Shady Hill

A Tiny Homestead

Today I'm talking with Ashley at Shady Hill. You can also follow on Facebook.

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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 Ashley at Shady Hill. Good afternoon, Ashley. How are you? I'm doing great. It's about low 70 degrees here in Virginia, so it's feeling really good here.

00:26
It's a little warmer than that in Minnesota where I am. I think it's probably 75, but it's also overcast. So I'm hoping it does not get hot today. That would be great. All right, so tell me about yourself and Shady Hill. Yeah, so Shady Hill is very new for us. My husband and I, you know, I just turned 26 this year. I feel like I'm getting up there in age now, but I'm 26.

00:54
My husband is 25, so we're considered young farmers in our area. Um, but we always wanted to farm, but didn't grow up on farms. So after we studied agriculture at Virginia Tech and kind of grew up throughout FFA, which is an agriculture organization for youth, we were like, okay, now what, like, how do we start farming? You know, we got the education. We've kind of been a part of community groups that have tried to help us and encourage us to start farming. But.

01:24
It wasn't that easy. Um, I started off teaching as an ag teacher. He started off working at a community bank as an ag, uh, loan officer, portfolio manager. So we were still really plugged into the agriculture community, but we didn't have any money to just buy a farm. Um, where we ended up living and moving is where I grew up. And so around here, most of what it looks like to farm is cropland and minimum of like a hundred acres of it.

01:54
Small farms around here are probably about 50 to 60 acres big. So it just wasn't feasible realistic for us. So that's really where Shady Hill came about was, you know, after I left teaching, I worked in marketing for a little bit and then I had a baby and stayed home. And with that extra time and just getting tired of making excuses for not being able to buy a farm, we found ourselves, you know, we lived on one and a half acres, so why not just start where we are. And so.

02:23
Shady Hill was born because we live on a hill with a bunch of shade trees. Um, and we mostly do everything on one acre, but that's Shady Hill and a little bit about us. You can do a lot on an acre and a half, just so you know. And it's a lot, and it's a lot better to start farming young than it is to start farming old. I can tell you that from experience. Well, we had the most of the encouragement we got from older farmers was to start small.

02:52
and to start because we kept saying, you know, oh, we can't afford, you know, especially now. I mean, I remember when I graduated college, we were seeing an acre of land for about $6,000 to $7,000 an acre. Now you see, you know, if someone has a nice house sitting on 10 to 15 acres, you're paying nearly a million dollars just for that. So we always just had this dollar value on farming and homesteading and we thought we just couldn't afford to

03:22
do it. But then we realized homesteading anyways isn't even about making money. It's about just being more self-reliant. We didn't have to take out any big loans for this and we're learning a lot now. So kind of the advice from those farmers that we got about starting small that we used to get annoyed by, because the world is not set up for farmers to start small to be honest, was actually some of the best advice because now in the future, depending on...

03:50
where this takes us and what opportunities come up with land, we now have experience for some loans or depending on what that even looks like. Because before we didn't have any experience to prove that we would be able to farm the land that we were going to buy. So we just didn't look good on paper to begin with. So it's been a blessing to learn and get the experience now, but it's by far not the easiest thing we've ever done.

04:18
Yeah, and honestly, it probably wouldn't have been the easiest thing you've ever done, no matter when you started it, because it's all learning and experience and trying new things and failing and then trying again. I have been where you are and it's so much fun. The beginning is so much fun, but it's really scary too. Yeah. Yeah, we have so much of, should we keep doing it? Should we not? And I think too, I forgot to mention what we do at Shady Hill is...

04:46
We grow cut flowers. And everyone thinks I've got these acres of flowers. You know, at a farmer's market, they're like, oh, how many acres of flowers do you have? And I tell them like, you know, our beds are 50 feet long, four feet wide. I've got four of those. And we pasture raise chicken for meat, and we butcher and package it all ourselves. And we sell it direct to consumer. And we sell out of chicken before we even get the chicks here. Like people, the demand is so high.

