As someone who grew up on an actual organic farm and did 4-H...*thank you*, " If you are interested in homesteading only because of how it looks or feels online, do not proceed unless you have enough money to pay actual farmers to do it for you on land you already own."
My parents didn't homestead, but my mom farmed and still has a huge garden and orchard.
Wanna "homestead"? Ok. Iowa farmland starts at about $11k/acre.
Farm work (not a gentleman's farm or owning 5 chickens) is dirty, hard, unpredictable work. As you said, it is really a lot of science and endless problem solving (farm equipment broke, local shop doesn't have the part, extra grasshoppers this year eating crops, no rain in August and corn is dry, etc, etc).
Fresh eggs, fresh vegetables and fruits, from-the-cow raw milk are the result of 5:30am wakeups in rain, sleet, or snow. It is more Carhartt overalls that smell like 💩 than milkmaid dresses.
I am typing this from my parent's farm, and it is beautiful here, and a wonderful break from Paris. But, good lord, farming is hard work.
My parents homesteaded before it was cool. Back in the 90s. Moved back to the Central Valley after my dad left the army. They leased the 3 acres of almonds then planted a giant garden, fruit orchard and 30 chickens. It was a fun childhood. But we eventually moved to a small town when my dad’s seizure disorder and working full time were too much. But, as you describe here, my parents love growing and caring for things so they still do that on a small scale in town, as do I. If you can’t afford acres and you still have to work full time, you can make your subdivision home a mini homestead. No one is forcing you to keep the lawn (well maybe the HOA but not in the back yard!)Turn that sucker into a plot of raised beds! You dont even have to post about it on instagram 😆 you can just plant peach trees in the front yard and give your neighbors bags of cherry tomatoes and eat way too much zucchini in the summer.
Yes, part of growing older is knowing yourself! I want to have several more children, cook from scratch, bake sourdough bread, write stories in my spare time, and read aloud to my family as much as I can, but I do NOT want to homestead. I saw my parents care for chickens and that was enough to put me off of it!
I've been working towards owning a homestead for a decade. After I met my husband and realized that homesteading was the type of lifestyle we both desired, everything we did was a baby step towards that goal.
We got married and had a small wedding we could afford out of pocket. We lived with my parents for almost five years while we paid off our student loans and bought our first house. Then we took all the overtime we could to pay off our vehicles before I gave birth to our first son. All the while I spent the time living in our tiny in-town house learning how to garden, can produce, and cook from scratch.
When my grandfather died and left my grandmother on their decrepit 15-acre farm that she couldn't handle herself, we offered to sell our tiny house near family to her. (The farm was too expensive for us to buy, unfortunately.) She bought our home, and we moved back in with my parents to continue to save money to buy land.
For the past year we lived with my parents, and I gave birth to our second son there. Fortunately, the day I went into labor we found a small 6-acre homestead with existing pastures and 5 buildings not including the house. It was affordable but far from where my husband works.
So we bought it, been here a few months. We've got our work cut out for us. But we figured we have a lifetime to make it what we want. It's not going to be easy, especially because I'm staying at home with my boys now.
But to get to this point, it has never been easy. People don't see the blood, sweat, and tears it takes to get where we are. I often felt stuck while our friends bought their houses before us and we were still living with my parents trying to pay off loans. Then the second time living with my parents, everyone I talked to who knew we were living with my parents with a toddler and heavily pregnant asked me, "How can you stand it?"
You have to learn how to be uncomfortable. And the small-scale experience I have with homesteading/subsistence living, you have to be uncomfortable with a lot of things. But the reward is so worth it.
The unspoken point everyone avoids mentioning is the fact, common to all lives, that you simply don't get everything you want. All decisions require rejecting anything you didn't choose, but people can't accept it. Like all decisions, homesteading requires giving up some things.
I gave up on my homesteading dream a few years ago because I realized, having turned forty, that by the time I could buy the land and move I would be too old and too creaky (and my husband has acquired a bad back) to be able to handle animals, and it seemed wiser to be close to good medical care as we age.
