Épisodes

  • Qwazy Quail Farm

    Qwazy Quail Farm
    Feb 21 2025
    Today I'm talking with Aaron at the Qwazy Quail Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Aaron at Qwazy Quail Farm. It's really hard to do two QWs in a row. Good morning, Aaron. How are you? Good morning. Doing good. How about yourself? I'm doing great. You're in Ohio? Yes. We are in Willoughby Hills, Ohio, which is just east of downtown. 00:29 Cleveland by about 12, 13 miles. Okay. Is it super cold there today? It is very cold today. Um, I think it's supposed to be in the teens at the highest today. Well, you've got us beat cause I don't think we're going to see above zero again today in Minnesota. It's been so freaking cold. 00:50 But that's okay, we're gonna get through it and it's gonna warm up next week. And I looked at the long range forecast and we're looking at spring temperatures in about two weeks. I'm very excited about this. Yes, I know all of my birds are very excited about the warmer weather also. Yeah, and I wanna hear all about your birds. So tell me about what you do, Aaron. Okay, so what we do here is we raise Coturnix quail, Bobwhite quail, and we also raise a small flock of chickens. So the... 01:18 Bob white quail we here in Ohio, because they're a native species, you have to have a special permit for those. So we have about a dozen of those right now, just getting into them. Um, as a, I'm not sure exactly what we're going to do with those birds, possibly get into a conservation program with the state of Ohio to repopulate them as due to environmental factors, uh, some farming practices, um, 01:47 predators, things like that. The Bobwhite quail population has dwindled drastically here in Ohio. So I think they're beautiful birds. The sounds that they make are, it sounds like you're almost at a zoo or something like that. It's really cool sounds. The Coturnix quail, we raise several colors of those, which we raise jumbo whites, jumbo Egyptians, jumbo 02:15 And then we have some Celadon and we have some black quail, which the black quail didn't come to the United States until around 2019 and they came from Germany. So there's a lot of people that are starting to get into them. Um, there's some people that have concerns. They have something called a yellow gene, which I don't get too much into the genetics. Um, I've attended a quail con last year, which was in, uh, Miami'sburg, Ohio. 02:45 And they had people, quail enthusiasts and farmers from Canada. And many, many states here in the United States attended that. And they have that every year in the fall. And so there you can meet like-minded quail farmers, people that are doing this as homesteaders, all kinds of different backgrounds in quail, but we specify or specialize in the quail for egg production and for meat. 03:14 We raise many of the jumbos because another thing we do is when you go to a pet store and you're getting some treats for your dogs, you want to make sure that you're offering them the best that they can get. And a lot of times these pet stores will have ingredients that have other stuff in there that's not necessarily the best for our pets. And it was just recently I had run out of our quail treats that we make. 03:42 And both of my dogs ended up getting extremely sick and coughing up and puking up blood and chunks of their innards. That was from a chicken treat that said it was all natural. And when I went and looked up more information on this company, they've got a lot of lawsuits and I almost lost both of my dogs. So what we do here is we raise the quail. The ones that are going to be processed for meat or for dog treats, they go to 04:12 a chicken or poultry processor that's USDA and Department of Agriculture really inspected. They're down in Baltic, Ohio called Pleasant Valley Poultry. And we take them down there and get our birds processed. We bring them back here. We put them in storage. We have our warehouse license so that we can also sell meat to grocery stores, to markets, to chefs and things like that. So. 04:39 But we've got a lot going on here and sometimes I don't know how I find the time to do anything. I was going to say you're pretty deep into the quaildom going on there. A couple things. My dog is actually allergic to chicken so she never gets any kind of poultry. We actually had to switch out her dog food because it turned out that the chicken in the dog food was making her sick to her stomach. So we don't do chicken here for the dog. We do chicken for us. Chicken is great. 05:09 But what I really want to get into is your expertise on quail raising, because...
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    33 min
  • Sustainable Driftless, Inc.

    Sustainable Driftless, Inc.
