A Tiny Homestead

WhoopsyDaisy Farm

Today I'm talking with Rachel at WhoopsyDaisy Farm.You can follow along 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 Rachel at WhoopsyDaisy Farm, I think is the name of your place, right? Yes. Okay. I have, there are so many endings to people's names, farm, homestead, farmstead. I'm like, which is it?
00:27How are you? And tell me about yourself. I'm doing great. So yes, we are WhoopsyDaisy Farm. We are an eight and a half acre homestead in central Kentucky. And we raise dairy sheep. Very nice. If I sound a little flustered, it's because I, you are the ninth episode I have recorded this week alone. Oh my goodness. Yeah. So it's been, it's been crazy. I've talked to a lot of people this week. I've made
00:55As of now, nine new friends. It's been really fun. Well, awesome. All right. So, um, where are you again? We're in central Kentucky. Okay. And do you have a big sheep raising operation or a small one or how does this work? Well, we have 30 sheep. So some people say, oh my goodness, that's a ton. And other people say, oh, that's it. You're a micro farm. So it kind of depends, um, on what your perspective is. Uh, I mean, it's, it's.
01:25It's a mid-sized sheep operation, I would say. It seems like, again, you either own hundreds or thousands of sheep or you own four. I mean, there's not really a lot of middle ground in the sheep industry from my experience. So yeah, we're on the smaller range. We're larger for a homestead dairy operation, but we actually raise two different kinds of sheep. And so that's why we have so many. So we, yeah, we raise.
01:52We raise dairy crosses and then we raise purebred Gulf Coast natives. So like we have a ram flock of at least five rams at all times so that we have genetic diversity for both types of sheep. Awesome. So tell me how you got into this because raising sheep is not something you just go, I think I'm going to get a couple of sheep and raise them. Especially not wool breeds in America today. So my...
02:18Origins with sheep were when I was growing up in New Mexico, my best friend's mom had a fiber store and they owned two sheep, two llamas, and 18 Angora rabbits. And they harvested all the fiber, they processed it themselves, they spun it and they would either sell the yarn or they would knit clothing and sell those. And then, you know, they ordered either wool from other shepherds or they got yarn from other yarn outlets and they sold it in their store.
02:48I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. So I always wanted to have some wool sheep just so I would have quote sheep yarn unquote in my backyard. But it wasn't really something I thought you could sustainably do, you know, during your working years. This was going to be like hobby farm when we retired that kind of thing. And then between high school and college, I went to Romania on the mission field and I tasted sheep milk cheese for the first time there. And I
03:16never heard of sheep as a dairy animal, but the cheese was absolutely amazing. And then when I was in college in Louisville, I went to this little Russian grocery store and they would import sheep cheese from Bulgaria and that was always my favorite kind too. So I kind of had in the back of my mind of, you know, okay, well, I'll have sheep when I retire for wool and milk. And so then
03:40You know, I got married to my husband and he had a major health crisis after he donated bone marrow right after we got married. And so we started seeing a nutritional therapist. I got my certification in nutritional therapy. I started learning about, you know, all the nuances of the food industry of our country and the medical industry. And we found out about Joel Salatin. And my husband was like, well, I want to farm like Joel Salatin.
04:10thing he was actually passionate about after getting so sick. So I was like, well, let's get a farm then. Because if you're chronically ill, that's what you do. You go get a farm. Sure. Why not? That'll help. So we got a foreclosed property and Joel Salatin says put animals on your property right away. So we got the chickens because that's what you're supposed to do. And we were trying to do a pasture poultry operation, but in Kentucky, everyone still raises chickens.
04:41corner of the world where everyone has little gardens every summer, everyone has chickens, everyone kind of gives you eggs in the spring or whatever. Like we haven't had a garden the last couple of years for a variety of reasons. And I mean, I don't miss it because people give us produce because they just have it. So all that being said, it's a wonderful place to live. It's not so great if you're trying to make money selling organic eggs pre-pandemic. Because I wanted four or five dollars a dozen.
05:08for my organic chicken eggs and that was just ridiculous. Back then like, anything over 99 cents a dozen was just silly. So we were like, well, let's, we need a farm product to sell to help offset costs. So, you know, the next thing after chickens is you're supposed to get dairy goats if you're a homesteader. And so we're like, let's get dairy goats and we'll do like the goat milk soap thing. And so we were all signed up to get our.
05:36starter flock of goats and we were supposed to pick them up in March of 2020. Mm hmm. And so that didn't happen because it was March of 2020. So, um, I don't know what happens to starter flock. They just, they weren't available. Traveling wasn't an option. So I started looking for four-legged in our area and, um, I was like, well, I know some shepherds in our area and I know you can get milk from sheep.
06:06And this was kind of when we were more like everyone was hoarding toilet paper and pasta. And I was like, well, I don't need to hoard toilet paper. We've got oak leaves for that. My husband can't eat grains. There's no point in hoarding pasta. And all it takes is one pregnant mouse and there goes your stash. So let's, you know, we've got chickens, we've got protein sources, but we should probably get a red meat source and a dairy source just in case the wheels really fall off. So
06:30There were these two border lester sheep available and those are not traditional dairy breeds at all, but when I was looking them up, the research I was doing said they've historically been used for dairy as well as fiber and meat. I was like, okay, well, it's a tripurpose breed. Let's do that. So we brought these two sheep home and we were just going to have the two for a while just to kind of get our feet wet. And the longer we had them, the more my husband was like, I like sheep. I don't really think we need to do.
07:00goats, let's just do sheep. And I was like, okay. And then, you know, we started getting stimulus checks. And he's like, let's boost our farming economy and go buy more sheep. And I was like, cool. So we ended up getting a ram in a weather, what they were both Gulf Coast natives. And then we had a Gulf Coast native you, because I wanted to do some critically endangered breeds just because I thought it was cool. And then we have the border lusters. And then I got two dairy mutts.
07:28Yeah, so they were crossbreed of East region, Awasi, and they had some Icelandic in them. So we don't have purebred dairy sheep in the United States right now for, again, a garden variety of reasons. So when people buy dairy sheep, they're usually a high percentage of the purebred you want, but then they're crossed with something else. Does that make them more hardy? I...
07:51wouldn't say so because when they import the semen and the embryos and the frozen eggs from overseas so like the way we get our dairy sheep is you start off with a you who is Similar to the breed you want so Yeah, you say you want to eat freeze and I'll just pull a breed out of my hat You'll start with a Chevy at you
08:16which is a meat breed, but they're larger and their wool is kind of like an East Frisian, so it wouldn't take much genetic tweaking to make them look like an East Frisian. And so then you would either import East Frisian semen from overseas, or now they've allowed you to import frozen, fertilized embryos. And you either do in vitro fertilization on the ewe, which is a surgery, so stupid expensive.
08:43Or you would do an artificial insemination with the semen, which is also a minor surgery with sheep, which is also expensive. And so then, I mean, the success rate of this is not very high. So I know a shepherd who did this and she impregnated six ewes and she got one viable lamb out of it. So if you do the semen, the offspring will be 50% the breed you want and 50% the breed that you use as the host. And so then you would just repeat that process with the offspring until you get
09:12you know, the high enough percentage that's considered an American version of that breed. So, so like the highest percentage you're going to get with this system is I think it's like 99.5 or something like that. But I think once you get into the 97% range, then that's essentially considered purebred. Okay, cool. Thank you for the genetic lesson. I love it. I really, really do.
09:38Yeah, you can get really nerdy and technical with some of this stuff. I find it fascinating and other people are like, just tell me what to milk. I don't care. Well, you just gave me an opening to chat about my dog because I talk about the dog all the time and this is a legitimate reason to bring this up. My dog is a mini Australian shepherd. And in a lot of circles, mini Australian shepherds are not an actual breed. They're called an American shepherd. Okay.
10:08their bread from Australian shepherds and supposedly smaller breed dogs. I don't know about this. I have to go dig some more because if you look at my dog, she looks like a 35 pound version of a black tri Australian shepherd. I don't see any other breed in her anywhere. So genetics are crazy. How they're absolutely crazy. I, we have a ram and we use a purebred Gulf coast native ram.
10:38And the Gulf Coast do not look anything like any dairy breed whatsoever. And we crossed the Gulf Coast ram with my best dairy you to try to get hard to your offspring. And she had a you and a ram. The you and so she had twins, right? The you looks just like the dairy cross mom. The ram looks just like the Gulf Coast ram. Weird. And they're twins. Like they grew up in the same, you know, bag.
11:08look like two completely different breeds of sheep. So yeah, it's crazy. I don't, I think genetics are awesome, but I don't understand them. That's why they call a genetic crap shoot. Because you can hope for the best on the breeding turning out the way you want it to. Yeah. But Mother Nature is always going to throw you a curveball. It's never going to fail. She's always going to be like, haha, look what I made. Yeah. Yeah.
11:34Yeah, we were both, my husband and I are both control freaks. So naturally we started homesteading because we joke the almighty needed lots of opportunities to humble us and take our control freak, get this out of, out of the system. So. Absolutely. I, I used to be a control freak really, really bad. I didn't even know I was one until someone pointed it out. And as I've gotten older and as things have not gone according to plan and I have had meltdowns about it.
12:03I have learned that it's so much easier to go with the flow as long as nobody is mortally wounded. Probably going to be okay. Well, that's probably why we called our farm whoopsie daisy farm because I said we're going to make mistakes and we can't just become incapacitated by that. So we're just going to have to be like whoopsie daisy and we move on. Like we're just so we're going to name our farm that as a reminder to just keep rolling with it. So.
12:30Yes, and I wouldn't suggest to anyone that they stuff their feelings about things on the homestead because that's a really good way to get the courage and give up. So if something bad happens and you feel like you need to cry about it, have a cry about it. Oh yeah, absolutely. But then realize that life is going to go on and things will get better. Well, and with shepherding, I mean, I tell people all the time, like,
12:57shepherding is going to force you to face every single emotion possible to experience as a human at some point in your shepherding journey. So you are going to have to get comfortable with feeling all the feels because you will experience the worst rage and the most deepest joy and the most profound grief and the most euphoric happiness sometimes in the same hour. So if you don't have the ability to
13:24look at your emotions and say, I have that emotion, but then you process that emotion and you keep going, you're not gonna stay in shepherding very long. So, yeah, it's very important to acknowledge what you're feeling, but just not to be incapacitated by it. Yes, and I think that that actually has a lot to do with control freakism. I feel like back when I was younger, I didn't know how to process what I felt.
13:52And so it got all bottled up and I would try to cope with it by avoiding things going wrong. Because if nothing went wrong, nothing hurt. Yeah. So as I, like I said, as I got older, I realized that it's probably not the end of the world. Everything probably will work out. And then I could let go a little bit. So, yeah, yeah. Yep. But anyway, um,
14:19Now that we're done with our Dr. Phil moment. Done with psychology, yes, exactly. And really, I mean, I hate to be all psychology-y, but there's a lot of stuff that is feelings when you're raising animals or raising produce or raising kids or raising a relationship. It's all tied into homesteading and farming. Yeah.
14:47influential in how our culture views animals or or PETA, for example, or, you know, all the all the things where in our culture as a general rule, the only animals we really interact with on a daily basis are pets, not food, or a zoo animal, but not food. And so when you leave, you know, mainstream culture to do something countercultural, like homesteading,
15:15you really have to confront that we actually have a lot of emotion. I mean, like, you know, when I was a kid, if the goldfish died or the hamster died or the dog died, I mean, it was like, yes, you're going to grieve now because your friend died. But if your chickens die, as an adult homesteaders, like, well, I, if I grieve every time a chicken kills over and have a little minor funeral for it, like, I'm not going to be
15:43protecting the other chickens that are alive. Like, you know, you have to kind of rewire some parts of your brain. And again, not to say that you can't feel your feelings. Like, of course you're going to feel grief that you lost animals, but there's a learning curve, I think, for new homesteaders from moving from, you know, Bambi or, you know, our love of dog Fido to, I do love my sheep. I care for them. I'm their shepherd. Like, I know each one of their ball and what sheep it goes to. They know me as their shepherd.
16:13But at the end of the day, their ultimate goal is to provide my family food. Yes. Yes. And, um, we just, we just lost a barn cat of a couple of weeks ago. This is like, this is like the fourth or fifth barn cat that, that we have lost. And it's the second one that has just disappeared. Like we don't know what happened to her. And the first one, I've talked about this already on the podcast. I cried. Like I was so upset about that first one.
16:42This one was missing for a day and she had kittens, which sucked. She had like three or four people kittens. And I was like, well, if she doesn't come back tomorrow, we have a problem because we are not bottle feeding kittens. This is not a thing they're doing. Yeah. They're barn kittens. That's not happening. Yeah. And then she didn't show up the next day and I was like, crap, we're going to have to put those kittens down. Not, not a happy moment at all. No, no, no. And.
17:12You know, I think that's part of homestaying that ever, it's becoming more talked about, I think, now, that so many people are turning to this lifestyle of, you know, you're gonna have a lot of hard. Yep. So you're gonna have to, A, embrace the hard, but B, choose your hard. You know, because it's hard to put down kittens, it's hard to bottle raise kittens. So which hard are you going to choose? And, you know, only you on your home said no, which hard is,
17:42Feasible for you, right? Exactly. I mean I have a one-year-old. I can't bottle feed a ton of kittens. Mm-hmm Yeah, bottle feed one lamb because they actually stayed in the pack and play together for a while but Probably not Yes, and and they were already they were already young She was not a great mom to start with so they weren't the healthiest little critters that ever seen right and I was just like
18:10No, this is not a feasibility for us right now. Mm-hmm. But the point in telling the story is that I was sad. It's soft. And I kind of miss Chirp was her name. She was a really friendly kitty. But I'm not broken up about it like I was with the very first one because I have learned that this is the kind of thing that happens. Right. Also, Chirp's mom had had a litter of kittens like two months before Chirp did.
18:38And we kept one of those kittens and we're keeping him. He's becoming the new boy male, uh, barn cat. And so yes, we had to put down three or four sickly kittens, but we also got to keep a really healthy male barn cat who will do a very good job in keeping mice down. So it's that, it's that one hand is empty and one hand is full, you know? Yeah. And I mean, you know, Daniel's Alison talks about how to be sustainable. You have to call.
19:07with a very heavy hand. And I mean, you need to cut your losses and invest in the viability, which again, I think is very counter-cultural because we have special need pet clinics for you to go pick up your special need animal. And so the thought of like, we had a lamb, our first lamb ever born on our farm was born crippled.
19:35And you know, we were brand new shepherds. And I do think the learning curve was beneficial for us to learn, like, all the options to care for this ewe. But at the end of the day, we were like, she's gonna have to go in the freezer. I mean, she's a critically endangered ewe. She's purebred. She's got amazing parasite resistance. Her fleece is okay. But if the flock has to run for some reason, she can't keep up. And if she gets bred, that'll kill her.
20:03And then are we going to have a viable lamb or a deformed lamb? Like, it's just like the odds of really hard choices outweighing any possibility of physical redemption here. And you know, that was like our first time we had to make this culling decision. And it was really hard because we were like, did we fail her? Like, is the amount that we have to put into her?
20:27Like, are we just being lazy? But then like the amount we have to put into caring for her is taking into time we need to put into the rest of the flock and that kind of stuff. But anyway, fast forward to picking her up from the butcher, then we tried the meat and we're like, oh, maybe culling's not so hard anymore. Because the end result is really tasty. Yeah, and I really don't want this to be a downer. Like, we're talking about the realities of the choices that we make.
20:57raising animals or raising produce or having a farm or whatever because it's not all prettiness. It's hard work and it will hurt your heart but it's also really good for you, makes you strong and there's lots of really happy things that happen too. I get told by my city friends all the time, your life is so ideal and I just laugh because
21:21Yes, there are so many idyllic moments there. There really are. I mean, Instagram is wonderful for making sure I can just tap on an app and I'm instantly shown my grid where there's all the ideal. But behind every ideal moment and photo, there's a lot of work and there's a lot of hard and there's a lot of sweat. Sometimes there's even blood and tears. And, you know, I don't want...
21:45the hardness to erase the idealism, but I also don't want people going into this thinking the idealism is what is the overarching experience you're going to have because, you know, I like hard work. But you know, I've had to work harder than I ever thought possible my entire life because you know, if you're in lambing season, you don't really have an option if you're tired or you've had a bad day or you're sick with something like when we had COVID, we still had to go milk the cow.
22:15So, you know, that when you live in the town or the city or whatever, like if you don't feel good, you just put it off and you can if you're on a homestead, like the animals will get sick or die if you put it off. So you really have to embrace self-discipline and you're you're just inner moxie, which I think is rewarding, but it can catch people off guard. Yeah. And and if you're actually really, really sick.
22:44Hopefully you have a partner who will kick in and help. Or you have a backup plan somewhere where somebody knows your routine and can come help you. Well, I will say, we didn't know to really, like, hardcore cultivate community when we first started because we were in this to be independent. And so when we were just kind of trekking along doing our own thing,
23:07And when we did get COVID, we reached out to people and they did step up and come and help us and stuff like that, but it wasn't until I got pregnant and we had other small farmers and homesitters in our area basically knocking on the door and saying, here's my phone number, you are going to call me, right? Because you are going to get to the point where you can't do stuff anymore. And...
23:33you know, then when we did have my son, I had a really hard labor and to recover was a lot more intense than I planned. And I mean, if our neighbors hadn't stepped in, we would have lost the farm because it was right after lambing, like, you know, sheep needed milk, stuff needed to moved around, parasites were hitting really hard. And our neighbors stepped in and just took over for us so that we could focus on healing and taking care of our newborn. And I mean, it was really an eye opener for us of like
24:01we've really got to talk more about cultivating community in the homesteading arena because it's starting to kind of be vocalized more, but I think it needs to be like, before you get your chickens, you need to figure out who your neighbors are first. Make friends and then get chickens. Yes. Yes, there you go. Yep. When we moved here, it was during COVID, we moved here in 2020, August of 2020. So we're
24:30August 7th is the day we moved in, so we're coming up on our four year anniversary. Well, happy anniversary. Yeah, very excited about this. And I don't know, like halfway through this past year, I thought, did we make a mistake? Did we really need three acres? Did we really need to do this? And I had to think about it for a couple of days and I had to sleep on it for a couple of nights because it was really bugging me. And I woke up on the third day and I went downstairs.
24:59and the sun was coming up over the horizon, and I was like, yeah, we did the right thing. Because that sunrise thing was not, we couldn't see that very well from where we used to live, and it was very important to me. Yeah. So, but we didn't meet any neighbors until six, eight months after we moved in. Because we live a quarter mile from our neighbors, any of them, on a two lane country road. And people had...
25:28They didn't want to meet new people. They wanted to be not around people in 2020 because of COVID. Right, right. So for the first year or so, we were very isolated here. And it was a little weird. Yeah. And then we finally met some people. And we were like, oh, OK, this is going to be fine. But we also don't have any livestock. And I have talked about this a ton, too. We don't have any place for livestock to graze. And feed is really expensive right now.
25:58So we're not doing livestock, we're doing produce, and produce is great. We like growing garden, it's fine. But we do have the barn cats to keep the mice down in the pole barn, and we have chickens. We have like nine chickens, and they keep us in eggs, and they're very happy, and so are we, so that works out great. So we already talked for like 26 minutes, or 28 minutes. 26 minutes. And...
26:22I wanted you to tell me about your book because when you emailed me you said you have a book about sheep's milk or something. Yes, I do have a book. It's called The Guide to Homestead Dairy Sheep. It's basically the book that I wish I had when I started shepherding. I actually ended up making a lot of friends online who are overseas and shepherd full time. That's where I got a lot of my shepherding know-how.
26:51There's some really good books on the market, like there's Stories Guide to Raising Sheep, for example. There's Pat Colby's Natural Sheep Care. But there really wasn't anything, like there isn't anything specific to dairy sheep. So there wasn't anything on here's how you train a sheep to get into a milking stanchion, for example. There wasn't anything on, you know.
27:16how to care for a ram or why you'd have a ram on your property. Because I mean, with dairy goats or dairy cows, you can do artificial insemination or you can borrow someone else's buck, but dairy sheep are still so rare that you really just need to have your own ram on property. And so I was like, well, it's a male, like they've got testosterone, like sheep are flock animals. So how do I do boy management? And so my book is basically just like,
27:44Here's the things you need to think about specifically for dairy. And then I do go quite a bit into the breeds of, you know, what is a dairy sheep? When do you want a dairy breed specifically? Or when would you want to, for example, milk a different breed of sheep? Like what are your options? Because, you know, like I said, the dairy sheep are still so rare in the United States. We don't have pure breads.
28:09So it's not always possible for everyone who wants to get sheep milk to get a dairy-specific breed. So, you know, what are your options then? And then one of the most common questions I get is, well, can you milk a hair sheep? Because a lot of people already have sheep for meat, and so they want to know, like, can I have a, can they be dual purpose? Can I have a viable, you know, sheep dairy with?
28:32or like can I just milk my katanas to try and see if I like it before I invest in a more expensive dairy animal. So I do go quite a bit into like how to pick the breed you want and why you would pick certain breeds over other breeds. And there aren't any dairy specific breeds on the market currently that are hair sheep for dairy sheep. And so I talk a little bit about the virtues and benefits of wool for homesteaders. But I
29:01probably going to have to write a whole book on the topic at some point just because it's really unfortunate how maligned wool has been in our culture so that the plastics industry can take over. But I mean, wool for the homesteaders is just a really amazing product that no one really knows about. So I do try to give wool a good plug as well as the milk.
29:29Did you self-publish or do you have a publisher for it? I went with an independent publisher. So it's a small brand new publishing company and it was started by a homesteader. All the authors are homesteaders and it's written for homesteaders. So it's not a big name label but it sawdust publishing. And they started actually a couple months before I signed my book contract. So I was their second book that they published.
29:55Okay, so is the book available on Amazon if people want to get it in e-form? It's not in e-form, but it is available on Amazon. Okay. Yeah. So the publisher said, you know, she probably will look at e-books at some point, but they're just they're not old enough yet to start branching into different options. Okay. So and then, you know, with people...
30:21Well, that being for homesteaders where folks are very rural. I mean, a lot of folks just want hard copies anyway, just in case, you know, internet gets spotty or goes down or whatever. Yep, okay. Well, I will find the link to your book and I will make sure it's in the show notes so that people can find it to buy it. Awesome, thank you. And if you order it from my website, I will sign it for you. Oh, awesome. Yeah. Perfect. All right, Rachel, I feel like we didn't really get into too much about sheep milk, but we sure got into it.
30:49We did, didn't we? Maybe you can come back in the fall and we can actually talk about the benefits of sheep milk and all the things that people might want to know more about. I swear 30 minutes is just not long enough for the podcast. Yeah, I see the virtue of 30 minute podcast episodes, but to really like flush out topics, you really need an hour, but then it's like an hour's a very long time. So I feel bad for podcast hosts. How do you make that choice?
31:17Yeah, and I'm really interested in you guys' stories to begin with because it's always interesting how people come to the choices that they make. Yeah. And if there's time at the end, I'm like, oh yeah, and you wanted to talk about duh. The actual topic. Yeah. So maybe I can have you back in September. I'm book solid from now until September, but. Yeah, I'm more than happy to come back. Let's set up a time in September and we'll stick to the topic of Sheeps Milk and why it's really good for you because I know that it is.
31:46Yes, yes, it really is. So great. Well, we'll talk again in September. All right. Thank you so much for your time, Rachel. I appreciate it. You're welcome. All right. Bye.
 