I still grow vegetables, and can food, and will return to sewing when my babies are old enough not to be underfoot constantly. I keep the old ways as much as I am able to. But unfortunately HOA restrictions forbid me from keeping chickens on my suburban property, which frankly ought to be made unconstitutional.
Same, re: chickens. We even had a vote a few years ago to change the rule and the old biddies who were worried about coyotes/the neighborhood turning into a third world country won out. I was so mad!
I got really annoyed when Ballerina Farm started to gain traction because we were working as caretakers on a ranch up in very rural WY, and while everyone was falling in love with the "homestead" lifestyle I was like...uh, this is super stressful because there's cows that could trample my small children and we have grizzly bears in the backyard. Also, my house is never clean. Ever. We didn't stay in that job because our employers were legitimately crazy but we learned a lot.
We did move cross country to set up a family compound with cousins, and there are animals, but also day jobs. It's stressful and our weekends are eaten by fencing and equipment getting stuck in the mud, but that doesn't feel too surprising because I expected it to be that way. I think most of my idealism wore off when I started to catch on to the huge chasm between social media and reality. The lifestyle is both privilege and sacrifice but one that's important to us because we really want good food for our family. I also don't mind processing meat, and find watching snorting piglets to be therapeutic. I am enjoying the fact that I get to go visit the animals but my children do the chores and my primary job is managing the food around the place --even if that means I got told not to get any meat out to thaw because we need to dispatch some roosters. I get super annoyed with the aesthetic shtick. Like, where are your kids muddy boots and are you constantly annoyed by the egg bucket that cannot go anywhere else besides on your dryer, right next to the clean clothes? Do we just not talk about how much dirt comes into the house with the garden produce?
Think this should just be extrapolated out to so many things. I thought I wanted to be an opera singer for nearly 2 decades. Turned out I mainly liked the idea of it and hated the reality. Narrowly escaped wasting thousands on training. Your advice to young women is spot on.
Re: music, creativity, homesteading. As a professional musician and educator, I remember a teacher quoting Stanislavsky: “You should love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.” Doing anything creative and unusual takes deep motivation, not just the desire to slap a label or brand on your identity. Do whatever because you will not be a whole person without it. Otherwise, move on and find something else.
Yes, the advice and questions in this article for discerning how to tell whether you'd be a good fit for homesteading are gold. More careers and vocations should discuss questions like those.
I took a permaculture class several years ago from a community of homesteaders and they had very intense and difficult lives that I don’t think most people could handle.
It’s interesting because one their biggest sources of income was instructing others on different facets of homesteading (mostly in permaculture and construction) and because of this they had to have online presences. While these particular people were fairly honest about their lifestyles and didn’t romanticize or glamorize them online, there certainly exists an incentive to do so among people who use instruction as one of their income streams. In this sense their hobby was homesteading, but their actual job was teaching and marketing a small business online.
Yes, among other plant-related fields (agriculture, horticulture, botany), permaculture has a bit of a reputation of being a pyramid scheme.
But as Lane says, don't do something based on respectability. Some people really like teaching and marketing a small business online. I just hope that's not an unsatisfying fallback for masses of people who were hoping to make a living off of actually practicing permaculture.
For the first couple years of marriage, I’d look at my husband on the weekend and say - let’s go visit a farm. I want to be in a garden. I need to pet horses! I felt like a cooped up sheepdog! I’d done enough brunches, parties, yoga classes, and it was starting to feel so empty. I had my mind set on 5 acres somewhere. But that didn’t happen. I slowly started getting competent in the little things - baking, cooking from scratch, broth making, seed starting, companion planting, etc. Now, my urban garden is more than enough for me (though I am plotting for some chickens!) Going from scrolling to doing was game changing for me. I’m a totally different person! The life and joy that the garden gave me were exactly what I was searching for.
I connect with this so much as a writer and as someone who grew up on a farm!
