm focused on for the time that I'm doing it. I get it. Yeah, I think everybody needs something they love to do where they're just doing that one thing for at least 20 minutes. That's what I think. Yeah, yeah.
26:01So I don't know how old you are, which means that I don't know how long you want to continue to do this animal rescue thing. So this is our final chapter. In my late 50s, my husband's a year older than me. And I've talked to the kids, we have together four grown boys of, you know, who would think about taking this over? Because I want it to be a legacy if at all possible.
26:30If there's some, and this is going to sound horrible and I don't want it to sound horrible. If for some reason this stops after I stop on this planet, I've told them all, if you can't rehome them, they cannot go to auction, they cannot be sold off, they cannot, I almost rather them be euthanized with me because it's just, I got them out of this situation. Let's not put them back in that situation.
27:00Yes, and it's a hard thing to think about. It's a hard thing to talk about. No, it's something that crosses our minds. I'm not 25 anymore. Somebody reached out to us, and I said, at this time, I can't make a commitment. But let's see where we are in a couple of years. She's in her 60s. She's got a donkey sanctuary in Texas. And all her kids told her, we want no part of this. We don't want it. We don't like it.
27:29So she wants to re-home, I think she's got 12 donkeys, she wants to re-home them before she passes on, or at least have a sanctuary or rescue that says, I can take the majority of them, or, you know, she wants that to be set before she moves on. So it's a big commitment. It's an obligation. You have these, you know, living, breathing creatures that completely depend on you. So, you know, if the right person comes along,
27:57I think we were the right people to buy this property. The folks that sold this property were older. They had built it as an equine. They had a couple horses on it for their daughter. And they wanted the right folks to buy it. They still come visit us. They come visit us every month. And they're, you know, they asked me to name one of the baby donkeys after. So I could see that. I can see us passing on this.
28:26Hopefully one of the kids, but if not somebody that wants to embrace it and continue this mission because it's not easy. No, no. I am not doing it and I know damn well it's not easy. Running any kind of rescue or sanctuary or refuge for animals is a huge undertaking and kudos to you for doing it because I could not do it. I...
28:53I am not young enough, I am not patient enough, and I am not determined enough to do what you're doing. I am determined enough to talk to you about what you're doing though, so that's good news. Because you're helping me spread my passion and you're helping me spread the information and the education that folks need to learn about. Yeah, exactly. And that's what the podcast is all about. It's about letting people hear about what other people are doing, whether it's growing
29:23I don't know, raising animals for food or whatever they're doing because you guys are brilliant people doing amazing things and there's so little chance for you to get the word out to the public and I want people to know. Thank you. I appreciate this from the bottom of my heart. We had a booth at the Florida State Fair in November for a few days.
29:48just to raise awareness. And we're trying to figure out, we're trying to figure out different things. How are we gonna raise awareness? How are we going to promote the cause? How are we gonna get more support? And I met some really great people. My husband's like, we're doing what? And I'm like, let's make some t-shirts and let's share our story. And I actually met a couple of people that are volunteers at the rescue now that I could not let, you know, they come out every other Saturday and they help me bathe horses and...
30:18They help me spray and they help me drag fields and you know, it's all about networking. I really think it's all about networking. But life is about networking. Yes, because one person cannot do anything alone. Except maybe use the bathroom. That's a good time to be alone. But other than that, if you're doing something, many hands make light work. Absolutely. And I feel like, I was going to say, I feel like the more love the animals feel, the better for them.
30:48Yeah. So I was going to ask you at the beginning, but I got sidetracked. So I was listening to your story. How come it's a red dragonfly animal rescue? How did you name it? My sister and I were walking in the little farm that we had in southwest Florida, and there was red dragonflies everywhere. And I thought I've never seen a red dragonfly that I remember. And my sister was kind of like, this is strange. So, of course, we took out our phones and we're like this. Somebody is sending us a sign. And yeah.
31:16The story behind the red dragonfly is when you see it, if you're going through a moment of despair or hard times, it's a sign that there's better times coming. Just hang in there, better times are coming. And it was like an epiphany. It was like, this is it. You know, cause I had talked about, my dad had recently passed away. Let's name it after him. Let's name it, you know, maybe after a location. And the minute I saw what that meant, to me, it was a given. And it's become our mission statement.
31:45You know, we are going to take these animals from really bad situations and show them love and kindness and, you know, care and nutrition and give them what they deserve. Those horses that we rescued, I say this to everybody who comes on the farm, those horses we rescued in January have every reason to be aggressive, to be mean, to be, you know,
32:14act up, they are the sweetest. One of them, I think, thinks is a dog because he always licks me when I go into the paddock. I think they appreciate and they know the difference between the situation they were in and what they've come into. And I feel like, you know, the red dragonfly just is that symbol that I want folks to know what we're offering these animals.
32:41Yeah, I love that. I didn't even know red dragonflies existed. So again, learn something new. And I'm talking to people on the podcast. Mary, you're going to go outside and you're going to see all your blue green and there'll be a red one. I promise you because I was like, wow. And I believe in, I believe in science. I believe that the universe sends you signs to tell you the right place at the right time. And the last father's day was hard for me.
33:08And I took a walk, we're up against the Apalachicola State Forest, and my son came to visit me, and we took a walk through there. And there was red dragonflies everywhere. I mean, he's the one that's with that mom. And I said, I know. We're where we need to be. I'm where I need to be. Yeah. And you're right. I think that your horses do understand because, and I've talked about this before, but I'm going to share it again, because it's what I do. I share the stories over and over again.
33:36We adopted a cat from the Humane Society. And they told us that he was two years old and that he was feral, stray, and would never be friendly, ever. And basically take him home, leave him in his carrier, give him some food and water, and let him be in his carrier for a day, like 24 hours, and then let him out wherever he's going to live. And leave him alone, basically. We want him for a barn cat.
34:06And this cat is in love with us now, because we feed him and we let him come to us and we pet him. He hates being held. He will growl the entire time. So I think you're right. I think that animals know that if they've been mistreated, if you can build trust with them, they will become friendly and kind. Trust. I think that's the key word, Mary. I think it's...
34:36you showed that cat that he could trust you. Yeah. And we named him Satan because he was full of Spitfire when we got him. He was not a happy boy. So his name is Satan, but I call him Lucy in my head for Lucifer because Lucy seems nicer than Satan. I like that a lot. How long have you had him?
35:05Three years now? Yeah. It doesn't happen overnight. No, and my son was the one who really bonded with him and it took him about three months for the cat to be nice to him. That's about right. So it was pretty quick. It was a pretty quick term. Yeah. And when I... Yeah, he's a lovely kitty. I'm sure he is. When what? When I say they're super nice and non-aggressive. It's not that I haven't been kicked.
35:35and I haven't been pushed and I haven't been because they still get scared, they still get spooked, especially the blind horses. It's not all super, but that's how they communicate. When you try and hold him, hold Lucy, and he doesn't wanna be held, that's how he tells you. I'm gonna growl at you to show you I don't have hands to push you away. That's the way he shares with you that, okay, you can feed me, you can pet me, but this is where I'm gonna draw the line.
36:04Yeah, I don't hold him. I don't want to get scratched and he's telling me that he doesn't want to be held and I respect that. My son however, he likes holding him and playing with him and the cat puts up with it. He hasn't actually scratched him yet. So we're good. Good. Good. But yeah, it's I don't know. I feel like I'm gonna sound like a Pollyanna for a minute. I feel like if people would just be kind and
36:34follow the people's lead that they're trying to know and same thing with the animals, things would be a lot better. I am going to put a caveat on that in that there are people who will lead you down paths you don't want to go. But if people could just not be mean and try to understand the other person's experience before they put their experience on top of it.
37:02maybe the world would be a better place. Absolutely. I could not agree with you more. Walk a mile in somebody's shoes before you pass judgment. It's so easy for us to be short with each other. You know, summer's here, it's hot, the kids are running around. You can have an excuse to be mean. You can have an excuse to be short every single day. Every single day. It's choosing not to be and working on it.
37:32Yeah, I, my husband thinks that I am a terribly soft hearted person and he thinks that it's a good thing, but that's what he thinks. And it's because when I was a kid, I was teased a lot. I am, I was very tall, very quickly. I did not come into a womanly figure until I got pregnant with my first kid. I had pitch black hair, bright blue eyes and very pale skin. This did not go over well in school.
38:00And I got teased a lot and I hated every minute of it. And my way of coping with it was to try to consider the other person's life and where they were coming from. Because I couldn't be mean and I wasn't big enough to fight back. So my coping mechanism was they must have a really terrible life at home or something must be wrong. And I think it molded who I became as an adult because when I see people acting in a not so great way,
38:29I'm like, huh, they must be having a bad day. I wonder what's going on. I wonder who they're married to. Or I wonder what's at work. Yeah, or do they have a really bad headache and it's making them cranky or something? Because that's how I dealt with it as a kid. And my husband is like, you always are willing to give people to benefit of the doubt. And I'm like, until I don't. Yeah. Once I'm done, I'm done, but I'm gonna try. With me as well.
38:59I used to pack extra lunches for my kids and tell them, I want you to sit with a kid that doesn't have a friend. I need you to sit with a kid who's sitting alone in the lunchroom. Mark my words, just sit with that kid. And my three boys have developed lifelong relationships because they chose to sit next to somebody that maybe nobody else would for whatever reason. They look different, they smell different. Kids are mean. They are, they are mean.
39:27I do believe the adults that we are today, there were hints of it in the beginning and I think we are formed into who we are today by things that happened in our childhood. And I have friends that, you know, as adult friends, I never talked about this really out loud about the rescue and animals that kept going. Is this a phase? Are we going through a phase? I'll support you, Terry.
39:56I kept saying, no, my mom and my sister, who obviously have known me my whole life, not surprised in the least. And they laugh and they're like, you were the kid that would make dad stop to pick up the turtle and get it across the road. You were the kid in fifth grade that said, I'll take the hamster home. My mom won't care. You were the kid that showed up in the backyard with, you know, six ducks because you found them on the side of the pond and you couldn't find their mom. And it's just who I've been my whole life.
40:27So this to me is just a natural, I'm an adult, I can make my own decisions because I don't have my parents to ask, can I keep the dog? Can I keep the cat? Can I keep the duck? I have my own finances and I have an incredibly supportive husband. I don't think he would choose this lifestyle if he was giving his, but he's the first one to say, where do you need the next fence? What do you need me to clear? Where do you need me? And he's...
40:56know, he'll halt your horse and he'll help me lead them and he'll do whatever without and I can't ask for more. I really can't. You are blessed because not every husband would do that. I know. I know. All right, Terri. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. I appreciate you, Terri. Thank you. I was like...
41:23We're at like 42 minutes, so I'm gonna let you go. I'm sure you have work to do. Yeah, that's okay. It's always worth it. All right. Yes, there is. All right, Terri, thank you again. Have a great day. Thank you. Bye.
 

Green Roots Farm

Today I'm talking with Liz at Green Roots Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well.
https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00This is Mary Lewis at a tiny homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Liz at Green Roots Farm. Hi Liz, how are you? I'm well, thanks for having me, Mary. Sure, you're in between, you said, Mankato and New Ulm? Yes, that's where I'm located, that's where my little farm is. Okay.
00:27Awesome. So tell me about yourself and Green Roots Farm. Well, I am a master gardener. I've been on this 10 acre spot for less than 10 years. I started this by just trying to be self sufficient and support, you know, healthy food for my family. And then it became much more of a passion. And I raise
00:55beef cattle, I raise chickens and pork, everything. So I don't leave the farm very often. Wow, okay. That's a lot of things from just starting out to maybe do a little gardening. Yeah, it's pretty large. We just tripled the size. So it was 50 by 100 feet, so now it's 50 by 300.
01:25Yeah, so did you have a background in this before you started it? Uh, no, not particularly. My mother was a very avid flower gardener, master gardener, so I grew up kind of with that, but I didn't have a green thumb until I was probably into my 30s. Okay, huh.
01:52That's really interesting because typically when people get this deep into it, they've had a lot in their growing up years with it. And I get what you said about your mom, but the beef cattle are a whole different thing. Yeah, it's a learn as you go process. And thank goodness I've had some wonderful teachers around me to kind of show me the ropes. I don't do a lot at the time, but I do enough to...
02:21support our family and others who want to buy. Very nice. Okay, so you have a CSA. How's that going this year for signups? I am currently working on getting the website ready so that I can take the signups online. Just to make things easier, but I'm setting up some different markets. Hopefully the Minneapolis Farmers Market.
02:51and will be in the late Crystal Farmer's Market, hopefully this Friday. And then there'll be signups in person at those times. Okay. Thank God for Farmer's Markets. We decided not to do a CSA this year because we had so few people sign up last year. I think part of it was that money was really tight last year and people were leaving about the initial outlay without the guarantee that...
03:19that they needed to be sure they were going to get what they paid for because everyone knows that not all the crops succeed. So we decided that we would do the farmers market last summer and that went really well and my husband's gone to the first two this year and done fairly well with no produce. He sold candles and soaps and lip balms and did pretty well.
03:45So again, thank you. We make all that stuff too. It's wonderful. Thank God for farmers markets, yes. Yeah, we're doing the farmers market and the CSA and we use all of the animal products to do natural products also. So fat from the pigs become lard and I make soap with that. There's all kinds of wonderful fun medicinal things to do out on the farm as well. Do you forage?
04:15Do you forage your property? Yes? I do. Yep. Awesome. So I got to know, are you originally from Minnesota? I am. Okay. You sound slightly Canadian. I was wondering if maybe you were a transplant. No, I am born in the cities and then grew up down in the Mankato-Nuwam area. Okay. Well, you have some Canadian lilt to your accent. And I was like...
04:43Maybe she's not from Minnesota. Nope. I'm here. Okay. Well, I'm not from Minnesota at all, and I don't sound like I'm from anywhere, so I'm the last one to talk about accents.
04:57There's nothing wrong with that. Blend in. Yep. You gotta hide. You gotta hide in with people. You gotta become like everybody else. Where are you from? Huh? Where are you from? I'm from Maine originally. Oh, wonderful. Yep. And I had to drop the accent because apparently it's not great to have a New England accent here.
05:22Hmm. Yeah, I can see. I can see how that would go. It did not go well. So I just I just spent a whole year of my life eradicating any trace of New England accent in my voice. And it's gone. It's completely gone. And that's okay. Yeah, no, you sound...there's no accent. Yeah, it's pretty clean. I like it a lot. Okay, so
05:52What else can I ask you? Why is it called Green Roots Farm?
05:57Um, I spent some time with the naming and it's a, it's a family run farm. It's me and my, and my kids that do most of the work. And I wanted to do something with, with that name, but I kind of ended up with. Just the roots was really important to me. I'm also a therapist and I run a private practice and coming into.
06:26the root of things was really important. And then also how healing, gardening and growing things can be was also another passion of mine also. So trying to spread the word on that for other people to get into and to enjoy is creative. It touches all of the five senses. If you let it,
06:57amazingly transformational. Okay. I love knowing how people came up with the names because some of them are really, really creative and some of them are really, really meaningful. And sometimes it's both, which is nice. Um, so how's your planting been going this spring? Cause we just finally got our garden planted because it was a big mud puddle for a week.
07:25Oh yes, I had to have mine. I had to work with the soil for a while to get it to my preference level, I would say. But I'm in full plant mode, almost everything's in, but I do a lot of successive planting. So some of that is just kind of babysitting plants and other things and seedlings until they're ready to be transplanted. So it's constant.
07:55Yes, it never ends. My husband is doing succession planting this year seriously for the first time, mostly because he decided that he wanted to grow only the things that he knows will sell like tomatoes and cucumbers and green beans and peas. We sold a ton of peas last year, sugar peas, sugar snap peas, I guess. And he had only planted one set.
08:24You know, it was like a big long row and they were sold out in two weekends. And so he said, I'm gonna, I'm gonna put peas in now. And then in like three weeks, I'm gonna put more peas in. And then three weeks after that, more peas. And I said, okay, so what you're telling me is if they don't sell, I'm going to be eating a lot of peas this winter. And he laughed cause he doesn't like, he doesn't like green veggies at all. He likes to grow them, but he doesn't like to eat them. That's interesting.
08:51No, it's frustrating, but yes, yes, it's interesting. Yes. So he's, he's doing that. I love that. I, I've got, I think 10 varieties at least of different tomatoes. And I like to grow rare things like black carrots and black tomatoes and the, you know, foot long or two foot long manjapookee carrots. There's.
09:20I find a lot of enjoyment in finding things that are hard to find and then growing it. Yes. Have you tried growing the zebra tomatoes, the zebra striped tomatoes? I have not, but I think my mother may have. Yeah, they're a real thing. We grew them one year and they're finicky. They want to split when it gets too hot, but they're yummy. So.
09:46You might want to just stretch marks. Don't you worry about those? Yeah, you might want to you might want to pick up some seeds and try that because they were really really pretty. I will do that. Yeah. Um, we're trying a new thing this year. We're starting honey berry plants. Oh, yummy. You have you tried them? Are they yummy? Are they good? They are. Okay. Yeah. Because we've never grown them before and I've never tried one and
10:15A lady that I interviewed a few weeks ago graciously sent me one plant of two different varieties. So one of each, the lacrosse pollinate, and we just got them in the ground. So we're excited about that for next year. This is exciting. Yep, because no one around here grows them that I know of.
10:39You do now. Yes, exactly. No one but us that I know of grows them around here. We're hoping that they will spread out and if it goes well, we'll get some more and we can sell honey berries at the farmers market. Oh, wonderful. So we'll introduce, we'll introduce LaSore to honey berries. It'll be great. Nice. I've got a large patch of elderberries, black elderberries. That should be.
11:08I don't know anybody else who's got, you know, quite a lot of those, at least in this area. But I think those would be a good sell this year too. Healthy, everybody likes it. Yeah, do you put netting over the trees so the birds don't get the berries? I just harvest quickly. Uh huh, yeah. We have two. We have two elderberries. Elderberry trees in our tree line. And I can't get to the berries before the birds get them.
11:38I'm not fast enough. The birds know where they are. Yeah, yeah, that is true. Yeah, you can do some netting to help with that. Yeah, I have to order some netting because we don't have any that will work right now. So I have to figure out what to use.
12:00So but that's okay. It's only two trees and I don't really use elderberry a whole lot. So so if we don't get them It's okay. The birds can have them. We want a healthy ecosystem, right? Yep Okay, it said you said it's you and your kids. So are your kids teenagers or are they adults or are they little I? Have an adult son and then I have a ten-year-old. Oh wow awesome. That are yeah, so they've been
12:29They've been out in the dirt for a while. I have a daughter also who's 26, but she lives up in Northern Minnesota right now, so she's not able to help hands on. Okay. So the boys help out is what you're saying. Almost definitely. The older boy and his crew have been diligently cleaning out the barn and working on fencing because we've got herd animals.
12:58who like to escape sometimes. That's amazing that they help. Our youngest still lives with us and he helps on our little homestead too. And I can't tell you how invaluable his help is. Okay, so with the beef cattle, cattle? I was told it's rude to ask how many head of cattle people have.
13:26So you don't have to tell me the exact number, but do you have like a couple or do you have a lot of cattle? Right now, all the cattle that I have are in the freezer. Ah. Or full. So yeah, hopefully be getting some calves here soon. Okay, so you don't- I don't do a ton, no, because I have my horses and cattle together and pigs sometimes will run out with them because I've raised some heritage breed.
13:56pigs and it's the most delicious, beautifully rich and red. But it's, yeah, so they all really spend a lot of time together. So I don't, plus I don't have, you know, I don't have old farmer money. So I can't go out and buy just a herd. Yeah, I just, I wanted to get an idea because I was going to ask you if you breed your cattle, but if you just, if you just pick up a couple calves and grow them out for the meat for you.
14:26then you wouldn't need to breed cattle. Right, yeah, not at this time. Okay. That's, you gotta keep the bull separate. It's just a whole, it's a whole process I don't need. It's a whole thing, it sure is. Okay, so have you tried sheep or goats at all? Yeah, I have goats. Currently have goats. They work, they've done a pretty good job of.
14:54staying in the grove and eating out a lot of the invasive plants that are kind of coming up in there and they're slowly doing their job. They much prefer green but they'll settle for greens. Yeah if they're hungry they'll eat. Yes they will. The barn, the siding, whatever they can find. Yep I feel like okay
15:21I was talking with a guy a couple weeks ago who has a whole bunch of chickens and they are very, he and his family are very, very good about the entire cycle of chicken from egg to stew pot to feeding the bones and the eggshells back to the chickens. So it's a full circle thing. And he was telling me about it. I was like, you know, chickens may be the most versatile farm animal.
15:51or bird, fowl, whatever, to have on your farm. And I think the next thing in line is goats. I really do because you can milk them, you can eat the meat, they can help clear your land, and that's almost a full circle thing too, because if they're eating off the land and then you're eating the goat, it's a full circle thing. Absolutely, and that's pretty much how we do things here.
16:21Full cycle, I raise meat chickens, I raise guineas, regular egg layers, I've got, I've had peacocks, I've got some about to hatch out hopefully, turkeys, now bronze turkeys, I got some bronze turkeys years ago as potential Thanksgiving meals. And the bronze turkeys started.
16:49Following me around like I was mommy pretty quickly. So they They became off limits. They became pets and they are They they can be a therapy animal. I found them to be as therapeutic as horses and and other herd animals Yes, I'm starting to learn that any any living being can be a therapy being cuz um
17:18I don't know what I was watching, but some teenage girl had a gecko and she referred to it as her therapy lizard. And I was like, oh, I had never thought of a reptile being a therapy thing. And I think it's about love.
17:39I think that therapy emotionally supports animals in quotation marks, whether it's a bird or a lizard or a turtle or a dog or a horse or whatever. It's just about caring for something. Oh, absolutely. Having empathy, right? That's where I think farm life shows you that empathy, but also the brutality of nature sometimes. For example, my 10-year-old.
18:09is out right now in the living room where he might even have it outside. He saved one of the little meat chicks I thought was going to have to be put down. He ended up saving it and now is following him everywhere. All over. It's adorable. But then right before this phone call, I had to try to give CPR on a kitten and it didn't make it. So it is, yeah, it teaches you the harsh reality of loss.
18:38but also a way to bond and create love that isn't through language. Yes, exactly. So you mentioned kittens. We have barn kittens right now too. And one of them died at two weeks old. And I had already had this happen last year with another litter. So it didn't hurt
19:08It's so sad when they're so little and they just don't make it. Yeah, it's, it's hard to watch what I've, I think when I initially started doing this, I probably was more sensitive to that. And over time now, you know, I still honor the animal and its life, but it doesn't, it doesn't hurt as much because I know that it's just nature's way. And anytime we
19:36We decide Mother Nature's wrong, she shows us. Oh, yes, every damn time. Mm-hmm. Yup. Um, so, so kittens leads to cats, which leads me to dogs. Do you have any guardian dogs? I have, well, I don't know if I call them guardians. One's probably in bed right now. I have two giant English Mastiff females, a mother and daughter. And they eat way more than I do. They're, they're-
20:05Pretty big, but they're gentle giants, at least with us. Yeah. They're pretty good around the farm. Mastiffs are beautiful. Yeah, they're. I don't want one that's too big for me, but they're so pretty. Yeah, they are. They're sweet. They're drool monsters, though. Oh yeah. Definitely. Yup. I can't have anything else. I really like St. Bernard's. I really like Great Pyrenees. I really like mastiffs, but my dog is a mini Australian Shepherd, and she does not drool.
20:35Oh, she's got energy though, I bet. And she's actually a weird one. She's very laid back. I swear she has the soul of a Labrador retriever. She's very calm most of the time. I haven't met a calm lab in my life. Oh, I have like five of them and they were all just big puddles in on the couch who wanted to be petted. So she's got that she's she's channeling them.
21:03the ones that I knew. She'd be along with my dog, Sam. That's what they do. Yeah. She's amazing. And I'm not going to talk too much about her because I talk about her on the podcast all the time. I released one, I'm releasing one episode a day this week. And I think I talked about her in the one this morning. But I think the next four, there's very little talk of Maggie because I know that it can get obnoxious listening to someone talk about their pet all the time.
21:33But the reason that I wanted to work her in today is because her former owners, our friends own Maggie's parents. And then they got a new mini Australian Shepherd a year or so ago. And that one just had puppies yesterday. So I got to see baby mini Australian Shepherds on their Facebook page today. I was like, puppies!
22:01Mini minis. I love them so much. I would love to get another one, but I am not prepared for the velociraptor stage again yet. Yeah, no, I can't do that. I do miss puppy breath though. Yep, me too, but luckily Maggie still smells like a puppy. She'll be four in August and she still smells like a puppy, so I'm good with that. I love it. Yep. So that's it for Maggie talk today. I don't want to...
22:30I don't want to bore my listeners again with Maggie. But whatever. Anyway, so let me see. Do you love the life you have chosen?
22:46Yes. It took a long time to get to this point. I decided many years ago that I didn't want to have a boss ever again. And that I was going to be the controller of my life, whether it led me into failure or it led me into success, but I needed to live authentically. And so I started a therapy practice and I... I...
23:16started the farming and it's my sanctuary. It's definitely where I'm supposed to be. It's your therapy. You're right, it is. It's also my stress. Yeah, but it's a whole different kind of stress. Oh yeah, if you followed me around all day, it would be mostly me talking to the animals,
23:45swearing at the animals, them swearing at it. It's an interesting vibe out here. All I can see in my head is the DNA helix. Where the strands wind around each other. That's what I'm seeing when you say the juxtaposition between talking to the animals and swearing at the animals. It's like having kids.
24:14It is. It absolutely is. I call the dog kid all the time and I call the kittens babies all the time. I love it. Yeah we have one kitten he is white with like beige spots and a beige crown. His ears are beige and then down over his eyes is beige and then his mouth is white and his name is tilt because he was walking around with his head slightly tilted for a couple weeks.
24:44He was out playing with his siblings today and he was not tilting anymore. Ah, what are you gonna call him now? I don't know. And... Nah, you gotta keep calling him Tilt. I like it. Yeah, yeah, and I mentioned to my son, I said we're gonna have to change his name and he was like, no, he's always gonna be Tilt. We're keeping that one. I was like, oh, okay, sorry. So Tilt. Tilt is his name. I love it. Yep, and he's a long... Sounds like a pretty cat.
25:12He's a long haired cat too. Yeah, I had a black long haired, just well born on Easter. And I've got a long haired orange. Oh, so pretty. Oh yeah. And it's getting blonde. It's a kitten and it's blonding out. I haven't seen that before. It's pretty. So nice. See, this is the problem with kittens. They're so cute. You want to like name them all and keep them all and you can't keep.
25:4210,000 kittens because they don't stay kittens. Oh no, especially on the farm. If you have lot tamales or multiple litters, then they're fighting and fighting over food, fighting over territory. It's, it can be a lot. Yes, yes it can. And we have, we're gonna keep tilt, but we have three females that I have to find homes for. Three female kittens. So I'm working on it. It's the right time of year for people to be looking.
26:10to get a kitten. Oh, most definitely. So hopefully they'll have homes because otherwise I don't know what I'm going to do with them and it's probably not going to be pretty if I have to do the last resort thing. I don't want to do that. So I'm looking for homes for three female kittens right now. Yes.
26:32I think there's, it pulls something on Facebook or Pregless, they should go fairly quickly. Yeah, we had two go become barn cats. They're barn kittens and the lady wanted barn cats and I said they're eight weeks old and they're kittens but they're barn kittens. They've been raised in the pole barn by their mama. I said, will that work? And she's like, that's perfect. I said, okay. So two of the six went already to their new home.
27:02Oh, wonderful. Yes, I was very excited to let them go because they needed to go. They all need to go. We've got to get the mama cat spayed, but I've been trying to get her and the one daughter that we kept from her litter last fall into a lower cost spay program for barn cats. Cannot get an appointment anywhere.
27:32Yeah, COVID really kind of took a hit on that because they stopped doing that during COVID. I think that's when, at least in our neck of the country down here, there were multiple kittens, multiple letters, and everybody had 13 to 30 kittens in their farms just trying to find homes. It's been difficult, I think, for some of those programs that maybe catch up with some of the rural need.
28:02Yeah. Yeah. And I checked with our vet that sees our dog and it's like $300 to spay a cat. Yeah, that's, that's a lot for a free cat. Ah, it's a lot. It's a lot of money right now. So in the meantime, we have kittens. So, and I love them. They're great, but we have to rectify this situation sooner than later, sooner than next spring for sure.
28:31Yes, I agree. I just have them all year long. It doesn't seem to matter if it's spring, fall, winter. They don't care. Oh, okay. Well, the mama cat did not get pregnant again until February, and that was when it warmed up to the unseasonably warm spring temperatures. And sure as shit, we've got getting since February. Oh my god.
28:58So anyway, kittens, bad plan. We messed up. We should have had her fixed last year, but again, $300. So don't have $300 to just throw at a cat right now. I didn't hear you. So that's also a part of homesteading life is that sometimes the money is rolling in and sometimes the money is not rolling in. That's right. So, but anyway, instead of talking about the dog, we're talking about cats. I'm all in on this. Okay.
29:28Is this your plan for the rest of your life, doing what you're doing? Yeah, for now. I think I like being in the dirt right now. And I've kind of hired a management team to take over and run my therapy practice. And I've got another farm business that I might be looking into, but this is definitely, yeah, what I'd like to do.
29:58as many people as I can. Okay, and you said that you are a therapist. Do you have like a specific, I don't know what the word is, do you do therapy with all ages or do you do kids or teenagers or adults or what? Yeah, so I generally don't work with children, although I do have some other providers that do.
30:25I tend to work with adults and generally adult males. I've worked with, I've worked kind of in the state systems, working with civilly committed, usually men. So I have a very interesting skill set in dealing with men who abuse. I've got anger management programs and domestic abuse program. So I'm again, trying to reach people who...
30:53who need these services but may not be otherwise able to get them, you know, unless they're online. So, you are doing good things in your professional life and good things in your personal life. That's great. Trying. Good. I love people like you who are trying to make the world a better place. It just makes me happy. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. You're welcome.
31:23You're welcome. All right, well, it's been half an hour. That was super fast, Liz. It must have been really interesting. We should do this again. Yes, we should. I should narrow it down and ask you something, like pick something and we'll delve deep into it another time. Absolutely. All right, awesome. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. You're welcome. May I give out my website? Yes. Okay, my...
31:50site for the farm business is greenrootsfarm.org. You can reach me at Liz at greenrootsfarm.org and the therapy practice is Comp Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yep. Bye. Bye.
 

