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Episode 1: Welcome to the Little Way Farm and Homestead Podcast!
508 Plays2 years ago
On this episode of the Little Way Farm and Homestead Podcast we become introduced to Mathew and Carissa. During the conversation we will hear about the journey Mathew and Carissa took from the city to the countryside.
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Transcript
Introduction & Podcast Purpose
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the My Catholic Homestead Podcast. We are your hosts. I'm Matthew. And I'm Carissa. We're excited for you to join us as we talk about the Catholic faith on the homestead.
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome to episode one. We are extremely excited for you to join us on the podcast here. We just passed the first year on our homestead and we have learned a lot. And we are extremely excited to have some conversations around the homestead, the Catholic faith, and really what this podcast is
Carissa's Journey to Catholicism & Homesteading
00:00:27
Speaker
about. But before we get into any of that, we thought maybe we should do some introductions. Do you want to start?
00:00:32
Speaker
Sure. So I'm Carissa. Matthew and I have been married for coming up on nine years this October. We have three children together and live on 26 acres in Southeastern Indiana. We met 10 years ago in college and I was introduced to the Catholic faith through Matthew and eventually converted a year later. And we have been on a long journey to the homestead ever since then. And we're really excited to share everything
00:01:02
Speaker
along the way and what we've learned in this last year on the homestead. Yeah. Wow. And we have learned a lot. No joke. So I'll
Matthew's Catholic Upbringing & Homesteading Path
00:01:12
Speaker
pick up from there. My name's Matthew. I was raised in a Catholic household. And I don't think I ever really grew up with a passion or interest in farming or homesteading. It really wasn't a part of my childhood. I did grow up across from a farm, but it was a standard typical commodity based farm, corn, soybean, that kind of thing.
00:01:29
Speaker
So for whatever reason it wasn't really ever on my radar except for just looking out the window and knowing that it was there Somewhere along the road though over the last few years We have really become interested in homesteading and very passionate about farming specifically local farming things like raising our own meat raising our own produce so much so that in fact that we actually run a farm now and the farm is called little way farm and homestead and
00:01:55
Speaker
And it's obviously located in southeastern Indiana as well. And we love it. And it's been super fun. We've learned a lot. We've had a lot of challenges. I think we've had a lot of successes. And I also think it's very evident that God's grace is all over this place in so many ways that it's become incredibly encouraging. And I'm very thankful to God for that and thankful to all of our family here for supporting us in that as well.
00:02:19
Speaker
Well maybe you can start though. Where do you think this began? Like we've been talking about this for a while and people have been asking us like did you guys you know do you have an education in farming or in home setting or how did you learn all this stuff? What do you remember? Where did this begin?
Health, Fertility Awareness & Homesteading
00:02:33
Speaker
Yeah so similarly growing up I was not familiar with farming or raising food. My grandma grew up on a farm raising her own food so I was familiar with it from like a
00:02:49
Speaker
an old-time story so to me living on a farm or a homestead and raising your own food was an old-fashioned thing something of the past but i didn't realize that it was something people were still doing today that there was a movement of people going back towards that i will say i don't know
00:03:10
Speaker
when exactly that movement started back up again. But I do know it was it was before we were really familiar with the idea of homesteading. Yeah, I'm not really sure either. It seems to me and maybe it's that we run in a lot of circles with people who are interested in homesteading practices or you know they want to live in more agrarian environments or they want to do things even even as simply as like living in the city but making your own bread.
00:03:33
Speaker
Right. That's like one of the, you know, a really easy way of kind of considering home setting stuff is the things that you can do wherever you are. Even if you don't have a lot of land, so you can't run animals or grow a big garden. Right. There's still a lot of things you can do. Which is honestly, I think more so how it started for us.
Dream of Land Ownership & First Gardening Attempts
00:03:49
Speaker
I think when I look back on our story,
00:03:54
Speaker
We both had a little bit of a leaning towards a healthy lifestyle. You really emphasized working out and staying in shape. I had a desire to eat healthy and cook really good delicious food.
