Honeysuckle Hills

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Honeysuckle Hills

We are a small urban family farm trying to live our best life. Our goal is simply to enjoy, learn ab
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20/04/2023

Thank you so much to everyone who came for our foraging classes last weekend! We had such a fun time foraging with you guys, drinking tea, sampling spritzers and wine, and talking about the many ways to put the plants in your backyard to use. We are so grateful for our amazing family, friends, and community who continue to support us in pursuing and sharing our passions.
If you missed the class but would like to come to our farm to learn about any of these facets, get a few friends together and give us a shout. We're always happy to put together a private experience around whatever you'd like to learn (and orchard wine and wildcrafted herbal teas are always on the agenda). ❤️

P.S. Milo totally stole the show on Sunday by finding a HUGE morel in the middle of our foraging walk! 🍄😍 Evidence in photos. :)

16/04/2023

Okay, folks, we are fulllll for today's foraging class! We won't be able to accept any new guests as of this time. If you were interested but didn't get to make it to this one, drop a comment and I'll keep you posted if we do another this summer! 💚💚💚

14/04/2023

A teeny tiny sneak peek for this weekend!😍 If you know Matt you know he doesn't do anything halfway and these foraging classes are no different. It's seriously going to be such a fun and informative experience for all who are coming... I can't wait!!!!

10/04/2023

Who's excited to forage this weekend?! If you've never been to a class at our farm, you're in for a treat! We can't wait to delve into nature's abundance with you. 🌱🌾🥰

15/03/2023

Based on requests from our community... Spring foraging classes coming up! Space is limited. Booking information is at the bottom of the flyer; please feel free to reach out with any questions. We'd love to see you there! 💚

24/12/2022

🎵On the twelfth day of Christmas, Honeysuckle Hills gave to me…
An experience tailored just for me!🎵

We hope you’ve enjoyed learning about some of the things we’ve been doing here on our little farm over the past 12 days. We really, really appreciate everyone who has taken time to read and engage with our novels, I mean posts😅, and the encouragement you’ve given us along the way. ❤️

On this final day, we’d love to invite you into our space to come and learn alongside us.

Hosting is one of our gifts and another one of our love languages… we really enjoy bringing people into the sacred spaces we’ve created and nourishing their minds, bodies, and souls. Helping people to reconnect with themselves, with each other, with nature, and with God has always been forefront in our mission here.

And as much as we love creating fun, entertaining, and meaningful experiences here on our little farm; we want to make sure that we are offering more than just a good time.

It is our wish that our community would use us as a resource, inspiration, and/or stepping stone for learning (or honing) life skills, basic homesteading skills, intentional living, or any of the other ventures that we’re dabbling in here.

We’re not experts on anything, that’s for sure. We’re human and we’re still learning every day. But we do have some thoughts, ideas, experience, skills, and resources that might be useful to somebody who is not quite as far in their journey yet. And we love learning from those who have experiences that differ from ours… we have such an incredible and talented village of artisans, gardeners, skilled laborers, and homesteaders and we wouldn’t be where we are today if it weren’t for the inspiration of like-minded people who shared their knowledge and passions.

We would love to put together a custom experience for you that incorporates any of the topics we’ve covered in our 12 days of Christmas, or anything else that we’re doing here. Whether you’re interested in foraging and creating your own plant medicines and herbal teas, learning the process of making wine and playing with some flavoring and bottling, turning raw wood into a cutting board or live-edge shelf, propagating plants, preserving food through dehydration, raising your own chickens for eggs or for meat… or any of the other ventures we have going on, we can put together an intimate experience for you that will be as entertaining as it is educational with an ambiance that truly can’t be replicated anywhere else.

You don’t have to want to learn our trades to take advantage of our affinity for creating meaningful and memorable experiences. We do have offerings that are just for fun, like ring-making and date nights, and we adore hearing the feedback from our previous guests that they created cherished once-in-a-lifetime memories here.

