Homesteading Goals for 2016

      After my post on Looking Back on 2015, Justin and I really discussed a lot about what we can do now to start accomplishing our desire to homestead. There is so much prep work and research we can do this year as Justin finishes school and we still don't have a home to call our own. We are calling this year, THE YEAR OF EDUCATION! After we are well-versed, we can decide what we really want to focus on, and then it will be easier to shoot for those specific goals instead of just pondering the generic idea of homesteading.

Before ground

       FIRST objective we have already begun. A huge preliminary step into a homesteading mentality is doing whatever you can right now even if you are not in your ideal location. Justin has spent the last month tilling a piece of land in our back yard to start a humble garden. It was a lot of work since the ground he worked on consisted of was mostly hard clay and huge rocks that plants cannot thrive in. So he aerated the ground and moved all the bulky rocks. He then put nice dark, nutritious soil on top to plant the seeds.

After five days of tilling

       We decided we wanted to use heirloom seeds, first for the organic factor (they haven't been altered over the years), and second, with heirloom seeds, you can keep using the vegetable's seeds to replant each crop. A lot of seeds aren't able to keep reproducing. We read that people who start up a garden do all sorts of random seeds they find in the store, but they encourage you to pick plants you really want to eat and already use in your diet. This way you aren't having this huge garden and then wondering what you are going to do with items you don't enjoy.
      I will talk more about our fun little garden in a later post. We are just praying with all the El Nino rain that it hasn't drowned all our hard work!
      SECOND area we want to focus on is who will be learning and researching what. We want to use our unique gifts and interests to divvy up what we want to grow our knowledge in. It also helps us quicken our growth by sharing the research load, then later on we can inform each other on our new skills.

       Justin loves gardening, animals, and herbology. I love the art of fermentation, textiles, and tincture making. With Christmas money we have bought a bunch of books to start off our research. Our first books include farming, premaculture, goats, homesteading, and a healing by herbs book. Most of these books summarize the basic, over-arching ideas which will give us a better view of what we are getting ourselves into.

       Yes, a goat book. We love the concept of having goats! Goat milk tastes so good and is extremely digestible compared to cow's milk. And... they are so cute! Well, the Nigerian Dwarf goats are smaller and cute. Alongside goats, we definitely want chickens. They say chickens are the 'gate-way' animal into homesteading. They are really easy to take care of and give you lots of eggs in return and eventually meat if you want to go that route too!
       I have loved getting into green tea kombucha, here is my post on how to start your own, and seeing how easy and delicious it has been, makes me want to dive into all sorts of fermented foods. They are beneficial to your gut and add healthy bacteria your body needs to properly function. We are looking into trying sauerkraut, water kefir, and pickling vegetables.
      We both love herbalism and creating tinctures to aid the body in fighting off sicknesses and increasing daily nutrition. There are so many 'weeds' that people overlook that are helpful, like dandelion and goldenrod. It will be so enlightening to study hundreds of plants and herbs that we may have heard about but never knew how amazing their potential was. Also, people sell tinctures for a ridiculous price, and people will pay it for their healing properties. Being able to create our own will be a huge money saver, and eventually if we succeed in it, we could make a profit producing and selling our own.
       THIRD is the idea of starting an unique podcast to add to our blog. With our blog, we are trying to seek ways of standing out of the crowd and bringing new and interesting ideas to the blogging world. One fun part of Family As We Go, is that we want to be a couples/family blog, not just a mommy blog. We want to incorporate both our perspectives on our life and family. Justin has always had a knack for speaking and teaching, so having him use his gift in a podcast could be an excellent addition to our blog. We do not have a specific route as to how the pod cast will develop yet, but are really excited for what may come with including it. 
        FOURTH important focus is learning what location and to what extent we want to be homesteading. We first need to look for our ideal location and use that as our basis of what we want to do. Do we want to build our own home or go with something already in place? What kind of alternative energy to we want to use? Should we have a home next to a river for water and food access?
        Right now we are looking at Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, three states which seem to offer what we are searching for. We love the alpine trees and mountainous atmosphere, and there is a lot of open land available, and right next to some of the national parks. It These areas really have everything that Justin and I love about nature. There is a lot more land to be purchased in these states. Growing up my whole life mostly in California, I have been in 70 degree weather my whole life = I am a wimp with cold. I am excited and nervous to finally get out of my comfort zone and adapt to the changing of seasons that will come with a move.
        Keeping in mind all hopes and our desires, the LAST focus will be finding "the place" after all the research and pin-pointing the area where we most want to settle. This will probably be something we come to at the end of this year when we have a better grasp on what it is we are after. However, we will always be ready for the unexpected.

"Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God." Corrie Ten Boom