Tending Seeds: Adventures in Gardening, Homesteading, and Herbalism

I've recently found myself reflecting on which habits and patterns have been the most helpful to me during these couple of months of quarantine, so I wanted to share a few of them with you today. I also give my suggestions for my favorite pandemic podcasts - who would have guessed that would be a whole genre??

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Interested in booking an herbal consultation with me via video conferencing? Learn more here.

Hi, friends! We're back with our second episode with my partner, Mike, as a guest. We're continuing this series discussing the process of restarting our homestead out here in Colorado. Today's episode focuses on our actual move from Tennessee to Colorado and some of the big decisions we had to make and the logistics that we had to organize. I hope this episode is helpful to anyone who finds themselves in the position of needing to move their homestead in the future. And I hope everyone else finds it entertaining to hear about our adventures!

Some topics we touch on :

• Deciding when to actually make the move.
• Deciding where/what to live in once we got to Colorado -- we bought raw land so we were starting completely from scratch!
• Working to get our TN homestead on the market to sell.
• Moving in stages -- we needed to have infrastructure ready to go for the animals before we brought them out.
• Our first work trip -- what we accomplished; help from friends.
• The actual move -- worrying about our animals; finishing fencing in the dark.
• The rush to beat winter -- getting ourselves situated; not letting solar equipment freeze.

The cover photo for this episode is the first selfie we took on our new property, the morning after we arrived and started stumbling around our land for the first time. If we look sleep-deprived and a bit wild-eyed, it's because we were!

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As always, we appreciate your support of this podcast and our work! Please check out the spring seasonal items in the Fox and Elder shop! Lymph Love, our favorite herbal vinegar, is back in stock. We also have violet leaf salve and calendula salve available in two different sizes now – both are great if you’re dealing with dry skin from winter still. And of course we still have our normal stock of delicious herbal teas and tinctures. Thanks so much for supporting our farm with your purchases! It means the world to us, especially as we work to get our farm re-established in a new location this year, which comes with a lot of expenses.

If you're enjoying the podcast, please share it with a friend or three to help us reach more listeners!

Until next time, keep your hands dirty and your heart open <3

Hi friends! I hope the month of May has been treating you well! Things here are looking great – it’s finally warm enough that we have some seeds started and sprouting, and we were invited to vend at a local market for a spring event last week. Our farmers' market also starts up at the end of this month and we’re looking forward to being there every Saturday!

Today’s interview features two awesome guests who I’m excited to introduce you to:

Stephanie Thurow is a Certified Master Food Preserver and Master Gardener Volunteer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is a homesteader, author of bestselling cookbooks Can It & Ferment It, WECK Small-Batch Preserving, and WECK Home Preserving. You can find here on the Minnesota from Scratch blog, or on Instagram under the same name. Stephanie hopes her experience with homesteading will help others reach more of their goals. When she isn’t in the kitchen preserving, she can be found in the garden with her hens, teaching food preservation classes, or at the lake with her family and friends.

Michelle Bruhn homesteads in suburban Minnesota. She's a local food advocate, Master Gardener Volunteer, writer, garden educator, and farmers' market manager. As the founder of ForksInTheDirt.com, an information hub for garden and farm-to-table living, her passion is helping folks "dig" their food. She can also be found at ForksInTheDirt on Instagram. When not in the garden, Michelle enjoys spending time with her backyard flock, family, and friends while immersing herself in nature (usually with a foraging basket in tow).

Their book Small-Scale Homesteading covers topics such as:

• Gardening tips and tricks: from composting, soil health and what plants thrive best during the different seasons.
• All things preserving: Canning, curing and how to keep your vegetables last year round.
• Raising chickens: how these feathered friends can inhance your homestead.
• DIY products and recipes: healthy alternatives to everyday cleaning products, lotions and soaps.

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If you’d like to support the podcast, please spread the word about it by sharing it on your social media!

You can also support us by checking out our online farm shop. We have lots of great herbal offerings in stock and pre-orders for our summer solstice box will be opening up soon.

Until next time, keep your hands dirty and your heart open.

We're back with our second episode in our Homestead Tools series! Make sure to check out Episode 53 - Essential Tools for Your Homestead if you haven't already listened to that one.

Today we're moving past the basic tools that we previously covered and talking about some investments that can really help to level up your projects. Mike answers my questions about everything from cutting metal and welding to a variety of options for sawing your own lumber, and so much more! We hope this episode will be super useful for you.

Here is the Miller welding app that Mike mentions.

Our third installment in this series will talk about tool maintenance so that you can make sure to protect your investments!

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Our new website and farm shop are finally up! All of our seasonings, including our smoked jalapeno salt and smoked garlic salt, are back in stock and ready to ship. Your support helps us to keep growing, literally and figuratively <3

Use code PODCAST24 at checkout to save 10% on everything in the farm shop!

You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook.

Please share the podcast with a friend so we can reach more fantastic like-minded people!!

Today I'm bringing you a lovely conversation with herbalist and herb grower Lucy Jones. We dive into the incredible story of how she got started down the plant path, training in two different herbal modalities and then integrating them into her clinical practice, and why she chooses to grow and gather the majority of her herbs rather than purchasing them from other growers. She also shares loads of knowledge with us from her book Self-Sufficient Herbalism, covering topics such as proper harvesting, drying, and storing of herbs and that there's no "one size fits all" approach to drying our plant material. I think you'll get so much from this interview and hopefully want to do some growing and gathering of your own!

If you're inspired to dive deeper into Lucy's work and purchase her book, her publisher Aeon Books has kindly offered a 20% discount code for our listeners. That code is SH20 and is good through December 31st, 2020. If you are in the US or Canada, use that code to purchase through Red Wheel Weiser. If you are in the UK, you can use the same code to purchase through Aeon Books.

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Lucy Jones is a medical herbalist with a busy high street practice, Myrobalan Clinic, in Somerset, UK. She grows or gathers the majority of the herbs that she works with and is a passionate proponent of self-sufficient herbalism. Prior to qualifying in western herbalism, she studied Tibetan Medicine with the great master Khenpo Troru Tsenam. This experience deeply influences her approach to therapeutic practice as well as the way that she grows and processes her herbs. She originally trained in Agriculture and Forestry and has two degrees from the University of Oxford. Her book ‘Self Sufficient Herbalism’ is published by Aeon Books.

Connect with Lucy on Instagram, on Patreon, or her website.

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