05:16
that we don't even have any to take to farmers markets when we go. We just have to ask people to pre-order. So doing all of that, the very first time we butchered chickens, my husband injured himself really bad. And we ended up going to the ER after we were 40 minutes in, like starting the whole process. And that was a big, should we even be doing this? Like this is, this could happen again. You know, it was kind of a freak accident. It wasn't

05:46
our fault. And so just, that was the first time that we had this, ooh, is this worth it? And we just started, but we just, we take these lessons in strides and we don't take it as a sign from God saying, don't do this. We're like, no, this is like a lesson to learn so we can keep doing it. So a lot of like these humbling moments keep coming up. Cause there's this.

06:12
I always come across these memes on social media for stay at home moms, now that that's kind of my life, that says when you were working, you just wanted to stay at home and figure out how to homestead and make more money only to realize that staying at home and homesteading costs you more money and you've worked harder than you ever have before. So that's kind of like where we're at right now of just all these trials and very intensive labor for us.

06:41
but it's been great for our daughter to grow up around that. And she's, we've seen that come out in her. She's one and a half just with how advanced she is and how independent she is because of the type of work that we do together.

06:56
That's awesome. I love that. And I love that she's a little girl and she is independent and advanced at one and a half. Oh yeah. She's a little woman really is what she is. One and a half going on 40. Yeah exactly. She's more mature than me some days I feel like. Uh huh. Yeah. Until she throws a tantrum and then you're like, I don't get to throw tantrums. Damn it. I know. No, I think about all the time.

07:25
how acceptable it is for toddlers to do literally anything and how adults, we have the same needs. Like we need naps when we get cranky. You know, like when we're upset or cranky, we either need a nap, water, or we're hungry. Right? And for a kid, it's very acceptable for them to have a tantrum about it. Adults not so much. So I know that I'll get to enter that space again when I'm very elderly, but right now I'm not allowed to have tantrums.

07:56
No, I always try to remember the acronym HALT, H-A-L-T, hungry, angry, lonely, tired. Because I live in a two bedroom, one bathroom house with my husband and our youngest son who is 22. The house is like over 1400 square feet, but it's not laid out well. And so it feels like we're always kind of in each other's space. And if

08:24
Somebody in the house is acting like they might need a nap or like something's wrong. I always try to remember the hungry, angry, lonely, tired thing. And I will literally ask them, are you hungry? No. Are you angry? No. Are you lonely? No. Are you tired? Yes. And I'm like, good, go take a nap. That's like, I need to remember that. Yeah, the HALT acronym, I heard it a long time ago when my kids were little.

08:54
Because as a mom, you know that the first thing you do if your baby is crying is you check to see if the new diaper changed. You try to feed them. If those don't work, you rock them because they're probably too overtired. Same thing with grownups. Yeah, we live in the overtired space a lot. And I have to remind myself too that she needs to play because it's so we have so much to do around here.

09:23
the farm tasks that she just follows along and does things with us. Like I'll cut flowers for her that don't look awesome. Or sometimes she picks the awesome ones herself and I just lose those. Uh, and she will be okay for a little bit playing with the flowers, but then she needs like to play with me as her mom. And so I have a lot of moments where I have to slow down and remember that. Things are just going to take a lot longer or not be as.

09:50
pretty or perfect because, you know, it's the farm is not at the expense of how our family grows. It's more for it to be the thing that helps our family. So there's been some moments where we've had a pause and realize like, oh, it's kind of coming at the expense of our family, whether that be the stress or the time versus the thing that's actually the reason why we started. So she's been able to help us slow down and

10:19
Um, remember that our family is more important than what's at stake with farming, but I'm glad that she's around to kind of teach us these lessons now. Yeah, it's amazing what you learn from your kids. I had four in my house at one point in time and I learned so much from my kids. The other thing that I will say is that farming is not a perfect endeavor. You know, people see all these pictures on Facebook or Pinterest or

10:49
All the other ones, I can't even list them off today, I'm too tired. I'm tired too. And you see all these beautiful pictures and it all looks so lovely and so perfect. But if you actually go to a working farm, probably the first thing you're going to smell when you get out is cow shit. And you're going to see a bunch of animals all muddy and dirty because they've been rolling in the mud and it's not perfect. So there's no reason to expect.

11:18
that your life on your farm should be perfect. Your life with your husband and your child should be wonderful.