    Feb 19 2025
    Today I'm talking with Julia at Sustainable Driftless, Inc. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like information regarding the documentaries mentioned, click here. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Julia at Sustainable Driftless Incorporated. I think it is Inc., so incorporated. Good morning, Julia. How are you? I am good. I'm good. I'm glad to be here with you. I'm so happy to have you on because I... 00:28 I have been to the Driftless area in Wisconsin once and it's gorgeous, but I don't know all the history and the stories behind it. So I'm very excited to talk to you. You're in La Crosse, Wisconsin? I would say La Crosse kind of geographically might be roughly the center of the Driftless region. I'm actually in the, I call it the suburbs of a very rural area. It's where I live on an 80 acre. 00:58 Homestead. Ooh. But I travel all over the Driftless region. Today I'm in Madison, Wisconsin. And we just do a whole lot of stuff out there in the Driftless. Okay. Well, first off, can you tell me what your part in the organization is and what the organization is? Okay. Let's see. 01:26 About eight years ago, I collaborated with somebody else that I had been working with on another not-for-profit. These two guys have produced mysteries of the driftless through the Mississippi Valley Conservancy, Tim Jacobson and George Howe. And the three of us got together and we formed Sustainable Driftless with the purpose of kind of shining a light on the area 01:55 basic idea is that if you love something, you'll treat it well. So what we're, our attempt was and is to get people to love the driftless region, to see what is around them. There are lots of people that have lived here their entire lives and don't necessarily recognize how precious and fragile and gorgeous it is. I think you have to go outside the region to recognize how special it is sometimes. 02:25 But we're shining a light on that. We produced Decoding the Driftless six years ago, which won some Emmys and worldwide accolades. And I think it's one of the number one documentaries that is shown on public television throughout the nation. And what that has done is it kind of... 02:51 gets people kind of into what this special place is all about. So we've continued on with that, and we had a terrible unexpected loss of George Howe about a year ago in a farming accident. And my role as one of the original founders and vice president, and now also is to find new ways to... 03:16 shine the light on the area and to uplift other organizations that are in this area that do work on sustainability and environmental and wise and smart development of the area, water quality issues, soil issues. We just want to get all those individual groups working, not necessarily working together, but aware of one another and having the general public be aware of everybody because 03:46 It's a really exciting time and it's a really exciting story to see this kind of efforts for biodiversity and home setting and gardening and all kinds of good stuff. Okay, that helps. Thank you. So for those who are listening that don't know about the driftless area, can you explain what it is? 04:12 The driftless area is a very unique part of the Midwest. And what it is, is over the two last ice ages, I think the last one was 10,000 years ago, there was no glacier drift as things melted. There was no glacier scraping this area. So you're not going to find drift from... 04:41 Far away. 04:44 that has landed in this area because the glaciers went around both times. And it's kind of like an amoeba-shaped island that encompasses 32 counties in Wisconsin, southwest Wisconsin, western Wisconsin, a bit of Minnesota, southeast Minnesota, and northeast Iowa, and a little tiny bit of Illinois. And it has karst geology, which makes it very interesting. 05:15 It has what geology? Karst geology, which is kind of limestone. It's like the Swiss cheese of rocks. So the rain and the water that, and this was once underwater as everything melted, but the rain and the water that falls on the hills and at this area and the valley percolates through kind of a 05:40 Swiss cheese, I would say, imaginary rock system. So the water kind of goes through it and absorbs all those minerals and ends up in a very abundant water supply in the area. Okay, thank you. I just missed the word and I didn't understand what you said. Okay, so one of the things that I either understand or misunderstand about the driftless area and people who grow food 06:09 is that you're not supposed to use man-made herbicides or pesticides ...
