Ever since I was a child, I loved doing things from scratch and on my own.
Homesteading is interwoven into my life. From making homemade soap to growing our own food, even in how we raise our children. There’s been ups and downs, learning experiences, and challenges all along the way—complete with muddy shoes and scraped knees!
My husband and I started out in a tiny walk out basement apartment with nothing more than a small planter of flowers. Then, we made our move to the suburbs. No real land, no room for goats or chickens. We had a garden, we made our own bread, we made it work for us. It just wasn’t enough.
Three and a half years later, we made the move from the suburbs to our dream home with a plot of land where we could raise animals, not just children. I quit my office job working forty to sixty hours a week to work part time from home to take care of the home and farm. I’ll never look back.
Sure, there’ve been some mistakes along the way. We didn’t fence in our garden before planting or have a brooder ready when we got chicks. Our soil at our new home, only fifteen minutes from our first one, wouldn’t grow anything.
I can’t imagine a different way of living. In five, ten, even thirty years, I’ll still cook for myself and can my own vegetables. I’ll still have flowers on my windowsill. Some part of me will always be part of life out here, even when I’m old and gray.
Is it perfect? Well, no. Nothing is.
The trick is to not get discouraged. To keep trying and learning. It’s hard and a lot of work but rewarding in the end when you can say you’ve accomplished something you couldn’t before.
You’re not going to know everything when you start—no one does. I’ve always had one foot in the dirt and I’m still learning. You’d think, after all this time, I’d be able to grow something as simple as broccoli.
There’s always next fall.
It isn’t romantic or beautiful; far from glamorous. It’s happy. It’s who we are. Homesteading has made us and our three boys self-sufficient. No matter where we lived, this was going to be part of our lives somehow.
We don’t get to take many vacations anymore, but our children learn so many new skills and spend more time outside. We have the space for them to run and roam. To us, that’s important.
There’s still a sense of community, despite that vein of self-sufficiency. While I do love being able to make a wide variety of things for my family, I love having a community that is very willing to help and share and support each other. We give away the extra milk and eggs, so nothing goes bad, share recipes. You mow the widow’s lawn when she can’t and share seeds or seedlings to help others get started. In the middle of hyper-independence, there’s a strong love for others.
Homesteading is flexible. You make it whatever you want it to be. Sometimes, that means dozens of chickens following you around when it’s their dinnertime, or the sound of a few goats bleating at you in the early morning. It could be a massive, sprawling vegetable garden, or a few tomato plants and a modest herb garden.
You don’t have to go about it alone, either, and social media has made it so much easier to form that sense of community and those bonds. In person and online, there is a wealth of information to make things easier and to get started. You don’t have to know it all to start living life out here.