S15: E4: STOP Stressing Over Your Garden: My 3 Non-Negotiable Strategies

I love to share the mental health benefits of gardening, but what do you do when your garden makes you feel STRESSED, not serene? I've been there (more than once).

Today I'm sharing my 3 non-negotiable garden strategies that I use every single year to ensure my garden is a place of joy and not overwhelm. A must-listen if you're trying to grow food in the midst of a busy life!

Podcast Episode Highlights

• My current struggles with streamlining my life
• It's fine to question gardening (and even taking a break!)
• Strategy #1: Automate your watering
• Strategy #2: Cover your soil
• Strategy #3: Create garden zones
• Final thoughts...

Resources Mentioned in This Podcast Episode:

Learn more about Aquatru here: www.aquatru.com

• Use the code HOMESTEAD to save 20% on your order

Listen to my podcast episode on mulch here: https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/tph_podcasts/season-15-episode-1-mulching-magic-unlocking-the-secrets-to-a-thriving-garden

OTHER HELPFUL RESOURCES FOR YOUR HOMESTEAD:

• Sign up for weekly musings from my homestead: http://theprairiehomestead.com/letter
• Get my free homesteading tutorials & recipes here: www.theprairiehomestead.com
• Buy Wyoming-raised, grass-finished beef: http://genuinebeefco.com
• Jill on Instagram: @jill.winger
• Jill on Facebook: http://facebook.com/theprairiehomestead
• Apply to be a guest on the Old-Fashioned on Purpose podcast: https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/podcast-guest-application

Did you enjoy listening to this episode? Please drop a comment below or leave a review to let us know. This can help other folks learn about this podcast and we also really appreciate the feedback!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:11

Hey friend, welcome back to the Old Fashioned On Purpose podcast. So gardening, it can be a lot of things. It can be exciting and invigorating, and reviving and relaxing, and it can also be pretty dang stressful, especially considering that summertime for many of us is the busiest time of year. And when you add one of the most labor-intensive homestead aspects, aka gardening, to it, well it can be a recipe for stress. And yes, people like me love to preach about how relaxing gardening can be and how it's so good for our brains and how it grounds us and brings us back into balance. All of those things are absolutely true. But I also know from personal experience, especially this year, that gardening can also bring that level of tension and stress into your life where your heart is pounding and you're feeling overwhelmed, trying to figure out how to keep everything watered, how to keep everything weeded and not let the garden bury you. So today I'm going to talk about how we can grow the gardens that we want to grow, raise the food that we want to raise, without growing a crop of stress at the same time. This is really timely for me right now, so I'm kind of preaching this to myself throughout this episode, but if I had to guess, I bet some of you might benefit from this as well. So this is the Old Fashioned On Purpose podcast, the show where we talk about what we have left behind as we have raced towards progress and how we can get it back. I'm your host, jill Winger. I've been living this homestead lifestyle for a long time, way before. It was cool, and one of my favorite things to do is to teach these old fashioned skills, but also to teach ways to be efficient and just smart as we add them into our modern lives. So, friends, this summer is shaping up to be a doozy and, yes, we are only at like three days into official summer at the time of this recording. But, despite my best laid plans and I'm telling you, I was bound and determined that this summer would not be as busy I did everything within my power underscore that last part within my power to keep that from happening, and it does not look like I'm going to get my wish. It looks like this summer is going to be just as insane as the last few. Man, I don't even know where to start. Just a little bit of a bird's eye view of what we have going on. Just maybe this will help you feel better about your crazy summer.

Speaker 1: 2:44

I explained in the first episode of this season, which wasn't that many, I think it was like two episodes ago we talked about mulch, but I also shared a personal update and I talked about how this idea of streamlining our life, which has been my motto and theme for 2024. It surprised me because it has taken more time to get streamlined than I thought it would, and I'm absolutely feeling that the tension of that this month and this summer especially. You know, I intended again I've said this before, but I'll say it again I intended in January to cut a lot of things and prune a lot of things out of our life, and they're still here, despite my massive action taking, despite my best efforts, despite doing everything within my power. So all I can conclude from that is that there's a reason these things are still in our life. There are lessons that we still have to learn, and so I've thrown a few tantrums over it, but I have come to the conclusion that I'm going to seek those lessons and just sink into this because, you know, I thought universe or God, or whoever you want to describe it.

