Steps to start homesteading from an experienced grower | Hacker News Reader

Steps to start homesteading from an experienced grower

worldwaterreserve.com

147 pointsjohnconner906767 comments

When we bought home, we got it with bunch of fruit tress (cherry, peach, orange, strawberry guava, lemons). And our previous owner grow 3 tomato plants for us before they left. It was a big yard with lot of fruit trees and plenty of empty space. In few years, we started growing some vegetables starting tomoato, okra, egg plant. And now in few more years we stop buying tomatos from grocery. we build bunch of raised beds and started growing more and more food and got bunch of okra and bottle guard. This year we build more raised bed by replacing/transplanting existing flowering plants and put raised bed there. And almost all the work done by us. You never believed but when you cook food from home grown vegetables, it tastes a whole different than the bought one. Give it a try and you can feel the difference. As long as you enjoy doing it, you won't feel all the pain that it comes with (i.e. hard work). Start small and as you go ahead, you will add more and more as you find it more manageable. But worth trying as long as you have space in your home (you will find time)

Cool. Fruit cocktail trees are also awesome because they have multiple fruit varieties on a single tree via grafting. If you know how to do grafting, you can add additional fruits without planting more trees.

Now, if only I can figure out how to start an avocado pit or a pineapple top because several experiments have failed.

I don't know what you've tried but I've started several avocadoes by using toothpicks to suspend the pit halfway into a glass of water.

I've done that 3 or so times now and each time it just sits there and does nothing. Would be super cool though.

I raid the neighbors citrus trees (with permission) and also prickly pear cactus fruit to make fancier lemonade.

I've done this, although in my cold climate it took months to throw out a root. Give it time.

While I applaud your enthusiasm, this is a long term project as avocado trees take 10-15 years to mature and bear fruit.

"You never believed but when you cook food from home grown vegetables, it tastes a whole different than the bought one"

I was always aware that store bought tomatoes had no flavor, but never had any interest in gardening. One time I took one of those store bought tomatoes and planted the seeds and what do you know, it actually sprouted and grew some more tomatoes? I don't think it's supposed to work that way, but it did. The thing I remember that always grew without any effort was rhubarb.

I think it's definitely supposed to work that way. My first year in my house, I tore out the previous owner's rose garden and planted tomatoes. Had so many that quite a few of them ended up falling off the plants and rotting into the soil. The next year, I scaled my intentional planting back but ended up with even more tomato plants because of the seeds from the previous year's decayed tomatoes. I'm not even going to plant this year, just water and hope that the same thing happens again.

I think they were surprised that store-bought tomatoes had viable seeds. I would have been kind of surprised by this too, but a quick google suggests that while some commercial fruit and veg is deliberately made sterile, it's probably much less common than I thought.

Right, folklore was that they aren't viable, and it was before Google.

The seeds might not be sterile, but you will probably not get the same breed of plant. A lot of mass-produced veg is grown as an F1 hybrid, and the next generation (ie, from the seeds) will not have the same desirable characteristics.

Pretty much every vegetable seeds bought from store are viable, it just for some vegetables (i.e. bottle guard, okra), store bought vegetables aren't ripe enough and so those seeds won't able to germinate. To germinte the seeds of any vegetables, the fruits has to be matures (some times on the plant, sometimes on the shelf) before seeds become viable to germinate. I don't know a single vegetable that will be sterlite. I know some Mangoes (coming outside of US) do get sterlite and so their seeds won't produce plant even if the seeds are mature.

that's how exactly it works. We got one Italian Tomato (heirloom, indeterminate) from a neighbor and grew it. It grew 10-12 ft tall and bushy. My wife loved it so much, she saved seeds from couple of tomatoes and next year, we grew only that Tomatoes along with other vegetables. And we grew enough to store for the entire year. We are still eating those tomatoes (Frozen) and hope it will last till our this season tomatoes will start coming.

