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Maryevelyn Murray 00:01
All right, hello. This is Maryevelyn Murray with the Queen’s garden. It is November 14, 2024and I’m speaking with…<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 00:10
Erin Culver. I call myself the little urban farm girl, and I manage and work at what I call my little urban farm.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 00:20
Perfect. Um, so I wanted to first ask a couple, like icebreaker type questions. So just what does a day in life look like for you nowadays, like whether on the farm or not chaotic?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 00:32
So I don’t garden full time. I have a full time job. I’m a graphic designer working for a sustainability company, and so Monday through Friday, typically I’m doing work around that, doing graphic design work, um, however, usually in the morning there is stuff that has to be done, like letting the dog out. Sometimes I’ll check on the chickens, depending on if there’s something going on there. In the summer and in the spring, when I’m very excited about my garden, and I get up very early and I might go walk the gardens, and that becomes kind of part of my schedule until it gets too hot. And then usually, once I get done with work, I’m primarily in the gardens all night until dark, which right now isn’t a lot of time. It kind of gets dark by the time I’m done working, but I really enjoy in the summer. I will be out there till nine o’clock at night, watering, checking for bugs, checking the chickens, cleaning the chickens, whatever, whatever it takes to keep things running on the I’m a little urban farm, so I don’t have, like, I think bigger firms might have more kind of tasks scheduled and stuff like that, but because I’m a bit smaller and just in my backyard, it’s kind of like, when I think about it, it’s like, oh, well, let me go check on this. Or maybe it’s my lunch break that I’m out weeding a garden, which I have to be careful of, because that can lead to being out there for two or three hours. Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the gardens. But I love it. I absolutely love it, and I love having access to it all the time. Which is, which is great.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 02:14
Is it like right beside your house?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 02:15
Yes, it is my backyard. Um, so when I first started, I was in Rock Hill, and I was on a little quarter acre plot right in the city. And that’s why I started calling my little place the little urban farm, because I was right in the heart. I had just a couple of raised beds and a couple of chickens and a teeny, tiny little house on this quarter acre. Then sometime during COVID, I moved and I bought a house in York so that I could have a little bit more land. And so now I’ve got maybe, I think it’s a little over an acre, maybe it’s an acre and a half, but about half of it, or maybe it’s only a third, I’m not sure, is wooded, so there’s nothing back in the woods, but I have this area in the backyard that’s just completely open. So I’ve got full sun, and I’ve got eight, four by eight garden beds, and then I’ve got two smaller raised beds, and then, you know, random pots and things. And right now, I’m currently building out an area to do my berries in another garden, so that’s going to get extended out as well, but yeah, basically it’s, it’s just in my backyard, and it’s fenced in. But because of the work that I’m doing there, my neighbor has started raising her own chickens. She never thought that she could do that before, and because of me, I’ve helped her do that. And then our other neighbor on the other side of her extended out her gardens and has a bigger garden, and she’s been talking to both of us about chickens as well. So we’re very slowly becoming like a little agro-hood, I think they call them, yeah, at least those two neighbors, the other neighbor I don’t talk to as much, but the two down the way, it’s kind of like we’re a little community, and I love it. I think that’s what gardening and farming should be. It should be a community so that you can share together.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 04:12
Yeah. And do you all did when they were sorry when they were starting out? Did you like, help them with the like, learning curve of all that stuff? Like,<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 04:19
Oh, gosh, yeah. Oh, to this day, my neighbor. I don’t know if you ever saw that that show Home Improvement where the guy is like, on the fence, [Laughs] that’s my neighbor, because I have this eight foot fence, and it’s like, she’ll come over, she’ll be like, Hey, I have this thing happening. Have you ever dealt with powdery mildew? So yeah, I’m helping my neighbors quite a bit with that kind of stuff, random pest issues like deer. We have a lot of deer in our neighborhood, and they do jump the eight foot fences. That was one of my little sagas that I covered on my channel couple years ago, I think. And every once in a while I still I’ll go out and there’ll be a herd of like 20 deer hanging out there. Nibbling on my garden, [Laughs]which is frustrating, but yeah, so they’ll ask me questions like that, and it’s great because we share so I had never grown potatoes until, think it was last year. Was my first year with the potatoes, and that was because my neighbor got them from the one next to her, and she had extra and she couldn’t plant them all, so she was like, Hey, do you want some potatoes? I’m like, all right, I’ll try this out. And so now I’ve been growing potatoes ever since, so it’s been kind of nice that we can share like that. And I’ll, I’ll get, like, onion starts, or whatever, and I’ll have too many, and I, you know, because I’m not a large scale, I don’t know what to do with them, so they kind of get passed over to the neighbors, and they plant them, and it creates more food. So I kind of see it as this thing that just continues building and sharing, and I love it.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 05:52
So like a little ecosystem. I was gonna ask about, do you think because [Coughs] sorry, because you’re so close to the woods there that that’s why you have such a big deer problem, or?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 06:03
because it just probably, probably, though, I will say, even when I was in Rock Hill, that’s how I lost my first chicken flock. I never thought, I thought in the city like they not that Rock Hill is a big metropolis or anything, um, but I was right behind a train, or right in front of a train. I don’t know how, directionally, where that goes, but, um, there was a an embankment that went down, and the train ran right by my house. And I thought there’s no I never thought I’d have an issue, and I did. I ended up with a predator. I never figured out what it was, but it came in and took my girls out one by one, no matter what I did. And that was in the city of Rock Hill, yeah, um, you know, I was downtown. I was, I was right near, like legal remedy brewing and, and that not, never thought that would be a thing, but it was so, yeah, the deer. The deer was definitely new to York, where I’m currently at, and I have some videos here and there that I’ve taken of them where, I mean, you’ll see a herd of them just crossing the street, and it’s like, where did you guys come from? My biggest issue with them right now is they’re going after my fruit trees. So I have planted some fruit trees, and I continue to build on that so that I can have my own little, like, almost like a little sustainable orchard. Yeah, I call it an orchard because it’s multiple fruit trees, but it’s not like I’ve got a lot of land for that, but I don’t have them in my back fence because I wanted them where my neighbors could get to them, so that I could share the food, because I will never be able to eat, you know, all the fruit that comes off of them. So my plan was, let me put it on the on the edge of my property, and that way my neighbors can can share in it as well, and can feel comfortable to come to the edge of my my property and pick some apples or pick some pears or or whatever. Once, once they get big enough to do that, if the deer leave them alone. Yeah, right now I’m sharing with the deer. So I have, I have quite a few stories about the deer on my channel. That’s probably I have some funny things that I try to cover, and I I like to show people what it actually looks like. And so for me, the deer will pop up once in a while, either I’ll do it with my backyard camera. Or if I’m covering damage in in the garden, I’ll, I’ll talk about the deer. I don’t think I’ve talked about them as much this year, um, other than the fruit trees and and actually, I’m probably going to be doing some more around that soon, because I need to put up a fence or something. I gotta, I gotta figure out what to do about that.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 08:40
Do you feel like, like you said you maybe talked about them less on your channel this year. But do you think the deer problem has, like, increased or fluctuated at all significantly?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 08:48
I couldn’t say, because I’m not from the area. Yeah, it is on a little mini mountain, and so I’m I’m not sure if it’s because there’s a lot of woods in wilderness there. It’s just a natural place for them. I also do think that a lot of the population shifting is probably at play as well. Even in Rock Hill, I think the deer were getting kind of pushed out because we’ve got so much that’s being built up. We’re losing a lot of our forests and a lot of the areas where the the deer are at. So they’re, you know, consistently having to move. Where are they going to go? So they end up in our backyards or or people feed them, whatnot. And that’s, you know, that’s a whole nother issue. But, yeah, I’ll be honest. I love seeing them. I do love seeing them, but they are probably one of the biggest pests in my garden.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 09:46
What other pests do you deal with?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 09:48
