Today I'm talking with Morgan at Cole Canyon Farms. You can also follow on Facebook. Content Seeds Collective 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. Today I'm talking with Morgan at Cole Canyon Farms in Montana again. I think for like the fifth time maybe. Good afternoon, Morgan. How are you? Good afternoon, good afternoon. Yeah, we've gotten to chat quite a bit since we met a few years ago over those little groovy goats. So I'm excited to be back on. 00:27 It's funny how podcasting can create friendships, real friendships. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually really honestly the digital age. It's crazy how we can create friends that we don't even see in person, but they, they're a real friend. It's I, mean, there's pros and cons to digital, but that is one of the things I love about it. Like the community I've made and met and the people like you I've gotten to meet have really shaped Cole Canyon farm. 00:55 to what it is today, honestly. Oh, well, I'm glad to hear that. How is the weather in Montana today? It's hot. We've been in the 70s. I'm not even kidding you. Like, I had shorts on and this is like unbelievable for Montana to be this warm. So I think it's like 70 today with light breeze. So it's a good, you know, a good day to start spring cleaning and getting all of the, you know, future projects we have done. How's your weather? 01:24 It is partly sunny. is 68 degrees. Feels like 68 degrees. I'm looking at my weather app right now and there's hardly any wind today. So that's a nice change from Saturday. Saturday, the wind was blowing so hard. was making the house creek. man. Yeah, it does that to our house. We've had like, so it's windy where I'm at, right? So I'm not ever shocked by wind, but in the last few years, we were seeing more and more gusts. I remember when like 01:50 75 mile per hour gusts were huge a few years ago and now this is the second time in the last six months we've had 90 plus mile per hour gusts here. Yeah, I, this, I don't even know what to say. I've talked, I talk about the weather on every single episode and I am literally out of things to say except that it's just weird. It is the apps never correct. Like we had rain last night. We could hear it cause we live in a middle, like a metal tin boot. 02:20 like 10 house, you Yeah. And I could hear it and my husband, it was like, I don't know, we got in a bed kind of late last night because I went to the auction, the horse auction. So I had a lot to film in on about. Did not come home with anything, side note, good thing on that. But, you know, we heard just this light pattering and I was like, is that hail? Because like that would normally like snow hail season as this season, right? Yeah. And we were like, no. 02:46 No, actually that it's sprinkling outside and the app never updated never said we had precipitation nothing. So I bought uh I think it's a hydrometer or whatever where you stick it outside. I need to figure out the real name for it, but I just called the rain catcher, but it will tell me how much rain we're getting because I think to be honest with you, they're not they're not as accurately recording what's going on and being a farmer. That's super important. So 03:13 because the digital age has changed and we can't rely on these apps anymore as much as we did for weather, I'm having to learn the old ways, which is always good, right? Like if the electricity goes out, you need to know how to do this. But I've started turning rain myself, so it'll be interesting. I need to look at what we got last night, but I don't think it was enough to even register, honestly, Mary. But yeah, we've had strange weather here too. 03:37 Yeah, I'm at the point where if I want to get kind of an idea of what the weather is going to be in a few days, I will catch the morning news. Yeah. They seem to be more accurate than the weather apps. And if I want to know what the weather is right now, I literally step outside. Yeah, that's how I am too. Like we live kind of on an outlook, right? So the storms whip around us because we're on the top. We're kind of on like it's called a rim out here, but it's like a fat uh kind of a flat plane that's in the middle of 04:07 Some canyons right there's canyons in the middle of it where it popped up. Well, you know it'll if it goes around us left If it goes around us left then Will sometimes get rain but if it goes right which is into Laurel the city Yeah, then we don't ever see it So you can almost stand on the flat and it'll say that it's you know, hailstorming and it's not where we're at 04:35 We don't even have any hail or snow, nothing coming. But in town, they're getting like beaten with golf ball size, literally