How did you get started?

I grew up IN Chicago, about a mile north of Wrigley and a mile off the lake. When I was about 8 I took over half of our familys yard and put in a garden. I got great satisfaction from growing food (and it helped establish a healthy diet too!). I always loved animals and told my G-Gram that I would marry a farmer! Well I got older and decided I would be a 'farmer'. I always planted as big a garden as I could and taught myself to can and otherwise preserve food, make soap, sew.......as I gradually went from city to country life (Chicago, Lake Forest, Antioch, Glen Haven) I got chickens and dairy goats and eventually a jersey cow. Then I learned to make butter and cheese. I've had all kinds of other animals too, mostly unusual breeds to breed and sell (still don't have the stomach to raise my own meat, probably never will). I guess they and my dogs are my 'knick-knacks'. I now have my 14 acres in the boonies and DH of 2 years is learning to 'appreciate' the lifestyle. Next time you need shopping therapy, buy a pressure canner!
Good Luck
Dianne

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I was born and raised in a medium sized city in Massachusetts (100,000 people). Came from a family of physically handicapped people, I was the only one who could walk without having surgery first. As a boy, I started working early in a little old fashioned general store and thus was influenced by a bunch of old time Yankee farmers who hung around the place and provided the produce. Even as a kid, I missed the "good old days" and formed scheme after scheme to get out of the city and move to the woods.

I married a city girl (really city girl, from greater Boston). In our late 30's, she came home one day and suggested that we sell our house and move to the country. To make a long story short, we did it three years ago. In that three years, we've been working constantly on fixing up the HUD auctioned property that we bought. We got it fairly cheap for this area, and the tradeoff was having to do some work to it. In three years, we have put on a new roof (using all freecycled materials), installed 2 wood stoves, replaced the oil heating furnace and installed a powerventer, repaired the freeze damaged plumbing, installed a water filtration system (very high mineral content in well water after hydrofracking), and are working very hard right now at remodelling the living quarters. The first floor of the building is my muzzleloader shop, upstairs is the house.

As far as homesteading goes, we started with chickens, then turkeys, then goats, and it took off from there. Now we have chickens, ducks, geese, rabbits, goats, pigs, and a steer. They are all housed in an assortment of temporary sheds built from freecycled materials, but we are working on plans for a post and beam barn to be built in an area we are clearing.

Start slow and read all you can about "how-to" stuff. Read the Storey's books, read the Foxfire books for inspiration. Soon you will find that the way you spend your time has shifted from the hobbies you had in the city to the country lifestyle.

If you are raising your own food and cooking locally grown stuff into from-scratch meals, you really won't need any hobbies because life provide entertainment for you. Eventually, watching TV is replaced by watching your chickens scratch in the dirt.

Along the way, you'll have certain milestone moments when you realize that you are actually living your dream out. Things like the first time you butcher an animal that was born on your place, or the first meal where every single ingredient was grown right there, or maybe even when you run outside naked at 2AM with a shotgun and a flashlight to chase a bear away from your chicken coop!

I just had this same conversation on the phone with a friend who still lives in the city and dreams of coming out here someday. The way I summed it up for him is that life in the country is "real life", where you are not insulated from it. You get to see where food really comes from, not a styrofoam tray in the supermarket, but from it's real beginings: a cold stall in the middle of the night when you actually get to witness the animal that will be next winter's meat supply being born.

I guess you need to set goals for yourself. Decide what you want for your lifestyle, then figure out how to get there. Some people want 100% self reliance, complete with all organic food and a house that is off-grid, others just want to relax after work while watching their pet chickens. Me, I just want to try to live in a simpler time, with minimal "processing" and "regulating" and to escape the rat race. So far, we are doing OK at it.

You are in control of your own destiny, and if you decide to live your dream, you have to work to make it happen. Take the plunge, you only get one chance at life!

I agree with the above. We are from Massachusetts and moving to Maine. Just waiting now for the final sale of our Massachusetts home so we can buy the Maine home.
We have been lving between states and know what our heart wants. We are following it at last.