I've been a hobbyist gardener for years with gardens at various scale. Some of my better gardens have provided ample veggies for 2-3 households to share. My very short list of recommendations for someone that wants to start providing some of their own food would be. 1) Control your soil (airpots are awesome BTW). 2) Practice consistent watering [same amount, same days, same time] (basic drip irrigation is helpful here, airpots help here too). 3) Make sure you're getting enough sunlight. Do these simple things, and you might be very surprised by the results. Lastly, visit your garden often (looking for problems), and make sure you are growing in-season for your zone.

I find the homesteading lifestyle so unattractive from a non western perspective. The image of the lone couple battling the elements and enduring the herculean task to be self-sufficient... yikes!

Compare to the crop of Chinese youtube channels, like Lingzhi, Diaxi that show village farm life. These are more attractive because it shows self-sufficiency in the context of a larger village community. Everyone comes to help in the harvest. Everyone comes to help to slaughter a pig. Everyone comes to preserve the latest crop of fruit.

But these America homesteading channels... so dreary. You and you alone have to work sun up and sun down, why? Where is the rural communal life?

I am addicted to watching various self sufficiency and off grid living YouTube channels eg Wild Wonderful Off Grid. It’s like all the videos on YouTube about Tiny Homes, Treehouses and people living in stealth vans: totally absorbing.

But this article is an entirely different level of realism; this is talking about actually doing it, and taking an attitude that seems quite different from all those super great videos I mentioned.

One of the things that a lot of those videos don't convey very well is this one, inescapable fact: homesteading is work. Hard work at times. A lot of videos romanticize it, but the fact is sometimes you're going to be tired and sore and cold and wet and hot and sweaty, and sometimes all at once.

I think that's something that not a lot of people really appreciate, and the linked article falls just short of touching on, which is a shame because they're almost there. The first point of "grow something - anything" is good advice, and it has the possibility of easing you into the physical labor part of homesteading.

Also a lot of the work is on its own schedule, not yours—esp. anything involving animals.

Oh yes. You gotta get the animals fed and let out when they get up, 7 days a week. And they get up when the sun gets up.

And that's why I built an esp8266-based automated chicken door.

This is one of the reasons I really like the TV show "Alaska: The Last Frontier." They don't shy away from showing the real hard work and explaining how things break, have to be fixed, dealing with predators, etc.

We live on a small farm and it pretty much mirrors my experience. No matter if it's -20F and gale force winds or 100F with insane humidity and clouds of mosquitoes, still gotta go out and feed the animals.

Have you seen Red Gardens? it's very practical and methodical

> and reduce their ecological impact

I wonder if this is true. Rural living is less efficient per capita then cities. The distributed electricity and water and transportation are less efficient and they have a physically larger impact on the environment. Even the food they grow themselves requires a lot of external inputs which are shipped in via far flung transportation networks and are used less efficiently than they would be at a larger farm.

Yeah, it's funny that people always seem to neglect these factors. If you account for food yield per acre, fertilizer input, and the amount of land required for any significant number of people to live like this, it starts to look silly.

> Even the food they grow themselves requires a lot of external inputs which are shipped in via far flung transportation networks

The author of the article noted they got their fertilizer from a neighbor. A lot of small farmers get dung of some sort from locals and spread it.

>The distributed electricity and water and transportation are less efficient

Many (most?) homesteaders are off-grid, so not sure this applies either. I think you might be conflating "rural" living with homesteading, which are different. That said, I imagine per capita efficiency is probably more efficient in cities as you said. It all kind of depends on what you do. If you are a rural homesteader and don't drive anywhere and don't fly anywhere, then that's already a big chunk of impact reduced.

Small-scale homesteading doesn't require to be located in a deep rural area. Any suburban house with a lawn can be converted to support gardening, solar panels and even animals if regulation allows it.

If you grow edible plants instead of grass, there is a net positive in your carbon footprint.