11:29
Yeah, we've heard of people, because homesteading is kind of a movement right now. People move in from the city, you know, Biden the little rancher, and just you think you could do all your stuff. But then the second thing that's trending that I saw after this on social media was people leaving homesteading or they're hiring people to work on their homesteads. Because

11:55
they don't realize how much work or even death for that matter that happens on your homestead like with animals. There's just a lot of upsetting or tragic things that happen that's out of your control as a farmer or producer. We've had chicks that just, we don't know why, but survival of the fittest, don't make it. Or we spend eight weeks pouring into a flock and then...

12:22
something on butcher day doesn't go like as planned with like partying that like after the process of Butcher, you know, like when we're plucking the feathers off if something perfect doesn't happen. We're like, okay. Well now we can't sell that chicken Um, so there's a lot of things that's happened along the way. It's like you work so hard, but it's still not at our will of what really what's the final product that we get from that and a lot of what why we started homesteading was to

12:51
get us a more, just to know more about our food and what's going into it and have better products and just be more self-reliant in that way. And so on not a lot of land, chicken was the answer for me, for us. And so we get upset when we mess something up or if it doesn't look perfect for a consumer, but we're like, well, it's really for us and we don't need it to be perfect. So.

13:17
There's been the, we have to remind ourselves to slow down and not sell all of our stuff. Because one time we sold all of our chicken and we didn't have any for our family. And we were like, oh, like we got so excited on the business side of things and how it was growing that we didn't remember to check and make sure that we had what we needed. So we've had to adjust a lot of things because even though we started small and there's so much potential to grow and more people are asking and businesses are asking about our products,

13:48
have that scale right now. Like we just can't do it. And that's been so disheartening to have like say that but it's like we're not really turning us like a salary off of this, you know, and we're also still very new and very fresh. But I think that's a big frustration that people have with farming and starting out. It's like you realize, oh, it's not profitable to do it for myself only. So now I need to like do this for consumers. But then...

14:16
you start scaling up and now you have this whole business that you've scaled up and you can't go back. We've seen that a lot, kind of where we're at of people getting too big, too fast. Mm-hmm. Yep. Drowning in their success. Yeah. So it's kind of, it's like frustrating for us, but we're also like, there's no way we could have taken on more right now. We just don't have time. Yeah.

14:43
And it's true of everybody. You have only a certain amount of numbers or hours in the day. You have only a certain amount of energy. And when you run out of both, you're done. That's it for the day. Yeah. So I think it's amazing what you're doing. And I'm gonna, I'm going to tell a secret that I haven't mentioned on the podcast ever when we bought our place four years ago, one of the things that we made sure of is that it didn't have to be a homestead.

15:12
It could just be a home. Because my husband and I, well, I will be 55 in November. My husband turned 55 in June and we're not getting younger. We don't have the energy of 20 year olds or 25 year olds or even 30 year olds at this point. And so when we looked for a place, we made sure that we found a place we didn't have to remodel. Number one, cause neither one of us want to do that again for a while.

15:40
because we had a house that needed to be repaired all the time for 20 years and it was awful. And we found a place where we have a huge pole barn. So if we wanted to, we don't have to do a garden, we don't have to sell eggs, we don't have to have animals. We could literally rent out the pole barn for people to store their boats and their trailers in for the winter. So we tried to find a place that would work on many levels when we looked for it.

16:10
So we have done the gardens, we have done chickens, we have sold stuff, and I'm telling you, I think we're probably gonna be scaling, or not scaling, pivoting in the next five years to other things because I don't know that we're gonna be able to keep up with a 100 foot by 150 foot garden in five years. Who knows? So home studying is...

16:35
a lifestyle. It is not about a land. It's not about whether you're selling stuff. It's about how you're living your life.

16:45
Yeah, I 100% agree.

16:49
So, you grow flowers and sell flowers, you have chickens and you sell chickens. What else do you do? We have Christmas greenery. So that was kind of the first thing that I ever started. I was still working at the time, but we have evergreen trees on our property. So I was throwing together some Christmas wreaths and I did probably only 20 my first year. Well, last year.

17:19
was year two. And I said yes to doing a fundraiser for a school. And then everyone else wanted Reeves and I never changed my prices because I didn't know better. And I was up till like 2 a.m. for about two weeks just making Reeves because our daughter was six months old at the time. And we were mostly still breastfeeding as well. And you know, I couldn't get work done until she went to bed at night.

