Learn how to incorporate homesteading into your everyday life regardless of your living situation!
A few years ago, we decided we wanted to change our lifestyle. The grinding hustle and bustle of corporate desk jobs was wearing us down to our bones. Doing work we didn’t care for left us in a bad mood every night. All we wanted was to work on our own projects, become more active, eat healthier, and spend as much, if not more, time outside than inside. Our solution was to start saving and buy a homestead. However, buying a homestead property outright can be a huge financial investment that not everyone can afford. Even so, there are plenty of ways to incorporate homesteading skills and mindsets into your current living situation.
The hardest part of homesteading
Starting a homestead is a long journey that will include lots of setbacks. We’ve discovered that patience is probably the hardest part about homesteading because it is easy to become lost thinking about what you want to achieve or what you feel like you should have achieved already. For example, both of us keep fighting this feeling that we should be further along in our plans already or have something grander to show for our last few years of work. It is a mental trap we’ve seen many homesteaders fall into, especially in a digital age where you can see people with massive farms and well-established properties and routines. The best approach we have found is to limit our exposure to the Instagram-worthy homesteads and actively look for the small things to be proud of. Homesteading is as much about the journey as it is the destination.
The lesson we’ve spent the most time learning is that homesteading is not just the tangible things like gardens and chickens. More than anything, homesteading is a mindset, a lifestyle that is ever-evolving as we grow and learn.
Why we started homesteading
We started our homesteading journey all the way back when we addressed my wheat allergy for the first time. Gluten-free food was not easily accessible when I first reacted to wheat. Even now, gluten-free options are more widespread but many gluten-free items cost more than their traditional counterparts and are filled to the brim with added sugar and preservatives. Learning how to make our own bread was initially a cost choice, but we liked what we made and realized how easy it actually is to make pretty much anything by hand.
This was the first step for us because, while we still needed to buy ingredients at the store, we were learning skills and practices that increased our self-sufficiency. On top of learning more traditional skills for self-sufficiency, we also noticed that we had a bunch of plants growing in the house for primarily aesthetic purposes. We figured that if we could keep houseplants alive, we could also grow edible ones and possibly save ourselves some extra cash at the grocery store. Once we were able to buy our first home, we were able to expand and add chickens for eggs, rabbits for fiber, and so on and so forth.
All it took was a simple change in our mindset. We wanted to save some money and become more self-reliant. Your reasons and your approach are going to be unique, as they should be. All of the recipes and advice we share here is based on what has worked for us. If you take what we’ve said and use it in your life, wonderful! If you change it to make it work better for you, equally wonderful! And if there is something we suggest that just doesn’t work for you, you don’t have to take it with you, and that is also okay. You don’t have to do it all yourself to be a “true homesteader.” We would rather see you drop something that doesn’t benefit you than try to drag around weight that fights you at every step.
How to get started on homesteading
It can be a hard decision to commit to homesteading. Homesteading is so much more than gardens and chickens. It is a lifestyle, a mindset that you can embrace no mater your living situation. Homesteading’s greatest task is that you must be willing to change constantly. Plans don’t work out quite how you want them to, or your priorities change over time. But being willing to change and adapt is the biggest reason why we have gone from surviving every day to living and enjoying everything we do. With all that being said, here are some of the tips that have helped us continually make progress on our homesteading journey. We hope they can help you on your homesteading journey.
Know your goal
Your goals can and will change as you learn and grow. However, you need to at least know one goal before you can get started. Even if it is something simple like “I want to learn how to bake,” that can spiral into a million other branches, like how we took learning how to make bread and expanded by adding pizza, desserts, sourdough, and all of the other recipes we’ve shared so far. Setting a homesteading goal and making a plan to achieve it are some of the most important steps to getting yourself moving.
Schedule your time
Like we’ve said a few times in our posts, it can be hard to balance all of the things you need to do every day, especially when you add new practices into the lineup. Creating a set schedule for what we want/need to do every day has helped keep us accountable to ourselves. And life happens, so you may not get everything done that you wanted. Something might take longer (or shorter) than you anticipated, and you have to reorganize your schedule on the fly. But having something like the planner we use for our daily to yearly goals can make a world of difference between finishing some projects or not starting any at all. If you struggle with time management, feel free to check out our article on our Best Time Management Tips and Tricks.
Get started
It can be easy to be overwhelmed by everything that you want to accomplish, especially when starting a homestead. The list of things seems to be ever growing, while your free time is not. Don’t get paralyzed by this never-ending list of to-dos. If a task is too daunting, try breaking it into smaller pieces. The important thing is that you get started. And if you find yourself continuously putting a task off, figure out why that task isn’t appealing to you and how you can cut it from your list or make it more enjoyable.
Homesteading skills
So want to get into homesteading but aren’t sure where to start? Or don’t have the land but still want to incorporate homesteading into your everyday life? Here are our favorite ways to start a homesteading journey whether you’re in an apartment or on acres of land.
- Make bread (especially sourdough!)
- Make more from-scratch foods
- Start fermenting foods
- Learn food preservation techniques, such as canning and pickling
- Set up a compost bin
- Cook with cast iron over nonstick pans
- Set up a garden
- Learn basic herbalism
- Do more DIY projects
- Cook with more animal fats
- Learn how to identify local plant species
- Harvest rainwater
- Make your own household cleaners
- Line-dry your clothes
- Learn traditional skills like sewing
- Spend more time in and appreciating nature
- Forage wild mushrooms and plants
- Get chickens or rabbits (if you can)
- Start keeping bees
- Support local businesses(visit farmer’s markets or family-owned stores)
- Hunt and fish
- Reorganize your budget to figure out where you can reduce spending
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