This is part two of a four part series on common excuses for not homesteading. If you feel the need to read them in order, you can read PART ONE: I DON’T KNOW HOW here. Today’s excuse is I DON’T HAVE TIME to homestead.

I Don’t Have Time to Homestead.

Dude. I hear you. You’re busy. It’s a wonder you get all the stuff done that you do every day. And now I’m suggesting MORE?!? Yes. Yes, I am.

Is homesteading important to you? If you’re homestead dreaming, stop dreaming and start doing.

You’re probably already doing some homesteading and don’t even realize it.

Today, we’re going to talk about ways to homestead that take just a quick minute or save you time. Some of these even conveniently save you money. (Bonus!)

Here are some ideas:

Compost on the Counter

How much time does it take to drop your eggshells, banana peels and coffee grounds in a bucket in the kitchen? 3 seconds at most. Every few days, you dump this outside in a compost heap (90 seconds). Maybe you dump some grass clippings and shredded newspaper on top later. In just a few months, you have rich, dark, beautiful compost. Your plants will love you so much!

Grow Herbs on a Windowsill

You can snip herbs to enhance your dinners or for crafts. They don’t take much time at all to maintain and are such a cheery addition inside your home.

You stand at your kitchen sink several times each day. I’m sure your water is running some of those times. It would only take a second to fill a drinking glass with water to water the herbs in the window, maybe with the rinse water from your coffee cup in the morning.

What about when you are brushing your teeth? You could fill a cup with water to give your windowsill plants a drink. Most of us are coordinated enough to brush with one hand and pour with the other.

Collect Gray Water

So, what happens to the water you’re running in the sink while you’re waiting for it to heat up? Usually it just runs down the drain, but it’s perfectly good water. That water costs the same as your shower water. Let’s put every dollar to work:

• You could use that water to fill a jug to put in your fridge to have super-chilled water later.
• You could also just use the water (and the waiting time you were already doing) to fill the container you use to water your plants or pets.
• Or you could fill the coffee reservoir with it for the next day (I always hate making time to do that, but it’s non-negotiable!)

Of course, this is assuming your water tastes good. I haven’t always been this lucky. Maybe your water tastes terrible. What about scooping out the tub water to water your plants? They won’t mind a little dirt and as long as you’re not using too many chemicals in there, it’s fine.

Use a CSA

Community Supported Agriculture. Do you know you can buy a share of a local farm? Some will even deliver to you. What’s not to love? You don’t have to plant or hoe or water, and you get farm fresh (sometimes organic) foods for the time you were going to spend at the grocery store buying sub-par GMO-laden flavor-lacking produce.

Visit U-Pick Farms

This is a great way to save time. These farmers have already grown the produce for you. You can stop by with the family when it’s convenient for you and make some memories. Buy extra and freeze it for later with minimal preparation.

Cut Your Own Hair

A single investment of a good grooming clipper with several guards will pay for itself many times over and save you so much time. My husband has been cutting his own hair for years. Here’s what he avoids:

1. He does not have to drive the six miles to town each way to get to the nearest barber.
2. He never has to spend a Saturday morning getting a haircut.
3. He doesn’t have to go to a barbershop during their business hours.
4. He doesn’t have to make appointments.
5. He never has to wait for the barber to finish with any other customers beforehand.
6. He doesn’t have to pay to have his hair cut.
7. He doesn’t have to tip himself.

This past weekend, he also cut both our boys’ hair due to an unfortunate lice infestation. We did three haircuts in less than half an hour, without having to put on day-clothes and it was free. Had we taken the boys to a barbershop, we would have spent at least an hour and a half, thirty bucks, and probably a lot of effort from distracting toddlers to wiping tears. Were the clippers worth it? You bet.

Cook Once, Eat Twice

This is so easy, once you train yourself to think like this. When you make lasagna, how much effort is it to make two (or three)? You’re already browning meat and onions. You’re already pre-cooking your noodles (and there are always extra). The clean-up is the same.

Cook one pan and throw the other one in the freezer.

Next month, you’ve got a homemade dinner that will only take baking time. Or a handy dish you can take to someone who could use a delicious homemade dinner, like a new mom, sick friend, or lonely neighbor. Just throw in some garlic bread and call it done.

Or cook both and portion out the second pan for single-serving homemade frozen dinners. You can do this with chili, which freezes beautifully. Try soup, gumbo, tetrazzini, chowder and casseroles.

I don’t bother dirtying a pot for two cups of rice. It takes the same amount of time to make six cups and freeze the extra in two cup increments for later use as a side dish, a base for chili or stew, or to stir into a casserole. (Not all rice freezes the same. Your mileage may vary.)

