Where to begin??? We’ve been homesteading for about 10 years now, and gardening for a few years longer. When we began this journey, we really knew nothing and had to learn from the ground up. I didn’t grow up eating much in the way of fresh vegetables, so when we grew our first garden and I had a surplus of tomatoes, I was so clueless. I had no idea how long they were “safe to eat” or how to know if they’d gone bad or how to store them. They sat for a good long while as I eyed them tentatively, wondering if we’d die if we ate them. Yes, I know. It’s sad. Fastforward to today, and I have well over 50 tomato plants growing in the garden. We preserve as much as we are able, from diced tomatoes and salsa to sauce. I really could have used a friend to walk me through all of those questions we had!

Here are some of the things we’ve learned over the years.

Just do it. I’m not a Nike person, but I appreciate the slogan. We know so many people who are waiting for the “right time”. Sure, we may or not be ready for some responsibility, and that shouldn’t be taken lightly, especially if it involves animals. But what do we have to lose by trying? Time? Money? Sure, but how many of us are guilty of wasting time or money on things that don’t edify us? Buy the raw milk and experiment with cheesemaking. Try making the jelly. I know, the “waste” hurts when things fail, but think about it like taking a class. Would you pay to learn this? How much? Failure is how we learn. “Failure is the mother of innovation.”

Chicken keeping is great, but you don’t have to sell eggs. It’s okay to only raise enough for the production needs of your family. For us, that’s about 10 chickens. We might up that number again someday, but the kids haven’t been eating a lot of eggs this year, and 10 is more than enough for our needs. Keep in mind, we have 8 kids at home. I could make them eat eggs more often, but they make breakfast, so I don’t. We eat mainly eat egg dishes on the weekends when mom or dad are the ones cooking. The rest are used as needed for baking, and someday, I intend to waterglass eggs for use in the winter.

When the garden is in full flush and you’re feeling overwhelmed, freeze things! We do a lot of canning, and I don’t love using the freezer because kids have shut them off on us before, and we’ve had the power go out without our knowing and a freezer didn’t reset and we’ve had a meat freezer die. (That’s the absolute worst!) So, I can a lot of our foods, do some dehydrating, and store some foods in our cellar. Freeze veggie scraps to be made into broth, freeze your tomatoes for turning into sauce… Deal with the foods that can’t be frozen and thawed to make what you want, and freeze the rest.

An electric roaster is your best friend. My sister-in-law used one to make maple syrup when she did less production. I use it to cook down my tomatoes for sauce. More surface area = less cook time.

Speaking of tomatoes… seriously, freeze whatever you want to turn into sauce. The water expands in them when they freeze, which helps to break down the structure of the tomato and release the water that needs to be removed to make sauce. Remove the crowns before freezing to make life easier. Large tomatoes can be cut in half. Freeze them in gallon zip lock bags (don’t do larger bags… they’re heavy and hurt when they fall out of your hand and drop on your foot), and thaw them out in a bathtub full of warm water. Then drain the water in the bags. I’m sure this water is full of all kinds of wonderful, good for you things, but I dump it down the sink because I don’t have time to do more. This is a good project to tackle anytime from November to April, when it’s still cool outside. Cooking tomato sauce can really heat up the kitchen! Cook them in an electric roaster or in a large roasting pan in the oven. You can skim off the water as it cooks to speed up the process.

Don’t be a chicken. Learn to do canning! It’s not that hard, and you aren’t going to die. The two most important things to remember are sterility (jars and lids) and to remove the canning ring after the seals have formed. I leave my jars on the counter for 12-24 hours before I remove the rings. By removing the rings, you ensure that if a seal fails, you will know it. If rings are left on, it can cause a false seal, and you won’t know if what you’ve canned is safe. We had some cider that we canned and the kids put into storage without removing the rings on. Thankfully, they fermented, and had seepage, because the seals failed on a couple of the jars. The fermentation would have clued me in immediately, but you won’t have that with beans. The seepage was what really caught my attention, because one of those jars had a false seal.

