Escape the hustle and bustle! In this episode, Juliet Clark dives deep into the world of ranching with Dorothy Beasley aka Grandma Beasley, author of Voices from the Prairie. Dorothy reflects on her upbringing on a ranch, highlighting valuable life lessons learned from early experiences with horses and the importance of giving voice to women in ranching communities. She discusses the importance of resilience, self-sufficiency, and traditional skills in navigating the modern world. Saddle up for a conversation that will inspire you to embrace resilience and reconnect with the land.

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the episode here

Cowboy Boots And Confidence: Embracing The Ranch Lifestyle With Attitude With Dorothy Beasley

Introduction

We have another wonderful guest, one that I think is going to be interesting for many of you out there writing books or thinking about writing books. Before we go any further, I want to remind you to go over and get your free subscription to Breakthrough Author Magazine. You can find it at www.BreakthroughAuthorMagazine.com. 

One of the things about our guest is she is one of the people who have been on our expanded tours. We have a new site out there that we are putting up and we are doing more and more book marketing for after-release and sometimes pre-release as well. We are doing more media tours. We’re doing all sorts of things on that end. Everyone that we’ve put in with our tour team has gotten tremendous results. Our team is a former Simon & Schuster publicist. They’ve got the contacts, they read the books, they do everything. 

If you’re someone out there who’s looking for that post, release, or publicity, and you wasted your time on other companies. Know that a lot of those other companies out there don’t read your book, they have contacts who are not within the categories where they’re going to get the right readers. We don’t have that problem. These guys read the books, they have the contacts from their days at the traditional publishers. 

Our guest is Dorothy Beasley, AKA Grandma Beasley, a proud Baby Boomer from Alberta, Canada, who was raised on a cattle farm where she learned to drive tractors and work with machinery as a young girl. Riding horseback and rounding up cattle were also part of her daily routine. Ranch life was hard, it was work, fun, and sometimes dangerous. 

Cooking wasn’t a skill that she picked up until after getting married. As the years passed, raising her four children and actively volunteering in the community, she discovered a love for baking and cooking nutritious meals for her family. Today, she values teaching young people essential life skills that will benefit them in the future. 

From cooking to money-saving techniques to public speaking and budgeting. She aims to pass on this valuable knowledge to help others lead fulfilling lives. She also enjoys sharing tips on preserving and harvesting garden vegetables, as well as wild plants and berries to make teas and lotions. She loves connecting, communicating, and collaborating with women, men, and children of all ages, as well as Mother Nature.

She enjoys new people, forming friendships, and learning about each other. She has a book called Voices from the Prairie, which is an anthology of ranch women. The reason I’m so excited about this book and what Dorothy’s doing is that I spent the first five years of my life on a horse ranch. Then my parents moved into the small town nearby because they didn’t want my sister and me going to school at a very small school system in San Miguel, California. 

We moved to Paso Robles, but I still had ranch connections because my grandmother lived right outside of town and had an almond ranch in California, a rather substantial one. I grew up on a ranch. I know it’s hard work. You have to be sustainable. One of the things I love the most about ranching is these people are probably the best stewards of our environment. Dorothy and I will delve into that a little as well. Stay tuned for our interview with her. Dorothy, welcome. It’s so great to have you here. 

I am so glad to be here, Juliet. 

I’m excited about your book because you and I have had so many discussions about all of these people who are moving from the city. I pulled stats, you guys. I’m impressed with myself. I don’t know if Dorothy is or not. Since 2020, about 32% of Gen Z and 26% of millennials have moved out of the big city and into country living. Small towns, more property, less cost for housing. The key reasons have been that 27% of them want more affordable housing. 31% of them have moved because families are closer and you have kids, I have kids. 

If you have family close when you have kids, it’s a huge help. Then 17% have moved because now that we have remote work, they can work from anywhere. One of the downfalls, which I love about your new book, it’s a transition. It’s hard work. It’s not just, “Yay.” It’s not green acres. Tell me a little bit about your background and why you wrote this book. 

Motivation For Writing The Book

My background, I have been a ranch woman all my life. I said, I was raised on a ranch, and rode horses. I began riding horses at the age of four on an old horse. Whenever I fell off, my dad just said, “Get back on there because it is going to be your life and it’s not about just falling off. You got to get back up there and continue with the journey.” That was a good lesson for me as a young child, “Never quit. You just keep on going.” There are pitfalls in every part of your life, but if you just keep getting up and doing it all over again, eventually you get it right. 

There are pitfalls in every part of your life, but if you keep getting up and doing it all over again, eventually, you get it right. Share on X

That’s so very true. I remember when I was about four or five, I got bucked off a horse because we lived out on a horse ranch and yes, it hurt but you know what? I had hit the horse. I can’t say that I was very deserving of that, “Buck off.” Very deserving. To give you guys some perspective about age, my mother used to ride her horse to school. We lived out in the San Miguel Parkfield area and she would ride her horse to school every day. Now, of course, that was back in the late forties, and early fifties. It’s not she did it there, but that was what people did back then too, when they lived out like that. 

