Sorry that things got rushed towards the end of part 1. It was actually close to 11 pm when I crawled in bed, and the hubby was getting rather impatient. ; ) That is one thing that we agreed on when we got married, that we would go to bed at the same time, at least as close as possible.
Anyway, I was talking about the animals... At the time, the house was our major "homesteading" thing we did. We gave up a "big fancy house" to move into the neighborhood "crack house". After we moved it to the 15 acres, we added a hallway and a portable building that my dad bought for $50. The portable building became our bedroom. People still had comments to make about how we lived, but for the most part, we ignored them.
There were times that we both got so frustrated what the amount of things that needed to be done that we almost gave up and went and bought a new house. Luckily for us, I'd get frustrated at different times than he did, so we'd be able to talk the other one out of rushing out and signing our lives away.
New people who met us and came to our house commented on how much love was here and how comfortable they felt in our home. Those were the kind of people that we wanted to be friends with, not the ones thinking that we needed a big, fancy home.
I had never even heard of "homesteading" until we went to visit a Haflinger ranch that was owned by a husband and wife. We stayed for the day, thoroughly enjoying ourselves with these neat people we had just met. Their ranch was run on horse power. The horses were their tractors, they tilled their garden, pulled logs, etc. We had been having a wonderful day, when the wife asked me if I had heard about the Homesteading Movement. Of course, I thought about "homesteading" your house to lower your property taxes. She kinda laughed, then explained what it was about. Hmmm...could it be that we had been homesteading all this time and didn't even know it? I thought we were just living like my grandparents and parents.
We came home, and I did a web search on homesteading. The hubby walked past me, saw what I was looking at and said, "you're not serious, right? I like air conditioning and TV." You see, he's been married to me long enough to know that when I'm interested, I tend to jump in with both feet. I assured him that I wasn't going to take away all of his toys, that I was just looking for ideas to lower our grocery bill, maybe raise a garden, and farm fresh eggs are much better! He gave me a half hearted "ok" but he was still suspicious. The poor dear, he knows me too well for his own good. ; )
Well, after a while, even he was interested in some of the topics I was reading up on. He hates writing that check out to the light company every month, and it seems to get higher and higher, but when we got serious about looking about going off grid...well, lets just say that it's not in the budget. Shoot! I have managed to ease him into a few other things. He loves fresh homemade bread and the fresh veggies from the garden cut our grocery bill quite a bit. We discussed raising animals for meat for the freezer, but neither of us have the stomach for butchering and butcher shops around here charge so much just to butcher the animal, that it's cheaper to buy meat on sale in the store. And he certainly doesn't mind me cleaning the barn out to put in the garden!
So, I say all of this, and I've probably forgotten a few things, because the thing about homesteading is that you can pick and choose the aspects that work for you. You don't have to jump in with both feet, like I would have, at least until the 100+ temps of August. You can pick and choose things that work for you in your current circumstances. The things we have accomplished have been over years, and things that we want to accomplish will take even more years. Our farm has a life of it's own, and sometimes it's just like watching a child grow and develop.
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