00:04:12
Speaker
while we were preparing for marriage we took an NFP course and they provided a book with the course that we took and in the book the woman talked about how our food affects our fertility and she kind of walked you through how to go to the grocery store and shop the perimeter to avoid the more processed foods and to eat more whole foods and she talked about different
00:04:38
Speaker
different foods that are good at giving healthier fertility.
00:04:46
Speaker
better outcomes and different things like that. Yeah. So that is what kind of got my mind rolling in understanding, okay, I know we want to have babies and I know that the babies are going to live within my body. And then coming across the concept that the food that I'm putting into my body will affect the health of those babies that are going to be pooling from everything I'm fueling myself with.
00:05:10
Speaker
It gave me a big drive to go and just continue digging into that and learning more about health and food. You know what's interesting about that too is that I think we were actually on different pages when it came to health because I was super focused on developing physical strength and on working out and you were really focused on eating healthy and taking care of your body from my food perspective and the nutrition perspective.
00:05:36
Speaker
Yeah, so I think it all started with learning about the food for me and you with the health and fitness. And then we started making our own laundry detergent to try to save some money. And our first summer married, you decided you wanted to start a garden. So we made a big thing about building garden beds together and growing produce. And it was so much fun to see the
00:06:05
Speaker
bountiful fruits that came from relatively minor work that I think that really sparked the idea, the concept of, oh, well, maybe one day we can have some land and we can raise kids on land and teach them how to raise food and have a garden. And that's when I think the idea really started growing.
00:06:28
Speaker
You know what I do remember from those times, though, that specifically that first house where we had the raised garden beds? Well, two things. One, I brought in I had a little old scion and I car and I brought in so much dirt in order to fill those garden beds. It was just absolutely ridiculous.
00:06:44
Speaker
but then our selection of crops was awfully strange like we grew a whole bunch of sweet potatoes and then strawberries well typically strawberries aren't even ready for the first year and the sweet potatoes there was so many of them that I just remember taking them out of the ground and they just kept coming yeah to be fair I don't think we had any idea how many potatoes can grow from one plant
00:07:04
Speaker
idea. I think we even forgot we planted them and it was like the end of the season and you're like wait we have potatoes in here and you started pulling them out and also I don't think we even ate sweet potatoes at that time. I don't think we did either. I remember finding them in the basement after we let them cure and being like oh I think they fermented in the basement.
00:07:24
Speaker
they didn't because we ate them i remember eating off of them for a while it took us a while because it was just the two of us and i didn't cook with sweet potatoes much so but i really appreciated having them once i did start cooking with them yeah but then okay so we were in that was a house in the city yeah and then we moved to where we did well we did a little bit of moving around for work and we moved into an apartment so we moved into an apartment
00:07:49
Speaker
in a different part of town.
Financial Journey & Land Search
00:07:51
Speaker
And I think at that time, I don't think we were really focused on what we could be doing from scratch. I still made laundry detergent. We focused a little bit on meal prepping. At this point, I was in my first pregnancy. So we did focus a lot on good food, and we were still working out a lot.
00:08:13
Speaker
I think we were actually really just focused on paying off debt at the time. Yes, we were paying off debt and that's actually when we started looking for land. I remember joking around this, oh my goodness, this is when we came across a property in the town that we live in now.
00:08:32
Speaker
We came across a property. I remember this. It was this old beautiful house. It had a couple acres and it was so cheap. It was like $185,000 or something. Which at that time. At that time we couldn't afford. To put it in context, our first house that we purchased was under, I think we paid under $70,000 for the house itself. Yeah. Which I don't know that that's possible anymore, unfortunately. I don't think it is. Not where we live. Not where we live, no.
