Homesteading: A Lifestyle, Not a Fad
I am not the first person to understand or say the following: Homesteading is hard. If you are not serious about it, it will break you. In an effort to exercise brevity, I could stop there but I will drive the point home a bit more.
There is undoubtedly a certain romance about homesteading. All the work that goes into preparing your land, sowing seeds, watching everything grow, raising chicks, keeping and breeding rabbits, harvesting! It’s all amazing. Knowing where that food that you are going to ingest comes from! No mystery ingredients, no pesticides, no post-harvest preservatives, no chlorine spray on the meat. I think that if you were to ask the people that have decided to homestead, you would find that there was a recognition that something in our world is wrong, especially with our food. Depending on how candid the person is, you would probably hear a frustrated diatribe about distrust of the government agencies that supposedly ensure that our food is safe for us to consume. At the end of it all, homesteaders were tired of being lied to, and decided to take action.
Faking it for likes and follows will only work for so long…
The joy of the lifestyle will provide you more than social media likes ever could.
At some point in a homesteader’s life, I would bet there was a desire for a more simple existence, to be more self-sufficient, and retake control over their lives. If you are still on the fence about homesteading, try this: grow some basil in your kitchen. Watch it grow, learn how to manage it so that it provides you more basil than you know what to do with, and then cook with it. Something changes in your mind, at least for me it did. For something as simple as a basil plant, you become aware of the little things. How much light it got, watering, pruning, maybe the pH of the soil that you used. Ultimately, there is no question when you eat that food because there is no mystery about it. It’s just basil, nothing more. But now you have a bunch of problems…and they all reside in your pantry and refrigerator – the food from the grocery store. What is in that stuff? All you wanted was pasta sauce, so what are all those ingredients that you need google to pronounce for you?
The lifestyle is extremely rewarding! As I am sure we have all heard at some point in our lives, “you get out what you put in.” All the effort: the sweat, cuts on your hands, pulling weeds, washing your harvest, cooking with food that you grew. And watching the money in your bank increase because you are not eating “food” at restaurants all the time [this is not to say that we don’t eat out, but it becomes more and more rare]. Your body will thank you too! Just watch how your body responds to the food your grew cooked in ghee differently than that stuff we buy at restaurants.
“If you ever wondered how Great Grandma and Great Grandpa were able to survive the great depression, its because they really had to be about the homesteading life”
However, if you have not divested yourself of the immediate gratification mindset of modern America you probably aren’t going to make it. If you are only homesteading because a celebrity has talked about it, I would be willing to bet (and I don’t gamble) that you will quit as soon as your back hurts the day after you prepare your beds for sowing. If you have decided to homestead so that you can brag to your friends or because eating organic is all the current craze, you are going to quit.
This is not meant to discourage anyone. But there is a reality about homesteading that you don’t really appreciate until you are doing it. You can watch all the YouTube you want, and there some great folks out there. But there is something that you cant gain from watching a video or reading…the experience, the blisters on your hands, sore muscles, etc. If you are going to do it, do it…really commit. You will be glad you did!
