Real Food Stories

The Reluctant Gardener’s Guide to the Homesteader Mindset

• Heather Carey • Season 4 • Episode 116

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What does homesteading look like when you live in suburban Los Angeles? Elizabeth Bruckner never imagined she'd become a passionate advocate for self-sufficient living – especially after years of killing every houseplant that crossed her threshold. However, a long-term chronic illness that left her bedridden forced her to reimagine her relationship with food and healing.

Desperate to regain her health, she abandoned processed foods and gradually shifted from her 27-year vegetarian diet to incorporate nutrient-dense, ethically sourced animal products. The improvements were dramatic, but it was the COVID pandemic that truly catalyzed her homesteading journey when even basic ingredients like garlic became temporarily unavailable.

"I didn't even know what broccoli looked like coming out of the ground – that's how divorced I was from my food," Elizabeth confesses. Today, she champions an accessible vision of homesteading that breaks free from the stereotypical image of rural living with livestock and acres of land. Instead, she focuses on finding joy in whatever aspects of self-sufficiency speak to you – whether that's fermenting foods, growing herbs as a "gateway drug" to gardening, or making cleaning products from fruit scraps.

Elizabeth's book, "The Homesteader Mindset," offers practical guidance for building sustainable habits without the overwhelm. Her approach acknowledges our modern lives while reclaiming traditional wisdom – proving that even "lazy gardeners" can create abundant food spaces through permaculture techniques that mimic nature's systems.

Ready to explore your homesteading potential? Visit Elizabeth's website for a free Homesteader Habit Tracker and discover how small daily practices can transform your relationship with food, health, and self-sufficiency – no matter where you live.

Links Talked About on the Podcast

Get the Fruit Scrap Vinegar Recipe HERE

Mason Tops (lids used for fermenting and preserving)

Acid Test Strips (tests for acidity of vinegar)

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Speaker 1:

Hey everybody and welcome back to the Real Food Stories podcast. We are in spring right now, especially in the Northeast, which is my all-time favorite season, because it means that we finally get to start growing and, as you know, I have been gardening for decades and I have a very large vegetable garden, which is kind of my pride and joy. So when I talked to my guest today, Elizabeth Bruckner, I wanted to have her on to share her story with growing and homesteading. So let me tell you a little bit about Elizabeth.

Speaker 1:

Elizabeth Bruckner is the author of the Homesteader Mindset, a book that she claims will transform the way you view self-sufficiency. Her book gives you the tools and practical tips needed for a more meaningful life. It's a must-read for every person who dreams of creating sustainable living through traditional skills and common sense. Through her research and experimentation, Elizabeth taught herself to compost kitchen scraps, ferment like an alchemist, cook traditional foods and live a life that is more connected than she ever thought possible. Regarded as the fermentation maven, she speaks to enthusiastic crowds on topics such as healing herbs in the kitchen, the life-changing power of habit creation for homesteaders and the art of lacto-fermentation.

Speaker 1:

Now, Elizabeth, you were not always a homesteader and in fact, you live in the suburbs of Los Angeles, right, so that's not really an area that I would first think of when I think about living off the land and homesteading. But when we spoke a few weeks ago, you told me that you spent most of your 40s healing from a chronic illness that left you bedridden for weeks and homebound for months, and you were too sick to work for years. So I know that food, as we talked about, played a pivotal role in your healing, and then came the focus on homesteading and really paying attention to what you put into your body. So I would love to hear your story and how you got then to writing a whole book about homesteading.

Speaker 2:

Well, thank you for having me today, heather. I'm really grateful that we're chatting about this, and I love chatting about all things homesteading. I think the most important thing that I want to highlight for those that are listening is that you may be a homesteader already and not even know it. There are many spokes to the homesteading wheel. So let's start firstly with how I got here. You mentioned my chronic illness and it was really debilitating and it was a wake-up call because I had to make a decision if I was going to slow down and appreciate my body and take care of it in a way that allowed it space and energy to heal. So I feel like before my 40s. I was running on empty a great deal of the time and in grad school one of my teachers in traditional Chinese medicine she had said you know, vegetarianism is good for people that want to Buddha Buddha all day, but we're not Buddha Buddha all day, we're treating patients. Low-cost clinic where I was burning a lot of energy and continuing to do it.

Speaker 2:

On processed foods. They were good processed foods. They were expensive, healthy, organic, pretty pictures on the box, processed foods and so I thought I was doing the right thing. I hadn't had refined sugar for probably 15 years by the time I got sick. But I was sneaking in sugar with high carbs, like a lot of rice and brown rice what's wrong with brown rice? But I would do that.

