The Years In Between Homesteading Efforts

This post picks up the story again after we left our land and life off the grid. We felt broken after running into the bureaucratic wall and decided to move north. We spent a year in Colorado in a rental house. While we did not garden there, we were required, as renters, to maintain the yard. To avoid the disposal or hauling costs of dealing with massive amounts of deciduous leaves in the fall, I started a compost pile. I cannot say we really did much else initially that would qualify us as "urban homesteaders."

However, I did spend the year reading and learning about living more frugally. If you put all the books I checked out of the library in a stack, it would probably have been at least four or five feet high. I checked out every book I could find on frugal living, being a cheapskate, saving money, being thrifty, doing without, making it myself, and so on, and then I hit up the Inter-Library Loan system for more. After a few months, I was just skimming new books because I'd read all the tips before and could only find a few new ones in each book.

These books led me to cutting our expenses everywhere possible. I turned the heat down to 55 degrees while my sweetie was at work during the day and down another ten degrees at night. We were very conservative with our water use. We cut out cable TV, a luxury we'd permitted ourselves when we moved after the disappointment of leaving the land. I cancelled our trash pick-up service and reduced our garbage output to a single kitchen trashbag per month; we drove that out to the transfer station ourselves, along with all of our recycling and any tree trimmings for the city compost and mulch program. Through our efforts to save money, we lowered our environmental impact.

We got healthier, too, when I started thinking outside the box about ways to save money. Taking care of ourselves physically was one way to reduce medical and health costs, both in the short term and in the long run. Following Dr. McDougall's program went a long ways towards improving our health. I shopped the farmers markets for fresh, local produce and cooked almost everything from scratch. Some of what we practiced definitely fit into the lifestyle of an urban homesteader, even though we did not grow our own food.


From there we moved back to Arizona. After fixing up an old 1917 house, I worked on the yard. I removed the dead rose bushes and transplanted almost a dozen live ones to my mother-in-law's house. (I hate roses and she loves them.) We planted a small vegetable garden that was totally unsuccessful. The soil drained the water too quickly and the sun baked the plot. However, we did enjoy eating fresh peaches from a large, old tree in the back yard and shared chiltepin peppers with friends. Life moved on and so did we.


Our next move, also within the state, found us in a unique earth-bermed house. We had incredibly low energy bills thanks to the added insulation and even had some tropical plants in a protected courtyard. However, the gardening bug had not bitten and we spent our time on other pursuits, such as making arts and crafts for sale (created with predominantly used and salvaged materials), and learning how to make sushi. Sadly, the nearest farmers market was very inconvenient to get to so I rarely went there for our produce.


When we tired of being in the rat race in the big city and tired of the conservative attitudes in Arizona, we decided to head north once again, this time to Oregon. I have loved Oregon since spending a summer there with friends when I was a teenager. I loved it again when we moved there. We rented an apartment with a beautiful view overlooking a tiny wooded copse but didn't try to do any gardening on the tiny little balcony. We spent a lot of time walking and biking along the Willamette River, and actually started to bike more than drive while we were there.

As sometimes happens, though, the bloom can fade when you get to know your love a little better. Winter in Oregon sucked, big time. For months, the sky was covered with an oppressive dull gray blanket of clouds. It drizzled all the time and the sun only peeked out for, I think it was, three or four days all winter. It also snowed multiple times, the first time in a dozen years there. Now, in southern Arizona, snow is a delight. It falls, it's pretty, and then it evaporates that afternoon or the next day. In Oregon, it snowed, and then it rained, turning it all into a big slushy muddy mess. This froze overnight into dangerous ice which was again rained on. This cycle continued for days on end and we soon got fed up with wiping the mud off the dog's paws.

The lack of sunlight, too, was quite an ordeal for us desert folks. I had successfully quit drinking coffee in September but took it up again mid-winter as a way to combat the blues I was suffering. We had looked into settling in Oregon but decided the winter weather was too dreary to contemplate living there forever.


So, it was back to Arizona for us. We rented a house in Tucson, pulling out of Oregon on a brilliant sunny day and arriving in Tucson on a stormy rainy one. How's that for irony? I suppose it shouldn't have been a surprise considering we arrived on April 1st.

We spent a couple of uneventful years here before I started reading blogs and renewing my interest in living an environmentally responsible life. I started my own blog in 2007. If you are new here, feel free to explore some of the things I've posted about in the past, using the tags on the left. I've written about many components of homesteading in the city, such as our gardening efforts and compost, our successes in water conservation, lowering our energy use, bicycling for transportation, and converting to the use of more manual tools around the house, workshop, and yard. On the food front, I volunteered with the local CSA for three years, took up canning, cooked with my solar oven extensively, and learned to make my own liqueurs and vinegars.

We both read lots of homesteading blogs and talked for several years about finding our own place to do this whole-heartedly. Last year, we finally found the perfect place in the price range we could afford, bought it, and moved our houseful of belongings, garden, and a ton (that's 2,000 pounds!) of compost.

Then we found out it wasn't quite so perfect after all, but that's a story for Part III tomorrow.