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Gardening has many benefits. You can grow your own food, have control over how it is grown, receive excellent nutrition, and experience the stress relief a garden can give you. Being in nature, digging in the dirt, breathing in the fresh smells, gives your body and mind a chance to unwind and ground.
Wait what is this thing about grounding? It is electrically reconnecting you to the earth. Our bodies tend to build up positive charge, especially under stress. The surface of the earth is negatively charged. By something as simple as walking barefoot, or digging in the dirt, you allow your body the opportunity to return to neutral charge by letting go of the positive electrical charge. Gardening is an excellent way to ground, while still accomplishing something for the type A personality.
Gardening is also a whole-body work out. Lifting baskets of produce, pulling weeds, digging holes, reaching for produce, pushing a wheelbarrow, are all activities that engage muscles throughout the body to accomplish the task. When you add general yard work, like pruning, or tree trimming, you have more specific exercises that work more of the upper body. Exercise releases endorphins that make us feel good. So, gardening can give you an exercise induced endorphin rush.
The act of growing something from plant to maturing fruit, gives you a sense of accomplishment. Even growing something simple like a pot of herbs, which you can harvest quickly and continually, can produce this feeling. This has a positive affect on your mental health, by giving you a reward.
So, gardening can improve your health emotionally by allowing you to ground yourself, physically through exercise, and mentally through giving you the sense of accomplishment. That is not even mentioning all the nutritional benefits from having truly fresh food.
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The biggest mistake I see beginners make when starting their homesteading journey is biting off more than they can chew. Don’t get me wrong, I know how exciting it is and all the things you want to do. But just breath one minute with me.
Start slow. That doesn’t mean only one thing per year, but one or two things at a time. The problem when you start a huge garden, get the chickens, milking goat, sheep, pig, and maybe a calf is you are easily overwhelmed and can get lost. When this happens, you don’t do anything well.
Start with a garden of manageable size, but have space planned to expand. Start with common veggies and herbs your family uses. Plan for growing for your own consumption and some canning. Maybe not a full year’s worth, but a start. Once you feel like you have a good handle on those plants, add more.
Start with one animal. Especially if you don’t have much previous animal experience. Barn cats and a dog is easy and universal care, as far as town vs country care. Chickens/ducks are also fairly easy as far as care and learning goes. Once you feel comfortable with the first animal, then add the next. That can be a couple months after the first animal.
Animals are one that is easy to add multiple per year, depending on the kind and how much self-repopulating you want to do. Birds have a short cycle from birth to reproduction, thus easy to start with. Goats is another popular homesteading animal as they can provide milk, and meat. They do require more care and much better fence. But are easy to add into a homestead.
The biggest take away is don’t get everything right away. Space it out, allowing yourself to adjust to the increase in chores and care. Giving yourself time to learn about each. This will help you to avoid burn out.
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Wanting a community to lean into? Join the FREE Courageous + Purposeful Mommas group! This community is for the Mommas, mommas to be, in the midst of raising, and kids grown, looking for tips on building your family up and providing for them through natural methods. Tips include: gardening, bulk buying, caning,/preserving, livestock, homesteading, and home remedies. Your family is precious, and this group is to help you gain the knowledge and tools to keep your family well and not reliant on outside professionals. Remedies and tips are easy and simple for the busy momma, time is precious after all, including pregnancy, birth, young kids, and illness. Trust your Momma gut again! This community offers the resources + community you need to help get started on your journey and prepare for whatever future you envision.
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Wanting a community to lean into? Join the FREE Courageous + Purposeful Mommas group! This community is for the Mommas, mommas to be, in the midst of raising, and kids grown, looking for tips on building your family up and providing for them through natural methods. Tips include: gardening, bulk buying, caning,/preserving, livestock, homesteading, and home remedies. Your family is precious, and this group is to help you gain the knowledge and tools to keep your family well and not reliant on outside professionals. Remedies and tips are easy and simple for the busy momma, time is precious after all, including pregnancy, birth, young kids, and illness. Trust your Momma gut again! This community offers the resources + community you need to help get started on your journey and prepare for whatever future you envision.
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What is a fear you carry deep inside? One that not many may know about, but affects many of your everyday decisions? Me? That somehow there won’t be enough, and my family will be left short.
Why does this affect my decisions? Because the last thing I want is for my family to be short somehow. Short of food, finances, or simply time.