I often thought that if people were serious about the environment they would grow food instead of lawns. The typical HOA frowns on this though. I was a big fan of John Jeavons back in the 90's. I'm sure he still has a lot of good things to say. http://www.johnjeavons.info/john-jeavons.html

And/or native plants. Growing a lawn is an atrocity in an arid climate, and a different kind of travesty where prairie would thrive.

Several people in our neighborhood have done this. We've debated it too. No HOA, but the houses are older.

If you want a new house, it usually comes with an HOA.

I've done that living in the middle of Minneapolis. Half of my back lawn was prairie "garden" and corn and a good portion of the other half was a vegetable garden. The only issue I ever had with neighbors was one concern that my water garden was breeding mosquitos. It wasn't: fish did a good job of seeing to that.

PSA: Please do soil and environmental status testing in the area first please. Many suburban areas are perfectly fine to live in but may have contaminated soil for natural or manmade reasons.

It really depends on the style of rural living we're talking about.

In my poor rural neighborhood most people simply consume substantially less than the average urbanite, and they reuse as much as possible. Since everyone has a lot of space, they tend to keep everything around and repair stuff, make things from disused junk, repurpose materials from disused/broken structures, etc.

I've never lived in an urban setting where storage space was so readily available and eyesore messes tolerated that everyone could practice such extreme levels of reuse. I don't even have garbage service at my place.

My urban experiences have been exercises in rampant waste and consumerism.

There are folks who live an urbanite high-consumption lifestyle rurally, and those people are definitely burning a lot of energy getting everything brought to them continuously. But that seems to be the exception around me at least; those households stand out like a sore thumb, with a UPS truck visiting every day.

> It really depends on the style of rural living we're talking about.

It also depends on the style of urban living we're talking about. People living in single-family houses and driving everywhere consume much more resources per person than those living in high-rise apartments and taking public transportation or walking. High population density, in general, means low per-capita consumption.

I'm not sure how this argument applies to people living completely off the grid and raising their own food. But many parts of the world have too many people to make that a practical option for more than a tiny minority.

Except that as my sister discovered after moving to the Loop in Chicago, public transportation is great until you need to depend on it. Work doesn't care if you're chronically late because of chronically late trains. Maybe other cities are better here, but before long she was spending 45 minutes commuting 20 miles in a car because at least then she could choose to give herself more time, and swing by the store on the way home.

Full caveat, I live on a homestead much like this story (except we still haven't gotten around to taking down the two dilapidated structures on our property). I sometimes think the story about high-efficiency urban living is myth. This is especially true when I think about the number of SUVs and trucks I see when I go to Boston, sigh.

> I sometimes think the story about high-efficiency urban living is myth.

Chicago and Boston are valid examples, of course. But I had more in mind cities like Seoul, Shanghai, Mumbai, Manila, Paris, and Dhaka.

> I sometimes think the story about high-efficiency urban living is myth. This is especially true when I think about the number of SUVs and trucks I see when I go to Boston, sigh.

The efficientcy is in the number of SUVs and Trucks that you don't see relative to the population. Even in a traffic jam of them you couldn't see an "equal" ammount of them because they wouldn't fit in the area in a per capita homogenized area. Well unless they were literally all stacked up.

> People living in single-family houses and driving everywhere consume much more resources per person than those living in high-rise apartments and taking public transportation or walking.

Neither of those fall into what I'd consider a rural "homesteading" scenario.

In my experience rural living conditions involve such an inconvenient drive to town that you make shopping lists and coalesce needs for the infrequent trip. It's necessarily a bulk-mode operation with substantially improved efficiency over what you're describing which strikes me as the typical suburban American home.

Of course if rural folks are commuting to a city by car every day for work, it's not great.

Neither of those fall into what I'd consider a rural "homesteading" scenario.

Well no, those were both examples of urban living.

