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Keeping the Homestead Dream Alive

- What to Do When the

Bluebird of Happiness Poops

on Your Head

by Sheri Dixon

There are a few, a lucky few, folks who were born on the family farm, grew up on the family farm, learned how to run the family farm, and have no doubt about where they will live and what they will do - they will continue the family farm. 

For the rest of us, the road to our Homestead is not usually so direct. Fraught with detours, dead ends, and missing road signs, sometimes it takes years to get there, and once there, sometimes, like the dream where you think you are at the bottom, but you just keep falling, our final destination remains elusive.  

Perhaps your earliest memories include fantasies of ponies, hen houses, and amber waves of grain, or maybe, in an otherwise normal adulthood, one day pushing pencils in your cubicle you were seized with the overwhelming urge to leap out the window and go plant something.  Outside.  In the dirt.  And the sunshine.  And never be "cubed" again.   

No matter - the result is the same: the need and desire to claim a bit of earth, raise a barn, fill it with food-on-the-hoof nourished by grass-in-the-pasture, and earn your keep by the sweat of your brow, darn it. 

'Tis a worthy goal, and like all worthy goals, there must be a worthy plan - a neat and well thought out plan that takes you from point A, to point B and all the way to point Q, which is right about where your farm sits, a perfect jewel set into the warm bosom of a blissful countryside. 

Point A is deceptively easy. It consists of “I wanna be a homesteader.” 

Point B is substantially more involved, and quite a bit more lengthy, but generally fun and relatively inexpensive and painless.  This is where all the preliminary learning is done.  Your collection of magazines, books, bookmarked websites, and business cards will amaze even yourself in an alarmingly short time.  New words and phrases will roll off your tongue leaving your ears wondering, “Who said that?”  Sustainability, Grass-fed Beef, and Nitrogen Fixing Cover Crops - these and other, until now, odd combinations of words will dance through your head at night like visions of sugarplums. 

The whole concept seems so right. Caring for the earth while caring for your family, dying a noble peaceful death, and being cared for, in turn, by the earth, like our ancestors did for generation upon generation.  Shunning the mainstream belief of the nine to five followed by the 401k, we voraciously devour every tale telling how others have accomplished this modern day return to a basic and good life. 

And one shining truth shimmers through each family story according to the published word: simply follow your plan (or THEIR plan, if they are selling a book), and the end result will be your homestead. Happy smiling family waving from a tractor on the last page.  The End. 

For most of us, this couldn’t be a crueler fallacy. 

Because somewhere after Point B, life gets in the way.  People lose jobs, they lose spouses, they gain a child or responsibility of a parent or grandparent, there’s a chronic illness or debilitating injury tossed into the mix and the lovely plan is in shatters, tatters, and shreds. 

This is where we separate the wheat from the chaff, the rice from the hulls, the peanuts from the butter.  At this juncture, some people will decide that the homesteading dream is just that - a pretty dream, like the one where Antonio Banderas rides up on a black stallion, swoops you off your feet, hands you a perfectly frozen Dove bar (not too hard, but not dripping and mooshy either), and gallops off to sunny Mexico with you to the perfect beach with sand that will never get into your ice cream… 

Ahem. Sorry… 

The “homesteading as a pretty dream” group will buck up, re-group and move on.   

The others... Ah, the others.  Every fragment of a thought inferring that they will never have their piece of earth will result in the sound of a tiny piece of their heart breaking.  

This story is for you, my friends. 

There is ALWAYS something you can do that will move you in the right direction, and just because you APPEAR to be moving backwards, does not mean that you must STAY moving backwards. 

Although the causes of Homestead Dream Endangerment are many, the results are basically the same few depression inducing scenarios: 

Dream Endangerment Scenario One: Stuck in the City - No Money to Get Out. 

This one is the hardest because it’s like you are smacked down even before you get started.  In actuality, this is where you can hone skills before you need them.  Go to the farmers’ market, buy a bunch of veggies and fruits and teach yourself to freeze, dehydrate and can.  Learn to bake bread.  Find and take classes on sewing, knitting, woodworking, basic carpentry, electrical, and plumbing, heck even car repair (tractors have engines - who knew?).  

If you only have a yard, you can have a garden; plant veggies in between your flowers, veggies are plants, too.  If you have only a balcony, you can have a few pots with tomato and pepper plants in them, and smaller pots with herbs around them.  If you have oregano, basil, and cilantro, you have spaghetti sauce and salsa. What more could you want?  

Volunteering and visiting working farms is a good way to figure out for sure and for certain what you like and what you hate about different aspects of farming, and is more helpful to be done BEFORE you leap in with both rubber boots on.  The fact that your elaborate and brilliant plan to raise heritage Widget Sheep is going to be more difficult than you imagined because you have a previously unknown allergy to lanolin, is something better learned early on. 

Of course all this is done in your "spare time", while trimming your budget and working overtime to truly be able to escape the city once you find your property.  Which brings us to:  

Dream Endangerment Scenario Two: Land Land Everywhere, But Not a Farm in Sight. 

Tiny, sweat-covered down payment in hand, it’s time to find your land and stake your claim to it.  Even if you know where you want to settle, it’s hard enough.  Even in the flattest part of the world, the difference between parcels of land is astounding.  If you are considering moving somewhere you’ve never been before, it’s mind-boggling.  

The first 100 or so parcels that you look at will be fun and educational.  After that it just gets tediously bizarre, like that old Dunkin Donuts commercial where the baker sleepwalks to work every morning at 3:00 AM chanting “Time to make the donuts.  Time to make the donuts...”, you will drive down little back roads, map in hand droning “Gotta find the land.  Gotta find the land...”

Continued

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