Echo Springs Farm

Today I'm talking with Echo and Jonathan at Echo Springs Farm.
https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Echo and Jonathan at Echo Springs Farm. Good evening, guys. How are you? Good evening. Good. Tell me about yourselves.
00:26So Jonathan and I, we met in 2010. We were both active in 4-H here in Pennsylvania and we were on the 4-H State Council. So we were selected as a group of, there was six of us that were on our State Council team. So they picked like the top six or top eight people in the state.
00:55teenagers in the state to be on the state for each council and they plan like the state events and do all of the state legislative things concerning for each throughout the year and him and I met because we were both on the team in 2010 2011. We started dating when we were done with council. We got engaged in 2014 married in 2018 and
01:23started the farm and the business in 2018. We both come from farming backgrounds. So I grew up on a traditional beef farm and he grew up on a traditional dairy style farm. And then when they sold the dairy, they had beef, cattle and sheep. And so we just, we both have a passion for farming. And in 2018, 2019, when we started our farm, we tried traditional style farming and it almost bankrupted us our first year.
01:51So we realized we had to come up with something different. And that's how the farm concept of doing everything grass-fed, natural was born. Okay, so you were 4H sweethearts. Yes. And how old were you when you met? I was 16 and he was 17. So it's like high school sweethearts except it's 4H sweethearts. I love it, that's great. Yeah. Okay.
02:19So tell me what you do at Echo Springs Farm. So we do a little bit of everything. Our primary focus is to produce the best possible quality food that we can for our customers. So be it natural, grass-fed beef, grass-fed lamb, grass-fed poultry, we have small...
02:49batch of rabbits that we raise for meat rabbits that we raise on grass in a rabbit tractor, or produce. We do no spray produce, so a lot of tomatoes, a lot of cucumbers, some berries. We have a pretty big batch of blueberries that we pick every year, and everything is pesticide and
03:18be toxic. We have two young children, a three-year-old and a one-year-old, and I'm pregnant with our third. So our goal is really for our kids to be able to walk outside, pick up what they want and eat it and not have to worry about what's on that. Wow. Okay. Congratulations on the third one on the way. Thank you. That's exciting. Okay. So do you guys have jobs off the farm or is this your job? Is the farm your job?
03:48No, so we both work full time off the farm as well. So the farm itself is 14 acres and then we rent another 20 acres. So we farm about 34 acres. We run- And run a hay ground. And run a hay ground, yeah. We run about anywhere from 10 to 15 head of cattle a year. We have a couple of brood cows and then we buy stockers. In-
04:15the spring or fall whenever we can get our hands on them. We have a flock of 21 sheep. We finish anywhere from six to eight sheep a year for customers. We do two batches of layer hens. So we typically have anywhere between 60 and 100 layer hens at any given time. We also then do meat birds. So we run batches of 60 meat birds at a time, and we do three to four batches a year, depending on what we have a want for.
04:44And then, like I said, we also do the rabbit. And then we raise some pigs for ourselves. We have a couple of quail, some ducks, two peacocks, a donkey, it's kind of like a petting zoo. My God, when do you sleep? We don't. No, no. No, like I said, we both also work full-time jobs. So we really, we're five to six hours a night, if we're lucky.
05:14Wow, I can't even begin to imagine. And luckily, I'm done child rearing. So I don't have to get up with little kids in the middle of the night anymore. But holy cow, you guys, that's a lot going on. Most mornings I start at between 330 or 4 o'clock and usually call it a day by 11, 1130. Yeah. Wow, I'm impressed. That is a gargantuan.
05:43task in having two full-time jobs, well, one each, and two and a coming along child, two kids and one coming along, and running the farm with that many animals. Wow, I'm blown away. Awesome. So you're selling produce and meat. So that's to... Is that to support the farm?
06:12Yes. So it didn't start out that way. We basically really just wanted to have the animals paper themselves. It was something where we were raising them for ourselves. So, you know, the two of us when we first got married, we didn't need a whole beef. We didn't need a whole pig. So we had the meat available to us. So why not, you know, pass that along to other people?
06:43Then as it progressed, we seen that there was a huge need in this area. We're in a pretty big food desert. So it became evident that what we were doing was not just helping us, but helping the community to an extent. And we're sandwiched between two towns that the only grocery store that they have is a Dollar General. So the lack of fresh produce, the lack of fresh meat.
07:13is very large. So we started to want to fill that need. And then as we started to fill that need, we seen that it was practical to continue to grow so that the farm could financially support itself. Okay. And you're in Pennsylvania, right? Yes. Yeah. Okay. What's the largest city that you're near?
07:43You guys are in Minnesota, correct? Yes. Okay. You've heard of flight 93 that went down door 9 11. Yes. We are a half hour east of that. Okay. All right. That doesn't help me on a city though. Penn State. State College is our nearest bigger town. Altunin State College are just north of us. Okay. Thank you. The closest city would be Pittsburgh.
08:13They were two hours east of Pittsburgh.
08:17Okay, so you're quite a ways away from any big city. Yeah, yeah, the town we live in has a four way stop sign. Yeah, yeah, I grew up in one of those in Maine. I know what those are like. So yeah, well, awesome that you guys are providing food for people that need it because that's an amazing thing to do.
08:45So how is it going? Well, I can tell you it was a catawain because my day job, I work with the Department of Ag here in Pennsylvania, helping farmers with a lot of grazing systems and stuff. So that's what got me into practice. I guess what really got me into it was practicing it at home and then took it kind of as a career. When I, 10 years ago,
09:13Now I've got to go back further than that. 10 years ago was 2014. 2014 was the year that I kind of took over my family farm because my father had passed away. In 2014, we had 11 acres fenced in for pasture. And those 11 acres could only support maybe three head of cattle. Today, those 11 acres, we can support 15 head of cattle. We only have to feed hay February and March.
09:45Okay, so how did it change? What did you do? Moving cows every day, keeping fresh grass. We started doing a lot of natural seeding. So instead of doing fertilizers and that, what I started doing was actually putting the seed down then moving the cows over top of what I just seeded. We actually fed some seed to cows, clover seed. Cows will actually eat and pass through.
10:14and the seed is still viable. We did reduce, we took a year off and no cattle. All I did was mow the pastures that year to try to get us back to, I guess you would say revitalization. And then from there, pretty much keeping the nutrients. What we were doing was we were renting a lot of ground, so we were taking those nutrients off the farm.
10:43And I kept those nutrients there and we cut back on the rented ground that we were doing and just focused primarily on the home farm for about two years till we got it up and moving. Okay, this is the cool stuff that I really like to learn about because to go from three head to 15 head on the same land is amazing. Yeah, that's great. Okay.
11:10So how you told me how people it's not like the 15 header all finishing beef. So we keep a constant flow of like right now our age group is from our herd of cattle is our youngest three are yearlings. So I guess the one is about eight months over the last Peter we bought all the way up to mature cows. So we keep that age bracket spread out so that we're not feeding you know all.
11:3915 head of finishers were feeding calves to finishing beef. Okay, yeah. And does that cut down on how much feed they're eating? Yeah, definitely. So like we do what we call mob grazing with our cattle and our sheep both. So like tonight when I moved cows, we're probably at, our stocking rate tonight was
12:09A little less because I gave him a little bit more just because it was kind of a weird area there. We had some low grass Um, because this is our second pass across the farm right now. We're on so my stocking rate tonight was Probably 6,800 pounds of animal per acre Wow, so we were trying to learn tonight. Uh, some of our highs will go like um 1500 Yeah, probably like 50
12:3915,000 pounds of animal per acre, some of our heavier stocking rates. So this one was a little, this one was a lower one. We're about 6,800 pounds per acre right now. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. So the weather, the weather really affects what we do obviously, because, you know, we need the heat and proper amounts of moisture to grow the grass to where we want it.
13:09So we had a lot of rain and then we didn't have rain and then we had a lot more rain. And so it's just been a very up and down year for us already. Um, but luckily, Jonathan's very good at managing the pastures and knock on wood. We've been doing really well with our cows out on pasture. Um, we actually had a cow cab out on pasture about six weeks ago, and we were concerned that there was going to be too much mud and there wasn't.
13:37because he manages the pasture so well that they just, you know, they, the cows do what they're supposed to do and they don't muck up the pastures. Very nice. Um, okay. So I saw on your Facebook page that you guys have fresh produce for sale already and you're in Pennsylvania. How? What is the secret people? Cause I'm in Minnesota. We don't have any fresh produce grown yet. We have.
14:05We start a lot of plants early. We do do some under plastic planting and we have a very good relationship with our plain sec folk around here that have greenhouses that can start stuff really early for us. And we can get it in the ground. And actually this year was very odd. Our last frost was in April. We haven't had a frost since April.
14:35So it's been a very warm winter and spring all over the US as far as I know. Our first produce that we have now is strawberries, which isn't the earliest we've ever harvested strawberries since we started. Rhubarb, which is pretty typical. Rhubarb. Yeah, pretty typical. We have a lot of lettuce right now. Our lettuce really took off. Kale. Fresh herbs, oregano, chives.
15:03We probably won't have tomatoes till another two weeks. What I thought I saw tomatoes. It was those we got from a grower that grows them in what it's not actually a greenhouse. It's called a high tunnel. Yep. Uh, he's a plain sect, a midnight gentleman that has a high tunnel. So he had tomatoes. Was that two weeks ago? Yeah. Two weeks ago was his first harvest at tomatoes.
15:30We have a very good working relationship with him. He also butchers our chickens and our rabbits. So we work very well with him and very close with him. And a lot of the, if I have customers, like restaurant customers that want lettuce in like March and April, typically he can get it for me. And he is very much along our standards of no spray. And he has, I think six young kids.
15:58seven young kids. So they are in the same mindset that we are that they want their kids to be able to walk outside and pick the lettuce out of the ground and eat it if they want to. So we have a very, very good working relationship with him and he's very open to supporting us as we are to him. That's great. No, I was looking at your Facebook page and I was like, I am so jealous. They already have tomatoes growing. So now I don't have to be jealous.
16:27Yeah, but we don't have a high tunnel. So how does high tunnels work? You're still planting in the ground. He does is actually deep mulch. He actually runs his goats in there in the wintertime. Yeah. So it's a deep bedding pack that he plants in. And then it does have, he has two wood burners at either end that he can heat it. So he's usually has tomatoes in the ground. Mid February. Yeah, mid February is usually when he plants.
16:57You are giving me so much hope because we just finished, we just finished our heated greenhouse build this past weekend. And I asked my husband if we could, if we could grow tomatoes in there in the dead of winter. And he was like, I don't know yet. He said, but we're going to try. I said, okay, good. A lady in cans. No, where is she? Wyoming.
17:25She has lemon trees in a greenhouse. Yup. I was reading about her. Yeah, she has lemon trees in a greenhouse in Wyoming. That's pretty impressive. And they grow in the wintertime. Yeah. Nice. Okay. So you should definitely be able to do tomatoes. I hope so because hot... Okay, I've said this once before on an episode of the podcast. There is a company in Minnesota.
17:55who grows Better Boy hot house tomatoes. And they are the only tomatoes I will eat in the winter time from the store because they taste almost like our tomatoes from our garden in the summer. Okay. So I'm really looking forward to our tomatoes come January. I can tell you a plan that we're gonna try this winter that my grandfather and my great grandfather did. Around here, they formed
18:25less than a mile over the hill here beside us. So this would have been in the 30s and 40s. They would take their watermelons, because watermelons come off July and August, and they'd put that between first and second cutting hay and stomp it down, and they would have watermelon all throughout the winter. So we're gonna give it a try this year. It might fail, but we're gonna give it a try. That's all you can do.
18:54I mean, what's the worst that happens? It doesn't work. And then the sheep and the cows will get some watermelon flavored hay. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Why not? I don't think they'll be mad. No, no, I can't imagine they would be. Okay, so now that I have picked your brain on what you're doing, how is it going? Are you guys like ecstatically happy with the choice you've made?
19:23Most days. Yeah, most days. There's a lot of times that I think we are our toughest critics. People will come here and they'll be like, oh, your property is beautiful and what you do is amazing. And we in the back of our minds, we're like, well, thank you. But there's so much more that we want to do. And in our minds, because we can't have everything here all the time, we're not we're not to where we want to be. You know, we want to get to the point where we don't have to outsource, where we don't have to have somebody else growing for us.
19:53where we can do it all ourselves. But we're really only six years into this. So for the most part, we're headed on the right track. It's just kind of one of those things where, you know, we're always gonna want more. We're always gonna wanna be able to provide more for the community. And until we get to the point where it's 100% of our products, I don't think we'll be 100% happy. And the other thing for one of us to be able to have
20:23the farm as our income. You know, right now with both of us working 40 plus hours a week, there is stuff that falls through the cracks that we just can't do because we have to go to that day job every day. Yes, yes. There are two things that I have heard my whole life and one of them is you can have it all and the second one is you can do it all. The addendum to the both of those are
20:52not at the same time. Yep. Exactly. That is a good way to put that. And you don't have to do it all and you don't have to have it all. You have to do what you aspire to doing and hope to accomplish. That's all you have to do. And I'm an old lady. I'm 54 and you guys are not 54.
21:20I have been living my life for a long time now and really just just bask in the successes as they happen. That's the best advice I can give you. We appreciate that. Because if you don't, you'll miss it. You won't have the opportunity to stop and breathe it in and go, we accomplished that thing. Now what? Yeah. And that last year we we we really did that. You know, we
21:49We got to the point where we were just like trying to get so much done and we just kind of lost sight of the big picture. And this year we've kind of taken it back a little bit. You know, we switched over to the self serve, you know, prior to this year we didn't do self serve. We were here all the time. We missed out on a lot of different things with our families. We missed out on a lot of different things with each other and we missed out on a lot of different things with our kids. And so over the winter this past year.
22:18We say we hibernate November through March. That's our hibernation period. And we... It's really when we renovate our house. We kind of sat down and decided that we needed to take a step back and we needed to figure out what was gonna work with having young kids because, you know, our kids wanna go out and do things. Our kids wanna go to the amusement park. Our kids wanna go fishing. Our kids wanna go hang out with friends.
22:45And we want them to be able to do all that stuff. We don't want them to grow up hating the farm. So we took a step back and said, okay, we can put self-serve produce out. We can cut down on the amount of pigs that we have. We can streamline the chicken process. So we did all of that. And this year, it has been a huge blessing already. It's made more time that we were able to get our gardens planted earlier. We were able to.
23:14uh, get our sheep out on pasture sooner. We were able to get our cows out on pasture sooner because we didn't have to be tied to the property where the produce is. We could just, Hey, it's there. It's in a building. The money goes in the box. And you know, we, we live in a, what I like to think is a pretty honest area. And Jonathan and I are both of the mindset that if they really need it and they take it, well, they obviously needed it more than we did. So.
23:44You know, we really kind of switched our mentality to focusing on our kids and wanting to spend that extra time with them instead of just being tied to the farm 24-7. I'm really proud of you both for prioritizing what's important to you because a lot of people get so caught up in the go, go, go that they forget to do that. So good job. Very impressed.
24:15And I actually tell people and I have to tell myself sometimes, this doesn't have to be an all or nothing lifestyle. When people are talking about, oh, I want to farm, I want a homestead, I want to start raising my own animals and I want to start raising my own produce, I am a big advocate for start small. If you live in an apartment, start raising plants in a raised bed, start raising plants in a …
24:44outside window box, you know, do what you can start small. Anything that you can do to get that healthier food in your body to source more locally, to learn to can and preserve and just basically not rely on the system as much is living the homesteading lifestyle. You don't have to do all or none. It can be a little bit at a time. And I have to remind myself that.
25:13Sometimes too, you know, because I'm sitting here thinking, oh, you know, my kids picked out on processed sugar all weekend at Memorial Day picnics. And I have to remind myself, it's okay for them to do that once in a while. I can't do it all, all the time. Your husband got a cup soon, ran him from work because he was tired. So. Yes, everything in moderation, including being moderate.
25:44Oh my. Okay, so you love what you're doing, but it's hard work. This is the refrain that I hear all the time when I talk to homesteaders. And I'm going to make the tagline for this podcast, do what you can with what you have, where you are, because that's what everybody ends up telling me. Yes. So what's...
26:10I know what to ask you guys because you're so busy and you have so much going on. The little kids that you have, do they love it? Do they love being on the farm? Yes, they absolutely love the farm. Our daughter, she's three, she'll be four in July. She is in, I think she's in our profile picture right now. She
26:39is very into showing animals. She has her own flock of registered Shetland sheep. Last year was her first year to show at the fair. She had a ram that we bottle raised with her and she absolutely loved showing at the fair. She now this year is taking six sheep to the fair and a heifer. So she's very into the animals.
27:07They are out with us every night when we do barn work. Our son loves the bunny rabbits And yeah, he's all about the tractors But our daughter is absolutely She's a big help I joke and say that she does more work than some grown adults because We can trust her to collect eggs. We can trust her to feed the rabbits. We can trust her to Work with the chickens and let us know if something's
27:37not right. She's super observant when it comes to like, oh, hey, you know, that sheep didn't get up and go eat or, you know, that chicken is doing something that's not normal. She picks up on those things. And she's been, I mean, from day one, she's been in the barn with us. I have pictures of her at a week old sitting outside the chicken house while Jonathan and I were doing barn work in a car seat. So she's been in the barn with us from day one.
28:07Her son, like I said, he's very into the bunny rabbits and he loves the donkey. And then it's all about the tractors, which I'm fine with. If he wants to just have his bunnies and then play with his tractors, I'm okay with that. Okay, you said your daughter's gonna be four in July? Yes. Wow. My goodness. That's impressive too.
28:35You guys, you guys are in it to win it here, you know. Well, I mean, I don't like to, I don't like to brag, but she moved 60 meat birds last night, so she put, she put 60 meat birds out on pasture last night. So I was, I was a proud mama. Yeah. Yeah, that's okay. I don't want to say that's crazy because it's not crazy, but
28:59That is so amazing to me that she's that little and already has so much knowledge and that's from you. Yeah, she's she's a quick learner.
29:15That is fantastic. I am so glad I asked to talk to you guys. So I'm so impressed. And I don't usually do interviews after noon because I'm more awake and more on my game in the morning. And so when I do them in the evening, I'm not quite as on it. So I'm really glad that you guys have all these stories because I don't have any stories tonight.
29:38I just wolfed a burger. You were saying you grabbed a Pepsi on the way home. I just wolfed a gross burger from Arby's to eat before I talked to you guys and I'm going to regret it tomorrow. I still have dishes and laundry to take care of after I get in talking to you. I'm like, I don't know what to ask now. But luckily we're almost at 30 minutes and I try to keep these 30 minutes anyway. So it all worked out great. I really love what you're doing.
30:06And I really, really love that you are providing food for people in your area in a food desert because food security is so important and there are so many places in America that don't have access to produce and good meats. And it seems crazy to me because America is supposed to be the land of milk and honey, right? Yep. And it's not. Yeah, it's a shame. It really is.
30:35If we had more time, Jonathan and I could both go on our soap boxes about the American food system and how broken it is, but we'd be here for another two hours. Maybe, maybe we can do that another time. Yeah. We'll have to, we'll have to save that for another time. But, um, Jonathan and I have both. The rules and regulations that Pennsylvania puts on farms. Yeah. We, we are bound by a bunch of crazy regulations as, as are a lot of states anymore.
31:04But Pennsylvania being a Commonwealth has really kind of kicked its farmers in the pants and said like, hey, you know, we know you're trying to do this, but we don't, we don't care. You know, you're still going to be bound by these regulations. But yeah, that's, that's a whole, whole nother conversation. Yeah. And honestly, every state has that going on in some way, shape or form. I mean, Minnesota is pretty progressive, but they still have things like you can't.
31:32buy raw milk in Minnesota unless you go to the farm where the cow is to get it.
31:39So we bought a local dairy for years. We bought. How did he always have a word for animal use? Yeah. For animal use. So, yeah. Yeah. And I understand in Pennsylvania right now is the huge target of some federal lawsuits. I don't know how much you follow that kind of stuff, but we have a, an Amish gentleman.
32:06in Lancaster County that is actually going through federal court because he had a raw milk membership, basically, where he was making kefir and yogurt and that kind of stuff with raw milk, and that's not allowed in Pennsylvania. And even though people were buying a membership, he wasn't actually selling a product, he still got arrested and they seized his product.
32:35and he wasn't allowed to sell his product. He wasn't even allowed to feed his product to his own animals. It's just an insane court case. It's just absolutely mind blowing. Yeah, there is a lot of insane court cases going on right now. And I'm sure that that is like the worst of them.
33:00I would actually love to do an episode with you and another couple that I talked to a while back because they have some thoughts too. So let me see if I can work on that and maybe we'll do it as a, somebody suggested to me that I should do a tiny homestead podcast after dark for subjects exactly like this. And I've been thinking about it. So. Well, if you do let us know because we would absolutely be welcome, be willing to talk about that.
33:30Yeah. And I just, we need to be aware of what we're saying, because I don't want somebody to come bang on my door and take me to jail for bashing on the US government. But I also feel like people have the right to express their opinions, but I can't do it in this one now. So, all right, guys, thank you so much for your time. And I appreciate everything you just told me. It was fantastic. Not a problem at all.
34:00Thank you for having us. Yeah, have a good night. You too. Bye.
 