Of course, you don’t have to schedule a formal experience to be able to come see our farm or pick our brains. (Okay, Matt’s brain.🤣) While we do have to prioritize making enough money to pay our bills, we also want to be a blessing to and a resource for our village and never want finances to be the primary focus of our endeavors here, or to be the obstacle that prevents anyone from reaching out. On the contrary, we just want to keep food on our table while doing the things that we are passionate about and hopefully having a positive impact on our community in the process.

So whether you want us to put together a date night you’ll never forget, a class/experience that is tailored to your interests and passions, or just want to come by for an informal tour and a delicious cup of tea, please get in touch with us and let us know how we can help.

We hope that you have a blessed holiday season and that 2023 is a year of abundance, growth, and love for you and your family. ❤️

23/12/2022

🎵On the eleventh day of Christmas, Honeysuckle Hills gave to me…
Organic wine that’s (mostly) hangover-free.🎵

If you’ve been following our “12 Days of Christmas” series of posts, you might remember me mentioning that this is the first year we’ve been incredibly intentional about being good stewards of our abundance.

As we went through spring and early summer, we were pretty successful at staying on top of the foragable plants, the early garden veggies, and the first fruiting trees. We got into a system of gathering, consuming, and dehydrating and it became forefront on our priorities list. But by the end of summer we couldn’t keep up. We had garden veggies, herbs, foraged plants, flowers, peaches, pears, and apples all competing for space in the dehydrator (and the time to continue to gather and process them). Matt was collecting fruit daily, dehydrating, making fruit leather, sometimes working by headlamp into the night to keep up with our bounty. I was trying to keep up with the garden and making pickles and salsa and stuffed squash and cucumber salads. Our usual outings and family days went to the wayside- we had to keep up with the influx of goodies. After all, fresh fruits and veggies tend to have a fairly short shelf life and we’re always at competition with nature. It doesn’t wait long to reclaim its gifts.

We’d considered making wine before, but in late summer, it was promoted from an interesting idea to a necessary undertaking. Making wine would allow us to use large amounts of less-than-prime fruits and to preserve in bulk, and would free up space in the dehydrator in the process.

And so we made the first of what would become many trips to Anuway Hydroponics in Rogers and came home with some food-grade fermenting buckets, wine yeast and yeast nutrient, and some little rubber plugs called “bungs”. (Yes, the bungs go in the bung-holes. Way too many Beavis and Butthead jokes ensued.😂)

Our early days (and by days I mean nights… so many late nights spent in our kitchen after the kids were in bed😅) of wine-making were somewhat laborious- we followed a fairly involved process that required a lot of steps and time for each batch. The biggest burner on our stove does not work, so we were shifting around these big stock pots of water between our second-biggest burner and a tiny burner in attempt to boil water as quickly as possible for sanitizing, blanching, and sterilizing while juggling other projects going on simultaneously- fruit leather or dehydrating or doing the dinner dishes in between fruit washing. It was fun, but a bit of a circus… and those really late nights were pretty exhausting!

But as we went, we made tweaks to our system and learned ways to be more efficient and which steps were necessary and which could be streamlined or eliminated. The whole process became much more seamless and predictable- and now is just another useful tool in our toolkit for preserving our fruits. We can usually finish before midnight now😅, and the payoff of those longer nights early on has been completely worthwhile. We definitely look forward to continuing this new tradition in the future! (I’m counting down to mulberry wine!!😍)

The best part? The wine is actually GOOD! Even though it hasn’t had much time to “age” yet, it’s truly delicious. It’s crisp, fruity, and slightly dry but not bitter. We’ve also started playing with back-sweetening and flavoring. With the hundreds of dried spices, herbs, and fruits that we have available, we’ve been able to make some unique and delicious flavor profiles that take the experience to a new level.

And my favorite aspect is that it’s just about as healthy as wine could be- since we don’t add any chemicals or sulfites, it’s much less likely to cause headaches or hangovers (assuming that you don’t over-indulge… we’re wine-makers, not miracle workers!🤣). And knowing that all the fruit comes from our own property reassures us that we’re not getting any undesirable farming byproducts, such as glyphosate or insecticides.

