Dandylion Farms LLC

A Tiny Homestead

Today I'm talking with Christina and Seth at Dandylion Farms LLC.

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00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Christina and Seth at Dandelion Farms LLC. Good evening, guys. Good evening. Hey. How are you? Good. How are you? Good. You guys are in Ohio? Yes. Okay. I'm in Minnesota if you didn't know.

00:30
Um, so tell me, tell me about yourselves and what you do. Well, uh, we're just kind of some average people who, uh, kind of started going down the whole homesteading trail, um, quite a few years ago. And, uh, you know, we, we kind of do a lot of, a lot of things, but

00:58
Our business right now primarily makes natural healthcare products like lotions, shampoos, soaps, salves, stuff like that. All the good things, yes. Yes, yeah. Yep, we make things like that here too. And Christina was kind enough to send me a lip balm and a shampoo bar.

01:28
And I'm probably, I don't know if I'm supposed to say that or not, cause it's a new thing, but I, I tried the lip balm today and it's a wonderful, I think you sent me the mocha kind. Yes. That one is her favorite. So I was like, Oh, let her try that one out. And then yeah, the shampoo bar, we haven't released them yet, but I've been giving them out to like a couple of people to try out and let me know what they think about them before we really put them out there.

01:54
Well, I have questions. I haven't used it yet because I wash my hair once a week and I had just washed my hair when the bar came in and I was like, um, I'm going to wait. So my question about the shampoo bars is how exactly do you use them? Do you use them like a bar of soap on your hair or do you lather them up in your hand and put the lather in your hair or how do I use it? So you could do either.

02:20
but I just put the soap bar under the water for a second and then obviously make sure your hair is good and wet. And then I just lather and it literally feels like there's a huge cloud sitting on my head. It lathers up so well. Yeah, I just scrubbed down. Okay. Like using a bar of soap. Okay, cool. And it looks like there's a lot of moisturizing oils in the ingredients and I am tickled about this because my hair tends toward dry and.

02:48
We have a cold front moving into Minnesota as we speak. Today it was 72, tomorrow it's supposed to be 55 for the high. And it doesn't look like it's gonna get hot, hot again until spring. Thank you, Jesus, I'm ready for this bouncing to be done. But my hair tends to get real dry in the wintertime because the humidity drops. So I'm very excited to see how the oils in it work. Yes, so I naturally have,

03:18
Like my hair will get, if I wash it too much, which when you said you only wash your hair once a week, I only wash mine twice a week. So it's much better for like the oil production. But I understand completely about your hair being dry because mine is as well. And that's why I packed it full of so many hydrating oils because I always feel like I had that issue. And that was one of the biggest things as to why I was like, we're making shampoo bars because one, all of the terrible ingredients that are in all the store-bought ones, you know, they,

03:47
can cause all kinds of issues. But also I was like, no matter what I purchase, my hair is still dry. So I was like, I'm just gonna make my own. So yeah, I made sure to put a bunch of nourishing and hydrating and moisturizing oils into it. So I'm excited to hear what you think about it when you try it. Well, it's probably gonna be tomorrow. So as soon as it dries, I will message you and tell you what it did. I also heard that I read, cause I looked up about shampoo bars, cause I keep meaning to get one and I never do.

04:16
And then one showed up magically in my mailbox and I was like, I don't know what to do with this. I don't know how it works. And I looked it up. And from what I read from three reputable sources, because that's how I decide whether I believe what I'm reading, people's hair goes through an adjustment period and you shift from shampoo to a shampoo bar. Yes, absolutely. So we'll see. Right now.

04:44
Right now I wash my hair and I let it dry and my hair is long. It's like mid back and I'm also 54 and my hair is about, I would say two thirds white and a third dark. Cause I started going gray really early. I have my first gray hairs at 14. And I have been saying for the last 10 years, I wish that it would just go white because this is driving me insane, but I don't want to color it cause it'll take forever to grow it back out again.

05:15
Point being is that no one tells you when your hair is beautiful and dark when you're in your 20s That when it goes gray those gray hairs are coarser than your your normal Hair is when you're younger. Yeah, and so not only does my hair tend toward dry, but now I have coarse white hairs and They frizz because of the dry

05:39
So I'm really, really hoping that this shampoo bar does wonderful things that I would love to have it do. Aw. Well, like I said, we're excited to hear what you think about it. I'm excited. I kept saying, I've been saying for like five years that we should try making shampoo bars because we make cold process lye soap. It can't be that hard to make a shampoo bar. And my husband was like, well.

