Episode 1 - The Modern Farmsteads Podcast is Live!
We’re so excited to announce that episode one of the Modern Farmsteads podcast is now live.
Please find us on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify, or any other major podcast app. If you like what you hear please subscribe to us and leave us a review, which helps opther people find the podcast more easily! We also love to hear from you on our Instagram feed @modernfarmsteads with the hashtag #modernfarmsteadspodcast.
We will be dropping new episodes every Tuesday night, starting with an awesome interview with our favorite flower grower, Allison Edwards of Sol Y Sombra Flower Farm on Tuesday, July 7th. We can’t wait to have you join us!
Christina & Jochen
PS - you can also listen here!
Welcome to the Modern Farmsteads Podcast!
Remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts here and follow us on our Instagram!
Transcript
Christina Manning Lebek: Welcome to the Modern Farmsteads podcast. I'm Christina.
Jochen Manning Lebek: I'm Jochen.
Christina: This podcast is dedicated to everything from the ways and benefits of creating a food forest at home to how to grow flowers and herbs, care for our pollinators, and everything in between.
Jochen: Yes, like how to make your great grandmother's jam or bread and all of that so that we can create community and memories with the people we love.
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Jochen: Welcome to the Modern Farmsteads podcast. This is our first episode, so congratulations. If this was the Boston marathon, you would be a winner for getting here first. We're super excited to be here with you.
Christina: We really are. We're so excited to be together here with you on this podcast. I want to tell you a little bit about us, so Jochen and I are married. This is our 25th year of being married and we have three girls who are not girls anymore. They have grown up to be amazing women who have wonderful, powerful opinions and thoughts of their own. I'm sure probably at some point, they will join us as guests on this podcast and tell you things about me that I wish you didn't know. [laughs]
Jochen: Yes, that is absolutely going to happen. Yes, I am German. It's Jochen like token, anybody who knows me knows that. If I'm at Starbucks, I go by Bob, and in the daytime, I work in tech and in the nighttime, the second the tech is over, I put on gardening clothes and I am doing Modern Farmsteads, which is so much fun. What else can I tell you? I grew up, one of my first jobs was working in the vineyards in Germany and the vine Valley. Yes, that's it for now.
Christina: He did work in the vineyards early on, but it wasn't his most favorite experience, was it?
Jochen: Oh, no, it's awful.
[laughter]
Christina: I have to be honest and say that I pulled him into gardening somewhat reluctantly back about 20 years ago. I started gardening at a key point in my life where I was studying for my BFA as an artist and I was working on creative recovery. I think, like so many of you, I read that wonderful classic by Julia Cameron called The Artist's Way. She talks about creating an artist well for ourselves, where we fill our lives with things that bring us joy and that by doing that, it will create innovation and creativity in our work.
So, I was thinking, well, what would bring me a lot of joy and I realized learning how to garden would do that. The other thing that I did at the same time was I really grew as a cook. I loved cooking, it was just so fun for me and it was a side hobby. If you're a gardener, you have to do something with that food at the end of the day and so we developed lots of really amazing garden recipes along the way, which have made a huge difference. Honestly, to this day, I consider gardening my art practice. For those of you who are interested in things in the arts, my work in gardening is a form of participatory art. Sometimes people call that community art.
What it is, is that the actual artwork is the wonderful exchange that takes place between individuals and within a community. For example, when I'm growing food for others or growing plants for others and then giving that to them and they're receiving it and growing it themselves, that wonderful interchange that happens between us and building community is an art form. To most people, I'm just considered a gardener and that's fine with me.
Jochen: When we started gardening, when Christina first got into it, and I by proxy and inclusion, we started here in Boulder, Colorado, and we've done a lot of gardening in Colorado. We can talk about that. We love to talk about it. It's our favorite state. Wonderful place to live. We've also gardened in a whole lot of other places with different climates.
Christina: Yes, that's true. We have gardens at home in Northern Ireland. We were part of a micro-urban farm in the UK, which they affectionately call allotments. We were part of a community garden here in Colorado originally and also a community garden in Northern California. Now, we have been working on creating our own urban farm at our home in Longmont, Colorado.
Jochen: We really wanted to create a podcast about our family's journey to what we call a modern farmstead. We call it that because our middle daughter reminds us constantly that, "Mom, dad, you know this is not a farm." That is very, very clear to us because we are on 0.15 of an acre in Old Town Longmont, so it really isn't a farm. Gardening is a huge part of our modern farmstead life and our journey. We'll be talking a lot about gardening.
