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Start Homesteading

These days, as prices soar, we hear a lot about homesteading. You may want to start homesteading. I know that it can seem overwhelming so the best way is to start slow. There are many websites and YouTube videos to show you how. 

There is no need to try to do everything at once if you have been a city dweller all of your life. Start out by doing one homesteading chore at a time. As you get comfortable with your new life, you will add more and more things that you want to do on your homestead.

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Start Homesteading 1/2/2023-1/8/2023

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Monday, January 2, 2023 - Start Homesteading

Good Monday morning! At 7:50am, I was out on our front porch talking to Matt about my chickens when one of our former team members showed up for work. She quit well over a year ago. About a week before Christmas, we ran into her at Walmart and David asked her when she was coming back to work. She said probably in a few weeks. But we never heard anything else from her...

She kept her word and showed up today. She pulled seed orders almost the entire day which is a good thing because my toe is broken and my whole leg was hurting today so I would have been very slow at pulling these seed orders. I am very grateful to have her back.

David had one of the guys who helped with planting a few weeks ago come by to help out back today. He will be coming out tomorrow again.

David and I had to leave at 1pm because David had a dental appointment in San Antonio. Once we left, the customers started coming to the Farm Store. When we got back, there were five customers in the Farm Store a little after 3pm. I went in and met them and then went back to Fulfillment to mail out seed orders.

I must say that the orders are pouring in and I did not expect to be this busy on January 2! It is great! Thank you to everyone who is ordering from us. We so appreciate it. After a very slow fall and winter season, this is a wonderful way for us to kick off the new year.

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Start Homesteading

You have heard the term homesteading for quite a while now but if you live in the city, you are probably wondering exactly what it is. When we were considering a move from San Antonio back in 2019, I thought we would start being more self sufficient, going to the grocery store less and staying out here on the farm more. Sure enough, that is what happened but mainly because of the 2020 nightmare of Covid.

Now that things are more normal again, we don't grocery shop a few times a week like we did in the city. There is no time and after a full day of working in the business the way we are now, there is no energy to go to a store. Even on the weekends, we don't want to fit it in.

Let's look at the definition of homesteading. Back in the 1800s, a homestead according to the United States government was a parcel of land, usually 160 acres that was given to any United States citizen who was willing to move West to live on and farm the land for at least five years. This was called the Homestead Act of 1862.

Homesteading nowadays is a life of self sufficiency in a home with land. The land can range from one half acre up to many acres but the difference is that it is no longer given to you. You have to pay for your land now. Some modern homesteaders do it all, going off grid and raising and growing all of their food. Others get a few chickens or pigs and have a garden. Still others learn how to make sourdough bread and can a few things.

The legal definition is "a house and adjoining land designated by the owner as his fixed residence and exempt under the homestead laws from seizure and forced sale for debts." Homesteaders grow gardens, raise animals for food, use alternate energy sources like solar power, have their own water wells, and try to stay "off grid" as much as possible. If you are going to do YouTube to make money, you have to have a source for the internet.

Most of the time, homesteaders will home school their children and teach the children farming and food preservation. Many of these homesteaders are Christians, but not always. I watch quite a few homesteading videos and more times than not, homesteaders are hardworking, debt free, back to the basics of life people who have learned to be self sufficient by trial and error. They might know how to knit, crochet, sew, woodwork, and use herbs that they have grown for medicine. They might make their own laundry soap, bath soap, lotions, shampoos, and lip balm. There are many ways to start homesteading.

The debt free part of homesteading is important because it is difficult to earn money being on the farm all day long, at least at first. Many homesteaders keep their city jobs and commute. Others are entrepreneurs who try to include their homesteads in their money earning endeavors.

We were able to buy our homestead by selling our city home. When we sold it, we bought a four acre parcel of land that David loved on the outskirts of Poteet. When I say outskirts, I mean 12 miles away from Poteet. There are many homesteads out here.

