Bayou Magnolia Homestead and Ranch

Today I'm talking with Jennifer at Bayou Magnolia Homestead and Ranch.  This episode is sponsored by Greenbush Twins & Company. https://www.homesteadliving.com/subscribe/ref/41/ https://homesteadliving.com/the-old-fashioned-on-purpose-planner/ref/41/ www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead 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. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. This episode is sponsored by Greenbush Twins & Company, where creativity and community grow hand in hand. Just like a thriving garden or a well-loved homestead, the best things are built with care, purpose, and heart. Through thoughtful design, storytelling, and handcrafted goods, they're helping people celebrate a simpler or meaningful way of living. Learn more at Greenbush Twins & Company. 00:28 Today I'm talking with Jennifer at Bayou Magnolia Homestead and Ranch in Louisiana. Good morning, Jennifer. How are you?  Good morning. I'm fine. How are you? I'm good. How is the weather there this morning? Brutally hot.  It's only, it's not even 10 o'clock yet. It shouldn't be brutally hot. Well, we have the super thick humidity down here to deal with too. So it adds on to the brutalness of the temperature. 00:57 I'm sorry to hear that. I'm up in the north in Minnesota and it is 75 degrees right now and it's really overcast and muggy. It was foggy when I got up.  man, that 75 sounds pretty great right about now and overcast too. We're kind of in the middle of a dry spell. So we're dry, hot and humid.  Yeah, we had two to three weeks of really, really hot and humid. 01:27 I don't know, a couple of weeks ago. And it sucked lemons because Minnesota does not usually have a stretch that long, that hot and that wet. So we're real thankful that it's finally leveled out again.  Well, y'all's weather sounds a lot cooler than it is here and I'd kill for it right about now. I'm waiting for the cooler months.  I think we all are. This summer has been hard everywhere with the weather. So I think we're all kind of like... 01:55 Okay, two more weeks and then we should be rolling into fallish temperatures, hopefully.  Okay, so tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do, Jennifer. Okay, so I am 29 and I am not originally from any kind of a rural life. I'm actually from the outskirts of New Orleans, so pretty big city.  However, 02:19 My family has always kind of been more of a self-sustaining kind of family, even in a more suburban kind of area.  I met my better half and together we bought a small five acre farm a little ways away from the city. And we just kind of jumped in on it, built a house and immediately the first thing I did was start getting birds and pigs and horses and. 02:46 So we kind of acquired just a little bit of a small but large farm here. And that was in 2025?  No. Yeah, well, we started building. We bought the property in 2021. OK. But we had done everything ourselves. So it was a wooded property that we ended up clearing ourself. And then as far as our house goes, we built that ourselves. We contracted out a few things, but for the most part, we did it ourselves. 03:14 Our barn was built by ourselves. So it took a lot of time. So we started our venture in 2021 as far as acquiring the property. And then we started operating a small business around 2025, which was, we moved here in May. So we started a few months after we moved. Okay, cool. So I'm going to ask at the beginning instead of at the end,  was it, is it? 03:43 a steep learning curve and are you loving it?  Absolutely.  And there's never, it's never ending learning. You're always learning something new. And I think that's really important and kind of anything that you go into is that you're always open to the idea of learning new things and believing that you don't know everything there is about what you're doing.  So it was definitely a learning curve.  Getting used to 04:14 I mean, I had a few farm animals in the suburban area, wasn't really supposed to, but as far as mass scale, that was a big learning curve. And it's a lot sometimes, I'm not gonna lie. It can be a handful and you always have sicknesses and illnesses and you kind of have to figure it out as you go. But I love every second of it and I wouldn't trade it for anything else.  Good. And you're 29. We need people like you coming up through the ranks to do this stuff. 04:44 We need you, Jennifer.  So tell me, what do you have at your homestead for animals? 04:55 So we started off with just having, had a horse beforehand that I was boarding. So we started off with the horse, but of course you're not really technically supposed to keep horses by themselves.  we did some searching and I came home with a feral Mustang that I've been training on the side.  She ended up being pregnant. So I have three horses. And then we had, we live in an area where unfortunately a lot of people kind of dump. 05:24 animals on our street because we're so rural. Yeah. So they think it's a good place where the animal won't come back to them, I guess.  So we found 15 chickens on the side of the  dumped chickens.  Someone dumped chickens and it was hens, roosters, everything. And they were young. They were probably maybe like four or five months old. So me, I come from a veterinary background. So I have a very large heart for animals. 