A Tiny Homestead

Today I'm talking with Lynne Bowman, author of Brownies For Breakfast. You can follow on Facebook as well. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Good morning, Ms. Lynn Bowman. How are you? Well, like you. I'm ready to roll, but prepared for all kinds of crazy stuff today. How about you, Mary? It's already been crazy stuff. Lynn and I have been trying to get Zoom to work for last 10 minutes. We are not technically broken. 00:29 but you would think we didn't know anything about technology. Well, to me, it's always the fault of the UX engineers. Always. It's not my fault. We'll blame it on them. Okay. So today I am talking with Lynn Bowman and she is the author of Brownies for Breakfast. And the reason I wanted to talk to Lynn is because my kids used to get brownies for breakfast two days after their birthdays. I made them brownies for their birthdays. 00:59 A swell way to celebrate. my brownies are as brownie as brownie gets. Difference is, Mary, they are made with no sugar. They are made with pumpkin, nut butter, cocoa, let's see, baking soda, eggs or egg substitute if you don't eat eggs, and know, salt, couple other little things, cinnamon. 01:27 But it's all whole food, good food, real food. And I guarantee when you set them down in front of people, they will look exactly like a quote, real brownie because they are real. Then what happens is somebody eats them and they go, oh my gosh, that's the best brownie I ever ate. is a, just don't ever tell them there's no sugar in them. Because when you do that, they go, oh, no thanks. Right? 01:58 Yeah. But there is something called Alulose in them. Terrible name, terrible name, wonderful product. It's real food. It's one ingredient. Uh, it doesn't give you tummy ache. It doesn't leave a funny aftertaste. And that's what I want everybody to know about. There is a way you can quit sugar because yes, you need to, you know, you need to. 02:25 You can quit sugar if you have a couple of tools like one, Alulose. You will never miss sugar if you have it. have to look this Alulose up because I listened to your interview with Amy Fagan on Grown It in Maine and you mentioned it on her podcast too. I meant to look up Alulose yesterday. I got busy and didn't do it. So shame on me. Shame on you. You did not do your homework, girl. I didn't. 02:53 It was terrible. I'm sorry. But you know what? And I know I sound a little crazy granny here because yes, I am. having spent most of my life, nearly all of my adult life trying to stay healthy and on my feet and may I say succeeding, I know some stuff about how to eat really well if you're diabetic, if you're trying to avoid chronic disease. 03:22 If you don't want to carry around extra weight, all the things, if you don't want to have heart disease, if you do have heart disease, all the things are really not complicated to deal with if you know a few things about how to eat. Really easy. You probably already know, but are you doing them? Real food, whole food, mostly plants. You can eat some other stuff, but mostly plants. Okay? Work together. Oh yeah. 03:52 I love a good salad. I do. And I absolutely love like steamed broccoli and steamed green beans and steamed whatever green veggie there is. okay, but what I'm talking about too is sneaky vegetables. You know, vegetables that don't come onto the table screaming, Hi, I'm a vegetable. I'm good for you. I like things that come onto the table like my brownies going, there's some vegetables in here, but don't worry about it. 04:20 Oh, like, like covert veggies. Kind of. Yeah. And if you've got children, the way of course to get kids to eat veggies is to have the kids raise the veggies. If you have any dirt, if you have pots, they love growing vegetables. Two, having the kids cook themselves, you know, with their own little darling hands, starting very, very young. If they cook it, they'll eat it. But 04:48 The recipes in my book, a lot of them are, they're vegetable forward recipes, but they're not salads, particularly, you they're not like a bunch of raw vegetables with some stuff on it. They're, mean, here's soups. Let's talk for a minute about soups. Um, Americans don't eat soup. Do you eat soup? Oh, I make, I make soup, let alone eat. Yeah. Good. Okay. That's great. Because it's a super way to. 05:18 Eat up what you have to use what's in the fridge to not waste food and to take what you have and make it something fabulous and then turn it into something a little different every day without a big deal. mean, my superpower, if I have one, was making dinner in 15 minutes. know, I'd come, like moms do now, you'd come screaming home with people yelling and dogs barking and t

Today I'm talking with Annie at Annie's Homestead. You can follow on Instagram as well. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Annie, Annie's Homestead in Idaho. Good afternoon, Annie, how are you? Hi, Mary, I'm doing so well. How are you? I'm all right. What's the weather like in Idaho this today? It's actually very beautiful today. We're sitting at about 90 degrees, so it's warm. 00:29 Our skies are clear, thank goodness, and it's just a beautiful, bright, sunny day. So I have no complaints over here yet. Well, give it time. My dad used to say, you don't like the weather, wait five minutes, it'll change. He sounds right. Yeah, and I'm in Minnesota and it is about 70 degrees out. It is bright and sunny and big, puffy marshmallow clouds. It's really lovely. Those are my favorite. I love those. We don't get those too often. 00:59 No. love them. We are really hazy. Our skies have been just like the sun, you know, has just having a hard time come through all the haze that we've had lately. So it's nice when we have clear skies and it's even better when we have puffy clouds. I love those. Yeah, I remember laying on my back as a kid finding shapes in the clouds. I haven't done it in years. That might be something I have to do this fall. I don't know yet. It's a good exercise. 01:29 Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so tell me a little bit about yourself and about what you do. So I am a homesteader. I'm actually off grid in the mountains in Idaho where my husband and I, we are in the Sawtooth mountain range and we love, love, love being out in the middle of nowhere. So we got really lucky when we were searching for land. We found 01:57 a 40 acre property. It's all undeveloped when we bought it and two sides of the property border at the Boise National Forest. So we are just secluded and we love it. We have elk and turkey and mule deer, little baby quails running through the property all the time. And it's just, it's heaven on earth. It's amazing. So we actually bought our property in 2021. 02:27 and started developing it very soon after. My husband is just a mastermind. Like this property would be nothing without him. He helped design all of the infrastructure. So we've got our solar panels. We've got really large solar panels. I'm not sure exactly what the size of them are. I just know that they're really big. 02:53 We've got a lot of those. We have about six of those. And so that's where we get all of our solar power to run our electricity. And we are on a well. Our well is probably dug about 150 to 200 feet down. Most of our neighbors, they were having to drill down about 400 feet. So we feel really fortunate to have the very strong well that we have. We've got a really strong stream. 03:22 down under all of the rocks, which is just a blessing. So... Let me jump in really quick for anyone who doesn't know, the deeper you have to dig a well, the more expensive it gets. Yeah. Thank you for pointing that out. I know. have just, we spent so much money homesteading, you know, and it's everybody's dream, but it's almost so hard to do it because it's so expensive. And we live out in the mountains. 03:51 So we always joke, you know, it's not a funny joke, it's kind of a painful joke, but we always say that we have to pay the mountain tax to any of our contractors coming out there because everybody is always more expensive when of course you have to, you know, go through the back country and drive on roads, you know, that are full of ruts. So it's been a really fun adventure. got occupancy on the home that we built. 04:21 last May. So we've been living full time out there for about a year. And oh my gosh, it's amazing. So we've got a garden, a greenhouse, we built an indoor grow room, because for those weird people who are always watching the aerials spraying and the chem trails and we're like, oh my God, how can I grow produce that isn't covered and all of these chemicals falling from the sky? 04:50 So we did that. I do outdoor garden as well, just because of space. And then we've got our small flock of about 70 birds. We do chickens, geese, and ducks, and we use them all for meat and eggs. I love goose meat, so I think we'll always have geese. As much of a pain as they can be, they're very delicious. So I think we'll keep them around for a little while. Okay. 05:20 Number one, I'm a very live and let live kind of lady. And so if you want to have, if you want to grow plants inside so that the stuff in the air outside doesn't get on them, I am all for that. I love that. It has been a challenge. I am kind of new to gardening. I've, you know, I've had houseplants, you know, for about, you know,

Today I'm talking with Lara at Mulberry Hill Microfarm. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Lara at Mulberry Hill Microfarm. Good morning, Lara. How are you? Good morning. I'm fantastic. Thank you so much for inviting me to chat with you guys. I appreciate that. Oh, you're welcome. I'm so happy when people say yes, because without you, I don't have a podcast. 00:29 That just helps. Where are you located, Laura? I'm in Northwest Arkansas in a tiny little bump in the road called Evansville. Okay, how's the weather there this morning? Hot. Hot and very sticky. Actually, for us, it's been a fairly mild summer. We've had a lot of rain. 00:56 And typically this time of year, we're sitting at 97, 98 degrees. Sometimes we're over a hundred. And really it's just been this week that we're getting into the nineties solidly. And for us, that's a nice break. Yes, we're having a break today too. It's supposed to only be 71 degrees for the high and it's supposed to rain all day. 01:25 Oh, that sounds heavenly. Yeah, I think there's probably a short nap in my future this afternoon because this is very good sleeping weather. Oh, excellent. Be bold. Make it a long nap. I can't. I've got too much to do, but I might crawl into a book for a few minutes and see if my eyes close. We'll see what happens. That's what happens when you get over 40 years old. You realize that naps are a gift. Right. Remember when we used to fight those? 01:54 Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. Now that was silly. Now I now I want them badly. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So tell me about yourself and what you Well, I've been an educator for almost 20 years now, and I think that's something that's run in the family when we get together for holidays and reunions. It feels more like. 02:20 teacher professional development as much as it does, just seeing each other and catching up on family news. But there's also been a strong presence for conservation in our family. My grandfather worked in Southeast Arkansas conservation efforts. 02:46 Water purity, he did a lot for Felsenthal Wildlife Preserve in South Arkansas to work with them and make sure that chicken plants weren't dumping water into the system and things like that. And so they were avid hunters and fishermen on the Saline River for a very long time. 03:11 And so even though I wasn't terribly close to my grandparents, there was still that thread that was always present about conservation efforts and ecosystem health and whatnot. And I think I carried that with me for a long time, kind of dormant. There were marriages, there were children, there was the career in education that was very successful, but there was always this sort of 03:41 little nagging in the back of my soul that said, a little land, just a few trees here and there, just a few birds here and there. And so I started that journey kind of late in life. I did not start until I was 48. I am 52 now and I am loving it. 04:05 I feel like there is a fulfillment here in some of the things that I'm doing on my tiny acreage. We're only just over an acre and a half. But there is a sense of purpose and meaning here that I have finally sort of plugged into and it's made my life very rich, very wealthy. 04:33 Fantastic. I figured that you didn't have a lot of land because you are a micro farm, right? Right. I think that's probably still a generous labeling for us. I started out here 150 years ago. My tiny little patch of land was hardwood forest, hickory, 05:02 Elm ash, hackberry, black walnut, black locust, and it was cleared for cattle grazing. Uh, but there have not been cows on my part of the property for probably 60 years. Uh, so it was just mowed as a lawn. The trees had been cleared long ago and so the topsoil had completely degraded. I don't know. 05:32 sort of slid downhill into the creek and is probably sitting at the bottom of Lake Tenkiller right now. And I just felt like I wanted to regenerate this little piece of nature. And so that's been my focus for four years. When I first came out and started planting trees again, 05:57 There's a layer of grass and grass roots and then there was just slabs of clay. No root systems, no organic material. There were places where there weren't even worms present and that kind of thing. And I've been working for the last four years to change that. And I have been, I think truly gobsmacked at just how quickly 06:26 the ecosystem is changing, even though the acreage is very small. Yes, I'm not surprised at all at how fast it's changing for you because nature wants to do what nature wants to do. So if you just take away the things that are preventing nature from doing what nature does, she's go

Today I'm talking with Maggie at New Frontier Farms LLC. You can follow on Facebook as well. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Maggie at New Frontier Farms LLC in Lonsdale, Minnesota. Good morning, Maggie. How are you? Good morning. I'm good. How are you? I'm good. I would ask how the weather is, but since I'm only about 15 miles away from you, it's gray and cloudy and may might rain, right? Yes. That seems to be the theme this summer. 00:29 Yes, and thank God it's not just constant pouring rain like it was last year. I don't know how you guys did, but our garden did really poorly last year. 00:40 Yeah, so I actually had a baby in March and I really underestimated how having a March baby would impact the farm compared to a September baby. And so we didn't plant a garden. But oh, because I had the baby and it was just it was a lot between kidding and camming and farrowing and the baby. The garden did not get planted. But everyone told me my garden did terrible this year. And I was like, you know, maybe this was a good year to not not plant a garden. 01:08 Yes, we, my husband's the gardener. I've talked about this a lot on the podcast and he planted tomatoes three different times. And I think we got our first tomato at the end of August last year. Oh goodness, that's crazy. Yeah. I like to joke. Um, I grew bacon seeds instead, cause I have to put my piglets on my garden. Um, things are growing great this year. So I think they did a good job of fertilizing, but it was all we could manage last year was bacon seeds. Well, you're only one person. 01:37 and you were growing a human and then birthing a human, so that is completely understandable. Okay, so I'm really excited to chat with you this morning because I looked at your Facebook page and you have so many things going on, so tell me about yourself and your farm. Yeah, so my husband and I have wanted to be farmers our entire life. We both grew up one generation removed from production agriculture, and so our grandparents farmed, but our parents had chosen to not. 02:05 And my mom had always wanted to be a farmer, but she was turning 18 during the 80s farm crisis and my grandpa just didn't want that. It was not a lucrative career at the time. And so my mom has always worked in agriculture. And then we always had beef cattle on our farm. was my grandpa's retirement gig. And so he retired from dairy cattle and got a hundred beef cows. So I grew up spending my summers in the pasture with the cows and fell in love with. 02:34 with everything to do with farming. I was very involved in 4-H, which just kind of fostered that love. And I went to South Dakota State University and I studied dairy production and speech communication with a minor in animal science, all with the goal of someday owning my own farm. While I was there, I met a man in a similar situation. He wanted to have his own farm someday too. And so we fell in love and that's my husband, Nick. 03:02 We got married in 2017. And right after college, we actually worked on a ranch and it was a really good experience. We were kind of thrown to the wolves and had to care for 600 head of beef cows on 20,000 acres in western South Dakota. It was a cool experience. We gained a lot of knowledge in a very short amount of time. And then we worked various in town jobs after that. Our oldest son came a little early. 03:31 Um, and that kind of whole experience really pushed us back home to Minnesota. So we moved back home with the entire intent of buying a farm. Um, we moved in late 2019. Um, and by the time we were working on selling our house in South Dakota, COVID had hit, um, and it had really, you know, changed the landscape of people at the beginning of COVID people weren't buying houses. Um, so it stalled things out, but we finally found our farm here. 04:00 in May of 2020 in Lonsdale. So we purchased that. We have 36 acres. 18 of those acres were in cropland when we purchased it, but it's all highly erodible land. And so we turned it all into pasture. It's not very good cropland. So it's been quite a few years process turning all that into grassland and it was very eroded. So a lot of our topsoil is in our swamp. 04:30 And so it will be many, many, many years until much of it is really fertile again. But we are seeing a lot of progress. It's made between our chickens, our pigs and our cows. It's getting there, but it's been a process. So we milk a herd of dairy goats. We milk about eight right now. We have a herd of cooney cooney pigs. They're kind of our primary product. So we sell a lot of pork. We do a lot of haves and holes, and then we do individual cuts. 05:00 And t

Today I'm talking with Casey at Haggard Mountain Homestead. You can follow on Facebook as well. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Casey at Haggard Mountain Homestead. Good morning, Casey. How are you? Good morning. I'm great. How are you doing? I'm good. Where are you located? We are in Western Pennsylvania, a little bit outside of Pittsburgh, PA. Is it raining? Not today, but apparently it's supposed to, I think tomorrow. 00:30 Have you been going through what my parents have been going through in Maine where it's rained all every day for the last 10 years, it seems like? Basically, yeah. Every single weekend it's been raining. So a lot of our projects have gotten pushed back, for sure. But now we're having a heat wave, so opposite. Great. That helps a whole lot, doesn't it? Yeah, it's literally the exact opposite, though. We went from cold and rainy to now, I think it's supposed to be like 95, 96 today. Yeah. 00:59 talked to my dad the other day. Whoops, I talked to my dad the other day and he said, honey, he said, I swear, it feels like I have been trying to get my summer garden in since two summers ago for this year. I'm like, yeah, we went through this last year too. So, all right, so tell me about yourself and what you do at the Homestead. So how much of a backstory do you want here? Cause I can talk, trust me. 01:26 Tell me what led you to having the homestead. All right. So my husband and I got married in 2016 and started looking for a house. And we knew that we wanted a little bit of property. And at that point, I just wanted a garden, some chickens, all of that. And we ended up purchasing our property. have a little bit under two acres in 2018. 01:55 Got our chickens, got our garden in, and it's like we can't stop. It's honestly been addicting. We started with a garden and the chickens and we put in fruit trees. He's gotten into honeybees. Now we're doing flowers. We've done meat chickens and now I'm doing the social media stuff too. You are cementing my belief that once you get into this, the questions that come up are why not? 02:25 And what's the worst that could happen? And I'm very, very careful about the second question. I try not to say that outside where the universe can hear me. Oh yeah. If you put it out there, it might actually happen. Well, if I'm going to say it outside, I say what's the best that could happen instead of the worst? That's fair. I like that too. And that way the universe is like, what do I do with that? 02:51 hopefully give you the best that can happen because that's what we want to put out there, manifest it. Exactly. And that's what I'm kind of getting at is that if you try, the worst thing that happens is it doesn't go quite the way you wanted it to. But if you don't try, nothing happens. Yeah, that's very true. We actually, we have a five-year-old son now and teaching him to emotionally 03:18 regulate himself and trying to like give him these life lessons and how to cope with things. That's actually, he's, I'm a perfectionist and he's very much a perfectionist as well. And that's, I'm trying to tell him, I'm like, what happens if it, if you fail, you just learn a lesson and you move on. Yeah, I used to be a perfectionist and then I realized that it was stopping me. Like if I couldn't do it right the first time, I didn't want to do it at all. And 03:46 I finally just was like, okay, start something that you don't have to tell people about. Just try something and see if it fails. If it fails and you want to share about what you learned, cool. If you don't, no one has to know about it. Yeah, I like that too. I think I'm 34 now and honestly, through all of high school, was scared to try new things because I was so much of a perfectionist. And I think at this point in my life, 04:14 Not that I stopped caring, but I stopped caring what other people think. And now especially I make silly videos for the internet. Sometimes I act a fool and I just, don't care what they think. If they think I'm an idiot, so be it. There's a really good saying that what other people think is none of my or your business. What they think about me or you. And it's true. What other people think about me is not my business. It's in their head. Yeah, I like that. 04:42 So I try to hang on to that and I try to realize that if I screwed something up, other people probably have too. And if I keep trying and share it, people will learn from that. So I'm trying to be very positive about my failures. And when you're home studying, I feel like you kind of have to be, because there's a lot of failures and a lot of learning. It's the best part. The learning is the be

Today I'm talking with Angel at Feeding Feasible Feasts. You can follow on Facebook as well. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Angel at Feeding Feasible Feasts. And you're in Washington state, right, Angel? Yes, I am. Okay. Awesome. How's the weather in Washington state? It is, well, where I am in Washington. It's beautiful today. Yeah. 00:26 Good. was a very, it's very warm here in Minnesota. It's very muggy. Midwest. Yeah. It's going to be warm out there. Are you in the Midwest? Did you say Minnesota? Yes. 00:43 Yes, it's really muggy. It's gross. And that's par for the course for July 2nd. I don't know why I'm even saying it out loud. Everyone knows it's muggy in Minnesota in July. So tell me about yourself and Feeding Feasible Feasts, because I am so curious to know what you guys do. Well, I'll give you a short version. I'm a little on the older side, so I've done quite a bit in my 01:11 I guess in my world, in my life. Uh, let's see here, uh, born in Chicago, 1961. So, uh, here before women could vote and black folks to vote and all of that, uh, moved here to the state of Washington, uh, Seattle, Washington. And let's see, that would have been 20 or no, 1989. We moved here. Uh, my husband and I, and we have seven children that are all adults. 01:40 Opened my first business here. Well, my second business. First business here was a promotional products company and had some pretty nice contracts with large companies. Developed a transportation model where we folks could get online and order their promotional products and have them delivered directly. So we did that with Labor Ready and True Value and some of the large companies out here. 02:08 I sold that company, moved on to real estate. My mother got very ill. So I had her here. So I went into real estate so I could control my schedule. fairly well with that until the downturn in the economy at a time. So I sold my book of business and moved into another arena here in Washington state at the time was a pretty hot topic, which was recreational cannabis. My husband in his years growing up. 02:37 enjoyed recreational cannabis. I myself never and still haven't tried it, but really felt that the medical part of that unit to be examined and supported. I became an advocate, joined our liquor control board as a board member to help with oversight for that particular industry. We still, we actually have at this point two retail cannabis licenses. 03:05 that we have in another county, not where we live. And I sit on the board here for the Washington Food Coalition, which is a coalition designed by congressional districts. And I am the representative here for that. As well as I had a chair with our city here for economic development on their advisory board, as well as I was a political delegate this year during the 03:35 the political race. And now we are feeding feasible feasts. It came about because I am a heavy gardener. garden, we have a pretty good swath of property here. I garden my entire portion of my house yard is a garden. So I produce quite a bit of food. And one of the things we do with feeding feasible feasts is we do teach folks how to can, freeze, hydrate, 04:05 You know, how to preserve food. I have about 16 fruit and nut trees in my backyard and two in my front yard. During the time of COVID, well, before all of that, I discovered that my neighbors didn't actually like zucchini as much as I thought they did. So I had to come up with a better method of, you know, finding a home for all of the food and found a national organization. I don't know if you know about it. It's called Food is Free. 04:35 And it is built for people like me, gardeners like me, who just produce way more food than they're ever going to eat. And you, it's a simple concept. You just put a card table on a corner with a sign, handwritten, if you like, that says food is free. Put the food on the table and people who drive by can take whatever they like. Awesome. I didn't know about that. It's a national movement. It's actually, we have several pods of that movement here in Washington state. 05:04 part of the effort during Kovac to rescue, had a potato onion problem at the top of Kovac when the schools closed down and restaurants closed down. Our farmers were not able to sell all of the produce. And so we did a huge rescue movement at that time. Several of the large food agencies here and lots of small ones like mine at the time drove over to Eastern Washington and we brought over, I don't know how many thousands of tons 05:34 potatoes and onions, but we were able to do to because he come from rotting in the field and in arms