We were fortunate enough to already be in business when we bought our property. Almost a  year after we moved in, we moved our business, David's Garden Seeds®, out here. It took that long just to buy and set up all of our business buildings. Everyone of them is paid for because we don't do debt.

We had to build 100 raised garden beds right away plus a greenhouse with PVC pipes and plastic. We covered those 100 raised garden beds with shade cloth to protect plants from the very strong sun we get here in South Central Texas. Now we have changed the greenhouse into a high tunnel, still made from PVC. We have added some other sheds for various uses and in early 2022, we built me a greenhouse in our fenced in yard to protect my plants from some of David's overzealous team members who would toss every single thing that I would plant. Those folks are no longer with us but it sure was frustrating for quite a while...

We added more garden space, animal shelters, and a lot of fencing. It is important to build shelters for your animals to protect them from weather and predators. It is also important to protect your garden space from your animals and predators. For instance, if I let my chickens free range, like a lot of folks do, they would go into the garden beds and eat David's plants. They would then be dead because David would kill them for ruining his garden. Also, if they are not protected by shelter, raccoons and hawks could easily get the chickens.

The fences keep the deer at bay because they are not going to jump over two fences, not being able to see what is on the other side of the fence. Trust me, it works. The fences also keep the dogs where they belong so they are not tearing up the gardens. (Been there, done that in our San Antonio yard.) Dogs will tear up things and so will farm animals. Gophers are always tearing up the ground out here. Nothing we can do about that. Cutter ants keep tearing up the trees and plants. We find the nests and poison them. It is the only way to get rid of them. They have destroyed so many of our trees and they spread like wildflower across the orchard.

So this week, we are going to talk about how you can start homesteading. The work is not really easy but you can ease your way into it, a little bit at a time.

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Tuesday, January 3, 2023 - Start Homesteading

Happy Tuesday! It started out at 53° and should get up to 84°. I spent most of the day filling orders and doing computer work.

More Spring Seed Sets are being made right now for the many spring orders coming in right now. It seems that the spring seed shopping season started on New Year's Eve and it is awesome. I have moved over to the Fulfillment Building to fill and close orders for the season. I go over to the store when customers come.

Believe it or not, we have had several more customers this week than usual. We had some helpers this morning. Our pastor brought two of his very well mannered and well behaved grandchildren over to help out. They did a very good job for us and were here for about four hours. We sure appreciated the help. Normally, I don't like to have kids around because they make a mess and ruin things but these two were just great. Their parents are doing something right!

It is now about 4pm and the plants are being watered. The ants have been battled. I have not done a thing in my house today because I was so busy with orders. The mailman took four big USPS mail bags of seed orders with him today after taking yesterday off. I now have another bag almost half full of orders that I have done after he left.

Snapdragons are popping up in some of the raised garden beds. I am sure we will get more cold weather between now and the end of February but right now, it feels like spring. Spring means we should be planting. However, if we do, it will be for nothing because it will get cold again.

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Start Homesteading

As I said yesterday, if you have been thinking about it, you can start homesteading. You just need a plan. Obviously, you will need some money to buy land, preferably with a house. You do not want to go into debt to get land if you can help it.

Once we sold our home in San Antonio, we bought our country property and found a beautiful, new double-wide that we would live in. We had to be out of our home within 30 days. We thought the mobile home company would have it put together and ready for us to live in. Not so...

About six or so weeks later, they put it together. Meanwhile, we had to have a place to live. The first two buildings on our property after the outhouse rental, were two sheds. We lived in one for the first six weeks. No water, no electricity in the beginning.

City water took about four weeks to get and it took several thousand dollars to turn it on. We had to buy a water tank and pay about $700 a load to fill it with dirty water that we could not drink. We used it to shower with the hose at night and to wash laundry in. We had a well dug three months later, but it is filled with iron and is orange colored. It smells bad and does not taste good, even with filters. It cost us $20,000.00 to have dug.

Electricity took four months to get and we had to pay about $4500.00 back in July before we bought the property just to get in line to have it turned on! So we bought a generator. That way we could have lights in our shed shack at night and, most importantly, an air conditioner. It was August in South Central Texas with 100° plus temperatures each day.

