Homesteading Secrets with Elizabeth Bruckner
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Cathy:Welcome to late boomers, our podcast guide to creating your third act with style, power, and impact. Hi. I'm Cathy Worthington.
Merry:And I'm Merry Elkins. Join us as we bring you conversations with entrepreneurs, entertainers, and people with vision who are making a difference in the world.
Cathy:Everyone has a story, and we'll take you along for the ride on each interview, recounting the journey our guests have taken to get where they are, inspiring you to create your own path to success. Let's get started.
Cathy:Hi there. I'm Cathy Worthington. Welcome to our latest episode of late boomers. I'm here with my cohost, Mary Elkins, and we are welcoming today a new guest, Elizabeth Bruckner, the author of the book, the Homesteader Mindset.
Merry:And I'm Merry Elkins. Elizabeth is known as the fermentation maven. She's an expert on fermentation and composting and an acupuncturist as well. Welcome, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Thank you both for having me today.
Cathy:Tell us about background. Tell us about your background and how you discovered gardening and composting and what led you to being an expert in homesteading.
Elizabeth Bruckner:It's funny. I fell into homesteading and I think I did homesteading before I knew what it was, which I think a lot of your listeners might be homesteaders and not know it. Homesteading has many spokes to the wheel. And so during the pandemic, I actually became aware of how fragile our food system was, and it was a it was a big culture shock because I've grown up in a very prosperous country. And I come from a family of war refugees from Belarus during World War two.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And so I'd heard talks of not having food on the shelves, but it always been stories. And I actually visited the Russia during the fall of the Iron Curtain, and I remember seeing empty shelves and going, wow. That's I'm so glad that doesn't happen in America. And then the pandemic happened and our shelves were empty. And I attempted to get garlic and ginger one day, and I was unable to get these two organic produce.
Elizabeth Bruckner:The produce section was was pretty wiped out. And I remember coming home to my husband and saying, I'm really worried. Like, this is concerning to me. This is this doesn't happen in in our in our lives. And he said, well, maybe you should consider growing some food in the backyard.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I mean, we have we have a little bit of space. I live in the suburbs of Los Angeles. And I kind of cocked my head to the side and said, do you know me? Like, we've been married fifteen something years. Are you aware that I kill everything in the backyard?
Elizabeth Bruckner:There's nothing that lives. So I would I was I was known for going to the grocery store. I'm sorry, the garden store and saying, please can you give me something that won't die? And then I would take it home, and in two weeks it would die, and then I would go back. It was this vicious cycle.
Elizabeth Bruckner:It was like they they couldn't break up with me. I just kept coming back and funding their business because I didn't know how to grow food. And so I started You're giving
Merry:hope to people who actually have that experience.
Elizabeth Bruckner:That's right. I mean, I did not have a green thumb at all, or nor did I know how to cook. I was a career woman, and I thought I thought, you know, here I was preaching to my patients that you need to eat whole foods, you need to eat good nutrient dense foods, but I didn't know how to cook. So I I outsourced a lot of my food. I outsourced the growing of it.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I outsourced the preparing of it. And when the pandemic hit, I thought, I don't know how to be an adult. Like, it's time for me to step inside to my home and actually take charge of the things that I can be that I can be responsible for. And so that's when I started doing gardening and also learning how to cook. Like, I didn't know how to bake a chicken.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I didn't know what broccoli looked like when it was growing out of the ground. I mean, I was a beginner and I was in my forties. And so that's when I started looking up how to do this in Southern California because, you know, every every region in The United States has a different growing, like, growing requirements and different plants that grow there. And so I wasn't going to try to grow something here that couldn't be grown. And then I was looking on YouTube and looking through podcasts, and everybody kept bringing up homesteading.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I'm like, what in the world is that? And then I was like, that's interesting.
Merry:To you because I don't really know.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Right. What is homesteading?
Merry:Yes. Yeah. What is homesteading?
Elizabeth Bruckner:I used to think initially that homesteading was mom paw kettle, and they're out in the wilderness like Little House On The Prairie, and they've you know, they're shooting bears to keep them off their land, and they make their own clothes. And that was that's the initial that was the original version of homesteading. So back in 1862, the government started a series of homesteading acts, which allowed the federal government to grant 270,000,000 acres of land to private owners. Sadly, a lot of that went to very, very rich people and but there were a few mom pa kettles that got their 40 acres and a mule. So that is what most people think about when they think about homesteading.
Elizabeth Bruckner:But for those of you that are not watching on YouTube, but you're listening on another place that you listen to podcasts, you will notice that I did not make my clothes, and I have running water, and I live in the suburbs. And so the new homesteading, the modern homesteading is a practice of cultivating resilience through an intentional way of living. And this involves reducing your toxic load, building your gut microbiome with nutrient dense food, potentially growing edible landscaping, and connecting more deeply with your innate resourcefulness. Because we all our bodies know how to heal. That I learned when I started training to be an acupuncturist.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And our homes can heal too if we just spend a little bit of intentional time in in the practice of homesteading.
Cathy:Wow. Oh, I love that.
Merry:Yeah. I do too. So
Cathy:what is a homesteader?
Elizabeth Bruckner:So a homesteader could be a number of things. I would challenge your listeners to see if as we talk today, they have any ounce of homesteading in them. If you're cooking from scratch, you could be a homesteader. Absolutely. One of the things that I say often when people are asking me, like, what should I do when I'm first starting to learn how to cook?
Elizabeth Bruckner:Because a lot of people just we don't know how. We're busy working. Is just buy, if you're a meat eater, buy a Vegetarian chicken. Buy a chicken, learn how to bake it, and then you've got four different meals that you can make just from baked chicken. You can have chicken soup.
