Moonlight Elk

Today I'm talking with Christie author of Moonlight Elk. You can follow on Facebook as well.

 

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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 Christie Green, the author  of  Moonlight Elk,  One Woman's Hunt for Food and Freedom.  Christie is in New Mexico this morning. How are you, Christie? Good morning. I'm wonderful. Thank you for having me.

00:25 You are so welcome and thank you for visiting.  love it when I get to people who are  into nature and also write books about it. um What's the weather like in New Mexico this morning? Well, it's unfortunately very warm and sunny and dry. We've had unseasonably uh mild weather. It's been in the high fifties and we haven't had uh much snow for a number of weeks. So it's really precarious here. It's not good when we don't have snowpack.

00:54 But we're hoping for some form of moisture, at least in the new year. We'll see. I will keep my fingers crossed for you. And I wish I could send you all the rain we got this morning. Oh, man. I do, too. I have a friend up in North Dakota, and they get snow and those cold temperatures. And I wish they could just push it down here. Yeah, it was so weird. I was looking at my Facebook memories, because I look at them every morning, because I sit down with my coffee and scroll through Facebook to find people to talk to.

01:23 looked at my memories and a year or so ago it was raining on this date as well. I'm like, okay, so is December 18th a rain day? Hmm. Yeah, interesting. It seems like it would be too cold up there for rain, but moisture is moisture. Yeah, I'm, I have an appointment tomorrow at 9 45 in the morning, half an hour from here and it's all wet out there. The temps are supposed to drop.

01:50 hard this afternoon and it's supposed to snow a little bit on top of whatever freezes.  And it's not supposed to warm back up until tomorrow afternoon. like, I may not make that appointment. We'll see how the roads are.  Go slow.  Yeah. Making appointments in the Northern tier States in December or January, February is a real  iffy game a lot of the time.

02:15 But it's fine. I love winter. Winter is my favorite. Well, fall is my favorite season, but I love winter because it's when we all kind of cocoon and  get cozy and eat really good food. So that's right. That's right.  All right. So Christy, tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do.  Well,  I  am  55 years old  and  I am originally from Alaska and now I live in San Diego, New Mexico. I've been here for

02:44 let's see, 28 years or so. And pretty much my whole career as I'm a landscape architect and I'm also an author and a designer and my work revolves around food and cultivating connection to each other and to place through the catalyst of food. And so in my work as a landscape architect, I focused on

03:10 building soil, harvesting water, and growing heirloom varieties of food for  people, like in the homes, but also in larger kind of contexts like housing developments and public spaces. And then I also work with native plants  and um doing like passive water harvesting landform grading techniques like berms on swales and bio-swales and things like that. And then uh I am a hunter. uh

03:39 As some people say, an adult onset hunter, started hunting when I was 40. And the original intent was to harvest my own meat, right? So I was growing all this food for myself and for other people. And I thought, well, what about, you know, meat? Why couldn't I hunt as well, you know, to fully round out this sort of self-sufficient way of gathering food.

04:08 I thought I was going to get food, so to speak, and what I ended up finding was this revelatory new relationship to place  and to myself, really,  through the animals and through the hunt.  So I started writing about  those experiences with the animals here in New Mexico and other places too, but mostly