A Tiny Homestead Podcast Por Mary E Lewis arte de portada

A Tiny Homestead

A Tiny Homestead

De: Mary E Lewis
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We became homesteaders three years ago when we moved to our new home on a little over three acres. But, we were learning and practicing homesteading skills long before that. This podcast is about all kinds of homesteaders, and farmers, and bakers - what they do and why they do it. I’ll be interviewing people from all walks of life, different ages and stages, about their passion for doing old fashioned things in a newfangled way. https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryesCopyright 2023 All rights reserved. Ciencias Sociales Economía Gestión y Liderazgo Liderazgo
Episodios
  • Polyface Farm - Joel Salatin on Food Emancipation

    Polyface Farm - Joel Salatin on Food Emancipation
    Dec 17 2025
    Today I'm talking with Joel Salatin at Polyface Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well. www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Joel Salaton at Polyface Farms in Virginia in the United States. Good morning, Joel. How are you? Good morning. I'm very good. Thank you very much. What's the weather like there today? ah Well, last night it was down about 00:29 15 degrees today. I think it's supposed to be a high of maybe 34, 35. And then drop down into 20s tonight. Tomorrow's going to be warm. It's going to be about a high of like 50 tomorrow. So. We're going to be warmer than you are in Minnesota today. It's supposed to hit 45 degrees today. Oh, wow. That's cool. That doesn't happen very often that we're warmer than Virginia. 00:58 Yeah. Yeah. Well, it, uh, it, it's, we, we've been in a really, really cold, I mean, the river's frozen over. It's, uh, we've been in a really cold, uh, cold dip here lately. Yeah. I think the whole United States has been at some point in the last week and a half. It's been, it's been unbearably cold here. And I'm really looking forward to getting back into what we would consider to be temperate degrees here. Um. 01:27 So I saw that Polyphase Farms is closed for the next week or so. Do you guys close for the holidays? Yeah, we do. We close for about two weeks. And that you got to realize much of many of our staff, we have a very, very young staff here. And so often they like to go to family over the holidays and things and New Year. we just, it's just the easiest thing is to just close for two weeks and 01:58 Um, just keep a, you know, keep a kind of a core here to do chores and feed cows and gather eggs and kind of hold the ship together, uh, for, for a couple of weeks and let everybody, uh, just enjoy. And then, and then those people that, put their hands up and say, I'll stay through Christmas. Then obviously they get there. They get there two weeks. One guy already took us two weeks back at Thanksgiving. And, and then, you know, they, they, they, 02:28 stagger out, you know, through January. you know, usually by the, by mid February, we're back at full staff and up and running, but these two weeks were pretty, were pretty core. That's fabulous. And it gives you and your wife and your son a chance to maybe spend some time together as a family. Yeah, some, although I'm a bit of a scrooge, you know, we've done this all our lives and, um, the, uh 02:58 The holidays, you know, the work stays. So we end up picking up the slack because we live here. don't have to go see family. know, we're here. so we pick up a lot of extra work during the holidays. I'm actually, what I've started doing in the last few years is the holidays oh with the crew kind of down to core level. 03:26 and not doing, not biting off any great big projects. That's when I do my writing. So yesterday I started on my next book and I'm almost done with the third chapter. I got two chapters done yesterday. got, em I was trying to get my third one done this morning before this, but I didn't quite get it done. I have to finish after our call here, but I'm hoping to get this knocked out here in the next couple of weeks. 03:56 And we'll be up and running. you have a working title yet? Oh yeah. The title is food emancipation. Oh, awesome. Cause we need that real bad right now. We do. We, we need it desperately. And, you know, this, I consider this, told Teresa this morning, this is probably going to be my, my single biggest contribution, I think to the culture. And of course she said, well, 04:26 It's taking your whole life to get to this, you know, to get to this point. but, uh, this, this, the food freedom, the food freedom, I think is the biggest issue we've got now agriculturally, oh uh, and, and in the food system. And, um, so, um, 04:50 I'm really digging into it. I'm excited about it. In fact, I couldn't even sleep last night. got two chapters done and, um, um, I'm really excited about it and glad to be jumping in. The big thing with a book, hard part, the hard part is starting. And, uh, so yesterday when I got that first chapter done, I was, I say, you know, I was on a roll and, uh, and now I'm, I'm just really excited about. 05:20 about knocking it out. Yeah, somebody told me a trick once that if you're stuck at the beginning, start in the middle. Like literally just get the words on paper and then you can move it around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's true. That's true. So, know, I have an outline, have an outline. And so I've got, you know, kind of the chapter, the ...
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    33 m
  • Hellfire Homestead