Elizabeth Bruckner:You can have chicken salad. You can have chicken with, you know, a side of of vegetables. And then you can make a meat stock, like a chicken chicken broth that you can use for medicinally for your gut. So that's one way is cooking traditional foods, stepping out of the fast food line, stepping out of the box food. A lot of people think that and I especially did.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Like, a lot of what I'm saying right now is coming from, years of of wisdom from experimenting with things that didn't work well for me. And one of those things is I thought that buying, like, organic happy looking boxes of food was healthy. And, again, I was outsourcing and people were doing a lot of seed oils in their food, in the packaged foods. There was a lot of preservatives. Even though it said organic, it wasn't healthy for me.
Merry:Right.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And so when you make it yourself, you know what you're getting. Another thing is growing edible landscaping. So that could mean going to the grocery store if you live in an apartment, buying just a a little pot of basil and clipping basil as you're cooking or putting throwing some basil in water and just letting it become an herbal infusion. Now I'm lucky enough to have a a very tiny, suburban plot, which is a backyard filled with cement, but there's a little planter around the cement, which is around a pool. And so I can grow food there, but for those in an apartment, you can actually grow food on your windowsill, you can use lighting to do it.
Elizabeth Bruckner:There's a lot of ways that you can do it in any place that you're living with any type of body as well. So let's say you have terrible back pain aside from getting acupuncture or doing something to help with your chronic pain, you can also, you can also find ways to garden and to cook while dealing with back pain.
Merry:Interesting.
Cathy:That's great. Is there and also is there a link between mental health and homesteading?
Elizabeth Bruckner:Oh, that's a great question, Kathy. Thank you. Yes. I I would say that, especially for Americans, I'm not gonna speak for every person worldwide, but for Americans, we have a chronic disease of depression and anxiety. And a lot of that has to do with we're living in a fast paced world and there's not a lot of room for health.
Elizabeth Bruckner:If you want to live a healthy life, you kind of have to step off the treadmill and make space for it. And so what I often say, and this is from a wise friend of mine that told me once, so it's not something I created. It is, the prescription for anxiety is action, and
Cathy:the
Elizabeth Bruckner:prescription for hopelessness is gratitude. And so if someone's feeling depressed and hopeless and they just don't think that they can they can make it, I recommend, walking around your house, and this is from an author named Honore Quarter. I recommend walking around your house, touching the things that you have, and actually feeling gratitude for them. So every morning when I wake up, I will lay in bed and go, oh my gosh. I'm so grateful for this warm bed, for running water, for heat, for air conditioning, whatever the gifts are that I have that I see at that moment.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And that really helps with mental health. Another thing that homesteading does in terms of helping with mental health is you're taking action because you are becoming more responsible for your food, for your health, for your well-being, for your community, for your family. And they there's a study that says, folks that have habits that are, using their hands are happier. So people that use their hands are actually happier. And homesteading is all about using your hands.
Elizabeth Bruckner:You're growing. You're you're creating. You're building in some cases, and you're also cooking and you're fermenting. You're doing all sorts of wonderful things. And there is a there is a groundedness that occurs.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I believe for me, because I was so allergic to the kitchen up until my forties. I just I didn't wanted nothing to do with it. And then when I started making food and sitting down, I realized that there's like a mindful practice that occurs when you are making food for your body. It's like you're set you're going, okay. You're I'm I'm worth this.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I'm worth real food. And then when I sit down with my husband, he is a huge foodie, and so we used to do only great restaurants. But now when I make food, his pupils of his eyes get heart shaped.
Merry:So he's like
Elizabeth Bruckner:he gets so excited because he can feel the love. It's it's crazy.
Merry:If you if you get really close, you can feel the heart's good for relationships too.
Elizabeth Bruckner:It is. It's nerdy. Yeah. It's really very sweet.
Merry:Yeah. I love that. I love that. That's great. Tell me something.
Merry:What made you decide to author a book called The Homesteader Mindset?
Elizabeth Bruckner:You know, there's a number of reasons, Mary. Thank you for asking the question. I would say the the foremost in my mind is I am a very enthusiastic teacher of what I learn. So when I was learning languages, every time a friend would ask me how I'm doing, I would explain to them how I'm creating habits to learn languages. And this has been throughout my life.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I've been a mentor for many years for folks that, need other type of spiritual practices. I, now that I'm homesteading, a lot of my friends would be like, why you know, what's happening? Your skin looks better. You have less pain. You're happier.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I accidentally lost weight because I was eating really good food. And so I'm always teaching them, well, if you make kefir cream in your it's kinda like sour cream. It's like a yogurt kefir. It's really pronounced kefir, but I can never remember to say kefir. So kefir because that's what we say in America.
Elizabeth Bruckner:If you can make that, it's very simple, then you can create incredible benefits in your gut, which then helps your brain. So what I recognize is when I eat well, I feel well, and people wanna know about it. And as a practitioner in the clinic and in my online traditional Chinese medicine sessions, a lot of, folks want to heal their bodies. They know that their bodies are capable of healing, but they're not quite sure of the steps. And so I really wanted to create a book that would teach you how to take what seems impossible and make it possible with really simple, tiny, almost, it almost doesn't seem like it would be enough.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Like, I talk about starting with a five minute a day habit, and then we just talk about changing the mindset. You could actually take the Homesteader Mindset book, and you could take that book and translate it into anything that you wanna do. I wanna start to learn how to sing. And then you could take the steps that I've created. And those steps are just about creating routine because routine is everlasting.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Whereas willpower, like, I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna learn how to sing or I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna learn how to how to raise chickens. That is very finite. You will run out of it quite quickly.
