New Beginnings Farmstead

A Tiny Homestead

Today I'm talking with self-described "A-team" of Egidio and Elisa Tinti, and Ryan, and Julie at New Beginnings Farmstead. You can follow them on Facebook as well.

00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. Today I'm talking to the team from New Beginnings Farmstead. Why don't you guys introduce yourselves? I'm Elisa Tinti. And I'm Julie Noble. Ryan Kuhn. And Jiddy Tinti. Okay. So now that we've done that, I have never interviewed four people in a group at the same time, so this is going to be fun.

00:27
Tell me about what you guys do at New Beginnings Farms, Ted. Are you, Alisa? Well, we are about 130 acres in upstate New York, and we purchased this farm in 2015. At the time, we were not married, and we were looking for someplace that was between both of our homes so that we could start a life together. And my husband was...

00:55
born and raised up in the mountains and I was born and raised in the city of Kingston. So we had many challenges when we bought this farm. Okay. And so what did you want the farm for? What was your plan? We just wanted a place kind of in between where I was living at the time and where she was living in the city. A true city mouse, country mouse type of situation. I grew up around bears and snakes.

01:24
farm folk and firewood and she thought not she did not. That's correct. So when we when we bought the farm, one of the first things, of course, you know, we're walking around looking at the place and it had been a dairy farm for probably over 100 years and sat vacant for about 10 years. And everything was pretty overgrown. And one of the things that I thought of right away with one of our very large barns was to have a wedding venue and.

01:55
My husband, well, at the time we weren't married, but he said out loud, who in the world would want to be married in a barn? And little did he know that a year later, he'd be getting married in a barn. But that's how we met our friend here, Ryan Coon, who is now part of our family. Okay. So what do you guys do now? You host weddings, right? Host weddings. And our main...

02:22
Agricultural production revolves around firewood and maple syrup. We have a decent size maple collection system in place. Julie signed on that way. That's how she came on. Her current position, full-time job, gives us a tremendous amount of knowledge. She brings knowledge to the farm that, short of us identifying maple trees, a lot of the maple production that we've started with was small.

02:48
We still consider ourselves small as compared to some of the other ones, but we're up to over 500 taps and our collection system is running on vacuum. Every year, the four of us go up to a conference in upstate New York and we learn more and more and more and add more and more and more. I think of the entire team, I'm the only one that wants to stop or slow down our production.

03:17
the three of them out in the woods with their hard hats on, tapping trees and having a good old time. And you can see the smiles on their faces just thinking about it. And in the Sugar Shack, it's really a Ryan show. He's the one who's got the evaporator under control. Okay, so what's Julie's background? I am a sustainability coordinator, but my background is in environmental education. So

03:43
teaching about the outdoors, getting people outdoors. And I had some, I worked on another nature center before this and was doing maple production there as well and teaching about maple. So I came into an operation that was already well run and I feel as though I brought a little bit of fun and a little bit of knowledge and some organizational skills that maybe needed to be upped a little bit here. That's true. Everything's about a checklist, check boxes, whiteboards. We are

04:13
very efficient when it comes to planning and test management. There's lots of singing and dancing and having a good time. Right, Ryan? Well, life is nothing without music. That's true. So Ryan is our sugar maker. He kind of took under his wing. So our first evaporator was really an old wood stove that we converted. Lisa and I tried to do it up in, I say the country, but about 20 minutes away from here where my family was...

04:43
born and raised and we did some maple. It was fun. She got the bug once she entered that small batch of syrup in our local county fair and won, took home the blue ribbon. And at that point she considered herself a sugar maker and wanted to increase. So we built our first evaporator, old school, took a, you know, everything's about recycle, we knew we'd use. And we took an old oil tank and lined it, put a draft system in it, researched it, talked to a bunch of people.

05:10
welded the pants together and started making maple on a very small batch system. And over the time we just outgrew it because they kept tapping trees without my knowledge. And we had way too much sap collected and not enough time to burn it, to boil it. So, you know, and, you know, we still use a wood fire evaporator. So a lot of that is, is, you know, the team you see really cuts the firewood, splits the firewood, stacks the firewood, moves the firewood.

