Learning to homestead isn’t the easiest. Most people who embark on this journey have no significant practical experience, no mentor who taught them to garden or can or raise animals. They feel a call to pursue this way of living, but when faced with the reality of it, don’t know how to begin or what to do when things get hard (and they probably will). I hope this series of posts provides at least a little help as you embark on your journey! When you are done with this one, check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t already, and don’t miss the post Planning Your Year!

Learn to plan food ahead for busy seasons.

This is one of the trickier things you may have to figure out. When it’s butchering day, you probably don’t want to think about making dinner. When you’re busy tending the garden all day, you don’t want to have to catch up on housework when you come inside. When you’re putting up food for the year, think about how you want to use it. I’ve learned to prep food for butchering day a few days in advance, so all that needs to be done is throw a dish in the oven or ask the kids to make sandwiches. I do my best to clean the house before going out to the garden for the day, and I straighten up when I’m inside taking breaks. The house still gets messy because the kids aren’t always where I am, but they have been trained to help with the chores, so even if they aren’t cleaning when I’m outside, they can lend a hand when I come in and ask them to clean while I prep dinner or take a break from the heat.

I try to can, freeze, or store food in portions and in ways that we are most likely to use. As I butcher, I cut the meat for grinding and freeze it on trays to make grinding day easier. I mostly can cider in half-gallon jars , but usually do some pints and quarts to give as gifts or to use in recipes. Green beans are canned in wide-mouth jars because they are easier to remove from the jar when cooking. I freeze a few bags of green beans if I want a fresh bean taste for a recipe. While I, personally, like to preserve things as ingredients, such as tomato sauce vs. spaghetti sauce or tomato soup, a good friend of mine likes to prepare meals in a jar. She makes a lot of canned stew for easy meals for her family. She dumps a jar into a pot and heats it up on busy days, and supper is ready. While I’m not at all opposed to the idea, having ingredients on hand allows me a lot of versatility in my cooking, and I don’t have to prepare a bunch of separate recipes while canning. Some of this can be planned for with a little knowledge and forethought, but some of it requires experience to know what works best for your needs.

Learn to plan ahead for the homestead year.

Planning food is just one side of the coin. There’s a budget, supplies, ordering, and more that need to be considered throughout the year. Do you have your tapping supplies ready before maple season? Did you order special seeds before planting time? Have you thought ahead as to when you need to order or purchase animals, and are you looking early enough? (To learn more, read about planning the homestead year and take a look at the liturgical homesteading calendar.)

Get Organized!

This is a no-brainer for plenty of people, but it took us years to get good at this. We bought an established homestead, and that meant we inherited systems that had been put in place for different people with different needs. We were also working on a very tight budget at first, which meant we were limited in what we were able to change, initially. Eventually, though, we began to establish our own systems. We bought plastic totes for storing supplies for different activities. There’s a bin of butchering bin with knives, sharpening tools, saws, and whatnot, and another just for packaging supplies for butchering. We have bins for our sap operation, and a bin for beekeeping, a bin for brewing, and a bin for candle-making. There are smaller bins for things like canning lids, and one for canning tools, like the jar lifter, the funnels, springs, weights and special lids for fermenting. The bins have the added bonus of keeping bugs and mice out of our supplies (we do live on an old homestead, so mice are inevitable).

Deep clean your supplies once a year.

At least! Scrub down the canning pot before putting it back in storage. Sort the empty canning jars by size and the filled jars by content. As we use jars throughout the year, the collection gets disorganize. Jars with food in them get reorganized once or twice a year, and the shelves get wiped down from dust and bugs as I move things. Look for jars with cracks in them or chips in the neck, and dispose of them or use them as flower vases or for dry goods. Get rid of rusty rings. Pro-tip, line your shelves with vinyl table cloth material, and store empty jars rim-side down to keep jars clean.

Reorganize the freezer at least a month before butchering.

If you don’t do it early, you’ll be scrambling to do it in the midst of butchering. It’s better to deal with it early, too, to see if you need extra space. We used to have one freezer, but now we have multiple. Some people don’t want to do that, and frankly, I’d rather not, but our family is large, and I don’t want to butcher all year round. Most people start with one freezer when they begin homesteading, and it might not be very big. But if you’re butchering for the first time, you might find you’ll need additional space. As I’m reorganizing, I usually try to take ingredients and turn them into meals. Often, those meals become freezer meals FOR butchering time. If I find I still haven’t used up all of the pork from the previous year, I’ll often give meat to family and friends or people we know who could use a few extra groceries. Another great thing to do with abundant food is to cook a few meals for a pregnant woman or a family with a new baby or to whip up a few small meals for a widowed neighbor. This not only clears a bit of freezer space, but it can a huge blessing to others, which is more important than space created.

