Overview of Years 1 & 2
Why is homesteading popular?
To be honest, I’m not really sure. Maybe it’s my age… maybe it’s the Midwest… In any case, having a “homestead” seems to be a new trendy thing. Cooking from scratch, baking your sourdough daily, having chickens roam your yard, canning the extra tomatoes from your garden…maybe it’s just the algorithm that social media is feeding to me, but it seems to have grown in popularity in the last few years. Am I wrong? I don’t do all of these, but I’ve started a few.
When I married my husband nearly 5 years ago, I sort of cringed at the muddy yard, faded red barn with a few holes in the walls, and lots of old junk. The small, 100+ year old farmhouse with yucky carpet that he had been living in as a bachelor for the previous 10 years was only slightly more appealing than my 1950s ranch because at least it had a basement, albeit unfinished. At the time, I was a single mom of 3, living in the suburbs, working full time as a public school teacher, and then going home to my second shift mom job. I never thought I would love the old farmhouse, barn, and growing my own veggies on the land, but I do! And my love for our home and land grows every year! Though I still don’t like the winter and spring mud!
2022 – year 1
Fast forward to 2022: we were all sort of returning to “normalcy” after being forced to wear face diapers everywhere and wondering if we should stock up on anything and everything because you never know when the grocery might run out of toilet paper with a 1-day notice. I had a baby in my 40s to bring our total kid count to 6. We decided that I could finally stay home and raise one of our kids like our mothers had — as a stay-at-home mom! We had cultivated a small vegetable garden the previous summer and I started to think about expanding it. I had time and I was finally home – so why not!? I had no food preservation skills or knowledge so 2022 was strictly limited to summertime consumption.
What’s a farmstead? What’s a market garden?
While nursing my newborn, I started watching videos about no-till market gardening. From what I can tell, all of the titles listed below are pretty fluid and people self-describe in different ways.
I learned that a homesteader aims to “live off the land” for his/her family while a farmsteader attempts to do the same — and also grow enough to sell some extras. Usually, these folks have a “day job,” too. They’re sort of in between a homesteader and a farmer.
A farmer, according to the YouTuber I was watching, grows full-time for profit.
A market gardener grows on a small scale (a garden) and brings the food “to market” to sell.
There are different ways to sell–markets, restaurants, local grocers–but most of the contacts seem to stem from a farmer’s market. in 2022, I was convinced that a farmer’s market booth was way too much of a commitment with a newborn and big kids who had sports and activities every night and many weekends. Also my 40+ year old back didn’t fare well leaning over to pull weeds and harvest lettuce. By July, my kids were doing most of the weeding and harvesting!
Neverthless, in 2022, we managed to triple our garden size, ran underground irrigation to 2 locations, and set up a road side stand to sell our extras. I tried planting some seeds in potting mix on a window sill that year but the dirt molded and nothing grew. As a result, I still purchased all of my plants as “starts” from other farmers locally. Our kids helped to stock the “honor system” stand in front of our house and they kept all the proceeds, which totaled to maybe $100. The financial return on our investment was sort of discouraging, but we had laid some good infrastructure and learned a few lessons about what to plant and when.
2023 – year 2
In the spring of 2023, we had sooooo much mud that I was unable to actually WALK to our “big” garden until probably May. I might have lost a boot and never recovered it prior to May, when the sun finally returned to northern Indiana. Over the winter, we had purchased an old greenhouse frame from a distant relative, but we couldn’t reach the large garden to install — due to mud. That spring, we did not want to spend any more money on soil since the soil and irrigation in 2022 was pretty expensive…so we attempted to expand the garden to fill the dimensions of the greenhouse by just tilling last year’s compost soil into the existing dirt–also hoping it would dry more quickly. As we say in our family, “FAIL!” It was a fail that resulted in very poor soil and not a great harvest. We actually had more food with the smaller garden! That year, we did not set up the stand but still enjoyed much of our own produce because our original garden still had good dirt.
On the plus side, in 2023, we installed the framework for a “big” greenhouse that we hope to turn into a high tunnel. We also created a “tiny” greenhouse with plastic for springtime starts and season extension growing. We also learned to start our own seeds successfully, and even how to cover the open garden areas inexpensively as early as February. Lots of learning in both years.
2024 – year 3
More details in the next post about HOW we did what we’ve done, and where we plan to go from here!
