Latest / Homestead And Heal Podcast / Ep 1 Part 2: Our Story of Healing, Homesteading & Creating a Life Aligned With Nature

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Ep 1 Part 2: Our Story of Healing, Homesteading & Creating a Life Aligned With Nature · Homestead And Heal Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Homestead and Heal.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Scott.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm Lindsay, and we live with our three children on a farm in Vermont.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Our lives revolve around growing food and medicine, working with the body, and trying every day to live in deeper relationship with the earth.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: And now we're welcoming guests to our farm for intimate retreats where they can slow down and feel deeply into this earth-body connection.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: This podcast is about remembering something many of us have forgotten: that we're not separate from the natural world.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Our bodies are part of it.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Our healing comes through it.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: And when we reconnect to both, our purpose often begins to reveal itself.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Through conversations with herbalists, farmers, body workers, and people walking unconventional paths, we explore what it looks like to step outside the modern paradigm and build lives rooted in connection, healing, and reciprocity with the earth.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: So we're here for a continuation of our discussion, Scott and I.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: Part two.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Part two.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: And where we left off was basically right before we met.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the end of college for both Scott and I.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: And at this point, I had found my connection to nature again.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Scott never really lost his connection.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I will say that one piece that I'd forgotten about from me that I'd like to mention is just that I did suffer from a handful of traumas in college that left me with some pain in my body.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And in my last year of college and the year after, I did start to receive some massage therapy.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I started to have more of this interest in healing the body.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was something that was a little bit present for me at that point.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: From there, for me, I applied for this ecology school for a job at it was my first job after college, my first kind of real job at what was then the Fairy Beach Ecology School in Sacco, Maine.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's just called the Ecology School.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I went on a little trip to South America, backpacked around Bolivia and Peru and Ecuador.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then a few days after that, I flew to Maine and got picked up at the airport by another one of the staff members and was taken to the campus of Fairy Beach Ecology School.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And within a few minutes of arriving there, I met Scott, who was already working there.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I had started working there the spring before.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: This was in the fall of 2006.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Long time ago now.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: 20 years.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I always say that I don't know if it was like love at first sight for me with Scott, but it was more the feeling of I know that this is the man I'm meant to have babies with.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just a very pretty clear, intuitive hit for me.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: I just recently came across this canvas that I painted that said I made it for Scott around that time.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just like a dream of the future.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: You were there with a beautiful sunset or something.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why not dream such beautiful things?
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was just very clearly, I knew that Scott and I were meant to create together in this life.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: It took a little bit of convincing for Scott, but not that much.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Not really.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: We got together pretty quick.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Pretty much immediately.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And had our first date.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: I got to try my first lobster roll.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, and from there we we worked at the Fairy Beach Ecology School, which was such a cool place.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was right on the beach, right on the ocean in Sacco, Maine, and right where the Sacco River empties out into the ocean.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we got to teach about, I don't know, seven different ecosystems or something like that.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: That was the school's claim to fame at the time was they within walking distance of the campus, which was like basically on the beach, there's seven distinct ecosystems that we could teach about, which was pretty cool.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: The salt marsh, the forest, the beach, it was really great.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just really fun.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: There were 15 of us that were naturalists, and we had a fun time together.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: We played a lot of music, and we definitely, yeah, I feel like that was when I really started to sing again and play music, which felt like a really that's an interesting thing because we're not focusing on that in the podcast, but that does feel like a connection to my body and earth, that that resonance of singing.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I had let that go in my teenage years and had just really not done, not really done any music for a big stretch.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then once I started doing that again, I just feel like it was so healing for my heart and soul.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we had an amazing time there.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: Made some amazing friends, got to work with kids typically fifth through eighth grade, would you say?
