Becca Burke - The Meadow Farmstead: EP14

Today’s episode comes to you from Au Sable Forks New York where we visit with Becca Burke of The Meadow Farmstead. She’s managed a diversified vegetable farm and CSA for the last few years on the Vermont side of lake Champlain, but finally landed some growing space of her own over in New York. She hit the ground running and I visited with her at the tail end of the first season on this new farm. We discuss strategic investments, lessons learned from other farms to set this new garden up right from the start and she shares how she’s striving to provide affordable food for her community.  

Chapters

• 0:56 Intro
• 2:48 Greenhouse
• 3:45 Field Walk
• 6:40 High Tunnel Talk
• 13:30 Lessons learned from year 1
• 17:27 What are you looking forward to next season?
• 22:50 What does sustainable ag mean to you?

Transcript

Andy Chamberlin (00:10):
Today's episode comes to you from Au Sable Forks, New York, where we visit with Becca Burke of the Meadow Farmstead. She's managed a diversified vegetable farm and CSA for the last few years on the Vermont side of Lake Champlain, but finally landed some growing space of her own over in New York. She hit the ground running and I visited with her at the tail end of the first season on this new farm. We discussed strategic investments, lessons learned from other farms to set this new garden up right from the start, and she shares how she's striving to provide affordable food for her community.
Becca Burke (00:56):
I'm Becca and I own and operate the Meadow Farmstead in Au Sable Forks. We're growing on about three quarters of an acre and focus on mixed vegetables, and we have a small CSA and supply wholesale. This is where we're going to put our workshop wash pack, but it needs a lot of work, so we're working on jacking it up and leveling it right now.
Andy Chamberlin (01:18):
Oh, holy moly.
Becca Burke (01:19):
Yeah, and then we're going to pour some concrete in there and hopefully...
Andy Chamberlin (01:25):
[inaudible 00:01:25] project.
Becca Burke (01:24):
Yeah. It's a great space. It's very old.
Andy Chamberlin (01:28):
Yeah. Yeah. A lot of farms have old, old barns.
Becca Burke (01:34):
Yeah, so we inherited the car.
Andy Chamberlin (01:36):
Oh, wow. Look at that. Farm vehicle.
Becca Burke (01:41):
Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (01:42):
Mustang.
Becca Burke (01:45):
Yeah, so the barn was here and then none of this was here. This was an old hayfield. A really long time ago I guess they grew potatoes up here, so they picked a lot of rocks for us, which is great. We dug
power and water from the house, so we have a power box here, and then we have water to the greenhouse. That's how we're getting water up to the field from a gas pump, from that little tank. There's a two-inch line buried from the basement all the way up to here.
Andy Chamberlin (02:17):
This is your first season, right?
Becca Burke (02:18):
This is our first season, yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (02:19):
You moved on last fall, is that right?
Becca Burke (02:23):
Yeah. Yeah. I finished up at Shaky Ground in February and we had already started putting things into motion here. We plowed everything and cover cropped last fall, so the fields were kind of laid out.
Andy Chamberlin (02:38):
Start to break up the grass.
Becca Burke (02:39):
Yeah, and pick rocks. Then the greenhouse we built, we started building it in November and we didn't finish it until the spring.
Andy Chamberlin (02:48):
Our first stop is into the brand new greenhouse, and the first words out of my mouth was, well, this looks beautiful.
Becca Burke (02:54):
Thank you. We just divided it for a little bit of season extension. We don't have any tunnel space. Then this is where we cured everything. These shouldn't still be in here, but they are.
Andy Chamberlin (03:09):
Looks good.
Becca Burke (03:11):
Pretty simple. I had some fans on them, and then just the shade cloth.
Andy Chamberlin (03:16):
Did you add any heat or close the sides in here too, or no, because you've got greens in here?
Becca Burke (03:21):
I closed the sides at night mostly for animal protection. Then we do have heat that I have set right now for like 39, just so nothing freezes until I get the stuff out of here. I still have onions over here too. I'd say two nights ago was probably the first good frost though.
Andy Chamberlin (03:39):
That was basically what there was to see at the greenhouse. So we stepped on back out for a field tour.
