Life on the Homestead
You — yes, you! — can learn the skills you need to be more self-sufficient. Here’s how one modern homesteader discovered the joys of a self-reliant life.
April/May 2009
By Jenna Woginrich
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A good place to start thinking about self-reliant living is in your own kitchen. Where does the food you eat come from, and could you produce more of it right in your own backyard?
JENNA WOGINRICH
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Late one night I was grinding coffee and listening to a radio show. There was nothing particularly interesting about this. Most nights I get the percolator ready for the next morning, and the radio is almost always on in the kitchen. But that night I realized something mildly profound: A hundred tiny efforts and decisions had converged right there on the countertop.
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The radio was crank-powered, and the coffee grinder was an old hand-turner I had picked up at an antique store. I was standing in the glow of my solar-powered lamp with the aid of some beeswax candles. Suddenly, I realized that nothing I was doing required any outside electricity. I was seeing in the dark, grinding locally roasted beans and listening to renewable energy driven entertainment . As mundane as the situation was, it felt perfect.
Outside the kitchen, my trio of hens was cooing in their hutch, and snap pea pods, hanging heavy on the vine, were climbing up my windowsill. The dogs sighed and stretched on the kitchen floor and the smell of just-crushed coffee beans wafted through the air, giving me a sense of profound comfort. I felt that if the world shut down, we’d just go on grinding and stretching and sighing until we retired to a warm bed. Maybe it was the candlelight, or maybe it was the promise of fresh-brewed coffee in the morning, but in that moment I felt I’d accomplished more than anything I had ever achieved in my professional career.
Seeking Sustainability
My first step down the path to self-sufficiency happened when I started learning more about how products get to us consumers. I was considering a vegetarian diet to get in better shape and feel healthier. By reading a few basic books on vegetarianism, I started to learn about the mass production of meat in factory farms and all its related problems. The more I educated myself about how the meals I was eating got to my plate, the more disgusted and disappointed I became. I also became much more appreciative of small farms. The more I read about all the small organic farmers who treated their meat animals humanely and didn’t flood their planting fields with chemicals and pesticides, the less I could stomach buying those foam trays of meat and plastic bags of vegetables from the grocery store.
When you start to comprehend something as basic as how food gets to your plate, you start thinking about how other items find their way to you, too — things such as clothing, electronics and especially energy. The bloodshed and national security threats caused by depending on foreign oil were loud and clear on the daily news. The scary thing was that I was completely dependent on fossil fuels, and so was everyone I knew. My gas-heated apartment, my groceries from the supermarket, my station wagon parked outside — everything was part of the system. And if the system broke, I was going to be hungry, cold and immobile. So I threw my hands in the air. I was done with Wal-Mart and Wonder bread. I wanted something real. I wanted a lifestyle that was no longer a part of the problem, or at the very least was constantly striving to be less involved in it. I wanted a more sustainable life.
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