Life on the Homestead
(Page 2 of 5)
April/May 2009
By Jenna Woginrich
Learning about homesteading — or the skills associated with it, anyhow — seemed like the solution I desperately craved. I decided to take the reins and start learning how to produce some of the food and resources I used every day. There were obvious problems: I had no idea what I was doing. I had just spent four years in design school learning where to put things on computer screens, and that doesn’t exactly help you bed down a chicken coop. Also, I didn’t have a home to stead. At that time, I lived in a rented farmhouse in Idaho. The only skills I loosely possessed were simple knitting and soap making, which I did for fun, not as part of some self-reliant lifestyle. So I started doing simple research. I pored over books and magazines. I haunted homesteader blogs and online forums. I did whatever I could to edge my way through the crack in the door.
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Finding a mentor who could teach me in person made all the difference. My first visit to a co-worker’s farm one Saturday in February of 2007 turned an evening of conversation into an amazing friendship and a year of learning a more self-reliant way of life.
It’s ironic that I didn’t meet Diana Carlin at the farmers market, or even in the produce section of the grocery store, but at a giant corporation. Her cubicle was a few feet from my own at work. A few weeks after we met, she invited me over to take a tour of her family’s homestead (about 20 minutes from the office), meet the animals, and get a personal introduction to raising chickens. Diana’s house was exactly what I imagined a real homestead would look like: a long, cedar-sided house with a chimney that puffed a wispy trail of wood smoke. It was surrounded by meandering homemade fences and was tucked into a spread of hills. A few pairs of cattle plodded around the front yard, grazing on the lawn (I wondered if the Carlins ever had to mow). We spent the daylight hours meeting cows and collecting eggs from her hundreds of hens. After we tended to the animals, washed up and ate a good meal with her family, we retired to the couches to talk shop.
Maybe it was just my full stomach, but I felt really comfortable. I sat back against a cowhide, which I was told once belonged to Ronald, one of their first farm-bred steers. If my vegetarian friends knew I was in a farmhouse snuggled up next to a blanket with a name, I think they’d be disgusted. But I’m a practical sort of vegetarian. I became one because of the way meat got to the table the disregard for animal welfare and the assembly line style of death were too much for me to get any enjoyment from a fast-food hamburger. But here at Floating Leaf Farm, everything was done the way it had been before industrialization. I respected that. I leaned back into Ronald (who was very warm, by the way — who knew cows were so woolly?) and accepted a glass of homemade wine.
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