**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?
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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. |
CarinaI'm a 40s something disabled mom living the life on our small urban farm. Archives
April 2022
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