Merry:Yeah. Mhmm. Making making looking at the most difficult thing to do and thinking, I'll do that now. I'll start with that.
Cathy:Yes. Well, are there things in the book like, how to ferment and and how to make kefir? Are those in the book?
Elizabeth Bruckner:Yes. There's a lot of information about how to firstly find where to to get these things. Because what I realized is that with this book, because there's so many spokes, there's so many things that people might be interested. For example, lots of homesteaders love to make sourdough bread. I do not.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I don't eat sourdough bread. My husband does, and we have a baker at the farmer's market that makes exquisite forty eight hour fermented sourdough. So I'm never going to learn how to make sourdough unless I have to. I have no desire. And there are, as I said, many spokes of the wheel.
Elizabeth Bruckner:So there are hundreds of things that people could want to learn. What I help people do there are a few things where I'm actually saying here's a really easy recipe or here's one thing that you can do. But I took three different families in urban setting, suburban setting, and a rural setting, and I showed the listener I'm sorry, the reader through the stories how they found the things that they needed to find. For example, if they wanted to know kefir, you could go to the back and see if I wrote anything on Kiefer, but you could also go to a, I have a bonus a book bonus, which you'll both see when you get the book. I have a book bonus that gives you links for everything that I've learned so you can pick and choose what you like.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And then also, how do you learn these things? Because for me, you know, I'm a little younger than a boomer, and I just wanna say hat tip to the name. Late boomers is adorable. And it's so important that we have a voice for our our wise elders. It's so important.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And I just am I'm enthralled that you you two are doing this and that you have a really good name. So what I recommend is for me, I didn't know this is going back ten years. I didn't know that YouTube had something other than cat videos and makeup tutorials. Like, I thought that's all it was. I didn't so I had no interest in going there ever because it didn't I had not I didn't want a cat video.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Sometimes I do now, but I didn't want any cat videos. I didn't want any any makeup tutorials. And then I recognize that you can learn anything. It's like having it's like having a wise elder in your family online that you can go to. How do I change the the faucet in my bathroom?
Elizabeth Bruckner:That's a version of homesteading, being resilient. Right? How do I do composting? You can just type it in and there it is. And it's very visual.
Elizabeth Bruckner:It's really good for visual learners. So for me, I had to I wanted to step back. For those of for those that are my, parents' age that are my parents are in their eighties, They're not quite savvy with, YouTube. So I wanted to teach them how to find what they're looking for. So if someone is has arthritic, hands and they want a garden, they can actually go online and and look up how to how to garden with arthritic hands.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And there will be tools that are available and and methods that are available. On top of that, I, you know, I eventually will do in a course on chronic pain because I think that we need to get people out of pain as well.
Merry:Have you taught your your parents, to homestead a bit? Are they out gardening? Is this in their interest?
Elizabeth Bruckner:Oh, my sweet parents. They're they are my mom is this five foot two, spitfire of a woman, and my dad is probably six two. And, you know, he has, he has a lot of difficulties with long term diabetes and and chronic illness, but they are still doing things outside. So they started raising goats before I was homesteading. And I remember going, ma, dad, this this sound crazy.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Why do you why are you raising goats? So they owe it but they did it to, create brush. They live in a very rural area, so they did it to clean out the brush. So they actually had they were raising lawnmowers, basically. And now they rent out those lawnmowers to other people that need to do forestry, like forest cleaning.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And so they I think they started homesteading before I started homesteading.
Merry:Wow. Mhmm. Interesting. Oh, yeah. Do you I have another question for you.
Merry:Yeah. Where do you have where do you buy your food for cooking healthfully? And have you changed those habits from going to say one type of market to another?
Elizabeth Bruckner:That's a very good question. Thank you, Mary. And I I wanna say that what I'm gonna say now is the end result of years of experimentation. So I started by going to, you know, the everyday grocery store and buying I just the first thing I started doing was reading the labels on the foods that I was buying. And if they had things that I couldn't pronounce, I wouldn't buy it.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Mhmm. If I found pasta and the one pasta said, you know, wheat and flour and the other one said wheat flour and, you know, all these other very big words that sound very fancy, I would not buy that one. And then I started going to farmer's markets because we're lucky enough in Southern California to have round round the year farmers markets. It's warm enough to do that always. And so my husband and I, this was probably, I would say, ten years ago, We started voting with our dollars, which was we really wanted to support local farmers.
Elizabeth Bruckner:We wanted to know who was touching our food. We wanted to get rid of the middleman. We wanted to get away from big food, big pharma, big ag. And the way that we could do that was going to farmer's markets. So now Mhmm.
Elizabeth Bruckner:When I go to the farmer's market, I'm, you know, well known because I I can say hello, Sarah, to the woman that, you know, makes that raises my carrots and brings them to the farmer's market. And when there was an egg scare, there was no egg scare with my farmers because they were not gigantic farms that were having issues. They were tiny farms that were having issues. So right now, I would say 90% of my food is from farmer's market, a nearby farmer's market. The other 10%, like, it's difficult to get dairy.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I know of a I know of someone that has dairy cows, but I'm not willing to drive an hour. So I will go to a just a one step up. It's a it's it's locally locally owned grocery stores that have milk that are from farms within California. So I'll do that. And then I also really like, there's an online there's two online places where you can get food that is relatively inexpensive that has a health bend to it.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I do I do say though, after I say these two names that you do need to still look at the ingredients because they have lots of stuff that isn't that healthy. So one is thrivemarket.com, and the other is Azure Standard. I really like Azure Standard. That's azurestandard.com. I really like Azure Standard because a lot of it comes from their farm.
Elizabeth Bruckner:So and they source from fair trade. They source from, people that are taking good care of their animals and their crops. So you're getting happy food there. And so when I need something like coconut oil, I will order it from Azure Standard.