Legacy Farms

Today I'm talking with Janet at Legacy Farms.You can follow along on Facebook as well.
If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee -
https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Janet at Legacy Farms. How are you, Janet? I'm doing well, Mary. And you're in New York, right? I am. I'm just south of Buffalo, New York. Okay. So I'm going to ask my usual question. How is the weather in New York?
00:29Well, right now it's hot and muggy, but true to form, Buffalo is known for its snowy winters. So anytime I say I'm from Buffalo, people go, oh, you get a lot of snow. Yeah, yeah, we do. It's lake effect snow, right? Right. So there's been multiple times where.
00:59We've opened the door and there's six feet of snow out there, seven feet. Blizzards that take power out. Um, yeah, there's, there's been a lot of fun times in snowmen. Yeah. I'm in Minnesota. I feel your pain. And I'm going to say it again. We didn't get a lot of snow last year. We got a foot total for the entire winter, which is highly unusual. Uh, us too. In fact, I think it had.
01:28something to do with it wasn't cold enough to kind of kill off the bad bugs. So right now we're in like a very buggy kind of season. And it's so the weather does play an effect on crops and how many flies I have to swat. And yeah, so I almost wish it was a colder winter.
01:58We would be. We would have a lot less bugs. Yes. And part of the reason that I ask about the weather when I talk to people is because weather impacts everything we do when we grow produce. So it's kind of a way for me to gauge where we were at at this time when I listen to it back next year. Yep. And I mean, I'm not going to post on my Facebook wall every day what the weather is when I get up because that would get real old real quick.
02:27And I'm not sure that Facebook would feed me back that particular memory anyway. So, so it's just a good running tally on what the weather has been doing all over the U S so that's why I ask if anybody's curious. Um, so tell me about yourself and what you guys do at legacy farms. Well, I, um, that's a great question. I decided that I want to leave a legacy behind. I have four wonderful children. Um,
02:56They're 22, 15, 10, and 11. And I realized a while ago that my children did not have the upbringing and background and work ethic and all of the little nuances that my grandparents raised me with. I was able, I grew up canning and sewing and knitting.
03:26spinning wool and it was a really nice family dynamic and I wanted to bring that back for my children and try to educate them on homesteading and permaculture and self-sufficiency. They, especially with COVID, video games became
03:56Hmm, a really, for lack of a better term, just an obnoxious thing for them to spend their time with when we couldn't go out or do things. And I, for the past several years, I made it my life's mission to just buy a farm on my own, a single mom, and try to get my children these ethics and morals that
04:25I grew up with and I wanted to instill that education onto them. I want to leave behind a legacy so that my children and my community can be better off homesteading, knowing the homesteading basics, understanding some basic principles of farming and self-reliance. There's a lot of kiddos in the community.
04:55I mean, we know that there's drugs out there. It happens in the city. It happens in the country too. We know that there's kiddos that come from broken homes that might not have a mom and or dad. And I don't know about you, but there's been days, weekends where I've like, okay, kiddos, what do you wanna do today? And we can only go to the splash pad so often or the park, but I wanted to be on the map.
05:24is something, a place where moms or dads could check and say, Oh, well, Legacy Farms is open to the public. Why don't we go there and ride a horse or milk a cow or have a, you know, pet the chickens or pick some flowers or learn what classes are open for what days and I want I wanted to give the community something too.
05:53And that's really where it started. And I will tell you, my 15 year old really kind of started it. And I'll tell you how, because he is, first of all, I think he's gonna be a salesman or he's so personable. But Bradley and I were watching YouTube videos and he and I were watching how,
06:23young woman and she goes Garlic is the mortgage lifter crop And he goes mom, you know if we just buy some garlic and plant it you can take those bulbs pick them Pick them apart every clove turns into another bulb. He goes mom. This is a no-brainer We could sell this even if it's 20 30 plus dollars a pound This could this could be what we do and I go Brad
06:51That's brilliant. I said, well, you know what? Let's try it. Let's see where it goes. And I leased a bit of property. And we started with like 400 pounds of garlic, which I think in retrospect, three, four years ago, that was four years ago, that was probably more than I probably should have bought. But I went all in. And.
07:20bread's like, we're gonna market this, we're gonna sell it, we're gonna do it. And there was a lot of learning curves, but we decided we're gonna use the garlic as our bread and butter cash crop, and then build off of that. So two years ago, we bought a old farmhouse on 10 acres. This farmhouse was built in 1840.
07:50Oh, wow. Okay. Uh, yeah, it was a part of the Underground Railroad. A lot of history, a lot of history. And I'm a big history buff. So it was exciting to me to look at all the history that was attached to this property and the people, um, that have lived there before us and realized that there was something kind of special about this. So here we are just crushing it.
08:19You know. So I have a question. Was Bradley like 11 when he floated this idea? That was about right. Yeah. Wow. That's awesome. I love that. He is a very brilliant kiddo. I he he is something else. Like he this is the child that I want taking care of me for my retirement. He he and I.
08:45go back and forth, he's already looking at investing and whatnot. So yeah, he's going to be a pretty good financial guy too, I think. Well that's great because with the state of the world, I'm glad somebody has a clue about money. Yeah, absolutely. Because man, oh no, this whole world with inflation and stuff right now is so hard on everybody. Okay, so garlic is your bread and butter crop.
09:15This is great because we've tried to grow garlic like three years in a row now, and it just doesn't do well. So I'm hoping I can pick your brain about how I can get garlic to grow in Minnesota. Well, yeah, and you're in a cold weather climate too for these winters. So there are two varieties of garlic mainly. You have your soft neck varieties and your hard neck varieties.
09:43A lot of what you see in the store is going to be the soft neck varieties that come from California or warm weather places. And I might be a little biased here, but the hard neck garlic that grows in the colder climates is now it is a lot to me better tasting. It does taste like real garlic to me. But the hard neck garlic is.
10:11really what you want for those cold weather climates. And it does really good if you plant it during October, the late fall, you could plant it from October. We've done as late as November when it's crunch time and we run a little later than we could, but it does love the colder weather. And it's one of those crops that
10:40Either people tell me it grows and it's like a bad weed, or they tell me that it doesn't work at all. My suggestion, I learned my mentor from Hugh Jick Farm out in Socrates.
11:10There's more market to be, I'm not gonna look at you like competition. He's very didactic, he's teaching, he's very open to teach me. And he said, this is what I do, you don't have to do what I do, but this is what helped me, so you don't have to cross those pain points by trial and error. And one of the things that we do is,
11:39when we're ready to plant, we try to test the soil, the pH, and try to supplement micronutrients. And there is a lot of research that says chicken manure is better. I noticed that the garlic that got watered, they say one inch of water a week on garlic. So the garlic that was watered better, grew better.
12:08bigger. So they like water like onions like water. Right. Exactly. Yep. And the way that we plant is very particular. On legacyfarm.org, our website, we show like how we do the hand planting. And we do hand planting because the roots need to be root side down or else it kind of grows all funky and crooked.
12:38But probably the biggest advice I would have for somebody is cover your garlic with about almost a foot of straw. It sounds silly, but cover it with a lot of straw and get as much natural fertilization you can in the fall. Cover it with straw and then when it comes up in the spring, cover it again with.
13:07some straw because it keeps the weeds down and the moisture in. When we go to plant, we do like a double soak. We rinse all of our cloves with peroxide and that kills some of the nasties that could damage the garlic later. Then once we do like a quick soak in
13:36and we also use, oh I hope I'm going to say it right, micro-risal powder, which people have used that a lot with trees and trying to help root growth, but it seems to really help the plants establish, the garlic bulbs establish that root growth so that they can get all the nutrients nutrients from the soil that we're putting in there.
14:04Okay, so I have a quick question. We don't really have anywhere around here local to buy garlic starts, you know, the bulbs for planting in September or October. We would have to order them because they sell them in the springtime here. Can you plant them in the spring and still get good results or is that a bad plant? Garlic really loves the cold weather so...
14:32I've heard people do start it in early spring. But so what happens is you have kind of like a window of opportunity to do this because the longer that it's in the ground, the better off you're gonna be when it comes to harvest time. I find that, because I thought about this as well. We had a bumper that we didn't sell, a bumper crop that we kind of didn't sell and we also didn't plan it. So.
15:01I wanted to do this in March or April and there was just too much mud. It was too hard to get the soil ready. We had to talk about weather. We had a lot of rain this spring. So I thought, well, with covering it with straw to try to, I mean, it does help with the moisture control. But I never...
15:31I never considered doing it in the spring for that reason. I didn't think it was going to get the best nutrient value and everything it was gonna need to do its best. Okay, because we've planted it in the spring and I'm glad that you mentioned that it really likes an inch of water a week because I didn't know that. And the last two summers, we've basically had a drought from end of June through the fall.
16:00And that might explain part of the reason we didn't get any good garlic. And we watered the garden, but it probably wasn't an inch a week by any stretch. So that might be part of our problem. And I don't know which variety we've planted. So I'm going to have to talk to my husband about the hard neck varieties when we do this again. And we'll probably just order some hard neck bulbs to plant in October, because that seems like a really good way to do it. Yeah.
16:29Just let me know. I'll send you out a care package. Oh, okay. Well, yeah. We love garlic. I mean, there's not a week that goes by that we don't eat something with garlic in it. And it's funny because I have friends who also love garlic and they keep posting things on Facebook, little memes about the recipe called for one clove of garlic. That's like a drop of salt in 10 gallons of water.
16:59it's not gonna do anything. And so you measure garlic with your heart, not with a number, you know? You have that right, yeah, absolutely. And it has a lot of health benefits and there's some things that I don't think are like really talked about as much. Everybody does like garlic, but every June, we harvest the garlic scapes, those little.
17:27pigtails coming off the tops that are the seed pods. Yeah. And that makes an amazing pesto, a really awesome stir fry we've made. I made like a finishing steak sauce where you just whip up some, you know, a little butter, a little scapes, a little seasoning, pop that on a steak and it's amazing. So I really wanna...
17:55I want to explore more recipes and see what restaurants would take that on a little bit more because I don't think it's as talked about as it is just the garlic plant, but there's actually a double harvest here. What I think is funny about garlic scapes is garlic scapes are kind of just an extra that comes with growing garlic.
18:23But people see it as this very gourmet, fancy thing to use. And I'm like, it's gonna get tossed in the trash if you don't use it. It's not fancy, it's just food. Yeah, yeah. And believe me, I've had to throw some away because there've been too much or haven't been able to sell some, but they freeze really well. And it's such a great piece of
18:53You know, I always look at the, when we sit down for dinner, I almost do it like, like make meals based on color. Okay, we have got meat, we have vegetables, you know, I, I hate a yellow plate. Usually it means it's all carbs, but, but you know, just to be able to take some dried or and add it to the meal. It just adds that nutrition and color.
19:22It's nice to have on hand. It gives the plate a pop is what it does. I have not actually eaten garlic scapes mostly because I don't buy them and I haven't had access to them in the garden yet. Are they a milder garlic flavor or are they just as garlicky as the bulbs? No, they're actually much, they're more mild. They don't have that, you know, if you bit into raw garlic, it would have that bite to it.
19:50The garlic scapes have more of like an onion, like a scallion type flavor, but instead of that onion, it's got a light garlic flavor. So they're almost interchangeable with scallions. So really good in a salad. Oh yeah. All right, cool. Well, you just helped me out immensely. You have no idea.
20:19I'm going to be chatting my husband's ear off tonight about garlic again. Yeah, let me know one moment. Yeah, and he's going to be like, oh, you talked to the garlic lady today, didn't you? And I'll be like, yes, I did. I talked to Janet in New York and she told me all kinds of things. So I was looking at your Facebook page. Do you have a new foal yet? Oh my goodness. I probably, I know that there's other farmers that probably sleep in the barn.
20:49I could probably sleep right next to her in her stall waiting for this baby to be born. She is ready any day and I am so excited. She has not had her full yet, but I can tell she's ready. She looks pretty round. Yeah, she is. She is. It's so hard waiting for babies. We have a barn cat and she was pregnant this spring.
21:19And she has obviously had her babies by now. It's tomorrow's August 1st. But she got so big, she looked like a basketball. And she was so uncomfortable. And she's the friendliest kitty. And my son went out to pet her and she hissed at him. She never hisses at anybody. She's aggressively friendly. He says, I think we're gonna have kittens tomorrow. And I said, well, we'll see. I said, she's been laying around and she's.
21:48pretty angry and she's pretty uncomfortable. And the next morning she had seven babies. But she looked, she looked due for like two weeks before that, she was huge. And I just kept waiting and waiting and waiting and I'm like, are you ever gonna pop? Are they ever gonna come out? So I feel your pain on waiting for babies cause babies are great. Well, my.
22:14My daughter Ava, she's 11 and she has a visual impairment. She's like 95% blind, let's say. She's not a fan of animals and I always wanted her to be a fan of dogs. Maybe she will need a seeing eye dog someday. The only animal she has really taken an affinity to
22:43is horses. So she has been, you know, checking on Betsy and she has been out to the barn and feeling her stomach and, mom, it feels bigger today than it does yesterday. And I'm like, I know we're gonna, we're really excited. But she's, you know, one of the things that is so funny about having horses and having a child with a disability is
23:12She'll never be able to drive, but she told me that she could probably take that horse through the Tim Horton's drive-through or the Dunkin' Donuts drive-through and be just fine because the horse knows where she's going. And I said, true. I said, Ava, well, maybe you will be a fine girl after all. Mm-hmm. Has she felt the baby move in the horse's belly? She has.
23:41So it was like a month ago, it was a lot more right now. She is so big. There's no room. There's just no room for that little fool to even, you know, just toss or turn. So we know that she's time. It's pretty much time. Uh-huh. Yeah, I halfway expected you to message me this morning and be like, I can't do it today because we're working on having a baby horse. I can't wait.
24:11I really can't. I want to, it's the first foal I've ever experienced. I've had horses and this will be the first one for our farm, our family. It's a pretty exciting time. Yup. Your heart just must be beating out of your chest waiting for this baby. Absolutely. Absolutely.
24:36It's funny, I was looking at your page and then Facebook reminded me I had memories to look back on because that's what Facebook does. And one of the first memories that came up in the list was that we closed on our new house four years ago today. And there's a picture of my son and I sitting in the bare nook in the kitchen eating our first meal, as it were, at the table in the kitchen.
25:01And I was like, my God, it's been four years. I can't believe we've been here four years. Well, not technically. We've owned it for four years. We moved in on August 7th in 2020. So I can finally say four years instead of almost four years now. That's a really, that's that in 2020, that must've been a lot of chaos to be moving in that climate, that crazy COVID climate.
25:31Well, we kind of did it ourselves because we didn't feel safe asking people to help because you know, we didn't want people to get sick and we didn't want to get sick. And it was my husband, myself, my youngest son because he still lives with us. And it was my older son. I have, okay, four kids. My daughter is the oldest. I have a stepson and then I have two sons that I birthed. So the two sons that I birthed helped us move in.
25:57And so it was a lot of getting all the big stuff in the beds, the bookcases, the tables, the dressers, you know, that stuff. And then for two weeks after that, it was my youngest and I going back and forth because we moved half an hour away from where we used to live. So we would drive up, pack up the SUV, drive home, unload the SUV, drive back up, load the SUV. It was a very long, hot August of moving things. Wow. But.
26:27I've been saying on the podcast basically since I started it last August, we've been here almost four years or we've been here three and a half years or whatever. So now I can change it to four, which is great because I'm tired of saying almost four. That's great. But in that four years since we're talking about it, when we moved in, there was basically a house, a huge pole barn.
26:52an old one-car garage and a useless two-car garage. Like we've never been able to use the two-car garage. It really needs to come down. And that was it. That was what was here on a 3.1 acre lot. And since then, we have put in a huge farm-to-market garden. We have put in a farm stand off of our long driveway to sell produce from the garden. And we just put up a hard-sided greenhouse this spring.
27:21So a lot of changes have happened in four years. Now, do you use your greenhouse year round? We will be, because it just went up in May. And my husband wants to put in a potbelly wood stove to heat it in the wintertime. And I'm trying to talk him out of it, because that means he's got to tend it. He's got to go out.
27:48before bed at 10 o'clock at night and throw wood in it. And he's gotta go out when he gets up in the morning before work and throw wood in it because it's gotta maintain a certain temperature throughout the winter. And he seems to think that that will work. And I'm like, dude, I don't know, because if you're sick or you hurt yourself, I'm not going out there at 10 o'clock at night to tend that fire, it's not happening. So I'm trying to figure out a solar.
28:16way, you know, solar panel way to heat it. And he's also got this idea of the, I don't know what they're called. They're these square plastic containers that hold gallons and gallons and gallons of water and they soak up the heat from the sun and that radiates out at night. So we're trying to figure out what the heating part of it is going to be. But the plan is that it will be a heated greenhouse in the wintertime.
28:45I noticed that composting, obviously composting for us with the animals, it started off really small because we just needed to clean out the barn. But it's grown into a really big pile of... It actually, we have a three room chicken coop.
29:15eggling chickens. Wow. Okay. Yeah, it's fun. They're my babies. I feel like the crazy chicken lady sometimes but the compost gives off a lot of heat. So what we did last winter and it actually worked really well was we turned one of the just regular run rooms of the chicken coop
29:43into a compost pile. And we continued it and it was able to provide like enough heat to keep the chickens warm and happy, but also our water, chicken water from freezing. And I was actually really surprised, but we've, you know, a lot of that organic material that we were just disposing of going in there, the chickens scratched it up, the heat.
30:13We turned it over, it stayed warm, it actually worked out really well. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because he had seen something on YouTube, I think, about someone actually using their compost bin as the heat source for their greenhouse. And we just don't know quite how that would work. We don't know how you would get the heat into the greenhouse because we don't want the compost in the greenhouse. That's right.
30:39So he's thinking of cutting a hole in the back wall of the greenhouse and putting like some kind of fan in that hole in the greenhouse and then having the compost bin enclosed with a door on the back of it to add more stuff to it and then basically having the fan blow the heat from the compost pile that's composting into the greenhouse. But we don't quite know how that's going to work yet. Yeah. And you have to be careful with whatever gases are being.
31:08know, expelled from the compile too. Yeah. So maybe, maybe some kind of fan with a filter on it or something. I don't know, but we're still looking into it and we have a couple of months to go before we really need to make a decision on how we're going to keep that thing warm. So, so we will figure it out. I like the word stove idea. I'm, I'm a Pennsylvania Dutch girl. So old fashioned, uh, slightly.
31:35Amish ways are right up my alley and a wood stove to me sounds like a good idea. Yeah. I'm on his side though. You don't have to repeat it, but I think I would. You're team wood stove? I'm team wood stove for sure. Okay. All right. You can be team wood stove. My only concern about the wood stove is God forbid something got screwed up and it caught the greenhouse on fire. That's my biggest fear because we got a grant to build that greenhouse.
32:05And so if it burned flat, we don't have the money to replace it. Right. So we have to do some, some discussing about what we want to do. And I'm a fan of the, the solar panel thing or the compost pile thing. Cause I think that would be very, very high techie interesting to talk about because yeah, we hit our wood stove or we heat our wood stove. Yeah. We heat our greenhouse.
32:32where the wood stove isn't as interesting as we heat our greenhouse with a compost pile and people are like, how does that work? Yeah, yeah. So I don't know yet. We'll figure it out. But I'm just thankful that we have a hard sided greenhouse now because hopefully the winds won't take it down like they've taken down our normal high tunnel style ones last two summers. Right, right. We had a windstorm this spring. It took down our greenhouse, our chimney.
33:02windows from our chicken coop. It was, it was pretty, I took a few shutters off the house. So yeah, we're, I'm, I'm really glad I didn't jump too fast to get a greenhouse in last year. Um, there, I, I really do have to, like, like you said, you need to put in the research and effort to make sure that you're getting the right, right thing for your climate. But
33:32That's probably on our next, one of the things that we have to do down the line is come up with a high tunnel that's going to allow us some year-round production. Yeah, we have friends that live about half an hour away. They have high tunnels and they have for a very long time. They have a high tunnel that has apple trees growing in it. Oh my bird, that's amazing.
33:58Mm-hmm. Yeah, we were over there a couple years ago and I looked in the door because it happened to be open And I said are those apple trees in the high tunnel? She was like, yeah I said don't they poke holes in the plastic? She said when we forget to prune the top branches, they sure do. I was like, okay Got it But it works. They have the most beautiful apples That is so awesome. They also have huge old apple trees in their backyard like the trees are
34:27at least 40 feet tall. They're gorgeous. And I said, how do you pick the apples from those? And she said, we pick them till we can't reach them. I said, what about a ladder? She said, you can't get a ladder up in there. She said, the branches are so gnarled that there's no way to do it. I said, okay. She said, so the birds get the apples on the top and we get the apples on the bottom. I said, oh, that's good. That works. So.
34:54Anyway, I could talk to you for another half an hour, but I have got to get done some things before I have my next interview at one today. So I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me about garlic because now I have all kinds of ideas to float to my husband about the garlic for next year. Yeah, and that's wonderful. And, you know, we do sell seed garlic so we can send you out some information and some garlic, you know, to get you started. If, if, um.
35:23You can even do a taste test of a couple different varieties we have and see what you like. There's, yeah, there's a lot to it, but it's a work of heart. And I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today. I feel like I got more out of this today than you ever will. So thank you so much, Janet. You're welcome, Mary. Thank you for having me on the podcast. Absolutely. Have a great day. You too. Bye.
 

Little House in the Woods

Today I'm talking with Dena at Little House in the Woods.You can follow along on Facebook as well.
If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee -
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00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Dena at Little House in the Woods. Good morning, Dena. How are you? I'm great, thank you. How are you? I'm good. So where are you in the great state of Maine? I am about midway. I'm probably central Maine.
00:29Harmony, I don't know if anybody's ever heard of Harmony, but that's where we are. We're about 20 miles from Skowhegan. Oh, okay, yep. I know where Skowhegan is. I grew up in Maine, so I am very familiar with the landscape. I figured you were. Yeah, so tell me about what you do. Actually, Little House in the Woods is a domain name that I have had for many years, and I just started using it for my website. I actually grew up in a little house in the woods.
00:59And we grew up about a mile from any neighbors with no power, no none of the amenities whatsoever. When you said run and get some water, you meant grab a bucket and run for it. And that's what we did for a long, long time. It was a great way to grow up. It was wonderful. I can't even imagine growing up the way the kids do now. But my mother did everything. All our meals were cooked on a wood-cooked stove. She would
01:29phenomenal lifestyle. When I met my husband, we started running an off-grid sporting camp for bow hunters only. And that was more of the same kind of lifestyle. And that was fun, meeting people from all over the place. Our children enjoyed it because they got quite an education from the different people and the different walks of life and the things that they did. And just in the last...
01:56I know it doesn't sound recent, but in the last 20 years, we've moved to where we are now and our kids are grown. We have grandkids and it was time for us to do something else. My husband is working on his own website and I decided to get this one up and going and I make baskets. I hand weave baskets, pack baskets are my favorite. It's something satisfying about doing them, I guess. And I like working on a bigger project. I've sold.
02:26I can't even begin to count how many over the years. I started doing it where we previously lived because there was seriously nothing else to do. But I mean, it's good and it's a cathartic process. So I really enjoy it. I have a lot of crafty things that I do. I knit, I crochet, I weave on a loom, I weave baskets. I used to make a lot of soap. I like to bake bread from scratch. I got all that stuff from my mom, make donuts.
02:54My daughter is the same way. She's in her 40s and has kids of her own. And we just live out in the country and live each day as it comes. I work on my website to get things done and ready and trying to decide the best next thing to put on there that people may be interested in. Fun, so much fun. So you're an original off-gritter. Yes. And you work with your hands all the time.
03:24Yes. How did you learn to make the baskets? I saw the pictures on Facebook. They are stunning. Thank you very much. I actually learned where we lived before was in Jackman. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's right on the Canadian border and it's in the Moose River Valley. It's a very small town. It's very insular. There's not much there, but my husband's job took us there. So I...
03:51As I said, I had to do something besides work and take care of my children. So there was an adult ed class for basket weaving and this wonderful lady taught us how to do it. And she's after the second class, she says, well, you're already way beyond me. She says, you're just natural. I said, well, I just love doing it. I don't use any molds or anything. Everything that I do, they'll never be too alike because I do it all from feel and hand and just the way I like the looks of it.
04:21I write a lot of my own patterns, but it was fun. We did her class for like six weeks and by the end of it, I was totally hooked. I have been doing it off and on ever since. The off part, I had had a pretty serious shoulder injury where I kind of tore it all apart and had to have surgery. That kept me down for over a year, but I have learned how to compensate for my arm not working quite right. I'm back at it.
04:50Loving it. Okay, so what are the materials that you use to make your baskets with? I use reed. It is the inner bark of the rattan tree. Okay. And it does not come from the United States, unfortunately, but it is a wonderful fiber. There are many fibers here that you can use, and a lot of the native tribes will use ash, which they cut the tree, pound the tree, get the strips of ash, but I don't have that ability.
05:20But the reed is nice and heavy duty and it comes in different widths, different thicknesses. I can either dye it myself or buy it already dyed. I have a couple of techniques that I use that are maybe different than somebody else's. My husband makes all the double bases and runners from my pack baskets. And I make all the harnesses or straps for them. Okay.
05:46So tell me what a pack basket is, because I am not up on my baskets. I actually don't have any in my house. Okay, it is a basket. They used to call it a trapper's basket, if that helps. They, you wear it on your back. It's a pretty good sized basket, and trappers would put all of their gear and goods into them. The ones I make are potbelly, they call it. Have a rounder, at the bottom of the, bottom of them, they're rounder, and they stick out some.
06:16because it gives you more room to pack clothing or ice traps or anything that you might need to carry off into the woods. I made them for my son and all of my grandchildren and my daughter-in-laws because they all fish or hunt and they all just bring them with them. The traps go in there and everything's in there and they're very strong. They're tough. You put them in the back of the truck.
06:46And when they get dirty, like I have a basket that I made in class, it's called a napkin basket. It is just a simple square basket that regular paper napkins go in. Now I've had this basket for well over 30 years. It does not look worn, but it has been around. And if I see it getting a little bit dirty, I just put it under the faucet, warm water. I put a little dish soap in the sink and swish it around, use an old toothbrush if I need to.
07:13rinse it off and hang it up to dry and it's just like new again. And I have no problem repairing them or I've fixed a lot of them that I haven't made. And sometimes that can be a challenge because you're not really sure what the material was, but people are usually happy because they at least get to use them again. Yes. Um, so a pack basket is basically the precursor to the backpacks that we used to wear in school. Yes.
07:40Yes. Okay. So what other kinds of baskets do you make? I make, oh gosh, I make bread baskets. I make napkin baskets. I make what's called a two pie basket. And when that pattern was created, it literally would hold two pies to take to a function like a Grange dinner or something. And I use it for a lot of things. And a lot of people do it comes out really pretty.
08:08And what else do I make? Oh, I have one that I made recently to go on the tank, my toilet tank. It fits perfectly on the back of it. So hair brushes, odds and ends get tossed in there, extra roll of tissue paper, that kind of thing. I've made a few custom things like for motel, I made a basket that would hold separate little compartments for their sugar and creamers and
08:36coffee packets and tea and all that stuff. And I'm trying to think of some of the stuff I've done because I have done so much. Yeah, a bean pot basket. It looks just like a bean pot. And it's just, the only purpose for it is that it looks like a bean pot and you use it as you would any basket. But it has a wire bail with a wooden handle on it. I make some mail baskets, which is my own pattern.
09:02And usually I have like a wire hanger for those that will be a moose or a deer, a little boy fishing, a farm wall tractor or something like that. Cool. Awesome. I did not know I was going to be talking about baskets this morning. I have not talked to anyone about making baskets. I've talked with people about crocheting and baking and growing food and raising animals, but not baskets. And it's really funny because you know how people are like...
09:31I should take a basket weaving class when they're stressed. Right. I have never seen a basket making class offered anywhere where I have lived. And so this is really interesting to me because I know nothing about it. So my question is the reeds, are they a flat finish or are they shiny? They are a flat finish. You can buy a cane like you would, you know, the cane chairs.
10:02Cane chair seats, you can buy that cane on a rock roll, but it's expensive and it's very fragile compared to reed. Reed is quite flexible and quite forgiving of how you use it, whereas cane is not. It's a flat wood, like wood finish and it comes in, I can buy it in round, I can buy it in flat oval, I can buy it in what they call oval oval or just flat flat.
10:30Um, you can buy it anywhere from like a sixteenth of an inch on actually a 32nd of an inch up to an inch and a half wide. You buy it by the pound or at least I do. And I used to buy it locally, but with all the businesses going out of business, unfortunately, I order it online usually from some Southern companies or out West somewhere. Whatever.
10:57I watch for sales, but I only have like three companies that I usually buy from. I know their quality is always good. And they ship it to me and it's so much a pound. When I first started, it was like $6 a pound. Now it's $16.95. Wow. Yeah. Which leads me to my next question. I am guessing that your baskets are not inexpensive and nor should they be. Well, apparently they're more inexpensive than they should be, I have told.
11:26been told that my pack baskets, a 19 inch pack basket is like $190. I've sold them for more than that 275 at times. But I just feel like with the economy the way it is, people can't afford it. And I can still do that. And I can make what I have to for money to replace my supplies. And hopefully when things start getting better, then my prices will go up a bit. But
11:53like a two pie basket would be $85. And that's a, there is a picture of one of those, I think, on my website, it's not featured because it's, I don't have any right now. But I can't remember what I have on there. I have a couple of pack baskets and what else? Oh, I have a couple that I made last year without a pattern. One of them looks like a small laundry basket, or a craft basket, where you just toss things in and carry it wherever you're going.
12:22And the other one is similar, but it has straps on it like a tote basket. And you can put a fair amount in it. Like if you're quilting something, it fits right in there perfectly. All your supplies to take to a class or somebody's house to work on or anything, really, or your basket supplies to carry with you. Sure. So how many hours do you put in to make a finished pack basket? Well, that's kind of a weird question. It used to be.
12:50Before I hurt my shoulder, I could do one almost finished in a day. So I would say two days. Now I'm closer to four days to finish one. And that is if I can continue to work steadily. But that includes staining it and creating the straps for it. And I buy the strap material from a company called Strapworks. And they make all different kinds of strap materials. And this is like a polyurethane.
13:20It's like, it doesn't bother it to be wet on the ice for hours and hours. It dries right out. And I mean, it would take years for it to deteriorate. And I buy certain buckles for it that I like because they hold and they don't slide. Um, it's like, it's kind of an experiment over the years to what you like best and how you like it best. Um, a lot of people don't stain their baskets.
13:46On a bread basket, I don't put any actual chemical stain on there. I use mineral oil because it is, after all, a bread basket and I don't want any chemicals sitting near somebody's bread. But it's, like I said, it's kind of cathartic to do. I enjoy it. It's kind of who I am these days. The reason I asked how much time you put in is because that's important.
14:13People need to understand that handmade things take time. The funny thing is, like when you ask about a pack basket, it takes me that long. The little tiny baskets take me almost as long. Because they're fidgety. I don't do well with little fidgety things. Like my mom used to make Barbie doll clothes for me when I was a kid. I couldn't do those. I would just scream.
14:38And, but I like, that's why I like pack baskets. I make something big, but I do make some small baskets, one that's called like a weed basket, but I would make that. I should make compared to what other make other people make of that. I should make a couple a day, but I usually only make one a day because that's enough aggravation for that. People don't take your time into consideration whatsoever. It's like, apparently your time is absolutely worthless.
15:07Yeah, and that's why I asked because I I've crocheted things and when I first started it took me forever to finish a project because I was brand new at it. And then as I got better, it took me less time because I knew what I was doing, but it still took time. Yes. Time is worth something. And so. Yes, it's your time. That's what they don't understand. It's your time that you are putting in to make something valuable for them. Yes.
15:36And so when you say $190 for a pack basket up to $275, I think you said, that might seem like a huge amount of money. But when you consider the materials, your time, your knowledge, your talent, it's really not. That's actually a really great price. Taken care of, in all honesty, that basket should be here 100 years from now. Yeah. Yeah, it's an heirloom. It is. My son, my oldest son, has one. He didn't realize.
16:04what he had when I first made it for him. It was when I first started weaving baskets. You know, he was a teenager, get thrown in the back of the truck, there'd be a spare tire on it, this, that, the other. And he didn't want to tell me he broke the corner of it. But his fiance did. And she's like, he's like, got this thing wrecked. He wants to know if you can fix it. I said, of course I can fix it. So he hasn't given it back to me yet, because he decided he doesn't want it changed from the way it is because I made it. So I just made him a new one at Christmas time.
16:34and sit here. Use this one and you can just keep the other one as a, I don't know, let's keep sake maybe. A memory, yes. Yeah, a memory, but I mean you can only be just so rough on anything and it's gonna break, but if you take care of it, you will have it forever and it will be passed down. Yes, definitely. So were you like a fidgety kid? Were you busy with your hands when you were young? Well, I...
17:01We lived, like I said, in the woods a mile from anybody else. And I grew up with brothers and sisters, but my closest brothers were seven years older than me. So they were off doing their thing, and I would do mine. I read unbelievable amounts of books. But also, my mom, she taught me how to sew, which I started on a treadle sewing machine, which I still have. It was my great aunt's machine. And
17:29My mom made a lot of our clothes on it, but I also learned to knit, crochet, embroider, hand embroider, which I really enjoyed even though I was a little kid and that was fidgety. And I liked it. It was just doing anything like that is usually peaceful feeling. And I did a lot of it outside because I could, because we lived in the woods and had a big lawn and I'd go out with a big old quilt under a tree and just sit there and do whatever I was working on. But my mom had a rule.
17:58for all of us, boys included, if we decided we were sick and we didn't go to school, and she later found out that we really felt okay, we just really didn't want to go to school, we would have to sit down and knit either mittens or socks. So everybody, all the kids in the family knew how to make mittens or socks. And it was a great punishment. It really was.
18:28have so many feelings about all of this. I am 54 and I grew up in, not the Maine woods, but the Maine woods in Steep Falls, Maine. When I, in the eighties? I don't really remember the seventies because I was a kid kid, I wasn't a teenager. I remember the eighties far more. And I spent an inordinate amount of time outside and that was before tablets and cell phones and
18:57and all the gadgets that kids have now. And I loved it. I really, really did. And I learned really good life skills because when you have nothing to do, you find things to do, like weed the garden, or I don't know, learn about identifying plants in the acre, well, the half acre behind my house, or go fishing with my dad, or can with my mom, or you know, all those things.
19:25Right. That's something I do. I do canning and I got that from my mom. And I'm very particular and meticulous about following the rules and the rules change. Yeah. They don't stay the same as they did 60 years ago. They've got new methods, new learning, and it's important to go along with that. But that's all stuff. Like you said, you learn things because you're outside. You're not, you don't have your face stuck in a tablet or phone. And
19:51I don't think they're learning anything on there. I think they're just playing games most of the time. Well, in the defense of the few children who probably are crazy curious about the world, there's some that are actually learning some things that might be important. But yes, a grand majority of kids are playing games on their tablets. I agree. I think they're a wonderful tool. They're a wonderful tool. And I wish I had had them when my children were younger because we homeschooled and they would have been invaluable.
20:21that. And but two of my grandchildren are very, very outdoorsy, woodsy kids, they fish, they hunt, they never want to just sit inside here. They're always out running around looking at things, finding animal tracks, you know, different, just different things. And what is this bug? And what is that? And I'm like, Ooh, and they're all excited about it, or bringing me a frog, they know better than to bring me a snake, that would be the end of the world. But, but they do.
20:50all the time. And my granddaughter, Kayden, she's just turned 14 this summer. And she's like, I just don't want to sit inside all the time. I said, you know, if you're unlucky enough to have a desk job somewhere where you have to, then you'll get plenty of time to sit inside more than you'll ever want. And she says, what do you mean? I said, the worst job I ever had in my life was a bookkeeping job where I sat all day. And I hated it. Absolutely hated it because I couldn't move around.
21:20I don't mind working and moving around and doing things, but I told my boss one day, I said, you know why secretary's butts are that wide as wide as the chair? Because they're sitting on that chair all day. He laughed at me, but I said, no, it's true. Yep, absolutely. I agree. So I guess what I was trying to get to in a roundabout way is that I am really glad that I grew up the way that I did.
21:47And I'm really glad that I had that experience because then I got to share it with my kids. And my kids grew up as cell phones and tablets and things were coming into, you know, everyday use. Right. And they had cell phones. I don't think any of them had tablets. They weren't really a thing yet. And we couldn't afford them because they were really expensive when tablets first showed up. Yes. But we took our kids camping. We took them hiking.
22:17We made sure that they got outside time. And we were lucky enough to live in an area in Minnesota where there's all kinds of state-owned property, like state parks and trails and stuff. So we'd take them out on the trails and they'd be like, what's that? And it was a plant and we would tell them what it is and what it's for. And we found wild asparagus growing and they were like, can we taste it? And I'm like, of course you can taste it. It's probably not gonna kill you.
22:45And so they got to taste their first Everest variegus shoots from a hike in the woods. Nice. When I was visiting my parents, there was a little cemetery, like an old, old, old, small family cemetery next to their property. And there were wild strawberries growing. My kid, my youngest, his first ever strawberry was a wild strawberry. Oh, nice. That's wonderful.
23:08His face lit up like a Christmas tree. He's like, mom, it's so yummy. I'm like, yes, of course it's yummy. It's a wild strawberry. Right. You'll never taste anything better. No. So so we've we've tried really hard. My kids are all grown now. Youngest is 22, oldest is 34. But when they were growing up, we lived in a little tiny town in in Minnesota, in town.
23:33And so we would purposely on the weekends take them and go do something out in the woods because we're like they need something besides the library and the comic book shop, you know? Right. So it's important that kids get to experience as many things as they can. And I'm absolutely not saying that kids growing up in the city can't grow up to be fine human beings. I think that that's not, it's fine.
23:58But I also think that if they have the opportunity to experience other things, that that's good for them too. And I think too, that it's good for the country kids to experience a little bit of the city. Amen. Me too. Well, when they need to go to the city, they know what they're doing. Yep. You're it's funny. I was just talking to somebody on another interview last week and I had a conversation with my dad back when I was in my mid twenties. And I said, I think that people who live in the country,
24:27should go live in the city for at least six months. And I think people who live in the city should live in the country for at least six months. And he said, I think you're wrong. And I said, oh, he's saying anybody who lives in the country should ever have to live in the city. That would be terrible. And I was like, okay, that's fine. We can agree to disagree. But my point was that I don't think anyone should live in a bubble of sameness their entire life. No, no. I know when the first time
24:56we ever went anywhere away from Maine, my husband and I, my husband had been everywhere before he met me, but I had never gone anywhere really. And we flew to Florida. It was my first flight. It was everything. And I was terrified to fly. And then after that, I was like, oh, this is pretty cool. I like this. But when we got down there, the trees, the trees were really through me. And after three or four days, I said, I want to see real trees. I want to see real trees, like they weren't actual trees.
25:26And it's like, but I still feel that way. I don't know how people, many people from here have moved down there, obviously for the weather, you know, I mean, Maine is a rough climate, just like Minnesota is a pretty rough climate and we, I mean, we're used to it and I appreciate the four seasons. I just don't appreciate the length of winter per se. Um, our winters are extremely long, but I do appreciate the differences and the ability to just.
25:55go anywhere and do anything down there at any time, because the weather is almost always great. And that was a change for me, and it was a great thing to be able to see something totally different than what I'm accustomed to. My daughter just moved to Florida with her husband over the wintertime. And she got there and she was like, it's so nice and warm and there's a pool where we live so I can swim every day. And I was like, that's great. Just wait till July.
26:23And she said, what's wrong with July? And I said, you just wait. She says, is it going to be miserable? I said, I don't know. I'm not you. And I was just kind of teasing her. And she called a week or two ago and she was like, it is so freaking hot. She said, I can't step outside without being drenched. And I haven't done anything yet. And I was like, that's why I said, wait till July. Yes. And that's why we have snowbirds. That's why we have snowbirds.
26:52And she's like, I don't know if I can do this. I said, I don't think you have much choice at this point, but you guys might want to rethink your life choices come winter. And she was laughing. She said, it's not that bad. She said the house has AC and the pool helps. And I was like, yeah, I said, honey, I couldn't do it. Could not do it. I would be so sick with headaches from the heat. I would just die. Uh-uh. So anyway, she's she's experiencing a whole new climate while she's there.
27:20Well, that's nice. I mean, it's fun and she's getting to see what something else is like and that it's not all so perfect to go somewhere else. Yep. And visiting, visiting is always perfect. Visiting for a week or two is always perfect because it's new and you know you get to go home at the end of the week or two. Yes. I fell in love with St. Pete Beach and then it was like, I don't want to go anywhere else. I want to go there with the white sand beaches and the blue Gulf water. And then we talked about trying to move there, but I couldn't.
27:50I couldn't because I have grandchildren and I don't want to leave them for anything. Nope. That's kind of how that is. My girlfriend lived in North Dakota for about four years and she took the most, they traveled around a lot and she took the most amazing pictures out there. And every time she would fly out or back, they would fly in and out of Minnesota. And she'd say, I've never been someplace so cold. I said, well, that's saying a lot coming from Maine. And she said the wind.
28:20And I was like, what do you mean the wind? She said it's the same way in North Dakota. In North Dakota, there's hardly any trees. There's nothing to block it. It just blows. Yeah. It's a bit like all the roads in North Dakota because it blows off. Yes. I couldn't visualize that. Yep. Where I live, it's all open corn fields and alfalfa fields and soybean fields in the wintertime. And farmers...
28:48used to put in tree lines to break, have a windbreak. Yes. Every farmhouse has a tree line for a windbreak. We have one. And that's great when the wind is coming from the west. Yeah, the west. But if the wind's coming from the east, we get drifts six feet tall when it really snows. Oh gosh. It didn't really snow this winter. I think we got a foot total.
29:13It's been the strangest year here for weather and I keep talking about it and I probably should just shut up about it because people have heard me talk about the weather for months now about how nuts it's been. But it just depends on where you are and how your property is set up and where you are in the state. I mean, up north, it's very much like northern Maine. It's a lot of trees. Yeah. When we lived in Jackman, we lived right next to the airport.
29:38and the wind would come down across there. And I said, if we didn't have that line of trees, we'd be in the lake. Yep. Because, oh, it was just tremendous. You step out the door and it would just take you right away. And the climate difference in just like 70 miles is incredible. And it's probably the same way there. It is. It's unbelievable. It's like you think you've gone to a different state or something. Yeah, we've had that happen. We've, it's...
30:07We've had days in Minnesota in the winter where up north they got four feet of snow and we got rain. Yes. So, yeah, it's very weird. But Minnesota is a very tall state. It's a long tall state. And Maine is, I don't think Maine is as big as Minnesota. It's not much smaller, but I don't think it's as big as Minnesota. It's huge. People don't realize when they come here. They'll say,
30:33Oh, it's only up in Holton there in Portland. It's only up in Holton. That's only a couple hours. I said, okay, go do that. No, no, that is not true. Holton's quite a ways from Portland. It is a long ways. And it's a gorgeous drive. It is, it is. And, and the state is, is beautiful. And I am a big fan of back roads. I love the back roads. Me too. And dirt roads, you know, like in the summertime or.
31:02In the fall, that's the place to be. But on the interstate, I just get so bored. It's monotonous. And people drive like they're on the raceway. And it's like, I can't say that I drive real slow on the interstate because I don't. But it's like, I just want to get there and get back because I'm not enjoying my drive. Yeah, I am.
31:26I don't really like driving and if I'm going to try to enjoy driving, it's back roads. It's the longest circuitous route I can take that keeps me off the highways because I do not like highway driving. In Minnesota, it's crazy highway driving. My parents came to visit back when my youngest was a baby and my dad had a class in Minneapolis.
31:53and they had to drive like half an hour to get back to our place from Minneapolis. And my dad came back from class that first day and he was like, you people drive like freaking maniacs in Minnesota. I was like, what was your first clue, dad? He said, when I got cut off three times in the first five minutes, I said, oh, that's nothing. You haven't even seen it all yet. And he was just laughing, but he was visibly shaking from his drive and he loves to drive.
32:22Yeah, people drive like nut bars and I don't like it. And so I try not to go into Minneapolis for any reason whatsoever. I can't actually remember the last time I was in Minneapolis. It has to have been at least seven years ago. I never thought I would be such a hermit or recluse, but I will make any excuse in the world not to have to go anywhere. And it's like, I love the fact that I can order my groceries online, drive in.
32:51and they come out, put them in my trunk and I drive away. I don't have to go into the store and I order most everything online. And I know that that's a sad thing in a way for businesses because a lot of regular retail businesses, it's put them out of business. But it's wonderful for someone like me that doesn't like to drive in the city. I have a back problem, a back issue.
33:17And I have a hard time walking around very much. So getting groceries was a job. So now it's just simple. And it's like, I love some of the new things that we have acquired over the years like that. But driving, I can't even imagine. I've seen pictures in Minneapolis. I can't even imagine it. Yeah, it's a little much. And when I first moved here, I had a job that required me to actually drive in Minneapolis.
33:43because I had to deliver things for my boss now and then. And I didn't mind it then because I was young and dumb and didn't realize how dangerous it was. But as I've gotten older, I'm like, I don't want to be on the road with all these crazy drivers. I do not appreciate it at all. And one of the things that happened years ago, my husband was driving. My two youngest boys were in the car in the back seat. And he was going to...
34:09He was going to pass the car in front of him and he was doing everything right. He wasn't speeding, nothing, put his signal on. He looked back to go to pull out in the left lane and he looked forward again, started to pull in the left lane and two cars went flying by him on the left at like a hundred miles an hour. They were, they were drag racing on a highway. We could have died. I shook for two hours after.
34:35I was so scared. I didn't ever want to drive again. I didn't ever want to be in a car again. I got over it, but I was really scared. Just very selfish and unconcerned for anyone but themselves. Yeah. And not really concerned for themselves because they could have been killed. Yeah, and they could have taken out a whole bunch of people with them. So, if you're a driver and you drive, please be aware that what you do impacts other people too. And if your kids drive,
35:04Please let them know that they are driving a one to two ton bullet and that it can hurt people. Yes, definitely. I used to drive all the time. I did on road sales, but I worked coastal main and the coast highway is not fast by any means. Nope. It's stop and go, stop and go. And it takes a lot of patience and make sure you have a lot of bottled water with you because it's going to take some time.
35:31I didn't mind it because the views were so good and I just planned for it. And I don't know how it is driving down through there now. People are probably just as crazy as they are everywhere else, but people don't take into consideration that not everyone sees them. Yeah. Yup. It's, I don't want to make this into a people suck discussion. Let's not do that.
35:58True people people are people and some of people are very very considerate of other people and some people are not and that is true I try really hard to surround myself with a considerate ones because they're much more fun to be around Yes, I spend a lot of time with my family which are obviously my favorite people And a friend of mine and I in 2017 we started a food pantry here in town nice We have worked
36:25hours and hours and hours on that. And we have built it up to a lot. And it was so funny because some people think that we get paid to do it. And I'm like, no, we pay to do it. It cost us a fortune and gas just to go places. But it's very satisfying. And the people that come in, people will think, oh, they don't need anything. I don't know that we've ever had anyone come through that door that didn't need something.
36:54You just can't judge by how someone is dressed or what they drive or anything else. And I, my friend and I were talking about, I just love when the elderly come in and then we started laughing. We're like, we are the elderly, you know, but there are some people like in their eighties and they come in and it's, it's as much of a social hour as, as it is to get food. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, we get wonderful things. We get.
37:21organic produce and stuff like that that we, I mean, I couldn't afford to buy the stuff at the store. And, but we have some local farms and stuff that all donate and people can be very, very generous when they want to be. Yeah. So people don't suck. Okay. Good. We're going to end this that people don't necessarily suck. They're not all bad people. Good. They're not.
37:43Because I just, I hate ending the podcast on a bad note because I've had it happen a couple of times and I listen to it back and I'm like, oh, ended on not a great note. So let's keep it positive. You're doing a fantastic thing with that. We enjoy it. My husband and I work at it, her and her husband, and we have the most amazing volunteers you've ever seen in your life. They're all older and they all work hard and they are.
38:07extremely dedicated which apparently is very unusual from what I hear from some of the other pantries and it's like You just got to let them know that it it's theirs. I'm not the boss. You know what to do. Go do it You have to let them know that they are not at a job this is something that's important to them too and They are fantastic. They're always there. They're willing to help they come in and do everything We could not do it without them
38:36Yeah, because no one person can do it all. We all need to make teams of people to help out. Right. Awesome, Dana. Thank you so much for your time and everything you're doing and teaching me a little bit about basket making today. Well, I would love a chance to show you, but I guess you're a distance away. But my daughter-in-law says I should do some YouTube videos, which I'm not very confident about, so maybe someday. And if I do, I'll send it to you. All right, that would be great.
39:05Okay, thank you. Thank you so much, Dena. Have a great day. You too. Bye-bye.
 