We also feel that there are other things that are significant parts of that reality and the beauty of trying to live a more connected, earthbound, balanced life in our modern times in society. We'll be incorporating those as well. That means we have guests that talk about conservation, about the environment, our mental health and gardening, making the most delicious food with what you've grown and just really interesting stuff, like interviewing people that have transformed their homes into little modern farmsteads. Everybody does it a bit differently and it's fascinating. Beekeeping, how to succeed at growing roses in Colorado, herbs, nutrition, and just so much more.
Christina: Another thing we're going to do is we're going to do Q&As. As you guys write in questions, we're going to respond to them with our guests and also on our own. We're going to share a little bit more about our journey. A huge part of that is that we want you to know all the mistakes that we made so we can maybe spare you some of our grief. We are going to tell you some crazy stories like the time that Jochen through a pitchfork into this foot by mistake. That is a very good story.
Jochen: That is a good story, but that's not even the wildest.
Christina: No, it's really not. We also have lots of resources for you. We're going to bring in guests from local nurseries, farmers, people who are a part of small local businesses. We're going to feature them and interview them. The reason for that is that we really feel that bringing in small businesses who are working into the areas of modern farmsteads just adds a huge element of interest and it gives you lots of different ideas of things that you can utilize at home.
Jochen: We're super passionate about that, especially right now when small businesses and local businesses have taken such huge shades during COVID. The industry is already dominated by corporate giants. That just keeps going getting worse, so we want to do our part in supporting local economy.
Christina: Also, we're going to have authors. There's so many awesome gardening books. We've learned so much along our journey from books that help us adapt to the current environment that we're in because we've gardened all over the world. For some of you, maybe you're new to the area where you are, you've never gardened in that zone. Having some authors speak to the specific issues that are affecting you will be really helpful. We're going to have a book section, and we're going to talk lots about the different tips and tricks that these authors can give to us.
Jochen: Like I said before, we're going to put all that on the website so you have a bibliography there and you can just head over to modernfarmsteads.com. Go to podcasts, and you'll find those resources there as well. Today, we want to talk to you about our current project, and by current, I mean for the last three years. That is our own modern farmstead, which we affectionately call the Manning Lebek Urban Farm. Again, as our daughter reminds us daily, it's a modern farmstead, it's really not a farm.
Christina: It's really not a farm.
[laughter]
I think she told us that when she was sitting on our back patio separating and transplanting hundreds and hundreds of tomatoes that first year. Telling you a little bit about our home, so we moved here and we rented for the first year, and we started looking for our own home. We had it in our mind that we were going to get some kind of a homestead at least, maybe a hobby farm. It was during this massive boom in Colorado where it seemed like every house that we made an offer on was snatched up by a cash buyer.
What that meant was is that there just wasn't a lot to choose from. When we came across the home we have now, we really loved the inside. It's a quirky, late 1940s modern bungalow and they've done an amazing job of renovating the inside. What I loved was it had a small but incredible chef's kitchen. The former owner had been one of the bakers for the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. That just immediately caught my eye because I knew, "Wow, I can make vast quantities of jam here. I can roast tons of garden vegetables and definitely will be able to crank out lots of sourdough bread," which is one of my other passions.
We loved that but the problem was that it was on a tiny postage stamp of a lot and the grass was terrible. I just remember my wonderful mother stepping out the back steps onto the back patio and saying, "How much did you pay for this? They were really lucky to get it."
Jochen: [laughs] Which is just what you want to hear when you bought a house.
Christina: That's right. The thing is, as I think probably because of my art background, I had vision for it. Yes, it really wasn't attractive on the outside, but it did have some really compelling wonderful features like it had a sprawling, probably 100-year old, concord grapevine that runs along the back of the property.
Jochen: As well as this really gorgeous pear tree right between the house and the garage that is just delicious and so abundant every year.
Christina: That's true. It gives us hundreds and hundreds of pears. We love to make vanilla pear jam, which I'm sure we'll talk about at some point. As we-
Jochen: Pear chutney.
Christina: Oh, yes, pear chutney but it is so delicious. One of the things that we began thinking about early on was how useful raised beds are when you have a small semi-awkward property because whereas you couldn't put in a huge, vast, maybe 30 by 30 foot in the ground garden what we could do was we could put raised beds in awkward places like the raised bed that we ran along the back of the garage.
