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