Episode 97: Homesteading with Amy Taye

Episode 97: Homesteading with Amy Taye

Introduction and Welcome

Autumn Carter: this is episode 97.

Welcome to wellness in every season the podcast where we explore the rich tapestry of wellness in all its forms I am your host autumn carter a certified life coach Turned wellness coach as well as a certified parenting coach Dedicated to empowering others to rediscover their identity in their current season of life My goal is to help you thrive as an individual and as a parent.

Meet Amy Tay: Homesteading Enthusiast

Autumn Carter: Today I have with me somebody who I met through my church, and I promise we're not gonna get churchy, but she has her own homestead. Her name is Amy Tay, and I do a girls night out every month with a bunch of women from church, we decided to invite ourselves over to her house to learn about Her plants and how to care for them because every Mother's Day she is kind enough to grow a bunch of plants and have the women in our church come and take some plants home.

And I overheard several women talking about how they did not know how to care for these plants. They were afraid that they were just gonna kill them after all the care that she put into them. So that was our whole plan with our ladies night out. And My mind was blown enough that I wanted to have her on.

So welcome, Amy. this podcast is all about wellness. So I figure this really goes well with environmental wellness.

Amy's Journey into Gardening and Health

Autumn Carter: Tell us a little bit about your journey, did you grow up in a family who was really into taking care of plants? Tell us about this path of yours.

Amy Taye: No, my parents are always really shocked when they see what I'm doing. We did the try it, plant a few plants, tomato garden, and that's pretty much it. Sounds like mine. Yeah. everyone does that let's try this and see how it goes. I think I definitely had like little steps as I was a child.

Like I loved the movie, The Secret Garden. And then my friend and I, when we were like seven, tried to make our own secret garden in the backyard. Me too! There were definitely moments that I can look back on and be like, oh yeah, I liked that movie so much. And then I was the one who ended up taking care of the little garden after my parents abandoned it.

I remember doing that. And then I did do some 4 H like cooking classes. I was super into like nutrition and health from like fourth grade. When I read about cholesterol in my weekly reader, I was like, okay, to eat healthy. and my dad was into health food stuff. So the health food part of it that was ingrained from my parents, the garden part of it, I don't feel like I really got into it until I was married.

Understanding 4-H and Its Impact

Autumn Carter: Take us back there for a second. That has to do with farming and there's something to do with the fair. That's about all I know.

Amy Taye: Yeah, that's right. 4 H is it's purpose is to help people in the community. Get to know our local agriculture. So that's why 4 H is part of the sponsorship of the fair.

Like it's an integral part of the fair to help people know agriculture, but it's also a little bit like Cub Scouts or that kind of thing where you're learning about that particular subject as well. So the 4 H. You can be in multiple clubs, but you pick according to your topic area of interest.

You don't have to have that kind of if you wanted to be in the dairy club, you don't have to have a dairy cow. You just go to the meetings, they're only once a month. And then you go for the week of the fair and if you didn't have that kind of animal at home, you would sponsor one at someone else's farm and go help with it so that you could learn about it.

But every month there's a meeting that teaches you about a different aspect of that part of agriculture.

Autumn Carter: Wow. I feel like with how much we're going to talk, we'll see how well we keep in the timeframe

Amy Taye: Yeah.

Autumn Carter: Because I know that there's so much information that we can gain from you.

so what led you into 4 H to begin with?

Amy Taye: we just had people at church that were doing 4 H, and I think my parents were a little bit worried about how health conscious I was.

Autumn Carter: Little did they wanted me to do this 4 H cooking class because, I was really worried about fat and cholesterol after I read about it in my weekly readers. So I think they wanted me to take it to tone it down and be a little bit more normal. Did it work? no, not really. I did learn a lot about it was true that I was trying to cut out like all fat and cholesterol.

Amy Taye: And now I know that's the wrong thing to do. Like we want complete foods, but example of how I was when I was a kid about health stuff.

Autumn Carter: So you were already naturally leaning this way. Tell us more about your journey.

Starting a Homestead: Amy's Experience

Amy Taye: So when I got married, we lived in a little house in Gaithersburg.

We specifically were looking for that house because of the land. I was like, I don't care about how big the house is. I want to be able to grow food and have a little garden. and we started with four small garden boxes. And then I just slowly replaced all the landscaping around that house with edible plants.

so that instead of Regular bushes, there was blueberry bushes and a cherry tree and quince and cranberries and all kinds of things around the outside of that. Even though it was a small property, it was like stuffed with edible things.

