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Plant Biology, Gardening, Cultivars & More with Dr. Doug Darnowski
215 Plays1 year ago
This interview was conducted between Mathew (Little Way Farm and Homestead) and Dr. Doug Darnowski of Sts. Therese and Isidore Farm College. The discussion covered an array of topics pertaining to growing plants and plant biology. This interview is fast-paced and opens the opportunity for consideration of how to best plan, cultivate and harvest crops for homesteading.
Check out Sts. Therese and Isidore Farm College by Clicking Here.
Additional Notes:
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For more information about Little Way Farm and Homestead, including the farm, podcast, and upcoming projects, check out LittleWayHomestead.com.
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Transcript
Introduction to Little Way Farm and Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Little Way Farm and Homestead Podcast. Little Way Farm and Homestead is a regenerative and educational farm in southeastern Indiana. Motivated by the Catholic faith, we strive to inspire, encourage, and support the development of homesteads and small-scale farms in faith and virtue. I'm Matthew. And I'm Carissa. We're excited for you to join us on the podcast.
00:00:24
Speaker
Thank you for listening to another episode of the Little Way Farm and Homestead Podcast. Today's guest is Dr. Doug Darnowski of St. Therese in Isidore Farm College. Doug Darnowski's greatest joy is having a wonderful Catholic wife and 15 children. He has a BS from Yale in Biology and a PhD from Cornell in Plant Biology.
00:00:44
Speaker
Doug has been raising animals and crops for over 20 years. Along with his wife Adele, the Darnalskis founded St.
Faith and Farming: Integrating Beliefs
00:00:51
Speaker
Therese and Isidore Farm College to teach the faith, traditional farm trades, and basic academics in person and online. This interview covers an extensive array of topics pertaining to growing plants. The conversation is fast-paced and opens the opportunity for further discussion in how best to plan, cultivate, and harvest crops for homesteading.
00:01:12
Speaker
I had a lot of fun interviewing Dr. Darnalski for this episode and hope you find the discussion helpful and encouraging. If you're finding the Little Way Farm and Homestead podcast helpful, inspiring, or otherwise entertaining, please consider sharing an episode with someone, sending us feedback at hello at littlewayhomestead.com, or leaving a review and a rating wherever you are listening to this episode. And with that, let's begin.
Family Life on the Farm
00:01:51
Speaker
All right. Dr. Doug Darnowski, welcome to the Little Way Farm and Homestead Podcast. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much for having me. Wonderful. Well, if we could get started, maybe you could provide just a bit of a background for who you are, what you do, and we'll start there. Sure. The most important thing, I guess, for this podcast is that I am married to the most wonderful woman in the world. She is a Canadian who unfortunately couldn't be on with his things. She's not feeling well.
00:02:20
Speaker
We live in Southern Indiana on a 20 acre mini farm with our 15 kids, nine born to us, six adopted internationally and handicapped. We have, let's see right now, we have donkeys, cattle, sheep, pigs.
00:02:39
Speaker
rabbits, ducks geese, chickens, and we've had other things in the past. We've had quail and turkeys and things like that. So we've done a lot of stuff. We raise food for our own consumption. My academic background, I have a bachelor's degree from Yale in biology, a PhD from Cornell in plant biology. My thesis, I worked on tomatoes mostly. I've also worked on cassava and radish, and you're talking about crops.
00:03:03
Speaker
and did a postdoc in crop sciences at Illinois where I worked on tobacco and soybeans and mustard, among other things.
Founding a Faith-Based College
00:03:12
Speaker
A college professor over 20 years had a research program on carnivorous plants, and we founded St. Therese in Isidore Farm College after I left my last
00:03:21
Speaker
Full-time university and we put classes up there that have to do with the faith and also with traditional farming practices and also some other academic subjects we have biology chemistry we have an epidemiology with an epidemiology professor and We have ones about the faith. My wife's doing one of those now. We have ones about how to
00:03:41
Speaker
slaughter animals, how to raise animals, how to grow crops, plant physiology for farmers, all kinds of stuff like that. Wow, phenomenal. So it sounds like in some sense, not only are you all actively engaged in living a lifestyle that could be characterized in some way by homesteading, but you're in a space where you're also balancing living the homestead lifestyle, living the Catholic faith, and educating other people about how to homestead and
00:04:05
Speaker
maybe engaging in some conversation around things like plant biology and general education about agricultural practices.
Science Meets Farming
00:04:12
Speaker
And that's one of the things we're trying to work in, especially with our classes, because not only do we have the basic, like, what should you do? And we've made plenty of mistakes over the years. When we started with pigs, we didn't start with cooney coonies that we have now, which are a wonderful homestead pig. We started out with pot bellies. We found it on Craigslist, because we thought, well, if something goes wrong and we lose it, we're out 50 bucks. It's rough on the pig, but not so rough on us. And I think a lot of people start there. So we've tried many different breeds of different animals.
00:04:40
Speaker
And that kind of thing. But one of the things we try to bring in in the classes is to bring in the scientific background behind things. And I understand a lot of people are somewhat uncomfortable with science, either they find it confusing or let's just say that there have been some scientists in the last few years who haven't exactly been stellar examples. But, you know, we try to so that not only do you understand here's how you can raise X, whether it's a crop or a pig or whatever it is.
00:05:02
Speaker
But here's how you can, here's the science behind it so that if you need to modify it for your own situation, you'll really understand that with classes like plant physiology like we were talking about.
00:05:13
Speaker
Sure. That's something that I've picked up on quite frequently is the importance of not just looking at what maybe someone has already done, especially in the home setting or small scale farming realm, but in how they got to that position to do that or what was maybe some of the engineering behind their decisions or the thought process.
Adapting to Regional Farming Conditions
00:05:30
Speaker
Because what I found is it's really important, especially as many of the conversations around homesteading,
00:05:35
Speaker
occur across the internet that people are in obviously very different geographical regions and climate conditions and As a result what may be worked exactly for someone in one part of the country does not work for me or for someone else but what does become very helpful is understanding how someone came to a decision or Some of the process behind the decision or the choices that they made with certain crop selection engineering processes animal management things of that nature
00:06:02
Speaker
No, I agree with you totally. We're also throwing examples that would apply to people in other areas because we're sort of smack in the middle of the United States like you are. We don't freeze to death like Minnesota, but in the end, we can't grow citrus outside like it's Louisiana or Florida.