I didn’t really enjoy farm life, always preferring to be inside with a book to anything outside on the farm. My favorite outside activity as a child was crawling up onto high spaces—barn roofs, etc—and looking out over the horizon, pondering my thoughts. And playing with our many cats. The rest was not appealing to me at all.
My husband would love to live on an acreage and have a little homestead, and it feels like a hard no for me. Our lovely friend group at church is all farmers and homesteaders; we are the only ones who live in town😄 So I apparently love the vibe of people who do that work—I’ve actually never really connected the dots that they are by nature (or desire) creative, outside-the-box folks! But I do not want to do it. I want to sit inside and read and write.
Ok, you're convincing me that I'm right I should not be homesteading (not that I was ever confused about that. I'm the kind of person who complains about being on a beach because there's sand. I do NOT deal well with rough textures or strong smells, as one would find on a homestead. I got rid of half of the previous tenant's plants, and kept the really healthy ones out of guilt- but you bet I'd never willingly add to this collection). But I should be writing. Because god knows I spend way too much time on this platform (among others) writing long comments. Even with a bunch of kids and lots to do, somehow I still manage to vomit out hundreds if not thousands of words a day. Maybe this one won't turn out very long. That'd be an outlier. Might as well spend some more effort and craft them into actual essays.
Yes to the sacrifices! We alll have to make choices about what to prioritize and how to manage those priorities given our own circumstances; and the vast majority of us will never get everything we want. But each of us get to choose how we focus our energy, and we reap what we sow.
Hi! I'm new here and saw your article on men in Fairer Disputations, which I really appreciated. I direct a Catholic Worker women's shelter, which isn't a homestead, but I felt a real kindred to what you said because we OFTEN have people come to us and tell us they want to start a house. I tell them we put our own money in, didn't take any salaries for years and still take very little, carry a on call pager, and the list goes on. I laugh at Hobby Lobby quotes like "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life." In reality, doing what you love is work, and work is of God, but it's work, and we have tenure no where and don't get paid to travel and aren't really given the best seat at the banquet table. I imagine Jacky wants those things and you can't have all the things.
Yes I think a similar phenomenon exists across multiple callings or vocations. Many people very much want to be a person *who has been called* to do something, but they don't want to do any of the work inspired by that calling. In some ways this is a faith and works metaphor, really. If you have the calling, if you are genuinely into the thing and not just the esteem of others, then you will do the work. By their fruits we shall know them.
When I was younger I was naive as to the sheer number of people who want to be esteemed as creatives or individuals but who have absolutely no desire to do anything. They have an entirely different motivation system. They want the recognition without the works. These types are always buzzing around creative or alternative lifestyle endeavors, mooching off others.
Not in the homesteading world, just remember watching this video when it came out. Also a Gen-Z guy who can definitely fall into the trap of wanting to put myself on a “team” like “homesteaders” or “writers.” I feel like I struggle actually noticing what sorts of things actually draw my attention like the way you described. I read, play soccer, enjoy music, but probably just as much as the next guy. Not comparing myself here, but do you think everyone has something that is “their thing?” And if they do, how do you cultivate it or figure it out?
That's a good question; I'm not sure. I can tell you that my parents had me play sports and really pushed that, and so that was most of my childhood. I grew up thinking that was "my thing."
But looking back, I remember when I got a second to myself, I almost always drew houses. I must have made 100 house plans before I was 16. Like floor plans and layouts etc. I also used to sing and record my voice and try to improve it and try to make it sound like people I heard on the radio. Once or twice, over Christmas vacations when I finally didn't have basketball practice or school, I made a city out of the manzanita tree forest on my parents' very wooded property when I was about 15. Like roads connecting treehouses for each of my three siblings, a "city hall" massive tree house, etc. I thought nothing of any of this; just messing around and filling time.
But after college I definitely was sick of sports, and found myself more interested in architecture, design, music, etc. And as I pursued those things I found I was about a thousand times more talented at that stuff than sports and philosophy. I wish my parents had noticed that, because I probably would have been an architect instead of going to grad school for political philosophy. But I was 30, maybe 35 before this became clear. I just thought I was a jock who liked to read.
