Podcast Episode 1: Our Story
Jacque and Laura tell the story of how this podcast started along with their experiences that initially got them interested in gardening and self-sufficiency.
Join us in our Facebook group: https://www.carrotgal.com/chats/
Visit our website: https://www.carrotgal.com/
Get your free Gardening Cheat Sheet here: https://www.carrotgal.com/freebies/
Disclaimer: The information in this podcast should not be considered medical advice. We are not licensed medical professionals. We are simply sharing our own personal experiences and opinions. Please do your own research and consult with a medical professional before beginning any alternative treatments. The things we discuss in our podcasts are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any illness or disease.
Transcription:
Hey Laura, how are you today? Hey, how are you? So good. It’s, I’m excited to be with you today and chat about some things. Yeah, so I was thinking today that I’d love to kind of talk about our story and. How this came about and why we’re doing what we’re doing, what the purpose is, who we want to talk to. Like why in the world are we doing, why are we, why are spending time recording topics about things like growing topics, about growing food and different things, like where did this all start from?
So, I’d love to share our story with our people. Is that okay? Oh yeah. That sounds great. Awesome. Okay. So maybe I’ll start and then you can jump in with any other parts and pieces of the story and you can, we can kind of go back and forth and share different parts of our story. So, I wanted to kind of set the stage with, well actually what I want to start with is before I jump into, like the actual events of how this came about is kind of tell you the background.
Laura and me. So, Laura and I are sisters. We have three other siblings. So, we’re a family of five children, two parents, we grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, salt the suburbs of Salt Lake City. And, really great family. We’re just kind of a middle class, typical average family. And, we always had a garden.
Both of our parents grew up, their parents were. Products of the Great Depression. And both of them grew gardens? Yes. Both of them grew gardens. That’s what I was getting to. And so, yeah, that’s always been a part of our growing up lives. I remember growing up like, we always had raspberry bushes and, you know, then we always had the tomatoes and different things in the garden every year.
I remember hating every summer the chores of weeding the garden. It was just the pits. It was the worst. I hated that part because that’s just my personality. I’m like, I hate doing this stuff. Mm-hmm. My mom always forced us, you know? But then, but then it came time to harvest season and it just kind of was like this fun for me at least.
Laura, maybe your story was a little bit different, but it was like, I enjoyed the harvest because it was kind of like we sat around the kitchen table and we like mm-hmm put off the green bean ends. Or were like, we pitted the peaches or we whatever. Milled the boundaries and yeah like all the things to make jams and bottling our peaches and yeah, it was like, yes.
All that stuff. Lots of memories of my mom. Of our mom, canning. Canning and pressure canning and all the bottles and running down to the food storage room and grabbing all the bottles, go grab me some bottled tomatoes, right? I’m like, okay, mom. You know? Mm-hmm. She’s making dinner and super good memories.
So that’s just part of how we grew up. And as Laura and I have grown up and become adults and done our own thing, we’ve obviously had different experiences. Laura’s been very passionate about gardening for many, many years, and as I. Grown up and, and shifted into different chapters of my life.
Gardening is becoming more and more important to me. I just because of where my husband and I live, we live in a condo and we don’t have any outside growing space temper at the moment. Hopefully that will be changing sometime in the future. But, the last few years, like I’ve just had this increased desire to grow more and more food and be more self-sufficient and to learn those skills.
And so, a couple of years ago, I. I had a really crazy moment and I was looking around trying to utilize the resources that I had at my fingertips and I realized I have these neighbors that live right next to our parking lot in our condo complex, and one of them has this, this part of his property that he really doesn’t do anything with.
And he is a single guy, single dad. And I had this crazy. It’s crazy idea. I should go ask him and see if he’ll let me go grow, like build a garden box on his, or raise garden bed on his property. And I was like, this is crazy. But I found my courage and I texted him, said, can I come over and talk to you?
And he said, sure, come on over. So, I ended up going over and he kind of looked at me like, that is a weird idea, but I’m not opposed to it, so go for it. So, he graciously has let us build, like dig into his land and like get rid of the grass and like build up this garden box. Garden raised. Garden bed. And I love that you built your raised garden bed out of pallets.
