A Tiny Homestead

Hellfire Homestead

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Today I'm talking with Shannon and Allen at Hellfire Homestead. 

 

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00:00

You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Shannon and Alan at Hellfire Homestead in New Hampshire. Good evening, you guys. How are you? Very good, actually, despite freezing. Is it super cold in New Hampshire right now? Yeah, we could kind of a little,

00:25

cold snap going on so that makes for frozen water bottles and water buckets which is always a nightmare but yeah Minnesota's pretty cold too but not as cold as it's gonna be Saturday the high for Saturday where I live is gonna be minus one oh my gosh  and it's probably coming your way three or four days later so you I've given you a heads up oh

00:50

Yeah, I know it's really hard with livestock because they've got to have fresh water whether you want to go out and break the ice and put water in or not. Yep. And we have quite a few different animals here. Okay. Well, tell me the first question I have is why is it called Hellfire Homestead? So, mean, oddly enough, it was sort of to weed out people that would be turned off by that name.

01:18

I think, and feel free to interrupt me, dear. But I feel that like in recent years, you know, with the influx of TikTok and other various social media, not only is there a lot of information that's absolutely wrong about homesteading, survivalism, bushcraft, et cetera, but a lot of people into it are not multi-generational. And there's a lot of returning to sort of like bad

01:48

Um, bad themes, I guess I should say as far as what we perceive to be gender roles in home setting and things like that on top of,  uh, just a lot of bad information in general, which I mean, as somebody who grew up in New Hampshire and  my family's been out here since the 1700s, um, ah I learned generationally how to can, um, how to keep meat clean.  Um, hunting was big in parts of my family. Um,

02:18

And I just sort of like grew up in the woods, like a wild feral child. ah So,  you know, and then you, you know, you log on to like TikTok and you see like 25 year old kids like canning with, ah you know, jars they got, you know, spaghetti jars they got from the grocery store and saying this is viable. And it's like, no, that will kill you if not ruin your entire harvest. There's a reason our grandparents use ball jars. ah

02:46

So that was part of it. And another part of it is that people are incredibly interested in what it is we do.

02:54

just on the day to day, like they're interested in the farm, they're interested in the fact that we fill our own freezer with our own meat. They're interested in the fact that we do process the hides of the animals that we eat and kill. We have sheep. ah So, some of us being online was to satisfy the curiosity of our friends, but also to kind of counter some of these like...

03:20

these ridiculous ideas that people who are not even generational farmers are starting to promote as good.  Uh huh. Good. I'm glad that you're, you're like standing up for that because you're right. There's a lot of crap  on the internet about what's safe, what isn't, what you can do, what you can't do. And I was grown up the same. I was brought up, sorry, not grown up,  brought up the same way you were Shannon. I spent so much time in the, uh, the woods and the swamp behind my house growing up in Maine.

03:50

And  I'm 56, there were no computers, were no tablets, there were no cell phones.  Mom said, you ate a good breakfast, go play, don't come back till dark. And that's what we did. Yeah, was Gen X. So my parents were basically like, get outside, you're on your own until it starts getting dark. Yeah, me too.  And  I couldn't necessarily do that with my kids when I finally managed to find a husband who wasn't terrible and managed to stay with him.

04:19

and lived in town because there weren't really any woods for them to go play in. So we would take them on the weekends and go hike trails in the area.

04:30

Yeah, my son that way too. we, you know, when I was,  it took a while to get a farm in my first marriage. Um, and we lived in the city. We actually lived in Concord, New Hampshire.  Um, so like keeping that rural, that like, you know, that aspect of like self sustainability was a little bit harder.  Um, but you know, we did things like, you know, from a very young age, he was taught gun safety from a very young age. He was taught at least some of the basics of.

04:58

killing and cleaning your own food.  And then as we got our own farm  with my ex-husband,  we started raising rabbits and doing things like that. So, I mean, that's definitely uh something that he's held onto. And hopefully I can pass on to my grandchildren one day on top of, know,  those future grandkids into 4-H as quickly as possible.  Yeah, I love where your heart is at. I really do. ah

05:26

The other thing that's funny is I'm sitting here listening to you talk about how you grew up. And I didn't know that I was brought up under a homesteading umbrella because my dad heated his house for the wood. My mom and dad both hunted. They both fished. ate bass every summer or every spring.  My dad will not, he does not keep any bass these days. He's 83 years old. If he goes fishing and catches the bass, it's catch and release.

