We Are Officially Homesteaders

Before Christmas, we officially became homesteaders, and when I say we, I mean me, my husband, and our four children. We’ve been living on someone else’s homestead/farm for four years, and now, we have decided that it is truly something we want to continue and do for ourselves in the future. So we’re making a start with what we have now. The land owner is happy for us to have a few of our own animals and granted us the space to start our own veggie garden and keep chickens. So we are now the proud owners of three goats; wether (male without balls), a buck (male with balls), and a doe (female.) We also bought 20 chicks from a good-quality poultry zoo. We rescued 20 hens from a battery farm that got shut down (secretly glad they got shut down; the chickens looked awful when we first got them, and they seemed to have Stockholm syndrome because it took a while to get them to leave their coop during the day which they desperately needed to do to get some color in them. More on this here)

It may seem odd that we’re only now officially homesteaders, but before December last year, we were just caretakers of someone else’s dream. We took care of their chickens, cows, pigs, veggie patches, and olive orchards. This was interesting but a complete challenge for city folk like ourselves. I’ve always been a country girl at heart and lived in the country in the UK when I was younger, but never a country like this. We’re off-grid in the Australian wilderness, I call it. We live in the Wheatbelt, and right now, it is summer, and it is sparse and desert-like at this time of year. When I step out into the yard, I think I am in some old country western movie and expect to see wild horses running past my front door.

The pig area from our first year here, this is how arid it is here and the green you can see in this picture is even duller in person in the summer time. The trees are still green but the ground is like straw.

Every now and again, I’ve had to fight back tears of joy, complete dismay, and tiredness. To quote something I heard about this kind of life a while ago: ‘It’s a hard life, but a good life.’ It’s not always easy feeling isolated from the rest of society or learning everything that we used to know about, like keeping animals for milk, meat, and eggs, or cultivating good soil for delicious fruit and veg. Everything has been a learning curve, and up until this point, it has been one that has often ended up in frustration and, in some cases, denial for the lack of knowledge and state of the world in which we live.

People today are so far removed from the soil and what is on their plates that, quite often, what is on their plates can’t even be considered food.

We are determined to turn our little bit of where we live into a lush green and dark brown (rich soil) homestead oasis. So, if you’re interested in homesteading or the idea of the journey, follow along on our journey as we develop this area and make it what we are dreaming of.