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<\/a>One of the driving forces behind the birth of Frugalwoods was our desire to leave the city and buy a homestead in the woods. That happened in May 2016 and let me tell you, we had A LOT of preconceived notions about what it would be like to live rurally, some of which turned out to be true and some of which\u2026 not so much. It\u2019s easy to gloss over the specifics when you\u2019re dreaming about moving to the country. It becomes very much about the specifics when you lose power and water for a week in the dead of winter thanks to an ice storm. It\u2019s those specifics\u2013those powerful details\u2013that have shaped our lives out here.<\/span><\/p>\n A gargantuan assumption was that we\u2019d grow all of our own food.<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n Before so much as starting a single tomato plant, I nurtured an idyllic vision of us growing all the fruits and vegetables we could ever want each summer. There I was among the rows, singing to each vegetable, encouraging it to flourish. Then I saw us in the kitchen\u2013with our children gracefully assisting\u2013as we meticulously preserved each harvest for winter. We then pan to us eating from our larder as the snow falls and the woodstove warms us with wood from our land. Little House On the Prairie<\/em> without the problematic gender roles, hunger, abysmal treatment of indigenous peoples, and lack of antibiotics and modern medicine!<\/span><\/p>\n I have a powerful imagination and in addition to growing fruits and vegetables, I thought perhaps we\u2019d raise meat chickens, pigs, goats\u2013why not!\u2013and have a dairy cow for milk from which I\u2019d church my own butter and make my own cheese. Surely we could provide for all of our needs and live out a modern-day sustainable, free range, organic paradise of our own making. <\/span>To be clear, all of this IS technically possible. And yes, plenty of folks do it.<\/span><\/p>\n However,\u00a0I am not destined to be one of those folks.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n My husband Nate and I moved to our 66-acre homestead in the woods of rural Vermont<\/a><\/span><\/strong> on May 18, 2016 and today, seven years on, I want to share what we\u2019ve learned, re-learned and are still learning about growing our own food. I\u2019ll share more of our rural assumptions in upcoming posts, which are all part of a series on\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n April was the NINTH anniversary of Frugalwoods and to celebrate, I\u2019m typing down memory lane with reflections on some of my most influential old posts. Nine years is a long time to do anything and I\u2019m curious to see if I agree with my old self or if my thoughts have changed in the intervening years. Since May is the SEVENTH anniversary of our transition to rural life, this seems the perfect time to reflect on rural.<\/span><\/p>\n You can check out my first three Frugalwoods nine-year retrospectives here:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Now let\u2019s get to debunking!<\/span><\/p>\n The primary reason? This is an all-consuming, full-time job during harvest seasons and I do not want to grow, harvest and preserve food full-time. <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n I like to do a little bit of a lot of different things, and that includes some gardening and some canning and preserving.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n To accept this, I had to let go of the image of myself as a perfect homesteader out here homesteading away. It\u2019s just not who I am. I like what we do on our land, but I don\u2019t want to do it all day, every day. After seven years, I finally no longer feel guilty for not growing and raising all of our food. I actually feel good about buying food from our farmer neighbors who commit to this work full-time. I like supporting their efforts. Plus, they\u2019re a lot better at it than me.<\/span><\/p>\n For Nate and me, the whole point of this lifestyle change was to let go of the city rat race, the external pressures and the societal expectations.<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n We wanted to no longer work for other people and no longer constantly rush around. Rural life, for us, means joy, time, freedom and space. And here\u2019s the thing:<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve learned that chaining myself to my vegetable garden is really no different than chaining myself to my desk and computer.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n A garden has endless needs, does not care about your time\/energy\/plans and exerts a lot of time-bound pressures. Anything that saps all my time and energy\u2013and demands I do things I don\u2019t have the desire to do\u2013isn\u2019t why I moved here. Excessive gardening stressed me out. So now, we grow a little bit of this and a tidbit of that and we call it a day. Let me tell you the story of how I got here.<\/span><\/p>\n Detailed in this old post<\/a><\/span><\/strong>, this was the harvest that did me in. Still early in our gardening experiments, Nate started from seed, planted, weeded, watered and harvested 80 kale and chard plants. Yes, EIGHTY. <\/span><\/p>\n That was 70 plants too many. Because let me tell you: that kale and chard LOVED growing here. It was the most successful thing we\u2019ve ever planted. All 80 of them.<\/span><\/p>\n Still under the delusion that I was perhaps actually<\/em> Laura Ingalls Wilder reincarnated, I was determined to preserve and save EVERY LAST STALK of kale and chard we grew. I wanted to see if we could do it\u2013actually provide for all of our sustenance needs (insofar as kale and chard are concerned). <\/span><\/p>\n I spent hours harvesting, washing and drying these greens. The leaves were so enormous that I had to use our baby pool and several giant plastic tubs for rinsing stations. My poor parents made the mistake of coming for a visit during this debacle and got roped into helping (sorry again about that, mom and dad!). When stuff comes ripe, there are never enough hands to help. But you never know quite when that ripe day will be, which means you live at the whims of the garden. <\/span><\/p>\n After we\u2019d harvested, washed and (kinda) dried the leaves, we took them into the kitchen for processing, which entailed:<\/span><\/p>\n And we did it. It took DAYS. A plural number of days. While there were fun moments, it was stressful to do with two tiny kids underfoot. I was exhausted from bending over to harvest in the garden and stooping to wash and standing in the kitchen for hours to process.