Oh man, right now, birds. They like to go after the tomatoes, especially when we haven’t had a lot of rain because of the water content. So right now, they have picked every tomato that I had. Lingering. And now that we’re getting cold, they’re they’re just about done. But every time I get one, I go to pick and there’s a giant pen work in it. I’m like, Oh, my own dog. That’s one of my so Brenna is, she is the little urban farm pup. I call her my head of security. She took over the legacy of Brenner, who was my previous pup. And anybody that has watched my channel from the beginning, they will see Brenner as a little old man that he he was becoming, and I lost him two, three years ago, and she took his place because she looked just like him. So hence the Brenner Brenna, which can be a little confusing. However, I got her. I got her as a puppy. And puppies and gardens don’t always go together, so she often likes to help me dig in the garden, often where I don’t need her to dig. And I’ve lost some things, but I’ve learned to just kind of roll with it and laugh at it. And, you know, I have found ways to get around some of that stuff. It’s taken some trial and error. But, you know, I am an all organic garden, and so things like, I get these square tomato cages, you can also, I guess, do, um, what are those things called cow panels. And people will cut them and put them on top of the soil because it’s metal and it creates a grid. They can’t just, oh, they can’t. They can’t dig as easily unless they keep it to a localized spot. So I have started implementing stuff like that, and that helps, at least with the diggers and sometimes Dollar Store hacks, there’s even they make these little like garbage cans that are, I don’t know if they’re metal or plastic. They feel like they could be metal, but you use them as like a little cloche that you put over your plants, and I didn’t come up with this. This was something that someone else figured out, and I just latched onto it because I thought it was genius. But that helps with the chickens, because the chickens will get in the gardens and they will nibble at things they don’t need to be nibbling at. In fact, I have friends on bigger farms that are like, I wouldn’t let chickens anywhere near the garden. Same with goats, they’ll they’ll get in and they’ll just destroy the whole thing. My chickens are not too bad, but they will get in there and they’ll dig as well, and they’ll eat some of the leafy greens and stuff. So using those little cloches has been helpful to just kind of keep them out of there. When I was in Rock Hill, sometimes squirrels were an issue. I don’t have that problem where I’m at now. And I don’t know if it’s because I have an eight foot fence in the back and they just aren’t typically in my backyard unless the bird feeder is full. And I have, I know on camera, I’ve seen a raccoon, but he didn’t mess with anything, and I haven’t seen him since. Rabbits. I’ll get some rabbits. Sometimes. They don’t usually cause me too too much damage. It’s more they like to bed down in the gardens in the winter and spring. And you go to plant the garden, and you pull back the leaves, and there’s this fluff pile, and it’s the little baby bunnies, which are so darn cute, but then you’re like, poop. What do I do? Do I leave them? What do I do here? And I can’t leave them, because Brenna will go after them. So I had a whole rescue mission of bunnies this past year as well,<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 13:43
it’s a comedy of errors on my little farm.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 13:47
Um, I wanted to ask, what year did you start in? Like, I think you said Rock Hill, right? What year did you start? And then what year did you move to York?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 13:56
Um, so gardening wise, I’ve been gardening as an adult, pretty much my whole life. Um, though I wouldn’t say I was doing it very well, that’s been a learning curve. Um, but the Rock Hill location I put up, I started with a pallet bed, I disassembled a pallet and filled it, and then slowly, I built a few more. They were just a four by four bed, I think. And I’m trying to think, um,<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 14:36
I might have put them in in 2017<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 14:41
I might have started, and that might be around the time I got the chickens as well.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 14:48
And then from there,<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 14:51
it grew like it started with the one garden bed, then it was two garden beds, then it was four garden beds, and the chickens and I moved to. York during COVID, I want to say that was 2020 so I think in my logo, I have est 2020 that’s what that that Maryevelyn Murray the mile marker year is, Erin Culver just because that’s the location I’m at now. But technically, the little urban farm was named and claimed back in 2017 or so. Maryevelyn Murray 15:19 Um, did you move specifically to like, upsize that, or were there other like aspects that went into that decision?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 15:24
Well, the COVID had a lot to do with that. Um, just because rent, we weren’t sure what was going to happen with the rental scene. And at the time, I was in a house, but I was renting, and space was an issue, but it didn’t really bother me. That’s not really the reason that I moved. It was more or less because I didn’t know what was coming down the line after COVID. I had been wanting to buy a house. It’s just I was, you know, finishing some things, figuring some things out in my own personal finances and whatnot, and just hadn’t crossed that bridge yet. And so when everything started to fall apart during COVID and the housing market was doing, you know, the craziness that that we saw, I got a realtor and decided to start looking. And my I like to say my house found me, but when I saw it, it was, you know, here was this house in the woods, quote, unquote. Because if you see my backyard, it doesn’t really look total woods, but it has this big open area, and it was like, That is perfect for gardening. And it’s like it was set up for this purpose, yeah, Maryevelyn Murray just waiting. Erin Culver Yes, yes. And I love, because I like, I like foraging as well, so I do a little bit of that sometimes, on on my social medias as well. And I’ve gotten pretty good at being able to go around and find like this year, I found muscadine grapes right near my house, several nut trees I know in Rock Hill, I was foraging for pecans. There’s a lot of pecans in Rock Hill. And trying to think, what else I’m not so good on the mushroom front. I don’t trust the mushrooms. My father is a mushroom guy. He has studied that, and he’s very good at it. I will send him pictures and say, What’s this? And if he doesn’t know, I just leave it alone. So I do have some work I still can do around that kind of stuff. But I think it all lends itself to the whole idea of of being able to cultivate your own food, and especially with things like COVID, when you don’t know where food is going to come from, you want to be able to find it if, if that’s your only option, or grow it if you’re able to. So all of that stuff kind of came into play because of COVID,<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 17:39
yeah, um, what time would you say your neighbors started to like, kind of like you started to work with them on their gardens or farms, or whatever they would call it. Was that around COVID as well? Or was that it COVID as well? Or was that it<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 17:51
was just it was coming out of COVID? So I moved in 2020<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 17:59
Wait, or actually, it was just the beginning of 2021<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 18:03
actually, I need to backtrack. I think the 2020 is when I went online to teach, yeah, and that was because of COVID. So that’s the 2020 in 20 it was like the in January of 2021. Is, technically when I moved. So it’s very fine line there, but in case you need that for documentation. Um, so my first year, it was January, so I didn’t have any garden beds. I was moving all of my stuff from the old house over. And I’m trying to think, I think that is also that spring is when I lost Brenner, so I kind of put my heartache into building my new space, because I knew I wanted it, and I knew I needed it, you know, to keep doing the work that I was doing. So I poured a lot of my time into that. And I think my neighbors saw me building that, and it influenced what they were doing. Now, my my neighbor right next to me doesn’t have a large garden bed space. She just does a lot more container gardening and that kind of thing. But the chickens, I think, came about because of the egg prices soaring. I mean, they were up to $10 some of them, um, trying to think, when I got the chickens, though it might, it had to have been,<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 19:27
it had to have been that season, I feel like<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 19:31
that same year. And so I think because she knew she could ask me questions, she felt comfortable enough to step into it. And chickens aren’t even hard. They really aren’t. They’re not expensive to get but if you’ve never done it before, it can be a little bit challenging. And my first flock was just in 2017 I had no idea what I was doing, absolutely none. I happen to be across the. Street from a southern states with co workers, and we decided to go over and see if they had the chicks. They might. They might have had a sign up for chick days or whatever, whatever they call it. And after seeing them, I was like, Yep, I’ve been wanting to do this. I need to do this. And so I was like, yep, after work, I’m going to buy chickens. That’s what I did. And I came home with<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 20:21
four chicken, no five.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 20:23
