What is Homestead Culture?
Home: The dwelling, place, village or region where one lives.Stead: Standing firm in a place.Culture: To tend, care or cultivate land or crops. Homestead Culture means to tend to gardens in the place where we live while thinking multi-generationally. We are literally putting down long term roots and co-creating with the natural world around our…
Homestead for Deep Connection, to Thrive
Homesteaders of the 1800’s largely chose to homestead as a means to survive. They claimed a privilege to have access to land to make a living. Not a living wage, but to live from the land by growing and raising their own food, building their own homes, making their own clothes, crafting their own tools.…
Is Living in the Country Lonely?
“It’s so lonely here,” my mom and some friends have told me when they visited us at our homestead. This comment has always struck me with a comical irony. Of course, I totally understand what they mean. The me in 2009 would definitely agree. Back then, I loved going hiking and occasionally apple picking (for…
Healing My Relationship With Consumerism Through Homesteading
Modern homesteaders are invited to live in two worlds. In one reality we are active participants in a global growth economy that refuses to slow down. In another reality we are participating in a de-growth economy as we choose to slow down and look closer at meeting our basic requirements to thrive as whole, natural…
My Journey From Suburbs to Rural Homesteading
How did I come to call myself a homesteader? I’d love to share the story with you because it is unique and fun. It wasn’t a straight line from point A to B and includes a few leaps of faith. My story begins about 13 years ago. In my past life I was a suburban…
Living in Season
It’s fall here in southern Oregon and this time of year often brings back memories of my first fall. The first time I experienced fall was my 2nd year in college. Up until then, I had never really known what four seasons was like. I grew up in Vietnam and moved to southern California with…
Why Do I Homestead?
I started gardening in 2009 with about 300 square feet of soil in our suburban tract condominium. Watching plants grow from seed that I had planted with my own hands quickly became my favorite pastime. Those garden plants began to nourish my creativity, spirit, body and mind. I began to feel connected to our earth.…
Transform
As a way of life that reconnects us to the Earth, homesteading challenges us to evaluate many of our current cultural values and beliefs. As we delve into these questions, we begin to see the potential of incredible shifts and personal transformation.