\u00a0And that was just to process ONE crop. More precisely: ONE harvest of ONE crop.<\/span><\/p>\n The absolute worst part of it is that we didn\u2019t have a chance to eat all of that hard-won preservation before some of it went bad.<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n Broke my heart to dump it out into the compost, but alas, home-canned stuff doesn\u2019t last forever and I didn\u2019t know how to calculate our consumption rate.<\/span><\/p>\n After that draining experience and the demoralizing realization that we couldn\u2019t even consume all that we\u2019d worked so hard to put away, I decided to change our homesteading food outlook. We are profoundly privileged that we\u2019re not subsistence farmers. We do not have to do this to ourselves. I was competing against an idyllic image I had of people who homestead and grow their own food. I\u2019d read the blogs and books and Instagram posts and I felt pressure to live up to that standard.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019d succeeded in transplanting the stress and anxiety of my office job onto my gardening.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n I needed to change this outlook or I\u2019d soon start to hate what I\u2019d worked so hard to enable myself to do.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s taken years and I\u2019m still working to divorce myself from the self-imposed pressure to be a perfect homesteader. But I\u2019m now a lot more realistic about how I want to spend my time during the summer months. I don\u2019t want to be tethered to the garden. I want to take the kids to the local lake with friends, I want to go hear live music at our neighbors\u2019 farm, I want to hike and play. I don\u2019t want to spend 12 hours chopping and blanching enormous stalks of chard. I want balance and freedom in my life.<\/span><\/p>\n Many of you have asked me to re-start my This Month On The Homestead series<\/a><\/span><\/strong> and to be honest, I haven\u2019t because I feel like we\u2019re letting you down as homesteaders! We did SO MUCH work our first few years and now, we kinda just rinse and repeat with each season. The infrastructure set-up of our first years was staggering and I\u2019m glad it\u2019s over with. I certainly could re-start the series and let you know how things are going, but don\u2019t hold your collective breaths.<\/span><\/p>\n We still garden and we still have a bunch of different food-growing areas around the property, so I\u2019ll detail each. I did an exhaustive overview a few years ago in This Month On The Homestead: The Full Garden Rundown Including Building Raised Beds<\/a>.<\/span><\/strong> If you\u2019re a garden nerd and want to nerd out, that post\u2019s for you! <\/span><\/p>\n Here\u2019s where we plant food these days:<\/span><\/p>\n 1) Four raised beds right next to our back porch.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Nate built these back in 2020 and I love them because of their proximity to the house. Easy to walk out and snip a few things for dinner. Here\u2019s what we\u2019ve done with them:<\/span><\/p>\n Beds 1 and 2: Strawberries<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Also, since these are raised beds, the soil level sinks each year. We put a ton of logs in the bottom to build up the base, but as those decompose, you really need to add more soil every year, which we can\u2019t do with the strawberries in there unless we replant all 100 of them.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n Beds 3 and 4: herbs and greens<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n 2) The \u201cBig\u201d Vegetable Garden<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n The \u201cbig\u201d vegetable garden is where we grow the majority of our annual veggies. Annual means you have to plant new ones every year as opposed to plants that are perennial, which means they come back every year. This garden is fenced in and has cattle panels\u2013which I installed by myself one year<\/a><\/span><\/strong>, might I add\u2013for things like tomatoes and snap peas to vine up. Much easier than trellising each individual plant. I gently bend the fronds up towards the panels and they take it from there. Highly recommend.<\/span><\/p>\n In this garden, we grow a fairly large number of vegetables every summer and love eating fresh tomatoes, beans, squash, snap peas, cucumbers, peppers, and other misc plants I\u2019m now forgetting. I also adore growing pumpkins and gourds for fall decorations, which I feed to our chickens when the season\u2019s over.<\/span><\/p>\n This is the garden where the kids each get their own row to plant, tend and harvest!<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n 3)\u00a0Mr. FW tends our perennial food situation, which he\u2019s grown to include:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ll admit that sounds like a lot. And in terms of sheer number of plants, it is a lot, but in terms of how much fruit we actually get? It\u2019s not all that much.<\/span><\/p>\n Here\u2019s Why:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n 1. All of this stuff takes many years to ramp up to its full production potential.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/a>Old Me vs. Current Me: A Showdown<\/span><\/h3>\n
<\/a>Rural Assumption #1: We\u2019ll Grow and Raise All of Our Own Food!<\/span><\/h3>\n
Fact Check: That\u2019s a nope.<\/span><\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/a>The Kale & Chard Apocalypse of 2018<\/span><\/h3>\n
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<\/a>Where We\u2019ve Landed In 2023<\/span><\/h3>\n
<\/a>Gardening Areas as of May 2023<\/span><\/h3>\n
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