What exactly is homesteading?
It’s growing, preserving, and harvesting our own food. It’s using our skills and resources to build and create. Homesteading is gaining control over how you feed the lives in your family. In a nut shell, Homesteading is self sufficiency. Beyond that, it’s about learning valuable skills, appreciating and utilizing what you have, and improving the quality of our mental and physical health. In a time where you can have whatever you want at the click of a button, we find homesteading more important now than ever before and we definitely aren’t the only ones! The movement of learning various homesteading skills has been growing exponentially within society.
Want to know the BEST part about homesteading?
It can be done on any scale that suits your environment. Basically, you don’t need to live on a farm or have acres of land to accomplish many homesteading skills. Our first home was your typical urban residential property. It was here where we started to learn how to preserve/can various items along with grow what we could in raised garden beds. What we couldn’t grow we would supplement from local farm markets to maintain the quality of food and directly support the original source.
Why we choose to live this way and advocate others to try!
Homesteading can be challenging, labour intensive, and time consuming. But there is something about growing, harvesting, preserving, and eating the fruits (or vegetables) of your own labour. You appreciate it more. You know exactly what went into it and where it came from. It’s as fresh as you can get, and tastes sooo much better because of it. It is the greatest feeling when we gather for a dinner and our plates are filled with chicken, potatoes, and carrots all grown/raised by our hands on our land.
One of our greatest motivators to increase our self sufficiency every year is our children!
We love being able to watch our children find eggs in the nesting boxes, or pulling 100lbs of potatoes from the dirt, or eating tomatoes and beans off the vine. Including your kids in the process of growing your own food, caring for animals, and/or building/creating various items is invaluable.
I’m certain we’re not the only parents who have gone through the never-ending “Why?” sequence. How many people don’t know that a red bell pepper is just a green pepper that has matured longer on the plant? or that an egg comes from the chickens vent, the same place it poops! (maybe it’s better that most people don’t know that though!). Or how to make a loaf of bread. The visual and physical learning through homesteading creates lasting impressions on their minds. It allows for greater understanding to their many questions and curiosities. Our goal is to educate our children with this knowledge along with building the skills necessary to be more self sufficient.
Homesteading is better for everyone including our environment.
I believe all the food we grow, animals we raise, meat we harvest, and handmade items we create are utilized completely with little to no waste. Not to mention it has no packaging, no shipment and no shelf life. From ground to fork, from hen to skillet, from our hands to our home. What we don’t consume from the garden goes to the livestock or compost, both which receive nourishments from it and ultimately come full circle back to our benefit.
The experience of growing, preserving, and consuming the fruits of your own labor is immeasurable. Though the process can be long, the difference is immediate. Enjoy the experience, embrace the challenge, and savour the rewards!
