Today I'm talking with Tracy at O'Connor Family Acres.

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00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with my friend Tracy at O'Connor Family Acres. Good morning Tracy, how are you? Good morning Mary. I'm doing well. Thanks. Thank you. How did you guys fare with all this crappy weather yesterday? Yeah, I stayed home.

00:28
We were supposed to go somewhere and I was like, nope, I'm going to stay in the house. Paul went to work though, so he had to venture out, but he did well. He just took it slow as we do in Minnesota. Yeah, no doubt. So this is yet another hyper local episode. Tracy lives like maybe five miles from me, maybe in Le Sueur. So I have to tell you, we're doing homesteadish stuff today.

00:58
Who? What are you doing? Well, I started that, that black garlic thing. That's the fermenting thing. And that's been going for three days. So my kitchen has smelled like garlic for three days. And it's got to go at least another couple before I can even open it to check it. And Kyle and Cameron are downstairs, um, basically heating up all the tomatoes that we froze to get ready to can them into sauce. So.

01:27
My house smells like an Italian restaurant right now. Oh my gosh, I love it. I love canning tomatoes was new for me last year was the first year I did it and absolutely love the smell. And I'm excited to hear how your black garlic turns out because that sounds super interesting. I was listening to your episode where you talked to the guy about black garlic and I was very intrigued. So yeah. Yeah, I will have to give you some so you can try it.

01:57
Awesome, I would love that. Yeah, I think there's 15 heads of garlic in that machine right now. So if it works, I'll have some to share. Nice, nice, nice. I will reciprocate with, you know, well, something. Goat milk in the spring would be awesome. Absolutely. That's a, well, that's a hopefully a for sure. We have a new buck this year. So.

02:22
And he's pretty young, so hopefully he did what he needed to do so we have babies in the spring. And that would be wonderful. And on that note, tell me about yourself and what you guys do at O'Connor Family Acres. Yeah, thank you so much. So we are, you know, a small homestead. We have about almost six acres. And we moved here to the homestead. This is going on four years now.

02:51
We started with ducks and we actually started with ducks in the city-ish. So city-ish. We were in Medina at the time on an acre and we started with maybe six ducks. And it was during COVID, of course, because we didn't have anything to do. And we're like, we had been talking about when we buy our forever home, getting

03:20
you know, some animals and really kind of not completely being independent, but controlling at least some of our food and how it's being, you know, handled, processed, what goes into it, all the things. And so we started with ducks. And then when we moved to where we are now, O'Connor Family Acres, those ducks multiplied greatly. And we also got goats.

03:49
And this year we added pigs. So we're kind of we're not really at a point where we're you know Consistently selling we'll sell something here or there But we're almost to the point I would say this next year if our buck did what he was supposed to do will be at kind of a tipping point where we can maybe start selling some stuff and the idea is to you know provide for us provide for our family and

04:18
you know, maybe offset some of the feed costs and, you know, the money that we're putting into it by selling some of the abundance, if you will. So. Awesome. I'm glad that that's the case because I don't, it's fine if you just have a homestead or a farm or whatever and you're just doing it to provide for yourself. But that never quite works that way because some years you will have an overabundance and you're like, what do I do with all this?

04:47
Oh, for sure. Absolutely. I mean, in the spring, because we do have so many ducks now, I'm literally trying to give eggs to people. I'm like, Oh, it is so nice to see you. Thank you for visiting. Would you like a dozen eggs? Yeah, we used to do that with the chicken eggs, because we just had so many we couldn't use them before they would go bad. Yeah, exactly. Duck eggs and zucchini. Zucchini is the other one I'm always having abundance of from the garden. We do have a garden too.

05:17
I'm always like, oh, would you like some zucchini? It was actually amazing to me this past summer when Kyle was selling at the farmer's market in Lesour that people bought zucchini. I was like, are you serious? You don't have neighbors who are just putting it in your car or in your porch? Well, and not everybody does, right? So that's kind of the beauty of it. And you guys have amazing vegetables. So I always love coming in and seeing the...

05:47
the garden and now the greenhouse and all the things. And of course seeing you guys too, but. Yeah, it's just the stuff. It's not. Kind of like when you have kids, right? And they're like, I come to see the kid. Well, also you too. But then when you have a homestead, it's like, I come to see all the animals in the garden. Oh, and you too. Yep, exactly.

06:12
So our garden this year, you know, did not do real well. We had some zucchini for a while and we had tomatoes after the third planting. And I'm very excited about the fact that we actually did get some tomatoes to make sauce out of and we're doing that today. But keep your fingers crossed that next summer's better because man, this was a very depressing year for the garden. Yeah, it was a rough, it was a really rough spring.

06:41
And I think our saving grace was that we had the raised beds, which can be a positive and a negative. It was nice that it wasn't white. I mean, we still had some stuff that struggled for sure, as we do every year. And part of that is just we're still learning too. I've always had at least containers. When I lived in the city, in the city, I had a little salsa garden with

07:08
containers of tomatoes and peppers. And then when we moved to Medina, we added some raised beds and now we're here. We have two, four, six, eight, about 12 raised beds plus some space. I plant pumpkins on the side. There's some asparagus, rhubarb, some of the things that you definitely put directly in the ground.

07:36
So long story longer, that was kind of our saving grace this year. It does limit you, I think, a little bit on the quantity because you leave space and there's only so much room. But for controlling drainage and things like that, it is definitely helpful. Yeah, my heart broke for you guys this spring for sure.

08:01
Yeah, ours too. It was very sad. Like we shed some tears over that four or five weeks of rain. Yeah. So I have a question about your asparagus, but I also want to ask you another one after that that has nothing to do with asparagus. Yeah. Was there asparagus there when you moved in or did you guys put in crowns? Yes and yes. Okay. So this was actually kind of funny. So Paul tilled the garden.

08:31
How did this go? He tilled the garden, said he had to buy a torch so he could burn the garden, tilled it again, and then I planted asparagus. And it's so funny because where I planted it is kind of, of course, on the edge of the garden because I know asparagus spreads like wildfire. Oh, yes. And just to the left of that was...

08:54
asparagus coming up that spring. I'm like, first of all, how did that survive our garden Armageddon? And then also, yay, I have extra asparagus. So that was kind of cool. And so that asparagus that was there, were you able to harvest some right away? I think not the first year. And I don't know if that's because we went crazy on the garden or if it was because...

09:20
Um, it was newer, like maybe the people before us just put it in. Um, but last, this last year was the first year we were able to really get some asparagus. So it took, it was the third year. Yeah. I keep hearing that it takes three years for it to get established. And I have the same experience. This is the first spring that we've been here that we've gotten more than like, you know, eight stems. So nice. Nice. It is though my, um,

09:49
Grandma's, my grandma's place, which is now my aunt's place, has an asparagus patch that's been there probably 50 years. I mean, I remember getting asparagus as a kid and my aunt still gives the family asparagus every spring. So it's a, I mean, once it's established, kind of like rhubarb, I know you had a really awesome rhubarb plant. It stays.

10:18
Yeah, we actually haven't gotten a whole lot of rhubarb from the stuff that we put in when we put it in the fall. We moved here for years ago, 2020. But the rhubarb plant that was here when we moved in, the one little rhubarb plant they'd put in, we got some this past spring from that. And it was pretty good. Cameron ate a bunch of it with the, you know, dip the stem in the sugar and bite it. Oh, yeah.

10:44
Oh yeah, that was one thing we planted too a couple years ago when we moved in was the rhubarb plant. And the first year it did not do well. The rhubarb plant was like, no thank you. But then I replanted a different one the next year and that one came back last y...

O'Connor Family Acres

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