00:08:59
Speaker
and it was a great house like it wasn't it was not a dump no it was a phenomenon the house we lived in but that one i do remember i bet that house is if i remember right i just remember it was beautiful it had huge ceilings super old style lots of fireplaces i think it was five acres yeah and we need to go find that house out here because it's out here somewhere we do and i remember showing your parents and us thinking no that's too far outside of the city we couldn't live that far and we can't
00:09:28
Speaker
quite afford that yet we were closer but we couldn't yet it's just so funny that it was in the town that we ended up in now but at this time so we were in an apartment and we paid off some debt there we spent a lot of time trying to pay off some debts and that was very successful and then we went and moved in with some family i think for a little bit
00:09:48
Speaker
Yeah, it was a short period while we were house hunting. This is when the housing market really started peaking in our area. Well, at the time we thought it was peaking. That's why we sold our house and moved into an apartment because we saw that we could make a really nice profit to pay down debt. So we did a temporary living with family situation and once we realized
00:10:11
Speaker
we couldn't quite find, we wanted land, but we didn't want to sacrifice, we didn't want to sacrifice the land yet. Like we wanted to buy a house and we wanted acreage. So because we couldn't find something with property that we could, in our price range, we decided to rent and a house came available within the family that we were able to rent for almost two years at that point.
00:10:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think it was about two years and that was actually really funny because I do recall that at one point there was I don't know how much land there was maybe half an acre three quarters of an acre relatively flat backyard and I definitely proposed to the family members who own the house that I was interested in tilling the entire backyard and turning it into a small farm
00:10:58
Speaker
Yes, this is when we started getting back into the idea of gardening.
Community & Learning Homesteading Skills
00:11:02
Speaker
We had all these ideas of growing a bean teepee for the, we had one child at the time, I thought it would be fun for her to be able to go inside and play inside the bean teepee. That's hilarious. And we talked about having big community dinners out in the backyard and we wanted to, like the concept of bringing community along with the food was starting to grow at that time.
00:11:27
Speaker
I think we talked about doing like community dinners at that point for like evangelization purposes, but also just bringing people together. Yeah. Wow.
Starting Homesteading Anywhere
00:11:37
Speaker
That's amazing to go back and remember. I can't, this is fun. I can't remember where this kind of came from. And this is really fun. It's so interesting how the whole thing has grown and the different directions it's taken, but how they're all connected to even where we are now. Yeah.
00:11:51
Speaker
So then from there we I think we continued probably to pay off debts if I had to remember correctly and a lot of this was student loans. We took cars that we had that were newer and we would sell them and we would buy older cars really just doing anything at all we could to pay down debts. So I do remember at the end of around that two years in that house we moved to another apartment and we basically just took a year off. We were
00:12:14
Speaker
Well, we took a year off from looking for housing and we obviously couldn't really garden. We tried to put some pots out on the patio, but we didn't get great sun where our apartment was located. But I did. We did start there.
00:12:29
Speaker
doing kombucha, I started learning about we started baking bread because this is when the pandemic hit. Right. And so we that really pushed us back into everything because we were like, OK, we've kind of put this on the side for a little while. But it reminded us of our passion for it. But it also gave us a drive of we've got to figure out how to make this happen for our family.
00:12:57
Speaker
because we don't want to find ourselves in a position like this again. If something in the world happened like that again. So you were you were baking bread. You found that like five loaf recipe. I forgot about that. I was so good. Crazy passionate about bread making. I think I was like, I'm going to start a bread company and a bakery. And this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to get up at two a.m. in the morning and go bake bread and sell it.
00:13:23
Speaker
Yep, so you did bread and kombucha. And that's when I bought my first whole chicken to learn how to cook a whole chicken. And I pushed myself because that was actually a really strange concept to have to do initially. Because when you buy a whole chicken, it's a lot harder to deny that you're working with an actual animal than when you just have a thing of meat that you're cooking. And it's just meat in your head. It's not an animal.
00:13:52
Speaker
that yep the cooking really started growing at that point like how to how to source food i started looking at buying in bulk and shopping outside of grocery stores because there were all the shortages in grocery stores so i started looking for local farms that i could buy produce from herbs from meat from um
00:14:17
Speaker
Yeah and that I don't know that time was really important I think for our journey. We did end up buying a house. After the apartment after this apartment we did one more house. We sacrificed on the land we put that to the side because we really wanted the security of being able to have a garden and being able to feed our family even if it was off of a little bit of land.
00:14:41
Speaker
And so we downsized from like, we need acreage to, okay, we need a decent size backyard where the kids can play and we can grow food and where we can continue to look for land. And to be clear on size of property at this point, cause I think some people may be interested in that. We're talking like.