Lorrie Adams - Realtor Learn about what's involved in buying acreage

Today I'm talking with Lorrie about the real estate market and things you may not have considered when thinking about buying a property for your homestead. You can reach her on Facebook as well.
https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Lorrie Adams, a Realtor extraordinaire and good friend of mine. Good morning, Lorrie, how are you? Good morning, I'm great. Good. So it may seem weird that I asked a Realtor to be a guest on my podcast.
00:27But it's not weird because Lorrie is brilliant at her job and she knows things that people looking for land might wanna know. So Lorrie, tell me a little bit about yourself first. Well, years ago, before I was a realtor, I was a paramedic for a number of years for 911. So I know the area inside and out and subsequently became a realtor in 2007 during the crash, figured why not. I always do things the hard way.
00:57So I've been a realtor for 17 years, absolutely love it. And don't specialize in one niche area. I like to be robust and be able to do multiple things. So I just stay on top of all aspects of real estate with the exception of I do not dabble in the business side. So just residential real estate, farm real estate, that kind of thing. Okay. And this is exactly why I wanted to talk to you because I have lots of questions.
01:26First first question is the housing market bad right now and is it bad all over the United States? Bad is a Term that is kind of means different things to different people. Is it a challenging market? Absolutely The challenge is because we have very little inventory we have a lot of buyers sitting on the fence and Many of which have never even seen an interest rate over five percent. So
01:56When they jumped up to around seven, people were a little bit flabbergasted as to what they could suddenly afford changes your buying power when you jack up interest rates. So, excuse me, with the interest rates up a little bit, historically though, 7% is an average interest rate. It's really not that outrageous. It's not impossible.
02:25There is inventory out there. You just have to have eyes on it. You have to have somebody with their ears to the ground and nose to the grind, Stella Perse, and make sure that you know how to negotiate a good deal for your clients. As well as having an excellent lender that is good at communication, that is available, just like a realtor is 24-7 basically on weekends as well. And there's a lot of creative financing out there right now with some of the lenders coming up with a...
02:54programs for helping buyers put in quote unquote cash offers and then financing after The transaction so there's a lot of things out there that can be done You just have to have somebody who knows what's out there and can find it and can negotiate for you I have to say I have never used Every tool in my toolbox as well as come up with new ones in the last few years to get my clients under contract But thank goodness, it's work
03:23Yeah. So is the reason that inventory is down, does it have anything to do with the fact that people ran like there was fire under their feet back in 2020 and 2021 to get out of the places they were in and now they're happy in the places they're in and they don't want to sell? Well, some are happy, some are not happy, but they're staying in them because of the interest rates they got when they refinanced at historic lows of 2.5 and 3.5 interest rates.
03:54To be honest with you, I wouldn't ever anticipate seeing those kind of interest rates again. But that's where people are in their mortgages. And then if they're not uncomfortable enough, they'll just stay where they're at. So there's a lot of restrictions as well on buildings. So new construction, the restrictions that have been placed on new construction by different government entities has added approximately $30,000 to each home.
04:24and cost of building it. So building is restrictive with pricing, but there are builders out there. They're doing their best to get houses out there, especially for the baby boomers that want to downsize into homes that are just slab homes or smaller homes, one level, those kinds of things. Okay, I was just curious about your take.
04:48on all this. Okay, so I'm going to talk a little bit about what you did for us. And then I have other questions regarding if people are looking for the kind of thing that we were looking for four and a half years ago. What you would suggest at this point because like you said, inventory is really limited. So the story is, Lori, we met Lori back in 2015, because we were trying to find a place back then.
05:17And we looked at four or five places and there was just nothing within our price range. And we just decided that we were going to stay where we were back then. And then back in 2020, we had a thing happen where we were not going to be able to continue to grow a big garden at a friend's place because they put up a pole barn. And that was the last straw for us on jumping into really looking again. And we're not upset with our friends. They, they are awesome. We love them.
05:46but it was just the thing that that kicked us to actually start looking again. And so I messaged my good friend, Lorrie, and said, we really want to look for a new place. And she said, call me. And so we did. And we looked at four places before we looked at the place that we now own and they were all not great. And then she called me and said, I found your house. And I said, uh-huh.
06:13That's too bad because we were up all night because there was a bad storm that night and the weather radio kept going off and my husband and I were both exhausted and she said you have to meet me in Le Sueur, Minnesota at 630 tonight because I found your house. And so we did and the rest is history. However, the backstory on all of this is that Lorrie is an incredible negotiator and got us a really reasonable price on a really nice 3.1.
06:42acre property with a remodeled home on it and a huge pole barn. So Lorrie is brilliant at her job. This is why we wanted to have her on the show. So my questions for Lorrie are these. Number one, if people are looking to get out of their smaller place and onto one to five acres of land, what would you suggest? Because inventory is limited, as we've said twice already.
07:12Aside from the inventory side of it, I would highly recommend that they do a lot of research in understanding what it takes to take care of acreage property. Whether you're just going to sit there and enjoy the privacy or if you're literally going to start working it like you and Kyle do. There's a lot involved. It's a lot of work. It's not just hanging out in the house, drinking coffee all morning and waiting for everything to happen outside. It's not.
07:41Really? No, I know. Isn't that a surprise? Yeah. And there's also a lot of other things, aside from the crops or animals or whatever it is that you're looking at having on your acreage, just having acreage property. So you're not going to be on city water and sewer. You're generally going to have a little bit more difficulty with your electrical systems because you're a little bit further out. So you want to make sure you have a backup system, especially in Minnesota. We have storms this year.
08:11Unlike last year where we had no storms and no rain, but this year we've got our typical storm season. So you're going to have a lot of electrical storms that come through, might knock out your power. You also have a septic and well system, which is for your sewer and water. You got to make sure that you understand those systems, how to take care of them. The fact that if something goes wrong, the city's not going to fix it, you're going to fix it. So an average septic system.
08:40is about $30,000 for a new septic system. And a well is anywhere from about 20 grand, 15 to 20 grand, depending on how deep they need to go. So as long as those are already existing, it's a little bit less expensive, but you need to make sure that they're all in compliance with the entities. So wells are governed by the Department of Health in Minnesota, and septic and sewers are regulated by the counties.
09:10So you have to have somebody who understands where to go to make sure that those systems are compliant and registered with the corresponding agencies, as well as just the acreage itself. It's got to be amenable to what you want to have on it. If you're growing crops like you guys, you want to have a fairly flat level with sun, not an orchard grove sitting on your property covering it up with shade or pole barns like your friend put up.
09:40where you suddenly don't have anywhere to put plants. So there's a lot of moving pieces and bringing what a client is thinking and what they really need to look at in reality and bring those into alignment with what their budget and their goals are is kind of my job.
10:07Yeah, and also on the client side, the client really needs to know what they're looking for. The first time we looked with you, we weren't quite sure what we were actually looking for. We were just looking to get the hell out of the house we were in. Right. And the second time, we really had a much better idea of what we were looking for and what we wanted to do with it. And we basically gave you a cut sheet. A unicorn. You told me to find a unicorn.
10:37Well, yes, but we told you the details of the unicorn. Right, right. And that's what I'm talking about. You have to come, you know, speak with people, determine exactly what it is that you're looking for so that we can come into alignment with everything. If possible, yeah. And we lucked out that this place has a generator that kicks on on its own and directs electricity to the house immediately.
11:05We didn't even know that that was going to be possible for us to have. And so that was the one thing that wasn't actually on our cut list, but we were pleasantly surprised by, and it works great by the way. Right. Now, didn't you need, but that needed to be repaired because it had sat there for so long not being used. It may, you guys did have to do a little bit of work on it. Yeah. It ended up needing.
11:31the circuit board replaced and then something else, I don't remember what, and I think it ended up costing us about $6,000 to get it to where it works. Which isn't bad considering the generator system can cost you upwards of $30,000, $40,000 depending on the size of it and what it's got to run. Yes, and we absolutely did not, I mean we kind of, kind of cringed at the price because that's a lot of money.
11:58but we were not at all bothered at having the repairs done because it's really important. Right, right. And in actuality, the fact that it was there and repairable saved you a fortune. It sure did. And then the other thing that I would say, having lived here for almost four years now, is if you're gonna buy a property and you're not, you're moving from the city to quote unquote the country,
12:26There are things that you're not necessarily going to realize you need. Like we ended up having to buy a small utility tractor to be able to move wood for the wood burning boiler system that we have, and we ended up picking up a pickup truck because kind of needed one and things like that. So it's not only that first mortgage payment and the rest of them that follow that you have to consider. It's all the things that you need to add to the property. Correct.
12:55So that you can run it and do what it is that you want to do on that property. Yep. And when we moved here, if you recall, the only plants that were here were hostas. Yeah, my favorite. And the stuff in the tree line, like the wild black raspberries, which is awesome, and the wild elderberry trees that are here, and the yarrow that was coming up in the pasture, as it were.
13:25having to, number one, dig up a bunch of plants from the old house before it was sold and bring them down and get them in the ground. And then anytime somebody had free rhizomes or roots for lilies or irises or peonies or whatever, we were like, yes, please, we'll take them because we needed to make it ours. So there are just little things that you won't know until you actually move in to the new place.
13:54Right, and no one can anticipate everything. No. So regardless of how prepared you feel you are for your move or for your new dream home and dream life, because it is a totally different lifestyle, you're never gonna be 100% prepared. If you haven't done it before, you're not gonna be ready. You can just prepare as much as you possibly can, but just know things are gonna come out of the side. And...
14:23knock you on your boots. Uh huh. You just have to brush off and get up and keep going. Yep. And the one thing I would not suggest is getting a brand new puppy a month after you move into a new house. Right. I couldn't believe you did that. We did because it was the right puppy and the right family that had her. So we did and she's fantastic. We adore her. She's amazing. She's almost four. And I'm not sorry we did it, but- Of course not.
14:53Having a puppy eat the floorboard corner in your kitchen because she's teething, just after you have a brand new remodeled house in your possession is a very sad moment. Oh, definitely. So puppies are just as much work if not more than kids. Although once they do grow up, they listen better than your kids do. So that's, you know, catch 22 there. Yeah, and they don't really talk back. I mean, they yip at you, but they don't talk back. They're not snotty, so.
15:22It's good. But either way, yeah, we got a new puppy a month after we moved in here and not sorry. Sorry, not sorry. Right. And then COVID happened as well. So you guys really got slammed when you moved in. COVID was going on before we even called you. So we knew that was a thing. I know, but I can't remember what year you bought it. 2020. 2020. Okay. So yeah, so COVID was, yeah, you guys are right in the midst of it.
15:51Yes, and we basically did all the moving ourselves because we didn't feel like it was fair to ask people to help and expose them to germs or us get exposed to germs. So that was a lot of work with a lot of trips back and forth. Yeah, you guys did it in the midst of all the unknowns, you know. Yep, and I think it was the best time to do it because we were like, why the hell not? Let's just go. So it worked. It was fine.
16:16And it was also in August and it was super hot the weekend we moved all the heavy furniture in so that was fun too. Yeah, yeah. People always say, oh, is real estate in Minnesota a seasonal job? Well, sweetheart, if it was a seasonal job, I would not be doing it. No. I need a full-time year-round job. And there are benefits to moving in the winter. If it's snowing, you're not getting soaking wet like you are in the rain. It can be colder, but you're not sweating to death.
16:45So yeah, so there's pluses and minuses about moving regardless of what time of year it is. Yeah. And somebody told me a long time ago, but this was like in the 80s, that people like to move in July and August because they can get in and get settled, especially if they have kids because then school starts and the kids are off to school. Yes. Yeah. So and then it is cyclical. It's not seasonal, but it is cyclical. So everybody wants to get in.
17:15excuse me, before the school season starts. But they don't wanna start looking until after school's out. So that really crams it in when they have kids. And then they wanna get in before Thanksgiving, then they wanna get in before the holidays, before Christmas or what have you. And then it's usually quiet for a couple of weeks till, cause people are like, no, we're entertaining, we're having our celebrations, we're not gonna show, we're not gonna look.
17:43Uh, and then after the first of the year, it's a little bit quieter. For some reason, Superbowl is like a key to the world. And as soon as that's over the spring market in Minnesota, just goes gangbusters. So like literally I have had clients message me or call me the day after the Superbowl is over. It's like, so yeah. That's interesting. Those are pretty much our cycles in Minnesota. Now, whether or not they're like that all over the States.
18:12You know, in the country, I don't know, I doubt it, but there would definitely be some similarities. Yeah. So, speaking of AC, because we, being hot when you move in. Yes. This place has central air, thank God, and we cranked it as cold as we could get it the day we moved in because it was just miserably hot outside. And so, it's now June and we've been using the AC, obviously, it's been hot and muggy when it's not been cold and rainy.
18:42And last night I had made a grilled ham and cheese sandwich and then Cameron put his together and made his and after he went upstairs, I could smell something hot. And I was like, did he get the spatula in the flame by accident? Because that happens. And then it went away. And I was like, okay, well, nothing's on fire that I know of, so we're good. And when I got up this morning, Kyle says, I got to tell you something and you're going to hate it. And I thought somebody died. And I was like, what?
19:12the blower on the furnace isn't working. And I said, oh, and he said, the compressor for the air conditioner is fine. It's working, but the blower's not working. He said, so, he said, do you want to call the place that came out and did the ones over on the furnace last year and see if they come out and see what's going on? And I was like, yep. So right now we have no central air working. It has turned off completely. We have...
19:40We have two portable AC units in our bedrooms because as you remember, the vents for the furnace don't come into our bedrooms. They come out in that landing. So we each have portable air conditioners in our bedrooms because otherwise we would sweat to death at night. So right now mine is off so that it's not making noises on the recording of this. But as soon as I'm done talking to you, it'll get turned back on and the fan is blowing that cold air out into the stairwell and dropping down the staircase and we'll be fine until
20:08The tech gets here at noon to tell us what's going on. So that's another thing that happens is things break. Right, and that's just home ownership period. So a lot of, you know, the good news is if you're renting and you move into a home, you're no longer paying somebody else's mortgage. You're actually gaining equity in your home. You can do whatever you want with your home. But you do have to pay for the upkeep. Yeah.
20:36Yeah, and it's not inexpensive people. It's not every, every repair that we have had done over the last couple of years has been at least a thousand dollars. Luckily we haven't had that many to have done. Right. Well, and you are in an older home, albeit it was remodeled. Your home was built like, I want to say early, early 1900s, before 50 for sure. Yes.
21:02Yes, it is an old farmhouse and it looks beautiful, but I'm sure the bones are definitely a hundred years old, right? And we love it. We absolutely love it except when things break then we're like, yeah But it's fine because if we had bought a new home in a development Things break there too. So absolutely and that's what I tell clients all the time They want to do new construction and new construction is great
21:31Um, but it also comes with its own headaches. So you can build a home and you can say it's perfect. And even if you find a house that's 85% checks all your boxes, that's the perfect house, um, because even if you build new construction, custom build all out, the minute you move in, I wish I would have done this, we should have done this. You know, we should have changed that. There's always something. So 85% is a pretty good mark.
22:00Yeah. And if you're partnered up, your partner has a say in the decisions on the new build. And Kyle desperately wanted to do, he wanted to buy land and then build a house on it. And I flat out told him no many times. And he was like, well, why we can have everything we want? And I said, no, because we are different people and we're not going to want the same things. Yes.
22:28And they don't want to argue with you for months about a house build. That would not be great for us. And he was like, yeah, you're probably right. And like I said, it's exponentially ridiculously expensive. Yes. Um, so you can get much more bang for your money if you buy an existing home. Um, but if you have the budget and you want to build, there's no problem with that, but your budget will definitely have to be higher if you want to buy land and then build on top of it. Yes, exactly.
22:58Not only are you building a house, you're going to be putting in a septic and a well and a generator and everything else. Yes, all the extras that go with it. Right. Which aren't actually. And LP, like you're not on natural gas out there either in most places. No. Occasionally you'll find one that does have natural gas, but generally you're going to be heating with wood or LP, which is liquid propane. So you'll have to have a tank and fill that up.
23:26Yes, an important hint for people who don't know. In our area, they have summer prices for propane gas. And it's marked down from what it normally costs the rest of the year. And so we always get our propane tank filled in like July or August while we're still on summer prices because it saves us a lot of money. Right. But you do have some boil off as well because of the heat.
23:55albeit the tank is insulated, you do still have some boil off. Yeah. So. Yep. But we didn't know about the summer prices when we first had it filled. The guy was like, it's a good thing you called now, because it was in August, I think. Right. And he said, you're saving yourselves like 20 or 30 cents a gallon by doing this in the summer. So, good to know. Yeah. Especially if you can do it like late in the season, because it's not going to, it's going to start to cool off, then you don't have as much burn off either. Right.
24:25And the other thing that we learned when we moved here is our house was set up for an electric stove, not gas stove. They didn't have it so that you could use the LP for a gas stove. And I hate electric stoves. I hate cooking on them. I can't control them the way I want to and I love to cook. So I put up with an electric glass top stove for a year and finally said, I can't do this anymore.
24:55And so we had a, I don't know what they're called. I don't know if someone who works with LP is a plumber or what their term is. We had a guy come out and get it so that we could have an LP gas cook stove. Yeah. So you, yeah, the plumbers come out and do the plumbing for the gas. Um, the plumbing for the gas. And then, uh, the nice thing is. Well, the good.
25:21there is niceties, but you need to know about them, is your appliances you can buy with conversion kits for LP. Yes. So it can be either LP or natural gas, whether it's your air conditioner or your furnace or your stove, what have you, you just make sure that you are purchasing one that has the LP conversion kit with it. Yep, and that's what we did. We bought a really nice, really nice gas range thing.
25:51from Lowe's, I think it was, and made sure that it had the converter kit with it. And then we called the guy and said, we have the stove, when can you come hook it up? And he said, how's tomorrow? I was like, that's better than a week from now, please come. And he did. Yeah. And he was great. He was great. He walked in and I was like, I'm so happy to see you. And I had a huge smile on my face. And he said, why are you so smiling? And I said, because I've been working with the glass top electric stove for a year. I hate it.
26:21My wishes come true in being here and putting this in. He was like, well, let's get it done. I was like, yes, please, let's get it done. So, and best gas stove I've ever had. I love this thing, it's wonderful. So anyway, wow, this has gone really fast. We're almost at 30 minutes. What can help the realtor the most?
26:48when a client is looking for a new place? We sort of touched on it, but is there anything we missed? Well, I think, you know, to round it off, when a client is looking for a realtor, you want to make sure that you find somebody who is experienced and well-rounded so that they can inform you and help you off in the right direction or away from properties that aren't going to be a good fit for you. Not that you shouldn't go look at them. I would never steer anybody away from a property.
27:18but educating them on the pluses and minuses of each one is huge. And then just communicate, excuse me, communication with your realtor is key. So be honest, be forthright, you know, and if you're not always going to get the answer you want to hear. I tell, and I told you in Kyle this, you're not always going to like what I tell you, but you will always know the truth and you'll always know where you stand. Absolutely.
27:46you know, just communicate with your Realtor, find somebody that you mesh with and somebody who can actually guide you and has the experience and the knowledge to make sure that you don't get in over your head. Okay, I want to add something to that. Also find someone as talented and skilled and bubbly personality as Ms. Lori is here because that really, really helped. Okay, this is the hardest part of this whole thing is listening to you rave. Oh, why? The fact that my voice is disappearing.
28:15Well, but yeah, listening to you compliment me is very nice. But yes, I'm very humble. Thank you. Well, we love you. You're now part of the family. Well, that's the nice part. When you do get a good realtor and you do get that relationship going, I would say pretty much most of all my clients, we become friends afterwards. Yeah, I refer to you as my sister from another mister a lot of the time. Oh, yeah, there you go. That works.
28:43Another one too, yeah, another mister and another mom. Yeah, that too, yep, exactly. But I think what I was actually trying to get at is what the person who's looking for a new place can do to help the search, help the realtor with the search. Narrow down exactly what you must have. I always tell my clients make two lists, makes a must have and a nice to have. Well, three, and then a deal breaker.
29:12So if you can come down to a few points that are absolutely necessities in that property, get those down on paper and get those to your agent. And then if there's deal breakers, like absolutely no way and heck are we going to buy those if it has this or that or doesn't have this or that, put those deal breakers down as well because that'll help narrow down the search. I find a whole lot of property, but most of it's nothing that you're going to be interested in if I don't know what you're looking for.
29:41Yeah, you've got to be able to narrow it down somehow. You can't, you can't just be like, I'm going to take you to see a hundred houses. That's not going to work. Right. But yeah, I mean, don't just tell me you want a kitchen. Yeah. The house comes with a kitchen that's guaranteed, uh, functionality. Can't always guarantee that, you know, things like that. Gas stove. I know you had to give up your gas stove for a year, but you've got a lot of your other things that you needed in that house. So you have to be flexible as well.
30:09It's a little bit of give and take with your must haves and deal breakers. Yeah. Well, the must have for us was not to live in the house in Jordan anymore. And we got that. So we're very happy. Yes. That was a big task because I did not think after, after the first couple of years that you guys were ever going to just pull the trigger. Well, we weren't really in a position to pull the trigger.
30:38things happen, life happens, and then it's the right timing. Yep, and then once we were, we were like, let's call Lori and get the heck out here now. And we did, and we're so happy we did. So it all worked out great. Yeah, and as far as clients go too, don't ever feel like you're putting your agent or your friend out if you call them or ask them a question, even if you're not ready to buy. I've known Mary and Kyle for years, they weren't ready to buy. I've known a lot of clients,
31:08Mary and Kyle are probably the law close to the longest before when they started searching to when they were actually ready to buy. So I've had clients, you know, two, three years and I just consult with them. That's what I'm here. I love real estate. I love helping people. If you have a question, let me know. If you're under contract with another agent, let me know that too because then there's a little bit of an ethical dilemma. But get to know your agent before you're ready to pull the trigger. If you're even thinking about making a move in the future.
31:37find an agent that you like now before the pressure's on. Yes. Then you can get that relationship going, you can get to know each other, and you can actually have a much more successful transaction when it comes time to actually do it. And far more enjoyable too. Right, less stressful for sure, yes. Yeah, because it really helps when the person who's trying to find what you want is someone you like and they like you. Right, oh yeah.
32:05I mean, my clients, I get totally invested in my clients, in what they want and their happiness and their goals. And any good agent will do the same. We're the second tier. You guys are first and foremost, always. So what you want, what you need, and then my job or any good agent's job is to guide you and to get you what you want for the best possible price, the best location.
32:36All right, I think maybe this will help some people. This particular episode, I hope it will. I hope so. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. I really wanted to do this with you. You are welcome. And again, you can share my contact information if anybody has questions in the future or questions that we didn't hit on in this podcast, feel free to contact me. All right, awesome. Thank you so much. Okay, thanks Mary. Bye. Bye-bye.
 