Today I'm talking with Pam at Mother Nature's Apprentice. You can follow on Facebook as well. Pam's new book, Wonder and Joy for the Wired and Tired: A Guide to Finding Inspiration and Well-Being in a Wonder-Filled World, releases in August 2025. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Pam, at Mother Nature's Apprentice in Kentucky. Good morning, Pam. How are you? I'm very well. How are you today? I'm good. How's the weather? It actually is nicer today. It's a bit overcast here in beautiful Northern Kentucky. We've been having 00:28 like most of the country, some hot weather, but we did get some rain and I think we may get a bit more today. How about you? It is lovely in Minnesota right now. The sun is shining. There's big puffy clouds in the sky, bright blue, and it's about eighty to seventy five degrees, I think, if that it's the first really nice morning we've had in just under a week because it's been really muggy here. So. 00:56 I was very happy to drink my coffee sitting on the porch with the window open and see the rogue raccoon we have visiting us. Oh, the rogue raccoon. Yes, we have one of those. How often does that little critter visit? 01:14 Yeah, our little guy looks like he has a leg that is maybe hurt because he looks like he's hopping a little bit. I've been calling him hop along in my head. And we don't have a live trap big enough to catch him. Plus our cats would get caught instead of him. And my husband wants to end his suffering with a firearm. And I am okay with that. The problem is he's never where we can get to him. 01:43 They are smart. They're very smart. Yep. And I saw him actually face on toward me the other morning and the sun was coming up. He's so beautiful. I'm like, God damn it. I don't want to kill this animal. He's gorgeous. Yeah. Those are tough calls, aren't they? I hate it. I absolutely hate it. And I know it's part of the life that we have chosen, but I hate it so much. Pam, it makes me sad. Yeah. 02:10 Yeah, I know we've been there a couple times. don't have the beautiful weather. You have, but we get things off the pond and whatnot and it just breaks my heart every time. 02:23 Yeah, it's hard, but if we don't put him down, a car is going to hit him. And I don't know which is worse. So we'll see what happens. Okay. So tell me about yourself and about Mother Nature's apprentice. Ah, well, I'm, I was born and raised in Indiana. And actually I'm a dual citizen. I'm a Canadian and a U S citizen. Lived here in 02:52 until my early twenties and then found my way actually to Western Canada, the beautiful province of British Columbia, which is just north of Washington state and lived there for quite a while. But you know, as beautiful as Canada was, I mean, I've always loved nature and backpacking and an incredible geography there. You know, when you're born somewhere, that's still where you consider home. 03:22 So I found my way back to the Midwest and not Indiana though, my husband and I, you know, live as I said in Northern Kentucky and we have sort of three acres that we've reclaimed. I'm a wife obviously, a mom, a grandma. Our kids are grown. We've got a bunch of little ones running around and we love nature. 03:50 Professionally, I guess that's the other hat I wear. I have a PhD and earned PhD and I'm a nurse practitioner clinician and an epidemiologist where I'm also an adjunct prof here at Northern Kentucky University where I investigate winter joy, wellbeing and nature, how nature has such a wonderful, powerful impact on our health and wellbeing. 04:20 And you're an author too, right? Yes, that was unexpected. As an offshoot of a research study I did, which talked about wellness versus well-being and nature and extraordinary ornery, cetera, I decided to indulge in my passion for creative writing. So I started the blog, Leather Nature's Apprentice, and it talks about nature and 04:49 all the things I just mentioned and some funky kind of nature, quirky things too, because I am a science nut. But that kind of dovetailed into a book, which I can't believe I did. That's been a journey. You people were very, thankfully, very kind about the blog and developed a bit of a following. And I said, you should write a book. And I guess even more than that, at the same time when I was 05:18 presenting some of my research findings on well-being at conferences, it really resonated with people and I got asked to talk more and more. And I initially thought, you know, I'll publish this in an academic journal like most academics do. But I realized that's, you know, that's not where most people are going to see this. This is information t

Today I'm talking with Amy and James at The Dorr Family Farm. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Amy at Dorr Family Farm in Whitefield, New Hampshire. Good evening, Amy. Again, I'm all confused on time. Sorry. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. You said your husband is there and I of course blanked his name already. Yeah, have James, my husband James with me. 00:29 James is with us too. So we have a couple to talk to tonight. Have you guys been getting a ton of rain? Yeah, way too much. Today too? A little bit. Okay. All right. My folks live in Maine and they have done nothing but tell me how much rain they have gotten this spring. So I assumed with you being in New Hampshire that it would be the same thing. Yeah, it's been, the ground is really wet. 00:58 We still have the remnants of vernal pools that are usually not still present this time of year. A little bit. Trying to get into it a little more. Well, this year must be hard because it's taken my dad 10 plus years to put in this garden this year. That's how it feels anyway. Okay, so I looked at your Facebook page and Door Family Farm has been around for a long time. 01:28 So tell me about yourself and what you guys do. So yeah, this place has been here for a really long time. We've been here 13 years. So the farm has been in my husband's family for now eight generations. And it started out in the 1800s. My husband's, let's see, great. 01:57 Great. Many greats. Many great. Grandfather settled here from Canada and just started like a small, he was alone and he had a little shack and he just, you know, worked the land and the house that stands today was built in the 1800s as well as the barn. And we just kind of ended up here. It wasn't in the plans. 02:28 That happens. hear that a lot. Yeah. Are you from New Hampshire? Well, I was born in Massachusetts, but I lived in New Hampshire most of my life. Moved here when I was about five years old. Okay. I'm just not picking up on any New England accent at all. And I was like, maybe she didn't grow up in New Hampshire, but okay. 02:54 Okay, so what do you guys do at the farm? It's a farm, so I'm assuming it supports itself? Well, it definitely doesn't support itself. Oh, no. No. So we hold full-time jobs. I'm a nurse and James is an independent IT consultant. The farm once did support itself. It has gone... 03:22 through many different changes over the years. At one point it was a strawberry farm and at another point it was a potato farm. Before that it was a dairy farm. So it's always been a farm of some sort. And when we came here, it was not in the plans and we sort of ended up here through happenstance. The house 03:52 has been in the family for generations and it was about to be sold. We didn't want that to happen, so we bought it. We moved here with no plan. We've consistently raised chickens the entire time we've been here. That's been the constant. At one time, this place provided all the food for the families that were here. 04:21 And we'd like to tap into that and get back to some of that. Okay. Awesome. And I think I saw something about a hip camp. You guys offer that? Yes. Yep. So we rent campsites on the property in the field and woods area in the back. And it's just kind of a little very minimal effort thing that we offer. And we've been doing it for a few years now. This year has started off kind of slow. 04:50 I think things are weird, but last year we were able to pay almost all of our property taxes with our hip camp income. So I feel like that's a win. 05:02 Okay. So for people who don't know, hip camp is sort of like Airbnb only for camping, right? Exactly. Yeah. And it's like rustic, undeveloped camping. So you're not going to get a fancy bath house or a pool. We rent to a lot of people who arrive on bicycle, actually, traveling across the Cross New Hampshire Trail, which starts in Woodsville, New Hampshire, goes to Bethel, Maine. So we just hosted one the other night. We rarely ever see them. It's kind of a... 05:33 just a really private, rustic camping experience. So we came up with that as a way to kind of utilize the land because it's just kind of sitting here and it's very minimal effort. And sometimes we meet some really neat people, but a lot of times we never see them, which is great. So it's easy. It's almost passive income. Exactly. Yeah, very much so. I'm a big fan of passive income. 06:02 I am. think that if you can provide a service that doesn't require a whole lot of effort on your part, you should do it. definitely. I agree. That's why we started it. I kind of talked my husband into it. Yeah, the closest we ha

Today I'm talking with Jennifer at My Attempt At Homesteading. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Jennifer at My Attempt at Homesteading in Missouri. Good evening, Jennifer. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. What's the weather like in Missouri today? Very warm. Yeah, here too. It's 81. I think you guys are hotter than we are though. 00:29 Yeah, we've we've been in the 90s for the past week or so. Oh I'm in Minnesota We had four or five days of that a week or so ago and it was disgusting. I hated every second of it Okay, so I hate saying this because people get kind of Miffed that we talked before the interview before before I started recording You were saying you're a little bit nervous because you're new at this and I was trying to say but the connection was bad 00:58 that you are exactly the kind of person I want to talk with because the beginners are the ones that give the people who haven't even started yet hope. So tell me about yourself and your attempt at homesteading. 01:12 Um, well, so I am a mother of two. my youngest just graduated last year. So, um, he still lives at home, but he's in, he's in college, so he's kind of doing his own thing. Um, my oldest, she just moved out earlier this year. Um, so it was one of those things that. 01:39 You know, my kids are kind of grown up and doing their own thing. And I kind of didn't know what to do with myself. So used to taking care of them and just, you know, even though they were older, but them just being around and just, you know, doing stuff with them. And, you know, I kind of took a step back and realized that, you know, I was, you know, for so many years I'd been, you know, the band mom or the softball mom. 02:08 the karate mom or the track mom or, you know, all those things. when I kind of slowed down for a minute, I realized that I didn't know who I was anymore because, you know, they weren't doing those things anymore. And I realized I had, you know, no hobbies or anything like that because my life had revolved around my kids for so many years. So basically I needed something to do something to occupy my time. 02:38 So I don't know actually what specifically made me start looking at, you know, different things, but I think it was just one of those like on a whim, I was like, oh, this looks like fun. So I just started like looking at things and reading up on things and I started very simple, like. 03:06 looking up different homemade spice mixes. And I just kind of started with that. And basically over the winter was kind of when I started trying to dabble with different things and trying to see what kind of mixes and things I could make from scratch. because at that point I'd never canned anything. 03:35 Um, pressure canner scared me. I, you know, I thought I was going to blow up the house. So, um, it took me a couple months before I would even attempt to do that. Um, but yeah, I just started small and, uh, mixes and that type of thing. Like, uh, I had no idea. Like I was amazed, like, you know, brown sugar, you know, who even knew that that was sugar and molasses. Like I had no clue. I just thought brown sugar that it just. 04:05 came like this. didn't know that. I didn't know you, you know, mix things together to make brown sugar. So, you know, it's definitely been a learning process and it's definitely, you know, I've discovered so many things and still, you every day learning something new. But baby steps, you know, every day just, I mean, I'm constantly Googling things and trying to figure out, know. 04:34 How do I do this or how do I turn this into something or how do I maximize? You know, if I have this ingredient, how do I, or this, um, you know, thing, how do I use up the whole thing without any kind of waste? And, um, it's definitely been a fun process. Um, uh, I've definitely been using my family as guinea pigs. Um, they've been there for. 05:04 some of my successes and definitely a lot of my not so much successes. But it's been fun. Yeah. You're not alone. I didn't know that brown sugar was just white sugar and molasses mixed together either until I found out about it on Google. And I'm not going to lie, I'm still afraid of our pressure canner and our pressure canner is still practically brand new. We bought it three years ago. 05:33 My husband is not afraid of it. So when we're going to pressure can, he's the one that handles it. Because I just, every time I walk by that thing, I'm like, it's going to blow up. It's going to blow up. So you're not alone. And we've been canning for four years now. So we did the water bath canning to begin with. And he was like, we're go

Today I'm talking with Emily at The Homestead Farm at Fruit Hill Orchard. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Emily at the Homestead Farm at Fruit Hill Orchard in Virginia. Good morning, Emily. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on today. Thank you for making the time. I know that you guys are all very, very busy people. How is the weather there today? 00:28 It is sunny. It's beautiful. The past week or so we've had a thunderstorm every day. So, um, I don't know what's coming up later, but right now it's just beautiful. Yeah, I'm in Minnesota and it is very sunny. There's a light breeze, but it's also like 80 degrees with heavy humidity. So I'm to be spending the day working on my podcast inside. Cause that seems like a good idea. Nice. Yep. 00:57 have laptop, we'll get work done. That's good. So tell me about yourself and what you do. So I am an owner of the Homestead Farm at Fruit Hill Orchard. We opened in 2016. I am a farmer, a baker. I do all the stuff behind the scenes. I manage our social media. I plan our events. kind of the 01:28 everything at the farm, which is a lot, but yeah, it's great. we 01:40 The farm has been in our family since right after the Civil War. My great-great-grandfather James Swate opened an apple and peach packing plant there. And then my grandfather carried on the tradition and has been farming there since the 60s, I believe. So the property has been in our family for a really long time. 02:08 Kind of why we got our name the Homestead Farm, because it's on our family's homestead. And then the Fruit Hill Orchard part comes from my grandfather's orchard business, which is Fruit Hill Orchard. nice. So do you have old photos from from generations past? Yes, we do. We so my grandfather, his grandmother grew up there. 02:36 And we have pictures of her out back with the old windmill, which funny story, she accidentally rolled her car into the windmill and knocked it over in the 80s, I think. And we have since put a new windmill up in her honor. But yeah, we have old photos of the family. The building next door that was the Apple and Peach packing plant, that used to be a barn, but now it is a 03:06 warehouse type building, but we have pictures of that before they enclosed the barn area and change that around. Yeah, old pictures of the house. Our farm market was actually the carriage barn where my grandmother stored her car and my great grandmother, um, stored her car. So yeah, lots of interesting history there for sure. And pictures. I love it. Um, 03:35 the reason I asked is our house is over a hundred years old and We've only been living here for almost five years and I keep trying to find someone who knows anything about the property because it's been here a long time and Nobody lives around here that knows anything about it from a hundred years ago So I'm out of luck on the history Yeah, you'll have to do some diggings. Yeah, there's a Historical Society in the town up from us 04:05 So they might have something I got to get up there this summer and ask and be like, so what do you know about this address in LaSore, Minnesota? Cause I need history. need it. I need it right now. So I'm sure there's a ton of it too. So hopefully you can find it. I hope so. Cause I'm so curious. I've been told that there was a real barn here and it got torn down or a storm took it out years ago. 04:32 And now we have this big ugly maroon and cream colored pole barn. And every time I look at the pole barn, I'm like, I wish the old barn was still here because that would have given this place so much more character. Yeah. Oh, but it's long gone. you know, what are you going to do? Okay. So what do you guys do at the farm? You have an art, you have an orchard. 04:57 We have an orchard that has been there for many, many years. That is part of Fruit Hill Orchards original orchard. That's apples and peaches. And then we also grow our garden produce there. We do tomatoes, beans, peppers, squash, cornmelons, blackberries, and that is all chemical free. We don't use any chemicals on our gardens or our berries at all. 05:27 We also source local and organic produce whenever we don't have something or ours isn't ready yet. Because chemical free and organic is super important to me. And then same with the bakery. We source local fruits, local eggs, as many organic ingredients as possible. And those are all, all of our baked goods are all homemade. 05:56 From scratch in our bakery, we also raise cattle. I have chicken, so we have some of our own meat and eggs for sale. We also have a sugar shack, which has hand dipped and soft

Today I'm talking with Amanda at Peaceful Pastures. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. 00:26 Today I'm talking with Amanda at Peaceful Pastures in Michigan. Good afternoon, Amanda. How are you? Hi there. How are you? I'm good. You said the weather's really nice in Michigan? Yes, it's beautiful today. We finally broke that heat spell that we had last week and the humidity has gone down and it's just perfectly sunny. So it's great today. 00:50 So you're having a top weather day in Michigan, just like we are in Minnesota. It's really nice here today too. That sounds great. I'm glad it's just as nice for you. Yeah, the spring has been actually pretty moderate. I have been, I dare say impressed with Mother Nature this year. So tell me about yourself and what you do at Peaceful Pastures. Well, my name is Amanda. I'm a mother to two. I have an eight-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter. 01:19 My husband is here with me too. His name is Andrew. We like to jokingly call him Goat Daddy. We kind of jumped into Peaceful Pastures, kind of like an overnight deal. We weren't really looking to sell our house and happened upon this property, just a little over seven acres, and we kind of jumped on it and looked, put it on offer, and right away it became ours. And overnight I went and crazily 01:47 purchased Nigerian Dwarf goats and one of them was pregnant and so it began with our livestock. So we now have 13 and we have a mini Dexter cow. Her name is Betty and we have chickens. Awesome. it is absolutely do a little bit of everything here. Yes. Fantastic. So if your name is Amanda and your husband's name is Andrew, 02:17 Do you ever get Mandy and Andy as nicknames? Oh, yes, we do. All the time. I have this thing in my head that I do all the time and I rarely ever tell people about it because I think it'll freak them out. But I always end up having nicknames for people that I like. And one of my friends on Facebook, and she was also in a writing group online with me, her name is Janna. 02:46 For the longest time when I would see her name, would think Jana Banana. Oh, and I never, I never told her that. And I was like, I got to stop doing this, but my brain just does all these weird associations with names. So, so if you were friends with me, you would be Mandy and your husband would be Andy in my head. That's okay. My husband always gets called Andy Pandy. So it works. Yep. Absolutely. Um, okay. So do you guys have a garden as well? 03:16 We do. actually have a quite large garden this year. Last year we had a great time with it and a perfect harvest. So I went ahead and jumped it up a little bit more this year. So we planted about five times as much as we did last year. So we're growing and hopefully by the end of this week, early next week, we will start having some produce. We have a little standout front too. And I like to fiddle around with that when I can. And we do lots of different things. 03:46 tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, pretty much everything you can think of. We grow here right in our garden. So it's a lot of fun. Keeps me busy. Yeah. I call it the usual suspects. When people ask me what we grow in ours, I said the usual suspects, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces, et cetera, et cetera. So all the good things. Yeah, exactly. All the things that people want to eat in June, July, and August. Right. And I don't know. 04:16 I don't know how things are going in Michigan, but here in Minnesota, we've had the nicest weather for getting an early start on crops this year. And we also built a heated greenhouse two Mays ago. So we had seedlings ready to go in the ground first week in May. We usually don't plant until May 15th because of the danger of frost. 04:45 And so we looked at the extended forecast and it looked like it was going to be good. And my husband planted tomatoes like three weeks earlier than we usually do. And I said, if they die, they're done. There's no coming back from that. He said, they're not going to die. He said, I have faith. was like, okay, I hope your faith works out. Well, I'm glad it did work out. I actually got a late start this year. 05:12 because of the weather, just because we actually took our first vacation in the last 14 years. So we were gone for that last week and a half. So it kind of pushed me b