Becca Burke (03:45):
So all of this area, we let grow wild all year. It's really beautiful with all the wild flowers. Then we put this deer fence around the entire growing space, which actually worked really well. I think one deer got in last week, but I think it was a baby and it maybe got stuck and lost. It was a tiny little [inaudible 00:04:06], they munched the strawberries.
Andy Chamberlin (04:07):
So it's been effective then for you?
Becca Burke (04:09):
Yeah, absolutely.
Andy Chamberlin (04:11):
Have you seen deer around a lot this season?
Becca Burke (04:14):
Oh yeah, all the time. That's why I close the greenhouse mostly because I'm worried about them going in there. Every morning we come up, they're all out here, and then daily, there's just 50 plus up on that hillside.
Andy Chamberlin (04:28):
The deer fence she's using is a 3D electric fence. You can see a picture of it on our website.
Becca Burke (04:35):
Yeah, it's really great. It was very affordable. Yeah, it seems to be working. They walk right by it. One time I was mowing and there was a couple just right outside the fence just watching me, but they didn't come in. Something about the mower, I guess, soothes them, I don't know. This is garlic to be.
Andy Chamberlin (04:54):
So has it been a weeding nightmare coming straight out of sod?
Becca Burke (04:58):
It actually hasn't been terrible. Granted we're so small that I've been able to, for the most part, stay on top of it. Where we had the most problems was over here. It gets really wet, and with the summer that we had, I just couldn't weed it. So the onions were drowning in water and weeds, but now it's under a tarp. Erase the problem.
Andy Chamberlin (05:25):
Cover that up. We'll get it later. What's your growing space here this year?
Becca Burke (05:29):
This year we were half acre with all of these plots, and then that plot out there, we added halfway through the season for some fall crops, and that brings it up to three quarters of an acre. It's 50% CSA, 50% wholesale right now. We ended up not doing a farmer's market or anything, which it's been great.
Andy Chamberlin (05:49):
How many people are in your CSA?
Becca Burke (05:50):
20.
Andy Chamberlin (05:51):
Yep.
Becca Burke (05:52):
Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (05:52):
That's quite a bit to manage.
Becca Burke (05:55):
Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (05:55):
Were you doing a CSA before?
Becca Burke (05:56):
Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (05:56):
Okay.
Becca Burke (05:57):
It was a little bit bigger. For the summer we started at 15 and then for the fall we went up to 20. So it's comfortable. Then hoping to grow that next year. We also opened an online store, so I haven't really launched it out into the public yet, but I'm hoping next year I'll advertise a little bit more so that people that aren't in the CSA can order and come and pick up here.
Andy Chamberlin (06:20):
That's convenient. How big was the CSA that you managed before?
Becca Burke (06:24):
I think the biggest it was was like 35.
Andy Chamberlin (06:24):
Okay.
Becca Burke (06:27):
Yeah. So similar. Yeah, but we were doing a farmer's market when I was at Shaky Ground too. If I can figure out a way to bring people here and it'd be one day a week instead of that extra market, it'd be awesome. So we're putting up a high tunnel hopefully in the next couple of weeks, and it's going right here. I think we're going to go with Connecticut Greenhouse.
Andy Chamberlin (06:52):
Okay.
Becca Burke (06:52):
Have you seen those?
Andy Chamberlin (06:53):
I've seen them at a trade show, but not in person.
Becca Burke (06:56):
Yeah, I think they're fairly new. Their pricing is really great. Their shipping is really affordable, and they give a discount for Young Farmers Coalition. Yeah, there's a lot of add-ons that they have that I really like. They have a baseboard system that's really good, and it comes with insect netting on the sidewalls and then the humidity controlled ridge vents, not a ridge vent, the gable vents.
Andy Chamberlin (07:26):
Gable vents.
Becca Burke (07:27):
We won't have electricity up here, so it's either that or Rimol, but the Rimol ones are a little bit more expensive. You just built one last spring?
Andy Chamberlin (07:37):
Yeah, we rebuilt the end walls on our [inaudible 00:07:40].
Becca Burke (07:40):
Gotcha.
Andy Chamberlin (07:41):
Which in one way is the way we did it came out very beautiful, very pretty to look at, but it took forever to build. We did it with, it had traditional framing and T1-11 siding on it. The siding rotted off, so then
we replaced it with corrugated polycarbonate, like the wavy style, which worked fine and looks great, but it's just a whole lot of screws to put in.