Exactly and quite a few of the ladies who have co-authored the book rode to school as well. They were born in the 1930s and some of them in the 1940s so yes they rode to school that was part of their life was the horse. 

I mentioned to you guys I mentioned that we moved to the city or moved to Paso Robles which isn’t a city but when we went to school part of that was my mother said I grew up in this really small place riding my horse to school and I don’t the kids to have to do that. Why did you write the book? You had all this experience. Why did you feel that this was something that you wanted to share with people? 

As I became a ranch woman, I married into a ranching family, I realized that women did not have a voice within the ranching communities. As I said, I’ve been a ranch woman, the wife of a rancher for the last 48 years now. I realized that it’s so crucial for women to have a voice. As I said, over the years, it was just something that I wanted to do. As I learned more and more about ranch life, I said that it was just so important to give those women and myself a voice.

Sustainability On Ranches

One of the things that I really about the platform that you’ve built, and you guys will be shocked by this, Ranchers is all about recycling sustainability, nothing goes to waste on a ranch. If it’s organic, it goes in the compost post pile. Some of your most watched videos are some of the things that go into that. Talk a little bit about that.

If you guys haven’t seen it, go over and look at Grandma Beasley’s Country Kitchen on YouTube. She has a video on one of her recipes about boiling banana peels, which I never knew you could do. Talk a little bit about that, because I don’t think people understand that it’s not like the city where you go to the garbage can. Every single piece of everything gets used. 

It’s funny you mentioned that because I was at my daughter-in-law’s to-be here on the weekend, and I said, “Do you throw everything in the garbage or do you have a recompose heap or whatever you do?” She said, “There used to be something in the city, but now there isn’t anymore.” It’s something that we’re lacking. It reminded me, as I said, “We either have things we do to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, or whatever, and make something more edible.” 

I had always heard that the banana skin was the most nutritional part of the banana. I looked it up one day and then that’s what I found. If you boil a banana peel, you can easily make some banana water and then you use it for sleeping. It’s actually to help you sleep. It was worth it to learn that. I said just little things like that you can use. You can do the same thing with an orange or a grapefruit. You can boil it in water. It takes the negative energy out of your room and it makes rooms smell nice. 

I never knew that. That’s so funny. I drink a lot of infused water because water just has no taste. I make infused water and a lot of times I cut oranges up in it with the peel and all. Also, it’s little things the peels on a potato are super nutritious. The peel on a cucumber, I don’t peel the cucumbers either. I just score them.

I was just going to say about the peels on a potato. If you have warts, you rub that potato peel on the wart and it will disappear. I used to have a wart on one of my thumbs. I learned that little trick and I used it. I haven’t had any warts on any part of my body since. 

That is so funny. There are so many things when you are living that ranch life that you can do as well. I think I’ve shared with Ms. Dorothy before that my mother used to have this salve that was forced medicine. When we got hurt, she’d just pop it on. The cut would be healed the next day. I wish I could find the name of it, but everybody around my family is past now. 

There’s just all these sustainable things. You don’t have to leave. You don’t have to do a lot with it. On your website, I know you’re going to do a lot of these tips on your new website. What are some of the other things that you feel would be beneficial for newbies going out into country life? Like growing poultry, growing different things. You grew up on a cattle ranch and a sheep ranch or goats? 

Sheep. 

I love it when goats dance, the babies. We have some down the street right now. They’re so cute.

My kids were allergic to cow’s milk as well. We did have goats when the kids were little as well. I milked a goat for all the kids and they grew up on goat’s milk and made goat’s cheese and those kinds of things and made the bread out of the goat’s milk and it was all healthy. 

I think we’ve gotten away from that a lot too because if you look, my kids grew up around cows, so it was no big deal. If you ask some of these kids today, cows come from the grocery store. It’s like, “What?” 

It’s really good to hear that people are going back to that age-old way of living because it’s a secure way to live. As I say, you are much more self-sufficient. There are so many things that you can do. If you have your chickens out in the chicken house, you can go out and butcher a chicken and that’s what they used to do in the old days if they needed chicken for dinner.

It's good to hear about people going back to the old way of living because it's a secure way to live. It’s much more self-sufficient. There are so many things that you can do. Share on X

If they had a bunch of people come. They just went out and butchered the chicken and then in a couple hours, you had a chicken dinner. 

I don’t know if I could cut a chicken head off, but I guess if I were hungry, I would do it. There are other things too, the fresh chicken eggs. That was one of the things I learned, you bring them into the house, you don’t put them in the refrigerator like you do with store-bought eggs. They don’t need to have that done. 

The trick to that is not to wash them. 

Yes, I’ve heard that. 

If you were to wash them, then you have to refrigerate them because you take the film off the outside of the egg, which protects it and helps it so it doesn’t get old as fast. 

I think people are going to be a lot healthier when they start doing these sorts of things too, because I feel all that much of the illness that’s out there is because of all the chemicals we put in everything we eat now as well. The other thing that you do well on your site is you have cooking lessons. I think that is cool. 