We built out of pallets, we did. We went and found some pallets that were just needing to get, take it, like thrown away to the dumpster because businesses don’t want pallets when they’re done with pallets. So, we pried open the pallet wood and like built it out of pallets. And, I mean, because I didn’t want to put a ton.
Money into this because it can get expensive really quick. So yeah, we used whatever we had at our fingertips, and built up a raised garden bed and it’s expanded. So, we have a couple of them now at this point. But I think you did buy some soil, right? Did you buy? Yes. Yeah, we did. Yep. We did start off with some like fertilized soil and stuff from Home Depot or wherever we bought it from. And we built it up, but then we’ve been using it as like a composting place. And so, we’ve been burying our food scraps and stuff when I remember too, in there. So, it’s just been building up and the soil’s been getting richer and richer from here to here. And so, it’s been really, so that’s where I’m at.
That’s where we’re at. So, and Laura’s background. I’m going to let you share your story with your, your website, your passion, your seeds, like all that stuff, and then we’ll jump into what cool. Where we’re now. Yeah. Like she mentioned, we grew up with gardens, but it wasn’t really my thing until I was in college.
So, I started my first garden when I was a college. In college. I think I was a junior. I was living with a family member at the time in the, in a basement apartment is what she had. And, she was my great-aunt and she rented out her basement to people that she knew. So, I was living there with some. my second year living there, she went on a mission for our church, which is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
And she, went on her mission and she said, you guys can use my garden boxes. She had four. So, her granddaughter who was renting upstairs while she was gone, the upstairs level took two of the boxes and I took two of the boxes. And so that was my first experience planting something on my own. And I grew, carrots, peas, I think I planted a couple tomatoes and pumpkins.
So little did I know that she had a lot of ants in that area. And so, like the insect ants and so, I got zero carrots because the ants came and ate all the tops of those. Oh, that’s so, my peas, I planted too late and they didn’t grow at all. And then, I don’t remember what else. I don’t know, remember if the tomatoes grew or not, but the pumpkins did fantastic!
And they, you know, squash takes over everything. Yeah. So, they I think they took over an entire bed. And I really only had one big pumpkin and two smaller ones. And the moment that I knew that I would forever garden was that fall when I, I actually was dating my husband at the time and we went to, a family home evening activity with our group that night and we were carving pumpkins and I took two pumpkins from my garden that I.
To this event and we carved them together. That’s so cool. My husband and I, we were dating at the time, but that’s what we did as our activity and I remember feeling like driving to the activity and remember just feeling like, this is amazing. I didn’t have to buy these pumpkins at the grocery store. And for me, that was just really empowering and like, I don’t know, like just fulfill.
to know that I grew these myself, make so much joy. So much joy. It was amazing. So fun. So that was my first garden. The only thing that grew was pumpkins, and I really only had three that that got to harvestable safe. That’s great. So, if that’s your experience with your first garden, you don’t feel terrible about it.
Since then, I have grown a garden in every place that I have lived. So, I lived in Arizona, in Tucson, Arizona for five years and it’s very hard to grow things down there because it’s super hot. But I tried and you know, things, heat lovers do really well down there. So, my rosemary was amazing. My tomatoes and peppers were amazing.
A lot of my other things didn’t work out so well. So, and then I’ve lived in an apartment where I had no land. So, I grew things on my balcony. I’ve grown things in pots in various places that I’ve lived. And right now, I live in Boise, Idaho, and I have five acres of land and, pretty good-sized garden chickens, raspberries, all the things.
So, we’re not self-sufficient by any means, but I do practice self-sufficiency skills and that’s where Jacque and I have really connected recently is that both of us love self-sufficiency topics and we love talking about it. And, we talk a lot on the telephone about various things and she asks me questions and I share things that I’ve learned and things like that.
We wanted to record what we have learned to be able to share with other people who are also interested in self-sufficiency. And maybe you can talk about, like, your experience of how this particular idea came to be? Absolutely. Before I get to that, Laura didn’t mention this, but she has a really great website that she’s been building for a couple years.
Really great blog. It’s called Carrotgal.com and she has so much so much information on there about all sorts of topics. And so, she’s very passionate about this topic. She’s been teaching classes over the past many years about gardening and different cool things. She has a great cheat sheet on her website, like on how to grow a garden.