(08:12):
If I was going to do it again, I think I do it, I've seen a lot of other growers do it with just greenhouse poly. So add a sheet of plywood across the bottom to give you that knee board to mount stuff to, and then do poly from there up. I think that would be a lot quicker to assemble and still look okay. Or full polycarbonate end walls, like the big panels.
Becca Burke (08:34):
Yeah, those were pretty easy on this. Still a lot of work though.
Andy Chamberlin (08:39):
Yeah, but I do appreciate having put in the effort when I did. I think it's going to be long-lasting and walking by it every day when it looks nice, matters a lot.
Becca Burke (08:53):
Yeah, absolutely.
Andy Chamberlin (08:55):
For me and for grandpa and all the other customers like, "Oh, your greenhouse looks so great." It's like we weren't really hardly utilizing it to its fullest potential. We had mixed veg in there this year, just kind of grandma's personal garden mostly, and a few tomatoes that didn't amount to much.
Becca Burke (09:11):
It was a rough year for tomatoes.
Andy Chamberlin (09:14):
It was just dark, I think.
Becca Burke (09:14):
Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (09:17):
I think that was... I mean, there may be something else in our soil. There's been tomatoes in there for such a long time.
Becca Burke (09:22):
Right.
Andy Chamberlin (09:23):
I saw a thing out from Caleb Goossen out of Maine saying, and that was back in June, that it was like the third cloudiest summer on record. It was one of the most rainiest summer from record, so that correlates that we didn't have sunlight.
Becca Burke (09:39):
Yeah, absolutely. All that rain. I mean, all of my tomatoes were in the field, so it was just blight immediately. They were so diseased.
Andy Chamberlin (09:49):
How big's your labor crew here?
Becca Burke (09:52):
It's me. Yeah. Kim and Jay have been a huge help. They helped with building the greenhouse and laying out the fields and moving tarps with me. They're also running a farm, so they're busy. My partner's a teacher, so he's a big help over the summer when he has two months off work. Other than that, it's just me. I'm still trying to figure out if I want to keep it that way, or right now I'm at a comfortable scale that I can manage it, but do I want to grow and have a crew or keep it the way it is? I'm not sure yet.
Andy Chamberlin (10:32):
It's a balance.
Becca Burke (10:34):
Yeah. I think it's been nice it just being me while I'm figuring things out.
Andy Chamberlin (10:39):
You can get your systems established, figure out what it is that you'd like to do, where you could use a hand.
Becca Burke (10:44):
Yeah. Absolutely.
Andy Chamberlin (10:45):
How to manage stuff where you don't need hands. It's tricky.
Becca Burke (10:49):
I would love to work with somebody in some kind of collaboration or something. We're pretty landlocked at this point. We can't really expand from here. So this goes up, it's about 30 acres, so it goes up pretty far, but it's very wooded and wet. We actually dug a couple of irrigation ponds back here that we're hoping to maybe use in the future.
Andy Chamberlin (11:15):
I like the deer fence.
Becca Burke (11:16):
Yeah, it's great.
Andy Chamberlin (11:16):
It's inspiring.
Becca Burke (11:18):
We'll put a gate here and then there's another gate there. I was very intentional about my layouts of having 20-foot roads and everything's kind of in a line, which is really nice.
Andy Chamberlin (11:30):
Are those things you've learned just from previous experiences?
Becca Burke (11:34):
Yeah. After working places where every field is a different size and you pull out remay and it's two feet too short or the tarps all being different sizes. It was just always such a pain. So it's really nice to be able to design things with intention and know all of my tarps are the same size. All of my remay is the same size, the fabric's the same size. Everything's a hundred feet long. It's just standard and easy.
Andy Chamberlin (12:00):
Do you have a tractor or no?
Becca Burke (12:00):
I do not.
Andy Chamberlin (12:00):
BCS?
Becca Burke (12:04):
We just bought a BCS. So I'm still kind of figuring it out. I'd love to have a tractor eventually. We have really awesome neighbors who own a construction company in town. They do all the work at Whiteface digging water lines and everything, so they're the ones that came over and did the initial plowing for us and pulled our rocks for us. Those all came out of the field, boulders.
Andy Chamberlin (12:29):
So mostly hand tools then. What's your favorite hand tool?