So what do I do? First, I try to not let the fear overtake me. I acknowledge that it is there, and then remind myself of all the ways God has continued to provide for us in the past. My heart calms, and I can clearly think towards my next step. I then thank God for His provision and ask that He continue to remind me when that fear comes up again.
This fear has also been a motivator for me. When I started staying home, our income was drastically cut. While we would no longer be paying for daycare or as much in gas, we now had to pay our own insurance and the grocery bill would be increasing. How were we going to offset the cost?
I looked around. We already lived on an acreage. I had gardened some in the past, and was getting pretty good at it. Why not take it to the next level and have the garden provide as much of our food as we could!
And so it began, in more earnest. I planted more of what I knew we would consume and less of the extra stuff. I learned how to preserve our food supply for the winter. I also started learning how to grow more of the vegetables my family liked, so we weren’t buying as much at the store.
The garden is still expanding and growing. I use the winter to learn more about the next vegetable or fruit I want to grow. I take notes and perfect the methods for our farm. I’m playing with double cropping and starting a permaculture orchard now.
What started as a fear of not being able to buy enough groceries, has turned into a huge garden with the potential to meet 80% (currently around 50%) of our family’s veggie and fruit needs when it is all mature. All this from not giving into the fear, but stepping back and looking for the opportunity in the fear.
Wanting a community to lean into? Join the FREE Courageous + Purposeful Mommas group! This community is for the Mommas, mommas to be, in the midst of raising, and kids grown, looking for tips on building your family up and providing for them through natural methods. Tips include: gardening, bulk buying, caning,/preserving, livestock, homesteading, and home remedies. Your family is precious, and this group is to help you gain the knowledge and tools to keep your family well and not reliant on outside professionals. Remedies and tips are easy and simple for the busy momma, time is precious after all, including pregnancy, birth, young kids, and illness. Trust your Momma gut again! This community offers the resources + community you need to help get started on your journey and prepare for whatever future you envision.
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There is something about old horses that is just too good. Maybe it is that they have seen most things and are unfazed by the noise and commotion of life. Or maybe that they have earned their living and are now peacefully enjoying retirement. But what makes them such great horses?!?
Old horses have usually had at least one carrier before they are considered too old and retire, but their life doesn’t stop there. They may have been a ranch horse working long days, or a rodeo horse used to all the noise. Maybe a professional show horse used to hauling and the arena. Maybe they were just the family trail horse who has seen more miles than could be counted.
It is an old horse's past experiences and work that make them so good, especially for beginner riders. They know most of what is up and will take care of their rider as the rider learns. This is the trait that makes them invaluable.
We’ve had two early 20s horses with our family for quite some time. The one showed his age very early. Hank, being an old ranch horse, not much physed him. My husband used him for a few years working and moving cattle, but his age caught up, and he could no longer keep up with cows that broke away. He retired to being the kids' horse. They are merely beginning to ride, but he would pack them along on the ride like it was nothing. You had better believe it was hard to say good-bye this summer when the time came.
The other has had a much easier work life. He has always been a family horse and mainly just trail rode. When I bought Mojo almost 10 years ago he already had a laid back personality, but what not the best trained. I worked with him and found that he wasn’t just laid back, but smart enough to play dumb to get out of work! I literally threw everything I could think of at him that might scare him and he quickly came to expect the weird and out of normal. Why did I do that? Because my vision for him was to be a therapy horse and I needed him bomb proof. He was the beloved mount for many special needs riders while I was teaching lessons. Now he’s my children's favorite.
See older horses may be set in their ways, but when they have good ground manners and experience, they are the perfect teacher for a novice rider.
Wanting a community to lean into? Join the FREE Courageous + Purposeful Mommas group! This community is for the Mommas, mommas to be, in the midst of raising, and kids grown, looking for tips on building your family up and providing for them through natural methods. Tips include: gardening, bulk buying, caning,/preserving, livestock, homesteading, and home remedies. Your family is precious, and this group is to help you gain the knowledge and tools to keep your family well and not reliant on outside professionals. Remedies and tips are easy and simple for the busy momma, time is precious after all, including pregnancy, birth, young kids, and illness. Trust your Momma gut again! This community offers the resources + community you need to help get started on your journey and prepare for whatever future you envision.
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