I think I have five chickens in a little container. No idea where to start. I was clueless, and I’m like, Okay, now what Maryevelyn Murray just jumped in head first? Yeah, Erin Culver but I’ll tell you what it adds to how I’m able to help people, because I understand what that feels like to not have any of that information and to go, Well, what do I do now? So it’s kind of giving me, like a little playbook of, you know, well, I know that if someone’s starting out, they need to know, you know, the basics of raising the chicks and how fast they grow and that kind of thing. So I like that. I understand it from that point of view, because I wasn’t raised on a big farm. My father, my grandfather, they weren’t raised on big farms. Now they had gardens, they had backyard gardens, but we never had chickens. There were never chickens. So in fact, my parents were adamantly against it. They were like, Why the heck do you want chickens? Um, well, and actually, I guess, I guess I could talk about that a little bit. Um, so I’m actually mostly vegetarian. I i can claim pescatarian, because I do eat a little bit of fish here and there, and some shrimp, just because I feel like it’s good for the brain, but I got away from eating meat because, well, number one, I don’t really like it. I don’t know why I’ve never liked it. But number two, I started watching food. Inc, back in 20 ah, was it 2009 when that came out, and I started learning about the industrial farming and the things that they do that are maybe not so good. And I’m hoping to branch into some of that with my channel at some point. I don’t know how yet, but I want to talk about some of the food politics and some of the stuff that’s happening there, but it started with Food, Inc, and I think that’s when I was like, Yeah, I want to grow my own food, because I don’t necessarily trust what’s happening in the industry. I’m not anti government or anything like that. I know there, there are some people on the socials that that’s kind of their shtick is, you know, don’t trust the government. Don’t trust anything. I have a love hate relationship where there are things I trust and there are things I don’t. But when it comes to the industrial farming, I think it’s just, unless you’re doing regenerative farming, where you’ve got practices that are adding to making a circular system. It can hurt, it can hurt the environment. It can hurt the soil, which is alive. People don’t realize our soil is alive.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 23:13
And yeah, it’s, it’s… [pause] I lost my train of thought…<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 23:22
Um, you were talking about food, Inc, and how that…<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 23:25
Oh, yeah, yeah.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 23:25
Okay. So I started learning about, like, the antibiotics and stuff that they’re pumping into the animals, and it made an impact on me. It made a very big impact on me. So I guess that’s where my true start probably came from at least as far as activating me into a space of food where my true start probably came from at least as far as activating me into a space of food advocacy and wanting to grow my own food so that, so that I could have control of it. One of the things they talk about in that video is knowing your food, knowing where your food comes from. And it’s fascinating to me that so many people don’t know where their food comes from. They just expect it to show up at the store, and kids, you know, they’ll sit kids in a classroom, and they don’t know where a potato comes from. So it’s an awesome opportunity for us to do a little bit of backwards work and raise our kids now where they can learn this stuff and they can, you know, implement some of this stuff moving forward. But yeah, yeah, the that’s definitely what probably influenced me the most. My new, recent one has been, it’s a book called big chicken, and it’s about the industrial chicken farming and how we are basically creating antibacterial resistance because they put so many antibiotics into these animals because they’re in tight, crowded spaces where they’re not supposed to be. They’re not getting the fresh air, they’re not getting the right food, so they suffer for it. And they pump them full of antibiotics in order to combat that, and antibiotics slowly, over time, stopped working. And so they’re finding that, like, I don’t know, they had a whole iteration of different things that they would use in the industry, and that would change, and they would go, Oh, no, why isn’t this working? The scary part about that is that that impacts us too. Yeah, the hormones impact us too. You know, you hear about these young children going through puberty at a very, very early age now, and a lot of that is because of the hormones that they’re pumping into the cows to keep them producing milk. And that’s why children are, you know, they’re filling out more and trying to be PC, they’re filling out more faster.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 25:58
Yeah, there’s visual like changes happening generationally, yeah, yep,<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 26:02
yep. And, I mean, I can’t remember, like, when I went through those changes, but I mean, to hear of 10 year olds going through those changes that to me, like, that’s, to me, that’s still a child. So, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s definitely playing a part in how we’re shifting, and it impacts the environment. And people don’t realize that these farms, unless you are doing these circular systems, which they call regenerative farming, the industrial farms, they have too many animals in too small of a space, creating issues like cesspools of waste that then go into the water system, and then it runs off, sometimes into a field, and then that’s how you might get E coli on lettuce. You know, is like, people wonder where these outbreaks come from. It’s it’s from things like that, and they don’t talk about it enough. But I think, is it the E coli deaths. When I was listening to that book, I knew all the stats, but there are some, some really pretty scary stats around the amount of people they get these E coli, I don’t know if they call it a poisoning or, I guess exposure, E coli exposure, and they have to be hospitalized. And, in fact, Food Inc, also talked about that, because there is a bill that was passed for a child that died from E Coli from a burger, and I think the law is named after him, and I don’t know that name offhand, it could probably be looked up, but yeah, so yeah, it impacts everything that we<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 27:39
Do… you, like? You mentioned, like, having watched Food, Inc, like, a while ago. Do you Did you always, even before that, like, kind of, I don’t know, you mentioned how your parents and, like, even grandparents, have worked with farming and gardening and things like that. Um, do you even grandparents, have worked with farming and gardening and things like that. Um, do you feel like that shaped you to like, think a certain way and like feel a certain way about things?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 27:58
Definitely. Um, in fact, I can tell you some funny stories. When I was little, I was like, I think my mom said I was like, a year old, I don’t know, probably a year to two years old. And my father was in the garden, and I was walking, so wherever that puts me on that scale, um, I guess I went in the cupboard and I grabbed a can of corn or a can of peas. I can’t remember what it is, but I went outside and I handed it to my dad because he was planting the garden. And I said, I want, I want to plant these. So even as a baby, I knew where that food came from there, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s missing, you know, like, I, like, I spoke about the kids not knowing their vegetables and where they come from. Like that, to me, is just unfathomable that we wouldn’t know where a carrot comes from, or a tomato or or whatever, um, and funny enough, even me ending up as mostly vegetarian. I remember a conversation I had with my cousin, because I never liked me. I don’t know what it was, I just never liked it, and I still, to this day struggle to get my my protein where it’s supposed to be um. But I remember saying to my cousin, I was probably, I don’t know, eight years old, maybe older, I don’t know. And I said, Yeah, I think I want to be a vegetarian. And she was like, you can’t be a vegetarian unless you’re doing it for political reasons. And I was like, Well, I’m not, you know, so I guess I can’t do that. Like, I don’t know why at that point, that made sense to my little brain, like, oh, maybe she’s right, you know, now at the time, I don’t know if she knew the distinction between vegetarian and vegan or not. I have no idea. But yeah, the conversation was, was kind of always there. Yeah, it was. Until many, many, many years later that I did finally decide to put, put it all down, but Food, Inc, was the one that kind of catapulted me into it, because of the chicken industry. The chicken industry is horrid, horrid, horrid. They say that 50% of the chicken in the store has fecal matter on it and E coli, yeah, and or they bleach it to be able to get rid of that. And that’s what we’re eating like. Why are we eating that? Well, we can go and even if people don’t garden and do farming like, you can go to a farmers market. You can go to your local farmers, and a lot of times, they take much better care of their animals and what they have on their their land and their property than these industrial farms. So yeah, it’s very important to support local not only for the healthy aspect, but also to keep our farmers around because they’re struggling. Yeah, if we lose our farmers, we lose our food. Yeah, oh, that’s scary.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 31:03
What would what is your like, family history in the like, I guess, I guess just farming in general, or gardening in general, what is like, like, specifically, what you grew up with, but also like beyond that, what is the like history there? Because seems like there’s a significant one.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 31:19
Yes,there is, there is. And it’s kind of funny, like, if I’m thinking like now, right now, I’m thinking about the sizes of the gardens of our families. Mine is probably the smallest,<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 31:33
which is fitting for little urban farm,<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 31:34
