A Tiny Homestead

Today I'm talking with Sven and Jania at Thunder Ridge Ranch. 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 chatting with Sven and Jania at Thunder Ridge Farm Ranch. Good morning, you guys. Good morning. How are you? We are well and yourself? I'm good. You're in Kentucky? Eastern Kentucky. Yes, ma'am. Awesome. 00:28 I have never been and I've talked to a lot of people there and I feel like I should make a trip someday because it sounds really pretty. The site certainly has a lot to offer. Yeah. So, tell me about yourselves and what you guys do. Well, we are a military family. I spent three years in the military. A year of that I spent away from my family overseas in Afghanistan. Got back and things just didn't quite seem right. 00:57 which kind of led me down a series of rabbit holes and kind of pushed us as a family towards a bit in a sense self-sufficiency and whatnot and that that path itself has kind of led us to more of a community sufficiency mindset and so we really wanted to 01:20 be able to provide our own food and make sure that everything that we're eating was whole and good for us and none of the toxins that you find in a lot of foods that you find on the market shelves these days. 01:35 Awesome. So number one, thank you for your service. I'm sorry that you got injured in Afghanistan. That sucks. And without getting both of us in trouble, what kinds of things did you notice when you got back? It just, it just didn't feel, it almost felt like a prank. It didn't really feel like the States. It felt like we had landed somewhere else and it was some sort of a test. Just, I guess because I had spent the year away. 02:05 coming back, the atmosphere was noticeably different. It felt darker, it didn't feel like the free, happy place that it used to be. And then I started realizing that we've been under a lot of propaganda and indoctrination, just to put it as loosely as I can, without like saying that's in trouble. Yes, thank you. 02:31 I really want to know more but I don't want to get into it on the podcast because I have this awful feeling that it would not go well for either of us. Okay. So yeah, obviously growing things yourself and raising animals yourself, you have control. You know what you're putting on your produce or in your dirt or feeding your animals. So yay, that's a good thing. So what do you raise? 03:02 We started off in 2021 with 10 chickens. And as you know, chicken math. So we now have over 50 or 60 birds now we've kind of lost count. 2022 we added in a honeybee hive. We're now up to three. And we also added heritage breed turkeys. And then 03:30 Let's see, that would have to 2022, 2023. 2023, we focused more on clearing up the land and preparing it for a lot for bigger livestock. And then 2024 this year, we added ducks, quail, hay sheep and pasture pigs. Very nice. We had friends over yesterday and 03:59 They were talking about how they're going to be getting some poultry birds Next spring and they're talking about it and out of the blue They're like do you guys want to go in with us on it and we can keep them at our house and you guys can Come over in Butcher and once time and we all win and I was like yes, that would be amazing Cuz I don't I don't want to deal with poultry not poultry birds. I'm sorry meat birds. I said it wrong 04:25 But I don't want to deal with meat birds at our place. We don't have a lot of room, but they have more room than we do. So if you can do it all yourself on your property, that's great. But the other thing that works is collaboration with like-minded people. Absolutely. And that's where that community sufficiency kind of kicks in is working as a community to work towards common goals and everybody wins as a result. Yeah. 04:51 We gave them a whole bunch of stuff last summer from our garden for their goats because goats love leftover stuff from the garden. 05:03 Absolutely. So that's one thing that we do is take our fresh scraps and feed them to the hogs. And sometimes the sheep will get some as you know, let's say for the sheep. And we like to try and garden extra produce that isn't necessarily for us to eat, but is good for the chickens or for the sheep or the pigs. We like researching what's good for them, what are the benefits of everything and 05:32 On that note, we've also studied just the plants and whatnot that are on our property and we're still learning this kind of lifestyle. We were always learning. Once you stop learning, you stop growing. Yes. So we've tried to really learn about what is around us. How many different ways can we use it? What's the benefit of

Today I'm talking with Orran at Aunt Katie's Community Garden. 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 Orran at Aunt Katie's Community Garden. Good morning, Orran. How are you? Good morning. Glad to be here. Good. Tell me all about Aunt Katie's Community Garden. 00:26 Okay. Um, so and Katie's community garden was started about 15 years ago by my director, um, Mr. Michael Jackson. Um, he was a lobbyist for, um, non-smoking designated areas, um, back when that was a big column issue. And so after being kicked down from passing these bills, he, he, he, he transitioned into. 00:55 healthy living. And so that started a community garden, which was named after a childhood lady of the neighborhood, Aunt Katie. So he created the garden, started with a few raised beds. And over time, the community kicked in. He got donations, funding to build out the garden, starting with a small greenhouse. 01:26 100 beds and five high tunnel houses. So that's kind of a brief history of the community garden. Okay. I'm really excited that you were willing to chat with me this morning because I'm really trying to find all the different places that help communities have good food for them to have access to and I've decided on making it my mission to find somebody like you. 01:56 in every state before the end of 2025 to talk to. That's awesome. Yep. Because people need to know where to find food. It's the inflation prices have been so bad that people are starving. People who shouldn't be starving are starving. Yes. Um, that's, so that's one of the main, um, focuses of the garden is to grow nutrient dense vegetables. Um, 02:25 I'm not sure if you're aware of it, but the things you get off the shelf are pretty subpar when it comes to nutritional value. So what we grow using our compost, our special compost mix, it allows us to have a lettuce or a leafy green that tastes the way it's supposed to taste and also gives you that nutritional value that we all need in order to, you know, health of your living. So 02:54 That's our main focus is growing top, you know, top-notch vegetables. And the public, they really, they really grasp onto the concept, especially during COVID. So, you know, we got people, we got people who you never think eating bok choy. Now bok choy is a popular plant that we grow. And so, you know, during the off season, everybody's, when's the bok choy coming? So it makes me excited that we can. 03:22 you know, change people's taste palates and have them eat more healthier. Absolutely. So you're in Alabama. Where are you in Alabama? Um, we're in, we're in Dothan, Alabama. It's, um, South, Southeast, um, the very bottom of the, of the state. What's the nearest big city to you? Uh, Montgomery, we're about, uh, two and a half, two and a half, three hours from Montgomery. Um. 03:50 four hours from Birmingham and five hours from Huntsville. Okay, so do you know if any of the big cities in Alabama have anything like what you're doing? Absolutely, so me starting my work at the garden, it's a pretty cool story, I can tell you that, but I'll go into, so what I do now that I'm a director at a community garden, everywhere I go before I... 04:19 arrive, I look up community gardens and I either call or drop in and try to do a tour just to see what these different parts of the state have going on. And of course, I'm from Huntsville originally, so we do have two great community gardens, which one is Oakwood. It's a college. They have a great, great community garden and they also have a grocery store. 04:46 which is very state of the art. I love it. It has self checkout. It's very small, but it's really neat. You should check that one out. And also my alma mater, Alabama A&M, they're starting their community garden process. So it's exciting to see and exciting to, you know, come back around to what I started and then see it. You know, now I see community gardens everywhere. 05:15 Okay. So how did, okay. What does aunt Katie's community garden do? Is it that you guys grow food for the community or is the community coming in and growing food at the community garden? Okay. So what we do is kind of multilayered. Um, I think I have a diagram that I drew. So it's like a, it's like a three-legged stool and one is 05:42 Nutritional education and outreach to the community. That's from kids to adults. That's one part the second part is community gardening Which allows people to come in and grow and learn how to grow and we have bed subscriptions so people can subscribe to a bed for a year and they can either work their bed or We'll do it for them and

Today I'm talking with Rachel at WhoopsyDaisy Farm. You can also follow on Facebook. If you order a copy of Rachel's book, The Guide to Homestead Dairy Sheep, she'll sign it for you! 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 Rachel at WhoopsyDaisy Farm. Again, because last time we were supposed to talk about her book and about sheep's milk, and we talked about everything but I think. Good morning Rachel, how are you? I'm good, how are you? I'm good. You're in Kentucky, right? 00:29 Yes. Okay. All right. So let's try this again. I would love to hear all about the benefits of sheep's milk. Awesome. Well, you know, a couple of years ago, even just talking about milk as a health food was really weird, you know, because there's been such a push in our culture against the benefits of dairy, you know, nut milks and other protein milks have really been pushed forward. 00:59 If we return to a traditional source of our protein, a lot of us are seeing these autoimmune and chronic health issues are just kind of melting away. So there's groups like the Weston Price Foundation who've really pushed the benefit of raw milk especially. And with sheep's milk, pretty much everything that is beneficial about the cow and goat milk is in sheep's milk, but you multiply it by two or three. 01:26 So it's as beneficial as all the other raw milks, just more so. Okay. So I have questions. Number one, how much milk can you get from one sheep in a day? Well, it depends. There's, there's a couple of different factors that play with the amount, you know, and it's the same thing with cows and goats too. So you, the factors are breed and feed predominantly. 01:55 you know, there's some breeds of sheep that can give up to a gallon a day, especially the East Frisian sheep, which is like the whole steam of the sheep dairy world. But if you want to milk a non-dairy breed of sheep for, and there's a couple of reasons why you would want to do that. Sometimes you get as little as a cup of day, but usually more like a pint or a quarter a day. Okay. And I'm, I'm guessing that she, she being, uh-huh. 02:24 milking a sheep is not a whole lot different than milking a goat. Correct. Sheep teats are more on the side of the udder. So I haven't actually milked a goat. I have milked a cow. We, we own a Jersey cow. And it's very different milking a sheep than it is a cow because cow teats are on the bottom of the udder. You're not moving the udder. You're just squeezing the teats and just collecting milk that's automatically pooling there. With a sheep, you actually kind of have to 02:51 guide the teats and the udder toward the teats are facing whatever you're collecting the milk and if you're hand milking. Now they are starting to make attachments on mechanical milkers that will fit sheep. But if you can't find one specifically for sheep, you can use attachments for goats as well. And you know, sometimes there's a little bit of a difference in the udders there, but it's pretty compatible between goat and sheep. Okay. Now the next question I have, I don't even know how to ask it correctly, so bear with me. 03:21 Cows give a metric butt ton of milk when you milk them and clearly sheep don't. So how does this become financially viable? Does it? Yeah, so gallon for gallon you're going to get more cheese out of sheep's milk than you are cow or goat. And there's a lot less waste. A lot of cheese makers. 03:47 Traditionally, they raise pigs and the pigs would eat the whey and get fat off of it. Some homesteaders are starting to experiment with fermenting grains with the whey for like their chickens or pigs and that kind of thing. But for the most part, modern cheese makers just dump the whey. Either they discard it down a drain or, you know, some of the more creative ones will spray it on their fields as like a fertilizer probiotic. But I mean, there's not a lot of uses in our culture today for whey. 04:14 And so having a milk where there's not a ton of that whey waste is, you know, appealing if you're going to do a cheese making enterprise. I mean, the other thing too, is that, you know, when my husband and I started off, we really didn't have a use for three to eight gallons of milk per day from our cow, which she doesn't give that much. But I mean, like if you have a dairy cow, like you're looking at gallons per day, not cups or quarts or whatever. So. 04:40 To have a smaller amount of milk to play with and learn what to do with was really appealing for me. The other thing is that, you know, some people see this as a con. I saw it as a pro that my sheep will milk fo

Today I'm talking with Kristin at Honey Friend Farm 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 Kristen at Honey Friend Farm LLC. Good morning, Kristen. How are you? Good morning. I'm good. How are you? I'm great. You're in Michigan, yes? I am. Is it beautiful there? Because it's gorgeous here in Minnesota this morning. It is. 00:30 Little warm for fall weather, but that's okay. It's gonna cool down soon, I know it is. It's gonna, a promise. Yes, absolutely. All right, so tell me about yourself and what you do. So I am a mom of three kids, and I work at the high school that they go to, but I also run a farm here at the house. We're trying to become more 00:58 independent I guess. We've got chickens and turkeys and a garden and I make a lot of our food, our bread. We try to buy from the farmers and not the big stores and that's I mean it's just it's a busy busy life. We just my husband works full-time and obviously so do I and then we do 01:26 all of the other things in the evening when we get home. Okay, cool. So it's always interesting to me because when I ask women to tell me about themselves and if they're a mom, almost invariably they say, I'm a mom of however many kids and then the rest of what they are. When I ask men, they tell me what they do, not that they're fathers of six or two or one. Right. 01:56 There's the difference. Yeah, it's really interesting how different men and women are. Yeah. You know? And I'm not saying it's a bad thing that the men don't immediately say I'm a dad of, but it's just different. Right. It is. We are built different. Yes, exactly. And that's what makes life really interesting every damn day. Absolutely. 02:25 Okay, so are your kids littles or are they teenagers or? I've got an 18-year-old, almost 16-year-old and a 13-year-old. And are they all in on the homesteading stuff you're doing? They resist occasionally when it's hot out, but for the most part, they're pretty good at helping. My youngest loves to help with the baking part. He loves to cook. And then my oldest, he typically does a lot of... 02:55 the strenuous work or the heavy lifting, I guess. And then my daughter, she helps with all like the household chores. She makes the house run when we are doing all of the other things. That's a hell of a team there, ma'am. I'm impressed. It is, yep. We, you know, it's rough sometimes, but for the majority of the time, we all figure it out. Awesome, I love that. 03:20 We didn't get our homestead till most of our kids had moved out, but I suspect that had we gotten our homestead when they were younger, they all would have been all in. Yes, they love it. Kind of wish we'd been able to do it sooner. Absolutely. So why is it called what it's called, the honey friend? The honey friend, okay. So that is because my husband and I were having an adult night and I usually call him honey as a joke. And then one night... 03:50 I just said honey friend and it kind of just stuck and we're like, I don't think there's any other honey friend farm. So that's where the name came from. That's adorable. I love it. Yeah. So it's fantastic. It has nothing to do with honey. It's just what we call each other. Oh, and that's fine. I think that's beautiful. So, okay. 04:16 Tell me what an average weekend day is like for you on the farm because I ask people this and they don't usually tell me. So I'm just curious if I'll get an answer on this one. So typically, so we run a roadside stand as well. So typically the weekends are full of picking the garden and loading the stand and baking bread and bagels and cookies and all of the things for the community to come in. 04:45 share a part of that. We do a lot of pay what you can events for the community so people can eat healthier and have a healthier option if they're not able to do it themselves or whatever the case may be. So we spend a lot of time in the garden and filling the stand and doing cutting the grass, feeding the animals. That's typically when we do like 05:13 clean out for the coupes and refill the food and, you know, just spend a lot of time outside bonfires at night. And we just hang out and just kind of work all day and then relax at night and have family time, dinner together. We like to barbecue a lot, like grill out. So that's typically what we do. 05:44 That sounds like a beautiful way to spend a weekend. The bonfire part is the best. That's my favorite part. Yes, absolutely. We have had maybe five since we moved in four years ago because it's been too busy up until this past, this past summer hasn't been as busy, but that's because i

Today I'm talking with Maggie at Bean's Bounty. Buy Maggie's cookbook, The Reluctant Cook. All proceeds go to two different dog charities! 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 Maggie at Bean's Bounty. Good morning, Maggie. How are you? I'm good. Good morning to you, Mary. How are things in Georgia this morning? Actually a lot cooler right now, but I hear the heat's coming back, so. 00:28 Is this hurricane that's approaching Texas gonna bother you guys at all in the next couple of days? It doesn't seem like it, but if anything, we might get a little rain from it, which I'll accept. Yes, definitely. So let's start this off with, I did not name my dog after the Maggie I am talking to. It just so happens they share the same name. And that's awesome because I love the name Maggie, always have and always will. 00:58 So tell me about yourself and what you do at Bean's Bounty. Well, I don't know what to say about myself. I'm not originally from Georgia, but I moved here in 2007, and I started gardening in 2008. And once I tasted what a fresh tomato tastes like, I think I was hooked. So my husband and I garden together. 01:27 for about four years maybe and I mean we rarely went to the grocery store. I still rarely go I've been doing the garden myself since then and What we don't get here will get from local farmers and then What I can't get from them then I'll go to the grocery store and that's just for incidentals like toilet paper paper towels things like that 01:58 but I love gardening, I love eating what we grow. And then of course, Beans Bounty is also where I bake. So I'll make homemade desserts for people, but they're not like all these fancy cakes and stuff you see there from very old recipes. We have over 300 cookbooks and they date back to the Civil War. So if you wanna know what an old fashion recipe tasted like, then that's me. 02:28 Wow. I made some kind of cookies years ago from an old, old, old cookbook. And I think there were only three or four ingredients and the main ingredient was egg. And it was like eating a crepe cookie. That's awesome. Really? Yeah. They weren't that great, but I suppose back in the very old days, anything that was a treat or a sweet. 02:55 was probably really special. Exactly. It really was. They couldn't afford much, you know. So whatever had any kind of sweetness in it, that's what was popular. Yeah. So you and I talked many years ago. I don't remember why. Why? I like a lot of it. You know, they're not really sweet. They're not, I don't know. They're just, I like a lot of it. Yeah. 03:25 You and I had talked many years ago, I don't remember why, we talked on the phone, and you said that you were in suburban, whatever your town is or your city is, and that you had a garden, and we talked about that for a little bit. So tell me how that's changed, how that's expanded. Well, we are in, we're in one of the suburbs north of Atlanta. So I have an acre and a half. 03:53 So the garden took up quite a bit of space. I mean, you don't normally find an acre and a half in Roswell, Georgia, but this is a very old home. It was built back in the 70s. So the only way it has changed is that as I have aged, I've had to cut back on the gardening. Before it was huge. And now I brought it up closer to the house and 04:22 take care of it from there. So I just have little sections all around my house that are growing different things. And it's easier for me because I'm getting up there. Yeah, we're all aging. As we get older, we're all aging, obviously, but we're all meeting new milestones in our lives every year. Yes, ma'am. And I understand, because ma'am, 20 years ago, 04:48 I would have been out in the garden with my husband every day of the spring, summer, and fall, and now it's his baby because I don't want to do it anymore. Yeah. Well, my husband is the same way. Well, he works a full-time job, so that's why he had to stop. So now I take care of it. Yep. The podcast is My Baby, the Garden is My Husband's Baby, and this is about the only time they meet is when I'm talking about him doing the gardening. 05:15 So what do you grow? Do you grow the usual suspects or is there stuff that's special that you grow? Whatever we eat, I try to grow. So I do potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, sweet and hot, squash, zucchini, well I guess that's a squash, pumpkins for the fall, lettuces, onions, I do onions and garlic. So whatever we use the most of. 05:44 And then we also eat seasonally. So whatever is growing in the garden is what we eat. So like we're done eating tomatoes until next year. And it's kind of s

Today I'm talking with Amy at Misfits Homegrown LLC. 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 Amy at Misfits, I'm sorry, hang on Amy. Misfits Homegrown LLC. It's already been a Monday and it's barely Monday, so. Yes, I agree. Our barn cat had kittens last night, so. 00:30 I got a photo from my husband this morning and I was like, yay, more kittens. Woo. Yay, just what you need, right? Yeah, there's six. We'll find homes for them. It will be fine. There you go. And they're very sweet. They're adorable. So it's been the Mondayest of Mondays in the best way possible. That's a good thing. So tell me about what you do, Amy. 00:59 Misfits Homegrown, we raise our own beef, pork and chicken and farm fresh eggs. We raise them from start to finish. Nice. So how did you get into it? Well, my partner and I, we've been in the, excuse me, the agricultural industry forever. He's managing a 2,500 cow dairy over... 01:26 And then I'm going to say Reedsville, Wisconsin. And then I was herdsman on a farm out in Valdez for years. That's how we've actually met. And, uh, we moved in together and we started out with three beef animals, just three steers we had. And as a word got out that we were raising beef, people started buying quarters and haves from us. And. 01:54 That was back in 2017. We established the farm in 2018. And with that, um, I had met some people who didn't have freezer space for a quarter or half steer. So I started doing individual cuts and I got a license through our county to sell individual cuts of meat. So now our clientele base has just grown. So when people need two pounds of ground beef and a roast, they can get two pounds of ground beef in a roast. 02:23 Awesome. Yeah. You guys are, how do you pronounce it? Manitowoc? Is that how it's pronounced? Yes. Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Yes. Yes. Okay. I interviewed a lady months ago from that area and I can't remember which business was hers, but she said that it's beautiful there. It is. It is. I actually left Wisconsin for about five years and came right back. So you get, you get a little bit of four seasons all in one day. 02:52 And sometimes you actually get months of each season, which is a blessing. So. 03:00 Uh-huh. Yeah, Minnesota's like that too. So yeah. Yep. We're neighbors. So, uh-huh. Hey, neighbor. So, so I saw on your Facebook page that you guys have a building now on your property. Yes. And you can, it's basically a store. Yes, we built. So basically what happened in the past, oh gosh, since 2018 and during the pandemic in 2020, people really realized 03:30 where their food came from and they wanted to know more. And that's where our clientele had tripled. So with that, I started doing the local farmers markets and I started, you know, advertising more. And we are now to the point where we built a small country store on our property and we're selling our meat and our farm fresh eggs. And then I have other local vendors in the neighboring area. 03:58 who does honey and maple syrup and produce. And we're pretty much trying to make this a central hub or a country farmers market. Well, congratulations on that. That's awesome. Thank you. Thank you. It's been a challenge. It's been a long year and a half since we started everything, but we're very blessed. We're actually opening the doors this Saturday, the 14th for a soft opening. And the 28th is our grand opening. 04:28 fantastic I love country stores my parents live in Maine and there is a there is a basically a country store down the road from them and we were back to visit we were back to visit in 2014 I think and we stopped by that store and it's stocked with the stuff that the people that own it grow and stocked with local producers yes things and 04:57 You walk in there and it's so cute. Yeah. The thing I don't like about grocery stores these days is they're very slick. They're very shiny. They're very colorful. They're very loud. Yes. There's always a radio station or whatever playing and I walk in and I'm like, I forgot what I came in here for because my brain is overloaded with, with what I'm seeing and hearing and smelling and country stores. You walk in and it doesn't do that to me. It's just like. 05:27 Oh, this is really calm and nice. Yeah. So I love country stores. We actually, so when Bryce bought this property in 2017, it was his great uncle's farm. So he actually, it's a family farm. And when he purchased it and when I moved in, we had a lot of repairs to do. The barns were falling down and it, you know, it was neglected for years. So we've put a lot of hea