Speaker 2:

And then eventually it caught up with me, and so what happened was I developed a chronic cough and I also had my period, for I think it was nine to 11 weeks it's all foggy because I started having a lot of cognitive issues during this time, so much so that I couldn't drive. I couldn't remember what was being said at the doctor's offices. My husband had to be my healthcare advocate after a time, and I was just spiraling and I didn't understand why. And I was still working. I was working two days a week and then resting for five days, and what would happen is I'd work two days, my chronic cough would get worse or I'd get an infection, and then I would be down for five days until it was time to work again. And I did this for about seven months, and then one day I was no longer able to use my legs. I couldn't stand up on my own, and it had been getting bad because I wasn't able to stand for more than five minutes without being fatigued. But when my body stopped working in that way, I knew that I finally was able to go.

Speaker 2:

I think I'm in trouble. I was experiencing a great deal of aphasia, which, for those of you that don't know what aphasia is, it's when you can't get grasp words. A lot of stroke victims get this. I had not had a stroke, but I couldn't finish simple sentences like I'm finishing now, and it was really scary. But I was too tired to be scared. And so I went to seven different doctors a neurologist, a gynecologist to make sure I didn't have ovarian cancer from all the bleeding, and, you know, someone to see my liver. And every single time I went to someone, they said that well, this is your problem, and it was. I wanted, I wanted a Western diagnosis so that I could treat it with acupuncture and herbal medicine, but I wasn't able to get the diagnosis. I just kept getting we'll come back and we'll do more tests and more tests and more tests.

Speaker 2:

Meanwhile, I was getting more and more ill and so I finally went to one of my colleagues, who is. He focuses on herbology, chinese herbology, and he was feeling my pulse and he goes oh well, what you're experiencing right now is yin separating from yang In Chinese medicine. That is bad news. That is when people are just about to go into a coma or just about to die. It's the yin of your body separating from the yang of your body, and it's for very, very sick patients. And I thought, oh my gosh, I got to do something because I don't want my husband to have to bury a young wife. That was really my thought. I don't want to leave my family with the burden of mourning me unnecessarily if my body can heal. And so I quit my job and slept, and slept, and slept, and slept.

Speaker 2:

And at this point I was still a vegetarian and one of my holistic doctors functional medicine doctors said I just I'm going to tell you I don't see vegetarians get better. And then I started doing some research on vegetarianism and I had become a vegetarian at 16. So I'd been a vegetarian for 27 years and I decided well, you know, in a last ditch effort, maybe I can do this. And so I started finding regenerative farms and like getting away from the thing that I was protesting most, which was factory farms, big ag, you know, just packing all these animals into terribly cruel places. There were other options, I just hadn't known about them, and so I started investigating that and slowly started incorporating meat into my diet as well as nutrient dense food, a few.

Speaker 2:

I think about a year ago I found the GAPS gut and physiology protocol, which involves a lot of juicing and lots of animal fats and lots of very easy to digest foods, on top of regular detoxes through baths and basic enemas and coffee enemas, and I noticed an immediate change because I was healing my gut and so once I started healing my gut, my brain started to heal, the migraraine started leaving, I had more energy, my ability to speak was coming back. It was all coming back quite quickly. So all of this to say that at the same time that I was healing from this chronic illness, then the pandemic hit right and I remember thinking like well, I've isolated from all people for a couple of years now I think it had been a few years, so I'll be fine with this for two weeks. But then, you know, two weeks later, suddenly people are panic buying food at the grocery store and my biggest wake up call in terms of the fragility of our food industrial system it was when I went to the store, or maybe it was DoorDash, I don't know if we were allowed to go to the store at that time and I tried to get organic garlic and organic ginger, which are very important herbs in the Chinese medicine cabinet for traditional Chinese medicine, and they did not have it. They were sold out. And I thought this is. I've never experienced not having food on our shelves before and I had seen it.

Speaker 2:

I went when I was 18, to the Soviet Union. The fall of the Iron Curtain had just fallen and they were allowing Americans to come in and I was 18, and I saw all of these stores, these giant stores with like one piece of bread on an entire shelf. So I remembered in my mind. And then I come from a family of war refugees, so I've been told stories of communism and you know what happens. So I understand food shortages, but I'd never seen it in America. And I came home that day and I was very upset and I told my husband I'm really nervous about this and he goes well, why don't we just grow some of our own food? And I paused, I blinked slowly and then I said do you know who I am? We've been married for like 20 years.