05:55

And the last time I had baked bass, he makes it with stuffing. is amazing. Was when my kid was like six or seven, my youngest, he caught the bass with grandpa. And I said to him, I said, if you catch a bass, talk grampy and bring it home. Cause I want baked bass for dinner. And  my dad got home. We're having baked bass for dinner. And I said, Oh, did you catch one? He said, no, of course I didn't. Your kid caught it.  And I said, Oh, did you bring it home?

06:25

He's like, yeah, cause he wouldn't let me put it back in the water cause mom wanted big baths for dinner.  So, um,  but seriously, I had no idea that my parents were doing anything unusual.  And as soon as I married my third husband, who happened to have a house in a small yard,  we started gardening because you can't eat grass. Yep. Very true.  And he was already a deer hunter. So we had that box checked.

06:54

And we started putting food away and preserving. And I started crocheting and making hats and scarves for the kids. And it was all stuff I grew up with. And now in quotation marks, it's a movement. Yep. For good or ill, I think that the preservation of these homesteading skills and bushcraft and things like that is not only just, you're preserving your heritage as a human being.

07:22

regardless of race, you we all came from the land. But you're also, you know, it's mental health. Because when you realistically look at it throughout human history, industrialization was what only the past, what since 1700, 1600, something like that. So you got to think how did we live for millions of years previously, well, we lived off the land and we lived side by side by animals. So there's a big mental health aspect to that, I think.

07:51

Yeah. And when I, when I said now it's a movement, it might've sounded snarky and I didn't mean for it to sound snarky. I just find it really interesting that the old ways are now the new ways. Yeah. And I'm not against that idea. I mean, I have go.  And the problem that I have with it, I think is that,  um, these movements, because they are popular on social media and they do generate money is that some of the easiest things that you can do when you're, when you're creating these,

08:21

this media is to slide backwards. And I've seen a lot of very detrimental, um, this toward women going back into the quote unquote, trad wife lifestyle. And I have watched a lot of these videos and they're, you know, on the surface, it's like, you know, this, this woman in a dress that looks like it's made out of a 1995, you know, kitchen curtain, you know, dancing around her kitchen, coop and cleaning it out in white sandals. And I'm like, this doesn't happen.

08:50

Like good luck keeping your manicure when you've mucked a sheep stall for like four hours.  So yeah, those are the ones that make me mildly crazy. I'm like, I can't even imagine trying to do that. I mean,  I haven't actually mucked out our chicken coop ever because my husband does it. God love him.  But if I was going to go out there and uh scoop poop.

09:15

I would be in the crappiest, holiest pants I have that I wouldn't be worried about throwing away.  my least favorite shirt, because you're going to get covered in straw or pine shavings  and poop. It's going to happen.  And spider webs and  dead bugs and beans. Of course, the dog is going to interrupt. Oh, that's okay. Maggie barked her head off this morning or yesterday morning when I did an interview with somebody and I was like, I'm sorry. And they were like, that's fine.

09:46

But  I think that um at least what we're going to try to do, we are putting together  some media. We're hoping to get some  videos up by the end of the year. We're just sort of collecting it and doing it in the winter while we have a little bit more time.  It's also to talk about that there's a lot of mistakes that happen in homesteading. It's not all like, oh, I get to go out and play with my cute little sheep and my dogs are frolicking happy and...

10:13

You know, like you do lose an entire litter of rabbits to a mother that, you know, knocks them out of the nest. Uh huh. You know, your sheep does split a hoof and then you have to figure out how to help, help that animal. yeah, break a horn on the wind. Oh my God. A broken horn on the sheet bleeds so terribly. So two of our sheep have four horns. Um, so, know, or, you know, a dog gets sprayed by a skunk or in the case of our.

10:42

idiot dogs,  porcupines and what? Four times last year.  you know, it's not all about, um you know, canning goods in your kitchen  and,  you know, your beautiful little pet chickens, you know, flitting around. um It's  gross. It's a lot of poop and it's a lot of um dirt.  And  it's not this like clean sunny thing all the time.

