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Turn Here, Sweet Corn - Atina Diffley
- 2025/03/27
- 再生時間： 37 分
- ポッドキャスト
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サマリー
あらすじ・解説
Today I'm talking with Atina Diffley, author of Turn Here, Sweet Corn. You can follow on Facebook as well. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe. 00:29 share it with a friend or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Atina Diffley, the author of Turn Here Sweet Corn. Good afternoon, Atina. How are you? Hello. It's really a treat to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Oh, I'm so thrilled you had time. I reviewed Turn Here Sweet Corn on my book blog years ago and I haven't read it since and it's been a while, but I remember just being smitten with your writing. 00:57 Thank you. was really fun to write it and really healing. Yeah. Yeah. I imagine it would be. was so like, it was so comforting to read it and know that I'm not crazy to love everything about the lifestyle. Uh huh. Yeah. Yeah. The good, the bad, the ugly, the aberrant, the fantastic. It's all there. Exactly. So because not everybody knows about the book. 01:25 Asina, will you tell me about yourself and what the book and what you're doing now? Sure. The book is a memoir. And when I started writing it, really all I knew is that I wanted to write a memoir about my experience as a farmer. our farm started in 1972. My husband, Martin, started it in Eagan, Minnesota. So for those of you who are familiar with Minnesota, Eagan is now 100 % developed as a suburban. 01:53 area, it's 20 minutes downtown Minneapolis. So he grew up there at Fifth Generation Family Farm and saw all that change happen. And that in and of itself is so much what this book is about because he knew that land through his ancestors and their experience as settlers, as Fifth Generation on land that had been in that family since it was taken from the Indians. 02:23 And that was rolling land. It was diverse. It was never farmed industrial style because of the topography of the land. wasn't flat and possible to put big equipment in it. So it was small fields settled into a diverse landscape that still had an intact biological system from pre-colonial days. 02:53 fields that he grew there were small vegetable plots, settled into this extreme diversity. And as a certified organic vegetable farmer, before anyone knew what organic was, he was really utilizing that diversity of that land. So that right there is a great place to pause and to really just sort of celebrate this word biological diversity that has now become somewhat of a 03:20 buzzword and a catchword and it's now being greenwashed, but it really is that the essence of all life on the planet. Well, yeah, because different is good and same is not good. It's boring. And from a health perspective, the more diverse any system is, whether it's a living natural ecosystem or a relationship, and you talk about any system, diversity is healthy. 03:50 and creates reduced disease transmission, reduced disease issues. When you think about it from an agricultural perspective, as long as we had a diverse landscape around our fields, we really didn't have disease or pest issues. And I was really naive when I joined Martin in the 80s. I was young and 04:17 There wasn't really a lot of science and research and conversation at that point in time yet about this and how it works. And so really, I organic farming was really easy. I mean, it was hard physically. We worked our butts off. But the management of our fertility and our pest-centered disease and our water needs was done through the diversity of the landscape and didn't take a lot of effort. But I didn't know that at the time. 04:46 I just was doing the task of planting and harvesting and I didn't really understand the impact that diversity had on it until the sky fell out and that land was developed. Yeah. It's, I, okay, I'm sitting here thinking about how to say this next. We lived in Jordan for 20 years, Jordan, Minnesota, and we moved to our little piece of heaven like a little over four years ago. 05:14 Our little piece of heaven is in the middle of the corn fields right now. And it's a 3.1 acre lot and our nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away. And part of the reason that we chose to leave Jordan is because stuff was starting to get built up. There were a whole bunch of housing developments that went in. And when housing ...