The First-Time Homesteader: A complete beginner’s guide to starting and loving your new homestead
Genres: Science Engineering
Book Preface
The desire for a homestead was born early in me. As a child, I’d been wooed by the steady rock of a horseback ride and had conceived the notion of a farm with a red barn, yard birds, and neat garden rows. It was a poetic desire, the romantic hope of a child. I didn’t grow out of it, though. I carried that dream well into womanhood and labored over it until I held it in my hands and other people could see it, too.
Our first farm was built on a 4-acre (1.5 ha) piece of ground in the middle of the woods in Central Arkansas. It was rocky land with little to no topsoil, but it was what we could afford. We learned to garden there, to build, to be homesteaders. After 8 years, we dug up the root system of our family, drove 11 hours through the southern United States, and planted ourselves on 27 acres (11 ha) of raw land in South Carolina. We wanted to put down our roots in a new community and to build a farm from scratch. In the process of doing so, I wrote this book.
In the years that have passed since my homesteading dream budded and grew into reality, I have watched an incredible transition take place in our culture. When I first began learning about chickens, foraging, sustainability, scratch cooking, gardening, and the like, I would gush with passion to anyone who would listen. I’d watch them nod politely with glazed-over eyes, and when they changed the subject, I wouldn’t bring up my desire to homestead again. Somewhere along the way, though, the tide turned.
Growing food in your backyard stopped being such an obscure idea. The conversation about food sourcing got louder, and mainstream shelves touted locally grown produce and pastured beef. Farmers’ markets boomed, community gardens took off, and the back-to-basics lifestyle was validated in the mainstream by celebrities keeping chickens and starting small farms. And though I saw this happening before 2020, the onset of COVID and the subsequent lockdowns and shortages set these changes in concrete. Homesteading as a worthy way of life was no longer in question.
I receive hundreds of messages a day, and there is a repeating theme in many of them: Folks are leaving cities and buying land for the first time, and they want to know where to start. Those who aren’t leaving, either because logistics won’t allow it or they don’t want to give up their suburban lives, are asking what they can do to grow food where they are. All over, in one form or another, people en masse are becoming homesteaders. This thrills me, and it is the reason I am writing to you right now.
There’s no way I could teach you everything you need to know in 48,000 words. Entire books have been written on the topics I’ll touch on in a single paragraph. This is not meant to be an exhaustive text. Rather, it is a love letter to the homestead and a guide to getting started for the homesteader, embellished with the mistakes I’ve made and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. Even if I had a million pages to fill, I couldn’t teach you everything you need to know to homestead well. I’m afraid some lessons are only learned by experience. My hope, however, is to equip you for the journey, to give you a compass to navigate this beautiful way of life, and to blow a breath of inspiration on the sparks in your heart that (if you’re lucky) will fuel a passion great enough to make a big leap and chase a worthy dream.
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