Thinking and cooking like a homesteader necessarily mean you're going to have to shop like one, too. Shopping like a homesteader means different things to different people, but here's what it means to me.
Shopping like a homesteader means being frugal, buying used whenever possible, and being careful to produce more rather than consume more. For many, it also means getting out of all debt as fast as possible, which honestly makes a whole lot of sense, especially these days, but that isn't always possible for everyone, what with a pandemic still raging and job pay still staying too low. So, while putting every dime you have into paying off all debt is a good plan, it makes sense to start by being frugal, buying used, and balancing production vs consumption. We live in a consumerist-based society, one in which we are constantly told to buy more and more and more. Even good homesteading influencers who make great videos and blogs on how to do this or that have gotten in on the act, telling us to buy freeze dryers, seeds from only this one supplier, and this or that special tool with their coupon code. We use the codes and think that we're helping them and saving money at the same time, but here's the thing: we still spent money, possibly money we didn't really have to spend. Being frugal isn't just about not spending. It's about spending only when you have to and being smart about it. My husband and I use Trello, a free app, to share shopping lists. I have a list for every store and place we buy from on there, and we add things we need or could use to the list as a to-do list so we can check things off or uncheck them as needed. Doing it this way means we both have access to all the shopping lists in case we have a chance to stop by or one of us thinks of something the other forgot, but it also means we end up talking about what we need vs what we want, usually during our weekly staff meetings. Do we really need more of that thing from the grocery store? Did we use it up in time? How much is that thing? Do we really need it, or can we make do without it? Even smaller purchases get talked about so as to keep a close eye on our spending. I've been able to cut down quite a bit on what we spend at the grocery store, not just by focusing on using up what we preserved last year, but also by meal planning by the month and then making sure to use up leftovers faster. We still get too much takeout for our liking, so that's the next part to work on, but planning out meals, only buying what we need for those meals in addition to what I already have in the pantry, and replacing what we've used up has taken a lot out of the frivolous food budget. You know the kind I'm talking about: the extra that we always end up buying every time we go to the grocery store. Oh, this thing is on sale that I didn't know about, they finally have that back in stock, or I'm hungry and that sounds amazing right this second. That stuff. It's hard to be frugal without a strict list, and it's even harder if you shop when hungry. With food prices skyrocketing, we just cannot afford too many or any of those extra purchases, not at the grocery store, not at the plant nursery, not at the farm store. My husband is the king of buying used stuff or getting stuff for free. He searches the FB Marketplace groups for things we need or could use, and it's amazing how often he finds things for a fraction of their price new. He and I love to hit estate sales and thrift shops with our lists, and honestly, that's where most of what I use every day has come from. Estate sales have great garden tools that just need a bit of cleaning up for a tenth or less of the tool's cost new. Thrift stores have good clothes, especially farm clothes that will get ripped and stained fast, for cheap, especially on sales days. FB Marketplace often has important things we need pop up, like the honey extractor my husband surprised me with this week for less than half of the cost new or even the cost to make our own. Honestly, it just doesn't make sense to us to buy new for many things these days, so we keep lists going for that, too. Last week, a young dad posted online that he and his young family had just moved to the area and that he didn't know what to do with all the cardboard from the boxes and all. I swooped in and took that for weed barriers in my garden, but a gal who had a compost sifter for a few dollars I was getting that same day was selling it because she was moving. She ended up taking some of what the dad had given me, as she needed it for packing more than I needed it for anything. I ended up getting needed stuff for my garden, she got what she needed for moving, and that young family got to get rid of a mess of packing stuff without having to worry more about it and even got to connect with their new community a bit. This kind of thing happens to us all the time. Robert will get something for free by the side of the road, and then it turns out someone in a free group needs that exact thing and will trade something that is on our list, or he is able to help a single parent out with this cheap part he was able to take off of something else, and it all works out in the end. There's no reason to spend tons of money on new stuff when so many Americans just throw fairly new stuff out all the time. In the end, though, it's about producing more than we consume, which is directly against what our society tells us to do every day on social media, in the regular media and ads everywhere, even in our movies and music. We're homesteaders, though, so it's about balance. We rarely shop for fun, and if we do, it's at a thrift store or the local estate sale outlet with a top budget already planned out. We focus more on getting the garden ready and in, making stuff as our hobbies, and fixing up what we can. If I get yarn from someone downsizing on FB for half or less what it would cost new and then knit up a sweater from that, I have made something with love and had many hours of enjoyment. If my husband gets a beater car and figures out that it only needs a couple of cheap parts to then pass it along to a family member at a price they can afford, he's had hours of enjoyment and saved them money, often money they didn't really have for the new car they needed. If I can make a pie or something for a friend, rather than buy something at a big store, or if he can pass along something he found for cheap that his parents suddenly found themselves needing, we're keeping more stuff out of landfills, saving money, and producing more than we consume. This is, ultimately, what homesteading is really about: making do with what we have, growing and raising as much of our food as possible, focusing on producing more than consuming.