Merry:Ah, it's different there. It's the coconut oil is different there versus the market?
Elizabeth Bruckner:Well, it's what it's doing is it's a number of things. Number one, it's supporting that farm that farmer because that particular farm is not a big, gigantic, huge corporation. And so a lot of times with grocery stores, we have the farmers and then we have the middleman, the sellers, and then we have the farmer's market. I mean, then we have the grocery store. And what's happening is you're paying everyone there.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And what I like to do is take out the grocery store middleman, take out the buyer middleman, and just pay the farmer so that it supports more sustainable farming. It supports more fair trade, and the money's going directly in the pocket of the farmer.
Cathy:That's great.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Yeah. I started slow, though. I started with just going to the grocery store, just looking at labels. Then then I would just on, you know, nice days when I felt like it, would go to the farmer's market in my fancy little, you know, sundress. And and now it's a it's something that I do every weekend.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Like, that is that is my my shopping is I go to the farmer's market.
Cathy:That's great. And you talk about the three things that turn a homesteader mindset into a reality. So what are the three things?
Elizabeth Bruckner:Those three things are simple and again, you can translate this into any type of mindset that you want. The first is pick a corner. The second is immerse yourself in found time. And the third is make home studying a priority. So let's talk a little bit about these three things.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Picking a corner. What does that mean? What I often recommend that the listener or in the case of my readers that are reading the book, I recommend sitting down for ten minutes and daydreaming. What does a homesteading what does homesteading look like to me? What would be my ideal homesteading adventure?
Elizabeth Bruckner:And so as we're listening to this and somebody's going, oh, you know, she doesn't wanna make sourdough,
Merry:but I would love to put on
Elizabeth Bruckner:an apron and make sourdough and share it on Instagram with the pretty little leaf, you know, one of the little leaf patterns that people put on their bread. Like, that's not my thing, but that might be someone else's. And so sit, grab a nice warm beverage, like a cup of tea or herbal infusion, sit down and just think what would feel incredible? What would my wildest dreams look like in terms of homesteading? And then when you're looking at that and that happens a lot like, Kathy, you were talking about a relative that's moving soon into a new home.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Like, they can sit down and go, what what is this house gonna bring me? What do I want? What do I envision in it? And maybe that person will envision a herb garden in the backyard, and that's what they wanna talk about and think about. And just what, like, lights them up.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Or for me, my next step is I would love to get chickens in my backyard. I would love to feed my chickens the, you know, my vegetable scraps because we have a lot of them and then have these beautiful eggs that I can that I can bring into the house. I would love that. And so if I were, daydreaming about that, I would think, okay, the first thing that I want like, let's go back to the the relative that has a new home. They want this herb garden.
Elizabeth Bruckner:The first thing I would think is just what does an herb what will an herb garden bring me? Ugh. Well, in the morning, I'll go outside and I will snip off some parsley to put on the side of my plate with my eggs in the morning, or I'll I'll use rosemary in my chicken, and I'm gonna have rosemary, you know, and I can just snip out. It's so great to go grocery shopping in your backyard. It is so much fun.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And then as you're looking at that daydream, then you've decided to pick a corner. My corner is I'm going to make a small five herb herb garden. That is my corner. So now once we found that corner, that's my dream of my home setting. It's the corner of the homesteading dream that feels really, really good.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Then I'm going to immerse immerse myself in found time. So a lot of people talk about dead time in language learning. Use dead time to learn languages. I really don't like the term dead. It just doesn't seem fun.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Like, who wants to use dead time? So I use found time. And found time happens whenever you are whenever you find yourself looking for distraction, whenever you're grabbing for distraction, you might be anytime that you're picking up the cell phone and you're not expecting a call and you're not expecting a text, but you're picking it up and you start scrolling, that's found time. That's the five minutes that turns into two hours. I mean, we've all been there.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Right? We've decided to go on for five minutes. Next thing you know, it's dark outside. Like, how did that happen? That is found time.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And what you can do is you can harness that found time. And you can do it by saying, for example, let's say you really like social media media. That's what you're into, and that's what you grab for. You can make an account solely on homesteading, and that account can be all about herb gardens. What what does it look like in Pinterest?
Elizabeth Bruckner:What are the most beautiful herb gardens? And then when you're pulling for out that phone for distraction, you're learning as well. Oh, I didn't know that it's really easy to grow mint in shade. I had no idea. Have a lot of shade in my backyard.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And then that five minutes is now five minutes that you're using. The next thing that you do in terms of immersing yourself and found time is creating habits around that. And my book talks a lot about it, and at the end of the at the end of our conversation, I'll make sure to offer a free gift for habit stacking, habit stacking trap tracker. And then the last thing that we talk about, the three, is making it a priority. And this, I think, is really hard in our day and age because we do have priorities.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Our priorities are make sure that there's a roof over our head and that our children are fed and that we're you know? And then if you go even a little farther, are we taking care of ourselves by brushing our teeth every day? Are we eating well? Are we moving our body? All of those very important things are priorities, but sometimes they become overwhelming.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And if we just take one priority and say, this is a priority for joy. I'm gonna do this solely for joy, not for fear, not even for preparation, just to ignite some delight in my life, and you make homesteading your priority there and you do five minutes a day, you will wake up more invigorated every morning. So if you wake up and you're like, oh my gosh, today's the day I'm gonna I'm gonna learn about how where I should plant my mint. And then the next day, you're like, okay. Now I'm gonna plan how to get to the garden store.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And then there's another five minutes. Again, it's five minute increments. Five minutes of going to the garden store, can I please have mint and bring it home? Five minutes of planting it. Every single every single action that you take towards that priority, towards that that vision of delight will then give you the same wonder that you had when you were five years old.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I mean, do you guys remember waking up waking up at five and being excited? Right?
