The Stories of My Homestead

Roots and Refuge Podcast

Jessica Sowards

Home & Garden, Leisure

5 • 646 Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hey y’all, welcome back to the Roots and Refuge Podcast! In this week’s episode, I’m sharing some stories from the early days of our homestead, the hard lessons, the high hopes, and the deep love that has grown in the soil of our farm over the years. This episode was recorded in a season of low battery mode for me, a time when I was physically and emotionally drained, but still showing up to care for my animals and tend to the life we’ve built.

In the quiet of these days, I find myself remembering. From the goats that first stole my heart to the steep learning curves of loss and perseverance, this is a reflection on how far we’ve come and how familiar this once-dreamed-of life has become. I talk about the value of seasoned love; in marriage, in farming, and in the calling to steward well. This isn’t about the novelty of a new adventure, but the deep roots of a life lived slowly and intentionally.

Thank you for spending time with me today. If you’ve found encouragement here, consider supporting the podcast on Patreon, where you can listen early and join our monthly Q&A.

As always—I bless you, until next time.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, darlands. Welcome to the Roots and Refuge podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Sowers. My friends call me Jess, and I hope you will too. And here on my podcast, we talk about all things homesteading, growing food by raising animals, growing gardens, preserving, preparing, and enjoying that food,
0:22.7	and just trying to live more mindfully in relationship with each other and with the earth.
0:27.0	So I'm coming to you today from my office here on a late spring day in the Midlands of South Carolina.
0:36.0	It's almost summer. It feels like summer.
0:38.8	And I would say this is one of the more difficult springs that we've had weather-wise.
0:45.1	For the last couple of months, we've essentially had this weather pattern where we will have a few days of thunderstorms.
0:53.3	We've had like a couple of instances where it rained almost without stopping for like 72 hours.
0:59.1	And then the temperature just like spikes.
1:02.9	So it's been running 90 degrees Fahrenheit, like 32 Celsius.
1:07.8	And then raining and then hot again and then raining and then raining and then hot again and then raining and then hot again and um those are
1:13.6	difficult conditions to keep a farm healthy to keep animals healthy to keep plants healthy now my
1:21.6	garden has never been so far ahead like i mean it is intensely lush and full and fruitful now i've known that with these
1:32.6	conditions if they continued especially into more heat that i was going to start dealing with disease
1:38.8	and that's definitely the case i'm starting to have some plants get kind of wilty and puny
1:42.4	just because when you live in a place that has such high humidity and you're dealing with so much moisture and heat,
1:48.1	that's just like a hotbed for any sort of bacterial or fungal issues in the garden.
1:53.1	The other thing that that causes a lot of issues for is parasites.
1:57.3	Essentially when the ground is just so absolutely saturated, what happens is you have all of this hatch
2:03.4	happening in the manure of your animals. And then the parasites are then crawling up, instead of going down
2:10.0	into the soil, they're crawling up the grass, and then the animals are eating them. And therefore,
2:15.0	their parasite load gets really high high specifically for animals like goats.
2:19.6	So when you have goats, they always have some measure of parasites.
	...

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