11:10

You're making it sound so incredibly attractive. Um,  um, but there is a lot of good to this and you know that, I know that.  And I think being real about it is really important. So like, when you look around, like, like what is, what is the pumpkin spice of the farmyard other than chickens, it's goats. I will tell you when Alan or probably chime in here,  goats are the most horrible animals you can ever have. And we say that from experience.

11:39

Like, you can't have fruit trees. can't have, I used to have goats that would break out of their pen in order to eat the dirt, like, and start destroying my rabbit hutches to eat the dirty peat on hay from my rabbits. Despite the fact that the goats had like a good acre of fresh, they always had hay. They always had fresh everything. I mean, they were just flat out destructive. Um, so I would always recommend sheep.

12:05

But you have a culture where homesteaders, the instant thought, and I fell into this too, which is why I'm mentioning this. The instant thought is, I'm gonna get goats. Don't get goats. Don't get goats.  It's so funny that you bring up goats because our friends have goats and they love their goats.  my friend loves her goats beyond probably loving her dogs. Wow.

12:32

I'm okay with that because everybody has a different experience with every single animal. swear I've been doing this podcast for over two years  and I have heard goats are not naughty. I've heard goats are great. I've heard  goats are terrible. So I think your mileage varies on what kind of goat you get and what kind of person you are. But I do know that you have to make sure that you have a really good place for them to be corralled because they will escape if there's any chance.

13:00

And our sheep basically, they just roam the yard. don't even fence them. We have a very small, I wouldn't even call it a neighborhood. We have a couple neighbors around us that are on a private dirt road and they just wander around and then about three o'clock in the morning, they start complaining because they want their pellets and to go to bed. So they're pretty easy. And we also have rabbits. We have two turkeys that I guess are pets now.

13:30

I think their purpose is to scream when the UPS guy shows up. uh I didn't realize that we ended up with Blackhead on the property, which is going to limit us from really ever having turkeys here. Yep. bought don't know what that is. So it's a, it's not at all. It's a, what is it? A protozoan. That lives in worms. Yeah. And so what it is is that chickens will bring it in, but it,  it'll actually

14:01

It's in the dirt now. So anytime, wherever the chickens have been,  and it doesn't even affect the chickens, but it does cause liver failure in turkeys.  the turkeys, any turkeys that eat like the worms and stuff, they come out of the ground because we've had chickens here for 20 years. Yeah. They, uh, yeah, it carries it with it. could have come in at any time during the last 20 years. It's hard to say.  So yeah, pretty much limited us to not having turkeys.

14:30

Yeah, so we lost 80%. Yeah, we lost 80 % of our turkeys and I bought like heritage breed.  Again, thinking that I was losing turkeys because they were the white meat bird and they just weren't healthy. And then it turns out they they had this blackhead disease. And again, I think this is why it's very important to tell people about your failures. ah Because now we're not going to have any more turkeys other than these two that are ah living with us now. ah

15:00

Because when you talk about your failures, things like blackhead disease or things about, you know, things, the realities of home study um are important to know because you also get into the situation where people think that they're going to come in and they're going to have this cute little farm and they go and they buy like uh a miniature cow and they go buy, you know, goats and rabbits and  a guardian dog. And then the next thing you know,

15:27

they're completely overwhelmed and have no idea what they're doing when that cow becomes a bull or that guardian dog wants to work and they have no idea how to control that. um I think it's very important to put out a realistic idea of what homesteading is because ultimately, even if you're eating your animals, you are the steward and the guardian of those animals. So their quality of life is on you up until that time that you um use them for food.  Certainly is. uh

15:57

Every time my husband floats an idea about what he would like to do next, I say,  we need to take six months and do the research and think about it before we make any decisions. And he looks at me like I'm cracked.  And I'm like,  no, seriously, we're not diving into anything until we know what we're doing. Because I'm one of those people who  when the animals die, it breaks my heart. We got, we got rabbits.  Um,  oh my God, three years ago now.

16:26

Rabbits are not our thing. Just for the record, we don't do rabbits anymore.  And the rabbits were not getting pregnant. And we still to this day don't know why. And we had a confirmed buck and two confirmed does.  We got one litter of rabbits out  of one of  the does in a whole year.  So either they were bad at their job or we didn't know what the hell we were doing. And I want to say it was probably both. But I did all the research.