I guess. But I didn’t know this until a couple years ago, but I was visiting my uncle in Rochester, New York, my sister and I were and he took over the house that my great grandfather built, and he was showing us around, and he was showing us the work that he had done, and he opened a key cabinet. And I said, Wow, that looks like grandma Culvers handwriting. And he goes, Oh, it probably was. And I got kind of confused, like, what? Why? Why would grandma be writing? You know, I don’t get it. So my great grandfather didn’t speak English. My grandmother was the first one in this country to speak English, and I did not know that until recently. So what happened was his father and he, after the World Wars, they they were German, and they were turned into and I try to be careful. I try to be PC, but I think they call them land slaves. And I know that’s not a term to throw around. I do try to stay on top of that and be very cognizant. I just don’t know what else to call them, but they farmed the land in the Ukraine<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 33:02
and that was your great grandfather. Who was that?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 33:04
That was great great grandfather, but his son was there too. So my great grandfather and the Ukraine was under Russian rule, and there was a czar, I guess I don’t really know the history of that all that well, but they were farming the land. You know, Ukraine is an area where there’s a lot of wheat and a lot of farmland, which I think also probably plays into why we’re having some of the political issues we’re having currently. But they were also, I think being punished for, you know what was going on during the world wars in Germany. But he told his son, you need to leave, you need to run, you need to get out of here, go save yourself. And my great grandfather got on a ship. Now, I don’t know if it was illegally it out. I don’t, I don’t really know those details, but he came into the country through Canada and emigrated into the Midwest, where farming was what he knew. So he was working on farms, and I didn’t even know that until after I started little urban farm, yeah. And I was like, wow, this is truly in my blood. And I didn’t know that. I had no idea. Now my my grandfather and my father both had gardens. My My grandfather was a busy man, and he had seven kids. And funny enough, my mom is one of seven as well, so I have a very, very big family. And, um, I think during, you know, during my father’s upbringing, you know, post Depression era, you had to grow food like I don’t think you had a choice grocery stores. I don’t even think we’re really totally mainstream yet, I don’t know. I’d have to look at the history of that. I guess, you know, to really break that down, but you know, that was part of what you did. So my father picked that up from my grandfather, and I, to this day, I remember walking through my grandfather’s garden in the backyard and picking strawberries and eating them, or cherry tomatoes and eating them. And as kids, we played in the apple tree that was behind the garden. And you know that was significant for my childhood, of seeing that now behind them was cornfields. So I’m pretty sure that whole region where I’m from in upstate New York. So I moved down south when I was 22 years old.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 35:51
I don’t know the year.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 35:55
I don’t know what year it was,<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 35:58
but, um, yeah, I grew up in an area in Eastern or Western New York. I call it upstate New York. There are people in the city that call upstate New York just outside of the city, and that’s I love y’all, but that’s not how it works. Oh, but I’m actually right on the border of, like, Canada, yeah. So it’s Rochester and Syracuse, New York, that area up in the Finger Lakes. And why am I losing my train of thought?<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 36:31
You mentioned you moved down to North Carolina at a certain point, and we were talking about the history, like what you experienced up there.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 36:43
Oh, well, because the cows and stuff, where I grew up with cows and corn and, yeah, it’s a very small town. But the reason I brought that up is because of the industrial farming and a lot of that. You know, when you see the cows and you see the corn, a lot of that is that subsidized farming, or it’s the industrial farming, and my father has been battling it’s called CLL, which is chronic lymphocytic leukemia. And his sister just recently died from breast cancer. That morphed. And, you know, grew over time she had a mastectomy to try to stop it. That didn’t work.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 37:28
But I think about that, and I think<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 37:31
how much of that impacted them, Maryevelyn Murray like the industrial farming, yeah, Erin Culver because it was right in there. But like, like, my grandfather’s garden is out back and he, I’m assuming he was an organic farmer, but maybe not. Back then, things were a little bit different. And it literally was like, behind my my grandfather’s garden is where these massive corn fields started. You know, as kids, we would go out there and we would we would play. And I’m pretty sure that my my father, was in a class action lawsuit they’re paying glyphosate is actually paying out people with CLL and non Hodgkins. So Hodgkins are non Hodgkin’s lymphoma. One, I don’t know there’s a list of them, yeah, that they’re paying out. And I don’t know. I have to wonder, did that, did my father growing up next to that cornfield and his sister growing up next to that cornfield? Did that cause some of the issues? Yeah, and the whole region is all farming. And last time I was home, we went by and went by a big field, and there was the tractor spraying, and I went up dad probably spraying roundup glyphosate, and he’s like, you’re probably right,<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 38:49
and that’s what I grew up in.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 38:52
So that that kind of impacted me around at least, like the organic farming. I am all organic for that reason. And when I started my farm. I was on such a small little piece of land that, you know, I didn’t have a lot of space. Oh, that’s right, I was talking about the size of the the farms and how they they had changed. But, yeah, my grandfather’s farm, or, well, he didn’t have a farm. My grandfather’s garden was twice as big as my dad’s<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 39:24
because it took up the entire backyard. Do<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 39:28
you know how many, like, acres or to size wise, at all?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 39:36
I don’t, if I base it on what I I’m pretty sure I had in Rock Hill, his would have been easily at least half an acre. Probably that was just the garden. Yeah, that was just the garden. And then it was kind of like my father. His backyard was just a little bit smaller, and so that his was probably more like i. A third of the size of my grandfather’s, yeah, and that was probably trying to think the size wouldn’t have even been my grandfather’s was almost like a football field, maybe a little smaller. My father’s would be, like<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 40:20
half that or less.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 40:24
And then here I am in little raised beds in North Carolina because of our or South Carolina because of our lovely red clay. So I have raised beds. I don’t have the ingrown beds that they have. Yeah, but yeah, wow, that it does. The size has shifted, and now I’m this what I call a micro, yeah, farm, or a mini farm. My sister, too has had gardens, so it did impact her as well. She ended up going up to New Hampshire, and now she’s in Vermont. When she was in the farmhouse that she was renting, she had a nice, big property, and she grew a pretty big garden, like my dad had my I don’t know if it was as big as my grandfather’s. I still don’t think it was as big as my grandfather’s.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 41:09
How did you come down to North Carolina? Like, how did, what did that decision or process look like for you?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 41:15
That looked like graduating from college and needing a job?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 41:22
So I had my first job was at a little non for profit in upstate New York, Rochester, New York, and I worked with someone who came down south. Oh, this is kind of interesting too, though it’s so funny how you start to put the stuff together when you start talking about it. I can’t. I worked with a guy there who took a job with RJR packaging, so our friends that make the tobacco and cigarettes, and he knew that I wasn’t making a lot of money because I was at a non for profit, and so he sort of recruited me. And he was like, Hey, I think you’d be amazing. Come down here. I want you to work in our training department. And I was helping to do graphic design of like manuals we were making in three ring binders and presentations and videos and stuff like that. So that’s kind of why I migrated down here. Was because he said, Hey, come come work here. And it’s so funny that I’m sitting here now, I remember my parents going, you’re gonna work for a tobacco company. And I’m, like, it pays the bills. Yeah, I think I am. And back then, I mean, you could sit in your office and smoke the meeting rooms people were sitting smoking. That’s they would go around and give people cigarettes. They had these little flavor tins they would do. And every time they came out with a new one, they would go around and give example, yeah, yeah. So yeah. I didn’t learn much about the whole tobacco growing side of it. But it is kind of interesting that, you know, here, my whole life I’ve been worried about chemicals and I’ve been worried<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 43:06
about sustainable practices,<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 43:09
yeah, and then here I was working for a tobacco company, but there again, I was pretty young and wasn’t truly established in how I feel about, you know, some of the stuff that’s that’s going on, and,<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 43:25
yeah, what kind of shifted your mindset then, from, like, be becoming more aware in adulthood to that sort of stuff.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 43:31
That’s a good question. Um,<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 43:40
I’m trying to think.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 43:41