If you follow all of the steps in a canning book like the Ball Home Preservation Guide for cook times and keeping clean rims on your jar before placing the lid on, you will have few failed seals. They’re always a disappointment. Sometimes a seal never forms on one of the jars in a batch of canned goods. If it doesn’t seal, stick it in the fridge or use it immediately. Other times, the seal might fail after a few months. You’ll know. There’ll be things growing in the jar, there might be seepage, and though the lid might not come off neatly, you can always test the “click” in the middle of the lid, and you will be able to remove the lid without much force. If you feel doubtful, it’s probably better to simply dispose of the food.

Don’t try to do everything perfectly. Just do things! Take the next small step. I bought a book years ago on “home brews” that covers everything from Kombucha and hard cider to soda. I’ve been wanting to make the soda for years, but I kept being a ninny about it and didn’t do it because I didn’t have the fruit from my own property and I didn’t have maple sugar that we produced… And instead, I continued to drink store-bought soda from time to time. I recently got wise to my own mental games and decided to buy the fruit needed and just use regular sugar. I still know exactly just what went into that 2-liter bottle, which is more than I can say for storebought brands. Will it be any good? I don’t know, but at least I’m learning.

Buy your animal feed from a local feed mill. Chances are, it will be significantly less expensive than the stores. Grower pigs and egg laying chickens essentially use the same feed with the same protein content. We buy ground (powdered) feed from the local mill in 50 lb. bags (which is different than what you’d get in the store), and we mix the powdered feed with water. You can ferment this for the animals for 24 hrs. if you want, which is good for them, or you can just feed that mix to them right away. This is significantly lower in cost for us, and the mill is a small, local business, run by people we attend church with every weekend.

Think outside the box. At our old house, we lived on .25 acres. We had a house, 2 small driveways, and a 2 car garage. We wanted to keep some grass for the kids to run around on, and had a swing set, but we turned most of the lot into garden space, including the narrow strip of land on the shady side of the house. Raspberries can do alright in the shade. We did vertical gardening and square foot gardening to increase growing space. Call the city to get compost and woodchips. You can pick them up for next to nothing, and depending on your location, you might be able to order a truck load to be delivered to your house for a fairly low cost.

TAKE BREAKS!!! DO NOT work on Sundays! If there are animal chores to be done, that’s fine, but you need time to rest so as to not lose your mind. God knew what he was doing when he created the Sabbath as a day for rest, and it’s so important that it was commanded in the Bible at least twice. You will feel more refreshed if you take time to relax, and you will get more done throughout the week than if you try to “get it all done.” It will never all be done.

It will never all be done. Make peace with that. There will always be some space in the house that isn’t clean. There will always be some task outdoors left unfinished. Injuries and sickness happen, and they just love to disrupt our plans for completion. It’s okay. Remember that God could take you at any moment, and that it won’t matter if you finished it all or not. This will reduce your stress-load significantly.

Take notes. I’m bad at keeping everything recorded because I get interrupted a lot, but when I used to keep my old homesteading blog, I was able to track a lot of what we did. I wrote about our failures and successes. I could tell when we did things by when an article was published. I’ve got some notebooks with sporadic notes about things we did and things we like. Anything is better than nothing. I have a lot of info stored up in my head, too. But one of these days, I’m going to get it all written down so that I actually remember that the chokecherries are ripe mid-August, and that the wild black raspberries at the back of the property are ready mid-July. If I remember to write down when I harvest different things, then I can plan ahead the coming year so I don’t miss out.

Be the person that asks for canning jars for your birthday or Christmas. If there’s some “homesteading” venture you want to get involved in, but you are short funds right now, have these items on your wish-list. And be the person who gives these kinds of gifts to the person who wants and needs them!

Question the standards of the world. We would enjoy doing a yearly family road trip, but it’s expensive. We don’t buy fancy clothes. We aren’t involved in sports activities or other “extra curriculars.” There are other things we can use our money for. We’ve lived without consumer debt, and we’ve been in some pretty tight financial situations, so I understand what it feels like to be held back from a dream, but we wait, and we have often found that God had something else or something better in store for us if we are just patient. We’ve often use our tax return to purchase some fairly pricey item that we want for the homestead. We don’t have huge investment accounts; we invest in our homestead. We’ve used tax return funds to purchase a large pressure canner, a tiller for the tractor, a new stove, the supplies to do electric fencing. We even put in a wood boiler with one of our tax returns.

What questions do you have? I’ll do my best to answer. I’ll do a “Part 2” as I think of more.

In Christ,
Danielle