Homesteading should entail watching a lot of homesteading videos to see how others started their homesteads. Ask homesteaders that you may know how it was to begin. I would suggest that if you are buying an empty piece of land, either make arrangements to live elsewhere while your home is getting ready or buy or rent a travel trailer with all of the amenities. I wish we had done that. We were absolutely miserable in that little shed with three dogs and a cat. One small couch that hurt my back because it was worn out but that is what we slept on in the way too tiny shed. No way to cook anything. Worst of all, it was so hot.

Things move much slower in the country than in the city. Don't expect things to go as you planned. They won't. Everything costs way more than you think it will.

We had to pay to have septic tanks put in and they were not cheap. Nothing was cheap and everything went way slower than what we were told.

We are miles away from stores, restaurants, doctor offices, and so many other things. Gas prices have skyrocketed so we don't get out much. Conveniences like grocery deliveries, pizza deliveries, and same day or day after Amazon deliveries just don't exist out in the country.

I am not trying to discourage you but things are slow and very expensive when you are homesteading. You need to have a lot of money saved or have a good job. Of course, that will require a long commute. If you think you will work online with good internet, ours is awful. Even after 3.5 years, we have horrible internet. They tell us it is high speed and we laugh. It is expensive and very slow, sometimes non-existent.

Cell phone reception is almost a joke. We have AT&T and we get one to two bars. Our team members and visitors with other carriers don't have any bars when they come out. So consider all of this before you take the plunge and buy property.

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Wednesday, January 4, 2023 - Start Homesteading

Happy Wednesday! I have been so busy again today getting orders out and waiting on customers. Can you believe it? The customers have been pouring in all week long and the seed orders are big. The spring seed ordering season has begun and we are grateful!

It started out at 45° early this morning and now it is 77° outside with clear, blue skies. The guys outside are getting a lot of work done this week since the air is pretty warm. The asparagus ferns turned brown from the freeze and they got cut down which is great. Everything has been watered. The cutter ants have been fought but that is a daily chore out back. The dead portions of plants from the hard freeze have been cut off or pulled up for the most part. More seeds are being planted in the big greenhouse for spring.

It is now 8pm and we are watching The Untouchables TV show from 1959 to 1963. I bought the DVD set for David for Christmas. He thought it was a Lucy and Desi comedy show since it was produced by Desilu. But he tried it and really likes the show.

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Start Homesteading

You can start homesteading once you have land and a place to live. Of course, you need a plan before you start. How will you get electricity and water or even internet? You choosing one thing that you would like to start with. It could be a garden or getting an animal or two.

As I stated above, the first thing we did was to build and set up 100 raised garden beds. We did not bring in soil because we own four acres of beach sand without the ocean. Our neighbor has a tractor so we paid him to fill all 100 raised garden beds with our sand. Then we began to plant, add compost, and mulch. We did plant some fall seeds, mostly root vegetables that first year.

Of course, it was natural for us to choose gardening first because we own David's Garden Seeds®. Seeds and gardening are our business so it was a good fit.

For the rest of that first year on the homestead, we unpacked and waited while all of the utilities got turned on and the well got dug. Then we had a houseful for Thanksgiving and a houseful again at Christmas. Meanwhile, we were driving back and forth to work to our shop in San Antonio.

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In January of 2020, we thought that our income should come next after gardening. Since we already owned a business, we needed to bring it down to the homestead. So we started preparing for our business move. It took a while because we bought each building with cash. We ordered buildings from the Derksen factory in Uvalde.

The first building was our retail store. Once it got here, we had to put in drywall and flooring as well as air conditioning. Unfortunately, the people tasked to take care of this for us took their sweet time. We were hoping to open in April of 2020 but they did not finish. In June, there was a conflict so we had to fire them and pay another contractor to finish the store so we could open it. He finished within two days and we opened up.

After that, we brought in three more buildings, one at a time, adding drywall, flooring, ceilings, and air conditioning.