I think, um, when I moved to Winston Salem, I was in a just like a little townhouse, so I didn’t have property, I probably grew at least some herbs. Because usually I’m trying to think, I usually tried to have at least some herbs. I could gather, um, do Yeah, and then I went to Reedsville, North Carolina, when they sold off RJR packaging, they sold off the division, and it got split up with like five different companies, and I was shifted over to<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 44:21
El cam packaging, I think.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 44:24
But they were going to start a new facility in Reedsville, which is again country. There’s nothing there. But I found a house and rented. And I remember my parents coming to visit, and I wanted to put in a couple of tomato plants, you know, just so I had something, yeah, that I could grow because I guess I felt a pull to that my whole life from having it in my own backyard. And I was terrible at it. I was not good at it. I didn’t get back then that, you know, you need to feed the soil. I sort of. Like, okay, I put this thing in the dirt now grow. It doesn’t work that that easily. I mean, it can depending, um, but primarily that’s, that’s not, not how that’s gonna work. Um, so, yeah, I’ve been on a little bit of a journey with that. Um, when I came to Rock Hill, when I got my current job in Rock Hill. So I did. I shifted around a little bit with my job, and again, I was in a townhouse, but I did have a little bit of property. Well, it’s not really it’s not really property. It’s just this area out back where you open the doors, and I happen to be on like a corner, so I lined the entire corner with containers, and I put in peppers and a couple of tomatoes. I think I tried to grow a squash that didn’t go so well. I definitely had herbs. That was, that was when I tried to get every herb, and I had it like at the doorway when you came in my house, because that’s where it got the best sun. But I remember that was when I started learning how to do canning and preserving food. I think because even though I had built this little tiny bed out of like, you know, those cinder blocks that are rounded, that people make retaining walls with, it couldn’t have been any more than maybe four foot by three foot, two foot something. Oh, I crowded that thing full of hot peppers. But I’ll tell you what it was. The first time I had ever gotten a significant amount of food out of it. Yeah. And so I was learning how to pickle them so that I could save them. And I think that might be where, where. Then it just it grew from there. It just consistently. It was like, okay, all right, we got the peppers down. Now let’s get the tomatoes down. That took a little longer. Once I figured out that if you actually use compost and you feed the soil, they grow pretty well on their own, other than some pest management and things, you know, then it does pretty well. But, yeah, there is no set it and forget it, or you probably won’t get it.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 47:11
Did you, um, were there any like, I don’t know what kind of like, like, whether YouTube or like something else at the time, like, different ways you learned or like, got advice on this?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 47:21
Oh, gosh, oh yes, yes, yes. And it may, it might be what, what pushed me into it as well into the end of the teaching realm. Oh, so I know that during COVID, I had these little gardens, and actually, you know what they were, they were going to be a community garden. I forgot. Part of the reason I put them in was because the plot, the little plot I was on, it used to, I think it used to be a house at one point, but I thought I could turn it into a little community garden. Have my neighbors come help me in your first Rock Hill. Yep, The Rock Hill location, and come to find out that everybody who lived in that house put in gardens prior to me as well. In fact, I had asparagus popping up in the yard, and I was like, my dad’s like, that’s asparagus. And I’m like, what? And then I found out from the person who used to live there. He was connected to someone that we both knew. And he was like, Oh yeah, I<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 48:24
planted that asparagus.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 48:25
I was like, I’m still harvesting it. Like, that’s so cool. But that was where I met my friend, Alicia. And Alicia started the charity the bulb and the bulb her mission with the bulb, because she was a social worker, often helping, like, I don’t know the PC the way, it just displaced veterans, because I don’t think they say homeless anymore. I think it’s unhoused or…<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 48:54
Something like that. I forget. I just learned it the other day.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 48:58
It changes all the time, so I can never stay up on it.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 49:02
But anyway, it was a passion of hers that she dealt with people not having their needs met, and so I jumped in to help her, because she wanted to start a charity rescuing food, and it was just starting to take off as a thing in larger cities, it wasn’t primarily known in this area. She’s the only one I’ve known that did it here. And it started basically with her gathering food on a small scale. I jumped in and started helping her because I had a little garden, and I also was using the CSA program at Bucha and Vine farm in South Carolina, and so any of the food that people didn’t want, because with the CSA, you can’t always choose what you get. So I would do a donation basket and let people put whatever it was they didn’t want in the donation basket. Well, we would then take the. Donation basket, and flip it back over to her, and she would distribute it in some of the local areas, small local areas, um, slowly that grew and like, she’d go to farmers markets, and she would talk to the farmers there and get some of their produce, and then she would flip that and eventually got to where she was talking to Trader Joe’s, and I used to run back and forth picking up boxes of stuff that they just they weren’t going to use. And we would take it into some of the neighborhoods in Rock Hill and give it away. We didn’t want it to go to waste. So her primary focus back then was, at the time, what they called food deserts. And again, I don’t know if that’s PC anymore. I think they call them vulnerable neighborhoods. Now, what they are is an area that is usually below the poverty level. There are people that may not have access to transportation. They are folks that don’t have access to a grocery store because they don’t have transportation, and so the stuff that they’re eating really has an impact on their health. So the closest thing to them, if it’s a gas station, they’re eating at the gas station, and I mean, if you think about the foods in a gas station sustaining life like, you can’t term, yeah, you can’t like, I think about, you know, the disease and the issues and the sicknesses that they probably went through because they weren’t getting the nutrients that they needed. And Alicia saw it too with with the people that she was servicing. And so that was really important to us is, how do we help people get better health? How do we how do we get them these foods and she didn’t have then? So, so back then, it was very grassroots. It was kind of like wherever she could get some place to pop up, she would and we went to, oh, what is the name of that place? I can’t remember the name of it, but we did a little small event, and it primarily was she worked with one farmer, and I think she was making tacos from the produce that came from the farmer. I think they were squash tacos or something. And she happened to get someone that donated herbs. And funny enough, I was the one that was sitting at the table showing people how to pot up herbs, and so they could take them to their apartment or their room or whatever, wherever they were, and they could have this little plant, to say, Pick some basil or whatever. There were some other things that she did at that event, and I can’t remember, but she was trying to make sure that they could get resources if they needed them. I think she may have also put together some very small baskets that had some of the rescued food that we would we would give to them. And, yeah, that just it just grew. It just grew. She started doing some small community gardens. I don’t know that those took off as well. Unfortunately, a lot of times you put them into communities and they don’t sustain them.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 53:27
The communities don’t sustain them?Yeah, is that what you experienced with your own like, I know you Don’t sustain them?Yeah, is that what you experienced with your own like, I know you mentioned you’d wanted to have, like, a community garden type?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 53:34
Well, that was kind of how that came in.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 53:38
So I had, I think I had, I had started building some beds, and I had mentioned it to her that I had this area, and I’m like, yeah, we’ll make it a community garden, and then I’ll donate it to the bulb, whatever I don’t use. And so I was a part of it from that standpoint, I think, I actually think we did some very early videos, too, trying to show people how to utilize food that might be thrown away. Quote, unquote, I remember doing a video where i i I’ve done this for years. I will take and I will rescue the turkey carcass from Thanksgiving. And I don’t eat meat, but I rescue those bones every single year from my aunt, and I bring them home, and I cook them up into a nutritious Turkey vegetable soup. So it’s like chicken noodle, but Turkey, yeah. And I think we did a video on that, and we talked about the, like, the cost breakdown of what that was. And then we went over to at the time, Rock Hill had a they had an unhoused person facility where people could come get food or get warm or a cup of coffee, that kind of thing. And we went over there and we we served the soup. We got in touch with them, and we served the soup there. I know I’ve also taken it over to like the. Homeless Shelter in I’m sorry, not homeless shelter, men’s shelter. However, I know there’s a lot of legalities, and there’s a lot of things around that that make that kind of challenging. Now, unfortunately, not everybody takes cooked food because it’s not always safe. You don’t know how long it’s SAT. You don’t know how they prepared it. You don’t know if they did it in a kitchen that’s up to standard. So it can be a little bit challenging. And I think the past couple years, when I’ve done that, I’ve given the soup to other people, not necessarily the homes and stuff, which I prefer. But it’s just gotten so complicated, it’s really hard to be able to do that. So yeah, giving, giving food back to the community, has been a very big part of my journey. And actually, during COVID, I guess I could. I could bridge into COVID, right? I could totally. So when COVID happens, I had been gardening for,<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 56:04
