Welcome 2021
2020 was a crazy year, wasn’t it?
Pandemic, toilet paper and food shortages, race riots, and a contested Presidential election. Crazy seems like a pretty mild word to describe 2020.
But it wasn’t all bad.
20/20 is perfect vision, and I can honestly say I see the world far more clearly now, than I did one year ago today. I saw how vulnerable our society is. I saw how fragile our food distribution is, and have a certain sense of clarity and urgency to become more self-sufficient.
I am fortunate enough to live on 2-ish acres in rural Louisiana, which, sadly, we have done nothing with. There is plenty of room for a garden, chickens, and maybe even a pig and a sweet li’l moo cow!
Ideas swirl through my mind! The possibilities are limitless.
I think I’m going to call this endeavor “Adventures in Homesteading” or something like that. To pull this off, I’ll have to dig back into my childhood, and remember all the things I set aside as I moved into adulthood. Things like gardening, sewing, and preserving the harvest. And I’ll have to learn new things like landscape design, animal husbandry/midwifery.
As a child growing up in Arizona, we were one of the few people in the high dessert that had a massive container garden long before container gardening was a thing. My step-father created “Garbage Bag Gardens”, and in the spring and summer my job was to water, and, thankfully, because we container gardened there were no weeds to deal with. In the fall, I helped my mother and grandmother roast peppers, shell beans and peas by the bushel, can pickles, tomatoes, and jams and jellies.
The year I was in 5th grade, my mother tried to make some pomegranate wine, which didn’t workout too well, so she made it into the most delicious jelly. Cooking the fermented pomegranate into jelly removed the alcohol, but not the vino bouquet, and my teacher called her to the school because he smelled wine on my breath! She brought him a jar of jelly to prove that I wasn’t a budding wino in training. Haha!
I’m 56, and all my adult life I’ve yearned to garden, make cheese and butter, and keep bees and chickens. Now, I’m going to bring that dream, that soul deep longing, into reality. I’m going to build, plant, grow, harvest, and preserve a garden, build a henhouse/chicken coup, and create a YouTube channel to accompany this blog to document my adventures in homesteading, and hope you’ll join me!
