I vividly remember the very first time I pulled a carrot out of my garden. Anyone who says homesteading isn’t thrilling clearly hasn’t had this opportunity. The carrot itself wasn’t anything to write home about. It was misshapen and relatively small, but I wiped it on my shirt and ate it whole. Dirt and all.
Homesteading has this power. The “I did that” feeling that’s popularly known as “The Ikea Effect” which describes the idea that people value something more when they’ve put effort into creating it. Dirt and all. Every homestead is different, but I’ve noticed that we all seem to share this thirst for tangible knowledge and skills. Growing our food unlocks preserving our food which unlocks herbalism and home apothecaries which unlocks reducing toxins in our clothing, toys, belongings, cleaning supplies, and more. I’ve never met a homesteader who is bored - we always have a new skill to master, and it seems we turn towards that process like it’s a balm.
The Catalyst
My homesteading journey started in the garden. When we started growing our own food I was already a kitchen wizard. I made most of our meals from scratch and shared my vegan recipes on my blog. Food has been my North Star since I was a child, so in a way, homesteading has been a long time coming.
When we finally moved to our property from a tiny, run-down one-bedroom apartment with no green space I was hungry for a garden. In our haste, we made all of the mistakes. We tilled out a rectangle in a sunny spot in the yard, bought some rootbound starts from Lowe’s, and planted them. Everything that came out of that garden felt like a gift. It wasn’t prolific. It wasn’t pretty. But it was ours. We planted it. We made it.
The ownership of our garden went straight to our heads. The following spring we started over 100 peppers and tomatoes, adding seed starting to our list of skills. I diligently moved them inside and outside, day and night trying to find room for them. In the end, we had space for about ¼ of them in our small garden and lost about half of those to spring rains that flooded our garden.
These experiences led us to learn about permaculture growing methods and garden planning. Unbeknownst to us, they were trials. It often felt like a failure when you looked at the stats - we started 100 seeds and ended up with 10 plants - but these experiences gave us a feeling, like a whisper, to keep going, keep learning, keep tweaking. Despite our apparent failure, we knew that with more planning and a way to elevate our garden to avoid spring floods, we could be triumphant.
The Cascade
Homesteading is a spiral. Its core is made up of our base skills. For me, this is cooking. As the spiral unravels I’ve got gardening and growing food. I’ve added pantry basics. I’ve added sourdough. A little further out you’ll run into composting. Seed starting. Permaculture. Fermenting. Etc. Each skill leads to a new one in this natural progression of homegrown and homemade living.
These skills loop, fold, and build off each other in a spiralic way. The web of learning is continuous, never-ending, and never all-encompassing. It’s not a closed loop, but one of keeping an open mind, allowing the skills to lead you to what’s next. The spiral reflects the culture of experimentation I experience with homesteading. There’s a lightness to the journey that’s filled with hard work. When you’re learning something new there’s room for failure and play.
Each of the homesteading skills that I possess motivates me to learn more. Each year I dive deep on a specific topic, take a new approach, or apply a new mindset. I’m constantly tinkering with new recipes, preservation techniques, and learning about new plants. The Ikea Effect is in full swing on the homestead - providing a new source of motivation and direction every day.
The Challenge
I recently realized that I’m not, as I had thought since I was a teenager, a perfectionist. How could I be on a homestead where I’m regularly forced to learn a new skill in order to get a job done? “A Jack of all trades is a master of none” comes to mind often.
While the mediocrity of this lifestyle can sometimes feel overwhelming, it plays a big part in The Ikea Effect on the homestead, at least for me. I love learning. I enjoy the challenge of figuring something new out. Researching and sitting with notes and my nose in a book. Homesteading has unlocked this process for me in that, yes, I have plenty of topics that require research, notes, diagrams, and book-based learning, however, we have the opportunity to put those things into practice.
During my master’s degree in public health, the topic of research versus practice came up a lot. What good is all of this knowledge if it is a.) only true inside a lab and b.) not accessible to the general population? Homesteading and gardening books are a lot like this - I can read about companion planting all winter long, be able to talk about it to anyone who is willing to listen, and then as soon as spring hits I stand in my garden with no idea how to apply the knowledge. This is my favorite challenge - distilling the wisdom into practice. (I don’t advertise my guides or workbooks much anymore, but that’s the premise of them - I took a bunch of theoretical information and presented it in an actionable format)
The investment in learning is worth it for these aha moments when you finally crack open a heady topic like succession planting, permaculture, or companion planting. When you finally figure out how to keep sourdough starter alive. When you finally grow a carrot.
The Confidence
The skills and practices that I associate with homesteading (because I can track them all on my homestead spiral) are lightbulbs in their own right. Take soap, for example. We use soap every day, multiple times a day. We wash our hands, our dishes, our hair, our faces, and our clothing with it. How often do you think, “I wonder how that’s made?” or, “Could I make that?”. The answer, I’ve found (since I do often think those things), is a resounding yes. The knowledge that you can make soap or tortillas or grow a tomato or make pizza dough out of sourdough discard for a quick meal gives you much-needed power over your days. It’s the confidence that you can handle whatever challenges come your way. Despite the constant “abundance” messaging under the homesteading umbrella, we experience shortages, timelines, and tight budgets.
It’s true, sometimes I learn that it doesn’t make sense to make something myself. In the process of making it however, I’ve gained a much deeper appreciation for the product and use it more intentionally moving forward. So, even if I decide to purchase it moving forward, I have ownership over that decision and a sense of pride for adding one more item to the intentional living column in my brain.
Despite this post making it sound like I do it all, I don’t fall into the belief that the main goal of homesteading is self-sufficiency. Instead, we should be focusing on community sufficiency. In order to make it doable to literally do it all you must make major lifestyle and dietary changes. For me, doing it all would take a lot of the fun and reward out of this lifestyle. There are a lot of “have to” chores that come with a homestead when you rely on gardens for food and have animals to care for but you take that to another level when you’re coasting through life by yourself.
I stopped by a farm this weekend to buy straw and talked with the farmer for a while about some of our challenges with expanding our garden and accessing hay throughout the winter for our goats. She shared a few phone numbers for hay and gave me a few directions for researching solutions to our garden expansion challenges. I left feeling grateful for the farming community and the open exchange of information.
Knowing you can make or handle something if needed is one level of confidence, but knowing you have a community of folks supporting you (& you them) is another. That’s what I’m striving for.
The Conclusion
It seems like the topic of trad wives is perpetually trending (I just caught this episode of Trevor Noah’s podcast on the topic) and an evening of scrolling through instagram certainly gives #goals vibes, but homesteading isn’t a destination. It’s a journey of project after project of learning, growth, and building connections with what you consume and who you are consuming it with. I encourage you to store the idyllic homesteading content away as inspiration, not comparison, and step into your homesteading journey one DIY at a time. Your homesteading spiral will grow, trust me.