16:55

I looked up everything. talked to the people that sold us the rabbits and it still didn't work. So, there's two schools of thought here. You can do all the research on earth and still fail or you can not do any research at all and for sure fail. And you can feel kind of strophically. Because I think people wonder. So both of us still work full time. I'm in school full time. And of course we have the friends that are like, how do you do it all? And it's like, well, you don't have a choice. So if you want to do home studying,

17:25

it's very rare unless you are inheriting ah the infrastructure and an established farm to actually make a living wage out of homesteading. And that's something that I've tried to explain to people as well. Like we don't, we, if anything, kind of break even by the fact that we can fill our, um you know, fill our freezers full of meat. Like we don't really have to go meat shopping at all. um And our dogs, we,

17:54

You know, I think that we avoid a lot of vet bills because our dogs eat a good raw diet. Um, for the most part that comes off of the animals that we process ourselves. Um, but I mean, are you going to make a complete living off it? I wouldn't quit your job. Yeah. Like don't, don't quit your day job until you're ready. You know, and that means you're going to be working yourself to the bone. Um, but that's again, that's the reality of the situation.

18:24

Yeah, yeah, and you're making a really good distinction here because a small homestead is not a big farm. It's never gonna be And one to two people um There's only so much you can do in a day, you know It does make it a lot easier with two people like we can get a bunch of chickens done in a day We can get a bunch of rabbits done in a day But it is it's hard work and it's constant work and

18:53

It's definitely, you know, a labor of love, but these are the realities of the situation. So again, like I talk about that on reality of things like tip-talk and stuff like that, where it shows these people, like one person doesn't have to work and one person doesn't have to do this. then I'm guaranteeing you that a lot of those people have landscapers. have, you know, people coming in and setting up the scene for them and things like that. So.

19:20

When it comes to people who actually want to start doing this themselves, don't believe anything you hear in that realm. If it looks too good to be true, it is. I always tell people if they're interested, they need to go to a place where the people are actually walking the walk and talking the talk. Absolutely. And that's what we've tried to do, you know, to an extent with our friends. um Next year, we're going to start raising meat birds ah to  help.

19:49

feed our friends and have them all come over and do a butchering party. I'm really excited for that. That will be very interesting on the psychology side. Yeah, well, it's kind of it's kind of interesting because once I think that people at least once in their life, if they're going to eat meat,  really should understand where it comes from. And at least on the homestead, you know that your you know, your meat, you know where it comes from, you know, it's not abused. You know, its final moments were not

20:19

you know, on a factory line, was,  you know, just picked up and  in the case of chickens, you just kind of cut their throat and it's instant.  Um, but I think that that's really important to understand because part of what we get at the supermarket where everything is sterile and pre-packaged is a distance from honoring the animals that we eat.  Um, and when you stop honoring your food and you stop honoring the animal, well, you don't miss it until it's gone.

20:50

And, you know, that's, that's part of a consumerist culture. That's part of a culture that just expects, well, when I need food on the grocery store in the grocery store, it's going to be there.  Um,  and part of homesteading and part of small time farming is to ensure that, or to understand that, no, it might not always be there.  And  you have to kind of provide for yourself, but it also connects you to that bridge between, um, you know, the wild.

21:18

and your domestic life because you are living with animals, you're caring for animals, you're  killing animals in order that their body feeds yours. So to have respect for that circle, I think is very important and very humbling as a human.  Oh,  absolutely. The first time I watched a chicken get butchered that was my chicken, I was like,  oh, this is hard. And I didn't cry. I was more shocked than sad.

21:47

And my husband said, are you okay? And I was like,  yeah, I said, but other people need to know this is how it's done. And he said, I think we're going to have that covered someday. And now I'm doing a podcast about all of this. So,  but yeah, it's really, really hard. The first time  you take the life of an animal to sustain your own life through eating it.

22:13

Yep. we try, I think another thing that we try to do is use every possible part.  um, you know, in the, in, in rabbits,  um, nearly everything is usable other than sort of the awful, which is like the digestive system and all the feces and things like that. Like you can basically use everything. The chickens will eat it. The dogs will eat it. You can eat it.  Um, and then the fur is obviously usable as our, like, we just barely completed a entire batch of rabbits.

