This is part one of a four-part series on busting through the excuses for not homesteading so you can live more sustainably. Let’s dig in.

“Oh, I’d love to homestead, but

I DON’T KNOW HOW.”

Oh, honey. This is a terrible excuse for missing out on some real personal satisfaction.

Remember when you learned to tie your shoes? At one point in your life, you did not even know how to tie your shoes. So you watched someone else do it every morning.

Then you decided you WANTED TO LEARN HOW to tie your own shoes.

Someone showed you how to make the bunny ears. You practiced and practiced, and eventually, you could tie your own shoes like a champ! ::cue “The more you know” star and chime::

It’s the same with homesteading. You decide you want to homestead. You know some people who do it. Maybe you read about it. Then you watch a video online. Then you start practicing it yourself. All those folks living off the grid didn’t just get there overnight and you know it!

You’re probably already doing a little homesteading now and don’t even realize it. If you’re not, I bet I can teach you some simple homesteading actions to get you started.

1. Bake your own rustic bread.

   TWO INGREDIENTS! The simplest recipe I ever found was to mix 1 bottle of beer and 2 cups of self-rising flour until just combined, and then bake at 400 for almost an hour. Bread will be dense, with a thick crust on the outside. But seriously great with some butter. You can mix two ingredients. You can homestead.

2. Make sun tea.

   Put your tea bags and water in a jar outside when it’s hot. A few hours later, tea. Could this be easier?

3. Make your own laundry detergent.

   Three ingredients. Well, four, if you count water. But I assume most folks with access to my blog are going to have ready access to water. Don’t go all Matt Damon on me.

4. Recycle, Re-purpose, Re-use.

   I’ll give you this great easy example: Turn your old T-Shirt into a re-usable bag for grocery or farmer market shopping. Slice off the sleeves and around the neckline. Turn it inside out and run a straight seam along the bottom hem to seal. Turn it back right-side out and done. You can make it completely no-sew by following this tutorial. Another example of re-purposing an item: the Baby Einstein Ball turned Chicken Snacker.

5. Learn basic carpentry skills.

   Staple chicken wire to an old frame. Voila! A memory board. Hang your own pictures or hooks. Use a drill to screw four boards together on end for a planter box. Even if you stink at carpentry, do you think plants won’t grow if it’s crooked? Of course they will.

   

6. Learn to sew.

   Have you ever re-attached a button? What about hemming a pair of pants? These basic skills will save you money and time over having to hire someone else to do it for you. Learning a straight stitch can also mean easy inexpensive pillowcases, curtains, and tee-shirt bags. Once, I cut off the elastic waistband of a tube skirt from college, replaced that with a straight seam, and created a cool crushed velvet pillowcase. That thing is nearly twenty years old and I still love it.

7. Cook from Scratch.

   I have this cookbook called How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. It has a huge catalog of recipes, from basic to more advanced fares and I use it all the time. Don’t know how long to bake a chicken at what degree? Can’t remember if pork is baked at the same temperature? Check the book. The pancakes recipe is a household favorite here (We double the sugar to four tablespoons per batch. Naughty, right? Then sometimes we add whatever we have lying around: berries, bananas, chocolate chips!)

8. Attend a class or workshop.

   You don’t know how to homestead? If someone’s giving a class, go, listen, ask questions. You might visit your library, local USDA cooperative, community center or university to check offerings.

9. Read homesteading articles, blogs, or books.

   If you’re into it, I’m sure someone’s writing about it. Make a list of all the things you want to know about & then look up one thing per day.

   What about starting with some primitive skills like how to start a fire without matches or how to tie knots.

10. Make your own soap.

    It just takes three basic ingredients:  water, lard, and lye. I made soap once because I couldn’t stand spending $4.99 for a bar of unscented soap for my husband to use before hunting. I calculated that it cost me approximately eighty-five cents per bar to make my own. So, it was less expensive for unscented soap.

    But since I regularly buy soap with coupons for less than forty-five cents per bar, it was not going to save me any money (or time) to make my plain soap. I’m sure things will change when I start incorporating goats’ milk in the soap.

11. Make pickles.

    Slice up a cucumber and toss it in the leftover juice in your pickle jar for two weeks. Boom. Pickles.

12. Make jelly or freezer jam.

    Don’t let those berries turn to mush. Cook them on the stove with a little sugar and you’ll have jam in no time. There must be a million recipes for homemade jelly and jam. I like the taste of zero preservatives, don’t you?

13. Change your own oil.

    I am not mechanically inclined, but when I was single and had a riding mower, changing the oil at the end of the season was a necessity. I printed out the user manual from the interwebs and changed the oil myself. Do you know what? It wasn’t even that hard.

See? This wasn’t so bad. These are all easy ways to ease into homesteading and I’m sure you are already doing some of them now.

Remember, the key to building the house is to lay that first brick, and then another, and another. You start with one homesteading skill, and then add another, and another. Soon, you’re the go-to person on homesteading.

You only have to be one step ahead of someone else to be considered an expert.

What interests  you most about homesteading? How do you homestead? What’s your next homesteading step?

~ Erica

PS: Don’t forget to come back next week and just TRY to tell me you don’t have time to homestead!

PSS: And be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss another post or great idea from Owning Burton Farm. Follow along on our debt payoff journey as we pay off over a quarter of a million dollars in debt by December 2026.