    Hellfire Homestead
    Dec 12 2025
    Today I'm talking with Shannon and Allen at Hellfire Homestead. www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Shannon and Alan at Hellfire Homestead in New Hampshire. Good evening, you guys. How are you? Very good, actually, despite freezing. Is it super cold in New Hampshire right now? Yeah, we could kind of a little, 00:25 cold snap going on so that makes for frozen water bottles and water buckets which is always a nightmare but yeah Minnesota's pretty cold too but not as cold as it's gonna be Saturday the high for Saturday where I live is gonna be minus one oh my gosh and it's probably coming your way three or four days later so you I've given you a heads up oh 00:50 Yeah, I know it's really hard with livestock because they've got to have fresh water whether you want to go out and break the ice and put water in or not. Yep. And we have quite a few different animals here. Okay. Well, tell me the first question I have is why is it called Hellfire Homestead? So, mean, oddly enough, it was sort of to weed out people that would be turned off by that name. 01:18 I think, and feel free to interrupt me, dear. But I feel that like in recent years, you know, with the influx of TikTok and other various social media, not only is there a lot of information that's absolutely wrong about homesteading, survivalism, bushcraft, et cetera, but a lot of people into it are not multi-generational. And there's a lot of returning to sort of like bad 01:48 Um, bad themes, I guess I should say as far as what we perceive to be gender roles in home setting and things like that on top of, uh, just a lot of bad information in general, which I mean, as somebody who grew up in New Hampshire and my family's been out here since the 1700s, um, ah I learned generationally how to can, um, how to keep meat clean. Um, hunting was big in parts of my family. Um, 02:18 And I just sort of like grew up in the woods, like a wild feral child. ah So, you know, and then you, you know, you log on to like TikTok and you see like 25 year old kids like canning with, ah you know, jars they got, you know, spaghetti jars they got from the grocery store and saying this is viable. And it's like, no, that will kill you if not ruin your entire harvest. There's a reason our grandparents use ball jars. ah 02:46 So that was part of it. And another part of it is that people are incredibly interested in what it is we do. 02:54 just on the day to day, like they're interested in the farm, they're interested in the fact that we fill our own freezer with our own meat. They're interested in the fact that we do process the hides of the animals that we eat and kill. We have sheep. ah So, some of us being online was to satisfy the curiosity of our friends, but also to kind of counter some of these like... 03:20 these ridiculous ideas that people who are not even generational farmers are starting to promote as good. Uh huh. Good. I'm glad that you're, you're like standing up for that because you're right. There's a lot of crap on the internet about what's safe, what isn't, what you can do, what you can't do. And I was grown up the same. I was brought up, sorry, not grown up, brought up the same way you were Shannon. I spent so much time in the, uh, the woods and the swamp behind my house growing up in Maine. 03:50 And I'm 56, there were no computers, were no tablets, there were no cell phones. Mom said, you ate a good breakfast, go play, don't come back till dark. And that's what we did. Yeah, was Gen X. So my parents were basically like, get outside, you're on your own until it starts getting dark. Yeah, me too. And I couldn't necessarily do that with my kids when I finally managed to find a husband who wasn't terrible and managed to stay with him. 04:19 and lived in town because there weren't really any woods for them to go play in. So we would take them on the weekends and go hike trails in the area. 04:30 Yeah, my son that way too. we, you know, when I was, it took a while to get a farm in my first marriage. Um, and we lived in the city. We actually lived in Concord, New Hampshire. Um, so like keeping that rural, that like, you know, that aspect of like self sustainability was a little bit harder. Um, but you know, we did things like, you know, from a very young age, he was taught gun safety from a very young age. He was taught at least some of the basics of. 04:58 killing and cleaning your own food. And then as we got our own farm with my ex-husband, we started raising rabbits and doing things like that. So, I mean, that's definitely uh something that he's held ...
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    39 m
  • Hope Hill Homestead