Today I'm talking with Sharon and Ben at Our Little Farm WI. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. 00:25 Today I'm talking with Sharon and Ben at Our Little Farm, Wisconsin. Good morning, you guys. How are you? Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for having us this morning. Yeah, thanks. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for being here. I appreciate it. What's the weather like in Wisconsin this morning? Sunny and warm. Although it's not too bad. It's only going to be like 82, I think, today. Yesterday was pretty hot and humid and... But great for the crops. Awesome. Good. 00:54 our very handsome weather guy on WCCO here in Minnesota. His name is Joseph Dames. My son just laughs every time he sees him because he's a very pretty, this guy's a very pretty boy. Says that it is a top 10 weather day in Minnesota today. Wow. That's something to on the calendar. Let's see if it's actually true though. I think it's going to be okay. 84 degrees, breezy, sunny. I'm going to this. 01:23 Right. Okay. So is your your farm actually little? Is your farm actually little? It is we're at five acres compared to around us. have three large cash croppers and they have, you know, I don't know. 1500 acres to 2000 acres each. 01:44 Well, you've got us by two acres with your five. We only have three acres. There's a reason we're called a tiny homestead because we consider ourselves to be minuscule compared to a lot of people. Exactly. That's how we're little just because everybody else is so big in this area. Okay. And where's the biggest city near you? We're actually located not just too bad. Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and there's Manitowoc. 02:15 Oh, Green Bay. Everybody knows where Green Bay, Wisconsin is. Right. 40 minutes southeast of Green Bay. Okay. So you're closer to, I'm blanking. Illinois is below you. What's to your right? lake? Right. So Milwaukee, we're an hour and a half north of Milwaukee. 02:40 Okay. All right. Cool. Awesome. So what do you guys do at your farm? We are we are into a lot of things. We're trying to figure out how to scale down. We like to do everything. So this is always our dilemma of what to do and what not to do. So yeah, so primarily our crops on on the bulk of our land, we have a little bit of rented land as well. That's again, small four acres. And we use that for growing our 03:10 Einkorn wheat, which is an ancient wheat, which was really kind of the start or the spark, you know, for us three years ago to create our little farm and get going with what we wanted to do. 03:25 And then we also do fruits and vegetables and then our baked goods is what we pretty much primarily do at this point. And then we're going to be adding animals to our little farm, hopefully sooner than later. Okay. I want to get back to that, but do you guys grow the einkorn wheat for yourselves or do you have a market to sell it at too? So that's a good question. Yes, we 03:55 We are currently growing it ourselves. This is our third cropping year. had the first year was a failure trial and error year. It turns out that it's not just like growing regular wheat where, uh, I mean, we don't spray, you know, it's all regenerative agriculture. So that, was a huge learning curve. Uh, so the second year we did much better and the third year now it's looking really good too. Uh, so yeah, we, 04:23 Our goal with the einkorn is to bring it full circle. mean, Joville was kind of an inspiration for us. when we landed on the einkorn, we just felt there should be a lot more of this available to everybody. So then we do sell the flour to people as well as we run it through our kitchen, through the baked goods. Yeah. Do you grind it yourself? 04:50 We do. So we actually sprout it first and then I dehydrate it and then we have access to a stone mill. So then we stone mill it fresh about every three weeks is what is about what we need to do to keep it fresh. Wow. Okay. Awesome. I love that because I hear about Einkorn flour a lot. I've never tried it. I probably should, but I haven't. And does it, does it look the same as the wheat that we grow today when you grow 05:20 einkorn wheat does it look the same as a there's a word for it. I can't think of it. The wheat that a farmer would grow, you know, today. it's quite different. I mean, if you had a handful of each, it's, y

Today I'm talking with Kim at Alpine View Farm. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. 00:28 Today I'm talking with Kim at Alpine View Farm in California. Good morning, Kim. How are you? Good morning, Mary. I'm fine. How are you? I'm good. How's California this morning? How's the weather? Pretty good. Can't complain. It's a little warm, but it could be a lot worse. Yeah, the weather this year has been much better than last spring and summer, but it's still been kind of weird. I'm in Minnesota. It's a beautiful, sunny, relatively cool day. 00:57 I'm kind of tickled with that. Yeah, for sure. All right. So tell me about yourself and what you do at Alpine View Farm. Well, we moved to the country about eight years ago and I quickly fell in love with the homesteading lifestyle. I've always called myself a country girl at heart, but this is the first time I've ever lived in a country. So I, uh, 01:26 I guess I was foreshadowing my future without even realizing it. But we just love it here and we, you know, started a garden and then we started with five chickens and now we're up to 36. So, you know, that chicken math kicked in pretty fast. And then I learned how to can and I learned how to make sourdough bread. And so that 01:55 has evolved into a little business where I have a micro bakery. And so I'm just really enjoying this new part of my life. Nice. What else do you make for your micro bakery? I focus mainly on sourdough sandwich bread, and I also make these really fun pull apart wreaths. And that's our focus in terms of the bakery at this time. 02:24 Awesome. So where do you sell your baked goods? Well, we started off just selling from the farm and then this year we've expanded. We sell at this really cute general store in a little town near us. And then last month we just started selling at a local farmers market. Nice. Awesome. 02:51 So I don't want to be nosy, but I'm going to ask the question, how much do you sell your sourdough loaves Oh, for the bread. So we sell our loaves for $7 and we sell the pull apart rolls for $10. And I've been told by customers, it's too cheap. But we wanted to try to keep things, you know, manageable for people. 03:21 You know, times have been really tight for so many people and, um, you know, we just want to make a little bit of money for ourselves, but also make our products really sellable to everybody. Awesome. The reason that I asked so pointedly, sorry, is that a loaf of name brand bread at the store, like Pepperidge farm or whatever. 03:49 is going for seven to eight dollars a loaf right now. So you are absolutely reasonable and your product is better. So I think you're doing a good thing. I know we have our bread contain six ingredients and we use all organic ingredients. And you know, a lot of people don't realize this, but a lot of the bread that's sold in the store that's labeled as sourdough 04:17 not actually sourdough. They're using yeast and something to make it flavored like sourdough, but they're not even using a sourdough starter. So it's not the fermented food that's such a health benefit for us. Isn't it amazing what major companies get away with but we small home bakers have to label everything specifically? Oh, I know it's so 04:47 difficult to get everything on a cottage food label. And not to mention the fees involved to be able to sell the products and even we have to get in California, an egg license to sell our eggs. You know, I just kind of laugh and shake my head because I'm thinking, do you know how many eggs I need to sell to cover this or? 05:13 Do you know how many loaves of bread I need to sell to cover this cost? Yeah, it just, doesn't seem fair. And I'm not implying that life is fair, but it just doesn't seem right, you know? Yeah, it actually feels like they're trying to push out the small farmer or the small producer. 05:37 um, not help them succeed. But I'm hopeful that there's going to be some positive changes in the future along those lines. Yes. And as long as we small producers continue to fight and to work and to produce good things, we'll probably win the battle at some point. Yes. I hope. In fact, a funny story, I have some tomatoes coming in, so I was going to add 06:04 those last weekend to our things that we're selling at the farmers market. And you kno

Today I'm talking with Sarah at Sourdough for Beginners. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. 00:25 Today I'm talking with Sarah Frank at Sourdough for Beginners. Good morning, Sarah. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. Are you in Canada? I am. I'm just north of Toronto in what we call cottage country. Okay. What's the weather like in Canada this morning? It's a beautiful day. A little bit overcast. We live right next to the lake. You know, it's nice and warm. It should be warm enough for the kids to go swimming later. 00:53 Nice. It is overcast and not raining. It rained really hard here yesterday. Like we had inches of water in front of our garage yesterday. It's been crazy weather this year for sure. So every time we get a decent day, we're pretty excited about it. Yeah, us too. It's, it's been, uh, it's been a much better spring than last year. And that's all I'll say. Cause I've already talked about how terrible last year was. Where are you located? I'm in Minnesota. All right. So, um, 01:23 I'm going to do a little bit of an intro here because I actually have info to share. You are an administrator for the Sourdough for Beginners Facebook group, which is really a great group. I have been stalking it because I've been learning about sourdough. And you are also an author of a book called Sourdough for Beginners, the ultimate companion for sourdough bakers. And so I really wanted to have you come chat with me because 01:52 As we were saying when we talked before, I have been avoiding sourdough like the plague because I thought it was intimidating. I thought that I would kill it. and sourdough became such a trend during COVID that I was like, eh, I don't know if I really want to do an episode about sourdough because it's very, very, very talked about online. And then a friend gave me some sourdough starter. 02:20 And now I'm learning and I made my first loaf a couple of weekends ago and it was, it was good. It turned out like a bagel texture. So it was under proofed, I've been told, but it was a loaf of bread and it was yummy with cream cheese. So I feel like I had a success. So tell me about yourself and what you do. So, um, I have a lot of kids. I'm a mom of five, two, three of my own and two stepdaughters. 02:50 We're very busy. Our kids range in age from seven to 18. We were actually just at our oldest daughter's high school graduation last night. And grads? And we've always been pretty health focused. So we always are like learning about the food science that's out there and then it's sort of across our whole family. So we are always trying to eat well and you know, we go to the gym, our kids are all athletes. 03:17 daughter's going to be playing varsity sports in university. we, about a year and a half ago, started looking at the food that we were getting from the grocery store and learned that one of the most, you know, one of the biggest culprits to poor health related to food is the bread that you buy in the grocery store. 03:43 So just like everybody else, we set out on the journey to learn about sourdough. And my sourdough starter, you know, took a really long time to get started. And I was in the big sourdough groups on Facebook. And sometimes it's hard to get an answer when those groups are so big. But ultimately I ended up figuring out not only how to make sourdough, but how to make it, you know, within a busy life and with the very most basic 04:12 cheapest ingredients and with very few tools. So the issue that we were having at the time is we were having some, you know, financial challenges. And at one point I actually went to the grocery store and had to say, I can afford either bread or the cheapest all purpose flour that they have one or the other. we just kind of took the leap. you know, fast forward about 04:36 three or four months, I'm making sourdough just like everybody else on the planet. I'm posting it on my Facebook. My friends start reaching out and asking me about it. I start sharing my sourdough starter, much like what happened to you. And then I found myself getting sore thumbs, texting with my friends all the time, kind of walking them through what to do. So I started this group on Facebook, Sourdough for Beginners, and I've never had a Facebook group before, so I didn't put any thought

Today I'm talking with Jena at Cooper's Knoll Farm. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. 00:27 Today I'm talking with Jena at Cooper's Knoll Farms. Good morning Jena, how are you? Good morning, I'm great, how are you? 00:37 I'm good. You're in Ohio, right? I am right in central Ohio, right outside of Columbus. How do you pronounce the name of your town? Pataskala. It's a popular question. Yeah, I was looking at your Facebook page and your About page and I was like, I have no idea how to say that one. Pataskala, Ohio. We're about 20 minutes outside of Columbus. Pretty convenient location and... 01:05 Easy to get to wherever you need to go, but still in the country, which is really nice. Yes, yes. 20 minutes to actual stores helps when you really need something. Is it raining in Ohio? Because it's raining in Minnesota this morning. It is not. We got some storms yesterday, but we're hoping it does rain today because we are in a massive heat wave. We're a heat index of 100. So everything right now is how do we keep the animals cool? 01:34 We're trying to work through this heat wave and hoping for a little rain actually. Yeah. How long has it been super hot for you? This whole week. So, but since maybe Friday last week. we've got a week straight of hundred degree index, heat index. So, and then before that it rained so much, we couldn't get it to stop. And now it's just dry and hot. So you can't get a good mix. It's all, it's one way or the other. That's it. 02:04 You can't win. Yeah, I know. I feel really bad for complaining about the fact that it was so hot this past weekend in Minnesota because we only had really hot for two days. a whole week of it, I would have been ripping my hair out by now. So. Well, yesterday was supposed to be the end of the heat index and then they have extended it now through, through Saturday. So just doing what we can to stay cool. am so sorry. It's no fun. 02:34 Okay, so tell me a little bit about yourself and about your farm because I can't wait to hear this story. Well, I'm Gina and my husband is Richard. We have two boys. They are ages 10 and 11. And then two years ago, we also inherited a daughter, a bonus daughter. She was 20 and 03:01 parents had both passed away in the same weekend. She spent the night with us and never left. we've got we've got a bonus daughter that's going to be 22 as well that that lives with us. And my mother-in-law lives here too. And so we have a little multi generational home and I work full time and my husband works full time too. So he's a data assessment coordinator at at Reynoldsburg schools here in Ohio. 03:31 And I work full time as a regional sales manager for an education software company. So I manage our entire Northeast territory and all of Canada. I teach jazzercise on the side when I'm not recovering from ACL surgery as I am now. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because it said something about that you didn't realize you would be bottle feeding lamb. Oh, yeah. When you were down. 03:58 ACL surgery two weeks ago, delivered a goat on Sunday sitting with my brace on the floor of our barn and then had creamy twin sheep and lost one and have had a house sheep for the last two weeks as well. So farming from my couch friend, farming from my couch. the animals don't wait unless you're dead. Unless you're dead, you're working. Yeah. 04:25 Exactly. So it has been adventurous here. tell me about how the farm got started because I get the impression that wasn't the original plan. 04:39 No, it was not. So when COVID happened, we were living in a suburb where my husband was invincible and it just was not good. And our kids were stuck in this postage stamp size yard and we just wanted more space for them to run. And so we had decided then that we were going to get some land where the boys could go outside and run. 05:08 play. And so we started looking for like two to four acres. And long story short, long story short, we were looking for two to four acres and the day before we went to look at properties, this 10 acre property popped up. And so we went and looked at all the properties and the 10 acre one actually ended up being just as much or less than the others that we were looking at that were smaller. So we we got this one, we built

Today I'm talking with Martin at Shady Lane Farm. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Martin at Shady Lane something. 00:29 and the computer just like blanked out your name, Shady Lane something in Illinois. Martin, tell me the name of your place again. It is Shady Lane Farm. Thank you. Once I hit record, it like cuts off half the people's names of their places. And if I haven't memorized it, I don't know what it is. So thank you. 00:51 So what's the weather like in Illinois today, Mark? It is cooler. It is only going to be 86 after about four days of 90s. And we have occasional thunderstorms, but it's cloudy, not a bad day. We were out doing chores this morning. So not a horrible day to do chores. Yeah. Was the weekend rough on you guys? Cause it was really hot here in Minnesota. Yeah, it was. We... 01:19 Mostly because I made everybody get up early to do chores before it got too hot. So it was, it was pretty rough, but we got through it. Yeah. The secret to homesteading and farming is get everything done before 10 AM that you have to do outside. Yes. We had a triathlon that came through our neighborhood here on Sunday and it was a heat index over 100. Yeah, it was gross. 01:50 I think it's supposed to be 82 here today at like three, four o'clock and 82 is better than a heat indices of 105. Yes. So thankful times have come down. So tell me about what you do at your place. So what we do and we bought this five acre property in 2023, my wife, Lisa and I, I have been an urban homesteader. 02:18 for many years and finally it got to a point where I had rented all the garden plots I could from the local park district and they had started to take plots back from us, which I understood to because more people wanted to vegetable garden after COVID, which I totally support. I had failed in an attempt to get chickens allowed in the city. 02:48 So I went to Lisa and I said, you know, we just redid this beautiful colonial house here in Rockford. And we love it. Let's sell it and buy a rundown five acre property and do it all again and add animals and fencing and new garden and building all these scoops. And she said, okay. That's a good woman. And she had, um, 03:18 There were farms in her past, but she herself had no homesteading experience. I had just taught her the vegetable garden and she was completely interested in doing it. And she took a year off from her second master's degree and was the general contractor for all the work on the house and has really adapted to it. 03:47 And now is full on farm girl. Her cousins and relatives can't believe it. Has she raised a bottle lamb this spring all on her own and just has totally adapted to it. She's embraced it. Yes. Awesome. I love her. That's great. So why did you want to do this? Did you, was it, was it just because you couldn't have chickens or did 04:17 were you brought up around farming or what? Well, my mom's family out in Western Kansas had a tradition of farming and she spent part of her childhood on a small farm, very small by Kansas standards. They milked a few cattle, very, very rural. They made their own electricity with an AC Delco 04:46 windmill generator. Once they had milk, they would shut down the power to the house from the windmill and they'd power radio off the batteries because they had to use all the power to chill the milk. So she grew up very, very rural, processing their own food, canning. 05:10 They had a root cellar. So she grew up with all of that homesteading. In fact, that side of the family arrived in Western Kansas in 1887 and took up a homestead claim. So literally they were homesteaders. Wow. Yeah. She brought that ethos to even our very suburban upbringing. She would can things. She would 05:39 very much make things from scratch. I grew up making my own egg noodles that she taught me to make. We didn't have a big garden because many of our government houses, you just didn't have the space for it. But all of that ethos was very much there. And I spent time in Kansas in summers and when my dad was in Vietnam. So 06:07 it really impacted me. And then when I was earning my PhD in American history, my dissertation was on the settlement of the far Western counties of Kansas between 1890 and 1929. And that transitional period where the railr

Today I'm talking with Larkin and Kevin at Fat Bottom Girls Mini Farm. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Larkin and Kevin at 00:28 Fat Bottom Girls Mini Farm, I love the name, in Florida. Hello guys, how are you? Hello, doing good. Good. You're melting in the sun, but trying to stay cool. Yeah, we were going through that yesterday. I said this on an interview this morning that I did, but I will say it again because it was ridiculous. We have central air in our house and it was set for 72 degrees. It got to 77 degrees in my house at three o'clock yesterday afternoon. 00:58 Yeah. Yeah. My dog was laying on the floor panting. I'm like, oh, this is bad. What kind of dog do you have? She's a mini Australian shepherd. Oh, cute, cute. We have a Great Dane. Oh, well, they're very different sizes, but I bet they're just as lovey. I bet they're on the same love scale. Yes. OK, so how did your farm get its name? So when I was a kid, I watched the movie 01:27 Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? It came out in 2000. Have you seen it? I have not. I keep meaning to find it and I just never get around to it. It's a worthwhile movie and the song, Bad Bottom Girls, you know, is in it. And the movie is about these guys that escape from jail and it's like a story of redemption, finding yourself. 01:58 and really like prioritizing your self-well-being. And it just resonated for me for a long time. And so when we developed our mini farm, it became a little bit of a play on words because we had chickens first and, you know, the layered chickens have very heavy bottoms. And then we got into bees and all the worker bees are female. And it's just kind of snowballed into our 02:27 our farm name. love it. it who what band did the Fat Bottom Girls song? Queen. Yeah, that's what I thought. But I wasn't sure. I didn't want to sound like a total idiot. Okay, cool. That is very cute. I love that story. So tell me about yourselves and what you do at Fat Bottom Girls Mini Farm. Sure. So my name is Larkin and we are I would consider ourselves 02:56 first generation homesteaders. It started as a hobby, you know, in the backyard before we had our first child. And that was around 2015 or 16 when we first got chickens and I was a zookeeper, worked with birds at our local AZA zoo. So I'm very fond of birds. And I decided I wanted to bring them to our 03:25 backyard and Kevin is a good sport. So he was like, all right, know, eggs for the kitchen. Great. And then as we got into more gardening and, and planting our own crops in our backyard, we decided that this was like a really great, sustainable, uh, an empowering hobby. Um, and so we've just been taking like small approximations until we're 03:54 where we are today, we have like a dairy cow. We do homeschooling as of this year and we do take advantage a lot of our public land for hunting. And we just try and be as self-sustainable as possible without making it overwhelming. And so that's kind of how we got started. 04:23 How much land do you guys have? So we have a family farm and it was built for horses. My mom is an equestrian. She breeds Grand Prix jumpers and then they show on the circuit here in Florida and they travel around the country. So we have probably about 17 acres and our farm is now down to two retired 04:52 horses that we ride for pleasure and the rest of the farm has been made available to us for our our creatures. Nice. And what do you have for creatures? We have chickens, quail, changing list, ducks, geese, a cow. We have a couple of horses and that's it. We have a rabbit. 05:22 for our composting needs. He lives a life of luxury. Yeah, we have the whole menagerie. And so are you using, I don't know how to ask this correctly. I never asked it right. Is anything on the farm produced to support the farm? 05:46 Oh, so we do sell our extras, if that makes sense. So we really produce for ourselves and for our family. if we have... Go ahead. Well, Kyle's making what? About a gallon a day or so? Gallon, gallon and half of milk a day? Yeah. We use that to make a lot of ghee. And then if we have some leftover milk or... 06:14 Even occasionally we'll sell some ghee or butter. It's just the butter and the ghee is extreme and eggs of course. But the butter and the ghee is pretty labor intensive.

