How Do I Get Started With Homesteading?

Whether it was watching YouTube videos, following homesteading pages on Facebook, or that sourdough starter somebody gave you, one way or another you've decided you want to start homesteading.

So where should you begin?

You could run straight to Tractor Supply, buy too many of the cutest chicks you can find, discover three months later that 90% of them are roosters, order an expensive chicken coop kit, buy some fancy feeders, and throw a chicken xylophone into the cart for good measure.

That's what plenty of people do.

And if that's you, that's okay! We can work from there.

But I think there's a better way to get started.

Before you start buying animals, building raised beds, planting an orchard, ordering beekeeping equipment, or figuring out how to contain the dairy goats, spend a little time figuring out three things:

• What resources do you have?
• What are you actually trying to accomplish?
• And what are you already good at?

You don't need to have your entire homestead planned before you start. In fact, I don't think you should. Your plans are probably going to change considerably once you actually begin doing this stuff.

But a little thought on the front end can save you a tremendous amount of money, frustration, and unnecessary purchases.

Salt & Soil Realty Group is a real estate brokerage, not a farm planner, attorney, or agricultural consultant. This post is educational. Confirm livestock, zoning, septic, and land-use rules before you buy animals or a property.

See what homesteading is, how much land you need, and can you homestead in a neighborhood.

Carroll Harrod with Salt & Soil Realty Group helps buyers start with the right piece of ground in Jacksonville, NC and Coastal North Carolina.

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Start with the land, tools, time, and money you already have

First, take inventory.

How much land are you working with?

What kind of tools do you already own?

How much money are you willing to invest?

How much time do you realistically have?

That first question tends to get most of the attention because people naturally associate homesteading with acreage. And acreage is useful. More land opens up more possibilities.

But don't convince yourself that you can't homestead because you don't have ten acres.

A half-acre suburban lot can go a long way with careful planning and good execution.

A quarter-acre can produce a surprising amount of food.

Even somebody working with a postage-stamp backyard can grow herbs and vegetables, bake bread, preserve food, compost, learn to forage, or develop dozens of other skills that move them toward greater self-sufficiency.

Bloom where you're planted. Use what you've got.

Your tools matter too.

Basic hand and power tools make homesteading much easier. A drill, saw, screwdrivers, wrenches, shovels, rakes, pruning tools and a few other basics will get used over and over again.

You don't need to buy an entire workshop before you plant your first tomato. Just recognize that the ability to build, repair, modify and improvise becomes incredibly useful as you go.

Then there's money.

You need to decide how much you're willing to put into this.

One of the beautiful things about homesteading is that you can do a surprising amount with very little cash if you're creative.

You can multiply a sourdough starter and trade bread for chicks.

You can reuse pallets and even pull the nails out of them for chicken infrastructure.

You can propagate plants instead of buying mature ones.

You can grow a significant amount of forage for small livestock such as rabbits.

You can repurpose materials that somebody else was going to throw away.

There are homesteading projects where creativity, time and labor can substitute for money surprisingly well.

But eventually you're probably going to discover another lesson:

Sometimes spending money makes your life considerably easier.

There comes a point where salvaging lumber for three days isn't worth saving $40. You may decide the automatic waterer is worth buying because you're tired of hauling buckets. You may own the tools to build something yourself but realize it would take you two weekends to accomplish what somebody else could finish in an afternoon.

You're going to make those tradeoffs constantly.

Homesteading doesn't have to be expensive, but knowing your budget lets you decide deliberately when to spend money and when to substitute your own time and effort instead.

If you are looking for more room, read how much land you need to start homesteading before you shop for 40 acres.

Figure out what you actually want from homesteading

Once you know what you're working with, think about why you're doing this in the first place.

Are you trying to become as self-sufficient as reasonably possible?

Do you mostly want a better relationship with your food?

Do you want to produce most of your family's meat?

Grow vegetables?

Build a pantry full of food you've preserved yourself?

Turn homesteading into an income source?

Or do you just want to grow enough tomatoes to eat fresh ones all summer and give a few dozen eggs to your neighbors?

Those are all legitimate goals, but they lead to very different homesteads.

I’d encourage you to sit down somewhere quiet, turn your phone off, grab a pen and paper, and write for at least ten uninterrupted minutes.

Write down everything that comes to mind when you picture the homestead you want. Don't organize it or worry about whether something is realistic yet. Don't turn it into a five-year strategic plan.

Just write.

Chickens.

Orchard.

More time outside.

Know where our meat comes from.

Save money.

Grow tomatoes.

Teach the kids practical skills.

Sell eggs.

Keep bees.

Get away from the grocery store.

Whatever comes to mind.

After you've filled the page, go back through it and ask:

Where do my values fit into this?

That's where things usually start getting interesting.

Maybe the thing you really care about isn't producing 100% of your food. Maybe it's knowing how your food was produced.

Maybe you don't care about making money from your homestead at all. You want something productive you can do with your family.

Maybe environmental stewardship matters a lot to you, and you want to improve your soil, create wildlife habitat and manage your property regeneratively.

Maybe independence is the big one. You simply like knowing that if you need something, you have a reasonable chance of producing, repairing or figuring it out yourself.

Those values should shape your goals.

Otherwise it's very easy to start building somebody else's homestead.

You see somebody with dairy goats, so now you need dairy goats.

Somebody else has a giant garden, so you need a giant garden.

Then somebody on YouTube built a $12,000 greenhouse, and suddenly you're pricing polycarbonate panels even though six weeks ago all you wanted was fresh eggs.

There isn't a correct collection of homesteading activities.