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I am taking a short break from writing about living like a homesteader for a quick update on diet issues and things I've learned in living with my leaky gut diagnosis. The next blog post about living like a homesteader should be out later this week.
Last January, I was diagnosed by one of my doctors at the Cleveland Clinic with leaky gut, adding yet another diagnosis to my rather long list. Honestly, I'd been wondering if that were an issue, but none of my other doctors seemed to know or know what to recommend, not even the GI doctor I saw a few years back when I had six months of serious GI issues that turned out to be a serious intolerance to soy. My Cleveland Clinic doctor made it clear that he isn't sure exactly where the imbalance is, but he said that, in the end, the treatment is the same. He is convinced that my gut issues are adding to a too-high inflammation level, and when inflammation levels are high, autoimmune diseases go a bit haywire. So, his theory goes, if we can heal up my gut and lower that source of inflammation, it should help me with the rest of my health problems. Anyway, several of my diagnoses are autoimmune or likely to be autoimmune, and I've been getting worse for years, little by little. I've tried all the things my doctors have recommended, from giving up gluten to doing yoga, from physical therapy to CBT therapy, a pain management program, and so much more. I have odd genes, so I don't metabolize many medications right, and it's gotten to the point that I really can't take much for my chronic pain or other symptoms. So many of their treatment ideas didn't work or, in all honesty, made me worse. Finally, my pain specialist sent me to the Integrative Medicine clinic at the Cleveland Clinic, and my doctor there decided I likely have leaky gut of some kind and that it would be best to just treat it simply with supplements and a diet change since my body is so sensitive to everything. For the first time in ages and ages, I got a little bit better when following his treatment plan. Last week, I was bad and ate stuff he told me not to (in my defense, my pain was bad, so I wasn't cooking, and I just ended up eating takeout that I shouldn't have), and boy, have I been paying for that. Cramping and more, so very not fun at all. I saw him today, and he recommended adding a couple of things to my treatment plan to see if they help, and given that he's the first doctor in years to help me at all, I'm going to follow his advice. In March, I even let my specialists know that I'm taking a year off from their treatment plans that aren't working and just following this one to see how much I can improve. Oddly enough, in researching his treatment plan and all (like I do with everything my doctors tell me), I ran into the book Nourishing Traditions by Sarah Fallon Morell. I ended up getting it from the library and liked it so much that I bought a used copy off Amazon. Almost everything she recommends in the book is what my doctor told me to do, so I'm working my way through reading the book and getting ideas for what to add to my cooking and food prep routines. Basically, my treatment plan is the following:
So, I'm working on getting back on track with the diet part of the treatment plan, and the book Nourishing Traditions, though a bit political in some areas, is really helping. The goat's milk kefir that I made is amazing in the homemade ranch dressing I make, and I'm trying yogurt with it next. She has so many good-sounding recipes in this book, all of which are safe for me to try, and I can't help but think it's a good place to start for me. The Nourishing Traditions diet basically boils down to fermented food regularly, natural oils and fats with animal fats getting priority, good free-range protein sources, little sugar and refined carbs, and lots of fresh and raw fruits and vegetables. From what I read about SIBO and dysbiosis, all of that is right on track for helping my gut heal up and reduce my inflammation load. The author uses research from the early 1900s on different traditional diets and how people who followed them were healthier than people who'd moved from those villages to the cities and started eating a more processed diet, and the research, especially when combined with more recent research is quite compelling. It's hard for me not to think of this as simply a homestead diet. We grow and raise a good bit of our own food, and when I eat food we've put up, I do feel better (which I'd honestly just thought was placebo effect or something). In reading this book and talking with my doctor, I think it might be more than that. So, to this end, we're expanding our gardens a bit this year (if it ever warms up enough to plant!), raising more muscovy ducks for meat, and doing what we can to follow this diet. Fresh fruits and veggies, better quality meats, more fermented foods, and a lot less processed everything--if this helps, it's worth giving up the fast food and all. I'm so very tired of being tired and in such severe pain. **This is part of a series on the mindset and skills needed for living like a homesteader. Here is the link to the first blog post in the series.**
