Farmer Brown's Produce - A Tiny Homestead | Lyssna här

Today I'm talking with Keelan and Rachel at Farmer Brown's produce.

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00:00 listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Keelan and Rachel at Farmer Brown's produce in Tennessee. Good afternoon, you guys. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm good. How's the weather there? Hot and humid. Same, darling. Same. In Minnesota, it is disgusting.

00:27 It is too soon in the season for this kind of hot, sticky weather. Absolutely. We've gotten a lot of rain lately, which has been a blessing and bad at the same time. Oh, yes. Yes, yes. We've had a lot of rain too. But as I've said a billion times in the last two years on this podcast, we had really horrible weather the last two springs. It rained every day, May through the middle of June, the last two springs.

00:56 And that is not the case this year. So we're crossing our fingers that our farm to market garden does really well this year.

01:07 The weather here, we had a very, very mild end of winter going into spring. uh It warmed up a lot quicker. Our normal last frost date is April 20th. And we, our last frost was actually like, I don't know. March. Yeah. End of March. Nice. So it, with us being prepared,

01:37 for that April 20th, we were actually kind of behind a couple of weeks, but we were able to catch up pretty quick with as warm as it got. Well, that's helpful. What do you got? Well, tell me about yourself and what you guys do. So we originally started Farmer Browns in 2013 in Wayland Springs, Tennessee. And we were we were the first CSA in the area.

02:06 And we just did, I mean, just your staple, you know, peppers and tomatoes and squashes and watermelons and corn. uh But a big thing that we did, because we were certified nationally grown at the time, was to educate people about the quality of their food, food miles. uh

02:31 why it's better to grow without pesticides and herbicides and synthetic fertilizers and all that. And the education thing for us was great and we really did reach a lot of people that way. And then we got really overwhelmed because we more customers than we were ready for and then we scaled it back up until the last two years where we were just doing eggs and a few things for certain people.

03:00 And then the last two years, we've really been putting 110 % into it. We've actually done pretty good.

03:11 Thank you for doing what you're doing because it's what everybody in this is trying to do. We're trying to educate the average American on food nutrition, nutrient density in homegrown produce, and that nature really needs our help. I think that's what we're all trying to do. So thank you for doing it. Absolutely.

03:38 Um, so tell me again when you started what year? 2013. So you've been doing this for a while. Yes, ma'am. Did you have a background in it before you started? Uh, working in your grandmother's garden. Yeah, that was about the extent. I've always had a passion for for growing. Uh, just garden crops, because I love to eat a tomato out of the garden. I love.

04:08 I love raw vegetables and that was like the easiest source, I guess. But I had just gotten out of the military, had really just gotten off of deployment too. And we had talked about it a little bit before. And I'll tell you uh kind of a funny aside, Rachel's from California. That was my last duty station.

04:38 And she came out here for a family reunion when I was deployed and she decided that this is where we were going to live, you know, and she packed up everything we owned and drove cross country with an infant and moved to Tennessee while I was still deployed. is a hell of a woman, Rachel. Good job. Thank you. It was not easy, but made it work.

05:09 You will do what you have to do to get to where you want to be and to who you want to be with. What branch of the service were you in, Kailin? I was in the Navy. Thank you for your service. My son, my son was in the Marines for eight years. Wow. And he is alive and kicking and happy and married, has a daughter and lives in Nebraska and they are growing gardens as well because they've learned.

05:38 really well from their parents like me and my husband and her parents. So we're raising them up right. Amen. I think it's important, especially in today's society, there's a lot of economic uncertainty. There's a lot of food uncertainty. you know, I hate to say it, but they're killing us with chemicals and, you know, processed foods and whatnot. So I think it's really important to teach this next generation how to grow.

06:08 It is of paramount importance. Yes, it is. And I don't know if you caught the headline earlier, because most people who are farmers or homesteaders or ranchers don't necessarily see the TV very often. Apparently inflation went up 4. something percent in the month of May. Wow. Yeah, that's a lot. And no wonder we're all having so much trouble feeding ourselves.