We brought the entire business out from San Antonio the last week of June of 2020. It was a relief not to have to drive an hour one way to work anymore.

Thursday, January 5, 2023 - Start Homesteading

Good morning! Welcome to the farm! It is a balmy 44° after hitting 78° yesterday. I woke up cold. Anyway, it was a beautiful sunrise this morning but I will spare you and give you some other things to look at, like our asparagus bed after the ferns have been cut down. I can't help it. I just love the sunrises out here. In San Antonio, I always saw the sun coming up behind other houses and the same thing for sunsets. It is nice to be somewhere that isn't houses every few feet!

David was outside walking around when I got up before sunrise. He said Nacho is already here working. That is pretty early!

David made breakfast tacos on whole wheat tortillas. They are not bad at all.

I did orders and then started adding more product to the website again. Nacho was here fixing busted water pipes from the freeze. He says there are broken lines all over, even though we attempted to drain them before the freeze. Cristian from Hondo was here to assist some more but it was the last day as he is going back to college.

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Start Homesteading

To start homesteading slowly, you should pick one type of animal at a time. Choose one type of animal to bring into the homestead, if you choose to have animals. Make sure you can provide adequate housing and food without it being a strain on your budget. Is there a way that you can make money with the animal you choose? Do you have enough money to pay for a shelter and for the animal without having to go into debt?

While we were bringing out buildings to house our business, we were also thinking about animals. Our first animals were baby chicks, my idea. I have wanted chickens ever since I saw the movie The Egg And I from the 1940s. I then read the book and the whole idea of farm living sounded great but we lived in the city.

But before the chicks, we had to prepare for them. We had Nacho build a chicken fortress. When he was almost finished, at the end of April of 2020, we got our first flock of 24 day old chicks and two baby guineas. We kept them in a shed for about four weeks inside of a box and then as they grew, we got a large galvanized tub. When they were about eight weeks old and flying, we moved them all out to the chicken coop. By this time it was finished and sealed with hardware cloth going down into the ground to protect our chicks.

Once the chickens were doing well, we added to the coop for the chickens. Several months after moving the chicks into the coop, we had Nacho come back out and add the run to the coop where the chickens spend most of their day, playing and eating and doing chicken type things. They started laying eggs in the fall. It was so exciting. I had wanted chickens since I was a teenager so I loved it. We sell the extra eggs in our Farm Store so that helps pay for feed.

I wanted a barn and a horse and cow as well as some goats but we reigned all of that in and concentrated on what we already had.

Some homesteaders start out with meat chickens, a beef cow, a goat, rabbits, or a pig to eat. Then they learn how to kill it for food. We chose meat rabbits. So far, that is the only meat animal we have raised and butchered. David used to raise rabbits in high school so he chose meat rabbits.

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Friday, January 6, 2023 - Start Homesteading

Good Friday morning! It is 46° and I froze all night, even under blankets. I just don't understand...It is supposed to get up to 81° today. I had a bad night with my clogged up nose last night. I understand it's Mountain Cedar Time...Not good.

I need to get ready for the day and open the store. Then pack and mail more orders. Thank you for ordering from us. We appreciate it more than you can imagine! Let's all make it a golden day!

It is now 2:15pm, breezy, sunny, and 79°. Strangely, we have not had one customer come by today. We don't have any visitors, just our regular employees. A customer made an online order for pickup on Monday and she still has not come by to get it. Another customer left a debit card here on Tuesday and has not come back to get it. Interesting, huh?

I cleaned out the fish pond this morning and filled it up. The guys are out back still fixing water lines that broke during the freeze.

David bought us all lunch today from Farm To Familia. It was good. They delivered the food in one of those tiny smart cars. They are cute but I don't see how they store much in them.

We have had quite a few customers today. David is now giving away our canned foods and our harvested turnips.

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Start Homesteading

Setting up a homestead takes time and money. Start homesteading as free of stress as possible. Have a plan. Be debt free. Have some savings because you will need it. You should write all of your plans down in a notebook to help you start homesteading. Include the specifics of what you want to do, what you want to grow, raise, and learn to do in the kitchen.

