Greenimalist

Our first garden plant is a strawberry.

I’ve been thinking about farming my own food. I think I’ll start small, maybe with a vegetable garden, with some tomatoes, kale, and zucchini, and eventually work my way up to fruit trees. If I get the chance, someday I’d like to grow my own wheat and rice. I’ll get to enjoy fresh baked bread and homemade strawberry jam. Ultimately, of course, my goal is to have a flock of chickens and a dairy goat to produce milk, yogurt, and cheese.

I spent the last month dreaming about homesteading. Historically, a homestead was a free plot of land granted by the US government to pioneers who settled in the West. Since there were no cities in the frontier, these pioneers had to be entirely self-sufficient. They built their own homes and produced their own food by farming and raising livestock. Eventually, the term homesteading came to refer to the pursuit of a self-sufficient lifestyle, a lifestyle which included growing your own food and living without public utilities. Since 1976, the government has stopped offering free land for homesteaders, but that hasn’t stopped many would-be homesteaders from pursuing a life of self-sufficiency.

In fact, there’s a new wave of 21st century eco-conscious pioneers who are giving the old-fashioned idea of homesteading a second look. One family converted their home in Pasadena into a small-scale farm to create an Urban Homestead; it’s been self-sufficient for several decades now. I plan to homestead as well, but on a smaller-scale at first. Homesteading fits within my larger goal of achieving a zero waste lifestyle, since any food I grow won’t use gasoline and won’t produce packaging waste. Hsinya has started experimenting with simple home-making skills like culturing yogurt. But if I can go even further by raising my own dairy goat, I can truly achieve a zero-impact lifestyle.

Two weeks ago, I checked out The Backyard Homestead to see what it takes to get started. According to the book’s estimates, I could feed our entire family of two with as little as 1/10th of an acre (4300 sq. ft.), an area the size of a basketball court. The harvest would include not just vegetables and fruit, but grain, meat, and milk as well. If I had a large backyard and a front lawn, that might be enough to achieve total self-sustainability. In the meantime, however, I live in an apartment without any land.

My current strategy is to rent a community garden right after we come back from traveling in Taiwan. I want to test out the idea with just a small 100 sq. ft. garden plot, which is about the size of a walk-in closet. Most importantly, I’m going to update a financial spreadsheet to keep track of costs, labor spent, and the value of harvest (1). After I post the spreadsheet, you can calculate whether farming is cost-effective for you, given the value of your time. I’ll count the cost of seeds, gardening tools, and labor spent gardening, and compare it to the market price of organic food. I’m curious whether growing my own food will turn out to be a profitable investment. Perhaps someday my homestead dreams will become a reality.

Do you think homesteading is practical in the 21st century?