More Than Farmers

Today I'm talking with Codi and Michelle at More Than Farmers.You can follow along on Facebook as well.
If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee -
https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprises 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 Codi and Michelle at Not Just, or More Than Farmers is the name of your place, sorry. How are you guys? We're good, how are you? I'm good, I thought it was Not Just Farmers, but it's actually More Than Farmers. So, tell me about yourselves and what you do.
00:29You want to go ahead, Michelle? Oh, you can start. Yeah, so we homestead on about 5 and 1 1 half acres. For the past, it's been about 10 years now. And we have our own milk, eggs, beef, chicken. We raise our own vegetables, berries, working on fruit trees. I mentioned milk. This is about the first time anybody's hearing about this. But we're working on the process of switching
00:59a cow to possibly getting sheep in the future. So that's all in the process right now. But that's kind of what we do here. We've got four children and just trying to live the homestead dream. Yeah. We also have a YouTube channel called More Than Farmers and we have an Instagram account and we create content full-time teaching other people how to do what we're doing. So awesome. You are doing great things. So
01:24Is all this all the food that you grow or produce is that for you guys or do you use it to help support the homestead? It is just for us at this point. So when we had first started we had dreams of building More of a farm business where we would actually be like selling products and stuff um We got to we got through the realization that It was going to kind of either be One or the other as far as either we were going to have to go all in
01:53on growing food to sell or we're going to have to back off because that in-between stage of trying to grow some food to sell and still trying to hold down a full-time job and stuff like that, that's a really tough stage to be in. So we ended up backing off on the food production, just growing food for ourselves. And then that's when we started our YouTube channel. Yeah, we did Farmers Market for quite a long time. We had an egg business where we sold eggs to...
02:20a restaurant, we sold eggs to a kind of like a butcher shop near us. We really enjoyed those things to some extent, but also for the small scale that we were at, that we were on, it just didn't, it wasn't quite worth it. Codi had a full-time job the whole time, so I was the one who was at home trying to do all the gardening and washing hundreds of eggs every week.
02:50pretty much tanked after my third baby. And so we really just had to back off. We realized that the food production wasn't the kind of work that I was going to thrive on. And then plus we also wanted to homeschool our kids. And that adding that to the workload of the gardens and everything was just too much. So we really took a step back and just started focusing on growing our own food. And then yeah, eventually
03:19Codi was able to come home from his job and we did the content creation, but we've never made a full-time income just from selling stuff on our farm. Okay. So, you said you started this 10 years ago and both of you sound really young, so how old were you when you started? So I would have been 24, Michelle would have been 23. Okay, so you were babies. You're babies. Yeah. So what?
03:47Why did you want to do this in the first place? So Michelle grew up with some kind of farm-ish background. We both grew up in the Mennonite culture, but she was in more kind of a conservative group where like canning and things like that were just part of the culture. I didn't grow up quite so much in that. I was actually a skater punk when I was younger.
04:14I did grow up in the country though I had a horse. I did and do enjoy the country life. But I had no intentions or dreams or anything of becoming a farmer. But I had some really bad teeth problems after a while. I just ate lots of junk food, did not care about how healthy I was eating and stuff. I had a lot of teeth problems. Somebody gave me a book. It was called Cure Tooth Decay. In there, it talked a lot about like...
04:44the way you eat affects how healthy your teeth are. And it kind of was like a kick in the pants. And that kind of started it, just the desire for the healthy food. So we actually started like buying some bulk foods. We were living in a basement apartment at the time, but we were buying some bulk foods. We did a little bit of canning. We garden at a friend's house and at Michelle's parents' house. Started doing a little bit of that stuff here and there.
05:11And then somewhere in that time, our first son was born. And I guess I just kind of realized, you know, at that time we were living in a basement apartment that I wanted more than that for my children. And I had grown up in the country, loved riding four wheelers and stuff like that. And I wanted that kind of life for my children. So it was within, I don't know. Uh, let's see. It was only about a, uh, a year after our first son was born that we bought our piece of property.
05:41It's funny how having children who depend on you change your perspective. Yeah, totally. Yeah. It was funny because so my upbringing was much different than Codi's in that like, yeah, he had horses so he knew a little bit about animals. He lived in the country, that type of thing. But for me, I was a gardener all of my life. My mom was a big time gardener and we didn't go as all out with food preservation and stuff as me and Codi do now.
06:09But I definitely had a really good solid basis for knowing how to do that lifestyle. And so we moved into this basement apartment and I just wanted a garden so bad. And so we ended up like while we were still in the basement apartment, Cody put in a couple raised beds for me and I grew like some herbs and peppers and green beans. And we also got some Bantie chickens. They're the tiny ones that lay the tiny little eggs. But it you know, that was where we got started. And then eventually.
06:39we did find some land and went from there. So it was a slow build, which is great. As I've said on the podcast a few times and as people have said to me on the podcast a few times, diving in to the pool without knowing there's water at the bottom in home setting is not a great plan. Yeah, definitely. You got to start where you're at and you've got to take the time and figure out.
07:06how to do things and what you really want to do and how to get there. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Because, dude, there's no way to just jump in. I mean, you will kill yourself if you try to jump into a full-time homesteading lifestyle without having any idea what's involved. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, even with a basis, I mean, I'll let Michelle talk about it a little bit, but even with a basis, that can still happen. Yeah.
07:34So basically, we just kind of dove in headfirst after we bought our property. We had to build a house on our land. I mean, that's no small feat for a young married couple with – we had a one-year-old and then another baby on the way. We were living in a camper and so building a house on top of all that was huge. But then we also – we're just so excited about this homestead life. We tried to have a garden in the midst of that.
08:03before our house was even completely finished, we got a milk cow, which, you know, it was just so much. We actually burned out to the point that we almost quit completely. We would have these conversations of like, is this even what we want? It wasn't until we got to a much healthier place in our marriage, in our health, that we finally were like, we need to make this efficient. We have to cut back on so many things. That's kind of where
08:32our YouTube channel was born out of actually was just, we wanted people, there was this massive, after COVID there was just this huge, or I don't know, movement. Yeah. And people were like, you know, they wanna know where their food is from and they wanna start this homesteading lifestyle. And I would see some of these people diving in headfirst and I'm just sitting here like, you're not gonna make it.
08:58I mean, you're growing this massive garden, your soil isn't good, and it takes a long time to figure out this stuff. It's hard, but once you have things streamlined on your farm and your property and have your foundations in place, like good soil and all those things, it can be very manageable and very doable, but it's something that needs to be built up really, really slowly. And our biggest advice for people is just to, before you add another thing to your homestead,
09:26Like master what you're doing. That just helps so much with the overwhelm piece. I agree completely. And I'm going to say if you are a gardener, you can master every skill there is in gardening and it still might not work. Oh yeah. So yes, learn how to do the thing that you're in the middle of to the best of your ability and then consider what's next.
09:55We do not have livestock on our three acre place because it's a lot of money to feed livestock and we don't have any place for them to graze. I've talked about this ad nauseam too on the podcast. But we do have a huge garden and gardens don't take as much money to feed. As long as you have water and sunlight and air and good soil, you're probably good. I feel like there's
10:25payoff in gardening than there is in livestock. And I could be wrong, but it's my experience. So. Yeah, I think that like I've heard that both ways. I think you're right in that it doesn't take a lot of inputs with a garden. Probably if you're really trying to go on natural anyways, probably your biggest input is gonna be compost if you don't have a way to make it yourself. Cause like we just published a video earlier this week about like the different sprays and stuff.
10:54that we use in our garden and it's all natural stuff. We don't use any like harsh chemicals and stuff, but we do some spraying, but it's very, very minimal. So yeah, those costs are low. For us, I find, I think our milk cow, I feel like is probably has the biggest return. It also takes probably the most work, getting up every day and milking that cow or whatever. But that's gonna depend, I think,
11:23Like what you're saying, it's going to depend so much on how much land you have because I mean, you're right. If you had to feed hay year round, then that would be really hard to justify. But the milk cow can provide, they can have calves that you can either sell or you can raise it for beef. You can get the milk, which you can make cheese, butter, yogurt. You can use it for fresh drinking and all that stuff. So there's a lot of return there with the milk cow.
11:49Um, not quite as much with raising a beef steer or something, but the thing, the cool thing I think with a beef steer is they're so, so easy. If you have the land, you need probably at least an acre to two acres, depending on where you live for one beef steer. But I mean, you literally just put them out in the pasture and set up, you know, and simple rotational grazing thing. Um, put them out in the pasture and give them water every day. And that's basically all that they need. They're so simple, but you do have to have the land to make it happen.
12:19Speaking of steers, I know that cows, the female bovines, need friends. They're a herd animal. They want friends. They want a group to be with. Do the steers need a group to be with or are they okay on their own? So I think that's a fairly applicable question at the moment because right now we had our milk cow and our beef steer that we had living together.
12:48We had either just the milk cow or possibly the milk cow and a calf or milk cow, calf and steer. And we've got about two and a half acres of pasture. So it was never more than those three at a time. But we just, our milk cow just left and we're down to just the steer. So I guess I'm about to find out. I actually called my dad afterwards and just asked him what he thought. And he said, I mean, he thinks he'll be okay.
13:18We'll just have to keep an eye on him and see how it goes. It's getting close to the age of processing. So if it is gonna be here alone, it won't be for very long. And if I just see that it's not doing well, noticing anything different or odd about it or whatever, I can take it over to my dad's and let it run around on the pasture there with his cows. But I'm gonna make sure that I go out there every day just to say hi to it, at least let it know that there's another living being on the property and stuff.
13:45But we have actually had our milk cow by itself for several months at a time. It would be in kind of those in between stages of the calf was weaned and we sold the calf and then we hadn't gotten another beef steer yet or something like that. And she always did really well, but she was also being handled every single day, being milked or whatever. So I feel like that does make a difference too.
14:09Yeah, I've always been told that cows need friends and goats need friends and sheep need friends. So that's why I asked. It's more important for sheep and goats than it is for cows. I have heard. Yeah, that's what we've heard. But I mean, even if it works to have them by yourself, I mean, it's just good. They are going to be better off with company. Yeah. Yep. They need buddies.
14:32I it's really funny my my grandpa had friends that had a dairy farm talked about this in the podcast lately actually and He had many many dairy cows and many many babies and I said to him one time I said so why do you have so many cows and I was probably seven, you know I was little and he said well cuz I love them and I said well gasped, but why do you have so many cows?
14:58And he said, you're one of those. You want a real answer. I said, I do. He said, I have so many cows because if I have more cows, I have more milk. I sell more milk and make more money. And if I have as many cows, I have babies coming every year. And he said, I have more cows. He said, and it just keeps going from there. And I said, okay. And he said, plus the girls need friends. And it stuck with me from a whole life. Cows need friends. So that's why I asked in the first place.
15:28Okay, so you guys have a YouTube channel and it's about what you do and I see that it's fairly popular so yay team, that's good. Viewers and listeners are important. Do you get feedback from your listeners? Do they, I don't know, email you or comment and say thank you for sharing this particular thing because I didn't know about that and I wanted to learn about it? Oh yeah, absolutely.
15:57You know, you always hear about all the crazy people online, crazy things they do and say. And while we do have some of those, like I would say, like the large majority of people, especially on YouTube, are so kind, very, very supportive. We get very little negativity, I would say, on YouTube. Maybe three out of a couple hundred comments on a video will be negative. Like there's not much negativity on there.
16:27we see our channel at like we take it very seriously and we see ourselves as teachers like that's kind of what our passion is teaching and people are so kind. Definitely they reach out to us and tell us oh we started this herb garden or we started a garden this year because of you guys so it's very very fulfilling for us and we do get a ton of positive feedback. Yeah.
16:56Yeah, Instagram is a little different. For the first, like when Michelle handles pretty much all the Instagram stuff, for the first, like, what day, half a day, it's more like her core audience. And those comments are nice and kind of stuff. But as soon as, like if a reel starts getting up into the hundreds of thousands or up into the millions of views, it's just, it's a dumpster fire in the comments. I don't know, where are these people, what rock they crawl out from under? But...
17:25They can just get really nasty on Instagram. Yeah, and I think it's possibly, I mean, partially because it's such a short clip, you don't get nearly as much context around a reel as you would on a long form YouTube video. And also, like your videos, your reels are getting shown to people that don't necessarily want to see it. You know how when you're scrolling Instagram, sometimes you just flip right on past if it's something you're not interested in. And so this stuff is being put in front of people that might not actually be interested.
17:53And so I think it's just a completely different crowd, a completely different community. So we definitely prefer YouTube above Instagram. Yes. I was raised by parents that told me if you have nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all. And it'd be really nice if people would do that. That would be great. I've had exactly one comment left on my podcast in almost the year that I've been doing it. Okay.
18:21It was really, really lovely. And I don't know why people don't comment on the podcast because everybody I do talk to is like, I love the podcast. I keep doing it, but no one ever actually leaves a comment online. And I'm like, okay, what do I do to get people to talk to me? Well, it's so funny though, because on, when I, on Apple podcasts, it's like really hard, you have, don't you have to go somewhere else to leave a review on Apple? I think you. I mean, basically you just said you can leave a review, but
18:51I mean, probably if you'd post your podcast on YouTube, people might comment more often. I'm guessing you'd have a lot more comments on YouTube than you would. Do you do it on Apple Podcasts? Is that your main platform? I do it on, I post it on like 12 different platforms. Apple Podcasts is one of them. Apple Music is one of them. Odyssey, I think, is one of them. Okay. YouTube for sure.
19:15My podcasts are on YouTube. Oh, that's so interesting. But they're not, but there's no video to them. So I don't know if that's why people don't say anything. It's not a big deal. I mean, people are coming back to listen and that's what I want. So that's the most important thing for me. But it can also be nice to have some feedback, right? Yeah, and it's so funny because I was talking with someone yesterday for an interview and we got done recording and she said,
19:45She said, I need to tell you. She said, I've been listening to your podcast. She said, I went back and started from the beginning. Oh. And I said, that was like over 100 episodes ago. She's like, yeah, she said, but I have learned so much from the people you talk to. She said, thank you for doing this. I felt so good for like an hour afterwards. I was just like, yay, it's doing what I want it to do. I want people to enjoy it and I want them to learn from it. So.
20:13So I get how important this is to you guys because I'm trying to do the same thing just in a not video format. And it's a lot of work. And for me, it's not probably as much work as it is for you guys because you guys are doing video. So what kind of equipment do you guys have to do to do video? It's surprisingly simple, I guess.
20:40When we first started I did have to buy a new computer or something that was powerful enough to run an editing program I think I spent about eleven hundred dollars on a computer, which I mean that's a chunk of money But it was at you know, and everybody or at least us lower income people were getting Yes, and so that's what we spent that money on getting a camera and a computer I got
21:08fairly simple Canon camera. And for a long time, that's basically all we had. We've got my, I use a gimbal with my camera now, which just helps get a steadier shot. Wireless microphones for some of our parts of our videos and stuff, we'll even just use our phones to video. But yeah, it's pretty much still just the computer and the camera. It's all it is. And a gimbal. Yeah.
21:35Okay, because I know there's lots of people who do YouTube videos and they have a whole studio set up. Right. And I've watched videos of people showing their setup for them making videos, which sounds really dumb, but that's what I watched. And it's like a professional studio setup. Right. All I have, I have a desk in my big old bedroom. Thank you, Jesus, I have a big bedroom for the first time in my life. I have a desk. I have a
22:05desktop computer, I have headphones that plug into the desktop computer, I have a monitor that isn't very big, and I have a decent keyboard and a decent mouse. That is how I do this. And I just, I can't believe that this is all I had to do to do this. If I had known this years ago, I would have done it years ago. Right. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much me. I do have two monitors for my setup that helps a lot with the video editing stuff. And I'm actually...
22:33in our bedroom right now too. I had been in our closet for like the last three years, but I just couldn't take it anymore. So I needed some windows. So I'm out in our bedroom now but I am in the process of building a small office detached from the house. I spend hours and hours editing videos and I just feel like I need to get out of the house. Needs to get away from the screaming children. Yeah. It can make it a little rough.
23:01It's coming and it works and you just you get you do what you got to do to make it happen Yes, and if I if I'd known it would be this easy. I would have done it 20 years ago however, the technology probably wouldn't have been as usable 20 years ago as it is now so I also bought a a really nice microphone you know one of the ones that has the arm that swings and has the the spit
23:28thing in the front so that you're not getting all the S's and the P's popping. I can't use it because it picks up every single noise. And we live on a country road where big old semis go by all the time. It picks up the rumble of the semis from a half a mile down the road. So I bought this microphone and can't even really use it. And my husband was like, could you sell it? I said, I doubt it. I don't think anybody would buy it.
23:56And I said, maybe five years from now, we can make a studio outside on the property somewhere and soundproof it. And then maybe I'll be able to do my recording out there. And he said, so for a hundred dollar microphone, you're going to spend $5,000 to make an audio. I was like, well, if the podcast does well, maybe we can afford to spend the money to build a studio, but we'll see what happens. So I guess my point in that.
24:25whole story is that if you are so inclined and motivated and inspired to want to do videos or podcasting or something like what I'm doing and what Cody and Michelle are doing, it is possible to do it on a very low budget and not have it sound terrible. Yeah for sure. Yeah I think honestly and if you listen to any you know gurus or whatever out there that are talking about how to start a YouTube channel and stuff they will also say it that the
24:55Quality of your content a high quality content has a lot more to do with The actual content you're putting out and not on you know The video not for sure not being fuzzy or something like I mean you want good good looking videos and good sounding videos But it's a lot more important How you're making the videos like you and your personality and the content that you're giving people if it's entertaining if it's helpful And stuff like that. I mean, that's the biggest thing
25:23Yep, and it helps to have a really good voice. I keep hearing this all the time. People I interview, I get done, and they're like, you have a really nice voice. And for me, I hear my voice through my own bones in my own head. So I don't hear what everybody else hears. Even when I listen to it back, I don't hear it the way other people hear it. But I know a good voice when I hear one. You guys have really nice voices.
25:53A lady that I talked to the other day, Nita, she is, Winfield Farms LLC is her episode. I think it came out yesterday. She has, she sounds like Angela Bassett. She has the most beautiful voice. And so for me, because I am so attuned to people's voices, this podcast is a joy for me because I get to hear different accents, different tones, different timbers every day.
26:24Right. Yeah. And I love music. So when people talk, it's like music to me. Yeah. Right. So I do this for completely selfish reasons. It makes me so happy on so many levels and everybody's like, thank you for doing this. I learned so much. And I'm like, no problem. I'm just going to do it because I love it. But the thing that I have learned in the last year, because I'm coming up on a year at the end of August of doing this.
26:53is that most people who have homesteads, and not all of them, but many, many of them, they have some kind of side hustle that relates to the homestead, whether it's agritourism, whether it's content creation, whether it's having people come and pick from their produce, whether it's a farm stand on the property.
27:20there's some other piece that isn't necessarily just growing food, whether it's meat or veggies, and selling it. And I think that part of being a homesteader is that you are creative. I think everyone I've talked to is creative in some way. Yeah, I mean, it takes grit and it takes, yeah, that creativity and everybody's creativity is gonna be different too. Yes, and that's what makes it so much fun.
27:50fun. And it also makes it hard sometimes because sometimes people are like, I'm going to do this thing and it's going to break my body, but I want to do it. Right. So, but so you said you have four kids? Yes. So we have an 11 year old, a nine year old and an eight year old at this point, and then also a three year old. So we had three.
28:16very close together and then we realized how hard it was and then we waited five more years to have another one. So, yep. Okay. And are they all in on helping out? Oh yeah. Yep. We definitely have them doing lots of things around here. The oldest three are doing chores. I mean, they honestly, now that we don't have our cow, do they do all the chores? Pretty much. Pretty much. I still have to do some like with the steer still here, I would do the rotating
28:45for him in the pasture, moving the chickens when they need to be moved but that's not every day. So like just your daily animal chores, they feed the chickens, give them water, feed the dog and cat. Gather the eggs. Gather the eggs, that kind of thing. Yeah, I can see that it's been – I mean they complain about it sometimes but – Just like all kids, yeah. But they – I can see it's really good for them and they also make – I make sure they make a little money doing it too. So it's, you know, teaching them responsibility in that way and stuff. Yeah.
29:15we homeschool them and we just consider that as part of their homeschooling. Yeah. Okay. And so do either one of you have an outside job, like besides the home side? No. I mean, the YouTube content is the job. I think a lot of people don't realize how much work actually goes into that. We spend one day a week planning a video, getting ready for a video, I would say maybe half a day.
29:45Um, and then the next day is usually solid filming all day long. And then I spend sometimes three full days, even more, sometimes four days editing a video. Um, I'm probably overly picky with my video editing, but I put a lot into it to try to make the story as cohesive and streamlined and smooth as possible.
30:13and I think people appreciate that, so I really work hard on that. But yeah, it is, and it's both of us working on it too. It's not just one of us, it's taking both of us working nearly full time to make it happen. Yeah. So. Do you put out one video a week, or how do you schedule it? Yep, one video a week. Michelle also does a few Instagram posts and stories, and like two reels a week or something on Instagram. But on YouTube, it's one.
30:43full length of video and every once in a while we'll either skip a video and do a live video because that doesn't take as much work afterwards and stuff. It's just the recording part. Or we'll even tack that on in between somewhere too if we want to. I think some people have this image in their heads of homesteading YouTubers. I'm sure this is true for some people but not for us. They have this idea that we just carry a camera around with us wherever we go.
31:12And it just isn't true. Like having a camera out, especially with four kids, can be pretty hectic. And so we're really, really, excuse me, we're very intentional about making sure that everything is ready to go, everything is streamlined. We have a plan for what we're going to do. That makes the editing easier for Cody as well, because he doesn't have to try to like piece everything together. And it also just makes so that it's so much more doable with trying to...
31:41shoot the video with our kids around. So we squash all of the filming into one day. Sometimes it goes over a couple of days depending on what we're doing. Yeah, depending on the subject. Yeah, but for the most part we have everything streamlined. Okay, wow, that's a lot. I mean, I know, I do know what it takes to do this kind of stuff. We tried. We tried doing videos of canning and making soap and stuff.
32:10My husband and I hated every freaking second of it. I think we made three and I tried to edit them and I was just like, honey, I know, no. You gotta love it. I mean, you may have to want to do it or it's not gonna work. And he said, why no? And I said, look at this. And I showed him the clips that we'd taken of the canning and the stuff we were doing. I said,
32:37It is going to take me two weeks to learn how to get this to work. I said editing software is no joke. Yeah. I said, we can't use the background conversation because we all swear like pirates. I said, so basically all the background noise, I got to get rid of it. And then we're going to have to talk over the video. Yeah. I said, do you really want to do that? He was like, no. I said, no.
33:04This is not us. This is not for us. And we did the whole thing. We got the ring camera, not the ring camera, the ring light. We got the thingies to hold cell phones in the right position. We did all of it. And now I'm sorry, we did that, but we did, because we wanted to make it right. And the video was fine. The video itself, the images were fine. But the editing in stuff,
33:33for sound, I give anyone who does that for a living props because watch a bean in the ass. It's funny because so many people, like you can tell they think we just have this cushy life where we make our money for making videos and stuff. But I think a lot of behind the scenes things that people don't think about is, I mean, number one, all of the editing. Like what is it, an hour per minute of video? It's about what it takes usually. Yeah. So if we have a 25 minute video.
34:03that's gonna take Cody about 25 hours to edit. And then also on top of that, it's just everything that you do while you're filming, if you're taking all the different angles and making sure that your image is changing every few seconds, everything you do, every task, every job that you do is gonna take double the time. And so it truly, truly is a job. It is not just, it's not just staying at home and playing.
34:33We've gotten the question a lot, like, how can I start homesteading while I have a full-time job? And we've done at least one, if not more, videos kind of about answering that question or whatever. And now that I don't have a job off the homestead, I've gotten the vibe from some people that, you know, it must be much easier now to homestead. You know, if you're just at home all the time, it'd be easy to homestead. It's pretty much the same.
35:00as it was. It's definitely better in some ways. Overall, we love what we're doing. We love that I'm able to be at home, that we're all home together, working together, things like that. But as far as actually getting more homesteading work done, it's pretty much about the same. Because like Michelle said, everything takes twice as long. We have to think through everything a lot more as how it's going to show up on camera and stuff like that. And it's
35:29all the hours of working. And so I basically, I tell people now I still have a full-time job and I'm still homesteading with a full-time job basically. And I like to tell people that because I want them to know that it's possible because up until just a year ago, I did have a full-time job off the homestead and we were at one point raising food to sell to other people.
35:56I mean, through the whole thing, we've been raising food for ourselves that we eat all winter long and stuff. And I love for people to know that that is possible. Yes, it is. And again, if we had more acres, we would be doing the same thing. But we don't because we could not. We bought our place in 2020. And I'm in Minnesota. You guys are in Ohio, right?
36:24Um, we got our place just before the housing market went crazy. Yeah. And it was one of the only places with acreage we could find that wasn't 25 miles outside of a town. Yeah. Right. And it's perfect. It's perfect for us, but having critters is not really part of the plan. I mean, I would love to have a goat. I would love, I would love to get two baby goats and a mama goat. And I would love to raise those babies.
36:54sell one at the end of the season and keep one and then have the mama bread again and just basically have a couple goats every year. Right. Yeah. But again, you have to be able to have them grazed. We don't have any of them to graze. So it's a thing. And instead of us growing our own meat, we try to buy from local farmers who do have steers and goat and lambs and whatever. Because if you can't...
37:23grow it yourself, buy it from a local grower. Yes, yes, amen. I think so many people miss that idea. It's kind of this idea, and I think I had the idea to begin with also, it's kind of like it's all or nothing. Like if you buy the land, or if you wanna go after the homesteading thing, you gotta do it all yourself. And that's just not true. I feel like we get a lot of people that leave comments that.
37:49tell us that they're living in apartments in the city and so they just can't do any of these things. Well, I mean, you've got an oven in your apartment. You can go to the farmer's market. You can ask farmers there, you can either just buy their produce there or even ask them if they've got seconds back at the farm that they didn't wanna bring to sell at the farmer's market if they'd sell at a discount in bulk or whatever. I mean, I would have loved if people would have bought our seconds at farmer's market. We had so many vegetables that we had to deal with.
38:17that weren't nice enough to sell the farmers market. But anyways, you could buy that stuff and you could start canning. You can bake your own bread. I hear people raising chickens in some crazy situations. I have a friend that was living in downtown in a city and he had this building that, it was on a, they were starting a mission and it was the building that was eventually gonna be their church house. And he had a section of it.
38:45penned off and he was raising broiler chickens inside that building. There's people that do rabbits and different things like that. You can get back to that creativity thing. You can get so creative. I just feel like you can start wherever you're at and it might not be in all the ways that you want to, but you can get started. Then, like you said, support your local farmers and people who are growing food the right way and stuff. We need the supporters.
39:14as much as we need people growing their own food. Because I mean, truth of it is, I mean, I haven't done the calculations, but there's not enough usable land on this earth for each and every person to have 20 acres or whatever. I don't know, but I'm guessing. And so, you know, there are just the way our world works. There is going to be cities and things like that. But if people in the cities would start supporting more of our local food and food
39:43farmers who are using regenerative agriculture practices and stuff. We'd have the Walmarts and all those places selling crappy food. They wouldn't last very long. Yep, absolutely. You were talking about small apartments and actually using the stove in your small apartment kitchen. One of the things that always makes me giggle is people have their kitchens remodeled. I'm not saying people have apartments. People have homes.
40:12They have their kitchens remodeled, these beautiful show place kitchens, and they never actually cook in their kitchens. My father-in-law and his second wife had their kitchen remodeled, like years ago. And it was beautiful. It was gorgeous. And I said to his wife at the time, I said, I would love.
40:41to cook in your kitchen. If you would like me to come over and make dinner for you guys some night, I would love to cook a meal in your kitchen." And she was like, oh, that's sweet, but you don't have to. And I said, okay, that's fine. And then like a few months later they came to visit our house and they'd had my cooking before. And she said, you know how you said you wanted to try cooking in my kitchen? And I said, yes. She said, would you like to make Christmas dinner for the family? I about sobbed.
41:11I was so happy. I said, are you serious? And she said, yeah. She said, you cook wonderfully and I know you can do a killer turkey and I know you make some homemade cranberry sauce. She said, I know Kyle makes, my husband's name is Kyle, I know Kyle makes wonderful breads. She said, do you guys want to make Christmas dinner this year at my house? I was practically dancing. I was like, yes, of course. And then she was kind enough to fund the shopping trip.
41:41Oh nice. For the groceries. I said you don't have to do that. She's like no, no, you're gonna be you're gonna be earning it. Please take this. And I did. And we we went all out. It was so much fun. And come to find out that kitchen wasn't quite as user-friendly as I. So it was it was a challenge. And it was really fun to to cook in a new place and realize that I
42:11But kitchens are for cooking. They're not for having company over and sitting around and chatting with a pop. They're for cooking. Right. So it just, it makes me laugh and it frustrates me when people go to all this trouble to make a beautiful kitchen that is set up for people to visit while you cook and then no one ever actually cooks. Right. Yeah, ours is kind of the opposite of that. We built our own house and we actually built it on top of...
42:41a pre-existing basement and it's a very small footprint. It's two stories, but one floor is only 660 square feet. In our downstairs, we have living room, laundry room, dining room, kitchen, and bathroom all on that one small floor. The kitchen is pretty small. Michelle, also, she's a little different than you. She actually doesn't really like to cook.
43:10ourselves and our children good food. She does a lot of cooking but you know, she's got definitely some hurdles with her kitchen size and stuff. But if it's something that you want to do, you'll find a way to do it for sure. Yeah. Oh Yes, the kitchen that I used to cook in was a galley style kitchen Oh, wow. And the kitchen that I cook in now is like five times that size I am I'm so thrilled having a big kitchen finally in my life and
43:39I'm not going to lie, cooking in the galley kitchen was easier because everything was within arm's reach. However, the kitchen I have now has a huge island which means that when my husband and I and my son all want to cook together, there is room to cook together and it's wonderful. It is so much fun. Yeah, that would be nice. So on that note.
44:03Uh, we've been talking for almost 45 minutes. I try to keep these to half an hour, so I'm going to let you go. But thank you so much for your time, guys. I appreciate it. Yeah, no problem. It was fun. All right. Have a great afternoon. All right. You too.
 