05:54 and I don't like to see endless suffering or unnecessary suffering. So I couldn't leave these birds just helpless on the side of the road. So we took a dip net and started scooping as many as we could. There were probably maybe 50 birds on the side of the road and I collected maybe 15 of them. Oh, wow.  It was quite the adventure and I was pretty disturbed that somebody could do that. 06:20 Um, but we also have four dogs and three of those four dogs were also set found the exact same way on our street,  banded on the side of the road. But for chickens, I never knew that people would do that for chickens, but they do apparently.  So, um, I acquired 15 chickens and I absolutely fell in love with them. I had a hen as a child and I love chicken sense, but we weren't really pushing to add a whole bunch of animals at one time starting out. 06:50 but the 15 chickens kind of did me in,  then chicken math takes over.  So we ended up getting a few more, some friends had asked me to take a few birds. And then I got kind of really dove into the world of zombie chickens, which is an Ayam Samani and a white-like horn cross and the Ayam Samani breeds.  Uh-huh, yeah, I've heard about those. Yeah, so I thought those were really cool. I... 07:18 kind of ventured into maybe breeding those and producing my own stock of those. I acquired a very, very nice Ayam Samani rooster for a very good price. So we acquired him and I then bought a bunch of white leghorn hens that I have. So we originally wanted to start breeding Ayam Samanis and white leghorns.  And we are still doing that. We just kind of took the back burner on breeding birds and 07:45 are focusing more right this second on just selling eggs and kind of dipping our toes in the water to see what we can best serve our community with.  Okay, so your number one, thank you for taking in the chickens and the dogs that got dumped.  And I just want to take a minute and or a couple of minutes and say, if you're a person who has an animal you cannot keep. 08:14 I'm pretty sure that there are shelters,  there are helplines you can call to find out if there's places you can take your animal,  and it doesn't hurt to ask the property owner if they're interested in taking your animal before you dump it. So please, for the love of God and everything,  good. Ask some questions before you just dump the animal that you don't feel like you're equipped to take care of anymore, please. 08:43 because it is really hard on those of us who are not prepared to find animals on our property or right on the road outside of our property because we have really big hearts and we want to help them. But we may not have what we need to take care of them right that moment.  So Jennifer, you have anything to add to that? Thank you very much for saying that. But yes, there is always going to be it may be you know, you may have to, you know, 09:11 actually try to find a place that'll take them. But there are places that'll take them. Even the chickens, I mean, I would have rather seen the roosters go to somebody that can use them for food instead of dumped on the side of the road.  Yeah. And you can always, I don't know about Facebook, but I think on Nextdoor, the app Nextdoor or on Craigslist, I think it's free to put up a post that says, I have 50 chickens. Is anyone interested? So 09:40 Try everything before you just dump an animal because when you take on the care of an animal, once your animal, you are supposed to commit to the responsibility of that animal.  And please be responsible in trying to find a new home. I understand that times are hard right now, but please try before you just dump them. Right, right. I definitely agree. And we live in a 10:07 world full of technology and resources and there's always another way for that.  I hope so.  I we just had an animal show up at our property last week was a probably four month old female orange tabby cat and we were we were fine letting her stay here and be a barn cat and somebody pulled into our driveway too fast and hit her and broke her and my husband had to put her down. 10:36 She'd only been here two days.  So number one, somebody dumped her. They picked a good place to dump her because she was welcome to stay. And then somebody else hit her. It was a very rough couple of days here last week. Wow. Yeah, that is rough. I can't imagine. And I don't know if you know this, but most orange cats are male.  Yeah. A female. And I was I was hoping that it was female because we have other barn cats. And I was like, 11:06 Yay, we can add to the gene pool, but no, we're not adding to the gene pool because she's no longer with us. So yeah, the whole dumping animals thing, I've got a tiny little burr in my butt about the whole thing. So let's not do that if we can avoid it.  So I was looking through your Facebook page and one of your horses or both of your horses are Mustangs, is that right? One of them is a Mustang that was caught in Nevada as a yearling. 11:35 and she went through some pretty bad stuff before I got her. A lot of people that really didn't know what they were getting into. I had been around horses pretty much my entire life and I had worked with alongside trainers and actually trained horses to get free riding lessons as a teenager. So I was very familiar. But she had gone through a lot of hands that weren't very kind to her.  She still kind of has an issue with men. 12:03 But she has come a very, long ways. But she was pastured with a stallion quarter horse and she ended up bred. But nobody could do anything with her. Nobody could touch her. Nobody could handle her. You couldn't put a halter on her.  