We were told....You just have to take the plunge. Right or wrong, if you don't try you will never know if you could have, would have, should have. We decieded we didn't want to look back in 5 or 10 years and say "If only we had done this or that." We want to say, "We did this and that and maybe it worked or it didn't, but we tried"

I grew up in the country with gardening and goats and lots of dogs. Learned to can and bake and cook on one of the two woodstoves my mother had. She was in incurable collector. One or two of something was never enough. she even saved our cloth baby diapers and when I became a mother, passed them on to me! My parents divorced when my youngest sister was in high school and my mother scraped by on a low paying job and then a small social security check. I always wondered if it had ever occured to her that all of her collecting had cost her in the long run as she had no savings. She NEVER sold any of it and my brother and another sister inherited it. Her example did teach me a few things: the value of cast iron cookware and woodstoves and the trap of surrounding oneself with THINGS but no money for the future.

And yet -

There are a few things that I dearly love but I have learned to purge and keep them to a minimum. So now, instead of 12 antique quilts I have two; instead of 26 antique stoneware bowls of various sizes, I have eight; instead of more than 2,000 hardcover books, I have about 300 - and the stacks are getting smaller every week.

And last week, looking at all the stuff in our yard sale, I was reminded of what most of it cost and how much I dearly WANTED it at the time! It's been a sobering reminder of how important priorities are.

In our situation, our income is VERY low while working toward our dream/goal is VERY much on our minds. We want it so bad we have given up lots of stuff and activities that most people take for granted. After 13 months I can't say we miss any of it. And, it's been the best test of whether or not we really do want our homestead.

I was sort of born to it, but got away from it like a lot of others here. Some of my earliest memories are of riding on the back of my grandfathers tractor pulling the lever to raise and lower the equipment.

I moved to the big city because that was where the jobs were, and it was exciting. Lived in Denver for 16 years, and all I could think about by the last year was getting out. I had a good job in corporate america, but looked for land back where I grew up. Found a few acres, and started paying for it month by month.

I ate a lot of top ramen for lunch to squeeze the extra money out of my budget, the whole time I was scouring the thrift stores and flea markets for useful tools and equipment to use on my place someday.

My job in corporate america went bye bye, and I took the money I had coming from it, and never looked back. I bought an old 22ft. camper trailer and hauled it to my land and have been building ever since. There have been some tough times, but five years later, I am still here, and much happier to live in the country on my little farm that I built with a lot of grit and sacrifice.

It is possible to do, you just need to be motivated to do it.

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Laughter is a social sanction against inflexible behavior.
Monty Python

Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.
William Jennings Bryan

I was fortunate enough to have a mother and father who wanted to have a bunch of land so we bought the land 12 years ago or so. 2 years after that built a house on it and been there ever since. The longer Ive lived out here the more self sufficient we have become.

wow, everyone thank you! i love reading all the stories....!!!

The best way I know to pay off debts is to put money into savings while I pay down the debts.

OK, in the spring the utility bills get lower. Should I pay more on the CC, which will make it dissapear, or whould I start a savings account?

There is something satisfying about a $25 deposite into savings that you just do not get when you add the $25 into the CC payment.

Eventuall, the CC bill was lower, and the amount in savings matched the CC bill. I now had the pleasant job of deciding if I should pay off the CC bill or keep a cash reserve in case I found the perfect land. OK, I HAD an acre, but I wanted to be able to keep livestock!

I decided to go on as I was.

When I DID find land, it was before the CC was paid off, and I had more than enough for a down payment. IF I had paid off the CC instead, I would have been $2000 short for the down payment.

But I WASN'T short, I bought 5 acres zoned agricultural, which means I could keep critters.

THEN I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, but that is a different story.

The MAIN point of all this is, if I was spending ALL of the excess money to pay off the CC I would have bought more "treats" for myself. But, there is something very pleasing when the savings account hits $200, $1000, $1,500, and so forth.

It IS a downer when you have to dip into that to repair a car, but it DOES go up again. And, there is just something satisfying about looking at a statement and seeing a considerable balance. It becomes not so much looking for land as looking for the RIGHT land, and THAT is a heady experience!!!!!!!!!