Speaker 1: 3:44

I thought I was kind of being given this message of streamline, and maybe I think that still is the message, but I think it's not the answer. The ultimate message is not yet. So finish well, what we have going. So a big piece of that is the Soda Fountain. You know we've had a lot of interested parties. Right now the interest rates are scaring folks off, and so it's been disappointing to have some really amazing buyers come. They like the model, they like the business, but ultimately they backed away just because of the crazy interest rates. I don't know when the Fed will adjust those. I don't know what the election year is going to do to that.

Speaker 1: 4:18

So, knowing that that's completely out of my control, that I think for this period we are going to continue to just operate the soda fountain well, and Christian and I have a number of growth strategies that we had kind of put on the back burner because we thought it was going to be selling sooner versus later, and so we decided to dig deep, dig back in. No one's coming to save us. That's something I tell myself all the time. So we're going to get back in there. We're going to figure out how to add some cool advertising options. We're updating the menu. We're just continuing to improve it, which is awesome and I feel good about it.

Speaker 1: 4:50

I felt a little bit confused for a while, but within that, I'm also going well. This is going to be more complex this summer. There's a lot of things at the charter school that are amazing, that are happening but also taking a lot of time and focus. I have kid activities, like most of you, 4-h and different sports and lessons running them all over the place. I'm trying to keep riding the horses and practice my roping, and we have a clinic coming up for eight days, which is amazing and one of my favorite times of the year, but it takes a lot of prep, but there's just a lot going on.

Speaker 1: 5:20

So, needless to say, I honestly sat myself down at the beginning of the growing season and said you know, jill, do you even want to have a garden this year? Like, should you even have a garden? And I think that's a fair question to ask yourself in a year where you feel like things might get out of control, and there's no shame in taking a year off from the garden. I think a lot of times, as homesteaders, we have this self-induced set of rules or standards we think we must uphold in order to be legit and having a garden. I mean, whether we are conscious or subconscious about that self-talk a garden's a big one, right? Can you be a real homesteader without a summer garden? Well, you can, and it's okay to take some time off, for whatever reason.

Speaker 1: 6:03

When it was time to plant in May, I really wanted to garden and I knew it would be a little bit of stress to keep it going, but I still wanted it, so I didn't feel like it was something I wanted to prune from this year. I will say, though, like I explained on that previous episode, I didn't put in two of my really, really big, long rows that had a lot of potatoes and a lot of onions. I still planted potatoes and onions, but in smaller quantities, and that felt like a happy medium because those rows are so much work to maintain. So taking that off my plate has been beneficial, but I still have a large greenhouse and a very large outdoor raised bed garden that I am growing in at the moment, so I have been forced to be extremely efficient and strategic in my gardening this year. I don't have full days to just go piddle around out there, and perhaps that's part of the lesson and the blessing in disguise is that I've had to get extremely efficient and focused. When I'm out in the garden, it's still feeding me. When I go out there, right, it's still helping me relax. But using the three strategies I'm going to share with you today, it has given me the ability to feel much less stress from my growing spaces and actually allow them to fill my cup when I'm out there, instead of like heart racing, panting, trying to get through the chores as fast as I can and so likely.

Speaker 1: 7:29

If you followed me for any amount of time, you've heard me refer to some of these strategies before, but I just think it's so important to talk about them again because they are 1000% saving my life this year, like I wouldn't be able to have a garden in the midst of our current schedule without them. So I'm going to go into them just in case you missed the previous times I've talked about it, just to give you some actionable strategies, because they are game changers. Okay, so number one said it before, I'll say it again automate your watering Hands down. This is the number one way you can reduce your garden stress, especially if you have a garden of any size, you know, if you just have a couple pots on your patio, you're fine. But any sort of actual food production garden, if you can automate that watering, not only will that take a massive load off of you mentally, but your plants will grow so much better. Massive load off of you mentally, but your plants will grow so much better.

Speaker 1: 8:26

Because in the past I fought this. Before Christian helped me set up our system, I was like, oh, it's unnecessary, it costs money, we don't need it, I just have myself in a hose or a sprinkler and it's good enough. And when I finally decided I'd give the automated system a try, things just grew better. Because I was inadvertently skimping on the water, because it's fun to hand water the first few days after you plant your garden and then it becomes a massive chore. I don't know about you, but we are dealing with an incredibly dry summer, like a depressing summer. It is June 24th at the time of this recording and I am already. I mean, it's brown, it looks like August outside. There's no grass, everything's dry and crusty, and so, especially on a summer like this one, if it's entirely up to me to water, I'm going to be spending hours a day out there with the hose or setting up sprinklers and try not to remember that or try not to forget that they're on.