06:05
He said, you're the only one's really going to use it. So can we wait? And I'm like, yeah, I can keep using shampoo. It's fine. And if this works, we're going to have to make a batch for me because I probably can't afford to buy them from you. I would love to, but I don't think I can afford it right now, but we probably have all the ingredients to make shampoo bars because we have all the ingredients to make soap. So. Yeah. It's a, it's.

06:36
Pretty much the identical product. OK, awesome. And just whatever oils you think work for your hair, I guess? Yep, absolutely. Just make sure that it's, since you make the cold press, just make sure it's even, you know, your even amounts with lye to your oils so it doesn't end up too, like, crunchy, like your bar is getting crunchy. Or gooey, yeah. Yes, so yeah, as long as you keep that ratio with the oils to lye, yeah, you can tweak it with any oils you'd like.

07:05
Fantastic. We have accidentally super-fatted, I think is what it's called, two batches of soap out of probably hundreds of batches of soap that we've made. And they end up being what we call the gardener's soap because they're still great for washing dirt and resins off your hands. But you don't want to use a super-fatted soap in the shower because you will fall on your butt in the shower. That's how slippery it'll get.

07:35
So yeah, it's not a good thing to have too many oils in your soap. Okay, so how did you guys come to this? Because not like I keep saying, not everybody's like, hey, let's become homesteaders on a whim. Well, so we've always kind of been sort of outdoorsy people. We both grew up on some acreage.

08:04
And it just kind of seemed like the life we wanted. But probably about 10 years ago, I decided to take a course in permaculture design, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with, but there's lots of great resources for it online. And so as I was starting to do that, Christy here started to

08:34
of get into herbs and herbalism and crafting and figuring out what she can do with those things. And then our first kid was born and we're like, hey, we don't really want all these chemicals like on our kid. And I had really bad eczema growing up and

09:04
throughout my adult years and all three of our children ended up with eczema. And as soon as we switched to natural soap, none of us had their skin issues anymore. And so that just kind of solidified things for us and motivated us to keep going. And, and it's always kind of, we are always the test subject.

09:32
And since we have such sensitive skin, if we react to it, somebody else probably will too. And so it's been a lot of trial and error figuring out what works and what doesn't. And, you know, a lot of it was like, here, friends, try this, tell us what you think. And that's kind of how it all started. People started asking for it. And so we've just been...

10:02
slowly progressing with it. Okay. That was one of the things that I was going to say about the lip balm and the shampoo bar that you sent me. I could pronounce every single ingredient on the label. I was very impressed. Yeah. I was just talking with my mom about that earlier. She was showing me one of her like high dollar name brand shampoos and she was like, oh, do you think this is good or whatever? And I was looking at the back of it and I told her, I said, if you can't pronounce the ingredients,

10:32
you shouldn't be using it. It was pretty much every single ingredient on the back. And I was like, well, that one irritates your lungs. That one is bad for your organs. That one can cause cancer. So she was like, okay, I'm switching. Yeah, for sure. I don't know what all the bad ingredients do. I just know that if I can't pronounce the ingredient and it isn't a word that.

10:57
is pretty common in everyday language. I probably don't want it on my skin. Absolutely. I mean, that's exactly what we think too. Like they should be simple ingredients that everybody knows or something that you could easily look up and be like, okay, that's for moisturizing your skin. Yeah. No big words that you are like, what in the world is that? So yeah, we are very simple and to the point, what is in it is on the label and nothing more.

11:27
Um, I don't know what the regulations are like in Ohio, but in Minnesota, we have to put every single ingredient, including water and whatever the scientific word is for lye. I mean, we put, we put lye on the label. We say lye, but we're supposed to put, um, high something. What is the, what's the scientific name for lye? I can't think of it right now. Something hydroxide? Correct. Uh, sodium hydroxide. Thank you.

11:56
But sodium hydroxide takes up a lot of space on a tiny label, so we just put lye and water. Yes, we do the same. So as far as the labeling here in Ohio, I know that they want you to put everything that's in the product and you need to start with what there is the most of and work your way down your list. So pretty much exactly the same. Yeah. And the reason I bring it up is because not every state has the same.

12:25
requirements or regulations. In Minnesota, I keep talking about this, but it's the best example I can think of. We have the cottage food laws here. And it's not a license. You have to have a registration number. So you have to take a little test so that you can prove that you know the food safety practices. And then once you get that registration number, you can make things in your kitchen and sell them.