Blended Acres

Today I'm talking with Lawrence at Blended Acres.
https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Lawrence at Blended Acres. Good morning, Lawrence. How are you? I am well, and you? Good. Where are you? I am located in Quinter, Kansas. Okay.
00:27I couldn't figure it out from your Facebook page. I didn't see anything about what state you were in. I was like, I have no idea where this person lives. OK, I will have to address that. Yeah. OK, so tell me about what you do at Blended Acres. We are a first generation farm with myself and my wife. We raise a
00:50sheep for lamb meat. We also raise corn and wheat and currently some oats and millet and a few other feed crops. And then we, in the fall we sell pumpkins and kind of have a small farm market.
01:14Very nice. How did you end up getting here? Because of your first generation, I'm guessing it wasn't family. It was not. I, uh, in 2004 when I graduated, I came to Kansas to go on a custom harvest crew. And, um, just absolutely fell in love with, with Kansas at that point in time. Um, and then, uh, it was in 2007.
01:43when we moved here permanently.
01:52Okay. So I get that you fell in love with the thing that you were doing, but it's a huge leap to go from falling in love to actually doing the thing. So were you just like, I'm young, I learned, I can do this? Well, okay. I'm sorry. I didn't give you enough detail there. I grew up in Michigan
02:22of my neighbors in that area on the farm growing up.
02:31Once I came here, it was quite a process. I mean, it started as a hobby. And...
02:45most things were done in the evenings after work and that and over time as we've been able forward to is how we've gotten to this point where we we have our own operations. Okay so tell me tell me about the operation because this is this is not small scale correct? Not anymore no not really. We have a currently
03:13a little over 200 years. We have 450 acres of farm ground that we rent. And then we custom farm on average, I do plant 8 to 12,000 acres a year between the different crops.
03:37When we messaged you were like, I'm not sure that I fit what you're looking for. And when I said that you are, I'm going to tell you why I said that you are. You are perfect for what I'm doing with my podcast because there are people in the world right now who are interested in doing the kinds of things that you're doing, but they don't know anything about it. They don't know how to go from falling in love with the idea.
04:06to making it go. And you fell in love with the idea and you're making it go and you're making it go big. So you're exactly the kind of person I want on my podcast because you're helping other people be inspired to go after the dream. What? I'm glad that that I can fill that role. Yeah because it's kind of scary for people.
04:34especially people who maybe grew up in the city and get introduced to the idea of not being a city person anymore. And they're like, I have no idea how to get from here to there. So part of my goal from my podcast is that people get to live vicariously through the stories they hear, or they get inspired to stop living vicariously and actually go do the thing.
05:04Okay. So that's why I wanted you to be on my show. Okay. So do you guys have kids? Yes, we do. We have...
05:19I'm sorry, I'm counting. We had five kids. We have, our youngest is five. We have two girls that are, will be 10 here in the next, well, one couple days and the next one is in July. And then our, and Philip would be.
05:48just turned 12 and then we had a son that passed away. He would have been 14 this year. Okay, so you're a classic farm family. You're married and you got a parcel of kids and that's way cool. It is. And that parcel of kids is gonna come in real handy as they get bigger and wanna help. Yes. And I'm guessing that.
06:16the older of the five probably do already help. Well, he kind of, he does help in the shop some and does some stuff like that, but it's not really his cup of tea. The youngest one and our one daughter are probably the ones that are most intrigued and in love with the farming.
06:46Well, a couple out of five isn't bad. It's real good. I don't try to force anything on the kids. We've been trying really hard to develop their likes and interests so they don't feel like they have to be part of the farm. But there's a lot of things that.
07:11are still useful on the farm that aren't directly, you wouldn't think are directly related. Our one son is very, he's mechanically minded, so that is a very useful thing, but that also can take you into a lot of other industries. Sure. Yes, absolutely. So he's not pigeonholed into just mechanics on the farm. No. So that's...
07:42That is one thing that I've seen a lot over the years is if you make your children feel like the farm is the only option, they're going to either hate it or they won't be around. So I try to leave the doors very open for the children. You are a smart man. That's a good plan. Okay.
08:12lamb for eating. Yes, yes. Does that like go to grocery stores or is that to local buyers? Well, the large majority still goes to a packer. We have a contract with them. But we, in the last couple years here, we have been having our processing done at a local processor and we've
08:42via Facebook, local ads and farmer markets here in Kansas. Okay, so my question is, because we, I've said this before on the podcast, we here at A Tiny Homestead really love lamb, but for us it's a treat to get it and cook it because it's kind of hard to come by. And so my question is,
09:08When you are sending your lambs to slaughter to be sold in stores, where is it going? Like what states is that meat going to? Well with the packer that we have a contract with, it goes all over the country. But mostly it's larger cities and a lot of lamb ends up in the East Coast where the demand is highest. If it's sold that way.
09:38here with what we're selling off the farm ourselves, it's mostly just been within a 150 mile radius of where we live. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know that there was a huge demand on the East Coast for lamb and I am in the Midwest. So that might be why I'm not able to get my hands on lamb at a grocery store very often.
10:03I guess you'd call it not our immediate small grocery store that's in our town, but where most everybody travels to to go to the bigger Walmart is in Hayes, Kansas. There is a grocery store that has it there, but what we've seen is it's very expensive. It's almost, it's more than most people are going to spend for a small cut of meat.
10:32So they don't stock a lot of it, but it is available there. We've been trying to keep our prices low enough that it is still feasible for a family to try it. Yeah. And with inflation prices across the board, it doesn't surprise me that it's super expensive at the grocery stores. When we have had lamb, we have literally bought a lamb. Okay.
11:01And and butchered it ourselves not killed it but butchered it ourselves and that made it very affordable But my husband hunts so butchering a lamb is not a lot different than butchering a deer No, they're very similar in size Yeah, so so that's how we got into knowing that we enjoy cooking lamb and lamb is is Terribly versatile for cooking with because it wants to take in whatever you season it with
11:31Yes, it does. And if you cook it right, it's really tender and it's delicious and now I want some. Yes. We have found that anytime you cook lamb, if you have patience, it's gonna turn out amazing. It's not something I would recommend that you grab out of the freezer and try to cook within 30 minutes because it needs to be completely thawed and you cook it.
11:59slower and you'll have a very desirable product. Absolutely, yes. I cooked a small leg of lamb in a very large crock pot one time and it was delicious. It turned out great. The other thing about lamb is the tallow. The fat is amazing for soaps and for lotions and all kinds of things. So that was part of the reason we wanted to buy.
12:29the whole animal ourselves and butcher it because then we can have the tallow too.
12:35Yes, there's a lot of different byproducts with a lamb. The lanolin and the wool has a lot of uses.
12:47Sorry, just lost my train of thought. It's a very versatile used animal, I think is where you're going. We actually had some ewes that had a lot of extra milk after we were weaning some lambs. So I milked some ewes for a time. The milk drank well. And my wife was making some soap for a little while with the sheep's milk. And that was a very...
13:17fun project and I really enjoyed how well it worked to clean my hands and it actually helped put some moisture back into my hands. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure with the work that you do, you get your hands dried out all the time. Yeah, all the time. The one thing I do want to say about lanolin is some people are allergic to lanolin and if you've never been exposed to it, make sure.
13:44that you put like a little bit on your skin, like on the inside of your wrist before you like slather anything with Lamolin in it on your body because you can get real sick from it. Yes, some people do have a reaction. So you have to be aware of how your body handles certain things. Yes. And the only reason I say that is because I have heard from a few people and it's happened to me.
14:10you can develop allergies as an adult that you never had as a child. So when you're doing something new, whether it's a food or something you're putting on your skin that you have never tried or that you haven't tried since you were a 10-year-old and now you're 40, be really careful because sometimes you're going to get surprised at the reaction to it. You can. You can. And just a public service announcement because I...
14:38I found out I am allergic to capsaicin two years ago, the hot thing in hot peppers. And I couldn't breathe. And I had always been able to eat hot peppers and then I can no longer eat hot peppers. So that was a huge surprise.
14:54So I want people to be careful and take care of themselves and be aware that things do happen that you don't expect to happen, that's all. Okay, so when do sheep or lambs go to market? When do you actually harvest them? Anywhere from 120 to 140 pounds is ideal. Some markets and some groups like them a little lighter.
15:24and some of them like older ewes. It just depends on their upbringing and where in the world they came from. Yep. Okay. So do your lambs, do your sheep, sorry, do your sheep lamb in like staggered batches throughout the year or do they just lamb in the spring? Well, that's...
15:51changed over the years, but currently we're trying to lamb a group in early February, March, and then we lamb again in October and November. Not every year takes for fall lambs, but there is a percentage that does. That way we have a more steady supply of lamb available.
16:21Yeah, so throughout, well, every six months basically. Yeah, yep. Yeah, okay. Cool, see, I haven't talked to anybody about sheep yet, so you're it. Okay. You're it. Okay, so when you guys butcher or have somebody butcher the lambs for sale in your community, do you get back the bones and the wool and stuff, or do you just get back the meat?
16:50Well, I always shear the lamb before it goes into the process, because if that wool touches the meat, it can leave a really gany flavor. So we want that hide pretty clean before it goes in. Okay. As far as I do get some of the organ meats back, but as far as the bones and the rest
17:20No, I usually don't take that back. Okay. Does anyone ask for the bones to make um to make lamb broth? Well it um
17:33I mean, you can get some, they'll package soup bones. That's one of the things we get back. But the people that want a lot of that product, a lot of times they'll come here to the farm and buy the live animal and harvest everything themselves. Okay. Yeah. The reason I ask is because we did make lamb broth, you know, bone broth from the lamb bones. And oh my God.
18:01It is amazing. Like we've met our own beef broth before from beef bones and that's okay. It's, it's, it's nice, but lamb broth is just so rich and deep and, and savory. And again, I'm going to have to talk to my husband this weekend and be like, we need to find somebody who's selling lamb because I just talked to this guy and I want to make lamb again, my mouth is watering thinking about it. That's how much we like it here. So.
18:30Anyway, anyone who's never made bone broth from lamb bones or sheep bones, try it, because it's really good.
18:39Okay, so what do you guys do with the wool? Do you sell it? Do you spin it? Do you make things? Well, the last couple of years the price has been, it hasn't even paid to send it anywhere. It's been doing, we use it a lot as mulch around plants. That's really good for that. But when the
19:06up enough to where we can pay for the shipping, we do send it to be processed. Okay. Yeah, I heard that the wool market is really not great. I heard it from somebody else a while ago. It is not. We in the U.S. are not able to scour and process a lot of wool because of the regulations that we have here in the States. So China is the main buyer of wool and
19:36Our wool in the US generally is not as good as the wool that's coming out of like New Zealand and Australia and those parts of the world. The western part of the United States, the wool from the western use tends to be more desirable than the wool from the farm flocks in the eastern part of the country.
20:02Is it really hard to process the wool to get it to the point where you can spin it? Is that why it's such a problem? It is quite a process and I think, I'm not an expert on this topic. I would want to do a little bit more research but a lot of what the issue is is getting the wool clean leaves a lot of byproduct, waste product.
20:31And that is, the exposing of that is the main concern, is why it's not a huge industry here in the United States. Okay. All right. That makes more sense. Because I know that the sheep can get kind of grubby. And I also know that the lanolin is all throughout their wool and that makes it hard to work with until it's cleaned. And carding wool is an...
21:01utter pain in the butt and then spinning it. I mean, back in the very old days, people had spinning wheels and they would spin the wool. But that's not a thing now. I mean, I'm sure there are people who do it because they like to do it. There are people, but they're very far or few between. I think I know four or five people throughout the country that do that. Yeah, and it's time intensive. It takes a long time. It is.
21:30an awesome hobby to have. We watched a lady doing it at a historical reenactment a few years back. And the process of it is amazing, but it's a very long time to make it worth it. So, okay. The crops that you grow, you said wheat and what else?
21:59I've raised millet and oats and then sorghum, sedan grass for feed also is another thing that we've raised and occasionally a soybean, but not very often. Okay, what's milo? Milo is a grain sorghum. It looks like a broom on top of the plant that has small round seeds on it. Okay. That's a feed crop.
22:29It's pretty widely produced here in western Kansas. Okay. And is it for, is it for, um, is it for cloven, hooved animals or is it just for cows? It's, it's, it, a lot of it would go to, uh, chicken feed, hog feed, uh, some cattle feed. I use it some with the sheep. Um, but it's, it's, it's mostly, it's very.
22:57The nutrients are very similar to corn. It just has a little less energy. Okay. Is it related to corn? I don't, I can't not direct. More of a sorghum type grass, but most, most corn is in the grass family also. So it, I guess in a way, but not directly. I'll have to look it up and see, cause now I'm curious. I'll look it up later.
23:27Okay, so with that stuff, is that just to feed your animals or is that sold out? Most of that is sold. When we raise it, it goes to the local co-op and a lot of that, the last few years has ended up in the export market. So that's really, and they do use it as a, our local ethanol plant does use quite a bit of.
23:57milo to produce ethanol also. Okay. So, there's a lot here. I mean, it's not just you get up in the morning and go feed the animals and water and that's your job. You have to consider all the markets. You have to consider the health of your animals. You have to consider the weather, the health of your crops, the futures. You have a complete and total farm business.
24:26Yes, I would say that that would be the marketing and the financial end is the most challenging part of what we do. Agriculture is very capital intensive. It takes a lot of dollars to operate on a day-to-day basis. Yes, and it takes a lot of dollars even on a small scale too. It does.
24:54We are a farm to market homestead. And so we have maybe a third of an acre garden that we grow every summer. And we are growing specifically cucumbers, tomatoes, and green beans this year heavily because that's what people want. They want to be able to can in August and September. And so...
25:22It's not a big garden. I mean, it's a big garden compared to our little tiny garden we used to grow on our city lot. But it's not the scale that you're doing. And it costs money. It costs money for the diesel for the little tractor to till it. It costs money for the seeds. It costs money in keeping, making sure that we're fed and rested so we have the energy to do the work. It costs money. And so
25:52So the old saying about it takes money to make money is absolutely true. Very true. Very true. And when I was a teenager, my first job ever, I think I was 11 or 12 was babysitting a six month old baby. I had never babysat in my life and it didn't cost me any money to make the $30 that I made for the night, but it costs me an anxiety and stress and being worried that I would
26:21that I would kill a baby because I had no experience babysitting. So everything costs, but in the expenditure of whatever the energy, the form of the energy it takes, there's usually a return. And so my next question is, are you happy doing what you're doing? Do you love it? I do love what I do. There is days.
26:50I need a disclaimer here that it's extremely stressful and then you will question is this really worth it. But I would say 90% of the time, I'm very grateful to be doing what I'm doing. And there's your return. Yes. Okay. I have one more question. Why did you name it Blended Acres? Well, there's... My current wife is my second wife. I had...
27:20I've been through a divorce and the first time I started off it was just Libby Farms. It was my last name. It was a pride thing. I wanted to leave an absolute legacy that had my name on it. After the process of going through a divorce and raising children.
27:47My wife came, my current wife came into my life and we became a blended family. Yes. And.
27:58when the opportunity came to start again into agriculture like we are now.
28:08We spent a lot of time pondering and discussing what to call this. I didn't have that absolute desire to have my name carried on, but I wanted it to be available to any of the children. Or if my children decide later that they don't want
28:35be any part of this that it could be transferred onto another individual. And that's where we come up with the blended acres. We are truly a blended family. What we do, it's a blended operation. We have multiple facets of what's going on here. And it just, my wife presented that name to me and it just stuck. Yep. I love that. That's fantastic. We are a blended family as well.
29:03The four kids that we have raised all have different sets of parents. I have three of my body and then my husband has one from a previous relationship. And the four kids, we consider them to be ours, but only one of them, the youngest, is actually genetically related to me and my husband. Does that make sense? Yep.
29:31So I love blended families and blended families are the best way to teach kids compromised. Mm-hmm. I agree with that. Because there was a lot of big personalities in my beautiful blended family. And they all had to figure out how to work together and how to have disagreements respectfully. And they all do it really well. So blended families are amazing.
30:00All right, Lawrence, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. And I love, I love, love, love that you are raising sheep because I had not had chance to talk to anybody in depth about sheep yet. Okay. One thing I would like to share if you have just a moment. I do. Um, some advice for anybody that is trying to do this. It's going to take a lot of hard work and don't.
30:29Strive for the shiny. Do what you can within your means. You don't have to have the nicest stuff to start with. Find stuff that's reliable and build from that because I've seen people try to have all the best right off the bat and it usually doesn't last. It ends in tears. Yes, it does. So I guess that's patience and diligence and trying to...
30:59make wise decisions in our businesses what's allowed us to get to where we are now, not just, oh, I want a new pickup. We have no new machinery here. That is not part of our operation. And to be quite frank, if it was, we would not be in business. We could not afford the debt load that goes with it. Yeah.
31:28Absolutely. I actually have another question about what you're saying because this is what happens. Would you also suggest that people find mentors, people who are doing it already and talk to them? I would very much so. If it wasn't for my upbringing with my grandfather on his farm and the gentleman that helped shape me as a young man, I would not be able to do what I do now.
31:58And another attitude that I've always adopted is I do not know everything, and I'm not afraid to ask to find out. Yeah. So yes. So yes, fine. I mean, I'm always asking questions, going to conferences, learning, trying to develop myself personally to continue to do a better job at what we have here. Yep. So.
32:26So basically do what you can with what you have where you are and don't be afraid to ask questions. Ask questions. Lots and lots of questions. Okay. I think that's fantastic advice, Lawrence. Thank you. You're welcome. You have a great day. You too. Thank you. Bye.
 

