Hello, hello, hello! My name is Antoine and I would like to welcome you to our blog. This is the first of what will be many entries by my wife, Deidra, and myself. We have long talked about having our own land where we could grow our own food as well as raise our own animals. We are not there yet, but in December of 2017, we decided to chronicle our journey whether we make it or bust!
So, a homestead? You really want to homestead? Yep, that’s what we want. We wish to “homestead” or to be “homesteading”. One of those words is the correct verb tense that I am going for, but I think you get the idea. Before I go further, I won’t assume that you know what it means to homestead, so I will try to explain.
In it’s simplest terms (in at least the US), today homesteading is a way of living a life based on self-sufficiency. People may have different takes on what it means to homestead, but the general idea is to sustain your life by doing for yourself without little outside assistance. Of course, if you are part of a homesteading community, then you’d work together with the same goal in mind. People go as far as building their own stick-built home by hand. Some will live in a trailers, yurts, tents, etc. As for us, we will definitely not be building our own home by hand, but we do intend to do a lot of other things by hand to save funds, learn, and to teach our kids some life skills.
At a time where technology is advancing – where computers are getting smaller and artificial intelligence is expanding into every aspect of our lives, why in the world would someone want go (for what appears to be) backwards? I mean food can be purchased in the grocery stores right? You can just go, whip out your credit card and purchase all the veggies and meat you need. Bread can be purchased on the bread aisle. I mean you can grab yogurt right out of the dairy section!
Yes, you are correct. We can do this, but there is just something about learning how to do some things for yourself. Have you ever tasted a tomato fresh off the vine? Or have you ever tasted a strawberry or cantaloupe fresh out of your own garden? Trust me, once you do, you will know that home grown food tastes way better than it’s counter-part purchased in a store! And baking…there is nothing like the smell of fresh bread baking in your house. The taste of homemade jellies, jams, and preserves are ridiculously good! I could keep going on and on but you get it.
So, where are we now? Right now, we do not have our own land, but we are working on that part. However, we have not let it stop us from learning to do some things on our own. In our first home back in 2009, we grew our first garden after talking about it forever. You can see the pictures below:
Once we did that, we had the bug. This kicked off something that we could not shake out of our systems. While we have gone through some trials, life changing events (we may or may not go into detail later) and set-backs, we have never lost the itch to want to garden. Now-a-days our desires have expanded to include hydroponics along with wanting goats, sheep, chickens, and ducks. The list could go on but I guess we have to crawl before we walk. Besides, we have to save a little blog content for later.
With that being said, we hope you enjoy taking this journey with us. And maybe along the way that you learn some things as we do them.
Antoine
CONGRATULATIONS from the Vandyck’s! We loved reading your journey thus far particularly since we are on the exact same journey as you and almost in the exact same place- not on our land yet but wanting it so very bad.
Hang in there and maybe one day soon you will be viewing our own journey as well!!!
P.S. We are in Wisconsin. Where are you all?
Thanks a lot!! It is crazy to find people exactly where we are because when you are in it, it sometimes feels like you are the only ones. With the exception of a couple of local friends, this is why we are glad to have found the fb group. It is a breathe of fresh air and we all definitely need to share our journey’s so that we can learn from each other as we go.
Right now, we are in NC but believe it or not my wife was born and raised in Milwaukee, WI. As a matter of fact, a part of our journey took us back to Milwaukee where we lived for three years before relocating back to Raleigh. So, it has truly been an adventure for us!
Your garden beds were crazy productive!! I pray you Homesteaders will get land soon. Have you read the book “One Second After”? Maybe just another doomsday prepper fictionary tale, but it should give everyone pause to think: What if?
Vera, I don’t know if that was beginners luck or what, but I absolutely loved it! Small space, but it did the job. For the book, I have not read it, but I have seen a few sites of preppers and a video or two to think about “what if”. I think it is something to not ignore because you never know now-a-days!