Memories of Homesteading

The tremendous pulling together of people that call themselves "urban homesteaders" to resist the trademarking of this lifestyle by a single family has resulted in my exposure to many new bloggers and folks interested in creating a sustainable and self-sufficient homestead. In some ways, this has been wonderful; in others, it has been heartbreaking for me personally.

Let me explain, especially since a few people unfamiliar with my blog may be reading here. I'm going to have to back up a bit to give you the full perspective. While living at home in my youth, I fondly remember a big garden out in the back. At times, I think up to 1/4 acre was cultivated with just about everything that would grow in the area. There were fruit trees, such as peaches, apple, pear, and apricot. There were pecan and almond trees. There was a small trellis of Concord grapes, which my mother used to make the most delicious homemade grape jelly imaginable. There were so many strawberries, we actually tired of them by the end of the season. Months later, though, we always enjoyed the tasty strawberry jam on our morning toast.

The vegetable garden produced quite a lot of what went on the dinner table: summer squashes (zucchini & yellow crookneck), tomatoes (cherry, plum, big tasty ones), peppers (jalapenos and green chiles), onions, greens (spinach, collards, mustard greens & more), cucumbers, winter squash (pumpkins and banana squash), and more that I can no longer remember. We ate them fresh out of the garden, prepared for the table, or however my mother preserved them. If you've only known store-bought ketchup, you haven't really lived. She made all sorts of pickles. The freezer was always crammed full with pumpkin pies made with either pumpkins or banana squash; we could not tell the difference. Roasted green chiles, and I think jalapenos, could always be found in the freezer, too.

We did not go so far as to have livestock. I'm not sure why, but my guess would be that my father really didn't want that much additional work. It also would have been difficult to manage with the long summer vacations we took, hauling a tiny little trailer behind the station wagon. I don't remember knowing anyone who owned chickens, actually, but I do vividly remember when my folks bought half a cow. The cuts filled up the full-size freezer. The purchase proved to be a poor choice in the end as my mother had no idea how to cook the more expensive cuts.

When I left home for college, that was the end of the delicious food from the garden and preserves from the cupboard. I was too busy with classes to even consider doing any of that myself and, quite honestly, I've never really enjoyed gardening. I became a regular consumer, buying from grocery stores. I still cooked from scratch as cooking and baking is something I have always loved to do.


Years later, I found and married my sweetheart. In the early years of our marriage, we bought 40 acres of somewhat remote, undeveloped land. There was nothing on the property other than a road going around two edges for access to neighboring land. No water, no power, no phone. Our plan was to build a straw bale home with solar power, graywater use, composting toilets, and so on. We cleared, by hand, a quarter-mile driveway to a spot where we could park a 25 foot RV that would be our temporary home while building the house ourselves. We gradually acquired the entire collection of Mother Earth News magazines and read them voraciously.

Things did not always go smoothly on our homestead. After paying quite a lot of money to have a well dug, praying the water would not be too deep for our solar-powered pump, we discovered finding the right kind of pipe for the pump was not easy. We ended up at an irrigation supply store 100 miles away. We were relieved when we dropped it all down into the well and it worked. Well, except for a leak where the pipe was connected to the pump.

We set about pulling everything back up to fix the leak. Now, keep in mind that 180 feet of pipe (flexible), 180 feet of thick electrical cable, and the well pump was heavy. In the process of hauling it up, the safety rope snapped and some of the cable fell, wedging itself firmly between the pump and the big well pipe. It took three long nerve-wracking days of fishing with a long rope and hooks to snag the cable, pull it free, and pull up the pump.

Once that was fixed, we had running well water when the sun shone on the two small solar panels. We'd fill the water tank in the RV and use the water sparingly. We had power in the RV, thanks to the generator and using the solar panels and a trickle charger to keep the batteries charged. We could run lights and low-power items off the battery but needed the generator for air conditioning (in the 100+ degree summers). We had phone service, kind of. This was in the early days of cellphones when they were big bulky things. Due to the surrounding mountains, the only way to get a signal was to stand on the roof of the pick-up truck's cab. Needless to say, we didn't use it much. (And, no, we had no Internet service either. Or TV.)