22:42

cheek, our key chain, sorry.  Um, so we try to use absolutely everything we can. If we can't use it, we pass it on to somebody else. So we even save bones and skulls because these things are the ears even, um, because these are really big on the oddities market. Yep. So it's important for us that, you know, every part is used, everything is used and that the animal dies a very quick,  um, quick painless death.

23:10

And it is hard. is hard with rabbits, especially when you, you know, you're the one raising them. So I kind of, I feel better by the fact that I have,  um, I do have a favorite rabbit who will live her life out here. name's October. She's very sweet and she's a very good mom. So I've decided that, you know, she will be one of the rabbits that stays.  Um, but I also think of it too, as you know, not only do we as humans eat

23:38

horrifically processed food, but so do our pets.  And um that was another thing that I think that I had issues with on TikTok too, was that, you know, there's this big thing of like showing people feeding their dogs, like these vegetables and things like that. And I've been a,  I've worked in, I've worked with dogs most of my life. ah I was a groomer, a dog trainer, a behaviorist. um I've ran kennels, rescues. We have five dogs right now that are all rescues.

24:07

They're obligate carnivores. So the idea that it's good or easy for them to digest vegetable matter is something that was promoted by pet food companies in order to sell you corn and soy and rice and things like that that dogs really should not be eating, same with cats. ah So another aspect of that was I wanted to start also talking about

24:34

you know, Ron ancestral diets for dogs. And part of how we supplement that is through our rabbits and chickens.  Um, so it's,  uh, it's, it's, it's a whole thing, I guess, like when you do this, it becomes your life and it becomes,  um,  sort of a center,  not necessarily of your world because you're working on it, but like a center that centers you. Yes. Yep. You're grounded in it.

25:04

Yes.  I love that. I think that's fabulous because a lot of people are like, yeah, we have chickens, we have goats, have cows, and they talk to me about it  and they're thrilled to have them and they take care of them and they do what they're going to do with them.  And that's  wonderful. Absolutely.  But you are grounded in this. Like you,  you were died and centered in this.  Absolutely.

25:33

There's a line from a movie. can't think of it right now, but  I said it badly.  Go ahead. God, I'm trying to think of what I want to do. And so we're, we're always like adding projects too, which is crazy. He goes a little crazy cause I'm a little ADHD and I'm always doing things, but,  um, you know, we do maple syrup too. So that's pretty fun. Like we get, um, you know, we'd pop trees on our property.  Um,

25:58

And every year we come up with big batches of syrup done the old way, quote unquote. We do use the aluminum buckets and we, you know, we cook it outside on a stove that we rebuild every year. That's for Gordon and Hames, sure.  And everything goes up and down at the same time and everything's made of rock out here. Yeah, that's true too. If  anybody out there is unfamiliar with the quote unquote granite state, well, it's aptly named.  Gardening is very hard here. It is, ah there's,

26:28

There's a lot of rock in the ground, let's say, and our property is extremely rocky. It's hard to drive people. It is.  Fencing is an issue all the time. ah And we also heat the house using wood mostly sourced from our own property. Like we go out there and we cut it and drag it out with the Jeep and, uh you know, spend the warmer months kind of processing it and drying it and things like that. But again, it's work.

26:55

Are you always a year ahead on your firewood? I would say no. We laxed last year, I think we did. But we made up for it because one of the things too to remember is people are always getting rid of things. Yeah, so we sort the tremendous amount because the emerald ash borer came through this area. It's filled all the ash trees and it's standing dead now.

27:25

So they, we were helping out an older couple cleaning up trees that were coming down on their property. And that's where we got a lot of the stuff this year, which was nice because it's already dry. Yeah. The Emerald Ash borers found our tree line this past year or two and  the trees were hanging in. And my husband noticed this spring that there were a lot of holes in the ash trees, you know, the trunks. And he came in and he said, we have a problem. And I said, what's that? And he said, the, uh

27:54

The woodpeckers are basically putting holes in our ash trees. And I said, well, yeah, that's what woodpeckers do. And he said, no, we have emerald ash doors. They're going after the bugs. I was like, great. I said, how many trees are almost dead? He said, at least half. And almost our entire tree line is all ash trees. I was like, what are we going to replace them with? He says, apple trees, peach trees, plum trees. I was like, go for it. Please do that.