00:06:18
Speaker
So we try to throw in ancient examples like, you know, there's a thing called the trifoliate orange, which is actually an orange tree, which is hardy where you live and where I live. You can't fresh eat it, but you can actually make like sauces. So you could make like ponzu sauce with fresh citrus juice that you can pick in your backyard in Indiana and actually far north of Chicago.
00:06:35
Speaker
That is fascinating. Again, it's one of those things where learning more about some of the science behind it all and how things work helps us to make these really simple decisions ultimately about what grows best where we are potentially and not try to force things to grow where they might not be most suited to do so. But let me start there. I want to ask a few different questions then.
00:06:57
Speaker
Your background in plant biology, where do you, what do you, what do you think is important for people who are beginning the home setting lifestyle to understand about the way that plants grow or how to make the right decisions or good decisions for growing of abundance for their families and preparing things like gardens to ultimately support not just things that they might want to grow, but things that are helpful for them to grow for their family and for themselves to be maybe a little more self-reliant and self-sufficient.
Beginner's Guide to Homesteading
00:07:23
Speaker
I think the first thing is, and again we put this in the classes, is you start with stuff that is going to work and is going to be easy to get some abundance out of. In other words, you can find cabbage cultivars that are going to go well at different times of the year in different places. And there are close cabbage relatives and you can grow bok choy. You can get bok choy that's mature in 30 days from seed. So you can plant that thing fairly late in the fall and still get a cabbage-y kind of crop out of it.
00:07:51
Speaker
Cabbage is something that you can then make sauerkraut out of and do it the natural way and with salt and a crock, which is not hard to do. Things like that that you're going to enjoy that are going to encourage you because it went well and that are relatively easy to get some abundance out of early on, that's a big thing to pick back. Another thing that's really important is to understand some of the science behind the basics of it.
00:08:15
Speaker
Why do plants need what they get in fertilizers? And organic fertilizers are wonderful, but chemical fertilizers can actually have a great role, especially, let's say, if you have a small yard and you don't have access to animal manure or something like that. There was a thing called the Green Revolution, which I know is, you know, Catholics really, revolution can be a scary word, but this is just in agriculture.
00:08:36
Speaker
It was led by a wonderful man who actually has a statue in the U.S. Capitol back in the 1950s. He was from the University of Iowa. And this movement turned countries like India, which faced major famines about every third year into net food exporters because of some basic things that they did with plant breeding and the fertilizer. So understanding what the plants need and why they need it and how you give it to them. And there's different ways. Again, you can use organic stuff, but, you know, judicious use
00:09:05
Speaker
also some chemical fertilizers especially depending on your access to manure size space that you have things like that. I heard this guy in a podcast and he said you know we should get rabbit manure and put it all over the garden oh wait we can't get rabbit manure we're doomed you know you can understand how you can substitute things in at least for a time and so I think those are basics you know choose the right stuff so you'll succeed with some things early on and feel good about it tomatoes are another great thing if you have the right tomato cultivars and then understand the basics of the plants how they grow
00:09:36
Speaker
And so that you will also again be successful and be happy with
Solving Common Plant Problems
00:09:40
Speaker
that stuff. And then I'll encourage you maybe to try things that are a little bit more exotic. And you want to have Jerusalem artichokes someday? Great. Start with potatoes first as a root vegetable and then move on to your Jerusalem artichokes.
00:09:50
Speaker
It's one of the things that has become particularly fascinating to me is simply learning about plant biology, at least enough of a level that I can understand maybe what is going wrong or what is helping to support particular types of plants, whether they're grown as a root crop, whether they're a flowering crop or various different styles of that nature. And it's become interesting to me because I'm finding myself in a position where I'm able to quickly identify problems that might be occurring within plants.
00:10:18
Speaker
and then think of ways that they can be remedied very quickly. So maybe that's something that you could expand on just a little bit. What are some initial problems that people recognize in the plants that they grow when maybe they're beginning the homesteading process? Maybe they simply plant some seeds in the ground and the plants start to come up and all of a sudden they're thinking, hey, this doesn't look like what it looked like in the catalog because it's got these brown spots on it or
00:10:43
Speaker
It's, you know, moldy on this section or the leaves are wilted. What are some things that people can look to as common issues that maybe they run into when they're growing plants?
Essentials for Plant Growth
00:10:54
Speaker
Well, I'd say one good analogy is, you know, think about you got a little baby, right? You know, you and I both have plenty of kids. You got a little baby, you give the baby what the baby needs so the baby's happy and the baby grows well and the baby's healthy.
00:11:05
Speaker
And for a human being, the baby needs love and warmth and food and liquids and that kind of thing. It's like third grade social studies. Food, clothing, shelter, water in there, and some kind of warmth or environmental control. Those are the five big things. And so he asked, okay, what's a plant need? Well, first of all, you have to understand the particular plant. And you can usually look this stuff up on the internet or get a couple of reference books.
00:11:34
Speaker
They're going to need nutrients. They need lots of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, which they can get from the ground. But again, if you buy a chemical fertilizer, it'll have three numbers, like 10, 10, 10. That's a balanced fertilizer. That's 10 parts nitrogen, 10 parts phosphorus, 10 parts potassium. Then you also need micronutrients, which will also be mixed in there, things like manganese and molybdenum.
00:11:56
Speaker
And once you're aware of that, you can also usually find some simple resources, a book, get a used plant physiology book because it'll often have a chapter on plant nutrition. And it'll talk about deficiency symptoms. That is, if you don't have enough nitrogen, how do you go out and look at your corn and go, oh, not enough nitrogen? And in that case, because nitrogen is so important for making chlorophyll, the thing won't be green enough. So it'll be a yellowish green, what we call chlorotic, instead of looking a nice dark green.
00:12:25
Speaker
And so there are these deficiency symptoms, like I say, you can look them up. And a wonderful resource that people should be aware of for this about this is the US Department of Agriculture.
00:12:34
Speaker
assigns somebody in the cooperative extension area to every county in the country, and you don't have to be a professional farmer with 100 acres or 500 acres to talk to them. You can call them up, send them a picture, take in a leaf that's got the brown spots on it, you don't know what's going wrong, and if they don't recognize that particular problem, they have reference books and they will help you figure it out. That's their job, to help the public.