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    37 min
  • Erin Anderson Coaching - How to handle the unknown

    Erin Anderson Coaching - How to handle the unknown
    Feb 17 2025
    Today I'm talking with Erin at the Erin Anderson Coaching. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Erin at Erin Anderson Coaching. Good morning, Erin. How are you? I'm great. How are you, Mary? I'm good. It's a really bright sunny day here in Minnesota, but it is cold. It's really cold here. 00:26 Yeah, it is in Utah. It's not bright sunny either. We've got the clouds, the cold, and the uncomfortable. We had that yesterday. Today it's just nice to see the sun pouring through my window because yesterday was just gray and I'm not even sure we got above zero. If we did, it wasn't by much. Yeah, yep, yep, yep. That's kind of where we're at right now. But you live in one of the most beautiful states in the whole 50 of them. 00:54 I love Utah, but you know, I've been to Minnesota too, and I've been to Montana and a lot of the 50, like the western half of the 50 states I should say. There's just beauty all over. There really is. Yes, I agree. I agree. I have done a lot of road trips between Minnesota and Maine over my last 20 years. And I grew up in Maine, so my parents and my family still live there. But 01:20 Yeah, it's always a joy for me to do a road trip from here to there because it's always just so pretty. And I don't like flying, so if I'm going to travel, it's going to be by car. Yeah, I get that. Yeah. I get that. Okay. So, Erin is a coach, a life coach, I guess is what I would say. Life and business. Yeah. And that might seem weird for a podcast, I mean a Homestead podcast, but it's really not. 01:46 Because there's a lot going on in the world that Erin might be able to help us understand and work through it herself. So Erin, tell me about yourself and what you do. Yeah, so let me tell you this much. I'm a homesteader myself, so there's that. We have 28 chickens. We built them literally a chicken Taj Mahal out in our yard. And so, you know, we gather our own eggs. We have family that raises dairy cows. And so, 02:15 you know, we can get our own dairy and things like that. So like we totally, totally understand like the homesteading thing. But what I love to do, um, is I love helping women, especially women, entrepreneurs heal from residual trauma. Uh, because you know, there's, there's so many things that women can do, uh, especially in the homesteading community, like we're, they're creators. 02:44 those women are massive creators in the homesteading community. And when we're being plagued with residual trauma, often what I see happening is we're not able to live our best life. We're not able to create the things that we want to create or even, you know, do the things that we want to do because we're always plagued with this. But what if, you know what I mean? 03:14 And so the thing that I love to do is I really love to help women heal those things. So that way they can turn around and they can create everything that they want to create with confidence, knowing it's going to work out, like knowing it's going to work out, not wondering. And believing in themselves because there's something beautiful about a woman. 03:43 who is really in that creative energy. Hmm. Absolutely. I agree. And the thing that's hard about living in the, the after effects of trauma is that you cannot move forward and extend the energy you're extending on feeling bad into doing something good. Yeah. Yes. It's, it's really hard. And 04:10 The reason I wanted to chat with you is because right now, there's a lot going on that is making people feel kind of anxious. And one of the things that's going on is people who have homesteads are kind of concerned about their funding. People have farms or homesteads or ranches because a lot of funding comes from the government and there's some stuff going on in the government that people are worried about. They're not gonna get funding to do what they're usually supposed to do. So, 04:38 How do you handle that as the person who is anxious about your future? So number one, you've got to get really close with your money story, right? When you are dealing with the anxiety of, oh my gosh, I don't know if I'm going to have that funding. I don't know if I'm going to have this. And you're feeling that there's a reason. And again, like it's. 05:06 probably has something to do with some type of trauma. There's several different types of trauma. But I would guess that if you're dealing with a lot of money trauma or these fears around money, you're probably dealing with something in childhood, like some sort of childhood or developmental trauma, or it can also be a ...
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    54 min
  • Hedgerow Collective

    Hedgerow Collective
    Feb 14 2025
    Today I'm talking with Anya at the Hedgerow Collective. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Anya at the Hedgerow Collective. Good afternoon. Well, I guess it's afternoon for you, but it's still morning for me. So good morning, afternoon, Anya. How are you? Good morning and afternoon to you as well. I am well today. 00:27 Pennsylvania, Southeast Pennsylvania where I live. It is a overcast day and it smells and feels like snow. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's not an overcast day here in Minnesota. It is just as bright as it could possibly be and it's very cold. I don't think we've come up zero yet today. Oof. Yeah. So that's exciting. 00:53 And I'm glad you opened with the weather because I usually do because like I've said, it's how I express my esteem for the people that I'm talking to. I always try to find out the weather where you guys are. So, all right. So I'm going to open this up with the fact that you're not really a homesteader, but reading your bio on your website, you are definitely a nature girl. So I figured they tie in pretty well. So tell me about yourself and what you do. 01:18 I agree, they tie in so well and I actually do a little bit of homesteading but I'm very, very new at it. But I am a nature girl, I am a gardener, I am a photographer and I also do horse massage which is really delightful. And I live on a little... 