I think I would have made a good homesteader, and would have enjoyed it. I can answer in the affirmative to most of your questions, more so regarding plants than animals.
In reality, after college and a few years in a boring office job, I went to grad school for landscape design and practiced that for a few years. After getting married and moving to very different climates a few times for my husband's job, I got my bearings in each new location by working in retail garden center management, which was the most enjoyable of my paid jobs.
Then I quit to have kids: three so far. I'm forty and we're planning one more baby. Being a homemaker with young children has been by far the most enjoyable time of my life. I wish I'd been able to start a decade sooner and have five kids.
Unfortunately for my homesteading potential, both my health and my husband's health are unpredictable. This unfortunately places us in a lower category of total productivity, or "competence," as you put it. Realistically, the two of us can only sustainably pick two from the following list:
- Have him work a paid job
- Have me work a paid job
- Have kids
- Homestead
My primary health issue is that pregnancy and birth injuries have reduced my back's safety for heavy lifting - so perhaps my choices are even more restricted than the above suggests. And my husband is not an outdoorsy or "dirty jobs" type, unlike myself, so he wouldn't want to pick up the homesteading tasks I can't. I'm fortunate to have a wonderful husband, but marriage involves compromise.
All in all, I feel I'm making the best life I can out of the hand I've been dealt. I have a great husband and three kids that I love with all my heart and get to stay home with. I have a quarter acre with gardens and swingsets (although it feels small to me compared to the acre and a half I grew up on). We live in a walkable neighborhood and our property backs up to an extra acre of woods, so the kids can learn independence from both walking to suburban destinations and free play in nature.
Is it everything I've ever wanted? Not literally. But I'd have to live for centuries to fully experience every career I could thrive in, all the kids I'd love to have, all the places I'd love to travel to or put roots down in. Nobody gets to do everything. I don't resent not being able to go all in on homesteading.
As someone who grew up on an actual organic farm and did 4-H...*thank you*, " If you are interested in homesteading only because of how it looks or feels online, do not proceed unless you have enough money to pay actual farmers to do it for you on land you already own."
My parents didn't homestead, but my mom farmed and still has a huge garden and orchard.
Wanna "homestead"? Ok. Iowa farmland starts at about $11k/acre.
Farm work (not a gentleman's farm or owning 5 chickens) is dirty, hard, unpredictable work. As you said, it is really a lot of science and endless problem solving (farm equipment broke, local shop doesn't have the part, extra grasshoppers this year eating crops, no rain in August and corn is dry, etc, etc).
Fresh eggs, fresh vegetables and fruits, from-the-cow raw milk are the result of 5:30am wakeups in rain, sleet, or snow. It is more Carhartt overalls that smell like 💩 than milkmaid dresses.
I am typing this from my parent's farm, and it is beautiful here, and a wonderful break from Paris. But, good lord, farming is hard work.
My parents homesteaded before it was cool. Back in the 90s. Moved back to the Central Valley after my dad left the army. They leased the 3 acres of almonds then planted a giant garden, fruit orchard and 30 chickens. It was a fun childhood. But we eventually moved to a small town when my dad’s seizure disorder and working full time were too much. But, as you describe here, my parents love growing and caring for things so they still do that on a small scale in town, as do I. If you can’t afford acres and you still have to work full time, you can make your subdivision home a mini homestead. No one is forcing you to keep the lawn (well maybe the HOA but not in the back yard!)Turn that sucker into a plot of raised beds! You dont even have to post about it on instagram 😆 you can just plant peach trees in the front yard and give your neighbors bags of cherry tomatoes and eat way too much zucchini in the summer.
So true. You don’t need much space to make a paradise
Love the concept of making one's suburban yard a tiny homestead. :)
It's the best! 😊
It’s such a great solution for people who don’t want to live on a farm. I grew up on an organic farm and now live in Paris.