17:47
So we were up so late just cutting greenery in the dark, bringing it down to our garage. Everything happens in our garage, by the way. We have a half garage so we can't park a car in it so we create everything in our garage. But we sold over a hundred last year. So I went from experienced, in quotes, saying, oh, I can make all these wreaths. Yeah, it's great. And then we sold over a hundred and made over a hundred. I think it was like a hundred and eighteen maybe.

18:16
Um, and so now this year we're trying to plan ahead, but it's tough because you can't really separate your time when you're doing something like greenery, uh, for the holidays, because the holidays, it's a calendar event. Like it, it doesn't go longer or shorter. Like people want it all at the same time. So you have to just power through and do it. And we're not at a place where we're paying employees to help us. And even if we have friends that we trusted to help create something like Reeds with us. Um.

18:46
It's like, well, then how do you value their time? Because it is a lot of work. So we just, we're like, we're not at the place to do that. So we do it all ourselves and we just kind of say, you know, we have a week or two out of the winter where we know we're going to be a little tired and power through. And a lot of others who see everything we're doing or who actually know how hard we're working and they question like, Oh, how do you do all of this? Like you shouldn't be.

19:14
doing it all. One of our family members says, we're human beings, not human doings. But when my husband and I look back at this and we're like, yes, we're really tired, but we enjoy this. And kind of to your point of like, you guys are going to start scaling back because you're getting older and that's just something you want to do. It's like...

19:35
We're not 20 year olds going out to clubs and partying in the city. We're the 20 year olds that are spending all of our time and energy kind of being crazy doing things like this instead. So it's almost like we're the, you either get this type of 20 year old or you get that one and we're the, the ones that are just kind of overspending our time and energy right now on, on learning and just doing all of this business stuff. So yes, it's exhausting, but it's not, doesn't last forever. Um,

20:03
And the older our daughter gets, the more kind of helpful she gets too. And it's a little more independent and doesn't need as much of our attention. But, um, that's been one of my favorite things of our homestead is the greenery, just cause that was the very first thing we ever started. The chickens came out of, because I used to work for a chicken company when I was in marketing, but it was a commercial company. Um, so I learned a lot from that. And then the flowers, I worked in a flower shop in high school and it was my project in FFA. So I learned a lot.

20:32
from my boss there and I was her first and only employee. And then now I actually, she reopened her shop in my hometown and I'll go in and see her and tell her some of the stuff we're doing. And she bought flowers from our farm a couple of times. So it kind of just all stays full circle, but we're really involved in the community even outside of our homestead too. So we spend our time.

21:02
canning portion of our homestead where this year I just kind of had women coming over who wanted to learn how to can foods. And I just taught them how like we, they paid for their produce and jars and they just came over to the house and took notes and canned with us. And I think there's more potential for that to be more of like a workshop in a commercial kitchen next year. But for now, it was just personally me testing waters on how something like that would go.

21:31
But we're always brainstorming for the next big thing that we're going to be doing.

21:38
Yeah, absolutely, because you're growing. You're growing your home state. You're growing your business. You mentioned FFA. You were part of FFA when you were in high school. Oh, yeah. So my FFA has about a million members nationally now. When I was in FFA in high school, there was about 600,000 members. So on a national scale, it's grown so much in just such a short amount of time. But

22:03
I was blessed to have a middle school chapter. So there's not a lot of middle schools that have FFA and mine did. So I was in FFA starting in sixth grade and didn't grow up on a farm but heard that I can make friends and have a lot of food at meetings if I joined this club so I did. And my teacher like still today is a friend of mine now but became such great mentors from middle school through high school. I was a state officer.

22:31
with FFA and so was my husband and that's how we met. So we were like leaders for our state here in Virginia. I moved on and tried to run for national office and didn't get it but stayed plugged in after that. And now I actually train other state officers with national FFA. So we're FFA nerds. We're trying to already plan how our daughter is going to be in FFA when she's in middle school. But it's really big around here. So we help out a lot with the chapters as much as we can.

23:00
so that we can kind of try to pour back into those teachers because I know it's hard being a teacher for FFA and Ag and those students still need community support so that those programs stay strong. We're also involved in Farm Bureau too here locally. So we just try to stay plugged in because really if it wasn't for us staying involved with these Ag organizations, we would not have had the support that we needed to start this business.

