-
Shell Smart - Australian Homesteader
- 2025/04/18
- 再生時間： 36 分
- ポッドキャスト
-
サマリー
あらすじ・解説
Today I'm talking with Shell. If you've ever wondered what it's like to homestead in Australia, this will give you a small taste. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe. 00:29 share it with a friend or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Shell Smart and she is in Australia and it's actually morning in Australia right now, whereas it's six o'clock in the evening here in Minnesota. Good morning, Shell. How are you? Good morning, Mary Ann. Good evening to you. Thank you. And the other thing's different is you are in the middle of autumn and we are in the middle of a spring, right? That's correct. Yes. 00:58 Okay, so based on all of that, your growing situation is very different from ours, so I wanna touch on that. But first, tell me about yourself and what you do. Well, I am a wife to Stuart. We've been married for nearly 33 years. And we have five children and they range from 28 down to 15. We're homeschooling. 01:27 still got two homeschooling or sort of one and a half homeschooling at the moment. So we're nearly finished with being homeschooling. think this is our 22nd year of homeschooling. And we're homestead as well. So we have three acres right within the town limits, but a very small town of a thousand people here in the snowy valleys of New South Wales and in Australia. And yeah, we have three acres and we have a little homestead here. 01:58 Very nice and congratulations on making your marriage work for that long with five children to boot That's that's I'm one grandchild. Okay Yeah, well you have outdone yourselves. I'm impressed. I I've been married three times. I'm keeping the third one. He's great 02:27 And I can't imagine being with someone for that long with that many kids because kids are a huge stressor on relationships sometimes. Yeah, they can be. But I think they can also really make you work better as a team because you've got something bigger than yourself to work for as well within your marriage. True enough. Yes, absolutely. But you also have to be willing to do that. 02:55 You both have to be willing to work together. And my first two, I don't want to say anything bad, but the third one is more than willing to work with me to make this work. Let's put it that way. That's the big difference. It sure does. Okay. So what do you do on your homestead? Do have animals? Do you grow gardens? What do you do? Yeah, we generally do grow gardens. At the moment, we haven't got any luck. 03:24 this season because we're just finishing our harvest season. So we haven't done gardens this last year, this last summer, because we are moving and we just didn't have the time and energy to into that. But we do normally grow gardens with, you know, not a huge vegetable garden, but we do have, you know, herbs and veggies and tomatoes. 03:53 Well, I'm not very good at tomatoes. I like to plant lots of tomatoes. And I get a few every season that actually grow. So that's something I need to work on. And one day I'll work on that when I've got more time and energy. But we do grow a lot and have grown at the, again, at the moment we've downsized, but we have been in the past growing. Between growing and we have friends that hunt, we've been able to raise most of our meat. 04:22 that we eat as a family. So that's been good. So we currently have our chooks, oh sorry, in Australia we call chickens chooks. So if I revert to that I apologize. So chickens are laying chickens at the moment, laying hens. And we have goats. They have in the past been milked, but at the moment we don't have any babies and they're not milking. 04:49 And we have had meat chickens as well and we just sent back some milking cows that we had on our property that our friend had lent to us over the summer. A, it benefited her because she needed to reduce her load on her pasture and B, we needed to get some big animals on our pasture. 05:17 We were able to be blessed by having two milking cows and two calves on our pasture over the last four months, I think five months maybe. So we're very quiet at the moment. Our poor livestock guardian dog, Chief, he doesn't have a lot to do. I we're down to about 15 hens and three roosters ...