01:45 property in a town called Marietta, Pennsylvania. It is ancient Susquehannaq land. And we moved here about three years ago. And at the time, my husband said, we're not gonna have any big trees. We're not going to do anything wild like that. We don't want the maintenance of trees falling on the house or the leaves or anything. 02:15 And over, you know, these past three years, we've compromised and we now have 11 trees on the property. Yay. Yes, and more to come. There's apple trees that are sitting in my sunroom. I have serviceberry trees that are being shipped to me. So we've created a really wonderful little habitat here that I 02:45 Um, really, it feels really magical here, even though we're in, you know, we have neighbors on all sides and a road in front of our house. And, you know, I think, I think part of my goal is that you don't need to have, you know, 10 acres, 50 acres to be able to do this type of, of work and grow your own food or grow, create habitats or anything like that. You know, you can work with what you have and it's... 03:13 absolutely possible. I mean, it's great if you do have 10 acres or 60 acres or 500 acres, but you don't have to have those things in order to grow some really amazing flowers or food or both. Yeah. Yep. That's one of the things that I'm trying to promote on this podcast is that you can do this stuff in a little tiny house on a tenth of an acre, or you can do it on lots of acres. But the point is you can do it. 03:43 Absolutely. I mean, you can find cheap things like baby pools or old, like food grade buckets on Facebook Marketplace for super cheap and you can grow things. Yeah. You mentioned apple trees. My husband actually went out and pruned our peach trees and our apple trees this past weekend and brought in the stems and he's rooting them. 04:09 so that we can have saplings because if it works, they'll turn into more trees. Absolutely. Yeah. That's great. Really excited. I have a sapling. Well, I'm trying, not quite a sapling yet. I'm manifesting that it will become a sapling of a witch hazel cutting. So that's my little project. I have it sitting next to me here and I just, I talk to her every day. I'm like, come on, you can do it. 04:38 Spread those roots. Do your thing. Yeah, I was going to say talk to it and sing to it. It'll come up every day. Yeah. OK. You mentioned Susquehanna land. Is that Native American land? That is Native American land. They were. Marietta is situated along the Susquehanna River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay, and it's one of the largest watersheds in Pennsylvania. The Susquehanna River. 05:07 is this is some fun facts here. It's 444 miles long and it is the longest unnavigable river in the United States. Because the Susquehanna goes from 200 feet deep to two inches deep so quickly, it's impossible to navigate it. 05:36 with any type of boat. And historically, they fixed, fixed, quote unquote, that by using canals, the remnants of which are still litter the sides of the river. But yes, the Sesquihana people were on these shores. They were part of the Lena Lenape tribes of the Northeast. 06:04 I try to acknowledge that they were here far, far longer and well ...
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    38 min
  • My Homestead Heart

    My Homestead Heart
    Feb 12 2025
    Today I'm talking with Sam at My Homestead Heart. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Sam at My Homestead Heart. Good morning, Sam, how are you? Good morning, Miss Mary. I'm doing wonderful, how about yourself? I'm good, and I love that you said Miss Mary because it's a very southern thing, I love that. 00:27 Yeah, that's what I am. I am from the deep south. Yes, and you have the most lovely sweet tea accent. I'm telling you, every time I talk to somebody with a southern accent like yours, I just smile. My face just breaks open because it's so pretty. Oh, you're so kind. Nah, I'm not kind. I'm honest. If I didn't like it, I wouldn't say anything because I'm not rude. Well, thank you so much. It's funny that I still carry it. 00:57 because I have not lived home in decades, but apparently I still bring it with me in some sort of way. However, if you were to listen to my family members, it is much more thick, thicker than mine. Wow. 01:18 Okay, well they must be terribly difficult to understand because you are clear as a bell. So if it's a lot thicker than yours, I probably would be like, Oh man, my sister's her accent. She's never, she was born and raised down there and, um, I can probably count on her hand the amount of times that she has left the area in her lifetime. And she is thick, thick, thick Southern drawl. 01:47 Well, I'm going to slip into it a couple of times because it's the one I pick up easiest. So don't be mad at me if I start sounding like a Southerner. All right. So tell me about yourself and what you do, Sam. Well, I am a military veteran. So I served a career in the military and separated back in 2005. 02:16 And my husband was still active duty. He actually just retired a few years ago and we are parents to a 10 year old. He's about to turn 11 next week. So yay on that. But, um, but yeah, we got transferred up here in Pennsylvania back in 2018 through the military and, um, just fell in love with it up here. I'm we spent. 02:45 the majority of our careers down south, whether it be in mostly Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, spent some time in South Carolina, and then lo and behold, I don't know what in the world they were thinking, sending a bunch of country folk up here in Pennsylvania. But he took orders. His last set of orders were out of Philadelphia. 