What is urban homesteading to me?

Do you have an interest in growing and preserving your food? Would you like decrease the amount of waste you produce? Do you want to be more self-sufficient? Even if you live in the city, you can achieve these. I shop at Costco way too often to be most people’s vision of the quintessential urban homesteader, but little by little, project by project, I’m making strides in sourcing my own food, reducing waste, and connecting with nature in ways that are usually limited to folks in the country. At first I really didn’t want to claim the label of “urban homesteader,” but then I found like-minded friends who were also keeping chickens, growing food, canning their tomatoes, and drying herbs, and within a year of engaging in this online community of friends, I had installed an aquaponics system to grow food from fish waste, added a covey of quail for egg production, fine-tuned by seed starting process, installed cattle panel trellises, invested in an egg incubator, bought a food dehydrator, and started converting my front yard into a food forest. Are any one of these practices essential to urban homesteading? Absolutely not. For me, it’s more about the mindset and process.

I challenged myself to identify three pillars of my own practice, and they weren’t the keywords I would have initially associated with homesteading. Ultimately, what I find I need most in my life is an outlet for my curiosity, creativity and connection.

Curiosity:

Life’s greatest explorations usually start with a question. “What if I…?” “How would this…?” Curiosity is what keeps us digging deeper for knowledge, and that newfound knowledge pushes us to make changes and try new things.

Creativity:

Once the initial questions are asked and observations are made, we seek to find creative solutions to apply the new knowledge. For example, we find ways to apply waste from one activity as a beneficial input to another. We create spaces that draw us in and inspire us to grow more curious!

Connection:

With these creative solutions, we connecting nature back to the land by supporting biodiversity through eco-friendly practices, building soil health, and providing habitat. We connect better to our own bodies in time spent working the garden, to our family through projects, and to our local community through shared resources.

I would love for you to join me on my journey. I think we have a lot to learn from each other through our successes and failures. Connect with me on Instagram and drop a note to say “hi.”

Here are some of the areas I’ve discussed on the blog:

Gardening
Starting vegetables from seed
Chicken Keeping
Quail Keeping

10 Weeks of Vegetable Gardening – Garden preparation tasks leading up to the last frost date