Today I'm talking with Heather-Marie and John at Rising Phoenix Community Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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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 Heather Marie and John at Rising Phoenix Community Farm. How are you guys? Good. Thank you. Yep. Great. How are you? I'm good. It's a beautiful day in Minnesota. Yeah. We have snow up here.

00:28
We got a little bit overnight and I didn't know it was going to snow. We got like an inch in Lasur. What'd you guys get? We didn't get any last night, but it was maybe a week ago and we have maybe two winches, something like that. And you're light. Yeah. And you're in Barnum. Is that right? Yes. Half hour south of Duluth. Oh, so you're up in the really pretty country. It is pretty up here.

00:55
Okay, well, tell me about yourselves and what you guys do. Yeah, I started the farm in 2011 and I didn't own land and proceeded over the next 10 years to move five times. And yep, I just leased land and so kind of moved from place to place. Also during that time, I built a tiny house. So it's a little house on wheels.

01:25
and that got moved around so at least I had a place to live. In 2011, I started a very small CSA. It was just me. Then John and I met in 2018. Then in 2020, we bought our farm and have had a permanent place since then. We do flowers and veggies and we have a 56-member CSA.

01:57
Very nice. And I'm so glad you found your permanent farm. Because I sort of do understand when we, back in 2019, I think, the summer of 2019, or summer 2020, a friend of ours said, do you guys want to grow a garden over at my place? Because we didn't have the room. And they had 24 acres and she had a perfect spot for a big old garden, but she didn't want to.

02:25
She didn't want to do a garden, but she knew we did want to. And so we took her up on her offer and that went really well until they decided that they were going to go ahead and get their pole barn built and the contracting company decided that the best place to put the pole barn was right beside where the garden was, which meant it would be shaded out completely the next year.

02:47
And that's part of the reason we actually bought our place in 2020, in August of 2020, because we were like, the only way we're ever going to have a big garden is if we actually move somewhere where we have some land. So I do feel your pain on this. And I'm really excited that you found a place that you don't have to move again from. Yes. Yeah, we are very excited about it as well. Yeah, it's gone. It's gone well. I think we were really lucky. We started looking in early 2020, you know, in the middle of the lockdown and

03:15
We didn't have anything else to do. Looking for land. And, um, this farm was, uh, in the same family for four generations. And, um, uh, one member of that family is still just down the road from us. And, uh, you know, we, we actually got married on our farm the year after we bought it in 2022 and, and members of the, of the Johnson family, who, who, you know, whose family goes back a few generations on this land. We're actually at the wedding. So.

03:44
It's pretty fun to have these connections to the land. And of course they go further back than that. And we can talk more about that if you want it to. I do want to, but I also want to say how sweet is it that you got to get married on your land? That's amazing. Yeah. That was pretty, pretty special and everybody gathered here and, um, yeah, it was, it was pretty great. Awesome. All right. So tell me, tell me more about the land that you bought. Yeah. So it's, it's a 40, it's a 40 acre farm and, uh, it's.

04:14
You know, we were looking for, I guess, you know, everybody's looking for that perfect piece of land, but we like some of its imperfections too. It's on some rolling hills. It's on a busier road than we would like, but that's good for us because we are able to have a rather than go to farmers markets, we sell a lot of our produce on Fridays at a farm stand here on the property. So that's been great. And we've in the process got to know our neighbors. And that's also how we

04:42
kind of opened the door to new customers. And then, yeah, going back further, we're also trying to learn more about the pre-colonial history of this land and the indigenous history of the land. And we've learned some things. We're really lucky that we are just down the road from the Fond du Lac reservation and have actually been able to grow some produce for a CSA program that they have as well. So sort of making those connections slowly has been fun also. Awesome.

05:12
I love it. I'm like a big history buff. I wasn't when I was in school. I hated social studies. I hated history classes because it was just dates and names. But when I started getting into historical fiction and then into historical books that weren't fiction, I was like, oh, this is where all the stories live. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really great when you can find out actual stories of what really happened around you and in your family. Yeah.

05:42
Yeah, that's really important. It is. And I, I kept telling my parents when I would come home from school that I just really didn't like my history classes. And my dad laughed and said, they're not teaching you history stories. They're teaching you facts. He said, wait until you discover some books about history and you start reading about it on your own and educating yourself, you're going to love it. And he was not wrong.

06:11
So history is amazing as long as you can get the actual stories that go with the names and the dates. Yeah, it's true. And we're fortunate, among other things, I'm a journalism professor up at the University of Minnesota Duluth. And so I write an occasional column for our local independently owned newspaper. And the editor there recommended a book to me, and it's called North Country, The Making of Minnesota.

06:41
It's written by, I think, a history professor at St. Cloud State, and I really recommend it to people. It tells the indigenous perspective and the indigenous story in a really strong way. And it's just a really, I started it last winter and I'll pick it up again this winter. It's really, really, I recommend it to anybody learning, interested in that history. I will have to find it. One more thing on history and then we'll get to the other stuff you guys do.

07:09
I live in LaSore. Like I said, we moved to LaSore in 2020 and I knew nothing about this area. We were living in Jordan before that. And there is a history center in St. Peter, which is the town south of us. And apparently we don't live more than 10 miles from where all the Sioux Indians were marched through Minnesota.

07:35
I had read a little bit about that, but I went to this museum and I was like, man, people still suck, but they sucked then too. Because what happened to those Native Americans is just reprehensible and it makes me crazy. And so I went to this museum with my kid who was, I don't know, probably 18, 19 at the time.

08:03
And he was very taken with all the farming stuff that they talked about at the museum. And I'm standing there with tears in my eyes and he's like, what's wrong? And I said, you need to read this thing too. And he read it and he was like, oh man. He said, why do we have to be so sucky as human beings? Yeah. It's, it's, it's remarkable. And this book really does a good job in getting into that history and the complexities of even like the treaties and the money that was involved in those.

08:32
Yeah, there's some unbelievable stories and like you say, unfortunately history classes maybe don't give us all the perspectives. No, they do not. They get whitewashed a lot and that's unfortunate because I think that we should learn from our mistakes in history and a lot of the times we just keep doing the same things over and over again. So that's all I have to say about that because we're gonna go down a rabbit hole that's gonna be way too deep. So did I see...

09:00
Heather, did you make prints as well? Yeah, yeah. I had gone back to school thinking I wanted to teach art and then did not end up teaching. But yeah, I have an art degree. And in the wintertime, I've been trying to kind of dive back into the art world. And so yeah, I do linoleum block prints. And it's the first time we've put them

09:29
on our website this year and so we have them up on the website for sale and I do a little fiber and some jewelry as well. So yeah, it's nice to have the winter time to do some of those things. Use a different part of my brain. Yes. The linoleum, lock prints are super fun. I did that in an art class in high school. Yeah.

09:56
The chisels that we use, I was just so impressed with how that all works. Yeah. And I don't remember what the print was that I did. It was a very long time ago. But our art teacher was fantastic and she was like, so now that you carved out all this stuff, here's how it's going to work. And she's a little ink over it. We're going to lay it flat on a piece of paper and press it. And the pieces that aren't carved out are going to make a design on the paper. And I was like, oh. And

10:24
We had some really talented...