We knew we were capable of building our own house, but we didn't have much money. We quickly learned that trying to pay as you went meant everything happened very slowly. While working on a rock and cement outbuilding, we also began working on providing some of our own food. A nice chicken coop housed four chickens which produced plenty of eggs. My compost pile yielded rich soil in just a month's time thanks to inputs (outputs?) from the chickens and boxes of discarded produce I picked up from the grocery store.

I also gleaned the food that was still edible from the discarded produce. It was time-consuming but there was a lot in there that could be eaten, especially if one didn't mind cutting out a few bad spots on the apples and pears, rinsing the slimy radish leaves off to salvage the good radishes in the bunch, picking out the good cilantro leaves from a wilted bunch, and so on. I made a lot of fruit compote, dried herb and celery leaves, and we ate a lot, I mean A LOT, of radishes. I figured 10-25% of each haul was edible for humans, another 25-40% could go to the chickens, and the rest went into the compost.

I finally started digging a plot for our garden. The soil there was hard and rocky. I was naive and didn't know that one should always wear firm-soled boots for shoveling and only push on the shovel with the ball of one's foot. I wore my tennies and often pushed (stomped, even) down on the shovel with my insteps. Two weeks of that led to years of pain and medical treatment for plantar fasciitis. (I've written about that journey here.)

We ended up growing lettuce in a big metal tub - the inside spin basket from a broken washing machine we salvaged from a nearby abandoned survivalist camp. (We found old literature there that indicated they were another sect like the Branch Davidians that were involved in the Waco siege. Thankfully, this place had obviously been abandoned for years, though.) Sadly, with all the other tasks on our list of things to do, we never did get a garden put in the ground there.

After two and a half years, we still were living in the RV. We had a small fenced yard around it, a 10x12' shed holding most of our belongings, the small rock/cement/block building we'd finished where we stored food (in barrels to protect from the mice) and supplies, the chicken coop, compost pile, and the lettuce garden. We'd also salvaged a 250 gallon metal water tank from the camp, patched the bullet hole in it, and used it for water storage. The plan was for this to eventually hold harvested rainwater.

One task that took a fair amount of time away from planning and building was dealing with the refrigerator. The refrigerator in the RV died so for a while we had to live out of an ice chest. We looked into replacing the RV fridge but the cost would have been over $1,200. We decided instead to order a compressor for around $700 and build a chest refrigerator ourselves. We built the box out of heavy plywood, filled it with six inches of foam insulation, and lined it with Formica for easy cleaning. The usable space was 8 cubic feet and there was no freezer section.

Due to the construction, the lid to this baby weighed over 30 pounds. That was a wee bit heavy to hold up while rummaging around for dinner, so we built a counterweight system. We had built a little gazebo cover over the fridge since it had to sit outside and the hot sun shining on it would have made it work harder. We mounted a pulley on the beam overhead and used a gallon jug filled with sand and water as a counterweight. Using a gate hook, we could latch the lid overhead to keep it out of the way while inside the fridge.

How did we power it? We put the well's solar panels on a wheeled cart so we could move them between the well and the fridge. With a bank of deep cell marine batteries, we could charge them up for the fridge and then wheel the solar panels back up to the well to pump water as needed.

In case those who have successfully given up your refrigerators wonder why we didn't just live without one, remember that we lived in the desert with two months of temperatures 100 degrees or higher. It got very hot inside the RV anytime I was away because I couldn't leave the generator running, so food would have spoiled in an afternoon. (And no, I never left our dogs in the hot RV either! In fact, we frequently spent hot summer days hanging out at my mother-in-law's house 20 miles away.)

All of our plans came to an abrupt halt when we drove the 100 miles to see the state Department of Environmental Quality office about getting permits for our graywater system plans and composting toilet. Arizona was not friendly towards alternative systems at that time and we were informed we would have to install a septic system, at great expense in our rocky ground, even if we would never use it. In addition, getting the permits approved for graywater would take six months (at best) to two years (more likely).

We went home devastated by the news and finally decided that we just couldn't hang in there that much longer. We were worn out, broke, and I was still having a lot of pain with my feet. We sold the fridge to our neighbors (who were living out of an ice chest occasionally emptied by their dogs); gave them the water tank, compost and the chickens; sold the composting toilet to my sibling (who is still using it); sold the RV; and put the land on the market. We were out of the homesteading business and back into a rental house while we regrouped and reconsidered our dreams.


Tune in later for Part II which will talk about what happened after leaving the land. Part III will then review the past year of trying to homestead again and talk about where we go from here.