And I was told that she could be, but they didn't think that she was because the stallion supposedly had broken out one time. 12:31 I learned later that was not the case. She was housed with the stallion. So she came to me pregnant.  So I have a Mustang cross baby and then a Mustang mare. And my other horse is a 22 year old quarter horse. Okay. And the foal is it like, like beige colored? So she is actually gray. So she was born a very, very dark Bay. 12:58 with gray horses and the way that gene works is they're born the color they would technically be as an adult if they did not carry that gray gene. And as they get older, they start lightening up. So that baby, while she's kind of beige looking right now, she's gonna end up pretty white. And she actually started graying very, very early on and very, very quickly. So I suspect she'll be gray within her first couple of years versus maybe five or six that they usually gray out at. 13:28 Okay, cool.  So I know nothing about mustangs except that there are wild herds in the southwest and that they can get out of hand population wise and people go capture them. Is that accurate? That's what I've read. Yeah.  So essentially mustangs were descendants of 13:53 Spanish conquistadors that came to the US early on when the US was first starting to get established.  And they are essentially a bunch of domestic horses that were escaped or let loose by early settlers. So they can range in different breed types.  So when you say Mustang, you could end up with a very large Clydesdale looking horse or you could end up with something very pony like. It's such a large gene pool that they have. 14:22 But they're broken into different sections that the Bureau of Land Management kind of organizes and names.  And when each herd kind of gets overpopulated is when the BLM will step in and round up a bunch of the horses and put them through.  They'll vet them, they'll trim feet, they'll do teeth.  And then they are put on an online auction. 14:51 for people to bid on and buy. For the safety of the horses, there is a one-year kind of, it's kind of like a contract where you're not allowed to sell or do really anything with that horse until you have a notice from a veterinarian and farrier that you've been taking care of this horse for the year and then they issue you a title. 15:17 that makes that horse officially yours, but you technically don't own the horse that you adopt for a year after you actually acquire it.  I love my podcast so much because I learned something new every single time I talk to somebody.  That's awesome. I didn't know any of that. Thank you.  So you also have a garden. Is that right? 15:44 I do.  So we are not very savvy in the gardening world, but it was definitely something we wanted to dip our toes in.  My fiance is very big into okra, wants to pickle okra, so we did a lot of okra. This year we did not open our garden up to any public consumers. We just kind of wanted to dip our toes in and see what we could do, what we can manage. But yeah, we did have a really good garden. 16:10 And we did have a lot of production in it. I was quite surprised because the ground here is so much different than what I grew up with. It's very clay-like versus a soft soil that you would typically think of. So I was really surprised that we had success in it, but we did. Good. Did you... I always have to ask about tomatoes because we've had two years of terrible luck with our tomatoes because it was so wet. 16:39 This year is a banner year. We have so many tomatoes already coming that we are probably going to have at least a thousand pounds by the time we're done. So do you grow tomatoes?  Yes.  So I, my family grew up with Creole tomatoes. I kind of gave that a swing this year. They did not do too well and they're supposed to be a very heat tolerant tomato, but they did not do too well.  Even with daily watering and 17:05 Very rigid care, they just did not thrive here.  I had tremendous amounts of luck with cherry tomatoes this year. I had cherry tomatoes coming out of my ears. I could not keep up with them. Were they good?  they They were very good. Very, very, very good. Good. Did you do something with them or did you just eat them and give them away? I did not do anything with them. mostly... 17:34 put them in like my salads and stuff or cook. I would cook them in like maybe burritos and stuff that we would make at home. And I did give some away to like family members and friends, but nothing special that I did with them. But I definitely want to look more into that because if I can grow cherry tomatoes like that every year, I would, I could probably come up with so many different things I could make with them. Oh, absolutely. And I 18:01 I could not find the recipe. was talking to somebody else a year or so ago and I swear I've seen a recipe for tomato pie and it's like a cherry pie, but you use tomatoes.  You use some cherry tomatoes. So I'm going to have to do some more digging and see if I can find that recipe because I know it exists somewhere.  Oh wow. That actually sounds pretty good. Well, yeah. mean cherry tomatoes, if you quarter them and 18:31 Follow a recipe for it. I assume that if you put more if you put sugar in it It's probably gonna taste like a sweet cherry pie And I mean obviously cherries don't have as much acid in them as we as cherry tomatoes do but I think it would work I'm gonna have to do some real dig and I swear to God I saw a recipe for cherry tomato pie at some point So I don't know it may just be something I dreamed up and I may just have to make the recipe myself. Who knows? 