Your Path to Self-Reliance
Curtis Stone: [00:00:00] As far as just deciding on what you want to do on the homestead, start with what you like doing. For me, I liked growing vegetables. It was something I just found that I was I was fairly good at.
And the animals came later, I have animals now, but I started where I felt confident and strong. And I was a vegetarian for many years. I’m not anymore, but I was just yeah, where you are, start where you are, start where you what you like doing and enjoy. And two, double down on things that you’re good at and then maybe outsource things that you’re not because we can’t do it all.
I think a lot, a big trap, a lot of homesteaders fall into. I see this, when I travel around Appalachia and places like that in the U S is this whole mentality of being the lone wolf mentality, and it’s really difficult. Humans are communal beings. We do well in small communities.
And so I think if you can identify the things you’re good at, the things that you like doing and things that you’re getting feedback from in the real [00:01:00] world, that’s the best place to start and focus that way. And then if you can pay attention in the broad sense of people in your community, you’ll identify fairly quickly.
If you’re out there making friends and talking to people that there’s other people out there that are doing things that you don’t like to do that you can trade and you can help each other with, we, my wife and I had this major aversion to butchering animals and doing that whole thing because I was a vegetarian for 16 years.
Mostly before I was a farmer, but it was a tough thing for me to do, but I found that by reaching out to people in my community and saying, Hey, can my wife come and my wife and I come and help you do this so that we can learn it. And then then those people would come and help us do it. So stuff like that, that’s been very helpful over the years.
Josh Wilder: Welcome to the Mother Earth News and Friends podcast. At Mother Earth News, for 50 years and counting, we’ve been dedicated to conserving the planet’s natural resources [00:02:00] while helping you conserve your financial resources in this podcast. We host conversations with experts in the fields of sustainability, homesteading, natural health, and more to share all about how you can live well wherever you are in a way that values both people and our Mother Earth.
Hello, welcome to this episode of Mother Earth News and Friends. I’m Josh Wilder, the content director for Mother Earth News, and with me I have Curtis Stone, a long time homesteader, farmer, gardener, maker. I’m glad to talk to you today about, the factors to consider when you want to be more self sufficient, more self reliant. Do things more for yourself not have to rely on , outside structures, organizations,
First of all, glad to have you. Thanks for taking your time.
Curtis Stone: Yeah. Happy to be here.
A Five-Stage Framework for Self-Reliance
Josh Wilder: When you think about, the risks and rewards of homesteading, what are some that you’ve navigated and some that , are common among people trying to be more self sufficient?
Curtis Stone: Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s the type of question that you can go really micro or you can go [00:03:00] really macro. So I’ll try to go a little macro at first to cover some broad stuff. I’ve been thinking about self sufficiency and self reliance in a five stage process.
There’s many different ways to start these things, but I like to think about our necessities that we like things we need to live based on four primary categories. So food, water, energy, and shelter. Those are the four main things. Yeah, of course, we’ve got communication, education community, economy, finance, all these kinds of other things, but those four main things, we need those to live bar none, right? And then from there, it’s it’s like a, imagine a spreadsheet where you’ve got food, water, energy, shelter on the left column.
And then on the top, you’ve got Dependency, less dependency, security, resilience, sovereignty. So there’s sort of five stages. And so we all start [00:04:00] dependent, whether you’re out of the mother’s womb or you’re, somebody just living in a city who, when you go to the grocery store, you hope there’s food when you come home, you turn on the lights, you hope they turn on you turn on the taps or flush the toilet, you hope it flushes.
And then you also hope that the infrastructure in your home is working so that it’s heated and the roof isn’t leaking or whatever it is. So we all start at that state of dependency. And then we can just move to different incremental stages of less dependency, security, resilience, and sovereignty and beyond.
But basically, that’s where I say everybody can start where they are. In terms of food, you start dependent, you go to the grocery store, you buy things. You can get to a state of less dependency fairly quickly by having, say, seven days of stored food. That’s a real easy win people can make and then you can get to a state of, security where you have say 30 days of food, right?
Then, and then you can get to a state of resiliency where you start incorporating gardens, greenhouses, you name it. Then multiple stages where you’re at a state of [00:05:00] sovereignty, where you’ve got all kinds of different things, you’ve got greenhouses, root cellars, cold storage, stuff like that.
