I know it’s hard to believe, but yesterday marked one year since we moved to our little 5 acre homestead! It had been a dream of ours for a long, long time and I still marvel at the way that God opened the doors for us to buy and live on a homestead! In the last year, we have gotten chickens, pigs, kittens, a dog, a bunny, a brand new baby, a lawnmower and all kinds of tools and gadgets we never even knew we needed. We’ve had so many lovely conversations in our backyard and we’ve puzzled over how to best fit our family into our house. We’ve had a flood, we’ve had a large coyote, we’ve had a terrible experience with piglets, we’ve had plenty of days that the work feels like too much for us. On the other hand, we’ve had hundreds of glorious sunrises and sunsets, so many beautiful walks around our back pasture, one successful pig butchering, four adorable abandoned kittens that we raised, countless times we have said “I am SO glad our kids get to live this life”, and some wonderful lessons learned.
So without further mushy, gushy talk…here are twelve things we have learned in our 12 months on our homestead.
- Bugs live in the wild, and your house is now in the wild. Our first 24 hours on our property, we were SO OVERWHELMED. There were bees, bugs, ticks, spiders…it was awful. Theo even had nightmares about bugs crawling on him that first night. Thankfully, once we got our feet under us, we also managed to feel like we had the advantage over the bugs.
- Bottle feeding any animal is a TON of work. In the past year, we have bottle fed four kittens and three piglets. Bottle feeding looks really sweet and cute from a distance, but it is SO MUCH work in real life. Like, way harder than breast-feeding a brand new baby.
- We are not dog people. We bought a beautiful livestock guardian dog at the end of the summer. She was so smart and so sweet…and for a number of reasons, we decided to rehome her in February. We were so overwhelmed with her training and let’s just say we are all much happier with the arrangements as they are now. She was extremely beneficial to our homestead, but we needed to face the harsh truth that we are NOT dog people.
- It’s a good idea to live on the homestead for one whole year to observe each season and fully know where to put things and what to use your land for. When we moved to our property at the end of Spring, we were really worried that our middle acreage would be flooded for the entire year. Turns out it’s mostly just a Spring thing, but it was really important for us to be able to see the land during each season before trying to make any decisions about planting, growing, or where to put animals.
- Start one project and do it until it becomes a habit, then add another in. This was some excellent advice given to us when we were so overwhelmed with all the tasks that needed to be done. We needed to pick the highest priority and do that until it felt like a do-able habit. Then add in the next chore/project.
- It’s ok to leave raw land and not use 100% of it. I felt a lot of pressure to use all 5 of our acres as soon as possible, but over the past year I’ve learned that it’s ok to leave some of it raw until we find a good purpose for it. It doesn’t all have to be functional and perfect right away.
- When heating with wood…cut and season double what you think you will need. We ran out of seasoned wood at the beginning of January, so for next winter we know we need a least double what we had prepared for this year.
- Kids love mud, and it will be impossible to keep the mud out of the house. Also, you will lose about 9 pairs of shoes a day. So much mud. So many shoes that go missing way out in the back field or along the banks of the stream. 5 acres of land means 5 acres for shoes to get lost in.
- Homesteading is way messier than most publicized versions of it. Um, there isn’t much that is neat and clean about the real aspects of homesteading. I hope to one day have a bit of a neater property, but the fact of the matter is that animals are messy and therefore so is our property.
- Chicken math is real. Remember one year ago when we thought 25 chickens was A LOT? Ha. We now have 59 chickens. That escalated quickly.
- Growing your own food brings a certain amount of deep satisfaction. I cannot even explain how special a meal feels that came from our pig, and I still haven’t gotten over cracking a fresh egg into a pan. There is just something about knowing where our food comes from.
- Being around animals helps kids understand biology, reproduction, and the cycle of life very naturally. Let’s just say this really came in handy with all the conversations around where baby Orion came from 🙂
And, two bonus things:
Kid’s can do a lot of hard work!
Murphy’s law of Homesteading says that anything “exciting” or “unpredictable that can happen, will happen at the most inconvenient time.
I can’t wait to see what else we learn as we continue to live out our life here on the homestead!