And the cool thing about Laura, you’ll find this out, is she knows how to save seeds. And then she sells seeds to people and that just blows my mind, like it’s just really cool. Who do you know that saves their own seeds and then sells them to people? I just think it’s really a neat skill that she has, which tells you how much she understands about things.
So, just wanted to plug that in. So, because that’s part of the background, right? Like, she’s been passionate about this stuff for, for years and, and I just, it’s amazing the things that she knows. So hence why I call her all the time. Like, how, how do I do this? What do I do about this? It’s just a lot of experience over many, many years and quite honestly, a lot of failures.
So, there’s, great I learned from all of that. You’re many steps ahead of me. So, I just love gleaning from your information and your wisdom. See? So, a couple days, like not too long ago, honestly, I was praying, at the end of the day and I was just kind of checking in with God and letting him know what I had done throughout that day and trying to wrap up my day before I hopped in bed and I just kept having this really, really, specific thought come to my mind, over and over and over again. And it hit me once and it kind of showed up in kind of an image in my mind. I don’t know if you guys ever get. Information coming to you in terms of images, but I do all the time.
And, there was this image that was planted in my mind and I kind of while I was in the middle of my prayer, I was like trying to shove it aside, go back to my prayer, trying to talk to God, like, hey, this is where I’m at. This is why I’m going to do tomorrow, yada yada, whatever. It just kept coming back like a magnet.
Like I couldn’t push it away, like of my own free will. And so, I finally paid attention because it came back like three or four times in a row. I was like, Okay, I guess I’m shifting and not in prayer. I mean, it was still prayer, right? But it was like right. Coming for a reason. Mm-hmm. So, I shifted and I gave it my full attention.
Mm-hmm. . And that’s when it started really expanding in my mind. And I was like, what? I wasn’t thinking about any of these topics or any of these thoughts or whatever. It just wasn’t there. And it was really neat and so I ended my prayer, when I, when it was appropriate too. And this was like late at night.
This was like 10 30 at night. You guys like bedtime. And so, I texted Laura and I said, Laura, are you awake? I need to talk to you. And she’s like, yeah, this is great. Part of the story, she’s like, yeah, I’m finish. I’m waiting for my pickles to finish pressure canning. We’re just living this stuff, right? You guys. And, I just, I didn’t tell you that before, but I think that’s, oh, it’s up late in the counter. Yes. like pickles. We’re making pickles, you guys, right. And so, she’s like, yeah, call me. So, I called her and I told her what this idea was that wouldn’t leave me while I was praying that night. And she was like, huh. That’s an interesting idea and it just has evolved from there. And we’ll tell you what the idea was in just a minute, but it took us a couple days to kind of wrap our brain around it and brainstorm and kind of create a plan and figure out what, what we’re doing and what, how, how we want to pursue this thing.
It just felt inspired for us to share Yeah. And to, to, you know, share what we know with other people. Yeah, exactly. So, and that’s where we’re at really the vision that came to me while I was praying that one night out of the blue was, just gathering people and talking about food topics and gardening topics and sustainability topics and like normal humans that are doing the work, right?
Like, that are in our growing zone. Mm-hmm. Like Laura mentioned, like in Arizona, it’s, it’s a totally different climate down there. It’s hard to grow things unless they’re heat loving plants. So, we wanted to talk to people here in our specific region of the world that can grow things in our temperate zone, and talk about these things.
And share our wisdom, our knowledge, and invite people really just gathering a group of people who are also interested in self-sufficiency. Exactly. And practicing self-sufficiency skills. Exactly. Right. So that’s, it covers a lot of things, you know, like Yep. And if you, there’s people who want to know how to do these things, and they don’t know where to start.
They don’t know what to do. They don’t have people in their corner to be able to help. Exactly. You don’t have me in your back pocket. You can call at any moment like Jacque does, right? So, let’s create a community of people, a place where you can feel supported and ask questions and. Absolutely. So that’s what we’re doing.
Some of the topics that Laura and I brainstormed to bring up in these kinds of conversations are gardening topics, right? Like talking about lots of different things to plant, when to plant, how to plant, like all those cool things. How to, can it, how to preserve food. Like what do you do after you, like I had literally had to call Lara two weeks ago, because the first time in my life I harvested onions.