So that’s how I like to think about it is because everybody’s context depends on where they are, what they have. And so I like to go that way. And then, say just with water, Dependency is turning on the taps and hoping that they work. Less dependency is you’ve got 7 to 30 days of stored water in your home.
In case there’s something that happens, you can drink and not die of thirst. And then, rainwater catchment, digging a shallow pit well in your backyard, to having multiple sources of water. On my homestead here, I’ve got three sources of water that are completely independent of anything.
I’ve got A drilled well that I need electricity to pull from, but I’ve got a pit well that I can literally put a bucket into and pull out and I’ve got rainwater catchment on all my buildings that go into a large cistern system that I can actually manually pump out so that I can have water, even without electricity on my off grid system.
So I think I would leave it there is that. [00:06:00] Think about it broadly and what you have and where you are and then go from there.
Self-Reliance Timelines & Realistic Expectations
Josh Wilder: When you’re talking about where you’re at and where you want to go, What’s a time frame that obviously depends on what your responsibilities are, family, community, all that, what was your time frame?
Curtis Stone: My time frame was a lot less than I wanted it to be, but that’s life, especially construction in this day and age with inflation and all the things that are going on. I was, yeah, I originally wanted to, I thought I could do this in a year or maybe two, but it’s been three going on four. Yeah, when it comes to timelines, add a year or more But it also just depends on where you’re at with what skills you have.
That’s probably most important. Resources are one thing. But even if you have the, even if you have limited, unlimited resources to say, build a homestead, you still have to be available to make decisions, unless you’re going to completely outsource that to somebody else, which is a very difficult [00:07:00] thing to do.
Very few people will do that. And very few contractors will even step into a position. To make all those decisions for somebody, unless you’re some, some sort of aristocratic billionaire who can just do that kind of thing. But even then, in my consulting, I’ve worked for people who are well off and it doesn’t even work that way.
Realistic time, it’s really difficult to say, cause it just depends on what you have. One thing I tell people in this day and age is don’t do what I did. Don’t buy raw land and build it all. It was a bucket list thing for me. I had some resources. I sold a house that I did well on in Kelowna, my urban homestead.
I sold that and walked away and did pretty well, sold it at the peak of the market and then moved to an undervalued area and bought low. So I sold high and bought low. So I had some circumstances that worked well for me, but I would say to people these days, don’t buy a homestead and just do it Try to find a place that has some of the fundamentals.
Of a good homestead. A house that you can live in. Yeah, sure. You might have to renovate it a bit, but you could stretch [00:08:00] that over a number of years. And if it’s good enough to live in, then that’s a good start. Has some fields, has a pond, has some of the basic infrastructure, some fencing infrastructure and things that you need.
Then you can just fix things over time. That’s a far better scenario than just going at hardcore and doing it all from scratch. I know. And a lot of people want to do that, but it is brutal. Construction costs right now are out of this world. And if you can piecemeal it, that’s going to be far better.
What I do is I try to look at. I look at everything through the lens of the 11 scales of permanence. If you’re familiar with that, it came out of P. A. Yeoman’s eight scales of permanence. And then Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier created the 11 scales of permanence that, that brought more clarity to the.
All of the things that make a good piece of land starting at, 11 scales of permanence. The basic idea is that at the top, it’s hardest to change and at the bottom, it’s easiest to change. So at the top, hardest to change is climate. What’s the average [00:09:00] wind speed where you live? Is the climate familiar?
Are you used to it? What’s annual precipitation, things like that. Those things you can’t really do much change. And so you start there and then you go, landform. What’s topography like? What’s the water like? What’s the socioeconomics of the area? What’s the access and circulation?
All the way down, soil and aesthetics being the last one. Looking at a property in that regard allows you to I’m just a big fan of first principles, and so I like to just see things in that way. And then once you can understand the fundamentals and the logic, then the rest falls in line.
Beyond Land: Outside Factors to Consider
Josh Wilder: I can see that. It’s important to realize that, like you mentioned, the market luck plays into it, like adding a year. You’re going to have to account for that.