Today I'm talking with Dana at Twin Acres Farm. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Dana at... 00:28 Twin Acres Farm in Idaho. Good morning, Dana. How are you? Good. Good. How's the weather there? It's actually better today. Like last week was in the 90s. And then this past weekend, you know, when you have something planned to do, it dropped completely. Luckily, we didn't get a freeze, but it was cold and windy. I was like, I thought it was supposed to be the first day of summer, but whatever. 00:56 Well, you had the opposite of what we had this weekend and yesterday. Oh my God, it was so hot. We had the central air set for 72 and at three o'clock yesterday afternoon inside my house, was 77 degrees and so sweaty. was gross. Oh my goodness. Yeah, we've been having some like for Idaho, it's been like above like record highs. 01:21 But then we had like this cool front come through on like right on the first day of summer. And we were like, what the heck? My daughter went camping and they went up to the mountains and they ended up getting snowed on like five inches of snow the night before. And she was like, I thought it was summer. Yeah. I had the opportunity to apply for a job in Idaho years ago and I gave it some serious thought. And then I saw what the weather is like. And I thought, you know, 01:51 Minnesota is a little more predictable than Idaho. I think we might just stay here. Probably. So, all right. So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do, So I actually am a school teacher. I've been teaching for about 15 years. And then when I'm not at school, know, evenings, weekends, 02:15 school, you know, we get all those awesome school breaks then like I can't sit still. So I decided to start this little farm to keep myself ultra busy. 02:28 Okay, and it's Twin Acres Farm, is that right? Right. So we own only, it's just small, if we have two acres in Twin Falls, Idaho, and I have twin girls. So that's where the name came from is like two, two, you know. So that's where we came up with the name. Okay. I was going to ask, so thank you for telling me. So what do you do at your farm? 02:53 When we very first started out, know, it was like everybody else, you get a few chickens and they're the gateway and then it grows from there. So I had some neighbors at the time and they had these adorable little goats. didn't, I thought they were baby goats, but it turns out they're dwarf goats. I knew nothing about them. And then we were hooked. So you have to start with two, right? Cause they're herd animals. And then now I'm up to like 40. Oh. 03:23 my. we obviously I don't keep that many but you know after baby season we need to sell down some. We still have some babies and stuff to sell but I do all the milking, make cheese, make soap, make caramel sauce, make you know all the different things that you can make with goat's milk pretty much. And then you know we make in can. 03:49 and garden and we have chickens, have ducks, we have rabbits. We've had other homesteading animals like the cooney coon pigs in the past. We've had turkeys in the past, but some things, we've even had quail in the past, but some things we've decided that that's not really our niche or something that we wanna tackle. And those are things that you have to find out over time because some people love those. 04:15 those types of things and then some decide that's just not for them or what they want to do. Just like some people are like, I would never have goats. I'd rather have sheep. You know, everybody has their personal preferences of like different homesteading animals that they would like to keep. So chicken math translated to goat math for you. Well, I still got chicken math too, because I'm probably sitting on over a hundred right now. So I have both. Uh huh. Yeah. 04:42 Yeah, chicken math is weird. You start out with like two chickens and all of a sudden you find yourself with a hundred and you're like, where did they all come from? Right. We started with like a dozen, you know, again from like neighbors had an incubator and we were like, oh, we want eggs. And so we started with a dozen and then now I, um, breed certain, you know, purebred birds and, um, we sell those here. Um, we also, we, a few

Today I'm talking with Beth at Twin Creek Gardens, CSA. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Beth at Twin Creek Gardens, CSA. 00:29 And Beth and I talked back in April of 2024. So it's been a year and a couple of months since we've had the joy of hearing about Beth's life at the CSA. So good afternoon, Beth. How are you? Good afternoon. I'm doing well. Thank you. Good. How's the weather in Wisconsin? It's hot here in Minnesota. Well, you know, it's funny. I've been waiting for hot and now that it's here, I'm going, oh, God, it's too hot. 00:56 So it's beautiful. It's an absolutely beautiful day. So it's been fun running in and out of the house to to switch gears with the water every once in a while. Yeah. Given everybody a nice deep drink. Yeah. My husband filled up three different bowls for the dog last night because she really wanted to play frisbee and it was hot out. And he said he said that she drank one and a half bowls of water after after she played frisbee. And I was like, don't play frisbee with her when it's so hot like this. You're going to kill her. You know. 01:25 Yeah, it is hard on them. Yeah, and when it's this warm and it hasn't been this warm yet, so she hasn't acclimated and she's a chubby dog. She's probably five pounds overweight. So I can't imagine it's fun being her and running across the yard chasing after the frisbee and realizing how hot she is when she's Right. So anyway, it's been over a year since we talked on the podcast. So catch me up a little bit. Well, 01:55 Um, last year I was doing a lot of dreaming and my tagline was if we build it, they will come. And I put that hashtag on just about everything as I was posting about what we were trying to do. And it seems like it's true. Um, we have a new website and that has been a game changer for us. I was trying to do that. 02:23 solo and try to build something that would meet our needs and the needs of our members. And it just wasn't working. And so I found CSAware. I don't know if you're familiar with that. found it through localharvest.org, which is a nonprofit. And we are a nonprofit, so it was a perfect fit. And I've got a wonderful person who knows the ins and outs of the website. She's my go-to gal. I can call her or send her a text. 02:52 at any time of day to help me figure things out. I think it's really made the difference for me in being able to meet the needs of the people of the community and yet still not have to spend so much time with the nuts and bolts of it. So we currently have 10 families that have signed up for the season and it's a perfect pace. They trickled in. 03:21 like two at a time, three at a time. And we have some really exciting partnerships that have started. I'm really excited to share with you. so, you know, I think it's growing at a pace that we, and I, can still hold on to the bucking bronco and go for a ride. We're having a lot of fun. Good, because I know you really wanted to take. 03:46 what you and Rob had started building and share it. And it sounds like you are, so that's fantastic. Yeah, yeah. We have some families who come pick up their boxes here on Monday or Tuesday. And they are, what's exciting is it's families. So little people are coming with parents and getting a sense of the garden and what it's like here at the farm. And we're talking about hosting one of their birthday parties in a few weeks. So 04:15 They really love it here. And that to me is such a blessing. Yeah. And let me, let me catch people up. CSA, it stands for community supported agriculture. And basically it is subscribing to a share of the farm's produce that is grown during the summer for a certain amount of weeks during the growing season. Correct. And our season is 24 weeks. 04:40 But we started a little earlier. Now, I've learned so much about how I'm going to structure next year. But there isn't a ton of fresh produce right now. And so what we've been doing, and everybody's so lovely about it, is they're getting fresh microgreens that I'm growing weekly. And they're getting salad greens because I can grow them hydroponically, quickly, and cleanly. 05:07 then the rest of what they're getting in their boxes right now is actually some of our specialty items that are available, in

Today I'm talking with Lindsay and Kaleb at Homestead Hobbyists. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Lindsay and Kaleb at Homestead. 00:29 Homestead hobbyists. There we go. Good afternoon, you guys. are you? Doing well. Good afternoon. Thanks for having us on. Yeah, you're kind of saving my bacon. It's been, it's been rough getting guests to commit because it's a really rough time of year for people who are, I don't know, birthing animal babies or trying to get their gardens in or their crops in. So I appreciate you making the time. Yeah. It's like it's busy season all of a sudden. 00:58 Yeah, I went through this back in November, trying to schedule interviews around Christmas time because everybody was busy with Christmas plans. And we're not big holiday celebrators here. We just aren't. We're not Jehovah's Witnesses or anything, but we just don't make a big deal of it. And I always forget that other people do. And I was like, huh, I might be entirely screwed on my podcast or two weeks straight at Christmas time. This is great. 01:28 Well, if you ever need us to jump on as backup conversationalists, you let us know. will. I will put you on in my stable of, of they'll talk to me, I think, hopefully. All right. You guys are in Ohio. We're in Ohio. We are more on like the middle Western side of Ohio. We're in a really, um, 01:52 not super small town, but we are surrounded by a lot of really small towns. There's probably only 20,000 people here and we're about 45 minutes north of Dayton. If folks know where that is. I know where that is because I drive through Ohio about once every five years from Minnesota to Maine to see my parents. So I know I have an idea of where Dayton is. my great aunt and uncle lived in 02:21 Oh my God, I can't think of the town, but right near Indianapolis, Indiana and my grandparents on my mom's side live in Oakwood, Illinois, which is not far from Chicago. I think it's an hour south of Chicago. So I'm familiar with the route that I drive and all those towns are on little signs that say, if you want to go to Chicago, go that way. then it takes you two hours to get there. 02:47 Yep, exactly. I love road trips. I really, really do. I haven't done one in four years now and I'm getting older. I'm not so good at the sitting in the car for three, four hours straight at a time. My back starts to hurt from sitting in the seat of the car. So road trips aren't as much fun as they used to be. But boy, when I was a kid, my parents were like, we're going to Illinois. I was like, yay, snack foods and pop all the way. 03:16 Our kids are just getting to the point where they like that. They like the idea of a road trip. My youngest, asked me probably just this week actually, I can't remember if it was this week or last week. She goes, mommy, when are we gonna do that thing where we get up really early and we get to wear our jammies and leave in the car? I was like, yeah, we're gonna do that soon. Yeah, it's exciting. It's getting you out of your comfort zone and going to a brand new place. 03:46 or a place you've been to before, but it's always fun to go there. So, all right. So tell me about yourselves and Homestead hobbyists, cause I want to know all about you. Okay. Well, Caleb, do you want to kick off? No. So we are originally from the Ohio area. We kind of had a, we're, 04:15 We've had an interesting journey to get to Homestead Hobbyists. Both of us grew up in this area and then went away to college and then lived in different states and then sort of found our way back to Ohio, especially as we were getting more solidified in our careers and starting a family and we wanted to be back close to home. So we live in the same town that 04:44 my parents and my in-laws live in, which comes in handy. And one of the things that I think we both recognized is that we grew up with some different homesteading activities in different ways on both sides of our family. And especially as we got kind of more into a routine of day-to-day life, it was like, well, I kind of want to bring some of this stuff back. 05:13 So, like, I grew up in my mom, she made a lot of our clothes when we were little. And, you know, we did a lot of just stuff ourselves. And then, Caleb's side of the fami

Today I'm talking with Dawn about homesteading and farming as we age at Dawn's Dirt. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. 00:25 Today I'm talking with Dawn at Dawn's Dirt and Dawn was a guest on my show, not two weeks ago, and told us about what she does. But today we're going to be a little more focused and we're going to talk about homesteading and farming and gardening once you get past the age of 40, especially as a woman. Good morning, Dawn. How are you? Good morning. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity again. I just love talking about these things. So yeah, it's good. Me too. so 00:55 If we're talking about when you get past 40, obviously I'm past 40, I'm 55. I think you told me you're 44, is that right? I was just going to say who says I'm past 40, but I'm just teasing. I'm 44. I almost had to edit all that out. Okay. So the first thing I want to say is aging is a privilege denied to many. And so I'm really glad that I'm getting older and hopefully wiser. 01:24 trying anyway. But there are some real things that come with getting older, especially with our bodies and manual labor. So how's that going for you Dawn? Because I will share mine after you share yours. For sure. Make me go first. Well, I'll tell you this. Like I'm not a 01:46 bigger, fatter woman, but I'm a bigger woman. I'm tall and I've got big bones and I've got good muscle structure. So I can actually lift and outlift a lot of people. I was just thinking back this morning, I went to the gym for a couple of months just after I got through my busy season on the farm. And on the farm, I could lift, you know, three buckets of potatoes, which was about 150 pounds. And I went to the gym and dead lifted 185 pounds. So 02:13 I can do it, I am stronger than most, but I'll tell you this, my back hurts a lot at the time and my lower back and my upper back and into my neck. It hurts a lot of the time and I've learned, I used to be able to do the 150 pounds in one shot and just do it and bust it done, but I've learned in the last couple of years here that I'm better off to do three trips of 50 pounds than one trip of 150 pounds. 02:42 It's harder. Everything aches a bit more and I fall into bed at night and I'm just physically exhausted, tired from doing physical work. Yeah. And it takes longer to recover once you get past 40 as well. Yeah, for sure. My youngest son still lives with us and he's 23 and his job is to help us out on the quote unquote farm. 03:12 And this kid can just bust his ass for two days in a row, be mildly sore the next day. And the fourth day from the first day, he's like, let's do it again. I'm like, nah, I'm not doing anything. You can go play. You do it. For sure. And I found that too. know, back when I had my farm, I would have to, in the spring, I'd have to get my boiler system going again. so, 03:38 What that involved was taking a ladder around the greenhouse and crawling up it and crawling back down it, know, opening the valves and things like that. And so I was up and down ladders, up and down ladders, up and down ladders all day for a full day. And I could do it while I was going because once I'm moving, I'm moving. But let me tell you, the next day when I try and do it again, my body says, uh-uh, you do not want to do this again. Like it just took longer the next day. And I was sore for several days after that. Yeah. 04:06 It's just your muscles don't recover the way they did when you were young. And part of it is that your body has extended a metric but ton of energy up to the age of 40 because you had all the energy in the world. And at some point your body is just like, you can go easier now. I give you permission by telling you to stop. Yeah. The problem is, is my brain doesn't want to stop and I just keep pushing. And so 04:35 Yeah, it's not the same as I was when I sold my farm. I'm I and then starting this new this new farm I'm I'm starting over from scratch and I'm you know doing cleaning jobs and you know have my animals and my gardens and things like that again and I'm doing it on my own. I'm a single mama and yeah, it was easier the first time around to keep up and do it all and work, you know 12 14 16 hour days and now I'm like a 12 hour day like a 16 hour day right now is

Today it's just me with a very short update at A Tiny Homestead. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Hey friends, it's Mary. It's just me today. 00:29 Um, I thought I would give a little update on what's going on in our place. And to begin with, I want to say thank you to everybody for listening and people who talk with me every day. It's been an amazing, almost two years of getting to people. And secondly, it was a really rough weekend in Minnesota. We had two lawmakers attacked in their homes, um, early morning, Saturday morning. 00:57 One of them died. One of them is recovering. And the one who died, her name was Melissa Hortman. She was 57 years old. She was the speaker of the Minnesota House. And the other one was Senator Hoffman, and he and his wife survived. Melissa Hortman's husband was also killed. And the person that shot them was actually taking cover in the county that I live in, in Minnesota, Sibley County. 01:26 So it was very much a nerve-racking, anxiety-inducing weekend around here. On the flip side of that, it is a beautiful day in Minnesota. Our gardens are thriving and flourishing. We have wild plums that are growing. We have apples. We have black raspberries. We have the usual suspects in the garden, cabbages, tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, peas, and 01:55 It's been an amazing start to the summer season. 02:05 As I say on the podcast a lot, if you support your local growers, you are supporting your community and we really need to do that. And we really need to do it every day in every way, shape and form that we can, which means that we should all probably take a big deep collective sigh or breath of relief and step back and think about how we approach conflict, how we approach problems and try to find the positive ways. 02:35 to uh... 02:38 To not have bad things happen this weekend really shook me and I'm not going to get into Democrat, Republican, any of that. And when President Trump was shot, I felt bad about that too. Luckily he didn't die. So yeah, violence is not the answer. So I really don't love doing solo podcasts recording and I'm going to keep this really short. 03:06 There should be a new podcast out tomorrow afternoon, new episode, and there should be one on Friday in the afternoon. There probably won't be one on Thursday. So thanks for listening guys and keep coming back to learn things. Bye.

Today I'm talking with Melissa at My Homesteading Chronicles 2.0. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Melissa. 00:27 at My Homesteading Chronicles 2.0, and we're going to find out why it's 2.0, in Ontario, Canada. Good evening, Melissa. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. I'm very excited to chat with you. Number one, why is it 2.0? It is 2.0 because about two years ago, I started My Homesteading Chronicles and I had about 2,400 followers and the hackers got me. 00:54 Oh no. they hacked my Facebook, they hacked my Facebook page. So I had to start at nobody. So it was June last year that I got hacked. And yeah, I've been trying to grow my page back. So it's 2.0. I do not know why people have to suck so much. Yeah. Yeah, I have no idea. They didn't get anything out of me. just, yeah, they got my followers, I guess. 01:24 I'm sorry. It's so much work to rebuild it too. Oh yeah, it is. It is. But it's doing better than I expected it be. So I'm over 3,000 followers since June last year. So it's about my one year anniversary of 2.0 this week. Well, congratulations. Thank you. This social media thing is so weird. Yes, it is. It is. I've been on social media, but this starting a page is... 01:53 It was new to me. had friends that kept telling me you need to start a page and I kept saying, no, I'm not going to. And well, I did. Well, I'm thankful that you did because people need to know about this homesteading thing because it's important. So tell me about yourself and what you do at my homesteading Chronicles. So I am just a mom. I have a 13 year old daughter this week and my son will be 18 next month. I'm married. I have a wonderful supportive husband. 02:23 We live in a very small town, about 500 people, just kind of five minutes from the shores of Lake Huron. I work full-time in corporate finance. I live in the village, so I don't have a lot of space, but I like to grow everything I can and make as much as I can from scratch. That's about it. About 10 years ago, I hurt my back and had to change careers. 02:51 and I was off work for about eight months. And that takes a toll on your income of your family. So I started to learn how to make things myself. So I've kind of over the last 10 years, I've been growing mostly a lot of tomatoes and I learned how to can and I learned how to crochet and I'm very self-taught. 03:19 Very nice. We talk about tomatoes on the podcast a lot. I am the tomato lady. Tomatoes and chickens. bet if I went through and had some computer program count the number of times chickens and tomatoes have been mentioned, it would be in the probably 50,000 by now. I believe it. I don't have any chickens. I'm absolutely terrified of chickens, but I love to buy 03:47 local farm fresh eggs. So I like to look at the eggs from far away and the chickens from far away. But tomatoes is my thing. love tomatoes and my husband has planted over 200 tomato plants this spring in our garden. He's got me beat. I've got 185 plants this year. 04:09 What kinds? Because if we're going to talk tomatoes, let's talk tomatoes. What varieties? Okay, we'll talk tomatoes. I have 71 varieties of mostly heirloom. About 20 different kinds of cherry, chocolate cherry, a lot of the bumblebees. I'm trying a whole bunch of different paste tomatoes this year, different romas. 04:33 Um, one called OptiMax that I hear is really good, but only one of them survived. So I'm hoping the plant does well. but I like, it's funny because I don't eat tomatoes at all and no one in my house eats tomatoes, but, I can them all. um, yeah, yeah. They have a lot of heirloom beef steak type. Uh, last year, my, my number one was lucid gem. sounds pretty. 05:02 It is beautiful. It's an orange tomato. The top is purple and when you slice it, it's red inside. Nice. So you say you don't eat tomatoes, but do you eat like tomato sauce or salsa? I do. make a lot of tomato sauce and a lot of salsa. About 20 years ago, I ate a bad tomato and I just haven't been able to do it. So I was telling somebody the other day, my goal this year is to eat a toasted tomato sandwich again. 05:32 You should give it a Give it a try. You might be surprised. I OD'd on cherry tomatoes when I was like 10. They were so yummy. My dad was growing them in our garden and I love

Today I'm talking with Keesha at the Little Cabin Big Woods. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. 00:25 Today I'm talking with Keesha at Little Cabin Big Woods in Tennessee. Is that right, Keesha? That's right. Where in Tennessee? We're in Middle Tennessee, about an hour from Kentucky, so northern middle. Okay, and how's the weather there today? 00:44 Today it is gorgeous out. We are on day two of what should be three days without any rain, which is the first time that's happened in a really long time. Oh, so you're getting the same weather my parents have been getting in Maine for the last three weeks. All they do is tell me it's raining. Yes, constantly. Yeah, we had that last year here in Minnesota. This spring has been fabulous. I am so thankful, like dropped down on my knees. Thank God, thankful. 01:14 And today it's kind of gray, but it's not raining. So I'm, I'm thankful for that too. Okay. So you got you or you guys, is it just you or are there other people? Oh, there's my husband too. Okay. So you guys are off grid. Are you completely off grid? We are, but we have solar. So we do still have some luxuries. mean, we've got a window. 01:41 AC unit for the days that it's just really, really still and stagnant. We've got a TV for an occasional movie. Got a couple of ceiling fans. So. Okay. So this leads me to tons of questions because the closest I have been to off grid in my entire life, I think I was about 15. My parents lived in Steve falls main and I live there with them with my siblings. 02:10 And we had the tail end of a hurricane come through and we were without power for an entire week. And the first, the first day and a half, we couldn't even get to fresh water because there was a huge pine tree across the road between us and the fire barn where they had water. And so luckily my mom, what grew up in Illinois where, where tornadoes happened and every time there was bad weather in Illinois. 02:38 her mom would draw water. She'd fill the bathtub, she'd fill pictures of water for drinking, and my mom grew up with that. So luckily, we had drinking water and we had water to flush the toilet with. But we had no power, we had nothing going, no heat, no nothing. It was September, so it was in the sweet spot of not too hot and not too cold, thank goodness. But 03:02 Yeah, my parents cooked outside on the grill or they actually had a fire pit so they would cook on the fire pit because they couldn't use their stove. So that's the closest I've ever been to off the grid. And so tell me what it's like. 03:20 That's a good question. I will say it has its challenges, but it's also really satisfying. And from your taste of being off-grid that week from the storm, I so you have an idea. When you cook out over and open a flame, there's nothing quite like that. It's really, really good. since we do have solar, 03:48 It's an adjustment period. You do have to keep an eye on things. But we do like pressure canning and such we do outside on the patio and get these wonderful views. And so yeah, it can be a challenge, but it's worth it. And we just love it. We have an regret a thing. Okay, well, that's awesome. What brought you to it? 04:16 Well, we lived in Arizona in Tucson for about two decades and raised our kids there. And as time went by, just, we weren't really satisfied anymore. And so we did always bring our kids up with, you know, going camping and learning things about how they worked and such. so they got older and we just started thinking. 04:43 You know, maybe we should just go ahead and take the leap and do it. And so when the kids were in high school, we kind of had a timeline thinking, okay, we've got four years left until they graduate. So let's start making plans. So we started looking at different states and growing seasons and narrowed things down and finally ended up picking Tennessee. But I think what really convinced us to go ahead and go for it was my husband and I. 05:13 We went on a 500 mile pilgrimage hike overseas in Spain and you learn a lot when you're living out of a backpack for six weeks. 05:25 And we realized all this stuff that we had waiting for us at home was just stuff. And you don't own it, it ends up owning you. So when we got back from that, I think we got rid of about 75, maybe 80 % of what we had and