You don’t have time to cook dinner every night? Have you tried Once-a-Month-Cooking? You can rope in the entire family to help you chop veggies, portion meats, and measure ingredients into gallon sized freezer bags. Empty a bag into the crockpot each morning for homemade dinners at night.

Pack Your Own Lunch

This saves more time than you think, so allow me an opportunity to give you a more detailed explanation here.

An important part of homesteading is living within your means. Most of us could benefit from packing a lunch each day to help save money and eat more healthfully. You tell me that you don’t have time to pack your lunch in the morning, but how much time do you spend hitting the drive through “real quick”?

You spend fifteen minutes gathering your phone, your wallet, & your sunglasses, and driving to your restaurant, another ten minutes in line at the drive through and yet another fifteen minutes getting back to the office. Now, either you have consumed your lunch while driving or you are rushed and consume your lunch at your desk, having only fifteen minutes left of your lunch hour. I have heartburn already.

Does this sound enjoyable? Not taking that five minutes in the morning has now cost you forty five minutes, eight bucks, and you’re headed back to the second half of the day without feeling like you had a break.

You can set yourself up for success by having most of your lunches prepared before the morning rush by trying the following:

• When you’re putting away the night’s leftovers, go ahead and prepare your lunch container so you just grab it out of the fridge and go in the morning. Or when you make that huge extra batch of chili, portion it out into single-serve containers & freeze.
• When you get home from the grocery store, grab some zip top bags or reusable containers to portion out your full bags of chips for lunches. Grab and go in the morning.
• There are lots of foods that are just as good or better the next day, like spaghetti. You can also roll up a huge tortilla with lettuce, sliced turkey and cream cheese with chives, or try lavash with hummus and spinach leaves the night before.
• Because I work in an office setting, I keep my bread, sliced deli meat, cheese, and yogurt in the fridge. I also have chips, peanut butter, crackers and silverware in my drawer. That’ll eliminate the “I forgot my lunch” excuse and saves me a lot of time and money.
• Pack breakfast the same way. I bring the last cup of coffee in my huge thermos and have a simple breakfast ready to heat up while I settle in for the morning.

Support Local & Small Businesses That Homestead

Ok, so you don’t have time to homestead. But you can support local and small businesses that do by purchasing their products.

1. You can buy farm fresh eggs without keeping chickens.
2. You can buy fruits and vegetables at the farmers’ market without tending a garden.
3. You can purchase cheese & soap produced from goat milk, without ever listening to the first “Baaa!”

Even before we had a farm, we bought half of a cow, had it processed and stuffed our freezer full. This not only saves us money, but also benefits the local economy in the following ways:

• A local cattleman makes money (by selling the cow).
• A local processor makes money (by processing the cow).

As an additional bonus for me personally, even though we did not have to feed and care for the cow, my family consumes hormone-free grass-fed beef which tastes better than store-bought beef. We never have last minute runs to the store for steaks or hamburger meat.

Invest in Permaculture

 Right, so, on the surface, it still looks like a lot of work, and it is, but if you’re already gardening and raising chickens, it makes sense to have them near one another. Chicken poop is great fertilizer and chickens are great insect-hunters. Vegetables could use the fertilizer and any extra vegetables are great for chickens.

What other love connections can you make? 

Fix It Yourself

You can probably diagnose most common appliance failures just by watching a few you tube videos. Order the $5 part and replace it yourself. Feel free to pause the video while you complete the steps with the tutorial.

Don’t waste an entire vacation day from work and tie yourself to the house for that sometime-between-eight-and-twelve time slot for the repairman to arrive.

Make Time

Quit laughing.

Seriously, you’re probably wasting an hour a night playing games on your phone or scrolling Facebook updates. You can cut back on that to make time for things that really matter to you, like cooking from scratch. Think about all the things you do on auto-pilot and come up with a way to be more efficient with household chores, so you can make time for the things that really matter to you.

Let me rephrase that: If it’s important to you, you’ll find a way. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse.

We talked about this in the first part of our series, and it bears repeating: the key to building the house is to lay that first brick, and then another, and another. You begin homesteading by making one homesteading activity a natural part of your life. Soon, you will take on another homesteading task.

If you never start, you’ll never get where you want to be. I’ll see you next week when we’ll bust through another excuse for not homesteading.

Get caught up on part one here: I DON’T KNOW HOW.

Feel free to comment if you’ve got something to add or just want to say Hi!

~ Erica
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 and build our homesteading operation here On Burton Farm.