Today I'm talking with Emily and Clayton at WoodFlower Farm.

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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 Emily and Clayton at WoodFlower Farm. Good morning, guys. How are you? Good morning. We're having kind of a terribly gray yucky day here in Le Sueur, huh? Yes, yes we are. It's that snow sleet.

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kind of mix today. It's really gross. My husband and son would normally be outside doing anything to not be inside and they actually decided to clean out our closet and our pantry this morning. I was like, oh, please do that. That would be great. That's a good task for today. I would love that because I have things I need to do. So you guys find something to keep yourselves busy and do something really productive. That would be great.

00:54
So Emily and Clayton live not even a mile from me, I don't think. And I didn't even know about you guys until I saw you on Instagram, which is crazy. I should have known, but I didn't. So tell me about yourselves and what you do. Yeah, well, you probably didn't hear about us because we're pretty small and this is, I think, our first official year. We're just a small husband and wife farm and homestead, and we are in Le Sueur, Minnesota.

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And we started our farm with the goal to grow flowers and also some veggies, maybe pasture raised meat and farm products for our local community. Okay. And have you lived there long as well or is that new too? Yeah, that is, that's kind of a story. We so I grew up in Le Sueur. That's where I'm from. My parents still live here.

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but we have only lived here for, I think this is our second year. Yeah, our second year, yep. Okay, cool. And I don't wanna ask a rude question, but do you have like an acre or do you have acres? Yeah, we have technically right here where we are. This is my parents' land. So we moved back.

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to Minnesota, well, back for me, first time for Clayton. He's from Wisconsin. We moved here after living in Colorado for a little while. And when we moved back, we thought we would move into this house because my parents own the house and that it would be very temporary. But after living here, I think it was about a year that we decided that we like it here. We were really struggling to find

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a house, it's a very competitive market. We were also struggling to find a house in Denver. So when we weren't really able to find a house, like with some land here, we thought, well, why don't we just settle in? And there's a, so the land that we're on is about 40 acres. That's my parents' area. And then there's little woods.

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And then on the other side of that woods, there's another like 36, 40 some acres. And that was also in the family. And we bought that land. So technically, we're landowners now. Nice. That's awesome. And you're young. I assume you're in your late 20s, early 30s, or even that old. Yeah, exactly. Okay. All right, cool. And what I want to say about where we, in quotations, live.

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because we live on the same road. This highway that we live on, this area is so pretty. And it's also so flat. The further you go out highway eight, the flatter the land gets. Yeah, the further west. Yeah. Funny that you say it's so flat because actually what separates our land from her parents' land is this really deep ravine that has a little creek running through it that leads into the Minnesota River. So we actually have some

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topography differences between the lands. So that adds a little bit of something unique, which is kind of fun. Yeah. We feel pretty lucky that of the acreage that we own, I think it's 12 acres is wooded. And that woods is really pretty. And the whole Minnesota River Valley really is a gorgeous area.

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Yes, Minnesota is a really beautiful state. And part of the reason that it's so beautiful is that it does have so many changes in topography. I grew up in Maine and I've been living here for over 30 in Minnesota for more than 30 years now. And I went kicking and screaming from my home state to here. And after 20 years, I was like, oh my God, I actually love it here. It's really pretty and it's not that different.

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You know, the land isn't that different. The things that grow here aren't that different. The only big difference is no mountains, no ocean. Well, I can travel, it's fine. And so I came to really love it here. And I really love spring. I'm not a huge fan of high summer. High summer is way too hot for me. Really love fall and winter's okay. Like it's the break that we need as people who grow things to regroup and plan for the following growing season. So.

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So Minnesota's not a bad place to land. Right, yeah, and we came from Colorado. So I mean, the competition, you're competing with the Rocky Mountains, right? But there's something about Minnesota. And the part of Colorado that we were, we were living in Denver, it felt like there was not as much of the seasonal change. And I think we are just seasonal people. We love the shift from spring to summer, from summer to.

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fall and then fall into that quiet winter time where we get some time off and we love the snow and all of that. So I think Minnesota, we're Minnesota people too. I'm Northern Tier State people. If it hadn't been Minnesota or Maine, it would have been Wisconsin or Pennsylvania as it were. Pennsylvania is not really a Northern Tier State, but Pennsylvania, New York, that area. Anything in the top states would have been fine with me. Yeah.

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So, okay, so I was looking at your Facebook page and your Instagram page, and I saw the photos of the tulips and the peonies, and I was just like, oh my God, they're so pretty, and it's a wrong time of year to be wanting them. Yes, yeah, so we did do, our first year was really full of trying everything. So of course we tried the tulips. We were lucky enough that there were, I think like 50 year old.

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peonies here that my great grandmother planted. So we had some well-established productive peonies to play with. But after trying a little bit of everything, we kind of thought this year we're gonna focus more on the summer flowers and we're not gonna do tulips because I would be doing tulips right now. If we had planned on doing tulips, I would have already planted them, but.

07:31
I think we just want to put more of our time and our money into the summer flowers because that's what really sells well. Perhaps we'll explore tulips when we actually have a high tunnel and kind of force them to come up a little bit earlier. We found that they kind of came up later than we wanted to and at the end of the day they don't necessarily bring in as much money as you necessarily want them to. Well, because they're a one time.

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You know you pay if you're not buying huge amounts you're paying almost a dollar a bulb and then wholesale You can't really get much for him So it it's not a it's not a great option for us with the size we are and then yeah like Clayton said without a high tunnel They're they're blooming pretty fast and they they blow out like they start to crack and then it's like you know Less than a day before they're all the way past picking

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Um, scrambling a little on the sustainability side, which is kind of the road that I'm starting to go down and learn more about, uh, tulips in general, just don't seem like a very sustainable product to me because you have to, you purchase them. They're probably coming from Holland or somewhere overseas and then they have to cross the ocean and get to you. And so, you know, you're looking at the emissions that come off from trying to get these bulbs in the ground. It just doesn't seem.

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Doesn't seem very friendly to the earth to me. So if we can move towards the things that grow native here, that we can focus on, you know, keeping in this closed loop circle in Minnesota, then that's definitely more of the direction we'd like to push. So, yeah, awesome. I love it. Um, and if you're like us, you probably have critters that are under the ground that eat the bulbs too, because we planted 150 tulip bulbs the second year we were here, we've been here for.

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And there are not 150 bulbs in that ground anymore. Not even close. I think we must've got lucky because we did not lose a lot of stuffed predators. I think what partly helped was that we planted our tulips like in our backyard in a pretty big garden area and our dogs definitely patrol the area. So I'm sure that our livestock herd dogs that we have.

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that aren't actually livestock or dogs, but they might have helped. Yes. And the peony thing, anyone who's listened to the podcast that I've been doing for over a year now knows that I am in love with peonies. I think peonies are the most beautiful flower ever created by God or the universe or nature, whoever made them. I love them. And we put in a whole bunch over the last few years because when we got here,

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There were no flowers except hostas and hostas are not my favorite thing. So, so last year, last spring we had tons of peonies bloom and I was talking to my husband about it and I was like, can we put in more? And he said, well, yes, if you find them for free. Oh, sure. Well, okay. Facebook marketplace is an incredible thing. P...

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