Today I'm talking with Heidi at the Secret Farmstead. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Heidi at Secret Farmstead. 00:29 in Texas. Good morning, Heidi. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. I would normally start off with questions about the weather and things, but I was reading your introduction on your Facebook page and are you sure you want to talk to me in a public forum because it's a secret, farmstead? Yeah. No, I'm not worried about it at all. Let's do it. Okay. What I'm alluding to for the listeners is that 00:58 Heidi lives on a couple of acres from what I gathered, but there's something about an HOA situation. Do you want to elaborate, Heidi? Yeah, I can do that. We live in a super bougie neighborhood. Our houses in this subdivision range from probably the high 700,000 up to close to $2 million homes. We bought this 01:25 location because we left the house and it has a guest house or casita and initially my parents had moved with us. So we were told that we didn't have an HOA when we purchased our land and that is technically true. However, we do have what's called an ACC, an architectural control committee that thinks they're an HOA and we do have deed restrictions. So despite living in the county and 01:52 The county allowing, you know, so many heads of cattle or livestock per acre and those kind of rules, our little subdivision technically does not allow anything like that except for your household dogs or cats. So while I have a couple of acres that is flat and completely usable, technically I'm not supposed to have anything like what I have. And it started with maybe a couple of chickens from 02:21 uh, tractor supply. Um, and now I might have 24 chickens. Um, and then I thought, well, uh, I want dairy. So now I have maybe a few goats. So anyway, it's just kind of expanded from there and where we live, we're on a kind of a corner lot at the entrance of the subdivision. So we don't have a neighbor behind us and we don't have a neighbor on 02:50 the other side of the property where the animals are kept. It's next to a frontage road. So no one's disturbed by our animals. And really most people don't even know we have them. We don't advertise them, but we also are respectful and don't advertise that we're breaking the rules either. Uh-huh. Except for being on a podcast that anyone can listen to. 03:14 You know, I used to be really concerned about being more open about it, you know, because I'm, you know, I have a career in law enforcement and I was always a rule follower and a rule enforcer. But my neighbors all love my animals. So the ones that are directly adjacent to me basically across the street or next door, the opposite side. So that's not been an issue for us. And I routinely provide them, you know, fresh baked sourdough or goat milk or 03:44 eggs, you know, so they really do benefit from it, even though they're not quite willing or able to break the rules themselves, they are kind of reaping the benefits of my break in the rules. And I did a lot of research as far as how the laws work and, you know, an ACC is architectural control. So really that is they can dictate, you know, the size of your home and what is built out of and your fencing and things like that. 04:12 As far as the deed restrictions that they have put into place for our subdivision, technically, in order to enforce those, a neighbor would have to take me to court. And if I thought, you my husband and I had this conversation initially, if we thought that truly this bothered any of our neighbors, we wouldn't do it. I mean, I don't want to a bad neighbor. But also, I want to be able to use my land and not have people tell me what I can and can't do because it seems silly. 04:40 that I have a couple acres that I'm not allowed to utilize in a way that would allow me to be a little more self-sustaining and a little more, you know, organic in my approach to my, you know, skincare and my food. So anyway. okay. Thank you. Thank you for elaborating. Because once I realized what was going on when I read your, your about you thing, I was like, Oh boy, I don't know if she's really going to want to talk to me, but clearly you do. I'm very excited about this. 05:10 Um, so what, what brought you to doing this? Well, you know, I

Today I'm talking with Michaela at CZECH BAKER MN. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Michaela at Czech Baker, Minnesota. 00:29 in Savage, Minnesota. Good afternoon, Michaela. How are you? I am good. How are you today? I'm good. Sorry about the technical difficulties logging in. I'm going to be emailing Riverside tomorrow and being like, what is up guys? Cause it's not working very well for my guests. No problem. We figured it out. So we're good. Yes. So my 00:51 I usually I say how's the weather, but I'm in Minnesota too. So we know the weather has been kind of rainy, kind of sunny, kind of cloudy, and we never know what we're going to get. So, Okay. So you are a Czech baker and I need you to tell me how you pronounce K O L A C H Y or E or whatever it is. So Koláč would be a traditional size that we have in Czech Republic. And that would be one item, just one. 01:20 Kolache would be multiple. And then here in Minnesota, they do use Kolache keys. So they add the S at the end to make it multiple. But if you say Kolache key, that would be multiple already. And single would be Kolache. And that is just a smaller version from the regular Kolache word. Okay. And that particular pastry we're talking about is the one that... 01:46 that's flat on the bottom, but the corners are folded in and it has like a jam or jelly in the middle. Is that right? You know, we're going to be hearing a lot of people about this because I was born and raised in the Czech Republic. Koláč comes from words, kolá, which means round. So in Czech Republic, if you ask for koláč, you're going to get a round circle item with the filling on the top and open face. And that's the ones I make. And then the ones here in Minnesota, they do 02:16 put in the two corners or sometimes they just do two of the sides, kind of wrap them over and kind of hide the filling a little bit. So we make those in Europe as well. We don't call them kolache. We have different names on a different presentations. It's the same dough, same filling, just a different presentation and gives you a different name. But in Czech Republic, if you ask for kolache, you're going to get a round thing with open face. Okay. 02:41 See, this is why I love talking to you people on the podcast because I learned things I didn't know. My husband and I were at a friend's house last year or the year before and the male of the couple was telling me that it's Kalachi and I've heard it called Kalaki, like Kalaki days in I think Montgomery. Kalachi days in Montgomery, yeah. Yeah, and for the longest time, I'm like number one, I don't know how to pronounce it correctly. 03:10 And number two, I don't care, they're yummy. arose by any other name would smell as sweet. And I suppose that whatever this pastry we're discussing is called, it tastes just as good. Yep, I would think so. mean, know, different names, but different views or different looks, but the same dough, same kind of filling, of course, depends, you know, if you get it from commercial store, if you made it from homemade, but yeah, whatever they're called, they are delicious. You're right. 03:39 Uh huh. love the pastry dough. is so good. And I'm not even a bread girl. Like I don't love bread, but these things are amazing. Okay. Thank you for sort of straightening that out for me because I figured you would know the correct answer. And where in Czech Republic are you from? I was born and raised in Ostrava, which is the East North side. I lived about, I don't know, have 20, 30 minutes to Poland and then about 04:08 30 to 45 minutes to Slovakia. So we're kind of up in that corner and all of those three cultures kind of, know, interlope in there for us as far as food goes. So we'll get a little bit of everything. And when did you come to America? I have been here since 1998. Oh, wow. OK. So how old were you when you came over? I was 19. So I've been here longer than my original start of life in Czech Republic. 04:36 Was that hard for you? mean, this is not a geography podcast, but was that hard for you? Was it a real culture shock? Not at all. mean, you I grew up with one brother and a mom, kind of. She was married for a while, but we never really kind of had a stable father figure in our lives. And I don't k

Today I'm talking with Christi at Tee’s Kitchen. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Christi. 00:27 at Tee's Kitchen in Louisiana. And Christi was a guest on my podcast back, I think, in March. And it was cold and snowy and gross, and we're rolling into summer. So Christi and I are going to talk about some less hot, cooler summer dishes that we can maybe introduce people to so they can make their electric bill go down. Good morning, Christi. How are you? Good morning. I'm great. I'm so excited to be back on. I had so much fun. had 00:56 Such a great conversation the last time. We did and I listened to it this morning because I was like, what exactly did we talk about? And I was like, oh my God, I still love this lady. She's fantastic. Oh, I feel the same way about you. Thank you. Good. I just I make so many new friends who I probably will never meet through the podcast. And my husband says, so what new friend did you make today? love that. I'm like, oh, well, do you really want to know? And he's like, 01:25 Kind of? And I give him the short version. He's like, I'm so glad that you have people that you get to talk with all over the place. He said, because you need that. I'm like, I do. I really do need that. So it's wonderful. you're in Louisiana. We're rolling into summer. We're not quite there yet, according to the calendar, but it's literally a week or so away. And we've had some really hot days so far here this spring in Minnesota. I'm guessing Louisiana hasn't been any different. 01:55 Louisiana has been really, really hot. We're approaching 100 degrees here and it's just, the humidity is insane. So it's pretty hot here. So it's summer here as far as I'm concerned. Okay. So how do you combat that when it comes to feeding your family? I have lots of ideas, but I want to hear yours first. Well, we, you know, we, we try to grill outside, but then again, it's very hot. We always have to have a fan going. 02:25 Um, so I try to do meals that I don't have to use my oven as much, or if I have to use my oven, it's like a shorter period of time. Um, because it just, it gets really, really hot in my house. We do a lot of like, uh, rice cooker meals. do, uh, one pan sheet pan meals. Sometimes I use my air fryer, but I don't like to use it for, it's not big enough for the whole family. Um, yeah, we grill just simple quick meals, I would say. 02:55 Okay, well, let's back up just a titch. The first thing I would tell anybody right now in the climate that we're all living in, meaning weather and government, is if you don't know how to cook, it's a really good idea to start learning how to cook. It's also a really good idea to start maybe learning how to grow something, even if it's just herbs in a pot beside your doorstep, because 03:24 I am, I don't want to talk politics, I do not, but we're in a kind of iffy, bouncy, chaotic world right now. And one of the things that makes me sane is that I know how to cook and I have a garden. So cooking is not hard. I swear to God, people, it's not. It's time and intention. And you don't have to start out making a gourmet meal. can. 03:50 You can make a grilled cheese sandwich with two slices of bread, some butter and some cheese you love. And it's super easy. And then once you get that accomplished, you can make scrambled eggs and you can boil eggs for egg salad sandwiches. There are really simple things that you can do to start the steps to learning to cook. And I don't, I don't want to like force this down people's throats, but 04:17 but cooking is such a vital skill for everybody to learn. Secondly, one of the things that we do around here is we do a lot of salads, like just lettuce, sweet peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, know, that kind of stuff, because it's cold food on a hot day. And you can throw some shredded chicken or some ham that's been sliced up or 04:47 If you're into steak, you can take steak that you've already cooked from dinner the night before, slice it really thin and put that on your salad if you want meat in your salad. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we try to do a lot of that to my husband. I will be honest, gardening is not one of my strong suits, but I can take, my husband is great at that and he runs the garden. And so I just, whatever he, he harvests, I'm good a

Today I'm talking with Stephanie at 60 Acre Wood. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. 00:25 Today I'm talking with Stephanie at 60 Acre Wood in Arkansas, United States. Good morning, Stephanie. How are you? Good morning. I'm good. How are you? I'm good. I don't think there's an Arkansas anywhere else, but I figured I'd throw the U.S. on there anyway. Sounds like a plan. How was the weather in Arkansas this morning? Well, it was real beautiful and now we're raining, which we need for the gardens. I'm pretty happy. Good. Good, good, good. I've got everything crossed that the weather is not as insane. 00:55 this season as it was last season, because we had rain for six weeks straight in spring and our garden was terrible. So, and I've talked about ad nauseam on the podcast because it just drove us insane last year. bet. Yeah, we've had a turbulent spring, more tornadoes than any other season. I think in history or something, it's been a rough spring and now it's kind of calming down. So it's pretty nice. 01:22 Fabulous. I wish you all the luck with all the things you're trying to grow because man It will break your heart when you put all that work into it and it just doesn't go Yep, and if you get hail and we do get hail so We get little we get little pea-sized hail. I'm really hoping that I never see golf ball size I really don't need to that. No, I we don't like to see it at all, but it does happen here. So Good 01:52 Okay, well, tell me about yourself and what you do at 60 Acre Woods. Wood. Wood. Wood or woods? wood. Acre Wood. Okay. Well, my late husband and I had a dream to be self-sufficient. We have six children and five grandchildren, and we wanted to not be off-grid 100%, but more self-sufficient. Just raising our own food, staying away from the grocery store. 02:19 And when he passed away, I said, you know, I'm going to make this dream happen. And I moved to Arkansas, bought a farm site on scene, never even been to Arkansas, which is crazy. And started building this farm that was in the end of 2019. I closed on the farm in the beginning of 2020 and been doing it pretty much ever since. We do a lot here. 02:47 We have a lot of animals for food and we have a lot of pets and we homeschool and it's, it's, it's a busy life and it's really rewarding and we love it. We love being that. We love that self-sufficiency. We're at about 65 to 70 % of our food comes from our farm now. And for us, that's Number one. 03:14 Congratulations on being a strong, capable woman. Proud of you. Thank you. Number two, that much food grown on your own property is amazing. That is astounding. It's huge. It really is huge for us. Yeah. And are you still a single mom? I am not. I remarried a wonderful man who thinks I'm crazy, but lets me buy goats. So keep him. 03:43 I'm going to keep him. Yeah. I would love to have goats and I've talked about this ad nauseam on the podcast too. We don't really have the room because we don't really have anywhere for them to eat, to graze. And I'm sure you've noticed that feed prices for every animal known to man have gone up in the last year or two. So we just visit goats. don't have any here. 04:11 Well, you know, our goal also is to start growing food for them. are not right now, but we have a goal to. the thing, goats have been our hardest animal so far. Believe it or not, we have, we have cows with pigs, we have chickens, donkeys, horses. If you name it, we've probably got it on this farm, but the goats have been very, very hard because there's a large parasite load in Arkansas. We've had a lot of problems with the, with the goats, but milk is 04:40 Cheese butter. I love them. They're fun Most of all they're But they're hard to grow hard to grow here so what's the what's the pesticide load not pesticide, um, what's the What's the problem? What what is it that's making it so hard? So the parasites here are very I want sorry parasite. They're very What is the word? resistant 05:10 to a lot of the common things that you use here. And we tried doing the natural, we do black walnut, we tried doing all the natural things and then we switched over to some of the not so natural things because we didn't want these animals to suffer. But we have just a resistant population of parasites, which we had just got under control p

Today I'm talking with Diane at A Farm Wife. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. 00:25 Today I'm talking with Diane at A Farm Wife. Good afternoon, Diane. How are you? I'm fantastic. How are you? I'm good. Are you in Michigan? You bet. Are you guys getting the wildfire smoke like we are in Minnesota? Yeah, it's kind of hazy. It's not really bad, but yeah, it looks a little bit weird. Yeah, it's raining here. So the air is already wet. And if I look across the cornfield that borders our property, it looks like it's foggy, but it's not fog, it's smoke. 00:55 Well, we actually have sun trying to peek through and it's very windy but it's getting it's like an 80 something right now, which is great for drying out our hay. I bet it is. We don't have any hay and I'm so glad it's raining right now because we've had like a week or so of beautiful dry weather and that's great because this time last year it was raining every day here, but 01:23 But it hasn't been and we've got a really good garden started this year. Like last year was a miserable fail for gardening season. So we've got everything crossed that it just keeps doing this week of really nice weather and then a day or two of a good rain and then another week of nice weather. Everything crossed. Us farmers are never satisfied with the weather. Oh, I know. And I feel so bad about complaining about it, but 01:49 If you could have seen my husband's disappointment last year, May into mid-June, because all it did was rain. We know what that's like. He was so good. Like it's just a farm to market garden, or farm to table, whatever you want to call it. But it's his, it's his joy. It's how he unwinds in these stresses. Yeah. It doesn't matter how big or how small you are, the weather affects what's happening. 02:16 Yeah, it was just rough and he was so good. He never blew up about it. He just had faith that this year was going to be better. And I said to him the other day, said, that faith is paying off. It's much better this year. He just laughed. Yeah, that's kind of our mantra as farmers. It'll be better next year or next harvest or next planting. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, that's all you have to hang on to. There's nothing you can do about what's going on in the atmosphere. So. 02:45 You just pray or send up smoke signals or just open up your hands and say that I will be done and hopefully everything turns out Okay, so yeah, all right So I have been looking forward to talking with you for a week since I well not week We only talked a day or two ago, but since I found out about you I have been very excited to talk with you because you are not a 25 year old lady Just getting started in this you have lived a very full very 03:14 I think lovely, wonderful life so far. Yes, very blessed, but I am not in my 20s. That is for sure. Yeah, so tell me about yourself and what you do. Well, just to back up a little bit, I was raised on the east side of Michigan. My dad was a tool and die maker and had a normal, what I thought was a normal life. Dad, home at 430, weekends home, went summer vacations and I 03:44 graduated in June, turned 18 in July, got married in September and moved across the state onto a farm and into a unknown territory. My husband would leave at five in the morning, come home at 10. It was crazy. It was so different that I couldn't even begin to tell you how different it is. And you learn how to do a lot of things that you didn't know you could do because there was nobody else around to do them but you. So I was, 04:13 Very fortunate to land on a beautiful farm here in West Michigan, a dairy farm. We had four boys. And to tell you the truth, the farm was my enemy for quite a while because it took my husband away and it took away what I thought was supposed to be family time and how family was supposed to look. And, um, he would be home on Sundays, um, after church for a little bit in the afternoon, because on Sundays we just did, uh, feeding. 04:41 and milking and everything else waited because it was Sunday, so that was the only time we had together. So it was very, very difficult trying to acclimate to a life that I never saw coming. But once the kids got a little bit older, you know, and they were on the farm and I was able to join in, then th

Today I'm talking with Daniel and Joni at Rawly-Mae Farm. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. 00:25 Today I'm talking with Daniel and Joni at Rawly-Mae Farm in Tennessee. Good morning, guys. How are you? Good morning. Good morning, we're good. How are you? I'm good. And as we just said before I hit record, you guys have been up all night getting ready for things going on in your life. And I have some pretty good allergies kicking my ass this morning. So we're going to try to make this as good as we can. So you were saying that it's really muggy in Tennessee this morning? 00:54 It is. It's very humid and muggy and we're, it's dry enough for us to our hay. So we're getting our hay done right now. So. Says it feels like it's 87 degrees. Ugh, gross. Well, it's raining here. Just so listeners have a weather update from Minnesota to raining. Nice soaker. I'm really happy about this. This is good. So tell me about yourselves and what you do. So, um, we. 01:22 of course, own Rawly-Mae Farm. We started that in 2021. We are a first generation. We've both been around agriculture, our whole lives. But when we got started, Daniel was a police officer with the city of Cookeville and I was a special education teacher in White County. So we have 01:52 We both put in over 10-year careers in those before we were both able to step away to just doing the farm. We have two children, Eliza who is nine and Ralston who is seven. They are big into rodeo. We travel a lot with them and try to support them the best we can with all of their endeavors. 02:19 I think we have too many pets to actually name as far as the livestock and the dogs and stuff. But that's just kind of like a short snippet of our life. Okay, awesome. And I don't want to, I'm going to do the opposite of burying the lead on this one. You said that you are getting ready to sell your farm. So does that mean that you're getting out of this? 02:48 No, it means we have outgrown where we're at currently. So we are landlocked where we are at. The airport in our area owns the land for the majority around us. So there's nowhere for us to expand. And with the amount of animals that we currently house, 03:17 needing hay and just the production of it all, we're needing to expand. So we've been looking in White County for a farm that offers more acreage. Okay, good. Cause I was, I was afraid this was going to be a sad episode because I just talked to somebody last night and she did end up selling her farm, um, year or two ago and she's moved on to a new thing and she's very happy doing it, but she misses her farm a lot. 03:46 Yeah, so I was like, oh no, not a second one selling no Right No intentions to stop Good. Okay. So what do you guys do at Raleigh May? So we sell various livestock we focus mostly on menter cattle and highland cattle as well as various exotics like llamas alpacas, especially chickens 04:14 Polish, Silkeys, know, stuff like that. Mature donkeys are a big thing that we sell. And we do little bit of everything. I we travel all over the United States. I think we go to several livestock sales across the country. we recently, the first of last year, started doing our own deliveries, which has expanded to, you know, we're delivering to, I think we're up to 23 different states that we have delivered to or sold. 04:43 livestock to over the past three and a half four years Wow, okay, and did I see that you guys take in animals that that need a home as well We do we've got Various rescue animals a lot of times when we buy animals to resell They just stay here. We all fall in love with them and they don't go anywhere. So that's 05:10 One of the perks of the job is we get to see all kinds of animals and sometimes we like them too much for them to go anywhere else. They become part of your family? They do. They do. They're a large family. Yeah, it sounds like it. It sounds like you are overrun with family. Yes. We have new members of our family coming sometime in next two weeks. We have three barn kittens coming to live with us. Awesome. We just actually might. 05:38 My cousin just gave us, she was going to give us a couple of her barn kittens and it turned into six barn kittens. we've recently found homes for four of them. So we're down to just the two. Well,