Today I'm talking with Isabelle at FarmRaise. You can also follow on Facebook. Use code REF20MEL to save 20% off the life of your membership for FarmRaise Tracks – a expense tracking app that is simple and will get you ready to fill in your schedule F in April. 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 Isabelle at FarmRaise. Hello, Isabelle, how are you? Good, how are you, Mary? I'm good. You said you're in Missouri? Yes, I am. Okay, well I'm in Minnesota. I don't know if it's a pretty day there, but it's really pretty here. 00:29 Oh my gosh, the weather has been absolutely gorgeous these past few days. Yeah, I always start the podcast interviews with talking about the weather because our weather is always crazy. It's either strikingly gorgeous or it's terrible and it feels like there's no in between this year. So it really, it really is like that. And I know that a lot of people think that talking about the weather. 00:59 is kind of shallow or small talk, but in agriculture, I think it's a form of kind of like a love language or like showing that you care about somebody because the weather just really impacts our ability to do what we do. And so the weather is just a vital part of our lives. And so I think that 01:26 In other industries, it may just be small talk, but in agriculture, we love to talk about it. We love to talk about it. We love to predict it. We love to complain about it, but it's a real thing. It's a really integral part of agriculture. Yes, it really is. It is. But we could definitely use a shot of rain where I'm at, but we'll probably... 01:53 A lot of people will start harvest here in the next few weeks that are in the traditional line of agriculture, but I mean, I have zucchini coming out my ears. So if I get any more rain, I don't know what I'm going to do with it all. So yeah, we don't have anything coming. Well, we have tomatoes coming in finally. 02:18 but it's been a terrible growing season for us. And I don't want to talk about it at all because I've talked about ad nauseum on the podcast and in real life and I just give up. It's a wash to next year is gonna be better. Yeah, I've heard that from quite a few people. I was talking to my cousin on the phone the other day and she said that, you know, she had a horrible year for sweet corn and peppers. And so she was really glad 02:49 they had an overabundance from last year, still in the freezer and still canned from last year because they just had a horrible year. Sorry, what was that? I was going to say it's been rough all the way around. Yeah, this was my first year kind of doing a really, really large garden by myself. 03:16 in Missouri. I grew up in Nebraska and I did some small stuff after my husband and I first got married. So I was just thinking it was just me, but turns out it wasn't. It was kind of a rough year for everybody. So that made me feel a little bit better, but next year will definitely be better for everybody. Keeping my fingers crossed. 03:45 Okay, so tell me about Farm Raise. Yes. So Farm Raise was started by three people who were at Stanford University and they saw a need for farmers to kind of simplify the FSA records process. And then that moved into simplifying the grant application process. 04:14 and then moved into, well, actually what farmers, homesteaders, ranchers really need is the ability to track their records. And so with FarmRays, we have a farm accounting software that helps you to track your records for your schedule F, track your inventory. 04:40 and on the app and then create invoices to be able to send to your customers. And then prepare to apply for loans or grant programs. So we have a really great software that can really help you to see where am I spending money on my farm? And maybe where can I cut back on some of my spending? 05:08 That's not making me as much money. And then another piece of what FarmRays does is we have some B2B software. So we host applications for climate smart farming programs. So we currently host the application for... 05:35 the Mizzou Climate Smart Regenerative Crops and Livestock, and then one for blue diamond growers as well. So we help create applications and then reporting features so that it's easier for farmers to apply for those programs, get the money dispersed to them, and then report the sustainable practices that they are doing back. 06:03 to the organizations to get that USDA funding. So Farm Raise has a lot of different software solutions, not only for farmers, but for businesses who are hosting grant applications for farmers as well. Okay, what does FSA

Today I'm talking with Ashley at Shady Hill. 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 Ashley at Shady Hill. Good afternoon, Ashley. How are you? I'm doing great. It's about low 70 degrees here in Virginia, so it's feeling really good here. 00:26 It's a little warmer than that in Minnesota where I am. I think it's probably 75, but it's also overcast. So I'm hoping it does not get hot today. That would be great. All right, so tell me about yourself and Shady Hill. Yeah, so Shady Hill is very new for us. My husband and I, you know, I just turned 26 this year. I feel like I'm getting up there in age now, but I'm 26. 00:54 My husband is 25, so we're considered young farmers in our area. Um, but we always wanted to farm, but didn't grow up on farms. So after we studied agriculture at Virginia Tech and kind of grew up throughout FFA, which is an agriculture organization for youth, we were like, okay, now what, like, how do we start farming? You know, we got the education. We've kind of been a part of community groups that have tried to help us and encourage us to start farming. But. 01:24 It wasn't that easy. Um, I started off teaching as an ag teacher. He started off working at a community bank as an ag, uh, loan officer, portfolio manager. So we were still really plugged into the agriculture community, but we didn't have any money to just buy a farm. Um, where we ended up living and moving is where I grew up. And so around here, most of what it looks like to farm is cropland and minimum of like a hundred acres of it. 01:54 Small farms around here are probably about 50 to 60 acres big. So it just wasn't feasible realistic for us. So that's really where Shady Hill came about was, you know, after I left teaching, I worked in marketing for a little bit and then I had a baby and stayed home. And with that extra time and just getting tired of making excuses for not being able to buy a farm, we found ourselves, you know, we lived on one and a half acres, so why not just start where we are. And so. 02:23 Shady Hill was born because we live on a hill with a bunch of shade trees. Um, and we mostly do everything on one acre, but that's Shady Hill and a little bit about us. You can do a lot on an acre and a half, just so you know. And it's a lot, and it's a lot better to start farming young than it is to start farming old. I can tell you that from experience. Well, we had the most of the encouragement we got from older farmers was to start small. 02:52 and to start because we kept saying, you know, oh, we can't afford, you know, especially now. I mean, I remember when I graduated college, we were seeing an acre of land for about $6,000 to $7,000 an acre. Now you see, you know, if someone has a nice house sitting on 10 to 15 acres, you're paying nearly a million dollars just for that. So we always just had this dollar value on farming and homesteading and we thought we just couldn't afford to 03:22 do it. But then we realized homesteading anyways isn't even about making money. It's about just being more self-reliant. We didn't have to take out any big loans for this and we're learning a lot now. So kind of the advice from those farmers that we got about starting small that we used to get annoyed by, because the world is not set up for farmers to start small to be honest, was actually some of the best advice because now in the future, depending on... 03:50 where this takes us and what opportunities come up with land, we now have experience for some loans or depending on what that even looks like. Because before we didn't have any experience to prove that we would be able to farm the land that we were going to buy. So we just didn't look good on paper to begin with. So it's been a blessing to learn and get the experience now, but it's by far not the easiest thing we've ever done. 04:18 Yeah, and honestly, it probably wouldn't have been the easiest thing you've ever done, no matter when you started it, because it's all learning and experience and trying new things and failing and then trying again. I have been where you are and it's so much fun. The beginning is so much fun, but it's really scary too. Yeah. Yeah, we have so much of, should we keep doing it? Should we not? And I think too, I forgot to mention what we do at Shady Hill is... 04:46 We grow cut flowers. And everyone thinks I've got these acres of flowers. You know, at a farmer's market, they're like, oh, how many acres of flowers do you have? And I tell them like, you know, our beds are 50 feet long, four feet wide. I've got four of thos

Today I'm talking with Elisabeth at Fostich 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 Elisabeth at Foss Stitch Farms. Good morning, Elisabeth. How are you today? Good morning. I'm wonderful. Thank you. Good. And you were saying you're where? We are located in central Missouri. So that would be where... 00:29 Our very small town is called Edwards, but it's the Ozark area in Missouri. Okay. So I've heard a lot about the Ozarks. I watched the series on Netflix or whatever it was with What's His Face and What's Her Face and all the crime and stuff. I'm sure that that is not true. So tell me about the Ozarks because I keep talking to people from the Ozarks or that area, but I don't actually ask about it. What... 00:58 What is special about the Ozarks? Well, a lot is special. It's a beautiful, beautiful area, gently rolling hills. There's lots of beautiful rivers, bluffs. It, contrary to that episode, or that series, the Ozarks, I think a lot of that is fabricated. Oh yeah. But it absolutely is a beautiful area. And we love it down here. We have... 01:28 We actually lived in this area for about four years and we moved down here from, we had a farm in Oryk, Missouri, which was like about two hours north. So we do, we love it down here. And also there's like the Ozarks. Okay, I was just curious, I've never been anywhere near it. It's very beautiful. Yeah. I've never been in that area at all. And I keep saying to my husband, if we take a road trip, we should head that way sometime. 01:58 Yes, so of course my parents always want us to take the road trip to Maine to see them So that takes precedence every time and that's totally fine with me because Maine is beautiful, too Okay, so tell me about yourself and about Fossage Farms, okay So we my husband and I both grew up on farms. We'd be considered like second or third generation farmers but we're 02:24 first generation using regenerative practices, which is what we kind of have focused in on our own farms. So after I left home, I continued farming on a small scale. I went to college, I'm an RN in the ER since 2002. My husband and I got married, realized that conventional way of farming really wasn't for us. It wasn't long-term. 02:51 what is healthiest for the land or our livestock. So we started researching alternative ways to raise our livestock. And so we started with cow-calf pairs and then we started with small scale meat production, just like word of mouth, things like that. And then, you know, as mentioned earlier, like we grew up on a conventional farm. So we used, our families use conventional methods. 03:21 And both of our families had small ruminants, so sheep and goats. And then also we had, my family had a dairy farm, Jersey cows. And then my husband's had Angus for the most part, cows. So okay. I love Jersey cows. I don't love them because of the milk that they give. I love them because their faces are so sweet. They are adorable. 03:47 love them. Every time somebody says Jersey cow, I'm like, aww. Okay. So did I see something about hair sheep on your Facebook page? Or was that somebody else? Yes. No, we love our sheep. So what we got into after we kind of moved toward the regenerative 04:16 are bred specifically for meat, so we do not shear them. So we pride ourselves on like excellent genetics. We have Sancroix, which is a breed that is parasite resistant. We have Catodin, which are excellent mothers. They have a beautiful, good hair coat that sheds really well. And then our rams are Lewis White Dorper genetics, and they actually are out of Oregon. 04:45 But this combination of genetics, which we've kind of fine-tuned, I guess, over the last several years, end up being really good mothers, no hoof issues, they're parasite resistant, and then when we wean them, they have excellent weight. Their weight is really healthy and good. So that's kind of the direction we went to. We also have... 05:12 Angus cattle and so what we do is we do rotational grazing. So our livestock, our sheep are moved behind the cows. Sometimes they're moved together, it just depends. About every three to five days and then it allows the lamb that they were on to rest and kind of return to its, helps the biological ecosystem kind of return to normal, helps microbial growth and then it... 05:42 Basically, we don't use any pharmacological interventions because we have animals that are never in the same area for any length of time. They're constantly moving. So that's what we focus on. We basically, like I mentioned earlier, conventional farming is fertilizers. I'm kind of letting t

Today I'm talking with Anna at Winkleman Family 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 Anna at the Winkleman Family Homestead. Good evening, Anna, how are you? Good evening, I'm good, how are you? I'm good, I don't usually do recordings in the evening, but I had to talk to you, so this was the only time that worked. I had, I get to talk to you. 00:29 Oh, thank you. Very honored. Yeah, I have a hard time at night because I tend to go to bed early. So I want to drink all the coffee in the world in the afternoon if I'm going to be up past like eight. And I was like, I can't drink coffee all afternoon because I'll be awake all night. So this is what we get people. We get a sleepy Mary talking to a very pretty Anna. It'll work out great. 00:56 All right, so Anna, tell me about the Winkleman family homestead. So I have a husband and three small children. My children range in ages of three months to four years. And I grew up in St. Louis city in Missouri, so not homestead at all. It was very urban. And honestly, like the little house in the prairie vibe, I always kind of liked. 01:25 but it just seemed like something that wasn't attainable. So yeah, I think my why started with COVID. When I saw those grocery store shelves empty, I was like, wow, maybe our systems aren't as, are more fragile than I think they are. Maybe I should do something about this and prepare myself more. 01:52 Yep. And that's, I think that's why the homesteading movement really picked up steam in 2021. I was going to say, you probably have had several interviews like this. Um, there's been a lot of talk of COVID babies and I don't mean human babies. I mean, new ideas, new projects, new focuses, COVID babies is what I call them. And the one thing that got me with the supply chain issues. 02:19 is I really like using Dawn dish soap, the green apple scented kind. Could not find it for a year. I was so mad because all the other dish soaps to me smell terrible. And I'm the one that does the most dishes. And I was like, I want my green apple Dawn dish soap back. Yes. But there were worse things than that. I mean, there were medications you couldn't get. There were just all kinds of things that you could not get. 02:50 And like we're through it. I think we're okay now for a while until the next thing hits. But yes. I had a formula fed baby during that time during the formula shortage. It was pretty rough. Yeah. Yeah. That's the other stuff that really scares me because I nursed all three of the babies that I birthed until they were... 03:15 I think my daughter was six months. I think my son was about six, seven months, and the last boy was eight months. And I can't imagine not being able to find formula for my babies if I wasn't nursing them. Just, it makes me choke up now just thinking about it. So yeah, that's terrible. So what did you do? How did you handle that? Well, we went to our pediatrician and... 03:42 We're like, well, what do we do? It's just not there. It's not on the shelves. And she's like, well, there's not really a substitute for formula. And I'm like, well, formula is a substitute. There has to be something. I know that our grandmothers made things. And she was basically like, you can't really do that. It's unsafe. Your baby will get sick. And so essentially what my husband and I did is we prayed before going to the store. 04:12 And just hoping that it would be there when we needed it and it was Every time that we went so I Just prayed Yeah, yep. And the fact is if it's a choice between your baby dying of starvation Right or trying something that might not be safe, but won't kill baby. I think that the thing that's not Not defined as safe might be better than it starving to death. So 04:40 Right. And the nice one of the good things that came out of COVID is that the European formulas are much more accessible in the US. So that has been great. And they're, they're healthier, they're better. If the US formulas, most of them, the first ingredient is corn syrup. But whenever you look at the ones from Europe, the first ingredient is milk, which is great. Yep. 05:09 Okay, so now I know your why. So what's the what? What's the how? What are you doing at your place? So we live, we're still pretty urban at the moment. We don't really have a whole lot in the way of land. We have like maybe a fifth of an acre. And we have a small house on top of that, 768 square feet. I know exactly how big it is because I have to use every inch of it. So. 05:38 Yeah, it just started with like preservation with just d

Today I'm talking with Megan at Weaver Meadow Farm. 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 Megan and a couple other people at Weaver Meadow Farm, and Megan can tell me the other two people's names. We are here with Rye, my office administrator, and Bree, my sales rep. Oh my. 00:29 You got the business end happening with you today. Yes, we've got all three of us here. Good. That's awesome. All right. So tell me about your farm. So I am Megan Weaver of Weaver Meadow Farm. We primarily raise a rare breed of pig called mason. They originated in China and they've only been available in the US since 2016. 00:57 And I am one of the largest breeders here in the U S with registered stock. And then we also, uh, raise sheep as well. Okay. I literally not even our, an hour ago got done interviewing with a lady who raises hair sheep, so I would much rather talk about this special pig than sheep for another half an hour. So can we talk about the special sheep? I mean, special pig, sorry. Yeah. 01:24 Not a problem. I love my sheep, but I really adore my pigs. Okay, good. So is it is it kind of like the wagyu beef that people are so fond of? Is that the same kind of level of special for the pig? Yeah, quite similar. We're still restructuring our grain program to create that similar marbling that the wagyu has. We are getting close to that and it is a red 01:53 deep red pork that is super flavorful. The fat has a lower melting temperature and so a lot of it will melt during the cooking process and reabsorb into the meat, just creating something wonderful to eat. 02:11 Oh, you're, you're, you're barking up the right tree here because I'm not really a fan of pork, but that sounds wonderful. That's pretty delicious actually. Yeah. Uh, Brie here has been, uh, taking photos and playing with recipes in ways that you don't traditionally see pork being used. And she's come up with some really creative recipes. Nice. Are they on your website? They're getting there. Okay. Good. Yes. 02:40 Good because no one's going to cook with the the mason pork. But right now we're just taking photos and then trying dishes and posting them on the Facebook page for people to view. Awesome, because no one's going to know how to cook this to the best of their ability without recipes. Believe it or not, this pork is actually really quick to cook. It's not, you don't take your time. It'll dry out. It's very fast. 03:10 Easy meat to cook. 03:13 Awesome. So how did you get into this? Um, when I wanted to get into farming after I was a farm sitter, I didn't want to just get traditional breeds. I wanted something more unique. And so I was doing a lot of research. Um, and I finally came across the Mason pig, but at the time there was only roughly 200 registered in the whole U S and they weren't cheap. 03:42 So I decided to go with a mixed breed, half mason and half herford, because it was a lot more budget friendly at the time to give it a try, see if the meat was any different. And even with it being a crossbreed like that, it was a big difference to any other pork that I've ever had. And so then we took the dive and we actually moved to a different location that was more suited for farms. And we 04:11 delved into the sheep and the registered mason. And that took a little bit of time to grow them and then breed. And it just took off from there. I think I was a couple of litters in and I was number 300 on the registry. Peg registered number 300 for the whole registry there. 04:36 And so that was pretty exciting and now the breed has really taken off. So it's just been fun because I love this breed. The look of them is like crossing Eeyore with a Shar-Pei. I think they're super adorable. Other people say they're an ugly cute. But they're just they're very docile breed. They're very easy to be around. They're not. 05:05 aggressive or dangerous. I've had little kids supervised around my boars. There's just certain ones that capture your heart here on the farm that are just like well mannered little puppy dogs. They follow you around. They just want, you know, to be scratched on. And so they've been a lot of fun. And the piglets when they're born, their ears are really big, but they're flat against their neck and they look like miniature elephants. 05:35 It's the cutest thing ever. That sounds adorable. How big did the the male pigs get? Um, unfortunately, my scale is for sheep and my pigs are a little too long for it. Okay. I would say they're around three to 400 pounds. And I think my biggest style that I have and she's really b

Today I'm talking with Holly at MN River Valley 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 Holly at the Minnesota River Valley Homestead. Good morning, Holly. How are you? I am good. How are you? I'm great. What a beautiful morning we have in LaSore, Minnesota today. It is wonderful outside. 00:29 Yeah, it's a little allergy inducing, but other than that, it's great. Yes, I agree. So, um, Holly is an acquaintance and sort of friend. She lives not far from me. And the way that I met Holly is because she sells her lovely baked goods at the farmer's market. And I had asked her months ago if she wanted to be a guest on the podcast, but there was stuff going on. So. 00:55 I finally get to ask you all kinds of questions today. So tell me about yourself, Holly. Well, I have been a stay at home mom for, let's see, gollish, it's been so many years, I don't think I even know, almost 20 years, mainly because I can't work because I'm epileptic, but I have all seven kids that I have raised and. 01:23 One is gone and now I just sit and keep track of the other six. And right now it's nice and calm because there's only two left at home because the other are at school. Yay. Today, first day today? Um, no, it's actually, um, they started their second week today. They started last week, so they were excited. 01:48 Yeah, I feel like kids are in one of two camps. They're either tickled pink to go back or they don't want to go back. Yeah, my two older ones were not very happy and the two younger ones were very, very excited. So. So how old are the kids that are still living at home? They are 345715. 02:17 16 Okay, so you got teenagers and little still at home. Yep Okay. All right. So what do you what do you do at your your? Minnesota River Valley homestead when I'm at home which is all the time obviously I Work on a lot of my yarn crafting I do a lot of crocheting I make blankets and 02:46 I make dishcloths and handbags and hats. Pretty much you name it, I can make it. Otherwise I make jams and jellies and then there's the other part of it that my husband is a really big part of. We make a lot of sourdough and bagels and other sandwich breads. 03:14 and we're now starting to get into dessert breads. 03:19 So yeah, we, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I guess that's, that's, that's the big part. Otherwise I get into making a lot of oils for different purposes, not, not scent, you know, not essential oils, but healing oils, things like that. So I'm a lot, I'm really big with herbal things. So always. 03:47 So you're a typical homesteader. You've got your hands in almost everything. Yeah, pretty much. Nice. Um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna toot your horn for you. Your bagels are amazing. Kyle brought some home Saturday and they were the Osceaga ones. Oh my god. So yummy. Yeah. And you're, uh, He said he's been eyeing those for a while, so he decided to get some. 04:16 Yep. And your raisin ones are really good too. Oh, I'm glad you like those. Yeah. We love bagels. We don't love store-bought bagels, but we love your bagels. So, Oh, I'm glad. I was going to ask, um, the Italian bread that he brought home. Um, I didn't get any. Cameron and Kyle ate all of it before I could get to it. Oh my gosh. But they loved it. I didn't get a chance to try it. 04:46 Oh, well, just let me know and I'll make you some. Okay. Yeah. I was going to grab some and I was like, where'd the bag go? And Cameron was like, we ate it. And then Kyle made honey oat bread and, and, uh, herbed bread yesterday that he makes, so I was like, okay, well maybe I'll get some of those maybe. Yeah. Food doesn't last very long in this house if it's, if it's really yummy. So it must have been really yummy, Holly. I will find out eventually. 05:16 Well, that's good. We make sure we have fresh herbs growing outside on our deck so I can grab them and we use those. So yeah, fresh herbs are the best thing. And if you can't have fresh herbs, dried herbs work just as well. So it works out great. Thank you. 05:39 I'm very excited you're going to get in dessert, two dessert breads. I cannot talk this morning. I feel like I'm not separating anything out and I'm not pronouncing my consonants. I don't know what's wrong with me. Your dessert breads are an exciting new thing. What kind of dessert breads are you guys doing? Oh, um, well, Chris has been making, um, one of them is a, gow, what does he call it? It's a cinnamon. 06:08 uh, cinnamon or not cinnamon chocolate, twist, I guess is what he calls it. But it's, um, he rolls it out flat and then he puts Nutella all over the whole thing and then he ro

