My Custom Homestead: Step 1

Inspired by Jill Winger's eBook, Your Custom Homestead (available on www.theprairiehomestead.com),  I have begun her 21 step plan for creating my own personalized homestead.  My current homestead is small, being that it is located in a highrise apartment in New York City, but there are plenty of resources right here to support urban farming.  I am also gathering resources for my future homestead which will be much larger, complete with farm animals and a garden that will supply a year's worth of food to feed my family. 

To organize all of these resources and ideas, Jill's Step 1 is to create a homesteading binder.  She lists several sections that you may want to include in your binder.  Since I don't have any farm animals yet, my binder will not hold much in the animal paperwork  and health records section.  But I do have plenty to fill a binder for now.  My own binder is divided into sections for canning and preserving recipes, recipes for homestead essentials like my natural cleaning products and Jill's other eBook Natural Homestead, and a fantastic mini-handbook on Grow-Biointensive mini-farming techniques. (I will post more about this topic in the near future.) I also have info from Peaceful Valley's website (www.GrowOrganic.com) that I printed out such has a winter garden checklist and a guide to vegetable families for crop rotation.  I have separate folders for cooking recipes and my collection of inspiring images. 

Now that my binder is is organized, I have officially completed this first step to my own custom homestead.  Woo-hoo!  I think I'll celebrate by baking a loaf of homemade bread. 

Peaceful Vallley Farm and Garden Supply

If you have the gardening bug, then you understand the sheer joy of opening your mailbox to find the season's new seed catalog right smack in the middle of winter.  Although I don't have a garden plot with raised beds at the moment, I do have wide sunny windowsills.  This spring I will start my indoor kitchen garden which is just one of the many ways I can cultivate my urban homestead until we have a rural homestead.

www.GrowOrganic.com

Yesterday I received one of my favorite farm and garden supply catalogs.  My joy expanded exponentially when I opened it to find a free packet of certified organic tomato seeds.  Simple pleasures like this fertilize my dreams and plans for a small farm.  Peaceful Valley Farm and Garden Supply has an amazing website (www.groworganic.com) where you can spend hours learning about gardening and homesteading from their resources like free videos on anything from starting seeds to making cheese. 

Farm Table: Healthy Granola Cookies

"Cookie" is a word that makes all toddlers pay attention. (More so than the word "no"...Hard to believe, I know.) Heck, even my ears perk up at the sound of "cookie", and that's good enough for me.  My niece, who also has a toddler at home, shared her idea for healthy cookies (thank you Anne!) that are made from kitchen staples:  peanut butter, bananas, oats, and raisins.  In fact, that's her entire recipe: Mix these four

ingredients together and bake for 15 minutes.  So today my daughter and I got out the mixing bowl and did just that.  We poured spoonfuls of peanut butter into a bowl and added one mashed banana, a handful of raisins (the size of my hand, not hers), and some oats.  We tossed in some pecans just for fun.  We mixed it all together with a wooden spoon until it seemed like the right consistency.  Then I patted little lumps of dough into cookie shapes and placed them onto a cookie sheet.  Fifteen minutes later, viola!  Healthy cookies!

Our first attempt did turn out a little dry (nothing a glass of milk couldn't cure).  I'm considering adding a smidge or two of applesauce next time to see if this helps.  And I'm thinking of all kinds of other ingredients that could be added or substituted:  craisins, carob chips, semi-sweet chocolate chips, honey, apples, blueberries, pears, and the list goes on.  You don't even have to be adventurous in the kitchen to bake these cookies into a satisfying snack!  So try it and let me know what ingredients you used.  We can compare notes here in this blog post.

These tasty treats are great for packing up and taking on our city excursions to ward off crankiness caused by crowded subway cars.  And I'm looking forward to packing some for extra energy on a long hike in the country too.
Bon apetit!

The Prairie Homestead

www.ThePrairieHomestead.com

My wonderful sister-in-law (thank you Karen!) sent me a link to this awesome blog called The Prairie Homestead (www.theprairiehomestead.com) and here I discovered a kindred bohemian farmgirl.  I immediately purchased Jill Winger's two eBooks (Your Custom Homestead: Awakening a Fresh Vision of Homesteading and Natural Homestead: 40+ Recipes for Natural Critters & Crops).  She also has a free eBook called The Essential Homestead: Successfully Using Essential Oils in your Home, Barnyard, and Beyond, which I also downloaded.  The next day I read Your Custom Homestead from cover to cover in one sitting!

 Jill defines a modern take on homesteading as "a mentality that strives to go back to a simpler way of life and celebrates wholesome foods and the natural world.  It's a mindset that resurrects time-honored skills and appreciates the simple, yet meaningful, pleasures in life." 