00:12:59
Speaker
And so again, your plants need nutrients, and it's not too hard to find out exactly what they are. They need enough water, but not too much. And then again, that depends on what particular plant you've got. So for example, some plants that can take fairly moist roots, if you will, maybe if you've got a sloped garden, you plant them down at the bottom where it's wetter, peas like that. And they'll actually bear a little bit longer in the spring because that helps keep it cooler.
00:13:23
Speaker
There are some other crops that don't like their roots super wet and super cool also. For example, sweet potatoes need hot soil before they'll start to grow well above ground and then start to set those nice big fat roots. Just like the baby, keep the baby happy. Think of the plants as babies.
00:13:43
Speaker
Give them the nutrients they need, give them the right amount of water, give them the right temperature. Give them good air circulation because fungi love poor air circulation. Fungi basically like it moist and still. If you let the air go through there, that's going to also keep your plants happy. So you look at your situation, air drainage. Air is going to drain down the slope. So that might actually be a good place. If you had south facing somewhat slope,
00:14:08
Speaker
And if you make sure you don't let your soil erode, that's great because the air is going to flow. It's going to get plenty of sunlight. Site your plants, you know, depending on how much moisture they want, that kind of thing. So you keep the plant happy, like I said, like it's a baby. And make use of those resources. They're online. You can get yourself a plant Facebook.
00:14:27
Speaker
If you get one that's 10 years old, and frankly our knowledge of plant nutrition is not changing that fast, the 10-year-old book will cost you five bucks online at a used book site, and it'll be a perfectly useful reference for homes that kind of stuff. And usually they're written, you can understand it, because it'll simply say, you know, here's what they need, and here's what it's going to look like if it doesn't get enough of that. So those are some big ones, and it's fairly straightforward in that way.
00:14:52
Speaker
I'm very interested in exploring how we can more so continue to produce good crops both in quantity, but really understand how to produce like very flavorful nutrition, heavy crops, et cetera, possibly such that we may not need to produce as much quantity because we get so many good nutrients from a smaller batch as well.
Impact of Cultivation on Nutrition
00:15:12
Speaker
Is that a reasonable conclusion to draw that there is potentially the way that we grow crops?
00:15:17
Speaker
and the way that we apply fertilizers to them or provide growing conditions to them has an impact on their nutrient quality? I think so, and also just the nature of the cultivars they've been bred, because if you look at a mass agriculture kind of situation, or if you look at garden catalogs, and garden catalogs are often, let's say, they often play at least somewhat fast and loose with the truth, the way they photograph things and make them look.
00:15:43
Speaker
More and more over the last couple generations, we have bred plants not for that kind of dense nutrition or other things like that. We have bred them to be things that when somebody sees them in the store, they want to pick it up, take it home, which means we have bred for visual things, not for flavor, nutrition, and odor. And this is true not just in edibles, but in ornamentals. If you look at roses,
00:16:08
Speaker
We have gone away from large, beautifully scented roses. You pick a hyper tea rose, that thing hardly smells because it looks pretty because that's what we've been breeding more and more for. So one thing is perhaps turn back to more traditional cultivars. You can get those one wonderful organization people can join is called Seed Savers Exchange. They're the world's
00:16:28
Speaker
not the oldest, but the oldest private seed bank in the world. They started in a garage in Iowa about 50 to 55 years ago. You can join them. I think the current fee is like $35 a year, something like that. And not only can you get a lot of advice and access to their publications, but you can also join their service where they exchange seeds with people. And so the way their seed bank works is, it's not like the US Department of Agriculture where they park
00:16:55
Speaker
80, 90% of the seed in Fort Collins, Colorado in freezers. Instead, what this is is certain tomato cultivars in one guy's fridge may be two miles away. Others are 2,000 miles away in somebody else's basement on a shelf. People can send small amounts of money to each other and exchange these cultivars. They have a lot of beautiful, amazing old ones.
00:17:18
Speaker
To save money, they've reduced the size of the book. But at one time, when they had really big type, the book was maybe six, 800 pages thick. And the tomato section was 100 pages. And there were dozens of cultivars per page. And you had every color in the rainbow.
00:17:36
Speaker
white, yellow, orange, red, green, tiger striped, the black and the blue tomatoes that have other colors on top of the usual reds and things like that. And they had stuffed every crop you can imagine, plus unusual crops. They had peanuts that you can grow further north than you normally think of peanuts being able to bear.
00:17:56
Speaker
And on and on and on. They had all kinds of great stuff. So that's a wonderful organization to join. And basically your second year, if you buy some stuff, you can increase it in your own garden, save it, and start to have people buy it from you the next year. It's a really marvelous place to find those kinds of cultivars.
Diversity in Crops for Nutrition and Safety
00:18:12
Speaker
On top of that, there are some seed catalogs that specialize in this, especially maybe relevant for homesteaders and Catholic homesteaders, is Baker Creek Heirloom Seed. It was actually started as a homeschool senior project by a guy in Missouri.
00:18:28
Speaker
He started this company and they're now the biggest heirloom seed company certainly in North America I think in the whole world. He's purchased a whole bunch of different seed companies including one that was right near the house where I grew up in Connecticut and he produces all kinds of amazing stuff. He now has plants and he's collected varieties from all around the world and that's really wonderful.
00:18:48
Speaker
And also in that same vein and something that I talk about in a course that I'm about to put up, I call garden from the grocery store. And that is there are a lot of crops grown around the world that we don't. If you look at our food base, it's really narrow. You know, if you go into, let's say, the produce section in your grocery store, just look at the fruit.
00:19:06
Speaker
There are two families of plants that are going to provide the majority of the fruit in there. Citrus family is going to give you oranges and grapefruit and lemons and limes and pummelos and maybe tangerines. The rose family gives us apples, pears, peaches, plums, cherries, almonds, and then also some more minor fruits like mayhaws and quinces and things like that.
00:19:31
Speaker
And it's not the safest thing in the world for a number of reasons that I go into in this course that I have. But if we look, we can find other crops as well. For example, I grow juju bees in my little orchard at home. I say little because we've only got about 15 or 20 trees in there.
00:19:50
Speaker
Jujube is called Chinese name. They're anywhere from about that long to about that long. They have an orange to red skin. They taste like apple when they're fresh, they're crisp. They actually have a protein in them called zizaffin, which tastes sweet without adding extra sugar to the fruit. The fruit has some sugar in it. They bloom late, so if you're worried about frost knocking out, like say your apples, which happened where I am this year, a lot of people lost their apple crop.