05:38
And then ultimately the last person to handle it before it goes into the evaporator is Ryan. And he has a pretty good system in place where he's constantly keeping the heat, monitoring the flame, got a good temperature control. And we've kind of modernized the system over the years. And at this point, I dare say fun, but it can be humorous at times. Yeah. There's an old saying about firewood heats you at least three times. That's right. At least twice we used to hear. Yeah, that's true.

06:07
Okay. So you're in, are you in New York? New York. Upstate New York. Okay. And does Ryan want to say anything or is he the child of one of the bunch? I'm not the one that talks a lot. That's okay. That's fine. I just do the work. Yeah. Well, he's got plenty to say. He's got plenty to say. Ryan, Ryan showed up one day with his then fiance and they came here to.

06:36
look around because they were looking for a place to get married. And that was in 20 probably 2016 when you showed up. Yeah, the end of 2016 I came down. My now wife said, let's go look at this place. I want to get married in a barn and have a country style wedding. And because she grew up in the country, I grew up in the country. So we roll in and it's it's raining in the driveway. It's a sheet of ice. And this poor guy is just wandering around and.

07:04
trying to figure out what to do next. And they kept telling us, we're gonna do so much before you get married and we have all this work to do, all these projects to do, it's gonna be beautiful. So in thinking about it, I said, well, that's a lot of work. And I have a construction background as well. And seeing all the stuff that needed to be done, I said, I'd love to give you a hand. Do you think we could barter on this for the venue?

07:32
This guy was a little reluctant because about six months later, five months later, I just showed up one day because Lisa said, he's not going to ask for the help. He just come. So I'm sad today. I showed up with my tools and that's really where it began. I never left. Never left. He quickly became part of, part of the family. We do have a very large extended, what we call our farm family.

08:01
which everybody really helps out with doing everything for maple sugar and for the wedding events as well. And what this is what we call the A-Team. This is our core four, actually five, are my brother-in-law. Jeff is not with us today, but he's normally with us quite a bit. And so this is what we refer to as our A-Team.

08:31
There's nothing we don't tackle. Electrical work, plumbing work, any type of construction, excavation. I mean, and you know, we don't hire anybody to do anything. We do it. Something needs to be built or moved or, you know, at one point Ryan was tied up on something. We were moving the chicken coop up the driveway. Julie wasn't one tractor and at least in the other. And I'm trying to direct them up this long driveway without falling to pieces and they made it. The driveway got chewed up into a couple of things.

09:00
Without chickens in it just yes they are. No chickens were damaged. Yeah and you know we for a long time we had bees unfortunately that's last past winter took its toll on the last hive but we plan on having those back but yeah with you know 100 plus acres part of that about 20 of those acres is a solar field that we put in a two megawatt solar field in the back. We were believers in renewable energy and sustainability.

09:29
before Julie entered the picture, but now it's clearly driven by a lot of that. We use, when we can, solar and charged battery backup vacuum systems for some of the lines in the back. And every time we install one, she claps her hand and gets excited and does a little sun dance. But it was... And she does all of our Girl Scout tours. And she is known for her enthusiasm. And people actually ask for her by name now because she is pretty animated with her.

09:59
with her tours. We all play a very distinct role here on the farm and none of the pieces would come together if we all didn't work together on it. That's fantastic. They say that it takes a village to raise a child. I think it takes a village to run a farmstead too. That's right. And this is not even our full-time job. This is not what we do for a living. That's right. Yeah, we all have full-time jobs, right? This is all in addition. But we say we put in full-time hours, right? Every time. There's something going on almost every day.

10:28
The idea to try to do more is never without suggestion. People come here, and although I refer to my wife as the mastermind, and I suggest, we have quite a few visitors, especially during the Maple Weekends, New York State Maple Producers, their association holds two weekends in March, and they promote Maple Weekend. We have, dare say, thousand people come over those two weekends, and mostly from New York City, since we're pretty close.