Build the homestead that makes sense for you.

Know what you're good at before you buy the livestock

The next part requires a little self-awareness.

Homesteading rewards an incredibly broad range of skills. That's one reason I enjoy it so much. Almost everybody brings something useful to the table.

Personally, I'm terrible at building things.

I can do it, but it's hard for me, it's taxing, it takes a long time, and the finished product usually doesn't come out quite as nice as I imagined it would.

That's a terrible weakness for a homesteader!

Fortunately, I've got neighbors who are naturally gifted at building things.

On the other hand, it turns out I'm unusually good at identifying, cataloguing and matching resources with needs.

That's a very useful homesteading skill.

If there's a material sitting somewhere unused, a person who needs it, somebody with a particular skill, or a problem that could be solved by connecting a few resources together, I'm pretty good at seeing and making those connections.

I use that ability on my own homestead, and I make it available to my neighbors.

You probably have skills like that too. You may just not think of them as "homesteading skills" yet.

Try this exercise.

Rate yourself from 1 to 10 on each of these, with 1 being a major weakness and 10 being one of your strongest areas:

• Woodworking
• Mechanical troubleshooting
• Electrical troubleshooting
• Planning complex tasks
• Designing build plans
• Following written instructions
• Writing instructions
• Cooking
• Baking
• Creatively repurposing things into new uses
• Gardening
• Animal husbandry
• Hunting
• Fishing
• Foraging
• Trapping
• Skinning and tanning
• Leatherwork
• Metalwork and welding

Don't worry if there are a bunch of ones, twos and threes on that list. That's kind of the point.

Nobody starts homesteading already knowing how to do everything. And frankly, I don't know many experienced homesteaders who would rank high in every category either. There are simply too many different skills involved.

Look at the handful you ranked highest. Those give you clues about some good places to start.

In the beginning, lean into your strengths

Once you've done that little self-assessment, you've got a decision to make.

Should you lean into your strengths or immediately start fixing your weaknesses?

In the beginning, I recommend leaning heavily into your strengths.

You need some wins.

If you're already a good cook and baker, food production and preservation might be a natural place to begin.

If you're good with plants, start expanding what you grow.

If you enjoy animals and already understand basic husbandry, perhaps livestock makes sense.

If you're mechanically inclined and love building things, you may have an entirely different path into homesteading.

Do something that has a reasonably good chance of succeeding.

Your first year of homesteading is going to give you enough failures without deliberately choosing the things you're worst at.

Plants die.

Animals escape.

Predators show up.

Equipment breaks.

Seeds don't germinate.

Things you thought would take two hours consume your entire Saturday.

You don't need to pile "learn an entirely unfamiliar skill from scratch" on top of every project.

Get some early victories.

Eat something you grew.

Bake the loaf.

Collect the eggs.

Build the thing.

Preserve a jar of something.

Solve a problem with materials you already had.

Those little successes build confidence, making it easier to take on harder projects later.

Then you can start intentionally working on the skills where you're weak.

Pick one or two homesteading projects and actually do them

This may be the hardest advice to follow because once people get excited about homesteading, they tend to get excited about everything.

You start looking at chickens.

Then rabbits look interesting.

Then you realize you could keep bees.

Obviously you'll need fruit trees.

Maybe blueberries.

And you should probably plant asparagus because apparently you're supposed to plant asparagus yesterday if you ever intend to eat any.

Then you need a compost system.

And rain barrels.

And a greenhouse.

Suddenly you've created three years of work for yourself before you've successfully grown a squash.

Slow down.

Pick one or two projects that fit your resources, goals and strengths.

Do them well.

Learn from them.

Then add something else.

There's nothing wrong with growing slowly. In fact, gradual growth is probably the best way to build a homestead that lasts.

Every new system creates work. Animals need daily care. Gardens need attention. Fruit trees need pruning. Fences need maintenance. Food has to be harvested and preserved.

All of those responsibilities stack on top of each other.

It's very easy to build a homestead that looks impressive on Facebook but makes you miserable to maintain.

The goal isn't to accumulate as many homesteading activities as possible.

The goal is to build a lifestyle you actually enjoy living.

Your neighbors may be one of your greatest resources

You also don't have to become good at everything yourself.

This is one of the places where modern ideas about "self-sufficiency" can get a little silly.

People have always depended on communities.

The farmer needed the blacksmith.

The blacksmith needed the farmer.

Somebody knew animals. Somebody could build. Somebody could sew. Somebody knew where the fish were biting. Somebody knew which plants were edible.

That kind of cooperation still works.

If you're great at gardening but can't weld, maybe somebody down the road can.

If your neighbor is a gifted carpenter but doesn't know anything about growing food, perhaps you've got something useful to offer each other.

If you produce more eggs, seedlings, vegetables, bread, honey, meat or knowledge than your household needs, share some of it.

Help people.

Teach what you know.

Ask questions.

Make yourself useful.

Keep looking for ways your strengths can help your neighbors and fellow homesteaders. Most of the time, they'll reciprocate.

And somewhere along the way, you'll probably discover that self-sufficiency doesn't mean doing everything alone.

It means becoming capable enough to contribute.

Start with what you have

You don't need the perfect property.

You don't need every tool.

You don't need to know how to garden, butcher a deer, or rebuild an engine before you're allowed to call yourself a homesteader.

Look at what you have.

Figure out what you value.

Decide what you're good at.

Pick something useful.

Then do it.

If the next step is actually buying land, use Eastern NC land due diligence and land buyer services so the property can support the homestead you just sketched on paper.