She continues on to identify 21 steps to creating your own custom homestead regardless of whether you live in a high rise building in a big city (like moi) or on 100 acres of raw land.  With her permission, I will chronicle my own journey through these 21 steps here on this blog.  I would love it if you joined me as you discover how Jill's ideas can make your own homestead adventure more meaningful for you.  Send me a note, write a comment after each post, and by all means check out the inspiration of Jill Winger on her blog!

I also posted a link to her recipe for homemade liquid dish soap on my Homestead Inspiration board on Pinterest. Once I have all the ingredients, I will let you know how I made out.  Stay tuned!

An Invitation to the Bohemian Farmgirl Blog

Fine Art by Elise Mahan available on Etsy

I have come to realize that blogging is like a constellation--connecting stars until something magical appears.  As someone who desperately wants to create a beautiful life in the country, I am not very attracted to all things technology, particularly social networking.  I'm much rather meet up with someone in person in a local bakery and share ideas over coffee and crusty bread.  I also fluctuate in mood between wanting to isolate in nature for days at a time like a bear in hibernation and longing to connect with other bohemian farmgirls who share the same creative passion.  ...Which is precisely why blogging is so perfect.  Here I can do both, and I don't even have to fix my hair.

As I read back on my journal pages for the past year, I see just how much clarity I have gained.  I know what I want.  I know what I don't want.  I know what I will do and what I won't do.  While my family and I are busy with this stage of our city lives, I have been able to explore ideas before making any major investments, commitments, or decisions.  Now the steps are clear, and with each new insight, things feel more right.  So moving to New York City hasn't been a step in the wrong direction; it has been a necessary part of the evolution of my dream.

So here is my invitation to you:  Do live on a farm or homestead, or imagine doing so?  Does the perfect day include creating and hiking or napping under a tree?  Do you long to grow your own food and serve it up on a beautiful handmade plate?  Do you count sheep, goats, chickens, llamas, cows, and bees before you go to sleep?  Do you wish you could make cheese, butter, soap, yarn, and maple syrup in your kitchen?  Do you scour flea markets and vintage shops for things you can repurpose or revive? Do you look forward to the New York Sheep and Wool Festival more than Christmas?  Do you want to do any and all of these things in a dress you made yourself?  If you said yes to one or more of the above, please, become a star in my constellation.  I am looking forward to meeting you.

Book Review: Handbuilt Home by Ana White

Okay, so we all know by now that I dream of having our own little minifarm/homestead in upstate New York.  And that once my husband and I have our Masters degrees in our hands, we plan on moving back there (May 2014).  But the more I study up on homesteading how-to's, the more this dream becomes an actual plan.  And, the more I fall in love with different aspects of homesteading (like caring for sheep to have my own wool to knit with, bio-intensive minifarming, preserving the harvest, making bread, making green housekeeping products, sewing bohemian farmgirl accessories to adorn ourselves and our home, etc).  My latest obsession is building my own furniture.

www.Ana-White.com

Mind you, I do not own any power tools, nor have a garage or workshop in which to build my own furniture (living in a high rise in Manhattan and all).  But in a recent issue of Country Living magazine, I tore out a picture of a beautiful farmhouse dining table that the owner built himself with scrap lumber and free building plans from www.Ana-White.com .  So I checked out the website to get the plans myself, and I was instantly addicted.  Ana White is this awesome woman in Alaska that built her own home with her husband while she was pregnant with her daughter.  This is how she learned to build, and now can draw up plans for any piece of furniture she desires.  And she shares all these plans on her website and in her book The Handbuilt Home.  After printing out a few plans for pieces I absolutely must build someday, I bought the book.  Ana is so inspiring and she makes me believe that I really can build all these beautiful pieces.  And I plan to!!  The book is beautifully printed with inspiring instructions and photos of people who built the pieces themselves using her building plans.  I seriously want to build everything in this book.  And in a couple of years when we have our little homestead, I WILL! 

Homemade Bread

Living in New York City and dreaming of starting a homestead seem like quite opposite living circumstances.  But as the months pass into semesters of educational goals achieved, I am counting down the time until we move back to the Hudson Valley and begin realizing that minifarm dream.

One of the country skills I have always wanted to learn is the art of making bread.  This seemed easy enough to do and something I could accomplish in our galley kitchen until the time comes when I have my country kitchen.  Yet for years, I put off this task as something that was just too hard to learn.  Yeast seems so unpredictable!  But then I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and discovered that even seasoned homesteaders love to use bread machines.  I always thought this was cheating so it never occurred to me that I could use one to learn to really bake bread.  But when a friend of mine started visiting a local thrift store to fill up her new home, I mentioned to her my interest in a bread machine.  She found one for $6 and mailed it to me for Christmas!

My first batch was a complete failure.  (Who knew there were different kinds of yeast?!)  But once I got the correct ingredients, bread making has been a quick and easy success.  There's nothing like fresh homemade bread and a pot of soup on the stove on a cold winter's day.  And the feeling I get when I smell the bread baking and the soup bubbling is one that reminds me that my homesteading dream is not that far off.