00:20:17
Speaker
The juju bees don't bloom until May or June, which means you totally miss the frost. They ripen, they stay on the tree, they'll dry on the tree naturally. They look kind of like a date and they're that sweet even though they're not closely related to date. It's a really beautiful thing. So you can find out about things like that and add that further because that gives you more options, it's more safe, it's going to bring in more nutrients, and there are a lot of other options like that. Like I mentioned, the trifoliate orange.
00:20:44
Speaker
You can get 200 or 300 oranges the size from somewhere between ping pong ball size, maybe twice that, where you can juice them. You can make marmalade from them. You can make sauces from them and get the vitamin C that's in citrus fruit, even where we live in southern Indiana, where you cannot grow tangerines or even lemons, which are one of the heartier of the standard citrus fruits. So those are some organizations that you can really look to. And there are other seed banks as well, but SeedSavers is huge.
00:21:14
Speaker
One of the ways that we advertise what we sell from our farm is we intentionally tell people that we grow heirloom and open pollinated plants. One of the reasons that we do that is because we believe it is more important that we sell open pollinated or heirloom plants where people can reasonably take the seeds from the food that we sell and they can replant it.
00:21:35
Speaker
Obviously in an open pollinated situation, I cannot control where the pollinators are moving around and what they're grabbing. So I can't guarantee that if you plant one of my pumpkin seeds that you're going to get the exact same pumpkin type, unless it's one that I have specifically, you know, pollinated ourselves and closed the flower up to do so.
00:21:52
Speaker
But I am interested in the idea of increasing plant diversity and ensuring that people have access to more variety of seeds. I think for maybe what you're hinting at with the narrowness of the plants that are available through the grocery store, maybe you could expand on that just a little bit. I presume it's a safety issue ultimately with regards to plant availability throughout the world. Just expand on that or talk to me a little bit more about that one.
00:22:18
Speaker
So a little background, so take in contrast to what we do, the ancient Inca. They lived at altitude in the Andes. It's a harsh climate. By the way, they actually invented freeze-dried mashed potatoes before there were any freezers or vacuum dryers.
00:22:33
Speaker
There was something called Chuma, people could look it up, C-H-U-M-A, but they, because they didn't know, they could predict, they're actually pretty good with their own weather predicting, but they didn't know for sure if they're gonna be wet year, dry year, relatively warm year, cold year, that sort of thing. So a typical Inca farm would plant 40 or more different crops. The idea being, well, if numbers one through five don't do so well, they're sure six through 10 probably will. And so you always had some kind of a backup in that way.
00:23:00
Speaker
We rely for tuber crops mostly on the white or Irish potato, which is in the tomato family. And we'll have sweet potatoes, but most people only touch sweet potatoes at maybe Thanksgiving and Christmas. But not only did the Inca have things like that, they had other tuber crops like Mashua and Yakan and a few others so that they always had tuber that would do well under those circumstances.
00:23:28
Speaker
They had other grains. You know, we mostly rely on cereal grains, which is basically grains from the grass family. That's going to be wheat, oats, rye, barley. You know, those are the grass family grains.
00:23:40
Speaker
And even within grass family grains, you look around the world, there are other ones you can grow. There's teff from Ethiopia, which I can grow where I am. It's wonderful. It's a staple food in Ethiopia. You can make this pudding with cinnamon for breakfast out of it. It's a standard food in Ethiopia. It grows just fine. And then there are non-ceo grains. So the Inca had, for example, things like quinoa, which people eat, but you can grow quinoa. There's no reason. It grows pretty well, certainly, where I live. And it's going to grow well in a lot of North America.
00:24:09
Speaker
And so you've got quinoa, you have brain amaranth, which is another great one which they had. And one nice thing about brain amaranth is it has balanced protein in it. So in other words, what does that mean? There are 20 amino acids that make up the proteins in your body, my body, the body of a banana plant, the body of a button mushroom you get from the store. We can only make, depending on our age, 12 or 13 of those, the rest we have to get from our diets.
00:24:34
Speaker
If you only eat members of the grass family, you can't get all of those seven or eight. If you only eat members of the bean family, you can't get all seven, eight. That's why vegetarians are supposed to eat both bean family and grass family to get that. Amaranth provides all 20 that you need. And so they had that in that way. And there are all kinds of other wonderful grains. Chia, which when I was a kid, in the United States, you only heard about chia because of chia pets, which I guess maybe I could use some of on my head.
00:25:04
Speaker
Something like that. I'm ready to be a Chia pet, but Chia is in the mint family actually, and it was a staple for the Aztecs. Chia, normal cultivars of Chia, I can't grow where I am because we don't have a long off growing season. In, say, North Carolina, if you drive a line across from there, you can.
00:25:24
Speaker
Chia is wonderfully nutritious. It's got more omega-3 fatty acids even than fish oil or it's healthier than flax for you. Its growth was originally suppressed when the Spanish came into Mexico because the Aztec used to demand it and tribute from conquered peoples. But here's the problem. What they would do is because it's kind of glutinous, that's why it would stick to my head if we made me into a chia pet.
00:25:49
Speaker
They could make little figurines use it like modeling clay after they wetted it So when they were going to sacrifice some poor guy and rip his heart out They would make a little figurine out this guy and then dribble his blood over the figurine and then everybody kind of had demonic Communion out of this thing so the Spanish when they came in said maybe we need to cut this out for a little while so you know Chia is making a comeback but again if you search places like seed savers or other sources like that and
00:26:13
Speaker
you find out that the lowland chia, which will not grow where I am in Indiana or further north, we don't have a long enough growing season, there is a variety selected by high altitude peoples in Mexico, the Tarahumara, which produces in about 75 days. So that's one that I could grow in my garden and a lot of other people could grow.
00:26:32
Speaker
And it's Chia and it's got the same nutritional advantages. And the Tarahumara are the people who are famous in Mexico because they will run like a marathon a day just to get around. They don't even think twice about it. So these are super healthy people talking about nutrient density and that kind of thing. So, you know, there are all these kinds of things. We need a broader food base. It'll be more nutritious and it's safer because, you know, if some super pathogen comes in, it could take out a lot of those rose family fruits.
00:26:57
Speaker
There are fungi out there that will, in my yard, attack pears, quinces, peaches, plums, and probably cherry as well. I don't actually have any cherry right now. But they can knock them all out in the same year. One fungus, goodbye if you have a narrow food base. But if I also have juju bees and other sorts of things growing, that gives you some insurance.