Today I'm talking with El at Minnesota Half-Assed Homesteaders. A Tiny Homestead Podcast thanks Chelsea Green Publishing for their support. 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. Today I'm talking with El, Minnesota half-assed homesteaders. Good morning, El, how are you? Good morning, I'm wonderful, how are you? I'm great, it is a glorious day in Minnesota this morning. It's beautiful, I always love it when I can go out and do chores in the morning with a sweatshirt on and you have that perfect, like, cool weather. It just... 00:29 It starts the day off perfect. Yeah, it's almost feeling like back to school day, used to feel when I would go back to school every year in Maine. So yeah, it's cool outside, but it's so sunny and everything's bright and shiny. It's lovely here. You are in Pine City? Pine River. Pine River, sorry. Nope, that's not it. And that's north of the cities, right? Yeah, we're in the Brainerd Lakes area. 00:55 Oh, so you're up there. You're in the really pretty area of Minnesota. Yes. It's beautiful up here. Awesome. Okay. So two things, El and I were talking before I started recording. El's real name is Elspeth. And I was saying that that's one of the most beautiful names I've ever heard. And I thought she might be named after a family member, but no, she's named after a person in a book. So do you want to tell me about that? Yeah, absolutely. I don't ever remember the name of the book. 01:25 But when my mom was pregnant with me, she was reading a book that had a good witch who was a steward of the earth and she would go around planting flowers and bringing life back to dead areas on earth. And her name was Elspeth. And my mom fell in love with the name. 01:52 They were going to name me Rowena after my great grandma. Um, but once mom found that name, she really liked it. And my dad liked it because I'm the youngest of four kids and the last girl. Um, and he thought it sounded like a princess name. So he was okay with that. And then gave me the middle name of Prairie. 02:19 Um, because he wanted to name me Prairie Rose. So they both kind of got to pick and ended up with Elspeth Prairie. I, like I said before, I think it's absolutely beautiful and how appropriate considering what you're doing with your life that you are named after, uh, a princess or whatever that, that basically stewards the earth. I, it's come to full. 02:46 come to full fruition for me. And it's one of those things that now, especially since my mom has passed on, and I'm kind of keeping her legacy alive too in homesteading and foraging, natural medicine, things like that, that I realized that maybe she was, she was getting to something and kind of determining my fate before I even knew it. So. 03:13 I feel like this podcast episode is going to be magical. That's how it feels from the start. Okay. So, and another thing, I love Minnesota half-assed homesteaders for a name. That is fantastic. We, you know, a lot of people who end up joining say, I joined because of the name. My husband and I started it about two years ago. 03:38 kind of just as a way for us to document what we're doing on our homestead. Our successes, our failures, our challenges. And it kind of grew into this community. It was originally strictly for people who were in Minnesota. But then we found, you know, we had people who had growing or similar growing seasons that we have. 04:08 and had similar interests and we wanted to have that diversity to be able to compare and contrast. So we started getting people from all over the United States and now we have 04:21 5,000 people, 5,400 I think in two years. So it's kind of grown into this fun little community of people who are like-minded. And our whole purpose for the name of the group is that we're not fancy. We don't necessarily, especially when we started, we didn't have a lot of money to put into. 04:49 our homestead, but we knew that we wanted to make our own food, provide for ourselves and be as self-sufficient as we could. And I was joking one day saying, well, I guess we're just doing it the half-assed way. And that is how Minnesota Half-Assed Homesteaders came about because we do what we can with where we are and what we have. 05:19 using plastic grow bags on the deck because we have horrible soil and we didn't know what our you know sun exposure was we didn't know where our best places to grow were and most of our yard was too shady for gardening anyway so over the last couple of years we've cut down trees and kind of expanded and built our way up. 05:47 to having raised beds and chickens and ducks, and we're just gonna keep seeing where things go. But that's kind of how we started, was just working with what we have and just wantin

Today I'm talking with Tracey at Makers Acres Homestead. You can also follow on Instagram. A Tiny Homestead Podcast thanks Chelsea Green Publishing for their support. 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 Tracey at Makers Acres Homestead. Good morning Tracey, how is the weather in Tennessee today? Good morning. It is sweltering. I think we're going to have a record high today actually. So like... 00:28 actual about 100 degrees. I'm not sure what feels like temperature will be, but I am so sorry to hear that. We had feels like temps two days ago of 110. Wow. In Minnesota. I'm going to say that's something from Minnesota. My goodness. Yeah. It was gross. You stepped outside and you were immediately misted. It was terrible. Yeah. And we were in a drought too. So my gardens are a hot mess right now, a little bit of a dumpster fire, but you know, you just kind of go with. 00:58 We've got a pretty good dumpster fire going on with our gardens and absence. So may so I understand. All right. So tell me about yourself and what you're doing. Makers Acres Homestead. Yeah, well, we we do a few things where I maybe I should say I or I don't know my husband's kind of long for the ride and some of this stuff. I'm the person with all the ideas. 01:23 I want to do about a thousand times more than I'm doing because my ability to execute everything doesn't keep up with all my ideas. But we named, we kind of gave it this property when we moved here five years ago from Michigan. We gave this property, we're on six acres and my parents have a home on the property as well that we moved them down to a couple years after we moved here. 01:51 And Makers Acres is just meaning that we just recognize and proclaim that all this belongs to the Lord and this is His land, His property, and we truly just want to be obedient to Him in that and how He wants to use it. But back in Michigan, before we even moved, I really had this like dream that I felt like God put on my heart. 02:21 to grow food and give it away to people, basically. And mainly because a little bit of just a brief backstory is I have really seen the power of nutrition change my health story and that of my family. And so I just recognize like everyone deserves access to fresh fruits and vegetables. And even back, 02:51 before even my health transformation, we, for a time period during the crash in 08, we actually utilized some of the government services like food stamps and stuff like that because my husband lost his job. And so I have like this intimate knowledge of just that process and being a part of that, just that world. And I mean, 03:17 It's fascinating. That's like a whole different rabbit trail. But when you can get candy and junk food and all that with food stamps, just as well as anything else, you're going for cheap because you're trying to make your dollar stretch. And so I think when anyone, whether they're using government assistance or not, 03:44 When you're feeling that pinch in your budget, we're always trying to make everything stretch farther. And it's so easy to. 03:55 just to compromise because unfortunately the system and the setup is where like junk food is cheaper than healthy food. And so we, I just really wanted to give everyone the access. Now I, you know, not everyone wants it. That's fine. I mean, I get that. And so there is an educational piece behind it. But 04:19 I just really wanted everyone to have access to fresh food. And so that's what kind of started this idea in my heart to essentially grow it and give it away. And I personally use these vertical aeroponic tower gardens, a distributor for the company. And that's really how I got my start, zero green thumb, but I just wanted to grow food for my family. And 04:45 Michigan soil is very sandy and I lived in a lot of shade and so My back porch was really the only place to grow so That's a nice. I started growing with those and I just realized how much I could grow in a small space So that's kind of what spearheaded that and that dream really took root once we moved to Tennessee and we bought this property and we're like 05:12 Okay, so we actually, it's the name of that is called Maker's Pharmacy. And pharmacy is spelled F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. You know, just, you know, food is medicine. And so that's kind of the, the story in brief behind that. I'm sorry if I went off on a rabbit trail a little bit with your question, but. Nope. I want all the stories I can get. I am thrilled when people talk for five minutes about what they're doing. It makes me happy. Oh, good. 05:41 So when did you move to Tennessee

Today I'm talking with Lexi at The Steady Home. A Tiny Homestead Podcast thanks Chelsea Green Publishing for their support. 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 Lexi Maitland, and I don't really have a business name for you. So good morning, Lexi, how are you? Hey, Mary, I'm good. And our business is The Steady Home, but how are you? The Steady Home, yes. I think that's how I found you, but I completely forgot. 00:29 No, that's okay. I'm well. It is not stiflingly, miserably humid and hot here today. So... Oh, I love that. I love that. Now, where are you, Barry? Minnesota. In what part of the country? Minnesota. Nice. Yeah, it's like 90, I think 93 here today. So it's a little toasty on my end. And you're in Virginia? I am. Just south of Richmond and Dimwitty. Okay. Yes. All right. So before we get into what you do... 00:57 I have a little minor self-promotion thing to say. Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my podcast. What? I'm so excited for you. I saw it on your Facebook yesterday. I was like, oh my gosh, that's so exciting. Yeah. And I just wanted to thank all my guests. I'm upset. I'm like, I'm shook up here. All my guests and all my listeners. Because when I started this, I didn't think it was going to do. 01:27 anything at all. So one year is a big deal. It's a massive deal, Mary. Your discipline through your podcast. I mean, you do multiple a week. I listened to a podcast not long ago and you said that you did nine interviews within a week. So I just want to congratulate you because it is not easy doing a podcast by itself, but your discipline and the community that you've created within your podcast has been amazing. I've loved listening to you. 01:57 Well, thank you. And if I didn't love it so much, I wouldn't be doing it. Well, you do a great job. I love it. Thank you. I didn't realize I was going to tear up, but boy, what a year it's been. Yes. Take that moment for you. That's amazing. So, that's my teary moment for the day, I guess. So, anyway, thank you everybody for supporting me. And so, tell me about the study home, Lexi. Tell me all about you. Sure. 02:25 a little bit about me. I grew up on a little over a hundred acre farm most of my life throughout my whole childhood and when I hit adulthood I had I thought I had been sheltered and so I thought maybe the city offered more to life and so I shifted to a smaller city and then I quickly came back to my to my roots and so how you found me I think was through 02:53 the Facebook group that I created. And so I'll get into a little bit about that. But how I started homesteading was my daughter, personally, I mean, I grew up on a farm, but personally started homesteading within my own home and cultivating that throughout my family was my daughter was born in 2021. And after the massive push for the COVID Vax and the boosters, I started doing my own research and questioning what feels like everything. 03:20 So when I started, I started a little Facebook group in November of 2023 to help others find a community of information and to feel safe in asking some of those difficult questions specifically for beginners. And since I started the group the end of last year, we've grown to over 97,000 in the group and our active newsletter subscribers reached a little over 40,000 now. So we have a total of 60 but active are right at 40,000. 03:49 Um, so we've, we've done some, a lot in a short timeframe and I feel like it's been a little overwhelming. So I understand celebrating your first year. There's so the, the grind and the hustle that first year is, is, um, you know, some of the best work I believe through that discipline. So again, hats off to you. Um, so since I started the group, um, yeah, we've, we've 04:16 We've done a lot. And so we've done, we've created like homestead workshops, we've created a membership, we have, you know, the newsletter and now, you know, we're inviting sponsors to sponsor the newsletter that are aligned with our audience. We've done a membership, we've started a little blog on Pinterest and yeah, it's been, it's been quite a year. So that's kind of like a gist and you know, what, what we're up to within this. 04:45 quote unquote steady home. It feels kind of cliche to say it publicly, but I really wanted to create more sustainability within our home and we ran a solar company for a little over five years. And so we really were immersed into sustainability before we were immersed into homesteading. So now we've got the basic homestead animals, the chickens, the goats, canning and. 05:13 growing our little raised garden

Today I'm talking with Troy at the Red Tool House Farm. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast thanks Chelsea Green Publishing for their support. 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 Troy at Red Tool House Farm. Good morning, Troy, how are you? Good morning, how are you? I'm good, it's nice to talk with you again. Last time we talked, we were talking about the Homesteading-ish Conference, but today we're talking about you. Yes. 00:29 So tell me about yourself and what you do at the Red Toolhouse farm. Well, Red Toolhouse is the name of the place that we've been on for the last 24 years. It is about a hundred acres and we're in the southwestern portion of West Virginia, what I consider the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. It was a piece of property in major disrepair when we bought it. 00:57 had lots of garbage on it, old house, old trailer, just had been abandoned for so long or unused for so long that it had just accumulated a lot of the neighborhood garbage. So we bought it knowing that we were going to have to put a lot of sweat equity into it. We had a lot of potential with the property. We knew. 01:22 We knew there was a lot of potential there, but just, just going to have to get through a lot of that work. Got a great deal on the property. Um, so young and dumb, didn't know any better. So just dove head first into it. So over the last 24 years, just kind of embraced more of a regenerative agricultural elements, you know, the homesteading, we kind of picked up the homesteading vibe about 14 years ago and started pursuing that more kind of knowing where food comes from, producing our own food. 01:51 raising livestock and then just managing the forest on this 100 acres is kind of where we've landed. Okay. So where did you live before? Okay. So I, my wife and I, we dated through high school and we were West Virginians. So we were, well, she's a transplant. She was from Florida originally, but we went to high school together. We went to college together. We went to Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. 02:16 And after college, we decided, hey, we can't stay in West Virginia. We want to get a job. All the things that went along with that. So we moved to Orlando for a couple of years. And Orlando is okay, but there's a lot of humanity in Orlando. So we kind of felt the call to come back home. We always joke that West Virginians are like boomerangs. They keep coming back. So we moved back in. 02:44 1998, I believe, eight or nine. And moved back, actually stayed in a little cabin that was just over the mountain from where I grew up and spent a year trying to find property. I told Kelly, my wife, I said, if we're gonna move back to West Virginia, I don't wanna live in town, I don't wanna live around people. Orlando had really turned me off from even liking people anymore. I just didn't like people. So I... 03:10 I said, we need to live as rural as we possibly can, but we both still work full-time jobs in the city of Charleston. So we knew we still had to be a reasonable commutable drive from Charleston. So we looked about an hour out, just drew a circle around the city of Charleston and said, let's look for land. 03:31 This land wasn't even on the market. It was actually just a piece of land lying here and we had to go door to door. As before, the internet was really a thing where you could search all that stuff. So we just went door to door, finally found out who owned it and made an offer on it and they accepted our first offer. Okay, so you had a plan for sure to do this. This isn't like you were living in town and went, eh, I want to try something completely different and just chose this. You had a plan. 04:00 Well, I grew up rural in West Virginia. My folks, we just call it rural life. I mean, mom and dad did a garden. We didn't have any livestock. I think we did a garden. We lived on a bigger tract of land. So we cut firewood. We provided our own fuel source for heat and that type of stuff. So I thought, well, if I'm moving back to West Virginia, I want to go back to the things I miss and Orlando really made me realize how much I missed not being surrounded by humanity. 04:30 And there's just some beautiful land in Western, just a gorgeous state. And I thought, well, I want to be able to have something I can call my own and be able to carve out whatever I want, have enough acreage that I can do, do the little piddly things that I like to do. So that was, that was probably really the only goal. We weren't, I wasn't thinking self-reliant. I wasn't thinking prepper. I wa

Today I'm talking with Brenda at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance about composting as an environmentally friendly self-reliant activity. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast thanks Chelsea Green Publishing for their support. 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 Brenda at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Good morning, Brenda. How are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. You're in Minneapolis? I'm actually in the Washington, D.C. office. Oh, okay. 00:29 All right, cool. What's it like in Washington, DC today? It's it's actually a very nice day. It's in the 70s. I don't have the AC on. I have the fans going. Very nice. It's it's overcast in Minnesota, but it's also not hot yet. So that's a good thing. All right. So tell me about yourself and what you do. Well, I head up one of our. 00:56 initiatives at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. We are a national non-profit research and technical assistance organization and we were founded in 1974 so we turned 50 this year and we have championed local self-reliance, a strategy that underscores the need for humanly scaled institutions and economies and the widest possible distribution of ownership. So what does that mean? Well we work in key sectors of the economy so 01:25 We have an independent business initiative, which is fighting the outsize monopoly power of corporations like Amazon. Before that, it was Walmart, which has kind of been dwarfed by Amazon. We have a community broadband initiative, which is promoting municipally owned broadband fiber optic networks, for instance. We have an energy democracy program, which is promoting community controlled utilities and. 01:54 Looftop solar and the like, and I head up our composting for community initiative and have been working on waste issues for 38 years. I've been at ILSR for 38 years and, um, most of that time I've been fighting trash incinerators and documenting communities with the highest recycling and composting levels and in. 02:18 probably the last decade began to focus more and more on composting because composting is inherently local. We can do it in our backyards, in our communities, at schools, community gardens, urban farms. You can do it anywhere in the world. Wherever we are eating, which hopefully if we're lucky we're eating at least three meals a day and you have food scraps, so we should be doing something with those food scraps. 02:45 Even the final product that you make from compost is generally used locally. We're not shipping the food scraps from coast to coast. You know, we have, you know, markets for waste paper and steel and metals, other types of recycled commodities. Those can be global markets, but we're not shipping our banana peels from the East Coast to the West Coast. And then the finished product tends to be used within local and regional markets as well. Back into the soil. Good. Okay. 03:15 So I am gonna, I'm gonna tell you my experience with composting in a small town. We don't live there anymore, so I don't have to abide by their rules now. But back when we lived in this small town in Minnesota, in town, we were only allowed to have the compost barrels that get closed up and you turn them. We were not allowed to have any kind of open compost bin. 03:45 And I think the reasoning was that it would draw in pests. So do you hear this in cities that there's specific ways you're allowed to compost? Yeah, there are definitely archaic and two laws on the books, old laws. And there was ones like the one you described that are just far too prescriptive. So I actually did a report a few years ago called Yes in My Backyard. 04:15 for local government on home composting programs. And we had a whole chapter on how to address archaic laws and ordinances. And we actually called out the problem with the specifics like what you just mentioned is, and let me just back up and say that there are a few things that you need to keep in mind for successful composting. And they are things like you gotta balance your 04:40 nitrogen rich materials, that's your food scraps, glass, grass clippings, think of nitrogen rich materials and things that can rot easily or have a lot of moisture. And you got to balance that with carbon rich materials, that's your browns. And the right ratio, you got to pay attention to oxygen, composting is an aerobic process, it needs oxygen, and it needs moisture. And you know, you need enough mass, but to do it successfully and to keep out... 05:07 unwanted critters like rodents or raccoons or possums. It's not about whether it's

Today I'm talking with Karina at Niemczyk Family Farms LLC. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast thanks Chelsea Green Publishing for their support. 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 Karina at Niemczyk Family Farms LLC. Good morning, Karina. How are you? Hi. Good morning. Doing well. Thank you. Good. I need to close an app real quick. Hang on. Okay. 00:27 Tell me about yourself and what you guys do. Yeah, so we started our business, or technically became a business in 2023. We've been living on our farm since 2020. So it's kind of been incorporating homesteading and small farm practices in our daily life. But when we decided that we wanted to kind of pursue this more as a business 00:58 potentially grow in 2023. So that was kind of the first kind of stepping stones. And, you know, the 2023 was kind of our basic growth year. And then this year has been a year that has been a little bit more, I want to say exponential, because that's a little bit aggressive, but definitely a bigger year for growth. So it's been good. 01:27 Okay, when you say we, is it you and a husband and kids? Yes, my husband and I are married. We got married in 2019 and so we partnered together and this is kind of our 50-50% business. We have two small kids, one is three and then one is one and a half. Our oldest is a boy and then our youngest is a girl. They don't really help out too much on the farm, but they are just, I don't know. 01:56 there and around and learning as we go. So soaking up all the good farm stuff. Yes. Exactly. So, okay. So you're, go ahead. Nope, go ahead. So you're a really busy lady if you have two under three years old and you're doing produce and you're doing cottage food production and you're doing meat too, right? Yep. Yep. And we, uh, we both still have full-time jobs. We haven't, um, 02:26 transitioned into being self-sufficient enough yet where one of us can potentially, you know, move into us having it as a full-time job. So that's kind of where we're, you know, wanting to grow and potentially within the next five years have one of us be able to stay home and pursue this full-time, which would be really great. But yep, so we both have full-time jobs, have the farm as our... 02:54 know, essentially side business right now and then our two, two young kids. And, um, uh, basically, you know, the, our passion or our desire to start the farm started with actually like the meat side of it and raising our own animals, um, raising our own food, um, and doing it in a way that was sustainable and regenerative in a sense of. 03:22 utilizing the land that we have, utilizing the resources and utilizing the environment and it being a regenerative type farm and using that instead of a conventional type basis. So that's kind of where everything stemmed from was producing our own food, but then also growing into doing it for others as well who wanted to purchase and also have similar beliefs as us as where their food comes from. 03:52 Yeah, absolutely. That's fantastic. So you must be working some time management magic over there in Arlington because I don't know how you're doing it. Yep, it's a long, long days, long, sometimes long nights. We also do hay. We run about 25 to 30 acres of hay. We do that in the summertime as well. So we, that's part of the... 04:21 regenerative aspect of our farm as well. Instead of necessarily feeding animals, crops such as corn and soy and things like that, which is definitely some things we utilize into the feed of our animals, but we also use hay for feeding the animals as well, but also using it to sell to other farmers who also utilize it for their cattle or you know a lot of times people use you 04:51 Yeah, so that's another piece of our farm as well. So yeah, time management is kind of just doing it as we go and trying to figure it out day by day. Sometimes it's not always like a week schedule or a month schedule. It's just kind of like flying by the seat of our pants sometimes. Well, I'm glad it works for you. I was hoping you had some advice because I know my listeners are dying for ways to schedule their lives easier or better. 05:20 I guess one thing we do utilize if nobody else, you know, I'm sure it's a very similar thing others do, but my husband and I, we have a shared Google calendar. So if you, each of you have like a spouse or a partner, use your Google calendar. And that's where we put in like, it's always, it always changes, but like we'll block out a week or we'll have a week of like, this is what we're projecting. We're doing, Hey, 05:45 or like thi

