
Steps to start homesteading from an experienced grower - johnconner9067
https://worldwaterreserve.com/self-sufficiency/steps-to-start-homesteading/
======
swapsmagic
When we bought home, we got it with bunch of fruit tress (cherry, peach,
orange, strawberry guava, lemons). And our previous owner grow 3 tomato plants
for us before they left. It was a big yard with lot of fruit trees and plenty
of empty space. In few years, we started growing some vegetables starting
tomoato, okra, egg plant. And now in few more years we stop buying tomatos
from grocery. we build bunch of raised beds and started growing more and more
food and got bunch of okra and bottle guard. This year we build more raised
bed by replacing/transplanting existing flowering plants and put raised bed
there. And almost all the work done by us. You never believed but when you
cook food from home grown vegetables, it tastes a whole different than the
bought one. Give it a try and you can feel the difference. As long as you
enjoy doing it, you won't feel all the pain that it comes with (i.e. hard
work). Start small and as you go ahead, you will add more and more as you find
it more manageable. But worth trying as long as you have space in your home
(you will find time)

~~~
perl4ever
"You never believed but when you cook food from home grown vegetables, it
tastes a whole different than the bought one"

I was always aware that store bought tomatoes had no flavor, but never had any
interest in gardening. One time I took one of those store bought tomatoes and
planted the seeds and what do you know, it actually sprouted and grew some
more tomatoes? I don't think it's supposed to work that way, but it did. The
thing I remember that always grew without any effort was rhubarb.

~~~
el_benhameen
I think it's definitely supposed to work that way. My first year in my house,
I tore out the previous owner's rose garden and planted tomatoes. Had so many
that quite a few of them ended up falling off the plants and rotting into the
soil. The next year, I scaled my intentional planting back but ended up with
even more tomato plants because of the seeds from the previous year's decayed
tomatoes. I'm not even going to plant this year, just water and hope that the
same thing happens again.

~~~
retsibsi
I think they were surprised that store-bought tomatoes had viable seeds. I
would have been kind of surprised by this too, but a quick google suggests
that while some commercial fruit and veg is deliberately made sterile, it's
probably much less common than I thought.

~~~
ppf
The seeds might not be sterile, but you will probably not get the same breed
of plant. A lot of mass-produced veg is grown as an F1 hybrid, and the next
generation (ie, from the seeds) will not have the same desirable
characteristics.

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tmountain
I've been a hobbyist gardener for years with gardens at various scale. Some of
my better gardens have provided ample veggies for 2-3 households to share. My
very short list of recommendations for someone that wants to start providing
some of their own food would be. 1) Control your soil (airpots are awesome
BTW). 2) Practice consistent watering [same amount, same days, same time]
(basic drip irrigation is helpful here, airpots help here too). 3) Make sure
you're getting enough sunlight. Do these simple things, and you might be very
surprised by the results. Lastly, visit your garden often (looking for
problems), and make sure you are growing in-season for your zone.

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willvarfar
I am addicted to watching various self sufficiency and off grid living YouTube
channels eg Wild Wonderful Off Grid. It’s like all the videos on YouTube about
Tiny Homes, Treehouses and people living in stealth vans: totally absorbing.

But this article is an entirely different level of realism; this is talking
about actually doing it, and taking an attitude that seems quite different
from all those super great videos I mentioned.

~~~
taborj
One of the things that a lot of those videos don't convey very well is this
one, inescapable fact: homesteading is work. _Hard_ work at times. A lot of
videos romanticize it, but the fact is sometimes you're going to be tired and
sore and cold and wet and hot and sweaty, and sometimes all at once.

I think that's something that not a lot of people really appreciate, and the
linked article falls just short of touching on, which is a shame because
they're almost there. The first point of "grow something - anything" is good
advice, and it has the possibility of easing you into the physical labor part
of homesteading.

~~~
tomcam
Also a lot of the work is on its own schedule, not yours—esp. anything
involving animals.

~~~
taborj
Oh yes. You gotta get the animals fed and let out when they get up, 7 days a
week. And they get up when the sun gets up.

And that's why I built an esp8266-based automated chicken door.

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lulula
I find the homesteading lifestyle so unattractive from a non western
perspective. The image of the lone couple battling the elements and enduring
the herculean task to be self-sufficient... yikes!

Compare to the crop of Chinese youtube channels, like Lingzhi, Diaxi that show
village farm life. These are more attractive because it shows self-sufficiency
in the context of a larger village community. Everyone comes to help in the
harvest. Everyone comes to help to slaughter a pig. Everyone comes to preserve
the latest crop of fruit.

But these America homesteading channels... so dreary. You and you alone have
to work sun up and sun down, why? Where is the rural communal life?

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bosswipe
> and reduce their ecological impact

I wonder if this is true. Rural living is less efficient per capita then
cities. The distributed electricity and water and transportation are less
efficient and they have a physically larger impact on the environment. Even
the food they grow themselves requires a lot of external inputs which are
shipped in via far flung transportation networks and are used less efficiently
than they would be at a larger farm.

