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1. The First-Time Homesteader: A complete beginner's guide to starting and loving your new homestead

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6. The First-Time Homesteader: A complete beginner's guide to starting and loving your new homestead

7. The First-Time Homesteader: A complete beginner's guide to starting and loving your new homestead DESCRIPTION Can you be a homesteader? The Oxford English Dictionary defines homesteading as “life as a settler on a homestead.” A homestead is defined as “a farmhouse and outbuildings.” This, I think, falls woefully short of describing this morning, all my mornings, and all my days. I like to use the term modern homesteading. Though I’m no scholar, if I had to write a definition, it would look like this: modern homesteading (verb): the act of living lightly on the land, of seeking sustainability, and of growing food in a modern world involved in this lifestyle are conscious consumption, awareness of the partnership between humanity and the earth, a reverence for the beauty of life, the embracing of a slower pace, and a desire to eat well and steward well I think that covers it, more or less. If you’ll notice, my definition of modern homesteading does not mention the need for acres, experience,

8. or any certain animal or skill. Homesteaders exist in all walks of life in our modern world. They live in apartments, shopping at farmers’ markets to preserve produce, growing container gardens on their patios, and tending a worm farm in their kitchen for compost. They are in rental houses, growing tomatoes in raised garden beds and gathering eggs from their small, movable chicken coop. They are on a few acres in the country, expanding efforts and filling their freezers with home-raised meat. They are living off the grid in remote places, embracing slow living and rarely frequenting the grocery store. Yard Birds Chickens are the gateway animal to the homestead life. Glorious, fresh eggs showing up in your backyard every day, when you are accustomed to things like this only coming from the grocery store, is a revelation. The shells are stronger, and the yolks are richer. The eggs actually taste like eggs. Suddenly, you find yourself considering other ways to create food sustainability. Meat in the Freezer Raising animals for meat is the homesteading act most unfathomable to non-homesteaders. The idea of raising an animal and caring for its needs daily with the goal of butchering it is the most contested part of our lifestyle. It is because we care about animals that we take responsibility for our appetites and raise the meat ourselves.Raising your own meat will create more gratitude for the meat you consume. In our house, it has eliminated a lot of waste. The Home Dairy The rhythm of a home dairy is beautiful, and it is hard. Milking happens twice a day, every day, whether it’s raining, snowing, or blazing hot. If your family consumes dairy products, keeping dairy animals helps offset the need for reliance on the grocery store. They provide milk for drinking, cooking, and making cheese, yogurt, kefir, and more. There is a lot of work involved in keeping them, and there is a lot of reward, too. Keeping Bees I count bees among the most valuable, not to mention interesting, livestock on a farm. While there are thousands of different bee species, honeybees (Apis mellifera) are a primary pollinator of our fruits and vegetables. The more bees visiting the garden, the more productive the garden. In addition to this invaluable pollination service, your bees offer sweet, rich honey and beeswax to use in candles and crafts. How Many Plants to Include in Your Homestead Garden Deciding how much to plant may be even more difficult than deciding what to plant. To start, understand how each vegetable grows and produces. If you’re planting carrots, each seed will give you one carrot (if the seed even germinates). If you’re planting peppers, each seed will produce a plant that grows a dozen or dozens of peppers. You need to plant more carrot seeds than you do pepper seeds to feed the same amount of people. This is easier said than done, but I want you to start small. Maybe you start with a little salsa garden in a few raised beds so you can eat some of your food fresh from your backyard for a few months of the year. As you become more comfortable gardening and are willing to take more risks, you can expand to eat more of your diet from your garden for a longer part of the season. It’s not a far leap to start canning, freezing, and dehydrating your harvest, and then you’re looking at needing a larger garden space. We grew about 80 percent of the vegetables for our family of eight in our 10,000-square-foot (929 m2) garden, but it took time to ramp up to that point. The work involved in gardening is not just the planting and cultivating it’s also the harvest and dealing with the harvest. You can’t prepare yourself for putting by your first big harvest until you’re in the thick of it, but you can temper your garden plans to reduce your initial overwhelm. Deciding What to Plant How many people am I feeding? How much space do I have, and how much space does each plant require? What do we love eating? Especiallywhen you’re first getting started, stick with your favorites. Homestead Kitchen Skills Canning Opening

9. your pantry and seeing row after row of neatly stacked jars filled with colorful vegetables that you put by yourself is a special thing. Canning is a time-and energy-intensive endeavor, yet I would not do without it. Cooking from Scratch Knowing what to do with the food you grow is a big part of success in producing your own food. You’re going to be more enthusiastic about your gardening, chicken keeping, and home dairying when your family is enjoying the bounty from them. Eating Seasonally It may seem like common sense that if you’re growing your own food, you’re going to eat it in season, but for most of us being so far removed from our food sources, this can take a lot of thought. Eating seasonally means eating flexibly. You will gain an appreciation for each food as it comes and goes with the change in season.