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of them were coming from Boston suburbs or cities, parts of New Hampshire.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so a school would send their, say, fifth grade for a week-long program, would get to work with these kids all week and do a morning, midday, and evening lesson, which was really cool.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: And just seeing those planting the seed of connections to the natural world with young people was really exciting.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And we also taught about food and connection to food.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I remember one girl being like, ew, the wheat in the pancakes is grown, or something like that.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was in one of my groups.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: We had one day a week, we would have picnic lunch with the kids.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: So we'd sit with our group, and there was always a dining hall education piece, and they had spoken that morning about how the buckwheat in the pancakes was grown on the nearby farm.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: And then I was sitting at lunch with these students, and I heard this one girl who was talking to her friend, and exactly like Lindsay was saying, Did you hear that the wheat in those pancakes was grown?
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yuck.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like hearing this and just I couldn't wrap my head around quite what she was saying or what she was thinking.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I so I had a conversation with them, and I was like, everything you eat is grown.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it was just like seeing how separated we are from that reality was pretty, pretty interesting.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and my embarrassing story from this time was walking with Scott on probably like day one or two of meeting him, and there was an apple tree.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: And grown in this really little sad spot, like practically like between the cracks in the sidewalk up against this little house.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like you maybe just picked an apple and were like offering it to me or something.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Oh, I haven't had an apple from a tree before.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you were like, wait, what?
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just, yeah, it speaks to my disconnect at that time because I just hadn't, I'm and you were like, Yeah, you definitely have if you've eaten an apple.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, No, I know, but I haven't like actually just picked an apple from a tree in probably since early childhood.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: And there weren't tons of apple orchards around.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: I do have a little apple orchard memory from Kansas, but it was just yeah, it was just really interesting for me.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: I knew very little to be teaching children about.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: I had to learn very quickly just about eastern east coast plants and those sorts of things.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: But it was a quick falling in love with nature for me as I started to teach more and more and more about it.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: It just developed even more.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: And for us with food as well, I feel like we started to just get more and more interested in food.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so we spent the next couple of years working there, more or less, right?
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then we moved to Montpelier, Vermont.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: We both served in AmeriCorps Vista positions.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: I switched roles.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: I was hired to start a farm, basically, but I was way underqualified for that.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: And whatever, long story, but I ended up in this organization called Food Works that did a lot of amazing programs connecting people with good food in the community.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: And Scott was serving with the Parks Department.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the Montpelier Conservation Commission and Parks Department.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I was mostly doing all sorts of stuff.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: Trail work, largely with kids, often like high school kids that were getting in trouble in school and were like sent on this program to go do some hard work and figure it out.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: They're mostly really nice kids who weren't real trouble or anything.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't know, maybe lucky for them, they got to go hang out in the forest and use tools and stuff, do hard physical work and a lot of invasives management and removal and things like that.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: And probably the most impactful thing about that time was that was it me that signed us up for I signed us up for a community garden plot.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And we basically Scott just really fell in love with gardening.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: So we had we got a 20 by 20 just on a whim.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I signed us up for a community garden plot.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, oh, that sounds great.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it was just a little north of town.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I just got so focused on it so quickly.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'd had some experience messing around with plants and growing stuff, but nothing really formal or focused.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so we got this 20 by 20, and we'd I'd get done at work, I don't know, like four in the afternoon or something like that, after doing like hard work for the day.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I would just want to go and spend time in the garden until dark, basically.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: And we ended up growing this super beautiful, amazing garden in the center of the community garden.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: And a friend of ours, a guy that I was working with, Jake Feldman, funny guy.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe he's still out there doing stand-up comedy.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think he's working for the tax department now.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: Said that he had met some people that had a garden next to ours.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think he had a plot up there too, did he?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: But he had met these people and they're like, yeah, there's these professional gardeners that have a spot next to ours.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it was our first year gardening, so we certainly weren't professional gardeners, but I remember giving myself a big pat on the back because our garden was beautiful.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: We just, I was like obsessed with spending time in the garden.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the things that I remember, the most beautiful thing that was in the garden is we grew a handful of these giant burgundy amaranth plants.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: We're just in the center and they would just sway in the wind.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: And we didn't know them.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of these plants we weren't familiar with.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: But watching those grow from little tiny seedlings up to these giant amaranths were just, I still have such a vivid memory of that.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: I loved those plants.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I'm not nearly a green thumb the way Scott is.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: I was his assistant, I would say.