Merry:Yeah. I love that. Talking about your book a little bit, I and I think you just answered the question that I had for you as who would benefit from reading it. And do you even have to well, do you have to be a homesteader to to read it? And I think you answered.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I think this is a a good question to focus on because a lot of people will go, oh, well, no. Because I'm busy or I'm a I'm a you know, I have a PhD in in microbiology, so I shouldn't be getting my hands dirty. And that obviously isn't for me. I would say that if you want fulfillment, one of the most important things is to get your hands dirty, whether it's, you know, making something in the kitchen or creating fermentation or playing with your kids out in the in the grass with bare feet or getting your hands dirty in the compost pile or in the garden. Anyone can be a homesteader regardless of where you live, regardless of your age, and most importantly, of your socioeconomic status.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Because I think that sometimes people think, well, you know, that's for bougie people that are going, you know, like, oh, you have to have a yard in order to do this or you have to have and that's not the case. And I've actually talked about a few ways that you can save money, and you can homesteading can actually be something that's really good when you're doing it on a budget.
Merry:Oh,
Cathy:yeah. Well, you talked a little bit about this, but tell us a little bit more about why willpower isn't enough to create a life of traditional skills and what to add to that.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Yes. I it's I think this is another one that's really important to repeat because a lot of times people think that, well, if I'm if I just had enough willpower, I would be healthier or I would have a better life. And yes, willpower does have something to do with it. I think willpower is really good for the first thirty seconds of a habit, but willpower is finite. So there have been some studies done.
Elizabeth Bruckner:There's a great book called The Power of Habits by Charles Duig, and in it, there's a ton of, research on the brain. And one of the studies showed that if someone had to do a hard math puzzle that they didn't like, and then they had to use willpower like they had to the the researchers said, okay, you can have this cookie, but I need you to wait as long as you can before you have this cookie. Those that had to do the really difficult math puzzle, so they had to concentrate, they had to use their willpower to do that. When it came time to eat the cookie, they ate it much faster than the others. Then the control group was just, can you wait?
Elizabeth Bruckner:Just wait as long as you can before you eat this cookie. And they were able to wait much longer because they hadn't exhausted their willpower with something else. So willpower yeah. Yeah. Willpower is finite.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I know it's that finite. It's that finite. And it and it does, of course, it does regenerate. Like, every day is a new day, but routine is everlasting. So there's a part of your brain that's and many people have talked about that.
Elizabeth Bruckner:We've got the prefrontal cortex, and for those of you that aren't watching on video, I'm touching my forehead. The prefrontal cortex is something that kind of differentiates us from reptiles and from from, animals that don't quite they don't raise their young, so they don't have a lot of binding. And the prefrontal cortex is all about, should I, shouldn't I? Is this dangerous? Is it not dangerous?
Elizabeth Bruckner:So the biggest example is you're walking in the park and you see what you think is a snake, and then you realize it's a stick, and then you keep walking. Is it a stick or is it a snake? Your body is constantly checking for danger, but it's not it's it's thinking about it logically. If it is a snake, then your reptilian brain will take play. And I'm actually touching the base of my the base of where my neck and my head touch.
Elizabeth Bruckner:That's kind of the base of the the brain stem. That's the reptilian brain, and that will when you see the snake and it is a snake, you're gonna yelp and then you're gonna run without thinking. And it makes for some very hilarious videos. Right? You've seen lots of people jump up when they're frightened, and then off they go.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And it's hilarious because we're seeing we're seeing them unfiltered. We're seeing them from the reptilian brain. Well, the beauty of the routine is that it is also very close to that part of the brain. It's once you get a routine going, it's normal. I mean, I can I can see the two of you are absolutely beautiful women?
Elizabeth Bruckner:It looks like you do your hair every day, you know, and you have a little bit of makeup and you've got you know, you're youthful and and and joy. You look like you're put together. Well, when you the first day Thank you.
Merry:Yeah. Thank you.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I saw I saw Instagram videos of you too, and I was like, I've gotta make sure that my hair looks nice today because these girls these girls have style.
Merry:I've gotta I've gotta step it up.
Cathy:You're so cute.
Elizabeth Bruckner:But, but we have to we have a routine. Right? So you're not you're not actively thinking, like, I need to get my bangs to go to the side and how do I do that? Because you know how to do that now. When I wake up
Merry:So you say.
Elizabeth Bruckner:That's true. We all have some stumbling blocks.
Merry:When I have a cow
Elizabeth Bruckner:lick, forget it. There's this note. There's just no getting it done. But a lot, like, even when we drive to work. Right?
Elizabeth Bruckner:We don't think about where we don't think about, oh, I made a left turn, and then I made a right turn, and then made a left turn. Our routine is there. We already know how to do that. And so when we are creating a homesteader mindset and we're creating traditional skills, we want to create routines so that there is no thought patterns on it. And some of the ways to do that is to connect habits.
Elizabeth Bruckner:For example, when you brush your teeth, I'm going to I'm going to look up, you know, five minutes of, YouTube videos on how to grow rose rosemary in my garden. And so I'm brushing my teeth and I'm looking at maybe I would have watched some celebrity gossip, but instead I'm brushing my teeth and I'm connecting that habit to doing something that's really easy but productive. That's habit stacking. And in that way, you can create these routines that are already happening on routines that you already have. You could be a smoker.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I don't want anyone to be a smoker. But if you have a habit of smoking, it's a very regular routine typically. People go out for their, you know, noon break and their 04:00 break. Well, you can habit stack. You can add another habit that is good for you onto that habit.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And then eventually, you can think about not not smoking again, but eventually, you will have another routine that's positive and that's productive.
