While sitting in the comfort of my apartment in anticipation of realizing my lifelong dream, I set a couple of rules for my ‘new life as a homesteader’. Now that it has been nearly six months since assuming the ‘homesteader’ title, I figured it was time to revisit my progress.
Rule #1: No Store-Bought Bread
The rule: bake all of my bread from scratch. The outcome: success! I have not purchased a loaf of bread since before I bought my homestead.
I have not found this difficult to achieve, though at times the solution was to simply omit bread from my diet. It takes about 36 hours to bake a loaf of sourdough, so it can never be made on impulse. As the winter months force me to spend more time inside, I hope to rebuild my freezer stock with both my classic sourdough loaves as well as other varieties of yeast bread.
This rule was only about bread, so exceptions were made for other bread products. I believe the only bread product I’ve purchased has been bagels, which I hope to learn how to make in 2026. Despite near daily salads in the height of gardening season, I did not purchase any croutons as I made them all with stale sourdough ends and homegrown herbs – which had the added benefit of being WAY more delicious than store-bought.
Rule #2: No Food Waste
The rule: produce no food waste. The outcome: success! My trash receptacle has not included a single scrap of food waste since before I bought my homestead. But then again, this rule was foolproof…
The basic hierarchy of food use has been as follows:
- Eat it and freeze the excess.
- Save vegetable scraps in a freezer bag; make stock when there’s enough.
- Give certain vegetable scraps, such as carrot ends, to the dog or the horse.
- If it’s beyond use, compost it.
There is room for improvement here in that I let more go bad in the fridge than I intended. Because everything wound up in the compost pile, I did not ‘fail’ as nothing went to the landfill – but that food could have been frozen and consumed, which would optimize the value for each food item.
Silicone freezer trays have been a very helpful tool for this endeavor. For example, I am able to cook a lot of beans at once and then freeze in reasonable serving sizes. The same goes for rice, soups, pumpkin puree, and more.
Interestingly, while I did build a compost bin, I have not found it to be vital for this process – a compost pile, a compost bin, or just throwing stuff into the field have all amounted to the same end. Of course, I have no immediate use for compost as a soil amendment because I have an endless supply of composted horse manure; if that were not the case, producing useable compost would be of much greater importance.
New Rules?
Originally, I called them rules because I saw them as cut and dry steps that I needed to take to jumpstart my new lifestyle. I knew I could implement the changes immediately with no learning curve, so I did not need any wiggle room.
There are many other rules that I’d like to set for myself someday, but they all require an incremental improvement process. As such, adding new “rules” at this time would be overly restrictive. Instead, in constant pursuit of my long-term goals, I will be setting some goals for 2026. Stay tuned 🙂
KC