Speaker 1: 9:22

So we have an automated or actually it's not automated in the greenhouse, but it's I'll explain that in a minute. But our outdoor garden is automated and it's huge. So let me describe how these systems work, just to kind of give you a visual or an audio visual, or however you want to think of it. Your system doesn't have to look like mine. There's a million and one ways to do this, but here's how we've done ours.

Speaker 1: 9:46

Okay, so if you've seen pictures of my raised bed garden, they're those metal boxes. They're like four by 10, I think, and there's 20 boxes. And so initially when we built the boxes, christian ran PVC pipe, like flexible plastic pipe, in to each bed as we were filling them with dirt, and then brought a pipe up through the middle PVC. So we had like a port coming up through each bed. And then on top of that port he had put a little manifold like, and we got all of our parts from Lowe's or Home Depot, so these are not specialty parts, they have a whole aisle of sprinkler things. So we got this little manifold that would have four ports on it and then from each I don't know if I'm using the right words, but just bear with me From each little port, we would run spaghetti line that would go in to the bed, and so there was four strands of spaghetti line, and on the end of the spaghetti line I would get these little they're on little spikes, they're super cheap, like a buck a piece um, little sprinkler heads, they're like mini sprinklers, so.

Speaker 1: 10:47

So they'll picture this four by ten bed with four lines running into it and that um. And then there was a valve on the uh pipe. So the pipe that came out of the ground had a, a valve we could shut on and off if we were winterizing it or whatever, or if I didn't want water in a certain bed yet, and that was was it. And so he put a timer on the faucet. So generally over the years we've run that set of beds because there's 20 beds, that's a lot of beds. We break it up into three or four zones so we have enough water pressure and we'll run each zone like three minutes three times a day, three to five minutes depending on the year. So it's not a lot of time that it is going out, but it really makes a huge difference. And I'm always shocked, even in our driest summers, our windiest summers, which is this year, is so windy it's horrible. Those three little or two little spurts of watering totally keep it wet enough throughout the day. But stuff grows so much better. And every year, you know, when I first plant the garden, I kind of get everything planted and then I set up the sprinklers. That week or so before the sprinklers are up, I feel that stress so much because I'm out there with the hose, dragging the hose, getting the hose stuck on the corners of the beds, trying to get everything watered. It's drying out fast. So they are game changers In our greenhouse. Oh, hold on, I need to make an amendment to that.

Speaker 1: 12:11

So initially, like I said, we ran the pipes up through the raised beds. However, a few years ago we noticed a leak somewhere underground and there was some things that had broken, probably frozen or whatever. Even though we blew out the pipes every year, there was some issues. So instead of digging all that up, which would have been a nightmare, christian rerouted the system and this time he just ran pipes along the fence that's on the border of those beds, and then we just have that manifold poking into the one edge of the bed. So it's no longer an underground system for us, it's an above ground system. Otherwise the spaghetti line and everything works the same. But that has allowed us to do repairs as needed without digging up the world. So if we were to start over with the raised bed setup, I would totally do an above ground system again, not an underground system.

Speaker 1: 13:04

Hey friend, I'm interrupting this episode for just a second to tell you about something new that I recently discovered and I think you might be interested. So here on the show we talk a lot about ingredient swaps and how we can get back to the nutrients we're designed to consume without all of the industrial junk, and one of the ingredients that's super important that I think we often overlook is water. So obviously our bodies are made up primarily of water and we're supposed to consume a lot of water during the day. Whether or not we do that is a whole nother topic, and beyond that, water can greatly affect the outcomes of some of your old fashioned from scratch foods. I'm mainly thinking of things like sourdough or lacto fermented veggies.

Speaker 1: 13:48

So I was really excited to discover AquaTrue, which is a reverse osmosis countertop water purifying system. Kind of a mouthful, but it's super cool because it filters out a ton of chemicals that are likely in your tap water that could not only be less than ideal for your body, but they may be messing up your homemade foods and you don't even realize it. This filter will take out the forever chemicals. Think like PFAS, fluoride, chlorine, arsenic, nitrates, pesticides and herbicides, and those last three are especially concerning if you live in an area with a lot of industrial farming, because they'll get into the groundwater. And I think what I love most about it is it's a counter top purifier pitcher system, so you don't have to redo your plumbing, you don't have to hire someone to install it, you just take it out of the box and go. Honestly, my 11 year old put it all together for me and it was super easy. So it filters out 15 times more contaminants than an ordinary pitcher, and I especially love the chlorine part, because I wish I had a nickel for every time. One of you have emailed me asking how to get the chlorine out of your water for your sourdough starter. So it can do that, plus so much more. One filter lasts anywhere from six months up to two years and if you're, if you have been buying bottled water. It will save you the same as buying up to 4,500 bottles of water. So it's a really good deal. And if you head on over to aquatrucom that's A-Q-U-A-T-R-Ucom and use the code homestead, you can save 20%. So head on over, check it out and let's get back to the show.