Curtis Stone: Yeah and a big mistake a lot of people make is they only focus on the homestead itself. So they just look at, people typically looking for homesteads in real estate. They’re firstly looking at price and then they’re looking at where like the location. And those are important things, of course, [00:10:00] but they don’t factor in the broad climate.
So a lot of people make the mistake of buying a place that has really bad average wind speed, or they buy a place that’s close to some nearby threat. And so that’s actually one of the things that I teach people to do firstly is, try to eliminate properties, make a short list, and then. Look for threats in the nearby area.
That’s why Google Earth Pro is such a great tool is you can just zoom out and then look at say, what’s 60 miles around and then look for threats. And so threats can be socioeconomic threats. They can be towns or cities that have high crime rates. They can be industrial. Agriculture, they can be mining.
It could be broad forestry, clear cutting. I got a buddy in Tennessee who lived downhill from a clear cut. And when they got those massive summer rains, the forests that don’t have trees. A road, right? And so things like that, looking outside of the [00:11:00] property, because it isn’t just the property and the property is, it’s important to focus on that because then those are the things you can control, but there’s so many things outside of your control that are.
Just outside of your property, like maybe your neighbor’s place and what they’re doing and how that may affect you. What kind of culverts does the neighbor have that’s upstream? When the disaster in North Carolina, we saw that play out. And it’s part of the reason why I tell people to live in rural areas.
If you want a homestead, not peri-urban areas is that peri-urban, or even suburban areas. The infrastructure that you rely on is also dependent on your neighbors. And in the temperate climates, everything east of the Mississippi and the United States is more or less temperate and you get a lot of annual rainfall and the culvert systems of these, of all your neighbor’s properties are incredibly important because if somebody who’s in say a watershed that’s above you.
And you have culverts at your driveway like you typically see in [00:12:00] places like this. If a guy 10 properties up didn’t clear out his culvert and then you had a big rain event, that culvert gets backed up and now it surges over, thereby creating a massive amount of water force that surges all the other culverts down below.
That’s when you have these disasters, because they build up. And so it’s thinking about things like that. As well that there’s so many things outside of your immediate control that can be devastating and water is probably one of the most devastating forces in nature.
Josh Wilder: And one of the most necessary resources, like you mentioned.
Curtis Stone: Exactly yeah, it’s your greatest ally and your worst enemy at the same time.
Prioritizing Skills Over Resources
Josh Wilder: When you’re going towards full sovereignty, like you mentioned, and having all the skills necessary to be independent. For you, what was your process of gaining those skills and what are some of those skills that you see as the basic building blocks?
Curtis Stone: My kind of story arc really worked out well in the sense that, and it was [00:13:00] just, I’ve always had this attitude of it’s better to ask for forgiveness than ask permission. So I’ve always just been a guy who’s just starts.
Like I’m sometimes the guy who gets in the car and moves the car and then I buckle my seatbelt as I’m moving. And so I’ve had the same approach. With all this land based stuff. But the fact that I started my farming business, and that’s how people know me as my book, “The Urban Farmer” is that I just started without owning land and I just thought at the time was I got to start where I am.
And if I can start developing a skillset. Before making a land purchase one thing that happens when you’re farming is that you have to constantly solve problems. This is why farmers are some of the best generalists in the world is that it’s always a matter of just fixing things and solving problems.
And so I had 10 years under my belt. Of doing that before I even started homesteading in this off grid sense, I was homesteading in my little suburban town in Kelowna, but not in the way that I am now. I was on a quarter acre there. Now I’m on 40 acres and I’m, it’s firewood and all these [00:14:00] other bigger things that you have to do when you’re off grid.
But I think if people spend less time thinking about what that perfect, and this is, this speaks to people who have limited resources, which is pretty much everybody is that, Think about where you are and what you can do now to start developing your skills, because your skills are actually almost more important than your resources, because you can be the best off grid prepper and have all the money in gear.
But then it’s going to go wrong sometimes and you’re going to have to fix it and there’s going to be nobody else to do it. So you’re going to have to troubleshoot. So if you can front load those experiences as often as you can, and that could be just by, getting a job working. If you’re a young guy getting a job working for a farmer.
Go and volunteer learn how to run a chainsaw, learn how to operate a tractor or small equipment. There’s so many things you can do before you even get on the land that by the time you get on the land, if you’ve got that skill [00:15:00] set and the ability to perform under pressure, the system, the off grid system goes down in the middle of winter and there’s no electricity and it’s 5 in the morning and there’s no light.
