A Tiny Homestead

Today I'm talking with Julia at Sustainable Driftless, Inc. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like information regarding the documentaries mentioned, click here. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Julia at Sustainable Driftless Incorporated. I think it is Inc., so incorporated. Good morning, Julia. How are you? I am good. I'm good. I'm glad to be here with you. I'm so happy to have you on because I... 00:28 I have been to the Driftless area in Wisconsin once and it's gorgeous, but I don't know all the history and the stories behind it. So I'm very excited to talk to you. You're in La Crosse, Wisconsin? I would say La Crosse kind of geographically might be roughly the center of the Driftless region. I'm actually in the, I call it the suburbs of a very rural area. It's where I live on an 80 acre. 00:58 Homestead. Ooh. But I travel all over the Driftless region. Today I'm in Madison, Wisconsin. And we just do a whole lot of stuff out there in the Driftless. Okay. Well, first off, can you tell me what your part in the organization is and what the organization is? Okay. Let's see. 01:26 About eight years ago, I collaborated with somebody else that I had been working with on another not-for-profit. These two guys have produced mysteries of the driftless through the Mississippi Valley Conservancy, Tim Jacobson and George Howe. And the three of us got together and we formed Sustainable Driftless with the purpose of kind of shining a light on the area 01:55 basic idea is that if you love something, you'll treat it well. So what we're, our attempt was and is to get people to love the driftless region, to see what is around them. There are lots of people that have lived here their entire lives and don't necessarily recognize how precious and fragile and gorgeous it is. I think you have to go outside the region to recognize how special it is sometimes. 02:25 But we're shining a light on that. We produced Decoding the Driftless six years ago, which won some Emmys and worldwide accolades. And I think it's one of the number one documentaries that is shown on public television throughout the nation. And what that has done is it kind of... 02:51 gets people kind of into what this special place is all about. So we've continued on with that, and we had a terrible unexpected loss of George Howe about a year ago in a farming accident. And my role as one of the original founders and vice president, and now also is to find new ways to... 03:16 shine the light on the area and to uplift other organizations that are in this area that do work on sustainability and environmental and wise and smart development of the area, water quality issues, soil issues. We just want to get all those individual groups working, not necessarily working together, but aware of one another and having the general public be aware of everybody because 03:46 It's a really exciting time and it's a really exciting story to see this kind of efforts for biodiversity and home setting and gardening and all kinds of good stuff. Okay, that helps. Thank you. So for those who are listening that don't know about the driftless area, can you explain what it is? 04:12 The driftless area is a very unique part of the Midwest. And what it is, is over the two last ice ages, I think the last one was 10,000 years ago, there was no glacier drift as things melted. There was no glacier scraping this area. So you're not going to find drift from... 04:41 Far away. 04:44 that has landed in this area because the glaciers went around both times. And it's kind of like an amoeba-shaped island that encompasses 32 counties in Wisconsin, southwest Wisconsin, western Wisconsin, a bit of Minnesota, southeast Minnesota, and northeast Iowa, and a little tiny bit of Illinois. And it has karst geology, which makes it very interesting. 05:15 It has what geology? Karst geology, which is kind of limestone. It's like the Swiss cheese of rocks. So the rain and the water that, and this was once underwater as everything melted, but the rain and the water that falls on the hills and at this area and the valley percolates through kind of a 05:40 Swiss cheese, I would say, imaginary rock system. So the water kind of goes through it and absorbs all those minerals and ends up in a very abundant water supply in the area. Okay, thank you. I just missed the word and I didn't understand what you said. Okay, so one of the things that I either understand or misunderstand about the driftless area and people who grow food 06:09 is that you're not supposed to use man-made herbicides or pesticides or fertil

Today I'm talking with Erin at the Erin Anderson Coaching. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Erin at Erin Anderson Coaching. Good morning, Erin. How are you? I'm great. How are you, Mary? I'm good. It's a really bright sunny day here in Minnesota, but it is cold. It's really cold here. 00:26 Yeah, it is in Utah. It's not bright sunny either. We've got the clouds, the cold, and the uncomfortable. We had that yesterday. Today it's just nice to see the sun pouring through my window because yesterday was just gray and I'm not even sure we got above zero. If we did, it wasn't by much. Yeah, yep, yep, yep. That's kind of where we're at right now. But you live in one of the most beautiful states in the whole 50 of them. 00:54 I love Utah, but you know, I've been to Minnesota too, and I've been to Montana and a lot of the 50, like the western half of the 50 states I should say. There's just beauty all over. There really is. Yes, I agree. I agree. I have done a lot of road trips between Minnesota and Maine over my last 20 years. And I grew up in Maine, so my parents and my family still live there. But 01:20 Yeah, it's always a joy for me to do a road trip from here to there because it's always just so pretty. And I don't like flying, so if I'm going to travel, it's going to be by car. Yeah, I get that. Yeah. I get that. Okay. So, Erin is a coach, a life coach, I guess is what I would say. Life and business. Yeah. And that might seem weird for a podcast, I mean a Homestead podcast, but it's really not. 01:46 Because there's a lot going on in the world that Erin might be able to help us understand and work through it herself. So Erin, tell me about yourself and what you do. Yeah, so let me tell you this much. I'm a homesteader myself, so there's that. We have 28 chickens. We built them literally a chicken Taj Mahal out in our yard. And so, you know, we gather our own eggs. We have family that raises dairy cows. And so, 02:15 you know, we can get our own dairy and things like that. So like we totally, totally understand like the homesteading thing. But what I love to do, um, is I love helping women, especially women, entrepreneurs heal from residual trauma. Uh, because you know, there's, there's so many things that women can do, uh, especially in the homesteading community, like we're, they're creators. 02:44 those women are massive creators in the homesteading community. And when we're being plagued with residual trauma, often what I see happening is we're not able to live our best life. We're not able to create the things that we want to create or even, you know, do the things that we want to do because we're always plagued with this. But what if, you know what I mean? 03:14 And so the thing that I love to do is I really love to help women heal those things. So that way they can turn around and they can create everything that they want to create with confidence, knowing it's going to work out, like knowing it's going to work out, not wondering. And believing in themselves because there's something beautiful about a woman. 03:43 who is really in that creative energy. Hmm. Absolutely. I agree. And the thing that's hard about living in the, the after effects of trauma is that you cannot move forward and extend the energy you're extending on feeling bad into doing something good. Yeah. Yes. It's, it's really hard. And 04:10 The reason I wanted to chat with you is because right now, there's a lot going on that is making people feel kind of anxious. And one of the things that's going on is people who have homesteads are kind of concerned about their funding. People have farms or homesteads or ranches because a lot of funding comes from the government and there's some stuff going on in the government that people are worried about. They're not gonna get funding to do what they're usually supposed to do. So, 04:38 How do you handle that as the person who is anxious about your future? So number one, you've got to get really close with your money story, right? When you are dealing with the anxiety of, oh my gosh, I don't know if I'm going to have that funding. I don't know if I'm going to have this. And you're feeling that there's a reason. And again, like it's. 05:06 probably has something to do with some type of trauma. There's several different types of trauma. But I would guess that if you're dealing with a lot of money trauma or these fears around money, you're probably dealing with something in childhood, like some sort of childhood or developmental trauma, or it can also be a societal

Today I'm talking with Anya at the Hedgerow Collective. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Anya at the Hedgerow Collective. Good afternoon. Well, I guess it's afternoon for you, but it's still morning for me. So good morning, afternoon, Anya. How are you? Good morning and afternoon to you as well. I am well today. 00:27 Pennsylvania, Southeast Pennsylvania where I live. It is a overcast day and it smells and feels like snow. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's not an overcast day here in Minnesota. It is just as bright as it could possibly be and it's very cold. I don't think we've come up zero yet today. Oof. Yeah. So that's exciting. 00:53 And I'm glad you opened with the weather because I usually do because like I've said, it's how I express my esteem for the people that I'm talking to. I always try to find out the weather where you guys are. So, all right. So I'm going to open this up with the fact that you're not really a homesteader, but reading your bio on your website, you are definitely a nature girl. So I figured they tie in pretty well. So tell me about yourself and what you do. 01:18 I agree, they tie in so well and I actually do a little bit of homesteading but I'm very, very new at it. But I am a nature girl, I am a gardener, I am a photographer and I also do horse massage which is really delightful. And I live on a little... 01:45 property in a town called Marietta, Pennsylvania. It is ancient Susquehannaq land. And we moved here about three years ago. And at the time, my husband said, we're not gonna have any big trees. We're not going to do anything wild like that. We don't want the maintenance of trees falling on the house or the leaves or anything. 02:15 And over, you know, these past three years, we've compromised and we now have 11 trees on the property. Yay. Yes, and more to come. There's apple trees that are sitting in my sunroom. I have serviceberry trees that are being shipped to me. So we've created a really wonderful little habitat here that I 02:45 Um, really, it feels really magical here, even though we're in, you know, we have neighbors on all sides and a road in front of our house. And, you know, I think, I think part of my goal is that you don't need to have, you know, 10 acres, 50 acres to be able to do this type of, of work and grow your own food or grow, create habitats or anything like that. You know, you can work with what you have and it's... 03:13 absolutely possible. I mean, it's great if you do have 10 acres or 60 acres or 500 acres, but you don't have to have those things in order to grow some really amazing flowers or food or both. Yeah. Yep. That's one of the things that I'm trying to promote on this podcast is that you can do this stuff in a little tiny house on a tenth of an acre, or you can do it on lots of acres. But the point is you can do it. 03:43 Absolutely. I mean, you can find cheap things like baby pools or old, like food grade buckets on Facebook Marketplace for super cheap and you can grow things. Yeah. You mentioned apple trees. My husband actually went out and pruned our peach trees and our apple trees this past weekend and brought in the stems and he's rooting them. 04:09 so that we can have saplings because if it works, they'll turn into more trees. Absolutely. Yeah. That's great. Really excited. I have a sapling. Well, I'm trying, not quite a sapling yet. I'm manifesting that it will become a sapling of a witch hazel cutting. So that's my little project. I have it sitting next to me here and I just, I talk to her every day. I'm like, come on, you can do it. 04:38 Spread those roots. Do your thing. Yeah, I was going to say talk to it and sing to it. It'll come up every day. Yeah. OK. You mentioned Susquehanna land. Is that Native American land? That is Native American land. They were. Marietta is situated along the Susquehanna River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay, and it's one of the largest watersheds in Pennsylvania. The Susquehanna River. 05:07 is this is some fun facts here. It's 444 miles long and it is the longest unnavigable river in the United States. Because the Susquehanna goes from 200 feet deep to two inches deep so quickly, it's impossible to navigate it. 05:36 with any type of boat. And historically, they fixed, fixed, quote unquote, that by using canals, the remnants of which are still litter the sides of the river. But yes, the Sesquihana people were on these shores. They were part of the Lena Lenape tribes of the Northeast. 06:04 I try to acknowledge that they were here far, far longer and well before any

Today I'm talking with Sam at My Homestead Heart. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Sam at My Homestead Heart. Good morning, Sam, how are you? Good morning, Miss Mary. I'm doing wonderful, how about yourself? I'm good, and I love that you said Miss Mary because it's a very southern thing, I love that. 00:27 Yeah, that's what I am. I am from the deep south. Yes, and you have the most lovely sweet tea accent. I'm telling you, every time I talk to somebody with a southern accent like yours, I just smile. My face just breaks open because it's so pretty. Oh, you're so kind. Nah, I'm not kind. I'm honest. If I didn't like it, I wouldn't say anything because I'm not rude. Well, thank you so much. It's funny that I still carry it. 00:57 because I have not lived home in decades, but apparently I still bring it with me in some sort of way. However, if you were to listen to my family members, it is much more thick, thicker than mine. Wow. 01:18 Okay, well they must be terribly difficult to understand because you are clear as a bell. So if it's a lot thicker than yours, I probably would be like, Oh man, my sister's her accent. She's never, she was born and raised down there and, um, I can probably count on her hand the amount of times that she has left the area in her lifetime. And she is thick, thick, thick Southern drawl. 01:47 Well, I'm going to slip into it a couple of times because it's the one I pick up easiest. So don't be mad at me if I start sounding like a Southerner. All right. So tell me about yourself and what you do, Sam. Well, I am a military veteran. So I served a career in the military and separated back in 2005. 02:16 And my husband was still active duty. He actually just retired a few years ago and we are parents to a 10 year old. He's about to turn 11 next week. So yay on that. But, um, but yeah, we got transferred up here in Pennsylvania back in 2018 through the military and, um, just fell in love with it up here. I'm we spent. 02:45 the majority of our careers down south, whether it be in mostly Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, spent some time in South Carolina, and then lo and behold, I don't know what in the world they were thinking, sending a bunch of country folk up here in Pennsylvania. But he took orders. His last set of orders were out of Philadelphia. 03:15 And we were like, Oh my goodness, what in the world? They, them city folk going to come see us hauling the tractor on a trailer coming to town. But we were lucky enough to be able to find some country space out here in the south eastern part, it's about, well, we've, we rented for a little bit in, in 03:43 outside of Westchester in a little Brandywine area, had found some country area that we rented until we found a place here. We moved here, it's about an hour outside of Philadelphia, right above the Maryland line. It's, you know, country, lots of Amish farms around us. And we got real lucky and found a 20 something acre little farmstead, so. 04:10 You know, we just love it. We love the weather. It's not so hot up here like it is down south and just the rolling hills and man, the change of colors and the seasons. It's just, we just love it. 04:28 Well good. Now you keep saying you're from the deep south. Where are you originally from? Mississippi. Okay. Way down by the in the bayou. Okay as much as I love southern accents I'm very bad at parsing which one I'm listening to so I had to ask. A lot of people say that I'm from Texas and no it's not Texas not Texas. Not many people you know we don't get a lot of tourists down where I'm from so not a little not a lot of people get 04:57 experience or particular dialect, I guess I should say. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so I messaged with you yesterday and you were saying that you're new to homesteading. So what inspired you to get into homesteading? Well, to be honest, you know, when we were living in West, when we first moved to Pennsylvania, my son at the time was four years old. 05:27 And we were living in Pennsylvania for about six months and before he was diagnosed with some autoimmune issues. And, you know, at, um, four years old, you know, I mean, he's just a baby, right. And then, um, as his condition would progress over, you know, time, he would 05:57 have more issues to have to deal with. And I just did not want to see my son on so many medications at such a young age. And so that's really where I began my whole deep dive into how can I help my baby, you know, have a good quality of life without having to take all these medicines. 06:28 And so, you

Today I'm talking with Sean at Blooming Health Farms. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Sean at Blooming Health Farms. Good morning, Sean. How are you? Hey, good morning, Mary. How are you doing? I'm good. It's, is it nice in Colorado, number one? It is gorgeous. It is chilly, but the sun here makes it feel like it's tropical. 00:31 Well, we have sunshine in Minnesota too, but it's not tropical. It's probably 10 degrees outside. Oh, that's fair. That's fair. And I always ask about how the weather is, where the person is that I'm talking to because how I show my esteem for the people I talk to. So that's why. Okay, Sean, tell me about what you do because I know it has to do with chickens. Yes. 00:59 Blooming Health Farms is a nonprofit aquaponic chicken farm in northern Colorado. We're located in Greeley. And I use that word aquaponic chicken farm, A, to get a little bit of attention, but it showcases some of the neat stuff we do. We actually grow some of our own chicken feed using aquaponics and hydroponic methods, as well as take care of our chickens in some really humane, compassionate way. 01:29 that we do with chickens, partially to run an egg laying operation and sell chicken feed. But we also work with at-risk youth and teach them entrepreneurship and give them mental health support so they get themselves out of those cycles that they find themselves in. That is stellar. Okay. So what is, okay, first off, what's the difference between hydroponic and aquaponic? Because I didn't know. 01:58 that they were separate things. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of like, you know, big funny fancy words in agriculture these days. So I like to say that hydroponics is an umbrella form of agriculture, like the big thing. And it really simply means to use water to grow plants that aren't growing in a soil medium. 02:22 So we're growing plants with a nutrient-rich solution, a solution that has all of the minerals and vitamins plants need. And we're doing that in something like just water or something that has an inert media, a media without nutrition. Aquaponics is a subset of that, a part of hydroponics, in which we 02:47 grow fish in a body of water and then we use the fish water to actually fertilize our plants, if that makes sense. So the fish are eating this really highly nutritious, high protein fish food and their waste product is going into the water. There's a bunch of naturally occurring bacteria that live in the atmosphere and they turn that fish waste from their ammonia waste into usable plant nutrients, mostly nitrates. 03:18 Okay, that helps. Thank you. Because I was listening and I'm like, I didn't know there was a difference. What's the difference? So you just defined it. Thank you. All right. So Sean, what brought you to doing this? Because everybody has a reason. Yes. You know, years ago, I found myself living up in the mountains here in Colorado. I lived in an area called South Park and I was a professional photographer. 03:46 And I would meet a lot of people that I was taking pictures of that was saying like, hey, Sean, you're living the dream up here. And I would reflect on the things that I was doing. And I was living as a poor ski bum, if you will. And I really did a lot of thinking and stuff. And I decided to get myself back in school. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that, to be honest with you, 04:14 I grew my first pot plant while I was up in the mountains and I did a terrible job at it. I tried to grow it hydroponically in a way that I mentioned earlier and the plant came out and it was, for lack of better words, just very poor. There were no flowers on it. So if I wanted to use it for marijuana, it was pretty much worthless. And it drove me down this path of trying to figure out how to do it better. 04:44 if that makes sense, to try to grow a better plant. Well, while I was researching and studying, I saw this picture in a book of a hydroponic tomato growing in the Epcot Center. And it was this tomato in a large pot growing over the size of a tennis court. And there were these tomatoes the size of baseballs. There was like 30,000 of these tomatoes on this tennis court size. 05:12 spot and I said to myself, oh my goodness, I think we should be growing food this way. And it led me down this path of trying to grow tomatoes hydroponically. So I literally rushed down from the mountains and enrolled in a community college and started studying agriculture, studying biology, studying chemistry. And I fell in love with just this whole world of trying to grow things. 05:42 hydroponically. Well,

Today I'm talking with Brecca at REKO- Local Food Community. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Brecca at REKO Local Food Community. Good afternoon, Brecca. It's one o'clock in the afternoon. I don't know where I was. Hello. Nice to be with you. You too. How are you? 00:26 I'm doing so well, thanks. We're trying to stay warm over here in my neck of the woods, but from listening to some of your previous podcasts, we're not that cold. So we hit two degrees this morning, and I was thinking I was not having a good day, but then I heard negative 25, and I was like, I'm OK. I'm OK. Well, it's really funny, because they're predicting rain for this afternoon here. It's like 35 degrees today. Oh my goodness, yeah. No fun. 00:52 It would be really, really nice if the weather would reflect what month we're actually in. Wouldn't it? That's true. My husband and I were talking in last year in January is when we got all our snow. So we didn't have snow all winter last year till January came and that's when we got pelted. And this year's been similar. We haven't been pelted with snow, but the temperatures are super cold. So I'm like, I'm ready to kind of start breaking into spring, not have the winter. 01:23 It's not that far away. We are rolling into February here soon. So there's hope. And I feel like all I do is talk about the weather at the beginning of every podcast episode. But like I've said, it's how I express my care for who I'm talking to. So well, when you're talking homesteading weather, that's what we're all thinking about. Exactly. Yeah. All right. So tell me about yourself and about RICO and what does REKO stand for? It's R-E-K-O. Yeah. So 01:50 REKO is actually a Swedish acronym that was put out by a Finnish farmer, and it just means fair consumption. So REKO itself here in Idaho started in 2020 around COVID craziness. So we had farmers markets that were threatening not to open because they couldn't meet the demands of city authorities and health authorities. 02:19 We had restaurants that were closed down. And for all of our small producers here in Idaho, those were two of the biggest cells for their farms and their homesteads was restaurants and farmers markets. And so we had Tia Groves with... 02:40 They no longer run it, but they sold mushrooms at the time. And she actually started Rico here locally as a collaboration of producers to create a way to continue to sell our goods because we were still producing them, but we just lost all of our avenues of selling them during 2020. 03:01 Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Did I see that it doesn't cost money to be part of it on your website or did I misread that? So actually, so there's two different parts of Rico. There's Rico the app, which is a great resource that has been produced by a couple of tech guys out of Utah and we just teamed up with them. 03:27 to be able to use the app, but the app is created with the producer in mind. So it is absolutely free for the producer. There's no cost. It is a storefront. So it's a great way to have a website that you can use that storefront of REKO through the app or if they're on a computer it goes through a website and 03:54 Sorry, my computer just notified me it's low. So anyways, but either way we can go, the producers aren't paying for it. There is a small fee that's asked from the customer at checkout and that's how the app is paid for. So we have a lot of producers here that have really taken advantage of that and created websites with that. 04:22 with REKO built in as the purchasing power for their website. So it saves our producers money on fees. It saves our producers money on having a storefront that's online, right? Because I know for our particular business, we have our own website and we set it up with WooCommerce years before REKO app was ever available. And we pay a lot of money for that every year. So 04:50 It is REKO. The app is definitely set up with producers in mind and it is a free tool for producers when that is When we talk about the farmers when we talk about the farmers market here in Idaho We have created a collaboration of vendors that have come together as REKO Treasure Valley And we actually created a farmers market out of it. So it's an online farmers market 05:17 We do charge, if you were to participate in all eight locations, it is $30 a month. So it's still very affordable. That $30 a month that we all pitch in goes to advertising the farmers market. So that's literally the only thing it pays for, but it's been a great resource for us as producers to