00:15:03
Speaker
I think I want to say like eighth of an acre to a quarter of an acre not not very much at all really tiny land we are talking like west side of Cincinnati right we didn't have half an acre it was I think it was a third of an acre is what we have it was very small but the amount of food that we grew at that house in the backyard that was one of the first things we did is we went we turned over soil in the backyard we
00:15:26
Speaker
we cleaned it up and figured out like where the sun was gonna hit. We watched the sun through the winter because we we came in in the middle of summer and we really just had to clean up the backyard because it hadn't been taken care of for a while and we like mapped out where we were going to put the garden and I remember watching the sun through the winter and realizing that the sun doesn't stay in the same spot in the sky so we started worrying about where we had
00:15:52
Speaker
decided to put our garden plot because i was like well the sun doesn't shine there now but it was winter and i had no idea i'd never paid attention to the sun i remember thinking that we had to make this like giant l-shaped pattern for a garden spot and that there was going to be just a random like an l-shaped garden because there was a giant tree where the sunlight would get cast over and it would shade and so i was thinking well that spot right there isn't going to be good for growing anything yeah and thankfully that didn't end up happening because it would have looked rather funny but it would have
00:16:22
Speaker
looked silly. We were really committed at this point to growing our own food and growing our own produce and we did and we grew in the middle of Cincinnati or just on the outskirts of Cincinnati corn and tomatoes and watermelons and pumpkins and radishes and lettuce, peppers, flowers, herbs. There was so much growing there that it kind of became a conversation point in the neighborhood.
00:16:46
Speaker
It was more so a let's see if we can grow it. But we didn't know exactly how to use it all at that point. So it didn't all get used. We grew a ton. And the squirrels ate all the corn. Yes. But we conceded on that because I literally remember looking out the window once and just seeing a squirrel climb the corn stock and the corn stock bending over and the squirrels just coming in and taking the corn and leaving.
00:17:12
Speaker
Yeah, it was also at that time from leaving that second apartment into buying the new home that we really started finding a lot of friends in our church community that were living similar
00:17:24
Speaker
lifestyles that were homesteading and they were a step or two ahead of us and they were really welcoming us in and showing us what they'd been doing and honestly it was just more so like coming alongside people in life and learning by being present and observing
00:17:44
Speaker
But there were friends who invited us over to teach us how to process chickens and we got to walk through a lot of gardens and
00:17:55
Speaker
We're just exposed to it a lot more and it became very normal for us, not just growing a garden and then kind of supersizing that garden, but also you can raise your own meat and you don't need an enormous amount of land to do that depending on the animal and you can make your own soaps and you can process your own food, you can make your own breads, you can make your own drinks and kombucha and all kinds of other things. Beer, we had friends that brewed their own beer.
00:18:19
Speaker
There's these little things that you just don't think about. I don't even want to say that you take them for granted, but it just becomes like a non-conscious experience through your life of just the foods at the grocery store, the foods at the restaurant, and that's just how it is. And not realizing that somewhere, somehow in a facility or by someone, it's being produced and made or grown. And I think that's really that last experience in the house
00:18:46
Speaker
On the west side of Cincinnati was really kind of that impetus for okay. We are going to do this at this point Yeah, and I think that at that point you and I had this understanding spiritually that God was leading us to to land into something bigger, but we talked a lot about
00:19:07
Speaker
at that time learning how to be present right where we were and doing the best that we could with the small things like living our life very intentionally and learning these skills and building community with people before we were in the place that we were working towards and where we knew God was preparing us for we really
00:19:34
Speaker
we really dug into learning how to be present in the waiting. And you know what that reminds me of? What? The original name for whatever the business venture associated with this was going to be called, at that time, was Little Way Homestead. Yes. Because it was inspired by St. Therese of Lisieux, who's been very impactful and very important in both of our journeys in the Catholic faith. But Little Way Homestead was
00:20:00
Speaker
not a concession, but almost a reality that we could start right where we were.