Speaker 1: 15:32

Okay, so over on the greenhouse side we put very short beds that are not raised beds, but we just built little boxes with two by fours. When we laid out the growing areas of the greenhouse and Christian kind of did the same thing where he had a pipe, he laid pipe on the ground, had the pipe run up the middle and then buried it, and again we'd have found there was issues with that system. I don't think necessarily in the greenhouse it was because it was underground. We didn't have any breakages yet, but the pressure was really struggling, and so because in this you probably wouldn't have this issue, but our greenhouse is far away from our main water system, so it was lower pressure anyway, and then trying to get pressure to come up that way just wasn't working. So last year he redid it and you may have seen me post an Instagram story. I'll probably post another one again here in a couple of weeks or a couple of days. But he rerouted it.

Speaker 1: 16:24

So now our greenhouse waters from the top, and I know a lot of people say you shouldn't water from the top. Well, I get it, but ours kind of mimics the rain, right? So, um, what I do once a day or twice a day if it's super duper hot. I have two little valves, cause there's two zones. I just flip the valve. So that is a manual process, right? You just have to flip the valve and then I let that water rain down in the greenhouse for about three minutes on each zone and it looks totally like the rainforest. It's very tropical and humid in there.

Speaker 1: 16:56

I leave my greenhouse doors open in the summer to keep the heat from becoming unbearable, but also to let pollinators in, and that's been sufficient. So could we automate that on a timer? Yes, we probably could. We haven't done that yet and, honestly, like we just had someone do chores for us this weekend, it was super easy for him. I just could say, hey, go flip that switch and just stand there for three minutes on each zone, and that was easy enough. So anyway, that is my lifesaver in the summer, especially on summers like this one where it's so freaking hot, like my other stuff that's not on timers or on automation, just like my pots and my deck, like I almost can't water them enough right now because the wind is so strong and the heat is so oppressive. This is rough. So if you can automate in any way, shape or form, it doesn't have to be as elaborate as mine. You just get a timer for a sprinkler or you know, there's all kinds of little tips and tools at Lowe's or Home Depot. Do it, it will make your garden so much less stressful. All right.

Speaker 1: 17:56

Number two my number two strategy is cover your soil, and I'm not going to belabor this point because I just did an episode, two weeks ago I think, on the mulch. So go back and listen to that one where I do a deep, deep dive on mulch materials and mulch techniques and all those things. But I just have to say mulch saves me a ton of stress because it does reduce weeds and weeds are one of those things. You know the water is non-negotiable. The weeding is something that if my days are just nuts and I've been in and out of chug water all day and running kids all over, if I run out of time to weed. I run out of time to weed, but it's something that weighs on me mentally and knowing that the weeds are growing and the weeds are coming, I don't like that feeling and I don't enjoy my gardens as much. So when I cover that soil it doesn't eliminate every single weed, but it does a lot.

Speaker 1: 18:48

I was just out in the garden a minute ago before I came in to record this. I've been gone for a few days and so I just was out surveying how things were looking. I have a bed of cabbages that I put mulch on probably two weeks ago and I went out there and they look great. They, you know, since I've been gone, they don't. They grew, but there's really no weeds. There's maybe one or two poking up through the mulch. Looks fantastic. Better than I left it, no issues.

Speaker 1: 19:15

I walked a few beds down to a potato bed that I had left. I didn't have enough mulch when I left for the trip and so I didn't put any mulch on that bed yet and when I left I looked at it it and I was like, ah, it's okay, it's not too bad, not worried about that bed. And I get there today and I'm looking and these weeds are like overtaking the potatoes, because you know how weeds grow. It's like two feet an hour, it's like they grow faster than anything else. And so instantly I see the potato bed and I'm like feeling that, oh no, I got to get it weeded. If I had emulsified it before I left, I wouldn't be feeling that. And again, that's not the end of the world. The potatoes won't die. Weeds aren't like the kiss of death every single time. But I just know, for my mental stress load, covering that soil just reduces that mental tension. It reduces the amount of weeding I have to do Um game changer. So again, go back and listen to that episode.