Today I'm talking with Kristi at Idaho Falls Community Garden Association. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Kristi at Idaho Falls Community Garden Association. Wow, that's a mouthful. Good morning, Kristi. How are you? Good morning. Hi. Doing good? Good. 00:30 I have a goal to talk to as many community garden places as I can in 2025, and I think you're the first one, Christy, so tell me about yourself. Lived in Idaho for almost 50 years now, came from Colorado. Got involved with community gardens when my kids were teenagers and growing more independent by the moment. 00:59 and we were all looking for something to put some energy into. And I came to the idea of getting a community garden started here in our small town. Oh, so it's your baby. Well, myself and, you know, three or four other people were part of the original group who started it. I have. 01:29 maintain my connection with it since we started it in 1995. So, yeah. That's amazing. Congratulations. I love that. Oh, thank you. Well, tell me about the community garden. How does it work? Well, we have now three community gardens. Our town is roughly 60,000 people, so it's not huge. We started with a single garden of about a quarter acre. 01:58 And within a couple of years, we started a second one in another part of town that's about a half an acre. And then five years after that, we started a third one that is a full acre. That was in 2003. And the gardens are open to the public. 02:24 Anybody can garden there. We have a formal registration every year where people sign up and get a plot assigned. Then they have their own garden space, including access to water. They bring their own tools and hoses and all that kind of stuff. They're free to grow whatever they want as long as it's legal and doesn't intrude into the spaces of a garden. 02:54 nearby gardeners. There's an annual cost, which up until this year was $40 for new gardeners. And then if you are a gardener in good standing, which means you've participated for one full summer and met all the membership requirements, which primarily 03:19 involve taking care of your own plot and then contributing to the community areas of the garden with eight hours of effort over the course of the whole season. So if you've done that, then your fee for the following years, as long as you maintain that standing, is half the original cost. 03:47 We have garden coordinators at each garden who are gardeners there and it's their challenge and Responsibility to keep the gardeners engaged to be sure that there's nobody causing problems in the garden to help people who are Maybe beginning gardeners pair them up with other gardeners who have more experience or help them themselves if they have time 04:17 And they participate in our board meetings so that they can give us feedback and tell us what they need and how things are going. And that's been the evolution over these now 30 years. 04:36 Some things have changed, but the basic premise and process is similar to when we started. Wow, that is super cool. So I feel like not only are you growing plants, you're growing friendships with this community. Well, that was a large part of the motivation in the beginning was to build a place. 05:04 where people in the community could gather to share a common interest in gardening and growing stuff and exploring new varieties and learning how to do things in new ways with people that they may or may not have a lot in common with otherwise. And it's a really good way to build a sense of community that is not founded on religious beliefs or political beliefs, but on a common interest in 05:34 seeing delicious, beautiful things growing. That's a wonderful premise, Kristy. I'm so glad you started a community garden. That's amazing. So how big is the smallest plot that someone can get? Well, you know, that's pretty negotiable. Our smallest formal plot is about 10 by 10, so 100 square feet. 06:04 But if a gardener comes and they're new or they know their time constraints are forbidding or they just want less space, we're happy to divide a plot and give them half a 10 by 10. Typically people want larger plots rather than smaller plots, but we have had it happen that somebody says, well that's just too much for me. And the garden coordinators, it's 06:33 at their discretion, they can just divide the plot and say, okay, here's what you need, use this. So that's how, and the largest plot is probably 20 by 30, which is a lot. And that takes an experienced gardener to really keep control of that. One of the

Today I'm talking with Brian at Sunny Acres Farms. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Brian at Sunny Acres Farms. Good morning, Brian. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing good. How are you? I'm good. You're in Arkansas. I know we already established that before I hit record, but I like people to know where I'm talking to people. 00:28 So you're in Arkansas and you said it's kind of chilly there this morning. It is. Yeah. We're experiencing some single digits. It's been, this is day five, uh, uh, that will not get above freezing, which is pretty unusual for this area, but it's becoming more usual as we have these extreme weather fluctuations, but, uh, yeah, that's pretty chilly today. Yeah. Today at noon, we're supposed to be out of our, um, frigid air. 00:58 warning. So we've been really cold for at least four days now. So I'm very much looking forward to not having it be so cold. Yeah. Yeah, we have a little bit of livestock too. And when it's this cold, it's always an added chores to keep the ice broken up on the water and keep them in a good situation when it's this cold. 01:25 Yeah, and they're not used to it. I feel so bad for the animals that aren't used to it being so cold because they don't know what to do. Right, yeah. They're like, what is this? This is not right. Okay, so tell me about what you do, Brian. All right, so my partner Becca and I started Sunny Acres Farms. We just completed our third season, so we're going into season number four. 01:54 started with backyard gardening that just kept getting larger and larger until we had a 1,500 square foot garden in our backyard, which was able to produce way more food than we could ever eat. So we just started selling some and creating pickles and canned goods and giving it away or selling some to our friends and family and things like that. When the COVID pandemic hit, we were both... 02:23 had careers in restaurants. We were in restaurant management and bar management and things like that. But that shut everything down for quite a while. And that kind of really made us reevaluate both of our careers. And we had an opportunity to – well, I went to a trade school basically. It's called CAF, the Center for Arkansas Farms and Foods, during the 2021 or 2020 year. 02:50 and it's basically 11 month long trade school for farming. It was super interesting because I grew up gardening with my grandparents on both sides, had a big garden that fed the family and everything. But farming was something that was definitely a lot different, a lot more different than I thought it was gonna be. I kind of went into it thinking like, oh, I know how to grow food. Like I'm a pretty good gardener. And you get into the actual farming techniques and what it takes to maintain a farm, or to keep a farm producing. 03:19 week after week throughout the entire year is much different than a home garden. So, yeah, so 2020 was kind of when we really decided to shift our focus from kind of hobby gardening for ourselves and pursuing other careers to really turning growing food into our passion. You know, it was already a passion of ours, but like turning our passion into something that could also make us money. And so that's kind of been the start of our journey starting there. 03:49 Completing year three so a lot of people that have a story like yours and trust me I've heard it over the last year on this podcast, but everybody's story is different. Did you ever think you'd be doing this? No, man If you would have asked me five even just five years ago like before like right before the pandemic if you would have asked me this I would have not guessed this or 04:14 I might have believed you because I was into gardening but it would have been like, really? That's where I'm going to be in five years? I would have never guessed that. That wasn't really ever the plan. I've always enjoyed growing food. When I was in college, my very first apartment, I got a lot of my neighbors to get involved and we in the courtyard just created a raised bed garden so we could all kind of grow our own little bit of a… 04:41 of our own food there. And it's always just been fun for me. So I've always enjoyed the aspect of growing food and enjoyed the quality of food you get from homegrown food. So yeah, I mean, I wouldn't have guessed it, but it was kind of the next logical step if restaurants weren't going to be my career. I love that you enlisted your neighbors in the apartment building. That's amazing. 05:08 Yeah, and so I went back to that apartment building in years p

Today I'm talking with Roy at Morning Song Orchard. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Roy at Morning Song Orchard. Good afternoon, Roy. How are you? Good afternoon. How are you? I'm good. You're in Oklahoma? Yes, ma'am, I am. I'm in Minnesota. It is very, very cold here today. How is it where you are? 00:28 I woke up this morning fed the chickens at two degrees. Oh, well, I've got you beat. I think it's probably still minus 10 here. Well, you can keep it. Yeah, yeah, we're going to keep it for another couple of months. And then as we say in Minnesota, we live in Minnesota and put up with the winter because spring, summer and fall are so beautiful. So let me ask you a question. We just got done watching. 00:56 Fargo wasn't that supposedly filmed up in that area? Yes, supposedly yes. And yes, that's what Minnesotans sound like I'm not from I'm not from Minnesota originally. So I you probably won't hear it from me. Oh, okay. I I've tried really hard to dump the main accent that I had 01:21 grown up with and not adopt the Minnesota accent. I try really hard not to have any accent. Yeah, similarly, that's the same as myself. I'm actually from New York originally. So I've been around Southerners all my life. Yeah, and honestly, the Southern accents are so lovely and so sweet that if you talk with a Southerner, all people are going to be thrilled to listen to you. 01:50 the New England and the Northeast states, not as much. I don't know what it is, but maybe we just sound rude if we live there, I don't know. No, there is an allure with the Southern accent, I have to admit. It's very, very sweet. It's like sweet tea and lemons, it's good. Okay, so tell me about what you do at the orchards. What do you grow? 02:18 Well, we actually started out here growing chestnut trees. And there was a reason behind that. I stopped working in my construction company when we built our house. And I was like, you know, we should actually start doing something here that's totally different than what the mainstream is used to in Oklahoma. 02:48 Excuse me, the nut industry out here is pecans. And I was like, well, why don't we introduce chestnuts and hazelnuts? I did the research. My background is in horticulture academically. And I was like, well, I think we can do it in this particular zone. So we tried it. And we wanted to bring an old culture. 03:16 to an area that's never seen it before because America grew up on this, especially on the East Coast, right, with chestnuts until the blight hit and wiped out the American chestnut. So long story short, we started getting into those. We planted 3000 blackberry plants. So we started getting into that. Just got our hands into a lot of things. 03:44 Now we're doing blackberries, elderberries, chestnuts, hazelnuts, and some grapes. Nice. That's a very eclectic group of things to grow. It is. Yeah, that's great. So do the hazelnuts and the chestnuts do really well? They do excellent down here. Now these are hybrids because... 04:12 We can't grow American chestnuts to this day. Nobody can, not even the American Chestnut Foundation. Okay. We're trying, so we have hybrids, and the ones that I grow on my property are trademarked under the name Dunstan, D-U-N-S-T-A-N, and they do really well, exceptionally well out here. We get some really large nuts, 04:42 Interestingly enough, the deer have never seen a chestnut out here. And chestnuts are probably the healthiest nut for humans and animals that, that there is other than macadamia. Okay. 04:59 Okay, so what other than chestnuts roasting on an open fire from the Christmas song, what are chestnuts used for? 05:10 Good question. I've not really had that question before. The chestnut tree used to be used for lots of things. And, and because it's been out of use for well over a hundred years, um, it's kind of gotten, gotten away and going more towards oak trees. So the, the use. 05:37 of chestnut seeds from an industrial standpoint, I would say there's absolutely nothing unlike hazelnuts where you get Nutella from hazelnuts. But chestnuts are, they're so high in carbohydrates that if it were to become a market again, they'd be excellent crops for feed for pigs, for instance. 06:05 Because the high carbohydrates, they can keep animals warm for the wintertime. The wood itself from the tree is beautiful. If you look at any antique furniture made out of chestnut. But other than that, I really don't think there's a market for the chestnut itself at this point. 06:29 Okay. I was just looking at Google while you were talk

Today I'm talking with Alexa at Go Green With Alexa. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Alexa at Go Green with Alexa. Good morning, how are you? Good morning, I'm well, how are you? I'm good, you're in Florida? Yes, I am. I know it's a little colder than it should be there, but I bet you're not as cold as Minnesota this morning. Yeah, I bet I'm not. 00:30 It's, I think it's minus 13 and I think the real feel or the wind chill or whatever they're calling it now is minus 32. Oh, wow, quite the difference. Yeah, it's 65 here and it's raining, but otherwise can't complain. Okay, what's the nearest city to you? I would say Fort Lauderdale, about 20 minutes away, north. Okay, all right. My daughter's in St. Petersburg. Yeah. 00:57 So she's been like, it's kind of cold here. And I'm like, I don't want to hear it, kid. I was just there last week and it was freezing. Yeah. My definition of freezing. Yeah, I said, you grew up in Minnesota. You know what real freezing feels like. I don't want to hear it. Just stop. She's laughed. She's like, OK, fine. So tell me about yourself and what you do, ma'am. Yes. So I am a sustainability copywriter by trade. 01:26 And I also create sustainability content on my own for the world to see and really just to show people how fun and exciting and how you can get creative with sustainability in your daily life. Awesome. I'm going to pull a page out of my other podcaster friends. Podcast she actually does a podcast about sustainability. And then one question she asks on every episode is, 01:54 What does sustainability mean to you? So what does sustainability mean to you, Alexa? Yeah. So sustainability means to me is what it means is making the least amount of impact on the planet. And that means by, by, by the means of reducing our waste, reducing our purchases, reducing, or not even just reducing the purchases, but being more mindful of the purchase. 02:23 where we're purchasing from and what it's supporting. And really just thinking about the end of life of everything before we make that purchase. It's just being a conscious consumer and also an advocate for the environment. That is an excellent answer. I love that. Thank you. So how did you get into this, the copywriting and sustainability? Yeah, so for copywriting, basically it was a, out of, 02:52 2020 out of the pandemic. I just realized that I didn't want to do what I was doing. I was, I went to school to be, I was pre-med in school to eventually hopefully be a doctor. I decided at the end of my college career that I did not want to do that anymore. I had degrees in biomedical science and public health. And while those might seem 03:19 unrelated to sustainability, I would say that at least the biomedical science gave me a great foundation into science and the overall world of the chemical processes and biological processes of the natural world. And then also on the flip side, the public health degree gave me that foundation of understanding how our systems are currently in place and how they actually all work together. 03:47 health, it's also about community, it's also about the way we live our lives. And the environmental aspect is also a piece of that. So it's something that always fascinated me. I was lucky enough to grow up in a family that really values sustainability and conservation. My parents are both immigrants from Brazil and I grew up in the scuba diving industry down here in South Florida. They had a business for 23 years of my life. They sold it when I was 25 and I was very much part of the business. 04:17 and worked there most of my life. And just being part of that, it shaped me. We composted at home. We were very conscious about what we used and what we threw away. And my parents participated in a lot of conservation efforts as part of their business, because that was something that always was important to them. So just growing up in that environment always caused me to just, I think, view things a little differently than my peers. 04:46 And I didn't really notice that until I went to college, to be quite honest. I obviously knew that my parents were, you know, different, um, than my peers and the way they thought about things and, and approach things was different, but I didn't really realize how different it was until I went to college and, um, was put in the position of, you know, cooking for myself, fending for myself, and then realizing that, oh, wow, I'm throwing a lot of this organic material into the garbage. And I obviously didn't feel. 05:15 It didn't feel right by me. So that's when I started getting

Today I'm talking with Kimberlee at Shades of Green Urban Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Kimberlee at Shades of Green Urban Farm. Good afternoon, Kimberlee. How are you? I'm good, Mary. Thanks. How are you? I'm doing. I'm still alive. I'm telling you, I'm really glad to be through this sickness. 00:27 My podcasts for the last three or four have just sounded like crap. I'm so sad about it. So you're in Phoenix? Yeah, I'm in Phoenix. Sunny, sunny Phoenix. Is it warm? It is warm. It's kind of well, I see that but it's been a little cool, cool for us. We've got down to like 30 degrees within the last few few days. But of course the 00:56 at night. But of course, the days get a little bit warmer, you know, pushing 60s and upwards to 70s. But for us, that's kind of cool. Sure. Sure. Well, I guess just a little bit of background about me. Like I said, we're here in sunny Phoenix and kind of just the way we got started, just kind of always having a passion for plants. 01:24 I love, love, love anything plants, mostly houseplants kind of a thing. Sustainability. Love the idea of building meaningful connections with the community and bringing the community together. And what kind of really started is this really kind of a small dream of mine of, you know, building this plant idea, the microgreens piece of things really kind of flourished into this. 01:50 of multifaceted business idea of mine, which really focuses on the microgreens piece of things, the business side, houseplants, and then our homemade home goods that we do. My daughter is an amazing artist. She does fantastic pottery. She throws amazing pieces of pottery and she makes 02:19 homemade rug, she's got this loom and she makes amazing rugs and she's just freaking incredible. With that, we just have this side business thing that we do with the home goods piece of that and the house plants that we do along with the microgreens, which is the side business type of thing. It's a broader aspect of things, but microgreens in and of itself I think is what you wanted me to talk about. 02:46 Well, sure, but everything you just said falls under the headings of my podcast topic. Yeah. So we can talk about it all if you want, but you're multifaceted is what you're saying. Multifaceted, yeah. But really for the microgreens piece of things, kind of what we do with that is in a nutshell, we really specialize in growing and delivering the freshest microgreens to 03:12 to people's homes, to restaurants, to local markets. We visit, as a matter of fact, I'm growing a crop right now for a farmer's market that I'm doing on Saturdays. We do a lot of farmer's markets. So our mission really is pretty simple. It's just to bring a touch of green into the lives of those that we're supporting. The community, we really wanna bring that touch of green into the community that we're here with. 03:41 We deliver within 24 hours after harvest. So we ensure that our customers are getting the highest quality and the freshest flavor that they can. So it's pretty simple. It's a pretty simple business model. Harvest within 24 hours or deliver within 24 hours of harvest. So it's pretty simple. Most of our greens we can grow within 10 days, just depending on which green it is or which 04:09 micro that they choose. We have a variety of different microgreens that we do grow. Our standard really can kind of grow within 10 days. So it's a pretty simple business model. Our customers love them. Sunflower is our biggest one. Pea is a big one. Broccoli, of course, is huge. Radish is huge. We have a really awesome variety 04:38 Oh my gosh, it's a super food variety. And then we also have a spicy salad that is one of our customer favorites. 04:51 Okay. So, so did you start out really small? Yeah, we did. Yeah. Started out pretty small. We're still pretty small, to be honest. The grow room that I have right now is probably, I mean, right now, I would say 600 square foot, maybe. Okay. Yeah. It's in our house. And so we've dedicated a spare room of the house. We kind of, you know, carved that out into this sterile little room that we 05:21 We keep with just for the grow room. So it's pretty small. We've got four grow racks in here, all with lights and everything. We'll keep everything pretty much in this room. Nice. Is it warm in that room? It's warm in here, yeah. We keep it at about 72 degrees. Yeah. Yeah, I would love to have a room like that in our house in Minnesota because that would be wonderful on days when it's minus 20 degrees outside. 05:48 Well, the beaut

Today I'm talking with Becca at Moon Ridge Acres. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Becca at Moon Ridge Acres. Good morning, Becca. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm good. You're in Alberta, Canada? Yes. Central Alberta, near Camrose. Is it super cold there? 00:28 Today not so much. It's actually around minus two But for the weekend, we're going down to minus 25 minus 30, which is a horrible jump real temperature Yeah, yeah, that's Celsius. Oh Yeah, I'm so sorry It's it's it's the jumping around that makes it really challenging because we get used to the cold we're used to these terrible colds, but 00:57 When you go from, you know, plus, in the plus degrees down to minus 30 within a weekend, it, it is hard on everybody. It's hard on the animals, it's hard on us. It's not fun. 01:12 Yeah, the last couple of days here in Minnesota, it's been really, really cold for us. And today it's supposed to hit 30. Tomorrow it's supposed to be 35, I think. I'm talking Fahrenheit. Right. And then, uh, today is Wednesday. So Friday is supposed to be warm again. 01:29 and then Saturday it's supposed to start to drop and then Sunday and Monday it's supposed to be super freaking cold again. I'm like, mother nature, could you stop with the basketball bouncing, Jesus. Yeah, exactly. It's these extremes. It's like, ease into it a little bit, you know? Or just level out for a while. I mean, if it's gonna be cold, stay cold for a while. If it's gonna be warm, stay warm for a while. That would be fine. Absolutely, and like. 01:55 Here with the melting and the freezing and the melting and the freezing, it just makes the roads absolutely horrific for driving. My husband is a full-time trucker, so it makes his job a lot harder to have to deal with ice on the roads. The counties are not always the best at getting out there and getting salt on the roads and taking care of them. It can be pretty treacherous. 02:24 And on the flip side, I bet summer is really beautiful where you are. Stunning, absolutely gorgeous. I was kind of laughing because I had made some videos about George and Katie Vanslake being in Tennessee and how right now they have two hours of daylight more than we have here in Alberta. But then come June, we actually end up with two hours more of daylight than them. 02:53 So it's just always flip-flopping in every way. 03:01 I'm so glad you brought up Katie. I love Miss Katie. I watch Miss Katie's videos every day and very excited that Kennedy just had her baby. Yes, I love it because Katie falls out right before my folding season. So she kind of like fills that gap and gets me super excited for when our babies start to come. And so yeah, watching new babies will never get old. 03:29 No, and she makes me happy because I don't have any animals like that. So I get to live vicariously through her videos, which I'm sure a lot of people do. Right. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. She's brought the joy of, you know, animal ownership to a lot of people. Yes. And she's so... Let's just rave about Katie Vance like for a minute here. Most people won't know who we're talking about. She's a young woman who does videos on... 03:59 Facebook and YouTube and she has mini horses and thoroughbreds and quarter horses and mini cows and goats and I don't even know and she has just been this shining light of How to learn how to take care of livestock and it's been a beautiful progression for her Yeah, if you're if you're interested in raising animals, she is very honest about not knowing everything 04:28 and learning as she goes and trying to share that. So I really like her. Okay, so this isn't about Katie Vance. Like I would love to talk to her, but she's a very busy lady. Absolutely, absolutely. So Becca, tell me about what you do. 04:44 So what do you do at your place? Oh, sorry. Yeah, I think we had a little internet connection there. So we raise miniature horses. So kind of when you asked me to be on the podcast and it was about homesteading, I kind of laughed because I consider myself a bit of a homesteader, but I'm like a really bad one because I do horses. No such thing. No such thing as a bad homesteader. 05:14 Yeah, we do miniature horses and we show them and we are kind of like working towards being on the upper level of that showing and having super high quality animals. I have raised rabbits for a few years now and I dabbled in the meat rabbits a little bit and my pride and joy were my Holland Lops which 05:42 not so great for the sustainability factor, but I love them. And then we have ducks

Today I'm talking with Jim at The Brickson Family Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Jim at the Brickson Family Farm in Baudette, Minnesota, I think is how you say it. Good afternoon, Jim. Good afternoon. It is Baudette. Okay, cool. And you said it's right at the Canadian border? 00:27 Yeah, we're about three miles from the Canadian border. Actually, the town we live in is Pitt, but there's not too many people. The township isn't that big, so they attach us to Bidet. Oh, okay, yep, that makes sense. So you said it's terribly cold up there. It is, it comes with the territory, though. It's the price we pay for solitude, stay away from all the rat race of life sometimes. 00:51 Yes, I understand. We moved to outside of LaSore, Minnesota for exactly that reason because we lived in town, Jordan, Minnesota for 20 something years and we were done. So we moved out in the middle of soybean and cornfields and we love it. We've been here four years and it's so quiet. It's so wonderful. All right. So tell me all about yourself and what you do at your farm. Oh. 01:18 We do a lot of stuff. Right now we're trying to do not so much because it's been cold. But my wife and I are both Navy veterans and work for the Salvation Army after our Navy career for well, until retirement as pastors. So we went back to college at a late stage in our life, became ordained and we thought nothing better to do than start a farm when you're 60. So we bought this 01:46 little home set up here, 50 acres and a house and a few buildings and just kind of been feeling our way through and trying to find out what works for us and what doesn't work for us. And so right now what we're farming is Dexter beef cattle. We have a small herd of Jersey milk cows and I don't know, a couple pigs. I think the pigs are going to go this year. It's just too hard to maintain pigs in the wintertime. 02:15 So we're probably just going to do like a finishing operation. Same thing with chickens during the summer. Yeah, we stopped our chickens back a couple months ago because we didn't want to feed them through the winter because they don't give us a lot of eggs over the winter so they don't earn their keep very well. So I understand what you're saying. It's tough. And they're expensive to keep too. People, you know, they're easy to raise but the bird, I mean chicken feed is expensive and... 02:44 I think we were selling our eggs for like four bucks a dozen at the farmers market and people were kind of scoffing. I'm thinking, wow, that's cheaper than in the stores actually. But no, I think my wife said the other day, there's like 10 bucks a dozen because of this new H1N1 scare. So the price of eggs are going crazy up here. Yeah. My husband stopped at Hy-Vee on the way home yesterday and bought two 18-pack of eggs, two separate containers of 18 eggs. 03:11 and he said it was $9.99 for 18 eggs. Oh, I ate the most expensive egg salad sandwich of my life today for lunch. Right. Yeah. Well, she freeze dried quite a bit of eggs before before we downsize our chickens. Actually, it was the chickens we didn't really didn't really go until. Oh, November, I think was the last of our chickens left here. So we were collecting eggs up until that point. 03:38 Yeah, this inflation is no joke. I'm very worried about people who can't afford to eat right now. And there are people in the world who a year ago could afford to eat just fine. And I bet there's lots who cannot afford to eat right now. And it makes me really sad. We worked on this side of that for about 18 years, my wife and I, with the Salvation Army, trying to provide for those that can't or couldn't. 04:08 And we were surprised because the stereotype that comes with that is that they've always not been able to but I was so shocked as we're going through our time there the amount of new people that were coming because Because life has just gotten too expensive and how humbling that is to have to ask somebody to help them out Yeah. Yep. It's it's a rough time right now and I am 04:32 I am so glad that we moved when we did. We now have room to grow a garden. We canned tomatoes this year. So if nothing else, I will have spaghetti sauce and as long as I can afford pasta, we're good. But it's just crazy. Yeah, it rained up here so bad this year. We didn't really get much. Our garden really was kind of a fail. I don't think anybody's garden up here really did much because of the amount of moisture we had. 04:59 Let's just say if you live in Minnesota and you got a good return on your investme