~~~
TopHand
I live on a ranch. We do not grow any crops, only beef. The surrounding area
is a combination of wheat farms and ranches. The reason the ranches aren't
wheat farms is because the terrain is just to rugged for productive wheat
farming. I can't really speak to the total efficiency but the electrical
distribution is very similar to what you have in the city. In fact we export
electricity to other states. Water comes from a well and the sewer is a septic
tank. That means that the water we use is returned to the water table minus
evaporation. I imagine each bovine exported off the property represents some
amount of water. Small outfits deal with what is called a co-op to offset the
problems of purchasing small quantities of external inputs. This helps us stay
somewhat competitive with the large corporate run farms and ranches. Because
we work on the place we live, we do not have to drive long distances to work,
saving fuel that way. My particular house uses a Ground Source Heat Pump for
heating in the winter. In the summer we leave the windows open all night and
the house gets down into the low 60's (F). We close the windows as soon as we
get up and close the shades on the side of the house the sun is on depending
on the time of day. I imagine though I can't really state it as fact, our
place is more efficient than the typical mcmansion you see in the cities these
days.

~~~
rriepe
> I imagine each bovine exported off the property represents some amount of
> water.

A cow contains 100 to 200 gallons of water, by my estimate.

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JshWright
Our suburban lot isn't well suited to growing much (it's in a wooded area, and
the areas that are open are very shaded). I do, however, have a dozen maple
trees on my lot (and a dozen more on an adjacent empty lot), and produce
several gallons of maple syrup every spring.

It's a ton of work... By the end of March my arms are in the best shape
they'll be all year (from hauling 5 gallon buckets of sap and splitting a
couple cords of wood). It's also definitely not worth the time I put into it,
from a financial perspective. I could earn enough money in an hour or two to
buy my annual production.

It sure is tasty though...

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QuinnWilton
There's a neat Elixir startup that develops a CNC-controlled farming robot.
They provide an app for planning your garden, and then it waters everything
for you, calculates yield, and manages sensors for moisture and temperature.

I'm probably not doing the project justice with this description, because
they've put together a really cool platform:
[https://farm.bot/](https://farm.bot/)

A lot of their code is open-source too. They've been really huge drivers for
the Nerves project: [https://github.com/FarmBot](https://github.com/FarmBot)

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eindiran
If there are any folks that have tried homesteading, can you share your
experience? Specifically, I would like to know what your starting conditions
were and how successful you felt you were.

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0000011111
I searched the article for the two works, "Hard Work"

These two words are not included in the article.

I grew up on a ranch-style property with homestead type parents. It was a
great experience that involved an endless amount of physical labor.

Some examples; 1\. Every morning before school, feeding the horses and in the
winter checking their water for ice. 2\. Every day after school. Feeding the
horses again. 3\. Weekly shoveling of horse shit, into a manure spreader. The
spreading it in the fields. 4\. Lots of work on small engines that break in
the winter the Colorado winter in a cold barn. 5\. In the fall if we were
lucky we would kill an Ekl. This required lots of walking around the mountains
off-trail looking for an animal. Once found and killed the grueling work of
and caring the meat to a vehicle on a road system. Then hours of butchering.
Then more hours of hyde tanning. 6\. Winter storms can be powerful enough to
rip the tin right off the roof of a hay barn. After the storm, the tins got to
be put back on. More hard work. Plowing snow is less physical but still works.
7\. Spring is calving season, a calf may be born in the middle of the night.
So you may be up all night supporting the birth. Then haft to go to school the
next day and try learning while sleep-deprived. 8\. Summer is hay season, you
might get two crops if you're lucky. There is always stress around the harvest
time. It rains in the afternoons in the summer. And wet hay can not be bailed.
If it rains after the hay is bailed and before it is bucked into a barn the
bails must be dried. I remember being about 8 years old. So small I could not
lift a bale. Me and my two brothers were sent into a 300-acre field to rotate
hundreds of wet hay bails. So that they would be dry before we loaded them
into the truck. It was exhausting. A few years later, when I was strong enough
to lift a bail of hay. We would spend a few days lifting bails onto a flatbed
trailer and then lift and stacking bails into a hay barn. It is amazing how
nice cold glass of water taste after moving hay bails all day. 9\. I need to
get back to work. So I will end with one last note on the work of
homesteading; filling a pantry with canned goods for the winter is another
major project which takes hours and hours of work 10\. Damn my tech job is so
fucking easy compared to the work I did on my parents homestead growing up.
11\. Ok, one more: cutting and chopping wood for heating it the winter. We
would need between 5 and 7 cords for the house depending on the winter. My Dad
found a way to make sure this process was always grueling as I grew up and
learned to take on more and more of it. That said, coming home from high
school and splinting wood for 20min to keep the house heated for the night was
relaxing after a day in class. I guess by the time I was ~15 my body had
adjusted to the physical demands of my parent's homestead.

My 2 cents ~ 01