Becca Burke (12:35):
Probably the scuffle hoe or the wheel hoe. Yeah. I got the Valley Oak wheel hoe. I like it.
Andy Chamberlin (12:44):
Good. How many years were you farming before finding this piece of land?
Becca Burke (12:50):
I was in Vermont for four years and maybe about a year before that of internship and working on a couple other farms. Then before that, studying agriculture and farming at the University Farm in California. That's actually where I met Kim. We were both at Chico State and then she brought me here.
Andy Chamberlin (13:15):
Well, it's a beautiful spot.
Becca Burke (13:16):
Thank you. Yeah, we have some really great views and we're hoping to thin out some of these trees because they shade the greenhouse and there's just some awful ones in there, and we should have this amazing view of Whiteface.
Andy Chamberlin (13:30):
What is your biggest lessons learned from year one?
Becca Burke (13:33):
Probably just to be patient like we were talking about before, it's like you can't have everything that you want right away. It's hard going from farming at a place where you had all of your tools, you had all of your equipment, your infrastructure was in place, and then having none of that, something like a wheel hoe is a huge purchase. Yeah, it takes time because buying that wheel hoe is a huge deal in the beginning of the season when I needed it. If I needed it now, it wouldn't be as big of a deal. So yeah, just being patient and knowing that things are going to fail and there's always next year.
Andy Chamberlin (14:12):
Especially after this wet summer. A lot of farmers are saying, I just want it to be next year.
Becca Burke (14:18):
Yeah, I know. I've been hearing so many people talk about how it's been their hardest farming season yet, and I guess I just kind of feel lucky that this is our first season and we don't have an easier season to compare it to, so it can only get better from here.
Andy Chamberlin (14:33):
Hopefully.
Becca Burke (14:34):
Hopefully. Yeah, we're really lucky too. Our soil is very sandy. It drains really well, so we were a lot more fortunate than a lot of other people.
Andy Chamberlin (14:46):
You've got a slight slope to work with.
Becca Burke (14:46):
We've got a slope. We're up higher than everything else. Really, the only flooding that we had was in that field with the onions, and now I know that that's a wet spot and I can plan for that better.
Andy Chamberlin (15:00):
You made it look so graphic on Instagram, like the whole farm's underwater. No, it was one plot.
Becca Burke (15:04):
That's a quarter of my growing space. No, it really wasn't that bad. Now I know, and that's a big thing too, is every season that you spend on one piece of land, you know those little microclimates better. Now I know that that's a wet spot and maybe don't put onions there.
Andy Chamberlin (15:04):
It's wet there. It's shady over there.
Becca Burke (15:28):
It's very sunny and sandy over here. It's a little more clay out there. Yeah. It's amazing that there can be so many variables in such a small space.
Andy Chamberlin (15:39):
You have experience doing this sort of thing, but you essentially hit the reset button when you moved on here, started with nothing. How'd you decide what to invest in off the bat, and do you wish you had invested in something different than a wheel hoe and greenhouse?
Becca Burke (15:56):
The greenhouse was the first investment, and I do not regret that whatsoever. I came to that conclusion by never having a proper propagation space and always being up at midnight trying to get this crappy heater to work and being worried that your spring transplants are going to die. So I just wanted to know that I had a space that was going to work. I could start my plants in there, I could cure things in there, so we don't have a ton of other space anywhere else. So that was, I don't know, I think a really good investment for me.
Andy Chamberlin (16:30):
Seems like it.
Becca Burke (16:31):
Yeah, that was the biggest thing. Then I guess the other big investment I bought early on was tarps, because I use a lot of them, and I guess just having that experience that I had in the past was like, okay, what was really hard and what would make it easier going in with nothing. Irrigation was a big investment as well.
Andy Chamberlin (16:57):
Yeah. Was it really dry over here in May and June?
Becca Burke (16:59):
Oh, yeah. I didn't have water then, actually. So we were carting up 55 gallon barrels in the backs of our trucks with a little pond pump with a hose and watering in our strawberries and our early spring transplants. So then once I invested in irrigation and got it set up, I never used it.
Andy Chamberlin (17:17):
I did the same thing.
Becca Burke (17:21):
Now I have it.
Andy Chamberlin (17:22):
Turned it on once and then it rained.
Becca Burke (17:25):
Then it didn't stop raining.
Andy Chamberlin (17:28):
So what are you looking forward to next year?