Today I'm talking with Elm at The Witch's Garden. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Elm at The Witch's Garden. Good morning, how are you? Good morning. Doing just fine. Glad to be with you. Glad to be with you too. You said Tennessee is where you are, right? That's right. The west end of the state. About an hour outside of Memphis. 00:29 Okay, and is it warm there today? It's warming up. We got incredible snow. I haven't seen it like this since we moved here, gosh, 16 years ago. We had a solid eight inches and it was beautiful. No ice, just, you know, felt like Christmas all over again. Well, I'm in Minnesota and you have gotten more snow this winter than we have, which is unheard of. I'm, I'm so confused by mother nature. 00:57 this winter and last winter. Last winter I think we got maybe a foot total for the entire season. So I don't know what's up with Mother Nature, but she's having a lot of fun with us I think. Personally, I think she's a little confused with us as well. Well, I think that's been true since humans started, but you know, it's a thing. All right. So tell me about yourself and what you do at The Witch's Garden. 01:23 Sure, we've been in business for about two years. The, uh... 01:29 The head of the business, shall we say, is Sanctuary Apothecary. So I have a little apothecary shop out here. And I'm beginning to do workshops and tours and that kind of thing. The Witch's Garden started as our flagship subscription service. So four times or eight times a year on a seasonal cycle, we send out boxes of ritual and inner work items. So I'm from a pagan tradition, European pagan background. And uh. 01:58 title it the witches garden but we're really at a point where we're working with energy healers we're working with with Yogi Yogi's and those with meditation backgrounds so you know I love our community it's really very party-colored and I wouldn't have it any other way awesome so I don't okay I wanted to talk to you because I tend to identify as pagan if anything 02:25 because I'm not Christian, although people who know me tell me I'm the most Christian, non-Christian person they know. I have a lot of that myself. And I take that as a huge compliment because I try really hard to be kind and helpful and do good in the world. And if that's what they're getting from me, that's what I'm going for. But I also am just, I feel like pagan is so much. 02:55 nature and being in the world and in the moment. And that's how I am with everything. So, Parla doesn't want to talk to you is because I saw that you grow a lot of the things that you use to make the things that you sell. And I'm all about growing things. So what do you grow? So for the last several years, we've been building out beds of herbs around the house in the garden. 03:23 and now across the landscape. So we started, gosh, close to 17 years ago, as a CSA. And we live in a home that's been in my husband's family for seven generations now. My daughter is number seven. And we started with a CSA. So we had the huge market garden and grew vegetables for several years and sold at local farmers markets and then also did a subscription service. 03:52 there that helped us, you know, understand what our costs were going to be for a whole growing season, understand what we could grow and know that we had an audience for it, know that we had families to deliver it to. And that was really satisfying, but it was an incredible amount of work for two people. We both, over the years, have taken on day jobs in other places because keeping up a house that was built in 1835 takes a lot of income. 04:20 So in my day job, I work in tech and it just became a little too much. Um, over the years, we've really started learning how to work with the landscape here. We both have a background in anthropology and are fascinated by those, I guess, intersections with people and culture that have existed for as long as we've walked upright, um, the landscape. 04:52 The landscape is a part of us to our core and that environment impacts every piece of who we are. This is the longest I've ever lived anywhere. And in that time, we've started a relationship with the land. We've really gotten to know it. Historically, the land in West Tennessee has changed so very much. We're at a point where... 05:18 big agriculture has caused a lot of environmental issues, but it's also changed the fauna and flora here. So we've, I guess, pivoted, we've shifted our focus, we've found our passion, and we're working hard to turn probably the 250 acres of this his

Today I'm talking with Brian and Sarah at Promised Land Farms. 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 This is Mary Lewis at a tiny homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Brian and Sarah at Promised Land Farms. Hi guys, how are you? Great, how are you? I'm okay. I'm starting to turn the corner on this being sick crap, so. 00:26 I had to cancel two interviews last week because of it. So I'm really happy to be talking new friends today. You guys are in Elko, is that right? Yes. Okay, so tell me about yourselves and what you do. So yeah, we're in Elko New Market, just south of the Twin Cities, and we've got a small farm, 37 acres, and we are raising grass-fed grass-finished beef, pastured pork. 00:54 laying hens, and then we're direct marketing all of our meat and eggs. Okay. What do you define direct marketing for me? So we are selling direct to customers. We had always, since we started doing this, we were, we were selling eggs before we even had a farm when we were living in the suburbs. And then, um, so we would just start, start it all with beef and selling quarters to friends, quarters and halves. 01:24 And then that just kind of turned into kind of selling everything. So cuts of beef, quarters, halves, whole steaks, hamburger, same with pigs and then eggs and some chickens. And we were just using Facebook and word of mouth. And in the last year, we signed up for Barn to Door and we're using that as our kind of our marketing tool and inventory tool. And what do you... 01:53 Think of Barnador. 01:57 It's really helped us streamline our business. It helps us cut down on human error. If somebody Venmo'd us a deposit and then there was an oversight and them getting the next cut of meat. This has helped everything just to funnel into one place. They have got a lot of really great training. I've been very impressed with their support. Yeah, it's been good. 02:27 It's helped us expand and get going with some email marketing and yeah, they've got a lot of great resources available. Awesome. I actually need to contact them and get them to talk to me because I'm hearing that they're a really good help and resource for people who are doing what you're doing. And they've contacted me, but I'm not a big enough place to need their services right now for what we do. 02:54 It hadn't occurred to me to see if anybody from their place would want to chat with me. So I'm going to have to email them and be like, hi, don't need your services, but I would love to promote your services. Sure. They have a podcast as well, which is super helpful. I listened to it. I don't know if Sarah does, but, um, all the resources that they have, they're kind of putting out on podcasts too, and it's just good stuff. They're interviewing farmers all the time and best practices and yeah. 03:22 Okay, I'll have to go look them up and see what they're up to. Okay, so how did you guys get into this? 03:31 Well, I caught the farming bug before we were married. So Sarah's dad had a small farm in central Iowa. And when we just started first started dating, we were going down there for a funeral. And I stepped foot on that farm and, you know, walked out in the pasture down to the creek and look at cows and just something inside of me came alive. And I'm like, wow, I could see myself doing this someday. And that just kept growing in me and became a passion. And, you know, then I was looking for. 04:00 the five or 10 acre fixer upper. And we were, we were doing a big garden in our, in, in the suburbs in our backyard and then doing backyard chickens and way too many chickens that we were supposed to have in our, in the city that we're living in. But, uh, yeah, just kept looking and then we just came, the Lord showed us a property that was amazing and we went for it. And so that's how we started farming. 04:25 I love that. I hear that story or some version of that story a lot. You have no idea. Okay. So here's what I want to get into with the beef and selling the beef. Most people don't know how it works. So if you could run me through how someone could acquire a whole or a half or a quarter or an eighth. Yeah. So it's kind of a... 04:53 It's kind of a clunky process actually. So if you're selling a quarter, half or whole of beef, the way it goes is we sell by the hanging weight. So somebody contacts us and says, hey, I would like to get a quarter of beef. And so we put them on our list for the next available. And I don't really know the weight of the animal until it's brought in to the butcher. And then we get the weight of the animal 05:23 pay based on that. Okay, I'm going to interject and give you the simplified version of t

Today I'm talking with Mike at Homecooked Magazine. You can follow on Facebook as well. Use discount code "tiny" to save 15 dollars for the first year when you subscribe to Homecooked Magazine. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking to Mike McCormick at Homecooked Magazine. Good afternoon, Mike. How are you? Good afternoon. Doing great. Thanks for having me. Are you in Oregon? Is that right? 00:24 Yeah, our company is based in Oregon. I'm just south of Portland, our warehouse and a lot of our team is in Eugene, but primarily in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Oh, I've heard it's beautiful there. It is. And, you know, we get a lot of grief about the rain, but honestly, you know, most of the year it's pretty, it's pretty tough to beat. I've been around lots of places and I keep coming back. So. Nice. 00:49 Okay, well, tell me about yourself and about the magazine. I see that it's very new. Yeah, so I've been in publishing for about eight years. We have three magazines. One we started in 2016 called Quilt Folk. And so I've been in the magazine space for a number of years, but Homecooked is really very new. In fact, we officially launched December 1st. So it's about, you know, 01:20 month and a half old, but we've been working on it for well over a year. Okay. And how did it come about? Whose brainchild was it? Yeah. So, like I said, I've been publishing for a while and had had the idea for Home Cooked for a number of years. And really, the idea was pretty simple. We just wanted to try to create a print magazine that sort of embodied everything we loved about. 01:48 home-cooked meals, we wanted to try to put that in print. So of course, the tastes that are familiar that we love, but also the faces and the people and the conversations, the plates, all the little things that go into making home-cooked meals feel warm and special. We said, well, can we recreate that in a print magazine? And so that was the simple kind of genesis of an idea. And then of course, it's just a lot of work to try to... 02:17 to make that happen and we've got a great team of people who love print. So our company is fully committed to print magazines, which I know is a little bit different in this sort of era. But that was the idea. And we felt like we've been doing this for a while. We had a business model that kind of made sense. And so I felt like the right time to kind of dive in. Okay. So here's the question that I was left with after I looked at your Facebook page and your website. And I'm... 02:46 I may be playing a little bit of devil's advocate here, but I don't think so. A lot of people these days don't cook anything from scratch. They don't use their beautiful kitchens for anything except a show place to have their friends come over and have a cup of tea or a drink of wine. And so why did you think there was a market for this magazine? 03:12 Yeah, I think that definitely what you said is true, but I think it's a big world and there are a lot of people who use their kitchens in pretty interesting ways. And if you just look at my family or my friend group, we've got people who kind of run the gamut. And so, you know, it's a big enough space. Everybody eats food is kind of a cultural touchstone for all of us in one way, shape, form. And so the idea with Home Cooked was... 03:41 It's not just for people who make everything from scratch or for people who maybe do it all the time, but it's for people who, like I said, appreciate a home-cooked meal, whether you're the person making it or enjoying it, all those kinds of things. And for that, I mean, there's just, I don't know, there's so many people who can resonate with that idea. And with home-cooked, it was kind of like, how can we create a big enough table where... 04:07 everybody feels sort of welcome here, whatever their relationship to cooking or food is, you know? Okay, that's a valid answer. I just was very curious because my kids are all grown. My oldest is 35, my youngest just turned 23. Oldest is a girl, the other three are boys. And one of the rules in my house, I've mentioned on the podcast before, is that they all had to know how to cook a dinner and a dessert that they would be proud to serve their friends. 04:36 before they moved out. And I cooked from scratch all the time with them growing up and they kicked in, they helped, they joined in. And every single one of them really does enjoy cooking from scratch. And I've been told that I was kind of weird making that a requirement. The other requirements were that they could do their own laundry and wash their own dishes because

Today I'm talking with Staci at Sunnyland Farms. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Staci at Sunnyland Farms in Georgia. Good morning, Staci. How are you? Good morning. I'm great. Thank you. Good. Is it lovely in Georgia? Because it's really chilly here in Minnesota. You know, it's... 00:28 cold for Georgia actually, not normally this cold. So I'm kind of enjoying it actually. Well, I would be enjoying the cold and except for the fact that I've had some kind of upper respiratory things since Saturday. And when I go outside, I start coughing because the cold hits me and I'm like, Oh, okay. So sorry. Sorry. 00:51 Sorry listeners, people out there, my voice is not the best it could be today, but that's okay, because Staci's gonna tell us all about what she does and about Sunnyland Farms. Yeah. 01:02 Well, my name is Staci Wilson and I am from Sunnyland Farms, a Georgia pecan farm. We're way down here in southwest Georgia in the city of Albany. And we do say pecan many different ways down here. You will hear pecan, you will hear pecan, and it's truly tomato, tomato. 01:29 And our farm actually started and was planted in the 1920s. And my connection to the farm is actually my husband's great grandfather planted the farm, planted the groves and the trees. And then his grandparents started to mail the pecans to their friends. And then the catalog mail order business grew from there. 01:58 His dad began, moved back in the 70s to join the family. And I'll talk about him in a little while, but he had some pretty awesome innovations for the industry. And then Alex and I moved back about 10 and a half years ago. And I've been in the hospitality baking industry. So it really coincided with. 02:24 a desire to live a simpler life and also join the family business. So that's just a little rundown. I love it when there's co-ink-a-dinks when your background matches up with the thing you're doing now too. And I always kind of disliked pecan pie when I was a kid because it was so incredibly sweet. And then 02:52 I had some, um, couple of years back that someone made from scratch and they were like, you have to try it. It's not like the store bought super sweet kind. And I said, okay. And I took a bite and I was like, this is not pecan pie. And she said, well, yes, it is. And I said, no, no, no, you don't understand. This is wonderful. Right. So, so I'm a convert now as long as it's made in a way that's not super, super sticky, sweet. Just, that's the only, uh, 03:21 It's the only pecan story I have. Right. And that's interesting because the industry itself is known for the pecan pie. And it's tried in the last because pecans are indigenous and it's something that Americans can be very proud of that this is one of our native nuts and has more antioxidants than most nuts. So 03:50 The industry itself is really trying to get that nutritional information. Even the American Pecan Council, their marketing motto is beyond the pie, right? So anyway, using high quality pecans is always the key, in my opinion, especially for the pies. But anyway. 04:15 What else would you like to know about we I can get into the To the planting and the different varieties and and all of that Well, we can start there and then you can tell me a little bit about the the history of the farm Yeah, absolutely Yeah, it is fascinating and it's the history of it is just the the pecans themselves are indigenous to the southeast native and it was a 04:45 staple in Native American diets. Georgia actually is the top producer pretty much in the world. We are normally outproduced sometimes by Mexico. Pecans love heat and they love humidity. So, you know, Louisiana, Texas, all of those places, Georgia, obviously. But Georgia, I feel like, you know, just the 05:13 The growing conditions are even better because of our humidity. Pecans themselves love humidity and heat. So anyway, our particular farm sits on about, it's about 1,700 acres of groves. And the farm was planted in the 1920s. And what a lot of people aren't aware of is that pecans are more than just one variety and the different. 05:43 just like a, you know, a grape for wine or whatnot. And the different varieties have different oil contents and the higher the oil content, the better tasting the pecan. And just a little side note, because of the high oil content, you should definitely store your pecans or any nut really in your freezer. 06:09 A lot of people don't know that because you freeze that oil content, whereas if it's sitting at room temperature, the oils are evaporat

Today I'm talking with Ben at the Homegrown Show with Ben & Nicole. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Ben at the Homegrown Show with Ben and Nicole. Good morning, Ben. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing great. Awesome. So we were just talking. You are in Canada. 00:25 And you are in New Brunswick, which is north of Maine, which I knew, but I didn't know for sure. And what do you do? Goodness, I do a lot of different things. I guess you could call us influencers, homesteaders, farmers. I don't like the term influencer, but we do a lot of different things with regards to education from farming content. And we just, in 2020, we decided we wanted to live and try a simpler life. So. 00:53 We've been documenting that journey and been able to share it with others ever since. Isn't it fun? Oh, we have, I never grew up on a farm and neither did Nicole. So it's been a crazy whirlwind of a journey. We were fortunate enough in 2020 to be picked up for a small TV show here locally. And it's been able to fund a lot of my antics to be able to buy things like a ton of chickens or goats before we're ready. So being able to document that and film our journey to 01:22 learning how to figure that all out has been just chaos and hilarious. Yeah, I'm sure you're entertained every moment of every single day. And I don't do videos because I don't, I don't, I'm not good at it. Number one, I don't like being on video. Number two, but, uh, my husband takes videos here and there of the barn kittens when they're little or the greenhouse construction, when that was happening and he sends them to me and I'm like, I don't know what to do with these. I like. 01:51 They're cute, but what do I do with them? So I commend you on your videos because it's hard work to make them. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun being able to document it properly. That's something I even spoke about in a recent YouTube video is just any type of documentation like what you're doing or writing it down is huge for being able to go back and reference because year over year, you don't really feel like you've done very much. But then when you can look back and see whether you've written it down or had a podcast about it. 02:17 It's cool to be able to see, oh, I did grow from last year. I did grow from two years ago. And seeing that is just more beneficial to us. Yes, I have to sit down sometime this afternoon and do our end of year recap. I try to do it and have it posted on the first of the year. But I got up yesterday morning to the terrible news from New Orleans about a guy who ran his truck into a crowd of people at a market. 02:44 New Year's celebration and I just lost all steam to say anything positive. So I apologized on my Facebook page and said, I'm just not in the right head space, maybe tomorrow. Understandably. So yeah, I just, I felt really weird about being like, so this is all the silly shit we did this year and this happened today, you know? So it was kind of a rough, quiet day here. I don't know why it hit me the way it did, but I'm just real tired of people getting hurt for no reason. It's really hard here in the United States sometimes. 03:14 So anyway, I don't want to be a bummer. So I looked at your Facebook page and you do tons of stuff. And if you're above Maine, how far above Maine are you? So we're pretty close to Holton, basically. It'd be about a half hour from our place here to Holton, Maine. Oh, so you're over the border, not by much. Okay. So your growing zone must be like what? Three B or four? I think it's 03:43 Four, Nicole is better. I'm more the animal guy. Nicole is better with the vegetables. I just do the labor for her. Oh, well, she's a very lucky woman. Okay, so is it easy? I mean, I know she's the one in charge of that, but is it pretty easy for you guys to keep yourselves stocked in produce? 04:03 Yeah, we've been very fortunate, like I said, over the last few years to learn how to do this stuff. So it's this past year, recognize the biggest downfall was our short season. So we built a couple of greenhouses. We were originally just going to build one, but we decided to build two to be able to have basically a seed house to be able to use in the spring. And then to be able to have a secondary tomato house because we've learned that the best thing for 04:28 for us is to have as much food as possible and to figure out what grows here as well. But to be able to can and preserve, you really need to have that longer growing season, especially for things like tomatoes and peppers, which don't rea

Today I'm talking with Taylor at Acres U.S.A. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Taylor at Acres USA. Good morning, Taylor. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing well. How are you doing? I'm great. You're in Wisconsin? Yes. Did Acres USA start in Wisconsin? No. It's... 00:28 It started in Kansas City and then moved to Austin, Texas. And then the company that acquired it from the founders had moved it to Colorado and that's where we ended up buying it from and then moved it to Wisconsin. Okay, cool. All right. So, tell me about yourself and Acres USA because no one who hasn't heard about it probably knows what it is. So, tell me all about it. 00:56 Yeah, well, Acres USA was founded back in 1971 and the founder was Charles Walters, who truly was a visionary and he was inspired by his youth when he was a farmer in Kansas and then he ended up becoming an economist. So he believed from early on that farming had become disconnected from nature and it was becoming destructive to the soil and human health and the environment. 01:25 So through Acres USA, he began to champion the principles of ecological agriculture and published some groundbreaking research by soil scientists, farmers, and thought leaders like Dr. William Albrecht. And then over the decades, Acres USA grew from just a magazine into a full movement. And we published books, host conferences, have digital resources. And the goal is to... 01:53 empower farmers to work with nature and also profit from it. So today we remain committed to Charles Walter's original mission and that's to prove that ecological farming is not only sustainable but also economically sound. And I think that's always kind of a key part of Acres USA is, you know, we talk about ecological principles but we also focus on the economics behind it. 02:23 Is that right? Correct. Okay. How did that happen? Well, that's kind of a long story. That's okay. We've owned it for just over a year now. I grew up in southwest Wisconsin and did not have much agricultural background at all. I always liked land though. My first introduction to land was through hunting. 02:51 And I kind of have a little bit of an obsessive personality. So I was kind of obsessed with hunting and interacting with the land. I became a police officer when I was 20 and that was the first career that I jumped into. I knew, you know, shortly into that, that it probably wasn't going to be able to get me into a position to actually buy my own farm or have my own land to manage myself. So. 03:21 I jumped into the entrepreneurship world, learned about business. When I was 25, I moved back in with my parents and said I was going to make a go of it in the business world. And then two years later, we were able to buy a farm. And while we had that farm under contract, the initial idea was still revolved around farming or revolved around hunting. And I knew I kind of wanted to create a. 03:49 a media company that talked about managing land and interacting with land because I did love – I've always loved just interacting with land and manipulating it and doing different things with it. I found Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown and Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shepard and I got bit by the regenerative agriculture movement and I realized Mark was actually just 20 minutes from me. 04:19 So I started, I probably listened to his book that winter five different times and I would just drive by his farm and try to figure out what all he was talking about in that book. And finally, I just knocked on his door and Mark and I have been working together ever since and Mark is, you know, like I said, the author of Restoration Agriculture which is probably the highest selling book that Acres USA has. 04:49 So I got introduced to Acres USA, bought a ton of books, and that's how I began my journey into regenerative agriculture. My business world from the side had kind of morphed into marketing agencies and working with tech to help business owners create books and courses and events, but it was completely separated from agriculture. 05:17 COVID happened, that business kind of took a little bit of a hit just because the majority of our clients were pretty affected by COVID. So I jumped into real estate, took our agency and began doing more of a local type marketing services and then became a realtor specializing in working with land and helping people find regenerative. 05:46 or find conventional type farms with the plan of transitioning into organic or regenerative type practices. And Mark was always kind of in my ear bec