So far, we have shepherd’s pie, and pot pie, which you can kill that chicken right out in your yard. You can take those eggs and put them in the crust. Banana bread and things like that are just really old favorites but because it’s Grandma Beasley’s Kitchen, you also have a lot that kids can help with as well, like the ice cream sandwiches.

I would like the families to be involved so that the children learn from a young age to know how to cook from the basic ingredients so that they’re not just buying banana bread from the store or whatever and saying, “No big deal.” I said that they were to make it from scratch and realize what goes into it and how much more healthy it is. It doesn’t have those ingredients in there that make it last forever. 

The preservatives.

As well, if they see the cow being milked right on the ranch and realize that when it lasts for three weeks or a month, there are preservatives in that milk because the fresh milk only will last at the most four or five days. 

Yes, and I noticed out in the stores. Tomatoes that last three weeks, you know they’re pumped full of something because when I take them out of my garden, we have to eat them pretty rapidly. They’re only lasting for three or four days. I think that’s something as people get more familiar with your platform and get over and watch, they’re going to realize that this fresh food, is not going to last as long, but it’s fun to grow. It’s fun to take ownership of all that. 

I believe the good thing that I’ve done with my website is I do a live cooking show so that people can interact. All of them were set up properly, we’ll have the recipe there, and then you can go to the store and get your ingredients, and then you can make it along with the recording. All those things or I can also do a live cooking show so that people can participate in that as well. 

This is not pioneer woman, fancy cooking, the dudes are in and out. She’s very basic with what she does, but you get everything in advance. You get not only ingredients, but you’re going to have some of the cooking, the utensils, the pans, the different things that you do over there as well, which I think is cool. I have a ton of stuff down in my pantry that I have bought and I’ve only used it once or twice. 

Ranch Retreats

I always tell my daughter when I die, she’s going to have to expand into a new pantry for all the stuff that I’ve gotten on that. Let’s get to not only the book, the book is an anthology, but you’re going to start ranch retreats. Tell us about those because that sounds like a fun way to get away from the kids, to be honest, for a lot of women, “Hi, going to the ranch for the weekend.” 

It’ll be a four-day retreat with two full days of things happening in between. You’ll come on possibly a Friday night. Either fly in from the airport and then rent a car and come out to the ranch. We’ll have a big open campfire, to begin with just to open up the night. There’ll be a couple of different packages. If you would like to experience life on the ranch.

If you want to do a horseback ride or interact with the horses, milk a cow, feed the chickens, see where the eggs come from and the different kinds of chickens. Those kinds of things, as well as a transformational vision workshop and vision boarding so that you can find out more about yourselves as well. It’s an interconnection with yourself. 

You can go inside and figure out if you’ve got some discontent in your life or anything that, and then what would you love in your life, as well as just walking around outside and connecting with nature. It’s very quiet out here, it’s just a peaceful situation and gets you maybe a little bit more idea of what it’s like to live out here as well. There’s some cooking together. Depending on the time of the year, I want to have it every month if possible. Weather permitting during winter, summer, spring, and fall, the women can experience all the seasons as well.

I would imagine winter is a little tough out with the snow. 

It could be. Depending if we’re in Manitoba or if we’re in Alberta, we have a ranch in Alberta as well as one in Manitoba. The snow can get to be about five feet deep in Manitoba but then that just means you do things a little bit differently. They would be able to experience how we feed the cows in the wintertime. There’s skewing and those kinds of things. It’s just a different way of life compared to the city. It’s harder because you have to open the water holes and those things. You need to know how to work an axe. 

Yes, and not a Lizzie Gordon axe. I’ve never experienced that part of it because I grew up on a ranch in California. The rain was devastating. Not cold snow. It sounds like it’s a personal development dudette ranch weekend. I’m excited. I keep bugging her. I keep nagging Dorothy about doing preserves, and canning because that’s what I would really to do. 

Where To Find The Book

I’ve done a little bit, but I’m never confident about that seal. I’m not a very good cook. I made blueberry jam once, and I’m not sure if anybody ate it. I think everybody was scared. Dorothy, where do we find your book? It will come out on June 11, 2024, and you have a website where we can go to see it and buy it. 

It’ll be coming out on Amazon, as well as Barnes and Noble and Target. 

Apple, Walmart, Target, wherever you buy books, you can get the ebooks at some of those bigger retailers. It’s going to be all over the place, but if you don’t want to go search, she has a website, VoicesFromThePrairie.com where you can go over and just click a link and go right into whatever retailer you want to purchase that book. Dorothy, thank you so much for being on today. This was great. Thank you for sharing. I’m excited about your ranch retreats. 

Thanks. You’ll know a little bit more once I get them all set up.

Important Links:

• www.BreakthroughAuthorMagazine.com
• Dorothy Beasley
• VoicesFromThePrairie.com
• Grandma’s Country Kitchen on YouTube
• Unlock the Secret Health Benefits of Boiled Banana Water

About Dorothy Beasley

Dorothy Beasley (aka Grandma Beasley) is a proud baby-boomer from Alberta, who was raised on a cattle farm where she learned to drive tractors and work with machinery as a young girl. Riding horseback and rounding up cattle were also part of her daily routine. Ranch life was hard work, fun, and sometimes dangerous.