Much of what we do in homesteading revolves around food. If you think about it, much of what we do outside of our working hours revolves around food, regardless of whether we're living the homesteading lifestyle or not, from figuring out what to eat to going to the store to doing the dishes and dealing with leftovers to cleaning out fridges and freezers to repeating it all over again. Food is a primary need for humans, so a lot of what we do surrounds food. When it comes to living a more homestead-based lifestyle, food becomes an even bigger chore. Homesteaders try to grow and/or raise at least some of our food, and we try to find the rest on sale at local stores or get it from other local homesteaders and farmers. Sometimes, it feels like this is all we do and that it's the only important part of the lifestyle. Broadly, very generally speaking, most homesteaders do more cooking at home than we get takeout or eat in restaurants. Part of that is simply due to how much garden produce we have. It's hard to justify getting takeout when you have a whole basket of goodies picked just that day from your own garden. It's even harder when you have eggs and/or meat that you raised on your homestead in addition to fresh veggies and fruit. All that good, homegrown, fresh food is just going to spoil if not eaten or preserved quickly, so you might as well cook something up and make your own meal. So, how do you make your own meals from that food or foods you've purchased locally? There are a few key rules to always keep in the front of your mind:
Cooking like a homesteader, in the end, means thinking it through ahead of time and then cooking what's ready and available, planning it out as best you can, having the right ingredients and tools at the ready, and then having fun with it. For example, we raise our own ducks for eggs, meat, and pest control. After getting them back from the butcher, I usually can several of them up. That shelf-stable meat and bone broth can be made quickly, especially after adding in whatever else I have on hand, into a soup or stew. Throw in enough herbs and spices to make it sing and have some homemade sourdough bread on the side, and it's a nutritious meal we can eat for a couple of days. Once we get a little tired of that, then I take what's left, add in more broth or veggies if needed, and then thicken it up. Pour that into a casserole dish and top with drop biscuits, and I have a casserole that's just different enough that we can eat it for another day or two (or freeze those leftovers for nights no one feels like cooking). Or, I can thicken it up and make pot pie or add in another jar of meat and make pasties. Take spaghetti. Make a solid sauce, and that's a base that can be used to make spaghetti one night, American goulash the next, and then a baked pasta with zucchini after that (that can go in the freezer, always handy). The main ingredients for spaghetti grow in most gardens: tomatoes, onions, garlic, basil, oregano. Add in some shredded carrots and zucchini to make it a veggie marinara, and it's a very useful base for many meals. There's a reason so many homesteaders can up jar after jar of homemade spaghetti sauce. Same goes for many, many meal options. That roasted chicken can be turned into bone broth for soup, a chicken casserole, stir fry or fried rice, or the filling for a pot pie or pasty. That jar of salsa can be the cornerstone of so many dishes, from chilaquiles to enchiladas to tacos. Most dinners can be stretched by adding more vegetables, let alone adding more side dishes like our foremothers used to do, and then, anything left over is good for lunch the next day or dinner the next night. Remember: it takes time to change thinking and behavior patterns, so don't expect to be a perfect homesteader in the kitchen right away. I can't even say how much food waste I've pitched into our compost bin, having forgotten about it or finally admitted no one liked what I made. I mollify myself by remembering that the food waste of today is tomorrow's garden soil so I can grow more veggies to try again with next year. I'm still learning how to be more efficient in the kitchen and how to better use what we grow and raise. So, why not take that step into the kitchen, take a good look around to see what you have and what you need still, and then take a leap? **This is the first in a series I'm working on about some basic skills and thinking patterns. Subsequent posts will cover shopping like a homesteader, cooking like a homesteader, and more.**
One of the things I’ve been pondering ever since watching a YouTube video on the My Self Reliance channel is the idea that we homesteaders, farmsteaders types think differently than mainstream Americans. Shawn James talks about how to prepare and all, but what he’s really describing is a different mode of thinking altogether. I’ve been doing this for so long, having been raised this way by my mom and stepmom, that it sometimes surprises me that everyone doesn’t think like this. I will admit that it is even one of the things that attracted me to my husband, as Robert thinks like a homesteader, too, and has all kinds of skills to keep things here on our farmstead going. Now, I’m not saying that everyone in the homesteading lifestyle thinks exactly the same or does all of this deliberately, but it does seem to be the basis of how we all end up here, up to our eyeballs in tomatoes and eggs as well as searching for more canning lids in the stores and cast iron pans at estate sales. In the end, we all worry about having enough healthy food on hand, how to handle too much stuff (waste and otherwise), and how to survive without going to the stores or Amazon every other day. This starts us thinking about where our food comes from and how to grow more of our own, gets us thinking about chickens or ducks and then what to do with all that waste, gets us thinking about meal planning and bulk food storage and more. Thinking like a homesteader means thinking in terms of sustainability, long-term planning, and reducing waste and costs. Sustainability just means that it can be done repeatedly without serious damage or cost to you, your family or community, or the environment. This can look like reducing what