Hayes Valley Farms

Today I'm talking with Christina at Hayes Valley Farms.

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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. Today I'm talking with Christina at Hayes Family Farm.

00:28 Good morning, Christina. How are you? Good morning. I'm good. Just watching the rain. Yeah. Where are you? We are in Marion, Virginia. That's right. I knew it was the South because you have that lovely Southern accent going on. Whatever it says. And I'm like, I don't hear it, but... You don't hear it if you don't... Okay. I am like a crazy fanatic about accents. You don't hear it if you live in it. Yeah, true. True. So...

00:58 It is gray here in Minnesota. It was supposed to be sunny and the sun has not decided to break through the clouds yet. Do you guys still have snow on the ground? Oh no, no, no, no. I think we had sleet three and a half weeks ago. I think. Might have been five and a half weeks ago, but it's been a while since we've seen any frozen precipitation. Thank goodness.

01:21 June 1st is Sunday and we have farmers market starting June 7th. So it better not snow.  Has it snowed in June there before? Not when I have lived here. I've lived here. I've lived in Minnesota for over 30 years and I have not seen snow in June.  I have seen like three inches of snow in May though.  Yeah, it was really pretty though. Oh my goodness.

01:50 because stuff had started to leaf out just a little bit. So the snow got caught on all the little tiny leaves. It was really  That's pretty. Yeah. Yeah. And I had a rose bush that had bloomed and there was snow on the rose. And I was like, oh my God, I got to a picture of this. And I did. So  you don't want to see it snow in May and June, but on those rare occasions that it does, make sure you have a camera handy.  Yeah, definitely.

02:18 Okay, so tell me about yourself and what you do at your farm.  So  we  are,  I'm  a,  I guess a third generation farmer, skipped a generation.  So my parents, well, my father grew up in Nebraska  and came from a farming family  and then joined the Air Force.

02:44 And then my mom was born in Cuba.  my grandparents  on my mother's side are Cuban. She came to America when she was two years old. And in Cuba, they had a farm, but  the great grandparents did not the grandparents. They were more city folk.  She went to the Air Force. That's where I was born.  so I guess, you know,

03:11 I don't know, third, fourth generation farmers skipped a generation.  I grew up on a farm. grew up in Miami, Florida  and met my husband in Tennessee  and we, he had, grew up farming.  Um, so he's, you know, country boy  grew up in the mountains, the Appalachia mountains.  And, uh, you know, he liked that I was the city girl. I liked that he was the country boy. He didn't want to farm.

03:40 He wanted to live in the city and I'm like, yeah, you don't want to live in the city.  So we're farming.  I won that argument. Nice.  Yeah. We started our farm in Tennessee  and  long story short, the county we were in was expanding. A lot of the farms got pushed out. And so between property taxes and then, you know, we,  I had been in Tennessee since about 2005, 2006.

04:09 And, you know, since then, you know, prices have exploded in East Tennessee because everybody's flocking, has been flocking to that area. So we couldn't afford to buy a bigger piece of land. You know, for what we sold our farm for, we were able to buy three times that here in Virginia. So that's how we ended up in Virginia. So his family, my family, they're all in Tennessee. So we're