Another little fun bonus that came of this venture was that we started making organic apple cider vinegar as well! Vinegar is the result when acetobacter bacteria consume the alcohol after the fermenting process, so it seemed like the next natural step from making wine. It also allowed us to utilize fruit that might not have made the cut for wine or for other preservation methods. Fun fact- fruit flies are the kings of transporting acetobacter bacteria. So they are actually a very welcome guest when you are working on creating vinegar (but a very UNwelcome guest when you are trying to make wine).

Pretty much any type of living fruit or plant can be turned into a fermented beverage with the right ratio of sugars to water and with the help of a little yeast to get things started. (Pine spritzers, anyone??) If you want to learn more about cool ways to play with nature’s bounty, reach out. We’d love to share what we’re learning with you!

One more day! Thanks for hanging in there.

22/12/2022

🎵On the tenth day of Christmas, Honeysuckle Hills gave to me…
A way to make use of a dead cedar tree.🎵

As you may have picked up if you’ve been following our previous posts, large/expensive purchases are not something we do often or take lightly. But last fall, when we had a giant stack of cedar and black walnut logs that Matt was having to move – again – in order to keep them from rotting, when we were in need of multiple tables and shelves for our all our jars of dried goodies that were stacking up, when lumber prices were at an all-time high and simultaneously our own lumber pile was at an all-time low, we decided to bite the bullet and invest in a sawmill. The idea had been in our peripheral for quite some time; Matt had been researching models and reading reviews for months, and regularly checking Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace for a decent used one. The used market didn’t have much to offer, and by this point Matt was pretty confident in which model would offer the most bang for the buck… so we whipped out the old credit card and made our first major purchase in some time. We try pretty hard to use credit as minimally as possible but hey, we’re being real here, right? And the reality is that when you’re living month-to-month, the big purchases sometimes go on the credit card.

While the price point was hard to swallow, we don’t have a single regret about making this purchase for our family. Matt’s DIY nature, natural creativity, and capacity for building beautiful things out of simple materials will continue to make good use out of this tool… and it has already paid for itself in savings on lumber for various projects around here.

Of course, the boys were eager to help their dad build a cover for it and help him get it set up and operational, and Matt was eager to start turning old logs into beautiful wood slabs to be turned into furniture, cutting boards, and shelves.

The moral of the story is that intentional living isn’t just about being frugal and denying yourself material things. It’s about truly considering which expenditures (of money, time, and/or energy) are worth the exchange, and about making investments that enrich our lives and enhance our priorities rather than distract from them.

Scroll the pics to see the transformation from log to finished product, or come by for a visit and let Matt give you a run on the sawmill in person! And if you’re looking for a beautiful hand-made last-minute Christmas gift, we’ve got a handful of beautiful black-walnut “everything” boards (for cutting, serving, displaying, or everything else you might want to use it for) available. Each of them are hand cut, sanded, and sealed with love right here on our farm.

21/12/2022

🎵On the ninth day of Christmas, Honeysuckle Hills gave to me…
Creative ways to cook for our family.🎵

Food is definitely one of our love languages, and chances are, if you’ve been here for more than a couple hours we’ve probably fed you- or at least tried to.

One of our favorite ways to turn a meal into an experience is by cooking (and eating) the meal outside among nature. There’s something transformative about cooking outdoors that you just can’t replicate in the kitchen. It just feels special.

Cooking outdoors doesn’t have to be a big, complicated event. We’ve cooked hundreds of meals on our little propane camp stove and it does a lovely job. A regular charcoal or gas grill does the trick, too, if you have one available!

But in our opinion, nothing quite compares to food that’s been cooked the old-fashioned way: with wood and fire. The right selection of wood, a little time and attention and some decent cast iron cookware, and you just can’t complete with the flavor and presentation of the end result. (Oh- and salt. Always plenty of salt.)

We cooked so many meals over our little firepit that Matt finally decided to use the giant pile of old scavenged bricks he had been moving around for years to build a brick oven for us. Like everything else Matt does, it was “go big or go home”, and 21 days and many, many, many bags of concrete and mortar later, we had a beautiful and functional new addition to our outdoor living room!

