How this Journey Began

I've been asked several times what lead us to homesteading and how much land do we have.  Let's take the first part of the question, how the journey began.  Steve, my husband, was in the Air Force so we traveled with his service.  I always had liked to garden and would put a small veggie patch wherever we were stationed.  I guess it just reminded me of my childhood.  My grandfather always had a vegetable garden and he would let us help harvest.  When I say he had a garden to me as a child it looked like a farm.  It wasn't; my grandparents lived on the outskirts of the city and had an usually big back yard.  But fresh produce was always part of our diet.  Then a few years later my parents moved to the next town over.  We moved closer to my grandparents but were in fact in the next town.  Across the street was one of the nicest older couples I have ever met.  Mr. and Mrs. Williams.  I don't mind using their names because they have long gone to be with the Lord.  Once a year the Williams would go out of town and I would watch over the house and garden when they left.  Mr. Williams would carefully walk me through the garden and tell me every detail I would need to know.  What to do if I saw a certain bug, or if I saw the beginnings of a fungus.  He tended the garden like most mothers watch over their children.  Now Mrs. Williams was a wonderful person herself.  She knitted and canned.  How I can remember her cherry preserves.  Back to the story.  Part of my pay was all the vegetables that ripened while they were gone.  So a love for gardening was cultivated early for me.

But the story really begins June of 1987 in Naples, Italy.  As I said Steve was in the Air Force and stationed there.  I had told him I was making lasagna for dinner, it was his favorite.  Well long story made short, he was in a horrible car accident on his way home.  He was taken to a local Italian hospital where he awoke to cuts being cleaned with alcohol.  This was the beginning of a long journey.  Over the years he was not doing as well as a young healthy man in his late twenties and thirties should.  He would go to the doctors many times and be told they knew he thought something was wrong but they couldn't find anything.  Doctor after doctor said the same thing.  Test after same test was done over and over with the same results, until one day in November of 2007.   Steve got up for work and collapsed.  He mustered some energy and continued to get ready for work.  He looked awful; for the first time since the accident in Italy I thought if he left for work I would never see him again.  I asked him to stay home that day; like many days his day was filled with meetings and appointments he couldn't miss.  I told him if he insisted on going to work I would drive him.  I know I'm not making this all that short, but I am working to the beginning of the journey.  Again long story short, he agreed to stay home and go to the doctors one more time.  That was the first day of Steve's very early medical retirement.

He was diagnosed with what is now called a TBI or Traumatic Brain Injury.  His body had been deteriorating for 20 years.  His Pituitary Gland was all but dead.  He had Osteoporosis to the point one good sneeze could break his back.  His memory was not at all good and he was sleeping 15 to 16 hours a day.  He was up for work and the drive there and home and sleep the rest of the time.  When the diagnosis was finally made he was to say at the least a mess. 

This is where my self taught PHD in cause and effect of medical treatments and food come to be. The treatments he was going to be on got me thinking a lot about our diets and how food would play into the changes.  Then a very simple encounter in a hardware store with a nurse I happened to be standing in front of in line, really got me thinking.  How safe is our food?  So with computer in hand and the internet at my disposal, I researched his condition, the treatments and how the meat and vegetables we eat are given or sprayed with the same hormones. 

Now Steve's hormone levels are checked every 3 to 4 months to make sure they aren't too high or too low.  Then I decided he or I didn't need any additional hormones in our food.  So that's how the journey really began.

Now for how much land we have.  It happens that just 18 months before he collapsed we bought a small farm style house on just over a half acre of land.  I had a friend who attended church with us, whose daughters were in 4-H.  They were raising chickens, ducks and goats.  They had just hatched a large amount of biddies and were selling them.  So our daughter who was staying with us while her husband was deployed and I went to the store and ran in to my friend and she told us of the biddie sale.  We followed her home and of course fell in love with the babies.  The short of it was, we came home with 24 little cheeping, fluffy chicks.  Not knowing the first thing about raising chicks didn't bother us in the least.  I know GOD was watching over us, but I'm really not sure if he wasn't looking out for the biddies more.  So with said computer and internet we started reading and studying about chickens.  We built a coop (we call it the Taj Baccaw) and put up fencing.  That was the beginning of the animals. 

Again remembering about hormones in all the food we consume I thought about our milk.  So off I went again looking for dairy goats.  I found two beautiful La Mancha's.  Now when everyone saw them for the first time, we always got the same question.  What happened to their ears?  La Mancha's don't have regular ears.  They have little button ears, with fur over them.  They are by far the most docile and loving breed of goats.  When in milk we would get 2 to 3 quarts of milk from one of them a day.  But sadly our small 1/2 acre was not large enough for full size goats.  So Myra and Hope were given new homes with more land.  But then I found pygmy goats, Nigerian dwarfs to be exact and they fit.  Well of course after the goats and chickens, how hard could a couple of rabbits be, right?  Well like I said before they do breed like bunnies, hahaha.  So now we had goats, chickens and rabbits.  I thought how hard would it be for a couple of turkeys?  Surprisingly they were the hardest to raise.  Not that you can't do it.  It just took a little more studying.

Well our daughter's husband has recently been medically retired from the Army.  One day we all took a ride to Tractor Supply.  May I suggest you don't go there in the spring.  They have animals.  Chickens and ducks to be exact.  So can you guess what happened next?  You got it, 9 little ducks found a home. 

Of course we have cats and dogs as well.  Dogs to keep predators away and cats, well if you have animals you have feed, if you have feed you have mice and if you have mice, you need a good mouser.

So this is how our journey began.  1 small farmhouse, just over a 1/2 acre of land, Noah's ark as my family and friends say and a garden.  With a good plan for land management, a lot of prayer to and help from the good Lord you too can have a small homestead.

I would like to suggest a book that may be out of print but you can still find copies; Gardening by the square inch.  Also Readers Digest has a series of books I find very helpful,  Back to Basics, Self-Sufficiency and Homesteading.  Each of these books are almost word for word the same but you may find one or two things in each that the others don't have.  Another book I use a lot is Storey's Basic Country Skills.  I have others and will make a list in another post but this should get you started.

Have a safe and blessed day.