23:30
because we had never farmed before. So you can't just come out of water with no network and just sell to your community. It just doesn't work that way. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It does not. We tried that. We failed the first year. We finally figured out that if we didn't meet the people in our area, we weren't going to sell anything. So the reason I asked about FFA is because I interviewed a lady from FFA.

23:58
for the podcast months ago. And she was fantastic. She was great. She told me all about Future Farmers of America and how it's not just Future Farmers now, it's the science of farming and all kinds of stuff. It was just a great informational chat. And I haven't really talked to anybody. Yeah, as I say, yeah, it started in Virginia. And so it started with just six,

24:27
six men at Virginia Tech here who wanted to start an organization for farm boys. So the only people who were allowed in FFA when it started in 1926, technically 1925 on this, like it was called Future Farmers of Virginia. So you had to go to Virginia Tech and you had to be interested, and to get into Virginia Tech, you had to be interested in the military and agriculture mechanics.

24:52
So you had this really small group of folks who were even allowed to be in it. And over time, like in the 60s, women were allowed in the FFA. We merged with New Farmers of America, which was an ag organization for African-Americans. So a lot of changes that happened, honestly, really late in our history as an organization. But yeah, now it's, I mean, in the 80s, they changed it to where it wasn't Future Farmers of America anymore,

25:21
turning away people who weren't farmers, but were really great for the agriculture industry. So yeah, I mean, I hope you nerded out over that because it's really cool about how it's changed over time and all of the things that it's doing still now for students. It's crazy. Oh, yeah. I asked her every question I could think of because I was not part of FFA when I was growing up because there were no classes at the school that I went to.

25:48
But what I was going to say is I haven't talked to anybody who has actually been in FFA in school. So I'm really glad that you brought it up. Yeah, I took, when you start out, you take these really introduction classes that teach you about animals, plants, and mechanics. But when you get a little deeper into high school, like after you take those intro classes, you get to pick.

26:17
like if you really like mechanics, then you run with the mechanics class. If you really like plants, then you run with like the natural resource classes. So I ended up taking a mechanics class, which I ended up not pursuing that. I was terrible at it. Um, and then I took some more plant science classes and my project was with floor culture. So it ended up paying off like what I had learned back then to right now. Um, and now I have, like, there are students that are in these ag classes.

26:46
that can do so much with small engines that I'll never know how to do. You know, and they're in high school. So that helps them learn more about careers they're gonna be interested in, whether it's college or not. So once they're gone, they're gonna be a productive human that knows about food, knows about the environment. You know, like I said, I did not grow up on a farm, but after my FAA experience, I was on like a national team that judged soils.

27:11
I sit on the national team that for Envirothon is what's called for the environment. So it's just like these contests and incentives that happen that reward you for just knowing more about the world that we live in. So it's definitely worth it to be an organization to invest back into whether that's time or money. If anyone ever comes about FFA, it's ultimately making good humans that will live around us. So.

27:40
We hope that our daughter chooses to be an FFA. We won't force her to do it, but I think naturally it will just be something she's interested in because of how she's gonna be growing up. Yeah, my granddaughter, who is, I think, 12, it's hard for me to keep track of her age because they live in Nebraska and we live in Minnesota and we don't actually see her a lot. So she is in...

28:06
The very last year of elementary school, or she's in the first part of middle school, I can't remember right now. And her school is tiny. And she just got involved in 4-H. And my son called. And he was like, yeah, she's going to join 4-H. And I was like, yes. And I almost said, do they have FFA? And then I was like, they probably don't have it for elementary school, because that's not where it starts. But if they do, I suspect she'll be in that too.

28:35
Her classroom size is 10 kids. Wow. Yeah, you know, my high school was about 700 people. My graduating class was about 150. So when I went to college and I learned that some people had a graduating class of 1,000, and then some had a graduating class of 10. And I was just like, OK, I don't know if I'm in the middle or what, but I just never knew such things existed.

29:04
of having such a small group of people that you are going to grow up with. But we've been considering homeschooling our daughter. So that's the only downfall about FAAs. There's no FAA for homeschoolers. But just, you know, I was a teacher only for a year and only for a year for a reason. And I just am like, I don't know. I don't know if I want her to sit inside a school all year, not going outside other than for 30 minutes of recess.