12:53
But there's a ton of things that you can't do. Like you're not supposed to buttercream because quote unquote buttercream is supposed to be refrigerated. Well, I've put buttercream on a cake and had it on my counter in a covered dish for three days and it's been fine. But because it's made with heavy cream or half and half or milk, they want it to be refrigerated. So you can't sell it. Anything that's gotta be refrigerated.

13:21
or heated you cannot sell from your home cottage kitchen in Minnesota. Yeah, it's pretty similar this way. Yup. So I got my registration. I still have it. I renewed it this year. And I haven't sold anything because I just, I feel like it's not worth the time that I put into it right now to sell it.

13:47
because I already feel bad enough that people are spending so much money at the grocery store for stuff at the grocery store. And to make it worth my time and my while, I would have to charge so much money for four cookies that nobody's going to buy them from me. Right. Yeah. That's something that we sort of discuss quite often. And our whole kind of...

14:16
goal is to keep things as affordable as possible. And so like our most expensive product is somewhere right around the $15 range. And even then, you know, you get people who are like, boy, that's kind of a lot of money for that. And it's like, well, it's handcrafted. It's natural. You know, I mean, we...

14:43
We milk the goats ourselves, you know, like we're not going out and buying all of these ingredients. I mean, some, yeah, we do purchase, but the main stuff, it's not made in a laboratory. It's made on a farm, you know? And so we do kind of run into that issue sometimes, but we do try to keep things as

15:13
be able to use it. It's not so much about us making a profit as it is just doing the right thing.

15:24
Yes. And with what you're doing, that makes a lot of sense. You're trying to help people and give them a better alternative to something they're going to put on their skin. With baked goods, it doesn't feel the same to me, if that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. So, and we try to sell our soaps and our lip balms and our candles and stuff that we make. We try to keep it within reason.

15:54
Um, my husband was telling me that he was at a farmer's market or a craft show or something last summer, and somebody was selling a 10 ounce candle for like $30. Because, because that's what it costs them to make it. And I looked into it and technically we should be selling ours for about 25. And we're not, we're selling them for, I think 12 bucks, I think. Right.

16:21
And I still feel like that's exorbitant for a candle, but I also know what it costs us to make it and the time involved. So it's really hard when you try to explain this to someone who doesn't make the things. They don't understand why it's so expensive. And with all the things that have gone up in price in the last year and a half, two years, people are already swallowing a very bitter pill just to get groceries. So it's really...

16:50
hard to sell anything that feels like a luxury right now. Right, yeah, for sure. And I hate it, I hate everything about it. It makes me so offended. It's the best word I can find, offended at how much just basic everyday food costs right now. It's insanity. Yep. We are down to the last of our half beef that we bought.

17:19
a year or so ago, probably a year and a half ago. And my husband wanted to know if we wanted to do a quarter this time. And I said, let me go see how much that's gonna cost from a farmer and a butcher, because you're not only paying for the meat, you're paying for the processing too. And found out that Sam's Club is selling ground beef in our area right now for.

17:48
$4.58 a pound ground beef and found out that it was going to cost us almost $7 a pound for beef from the place we got it from last time. So I'm a butcher by trade. And it is the I mean, the prices of everything ever since COVID have, you know, gone through the roof.

18:16
uh, somewhere around $6 a pound for ground beef right now. Yeah. But like, if you, if you ordered from us, you're paying for something a pound. Um, but we, we raised the beef that we slaughter so we can control those prices a little bit better. But if you're going out to the farmer and buying his beef and then coming to us and processing, you're going to have more money in it. Yeah. But.

18:46
in all reality, you have to understand the trade-off where you're paying $4 a pound for your rib-eyes, whereas if you went to Walmart or somewhere else, you're paying $16 to $18 a pound for rib-eye. So you're paying a little bit more for certain things, but significantly less for others.

19:16
And in the long run, it's still a lot cheaper than going to the grocery store every other week or whatever and buying meat. But it is, it's a hard pill to swallow paying all that money up front for beef. That's where I was going to go with this is that I would love to do it, but we don't have the extra money to lay out ahead of time, as it were.

19:44
Because for anyone who doesn't know who is listening to the podcast, if you buy a quarter beef or a half beef or a whole beef, how it works is you put in your order with the farmer or the butcher, depending on how they do it, and you pay for all of that beef up front.

20:11
farmers and butchers will require a deposit, some won't. And then once you get your beef, you write them a check or you give them cash or you pay for it with a card. And the last place that we got our half beef from, I think it was $1,600 a year and a half ago. And that was pretty good. That was a really good price. Right now it's at least $1,000 more, if not $2,000 more.