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And very quickly, because of Scott's amazing skills and yeah, just his natural ability to connect with plants, grow plants, our little tiny apartment we lived in just started filling up with produce.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so here we were, 25 years old.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: This was like our first time living together in our own place.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sure.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: In our own place where we had to cook our own food.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: And we just dove right into learning how to cook, learning how to make sauerkraut.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: We got into West and Price.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: We were learning about herbal medicine then, you know, surface, but starting to herbal medicine.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: We made beer, we we baked food.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: Sort of making sauerkraut.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's what I said.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we did lots of just lots of food projects.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: We were just really getting way into it.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: But you know what I forgot that we didn't talk about was after we'd known each other for just maybe three months, our first season working together, Scott flew out to Seattle and we drove my car down the coast of California, across the whole Southern United States, and back up to Maine.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And we we woofed.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: So we stayed on four different farms, one in California, one in New Mexico, one in Georgia, and one in North Carolina.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: All perfectly unique, so different, such different experiences at each place.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Through worldwide opportunities on organic farms or WOOF WWOF, which we are now hosts for, which is fun to come full circle.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that was just an amazing experience to see the way different people were connecting with the land, growing food.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: We learned, and that's where you learned some grafting at the first farm with Debra and Jabaiah.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: I remember for me, like when I think back, the first farm we stayed at in California, they had their first baby that was maybe, I don't even know, three months old.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, wow, I had so little awareness of how to support a mother in early, early motherhood.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm shocked that they invited us to their home and hopefully we were helpful for them.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: And their the accommodation was in their house.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: So it was like the spare bedroom in their house.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: So we were right in there.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: I was just such a clueless maiden who did not recognize how I could be supportive of a new mother, really.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure we were probably kind and polite and got some work done for them.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then yeah, each place was just really different and unique.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: But that was such a beautiful opening into how life could be, how life could be where you're connected to the land.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I would highly recommend woofing for anyone that is interested in that.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And like I said, we do have that as an option at our farm now.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: Later on, we woofed in Europe.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: At a farm in France and a couple in Italy.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: But I would, yeah, woofing anywhere, I think is an amazing opportunity just to get the real flavor of the place, see people doing cool stuff.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the fact that there's woof hosts all over the world and all over the United States.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think we can get down on the state of things here.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: But to get to participate in these little communities where there's really magical things happening, I think is very cool.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of think we might need to do a different episode that's all about our woofing experiences.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because we do have a bunch of stories from that.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: Some fun some funny stories.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, then if we fast forward back to our time in Montpelier as we were finishing our year there as AmeriCra Vista members, which is the whole point of that is being paid poverty wages.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: We used food stamps or, you know, that sort of system.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Work with underserved populations.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: Build capacity in underserved communities.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: And but we had just fallen in love with the idea of growing food.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that was our entry point back into Vermont and where Scott is from, of course.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then we just decided, I guess we decided to move back to the Rutland area where Scott is from.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: No, so by the end of that season, I recognized that, like we recognized that farming.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: So we were loving growing so much.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: There was something so compelling there that perhaps the next step would be working on a farm to see if we enjoyed that work on that sort of scale.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so we went around and talked with, interviewed with a handful of farmers, some up in the Montpelier area.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's true, yeah.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm forgetting their names.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't matter.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we were just we were looking for a farm apprenticeship so that we could learn more about growing.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so we looked around there and then we looked around here as well and found a farmer that was ran a really tight operation, just really neat and tidy, really had his systems in place and was well organized.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: His background was that he had been a production manager at Rand McNally making uh the road atlases.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so he was very regimented and production focused.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: And he brought that to his farm in a really cool way.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so he was a really wonderful person to learn from.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: So we spent so yeah, that's what we did.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: We did we woof we went to Europe.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: We went to Europe right before that.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: Right when we finished our Vista positions, AmeriCorps Vista positions.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then we woofed in Europe and stayed with some friends that I'd met working with in Montpelier in Spain, which was really fun.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then we worked on these three farms that were all super incredible, amazing experiences.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: We'd love to get back there sometime.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we're gonna have to tell those stories because I feel like they need to be told.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then we returned in the early spring.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: Late winter, early spring.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: Early spring.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: Spring.