Autumn Carter: Is that what caused you to move to the house you're at now? Is you needed more land?

Amy Taye: That's what I was going to say. So when we moved to that house, we had one baby and then we had four when we moved out of that house and it was like basically a two bedroom house. Yikes. so we had four kids in one bedroom and then that was,

Autumn Carter: So it's like a mansion in comparison.

Amy Taye: Yeah. That was part of the motivation. And then also we had chickens, but, I wanted to do rabbits and I could already start to see like all the ways that the system could like work together if I had some animals that were part of it. And if I had more space to. Do more let more fruit trees. We had started at that.

Even in that little house. We did no shopping month and we would test out our food stores and how self sustaining we were. If we could go a month without going to the grocery store, which is really hard to do with that little tiny properties.

Autumn Carter: And. It's from when you were showing us around your property in person, which you'll have to send pictures so I can share it with the listeners here.

if you're willing, it sounded like this was something that you were interested in and your husband was willing and then learned along the way. how did that work?

Amy Taye: Yeah, that's still what's happening. He's I love you. So I'm helping you with this stuff, but it's not his dream.

he's like kind of ambivalent about it. I think he likes it more now, but it's not like he's. All gung ho about it too. No, it's definitely

Autumn Carter: my

Amy Taye: thing.

The Importance of Soil Health

Autumn Carter: So tell us about your ecosystem that happens in your yard and why you started adding animals in and the layers that are in there, can you tell us about that and go into a little bit of detail to help people who don't know what homesteading is or.

I went away with, wow, I need to do a lot more for my soil, for my plants. Maybe that's why they're meh. I can do flowers just fine, but if it's something edible.

Amy Taye: Yeah. I think a lot of people miss the soil piece and it's just, we're just learning so much about soil.

We barely scratched the surface of our understanding of like plant communication and all these fungal networks that are under the soil and how nutrients are moving through the soil

They're like plants on an Ivy. They're just sucking up nutrients because you're using something that is already formulated for them to just take in. But really healthy plants have a lot of organic matter in the soil that makes it so that there can be a lot of micro organisms in the soil. They're happy when there's a lot of organic matter and then so are the fungi and they're all interconnected, working with each other to make sure that plants get the food that they need.

So starting from the bottom up. You really need organic matter and balanced organic matter in your soil so that the plants can get what they need because if there's, if a nutrient isn't in your soil, then you can eat a nice carrot from that soil, but you're not going to get any nutrients from, or whatever nutrient it is, you're not going to get it in that carrot, especially micronutrients.

Autumn Carter: you had several, I soaked up too much information and now I need to figure out how to sort and process this.

And I know this is a really great place to insert this.

Amy's Homesteading Planner

Autumn Carter: You also have a homesteading book that you wrote. You were holding onto it. When you were showing us your property, it's like a

Amy Taye: planner. It's like a planner. So it has. 30 pages that are like information pages. a lot of it is, like a weekly planner.

So I have it so that I keep a diary of what's happening in my garden. And I keep all those pages bound together in my,

Autumn Carter: Tell us the name of it and how to find it, though,

Amy Taye: for those that might be interested. It is the Homestead Garden Journal and Planner. it is available on Amazon. It is available to print on Etsy.

Some people were overwhelmed, like they didn't want weekly planner pages, they just wanted the how to pages. And if you're in that category, then buy it for cheaper on Etsy rather than buying it on Amazon. But It's nice to have it be bound because that was why I made it I had a page about this and a page about that.

And I was them all together in a binder. And then things were getting lost. And it was all separate from my actual planner. So now it's organized like a workbook. the pages that you need before you start working on garden things at the beginning of January, they're all at the front.

then you have January and you have a checklist of what things you should be doing in your garden in January. And then, planning your garden, planning the seeds that you should be ordering, et cetera. And your garden layout and all that kind of stuff is happening in January. So that by the time you get to the time that most people are thinking about gardening in March or April, you're ready.

You've already had time to start seedlings and prepare the soil and soil test

Autumn Carter: All the things that I miss. I don't think about it until May and I'm like, oh, I miss. It's part of the season already. I know, I'm not the only one.

Amy Taye: It's just really hard to think through how to spread that out in a normal time frame versus getting overwhelmed by it when springtime hits.

Autumn Carter: Yes, especially when you had kids to it.

Amy Taye: Yeah. Is actually going to high school, public school for high school this year. She just wanted to try it, so everyone else is homeschooled though.

Autumn Carter: And then, going into you having a weekly schedule, when you were showing us your basement and your growing station and your seeds, do you even have that mapped out?

