Beginning Homesteading

I didn’t start homesteading with the goal of homesteading. I more so grew into as I went from one challenge to the next. Homesteading is more so experiencing challenges while having a goal or ideal in mind. You don’t necessarily complete the challenge or do it perfectly. Most importantly is you just do it.

My first challenge was just to renovate where I was living. I started working on renovating my dads’ old pole shed/office in the end of 2019, right as COVID was starting to make its way. It had heating and plumbing, it just needed major cleaning, a kitchen, and removal of pests, oh and a leaky furnace pipe and roof.

When spring of 2020 came I was still working on the inside, no internet, and doing a little bit of a garden out to the side and trying to get the front yard to not look like a dirt pile with rocks. In the middle of the summer I slightly impulsively bought my first dozen chicks. My thought was that I hate having to go buy eggs when I could just go out front and grab them. No it is not as romantic as one may think. Yes there is hard work that is involved, and I never minded the poop or cold, as long as I could get back inside and warm up! By November I was getting my first eggs!

Then came 2021, I started experimenting hatching my own eggs using an incubator. I hatched out 2 the first time, having trouble maintaining the humidity. When I received my hatching eggs from Meyer’s Hatchery, almost all the eggs were developed, but a good portion died before pipping. I learned in certain hatching groups that this experience was happening with many other people all over the US. There was no direct cause, not incubators being faulty, not poor humidity management of water usage, not temperature related. The best guess was that it was related to atmospheric pressure. Ultimately I lost a lot of chicks that year. I learned about loss for sure.

I also grew a bigger garden. I picked seeds that I knew I would most likely eat and two that I wasn’t as familiar with to grow. We happened to have a drought that summer and while I didn’t think there was going to be so little rain, I had installed an above ground irrigation system because I wasn’t going to water with a gallon bucket the plants every morning.

I ended up with a good garden; harvesting broccoli, black krim and beefsteak tomatoes, buckets of bell peppers, some jalapenos, sweet peas, acorn squash, radishes, long onions, potatoes and a few corn. It wasn’t perfect though, I had watermelon grow and then suddenly start rotting where they touched the ground, same with cantaloupe. The corn grew unevenly and not all the ears continued developing, they just quit. The ones that did continue got stolen by the squirrels or dogs.

I canned as much as I could using both the water bath canner and pressure canner. There was an issue with canning lids being in short supply so I would frequently check to see if they were in stock when I went to Menard’s, Walmart or Target. Also the canning jars were a little sporadic in availability. Now I have a nice stash of food canned or frozen.

I will end this post to say, homesteading is a slow journey. You will not see immediate evident results that you made the right choices. Sometimes you experience it coincidentally. Sometimes you experience it long term. As I see my full pantry in January of 2022 and read about supply chain issues and food recalls, I realized those hard decisions and work has set me up for a bit of peace of mind right now. It pushes me to continue to find ways to do things in a more self-sufficient manner so that I’m less reliant on finding things I need in the store, and instead knowing I have what I need because I grew or raised what I have to provide for what I need.