Welcome!

And so it begins, our new adventure, Urban Homesteading.  There are so many reasons why we decided on this new adventure, and that is the question most asked when we started putting our idea out there.  Long story short we have a huge backyard that is begging for us to do something with it, we have a desire to eat and live a healthy lifestyle and we want to know where most of our food is coming from.  I started researching landscaping years ago in an attempt to figure out what to do with all the space.  Quite frankly it terrified me, there was just so much space to use.  We have done things here and there, built a small garden, added a fire pit, and just recently a beautiful deck, but all of this didn’t even touch a quarter of the yard! We have drafted many plans, and come up with many ideas, we have attempted to plant trees, and grass and have had many years where our small garden wasn’t successful.  We were ready to give up…until this past winter.  One day I was looking at our planters and thought “What a shame it is to go buy these flowers year after year and plant them just for a season.  Its so expensive! and quite frankly a waste of money for a pretty yard!”  Yes we have certain flowers that last year after year, but we still spent a good chunk of money year after year buying and planting the ones that don’t last forever.  And that’s when I had my thought! I wanted to attempt to grow those same flowers from seed!  So I started research……lots of research.  Seed was definitely way cheaper and you got way more and you aren’t limited to color choices or plant choices! I was getting excited, so I researched HOW to grow these said flowers.  There turned out to be simple ideas too! All you needed were seeds, dirt, containers to plant in, a black light, and a way to create a cheap greenhouse effect!  I sat down and figured up the cost of what we spend every year on these things at a local nursery versus the cost of the seeds and materials and realized it would cost us 1/4 of what we spent every year! YAY! Excitement, I had most of these supplies or access to them!  DONE! SOLD! SIGN ME UP!
And this started our adventure………I thought why do just flowers?  We can do our own tomatoes, peppers, and whatever else we felt like growing. So my husband dug out the mini greenhouse we had, I ordered the seeds and supplies (that we did not have) and we began.  We started our entire garden using this idea and everything grew!  The true test was planting  outside and it all worked! We were ecstatic! Of course there were stumbles along the way, such as don’t trust random people on amazon to send seeds and expect them to be what you ordered.  The flowers started blooming and they were not what I bought!, but still beautiful anyway.  Flowers and peppers need started WAY before we started them, and don’t start lettuce this way!
Along the way we started a new diet on a quest to eat healthier and we built our beautiful deck, and I only mention this because all of these combined gave us the idea to create an Urban Homestead.  Sitting on the deck, I now enjoyed sitting in the backyard, but it also gave us a sense of urgency to finish the rest of the yard so it looked just as beautiful.  With the diet, we pretty much eliminated 90% of processed foods, and most sugars. We never truly ate bad, but we needed to eat better.  We began eating more veggies, whole wheat products, and eating gluten free.  We felt so much better eating this way, and I thought (other than the wheat) we can grow most of these veggies!
One day while looking for seeds and ideas for next year I stumbled upon a website about ecosystems.  It was basically a website that taught you how to landscape your yard and have it be useful.  It showed every piece of the vision we had in our minds of what we wanted to do with our backyard…….gardens, flower beds, living fence, paths, and ponds.  It talked about using every piece of land with a purpose!  I sent the link to my husband and said “This is it, this is exactly what we have wanted to do!”.  And the ideas began coming rapidly.
And here we are………..We are going to landscape our yard with purpose and live off the land.  No it won’t be a “traditional” homestead, because its not in our nature to do anything traditional. We will built this with our needs in minds.  We won’t have pigs, or cows, or goats (well maybe someday).  We will eventually have bee’s and chickens.  We will add to our fruit trees, and will plant many other trees. We will have a greenhouse to grow things year around, and we have already started becoming experts on freezing and canning vegetables. The goal is to eventually grow a years worth of veggies.
What do we hope to gain from this experience?  Well saving money for one, landscaping our yard with a purpose, but most of all the rewarding satisfaction that we did this ourselves, that we are eating food we grew!
Follow us on our journey!  We will document it the entire way!