29:33
But you know, my husband and I went through public school and we turned out fine. So I know it's not the end of the world, but we're just trying to figure out what we value more with school and kind of the lifestyle that we're trying to, to live here on what we're going to do. But we've, we have a little bit of time, a little bit of time, just like one and half, so we don't have to pick anything right now. Don't stress yet, mom. Don't borrow trouble yet. You've got lots of time. Yes, we do. Yep. Um, my kids went to.

30:02
a small town, elementary school, middle school, and high school. And then a couple of my kids actually did homeschooling for the last four years of their education, you know, the high school. And I don't know which is better. I honestly don't. The fact that they were home with me the last four years of high school made me feel better because I didn't have to worry about their school being shot up because they weren't there if something happened.

30:29
that they were not at that building if something happened and that made me feel better. But they also are very antisocial and I don't know if that's from them being home schooled through 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th grade or if they just get it genetically because I'm terribly non-people too. I'm not terribly social. That's not my husband. My husband is like that.

30:57
Yeah, so I don't know. My husband is-

31:04
Oh, sorry, go ahead. I was interrupting you. My, my husband is very antisocial and I am not so much. Um, but what I've learned from working with students, like through FFA now, um, but even this college age group is that just typically this generation coming up is being called the pandemic generation because of COVID and just how that's affected them like now developmentally. And just a lot of.

31:33
this younger generation is very anti-social or has a lot of imposter syndrome, mostly because of technology, are very good at putting on a face in public, but then behind, like when they're behind closed doors, they're like really down on themselves. And so that's really hard to hear when, cause we get trained on this so that we have more just situational basic awareness of this population that we're working with primarily. And that's not the case for everyone.

32:03
Um, but, you know, unfortunately, especially I was in doing public school, um, during the pandemic. When school was mostly virtual and we saw some students who just switched to homeschool and they were doing really well. And then some who just didn't have that choice and family members were still working while they were having to get, like be responsible for themselves to get on the computer, to go to class. Um, and these are middle schoolers, elementary schoolers.

32:31
uh, that are having to have this responsibility really early on and just not doing well with learning. So I, I, I feel like it took four years to get back into the routine of normal school quote unquote normal school. But then you have this group of children who had three or four years of not normal socialization, not normal education, trying to figure out what new normal is, is very dangerous territory.

33:01
organizations like FFA or families who are more plugged into their community through farmers markets, through organizations like Farm Bureau, you know, you just don't see that. You just don't see people caring about where they live or what they eat or who they know anymore. And I think that makes me very worried about my daughter going to school in the future and the people she's going to be interacting with. So it's unfortunate when people say the world's not the way it used to be and it's really not.

33:31
So that's where it's like, I don't know why we just don't take matters into our own hands and work to create this like home that we want to create and this community we want to create. It's not like you have to change the world by any means. Um, I just don't know why we don't care anymore. So yeah, that's kind of a big reason why we try to switch some of our mindset to kind of be more independent, but still be plugged into our community, you know? Um.

33:57
So we'll figure out what we'll do with school, but I think it's just a generational thing that we have antisocial kids, you know? I think that's very normal now.

34:07
Yeah, and I'm going to tell you when I was growing up and when I was in school, I got teased and bullied a lot and school was not fun for me. I loved learning. I loved my teachers, but I did not love the social aspect of school. And I think that's where my, I'm not really comfy around a lot of people started. And so now I get to curate my life, which means I get to have people who I really appreciate being around.

34:37
around me. It is such a beautiful thing that when I say, Hey, would you like to come over and have coffee with me? It's because I genuinely appreciate the person that I'm inviting into my home. So I'm not, I'm not anti people. I'm just anti. I don't like people that don't act like human beings who are good. Yeah. Does that make sense? And it's so, yeah. And it's so hard, you know, cause like you want to tell like,

35:03
a kid that or a student in high school is a little easier to grab on to because they're going to graduate soon. But you want to be able to tell students who have a hard time that it gets better because when you're an adult, it's not like this. But at the same time, you have to be able to process the trauma you went through as a student. A big reason why I left teaching was because it was emotionally taxing for me. I would have been able to do

35:30
come home exhausted from the emotions I was carrying for my students because of just what they were dealing with at home. It was a lot. It's like I couldn't just, I couldn't be a teacher. I first was usually like counselor mode, which I'm not trained in to do. And I like, it's just being a teacher is a lot more than teaching content, which I already knew that, but just the issues of the world today really got to me.