28:22

It's a good time. Is it south facing? Good time for like a food forest. You can see it.  It's actually  south. It is south. It's it runs north to south. And so we have plum trees and apple trees and pear and peach trees over there already. And they're doing great. So he's just going to keep adding some in every year. That's what I want to do. I want to do more like the permaculture aspect of things as opposed to  the annuals where you have to like

28:52

them every year. So you're getting more out of a out of the permaculture state like plants as opposed to like your corn, which you have to put a ton of effort into planting every year, you know, where you could just go out there and pick fruit or berries or. Okay.  You know how Shannon is very uh adamant about homesteading is hard and TikTok sucks because people put happy.

29:21

the lucky stuff on there. Yeah. I hate corn. Corn is not good for you. really is. It's a grain. It's not even vegetable. It's a starch. It really is not. Not gonna lie. The food quality is so poor in that. Yep. So I am going to die on that hill. Corn is not really good for you. And I mean, if you want to have an ear of sweet corn picked from the field down the road from you because it tastes good in August,

29:51

Go for it, slather it in butter, enjoy it. But  corn every meal is really bad for you. Yeah. It is a dietary, you know, like  the amount that we eat it or the amount that we force it onto our pets is absurd. It's a sugar spike here. Yeah. And I think again, that's something that we have to be aware of when we are doing this homesteading thing. Like, why are we doing it? Because the food that we're being fed in the grocery store, 99 % of the time is just manufactured garbage.

30:20

It's crap is what it is. My husband grew these beautiful cabbages, like an  old variety of cabbage this summer.  And uh I had told him to not bother growing cabbages because usually they're not very good and they take up a lot of room  and they're buggy. They get bugs really easy. Yeah, I the veracica as well.

30:43

Yeah, and he picked this very old variety from some place and got the seeds and put them in and started them from little baby cabbages.  And they were like  dark green. They were sweet. They were crispy. I said, you can grow those cabbages every summer for the rest of our lives if you want. Cabbage is good for you.

31:06

Yeah, we tried gardening. Our garden is a little, uh, was feral. We took off for a week in the river and came back and it just sort of took over. We went from the extreme water this year too. So it rained. I think it was like, you know, working full time made it really bad, but I think it was like 15 or 16 Saturdays in a row. Yep.

31:31

Like every weekend for like 16 weekends, all spring, rain every weekend. We got so much rain this year from the beginning. And then all of a sudden July came and then it stopped raining. It didn't rain again until October. That was our summer two summers ago here in Minnesota. And these things are difficult. So the garden did okay. We're probably going to try to refurbish the whole thing this year. And we do it again, composting. like we make

32:01

Rabbits make massive amounts of manure that you can literally just kind of throw in the garden. um But we have so much  poo production here that, you know, we definitely ah make enough compost, um which again is another thing that I think ah needs to be discussed too, because,  you know, rabbits are definitely a very sustainable way to raise meat for yourself. Supposing you can kill them. Caveat. um

32:30

But  there's a lot of push like, you can raise rabbits in a small space. You can raise rabbits like right in your backyard. But what they don't tell you is how much poop they produce and that you have to find some method of disposing of that, whether it's giving it away or uh putting it in the corner of your house because  animals make a lot of poo. And anybody who has ever worked with animals  will tell you that like,

32:57

Probably like 70 % of working with them is poop.  Oh yeah.  Even the dogs.  Yeah, for sure.  It's not a clean and shiny and roses and candy kind of lifestyle. No, and it's expensive too. know, like, I mean, when we have the egg shortages, I was trying to go get meat birds and everywhere I went, it's like, we're focusing on egg layers because people want to buy egg layers.

33:26

And I tried so hard to tell people like by the time you get your eggs, you've put more money. You could buy eggs even at that extended price cheaper than you ever could by raising your own chickens. Yeah. There's a lot of people in our area that have a $2,000 dozen eggs this year. Yep.  Oh yeah. Those first eggs are expensive. Yeah. Between the feed and the chickens. You can get it layers all day long on Craigslist right now though, free.  Yep.