How will you make your homesteading dream a reality? How will you live off the land? How will you make money? Will you keep your same job that you have now? Which animals will you start off with? What will you live in? Do you have a decent amount of money in savings for emergencies? Trust me, there are always emergencies and many expenses when you start homesteading. That is why you need a plan, an income, and a budget.

Make sure you are planting in your garden area every season. Use good quality seeds, like those we sell. Follow the directions for growing food that you can eat, sell or give away, and can or preserve. Make your own compost from kitchen scraps and greens that come from your garden, along with grass clippings and leaves. Each year, rotate your crops.

It is a good idea to invest in freezer bags and mason jars as well as a good canning pot. You can put some vegetables in the freezer for winter and then learn how to can. Get a Ball Canning book, vinegar, sugar, pectin, dill, salt, and spices. Then start with one harvested vegetable or fruit and experiment and learn how to can.

When you learn to can and preserve the foods that you grow, take your time. Do a small batch at a time until you really learn how to can foods. If possible, before you can, build a root cellar or an indoor, climate controlled pantry where you can keep the glass jars full of foods displayed neatly on pantry shelves.

You can also invest in a food dehydrator and dry some foods. Once they are dry, keep them in mason jars. Always mark the date the food was canned on the lid. The lid is the part you will throw away so it doesn't matter. Save the jars and the rings that hold the lids on, but always throw out the lids because they are not made to seal again. You should always buy new lids. If you discover the lids are not on the jars of food tightly or if the top moves up and down on a jar of canned food, it is no good. It will be spoiled. Do not eat it. Toss it out. Don't take chances. Food poisoning is not a joke. You can actually die from it.

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Saturday, January 7, 2023 - Start Homesteading

It is now almost 1pm. My day with customers started at 9:45am when I was unloading the dishwasher. We open at 10am on Saturdays but my first customer showed up early. David made me go wait on her and soon, too other ladies followed. Many after them so it was a busy day. We close at 1pm. I am just now eating lunch and then we will be getting some groceries. There is never time to buy groceries around here.

We opened back up on Saturdays starting today and soon we will be opened for longer on Saturdays. No, we will not be opening on Sundays. I need some time off. We can't get anyone to work on Saturdays so it is me. No, there are no tours on Saturdays when it is just me. I have a broken toe.

We are giving away what is left of our canned goods and turnip harvest so come and get it starting Monday morning. We gave away a lot yesterday and today.

I was so busy today that I did not get to do any orders at all and there are a lot of them.

I did get to order my seed potatoes this morning. Every year, I want to try and grow potatoes. Every year, it is too late to get them. This year, I ordered four kinds of potatoes and two kinds of sweet potatoes. I am beyond excited to plant them. I had to order potatoes from one company and sweet potatoes from another. But I paid for them and I will be getting them! Yay! Potatoes are one way that we can start homesteading more seriously. Potatoes are a seriously delicious vegetable. I love them!

We left the farm a little after 1pm and got some groceries. I forgot half of what I needed. It was so cold in that store. Usually it is too hot. It is 76° and humid outside but they have it freezing in there. Now I have to catch up on laundry and other fun, household chores plus add a few pages of seed products to the website. I never get a day off to just think or do things that need to be done.

Matt made pulled pork for Svengoolie tonight. He cooked it in his new crockpot and it was delicious. We made pulled pork tacos with all of the trimmings and on the vegetable end, he made some freshly cooked broccoli. I roasted turnip, potato, and sweet potato fries in the oven. It was a good meal! The movie was very entertaining with Vincent Price, Lon Chaney, and Peter Lorre, The Raven. It was hilarious and I never heard of it before.

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Start Homesteading

Homesteading made easy means budgeting and recording all of your monthly expenses. Keep track of all that you spend and what you are earning from homesteading. If you can find a way to help the homestead to pay your bills, it is a win-win. Hopefully, you are fully out of debt before you start homesteading, but you will still have bills like water, utilities, trash pick up, health insurance, car insurance, home insurance, life insurance, not to mention food and supplies, clothes, a car or truck, and more.