03:15 And we were like, Oh my goodness, what in the world? They, them city folk going to come see us hauling the tractor on a trailer coming to town. But we were lucky enough to be able to find some country space out here in the south eastern part, it's about, well, we've, we rented for a little bit in, in 03:43 outside of Westchester in a little Brandywine area, had found some country area that we rented until we found a place here. We moved here, it's about an hour outside of Philadelphia, right above the Maryland line. It's, you know, country, lots of Amish farms around us. And we got real lucky and found a 20 something acre little farmstead, so. 04:10 You know, we just love it. We love the weather. It's not so hot up here like it is down south and just the rolling hills and man, the change of colors and the seasons. It's just, we just love it. 04:28 Well good. Now you keep saying you're from the deep south. Where are you originally from? Mississippi. Okay. Way down by the in the bayou. Okay as much as I love southern accents I'm very bad at parsing which one I'm listening to so I had to ask. A lot of people say that I'm from Texas and no it's not Texas not Texas. Not many people you know we don't get a lot of tourists down where I'm from so not a little not a lot of people get 04:57 experience or particular dialect, I guess I should say. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so I messaged with you yesterday and you were saying that you're new to homesteading. So what inspired you to get into homesteading? Well, to be honest, you know, when we were living in West, when we first moved to Pennsylvania, my son at the time was four years old. 05:27 And we were living in Pennsylvania for about six months and before he was diagnosed with some autoimmune issues. And, you know, at, um, four years old, you know, I mean, he's just a baby, right. And then, um, as his condition would progress over, you know, time, he would 05:57 have more issues to have to deal with. And I just did not want to see my son on so many medications at such a young age. And so that's really where I began my whole deep dive into how can I help my baby, you know, have a good quality of life without having to take all these medicines. 06:28 And ...
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    29 min
  • Blooming Health Farms

    Blooming Health Farms
    Feb 10 2025
    Today I'm talking with Sean at Blooming Health Farms. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Sean at Blooming Health Farms. Good morning, Sean. How are you? Hey, good morning, Mary. How are you doing? I'm good. It's, is it nice in Colorado, number one? It is gorgeous. It is chilly, but the sun here makes it feel like it's tropical. 00:31 Well, we have sunshine in Minnesota too, but it's not tropical. It's probably 10 degrees outside. Oh, that's fair. That's fair. And I always ask about how the weather is, where the person is that I'm talking to because how I show my esteem for the people I talk to. So that's why. Okay, Sean, tell me about what you do because I know it has to do with chickens. Yes. 00:59 Blooming Health Farms is a nonprofit aquaponic chicken farm in northern Colorado. We're located in Greeley. And I use that word aquaponic chicken farm, A, to get a little bit of attention, but it showcases some of the neat stuff we do. We actually grow some of our own chicken feed using aquaponics and hydroponic methods, as well as take care of our chickens in some really humane, compassionate way. 01:29 that we do with chickens, partially to run an egg laying operation and sell chicken feed. But we also work with at-risk youth and teach them entrepreneurship and give them mental health support so they get themselves out of those cycles that they find themselves in. That is stellar. Okay. So what is, okay, first off, what's the difference between hydroponic and aquaponic? Because I didn't know. 01:58 that they were separate things. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of like, you know, big funny fancy words in agriculture these days. So I like to say that hydroponics is an umbrella form of agriculture, like the big thing. And it really simply means to use water to grow plants that aren't growing in a soil medium. 02:22 So we're growing plants with a nutrient-rich solution, a solution that has all of the minerals and vitamins plants need. And we're doing that in something like just water or something that has an inert media, a media without nutrition. Aquaponics is a subset of that, a part of hydroponics, in which we 02:47 grow fish in a body of water and then we use the fish water to actually fertilize our plants, if that makes sense. So the fish are eating this really highly nutritious, high protein fish food and their waste product is going into the water. There's a bunch of naturally occurring bacteria that live in the atmosphere and they turn that fish waste from their ammonia waste into usable plant nutrients, mostly nitrates. 03:18 Okay, that helps. Thank you. Because I was listening and I'm like, I didn't know there was a difference. What's the difference? So you just defined it. Thank you. All right. So Sean, what brought you to doing this? Because everybody has a reason. Yes. You know, years ago, I found myself living up in the mountains here in Colorado. I lived in an area called South Park and I was a professional photographer. 03:46 And I would meet a lot of people that I was taking pictures of that was saying like, hey, Sean, you're living the dream up here. And I would reflect on the things that I was doing. And I was living as a poor ski bum, if you will. And I really did a lot of thinking and stuff. And I decided to get myself back in school. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that, to be honest with you, 04:14 I grew my first pot plant while I was up in the mountains and I did a terrible job at it. I tried to grow it hydroponically in a way that I mentioned earlier and the plant came out and it was, for lack of better words, just very poor. There were no flowers on it. So if I wanted to use it for marijuana, it was pretty much worthless. And it drove me down this path of trying to figure out how to do it better. 04:44 if that makes sense, to try to grow a better plant. Well, while I was researching and studying, I saw this picture in a book of a hydroponic tomato growing in the Epcot Center. And it was this tomato in a large pot growing over the size of a tennis court. And there were these tomatoes the size of baseballs. There was like 30,000 of these tomatoes on this tennis court size. 05:12 spot and I said to myself, oh my goodness, I think we should be growing food this way. And it led me down this path of trying to grow tomatoes hydroponically. So I literally rushed down from the mountains and enrolled in a community college and started studying agriculture, studying biology, studying chemistry. And I fell in love with just this whole world of trying to grow things. 05:42 hydroponically....
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    40 min
  • REKO- Local Food Community

    REKO- Local Food Community
    Feb 7 2025
    Today I'm talking with Brecca at REKO- Local Food Community. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Brecca at REKO Local Food Community. Good afternoon, Brecca. It's one o'clock in the afternoon. I don't know where I was. Hello. Nice to be with you. You too. How are you? 00:26 I'm doing so well, thanks. We're trying to stay warm over here in my neck of the woods, but from listening to some of your previous podcasts, we're not that cold. So we hit two degrees this morning, and I was thinking I was not having a good day, but then I heard negative 25, and I was like, I'm OK. I'm OK. Well, it's really funny, because they're predicting rain for this afternoon here. It's like 35 degrees today. Oh my goodness, yeah. No fun. 00:52 It would be really, really nice if the weather would reflect what month we're actually in. Wouldn't it? That's true. My husband and I were talking in last year in January is when we got all our snow. So we didn't have snow all winter last year till January came and that's when we got pelted. And this year's been similar. We haven't been pelted with snow, but the temperatures are super cold. So I'm like, I'm ready to kind of start breaking into spring, not have the winter. 01:23 It's not that far away. We are rolling into February here soon. So there's hope. And I feel like all I do is talk about the weather at the beginning of every podcast episode. But like I've said, it's how I express my care for who I'm talking to. So well, when you're talking homesteading weather, that's what we're all thinking about. Exactly. Yeah. All right. So tell me about yourself and about RICO and what does REKO stand for? It's R-E-K-O. Yeah. So 01:50 REKO is actually a Swedish acronym that was put out by a Finnish farmer, and it just means fair consumption. So REKO itself here in Idaho started in 2020 around COVID craziness. So we had farmers markets that were threatening not to open because they couldn't meet the demands of city authorities and health authorities. 02:19 We had restaurants that were closed down. And for all of our small producers here in Idaho, those were two of the biggest cells for their farms and their homesteads was restaurants and farmers markets. And so we had Tia Groves with... 02:40 They no longer run it, but they sold mushrooms at the time. And she actually started Rico here locally as a collaboration of producers to create a way to continue to sell our goods because we were still producing them, but we just lost all of our avenues of selling them during 2020. 03:01 Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Did I see that it doesn't cost money to be part of it on your website or did I misread that? So actually, so there's two different parts of Rico. There's Rico the app, which is a great resource that has been produced by a couple of tech guys out of Utah and we just teamed up with them. 03:27 to be able to use the app, but the app is created with the producer in mind. So it is absolutely free for the producer. There's no cost. It is a storefront. So it's a great way to have a website that you can use that storefront of REKO through the app or if they're on a computer it goes through a website and 03:54 Sorry, my computer just notified me it's low. So anyways, but either way we can go, the producers aren't paying for it. There is a small fee that's asked from the customer at checkout and that's how the app is paid for. So we have a lot of producers here that have really taken advantage of that and created websites with that. 04:22 with REKO built in as the purchasing power for their website. So it saves our producers money on fees. It saves our producers money on having a storefront that's online, right? Because I know for our particular business, we have our own website and we set it up with WooCommerce years before REKO app was ever available. And we pay a lot of money for that every year. So 04:50 It is REKO. The app is definitely set up with producers in mind and it is a free tool for producers when that is When we talk about the farmers when we talk about the farmers market here in Idaho We have created a collaboration of vendors that have come together as REKO Treasure Valley And we actually created a farmers market out of it. So it's an online farmers market 05:17 We do charge, if you were to participate in all eight locations, it is $30 a month. So it's still very affordable. That $30 a month that we all pitch in goes to advertising the farmers market. So that's literally the only thing it pays for, but it's been a great resource for us as ...