Strom Acres Homestead Pinnacle, NC

Today I'm talking with Jamie at Strom Acres Homestead Pinnacle, NC. If you'd like to buy Happy Homestead Coaching by Jamie Strom, click here, and I will receive a small commission. 
https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Jamie at Strom Acres Homestead. Good morning, Jamie. How are you? I'm well, thank you. How are you? I'm great. Is it lovely where you are? Yes, it is. Very sunny today. And where are you again? Pilot Mountain, North Carolina.
00:28That's right, North Carolina. You're like the 10th person I've talked to from the Carolinas in the last month. It's, it's gotta be the place that homesteaders go to, to build their dreams. I swear. There's a lot of it around here. A lot of it grew up learning it. Yeah. Um, so tell me about yourself and what you guys do. Um, I live here on Six Acres with my husband. We are empty nesters.
00:58And I replace my children with farm animals. As we all do, yes. Um, they're fenced in orchard. The orchard has apple, peach, pear, plum, almond, trees. I think that's all out there. And I keep the chickens fenced in with the orchard. That way I don't have to move their poop. They just fertilize the trees for me. Perfect. And you have two coops inside that. So if a predator or something has to get in, they got to go through two fences.
01:27We've also got dogs and cats and honeybees. That's all for now. I'm also a nurse. I'm a diabetes teacher. I work part of the hospital and part time from home. I have two grown kids, 33 and 27, and I have a grandson that's 10. Wow, okay. I have four grown kids too, and one of them is 34 and one of them is 32. So your 33 year old is right in between. Yeah, yeah.
01:57Nice. Okay, so how did you end up coming to this lifestyle? I think it slowly progressed over the years. Um, I've always had a little garden started out probably in my 20s. When I first got married, got my own place, always had tomato plants. And then started the raised bed thing and then started the chicken thing. And then we added on honeybees.
02:26And then we expanded the raised beds to now we have about, well, I think it just keeps expanding. Um, I like the idea of living, being self-sufficient. Um, COVID did scare everybody when they ran low on food in the grocery stores. And I thought, Hmm, I could just do this myself. My grandparents did it. If they could do it, I can do it. So I've just slowly been learning more. And just.
02:55building on the knowledge already had. Yeah, it's like a runaway train, I swear. Especially with social media, you always see something else out there you think, if they can do it, I can do it. Yeah, I think it's true. And I don't think it's true for everyone. I've said this a couple times on the podcast that
03:18I'm not sure that homesteading is for everybody. I think that it takes a special person, and I don't mean in a derogatory way, I think it takes someone special to want to learn and grow in this way. Absolutely. I know lots of my friends say, I could never do that. I could never do that. I'm like, well, I'm glad I can. They don't wanna get their hands dirty. They don't wanna do a little chick-a-boop. They don't wanna hear a rooster. And that's the kind of stuff that just don't bother me.
03:46Yeah, I kind of like hearing roosters. We don't have one, but our neighbors about a quarter mile away have a rooster. And I'm usually up before the sun comes up and I hear him calling and I'm like, oh, he knows what time it is. I recently made a ringtone out of my rooster's roost because he's teaching a younger rooster how to do it. Oh, fun. He's going, he's doing his, errr, errr, and then the baby goes, errr. That's adorable.
04:16That's great. So I don't know when your book came out. I know you have a book out and I don't think it was out when I approached you about being on the show. So can you tell me about your book? Sure. I wrote it the last half of last year and it was published in January. It's called Happy Homestead Coaching. That's the book. It's on Amazon. Anybody's interested. Okay, what's it about?
04:46about how to not just do the homestead thing, but how to maintain happiness and a peaceful life throughout it, not let it overwhelm you, not let it be something that you regret. That is a fantastic topic for a book because there have been days since we moved to our three acres where I'm like, what are we doing today? And it can, it can overwhelm you. Oh yes, absolutely. You have to know when to say, that's enough for now.
05:15Yeah, last summer we were making lip balms and cold process lye soaps and candles. And my husband was doing the garden and the farmers markets and the CSA. And I was trying to keep everybody fed and make sure the clothes got washed. And like in July, I just looked at him. I said, what are we doing? This is nuts.
05:40And he said, this is summer. He said, wait until November. You'll be like, I'm so bored. What do I do now? And we don't even have animals. I mean, we have a dog and barn cats and chickens. It's not like we're taking care of cows and goats and horses. Right. That's one reason I don't have those is because I do feel like it would overwhelm me. Yeah. I mean, I would love to have them. I think that would be really fun, but I think the fun part of it would probably go away after about a month and I'd be like, Oh, this is.
06:10a lot of work. Okay, so do you guys, I asked this of everybody who homesteads, do you homestead just to be sustainable for yourselves or do you sell stuff? We haven't sold stuff as of yet because we, I can and I want to preserve and keep as much as I can in the basement. After I feel like I've got enough stored on my own, then I'll start selling. And I just got about 70.
06:40chicks from Tractor Supply in the last two months. So I'm gonna start getting too many eggs and I'm not canning eggs. So I probably will start selling them at that point. I got that many chickens so that I could raise them and then sell the chickens. I can buy the chickens for three or four bucks and then sell them for 30 or whatever. That's my plan. My plan is not to keep 70 chickens. Yeah, that's a lot of birds and a lot of eggs. Oh my God. You're using ducks too. Oh.
07:10So you have branched out into other fowl. I did, I was a sucker at the tractor supply. They're awfully cute, it's hard to walk away without them. Yep. And if we had the set up for chickens, it'd be so easy just to put them all together, and it is. Just like other chickens, they all get along fine, they all eat fine, they all drink from the same water. No fault can go to it though, ever. Yeah, I won't go to tractor supply between February and-
07:39June if I can avoid it because I'm gonna get suckered in and I'm gonna be like we should try doing baby chickens and my husband really wants to do that and I don't most of the time I don't but I went to Tractor Supply like two springs ago and they had the most adorable ducklings and the guy let me hold one and they're not supposed to but he did and that duckling almost came home with us and I was like yeah I need to not go to Tractor Supply when it's when it's the
08:07the time that they're selling the baby fowl because they're adorable and I want them, but I don't actually want them. You kind of do and you kind of don't. Yeah, we have like 18 chickens that are laying hens and that's more than enough. I'm good. It's all good. And they're useless so you don't ever get baby chickens? No. Okay. Nope, but we have many, many, many eggs, many eggs. I'm sure. When I first brought the babies home, I had them in plastic Walmart tubs in my kitchen.
08:37I had three of them on my kitchen table. I was not ready for them. And as they got bigger, I'm like, hmm, now what? And luckily we had a storage shed, it was 10 by 10, that we just cleaned out and made it the nursery. Yeah. This week we put a chicken access door through it and fenced outside so they can go in and out and it's working great. Yeah, I mean, honestly, chickens are the gateway drug to all the other animals you wanna get.
09:04And the reason why is because chickens are fairly low maintenance. Fairly. I mean, we got four chickens when we lived in town before we moved here. And really, my husband would clean out the coop like once a month because it was four chickens. And we had eggs enough for me to make a batch of cookies for the kids and for the kids to have a couple scrambled eggs during the week. So it's not that hard.
09:32They don't require a lot of care and they don't really require a fancy coop. We bought one of the sheds you can get at Home Depot, you know, the vinyl ones, when we first got them. And actually, no, when we first got them, we got one of those chicken coops that it, I don't know how to explain it. It looks like a rabbit hutch. Yeah. One of those. And it really wasn't big enough for four chickens.
10:01And so we ended up getting the shed thing from Home Depot. And once the shed was built, the chickens were so happy because they had so much more room. And we kept referring to the shed as the chicken mansion. We built them a mansion. And we called it that to the neighbors. And the neighbors like, what do you mean chicken mansion? And we explained, they were like, oh, they're moving up in the world. I said, yes, they have much more room now. So it's a really simple thing to do.
10:28as long as your city allows you to do it if you live in a city. Yes, you mentioned having them when you were in the city. When we started out, we lived in the city. And then I didn't know they would get old enough to fly over the fence. We would get calls from the neighbors saying your chickens are walking down the sidewalks. And I learned how to trim their wings, but that's when I thought maybe we need a different place.
10:56Yeah, our plan was always to try to find a piece of land with a house on it because living in town wasn't really my favorite thing ever. And so when we had the opportunity to go, we went like there was a fire under our feet. We were like, okay, it's time, let's move. And we did. And our chickens are smarter than the average chicken, I guess. We live by a very busy highway. And it's not
11:26It's not like an interstate highway, but like a two-lane highway. And we live in the middle of corn fields and soybean fields and alfalfa fields. And so the big semis are going down the road all the time because they're transporting stuff back and forth. And I was afraid we started letting the chickens free range this past fall. They've usually been in a run and my husband was like, I'm gonna let them out. I said, okay.
11:54I was afraid that they would go out on the road and get hit. They only go about halfway between where their coop is and where the road is, and then they go back. They never actually go to the road. So we have not lost a chicken to a truck yet. Yeah, that's good. Maybe they go to the mountain too. Yeah, I don't know, but they love going out halfway across the garden, which is the expanse between the road and where their coop is. And they get about halfway across the garden.
12:24eat their way back through the earthworms and stuff. So I don't know what the deal is, but maybe they're just smarter than I think they are. Maybe so. Could be. I might have the smartest chickens in the world and I don't even know it. Who knows? I doubt it. Chickens are not the smartest animal ever. They're fine. Okay. So your book is... Tell me the name of the book again real quick. Nappy Homestead Coaching. Thank you. So are you...
12:54interested in coaching other homesteaders by chance? Yes, and I put in my book that I would coach other people. I put my contact information in it. And the book also teaches you how to coach others once you become a coach yourself and make an income off of it if that's what you choose. Very nice. That is a really great idea. I put all my passions together. The coaching, which I do through nursing, the happy, peaceful stuff, which I do online too.
13:24And then the homesickness kind of mixed them all together. Yeah, I really love the topic of the happy part and the joyful part because I have talked with so many people lately who are just swamped with the busyness and the fastness of life right now. And it's like they never get a chance to just breathe, to calm down and look around.
13:54Yes, enjoy it. As humans, we all need that. We need a chance for our anxiety levels and whatever the hormone is that goes with stress to come down. Yes, absolutely. I've got used to not being fixated on having the perfect garden. If I've got weeds in my beds, so what? I'm happy and the plants are still growing. I'll get to it when I get to it. I don't let it take me out.
14:22Yeah, I mean, I don't know, I have lots of thoughts about this and they're all dancing in my head and I can't pick one. Yeah, humans have to rest. You can't stay at a level of high anxiety all the time. It will kill you. It will, literally.
14:44So yeah, I think it's great. I'm actually thinking about picking up a copy of your book because I'm really curious about what's in it. Yeah, I'll probably get the E version and read it before I go to sleep, probably. Because right now I've got a lot going on too, who knew? So. You should watch out for it. If I'm not careful, it'll sneak up on me and I'll get overwhelmed, especially when I went from 10 chickens to 80. But you gotta face yourself and remind yourself
15:14Enjoy the small moments. Look out the window every morning and look at what you've got and just take a deep breath and relax and be thankful for the things you do have. Not worried about the things you still need to do. Yeah. My husband is one of those guys who is always looking forward further than he probably needs to. And he's always thinking about how do I make it bigger, better, more?
15:44And I finally had to sit him down a couple years ago and just be like, honey, we have already achieved more in our fifties than most people do by the time they die. Can you just take a day and look around and breathe it in and smile and realize what you've accomplished? And he was like, but, and I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, you need to slow down. You need to stop for a minute and just take it in.
16:14This being of brain activity becomes a habit over your lifetime. You get used to being in this crisis mode where you have things to do and you've got to keep going or something bad's going to happen. So it's like turning your brain sideways to make it slow down and go from sixth gear to third and realize you can relax. It's just hard to do until it becomes a habit. Yeah, I tricked him. I had our kid make a fire in the fire ring. And
16:43I poured a little tiny snort of whiskey in a glass and my husband came over to talk to my son because we have benches that sit around the fire ring. My husband was sitting down talking to my son and I handed my husband the little tiny snort of whiskey and I said, drink this. He said okay and he drank half of it, put it down and I said okay.
17:07I said, you're sitting still. He said, I am. I said, there's a nice fire. He said, there is. I said, you have another sip of whiskey. I said, can you please now settle down for a minute? And he was like, you tricked me into stopping. I said, I sure did.
17:24And I started asking him questions about what he thought of what we had managed to do that particular year. And he's like, well, we did this and I want to do that. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, stay focused on this past year. And he did. He tried. And after he got talking, he thanked me. He was like, thank you for asking me about this. Because I didn't realize how much we've really managed to get done and how great it is.
17:53So if you have to trick somebody into calming down, trick them, it works. They'll thank you later. Exactly. So, speaking of busy, I cannot keep a lid on my news. I wanna share it with you and it'll get shared on the podcast when this comes out. I am starting a Midwest Makers Directory online today. I am starting to build it.
18:21because it does not exist. I'm making a directory for people who make things and who are crafters. And I am so excited about this. I woke up yesterday morning not knowing I was gonna do it. I had floated the idea a year and a half ago and it didn't seem like anyone was interested and I didn't think I had the skills to build it. And then yesterday someone commented on that post from a year and a half ago.
18:48And a whole bunch of people also commented and liked on it. They would be interested in that being a thing. So I went to Google and I typed in, how do I build a directory website? Because I didn't know if maybe there was a program that would do it for me, that I just had to pay somebody to do it and found out that it is affordable and simple and I can do it. So.
19:15talked to my husband last night when he got home and I said, so I have a thing that I ran by you a year and a half ago but now I have more information thinking about doing this and he's he listened and he said do that that is something people obviously want and need and you're good at this go do it. So for the next two weeks I'm gonna be building this thing and then getting the word out. The reason I'm sharing it is because it plays into the calm and joy thing.
19:44I thought that I would not sleep last night because when I have a thing that I'm gonna do that seems big to me, I chew on it when I try to go to sleep and I can't get to sleep. I slept like a baby last night so I know it's the right thing to do. Yes. So excited. And I don't want to hijack your story but it's driving me crazy and if I didn't get it out I was gonna be all distracted and not be able to ask any more questions. So. You got it before you. It's a good idea. I'm so excited. Um.
20:12A lot of times I wanted something homemade. Like recently I wanted like a crochet chick because I didn't think I could make it. I do crochet but I don't think I'm that good. And I wanted something local but I usually go to Etsy. But Etsy, it could be coming from anywhere all over the world and I can't really narrow Etsy down to looking just in like Midwest area wherever you are. So that's an awesome idea.
20:40Is it set up so you can do it as regions of the United States? And you can also have a map where there can be pins for people, for their addresses and stuff. It's really slick. I'm so excited to dive into this later today. And I was a good girl. I did not jump on it last night. And I absolutely did not cancel this interview with you because I was like, nope, I have to do the podcast and then I need to eat food.
21:07And then I can start on this because it's going to require my whole brain to get it going. Yes. So I'm, I'm glad that I had you to talk to you because it made me think through and take time and not just jump in and then be frustrated by six o'clock tonight with it. So that does come back to, to calm and joy and ideas and that you can't do everything at one time.
21:36Absolutely. So I think that plays into your book. And I will absolutely list the link for the Amazon listing for your book when I do the description for the episode. Don't let your new project overwhelm you. One more time? Don't let your new project overwhelm you. No, no, no, no. I'm going to try to take it as slowly as I can and still make it worth the time I'm putting into it. And my daughter happened to take a coding.
22:05class, a computer coding class two years ago. So I called her last night and I was like, I'm going to do this thing. If I get stuck and frustrated and overwhelmed, can I call you and can you try to talk me through whatever is I'm doing wrong? And she was like, of course I can. So I have a helper. Good. It's nice having grown kids sometimes. It is wonderful having grown kids who know more than I do. Yes.
22:31I want my kids to be more successful than I have ever been and she's well on her way. Anyway, enough about me and my idea. I just had to spit it out before I choked on it. So let me see what else I can ask you. You said that you can. Do you love canning or is it just a necessary evil? I enjoy it. I mean, if I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't grow so much.
23:01But I didn't know that my dad did it until I told him I was doing it. And he gave me a book that he used. My grandparents never really taught me how it's like, I know they did it, but it was like a survival skill that they had to have. And I guess they felt like, now that we've got canned food at the grocery store, I don't, my kids will never need those skills, but we do. I do enjoy it and I do try to teach it to my kids too.
23:31I think one of the best and worst things that ever happened is I think it was after World War II when all the instant foods became a fad. It was great because it freed women up to go pursue other things, but it was terrible because people stopped learning how to cook and providing nutritional food for their families. And I like knowing exactly what is and is not in my food.
24:01Yeah, me too. Me too. And it's, I swear, everything is a double-edged sword because women back then were expected to be in the kitchen and take care of the kids and bring their husband, their pipe and their newspaper and their dinner. And I, I'm trying really hard to say this the way I want it to come out.
24:29I am a stay at home mom to this day. Our youngest still lives here. He's 22. He's a fully grown adult and there are reasons why he's here and there are very important reasons that I'm not allowed to get into them. But I'm also not a full time hands on radar raised mom of little ones anymore. And the fact that I have time to cook from scratch and enjoy it is such a joy to me.
24:58It's such a blessing to me. And the thing that I have really learned in the last 10 years is that all that home cooking that I did for the kids made them healthy and made their brains work. And so I'm glad that I had the privilege of being a stay-at-home mom and cooking for them and making them things like crocheted scarves because I could.
25:23Because they saw me doing these skills that were important to know and they all learned to do them too. Yes.
25:33So I don't know, you can play on that if you want. If not, that's fine too. Yeah, I totally agree. I wasn't a stay at home mom, but now I think I've done more of the homesteading since my kids grew up and moved out because I got the time to do it now. Yeah. But yeah, I think there's a balance to it. You don't want to do too much. You mentioned like when we had to stay home and cook and clean and raise the kids all the time, there's a balance to it. And now we do have a choice.
26:01where we want that balance to be. We could be at home doing this kind of stuff all the time, or you can work full time now. Women have a choice. Yeah. But when you have the balance of both, it can be awesome. Yeah, and it's wonderful. I mean, I loved raising my kids. You know, I really, really did. But once the oldest turned 18, I didn't realize how I had been holding my breath for that.
26:31The day he turned 18, I swear I exhaled for five minutes straight. I was like, okay, he is, he is of age and I am still sort of responsible for him. But I'm not anymore. And it's a lot of weight on parents to raise their kids to adulthood. Oh yes. On top of everything else they're doing. And kids are, these days are needing their parents more past the age of 18. Yes.
27:01We still take our kids, new stuff every day because they're willing to learn. Especially a lot of the home fitting stuff. I didn't do a lot of this when they were growing up. I was working full time every time as a nurse. So now that I'm getting into it and sending them pictures of the baby chicks and the cannon in the garden, they, they do ask more questions and they're interested and they start more of their own at home too. Yes. We never stop being examples for our kids. It just keeps going. Oh yes.
27:30Okay, so I saw the pictures of your chicks. They are adorable. And most people don't know, I mean, anyone listening to this podcast probably knows, but people who are new to the homesteading idea don't know that average laying time from, from hatched chick to eggs is like 18 to 22 weeks. Right. And so,
27:58Part of the reason that we don't buy chicks, we buy laying hens that are already, you know, just started laying is because you still have to feed those little creatures until they start laying before you see a return on your money. Oh yes, and when they're growing, they eat more. Once they're grown, they kind of just free range. I don't feed them a lot of feed. They eat a lot of bugs off the ground. Yep. Right, when they're young, we're going through a lot of chicken food. Exactly.
28:27So it's really fun getting a day or two old chick and raising it, but it's also expensive if you're buying like 20 of them to keep them fed until they start giving eggs. And the reason I say this is because there is this picture of homesteading in a lot of people's heads that it's just this very pretty, very fun, easy thing.
28:54and it is very pretty and it can be fun, but it's not easy and it can be expensive. And it makes you work hard and you're tired at the end of the day. Yes. And I don't say that to discourage anyone, but I just want to be honest about this particular lifestyle. If you're really gonna dive into it deep, you gotta be ready to do the work. Absolutely. My justification always is that I'm gonna get a return off of it.
29:25I wouldn't have 80 chickens just to be pets. I plan on selling them and making money. And that's my justification for anything around here I do. It's to save money. Yeah, and that's honest. It's really nice when you can do something and give of yourself without expecting any return. But even with stuff that isn't a monetary return, there's some return or you wouldn't be doing it.
29:55The self-sufficiency is huge for me. The money we put into the garden blend dirt and the raised beds, I'll never get back. It would take a lifetime to get that back out of food. But the self-sufficiency part of it that I can take care of myself if I need to is something money can't buy. Yeah, exactly. And I'm gonna say this and then we're gonna wrap it up because it's been like half an hour already. That was fast.
30:24We have a huge garden that we grow and we sell produce at the farmers market from it and we sell produce at our farm stand on our property. And my husband decided that he was going to cut back on the many varieties of things that he's been growing and focus more on the things that we know people want like tomatoes and pickling cucumbers and just cucumbers and squash and green beans, the stuff that people really want.
30:52And I happened to look at a loss leader flyer this past weekend from the store. And I said, um, how many tomato plants did you plant? He said, 120. I said, how many cucumber plants or seeds did you plant? And he said, a hundred. I said, good. And he looked at me because I had that, oh, thank you, Jesus. Look, I'm there sound in my voice. He said, what? And I said, honey, I said, I don't see inflation coming down anytime soon.
31:21I said, I am happy to sell the excess produce this year. I said, but I hate to say it, but we need to make sure we can tomato sauce and diced tomatoes and pickles and green beans and freeze our squash because it's going to be real expensive to eat this coming winter. Yes. And he was like, Oh yeah. And I said, I'm actually getting a little nervous about this. And
31:49He said, well, he said, we've got all growing season. He said, and I have lots planted. I said, yeah, we need to stay on preserving it. So, anyone out there who isn't growing things, if you have even the littlest space in your yard that you could put in a raised bed, I would suggest growing some things this year. Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned how many tomato plants you had going. I'll tell you a funny story.
32:15I bought like 10 packs of tomato seeds, different tomato seeds that I wanted to plant in like January. And my husband thought it'd be sweet and bring home a tray full of 96 cherry tomato plants. Oh my god, okay. So now my plant tomato bed is now his cherry tomato bed and I told him I hope you like cherry tomatoes because you're going to be eating them for the next year. That's a lot. And we found two other beds and I cleaned out that I put my seeds in. Yatch. I love cherry tomatoes.
32:45And cherry tomato plants are prolific if they're healthy. Mm-hmm, like bushes. Yeah, yeah, and I like cherry tomatoes, but I don't think I could eat that many from that many baby plants, no. Not the good news. We're gonna have to find a cherry tomato recipe book. Mm-hmm. There is a cherry tomato pie recipe that I saw, and the comments that I saw under the recipe said that it
33:14almost tasted like a strawberry pie. So I can try to find it and send you a link if you want to try making a cherry tomato pie. Yeah, that'd be great. I don't want to. When I eat too many tomatoes, they do start to taste like strawberries to me. And when I eat too many strawberries, they start to taste like tomatoes to me. So I'm going to skip the pie thing. But it is a thing. It's out there. Yeah, please send it to me. I will try to find it again. I'll message it to you.
33:43All right, Jamie, thank you for entertaining me today, because really this is all about entertaining me today, because I was so distracted by my idea that I got to get going on. I'm like, I'm going to let her talk, because I need something to get my brain off this idea that's been spinning in my head for 24 hours now. I understand. Thank you for your time and your thoughts, and the fact that you wrote a fantastic book that will help other people. That's great. You too. Have a great day.
34:13Thanks, you too. All right, bye. Happy to see you. You too, bye. Bye.
 