33:55

give them a whole lot.  And the roosters were insane. mean, I even went to tractor supply looking for the meat birds and this woman was there like, Oh, we're get chickens, we're gonna get eggs. And I'm like, these are straight run.  So you might end up with roosters. And I told her flat out, said, I got a couple of Americanas. I got five just to sort of add the blue eggs to my flock. And I ended up with four roosters. ah So you also have what you know, another thing comes into home studying is responsibility.  And part of that is

34:25

On a homestead, males are kind of useless. uh know, like, do you, I mean, if you have pets, that's one thing, but like, how many rams do you need? How many bulls do you need? How many roosters do you really need? How many bucks do you really need? Not that many. So what happens when,  you know, someone goes and buys a straight run of chickens  and they end up with mostly roosters. Well, what are you going to do that? Nobody wants a rooster. You might be able to rehome a few or send a few to rescue, but.

34:54

for the most part, those roosts are gonna be culled. And that's another thing to consider that you have to be a part of. Even if you're not the one doing the culling, these animals that you're raising, responsibility-wise, they're most likely going to end up culled. And I think too that there's a lot of, there's a lot of rose colored glasses when it comes to how people perceive.

35:23

homesteading, or even chickens in general. mean, I'm not, my dogs are being ridiculous right now. I've gotten a lot of flack for, you know, how can you butcher chickens? Well, they're so beautiful and wonderful and friendly. And I said, well, chickens will eat each other. I was like, as soon as I go to butcher my meat birds, my egg layers are out here. They're looking for the blood. They're looking for the entrails. They don't care. They're little dinosaurs. They are absolutely.

35:52

And you see a lot of people's vision shattered by this sort of thing. And then again, you look on TikTok, like I saw some lady post this ridiculous ah post about she tried to make it out as her rooster was mourning a hen that died. And of course people in the comments were like, oh, those poor, you know, birds, were, they were, you ah meant to be together.  you know,  people were coming up with this entire love story of this hen and this rooster. When people who actually had chickens are like,

36:22

The only reason he's looking at her is he's cause he's trying to peck feathers off her to eat the feathers. Cause they do that.  And  there's again, there's this like sort of blindsided disconnect of how these animals actually are. And I'm not trying to like, you know, I'm not trying to say that if you want to have a pet chicken and you love that chicken, we have one here.  Um, that there's anything wrong with that. But again, when I go back to like, you have to honor the animal.

36:49

You have to honor the fact that yes, that chicken is a little dinosaur and they can be exceedingly cruel to each other. I mean, they will peck each other to death. So we don't honor these animals by giving them human feelings and emotions. We honor them by respecting the animal that they are. Yeah. It's like Joel Saliton says, the pigness of the pig. Yes. Okay. Well, this is not the conversation I thought I was going to have this evening, but I'm glad I'm having it.

37:20

Well, I'm actually glad to hear that  Yeah, I want to have you guys back because who makes the the pens and the crochet hooks is it yours at oh out? Well, let's have Alan come back when you guys have time and talk to me about that because those crochet hooks look amazing Oh, no problem. I'm sure he would love to oh

37:50

If  it was a hit or not. Yeah, he had, he really. look great. oh He would probably enjoy actually talking about that because he starts talking about wood stuff to me and I start glazing over. So.  We'll have to set it up for after the new year.  Excellent. All right. Shannon, Alan, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me.  Can people find you anywhere other than Hellfire Homestead on Facebook?  There's that and we've put up a YouTube.

38:20

Currently, we don't have any media on that because we're still kind of putting that together. Again, like I said, like over the winter where we have slightly less time um in the summer and fall to do this. So we're trying to just sort of get that done now and probably put it out by spring um because we also have our paranormal group and things like that going. So  lots of stuff. I wish my podcast, I wish I could figure out a way to stretch it to paranormal stuff because I would love to hear about that.

38:50

I don't think I can work Homestead and Paranormal into the same thing.  We could talk about how our rural history is very haunted.  Maybe we'll do that in the spring too.  All right. uh As always, people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com. And if you want to support the podcast, you can go to atinyhomestead.com slash support, because I'm really original like that.  Thank you guys so much for your time. I appreciate it.

39:19

No problem. Have a good holiday. You too.

 

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A Tiny HomesteadBy Mary E Lewis