Speaker 2:

I was notorious for going to the garden store buying a plant and asking the gardener please can you give me something that won't die? And then I would promptly kill it within a week, and then I'd go back in a month and buy another. You know, sad victim that would then be tortured by me and I either watered too much, watered too little. I didn't know anything about gardening, but I know that the prescription to anxiety is action, and so I was like, well, I mean, I don't have anything else to do. So I went to the garden store and I started learning how to grow food. And I have grown garlic it's actually quite easy and I've grown ginger, and there's a sense of empowerment that comes with that, and it definitely cuts the ties that hopelessness can bind us to. So that's when I started going. There's something about this. So I started gardening, I started fermenting I don't remember which came first, but I fell in love with fermentation, mostly because even when I was chronically ill, I could still go and make some pickles and then let it sit on my shelf for a little bit, and so the two came hand in hand.

Speaker 2:

And when I started reading about this stuff, I wanted to learn how to do gardening if you have back pain and I noticed that people kept saying homesteading, homesteading, homesteading. I'm like, what is that? And it turns out that homesteading is just a sustainable, intentional way of living. It's an intentional way of life and it harkens back to some of our traditions which we're not that far from at least I'm not that far from and you get to do it in ways that delight you. You know, I don't make sourdough bread because that's not my homesteading passion. So that's a little bit of my story of how I got to homesteading and being on this podcast with you having being on this podcast with you, okay, great.

Speaker 1:

So, yeah, let's recap for a second. Yeah, so you were suffering from this sounds like pretty mysterious chronic illness, and it also sounds like there was a link to your food, and I know that you said that you were a vegetarian and just be. I think there's a big misconception about being vegetarian or vegan that that necessarily equals healthier, and sometimes you can eat really poorly as a vegan. Yes, and it's not necessarily healthier, and so you have to be really mindful of protein and certain nutrients to be really mindful of protein and certain nutrients. And so I don't know if you ever got a definitive answer to your what was ailing you, but it sounds like just changing your diet really had an enormous impact on your healing.

Speaker 2:

Yes, food, community, rest and movement. So when I was so sick, I could walk only five minutes and I'd get nauseous and we'd have to come back to the house and my husband had to come with me because my cognition was so clouded that I couldn't cross streets. There was too many decisions that had to be made in order to cross the street safely, and I was. I had such brain fog that I couldn't do those things. And I say community because you have to. You know, we are social beings, so it's not just. I started juicing and suddenly my life was better.

Speaker 2:

It was a number of things, and I knew, as a practitioner, I kept going what would I tell my patient? What would I tell my patient? And so, just before I got sick, I did something markedly different in my life. I did something purely for pleasure, and what that was is I decided to learn French. My husband and I visit France from time to time, but it's not like there's 1% of the population in the area that I live in speak French. It wasn't like it was useful at all. It was just something I wanted to do because I liked the way it sounded.

Speaker 2:

I've always wanted to learn a language, and so I had about six months of learning this language before I got sick and I decided to keep it and the people that I spoke with like my teachers online and I had a few language learning friends online none of them knew I was ill. So I had to cancel a lot because I was ill, but I never told them why I was canceling. And so there was this one pocket of my world where people didn't know I was sick. That wasn't my story, and they now a lot of them now know. But there was something about that, because the people that I loved and cared for me the you know, they always had puppy dog eyes when they were like, how are you doing no-transcript? How big it was.

Speaker 2:

I just knew that something wasn't working and so I'm going to try homeopathy and acupuncture and herbs and I was like throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what stuck. But what stuck, really what was the most magical, was getting nutrient dense foods in my body and the body knows how to heal. Like I was taught that in grad school. We were often talked trust the needles, which really means trust that patient's body. Like I don't have to be super creative or clever, I just need to do the pattern, the pattern diagnosis, and then find and then treat them according to that pattern and the body does the rest. And it's remarkable. So if I could do that in practice in the clinic, when I took off my work clothes and I was at home, could I do that at home and I recognized that finally I could.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I want to pause for a second, because I don't know if I mentioned this before, but you are a trained acupuncturist, correct? So that's why, when you're talking about needles and so you, yeah, that's your whole business, right, and your whole career is acupuncture. So I want to just make sure that we were clear on that, because I know that we hadn't mentioned it before. So community was really important food and then COVID happened, yes, and that creates a lot of isolation and you couldn't get access to things that were very important to you. I totally get that. I remember that very clearly, because food is very, very important to me as well.

Speaker 1:

As a nutritionist and a cooking instructor and chef, I'm cooking all the time, so to not be able to walk into a grocery store freely and go to a farmer's market was extremely stressful, extremely stressful, and so it sounds like that's what really prompted you, though, to then start growing your own food, which is such a wonderful practice, because you are then totally in control of your food. You want organic garlic? You're going to grow it. You want organic ginger? You know you can do that. It sounds like in los angeles, too. I don't know if I, if I could even grow ginger in connecticut, but where you live you could probably do that very easily. Well, and then that led into this, this homesteading lifestyle that's correct.

Speaker 2:

Well, I will say you might want to. You might want to experiment with garlic. You said ginger. You don't know if you can grow ginger.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I can grow garlic, but I I have never tried ginger, I don't even know.