10:58
And we give them tours, we talk about the process, we have a gift shop set up, and it just amazes me how many people really have no idea about maple production, you know? And if you're raised in the city, I can understand it a lot better now, but yeah, the first time I tapped a tree for my wife, she saw that stuff dripping out, she's like, this is great, but it's kind of thin.

11:21
It's not like that. It's not quiet. Yeah, it's gonna take a little while. I still have trouble identifying maple trees. And I joke, when Julie's not giving the tour and Ryan is busy running the evaporator and so somehow my name gets thrown into it. When I give a tour, I start the conversation with my wife's from the city. She doesn't understand. I mean, we got here, she said, hey, is this a maple tree? And I go, no, that's an oak. What about this one? That's a birch. What about that one? I said, that's a telephone.

11:49
I appreciate that. There's a lot of camaraderie around here. A lot of teasing. There's a lot of ball-busting. That was fun though. Unless we pick on Ryan. We're trying to get his feelings. You guys definitely sound like East Coast folk. I'm originally from Maine. And the camaraderie

12:19
amongst you reminds me a lot of the stuff that I used to have when I lived there too. Do you miss it a little bit? A lot, I do. I do, but Minnesota is not the same, but I call it a lateral move because really, Minnesota has the same weather, we have pretty much the same trees, we have the same grass, we have the same sky. I'm just not half an hour from the ocean and half an

12:49
So that's how I breathe through my sadness. But yeah, it's weird because the East Coast has a bad rep. People think that people from the East Coast are rude and we're not very hospitable. Yeah, that's true. And honestly, I...

13:16
felt like when I moved to the Midwest, everybody is very nice, but there's not the conversations that start on the East Coast. Like if you stand in line at the grocery store on the East Coast, people are going to talk. Here, no, people just kind of don't talk to each other in those situations. And I was very confused.

13:45
I made it my purpose in life to make someone smile anytime I interacted with them just because I could. Yeah, that's true. You have to prepare to go to the grocery store around here. You have to be in the mindset for socializing and it's an event. It is. It's an event. You always know somebody who's related to somebody or you run into, you know, it's a small town where we are in Kingston. Yeah.

14:11
Yeah, every time I would interact with someone the first six months that I lived in Minnesota, I would try to get them to look in the eye or say hello or smile or something. And after about two months of this, my husband was like, what are you doing? Stop talking to people. I said, trying to get a reaction. Let me do this.

14:35
That was the first husband. I'm on the third husband and third time is the charm. So we think second, so it's true. The two of us. Good. Good. So anyway, yeah, New England and the East Coast are a very different animal from the Midwest. My mom is from Illinois. She was born there and lived there until she was 19 and married my dad and moved to Maine. So whenever I'm like, what is with this Midwest thing, I call my mom and I'm

15:04
I'm like, was it like this for you when you were living in Illinois? And she's like, oh yeah, that's how people are. I'm like, okay, good. I'm not crazy. At least not on that front. So yes, I do miss, I do miss Maine a lot, but I also love where I live now. So it all worked out in the end. What counts. Yeah. We were fortunate where we're just a few miles outside the city of Kingston on a major highway, I think, you know, it's actually a state route, right? So for us.

15:33
It's easy for people to get here. We're very fortunate that the event venue actually worked out. You know, it was an old barn. The property was vacant for over 10 years and for sale for 10 years on the market. When we initially looked at it, you know, because everything was moved and the operating this dairy operation and moved a couple of miles down the road to a new place, everything was overgrown. If you had taken a look at the barn or the house or the other barn or the road,

16:03
It was an absolute mess. And my first words out of my wife at the time, we pulled in the driveway, she jumped out with this huge smile on her face, all the energy in the world and said, what do you think, what do you think, really? What do you think? And I said, get back in the car. I said, I am not rebuilding my life at 50 years old. Come on, this is crazy. This house needs to be torn down. Let's go, get in the car. And we canceled the appointment with the realtor. And I said, no, this is, and it's a hundred and some acres. We can't, there's no way we can afford this.