While we still enjoy cooking over an open fire or on our Coleman stove while we’re camping or on an outing, the brick oven has really taken our outdoor cooking to the next level. When the weather is nice, we cook outdoors more often than not, and if you come to our place for dinner you can pretty much guarantee that some sort of brick oven treat will be on the menu.

Whatever tools you’ve got to work with, learning to cook outside of the kitchen is a skill that is attainable for pretty much everyone. As Matt always says, it really all boils down to time and temperature (and a partner to do all of the chopping and prepping for you!😉).

If this post has made you hungry to learn more, come on over for a demo. And next time you’re prepping for a picnic, instead of grabbing the bread and lunch meat, grab some firewood or a little campstove, some meat, some potatoes, and your cast iron skillet and prepare to wow yourself with a delicious meal cooked and enjoyed among nature’s bounty.

Stay tuned tomorrow for the 27th day of Christmas… I mean, the 10th day of Christmas.🤣 Thanks for bearing with us a few more days!! ❤️❤️❤️

20/12/2022

🎵On the eighth day of Christmas, Honeysuckle Hills gave to me…
Some thoughts on living intentionally.🎵

The idea of living intentionally means different things to different people. For us, it’s all about investing our time and energy into the things that we believe in- things that bring meaning, joy, or purpose into our lives or into the lives of others. It’s about putting a lot of thought (and prayer) into our decisions and being willing to “sacrifice” some things to be able to prioritize others.

I use that word, sacrifice, in quotes because in reality, it’s not a sacrifice at all to live this way. But it has been a big adjustment to really consider which aspects of our life were worth the money (read: time and energy) we were trading for them. In a matter of a few years, we went from having 2 incomes and no kids to 2 kids and no income. 😆I’m joking (mostly)… but we did have some big lifestyle changes as part of the transition to this way of life. We took out my retirement, we’ve spent all of our savings and even sold my diamond engagement ring. We both drive older, unglamorous but dependable vehicles; we buy just about everything second-hand (furniture, clothes, shoes, appliances, bikes… you name it, we’ve probably thrifted it), we whittled down our monthly bills as much as we possibly could. (Matt and I are sharing 2GB of data on our phone plans, y’all.😂) I typically go to 3-4 grocery stores every week (plus farm visits for fresh milk and meats) so that we can eat a healthy diet as affordably as possible. We’re always browsing Craigslist and Facebook for free deals that might benefit our lives (or, you know, might end up in the dumpster after hours of labor🤣), and as I’m sure you’ve guessed, Matt DIYs just about everything, from car maintenance to plumbing to carpentry. I can’t remember the last time I had my hair done or my nails done or any of those other little indulgences I used to enjoy when I was bringing home an actual paycheck. We say a lot of “no, thank yous” to social events that cost money.

But in the big picture, NONE of that stuff truly matters. The trade-off is so much more rewarding than any material goods or any experience or convenience that money can buy. Sure, it would be nice to have more money, and there’s nothing wrong with having money or spending money or having material things or worldly indulgences or modern conveniences. It’s a very personal thing to decide what is important to you and how you prioritize your time and energy investments. (And yes, we realize just how blessed we are to have a choice in how we prioritize our time and energy- the privilege of our lifestyle is not lost to us.❤️) For us, this life- being in touch with nature, spending time together, learning new skills, educating our own children, doing hard but rewarding work- is what fills our hearts and souls and gives us purpose.

Ironically, now that we have the time and energy to invest here at our place, everything we have is nicer than it ever was when we had plenty of money but no time. We eat better, we rest better, we have beautiful spaces to connect with each other. Instead of lavish vacations we take little camping trips or get discount AirBnbs or take one-day “adventures” around our diverse area. Instead of spending a bunch of money dining out, we cook drool-worthy meals in our brick oven and eat them on the bridge over our creek or around a cozy fire. Instead of outsourcing the care of our children while Matt and I work outside the home, we continue to work to make our home a place worthy of bringing the work to us- and worthy of raising and educating our children- in the process.

