Homesteading: You can start where you are

To me, the most beautiful thing about urban or suburban homesteading is that it’s an activity that meets you where you are.

Whether you are a parent concerned about the quality of the food you’re feeding your family, a single adult concerned about the skyrocketing cost of utilities, or a group of roommates wanting to find the way back to a more basic and simple life, homesteading activities give one both a place to begin and a place to aspire to working towards.

Our own homesteading journey began simply enough: with a $400 electric bill one summer, a collective shriek of outrage from my husband and I, and a “shock and awe” campaign to reduce the cost of the kilowattage we consumed in the peak months of June – September.

It’s hard to believe that one electric bill led us to where we are now, with raised vegetable beds, compost pile, backyard livestock, a solar oven for cooking and a row of fast-growing deciduous shade trees lining our western property line and staving off the worst of the blistering summer San Joaquin Valley sun.

Sometimes I’m not quite sure how it all happened, but one thing led to another, in domino fashion:  The energy saving chest freezer which replaced the kilowatt-sucking second refrigerator in our garage seemed a perfect place to store foods – homegrown foods.  It made sense to cook those foods outside in the summer sun, hence the solar oven.  And as long as the sun was out, why not invest in a clothesline and stop using the electric clothes dryer, which was only making the house hotter in summer anyway?

It was, quite simply, that one thing led to another … over and over again, until the house we lived in, the products we consumed, and the landscape we looked out on had all altered dramatically from what they had originally started from.

Most homesteaders will tell you the same thing.  It rarely begins with a grand design of some kind.  Most of the time it’s just being fed up with one thing, and changing that one thing is where the journey begins.

To me, one of the most satisfying things about homesteading is that you’re never at the road’s end unless you want to be –at any point it is OK to sit down and reflect on how far you’ve come, stopping there if you wish. But for those who want more, there’s always more to achieve.  For the most enterprising homesteaders, we have, in the back of our mind the One-Year list (take out the rest of the lawn), a Five-Year list (establish a few more fruit trees in the side yard), and maybe even a 10-Year list (solar panels!).

And yet The List is not a yoke to be harnessed to, heavy to pull and uncomfortably burdensome.  All the lists and all the plans are pleasurable to lie back and dream about, and knowing you’ll get there when you can moves you along at your own pace, with ease and with a practical eye towards budget and time.  But dreaming is an acceptable task in the homesteading life, and it’s where the seed for the next project or idea always germinates best.

But at its most basic, I think it’s the measure of independence that homesteading activities bring us that gives us satisfaction, and that in turn can make us want more of it.  That’s why we dream.  The fact that I can grow a crop, cook it up, and serve it to my family without ever using grid-based technology or energy to do it gives me a feeling of autonomy and freedom sorely lacking in the gridlocked techno-life most of us live in much of the time.

That is why the staircase leading down, out of the clouds and back to the ground floor of a simpler life is the one I always take, once an idea takes root in my dreams and wants to make its way down into reality.  There’s always something new to be cooked, grown, or built.  And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Whether you’ve been living off-the-grid for 30 years, or have just started your first container crops on the balcony of your apartment, homesteading always meets you where you are, and takes you on as big a journey as you care to dream up.

We dream.  We build. We homestead. It’s that simple.