Homestead Bakes

Today I'm talking with Kay and Courtney at Homestead Bakes.
If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee -
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00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Kay and Courtney at Homestead Bakes. Good morning, ladies. How are you? Good morning. I wasn't sure who gets top building. Billing. Geez, I can't talk this morning. I wasn't sure.
00:27who gets top billing, so I just read it from the order on my screen. Sure. All right, ladies, tell me about what you do at Homestead Bakes.
00:39Well, so we're two local moms. We're both Sane Hole moms and we decided to start baking out of our homes. So we're cottage bakers. And we mainly started because we both have small children and we cook on a regular basis and we bake on a regular basis. But we wanted to start focusing more on nutrition for our children and our families.
01:09And bread was just something that we consumed every day. When we noticed one of our store bought bread that we actually paid a lot of money for, didn't grow mold for weeks on out, we sort of kind of came together and decided we have to change. We have to change something and try to make something from scratch that's nourishing and healthy and clean. And bread was that common thread that she and I both had.
01:38And we came to Instagram locally within our town to see if anybody was willing to teach us. Because you know, as you know, sourdough is very popular now. It's on trend. And you see it on Facebook and Instagram everywhere on how to make it. But with so much information out there, we really didn't know where to start. And...
02:03Luckily, a local baker around here, she was willing to teach us. So then once we were taught, we just couldn't stop baking. That's pretty much like how we got started. And Courtney and I, we've always talked about wanting to start a business, wanting to do something to contribute to our households, especially with us being stay at home moms. We needed another creative outlet.
02:31to help us get through the day, get our mind going in different ways. And other than just being a mom and being a cottage baker and being able to kind of dictate our own schedules with baking, it just all came together. And here we are. Very nice. I know what you mean about...
03:00the needing something to make your brain work when you're a mom, when you're a stay-at-home mom. My favorite part of having my babies was that first couple of weeks when they're brand new newborns and you're exhausted all the time and you just cocoon in for a couple of weeks and you just do what the baby needs and you sleep as much as you can. And if you have older kids too, it gets harder to do that cocooning. But when I had my first baby, my only daughter.
03:30That first two weeks was the most beautiful time of my life. But as she got older, I was like, I can only wash so many clothes and wash so many dishes and back in the floor so many times before I'm going to go insane. And so I found things to do. I read a lot because it was the only thing I could do at the time to feed my brain. And so yeah, it's being a mom is, is an honor, but it also will drive you.
03:59to insanity if you don't have something more than that. I'm like, well, the class didn't talk about the potty issues, right? Yep. I'm like, how can that be? There's just so many ways that the potty issues come up and we're just discussing potty. We know that you're a parent when you're starting to refer restrooms as potty, right? It doesn't go away.
04:26I still to this day if I'm like honey I need to go to the bathroom I say potty because it's so ingrained in you and I'm 54 my oldest kid is 34 so it's never gonna go away guys sorry and I'm gonna say something that's probably not popular I'm not a big sourdough fan I know lots of people love it and good on you for making it yay team sell it to whoever wants to buy it
04:54I can't, I don't love it because of that tang that it has. However, I'm really weird because I do like rye bread. So it's one of those to each their own things, I think. We've kind of found out that there's a lot of nuance to sourdough and it's really not, you know, there's so many ways to do it. And you can actually manipulate the sourness in the bread.
05:18found, you know, we can make it more sour or less sour, depending on, you know, the different techniques that you use. Basically, the longer you keep it in the fridge to cold ferment is how you develop that more sour flavor. Okay. So, we've kind of come to a happy medium. I think we've found a good spot where our customers really like our sourness of our bread that it's not too sour. And some people like it more sour and they can certainly request that, I think.
05:49Yeah, like Courtney and I, we're both a similar way that we don't, we actually like breads not as sour ourselves. And one of my mom friends, she also was like, oh, you know, I wasn't a fan of sourdough because I just remember the tang, the sourness of the bread. But our sour, our starter is very balanced because we personally, we make it to our problems and our children's palate as well. And yeah, it's not very sour.
06:18We recently had one customer that was saying like, I missed the tang, where's the tang? We're working to get the tang out of our bread. But I will make it more tangier for you. And she's like, okay. So, you know, she was happy with that. But yeah, I think with techniques and evolving, right? Everyone is, we're always trying to strive for developing new recipes, something.
06:46better or something that's not just out in the commercials, right, what's available at that. You know, I have a tush baby that I use for my nine month old and a lot of other moms and even mostly grandmas sees me using that. They're like, man, I wish we had that when I had my babies because that would have helped my hips. So, you know, and I just think that now these days, especially all these moms and women entrepreneurs coming up, developing things to help
07:16our everyday lives that not many factories or brands may have even thought of. I think the world is just kind of getting better and I think women and moms in general are kind of taking the reins and creating things and innovating things that helps us in our home lives, with our children, just to kind of better our lives.
07:44and make things easier for us, right? And we kind of feel that way with some of them. Like, yeah, we're like you, Mary. Like, we didn't like that a lot of tang. So we worked to get our starter very balanced, and she's very robust. We went through a lot of recipes to develop that balanced loaf that a lot of most general people would like.
08:11And the caveat is certain people would like zucchini, which we can do that too. So I think that's the beauty of being able to make your own, right? You're able to create something that you like. You don't have to worry about all the added preservatives or chemicals. Like you can control what goes in there. You know, like my sister, for example, she's very sensitive about salt. So, you know, I showed her, I was like, make it, and here's the baker's knife. You can figure it out.
08:41you know, the level percentage of salt that you want so that it fits your needs. And so we recently just got done with teaching a sourdough class to 21 people. And that was one of the points that we were trying to draw from, you know? Like, homestead dates, like what we stand for, you know, this community, you know, community engagement, just kind of getting back to the roots.
09:11of our food source, being able to have input into what you put in your bodies and what you feed your loved ones. Yes, definitely. I have two things. When did you guys start as a business?
09:29So we started as a business officially Memorial Day, Courtney? Yeah, we got our cottage license. It was around Memorial Day, just before Memorial Day, but we were baking way before that. Yeah. Okay. So Memorial Day was our first, that weekend, my neighborhood actually had a community yard sale scheduled. So Courtney and I, we've been waiting for the cottage license to go through.
09:58And we literally got it, I think day before, the day of the yard sale that we were thinking like, oh man, if the license comes through, like we would love to have a pop-up, in our neighborhood yard sale. And that's exactly how it ended up happening. And that pop-up was hugely successful. Like we got so much positive response from our neighborhood and.
10:24We actually like met one of our very regular customer through that pop-up. And she also has taken a class yesterday with her son and it was just so great. And we just love meeting people like just with a similar likely mindness, right? About the whole host of nutrition and just wanting to create something of your own. Yeah. Super cool.
10:53Okay, so the other thing I was gonna say is every time I talk to somebody on this podcast, invariably I learned something new. I didn't know that you can make sourdough without it having that tanginess to it. So I may have to revisit my not making sourdough bread because I had decided not to even try because I don't like how it tastes. But if I can figure out how to make it not so tangy, I might be willing to try making it. Yes.
11:22Just even the process of making bread, like seeing like how you mix everything, to make sourdough is literally three ingredients. And it's just amazing to see, yeah, flour, water, and salt. And it's amazing to see those ingredients transform into something completely different from what it started out with. And even just the texture and the sourdough process is based on fermentation. And besides all the
11:52health benefit comes with fermented foods, fermented grains. Just seeing that transform and seeing the bubbles and seeing that like your starter bacteria just working and fermenting, it's like transforming right in front of your eyes. I love it. I think it's just amazing. And I just wanna share with everyone. Like we're so passionate about it.
12:18Yeah, you just you want to have a video of it and say, this is so cool. You guys look at chemistry in action. This is new for happening. Yes. And there's nothing like the hands on experience, right? Like, I mean, I see videos all the time and yes, I can relate. But for someone that has never experienced it and, you know, like mix the dough from scratch, you know, using your hands, there's just really nothing like it.
12:43Yeah, the closest I can come to that, and I was just thinking about this an hour ago because for some reason I really want scones. I don't have time to make them today, but I will be making scones sometime this week. And when you put scone ingredients together, you put all the dry ingredients and the butter together first, and then you add the milk or the cream or whatever you're using for the wet. And it looks like nothing. It looks like flour mud once you get it stirred up. And it's very wet.
13:13The first time I made it, I was like, this can't be right. This is such a wet dough. How is it going to become a scone? And then I did what it said to do and I put it in the oven and I turned the light on the oven so I could watch what happened and it became this very tall light biscuit treat. And I was astounded that it actually worked because back when I did this, I wasn't really good at cooking. I didn't know what I was doing yet. And to this day, when I make scones, I'm just like,
13:41I love this process. So I think scones for me is sourdough for you. Yeah, it was really cool to see, because we did our class yesterday, it was cool to see the people go home and bake their bread and then report back to us later and say, this was so good and they sent us a picture. And it was really cool to see them kind of experience that for themselves. Yes, and teaching people is a gift to yourself.
14:12I think I really enjoy telling people how to do something or sharing the instructions. I don't want to say teach because I'm really bad at teaching. I have no patience. But if somebody's like, will you please show me how you do this? And I cave and I do. Watching them learn it and experience it and have the satisfaction in that they did it, it's just such a heartwarming moment for me. Yeah.
14:42for us as well. It's just amazing to be able to share and that and the other person receiving it right and seeing the value in creating something and not just relying on convenience or you know the store-bought things which there's nothing wrong with store-bought things right like in a pinch like yes it works but at the same time you know being able to
15:11Be sure creative outlet. I mean, like the sourdough alone, you can add in so many different flavors, right? Like rosemary herbs, that's one of our really popular flavors. Cinnamon sugar, jalapeno, cheddar. Roasted garlic. Roasted garlic. Yeah, that's a big one. There's like endless, you know, like combinations of flavors that you can create. I mean, it's just so much fun. And the starter, all people the starter.
15:40It's like having a baby. You have to like feed her. A lot of people name them, right? It's just like a living, breathing thing. Yep, I can remember my mom getting friendship bread starter, which I think is the same thing. It's sourdough starter. And she did it for a while. I was probably, I don't know, 10. She did it for a while, and she never actually made bread out of it, as far as I know, but.
16:08But she fed her starter every day for a couple of months. And then she said to my dad, she said, you know, she said, I'm probably never gonna do anything with this because I don't know how to do it. Because they didn't really tell her, they gave her a recipe but she was not really into it. And she said, I think I'm gonna toss Herman because she named it Herman. That's what's so great about the class because like you can look at a recipe but it's not the same as like
16:38seeing someone do it. Yeah, she really loved making, it's called anadama bread. It's a dark bread and it's sweet and she liked doing that. So she was already set, heart set on anadama bread and her friend gave her the friendship starter because she had it, the friendship bread starter. So I don't think my mom was into it. I don't think anyone around her was really doing it. The friend lived further away from her.
17:08So Herman, Herman met a sad demise in the trash can, but I still remember Herman, the friendship bread starter in the fridge. That's great. So it's really funny the things that stick with you from when you were a kid. But anyway, we're hoping to change those friendship bread starters into like memories of fresh baked bread that you will never forget because there's nothing like freshly baked bread.
17:35that's like straight out of the oven with like, well, not straight out. We recommend cutting it about an hour. Um, but you know, so still warm bread with butter. It's just, it's like nothing like it. You will never be able to eat like regular commercial bread, I guess. My, my husband makes honey oat bread and he makes a white herbed bread from scratch. And
18:03And we can't even wait that loaf comes out of the oven and we cut the end off right away and let it cool and try it because it smells so incredible while it's baking. Well, it's like savage moment. You're just like, oh, I don't care about any other toppings or making sandwiches. Everybody's just taking a piece and eating it. Oh yeah. When, when all four kids still lived at home and one still does and he still joins in on the ripping the bread apart thing.
18:30But when all four kids were still at home, we would pull a loaf out of the oven and it would cool just long enough for them not to burn their fingers and they would literally break a piece off and eat it. It was like pull apart bread, except it wasn't meant to be pull apart bread. The only thing that beats it is a fresh out of the oven chocolate chip cookie from scratch and I'm not even sure that that beats fresh baked bread, but it's close.
18:59Okay, so do you guys sell it like farmers markets or how do you disperse your product?
19:09So we sell at farmers market. We have one locally that comes out every Sunday. And we also sell out of our homes. We get a lot of emails or Facebook messengers asking for loaf of bread on a certain day. One of our customers, she actually has an Airbnb property that she orders bulk from us. And she likes to gift her guests with our bread.
19:38But yes, our long-term goal is to be in retail. We would love to supply our freshly baked sourdough bread products to farmers markets that are open all year round. And so that's our long-term goal and what we're aiming for. But in the meanwhile, especially with our littles at home, with them being so young, we're waiting.
20:07Okay, we're doing the farmer's market and doing some classes here and there. Yeah, well. Where do you hold your classes? You don't do them at home, do you? Or do you?
20:20No, we don't do them at our not our homes because there's there just wouldn't be enough room, you know So we just did one at a local park. They'll have a lodge with a full kitchen And um, it actually can have up to 50 guests But you know our class kind of broke it up into like 10 10 to 12 and we think that was like the perfect amount between Courtney and I we were able to give
20:47like that attention right to each individual and just kind of like check up on what they were, how they were doing, making sure they're able to kind of follow and for them to get all the information they need for them to be able to make their own.
21:02Courtney's very quiet. I have a question for Courtney. So Courtney will talk to me too. What do you love about this the most, Courtney? I just love having the freedom to fit it into our own schedules as moms. I also home school. So right now that's quiet, obviously for the summer. So home school, you know, stay at home mom.
21:29We have like busy schedules, but it's nice that we can, like Kay said, contribute to our households, have a creative outlet and also still be moms. Okay, that's a fantastic answer. And I got to hear your voice for real. You have a lovely speaking voice. I don't know if you're shy, but you should talk more. It's pretty.
21:53I agree. Okay, so what's the feedback been like for your breads? I'm guessing it's been great. Yeah, we've had a lot of good feedback so far. Like we said, we had the one customer recently that was wanting a little more tang and we can do that. We've had a lot of good feedback from our different markets and pop-ups and people that we meet at the different markets and stuff like that. Those are the people that...
22:20they come to our classes because they love our bread so much and they want to try and give that you know do that themselves for their families. Yeah I feel like lots of people that I've talked to in the last year for this podcast people who are bakers or homesteaders or makers or whatever they're all really I would swear ninety nine percent of the people I've talked to have been more than willing to teach other people about what they're doing.
22:49And I feel like it's a certain, I don't know, heart set, mindset for all of us that we want to help. We want to share. We want to make the world a better place. Yes, we kind of feel that way too. We don't want to keep sourdough making a secret. You know, I don't think, I think we like the community engagement and meeting new people and sharing the craft with other people. You know, I think.
23:19We like that. Yeah. Um, we did always talks about, you know, especially with our breadmaking, not just the bread making, but things like canning, right? All the other homesteading like skills that goes into doing that, um, preserving food for during the summer, for the winter, like she, she calls it generational knowledge, and I think that really basically sums it up like it's knowledge that you can.
23:47my gift to your kids so that they can have good clean food for themselves and their families. Absolutely. One of my goals when my kids were little, like I made a list of things they had to know before they moved out. They had to know how to do their own laundry. They had to know how to cook a meal and a dessert that they would be proud to serve their friends. Even if it was only a one trick.
24:16wonder, a one trick pony. They had to know how to make something that was actually real food from scratch that they would be proud to serve their friends. And all four kids can do their own laundry and they can cook like crazy because they love to cook because they were given that opportunity. And when I told them in their teens, as they all reached like 15, I was like, okay, you need to pick a meal.
24:45that you like to eat that I make because I figured that was the easiest way to get them to do it, that you're willing to try making yourself. And the boys were not as into it as my daughter, my daughter, the oldest. I think that girls just know that they're expected to make food. So floating the idea to her wasn't that hard. I think the girls tend to be more the nurturers too.
25:13Yeah. And so she learned how to make something. I don't remember what it was now. It's been way too long. And she learned how to make cookies because she was like everybody likes cookies. So that's fine. It's a dessert. You can do cookie. Yeah. And to this day, if she, if she wants to cook, that's the thing she reverts back to is that first thing she learned to cook, which I think is funny. And the boys actually all love to cook all of them. That's great.
25:43Like we had a few males that came to the class as well. And we had one guy, I mean he was like 6'4", like really built guy, with a great reddish hair, like beard. I mean he looked like a Viking. And he was the friendliest person ever. And he was just chatting it out with all the ladies, you know, mixing breath. We'll go listen to this later, okay? Uh huh.
26:12It was so cute and I think men too, we don't give women that credit. I think given the chance, I think they like being able to create something. You know, like women, we get to create babies, but men don't. And I think that's why a lot of them like to build things, right, with their hands. Because they want to be able to have that feeling, right? That gratification from like, I have made this from nothing. I think bread is like the perfect.
26:42Sure. And honest to God, life skills are not gender biased. Everybody should know how to cook and how to clean. And the stuff that you have to do on a daily basis, it's not men do this thing and women do that thing. Everybody does it. Yeah. I mean, people have told my husband that he should have been a baker and he laughs and he says, it's not that I don't love baking. He said, I do.
27:12He said, but it would become a job if I became a baker. He said it wouldn't be nearly as much fun if it was my job. And he said it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm a man. He said, I don't feel any less masculine because I can make a really good loaf of bread. Yeah. So, but whatever, it's fine. Okay, we have like three more minutes and I need to think of a really good question to end this on. Oh.
27:39What happens if a loaf of bread doesn't turn out the way you want it to? Luckily we haven't had too many fails, right? I mean we've had a couple, nothing great, like we've had some overproofing of bread, but yeah we haven't had any like crazy fails. If the bread doesn't turn out the way we want to, we still eat it because it's still tasty. Okay.
28:07All right, then my next question is, do you guys donate any of your bread at all to anybody? Yeah, so we're just talking about this earlier. I don't know if, is the buy nothing page like a, it's a national thing, right? Is it? I don't know. Have you heard of that before? I know there's local ones. Yeah. Like each local area has their own buy nothing page. We're both very active on buy nothing for all of our, you know, personal things too. But.
28:35You know, when we started out too, we gave a lot of bread away there too, just because we're baking so much. Like, what are we going to do with all this bread? You know, we need to share it. So we, you know, that's kind of how we started out, you know, gifting our bread away at first to share it with people. Different recipes and just for us to gain more experience. And yeah, like Courtney said, we were baking every day and we had all this bread. So we would just post it on our mapping page.
29:02And people would just come and pick it up, you know, and they thought it was really good. We're gifting it to our neighbors. And after like, you know, pop ups and whatnot, if we have any extras, we do a lot of the gifting as well. Again, at the end of the day, we're baking to nourish, right? And we don't want any of it to go to waste.
29:27We think it's a really good way to connect with the community as well. And to really get our name out there too, you know? And anytime I think you're baking, you're making food, right? I joke to Courtney all the time, like, anytime I go to Costco and I try a sample, I'm probably buying it. And I think there's nothing better to, there's no other better way to advertise food than to try it themselves.
29:55And I think we get a lot of repeat customers because they chart our brand. Definitely. Okay. So I think I don't have any more questions because we're at 29 minutes and we're at 30 minutes where we did it. All right ladies, thank you so much for your time. I know you're busy with the littles. Thank you for having us. Yeah, this is, you know, we've been.
30:23we were hoping to try to like, you know, get our, about us out there, you know? Like we were doing a class, we allotted some time to try to talk about ourselves and how we began, just to kind of get to know, for the customers and our students to get to know us, besides, you know, we bake bread and we can teach you how to do it. And we just felt like this was a perfect opportunity to get a little more stories behind.
30:51you know, the two moms that are baking. Yeah. And I love stories. That's why I do the podcast. So I'm really glad that you wanted to chat with me. Um, you guys don't have a website, right? Not yet. Okay. Not yet. We're looking to get one. Facebook and Instagram for right now. Okay. That's what I was asking. All right. Well, ladies, you guys enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you again for your time. Thank you. Bye.
 