Today I'm talking with Laura at Aussie Rescue of Minnesota. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Laura at Aussie Rescue of Minnesota. Good morning, Laura, how are you? Good morning, I'm good, how are you? I'm good, it's a really grody day in Minnesota this morning. It is. For anyone who doesn't live in our area, 00:29 It is very, very gray and the fog in LaSour is like pea soup. I don't know what it's like where you are, Laura. It's raining here, which is always miserable in the winter. 00:41 Yeah, it's really weird. I'm not loving this winter so far because it reminds me an awful lot of last year. Yup. All right, so tell me about yourself and about what you do. So I joined Aussie Rescue of Minnesota in 2012 because I had heard such great things about Nancy and the organization, Nancy Anderson, and the organization that she had started with another person like 30 years ago. 01:09 And so she had started, she saw the need for Aussies to find Aussie appropriate homes, because Australian Shepherds can be special. They can be high energy, definitely, but also they're very smart. So sometimes smart isn't easy to live with, because they find lots of things to get into and to do, and if you don't give them a job, they find their own job, which is generally something you didn't want them to do. 01:36 And so she saw a lot of Aussies being re-homed because of that. She saw a lot of Aussies being re-homed because people, maybe their lives had changed. The dog didn't get along with a new baby or they'd lost their home or, I mean, there's so many reasons that people's lives can kind of go topsy turvy. So she started rescuing and a few years later made it into a formal nonprofit. 02:04 and she's been sailing this ship ever since. And I was looking for a way I could help and had heard so many good things about the reputation of Aussie Rescue of Minnesota. So I got on board and kind of got sucked in pretty heavy. I went from just fostering one dog to fostering multiple dogs, to being on the board, to adding roles as I went. So... 02:34 Aussie Rescue of Minnesota has been around for a long time, 30 years. And they pride, we pride ourselves on good matches with people, not just finding a good home for the dog, but finding a dog that really fits that family. And then we are with our dogs for the rest of their lives. So if anything happens, they come back to us. If the new owners have 03:00 behavioral issues or, you know, vet issues or anything like that, we're there to help them or assist them in any way we can. So that's what we pride ourselves on is the long relationship and the quality of our adoptions. Wow. Okay. This is why I wanted to talk to you because I need to know more. Number one, 03:30 because sirens were the mermaids that would suck the sailors in to basically dying. And Aussies suck you in. There's something about her little faces that you're just like, oh, I am yours forever now. I am your human. You are not my dog. And I know this because we have one and we've had her for a little over four years and I love her to pieces. And I've talked about her endlessly on the podcast. So. 03:58 I may throw in a couple things about Maggie today, but I want to know more about the process here because as you said, Aussies are a very special breed and they will get into trouble and they do need a job. And they also bond really, really tightly with their owners. So it must be incredibly hard when they're surrendered to you guys. Yeah, it can be. Although, you know, dogs live in the moment. 04:26 So as much as we'd like to believe that our dogs would shine away for us forever, if given up, they do tend to just bond with the next person, unfortunately for our egos. They really live in the moment and they're looking for that bond, like you said. Having an Aussie is more like having a partnership than having a pet. And I work with my dogs a lot, my own personal dogs. 04:53 I do a lot of competitions with herding and agility and obedience. And so that bond becomes even stronger since we spend so much time training together. But even a dog coming in that's just met me within a couple days, they'll pick the person in the house and it might be myself, it might be my husband, it might be one of my kids. But they actually have an opinion on that. They don't, you know, you can't get an Aussie and say, well, this one's going to be my dog because it's really up to them. They pick their person. 05:23 and you can't change their minds. So yeah, that bond is very strong. Yes, and they will pick the person that

Today I'm talking with Cheryl at Brookhaven Mill Farm-North Carolina. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Cheryl at Brookhaven Mill Farm, North Carolina. Hello Cheryl, how are you? Hi, I'm doing well. How are you doing? I'm great. I was looking at your website and your story is so cool, so tell me about yourself and what you do. 00:29 Okay, so let's see, I'll just give you the brief rundown. At age 60, I purchased a farm, my first farm, and I am now 66. So I have been running this farm for the past five and a half, almost six years. I am in central North Carolina, right outside of Greensboro, and I diversify a bit as far as the farm model goes. Because I... 00:58 physically do not grow crops. I decided to grow livestock, and I am now centralized around growing sheep. I started with East Friesian sheep, and now I've diversified into a different breed that's a little more parasite resistant in this part of the country. And it's a Catawdin-Dorpor cross. Right now, I have about 30 head. But raising sheep is kind of boring. It's like golf. If you don't do it, it's kind of boring. 01:29 So what I do on the weekends is I open my farm for an agritourism destination. So I get locals from Greensboro and visiting to come out to the farm and not only see the sheep, but to see some of the other animals I've added. Sheep get along really well with goats. So I've added some goats and a couple of donkeys for a guardian, a couple of... 01:57 dogs, a lot of cats, and chickens, ducks, and geese. And it just makes for a wild menagerie of animals for people to feed and just get excited about learning. Awesome. I have two questions. I'm gonna forget one of them if I don't ask both at the same time. One is about the cross-breed of your sheep and one is about the fact that you started this at 60. So we'll start with the sheep one. The cross-breed that you have. Catodin is a hair sheep, right? 02:26 Yes, that's correct. Is the other one also a hair sheep? Yes, Dorpher is also a hair sheep. And you know, it's really just a bunch of mutts out there, but they have had four lambing seasons coming up on my fifth lambing season, Valentine's Day. We're expecting lambs. And each lambing season is getting more and more specific to the Katahdin look, the fine features, the sweet face, the little smile. 02:56 and just easy to handle, very docile, very good choice for meat. And not so much milk that I can tell. I'm going to try to milk some of my ewes in February. I morphed into this mutt breed of mostly Katahdin now, but some dorper, because the sire, the ram, is a dorper. But he's also a cross. 03:26 So he's a Dorper St. Roy cross. So these girls have all been lambing. 03:36 Some have been lambing for four years, some have been lambing for three. This year I've got a couple of first time moms, so it's gonna be interesting to see what they're offering exhibit as far as the traits that I'm trying to get to, which is worm resistant, hair, completely hair, because the original seven sheep I started with six years ago when I bought the farm were all German breed, East region, and they were wool. 04:04 So I've just about bred the wool out of the lands now. Okay, that was what I was gonna ask you about because I haven't actually talked to anybody who's bred a hair sheep and a wool sheep and how that works, because I have no idea. Is it just like any other animal that you breed with a different variety? That's why it's. 04:27 And then you get wool sheep or hair sheep or like maybe a wool hair sheep. I don't know. Yeah, you get a wool hair sheep and that's what's so funny is because it's taken a couple of generations now of lambing to get to the point where all the lambs are now starting to look like hair lambs. The first experiment, the first lambing when I crossed the dad with the, you know, the 04:57 lambs. Some of the lambs had the nubby, woolly texture. Some had sort of a half and half fill. And now they've been bred back to their father. And their offspring now exhibits very little wool nubby. But sometimes you'll get one that looks like it's... Where did this one come from? It's got almost like Velcro. 05:26 fleece, which is really hard to shear. So not only have I saved money for the farm by going to hair sheep, because it's quite expensive to shear, have a shearer come and shear 30 head of sheep. So this year, the shearer is only going to have to shear six sheep, which are the half and halves, but they still need that wool taken off. 05:55 how to be comfortable in the summertime. Okay, that's what I was won

Today I'm talking with Salina at Hart Farmstead. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Salina at Hart Farmstead LLC. Good morning, Salina, how are you? I'm good, how are you? I'm good, bet it's not snowing where you are. No ma'am, I think it's actually like in the low 50s so far. 00:29 Well, I'm mildly jealous but not really. It is snowing here in Minnesota this morning. Oh, I bet it's beautiful. It really is and I would be perturbed except that last winter we only got like maybe six inches total for the whole winter and we've probably gotten about four this morning. So I'm very excited to see white stuff falling from the sky. That is awesome. We haven't had snow here and 00:58 Almost three years until two weeks ago, we got like a little dusting. That's the first side of snow we've seen in three years. Wow. Okay. So you're in North Carolina. Where in North Carolina? We're in like the central area in North Carolina, just south of Winston-Salem. Okay. Cool. I just talked to a lady, uh, today's Thursday yesterday, who was from East North Carolina, and I don't remember where, but E-N-C is part of their. 01:28 their business name. Okay. So, I get to talk to two people from North Carolina in 24 hours, it's kind of great. That's awesome. Yeah, so tell me about yourself and what you guys do. So, we have been homesteading for over a decade now. I was raised by my grandparents who grew everything and or hunted everything for our food. 01:57 My Nana did a lot of preserving, whether it was dehydrating, pressure cannon or water bath cannon. So I got to kind of be hand in hand with that growing up as a kid. My dad and my grandfather both enjoyed hunting about anything that you could hunt. So I've eaten most different types of wild game. When I met my husband in 2009, he is a farmer. 02:26 He does a lot of small grains. And I moved here a couple counties away when we got married. It used to be a dairy farm that started back in 1947. And they sold the dairy cows when he was five years old and his dad changed over to run in strictly beef cows at that point. When we got together, being able to live on a farm kind of... 02:56 really pulled me to continue what I grew up doing, whether it was hunting or raising our food. So we have a really big garden, and I started with just that, but then over the years it has expelled to three really big gardens, multiple raised beds. We have a variety of animals. And about two years ago, we started milking our first dairy cow. It was supposed to... 03:24 only be like for our family's milk. And we had my best friend who was currently buying raw milk down in the central part of the county. And so she started coming and getting some from us. And now we have 10 dairy cows. We currently are milking six. So our biggest thing now is raw milk products. 03:52 and we still have beef cows. So I keep a lot of their beef fat and I render it into tallow and I make a variety of products and then some other organic clean products that I've used for years and people started asking me for them. And so we've just kind of continued to grow in that aspect. And then I've added, you know, I do the sourdough and the kombucha. 04:22 and all the good fermenting. My husband calls them my science experiments. They are spread out around our home. We joined the Homestead community with Homesteaders of America about five years ago and started going to their conferences in Virginia every year. And we really have enjoyed meeting new folks that have the same passion as we do. 04:52 And, you know, even though it's a state away, so many of my close friends and our family have grown to want to learn more, especially when COVID hit. When COVID hit, people started to reach out and they're like, hey, can you teach me how to can, can you teach me how to grow vegetables? And it's just continued to grow over the last few years. 05:20 people wanting that knowledge of knowing where their food comes from, what's in their products that their family has in their home. And it's just kind of always been my passion and it's really all that I've ever known. We do both work off of our farmstead though with goals to eventually at least have me home probably in the next year or so. 05:47 Um, running the, the farmstead with a little store. Um, you know, we, we have found our niche and we have found what truly brings us joy and, uh, the dairy cows are just a whole different level of happiness that I didn't even know that I had. Um, and so we just, uh, we continue to want to learn anything that we can. Um, not just 06:15 for offering what we have to

Today I'm talking with Sami at Heaven On Earth Homestead. You can also follow on Facebook. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Sammy at Heaven on Earth Homestead. Hi, Sammy, how are you? I'm good. Thank you. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. So I was, I found you on Instagram. 00:27 And I was looking at your Instagram page and your Facebook page and you and I could have been really good friends about 20 years ago. Oh, wow. Because, because 20 years ago, I was doing the same things that you're doing right now with all the preserving food and stuff. And I'm still doing it, but just not as heavily because my kids are grown and it's only a couple of people in the house now. Fair enough. So we could have gotten together and roasted squash and bagged it up and 00:57 homesteading and preserving, it would have been really fun. So tell me about what you do. So we are on just about an acre of land. It's actually quite small, but we try to utilize it the best we can. So we started this journey maybe about 12 years ago, when our oldest was almost eight years old. And we're having a... 01:25 They were having a bunch of health problems and we were seeing a ton of specialists and taking a ton of medicine. I work in healthcare. I'm a respiratory therapist by trade. And so I was just really concerned and we were at another gastroenterology appointment, I think, for reflux and all kinds of other things, autoimmune related. And I was just kind of airing my frustration and saying, you know, like, I don't understand why my eight-year-old is on eight medicines twice a day when... 01:54 You know, my 80 year old grandmother is not even on this much. And he's, he kind of said, you know, well, the only thing I can really offer as a physician is to add another medication for these problems. And I was just so disheartened, but I just wanted them to feel better. So I said, well, you know, is there any 02:16 anything non-traditional that we could try. And he said, well, I have a couple of patients who have Crohn's and IBS and other things that have tried an anti-inflammatory diet and they've seen great success with that. So he gave me the name of a book and we bought the book. I read it overnight and my husband went to work the next day when he came home. I had all the food in the house boxed up. He said, we're going to try this for 30 days. We're eating nothing. 02:46 that could cause inflammation in the body, we're going to reset all of our immune systems, I bought into it a thousand percent." And he was like, okay, how are we going to do this? And I said, we'll figure it out. I don't, you know, it'll be fine. We'll figure it out. And so we, for 30 days, we ate very strictly anti-inflammatory, no sugar, no dairy, no gluten, no grains, you know, it was no beans. It was all kinds of things that we couldn't have anything of. 03:13 And after 30 days, my child went from taking eight medications twice a day to taking an inhaler as needed for asthmatic symptoms. 03:23 Good job, mama. And I realized I was inadvertently poisoning my kid with just regular standard food and I was so frustrated. And then it kind of, that's kind of where this journey began and it kind of spiraled into all this. So it's been a long time coming, but we finally, we relocated so we could have some more land and be in a better climate. So we had a longer growing season. And so where we are now. 03:51 We have a very large garden. We have laying hens and we do meat birds in chicken tractors. And we have a very beautiful little community here where we live of friends that we've made who are kind of of like mindset. And so we have friends who do beef and friends who do pork and friends who do lamb and goat. And so we kind of all work together to make sure all of our families have what we need and support each other. And it's been just a... 04:20 beautiful journey. So it's nice to meet other people who are of like mine because sometimes you kind of get the hairy eye when you explain things in public. Yes, absolutely you do. And we've gotten it too and I just ignore it now. I'm like, you don't have to do what we're doing. You keep doing what you're doing. We're all good. Absolutely. So I'm really impressed that you asked the doc for 04:48 different solution and I'm really impressed that the doctor said hey you could you could look into this because a lot of our medical professionals don't don't give you answers like that. Absolutely. Absolutely. Which is why I said good job mama because you were a great advocate for your kid. I'm so proud of you because it takes a lot

Today I'm talking with Jess at Muddy Roots. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Jess at Muddy Roots in Boston, no, near about Boston, Massachusetts? Yes, Boston, Massachusetts, but located in Dorchester. Okay, cool. Yeah. 00:24 Awesome. So what's the weather like in in Dorchester? Because it's really gray and overcast and kind of chilly in Minnesota today. Yeah, looking at my window, it's about the same. I mean, we had like a pretty delayed start to our winter. So that was great. But yeah, it's gloomy. It's cold. You know, we're probably get snow soon. And that's what it is until, you know, till March, April. Yeah, I understand. 00:50 we're actually supposed to hopefully get a little bit of snow because really we haven't had any and we are coming up on Christmas next week. And I'm like, okay, if it's got to be gloomy, can we at least have pretty snow falling? You know? Well, that's what I said. I said to my kids at work, I was like, God, like, have you had like, have you had a snowy Christmas yet since you've been born? And they're like, no, you know? So, hopeful for that too. 01:13 Which is insanity because I grew up in Maine and I don't remember not having a snowy Christmas in the entire time Until I moved out of the state when I was 21 22 So Just the fact that that new england is not having Consistently white christmas is so weird. Well, it's not and I moved here almost four years ago and since then like 01:41 you know, the warmth of our winters and the fact that we really are like compared to what it used to be, barely getting any snow. I mean, we used to have 12 feet of snow, six feet of snow, and now we're lucky, you know, now we're lucky if we get a couple inches snow, you know, and I grew up in New York in Long Island, and I remember being little and small and going out into the snow and it coming up to my to my chest, you know, and growing up having these 02:10 you know, massive snowstorms every year that you kind of got to look forward to. You get to take them from school and, you know, with the way the climate's going, that's just not happening anymore. Yeah. And there's lots of people who don't believe that climate change is a real thing, but I think that climate change is real. I think that it's definitely here and I think it might be a little too late to fix it, so I'm, I'm kind of worried about it, but 02:37 I'm going to make the best of every day that I have alive on this planet. So that's where I'm at with that. So tell me about yourself and what you do. Sure. I mean, so we started or I started Muddy Roots. I mean, I started Instagram for myself to find an online community of what I was going through, which was chronic illness at the time that was undiagnosed and being a woman and just how long that was taking for me to understand what was happening. And so I sought. 03:06 community and I found a bunch of young women going through similar things, right? Just being young and it taking so long to get where you need to be. So in that time I had started that for myself, but was also at my wits with you know medicine in general and I've always been a gardener. My last name is gardener. My dad always used to bring us outside to our yard, force us to garden every year and do a vegetable. 03:33 Garden and plant all the flowers and just say, you know, your last name is Gardner and you will do this And you know, this is in Long Island, New York And I so I grew up like that right your parents Sometimes force you to do these things and you grow up and they just become part of who you are and you continue them You know, you don't start to stop doing them You learn to love them and appreciate them and you know, thank your parents for it later so when I was going through the midst of my illnesses and things like that and 03:59 you know, there really was no medication from me to help my pain, I, out of pure desperation in order to function and have some semblance and quality of life, went to my garden. And I started going herb by herb for what I was growing. Sage, rosemary, oregano were like mainly the three things that I started with and noticed that like, they helped my pain significantly when other things weren't. And that kind of led me down this rabbit hole. 04:29 Like if I was never taught about this, if I didn't know about this, if people don't talk about this, and this was almost 10 years ago, what else don't I know? What else can I find just by growing more, experimenting, being inquisitive, you know, and trial and error, really, you know? I wasn't like, I didn't go to school for this. It just was

Today I'm talking with Tracy at O'Connor Family Acres. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with my friend Tracy at O'Connor Family Acres. Good morning Tracy, how are you? Good morning Mary. I'm doing well. Thanks. Thank you. How did you guys fare with all this crappy weather yesterday? Yeah, I stayed home. 00:28 We were supposed to go somewhere and I was like, nope, I'm going to stay in the house. Paul went to work though, so he had to venture out, but he did well. He just took it slow as we do in Minnesota. Yeah, no doubt. So this is yet another hyper local episode. Tracy lives like maybe five miles from me, maybe in Le Sueur. So I have to tell you, we're doing homesteadish stuff today. 00:58 Who? What are you doing? Well, I started that, that black garlic thing. That's the fermenting thing. And that's been going for three days. So my kitchen has smelled like garlic for three days. And it's got to go at least another couple before I can even open it to check it. And Kyle and Cameron are downstairs, um, basically heating up all the tomatoes that we froze to get ready to can them into sauce. So. 01:27 My house smells like an Italian restaurant right now. Oh my gosh, I love it. I love canning tomatoes was new for me last year was the first year I did it and absolutely love the smell. And I'm excited to hear how your black garlic turns out because that sounds super interesting. I was listening to your episode where you talked to the guy about black garlic and I was very intrigued. So yeah. Yeah, I will have to give you some so you can try it. 01:57 Awesome, I would love that. Yeah, I think there's 15 heads of garlic in that machine right now. So if it works, I'll have some to share. Nice, nice, nice. I will reciprocate with, you know, well, something. Goat milk in the spring would be awesome. Absolutely. That's a, well, that's a hopefully a for sure. We have a new buck this year. So. 02:22 And he's pretty young, so hopefully he did what he needed to do so we have babies in the spring. And that would be wonderful. And on that note, tell me about yourself and what you guys do at O'Connor Family Acres. Yeah, thank you so much. So we are, you know, a small homestead. We have about almost six acres. And we moved here to the homestead. This is going on four years now. 02:51 We started with ducks and we actually started with ducks in the city-ish. So city-ish. We were in Medina at the time on an acre and we started with maybe six ducks. And it was during COVID, of course, because we didn't have anything to do. And we're like, we had been talking about when we buy our forever home, getting 03:20 you know, some animals and really kind of not completely being independent, but controlling at least some of our food and how it's being, you know, handled, processed, what goes into it, all the things. And so we started with ducks. And then when we moved to where we are now, O'Connor Family Acres, those ducks multiplied greatly. And we also got goats. 03:49 And this year we added pigs. So we're kind of we're not really at a point where we're you know Consistently selling we'll sell something here or there But we're almost to the point I would say this next year if our buck did what he was supposed to do will be at kind of a tipping point where we can maybe start selling some stuff and the idea is to you know provide for us provide for our family and 04:18 you know, maybe offset some of the feed costs and, you know, the money that we're putting into it by selling some of the abundance, if you will. So. Awesome. I'm glad that that's the case because I don't, it's fine if you just have a homestead or a farm or whatever and you're just doing it to provide for yourself. But that never quite works that way because some years you will have an overabundance and you're like, what do I do with all this? 04:47 Oh, for sure. Absolutely. I mean, in the spring, because we do have so many ducks now, I'm literally trying to give eggs to people. I'm like, Oh, it is so nice to see you. Thank you for visiting. Would you like a dozen eggs? Yeah, we used to do that with the chicken eggs, because we just had so many we couldn't use them before they would go bad. Yeah, exactly. Duck eggs and zucchini. Zucchini is the other one I'm always having abundance of from the garden. We do have a garden too. 05:17 I'm always like, oh, would you like some zucchini? It was actually amazing to me this past summer when Kyle was selling at the farmer's market in Lesour that people bought zucchini. I was like, are you serious? You don't have neighbors who are just putti