19:01 We'll definitely share if you do.  will.  I'm being really silly.  And also,  you bake?  I dove into baking even before I moved here, actually. I was pretty big into sourdough.  Lately, I really haven't had the time to keep it up for the demand that I would have for it. But sourdough was really big on my list. I was doing sandwich breads and 19:29 The whole spiel, everything you can imagine I was trying to make.  I was I still am very into homemade is probably the best you will ever have.  I really my goal is to eventually be able to support me and my family mostly on things that we can make here at the farm.  Fabulous.  I have a thing about bread. I actually love the smell of baking bread. 19:58 more than I like eating bread. Is that weird or is that not weird? No, I can relate to that actually. I think the smell is probably what triggers us to really want to eat bread.  Yeah. Yeah. And the thing is that first warm slice of a loaf of bread is astoundingly amazingly yummy. After that, I'm like, eh, it's bread. It's better than the store bread, but it's just bread. 20:27 Right, right.  I'm also not a big fan of bread. I don't like to eat it just to eat it. So that might be part of my issue. 20:37 Well, I can relate. It was definitely very exciting when you first get it, but then when you've had it sitting for a minute, I'm kind of like, meh, it's bread. So I can relate in that sense, definitely.  I do like the homemade bread a lot better than store-bought bread. I can say that. I do too. The only thing that, I don't want to say it sucks, but the only thing that's not great. 21:03 is with homemade bread, it's going to mold a lot faster than store-bought bread because homemade bread doesn't have preservatives in it. Right. And that is the downfall. I hated that while making bread because I couldn't enjoy it as long as I would store-bought bread.  I would.  It kind of made it difficult actually because you were trying to find a lot of things to use the bread for before it went bad.  Yeah, exactly.  And 21:28 The thing with bread is you can't just stick it in the fridge. If you want to retard any growth on it, you have to freeze it. Right.  the fridge, it just dries the bread out and it doesn't taste good and the texture is really bad.  Right, right.  And I wish there was a way that we could preserve bread a little bit better without adding all of the artificial preservatives. 21:58 Yeah, and the thing is, you know why this doesn't work,  right? Mm-hmm. The reason this doesn't work is because people in the old days,  made bread every day and their big families ate it. Right. There was no time for the bread to go bad because by the time the bread would have been bad, it's gone.  Right. And bread was a very big staple. Yeah, and these days we don't have big families and the bread just, you know... 22:26 half the loaf sits for three days and then it's moldy and it goes in the jarash. Right. Which is very wasteful and I don't like wasting. I don't think anybody should like wasting right now the price of ingredients and pre-made food. Let's not waste it. Oh, I know.  It's kind of hard for your average person to really survive right now. It really is.  We're having our first batch of this year's bruschetta. 22:56 for dinner tonight or for lunch tomorrow. Do you know what bruschetta is? Yes. Yes. We live for this day. We finally have potatoes that we can make a batch of it. And my husband bought the big French bread loaf when he was picking up groceries yesterday. I was like, I'm going to be eating bruschetta for three days because I don't want that bread to go to waste.  Right. Right.  Now. 23:21 This is not a hardship by any means, but I won't want bruschetta again until at least October.  I know.  There are lots of things that we've had to live off of that. I'm kind of over at this point.  Mine is Cheerios growing up. That's what we had for breakfast every day for years. I can't even handle the smell of a box of Cheerios being opened these days. 23:48 Mine is probably rice. I think rice was always the cheapest and easiest thing to make and have around. So I am very, very burnt out on rice.  We didn't do a lot of rice and I actually love brown rice. I will make brown rice and just eat it with a little bit of butter and salt. That's how much I love brown rice.  So let me think, is there anything else? 24:15 I don't think there's a whole lot more here.  So do you have plans to keep adding to the homestead or are you pretty good for a while? So animal wise, I think we're good for a little while. We're kind of up to our ears on animals, but we've been doing pretty well with the eggs. I think the chickens are kind of paying for themselves at this point.  But we don't have any plans to add any more animals.  We are adding some fruit, fruiting. 24:43 shrubs and trees on our farm that hopefully we'll be able to offer things like jam and syrups in the future. So really excited about that.  We just got to kind of organize ourselves a little bit better because we're still pretty new here.  So when you say syrup are you talking like fruit syrups? Yeah like a fruit syrup. I had years ago made a really nice blueberry syrup that you could 25:11 pour on pancakes, you could also mix it into like a lemonade and make a very nice blueberry lemonade. I was drinking that like crazy.  