Homesteading is the return to simpler times. A drive towards self-sufficiency. A life focused more on production rather than consumption.
It can define lifestyles ranging from completely off the grid to those who choose to make more from scratch, both for things in their home and cooking in their kitchen. The self-sufficiency part is the meat and potatoes of homesteading. You can do this on a large amount of land or in a tiny townhome, it’s just going to look a bit different (we live on just about a quarter acre), so we are sort of in the middle of those two extremes.
Why have we chosen this life?
For us, our choice was fueled by the desire to rely less on the society of consumerism. It isn’t a political statement. It’s the desire to know what is in our food, where it came from, and to support our local community. Creating a productive home has been a dream of ours for a quite a while. Our move across the country was something that we chose to aid in the ability to do the things we were already doing on a larger scale. The pandemic that started in 2020 really pushed us into the lifestyle even more.
Do we grow everything we eat?
No, we don’t. While we can grow a lot on our property, we can’t grow everything. We don’t currently have the time to tend to any livestock, nor do we have the space for much more than perhaps chicken or quail on our property. When we can’t provide something off of our own land we try to support other local businesses, farms, and homesteaders. We buy local farm eggs, local dairy, and locally raised meat. In the winter months we participate in our local greenhouse/farm’s CSA box.
We try to eat homegrown and if we can’t then we try to eat local. That might mean a local restaurant that boasts farm to table, but it can also just be a local restaurant. We still leave room in our lives for the occasional fast food, because sometimes that’s just in the cards for the day/evening, but I imagine as we decrease our time working in the city, that we will be able to increase our time cooking from scratch. Overall, we try, we try to keep the money in our town or local area, and we try to put the best food possible in our bodies.
Is homesteading just about gardening and food?
Not at all. While a lot of homesteading practices do revolve around the production, consumption, and disposal of food there are other factors in that self-sufficiency realm. The non-food related one that we were the most thankful for when the hording part of the pandemic started was the fact that we don’t use paper towels or paper napkins. So while we still had to deal with the toilet paper fiasco, we didn’t have to worry about any other paper products.
Things you can do to start homesteading NOW:
-Composting
-Sewing (mending or making clothing, quilting)
-Preserving Food (Dehydrating/Canning/Freezing/Fermenting/Freeze Drying)
-Food Storage (Pantry/Root Cellar/Freezer)
-From Scratch Cooking and Baking
-Herb Gardening
-Vegetable/Fruit Gardening
-Raising Livestock
-Harvesting Sap and Making Maple Syrup
-Cloth Napkins/Towels/Diapers
Right now we do everything on this list except raising livestock and freeze drying, and we would really like to build up our food storage to about a month’s worth, right now we could make it about two weeks. While we don’t have a lot of desire to live on a giant piece of land, we do wish we had actual acreage for ourselves. With more land we would likely add some livestock into the mix with chickens and perhaps goats, that will happen when it happens. Right now, we are happy with learning and improving on the steps we are already taking and adding to the skills we have already learned.
surfandsewhomestead.com 