Mm. and I called her because I know enough to know that you have to do something with the onions, but I didn’t know what you had to do with the onions. So, I called her, I was like, what do I do? And she said, you just, they just need to like, they just need to cure, they need to dry. They just let them hang out.
They’ll dry just a couple weeks and then, yeah, but I didn’t know that, you know, it’s like, can you store them immediately? They’ll. Right, right, right. But like, unless, you know, like when you get onions at the store, they’re just already going. So, I do, I have Laura in my back pocket, but we really wanted to create a space, like she said, where you feel supported.
You come and we’re talking about these cool concepts. It’s like we said, gardening. I’m been really getting into concepts like permaculture, which if you don’t know about permaculture again, go google it really quick. We’ll talk about it as we go in these episodes. But permaculture in a nutshell is really how I describe it, is like us learning about the natural rhythms and the cycles and the laws in nature, and how humans can actually get in tandem and in harmony with those natural laws of nature, right?
And without us doing excess work that we work harmony. How nature already does things and it’s better that way. And so, permaculture is a concept, preserving our food. Even foods we’re going to dance around in topics like long-term food storage, like how do you use herbs, like how do you wild harvest herbs that are all around you?
Like how do you identify plants that are medicinal or things that you need, or do you want this in your food supply or, how do you create. Even, what’s, what are we calling it? Like sourdough and, yeah, sours and like fermented foods that you can enhance the, the nutrition of your food and all these really cool concepts.
So that’s, yeah, that’s our self-sufficiency topics. For real. Whoever wants to learn with us Yes. To come and we would love to, interview other people as well. At some point. So, we’re going to work on that aspect. For, for now, it’ll probably just be the two of us, but we’ll, we would love to have some other people that we bring in and talk about and have chats with about various topics and absolutely learn together.
It’ll be so fun. Absolutely. So, by no means are Laura and I full on experts on any topic. We’re just here, we’re just chatting. We’re just sharing our recorded conversations with you as sisters so that you can have an inside scoop into these beautiful conversations that I’ve been privy to for so many years,
And we just want to expand that. And so other people that we invite in to have conversations and to interview and, we’re creating that same culture right around like, we love you. Like we want to hear about you, your experience and your expertise and what do you know, what can you bring to the table and all of that.
So just be, and share your successes with us down there. Like show us your garden and your harvest and all those kinds of things, right? We celebrate all that stuff. I just texted Laura a picture of my very first carrot that I grew. It’s so exciting. Last, I think that was last year, and it was this big giant, and it was like me pulling it out of the ground and I was like, just the, like Laura shared story about the pumpkin, like that was me.
Like I, this carrot. It was so exciting. So exciting. And we want celebrate you. Absolutely. So, and it really makes you appreciate your food too, when you know what goes into it. So, absolutely. Yeah. So that’s our, that’s our vision. Yeah. Where are we going? It may change and shift from here. We’re just being open to inspiration and we just, our love and what we’re creating at this point in time.
So, hope that this is helpful and supportive to you. But I don’t know any other. No, I think that’s it. I mean, just creating a community of people who are like-minded is what we hoping for. So, absolutely. So, we’re excited that you’re here. Welcome to our community. Thanks for joining us. We’re excited about your self-sufficiency journey, whatever that looks like.
And you’ll hear me say this again and again and again. If all you can do is plant some herb seeds in a little pot and put it on your windowsill, like, do it right now. Go plant your seeds. Let, it’s a step towards self-sufficiency. Yeah. It’s one step. And then you can use those herbs in your, in your cooking.
And that’s one less step out of the food production cycle. Sure. You’re being self-sufficient with, so, yeah. Yep. And join us in the Facebook group. We’ll post a link to that. So, so excited have you guys here. Thank you for joining us!
Join us in our Facebook group: https://www.carrotgal.com/chats/
Visit our website: https://www.carrotgal.com/
Get your free Gardening Cheat Sheet here: https://www.carrotgal.com/freebies/
Disclaimer: The information in this podcast should not be considered medical advice. We are not licensed medical professionals. We are simply sharing our own personal experiences and opinions. Please do your own research and consult with a medical professional before beginning any alternative treatments. The things we discuss in our podcasts are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any illness or disease.