I think, at least a year on that property. It was, it was after the bulb, and after helping the bulb and I put in these gardens, and COVID hit. Was it the beginning of 2020 it was Yeah, 2019?<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 56:23
Beginning 2020 it was like impending and then yeah.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 56:26
And I remember, well, I do remember, it was around St Patrick’s Day, because I remember my friend and I went out we had one last dinner because we knew we were getting shut down. So it friend and I went out we had one last dinner because we knew we were getting shut down. So it was, that must have been March.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 56:35
It was March 14, yes. Was the last day of school I had, yeah, okay.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 56:39
So it was in the spring, yeah, and I was sort of sitting there like, All right, well, I need to do something about this. I’m a solution seeker. I don’t often sit back. I try to find solutions that I know can help people. And I knew that I had to put in my garden, and so I started filming it.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 57:05
And I guess my work from the bulb kind of came into that as well, because, like, I then was showing people, you know, like, showing them how to make the soup. It was like, well, people need this. Not only do they need the food and how to grow it, but sometimes they also need easy recipes for how to use it. A lot of times, people will grow something and they’ll write to me and like, Hey, I have all this eggplant. What do I do with it? I still don’t have an easy answer for that.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 57:35
I have a few things here and there, but that became a part of it was, you know, I can show people how to plant these plants, even though I wasn’t even very good at it at the time, I was like, I can at least show them how to get the plants in the ground. Get started. We can work through some of the issues together. And that’s where my slogan, Let’s grow together came from. Because I did. I did not know what I was doing, and I was not claiming to be an expert. I relied on the community that was watching me as much as they maybe relied on me,<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 58:19
and I um… [pause]<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 58:25
like, starting online, and like, the Let’s grow together. And like…<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 58:30
Oh, somehow we skipped over to you were talking about the learning resources. Um, so during that time, I finally decided to start filming, because I figured number one, I can’t, I can’t see people, but I can put stuff up on YouTube. people, but I can put stuff up on YouTube.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 58:49
I didn’t know how many people it would help. I didn’t care. I was like, if I help five people grow a tomato that matters to me during a time frame when our supply chain is messed up and people are scared, at least, this might give them a little bit of hope so that they can go, I’ve got food in my backyard. It’s okay. In fact, I was, I will say I was one of the few people during COVID. I wasn’t worried about not having food because I was putting in us, putting in the garden and had canned food. And so I had, you know, tomatoes that were canned. I had peaches that were canned, you know. So I was sitting there like, alright, this is not an ideal situation, but I wasn’t panicking the way some of the other folks were, yeah, but it certainly spurred me into action, yeah, um, I had no intention of ever this was not something that I always wanted to do. I literally just saw a need and decided to fill it, yeah, um, because I was teaching as well, it. Kind of helped me get into that mindset of, geez, I need to be better at this. So during that time, the victory gardens were a big come. They were having a big comeback, a big resurgence. And so that was, you know, the thing that people were starting to look into was, you know, how do I grow my food? How do I preserve my food? And there was a documentary. Was it a documentary? Or was it, yeah, I guess you would call it a documentary. Um, it was called war, war time gardens. Um, okay, let me see the wartime kitchen, yeah, the wartime kitchen and garden, and they covered growing food during, you know, the world wars and what it looked like during the time. And so I learned some of the old things that they were doing. I still haven’t tried some of them. Some of the things they were doing were was kind of progressive. Well, I don’t know, could you call that progressive? Because I guess it would be traditional, but now we think of it as progressive. It kind of flipped, um, but like nettles, nettles works as a great spinach substitute. And so, you know, they were foraging on their land, and they were taking things like that to put in some of the stuff they were cooking, or they were finding ways to preserve certain things, like eggs. In fact, I think one of the videos they do like a hot box where they stuffed it full of hay, was it like a pasteurization process that they were doing. It was just fascinating. It was fascinating. And anybody who likes to follow any food history like to see how far we’ve come from that is just like, it’s crazy. It’s crazy to think about. They even share some of the recipes, and some of them were kind of wild because the recipes were based on what they could get access to. You know, they might not have access to sugar, so maybe they would have to use plums or, you know, whatever it was that they could get their hands on to to make a substitution. But it’s fascinating. It’s so fascinating. The other one I started watching was roots and refuge, which, funny enough, they now are located in South Carolina. Okay, I don’t remember where they were in, I think Arkansas, but it’s a family that she same idea. She wanted to grow her own food, wanted to take better care of her family, and so they put in raised beds, and they, you know, it just grew. It grows. And I think anybody that gets into this and loves it, that kind of happens. And they now are homesteading in South Carolina, and they, they have had a cow. I don’t know if they still have a cow. I haven’t, I haven’t stayed up on it, but she was, she was doing some of that kind of stuff, but I learned a lot of gardening information from her as well, like, you know, and during COVID, there was nothing else to do. I’m not a TV watcher, yeah, um, I gave up TV a long time ago, but I can get on some YouTube. I can get into something like that, where I’m learning, and I am in seventh heaven. And so her channel also helped me kind of kick off into this realm, because I was like, I need this is stuff that I need to be learning and getting better at myself. And then each year I also would pick up new things, like I told you about the potatoes, like I had never grown potatoes, but it was like, Okay, let’s try it. Yeah, my parents, living in upstate New York, and my grandfather living in upstate New York, they didn’t grow okra and sweet potatoes, yeah, but I can grow them here. In fact, to this day, my my dad says, take the okra and throw it in the garbage. Why are you growing that. And I grow it every single year, and I find different ways to use it, and I, I personally love it. But, yeah, he jokes with me about that, because they that’s not something we grow up there.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 1:04:12
What all do you grow down here? And like, how does it differ from what they grow or have grown before? Um,<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:04:19
well, so gardening zones, the gardening zone that we’re in here in the south, it actually has shifted. It was 7b and I started referring to it as seven b8, A, because they took the entire map of the hardiness zones, and they’ve changed it due to the climate warming up, yeah, so they shifted it, and we primarily grow. Well here we can almost grow year round, where I’m from, in upstate New York. We can get snow in October, yeah, I think even September is a possibility. So they can’t grow through the winter because they it gets too cold. There they get primarily, I’d say two seasons. They get their spring and then into the summer. And I think, like, they’ll, they’ll plant garlic and stuff that will go go through the winter time frame. But they don’t have full blown gardens here, we have the luxury of being able to do that where the fall is a lot like the spring for us. So we get another season that looks like the spring and is a lot of your springtime veg. So I always say it’s, you know, your leafy greens, your root vegetables, peas, carrots, then your brassicas, so like broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, cabbage, that kind of stuff. But yeah, we kind of get two seasons of that, and then, depending on how the year goes, like last year, we had a really mild winter, so I want to say that I had stuff growing all through the winter. I had leeks that were still out there. I had, think I had cabbage and kale and collards. Collards is one they don’t grow as much up north that I remember now. I don’t know it could be just my family didn’t grow. So don’t, don’t take my word on that.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:06:26