Merry:Yeah. That's yeah.
Cathy:That's Wow. That's a good plan.
Merry:Absolutely. That's great advice. What are the three big myths that stifle positive living and positive thinking, and how do we kick them to the curb? Is that by habit stacking?
Elizabeth Bruckner:Yes. Habit stacking has a lot to do with that. I love talking about the three big myths. There are actually three chapters in my book. The first is I don't have enough time, I don't have enough money, and positive change is too complicated.
Merry:Mhmm.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And you will hear that all the time in any type of accomplishment that people have tried. So for instance, Kathy, you have you have like this incredible Instagram and you have a you have a a background in TV and films. Right? So I'm sure that every time you mention your background in TV and films, people will say, oh, I've always wanted to do that. I've always like, I hear that a lot when it comes to language learning and when it comes to homes.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Oh, I've always wanted to do that, but I just don't have time. I'll do it when the kids are grown or but I just don't have money. I don't have money to, you know, to get headshots or whatever you need to do to become that or it's too complicated. You do this, but I could never do that. That's not true.
Elizabeth Bruckner:We can all do. If we have a a strong desire or strong fulfillment, it's absolutely possible. And so when it comes to I don't have time, we talked a little bit about that. You're utilizing found time. You're creating habit stacks and habit chains.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Habit chains is a little different than habit stacks, which is you take a habit that you already have and you chain something right after it. For example, when I wash my dishes, right after I wash my dishes, I'm gonna put my shoes on and go for a walk. I'm gonna put my shoes on and I'm gonna go for a walk, and that's the habit chain. I have the shoes out. I'm ready.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And so now it's just automatic. It's not, I wash my dishes and I think about I should probably do it in an hour or two hours and then it never happens. A habit chain.
Merry:Now
Elizabeth Bruckner:when it talks about not having enough money, this is a really important topic because I think it affects a lot of people in our in our modern society. They're working hard, but they're still not making ends meet. How on earth could they start homesteading? Well, I will tell you that homesteading can save you money. Some of the ways is knowing how to upcycle.
Elizabeth Bruckner:For example, I make I make cleaning cleaning solution with homemade vinegar. So I take fruit scraps. I throw it in some water with some sugar. I let I stir it once a day. And in thirty days, I have vinegar.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And then I take that vinegar. I dilute it with water. I put a few essential oils in it. And now I have what in the grocery store I would pay, you know, 8 to $9 per bottle. I now have five or six bottles from that half gallon of of vinegar.
Elizabeth Bruckner:That's Is
Merry:that recipe in your book?
Elizabeth Bruckner:It's not, but I should put it in the next book because I think it's really important.
Merry:Yeah.
Elizabeth Bruckner:It's fairly easy to make. There is a woman on YouTube. Her her mess her videos are not edited, so they're a little lengthy. It's called Rain Country Homestead, and she will tell you how to do fruit scrap vinegar. But I think I'd like to I'd like to put that in the next book.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Yeah. Fruit scrap vinegar. And it's just it smells great. I do it with, like, lemon and tea tree to kill bacteria, and then it's I mean, it cleans your whole house, that and baking soda. And now I've saved hundreds of dollars on cleaning, and I've reduced the toxic load in my home.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Another thing that you can consider if you live in the urban area, or suburban area is, one man's trash is another man's treasure. So I'm sure we've all walked by a fruit tree in bloom, and you see fruit rotting at the bottom of it because that poor person they might not be poor, but that poor person that has a home, they just they're working every day and they just don't have time to pick the oranges off that tree. Well, if you knock on that door and say, listen, I would love to harvest your fruit, and I say, I'll take a third. I'll give you a third, and then we'll donate a third to charity. What do you say?
Elizabeth Bruckner:I will bet you nine times out of 10 that person will be so happy to get the rotten fruit or the potential for rotten fruit and just feeling bad every time you drive by it in your driveway. They will be happy to share it with you. Another thing you could do is sharing land. So if you're in an urban area specifically, a lot of people say, you know, they just have apartments with absolutely no no, yard. You can find little plots in the urban area that look a little deserted, and I'm talking about just the plot near in front of the the front door, not like an empty lot.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And go knock on that door and say, look, I'd love to grow some, herbs, and I would love to use your your land to do it, and let's let's split it fifty fifty. That's now you're not looking for a community pot. You're not, you know, applying for a community garden and trying to get in. You're just finding someone and and reverse engineering finding land. And then lastly, propagation, which is one of my favorites for saving money, is there's a lot of plants that if you clip off a branch of them and stick it in water, it will grow it will grow roots, and then you can plant it.
Elizabeth Bruckner:So no seeds required. You don't have to go to the garden store. I have been known to take a bowl and some scissors and knock on my neighbor's doors and say, hey, do you have any plants that I can propagate? And then often we share. We share a lot.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I have probably about 20 plants in my yard that were from propagation.
Merry:Like what? Give us some examples.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Tomato plants. You can cut a tomato plant and you can actually take a tomato plant. If they grow in your region, you can just stick the the the branch in in the ground and it'll start growing. I really like to see the roots. So typically in my bathroom, there's a nice sunny windowsill and I'll put it in there.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Mint can grow that way. Let me see if there's anything else that would be fun.
Merry:Rosemary?
Elizabeth Bruckner:Rosemary. I don't know. I've not tried rosemary because my rosemary bushes have been so they're they're so prolific that I haven't done that. But I have
Cathy:Rosemary grows so gigantic all by itself.
Merry:It does.
Cathy:You know? It does.
Elizabeth Bruckner:It really does.
