Today I'm talking with Krista and Dave at Steadfast Roots Homestead.

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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 Krista and Dave as Steadfast Roots Homestead. Good evening, you guys. How are you? Good evening. We're good. How are you?

00:22
I'm good. Other than technical difficulties over the last 48 hours, I'm ready to shoot my computer. Other than that, I'm great. Thank you for spending some time with me on Friday evening. I'm sure you probably had more fun things you could have been doing, but we're going to try to make it super fun. Tell me about yourselves and what you guys do. So this all started just a couple years ago. We started really

00:51
getting into the homesteading lifestyle just a couple of years ago during COVID, essentially. We had been thinking about getting chickens for a while and that's what we started with other than we were already gardening and stuff. But we started with chickens and we moved on from there to getting a new property and more animals and that's where we are today. We're starting from scratch essentially.

01:22
We're learning along the way. The gateway animal got you, those darn chickens. Right. Yes. We've always been really interested in natural living and more whole foods and stuff like that. We really wanted to be able to have our own. When you really look into the meat industry, it's scary. And you're like, that's kind of like, we're like, we can make our own chicken. Why not make our own chicken?

01:53
And then it just ballooned from there. And now we're trying to do 10 million other things. We didn't get chickens for meat. We got chickens for eggs. And it was a good plan until our chickens decided to be lazy and stopped giving us eggs about three months ago. So we don't have chickens right now, but we will have chickens again in the springtime. Awesome. Yeah, we started with eggs and we've moved on to, we tried the, with the kids,

02:24
corn scrosses for 4H. We didn't really like their breed just because they're kind of gross and we decided we'd go with more heritage breeds. Breeds that haven't been bred to be more meaty and bigger and produce meat in mass quantities is what our... where we want we want the more natural, the less

02:55
the less engineered, yes. Yeah, yeah.

03:00
Yeah, I don't blame you. This is our first year going and, um, uh, growing out our own chickens from eggs to harvest and we're working on it. And I think our results are turning out pretty well. Yeah. That was kind of like the goal. It was, it was egg chickens, but for meat too, like dual purpose. Yes. Yeah.

03:27
Is it difficult for you to raise them from egg to eating? Is it difficult when you have to call them or are you okay with it? So the hardest times I've had with calling isn't really the ones that are for me. It's the mercy calls, you know, when you have a chick born with a defect and having to take care of that one and sometimes that's what gotten the most. But.

03:57
Growing them out, knowing that they're going to be used for me and that they're going to be used for sustenance, it's never bothered me. It gives me a new appreciation for it. It doesn't bother me. It's like I know I'm a meat eater and I eat meat and it makes me feel, I don't want to say good, but it makes me feel better knowing that this animal that I'm eating has lived a full and good life.

04:27
throughout its whole life and that its ending is going to be swift and fast and it's not going to suffer. And almost, I mean, I would say probably all the meat we buy in the store probably suffered. So when I look at it that way, and you know, and for me, it makes it a lot easier to do the ending because swift and fast and I know that, you know, that animal's life was for that purpose.

04:57
Yeah, and I didn't ask that for you to feel like you had to defend your choice. It's just that there's so many people in the world who are like, I could never do that. And the thing is you never know what you can do until you do it. So I just, people don't quite understand if they haven't done this, that this is not murder. This is not a terrible thing that you're doing. This is actually a sustainable.

05:27
normal practice that went on for years before we had farms that grew tons of animals and dispatched tons of animals. So totally. I hope I didn't come across that. That's been done on it too. That it's just, it's better this way. Yeah. I hope I didn't come across like I was asking you to defend yourself because I'm absolutely not. I am right on the same boat with you. No, I just felt like that that's part of my explanation of why it, you know, like it doesn't

05:56
bother me because a lot of times people are shocked because we eat things that are cute like rabbits too. And that can be really touchy for people. They're like, how do you do that? How can you do that? But it's so much sustenance. And when we have a meal that's rabbit, we can feel the difference in the nutrition in our bodies almost. You get fuller faster. Yeah, and rabbit is really tasty. Yes, it is. It's very tasty.

06:26
Yeah, if you cook it right, it's fantastic. I kind of love rabbit. Um, okay. So I've got a couple of questions for you that have nothing to do with, with chickens or rabbits. Um, you have an Airbnb that you, that you do. Is that right? It's a camp. Oh, it's like Airbnb, but it's a camp. It's like, we, we go through hip camp and, um, hip camp is like, um, it's basically like Airbnb, but just for camping stuff.

06:55
So we just do tent campers, but we have we have 20 acres and we have a lot of interesting buildings and stuff on our property and it just felt like It would be a good way to make a little bit of money on the side to help fund the homestead As well as give a sense of community to the property as well Give back. Yeah, we like to share we want to share. It's really magical here

07:22
Yeah, and you guys are in Ohio. So do you do you do that during the winter too? Or do you shut down that part for the winter? We've left it open in the winter last year was our first year. And we did have a couple campers that came in the winter. And they did a really good job of doing their thing. And they had a great time this year, though we had that we recently had this really bad snowstorm and we're under feet of snow. So we did shut down for a couple months just so that we can figure out where

07:52
what's even going on because we haven't even been to the back end of our property because of the depth of the snow and the storms. Wow. I didn't realize you guys got that much snow in your area. Yeah. Yeah. They, what was it? The governor declared it a state of emergency or something. We went under level three. Do not leave your house. Yeah. We weren't allowed on the roads. Roads are still pretty rough, but they're scooping them. Huh.

08:21
Wow, I'm sorry to hear that. Winter hit with a vengeance for you guys. This is our second year here for winter and this is so far the worst so far, with snowfall. Yeah, yeah, definitely. We were not as prepared. We were told that we were gonna get between one to one and a half feet of snow and we were like, okay, we can handle that for a few days, but we ended up getting three feet of snow and trying to unbury things that we didn't know we needed at the time.

08:51
It's become interesting. Yeah, that's one word for it. Interesting. Okay, so when people come to stay with you and it's not three feet of snow on the ground, do they get to help out on the farm or do they get to see what you guys do or how does it work? We would love that. We're open to like lots of different things like that. We've had people that want to see the animals.

09:20
and we've had them and we had one. I have an option for photography because I'm also a photographer to add to our package. So if they wanted to have like their picture taken while they're here. So we did have a couple that did a little photo shoot. We did a photo shoot with them. We offer eggs for them to purchase if they wanna have from fresh eggs from our homestead.

09:44
We, it's, hip camp is really open to like your own interpretation. It's kind of cool. You can kind of do what, what you want and charge for with what you want. Like some people charge for boat rental, but we have a couple of kayaks in a boat and we just let them use them, you know, like we don't charge for things like that. But then like, um, I have like, just. We're, uh, we're still figuring it all out too, because we really don't know what.

10:13
exactly people want. It seems like most of the people really like to just come and be there in the back alone by themselves and they have the best time ever and then they leave and we don't even see them sometimes. We have a beautiful forest back there. It's definitely older and it's gives them plenty of privacy as they need it. Very nice. Is is hip camp

10:40
a business like Airbnb is or what? I've never heard of it. Yeah, it is. It's kind of like Airbnb. We use them and so we don't have, you know, like we're insured through hip camp for the campers that come to our property. We're insured like similar to what Airbnb does, but it's for landowners.

11:04
Most of the, some of them a...