you buy so as to reduce the costs (making the costs to the budget sustainable) and the waste (making the environmental costs more sustainable), growing and raising as much of your food as possible, mending and fixing broken items instead of buying new, and getting out of debt as soon as possible. A lot of homesteaders on social media make videos and posts about exactly this issue: how can we survive without buying stuff made from far away, without tons of pre-packaged junk food in our pantries, without constantly buying more and more stuff? How can we live a more sustainable life and help out the environment? How can we get healthier and afford good, healthy food for us and our families? Thinking about sustainability is the first step for most of us, I think. Trying to live a more sustainable life means you have to do more planning. You have to plan out a garden before actually planting anything because you need to know how many plants to get and where to put them. You have to plan out a pantry because you need room for those items you buy in bulk or on sale, let alone any foods you preserve from your homestead. Financial planning is a part of this, too, if just to get out of the consumer and student debt that many Americans are drowning in. It isn’t sustainable to carry loads of debt that keep you from buying something needed for your family, and it isn’t sustainable to have no plan for retirement or ending up disabled like me. Planning becomes part of regular life after awhile, planning out the homestead year, planning out storage spaces, planning for new ducklings, and more. Reducing waste is a huge part of sustainability. When we started composting more seriously, especially when we switched to the Bokashi method, our home waste went down massively. We didn’t need the yard waste container anymore since all of that was ending up on the garden. We often really only fill our trash container every other week, and sometimes, not even then. We put out less for recycling, too, because so much of that ends up being used for the garden, and for plastic and glass, we often find ways to reuse it first. We can’t reduce the duck waste, but we do put it to good use on the garden and get much better yields because of it. Putting out tons of trash and recycling week after week just isn’t very sustainable in the long run–there just isn’t enough room on this planet for all the landfills we would need two and three generations from now. So, it feels a bit weird to say this, but we homesteaders think about sustainability more than anything else. We are thinking about our food sources, planning out as much as we can, making sure we are ready for anything, and trying to cut down on our waste as much as possible. When I read that most Americans don’t have more than three days’ worth of meals in their homes at any given time, I cannot wrap my head around that. I was raised to make sure that we had enough in case of long-term power outage, which to be fair, happened a lot when I was a kid in rural Michigan. Homesteaders plan for power outages, emergencies, and higher food costs at the store, and that helps keep our homes running more efficiency and sustainably. Are we preppers? Sort of. We need to be prepared for gardening season, and we need to be prepared in an emergency to take care of our families and animals, but most homesteaders are more focused on sustainability and planning for probable outcomes than we are worried about some zombie apocalypse. It’s more about sustainability than it is about worst case scenarios taking up all our thinking space. In the end, thinking like a homesteader means thinking about what you and your loved ones need, planning for that, making it happen, and also figuring out how to cut down waste. That this usually ends up meaning big gardens, lots of birds and other farm animals, canning and putting up food, and worrying about how to get out of debt sooner rather than later is just a side effect of thinking like a homesteader. How do you think like a homesteader? Our weatherman is calling it "second winter" since we got to seventy degrees just days before this happened. Now we are in a cold front that's sticking around with snow, but it might warm up a bit more soon.
The garlic is starting to come up, as is the rhubarb. I saw a tulip starting to peek through this morning, too, so spring is coming. That means garden beds prep more than anything else right now, and seed starting, which I'm seriously behind on. It also means ducklings, and we will likely be getting some late this week, so we need the brooder up and ready. Spring is the start to the homestead season where everything speeds up and you can't keep up with all the work. I can't, at least. This is also usually when I start getting grumpy at being as disabled as I am and my chronic pain that makes me stop and rest when there's still so very much to do. So, my goal is to get caught up this week on seed starting, get set for ducklings, and get the garden beds further along and ready for planting. Potatoes and onions go in the ground in two weeks, which isn't much time. What are you working on for spring? This year has been a weird one for maple syrup. It got too hot too quickly, we got inundated with sap only to have both ways to do the first boil fail on us in ways we hadn't planned for (thought one backup was good enough, and it wasn't), and now we're getting to the end of the sap season (seeing the quality change like it does when it's too warm for too long). All I've finished so far is this: 2 quarts and a pint. We have 20 gallons of sap still to boil down and maybe a bit more from one or two trees, but I don't see us getting as much as last year or as much as we'd hoped for.