Merry:It takes over everything. It does. You gotta eat a lot
Cathy:of massive. I have a massive one.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Do you? Yeah. I love rosemary. So those are a few, but you would be surprised. And I would say if you're not sure, clip it off, put it in water, and see.
Elizabeth Bruckner:You don't even have to look it up. Just see what is it what does it hurt? Now lastly, positive change is too complicated is the third one. And this, I think, is the crux of my success as a homesteader and in much of life is that I keep it really simple. So I I find out what I wanna do.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I try to center it around delight and joy because before, like, I'm in my fifties now, but before in my before my forties, everything was a chore. Even the fun stuff. Like, vacation was a checklist. I have to do this. I have to do that.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And it was not fun. Like, I wasn't having any fun. And then I started learning that when you do things for pleasure, your brain actually wants to do more of it, and you become more successful. And so keeping it really simple, and the there's a process to that, which is in the book, and also looking for moments of joy will make you a better wife, mother, business owner, employee, community member. If you're happy, you're gonna be more productive.
Elizabeth Bruckner:You're gonna be way better, way more fun to be around. You will make better the world a better place if you focus on the light.
Cathy:Well, talking about that, you also you share about using play to establish homestead habits. So that sounds like what you were just starting to touch on a little bit. Can you explain that?
Elizabeth Bruckner:Yes. I can. Choosing a life of delight makes for a vibrant existence. And so I think a lot of times, people don't know that that is the secret to many people's success. I don't wanna be a successful person, and I think a lot of listeners will agree, and maybe you two will agree as well.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I don't wanna be super successful and miserable. I mean, I know a lot of people that have a lot of material wealth or a lot of accolades or even a long alphabet after their name of, you know, PhDs and MDs and all these things and they're not happy, I would take the person with none of that that has a, an authentic smile on their face. I would wanna know what their secret is because it doesn't matter. The truth is, you know, when we when we pass on, right, we're not gonna get to have any of the material as well. I'm not saying not to have the material.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Have it, but have it and be delighted with it. And so I learned that learning for pleasure, it does a number of things. It improves your mental health. We just talked about that. It's creating neural pathways that are, comfortable and fun and, attractive as opposed to when I was talking about having the checklist and, you know, I gotta get I gotta pack everything and it has to be good and it has to be perfect.
Elizabeth Bruckner:That's gonna create neural pathways that have that light up your pain receptors. So a lot of people don't realize this, but when you learn stuff, it's actually painful when it's brand new because it's new, you know, it's it's there's no there's no trail train track. There's no neural pathway that's already there. You gotta create it. It's kind of like taking a machete and going through a jungle to get to what you need to get to.
Elizabeth Bruckner:So you wanna do it as you wanna do it as gently as possible, and you need to have pleasure to get to the treasure. If there is no treasure I know that was I didn't mean to rhyme, but there you go. Now we have now we have a T shirt.
Merry:It's a pleasure to
Elizabeth Bruckner:get to treasure. Once you fill fill up with delight, once you fill up your self care cup, you are going to be way more motivated to use that little bit of willpower that you have to create those routines, and then your life will be inspiring to others, which I would say I mean, we could even look at what you two have done, Mary and Kathy. You've created a podcast. Not everybody does that. And you've created a podcast.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And like me, podcasts didn't exist when we were younger. Like, there was know mean?
Cathy:It's not
Elizabeth Bruckner:like we know podcasts. There's a lot that goes into it. There's sound. There's recording. There's setting up guests.
Elizabeth Bruckner:There's figuring out what you're gonna ask and when you're gonna ask it. There's so much to do. And if you don't have a little bit of joy for doing it, I don't know that I know that many people can't get past the third episode because it's too difficult. But if you have pleasure, if you have play, if you pique your curiosity, which I think is what having these conversations are. Right?
Elizabeth Bruckner:You're using your curious your curious nature to it.
Cathy:People like you.
Merry:Joy in it. Yes. People like joy. Exactly.
Cathy:Joy from people like you that come on and say
Merry:Absolutely. Guys are doing a
Cathy:great job.
Merry:We we read each other's minds. I was about to say the same thing. I have to ask you, though. You have a quote in your book that says badly done is better than well said. Tell us about that.
Merry:That's different.
Elizabeth Bruckner:That is different, isn't it? Oh, yeah. Well, it's a spin on Ben Franklin's quote, which is well done is better than well said. And I thought, well, that's nice.
Cathy:Mhmm.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Except that doesn't work for perfectionists because the perfectionist will never get the podcast made. The perfectionist first of all, you know, during my twenties when I really had a hard time with, self criticism, etcetera, I wouldn't have even gone on a podcast. Like, to be recorded and to fumble and to make a mistake and maybe I say something wrong. And nowadays, when you record something, somebody's gonna listen to it twenty years from now, and maybe you weren't supposed to say the word blue and you said the word blue. You know?
Elizabeth Bruckner:Like, it could be Yeah. You just Yeah. There's a there's a lot of there's a lot of anxiety that could be produced around that. And so when I make bad being starting something and doing it badly done as my battle cry, that is when I go, you know what? It's gonna be messy.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I'm gonna make messy mud pies. I'm gonna be really cute with a little bit of dirt on my nose. Like and people are gonna love me because I am authentic, then it doesn't matter if it's badly done.
Merry:Oh, that's great.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Yeah. And so I would love to say to people, make a really messy, terrible herb garden. Make an herb garden where four out of five of your plants die because you will learn and then you will you will eventually create an herb garden of your dreams.
Merry:That's great. Yeah.
Cathy:Wow. I love that. Yeah. And how did you manage to harness a a homesteader mindset while dealing with chronic illness?