I live on a ranch. We do not grow any crops, only beef. The surrounding area is a combination of wheat farms and ranches. The reason the ranches aren't wheat farms is because the terrain is just to rugged for productive wheat farming. I can't really speak to the total efficiency but the electrical distribution is very similar to what you have in the city. In fact we export electricity to other states. Water comes from a well and the sewer is a septic tank. That means that the water we use is returned to the water table minus evaporation. I imagine each bovine exported off the property represents some amount of water. Small outfits deal with what is called a co-op to offset the problems of purchasing small quantities of external inputs. This helps us stay somewhat competitive with the large corporate run farms and ranches. Because we work on the place we live, we do not have to drive long distances to work, saving fuel that way. My particular house uses a Ground Source Heat Pump for heating in the winter. In the summer we leave the windows open all night and the house gets down into the low 60's (F). We close the windows as soon as we get up and close the shades on the side of the house the sun is on depending on the time of day. I imagine though I can't really state it as fact, our place is more efficient than the typical mcmansion you see in the cities these days.

Please start a blog if you have the energy

> I imagine each bovine exported off the property represents some amount of water.

A cow contains 100 to 200 gallons of water, by my estimate.

It all depends on what terms you're looking at. You're right about infrastructure - rural housing has much larger per-unit quantities of electric/transport distribution. Water is mostly a non-issue, anywhere I'd call rural has well water, which is in some ways more efficient than communal water (no treatment).

In other metrics, though, rural living could be more efficient. Someone homesteading can have much less issue with nutrient and topsoil runoff, while producing much higher volumes of human-consumable calories per unit area. Not saying they do by default, but they could.

Suburban living is the least efficient land use, though - large distances travelled daily by everyone, large per-unit quantities of water/wastewater/electric/transport infrastructure, large per-capita land usage, low-to-negligible production of useful stuff (solar energy or food)

Why do your utilities needs to be distributed? We have our own well, and generate our own solar power. Transportation isn't a big concern because the kids walk to school, we grow food, and I work from home. With the mix of animals and crops we grow, there is a full ecosystem that supply our fertilizer via composting. Our waste is reduced because we use less packaging, and even food waste goes to the chickens and becomes our egg supply.

Those counter-points notwithstanding, your larger point is still valid -- but you are bringing in a pile of assumptions.

No one ever mentions concrete production [1] when ecological impact comes up. It's often absent from all analysis too. Like these poured structures just appeared one day.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_conc...

Just the lack of DoorDash delivered meals probably means rural living has a lower ecological impact than urban living

Our suburban lot isn't well suited to growing much (it's in a wooded area, and the areas that are open are very shaded). I do, however, have a dozen maple trees on my lot (and a dozen more on an adjacent empty lot), and produce several gallons of maple syrup every spring.

It's a ton of work... By the end of March my arms are in the best shape they'll be all year (from hauling 5 gallon buckets of sap and splitting a couple cords of wood). It's also definitely not worth the time I put into it, from a financial perspective. I could earn enough money in an hour or two to buy my annual production.

It sure is tasty though...

There's a neat Elixir startup that develops a CNC-controlled farming robot. They provide an app for planning your garden, and then it waters everything for you, calculates yield, and manages sensors for moisture and temperature.

I'm probably not doing the project justice with this description, because they've put together a really cool platform: https://farm.bot/

A lot of their code is open-source too. They've been really huge drivers for the Nerves project: https://github.com/FarmBot

If there are any folks that have tried homesteading, can you share your experience? Specifically, I would like to know what your starting conditions were and how successful you felt you were.

I searched the article for the two works, "Hard Work"

These two words are not included in the article.

I grew up on a ranch-style property with homestead type parents. It was a great experience that involved an endless amount of physical labor.