Homesteading-ish

Today I'm talking with Troy at Homesteading-ish. You can follow on Facebook as well.
Homesteading-ish is a conference for new or current homesteaders.
"Do you want to learn how start your own homestead? Already have a homestead property and need some extra help? We're bringing the homestead community together. Real people, real life homestead experience, all in one place, learning and living out dreams."
Use coupon code HOMESTEAD24 to get $10.00 off admission price 
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https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Troy at Homesteading-ish. Tell me about Homesteading-ish. Why is it called that? So it's Homesteading-ish is kind of an acronym. It's homesteading in search of help. So the ish is an acronym.
00:29And it was really, obviously the homesteading movements is really taken off here in the last several years and there's a lot of conferences and those things popping up. But here in West Virginia, we have not had one yet. So we thought, well, this will be a great opportunity to kind of do an inaugural conference here in the state. You get in these mountainous states, homesteading becomes a little bit more of a challenge in certain areas. So we thought, well, there's a lot of people in
00:58It's a rural state, so there's a lot of people that already kind of have that. You know, we raise a backyard garden, we do that kind of stuff. But what can we do to encourage them to maybe look deeper into a homesteading lifestyle? So that's kind of why we thought in search of help. So you're kind of already homesteading, but you're also in search of help. You're looking for that extra push or some of those new ideas.
01:22Awesome. I didn't even think about the fact that the ish was an acronym. I'm not with it today. So define your version of homesteading for me because I have talked to so many people in the last year who have different definitions. So what's yours? Yeah, so that's a great question, Mary, because it is all over the board. So I personally have a social media presence and talking about
01:53for goodness, probably eight years now. And I still get people saying, wait a minute, you're not homesteading. The Homesteading Act of 1863 was, you know, that's done, nobody's doing that anymore. And it's like, well, okay, maybe we need to call it modern homesteading, or as my grandma would say, well, it's just everyday life because that was rural life for her. So I think it means different things to different people, but I look at it as taking more responsibility for
02:20your livelihood when it comes to food, when it comes to income, when it comes to security, when it comes to just keeping the lights on type of thing. I think it's a pretty broad brush that we can paint with, but it'll mean a little bit of different things for different people. Somebody said, well, you're not really homesteading if you don't have this many acres, or you're not really homesteading if you don't have this many animals, or if you don't at least grow this much percentage of the food that you consume.
02:49And I don't think there's any specific parameters that we need to put on that. I see people, I've got a friend, Harold Thornbrough, my goodness, that guy's homesteading on like two acres and he puts away more food than people on 10 acres do. So I don't think there's limitations that could be set on that, but I think it does have some fluidity for people depending on what their motivations are. Okay.
03:14And you just made me really think about this because I haven't really defined it for myself either. And as you were talking, I was like, so the only people who aren't doing homesteading are those who don't actually do anything themselves. Like they don't cook for themselves. They don't do their own laundry. They don't grow anything. You know, if they don't have any self-sustainability skills, then they are not a homesteader. That's how I would define it. Yeah. And I think there has to be a conscious effort. Again,
03:41I don't think my grandma, obviously, she didn't call it home studying back then, but if you came back and said, are you trying to be kind of push against the cultural norm in what you're doing when it comes to your food and your income and how you raise your family, all that type of stuff, you'd say, well, no, no, this is everyday life for us. So you fast forward now to our generation and say, what's everyday life? Well, everyday life is kind of a nine to five. It's a...
04:11commute to an office, it's a majority of the population living either urban or suburban. And so home setting would be, well, we're kind of pushing against that. We're deliberately, instead of going to fast food restaurants all the time or doing an Uber Eats or necessarily working a nine to five, or maybe when I get home and my weekends are spent golfing or doing something else, you're saying, I want to do some of these other things. I want my hobbies to be.
04:40related to this more self-reliant lifestyle. Yes, exactly. That's what I was getting at. Okay, so this conference thing that you're gonna be doing, I'm very excited for you. I will not be in attendance. I am too far away and I am too broke to fly or drive right now. But I'm really excited about it because it's, I'm like a huge fan of this whole lifestyle because we do it, our friends do it.
05:09And it's not like we have to do it, but we really enjoy it. So what is the conference? Tell me the dates, tell me what's gonna be happening. Okay, so what we're doing is September the 13th and 14th, which is a Friday and Saturday. We are trying to jam as much information into those two days as possible without people screaming time out. But we wanna be sensitive to the fact that an overnight stay is expensive no matter where you go.
05:37So we're trying to cram all that together in those two days. The event is in Charleston, West Virginia, which is the capital of our state. And it's actually at the convergence of three interstates. So it is geographically beneficial. You're not going to come a long way. You're not gonna have to go, you know, come to town and then drive an hour out some country road to find the venue. So there's a benefit there.
06:04But also, we've got an airport right there. So if people do want to take the time to fly, then they can fly in and just a short Uber ride to the venue and also allows there, you know, there's a lot of hotels and areas and things like that in the area. So the venue has really allowed us to leverage some of our opportunities. So we were able to reach out.
06:28to, you know, Joel Salatin, obviously he's kind of the top of the tier of people that you want to come to your conference. And Joel has been very helpful with us. I've met him in the past. We've talked in the past, so it was good to have that relationship and get him on board. And so we're looking at, okay, who from the homesteading YouTube influencer book writing type of thing can we get? And so we got Josh Draper from Stony Ridge Farmer.
06:58Nathan Elliott from Out of the Woods, he's more of the sawmill forestry side. We've got Sean and Beth Doherty, they're not necessarily have a YouTube presence as much as they're just known in the homesteading circles as being experts in the field of, especially with livestock and those types of things. And of course, they're just across the river in Ohio. So there was some logic there. Chuck Lewis from Sheridan Park Farms, he brings a unique perspective from
07:28from taking a homestead to more of a commercial farm level, but still doing all that slow food, regenerative agriculture approach to it. So, and then Red Tool House, which is my YouTube channel, we kind of have this rural Appalachian-based homesteading approach to things. But then, so the flip side of that, we then said, well, okay, let's reach out, because our partners in this, this is actually, I'm a co-host with the...
07:57Capital Conservation District here in our area. So that's an entity that of course has resources and access to grants and those types of things and they can get over into more of academia. And so there it's become a really neat mashup of some of our speakers we have coming in. We have people that are coming that have these credentials at the end of their name that are gonna be talking about organic farming, they're gonna be talking about
08:24agritourism, they're going to be talking about, of course, beekeeping, all those type of things, but how to get certified and organic, herbalists that are talking about herbal medicines, finding mentorships or utilizing grants or utilizing NRCS money type of thing. So there's kind of this neat mashup of those that we say, well, kind of social media, do-it-yourself type of thing versus the academic side that's coming in. So...
08:52we're going to have 36 different topics discussed by over 20, I think about 24 presenters is where we're at right now. Wow, that is a lot. Yeah. Okay. So is it going to be like, I don't want to say lecture because I have a terrible connotation about lectures. I don't love sitting in a classroom and listening to someone talk. So is it going to be an interactive kind of thing, or is it just going to be
09:21Joel and all those other people standing in front of a group of people and just talking at them. How's it going to work? So there's going to be a balance of that, of course. When we get into some of these things, there's some things that are hands-on. So when the beekeepers are going to be here, obviously they're going to be outside doing that, you know, kind of showing their stuff. They're going to have frames. They're going to have hives that you can interact with. I'm looking down my list here. We even have...
09:49somebody from the state department that's teaching chainsaw safety. So they're obviously going to be out running a chainsaw mill or cutting up some stuff. And there'll be also times that it does make sense. I'll be talking about pigs, raising pigs in the woods. And so I obviously can't load a 500 pound sow into my truck and bring it to the venue. So there'll be more of a
10:14an inside room setting, but we'll be using video and PowerPoint, those type of things to kind of show the challenges with raising hogs in the woods on sloped land like we have here in West Virginia. It's a common challenge for all of us because of the topography. So it'll be a mashup of some will be inside, some will be in classroom setting as we kind of maybe get into some really detail-y stuff, and then others will be hands-on. We have a foraging expert that I think they're going to be taking people.
10:43through the woods around the venue. The venue is actually a very large church that sits on 90 acres. So there's a lot of woods around it. So they'll actually be walking through the woods, kind of doing a live foraging demo. Okay, that sounds amazing. Speaking of Joel, I actually interviewed Joel back a few months ago for the podcast. And I was so excited to chat with him and I was scared to death because I didn't know how that was gonna go.
11:13He is the nicest, most personable, down-to-earth guy ever. He reminded me a lot of my dad. And Joel's probably not that much older than I am, but he reminded me of my dad. And I really enjoyed chatting with him because he was so, I don't know, welcoming and open to the conversation. So I don't know if he's different in a teaching mode at something like this. Well, I would almost, I'd bet my lunch money.
11:43that Joel is not, well, I know for a fact Joel's not coming with a PowerPoint presentation. Joel's not coming with a stack of notes. Joel's coming and you know, the really challenge, the only challenge we're going to have was just to have him keep the microphone close to his mouth. Because Joel's going to be one of those guys that just, he just eats, sleeps and drinks this stuff. I mean, he's, he's, my goodness, he's so sought after he's traveling the world now, speaking about, you know, what he calls his lunatic farming approach. And
12:12And so it's just going to be, I think it's just going to be great to be able to get him to talk about, I'm trying to look at the lineup we have here for him. Goodness. I mean, he's like, Hey, I can speak about 16 different things. What do you want? Um, but just be talking about like, um, startup. So, uh, you know, a business startup, a lot of us with homesteading, like, okay, we need to, to be able to build this lifestyle. Obviously it takes capital investment to do so. So what are we doing on our homestead slash small farm that can generate
12:42some income to help support our hobby and our desire to move in this direction. So Joel addresses those type of things. He's obviously written books about how to do pasture poultry and turn that into a $30,000 a year profit. And so he can speak into a lot of those things. So I think that's one of the things that Joel's going to bring to the table is just his ability to kind of ad-lib and even feel the crowd out and say, okay, maybe we go this direction or maybe we go that direction. But we're also going to be doing a roundtable on Friday night where we have...
13:11Joel and a couple other keynote speakers where we can just do some open questions. That's something I'll be emceeing and just be able to kind of just let it go where the crowd wants to take it when it comes to discussing key things around homesteading. Awesome. I think Dawn is with us but her mic is shut off. So if you're there Dawn, if you want to turn your mic on and say hello, that would be great. I don't know if she can do it or not. So let's see.
13:41Maybe not. I don't know. Okay. While we wait to see if Don's going to join us or not. So how did you decide to do this conference thing? Because this is not an inexpensive endeavor. I know it's not. So how is this, how is that going to work? Right. So there's no way in the world I could have done this on my own. In fact, capital conservation district approached me and said, hey, we want to do this. They, they have always been in an educational area.
14:11That's kind of been their wheelhouse. And of course they partner with other organizations that are both local, state, and even at the federal level. And there's resources there to say, Hey, we want to educate people on agriculture. And what I think is just amazing that this, whatever you want to call it, regenerative agriculture, slow food, homesteading movement, all of those things are sometimes synonyms, sometimes they're, they're, they're close cousins to one another.
14:39But it's getting the attention, it's getting input from larger and larger organizations. This is really, pardon the pun, this really has been a grassroots type thing. So when you see people like the Capital Conservation District has been here, been around forever, been trying to do great things in the area and have these resources, like, hey, let's take what we've been doing for a long time in education and just kind of...
15:04not rebranded, but just kind of package it differently, partner with somebody in the homesteading community that has an audience and has some expertise in this area. And let's see if we can do a conference. And that's kind of the genesis of how we got to talk in. And being a small town, small state area, the director of the conservation district is a friend of mine. We've known each other for a while. So it was just a logical conversation to say, hey, can we?
15:33Can we pull this off? Can we do something where you're bringing your audience this way and your type of people this way and we're bringing our expertise and our resources from this way? And can we put something together that people will really enjoy? So that's kind of where it started this about, almost a year ago now that we started this conversation and it's like, hey, yeah, I think this will work. Let's see what we can do. That's a pretty quick turnaround. I'm impressed.
16:02It's funny to me how great ideas are born from friends sitting around, shooting the shit, going, what if we tried this? What if we tried that? Have we considered this? And there's usually coffee or an alcoholic beverage involved. So, yeah, it's, it's, I don't know, some of the best songs ever written, I think started with a beer and a couple of people sitting around with guitars. So, um,
16:32So are you guys going to have anything about beekeeping? Did you say beekeeping? Yes. Yeah. We have some beekeepers. And then, what's neat, again, the Capital Conservation District, because of their expertise and their years of doing this type of stuff, they've got access to a lot of very educated people that have a lot of data to back this up. So I think of.
17:00Some, you know, we'll take me for example. So, uh, you know, we're talking about sawmillings. Like Troy, what makes you an expert in sawmillings? Like, well, I'm not necessarily an expert. I've just had a mill for 20 years and I've had a lot of lumber on my place, but I'm, I don't do it for money. I don't have a commercial operation. I don't have, you know, not that there's are these certifications, but I don't have certifications, but when you look at what they bring to the table. Say, Hey, we've got somebody from academia that can come talk about pollinators.
17:28So not only talking about the honeybee that everybody loves because of the product they produce, but then also when you look at, hey, if you really want your garden to flourish, you need to encourage pollinators to hang out. And this isn't just honeybees. And so we'll have a pollinator expert come in and this person has had a history of presenting, has all of this research and data to back stuff up because that's just the direction they're coming from. They have that resource. So we're gonna have...
17:55Like I said, from that side of academia talking about pollinators and honey versus, like we've got some real estate agents that are coming to talk about, you know, how to find land because that's usually the biggest obstacle for a homesteader is, yeah, I recognize I want to get out of my postage stamp lots or I want to get out of my housing development that has a crazy HOA that doesn't allow me to do anything. They're going to freak out if I plant a garden in the front yard, much less put a chicken there.
18:25So that next step, of course, is how do I find land? Well, land prices are just crazy right now. So getting a realtor to come and say, hey, when you're dealing with raw land versus postage stamp lot or developed land or those type of things that most realtors prefer to work with and understand to work with, then they're going to bring their expertise to the table. Say, no, here's how to navigate looking for raw land or what I like to encourage people to do is look for land disrepair.
18:53land that's been trashed, unfortunately, and say, if you've got the elbow grease and the sweat equity that you can put into it, then you can really turn a diamond in the rough into something really neat. So having those different topics, people come in with those different topics, and we're trying to be as eclectic as possible. So we're looking at topic categories of land and land management, security, and we say security by kind of being around the infrastructure of your homestead, financial security, food security.
19:23And then of course, just legitimate security, how to keep somebody from coming stealing all your stuff. We'll have a specific track that's kind of devoted directly to Appalachia. So Appalachia is, is, you know, hardwood forest is just, everybody has a tree around them type of thing, so benefits of that. And of course, as I already mentioned, some of the challenges of, of raising livestock or doing a garden when everything's on 20 to 30 degree slope.
19:47And then maple production, our state is really doubling down into maple syrup production because we are far enough north that we get a hard enough winter to allow the sap to flow. But our maple trees, I mean, we rival New England when you look at the number of maple trees per square acre in West Virginia. So the state is dumping a lot of money and grants and those type of things, business
20:16people producing maple syrup. And so we're having those people that are experienced in how to present that. They're the ones saying, hey, here's a grant that this organization is doing. This is how you do it. So they're coming to talk about that. But we'll also do organic tract. We're doing homesteading skills tract and then even urban homesteading for those people that say, I want to do this.
20:40But I'm not ready to do it yet. Maybe it's a retirement thing I'm gonna do. So how can we do stuff in the backyard? How can we do stuff even on a terrace per se if if I just want to learn how to grow some of my own food And and stick my toe in the proverbial homesteading waters there Okay, if if I wasn't already doing homesteading, I would be going to this conference to learn about it It sounds so amazing. So two things
21:05One has to do with how much it costs to attend the conference. And the first one I want to talk about is I actually interviewed our realtor a couple of months ago who found us our acreage. And she was really great about talking about the things that you, you won't think of if you're coming from an in town or suburb in place and then moving to acreage, like when we moved here, it, there was nothing, there was, there was no equipment because
21:34the person that sold us the house and the land didn't sell us their equipment. So she was talking about how you really need to think about how you're going to heat your home. Because if the power goes out and you are miles away from people, you're probably going to want to have a secondary heating source, especially in Minnesota, because it gets really cold here. And she was talking about how you're going to need some kind of small tractor to mow your quote unquote lawn.
22:03because you're going to have something you need to mow and it's not just going to be a push mower kind of situation. And you need to look at if you want to grow crops or if you want to have animals, how are you going to make that work? There's a lot of thinking and planning that goes into this. And she was so great about helping us find our place. So I'm really glad that you have a realtor or someone who's going to be there. That's fantastic. So having said all that.
22:31How much is it gonna cost people to attend the conference? Well, right now, we just, at the time of recording this, we just hit kind of our last month of ticket sales. So, we kind of have our, what we consider a late registration. So, you're not too late, because ticket sales will go on all the way through the month of August. But right now, there's $75 a person, and that gets you both days. We do actually have an additional add-on if you want to do a meet and greet with Joel Salatin. It's like a...
23:00a personal, small, intimate setting to hang out with him for the evening. I believe we may be sold out of those already. But yeah, it's $75, and I believe, and this is where I may be ill-prepared, I believe we even have a discount code. So I'm going to say on the record that I think there's a discount code, and then we can put it back on you to include that in your show notes. Oh, yes, absolutely. That's fine.
23:30Okay, so I feel like $75 for two days is not terrible at all. I think that's actually really, really reasonable for what you're doing. Well, thank you. Yeah, and we're going to have some, we call it swag bags. That's the other neat thing of having an organization like the Conservation District coming along with those resources. You're not going to leave this conference empty handed. Your head obviously should be pounding with all the knowledge that's been poured into it.
23:58but you're not gonna leave empty handed as well. There are going to be some takeaways that we think are gonna be beneficial or at least commemorative of your time with us. Yeah, if you leave empty headed from this, you didn't do it right. Exactly, exactly. Okay, so for people who can't or aren't going to go to this, do you have like a website or something where they can go and learn certain parts of this from you or is it just this homesteading-ish thing?
24:27So this is so new that we are really cutting our teeth this year on it. And we've already learned so much about what we want to do different next year. But fortunately, the venue we're working with, like I said, is a really, really nice, very big church. Their auditorium can seat a thousand people in that one primary room. So they've got a lot of audiovisuals. So they're going to be helping us out with recording some of the...
24:56some of the presentations, but we're not going to be able to get all 36 presentations recorded. We just don't have the bandwidth to do that. So our plan is after the event is over to make these presentations available, obviously we've got to sit down and do the non-fund accounting portion of that to see if we cover our costs, can we pay our bills type of thing, and whether that allows us to do...
25:21you know, a small pay to play to access some of these things, or, you know, it's a free resource at that point. We're just going to have to play it by ear and see. But we definitely don't want to stifle the opportunity for people to get this information. That's the key is to encourage people to do this. But obviously, we got to make sure we're covering the nut of expenses there because if we go in the hole, then it makes it tougher next year to do it again. So yeah, we think we'll have some resources available afterwards for sure. Okay, cool.
25:50So we have like five more minutes to go here. And I guess I would love to hear your opinion about the whole shift to homesteading stuff during and after COVID. Because a lot of people in that first year with the COVID pandemic had time to sit back and go, okay, what are we doing with our lives? And what do we actually want to be doing with our lives? And a lot of people shifted to this homesteading thing.
26:18What, what do you think of that? Cause I think it's great, except that I also think that a lot of people got in over their heads. So what's your take on it? Wow. Um, I, I could spend an hour talking about this and I know we won't, but, um, yeah, definitely some personal experiences in this. So, so yeah, so COVID happens. We all freak out. We all get locked down. All the things that go along with it. It gets, you know, deeply politicized. I mean, just, just everything you can imagine, but we all got that little taste.
26:47of just what it may be like if our everyday lives get drastically changed for whatever reason it is, whether it's a global catastrophe or a virus. So we got that taste. And like you said, that got a lot of us thinking, okay, we got to snap out of this dream world that we're in, or we got to at least take the blinders off and be able to see 360 around us. So.
27:13What's interesting is, is I saw that firsthand here in West Virginia, because people started reaching out to me that, you know, as you're sitting around in lockdown and quarantine, you're, you're obviously skinning the internet, you're on YouTube, so I, a lot of people found me at that point where I'm talking about rural land and how to acquire it and all of that. So I started getting a lot of inquiries. Hey, how do I find land? Like you're giving in these examples, you know, like your own personal example, where we got a hundred acres for $250 an acre.
27:4324 years ago, is that still possible? And so we started having these conversations and it's just over and over again, it was, if I've learned anything through COVID is that I do not want to be in an urban setting. I do not want to be reliant on trucks or other businesses providing me food more than a day or two in advance type of thing. And so there's definitely a pro to that. I say, you know,
28:11good for these people to recognize that and to realize that, yeah, you can't always depend on other entities, other people, other organizations or our government to take care of us. We have to assume more responsibility for our own livelihood and our own existence. So that was a pro. The con, as you mentioned, is some people are like, okay, I'm going to dive into this head first. And I won't get into the details, but I could tell you of a couple that did that very thing.
28:40They purchased 111 acres, very rural, more, I mean, makes my place look downtown, but very rural here in West Virginia. And they asked me to do some consulting with them and help before they moved. But they moved in the grand scheme of things, but because of just not being prepared, they spent the first winter in a makeshift cabin they put together that had no insulation and it was not good.
29:07It was not a good situation and that's kind of an extreme example, but I think a lot of people that pulled the trigger on buying land, that land may be still setting fallow. Some of it's not. Some people have moved on and started working it. Or if some people went out and bought a piece of equipment or maybe it was a food dehydrator, it's like, well, I'm at least going to be able to try to put some food up or a pressure canner. All that stuff's good. But I think some people...
29:34Got in over their heads or they got it and realized, well, this is harder than it looks. Or they got into it and say, well, I'm, you know, things are going back to normal. So I'm going to, I'm going to be comfortable with putting my blinders back on. Another con that we've seen is that rural property prices have just skyrocketed. And I did an example of this on my YouTube channel where pre COVID it was, you could still find acreage here in West Virginia below a thousand an acre. And that was, you know, that was 2019. I did a video on that, I believe.
30:03And now, we're doing everything we can to try to find people land that's 3,000, 4,000 an acre. So we're definitely riding this bubble right now when it comes to rural, raw land. I think it'll settle down again, but I don't know that it'll ever get back to where it was pre-COVID. So that's kind of the drag is if people didn't get a chance to move on land before the bubble hit, then they're going to be spending more money to try to pursue those dreams if they're trying to acquire land.
30:32Yes. And that's why we bought 3.1 acres in 2020 before everything went crazy because we were like, we were like, if we're ever going to do it, we need to do it now. And we're so thankful that we did. So I was just curious because I've talked to many, many, many people in the last year for this podcast. And it seems like everyone had a COVID baby. And I don't mean a human baby. I mean an idea or a project or something. And
31:01COVID was terrible, and I've said this a lot, it was a terrible thing. But if you didn't lose someone you loved, if you didn't get long COVID yourself, you had time to reevaluate and think about what you wanted to do. And if you were lucky enough to move forward on what you wanted to do, you did. So again, COVID sucked, but some great things came out of it. And we're not done with it yet. There's still, COVID is gonna be a thing forever. Now just like the regular flu. But-
31:30the insanity of that first year and a half is maybe settled down some. Yeah. So, yeah. And it's, and it's not going to be a rarity. I mean, a global pandemic of a virus. Yeah. Hopefully that doesn't happen every summer type of thing. And like you said, we're going to be dealing with the COVID virus. It's getting watered down. Um, but there's always going to be something. And just this, um, couple of weekends ago, I was trying to fly back from Canada and the CrowdStrike thing happened. And.
32:00And while that wasn't anything close to what COVID was like, it still just, it reminded me again, cause I was stuck in Charlotte international airport and I saw people start to break down. It's like, okay, we, society is just, it's just balanced so fragilely on the edge of a knife right now that if anything upsets that, whether it's access to food or access to travel or access to just even creature comforts, people are going to start to freak out.
32:30And what can we do? I don't necessarily think the big prep when it comes to homesteading that we got to prep for an apocalyptic type thing as much as it is, we need to just be ready for a four week to four month lull in resources. So it could just be that things get paralyzed before they can get reset. And if it's one of those things, are you going to be a victim in that situation? Or if my faith tells me that...
32:54I don't want to be a victim. I actually want to be a resource for others. I want to be able to help others. So if I've got plenty, because I've been the, you know, I've been the aunt instead of the grasshopper per se, then I can reach out to my neighbor in a time of need to say, hey, it's really rough right now. Things are going on. We have some resources for you. We've got some food or we've got some other things. That's what I feel challenged to do. And that's what I like to see.
33:19to see others people just embrace. It's like, what can I do to not only take care of myself, but take care of others should we see a lull in these resources that we're so used to? Yes, and the thing that I hang on to is that worry is just borrowing tomorrow's troubles. So don't worry, just be proactive and take care of yourself and try to help people around you and then you're too busy to worry. Right, very good, yes. So, all right, Troy.
33:44I really enjoyed talking with you and I'm so excited for your conference. I kind of wish I was 20 years younger and a lot richer so I could go. Well, I'm sure there'll be a home setting conference in your neck of the woods. They're popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain, which I think is just fantastic. I love, love to see people get more and more involved in it and to see, to see big business corporations, all that stuff, even wake up and see that, Hey, you know, there's
34:11let's support this stuff, let's get behind it, let's do what we can to fund some of these things because it is a growing area and they want to cater to their audience, but it's good to be able to have that back and forth where we can see more organizations do these type of things and be able to cover the cost of them because it is expensive to do and it's nice to see companies partner with these type of events. It really is. I'm really glad that you have the opportunity to do it.
34:41Again, don't leave me when I stop recording because I need to file upload. Thank you so much for your time today, Troy. I appreciate it. Wonderful. Appreciate it, Mary. Thanks for your time.
 

Whiterock Homestead

Today I'm talking with Jason and Tara at Whiterock Homestead. You can also follow on Facebook.
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00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Jason and Tara at White Rock Homestead. Good morning, guys. How are you? Good morning. We are doing great. Is it a nice day there? Oh, yeah. It's a beautiful morning. In Arkansas, you said?
00:29Yes, ma'am. Okay. I am not in Arkansas. I am in Minnesota and it's actually really nice here today too. Thank God. We have had the worst spring ever. So tell me about yourselves and what you guys do. So yeah, well, I'm Jason. Obviously this is my wife, Tara. We actually sold our property about a year and a half ago in Michigan.
00:59and we moved south here to north central Arkansas and I retired from the Marine Corps. She's retired from nursing and we looked at life and said we need to do things for ourselves. Grow our own food, raise our own animals and just have something that is ours that nobody else can tell us what we're going to do and how we're going to do it.
01:29So we spent a few years researching, driving around, searching different areas to finally settle and we're building, we're running a homestead while we're still trying to build a homestead.
01:43I understand completely we're doing the same thing. We've been here for almost four years and we're still building on it. Oh yeah, it's not gonna take an overnight thing. It's always a work in progress. Yes, absolutely. And Jason, thank you for your service. My stepson is a former Marine, although he says once a Marine, always a Marine. So he's always a Marine. So thank you. Yeah. Absolutely. And he is very correct in that statement.
02:12Yeah, our sons and Maureen as well. Yep, it was the hardest eight years of my life waiting for him to be done with active duty.
02:23Cause that boy has my heart and every time he was like, I'm getting moved here. I'm like, no, I want you to go home. I appreciate what you're doing, but please don't die. Yeah. I mean, there's always that chance or option, I guess. Uh, but for the most part, we try to go where we're going to go and come back and experiences that we couldn't have gotten had we not joined, um, and you know, of course the protection of our nation and, you know,
02:53all that that lovely gig of a role but loved every minute of it. I mean there was moments that I could have questioned myself but definitely a great choice and it and honestly has been a good stepping stone. I remember early on in my career and I think even before I fully enlisted and left for bootcamp was somebody had told me they said if we gave you the best advice about joining the military was get a job that translates when you get out.
03:22Um, and I said, okay, great. So I went in as a mechanic and I'm like, Hey, you know, there's always mechanics needed and you know, lo and behold, I'm not, well, I do a little bit of mechanic and around the homestead, but a little bit. Yeah. You fix everything, which I think as a homesteading family, you have to have that resourcefulness. So I'm, I'm very blessed to have a husband with those skills that we don't have to farm out, you know, every single thing that breaks her.
03:52Um, you know, he's, he's able to, to fix it all. Yep. It's a good thing. Um, my stepson went into, I think it was like computer stuff. I don't know exactly what his, his MOS was, but, uh, he is now basically he would call it on effing problems with servers. I will not use the word cause I don't use that word on the podcast, but I think you know what I'm saying.
04:20And he loves it and he's doing great. So he went into a field that translated after he got out as well. Okay. So enough about the Marines. And again, I really do appreciate our service to people and I feel for their families when they're deployed, cause it's really hard. So what do you guys do? I mean, do you have livestock? Do you grow gardens? What do you do? Oh, yes. So one of the first things that we put up.
04:49on the homestead was a greenhouse and a chicken coop. We had those where we even had a structure. Well, I guess the well house, but prior to Jason and I getting together, I'd had a homestead in Ohio for 10 years. And so I had a really good start on what it took to build certain things, what worked, what didn't work and was able to kind of dial in for this homestead, things that I felt would work. Although it is a different,
05:19climate in a whole host of different ways you have to learn the garden. But the greenhouse was definitely a pillar to getting us food sustainable. And we added chickens, we do meat rabbits, we have goats, and a sawmill, which provides us the ability to do all of those things relatively inextensively with just our time.
05:49like an actual sawmill or is it one of the ones that you use on a on a chainsaw? No it's real. No it's a woodland mills it's a legit full-on band you know I guess it could be portable I didn't buy the trailer option but it's a full-on sawmill. Very nice. So did you know how to use it before you bought it?
06:16I had a little bit of experience with one. Tara's uncle in Tennessee has one. And I was able a couple times that we had went and visited, I was able to go out there and run it with him and get the basic idea of what it was. And then I literally just ended up watching a lot of YouTube videos, tips and tricks and that kind of stuff to...
06:44be a little more effective on it. And it's a daily learning curve with that. Yeah, my husband really, really, really wants one. And luckily we can't afford to buy one right now because I am scared of it. I'm afraid that he's not gonna do something correctly and like take an arm off. And I tend to be the more conservative, more cautious of the two of us on a lot of things like that. So.
07:13he's all, I want a sawmill and I'm like, uh-huh, okay, let me know when you wanna do that. It's actually not really, I run it all the time myself also. Yeah, okay. And it definitely is paid for itself. When you sell everything and move, you've got your profits and your savings and your investments or whatever it is, whatever you're coming out of, wherever you're moving from. Yeah. And so you have a chunk of money, right?
07:42And you have to play it smart because I will tell you, and any homesteader that's done what you've done will tell you the money goes way faster than what you think it's going to. And so we had sat down for several years and determined what the core equipment would be needed on our future homestead. And so we were both in line with the sawmill and a nice tractor. And...
08:11Short of that, honestly, those were the two largest ticket items, but they have saved us double back what we would have spent to pay somebody to do what the tractor's done and to do what the sawmill has done. So, for us, we chose to go that route with putting what money we had into the land to be debt free and the equipment that would be needed for that versus just spending the money on, you know.
08:39end up in a large structure or a big home or whatever. For sure. I interviewed our realtor three, four weeks ago who helped us find this place. And one of the things that we talked about was when people start looking for a place to make into a homestead or buying an already established homestead, people don't realize if you're starting from scratch. Like if there's no
09:06equipment or tractors or anything that comes with the purchase, you have to take into account that you're going to need a tractor because you've got to be able to move heavy things and that you will probably need a pickup because you need to go get things to bring back to the homestead to build it up. You're absolutely correct. I forgot that. We did end up with a truck kind of pooper out on us and we did have to buy another truck. So between the truck, the land, the tractor and the sawmill, you know.
09:35That was a big chunk, but you're absolutely correct. You don't, some people don't take those things into account. Um, you know, that unless you want to break your back, uh, and do it all manually, those things are a necessity to, to get it up and going if you're buying raw land and even if you're not sometimes. Yep. And the other thing I'll say is buy, buy the thing that you can afford to buy that you really love.
10:01whatever that means, whether you like how it looks, whether it's the functionality, whatever it is that you love about it. Because when we bought our pickup truck, there were two pickup trucks. One was an older model, it was about $4,000 less than the one that I actually wanted, which was a newer model, and had the bells and whistles that I wanted, and we ended up buying the less expensive one. And to this day, I have buyer's remorse because...
10:29can't hook my phone up to the truck and have music play from my phone. And I love music and I love, I love having music on when I'm driving. So I'm kind of stuck with the radio and I don't know if you guys have listened to radio lately, but it's not great. So buy the thing that you can afford because I wish we had bought the other truck. My husband actually now wishes we bought the other truck too. So I'm not alone in my buyer's remorse. Yeah. And we were in that situation when we have the
10:57truck that we currently have now because we had drove the truck that got us here and moved all of our stuff and got us started. We had gotten a great deal on that truck and we drove it from Michigan clear to Texas and back and Tennessee. I mean we made multiple trips and it moved. I mean we spent two years riding around in that truck. Didn't have all the bells and whistles. Was not the most comfortable truck.
11:24But it was something that we said, hey, when we get our major structures and expenses covered on the Homestead, we'll look at upgrading the vehicle. And it just so happened that truck started getting a little too finicky and we bought an upgrade of a truck. And it's been, yes, a night and day difference too. And it's funny, you mentioned the whole stereo. I've, I've bounced through the trucks in the last.
11:53you know, seven, eight years. And when I end up having to step back a little bit and get one that doesn't have the Bluetooth through the stereo, it's uh, you guys are bougie. I got the bougiest husband ever. There's those comforts though, especially for us, we travel a lot and, um, having some of those comforts that it provides makes those trips less horrible.
12:20Yeah. And we, we were able to take the other one ton truck and even in its condition mechanically and trade it for a side by side, which is something that I really wanted. That was, I wanted two things when we started the homestead, a wood chipper and a side by side. And I got, I got my wood chipper and I got my side by side. Very nice. Yeah. I feel like.
12:44complaining about the fact that the radio isn't what I want in my truck is a very first world privileged problem to have. So sorry guys, but when you love music as much as I do and you love to sing as much as I do and not in front of people, but in the truck and in the shower, music coming through the speakers on my truck is really important to me. Well, that's an easy upgrade. I think it's fairly simple to put in a new stereo.
13:13Quality is what the factory ones are. I really wasn't even so much the music as it was if I'm on a long drive We typically that's that's when we have time to sit and talk to people Yeah, so it's the Bluetooth function of being able to use the phone, you know while driving And you know meeting all the laws and requirements so Definitely, like you said first world problems I mean we're struggling now because my air conditioning is out in the truck and I'm like no
13:43Um, but we're just, we roll the windows down and, um, but circling back to what you had said, I think that that is a very, for anybody listening that is looking at wanting to get into the home setting is you need to set yourself some realistic goals of what you want your home set in a timeline, but also financially. Um, I think.
14:10at least for our friend group and the circle of friends that we've been surrounded around is we don't have that keeping up with the Joneses mentality which you know Tara and I both have lived those lifestyles you know previous to us getting together was like oh this new thing came out we want to go get that because you know Joe the neighbor got one or you know
14:38whatever that case might be. And if you're gonna be realistic in homesteading, you need to lose that mentality and be okay with what you have. But then also surround yourself by friends that have equipment to where you don't go brofying at all. Yeah. Yes. I have a saying that I always say, that alone we can't do everything, but as a community, we can do it all. And that means a lot when you're looking at,
15:08sharing of your resources, knowledge and time. Those are things that our great grandparents did, our grandparents did, you know, a hundred years ago and beyond. And it worked for them and it worked for the communities and it, it worked for humanity. And we love the homesteading community because we're all trying to bring back that feeling of being surrounded by people who are actually genuinely interested in you.
15:37and interested in what you're doing and extend a real friendship through their time, their knowledge and your own resources. Absolutely. Friends are good to have and if they're into the things that you're into, they're even better. Absolutely. Yep. We had, we, it wasn't me. I didn't do anything. My husband and my son built a greenhouse, a hard-sided greenhouse this spring. And they pretty much did it.
16:07themselves and it's I think it's 40 by 20 feet I think. Oh nice. And neither one of them really like heights so they had to be on a ladder for yeah probably eight ten hours total you know not not all in a row but that was a total amount of ladder time and there was a Saturday when it was nice and they were out there and my husband was on the ladder for
16:35you know, on and off the ladder for about half an hour, hour. And I would looked out and my son was then up on the ladder half an hour, hour, and then they were done with that for the day. And they came in and I said, I said, you guys done for today? Cause it's only two o'clock in the afternoon. And they were like, yeah, we can't face that ladder anymore today. And so they did other stuff that needed to be done. And then they went out the next morning and got the rest of the roof done.
17:02so they didn't have to be on the ladder anymore because that's how much they hate climbing on a ladder and being on heights. So they sucked it up and they got it done and that greenhouse has been wonderful this year because it's been terrible weather here and it's been very wet. So a lot of our stuff that's growing is growing in the greenhouse in buckets. Yep. And that's really important because I've actually gotten to have a couple cucumbers and if I was waiting on the garden, I probably wouldn't have very many right now.
17:32Right, and that's the beauty of having the greenhouse. Eventually I would love a hard-sided greenhouse, but honestly I'm fine. I'm not bougie like my husband. I'm good with, you know, we did a cattle panel greenhouse. I would have done it up north, but as you know, with being up north, the snow loads are too great on anything but with cattle panels. But that's kind of the beauty of being in North Central Arkansas is we don't have that snow load.
18:00And it allows me to take the plastic off in the summer and actually trellis, you know, use the structure as a trellis too. So it's kind of a double dip in type of situation. They actually have cattle panel ones. Honestly, when I started looking on YouTube for building one, most of the ones that I found were out of Alaska. I don't know. When I was researching them, I just...
18:28seeing failures from snow load. And I'm like, goodness, this is why I didn't do it up north. But I mean, I'm sure it's anywhere. And I think a lot to do also would be how wide you make it. Because the wider you make those cattle panels, the less structural integrity it would have from a heavy weight on top. So if it was a real narrow tunnel, yeah, I think that would work.
18:52Yeah, we had the high tunnel style ones the first two summers we were here. And we had, we have had such high winds in the spring and the summer that they would just go over. It didn't matter how secure we thought we had them with the stakes or whatever. The wind would take them and flip them over. And the last draw for me was two summers ago.
19:21We had a whole bunch of seedlings that were growing in the greenhouse to go in the garden. And it was just whipping and it went over and took all those seedlings with it. So we had, we had like surprise gardens all over our property because we didn't know what the seedlings were. So we just planted them. And it, they did really well. But that was it. And I was like, next greenhouse that goes up, I want it to be a hard sided greenhouse because this is killing me.
19:50This is making me so sad every time we lose a hoop style house. Yeah. We're actually interested in seeing, um, we've got friends that live close and they're, they're homesteading also. And he, um, he had a lot of, of good soil that was flat ground, which are two things that are very rare in Arkansas, um, especially in our area and he had planted several crops and some of them work, some of them didn't, but he had a,
20:19very large chunk of two separate gardens he put in that didn't have anything planted. And they actually, a friend, neighbor of his had a couple bags of this, what they called chaos gardening seeds. Yep. And they just went and broadcast it. So he's like, I don't know what's going to come up and what's not going to come up and how well it's going to grow, but going to be a very large area of, hey, let's just see what works. But.
20:46I think that's a big thing of homesteading though is also those experiments, you know, because what might work for your neighbor might not work for you. And so we just always call everything that we're doing at this point as an experiment. And we take the notes of, hey, this worked and then this didn't work. And what changes to make for the next season. Yep.
21:13That's what we do too. I wanted to grow luffa gourds because I wanted to make soap around the actual sponges that come out of luffa gourds. And luffa gourds have a very long growing season and it gets too cold here. And so this fall I'm going to order luffa gourd seeds and we're going to start them in the house in like February and then move them out to the greenhouse in like...
21:43end of March and that'll give us that extra growing time that we couldn't get if we just started them outside. Because these soaps that I want to make, we already make cold processed lye soap. And basically what you do is you pour the soap around the spongy things in the luffa gourds when they dry out and then you cut them and it's like a exfoliant kind of scrub thingy with the soap around it. Oh nice.
22:10And we've bought some before and we love them. So we wanna try making them. So that's our experiment for 2025, not this year. Oh, that's fun. I wanna grow luffus too. That is something that's on my list, but like you said, everyone was about the day and all in time. My dog is losing her mind because there's a delivery truck in the driveway. I don't know if you guys can hear her barking. Oh, we got one of those too.
22:38Yeah, she's an excellent watchdog, but she does this every time I'm recording. Something sets her off and she has to bark in the background. So that's Maggie's cameo appearance for the morning.
22:51I love her. This is the worst thing she does. We're all good. Yeah, I know. That's the exact same position we're in. We get a lot of deliveries as well. She goes nuts, but she's a full pit. She can be intimidating and scary. There's no one that's going to be coming on the property for sure. Yeah, Maggie is a mini Australian Shepherd. She weighs 35 pounds. Our male delivery guy is afraid of dogs.
23:19So we have to make sure that Maggie is in the house when he comes because he won't, if he's delivering something, he's really afraid to come up the house if she's outside. And she would never hurt him. She's never ever hurt anybody. She's almost four years old. She's never offered to bite anybody. So he has an actual phobia of dogs and he's already talked to me about this. So we go out of our way to make sure that she is not outside when he shows up. Right.
23:49So anyway, what's the plan for the homestead? You guys have been there how long now?
23:56A year and a half, maybe just over a year and a half. Okay. Obviously we wanna just keep building ourselves in the simplest version of saying it, is keep working towards the self sustainability as much as possible. We're aware that there's things, flour, sugar, those types of things that we're just gonna have to rely on.
24:26the normal market to purchase. And, but yeah, we, we've got the tiny house done. We have plans in the next few years. It's kind of a three to five year plan to build a log cabin as our forever home on the property from trees off the property. And just keep developing.
24:53Our animal structures, the garden area, that kind of thing to be more established. We bought pretty much raw land. There, there was electric already ran to the property. There was already a well established on the property and somebody had started to build a foundation to a very significant house, but then it went abandoned for probably 10 plus years and it's. The block is usable.
25:23but as the foundation right now is not a usable thing and so we just a lot of starting fresh clearing the land to be able to make it usable for something um whether it be we can't really do a lot of pasture the soil here all of our gardening is in lick tubs so basically the equivalent of raised beds because in-ground growing around here it's not an option um and yeah just
25:53We want to age in place. So the idea is we're going to build everything up to be able to spend the rest of our days here on the homestead and build it in a way that even when we can't move as well, we can still function just maybe slower. Yep. I understand when my husband and I were looking for our place, I said, the place that we find that we buy is where we're going to die.
26:21I don't ever want to move again. And it's funny because it was remodeled a year or so before we bought it. And there used to be a bedroom on the first floor. And when they remodeled it, they changed it. So we have this really weird living room where the living room is almost a square. And then to the right of when you walk in the living room, there's like an L shape where the bedroom used to be. And so it's just an open room now.
26:50I keep looking for ways to turn it back into a small bedroom because I would love to have a bedroom on the first floor for as we get older and can't come up the stairs to go to bed. And haven't quite figured it out yet, but I keep looking at plans going, would that work? Would that work? Yeah. We've not decided on a full out plan yet for the log cabin. But you know, that's several years away. So we are making adjustments to the tiny house.
27:19What we're realizing living in a tiny house is it's extremely difficult to be full on homesteaders and full on self sustainable in such a small space because you have food storage to think about. You have mass production of processing vegetables to think about. Where do you put all that stuff? Where do you put your equipment? I have a beautifully large kitchen, it's for a tiny house, but it is half the house. But it's those things that
27:49Realistically, you do need a little bit larger of a space, unless you have like an exterior reseller or something to store your stuff in. So we've got a lot of plans. We're actually gonna add on to the tiny house, a master bedroom downstairs, just for those reasons that we discussed. And we are adding an outside kitchen to the tiny house as well, which will be a little bit more functional in the summertime.
28:19with canning and processing and everything. And well, right now we're working on our YouTube studio, which is another structure outside of the tiny house. And then we got a barn to put up. And yeah, there's never a shortage of projects. No, no, there isn't. And even when you're not starting from bare land, there's never a shortage. We always have stuff going on here. Right, yeah. Like,
28:48Like, I don't, I am a bad homesteader, I'm going to admit it. I really, really love cooking, and I really love crocheting, and I really love podcasting, obviously. And so for me, when we talked about buying acreage, and we ended up with a little over three acres, I said to my husband, I said, the garden is going to be all yours. The outdoor stuff is going to be all yours, because that's not what I'm into.
29:17I said, are you okay with that? And he said, yeah, he said, cause that's how I de-stress. He said, that's when it's quiet and I can just think and putter. And I was like, okay, good. And so for me, I, in my younger years, I loved to garden, but I'm 54 and like, I don't know, eight years ago, I was like, I'm kind of over it. I don't wanna sit in the garden in the dirt anymore. I just don't. And my husband loves it. He comes in sweaty and
29:46dirty and he whips his shirt off and throws it in the washer in the bathroom and then gets in the shower. I'm like, yes, please do that. That's awesome. So for me, I'm not, if he came home tomorrow and said, I don't think I'm happy with this. I think that I would just like an acre closer to town and have a small garden and keep my job. I would be fine with that. That would be okay. As long as we got to keep the dog.
30:14I can't give up the dog, she's my life. I can't give her up. But in the meantime, I love where we live and I love that I get to can tomato sauce for spaghetti sauce in the wintertime. I love that it's quiet. There are things about homesteading that aren't necessarily busting your body up that are just a benefit in and of themselves. The quiet is one of them. Right, yeah. We love the quiet as well. And I don't...
30:44We rarely have ever watched TV. It's something we turn on at night before we go to sleep so I can turn my brain off. But short of that, we don't have music running. We don't have the TV going. We like the sounds of the homestead for the most part. I mean, while being YouTubers also, we, when you're filming your life, you get used to not being able to have the radio on because of copyright purposes. So.
31:14We're kind of used to that aspect of it, but even outside of YouTube, we find peace in the silence and peace in the beauty of the homestead, even when the goats are being loud. Yeah, I can't see us. If we do anything, we do have a five year plan. The homesteaders are heading to the ocean and the river systems. We're going to do the great loop. And so.
31:42It'll be interesting to see how we transition from life on the homestead to take a year out to be on the loop. And being on water and I don't know I've got some ideas in my head on how to transition that but that's a dream of ours and it's something that we both want to do and it'll be fun to add that element of nature into what we love. Absolutely.
32:09You were saying that you love the sound of the goats and that you can't have radio on because as YouTubers you can't because of copyright issues. I got up at about three o'clock in the morning a couple mornings ago because I couldn't sleep because I said this on another podcast recording last week. My husband snores so sometimes it's too loud and I just can't sleep so I get up and I went downstairs and I sat on the porch because I like to listen to the noises at night too. Oh yeah. And it was eerie because it was dead.
32:39Silent no crickets. No nothing. I was like did a bomb go off. I don't know about It was silent. No trucks went by no cars went by I sat there for five minutes and I was like this is eerie I'm going in the house. I didn't like that. It was silent because usually You hear that the cow lowing a quarter mile away at the neighbor's place. You'll hear the crickets You'll hear a car go by
33:08Something there was nothing it was the strangest thing in in the almost four years. I've been here has never been dead silent here Maybe that would be Sasquatch up You know, they say it all gets silent when Sasquatch comes out I don't know what it was, but it was bizarre and there was no wind either So there was nothing, you know, we have a tree line and there's a cornfield around it So, you know how it sounds when the wind blows through leaves and through the corn
33:35That wasn't even happening. I was, it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I was like, yeah, I'm not going to stay out here by myself in the middle of the night right now. It's too quiet. Yeah. Most of the time, I mean, I'm notorious for waking up extremely early. It's all the years I've worked in for shift as a nurse. You know, I'm, well, this morning I was up at four. So a lot of times when I am outside in the middle of the night, I find peace in that. And there are different sounds at 4 a.m. than there are at 10 p.m.
34:04And I know exactly what you're talking about on those mornings or in the middle of the night when it does go dead silent. And it is a creepy feeling. I'm, I'll agree with you on that. And I typically won't stay outside either. Yeah, I just couldn't figure it out. It has never been dead silent here. Ever. So it kind of made me nervous. I didn't like it. So I was like, okay, I'm going to go in the house. I'm not going back to bed, but I'm going in the house. Yep.
34:33The dog's in the house. She may be 35 pounds, but she's going to protect me if something bad happens. I know she will. It'll be okay. So anyway, I feel like we've just talked about the things that people should consider when they're thinking about becoming homesteaders, and that is super cool. I just didn't know if you guys were gonna try to make anything.
34:57support the homestead as you build it from the homestead like if you're going to sell wood or if you're going to sell produce or anything We've tossed that idea around And it's it's it's funny because we haven't got asked that question since we started YouTube And it was actually one of the first questions that we got asked was What is what's your business model? What's your business plan for your homestead because a lot of times?
35:25And in most situations, people do homesteading with that intention. You've got to have some source of income, right? Homesteading is not a cheap way to live necessarily, especially starting out. I think as you get developed, you can make your expenses less, but irregardless, there's expenses out there that we have to cover. Even in an off-grid situation.
35:51they're still paying for an internet service or they're still paying for a cell phone. And while we know you can't go anywhere and not pay car insurance. So there always needs to be a source of income. We honestly, we do not have a business model set up for our homestead because we didn't build it, we're not building it and our intentions coming in. We're not to make it a profitable
36:20making it a sustainable. Now we have several friends that are close by that you know they're home setting, they're doing a lot of the same things we're doing, but they don't have an outside source of income coming in so it's like hey what do we do? So they prepped their land and their model was to do a market garden, grow a large garden and be able to take it to the markets and
36:49and make their money that way. And for the most part, it's doing really well for them. They're on year two of doing that now. I think we both moved to Arkansas within just a couple months of each other. And so now, for anybody that's went and watched our YouTube channel, we did build a market stand that we wanna put out by the road. And that basically,
37:18That's just some excess. Yeah, that's for excess. You know, when the chickens are really full laying and we're getting, you know, 20 plus eggs a day, you know, we can't eat that. We eat a lot of eggs, but not that many. And so what the behind the mart, that is to recoup our cost and feed, honestly. Well, plus I've also started getting into like, you know, team shows and
37:47We've done a viral study on...
37:52Uh, crap, I'm losing them. Was that Ruth? No. Or the frankincense and stuff? It was the frankincense. And then. Wasn't that in Ruth? No, that was Esther. Sorry. Oh yeah. Go back if you. And, uh, you know, it got me thinking if she spent six months, uh, getting treatments of oils, uh, being castor oils and frankincense, then if it was good enough for Esther, it's probably good enough for me too. And you'll be in 50. Uh.
38:21I'm not getting any younger and so I noticed some crow's feet and stuff. And so I've started making my own lotions and base creams, kind of dwell them into that. I've got some oils marinating, tinctures marinating, and just kind of doing some of those more natural things. And if I sell some oils, I'll put it in the market stand.
38:48I don't know, it's not something I'm going into to like make a bunch of money for. It's more I need to find out what works for me. And I, like anything else on a homestead, you want to be dependent on your own skills and what you can create for yourself and protect yourself. And face creams are one of them. When you look at the chemicals and everything inside what you're buying in the store, when the whole time, you know, you can make up.
39:18something with castor oil, frankincense and tea tree oils and just all those different things. Weeds out of the yard, behind the mow. Yeah, so it goes along with just being self sustainable and yet having such a superior product. And so I've shared them with friends and everyone's loving it. And I don't know, I made for some of that in the market stand as well, but it's not for excess. Yeah, and there is potential. I mean, I guess if we go down that discussion,
39:47We potentially could do things for profit. We have the availability of growing a larger garden and selling the produce off of that. Or selling the wood, you know, we could timber. We've got the, well, we've got timber, we could do firewood. We also have the saw mill. So I know that is, that's a big, I guess a big selling point for a lot of the
40:15people that I've seen online or even talked to that buy a saw mill is they get to mill their own lumber, but when they're done milling what they need personally, then they can start doing it as a business and make that money back and be profitable. Especially with the price of lumber at the big box stores if somebody can do some rough sawing lumber. I mean, I think it would be something that we
40:44if we were looking to make money off the homestead, it would be as a hobby, I believe, because you spend, I always knew I wanted to be a homesteader. I was always into Grizzly Adams and Laura Engel Wilder, and it always resonated with me. And so I always knew I wanted to be a homesteader. And through raising my kids and being a single mom, I worked and worked and worked hard.
41:12so that I could retire early. And, you know, we have one little friend of our daughter's that he's always looking for the next business venture and wanting us to go in on it. And I'm just like, dude, I hustled for 40 years. I don't wanna hustle anymore. You know, 34 years. It was all about, you know, putting us in a position to be able to do this. And if the need be, I would go back to nursing. You know, I never say never, but I think at this stage in our life, we're just,
41:41enjoying loving what we're doing for ourselves here and for our friends and you know if there becomes a situation where we got to make more money I'm not opposed. Right the options there but that's not our main our main goal is is sustainability of ourselves like making a dollar. Well I think you guys have it figured out you have a wonderful next 45-50 years to look forward to.
42:10Yeah, we can only hope so. I would hate to know what my body's gonna feel like in 40 years. Yeah, well, I could have said 20 and then you die, but I don't think that's what's gonna happen. So well, and I think that that's a good reminder to a lot of people is, you know, I've even got family that have said, you know, man, I wish I could do it the way that you're doing it or, you know, I'd love to move there, but I'm just too old to do that. And.
42:36I don't know. I'm a firm believer because I do have quite a few family members that have lived into their 80s and 90s and You know Age is a number and I mean obviously our body tells us what we can and can't do And we are doing it on the fairly younger spectrum, I guess But it is something that holds a lot of people back because it it's a very it is a very active lifestyle Yeah
43:06You know, typically in your normal society where you're working a nine to five and you're not trying to homestead, maybe you have a little garden, right? But you're living in suburbia. You're going to your job every day. Your kids are going to school. You're doing that. So, you know, your weekends are always, Hey, I want to sit around and barbecue and relax and not do much, or you're hammering down on projects, but it's only for a couple of days, and then you're right back to your, you know, a lot of times, you know, an office job that. Um.
43:35isn't typically a physically active lifestyle. So it can be a big change depending on what you're coming back from. And I know even, even for me coming out of the Marine Corps, um, and, and it was what five, six years, I think that I had been retired before we started homesteading. Um, but even then I w I had been in the Marine Corps so long that my job was to sit behind a desk.
44:05and I went to sleep at night out of boredom. And now I go to sleep out of exhaustion and it's such a better sleep. I feel better being more active. And we always say, if you don't use it, you lose it. And so we try to stay as active and no matter what it is, it's possible for as long as we can. If it makes you feel any better about 50 years from now.
44:34My dad will be 81 years old next week. He and my mom live on a 14 acre property in Maine. They have a beautiful home that they had built eight or 10 years ago, I can't remember, on the property. They have a border collie. My dad has a wood stove that he uses for heat in the house. He chops all his own wood. He has a garden. My mom and dad both go down and work on it after he plants it.
45:04and my mom just turned 78 two days ago. So they are busting their asses all the time too, and they are 78 and almost 81 right now. So it is possible. Yeah, very much so. And that's what we hope for ourselves. And we don't have all the answers and we don't do everything correct. We just do what feels right in our hearts and we go from there. And we are both finding so much love in what we're doing.
45:34And it's kind of an awesome feeling like right now the goats aren't giving us milk, but when you only go to the store to buy dairy products, and that's literally what you're walking out buying, you know, I get frustrated that I am going to the store to buy those things. So eventually when the goats give us milk, then hopefully I can diminish my reliance even more. But it is, there's a beauty in that and there's challenges in that.
46:03being outside and doing the chores and building things. Cause I, as much as I'd love to be in the kitchen all day, every day, my husband and I are a team and we build together. My dad was a contractor and so I grew up on work sites and have those knowledges as well as he does. So we work together on everything and you know, it not as efficiently as we did 20 years ago, but no, so keep going. Yep.
46:32Okay, I have one thing about the beauty in being self-sufficient and then I'm gonna let you guys go because we've been talking for 46 minutes now. We canned a whole bunch of tomato sauce, summer 22, and then last summer. And we are down to maybe six jars of tomato sauce left. And I actually, I mistakenly bought tomato sauce from the store when I was trying to grab tomato paste. And we used some of it the other day. The store bought stuff.
47:01and it was the store brand tomato sauce. As soon as the tomatoes start rolling in in August here, we will be canning tomato sauce because that tomato sauce from the store was terrible. So yes, there is satisfaction and beauty and thank God there is in doing your own thing because I don't wanna have to buy tomato sauce ever again. It was disgusting. And I think when, I wanna say it was one of our last trips
47:32because we were there for an extended period of time. And we had taken several dozen of our own eggs with us. But then we had to go buy eggs at the store. And it was like, no, this is not acceptable. Do we need to do a, how do we hook a mobile chicken coop up to our camper to constantly have an egg supply? On a good note, we are gonna be within driving distance
48:02my aunt and uncle who also have children. So they have a homestead. But we say it all the time, that same thing. It's refreshing, I guess, to know. I mean, we know we're not the only ones that have that same comment. But when you're used to eating your own homegrown food and products, and then you have to buy something because, hey, I'm in a pinch or I'm not in a place that my stuff's available, you clearly know the difference. Yeah.
48:29Uh-huh. I was sad. I made spaghetti sauce and I was like, this is terrible. I hate this. I need my tomato sauce. Yeah, for sure. And, uh, you know, since we're wrapping up, if, if you are a subscriber of ours on our YouTube channel, there are going to be some changes coming up. Um, we've announced it on one of our channels on the coffee chat, but we are leaving back out Monday or Tennessee for an undetermined amount of time.
48:58My father is not well. And so we are going to be in Tennessee, we're going to take our little camper we call it nugget and Be there to be able to spend some time with with my dad and So we're going to actually be filming and doing our best to homestead from Tennessee from Arkansas so if you if you're a subscriber and You're you've probably already
49:26gotten wind of that, but if you're a new subscriber, just letting you know that we're gonna be in Tennessee, probably in the next couple of videos, and for an undetermined amount of time. So, hang with us because we're just doing what we have to do in our hearts to be there for family, and we will be coming back to the Ridge at some point and picking up where we left off. Awesome. Well, I'm sorry to hear about your dad, but at least you can go and be with him. That's amazing.
49:55Yes, true. All right, guys. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you for having us. Yes. Thank you for the invite and having us. We love talking homestead if the time on this video doesn't show. Uh-huh. All right. You guys have a great day. Thank you. Thanks.
 