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: To this farm in Benson, nearby to here, but with quite a different character.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: So across the valley, and there's this spot where you can just as you enter the southern end of the Champlain Valley, like the ecosystem just changes.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: You can see the plants change really abruptly, and there's lots of snapping turtles over there, and these big black rat snakes, and just very different sort of vegetation from where we are 40 minutes away.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Just interesting.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, it was that year while we were there, we just I feel like the biggest thing that happened for us, not only did we just learn a ton about growing, we started going to the farmer's market every week.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: There was a lot of amazing learning happening.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then in the late summer, we went to a party at our friend's house in Shrewsbury.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: People that I didn't really know very well at all, but our friends Terry and Vicky.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and I knew a bunch of them somewhat.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because of the camp Scott had gone to as a kid.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And this party was just hugely impactful for us because it was we just, it was again one of those situations of you're like, I want what all these people have.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was just community.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: It was the most amazing food.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: Potluck.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone just brought something.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't organized.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: It was just such an amazing meal.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: The kids were all running around.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: There were people playing music, there was a fire.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: It was just like, oh, we want this life.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: So somebody showed up with an ice cream truck.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how that I know.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was telling the kids that the other day.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, there are no ice cream trucks.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody with an association with this group of people had the ice cream truck gig that summer and in a surprise showed up at this kind of rowdy party, and it was very hilarious.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was just so fun.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so we basically left that party, and within, I feel like the next day or the few days, we just felt total inspiration to basically speak our dreams to the universe.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so we did.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: We got really clear about a couple of things that were critically important to us, which were we wanted a place where we could grow our own food.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: We weren't totally sold that we wanted to pursue like a career in agriculture.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we just knew we wanted to grow food.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: That was a big part of it.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: As a central piece.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that we wanted to live in Shrewsbury.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: That was it.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was really clear.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: And we just we like wrote it down and spoke it.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then we got a phone call like two or three days later, literally.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it was someone saying, We're reopening this historic general store in Shrewsbury.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: And somebody suggested that the two of you might be great managers to take on this project.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: Which was funny because we didn't have any experience running a store like that.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: But it was amazing.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we said yes, and we took on reopening this historic general store into a little town cooperative in this town of a thousand people.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: It had been operating since the 1860s, I think.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: Something like that.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then had closed for maybe 15 years after the last person in this family had that it had been handed down to over time.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: When she finally passed away, it was closed for a stretch of years and then reopened as a cooperative.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's now open still and actually is just so amazing now compared to when we were getting it going.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: But we took that job.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: So we knew we were going to be able to live in Shrewsbury.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: We lived in the house connected to the store, which was an amazing experience and also challenging in different ways, but amazing to live in a rural place and be connected to a store where you could go and get your staple things.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so we we did that.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then we'd met and connected with one of our amazing farming mentors, Greg Cox, at the Rutland Farmers Market.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: And he basically was like, why don't you come sometime?
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: And if you guys want some land to grow some food, come to our farm and we'll we can see what we can do.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: So we talked about it for all of the late part of the season, and then we finally had the opportunity to get over there.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: And Greg walked us around and showed us his farm and all the amazing stuff that was growing and happening.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: And he walked us out to this far corner, this beautiful spot.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: I still love that spot so much.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: I have such fond memories.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: And walked us out.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: We were looking for a home garden.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: So, like pretty small scale at that point, because we were going to be busy managing the store and everything.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: And he walked us out to this corner of his farm and said, I'm thinking this for you guys.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it was an acre, and like I talked about in our last episode, people don't know what an acre it is.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: Sounds small, but when you're when you actually know it's a big space to grow on and for a couple of people to manage properly.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: So we're no, we're just we're looking for a home garden.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: No, this will be perfect for you guys.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think this spot, he was such a uh we'll have him on at some point.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: He's a truly inspiring, amazing person who's just created so much positive change in our community.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: But so he planted the seed in us.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: So we went back and thought about it and we're like, we feel like we know what we're doing.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we should just start a farm business and take Greg up on his offer and go to the farmer's market starting next spring.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: So, and then we realized, oh, what about refrigeration?