~~~
hash872
This. My father also has a farm, and I did a ton of manual labor until my
mid-20s. It has zero romantic appeal to me, and I'm always amused by office
workers that idealize rural living. For one thing, manual labor is incredibly
mindless and repetitive. I am now a very comfortable urban dweller, and happy
to not even have to shovel my front walk. I miss absolutely none of this
lifestyle.

On the political front, I find idealizing farmers obnoxious because it's
mostly a taxpayer-subsidized existence for extremely dubious reasons

~~~
bingerman
There is not too much common with having a farm and having a homestead except
(in most cases) rurality. To support your homestead financially you can be a
farmer but you can be a software engineer too like I am. Farming is commercial
activity to produce maximum amounts of "stuff" to sell others. Our
homesteading usually produces some extra veggies too, but we share them with
neighbours.

Nowadays a lot of the most boring and repetitive stuff can be optimised even
in commercial farming. Chopping wood (and felling the trees with a chainsaw!)
for the whole year, for example, takes less than a week of combined relatively
relaxed and certainly not mindnumbing labor with modern tools. Personally I
just often use an axe anyway since it gives a superb workout and I like it (I
grew up in a farm so it has no novelty value for me).

Doing a lot of various small tasks that itself are boring and mindless when
done commercially is really the best lifestyle I know. Of course, your idea of
perfect life is allowed to be different.

There are homesteading purists who refuse to use even tractors and that stuff
includes a lot more hard labour with little results. Oil has really changed
the game and running a homestead doesn't have to be from zero to completely
self sufficient in a year sort of thing. Especially those who haven't grown up
in a farm (or homestead) need to start slowly to see if the reality of
homesteading is what they really are after.

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rdtwo
Nobody mentions the serious vacuum of useful information when it comes to
small fruit and vegetable gardens and homestead. Thousands of websites but
most lack useful info. Managing soil, pests and irrigation is really hard in
mixed planting beds because you need a bunch of different chemicals for all
the different pests and problems, also one screwup and you are done for the
season try again in the fall or next year so learning is slow

~~~
swapsmagic
it's not that difficult and no need to use pestisides. As long as you grew
healthy plant in good soil, they can resist pests. And yes, some times you do
get failure, but if you grow enough stuff, some failures won't be noticable
given you have other stuff growing. And gardening is also a skill, the more
you do, the better you get at it.

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mgarfias
I wonder how she'd feel if she knew the stuff I was making were guns, ammo,
and puppies.

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holri
An alternative is CSA: Community Supported Agriculture. The power of
cooperation comes into play, and if you are not interesting in gardening you
can bring in other useful interests / resources.

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richard78459
This is important now more than ever as we are at the mercy of external
factors in getting infected by corona virus.

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reggieband
> Kara Stiff holds a BS in Sustainable Agriculture from the University of
> Maine.

I'm sure that education helps quite a lot.

I would love to have a small homestead (e.g. 1 acre) and I am currently in the
process of finding a property to buy. I have been looking for about 6 months
now for an appropriate place and it is quite difficult. Perhaps it is just the
region I live in but the prices are ridiculous and the majority (like 99%) of
available residential real-estate properties are cookie-cutter suburban homes
embedded within suburban sprawl. The modern world is just not developed around
the idea of people having gardens and chickens.

When I started looking I naively assumed I could find a rural property with
high-speed internet within proximity of a small town. I even have extremely
low expectations on the quality of the house and would take a quarter acre lot
with a home built in the 1960's. I've been out to see probably 50 properties
with my agent and it is like a non-stop crushing disappointment.

Still, the dream of living on my own quarter acre and working remotely is
worth the effort. I just feel like the article glosses over the first hurdle:
finding an appropriate property within a like-minded community. Depending on
where you plan to live that could be significantly more difficult than you
expect.

~~~
markdown
> I would love to have a small homestead (e.g. 1 acre)

> Still, the dream of living on my own quarter acre and working remotely is
> worth the effort

That's just a house in a residential subdivision. A homestead should be at
least 5-10 acres at a minimum IMO.

~~~
JshWright
Where are you living that subdivision lots are 1 acre? Even a half acre would
be a very large lot around here (in central New York).

You can do a whole lot on an acre of land. You may not support a family of
twelve and twenty head of cattle, but you could produce a pretty significant
amount of food.

~~~
rootusrootus
I read it differently. They said a quarter acre was a subdivision size lot.
That does sound about right.