20:40
And it's not so much the cost of the beef, it's the cost of the processing in this case. Yeah, I mean, where in our area of Ohio, you're looking at probably for a half a beef somewhere around $1,600, I would guess. I mean, there are a lot of variables there, but.

21:08
One thing that a lot of the butcher shops in our area are doing now, because nobody can afford to buy a half a beef or even a quarter beef, not a lot of people can. They do bundles where it's like a 50 pound bundle or a hundred pound bundle and it's a set price. That way you're still getting a decent amount of meat for significantly less money.

21:40
Yeah, exactly. And the other thing that's putting me off of it, it's not only the price, it's a personal preference. Because it's just my husband and my son and I who live here, we have been eating a lot of beef because a half a beef is a lot of meat. And I am so over it. Like, man, I don't want to see another hamburger for a year. I'm just so over it. It has pretty much turned me into wanting to be a vegetarian.

22:10
You can only eat so much of one kind of meat and not get sick of it. Yep. Yeah. Well, so like with, with us, we eat more chicken than beef. And one, it's a lot easier and a lot more cost effective to raise chickens and process them ourselves. Oh, for sure. Yeah. But, but two, it's, you know, our kids are still.

22:39
Fairly young. So it's like we just, when we have beef, it's typically ground beef. Yeah. You know, we, we saved the stakes for a special occasion. Um, but I'm not going to go pay top dollar for some beef to get 90% of it ground, you know, like, um, when I can just go to Aldi and buy a couple pounds here and there, um, right. Exactly.

23:08
But yeah, we eat a lot of chicken and we're hoping in the next year or so to start raising hogs as well, which I'll process on the farm, so to speak, for our own consumption. And that was actually kind of, it all sort of ties back into the homesteading thing where I was like, hey, I want to know how to...

23:38
harvest these animals, if we're going to raise them, I want to know how to do it from start to finish. One thing led to another, and I've been butchering for like 10 years now. It really gives us sort of peace of mind because I know that if anything were to happen with the economy or whatever, I can go out to the backyard and harvest all the meat we're going to need.

24:09
Yeah, absolutely. Yes. You know, I mean, it's about being self-sufficient and not needing to rely on...

24:26
things that are out of our control. Right, exactly, yeah. So, I have a weird question. If, I have to look into this in Minnesota, but I don't know what it's like in Ohio. If somebody came to you and said, I want a quarter of beef, but I wanna butcher it myself, like I just want you to give me whatever section that is, and I will take it home and cut it up myself, is that legal or can people not do that?

24:57
I suppose you could get away with it, but to the best of my knowledge off the top of my head, the animal has to be sold while it's still alive. And also, they, that person would probably have to be there during.

25:25
the the time of harvest. Okay. And there there are some gray areas that if the inspectors heard me talking would probably disagree with me. But like, in Ohio, you can legally process 1000 chickens a year for other people without being inspected.

25:55
Okay. Yeah. Um, and I have brought that up to our inspectors and they said, yeah, technically, but we're still going to come knocking. Um, so it's like, you just kind of have to make sure that you're keeping good records and, and, you know, it's kind of always best, I guess, if you find yourself in that situation to call the department of agriculture and see what they say.

26:22
Yeah, and be like, how does this work? Am I going to get in trouble if I do this thing? Yeah. Yep. I know that we have butchered a hat. We've butchered a pig. We, we bought, we bought a pig. It was basically, um, slaughtered on the farmer's property. It was gutted and cut in half. So we brought the body home into halves.

26:47
And then a friend of ours came over and helped us butcher one half and he took that half home because he paid for that. And we butchered the other half and it went in our freezer. We have butchered a lamb that was brought to us basically no skin, no hooves, no head, no tail. It was wrapped in paper and we butchered it on our kitchen table. And my husband hunts, so obviously we've butchered deer before. So

27:16
So butchering is, I mean, we are not artists at it by any stretch and I think that a good butcher is an artist. I think that if you're good at it, it is artistry. We're not there. We just wanna be able to cook the meat so we cut it the way we want it. Well, I mean, at the end of the day, all that really matters, if you're doing it for yourself, is that you get something to eat. Yes. You know, I mean, if the world were to end,

27:46
right? You're not going to care how nice those steaks look. You're just going to be thankful you don't meet, you know? Yep. Yep, exactly. But if you were going to turn around and try and sell it, then yeah, you want it to look good and you want to know what you're doing.