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: What about equipment?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: About a greenhouse, and Greg basically provided all of those things for us.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: We ended up so we did we put up a greenhouse that I pulled out of Greg's field that somebody had left there, had been just growing in the weeds for years.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: So we resurrected this old greenhouse, built it next to the store, put a wood stove in.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: We used to have to stoke the wood stove midnight, 3 a.m.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: 6 a.m.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: to keep the plants alive.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, started our farm business, Alchemy Gardens.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: We had this inspiration for the name.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so this was 2010.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, Scott channeled that name and just this idea of taking, you know, simple elements.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Simple elements and creating better than gold nourishment.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: And we just loved it.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that from that point on, alchemy has always been since 2010.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was our business name for the farm.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then it became my business name for my bodywork business.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: And we just, people in our community sometimes would just say, Oh, you're alchemy, right?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: They just related to us that way.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: And we just, yeah, we had one year of community garden experience, one year of a farm apprenticeship, and we just went for it.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say we we were successful.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like when I look at our first the pictures of our first farmer's market stands, we didn't have a whole lot, but over the years, over the course of 13 years, we really built a successful business and became really well known for a lot of our produce and having really one of the most beautiful stands of the farmers market.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: I guess I would just say the most beautiful stand.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Our vegetables were, yeah, just so beautiful.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: And over those years, we so two years we worked at this store in Shrewsbury.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: Then we stopped that work.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: I did some kind of nonprofit work.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: I started going to massage school.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: I started getting more interested in the body.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: I felt like farming was not super supportive for my body.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: It just didn't feel that good.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: I've met other women that don't feel that way, that really love the physical work of farming.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: But for me, it just didn't feel quite right.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I definitely was having some pain in my body and more and more interested in kind of trauma and healing patterns within my body.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so I went to massage school and then started studying myofascial release.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so over the course of those years, Scott ended up taking on the farm pretty much entirely himself.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: I would help with just little things, maybe delivering plants to our local co-op.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: When we had during the plant season, we would we were the sole provider of plants and making beautiful labels for the market.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: Making beautiful labels.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: Helping at the market.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: I loved helping at the market.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: That was so fun.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I think we just we knew from that, those first couple years, that 2010 time, basically when we made that declaration of w wanting to live in Shrewsbury and wanting to grow food, we had also this understanding that we were meant to help people feel vitality in their bodies, connected to the earth, connected to their body.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that I think was a kind of like the background of what was driving us towards living in the community that we chose.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, and I guess maybe one piece of that too, just we have had these powerful manifestation moments.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: So when we were finishing up our time at Pierce's store, the little store, we decided we didn't know where we were gonna live.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: So we put an ad in our little town newspaper, which is like an 8 by 11 free thing that goes out once a month.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just like young couple wanting a house with space for a greenhouse, a piano, a barn, like we just a wood stove, we listed everything we were looking for.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we had this farmer, this raw milk dairy farmer, come by one time and he's I'm thinking of building a house and I'm wondering if you guys want to live in it.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: And we were like, okay, what's the catch?