Shipshape Farm

Today I'm talking with Whitney at Shipshape Farm. You can also follow on Facebook.
https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Whitney at Shipshape Farm. How are you, Whitney? I'm doing really well. Loving this day. Good. Is it North Carolina? It's actually South Carolina, but we're super close to North Carolina, so it's all good.
00:28Yeah, I've talked to a bunch of people in your area over the last couple of months and I always screw it up. If it's South Carolina, I say North Carolina and if it's North Carolina, I say South Carolina. I can't keep them straight, so. You're totally good. It's the Carolinas and I'm a North Carolina girl who now lives in South Carolina, so I'm good either way. Okay. Well, tell me about yourself and Shipshape farm.
00:54Well, first off, the name, I know it's a little tricky, but it comes from when we first moved out here in 2020. My husband is former military, former Navy, and the land was in a lot of disarray because it had been a couple of years since it had been well tended. So the idea was that courtesy of the Navy with an anchor and getting things ship shaped and then also
01:21kind of rescuing the land, that's where the name came from. But yeah, me, my husband, our four kids, and my parents all live here on the farm in the upstate of South Carolina. And I'm not exactly sure what you want to know about, so you'll have to ask me more detail. Okay. Well, how did you end up having a farm? Oh, I'm...
01:48We had moved to the upstate after my husband got out of the military because it was near to all of our family and that was in 2017. And then in 2020, the world kind of went on fire for everybody. And we were living on a quarter acre in the city and it was just not the best spot if we needed to like, if food supply chains got shut down, we needed to have better, just
02:18to take care of our family well. So we started hunting at the time. I was actually a real estate agent and was able to find this property that was only really 25 minutes from our existing home. And we were, the owner was lovely. We were able to meet and talk with her and then move onto the land. So initially we moved to the land for just.
02:45our family thinking we didn't know what was going to happen in the world, but we wanted to be prepared. And then as we've lived here, thankfully the world has not imploded. So that's been marvelous. And we've gotten, that's a good thing. So we've gotten to learn a lot because we started out as like the very worst farmers ever. But we've learned. So here we are.
03:14My mom is in charge of the garden. She does a fantastic job taking care of that. And really, from about April to November, we don't have a greenhouse yet, but from about April to November, we primarily eat all of our fresh produce is from her garden for all eight of us. And then we have chickens, and so we've got lots of eggs. And then we have goats who we milk. So they're dairy goats and then land clearing goats as well.
03:42And so we're slowly working to the self-sustainable component. Yeah. Okay. You're not, you weren't the worst farmers ever. You were just beginning farmers. That's all. Oh, I don't know. We lost some livestock. The things that you think you're supposed to know, we just didn't, we just did so many things backwards. But the beauty of it was...
04:12Our mistakes sent us hunting for the people who knew more. And so we've been able to build a phenomenal community here with people who are much more knowledgeable and very gracious in sharing their wisdom. So we've been able to learn a lot from them. It is so funny to me that so many people changed their lives during COVID. Yeah. And pretty much to either make sure they had food
04:41or to get away from people because it was just so uncomfortable being surrounded by people but not being able to be around people. And the thing that's come out of it is this huge community or network of new people in our lives. Yes. And that's wonderful. It's this crazy circle that happened. It's been really grand. I would say my favorite part though is that...
05:11getting to do life with multiple generations together. If you had told me that this is my life, would be my life, like 20 years ago when I got married, I would have said you were insane and that that was not me. It sounded like a terrible idea to especially live, share the land with my parents and I'm about a mile and a half away from all of my in-laws and...
05:40But it is glorious. It's very much like a lot of people in a marriage. So there are times that it's tricky and challenging and conflict and confusion, but the good far outweighs the difficulty. So it's been really wonderful to build those deep relationships in a way that we could have never done with the military. Yeah, it must be a great way to hone your compromising skills. Yeah.
06:11That is very true. So, we don't really have any, maybe laid back is a good word. I mean, I would say I'm probably the most laid back of everybody, but I'm still pretty hyper. And so getting us all to work together well with all of our very strong personalities has been entertaining, to say the least.
06:38I bet. I bet it's been fun and frustrating at exactly the same time. Yes, yes. But that's most good things, right? Yes, it sure is. Every damn day. Pretty much. Yeah, you just... But that's, I think, I think with both the land and the relationships, it's it's such a constant in-your-face reminder that the good things in life take effort. They take work. They're not easy.
07:08And we have this idea in our culture that easy is the best way to go. Easy is to like almost king. Comfort is king. But we miss so many beautiful things in our lives when we're not willing to put in the effort and the work. Absolutely. I couldn't have said it better myself. That is brilliant. Okay. So what do you guys do at Ship Shape Farm? Well.
07:35As of this past semester, so in January, we opened up to be able to do classes here on the land. So, and you already heard, I said I'm not very phenomenal or I started out not very phenomenal. So it's kind of fun because we have preschool classes and we have homeschool classes that come, they come once a week. And it's been amazing because they cannot ask a dumb question that we have not already asked.
08:05There's this level of, it's all good. Let's ask and learn together. So starting in February, we had a winter session. So that was six weeks long. People signed up to come for one class per week, either preschool or homeschool bracket. And we just explore the land. So the biggest perk I have found personally, and what's been mirrored back from the parents of the preschoolers is that
08:35The goal is when you come onto our land, we leave hustle culture on the main road. It's not allowed on the driveway. So we come here and spend two hours reconnecting with the wonder of childhood in the world around us. And so we go at the preschoolers pace. We do not hustle them. We do not rush them.
09:00So sometimes our little nature walk will take an hour and a half. It's not a long walk. But when you're counting every single acorn that you see, it takes a minute. So it's just that ability to be delighted in the smallest things. So that's one component with our preschoolers and then with our homeschoolers. It's really just enabling them and we have it catered for homeschoolers because that is...
09:29during the school day, it's not taking up nights or weekends. But it's enabling them to have tech-free learning engagement. There's so many opportunities for homeschoolers now, but a lot of them do involve some sort of device. And so it's really grand for them to get outside. We build things together. We're painting farm buildings. We're learning about goat care. We're gathering eggs. We're digging in the garden, taking care of plants. So it's just that opportunity to.
09:59really engage with your world and be where your feet are. So it's farm and nature school is what it is? Yes, yes. Okay. So they all get to taste our goat milk. They learn how to milk the goats. They learn, the older ones who have the hand strength learn how to trim the goat hooves. So they just, they love it. So we did a winter session, a spring session, and we're in a little.
10:26short three-week session this May before the summer time. We're actually doing summer camps here on the land this summer. Okay, summer camp. Does that mean that they'll stay over or is it day camp? It's day camp. The lodging and liability for overnight, it was pretty daunting. So we're just doing day. Yeah, I just, I never know because when I was growing up in New England, there was a lot of go to camp and stay for a week or two.
10:56Yes. So I thought I'd ask. That's a fair question. There's a lot of options in the area. There's not as... Let me back that up. There are many marvelous options in our area for camp. However, quite a few of them involve a lot of time inside.
11:20And ours is gonna be totally outside. If it is raining, we're gonna be outside anyway. Like you don't melt in the rain. You're not the wicked witch of the west. So we're just gonna get messy and get dirty. In fact, I have a very clear warning when people sign their kids up, like they will get dirty. And just pack them a change of clothes for going home in because you're not gonna want them in your car. But I think...
11:44I don't know. I think it'll be grand. They're based, all the camps are based off of classic children's books. So we're doing one based off of Treasure Island, one off of Peter Pan, and one based off of Charlotte's Web. That is amazing. I have a question. Were you a teacher in a former life by any chance? No, I'm just a mom that liked to be over the top. Okay.
12:11really just doing the stuff that I did with my children when they were little. Um, we would, we would just create things and do fun stuff together all the time and we'd bring their friends in on it. And so now this summer I'm working with my kids, cause they were all teenagers, they're all old and having the opportunity to, to, to share that delight and joy and creativity with other people. That is phenomenal.
12:39I'm in love with your plan. I think it's amazing. During COVID, my youngest kid was still living with us and he's actually still living with us. He's 22. All right. And we, I don't know, I think we both felt trapped because we couldn't really hang out with anybody because we didn't wanna get sick and we didn't want to get anybody sick by accident. And so we would go on hikes every morning about...
13:09five miles from where we lived. And one of the funniest things is we started doing it in like end of April 1st, part of May of 2020. And this hiking area was state land in Minnesota. And it had this hillside that you would basically like S curve down to get down to an old building that people used to live in. And you couldn't go in the building, but it was a really cool old mansiony kind of building was really pretty.
13:37And the hillside was right in the sun in the morning when we would go and come to find out garter snake baby season in Minnesota is May. So the first time we were walking down the hill, there were all these little snakes crawling across the warm tar. And I'm not afraid of snakes. Garter snakes are harmless. They stink if you hold them too long, but they're fine. And he's a fanatic. He loves amphibians, snakes, whatever. So
14:05To our pleasure and surprise, there were all these little snakes. I was holding snakes, he was holding snakes. There were no cell phones or tablets or anything. We were literally just in the moment of discovering baby garter snake season in Minnesota. It was so fun because he was 17, I think, at the time. That's awesome. Just watching him be five again was amazing. So
14:34I am a big fan of getting outside, getting in a nature and just seeing what is presented to you and taking that moment to drink it in because it might not come again. Yes. And so how old are the kids? How young is the youngest kid who signs up for camp and how old is the oldest kid? We have two age groupings. So it's ages four to seven and then eight to 11.
15:01We have a couple sibling groups where they're like slightly on the edge of one or the other. And so we've worked with the families to enable their kids to come. So we're talking kids. We're not talking teenagers. No, not yet. I'm working on that. I'd really love to have a program in the future where we can have older kids come out and learn.
15:26really just comfort with various tools and the ability to like mend fences or just have some actual skills that come from manual labor because they're really beneficial. And you can learn a lot about yourself doing hard things. Yeah. The reason I asked about the kids' ages is because those ages are perfection for discovering the world. Yes.
15:51You must have such a good time watching these kids discover things they had no idea existed. It is so fun. I think what I love the most is watching the parents remember. Because our preschool class is not a drop-off class, so the parents come with. And watching the parents see their children's curiosity gets...
16:19barked again is so beautiful. With our homeschoolers, some people drop off, some people stay, we're good either way, whatever makes you happy. Our homeschool kiddos, they, COVID was extremely life altering for them. So if you think of like a child who's seven now, I mean, they were three when COVID happened. And...
16:47that amount of isolation and just fear. Like everyone was kind of bathed in fear there for a bit. And our kids bear the marks of it much clearer, I think, or it's much more obvious than the adults. We all have kind of learned ways to like hide our crazy, I feel like, but kids don't have that and it's a wonderful gift. So it's been fun to kind of show them like, no, you can get dirty and that's not bad.
17:16And you can actually be a little bored because then you might ask a question to learn something. Like, let's learn about the world around us. Let's be curious. And that's the thing I've noticed more than I would have thought. With our kids who were toddlers in COVID, they're very wary of curiosity and questions. They're much more fearful.
17:45than what I remember my kids being, I guess. Huh. Yeah. I haven't really been around any small kids since before COVID hit, so I would never have known that that was a thing. Well, it's been fascinating to observe. So my oldest, who is almost 19, she is also a dance teacher. And both of us have... And then my...
18:1116 year old, my almost 15 year old, they babysit kiddos. And it's something they've noticed that they're like, we have to kind of teach these kids that the world itself is actually not scary. Like you can take a step off of a ledge, you know, like take the step off the deck or whatever, and you're gonna be okay. Like jumping on the trampoline is not the end of the world. Like it's, what I would think of is just like regular.
18:38childhood type things, there's just a lot more fear. And so that impacts how we talk in our house, how we interact with other people, because we as humans don't do best when we're constantly surrounded in fear. We need to focus on the good, focus on the joy. It's always there, it's just sometimes you have to hunt harder. Yeah, huh. I hadn't even thought about that impact on small kids with COVID, because I just, I wasn't around any. Yeah.
19:08then. All my kids are adults. They're all grown. So yeah, I wouldn't have had any experience with that. I, hmm, that's kind of terrible. I'm really glad that you're doing what you're doing to maybe bring them back to being able to be kids. That's great. It's so fun. And I don't want to leave out my youngest. My youngest is 13. He's the only boy. So we've got three girls and then dude.
19:32And they're actually already out of school for the summertime. And so they've been helping me teach farm school this, this may. And it has been so much fun. I, my wish is for every parent to have the opportunity to work side by side with their kids in an area they excel in, that their kid excels in. And then you can, you can learn from them.
19:55and they can teach you how to do better. And it's just, it's a beautiful thing. So this is, I think, gonna be my favorite summer of like my entire life. Well, good. It's always good to have something to aspire to. That's a beautiful thing to aspire to. I have not worked side by side with my three oldest because I had one later in life when I was 32.
20:21And so I was very busy still in the trenches of diapers and then body training and then trying to get him to eat food, which actually wasn't that hard. I shouldn't say that he was the most adventurous eater of the four. But the youngest actually is living with us and helping us on our homestead. And I was watching him and his dad work together on building the heated greenhouse that is almost done. We're within days of it being finished.
20:50And watching those two work together was just the most entertaining thing two weekends ago. I was like, they're exactly like each other and yet they are so different. So I understand the working with and I get to work with them when we're cooking together. So that's fine. It's kind of really, I shouldn't say it's kind of really, it really is very satisfying and makes me really proud.
21:20of this kid and I'm proud of the other three too, but this is more working together as adults than working together as teenagers. That's awesome. Well, I'll have to get pointers from you on the greenhouse because that's the next big project on the land for us to do. I don't have any pointers except that you can find plans for greenhouses online that
21:48that will give you an idea of what you want, how big you want it, whether you want it completely open on the inside with the rafters exposed, that kind of stuff. And then basically you're building a frame out of wood. And then the backside is like the corrugated metal sheeting for the back wall and the back roof part. And the rest of it is that polycarbonate plastic stuff so that light can get in.
22:18So you're basically making a box. And I didn't have a hand in any of this. The only thing I did was I wrote the grant application to get the funds to be able to build it. That was my contribution to the greenhouse. I wrote the thing. Which is a solid contribution. That's beneficial. Yeah, I wrote the thing. They said, yes, here's the money. And they said, you must spend all of it by the end of April on your...
22:45supplies to build your greenhouse and I was like I am more than happy to do that. So really, I don't know, do you have somebody in your family who is good at building things? Yes. So my primary role is not building. I'm normally the feeder of all the people. So I handle that. But my husband's very mechanically minded and he and my mom and dad work really, really well together.
23:13So they typically are the ones that handle the different building things. So mom and dad built our chicken tractors and they've been throwing ideas around for what they want to do for the greenhouse. But mom is the gardener, so she's like the final say on exactly how it looks and what she needs. So they just have to work together. Yeah. Yep. It's genuinely not.
23:41that hard to build a greenhouse. The hard part is the up and down the ladder to get the roofing pieces on. That makes sense. And neither my husband nor my son are very good with heights, so they really had to knuckle down and just do it. And they trade it off because my son does not like heights and my husband doesn't like the wobble of the ladder under his feet. And so basically he would do some.
24:08And then my son would do some and then he would do them. My husband would start again helping out. They would trade off on being up and down the ladder. And both of them at the end of the day, they were like, I can't face that ladder again tomorrow. So they did the side parts and then the following weekend they did the roofing. They finished the roofing so they didn't have to do ladder climbing two days in a row. Well that makes sense. That sounds reasonable. Yup.
24:35their thing and I don't blame them. They're not my thing either. And the greenhouse is only about 20 feet tall. It's not like it's, you know, 10 stories or anything. But they figured it out and it's looking great. And I think it's going to be finished at the end of the day, Monday, Memorial Day, I think. Oh, that's exciting. That's very exciting. Yeah, but I certainly could, I could have my husband.
25:02scan the drawing that he did and I could message it to you if your husband wants to look at it. Oh, that would be amazing. They're always on the hunt for what we need to do next. So we were fortunate when we bought this property, there were quite a few different structures on the land. We just have had to repair and replace roofs and that kind of stuff. Sometimes the tricky part when you inherit...
25:27different buildings is that they're not actually what you need. And so you have to figure out, do I want to repurpose it? Is it worth saving? Is it worth taking completely apart and then using those materials in a better way? So we just had to go from one building to the next to try and figure out what we wanted to do. Yeah, I understand. We have a one car garage to the
25:56It's got to be at least 50 years old. I bet it's 60 years old, the one car garage, because it's just wood with a rolling door that goes up into the ceiling. And it's not big enough for a car. I suspect it was probably for a carriage at one point. And then they redid it for a car. And cars were small back in the 80s. A lot of car models were very small, so it fit.
26:23And so it's become the wood shed because it's still fairly dry in there and water doesn't pull in front of it. So that's our wood shed. It's not a garage. That's awesome. Yeah. When I first saw it, I was like, oh, this would make a great writing studio. Cause I write sometimes and I thought that I would be doing that, not podcasting. And it just, it was so beat up that my husband was like, I
26:51we're going to have to redo the whole thing if you want this to be an actual writing studio. And it's going to cost about $10,000. And I was like, no, no, no, wood can go in there. That'll make an excellent woodshed. I'm good. Yes, that works both. And so instead I do a podcast and I sit at a prefab desk with my five-year-old computer and my brand new monitor. The monitor died, so I had to get a monitor. And I talked to people about what they're doing instead.
27:21it's really fun. Well, that's really cool. That's hopefully in the future, I will be able to write. That's always been a dream. I've just always been running around a bit too much to write. Yeah. And I'm going to say it again. I've said it a couple of times on other episodes. Writing is, it's like wonderful once you've done it. The actual writing part, I could live without the pen to paper or the fingers to the keyboard.
27:51I could, I just skip that. That would be fine. And you can't actually write anything without those things happening. Writing is painful. I know there are people who don't think it's painful, but for me, it's painful. When I'm in the zone and I know what I'm trying to write and the words are coming, it's amazing. But that blank screen or that blank piece of paper that you start with is the most frightening thing ever. Yeah, I would agree with you on that.
28:20But with the podcast, I just say, hi, how are you? What do you do? And people talk to me and it's like, this is great. I love this. Well, that's good. Then you found the right spot. Exactly. And I get to learn so much from everybody I talk to. I have gotten so many secrets and tips about things that I have been doing my whole life that make the things I've been doing my whole life easier. Oh, that's awesome. It's amazing.
28:49I love, love, love your farm school idea. I talked with a lady a couple weeks ago. Her Facebook page is Independence Gardens. And her organization that she started, they go to schools and they put in gardens for the schools so that the kids can learn about gardening and if there's enough produce, they can use it in their school lunches.
29:18Oh, that's so cool. And so the reason I bring it up is because you are feeding the kids souls with what you're teaching them. And her program feeds their souls, but also feeds their bodies. It's really neat. That's awesome. That's really cool. I love how many different people have had ideas and been able to share things with others. That's been really cool. I have enjoyed.
29:47having people taste goat milk and like it. That's like my favorite part regarding the tasting things at the farm because a lot of people have had like farm fresh veggies and farm fresh eggs and that kind of a thing. But I would put our goat milk up against anybody's and people actually like it. So it's a good deal. Yeah. I love goat milk cream. The cream from their goat milk is amazing. Yes. I agree. I agree.
30:16We're experimenting with ice cream, which is really good. Even the first iteration, which was not amazing, was very good, so we're on a good track. Do you have one of the old fashioned ice cream makers, by any chance? Well, no. It's a plug-in one. So my great uncle had one of those old ones, but a cousin got it, not me, so.
30:45You should keep your eyes open and see if anybody's looking to get rid of one or if you can get one for cheap because that would be a super fun thing to do with the kids. Yeah, with the goat milk. Yes. Oh, that would be so... I can remember making fresh strawberry ice cream at a family reunion that we went to when I was like 10. And the guy...
31:12that set it up, he'd been making it forever. And one of the old fashioned ice cream makers with the rock salt and everything. And his brilliant idea for the reunion every year was to have all the kids take a turn turning the thing. Oh, that's a good idea. So that we all had a hand in making the ice cream. And I can remember doing that and just being like, I can't believe we made ice cream out of milk and sugar.
31:38It's a really cool feeling. That's a great idea to find one. I'll have to go hunting. Yeah, the kids would probably love it. And then you've got their snack all made and they made it. And we're good to go. Yeah. All right. Well, Whitney, this went really fast. We're already at 31 minutes. Wow. Okay. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me and good luck with your camp.
32:03Oh, thank you. And thanks for reaching out. It's always fun to talk about things you are thrilled about, you know. That's much easier to talk about than the wretched stuff. So this was a lovely time to talk. You're welcome. Thank you again. Have a great day. All right, you too. Bye.
 

