Where This All Began

I woke up early this morning! I went to bed at about 1:30 am and then this morning at about 5:15 am I woke up. I considered going back to sleep but decided I wanted to stay awake. And now here I am an hour later, blogging.

When I was little, we lived on a ranch in Southeastern Arizona. Originally we lived in the antique-pioneer house. It was adobe and the ceiling in the living room was gone. My dad has always been a pack rat so one of my earlier memories are of a little trail through the living room to the woodstove in the back corner. My mother tried many times while they were still married to de-junk it and make more space for living. She also tried to make it more livable and prettier since it is, and always has, been falling apart.

My dad still dreams of buying the ranch (he owns a small share of it) and renovating what we now call "the old house," but he has never really done anything and probably never will.

When I was a few months shy of my second birthday, we moved to Salt Lake City for awhile where my sister was born (exactly one week after my birthday, ironically). Then we went and lived with my grandma for awhile. My mother refused to move back unless my dad got something better to live in. He found a trailer. The house was bigger (but not really living standard without some work and money that we didn't have), but the trailer was better.

I liked living on that ranch. We had a garden, dogs, goats, and horses. The neighbors (the only other inhabitants of the ranch) had the same as well as cattle and chickens. My best friend (she was born a few weeks before I was and was the daughter/granddaughter of said neighbors) roamed everywhere. We played in the creek when it ran in early spring (from off of Graham Mountain) and in the hot summer we would run barefoot from shade spot to shade spot (since we went barefoot almost year round due to the short, mild winters).

There was an outhouse off to the side and back of the yard which we never used because for some reason bees lived there (no idea why...). My dad's kids from his second marriage would come to visit and of course my best friend and I would follow my older sister and her friend (my friend's aunt) everywhere which of course annoyed them no end.

I loved it when we got to bring the baby goats in the house (for whatever reason) and feed them milk from calf bottles and following my dad around as he did the "chores." (Feeding the animals, watering the garden, milking, straining the milk, etc.) When there was a day when we butchered, I would go inside and sit under the cooler where I couldn't hear anything. Then when it was over, I would come out and watch my dad chop up the goat (hung from an obliging mesquite tree) into tasty bits of chevron.

I remember one night when I was three or four, my dad was going to go out to the outhouse to get honey from the bees and I wanted to come with. He didn't want to take me, so he told me that the bogeyman would get me. I knew he was teasing, but even if I hadn't I wouldn't have been afraid (my idea of the bogeyman: man in all black wearing a ladybug suit). I insisted so he took me with him (the bees were all asleep, I think), so he finally gave in and we came back with lots of tasty honey.

When I was almost seven, my mom decided she was fed up with my dad and moved out. We moved to a less secluded (the ranch was miles from any kind of neighbor and I loved it) place with two acres and a trailer. From then on out, all the places we've lived, we've never had much more than a garden, a few cats and the occasional dog. So I would pretend. When I was younger I would go out to bring home the (imaginary) cows with my imaginary older siblings (I'm the oldest of my mom's kids) and ride my bike pretending it was a horse. My sister wanted to play Barbies. I wanted to play Farm.

When I got older, we moved to Northern Arizona and when it snowed, I'd go and check on my pretend farm animals to make sure they were safe from the snow. I wanted to plant a garden but I never could remember to water anything I planted and when I wanted to do more than plant a seed and water it once or twice, I had no idea where to start anyways. I devoured the Mother's Children section of the Mother Earth News (we have years of back issues).

After I got to be 12 or 13, I kind of forgot about it all until just before my sixteenth birthday when I started looking at our old Mother Earth News issues. That's when I decided "that's what I want to do." And when I ran out of issues, I decided I wanted to see if there was anything on the internet. I googled all sorts of phrases containing the words "country," "farm" and "rural," but I never found anything until I googled "homesteading." That's when I found Homestead.org and A Homesteading Neophyte. I was so excited when I discovered people still do this and that, even better, they blog about it.

And after reading through two or three blogs, I discoverd that no one ever really started blogging until after they'd been doing what they were doing for awhile or they bought property. I wanted to know about it from before all that. So I decided to write my own blog. And here it is. :)

Urban Homesteading: Garden Girl TV

A lot of times homesteading in town is overlooked or not addressed. We know it exists, but we don't talk about it enough. However, there is a site I found that is all about "urban sustainable living."

This is the teaser-like commercial thing:



The website is Garden Girl TV.

Ironwood Farm Project

I have new blog to add to my blogroll! I just finished catching up! Whoo-hoo!

This blogger's name is Jenny, and her blog is called "Ironwood Farm Project." She has two children, a boy and a girl, which she homeschools in an unschooling way. She and her husband live in New Mexico on a 10 acre family farm in an off-the-grid strawbale home (I know all of you are green with envy lol) which is featured in this article. She does Flamenco as a hobby and is working on living sustainably. They have cattle, a pair of pigs, sheep, bees, a garden, and various poultry. Her husband had an awful accident involving his thigh and there are complications at this point. They are also planning on making a living with their farm at this time.

So off with you now! Check them out!