Today I'm talking with Emily and Clayton at WoodFlower Farm. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Emily and Clayton at WoodFlower Farm. Good morning, guys. How are you? Good morning. We're having kind of a terribly gray yucky day here in Le Sueur, huh? Yes, yes we are. It's that snow sleet. 00:29 kind of mix today. It's really gross. My husband and son would normally be outside doing anything to not be inside and they actually decided to clean out our closet and our pantry this morning. I was like, oh, please do that. That would be great. That's a good task for today. I would love that because I have things I need to do. So you guys find something to keep yourselves busy and do something really productive. That would be great. 00:54 So Emily and Clayton live not even a mile from me, I don't think. And I didn't even know about you guys until I saw you on Instagram, which is crazy. I should have known, but I didn't. So tell me about yourselves and what you do. Yeah, well, you probably didn't hear about us because we're pretty small and this is, I think, our first official year. We're just a small husband and wife farm and homestead, and we are in Le Sueur, Minnesota. 01:24 And we started our farm with the goal to grow flowers and also some veggies, maybe pasture raised meat and farm products for our local community. Okay. And have you lived there long as well or is that new too? Yeah, that is, that's kind of a story. We so I grew up in Le Sueur. That's where I'm from. My parents still live here. 01:54 but we have only lived here for, I think this is our second year. Yeah, our second year, yep. Okay, cool. And I don't wanna ask a rude question, but do you have like an acre or do you have acres? Yeah, we have technically right here where we are. This is my parents' land. So we moved back. 02:21 to Minnesota, well, back for me, first time for Clayton. He's from Wisconsin. We moved here after living in Colorado for a little while. And when we moved back, we thought we would move into this house because my parents own the house and that it would be very temporary. But after living here, I think it was about a year that we decided that we like it here. We were really struggling to find 02:51 a house, it's a very competitive market. We were also struggling to find a house in Denver. So when we weren't really able to find a house, like with some land here, we thought, well, why don't we just settle in? And there's a, so the land that we're on is about 40 acres. That's my parents' area. And then there's little woods. 03:18 And then on the other side of that woods, there's another like 36, 40 some acres. And that was also in the family. And we bought that land. So technically, we're landowners now. Nice. That's awesome. And you're young. I assume you're in your late 20s, early 30s, or even that old. Yeah, exactly. Okay. All right, cool. And what I want to say about where we, in quotations, live. 03:47 because we live on the same road. This highway that we live on, this area is so pretty. And it's also so flat. The further you go out highway eight, the flatter the land gets. Yeah, the further west. Yeah. Funny that you say it's so flat because actually what separates our land from her parents' land is this really deep ravine that has a little creek running through it that leads into the Minnesota River. So we actually have some 04:17 topography differences between the lands. So that adds a little bit of something unique, which is kind of fun. Yeah. We feel pretty lucky that of the acreage that we own, I think it's 12 acres is wooded. And that woods is really pretty. And the whole Minnesota River Valley really is a gorgeous area. 04:40 Yes, Minnesota is a really beautiful state. And part of the reason that it's so beautiful is that it does have so many changes in topography. I grew up in Maine and I've been living here for over 30 in Minnesota for more than 30 years now. And I went kicking and screaming from my home state to here. And after 20 years, I was like, oh my God, I actually love it here. It's really pretty and it's not that different. 05:09 You know, the land isn't that different. The things that grow here aren't that different. The only big difference is no mountains, no ocean. Well, I can travel, it's fine. And so I came to really love it here. And I really love spring. I'm not a huge fan of high summer. High summer is way too hot for me. Really love fall and winter's okay. Like it's the break that we need as people who grow things to regroup and plan for the following growing season. So. 05:37 So Minnesota's n

Today I'm talking with Peer at Finny's Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Peer at Finney's Farm. Good afternoon, Peer. How are you? I'm doing well, thank you. How are you? I'm good. I'm so curious to hear the story on what you're doing because you have a lot going on there. So tell me about yourself and what you do. 00:29 Well, I yeah, I do have a lot going on. We started this project. Couple years ago I was I've always been into horticulture and and just plant biology and stuff and actually went to school for it. But about three years ago, two or three years ago, I was diagnosed with some 00:59 issues which were health related to other, you know, environmental things. So I spent a lot of time really researching just growing food, consumption of food, the things that are in the air, the soil that were contaminating, and my, to go back a ways, my 01:27 education was in sustainable food and farming, although I went off on a different career for 30 years. So about two years ago when I was diagnosed and had to change diets and change everything I did, and I kind of backed away and semi-retired, but I can't sit still. So we decided to, I'm on two and a half acres here, and we decided to 01:56 kind of start doing it ourselves, homesteading to a degree, mostly food. And kind of ended up here where I said, again, I'm a busy body, so it was like, let's try this. Let's try a co-op. Let's try garden-ready plants. Let's try a CSA. So that's kind of what brought me to where I am right now. 02:27 really trying to kickstart it and get things out there so I can help other people just localized, you know, so. Yeah, and you're in Mankato, Minnesota, right? Correct. Okay, so do you go to the farmers market in Mankato? I go to the farmers market, as a vendor, you mean? Yeah. We will be this year, so yeah, I haven't in the past, but the person I partner with, 02:57 has had experience at the farmers market and doing that kind of stuff. So I'm kind of working with somebody else on that portion. So. 03:11 Very nice. I hear great things about that farmers market. So I wish it is. Yeah, it's good. Yeah. A lot of good ones around here. You know, we're Mankato. I'm not sure where you're from and what, but Mankato is very, um, agricultural. So it kind of, it kind of brings two sides to what I'm doing because I'm surrounded by monoculture and 03:37 you know, no matter what you try and do when they're spraying pesticides, it gets in the air. And, you know, so it's there. I'm just surrounded by things. So it's kind of tricky. And we, you know, are trying to find different ways to make sure that everything that comes out of our garden is healthy and pest free and chemical free and all that. So. 04:02 I understand. I'm in Le Sueur, Minnesota, so I'm about half an hour northeast of you. Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah, my husband actually works in Mankato. Okay. Yeah, and we are surrounded by corn fields and soybean fields, so I feel your pain on the pesticides spraying. Right. Because we grow a fairly hefty garden as well. And we try really hard to use organic practices, 04:31 you have drift, you can't be organic. So exactly. And that's one of the things that I'm not going to brand label myself as, you know, because it just, it's too difficult in this area where you and I are just because of the drift and everything. But, um, but you can do what you can do. And that's what I'm trying to bring some people. Yep. Exactly. Um, so I was looking at your website, which is beautiful, by the way. 05:00 And I saw the online co-op and marketplace tab and it says, it says vendor information, and then it says project Green Haven, and then it says community garden benefits. Is project Green Haven yours or is that just an example that you put on there? Well, it is, it is something, it was basically my kind of final paper thesis. 05:30 when I was at the University of Massachusetts. And I kept it all these years. So I'm in my 50s, went to school a long time ago, but went back in like 2015 to kind of continue my education with, like I said, sustainable food and farming. That was one of my things. So I put it up there. And I don't know where I'm gonna go with it, Mary. 05:59 But I just, I spent so much time on just researching it and finding ways that people can live healthier lives and embrace the environment and be stewards of the land. And so, so to answer your question, I don't really know where I would go with it. I wish somebody would. 06:27 know, a developer would say, hey, that's a good idea. Let's take it to place. Bu

Today I'm talking with Brit at PTY Granola Company. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Brit at P&TY Granola Company. Good morning, Brit. How are you? Good morning. I'm so good. How are you? I'm great. You are where in Minnesota? Our kitchen is in Plymouth, and I live in Dayton, Minnesota. 00:30 Okay. I wasn't sure which was which, so I thought I should ask at the beginning. Yes. Okay. So I went and looked at your website this morning because I'm a dumb ass and hadn't had a chance to go look at it and found out what P&TY stands for. And I just giggled. So can you tell me about yourself and your company? Cause I can't wait for you to share your story. Absolutely. So I'm Brit Williams. I started P&TY Granola Co. five years ago. And it all started 01:00 I was making granola bars for my husband because he was eating a granola bar and I looked at it and I was like, Trevor, there's no nutrition in this granola bar. He's like, yeah, but it tastes good. I was like, well, let me see if I can do something better. And so I started making these bars and I would take them at the time I was an event planner and I would take them on the road with me for my staff. And one of the events that I did was for Whole Foods Local. 01:29 And Whole Foods staff there was like, you got something different with this recipe. It's not like what's on the shelf. I think you should do something with it. And that was April of 2019. And by June of 2019, I sold my first granola bar and it was all by Insta story. And I just was having people test it out and everything. And as I was doing that, I was thinking about the fact that there's like 50 million granola bars out there. And. 01:58 How do I stand out? Something has to catch them before they get to the taste. So if it tastes so good and they want to keep going after it, how do I get them to do that? And at the time, I had my son who's seven years old now, he was two or three, and I was teaching him manners. And he would yell at me like a toddler does and he would yell, no. And then I was teaching him about no, thank you. 02:27 And so then he goes, no, thank you. And I was like, Oh, so there's something to this manners, right? Like there's something like it hits differently when you consider someone, even if it's coming from a toddler. And so that's what got me to think about what does, what does my company stand for? What do I want people to think about when they have a granola bar? And that's where P and T Y comes from. Please. And thank you. So granola bars that say please and thank you. 02:57 So it's this message, this fueled by respect. Every time you have a bite of our granola bars or you go and grab them, I want you to just be reminded about the power of manners. I wanna think outside of myself. I wanna think about other people and how I can make them feel and how I can make myself feel by treating myself with respect as well. So that's where PNTY came from and it... 03:27 My hope, my dream is that our granola bar tastes so good that every day you have a little bite and you're just reminded about the power of manners and how that can make an impact in the world. I love it so much and I'm gonna tell you why. I always say please and I always say thank you to the point that when my dog does something I ask her to do. I say thank you Maggie. Yes. 03:54 And excuse me is a big one in my house. You know, we don't say, we don't say get out of the way unless there's a reason we say, excuse me, to the point that I say, excuse me to the dog as well. And everyone who listens to the podcast knows that I love Maggie beyond life itself. So of course I'm going to talk to her like she's my kid. And I have been talking to my kids like little adults since they were born. 04:19 And thank you and please and excuse me and all those wonderful things that let them know I care about them have been part of my vocabulary with my kids forever. So I'm just so impressed with the fact that you put that much thought into naming your business. Well, it makes a big impact, right? I'm sure your dog appreciates being acknowledged and respected, right? And so does our kids and whoever they interact with and whoever you interact with. 04:49 consideration factor and I think humans just need a little bit of a reminder of that like we're all doing our best right just have some consideration and and treat each other well. Yes patience goes a long way and that's part of consideration so yes I love it I love what you're doing. You asked me when I messaged you if the fact that you're

Today I'm talking with Rob at The Food Movement. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Rob at The Food Movement. Good morning, Rob. How are you? Good morning. I'm well. How are you? I'm fantastic. Are you in Illinois? I am. I am talking to you right now from Arlington Heights, Illinois. Okay, yeah. 00:29 My mom grew up in Illinois, so I have a little geographic knowledge about the state. I'm in Minnesota. It is a beautiful sunny day here. I don't know what it's like where you are. Oh, yeah. No, the sun is shining. It's actually relatively warm. It's in the 40s today. Yes. For anyone who listens to my podcast, I usually ask about where you are in the weather because I feel like asking about the weather is asking... 00:55 How are you? Like it is how I say I care about you. So for anyone who's never heard the podcast before, that's why I do it. Well, likewise, what part of Minnesota are you in? I am about 40 minutes southwest of Minneapolis. Okay, cool. Yeah, so. I know the twin cities very well. Yeah, corn and soybean country is where I live, so. Yeah, I've driven through it. 01:19 Yeah, it's really, really pretty. It's much prettier in May and June than it is right now. But we have to have the winter too. The winter is the tax we pay to enjoy the spring, summer, and fall in Minnesota. Yeah, I like having all four seasons, but I don't know, this year here in Illinois, I think we skipped right past fall and sort of an interesting year weather-wise. 01:45 It sure was. And I'm really hoping we get a reset in January and we can have some normal, moderate weather for 2025. I was just talking to a friend yesterday about this and she was like, our gardens didn't do anything. And I was like, no, neither did ours because the weather was crazy. So anyway, that leads me to tell me about yourself and what you do, because what you do has a lot to do with food. Yeah. So for the past 02:15 Oh, 24-ish years. I've had a company called Whole Earth Marketing and we sell nutritional supplements, primarily to independent health food stores. And I love this business so much that in about 2009, I became a partner in an independent health food store in Gurnee, Illinois called Earthly Goods. Sorry, I'm giving you the long version, but- No, that's fine. Tell me. 02:45 And so a business partner and I acquired a store called Earthly Goods. It's no longer there, but had a good 20 plus year run in Gurnee, Illinois. And about two years into it, we realized that it was a lot more work than we thought running a store. We had some complications, staff left and things like that. And we conveniently got an offer to sell the store. And we did that. 03:15 Around that time, I had been working on a line of private label superfoods for our health food store. And I really wanted to do something in depth. I didn't want to just accept something turnkey from a manufacturer. So I started sourcing superfoods from around the world. And my naivete led me in some really interesting directions. 03:44 For example, importing superfoods from other countries or any kind of foods is a really complicated and potentially risky business. You really don't necessarily have to, which is what I found out later. There are ways to navigate that. In that process of putting together a line of superfoods for the health food store I was part owner of and then selling that store. 04:14 The food movement was born. I said, I've done all this work. I've come so far. This could really be a business venture in and of itself. 04:25 And that became the food movement. Okay. So do you have a background in the science of this, or did you just learn it as you went? So I think my background coming into the industry would best be described as herbalism, which is somewhat of a science, but also a traditional school of healing. 04:53 So, you know, my interest has always been in sort of the overlap of science and tradition, whether it be herbs or food, you know. So no, my background is not primarily scientific, but I do find the science quite interesting and relevant. And, you know, one of my favorite books when I was starting out in the industry working in a health food store, I was the book buyer. And there was a book. 05:22 called the scientific validation of herbal medicine. And I really thought that was cool, because I thought, you know, here we have traditions of thousands of years sometimes that cultures have found the validity of these foods and herbs, and they've seen the results, you know, in their culture and their trial and error. You know, traditio

Today I'm talking with Krista and Dave at Steadfast Roots Homestead. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Krista and Dave as Steadfast Roots Homestead. Good evening, you guys. How are you? Good evening. We're good. How are you? 00:22 I'm good. Other than technical difficulties over the last 48 hours, I'm ready to shoot my computer. Other than that, I'm great. Thank you for spending some time with me on Friday evening. I'm sure you probably had more fun things you could have been doing, but we're going to try to make it super fun. Tell me about yourselves and what you guys do. So this all started just a couple years ago. We started really 00:51 getting into the homesteading lifestyle just a couple of years ago during COVID, essentially. We had been thinking about getting chickens for a while and that's what we started with other than we were already gardening and stuff. But we started with chickens and we moved on from there to getting a new property and more animals and that's where we are today. We're starting from scratch essentially. 01:22 We're learning along the way. The gateway animal got you, those darn chickens. Right. Yes. We've always been really interested in natural living and more whole foods and stuff like that. We really wanted to be able to have our own. When you really look into the meat industry, it's scary. And you're like, that's kind of like, we're like, we can make our own chicken. Why not make our own chicken? 01:53 And then it just ballooned from there. And now we're trying to do 10 million other things. We didn't get chickens for meat. We got chickens for eggs. And it was a good plan until our chickens decided to be lazy and stopped giving us eggs about three months ago. So we don't have chickens right now, but we will have chickens again in the springtime. Awesome. Yeah, we started with eggs and we've moved on to, we tried the, with the kids, 02:24 corn scrosses for 4H. We didn't really like their breed just because they're kind of gross and we decided we'd go with more heritage breeds. Breeds that haven't been bred to be more meaty and bigger and produce meat in mass quantities is what our... where we want we want the more natural, the less 02:55 the less engineered, yes. Yeah, yeah. 03:00 Yeah, I don't blame you. This is our first year going and, um, uh, growing out our own chickens from eggs to harvest and we're working on it. And I think our results are turning out pretty well. Yeah. That was kind of like the goal. It was, it was egg chickens, but for meat too, like dual purpose. Yes. Yeah. 03:27 Is it difficult for you to raise them from egg to eating? Is it difficult when you have to call them or are you okay with it? So the hardest times I've had with calling isn't really the ones that are for me. It's the mercy calls, you know, when you have a chick born with a defect and having to take care of that one and sometimes that's what gotten the most. But. 03:57 Growing them out, knowing that they're going to be used for me and that they're going to be used for sustenance, it's never bothered me. It gives me a new appreciation for it. It doesn't bother me. It's like I know I'm a meat eater and I eat meat and it makes me feel, I don't want to say good, but it makes me feel better knowing that this animal that I'm eating has lived a full and good life. 04:27 throughout its whole life and that its ending is going to be swift and fast and it's not going to suffer. And almost, I mean, I would say probably all the meat we buy in the store probably suffered. So when I look at it that way, and you know, and for me, it makes it a lot easier to do the ending because swift and fast and I know that, you know, that animal's life was for that purpose. 04:57 Yeah, and I didn't ask that for you to feel like you had to defend your choice. It's just that there's so many people in the world who are like, I could never do that. And the thing is you never know what you can do until you do it. So I just, people don't quite understand if they haven't done this, that this is not murder. This is not a terrible thing that you're doing. This is actually a sustainable. 05:27 normal practice that went on for years before we had farms that grew tons of animals and dispatched tons of animals. So totally. I hope I didn't come across that. That's been done on it too. That it's just, it's better this way. Yeah. I hope I didn't come across like I was asking you to defend yourself because I'm absolutely not. I am right on the same boat with you. No, I just felt like that that's part of my explanation of why it, you k

Today I'm talking with Heather-Marie and John at Rising Phoenix Community Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Heather Marie and John at Rising Phoenix Community Farm. How are you guys? Good. Thank you. Yep. Great. How are you? I'm good. It's a beautiful day in Minnesota. Yeah. We have snow up here. 00:28 We got a little bit overnight and I didn't know it was going to snow. We got like an inch in Lasur. What'd you guys get? We didn't get any last night, but it was maybe a week ago and we have maybe two winches, something like that. And you're light. Yeah. And you're in Barnum. Is that right? Yes. Half hour south of Duluth. Oh, so you're up in the really pretty country. It is pretty up here. 00:55 Okay, well, tell me about yourselves and what you guys do. Yeah, I started the farm in 2011 and I didn't own land and proceeded over the next 10 years to move five times. And yep, I just leased land and so kind of moved from place to place. Also during that time, I built a tiny house. So it's a little house on wheels. 01:25 and that got moved around so at least I had a place to live. In 2011, I started a very small CSA. It was just me. Then John and I met in 2018. Then in 2020, we bought our farm and have had a permanent place since then. We do flowers and veggies and we have a 56-member CSA. 01:57 Very nice. And I'm so glad you found your permanent farm. Because I sort of do understand when we, back in 2019, I think, the summer of 2019, or summer 2020, a friend of ours said, do you guys want to grow a garden over at my place? Because we didn't have the room. And they had 24 acres and she had a perfect spot for a big old garden, but she didn't want to. 02:25 She didn't want to do a garden, but she knew we did want to. And so we took her up on her offer and that went really well until they decided that they were going to go ahead and get their pole barn built and the contracting company decided that the best place to put the pole barn was right beside where the garden was, which meant it would be shaded out completely the next year. 02:47 And that's part of the reason we actually bought our place in 2020, in August of 2020, because we were like, the only way we're ever going to have a big garden is if we actually move somewhere where we have some land. So I do feel your pain on this. And I'm really excited that you found a place that you don't have to move again from. Yes. Yeah, we are very excited about it as well. Yeah, it's gone. It's gone well. I think we were really lucky. We started looking in early 2020, you know, in the middle of the lockdown and 03:15 We didn't have anything else to do. Looking for land. And, um, this farm was, uh, in the same family for four generations. And, um, uh, one member of that family is still just down the road from us. And, uh, you know, we, we actually got married on our farm the year after we bought it in 2022 and, and members of the, of the Johnson family, who, who, you know, whose family goes back a few generations on this land. We're actually at the wedding. So. 03:44 It's pretty fun to have these connections to the land. And of course they go further back than that. And we can talk more about that if you want it to. I do want to, but I also want to say how sweet is it that you got to get married on your land? That's amazing. Yeah. That was pretty, pretty special and everybody gathered here and, um, yeah, it was, it was pretty great. Awesome. All right. So tell me, tell me more about the land that you bought. Yeah. So it's, it's a 40, it's a 40 acre farm and, uh, it's. 04:14 You know, we were looking for, I guess, you know, everybody's looking for that perfect piece of land, but we like some of its imperfections too. It's on some rolling hills. It's on a busier road than we would like, but that's good for us because we are able to have a rather than go to farmers markets, we sell a lot of our produce on Fridays at a farm stand here on the property. So that's been great. And we've in the process got to know our neighbors. And that's also how we 04:42 kind of opened the door to new customers. And then, yeah, going back further, we're also trying to learn more about the pre-colonial history of this land and the indigenous history of the land. And we've learned some things. We're really lucky that we are just down the road from the Fond du Lac reservation and have actually been able to grow some produce for a CSA program that they have as well. So sort of making those connections slowly has been fun also. Awesome. 05:12 I love it. I'm like

Today I'm talking with Kayla and Trent at Brotzler Farms. "We are a sustainable family homestead. We have over 120 free range egg laying chickens, fresh sourdough, herbal remedies, a few goats, and we make pure Wisconsin maple syrup. We believe you should know where your food is coming from! Local!" 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Kayla and Trent at Brotzler Farms, I think is the way I pronounce it. How are you guys? We're good. Thank you for having us. Did I pronounce it right? Yes, you did. Okay, good. All right. So tell me about yourselves and what you do. 00:29 Well, we have a tiny little three acre homestead in Osceola. We moved there about three years ago now. And we kind of do a mixture of all sorts of things. We kind of started out with 20 chickens that were handed over to us from the old owners. Trent has been doing maple syrup for a good while now. And then I started into... 00:56 herbal remedies and different concoctions that I make, gardening. And now we have, I don't even know how many chickens, over 100 chickens, three goats, and I do sourdough now. So we kind of dabble in a few things. I also was doing microgreens last year and that turned into a pretty decent sized little business that I was doing pretty much all by myself, but I stopped doing that just because it took. 01:24 quite a bit of time, but everything else we're still doing. There's nothing prettier than a tray of microgreens, I swear to you. I know. They're so cool. So for the listeners that aren't Midwesterners, Osceola is in Wisconsin, just so everybody knows. Yes, Northwest Wisconsin. Okay. All right. So does Trent have anything he wants to throw into that description? She pretty much covered everything. As far as the maple syrup, I started in 2018 myself. 01:54 My grandpa done it many decades ago, but I never, unfortunately, never met him. Um, so I kind of, I guess I picked up a little bit where he left off and I started with one tree, one tap and now I'm over about 150 taps. And we do about 40 gallons of syrup a year. So, and just kind of looking and expanding that every year. So it's going good. Wow. I love maple syrup. I'm not kidding you. We always have some in the fridge because. 02:23 I can't do pancakes or waffles without it now. Without real maple syrup. The stuff that is manmade or factory made, forget it. I don't even have it anymore. Yeah, I was just saying that the other day. I'm ashamed to say that I was raised on the store bought stuff and I didn't, at first I didn't like real maple syrup and I started eating it more and I was like, wait a minute, how did I ever eat the fake stuff? That's how I was too. Yeah. 02:50 I had no idea that maple syrup that was made from maple tree sap was so yummy. Right. And especially when you look at the medicinal properties of it too, I think that's one of the things that I'm kind of passionate about is looking at the nutritional value and the medicinal aspects of different foods and different plants and herbs and everything. And it's really cool to learn about. Yeah. Two of the things that will never be missing from my pantry is real maple syrup and honey because they both have such great... 03:20 medicinal and nutritional qualities that I don't want to be without it. Yeah, absolutely. We've talked about getting honeybees too, so that's probably on the list eventually. Mm-hmm. It's a great thing to have, but I don't know if you've looked into it at all, but it's an expensive hobby. Yeah, my parents did it for many years, and my uncle did it for many years, so we have supplies and stuff to view it. But yeah, you're right. It is a lot of work, so that's kind of why I haven't done it yet. But it's something I'd like to at least try at least once. 03:49 Yeah, the reason we haven't tried it is because number one, we don't have all the things yet, and it's expensive to acquire them. But I'm also afraid that we're going to kill the beehives by accident. I would be so sad if we got them and they just died over the winter. Oh yeah. So no, we're not doing bees. We're doing chickens. Chickens and barn cats, those are pretty much the only things we do right now. So yep. 04:16 Okay, so I was looking at your Facebook page because I do my homework, and you had a post on there about ghost pipe mushrooms. And I had to go look them up because I thought they were poisonous, but they're not across the board poisonous. They're poisonous in certain ways. So can you tell me about that? Yeah, so ghost pipe, it's actually a flower, but they do generally grow amongst mushrooms. 04:44 From what I underst

