Why We Are Choosing This And You Can Too!

I don’t know if you saw hubby’s last post, “Today, The Land Became Ours“, but after six long months, we finally closed on our land! Now that was a long lesson in patience. I just wanted to share that great news with you guys before getting on to the point of this post.

Okay, now that that’s over….Homesteading. That word means a lot of different things to different people. For some, when you say homesteading, you think of “Little House On The Prairie” living. Some think of “roughing it” – no modern conveniences like electricity or plumbing. Some think of it as a hobby more than a way of life – having a couple of chickens for entertainment (and eggs) and a small little garden to tend to and keep busy with. Some imagine vasts amounts of land, while some think of just a small patio off of their apartment living room door. Some think of it as a way to live more healthy, knowing what’s going into your body and where it came from.

For us, homesteading means finding ways to be more “Self-sufficient” in what we do. And self-sufficient is even a loaded word. Being that no one will ever be totally self-sufficient, for us it is trying to live a life where we learn to do as much as we can for ourselves, by ourselves. And we have been trying to do that right where we are – in a rented home, with an unfenced yard, in the middle of a subdivision, in a major city that is growing by the second.

Taking a look around us, we can see that things aren’t sustaining themselves like they used to. The economy – even though it’s being reported as being the best it has been in years – is not stable. Gas prices are steadily rising which in turn is making food prices rise. People are still losing jobs and with that their insurance. People are eating cheap or what they can afford in turn making themselves sick. It’s easy for my husband and I to see that at some point, with God’s help, we have to take control of as much as we can. So, we are setting out to learn to feed ourselves and learn skills that were once lost. And as we learn, we are bringing our kids along for the ride so that they will know these same skills and improve on them.

I remember when Antoine and I first got married. There was a huge ice storm that hit our area. It knocked out power for us for about a week. We were both in our early twenties – babies really. Stuck in our apartment, people were losing it after about day 2. But keeping a cool head, we drew upon the knowledge we had. Me being from the upper Midwest, I knew how to use snow to our advantage. We took all of the food out of the fridge and packed it on our patio and covered it with snow and ice. He being a “country boy” always kept tools and had and ax that he used to go into the woods and chop down old dead branches to drag back home for our fireplace (we were blessed to have a wood burning fireplace in our apartment!). No one had hot water, but thinking outside the box, we had a grill and charcoal, so we would heat up water while we cooked on the grill to take a warm “bath”. We survived.

Looking back makes me thankful that we still have the choice of using modern conveniences, but the question begs…what happens when you don’t? What happens when food prices get so high that you have to work all day just to buy a loaf of bread, or worse yet, they don’t take your hard earned money because our economic system crashes? What happens when you get sick and you can’t afford to go to the doctor? What happens when the electricity goes out, or a storm comes, or……you get the point. How will you react?

This post isn’t to scare you, but it’s to make you think. We’ve been lulled to sleep for so long in comfort that many of us wouldn’t know what to do or how to help ourselves if something “bad” should happen. I urge you, take some time to invest in yourself. You don’t have to have a full farm, but take a few classes on gardening. There’s free food all around us, learn to forage. Learn about camping and how to build a fire and shelter. Go fishing or hunting. Learn to make jam or can fruit. Learn to sew or take some self defense classes. Do things that can help you be more self-sufficient so that when things do go haywire, you will have a useful skill to help you through.

That’s all for today. Remember you don’t need acres to homestead. You just need a will to stay alive….

Take care,

Deidra