Today I'm talking with Sara at Fameflower Farm. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast thanks Chelsea Green Publishing for their support. 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 Sara at Fameflower Farm. How are you, Sarah? I'm doing good. Thanks. How about you? I'm good. You're in Tennessee? Yes, middle Tennessee, not too far from Nashville. Oh, nice. 00:26 All right, well, tell me about yourself and what you do at Fameflower Farm. Okay, so we are a mini farm and we've been at this little homestead mini farm thing for about a decade now. And we, my husband and I moved here from the Chicagoland area with the ultimate goal of growing and raising as much of our own food as possible. We moved from a condo with zero land whatsoever. So it was a huge shift to almost 17 acres in Middle Tennessee. 00:56 And you know, we thought it'd be easy-ish to figure it all out. And we're learning as we go that there's just so many things and everything has a big learning curve, but we love the lifestyle, the homesteading lifestyle and are really happy we have moved here and are doing all the things. We've got a bunch of different animals, huge garden and permaculture food forest and probably other things I'm forgetting. 01:23 Oh, that's such a good question. Naming our farm was such a challenge. So our last name is Chodal, but it's spelled with a C-H, super hard to pronounce. So we figured that's out. We're not gonna use that name. And a lot of people name their homes that are farms based on their names. So since that was out, we had to go with something else. And we were looking for a bunch of different names and we discovered we are on limestone and we're in an area of the country that has some endangered plant species. We happen to have limestone glades on our property that grow maybe 01:51 up to 10 different types of endangered plant species. The fameflower is one of those. And it sounded kind of cool, fameflower farm, three Fs, so we went with her. So what is a fameflower? It's a tiny little, it almost looks like a succulent with its leaves and it has a very beautiful, bright, almost fuchsia color of flower that only blooms in the afternoons in the summer. 02:16 And it's an endangered plant species, so it's not found everywhere. It's challenging to find. And since we have it on our property, you know, that's pretty cool. Very nice. I'm always excited to hear about flowers that I don't know about yet. It makes me grin. Okay. So I really, I really want to talk about the dogs. And I mentioned this beforehand before we started recording. 02:41 We have a mini Australian shepherd named Maggie that I talk about ad nauseam on the podcast. I try hard not to talk about her. So that's what we have. We have a dog. Her job is to be a watchdog. That is her only job. She does it really well to the point of doing it too well. So you raise Pyrenees poodle crosses. And they're gorgeous. 03:08 But I need to know more about why that's a good mix. Okay, so we had a... Do you want me to tell you how I got into this whole dog thing to begin with? Yes, please. Okay, so we, both my husband and I have had dogs our whole lives. And we had, when we moved here, we had an Aussie poo, so Australian Shepherd poodle mix. He is an F2B, which means he's got a lot of poodle in him, essentially. 03:37 And then we also had a skipper keep poodle mix. So we already loved poodle mixes. Those two dogs are just house dogs, cute, friendly, whatever. Nothing that they're gonna have work to do. And then we had a big chicken loss with a predator. So we got a great Pyrenees to guard our flock. As our great Pyrenees grows, she's just a beautiful, wonderful, amazing dog. And my mom, who had previously bred dogs like 30 years ago, kept saying Bishop, that's her name, is beautiful. You should breed her. 04:06 And I told her I wasn't really sure that that was something I wanted to do because, you know, there's lots of dogs that need rescued and I don't know if I want to become a dog breeder. And then my mother-in-law also said she really wanted a dog and would love to have a dog if Bishop had babies. And they both had met our poodle mixes and everyone that we know likes the poodle mixes. I know poodle mixes are not for everybody, but they are for us. So we decided to do a litter with Bishop and a standard poodle. 04:34 my mom's water aerobics instructor happened to have a health-tested standard poodle available to be the dad. So it just all kind of came together perfectly and he was a very beautiful, calm-ish for a poodle, standard poodle. So it was all wond

Today I'm talking with Andre at Firefly Farm & Mercantile. For a 10 percent discount off a Firefly Farm and Mercantile purchase, use code Home Grown. A Tiny Homestead Podcast thanks Chelsea Green Publishing for their support. 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 Andre at Firefly Farm and Mercantile. How are you Andre? I'm great. How are you? I'm good. You're in Wisconsin, right? Yeah. We are located right in the Driftless, right about 25 miles east of La Crosse. 00:29 in a little town called Cashton. You live in one of the most beautiful areas I have ever visited. I have been to the Driftless area, and I can't remember the name of the town I went to, but it was gorgeous there. Yeah, we feel pretty lucky. It's, you know, we moved here, kind of sight unseen six years ago. My wife's like, you sure you wanna move here? We haven't been up to see it yet. And I said, I feel, I'm fine. I'm, you know, it's tired of Texas heat, so. 00:57 Oh, yeah. I'm sure Wisconsin is a big change for you from Texas. It is. I was in Texas for a few years, but I was happy to trade in 110 degree summers, though. Yeah. And honestly, the upper Midwest can get kind of nippy and kind of unbearably muggy, too. But as I say, living in Minnesota, spring and summer and fall are why I tolerate the winters in Minnesota. 01:26 Oh, the Four Seasons are so nice. Growing up in New England, I just loved the Four Seasons. You kind of get in those cycles of things. So as you move around the country, and I've lived in Florida and Alabama and then Illinois, I'll say the Four Seasons, I've always loved the Four Seasons. So. Me too. Where in New England did you grow up? I grew up in Connecticut. Okay, I grew up in Maine, so. 01:53 Hi there, buddy. How you doing? Okay, so tell me about yourself and what you do. Well, Firefly Farmer Mercantile, we have a garden shop and farm out here in Cashton. So my love is gardening. And I would say didn't really plan on starting a garden shop when we moved up here, but just sort of it happened. 02:19 We love just heirloom seeds. That's our specialty. And then kind of garden bulbs for all seasons, whether it's winter or summer, spring, fall, everything in between. We raise our own chickens and we raise our own lamb. So we sell those to a lot of restaurants. We do a lot with herbs. We do a lot, it's more specialty items that we grow for some of our local restaurants. Things that maybe no one else wants to grow or things that are just so small scale. They're like... 02:48 It's not really worth our time. So I'll say we're pretty lucky that a few chefs will seek us out and say, Hey, can you grow me like three pounds of this or five pounds of this? And since we have the seeds, why not? What do you mind telling me what kind of special things you grow for them? Well, I will say that I have a request for the most pungent mustard I could get my hands on. Okay. So our wasabina mustard by High Mowing Organics is perfect for that. It gives you that pungent, that heat. 03:18 We have another one, it's called Southern Curled, and that is another great little mustard too. So that's just an example. We have Red Vein Sorrel going in for a couple places. They wanted to have that for the fall, and that's a fun one. You know, and I'm surprised more people don't grow more of the perennial type greens, just because I think there's such a place and a need for them in the local food restaurants. Yeah, and 03:44 Honestly, perennial things are so much easier than annual things. You plant them, they continue to grow, you do very little, I don't know, babying them typically and you're set for years to come. With annual stuff, you have to get the seeds every year or the seedlings, you got to put them in, you got to do all the work, you got to baby them. And then at the end of the season, you're done. It's so frustrating. 04:12 I say that as not the gardener. My husband is the one who loves to garden. He's a lot like you. And I used to help. I don't help now. I don't like it. I don't enjoy it. I don't like being out there when it's hot. I get headaches from heat. So it's just, it's not fun for me. He loves it. And he's, I've said this a billion times this summer because I'm so frustrated with it. We had terrible weather here this spring and the garden is pretty much a no show. It's, we're not. 04:42 We're not getting nearly as much out of it this year as we have the last three years. And he's been so great. He's been doing what he can with what he has. And he's been terribly sad and terribly frustrated, but he's kept a really good attitude. So I'm

Today I'm talking with Irene at Little Blue's Traveling Zoo. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast thanks Chelsea Green Publishing for their support. 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 Irene at Little Blues Traveling Zoo. How are you, Irene? I'm great, how are you, Mary? I'm good. You guys are in Minnesota, yes? Yes. Okay, I wasn't positive, so I thought I should ask. 00:29 So what do you guys do? Well I have a traveling petting zoo which means that I just take my little crew of farm animals around to different parties. We're normally around the twin cities except kind of the area beyond. But we do like birthday parties, community events, church events, festivals, just kind of whatever anyone would want a petting zoo for. Okay and when did you start doing it? I can't talk this morning. And how did you get into it? 01:00 So my dad actually started it when me and my sisters were in college. Probably about four years ago, he started it, like started the idea of it. Um, and I always called it his mid crisis that he just started a petting zoo cause he thought it would be fun. Um, but I got my degree in agriculture education and so I was going to be a high school agriculture teacher. And I did this for my dad one summer cause it was a lot busier than he thought it would be and he has a full time job. So I did it for him one summer and I decided I actually. 01:29 really loved and I wanted to stick with it. And so now I'm doing all of the management side of it as well. And I love it. It's just so much fun. How much has it grown since you started it? It's amazing how much it's grown. We started out in the fall our first year, and so we only did a couple events that fall, which was a lot of fun, but that's all we did. And then that next summer, I think I did like 15 events a month in the summer, which I was ecstatic about. 01:57 And now fast forward two years, this August actually, I have 39 events in August. It's amazing. I just get busier and busier and we have a second truck trailer now too, so we can do twice the amount of events. So it's just been, it's been a wild ride. Okay. And I don't want to get real personal on finances, but how much does it cost to book you guys? So my base price for two hours is $600. And then I have a trip charge of $1.50 per mile from the farm. 02:28 Okay, so it's a lucrative business if you have that many people booked for August. Yeah, I mean animals sure cost a lot to take care of, but it's able to pay for them and pay for my own living expenses, so I feel very blessed. That's amazing. So you guys don't really have a homestead as it were, but you work with livestock and you have a business that serves the public, so I figured that you might fit the bill for my podcast. 02:58 Um, what kind of animals do you, do you take around to show people? So I take goats, sheep, pigs, turkeys, and then I have an alpaca and a mid sized cow. So I usually take all those animals and then either the alpaca or the cow. And is it just you taking them or do you have help? I help. I have my amazing friend Jordan, who I convinced to move up from, uh, Iowa to stay here and do this job with me. 03:27 And so it's both of our full-time job. Okay. So it's the two of you moving the animals from where they live to wherever they're going. Okay. Cause that's a lot of critters to move by yourself. And are the animals with the program, are they, are they on board? Are they happy? Do they love doing what they do? Do you think? Yes, they really are. Cause we have some who don't love it and they stay at home. 03:52 But we have a bunch that love it. I have in particular this one goat, his name is Mr. Waddles. And when we try to leave the farm without him, he just stands at the gate and he just yells. He is so mad. He does not want to be left behind. They love going out. They love the fresh green grass that they get. And they love directing and meeting new people. Awesome. So when you take them places, where... 04:18 Where are the events usually held? I mean, is it outside? Is it inside? Is it both? Yeah, most of them are outside. I have a strong preference for being outside because then we can get a nice breeze going through and it doesn't get as stuffy. But in the winter I do some indoor events and for the indoor events you have to lay down a tarp and then some shavings and all that stuff for the animals. So I prefer being outside but we do indoor events as well. Okay. 04:44 So tell me about the latest event. Like I want to get a feeling for how it goes, how it works. Yeah, my last event was Kai Ch

Today I'm talking with Monica at The Green Korner. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast thanks Chelsea Green Publishing for their support. 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 Monica at The Green Korner. Good morning, Monica. How are you? Good morning, Mary. I'm doing great. How are you? I'm good. And where are you located again? In Houston, Texas. Okay. I didn't catch any accent. I... 00:29 I could have guessed if there was an accent, but you don't have one. Oh, no. That's because I'm Costa Rican. My family moved into the States 50 years ago. However, I was born in Costa Rica and my parents brought me to the States when I was one year old. Okay, that makes sense. So I have been living in both countries since then. Okay. So you're in Texas. Cool. Yes. All right. So tell me about yourself and the green corner. Yes. 00:57 Like I said, I was brought into the States when I was 12 months. My great grandparents, they used to have tobacco farms. And my grandparents, they used to raise cattle and obviously they used to grow their own food. However, I was not really raised into that environment. And that was way before my time. Just a normal person. You know, I'm a community health worker. 01:26 And then we have the pandemic. And I was bored, quite honestly. I was like, oh my gosh, what am I supposed to do now? And I saw, it was a video, I believe it was on YouTube, about growing pineapples from the store. I'm like, yeah, right. 01:47 little that I knew that was going to be the beginning. I'm like, hmm, let me, you know, just get some pineapples. I started like growing, experimenting. Then I went with bunching onions and name it. So my dining room became a lab. And I'm like, hmm, okay, I'm liking this. So let me just start doing it outside in my backyard. And within a few weeks, I'm like, 02:17 convert my home into an urban homestead. So I redesigned my entire backyard. It's no longer a backyard. It's a mini urban farm. Every single inch, it's a racemate. 02:35 That's how The Green Korner came to life. Yeah, I was gonna say, is that why it's called The Green Korner? That is why it's called The Green Korner because in the early stages, I bought me a green house from Walmart. And it was a mess. I didn't know what I was doing. I was barely learning. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this corner is so green. Because I was upset because then I had ants beneath. 03:04 And I'm like, Green Corner, ooh, I like this name. That's how Green Korner, you know, the name that's where it came from. And then it was with a K because it's very distinctive. It's not like, you know, normal Green Corner. It's a very unique project and that's where the name came from. That's a great story. So. 03:32 I ask everybody this, are you using what you're doing to support the green corner or are you just doing this for you? No, I'm not doing it for me. Actually my vision is to touch as many lives as possible. I want to set an example that if I did it, you can do it. You don't have to have a agricultural degree. You don't have to. 04:02 know much. You can learn on your own and go from there because at the end of the day I believe growing our own food, that's what the future is. Yeah. And I feel like if you can read and you can read directions, anybody can grow produce. Anybody. Oh, absolutely. I watch infinite YouTube videos. 04:28 books, now I'm attending gardening classes in my community, which are free. I mean, the resources are there if you look for them. So my goal is to be another resource to people. Absolutely. And I'm going to do a shameless plug because you gave me a perfect opportunity to do it. My sponsor is Chelsea Green Publishing, and they have so many books about 04:56 just getting started and about growing things and homesteading and all the things that people want to read about. So if you want to go see Chelsea Green Publishing's list of books, it's ChelseaGreen.com. Thank you for giving me an opening, Monica. I appreciate it. You're welcome, Mary. You're the first person that I've actually been able to work that in with. So pineapples, I need to know more about pineapples. How did you... 05:25 How did you do that? Pineapples, you cut the crown, you put them in water, roots will start developing and then you transfer them into soil and after two years, you will get a pineapple, mind you, it has to be an organic pineapple. It has to be an organic pineapple. Now, carrots, please, those videos are not true. You cannot grow carrots from scraps. 05:55 I experimented with all of these hacks that they have. But to me that was

Today I'm talking with Brandon at Beck's Farma. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. As a special bonus for A Tiny Homestead listeners, receive 35% off your total order from Chelsea Green by using discount code CGP35 at check-out!* *This offer cannot be combined with other discounts. For US residents only. 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. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. 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 Brandon at Beck's Farma. Good morning, Brandon, how are you? Good morning, Mary, how are you? I'm great. Where are you located? Well. 00:26 The farm is located in Sauk Center, Minnesota, and I have a sister company that is called Chey En-Alise Canna Bakery, where I sell the oils for my farm in freshly baked pastries located in Minneapolis at 6001 Windale. Okay. Where is Sauk Center? What's the nearest city to Sauk Center? So Sauk Center is about an hour and a half west of Minneapolis and St. Paul on 94. 00:56 St. Cloud in Alexandria, so about 20 minutes from LA. Okay, cool, thank you. All right, tell me about yourself and what you do. Well, that's a long story, so I'm not sure where to begin. I was raised in Minnesota, and I ended up traveling the world for about 16 years, living in Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America. 01:24 And as I began to get older, I realized that I wanted to also have family in my life. And so I made the decision to return to Minnesota. And I kind of came up with the idea that if I was farming, I would be able to spend my summers with family in Minnesota and continue traveling over the winter months. And so I returned to some family land in Sauk Center, Minnesota, and I planted a vineyard in a hop yard. 01:54 and started that dream for about two years. And in 2019, the farm bill legalized hemp, allowing people to grow and to harvest CBD. And that seemed like a good decision for me because the hop yard and the vineyard would take three to five years to develop where with the hemp products, I would be able to 02:23 begin to harvest that fall. I was also really interested in the medicinal benefits as an alternative medicine from CBD and cannabis. I saved my money, quit my job, planted the field in 2019 and had a successful year growing, harvested that fall. The drying process in harvesting takes about two weeks. 02:52 to three months of CBD in the CBD farming. It's a long process, the drawn in and curing before the processing. And so right around the time that was all done, the pandemic had happened. I had gone into growing to be a wholesaler to supply kind of the brick and 03:20 who were selling oils and things like that. And I had had some contracts around the state set up, but when things started to kind of move in 2020, everything stopped moving for me. And so I had to decide what I was going to do with this crop that I'd grown in 2019. And my decision was to have the oil processed and... 03:49 found my own CBD company and began selling products online. And so that was how Bex Pharma started. And I think there was a lot said there, so I'll give you a chance to, and everyone a chance to kind of catch up or ask questions. Uh-huh. Okay. So you pivoted just like a lot of people pivoted in 2020, which is great. I'm glad you had the wherewithal and the opportunity to do that. 04:19 I have questions. I have so many questions because I don't use CBD at all, never have. And so I am like the dumbest person when it comes to hemp, marijuana, any of it. So my first question is, is a hemp plant different from a marijuana plant? Are they the same thing or are they different? So scientifically, they're the same plant. They're both cannabis sativa. 04:48 Legally, they're different because of the contain. So basically hemp is defined as less than 0.3% of delta-9-THC. 05:13 cannabinoid that is found in the cannabis plant and is what is traditionally used when you think of somebody getting high. While the two plants are the same, marijuana is more to get you high and CBD or not CBD but hemp, well that's rich in a cannabinoid called CBD. 05:43 properties because it wasn't until very recently a schedule one drug. It was really difficult for scientists to do clinical research with it because of the restrictions and the costs. But there have been a few studies and those are kind of the only things that I'll talk about as far as making claims for the efficacy of CBD, but there is a 06:13 a lot of benefits that are out there that are just kind of spoken or common knowledge. So things that I won't go over that people seem to really be benefitin

Today I'm talking with Sam at the Civic Garden Center. You can also follow on Facebook. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. As a special bonus for A Tiny Homestead listeners, receive 35% off your total order from Chelsea Green by using discount code CGP35 at check-out!* *This offer cannot be combined with other discounts. For US residents only. 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. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. 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 Civic Garden Center. How are you, Sam? I'm good, Mary. How are you doing? I'm great. I'm so curious to find out about your organization and a little bit about you, so tell me about yourself. 00:30 Yeah, the Civic Garden Center is an organization that's been around for a long time. My role at the Civic Garden Center is the conservation program manager. So our organization as a whole, as I said, we've been around for a while. We were founded in 1942 coming out of the big green gardens movement. So we were teaching people how to grow food at home so that they could send more industrial agriculture overseas for the war effort. 00:57 And we've basically been teaching people how to garden ever since. So our mission is building community through gardening, education, and environmental stewardship. And we really focus primarily on working in urban neighborhoods within the greater Cincinnati area. Food access on issues surrounding conservation on youth education. So we have a pretty wide ranging scope of work. And our. 01:27 The primary focus is the education piece. So we really try to make sure that we're spending as much time as possible training people, teaching people how to garden, how to be self-sufficient, so they can then take those practices back to their home garden, back to a public garden or another community space. And so through that work, you know, we really... 01:51 We try our best to encourage people to get outside and get their hands dirty. And we try to be that resource to come back to so they can keep kind of going down their journey of learning how to, you know, vegetable garden, learning how to work with native plants, whatever kind of their passion or interest may be. We try to be their kind of educational resource for folks in the Cincinnati area. And then within... 02:15 Our organization, my role specifically is focused on our conservation program. So for us, our conservation efforts are really focused on invasive species removal and establishing native habitats. So we work both with private landowners and homeowners, as well as public spaces and the Cincinnati Parks Department to try to kind of... 02:44 our conservation efforts. And so I have the fortune of running our native plant population programming on site where we grow about 4,000 native plants a year and a couple hundred native trees on top of that. So we'll work to educate homeowners through classes to grow native plants. We organize a couple of plant festivals throughout the year where people can come and buy plants from us and we provide some education along with that. 03:14 And then finally, I work with folks on doing species removal, primarily in public land. So at the Instant Sandy Parks, we train volunteers on how to do that removal and how to identify plants and how to work with volunteers so they can lead their own kind of neighborhood efforts doing this work. You have a Native Plant Festival coming up, right? We do. We do. We have our Native Plant Festival. It's the first Saturday after Labor Day. 03:44 here in Cincinnati. It's a really, really fun event. It's one that has been, it's only in its second year right now, but it's been growing really quickly in popularity for us. And we grow plants for that festival and then we also invite other local native plant nurseries to come and sell plants and to really try to get the word out both about the importance of native plants and just try to provide space for the community of people to gather and celebrate native plants. 04:15 Yeah, can you tell me about the importance of native plants? Because I know, but my listeners might not. Yeah, of course. I love to love to talk about this topic. So when it comes to native plants, you know, the importance that we really focus on is first and foremost, the ecological importance. You know, the plants are simply the plants that are indigenous to North America. So they're the plants that naturally evolved and adapted. 04:42 for our climates, our soils, all of the conditions that we have here in North America. And through that process, they developed pretty tig

Today I'm talking with Joel at the Ever Green Burial Company. A little bit of cemetery history, a little bit of psychology, a lot about burial practices and their impact on the environment. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. As a special bonus for A Tiny Homestead listeners, receive 35% off your total order from Chelsea Green by using discount code CGP35 at check-out!* *This offer cannot be combined with other discounts. For US residents only. 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. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. 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 Joel at Evergreen Burial Company, and this is a hyper local episode. Joel is maybe eight miles from me. Good morning Joel, how are you? 00:28 Good morning. I'm doing well. Thank you Good. Um, I'm so excited to talk to you about what this this thing is Because it seems kind of weird to be talking about natural burial practices, but it is Environmentally friendly it is a sustainable practice and that fits with the homesteading genre I guess so tell me about yourself and what you do so well 00:57 First of all, thank you a ton for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about some of this stuff. So, I have been in the funeral industry for it's 27 years now, and I have no idea where the time has gone. And it's taken me a long time to get to where I'm at, but I love what I do. So, my main job is that I work for a, for lack of a better term, it's like a funeral home marketing company. So, we're based out of Mankato. The name of the company is Laker Planning. 01:26 We work with funeral homes throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, kind of the upper Midwest. I do a lot of speaking, public speaking, and doing programs with funeral homes to talk about funeral and cremation options and the benefits of pre-planning funerals. And then another big part of what we do is talk about medical assistance rules and regulations, and that's kind of the boring stuff. But that's my main job. And the last, 01:56 couple of years I've been working with, it's called Traverse Cemetery is the original name. Green Lawn Cemetery is what it's referred to a lot and if you actually Google it or look it up on MapQuest, you have to type Green Lawn to get the name of it. So it's a little cemetery just outside of St. Peter off of County Road 20, about a mile north of town. I've driven by this cemetery. 02:24 a number of times on my way to do seminars. And one day, about two years ago, I swung in there, got out and started walking around. And it just, I don't know how to explain it. I was just drawn to the place and I thought I've got to be able to do something with this. And this would be a perfect cemetery to allow for green burials or natural burials. And I had no idea who to contact. There were 02:54 some numbers on a little old sign outside the cemetery. So I started with that. Anyway, long story short, I got ahold of the president of the board. It's run by a board of directors and his name is Robert Meyer and started talking to Robert about allowing for green burials and what the cemetery has been doing in the past and come to find out that it had been closed for many, many years. 03:23 This is about everything that I've read on this and looked up and can find, and I can't find anything to tell me different, although I have a hard time believing it. It's the second oldest cemetery in the state. A lot of these burials go back to about, you know, like the mid 1800s. There's only about 160 burials, I think, in the cemetery, and it sits on about 10 acres of land. 03:50 So, with talking to Robert, I was so lucky that he is open to the idea of green burial. And we talked on and off for two years before this actually happened. I originally wanted to buy the cemetery, but it was important to him to keep the board in place. Up until this year, the board had, you know, they met once a year. 04:14 All that they've done really for upkeep out there is mow the cemetery three or four times a year and that's about it. So he was anxious to have somebody who was interested in it because as he's getting older, he was wondering who was going to care for the cemetery, you know, someday when he's gone. So the timing was right. He was open to the idea of green burials or natural burials. 04:38 It's something that being in the funeral industry for as long as I have, I've wanted to do something with it, but I didn't really know where to start. This idea isn't for everybody. I know that, but I talked to enough people and enough groups of people to know that there's interest in it, and the