Maybe I’m oversharing here. Maybe it’s taboo to talk about finances or to be so forward in defining our own priorities and intentions for an audience that didn’t ask. This type of talk tends to make some people uncomfortable and that is certainly not our intention. It just felt important to acknowledge that sometimes, to experience change in the way you feel and the way you’re experiencing life, you have to be willing to let some things go. If we had never taken a leap of faith, never stepped outside of our comfort zone, never let go of financial security, Matt would still be miserable in the construction industry, I would still be slaving away for 70-80 hours a week teaching in public school, our little farm wouldn’t exist nearly in the capacity it does today, and we would hardly have any time to spend with our most precious gifts- our children. So if you’ve been feeling the itch to do something different, something more fulfilling, we would love to encourage you to be willing to trust that everything will work out just fine if you are following your heart path. Will it be without obstacles, bumps, challenges, failures? Absolutely not. As I said yesterday, very little that’s worth doing ever is. But will it be worth every struggle when you are free of the relentless pressure of a hurried, overscheduled lifestyle and when you finally begin to feel fulfilled in your day-to-day life?

Yes. Yes, it will. ❤️

Thank you for reading, and for being witness to this journey. We appreciate you!

18/12/2022

🎵On the seventh day of Christmas, Honeysuckle Hills gave to me…
A long list of fails for all to see!🎵

Social media has the tendency to make us all want to put our best foot forward. Especially when it’s our livelihood at stake- when we are literally trying to keep food on our table- it’s easy to put out the highlight reel and conveniently leave out all the ugly and messy that comes in between.

These posts we are doing were starting to feel like a bit of a flex: “look at all the cool stuff we’ve got going on!” And while I suppose that is sort of the point- to catch you all up on what we’ve been learning and doing the past couple years- we also don’t want to pretend to be something we’re not. And flawless is definitely, unquestionably something we are not.

Most things in life worth doing come with challenges and obstacles, and farm life is certainly no exception. That tub of moldy tomatoes spawning maggots?🤢Yeah, that was definitely us- just a few months ago. I had painstakingly “saved” 2 giant tubs of green tomatoes from our garden before the early freeze in October, only to see them ripen beautifully… and then eventually disintegrate into something truly horrifying. We had too much going on at the time and just couldn’t find the time to do something with them.

Of course, the tomatoes are far from being our only garden/food casualty. When I said in a previous post that “this has been the first year that we’ve been incredibly intentional about being good stewards of our abundance”, that was a reflection of all the years we *haven’t* been the best stewards of our abundance. The years that beautiful fruit sat rotting on the ground until it became fodder for chickens and deer; the gardens that got neglected and choked out with weeds and grass; the entire row of fruit trees that just never took off; the jars of fresh apple juice that fermented in the fridge; the baskets of peaches that rotted after a careless FedEx driver blasted through our fruit trees (and over the berm Matt had just spent a week building and planting with herbs and grass seed). We’ve had hundreds of failed seed starts, we’ve dealt with fungi and bugs and all of your typical garden nemeses, we made a huge potato box to grow potatoes year-round… only to take it apart after yielding a small handful of very tiny potatoes.

Then there was the year that we pruned the fruit trees too late in the season and had no fruit due to our misstep. There were the honeybees that we lost due to our lack of proper preparation- two winters in a row- and the third set, which lost its queen after their hive was knocked over by an animal. (We’re on our fourth set now, and hoping this time is more successful.) There are all the baby chicks and young chickens that we’ve lost, the flooding we’ve continually dealt with, the failed business ventures (does The Natural Craftsman ring a bell to anyone?). There were those free wood “slats” we found on Craigslist… which turned out to be COVERED in 40 years of chicken feces… and after a ridiculous number of hours attempting to clean, disinfect, and air out… ended up in our dumpster. On that note, that wouldn’t be our first Craigslist “free” venture that ended up in the trash!

This is just skimming the surface… I could honestly go on and on. (I’m sure you couldn’t have guessed that I could say MORE!😆) The point is that while we tend to share the things that we’re most proud of and excited about, there’s always plenty of struggle going on behind the scenes. Of course, each challenge is an opportunity for growth and learning, and we try to view our failures as stepping stones to our success. But we always want to be real and genuine with all of you, and we would never want anyone to feel discouraged or give up because their first shot at something (or second or third) didn’t work out.