Some examples; 1. Every morning before school, feeding the horses and in the winter checking their water for ice. 2. Every day after school. Feeding the horses again. 3. Weekly shoveling of horse shit, into a manure spreader. The spreading it in the fields. 4. Lots of work on small engines that break in the winter the Colorado winter in a cold barn. 5. In the fall if we were lucky we would kill an Ekl. This required lots of walking around the mountains off-trail looking for an animal. Once found and killed the grueling work of and caring the meat to a vehicle on a road system. Then hours of butchering. Then more hours of hyde tanning. 6. Winter storms can be powerful enough to rip the tin right off the roof of a hay barn. After the storm, the tins got to be put back on. More hard work. Plowing snow is less physical but still works. 7. Spring is calving season, a calf may be born in the middle of the night. So you may be up all night supporting the birth. Then haft to go to school the next day and try learning while sleep-deprived. 8. Summer is hay season, you might get two crops if you're lucky. There is always stress around the harvest time. It rains in the afternoons in the summer. And wet hay can not be bailed. If it rains after the hay is bailed and before it is bucked into a barn the bails must be dried. I remember being about 8 years old. So small I could not lift a bale. Me and my two brothers were sent into a 300-acre field to rotate hundreds of wet hay bails. So that they would be dry before we loaded them into the truck. It was exhausting. A few years later, when I was strong enough to lift a bail of hay. We would spend a few days lifting bails onto a flatbed trailer and then lift and stacking bails into a hay barn. It is amazing how nice cold glass of water taste after moving hay bails all day. 9. I need to get back to work. So I will end with one last note on the work of homesteading; filling a pantry with canned goods for the winter is another major project which takes hours and hours of work 10. Damn my tech job is so fucking easy compared to the work I did on my parents homestead growing up. 11. Ok, one more: cutting and chopping wood for heating it the winter. We would need between 5 and 7 cords for the house depending on the winter. My Dad found a way to make sure this process was always grueling as I grew up and learned to take on more and more of it. That said, coming home from high school and splinting wood for 20min to keep the house heated for the night was relaxing after a day in class. I guess by the time I was ~15 my body had adjusted to the physical demands of my parent's homestead.

My 2 cents ~ 01

This. My father also has a farm, and I did a ton of manual labor until my mid-20s. It has zero romantic appeal to me, and I'm always amused by office workers that idealize rural living. For one thing, manual labor is incredibly mindless and repetitive. I am now a very comfortable urban dweller, and happy to not even have to shovel my front walk. I miss absolutely none of this lifestyle.

On the political front, I find idealizing farmers obnoxious because it's mostly a taxpayer-subsidized existence for extremely dubious reasons

"I'm always amused by office workers that idealize rural living"

or welding, or plumbing, or...

However, I think there's also an effect of getting older, where you feel like you need more space and are willing to have a little more responsibility for it, because you then get to maintain it the way you like.

That doesn't necessarily mean farming or moving to the country, but it might mean shovelling and mowing.

There is not too much common with having a farm and having a homestead except (in most cases) rurality. To support your homestead financially you can be a farmer but you can be a software engineer too like I am. Farming is commercial activity to produce maximum amounts of "stuff" to sell others. Our homesteading usually produces some extra veggies too, but we share them with neighbours.

Nowadays a lot of the most boring and repetitive stuff can be optimised even in commercial farming. Chopping wood (and felling the trees with a chainsaw!) for the whole year, for example, takes less than a week of combined relatively relaxed and certainly not mindnumbing labor with modern tools. Personally I just often use an axe anyway since it gives a superb workout and I like it (I grew up in a farm so it has no novelty value for me).

Doing a lot of various small tasks that itself are boring and mindless when done commercially is really the best lifestyle I know. Of course, your idea of perfect life is allowed to be different.

There are homesteading purists who refuse to use even tractors and that stuff includes a lot more hard labour with little results. Oil has really changed the game and running a homestead doesn't have to be from zero to completely self sufficient in a year sort of thing. Especially those who haven't grown up in a farm (or homestead) need to start slowly to see if the reality of homesteading is what they really are after.

Similar experience, but Australia with heat and insects and bloody fences and cows and 'roos that like to trample them. I love my tech job.