Or heat, right? Being able to operate under pressure and fix things and be a problem solver. That’s actually almost first, because when you get there that’s already, you’ve already won half the battle. And so I think For many people they can do that. And then and the beauty of that too, is if you’ve had that experience a bit on the front end, when it comes time to make those big purchase decisions, you’ll already have this mindset of redundancy.
Which will help you make better systems to build your system. And that’s what it was for me. And because I’d had so many years of doing that stuff, doing things, DIY, doing things on a limited budget, problem solving and even networking with people in the space of off grid stuff in general made it so much easier for me when I started to do this, because the decision making is unbelievable.
Like when you [00:16:00] want to get off grid and build a system and set your homestead up, the decision making is just exhausting. I’m three years in going into four of just decision making fatigue where, you’re just this that how many things there’s so many options and the more you go online, the more options you find.
And so again, I think first principles, look at what you have, even having an understanding of the eight forms of capital is a fantastic way to get a perspective on what do you have and how you take an inventory for your life because the establishment want you to think that capital is only finance, right?
It’s all money and then they can tax inflate you and do all these things, but capital is far above and beyond that. And it’s actually real permaculture thinking is that. There’s social capital, there’s material capital, there’s biological capital, right? There’s experiential capital, there’s cultural capital, spiritual capital.
When you take an account for your life in these things, the money actually becomes less important. And then [00:17:00] you can actually start to realize that you’re richer than you thought when you really start to have a holistic a holistic perspective on what you actually have. So taking an inventory and going from there can be actually quite an empowering experience for many.
The Importance of In-Person Learning
Josh Wilder: When you’re talking about social capital and skill building, obviously, we’re both biased having online platforms, but, a lot of these skills and for us as a print publication, primarily, we see the value in having, something in your hands and someone right in front of you.
I worked in events for a while there at the Mother Earth News Fair. So I see the value of people learning a skill together. We just did, chicken processing at the Pawpaw Festival in Ohio in September and seeing just people like go through that process for the first time that’s not something you’re not going to get the same experience on YouTube.
During your experience, I’m sure there are instances that you had where you had to learn from [00:18:00] someone who was right in front of you. Can you talk about a couple of those and how you found those mentors?
Curtis Stone: Yeah. That’s a great question.
And it leads to a very broad conversation in many ways, but because today, everything is online and I find with all this great information that we have access to paralysis from over analysis is one of the biggest things that, that people deal with. I honestly, in terms of my life and seeking this sovereignty in a broad sense or a multifaceted sense, the best experiences and the best learning that I ever had was from direct people, every time. Chicken processing is a perfect example, because that’s quite a gruesome thing that for somebody for the first time to experience, you get shell shocked after, the first time. And but there’s a lot of things in homesteading, in off-grid life that’s like that.
And so I would say it’s now more important than ever to get offline. And reach out to people in your community. [00:19:00] And I really push this for the young folks, the people in their 20s that want to learn these skills. There’s an endless stream of YouTube videos that you can just be watching homestead videos for the rest of your life.
. . You might be developing knowledge in some way, but you’re not developing social capital, you’re not developing experiential capital, you’re not building cultural roots and you’re not making money at it, where you could say, be a young person and take a part-time job at a farm, not for the money, but for the experience, the social capital and the community building that comes from it.
So I think online is in a way really is really limiting people and how they can learn. Because if you understand the basic permaculture principle of stacking functions, you can stack functions. More if you just get out there and learn that way. And a lot of homesteaders will relate to this and I’m the [00:20:00] same way as that.
I’m just a, I’ve always been a hands on learner. I’ve never been a book learner. I was a terrible student in university. But yet I am here as a published author who wrote a book and I failed pretty much every course in high school. And I was more or less a C-minus average student because I just didn’t, It just wasn’t my way of learning, but I’ve published a book.
And most of my friends from high school who are academics never did, because I just thought, Hey, let’s just shoot from the hip. And that’s, I think that’s the best way to be with homesteading is, you know what? You can do all this front loading of information all you want, but eventually you’re just gonna have to do it.
And the best way to do it is with other people.
