Homesteading For The Rest Of Us

Crafting the spirit of homesteading no matter where you are or what you have

Jump to the end of this essay if you’d like the video version.

I don’t love the term homesteading. I used to like it, but lately it seems to be being used in an exclusionary way. I see people commenting online something like “When I’m able to buy land, when I can start my homestead, sometime in the future when I can do this thing”. The truth is that if the idea of producing things with your own two hands appeals to you, then homesteading is for you. It’s not a future goal or a far-off dream. I think that we can all be homesteaders, no matter if we live in a town, a city, or way out in the country (or the wop wops, as one would say here in New Zealand).

To me, the essence of homesteading is heeding the call to be a producer rather than only a consumer. It’s a call to re-learn basic humans skills like growing food, cooking food, preserving food, and crafting things for ourselves rather than just going out to buy whatever it is we need or want. For many people, their pathway into this world is from wanting better food. Once someone has become aware of the way our food systems work, once they have tasted real, fresh, nutrient-dense food, there often isn’t a way to just stop that education at only buying better produce. The homesteading movement can welcome everyone.

I haven’t got a large amount of land, a little less than 1/4 acre available to me for productive purposes. It’s good land, and it lets me keep more chickens than I maybe should…. and grow a lot of food. I can’t grow all of the food my family needs from this much land, but I don’t want to. I’m a normal person, with family obligations, job obligations, life obligations! I can’t spend every moment working the land. That doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t do the things that I can do. It also helps that these very human skills can contribute significant savings to your household budget. The savings you make can allow you to work less hours for a paycheck, allowing you to dedicate more time to producing, and thus more savings, and less time needed to work a job… and on it goes.

I’ve brushed off the ‘make-it-do’ skills I learned as a child and have started making most of our food from scratch. I already did most of our cooking from base ingredients but I’ve doubled down the past few years. It’s amazing how much you can shave off the grocery bill when you take things back to basics. It helps that the food is extra delicious too! Learning the building blocks for being a great cook is an essential homestead skill as far as I am concerned. Understanding how cooking works allows you to cook without needing a recipe. It means you can turn what is abundant (and cheap) either in your garden, the farmers market or the grocery store into mouthwatering meals. It’s not an easy skill to learn! There’s no point in growing cart-loads of produce if you don’t know how to turn it into something wonderful in the kitchen. Cooking and preserving food is a skill that almost anyone can start learning right now, wherever they are living.

Many things can’t be easily grown at a small scale; things like staple grains, or simply the volume you’d need of a thing if it was what you were going to eat for calories all year round. It’s not efficient or cost-effective to try to produce these things on small land areas. However, if the people living in towns and cities got together to grow the things that are possible in urban areas (vegetables, berries, fruit, eggs, even dairy from goats), it would open up land currently being used to grow those things out in the country. This improves the freshness and nutrition of food in urban areas as well as improving local food security and lowering transportation energy costs. With less pressure on agricultural land for producing things like vegetables or eggs, that land can be dedicated to staple crop production. With less pressure on the land, more regenerative farming techniques can be implemented, and maybe we don’t need to grow ‘hedge-row to hedge-row’ anymore, and we can do a bit of rewilding.

My dream is not of everyone moving out to the country, or going ‘back to the land’. Not everyone wants to do this. Not everyone can or even should do this. My dream is of towns and cities, collectively, turning themselves into Townsteads or Citysteads. Where they produce large portions of their own food, and recycle their own organic wastes and water. Where we value each other and the land we stand on, and we have first-hand experience of the magical power in natural systems to give abundantly if we just give them a helping hand. Our urban landscapes can be so much more than they are allowed to be right now. We can dream just as big in the city as we can on 10 acres in the country.

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