Today I'm talking with Nicole at Little Strawberry Patch Homestead. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. As a special bonus for A Tiny Homestead listeners, receive 35% off your total order from Chelsea Green by using discount code CGP35 at check-out!* *This offer cannot be combined with other discounts. For US residents only. 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. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. 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 Nicole at Little Strawberry Patch Farm or something. She's gonna say it for me. Say it, Nicole. What's your voice again? Little Strawberry Patch Homestead. 00:27 Homestead, yes, I'm so sorry. I have talked to so many people lately and they all end their names in farm or farms or homestead or farmstead. I'm like, which is it? All right, Nicole, you're in New Jersey on a small lot. Tell me all about yourself and what you do. I was born and raised in South Jersey. We are still in South Jersey. We're a little further up in South Jersey. We're in Cumberland County. 00:56 We recently moved here in 21. We have three, three children, three wild children, nine, five and four. And we live on a very small homestead. Basically it's very tiny. It's only 0.40 acres. Okay. And your house and maybe a garage is on that 0.40 acres? There is a, there is a house and a garage. Yep. 01:25 been there done that except we did it on a tenth of an acre so it can be done. It really can and that's crazy. Yeah. A little aside, I was born in New Jersey and my parents moved to Maine when I was six months old so I have no working memory of being in New Jersey but it was at Fort Dix Air Force Base. Oh yeah, that's like an hour and an hour or so from here. Yeah. So I'm... 01:53 I'm not a native Maynard because I wasn't born in Maine, but I might as well be and I'm actually not even there anymore. I'm in Minnesota. So I was a I was a almost native Maynard until I was 21 or 22. And I will never be a native Minnesotan because that's not how it's played out here. I am I'm going to be away and away from person for a long time. Oh my gosh, that's funny. 02:21 Yep. So I never got the Jersey accent. I got the main accent. And then I got it. So I definitely have the Jersey accent majority of the time. It's not as heavy as I thought it was going to be. I was like, oh, she's going to sound like a Jersey girl. And then you started talking about Philadelphia and that's my husband. Okay. All right. Okay. So I just wanted to throw that in there because I think it's interesting. So what are you doing on your 02:50 your little bitty homestead. So we initially had started out when we moved in. I obviously had to have chickens because who doesn't have to have chickens, right? And initially that was just supposed to be like a little fun hobby thing for me. And then I was like, you know, we can get more chickens because that's how it works. You start adding chickens with chicken math. 03:13 And then I was like, well, we can start giving to the neighbors. Like I'd rather give it to them than them go to the grocery store. And this is when the grocery prices for eggs were through the roof. So it was like, yeah, we need to get more chickens. So we've slowly been adding chickens. We only have 10. But we're doing that for eggs. Mostly we have a rooster we might keep. So hopefully we'll have some chicks too. And then maybe we could do meat. I'm not positive. 03:43 quail currently that we just got that we're doing for meat and for eggs. And hopefully we can do offspring with them too. We're doing silver fox rabbits, which we just started this year and we've built them like an outdoor enclosure. We're now going to do a secondary enclosure for them, which is going to be like double what they have. And then we're going to move our pet rabbits outside and we'll use those for. 04:12 meat for our dogs, which is what we've currently been doing with them. And then if anybody wants pets, because they're adorable, they're an option too, if they would like them. And then we also just recently got dogs, which are my new favorite. We had our chicken hatch, two duck eggs, and then we have a duck that's now sitting on like a whole clutch. But we now have four, five, six ducks, adult ducks, and then we have two babies. 04:42 So like overall, we're just like flourishing in the animals and we're starting to now add in like garden stuff. We have fig trees, like two massive ones that everyone loves, animals included. And my husband just recently, we just recently tilled way in the back. So we have corn going and stuff like that. Peas. A

Today I'm talking with Charlotte Smith about Farm Marketing Mindset. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. As a special bonus for A Tiny Homestead listeners, receive 35% off your total order from Chelsea Green by using discount code CGP35 at check-out!* *This offer cannot be combined with other discounts. For US residents only. 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. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. 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 Charlotte Smith. Good afternoon, Charlotte, how are you? I'm good, thank you. Good afternoon to you too. Good, so tell me about yourself and what you do. 00:30 That is a big question. So I live in St. Paul, Oregon, and I've been a farm girl my whole life. As a matter of fact, I went away to college and swore I'd never come back. But then I came back 20 years ago because I wanted my kids to have the same lifestyle. And first of all, started kind of a homestead, milk in my own cow to provide milk for my family. 00:56 And as anyone who has a cow knows, one cow provides milk for like 50 families. So I started selling my milk and had a raw milk dairy at an on-farm store. And then that evolved into about 10 years ago, teaching other homesteaders and farmers and now ranchers to market and sell their products too. 01:25 These are expensive endeavors and it's nice to get some money back, either to pay your costs if you're just a homesteader or if you actually want to make a business out of it. I teach farmers how to do that too. So yeah, I'm a multi-passionate entrepreneur, I like to say. Well multi-passionate is a great thing. 01:55 Perferred in Australia last week and I don't know if you know about her but she does sort of the same thing you do but her focus is women over 40 and helping them find what they're good at regarding homesteading to Make money to help support the homestead. I don't know if you know about her. I don't but this You're slightly different than her number one. You're in Oregon not Australia and 02:24 I just was like, I want to see what your take is on how to make this go, I guess. Sure. Well, absolutely you have to be good at it. What I always say is, what are you passionate about? Because if you are milking cows because you think you need to make money and not because you love it, you're going to be very unhappy and unfulfilled. So... 02:52 I always work with my clients to make sure that yes, they're learning to make money and they are making money at something they love. Sometimes it's just a matter of telling them that yes, you have permission to say you don't enjoy it. Sometimes they're making money at things they don't enjoy because they think they need to keep doing it or need to make money. Yes, so I do similar things. 03:20 Figure out what you love and what you're passionate about, and you can make a profit at it. So, yes, and live a very fulfilling life. All right, that's kinda what I thought. That's why I decided to do a podcast, because I really, really do love it. Yeah, that's wonderful. And people love to talk about what they love. So I was like, I love talking to people. People love talking about what they love to do. 03:50 I'm doing homesteading, I bake, I make crafty stuff. Let's go talk to people who are doing the things that I'm doing. And it's almost a year that I've been doing this and I still love it as much as the first one I did the last week of August last year. I hear you, I hear you, I'm the same way. Yep, it's crazy. I was not a podcast listening girl. I've listened to more. 04:15 podcast from other people in the last eight months than I have ever listened to in my entire life. Because I needed to know how other people are doing it. Mm-hmm. Yeah, you educated yourself, huh? I had to because I was like I have no idea how to do this. I need help. And that's one of the things that I would say is that if you're going to start a business, do the research. 04:41 go look at what other people are doing, find somebody who's doing what you want to be doing and ask them questions. Yeah, or go intern with them. That's my thing. Before I brought home my first milk cow, I spent a year going and visiting other dairy farmers, observing them, actually sitting next to them, milking with them, and you can do that no matter what it is you're doing on your homestead. As a matter of fact, if you do that, you'll save so much money. 05:10 because you will prevent so many expensive mistakes. Yes, and there are so many expensive mistakes to be made. And I don't want to discourage anyone from homesteading life, but just understand that if

Today I'm talking with Madeline at Pleasant Valley Acres. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. As a special bonus for A Tiny Homestead listeners, receive 35% off your total order from Chelsea Green by using discount code CGP35 at check-out!* *This offer cannot be combined with other discounts. For US residents only. 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. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. 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 Madeline at Pleasant Valley Acres. Good afternoon, Madeline, how are you? Good, how are you? I'm good, you're in Oregon, right? 00:27 Yeah, we are in Sweet Home, Oregon, in the Willamette Valley area. What a great name for a town. Yeah. I love that. Okay, so tell me all about yourself and what you do. Oh well, we have been doing just a little bit by a little bit over the last couple of years. I got married to my husband about four years ago. And 00:54 He is not necessarily an animal freak, but I am. So what turned into just a few chickens is now turned into a herd of, I think, eight goats and we raise them for dairy and show and just good milk quality. We raised registered mini limachas. OK, so. 01:17 I have talked to many people about many different kinds of goats, but I haven't talked to anybody about Lamanches and I didn't know there were mini Lamanches. So tell me about your particular color or spice of goat. Tell me about the Lamanches. Well, the Lamanches, the mini Lamanches come from a standard breed of goat called the Lamancha goat. These are just essentially a smaller scale, more economically friendly breed. 01:47 They are small in stature, which means they need less feed, they need less room. Um, but you're getting that small stature of a standard size or a small stature of mini goats with the production of a standard size goat. So for us, it's kind of the best of both worlds. I'm not feeding tons and tons of hay, but I'm getting lots and lots of milk. So, um, they're an earless breed of goat. So. 02:15 People tend to look at them a little weird at first. But we like their characteristics. They're very mellow and easy to work with. Okay, so how big is a standard lemonsha versus a mini lemonsha? It varies because the mini lemonsha go in different generations. So you have your first generation cross, which would be an Iberian dwarf goat and lemonsha. 02:44 I've seen those first generation minis range in size a lot. The farther you get, so the more generations of that mini La Mancha, I'd say that they don't usually get more. Like the doughs stay around 100 pounds maybe. Bucks getting closer to 125. Your standards are, I think the doughs are about 150. 03:13 125 to 150 pounds for your standard La Mancha does. And your bucks are pushing close to 200. And I could be wrong, but they're depending on the lines of that standard size goat, they are pretty big. I've seen some of the La Mancha bucks be huge. 03:34 Okay. It's really funny. I feel like my podcast varies from psychology to philosophy to science to chemistry to genetics on whatever day I'm talking to whoever I'm talking to. I just talked to a lady the other day and we're talking about genetics and I can't remember what it was about right now, but got a full genetics lesson from her and 04:02 I thanked her and I wasn't being a smart ass. I actually was really excited to hear about how that particular thing worked. With the Lamanches, what they're talking about, genetics play a huge part. I'm going to relate sort of the same story I related to her to you. Our dog is a mini Australian Shepherd and she weighs about 35 pounds. 04:31 standard Australian Shepherd and supposedly smaller breed dogs, but I have to look into that because I'm not sure and Our dog looks exactly like a black tri Australian Shepherd except that she is 35 pounds now Technically because I've been doing some research. She might actually just be a small standard Australian Shepherd because she's tall and she's right at the weight 05:02 edge of not being a mini. However, her mama was only about 25 pounds and her dad was probably 40 to 45 pounds. So it's all crazy to me how genetics are bred into animals to get what you want. And even then sometimes it doesn't quite work out that way. Yes. Yeah. And that's kind of the... 05:27 you know, the toss up with breeding, you try to pair your best genetic quality to get a better kid than their mom is. But sometimes it doesn't work out that way and you still get like a little curve ball here and there. And you know, that's okay. You can work with the curve balls most of the time. But yeah. 05:53 you w

Today I'm talking with Tamara at Windy River Eco Farm. You can follow along on Facebook as well. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. As a special bonus for A Tiny Homestead listeners, receive 35% off your total order from Chelsea Green by using discount code CGP35 at check-out!* *This offer cannot be combined with other discounts. For US residents only. 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 comprises entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. 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 Tamara at the Windy River Eco Farm in Big Lake, Minnesota. Good morning, Tamara, how are you? Good morning. Big Lake, Minnesota, right? That is right. 00:29 Okay, you're about two hours northwest of me, I think. More north than west. Yeah, we're an hour from Minneapolis, half hour from St. Cloud. Yeah. Yeah, you're a little bit of a distant, but we're in the same state. Yeah. That's awesome. So tell me about what you do, Tamara. Well, at this point, I just do CSA shares, and they are all member choice. So I don't do boxes. I let them pick out their items by 00:59 I call it buffet style. And the only other thing I'm selling off of, outside of that is garlic. I started selling garlic off my website last year mostly for planting. And I've stopped selling at markets and I've stopped selling to the store and things like that. I don't sell anything off the farm. I just streamlined and just do CSA. But I also do, I'm a registered cottage food producer. And so I do. 01:29 Make various cottage foods that I offer with the CSA as well, and I do sometimes sell those locally if I can So that is what I'm doing. I do work, you know minor part-time job And then the CSA I have I have enough I grow one acre and in that I could do 45 to 50 families a week at the best Yeah, you know in my best shape and the garden's best shape with the most members I can get 01:58 Um, but right now I just have, I think only about 25 this year per week. It's a little bit down. So, Well, I'm very impressed that you managed to have produce for that many people this year after the freaking spring we just had. It actually didn't affect me very much because, um, we are in the sand and I like that and so I had no problems at all this spring with the, um, 02:25 with the extra amount of rain that we've had. It's been really nice actually. Well, you are lucky because we are not doing so great here. We decided last winter that we weren't going to offer a CSA this year, we have for the last three years. And I'm really glad we didn't offer it because we would have had nothing to give anyone until probably two weeks from now. That's a real, real bad way to run a CSA. Yeah, that would be. Yeah. 02:54 I know I have heard a lot of that. I grew up with my grandma's farm and where my dad farmed. It was in the clay out in Eastern Minnesota and there was always a tractor getting stuck or you can't get into this field or whatever. And I ended up settling in the Monticello area between Monticello and Big Lake for the last 30, 40 years. And it's sandy here 03:24 you know, there's some problems with that, but I like it. And so when we were moving to our own land, I decided definitely to stick with the sand and it definitely has problems, but I don't have to worry about a wet year or a wet spring. And I can get in as soon as the snow melts, I can start planting. The perennials are very, very slow, but it does have its advantages on a wet season. Yeah, yep, absolutely. 03:53 Your produce looks amazing. I was looking through the pictures on your Facebook page and I was like, I'm so jealous. I want to go visit her just to see some really nice produce. Thank you. But I'm sure that if you visited for real, you'd see a lot of bad things because, yeah, you always take pictures of the good things. And I always say to, I have really small hands. I'm not a very big person. And so when you have small hands, your produce always photographs really well and it looks huge. So that's like a little trick. But yeah, I. 04:22 I mean, some things do well and I have a lot of experience now, but there's always good and bad things. I think people need to recognize that there's good and bad out there. And any day you're going to see something good and you're going to see something that makes you happy and then something that on the next bed over even that makes you sad and depressed because it doesn't look very good and you wonder why. And then you'll feel like you really know what you're doing and then five minutes later you'll feel like you really don't know what you're doing. 04:52 That is farming. It sure i

Today I'm talking with Aaron and Julia at The Canny Couple. You can follow along on Facebook as well. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. As a special bonus for A Tiny Homestead listeners, receive 35% off your total order from Chelsea Green by using discount code CGP35 at check-out!* *This offer cannot be combined with other discounts. For US residents only. 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. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. 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 Aaron and Julia at The Candy Couple. Good afternoon, guys. Hello. Thanks for having us. Yeah. 00:26 So tell me about what you do because from your Facebook page and your website, it looks like you're very much content creators. So tell me what about what you do. Yeah, we, we do content creation. We do podcasting. Um, it's really all comes to how we live a homesteading, frugal lifestyle. Yeah. And it all we've considered all underneath the candy couple. Like we have different. 00:55 side hustles things we do on the side, but in our mind, everything falls underneath the candy. It does. So the candy couple is the umbrella that covers everything you do. Okay, cool. We do a little bit of everything. Okay, so do you have a homestead or how does it work? Yes. Yeah, so we do. We have a small, we're a small homestead family. We have 25 acres. 01:23 Most of it is wood and mountainous areas. So we, we, we, we considered a small homestead because we don't have much real usable land unless we were to clear some of the forest out, which we don't have any plans of doing. Right. So, but we do have a small homestead. We do a lot of gardening, animals, poultry, mostly is what we focus on, on our homestead. And 01:52 Where it's really working every single day to be more self-reliant, self-sufficient. We do have a pretty extensive orchard. I guess you would call it. Most people call it an orchard that we are cultivating and working through. Okay. Tell me again where you guys are. So we are in rural Southwest Virginia. We're closer to the Tennessee line than anywhere else. So, um, like most of our trips. 02:20 involves going into Tennessee. And I know there's a lot of homesteaders in Tennessee areas. So we're always at least there usually at least every other week. Yeah, I was going to say you sounded more Tennessee than West Virginia. So it's mountain. It's a mountain accent. It's what somebody told me once and it made sense. It's just one of those, but it's not West Virginia where we live in Virginia, not West Virginia. We're just like in the south. 02:49 western part of Virginia. Oh, okay. Sorry, I misheard you. That's okay. Yeah, your accent is beautiful. There are some southern accents and I'm like, I can't understand it. And you guys is just gorgeous. Oh, thank you. I'm big on accents. Part of the reason I love doing the podcast is I get to hear a different accent almost every day. It makes me so happy. That is true. It is. Yeah. So do you guys... 03:18 I asked this of everybody homesteads don't be offended. Do you guys try to make what you do on the homestead support the homestead financially? Are you just more about being self-sufficient? So our goal is to have the homestead help support us financially. Um, with our tree crops, because that's kind of where our big focus was at the beginning of our journey was to work on our perennial systems. We look at everything through the lens of we are going to get older. 03:48 And everything takes a lot of really good systems take a long time to put into place. And we have experience on our property of these six apple trees and they produce a great crop for us. We eat them, we use them, we can them. And we wanted to have a lot more of that, but we're also hoping to eventually sell a lot of that produce and things like that. But that's a ways down the road. If I had it to do over again, I would probably put in more. 04:18 um, berry crops because it has a faster turnaround. Mm-hmm. Yep. And that could also still happen. We do have some property we could cultivate. Um, but it's just, that is like a five year plan, not a right now plan. Okay. You said apple trees. How, how did the apples do in the South? Because I'm up North in Minnesota. I'm a Yankee and, uh, our apple trees go dormant about October. 04:46 And they're asleep until at least April. So how does that work in Virginia? I'm sorry. That's the same one. So ours, usually we have, so we got, it's an old red delicious, old yellow delicious that we had. Um, these trees have been here almost, I guess, 40 years now. So they're older trees, that

Today I'm talking with Andrea and Renata at Tandi Family Farms. You can follow along on Facebook as well. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. As a special bonus for A Tiny Homestead listeners, receive 35% off your total order from Chelsea Green by using discount code CGP35 at check-out!* *This offer cannot be combined with other discounts. For US residents only. 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. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. 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 Andrea and Renata at Tandy Family Farms. How are you girls? We're good. What's going on? How are you? Good. I'm great. You're in California? Yes, California. 00:29 Like where? California is a big state. Yeah, the San Francisco Bay area, specifically San Leandro. Okay, cool. Yeah, and I'm in Minnesota, so I'm a long ways away from you guys. So tell me about yourselves and what you do. So we're brand new. We launched everything that we're doing in May. 00:54 Kind of in honor, not kind of, but in honor of my grandfather who was a farm to table chef. Mm-hmm. Okay. And so what are you doing? Well we are forming a nonprofit organization. We're almost have that set. And we are currently spending our time helping people set up gardens in their spaces, whether that be a backyard or... 01:22 In one case, an apartment complex, community garden, but we are in the process of fundraising and looking to get a piece of land, hopefully in the near-ish future. But of course, that depends on funding. To have a teaching farm, which will be a regenerative farm, as well as a place to teach from, so a farm and farm school. So we're in the early stages. 01:53 That's where we are now. Okay. So a teaching farm. So like anybody, any age or kids or grownups or what? Everyone. Anyone willing to learn and wanting to learn about how to sustainably grow your own food and how to cook the food that you grow. I love that because usually farm school is about growing food. It's not necessarily about what you do with the food that you grow. Yeah. 02:20 And it's really important to use that food you grow because there's a lot of work that goes into it. There is a lot of work and patience. Mm-hmm. And it's so good for you. We have a farm-to-market garden that we grow. And it's looking real sad this year because we've had a lot of rain. But I did manage to eke out four cucumbers so far. And oh, my god, they're so good because of the rain. Go fig. 02:49 It's terrible growing conditions, but cucumbers love water. Yeah. Yup. It's a hard job growing food and I don't grow the garden my husband does, but I have helped him in years past and it's hard work. It's dirty work and it's such good work. Yeah. We love getting dirty and we love hard work. 03:16 So it's a great combination. Yeah. So why did you guys exactly start to do this? You mentioned your father? My grandfather. Grandfather, yes. Tell the story. So my Nono, so we are Italian. My Nono John or Giovanni Tandi, he's a first generation Italian American. And his family. 03:45 They come from a little province in Italy called Genoa, and more specifically, Appicella. And their vocation, they were farmers. So something that's kind of cool is that my great grandfather, Angelo Tandi, he brought with him these green beans. And they're an Italian broad green bean. And they've been in our family. 04:12 for over 100 years and they're currently growing in three of the Victory Gardens or community gardens that we've started. So they're literally heirloom vegetables. Yes, literally, yeah, literally heirloom vegetables. I love that, oh, you make me so happy. Yeah. Stories like this just make my heart too big for my chest. That's great. One thing, oh, sorry. Go ahead. 04:40 Oh, one thing that Andrea maybe didn't mention is that he, he passed this year. And so we've had this dream of launching this farm for a while now. And it was just kind of like the, the motivation or just the, the oomph we, we had to, this is the time, um, you know, to do it in his honor. Um, so, but it is a dream we've had for a long time. It just, it just kind of felt like it's the time is now. Right. Yep. 05:10 And I made the decision to leave public education after 22 years, the last 10 being an elementary school administrator. And yeah, this has been a healing process and it's like a passion too. 05:31 Fantastic. So it's non-profit. So does that mean that you won't be charging for the classes or does that just mean the money goes right back into the business? Goes right back into the business. Okay. Yeah. And currently how our, what we call little