Speaker 2:

That might be tough.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, if you walk into a garden store here, you would not find. Yeah, I don't.

Speaker 2:

I don't think so. I mean there's. I mean, if you did a greenhouse, of course, yeah, but garlic for sure, Okay, yeah.

Speaker 1:

So then you went from just realizing that you could start maybe growing food, even though you had never done it before. Yeah, and you kill all houseplants and everything.

Speaker 2:

Although I see a couple of plants Now yes, behind you.

Speaker 1:

On Zoom but that this philosophy of homesteading then came to be and you describe it as an intentional way of living or of life correct. So let's talk a little bit more about homesteading. And also because, like I said before, you live in Los Angeles. I think when people think or many people think of homesteading, they think of living someplace very rural. That's right, you know where. You have no choice. Your closest grocery store is 50 miles away, and so you're going to be raising chickens and goats and cows and growing all your own food so you can survive.

Speaker 2:

Yes, and growing all your own food so you can survive on your property.

Speaker 1:

So you don't technically need to survive in this way, because I imagine that you have access to lots of food sources there, but it is a way of life.

Speaker 2:

It's a way of life and I will say that the first thing that I thought of when I thought of homesteaders was someone like Little House on the Prairie. They live in the middle of nowhere. They've got some kids. They've got to fight off bears with a rifle. They've got homemade clothes it's probably made out of curtains, I don't know and what really the original homesteaders were. That there was a series of homesteader acts, starting in 1862 where the federal government gave federal land to private owners, about 270 million acres. A lot of that did not go to Little House on the Prairie, it went to big business, sadly, but there was quite a few homesteaders that had long beards and bonnets and all that stuff.

Speaker 2:

Homesteading now is more of an intentional way of living, as I'd mentioned before, and it's a mindfulness practice. I think a lot of minimalism and homesteading can go hand in hand. I think there's a lot of crossover into what's trendy now, doing things that you love, like the woman that cleans closets Marie Kondo, I think, is her name. She know she was really big about tidying up. Well, homesteading can go into that, because you can decide on things that you absolutely love. What homesteading looks like now and again it's got many spokes to the wheel, so I'm going to name a few, but there's a lot more. It's reducing toxic load in your home, building your gut microbiomes with nutrient-dense foods so that your terrain is really strong, so that you're not getting sick and you can close that loop. You're not constantly going to the pharmacy or the hospital or urgent care. Growing edible landscaping is another spoke. And connecting more deeply with our innate resourcefulness that's the real key is I don't have to do it all alone, but I also can do a lot of it. And so when we connect, we're going to. You know you're going to meet other people in the community that have similar interests and you kind of you share tasks.

Speaker 2:

For instance, at the farmer's market, there's this incredible baker that makes 48 hour fermented sourdough. My husband loves bread and I was like, well, I think I should start making this bread. And he's like, why you don't eat it? And we have a baker that makes it incredibly for 12 bucks. And I'm like, well, I think I should continue to buy it from the baker. That's a really good idea. And so, because I have the ability to have convenience Now I will say that there's an urban farm. It's a little postage stamp. There's probably more than one, but one that I know of a postage stamp house with a little, not even an acre of land, like tiny, tiny, like inner city land, and he grows enough food. I think it's a quarter. No, it's not a quarter, it's like one fifth of an acre of land. He grows enough food for four people for the entire year, like enough produce in downtown Los Angeles. Know Los Angeles. That's remarkable.

Speaker 1:

And so it's so possible. It's incredible.

Speaker 2:

And so what I learned with homesteading because I did a lot of permaculture which permaculture is such an incredible education kind of an education group, and what they're teaching you is to mimic kind of an education group, and what they're teaching you is to mimic nature in your backyard. So, for example, I have things called guilds, which are really families. I'll have a tree, a fruit tree, and then when the fruit tree's a baby, I will have some cover crop around it that I can eat. So maybe or not eat, maybe it's pretty like snapdragons or I think there's I forget what the other. I'm not big on flowers, but there's other flowers that will cover the ground and keep that ground, because our ground gets really, really hot and really really dry so I need to keep it moist so I don't actually need to mulch. I can mulch with living beans. And then I'll have another thing, like one of my favorite. What is the name of it? It starts with a C Comfrey, that's it. I love comfrey because it's a nitrogen fixer, so it goes really deep down. It doesn't affect any of the other roots but it's going to feed the tree and then I can also use it medicinally for bruises and scrapes and all that stuff it's called knit bone in familial herbal remedies remedies, and so I've created this family and then I can walk away and I do walk, I'm I am not like you, I'm not a proud gardener, I am a really lazy gardener, and so I will walk away for a few months if stuff gets really busy and I'll come back and everything's still alive and thriving in southern California in very, very hot area, because it's off of my cemented backyard I have some planters that are mean, it's hot and these things are doing just fine.