Spiritual Inspiration & Little Way Homestead Branding
00:20:05
Speaker
Like we really wanted to be on an enormous amount of land and to be doing all the home setting stuff, raising all our animals, running a farm business, doing the whole thing. But we just weren't there and we weren't finding it and we just couldn't make it happen. And then a whole bunch of very unique circumstances kind of aligned where
00:20:24
Speaker
Yeah, it's actually happening. And I'm certain that God was involved in making that occur. But before that, it became Little Way Homestead. And that's how we started to brand some of our online presence was Little Way Homestead. We actually bought the name. We established the LLC while we were in that home.
00:20:44
Speaker
that brings me back to why our website even for the farm to this day is littlewayhomestead.com yeah because that was the name it was the name at the time i totally forgot about that and that it was registered back then as well we own that domain website for maybe over a year before we even really did anything with it
00:21:04
Speaker
Yeah I think, I feel like it was around St. Therese's feast day that we probably bought it. It probably was. We'd have to go back and take a look. Yeah. But that was really the start of it was that we were you know thinking yes we are going to do something and we're going to start right where we are which hopefully is a moment of encouragement for anyone who's out there thinking I am so frustrated or tired or I feel like I'm missing out because I don't have x amount of land whatever that is that there are so many homesteading things that you can do right where you are
00:21:33
Speaker
and inspired by kind of that life of Saint Teresa bless you, it's about those little things that you do every single day in honor of God. Yeah, and arguably for people who are new to homesteading, I almost think it's the better way to go in learning a lot of the skills before you have the land and the animals.
00:21:54
Speaker
There's just so much that built a foundation for me before coming here and learning how even I just got to practice canning the amount of tomatoes we were able to pull out of that small big garden we had in the suburbs.
00:22:12
Speaker
And being able to have that experience of canning or I spent about a year trying out sourdough and learning how to do that and learning how to source my food locally, learning how to buy in bulk and switch from grocery shopping every week to once or twice a month. There's so many things that I was able to do there because I had the time and the space to focus on it and learn.
00:22:42
Speaker
that it would be way more overwhelming now if I hadn't prepared in that way right before getting here right and even you know down to there's just so many things that once you're on this much land and if you truly do go out and you bring in the animals and you bring in the large gardens and if you have to if you have to get outside of the city a little bit more than you were hoping
00:23:04
Speaker
Right. And then if you commercialize it or turn it into a business, then it becomes a whole different thing and it's a whole nother set of circumstances and skills that you have to learn. And it can be really draining. Yeah. So I would really, it is really draining. It is very draining. I would really encourage people who are hoping to have a homestead one day or hoping to have land to really plant yourselves where you are right now and focus on the things that you can be learning and growing in.
00:23:34
Speaker
while you are wherever you are yeah i would agree and i think that's something that even in looking back we certainly could have done even better and it would have really decreased a lot of the friction coming out into the country because there's a culture change there's you know different things that you have to consider just about the way that you live life even down to you know how long it takes us to get to a grocery store
00:23:57
Speaker
We talk about the importance of kind of decreasing frequent grocery trips. It's actually just a matter of practicality. We would lose so much time in the week driving to the grocery store if we had to do it multiple times in the week because a round trip to the grocery store is like an hour and 15 minutes.
00:24:14
Speaker
presuming that you don't have to stop to eat or something else or that there's not a combine on the road that you get stuck behind or a deer or a traffic jam or something. It takes a long time and it can be really difficult to adjust because you find yourself thinking, Oh, I've just got to do these different chores or these different tasks in the day. And the next thing you know, the day is almost over and it's time to make dinner and, you know, get the kids ready for bed. Yeah. So it can be very difficult. So I would definitely encourage anyone.
Land Search & Property Purchase
00:24:41
Speaker
Don't wait to start, start where you are.
00:24:43
Speaker
Yes, there are so many things you can do before you're on land or even if you don't have the goal of being on land, you can still homestead with with a patio or with a tenth of an acre. You can homestead anywhere.
00:24:59
Speaker
But to finish out the story about how we got here, so we were in the house and then that was the last stop before where we are now. In order to get from the city side to the countryside, it took a lot of time. We had to do a lot of driving in different areas. We drove
00:25:20
Speaker
I don't know. I want to say we drove over an hour south out of Ohio through Kentucky. We drove way out west into Ohio. We drove all the way up near some of the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio from Cincinnati. Yeah. And eventually we ended up in southeastern Indiana.
