Is Self Sufficient Living Worth It? 6 Years Into Homesteading

Some of the most important things our kids are learning right now will never come from a textbook. They're learning how to grow food, care for animals, work hard, contribute to a family. Six years into homesteading, our family of 12 now raises much of the food we eat right here on our property and that's changed everything for us. But is self-sufficient living really worth it? Here's the honest answer. A few weeks ago, our pigs came to the farm. We raise pigs in the summer every year. They're here for about six months. We get them when they're about six to eight weeks old. We raise two to feed our family and then the other two we exchange with a friend of mine who raises beef cattle and so we raise two pigs for her in exchange for beef. It's been just such a wonderful arrangement. It meets both of our needs. We also have layer hens. These layer hens are here all summer long or all year long so we have them during the winter. They don't lay as many eggs in the winter even when we keep the lights on but in spring the egg production really ramps up. Also in spring we get our broiler chicks. We get two batches of 80 broiler hens and we raise these for meat. So we don't buy any meat at the store. We raise all the meat that we eat here on our small property. We also have a large garden. We grow strawberries, raspberries. I have an herb garden. In our vegetable garden we grow a lot of green beans, beets, cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes. Our approach has been to find a vegetable or a fruit that we can preserve in a way that everybody in our family eats it and then just grow a lot of that. So it started for us with strawberries. Our kids love strawberry jelly. That was something I knew how to make and so we just grew a huge strawberry patch and then it went into green beans. That's something else that we just love. Fresh green beans from the garden. We have frozen them. We've also canned them. We like them both ways and so we just grow large quantities of green beans. It's something that's really easy to grow and our family eats. Getting our pigs every year is just a really fun day for us. It's just having a new animal on the farm. It's really exciting for the kids. That and when we get our broiler chicks. It's just fun to see the baby animals and they're a little bit more fragile so everybody wants to take care of them and check in on them. My husband was raised out in the country. They had a big garden so he had a little bit of experience and his family did a lot of canning but this is something that was pretty new to me and when we started homesteading six years ago it really was kind of a new thing for both of us and we've learned a lot along the way. When we first started homesteading we had no idea how it would go. We have learned so much. We learn mostly from our mistakes. Sometimes you try things it totally flops and you just have to try it again next year and figure out a different way to do it. But one of the biggest reasons that we wanted to do this was because it helps teach our kids self-sufficiency. It helps give them real life skills to know where their food is coming from and our kids help with all of this work. It is a family affair. They help feed animals. They help us plant, harvest the vegetables, wash the produce, collect the eggs. They help us preserve food for the whether it's canning strawberry jam or canning green beans or tomatoes or freezing. We also do some freezing and some dehydrating. Over time this has stopped feeling like different projects were trying and has just become the way our family lives. If you're new on the channel hi my name is Sheri. I'm a Christian homeschooling mom married to my high school sweetheart. Together we have 10 kids and I love sharing homeschooling encouragement here on my channel. And a big part of that is life skills like this that kids are not going to learn from a textbook. The longer we've homeschooled and we just wrapped up our 16th year the more I've realized that there are so many important skills that we want our kids to learn that are not part of the curriculum. So in the younger years we focus a lot on living books, short lessons. It's a very Charlotte Mason and classical type feel. But we also have learned to really value teaching life skills and that's a big part of it especially as our kids get older into the high school years. To help prepare them for real life they have to have experiences trying different things. This is something I teach in my brand new course Beyond School the Home Education Breakthrough. This is a course for new and current homeschool moms where I take you step by step through a mom mentorship just sharing with you everything that I've learned in our 16 years of homeschooling. You can learn more about it by clicking on the link in the description box. One mom said, Hi Sherry I'm almost done with the course and I just want to thank you for your incredible work. It really has been tremendously helpful and it's opened my mind to a new more flexible way of doing homeschool. One of the skills our daughter has spent a lot of time on is growing her bakery business. She's always been interested in baking. She wants to try new things all the time. So she put up a stand at the end of our driveway and it's done really well. She puts it up every Saturday all summer long and I love seeing them exercise their talents and learn in this way. So much learning comes from just trying things and when it doesn't work then you have to figure out another way to do it. You have to problem solve. Our second oldest son who just graduated is working full time this summer with a framing company which is also a great skill to learn. But on the side he has started a mobile car detailing business and the jobs have picked up especially with the nice weather and it's just been a really great thing for him to manage on his own. So we focus a lot on life skills and I think some of that has come from what we've learned in homesteading. People ask is this lifestyle really worth the work and honestly for us it is. Not because it's easy it's it's definitely not easy and if you ask me at certain times of the year like in the spring I get pretty excited about our garden and all the ideas and things that we want to grow this year. But at the end of the harvest I am usually burnt out and tired of being in the kitchen preserving food. But it's definitely worth it to us because we know where our food comes from and that matters to us. The eggs that our kids collect, the chickens we raise, we make our own chicken broth from the chickens we grew ourselves. It all connects our family to the food we eat in a completely different way and beyond the food this lifestyle gives our kids something meaningful to do. They're not just being entertained all day. They're not bugging us asking for stuff to do. Not that that doesn't ever happen but there's so much to do around here. There's so much to see. They're contributing. Their work actually matters here. We need their help. We all need each other. We're a family that's working together and I think kids thrive