00:27:20
Speaker
Hey there! We hope the first half of this interview has been edifying
Supporting Pro-Life Causes through Real Estate
00:27:24
Speaker
to you. We will get right back to the second half, where we will hear more about homesteading in the Catholic faith, but before that, we did want to encourage anyone listening who might be considering moving to land or buying property to check out Real Estate for Life.
00:27:37
Speaker
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00:28:07
Speaker
So let's presume maybe someone is thinking, hey, I want to buy seeds this year and I want to plant a garden or a large garden for my family next year. And I want to source a lot of our food from that garden, maybe up to and including the grains that they want to try to mill themselves.
Starting a Family Garden
00:28:23
Speaker
What advice would you give someone, presuming budget is not an option or is not an issue and space is not an issue. They just want to have a go at it and they want to grow as much as they can to support their family's diet. What would you give them as a recommendation?
00:28:41
Speaker
I think the first thing is I wouldn't necessarily, especially the first year, try to, unless I had a lot of space and already had some equipment, some basic equipment, I don't think I would try to do cereal grains the first year because some of your higher yielding cereal grains are winter grains, so you're not going to be able to get them in by the time they're seeing this podcast and have them succeed. They could, they could give a try at it. I might put in a little plot as a practice or something like that, but if I wanted
00:29:07
Speaker
carbohydrate best calories, I'd probably emphasize more potatoes. And by the way, if you want to save a budget isn't something you're worrying about. You can just go to the store and get russet potatoes, cut them up once the eyes start to sprout, plant those as well to save some money. But I would emphasize something like that and I would hit some of the big crops that yield real well. I would plant a whole lot of tomato plants.
00:29:29
Speaker
I'd start those seedlings myself because it's pretty easy to do on a windowsill or something like that. I would also go for things like cabbages, probably some lettuce, and a handful of other things. Squash is also wonderful. I also think about things that I could grow vertically like cucumbers. But I go with more standard kinds of crops. Again, you want to feel successful and get something good out of this. And I would go with those kinds of things. And also because the time can creep up on you.
00:29:58
Speaker
I would probably pick crops that I know that if I run out of time, because if you're into this whole homesteading, Catholic homesteading thing, there's a good chance you've got a decent sized family and stuff happens. I've got 15 kids, lots of stuff happens. And so if you don't get all your tomato plants started that year,
00:30:18
Speaker
you know you can go to the hardware store and buy some especially if you know budget is not that that critical and so go buy a hundred tomato plants and put them in the ground cause yeah okay you didn't start your own seedlings but you'll still get a good yield out of a hundred tomato plants you'll get a whole lot of tomatoes and you'll feel good about that and that'll encourage you for the next year uh... you know because I a lot of the thing with the whole Catholic homesteading or the homesteading movement in general not that many people can
00:30:44
Speaker
Do it all. In other words, you need cash in a modern economy, no matter how much we want to do this stuff, to pay for kids' health care and diapers and stuff like that because we're not really fully spun up to do things the way they were done three and four generations ago. A lot of us are trying to find a way to work back to where things were without killing ourselves or our family members in the meantime.
00:31:08
Speaker
And I think also sometimes, just one other sort of side note, is I think this whole homestead movement and the growth of these kinds of schools, like I've started and I'm seeing other groups around the country doing, I think God's preparing us because the way things are cannot last. And at some point, we may get kicked back more and more to what our grandparents and great grandparents did. And so if we can gradually work our way to that point, I think that'll be a good thing. But again, I think it's also really important is like start
00:31:37
Speaker
in a way where you're going to succeed so you don't burn out and just run away screaming from the thing. I think that's a real big thing, which is also why people will start with poultry because they're scalable. You can get them easily. And if you get 20 chickens and a couple die and you buy two pigs and a couple die, it's a disaster.
00:31:56
Speaker
No, entirely. And I think you're on to something specifically that's of interest probably to a lot of people, which is maybe not going back in history too far for a lot of people, but really trying to gain this sense of security or at least fulfillment even in what they do in their entertainment lifestyle or in just their family activities that is more meaningful and productive than what the modern world typically offers them.
Homesteading as a Family Experience
00:32:23
Speaker
I'm finding that homesteading and small scale farming is a great place to put a lot of those efforts. And while that may sound really interesting to people because they may think, well, that's not very entertaining or not very relaxing to go outside and garden and do farm work. Maybe it's simply because it's a break from what I'm used to or have grown up in, but I find it to be particularly productive and fulfilling. And it has become such that our family is so invited into it.
00:32:48
Speaker
that a lot of our family memories in a very happy and positive way are found out in the middle of the garden or in the homes, in the home setting activities. I agree with you totally. And that connection with nature is something that an awful lot of us have lost. You know, even if you live in a suburban development and you have an acre, I remember when I lived in Maryland with my dad before I got married and he had a huge garden and we had one acre and they actually, the neighbors complained that he looked like he had a commercial garden.
00:33:15
Speaker
He would go out there. He was diabetic. He actually got to a point where his A1C was non-diabetic because he spent so much time out there. He was happy. He was relaxed. And people were upset about this. And I looked around the development. I said, I never see anybody else out. And there were children. And we never saw the children because people had no connection with nature, with the natural world on all of these other lots in this development.
00:33:40
Speaker
and that connection with nature and that's also something you know if you read great Catholic literature you're going to hear about that and the importance of that connection with nature because it's where we come from and God gave it to us a gift and you know read Tolkien read the Lord of the Rings and those themes run through there all the time you know it's there a lot of great things in the modern world gave for electric lighting you know it's a lot less likely your house is going to burn down when somebody knocks the light over or something like that
00:34:08
Speaker
There is a balance and we've gone too far in one direction. I'd say to those people, also go find a friend who has some chickens or turkeys or pigs or a cow or something like that and hang out there for an hour or two and you'll see how much you probably actually enjoy it if you just let yourself relax a little bit and see that it is actually a really wonderful thing. I know my kids have a ball.
00:34:32
Speaker
I have a bunch of daughters who ask for Christmas or their birthdays for gigantic knives so they can help butcher animals. My kids, they can pick up a kitten and they can pet the kitten, but they also know where their supper comes from because in many cases it's a ham that they actually cut off the pig.