Finding Homesteading Mentors
Josh Wilder: How did you find mentors yourself then?
Curtis Stone: Just seeking them. I before I started actually farming, so say pre the urban farmer days, I really committed to buying local food. And so I started just, going to the farmer’s market twice a week, talking to the growers and asking them questions and.
[00:21:00] Supporting them at the same time. And, a farmer will give you a lot of information if you’re buying their product. And Hey, what a concept, right? But that’s really what it was for me is there was about three different organic growers that really became my mentors in my earlier year and earlier years.
And I was their biggest supporters at the farmer’s market. And I would just go and shoot the breeze with them and ask them about this crop or this crop, how this works and how do you have any problems with this germinating at this time of year or whatever the question was, is if I’m out there supporting that, that economy, getting to know those people, but also trying stuff at home, that was just an absolute, just like skyrocketing of learning and it’s the biggest thing that allowed me to accelerate my curve.
And then once I started actually commercially farming, I started my farm in 2009. Another thing I did is I just called people. I called people around the U S and Canada on the phone, other farmers that were doing what I was doing and old school, I [00:22:00] was sending messages on social media, call them up and ask questions.
And I, and pretty quickly within my first year, I had about 10 different growers from all around North America. That I was having fairly regular conversations with and they, it was equally beneficial for them because I also had insights that were interesting for them too. And so it’s one of these things where if you’ve got something to give, then people are also willing to spend time with you.
And so that’s really was the foundational learning for me in those early years.
Building Relationships and Giving Back
Josh Wilder: Yeah, and frankly, it’s something I’ve learned from working with so many folks in this space is that they are very willing to share their knowledge. They want people to learn these skills. There’s no holding it back because, it’s only going to help the younger generations, like you mentioned.
Curtis Stone: A hundred percent, but also be somewhat self aware. And as a guy who sold at farmers markets for many years, You really learn a lot about people. Farmers markets has got to be one of the best places to learn social skills and basic economic skills as well. But don’t be one of these people that just goes and [00:23:00] ask questions from a farmer and never buys anything.
And just one of these sort of really. Not self aware people that just sit there and take and take, give first give before asking. And it really goes a long way. Read a book, like “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, and then go and apply that logic to a farmer’s market.
You’ll find really quickly that you’ll not only make a lot of friends but you’ll learn very quickly.
Prioritizing Projects
Josh Wilder: Going back to the deluge of information and the paradox of choice when you’re approaching an enormous project, like a homestead.
Obviously, there’s a number of projects that you either plan on undertaking or start to undertake. What’s your process for prioritizing?
Curtis Stone: Yeah that’s that’s the blight of most homesteaders is as soon as you step outside of the house, there are a hundred things to do and what needs to be done.
Obviously this sort of this sort of a priorities checklist, the things that need to get done to sustain your lifestyle, the chores, of [00:24:00] course, take priority because they need to happen. Second, I would say address the weakest links first there’s that spillover part on your driveway, where if you just took a day or two to dig in a culvert and get that done it’s gonna benefit you now.
And then I would say the third thing is probably things that have a lot prioritize things that have an immediate and long term effect. So if you go and do this one thing. It’s going to solve a problem now addressing that sort of weak link thing, but also it’s going to have a long term effect where you’re going to get the benefit for this task over time.
So I try to prioritize those things and I have to remind myself of that because sometimes you’ll just get excited about a project. And really just want to see it through, but then you’re going, ah, I got this and this, that if I don’t do these things, it’s just going to keep stacking up problems.
So weakest links really And you address the weakest links first, and then just [00:25:00] prioritize things that have the short term and long term benefit. And then once you get to a point where, you’ve got those things sorted, then you can start looking at passion projects or things that, will benefit your business or benefit your family in the longterm.
But I use those things as a filter to start really.
Overcoming Challenges and Staying Motivated
Josh Wilder: When there is a project that feels necessary an energy project, for example, but you’re hitting a lot of barriers and something for that, generally, I find that’s, making a commitment with someone else, that you’re going to do this with them and then like in a mentorship, for example, like you’re interested in learning it, you need to do it.
You say, you tell them that you’ll show them how to do it that way. You get it done and you have somebody who’s keeping you accountable.
