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The visiting wood duck.
This female wood duck has been eating bird seed with the other wild birds, and she hangs out with our pet ducks. She spends time in the pond and she perches in the bare hardwood trees.
The easy part of homesteading is deciding it’s the lifestyle right for you. The definition of homesteading has changed over the years. The first homesteaders had fewer choices and different decisions than most of us. Where do you want to live? What you need to live the lifestyle you desire has a lot to do with that decision.
What kind of area are you considering?
Remote living is great if you don’t want to be near a lot of people. What’s your definition of a small town? Is it 1000 people? 400 people? 20,000 people? Be sure your real estate agent knows what you’re thinking. Do you want to live in town on a larger than normal lot? Maybe you’d be more comfortable on a small lot just outside the city limits. What you from the experience and as your lifestyle will help you decide where you want to live.
If you decide to settle in town you’ll want to know ahead of time that your lifestyle is acceptable in the community. If you want to garden, have laying hens and hang your clothes on the line to dry you probably don’t want to live in a community with a home owners association that forbids these activities. You’ll probably be able to find a town that allows these “old fashioned” activities.
You can grow food in a suburban garden by getting creative in where you plant.
What public services do you need? A few things to consider:
How close do you need to be to health care? That includes dentist, eye doctor, primary care provider, hospital, clinic, lab and specialist. Everyone tries to be safe and not get hurt but life happens. If you need stitches or heaven forbid, more than stitches, how far are you willing to travel? How quickly can an ambulance get to you?
How remote is too remote? Hundreds of thousands of acres of forest and a few houses – remote living.
Personally, I live 30 miles from a hospital in one direction, 50 miles in the other. The ambulance service could take 20 minutes to get here. If you’re going to live some distance from heath care you should at least take CPR and First Aid training.
Cell phone reception and internet service are something the first homesteaders never had to consider but being a huge part of every day life for most people these days, do you want it? Need it? Are you going to be a hard core homesteader who disconnects? I’ve helped friends look for land many times and every single time, cell phone reception and the ability to not only get online but the need for high speed internet has been first or second on the list of necessities. Many homesteaders work from home now and really can’t do without dependable high speed access. If you don’t need it at your house but want access to it you can look into availability at the local library or small town mom ‘n pop store.
It’s a lot to think about. Make a list. What do you need? What do you want? What can you do without?
A young couple asked me the other day what we thought about in our homestead planning. I had to admit we hadn’t done enough homestead planning because we didn’t know what we were in for. It wasn’t long after we moved out here to the woods that an ice storm hit. We were fortunate to lose our power for only 12 hours while parts of the state were down for three weeks. We quickly learned that life is a lot easier when you have a way to cook a hot meal, make coffee or heat water for tea and hot chocolate, and have water.
You’ll want to be able to stay warm. Electric heat is useless when the power goes out. We have a propane furnace (similar to natural gas) for backup if we’re away but it doesn’t work without electricity to start it. Our heat source is a wood stove. The power can go out all winter and we’ll still be warm.
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If you’re going to burn wood you’ll need a solid supply of firewood. As a general rule of thumb a well managed woodlot in the northeast will provide a cord of firewood per acre per year without over harvesting. That doesn’t mean you’ll cut one cord on each acre. Overall the amount will work out to that amount. If you don’t have a woodlot or don’t have time to put up your own wood you’ll need to secure it some other way. You might find deals on Craig’s List or local barter boards. Tree length wood in my area this year was $185 a cord in tree length. Wood that was cut and split and ready to stack was as high as $240 per cord. And advantage of wood stoves is their flat top. You can heat water and cook if necessary.
Propane and natural gas heaters are popular. They are convenient and do a good job of heating a home if you an appropriate sized heater. Unlike firewood, they are clean. Pellet stoves provide the nice, warm, cozy heat of a wood fire without the mess and extra work. You might need a battery to run the blower on a pellet stove while the power is out.
We’re warm and have water now. A hot meal is a wonderful thing during a storm. One of our favorite meals during short outages is grilled cheese sandwiches cooked on the woodstove. If you need a good meal after shoveling snow, removing trees that have blown over or just plain want a good meal during a storm, you need to be able to cook properly. A propane or natural gas stove and oven will keep you well fed. Modern stoves and ovens usually light with an electric spark. You can light the burners with a match but the oven would have to be lit every time the temperature dropped. If you can’t or don’t want to do without an oven you should buy a stove with pilot lights, small flames that burn from the fuel source and ignite the oven and burners.
There are plenty of other things you need on a new homestead. These things will help you be less dependent on the grid and more comfortable when the lights go out. Losing our water was an eye opener and we spent the rest of the winter tightening up our homestead planning.