Today I'm talking with Andy and Becca at St. Croix Valley Hobby Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Andy and Becca at St. Croix Valley Hobby Farm, and it's a revisit episode. I'm so excited. How are you guys? Good. Great. Great, Mary. Thanks for having us again. We're excited too. 00:27 For sure. And I didn't meet Becca last time, so it's really nice to hear your voice, Becca. Nice to meet you. Yeah, same. So what's new? What's been going on since I talked to you? Well, we've done over 20 shows across the metro this year from Islamic temples. We've been to Elko Speedway, residential birthday parties in Columbia Heights, Brooklyn parks all the way up to North Branch, retirement facilities around the metro. It's been just kind of a... 00:54 Amazing journey to be honest since the last time we talked. I was kind of fresh and new to it and new to the scene, but the animals have taught us a lot and the people that we've seen has just been incredible throughout the season. So right now we're kind of setting up for our Christmas display and getting that ready so that we can have people come to the farm for walk-ins for our Christmas setup. So really good on our side, but let's let Becca add some to that if she has anything to say. 01:22 Yeah, and it's been great. Our girls have helped out a lot. They're working in mission, helping with the animals. They do a lot of the traveling events also. So it's been fun to get them involved as well. 01:38 Awesome. So you guys have been over to Minnesota? Yeah, quite a few times. We did Elko Speedway in Minnesota. We've done a few churches, residential birthdays, Easter, Halloween. Fun. Just so I can catch the listeners up. You guys are in Osceola, Wisconsin, is that right? Yeah, just north of Somerset. So it's almost smack dab in the middle between Osceola and Somerset right off Wisconsin 35. So. 02:07 If you're heading north out of Somerset, you can't miss us. It's right off the road, big red barn, green roof, little small barnyard animals running around next to the road. Yeah. So, for you guys to go and bring the animals to Minnesota is not too far. I mean, I'm assuming it's not just a hop, skip, and a jump, but it's not like an eight-hour drive. Nope, not at all. And that was what was nice. Even Elko wasn't too bad. Nah, 35 mostly the whole way, 36 to 35. 02:36 Head down to Elko, hour and 35, hour and 40 minutes, I think it was. And that's typically what we like to do for the animals is keep it under a two hour drive for them. The onsite events are ranging from two to four hours. So give them an eight to 10 hour day. And most of them are just over a year old. So we like to try to keep it as short as we can for them, especially in the normal months. Yes, because stress and animals is a bad combination. Right. Yep. 03:05 Okay, so what animals do you have? Because I don't remember. I think you have many cows. We have four female alpacas. We got two, one micro high park heifer, one mini herford steer, and then seven Nigerian dwarf goats. We have a couple more on the way. Should be here to have some Christmas baby goats any day now. We have two pot belly pigs. We're working on a couple black faced sheep and some mini donkeys next, I think. So chickens, ducks. 03:34 couple how and lop rabbits that free range at your feet when you come in to check in they're kind on the check inside of the pen so when you enter the barn they're hopping around they have their own little tunnel that goes underneath the barn and outside into their pen outside so it's kind of unique to see that but a hamster teddy bear hamster that rounds it out about for now anyway okay my sister has a pet rabbit and and I can't remember its name right 04:04 She basically lets it run around the house like a cat and it uses a litter box. And I'm like, how in the heck did you train a rabbit to use a litter box? But he, I think it's a he, he's very sweet. He's a very sweet bunny. They're amazing. Yeah, ours are litter box trained, super friendly, super sweet. They're feet chasers, so it makes me nervous when people come in sometimes if they're not watching their feet, because they like to hop right up to people. They're definitely not afraid at all. They like attention. Super sweet, yeah. 04:32 I didn't believe that at first either. I've been around animals my whole life, but I didn't know you could do that with a rabbit. And since our team has done it, it's been one of the most loved family members that we have. They come right up to you in the mornings. They put their heads dow

Today I'm talking with Robin Easton, author of Naked In Eden. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Robin Easton, author of Naked in Eden. How are you, Robin? I'm great and excited to be here with you, Mary. I'm excited to have you. You are such an interesting person to me. 00:30 So tell me about yourself. What do you do? Oh, wow. That I've been listening to your podcasts and how you ask people that. And just, I was asking, they're great podcasts. I'm loving them. But anyway, I asked myself, well, what do I do? And I kept coming back to this line in my first book when I'm 25 in the jungle. And I'm, what do I do? And then the answer came, I feel. 00:59 You know, what do you do for a living, Robin? I feel. And it sounds an odd answer, but from that is born my music, my writing, my communication with other species, you know, my love of the earth, you know, everything that I am and do. And right now I'm writing, I'm kind of finishing up two books. 01:29 that I hope to get out this year. One is about all the incredible interactions I've had with other species and how it's changed my life, what I've learned, and how my own intelligence and awareness has just expanded more than I ever could have imagined through experiencing the intelligence of other species. 01:57 and their emotions, their ability for compassion and love and tenderness and just so much. And then the other book is kind of a look, I suppose, looking at the world, a woman who lives so much of her life, wild in the wild and places when I went in decades ago were very wild, were virgin forests and remote. You had to winch and could take, I mean, it was an ordeal sometimes just to get in there. 02:27 And then coming back out into my culture again and seeing the world again through wild eyes, because I very much went wild. And then another project I wanted to just touch on, but is I'm buying a piece of land. I've owned land before, but they were always bigger pieces, probably nothing 02:56 a small like six acres anywhere up to like in Australia, almost up to 200 acres. And they were wild and I didn't really have to do anything. I could just kind of move in and enjoy being there. But the place I'm buying now is one acre. It's in a rural area like they're small acreages with the people are all kind of 03:23 micro homesteaders. They have gardens and chickens and some nice docks and whatever. And it's a wonderful community. Like kind of back in the pioneer times where even though we're all on the grid, you know, it still has that feel where your neighbors say if you need anything, let us know. We'll come help. And I decided to do this, you know, this project. And so I'm 03:52 buying this acre, my partner and I, and we're going to turn it into a pollinator conservancy. And someone might say, one acre? Yes. You know, and so it's the first time where I bought a piece of land where one half is lawn and the other half is kind of was made into this extended kind of drive that's gravel and hard and it has a couple fruit trees, a little mini 04:21 great vineyard and a couple of trees. And it's like, what can I give back here? What life was driven from this acre? And that just touches me to tears, Mary. You know, what birds, what butterflies, what bees, what bats, what insects that are starved for homes and don't have them? What families? 04:51 were driven from this property. And how can I give back? And someone could think, one acre, what are you giving? Oh, we all need to give back. Even if we just have a balcony that has plants on it, flowers, you know, in a city. Even if we just have a quarter acre and we decide to plant organic. 05:19 lavender, organic things so the bees don't get harmed. Every little bit helps. And so right now, I mean, I'm coming from someone who used a hand crank washing machine, logged water from creeks and went without electricity, computers, phones, TV, radios for several, like decades. So now I have power. 05:49 It's an interesting, I mean, it's like it's making me grow in a different way. In terms of thinking, what can I give back now? You know, I'm, I'll be 71 in December and it could seem a huge project, but I want to do it, you know, I think it's great that you're going to do it. I think it's fantastic. And I get your, I get your, um, I don't know, bafflement at. 06:18 at really going from no technology to using technology because we here have obviously the internet at my house and we have TV and we have our computers and we have all the things but my favorite thing is just being outside and watching

Today I'm talking with Sunshine at The Farm at Prophetstown. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Sunshine at the farm at Prophetstown. Good afternoon, Sunshine. How are you? Hello. Hi. I'm doing wonderful here in Indiana. Good. It's really funny because I call my kids. 00:29 Well, I used to call my kids or grownups now, but when I would wake them up, I would say, good morning sunshine. So the minute I saw your name, I was like, oh. Yes, I get a lot of people who go, that's cute, but what's your real name? I'm like, well, it is, but it is unique. People do remember me. Oh, I would imagine so. Is it because your parents were of the hippie generation or what's the story? Yes. 00:58 Yes, that's it. Okay. I think it's beautiful. I think that being called sunshine all the time would be a lovely way to live my life. Okay, so tell me about what you do at the farm and then tell me about the farm. Sure. The farm at Prophetstown is a 1920s living history museum located inside of Prophetstown State Park. 01:27 I at the farm am in charge of our marketing, our website, our social media, our school tours, any kind of regular tour, anything public facing. I kind of consider myself an experience enhancer in a way. What a wonderful job, yes. 01:52 Yes, it's super fun. My previous job I did the same things, but I worked at a university. I worked at Purdue. So this was a totally different environment for me. I did not grow up on a farm. So everything I do here is kind of first for me in a way, even though my day-to-day job and what I'm doing as far as event planning and 02:20 tours and interacting with people. I'm very familiar with the course, but the farm itself and everything's a little different. Example, today it was our first snow here. So it's the very first time I'm seeing snow on the farm, but now we have a little bit of a mini, I don't know, it's not a blizzard, but it looks like a blizzard outside the window. I bet it's absolutely beautiful. 02:50 It really is. When I first pulled into the drive this morning, the sun just came up and to see that snow on the barn, just beautiful and the horses out. Our farm is six on a hundred acres. We operate on about 25 acres and the rest we use for our feed alfalfa. 03:16 We have several animals that we take care of year round. So our farm is open year round every day, seven days a week from 10 in the morning to 5 PM. We have three horses, three goats, three cows, six pigs, three sheep. We have a bunch of chickens, about 65 chickens, two turkeys, 11 ducks. 03:45 two farm cats. I'm thinking if I missed anyone out of all them animals. Is there a dog? No, we do not have a dog. Okay. We do have a mini horse and a donkey. Okay, well that's a pass little animals right there. Yes, and so we care for those animals every day. We have a staff of about six part-time farm hands. 04:11 And so our day begins, I come in in the morning, I open the farm, and then from there, the farm hands will start doing their, letting the animals out, feeding them, doing all the morning chores about 9 a.m. And then we will repeat it again about 4 p.m. in the afternoon and we button up the farm by 5 o'clock and we all leave. Okay, so. 04:39 It might seem weird that I'm talking to Sunshine about this place in Indiana, but I really love places like yours because I, when I was in school, we went on a field trip to a farm in Maine called Norland's Farm, N-O-R-L-A-N-D-S. And I don't know if that's what it's still called now cause I'm older now. It was quite a while ago, but it was a living history place and kids would go there for field trips. 05:08 and everybody on the farm was in character from like the late 1800s. And it was really fun, partly because one of the girls in my class, I think it was middle school, junior high, she had nail polish on. And nail polish wasn't a thing they did in the late 1800s. And the woman who was taking us through the experience of what we were doing. 05:35 She saw her hands and she said, did you damage your fingernails? And the girl looked at her and said, no. And she said, oh, well, they're all red. I thought they might be sore. And she stayed right in character. And at the time, all of us girls were just like, oh, yeah, okay, yeah, that makes sense. There wouldn't have been red nail polish in the late 1800s, especially not on a kid that age. But as an adult, 06:03 that could have gone one of two ways. We all could have taken it in stride and then like that makes sense, or that kid could have gotten picked on for the next five years in school beca

Today I'm talking with Ellen at Homestead Harvest of Delano. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Ellen at Homestead Harvest of Delano. Good afternoon, Ellen. How are you? I'm all right. How are you? I'm good. Are you looking forward to the snowflakes we're supposed to get tomorrow? Tomorrow? 00:29 Yeah. No, I did not know that. My weather reporter did not tell me that. Oh, yeah. We're supposed to get like a trace to an inch of snow. I'm in LaSore and you're in Delano, so I'm assuming you're probably looking at a little bit of snowflakes tomorrow. Okay. I will let him know that he has, you know, got a demerit for failing to keep me apprised. 00:57 Well, it is after mid-November. It's time. It's time for things to start looking holiday-ish, you know. All right, so tell me about yourself and what you do. I know you make jams. Uh, yep, I do. I started because my mom used to make wild plum jam jelly from our plums on our property and then she died and we had to sell the place and 01:27 I decided I wanted to make jelly like she did because it was so good. And so I started making it and I had a good time doing it. Thought it was a lot of fun. So I then decided that I wanted to try other kinds of jellies and or jams. And that's where it started. But my nephew, my great nephew really, really likes the wild plum. 01:57 So he kind of, you know, encouraged me as only a child can do. Yep. I've got four kids and they all are my biggest fans when it comes to trying out new foods, because they figure the worst it's going to be is edible. Yeah. It helps when you have somebody who will eat your practice sessions. Yes. We call it eating the evidence. Yeah. 02:27 Okay, good. Yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah, my husband makes Christmas cookies every December and invariably some of them burn a little and none of us care because you just break off the burnt piece and the rest of it's yummy and he calls that eating the evidence. Yeah, that's, he's got a great point there. Uh-huh. And you can't waste food right now. I mean, you should never waste food, but right now don't waste food. It's so expensive to eat right now. It is. It's crazy. 02:57 I have chickens, so they can also eat the evidence. Yes. Chickens will eat anything. So will pigs. Pigs will eat anything too. Um, so I, I knew that jams and jellies didn't always have to be just sweet. I knew that they could be spicy or they could be even salty or minty. But a lot of people don't realize that the jams and jellies can be of. 03:23 a food that goes with like dinner, not just toast and jam. Right. Right. So over the past summer, I was asked by several people if I had any pepper jellies. And so I started making pepper jellies using my sister-in-law's peppers from her garden. And I've had good luck with those. I've had a lot of people. 03:53 enjoy them and buy multiple, you know, come back and buy more. Mm hmm. And, um, that is gratifying because I had never thought of jelly or jam except for mint, mint jelly, you know, you, you know about that. Cause it goes on lamb. Yeah. But, um, also I've had people put it on their fish and their chicken. 04:22 Your jams or mint jelly? Jams. Like, yeah, I have a pineapple variations and peach variations that are used on their meat, whatever, you know, chicken or fish or like that. And then I made, I had a boatload of tomatoes last year. 04:50 So I started making tomato jam and that is so good on like your, um, it's a savory jam. So you put it on your hamburger or your meatloaf or your ribs. And it, um, you get the tomato, but you also get all the, the spices, depending on which spices are used, it brings out the taste of the meat more. 05:19 Yeah, we tried a blackberry jelly and balsamic vinegar glaze on steak one time and that was really good. Oh yeah, that does sound good. Yeah, it was sweet. It was almost like a barbecue by the time it was cooked, but it was very blackberry-y but it had the zing of the balsamic vinegar. It was really nice. Yeah, that sounds good. Yeah, and years ago. 05:49 I used to do roast chickens and I would mix apple cider vinegar and apricot jam and something else. I can't remember what the other thing was. Like whisk it together in a bowl and put that over the top of the chicken like you would put butter over on a turkey. Yeah. And then- Yeah, baste it with it. And that's really good too. My mom still uses my recipe because I sent it to her. I was like, you should try this. And- 06:17 She's like, we make an apricot glazed chicken once a month since you sent me that recipe. I'm like, well, good, I

Today I'm talking with Lindsay at Waddle and Cluck. You can follow on Facebook as well. You can visit Nature Notes, as mentioned in the episode. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Lindsay at Waddle and Cluck. Good morning, Lindsay, how are you? Good morning, I'm doing good, how are you? Good, wanted to make sure I pronounced the cluck with the C-L because it could have been misconstrued, and that would be really bad on my podcast. 00:28 Yes, it's Waddle and Cluck, an old English pub for birds. Oh, okay. Cool. I was going to ask you the story behind it. So is there an actual story behind it? Yes and no. We started off with chickens and ducks and so Waddle and Cluck. And I just, I thought it sounded like when I went to London and I was visiting some of the places around there. 00:56 I just like the way it sounded. So that's what we went with. Yeah. I feel like if you go to the UK, you can't throw a stone without hitting a pub. Is that about right? Yeah. Yes. I've never been, but every time I read a book about it or see a story about it, there's always a pub somewhere involved. So all right. So tell me about yourself and what you guys do. Well, we are a family of six. We're a blended family. 01:24 We have four kids, three boys and a girl ranging from 14 to 19. The oldest is in college. And we have a little hobby farm. So we have chickens, ducks, geese, guineas, quail, and turkeys. And we plan to expand that once we can finish off fencing. 01:52 I think fencing is the bane of existence for anyone who has animals. And then we also do a lot of gardening. I am also a business owner in addition to that. So we also, there's a couple of local markets around here, indoor markets that are geared towards local products that we sell eggs and baked goods and some handmade goods. 02:21 And so we do a lot of things. Yes. I was looking at your, uh, your Instagram page and your Facebook page. And I was like, does this woman ever actually sleep for more than an hour at a time? Yeah, three. Yeah. You know, it's, it's one of those things when you want to have your dream life. Um, you're willing to work harder for it. 02:51 Absolutely. And sometimes if you're lucky that dream life happens and you realize you don't have to keep pushing so hard, that's kind of what happened with us which was really nice because my husband and I are in our mid-50s and we worked really, really, really hard until we moved in here four years ago. And we still work hard but we're not quite as stressed about it as we used to be. 03:21 Yep. And you know, once you really get the hang of things and you get systems in place, it does become a lot easier to do all of the things. I am intensely organized and we have all of our farm stuff on a pretty good schedule. And so other than getting up at sunrise, things flow pretty smoothly around here. 03:50 Yes, and there is a huge benefit to getting up at sunrise. I have a kitchen sink that has a picture window above it. And so when I get up in the morning and get my coffee, I try to get up before the sun comes up because I didn't have the luxury, I guess, of seeing the sunrise from where we used to live. And now there's an open field out that window and it looks due east. And every morning if there's a sunrise, I get to see it and it just makes my day. It starts my day. So. 04:20 peacefully and beautifully that the rest of the day can't go wrong even though there's a chance it will. That's a great way to start your day. Our daughter is currently obsessed with sunsets. Every time there's a sunset, it's prettier than the last one and her phone is filled with pictures of sunsets. 04:45 So is mine because my husband does the same thing. He goes out in the morning if it's a pretty sunrise, he's taking six or seven pictures, and he's always out in the evening at sunset. It doesn't matter what time it is, but he's outside. So I have thousands of pictures of sunrises and sunsets in my phone. I told him we should make calendars every year. You should, you should. Yeah. 05:09 My thing is that in the house that we lived in before this one, there was no window in the kitchen. There was a window out the back door that was in, you know, it walked, it entered onto the kitchen, but it looked north. So you could not see a sunrise or sunset from the kitchen. And when I did dishes, I was looking at a blank wall. So I'm so incredibly thankful for having a window over my sink. 05:36 And that sounds really, really stupid and small, but it's not, it's huge to me. It is. And you know, there's, I have in my office here at the house, I have

Today I'm talking with Lynn at Nourish and Nestle. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Lynn at Nourish and Nestle. How are you, Lynn? I'm well, thank you. Awesome. I have to tell you, my nickname is Lynn. My given name is Mary Evelyn. Oh, okay. And my... 00:28 and my parents couldn't decide which name was going to come first, and they settled on Mary. And by the time I was like a week old, they were calling me Lynn. So I grew up not knowing that my name wasn't technically Lynn. So when I saw yours, I was like, oh, a real Lynn. Okay. A real Lynn. Yep. All right. So tell me all about yourself and what you do. So this like 00:57 stocks me when I say this, but I've been blogging for about nine years, which is like a lifetime. And I, you know, so my blog is Nurture Nestle, obviously, and it's a basically everything I like to do, you know, I kind of ignored the advice to niche down and I kind of niche out. So 01:21 I like to cook, so I cook. I like to garden, so there's gardening. I like to knit, so there's knit. So whatever I like to do is kind of on there. So yeah, that's pretty much it. In a nutshell, I've enjoyed this blogging journey. I got to a point earlier this year where I was like, gosh, do I really wanna keep doing this? And what I did is I just kind of slowed down and just. 01:49 focused on the stuff I wanted to do. And I really kind of stepped back from all the crazy stuff that, you know, make Facebook happy and Google happy and Pinterest happy. And I'm really blessed that I have a great email, active large email list. So I just started really kind of focusing on them and I'm in a happy place right now. You did all the hard work at the beginning and now you get to make the rules. I think that's great. Yes. Awesome. 02:19 Okay, well, I have been doing my podcast for a little over a year. And at a year, I went through the same thing. I was like, do I want to keep doing this? Because it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work to be a creative and put yourself out there and put the time into it. And I talked to my husband about it and I was like, this five days a week thing is a lot. 02:47 And he said, cut back to three days a week again. He said, when you first started, it was once a week. And then you moved to three a week and then you did months of five episodes released a week. He said, drop back down to three. He said, you have a following now. See what happens. And that's what I've done for the last week or so. And it's fine. So no one's your limits and slowing down is not a terrible thing. And, and there's a, there's a lesson for us all there. 03:16 You know, we're not doing our best when we're not enjoying it and when we're feeling like under the pressure and we're feeling like, you know, I must do this, I must do this. And we're at our best, especially creatives, when, you know, we listen to our heart on that, you know. And luckily, you know, I am and hopefully you are in a position too where 03:42 you know, we don't have to go to the daily grind. I know not everybody is lucky enough to do that. And I'm lucky enough to kind of step back and say, okay, this is what I want to do. And I don't want to do all the other things. So yes. And I'm in the same boat. So whatever it is that catches my eye and the person I want to talk to, if they say yes, I am all over it. And it can be anytime between 8 a.m. Central time and 6 p.m. Central time. 04:09 After that or before that, I'm asleep. I'm done. I'm exactly. I need sleep. I am 55 years old. I spent years not sleeping, raised four kids. And sleep is like my favorite thing next to talking to people on the podcast. You and me both girls. Sleep is my happy place too. Uh huh. Yep. And I have to get in some reading just for me. I'm an avid reader. And if I don't read something for me. 04:36 at least an hour a day, I feel like my life is off kilter. So that's kind of my thing. So we could talk about all that stuff all day, but we're not going to. So I wanted to talk to you basically, because you're all about home and design and creating things and I love it. First question for you is what is your particular style when it comes to decorating? 05:05 I think I would be called eclectic. I don't, and I don't, so with not offending anybody, I don't buy decorations. I haven't really bought furniture in forever. I have hand-me-down furniture and I have, the furniture my husband and I bought when we were married 35 years ago. 05:32 is the furniture that I still have today that I've recovered, obviously. But I'm kind of a... I don't want t