35:59
And I had students who were bullying me as a teacher, just the disrespect that was happening in the classroom. And so, you know, I hope that over time, the world tends to shake out when you become an adult and you, like what you're saying, like you have more control over what you wanna do and I'm still learning that as an adult now. But.

36:21
It's kind of sad to see what students have to go through. So yeah, that's where I've seen these, I have homeschool groups in our community where I've got to see how they're taking their kids through homeschool or these smaller schools. Like we have a private school across the road that's pretty small. And just seeing the hearing from those parents, the positive things that are coming from their students' experiences there. And I'm like, I think that's more of the route that I would want my daughter to grow in instead of feeling a little more limited.

36:51
Um, but I just, you know, I say, Oh, we turned out fine. We went to public school, but it's like, well, public school is different now. So, yes, yes, it is. Absolutely. But like I said, you have lots of time and you get to watch your daughters grow and become who she's going to be because the, the one and a half year old that she is right now is not the five year old. She's going to be. Yeah. That's sad to think about.

37:21
She's going to grow up. Yeah, she is. She's going to grow up and she's going to become a fabulous young woman. And you're going to be like, wow, the days are long, but the years are short. And thank God I did all the things I did for her because she's an amazing human being. That's what's going to happen. My daughter is 34 and she's brilliant. And she entertains me every time I talk to her. So you have wonderful things to look forward to.

37:51
Yes. Yes. 34 and your youngest is 22? Yep. Do you only have two kids? No, I have four. I have four. That's right. That's right. You say you have four. Yeah. My daughter is 34. My stepson is 33. I think he just turned 33. And my son after that of my body is 27. And then the youngest is 22. And that's a boy too. So my daughter is the only one out of the four.

38:21
as a girl. Wow. Yeah, we don't know what will happen next for us with kids, but we hope to have at least one boy, but we don't really get to pick. So yeah, the thing that's funny is everybody when I talked to them, they're like, how many kids do you have? And I say four and they say, how many girls? And I say one and they say, where does she fall? And I'm like, she was the oldest or is the oldest. And they're like, oh my God, she must have been hell as a teenager. And honestly, she was the easiest one of the four.

38:51
and she was the girl. The boys were harder for me. So, yeah. He just assumes that- Our girl is so sweet right now. Yep.

39:04
Yes, baby girls are adorable. I really wanted my last baby to be a girl and then I found out at the ultrasound that he was a boy and I cried for five hours straight. Oh my goodness. Yep, sobbed. And then he was born and I locked eyes with him and I went, oh, you're all right. This is okay, I can handle another boy, it'll be fine.

39:30
So, I cried for five hours for no reason, because he's a wonderful young man, and I love him just as much as I love the other three. It worked out great.

39:39
Yeah. So, anyway, we got way off homesteading stuff, but we definitely talked about choices that wrap around homesteading lifestyles like homeschooling. So that worked out fine. Ashley, I tried to keep these to half an hour. We're at 39 minutes and 45 seconds. I'm going to let you go. Thank you so much for your time today. Yeah. And, um...

40:03
We encourage people to follow along with us on social media. We're Shady Hill VA for Virginia. And so we post kind of everything we're doing. We've built most of our equipment and things that hold our flowers and chicken. So we have a lot of folks like ask us questions about where we buy things. We're like, well, we built it. So we try to share that experience on social media and on our website so people can follow along there if they're ever interested in pasture raising chickens or growing their own flowers.

40:32
Yes. And your Facebook page is beautiful. It is loaded with so many gorgeous photos. Yes. I worked in marketing. So I've got the, what do we need to do to actually show up and be a brand online? And so we've invested a lot first there with marketing. And it pays off when you have your products looking great and tell your story the way you want it to be consistent.

40:59
So really that's kept sales going for us is just being present online. Like all of our sales have been online. Um, so it's definitely worth the investment. So check us out on social media. Cause from time to time too, I give tips, um, from my, when I used to be a social media manager on like how to kind of be better about the little things you can do on building your brand online. Awesome. All right. Well, I will put the links in your, in the show notes for this. And thank you so much for chatting with me. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much.

41:28
All right. Have a great day. Ashley. Bye.