Curtis Stone: The accountability is really great. Yeah, it just depends on, how you’re set up. One of the challenges that I have up here is that we’re very rural and there’s not a ton of people around.
We’ve got a [00:26:00] town that’s 15 minutes away where, we have friends in the area, but we don’t live in a little area where you can just walk down the road and see people, you will, like there’s people in my area, but not much. And so my commitment is to my family mostly and making sure that the things that, that we need to survive and thrive are, are prioritized and the challenge, dealing with, if you have community around you, it’s great actually.
And things can happen a lot quicker in that regard. And that accountability is so key. But if you’re out in the sticks I have found that my way is I just use lists like crazy. If I don’t have lists things just don’t get done. And so I have my immediate list. I have my today list and then I have my this week list and then I have my important projects lists, and then I have my rainy day lists basically.
And so that’s for me it’s [00:27:00] critical. And I adjust my list throughout the day. And then I adjust my list throughout the week and I adjust my list throughout the season. And so that’s how I stay focused. Cause I don’t have people coming up all the time to help me. I’ve got, trade, various trades involved in my construction projects and stuff like that, but all the infrastructure that I’ve built for my homestead has been all me. And so if I’m not really using those lists, things just get lost and you don’t want them to get lost because there’s so many things to do on a homestead that you really want to write all those things down. So you remember them because you can literally think about something really important you wanted to do this year and you didn’t get it done because you got distracted in the minutia of all the things that are coming at you day to day.
And so you need those, you need sort of these guardrails that kind of keep you focused and go, okay. I’ve got this thing coming at me today, but it’s not really critical because this one issue isn’t pertinent to this and this. Whereas if I get [00:28:00] this one thing, it’s going to solve this problem and this problem.
So for me, it’s lists. And I even talked about that in the urban farming days. It was just so important to just use these lists all the time.
Josh Wilder: I can’t imagine how people run large projects without constantly updating. It really it’s like a magazine. It’s not just writing the list.
It’s rewriting it. It’s editing it. It’s making sure that it’s always up that best up to date information on what needs to be done.
Curtis Stone: Yeah. And also too, there’s moments of inspiration, right? Like sometimes people just get caught up in the grind of the chores, especially if you have a day job.
And then, you get home and the home said, you got to chop a cord of firewood. You got to go and clean out the chicken coop, replant some stuff in the high tunnel or whatever it is. There’s those moments. They happen every time of year for me. I get moments in the winter, spring, summer, and fall that these happen is that you get these moments where you’re in this transcendent mode where you’re doing something monotonous, but then you get this moment of [00:29:00] inspiration.
It’s “Oh!”, a light blinks off in your head and you go, “Oh my God!” Is making sure that when those happen, you write those things down. And so journaling is also another element to that. Because when you get caught up in all the day to day, sometimes you’ll get this inspiration and then it’s gone.
And then weeks later, you’re going, Oh, what was that thing? And so I find it’s just so important to to express yourself with your brain and write things down as often as you can. I just use the, what is it on my iPhone here, the reminders list, I just do it all in there. And then it’s synced to my computer. I’ve got, what have I got here? I’ve got 15 different lists in here.
Josh Wilder: I think it’s worth mentioning we’re five days away from Christmas and, this season of it’s celebrating and supporting one another. Something that’s necessary for humanity, like you said. The communal aspect of any lifestyle. And then at the New Year, there’s the idea of resolutions and resolve being the root of that. So how do you keep resolve? It should be [00:30:00] said, this is not an easy life,
Curtis Stone: No.
Josh Wilder: How do you keep motivated?
Curtis Stone: Yeah you gotta like it. Like you said it, none of it’s easy, but that’s life. Nothing great. comes easy. So that’s nothing exclusive to homesteading.
But you do have to like it. One of the things that really motivates me all the time when I’m doing the mundane, cleaning out the, I gotta go clean the chicken coop after we get off the call here. And I got to chop a bit more firewood. When I think about how I used to live in the city, I used to be an urbanite musician living in Montreal, massive metropolitan city.
And I think about how I live now is that the greatest thing that I enjoy regularly. I get through the mundane in the sense that when I go and chop firewood, for example, I own that work and I own the result of that work and there’s no taxes on it. There’s no inflation on it. When I go to chop [00:31:00] firewood, I feel this sort of spiritual groundedness that goes, I go and do this thing and it’s such a fundamental level.