Cauldron Ridge Farm

From there I went in search of a new blog to devour. And I found Gina's "Cauldron Ridge Farm." I read it all. From her move to Cauldron Ridge Farm, through two different jobs, graduating with a degree in entomology (that is what you call a degree in bugs, yes?) to her move to yet another farm and the ups and downs of everyday life. She works full time, plus does the farm thing with her two little boys and husband. It's amazing.

Dancing in A Field of Tansy

When I caught up with "A Homesteading Neophyte," I went in search of new blogs that had quality content. I had to get my fix, you see. lol

That's when I found "Dancing in a Field of Tansy." I caught up on that one faster because there are not so many posts. She is artistic and crafty from what I've seen, and she has goats. I like goats. I grew up on goats' milk from our very own French Alpine/Saanen crosses. Some of them were nasty, some of them were gentle but didn't know how to nurse babies, so we fed her kids with a couple of calf bottles and kept them in a box in our living room. Some of them died. We ate some. As a child, I would sit on my parents' bed under the cooler where I couldn't hear anything. Then, after it was done, I came out and watched them bleed the goat. They hung it on a ginormous mesquite tree we parked our van under.

One goat got her horns stuck in the chainlink fence, crying for her mama. We didn't get to her fast enough (and nobody called a vet after the fact), so she went through the rest of her life with her nick twisted sideways.

But I'm off topic again...Tansy has goats, yes, and I like goats.

A New Tradition; A Homesteading Neophyte

I have decided to do a "Blog of the Week" type of thing. Except I'm not reliable enough to make sure I post about a blog I like each week. So instead I am going to post about blogs that interest me whenever it occurs to me to do so. It's kind of the way I live my life. Do it when it occurs to me and hope it occurs to me.

Today I am posting about the very first homesteading blog I ever discovered. I found it last summer. After I read thirty years worth of back issues from Mother Earth News and wanted to know how people homesteaded now (rather than in the seventies and eighties). Well, I googled all sorts of phrases, trying to find the one that would hit the jackpot. "Rural Living" was out "Country Living" brought up another blank. Phrase after phrase, I searched; using every phrase I could think of that would describe what I was looking for. Finally, I found the right one: "homesteading." Bingo! And best of all, I discovered there were blogs that were worth the space they took up in cyberspace. Homesteading blogs. Until then I had only found dumb ones written by dumb kids who wanted to tell the world about their alcohol addictions and how they cut themselves...as though anyone cared.

Well, I found Phelan's "A Homesteading Neophyte" and, starting from her first post ever, I read all the years of experience buried deep in the archives. It was like reading a good book that never ended. And better yet, it's happening now instead of 1979 or 1983 or 1995. That's something that's important, that it's possible now.

Beginning Steps to My First Garden

Last night I had a lovely dream about sheep. I dreamed I had eight sheep and five of them were pregnant. And they had cute little lambs. It was a homesteading dream, or else I wouldn't have mentioned it in this blog.

You probably know from my blog description that I am a teenager who wants to be a homesteader. If you know what homesteading is, you probably know that most teenagers (at least the ones I know) want to be fashion designers and doctors and actors and authors and veterinarians and brain surgeons and singers, and artists, and archeologists. All those subjects fascinate me, yes, but I want to be a homesteader. I want cows and sheep goats and chickens and a garden and cats and dogs and children on a nice size piece of land in the Rocky Mountains where I can live a life that makes sense to me. Right now I'm learning as much as I can about cooking and sewing and crocheting and other domestic chores as well as more homesteady things like gardening and animal husbandry. Most of my experience in the homesteady things up until now has been book learning and blog reading.

I am still working on that, but now I have decided to plant a garden. I figure now is a good time to start when I have a ton of time on my hands (and I'm graduating this spring even though I just turned seventeen last month, so I'll have even more time on my hands, soon). I don't want to do animals just yet because I'm going to do college and and the job thing before I do the homesteading thing and it's a little difficult to take care of a dog when you're busy with college and all that fun stuff. At least you could leave it home and ask your mom to take care of it (I don't have a dog, just so you know).

My mom really doesn't know the first thing about chickens. She likes cats and tiny dogs. The one time I had her take care of my chickens (because I was at youth conference for four days), she didn't give them any water and they started eating their eggs to compensate. So any animals I have from now on will be at a time I can take care of them. Now back to the subject I'm writing this post on: gardening.

Now is about right to start doing the garden thing. There's never a frost after Mother's Day (ironically, it has sometimes snowed for the last time on Mother's Day and then all melted away and been sunny and just like spring the next day, but it has never broken the rule), so anything I want to start indoors needs to be planted in March or April. Therefore planning is in February (or January if you're really organized and motivated, which I am not under normal circumstances).

I am doing a 20'x30' garden this year. I figure it's a good size. I'll be able to have some variety but not be overwhelmed. Plus it's already fenced off with four feet of chicken wire above the ground and 6-8" buried. And these are the plants I want to grow:

• Tomatoes
  
• Cucumber
  
• Zucchini
  
• Onions
  
• Garlic
  
• Herbs (haven't decided which yet, but definitely the kind for pizza/spaghetti sauce)
  
• Carrots
  
• Lettuce
  
• Some berries
  
• Maybe some flowers
  
• etc
  

This is far from an exhaustive list. It's just kind of a general idea, I may add some plants, I may take away some plants, I'll probably add more details and whatnot. You'll see. I'll post my plans as they develop and become more specific and specialized.