16:33
You want it about 40 acres. Yeah, I'd like 30 or 40. I mean, like you said, I was born in the country and I like my privacy to some degree. And, you know, and I honestly, this is a running joke here. You know, I lived off a county road and I thought that was busy. We're on a state highway here. Holy cow, it never stops. There's traffic all the time, 24 hours a day going down this thing. So it is an eye-opener for me. But what's nice is it is relatively private in the scheme of things. At any point, any one of us, once we're fed up with each other,

17:01
can take a walk down the driveway and get lost in the woods. Or, you know, every so often we'll find Julie up in a tree just soaking up the sunshine. And we're on a rock, on a rock just laying there, just soaking it up. But we're very fortunate. Or if there's a wedding, she might be off crying somewhere. It's true. She cries at every wedding. Yeah. You know, and that's the other part of it too, is when we do the farm weddings, you know, we have no control over the weather, but we make the most accommodations. And that one, although you're seeing four of us here,

17:31
you know, during maple weekends or even the production of the maple season or the weddings, you know, we've got full family force and it's 12 or 13 people that help us. And they all, you know, we have a certain location on our farm that we kind of stand around in case anybody needs anything. And but, you know, we built hay wagons off of stuff junk we pulled off the woods and we built it. We went out and, you know, she's saying, hey, we can take you in the back on the hay wagons. And we don't pay that. Ryan drives the other.

18:00
And then so we make it work and it's very good. It's a very good time for everybody. And there's times of panic. There's certain times when there's changes being made less minute. And of course we try to focus on making it the best day for the bride and groom and their family. But occasionally, you know, things turn. And you know, we had a wedding cake fall down, start to melt. They delivered it early in the morning in this barn. And the heat, you know, it was a pretty warm day in September. And so Ryan and I became bakers.

18:29
Right? We had it, we figured out how to put these wooden dowels in it and stand it back up and essentially Ryan saved the day, you know? So he didn't get the first piece of cake that still went to the bride and groom. What are you going to do? Yeah, necessity is the mother of invention for sure. Okay, so what else do you guys do there though besides the wedding stuff? Do you have animals?

18:59
I'll speak for Lisa on this one, but you know, the only animal she ever had in her entire life growing up was a small squirrel, pet squirrel, right? Yeah. Dogs. I did. Wait, lookie. I had a pet squirrel. The look of them. See the looks of them. Dogs, right? Yeah, who does that? That's the whole story. Yeah, that's the whole story. Dogs, right? Yeah, that was it. That was it. Yeah. I had a mouse, a pet mouse at one point. I had pet mice too. Yeah, and they're super smart. Love mice. Dogs. Yeah.

19:29
But Ryan and I grew up with snakes in the house and bears. No, Ryan did not grow up with snakes in the house. No, I didn't. Ryan has the same feeling I do. There's a snake in the house, you've got to burn my house down. He doesn't like snakes. So for us, the country living was not a big change. But for Lisa, that was a big change when she opened the door to go out front one morning and there was a big bear walking through the front lawn. And at that point, I think when you called me up in a panic saying,

19:59
I have, we can't live here anymore. We got to move. Well, the first night the, uh, the power went out. And I, again, I was in the city and we did not have wells. So even if you didn't have power, you could run the water and flush the toilet. And suddenly on first night, I moved in with my kids, couldn't run the water, couldn't flush the toilet. And that whole background come, the reason I mentioned all that is because I pulled into driveway one day and now there's three sheep sitting in a barn. And, uh, I asked her where they come from. And she said, I rescued them from a meat bar. Yeah. And.

20:29
So she's named them. Ross, Chams, and Joey. My kids named them. So from the friends show and they have now essentially become pets. Shear them twice a year. They are more pets than anything else. And we did have about 35 chickens at one point, lost a couple to the predators and bees. We had quite a few hives. We had up to 11 hives at one point. Produced the honey, that was pretty good.

20:58
And we will do it again. We just, we need to, we need to regroup. Well, the location at the hives were really weren't, wasn't good. We live across from a large field that another farm is at. And it just, the way the wind kicks up, we felt that the hives weren't making it through the winter, but we've done honey. Um, we collect the wool from the sheep. So, although it's not a lot, we, uh, we do that and, uh, the chickens sold eggs for a little while and for a long time, uh, you know, people love that, right? You just have a good farm stand at the bottom. And, but in addition.