Today I'm talking with Jane at Prairie Creek Farm and Apiary. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Jane at Prairie Creek Farm and Apiary. Good morning, Jane. How are you? I'm fine, thank you. Good morning. You're in Kansas, right? I am. I'm in South Central Kansas, just north of Wichita. Okay, awesome. So tell me about yourself and what you do at the... 00:29 the apiary. Well, my name is Jane and I, I'm retired from federal government. I worked in the federal government for over 22 years in law enforcement. And back in 98, when I first was hired on, I bought this little farmstead in Harvey County. And after retirement, 00:58 I continue to work it as just a small horse farm. We used to breed horses here, my daughter and I, but we've always had a garden. And then after my grandsons started being born, one of them had allergies and eczema, and the doctors wanted to put him on medication right away. And I said, well, why don't I just start keeping bees and see if honey really helps? 01:28 And it did. And now 12 years later, I'm, I'm up to 25 hives and starting to do farmers markets on the weekends or during the week here locally. And then I started making goat cheese with a friend up in Park City, Kansas. And I made cheese for him for three years. 01:58 and they purchase my honey and my byproducts to put in their little market shop. So that's kind of what I do. Fun. I love it. Okay. So I do want to get into a couple of things about the bees, but the first thing I want to ask you about is I was looking at your Facebook page and you have some kind of salt bar that you make. What is that? It is basically the base oil in it is 02:28 olive oil, or sorry coconut oil with a little bit of olive oil and castor and then it has a couple grams or probably like a cup of Himalayan sea salt and it just lathers up and is so pleasant for your face and I do it with and without 02:58 So, and it's just fun. It's fun to work with and it's really lovely on your face. And you can use it as a total body soap, but it's something I've started this summer more continuously. And I have people that just absolutely love it. And that's the first bar that they come to. Some of them I have with turmeric. 03:26 So it has sort of an anti-inflammatory with the turmeric. And then I'm getting away from fragrance oils and using more essential oils now. So I have several different essential oils. I just made some with tea tree and then I have some with eucalyptus and thyme. So yeah, I'm just kind of experimenting. Okay, so my question is, it's a soap. 03:55 bar but the salt bar. So why is the salt important in this? Um, it's fun because salt and sugars help with lathering but the salt also it can be used as 04:12 Oh, it's like a scrub. So it just has nice lathering properties. And I wish I had a better answer. It's just a really beautiful salt bar. And I can go get some more documentation on it. But that's my best answer is because of the lathering and the scrubbing nature of the salt. Just like if you make salt. 04:38 foot scrubs with honey and salt. It just helps with exfoliation and cleansing your face better. And then I'm just kind of experimenting different ways. I follow a lady, I believe it's the nerdy farmer's wife, and she has some really great books and series on soap making. And when I started making milk soaps, I followed a lot of her recipes. 05:08 And then she had this series coming out with salt bars. And there was another group of people, because when you start doing one thing and you start researching, then all of a sudden you start getting these pop-ups and other people that make soap. And so I started looking at some of their recipes and putting things together. But mostly I would say that the salt itself is, getting back to the original question. 05:37 um for exfoliation and help cleaning your skin and it helps with lather. Okay got two things off of everything you just said. The internet the internet is the most amazing rabbit hole to go down ever and the reason I asked about the salt bars is because I didn't know I'd never heard of a salt bar before and we make soap and I was like what is a salt bar I need to know more. 06:04 Yeah, if you look up that nerdy farmer's wife, she has some great books. And then if you follow them, every once in a while you'll receive an email and she'll have a recipe in there and you can kind of look at the recipe and add things or take things away, you know, run it through a lie calculator and. Salt bars are just great. I find them to be one of my favorite soap bars. Okay. 06:34 Awesome. I just I need

Today I'm talking with Eric at Cultinary Family Farms. You can also follow on Facebook. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Eric at Cultinary Family Farms. Good morning, Eric. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing great. And you? I'm good. You're in New Jersey? Yeah. While we're in Jersey, we have to say South Jersey, Central Jersey, or North Jersey. So we are in South Jersey, right by Philly. 00:30 Okay, cool. I'm in Minnesota, if you didn't know, so I'm not going to sound like you and you're not going to sound like me and that's what makes the world go round. And I'm from Montreal, so I have a double accent. I'm not hearing a lot of the Montreal, I'm hearing more of the New Jersey, but either way it's all good with me. All right. So, tell me about yourself and what you guys do at the farm. Well, it all started in Quebec when we lived there. I have a passion with... 00:56 garlic so I started garlic you know I said you know I'll try farming garlic for fun I started really small and I failed miserably and then that got me like a kick just to try again and and then you know I rented a little lot and then we started planning and it went really well so it got me you know what I'll do it bigger so we sold where we were we bought a little land with a house and we started 01:25 farming there, starting getting animals and everything. So starting to do in like, you know, people would come to the house and buy her honey, buy her, you know, garlic, eggs and everything. And then when I moved here, since I was a brand new immigrant, it took me about 16 months to get my green card. So I didn't want to wait, you know, because it was, so I opened up my farm again here in Morristown. 01:51 So I knocked on everybody's door. I was looking for vacant lot for farmland and everything. I got turned down for like six months and then someone answered one of our ads and said, hey, you know, I have a land. It's not ready, but hey, if you wanna rent it, go ahead. So I started with smaller tools. I pulled out all the tree. There was about 10,000 trees on it. So I started by myself and I removed all the trees, all the rocks, got a beat up tractor. We have a. 02:19 hashtag that's called curse tractor because everything happens right now. I'm working on my tractor as we speak. And, uh, so we started with that, you know, so it's like a second year. We're heading into our third year. So we, last year we harvested about 45,000 cloves that I planted by hand. And, uh, you know, we do a fast farmers market, we do food expos, we do a few things and now we started a home delivery. So it's the farmers market delivered to your door. 02:48 So that's what we're trying to do. And that's where we at today. If you put that in like a, in a ballpark real quick, that's pretty much what we do. That's awesome. And the more you talk, the more I'm hearing the French accent. You have a beautiful speaking voice. Thanks. Okay, so I had a couple of questions that are specific and then we can just kind of go from there. I saw that you sell black garlic. I freaking love black garlic. I had never tried it until a few years back. And... 03:17 I tried making it and it was an epic fail. I tried making it in a rice cooker and it did not work. So is there a trick to, well, number one, tell people what it is and then number two, is there a trick to making it at home? Well, yeah, the black garlic is a fermented regular garlic. So what you do is you really in a slow heat, you slowly cook your garlic to, depending on 03:47 what you use to cook it in. So it's you people try rice cooker, slow cooker, you can put it in your oven, you can bury it in the ground with you know, it's depending on where you at, you know, like so, so it becomes like a gummy bear in a way kind of like texture. And we actually cook it a little bit so it's harder and it's a bit drier so people can handle it with their hands and it's not sticky and you know, so that's what we do. 04:16 And it becomes like, it's crazy, the antioxidant and everything, it's the benefits for your health and the flavor. It's like it becomes that umami flavor. 04:33 I think it's like candy. Yeah, well, it's like a brain kind of tease in a way because you go through five steps. Well, the one we have, the one we make, I tried a few other ones that, you know, like we go to a store and it's really like watery and it's like mushy. It doesn't give you the same, but ours give you like five flavor steps. So it's kind of like for 10 seconds when you put the gummy in your, in your mouth, it becomes like a, like a brain teaser. Cause you go

Today I'm talking with Kristin at Murrell’s Fowl Play. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Kristen at Merle's Foul Play. How are you this morning, Kristen? I'm good. How are you? I'm great. You're in Tennessee? East Tennessee, yes. Okay, cool. Another Southern accent. I love it. 00:27 I talk to so many people in the South and I'm in the very, well not the very, I'm in the North, I'm in Minnesota so I don't hear a lot of Southern accents up here very often. I like to say that mine's not that bad but if you ask my husband he's going to disagree. Yes and most of us who have accents can't hear them at all because we're so used to it. Yeah. Okay so tell me about yourself and what you do. 00:53 Uh, let's see. I used to breed, well, I used to show chickens when I was in 4-H in middle school. And for the last three years, I have been joking with my husband that I wanted to get chickens. And he thought I was not serious. And the next thing you know, we're going to, well, two, three hours away to buy a coop and bring it back. And I started with four birds that have now turned into 30. Oh my. Yes. So now we breed. 01:21 Silky's and seramas and we just got some Rhode Island Reds and now we are working on our egg production and our incubation Okay, so I was looking at your Facebook page because that's what I do and I saw that you raised chickens for show for showing them Do you also raise chickens for eggs and meat eggs? Yes meat? No, I have not got into meat birds 01:49 I have a couple friends who do that and they love it. And then I have a couple of friends who do that and they hate it. So we don't eat a lot of chicken here. We're more of a beef household. So I just couldn't justify the feed cost to meat cost. Uh-huh. Yeah. Um, chicken feed is very expensive right now. Yes. That's why we don't have chickens this winter. We called them a month and a half ago because they were being lazy and they're also getting old. 02:17 And my husband said, I don't want to feed chickens all winter for no return. And I said, that's fine. Yes, exactly. And I could, I mean, we eat chicken maybe twice a month in this house. So I couldn't justify raising a ton of birds to just let them sit in the freezer for a while. Yeah. And we didn't raise meat birds. We had them for eggs and we can afford to buy a dozen eggs a week. Right now it's fine. So, and there's a really sweet woman who sells eggs at the farmer's market in the summertime. And my husband. 02:47 works at the farmers market. He sells our stuff there. So he knows her and he's going to get ahold of her and be like, can we buy some of your eggs? That's probably going to be the cheaper route compared to chicken feed. Yeah. Your eggs are better than the store bought eggs and your eggs are cheaper than chicken feed. So we would like to buy eggs from you ma'am. So tell me how, how in the world did you go from, I don't know, taking care of chickens for 4-H when you were a kid 03:17 to now being so invested in this? I'm not even sure how it happened. I just kind of got this idea one day and I ended up with those four birds. And I bought, I originally bought pet quality silkies, even though I knew that my goal was to breed show quality silkies. So I bought these four silkies and I was just like, I just want to see if I enjoy raising the chickens. Cause I can maintain four birds and if I don't like them, they'll just live and die here and I never have to get any more. And then I got those four. 03:44 And they were so sweet and they're still really sweet birds. They're not as sweet as my seramas, but they're still incredibly sweet. And I enjoyed messing with them and I enjoyed hanging out with them. And then my grandfather had this coop at his house and he was like, I'm not raising chickens anymore. Why don't you take it? And I was like, well, if I get a coop, then I got to get more birds. So then I ended up with some egg laying birds and then my husband loves those birds. So he decided to get more egg laying birds and I was like, well, I got to go back to, you know, showing my birds. So I started getting. 04:14 I won a contest for six free bread to standard silkies and I was like well that would be perfect because then I can separate them into their color pens and work on that. And then one thing led to another and now there's birds everywhere. Well I bet they're clucking happy birds. Very much so. Uh huh. Okay so I am not anywhere near an expert on chicken varieties so tell me about what silkies are and why those. 04:45 Silky's are bantams, so they're a lot smaller than your regular standard

Today I'm talking with Mindy at Pumpkin Hill LLC. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Mindy at Pumpkin Hill LLC. Good morning, Mindy. How are you? Good morning. I'm good. Thank you. Good. You're in Wisconsin? I am. I am in the southern west portion of Wisconsin. 00:29 Okay, what's the nearest big city? Um, La Crosse. Okay, so you're, I think you're like four hours from where I am in La Sour, Minnesota, I think. Yes, yeah, we're about, I mean, it takes me about three and a half hours to get to the Twin Cities. Okay. Well, every time I talk to somebody who's in a bordering state, I say, hey neighbor. So hey neighbor, nice to meet you. So tell me about yourself and what you do. So um. 00:58 I have two children and a husband and we own a farm in rural fairyville. We just started at this year and we have a pumpkin patch in animals and we're really focusing on farm to table on our farm. We have homegrown eggs we're starting to produce and sell hoping that it gets a little bigger as we go. I also own assisted living facilities. 01:27 more so group homes and then we also beef farm and green farm. Okay, when did you start doing this? Pumpkin Hill, I started a year ago. Okay. So we're really fresh. Well, that's good because fresh pumpkins are good pumpkins. Okay, so why did you start it? What brought you to doing this? Oh, so... 01:57 I guess my dad and I have been in businesses together for a very long time. And we also do vacation rentals. And so we actually, my husband and I came over to the neighbor's house one day because we were going to build a house and we were asking about her sewer and it just kind of took off from there. She looked at us and said, I'm moving. Do you want to buy the farm? And we were like, whoa, what? I think we were in shock. 02:26 And we were like, yeah, I guess. So we had talked and my dad and I chose to sell another property to buy this together. So he's part owner right now of the farm with me. And then it kind of snowballed from there. We're like, okay, we know that land prices are expensive. How can we still provide for our family, live on this beautiful land and pay our mortgage? And so it kind of came from an idea 02:56 let's do something where we can get the community involved and we can share the beauty of this land with everybody. So let's come out snowball. Awesome. The reason I ask everybody why is because everybody's reason is different and no one buys land without wanting to do something with it or on it. Yes. We bought land and we thought we were going to raise 03:25 rabbits for meat and we thought we were going to raise chickens for eggs and meat. And right now we have neither. Everything happens for a reason. I feel like we just kind of, we had different ideas in our minds at first and it just kind of went in this weird direction and here we are. Yeah. Our weird direction failed. We, we really wanted to try raising rabbits for meat and 03:54 Our bunnies were stupid and did not understand that they were supposed to reproduce. Even though we did everything right, since getting rid of the rabbits, we've discovered that Timothy hay may have been the issue because they were too fat. The female rabbits were too fat. And fat rabbits don't breed. Who knew? So weird things happen. You can't know what you don't know. And if you don't know where to look, you can't find out. 04:24 And so our rabbit enterprise was a very short-lived experiment that did not go well. But that's okay, because we got years to go and miles to go and lots of sleep to get, and we'll find a new thing. It'll be fine. So I was looking at your Facebook page and it looks like a wonderfully fun thing to do to visit your place. Yeah, we're focusing on family, I think, because my family's so close and 04:52 we're always doing stuff together. I mean, my grandparents came over there in their eighties and God bless them because they put their sweat and tears into this too, so help me get going. And we just kind of creatively came up with games for people and animals for people to see and things for them to do. My cows are kind of my little babies. Um, and they'll come up and they'll kiss me and they'll lick me and they'll, you know, play with people. So we really wanted an interactive place for people also to learn. 05:21 because we know that a lot of places around here don't have that. So people will ask us questions like about our Highland cows, like what different sizes do you have? Well, we just have a mid-size Highland cow. There are four different sizes and the breeds and all that fun stuff. So it's a good learnin

Today I'm talking with Dan at Spring Hill Tree Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Dan at Spring Hill Tree Farm. Good morning, Dan. How are things in Georgia today? Good morning. Things are good, sunny, clear skies, and I just got done working in the strawberry field a few minutes ago. 00:30 Nice. It is incredibly overcast and sprinkling here in Minnesota this morning. For the third day in a row. So strawberries, is that for next year? You're getting them ready for next year? Yeah. So in South Georgia, you grow, you plant strawberries in October, and then they fruit usually in March after that last frost, about 30 days after the last frost. 01:00 Okay, cool. So tell me about yourself and what you guys do. Yeah, so I am a third generation specialty farmer, if you will. We do what you what you call agritourism. So we're here on Spring Hill Farm in Bainbridge, Georgia. And we've been doing agritourism for about 40 years now. Agritourism, simply put, is 01:29 Really, I mean you can take the two words right so agriculture and tourism and sort of blend them together and It's anything that you can do on your farm whether it's an event or maybe like a you pick scenario Trail rides something of that sort right to get people to come out and enjoy your property and You know usually charge some some small fee for them to come and do that Okay, so you've been doing it for 40 years I know that 01:59 Agritourism has been a thing, like a buzzword for the last few years, but it's always been a thing. I mean, I'm 55 and I remember my parents taking me to farms where they were like, let's go on a hayride and pick apples or let's go see cows or whatever it was that they were doing. So you're an OG, you're an OG agritourism dude. Yeah. It's funny because, you know, my dad and I, so I'm... 02:29 I'm 28, I'm the younger person on the farm that's sort of starting to take over things a little bit more. My dad's been doing this for a long time. And I remember he and I would go on trips to Atlanta because we're in South Georgia. And a few years ago, man, it was longer than that, 10 years ago or so maybe, we were driving down Highway 27. And we saw this sign that says, you know, Georgia's first agritourism farm on the left. 02:57 We're thinking, well, what's agritourism? That sounds like what we're doing. And we started to learn more about it and we said, well, they're not the first. And we don't, we don't claim that we're the first, but, but it is growing in the, in, it is a buzzword and I think it's the second largest or second fastest growing business in Georgia and has been for some, for some time. 03:22 Yes, and I am a huge proponent for agritourism because so many people have never set foot on a farm. And I think that they thought that they couldn't like, call and ask if they come visit. So I love that people are opening up their properties to people to come see what they do. Yeah, that's, that's what my grandfather would have wanted when he bought the property. He, he worked his whole life, was in the military and 03:52 sort of came across the US, started in Oklahoma, went to Texas, went to Atlanta, then came here and always wanted to buy some property with the end goal of being able to share it with people. And what's really cool about this property is he came down here and searched and searched and searched for some property and everything down here is flat, you know, peanut fields, corn fields. 04:19 And he just wasn't interested in flat land. He had seen enough of that in Oklahoma and wanted to see more trees. And they found this property. We're on the highest elevation in Decatur County is where we're at. And we are 321 feet above sea level, which is not a crazy amount, but for here it is. And we're on what's called Curry Hill. So it's this ridge that runs through. 04:49 um this area and it just it has you know springs on the farm creeks on the farm valleys um really beautiful property and i think when he and my dad found this place they kind of looked at each other like hey you know don't say anything let's let's go ahead and get this deal done um so and so 40 i think we got it they got it in 1982 and the next year uh my grandfather had 05:18 you know, so many hundred Christmas trees and he and my dad were going to do that. And unfortunately my grandfather passed away before they, before they arrived. And so my dad just kind of had this, uh, you know, I guess he had a decision to make and when the Christmas trees showed up, um, he planted them and then the rest is kind of history.