Today I'm talking with Kate Herford at New Generation Homesteader - Homestead Business with Kate. You can follow along on Facebook as well. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. As a special bonus for A Tiny Homestead listeners, receive 35% off your total order from Chelsea Green by using discount code CGP35 at check-out!* *This offer cannot be combined with other discounts. For US residents only. 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. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. 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 Kate again from New Generation Homestead. Good evening, or good morning, Kate, how are you? I'm very well, thank you, Mary. 00:26 The reason I said again is because Kate and I recorded a podcast episode months ago and my platform ate it. It's gone. I can't find it. So Kate was kind enough to come back and chat with me again. So Kate, you have been on vacation, right? Oh yes. Yes. I took three weeks. My partner was part of a support crew for an off-road. 00:54 racing event up in central Australia, if anyone knows where Australia at all is rock, or they call it Uluru. And up near there, there was an off-road race that's held once a year. And I thought, well, if you're going, I'm going too, not going to miss out. And so we spent three weeks touring up to central Australia and then around Uluru and the gorges and that sort of 01:24 which is a very off-road track in central Australia as well. It was a lot of fun. Good, I'm glad you had a chance to maybe let down a little bit, because I know you're really busy with your business. So, tell me about yourself and what you do at New Generation Homesteader. Okay, so I am a mom of two boys, and then I'm stepmom to three. So we've had five kids in the house at various times. 01:52 And I started New Generation Homesteader during the COVID lockdowns because I realized that we need to be more in control of our own food supply. So I started gardening and wanting to connect with people who had the same values as me. And it took me ages to find the word homesteader. And then when I did, I went, oh my gosh, this is where I want to be. I've been a business coach for a number of 02:22 Just my niche had changed a little bit, but nothing really set my soul on fire. And when I came to the homesteading area and I started looking up all the different homesteading pages and YouTubers and that sort of stuff, I went, oh, these people have the same values as me. But what I did find was a lot of people were really exhausted and burnt out and they're really struggling to make ends meet. And I thought, well, as a business coach, how can I help? 02:52 And the new generation homesteader was born because it's about getting back to the old ways of doing things and that's your homesteading and being more self-sufficient. But looking at earning an income in the new space, which is in that digital space, creating a course or a membership. At the moment I've got a resale rights program which actually teaches women how to create their own digital business and you know it's very quick and easy to set up. 03:21 So I just wanted to go down that path because the whole idea is to relax and have that time in the homestead. And if you've got little kids to be able to do that without really stressing about the bills and all the costs associated with homesteading, it was like, well, how can I help people to start their own digital business and bring in money even when they're sleeping? And so the new generation homesteader, doing things the old way. 03:51 but earning money the new way as well. Yeah, I didn't ask you this last time. How did you get into being a coach? Look, many years ago, I started up doing Tupperware when I was traveling Australia with my ex-husband and when my boys were one and three. And it was 2008, the global financial crisis hit and I'd taken two years leave from my job 04:21 my ex-husband had just got a redundancy. And so the financial crisis hit and we lost quite a bit of money and I had to, you know, work as we were traveling. There's a whole story wrapped in around that that's quite trauma based in that I wanted to have that experience with my kids, but I didn't. I ended up working government jobs and doing Tupperware on the side. And I love the Tupperware. 04:50 It was with women and it gave me a sense of purpose and they lifted me up. But when we got home, I got back into other government jobs and then the marriage broke down and I just realized I wanted more and you know, someone offered me, uh, uh, it was a opportunity for a health product and I took tha

Today I'm talking with Rachel at WhoopsyDaisy Farm. You can follow along on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee - https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 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 Rachel at WhoopsyDaisy Farm, I think is the name of your place, right? Yes. Okay. I have, there are so many endings to people's names, farm, homestead, farmstead. I'm like, which is it? 00:27 How are you? And tell me about yourself. I'm doing great. So yes, we are WhoopsyDaisy Farm. We are an eight and a half acre homestead in central Kentucky. And we raise dairy sheep. Very nice. If I sound a little flustered, it's because I, you are the ninth episode I have recorded this week alone. Oh my goodness. Yeah. So it's been, it's been crazy. I've talked to a lot of people this week. I've made 00:55 As of now, nine new friends. It's been really fun. Well, awesome. All right. So, um, where are you again? We're in central Kentucky. Okay. And do you have a big sheep raising operation or a small one or how does this work? Well, we have 30 sheep. So some people say, oh my goodness, that's a ton. And other people say, oh, that's it. You're a micro farm. So it kind of depends, um, on what your perspective is. Uh, I mean, it's, it's. 01:25 It's a mid-sized sheep operation, I would say. It seems like, again, you either own hundreds or thousands of sheep or you own four. I mean, there's not really a lot of middle ground in the sheep industry from my experience. So yeah, we're on the smaller range. We're larger for a homestead dairy operation, but we actually raise two different kinds of sheep. And so that's why we have so many. So we, yeah, we raise. 01:52 We raise dairy crosses and then we raise purebred Gulf Coast natives. So like we have a ram flock of at least five rams at all times so that we have genetic diversity for both types of sheep. Awesome. So tell me how you got into this because raising sheep is not something you just go, I think I'm going to get a couple of sheep and raise them. Especially not wool breeds in America today. So my... 02:18 Origins with sheep were when I was growing up in New Mexico, my best friend's mom had a fiber store and they owned two sheep, two llamas, and 18 Angora rabbits. And they harvested all the fiber, they processed it themselves, they spun it and they would either sell the yarn or they would knit clothing and sell those. And then, you know, they ordered either wool from other shepherds or they got yarn from other yarn outlets and they sold it in their store. 02:48 I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. So I always wanted to have some wool sheep just so I would have quote sheep yarn unquote in my backyard. But it wasn't really something I thought you could sustainably do, you know, during your working years. This was going to be like hobby farm when we retired that kind of thing. And then between high school and college, I went to Romania on the mission field and I tasted sheep milk cheese for the first time there. And I 03:16 never heard of sheep as a dairy animal, but the cheese was absolutely amazing. And then when I was in college in Louisville, I went to this little Russian grocery store and they would import sheep cheese from Bulgaria and that was always my favorite kind too. So I kind of had in the back of my mind of, you know, okay, well, I'll have sheep when I retire for wool and milk. And so then 03:40 You know, I got married to my husband and he had a major health crisis after he donated bone marrow right after we got married. And so we started seeing a nutritional therapist. I got my certification in nutritional therapy. I started learning about, you know, all the nuances of the food industry of our country and the medical industry. And we found out about Joel Salatin. And my husband was like, well, I want to farm like Joel Salatin. 04:10 thing he was actually passionate about after getting so sick. So I was like, well, let's get a farm then. Because if you're chronically ill, that's what you do. You go get a farm. Sure. Why not? That'll help. So we got a foreclosed property and Joel Salatin says put animals on your property right away. So we got the chickens because that's what you're supposed to do. And we were trying to do a pasture poultry operation, but in Kentucky, everyone still raises chickens. 04:41 corner of the world where everyone has little gardens every summer, everyone has chickens, everyone kind of gives you eggs in the spring or whatever. Like we haven't had a garden the last couple of years for a variety of reasons. And I mean, I don't miss it because people give us produce because they just have it. So all that be

Today I'm talking with Janet at Legacy Farms. You can follow along on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee - https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 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 Janet at Legacy Farms. How are you, Janet? I'm doing well, Mary. And you're in New York, right? I am. I'm just south of Buffalo, New York. Okay. So I'm going to ask my usual question. How is the weather in New York? 00:29 Well, right now it's hot and muggy, but true to form, Buffalo is known for its snowy winters. So anytime I say I'm from Buffalo, people go, oh, you get a lot of snow. Yeah, yeah, we do. It's lake effect snow, right? Right. So there's been multiple times where. 00:59 We've opened the door and there's six feet of snow out there, seven feet. Blizzards that take power out. Um, yeah, there's, there's been a lot of fun times in snowmen. Yeah. I'm in Minnesota. I feel your pain. And I'm going to say it again. We didn't get a lot of snow last year. We got a foot total for the entire winter, which is highly unusual. Uh, us too. In fact, I think it had. 01:28 something to do with it wasn't cold enough to kind of kill off the bad bugs. So right now we're in like a very buggy kind of season. And it's so the weather does play an effect on crops and how many flies I have to swat. And yeah, so I almost wish it was a colder winter. 01:58 We would be. We would have a lot less bugs. Yes. And part of the reason that I ask about the weather when I talk to people is because weather impacts everything we do when we grow produce. So it's kind of a way for me to gauge where we were at at this time when I listen to it back next year. Yep. And I mean, I'm not going to post on my Facebook wall every day what the weather is when I get up because that would get real old real quick. 02:27 And I'm not sure that Facebook would feed me back that particular memory anyway. So, so it's just a good running tally on what the weather has been doing all over the U S so that's why I ask if anybody's curious. Um, so tell me about yourself and what you guys do at legacy farms. Well, I, um, that's a great question. I decided that I want to leave a legacy behind. I have four wonderful children. Um, 02:56 They're 22, 15, 10, and 11. And I realized a while ago that my children did not have the upbringing and background and work ethic and all of the little nuances that my grandparents raised me with. I was able, I grew up canning and sewing and knitting. 03:26 spinning wool and it was a really nice family dynamic and I wanted to bring that back for my children and try to educate them on homesteading and permaculture and self-sufficiency. They, especially with COVID, video games became 03:56 Hmm, a really, for lack of a better term, just an obnoxious thing for them to spend their time with when we couldn't go out or do things. And I, for the past several years, I made it my life's mission to just buy a farm on my own, a single mom, and try to get my children these ethics and morals that 04:25 I grew up with and I wanted to instill that education onto them. I want to leave behind a legacy so that my children and my community can be better off homesteading, knowing the homesteading basics, understanding some basic principles of farming and self-reliance. There's a lot of kiddos in the community. 04:55 I mean, we know that there's drugs out there. It happens in the city. It happens in the country too. We know that there's kiddos that come from broken homes that might not have a mom and or dad. And I don't know about you, but there's been days, weekends where I've like, okay, kiddos, what do you wanna do today? And we can only go to the splash pad so often or the park, but I wanted to be on the map. 05:24 is something, a place where moms or dads could check and say, Oh, well, Legacy Farms is open to the public. Why don't we go there and ride a horse or milk a cow or have a, you know, pet the chickens or pick some flowers or learn what classes are open for what days and I want I wanted to give the community something too. 05:53 And that's really where it started. And I will tell you, my 15 year old really kind of started it. And I'll tell you how, because he is, first of all, I think he's gonna be a salesman or he's so personable. But Bradley and I were watching YouTube videos and he and I were watching how, 06:23 young woman and she goes Garlic is the mortgage lifter crop And he goes mom, you know if we just buy some garlic and plant it you can take those bulbs pick them Pick them apart every clove turns into another bulb. He goes mom. This is a no-brainer We could sell this even if it's 20 30 plus dollars a pound This

Today I'm talking with Dena at Little House in the Woods. You can follow along on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee - 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 Dena at Little House in the Woods. Good morning, Dena. How are you? I'm great, thank you. How are you? I'm good. So where are you in the great state of Maine? I am about midway. I'm probably central Maine. 00:29 Harmony, I don't know if anybody's ever heard of Harmony, but that's where we are. We're about 20 miles from Skowhegan. Oh, okay, yep. I know where Skowhegan is. I grew up in Maine, so I am very familiar with the landscape. I figured you were. Yeah, so tell me about what you do. Actually, Little House in the Woods is a domain name that I have had for many years, and I just started using it for my website. I actually grew up in a little house in the woods. 00:59 And we grew up about a mile from any neighbors with no power, no none of the amenities whatsoever. When you said run and get some water, you meant grab a bucket and run for it. And that's what we did for a long, long time. It was a great way to grow up. It was wonderful. I can't even imagine growing up the way the kids do now. But my mother did everything. All our meals were cooked on a wood-cooked stove. She would 01:29 phenomenal lifestyle. When I met my husband, we started running an off-grid sporting camp for bow hunters only. And that was more of the same kind of lifestyle. And that was fun, meeting people from all over the place. Our children enjoyed it because they got quite an education from the different people and the different walks of life and the things that they did. And just in the last... 01:56 I know it doesn't sound recent, but in the last 20 years, we've moved to where we are now and our kids are grown. We have grandkids and it was time for us to do something else. My husband is working on his own website and I decided to get this one up and going and I make baskets. I hand weave baskets, pack baskets are my favorite. It's something satisfying about doing them, I guess. And I like working on a bigger project. I've sold. 02:26 I can't even begin to count how many over the years. I started doing it where we previously lived because there was seriously nothing else to do. But I mean, it's good and it's a cathartic process. So I really enjoy it. I have a lot of crafty things that I do. I knit, I crochet, I weave on a loom, I weave baskets. I used to make a lot of soap. I like to bake bread from scratch. I got all that stuff from my mom, make donuts. 02:54 My daughter is the same way. She's in her 40s and has kids of her own. And we just live out in the country and live each day as it comes. I work on my website to get things done and ready and trying to decide the best next thing to put on there that people may be interested in. Fun, so much fun. So you're an original off-gritter. Yes. And you work with your hands all the time. 03:24 Yes. How did you learn to make the baskets? I saw the pictures on Facebook. They are stunning. Thank you very much. I actually learned where we lived before was in Jackman. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's right on the Canadian border and it's in the Moose River Valley. It's a very small town. It's very insular. There's not much there, but my husband's job took us there. So I... 03:51 As I said, I had to do something besides work and take care of my children. So there was an adult ed class for basket weaving and this wonderful lady taught us how to do it. And she's after the second class, she says, well, you're already way beyond me. She says, you're just natural. I said, well, I just love doing it. I don't use any molds or anything. Everything that I do, they'll never be too alike because I do it all from feel and hand and just the way I like the looks of it. 04:21 I write a lot of my own patterns, but it was fun. We did her class for like six weeks and by the end of it, I was totally hooked. I have been doing it off and on ever since. The off part, I had had a pretty serious shoulder injury where I kind of tore it all apart and had to have surgery. That kept me down for over a year, but I have learned how to compensate for my arm not working quite right. I'm back at it. 04:50 Loving it. Okay, so what are the materials that you use to make your baskets with? I use reed. It is the inner bark of the rattan tree. Okay. And it does not come from the United States, unfortunately, but it is a wonderful fiber. There are many fibers here that you can use, and a lot of the native tribes will use ash, which they cut the tree, pound the tree, get the stri

Today I'm talking with Codi and Michelle at More Than Farmers. You can follow along on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee - https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprises entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Codi and Michelle at Not Just, or More Than Farmers is the name of your place, sorry. How are you guys? We're good, how are you? I'm good, I thought it was Not Just Farmers, but it's actually More Than Farmers. So, tell me about yourselves and what you do. 00:29 You want to go ahead, Michelle? Oh, you can start. Yeah, so we homestead on about 5 and 1 1 half acres. For the past, it's been about 10 years now. And we have our own milk, eggs, beef, chicken. We raise our own vegetables, berries, working on fruit trees. I mentioned milk. This is about the first time anybody's hearing about this. But we're working on the process of switching 00:59 a cow to possibly getting sheep in the future. So that's all in the process right now. But that's kind of what we do here. We've got four children and just trying to live the homestead dream. Yeah. We also have a YouTube channel called More Than Farmers and we have an Instagram account and we create content full-time teaching other people how to do what we're doing. So awesome. You are doing great things. So 01:24 Is all this all the food that you grow or produce is that for you guys or do you use it to help support the homestead? It is just for us at this point. So when we had first started we had dreams of building More of a farm business where we would actually be like selling products and stuff um We got to we got through the realization that It was going to kind of either be One or the other as far as either we were going to have to go all in 01:53 on growing food to sell or we're going to have to back off because that in-between stage of trying to grow some food to sell and still trying to hold down a full-time job and stuff like that, that's a really tough stage to be in. So we ended up backing off on the food production, just growing food for ourselves. And then that's when we started our YouTube channel. Yeah, we did Farmers Market for quite a long time. We had an egg business where we sold eggs to... 02:20 a restaurant, we sold eggs to a kind of like a butcher shop near us. We really enjoyed those things to some extent, but also for the small scale that we were at, that we were on, it just didn't, it wasn't quite worth it. Codi had a full-time job the whole time, so I was the one who was at home trying to do all the gardening and washing hundreds of eggs every week. 02:50 pretty much tanked after my third baby. And so we really just had to back off. We realized that the food production wasn't the kind of work that I was going to thrive on. And then plus we also wanted to homeschool our kids. And that adding that to the workload of the gardens and everything was just too much. So we really took a step back and just started focusing on growing our own food. And then yeah, eventually 03:19 Codi was able to come home from his job and we did the content creation, but we've never made a full-time income just from selling stuff on our farm. Okay. So, you said you started this 10 years ago and both of you sound really young, so how old were you when you started? So I would have been 24, Michelle would have been 23. Okay, so you were babies. You're babies. Yeah. So what? 03:47 Why did you want to do this in the first place? So Michelle grew up with some kind of farm-ish background. We both grew up in the Mennonite culture, but she was in more kind of a conservative group where like canning and things like that were just part of the culture. I didn't grow up quite so much in that. I was actually a skater punk when I was younger. 04:14 I did grow up in the country though I had a horse. I did and do enjoy the country life. But I had no intentions or dreams or anything of becoming a farmer. But I had some really bad teeth problems after a while. I just ate lots of junk food, did not care about how healthy I was eating and stuff. I had a lot of teeth problems. Somebody gave me a book. It was called Cure Tooth Decay. In there, it talked a lot about like... 04:44 the way you eat affects how healthy your teeth are. And it kind of was like a kick in the pants. And that kind of started it, just the desire for the healthy food. So we actually started like buying some bulk foods. We were living in a basement apartment at the time, but we were buying some bulk foods. We did a little bit of canning. We garden at a friend's house and at Michelle's parents' house. Started doing a little bit of that stuff here and there. 05:11 And then somewhere i

Today I'm talking with Kay and Courtney at Homestead Bakes. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee - 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 Kay and Courtney at Homestead Bakes. Good morning, ladies. How are you? Good morning. I wasn't sure who gets top building. Billing. Geez, I can't talk this morning. I wasn't sure. 00:27 who gets top billing, so I just read it from the order on my screen. Sure. All right, ladies, tell me about what you do at Homestead Bakes. 00:39 Well, so we're two local moms. We're both Sane Hole moms and we decided to start baking out of our homes. So we're cottage bakers. And we mainly started because we both have small children and we cook on a regular basis and we bake on a regular basis. But we wanted to start focusing more on nutrition for our children and our families. 01:09 And bread was just something that we consumed every day. When we noticed one of our store bought bread that we actually paid a lot of money for, didn't grow mold for weeks on out, we sort of kind of came together and decided we have to change. We have to change something and try to make something from scratch that's nourishing and healthy and clean. And bread was that common thread that she and I both had. 01:38 And we came to Instagram locally within our town to see if anybody was willing to teach us. Because you know, as you know, sourdough is very popular now. It's on trend. And you see it on Facebook and Instagram everywhere on how to make it. But with so much information out there, we really didn't know where to start. And... 02:03 Luckily, a local baker around here, she was willing to teach us. So then once we were taught, we just couldn't stop baking. That's pretty much like how we got started. And Courtney and I, we've always talked about wanting to start a business, wanting to do something to contribute to our households, especially with us being stay at home moms. We needed another creative outlet. 02:31 to help us get through the day, get our mind going in different ways. And other than just being a mom and being a cottage baker and being able to kind of dictate our own schedules with baking, it just all came together. And here we are. Very nice. I know what you mean about... 03:00 the needing something to make your brain work when you're a mom, when you're a stay-at-home mom. My favorite part of having my babies was that first couple of weeks when they're brand new newborns and you're exhausted all the time and you just cocoon in for a couple of weeks and you just do what the baby needs and you sleep as much as you can. And if you have older kids too, it gets harder to do that cocooning. But when I had my first baby, my only daughter. 03:30 That first two weeks was the most beautiful time of my life. But as she got older, I was like, I can only wash so many clothes and wash so many dishes and back in the floor so many times before I'm going to go insane. And so I found things to do. I read a lot because it was the only thing I could do at the time to feed my brain. And so yeah, it's being a mom is, is an honor, but it also will drive you. 03:59 to insanity if you don't have something more than that. I'm like, well, the class didn't talk about the potty issues, right? Yep. I'm like, how can that be? There's just so many ways that the potty issues come up and we're just discussing potty. We know that you're a parent when you're starting to refer restrooms as potty, right? It doesn't go away. 04:26 I still to this day if I'm like honey I need to go to the bathroom I say potty because it's so ingrained in you and I'm 54 my oldest kid is 34 so it's never gonna go away guys sorry and I'm gonna say something that's probably not popular I'm not a big sourdough fan I know lots of people love it and good on you for making it yay team sell it to whoever wants to buy it 04:54 I can't, I don't love it because of that tang that it has. However, I'm really weird because I do like rye bread. So it's one of those to each their own things, I think. We've kind of found out that there's a lot of nuance to sourdough and it's really not, you know, there's so many ways to do it. And you can actually manipulate the sourness in the bread. 05:18 found, you know, we can make it more sour or less sour, depending on, you know, the different techniques that you use. Basically, the longer you keep it in the fridge to cold ferment is how you develop that more sour flavor. Okay. So, we've kind of come to a happy medium. I think we've found a good spot where our customers really like our sourness of our bread that it's not too sour. And some people like it more sour and t