This is just what happens in homesteading, let alone when homesteading while disabled. Today, my fibromyalgia and FND have been hitting hard, so the idea of boiling down all that sap in the rain (the reason why I hurt and my tremors are bad today) is not a good one. This might be all the syrup we get this year, and if that's the case, we will have to buy more locally (we use over a gallon a year, and I wanted to make maple sugar, too) like we used to. Oh well, that's just the way it goes sometimes. This batch is extra good, though, with a buttery finish that is quite tasty. We're very happy with it and will try to get one more batch boiled up tomorrow and see what happens. If it's not clear from the name of our site, I'm disabled. In dealing with my health crap, I've been bounced around from specialist to specialist, clinic to clinic for years. Honestly, it's all been a lot to manage, but worse, I've been hearing the same answers from medical provider after provider: therapy, physical therapy, mindfulness, and oh well, there's nothing more we can do for you. I've been in therapy for many years, starting before the worst of these symptoms started, so while it's a great help and still needed, that's obviously not the answer. Physical therapy almost always puts me in a flare and increases my pain levels long after they finally admit that it's not working. Mindfulness is something I've practiced for years and continue to work on, but again, if it were the answer, I wouldn't have all the health stuff going on that I do. As for not being able to do anything more for me, it's a frustrating answer I've heard so very many times over the years that it's not even a surprise anymore.
Until this January when I saw Dr. Umeda at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Integrative Medicine. He was the first doctor in forever who actually had read my chart before I walked in, and he had a theory I'd asked others about only to be dismissed: leaky gut. It's his theory that, while the leaky gut is not the cause of all my health problems, it's a confounding factor. Many of my conditions seem to be very sensitive to inflammation levels, which have been increasing over time according to my blood work. If treating the leaky gut lowers my overall inflammation levels, then it would, by extension, help my other conditions as well. It wouldn't stop me from being disabled, but hopefully, it would help me get back to where I was a few years ago in terms of overall pain levels and energy. So, I decided to try his treatment plan, and for the first time in years, I've had a little bit of improvement. One of the supplements he told me to try, rhodiola root powder, has turned down my daily headache so much that I can basically ignore it. It's frankly amazing. Nothing had worked on that headache, other than more Pepsi than was healthy for me and even then, it didn't work as well as this has. It's even increased my daily energy level a bit, and with a farmstead to keep going and a teen at home to help raise, I need all the energy I can get. For the leaky gut, Dr. Umeda told me to do the following:
I've added in collagen powder in my daily oatmeal breakfast (something I'd started before seeing Dr. Umeda) and up to a half a cup of a live cultured food (my homemade sauerkraut, yogurt, goats milk kefir, etc.). I added those in after seeing them recommended in so many books and websites, and they really do seem to help some. We are also using more traditional fats (rendered pork fat, avocado oil, coconut oil, olive oil, butter, duck fat), and I think that's helping, too. The big thing is to avoid processed food and the standard American diet, and when we do, when we make our own, my husband and I both feel better. One of the books that has been helping me on this new journey is the Nourishing Traditions cookbook. Now, I'm no fan of everything she has written, but Sally Fallon was on to something back in 1999. The way she describes a traditional diet in many different cultural groups, using the research by Weston Price from the early 1900s, just sounds like a farmstead diet to me and a whole lot like the diets that are recommended for leaky gut, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), and dysbiosis. The more I read and think through the recommendations in that book, the more I realize this is where Robert and I have been headed for years. More vegetables and fruits, better proteins, less dairy and sugar, more cultured foods. We grow, raise, and make a lot of that food, and if just eating more off our farmstead will make us healthier, then that's all for the good. This year, our goal is to raise many more meat ducks than we have before, mostly in response to really high meat prices. That said, it's a really healthy meat, as is the fat, and I need the bone broth to drink daily. Those ducks forage our property (that's all organic) and eat out of our organic garden. That makes for healthier eggs and fat, too. We've been expanding the garden little by little every year, and we need to eat more vegetables daily, especially fermented ones. The goal this year is to eat more fresh foods out of the garden first while in season, then preserve. When I started down this serious farmstead path, I got it in my head that I am growing all this food to preserve, but this year, I want to make sure we eat more of the vegetables and fruits in season first, then preserve and ferment after that. I think we can definitely do that. One of the dietary rules I have read somewhere while trying to learn all I can about leaky gut was to have half the plate vegetables, one quarter starch, and one quarter protein. We have been moving towards that more and more every year, and we have some plans to make this even more accessible now that spring is around the corner, which means more work taking more out of us by the time dinner comes around. It will be much easier once the garden is producing, but we still have some frozen and canned vegetables from last year to get us by. Another dietary rule I often see mentioned is to eat the rainbow: try to have as many different colors on your plate as possible. This is easier with salads, casseroles, and soups, to be honest, but it is a rule I try to take into account when making dinner. So, our farmstead diet that we will be following this year consists of these basic rules:
One of the reasons many homesteaders give for why we do what we do is to save money. Growing our own food saves us money. Cooking our own food more than we eat out saves us money, as does fixing up everything on our own as best we can. Raising animals for food also saves us money. This is what I hear over and over again, and honestly, I believe it.