28:03
Yes. And I just, I want to, I want to make the distinction that, that there's a big difference between us cutting up a lamb and you know, it's for us to eat. No one's going to see it. We don't have to care about what the cuts look like. And you as a butcher doing what you do, I'm sure that you take pride in the skills that you have cultivated in your, your butchering career. Absolutely. Yeah. And, but

28:32
Also, I've gotten unfair advantage because I've got all the equipment to do it. You know, like, um, when, when you're doing it on your kitchen table, it's a lot different it's let's get this done and in the freezer, you know, like, um, and, but, but yeah, it's, if you don't take pride in what you're doing, you shouldn't be doing it, you know,

28:54
Yes, exactly. And when we, when we cut up that lamb, oh my God, my kitchen counters look like someone had been murdered. I was like, okay, now that we're done and all the food is put away, who's going to help me clean off the counter and mop the floor? My husband's like, I will. I'm like, good, thank you. And what works really, really well? Windex works really, really well for getting blood off of floors and off of countertops. Interesting.

29:23
It's stinky and it's not good for you, but it works.

29:28
So yeah, it just, it cuts all the, the yuck. And I was very happy to have two bottles under the kitchen sink. I was like, we're going to have our neighbor who is a police officer stop in just to visit and he's going to be like, who died? Who did you kill? We didn't look in the freezer. See it. It says lamb chops, lamb leg, lamb roast. So yeah.

29:56
Okay, well I didn't know I was going to turn a discussion about butchering and I think it's great because I don't usually talk about this and I had just looked up somebody to buy beef from last night and saw the prices and went, we are not ready to buy a half right now or a quarter or an eighth. We're just going to buy what we need every couple weeks and call it good until we're in a better financial position to drop thousands of dollars on a freezer full of beef.

30:24
So yeah. Okay, so you said you have goats and do you have steers? Do you have cows? So we are sort of crashing with my wife's parents right now. We recently sold our home and we are building a new home.

30:52
And so we're, we're crashing here and my wife's father has had beef since the dawn of time. Okay. So he's got a, a small herd right now of dexter's, um, which are a sort of smaller breed of beef. They max out at like six to 700 pounds. And they are probably the smartest.

31:21
cows I've ever seen. And so he's kind of in his retirement playing around with this herd of dexters and eventually one or two of them will end up in the freezer, I'm sure. Okay. So if you were building a house, does that mean that you bought land?

31:51
will be the new headquarters of our homestead here hopefully very soon. That's exciting. Congratulations. I know how that feels. Awesome. How many kids do you guys have? We have three boys. Oh my, you're busy. Oh yeah. Yeah. My wife is a superstar. That's for sure.

32:20
I'm really glad you said that because my wife, my wife, homeschool the children and does the business and takes care of all of the stuff at home. I mean, she's the unsung hero here. Seth, I love you. Thank you for saying that. It is so important that the partners talk up their partners. And I'm saying partners because not everybody's married.

32:49
You know, people don't necessarily just get married anymore. They just, they just live together and they're partnered. They're not married, but, but spouses need to encourage and support their spouses. And it's really nice to hear the male support the female because I feel like females support the males a lot. And most men are really weird about saying, my wife is awesome. I'm so proud of her. She does all these things. My husband says it about me all the time. I don't do anything anymore. I used to,

33:19
bust my everlovin' ass, but my kids are now grown. I don't have to work quite as hard or crazy as I used to. Yeah, well, we're right in the thick of it. So thank you for saying that about your wife. Yeah, yeah, no, she is fantastic. I mean, the business wouldn't exist without her and neither would our homestead. Good job, Christina, I'm proud of you. Well, thank you.

33:46
Woman to woman, I am very proud of you. You keep kicking ass. Okay, guys, I like to keep these to half an hour. I would love to talk to you for another half an hour, but I'm not going to do it because I'm sure you have things to do. Well, it was really nice chatting with you. Can I ask you how you found out about us? I think I found you on Facebook, just like I find almost everybody. Okay.

34:15
Yeah, the best thing about Facebook is that the algorithm feeds you more of what you're interested in. So the minute I started looking at people's homestead and farm pages, it just keeps feeding me people. And I'm like, Tandelion Farms, LLC sounds like an interesting place. Let me get ahold of them. Yeah. I mean, we just try to keep it real and keep it simple. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, me too. That's why the podcast is basically yapping about homesteading and farming.

34:44
and baking and crafting because I'm like, it needs to be easy. I don't have the bandwidth for a huge learning curve right now. So it's just a chat with people about what they're doing because I think it's really interesting and apparently other people think it's interesting too. So all right guys, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Yes, thank you so much. Have a good night. You too. Bye.