Speaker 2:

I gave a tour yesterday and I was showing some taro, some yarrow, which is great for stopping bleeding for emergencies, and it was thriving and I haven't watered this thing in like a few months, honestly, because I'm a lazy gardener and so homesteading doesn't have to be perfect or beautiful. It can be very messy if that's the type of person you are, which for me, that's what my gardening looks like. But we can come back to finding what homesteading means to us, and I think that's what I was most surprised about. I'm like, I'm not a homesteader, I don't even cook and as a nutritionist, I think we should talk about this a little bit, because there's lots of professional women, career women and career men that think I'm too busy to cook. I'm just going to, I'm going to outsource it.

Speaker 2:

And you can get into a lot of trouble outsourcing. So initially when I was outsourcing, I was getting rotisserie chicken at the organic grocery store that's, you know, very close to my house, and that was all fine and good, except I didn't know what oils they were using on that chicken. They were using stuff that I probably wouldn't use in my kitchen. So when I bake a chicken, I bake it with a little bit of chicken fat on top to give it a nice crispy feel, but I don't know what they were using. And seed oils I'm highly allergic to them. They really make me ill. But I didn't know that they made me ill because I'd had them all the time, because I was outsourcing all of my food.

Speaker 2:

So what I would say to the professional that's like I'm just too busy. There are ways that you can create found time and there's ways that you can prioritize the things that are important to you in a way that's not painful. For me. Cooking felt painful, so I initially started with I'm going to find a recipe that has no more than three steps. So chicken, you clean it, you put some grease on it, you stick it in the oven. That's three, you know less than three steps, and it's and it's not three steps and it's it's fast food. Right Now I have a chicken that I can pull out and make chicken salad or soup or sandwiches, or just that with a little side, and so I'd love for us to talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 1:

This idea that cooking is just not that important, because it is oh yeah, I could talk I mean, I could do millions of podcasts on that because I mean, this is the theme that I see with so many people is that they are just too busy to cook. And number one, I feel like when you are outsourcing, like you said which I like that analogy you are losing your connection to your food. I mean you don't know what the chicken that you buy for the rotisserie chicken, you don't know what they're making it with when you go to a restaurant. It's all fine to go out to a restaurant every once in a while, but you just lose the connection. You don't know what they're making it with when you go to a restaurant. It's all fine to go out to a restaurant every once in a while, but you just lose the connection. You don't know how they're preparing things and so you don't know the ingredients, the sources, all of that.

Speaker 1:

So I think the more that we can cook at home, the better, and be more in just in charge of our food, even just for the amount of calories and the fat and the salt, and that you know, just like that basic level, when people say that they're too busy to cook, I have lots of tips for that, I mean number one, you don't need to be a five-star gourmet chef. I mean it does not have to look like something that came out of a food channel show. It can just be as simple as roasting a chicken once a week, and I mean that's such a great example, as one roast chicken can make a couple of meals. You can put it into soup, you can make tacos, you can whatever you know, you can make chicken salad, whatever, whatever, and so that's a really good example.

Speaker 1:

So I think we want to learn how to maximize food in that way making double of something, freezing half of it, having you know things on hand. So meal prepping and meal planning, I think, are very, very crucial steps in that, and that's you can't just wander aimlessly through a grocery store five days a week just wondering, like, what am I having for dinner tonight? It really does take some kind of forethought and plan and it lessens the stress of what am I going to eat every week?

Speaker 2:

Yes, that's exactly right. And I think even gardening and I'm not suggesting that people garden if they feel that they can't even, you know, roast a chicken but gardening makes for this really there's less plan and less prep. So sometimes I'll go out into my garden and go, oh, the cucumbers are up, I guess it's time to make cucumber salad. Or oh, the basil's here, let's make a pasta salad with basil. But I think if we circle back to because sometimes for me, if I heard just bake a chicken, I'd be like that's insane. You've like what? What are you talking about? Like I've still have.

Speaker 2:

I remember in grad school I had bedsheets for curtains because I just didn't have time to go get bedsheets, so we just had bedsheets for curtains. So you're going to tell the listener that has bedsheets for curtains to roast a chicken. And I will say that minute by minute it's easier and more effective to roast a chicken than it is to go out to a fast food joint, stand in line, get in your car, get in line, wait for the order, come back, feel like crap after you eat it. Absolutely.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

So there's just there's a few pieces. So once a week we make a roast chicken. Do we get tired of chicken? No, we, we, we. You know, now that I'm getting better at cooking we switch it up a little bit, but initially it was like we have cold chicken in the fridge. That's a win. Like I can eat a leg of cold chicken with a piece of steamed broccoli, and I'm good. Before I thought that it was easier to get in that fast food line because I was. That you know.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, I understand that that there is a lot of mental blocks to cooking a lot. I mean, that was something that I think when I first got into my business I was not totally prepared for that. There was going to be a lot of fear around cooking and just this mental block of like I can't cook, right, you want to. You want to tell me to cook? How do I even do that? I mean, what does that mean? Roasted chicken, if you didn't learn how to cook from your mom?