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that is like a whole big story.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: But essentially, this project was funded by an amazing woman who lives in our town.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: She's in her 80s.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: She's just the most incredible poet, and she's taught poetry, she's published lots of poetry books, and she's just like an incredibly generous benefactor for so many people in our community, in our town, and elsewhere.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: Her name's Joan Ailshire.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: You can look at her uh poetry, and she wrote a novel recently.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we didn't really understand at the time that she was funding this project.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: There were some quirks to how it all came about, but essentially this house was built on the farm that this dairy farmer lived on that Joan owned.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so there were two houses then, and we got to move into this brand new house.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: And at first it was just exchanging labor for being able to live there, and then it became, then we had a rent payment, but it was always very affordable for us so that we could keep farming and doing the work that we wanted to do in the world.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: And now at this point, there have been many different iterations of what happened over those years, but early on, we also helped to found this nonprofit, which is now a foundation called the Shrewsbury Agricultural Education and Arts Foundation.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sage.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: We've always done a lot of education around food, cooking.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: We had kids come to the farm all the time.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: We were pen pals with some classrooms of kids, teaching them about what was happening on the farm.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: Also, there's we did a weed dating event where people, it was like speed dating, but people came out and weeded the garden.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: That was pretty cool.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like doing something like that again would be.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone who participated is now married.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's not true.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, we did a lot of fun, like educational things, hosted things like that.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: And and then after I don't know how many years of living at that house, 12, 12 years.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, something like that.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, we have a very specific agricultural easement, conservation easement that allowed us to buy that land for a very reasonable price because Scott was full-time farming.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: And and we will never be able to sell it for development for a price that equates to what you'd be able to sell it for to develop it if it were not conserved.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, if it were not conserved.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: So it will likely stay in our family for many generations.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: Hopefully.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully, we'll be buried there on the land.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: Hopefully.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: Just know what that was.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's the only option.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: Unless we live forever.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's not happening.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, we now have moved to the big old farmhouse, the 1790s farmhouse.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: And our the house that we had originally moved into new back in 2012.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: Is what we have just finished putting together as a guest house for these homestead and heal retreats, which is so super exciting and entirely in the works right now.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like we should speak a little bit about that.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't really plan to, but that's such a big piece of what we're up to right now.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: And we're just so excited to be spending time over there again.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: So we lived there for 12 years.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: In that spot.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: And the whole time.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: Our last baby in that house.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: Raised our older kids in that house.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the whole time we're just planting interesting stuff all around.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: So there's just tons of my my plant friends are all around surrounding.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: Blueberries, tons of blackberries and raspberries.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: All sorts of medicinal stuff and flowers.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's a pretty magical spot, really.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: The rhubarb from Scott's great-great-grandparents' homestead site.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's planted in multiple places there.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so we've just furnished this whole thing.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: We had friends living in this house for quite a long time, and then they finally bought a place of their own.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: Finally bought a place of their own.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so now we get to really fulfill our dream of having people come to our land so that we can help people find that connection with their body, connection with the earth.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: Scott teaching about homesteading, teaching skills that so many people desire at this time.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I know for me, I'm just never gonna watch a YouTube video about most things.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: I would so much rather come and be in person and learn from Scott.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: Scott's such an amazing teacher, and all of the woofers we ever have, or people that come through for educational opportunities, just rave about Scott's teaching.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: And thank you.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's nice.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so much better in person.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: And for me to be able to have people come and also receive the healing work that I do, the fascial care for their body, I feel like it's just a really potent and powerful combination.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what we're doing this summer is and really as soon as this podcast comes out, we're our website should be nearly finished.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we will be starting to book individuals, couples, and families to come for a two-day, two-night stay or a five-night stay and be able to actually really feel this connection to their body, connection to the earth.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: They will come and have a farm tour.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: There's different kinds of menus, but come and have a farm tour, have a body work session with me, get an herbal consultation with Scott, meet the medicine that is going to support them.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: So go out and wild harvest the medicine, the herbs that they will then take and make into medicine with Scott, have something to take home like that.