So that's something I kind of want to experiment a little bit more with and see if that's something that I can offer people.  didn't, I wasn't sure if you were talking about maple syrup or fruit syrup, and I'm glad that you're talking about fruit syrup.  We had a banner crop of black raspberries like three years ago, and we tried to make black raspberry jelly. 25:42 and it didn't set up, so it was black raspberry syrup. It was amazing on Belgian waffles with real whipped cream.  was the most decadent homemade dessert we've ever had.  I can imagine.  really, when I had made that blueberry syrup, I was just amazed at the fact that I could make something that tasted better than store-bought. 26:09 satisfied my sweet tooth and I could use it for just about everything. 26:16 Yes, and you made it yourself. You made it yourself. And this is why I do this podcast. I want people to know that almost everything that is made or fixed or built, people did it long before we had places to go to to get or have somebody fix something.  Right, right. And I unfortunately feel like we 26:45 as a society have kind of stepped away from being able to do things and be more self-sufficient and kind of rely on other people to do things for us, which kind of hurts us as human beings tragically.  It sure does. And I live in fear of the day that the internet goes down, you know, for more than a day. Right. Because people are going to lose their minds. They're going to riot. They're going to loot because 27:12 they won't know what to do with themselves.  Right, right. And we rely so heavily on the Internet. See me, I'm a very, very big book person.  I will sit down and read books and acquire information a lot that way. But I feel like so many people nowadays rely heavily on the Internet for their sole bits of information that that's all they know. If the Internet went down, nobody would know how to do anything. Well, that and all of our shipping. 27:42 systems would go down because that's all reliant on satellites and information being texted and emailed and it would just be a disaster. And I can remember when landlines became digital. There are no actual regular landlines anymore that I know of. They're all voiceover internet protocol, the OIP. Right. And if the internet goes down, 28:11 None of us are going to be able to get hold of anybody through our phones.  And my parents live in Maine. My sister lives in Maine. My brother lives in Massachusetts. I live in Minnesota. I won't have any way to get hold of my parents or my siblings if the internet goes down. It used to be that if you had a regular old landline that wasn't VOIP, 28:37 You could still get hold of your loved ones to make sure they were okay using a telephone. So I'm dating myself. I'm 56.  was alive before internet was a personal home. Internet was a thing. 28:54 So I just worry and we have books, we have at least five books sitting on the bookcase downstairs that are all basically back to basics skills like how to butcher a rabbit, how to butcher a deer,  how to can, how to preserve food, how to salt preserve food even.  So yeah, you can't, I keep saying this, you cannot rely on. 29:21 the internet to provide you information immediately if the internet isn't available and you cannot rely on your local or federal government to bail your ass out when you need it right now because that's how it works.  whoever is listening to my little rant here, I should have a power rant thing, I don't have a noise for that, but if you're listening to my rant here,  really try to commit some stuff to memory and try to do some things that 29:50 might just save you if things go wrong.  Yes. And as someone that does live in South Louisiana and deals with lot of hurricanes and has gone through a lot of major hurricanes, I can attest that when you're in a state of an emergency, you really can't rely on the government to come and save you. For Katrina, I remember pretty much every man was for himself for a very long time before even the National Guard came and started issuing out MREs. 30:20 It's very important to be able to manage on your own and not rely so heavily on technology and your government. You need to be able to self sustain at least to some kind of extent.  Yes, I've heard, I've heard in general it's good to have two weeks of supplies on hand. 30:44 just in general, not when there's bad weather predicted, but just to have some water put away,  some canned goods put away, some rice and beans put away so that if something does come up, you're covered for at least two weeks. And I think that that is a very good suggestion. Yes, absolutely.  All right, Jennifer, I tried to keep these to half an hour and I feel like we got a little off topic, but I feel like preparedness is part of home settings. I think we're good.  Where can people find you? 31:15 You can best reach me on my Facebook page by you Magnolia Homestead and Ranch. Okay, and do you have a website? You do. I do have a website and it is the same by you Magnolia Homestead and Ranch,  but it is at I think it's GoDaddy. I haven't messed with my website a whole lot. I love that it is.godaddiesites.com 31:41 So cool, so people can find you if they have questions or if they want to talk to you about all the things that you're doing.  As always, people can find me at tinyhomesteadpodcast.com. Jennifer, thank you for taking time out on a Saturday morning chat with me. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for inviting me. You're welcome. Have a great day. You too.