Davis Farm

Today I'm talking with Tammy at Davis Farm. You can also follow on Facebook.
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00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Tammy at Davis Farm. Good afternoon, Tammy, how are you? I'm well, thank you. How about you? I'm good. It's a beautiful day in Minnesota. Is it lovely in Vermont? Oh my goodness, yes. It's absolutely amazing.
00:29Finally, we've had this ridiculous humidity that just we're not used to. So today is a glorious, you know, they call it a bluebird day. It's just blue skies and green, green pastures and cool weather. It's a bluebird day here too, but it's muggy as hell. So I'm so, you know what? My heart goes out to you because I thought I was going to die last week and the week before. Yeah. At least it's not raining.
00:59I have talked about this a lot. It's rained a lot in Minnesota this spring, so we're really happy to have some sun. Yeah, we've had a lot of rain. We had an incredible amount of flooding again, which we've had this 100-year flood now, literally on the same day, two years apart. That's not 100 years. Indeed. Indeed. All right, Tammy, tell me what you guys do at Davis Farm. Yeah, well, we're a dairy farm. So we...
01:29We're milking probably about 70 cows now. We used to be a conventional dairy farm. We shipped to DFA for decades. And then in 2016, we made the decision to go organic. And then in 2000, shortly thereafter, I don't know, 18, 19, we decided to go grass fed. So we stopped feeding grain.
01:57and we're fully organic now. Very nice. I have to ask, is that an expensive proposition because I keep hearing that going organic, anything costs a lot of money to get certified. Yeah, that's a great question. For us, it was not too much of a transition. The grain situation was kind of brutal because you have for the first year,
02:24For us, we had to buy organic grain but still ship at conventional prices. They did give you, I think, like $3 per hundred wheat to help with the grain transition. But other than that, that was a little bit tough. But all of our land and most of our practices have always been organic anyway. We've always been a pasture-based farm, so there was not a lot for us to switch. We should have done this 30 years ago. But, you know.
02:53how life goes. And so anyway, so, um, but it has been a great, a great, um, move for us, um, for our business. Good. So I know nothing about dairy cattle and I've been looking for someone to talk to about it. So guess what? You're it. Oh, fun. So you said you have 70 cows you're milking. Yes. That is correct. Yes.
03:20Okay, so are you selling that milk to, I don't know where milk goes to, to be sold at grocery stores? Sure. That's great questions. So we belong to a co-op. As I mentioned, we belong to DFA for years. And then we transitioned and we went with Organic Valley co-op. So we shipped to Organic Valley. And they...
03:49They basically pick up the milk and then once it leaves the farm, it leaves the farm as fluid milk and then they go and they take it and they do the marketing and most of our milk goes into fluid milk or cheese in this area, in the New England area. And then, yeah, I guess I should say that I'm from Northern Vermont. We're about 45 minutes from the Canadian border. Okay. So in our area.
04:20Most of our milk goes into New York state and then gets processed or distributed. Okay, then that leads me to my next question. When people who sell milk from their cows sell it to a co-op and that milk goes to be processed, pasteurized, whatever, to be sold in gallons or half gallons at the store, it's not just your batch of milk in that.
04:47jug, it can be mixed with other people's cow's milk, right? That is correct. Yes. So right now we're on the grass truck because we're a grass-fed farm. So all of our milk is picked up with all the other grass-fed farms in the area. When we were conventional, it was a huge truck that would come and it was all the farms in the area. They're on a milk route.
05:15And so then it would just come and pick up all the different farms. Now every farm, I don't know if, if sort of you were getting to this. So every farm, when they pick up our milk, um, vials are taken samples of our milk. So everybody's, um, milk is tested and, um, you know, and then the tank is tested to make sure like everybody, you know, if somebody had bad milk, you know, um,
05:45know, we might have to get dumped. I mean, it depends upon what happened. Yeah, that was going to be my next question because I think that when I was young, I assumed that the milk and the jug in the fridge probably came from the same cow. And as I've gotten older and talked to people in the business, I'm like, oh, it's a mix of different cows milk. It is, but it's fun because, you know, every area has a lot number. So, you know, when we used to ship to conventional
06:14You know, we would work with the elementary schools and we could find, you know, where, you know, our milk went to, like which, which school or whatever, because you could look at the lot number and you know where your milk has gone. So that was kind of fun. Yeah, I mean, it's government regulated, so they're going to want to keep track of where stuff comes from and where it's going. So my next question is, do you sell raw milk?
06:43from the farm because we can do that here in Minnesota if we had dairy cows. Yeah, we're able to do that too in Vermont. Vermont has done a great job with lobbying for raw milk sales. Again, it's highly regulated. We have a separate certification for that, separate requirements and criteria that have to be met in order to do that. But that is
07:13actually quite a bit of raw milk. And do you, I don't know, I assume you know who your customers are, so you probably have an idea of what they're doing with the raw milk. Are they using it for drinking milk? Are they using it to make cheese or yogurt, all of the above? What do they do with it? Yeah, that's a great question too. Most all of our customers use the milk to drink. There are, you know, most everybody does make yogurt. A few people make
07:43cheese, not a lot. But you can't use raw milk for another sale. So nobody's using our raw milk to make any other products to sell. It's just for home consumption. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the same way here. I think. I don't know. Yeah. That's a pretty common thing. Yep.
08:12Can, okay, this is gonna sound crazy. Can raw milk be sold in grocery stores in Vermont? No, not in Vermont. You cannot sell raw milk in grocery stores. And we just recently are able to bring it to a farmers market. And that's a different, there's a two tiered licensure to sell raw milk and it's not a license, it's just whatever, certification.
08:41and so and you can do that. I don't know all of the, I haven't done that. We just have a great customer base. People come to the farm so we have not branched out into that area but I know that you can sell either vouchers and they come to the farm to get it or you can bring a certain amount of milk with you to a farmer's market now. Okay the reason I ask is because when we were visiting my parents in Maine back in 2014
09:08They have a general store down the road from them. They live in Whitefield, Maine. And the general store, they sell, basically everything is local. Local things that are made, local things that are grown. And they had raw, unpasteurized cow's milk in their cooler. And I was dumbfounded. And we got, I think, a quart and took it up to the counter to buy it. Because I love raw cow's milk, especially for coffee.
09:37And I don't get it very often. And when I walked up to the counter, I said, how long has Maine been able to sell raw cow's milk? And the woman looked at me and she said, for a while. She said, are you, where are you from? And I said, Minnesota, but I grew up in Maine. And she's like, huh. She said, I thought I heard just a little tiny bit of Minnesota in there. And there's a tie in for her too to Minnesota.
10:06And I said, yeah, I said, um, I said, we can't get raw cow's milk in Minnesota in a store in a public venue. And she said, really? And I said, Nope. I said, you have to go to the farm and get the milk from the cooler from where the farmer milked the cow and put the milk in the cooler. And he, she was like, really? I said, yeah. And she said, well, she said, I don't know how long it's been.
10:36legal in Maine, but it's been legal for a while. I said, thank you, Jesus. Yes. And she's laughed at me. Well, it is. I mean, there are lots of people who grew up in raw milk and have a really hard time trying to find it. And every state is different. I don't know how many states in the US allow it to be sold in a public venue, but I know there's not a lot. Yeah, I don't know either. I know that.
11:03I don't know, about 20 years ago, we went to South Carolina to visit one of my cousins. I know that when we were down there, they had low pasteurization, which is an interesting thing in and of itself. That was able to be sold in the stores. I haven't really looked into other places very much. I've just been very, very thankful for the work that's been done in Vermont.
11:33Vermont is a very low populated state and, you know, it used to be predominantly farms, dairy farms. And so to have that leaving, you know, it was harder and harder to get raw milk. So I was very grateful when these laws passed.
12:01sell or can't ship their goods at all anywhere, even in the state. And every cottage food producer I know is like, they're working on it. They're working on it. And I'm like, I wish they would work on it and get it passed. I wish there was more information and more support for drinking raw milk across the board. I grew up in the city, so I didn't grow up.
12:30on a dairy farm. I came here to Vermont when I was about 22 and met my husband. But that was all new to me and just the health benefits and there's just so many, I mean, like everything, you need to be educated. You need to educate yourself. Don't take someone else's word for it. But it just, there's a lot of misinformation out there and it just, it makes me kind of sad. Yep. You and a whole lot of other people too. You are not alone in that boat, I'm telling you.
13:00So do you, if you have dairy cattle, then you must breed for the babies that you have more milk coming in. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. When we, when we were shipping to conventional market, we, you know, we'd used AI and, you know, we would joke. My husband and I would, you know, have our date night and choose our bowls. And but with, um.
13:24Pastry management with all of our children, with everything that was going on, we kept finding it harder and harder to schedule breeders. We've just been through a lot in the farm. We mostly just use bulls for breeding now. There's a lot of different thoughts on that. We have a mixed herd, so we have Holstein Jersey Crosses. We just breed too.
13:53depends upon what year to a jersey and then for the younger stock and then we'll breed back the next generation to a Holstein. Nice. So on average, how many, okay, number one, do you only have like one, I don't know what the word is, batch of calves a year or do you stagger them so you have a couple? Yeah, another great question. We have done it.
14:21different ways throughout the years. We tried to go seasonal one year, so we were having calves all in the fall because there's a premium for fall milk production. We tried to do all calving in the spring to have maybe a couple months off while the cows were dry and then so that everybody's calving at the same time and then the cows are getting fresh grass.
14:49As soon as they calve, now we pretty much just try to calve in the warmer months. We just try to have the bulk of our calves now. We start calving maybe the end of May through the end of October.
15:14And then of course, you know, we always have those teenage pregnancies during the winter. Those, oh shoot, whoopsie. Surprise. How that happened, but. Surprise. Yep. Okay. So that leads me to, you said you have 70 cows, cows, not, not the bulls aren't included in that number. Right. Um, we have about 70 milkers. We have.
15:43I don't know how many dry cows we have right now. Probably just a handful of dry cows right now. I don't know how many heifers we have left to calve this year. There's probably again probably a handful there and then the young stock there's probably we have two groups of calves that have calved this year and then the the calves that will be ready to breed next year.
16:10So probably another, so we probably have about 100 head total in cows. And that's, you know, we used to milk about a hundred or a little over a hundred. I mean, we had about 160 animals or so. So we're down. We're, you know, we're phasing out a little bit here. So maybe, yeah, we have just a little over a hundred animals right now. Okay.
16:38So that leads me to two questions. First one is cows typically have one calf, on average one? Yeah, their gestation is the same as ours. So they calve every nine months or so. Well, we like to have them within 13 months spread again. So. Yeah, but they're not like goats. Goats tend to have two or three babies at a shot and cows.
17:05usually have one. They have single births, right? Their twins are, they can be and we love it when we have twins. They need to both be female or both be male. One is a female and one is a male. The female tends to be a free martin. She's not, doesn't typically have parts to breed.
17:35So if there is a free Martin, do you guys raise it for a while and sell it? Um, no, typically we, we just sell calves, you know, within a couple of days we rate, you know, we, we let them have their mom's, um, the colostrum and then probably keep them for a couple of days and then we just put them on the beef truck. Okay. And that leads me to my second question. If you have male calves,
18:03Do they hang around for long or the same thing? They go on the beach. We save, it depends upon, it depends upon where we are in our cycles of breeding. We will raise one or two bulls to use. We have in the past raised them as steers for meat, but we've been raising Highland cows over the past.
18:29I don't know, 15 years or so. So we've been using the Highlands for beef pretty regularly now. Okay. All right. The reason I asked all that is because when I was growing up, my grandpa had friends that lived down the road and they had a dairy farm. And I just assumed, because I was young, that they just kept all the babies. I thought that the babies just grew up and became mama and daddy cows.
18:58That's why they had so many cows all the time. And then I discovered in my teens that no, some of those cows went to the grocery store or freezer camp as my grandpa's friend called it. And I was heartbroken for a little bit. And then I realized that that was silly. I didn't need to be heartbroken because beef is beef and it's yummy and people eat it. So a lot of people do not necessarily understand how this all works. You're right, they don't.
19:28They don't. I actually have some friends that came to visit and we got into talking about what we were eating and I was like, oh yeah, you know, we're eating our own meat because we raise everything. And they were like, oh, no thank you. I'd rather go to the grocery store. And to this day, we still joke about it because it's like they would rather eat something from the grocery store, which is, you know.
19:56similar to what we have except we just know what's gone into our meat. So, but yeah, people are very disconnected from the food chain. Yep, they sure are. And I was one of those people because I didn't know. And as I've gotten older and learned more and discovered more, I understand that if I happen to meet a steer at somebody's farm and if I happen to buy beef from them, I'm
20:25I might be eating the steer that I met, which was alive and friendly and let me pet its nose, you know? Indeed, yes. And we are terrible because our kids have often named whatever we're raising for meat and they'll joke at the dinner table, oh, we're eating so and so. And I know other people don't find the humor in that, but my kids did. It's probably a way of them not...
20:54not coping with but processing the fact that they knew that animal before it became meat. Yeah and I think that they like the fact that the animals were cared for and you know taken care of and and it was also expensive to eat so I think we were all very grateful to have food. Absolutely. It's not a very lucrative lifestyle. Yeah.
21:17It's not. The other thing is if you live on any kind of farm or homestead or a place where you're going to have chickens or rabbits or goats or cows or whatever, I don't name our creatures unless they are pets. And we have a pet. We have a dog. Her name is Maggie and we love her to pieces. We have three barn cats.
21:43They have names because they have managed to survive being barncats. The chickens do not have names. We don't name our chickens because chickens die for no reason out of the door all the time. So we don't name our chickens. I don't need to name my chickens. When we first got chickens, we had four and they're distinguishing monikers or A, B, C, and D. Yeah. Yeah, it's hard. We have chickens as well.
22:13We just have so many of them. We just, yeah, I can't name them. Plus we've had them for so many chickens over the years. We've run out of names. I think the only chicken we specifically named was one that came in a batch, and it didn't look like the other ones. Oh yeah, so you could tell which one it was. And its name was Oddball because it didn't look like the other chickens. Oh.
22:41That was the only chicken we've actually given a name. And Oddball died like last year. And I was not heartbroken at all because we never, I don't like hang out with the chickens. I don't like chickens. I like eggs. I don't like chickens. Yeah. So when my husband came in and said, Oddball died, I was like, that's a bummer. Yeah. And that was kinda it. However, I made a big mistake last fall when our barn cat had kittens.
23:12First experience, first experience with this. Oh, good to hear. They were super cute. Yeah. And Mama is a really fluffy cat. And so some of the kittens were short haired and some of them were really fluffy like mom. And we of course named all the kittens because they were adorable. Yeah. I think one, yeah, one kitten out of six survived ultimately. And is actually living her best life with someone who adopted her.
23:41This time, this spring, when mom had babies again, we did not name them anything special. Like one was yellow and white and had black spots. So that was spot. And one had a head tilt for a while. So his name is Tilt. He's the one we kept. He's doing great. And every one of the seven kittens survived except for one. And that one actually died at like a week old. There was something wrong with it. So.
24:10Six out of seven survived this time. That's awesome. Yeah. Yep. And they all went. Barn kitties are the best. We love. I love kittens. My kids all have allergies, so I can't have them in the house. I love having them at the barn in there. They get loved on very much by all of our customers. Even our chickens, people love our chickens. We have a couple of people who bring food to them when they come to get milk. So they're actually quite.
24:40quite friendly and very sweet. So we just have a, we have an issue with a fox that comes and takes them off one by one. Drives me nuts, but other than that, so. Well, I was very careful with this litter to not get attached to any of them until we decided we were keeping Tilt, and Tilt is a boy, and he made it to eight weeks, and I said to my husband, I said,
25:11He was like, well yeah, but if he gets hit by a car, you're gonna be really sad. And I was like, that's different. Yeah, yeah. So.
25:20But anyway, yeah, don't name animals that are destined for the freezer or who have a high likelihood of just dying because you don't know why they died. Yeah, yeah, that is tough. That's part of the life cycle of farming. And it's something that I feel like benefited our kids and that a lot of kids don't see. And they're able to.
25:49to deal with their own things, I think, because they've had such a versatile experience on the farm, for sure. Yeah, I mean, I hate to say it, but living on a farm is a really good way to be introduced to sadness and disappointment at some point earlier than most people are. Yeah, it's a lot of great things too. I mean, we've had the benefit. My mother and father-in-law lived next to us and my husband's families.
26:15rather large. So the kids, the cousins all grew up together. My sister-in-law lives in my mother-in-law and father-in-law's house now, and then my brother-in-law lives on the backside of the property. And now my kids are all coming home now too. So my daughter and her husband and our new grandbaby are living in our apartment, and another son and his fiance are living on the property. And then another daughter is getting married.
26:45She and her fiance will be buying our guest house. So, you know, everybody's coming home. So it's been nice for the kids to have a space to come back to, too. So it's a family farm for real. I mean, everybody, yeah, nobody works on the farm. Our son Cedric has a manure spreading business. So he started spreading manure when he was 16, bought his first tractor.
27:12a newer spreader and then he does a lot of other things as well. He's very diversified. He's been around the farm. We thought our youngest daughter was going to take over the farm, but she's very into horses. We have horses. She graduated from high school a year ago and has been starting an equine business. She gives horseback riding lessons.
27:41She ran two summer camps this summer, which was really fun to watch her do that. So, but nobody's very interested in the dairy. Yup. I'm not, I'm, I'm not surprised, but that's how it goes sometimes. It is. And it's okay. I mean, it makes me sad to think this is, you know, we're third generation farmers here on this farm. It makes me sad. But I.
28:09We've done some other things. You know, we've been having, hosting weddings on the farm. We have a beautiful view of Mott Mansfield. Um, you know, we have a compost business. I have a guest house. So we've been doing a lot of other things. Um, we actually went to once a day milking about, uh, just, just about, um, during COVID and, um, and that's been, that's been great. That was a great transition for us. Um, it's.
28:38afforded my husband some time in the afternoon, which he's never, never ever had. So, yeah, so I'm sad. I'm sad to see dairy farms just going by the wayside. It's sad. It's sad to see that lifestyle. I've been very blessed. I've loved being a farmer's wife. I loved raising my kids here. I'm sad that that's going by the wayside. But we've conserved our land.
29:08No developments can be built here and hopefully our kids can enjoy this space doing other things. Great. So, when you say once a day milking, are you talking about the machine milking? You're not talking about milking that many cows by hand. Oh, goodness. No, no, no. We have, yeah. And we had a tie stall barn and then in 1993, we built a new barn and started milking in a...
29:37milking parlor in 95. And yeah, so we have a free stall and a milking parlor. But we've always milked twice a day. And then like I said, 2000, when we had gone grain, when we went grass fed, we got rid of the grain, the milk production dropped quite a bit. And so we had thought about going to once a day milking and
30:07there were a lot of things that happened around here. And so we just made the decision to go to once a day. And it was actually a great, great decision. And the cows didn't object. They didn't, you know, just like, just like us, when we're nursing, we adjust, they adjust, they had really dropped in milk anyway. So milking twice a day was a lot of, um, uh, a lot of effort, you know, it was, I think it was, it was cost effective for us to go to
30:37You know, now their milk has it. We were really new to grass fed, so no grain. So we were in an adjustment period. And I would say, I think this year for the first year, we've done a really good job of feeding them and they're making pretty good milk. I mean, pretty good milk for a grass fed. Not like some of these amazing cows that are on grain. I mean, they make so much milk, it's crazy.
31:06But we're doing a good job. Good. I was going to say, is there a difference in how much milk fat there is when you change from grain to grass-fed? I think that's more affected by the breeding than the grain. We produce really high butter fat because our cows are.
31:35across. So we we often do really, really well. So you get paid. So you get paid by the by the butter fat and the protein in the milk. That's sort of what is, you know, what, what the bulk of your payment is. So having a really high butter fat and really high protein is, is a good thing. So and so we're that's why a lot of farmers are
32:06are Jersey farmers because they make a lot of butter fat. But we do pretty well. So I would say no, I think it's more the grain helps to balance milk production. You're able to say, oh, they're not getting enough protein in the grass because it's getting late in the season. So then you supplement with the grain and we don't have that luxury right now.
32:35Okay, so I have so many questions and I don't want to keep you too long. I know a lot about the East Coast because I grew up in Maine. I know Vermont's cold in the wintertime and I know that they're probably not eating green grass out of the field, out of the pasture in December, January and February. So are you buying hay for them? So we put up our own feed. Okay. I mean, we're pretty, we've got quite a few acres and then we rent.
33:05another, you know, 100 or 150 acres and get a good crop off of that. So we put up haylage, we put up the round bales. Then we can put up some pretty good feed. Um, past couple of years has been a little bit difficult because of all the rain and the flooding. So, um, that was a little difficult, but we actually cut back a little bit on our herd to be able to, um, be able to feed everybody through the winter. Okay.
33:34I was just wondering, because I know that a couple, well, I don't know how many years ago, but a while ago, there was a shortage in hay and people had to buy or bring in hay. Yeah, we did. We did two, three. Well, I mean, pretty much most of the winters we will buy feed from other organic farms in the area. So we'll get in touch with Organic Valley and they'll send us lists of farmers in our area.
34:03that have organic feed. And then, you know, like right about now, I mean, we're, we're, we're done with our second cut. So we can pretty much project what our third cut will be. We might be able to get a fourth cut this year, but, you know, we'll start looking at how many bales we have and start preparing for the winter, letting other farmers know if we have to buy hay.
34:33What kind of hay are you feeding them? Because there's so many different kinds of hay. Yeah, we just do straight grass. We don't add to our fields or we might, it's mostly clover. If we enhance our pastures, we'll maybe put some clover and festiolium in there if we get time to frost seed, but it's just been hard.
35:02We have some really good help now, but it's been hard because we haven't had the greatest help in the past. So we haven't been able to do a lot of things that we would like to do. But yeah, it's just, you know, we don't plant any crops. We don't plant alfalfa or any of the grasses. Okay. I just, I don't know anything about this. So you're the only person I think of today to ask these kinds of questions and you are so forthcoming. Thank you for doing that.
35:31We're pretty, we're very, we're minimalist. We're not, you know, we're not charged to, you know, put up the best grasses or, you know, I mean, there's a lot. I mean, it's fun. I mean, there's, I mean, you can spend all of your days managing, managing the farm, but there's other, other things we also do. Okay. And then I have one more question, should be a fun one and then we'll wrap it up.
36:01baby bottle babies for calves. For the calves? Yeah. Yeah. We bottle feed. Uh, we let them stay with their moms, but then we bottle feed all of them for probably, probably, um, maybe a week or so. And then they go on to sucker pails. Okay. I was going to say that's the worst week of your life, isn't it? When you've got a bottle feed them little boogers. We don't mind. I know.
36:29Teaching them to drink out of the buckets used to be, that used to be so hard. I used to teach elementary school and I would go out before I went to work and feed the calves and oh my goodness gracious, teaching them how to drink from a bucket was, yeah, you'd lose your mind. So I like feeding them from the bottle and kids love to come and help feed and you know, for the most part, that's actually a fun job.
36:56Do the calves get milk drunk like babies get milk drunk? Yes. They're very cute. They really are. They're a lot of fun. And we moved them into a, we had a really bad windstorm in 2017 and we lost our barns. And we were able to rebuild one of them. One of them hasn't been rebuilt yet. And then we had another really, really bad windstorm at Christmas Eve a couple of years ago. And it...
37:25destroyed our heifer barns. So we're still short couple of barns, but they go into groups of five. So they're like, you know, we usually raise about 20 calves. So they're in these little groups, these little groups and they're like, you know, just little family members and they're very, they're very darling. And so after they've been fed, they're, they're, they are very milk drunk and a lot of fun.
37:55Cause I watched some of the barn kittens, you know, nurse from mom and they would just go fall over on each other and go to sleep. They do, or they get the zoomies. That's, that's the other thing. The little calves, like, you know, like a puppy will get the zoomies and run around. So they're, they are, they're very fun to watch. And often, you know, as we've gotten older, we will let them just go with their moms out in the field. And that's an awful lot of fun to watch the calves.
38:23running out with a herd. They're very silly. Yep. I love what you're doing. I can hear how happy you are about what you're doing. We do. We have a lot of fun. I have to say, like I said, my kids are great. My grandkids love, love being here. So, um, and it's always fun to share. You know, like I said, I grew up in the city, so this is, was all new to me. And I'm, I feel very blessed to, to have, um, stumbled upon this lifestyle.
38:54Well, I'm really happy for you because it's amazing when you find the thing that makes you happy or you find your calling. And if they are the same thing, that's even better. Yeah. Well, my husband will definitely say, I mean, this is all he's ever done. And, you know, it's a, it is definitely a lifestyle. Mm hmm. Yep. I, okay. I'm going to go on a limb for a second. I think that a lot of people have adopted.
39:23lifestyles since COVID. Yes. And it sounds like this was a before COVID thing for you guys, but I have talked to a lot of people over the last year for this podcast. And I would say 85% of the people that I have talked to have come to the thing they're doing because they had time to reevaluate what they were doing during COVID. Yeah. I would say that that is true because our raw milk sales.
39:52I mean, they quadrupled during COVID. And I think because people wanted to come to the farm to get food. Mm-hmm. And it has been, I mean, it's always been, my husband and I love to talk to people about what we do. And I would say since COVID, you're absolutely right. We've met so many people who are wanting to make yogurt and make cheese and make ice cream and just slow things down a bit. And I think that
40:22that I've appreciated that from people. Yep. I think, again, I've said this a bunch of times. I think that COVID was a terrible thing to happen. But some really amazing good things came out of it. Oh, yeah. I did, too. It was a horrible, horrible thing. But I think anything that causes us to stop and reevaluate and look.
40:48at how we can do things better is a great thing. And I think that that caused so many of us to do that. I mean, I feel guilty seeing this, but I mean, we weren't affected. I mean, there was nothing for us that stopped. We still had to milk cows. We still had to take care of all of the things here. So, and we were very fortunate. Nothing was interrupted, milk pick up.
41:16know, those milk truck drivers need awards for picking up milk in all of the weather and, you know, farms that are hard to get to anyway. They're amazing people. But yeah, for us, things didn't stop. But people, more people came to the farm and that's been a blessing. And we've enjoyed getting to know more and more people and sharing about what we do. Awesome.
41:44I'm so glad that it worked out for you because it didn't work out great for some people, but for others it did. It really did. Yeah. Us being one of them, we actually moved during COVID and we are so happy we did it. Yeah. All right, Tammy, thank you for entertaining my questions about dairy cows and milk and how it all works. I really appreciate it. Have a great afternoon. Thank you. All right.
 