Today I'm talking with my daughter, Cassandra, about how being raised by a mom with homesteading skills has impacted her life. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with my first born child and my only daughter, Cassandra. How are you? Hi, I'm good. How are you? I'm good. I don't know what the weather's like in Florida right now, but it's gray and misty and cold here today in Minnesota. What's it like in Florida? 00:29 It's in the 80s and sunny and not a rain cloud in sight. Must be nice, although honestly, I'm real happy to see fall rolling in. So Sandra was nice enough to come and visit with me because she is a self-professed non-homesteader, at least that's how she told me or explained herself to me. But I think that there's some homesteading genes in there somewhere because 00:57 You are taking care of your mother-in-law's citrus plants and avocado trees, right? Yeah, mango trees, avocado trees. We have a lychee tree and banana trees. I think that's it. I thought you had lemons or oranges or something. We have a baby lemon and a baby lime tree. They are making fruit, but they're very small. They're not making grocery store-sized fruit yet. 01:27 So they look like toys? Yeah, it's really funny. Uh-huh. And how are all the plants doing? Well, so we just had two hurricanes. So the plants are not doing great right now, really anywhere near us. But right before the hurricane, the starfruit, that's what we have. We have a starfruit tree that just drops probably hundreds of fruit in October. So right before the hurricanes, that was producing like crazy. 01:56 But now we just have a lot of trees that are twigs. Oh, no. Okay. So, I don't know what you know about all the fruits that are growing on that property, but did they all, are they all in season at the same time? Or is it just different? No, definitely not. I can't remember when the mangoes go, but it's like the mangoes have their season. 02:24 And they're the kind of mangoes that like don't ripen until you take them off the tree. So they will stay, they'll stay good for like months as they're growing. And the lychee is a different season. And like I said, the starfruit is a different season as well. So you can't have a citrus lychee, starfruit salad all at once out of the garden as it was? Not from my yard, no, yeah. Okay. 02:50 So tell me about getting prepared for the hurricanes that came through. Yeah, it was kind of crazy. We had another hurricane, not the most recent two, but another one earlier in the year. And I'm not from here, my husband is. And he was saying like, oh, the hurricanes are not a big deal. They haven't really hit St. Pete in like 10 years. 03:15 So the first one was fine, we didn't do any prep. And then the second and third one, like people were predicting it to be so, so bad, we were like, okay, well, maybe let's go get some water. But, um, we talked about water. We have these big glass jugs that we always fill. My mother-in-law always fills before, um, hurricanes. We went. 03:38 The joke in their family is that the only hurricane supplies you need is boxed wine and bananas. So we got boxed wine and bananas in addition to like ramen and batteries and candles. Okay. And you told me that Helene wasn't bad, but Milton was worse, right? No, Helene was bad. Helene is the one that brought the floodwater surges. Yeah. 04:08 And that is what did most of the physical damage. Milton wasn't as like floodwater heavy, but the winds were crazy. So it took out like it took out trees, power, we were without power for like a week, I think here. No, I meant, I meant out of the two for you where you are. I thought Helene wasn't as bad as Milton. Because I live like on the only hill in St. Petersburg. So Helene didn't affect us as much. We're just we are not susceptible to flooding where we are. 04:38 Okay, cool. So I don't even know what to ask you. You were saying about... Let me ask you. So what's your wake up in the morning homestead life routine? Okay. And then we can compare and contrast. Oh, well, my wake up in the morning is at like 430 in the morning because I can't stay asleep past four. My get up is 430, five o'clock in the morning. And it's go directly to... 05:08 potty and then to the coffee maker and then to my phone to see if any new people have said yes to talking to me on the podcast. Sure. That's my get up routine. Yeah. What do you do throughout the day for home setting stuff? Meal planning? Do you do? Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. We do a weekly meal plan. We usually do it on Sunday. 05:34 or Saturday and then shopping happens because sometimes you

Today I'm talking with Val at Off The Beaten Path Homestead. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Val at Off the Beaten Path Homestead. Good morning, Val. How are you? Good morning. I'm great. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. As I was telling Val before we hit record, I discovered Val on... 00:29 on Facebook through her videos and I fell in love with her immediately because she has such a great personality. Thank you so much for that. Yes, absolutely. So tell me about yourself and what you do. Well, my name is Valerie Bias and I live in Virginia. I've been here most of my life. I 00:55 I grew up in a small town in Virginia, in Buckingham County, and six sisters, so my mom and dad had seven girls. And I watched them garden and take care of livestock. And of course, feeding seven children was quite a feat. And so they had to do whatever they had to do to stretch what we had. 01:24 And so they garden and they preserved food and we had livestock, hogs and chickens and goats. And, uh, that's what we did to survive. And, um, so when COVID hit, you know, my, me and my husband were talking and, and we started thinking, you know, this is different and, and, and we've got to do something, um, because. 01:52 Our world had changed and so we moved from our home in North Chesterfield, Virginia, and we purchased a piece of property in a rural area. We're only about 20-25 minutes from amenities. We can still, you know, get to the grocery store. And so we moved out here and we started doing what I learned to do as a child, which was 02:21 We only have chickens right now. We've only been out here since 2021. And so we just love it out here and we love what we do. We garden and raise our own food. And we also have a farm store that we put our excess products in. We are just a shed and. 02:48 We stock that with food that we preserve for long-term use. And so that's what we're doing out here and we're trying to get our community involved and so that we can learn from each other. That's been a bit difficult because we don't know anyone out here trying to find people who do what we do and who wanna learn from us and so that we can learn from them. 03:15 And so that's what we're doing out here. We just. I love it. I'm so excited that you decided to do that. We did the same thing. We moved from in town to out in the country in 2020. So, Ben, where you are. So your videos on your Facebook page are so fun. And the way that you say hello to your viewers and then. 03:42 Identify who you are is adorable. Could you could you do it for me? Well, I mean it's part of my personality and who I am and when I Meet people or I'm introduced to people. It's hi, sweetie. How are you? And so I start my videos off with hey sweet people. It's mama Val and so That's who I am My my daughter she's 41 04:12 and all of her friends, they refer to me as Mama Val. And I love it and that's who I am now. And most people who know me, they're younger, they call me Mama Val, so. Yes, and your accent is a little bit more pronounced on the videos too. And that was the thing that really caught me because I am a big, I don't know, I'm obsessed with people's. 04:38 accents. I think that it's so fun when people talk in a way that's different than I do. Oh, wow. I've never noticed that. Yeah. And I don't know if it's a southern accent or what it is. And it probably has to do with my stepfather was in the Navy and we moved around so much. He was in the Navy for 36 years. And we moved all over and 05:07 I'm sure it has something to do with moving around. Yeah. Yes, I would say that your accent is a generic Southern drawl in the best way possible. And basically to me, you sound like a warm hug and a glass of sweet tea. Oh, you are so sweet. That's how it sounds. Yes. It makes my heart sing, so hearing that. Yeah. 05:34 I just, I don't know, I just, I saw your video and I just sat there and I was like, I love this lady. She's amazing. Thank you, Mary. Thank you. Um, yeah. You're welcome. And I'm not typically this effusive, but when people grab me, they grab me hard, like grab me in full and you're one of them. I don't know why. So any, anyway, um, you're okay. 06:01 your videos that I've seen one was making two pennies into a dollar and one was something else and I can't remember but the two pennies into a dollar one really struck me because I have raised four kids. My youngest is 22 and he still lives with us. Back when they were young, we were a family on one income. I was a stay at home mom and I was trying to cook for six people total. 06:31 And so I cooked for an army b

Today I'm talking with Kirbe Schnoor at FarmHer. You can also follow on Facebook. "FarmHer is all about the women who love the land, care for their community, and feed the people." 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Kirby Schnoor, which is really hard to pronounce, at FarmHer. Good morning, Kirby. How are you? Good morning. I'm great. Thank you for having me on. Oh, thank you for coming because I have lots of questions and you're going to be an amazing person to get them answered. 00:29 Uh, so first question is, are you based in Nebraska or is FarmHer based in Nebraska? Well I'm based in Fort Worth, Texas. And FarmHer is kind of based all over, I would say most of our crew, our two videographers, editors, producer, they're all in Nashville at our offices there and studio there. And then we have offices in a studio here in Fort Worth and then we have office space in Omaha as well. Okay. 00:58 My stepson lives in Nebraska. So when I saw Nebraska on the website or the Facebook page for FarmHer, I was like, oh, Nebraska, here we go again. Okay. So tell me about yourself and what you do regarding FarmHer and tell me about FarmHer. Awesome. Well, thank you again for having me on to talk about this. I grew up in a farming family in the Central Valley of California, a tiny town called Chochilla. 01:27 It's based in between Fresno and Modesto. And then if they don't know those places, sometimes they'll say Bakersfield. Bakersfield is about three hours south of us. But I say in between LA and San Francisco, right? But it's all the heart of agriculture in the center of California. And I grew up, my mom's side of the family, they farmed in ranch and my dad's side of the family, they farmed. 01:56 Yeah, so it's just been a multi-generational thing that's carried on in our families. We used to farm a lot more diverse crops. And over the years, given land and regulations, prices, you name it, in California, kind of had to go into one main thing and make it a bigger production. And so my family mainly now farms almonds, and we do hay as well. But we used to back in the day do corn and alfalfa and tomatoes. 02:24 as well as almonds and hay and cotton. And so it's just interesting that I was able to grow up exposed to all of that and the diversity. And like I said, it's changed over the years, but still, yeah, everyone in my family, for the most part, is involved in the farming aspect. And I went to college at Fresno State in California, and I majored in mass communications and journalism. 02:52 emphasis in broadcast journalism and I said, oh my gosh, I'm never going to go into TV. I loved writing and I just didn't know what I really wanted to do. I didn't want to do a local network or local news station and hard news and things like that. But I found a place for me here in Fort Worth, Texas working at Superior Livestock Auction and they were the nation's leader in livestock marketing cattle via… 03:20 satellite and television. It was started by two gentlemen who grew up on our group ranching and they partnered with Patrick Gotch. They actually helped Patrick Gotch kind of get his start, Jim O'Dell did back in the day because Patrick, who is the founder and CEO and sadly had passed away earlier this year, he founded RFD TV and then which led into the Cowboy Channel and Cowgirl Channel as well. 03:47 He grew up in a farming family in Nebraska. And so that's where the roots of Nebraska and Omaha come from. Okay. But yeah, so I got my start with Superior Livestock and they didn't have a place for me. I started answering the telephone and working on the bid line and there it spiraled into some of their television shows that they did. And that still air to this day on RFD TV. And so I worked closely with RFD TV, never directly until several years ago. 04:16 I made the transition when they decided to open up the branch in Fort Worth called the Cowboy Channel. I helped get that started and I've been with RFD and the Cowboy Channel ever since. I basically have been with RFD since the start of my career, 2012, 2013. The two connected. I grew up showing livestock with my sisters. We had a cattle company, still do called Schnorr Sisters. We showed cattle throughout the United States. 04:45 And it was really fun and coming from the farming background with my family, running cattle, raising cattle, I was exposed to quite a bit. And when we started the Cowboy Channel, the original creator of FarmHer, she wanted to branch off into rancher as well. And so she said, she was so great. And she's like, her name's Margie. And she said, Kirby, wo

Today I'm talking with Paul at Blue Star Farm. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Paul at Blue Star Farm. Good morning, Paul. How are you? I am doing very well. Thank you. Good. So tell me about yourself and how this all got started because you have a lot of things that you guys do at the farm. 00:30 Well, I purchased this property back in 2016. I had been farming full-time and, oh gosh, I guess I started in 1993, actually. I was in a dairy business for a number of years and moved on to a couple other career paths for a while. And then I purchased this property and decided it'd be fun to play around with an apple orchard. I also grow some other vegetables, pumpkins, popcorn. 01:00 gourds and do a little bit of hay as well. So this is a part-time venture. I have a full-time day job as well at the moment. But most recently, I opened up a storefront where currently I make sweet cider and I'm in the process of getting licensed to make hard cider. Hard cider is the best. It doesn't give me a headache. Most beer gives me a headache, but hard cider does not. Okay. 01:29 So why? Why did you get into this? Well, it started off as kind of a little bit of a hobby, the hard center in particular. And there seems to be a market for it and I thought it would be a nice project to work on. I am not too far away, well a few years probably, from not having to have to have that day job. 01:59 can't sit still very long so I figured I'd create some kind of business keep me occupied and something that would be fun and make them hard cider and having people enjoy it is it's a good time for me for sure. Absolutely. So you're in Sharon Springs New York are you I don't want to offend you but I'm gonna ask are you near the Beekman boys guys? 02:26 I am not too far away. The farm that they purchased is about two miles south of the village of Sharon Springs here. Their flagship store is located in the downtown portion of our little village here and that is less than a mile from where I'm setting right now. And actually the building that I recently acquired where I'm starting my cider operation, Beekman 1802, used that as a warehouse for their product for a number of years. 02:56 So, thank you very much. 03:00 Very nice. The reason I said I don't want to offend you is because I've heard two sides of a coin about them. That they came in and made Sharon Springs not a small town anymore and made people mad. And the other side of the coin is that they came in and got Sharon Springs on the map. So I don't know which side of the coin you're on. 03:22 Well, honestly, Sharon Springs had been on a map for a number of years as a tourist destination for the mineral baths. It was in direct competition with Saratoga Springs, New York. And unfortunately, Saratoga had a little bit more going for it. They kind of won that battle, I guess you could say. But eventually, prior to Beekman 1802 coming to life here in the village, 03:50 There had been a resurgence, our former mayor, he and his husband had opened up several businesses in this area and they had, and actually I think their influence is why some others had relocated here, such as the folks that took over the Beekman farm, so it's been a long, slow process. 04:15 Okay. 04:18 Yes, and we haven't been home to Maine in a while. My parents live in Maine and I'm in Minnesota. So when we drive back, I don't fly. So we always do a road trip. So when we go through New York, I always see the sign for Sharon Springs on the highway that we're on. And I'm like, we should go to Sharon Springs someday. And my husband's like, the only reason you wanna go to Sharon Springs is to go to the Beekman store. And I'm like, well, yeah. 04:48 And we haven't done it yet, but someday maybe we'll do it 04:54 Okay, I do know they've got limited hours, so I think they're not open. They used to be open seven days a week there. I believe they're only open Friday through Sunday. I can't say for a fact, but you'd have to check their website. 05:10 Yes, and I don't have any plans to do a road trip in the next couple of years. So we're good for now. But it's just, it's funny because when I saw Sharon Springs, I was like, I wonder if that's the Sharon Springs. And so it is. Okay, so, so you're doing this as your retirement plan, basically, from the sounds of it. So you're not going to retire, you're going to keep working. 05:36 That is correct. 05:40 Yeah, I think that's the case for a lot of us who are over 50 at this point. I don't think any of us who are over 50 are like, you know, retirement sounds great. I don't think retiremen

Today I'm talking with Andrew at White Pine Berry Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Andrew at White Pine Berry Farm. Good morning, Andrew. How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. So tell me about what part you play in White Pine Berry Farm and... 00:28 the story of White Pine Berry Farm. Great. I'll kind of start at the beginning. My dad was a dairy farmer for his whole life. Opportunity presented itself that some other family, my uncle, my cousins would continue the dairy farmer. And my dad went from dairy to berry and started a you pick berry and egg tourism farm from just a neighbor's, you know, kind of hobby bee farm. And. 00:56 I just was helping out a little bit the first couple of years, helping out the first couple of years just on the weekends and getting it going. And he ran it for seven years. And then in 2019, I came back as the manager and dad took a different full-time job, but it was still helping me a lot on the weekends. And I ran it for the last five years. And then this year we've been running it together as he retired from the... 01:27 the job that he took as a farm director at a local university. That is so fun. Was it his dream that you guys would end up working together? Not necessarily. It seemed like it worked out that way. It worked out that way. It was something that we talked about when he was looking at what we want to do if he ever wanted a farm. 01:54 This intrigued me a lot compared to just dairy farming. If you always look at different farms, I think this is both really good fit for our personalities. We enjoy working with people. It's having guests and public out to the farm. Yeah. 02:10 Okay. Is your dad Greg? Is that his name? Yes, Greg Farmer Greg. Okay. Yeah. Farmer Greg. I was looking at your Facebook page today because I have been crazy busy and hadn't actually looked at it since I booked the interview with you. And I was like, it looks like such a fun place to be. And your Facebook page is brilliant. I don't know who handles, who handles that, but whoever does it is doing a great job. 02:38 Well, thank you. It's something we've always enjoyed. My wife and I have done it for many years. The last couple of years we have joined with. So thanks for the comment on our Facebook page. My wife and I had been running the Facebook together for many years. And then we also have hired an intern the last four or five years to give us a hand with it, especially on the video editing side. But it takes a whole bunch of us to come up with some fun, creative ideas and put them together. Yeah. 03:08 looks super fun and the the way the videos and photos are taken it's very colorful and inviting and that's what you want for people to want to come see you. Yep and we like to think that our Facebook reflects our farm when you come out here you're out here to have experience it's not just about us growing you know fruit and vegetables and pumpkins it's about having a good time on the farm. 03:35 making memories with your family and friends. And yeah, I just want to be a place that is really welcoming and just something that people look forward to. And we reflect that on our Facebook and our website as well. Yes, I was just going to say your website is crazy full. Yeah, it's really hard to describe what we do just in one page because we, like you were saying, it's all summer and fall long. 04:02 We start out with strawberries usually mid-June. Follow that up with strawberries at the beginning of July. Then raspberries, blueberries, and currants come into play. Throughout those times we also have strawberry shortcake days where we have shortcake we sell out of our store and food and wagon rides. On Saturdays we typically do those. 04:26 In July, we have the ElocoCoop Farm Tour. We're a part of where other farms and us, we are kind of used to open our doors. We open our doors, have people from all over Western Wisconsin and the Twin Cities area come out and check out what we got going on. Moving into August, we saw some blueberries that we do our sunflowers and zinnias. In the fall, we do a corn maze pumpkin patch. 04:49 Sometimes we sell some flowers depending when the frost comes, fall raspberry pickin', we even have golden fall raspberries, guided wagon rides on the weekends. We had at least six to seven hundred kids come for field trips this year and always a blast. On top of that we planted Christmas trees which are still a ways out and we host a handful of weddings here as well in our wedding barn. 05:18 And those photos are

Today I'm talking with Amy at Grounded In Maine. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Amy Fagan from Grounded in Maine. How are you, Amy? Again. I'm good. Good. Amy and I talked months ago. I think it was June. 00:29 I think. I don't remember. And we recorded an episode and it was released and it was great. But Amy is no longer grounded in Maine. She has uprooted herself to Virginia. So I wanted to have her back and talk about how that's all going. So tell me about what's changed. What hasn't changed? Yes. 00:50 No, I will always be grounded in Maine. I spent my first 49 years in Maine, so I will always be grounded in Maine, but I no longer live there. I got divorced in July. I moved to Virginia in August because Maine is way too expensive for a single income. And so I just relocated. And you moved to some land as well as a house on it. Is that right? It's not a lot of land. I'm on a little more than an acre, 01:20 It's all me. It's plenty. You can do a lot with an acre honey. Yeah well I mean it's weird because the backyard is this super steep downslope. That's where the chickens are and I need to fix that up but so everything is gonna be in the front yard. All the gardening is gonna be on the front yard and people are gonna hate me here because they are very they love their lawns. 01:49 are very meticulous about their lawns and I am not going to be mowing my lawn. I am growing a food forest. Maybe they'll be inspired. Maybe they will. I hope so. He'll be a trendsetter. I am going to be a trendsetter and I'm getting more chicken. So I will be selling my eggs to my neighbors and, um, and if I have a really great, if I have really great crops, I will be feeding them too. So meh. 02:17 Nice. Take that about my scruffy lawn. Well, yeah. And you can't eat grass. I say this all the time. You cannot eat grass. Absolutely. Doesn't taste good. It makes it smells good. Doesn't taste good. Yeah. Yeah. It makes me insane when people are like, but I want a nice green lawn. And I'm like, you can have a nice green lawn. You could be growing chamomile and it would smell amazing when you step on it. 02:46 But no, it's grass. Or mint or creeping thyme or anything. But yeah. Even Creeping Charlie smells good and it's a low ground cover and people hate the Creeping Charlie, but it's really pretty and it smells good. I don't know Creeping Charlie. I'll have to look that up. But yeah, I mean, I've had three people in the first month offered to mow my lawn. I mean, not for free, but. Well. 03:16 One of them did for free. But I said, you know, I don't plan to do this ongoing. So I'm sure if you want to know it now, but it's not gonna last. But the man that lives across the street is super, super sweet. He's a retired policeman, which was, I knew that before I moved here and I was psyched about that. I'm like, so he's gonna look out for me. And he is, but he's also 75. He just lost his wife this year. 03:44 He was in the hospital earlier. He can't really get around well, but he can get on his mower. Well, that works. My first time meeting him, he had come over and was mowing my lawn. I was like, oh my gosh, what? Wait, no, I was gonna have someone else mow my lawn. And he was like, I just didn't know how to say hi. Like, you know, I saw that. He can't just like walk up the stairs because he's older. 04:09 But he's, you know, he's been in this house across the street for 75 years, his whole life. And his daughter lives on one side of him and his son lives behind with his donkeys and other animals. And his grandson lives next door, which is right across the street from me. But so it's like, it's, it's kind of cool. It's family, it's family area. He owns some land up at the end of the road too. But it's, I'm an agricultural because I brought my chickens. Good. 04:39 Hmm. Yeah. So it's good. It's good. I have I mean, I've met a lot of neighbors and I will say my my. 04:50 I really like them. I really like my neighbors. People drive like they want to take me out and I'm not sure if they really do or if that's in my head. Nobody walks here except for me and we risk our lives doing it. Yeah, but it's so good for you. So keep doing it. As long as nobody runs you over, it's great for your health, right? Yes. Yeah, it's a nice uphill too. It's 05:19 It's so funny to me how many co-incidents you and I share because our neighbor who lives northwest of us, about a quarter mile away, he is a county sheriff. So you have former law enforcement and I have current law enforcement. And actually the county sheriff st

Today I'm talking with Teena at Serenity Farm and Stables about equine therapy and the grounding power of nature. You can follow on Facebook, as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Teena, and of course I just shut the Facebook page, so I can't read your business name. Tell me your business name again. All right, well my company is Serenity Farm and Stables. We're at a water town, Minnesota. 00:29 We are a facility that specializes in programs that support mental health, healing, and so predominantly working not riding horses, but groundwork, a lot of group therapeutic experiences, individual couples and families. So how did this come about? Because I know that you are educated in all of this. So how did you get to where you are? 00:56 That's a great question. I would say in terms of the equine piece, I have children that were more or less born with a passion for horses. And so that's what got us into the equine world. As my children have now moved on into college, we still had these three amazing mayors and I desired to continue to work with them in a capacity. And that included as an equine therapist. My background was oncology nursing. 01:25 with a component of marriage and family counseling around oncology and family and cancer survivorship, which then led to holistic healing and homeopathics and other things. Ultimately, all of them tied together, though, so beautifully with equine therapy, which is really amazing for trauma release. And so much of our physical experience of suffering comes from suppressed emotions. So. 01:53 They are amazing facilitators for that. Yes, and what you just said about all of our misery coming from suppressed emotion. Folks, let it out. That's the thing I want to say about this, because you cannot suppress everything and manage to thrive. No, they cannot cohabitate, for sure. And a lot of times, which is why the horses are also the most amazing facilitators, because a lot of times, the suppressed emotion we have 02:23 might not even be on the conscious level. And they have the ability to meet us at both conscious and unconscious levels, which is why they do such beautiful and amazing healing work with clients, perhaps on the spectrum, who might not have the words to express their experience. The horses don't communicate on that language level. They communicate on an energetic level. And so they have the ability to understand. 02:51 and transmutate energetic experiences and emotional experiences in ways as humans will never comprehend. Yes, and so this is gonna get real deep if you keep talking that the way that you're talking because most people do not understand how this works. So can you, I don't know, in layman's terms, tell me how the horses help? Okay, so I'll try to... 03:20 You're right, this is deep work and it's what I'm submerged in, so it's kind of how I live day to day. But so how the horses work in a herd scenario is they rely on one another because they're prey animals. And so they can communicate in very, very subtle ways through energy. Just the slight movement of an ear or flip of their tail or the angle of their body could indicate there's a predator to be unaware that they should be in awareness of. 03:50 And so when you take that very strong sensitivity to their environment and you bring it into, for instance, an arena with clients, often when we come in with clients, the clients might have a lot of anxiety or a depressive state or high stress kind of personality. And as such, their heart rate might be very elevated, the respiratory rate might be elevated. And so the gift of the herd is as we enter into their herd, 04:20 meaning like our relationship as a human to them as a horse, often it will help bring down our heart rate, it will slow down our respiratory rate. So that's what we call co-regulation when there's a sort of a movement towards something that is more stable. And so we can apply that to the physical sensations of stress, which I just shared, like the respiratory heart rate. 04:48 But then also our emotional state can come down from a place of trauma and stress to a one of more of a harmonized state. Does that feel more simple? Yes. And I would have been happy to keep listening to the big words because I love words and ones I don't know. I would have been like, what does that one mean? But it makes it really hard for people who are listening because they'll be like, I'm lost and I don't have time to look up the word, you know? 05:18 All that is important is that we understand that we harbor and hold so much emotion in our bodies that sh