5 ways to turn your Home into a Homestead no matter the land amount!

Its' all our dream right? 150 acres, tons of trees, big house by the pond with a lean to or barn for the animals. A woodstove to keep us warm while we knit or read books at night. Waking up to the crow of the rooster, and the cluck of the chickens. Doing the days chores on your schedule and your time, not having to punch a time clock, no commuting......

I know.
I.
KNOW.

I want it badly. So badly I can taste it. I spend about an hour a week searching for land back home that I dream we can buy and finally have our homestead. Ok, maybe more than an hour a week dreaming. Lets be real.

What I finally realized is that what makes a home a homestead isn't how much land you have. Or if you have dairy cows or does. Not how many chickens you have, or if you sell produce from your acre garden to the locals. What makes it a homestead is self sufficiency. And this is something everyone can have. Even people living in the city. Even those with almost no land.

So instead of worrying about what resources for self sufficency you *don't* have, we need to focus on you what you do have and making the most with those!

Number one is food. 

Obviously you cannot grow or raise all your own food. In fact, it's hard for any farm to achieve this. Its hard to have beef, pork, fish, poultry, eggs, milk, dairy products, and produce and do it all  yourself. So pick what you can do and do it. What you can't do, source out locally. We can grow most of our own food, and raise chickens for our own eggs.

We don't eat much pork because I don't like it and so we go without. We source our beef and we're trying to find a local place to source out our poultry. Our current chickens will end up in the stewpot when they've reached an age where they no longer lay. We don't have room currently for a goat and cows aren't allowed, so we buy dairy at the store, but are looking for ways to source that as well. That might mean sourcing raw milk from a local **trusted** farmer and making your own yogurt, cheese, butter etc. Or maybe you can find those products already made for you and source them. Either way.

Grow what food you can, and buy what you can't from local farmers. This might be a CSA or the Famers Market. You'd be surprised what you can grow in your own backyard, or on your patio in containers.

Cook from scratch, and get rid of processed crap. If you need faster meals on the weekdays, spend some time on the weekends preparing what you can ahead of time. I try to do things like keep frozen lasagnas in the freezer to just pull out, thaw and cook in the oven. Its takes as much time to prepare one as it does four, so this way I have three more to put in the freezer for the rest of the month.

Number two is water. 

Water is the most essential thing in life. We need both food and water, but three days without water is really bad, you can go up to a month (ish) without food. Having a source of water that you know is clean and without added chemicals will go a long way to your self sufficiency. We have a well on our property, and this year is going to be the first year we're going to get it back up and running. I can't wait! But we'll also use rain barrels to collect water from the roofs of our garage, chicken coop and house. The coop water will be for the chickens. But the rest, we can either just pour it directly on our garden, or we can distill it for drinking/cooking. You'd be surprised what a homemade distiller and a bit of sunshine can yield you in drinking water, and if you have no sunshine, you can simply add heat.  

When a drought hits, and they will, they always do, you'll still be able to water your food and not have to worry about raising prices at the grocery. 

Number three is Go with the Flow. 

Why can we buy strawberries in January? They're most definitely a summer crop. We can, because people grow them for us and we buy them. They're not near as tasty, they don't have near the nutrients, and they feel like cardboard. This goes for everything out of season. There's a reason we have seasons. We plant food, it dies off, and you either till it under or plant cover crops to replenish your soil. You put compost you've made all year onto it in the spring and till that under. And all this will yield you super fresh, great tasting food that you'll love to eat.

We've managed to try to spend our lives running 24/7 365 days a year. Our jobs don't give us the winter off, even though most things are designed to be dormant or resting in the winter. And we see this as normal? Getting up at 5:30 am to feed the chickens in the winter is made better by knowing that my winter days are spent resting and not working near as hard, and shoot, I like that because it's cold out there! Take the time nature is giving you to try to live in harmony with Her. If you work it right, you can eat fresh produce most of the year, about 9 months, even longer if you use cold frames or greenhouses.

I spend my summers working in the garden, doing projects like fixing up fences, or what not. Then in the winter I spend my time working on things like garden planning, or my knitting/sewing for the family. Things I can do inside that keep me nice and warm. Obviously, not all of us are able to live with the seasons. And if you can't, live by your farmers' seasons. Buy your food locally when it's in season, join a CSA, or produce share around town.

Number four is Learn New Things. 

This may mean breaking out the old sewing machine and mending your clothing so you don't have to buy more. Or maybe you wanna learn to knit/sew so you can create your own clothing. Perhaps you want to learn to make cheese so the local raw milk you get can do more than just be for drinking and coffee. Maybe this means learning how to pressure can, water bath can and root celler your garden produce for the whole year. Maybe you don't know how to cook from scratch, a new skill to learn will be to learn how to cook. You'd be surprised at how you can come up with your own recipes when you understand the chemistry behind baking. (And yes it really is chemistry). Or how you can even fix a recipe to suit your needs. Maybe you want to learn to butcher your own animals and those you hunt. 

There's many many things we don't know how to do these days. We rely on people to do it for us, and they do one thing only. There's nothing wrong with using the local butcher if you want to, he needs to make a living too, but if you want to, you can learn. 

