Building the Dream Homestead

If You want a homestead lifestyle you can achieve it! We did and if we did so can you. Your homesteaders' journey might not be exactly the same as ours, but it will be a journey none the less. We have tried so many things to achieve our dream homestead to get it to be what it is today. Many things we tried failed and cost us a lot of time, money and heartache. We often took farm magazine articles as gospel, bought our livestock from people who took advantage of our newness and didn't know good advice when we got it!

Now we know better. Thinking outside the box has served us well! Looking into ancient livestock husbandry before big ag commercially bred livestock took over was important. Seeking old-time gardening methods and studying up on heritage vegetable varieties that were better for our area helped us reach our goals. All this and then some played a role in developing our self-reliant modern homestead with its sometimes unique features. 🙂

One of the many highly productive gardens on our farm

There is no one way to homestead

A hard thing to understand as a beginner is no homestead looks exactly like the next and that's ok! What works for fabulous homesteader expect Jackie Clay in Montana may not work for me or my land or my climate!
What we do works for us, and it might work for you! But if it doesn't we are here to tell you there is just no one 'right' path to the dream homestead! We started down many different paths to building this dream, they all had a purpose. The thing is its all about learning and improving.

We all start somewhere!

Part of my master life plan had always been to have a farm by the time I was 38. My parents left had the family farm I got to grow up on when I was 12 and I wanted that life back someday! I married a city guy though! I thought I'd have to settle for a backyard garden and a couple of rabbits.
Which would have been fine until HE got the homesteading bug!

Our Homestead Journey began with my dream and my husbands' lack of ability to accept that I would not plant corn in our tiny subdivision backyard garden.

Instead of fighting over the space we decided to look for land. We found the land, set goals and made a plan!

Our tiny subdivision garden the husband wanted to plant corn in! NO!

Finding our Homestead Dream 

Our current homestead looks NOTHING like the original plans we made! It's better than the original plans!!! There was no magic formula to get us here. Trail and Error. Seeking advice from others who were actually doing what we wanted to helped tremendously. Seeking older out of print books without a lot of fluff and advice from longtime farmers was priceless in our journey.

With the original homestead plans, things did not turn out the way we expected. None of the original livestock we planned for worked out right. The original garden plans didn't fill our needs either!

The better 'dream' homestead started to develop when we started letting the land and our climate choose what we plant and what livestock lives here. What truly fits our needs and our personalities.
I mean, if all your family wants to eat is meat and potatoes why would you grow greens and eggs?

And another example, certain animals aren't for everyone! Like some people love to keep goats. I love that other people love to keep goats and I don't have too! I tried so hard because goats seem to work for everyone right? But no matter what breed, goats were to high input for my needs and they drove us crazy! That is ok because we found livestock that worked better for us.

The beauty of creating our dream homestead began when we finally let go of the 'idea' and what most homesteading magazines tell you to need on your homestead.
We enjoy writing about what works for us! We also enjoy writing about what didn't and why. 
Maybe our 'why it didn't work' will be your 'why it does work'!

Dairy goats and dairy sheep didn't work out. But donkeys for milk was the perfect fit for our farm needs!

Achieving a Self Reliant Homestead

Self-reliance can have different meanings to different people. For us, starting out with self-reliance in mind meant cutting the grocery store umbilical cord. 

Then we quickly realized we were just as dependant on the feed store and the seed companies as we were the grocery store. Sure we knew where our food came from but in a real economic crisis, we wouldn't be much better off. We also spent about as much money at the feed store as we previously did at the grocery store. One of our goals had been to save money on what we raised for food. We really weren't saving money on our protein sources (meat, milk, and eggs) though we had been producing all our own food for almost 3 years! We produced all we ate. Well, All but coffee, chocolate, beer, and salt! 

I also developed severe food allergies to all milk products we produced from ruminants, so the dairy sheep and goats weren't the food source we needed any longer.

Our plan had to change with my health needs and our new goal to truly be what we considered self-reliant.
Change goals+change plans=the better dream homestead for us!

Living your Homestead Dream

We have enjoyed parts of the journey to get here but many parts did wear us down, leave us sad and disappointed. Once we started finding our own way in this lifestyle the dream became a reality! We no longer felt like our farm was a job site either! It can feel that way sometimes when we were trying to force things to work but it just isn't. 

We love our homestead farm and the unconventional way it's turned out! Because it works for us and our needs. It's our hope that our experiences can help you find your own way too! Your dream homestead doesn't need to look like ours or anyone else's! You can attain true self-reliance if that's a goal. You don't have to kill yourself trying to make your farm look like the supermodel farms in mother earth news either, unless you want too!

It is your dream, it's your homestead! I hope our experiences help you find your way your homestead dream.

Done right, done your way! It is a lovely life!
Angelia and Rico Silvera

Me and the husband.. taking dance lessons back when we were city folk.

Some other info about us

Our Homestead business sites Gods Blessing Farm Meishan Pigs
Meishan Breed Registry

My Ebooks for small farmers Homestead Ebooks

Do follow us on Pinterest for more homestead ideas! Homestead and Horses

Posts on Homestead Gardening
Posts about using donkeys on the farm Many uses for the Economical Donkey!

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