Today I'm talking with Troy at Homesteading-ish. You can follow on Facebook as well. Homesteading-ish is a conference for new or current homesteaders. "Do you want to learn how start your own homestead? Already have a homestead property and need some extra help? We're bringing the homestead community together. Real people, real life homestead experience, all in one place, learning and living out dreams." Use coupon code HOMESTEAD24 to get $10.00 off admission price 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 Troy at Homesteading-ish. Tell me about Homesteading-ish. Why is it called that? So it's Homesteading-ish is kind of an acronym. It's homesteading in search of help. So the ish is an acronym. 00:29 And it was really, obviously the homesteading movements is really taken off here in the last several years and there's a lot of conferences and those things popping up. But here in West Virginia, we have not had one yet. So we thought, well, this will be a great opportunity to kind of do an inaugural conference here in the state. You get in these mountainous states, homesteading becomes a little bit more of a challenge in certain areas. So we thought, well, there's a lot of people in 00:58 It's a rural state, so there's a lot of people that already kind of have that. You know, we raise a backyard garden, we do that kind of stuff. But what can we do to encourage them to maybe look deeper into a homesteading lifestyle? So that's kind of why we thought in search of help. So you're kind of already homesteading, but you're also in search of help. You're looking for that extra push or some of those new ideas. 01:22 Awesome. I didn't even think about the fact that the ish was an acronym. I'm not with it today. So define your version of homesteading for me because I have talked to so many people in the last year who have different definitions. So what's yours? Yeah, so that's a great question, Mary, because it is all over the board. So I personally have a social media presence and talking about 01:53 for goodness, probably eight years now. And I still get people saying, wait a minute, you're not homesteading. The Homesteading Act of 1863 was, you know, that's done, nobody's doing that anymore. And it's like, well, okay, maybe we need to call it modern homesteading, or as my grandma would say, well, it's just everyday life because that was rural life for her. So I think it means different things to different people, but I look at it as taking more responsibility for 02:20 your livelihood when it comes to food, when it comes to income, when it comes to security, when it comes to just keeping the lights on type of thing. I think it's a pretty broad brush that we can paint with, but it'll mean a little bit of different things for different people. Somebody said, well, you're not really homesteading if you don't have this many acres, or you're not really homesteading if you don't have this many animals, or if you don't at least grow this much percentage of the food that you consume. 02:49 And I don't think there's any specific parameters that we need to put on that. I see people, I've got a friend, Harold Thornbrough, my goodness, that guy's homesteading on like two acres and he puts away more food than people on 10 acres do. So I don't think there's limitations that could be set on that, but I think it does have some fluidity for people depending on what their motivations are. Okay. 03:14 And you just made me really think about this because I haven't really defined it for myself either. And as you were talking, I was like, so the only people who aren't doing homesteading are those who don't actually do anything themselves. Like they don't cook for themselves. They don't do their own laundry. They don't grow anything. You know, if they don't have any self-sustainability skills, then they are not a homesteader. That's how I would define it. Yeah. And I think there has to be a conscious effort. Again, 03:41 I don't think my grandma, obviously, she didn't call it home studying back then, but if you came back and said, are you trying to be kind of push against the cultural norm in what you're doing when it comes to your food and your income and how you raise your family, all that type of stuff, you'd say, well, no, no, this is everyday life for us. So you fast forward now to our generation and say, what's everyday life? Well, everyday life is kind of a nine to five. It's a... 04:11 commute to an office, it's a majority of the population living either urban or suburban. And so home setting would be, well, we're kind of pushing agains

Today I'm talking with Jason and Tara at Whiterock 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 Jason and Tara at White Rock Homestead. Good morning, guys. How are you? Good morning. We are doing great. Is it a nice day there? Oh, yeah. It's a beautiful morning. In Arkansas, you said? 00:29 Yes, ma'am. Okay. I am not in Arkansas. I am in Minnesota and it's actually really nice here today too. Thank God. We have had the worst spring ever. So tell me about yourselves and what you guys do. So yeah, well, I'm Jason. Obviously this is my wife, Tara. We actually sold our property about a year and a half ago in Michigan. 00:59 and we moved south here to north central Arkansas and I retired from the Marine Corps. She's retired from nursing and we looked at life and said we need to do things for ourselves. Grow our own food, raise our own animals and just have something that is ours that nobody else can tell us what we're going to do and how we're going to do it. 01:29 So we spent a few years researching, driving around, searching different areas to finally settle and we're building, we're running a homestead while we're still trying to build a homestead. 01:43 I understand completely we're doing the same thing. We've been here for almost four years and we're still building on it. Oh yeah, it's not gonna take an overnight thing. It's always a work in progress. Yes, absolutely. And Jason, thank you for your service. My stepson is a former Marine, although he says once a Marine, always a Marine. So he's always a Marine. So thank you. Yeah. Absolutely. And he is very correct in that statement. 02:12 Yeah, our sons and Maureen as well. Yep, it was the hardest eight years of my life waiting for him to be done with active duty. 02:23 Cause that boy has my heart and every time he was like, I'm getting moved here. I'm like, no, I want you to go home. I appreciate what you're doing, but please don't die. Yeah. I mean, there's always that chance or option, I guess. Uh, but for the most part, we try to go where we're going to go and come back and experiences that we couldn't have gotten had we not joined, um, and you know, of course the protection of our nation and, you know, 02:53 all that that lovely gig of a role but loved every minute of it. I mean there was moments that I could have questioned myself but definitely a great choice and it and honestly has been a good stepping stone. I remember early on in my career and I think even before I fully enlisted and left for bootcamp was somebody had told me they said if we gave you the best advice about joining the military was get a job that translates when you get out. 03:22 Um, and I said, okay, great. So I went in as a mechanic and I'm like, Hey, you know, there's always mechanics needed and you know, lo and behold, I'm not, well, I do a little bit of mechanic and around the homestead, but a little bit. Yeah. You fix everything, which I think as a homesteading family, you have to have that resourcefulness. So I'm, I'm very blessed to have a husband with those skills that we don't have to farm out, you know, every single thing that breaks her. 03:52 Um, you know, he's, he's able to, to fix it all. Yep. It's a good thing. Um, my stepson went into, I think it was like computer stuff. I don't know exactly what his, his MOS was, but, uh, he is now basically he would call it on effing problems with servers. I will not use the word cause I don't use that word on the podcast, but I think you know what I'm saying. 04:20 And he loves it and he's doing great. So he went into a field that translated after he got out as well. Okay. So enough about the Marines. And again, I really do appreciate our service to people and I feel for their families when they're deployed, cause it's really hard. So what do you guys do? I mean, do you have livestock? Do you grow gardens? What do you do? Oh, yes. So one of the first things that we put up. 04:49 on the homestead was a greenhouse and a chicken coop. We had those where we even had a structure. Well, I guess the well house, but prior to Jason and I getting together, I'd had a homestead in Ohio for 10 years. And so I had a really good start on what it took to build certain things, what worked, what didn't work and was able to kind of dial in for this homestead, things that I felt would work. Although it is a different, 05:19 climate in a whole host of different ways you have to learn the garden. But the greenhouse was definitely a pillar to getting us food sustainable. And we added chickens, we do meat rabbits, we

Today I'm talking with Tammy at Davis Farm. 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 Tammy at Davis Farm. Good afternoon, Tammy, how are you? I'm well, thank you. How about you? I'm good. It's a beautiful day in Minnesota. Is it lovely in Vermont? Oh my goodness, yes. It's absolutely amazing. 00:29 Finally, we've had this ridiculous humidity that just we're not used to. So today is a glorious, you know, they call it a bluebird day. It's just blue skies and green, green pastures and cool weather. It's a bluebird day here too, but it's muggy as hell. So I'm so, you know what? My heart goes out to you because I thought I was going to die last week and the week before. Yeah. At least it's not raining. 00:59 I have talked about this a lot. It's rained a lot in Minnesota this spring, so we're really happy to have some sun. Yeah, we've had a lot of rain. We had an incredible amount of flooding again, which we've had this 100-year flood now, literally on the same day, two years apart. That's not 100 years. Indeed. Indeed. All right, Tammy, tell me what you guys do at Davis Farm. Yeah, well, we're a dairy farm. So we... 01:29 We're milking probably about 70 cows now. We used to be a conventional dairy farm. We shipped to DFA for decades. And then in 2016, we made the decision to go organic. And then in 2000, shortly thereafter, I don't know, 18, 19, we decided to go grass fed. So we stopped feeding grain. 01:57 and we're fully organic now. Very nice. I have to ask, is that an expensive proposition because I keep hearing that going organic, anything costs a lot of money to get certified. Yeah, that's a great question. For us, it was not too much of a transition. The grain situation was kind of brutal because you have for the first year, 02:24 For us, we had to buy organic grain but still ship at conventional prices. They did give you, I think, like $3 per hundred wheat to help with the grain transition. But other than that, that was a little bit tough. But all of our land and most of our practices have always been organic anyway. We've always been a pasture-based farm, so there was not a lot for us to switch. We should have done this 30 years ago. But, you know. 02:53 how life goes. And so anyway, so, um, but it has been a great, a great, um, move for us, um, for our business. Good. So I know nothing about dairy cattle and I've been looking for someone to talk to about it. So guess what? You're it. Oh, fun. So you said you have 70 cows you're milking. Yes. That is correct. Yes. 03:20 Okay, so are you selling that milk to, I don't know where milk goes to, to be sold at grocery stores? Sure. That's great questions. So we belong to a co-op. As I mentioned, we belong to DFA for years. And then we transitioned and we went with Organic Valley co-op. So we shipped to Organic Valley. And they... 03:49 They basically pick up the milk and then once it leaves the farm, it leaves the farm as fluid milk and then they go and they take it and they do the marketing and most of our milk goes into fluid milk or cheese in this area, in the New England area. And then, yeah, I guess I should say that I'm from Northern Vermont. We're about 45 minutes from the Canadian border. Okay. So in our area. 04:20 Most of our milk goes into New York state and then gets processed or distributed. Okay, then that leads me to my next question. When people who sell milk from their cows sell it to a co-op and that milk goes to be processed, pasteurized, whatever, to be sold in gallons or half gallons at the store, it's not just your batch of milk in that. 04:47 jug, it can be mixed with other people's cow's milk, right? That is correct. Yes. So right now we're on the grass truck because we're a grass-fed farm. So all of our milk is picked up with all the other grass-fed farms in the area. When we were conventional, it was a huge truck that would come and it was all the farms in the area. They're on a milk route. 05:15 And so then it would just come and pick up all the different farms. Now every farm, I don't know if, if sort of you were getting to this. So every farm, when they pick up our milk, um, vials are taken samples of our milk. So everybody's, um, milk is tested and, um, you know, and then the tank is tested to make sure like everybody, you know, if somebody had bad milk, you know, um, 05:45 know, we might have to get dumped. I mean, it depends upon what happened. Yeah, that was going to be my next question because I think that when I was young, I assumed that the milk and the jug in the fridge probably came from the s

Today I'm talking with Nita at Winfield Farms LLC. 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 Nita at Winfield Farms, I think is the name of your place. Good morning, Nita. How are you? Good morning. Good morning, Mary. I'm starting to get confused because I've talked to so many people with so many names that I'm like, I know the name of the place when I sit down and when I start to introduce it, I'm like... 00:29 What was the name of the place again? So what do you do at Winfield Farms? So Winfield Farms has been around since like 1890s. So it's been traditionally a row crop farm. And after my mother was no longer able to manage it, my sister and I took it over and we now own it. And so we're moving from row crops to more agritourism. 01:00 and we're looking, we partnered with an organization that helps us get our food out to food deserts in the city. So we're taking a different approach. We're bringing the soil back up to where it needs to be, but we're also focusing on agritourism and food deserts. Awesome, I love that. Tell me about the history of the farms. I was looking at your website and it's really interesting. So tell me about it. 01:29 So our family has a really long, long history in Surry County as free blacks as early as 1804. But this was that's on my grandmother's side, but the wind fields are my grandfather's side. And so the first property was purchased by my great grandfather on a land contract in 1890. And that's where my grandfather was born in 1892. And then my grandfather, then the second track. 01:56 we have, which is the one that my grandfather purchased in 1923. So we have a total of three tracks. One was later purchased by my uncle and we've consolidated all of those. But the family has a very diverse history. My grandmother, it's funny, and you ask me this and it won't take long talking about it, but people look at me and they say, well, how old are you if your great grandfather was in the Civil War? And so. 02:24 That's more like great, great, great grandfather, right? But my grandmother's father was a Civil War veteran. And she was born in 1892. My grandfather was born in 1890. She was born in 1897. Grandfather was born in 1892. Okay. And my mother was the youngest. So we have long generations. My mother was born in 1930. And so to end up with a great grandfather in the Civil War, he married twice. 02:50 And my grandmother was the youngest of his second marriage, his first wife passed. So that's how I end up with that long span in terms of generational gap for us. So we have a lot of history in this story. That's called longevity and that's amazing. It is. Okay, so one of the things I try really hard not to do on the podcast is talk about religion or politics because they're very divisive topics. 03:21 However, the fact that your family was free blacks who owned land and made it go is really, really interesting. And I say that as a very, very white woman. I have been called whiter than the queen. And so it's always interesting to me because I actually, I think I have been told, I don't have it verified. 03:48 that one of my ancestors was an Abenaki Native American woman in Maine. And so I always feel real divided because I know what happened with the Native Americans. So if I have Native American blood in me, I am very, very conflicted a lot of the time about the things that happened. So I don't, like I don't want to make this a story about how terribly people who weren't white and privileged. 04:18 We're treated because I don't really want to get into it because we all know that that's true. But like, it's amazing to me that your family with probably a lot of odds stacked against them managed to do what they did. And now you're doing something that benefits your community. Right. 04:40 I'll tell you what, I think you see on our website, and at least we're a part of the Surrey Cultural Trail because of our family's history, we brought together a diverse group of experiences for African Americans because there were African Americans, and yes, slavery was bad. It was terrible. My grandfather's father was the son of his slave owner. 05:07 My grandmother's side of the family, they were free in 1804, property owners. And my grandmother's maternal grandfather escaped through the Underground Railroad and went to Canada. And so my great grandmother was Canadian and came down and married this guy who was free. So when you look at our family, it is, I think we have captured about every, well, close to every single kind of experience African Americans had in the

Today I'm talking with Crystal at The Homemade 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 Crystal at the Homemade Homestead, which I love the name. Go ahead, Crystal. Crystal, how are you? I'm good. How are you doing? I'm good. Tell me about yourself and what you do. 00:24 Well, my name is Crystal. I'm married to my husband, Robert, for 24 years, and we have four kids, ages three to 21. We had a little age gap in between number one and two, three, and four. And so we decided that we wanted to do some homesteading. It started many, many years ago when we lived in Georgia, and then we moved to Alabama. 00:51 and decided to purchase a poultry farm, a commercial poultry farm. And if you know anything about commercial poultry, you cannot have backyard chickens if you do commercial poultry. So we ended up selling the poultry farm and buying some land and decided that we really, our dream was just a homestead. Well, more so my dream. My husband was kind of along for the ride, but he gets more and more interested as we go. 01:20 So the Homemade Homestead was just a way for me to kind of talk about some of our beginner homesteading. I kind of consider myself a beginner at this point because all the things that we did in the past, I've kind of either forgotten or, you know, things have changed. I had to remind myself of things with with all the stuff I've got going on. But the Homemade Homestead was a way for me to document some of our beginning. 01:50 things with homesteading. We're a pretty private family, so we don't allow our children, we don't allow their faces on any kind of social media. So that presents a challenge for me when I want to document things because my kids are always around. So, but that was also a way for me to document my soap making and tallow. I started making homemade tallow balm for my face and homemade soap. 02:18 And once I started making it, it was so exciting to me just to be able to make something from scratch that I created that was natural and non-toxic. And then I started selling it. And now I'm just obsessed with all things natural and making whatever I can. Awesome. And I'm going to tell you a secret. I think that everybody is a beginner homesteader, even if they've been doing it for 20 years, because there's always something new. 02:47 Oh, yes, absolutely. It's a little scary, you know, when you, especially me, I love to research things and I get on there and I start researching stuff and it becomes a little overwhelming. And then you kind of get paralyzed because you're afraid to start. So I have to kind of withdraw myself from doing too much research and just get in there and do it. Yeah. We had a thing happen here last week. We had black ants. 03:16 flying ants coming in our window frame into the house. And we haven't had this happen in almost four years we've been here. And I was like, there's gotta be a home remedy to make these guys not come in. So I went to Google, as everyone does, and it said they really don't like lavender, they don't like peppermint, and they really don't like vinegar. And I had lavender essential oil and I had peppermint oil. 03:44 but I already had vinegar in a spray bottle. So I sprayed the window frame and within 24 hours, no more ants. And I was like, hey, it worked. And that's a homesteading hack, you know? Absolutely. There's so many natural, easy ways, even for somebody, I think, that lives on small acreage or apartments or anything small. There's so many different ways you can get into it that are fun and don't require a lot. 04:13 Absolutely. You are absolutely right. We did it out of necessity because we were raising four kids on one income and it's more time but less money if you make things yourself typically. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I know with a lot of the things that I make are out of necessity for our health. We each have our own set of health challenges. 04:42 I've got really bad migraines. My husband, after we had our poultry farm, he was in there in those houses for hours a day, breathing in just really nasty, dirty air, and he didn't wear a mask. And then after COVID, we had COVID three different times. And I think it might've damaged his lungs a little bit, along with all of the poultry house, just the in and out. 05:08 daily breathing that stuff in and he suddenly developed adult asthma, which was a huge hindrance to my homesteading goals because I need him to build things. I make things, but he builds things. It got to a point for a while where he couldn't even walk to the mailbox because he could not breathe. He felt like h

Today I'm talking with Kayla at The Wild Midwest: Heritage Livestock and Native Plants. 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 Kayla at the Wild Midwest Heritage Livestock and Native Plants. Good afternoon, Kayla. Hi, how are you doing? I'm okay. A little crazy, but good. 00:26 I'm excited to talk to you because you're in Illinois and I'm in Minnesota and we're going to talk about native plants. We put in some native plants to Minnesota last summer in the middle of a drought and we forgot that we needed to pay attention to them and they died. I'm very excited to talk about native plants today. Tell me about yourself and what you do. 00:54 the Wild Midwest, that is the business that I own and operate. And so it's currently a side hustle. And I also have a full-time job with a company called Canopy Farm Management, where I work in regenerative and restorative agriculture, especially as it pertains to tree crops and agroforestry. So my two gigs are kind of, they go together well. 01:24 I actually love that I've talked to a couple people in the last two months that have the same kind of symbiotic relationship with their jobby job or their career and their side hustle as it were. Yeah. I mean, do you want me to expand on like the business a little bit? The business that is your side thing, not your job? Yeah. I want to know how you came to doing this actually. 01:54 Okay. So I have my undergraduate degree in animal sciences and I knew that I wanted to do something that was helpful in terms of like conservation of biodiversity and like creating healthy habitats. So I ended up pursuing my master's degree in landscape architecture and during that time 02:24 studying more and more with the intention of trying to figure out how we can live in the world a little bit more harmoniously with the other species that are here as well. I stumbled upon how important native plants were to that whole process. So it became... 02:46 sort of a huge passion of mine, I started attending the Illinois Native Plant Society gatherings and hikes. And I had a seasonal position at the Champaign County Forest Preserve where I got to meet a lovely botanist who helped me learn a ton about the native plants to specifically Champaign County. And it just sort of became... 03:15 I just sort of became completely consumed by it. I started growing my own plants when I was still in grad school. And I think it was 2018 when I grew my first couple hundred plants and had a couple of design projects on the side with some acquaintances and friends. And then it's kind of just grown from there. I graduated in 2020 and 03:43 Due to COVID, it was pretty difficult to find another job. So I did have about close to a year of just working on this business and getting it spun up before I did get other full-time jobs. My full-time job I've been in now for not quite a year yet. So, I mean, I would love to. 04:10 work on the nursery full time and that is the eventual goal. But it's pretty, nurseries in particular are pretty high overhead businesses to run and they're pretty difficult to get off the ground because they just take so much infrastructure and investment. So yeah, we're still very much in the building phase of the business to try to give it some legs. 04:39 you put yourself into starting a business. And many, many people did. 04:48 Yeah, absolutely. And kind of out of necessity for a lot of us. Yeah. We moved in 2020 so we could start our farm to market garden and see what we could do with that. That's what we did. And my husband has a jobby job and he comes home and he putters in the garden and he does the farmer's market on Saturday and we sell stuff in the farm stand on the property. We did the same thing too. And it was time. It was time for that to happen. 05:19 I keep saying that COVID was terrible, horrible for so many people, but amazing for people who didn't lose anyone they loved and who didn't get sick themselves because it gave us time that we didn't have before to think about what we were doing and how we were doing it. Yeah. It was definitely bittersweet in that regard because for me personally, it certainly gave me some challenges. 05:48 debt burden and not having a full-time job was pretty challenging. And thankfully I have my husband who supported me during that time. But yeah, I don't think I, the business would not be as far as it is today if I hadn't have had that time to just solely focus on it. Yep, exactly. So I'm guessing you're probably in your 20s? I'm actually, I mean, my... 06:16 30s. So I'm 33

Today I'm talking with Jennifer at Hog Trap Herb & Flower 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 Jennifer at Hog Trap Herb and Flower Farm, I think is the name of it. I'm sorry, I got stuck there for a second. Good morning, Jennifer, how are you? I'm wonderful, how are you? I'm good. You're in Texas? 00:29 Yes, we are actually in an odd spot. We're in south Texas and we're not really central Texas. We are south of Austin and east of San Antonio. So we're in a non-regional area. So we call it south central Texas. Okay, well I'm in Minnesota and it is like seven, it's not even 70 degrees yet 00:59 And the reason I say this is because we have had the wettest, most miserable spring and early summer ever. So I'm so excited that it's gorgeous out today. Yes, yes, that it helps. But we've had rain, but we've had more storms this year, which has really impacted us a lot a bit. Yeah. Tell me about yourself and what you do. Okay, so I am actually a Texas transplant. I grew up along the Mississippi River. 01:28 Mississippi and Arkansas, lived in DC for 10 years and moved down here to Texas. And then married a cowboy down here and we live on a fifth-generational ranch. We do raise cattle, but we also have some areas to the side where I do some farming for our herbs and flowers. I'm a grandparent. 01:57 and we have a whole bunch of kids and I'm actually transitioning back into teaching and we're pretty active in our community and just outreach and just we stay busy. We really love living life to the fullest and we are constantly always adding to our busy schedules. Very nice, so my first question. 02:23 is I saw on your Facebook page that you have the apparatus to distill your own oils from herbs. What is that called? Oh, I am so excited. So that's kind of a new addition and it's kind of, I've learned to diversify a lot doing this type of work. And so it is a still, it's a distillery. So instead of making moonshine, we're filling a set of stills from raw material. 02:52 Oddly enough, I watched it on a TikTok and I thought, you know what, that seems really easy to do. And I purchased it probably about two months ago and I'm already looking to upgrade to a larger device. And so it's something I've really enjoyed in the spirit. It seems like it could be overwhelming, but it's very, very simple. 03:19 to use and it's just another avenue for us to get our product out into the market. Okay, the reason I asked is because I didn't know if it was called a still because I thought maybe it had a different name because stills are associated with alcohol. Yes. So no, it's a distiller. So what it does is I use depending on what I'm trying to get from the product. It uses steam and so on the it uses a bottom heat which of course 03:48 heats the water and uses the steam that goes up into a column, which then produces either the essential oil in the beginning and then it slowly turns up the hydrosol, which is basically just scented water at that point. You can use it that way or you can just use it for hydrosol and that's when you would just put the material directly into the boiling water and the steam would rise and you would get more of the hydrosol that way. 04:17 Okay, so how much essential oil do you get from like one batch of doing this? Because I'm assuming it's pretty small. It is very small. So it all depends on the, it has, if you have a high quality product or if it's dry material will help, will kind of affect the average, I guess, what you get from it. 04:46 So if I use dry lavender buds, for instance, I could probably use... 04:56 almost a pound and I may get one mil of essential oil. Wow. And how long does it take? Oh, it takes about... So for the essential oil process, you want to grab that first 30 to 40 minutes of the oil. After that, it kind of depletes. It's kind of... Not its pureness, but the aroma effect of it. 05:21 But the remaining time, the other two and a half hours, you're going to get your hydrosol from that. And the longer that it kind of distills, the less quality of a product because it kind of goes away after time. So for the most potent part of the whole process, it's going to be the earlier the better. I usually cut everything about two hours. And I usually get about a quart of hydrosol. 05:51 You could go longer, but it's not as potent as you do the initial batch that you get. Okay, so what do you use the hydrosol in? What do you use it for? Oh, there's a few different ways you can use hydrosol. You can add witch hazel. So if you're doing a lavender or even a rose, if you go to like departme