Goose Ridge Soaps, LLC

Today I'm talking with Kim and Janice at Goose Ridge Soaps, LLC. You can also follow on Facebook.
https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Kim and Janice at Goose Ridge Soaps, LLC. I do not know what is wrong with my tongue this morning. Good morning, ladies. How are you? Good morning. Doing well.
00:26I'm good, except I hate it when I screw up the intro. It makes me mad. It's fine. It's always like goat rope. So which sometimes is accurate. Well on that note, my dad used to call people from the Midwest goat ropers. And he and my mom live in Maine. He's always lived in Maine and I live in Minnesota. So I am technically now a goat roper or a flood lander according to my dad. So go figs.
00:56All right, so tell me about yourselves and Goose Ridge Soaps. Yeah, well, Janice and I met a number of years ago in a different part of the state. So we're both Marylanders and we met in Western Maryland, which is a good two hours or so from where we had lived previously and where we live now. We were really into, or still are, really into kind of outdoor stuff, the homesteading type things, learning new skills.
01:27stuff our ancestors did that we've kind of all kind of sort of forgotten how to do, which is a shame. So there was a outdoor women's weekend where you do all kinds of things. You're doing everything from basket weaving to kayaking to fishing to trap shooting, archery, all kinds of just cool outdoor stuff. And she and I both attended this weekend, did not know each other. And I was actually in the process of selling the house I was currently living in and moving
01:56an hour and a half south and found out where I was moving to. That's where Janice was from. And we were going to be living a half, a half a mile, quite literally apart, which was hysterical. Um, and both being into the same types of outdoor activities and stuff like that. I mean, we just instantly became friends. So when I moved down to my new house, I had a built in friend already and we would get together and do stuff. I kept bees. So we would.
02:25We made canned applesauce. We got the honey from the beehives. We would go pawpaw picking because there was a pawpaw stand in the woods, a secret place near the river. We both lived at that point near the Potomac River. So we would do all kinds of fun things together. And one day I had been using.
02:48natural like real soap with lye and fats and oils like the old fashioned stuff. I just just had started using it didn't realize that it was a different feeling than what you buy in the store. And I thought, well, how do you make this? And I started researching and I called Janice up and I said, Hey, let's make soap. I got all the stuff. Come on over, bring a bottle of wine. So yeah, we
03:17She came over, we decided we were going to do this and we made a whole bunch of real soap that summer and gave it away as Christmas presents to friends and family that year and kept some for ourselves of course. But what we quickly found out was that other people, the people we gave the stuff to, they didn't realize there was a difference between real soap and commercially manufactured things that you bought at the store.
03:47everybody commented on how it was, it felt amazing on their skin and oh, you guys need to sell this and all that kind of thing. And at the time I was working full time, Janice was a stay at home mom who was, who was also house babysitting other people's kids and working part time doing stuff. So we were both really busy and we just kind of made it as a hobby and sold it on Facebook just to pay for ingredients. So that's kind of where it started.
04:17And then in 2019, I met my husband and I moved from Southern Maryland up to where we both actually live now. So a year later, Janice and her family sold their house and moved five minutes away up here and we decided to get the band back together and make our hobby an actual business. And so we formed our LLC in April of 2021. And it's been kind of a...
04:46you know, a whirlwind ever since. So that's, yeah. Okay. So your story defines, um, um, coincidence and serendipity. Oh, totally. Every step of the way. I, we, that's how it's sort of worked out for us. Yeah. It's been, it's, it's been interesting. Everything that that has happened with our business since we decided to make it a business, everything is just really,
05:15fallen into place when it needed to happen at the best time for us. And we've been really blessed in that respect that things have happened. And if things haven't happened, it's because we weren't ready for it yet. And it's been neat. It's been really neat. Okay. So are you guys like the only game in town for soaps and salves and things, or do you have competition?
05:41I believe we're the only ones that are doing it exactly how we're doing it. There are some other natural soap makers in the state that are a little bit bigger, that have been around longer, but we seem to be the only people that are – we're teaching soap making classes in the community and I don't think anybody else is doing that. We like to educate people and do things like career day at some of the local schools.
06:11We are in a lot of the local retail stores. I don't think anybody, there's some other small soap makers that are doing it at farmers markets as a hobby mainly. There's somebody, there's a company that's up in Hanover, Pennsylvania. They have their own facility, their own retail space and everything up there. Pretty large, but they're still just local. They don't reach outside, to my knowledge. They don't distribute in any.
06:39stores other than their own, but they do the same type of thing, the natural soaps. What's really nice is people are starting to realize that stuff feels better. And so there's a lot more soap makers coming on the scene, which I think is fabulous because people really didn't know or weren't paying attention, maybe. I'm not sure to what they were putting on their bodies. And people have found that getting back to the...
07:06for lack of a better word, ancestral formulations of things. You, nine times out of 10, fix a lot of the problems you experience. People who have eczema, oh, I break out when I use this, I go, and they go to the dermatologist, they get all these steroids and medications, and sometimes it's just as simple as getting rid of all the synthetic stuff and using something natural.
07:29You know, one of the things that we like about our brand in particular is that from the get-go, we have always used animal fats in our soap. And that is not something that most people do. We find most, not everybody, but the majority of soap makers we see, they're plant-based. They're using plant-based oils and butters. And as we kind of have seen lately, tallow-based skincare.
07:58stuff that's got animal fats and it's making a big resurgence. People are realizing, wow, this actually feels really so much better than anything else. And we've been doing it since we started as a hobby seven or so years ago, we've been using lard, animal fats. And we appreciate people who are vegan, who don't want to use those products, that is absolutely their choice. And we commend them for sticking with what they feel ethically and
08:27strong about. There are a lot of other soap makers who do make vegan plant-based soaps. We're just not one of them. I think that is what makes our brand stand out a little bit. Yeah. That's also all of the local soap makers that we have met for the most part. Everybody plays nice in the sandbox, so to speak, because everybody does it a little bit differently. There's plenty to go around. Most of us see each other as collaborators and friends, and we bounce ideas off one another.
08:55It really has been a refreshing kind of not really a super competitive thing. Yeah. I mean, like she said with the vegan soaps, there are people out there that do that. And when we have customers that express a desire for vegan soaps, we can refer them to those people. We try to use natural colorants, for example. There's other soap makers that like to do more artistic things with brighter colors. That's what someone's looking for. We refer them to those people.
09:25Yeah, it's a collaboration more than a competition really. Very nice. I'm impressed because I'm going to say this again, women tend to help each other up, help each other move forward. And I don't know if all the soap makers or whatever are all female, but women, women tend to want to be part of a community and lift each other up. So it's not, like you said, it's not a
09:53competition, it's a collaboration. Right. So, where do you guys source your ingredients from? Oh my, good question. Because of the size of what we're producing now, a lot of our ingredients come from bulk suppliers of oils and butters and things like that. But, the goat milk and the cow's milk that we use in our soap, we source locally. So we have two
10:23people who raise dairy goats that we get our milk from. I have goats, but they're all weathers. So, you know, milking them is a little awkward. Just a titch, yeah. Just a little bit. So we have two people that we source goat milk from that are in within probably 30 minutes of us. And then the cow's milk, the majority of it comes, my younger sister has a Jersey hobby, if you will.
10:51And she's a veterinarian. She has a practice in Pennsylvania, which is not that far from us. Um, cause we're up in the Northern kind of area in Maryland. Um, so the majority of our cow's milk comes from her. Uh, but in a pinch, my neighbors are dairy farmers. So we, we get that locally as well. Um, the, I'm trying to think some of the herbs and things that we use, like the comfrey, the calendula, some of the botanicals, lavender buds.
11:20Oh yeah, jewelweed and cornflower, if we've had enough of it. My farm is 45 acres, so a lot of that we either grow or we forage for at my place. And the jewelweed, we go every June or July and we go get jewelweed while it's still pulpy down in the woods and we...
11:48macerate that and use that in one of our soaps for poison ivy. So we try to source things as locally as possible. The Lardy even now, we have found a couple of local processors to where, I mean, it's a byproduct of an industry that exists anyway, so why not support a local industry instead of buying it from, you know, a big manufacturer or something like that. So we try to source as much locally as possible. Definitely. Can we, can we, I'm going to...
12:17Jewelweed. I love jewelweed. I'm so glad you brought it up. Oh, yeah. I live in Minnesota and my husband and my son have been trying to get the gardens in, but it's been raining every other day here. Yeah. Yeah. Six inches of rain between yesterday afternoon and this morning. Wow. We've had a wet spring here too, like really wet spring, but geez. Yeah. It's a big mud puddle out there right now.
12:46But getting back to why I want to talk about jewelweed, I had made some jewelweed bombs two years ago, maybe three years ago, and stuck them in a Ziploc in their lip balm tubes and they're all sealed up and whatever. So I have like, bleep tubes. And pulled one out last year because we had some wasps hanging around and jewelweed actually helps with bee stings. And so because it's been so wet,
13:16We've had an insurgence of mosquitoes this spring. Husband and son were out working outside the other day and my son came in. He's like, do we have any jewelweed sticks? And I thought it was funny. He called them that. And I said, we do ones on the shelf in the kitchen. And he grabbed it and rubbed it all over the mosquito bites. And I said, does it help? And within seconds he was like, Oh, the itch is so much better.
13:44us if it helps things other than poison ivy and we also put camphor in the jewelweed soap so we're not really sure if it's the jewelweed or the camphor but people will ask us but then we have other customers that come back and go oh this works for everything that itches so that's interesting that's interesting yeah and the other thing is if you make it into a balm it moisturizes your skin where you might have already scratched yeah I love it new product do it do it
14:15Thanks for that idea. The other thing that I do with jewelweed, and I lost my source a couple of years ago because we had been in a drought the last three summers and jewelweed wants its feet very wet. So I finally found a neighbor who had some jewelweed and she was like, come cut it. I don't do anything with it. I was like, oh, thank you. Jesus. Thank you. And so last August, I think it was my...
14:43My husband cut me a whole bunch of stems and I cut them up in pieces and I let them soak in almond oil, sweet almond oil. Oh, okay. I have a quart jar full of jewelweed sweet almond oil in my dark pantry right now. I will be making more. But the good news about that is that you can just use that oil too. I don't even have to make it into a stick. I even tell people if they want to go forage for it.
15:12smash it all up. We this is what we do when we're going to make the soap we cut it we we harvest it when it's still pulpy because it's it's when it's still pulpy and the stems that's what's really got the good stuff in it. So we tell people to harvest it up when it's pulpy about the size around of your pinky and cut it into pieces. And then we steep it in a tea in distilled water and then siphon out or not siphon but um
15:37Strain. Strain. Thank you. Strain out solids and then we pour it into ice cube trays and freeze it so we always have it. But then we tell people, do that. Pop an ice cube out, rub it on whatever, put it back in the freezer. And if people don't want to mess with the oils and stuff like that, it makes it really easy. Plus the ice cube just feels good anyway. Yeah. I'm so glad you mentioned jewelweed because I haven't really talked about it on the podcast with anyone because I keep...
16:04forgetting that it exists, number one, because it's such a back of my hand thing. Right, right. And someone brought up crocheting like three weeks ago and hadn't talked about crocheting either. I was like, because I'm so close to the things that I do, I don't think to say anything until someone brings it up. Right, it's muscle memory. People being aware of jewelweed has really gotten better over the last couple of years, because when we first started making this soap,
16:32the majority of people had never even heard of it. Lately, a lot of people have heard of it. People come to us going, I heard you are the ones that make the jewelweed soap. Do you have any? It's just hilarious. You know, it's nice though. Yeah. I did an essential oil last summer and I can't for the life of me remember what I blended together, but I called it Bug Off. Oh yeah. Because it does, it really helps with the mosquitoes and the
17:00the gnats and the noceums and the blackflies. And somebody read the label and just laughed. And I said, it's not to keep people away, it's to keep bugs away. Yeah, we had somebody tell us recently that our lemongrass soap works really well as a bug repellent. And I said, huh, never thought about that. Never thought it would stay on your skin long enough. Once you wash, never thought that it would linger long enough to make a difference there. But they...
17:29They claimed that it really helped repel bugs. I was like, okay, that's a bonus. Yeah, I love lemongrass. Lemongrass is the best essential oil ever for an actual lemon, true lemon scent. Yeah, yeah, very true. And it sticks better. It's funny you bring that up. We use lemon and lime and lemongrass in soap making and the lemon and the lime, anything that's a citrus.
17:58essential oil, it doesn't stick well. It doesn't hang around well. So there's things you have, little tricks you have to do to bind it. So we'll use like kale and clay and make a slurry with the essential oils and let it sit. And then we use that, that slurry to, as the, when we put it in the soap batter for the fragrance, because it'll help hold it longer. But yeah, that was,
18:23It's very strong and I love the smell of it. Janice loves the smell of it. And, you know, it helps kind of give it that little extra kick when you need it too. Have you guys used the sweet orange oil for soaps? We have and again, it doesn't hold. So we were starting to get like the 5X concentrated stuff, but the price of everything, as you probably noticed, olive oil, everything is getting out.
18:52outrageous. So, and 5X orange essential oil is almost priced itself out of the equation. So we're going back to using a slurry with the kaolin clay to hold that orange and switching back to the sweet orange because it's less expensive. It's not as concentrated, you know, so you either need to use more of it or you have to find a way to get it to stick in the scent. It doesn't change the profile of what we're doing at all, but you definitely have to use some tricks to make it work.
19:22Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I don't I don't know a lot about making soap my husband and I started doing it years ago because like you were saying It feels different than store-bought soap and I got itchy from store-bought soap and I said, will you please can we please make? Cold process lye soap because I had bought a bar From someone who made it and loved it. And so we're not we're not experts we just kind of play at it when we make it mm-hmm and
19:52I found a peony fragrance oil. It's not an essential oil, it's a fragrance oil. And it's really weird because the fragrance oil is usable in soap, but it's also usable in candles. So this weekend, my husband was at the first farmers market and a woman and her 10-year-old daughter walked up to the table and they were smelling the peony candle. My husband had actually brought some real live...
20:21blooms from peonies to sell. Oh, wow. And the little girl was smelling the peony candle and he pointed toward the bucket with the peonies in it and said, smell those and tell me if the candle smells exactly like those. And she of course walked over, picked up one of the peonies, sniffed it and went, oh, it smells exactly like the candle. And I thought, oh, thank God. Yeah, right. Yeah. Sometimes things go sideways. Yeah. And then she was intrigued with the flowers and her mom was like, do you want a flower?
20:51And the little girl said, yes. And so she ended up buying a peony stem for $5. And I thought, man, peonies are a dime a dozen here in the Midwest, but he just sold a peony for $5. And that's awesome. Point being is that you can make things smell like the actual thing that they're supposed to smell like.
21:21Yep. Yep. We found, you know, we use predominantly essential oils to scent our soap, but Janice tells people this all the time. Sometimes you can't quite get what you're trying to do with just essential oil blends or the essential oils you have to use are so outrageously expensive. Nobody's going to buy a $40 bar of soap.
21:45The one I always like to explain to people is in the fall, everybody wants a pumpkin spice soap. There is no pumpkin spice essential oil. So the only way you're going to get that is with a fragrance oil. We just try to use good quality fragrance oil. Yeah. Yeah, us too. And we made a mistake. We made soap with a pumpkin spice fragrance oil that wasn't soap safe. Oh no. So we have like 14 bars sitting on the drying rack in my bedroom.
22:15that are basically a year old and they don't smell like anything now. So they're probably going to end up going in the trash. Right. That's heartbreaking, isn't it? Yes. But my bedroom smelled so good when they were first curing. My bedroom smelled like pumpkin spice. I was like, I don't even love pumpkin spice, but this smells really good. When we used to make the soap, we started out in my kitchen.
22:43down in Southern Maryland and all the soap would cure at my house. So I never needed air fresheners. And then when we both moved up here, we were making the soap in Janice's basement at her house. You'd walk in the front door and could smell it. And now we're in our own shop. And people walk in and go, oh, it smells so amazing. We don't even smell it anymore. Yeah, it's totally nose blind. It's funny. And in order to smell something, we have to step out. We have to carry something outside.
23:11and smell it because otherwise it just doesn't register for us anymore. It's, you know, it's kind of funny. And when we leave, we'll, we'll smell our clothes will smell like the shop and we get people stopping us all the time. Oh, where did you just come from? You smell amazing. It's a little awkward. Well, at least that you smell amazing and not you stink. Right. Well, that's true. It could be worse. We could work for a septic company. Yeah. But it's so so. Or at a hog farm. Yeah. Just to do that.
23:40Yeah. Okay. So clearly you guys love what you're doing because it's just ringing through my headphones. Oh, we do. Yeah, for sure. Good. Because part of the reason I wanted to do this podcast is because I wanted to talk to people who love what they're doing. And pretty much everybody says they do. Yeah. It's well, for me personally,
24:07I'm a really, my brain is a very creative brain. So I always have to be learning something new, trying something new, creating something. And Janice is this always wanting new knowledge. She's always wanting to have a different experience and learn something. And so this worked really well. And we just got to where we loved doing it so much and it just kept growing legs. You talked about the serendipity earlier.
24:33Every step of the way, it just got a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger and it wanted to go this direction or that direction. So we just let it. It was never about making money. It really wasn't. We were just selling it to support our habit. We enjoy what we're doing and it's also nice at our ages to be able to just work for ourselves. Yeah. That's big. Yes. It's a lot of work and it's a lot more hours.
25:02but there's something to be said for being your own boss. Yeah. There sure is. There's lots to be said for it. And I keep going, why did I retire from my, you know, nine to five and do this full-time two years ago? Now it's 24 hours a day, but it's when it's something you're passionate about and that you really, really love, it doesn't feel like work, honestly. It doesn't. And you can't stop thinking about it. I actually had my first anxiety dream.
25:32about the podcast the other night. And I've been doing this for nine months now, I think. Wow. First anxiety dream ever. And it was that I had overbooked myself and had five interviews scheduled for the same hour time slot. We can identify with those anxiety dreams for sure. And just raging intrusive anxiety thoughts all the time. Yeah. We can identify.
26:01Yeah, but if we didn't care, probably wouldn't have those dreams. So it shows how much we care about what we do. Yep. And we've even like, one of the things that was really important to us was what Janice touched on earlier, teaching people about the difference between what we're making and what you're buying on Amazon or at Walmart or anything like that when you're just going in and plucking something off the shelf and you turn it over to go read the ingredients and you have to have a decoder ring.
26:31And so it was really important for us, and it still is, to just educate people about what these ingredients are, what they do, just because it's synthetically made does not mean it's evil. You know, we want it, we stress that. It doesn't mean it's evil, and you're not bad if that's what you use. It's just understand what you're using and how your skin or hair could react to some of those ingredients. And if you don't know what those ingredients are,
27:01how can you know how it's affecting you? And so between teaching hands-on classes in the shop and then every other week we do a soap lady chat, we go live on our Facebook and it's an educational piece where we talk about deciphering labels, we talk about natural ingredients that we use in our product. Like we just did one about marshmallow root. You wanna talk about really cool herbs and things to use. It has great.
27:31benefits for your gut health, it's got great benefits for your hair. So we put it in one of our shampoo bars that we make. And we talk about those kinds of things, why we use it, how you can use it, and the fact that it's something you can go out and you can either grow it or forage for it. We just think that's super cool. And we like to teach people. And one of the things that I really like about the classes is just the range of the people that are taking classes. For example,
27:58Some people might just want to do it as a very minor hobby for just for their household. And that's okay. They don't have to get super into the science and the math and the technicalities of it. And then other people really want to learn as much as they can and formulate their own recipes. And I like that it can go to either end of that spectrum. It's not for any just one group of people. It can be for the whole range.
28:28Yeah. Absolutely. I love the fact that all this making stuff allows you to be as in-depth and as creative as you want to be. Yeah. Yeah. You can take it every which direction. And that's when we first started learning, we were just copying other people's recipes, just getting used to.
28:53the process and people get really, and we were this way, people get really weirded out and really scared when they start mixing and playing with lie. I mean, that's a scary thing. And so we like to be able to do that with them and they get comfortable where they're like, okay, this wasn't as scary as I thought, you know, everything on the internet tells you, oh, it's this, it's that, it's so, it's so caustic. Yeah, it is for sure, but you don't need to be scared of it if you know how to handle things properly.
29:20And so when we first started, we were just using other people's recipes to get used to how everything moved, how everything worked, you know, get used to the technique itself. Then very, very quickly, the creative brains took over and decided we needed to really start playing with our own formulations. And then you start learning about chemistry. That's super fun.
29:44You know, and it's been neat. You know, we go, oh, let's make something that has these properties. What oils can we use that'll give us those properties? And you start researching all the different oils and all the different additives you can put in to get something that feels a particular way for your face, your body, your hair, you know, and then you test it. That's the fun part is when we do testers. Experiment. And then, yeah, and then we give it out. We'll test it on ourselves.
30:11We'll give it to people and go, what do you think? Give us some feedback. That's really fun. I like that part. Yeah. I love that part too. And even if we're not going to sell something, I always end up sharing something new that we made with friends. Cause I'm just like, try this. Let me know what you think. Yep. We've done the same thing. We're, we're working on a couple of different recipes and we're working on a tallow soap and we made a bunch of different.
30:38iterations, different formulations that Talos open. We've just been handing it out to our friends, go and tell us what you think. Here's the three different recipes. You come back to me, tell me what you think of each of them. You know, and, and we've had recently had a woman who's asked us about making the purple shampoo bars for gray hair. So we're going to start the process of formulating that using 100% natural stuff. So, you know, no
31:06no synthetic color dyes or anything. We're going to figure out how to do that with things like alkanet root powder or purple clay to see if that actually makes a difference in gray hair and brassiness. So it's solving a problem. I don't know. It's fun to noodle it out and see what you can come up with that's natural to solve the problems people are coming to you with. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to have to watch and see how that goes because...
31:33I have been going gray since I was 14 years old and I'm about three quarters white and a quarter black now. Wow. My sister, my younger sister is totally gray. I've got a little bit through my temples. I don't know why I'm not as gray as she is. She's three years younger. She's totally gray. So she's definitely going to have to test this shampoo as well. Yeah. Let's see. Yeah. And because my hair that is going, quote unquote, gray, is actually white.
32:03It's really interesting because when I wash it, you know, when it's just washed, it is snow white. Wow. And my parents took photos of me at the family, well not the family cemetery, but the cemetery where my grandparents are buried. Back in 2014, we were there visiting. And I was standing in the sun. And I swear to you, it looks like I have a halo around my head.
32:32because that white hair just reflects all the light back. I remember this older woman, her name was Alma Robinson. She went to my church when I was a kid and she had the most beautiful snow white hair. And she was an older woman. And I'm not saying, I was a kid and she was 30, you know? Yeah, yeah. Perspective. But she was probably in her 80s and had the most, and I used to sit there in church and just hope.
33:01that when I got older, my hair was that pretty. I used to love her hair so much. Oh, like you said, it was like a halo, it just glowed. It was beautiful. I loved it. Yeah, I really wish that mine would just finish transitioning because this pepper in a lot of salt is not great. I'm not loving it. But eventually I'll be old enough that it will all be white. There you go, yeah. I have my dad and my dad's mom.
33:30to thank for this because my dad's mom was going gray very early. Oh, wow. And then my dad had a patch that started really early. And then when I was 14, my friends kept leaning in while they're talking to me to pluck a white hair out of the streak that was coming in. And I'm like, just leave it alone. And they were like, why? And I said, because nine more grow in for the one-year poll.
33:58Its friends will rally. Yes, please don't pull them. Leave them be. Because if I pulled every white hair I had, I would have had a inch wide streak across the top of my head from, I don't know, 18 till I was about 40. Wow. Yeah, neither one of my parents went gray early, so I'm not sure where it's coming from with my sister. It's got to be somewhere in there. But yeah, I just...
34:24I hope that when everything starts to change with my hair that it's going to be as pretty as Alma Robinson's hair was. Yeah. And I'm going to tell you a secret. Pretty becomes not as important once you get over 50. Well, we're both. I'm over 50. Janice, close. Okay. Being clean and being presentable is awesome. But that whole got us spruce up to go out in public thing.
34:51It's, I don't think it's as important. I think that you, you need to be presentable and you need to be kind. That's what I think. Yeah. I agree with you. We're barely presentable most of the time. I guess. That's not so important, but I just want my hair to be, I don't know why I want my hair to be snow white when I'm older. I have no idea why. And I like winter. Well, if you perfect the shampoo bar, you'll be all set. There you go. Perfect.
35:20Perfect motivation. Yeah, why not? All right, ladies, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. And I love that we got to talk about. Thank you for having us. Love that we got to talk about jewelweed and shampoo bars and lye soap and all the things I love. Yes, thank you so much for having us. It was fun. Yeah, it always is. I keep hearing from everybody, this was really fun. And I'm gonna toot my own horn. This is really fun to do.
35:50I really do love talking with you guys. Yes. I've listened to a good many of your previous podcasts. You definitely really enjoy it and it's nice. It's fun to listen to. Good, because I would hate if it sucked. That would make me very sad. Yeah, very true. All right. Have a fantastic day in Maryland. Thank you. You have a fantastic day in Minnesota. Okay, thanks. Bye.
 

