Stone Soup Farm - SNAP How to find help, and how to help

Today I'm talking with Megan McGovern at Stone Soup Farm. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Cottage Foodie Con. The code HOME 15 will get you 15% off any ticket and is valid for the month of November www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Have you thought about being a cottage food producer? Or if you're a cottage food producer, have you thought about expanding it into a small business? Cottage Foodie Con is probably for you. You can find more information at cottagefoodiecon.com and if you use the code HOME15, you'll get 15 % off your registration costs. 00:29 and that price is valid through the end of November. So again, check out cottagefruitycon.com. A tiny homestead is sponsored by uh cottagefoodiecon.com. Today I'm talking with Megan McGovern at Stone Soup Farm in Oregon. Is that right? No, I'm in a little town called Ferndale, Washington, which is about as far north west in the United States you can get without being in the ocean or Canada. 00:59 I was one state away. I screwed up. I'm sorry. uh Good um afternoon, Megan. How are you? Good. I'm doing great. Thanks. Good. um So how's the weather there? um You know, the nice thing about Washington, and we love it here, we are right on the, it's a beautiful place. We're in between mountains on the East and they are just gorgeous mountains. And on the West, about eight miles of us, there is ocean. 01:27 So we have everything we have. could literally if you were doing like a design theme, you could have, you know, Western house in a little log cabin or you could have a cabin in the woods or you could have beach house. It's really fantastic here. And the best part is that it never gets really cold and it never gets really hot. So in the winter never gets dips below freezing a few times, never gets a hard freeze or much snow, a couple inches here and there. Summer never gets above 75, 80 degrees. 01:57 The winter is dark and gloomy and they call it the big dark. In the summer, you've got daylight till almost 10 o'clock at night. You can't even go watch fireworks, 4th of July, because it never gets dark. In the winter, it's dark at 430 and doesn't get light till 815 and we're right heading into that. And it rains every day all day long. And this weekend, this whole week has been dark and gloomy and overcast and sad. Makes me miss summer already and it's only November. 02:26 As I sounds like November. We're kind of in the same boat today. It's drizzly and it's gray and I think it's like 45 degrees outside in Minnesota. Yeah, but it gets cold there. also not only cold, you have sunny days occasionally though, right? Oh, we have lots of beautiful, bright, crisp. 02:46 Yeah, bright blue sunny days, you bright blue sky sunny days. Yes, absolutely. But today is not one of them. my my husband happens to have a doctor's appointment here in an hour. So he's home today. And he just got the wood burning boiler started for the first time this season. 03:05 Yeah, yeah, we're about to start. Same thing. I love that thing. It saves us so much money in the wintertime, because as long as we're willing to do the work, the wood is paid for. Well, we have a very old not OK, not very old by Minnesota standards, but we have a farmhouse that's been a farm since the 1920s. And one of our little buildings outside was built as a place for farmhands to sleep in the 1940s. And my two adults 03:34 sons are both ones in college and ones just graduated and they're both moving home for a while to save money and they want to live in this little outbuilding. It is not insulated. It is not warm. It is basically a barn and they're trying to keep warm with a little propane stove and it's not working. We might need to upgrade to wood for a while or something because it's or I could insulate but you know that's work. So we'll see. 03:59 Whatever you're do you better get on it. No kidding the bar cats are sleeping on their beds right now to get everybody keep warm. yeah, exactly All right. So tell me a little bit about your farm we Honestly, we did not set out to be farmers Although I have always loved food and the food supply and figuring out where my food came from but we have 04:26 three kids who are all gluten-free and dairy-free for health reasons. And so we need to be very strict about what we eat. And my middle son, he's in college right now, but he needed room to roam. He could not be contained in a suburban household. And he's the kid that when you go to the park, he's the one that all the other moms are pointing at the tallest tree and saying, whose kid is that? 04:54 and it would be mine. ...