06:35 So yes, I encourage everybody. Listener, if you are an American, and I mean, if you aren't an American, if you live somewhere else, that's cool too. But if you are in America right now, you should really start a Victory Garden. Look it up on Google. Victory Gardens were a big thing during World War II, I think. everybody grew a small Victory Garden to have extra food because people were on rations back then.

07:05 So please, please learn to grow food and cook because things are not going to get better soon. No, unfortunately they're not. Yep. It's so disheartening. And again, if you don't have a place to grow a victory garden or a kitchen garden, a small garden, yet to know your local growers and put your money with them, buy from them because

07:33 they will be the people who save you when everything goes to hell. Yeah, I mean, I know it's been a blessing for a lot of our neighbors and stuff too for what we do because we are really well priced for the area for what we provide. And so um it's definitely helped some of them. And it's also been, you know, most CSAs you pay upfront for the whole season. And for us, we do it on a weekly basis. So if it's a harder week than usual, they can skip if they want to.

08:02 That's awesome. know, helps with the flexibility of that for budgeting. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for doing that too. You guys are really good. I like it a lot. ah So do you just do produce or do you guys have some chickens hanging around there too? Well, we got a lot of chickens hanging around. Do you sell the eggs? We do. And we also have some ducks too. got a few customers that enjoy duck eggs. So I am unfortunately allergic to duck eggs.

08:32 but ah which is what I had got them for originally. But thankfully there are a people that actually do enjoy them. are you allergic to chicken eggs too? I am not. It's just duck eggs. Huh? It's usually the opposite, isn't it? they're fully cooked, I can eat them so I can scramble them and I can bake them into stuff, but I can't have slightly undercooked eggs if I have duck eggs. Yeah. It's usually the opposite. People will get duck eggs because they're usually allergic to chicken eggs, right? Yep.

09:01 Yeah. first duck egg customer was, she was allergic to chicken eggs. That's all she could eat. And she was buying a dozen a week. And we didn't have that kind of duck power at the time. I do now. You didn't have super ducks at the time, but now you have super ducks who produce really well. Yes. We sell duck eggs in our farm stand. Our friend has ducks and they don't have a place for a farm stand. It just would not work very well.

09:30 And she asked me last summer or spring, two springs ago, she said, could we sell our duck eggs in your farm stand? And I was like, of course you can. And people were, what most people don't know is that ducks don't lay in the fall and the winter typically. And we had people asking for duck eggs in November and I was like, there won't be duck eggs until at least May. And so- And then like turkey and stuff like that too, they're very seasonal.

09:59 Yeah. so for the listener, ducks, duck eggs are not available typically at farm stands from about September through about end of April, first part of May, because the ducks are not laying eggs in those months. And it has to do with the number of light uh out, light. I can't talk hours of daylight, just like it is with chickens. If you don't put a light in your chicken coop, they're not going to lay as much either. No, no.

10:28 People don't know this stuff. We've gotten so far removed from seasonal stuff and nature cycles. People just don't know. I've seen a lot of on that topic. I've seen a lot of Facebook videos where people are like, I'm doing this new thing. I'm doing this new thing. And it's like something that we did 20, 30 years ago. But because people are so disconnected, they're just finding out about this.

10:58 is wild to me. Well, that is like understanding seasonal produce in itself. Like they're so used to the grocery store where you can get anything any time of year. And so to be like, hey, we won't have this certain product until this month because that's when it'll be available. You know, that's when it's available in season. Yes. um We go through that every spring here because we have a huge asparagus patch that we put in. Oh, lovely. But the farmer's market doesn't start until June.

11:28 The asparagus is done by June, for Saturday in June. So this year we finally got to sell four bundles of asparagus in the farm stands. We actually had enough to sell. We were so excited, you guys. It sounds so stupid, but oh. No, not at all. It took four years to be able to sell four bundles of asparagus this year. And then the other thing too, like for us is we like getting people to try new things.

11:56 I have a lot of customers are like, I don't like this. And I'll say, you know, we'll give them something and we'll like, try this. Here's a recipe. Um, but you have to at least try it once. And if you really don't like it after that, then I won't include, you know, whatever in your, in your bag. Um, but yeah, there's a lot of people who've only eaten certain vegetables or haven't tried anything new. And that's fun too, for me.