You have it file organized, I thought that was really cool.

Amy Taye: yeah, so the seeds, I have them organized like a card catalog so that I can just go down there and look at the date on the card catalog and say, okay, these seed packets that are behind this day, those need to do something during this week or two.

Autumn Carter: It doesn't

Amy Taye: the better. Yeah, exactly. So the less I have to think about it during the busy season, the better if I can make that card catalog in January when I'm just sitting here like wishing I could garden then and it helps a lot later.

Autumn Carter: When there's freezing rain and everything else going on

Amy Taye: soil getting back to that, I think that's huge. And that's where the animals came into it is I started looking at my soil and thinking I need manure for this soil. I need green manure. I need animal manure. I need all kinds of organic matter to add to this soil. I started buying when we lived in our little house in Gaithersburg, I started buying buckets of rabbit manure from other people.

And so I knew when we moved to this house, it's I need rabbits because rabbit manure is really like you can put cow manure or horse manure, but rabbit manure has a really good balance of nitrogen and potassium and calcium, which are your main elements that are going into the soil. So it's perfect.

Autumn Carter: adding ducks.

Amy Taye: Yeah, and then we added the other things that would make different contributions to the system. Like the ducks to eat the slugs. Ducks love the squishy things. slugs, snails, grubs, ducks are All over those things and all the ducks are free range because otherwise they're super messy they drink a lot of water and everything that comes out is very watery, so it needs to be spread out over a big area not pen.

And then chickens have their own jobs to do with aerating the soil because their beaks are sharp they're really good at composting things and eating more unusual things Last year we grew eight or 900 pounds of winter squash.

And I use that to feed my chickens throughout the winter and they can peck at it and pull it apart and use things that they're not going to be able to use. So just making sure that we, it's a permaculture thing, like for every problem, it can be turned into a solution.

And how do I incorporate that into my system in such a way that it's not wasted and how do I feed my animals less expensively?

Autumn Carter: sounds like you're back in touch with what our ancestors used to do, what they figured out and what we have grown away from

Amy Taye: Yeah. I feel like a lot of that has been lost, but.

with the homestead movement or our most recent homestead movement. People are keep getting more in touch with it. Of course, there's like the Amish who never stopped doing things the old way, although a lot of them use not commercial farming equipment, but commercial farming, like fertilizers and stuff like that.

Autumn Carter: went to, I didn't even know that. And we can say Amish, we can mention them because we are in Maryland and the Amish stayed above us.

Amy Taye: That's true.

Autumn Carter: Once in a while I'll catch them when I'm driving on one of the more quiet roads and I'm shocked to there's a horse and buggy right here in Maryland.

Amy Taye: Yeah, I feel a close kinship with them because they're trying to do a lot of the same things that I'm trying to do.

Autumn Carter: But I walked through your house, you still have air conditioning and it's a total normal house.

Amy Taye: This, is because of my husband. If it wasn't for him, I would be way more extreme.

So you two try to balance each other out. Yeah, luckily he keeps me in check. Don't you want to move to the wilderness and build a cabin? No. Let's not do that. he keeps me in check, yeah.

Autumn Carter: Sometimes they slow us down too though. No, We don't need to go extreme.

Yes, that's my husband. You don't need to go extreme in this area. Take a chill pill. He's a lot more gentle than that. That's more my wording. Yeah. So it sounds like When you were getting married, you already had a plan for having a pretty big garden and then it's just naturally. Yeah.

Amy Taye: Yeah. I think, it's just, I knew I wanted to do some self sufficiency things and gardening was already in my mind as something that I liked.

I don't know exactly how did I get to that? I just knew that I wanted to look. I think maybe subconsciously I realized that it would be good for me, but

Autumn Carter: yeah. And you said that's what your workout is at gardening.

Amy Taye: Yeah. hindsight is 2020, right?

So now that I'm 10, 15 years into it, eight years at this house and then six years at the other house. I can look back and say, oh, I can see where that was fulfilling a need for me as I was transitioning from working full-time and that being my contribution to the family, to working part-time and being home with kids and still wanting something that made me feel like I was producing something tangible the food being

An immediate need fulfilling a financial need and a health need. was a perfect fit in what I was looking for in terms of, contributing something getting outside exercising and I can do it with my kids they're getting outside I wasn't able to do as much with little kids as I'm doing.

Now my youngest is four. there's a big age gap between him and the next one. the four older kids, age is 15 to 9 help a lot. that's because I taught them when they were little let's do this. Let's plant these seeds. They all know how to do it. They all know how to transplant things.

