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Homesteading to a High Standard

Foundations for Farming,  connected with the Well Watered Garden Project and our friend Noah Sanders, uses four key principles in farming, homesteading, and all of life. Honestly, we aren’t perfect, and we are still working to reach optimal stewardship of what we’ve been given. But we still wanted to share these principles with you.

Principle #1: High Standard

God has called us as Christians to steward well what he has given us, and to multiply it. This means doing our best, working hard, and not skimping on anything. It’s a powerful witness to unbelievers to see an orderly, beautiful homestead, and it often saves you work in the long run.

Practical Tips

Doing your work to a high standard goes from the little thing to big things:

    • Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Work with portions that you’re able to do to a high standard. Then work up from there!
    • Straight rows
    • Clean animal environments (see this post about clean nesting boxes)
    • Keeping records
    • Planning
Straight row

How do you all keep your work to a high standard on the homestead or other contexts?

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Water Resiliency

The Problem

On Christmas week, our water pipes froze, leaving us without water. We innovated for daily tasks like washing hands and going to the bathroom, but it brought up a good question. What would happen if we lost water for a longer period of time, and how could we increase our water resiliency?

Prevention and Preparation

Prevention is a key to being water resilient. Our pipes froze because we weren’t prepared for days of single digit temps. Next time, we’ll insulate them if the weather is going to be cold. Also, keeping a single faucet running would have prevented the pipes from freezing.

Preparation makes emergencies a lot more bearable. When our water went out, we had bottled drinking water on hand from when our water was turned off for construction. If you have forewarning, prepare!

Some Solutions

When we lost water, we were blessed to have friends gather round and help out. Some got us bottled drinking water, and others gave us a Berkey water filtration systems for drinking water from our creek, which saved us from having to buy more water.

Berkey water filter and tank
Berkey water filter and tank

We flushed the toilets by hauling in five gallon buckets of water from a large tank pumped from our creek, and washed our hands with a small filter bag and tube.

Tank with water from creek
Tank with water from creek

 

This made it possible to survive rather normally, even with no grid water, which was awesome!

We realize that not everyone has a creek, so you have to innovate according to your circumstances, but these are just some ideas for preparedness in case of an emergency. Other ideas could be collecting runoff from your roof, or rain barrels.

This was a great, albeit inconvenient, learning experience for us. Thankfully, none of our pipes burst, and we got our water back after 5 days. But it has changed our resiliency list: drilling a well has moved up higher on our list!