Are you looking to live a homestead lifestyle but don’t have a homestead? Don’t be discouraged! There are still a lot of different things you can do to live like a homesteader. Try out some of these ideas to experience the homesteading lifestyle wherever you are today.
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When we lived in town, there were many days dreaming of living a homesteading lifestyle. I watched lots of homesteading videos, wishing that I could live that lifestyle too. But I would always feel discouraged and trapped. How could I live a homestead lifestyle if we didn’t have an actual homestead? It turns out, there were lots of ways! By the time that we actually did move out of our town property, I had already learned a lot of homesteading skills that allowed me to live a homestead lifestyle- even before we had our homestead. Today, I wanted to share some of those things with you so that you can experience homestead living even if you don’t have your homestead quite yet or if you’re not ready to commit fully to homestead living right now.
Table of Contents
- Learn to Cook from Scratch
- Eat Seasonally and Shop Locally
- Learn How to Preserve Food
- Learn to Forage and Hunt
- Adapt a “Think Outside the Box” Mindset
- Need more inspiration to start your own homestead?
- Save this post!
Learn to Cook from Scratch
Homesteading in general means to provide as much from your own home for your family as possible. And for homesteaders, food is a big deal. Life revolves around growing and raising food, so for them, it’s important to know how to prepare what you have produced.
When cooking from scratch, you’re using ingredients that don’t have an ingredients-label attached to it. You’re using the most basic ingredients to pull everything together into a meal.
One thing you can do to live a homestead lifestyle is to learn to cook from scratch, just like a homesteader would do. Think of foods that are in season and use those to prepare your meals.
Interested in learning more about cooking from scratch? Check out this resource that I put together to help you do just that- even without a meal plan.
Read: TOP 5 TIPS SO YOU CAN COOK FROM SCRATCH WITHOUT A MEAL PLAN
Eat Seasonally and Shop Locally
As I mentioned before, a homesteader’s life revolves around growing food for your homestead. When you grow your own food, you’re going to be eating seasonally. This simply means that your diet is mostly made up of the foods that are available from your homestead (or locally) at certain times of the year. Summer will be your prime vegetable season, with your main large harvest crops coming ready in late summer. You’ll find yourself eating fresh vegetables like tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, corn on the cob, and berries. As fall rolls around, you’ll be harvesting apples, squashes, pumpkins, nuts, and cold-hardy vegetables like broccoli and swiss chard. Winter means eating preserves from the prime harvest season, along with meats. You might see meals like meat and potatoes, stews, soups, fermented foods, and canned fruits and vegetables. Then finally in late spring, you’ll find yourself eating lots of eggs, leafy greens, rhubarb, wild ramps, maple syrup, and radishes and the cycle begins again.
If you’re considering homesteading as a way of life, see if you’re ok with the food cycles that come from eating seasonally as the majority of your diet. Buy from local farmers to see what’s being grown at different times of the year and find out if you’re able to prepare the food in a way that your family will enjoy. Eating seasonally is a wonderful way to get necessary nutrients into your body at different times of the year!
If you’re thinking about starting to grow your own food this year, check out some of these resources:
- THIS IS WHAT AND HOW MUCH TO PLANT FOR A SELF-SUFFICIENT GARDEN THIS YEAR
- EDIBLE NUT TREES FOR YOUR COLD-HARDY HOMESTEAD
- CHOOSING COLD HARDY TREES FOR YOUR SMALL HOMESTEAD ZONE 4 ORCHARD
Learn How to Preserve Food
Preserving food is a must for a homesteading lifestyle! For many, harvest season is just that- one season! That means there is time during the year when growing food for your family just isn’t possible (or as easy). For this reason, homesteaders must know how to preserve food from their bulk harvest so that they have food from their homestead during the off season.
If your goal is to live like a homesteader this year, start learning how to preserve food. It’s not as scary as it might seem, I promise! Most of preserving food is just taking the time to do it.
I have a whole post on how to get started with home canning, as well as the resources and recipes I use when it comes to canning for home preservation. The first time you eat something that you canned yourself is going to be a great feeling! Don’t let fear stop you from learning this really important skill.
Read: CANNING FOR BEGINNERS: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE STARTING HOME PRESERVATION
Learn to Forage and Hunt
Foraging and hunting is an excellent way to get fresh, delicious food that is entirely raised by the greatest resource for it- Mother Nature! We forage apples, nuts, asparagus, ramps, plums, berries, and mushrooms as a part of our own diet and are always looking to learn more foods to forage for. My husband is an avid hunter and provides our family with venison each year, as well as turkey and the occasional water fowl. Fishing is another great source of protein that feeds your family at a very low cost! Again, like most food accumulation, the biggest thing you’ll need is to take some time to do it. Weekends are a great time to go foraging or hunting if you work outside of your homestead. Just make sure it’s a priority!
When it comes to learning how to do these things, Youtube, your local library, and elders in the community are excellent resources. An excellent book on foraging in Wisconsin is called The Forager’s Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants by Samuel Thayer. The book is jam-packed full of images, descriptions, and easy to identify wild edibles, making it a great book to have on hand when fall foraging in Wisconsin.
Read: FALL FORAGING IN WISCONSIN
Adapt a “Think Outside the Box” Mindset
The homesteading lifestyle is all about adaptability, changing with the seasons, and making do with what you have. As you start to think about your own homesteading goals and make dreams about what you’d like to do this year, be creative. It can be easy to feel like your environment might prohibit you from having the homestead that you want. However, that shouldn’t stop you from homesteading at all!
Even if you’re living in a small space, there are plenty of ways you can still homestead and produce food for your family successfully. Anna Timmerman is a prime example of a person who has “thought outside the box” to create a homestead on her city property. It’s truly amazing all of the food she has produced from her urban dwelling! You can read her story of urban homesteading and see how she makes it work with the link below!
Read: WHAT LIFE LOOKS LIKE ON AN URBAN HOMESTEAD
Need more inspiration to start your own homestead?
You definitely can live homesteading lifestyle even without a homestead of your own. I hope you will try some of these ideas out as you plan for or begin your own homesteading journey!
Read some of these posts!
- HOW TO BECOME A HOMESTEADER: HOW THESE FAMILIES STARTED THEIR OWN MODERN DAY HOMESTEADS
- THIS IS WHY SO MANY PEOPLE ARE HOMESTEADING TODAY
- WHAT 200 HOMESTEADERS WISH THEY WOULD’VE KNOWN WHEN THEY STARTED
- HOMESTEADING WHILE WORKING FULL TIME: CAN IT BE DONE?
Save this post!
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Would you be willing to share more recipes or items you cook from scratch?
I can try! The problem is that so much of the cooking I do is “by the eye” instead of with an actual recipe….But I can definitely try to measure some things out and share more of how I do that!