For us, homesteading and our business are sort of intertwined out here because so much of what we do is a part of our business. We sell seeds. We made a parking lot for the customers and delivery drivers. We added a pond, gazebo, and fish for the customers to enjoy while they are here. We are not yet full on homesteaders.

We added some lovely TrimLight Edge lights to the outside of our buildings so people can see us at night as they drive by. We added a huge gate and some professional signs to the outside of our business, all for the convenience of our customers and delivery drivers. None of these things benefit the homestead itself but they do benefit our business by bringing visitors who shop in our Farm Store.

Our business, David's Garden Seeds®, is our only income so we do whatever we can to encourage visitors to our farm as well as visitors to our websites to order seeds. We write a lot of how to articles on gardening and homesteading to help our customers who are new to gardening. This takes up a great deal of our time but it beats driving into San Antonio in all of that traffic to work a day job. We love what we do out here. We care that you buy and grow top quality, fresh, Non-GMO seeds to feed your family.

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Sunday, January 8, 2023 - Start Homesteading

Happy Sunday morning! It is still dark and 54°. I need to go out and get a few reams of paper from Production. I forgot to get some when I was out there yesterday. I am printing out orders and just ran out. There are a lot of seed orders and most of them are three to five pages long. Thank you to all of our customers!

Of course, this afternoon, I need to finish adding the two page list of products to the website. We now have the Juliet tomato again if anyone is looking for it. Bob Webster always talks about how heat tolerant it is and we have been out of it since last March. It's back!

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Start Homesteading

Learning how to bake things can make homesteading easier. One of the things most people associate with homesteading is sourdough bread. I learned how to make sourdough bread and it comes out pretty tasty most of the time.

There are a lot of videos on making sourdough. If you are in need of a good recipe, I have one here.

Other baked goods like cinnamon rolls, any type of bread, and comfort foods like stew and macaroni and cheese also show homesteading made easy.

Don't start homesteading without knowing how to cook well enough that you won't starve. You probably won't have a lot of discretionary income to go out to eat and honestly, if you are out in the country, there probably aren't a lot of places to go to eat. Invest in some good cookbooks and learn how to make food taste good. Practice, practice, practice.

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Seed Sales Now

We have two seed sales going on now. First, if you spend $25 or more, you get 10% off.

Second, if you buy two of each of the following seeds, you get the second one half price! We are way overstocked on a few seeds. This won't last long with spring planting coming up. Here is the list:

• Black Beauty Zucchini
• Boston Pickling Cucumber
• California Giants Zinnia
  
• Mammoth Grey Stripe Sunflower
• Straightneck Summer Squash
• Wildflower Butterfly Hummingbird Mix
• Yellow Crookneck Summer Squash
  

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It is time to head to church already. Sunday mornings always go by fast.

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Return from Start Homesteading to Our Fourth Year

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Since 2009, over 1,500,000 home gardeners, all across the USA, have relied on David's Garden Seeds® to grow beautiful gardens. Trust is at the heart of it. Our customers know David's Garden Seeds® stocks only the highest quality seeds available. Our mission is to become your lifetime supplier of quality seeds. It isn't just to serve you once; we want to earn your trust as your primary supplier.

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Our New 2024 TV Ad

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Please like and subscribe on YouTube and come visit us at our Farm Store! The music on our TV ad was written, played, and sung by our son, Matthew Schulze. You can meet him when you come to the farm. He just might give you a tour. Ask him to grab a guitar and sing our jingle that he wrote.

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We are David's Garden Seeds®. If you need great seeds, we've got over 1,000 varieties to choose from.

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Find out what is going on down on the farm by reading our blog and by subscribing to our free newsletter for all of the information going down at David's Garden Seeds® and on the farm. I love to share helpful information with you. Please let your friends know and y'all come on down for a visit when you get the chance. We would love to meet you!

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