I’m a terrible homesteader because I won’t wear gloves, no matter how many times I say I need to, so I always have splinters in my palms or underneath my fingernails from moving bales of hay and pallets around.
I am a terrible homesteader because I built a fenced-in area for the chickens and they just hopped out of it, as if to mock me.
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I am a terrible homesteader because I can’t feed us from my garden, but I won’t lie for likes on Instagram. If I had to feed us without the grocery, we would starve.
I’ve never made sourdough.
I am a terrible homesteader because I didn’t know that the alpacas would break every one of our orchard trees, scratching their backs on the young branches and eating every leaf until the trees starved to death.
In fact, the alpacas make me mad sometimes and I tell them quite plainly when they are being bitchy and I don’t think #alpacasofinstagram would condone that.
I am a terrible homesteader because I’ve never had a bumper crop of honey.
If I make something, it looks like I made it, and that’s usually not great.
I still can’t use the spinning wheel, because I spend all my free time reading and writing. Even if I could use it, I would not be able to clothe us. Our homestead is not productive enough.
I am such a terrible homesteader, my husband teases me, calling me a “stick farmer” because there are more sticks and branches fallen from our trees than actual plants in the garden.
My compost never breaks all the way down. Between the chickens and composting, most of our kitchen waste is diverted, but it is not going back to our soil—unless you count via the chickens pooping everywhere.
I might be a terrible homesteader because I am not a tradwife. I might look like one from the outside, with my long hair, staying home with my kid, saying my prayers. But I swear frequently as I try to get this homestead growing and my writing off the ground. I grumble as I drag the trashcan to the curb. I stop myself just short of flipping off speeding trucks. I boss my husband around. I look like shit while I shovel it and I do all of this for personal and political reasons that have nothing to do with conservative values, and everything to do with wild love.
I think sometimes of generations of women who passed on skills or shared secrets while churning butter. I am grateful for many luxuries of modern life, but it is easy to see emotional tradeoffs. I brought home a baby to the quiet of a pandemic summer, and my own mother did not get to meet her for over six months. In that isolation of just the three of us, adding four alpacas, six chickens, and 20,000 bees felt like the more the merrier. It was too much at once and I see that now, but I would not go back and change it.
Sometimes I look at the books about homesteading on my shelf or see thriving one-acre farms on Instagram, with whimsical animal habitats and flourishing flower gardens, and I remember how we spent three summers cleaning out a neglected old barn, moving a mountain of manure from other people’s horses, turning that mound into a flowerbed, shoveling a ton of mulch, and doing a wild, whooping dance when something finally grew there.
Sometimes, I see the picture-perfect crafts other people create and I wonder how they make it look so easy.
Sometimes I read memoirs about people developing their homesteads into self-sustaining ecosystems and I realize I have so much more to learn. That four years in, I am nowhere near where I dreamed I would be.
I may be a terrible homesteader, but failure works its own kind of magic, sowing gratitude for the abundance of things that thrive despite my best efforts as much as because of them. I preside over a half-acre of dirt and a half-acre stick farm and I celebrate every spring that I am greeted by my bees. I welcome every flower like it is a friggin miracle that it came up from a seed I planted. I know enough to be thankful for that.
I remember reading Good Housekeeping when I was a young homemaker and thinking I could never do all the things suggested. It frustrated me. I’m so proud of all you have done on your small farm. It’s remarkable.