Alternative Roots Farm

Today I'm talking with Brooke at Alternative Roots Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well.
https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Brooke at Alternative Roots Farm. Good morning, Brooke. How are you? Good morning. I'm good. The season's off to a great start. Good. Tell me about what you do.
00:25Yeah, well, our focus at Alternative Roots Farm is on certified organic apples and other perennial fruits. Well, we have about 1,500 apple trees. We also have apricots, raspberries, cherries, plums, blackberries. And when I'm thinking spring in the orchard here, also asparagus and rhubarb. We have some pastured heritage breed hogs, some purebred Gloucester old spots.
00:55And I do some herbal wellness products and grow greens in my deep winter greenhouse, which is a passive solar structure, and bedding plants in there as well, which it's the season for that. It certainly is. We are doing the same thing right now. I have, I think, 30 basil seedlings sitting on my kitchen table right now that need to go out to the greenhouse.
01:24But I was worried that the cold would burn them. Because our greenhouse is not heated yet. It will be in the fall, but it's not heated yet. Yay. Yup. So I have a couple of questions for you right off the top of my head. If you're growing all that fruit and you're trying to be sustainable, and I assume not use terrible things on your trees or your plants.
01:53What are you using for your apples to keep the bugs off of them? Yeah. So that's a big, huge question. And we've definitely evolved over the years. This is our 13th season and we expanded our orchard seven years ago. Um, so from the get-go, we transitioned to be being certified organic. And so we follow all, all organic practices, but what does that mean?
02:22You know, that doesn't mean that we don't spray anything, but we are selective about what we use in the orchard. Now, at the very beginning, we tried to be, I want to say just like too organic. Um, we tried to just do nothing and that does not work if you want to make a living. Um, so we really focus on.
02:45kind of a permaculture take in the orchard. We want a diverse understory. We've got comfrey planted and we're trying to continue to build that. But we do use organic sprays. My husband John does degree day monitoring, which is a... I'm not going to explain the whole thing, but it's tracking the high and low temperatures to monitor pest.
03:15life cycles or like the life cycle of scab and other bacteria and fungus that might be an issue in the apple orchard. So we're making sure with what sprays we do use that we're targeting it at a very specific time to maximize the benefit and not spray anything additional that doesn't need to be sprayed on there. So we do use some organic insecticides.
03:44We, for certain pests, but then like for coddling moth, we use a virus that is specific to that pest. So, we're being very specific as to which things we're trying to target. Some people like to spray like copper in the orchards. For scab, we prefer to stick with a sulfur. You know, that's a naturally occurring element. We just try to minimize as much as possible.
04:17Okay, you mentioned comfrey. What does comfrey do? Oh, great question. This is one of the biggest questions I get when people come out to the farm, because you'll walk out to the farm, you'll see all these big, beautiful plants with these big purple flowers underneath the apple tree rose. And that was kind of the start of our diverse plantings in the understory, which we're kind of kicking back into gear now. Comfrey has a diameter of like...
04:46three-ish feet. And it is a big hairy leaf, large-leaved plant that's basically like a living mulch under the apple trees. So I grow a variety that is not self-seeding, which is important. And basically it flushes up with these big nutrient-dense leaves. It's a very nutritive plant several times throughout the season. And then that mats down and just creates
05:15a green mulch. It outcompetes all the grasses and everything. So it acts as a living mulch. It breaks down and feeds the soil and feeds the apple trees. And then it has a very deep taproot, like 20 feet. So it brings up water and nutrients that the trees can't access. I also use it to dry it for teas and infusions for myself. And I make herbal infused oils out of it and use it in my herbal salves.
05:45Um, so it, uh, it feeds, feeds us and the trees.
05:54I had no idea. I'm so glad that I'm talking with you. We have apple trees. We have, I think, 20. There's like eight in a row on the right-hand side of our house and there's a bunch over on the far left part of our property. We spray neem oil on the baby apples when they come and they start.
06:22And we did that last year and we actually got apples. But I'm going to have to look into the comfrey idea because I didn't even know that that was a thing. It's really fun. And I completely forgot to mention that bees and bumblebees and everything love it. So yeah, it's great for that. And we've started transplanting other flowers, even like extra onion plants, violets. And we're looking at putting more like herbs underneath the trees and stuff as well.
06:53Okay, so it's to bring in the pollinators, it's to make a natural mulch, so that's awesome. Okay, I had a question at the beginning too because you said something and now I can't remember what my question was. Because again, you guys get talking and I listen really intently because we are baby homesteaders. I keep saying baby as an adjective to what we're doing because...
07:20We know just enough to get started, but we're not that far down the road. We've been here almost four years and we knew a little bit about a lot and a lot about a little bit. So every time I talk with you guys, whoever I'm interviewing, I'm trying to make notes in my head from my husband, who is the avid gardener, because he's always like, what do I do about this? What do I do about that? And I'm like, I don't know. I'm not the gardener. I don't do this. You do this. So.
07:50Whenever people share information with me, I turn around and share it with him and then he goes and studies. So Yeah, yeah Here like John could give you a lot more details about all the sprays and stuff like that cuz that's like his department But I know like the general outline and some of the details but Yeah Yeah, so how did you guys come to be doing this? No, it's a it's a fun story. So
08:19We went in college a billion years ago and we were living up in Bemidji, which is where we went to college. We moved back there and we were both, we both went to school for environmental things. We were working in the conservation field. We had a big garden. We had some great friends who had an organic CSA, vegetable CSA, and we thought, you know, it'd be really cool if we did this in like 10 years.
08:46Uh, 10 months later, uh, John got a call about his old job opening up. We moved back down here and started the farm. Um, so sometimes you just got to put it out there in the universe, I think. Uh, so that was 13 years ago. We started as a organic vegetable CSA farm and transitioned to focusing on our apples seven years ago. And we've just kind of evolved since then. We added the passive solar winter greenhouse. Um.
09:16in partnership with the U of M. And I started doing winter farmers markets. And over the last few years, I've really expanded on my herbal wellness items. That's kind of a passion of mine. And that ties into the holistic care of our orchard and taking care of, you know, we wanted to get into this because we were in the conservation field, but we wanted to actively put conservation on the land. We want our land to, you know,
09:46be better than we found it and be a habitat for all sorts of critters and um, birds and all that. And, um, yeah, here we are today. And it's been quite an evolution.
10:03Yeah, it's amazing how that happens. Where are you guys again? Sure, yeah. So we are in- What time? Technically we're in Medelia. We're kind of like halfway in between New Ulm and Medelia. We have an on-farm store located at our farm. And we do that all year round. And then we do the Mankato Farmers Market starting in August when apple season kicks up. And we do that, I do that all winter with the winter greens.
10:32Um, and I should mention five years ago, we started a second business because we have a lot of apples. Um, so we also make hard cider with our brand tall grass cider, and that's kind of available in the, in the region here, not a single apple goes to waste. I, I bet it doesn't. I love hard cider and I love mead. They, they are the only two things that I drink that are a treat.
11:02and that I can't get my hands on very often when they're made really well. There's a guy in Prior Lake, I can't think of his business right now, Gluey something, G-L-E-W-W-E. He has a thing every summer, like one Saturday a month they open up their place and he makes mead as a hobby. He doesn't sell it because he doesn't have the liquor license to sell it.
11:30Yeah. But he let us try some of his blackberry mead and oh, I wish that he had a liquor license because we would be buying it in the summer. But hard cider is wonderful because it's like fizzy apple cider that can get you drunk if you drink enough of it. And I don't enjoy being drunk. I haven't enjoyed being drunk in a very long time.
11:56But I do like the first glass because it makes you very warm and fuzzy and relaxed. I like that part. Yeah. So hard cider is a wonderful drink. Yeah. And for those who are gluten-free like myself, it's a fantastic option. And we use all of our organic apples and some other select local apples. We forage for...
12:21Forge, for and grow some of the other fruits that go in like aronia berries and raspberries and wild black caps. So it's fun to bring all that together.
12:32That's very nice. I'm so impressed with what you do. I wish that when my husband and I had been in our 20s, we had known each other. We didn't really meet each other until we were 26, I think. And I was married to somebody or I was going to be married to somebody else. I can't remember now. But it doesn't matter. We just were not at the stage where we were going to be ending up together at that point. And I wish we had known where we would end up.
13:01because if we'd known we would have ended up, maybe we would have done things differently and gotten there sooner, if that makes sense. Yeah.
13:10Yeah, it's kind of a bummer. We missed out on the best years of our lives because we hadn't hadn't found each other yet. So, Well, as a fruit farmer, we continue to ripen well every year. Yeah, like fine wine. Yes, exactly. Um, okay. So do you have people come in to the
13:37to your property and visit and do you give them tours or is it just they can buy things at your property? We give tours on occasion, organized tours and we are going to have a farm tour coming up in June. We have another event here in July, sowing seeds, celebrating local foods and lost skills, which is super cool. This is our second year doing that event.
14:03And, you know, sometimes when groups contact us, we arrange tours, but it's all arranged ahead of time, but our farm store is open five days a week and people can come there on their own. And there's usually chickens wandering around and pigs on pasture and, um, you know, whatever else is going on seasonally. So that's kind of how we do that.
14:29Okay, so I have a question because a lot of people who are doing what you're doing offer events or tours or whatever to get people to come in and visit and see what you're doing. And so my question is, when people come and they don't really know about farming or gardening or homesteading or anything, is there a light bulb that you see go on with them when they've been there a while?
14:57Yeah, I mean, I've definitely experienced that over and over again. It's neat to see, you know, they didn't say, oh, I didn't know that grew that way. Or I didn't know we could grow apricots here or just seeing pastured animals, you know, in a different system or whatnot. Or with that event I mentioned, we did, we had a lot of homesteader type folk.
15:26attend and be part of the farm tour and say like, Oh, I didn't know you could do so much on such a small space. Because we only at our home farm here have 4.6 acres. And we have over 400 fruit trees here. And then we have another 10 acres that we manage, which is where the remainder of our apple trees are. But we do a lot on our little postage stamp here.
15:52I love seeing that happen and I love seeing that with adults and with kids, you know, getting to experience that stuff. Okay. Well the reason I ask is my brother is an English professor in Massachusetts of all places and we were talking a while back, like maybe five years ago, and I said as a professor
16:22teach and see that that light come on when someone gets a concept or realizes that they wrote something really beautiful that they thought was just mediocre. And there was like a good 30 second pause and he said, that doesn't happen. No. And I said, what do you mean it doesn't happen? And he said, he said, sis, it's, it's college. He said,
16:46He said, it's not the same as elementary school when kids are learning things for the very first time. He said, he said college people tend to be slightly more jaded because they're adults. And, and I felt so bad for him because he just, he sounded so sad that there isn't that light bulb moment. And I don't know about you, but I live for watching people grow and learn. And so I said that my
17:16I said to my brother, I said, you might want to find a different profession. I said, because it's making you this sad. Are you going to be able to sustain this career? He was like, it's paycheck. He said, and I actually love what I do. So yes. And I said, okay. Well, that's important. There is something, yeah, there's something amazing when something that you're doing sparks an idea or joy or happiness in somebody else. Yeah.
17:46Yeah, you know, I really am passionate about like teaching people about preservation and just some of these lost skills, some home setting skills, whatnot, you know, making tinctures, making salves, gardening, that builds a resiliency in our community and gets us engaged with working with our hands.
18:15because I think that's something that is kind of lost in our society today. Is that like a deeper sense of purpose or whatnot that comes with doing some of those things? And I just think those are the kind of things people, I see people craving, especially just more so in the last number of years that they want that experience. And I think
18:41that leads to light bulb moments and exciting feelings.
18:51Just those human connections. Yeah, and it leads to wanting to learn more. Yes. When I started cooking from scratch, I didn't know what I was doing. I made cookies from scratch. I was like, oh, these are pretty good. What else can I make? Then I did cake. I was like, huh, that's pretty cool. As I got...
19:18further and further into cooking, it branched out into like dinners or I don't know, just more, more and more and more. And I learned that cheesecake is not a gourmet specialty. Anyone can make a cheesecake. But I thought that it was a special magic thing. Up until I made one and I was like, oh, you put the ingredients together and you put them in the oven and you cook it. That's how you make cheesecake.
19:48So, I think that people think that it's hard to learn how to do these things that you can just pay someone to do for you. But it's not hard, it's just you have to want to learn how to do it. Yeah, yeah, you just got to do it. And that can be a really hard thing to see depending on what place you're in. But then, kind of when you go over this hump sometimes, it's like, oh, yeah, you just have to try. And you just have to fail sometimes.
20:19Um, have you ever heard the term limiting beliefs? Uh, I think we, we tend to put a lot of, yeah, we tend to put a lot of limiting beliefs on ourselves and you probably told yourself like, I can't make cheesecake or I would say to myself, like, I am not a baker. Well, you know, I'm going on three years making sourdough because I just like. Decided to throw that limiting belief in the trash and try and burn a few things and, you know, whatever, but like.
20:48It feels good and you get somewhere. Um, and you just, yeah, you just gotta try and get your hands dirty. And not everything. I'm going to say something that. Go ahead. Oh, no, you go ahead. I was going to say, I'm going to say something that probably sounds counterintuitive, but there is actually something really satisfying about completely screwing up the thing you're trying to make and then throwing it in the trash.
21:17and thinking, I can try again. Yeah, with a clean slate. Or when you do that and you try again and you go, oh, that's what I did wrong or something like that, you know, and it just like, you have these little clicks, those light bulb moments, right? Yeah, yeah, I made something like 15 years ago, I made something, I put it in the oven
21:47one of the kids needed something and I completely got distracted from the thing in the oven. And they got my attention before I had set the timer on the stove. And so I never set the timer. So I was dealing with whatever emergency was going on with one of the kids and I could smell something cooking and I was like, I got to check that. And I didn't until it smelled like it was burning. And I was like, well, dinner's ruined.
22:13And I went out in the kitchen and I pulled it out and I put it on the top of the stove and there was no salvaging it. And I was like, okay, this was not my fault this time. And I just let it cool down and I think we had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that night because there was just no other plan. And once whatever was in the pan cooled down, I literally scraped it into the trash and thought...
22:42good riddance, it was not supposed to happen today. And I wasn't upset, I wasn't angry, it was just one of those things. And when I threw it in the trash, I was like, that's okay. Sometimes things just need to go in trash. So I tried, I failed. It wasn't necessarily because I did anything wrong, but kids come first, obviously. And so we just, we have to keep trying and we have to keep moving forward because if you don't...
23:11and you don't move forward, you might as well not be alive.
23:18At least that's what I think. That's so true. We feel that a lot in the farming universe. That's why we sit down every year and say, what worked? What didn't work? What do we need to throw in the trash? Where do we want to evolve? I think that's just a metaphor for life, but we find it really important on the farm as well.
23:46Yeah, and who knew how important weather would be regarding growing things? I don't know how you guys did last summer, but boy, last summer was rough on everybody regarding weather. Yeah, you know, last year wasn't too bad for us. You know, there is something nice to having perennial crops. Um, and
24:13Apples will start setting, fruit will start setting, fruiting buds in the fall. Weather in the fall is important too as far as moisture goes and whatnot for us. When we have dry years, things tend to be, the seasons tend to be a little compressed, which can sometimes, when four weeks of raspberries come in three weeks, it's like a bust in your bud.
24:38Some things did not size up as much as they were, but like that's also something I guess I can say I enjoy about the job is every season's a little different. You are learning all of the time. I mean, sometimes it can be really difficult, but that's also what the human experience is about, I think is continuing to learn and grow. It doesn't feel good to be stagnant.
25:06So I feel grateful that last year ended up okay, pretty decent. This spring was what made me more nervous but it all panned out.
25:19Yeah, and this past winter was insane. I cannot believe we got through the winter with like a foot of snow. That was it. We didn't even get our snow blower out, which is ridiculous. But I mean, it kind of made up for the last winter because there was so much snow. It was ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. It was a lot two winters ago.
25:45I'm hoping that this week of rain that we have coming and is raining now here, is going to be okay for the tomatoes and the cucumber babies we just put in. My husband planted over 150 tomato starts this past weekend. Wow, that's great. He also planted radish seeds and green bean seeds. I was like...
26:14Are you going to be mad if those seeds rot out because it's going to be really wet this week? He said, nah, he said, I'll just put more in. I said, okay, good. At least the radishes have a quick turnaround.
26:28Yeah, I put my tomatoes in, but I didn't fully mulch them. So hopefully they won't stay soggy because we have kind of like a clay loam, heavier soil. We'll just see. Yes, the battle cry of farmers everywhere. We just have to wait and see how it goes. I've said before on the podcast that I am...
26:57I am absolutely not a gambling girl. I don't like to gamble with money or time or anything else. I really, really want to know what my odds are and I want to go for the best odds possible. And so when my husband was talking about us finding a place that wasn't in town to move to, he said, I want to have a big garden and I want to do this and I want to do that. I want to do that.
27:25I want to do this." And I was like, you're talking about a huge gamble. And he said, well, yeah, but life's a gamble. I said, I hate gambling. He said, he said, the house will always win on this one. I said, I don't believe you. I don't believe you. And he said, okay, he said, let me, let me rephrase it. He said, it will be worth the risk. I was like, okay, I guess we can go with that. So.
27:52What I'm trying to get at here is that anyone who gardens or farms, it is always a gamble. And you can't be afraid if you want to live this life. And I'm not afraid of it, I just don't enjoy the gambling part of it. I prefer to refer to it as an experiment. It sounds a little more exciting than a gamble.
28:19All guard. And it is an experiment. Brand experiment. Yeah, yeah.
28:25It's a grand and glorious thing no matter how it turns out. Well, and I just, I mean, it's so great that you are gardening and homesteading. I think I see more and more people.
28:39you know, reaching to that or growing a garden or just trying to be a little bit more self sufficient and sustainable, whether it's out of a desire to, you know, get dirty, get their hands in the ground, just try to make something for themselves or if it's because of inflation or supply chain issues. I just see more and more people heading towards that experiment and it just makes me really encouraged.
29:08Yeah, and I'm really happy that people who are living in towns who only have a little tiny bit of space to grow are at least trying to grow something because that's the gateway to, oh, I can try these things and these things and these things and they grow and they learn. So we're right back to the growing and learning thing again. There you go. Yeah. And if people want to get into foraging and...
29:36preserving, canning, drying, freezing, whatever. They don't even have to have gardens, but to get connected to the farmer's market or a local farmer, there's many, many, that's what I love about it. No matter every single farm and every single homestead and everything, it's like thumb prints. We all have our unique way of doing it and you can do it however fits you. So if you really think gardening isn't your thing, you can still.
30:05get your hands on all the fresh goodness or do preservation or do some sort of urban homesteading or something like that.
30:18Yeah, and it's a good thing to keep our dollars local. And I say that as someone who used to go to the farmer's markets and buy from the local farmers because we didn't have room to grow as much as we needed. But I also say it as someone who now has a farm stand on property and someone who sells at the farmer's market because our bottom line relies on people buying our things as well.
30:46So it's a really nice circle. And if you can't grow, you can support your local growers. And if you do grow, you can provide it to the people who need it. Exactly. So important. Right back to that resiliency and connection piece, because our communities are just really important.
31:14Yeah, and our communities tend to be our friends and our neighbors, and we want everyone to thrive and rise with the tide. And apparently the tide right now is locally grown food, so that's awesome. Yes. I grew up on the East Coast, so anytime I think of a tide metaphor, I'm going to use it. All right, Brooke, well, I try to keep these to half an hour, and we're at 31 minutes and 30 seconds.
31:44two seconds. So I am going to cut you loose because I'm sure you have lots to do considering it is springtime. And thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks for reaching out, Mary. If you ever, if you need anything in follow up, just holler.
31:59Yep, and don't actually leave me because I need the file to upload. So don't go anywhere when I say goodbye. Thanks so much, Brooke. Have a great day. You too. Take care. Bye.