Today I'm talking with Dawn at Dawn's Dirt. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Dawn at Dawn's Dirt in Alberta, Canada. 00:29 Good, I don't know what time it is. Good afternoon, Dawn, how are you? I'm really good. Thank you so much for having me. And yes, it's just after 4.30 in the afternoon here in Alberta. Yeah, and it's just after 5.30 here. And again, I tend to do most of my recording in the morning. So I'm programmed to start to say good morning. And I'm like, no, it's not morning. Stop it. It's funny how things go like that. You you get into a routine and a rut and... 00:59 But here I am throwing you for a loop already. So let's do this. I'm all good with that. And the only thing that I request is that we don't talk religion or politics only because I haven't and it can become really divisive and hurtful. And I would just rather talk about positive things like growing plants and feeding people. I love it. Those are my two favorite subjects to talk about, but I don't like the division and the the either. let's yeah, sounds great with me. Yep. And I just 01:29 I've come really close, Dawn. I did. asked one of your compatriots in Canada, how Canada saw America right now. And she was like, if I say something not okay, just edit it. And I was like, okay. And she was very, very diplomatic and kind. And we kind of talked around things for five minutes. And then I was like, okay, that's as close as I want to come to talk in politics on my podcast. And she just laughed. So worked out great. Okay. So. 01:59 Tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do. Yeah, so I'm Dawn from Dawn's dirt. If you're looking me up and I am a farm girl. was raised in the greenhouse industry here in Canada. So my parents had a 26,000 square foot greenhouse and they grew long English cucumbers and 02:19 In 2007, me and my ex-husband built our greenhouse my parents sold and we took over kind of my family business and we were growing long English cucumbers as well and we started, it was pretty tough. Farming is of all types and sizes, no matter what it is, is really hard. And so we ended up branching into tomatoes and peppers and then we eventually ended up growing 20 acres of garden and field crops and I direct marketed them. 02:46 everything that I grew to my consumers at farmers markets and online and things like that. So I was a vegetable farmer for many many years plus I had some chickens and some sheep. So that's who I was. Unfortunately a year and a half ago I had to sell and so now I'm getting into the whole online thing and if you give a man a fish he eats for a day but if you teach a man to fish he eats for a lifetime. So I'm teaching people how to 03:13 grow food in the spaces that they have. think everyone should be growing something in their backyard and I'm teaching people how to do it. So that's my new venture. Fabulous. And I agree on the teaching Amanda Fish premise. And I am trying, we are trying to feed our community too. So we are aligned on both of those points. Perfect. I love it. I think that we've lost a connection between our food, you know, back in the day, back 50 years ago, 03:42 Grandma had a garden, know, great grandma had a garden. Everyone had a garden and a few chickens in their backyard. And I just feel like we need to take society and shift backwards to some of that again, because it's so important for kids to know where their food comes from. so, yeah, I just think that's where we need to head to is to know that your carrots come from the ground and that, you know, eggs come from chickens. Yeah, they sure do. Weird, huh? 04:10 They don't come from a grocery store. mean, grocery stores are a building that houses items that we can eat. But at the end of the day, the farmer and the field and the sun and the animals and the earth, that is where our food actually comes from. Yeah, yeah. Yes, absolutely. It does. I am living proof of it. ate 04:37 butter crunch lettuce out of our garden on my taco last night. Oh, yum. Yum. And did you grow your tomatoes too? Well, we do. We do grow tomatoes. We do can tomato sauce. We don't can tomato paste. Long story. Haven't tried it yet, but we just used our last jar of homemade canned San Marzano tomato sauce last weekend. And

Today I'm talking with Megan at The Kelley Family Homestead. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Megan at the Kelley Family Homestead in Connecticut. 00:30 Good morning, Megan. How are you? Good. How are you? Oh, I'm great. Is it beautiful in Connecticut today? No, it's raining today. I'm sorry. It is gorgeous here in Minnesota. Oh, nice. Last weekend was beautiful. It's the first Memorial Day weekend we've had in years where all three days were just stellar. And I thought for sure it would rain this weekend. It's really nice out today too. I have no idea why Mother Nature is being nice, but I'm very good with it. 00:58 The running joke right now in New England is it's the weekend because it's raining. It's only nice during the weekdays. The weekend, we've been getting rain for like a month straight. You are having the spring that we had last year. And my parents live in Maine. I just spoke with them this morning and my mom was like, so how's the weather there? I said, it's sunny and 57 degrees. She's like, I'm happy for you. I said, you sound really not happy for me. 01:27 that is pouring here in Maine this morning again. was like, oh great. Yeah, everything's wet this morning. So yeah, I'm sorry to hear that and I'm sure you don't actually need any more water from what they've been telling me. It's been bad. it's all right. It's filling up the rain barrels. So we're good. Good. Okay. All right. So tell me about yourself and what you do at the Kelly family homestead. 01:59 Well, I'm a mom of three. I am very interested in native plants and growing my own food. So we moved into our house about nine years ago in the fall and the next spring I was basically ripping up the grass to grow gardens as soon as possible. We put in over 15 fruit trees, berry bushes, grapevines. 02:26 garden plots for annual vegetables and things. And it's just been kind of growing ever since. And a couple years ago, I just decided to go for it and planted a ton of seeds. And everything sprouted even though they were like super old. So that was kind of the beginning of the farm stand. I was just growing my surplus vegetables and putting them out there. The vegetable plants and 02:54 That did really well. So the following year I started adding native plants and cuttings of my grapevines and some of the berry bushes that I grow. And that did really well. So this year is the third year of the farm stand and it is even bigger. We've got a lot more bushes and trees. I mean, it's just a little roadside stand at the end of my driveway for right now, but the plan is to eventually get a piece of property and make it like a full on nursery and 03:24 do the whole thing. But it's a lot of work, but it's a lot of fun. I really enjoy gardening. I really enjoy propagating. It's always fun to see what works and what doesn't. And my kids like to help out, and it's just been awesome. Fabulous. You are in an urban setting, according to your website. Is that right? We're on a third of an acre. 03:53 Yeah. Where are you in Connecticut? I'm in Enfield, right on the Massachusetts line. Okay. So question for you is if you are in an urban environment, did you have to get any permit, any permits from the city to have the farm stand or did they, were they not even bothered by it? 04:16 Um, I checked with the city before I started and as long as my farm stand is under 200 square feet and is mobile, I'm good to go. Um, I did have to get a nursery license from the state. Um, um, you know, pesticide or a pest thing, know, license to say that I, I'm making sure that my plants are not, you know, carrying any pests that I'm selling and that I'm, you know, any starts that I get from anybody else, I'm making sure that they're. 04:45 equally certified and have their pest light prevention inspection done. And everybody I buy from sends me their copy of their certificate. I've been working with the... the re-go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. You've been working with me. 05:10 The North Central Conservation District, I bought some seedling trees from them this year. And then I also bought from the New Hampshire State Nursery, some seedling plants from them as well as some natives. Just because my property is so small, I can't alwa

Today I'm talking with Christina at Hayes Valley Farms. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Christina at Hayes Family Farm. 00:28 Good morning, Christina. How are you? Good morning. I'm good. Just watching the rain. Yeah. Where are you? We are in Marion, Virginia. That's right. I knew it was the South because you have that lovely Southern accent going on. Whatever it says. And I'm like, I don't hear it, but... You don't hear it if you don't... Okay. I am like a crazy fanatic about accents. You don't hear it if you live in it. Yeah, true. True. So... 00:58 It is gray here in Minnesota. It was supposed to be sunny and the sun has not decided to break through the clouds yet. Do you guys still have snow on the ground? Oh no, no, no, no. I think we had sleet three and a half weeks ago. I think. Might have been five and a half weeks ago, but it's been a while since we've seen any frozen precipitation. Thank goodness. 01:21 June 1st is Sunday and we have farmers market starting June 7th. So it better not snow. Has it snowed in June there before? Not when I have lived here. I've lived here. I've lived in Minnesota for over 30 years and I have not seen snow in June. I have seen like three inches of snow in May though. Yeah, it was really pretty though. Oh my goodness. 01:50 because stuff had started to leaf out just a little bit. So the snow got caught on all the little tiny leaves. It was really That's pretty. Yeah. Yeah. And I had a rose bush that had bloomed and there was snow on the rose. And I was like, oh my God, I got to a picture of this. And I did. So you don't want to see it snow in May and June, but on those rare occasions that it does, make sure you have a camera handy. Yeah, definitely. 02:18 Okay, so tell me about yourself and what you do at your farm. So we are, I'm a, I guess a third generation farmer, skipped a generation. So my parents, well, my father grew up in Nebraska and came from a farming family and then joined the Air Force. 02:44 And then my mom was born in Cuba. my grandparents on my mother's side are Cuban. She came to America when she was two years old. And in Cuba, they had a farm, but the great grandparents did not the grandparents. They were more city folk. She went to the Air Force. That's where I was born. so I guess, you know, 03:11 I don't know, third, fourth generation farmers skipped a generation. I grew up on a farm. grew up in Miami, Florida and met my husband in Tennessee and we, he had, grew up farming. Um, so he's, you know, country boy grew up in the mountains, the Appalachia mountains. And, uh, you know, he liked that I was the city girl. I liked that he was the country boy. He didn't want to farm. 03:40 He wanted to live in the city and I'm like, yeah, you don't want to live in the city. So we're farming. I won that argument. Nice. Yeah. We started our farm in Tennessee and long story short, the county we were in was expanding. A lot of the farms got pushed out. And so between property taxes and then, you know, we, I had been in Tennessee since about 2005, 2006. 04:09 And, you know, since then, you know, prices have exploded in East Tennessee because everybody's flocking, has been flocking to that area. So we couldn't afford to buy a bigger piece of land. You know, for what we sold our farm for, we were able to buy three times that here in Virginia. So that's how we ended up in Virginia. So his family, my family, they're all in Tennessee. So we're about two hours from family. 04:39 So I have a background actually, had a mortgage company. You know, my background is finance, business. So I traded high heels for muck boots. That's excellent trade. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we raised Angus in Tennessee. And then when we moved the farm to Virginia, because we wanted more land, we decided to start a micro dairy. So now we have jerseys. We traded. 05:08 one cow for another and we're a full working farm. We raise hogs on pasture. We have chickens, we have a small hatchery, we have a rabbitry, we have sheep, have goats, we have Jersey cows and a couple of mini donkeys and then standard donkeys. And then geese and ducks. I think that's pretty much everybody. But we offer, you know, grass fed beef. 05:38 pasture raised chicken eggs, poultry, rabbi

Today I'm talking with Claire at Hundred Acres Meadows. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Claire at 100... 00:27 100 acres something and I can't read the screen. What is it again, Claire? Hundred Acres Meadows. Thank you. I swear this technology doesn't work sometimes and my eyes get older every day. So it doesn't help me at all. So what's the weather like in Louisiana? Because that's where you are. Very hot and very humid. It's in the 90s and the air is saturated. Is that unusual for me? 00:56 Oh no, May is usually our kind of summer dress rehearsal. It's usually hot and buggy and icky and then it just gets hotter from there. Okay, well, I'm in Minnesota and we never know what we're going to get in May. We had a 90 degree day a couple weeks ago. And today it's like 67, I think, and it's sunny. I, Minnesota is weird. I don't really appreciate the swings all the time. 01:27 So at least you have sort of the gauge on May for Louisiana. Yes. Okay. So tell me about what you do because I think you have classes. I know you have horses. What is it you do? So we do a couple of things. A, we homeschool. So we spend time homeschooling our two kiddos. And then a lot of times we'll have homeschool families over to the farm. 01:57 teach them how to milk goats and introduce them to the ponies and the chickens. And they take home milk and sometimes cheese if we have some that we've been making. And then we run our farm. And then my main gig is I'm actually a vet. So that's a part-time job for me. Very nice. But that comes in handy with your animals. Yes. I mostly do small animal for work, but I'll take care of minor problems that come up here on the farm. 02:26 the major than I let somebody else handle it. Okay, awesome. And I'm guessing you're probably connected with other veterinarians if you are a vet. Oh, yes. So that helps. Okay, I have a couple questions about you being a veterinarian because why not? I don't get to talk to veterinarians other than when I take my dog to her vet who she loves. Thank God. 02:54 My dog is crazy, she loves going to the vet. How did you decide you wanted to become a vet? Did you know from when you were little or was it something that you got into when you were in high school? So I always loved animals and I thought from the time that I was, you when people start asking you what you want to be, that was often my answer. But I actually got to college and I got a C in chemistry and I said, 03:20 they're never gonna let me in because getting into vet school is harder than getting into med school. It's a very, very competitive process. So I actually stopped aiming for vet school and I switched over and became a teacher. My background was elementary education with a minor in special ed and talked for a couple of years. I got my master's in Ed specialist in gifted education. 03:45 And after a few years teaching, I said, this is not what I want to do for the rest of my life. I love the kids. I love the teaching. I didn't like all the other stuff that went along with it. So I said, I'm going to give myself one semester of retaking science classes and see if I can make. 04:05 A's in it, not hey, I scraped by and I got a B plus. I wanted to feel confident that I could handle material. And I did that and I said, okay, well, if I can do that, I'm going to apply to vet school. So I went ahead and applied and went to vet school and graduated later than most of my peers did, although we had somebody that was, I want to say 55 when he graduated and he owns his own clinic in Florida now. So. 04:32 age isn't a requirement with it, but it did give me a nice background for homeschooling my kiddos that I feel pretty comfortable with the education side of things. Well, that's impressive. I'm proud of you. That that must have taken a lot of I don't know, pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and really digging into to learning the things. Yes, yes, it did. And I actually had my son a few months before. 05:01 I started vet school, so I had him in April and we started in August. So I had a bitty baby and a toddler all through vet school, which made things extra challenging, but I have a wonderful husband and family who helped support me through it. Oh, honey, now I'm really proud of you. Wow. That is a big ask

Today I'm talking with Louis De Jaeger author of SOS: Save Our Soils. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Louis de Jaeger in Belgium. 00:29 and he's an author of a book called S.O.S. Saving Our Soils. Good. I don't know what time it is in Belgium. Good day, Louis. How are you? No, very happy to be here on your podcast. It's so nice. What time is it in Belgium? It's 10, 12 here in Minnesota. Well, it's 5 p.m. 5, 12 here. So almost time for dinner. OK, so good afternoon to you, Thanks. Good morning. 00:58 Thank you. So I was very surprised when you reached out to ask about being a guest on the podcast. And then I saw what you do. And all my surprise went away because you are trying to save the earth by teaching people about soil. Exactly. And so I would love to know what your background is and why you got involved in this in the first place. Yes. So 01:25 I actually have two grandmothers that grew up on farms and they had to move from the countryside to the city because there was actually no future anymore for farming. that actually influenced me until a point that when I was 18 years old, I actually wanted to become a farmer. The only 01:48 problem was is that I didn't have land anymore in the family and land is like super expensive in Belgium. It's around 100k per hectare or like, let's say 40k per acre. And so that wasn't really an option for me. And I was kind of curious about why that is, how things are going. And also was thinking about what kind of farmer would I like to become. 02:16 For that, really was looking for answers and the more I kept looking for answers, the more I realized that the farming system worldwide is actually pretty screwed. that the way we farm today is a lot of the reasons we farm today as we farm today is because of governments, of lobbyists pushing us in certain directions. actually nobody's winning, only big corporations and not the farmers themselves and certainly not 02:46 not the consumers. So yeah, we need to do something about that urgently. Okay, that explains the drive for you to write this book and do all the other things you've done over the last, I don't know, 12 years. And you're only 31. Yeah, correct. You're baby. My daughter's 35 and she's the oldest of four. So yeah, you could be my kid. 03:16 So what I want to know is in all your travels, because I know you've traveled a lot looking at your website, who is doing it the best out of the worst? Well, the good news actually is that I've traveled to like half of the states in the United States. I really love America. I've also traveled to Canada, to Central America, South America. 03:41 And every country that I visited, there are farmers that are really showing that it's possible to grow crops, very high yields and taking care of the planet at the same time. And also not unimportantly having more profits than their neighbors. So that's actually the good news that there's no one country doing better. are just like a lot of pioneers 04:09 spread across the world, spread across the United States as well. if more people would know about them, if more farmers would see that, like a farmer living only 50 miles away is like, gone by one Porsche car every year because of the savings and pesticides, then more people will make a transition to a more natural way of farming. Well, I'm glad that America doesn't 04:39 fall way down at the bottom because I live in America. And my husband is a gardener. He does a farm to table garden. It's 100 feet by 150 feet. It's a little garden. We're not a farm. We're a homestead. And he uses no pesticides, no herbicides, no chemical fertilizers. As close as we get to chemical fertilizers is our chickens manure. 05:08 And it works. mean, when we don't get rain for six weeks from May to the middle of June, like we did last year, we have a really beautiful, productive garden to the point where we have too much and we sell it. Wow, that's great. So it can be done on a small scale. For sure, we're doing it. But how do farmers who are doing it big scale handle this? Because 05:37 For a long time in America, it has been all about weed control and pushing bigger yields and using things that aren't good for the earth to make that happen. how can bigger farmers do this

Today I'm talking with Becca at Moon Ridge Acres. You can follow on Facebook as well. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. 00:25 Today I'm talking with Becca at Moon Ridge Acres in Alberta, Canada? Yes, that's right. Yes, okay. Good afternoon, Becca. How are you? I'm great. How are you? I'm good. It's a gray, drizzly kind of day here in Minnesota. What's it doing in Alberta? It is actually sun, shiny, and beautiful. After a mega thunderstorm last night, it's actually quite lovely. The birds are chirping. Everyone is. 00:53 Seemingly good the calm after the storm, I Yeah, the weather has been absolutely insane everywhere this past weekend was Memorial Day weekend here in the States and In Minnesota where I am Friday and Saturday and Sunday were absolutely breathtakingly gorgeous days Right that doesn't usually happen. Usually one day of Memorial Day weekend is a washout and it didn't happen 01:21 That's impressive. Our, our May Long was like last weekend and it was absolutely frozen. It was so cold. It was like, it was terrible. We couldn't do anything. Oh, God, mother, mother nature. didn't get snow though, which is, you know, it is normal for us to get snow on May Long. We say we don't plant our gardens until after May Long and we didn't get snow, but it was like in the, in the single digit. 01:50 So it felt very cold, but today it is, oh, it's got to be close to 20 degrees already. Which is what in Fahrenheit? Because I'm really bad at it. I'm really bad at it too. I would say that's like 45, 50, I think. Warmish. It's warmish there. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Wait. 02:16 Yeah, I could be wrong on the conversion. I'm sure someone will correct me. I can always look it up and put it in the show notes and be like, here's the chart that says what's it actually is. When I went to the US, my car had this really handy feature that it just converted it automatically for me, which was so handy. And it's funny how quickly I was able to go from Celsius into 02:46 um, the Imperial system and then, and then back and it just felt totally normal with that, you know, system in my car. But like, if you asked me to convert it like right now, there's no way. Yeah. And one of my best friends is from Canada and you would, I've known her for over 20 years. You would think that I would have made a point of learning this, but I still haven't. It's terrible. 03:09 And my parents are old enough that they still use the Imperial system for like 90 % of things. Like the metric system was kind of imposed upon them like after they were out of school. So they're still very much on the Imperial system. They're always talking in Fahrenheit and I'm like, what? And you'd think I would pick up on it, you know, but no, like I'm, I got Celsius on the brain, but I use inches though, which is a very Canadian thing to do. 03:39 Yeah, I feel like whatever you're first introduced to, like I am not a Macintosh computer kind of girl. I really do like Windows. Right. And I tried using a Macintosh Apple as they were known when I was in school and that was a very long time ago. I'm 55, you can do the math. And I can do it. 04:06 but it's like retraining my brain to find where files are if I use that. So yeah, it's what you're introduced to as a brand new thing, what you tend to gravitate towards. So, okay, so got the weather covered, got the small talk covered. You have been going through some fits and issues with Facebook lately. Did you want to vent for a couple of minutes about that? Oh, absolutely. I would love to. 04:36 So as a Canadian, when it comes to content creation across social media, we are very limited in what we can access for monetization. We don't get paid for TikTok. And then we have Facebook and YouTube. 04:57 I believe Instagram also monetizes, but I don't think Instagram pays very well. think Instagram is very much targeted for like attracting brands to do brand deals. And for me, as a millennial where Facebook was like the OG platform, actually like just be like, we were just saying, I love creating on Facebook. I love that there's multiple different, um, 05:25 like ways, like I can do text, can do photo, I can do groups, I love Facebook. So that is where I've put a ton of my effort. I'm also on TikTok and TikTok is fantastic for like discoverability. The algorith