There's ways to bite off a little. I live rural, work remotely have a decent garden and the wind in my area makes for little snow shoveling. Garden is two days of work each season. Fun to do with the kids.

Nobody mentions the serious vacuum of useful information when it comes to small fruit and vegetable gardens and homestead. Thousands of websites but most lack useful info. Managing soil, pests and irrigation is really hard in mixed planting beds because you need a bunch of different chemicals for all the different pests and problems, also one screwup and you are done for the season try again in the fall or next year so learning is slow

it's not that difficult and no need to use pestisides. As long as you grew healthy plant in good soil, they can resist pests. And yes, some times you do get failure, but if you grow enough stuff, some failures won't be noticable given you have other stuff growing. And gardening is also a skill, the more you do, the better you get at it.

I wonder how she'd feel if she knew the stuff I was making were guns, ammo, and puppies.

An alternative is CSA: Community Supported Agriculture. The power of cooperation comes into play, and if you are not interesting in gardening you can bring in other useful interests / resources.

This is important now more than ever as we are at the mercy of external factors in getting infected by corona virus.

> Kara Stiff holds a BS in Sustainable Agriculture from the University of Maine.

I'm sure that education helps quite a lot.

I would love to have a small homestead (e.g. 1 acre) and I am currently in the process of finding a property to buy. I have been looking for about 6 months now for an appropriate place and it is quite difficult. Perhaps it is just the region I live in but the prices are ridiculous and the majority (like 99%) of available residential real-estate properties are cookie-cutter suburban homes embedded within suburban sprawl. The modern world is just not developed around the idea of people having gardens and chickens.

When I started looking I naively assumed I could find a rural property with high-speed internet within proximity of a small town. I even have extremely low expectations on the quality of the house and would take a quarter acre lot with a home built in the 1960's. I've been out to see probably 50 properties with my agent and it is like a non-stop crushing disappointment.

Still, the dream of living on my own quarter acre and working remotely is worth the effort. I just feel like the article glosses over the first hurdle: finding an appropriate property within a like-minded community. Depending on where you plan to live that could be significantly more difficult than you expect.

> I would love to have a small homestead (e.g. 1 acre)

> Still, the dream of living on my own quarter acre and working remotely is worth the effort

That's just a house in a residential subdivision. A homestead should be at least 5-10 acres at a minimum IMO.

That's fair, although there are more than a few 1 acre properties I've seen in the middle of rural no-where that have been carved out of the corner of a large farm. I just haven't found one yet that also has high-speed internet.

Hopefully Elon will come to our rescue with Starlink.

You have no idea how much I hope that is true. In fact, one of my fears is I give in and take a lesser property just because it has high-speed internet only for Starlink or similar to come a few months later. Starlink would completely change my situation and expand my options 10 fold at least.

Where are you living that subdivision lots are 1 acre? Even a half acre would be a very large lot around here (in central New York).

You can do a whole lot on an acre of land. You may not support a family of twelve and twenty head of cattle, but you could produce a pretty significant amount of food.

I read it differently. They said a quarter acre was a subdivision size lot. That does sound about right.

With about 1/3 an acre I have a pear tree, two lemon trees, three apple trees, a nectarine, a nectaplum, a plum, two pomegranates, and a fig (there's also a redwood and various other non food producing trees). I've got some grape vines started and a couple volunteer avocados. Every year I grow a bunch of tomatoes, carrots, rainbow chard, kale, lettuce and other veggies. I have rosemary, thyme, oregano, parsley, lavender all growing happily year round. There's a couple guavas and other berry bushes maturing, not yet producing. I have 6 chickens for eggs and they help me work through the compost. Every day I'm eating something from my yard, one of the benefits of being in Northern California. I dream about having a few acres but there's a lot you can do with <1.

Come to New Orleans and you'll see all the chickens roaming around the neighborhood you'll ever want. The only problem is some of the roosters think 2 PM is the time to crow.

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