Today I'm talking with Savannah at Simply Rooted. 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 Savannah at Simply Rooted. Good afternoon, Savannah. How are you? I'm doing well. How are you? I'm good. You're in Georgia? Yes. We are up in northern Georgia, very close to the North Carolina and Tennessee border. 00:29 Is it warm there? It is warm. Occasionally we will be up in like the 90 degree area, but mostly we stay in like the mid to high 80s. So like on average all summer long? Yeah, I would say so. It definitely gets hotter as summer progresses and that our winters are pretty mild. It's funny like we're all the way up in like the mountains of Georgia, but we're 00:57 technically a, I think it's called like a temperate rainforest here. So we do get a lot of rain in the winter time. Okay. Well, Minnesota, the summer can't make up its mind. What the hell it's doing. We were really, really cool over the weekend. I mean the high on Saturday, I think maybe got to 70. Wow. Maybe. And today it's really muggy and I think it's 75. And then, um, two weeks ago. 01:24 it was hot and the humidity was high. It was just gross. So we never know what we're going to get here. It's like a box of cracker jacks. You never know what the prize is going to be. So anyway, tell me about yourself and what you do at Simply Rooted. Yes. So I actually started Simply Rooted back in April and it really started as a subscription box. I am actually by career a registered nurse. 01:53 And so I work from home and I have my own company at home. I work with attorneys and I review their clients' medical records. But my husband and I, we have eight acres and we're very much into like the homesteading lifestyle, slow living type of thing. So I wanted to create a business kind of around this lifestyle because I'm so passionate about it. And I have a lot of our friends and family ask me, 02:22 about what I do, how I got started. And so I decided to kind of create a subscription box for those who are interested in that more simple living, slow living type of lifestyle. And so it's a quarterly subscription box and it comes in January, April, July and October. And so it's mainly seasonal, but we include products from 02:50 small businesses and small family-owned farms from other country. We put their products in our box and we usually shoot for about six to eight different products every quarter. They all kind of revolve around kind of like that home setting lifestyle, that simple living lifestyle. So, you know, we have non-toxic all-purpose cleaners, tallow body butter, tallow body soap. In this box, we have a peach jam. 03:17 and we have some non-toxic mosquito repellent. In our last box, we had a homestead and cookbook. And so just kind of things like that, kind of to push people towards cooking from scratch, creating a non-toxic home, getting in their garden and planting different things to kind of really push you in that direction. So there's so many people like with prices today that they really, and like just the stress of everyday life and they really just wanna take it slower. 03:45 and enjoy life and not have that stress that they have on a day to day basis. Okay. So I have a question. The in the subscription box is anything made by you or is it just from other crafters that you know? It's mainly from other crafters. We buy it through wholesale. We also have a couple of local people in our community that we get products from as well. 04:11 And then something new that I'm going to add here in the future is have our subscribers send in people that they know in their community and we can feature products from someone in their hometown. Nice. So you're a curator of good things. Yes, definitely. Yep. Fun. I should consider that. 04:38 I should think real hard about that because we do make stuff. We make lip balms and soaps and candles and whatever. And it's a lot of work. It's a lot of time. And I don't mind doing it. It's fine. But I like your idea better. Yeah. And it just gives a way to support the small businesses around the country. And a lot of these products you can't find on Amazon. 05:04 That's kind of like the whole point of it too, is that they're not readily available. And so by supporting these small farms, small businesses, you're supporting their kids and their college fund and all those great things. And then you also get a benefit of it too, if you get these amazing products that are actually good for you. And they come from good ethical people who care about your health as well. Yeah, I love it. That's

Today I'm talking with Nancy at Nana's Kitchen MN. 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 Nancy at Nana's Kitchen, Minnesota. How are you, Nancy? I'm doing good. How are you doing today? I'm good. The MN is for Minnesota, yes? Very good. 00:24 Okay, good. I never know if people want me to use the word that the letters stand for or just the letters. So, nope, we just had to tag it on there when I got my cottage kitchen because believe it or not, there's other Nana kitchens. Well, there's lots of Nana's in the world. So it doesn't surprise me. Yeah, so we had to distinguish ourselves. Okay. Well, tell me about yourself and what you do at Nana's kitchen. I cottage kitchen and I make gluten-free, basically pastries, pies, cookies, 00:54 I also make some that are dairy free. Been baking gluten free for the last 16 years and just have done it for family and stuff like that. People always say, gosh, you're so good. You ought to try to sell them. It's one of those things to kind of get the nerve up to put your neck out there and do it. Yes, I do. Yep. One of my daughters retired from the military, moved nearby, and she's been pushing me, just do it, mom. Just do it, mom. She's my spokesperson. 01:23 She pushed me into it. But anyhow, I enjoy baking. Gluten-free is something you have to learn to do. It doesn't come easy because there are so many different types of flours and stuff like that. I've worked on a technique that works for me and it comes out pretty darn good. You don't know that they're gluten-free products and that was the whole goal. People don't miss the gluten when they eat the product. Awesome. So when did you start? Okay, two things. 01:53 I can't talk this morning. How did you come into this? Like, why? Yeah. And when did you start the actual business part of it? The business I just started doing this year, like in January, I just kind of started putting stuff out on Facebook. Well, my daughter started putting stuff out on Facebook. She's my social media person, like I said. 2008, my oldest granddaughter was diagnosed with celiac disease and she's autistic. And 02:23 With that time it was, huh, what's celiac disease? I hadn't really thought, heard about it. Her mom had kind of, my oldest daughter, had kind of looked into it because of the autism, this connection sometimes with different things causing autism. But we waited, it was like December 2007, so January 2008 we had her go gluten free and it was, I mean, at that point in time there aren't products on the shelves. Like you can go in the store now and there's Char and Glutino and all kinds of different. 02:50 products you can buy that are gluten free. It was very, very limited. So she wanted like, you know, cookies and the things that she would miss. So I started baking those, looking for cookbooks and recipes. And back then it was a lot of gabaazanbee flour and heavier flours, and it was a product, but it didn't taste the same. And over time, flours have evolved. There's different types and brands you can use. And I'm finding different blends, putting different starches together. Finally, just all worked out that I could bake stuff. 03:20 that was palatable and she enjoyed it. So I went from cookies to cakes, all kinds of different things. But as it turns out, her mother then, my oldest daughter was diagnosed with Celiac of May of that same year, 2008. In July of that year, my daughter's younger son, who was seven, was diagnosed with Celiac's disease. Wow. So now we had three of them, which then, my youngest child, I have three daughters and a son. He at that time was 25. 03:49 And he got tested. Actually, the whole family did blood work tests. He has celiac disease. So if my four children, two have celiac, two don't. I have five grandchildren, three have celiac, because then the daughter has another child with another man, the second husband. He has celiac disease. So all three of her children have celiac disease. So it runs in the family. We did DNA testing on 23andMe. I'm a carrier. I don't have it, but I carry it. 04:19 And the percentages of I have it are the same as my daughter and granddaughter and stuff like that. So I'm gluten free as well. But I suspect my mom had it. She had symptoms years ago that hindsight looking back on it, I think she had celiac disease. So that got me started because I had to cook for the grandchild. Wanted to give her baked goodies that tasted like everybody else's that she could watch her friends at school eating cookies and she couldn't have one. So that's how it kind of evol

Today I'm talking with Jeff at The Heartland Self Reliance Conference. 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 Jeff at the Heartland Self-Reliance Conference. Good morning, Jeff. How are you? Good morning, Mary. I'm well. How are you? I'm great. So I don't know a whole lot about you or what you guys do, so tell me about yourself and the conference. 00:30 I sure will. Well, that's, uh, I'm, I'm known to many out there as the everyday prepper I got originally got started in the preparedness side of things. Uh, but always been into gardening and probably the last 12 years or so, my wife and I have been working towards being more self-sufficient and, uh, we just moved to a new place last year. Gives us some new opportunities. So we're, we're working to get everything going there. And, uh, it's, you know, one of my big things is. 00:59 coming from both sides, homesteading and preparedness, I really realized how the two really need to come together in a lot of ways and both sides need to learn from each other. Yes, absolutely. And the great thing about homesteading is it doesn't have to be a huge property. It can just be a quarter of an acre or a 10th of an acre. You can still. 01:24 grow things, you can still cook from scratch, you can still learn how to take care of yourself. Yeah, and you know, we had, I was just talking to a potential vendor for the Heartland Self-Reliance Conference, and they have a business in urban Cleveland, Ohio, and she was telling me about how many of their customers are. 01:48 actually, you know, in an urban area and they're growing whether it's on their balcony or on a rooftop or wherever they find space there Grown their own food and they they're developing an interest in homesteading Yes, because it's a lifestyle. It's not it's not defined by space or Ownership of lots of room and I love that because we did the same thing back when we lived in town so that's part of 02:14 The reason I started the podcast is because I wanted people to realize and maybe learn that they can grow some of their own stuff and they can make things in their apartment if they want to. My daughter, the apartment she lived in for several years while she was in college, she was able to have, I got her some planters that would fit over the railing on her balcony and she had some... 02:43 peppers, some tomatoes, some other things going there. And I got her a hanging herb basket arrangement that you could put about, if I remember right, about eight different plants in there. And she had that hanging on the side of the railing. And then she had, I think, one or two pots with tomatoes in them. So, you know, there's lots you can do and you're really only limited by your imagination. Mm-hmm, yeah. And... 03:09 Honestly with YouTube and Facebook and all the things on the internet you can learn how to grow anything or how to do anything I am so Happy that I live in this particular time. Oh Yeah, and there's you know, there's the internet really gives us the opportunity to really expand expand our knowledge and the ideas that are out there because that's 03:37 You know, 40 years ago, if somebody told me one day I would be raising hydroponic tomatoes, I would have told them they were crazy or growing hydroponic tomatoes. But that's, we did that a few years ago, just more or less as an experiment. We got everything we needed and we tried it. We haven't done any here at this house yet, but I imagine at some point in the future we'll be doing it again. Yeah. 04:01 I don't know how that works. Could you give me the short version of how hydroponics works? Because we've never done it. Yeah, sure. And you're just putting a combination of things. If I remember correctly, there's some salt and some other stuff that you make a mixture that you put in there with water by nutrients. And basically, we would get a five-gallon bucket. 04:30 and you can go online and you can find these covers. They're like a lid, will fit right over the bucket, but the center of them drops down and has sort of a mesh cup in there. And that's you put the plant in there, use some hydroponic medium. The stuff we were looking to look sort of like using looks sort of like lava rock that you would put down in there and actually plant the plant in there. 04:57 And you just had to make sure that the liquid stayed up where the roots of the plant could get to it. And really you could do anything and it was amazing. You would pull that lid off and look and the mass of roots that had grown down into that bucket, into the liquid was jus

Today I'm talking with Lori at Empty Pockets Ranch. 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 Lori at Empty Pockets Ranch. Good morning, Lori. How are you? Good morning. How are you? I'm doing well. I'm good. And I can hear the wind blowing, so it must be sunny and beautiful there. For right now, yes. And you're... 00:30 You're in New York? Yes, I'm in upstate New York. Okay, awesome. All right, well, tell me about Empty Pockets Ranch. Yep, okay. Tell me about Empty Pockets Ranch. Is it called that because if you're going to run a ranch, your pockets are going to be empty? Yes, basically. And it's funny because that's probably like the number one question I get asked by visitors is, why would you call yourself something like that? And I feel like if you're remotely involved in any type of agriculture... 00:59 like you're going to get it. It takes a certain kind of someone to want to do this. You work a bazillion hours a week for hopefully to break even type of thing. So it's just like a running joke amongst so many farmers about having empty pockets. So I was like, this is a nice tongue in cheek way to salute everyone in agriculture because we're all in this together. 01:30 Yeah, I was telling my son that I was going to be talking to you today and the name of your ranch and I said, we should have named our place Go For Broke Acres. It's true though, right? Yup, exactly. It's hard work and it's expensive and it takes time. So I think it feels like all of your resources are sucked dry all the time. Yes, exactly. 01:59 economic mess that we're in. It's so hard to be able to predict the future, what's going to happen, what should you invest in, what should you grow. It's very, I don't know, it's weird times right now. Yeah, that's what everybody I've talked to lately says. They're like, I don't know what's going on with this world, but we're just gonna keep trying to grow food and feed people. And I'm like, good, do that. Right. So I looked at your Facebook page and your website, 02:29 By the way, tried to look at it 10 minutes ago and I couldn't do it. Something about DNS stuff. So you might want to look into that. Yes, it's brand new. So maybe there's some kind of issue. Yeah. I don't know, but wanted to give you a heads up. So look, looked at your Facebook page. You have a gazillion things going on, like you said. So tell me what you guys do. So we started. 02:58 in 2017 with dairy sheep. And I had worked at a big dairy sheep downstate milking. And most people are like, oh, you can milk sheep? And then I say, yeah, you can milk anything with nipples. But I started my own flock after college. I went back to college as an adult later on and getting into cheese making is pretty much impossible. 03:29 Okay. It's so regulated. There's so many rules. Just to get started, I needed about $100,000 worth of upgrades to my barn. So right off the bat, I said, okay, no, can't do that. I had already started to piece together East Frisian sheep. They're not very common in my area of the country. 03:59 wax compared to here. So I had these sheep now and I'm like, all right, these aren't cheap. I went all over the place looking for them. Doing sheep cheese is not going to be an option, at least not at that time. So I'm like, what can I do next? So I bought a soap business. I had never made soap in my life. And I started like experimenting. 04:28 using the sheep milk and soap because goat milk was like all the rage several years ago. But it was getting played out at that point. So I'm like, all right, this is working. And I started doing pretty well with the sheep milk soap because it's different, you know. And we upgraded our farm. We were renting a farm in another town and it was only on four acres. So we had the sheep, we had the livestock guardian dogs. 04:55 And then we moved to this bigger farm that was 94 acres. So I went from four to 94. And then COVID came, like right after we had moved in. I did most of my business downstate on Long Island because that's where the money was. My town up here is pretty poor, rural, like typical agriculture town where they can't justify. 05:24 you know, the added expense of a luxury item like sheet milk. So, so I would take all of my stuff downstate. COVID came and everything was canceled. You couldn't go to markets. You couldn't go anywhere. So we had a three-car garage just sitting here on the property, and it was full of prior owner stuff. So I was like, all right, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm turning this into a farm store. So that's kind of what

Today I'm talking with Alain at Triskell Bakery. 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 Alain at Triskell Bakery. How are you? Hi, good morning. How are you? I'm good. Sorry to make you talk shop on your vacation. No problem. Okay. All right, so tell me about yourself and what you do. 00:30 Yeah, so, well, I'm a baker now. I was a food scientist for all of my career, and I retired last September, and I always wanted to start something from scratch. And I had several options, I had several hobbies, and I ultimately selected baking, because that was... 00:57 passion of mine. I've been baking for about 15 years and you know, I came from a family of baker in France and so I started the bakery in January of this year. January 23rd was my first day and so I you know I posted on on social 01:27 thousand followers from my town and you know, neighboring towns and quickly realized that there was a need for an artisan French baker in Medina, Medina, Ohio, where it is. And it started from there. And yeah, it's taken off fairly quickly. That's amazing. So I have a quick question. In Ohio, do you guys have the cottage food producer? 01:55 thing like Minnesota does? Absolutely. That's exactly how I operate. So back in December, I started an LLC for Triskell Bakery and I looked up the rules and regulations for college law and made sure that I followed those guidelines. So I operate out of my house. I converted 02:24 mixing and my ingredient storage and all the extra equipment that I need. And I essentially used the oven in the kitchen and I've taken over several rooms in the house now. So my dining room is my office and a freezer in there and a refrigerator. So my wife is very gracious. 02:50 That helps a lot. Gracie's spouses are amazing. Absolutely, absolutely. I could not have done this without her support. She still works, she's a marketing project manager for a pet food company. And she's the one who told me, follow your passion. I was ready, I was ready to retire. I'm 57, so I was 56 when I retired, so fairly young. But I had enough seniority that 03:20 I was able to do that. So she's the one who carries the load for, she's the breadwinner and no pun intended. And she carries the family with all the insurance and things like that. Yay, girl power. I love it when women have the chance to do that stuff. She's a rock star. Awesome. 03:47 Okay, so since you've taken over a bunch of your house, does that mean that you might be considering moving into a bigger space? You know, we thought about it and eventually I think this is something that I would like to get, you know, at least a commercial kitchen so I could expand and grow because I'm close to capacity right now. 04:14 And so that's something we've talked about. A couple of options that came up. Ultimately, we decided that we want to go through at least an entire conduit year and see how this progresses and make sure that it's not a flash in a pen and it's something that's sustainable, both from a business standpoint, but also from a financial standpoint for us. We didn't want to go into taking a significant investment at this point. 04:43 So, but in the future, I think this is something that I'd like to do. Not to have a retail place to sell bread. That is clearly not my, my, my, my objective. But, you know, we'll talk a little more about this. I'm sure I, besides selling bread at local stores and farmers market, I also teach classes. So what I'd like to do is to have a commercial space where I can, I can have more equipment. 05:13 and that I could also teach my classes out of. Yeah, yep. Because you'll need the room because you're very popular and people are gonna wanna learn from you. So speaking of classes, I have a question. I have a question about croissants. When you make croissants, we have never attempted that here. My husband loves to bake breads, but we have not attempted croissants yet. Is that? 05:39 Is that like the puff pastry dough? Is that how that works? So croissant is a laminated dough. So that means that there's layers of, yeah, so it's essentially it's a puff pastry but with a commercial yeast. So it's using yeast. So it's, you know, a very simple list of ingredients. It's, you know, very similar to puff pastry, but there's also yeast in 06:09 overnight then I create my butter layer which is Typically deposited on the center of that dough that I stretch and fold until I get multiple layers. So You know you you make what you do You make what you call a butter block butter layer and then the dough is Encasing that but

Today I'm talking with Kelly at The Fiddlin' Farmstead with an update on her Valais Black Nose sheep babies! 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 Kelly at the Fiddlin' Farmstead, and Kelly was my, I think, third guest back in August, and she was the third episode released back in August. How are you, Kelly? How you doing? I'm doing pretty good. 00:29 I'm good. So, Kelly raises Valet Black Nose sheep. And back when we talked in August, you were working on having full bread. I guess that's the right word. Valet Black Nose sheep. Is that what was going on then? Yes, I think we were in the process of purchasing a purebred ram. Okay. So what's happened since then? Because I know, but I know you're excited to talk about it. 00:58 We had our first purebred lambs and they are everything and more that I had hoped for. I couldn't be more just tickled by them. So that was super exciting. How many did they did you end up having? We ended up with three. They both had twins. Unfortunately, the little ram lamb on my second ewe didn't end up making it. He was just tiny, stillborn. So we ended up with. 01:27 three ewe lambs total. Okay, awesome. So are you going to keep all three or are you gonna sell a couple? No, we've been working on listing a couple of them. We ended up with a bottle baby again as well that lived in my house for a couple months. So she's a tough one to let go, we'll probably end up keeping her. But yeah, I think it just went so smoothly having a ram here. We're hoping to do the same breeding again next year. 01:57 Okay. And are you going to, is it going to be the same, the same number of ewes bred or are you going to be breeding more? Yes, it'll just be the same too this year because our bottle baby, you know, our ram would be a herciter. And then we have two polypay ewes as well that we've been experimenting breeding. That would be a first generation valley. So half polypay, half valley. Okay. And 02:26 I read something about that blend that there's a reason you wanted to do that. Yeah, I got into it. Well, with the Valley, their personalities and their friendliness just really caught my attention for somebody like me who was not very experienced with livestock. With the Polypay cross, their milk supply and their fiber is excellent. So my idea was to kind of create a perfect homestead sheep with those qualities you want for production. 02:55 Also the friendliness and well-maneu-rism. And they're also a polled breed, the polype, and because polled is a dominant gene, this cross will always be polled. It won't have horns, which also makes people more comfortable on the smaller homestead. Okay, do the valet ones have horns? Oh yes, they have massive horns. And they, you know, they're not mean with them by any means, but when they come run into greet you, they really get you in the back of the leg sometimes, and they get caught in the fences. 03:25 all the fun that comes with organs. Okay. All right. So for those who haven't listened to the original interview with Kelly, tell me, you were saying something about there are very few full-bred belay sheep in the United States and something about the country that they originated from. So can you refresh my memory? Yeah, so we come, they come from Switzerland. The UK had a breeding program. They were able to import 03:54 the actual animals were in the US, we were not allowed to. So we worked out something with the United Kingdom to purchase frozen semen. That's where the breeding up comes in. Artificial laparoscopic insemination. Lately, though, we've been able to import embryos as well. So there are more purebreds. They actually call the embryo ones pure blooded. But there's a lot more of them in the US now than there was two years ago. 04:22 just because of the availability of the embryos, more rams live here. So they're not quite as uncommon as they were a couple years ago. A lot of people really got into the program, but they're still hard to come across, that's for sure. OK, and why couldn't the actual sheep be imported? Because of disease resistance. It's kind of a closed. 04:52 with, I think with sheep, I'm not sure what other livestock that applies to, but mainly to keep disease out of the US. Yeah. And plus, I'm assuming that it's very stressful on the animal to be put on a boat or on a plane and shipped here. And that would make them vulnerable to being sick on top of being vulnerable to being sick with things they haven't been exposed to before. 05:18 Right. We had a similar situation with the valley. A lot of people a