I went and got that firewood from the forest. I’ve got 30 acres of standing timber that I can thin for my life here. And I’ve done all of that work to heat my home. How rewarding is it that when I, get in there and experience that heat, all of that work, the whole way through was from us, from me.
And that’s incredibly rewarding. And so as I go through and the systems get better because I’ve built a lot of redundancies into our homestead and with our new build project, we’ve made the house so efficient that I’ll be able to heat the home with about a sixth of the firewood that I did for our little cabin and this house is three or four times the size is that when you’ve experienced scarcity and you put the time in, when you get to a better place, you ratcheting yourself up over these years, you really appreciate it. And I think that’s a big part of [00:32:00] what actually continuously motivates me.
And also the values that instills on my children. Is incredibly rewarding when I see, my son watches me go and do firewood and my daughter sees me, she’s more involved in the animals and the gardens, but when they see you do these things and then you see those values and work ethic come through them at a young age, it’s incredibly rewarding.
And so that’s a big part of what motivates me. I always get re-inspired, on that, in that traditional clock way of. That building up to the new year, bit of downtime for Christmas as we have and time to process and think, celebrate the successes and then renew to go. Okay. With a new perspective, what are some of the biggest things that I want to challenge myself and accomplish this year?
I think, yeah, some of it just comes through that process and it’s always an exciting time. And. One thing I like about living in a cold climate is that we have very, we have four [00:33:00] very distinct seasons. And at those season changes it’s just so much inspiration. As soon as the snow melts in April, we’re just beaming with inspiration.
And in the summer, we’re beaming with inspiration because we’re enjoying the hot weather and the trips to the beach and things like that. And in the fall, the season change brings that same level of inspiration. And then the winter. brings that inspiration through insight because when you’re in a cold climate, you nestle in a bit more, you spend a little bit more time reading books with the kids and sitting by the fire.
And so I have no shortage of inspiration, but I guess, yeah, to make a really long winded answer to a close, it’s just that those times of inspiration and those insights that you get from the hard work continually inspire you as long as you’re looking for it, and sometimes you have to remind yourself you have to, because sometimes you’re grinding and you have to pull the lens back a little bit and go, okay, wait a second.
I’m stuck in the minutia right now, but if I pull the lens back and see the bigger picture, look what we’ve accomplished, and sometimes you have to remind yourself or your spouse in particular of those things.[00:34:00]
Josh Wilder: Those moments where you think of some things that are great ideas and during these times when you’re, resting and zooming out like you mentioned, I lived in Wisconsin for a little over a year and grew up in northern Indiana. So I definitely appreciate the idea of all the seasons. I’m in Kansas now, and this is the most mild winters I’ve ever experienced. And I wasn’t built for these summers.
Curtis Stone: Yeah. Yeah.
Josh Wilder: That’s, and that’s something to think about too, honestly is what, what you feel, as far as climate, like you mentioned earlier, what inspires you, frankly, because I think snow is inspiring.
Whereas other people
Curtis Stone: It’s work for them. I love it, man. I get so stoked on the snow chores. We got this massive dump the other day and then sometimes it comes a little too quick, but no, I think it’s great. And you actually touch, you’re touching on a pretty important point that is another macro sort of cultural issue is where are you from?
Where’s the place that you feel [00:35:00] home? Because I’ve met people that are from somewhere like Indiana or Wisconsin cold climates. And then they move out to Southern California and they just go, man, it’s just the same all the time. And then there’s something about that. But you might be born in Southern California and that might be the place that you just feel home in.
And it’s actually why I never moved. I’ve been in, I’m a Canadian, but I’ve been an American entrepreneur for near 10 years and I could have picked anywhere. I had a manufacturing company in Southern California. I could have moved there years ago, but I stayed here. Cause I go, you know what?
This is my home. These are my people. And this is the cultural and climate experience that I’m used to. And I want my children to experience. And be where you are and enjoy it.
Josh Wilder: Yeah. That said. I don’t love the summers and I missed more of the snow, there’s something pretty awe inspiring about prairies just the wide open sky.
I went to school near Appalachia and that’s, that’s all, like you mentioned, that’s a whole different [00:36:00] type of mentality.
