Our Homesteading Dream

Living, laughing, loving, and learning on our little suburban homestead.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Homesteading Wherever You Are

When you hear the word "homestead" what comes to mind? Originally, to "homestead", meant to be given free land by the government in exchange for building a home and farming or maintaining that land. Today, it means something different.

According to Wikipedia, the term homesteading means "a lifestyle of agrarian self-sufficiency"

I believe that homesteading is a frame of mind, and you can homestead wherever the Lord places you. To me, homesteading is about being self-sufficient. Growing and preserving as much of your families foods as you are able....and trying to be as independent as possible.

At this time last year, our family was still living in the city. We lived in a rental home with a postage stamp yard. But, in that small rental home is where I learned how to mill wheat into flour, make bread, can, freeze and so much more. I learned to keep all of our foods as close to the way the Lord made them as possible...while on a budget. We had a few square-foot gardens in that tiny yard and grew as much of our food & herbs as we could. We learned a lot about nutrition...and frugality in that tiny home.

I believe God used that little home in the city to prepare us for the next step...our current home. We are now living in our own home on 1/2 an acre of land. Now, 1/2 an acre isn't much land, but we are able to have gardens for some of our produce, chickens for eggs, and goats for milk. We even have room to plant some berry bushes, and fruit trees.

My dream is to someday have enough land to completely sustain our families food and heating needs...to buy it the land with cash...and to be able to live completely off the grid.

But until then, I'm content with our little spot of land...and I'm still learning!



Our current veggie garden...it's over 5,600 square feet!



Our chickens...many of which we hatched here at home in an incubator...gotta love homeschooling! :P



The two newest editions to our little homestead...Fiona and Sophia were born on June 13th and their Mama, our Nigerian Dwarf doe Ava, is finally in milk!

1 comment:

Jeremy said...

I love this post, and I share your dream of self sustainability. We live on a fairly large piece of land, but unfortuanately, we rent. Our landlords didn't let our chickens move in with us, so they are in a "foster home." Good work on the new homestead.