Becca Burke (17:30):
Starting again, having a blank slate, knowing the land better and really excited about putting up a high tunnel and being able to have an enclosed space and have some winter production. I don't know if we'll go year round, but at least having that security. I really miss tunnel growing. Everything grows so nice in a tunnel.
Andy Chamberlin (17:56):
How many tunnels were at Shaky Ground?
Becca Burke (17:58):
They had three, and they were really... Not really small. They were about the size of the greenhouse, so smaller than the ones they usually see. So having that one, I'll almost be at the planting space that I was there and that felt really comfortable. So who knows, maybe next we'll put one over here.
Andy Chamberlin (18:21):
Right, right.
Becca Burke (18:22):
Yeah, so I'm really excited to, once this is all put to rest, to be able to look at the spreadsheets and plan for next year.
Andy Chamberlin (18:30):
Right. You've got some spots like here and here that are still grass. Is that for a particular reason?
Becca Burke (18:37):
Access.
Andy Chamberlin (18:38):
Okay.
Becca Burke (18:39):
Yeah. I like just being able to drive around everything, be able to pull my truck in here, get to the compost, get to that plot, and they're wide enough that I can make the turns. Then there's a boulder
there that might be a ledge, so it's not going anywhere. Maybe if we end up with a tractor one day, we can fill in this space and have more growing space. I really like, and that goes back to experience of other places, where there was permanent fencing and I couldn't even get a walk behind tractor in some places. So I really wanted to be able to access everything, have room to move tarps, have room to move remay.
Andy Chamberlin (19:22):
That's a good point too, just having a flat lawn space where you can stretch stuff out and roll it up, not on your beds.
Becca Burke (19:28):
Yeah. Or have space to drive your truck in with your 55 gallon barrel of water.
Andy Chamberlin (19:35):
Yeah, and sides of it and yep.
Becca Burke (19:38):
Yeah. It's really great for harvesting as well. We had our winter squash here and being able to drive up the row. We're not driving in the fields at all, so being able to drive up and harvest. Then same thing, if we ever get our cabbages out to be able to drive over there.
Andy Chamberlin (19:53):
Right. Less driving, very strategic.
Becca Burke (19:58):
Who knows? You'll come back next year and it'll all be filled in.
Andy Chamberlin (20:01):
I wanted the space.
Becca Burke (20:02):
Well, when we initially designed it, we very much so were designing around boulders that we could see, so we were like, this is a boulder. It can be a road. There was one over here as well, and then our neighbor, Elliot, thank you so much, Elliot came over and was just like, "Oh, I'll get that. I'll get that." Pulled all of them out. So yeah, it's easy to look at a piece of land and think that you have to just work with that, but you really can make changes. It'll work for you.
Andy Chamberlin (20:31):
It may just involve an excavator.
Becca Burke (20:33):
Yeah, absolutely. Get yourself an Elliot.
Andy Chamberlin (20:38):
Neighbors with equipment.
Becca Burke (20:40):
Yeah, so amazing. He also leveled where our greenhouse is. That was not flat either.
Andy Chamberlin (20:45):
Yeah, that's nice.
Becca Burke (20:47):
Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (20:48):
It's pretty quiet up here too. Is there much traffic on that road or no?
Becca Burke (20:52):
There's not really. No. Most of our neighbors are pretty quiet. They're mostly older. Linda across the street, she actually used to own this property, and my partner lived in the little house down there, and he was here for five years before he convinced her to sell it to him. So thank you, Linda, as well.
Andy Chamberlin (21:17):
Is she excited to see it in production?
Becca Burke (21:20):
I think she is. She remembers this being a working horse farm, and she's really excited to see it being put to use. She didn't want to sell it. She was afraid that somebody was just going to build some houses up here. She's got to look at it. We were worried that she was not going to be happy about her view of the greenhouse, but she's really excited that it's just getting used.
Andy Chamberlin (21:43):
Great.
Becca Burke (21:43):
Yeah. During the summer, she can't see us quite as much, but now that all those leaves are down, it's like I feel so exposed.
Andy Chamberlin (21:54):
Are there many other vegetable farms around here that would be potential competition or no?
Becca Burke (22:00):
There's not a ton. There's Wild Work, and as far as bigger ones, there's North Point up in Plattsburgh, Juniper Hill.