21:27
Probably the biggest agricultural product for us is maple because it's a year long, even though we produce it for those three or four short months, the work continues on every month, whether it's making more trails or producing stuff with the maple that we did produce, cakes, right? Just cookies, cakes, whatever else you do with them. I try to make suggestions on what she should because we have enough work for these. And mind you, this is all after we do our normal day jobs. We all actually work for the city of Kingston.

21:57
And so we do sometimes interact with one another at work during the day, and then we see each other here. So it's very interesting. Wow. That's a lot of togetherness right there. I think we love each other so much. And we all have very different jobs. Yeah. That's true. It makes for a good conversation. But sometimes the jobs intertwine. Sometimes.

22:27
Okay, so you guys are a four person team. And so when one of you has a new idea for the farmstead, how does that go? We like, I like to think that the A team doesn't have a hierarchy. It clearly does have a hierarchy. So we, the three of us tend to default with the ideas. So that can be. So usually if I have an idea, I'll like.

22:57
I usually talk to him first and he never likes any of my ideas ever, ever. So then I will usually try to get one of them on my side. And if I can get one, then there's a possibility. So there's been a lot of iterations of things that could happen here that we've shut down immediately. They shut me down all the time. Camping, growing Christmas trees, growing hemp. That was a thing for a little while. So one of the first things that Lisa wanted to do when we were talking about

23:26
cultural product was to grow hops. Hops, right? Hops. There's a small microbrewery type of environment around the Catskills. And she's like, we have a field, we can do this. And then once we started researching it... Well, no, we went to, we took a class. At Cornell Co-op, right? Yes, we drove like three hours for a class and we didn't get halfway through and I leaned over and said, we're not growing.

23:55
So, we're out of here. We had lunch break and we left. It was like, that's not happening. But it's funny because when people show up here- But you don't know until you, you know. I knew, I knew, because all of this involves work. In some cases, unnecessary work. But yeah, so when people show up, they're like, man, this is amazing. If you had, I go, please, please don't say another thing. Don't ask, don't, we've had suggestions about clamping sites and cabins and, you know.

24:24
what our property sits at the edge of the O&W rail trail that goes essentially part of the state line really. And so we have people coming off the rail trail through our fields into our property and enjoying the woods and stuff. And we recognize we're just stewards of the land. We own it as long as we're paying taxes on it. But when we came here, we cleaned it all up, took a bunch of trash and garbage from the old farmers that were here for years, took it out of here and cleaned it up. And...

24:53
Every so often we come across a tire or an old engine or transmission. And we try to hide it from Julie. But, but for the most part, I mean, just the location is really, really nice. We have decent neighbors. Um, you know, really the, we try to keep it to a minimum. I mean, the only noise we make occasionally is the music before 10 o'clock and, uh, that plays during the events and, uh, chainsaws and that's pretty much it, you know? So everything we do, uh, our meatball operation has included the use of them.

25:22
versus osmosis pump so we can reduce both the emissions that the wood burns from the wood burning and the amount of firewood we burn as well. So Minnesota is a maple state, right? They produce it? Yes. So yeah, you can understand. I mean, there's producers around us that use fossil fuel or gas to do it. And just because of the essentially unlimited fuel source through firewood on this property, I mean, there's more debt stand. And we work with a forester.

25:52
Lori Raskin and DHW and she does a fantastic job coming out every year and marking out the property and we also work with the DEC, New York State DEC, to maintain a forestry plan. We just got a certification as an American tree farm as well. So you know we're just trying to show the neighbors and everybody around here, anyone who shows up, that we are invested. We're not doing it really. I mean I say for our own pleasure, it is and it isn't, you know.