12:26 And the same thing with accomplished growing, like what we can grow that most people don't have. Yes, exactly. And honestly, I can't blame people, especially on tomatoes. People will tell me they don't like tomatoes. oh I say, have you ever had a homegrown tomato, like a fresh out of the garden, sun-warmed tomato? And they're like, no, I get my, you know, the tomatoes I've had have been from the grocery store.

12:53 And I'm just like, need to get a real tomato because real tomatoes taste nothing like what the grocery store has because the grocery store tomatoes cannot possibly taste as fresh or as nutrient dense as the tomato you get from down the road or from your own garden. And I've seen people be converted from one tomato from a garden.

13:18 Yeah, I love tomatoes. this year, we're last year we grew Brad's atomic grape tomatoes because they're so beautiful. And I actually like the taste. They're kind of sweet and tangy at the same time. We got a lot of really positive feedback on those. So we're growing those again, but we try to grow one new variety every year. And this year we've added uh the queen of the night, which is another aesthetic tomato.

13:49 um I like, you eat with your eyes first. So I like really pretty produce. And heirloom tomatoes are pretty. I'm guessing that heirloom tomatoes probably grow better in Tennessee because we've tried so hard to grow heirloom tomatoes here and they just don't do well. And I don't know why we tried growing um brandy wines and

14:18 They just, got so big so fast that they split all over them. Not just because that's what Brandywines do. I mean, they were splitting big. And it happened like three years in a row. And my husband finally said, I don't think we should try to grow them anymore because we never get any that we can eat. And I said, it's your baby, it's your garden. You grow what you want to grow. But we've tried other ones and we tried the zebra ones.

14:47 I don't know if there's a word before zebra. There's a zebra tomato. Yeah, they like really stripe either. I can't remember what they're called either, but they're really cool looking. Yeah. And they didn't do well. And I said to my husband, I'll try to find out through Google what we can do to amend the soil. And I tried to find information. I couldn't find anything about what we could do to make these heirloom tomatoes not go to crap on us. So I don't know, but congratulations on having really good soil to be able to grow heirlooms because we can't do it here.

15:17 ah We make a lot of our own compost, uh which I think is, I think that's one of the most important steps. uh Healthy living soil produces nutrient dense crops. you're reducing waste, you're adding to nature. So that's like the first step for me and probably number one on importance levels.

15:45 But here we're also blessed with a really good growing season. oh It'll stay hot until October and it's warm and it's humid. We get a lot of We get a lot of rain. I can't remember what it's called, the days of sun that you get. uh our sun doesn't go down until nine o'clock at night and it's up at...

16:14 five o'clock in the morning. So we get a really long grow day as well. Nice. Do you guys grow cucumbers? We do. I bet they're wonderful too, aren't they? love cucumbers. I need to learn how to make pickles this year, I think. I can, I can send you my recipe for refrigerator pickles if you want it. Oh, please do. They only last for about a month in the fridge, but they taste so good. They're gone before that month. They probably only last about a day with all of our kids, but.

16:44 Yeah, and you can make sweet or you can make garlic. So totally up to you how you do it. Yeah, pickles for sure. I got a kid over here nodding because she's listening. She's like, yes, make pickles. Oh, OK. I will try to find it and I will try to email it to you. Thank you. Do you guys grow squash? Mm What kinds? So this this time of year, it's just.

17:11 We have straight neck and crook neck yellow and then zucchini, but I've already got um butternut squash coming up. We'll probably do patty pan next and then um we'll do an acorn squash.

17:28 closer to fall. huh. I don't know a lot of people don't know what patty pans are. I do because we discovered them a few years ago. Patty pans are the craziest looking little squashes you'll ever see but they're like they are summer squash. So like a zucchini or a yellow crook neck or straight neck or whatever squash and if you slice them into thin slices and fry them up, they're like chips. They're so good.

17:58 That's gonna be the first year we've grown those. We grew them one time ago. And remember we had the ornamental gourd patch? I I lost you guys. I do remember that. We had gotten uh some mixed squash seeds a few, well, several years ago. And we planted them out. And what was wild was we got these gourds that we had never seen before, like squash. And, uh...

