Seeds of seeds

I believe that the seeds of homesteading are first planted when one realizes just how messed up our food system is. I recall being newly married in a small urban apartment checking the backs of all our food and resolving to no longer buy things with high fructose corn syrup in them. That was the first step I can remember taking to control the quality of food we eat.

Checking labels turned into how can I make this more cheaply and with less ingredients? Then it turned into how can I grow this so I have control over the entire process? I remember in that same urban apartment starting tomato seeds in our bright yellow kitchen and putting them in the dirt backyard with barely a sun ray.

A couple of years later we added 9 garden boxes to our inner city front yard. We filled them with tomatoes and quinoa and beans and it filled me with joy to tend them with our two small boys. One time a guy walked by and said he had never seen a tomato growing before! Can you believe it?

We also started our rabbitry and raised many litters of meat rabbits in the broken garage behind the house. I always giggled on butchering day because passersby had nary an idea of what was happening behind those walls.

We dreamed and schemed of having land and a couple of years later we were able to move to my grandparents house and the 6 acres in which my dad and his siblings grew up on. It was beautiful and wonderful to get to be on family land and we had big dreams to tend it and supplement our income with farming.

We raised layers and meat chickens, grew big gardens with lots of weeds, and had a few Thanksgiving turkeys gobbling around. We loved doing it, but it was an overwhelming amount of work.

God continued to call us to other missions and eventually we had to lay our self sufficient homestead desires down. Over the years on that land we continued to tend smaller gardens and even raised pigs one season, but we gave up the desire to homestead for profit and to do it for mere enjoyment.

Last year God moved us back to town. This spring Brad and the boys built 3 beautiful garden boxes in our backyard and I added only my favorite plants. Why plant green peppers when no one here really likes them? Gardening has become such a place of enjoyment for me. I still very much care about the food we eat, but I also try to not worry about it. I glean extra produce off of family members and friends when they have it and preserve it in jars, both because I enjoy doing it and because I appreciate knowing it’s there in the winter. And what I can’t glean I can buy from local farmers, grateful for the hard work they invested to grow good food that I can feed my family.

It amazes me that all this stemmed from the seeds planted in me when I would help my dad tend our garden as a child. And then those seeds sprouted when I began to read about how bad high fructose corn syrup was. They took root when we first put in a front yard garden and rabbitry in our inner city house, and grew tall when we took steps to a full fledged homestead on 6 acres. And now, while it looks like we might have given up on homesteading, I actually feel more homesteady than ever before. I’m confident in my abilities in a way that I wasn’t for a long time, and best of all I know what I enjoy doing and what I am ok with letting someone else do for me.

We could have milked a cow, raised all our own meat, grew vegetables and preserved them for winter, but God has called us to other things and trust that He will provide all the good food we need. It’s good to be where you are called.