26:22
As much as I will say, I hate to do the amount of work that we've done. I'm amazed by what we've gotten completed only because of the friends and family we have that we've been able to be so blessed. And, but it has, this has now become like the central point of collection for, for all of at least farm and family events, right? Like this is it, right? So, and we're blessed that way. And for us, we just, we just had our first grandchild between us and it was just, he's

26:51
I can't wait to get them on a four wheeler and start riding through the woods. Yup. Um, make sure that mom is okay with that for you. Yeah. Yari. Well, she, you know, my daughter had her a four wheeler when she was young. She was fine. I'll give him a helmet this time. Okay. Ryan has a very little one as well. So we enjoy them. Yeah. Um,

27:20
my granddaughter, my first son, he's actually my stepson, but he's the first of three boys, is married now. He got married in September. And his wife has a daughter from a previous marriage. And when I met said daughter, she was like eight, I think. And we had had a huge load of firewood brought in, logs to be cut up. And they were really big around logs.

27:51
little girl wanted to climb on the logs and it was the first time we'd met that met her, met her mom and it was scaring the living hell out of me to have her get up on those logs and I basically told her to get down because I didn't want to break a leg and spend the last four days that they were here in a cast and come to find out my stepson was irritated with me for telling her to get down but he never told me.

28:20
And I was just like, I don't want her to break a leg. That would be a horrible memory from visiting the soon to be grandparents from Minnesota. I'm just, I'm just trying to protect this little girl. And my husband was like, from now on, when they visit, why don't you talk to the kid that is ours and find out what she's allowed to do. And then you guys can come to some consensus about what she's allowed to do. I was like, yeah, that's probably a good plan.

28:49
Yep. So that's the only reason I say make sure mom's okay with that. Yeah, I get that a lot. She was fine with it when I was, I was raised. We also had a little girl who was climbing logs and falls down a lot. Well, we were splitting wood and the logs would crawl up. I had to get them down. We were taking turns moving the books. She got them down. Yeah, she got them down. All right.

29:16
What I also didn't know is this little girl has been brought up around, um, dairy cows and steers and, you know, the whole bit. And I had no knowledge of this. Had I known, I might've not been nearly as afraid for her. So yeah, mom's, moms are, are one of two. We're either super, super worried or we're like, eh, if they don't break anything, they're probably fine. You're not bleeding.

29:46
Okay, so we got, we're almost at 30 minutes, but I have a question for you guys. I have two actually. What's your favorite thing about working at the farmstead?

30:01
Um, my favorite thing is really.

30:08
not really the working part. I just like being together and planning it. We do a lot of, we have coffee meetings and we plan out what is the plan, what's the next plan, what's going to happen next weekend. So I enjoy that. Okay. My favorite, the reason that I keep coming here is that it gets my mind off of the rest of my life. Although

30:33
Although all of us happen to work in the same place and live in the same community, we don't tend to talk shop. And whatever we're doing here, whether it's splitting wood or tapping trees or running a wedding or whatever it is, we need to be fully present and fully mindful and it is an escape from everything else that I do on a normal basis and that is what brings me a lot of pleasure. Yeah. I, I have the same. I.

31:02
I'm a task oriented person. I like having a list of things to do. I like to set out and do it. We have everything we need here. As a JDO mentioned, we, we don't sub anything out. All the work is done here. We have all the tools, we have all the heavy equipment. So you just show up and go to work and it just removes you from the world where the news is awful and sometimes the people are awful and you could just come here and forget about everything. Get lost in the woods.

31:31
And at the end of the day, feel accomplished and know that you've, you committed yourself to something better and, um, can relax and distress be part of nature. Yeah. I think that's a big, similar situation, right? Because we all have what I consider to be high stress jobs at the end of the day. We can be us, right? We can talk about things here that we normally wouldn't be able to talk about in our other capacities. It just doesn't happen. And, you know, essentially it's sometimes they

32:00
they mix and match, you know, people that are from Kingston or the other area, they recognize us from time to time and go, Hey, aren't you them? You know, we get that sometimes, but when they see us, you know, we're all cleaned up now, but I got to tell you, I asked my wife, can I be in my regular farm clothes? And she said, absolutely not. There's a Cameron Bob, who was just a microphone to be different. So part of it is that, and that's what I enjoy. I enjoy coming here and I say, come at home, but coming here and working and really looking forward to working with everybody here.