00:34:51
Speaker
that they helped kill and it also grounds us a lot more and gives us a lot more sense and balance and you know shows us also our place in the order that God created in nature and shows us that you know we're really different because you know we don't go out and eat people but no matter how cute the pig is you know it's it's
00:35:10
Speaker
Maybe it will get eaten one of these days. That's a great point. It's a good reminder. And we found the same is that there's something about being in nature and participating in nature and in stewardship of the land that it just helps not only to maybe ground us in what God has created us to be, but also just promotes this remarkable environment for families and an easy way to pass on the faith and teach elements of the faith to children. And it's very accessible.
00:35:37
Speaker
No, I agree with you totally. And I'd say one other thing real quick, and that is, you know, also, if you want your kid to be a doctor someday, which a lot of people do, or a nurse, let them cut up some chickens and pigs because they'll get a great lesson in anatomy, internal anatomy. You know, my 10-year-olds know more about an internal anatomy than a lot of the students I was teaching in 300-level biology classes because my kids have cut up animals, and they've seen, you know, where the heart is and what it looks like and sliced them open and then cooked them.
00:36:06
Speaker
No, it's a whole bunch of great lessons all around that are just so accessible and it's wonderful. Well, I want to take it back to something you mentioned earlier, I think might be interesting here too, or I'm particularly curious about this.
Tomatoes: A Beginner's Crop
00:36:19
Speaker
You mentioned studying tomato cultivars and then you also mentioned how tomatoes could be something good for starting, you know, beginning homesteaders effectively to grow. Maybe just talk a little bit about what you know about tomatoes, why they're important or why you're interested in them and how they can be incorporated into the homestead.
00:36:37
Speaker
Sure. So the short part is where I started with tomatoes. Well, I really started with tomatoes is my father was a guy who grew up in an inner city neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. And as he got out of there and he found things he loved that he found himself, he loved cooking and he loved gardening. And so we always had a big garden. He loved growing his tomatoes, that kind of thing. And my mom was always happy with the tomatoes and we fed them to our dog.
00:37:03
Speaker
And we always had tomato plants coming up different places in the yard after the winter, let's just say, and stuff like that. So that's the very beginning with tomatoes. And graduate school was working on them because we needed a model system that we could look at how the pollen fertilizes the egg and you get the seed which drives the growth of the tomato fruit. And so that's why I was working on tomatoes in that particular case.
00:37:25
Speaker
But I just love them, I love the taste of them and I just find that the range of colors so beautiful and they're so really easy to grow if you just know some basics about tomatoes and there are cultivars that will grow in all different kinds of places. I love color and the range of colors on tomatoes to me just blows my mind. So those are the kinds of reasons why I love growing these things. Plus I have a family that really likes eating tomatoes and they yield really, really well.
00:37:53
Speaker
And on top of that, you can can them and all, but one of the things we've really gotten into the last couple of years is drying them. Because canning, once you get into that, that's another homesteady kind of thing, there's a decent amount of equipment demanded there. You have to have the jars and the two-part lids, and you have to have the canner, and it generates a lot of heat and steam. And it's a lot easier, we've found, to have a dehydrator. And you can even have a dehydrator that's not electrically powered. You can just use the sun.
00:38:21
Speaker
But you can take your tomatoes, you slice them up thin, you pack them in jars. We've actually found we like sort of like grilled cheese sandwiches made with dried tomatoes. The kids actually like them better than with fresh tomatoes in them. So, you know, last year we ate tomatoes most of the way through the winter, and most of the ones we ate were dried ones that we worked in, and you can crumple them up, put them on a salad that way, and they're really nice.
00:38:44
Speaker
So there's all these advantages. Tomatoes are fairly acidic, and that means they're easy to preserve, whether you can them or you dry them, something like that, because the acid prevents one of the big nasties, which is the botulism bacterium from growing. High acid foods, you don't have to worry. That's why you can just sort of boiling water bath can them.
00:39:04
Speaker
Low-acid foods like squash that's why you have to pressure cannon because the pressure and the heat together will kill botulism But the the heat of the boiling water will not alone do that job So there's awful lot of wonderful things if you ask me about tomatoes And so that's how we we really got into them. Is it? True that potatoes and tomatoes are of the same family Yes
00:39:27
Speaker
So, and you can either call it the potato or tomato family, and it also gives us peppers, eggplant, tobacco, also huckleberry, garden huckleberry, which was developed out in California by a famous plant breeder. That's actually, you know, you talk about poison nightshade, well, garden huckleberry is actually
00:39:45
Speaker
a nightshade, which was bred to get the nasty out of it. It kind of looks like a really dark blueberry, but it's another relative of tomato. And there's some other more minor crops like siphomandra, and I'm just blanking a tree tomato, which we can't grow so much here, but it's more like a more of a subtropical tropical kind of crop. And there are other things in that family as well. But that family gives us another one that provides an awful lot. If you go to that produce section and look around, you're going to find a lot of
00:40:15
Speaker
tomato potato family members there. Interesting. Well, one other topic, I think you may be able to speak to this and I find it particularly interesting as we continue to work towards more of a self-sufficient lifestyle for our family itself.
Herbs and Their Uses in Home Gardens
00:40:30
Speaker
And also think of how we can use plants that we can grow from medicinal properties or to help build certain nutrient banks in our family as well that we can draw from.
00:40:40
Speaker
Herbs is something that I'm finding really intriguing and I suspect quite a few other people will as well because what we somewhat kind of ubiquitously know about herbs is that they seem to either pack a serious punch when it comes to flavor or also potentially when it comes to the nutrients that are inside them. What do you know about herbs and what should other people be aware of when thinking how they can either
00:41:04
Speaker
bring them into their cooking in their household, use them in the garden potentially to ward off pests or also possibly just to build up kind of a nutrient bank for themselves to draw from. Sure.
00:41:16
Speaker
A big thing with herbs, and with plants in general, but especially herbs, and especially with flowering plants is, they make, and this is something I talk about in my plant phys course, in the garden for the grocery store, and other courses, and this was always my favorite lecture teaching at university. They make what are called secondary metabolites, and so a couple sentences to explain that.
00:41:36
Speaker
If you think about a job, your primary function is the thing. If you don't do it, your boss is going to fire you. Your secondary function, they want you to do, but you got to take care of the primary first. And then they may say, well, you know, if you don't have enough time, leave that other thing off till next week. Primary metabolites are the stuff that you have to make as a living thing or you're dead. So, for example, if you're a plant, you need to make glucose to build cell walls because the cellulose in cell walls is just glucose is hooked together one after another like cars in a train.