Speaker 2:

or your, you know right so then it goes.

Speaker 1:

It's it's difficult, but I think so just taking these like small, step-by-step right, it's possible. Yeah, so when I say you have to start meal planning and meal prepping, I totally get that you have to start where you're at, where you're comfortable. And same with gardening. I mean same with gardening. I tell people like I have a very large vegetable garden. That was years, though, of me planning it, failing. I mean I could tell you stories all day about, like my first couple of gardens. It was just like such a fail. And now it's a large vegetable garden that sometimes doesn't do great, and that's just how it goes.

Speaker 1:

And I love how you talk just more about outsourcing some of the other things that come in with your homesteading mindset, like buying the bread from a great baker who makes. I'm sure you know exactly where her ingredients come from and you feel good about buying her bread rather than you taking your time to make bread. You know that that's just not in your wheelhouse, that you want to even be baking bread, and that's fine. And I've been there. I mean I have bees at my house, we're beekeepers, I've had chickens, I bake bread, the compost, you know it's like some things have worked. We don't have chickens anymore just because of our lifestyle and traveling and everything. It's hard to keep chickens when you're not. You know you have to be there all the time you can travel with bees like bees are pretty you can leave alone for, yeah, a couple of weeks.

Speaker 1:

You don't have to be like attending, you know, tending to them every single day on their own. But chickens are different. Chickens need your attention. They're like pets. They need love, but we don't want to outsource too much, right? We want to have some control over our food and our, you know, and our ability to, to create our own health around. That, you know, and, and just, and it gives you, I think, a good sense of control. Yes, yeah.

Speaker 2:

It gives you a sense of hopefulness, if you can see. First of all, I didn't even know, pardon me, what broccoli looked like coming out of the ground, like that's how divorced I was from my food. I was a latchkey kid to income home. Everybody was out of the house, so of course they weren't going to teach me how to cook. They weren't there to cook. We lived on Pop-Tarts and microwave stuff growing up, and so I do agree with you that patient compliance is really tricky, and it's always been an issue, this patient compliance.

Speaker 2:

And so even when I'm treating patients in the clinic and they come for acupuncture, I'm often giving them homework and saying try this one little thing. And a lot of times I hear those three big myths, which is I don't have time, I don't have enough money and it's too complicated. And I hope that the readers, the listener, reader because I'm an author, I hope that the listener is taking this in, and especially that's what I was looking for for the reader as well that it's possible. It's not that complicated, especially if you focus on what you love. For example, if gardening is not right now something that interests you, what does interest you? If cooking feels like too much, what does feel like something that you can. For me it was fermentation. I loved the idea of increasing my vitamin count simply by putting a jar of some vegetables with salt and water on my counter one of the fun facts that I learned, which made me so happy, and I told everyone at every cocktail party I went to, because I go to so many cocktail parties. Who goes to cocktail parties 1950s? With my little martini? That's where I am usually on a Saturday. But I was constantly saying do you know that in a table, a teaspoon of sauerkraut there's more probiotics than an entire bottle of probiotics? Like that, to me, blew my mind.

Speaker 2:

So if someone is starting to get into homesteading or starting to create a more mindful, intentional way of life, and there's one thing that they could talk ad infinitum about, right, like you could talk about how to make cooking easy. Like your eyes lit up when you were talking about it. You're a nutritionist, you're doing the right thing, you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, and so when we find something as a hobby that feels, you know, very full of passion and desire and motivation, that's the corner that we can start on and we can grow out from there. You know you may have been a good cook initially and then you got into gardening because it was the next step in your passion journey and now you have this incredible and yes, there are.

Speaker 2:

I think it's really important to show our bumps and bruises. Like I feel like I don't have any social media, but if I ever do go back to social media, I'm going to take pictures of all the ugly patches of my garden and I'm going to show people like this is what a real garden looks like, if you're not doing it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, I totally agree. I know and I don't mean to sound like. Well, I have a large vegetable garden and I mean, believe me, I have had years where things don't grow. I actually just this year got my soil tested for the first time in a good couple of years and they told me that I had too much of everything in there all the nutrients, it was like because I compost so much and so regularly that I was overfeeding my garden. I had no idea in all of these years of gardening that you could actually overdo adding compost into your bed. So they said leave your beds alone for a couple of years. And I know, like last year, a lot of my vegetables, they weren't like vibrant. So I'm just experimenting this year and seeing how that all comes out.