Here's the problem: it doesn't always actually save us money. In fact, homesteading can be really expensive as a lifestyle, especially in the first couple of years. The up-front costs, even if you buy used or get free stuff as much as possible, can be quite high depending on the project and exactly how you do it. People laugh about the $50 tomato, but to be completely honest, that can be the case. It's about economy of scale. If you spend $50 on gardening supplies and only get one good tomato, then that tomato cost you $50. If you spend $50 on gardening supplies and get 2 bushels of tomatoes and a bunch of other veggies, then the price per vegetable is a lot lower. The problem with homesteading is that there is a limit to how much we can scale up production of any one thing we do. We might only have room for one pig, not the five or more it would take to make money, for example, and that goes for chickens, ducks, and vegetables, too. The first year or two of any project on the homestead means you need new tools, new materials, and stuff to replace what you thought would work and didn't. The initial costs can be quite high, though those costs go down as the years go on. For example, in rough numbers, it costs us about $3.50 a month to raise each duck and goose. This includes food, bedding, treats, medicines, and water (we're on city water and don't have our rainwater collection system up and running just yet). From our core flock of hens, we get about 1-2 dozen eggs every month. Therefore, each dozen, roughly, costs us about $3.50, half that from our heavier layers. Part of why the cost is lower, though, is that we have more ducks than we did when we started. Yes, we have to buy more food, especially during the winter, but in the end, it's still about the same amount of bedding, treats, and medicine. Meat ducks cost us a bit more, mostly due to the vitamin supplement that we have to put in their water when they're ducklings. By the time we raise them and get them to our butcher (who, due to economy of scale, can do it more cheaply per duck than we can here at home), those ducks will cost us this year with higher feed costs about $20 each (on the high end--I'm rounding up a bit, expecting feed costs to continue to rise). Ducks to buy in the store cost $25 each in our area, so if we compare like to like, we are saving money. But would I buy those $25 ducks in the store? Likely not. I'd buy the chicken that costs half that, less if it's on sale. So, are we saving money really? We still think we are due to two reasons: 1) ducks also provide great pest control and manure for the garden, increasing yields there, and 2) Muscovy ducks taste more like beef and so really are more of a replacement for that in our diet. Ducks, and all domesticated farm animals, are multipurpose animals on the homestead. They provide eggs, meat, manure for the garden, and pest control. The extra eggs we can sell for $4 a dozen, cheaper than they go for in the local stores, and they are a premium source of protein and vitamin B12, not to mention other benefits. I have found that I do better if I eat duck eggs regularly, and that's critical for my health. Add in the garden benefits, and it's worth keeping the ducks around for $3.50 a month each. As for meat ducks, we have found that we tend to use the meat more like beef instead of chicken, and duck meat (whatever breed) is far better for us than beef. Higher in omega 3 fats, lower in bad fats, still high in proteins and more, it's a very healthy meat, especially Muscovy duck. Now, with Muscovy ducks, I get about 4+ pounds of meat per bird, making for 4 pints and therefore four meals per bird, plus the bone broth I have to drink daily. So, roughly, they cost us about $5/pound of meat. In our area, most beef is going for more than $5 a pound, even at the cheaper stores, and that beef was not raised anywhere near as well or healthfully as our ducks. Compare that Muscovy meat to free range beef, and the cost savings is substantial. But is it really cheaper? No. I can get