Speaker 1: 20:05

I don't want to reinvent the wheel here, but Alrighty, and now my number three stress-free gardening strategies. This is one of my favorites, just because it works so well with how my brain works, and this is to use garden zones. So this is something I mean. I call them zones. Maybe you call them something else. I came up with the name zones and this is how I think of it. But with the way my brain works, you may or may not be like this.

Speaker 1: 20:40

I am motivated by completion. I'm motivated by checking off a box. That's why I love my planner. That's why I love checklists. I need that. When I get that, I get enough dopamine and it drives me forward and that's very, very motivating for me.

Speaker 1: 20:56

What kills my motivation and makes me feel panicky and stressed faster than anything is when I am doing a huge job and I can't feel that sense of like okay, I did enough. For today, I did the thing I needed to do. If it's like a never ending giant project and I will literally run myself in the ground trying to feel like I did enough, and that's not healthy and that's a huge weakness of mine. So I've learned how to game my brain over the years when I'm doing a big project. So what I've learned to do is to break big tasks up into manageable chunks and plan out enough chunks for each day that I feel like I did something. But I can also feel like, at the end of the day, I can shut the computer, I can walk away from the garden, I can walk away from the project and feel like I did the thing I needed to do.

Speaker 1: 21:44

So a way I did this this is a non-gardening example with my book, when I was writing old fashioned, on purpose, writing a book 80 plus thousand words is a huge undertaking. You never get that feeling of I'm done because you aren't done for sometimes years of that process, and for someone like me that can just be so draining to feel like I'm not doing enough. I have to do more, more, more. And so what I did with that book is I broke up each phase, whether it was the writing or the editing or the other rounds of editing, because there were many. I broke them up into chunks and so like, for example, when I was writing the book, I knew I had 12 chapters and so I knew that each chapter would have an introduction and a body and I had some practical pieces, and so I broke each chapter into pieces. And then I looked at how many months I had before my deadline and assigned chapters and chunks into each day and week and I had it on my.

Speaker 1: 22:39

I love a big whiteboard with a fresh marker. Like nothing makes me happier. So I had this crazy looking scientist whiteboard thing in my office and I had columns and checkboxes and deadlines and dates and arrows and I lived and died by that whiteboard with those checklists. But it made me feel so much better and I could look at like okay, I wrote this chapter today, I could check it off and I knew that tomorrow I'm going to proofread that chapter and then the next day I'm going to add the recipe to that chapter. And I could feel like I was on track. I wasn't laying awake at night worrying if I had done enough or if I was going to be missing a deadline.

Speaker 1: 23:14

And so I take that principle and I have put it into gardening, because when you are staring down the barrel of a very weedy garden because they get ahead of us really easily, right, they can get out of control fast. You go away for the weekend, you come back and you feel like you're weeks behind. So the way that I deal with that stress of feeling like I didn't weed enough for, oh my gosh, am I going to get this done in time is I break my garden into chunks and that's what I call the zones. So here's the practical method for how I do this. So the first thing I do is I decide how many days a week I can be in my garden. Now, right now I can do about five days a week, sometimes seven, sometimes six, sometimes three, depending on the schedule, but I know that I at least have, let's say, 15 minutes a day, five days a week, that I can go piddle around in the garden. Some days I might have a little more, some days a little less, but you get the idea.

Speaker 1: 24:10

So, because I know I have five days, I have broken my garden up into five zones and when I first did this I had to literally draw it out on paper and draw my little boxes and I colored them one color for each zone. And these days I just do it in my head and so I know that, for example, let's say, monday is day one. So I'm going to focus on zone one. I'm going to walk in the garden and then make sure things aren't like imploding or on fire. But I'm going to make sure things aren't like imploding or on fire, but I'm not going to really focus on anything else except that one zone. So I go into zone one and I get everything done there I can possibly do and I work on it till it's done.