Today I'm talking with Chelsie at Rosewyn Urban Regenerative Farm. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead is sponsored by the Homegrown Collective, the best option for organizing a responsible and regional food system for America. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Chelsie at Rosewyn Urban Regenerative Farm. Almost forgot the name of your place is Chelsie, sorry. Good morning, are you? 00:29 I am doing phenomenal and yourself? I'm good. It is a gorgeous day in Minnesota again, two days in a row. Yes, we're finally hitting steady seventies over here. So it is optimal outside time. Yes. Springtime is wonderful. Um, my favorite is fall, but spring is my second favorite season. So, and, uh, I know you're in Montana because I talked to Morgan yesterday. 00:56 and she recommended that I talk with you and Morgan is in Montana as well. tell me all about what you're doing because urban regenerative farm is not something I hear very often. No, no. I mean, the optimal idea was to get a big plot of land, but then I just figured I need to do something where I am to show other people it's possible to do it wherever you are. So I focus a lot on small footprints. 01:24 Growing options that way if someone's in an apartment or in a trailer, they realize that they have an option as well. Um, I really, really am an advocate for food and medicinal security as a community. And if we can all grow something in our yards and trade, then our community will be a lot more sustainable, uh, as a whole. And no one, it will, it will equalize kind of the deficit or the difference between income levels. 01:56 So essentially sovereignty for everyone and burning down the gates on the way. Good, good. I don't advocate burning anything, but I understand the phrasing, burning down the gates to keeping people out from doing what they want to do. Yeah, gatekeeping, know, just those gates. So I collect knowledge so people have access to it. 02:23 and can check out books or whatever they need to check out. Yeah, absolutely. The reason that I kind of jumped on that phrasing is because this is the five year anniversary of George Floyd's death in Minneapolis and I live an hour southwest of Minneapolis. And at the time that that happened, my husband worked not a mile and a half from all the destruction from the fires that were set. So 02:50 I'm a little twitchy about anything on fire right now. I understand and I apologize about any triggers that happened. No, that's okay. I just remember him coming home from work when he was actually allowed to go back to work because the place that he worked at was on lockdown for three days. So it was a hospital and he was, he looked pretty shell shocked when he walked in the door and we are both very white people. And I said, why do you look so sick? And he said, honey, he said, if you could see. 03:20 the road I drive on to get to the hospital. He said every building has plywood up on the windows or it's burned. it to affect him in that way when he had nothing, I don't know, at stake as it were in it, it was a big deal here. So I don't want to bring the discussion down, but I'm just making people aware that we all really need to respect each other. 03:49 And we really, really need to be careful of how we live our lives because everyone deserves a life that's good and everyone deserves respect. So that's all I have on it. Absolutely. No, I fully understand that. So anyway, so do you teach about the urban regenerative stuff? So I am definitely more a one-on-one person because everyone 04:17 and everyone's situation is so individual and unique. So what I do, I'm also a shamanic healer. So in all areas, I create like a sacred space for people to find their own power, you know? And so I do give tours and answer questions, but on a whole, have not done like classes at this point yet. I'm sure it will evolve into that at some point, but right now, 04:47 It's just trying to figure out how one, each person can implement something where they are. Okay. Yeah. Um, we have a bunch of plants, like bedding plants that we grew on purpose to sell to people this year, because I want everyone to be growing something if they have the space, if they can make the space because our, our supply chain stuff might go a little wonky this year again. And I'm really concerned about people having food. 05:17 And the best thing you can do for yourself is grow your own produce. if it's just herbs. Herbs have medicinal properties. They are also really nutritional and they make crappy food taste better. Absolutely. Yeah,

Today I'm talking with Morgan at Groovy Grazers. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. 00:25 Today I'm talking with Morgan at Groovy Grazers in Montana. Good morning, Morgan. How are you? Good morning. It's a wonderful morning. How are you today? I'm really good. It's a wonderful morning in Minnesota too. It's a little nippy for May. I think it's only like 45 degrees out. Wow. You guys are colder than us. We're like in the 60s. It's hot already in the morning. Yeah. A week or so ago we had some really high temps for May and then it dropped back off. 00:54 And I think the high for today is supposed to be 69, I think. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's pretty nice. I mean, it's easier to do things when you're able to be outside, you know, so colder almost is a little better, but not for planting season, you know, so it kind of depends on what you're doing here with the heat. It just it weighs on the animals because we'll we'll get snow and then all of a sudden it'll be, you know, like super hot. 01:24 So we're bouncing back and forth like a bouncing ball. Yeah, it's been that way here too. And honestly, I'm not, I can't complain about where we're at here because last summer was terrible with rain for all of May and into June. So we haven't had that this year, thank God, because our gardens are actually planted other than basil. We can't put basil in yet because it hasn't been warm enough overnight to not kill them. Yeah. So this year I actually decided to not do a garden. 01:52 Even though I took my master gardening course, so I did go to it's called Carbon County as the county I did it in and I was gonna take the test and it's an open book test which so if anyone's interested in Master Gardening most of them I guess level one is open book. But I just found out a lot about my soil being too alkaline-y which we kind of knew but it's so hard to amend it that it's not even worth. 02:18 trying to plant in it right away. So I learned so much in master gardening that I was like, whoa, pump the brakes. I don't want to spend a bunch of money, you know, because it's trial and error for a lot of us. And the more things we try, the more it costs. So the more failure, you know, so I've learned that sometimes it's better to do a lot of research, almost what seems overkill, such as going to a master gardening class to make sure that I'm able to do. Yeah, so I'm able to do. 02:46 you know, the multiple things that I want to do and not spend the money on it. Yep, absolutely. Okay, so now that we've gotten the weather report out of the way and the gardening report out of the way. Morgan was a guest on the show back last July and she was gracious enough to come back and visit with me and give me an update because you're doing a lot of new things. So where is Groovy Grazer is at now? 03:12 Yeah, so thank you for having us again, because I think having an update yearly is really helpful for some people. Because man, has the farm changed in a year? I might get a little emotional. Our first year of farming was really hard. You I came on the episode and I talked about worms. Yep. And that was just the biggest hurdle we had all summer long was trying 03:39 to overcome these worms, which were Barbara pole worms. A lot of farmers that have goats deal with them. Goats, yes, you have goats. Yes. Worms with goats, yes. Yep, worms with goats. So we have goats and sheep. We added sheep in and sheep kind of have the same cycle too. And I did buy a horse. Horses don't get Barbara pole worms. So we end up using land of Havala. I might be saying that wrong. 04:06 Um, but she's a master herbalist. has dairy goats also, and she creates her own blend of herbs. So we were doing like a worm tea. And this year I had 10 babies in one week. So I had three does drop triplets a piece. So nine babies in 48 hours. And what that talks to is like that we were able to get their health in control and they were able to produce. We had a lot of miscarriages last fall. I only had one baby. 04:35 born or not one baby one doe that gave three babies but like you know one birth last fall so we were kind of behind track so I kind of fell down you know and I was like man the worms are really kind of kicking our butt we got to figure it out so we made a lot of changes I changed feed we went to a locally l

Today I'm talking with Karen at Cottage On Cross. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Karen at Cottage On Cross 00:28 Good morning, Karen. How are you? Good morning. Thank you for having me. You're in Pennsylvania, right? I am, yes. Okay. I'm in Minnesota. It's beautiful here for the first time in four days. We've had clouds and rain since, I think, mid-afternoon on Monday. So it's been really nice to get up this morning and see the sun shining. So how are things in Pennsylvania? Well, we probably got your weather. Oh, We're in the midst of that rain, but it's spring and it's needed, so I'm not complaining. 00:58 Yeah, the weather people here were saying on Monday, they were giving us the heads up that this drenching was coming and they were all like, we need the rain. And I'm like, we don't need 17 inches guys. Oh gosh, no. Yeah. I think we've all, I think we've all ended up with five inches total. Well, that's better. Yes. You don't want your garden to flood. No, that happened last year. I don't want it to happen this year. So, all right. So you tell me why it's called Cottage on Cross. 01:28 That's a fun story. It's purposeful, but it's also out of desperation. This is not my first online business. And I learned accidentally with my last one that your name matters in Google searches. If people don't even know what they're looking for, but type in a keyword, you'll come up. know, cottage core, was super trendy when I started it. 01:56 And that's a lot of what I make. So I wanted that name somewhere. And the first maybe 28 names I chose weren't available either on Etsy or on Instagram. And I needed the availability on both of those. So I ended up with Cottage on Cross because we live on Crossroad. okay. Okay. So for people who don't know what Cottage Core is, can you explain that? 02:24 Um, well right now, grandma core is trending, which is pretty much the same, just another term for it. It's just kind of a, uh, a back to basics, um, aesthetic where, uh, if your grandma had it, you're gonna like it, but, but that's the grandma core. Cottage core is, uh, well, kind of the same thing. It's like little house on the prairie, um, vibe going on. Um, it's, it's a more, uh, old fashioned vibe maybe. 02:54 Uh huh. Okay. Um, what I find interesting about Cottage Core is that I grew up with Cottage Core because we spent time with my grandmas, obviously, and, my mom was very influenced by her mother, who was my grandma. And so we always had old fashioned things in our house. And to this day, I really, really hate sleek, shiny glass metal furniture. want, I want wood furniture. want cast iron. 03:23 hooks for my coats. want the old fashioned stuff. I am the same. I am the same. And I think we probably grew up similarly then. Yeah, just in touch with family and the generations back through and all their things that they brought with them and they didn't have the new shiny, partly because they couldn't afford it. And partly because it was cherished memories for them from the generations. And yeah, so you just grow up loving that stuff and 03:52 No, I shunned. I shunned all that too. So this is not a going back for me. This is a celebrating that they've caught up with us. exactly. And I feel like I'm going to sound really dumb. I feel like shiny glass and metal is very cold. And I feel like quilts and cast iron and wood are very warm. I agree. So I really like the cozy warm feeling in my house. I don't want it to be, you know, austere and cold. Yes, I agree. 04:21 So before we get into what you do with quilts, because I've seen the pictures and what you do is really beautiful. Thank you. Do you live on a farm? I grew up on a dairy farm. I had almost all the animals growing up and it was a fantastic way to live. We have land off my family's farm now. We are right across from the farm. I see it every day. It's beautiful. 04:46 I do not have a farm. I have a working knowledge of what a farm is and how much work it is. So I've chosen very carefully what I want. We have chickens. They are easy to care for. I can walk away from them for a day and bank up on their food and they're going to be okay versus a milk cow. can't do that. The goats are really hard to contain. So no, I do not have a farm. 05:12 I live on four acres with

Today I'm talking with Amy at A Farmish Kind Of Life. You can follow on Facebook as well. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy sell trade in local garden groups and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. 00:25 Today I'm talking with Amy at A Farmish Kind Of Life in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Good afternoon, Amy. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. Amy is who I want to be when I grow up. don't even know who I want to be when I grow up. That's funny. Amy is an author. She's a podcaster. She's a blogger. She falls under the homesteading umbrella. 00:55 but it's more of a farm, right? I mean, what is a homesteader? know, isn't that what we're always trying to figure out? What is the definition of a homesteader, I suppose? I still We do have a farm. Yep. We do have a farm. I'm here. I have five acres in central Minnesota with, you know, a ton of different animals. We've been through, you know, all the different animals and we got all the gardens and we've got space. So yeah, it is farming, although... 01:23 there are people around here that have such huge farms that they think we're just kind of playing farm. So, you know, our little five acres is just kind of a little thing. But it's not. It's a big thing. It's a big thing. So tell me what brought you to this whole farmish kind of life, Amy. What brought me to the farmish kind of life? You know, when my husband and I were first married, we lived right in town and he had always lived in town. When I grew up, I grew up at 01:53 I grew up out in the country, but we didn't have a farm. We were more like in the woods and we had a creek and you know, all of that didn't grow up with, you know, the farm animals or anything. And we got married, we lived right in town and knew that was going to be a temporary thing. But we just we really wanted to be out in the country and have space, you know, to just kind of breathe. And I don't know if ever intentionally in the beginning, it was going to be we're going to have all these animals, we're going to can all this food and all this stuff. just 02:22 You just kind of morphed into that, suppose. think part of it was when we were first married, you we were, you know, you're trying to make ends meet and stretch the dollars and then you have the babies, you know, and things get crazy. And I think frugal living and just trying to figure out, you know, can we make this from scratch? What can we substitute? How can we do without this? How can we do something different? That and various other things just led us to whatever you want to call this. 02:52 this life, this farmish thing or this homesteading thing. Right there with you. That's how we got found ourselves in this, this, uh, this quagmire of trying new things all the time. Oh yes. Yeah. There's always something new to try. Yep. I, uh, front of mine brought me sourdough starter Monday night. Thank you Tracy. And, uh, it's fine. The starter she, she brought me, I, 03:22 got up this morning and I have water on top of it. And I was like, that doesn't look good. So I had to go Google it and find out if it was still alive. And apparently it's doing really well. So I threw some more flour in there. It's good. And then I realized, yeah. And then I realized I didn't know anything about sourdough starter. And I've been doing home studying stuff for a long time. So I went back to Google and, and, when looked in Wikipedia and I Oh, 03:49 this is not as hard as I think it is. I'm going to start my own starter too and see if I can make it go from scratch. So that now has water on top of it. And I'm like, okay, this, don't know what to do with it. So. I feel like, you know, like home setting is such a big thing. there's, there's, there's so much to learn. think for us this year, it was, I mean, we've been at the farm for 14 years now and just this past winter. you know, like not that many months ago, we finally tapped our maple tree. 04:19 And we've been here 14 years and we're like, wait a second, we have maple trees. Why are we not tapping these and trying to do this whole maple syrup thing? And it went way better than I thought it would. it's just, you know, I think there's just only so much you can have on your plate and process at once. And then you're like, wait a second, we could do this thing. We could do this thing. So there's always something new to get into. Well, yeah, I've been draggi

Today I'm talking with Marissa at 5 Acre Wood Homestead. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year? Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months. So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com Lang calendar. 00:26 because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. 00:56 You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Marissa at Five Acre Wood Homestead in Washington State. Good evening, Marissa. How are you? I'm great. Thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to talk with you because you have everything going on at your homestead. So tell me about yourself and what you do. Well, um... 01:27 I, so we weren't always, you know, Homesteader, Homestead life. I really just stumbled into it as a lot of us do, right? But I did, I am from a very small, tiny town in Idaho. And there was a lot of, you know, Homestead like things that went on there. And so I did have that very early young childhood. 01:52 experience of that. Like I have memories of the things my parents had to do to get us through winters and whatnot, you know. And my mother and my grandmother, you know, they sewed and crocheted and canned and did all the things. And so I kind of always had that influence in my life. But growing up, we were, I was, you know, displaced to the city here in Tacoma. 02:21 And that's where I spent 40 years was the middle of the city and had my kids there. And at a certain point in my life, I was, I just decided that. You know, we, it's nice to talk about how we want to get back to the country and the small town life and be self-sufficient and do all the things. But at some point you just got to do it. And that's really how this. 02:50 how the homestead came about. And we've been here six years now. Okay. And still no animals. Still a work in progress, right? Because our homestead was was vacant for five years before we got it. And so nature kind of just did what nature does and took over. And so it's been the last three years has been 03:18 a lot of rebuilding and a lot of taking down and a lot of getting the property back to where we need it to be so that we can incorporate the things that we want to have. It's been a lot of work. Well, I'm going to jump in for one second. You don't have to have animals to be a homesteader. It's totally cool if you don't. I know. I know. And so many people have told me that because I feel 03:46 you know, kind of some days like we're not a real homestead because we don't have animals yet. And you're right. That's not that's not true at all. 03:58 Yeah, my friend, she's become a friend. didn't know her a year ago, but now I do because of the podcast. My friend Amy Fagan at Grounded in Maine is her podcast. She asked me to be a guest and she basically introduced me as a homesteader who was bucking the system because we only have three acres and we don't have cows. And it was kind of tongue in cheek. And for anybody listening. 04:23 If you are doing something that's an old fashioned skill as a part of your everyday life, you are practicing homesteading. Yeah, that's true. That's absolutely true. And I do it on so many levels. And I think the animals and the husbandry is probably the only thing that I don't do. And honestly, that's probably a good thing because we tried raising rabbits here and number one, they were dumb and didn't procreate the way they were supposed to. 04:52 And number two, having to call or butcher those babies, not babies, I call them babies because they were my babies, but having to butcher those rabbits and put them in the freezer about killed me. I don't, don't want to do it again. really don't. It's that's a part that, um, you know, it's not everybody can handle that part. Now my dad, um, did have a family farm down in Corvallis, Oregon. 05:22 It's not in our famil

Today I'm talking with Steven at Hot Mess Ranch. You can follow on Facebook as well. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year? Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months. So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com Lang calendar. 00:26 because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. 00:56 You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Good morning, Steven. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. I'm really excited to chat with you because I understand that you have a ranch, but I also understand that you are all over social media. And I want to talk about that too. So first off, why is it called Hot Mess Ranch? 01:26 Well, when my wife and I started the ranch, uh, 2021, we thought for months on what to name the place. And one day when we were watching TV, one of my daughters walked through the living room, did something funny or whatever. My wife looked at her and said, Oh my word, you're such a hot mess. And then it was like a spark went off and instantly 01:53 My wife and I looked at each other like, let's just name it Hot Mess Range. Uh huh. And it was kind of a joke for a little bit. And then it just kind of stuck and we named it the social media that and that it kind of, that that's how it got started. So it's named after my daughters being silly. Well, I love that. And honestly, every time I see a hot mess before someone's name on any social media, 02:22 channel I'm like hmm what kind of hot mess is that one? Right. So it's a good way to get attention too. Yes. Okay so what what brought you to doing Hot Mess Wrench? 02:34 My wife grew up on a Longhorn cattle ranch for most of her life. And we had kind of kicked around the idea of getting land for years and we had always looked at it and coming out of COVID, we just, we found some property and then kind of got serious about it. And I have a daughter with autism and she was kind of having a rough time in the city and 03:04 Um, you know, kids can be kind of cruel and, and, um, we were like, let's just give this a go. Um, really my daughter is what kind of pushed it over the edge. And so we found this place and got out here and that main reason for her, uh, being a, a, um, 03:29 I'm a word I'm kind of brain farting here. The main reason for moving out here with my daughter, uh, played out really well. And, uh, she's her self-esteem is through the roof now and she's feeling great about herself and she's settled in with the animals. And so that's kind of really what it was all about. And then that's, that's why we came out here and got started. I have a question about your daughter and if you don't want to answer it, just don't, and I will edit it out. 03:58 Autism presents in a whole lot of different ways with kids. So how did you find out that she had autism? 04:08 Um, my wife is a teacher and so she holds a, well, she does now she holds a doctorate in elementary education. And so she's got a lot of experience with that, especially with kids in the, in school. Right. And so we could tell, she could tell kind of an early age that there was a chance she was kind of on the spectrum. And then we went and got her diagnosed. 04:35 Uh, early on, so we've, had known for quite some time. You can, you can generally tell they're not a, they're not as social as a lot of people, you know, she gets a lot of anxiety and in heavy social situations, a lot of people around a lot of noise, um, uh, over, over stimulation happens pretty quick, but the noise is really kind of. 05:05 you know, was a telltale sign. And she even to this day, if we go back into large gathering, you can tell she just kind of gets overstimulated pretty quickly. So that was one of the main signs that we noticed and she still has today. Okay. I was just wondering, don't want to make this about me, but I have a c

Today I'm talking with Jesse at Organic Urban Farm. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year? Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months. So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com Lang calendar. 00:26 because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. 00:56 You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Jesse at Organic Urban Farm. Good morning, Jesse. How are you? Good morning, Mary. How's everything? It's good. If I lose you, it's because we have some really high winds happening here in Minnesota today. Not a problem. Just a call away. Okay, cool. All right. So. 01:25 I had to go look up Long Island, New York because I never even wondered about where it is. I grew up in Maine, but never even wondered how Long Island fit into the state of New York. And it is literally a Long Island. Yes, it is. So is it very populated because that helps me raise my questions here? Yeah. So I've lived on Long Island my whole life. I've lived in the town of Oceanside since basically I was 01:54 Around three years old, we moved over here. The Oceanside is about 40 minutes from like New York City. So Manhattan and you you're very close to the boroughs. You're only a car ride away really from anywhere. But for me, I grew up upstate a lot in upstate New York with my grandparents, raising chickens and horses and other animals. With my papa was a big thing for me growing up. And I spent most of my summers over there. 02:23 I always loved it. So once my papa passed, I decided to do a little nice chicken coop in my backyard and start something small just in his memory and something that made me happy to do. But around us, we really don't have many chicken coops. I'm probably one of the few people in our neighborhood who has a chicken coop. So it is rare to have this over here, but it was something I love and it was something that I really wanted to do. But yeah, this is really more of like... 02:53 Urban city. This is more of you know a fast-paced area. It's You know more of a city suburban life, and it's a little bit different than Then what you would see on most forms I would say yeah, that was part of the reason that your Instagram page grabbed me because I was like organic and urban don't necessarily shake hands well unless you work some magic Yep, absolutely so 03:21 You know, we don't have our certifications and stuff like that, but we raise our chickens all organic when it comes to free-ranging them and then as well as feed. Right now, we use Scratch and Peck, which honestly is one of my favorite brands. It's a little pricey, but the chickens really do love it. And honestly, I haven't had any problems with it, even when they were babies with the coxodosis. you know, I was raising chickens, you guys know. 03:51 that the babies tend to sometimes eat their poop and stuff like that, which will make them sick. But a lot of people use the medicated feed, but I don't see a need for it, honestly. I've noticed that the organic feed, as long as it's a quality feed, seem to be, you know, you don't seem to have any sicknesses or anything. But that also goes with how neat you keep your coop and how neat you keep the brooder. Because that's very important when it comes to that. 04:19 When it comes to the health and the sickness in a small area like this, especially when you don't have a big farm, you really have to be neat. It's the most important part of it. Yep. Absolutely. Because those bacteria nasties will take any opportunity to get in and wreak havoc. Absolutely. Yep. So, um, so how big is your, uh, yep, go ahead. No, I'm sorry. That was, I was just getting, uh, in somewhere. Well, go ahead. What were you saying? How big is your, um, 04:48 your lot that you have your chickens on? So we have a very big backyard. So like by us, d