18:26 Just on the fluke entered them in the fair in one first place because like nobody else had seen them either. Not sure what happened. I lost you. Yeah, we just got kicked out for some reason. Weird. Riverside does not do well in the afternoon is why probably. Anyway, I was saying that patty pans are fantastic. If you fry them up in thin slices in a frying pan, they are like chips. Yeah. I thought about that doing like squash chips.

18:55 Yeah. We, uh, we had gotten a packet of mixed squash seeds one year and their patty pan was in there and there were some other like gourd type squashes and they grew into the wildest looking gourds and we had never seen them before. And on a fluke, we just entered them into the fair and we got first place in decorative gourds off

19:23 something that they had never seen either. was, think we'd replanted those seeds though. then they come up. Yeah. Huh? Well, very nice on, on winning a ribbon for your unknown gourds. That was the first and only time we've ever entered anything in the fair. oh So, well, beginner's luck, or maybe it was, they were just that fabulous. They were just neat looking. I don't know how to explain it. They were really cool looking.

19:53 I feel like part of being a farmer or a homestead or a rancher is those kinds of wins, those kinds of surprises. Because when it's your world and your property and your skills, you can do whatever you want. You can try anything you want. if it fails, you learn from it. And if it succeeds, you have so much pride in that success. Yeah, that's true.

20:22 So you said there's a little person listening. How many little people or young people do you have? We have four that live at home and one that's an adult. And so how old are the kids? Let's see. Kalina just turned 30. And then we've got 17, 14, 12, and 10. Wow, that's a heck of a span. Yeah. My oldest is 36. My youngest is 25 this December. So we had a 12 year span.

20:53 It's a and there's and then there's two in between them. So so are the kids into this? Some of them are. I got about two that are into it and two that are not. OK, well, half is not bad. I saw a neat quote the other day about farming and homesteading that said, just want to do this long enough for my kids to say, I got it from here. So.

21:22 Yes. Yes, absolutely. And I don't want to beat a dead horse. And that sounds like a pun, but it's not. Um, we need our kids to step up and take over because a lot of people are aging out of farming and ranching and farmers and ranchers are the ones who grow and produce the food that we should be eating. So encourage the two who are into it to stay with it because

21:51 We need them desperately to love it and move on with it. Yeah, and just be good stewards of the land. Mm-hmm. That too. The other thing that we really need, and I don't if you guys hunt or if anybody around you and your family hunts, but we need dads and grandpas and moms and grandmas who hunt to teach their kids and grandkids. And not necessarily because we need venison, but here in Minnesota,

22:20 Every fall they have special hunts for deer because there are so many deer here that they've become a nuisance. They have become a problem to towns and cities and they've also become a problem to themselves because they're running out of food. Yeah, we're starting to get that way here in Tennessee too. Yep. So if you've got kids that are interested in learning to hunt or fish, I fully encourage that to happen. My mom and dad both hunted. I am not a hunter.

22:50 I don't like guns. don't like the noise of them. I hear everything. have a hard time filtering noise. So gunshots are very hard on me. The sound really hurts my head, but I am an advocate for learning to hunt. think it is an incredible skill to have. Now y'all have mule deer up there, correct? No, no, we have white mule deer. Huh? Yep. And apparently there's some elk in northern Minnesota as well.

23:19 Oh wow, I didn't know that. I'd like to that. We're having some issues with moose in northern Minnesota though for the same reason that their food sources are not as available as they used to be. Oh wow. There's migrating? I guess so. So yeah. Yeah, and I'm not an expert on any of this, but because I was raised with a dad and a mom who hunt, I just, it's such a great skill to have.

23:49 And honestly, venison is an incredibly good for you source of protein. It is. Yes. It's pretty tasty too. I'm not a fan. I don't love it. I ate a lot of it when I was growing up, but don't love it. That's why you are a duck, right? Well, yeah, because my grandfather hunted a lot. So we had quail, duck, deer. What else? I like I'm missing something. Not that I don't think you ever go hunting.

24:17 beer and eat the heck out of some flails a kid. And I'm going to be real honest, I'm not a huge fan of meat with every dinner. I try really hard to do two or three meals a week that are just meatless. Yeah. I don't love it anymore. I used to, but in the last probably eight, 10 years, I've been kind of like, chicken is kind of not my thing and beef is kind of not my thing.