Speaker 1:

So it's all like a give and take and I think the luxury that we have living in suburbs and stuff and we don't live out in the middle of Montana is that if all else fails and you're gone, you can go outsource it Right To like. You can go get to the grocery store and find food. It's not like you're going to starve, but it's still, I think, extremely important to grow. And then there's nothing better than growing tomatoes or herbs and picking them right out of your garden. Or, like you said before, all of a sudden you have a bumper crop of cucumbers, and so then that's what becomes part of your plan for the week. Is that you have 20 cucumbers? What am I going to do with them? That's fun for me. I know for some people this can be intimidating, and I tell people that if you're just starting, get a container on your deck and grow some herbs. That's a great start.

Speaker 1:

Have some fresh herbs that you can put into your food and see how that feels.

Speaker 2:

In my book I mentioned that herbs are the gateway drug for gardeners, because it's hard to kill them and it gets you started, and I did a lot of them.

Speaker 2:

I do something called simpling, which is just taking an herb from your garden or going out into your garden and kind of figuring out what does my garden want to give me today for my water. And then I'll take like some mint and maybe a little bit of rosemary, and I'll just throw those sprigs in some water, let it sit on my counter for a few hours and then I have this spa-like deliciousness. Well, guess what? That easy step of walking out, clipping two little herbs or even, for those that aren't growing food, going into the grocery store and sniffing, or going to the farmer's market and sniffing some herbs and just picking a satchel of them and deciding that you're going to put some in your water and some in your food. It does give you that. That is homesteading, that is getting more connected to your true essence, right? The fact that the natural world and humans are one, they're not separate. Just because we have, you know, polyester clothing and drive-in metal boxes Like that doesn't make us any separate from that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, I love your definition of homesteading and this concept of it doesn't have to be this all or nothing, right? I mean, I know you've mentioned fermenting before. I have absolutely dabbled in a lot of I've made kombucha. I don't think kombucha is really for me to make. I mean I've done it. I could say I checked it off my list. I'm like I you know, I know really good places to get kombucha, so I don't really feel the need to do that again. But yeah, so things like that, I think I think the think maybe the important takeaway is just to try, try some things and see what works.

Speaker 1:

And I know earlier we were talking about using some kitchen scraps. I mean, the art of composting, I think, is really part of gardening and it's such an important part because you pick things out of your garden. You have all the scraps the fruit scraps and vegetable scraps you then compost. I know this is maybe very next level for some people, but the you know the compost which then turns into dirt then can go back and feed your garden. But you were talking about a way to also use kitchen scraps. That I wanted to mention because I think this is a very easy way to maybe take one step into homesteading. So do you want to talk about your vinegar that?

Speaker 2:

we were talking about. I've never done this and I'm very excited to go home today and do this.

Speaker 2:

Well, once you do it, I want to hear all about it. I really do. So. There's something called fruit scrap vinegar. It's so easy to make. You just take your fruit scraps, so your apple cores, and I did it with recently. I did it with grapefruit peels, because grapefruits are in season and so I was getting a lot at the farmer's market. They were so good and I would just throw them into a jar. So I have a half gallon jar, mason jar, and I fill it with water and then I put in a half cup of sugar. So a half cup of sugar for a half gallon of water and fruit scraps, and then I just shake it up and I put it on my counter with a canning lid. So I have plastic lids as well, just because they don't rust and stuff. But for the actual fermentation I like to have a lid that will pop.

Speaker 1:

And so every day. So just to get, let's just get clear, because if people are like just starting out, so a canning lid just has like a hole in the top, like a little stopper kind of thing. You can let a little air, like pressure out the top like a little stopper kind of thing you can let a little air like pressure out.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's a fancier version.

Speaker 2:

You can get them at masontopscom, by the way, if people are questioning where to get them this is just the metal lid that you have, like when you buy pickles at the store, and you pop it open, it goes and it's a lid and it's a ring. It's a metal lid and a metal ring. You can also get plastic rings which don't. They don't rust as much, so it's not the one with the hole. That's really good for fermenting vegetables, like with this one. You don't need to pop it as much. So you don't really you can. You can do the hole for sure, and masontopscom has has those. The ones that you're talking about are silicone and they let the air out and they're much more.

Speaker 2:

they're great because you can forget about it and not get fermented. In this case, it's just the metal one that usually comes with the mason jar that you buy.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so you let this sit on your counter.