Speaker 1: 24:47

And so for me that's usually about four of my raised beds and I will weed them, I will mulch them if they need fresh mulch or new mulch, I will prune them Like if they're tomato plants, I'll pinch suckers off of the tomato plants. I will replant things that aren't growing well. I don't know what it is about this year, but my cucumbers and my squash seeds will not germinate. I've replanted them twice already. I was out there today and I'm going to have to replant them again. They won't germinate. I don't know what's going on. So I'm, you know, replant whatever needs replanted in that beds. I may trellis or stake things, tie them up. I may, you know, take weeds For me. I have walkways around those zone beds and so I will weed around the walkways, clean up any trash, make sure the sprinklers are covering properly, just kind of check the soil dampness.

Speaker 1: 25:40

So I do everything I need to do in that zone. It sounds like a lot, but honestly it's usually 10 or 15 minutes, especially if I'm doing this every week, and I can have that whole zone in tip-top shape. And then, if that's all the time I have for that day, that's okay. I can go in back in the house, check off my garden chores for the day and I feel that sense of completion which is really important for our brains. So we don't start feeling stressed out If I have a really open day, which is not happening right now very much. I might do two zones and just kind of beat the system a little bit. But even if it's just one zone a day 10 or 15 minutes I just rotate through that and it goes such a long way in keeping my garden where it needs to be, making sure things are growing. But also I just don't feel stressed because I know, oh, that zone over there I'm going to deal with that Wednesday. Oh, that's Friday's zone.

Speaker 1: 26:30

I don't have to jump ahead because what I would do otherwise back in the day is and maybe you've done this too you go out, you find a weed, you pick this weed. You pick, you weed this bed for a little bit, or this row. Then you see another big weed on this row, so you mosey over there and then you go weed this edge and you go pull this. You know the sucker off this tomato plant. You go tie up this bean plant and you've spent 30 minutes out there but you don't feel like you've done anything because you've just kind of grazed all over the garden and you can't see what you've done. So it's just a simple little brain hack that I use. But man, combine that with the mulch and the automatic watering it is, it makes such a massive difference in my ability to enjoy my garden versus resenting it. So, anyway, these are common sense things.

Speaker 1: 27:20

You may have listened to this episode and gone duh, I knew all that. Or some of you might've gone, wow, never thought of it that way. But I hope it was helpful. I hope it encouraged you to think about just how you do your homestead chores and how you could do them more efficiently. There's just sometimes the smallest things we can do to reduce our steps, to make our lives a little bit easier, to take that mental load off that can transform our food production activities from stress or drudgery into something that can be relaxing. And these days I have found and this is where I think the magic really happens this is what I talk about so much in Old Fashioned, on Purpose. The garden is something that's utilitarian right, we're growing food to eat, but there's something beautiful that happens where the garden can begin to nurture us too.

Speaker 1: 28:09

And I find that when I am able to take these measures that I shared today and cut through the stress and get rid of that stress and overwhelm, that that's when I start to feel relaxed in the garden. That's where my heart rate goes down. You know, I've been wearing this aura ring this is not an advertisement, this is just me sharing because I was starting to want to track my stress levels, because I felt like there were so many days where I was super stressed and I was wanting to see how that was affecting my sleep and just get data around that. And so I got an Oura Ring and I've just been watching. It gives me a stress report at the end of the day and I love so much when it's showing me in the garden, it'll be like oh, you know, at 6pm you were in the restored state, you were in the relaxed state.

Speaker 1: 28:58

I'm like, oh, that's when I was in my garden and it hasn't always been like that for me. There's been times where I'm out in the garden sweating and my heart's racing and feeling resentful of it because I just have to get it done, just have to get it done, and that's just not enjoyable, that's not going to be sustainable long term. So figure out how you can manage that overwhelm so the garden can be a place of relaxation and joy and these days, when I get back from a busy day at the soda fountain or helping with the school or running around with kids doing a hundred different things. I look forward to going out at dusk or after supper, when it cools down a little bit, and just tinkering and doing the weeding. And my breathing slows and I sometimes will listen to a podcast or sometimes I'll just bask in the silence. And that's one of the biggest harvests you can reap from this home food production. It's the vegetables, but more so it's that feeling of peace and groundedness and that's what it's all about.

Speaker 1: 29:47

So I hope this was helpful for you today. I hope that you get to grow food this year and enjoy the process. I'm not saying it's always easy. There's days where it's still challenging or it's just another to-do list, and it's okay to feel like that sometimes too. But I think when we can step back and get strategic, we can really enjoy this homestead journey as we go along. So that's what I have for you today. Friends, short and sweet, go forth into your garden. I hope that you can enjoy some relaxing time out there and I will be back to chat with you in the next episode of the Old Fashioned On Purpose podcast.