We were a family of 3 for almost a decade, and now we’re a family of 5. Yes, in this economy. This is the time in our life where we were blessed with a growing family. Our family grew and we decided to pursue our dreams. My husband always dreamed of moving back to a farm like when he was a kid, and I always dreamed about having more animals than I could count. So we moved and we started a little homestead on 3 acres and we have a good amount of livestock and a really great garden. It’s like the best of both worlds. Start the homestead, live in abundance.
We’re living in this scary uncertain time. The prices of grocery store staples make you want to cry. Heck, we can’t even afford fast food anymore. Having some food security right now is so important, if we had to rely on the grocery store for everything our family consumed we wouldn’t be able to make it. This is also the first time this decade that I’m not bringing in an income, which definitely doesn’t help our situation, so we have to make due with the resources we have. Financially, we’re scraping by, but when we look around we can’t help but smile, we live in absolute abundance.
Our cellar and freezer are full of things we’ve grown. We have jam from the strawberries we grew, we have bags upon bags of broccoli in the freezer, we have a years worth of green beans and tomatoes canned, we have a deep freezer full of chickens that we raised and butchered ourselves. That’s only the things I can think of off the top of my head, I really need to work on our digital inventory again. We have an absolute abundance.
On a homestead you might be broke, but you’ll always be surrounded by an abundance of what truly matters.
Not only do we have an abundance of food, we have this awesome amount of knowledge about things I never thought I would want to know. We learned the best ways to grow our own food, getting carrots to grow this year was the coolest thing ever, why? Because before this year we could barely get any seeds to germinate, and with trial and error (and a weird Tiktok trick) we figured it out! We learned how to pressure can, it was a huge step in becoming more self sufficient and a huge step in relying a little less on freezers. We even learned how to butcher our own meat, hopefully soon we’ll have a freezer full of venison again. Our knowledge of animals and plants is becoming vast quickly. It’s so exciting, we screw a lot of things up, but we learn from all of our mistakes and we keep getting a little bit better at everything.
The best thing though, is we have an abundance of really great moments. Having a homestead is so hard, and you have a lot of really bad days, but when you can take your toddlers outside to pet a goat at any given moment it makes up for the bad. Greeley was just holding a kitten yesterday, it was the best. Just seeing our little 2 year old just playing with this adorable little kitten was probably the highlight of my week. It was probably a core memory for her, way more likely than that time I bought a goat on her first birthday. One of my favorite meditation exercises is imagining your favorite place, and every time I start to meditate I find myself walking towards the front porch, gazing out at all we created. The real thing is a lot dreamier than anything I could imagine.
We don’t have money for extra things right now, but its ok. Our kids hate leaving the house anyway, we’re not going to talk about how much they despise zoos, because clearly our farm is cooler than feeding a giraffe. With the littles being so close in age we don’t have to buy them a lot, they play with each others toys, and the coolest toy ever is an old parmesan shaker anyway. Seriously, if you’ve never given your kids a parmesan shaker just do it. They love putting small toys inside and taking them out, and it makes me feel like a cool crunchy mom, it’s totally an upcycled montessori type toy, right? (Just ignore that it’s plastic.)
What’s the moral of the story? If you’re going to be broke, you’re going to be broke, you might as well do it enjoying a life you love. Start the homestead, live in abundance.
Written by, Brittany, the geek behind the blog. Sharing tips and stories from the trenches on navigating life homeschooling and homesteading as a stay at home mom.