Born and raised in a part of a medium sized city where the neighborhood had some large yards that I got aquainted with different folks raising pigeeon, rabbits, and chickens. My folks, though living in town, did a lot of what is now called 'homesteading lifestyle' by gardening seriously, canning for storage some self sufficiency, later my dad kept bees after retirement started by rounding up neighborhood bees, building all his own hives and equipment for that. He also grew fruit trees with some obsession for growing apples and I remember a massive apricot tree in the yard.
At about whatever age as a youngster...I'd say around age 7, I took over a good part of the yard with rabbit pens, pigeon coops, and built my own dog pen later for my interest with bird dog companions. It was always 'in me' to raise animals, learn about growing plants and so forth. That's basically when/how I started. Found out later in life the house we lived in was actually where a barn stood on a farm about 50 years before. My dad worked partly on one farm near where we lived, just on the outskirts, and it was all connected before housing spread inward calling that a part of the city. I remember going there often to hunt morels, hunt game. It wasn't far. My paper route ended on the last street (road) in the town. On one side were my houses for throwing papers, and on the other side was farmfields for miles. Friend I grew up with always got into stuff with me about animal raising. Lord knows what we Didn't try to keep and raise if we could.

Later in working life, living in a small town, doing a 'career' like most people do in a job and gotta live somewhere. Always had a hankering to get property to grow something... a big garden, poultry, beekeeping and such.
So, I did with a spouse at the time. We worked weekends on the gardenstead of 1 acre garden and 25 acres bush behind that. Grew tons of good veggies there, raised ducks, chickens for meat and eggs, etc.

From the gardenstead, moving permanently out of town in the boonies where it's basically farmlands in one direction, and wildlands surrounding the rest. That's the homestead now for the last 17 years, and still at it in one shape of form. Currently I'm keeping to raise 18 meat turkeys, have a laying flock started again, and just recently butchered about 20 big broilers for freezer camp. 3 gardens on the go.....potato patch, main garden, and a 3 sisters (corn, squash, beans). I work on trails and clearing whenever I can to encourage wildilfe and good pastures for both foraging on the stead and for animal food (clover, etc.). So, that's the homesteading 'lifestyle' in a nutshell as far as I'm doing it. There are/were other offshoots such a baitfish harvesting in areas away and the obvious 'work life' 20 miles into town commute, but I'd rather be on the stead than live in any town.

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The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of man.

Wow..thanks for posting this. Kind of goes along w/ my "lot of land" post. Lots of neat stories and good info for those of us getting started.

Rachael

I have always as long as i can remeber wanted to live in the old days. I have always been told I was born 100 yrs to late. I was raised on the other side of the mtn we live on now. As a kids we never had the newest styles or the best toys, we did have what we needed, we didnt go hungry, we did have a roof over our heads and we never went to bed hungry, We raised our own food back then, we ate alot of fried salt pork and gravy on boiled potatoes, My mom was the only person i know could make something out of nothing and 5 kids didnt leave the table hungry. I remember every Saturday night was beans and hot dogs, biscuits or corn bread, to this day we have beans and hot dogs or biscuits and corn bread every Saturday night. Mom made old fashion puddings and custard for desserts, we didnt have alot of store bought foods, they spent the money on food for the animals which in turn fed us. we use to have huge gardens, I rememeber 5 of us kids spending all day digging potatoes and having them dry and picking them up in bushel baskets, boy if you wanted kids to work in gardens today they would want to be paid. My kids now how to live if the store closes down, but families we know couldnt make it a week, with out going to the store, I guess its just second nature for us to have a pantry and having a couple mos worht of food stored up ahead of time. I took my grand children berry picking the other day and they didnt understand why we just didnt buy fromt he store like theirs friends mother does, its faster and easier.. Right but there isnt the same satisfication, of working for your food, providing for your family with your own hands. They had a good time picking berries. To this day we try to live as simple as possible, I hate spending money for things that arent really needed. I work to hard for money. Cant say i dont spend money on some things, my habit is buying material to make clothes and quilts, but in turn I can sell them to make more money, We have friends who dont understand how we live on less than 20,000 a yr for a family of 5, and pay our mortgage and what ever simple monthly bills, They have 20 and 30 yr mortgages we have 5yrs to go and we own it all, Living the simple coutry life is in our blood, its what makes us happy. Our souls are country through and through. Stores could close down and we could survive with no problem. Pantry is full, freezers are full. Hearts are full. If its not country its not living