chicken or pork on sale for $2/pound, and I can get chicken eggs for less than a dollar a dozen in some stores. If I wanted to go with the cheapest option, it would not be raising our own ducks, even taking their garden benefits into account. Those aren't exactly a fair comparison, though, given the quality of the eggs and meat are nowhere near the same, but purely on a cost basis, it is not cheaper to raise our own than to buy the cheapest eggs and meat in the stores. Next, let's look at the garden. Now, my garden is not the biggest, only 690 square feet for the back garden with the other beds only adding another 300 square feet or so. This year, like last year, I'm on track to spend about $250 all told on the garden. For that money, I grow all the summer and winter squash, garlic, culinary herbs, green beans, tomatoes, hot peppers, kohlrabi, cucumbers, kale, daikon radish, collards, and dried beans we will eat for a year; in addition, I will grow some or most of the onions, potatoes, lettuce, cabbage, carrots, and broccoli we will eat in a year. Adding all that up, keeping higher food prices in mind, it saves money but probably not as much as I'd like. I still often end up needing to buy apples and other local tree fruits, a few cabbages for coleslaw and sauerkraut, onions and potatoes to get us through, and sweet corn because, no matter what I try, I can't get it to grow well here. It would cost more to buy locally grown, organic produce and then preserve it myself, but it likely wouldn't cost a huge amount more. Comparing like to like, my home-canned tomato products aren't always cheaper than organic products from Costco or a similar store. Comparing the lowest cost to what my costs are, and the garden is likely a wash when it comes to how much it saves us. So, why homestead if it isn't actually cheaper? For me, it comes down to one main reason: I need to eat healthier food due to my health problems, and if we grow or raise it, we know what went into that and that it's safe for me to eat. If I put up the food we grow and raise, then I know what went into that jar or freezer bag, and when I cook it up, I don't have to worry about allergic reactions or whatever. This is why I buy locally, too, whatever we cannot grow or raise, and try to buy as much as I can from farms I trust. When I take into account a true comparison of like to like, organic to organic, free range to free range, then the cost savings do become quite clear. As my husband also likes to point out, there are all kinds of intangible benefits to homesteading. The ducks and geese, while a lot of work and cost, really are fun to watch and get to know. We love having them around, even when shoveling out a pen in the spring is no fun. They make us laugh and get out of our heads and whatever depressing stuff is on the news. Getting my hands (and often bare feet) into the soil in the garden helps ground me and helps with getting beneficial organisms into my gut to help repair it. My husband fixing things in the barn or the cars gives him a satisfaction hiring someone else to do it just wouldn't. Homesteading forces us to live more with the seasons, too, which studies seem to be showing can really help with stress loads and health issues. It slows us down in some ways, too, as we can't always make it to things since we have ducks to care for and food to grow and put up. Homesteading may not always be cheaper, but in the end, it's a better life for us and does save us money in the end if we truly compare like to like. I really do believe that it's a critical part in managing my health issues, and we end up with better food and better lives because of homesteading. Amy Dingman of A Farmish Kind of Life shared in a fairly recent podcast that homesteading is about producing more than consuming, meaning that we are to make more than we buy. I have been thinking through this ever since I heard it, and honestly, I think it sums up what homesteading really is, what the lifestyle is really about, more than anything else I have heard or read.