But um, yeah, down here we have, because we have the longer, hotter season, the okra, the sweet potatoes and the collards thrive. They love it. Our tomatoes here and peppers Thrive up there. They have to start them early indoors. I’ve gotten to where sometimes I’ll do them indoors. I don’t have to, though. I actually can wait till it’s warm enough outside and can start them. And I don’t have to start that process in, say, February. Yeah, they have to start in February because they want to have a plant that’s big enough that they can get into the ground as fast as they can, so they can eat tomatoes for more than, like, a month, because otherwise, you know, the cold weather sets in, and before you know it, there’s not enough time to, yeah, so I know that, like, bell peppers are hard because they just don’t have enough time sometimes to get them to the size, you know, for them to get right. Hot peppers don’t usually, I don’t remember those having as big of an issue up there down here, they they just go crazy. They love the heat. Um, what else they grow up there that could be trying to think of something they grow that maybe we don’t down here, nothing’s coming to mind, though.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 1:07:44
Do you feel like you’ve had more opportunities, kind of, because of being down here, as opposed to forever?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:07:50
I mean, yeah, with the extended seasons and sometimes being able to do, like, year round. I mean, the coldest we get. I mean, I’ve seen it get down to 10 degrees here, where up there, it can very easily drop in the negatives, yeah. So you can’t, you can’t sustain anything with that. Here. We can do little hoop houses, and we can extend that growing season a little bit. And so even, like our leafy greens, if we cover them with like a little hoop structure, it can actually make it through the winter, as long as it doesn’t drop down, you know, too low.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:08:27
I’m still not great at it.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:08:30
There’s a learning curve there. There’s definitely a learning curve. But it is kind of fun to sometimes have vegetables that you didn’t realize were out there, and you’re like, Oh, well, I could use the leek I can make a soup and, oh, look funny enough, the potatoes are also sprouting that I didn’t know. So, yeah, we definitely have a little bit more opportunity. I think.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 1:08:53
Yeah, how does being an organic farmer affect like, your work like that, whether seasonally or just…?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:08:59
Oh goodness, well, you’re outside in the garden non stop. You have to be you’re basically on bug patrol.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:09:13
Time is probably one of the biggest factors that have to be taken into consideration with the garden. I mean, yes, you need sun, you need nutrients, you need seeds. You do have to spend a certain amount of time in the garden, though, because you you need to be able to see when plants are having an issue. You need to be able to see if there’s a bug that you need to remove. And being an organic farmer, it’s more time, because you can’t just spray, you know, you’re doing a lot more manual labor. So like with squash, I every year the squash borer is something that every gardener who listens to this will go, oh, gosh, you. Was the squash poor um, I’ve actually gotten really good at managing it, because I would go out into my garden every single day. I learned what the life cycle looked like. I learned what the eggs look like, and have learned some different practices to to combat it. Um, there are natural insecticides, believe it or not. Bt is one that comes to another, and I can’t pronounce it. It’s like bacterial thuringiensis or something. What it is is it’s a bacteria, so it is organic, but it only affects grubs and caterpillars. So you can spray your plants with that. And actually that will sometimes save your plants. Once I found that out that was, like, that was a game changer, but the prevention with any of your plants, and being out there and finding stuff is probably the best way to combat anything so but yeah, the time, oh yeah, it’s I’m trying to think, during the summer, I don’t always take long vacations, because I’m afraid that my gardens will suffer because we’ve droughts and things like that too. So yeah, I’m pretty much if I’m not working, I’m in the garden in the summer, and in the spring, the fall, well, the spring, in the fall, the cooler weather, vegetables are a little more hands off. I feel like, probably because the bug pressure is not as heavy. I call June the bug days of June, because that’s usually when they start showing up. That’s when I start seeing the boar eggs and the the squash beetles, and, you know, numerous other things, and all of a sudden, it’s like they all swarm on you at once. Once I see the Japanese beetles, I’m like, Oh, great, yeah, they all come. They’re coming. And there are some things you can do. You can you can do a like, a hoop structure with some netting.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:12:03
I’ve seen nominal success with that. I feel like half the time I end up trapping them in there, and then they just go crazy inside the net. Yeah? So that doesn’t stay put, yeah? But,<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 1:12:17
Um, I know you mentioned working with the bulb and like, how that’s influenced your work. Do you work with any organizations or people at all, like currently, like, whether in Charlotte or where you’re based at all?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:12:28
Right now, not really trying to think primarily where I am now. Well, when I, when I was in Rock Hill, I was giving away a lot of food during COVID. Once I moved I’m now in a little bit more rural area, so it’s harder for me to have access to people to give it away. Um, I more or less grow it for like my neighbors and I, and I definitely want to look into some more options. Um, unfortunately, my friend Alicia moved over to Concord, so her and I are just so far apart that it’s really hard for me to get her stuff, and vice versa. So that makes it more challenging. Um,<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 1:13:20
when you say stuff, do you mean, like, just collaborating in general, or, like, is that like,<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:13:25
Oh, no. I just mean like, getting her vegetables. Yeah, she could give away or take to the bulb, Oh, no. I just mean like, getting her vegetables. Yeah, she could give away or take to the bulb, and I suppose I still could. I could bring stuff over to the bulb. I know my friend Demetria. She’s a nutritionist, and she is a fantastic gardener. She learned from her father, she donated a lot of stuff to the bulb, and still does, I think so she’d be a good, good person to talk to. Yeah, I’m right now, I’m I’m working with a group that the name might be changing, but it’s called renew western North Carolina because of the hurricane that we just had. I typically don’t take my social media content and veer off what I’m doing. I did only because that was kind of in our backyard. You know, the hurricane Helene stuff was, I guess the area was about two hours away from me, yeah, so it’s rather close. I had damage from from the hurricane, so I did shift some of it to that, and I am working with them. The cool thing about that is that they’re doing an Adopt a Family Program, and they are taking lists of needs from people who didn’t get maybe what they needed through FEMA funding or insurance, and we’re trying to help offset that for them. And my involvement on the gardening side has been minimal right now, just because we’re going into winter, yeah, however, they did get one woman that contacted who needed help with her chicken. Coupe. I haven’t heard back from her yet, but I wrote to her and said, Hey, how can I help? I’ve got chickens. I would love to come help you out. I’d love to either fix up your coop or help you build another one. If there’s any plants you can grow or seeds that you need, let me know, and I’ll bring them to you, just because that’s going to be a need out there. Anybody that had anything out there, it’s going to be gone. In fact, one of the seed companies I love supporting is out there called so true seed. They’re local to us, because they’re located in Asheville, and their employee owned, and all female owned too, which I think is pretty cool.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:15:39
They are in that region.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:15:42
But by and large, most people, if they had a seed stash, chances are got affected. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there’s not a lot they can do if they had gardens, they’ve probably been washed away. So I do expect that probably sometime next year, I’m going to see how I can pivot and help more people there, just because I think they could use it. They could use either the extra pair of hands. They could use the extra plants, you know, the seeds, whatever I have done, a lot of volunteer projects. I also very much have been connected to it’s called redesign. It used to be called gratitude trainings. Now it’s called redesign. And the whole idea behind redesign is that you learn how to become more self aware and work through like some of your blind spots and things in life that might have you hold back and not go after what you want. I do think that little urban farm was kind of born out of that, because I learned, you know, hey, take the chance. And I did, and my social media following kind of blew up because of it. I didn’t expect that they often do what they call legacy projects as well, and they’re community based projects. In fact, my my legacy project, and if anybody from redesign or gratitude is out there, I’m ML 18, Charlotte, groundbreakers. Love grow, repeat. Our legacy project was putting in a aquaponic garden in a school. Oh, yeah, because of the circular economy idea there of you know, if you teach the children how to grow their own food, and you know, the fish, they can harvest the fish, they can take the food, then they can take the food and the fish, and they can cook it up and eat it and share it with their community if they’re not eating it themselves, and they can take that knowledge back home and maybe implement it in their backyards.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 1:17:47