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    32 min
  • Idaho Falls Community Garden Association

    Idaho Falls Community Garden Association
    Feb 5 2025
    Today I'm talking with Kristi at Idaho Falls Community Garden Association. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Kristi at Idaho Falls Community Garden Association. Wow, that's a mouthful. Good morning, Kristi. How are you? Good morning. Hi. Doing good? Good. 00:30 I have a goal to talk to as many community garden places as I can in 2025, and I think you're the first one, Christy, so tell me about yourself. Lived in Idaho for almost 50 years now, came from Colorado. Got involved with community gardens when my kids were teenagers and growing more independent by the moment. 00:59 and we were all looking for something to put some energy into. And I came to the idea of getting a community garden started here in our small town. Oh, so it's your baby. Well, myself and, you know, three or four other people were part of the original group who started it. I have. 01:29 maintain my connection with it since we started it in 1995. So, yeah. That's amazing. Congratulations. I love that. Oh, thank you. Well, tell me about the community garden. How does it work? Well, we have now three community gardens. Our town is roughly 60,000 people, so it's not huge. We started with a single garden of about a quarter acre. 01:58 And within a couple of years, we started a second one in another part of town that's about a half an acre. And then five years after that, we started a third one that is a full acre. That was in 2003. And the gardens are open to the public. 02:24 Anybody can garden there. We have a formal registration every year where people sign up and get a plot assigned. Then they have their own garden space, including access to water. They bring their own tools and hoses and all that kind of stuff. They're free to grow whatever they want as long as it's legal and doesn't intrude into the spaces of a garden. 02:54 nearby gardeners. There's an annual cost, which up until this year was $40 for new gardeners. And then if you are a gardener in good standing, which means you've participated for one full summer and met all the membership requirements, which primarily 03:19 involve taking care of your own plot and then contributing to the community areas of the garden with eight hours of effort over the course of the whole season. So if you've done that, then your fee for the following years, as long as you maintain that standing, is half the original cost. 03:47 We have garden coordinators at each garden who are gardeners there and it's their challenge and Responsibility to keep the gardeners engaged to be sure that there's nobody causing problems in the garden to help people who are Maybe beginning gardeners pair them up with other gardeners who have more experience or help them themselves if they have time 04:17 And they participate in our board meetings so that they can give us feedback and tell us what they need and how things are going. And that's been the evolution over these now 30 years. 04:36 Some things have changed, but the basic premise and process is similar to when we started. Wow, that is super cool. So I feel like not only are you growing plants, you're growing friendships with this community. Well, that was a large part of the motivation in the beginning was to build a place. 05:04 where people in the community could gather to share a common interest in gardening and growing stuff and exploring new varieties and learning how to do things in new ways with people that they may or may not have a lot in common with otherwise. And it's a really good way to build a sense of community that is not founded on religious beliefs or political beliefs, but on a common interest in 05:34 seeing delicious, beautiful things growing. That's a wonderful premise, Kristy. I'm so glad you started a community garden. That's amazing. So how big is the smallest plot that someone can get? Well, you know, that's pretty negotiable. Our smallest formal plot is about 10 by 10, so 100 square feet. 06:04 But if a gardener comes and they're new or they know their time constraints are forbidding or they just want less space, we're happy to divide a plot and give them half a 10 by 10. Typically people want larger plots rather than smaller plots, but we have had it happen that somebody says, well that's just too much for me. And the garden coordinators, it's 06:33 at their discretion, they can just divide the plot and say, okay, here's what you need, use this. So that's how, and the largest plot is probably 20 by 30, which is a lot. And that takes an experienced gardener to really keep control of that. One ...
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    32 min