Autumn Carter: I'm looking at the time, so I can ask you some questions.

Tips for Houseplants and Edible Gardens

Autumn Carter: what would you recommend to somebody who's more like me? And I heard that from a lot of the different women that were there that night they just want to start like maybe with their houseplants and you did, you offered some advice there that night, what would you offer for houseplants and then just basic starting on an outdoor garden?

Amy Taye: Are you talking about houseplants that are edible, or just houseplants in general?

Autumn Carter: Houseplants for pretty and cleaning the air.

Amy Taye: Okay, so houseplants for pretty and cleaning the air they're in their own little pot and you do have to that's the biggest it's the same question like someone comes to me and says my house I've had it for three years and now it's just not doing as well and I'm like so when was the last time you fed that house plant and they're always like I'm supposed to feed it?

what do I, what am I supposed to do? there's a certain amount of nutrients that came in the soil that you put into that pot. But it has a, it doesn't last, the plant used it, and once that's gone, then you have to feed it with something. And unless that plant has a microbiome happening in the soil that it's in, probably not, because it's in a pot in the house, you have to use Miracle Gro for those plants.

Which is why I was asking if it was edible or not. So for Houseplant, I do, I use Miracle Grow because they've gotta have something to eat and they don't have the microbiome in the pot with them. So if you're just trying to make it pretty, then like once a month it needs it's, it needs to be fed.

I have a fiddle leaf Big that is one of those ones that gets really big, like a tree size, and it's happy still in the house. I also have a, I'm gonna forget the name of it. It's like a Norway pine. That makes pretty feathery leaves and it's also surprisingly happy in the house

And I was like, this is gonna die like I can't believe it survived in her house it looks like it needs tons of sun. It's fine in a little corner I mean it does get some sun, but it's not South facing that window isn't South facing like East facing. So the biggest thing with houseplants is make sure you keep feeding them, and then make sure that they're in a place where they can get the kind of sunlight that they want, like spider plants and anything in the ficus family, like they're all fine with not too much sun, but anything that's like a succulent or a cactus, those all need some sun, and especially if it's something that is going to flower, it needs sun to make those flowers.

If it's just green and leafy, it can do that with less light, but if it's going to flower, most of the time, those plants are going to need a fair amount of sun. There's certain ones, like impatiens, that can grow without sun, but they're an annual, so you have a short shelf life, too. I think that's the other thing people do, is they buy a cute plant at Home Depot, and they put it in their pot at their house.

Without realizing that they bought an annual. It's an annual so it lives one year and then it dies So if you're looking for a house plant, that's a flower. You want to get one. That's a perennial

Mums can be perennial, if they don't get too cold. trying to think of, I don't know if echinacea does well in a pot in the house, but there's a bunch that are perennial flowers that you probably do find in the house.

Autumn Carter: What about if we are in an apartment and we want to have an edible garden? What are your recommendations?

Amy Taye: Yep. So there's a lot of people, especially like during COVID, there's all kinds of options for that now. Basically you need to grow light of some kind because Putting anything that's an edible plant. If you put it by a window, even a south facing window that gets a decent amount of sun.

It's not going to be super productive. They just don't thrive, at least in my experience in the house next to a window. So if you're in an apartment, you need to grow light. You need a dedicated, My sister has a, like a two by four foot grow light and she puts all of her little plants under there. And that's, a good way to do it.

If you want to just grow some for grow lights, your best bet are any leafy greens, salad greens, you could pretty much always have salad greens. The other options are just to do sprouts. I feel like people don't recognize the amount of nutrition that they can bring to their family by just doing sprouts.

So you, you're planting alfalfa or sunflower seeds or the simplest grains of almost pak choy, pick a plant, and you're just letting them get their cotyledons, like the first two leaves, and then you chop them all and harvest. And that's hugely nutritious, and it doesn't take very long. And you can easily do that under a grow light in regular grow pan size

Autumn Carter: and when you're cutting them, they keep growing.

Amy Taye: No, you just yeah, so ideally you want to have one because it's a sprout, right? So you can have one that once it's started to grow, then it needs light. But before that, it doesn't need light.

So while you're waiting for those seeds to pop up, you could have one that's off to the side that just has the little plastic cover on it, and it's seeded, and you're waiting for that one to sprout. And then you're so say you're harvesting the one that's under the light and then you move your other one under the light so that it can sprout

Autumn Carter: People will eat sprouts and they're very nutritionally beneficial.

