Today I'm talking with Leah at Bauer Family Farms.

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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. At Green Bush Twins and Company, we believe in the power of creativity, imagination, and art to bring people together. Our mission is to inspire connection across all ages, encouraging understanding, individuality, and a true sense of belonging. We're building more than a brand. We're growing a mindful community rooted in kindness, intention, and shared purpose.

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At our core, it's about real people sharing real stories, ideas, and products that make everyday life more meaningful. If you believe in living with purpose and supporting brands that care, you'll feel right at home with Greenbush Twins. That tiny homestead podcast is sponsored by Greenbush Twins and Company. Today I'm talking with Leah Bauer at Bauer Family Farms in Faribault, Minnesota. Good afternoon, Leah. How are you? Doing well. I got most of my chores out of the way, so I'm...

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sitting pretty with a nice coffee in my house and ready to chit chat about farm life. Good. And normally I would say, how's the weather? But you and I both know it is a gloriously beautiful day in Minnesota today. Compared to yesterday, yes. Yeah. And Saturday, Saturday, we got snow in the morning. Right. It was enough to to build up on the grass where we were at. We're we just had unhooked our our plow and everything and got it put away for the

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spring, which those couple of 80 degree days really, really had me going for a second there. Yeah. And I just said that wrong Sunday. It was yesterday morning. I'm not quite with it. Oh, you're right. Yeah. It was yesterday morning because I was up at five and at 515, I went out on the porch with my coffee and looked outside and I was like, I will be damned. It's snowing big white feathery flakes. Right. Which is not what you want to see once you've already had what? Five 80 degree days? Yeah.

01:55
Yeah, it's spring in Minnesota. Doesn't know what it's doing. Oh, it's coming. It's all going to be okay. Our rhubarb is leafing. Our tree line is leafing. My peonies are up. They haven't budded yet. Thank God, because they'd be useless if they had, because the snow would have killed them. We have um tulips up with buds on them. They haven't opened yet. um

02:24
The tree has not bloomed yet. The apple trees have not bloomed yet. So that's good news too. We have about 500 cloves of garlic planted that are, I think like eight inches tall already. Wow. I know I'm so excited. We started, I think in 2023, we planted 80 cloves from a neighbor and the plan was to just multiply it, you know, cause garlic is

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It's one of those things that if you plant one, then you usually get five to eight cloves back at the end of the season. Oh yeah. And so started with 80 and then replanted everything. And now we've got 500. So when we harvest, we should have 3000 or 4000 cloves to plant again at the end of this year. I am so jealous because we can't grow garlic here to save our lives. The dirt's too heavy, too black. You have more of a clay soil.

03:20
Yes. Yes, we do. That sucks. Garlic likes soft soil, kind of a loamy almost so that it has room to expand. Yeah, I asked my husband if we should just put in a raised bed and, you know, make the soil what the garlic would like. And he said, yeah, we could do that. And we haven't done it yet. It's easy to to get all of the dreams together.

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But then once it actually comes to putting the supplies together, that's a different story. Well, we're just not sure that we need to grow garlic because lots of people grow garlic in Minnesota. And he really loves growing tomatoes, so he puts all his focus on tomatoes.

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I think it was 2024 that we did a ton of tomatoes and I still have some in the freezer. We just, we don't need a ton of them. And some other family in Wasika actually grows a greenhouse load of them. So they cover us for that and we're going to stick with garlic, I think. It's lot of fun. Yeah. And garlic is like God's gift to cooking. So keep growing garlic, please.

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Yes, absolutely. We're hoping to put it in the farm stand if we get any smaller heads that aren't suitable for planting at the end of this year. Yes. So we kind of jumped the gun here. How about you tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to be farming and what you do? Right. So we just kind of started up the farm and the farm page this year, but I do have a rural

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background and grew up out in the country. Always had chickens when I was younger, but never really cattle or any other types of poultry or pork. ah So we're just really getting into it again, after a few years hiatus and jumping in with both feet, you know, starting chickens again, I have about 125 egg laying chickens.

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Very nice. And I have six New Zealand doe rabbits and one buck. And we're hoping to get some quail eggs in the incubator soon, along with hopefully doing cut flowers for the farm stand and lots of vegetables. I love a big garden and I do a lot of canning myself. And so most of it's for my own shelves. But I'm hoping to get my cottage license here soon and I'll be able to sell my canned goods.

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Yes, do that. Cause I think it's still free. Oh yeah. To get the cottage license. It's I've from the women around me that have applied and gotten approved. said that the process is fairly easy. It's super easy. have to renew mine and basically the website has a bunch of information you read through it. And then there's a quiz. It's like 10 questions and you have to get seven or eight correct. Right.

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I mean, it almost sounds too easy. Anybody could do it, but maybe that's the point. Yes. Yes. And the thing is, if you don't love to cook, you're not going to bother to get your cottage registration. So I think it's fine. But yes, we we have a farm stand on our place too. And my intention over the next month or so is to start cooking some start cooking, start baking some cookies and get them packaged up and out there because

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People are stopping in for eggs anyway. And if there's like a little box of six cookies out there for eight bucks, maybe they'll buy them. Who knows? Oh yeah. I'm pretty terrible at the impulse buys. And so that would get me a hundred percent. Yes. And my cookies are way better than store-bought cookies. I promise. That rings true for, I think, at least 99 % of farm goods.

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Why buy it in the store when your neighbor can make it and you can barter for it or... And it doesn't have preservatives in it. You're right. Exactly. Five ingredients compared to a paragraph. Yes. And thank God for that because the labels would be impossible to create. So our neighbor, um the lady that I do the farm stand with, her name is Summer and her cottage name is Summer Flowers. It's kind of a play on words.

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Cute. so she does all of the cottage baking and she is incredible at it. I mean, she's she truly has a gift. I'm looking at uh jalapeno cheddar and cinnamon raisin loaves right now that I snagged from the weekend. And so she does a lot of the cottage baking and I am going to supply cut flowers, fresh produce and farm fresh eggs at the farm stand. So it's kind of a

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oh co-operation with the farm stand. But it's been a lot of fun so far. We've only been open, I think, three weekends now on Saturdays and Sundays. Nice. So do you get a lot of traffic in there? Yes. They have a gorgeous property and it's a little brick building that I think used to be like a pump house or a garden shed or something, but it was repurposed beautifully into what the farm stand is now.

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but lots of, uh, not nitpicking, but we'll change little things about it as the season goes. Yes. You'll have to re revamp it as the season goes. Right. Fresh pangy, um, so...