Green Living
mhwood
member
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Anyone Homestead/Farm?
in Green Living
Right now we live in a townhouse, but we will be buying soon.
We are hoping to get at least 1/3 of an acre so that we can grow fruits and veg, as well as raise chickens. My husband is in the process of building an apiary for bees to put at my work and we've planted a full veg garden along with using heirloom seeds to plant a full culinary and medicinal herb garden.
Does anyone else homestead or have a small farm?
Re: Anyone Homestead/Farm?
I don't now, but I grew up on a farm and both of my sets of grandparents were homesteaders (in the pioneer sense).
It's a lot of work. A lot of work. I have a large garden for a city garden... and it's maybe 1/4 the size of my mom's. Growing up, we had chickens for meat and eggs, milked a cow, kept a few pigs, had working draft horses, and then had the beef cattle that are the main farm income. We also picked a lot of wild berries, and mom can preserve anything under the sun: canning, pickling, jam, jelly, freezing, drying, etc.
I like my garden, but I also like my grocery store and my ability to take a vacation now and then. It's really hard to find a farm sitter to take care of things if you want to go away.
MH's family is very, very similar to this. My FIL didn't want to come to our wedding b/c he didn't trust very many people to do a good job taking care of things while they were away. He continuously said he wasn't coming b/c the cows needed taking care of.
I think he was only half-joking. He showed up and had a really fun time--but the day after the wedding, they zoomed out of town!
We have a 0.4 acre lot, which is pretty big for being in the city. It has a lot of shade cover, and we have kids that need space to play, so the whole thing is not gardens.
However, what I do have is big enough to make a dent in our food budget in the summer, and I also preserve for the winter.
The not able to get away thing is real. We were gone for a week at the end of June, and I cam back to every garden bed being FULL of weeds. It took me weeks to catch up on the weeding (or course with the kids I only weed in 10 minute increments but still...)
Anyway, we have strawberries, raspberries, cherries, and are adding blueberries. I try to focus on the crops that cost the most at the grocery store, which is mostly fruit for us. We also have plenty of veggies. We will be adding bees once are kids are older (I can't handle any more hobbies right now!).
We're homesteading in our townhouse. We've got two 6x3 raised beds and a ton of pots, which provide us with lots of food all summer long. We're canning, dehydrating, and freezing the Farmer's Market bounty in addition to our own crops. We make a lot of food stuffs ourselves, like wine, vinegar, cheese, and bread.
It's our goal to move to upstate NY where DH's family is, and buy at least 5 acres. We'll do a large veggie garden, hopefully big enough to have a booth at the Farmer's Market. I already work at our market, so I'm learning a lot about running my own farm. We're taking classes for fishing, hunting, and raising chickens to be more self-sufficient. We'll continue preserving food so we can eat local year-round.
I love that it's a lot of work. I hate working my 9-5 desk job in a cube with no windows, just to get little pieces of paper to trade for food. I love cutting out the middle man and trading the sweat of my brow for food instead. I love how much better homemade jam tastes, and it has 3 ingredients (strawberries, sugar, and lemon juice). I love the quiet tranquility of a bubbling water canner. DH and I are very happy being dweeby ants in a grasshopper nation.
ETA: My parents never grew or preserved anything, or shopped locally. They think we're nuts. DH's grandmother had a veggie garden when he was little. His parent's don't farm or homestead at all either.