    Hope Hill Homestead
    Dec 10 2025
    Today I'm talking with Marcus at Hope Hill Homestead. Route 2 Revolution www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Marcus at Hope Hill Homestead in New Hampshire. Good morning, Marcus. How are you? Good morning, Mary. How are you? I'm good. I'm very excited to find out what you do, but tell me how the weather is in New Hampshire this morning. Well, when I was dropping my kids off at their little 00:28 uh school, little farm school, little private Catholic farm school. It was two degrees. Okay. Is it sunny? it cloudy? What? It's partly sunny, cloudy. Okay. so, but there's some snow on the ground and everything is frozen here. um It is, I think it's 22 degrees outside here. 00:56 In Minnesota, it's very overcast. Our yard light, we live on three acres, so we have a light that lights up the door yard at night. It was still on at 7.30 this morning and the sun was supposed to be up. I was like, oh, it is very overcast. And they are predicting rain this afternoon. Oh no. So you're going have some hard driving conditions pretty soon. Yes. And my husband actually has an appointment at two. So I was like, please be careful when you go. 01:26 True. Yeah, I don't love it when the weather does this flip floppy thing because it's been really, really cold here and we've had snow at least a trace every day for over a week and now it's going to rain. Yeah, it just makes a big mess. yeah, we did the driveway and like, for example, I had an oil truck try to come deliver oil to me and we burn wood and we have like oil as a backup and sometimes if the fireplace goes out, the stove goes out in the night, then you... 01:55 the heat kicks back on and I wanted to make sure I had the oil tank full because we live up on a dirt road, a driveway is a dirt road that goes up pretty steep and uh at some points the oil company will say we won't even attempt to go up your driveway because it's dangerous. uh yeah, yesterday he tried to, a few days ago they tried to get up, they couldn't make it up and I'm like, oh please God, please let them help him get up and then they came today and he delivered it. So now we're, hopefully we're set for the winter. 02:25 because it's really important when you live on a homestead, as we all know who do. Okay, so tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do at your place. Yeah, so we live on, me and my wife and my four kids, live on 10 acres and we have some sheep and we have some chicken and I also from home, I'm a work at home parent here and I 02:54 I make furniture, but I also make like little A-frame cabins and greenhouses. That's primarily what I do now. I make these kind of these smaller concept cabin structures that people use for like Airbnb or just for, you know, their backyard sleeping cabins or whatever. Yeah. And as far as like the homesteading part, we just started milking some sheep this last spring, the first time we milked. um 03:24 That's been interesting and we made cheese. We were in the process of trying to become more self-sufficient, but as you know, you got to take little steps and sometimes with every two steps you take, you take one step back. Yes, you do. Sometimes you don't even go forward again. We did that with rabbits. 03:48 We're not doing rabbits again, I don't think. We keep talking about it, but I don't think we're gonna do it again. just not, it is not worth the return for us. So with the sheep, I already knew that you could milk sheep, but are they good with that or do you have to like train them to be okay Well, you know, there's a couple breeds that are very good milkers. So we have some East Phrasians and 04:14 The East Fraser's sheeps, can produce up to a couple gallons each one a day. And a lot of people don't know that about um sheep that you can milk them. we love our sheep and we've had sheep for the last, well, we had to get rid of our herd a few years ago because we just didn't have enough pasture and it was getting too expensive and we had young kids and it all together was hard. so we... um 04:43 We got rid of our sheep and our goats for a little bit. And then we just had the chance to get back the same sheep that we got rid of, returned to us um because they had young children. They couldn't take care of them. And luckily they were, one of them was in milk. And uh so we just kept on milking and it was fantastic. And sheep's milk, if anybody has tried goat milk, there's a little bit of a taste with goat milk. It doesn't taste like cow's milk, but sheep's milk. 05:11 actually taste just like cow's milk, I would say even better than cow's ...
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    39 m
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