Jochen: Yes, that's right. Then there was another raised bed that we had a space underneath the pear tree that offered an L-shaped opportunity. We put a raised bed there that was also pretty tall that we can grow our lettuces in later in the season and into the winter.
Christina: The advantage of making them tall was we also have three dogs at home and so that kept the dogs out. It also enabled us not to have to bend over a lot and it was good for our backs but it also created a really large growing space. In the raised bed that runs along the back of the garage, that's where we put all of our herbs. We have our culinary herbs and our medicinal herbs. It gets just enough sunlight in this microclimate there that we're able to utilize them every day throughout the day as we need them because it's literally just steps off the back steps of our back door.
The other area that really bothered me was that we had a very long, ugly lawn that ran along the side of our house. No one ever told me about the responsibilities of being on a corner lot. The amount of snow that you have to shovel on your neighbors' behalf. I did not know about that before we moved in, but that's another story.
What I didn't love was that all along the side of the house that runs along the sidewalk and then the street was this huge strip of meaningless grass. Every day I would happen to look out through the window and I would just see that this is the place where everyone walked their dog and our neighborhood. I didn't want to have wasted, ugly grass that people used as a micro park, so Jochen came up with a great idea. Do you remember?
Jochen: I don't remember how we got there.
Christina: You gave me the Christmas present of the raised beds.
Jochen: Oh, that's right. I did that, yes. So, the first thing we did is we broke that long area that was like 60 feet by 25 feet or something like that, and it was divided. It had a walkway that divided down the middle and we carved it up and for a Christmas present, I went out and I bought all the lumber to start building raised beds and I actually started building the raised beds in the winter. At times I had to cover them while the process was going on with tarps because it's Colorado and we get a lot of snow but we started, we created a tomato and vegetable heaven of initially, a cluster of four beds that were four feet wide, 10 feet long and about just shy of two feet tall.
Christina: Yes, that's right. It was so wonderful for the first time we were able to grow a ton of vegetables right there on that property that first year. It just gave us the sense that, yes, over time, we're going to be able to transform this into a really magical edible landscape. Here in Colorado, we have these long winters where it's really cold, so I have lots of time to dream. I began dreaming of all the things that were possible. I, of course then while I dreamt up nine more beds that would run that the rest of the side of the house. When the spring came, Jochen went out and bought a lot more lumber. We had, I think, was it three truckloads of soil that was brought to the house?
Jochen: I think it's something like a combined total of 18 cubic yards of soil that we had to shovel in by hand that got dumped in our driveway at various stages. Yes, a lot of soil,
Christina: It really was, he was using the wheel barrel to take the soil from the driveway over to all those raised beds, and one day just out of pity, I went out and bought him one of those incredible wheel barrels that have four wheels that you can actually tip into the raised bed to try and make this process much easier because, boy, that was a ton of work.
Jochen: Yes. That really helped a lot but the projects we just kept dreaming and as we kept dreaming, we just kept building. As we kept building we kept planting. Do you want to talk a little bit about where we ended up so far, where we're at now?
Christina: Yes. We just began colonizing pretty much every inch of space on our properties. Between our house and our neighbors, there's a small tiny strip there that is in partial shade and sun and it was the perfect place to put in a whole bed of rhubarb plants. We did that and then one by one, we began adding different fruit bushes. There's a stretch of about three feet by about 25 feet that we turned into a bed that runs right along our driveway, and we put in 18 raspberry bushes.
We've got everbearing and summer bearing raspberry bushes that we love, Purple Royalty, Red Novas, and Fall Golds, the Fall Golds are my favorite, that we just enjoy every year. We also put in 10 blueberry bushes and Cedar Whiskey barrels. This year, we added another eight of those cedar barrels filled with strawberries and they run along the fence and they just look very beautiful. Also, we're now creeping into the lawn to be honest, you guys.
[laughter]
This is what happens. Periodically, my neighbors drive by and I can see in their eyes, "Oh, I wish there was an HOA." Then I tell them, "Look, it's going to be okay. It's going to be beautiful. Don't worry."
Jochen: Guys it's super pretty.
Christina: It really is pretty. Honestly, it's really beautiful. We definitely bring my art and design background to this so that we're not hurting our property value. Sure enough, we began inching into the grass and we created on the other side of our raised beds, a whole area where we planted a lot of berry bushes. We have three gooseberry bushes and we also have three currant bushes. We just added one more this year so now it's up to four.