golf ball size pieces of hail. So I'm, I'm like you, I just walk outside and I try to look, you know, and see if there's any storms blowing in. But you just, don't know. I pack enough clothes, I guess, with me for any type of weather. I've got bibs, I've got jackets, I've got shorts, I've got t-shirts in the truck, right? Like, yeah. 05:01 just changes often, so you just go with the flow, but it is gonna make farming interesting this year. So I think having, like you said, just some idea of where to look for reliable stuff is important. It is, and it's so funny because I listen to a lot of podcasts about podcasting and everybody's like, don't talk about the weather, it's boring. But anytime I ask someone who is farming, homesteading, ranching, it's not boring. 05:30 It's really interesting to hear everybody's take on what they've got going on and what it's doing. Yeah, it literally, I mean your whole life as a farmer is based on an amount of rain that's going to come down if you don't have irrigated land. And we sadly have to haul every drop of water on and off this property, know, like there's, it's not an option for us. My leach field is green with three or four inches of grass already, which is crazy. The horses love it, you know? So 05:57 I think it's going to be great for the animals. They've had a rough swing this year. know my animals really need some extra TLC after going from 70, not even kidding you, down to one degree in less than 24 hours. That's really a big swing. So I think, you know, it's important to watch the weather because of that, but just knowing how to adapt to it. that's something that I'm actually planning my whole life around is all these weather changes, like building more greenhouses this year. 06:27 Yeah. Trying to make more wind blocks. Like that's a whole thing. We've been looking up the Texas Ys. They're like in Texas, they're known for it. You get a lot of wind there, right? So it's like a Y shape, but they use it for cattle and horses. We've been trying to plan how many of those we're going to need because if not, my poor horses, it doesn't matter where they stand in a shelter, they're going to get, you know, soaked. 06:53 with how much wind we have in the unpredictability. can't go put sheets on them, you know, because I don't know when it's going to rain. exactly. All right. So let's let's go back to when you and I first talked. When you and I first talked, you were Groovy Grazies, Grazies Montana, and you were raising goats and taking the goats to parties and things. And the last time we talked in January, end of January, you had gotten a couple of horses. So 07:23 What I'm wondering about is how you got into horses because that really wasn't on the radar for a while. Yeah. So I'm a horse girl. I'm a I'm a covert horse girl. That's what my husband calls me. Right. Because Andy made fun of horse girls growing up. It's actually funny. One of the girls that I'm going to buy hay from this year, she knew Andy growing up and I was like, I turned him into a horse girl. So he's like almost completely also turned into a horse girl himself. uh 07:52 But I was writing when I was nine actually, ah wild fact about me. When I was little, ah Mike Baumgartner was my trainer out in Texas and he was like an Olympic candidate. He actually taught the first girl ever who was legally blind in death back in like the 1980s or 90s. I'd have to look it up, I haven't in a while to do dressage. So I did weekly lessons and work. 08:21 my hind end off for Mike Baumgartner so I could do extra lessons with him and I fell in love with horses. My mom gets bit by horses. When she comes out here, she's gonna get bit by every single horse I guarantee you I have on this property. Not because my mom does anything weird, it's just her energy. I think they know she's scared of her, right? But yeah, I've been writing since I was nine and then, so Mike Baumgartner, then uh I got into hippotherapy. 08:50 um Hippo, sorry, hippotherapy with the horses. um It's uh working with kids and adults on the spectrum, nonverbal, some kids didn't move. ah And we were using horses to be a form of therapy. And I did that, uh she's almost like kind of like my mom, Tara, actually, out in Texas. And I was going to become an instructor for that. And then we moved to Arizona. So right, like my whole childhood, I was just immersed. 09:18 emerged into riding and being around horses. They were kind of my calm spot. then Arizona, I got really, really sick. January 11th, I can tell you the day of 2020. was riding before that, I was riding some Western Pleasures out there with Heather Meyer. So people are horse people, they'll know her. She won some world competitions in Western Pleasure a