32:29
The plans are different. Certainly there's always, you know, we have four people with four different opinions. Mine usually is the most reserved. Hey, do we really have to build that big? Can we build it smaller? Really? Oh yeah. But at the same time, it's like, that's what I appreciate the most is that there's four different opinions and that's we can bounce off ideas and everybody has a reason why or why not we shouldn't do something or how we should do it.

32:56
And I think that's a big part of what we do. That's very important. I love that. Ryan used to say, I just love coming here because it's like one big sandbox. All right. If we have, I have all the machinery, the dozers, excavators, and we started with nothing and we were just fortunate to be able to, you know, even with the machine over here, right, and buy something and say, he's like, man, that's a nice machine. I go, yeah, except the clutch is bad on it. We're going to have to split it. That's why I got a good deal. And we'd spent a couple of nights over the course of, uh, you know, time to.

33:24
take it all apart and get the manual and wrench it back together and got it working, you know, and more so than not, that was always the case. So we're fortunate. So yeah, I think we're on agreement, right? It just gives us an idea.

33:37
Okay. So is there anything that's a least favorite thing about the farmstead? My least favorite thing is that I get zero cell phone service here, which means people text me all the way. And as I drive home, I get flooded with all this information and texts and phone calls. But at the same time, it's also fantastic because that means I am fully disconnected while I'm here.

34:04
Anybody else? I don't have a least favorite. I wouldn't keep coming back if I had anything I didn't like. Some days are better than others. Some days there's some trying ideas that get passed across the table. And some creative persuasion to push those ideas or pull from one side to the other. But it's all good. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here. Probably one of the things I like the least

34:33
It's January or February and it's really, really cold and we have to go into the woods and I have hand warmers and gloves. Julie says all the time, there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing. And I keep trying and trying to tell myself, that's the truth. But that would probably be the only thing that I really don't look forward to is when it's.

35:02
ridiculously cold and windy and we still have to go in the woods. It doesn't matter. Yeah. To me, I think we set somewhat of an unrealistic goal sometimes. I know I'm guilty of it. They used to call me all kind of ambitious. We're going to get this set, we're going to do the roof, we're going to put the truss down, get the gutters in, we're going to get it all finished, and then we're going to get trenched. And then at the end of the day, we get maybe two-thirds of the way. Daylight's setting and I'm frustrated because we still...

35:27
need to get all this done thinking, okay, one day we got to be back to work and we only have another day to get it. So there's a level of frustration on it. The older I get, the more I realize my mind's thinking one thing, my body's not translating that anymore like it used to. So, but overall we recognize we are absolutely a hundred percent blessed with what we do. We've had some setbacks time to time. In addition to the maple production and the sheep and the bees and everything else, this house and these barns were essentially full rebuild.

35:57
The house didn't pass inspection. It should have been torn down. It's on a stone foundation and there was no heat. The electric had to be redone. We did everything. And unlike some of the other people that are fortunate enough to have the funds or whatever, we didn't and we just were able to afford the property and put it all together. So we're very thankful. And every time I look around, I see the amount of work that we did and go,

36:24
My wife will forget, Alisa will go, what are you looking at? I'm going, do you remember that that door wasn't there? She's like, oh my gosh, you're right. What do you want for dinner? I understand because when we moved here, there was a huge pole barn. There was a useless two car garage and it still stands and it's still useless, can't open the doors and it's not worth fixing. There's a small one car garage that we use as a woodshed, our house, and that was it. That's what was here.

36:54
And now there's an on property farm stand that we had put in for us, because we're not nearly as ingenious as you people, but we love it anyway. And we have a chicken coop and we have a heated greenhouse going up this spring. So I look around at this place now and I'm like, God damn, how did this happen? So I get it.

37:23
All right, guys, this was really fun and I don't want to keep you because, you know, I'm trying real hard to keep this podcast at 30 minutes, but I keep creeping over a little bit. So, appreciate your time. Thank you so much and have a great evening. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Yep. Bye.