00:25:36
Speaker
We had some friends out here, so that was definitely encouraging. When we say friends out here, that still means you're 15, 30, 45 minutes or an hour away from people, just that we knew people relatively in the geographic area. And it was a Catholic community, which is something that we were growing to understand would be really important for us. And being able to move somewhere where we already knew Catholic families,
00:26:00
Speaker
Where it seemed there were growing amounts of Catholic families moving to that area it helped Encourage that yeah, but to be clear where we did end up in fact living It's a very minimal Catholic population now unfortunately, though we do know of Catholics who are in the area, which is very helpful and
00:26:24
Speaker
But the story, effectively, or at least some tidbits of the story of how we ended up where we are in southeastern Indiana, I ended up meeting a realtor, a real estate agent in the area who drove us around to some raw land. Raw land is land where there's no housing structure on it right now. And you would ultimately have to build the house or put a trailer on it or camp on it or something. But there's no housing structure, which means there's typically no utilities, no plumbing, no electric.
00:26:48
Speaker
And we drove around to a few different properties and Chris and I were getting super excited and nervous. We were exploring what it would look like to purchase raw land in that way and exploring different finance options.
00:27:00
Speaker
Yeah. So while you were looking at the raw land, we were seriously considering at that point buying a camper and living temporarily in a camper while we built something. We were really looking at the concept of a pole barn house. We were. And we we started looking into finance options for buying raw land and then building a pole barn home on it. Right. And
00:27:27
Speaker
That's when things started to look like it wasn't gonna work for us anymore. We got to a point where the money just wasn't adding up and we started thinking, I think our windows shut. Like I don't think we can buy in this area in this time because of the way the housing market was just skyrocketing all around us. And you went to call our realtor to tell him
00:27:55
Speaker
Hey, I think we're going to have to take a break from looking right now because we just don't think that we can fit into the prices in our area. And then he told me he had two properties coming up that weren't even on the market yet. Yep. They both had houses on them. They both had land with trees, 10 plus acres. The houses were.
00:28:23
Speaker
Nice. I mean, they were in very reasonable living condition, which we had looked at a lot of houses that were not. So that was a bonus for us. And it was right within the hour mark of our parish that we had set for ourselves. Like we don't want to switch parishes right now. We want to be within an hour. You know what's funny about that is we had set this arbitrary. That's not really arbitrary. We said we want to be one hour radius from that parish. We do not want to step out one hour.
00:28:51
Speaker
And when we put this into the GPS, it was one hour and one minute away from that church. And that was really funny. And to this day, it's about an hour and one minute. Yes. We were, we were used to driving about 40 minutes all the times we had moved around in the city. At times we had been about 40 minutes outside of where our church was. And so we thought an hour is not going to be that much more. We'll, we'll move our radius out to an hour and we thought it would give us more options.
00:29:21
Speaker
yeah and we ended up ultimately closing on one of the properties out here in southeastern indiana it was amazing we were able to come see both properties before they were listed we were able to choose between two houses we had time to think about it we were able to make a reasonable offer where we weren't offering against other buyers it was
00:29:43
Speaker
like such a divine opportunity we knew that this was literally our window like this is we either make the decision and we do this or we've got to reevaluate everything and now we're here and praise be to god it's an amazing property
00:30:01
Speaker
We've done a lot of work on it over the last year.
Successes of Little Way Farm
00:30:04
Speaker
We opened up a farm here. We now sell pasture-raised meat. We sell produce. And the farm is beginning to open up its first season of agritourism, where people will be able to come out and join us for homesteading tours. And our homestead is here. The children are running around. We have chickens. We have beef cattle. We have dairy cow.
00:30:23
Speaker
We have so many things going on here, and it's amazing looking back over the last year and considering the journey it took to get here. And I'm honored, I'm excited, and it's so fun to be able to open this journey up to others and hopefully help others in this way. But more importantly is talk about what really is the important thing, which is that this is not just a farm in Homestead, it is most importantly a Catholic farm in Homestead.
00:30:51
Speaker
And that's where we'll leave you. Until next time.