Winfield Farms LLC

Today I'm talking with Nita at Winfield Farms LLC. You can also follow on Facebook.
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00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Nita at Winfield Farms, I think is the name of your place. Good morning, Nita. How are you? Good morning. Good morning, Mary. I'm starting to get confused because I've talked to so many people with so many names that I'm like, I know the name of the place when I sit down and when I start to introduce it, I'm like...
00:29What was the name of the place again? So what do you do at Winfield Farms? So Winfield Farms has been around since like 1890s. So it's been traditionally a row crop farm. And after my mother was no longer able to manage it, my sister and I took it over and we now own it. And so we're moving from row crops to more agritourism.
01:00and we're looking, we partnered with an organization that helps us get our food out to food deserts in the city. So we're taking a different approach. We're bringing the soil back up to where it needs to be, but we're also focusing on agritourism and food deserts. Awesome, I love that. Tell me about the history of the farms. I was looking at your website and it's really interesting. So tell me about it.
01:29So our family has a really long, long history in Surry County as free blacks as early as 1804. But this was that's on my grandmother's side, but the wind fields are my grandfather's side. And so the first property was purchased by my great grandfather on a land contract in 1890. And that's where my grandfather was born in 1892. And then my grandfather, then the second track.
01:56we have, which is the one that my grandfather purchased in 1923. So we have a total of three tracks. One was later purchased by my uncle and we've consolidated all of those. But the family has a very diverse history. My grandmother, it's funny, and you ask me this and it won't take long talking about it, but people look at me and they say, well, how old are you if your great grandfather was in the Civil War? And so.
02:24That's more like great, great, great grandfather, right? But my grandmother's father was a Civil War veteran. And she was born in 1892. My grandfather was born in 1890. She was born in 1897. Grandfather was born in 1892. Okay. And my mother was the youngest. So we have long generations. My mother was born in 1930. And so to end up with a great grandfather in the Civil War, he married twice.
02:50And my grandmother was the youngest of his second marriage, his first wife passed. So that's how I end up with that long span in terms of generational gap for us. So we have a lot of history in this story. That's called longevity and that's amazing. It is. Okay, so one of the things I try really hard not to do on the podcast is talk about religion or politics because they're very divisive topics.
03:21However, the fact that your family was free blacks who owned land and made it go is really, really interesting. And I say that as a very, very white woman. I have been called whiter than the queen. And so it's always interesting to me because I actually, I think I have been told, I don't have it verified.
03:48that one of my ancestors was an Abenaki Native American woman in Maine. And so I always feel real divided because I know what happened with the Native Americans. So if I have Native American blood in me, I am very, very conflicted a lot of the time about the things that happened. So I don't, like I don't want to make this a story about how terribly people who weren't white and privileged.
04:18We're treated because I don't really want to get into it because we all know that that's true. But like, it's amazing to me that your family with probably a lot of odds stacked against them managed to do what they did. And now you're doing something that benefits your community. Right.
04:40I'll tell you what, I think you see on our website, and at least we're a part of the Surrey Cultural Trail because of our family's history, we brought together a diverse group of experiences for African Americans because there were African Americans, and yes, slavery was bad. It was terrible. My grandfather's father was the son of his slave owner.
05:07My grandmother's side of the family, they were free in 1804, property owners. And my grandmother's maternal grandfather escaped through the Underground Railroad and went to Canada. And so my great grandmother was Canadian and came down and married this guy who was free. So when you look at our family, it is, I think we have captured about every, well, close to every single kind of experience African Americans had in the 1800s in the US.
05:35from being free property owners, going through the Underground Railroad, being a child of the slave owner, having land, not having land. So it's diverse. And I think that people always focus on just one aspect of the African-American experience. But for us, it was very broad. My ancestors were educated on one side. Helped to fight.
06:04to establish Virginia State University. On the other side, they were not, you know, so it's broad. And so I can see where there's both camps. My family was in the Civil War as free blacks in the Civil War. And then went on to become the first group in the House of Delegates that were black for the state of Virginia. But then we had others, you know, the haves and the have nots are all there in our family. So.
06:31I feel like you might have a book in you. I think we do. I think we have a series. Sounds like a Netflix series to me. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you're a writer, but maybe there's a writer in your family who would be happy to write your story because I would buy that. I would read that. I love books and I love books about history. So okay. So um, so.
06:58What exactly do you do at your place? You said that you provide food for the food deserts around you. So it's what we did. We started out when we took over the property, you know, with row crops, they do not necessarily, farmers don't necessarily when they're renting your land, take care of your land. And so the land had been rented for a while. And so we found that it was not, you know, the pH wasn't being managed properly, the soil wasn't being managed. So we took that back and we have about 100 acres.
07:28And so we put part of it, we've gotten a lot of grants to take part of it back into trees, so what we can manage. Because we're really environmentalists at heart, so to speak. And in order to get the soil back up, we started planning just cover crops, working with the USDA so we could get the grant funding. And we said, okay, the first year we're gonna put in sunflower seeds, because it was the cheapest seed we could get, right? And then we could plan our cover crop where we would get the reimbursement. So many people stopped for the sunflowers.
07:58My sister and I looked at each other and we said, this might be a business. So we had our second annual, we planted them three years now. This year we just had our second annual sunflower festival. People are coming from everywhere. We just let them, we sell them a vase and it's all you can pick some flowers. So that's what we've done in tourism. And it's amazing how many people come to just pick some flowers over.
08:26We have about 40 acres planted and we just cut ass through where people forage for flowers for the... So that's what we do in the fall because we're still trying to rebuild our barn. And so we have to use the weather to work with us in terms of storage. We plant fall crops, brassicas, and from our broccoli to our collards, we have sweet potatoes as well. And so those are the ones.
08:55We work with the Black Church Food Security Network and we're also GAP certified. We got GAP certified last year. And we provide those to 4P, but with the Black Church Food Security Network, we provide food to churches. And that's a plan for this year. They've also invested in a half acre of blueberries, knowing that it will take about three years to get those to market. And we've planted blackberries.
09:23They're fruiting this year, but again, you know, they are more floricane as opposed to primocane. So we only have a few blackberries, but again, all of those we will use to support the Black Church Food Security Network. Okay, what is GAP certified? I haven't heard about this yet. GAP is good agricultural practices. So it's a USDA certification that allows you, that says you practice safe agricultural
09:51methods for harvesting, for growing, you track what animals come in your field. If they make a deposit in your field, then you isolate that area, you have good hand washing procedures, you have procedures for your workers. So we obtained our GAP certification last year, which is really good, and you renew it every year. That allows you to sell to K-12.
10:17to universities. Restaurants don't necessarily have to have it, but people want to know that you have good agricultural practices in terms of hygiene, how you handle your pesticides or pesticides or whatever. So we now have achieved that level of safety in our production process. Very nice. Tell me again what state you're in. We're in Virginia. We're in the eastern part of Virginia, yes. Okay.
10:45I don't know if Minnesota has that GAP certification thing. I've never heard of it. They probably do. I just haven't heard of it. Well, it's through the USDA. So it's a national program. And the USDA subcontracts with the Virginia Department of Agriculture to come out and audit your facilities. And then the paperwork is sent to the USDA. So I'm sure it's a national program.
11:13And for small farmers, they reimburse you for it as well. Okay, I have no idea. Maybe it's for like bigger operations than your usual farm to market kind of little place like we have. I'm gonna look into it though, cause now I'm curious. See, this is what happens. I talk to you guys, you tell me stuff and I'm like, gotta add it to the look it up list. I have a look it up list. So.
11:40Sunflowers. I have talked to a couple people on the podcast about sunflowers. We grow sunflowers, but we grow them because they're pretty and we don't grow very many. To me, sunflowers are the most wonderful thing on earth to grow because they will grow anywhere. And they're beautiful. Ours just started blooming a couple weeks ago.
12:06And I looked out my living room window in the morning when some was coming up and I could see one and I'm like, Oh, it's back. I love this. It makes me so happy. They're just, they're the happiest weed-ish flower I've ever seen. So how many, how many acres did you say you have? We planted this year, we planted just about 30 acres. Do you have?
12:33photos of it on your page, your Facebook page? Yes, we're probably going to, on my Facebook page, I should, I have a lot of ads. We have photos for this year, we have photos for last year. I can email them to you as well. I'm getting ready to update our page, but in some of our videos I have. Yeah, do you guys have a drone? No, we do not.
13:02Do you know anybody who does? It would take aerial photos of your 30 acres of sunflowers? I probably could find someone. And they're on the downside now. I have some other photos I could send you that are not drones. But you know, that's a good idea I never thought about. Yeah, I bought my husband a drone for his birthday. I think the second year we were here. We're coming up on four years next month. And he was like, why did you buy me a drone? He said, thank you. But what?
13:32is this about?" And I said, we have three acres. I thought you might want to be able to take aerial footage of your three acres as things are growing. And he went, oh, yes. So the thing I would suggest to anybody who has anything going on like you do is pick up an inexpensive drone. They're not that expensive and get video of your property because we did it and we were so glad that we did.
14:00trying to build infrastructure or rebuild infrastructure. You don't think about things like this. But yes, it's a good idea. That's a good idea. I do have photos from the ground. And this year we really struggled. We thought we were gonna have crop failure because we went for three and a half weeks with no rain. And even though sunflowers are super, super, super hardy, they did not get a lot of hype to them. But guess what? They bloomed like crazy.
14:30after the rain. They're short little jokers, right? You know? But after we started getting rain they started shooting up. But we really were concerned we were going to lose the crop this year because we went through a terrible drought. The corn farmers are suffering. They are going to have much of a corn crop this year. I know where all your rain went. It went here. Right!
14:55Now we're getting rain and rained on the day of our sunflower festival in the morning. We were thinking, where were you a month ago? Yeah, you guys had exactly the opposite weather from us. Our cucumber plants are already showing blight because of all the wet. And I freaking love cucumbers. And my plan every January.
15:22is to talk to my husband about how many cucumber plants we're going to grow because I want a cucumber every day from the end of June until they die. And I have had one so far and it was wonderful. My son just brought me in another one this morning and that will be gone by tomorrow. And it's going to be a really sad year for us for cucumbers. So
15:45I understand what you're saying and I don't want to bitch too much about the weather because it actually been okay the last week or so and I would like it to continue to be okay.
15:57But you bring up a really important point. People who grow anything are at the mercy of Mother Nature. And some years, she is really kind to us and we get wonderful produce. Other years, she has a being her monnet and she's not kind and you don't know what you're gonna get. That is absolutely correct. And all you can do is
16:25decide how am I going to mitigate the risk at the beginning of the year. And we did not do that well this year, but next year we will have patches of sunflowers where we know we can keep water on them and keep them irrigated. And because I'll tell you trying to irrigate 30 acres is like giving a whale a tick tick. It does not work. You just can't do it.
16:51So we're going to try to mitigate that risk. So we have larger sunflowers. It was disappointing that the size of them weren't great. We had some that we were able to keep water on and they were beautiful, but yeah, it was sad to see. Yeah. So when you say we, who's involved in the farm? It's you, your sister?
17:14Right, my sister and I and my family. My sister, my family, I have cousins. We all, they all participate. Not necessarily to the extent that I do, but I am not going to discount any help that I get. It's all good. Everybody works full-time and, you know, to a lesser degree I'm the only one that has children or a child out of the house. Everyone else has kids
17:43So they're still participating and contributing in a lot of ways. So we're making this a family effort and the goal is to bring all of the parcels back together and put them in the trust for the benefit of the family. I love that. I'm so glad you're trying to keep it so that it is a legacy. Great, great. You can't throw away property that's been in the family since 1890. And we are just determined not to let...
18:13one generation just decide, oh, well, we'll sell it. We wanna avoid that. Yes. And I'm guessing that if it's a trust and if none of the younger generation at some point wants to do anything with it anymore, is there a clause that says that if someone wants to take it and do what you're doing with it, continue it, is that doable?
18:43Okay, I don't know. No because what we've done, our strategy is to have enough of a long-term resource where the funds go into the trust and maintain the property. And a part of what we're doing is we're bringing the younger kids in so that they have an attachment to it like we all did. You know my older cousins and I.
19:12You know, we all grew up with granddaddy, we know, but the younger ones, they don't know. So that's the other thing. We're trying to bring the younger ones in, but we have a long range investment strategy. We have, you know, the loblolly pines, but we've planted hardwoods. We're putting up the barn so that infrastructure can be rented in, not just the land. And then the trees can be harvested over 20 years, 40 years, 50 years. All of that goes into the trust, the mineral rights, everything goes into the trust.
19:41so that it isn't a financial burden for any future generation, that it is self-sufficient. Okay, that makes more sense, thank you. I don't know enough about all of this to speak to any of it, so I'm really glad that you're explaining it to me, thank you. And I'm still learning about the trust too, but the biggest piece that we found to be most challenging for a lot of families is the financial burden that a farm brings with it. Because...
20:10renting the land and getting row crop money for it isn't enough these days to cover the taxes. It used to be, but not anymore. Yep, taxes. Taxes suck. Doesn't matter what is being taxed, it just sucks. And I get it. I get why we have them. I get that taxes are used for things. I understand it. I just don't like it. But that's okay. I don't have to. I just have to pay them.
20:39So, do you guys have any animals or is it all just produce? It's all just produce and orchards. We have a small orchard now. We're building it up of Japanese persimmons, which are pretty popular and they grow well in this area. And the blueberries and we're growing the blackberries, but we don't want animals. That's just a little bit too much. There are too many rules now for what they eat, how to take them to market.
21:08you know, it's just, it's more complicated than, than we want to deal with. Yes. And plants don't eat grain or hay. Um, one of the things that I keep hearing is how expensive it is to have livestock. And we do not have any livestock here. We have, well, we have chickens, but they don't, they don't cost too much to feed because we only have like 11 chickens now, so we're not feeding them too much. Um,
21:36and we have like three cats and a dog. So we don't really have livestock. And the reason for that is that it is expensive to feed livestock if you don't have acres for them to graze and we do not. Correct, correct. And I'll tell you what, even chickens, some of the insurance companies here do not want you to have roosters on your property. Really? I know.
22:01I know one of the farmers who's been mentoring us was just contacted by his insurance company and they said, oh, you have roosters. You know, they did an inspection and they said, well, you got to get rid of the roosters or we're going to drop you because roosters are ugly creatures and they're not friendly. So now roosters are. Yeah, that's all I got to say on that. He's looking for another insurance company.
22:30You've got to be kidding me. That's nuts. Did you not? Huh. Well, I'm going to tell you right now, our neighbors have a rooster and he sings every morning and he is at least a quarter mile away. And that is one of my favorite sounds here. So I am offended for your friend. I know. I love the sound of rooster. I love it. That's how you know you're in the country. Mm hmm. I love it.
22:57Yes, the same neighbor also has or had, I don't know if they still have him. They had a donkey and we could hear him braying too. And that was really fun. Obnoxious, but fun. They also have at least one cow. I assume they have more than one cow. And I think one of them is for milk and she lows in the morning. She does that, that low like moaning noise.
23:25I hear that and I'm like we live in the country. I love this. This is great I know we grew up with animals on the farm and so I do miss them. But right now it's just it's just too expensive Uh-huh Everything is too expensive right now I Again, I don't want to get into politics, but I'm really really really really hoping that by this time next year maybe food
23:54will come down to almost reasonably priced again? I know it and there's no reason for it. The farmers are not getting the benefit of these high prices in the grocery stores. People still want to buy cheap and resell it expensively. I mean even the wholesale prices are not reflective of what it's being sold for in the grocery stores. No, no it's not and it's offensive and I'm going to say this, I've been saying offended and offensive for the last two weeks. I just...
24:24everything is crazy right now. And I wake up in the morning and I'm like, Oh, we're still here. Okay. That's good news. Cause I go to bed at night thinking, is the world going to actually blow up while I'm sleeping? You know, it's scary times, you know, scary times. And I think, you know, not just, you know, politically or whatever, but
24:51because there's so much construction, so much of our farmland is now being developed. Animals are moving closer in, they're not away. We have more bears in our area, so that scares me. I'm looking at just, growing up, I never would see bears close by the farm, or a lot of wild turkeys. Most we had to deal with were deer. But now we even have coyotes in Virginia.
25:21you know, there's so many bears out. So it's just, things are changing in a not so good way. I think we're just over developing, you know? Yeah, things are out of balance and it's not great. You mentioned coyotes. We actually have coyotes around us and we live in the middle of cornfields right now. And every spring, the coyotes have puppies. They have their babies.
25:48And if you are up in the middle of the night, like I sometimes am, because I can't sleep because my husband snores, don't tell anybody. I will sit out on the porch and listen. And in the springtime, you can hear the puppies, the coyote puppies yipping just like regular old puppies. And I feel like all I'm talking about is the sounds that I hear around here. But it's adorable. And then I think, oh, those puppies are going to grow into adult coyotes. That's probably not good.
26:18But I relish in the sound when they're puppies and then when they're grown, I pray that they just stay not on our property because we have a dog that I would not like to see get attacked by coyotes. Right. So it's a double edged sword when you live in the country. It's wonderful. I love it, I do. But you are at the mercy of what is naturally occurring around you.
26:47And so far we've been fine and I am not going to lie. The first time I heard coyote pups, yep, I was tickled. I giggled. I thought it was amazing. But when I heard the howl that the grownups do when they make a kill, I was like, Oh, I don't like that part. That's not good. But like I said, everything seems to be very out of balance right now.
27:13And that makes everybody feel on edge and that makes everybody testy. And so if I had anything to say to the listeners is, is take a breath, do what you can do to make the world a better place and just hope that everything turns out okay, because that's what I'm trying to do. Take care of my little piece of the world. Do what I think is right. And then hopefully everybody does the same.
27:42Yeah, and regarding the grocery prices, we were so excited back in February when we were planning our garden. Planning, not planting, because we had great plans to grow a whole bunch of really good produce and donate like half of it to the food shelf so that there would be really good food for our community. We're not going to have nearly enough to do that. We will donate probably...
28:09if we're lucky, 20 pounds of tomatoes to the food shelf this year. And we donated hundreds of pounds last year. So, so yeah, it's hard. All of this, this year is hard and I'm having a hard time with it. I'm not going to lie. I, my husband told me yesterday, they were out working in the greenhouse in the garden, my husband and my son. And he came in and he said, well, he said,
28:37We've got 200 tomato seedlings to put in." And I said, what? He said, there's 200 tomato seedlings in the greenhouse that we're going to be planting over the week. I said, when did you plant 200 tomato seeds? He said, like a month ago when it was raining. I said, oh. He said, honey. He said, I knew we were going to have to replant. He said, so I just went all out. I said, good. I said, when will those come in?
29:06This is probably end of August.
29:10I said, okay, well the food shop's gonna get a whole lot of tomatoes at the end of August!
29:18Well now, do you all do all the work around your farm? Because that's one of the challenges we have, is just finding people to work. Yeah, honestly, it's my husband and my son. My husband loves gardening beyond all measure. And he has a real job, he has a jobby job that he does Monday through Friday. And his way of de-stressing is gardening. And...
29:45Our garden is like 100 feet by 150 feet. So it's not huge by any stretch, but it produces a lot when the weather is good. So my husband does it because he loves it. He enlists my son to help him because he needs help now and then. And I basically market what we're doing and I cook whatever he brings in for us to cook and we do a lot of canning. So it's us three, that's what we're doing.
30:15Well, I'll tell you, when we obtained the GAP certification, we realized we were moving from large gardeners to small farming. Yes. And we needed more automation for planting as well as for weeding, for cultivating, and that we could no longer manage our garden.
30:40And the size and the volume that we needed because I'll be honest with you when we obtained gap certification There was so much demand for our produce that we literally sold out the first You know, we thought we had enough produce for like, you know two months We literally sold out after our first delivery on all of our broccoli We were just shocked and so this year and that was last year. So
31:10Both organizations that we work with are like, well, Nita, what can we have? I told them, I said, we have to grow our infrastructure in order to be able to meet your need. This year, we're actually trying to invest in cultivators and vacuum seeders because we have to reduce our cost of production by reducing our labor and
31:37cost of buying seedlings. We have to plant seeds. And then we need the barn. Our barn fell down. It was over 100 years old. So we're trying to build a new barn. But I don't even have anywhere to store all the produce that everyone wants. You know, again, I was telling them, I said, look, our winters are warmer now. I can't just leave your broccoli outside overnight before I deliver it in the morning. It's still going to cook. And so that's one of the growing pains that we've had to contend with. And that's
32:06slowing down and not taking so many orders because the demand is there.
32:22That's okay. Yeah, so that's been the challenge. Yeah, and I'm glad that you said all that because there's a lot of stuff behind the scenes that most people don't know about. Right, right, there's a lot, there's a lot. Especially when you're a bigger production situation. Here in Minnesota, we...
32:50don't have a whole lot of restrictions on growing produce. Basically, we here at our place, we don't use any insecticides, we don't use any herbicides, we don't use any manmade fertilizers, we make our own compost the way you're supposed to with dirt and coffee grounds and stuff, you know, not stuff.
33:19from the garden. Like if we need greens for the compost pile, we're going to pull some lettuce and the rhubarb and throw it in the compost. So we're not at the mercy of a whole bunch of regulations as long as we're doing what we know to be right. And that's what we know to be right. But I hear from other people that there's a lot of different restrictions and a lot of different states on what you're allowed to do to be able to sell.
33:48to other people. So we're really lucky here. And I'm glad that we are because if it was a lot of restrictions, our life plan might have been a little different.
34:04Right. With the GAP certification, you do have a lot of restrictions with organic. So, we have to be very mindful of what we do with GAP and with how we handle it. Yes, we do. So, you're right. I think a lot of people don't understand what it takes to farm, what it takes to deliver produce commercially versus just out the garden. It's a big difference.
34:33a big difference. It is and it's a huge difference in regulations, it's a huge difference in manpower, it's a huge difference in time. I mean if we were doing the entire property as as produced we would have to hire people there's no way that we would be able to keep up and that's just three acres. So...
35:00Right, that's right. And we limited our produce that we're growing commercially to about an acre and a half. The agritourism part covers the rest of the acreage and then we're putting in trees. So, no. And you can't find labor. So you have to mechanize as much of your process as you can. And then you have the labor for harvesting and packing. Because people are not working for minimum wage.
35:30They're not because even your migrant laborers, they're making $20 an hour and then you have to provide housing. Yep, it's a different world. It's completely different. So what kind of fruit are you growing? You said blackberries and what else? Right, we have blackberries, we have blueberries, and we have the Japanese persimmon, not the Native American, but it's called a Fuyu persimmon.
35:58And it is super sweet. It's not astringent like the Native American persimmon. So when you bite into that, the Native American one just seems to take your adenoids and suck them out of your mouth. Right. You know, just so dry. But the Japanese persimmon is super sweet and you can eat it just like a peach, you know, and it's firm and nice. And that's a tree? It's a tree. It's a tree. It's a tree. It's a tree.
36:27it has a wonderful, wonderful and expensive fruit too. So is it, I don't know anything about persimmons. In the spring, is it blooms and then they turn into the fruits once they're pollinated? Yes, yes, they do. Do you guys have wicked winds in Virginia? We do have wicked winds and we have those trees staked.
36:58Yes. Okay. The reason I ask is we have apple trees and we got apples last fall for the first time since we moved in almost four years ago. And this spring, all of our trees were loaded with beautiful, beautiful apple blooms. And we had a terrible windstorm come through, took almost every single blossom off the trees. And we have like eight apples out of 20 trees.
37:24So that's the other thing that is tough if you're dealing with fruit trees is that again, the weather really does affect how things happen. I was so excited to finally get Harrelson and Regent apples this fall and there is one red apple on those two trees. One. Oh wow.
37:48Yeah, our winds are not that bad. Our trees are about three years old, so I would not allow them to fruit this year. And I went through and picked off most of them. I got most of them. There were a few. But they were really full of small fruit. I waited too long before trying to get the blooms off of them. But I got the fruit off. And they seem to do pretty good. We are going to have to stake them. And we might use an espalier method, you know, where we just put the wires in and...
38:18and you know drape the leaves kind of attach the branches to the wire but um but no so far the winds are not that bad they're not too too bad. Yeah it pretty much destroyed our apples and I'm starting to understand why when people start apple orchards they do like rows and rows and rows next to each other because the outside rows protect the inside trees. Great.
38:44So we're gonna have to figure out a way to acquire some more trees and do rows. Because we have a row on one side of our property and a row on the other side, and that's not really working well. So we have to figure this out. Great. We have four rows and we're probably going to put up a windbreak as well. So that helps us out. Yes. And honestly, we live in the land of...
39:13flat corn fields. So figuring out a plan for apple trees is probably a good idea because otherwise if the wind picks up when the blooms are blooming, we're screwed. And I would really love to have apples. You know, part of our dream when we looked for a place was to be able to have room enough to have apple trees. Well, we have apple trees. It'd be nice if they actually produced apples. That would be great.
39:39You'll get them. It sounds like you have a plan forthcoming. We have plans for everything. It's just a matter of whether the plan actually works. And then implementing, there's always something to do. You know, you're never finished. You are never finished on a farm. Never. No, and there's always, always some new technique that you didn't know about. And you're like, why in the hell did I not think of that?
40:09I know, I know, I know. But, you know, and then, you know, you have people say, well, you should be taking notes. And you're thinking, all right, you know, if it would be really good if I had time to write all this down. And so you try to dictate it. I try to take a few notes, but that's easier said than done. You know, you need an assistant to take all the notes and jot everything down for you. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Or you just need to hit the record app on your phone.
40:38Right. And record it, go back and read it later, type it in later somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. It's really, I don't want to say it's really hard. I say it's really hard all the time about stuff. It is a lot of things to keep track of and remember and do. And you're one person. And if you're like everybody else, sleep is a commodity.
41:03So if you're lucky, you get maybe four to six hours of good solid rest a night, if you're lucky. So it's a wonderful life. However, it is a lot of things to do in the time that you have to do it. That's correct. And you have to love it. You have to love it. People who say, oh, I want to farm and they don't love it, they're in and out in three years.
41:32because it really does take three to five years before, you know, not for a tomato to grow, I'm not saying that, but if you are really wanting to make farming a career, it is not a slow process, it is not slow, and it is not inexpensive either, you know? So, and I think today now, you almost have to inherit the land, the cost of land is so expensive, I don't even know how new farmers, young farmers are able to get into the business.
42:01unless they've inherited the FAR. I don't see how you can break through. Well, having done this podcast for almost a year now, you're absolutely right. It does tend to be that they get into it through family land.
42:19I think that's the only way, the cost of land. And then if you are a big row crop farmer, the equipment is out of this world. That was the reason why we said, no, we don't have enough land to do row crops. Even though it's a hundred acres or so, you can't even afford the combine to, you'll never make your money back on a hundred acres. If you're not farming 500 to a thousand acres, it's not even worth your time. You can't even pay the lease on the equipment. Yes, and.
42:48It's not just the the outlay for the new equipment It's the the money to keep those that equipment repaired and up-to-date right So host of seed and fertilizer and lime Yeah, it never ends I know I was so worried about our friends that well not our friends our neighbors We don't really know them our neighbors who owned the cornfield around us Because the cornfields were just flooded out this spring
43:18And I was like, what are they going to do? And my husband said, they got it implanted before it started raining so much. He said, probably they will have a crop. And until about the middle of June, they had little baby short corn plants out there. Right now, some of those plants in the middle of the field are eight feet tall. What? So they know what they're doing. And, and there was a.
43:47There was a news story on a couple mornings ago with some of the farmers here in Minnesota. And one of the guys was a corn farmer. And he was talking about that they really lucked out because they had some parts of their fields that flooded out and the seed rotted. But a lot of their corn survived. And he said, just thank God it wasn't hail, because hail would have destroyed the plants. What? Mm-hmm.
44:17So there's a bright side for you. Right. You have to be thankful. You can find that silver lining and no matter, no matter what, you know, you do find it. So, absolutely. All right, Nita. And on that upshot, I'm going to let you go because we've been talking for almost 45 minutes. And I'm so glad we have been. Thank you for your time today. I really appreciate it. All right. And thank you for the invitation. I enjoyed.
44:43I enjoyed chatting with you. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for your interest in the forum. Of course. Have a great day, Nita. All right. You too. Take care. Bye.
 