So I was thinking, how do you keep those growing while you're

Amy Taye: you eat them and that harvest of food is done. And then you need to replant. Again, and you eat them again, the reason it's so nutritious is because you're getting all the food that seed, put into its first leaves.

 And it's, you can do there's bean sprouts, which don't need any light, but if you want those green, I don't know if phytochemicals is the right word, the nutrients that come with green plants, then you want the green sprouts. My dad, he has a really shady yard, and so we got him a big grow light shelf from, Ask Me After, and I'll find it, gardenerslife.

com or something. It's a very simple website name.

Autumn Carter: I can link it in the show notes, no worries.

Amy Taye: Yeah, it's four shelves and each one has a light and it's modular so you can buy one one year and then buy one the next year we bought one for him for a couple years, like for Father's Day and for his birthday so that even though his yard was shady and we tried to help him grow things in his yard, they just never really produced very well because there's not enough sun.

So he was able to grow things that he had been buying at the store that were really expensive, like watercress. And he's vegan, so he liked fresh spices like basil, you can sprout basil and harvest that stuff.

Autumn Carter: we are close on time. So is there anything else that you would like to share words of wisdom wise?

And then is there anything else that you're doing professionally that we can follow you? do you post anywhere? Do you have a newsletter or anything like that?

Amy Taye: Okay. one thing that we didn't talk about, but that I feel is so important. It's really like under appreciated. So say you're living in an apartment and you don't have time to grow it, or you're even living in a house and you're just at a phase where you cannot manage a garden.

That doesn't mean that you can't get this fresh, really nutritious, organic food. And you want it to be like it was harvested that day and it came to you. Because the longer it's been since it was harvested, the more nutrient loss has happened. So everything that you're getting at the grocery store is two weeks old.

And. half of the nutrients have been lost. So even if you're getting something organic, you're still not getting like a full nutritious head of broccoli that you could be eating.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

Amy Taye: what I recommend to people is join a CSA. CSA is community supported agriculture and there's plenty of them around.

And they have different timeframes, like some run from April to November and some just run from June to September, but it's basically a subscription to a box of vegetables.

And you are investing in that farm and saying, okay, we don't have time to do this, but we really want this quality of food. So we're going to invest in you and your promise of giving us a box of fresh vegetables every week that are in season, harvested that morning. And so that way you get maximum amount of nutrients and you're supporting someone local.

That is going to keep producing food and is if anything happened with the supply chain, then we've got local farmers, not just gigantic farms in California or somewhere. I always recommend that people look into that. you can type CSA, you can look for the biggest one, I think, in our area is Moon Valley Farms, but wherever you are, you can.

Type local CSA and your county and you can find farms that are doing subscriptions and usually you need to Subscribe in like January or February so they know how many people they're going to be growing for

Autumn Carter: that's beneficial for me because we have not found one since moving here 11 years ago and When we were on the west coast we found one and we loved it and things were a lot more fresh we ended up. Expanding our list of veggies that we did like from trying new ones and the ones that we didn't like, we would just trade off with other people. So we ended up developing friendships with other people and just feeling part of the community. It was different because we had to show up earlier in the morning and being young and waking up early in the morning wasn't my favorite, but it was really fun to be able to be alongside other people and help distribute everything.

Thank you. Okay, yes, go.

Amy Taye: At Mid Atlantic Homestead, and I also have a website that's Mid Atlantic.

Autumn Carter: The internet flaked out on one of our sites, so all I got was Mid Atlantic.

Amy Taye: Oh, dang. Really, internet?

Autumn Carter: start over.

Amy Taye: Okay, so I'm mostly on Instagram at Mid Atlantic Homestead, and then I also have a website mid Atlantic Homestead. Dot com.

Autumn Carter: Thank you so much for doing this,

Conclusion and Next Week's Preview

Remember to take time to heal, relax, and be present. Next week, we will be talking about the power of not waiting. And we will have a life hack on setting reminders in your phone to help you not have to wait or spend so much mental bandwidth on the things that you should be doing that you forgot about. So I'll see you there. Thanks for tuning into this week's episode.

I am your host Autumn Carter, a certified life coach dedicated to empowering individuals to rediscover their identity, Find balance amidst chaos, strengthen relationships, and pursue their dreams. My goal is to help people thrive in every aspect of their lives. I hope today's discussion inspired you and offered valuable insights.

 You can work one on one with me or on demand through one of my programs by visiting wellnessineveryseason. com

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This is very general. If you want personal one on one coaching, go to my website, wellnessineveryseason. com. That's where you can get personalized coaching from me for you. Bye.