Canning meat saves freezer space!

Canning meat isn’t as quick a process as freezing, but it makes for an easy addition to a meal when you’ve failed to plan ahead, it saves on freezer space, and my favorite part is that it’s less meat that could spoil if a freezer goes out without you noticing. We have had 2 major freezer issues in the past. In one circumstance, we lost all of the food in the freezer. In the other, we lost about 1/4th. If you aren’t pulling food from a freezer daily, you may not notice if the power goes out, a freezer fails, or if somebody failed to shut a freezer properly. Canned foods (or foods stored by other methods) will last for a very long time on a shelf, without freezing or refrigeration.

Rotate what you do.

We’ve been raising pigs for a number of years now, but we’re taking this year off. We’re having another baby in August, and I don’t feel like butchering pigs when I have a little baby. We’ve done it before, and if we felt it was necessary, we’d do it again. However, our freezer is full right now, and that meat, if frozen properly, will last me until we’re ready to raise pigs again next year. We didn’t raise chickens for meat last year, but we will this year. They are easier to butcher, and we haven’t had chicken meat on hand in a couple of years. I don’t grow cabbage every year because we don’t eat that much of it, and one big batch of sauerkraut will last a long time. If my green beans do really well, I won’t grow as many of them the next year because I will have enough canned and on the shelf from the previous year. We rotate what we do, which helps to limit the division of attention, the workload, and the stress.

But there is another meaning to “rotate what you do.” Yes, in tasks undertaken, rotate, but also, if and when possible, rotate where your animals graze and where you grow particular foods for the health of the soil. I won’t get into the “why” with animals, but this is so important for the food you grow. If you plant potatoes in the same soil year after year, it will a) become depleted of nutrients needed for them to do well and be as healthy as they can be (for what you put into your body), and b) if you’ve had any problems with pests or disease, keeping a crop on the same piece of soil could bring ruin to future crops planted in the same location. It is very worth your time to learn how to rotate your crops, (and while you are at it, learn about companion planting), because you can have issues if you try to plant beans where tomatoes have previously grown, or tomatoes where potatoes have been. Rotational planting can be the difference between abundance and a failed crop. (When I say crop, I really mean any quantity of food harvested from what you plant. It doesn’t have to be a field of potatoes… just a few plants will produce a crop for you.)

It’s okay to start over.

We bought an old homestead with some beautiful outbuildings, but they were old and worn when we moved in. We looked into replacement costs of buildings, as well as repair costs, and just didn’t have the funds necessary to maintain or replace these structures. They have lasted long enough overall. There was a beautiful old hog shed that was used as a chicken coop when we moved in. It was the only building in good shape and the only one we wanted to keep, but God had other plans. For as much as we loved that building, we felt locked in to using it as a chicken coop, though we could have used part of it for other animals as well. The building burned in a fluke fire, which was devastating, but it opened up a world of possibilities. Today, we have a chicken coop that is better suited to our needs, in size, location, and overall function, though it took 6 years after the fire before we were able to build a permanent coop. The location of the old coop is going to be used for other plans once we have the resources.

It is okay to repurpose buildings, either in finding a new way to use it for storage or service, or in taking the literal materials to create something new. For those on raw land, this isn’t really an issue, but if you, like us, own something that served a similar or even a totally different purpose, it is okay to start over. Give yourself permission to think of the place as a blank slate, particularly if you are feeling a bit trapped or frustrated by the current setup!

Learning to actually incorporate practical tips is a whole different ballgame than simply learning them. It took me years to implement some of the things I’ve shared in these posts because life can just be too busy or overwhelming for us to remember them. Some of these things were simply learned from trial and error and finding ourselves in incredibly stressful situations. Consider the advice seeds planted, whether you readily remember them or not. During some of those most stressful moments, especially when you throw up a prayer for help, you’ll find that the Holy Spirit or guardian angel whispers to you and a piece of advice comes out from hiding and suddenly makes the situation a lot less overwhelming.

Happy Homesteading!
In Christ,
Danielle