Cluster Cluck Acres

Today I'm talking with Samantha at Cluster Cluck Acres. You can follow on Facebook as well.

A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org.

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, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.  A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system.  You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe.

00:29 share it with a friend or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Samantha at Cluster Cluck Acres and I had to say that really carefully. Good morning, Samantha. How are you? Good morning. How are you?  I'm good. You are where again? You're in Illinois. Is that right? Nope, Monticello, Indiana. Indiana. Sorry. Yep.  Is it gray in Indiana this morning? Cause it is gray and drizzling here in Minnesota. It definitely is. And it is cold, very cold.

00:56 Oh, it's like 45 degrees here this morning. I got up at five and it was warm outside. was like, ooh, spring might be here. I don't call 45 that warm. Well, after the week or so we had back in January when it was minus 20 to 25 at night, I'm good with 45. So tell me about yourself and what you do at Cluster Cluck Acres.

01:25 Well,  I am  the owner. So  it's kind of just a basically a family farm. We  started off with chickens  that were actually kind of given to us. We had a friend that had a bunch of chickens and the rooster had attacked one of our kids.  I had wanted some and I grew up with chickens. So I knew.

01:51 Um, after I got in the farm that I wanted chickens and then we've moved on to,  I was thinking, oh, they had rabbits also. They wanted to get rid of it. So we took two rabbits in  and then, uh, my oldest son had bought a horse  and we have horse stalls. So he wanted somewhere to bring his horse. So we have a horse.  We have, uh, pigs.  had three, we got down to two and then we just got six more.

02:22 Uh, in that chaotic time, we also had a litter of puppies. had 10 golden doodle or 10 doodles. I should say they're a mix of doodles, but they're 10 doodles. So we, we added a little, little more chaos to our, to our lives with puppies.  So yeah, that'll, that'll shake things up a little bit. Just a little. I decided that I will never do a litter again. It's a very emotional process. I didn't realize how emotional it was.

02:54 I would have kept all 10 if I could, but...

02:58 Yeah, that doesn't usually work. That's a lot of dogs to handle.  And not only that, but you get to deal with littermate syndrome too, which is something I've heard about. Yeah. Well, we thought we were coming, we were getting sick.  So we spent a long night with mom delivering babies. So it was a, it was an all day process, but it was, it was a good experience.

03:23 We've had an opportunity to hatch some of our own chickens also. I took the time to get an incubator and so we do some chicken hatching and I just got into doing sourdough. So at the beginning of last week,

03:45 Or actually over the weekend, last weekend, we opened a little farm stand out in front of the house. So I have been  creatively working on different items to put out every day to fill the farm stand.  Your  farm stand has inspired me, ma'am.  We have a farm stand. It's a