Curtis Stone: Yeah, Appalachians are like their own unique culture, that’s amazing things about North America because Canada is like that to the people in the Maritimes are very different from people in the prairies and the coast and all that.
And I love that stuff.
Josh Wilder: Honestly, what it comes down to, too, it’s easier to build community in certain places, just culturally.
You find the nuance when you live there and it is affected by the weather, big time,
Curtis Stone: Especially in the West. You go basically west, it’s just the map of North America is so phenomenal when you look at the climate regions and where people settle.
It all makes sense, but there is something so particularly unique to that. It’s a very Canadian and American thing of space and just, like I look out my window. And I don’t see anybody like I look down into a valley facing the south and I don’t see any neighbors. I just see trees and forest.
And so there’s something unique to that. And I love it. I think, I’m so pro [00:37:00] Americana because of that whole idea of space and freedom to roam, that’s something that a lot of people in the world don’t experience at all, born in Europe or you’re born in populated areas of Asia, forget about it.
This is not even something you can comprehend, but it’s such a particularly North American experience. I think it’s wonderful.
Josh Wilder: Yeah, that’s something honestly, I think about snow. That’s so amazing. It makes things look that aren’t usually they look vast because it equalizes all terrain.
It’s like an ice storm when everything’s covered in ice, everything just has the sheets of, I love it.
Curtis Stone: I love it. I find that when we get the first snowfall, it has this unifying thing, right? Cause it just covers everything. So everything looks the same, but it’s a great time to observe topography that you wouldn’t normally observe because all the shrubbery changes.
And so when you get the snow, all the deciduous trees drop their leaves. Everything’s down [00:38:00] to a skeletal sort of appearance and then that snow gives you, I have had some of my best earthworks insights at the first snowfall or during the winter because you can see everything so differently. And again, it’s that idea of perspective that, just changing your angle.
Seeing it through a different light, seeing it through a different time. It changes everything. And that in a broad way that’s a really good way to think about homesteading and how to be successful at it is to change your angle. Look at things through a different light, look at things through a different season.
And that’s what I say to people. If you have the privilege to be able to buy a property like I did, where I bought this property and I didn’t move onto it full time for a year, but I had it and I was able to experience all four seasons. Before making big critical decisions. Wow. What a life changing experience that can be because, you make critical infrastructure placements or critical land form modifications to a property without [00:39:00] seeing four seasons, without seeing the snow melt, man, it can be one of the, you can make some of the best or worst decisions of your life on that land.
Josh Wilder: Yeah. I think just generally some of the worst decisions are based on assumptions. Exactly. Until you have solid observations. That you can, make decisions off of.
Curtis Stone: And that you can verify, right? Because it’s one thing to make observations, but it’s another thing to verify those observations through either the eyes of other people or your own eyes at different times and then trying things.
And that’s another thing that speaks to the frugality of homesteading and how that actually is a real. It’s a very undervalued thing in the consumerist culture that we live in today is that frugality and economic scarcity actually help you make some of the best decisions because you have so much skin in the game on those decisions.
Whether it’s scarcity of resources is that if you approach it from a frugal [00:40:00] lens you can incrementally do things. Which if you sometimes people just throw a ton of money at something and I’ve seen this through, consulting for nonprofits and companies for so many years is that throw a ton of money at a problem without the time and the incremental decision making and observation and then boom, you made this massive mistake and blew all these resources to find out something wasn’t as you thought.
Josh Wilder: Yeah, frugality, demands experimentation. A lot of it.
Curtis Stone: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Josh Wilder: I appreciate your time and thank you for chatting with me today.
Curtis Stone: Yeah. It’s been a real pleasure.
Josh Wilder: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Mother Earth News and Friends. To listen to more podcasts and get connected on our social media, visit www.motherearthenews.com/podcast. You can also email us at podcast@ogdenpubs.com with any questions or suggestions. [00:41:00] Our podcast production team includes Kenny Coogan, Alyssa Warner, and myself, Josh Wilder.
Music for this episode is the song Hustle by Kevin MacLeod. The Mother Earth News and Friends podcast is a production of Ogden Publications.
Jessica Anderson: Until next time, don’t forget to love your Mother.
