Homesteading…then & now…

It all began with an idea. An idea, or rather, a very strong conviction that we did NOT want to raise our family in the city or even in the suburbs for that matter. This was my husband and I back in 2013, as we awaited the arrival of our second daughter. Shortly before her birth, we purchased a new home in (what was) a small town in Colorado, just outside of Colorado Springs. We had a house on a 0.8 acre lot, (but we always just rounded up to 1 acre lol) and we were pumped to begin our more self sufficient lifestyle in raising our sweet little family!

We started with a garden and chickens. We turned roughly 1/3 of our lot into a massive garden! We also had the motto with any landscaping that we put in that “if we were going to water it, it needs to feed us!” so we had lots of edible berry bushes, etc. Our house was at an elevation of 7,600 ft and our growing season was SHORT! We typically had only 8 weeks between the last snow storm of the season and the first of the season, so we had to be garden ninjas! We learned a lot about keeping chickens, composting and using the chickens for pest control. We dabbled in beekeeping and harvested our own honey and even rendered our own beeswax.

Colorado was awesome! It was my home for 38 years and my husbands for 15. But, we longed for more land and the true rural lifestyle and we felt it wasn’t attainable there anymore. So in 2020 at the height of cov!d, we moved our now family of five, 1,000 miles northwest to Kalispell, MT. There we had 5 acres of gorgeous land (they don’t call it Gods country for nothing), and we were able to diversify our homesteading adventures. We again had a huge garden and a custom built greenhouse, we had waaaayyy too many chickens (like 50), and we also started raising blackberry sheep and added a sweet pair of guard geese to our menagerie. I loved those darn geese! Our elevation there was actually much lower than Colorado, somewhere around 3,000 feet, and though the winters were very harsh, the garden growing season was much longer and things were easier to grow overall. We grew as homesteaders a lot while we were in Montana and learned a lot about what it takes to raise livestock and also about what we were mentally and physically capable of.

Fast forward only 2 years and our home and property in Montana had doubled in value and we were handed a tremendous financial opportunity. An opportunity that lead us to a place I NEVER imagined living…Florida! Talk about extremes! And so our homesteading adventures started over…again.

We now have just shy of 11 acres. We are working on our garden and greenhouse and trying to learn how to grow things here in the South with all of the heat and humidity. We have lots of chickens again, and now we are raising kunekune pigs. They have been such an awesome addition to our homesteading lives!

This lifestyle we choose to live definitely is ever evolving. Particularly because we have moved so many times, but also because you learn and grow as you go. We are constantly trying to improve and streamline things and learning from others who are living this life as well. I suspect if I come back to this post a year, two or five years from now, it’ll look different than it does now. One things for sure, it will still be worth it!