Question- What The Hell Happened to Homesteading???
I stumbled onto this Youtube video (link to article in Substack Jill Winger Substack) and was blown away. I had been thinking the same things for quite a while now. Video here, please comment on what you think? My comments on Youtube and Substack below video-
My comments-
Really great post on Substack, interesting comments. I'm a little different where my husband and I started a little urban homestead back in the 2010 or so. I grew up in the city in Southern California, mostly in apartments and never had a yard until I was an adult. I got married and raised a family with a wonderful man who loved gardening! I started blogging in 2011, Little Homestead in Boise, which I still do. I thought it might be fun just to sort of document what we were doing as we did it and it's actually really great to be able to look back and see what we did over all the years. I think my grandparents would be proud! I grew up in the city with the only set of grandparents I knew who had fruit trees, avocado tree, Concord grapes and strawberries in their little tiny urban backyard. My grandmother also knitted, crocheted, embroidered, canned foods, made everything from scratch. That was the generation that were adults during the Depression. I'm almost 70. After I became a Master Gardener we bought our current house where I really wanted to pursue more self-sufficiency type skills. I had stumbled on to a California family that were doing hardcore "urban homesteading" and Permaculture. It was really inspiring to me. I didn't know what else to call it, so "urban homesteading" fit for me. So after we moved in we planted fruit trees, medicinal herbs, low water use plants (high desert here), got chickens, and planted another summer garden like our two previous houses. Almost all of this was done frugal and DIY. Sadly my husband has vetoed beekeeping as he is afraid of liability issues! Oh well, what can you do. My husband luckily had parents that were hardcore gardeners also, in Portland, Oregon. His Mom grew tons and tons of homegrown produce. Eventually I learned how to can and dehydrate foods, etc. I never really made any money off of my blog. When I started to see YouTube taking off years ago and a lot of bloggers going there or even just switching to Facebook I just sort of shook my head. I really didn't want to lose my privacy by going online and posting videos of myself doing stuff and I didn't really think there was much interest in it anyway. Boy was I wrong. While I'm not sure if I thought it was a movement, it was something. When chickens became a "thing" for instance, I saw a huge onslaught of cheaply made, inappropriate sized instant chicken coops for sale. I saw a lot of people buy a lot of chickens and a lot of them died. People didn't know what they were doing, but it sounded fun. I did about 6 months worth of research before we ever bought our three little chicks and built a nice sized big coop. We've been successfully raising chickens for years. Sadly many of my blogger pals who were around the same age or maybe younger have either stopped blogging or passed away. I used to have a real regular group where we crossed pollinated each other's blogs with comments and now I'm down to one or two. Sad. Now we have the cosplay farmers and homesteaders who have millionaire husbands and dress up in overly expensive, quaint clothing and say that they are farmers. They have large families (some of them) and promote all their sales and/or services and the attitude of "you can do this too without any money"! It's also easy to raise lots of kids when you have lots and lots of staff doing most of the work. I do feel sorry for the children in that scenario as the ones who are all over social media have no choice in that sadly. I see a lot of therapy in their future. Good job on your post and you made some excellent points! Will be putting a link to this on my blog. Will be curious to see any comments.
4 comments:
In the past, when the economy got bad people would start hunting for land and looking for ways to be self-sufficient. It was a great time to be blogging and writing books to encourage people. But when covid wore on, and people couldn't work and inflation started getting out of control, I realized something had changed. People were struggling financially, but no one was talking about starting gardens and ways to become more self-sufficient. My goat sales completely collapsed. I sold fewer homesteading books and had fewer visitors to my homesteading blog. I have no clue why. And in the several years since, the interest hasn't resumed. In fact, that's why I don't write much on my homestead blog any more. I still have regular readers but very few of them are homesteaders.
Maybe it was just a fad. I don't know. For Dan and me, it's a much better lifestyle than fretting about whatever everyone is fretting about. There is something immensely satisfying about the sense of purpose we get from interacting with the land. For us it's the lifestyle we are meant to live.
I totally hear what you're saying! That's part of the reason too I've taken some breaks from blogging because I don't know if anybody bothers reading it anyway? When I look at my stats I can see that people are actually coming here on a regular basis, but very few over comment which is sad. I thought about doing a blog post on that! Glad you guys are hanging in there we're doing that also. Will be posting more in the future
I've considered to not continue my blog. I felt no one was growing gardens, living off the land so to speak. Chickens were a rage for a lot of people, but now there are people giving their chickens away here in our area. I also did not feel that there was one person who grew herb gardens, or grew medicinal gardens, or even made their own natural remedies with herbs. Heck, it's hard to find someone to talk to that even cooks from scratch, let alone grow their own food.
Yes I hear what you're saying! Couple years ago I just felt like I didn't have much to say and that people were reading it anyway. Yes I think a lot of people are giving their chickens away which is kind of crazy given the state of the world but that's me. I think there are a lot of quiet people making good positive changes but they don't make the media. And yes with the advent of delivered foods and things and people with money to burn a lot of people think that cooking is heating something in a microwave
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