00:42:04
Speaker
And there are certain other things you have to make. We call those primary metabolites because those are the first things you got to do. Secondary metabolites and the flowering plants are especially good at making these.
00:42:15
Speaker
In fact, one theory at one time for the disappearance of the dinosaurs was the rise of the flowering plants. Because they said, well, the flowering plants are so good at making these nasty chemicals that I'm about to describe, maybe they help to wipe out the dinosaurs simply by sort of poisoning them as they took over the floral kingdom. Because secondary metabolites make the plant's life better, but they can get by without them. So for example, the nice reds and purples and blues that are from a class called anthocyanins that are great for our health,
00:42:44
Speaker
The plants use them actually among other things is built in sunscreen and also to attract insects because these pigments are working the UV where bugs can see, where we can't see. But those anthocyanins, you can find anthocyanin-free mutants. As an example, take iceberg lettuce, okay? It's got no anthocyanins. It's just got chlorophyll, it's green. But if you think about a nice red lettuce, like 4-Ellen Schluss, it's got red anthocyanins in it.
00:43:10
Speaker
Iceberg is just fine without the anthocyanins, but the anthocyanins help because they help to protect the nuclei from UV radiation in the cells, stuff like that. So that's one reason the plants make it. The other reason they make it is animals, and we're not animals, we have human souls, but we do have animal bodies. It's why we can use pigs and guinea pigs for doing medical tests on putative chemicals. We have animal bodies.
00:43:37
Speaker
And those secondary metabolites are originally designed to make animals either die or go away when they're chewing on plants. So, for example, there are some plants which make chemicals that will make female mammals abort their babies.
00:43:53
Speaker
The idea being, if this thing's chewing on me, I'm going to kill her baby, she'll go away, baby's not here, I'm safe as a plant. When first Europeans dropped off their sheep in Australia, over and over, they had these problems, the whole herd of sheep would go out and boom, they would all lose their babies because of these kinds of these issues.
00:44:12
Speaker
Or think about, I'm sure at some point we've all been cooking in the kitchen and said, I wonder what peppermint, lemon, something like that extract is like. And you touch it on your finger and you go, oh, that's horrible. That's what the bug is supposed to taste and go, oh, and go away or get sick and die. What we do with a lot of those secondary metabolites, which makes them great as seasonings or as medicinals, we back the dose off to where it doesn't make us sick, but it has some beneficial physiological effect.
00:44:40
Speaker
Those extracts are a great example. Or aspirin originally comes from willow bark. The chemical that kills pain originally is called salicylic acid, which comes from the name Salix from willow in Latin. And so Salix salicylic acid. What the Germans realized in the 1800s was they could make a little tweak in the structure of salicylic acid and make it a little easier on people's stomachs.
00:45:04
Speaker
But Willowmark still works as a painkiller. But again, originally it's going to have other effects on, or caffeine. Caffeine's original, you know, think about if you've ever sat up all night, you've got babies, I have babies, you know what this is like. You drink too much coffee, coke, whatever to stay awake, so like you're rocking them to sleep, you know, drop them. Well, you know what it feels like when you've had too much caffeine. You feel nauseous, you feel jittery. That's what the bug's supposed to feel like when it chews on the leaves of a tea plant or on a coffee berry.
00:45:35
Speaker
But what's supposed to happen, what we do is we back the dose off where it doesn't make us sick, but it wakes us up and gives us a beneficial effect. And so that's where all the chemicals come from in those herbs and those other plants that we use in this way. Things are supposed to hurt us, we figured out how to back them off. And the great thing about those herbs is grow them, they dry readily, and they also usually, unlike your tomato plants, they maybe have hornworms chewing on leaves and you have to do something to kill the hornworms.
00:46:02
Speaker
Those herbs are usually so rich in the chemicals that the bugs don't like. You get very little or no herb damage. If you've got peppermint in your backyard, go look at it. I challenge you to find a bug hole in your peppermint leaves. Whereas the tomato leaves or the pumpkin leaves,
00:46:17
Speaker
right near them may have plenty of bug holes that you have to worry about. So grow those guys. And there are some cases, as you suggest, where you can grow up a plant that's rich in the metabolites and apply it as a sort of a natural insecticide or at least insect repellent. Tobacco is one that you can do this way. You can grow your own tobacco.
00:46:34
Speaker
Make an extract leaves, spray it on the plants. Nicotine also, again, same as caffeine. It's supposed to make the bugs feel sick and either kill them or make them go away. You can use it in that sort of a way. So that's what those guys are all about. Herbs are wonderful things to grow. And there are probably a lot more than we in modern life are aware of. You go to the big grocery store and look down the rack of spices. Go check Seed Savers Exchange or do a little bit of reading. You'll find there are at least twice as many herbs out there that you can grow.
00:47:02
Speaker
season your food with. And also you can even go out and forage as part of homesteading.
Foraging and Sustainable Homesteading
00:47:07
Speaker
where we both live in Indiana, the woods where there's a little bit of shade are rich in spice bush berries. Used in pioneer days as a substitute for allspice, they're tasty, they're free. You can also deliberately cultivate them if you want to, but they're there for free. And there are lots of other fruits and things like that rich in these secondary metabolites that are as good as antioxidants, they're great in our diets, and so on and so forth. So yeah, they're wonderful things, grow lots of them.
00:47:34
Speaker
That is fascinating. I am awestruck at the amount of information, one that you're talking about here, but two, because I know it's opening up a humility in me to recognize how little I know about the plants that I grow.
00:47:50
Speaker
As in we grow heirloom plants and some specialty crops for commercial production to sell wholesale and direct to consumer. And yet I know how to make those grow and I know some very basics about what would make them grow better, et cetera. But I certainly am receiving an enormous lesson here and I'm really interested in learning more about plants at this point.
00:48:13
Speaker
There's a ton of wonderful stuff out there and the more you study them, no matter what level you are, you realize just how much you don't know and the new things that pop up all the time. One quick example, because I know garlic is one of your crops and you do wonderfully with it that you sell.
00:48:28
Speaker
And the standard way of propagating garlic is to break up the head and use the individual clothes. But garlic, as I'm sure you know very well, but for everybody else, when it flowers, and it does have true flowers, will produce these little bulbils. And if you're trying to produce just the heads, you'll probably snap those off and throw them away so that energy doesn't go to them.