The Homemade Homestead

Today I'm talking with Crystal at The Homemade Homestead.
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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 Crystal at the Homemade Homestead, which I love the name. Go ahead, Crystal. Crystal, how are you? I'm good. How are you doing? I'm good. Tell me about yourself and what you do.
00:24Well, my name is Crystal. I'm married to my husband, Robert, for 24 years, and we have four kids, ages three to 21. We had a little age gap in between number one and two, three, and four. And so we decided that we wanted to do some homesteading. It started many, many years ago when we lived in Georgia, and then we moved to Alabama.
00:51and decided to purchase a poultry farm, a commercial poultry farm. And if you know anything about commercial poultry, you cannot have backyard chickens if you do commercial poultry. So we ended up selling the poultry farm and buying some land and decided that we really, our dream was just a homestead. Well, more so my dream. My husband was kind of along for the ride, but he gets more and more interested as we go.
01:20So the Homemade Homestead was just a way for me to kind of talk about some of our beginner homesteading. I kind of consider myself a beginner at this point because all the things that we did in the past, I've kind of either forgotten or, you know, things have changed. I had to remind myself of things with with all the stuff I've got going on. But the Homemade Homestead was a way for me to document some of our beginning.
01:50things with homesteading. We're a pretty private family, so we don't allow our children, we don't allow their faces on any kind of social media. So that presents a challenge for me when I want to document things because my kids are always around. So, but that was also a way for me to document my soap making and tallow. I started making homemade tallow balm for my face and homemade soap.
02:18And once I started making it, it was so exciting to me just to be able to make something from scratch that I created that was natural and non-toxic. And then I started selling it. And now I'm just obsessed with all things natural and making whatever I can. Awesome. And I'm going to tell you a secret. I think that everybody is a beginner homesteader, even if they've been doing it for 20 years, because there's always something new.
02:47Oh, yes, absolutely. It's a little scary, you know, when you, especially me, I love to research things and I get on there and I start researching stuff and it becomes a little overwhelming. And then you kind of get paralyzed because you're afraid to start. So I have to kind of withdraw myself from doing too much research and just get in there and do it. Yeah. We had a thing happen here last week. We had black ants.
03:16flying ants coming in our window frame into the house. And we haven't had this happen in almost four years we've been here. And I was like, there's gotta be a home remedy to make these guys not come in. So I went to Google, as everyone does, and it said they really don't like lavender, they don't like peppermint, and they really don't like vinegar. And I had lavender essential oil and I had peppermint oil.
03:44but I already had vinegar in a spray bottle. So I sprayed the window frame and within 24 hours, no more ants. And I was like, hey, it worked. And that's a homesteading hack, you know? Absolutely. There's so many natural, easy ways, even for somebody, I think, that lives on small acreage or apartments or anything small. There's so many different ways you can get into it that are fun and don't require a lot.
04:13Absolutely. You are absolutely right. We did it out of necessity because we were raising four kids on one income and it's more time but less money if you make things yourself typically. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I know with a lot of the things that I make are out of necessity for our health. We each have our own set of health challenges.
04:42I've got really bad migraines. My husband, after we had our poultry farm, he was in there in those houses for hours a day, breathing in just really nasty, dirty air, and he didn't wear a mask. And then after COVID, we had COVID three different times. And I think it might've damaged his lungs a little bit, along with all of the poultry house, just the in and out.
05:08daily breathing that stuff in and he suddenly developed adult asthma, which was a huge hindrance to my homesteading goals because I need him to build things. I make things, but he builds things. It got to a point for a while where he couldn't even walk to the mailbox because he could not breathe. He felt like he was suffocating. He would start coughing so bad that he was gagging.
05:37Just making natural things is a huge part, I feel like, of trying to regain our health. And I want my kids to have a better life than I did. I want them to have good health. And I feel like that starts with me as the homemaker. I kind of guide the temperature of our home. So it's exciting to me. Yes. And I will share a story about
06:07not being able to breathe. When my kids were young, they would get a head cold and they get all stuffy, you know. And there's a thing on the market that is Vicks Vaporub. And I'd been brought up with that and I don't love how it smells and it's really sharp. And so I was like, hmm, I wonder if there's a way to make something like it that isn't something I buy. And so what I did is I got eucalyptus essential oil and
06:35Rosemary essential oil and something else. I can't remember what now. Maybe lemon. And I mixed the coconut oil and the oils together because coconut oil is typically hard at room temperature. And so I tried that on the kids and they were much more receptive to having that under their nose and on their chest because of the lemon scent.
06:59because it masked some of the sting smell from the eucalyptus and the rosemary. So same result, but different ingredients. And I don't know what they put in Vic's vapor rub besides the acid ingredients. So I was very impressed with myself that the kids were like, that smells really good. Can I put it on again? Hey, that actually gives me an idea. Because the
07:27The bombs that I make for my face and our soap, I make out of tallow. And it was kind of an accidental thing, I guess. I was at our butcher one day. I tried to get our meat from a local butcher. I'm a big proponent of shopping local and supporting local businesses. And so I had started buying all of our meat from a local butcher and he had beef fat. And I had read about making tallow.
07:57and making it for your face and all the benefits of it, cooking with it and so forth. So I bought a bunch of it from him and that's when I started making the tallow and I render it down myself. It's a long, painful process when you're making it for face cream because you don't want to smell like a cow. So I have to do a lot of purification on it to make it smell where I would be comfortable using it.
08:26wondering and trying to research different things that I can make with tallow. And I never thought about doing like a Vicks Vaporub. So like you use coconut oil, I wonder if I could use tallow because it's also hard at room temperature. I think you can. Yeah, that would be a great idea, especially with winter coming. And you know, for my husband, he he can be a little stubborn when it comes to
08:53my natural remedies. He'll do it, but he's not exactly pleased about it. So he will try it though. So now I've got an idea. I'm going to make some. All right. I helped somebody today. Yay. Yeah. And the other thing is I was going to say if anybody's going to try using essential oils, the important thing to remember is that they need to be in a carrier oil if you're going to put it on your skin. Yes, absolutely. Because some
09:22some of the essential oils will actually sting or burn your skin and it hurts. So don't do that, do not use it. Great. Yeah, yeah, we, I've been using essential oils for probably maybe six or seven years. I didn't really know anything about it until we moved up here and I started meeting all of these friends that were into the same things that I was, it's kind of funny.
09:50when you find a person that is into one thing, they typically are into other things that you are interested in. So I kind of find that the people that I meet that homeschool because we homeschool are also interested in homesteading and they're also interested in natural health. And it just typically works out that way. So once I started getting into the homeschooling, I met all these friends that were into essential oils.
10:17natural remedies and things like that, and I started getting interested in it as well. It's very fascinating. You found your tribe. Well, I did. I'm not much of a people person, so I have to kind of make myself go out and be around people, but I do find that when I do it, I enjoy it, and I can glean information from individuals that means more than if I'm just Googling it at home.
10:47Yeah, and I am not a people person either. I always say that I don't like people, but I love persons. And when I do actually spend time with my people, I do enjoy it, but it's exhausting and I don't do it often. And it's really sad because this podcast has made it possible for me to talk to so many people who I consider to be my people.
11:15I will never meet you guys. I don't travel. I don't want to. I have no interest in traveling. I like where I live. But I feel like I make a new friend every time I talk to somebody for the podcast because you guys are into what I'm into. Yes. Or I learn something new from you, which makes me so happy every time. Yeah. I'm the same way. My husband tries to, especially for our boys, you know, our children, they need friends and they need...
11:43They need more interaction than I do. So, you know, I kind of do it for them, but me, I would be perfectly content to text or speak audibly to a person and exchange tips and learn things about them, but I don't necessarily have to be sitting in front of you. I'm kind of, I'm introverted in that way. So homesteading seems to work out well for me because, you know, I love to be home and we have a lot of plans for our property.
12:12um... things that i've wanted to do but i didn't feel that they were possible uh... and i don't know if you've ever listened to the holler homestead uh... or watch their youtube videos they uh... they have some property over in north carolina and they do a bunch of videos on how they homestead and one of the things that they had they had a lot of woods and uh...
12:38I've always wanted pigs, but our prop, we've got 44 acres, but it's probably 80% wooded. And they would use their pigs to clear their land. And so once I started watching their videos and I saw how they were able to homestead on land that was very similar to ours, it just, it kind of opened up a lot of possibilities for me and it was very exciting. So.
13:05I've been slowly trying to convince my husband for us to get some pigs and a dairy cow. So I need prayer. Okay. Everybody pray for Chris. She gets pigs and a cow, a dairy cow. Yeah, it's funny how you can make your land work with you, but you have to work with it too. Oh yeah. And when we looked for our 3.1 acre place that we live at now.
13:34My husband said, we need to find a place that has a place for a garden. And I said, yeah, that's, that's great. But you know, we can always make a place for a garden. Yeah. He said, honey, he said, I don't want to have to take down trees and, and clear the land to make a garden the first year. He said, I have been waiting and waiting and waiting for this. And I was like, okay. And so when our wonderful realtor friend found us this place and we came to see it for the first time.
14:04there was an open fieldish kind of thing to the left of the driveway. And my husband looked over at it and went, that's where my garden's going. And I said, you've got your wish, you're set. And he did get his wish the last three years, not this year, but the last three years, that garden has produced food for us, for us to preserve, for us to donate to the food shelf, for us to sell at the farmer's market, for us to sell at the farm stand on the property.
14:33This year, not so much. We've had a ton of rain and the garden is like three weeks behind. Oh, so you're the opposite of us. We've had hardly no rain and our garden is, it's pitiful. It's not even a garden anymore. Yep. We've been, we've been doing, we're not really God people, but we've been doing a little asking Mother Nature to smarten up and maybe provide some good weather.
14:59for us so we can have some zucchinis and tomatoes and cucumbers this year. I ate my first cucumber the other day. So we had one. That's exciting. It was better than none. Yes. And it was delicious. And I tried to share it with the husband, but he was like, Nope, that one's yours. Oh, yeah. We, um, I let my kids, um, I was a little hesitant to do a garden this year because we did own a business over in town. Um,
15:28at the time and we ended up shutting it down. But my neighbor down the street had offered to plow us a little garden and because my husband's tractor was not working at the time and so our tiller was broken, everything's broken. So he had texted me and asked me, he knew that I was wanting to learn gardening. And so he asked me if he wanted, or if I wanted him to plow us a garden and I said,
15:56I would love to, but I think right now we're just so busy because I was running our business, plus homeschooling my kids, plus cleaning and cooking, and my husband worked full-time and traveled for work, so it was really busy. So we closed our business a few months ago, and I texted our neighbor and I said, I know it's late, but I think I'm gonna try a garden. So he came out and tilled me. It's about...
16:23It's huge. It's way bigger than I actually needed, but I thought I'd rather have too much than too little and wish that he had done more So I've kind of divided it and I let my six-year-old and my nine-year-old plant their own little portions of the garden because I want them I want them to understand where their food comes from and I want them to be a part of growing things especially my picky eater
16:48I feel like if he is a part of it, then he's more likely to eat things and make healthier choices. So we all three planted the same soil, the same garden. It's probably maybe 50 feet long. And my boy that planted on the left corner, his garden did way better than mine or my other boy, even though same seeds, same soil, same sun, same rain, same everything. So...
17:17I'm a little confused as to what happened this year, but it's not good. Yeah, we have sort of the same situation in our little field. We actually ended up putting up a greenhouse where nothing would grow because we have gray clay underneath our dirt because we live just above where the river valley starts.
17:46on our property. Yay. And so where the garden grows, we have like six to 10 inches of really good black dirt. And then underneath that is a bunch of gray clay. But at the end of the garden to the tree line, so like the garden again, it's all clay. You dig down a couple inches, it's clay. So if we hadn't known that and had planted, we would not get the same results.
18:13as we do in the other part of the garden. It just depends on what's going on in that soil and underneath it. Yeah, we have red clay. We're red clay as far as the eyes can see. It's it's horrible. Yeah, yeah. I hear about red clay from people in the South a lot. Yeah. Well, when we lived in Georgia, you know, everybody talks about Georgia red clay. And when we moved to Alabama, I called my mom and I was like, wait.
18:41There's red clay everywhere up here. It's not a Georgia thing. It's a Southern thing. So it is really bad. I think, you know, as we learn and grow with this whole homesteading thing, it's, you know, it's a, a work in progress. Um, and I, I've learned a lot this year of what not to do, what I want to do. Um, so next year I've got some pretty big plans on how to grow, um, not just grow a garden, but grow our homestead. And, um, you know, we.
19:11We've got some great, well, I have some grand plans. My husband has different plans than I do. You know, there's different things that he wants out of our homestead dreams and different things that I want. We have had, in the past, we had a dairy cow. So I'm familiar with milking. And that is why I want another dairy cow. I currently drive 30 minutes every Thursday. So today's my milk day to go pick up milk from a local farmer.
19:41but there's just nothing like having your own milk, but it is such a, it's a huge undertaking to do it yourself from, you know, the having the cow milking it every day. Well, we had trained hours to do once a day milking, but I'm really excited to get back to that. And I have a lot of goals of things that I want to learn. I wanna learn all of the home preservation skills.
20:05I have not learned to can yet. I'm a little scared of it, but that is my goal for probably winter when things kind of slow down a little bit, you know, I wanna get into all of those things. Eventually to be pretty self-sufficient as close as we can. Awesome. I'm gonna tell you something about canning. Canning seems scary. Yes.
20:30I did not want to can. I've told the story a few times on the podcast already, but I'm going to do it again. My mom canned in the hottest months of the summer, no AC, in Dean, where it was hot and humid in July, August, and September. And it seemed like the walls would sweat when she would plan. I don't have good memories of canning from growing up. However, my husband and I did it for the first time.
20:58three summers ago in our house that luckily has central air conditioning. It did not make the walls sweat. We were okay. We did break a jar or two in the canner. That was fine. You just pour the, you just pull the cans out that didn't break, the jars out that didn't break. And then you drain the, the water from the canner into a colander in the sink and then the glass gets caught and you shake glass in the trash. You rinse the colander out and you start again. Nobody gets sliced.
21:28Um, have not dropped a can on our jar on the floor yet. Thank God. And I suspect if you've never done it yourself before, once you do do it, you'll probably love it and you'll want to do it again. Yeah. Well, I had a unfortunate incident with, um, a pressure cooker, not a can or like an instant pot, but it was the off brand. And, um, this is years ago.
21:54when we had our dairy cow and I was making yogurt. I had learned how to make yogurt in this off-brand instant pot. And I was homeschooling my boys. They were at the kitchen table doing their score and I had put the milk into the pressure cooker. And you have to boil it first. And I had it on the boil function. And for some reason, I guess I was distracted. You know, young kids will do that to you. And...
22:24all of a sudden this thing just started wiggling and jiggling and making these weird noises. I guess because I was unfamiliar with it and also distracted, I walked over thinking, hmm, that's weird, and I opened it. Oh, no. Yeah, it was horrible. Scalding milk exploded, and it was waste. It was at my waist. The scalding milk exploded out of it.
22:53I had second degree burns all across my stomach, all down my arms. Of course, I screamed and I was crying. My husband works from home and he'd come running upstairs and ask me what happened. I've never thanked God so many times in my life because normally my kids are under my feet. Had they been under my feet at stomach level, it would have got their face. It would have burned their face.
23:21And I just remember leaning over the sink, praising God, thanking him so, so, so much for protecting my children. Not even thinking about the fact that my skin was peeling off because I was so severely burned. So that kind of imprinted in my mind with the whole pressure canning thing. And I know, you know, it's not likely that anything will explode. I think my
23:48biggest fear with canning is botulism, that I would mess something up and not realize it. But again, I mean, that's like anything with homesteading. You've got to overcome that fear and just get in there and do it. Absolutely. Yes. And my mom always said, when in doubt, throw it out. If she had any question about anything she can, it went in the trash and we started again. You were saying that you have big plans and dreams for the homestead and your husband has maybe slightly different
24:18plans and dreams for Homestead. My husband floated an idea the other day and I have learned to just listen and say, I need to think about it or I need to sleep on it because my knee jerk on a lot of things is no. Yeah. I've had to train myself to not do that because he thinks that I'm just being adverse and I'm not. My immediate thought on things that are going to cost a lot of money is no.
24:46And so he floated this idea about how we could get a garage on the property and use half of it for a workshop and then on the other side of the garage we could do more gardening stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah. He's telling me this grand plan and I know my face is doing the, I don't want to do that face. And he looked at me and I said, please don't read my face. I'm listening. I'm considering, can I think about it?
25:14And he was like, well, we can't afford to do any of it yet anyway, so you have time. And I said, okay, good. And I slept on it for a couple of nights. And this morning, I said, you were talking about the shipping containers as the structures. And he said, yes. I said, if we can make them not look like shipping containers, I would be okay with that. And he immediately gets his phone out and pulls up pictures. Oh, goodness.
25:43of people who have used shipping containers to do what he's talking about. And he said, it really doesn't look a lot different than the pole barn, does it? And I said, no, that would be fine. I said, luckily we have a couple of years to think about this, refine the ideas, and have the money to do it. Yeah. Well, one thing you might want to be concerned about with the shipping containers, because we thought about the same thing, not for your purpose.
26:10We had a friend years ago that had a huge operation. He did all organic All-organic meat and he was big into As natural as possible, but he was also big into prepping and he wanted to get a shipping container To I think he wanted to bury it as like an underground bunker. Yeah, which I thought was a fantastic idea But he was mentioning that the problem he runs into
26:39is a lot of them are coated with lead, which would be a health hazard. Because he wanted to, it's not pressure wash, like sandblast, to get it all off. And then you run the risk of that lead leaching into your soil, and especially if you're going to do gardening. So that kind of always stuck in my mind with the shipping containers. I don't know how you would find out if they do or don't.
27:08Maybe something to keep in mind. Google knows everything. We will have to do some real research into that. Yeah. But either way, when my husband says, I was thinking, I say, yes, and? And he tells me, and I listen with as open a mind as I possibly can. And the biggest issue he and I run into is I process information really quickly.
27:37And then I think about what I know about the thing that he's floating and that gets added in. And I'm at my probable answer within a minute. He processes slower than I do. So he comes up with an idea and he hasn't actually looked into it yet. He just fits it out. And so we've had not knockdown drag out fights about things, but because of the way we both think differently.
28:05We've definitely had some discussions about things. That's kind of like me and my husband. I think about every possible scenario. I have already got it all planned out in my head and my husband, he's more thoughtful and he takes more time to process something. But you know that God created him different than me and he knew that we couldn't have two of me or two of him.
28:34It works out good. Although my husband is usually the one that says no between us two because we're both dreamers. We both love to dream and plan. We just do it differently. We're kind of at a crossroads right now with a property beside us that it's an acre and a half property that was cut out of.
28:59a 46 acre track and we bought 44.5 and then they cut the other one and a half out for an elderly lady that lived next door. She is currently in a nursing home and they're not expecting her to come back out. So eventually that property will come up for sale and when we bought this property, we signed first right of refusal that would guarantee that we would have the first shot at buying that if it came up for sale.
29:28And I want that property so bad I can't stand it. And my husband is more like, yeah, we don't have the money to do that right now. And I'm like, okay, well, how can we get the money? What can we do? And I'm dreaming and I've already got, I've got this entire homestead planned out knowing that we're gonna own that land. And he just, he kind of shakes his head and hugs me and tells me, okay, honey, we'll see what we can do. But knowing that we probably won't ever get it.
29:57It's fun. It is really fun to dream. And my husband and I years ago, like 20 years ago, we're talking about what our life looked like after the kids were grown. And we both wanted to live on at least an acre in a decent house where we could grow a big garden and have a dog and all those things. And we never thought that we would be able to actually do it. And some things happened. We lost a couple of parent figures.
30:27and those parent figures were kind enough to leave us some decent fundage. And we thought, why not take that fundage and buy a place where we are really happy till the end of time for us? And that's how that worked out. But had you asked us 20 years ago if we'd be where we are now, we would have been like, we don't have the money to do that. Yeah. So you just got to have faith, I think. Yeah. And not just the money, but just the foresight.
30:57to know, I mean, life is so vastly different now than it was 20 years ago. We're having to think differently, the way the world is going. It's being self-sufficient is so much more important now than ever. And I think there's this huge movement for people that want to be self-sufficient and want to go back to a simpler time.
31:27want to actually homestead, still want to have a simpler lifestyle, you know, kind of as an escape from the craziness of what life is now. So I see a lot of people, especially younger people, that I wish that I would have been like that when I was younger and been into the homesteading thing. And you know, it's fun to see it, you know, to see so many people coming around to the idea of this type of lifestyle.
31:56um, things that I want that my husband wants. I wish, I wish my daughter, my oldest is 21 and she has absolutely no interest in farming, homesteading, um, natural remedies, anything like that. And it hurts my heart a little bit, but you know, she's, she'll have to go her own path. Yeah. My oldest is also a girl. She's 34.
32:25And I just talked to her yesterday and she was talking about how she's watching the pomegranates on pomegranate tree where she lives in Florida. My daughter lives in Florida. This girl is not, she's not a homestead and kind of girl. She loves the city. She loves clubs. She loves good restaurants. You know, she's not into the whole thing. And I was telling her that I usually have 10 episodes in the bank for the podcast.
32:54record it ahead of time and that I was going to be lucky if I had five to put out next week. And she said, you know, mom, she said, I could be a guest on your podcast. And I said, okay. Um, why, how? And she said, well, we have lemon trees, we have lime trees, we have orange trees on a property. She said, and I've been watching those cause I'm ready for a fresh off the vine citrus fruit. She said, and I'm
33:24it's just me and my husband here right now, so we're taking care of those trees for his mom. And she is not out in the country by any stretch. And she said, so we're doing some homesteading things. She said, and she said, my husband cooks from scratch all the time, he's amazing. Wow. I was like, I might just hitch you up at some point to have you talk about that, because you're riding that line between suburban and homesteading, and that's a great line to ride. So.
33:53I have my daughter on at some point. I think that would be great. You know, I think there's so many people that think unless they have huge amounts of acreage or unless they know all of the skills that they're not a real homesteader or they're not gonna ever be able to achieve that type of lifestyle. But I mean, there's literally hundreds of different small things that you can do to be more self-sufficient, to work towards that goal.
34:23Um, you know, that's one of the things that I have to, because I'm a, I'm a, I'm a big, um, if I don't do it huge, then I'm just, I'm not succeeding at it. And I've had to retrain myself in that, you know, that I'm in a season of life right now where I have young children and, um, when Hannah or oldest, when she was younger, I was, I was young when I had her. Um, so with my boys, I'm at a different stage in life. Um,
34:51I see things differently, but life is very, very busy. And so I tend to get down on myself because I haven't learned how to can yet, or we don't have my dairy cow yet, or I stink at gardening. But it's just, it's one thing at a time, one skill at a time. So that's kind of my goal, especially now that we've closed our business down. We still operate an online business,
35:21our storefront is closed down. So I'm home all the time now. And that's kind of my goal over the next year is to pick a skill and learn it instead of my normal. Hey, I'm going to learn 10 different things at the same time and then I get overwhelmed and I learn nothing. So with with the homemade homestead that it's a fairly new Facebook page that I started and
35:48That's one of the things that I really want to start doing is having people follow along with me. So maybe I'm going to learn how to crochet. I really want to learn to crochet and work on that for a set amount of time. And then when I not necessarily master it, but feel comfortable with it, then I can introduce the new skill or canning. I'll start with water bath canning and then work my way up to pressure canning.
36:16That way I can feel like I'm learning something and I'm not too overwhelmed. Yes, the only thing you learn when you try to learn more than a couple things at a time is that you can't learn more than a couple things at a time. Yes, yes. I'm great at multitasking when it comes to things that I already know how to do. But when I'm learning something, I'm the type of learner I need quiet and I want to
36:44I don't want to hear you. I don't want to see you. I need to focus on what I'm doing. And there's no such thing as quiet in this house. So that has prevented me from a lot of the things that I do want to learn. And baseball season's about to start back. So we're going to be in the thick of baseball practice with two of my boys. And come spring, my youngest will start T-ball. Then we'll have three boys in baseball. And I'm going to have to learn how to still do the things that I enjoy because I don't want to.
37:13I don't want to lose the love that I have for the natural, simplistic, homesteading lifestyle. And I feel like sometimes that gets overshadowed by the stressors of life. But it's exciting to me. I love to look and see how other people do it. It gives me ideas on how I can kind of streamline things. Because for my husband, if he's going to be involved in something, it has to be something that he sees as attainable.
37:43So, you know, I need to sit down and write out a list of what's important to me, what I want, and then give that to him so that he can execute it. So you know, I've got, he actually is very open to pigs and a dairy cow. In fact, he thinks we should get a cow first. I'm not sure why, but I did not complain when he said it. Don't ask questions, just go for it.
38:12So it's exciting that we've got so many plans and money always is a big factor. You know, homesteading is not cheap in a lot of ways. So, you know, as we were also right now, and this is something that I posted on our homemade homestead, we're doing the Dave Ramsey debt payoff plan. If you're not familiar with Dave Ramsey, he is fantastic. He's got a program called Financial Peace. I think it's called Financial Peace University.
38:42So it's a way that you structure your finances to pay off all of your debt in an attainable way. And so that's what we're doing right now. We just sold my suburban, got rid of that car payment. We just paid off our truck, got rid of that car payment. And we're just chugging down the line so that we can start building more infrastructure around here and getting the animals that I want because they're not cheap.
39:13Nope, they're not and you got to be able to feed them too. And that's not cheap. No, it is not. But I totally get what you're saying. Oh, I was gonna say something and now I just blanked out because I was thinking about all the bills we have to pay today. So, when my kids were young, and they're not young anymore, oldest is, I mean, youngest is 22, oldest 34. I was really busy too.
39:41And I had to, like I had no choice. I had to learn how to work on things with it not being quiet. And it was one of the hardest things I ever did. And I learned that if I invited the kids into helping me with whatever I was doing, they were a little quieter. Like I learned to crochet when my kids were six. The youngest was six, next one was.
40:1010, next one was 12. Oh wow. I think the oldest was busy doing other things. But they learned how to do the chain stitch and the single crochet, and that was about as far as they wanted to go. But they did it with me, they learned it with me. And if I was learning a new recipe, I would be like, you guys wanna come learn how to make, I don't know, chocolate chip raisin oatmeal cookies? And invariably the two younger ones were all in cause cookies.
40:39Yes. And so all the kids learned the things that I was learning along with me, which was really fun. And I know your youngest is little, little, but soon, soon youngest will be big enough to kind of join in on the things you're learning if it's not totally dangerous. Yeah, it's hard. I think I'm the type that I'm very servant minded. I want to serve my family.
41:09that for me that involves you're not coming in here and helping me. I'm going to do it and I'm going to serve you. And I've had to break that mindset, especially with my boys, being patient enough to let them come in and help me. And especially with the three year old, because he wants to be held. He wants to he's not very patient. You know, he just wants to get in there and do it. So it has been something that I've had to to really.
41:38be intentional about and stop myself and say, hey, even though this is hard, I'm doing them a disservice by not allowing them to help me. So it's a learning curve for me because that is very hard. I would rather you go sit down and me do it all for you because mom is going to pamper her babies. But really, I'm just hurting them in the long run by not allowing them to help.
42:06the more that you teach them about life skills, you are serving them for the rest of their natural lives. So I'm gonna encourage you to get them involved and teach them because number one, boys, boys don't get taught life skills the way that girls do usually. So you are actually doing them the biggest service ever by teaching them how to cook, how to sew, how to create, how to clean, how to do their own laundry, and...
42:36When they get older, they do it themselves, which means you don't have to do it. Yes. Yeah. There's, there's, um, a lot of things that my husband teaches them. He's a lot better at letting them help. Um, but you know, it's a lot of it's the way that I grew up. I grew up, my mom, um, she, she did all the, she is the way that I am. And I learned it from her. So I didn't learn how to cook as a child. Um, you know, she didn't really teach me. How to.
43:06hook or do now I did learn how to clean because she made us help to clean but you know with my boys I want them to not just learning the skills but being included in something and we're a very close family we spend a lot of time together and so if we're going to be spending time together we might as well be doing things that are functional and then learning something from it. So and that's a big benefit of having.
43:34animals and having a homestead and gardening because it's good things that they can learn that are practical and I think when their minds are busy on something that's worthwhile They're less likely to get in trouble as they get older Yes, and as a God person you are a God person. Yes, I understand that God created the world and is like nurturing the world and
44:02in teaching them to cook and garden and do those things, you are giving them the gift of nurturing that you believe in. Absolutely.
44:13So I'm all for it. I think it's great.
44:18Yep, it's exciting thinking about all the things that they're going to learn and they're getting older. And naturally, I want them to lean towards what we see important. And the only way they're going to do that is if they're taught it, especially when they're younger, it's more likely to stick. So I remember the first time when we butchered chickens and my daughter was absolutely mortified and how disgusted she was.
44:46And she was a teenager and I remember her saying, that is so gross. I'm going to McDonald's. I said, Hannah, do you know where their stuff comes from? I don't care, I'm going there. And she was just so grossed out by it. So, you know, I think back to that and how exposure to things like that, now when my kids are younger and for them to have the appreciation that an animal is giving its life up for us to eat.
45:14You know, and teaching them hard work, good work ethic. There's just so many benefits that this lifestyle provides for my children and for us. So it's exciting. I've got so many plans and this, I think talking about it kind of reignites some of those cause you know, you get kind of down and just kind of forget what your goals are. And so talking about it kind of reignites that.
45:43Yes, absolutely. The more you talk with people like me and your tribe of people who are into the things you're into, the more things pop in and you're like, why not? Why not try that? I say why not more now than I ever have in my whole life. Yes, might as well. Why not try it? The worst thing that happens is it doesn't work and we try something else. That's right. That's me and gardening. I'm going to try again for a fall garden. So, you know, I learned a lot.
46:12And it's just a learning curve, just like anything else is. Grownups have to learn it just like kids do. Yep, and the minute you stop learning, you might as well start digging the six foot grave because that's it. That's right. That is true. The more curious you are, the more you're willing to learn, the longer things last and the happier you are because you're feeding your brain. Absolutely, absolutely. All right, Crystal, I have really enjoyed this conversation.
46:40Do not leave me when I stop recording because I need your file to upload completely. I keep meaning to tell people that at the beginning and I keep forgetting. Oh no. And thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you. I'm gonna go plug my phone up. All right, thanks. It was nice talking to you. Bye.