Hellfire Homestead

Today I'm talking with Shannon and Allen at Hellfire Homestead. 

 

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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. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Shannon and Alan at Hellfire Homestead in New Hampshire. Good evening, you guys. How are you? Very good, actually, despite freezing. Is it super cold in New Hampshire right now? Yeah, we could kind of a little,

00:25 cold snap going on so that makes for frozen water bottles and water buckets which is always a nightmare but yeah Minnesota's pretty cold too but not as cold as it's gonna be Saturday the high for Saturday where I live is gonna be minus one oh my gosh  and it's probably coming your way three or four days later so you I've given you a heads up oh

00:50 Yeah, I know it's really hard with livestock because they've got to have fresh water whether you want to go out and break the ice and put water in or not. Yep. And we have quite a few different animals here. Okay. Well, tell me the first question I have is why is it called Hellfire Homestead? So, mean, oddly enough, it was sort of to weed out people that would be turned off by that name.

01:18 I think, and feel free to interrupt me, dear. But I feel that like in recent years, you know, with the influx of TikTok and other various social media, not only is there a lot of information that's absolutely wrong about homesteading, survivalism, bushcraft, et cetera, but a lot of people into it are not multi-generational. And there's a lot of returning to sort of like bad

01:48 Um, bad themes, I guess I should say as far as what we perceive to be gender roles in home setting and things like that on top of,  uh, just a lot of bad information in general, which I mean, as somebody who grew up in New Hampshire and  my family's been out here since the 1700s, um, ah I learned generationally how to can, um, how to keep meat clean.  Um, hunting was big in parts of my family. Um,

02:18 And I just sort of like grew up in the woods, like a wild feral child. ah So,  you know, and then you, you know, you log on to like TikTok and you see like 25 year old kids like canning with, ah you know, jars they got, you know, spaghetti jars they got from the grocery store and saying this is viable. And it's like, no, that will kill you if not ruin your entire harvest. There's a reason our grandparents use ball jars. ah

02:46 So that was part of it. And another part of it is that people are incredibly interested in what it is we do.

02:54 just on the day to day, like they're interested in the farm, they're interested in the fact that we fill our own freezer with our own meat. They're interested in the fact that we do process the hides of the animals that we eat and kill. We have sheep. ah So, some of us being online was to satisfy the curiosity of our friends, but also to kind of counter some of these like...

03:20 these ridiculous ideas that people who are not even generational farmers are starting to promote as good.  Uh huh. Good. I'm glad that you're, you're like standing up for that because you're right. There's a lot of crap  on the internet about what's safe, what isn't, what you can do, what you can't do. And I was grown up the same. I was brought up, sorry, not grown up,  brought up the same way you were Shannon. I spent so much time in the, uh, the woods and the swamp behind my house growing up in Maine.

03:50 And  I'm 56, there were no computers, were no tablets, there were no cell phones.  Mom said, you ate a good breakfast, go play, don't come back till dark. And that's what we did. Yeah, was Gen X. So my parents were basically like, get outside, you're on your own until it starts getting dark. Yeah, me too.  And  I couldn't necessarily do that with my kids when I finally managed to find a husband who wasn't terrible and managed to stay with him.

04:19 and lived in town because there weren't really any woods for them to go play in. So we would take them on the weekend