When you learn these things, you'll find that the more you know, the more you can do and then the more you'll turn around and try to learn. Soon, you'll be doing everything yourself you can and saving all kinds of money and time. 

Number five is Learn How to Use Money More Wisely. 

Unless you own a money mint, you have a finite amount of money. This means, that the longer you make it last, the more you'll have for things around the homestead. Maybe you're saving up for buying that 50 acres you just can't live without. Maybe you want to put solar on your home and go off grid. Maybe you want to only have to have one income. There's many reasons, but most of all your reasons are the important ones. I'm a SAHM so for us, having one income and one car, means that we live frugally to afford that lifestyle. Homesteading took that a step further and gave us a bit of cushion so we can save up for land and solar energy eventually.

There's many ways out there of doing this, and I won't plug one over the other. The best one is the one that works for you.

Homestead Barn Hop!!! 

From the Farm Blog Hop!

Home Acre Hop #68

8 Ways to Reduce Your Food Waste

So I was reading online the other day, and I came across this article in my Facebook newsfeed.

About 40 percent of food in the United States today goes uneaten. The average American consumer wastes 10 times as much food as someone in Southeast Asia — up 50 percent from Americans in the 1970s. Yet, 1 in 6 Americans doesn't have enough to eat, says the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And food waste costs us about $165 billion a year and sucks up 25 percent of our freshwater supply.

Seriously. 40%??? 

Wow. Why in the hell are we wasting that much food? So I dig deeper. Turns out that we've grown so accustomed to "perfect" food (no blemishes, or odd shapes etc) that we throw things out willy nilly now. Also the old mantra "when in doubt, throw it out" plays a part, because a lot of Americans are completely out of touch with their food, their food sources, and don't have the knowledge they need to make proper food decisions.

Now don't get me wrong, if I pull chicken out for dinner and it smells "off" because I left it in four or five days, then I toss it. But the idea is that we should be organized enough and aware of what's in our fridge and pantry so we don't waste! We also shouldn't cram our fridges so full we forget what's in there, thereby wasting food. So here's some steps to reduce your kitchen waste.

1. Use what you have in the fridge first. This goes for both freezer and pantry items.

2. Plan your meals. This sounds like a no brainer, and I imagine we've all at one time or another planned our meals, but then a few days of harried schedules happens and the meal routine is off. So one good thing is to plan out 21 days of food, that your family likes. Then go over your schedule for the next week and plan your weeks meals from that (I do this on a two week rotation). I try to have several crock pot meals so that if I have a busy day that's unplanned I can simply make a crock meal. This will help you buy only what you need and then you'll use it.

3. Don't buy so much in bulk! Ok, so I'm the queen of bulk, I know. I buy whole wheat flour by the 50lbs bag, and pinto beans in 25lbs. But one thing I won't buy in bulk is fresh items. Now, I totally break this rule if something is on a really good sale Like last summer, cherries.Cherries were 1.99 a lb That *never* happens around here, so I bought 20lbs and canned them. I made cherry jelly and canned cherries in water with a tsp of sugar. So for months we had cherry jelly (it's gone now) and every now and again I make a black forest cake or put some in my yogurt.

4. Use mason jars and plastic screw on lids to store your leftovers. Now this is twofold for me. One, I hate plastic. I really hate it. It gets nasty and scratched up, it gets smelly from things like spaghetti sauce, and eventually you dont wanna put food in it. Plus, you can't see through most of them to know what's in them. So I use mason jars. They come completely clean, I can easily go from pantry to fridge with goods I've canned and best of all I can see leftovers. We don't have as many now that I've started using clear jars.

5. Freeze stuff. Don't be afraid of the freezer! If you have wide mouth jars, you can even store stuff in the jars in the freezer. If you have an abundance of something, freeze it so it doesn't get wasted.

6. Can stuff. Don't be afraid of the canner! There's so many recipes out there, and best of all, you can can things like soups and meats where if you take advantage of on sale items, you can prepare them ahead of time,all at once, thusly using your bulk purchases and not letting them go to waste.

7. Eat your leftovers for lunch or snacks, or have a leftover night for dinner.  Lunch is one meal that's not too planned around here. We do pack our Bento boxes for the kids for school and some days, I have to plan out a meal, but mostly, I just send them with leftovers now. Hubby and I also eat leftovers a lot of days. I'ts easier and cheaper to make a meal for 10 and just eat the leftovers than it is to plan 2 separate meals.

8. If  you must throw it out, put what you can in a compost pile. Even if you just compost for your flower bed, it used to be that humans would eat foods, of course, there were no processed foods then, just whole real food, and then wed toss that apple core or carrot top back onto the ground where it would decompose and put nutrients back into the soil. Now, we grow our foods on commercial lots that are so devoid of minerals and nutrients because they don't use compost, they use chemical fertilizers, and then we toss our "trash" into landfills where they don't do us any good. So see our post on composting if you need a place to start.

If we work hard enough we can reduce our waste, which is better for everyone, including your pocketbook!