Shannon Stonger - The Doable Off-Grid Homestead

Cultivating a Simple Life by Hand on a Budget

founders of Nourishing Days

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To our children:
May the Lords precious mercy and grace become a reality in your heart and life. Forget not the Lord thy God. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world (or even just a homestead), and lose his own soul?
We love you.

We are doers and dreamers, makers and mothers. We are fathers and daughters, husbands and workers. We are concerned about our land, cognizant of the consequences of rampant consumerism, desirous of a life outside the rat race. We want nothing more than to give our neighbors and children something better, something mindful, something real. We do it because we see no other way forward than thisbecause our conscience would allow nothing else.

We are modern homesteaders.

We had our reasons for leaving the so-called American dream, as most who take such a sharp turn do. They are practical and moral and spiritual and personal, and all of us agrarian types have them. They are generally of the nonnegotiable variety, and they have to be, I think, to plow through the many challenges of this so-called simple life.

And so we make the move: some of us with savings, some of us with debt, some of us with only a pocketful of dreams. Those earliest days are the stuff of Little House books, but truly they are the days of survival. And sometimes those days turn into months and then into years and all that you thought your homestead would be is still too far away to touch. But you continue on because, when your reasons are what they are, there is only finishing.

For those of us with a pocketful of dreams, we are at once working to finance a homestead while trying to build a homestead. Obviously, that road is not as easy as the one where there is a full bank account to tap into. But then one day you work out a solution to watering the garden that doesnt involve carrying bucket after bucket from the pond on a 100-degree day. And then you find free amendments in your backyard that completely change the trajectory of your dismal, lifeless garden. Or maybe youre able to build with alternative materials and create infrastructure for animals and people alike. Some of it is simple, some of it just takes a bit of time and work; all of it can be had for the homesteader on a budgetif only for a bit of sweat and patience.

These are what we call the game changers. These projects, ideas and epiphanies have literally changed the trajectory of our homestead, even overnight. We see themboth the concepts and resourcestruly as gifts from the Lord.

Some of these are commonsense solutions that we just never came across in the many homestead books weve read. These are tipping points that got us beyond survival and into the possibility of really, truly growing at least some of our own food. And some of these are solutions we had to find by trial and error when no book or online resource met the need for a frugal enough solution for our circumstances.

There are projects that require some saving, but when water is at stake, they are worth prioritizing. There are ideas that have furthered our goal of creating a closed system of animals feeding the plants, plants feeding the animals, and all of it feeding people with less and less waste.

That these projects have allowed us to peaceably work the land with our hands alongside our children is something we consider a gift. And so, this book is a collection of all of those thingsbig and small, but often profound in tough circumstancesthat weve accumulated along the way.

In our six years as off-grid homesteaders, we have slowly, incrementally, built shelter, gardens and the beginnings of a food forest, as well as a pasture and infrastructure setups for water, energy, fencing and animals. Many of these are still very much works in progress. We have no grid electricity, no well or conventional running water. We live without washing machines, dishwashers, large-scale refrigeration and air conditioning, and we exclusively use wood to heat our home during the cold months.

In no way are our efforts outstanding or remarkablewe still have many seeds to plant, many calories to grow and many needs to meet through the work of our hands. In fact, if you keep reading, we will try to paint a realistic picture of what it looks like to build an incremental homestead, replete with the many iterations of infrastructure that were there simply to get us by until we could afford to spend time or money on a more ideal solution.

We are far from experts at this homesteading or sustainable living thing. But we do feel very grateful that this has been our portion these past six years. Our hope for this book is not that we can show you exactly how to build the ideal homesteadthere is more than one way to skin a cat, after all. Rather, we hope that by sharing our mistakes, they can be ones that you dont have to make; our solutions are some that you can implement to further your own pursuit of sustainability.

And maybe, if you are like us, you will find that not only is your homestead dream doable but that the process of it all is far more valuable than the vegetables you harvest or the cheese you make.

One early fall morning in 2011, we packed everything we owned into a minivan and 5 8-foot (1.5 2.4-m) trailer and headed south. Two acres sat thousands of miles away with nothing more than a camper, a roofline and a water tank to greet us as we began our journey toward sustainability. Our little family had decided to start an off-grid homestead from scratch and, after getting rid of nearly half of what we owned, we quit a corporate job and took the plunge.

We had purchased 2 acres in the middle of Texas and had a dream in mind. It really didnt seem that outlandish to simply want to live as former generations had; to follow the old paths wherein is the good way, and walk therein. So we started with 2 acres we purchased outright. We didnt have a lot of money, but we didnt want a bunch of debt either. A few years in, we realized we needed to expand if we were to have a pasture, so we purchased 3 acres from our friend and neighbor on a monthly payment. It was debt, to be sure, but the short-term nature of it, coupled with our need to feed a family of seven, made it something we were willing to live with.