Speaker 2:

You let it sit on your counter Every day. You take a long fork or chopsticks or a butter knife and you mix it and what you're doing is you're just trying to get the top layer to go down under the water so that mold doesn't form. You're just gently mixing it, gently mixing it, and after about 30 days it will start to change. Now what I do, because I'm not a vinegar expert and I still am a little Western minded, so I'm like, oh, I don't know if I, you know, modern minded, I'm not used to just using vinegar. I go and get acid strips that you can tell what the acid is. They're like $3. You get them online and you dip it in and it'll tell you. And when it gets to the acid, that's for cleaning vinegar. And I'm sorry, I don't remember what it is. Remember, I told you, if I don't write it down, I don't remember.

Speaker 2:

It's just the one that's. It could be edible, but it's definitely going to clean your, your, um, your counters. Then I strain it through cheesecloth so I get a second. This is at the end of 30 days. I get a second um Mason jar. I put cheesecloth over it, which could be a t-shirt, if you have a white t-shirt. That's, you know, clean like a tea towel. It's very thin cotton. You strain it by. What that means is just pouring the vinegar through that cheesecloth into the mason jar.

Speaker 2:

Sometimes I'll let it sit a little longer if it hasn't gotten acidic enough. And then I take that strained liquid and I put half of it in a spray bottle. I fill the other half up with water so it's half and half and I put in my favorite essential oils and I write on the bottle what the essential oils are so that when I refill it I can do the same. So I like rosemary. It smells great for cleaning. Lemon balm, definitely tea tree, because it's so antimicrobial. And so let's just say I'll do those three. You don't need as much tea tree because it's a bully scenting. It's very strong. So you use a little bit of that, a lot of the rosemary, a lot of the lemon balm. And now you have this. You know $8 or $9 bottle of organic cleaning that you know where it's come from. It's saved you now $8 to $9 and it costs you relatively nothing, because if you're not using the sugar for anything else in your house, then that sugar, that bag of sugar, is going to go a long, long way.

Speaker 1:

Well, great, I'm excited. I can't believe that I have. I mean, I've heard of versions of this and I cannot believe, like in my homesteading journey, that I have not done this yet. But I have definitely got to do this and I will keep you posted and let you know how it? Turns out and I will put that recipe in my show notes so people can get that. And I will put that recipe in my show notes so people can get that Great that would be.

Speaker 1:

yeah, I think, an easy way to ease into some homesteading habits. So tell me a little bit about your book and then how people can find you and what you're doing now, great.

Speaker 2:

Well, I'm so happy to be chatting with you and I love that, would you have?

Speaker 1:

called yourself a homesteader before this conversation. No, I definitely would not have called myself a homesteader because, honestly, when I say that, I think of homesteading, I would never have identified myself as a homesteader. But while we're talking and I'm like, oh, I do do a lot of those homesteading habits, yeah, you are a hardcore homesteader.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I know I'm more of a homesteader than I had imagined. Yes, you've had chickens I mean, that's fantastic. And bees oh my gosh. I could talk to you for hours about that. So my book, the Homesteader Mindset, helps busy people tackle the overwhelm of creating a sustainable, healthy lifestyle through the implementation of small daily habits. So we didn't talk a lot about habit formation, but that really is the premise. What we did talk about, which is very important and key to the homesteader mindset, is we're helping people get to the joy and the pleasure and finding ways to create these habits without pain, with joy. I really think that that's like everything that you've talked about.

Speaker 2:

I do have a free gift for your listeners. Really think that that's like everything that you've talked about. I do have a free gift for your listeners. It's a Homesteader Habit Tracker and you can get that at my website, which is wwwcreatewellnessprojectcom. Forward slash gift that's G-I-F-T and that will give you an idea of how to create these tiny little habits and also give you a tracker to start doing them. So if you want to do your vinegar like, that could be one of your first habits. You know, did I shake it up? Did I stir it up every day? And then you can let us know, because Heather and I are really excited to have you join us in the homesteading revolution.

Speaker 1:

Yes, yes, so that's great and I will put that in the show notes too, that link, and then they can get your book right Probably easily on your website. I'll link that. I could talk all day with you about homesteading and gardening and growing food and food itself, and maybe I'll have you back on. I would love to have you come back on and do a part two, because I feel like we are unfortunately out of time, but I have a million more questions, so let's do that.

Speaker 1:

You know what I want to have you come back, I think in the 30 days after I've made my vinegar, my spray, and let you know how it goes.

Speaker 2:

I would love that. And baking soda. If you have a hard stain, you can add baking soda, sprinkle it on the area and then do the vinegar on top. It's crazy, but yes, let's do that. That sounds like a lot of fun.

Speaker 1:

Okay, all right, good, we will do that, elizabeth. Thank you so much for coming in today and talking. This has been super helpful and just meaningful, and you're going to come back, so we'll see you soon. Okay, we'll see you soon.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much for having me.