I'm often asked, "Why do you live like you do?" My answer is usually something like, "Because we love this lifestyle!" While that's true, I answer that way because in reality, the answer is more complex than you can boil down into a simple reply. In truth, the reasons we live this way are many. I was raised this way, as was hubby, although we were raised differently. Hubby was raised in the gorgeous state of Utah in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (formerly known as "the Mormons") and was raised with a strong conviction on preparedness and food storage. He was taught to can and freeze food, and how to garden at a young age. He worked for a bee keeper and learned from the age of 8 how to keep bees successfully. I on the other hand, was raised in beautiful, rural New Hampshire on an organic homestead by "old hippies". My parents were in their mid 30's when I came along, yet they embraced the 70's back to nature lifestyle long before it went mainstream. I was taught to make bread, cheese and soap as a child. I was taught to cook, bake and preserve food early on in my life. We raised livestock for our freezer, had an orchard, bramble fruits and grape arbors and a big garden and an herb garden that provided all the veggies and herbs we ate all winter long. There were 5 of us at home at the time and when we got to be teenagers, even though all girls, we ate our share and then some! We cut and burned wood for heat, having 2 wood stoves and wood burning furnace in our 150 year old cape house. We had chickens for eggs and 2 milk cows we milked.
So you can say this lifestyle is really all I know, or hubby knows. But that wouldn't really be true. You see, after high school, I joined the Air Force and went off to see the world. Hubby left home and headed to California to make his own way in the world as a young man. He also served a mission for his church. He had some very lean times in his young adult life. He could have turned back to his family for help, but he was determined to make it on his own. And for the first time in MY life, I was dependent on the grocery store. I hated it. I endured and also had lots of lean times. After my stint in the Air Force, I went to school for nursing. I married and had two children. We lived a very suburban life, one I hated. I felt disconnected from in a very real and strange sense. Fast forward several years and a divorce later, and I'm a single mom with 2 children. At church one day, I met the man who, unknown to me at the time, would be my husband and eternal companion eventually. We talked a lot early on and what did we talk about? We talked about the lifestyle we both dreamed of having. We schemed and planned on how we would get there. He was a returned missionary and I was a single mother. We married soon after meeting. We were poor as church mice, both of us as broke as anyone can be. We had no vehicle and were living in an apartment in town. Both of us hated it. He walked to work at a factory, and on his way home one day when we were newly married, he spent a few dollars buying a bushel of Grimes Golden apples and carried them on his shoulder home to our apartment. We spent that evening in the kitchen, drying some, making apple butter and just enjoying ourselves. I knew I really had found my kindred spirit! We both recognized that we needed to get somewhere else, out of town and into the life we both longed for. We started doing without while we saved every dollar we could. I made our bread and made our jams and jellies and canned everything I could get in bulk. I had a garden on the balcony of our apartment. I had veggies in pots instead of houseplants. It seemed to take forever, but we passed the time dreaming about our future homestead.
Eventually, it happened. We bought a small place and raised chickens and turkeys and rabbits for meat and eggs. We'd buy Christmas birthday presents with a homestead flavor for each other, like a grain mill, or a gift card to a seed company or a hatchery. We started small and always knew we would build up to our dream homestead. Hubby eventually got a better job and we sold our little place and moved up to a bigger, nicer homestead where we raised pigs, sheep, a steer and had a milk cow, chickens, rabbits, turkeys and geese. Hubby learned to graft and we put in a greenhouse where he could graft heritage fruit trees for sale. We bought a saw mill so he can mill our lumber. We learned as we went. We celebrated our successes and discussed our failures, encouraging each other to try again!
We now can't imagine living any other way. We teach others to live this lifestyle by hosting grafting classes, teaching beekeeping, orchard management, bread making, butchering, canning classes, etc. We're currently living in Minnesota where hubby has taken a position with the same company he's worked for, for 24 years, as an arborist sales rep. We have 5 acres and have a full and active homestead. Our children have homesteads themselves, both still developing and learning. Its fulfilling to see!
We believe in self reliance as much as we are able. We're not interested in living off grid. We like being part of the comforts of the 21st century, but we are prepared to live off grid if we HAD to. We like to know what's in our food and minimize our ingestion of preservatives and other things we can control. And there's a certain joy and satisfaction in the doing too!
This is our homestead the day we bought it. The back part is now pasture and we have gardens and fruit trees as well.
So you can see, the answer to "Why do you live the life you do?" isn't at all easy. It's just in our blood I guess!
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