Less photos for this post because… well, because we haven’t really prioritized documenting our failures. 😅

Next up, we’ll talk about the financial side of this lifestyle and what it means (to us) to live intentionally. We hope you’ll keep reading and sharing your thoughts with us as we make our way through 5 more days of Christmas! Thank you for giving us a little bit of your time and attention during this busy season!

17/12/2022

🎵On the sixth day of Christmas, Honeysuckle Hills gave to me…
6 hens a-layin’!🎵

Our goal is to always have more than 6 laying hens here on our farm, but it doesn’t always work out that way. Right now we have 11 adult hens, and about 1.5 of them are laying… but it’s that time of year and we’ll take what we can get and be grateful for it!

Our chicken farming adventure started many, many years ago with a handful of adult chickens that Matt got from a friend… and may or may not have been met with a little distaste from this (former) city girl. 🙈After all, I could get perfectly good eggs at the grocery store without having chicken p**p all over the yard and front porch!

But like just about everything else in this lifestyle, the true beauty of living in harmony with nature and raising our own food would reveal itself in time.

The eggs were the first selling point. I only thought I was getting “perfectly good eggs” at the grocery store… until I was spoiled with fresh eggs from our free-range chickens! Fresh farm eggs are far superior to their grocery-store counterparts not only in taste and color, but also in nutritional benefit. They are much higher in Vitamins D, A, and E, Beta Carotene, and Omega-3s due to time spent grazing in the sunshine and the chickens’ natural foraging diet which includes lots of insects, worms, and even small frogs and lizards... “vegetarian fed” is NOT a selling point for good eggs!

From raising and eating delicious and nutritious eggs we evolved into hatching our own eggs. Ever the DIYer, Matt made an incubator out of an old cooler, some silver insulation, a lightbulb, and a temperature regulator. Hatching our own baby chicks and raising them into full-grown laying hens brought a new level of CUTE to raising chickens and made us feel a little more empowered in our abilities to raise our own food- even though we lost a lot of chicks along the way to predators and to the elements.

The next step in the natural progression was to facilitate egg hatching with the help our broody chicken mamas. Letting a mama hatch her own eggs is not always a successful endeavor, as there are so many factors beyond our control. But Matt finally found a good working system that allows our broody mother hens to raise their own little flocks of babies with a little support from us, and the success rate is much higher than it has been in the past.

The final aspect that was missing from our chicken farming was raising birds for meat. We loved the IDEA of eating our own birds… we spend a lot of money on quality, organic meats and wholeheartedly believe that it is much more humane (and healthy) to butcher and consume a bird that has been raised lovingly on a free-range farm than to support the slaughter and consumption of factory-farmed chickens raised in overcrowded, unhealthy, and unhappy environments. Even so, it took us some time to be comfortable with the idea of turning our little feathered friends into food for our consumption.

Matt finally bit the bullet recently and after much research and deliberation, settled on a method for butchering and turned roosters that would otherwise have been giveaways into meals for our family. The process, while not overly pleasant, was far less painful than we anticipated (I’m using the word “we” VERY loosely here😅) and resulted in not only tasty and nutritious meals for our family, but another tool we can add to our toolbelt. (Not to mention all that gut-healing bone broth we make from the carcasses!) We will no longer be trying to find new homes for our cocky young roosters- we’ll be making space in our freezer instead.

Overall, being able to take part in the entire life cycle- to begin with an egg laid here on our farm and end with a beautiful smoked chicken that will feed our family for multiple meals- is an incredible gift and a wonderful way to feel connected to (and grateful for) the food we eat.

If you’ve been considering backyard chickens but haven’t quite felt ready to take the leap, come see us and ask all your questions so you can feel empowered to take that next step toward sustainable living. If this city girl can be converted into a chicken farmer, so can you! And if you’re already raising chickens but want to learn more about hatching your own or about the butchering process (or about turning an old cooler into an incubator), Farmer Matt will be happy to help.

Stay tuned… you won’t want to miss the seventh day of Christmas. We have something fun in store!

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