24:45 Huh, maybe meat isn't my thing anymore. I'll eat. Recipes out now for vegetarian dishes and stuff too. Yeah, I was going to say I'll eat the hell out of a dish of pasta with, you know, steamed veggies in it. That's all good, but I don't want meat with every meal. And my husband would eat meat breakfast, lunch and dinner. we're having a bit of a transition. I'm kind of like that too.

25:15 I enjoy, I enjoy steak. I'm not really big on ground beef, but like I enjoy like steak or that kind of cut of meat. Yeah. We have a cousin that has a cattle farm and we bought half a cow from him this year. And I'm like, I'm excited because you know, that means I can have steak once a week if I want to, or, you know, something like that. But we do, eat a lot of chicken and we do, we do vegetarian meals probably twice a week.

25:46 This variety is a spice of life. it sure is. And the thing that I love about the fact that we cook from scratch here is there are so many herbs and spices that most people don't even know about. We change the flavor profile. So if we were eating meat every night of the week, we could change it up with spices and herbs.

26:15 So anyway, eh I try to keep these to half an hour, we're at 27 minutes. Is there anything that you guys would like to share before I let you go?

26:28 I'd to echo your sentiments as far as like everyone learning how to at least grow one thing, even if it's just a tomato plant. But it's easy to do and it's easy to do even in small spaces. My sister had a whole little container garden on her balcony for her apartment for a long time. So there's ways to

26:58 accommodate smaller spaces or larger spaces for anybody. It's very, very important to grow your own, not just for the health of the food and the flavor, but just it'll offset your bills significantly. You do have to go to the store for everything. Definitely. And again, if you aren't capable of growing stuff at your place, definitely look into the people in your area who can.

27:26 Oh yeah, there's farm stands popping up everywhere. It is kind of scary. It is. I'm happy for it though, because it's a lot of people getting back to their roots of making their own things and most people make them cleaner than you would get from the grocery store. So I'm happy to buy a bar of soap from up the road.

27:45 Definitely and That's it's really funny. You said that because I just wrapped soaps for the farmers market last week for Saturday's farmers market and We do a coffee soap a coffee scented soap Yeah, and When my husband got home from the farmers market I said did you sell any soaps and he said yeah, he said I said I sold a few and I said what sent and he said

28:12 Oh, people want more coffee. said, well, good. We've got about 30 more bars to wrap. Oh yeah. But that smells amazing. It's so good. We got some goats that'll hopefully be in milk next year. So my plan is to home make some goat milk soap. Oh, it's so fun. And there are two frames of mind about this, Rachel. People who make homemade soap. I have done a study, you know, just

28:41 on my own of people I know who make it. if someone has never made it before, they have one of two reactions. I'm never doing this again or I'm making this my life's purpose. So you're going to have to let me know which you think is your case. Absolutely. I'm notorious for adding too much on my plate. So if it's too much, I'll probably push through it.

29:08 Okay. Well, let me know because I'll be really curious to add you to the tally of which side you're on. Pro homemade soap or anti homemade soap. All right. Where can people find you guys? We're on Facebook at Farmer Brown's Produce, Instagram under the Farmer Brown's CSA. that's really well, that's it. We don't have a website yet.

29:38 or anything like that, but um social media has been a huge, huge thing for us. Yes. Yes. And I'm telling you, any way to market without spending money is a fabulous way to do it. Yes. Before I let you go, can people still sign up for your CSA or is it closed for the season? So we have a limited number of spots and we offer those January to February. um

30:08 And, we start in May, mid May. um, we have a wait list and we're, you know, we're constantly adding people because inevitably you lose customers mid season, either, you know, moving or travel can't, can't afford it. And we've even done like where somebody has said, Hey, I'm going to be out of town for these two weeks. We've added somebody.

30:37 for just that two week period. So, I mean. As far as like a full season thing. Yeah, we're booked for the year. But wait list is growing. Okay. That is so great. You guys are the most accommodating produce growers I've ever met. uh right. As always, people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com. Cannot talk today. Geez. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you for having us. All right.

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