00:48:50
Speaker
But they're another way of propagating garlic. And one of the things I only realized about three years ago is, where I live in southern Indiana, and where there were a lot of German settlers starting 150, 175 years ago, the Germans actually took garlic and put planted along the edge of their fields and in corners. And I haven't yet been able to find out whether it was more like a, they actually got it blessed and planted it as like a sacramental, or whether it was more like some surviving superstition. But one way that they planted it there is a protection.
00:49:20
Speaker
It's still there and they don't generally they don't know about it or they don't care about it because it's true garlic But the amazing thing is over time you've selected unlike the garlic you grow commercially
00:49:31
Speaker
Most of the energy isn't going to go down into the head. These guys put most of their energy up into the bauble. So there's a lot of them. You can pick, I can, on the way home from work, I can pick five pounds of garlic for free like that on roadsides in July and August. But the other thing is, over time, because the places where they didn't get mowed and killed is in wet ditches, you now have this garlic around here which matures in wet soil, which
00:49:55
Speaker
Garlic, as you know, doesn't really appreciate just like onions. But this stuff, the heads will dry out and mature and stay year after year in a ditch that stays wet 12 months of the year. It's the weirdest thing. So that was one I just found a few years ago. And so there's a ton of stuff to learn. There's so much out there.
00:50:14
Speaker
Well, I've got one more specific plant question to run by you here before we
Enhancing Soil with Mustard Cover Crops
00:50:18
Speaker
wrap up. Something else that has recently hit my radar is cover crops, but specifically with cover crops is we are working to balance the use of cover crops over the winter, as well as those that we use during the summertime and the growing season.
00:50:31
Speaker
Mustard is one you mentioned some educational background in mustard early in the conversation and I'm interested what do you know about mustard and why should it be maybe something people consider for their their property their land or as a cover crop or otherwise.
00:50:48
Speaker
So number one, mustards do really well. If you go out in the springtime, we have lots of wild mustards, including native ones. And those mustards thrive. So it says something about it's a good thing to have around. Number one, the yellows and a lot of the whites and purples in the springtime just growing in hedgerows. That's mustard family.
00:51:06
Speaker
Mustard itself, you can raise your own mustard, number one. It's a great seed. It's a great condiment to have, number one. Number two, a really wonderful thing about members of the mustard family is they don't make what are called root hairs. So most plants want to have more surface area so they can absorb more water and more nutrients from the soil. And so they'll have a root, but then they'll have these tiny little skinny hairs that come off and give lots of surface area. It's what we call increasing the surface area to volume ratio.
00:51:35
Speaker
This is the reason why, because surface area to volume ratio when it's high means you easily pull stuff in, but you easily lose stuff to the environment. This is why if you watch a nature show about Alaska,
00:51:46
Speaker
Everything that's wandering around living well in the wild in Alaska is kind of bad because it's nice and rounded and it minimizes the surface area and they hold on to heat better. You never watch a nature show from Alaska and see like a python just grab somebody by the ankle because that long skinny shape just doesn't work in that climate. Same way with roots, okay? But mustard plants, even though they thrive, they don't make these root hairs a lot of them.
00:52:09
Speaker
What they do instead is, or one of the things that they do is they attract earthworms. And those guys in the soil actually help to liberate nutrients and bring them in, and in some ways replace some of the role of those root hairs. And by the way, when people go, oh, and introduce species, oh, they're invasive, it's going to destroy us. Whenever you say that, there are some things that are problematic, but just bear in mind that two invasive species in North America are the earthworm and the European honeybee.
00:52:37
Speaker
And I don't think anybody wants to get rid of those. So some of those invasives are actually kind of cool things to have around. And they work well with the mustard.
00:52:44
Speaker
And a lot of times with the cover crops, you're doing one of two things. In some cases, you're finding cheap seed, not just with your mustard, but with other things, planting it and adding nutrients via the seed and the plants rotting down eventually. With the price of fertilizer this year, I see the commercial farmers around me doing the same thing. They plant rye that they can get cheap, because it was grown with fertilizer from a couple of years ago when it was still affordable. They work that in and then plant their beans and corn on top of that as it rots in and lets the nutrients go.
00:53:11
Speaker
But the other thing is a lot of cover crops, not just mustards, you're going to have bean family members, they have the ability to make associations with certain bacteria that can pull nitrogen out of the air and fertilize them. Because if I take a deep breath, 80% of what I just breathed in is nitrogen gas, but it's in a form that almost no living things can access. However, these special bacteria can do that.
00:53:33
Speaker
They will then swap the nitrogen to the bean family plants that could be beans peas that shelf alpha and in return the plant gives them some sugar so everybody it's a win-win and That nitrogen now if you turn those cover crops under as you know That nitrogen will then rot out of the plants and can be picked up by whatever next crop whether it's your garlic or your pumpkins or whatever else and
00:53:55
Speaker
So that's another wonderful thing. And there are other bacteria that can do that in nature, and in fact, as a cool example, in Vietnam, for the rice paddies, what they do is, they grow this little water fern called azala that can associate with another nitrogen-fixing bacterium. And then that grows in the rice paddy, and when they harvest the rice, the paddy is drained, they turn the azala under, and that's how they get nitrogen into those fields, pre-chemical fertilizers.
00:54:21
Speaker
That is fascinating. That's absolutely fascinating. Doug, I could go on and on. I can think of a whole bunch of additional questions that I personally would want to ask you, and maybe we'll do that on another episode in the future here, because this is absolutely fascinating to me. Probably one of the most educational conversations I have ever had in my entire life when it comes to plants, plant biology, or really growing things, both from a farming perspective, but also from a homestead perspective.
00:54:51
Speaker
So simply want to say thank you for being here, for being willing to talk and share as much as you have and definitely encourage people to consider taking your courses. If this is any indication of what you're presenting them there, I'm sure it's very much worthwhile.
00:55:08
Speaker
We have a lot of fun with those courses, and I've even had people who grew up on some of the last farms in my area where they literally grew everything themselves, except I think they bought cornflakes. But other than that, they produced everything themselves, and yet I have retirees who've come to the courses and really had a great time with them. So I hope people can learn from them, and it's great to be able to help people. Well, thank you for being here, and have a wonderful day. Thank you very much, you too.
00:55:29
Speaker
Thank you for joining us on another episode of the Little Way Farm and Homestead Podcast. Check out the show notes for more information about this episode and be sure to tune in next week.