We've got three black currants and one red currant bush and we also have a stretch of daylilies that runs along the middle which, I don't know if you knew this, but daylilies are edible. We have that just creeping on. Then across the front, we're now adding whole areas of flowers because, to be honest, I'm a real sucker for cut flowers in the house. One of the things we'll talk about in the podcast, later on, we'll bring on guests who are going to talk to us about how we can grow our own cutting gardens in our homes.
Jochen: We're just giving you an overview here, and there's more. We want to talk about all of that in more detail and just explain how to do it. The other thing that happened is that we added a tiny greenhouse in the winter and something that I did not know is that greenhouses have babies. All of a sudden, they were two greenhouses, the small one we bought originally, and then twice that size. This year, I think we've done back of the napkin math, and we grew right around 3,000 tomatoes, peppers, herbs, flowers, eggplants, ground cherries, tomatillos, artichokes, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some stuff from seed in those greenhouses.
Christina: It was so rewarding. It's just so wonderful to be able to grow your plants from seed. One of the things we love to do is we sell our plants to our community and that's really exciting and an honor and a tiny bit scary realizing that they're all growing tomatoes that we grew but we love doing it. One of the advantages of starting our plants from seed is that we get to choose rare and unique open-pollinated varieties, which just adds so much color and flavor to the garden.
For example, one of my all-time favorite tomatoes that we grew a lot of this year is our black beauties and they're a perfectly black tomato. On the inside, they're red and they have such an incredibly rich flavor. It's been wonderful being able to do that and be able to share in that with our community. We also get to harvest all of that and convert it into things like jam and herb mixes. We also create lots and lots of different sauces and things that we can in jar and freeze. That really lasts us throughout the year.
Since we've put in all of our garden beds, we live off of the produce that we grow mostly throughout the year, whether it's fresh starting in the spring, like with the very first lettuces, well into the fall with our fall crops. Then we grow crops that we can store in our root cellar and we also have all the things that we've frozen and processed to use throughout the winter months. Just to encourage you, if you've wondered if you could turn your home into an edible landscape that you can enjoy, you absolutely can. It's not something that you need to do overnight. I'm a little bit of a go big go home kind of girl but you don't have to.
Like the proverb says the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago and the next best time is to plant one today. Maybe this is a year that you add in a fruit to you that you've always wanted to grow or maybe you start with a patio garden where you're growing some herbs and things out back. It's so fun to dream and to create an edible landscape where you can live off your land and you can enjoy the things that you grow for yourself. We've loved it.
Jochen: Christina alluded to this earlier in the podcast. I came to gardening a little bit later but I just couldn't love it more. It has been so much fun and so rewarding but a big part of it is to that gardening for us it's about community and community is about sharing. Sharing ideas, suggestions, stories, celebrating gardening wins, gardening losses. We had some cabbages that we had some losses in last year. Those kinds of things. Please head over to our Instagram, it's @modernfarmsteads. Use the hashtag Modern
Farmsteads podcast and tell us about your gardening stories and your journey. We'd love to hear from you and yes, I know that's a long hashtag, but I'm the guy with the longest name in the world, so I'm just asking you to be okay with that.
Christina: The other thing too is on Instagram, we love to write back and forth with people. Sometimes it might take me a day or two, but we do love to write back and answer questions and chat about your garden because we love to talk about all things gardening.
Jochen: As you all know, COVID has been super weird and honestly seems, from where we sit, that the world falls into two groups, those that started a garden and those that wanted to end didn't get to and are now sad that they didn't. If you're in that second group, then we just want to encourage you, we can still help you. It's not too late. You absolutely can start a garden head over to our website, again, modernfarmsteads.com, and take a look and we can absolutely still set you up fall crops are going in and you absolutely have a wonderful garden this year.
Christina: Yes, you can grow kale. You can go Swiss chard, all kinds of greens, and lettuces. There's so many things that you can still grow even though the beginning of spring has passed. It's not too late.
Jochen: Stir fry chard is absolutely mind-blowingly good.
[music]
Christina: It is so good, with garlic, yum.
[music]
Thanks for listening to the Modern Farmsteads podcast. If you like what you heard, please do rate us on iTunes, download and subscribe.
Jochen: Don't forget to visit us at modernfarmsteads.com where you'll find show notes, links to our expert guests, the books we mentioned, and other super useful content.
Christina: If you want to connect more, head over to Instagram @modernfarmsteads, we write back and forth with our listeners and we would so love to hear from you.
Jochen and Christina: Thanks for listening.
[music].
[00:23:56] [END OF AUDIO]