Today I'm talking with Scott and Lydia at Abundantly Blessed Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well. 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 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Lydia and Scott at Abundantly Blessed Farm. How are you guys? I'm good. Doing well. Thank you. It's a really pretty day in Minnesota. Where are you? We're in Ohio and it is rainy, which we are very thankful for. 00:29 because it has been very dry this summer. Yeah, we had a really rainy spring, but it's been very dry for the last couple of weeks. So we're waiting on some rain here too. So tell me about yourselves and what you guys do. 00:45 We started a lavender farm about two years ago. Um, we had visited Michigan and visited a lavender farm up there. We had an extra acre at our property and we weren't sure what to do with it other than just mow it. And so we came back and decided we'd plant some lavender and see where it went. So we have been growing lavender and then we started a farm stand and we sell some products out of that. And then we've also started selling some, um, that pasteurized milk. 01:14 So we do pre-orders for milk that we sell on our farm stand as well. Nice, when I saw you guys are primarily lavender farmers, I was very excited because I haven't talked to anyone on this podcast about lavender yet. So what made you choose lavender? Yeah, so neither one of us have a true green thumb. So that was one of the things that attracted us to the plant. So when we went to Michigan, we took a tour, we were asking a lot of the interns there. 01:45 we were to start growing this, how much of a green thumb do you need? Each one of them said, yeah, we're all going to kill our plants. It's totally fine. It was a little bit of some hope that we had some chance. Lavender is a Mediterranean herb. So it grows in honestly some really rocky, junky soil. As long as it has good drainage, it will just take off. It'll explode. 02:13 And just thinking about the past two weeks, it's been severely dry here, brown grass everywhere. And the lavender loved it. Nothing else loved it, but the lavender certainly did. So kind of the main reason why we chose it is because either one of us have a green thumb and we've only killed off a few. So we're thankful for that. Yeah. And lavender has so many great properties. You can use it for, you can eat it. 02:42 I don't love it, but you can put it in lemonade, I hear, and you can use it as a seasoning for cooking meats and stuff. It's really nice to have as a dried flour in a bouquet. It's really nice to have in a bouquet not dried because it smells amazing. And you can use it in soaps and balms and lotions and things, yes? Absolutely, yes. So we actually grow two main varieties. One is a culinary variety. It's called Munstead. 03:11 England lavender. That's the one that we use for our lavender syrup kit. Our lavender sugar. We actually sell that we wholesale that a couple of bakers in the area who actually incorporated into a lavender lemon cookie lavender lemon scones. We've used it for a lavender lemonade made that fresh here on the farm and it's amazing. And then the other variety that we grow is something called phenomenal. It's a hybrid variety mostly for 03:39 its flower production, also for its oil production, because like you said, the scent is truly to die for. Even once it's dried, the scent is still present. You just kind of have to rub the plant a little bit, and you get that wonderful lavender scent right back. So, it's truly versatile. We use that for some of our other products, our linen spray. 04:04 Lydia makes a tallow bomb. It's so tallow, it's rendered beef fat. That's great as a lotion, as a cosmetic agent. So yeah, it's definitely a wide variety of uses. And we're very thankful that we can grow it here locally. Yeah, we grow it here every year, but we only grow a few plants because it doesn't do really well because our dirt is very black and really loamy and it isn't dry. 04:33 So, and especially this year, it wasn't dry. We grew our lavender in the greenhouse in a pot and that's doing fantastic because it wasn't in the wet dirt. But my go-to for lavender is when anyone on the house has a headache, we have lavender oil in a bottle. And anytime anyone has a headache, the first thing we do is take a sniff off that bottle of lavender oil because it really does take the edge off. It truly does, yeah. It's got so many great properties, whether it's for migraine relief. 05:02 We even have some individuals who claim that it's really helpful for just general pain control. It's fantastic for sleep. We know that. Great for ...