Homesteading isn't just about living in the country on many acres with all the animals and a huge garden. One can homestead anywhere, really. It isn't about a set to-do list that all of us must do in order to call ourselves real homesteaders. It's about the mindset of producing more than we consume. We live in a consumerist society here in the United States, having moved past capitalism starting in the 1980s. After 9/11, our own president told us to fly on planes and go shopping, mostly to make sure that our consumer-based economy kept going. We are seeing that now with the pandemic, as people struggle to afford needed items with loss of jobs or high medical bills as well shortages in things people want to and need to buy. The problem with consumerism is that, after awhile, there just aren't enough people or resources to keep making more and more and more and feeding that always starving monster, the American consumer, especially as that consumerism spreads to other countries. In a lot of ways, homesteading is a direct response to consumerism. Many in the homesteading movement take "making do or doing without" very seriously, making sure to reuse items until they can't anymore, reduce what they buy, and recycle various things on the homestead until they finally have to go into the waste stream. Turning a plastic jug into a feed scoop so we don't have to buy a feed scoop at the farm store is just one example of this kind of thinking and lifestyle. For homesteaders, it goes beyond that, though, as it really is more about producing food, bathroom products, cleaning products, clothing, and items for the home and barn and trying to produce more than we buy. Do homesteaders buy a lot? Sure, we do! We need jars and lids for canning, crocks and all for fermenting, seeds and plants for gardening, baby chicks and ducklings for meat birds, and on and on. There's a reason why farm stores can be so big: there is a lot of stuff that we need in order to work more efficiently in our homes, barns, sheds, gardens. Certain clothing items really help, from overalls to quilted barn coats. Certain tools make it so we can do our jobs at all or, at least, in a more timely and efficient manner. In order to raise baby animals, we need to buy the right supplements, feed, waterers, and more to make sure that they have what they need to grow up strong and healthy. It doesn't help that we are bombarded with messages even from other homesteaders of how we need to buy this, buy that, buy this other thing in order to be happy, popular, good homesteaders. The thing is, our goal is to produce more than we consume. My goal every year for the garden is to grow and put up enough food, of what I can grow given that we're in Michigan, to feed our family. I didn't meet that goal last year due to disability and health problems, and it hurts to see that we're down so many jars or running low on bags in the freezer. So, this year, it's all about meeting that goal and working together to take it more seriously and get more foods on our shelves and in our freezers. One of our homestead goals this year, as well, is to raise more meat ducks so as to produce more meat than we buy at the store. With the prices of meat these days, we don't have the ready cash to buy from another homestead or do much more than hit the sales at the cheapest, best store and stretch that meat as much as possible. Raising more of our own, producing more here on the homestead, will not only help with that but provide safer foods for my health issues and make us more producers on the homestead than consumers at the store. If I knit a sweater, especially from local wool I've spun up, I've produced that sweater rather than gone to the store and bought some fast fashion item that I could afford and been simply a consumer. If I grow tomatoes from seeds, especially from seeds I've saved, and then I can those up in jars I've been reusing with lids I've been reusing (Tattlers really are amazing!), then I've produced food that I could have bought at the store simply as a consumer. When my husband takes a used part to fix one of our vehicles, he not only hasn't been the average consumer just taking it to a shop, but he's also kept the total cost to our family down and kept the vehicle useful for us. The goal is to think through what we eat, what we use, what we wear, and then produce as much as possible. A corollary of that goal is to buy used as much as possible. My husband and I constantly keep an eye on Facebook Marketplace and similar sites, not to mention estate sales, garage sales, and resale shops, for the things we need for the homestead. If we have to buy parts for a car or tools for the garden, we would rather buy used and in good condition. Honestly, I've started keeping an eye out for fabric remnants, used clothing, yarn from people de-stashing for personal reasons, and other crafting and clothing, as well, since I personally find fast fashion very problematic and want to avoid it when I can. If we have to be consumers, it's best to use that power to keep things out of landfills. That minimizes the effects our consumerism, and we often end up with better stuff that lasts longer anyway. In the end, the question we need to ask ourselves as homesteaders before deciding on any plan of action is: how much does it produce for us in the end? If it requires us to buy a ton of stuff but produces very little, then it isn't in line with our philosophy unless it produces more and more over time. People who got into homesteading with the pandemic and dealt with failures talk about the $100 tomatoes, sharing how they bought all the containers and soil and plants and mulch only to have plants hardly produce anything, or the $50 eggs, sharing how much they spent on their three or four chickens only to have them produce few eggs in comparison to how much was spent on them. Once that infrastructure is in place, though, and the one-time costs are paid, how much are we really producing? If we're consuming more at the farm store or at the grocery store than we're producing on our homestead, it's time to revisit how and why we do things and to ask ourselves if we're really homesteaders. Lucky is our newest drake. He's a Muscovy drake who managed to hide long enough that his former owner didn't butcher him at the end of the day. His name there was Brother, but we call him Lucky. He isn't as aggressive as Elvis, our massive Muscovy drake who is the alpha bird in the flock and even bullies the geese, but the gals all seem okay with him, and he's getting along well. Last night, my husband was putting all the ducks to bed for the night, and he managed to get this video of Lucky being silly. Neither of us has the faintest idea why he was playing with the straw and pine shavings. From the look of things, Raven, the black and white Muscovy duck next to him, didn't know what he was doing, either. |
CarinaI'm a 40s something disabled mom living the life on our small urban farm. Archives
April 2022
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