Andy Chamberlin (22:12):
Yeah, they're pretty close.
Becca Burke (22:15):
Tangleroot Farm in Essex. Those are kind of the main ones. I mean, I know all of them and everybody's been really friendly.
Andy Chamberlin (22:24):
Cool.
Becca Burke (22:25):
There's definitely less than in Vermont, and it is different. The markets are quite different, but I think there's not a CSA, at least that serves this immediate area. So people previously would have to drive to Essex or to one of the pickup locations in Plattsburgh or Saranac Lake. So people like that it's close and it's local.
Andy Chamberlin (22:50):
Yeah. What does sustainable farming mean to you?
Becca Burke (22:58):
Something that makes sense that I can keep coming back to every year and still trying to figure out what the balance is between, it's important for me to grow food that's affordable. I want to grow food that I would be able to afford if I was buying it, but I also want to be able to pay myself. So trying to find that balance. Of course, just taking care of this land in a responsible way.
Andy Chamberlin (23:24):
Yeah.
Becca Burke (23:25):
Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (23:26):
What do you do for fun? How do you turn off work that doesn't stop and relax a little bit?
Becca Burke (23:35):
I learn to love winter. I got into skiing a couple years ago, and Whiteface is 15 minutes up the road, and it's an amazing local mountain. Yeah, it turns out I love skiing and hopefully we have a wet winter and we can get into the back country a little bit more. I'm excited about that. During the growing season, I like to read a lot. For a long time I was only reading farming books and it would take me forever to get through a book. Then I realized that I needed to do something different. So I like to read a totally irrelevant, fiction novels, and that's something to turn off my brain from everything else.
Andy Chamberlin (24:18):
That's good.
Becca Burke (24:19):
Yeah. Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (24:23):
It's important.
Becca Burke (24:24):
Yeah, absolutely. It's so funny, I kept reading these farming books and there's great information in there, but I was like, oh my gosh, I never finish a book anymore. I was like, well, read something else. Do something else with your time.
Andy Chamberlin (24:40):
Brain, is that enough agriculture sometimes?
Becca Burke (24:43):
Not farming. Yeah. Farming's fun too though. I like to do that for fun. I mean, you have to like it if you're going to keep doing it.
Andy Chamberlin (24:54):
Yeah. It's my long-term plan to be a full-time farmer.
Becca Burke (24:58):
You and me both. Yeah.
Andy Chamberlin (25:02):
Well, this is great. I'm glad I stopped in. Thanks for showing me around.
Becca Burke (25:07):
Yeah, thanks for coming.
Andy Chamberlin (25:15):
I'm Andy Chamberlin, and that was The Farmer's Share. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Becca Burke of The Meadow Farmstead. You can follow her farm journeys on Instagram at The Meadow Farmstead or visit her website, themeadowfarmstead.com. This show has been awarded a grant offered by the USDA Specialty Crop Block Program from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture Food and Markets. This funding will help cover some of my time and travel in order to produce more episodes of this podcast for the next two and a half years. The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service supports projects that address the needs of US specialty crop growers and strengthen local and regional food systems. I have no doubt that this podcast will meet those needs and help educate growers to support the industry.
(26:05):
The Farmer's Share is also supported by The Vermont Vegetable and Berry Growers Association and the Ag Engineering Program of the University of Vermont Extension. If you enjoy the show and want to help support its programming, you can make a one-time donation or reoccurring donation on our website by visiting thefarmersshare.com/support. On our website you can listen to previous interviews or see photos, videos, or any relevant links discussed from the conversation.
(26:35):
If you don't want to miss out on the next episode, enter your email address on our website and you'll get a note in your inbox when the next one comes out. The Farmer's Share has a YouTube channel with videos from several of the farm visits. We're also on Instagram, and that's where you can be reminded about the latest episode or see photos from the visit.
(26:54):
Lastly, if you're enjoying the show, I'd love it if you could write a review. Honestly, there's only 13 ratings and two reviews on my podcast, and I know a whole lot more people listen to the show, so I'd love it if you could leave a little note in Apple Podcasts. In the app, just click on the show, scroll down to the bottom, and there you can leave five stars and a comment to help encourage new listeners to tune in. I'd also encourage you to share this episode with other grower friends or crew if you think it'd be inspiring for them. Thanks for listening.