Today I'm talking with Lindsay at Home In The Pines. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year? Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months. So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com Lang calendar. 00:26 because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. 00:56 You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Lindsay at Home in the Pines. Good morning, Lindsay. How are you? Good morning. I'm good. How are you doing? I'm good. Where are you located? We are in East Texas. Okay, cool. Is it sunny there? Because it's gray here in Minnesota. Same here. We've had a lot of rain lately. I mean, honestly, it's just the humidity. I feel like we're just one big 01:26 ball of humidity. It's just like walking through steam all the time. Yeah. Yeah. I keep waiting for the first really nice moderate spring day and it just hasn't happened yet, but we're supposed to have a gorgeous weekend here. I'm so excited. good. Yeah. So tell me about yourself and what you do. And I have one quick question. Your Instagram page shows you as home in the pines, but it also shows you as something else. What's that something else again? 01:57 Um, Homestead Hustlers in Progress. Yes, that. So tell me, tell me about yourself and Homestead Hustlers in Progress. Okay. Um, well, my husband and I are actually originally from Minnesota. So we get through this stand. Yeah. We know what you're going through this time of year. Um, we both grew up in the city. My husband really inner city and I was, you know, more on the outskirts suburbs. And, um, when we first got married, I was teaching. He is a basketball coach, now teacher and. 02:27 Um, we were led to go to Iowa a couple of years after we were married and, um, he was coaching at a Christian college there. We adopted our two older boys while we were there and we were in a neighborhood, but we had about an acre of land. It was a super big yard for, for the neighborhood. And we absolutely loved it, especially both coming from the city. Um, my husband will say like, I never want to live on top of anybody ever again. And, um, so we just really got like that. 02:58 it to like, oh, this is nice. This is kind of nice having a little bit of space, you know. After a few years, we moved to West Texas where we worked in a facility for at-risk youth. We were both teachers, both coaches. Again, we had our two older boys and then we had a baby while we were there. And we lived on, was like a working ranch. We lived on the ranch there. 03:25 but we also bought some property about 15 minutes away. So we would go there on the weekends. My husband liked doing projects, being out there, bringing the kids, you know, just having some freedom and fresh air, that kind of thing. Excuse me. So then just two years ago, we moved over here to East Texas where we purchased a major fixer upper. it had been abandoned for a few years besides all the critters. And 03:55 had another baby, so we four kids, three boys and a little girl. And I work part time from home. My husband still teaches and coaches. And we just, we have about 13 acres here in the middle of the woods and we love it. It's just, it's like been a gradual progression from like where we started to now kind of just like fully immersed in this like own land, you know, work it, that kind of thing. 04:23 Okay, that's a fabulous story. I have to know, was your husband living in Minneapolis? Is that the big city? Yes. Yep, right there in South Minneapolis. Okay, cool. Yeah, I had no idea that you were from Minnesota, but the minute you said no, no, I heard the big O and I was like, oh, I would have known either way. everyone's like, where are you from? What accent is that? I was like, I'm the one with the accent. But it's funny. Uh-huh. Yep. 04:50 It's really interesting

Today I'm talking with Matt and Deb at Plotting To Plate - The people on plot 11 & 5. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year? Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months. So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com Lang calendar. 00:26 because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. 00:56 You can find them at HomegrownCollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Matt and I think you said Debbie. I might have screwed that up. At Plotting To Plate. Hi guys, how are you? We're good. Thank Very good. Thank you. Did I get the name right? Yes, it's Deb. Okay, good. I blanked for a second. I was like, what is her name? 01:24 Okay. You guys are in Staffordshire or Staffordshire, England, right? Yeah, we're in Stafford, which is in Staffordshire. It's a market town, about 71,000 people. So it's quite a big town these days. It's so medium to large. And it's in the Midlands. Okay, cool. And how is the weather in England today? It's lovely. 01:52 It's really nice. So if you're wanting to go outside and get some time and sit and have a cup of tea and read books, it's great. If you're growing vegetables, not so good because this has been the driest spring that we've had since the records began. So obviously we have two hats on these. Oh, no. 02:19 Unseasonably warm and dry for the UK at the moment. I really wish that Mother Nature would get her act together. Well, just give us more warning about what she's going to be because we've got seedlings and things we need to look after. So, you know, you need to be able to plan for that, don't you? Yes. And we went through this last year here in my town because we had six weeks of rain straight in May and June. Yeah. 02:49 And it was bad. Our garden was terrible. And I've talked about it a lot, so I'm not going to talk about it anymore right now. tell me about what you guys do, because I know in England you can either have plants growing where you live or you can have allotments. And I'm not quite sure I understand what allotments mean. So tell me about it. Yeah. So an allotment is a large piece of land. 03:17 that's often owned by either a council or an association. And then it's subdivided into plots. And the sole purpose of the plot is to grow fruit and veg. And you rent that land from either the association or the council. So we rent two plots on our site. There's plot five and plot 11. And there's about 150 plots on the site. So it is a massive site. 03:47 But it's urban, so it's completely surrounded by housing. There's nothing rural about it outside of the gates until you get in the gates and then there's all the small plots that are put over to fruit, veg, flowers or whatever you want to grow there. Allotments, it's quite an old tradition in the UK. 04:15 the 1970s became popular and then it died off again. Then it came back to life in the 1990s and has sort of grown ever since. We found that we actually took ours on in just after lockdown in 2021 because during lockdown, know, we love food, we love eating well and we love eating organically. So lockdown gave us the time to think and consider about having. 04:43 a more sustainable and simpler life and part of that was to get these two allotment plots. We haven't looked back since actually, just absolutely love it. So as far as allotments for the third, as quite large. So normally in the UK they're about 300 yards, but as a bigger, so with the two together, I think we have about a quarter of a plot, something like that, isn't it? 05:13 A quarter of an acre. Not a quarter of a plot. That wouldn't feed us. It's about a quarter of an acre, which it's not too big. It's just about as much as we can manage because Matt still works. I'm retired but he works. But it does sustain us to be able to eat seasonally, to eat organically and to also grow

Today I'm talking with Ty at CT Farms Mobile Processing. You can follow on Facebook as well. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year? Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months. So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com Lang calendar. 00:26 because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. 00:56 You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Ty at CT Farms Mobile Processing in Le Sueur, Minnesota. Good morning, Ty. How are you? Good. Hang on one second. My computer is doing something weird. Okay. Nevermind. We're good. Okay. So, um, Ty is not far from me. Where are you in LaSore, Ty? 01:26 Uh, right outside we live over by the Cambria plant. Oh, okay. Yep. And we live over by Michael Foods on Highway 8. you're maybe five miles away from me, I think. Yeah, not terribly far. Yeah. So it's a hyper local episode today, guys. I'm very excited about this. What does CT stand for? Uh, stands for Chad and Ty. So I'm Ty, the son of the operation and then Chad is my dad. 01:57 Okay, awesome. That makes sense. I would normally I would ask how the weather is where you are, but we have been having the most glorious streak of beautiful weather here in Lesor. Oh, God, yes. Today is just beautiful. My husband and my son have been outside all morning watering plants and getting our plant sale set up and all kinds of things. And I've been taking 02:22 I've been taking care of stuff in the house and doing dishes and the stuff that the girls do so So tell me about yourself and what you guys do, please um So kind of just all started, you know I was Wasn't having fun really doing concrete breaking my back for a whole lot of money, you know processing pretty easy money We've been doing it 02:49 I've been doing it for a very long time now. My dad used to do it when he was younger. So it was kinda like in our family. You know, we knew what we had to do. We knew that it would provide everything for us. You know, it cost us less money if we just butchered the animals ourselves. Saved us money and it provided food for our family. So you know, it was kind of a big plus to it. There's one guy getting out of 03:18 mobile processing for chickens and we just kinda started questioning if we could do it. We were gonna go buy that trailer but it sold so we were like alright well we can kinda base our trailer off of that. So we did, we tried our best and it turned out pretty good. As a business getting into something obviously there's some stuff that needs to adjust. 03:47 which we are slowly working towards. Our business is definitely getting better and better every year. Our customers love our birds that we do for them. They love us. And we love having them come to us. So yeah, I mean, it's pretty fun. Awesome. So is it only chickens that you guys butcher or do you do other things as well? 04:16 Uh, we mainly stick to chickens. Um, we do butcher our own animals at home. have a little hobby farm per se. So. Yeah. Cause, a friend of ours was looking at getting into mobile butchering and discovered that, um, the state of Minnesota does not really smile upon much else except chickens for mobile butchering. Yeah. They don't really like you doing everything else really because 04:45 You know, there's just a lot of stuff going on in the government. Uh huh. Yeah. All the rules and regs that you have to follow and, something about that, that the USDA inspector person has to come out and be there for butchering of anything other than a chicken or a rabbit, think. Yep. Yeah. And that's, that's difficult to schedule and they don't really like to do it from what I've heard. So. 05:14 Yeah, that's a big thing. If you're approved, they kind of just got to come out there, just have a little office, you know, cornered off or something. Just always check

Today I'm talking with Heather at Heather's Homestead. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year? Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months. So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com Lang calendar. 00:26 because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. 00:56 You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Heather Richards at Homestead from scratch. Good afternoon, sorry, good afternoon, Heather. How are you? Good, how are you? I'm good. I have to keep reminding myself of what time it is because I almost said good morning again, and it's not morning, it's afternoon. So how's the weather in Montana? 01:23 It's beautiful today. We're supposed to be expecting a lot of rain though this week. So we're trying to get things kind of ready for that and things buckled up a little bit because it's going to be a rainy week. So got a batten down the hatches. Yeah. Yeah. It is a beautiful sunny day here in Minnesota, but it's going to be really hot in about an hour and a half. Nice. Well, I've actually been like waiting for it to get really nice and hot here. So I'm kind of jealous. 01:51 Yeah, it's too hot for Minnesota right now. This is not beginning of May weather. This is end of July, 1st of August weather. And actually on, oh, I can't remember what day it was. A couple days ago, my husband planted the tomato seedlings and they got burned because it was so hot and sunny. I don't know if they're going to recover. They're still looking a little yellow today. So we're keeping our fingers crossed that they're going to. 02:21 They're going to bounce back, I hope. All right. So tell me about yourself and what you do at Homestead from scratch. Well, it's Heather's Homestead, technically. But I do say that's my little bit of a, I don't know what you would call it, my tagline, I guess. But yes, Heather's Homestead. We just started building this about four years ago, but we've only been here about three. We're kind of building, I guess, what you could call a family compound. We have five children. 02:51 And most of them are raised. have one at home that he's 18. But the goal is to someday hopefully have everybody want to build here and live here on the property. So we kind of gave each one of our kids a few acres apiece so that they can have. And just so we can kind of just live closer, I guess, as a family. And that's pretty much the goal. we have, like I said, I five children. 03:19 ranging from almost 29 down to 18. Three of them are married. Yeah, and one of them's about to get married, maybe this summer. That's the plan for him, maybe. So we might have a busy summer. But yeah, we are raw milk producers, I guess. We sell raw milk and eggs and have a little bit of, I guess you could call a little mini homestead. We have all the animals. 03:47 Actually, my husband's going to pick up some pigs today. So we'll be adding those to the farm this week. yeah, other than that, that's kind of been a little bit about me, but it's been a fun adventure for us. We started this place from scratch with nothing on it, and we've built everything ourselves. So it's been kind of quite the undertaking, but we've had a really good time and learning as we go. 04:17 So as we all do, yes, especially when we're not in our twenties and we have all the energy in the world to just dive in and beat ourselves up. So you said you sell raw milk. What are the regulations in Montana? And then I will tell you the ones here in Minnesota. So we have to get our animal disease tested once a year and we have to get the milk sent off twice a year to, you know, to a lab to make sure everything is good. 04:47 The counts are good. so yeah, we are actually pretty low key here. It's really nice. We don't have too many restrictions, I guess, but and we can sell fro

Today I'm talking with Rachel and Nick at Narrow Gate Homestead. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year? Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months. So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com Lang calendar. 00:26 because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. 00:56 You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Rachel and Nick at Narrowgate Homestead in Lebanon, Maine. Good afternoon, you guys. How are you? Good. Good afternoon. Top of the soggy day to you. Yeah. I'm so sorry. I usually open the podcast with How's the Weather? And I know how the weather is because I just talked to my parents yesterday morning and 01:26 They said you guys have had a ton of rain in last, what, three weeks? Oh gosh, yeah. A couple inches. I actually, think it just finally broke. So this afternoon, I think it's going to be without raindrops. Yeah. Well, I'm happy for you. I am looking out my window and it is sunny. It's about 74 degrees with a light breeze here in Minnesota. Oh, nice. Well, that sounds nice. Much nicer. We have had the most beautiful week of just glorious. 01:56 reasonable, beautiful, sunny, hardly any wind weather for the first time in weeks. So it's been, it's been the opening day or the opening week for May, for spring. can't talk. It's been amazing. I'm so excited about it. My words are falling all over themselves. anyway, go ahead. Anytime that there's no wind is Nick's favorite kind of day. Yeah. 02:26 You know about the weather in Minnesota, how it can be just flat still or it can just be whipping through, right? Oh yeah. Yeah. huh. Yeah. Yep. We had, I think it was three weeks ago, we had thunderstorms and off and on during the day, but we had wind gusts of like 60 miles per hour that day. It was insanity. Well, that is a, that's crazy wind. Yeah. 02:54 or the greenhouses. Yeah. Our greenhouses survived, thank God, but we live on a very flat plain above the river valley. And so when the wind comes through, really comes through because there's hardly anything to break the wind. So it can get real iffy here sometimes, but so far we've been okay. Okay. So you guys tell me about what you do at Narrowgate Homestead and about yourselves, please. 03:22 Oh, yeah. Well, we started this journey in 2022. Before that, we're two Navy veterans with no farming background. That's true. 03:40 We decided in 2022 that we wanted to be a part of our, knowing how our food was raised and where our food came from. I suppose it started, I'm sure most people that you podcast with are familiar with the documentary Food, Inc. Probably yes. Yes, so that's when we met Joel Salatin for the first time. Never actually physically met him, but that's when he... 04:10 That's when we kind of first got involved with the idea that the way our food is produced and cared for and put on our grocery shelves might not necessarily be the most ethical and healthy manner that is out there and available. And we marinated on those ideas for quite a few years and really didn't do a whole lot about it. But I think it was, COVID was kind of like the catalyst for a lot of things, for a lot of people. And one of those things for us was 04:39 The fact that our food supply, I'm sure people remember going into the grocery stores and something like chicken has never been a problem before, wasn't on the shelf. So it kind of occurred to us that maybe we should put action into words or words into action rather. And, you know, now it's 2025 and we have probably what? chickens outside right now. Oh yeah. 600 here. 05:08 hundred down the road on pasture. So we solved the chicken on the shelf problem. Yeah. You sure did. Yeah. I mean, kind of going off of what Nick said, you know, we, very quickly and clearly saw just how weak the local food chains are and b

Today I'm talking with Kevin at The Kitchen Mechanic. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year? Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months. So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com Lang calendar. 00:26 because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free to use farm to table platform, emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. 00:56 You can find them at HomegrownCollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Kevin at The Kitchen Mechanic. How are you, Kevin? I'm Dandy. And where are you located? I'm located in Reno, Nevada. Oh, well, not quite Sin City, but close. What's Sin City? Which one? There's so many. 01:26 The one near you. Okay. Is it hot there? Not yet, but it's still early. It's so, it's so, I only moved here like eight months ago. And so I'm still getting acclimated, but you know, where I moved from, had tomatoes in the ground in March. I'm still waiting to put tomatoes in the ground here. Cause I, they, the locals say you have to wait till the snow melts off of this certain mountain peak to know that you're going to have any more frost issues. So. 01:55 I'm waiting for the snow to melt. Okay, where did you move from? I moved from the Sacramento area. Okay, yep, that makes sense. I don't have you grow. Okay, I'm really garbling this. I'm sorry. I didn't really know you could grow a lot in Nevada. Well, I'm still figuring it out. We'll see. But they have definitely have a shorter growing season. 02:24 Yeah, so I'll know for next year, you know, get my hydroponics out and get them started early and be ready for them. Because right now I'm still waiting for seeds to emerge from my little starts. So we'll find out. Okay. Well, tell me about what you do at the kitchen mechanic. Well, I mean, I retired from the culinary world some time ago, but I've kept one foot in it. 02:52 I do a lot pro bono stuff like, you know, schools do fundraising events or like the city of Orangeville did a day of service for the city. And I ended up donating my time making breakfast for about 1200 people for that event. And so just looking for opportunities to give back and, you know, do some teaching. I started an online store. I've been off of it for a couple of years because of 03:22 everything that's going on in my life. So I just decided to get back on it. So I got a cookie sale going on. But you know, I make stuff and I sell it people over the internet or locally or whatever. Okay, so why did you call it the kitchen mechanic? Because I am very much not mechanically inclined. 03:51 Matter of fact, on the back of my calf, have a picture of two knives crossed with a sharpening steel going through the middle of them. I walk into Home Depot and I walk up to them and I say, see this? These are the only tools I know how to use. The only thing I know how to fix is dinner. So I need you to hold my hand. So that's kind of where it came from, the kitchen and candy, because the only thing I can fix is dinner. 04:17 That is very funny. I did a TV cooking show in Phoenix back in the 90s. And I wore an oversized tool belt with big, huge kitchen tools in it for effect. And basically, we did the whole thing there based on the premise of the kitchen mechanic. It's kind of where it all grew from. That's fun. I love that. OK. So what's your favorite thing to cook? 04:47 Well, if I had a dollar for every time I got asked that question. And it's funny too, because a couple of chef sites that I'm on, not Facebook, people bring us, what do you say when people like, what are your favorite thing is? It's like saying, what's your favorite child? The emphasis on my training is in pastries and chocolate. I was actually a senior chocolatier for Dub Chocolate Discoveries for a bit. 05:16 That's the stuff I enjoy doing for other people. I used to teach a class for Williams Sonoma on exotic cheesecakes and so that's kind of one of my things I'm kno

Today I'm talking with Katie at Sunset Creek Farm LLC. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead is sponsored by the Homegrown Collective, the best option for organizing a responsible and regional food system for America. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Katie at Sunset Creek Farm LLC. Good, well, I guess it's evening, Katie. How are you? I'm good. How are you? 00:27 I am good. I usually record in the morning and so I'm always saying good morning and when I do them in the evening, I'm like, ah, it's not morning anymore. Yes, it is a dreary afternoon here for sure. Yeah. And you're in Georgia, right? Yes, in Trine, Georgia. Yeah. It's not dreary here cause it's not raining, but it's been gray all day. Yes. And I'm in Minnesota if you didn't know. So. Yes. Okay. So tell me all about yourself. 00:57 and Sunset Creek Farm. Okay, so like I said, we're located in Trine, Georgia. We have been here about six years. So my family actually owns part of the land and then we took a little bit of it and then we had actually built a barn so that way we could get married in it. So it all started from there. 01:22 And so then last year, and we've always had, I rodeoed my whole life. And so I had, I've had horses and cows my whole life. But then whenever me and Caleb got married, then of course we had planned to build here and everything. And then last year we ended up getting Kiko goats. So that was really kind of how we got started. 01:47 in having our own little farm. It had always been a dream of ours to have our own farm. And luckily we had the acreage. And so then from there, of course, the goat supply just kept coming. So we ended up, we have about 13 nanny goats. And so, and we've got a couple of billies that we're keeping separate. That way we can keep the. 02:16 the lines going and then in December, I decided that I needed a milk cow. So I do a lot of research before I do anything. Me and my husband are both that way. And so I got to look in and you know, we didn't need a full size cow because we didn't need that much milk just for our family. 02:40 And so I ended up doing a lot of research and discovered that the mini jersey was probably our best option. So we get anywhere from one to two gallons of milk a day, just depending on how much I'm milker. So I do have a full-time job. So this is our hobby on the side. And so luckily we do have a bottle cap. 03:06 that he helps me milk her during the week and then I milk on the weekends so that way we have enough milk to get us through the week and I like to you know make the different cheeses and I've made feta and mozzarella. I haven't tried hard cheeses yet. I'm a little intimidated but I'm trying to build myself up to there but then we like to do butter and yogurt and you know different things that I can make with the milk. 03:34 And so, so that's one thing that, you know, the mini Jersey, we have loved having her. And so in the, the buttermilk or the, excuse me, the milk is very rich and has a lot of butterfat. And so that lets us that I don't have to have as much milk or cream as I need to make the butter. So that makes it, it makes it easier for me to be able to produce butter when I want to. 04:04 That's really enjoyed it. Yes, yes. you know, really, it's been nice to be able... So the main reason that we started... So I had breast cancer in 2023. So that made me start looking at what chemicals that are in our food, what chemicals are in the shampoo, the conditioner. 04:30 the body washes, the even, you know, the different laundry detergents that you have, all the chemicals that are unnecessary to have and to put on your body. And so that was whenever we really started looking at what is the best way to be able to grow our own food and to be able, you know, to have our own milk and, and take those chemicals that we can. Of course there's chemicals around us all the time, but to 05:00 but to take what I could out of our lives for what I could. Yeah, because your skin is your biggest organ. Not everyone knows that, but your skin is exposed to everything. whatever you can do to cut back on what you're putting on your skin that's going to get absorbed that's bad for you is a grand and glorious thing. Yes. And that was one thing that got me started in the soap. 05:28 making was because you know, I only have you know, five different ingredients in my soap. And if you look on the back of a body wash, I mean, there's all these ingredients, I can't pronounce. And so then that makes you think if I don't, if I can't pronounce it, I definitely don'