Yeah. What school did you work with with that?<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:17:50
It was the Phoenix Montessori. I think, I think we ended up putting it in that school because we had someone that had a connection there, or knew someone that they could talk to there. I think at the time, we were wanting, we were wanting to do a bunch more. It just never happened. But it’s still, it’s, it’s still a part of, you know, the whole journey of this, of teaching people Potter garden and teaching that legacy, and I think especially, you know, after COVID and this whole resurgence of the homesteading community, like we’re teaching people this stuff again, yeah, and I think that’s really freaking cool. And social media, of course, is pushing that forward. You know, it’s very easy now to go get the information that you need, and, you know, learn it in 30 seconds or a minute. When I started, I was on YouTube. I was not doing 30 seconds to a minute. That was a pivot shift.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:18:54
In fact, my YouTube what I I basically started doing garden tours, you know. And I if I had an issue, I would talk about it. And I think my primary audience was like 65 and older. You know, they were people that just wanted to see what I was growing. And I loved it. I loved I had people that I would constantly keep communication with through that, and they would, they would come back on every video and comment, and once I figured out the whole tic toc thing, I had a friend that pushed me into tick tock. I didn’t want to do it. I was perfectly happy doing my 10 minute garden tours. That was okay. He was like, you really need to try this out. And I’m like, Oh, all right. It was right about that time that Tiktok took off, so I just happened to be entering it at the right time with the right information for the right audience of people that came out of COVID and wanted to learn. How to Grow, cook and preserve their own food. I had to learn how to do that in 30 to 60 seconds on YouTube. And I gotta tell you, it’s challenging. I think most of my videos do end up being 60 seconds. I don’t do very many of the short videos, just because usually in the teaching realm, it’s hard to teach much in 30 seconds. You can get about an intro and maybe one or two points across that help people, but it’s really hard to go into anything in depth, though, now that they, you know, we have so many of these platforms, it’s, it’s kind of nice that you could put a longer format one on YouTube, then you can put the shorter ones on YouTube and Instagram and Facebook and let people know that a longer one exists if they want more detail. So that’s helpful. And I really enjoyed doing like the DIY projects. One that I’m working on right now, that I haven’t posted yet, is actually a self watering planter for my citrus trees. I think they call them Earth boxes. I didn’t do it exactly like I saw online. I took my own spin on it, but that was, that was what I’ve done recently. That’s a longer video that I still haven’t put up, and I’d like to, but I want it. I want to be able to have project sheets of that kind of stuff, so that people can easily go download this stuff. And, you know, all right, maybe you don’t have the space to grow a big garden, but you might be able to grow one giant citrus tree, you know, or a potted tomato or whatever, and be able to use that self watering pots<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 1:21:41
and, like, specialized with it, yeah? Um, I think I asked most of or, like, you’ve covered a lot of what I was going to ask you about. I wanted to ask if you had any like, final remarks that you would say to, like, someone starting out gardening or farming, or especially in areas you<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:21:58
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say start small and work your way up. You don’t want to spend a lot of money on a lot of gardens and dive into it at that stage, because you if you don’t love it, you’re then stuck with it, and you might be going, Well, what do I do with this now? But if you start small. On a small scale, I would suggest maybe just one, four by four foot bed, or a four by eight foot bed, maybe two, if you’re feeling a little ambitious, and start with some stuff that’s easy to grow, you definitely need to have at least eight hours of sunlight in most cases, if you don’t, because we all try to push that envelope at one point or another. If you don’t, they’ll get leggy, they get long, they don’t produce as well.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:22:54
I would say compost. Compost is your best friend, not only for the environment, but also for your gardens, because it feeds the soil, which feeds the plants. And it’s a way that you can take some of your wasted food and turn it into something that’s not wasteful, you know, it goes right back into the garden. Or, if you’ve got chickens, it goes to the chickens sometimes, and then their fertilizer ends up in your gardens as well. But yeah, I would say, start small, build up from there. Learn about compost, if you can, learn about these circular systems, and if you don’t have the space, grow some herbs. Grow some herbs in a pot. Herbs are actually surprisingly, pretty easy, and most of them will thrive on their own to an extent. We do have some drought conditions sometimes we have to watch. But I mean, I grow all my herbs and pots, and they do fantastic. And then you’ve got them for cooking and things like that. Once you start doing this and start cooking your own food that you’ve grown, you’re going to have a harder time going back to the grocery store. We still have certain things we have to go to the store for, like, that’s just, we’re not a culture that can easily get around that, yeah.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:24:14
But if you eat a tomato fresh off the vine and then go get one from the store, you’re gonna notice there’s a vast flavor difference, and the reason for that is, again, you know, industrial farming, they’re working with practices where they’re shipping this stuff so they pick it when it’s green, and maybe it doesn’t have the same stuff that it needs to ripen and to develop those sugars and that tomato that make it that juicy, warm, delicious tomato, strawberries, oh my gosh. The first time I ate one of my own, it was probably tiny. It, you know, my first strawberry. I remember popping it in my mouth and going, why don’t strawberries at the store taste like this? Um, even your eggs, eggs like you don’t really think about eggs having much of a flavor, necessarily. But once I started having chickens and knowing what I fed them, and knowing that they were healthy, and eating their eggs compared to the eggs at the store, the eggs at the store, I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I do think that also plays into why we’re having such an epidemic of mental illness, depression, ADHD anxiety. I suffer from some of the stuff as well, and part of it is the diet that we’re choosing. Because, let’s be honest, we’re not always, you know, on top of eating healthy foods to begin with, but even when we are eating healthy foods, they’re not being grown with the same care, and they’re not getting the same micronutrients and the nutritional content that we need them to have, and so I do think it’s harming our health. It’s harming our health in a big way. So yeah, support local. Grow yourself if you can, if you can’t, supporting local is just as good, and the farmers do appreciate it. Your local farmers are the backbone of your community, and they’re struggling, so give them all the love and support that you can whenever you can. So.<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 1:26:29
Thank you for your thoughts and life experiences. Yeah, I appreciate it.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:26:32
Yeah, you’re welcome. I believe that everyone should have access to grow their own food. They should have access to healthy foods because it’s, you know, it keeps them out of the doctor. It keeps them from getting sick.<\/p>\r\n
Erin Culver 1:26:44
It’s, it’s an entire what am I trying to say? It’s, um, everything works together. Yeah, everything works together. So you know, if you’re growing your own food, it leads to better health if you’re eating the food, and then that keeps you away from the doctors, and it keeps you away from the pharmaceuticals. So, I mean, it really is, I guess I’m coming back to those circular systems. It really comes back to the same ideas, like with your soil and treating these, the regenerative farming. It’s the same thing with us. You know, what you put into it is what you get out and go into the store while, yes, we have to rely on that for certain things. We could do better. Yeah, I think we could do better, and I’m gonna continue teaching as much as I can so that people can have access to this stuff. Yeah,<\/p>\r\n
Maryevelyn Murray 1:27:40
awesome. Thank you so much. You’re welcome. Thank you.<\/p>\r\n
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Erin Culver began farming in raised beds in Rock Hill, SC; and moved to grow her farming effort in 2020 to York, SC. During the move, she began to share tutorials and educate others in order to promote urban farming through YouTube. Within this interview, Erin elaborated upon an abundance of both personal experience and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbeiID-m0","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.charlotte.edu\/food-oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.charlotte.edu\/food-oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.charlotte.edu\/food-oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.charlotte.edu\/food-oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.charlotte.edu\/food-oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1364"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.charlotte.edu\/food-oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1365,"href":"https:\/\/sites.charlotte.edu\/food-oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1364\/revisions\/1365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.charlotte.edu\/food-oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.charlotte.edu\/food-oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.charlotte.edu\/food-oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}