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: Different options include cooking a meal together, harvesting from the garden and cooking a meal, learning how to butcher meat.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many different seasonal things, depending on the time of year, making maple syrup with us, sauerkraut.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: Sourdough.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: Making sauerkraut, making sourdough, apple pruning, apple grafting.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: There's just, it's actually just endless the different opportunities.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so we'll be welcoming people for that.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: And we're also putting together some themed kind of camp retreat options, where instead of it being an individual or a couple or a family just coming and having their own kind of private retreat experience, these will be group experiences, small group experiences, maybe four to six people because of the size of our house.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps we'll have some camping options.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: But where people will come and those themed weekends might be one that Scott's thinking of as like an herb camp.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: For adults, where people get to come and we just delve into all the magic of medicinal herbs and plants and yeah, wildcrafting, wild harvesting, working in the garden with them, making medicine, all those sorts of things.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: Being able to kind of go home with your own little herbal first aid kit or the things that are going to most support you in your health.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then I am really excited to offer a pelvic healing retreat and a heart healing retreat.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it will be full body sort of body work because that's all the body work I do is for the full body.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's just, it's so important to recognize that the fascia runs head to toe without an interruption.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: And we're never just focused on one part of the body, but really a little bit more focus on the pelvis and the pelvic alchemy that I teach and the way we go into the subconscious, heal these deep wounds of the pelvis, the shame, the grief, the lack of support and loss of power, and also receive quite a bit of bodywork.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: These will be retreats that are more heavily focused on the bodywork and healing, whereas our kind of general homestead and heal retreats have a little bit of bodywork and then a lot of homesteading skills as well.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of time to just sink into the quiet of our place and the serenity of it and beauty of just slowing down for a week, having a time to just so it'd be like some planned programming every day, but then a lot of time for walking on our trails and all of those sorts of things.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: And my hope is really, and this has been a thread that's been that has followed us throughout, is just when we've gotten inspired about certain things, it has been life-changing for us.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so providing that inspiration of okay, here is uh sort of a different model of what life can look like, sink into it for a week and just become have that as your new benchmark of okay, this is like life can feel different than it has felt.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so just to really inspire people of what is possible, what life can feel like, look like.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I think for some people that maybe is a little bit confronting and healing in its own way, potentially through a sort of catharsis.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so being able for us to provide journal prompts for you to go and sit at our brook and have a conversation with our brook and see what medicine it brings for you, or go and lay under an apple tree and have a conversation with that apple tree and really feel into the vision for your future or whatever it looks like, because that is, I've been thinking about it a lot, just for example, with AI and like this idea of what if instead of prompts that you're asking a computer, you have prompts that you're going out into nature and asking nature.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: We're forgetting that connection.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so while your body is attuned to the place where you are, to our land, which is just so healing in itself, how can you both allow yourself to have any healing come up, to let emotions move, to let yourself sing, dance, whatever it is, be really well nourished and also just feel into where you're satisfied in your life and where there's a little bit missing and where things are a little out of alignment and make the plans to come back into more alignment, whether that's just bringing one or two practices like starting to make sourdough or some deeper questions that you need to ask.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a Scorpio rising, I love going into the depths.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: So that's really that's where I like to be.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: And we want to keep it accessible to people.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: You can just it you don't have to go that deep if you don't want to.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: You can come and just go for a nice swim or go for a walk and just be in the quiet for a little while.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what we're really excited about right now.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like there are other pieces of our story too, but those are for another time, I think.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's getting to be a long episode.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: So we hope that you might decide to come for a visit.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: And we look forward to we are have already had some amazing interviews on this podcast that will be aired soon, and we're so excited to share them.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we really want to hear from you.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: So if you have guests that you'd like us to have on the podcast, if you felt inspired by what you heard here, we would absolutely love it if you could leave a review for this brand new podcast.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: Leave us a five-star review.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: Write to us, find us on social media.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm at Lindsay Corsell, Scott's at Alchemy Gardens, not very active, but I'll be trying to reinvigorate that site a little bit too.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: You can visit homesteadandheal.net as the primary place to find out about our retreats and just reach out to us.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: We would love to hear from you.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: We are very much the ones who are answering our messages, and we just hope that you felt a little bit inspired by our journey and our path.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thanks so much.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks so much for listening.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: Have a wonderful day.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: Don't forget to go outside and smell the flowers, feel your feet on the earth.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be here next time.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of Homestead and Heal.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: If you loved it, please help us spread the word by subscribing to this podcast and leaving us a review.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: For more information about our work, visit homesteadandheal.net.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: We're wishing you the life of your dreams, one that feels deeply rooted, fully alive, and connected to the earth beneath your feet.