Elizabeth Bruckner:Well, that's probably going to be another book is stepping out of chronic illness. So in my forties, I lost the decade of my forties to illness. I was bedbound for weeks. I was homebound for months, and I was, unable to work for years. And when I woke up, I was in my fifties, and I was like, oh my gosh.
Elizabeth Bruckner:What happened? You know? Like, what happened? And this chronic illness made it so debilitating that I remember saying to my husband, like, I can't do anything. I can't I wasn't able to think properly.
Elizabeth Bruckner:I had a it was a lot of gut issues that were causing problems with my brain and causing incredible weakness. I couldn't walk for more than five minutes. It's not quite Wow. The coming out of a coma like the, the man that wrote, the Goya the Goya guy. I forget his name.
Merry:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Cathy:Yeah. I don't know.
Elizabeth Bruckner:You have
Merry:so many you have so many Yes. Get off your ass.
Elizabeth Bruckner:That's right. That's right. That's the guy.
Cathy:Oh, Goya. Get off your ass.
Cathy:That's right. I I didn't know what
Cathy:we were talking about, of course.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Yeah. He's I mean, he had a very traumatic, a traumatic injury. Mine happened over the course of a long time of being malnutritioned by not eating good food and just not recognizing that I wasn't eating good food. And so what I learned in terms of harnessing a homesteader minus mindset during my chronic illness was that I had to start from the bare minimum. So originally, and I talk about this in the book, my husband said, alright.
Elizabeth Bruckner:You need a to do list. Here's your to do list. Eat, poop, and sleep. If you do all of that every single day, you're a success. And so I was like, okay.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Had something to focus on.
Merry:That's pretty simple.
Elizabeth Bruckner:It was super simple. And then eventually, was like, well, what if I created, what if I created fermented vegetables, which is gonna increase the it's like a 12% I'm sorry. It's like 12 times the vitamin content of normal vegetables when you ferment them. And, here's a fun fact. A teaspoon of sauerkraut has more probiotics in it than an entire bottle of your $50 expensive probiotic formula that you buy at the supermarket.
Elizabeth Bruckner:So making your own fermentation is pretty pretty remarkable. And so it it that light lighted me up. That and learning languages and just doing things for pleasure because I couldn't do anything outside of that. I couldn't be responsible for anything aside eat, sleeping, pooping. When I started doing that, that's when I learned that I could harness even doing the bare minimum.
Elizabeth Bruckner:And so for me, finding joy in fermentation was was what I woke up to. That's what I wanted to do every morning, And that's what I wanna give to my
Merry:readers in this instance. Fermenting like sauerkraut?
Elizabeth Bruckner:That's correct. So sauerkraut is very easy to do. You take some some cabbage, you put it in a food processor, you sprinkle some salt in it, you let it sit for a day, and then you put it in a jar and you pack it down. It's got a little bit of juice, then you let it sit. You can let it sit for seven days.
Elizabeth Bruckner:You can let it sit for seven months. And then when you eat that that sauerkraut, there's it's called lacto lacto fermentation. So what you're doing is you're the salt is inhibiting the bad bacteria, the bacteria that's gonna make you sick to your stomach or it's gonna make you ill, and it's allowing lactobacillicus, which is a different kind of different kind of bacteria that's good for your gut, it's allowing it to grow and flourish, and that's what changes the vegetable. It actually digests the vegetable. Those little microbes are eating that vegetable and making it easier for you to digest it.
Elizabeth Bruckner:So when you have right now, have a seven month sauerkraut in my fridge, and it is so mild in flavor and so easy to digest, and yet it's my supplement that I have when I want prebiotics and probiotics.
Merry:That's great.
Cathy:Yeah. I wanna start
Merry:Elizabeth, I have so many more questions that I could ask you, but we're running out of time, unfortunately. So what would you like our listeners to have as their main takeaway today?
Elizabeth Bruckner:Oh my goodness. I would say that it's possible for anyone, anywhere to create a homesteader mindset, to create a life of their dreams. And if you like the, just a small little tiny explanation of how to create small habits and then how to track them with a habit tracker, you can get that at my website, which is createwellnessproject.com/gift,gift. And it's possible to have the world the life of your dreams. Even one one little five minute snippet at a time, it is possible.
Merry:That's great. Love it. Thank you. That is I can't wait to read your book. Thank you.
Merry:Our guest today on late boomers has been Elizabeth Bruckner, homesteading expert and author of the homesteader mindset. Visit her website, as she said, createwellness.com or createwellnessproject. Create wellness project Com. Thank you, Kathy. Or createwellnessproject.com/gift, and you get a free Homesteader daily habit tracker if you go to that website and put your name and all your information in it.
Merry:Thank you so much, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Thank you both.
Cathy:Thank you for listening to our Late Boomers podcast and subscribing to our Late Boomers podcast channel on YouTube. Listen in next week when you'll meet Chip Duncan and Salim Amin, the two filmmakers who have produced a phenomenal documentary called Stand Together as One, The Famine, The Music, The Impact, all about the famine in Ethiopia that led to the music business efforts of Band Aid, We Are The World and Live Aid. You can listen on any podcast platform and we do appreciate you so much. Please follow us on Instagram at I am Kathy Worthington and at I am Mary Elkins and at late boomers. Thanks again to Elizabeth Bruckner.
Elizabeth Bruckner:Thank you, ladies.
Cathy:Thank you for joining us on late boomers, the podcast that is your guide to creating a third act with style, power, and impact. Please visit our website and get in touch with us at lateboomers.biz. If you would like to listen to or download other episodes of late boomers, go to ewnpodcastnetwork.com.
Merry:This podcast is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and most other major podcast sites. We hope you make use of the wisdom you've gained here and that you enjoy a successful third act with your own style, power, and impact.