when they know they're needed. You know, toddlers especially, they always want to do whatever you're doing in the kitchen. If you're cooking they want to help. If you're folding laundry they want to do it with you and sometimes it makes it harder to have them there. But they want to do what the adults are doing. They want meaningful work. The more we have been homesteading, the more we've realized that some of the most important lessons our kids are learning aren't coming from textbooks. Our academic homeschool year is wrapping up for us right now. We finished last week but honestly the life skills learning is kicking into high gear and this is where so much real education happens. So this is not necessarily part of the 180 days that I log but this is where our kids are learning so much. They're raising animals, preserving food, cooking food from scratch, problem solving and that's a big one. When you have a homestead, animals to care for and you're growing food and preserving it, there are problems that happen all the time. It involves more tools, tools break, sometimes we have to figure out why did we plant 300 years of corn and now it's all falling over. We've had so many different challenges over the years. Our kids have learned to work hard even when they don't feel like it and we all do it together. These are things our kids will carry with them forever. No matter where life takes them, they'll know how to provide for themselves and their families someday and that's something we really value. Here we're planting some beans. We plant them in succession. So we planted two rows and they came up and then we wait another week and we plant two more rows. That way when they harvest it doesn't all come up at the same time and it's overwhelming. It comes in bit by bit and it just makes it a lot more manageable for preserving it. And because our kids have been doing this with us for so long, they could go out into the garden and tell you what a bean plant looks like when it's just coming up. They can recognize tomatoes from peppers, from beets, from peas. Even when they're just slowly emerging from the ground, it's just so familiar to them. They have learned the difference between weeds and plants and sometimes that was a painful lesson because we had had many plants picked, plucked up that were not supposed to be but that's how you learn. This year in our garden we have I think 30 tomato plants and we can these into diced tomatoes. We have probably 15 pepper plants and I'm not sure why we bought so many because this is one area where sometimes you have an amazing harvest and your plants overproduce and you don't even know exactly what you did. That was the case for us last year. Our pepper harvest did so well. We still have bags and bags of frozen peppers but in the past it hasn't always been so. We hardly got any peppers and we didn't do all that much different. So you're always learning and growing. Here we are weeding through our patch of corn. So we planted about 300 ears of corn but you can't weed it until the corn starts coming up. So as soon as the corn started coming up now we can see which are weeds and which are corn plants. So we're all out there pulling up the weeds and we also learned this year that the reason some seeds don't come up is because the birds will come and dig the seeds out of the ground. So we have to go through and re-sow some seeds that were taken by the birds. So these are just small lessons that we're all learning together every year but it adds up over time when you've been doing it for so long. We've gotten better at so many things. It used to be such a challenge for us to take care of our broiler hens and they still are probably the hardest part of what we do on our homestead but they're only here for eight weeks and we've gotten better at it. My husband does the butchering. We have a and the first year that we did it it seemed like such a huge job till we figured out all the parts of the process but we've been doing it now for six years and each year it gets a little easier. We've learned to ask people to come help us on our butchering day and with all the help it goes pretty smoothly. Another area that we've learned is with our corn we've had I think this is our third year planting a huge batch of corn and it still has not been very successful for us. The one year it looked so so beautiful and then one time we went out there and from the outward appearance of the corn patch it looked great but we noticed a hole right in the middle and apparently some animal maybe a raccoon I'm not sure was smart enough to go in and take the corn from the middle of the patch so that it was doing this little by little and moving out and it took us a while to realize it was even happening and we lost most of the corn that year. So things like this really do make it discouraging when you have setbacks like that but for us it's still absolutely worth it not because it's easy it's it's been so much work but we like what this lifestyle is producing in our family. Some other things we're growing this year are two zucchini plants. Zucchini are prolific so one plant will probably be plenty to feed our family. The second one maybe we'll give some away. We're also doing beets because we like to can red beets. I have a strawberry patch, some raspberries, blackberries, a little herb garden on the side of the house and here I'm making a soup with chicken broth that comes from our chickens. I can't tell you how rewarding it is to know that what you're eating was something you worked hard at growing yourself. It's really neat when you make a meal, dinner perhaps, and by the time you put it on the table you look at the different things that you're making and realize we made all this we grew all this here on our homestead. So it is hard work but the work comes in waves so each day it takes us probably in the summertime at least about an hour to take care of all the animals especially when our chicks are out to grass and then there's so that's not a lot of time but then there's the time where we do butchering and that is an all-day process. Canning, that's an all-day process so that's where most of the hard work comes in. So I would say if you value knowing where your food comes from, if you value passing on these skills to your kids and giving them something to do during the summer then yes it's absolutely worth it. Long after the garden season is over these are memories they'll carry with them for the rest of their lives and a family-centered life makes all the hard work worth it. If you're doing something similar in your family or if you've ever thought about starting a homestead let me know down in the comments what part of this lifestyle means the most to you. And if you'd like to see more homeschooling resources you can check out the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com where I have free copywork and book lists and so much more. You can also find me in the Made to Homeschool community which is an online support for homeschooling families. Links for these are below. Thanks for watching. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'll see you next week.