There are so many ways to make life work, no matter where we are :)
Yes, part of growing older is knowing yourself! I want to have several more children, cook from scratch, bake sourdough bread, write stories in my spare time, and read aloud to my family as much as I can, but I do NOT want to homestead. I saw my parents care for chickens and that was enough to put me off of it!
I've been working towards owning a homestead for a decade. After I met my husband and realized that homesteading was the type of lifestyle we both desired, everything we did was a baby step towards that goal.
We got married and had a small wedding we could afford out of pocket. We lived with my parents for almost five years while we paid off our student loans and bought our first house. Then we took all the overtime we could to pay off our vehicles before I gave birth to our first son. All the while I spent the time living in our tiny in-town house learning how to garden, can produce, and cook from scratch.
When my grandfather died and left my grandmother on their decrepit 15-acre farm that she couldn't handle herself, we offered to sell our tiny house near family to her. (The farm was too expensive for us to buy, unfortunately.) She bought our home, and we moved back in with my parents to continue to save money to buy land.
For the past year we lived with my parents, and I gave birth to our second son there. Fortunately, the day I went into labor we found a small 6-acre homestead with existing pastures and 5 buildings not including the house. It was affordable but far from where my husband works.
So we bought it, been here a few months. We've got our work cut out for us. But we figured we have a lifetime to make it what we want. It's not going to be easy, especially because I'm staying at home with my boys now.
But to get to this point, it has never been easy. People don't see the blood, sweat, and tears it takes to get where we are. I often felt stuck while our friends bought their houses before us and we were still living with my parents trying to pay off loans. Then the second time living with my parents, everyone I talked to who knew we were living with my parents with a toddler and heavily pregnant asked me, "How can you stand it?"
You have to learn how to be uncomfortable. And the small-scale experience I have with homesteading/subsistence living, you have to be uncomfortable with a lot of things. But the reward is so worth it.
*you have to learn how to be uncomfortable*
Yes.
The unspoken point everyone avoids mentioning is the fact, common to all lives, that you simply don't get everything you want. All decisions require rejecting anything you didn't choose, but people can't accept it. Like all decisions, homesteading requires giving up some things.
I gave up on my homesteading dream a few years ago because I realized, having turned forty, that by the time I could buy the land and move I would be too old and too creaky (and my husband has acquired a bad back) to be able to handle animals, and it seemed wiser to be close to good medical care as we age.
I still grow vegetables, and can food, and will return to sewing when my babies are old enough not to be underfoot constantly. I keep the old ways as much as I am able to. But unfortunately HOA restrictions forbid me from keeping chickens on my suburban property, which frankly ought to be made unconstitutional.
Same, re: chickens. We even had a vote a few years ago to change the rule and the old biddies who were worried about coyotes/the neighborhood turning into a third world country won out. I was so mad!
Completely unconstitutional 👎🏼
I got really annoyed when Ballerina Farm started to gain traction because we were working as caretakers on a ranch up in very rural WY, and while everyone was falling in love with the "homestead" lifestyle I was like...uh, this is super stressful because there's cows that could trample my small children and we have grizzly bears in the backyard. Also, my house is never clean. Ever. We didn't stay in that job because our employers were legitimately crazy but we learned a lot.
We did move cross country to set up a family compound with cousins, and there are animals, but also day jobs. It's stressful and our weekends are eaten by fencing and equipment getting stuck in the mud, but that doesn't feel too surprising because I expected it to be that way. I think most of my idealism wore off when I started to catch on to the huge chasm between social media and reality. The lifestyle is both privilege and sacrifice but one that's important to us because we really want good food for our family. I also don't mind processing meat, and find watching snorting piglets to be therapeutic. I am enjoying the fact that I get to go visit the animals but my children do the chores and my primary job is managing the food around the place --even if that means I got told not to get any meat out to thaw because we need to dispatch some roosters. I get super annoyed with the aesthetic shtick. Like, where are your kids muddy boots and are you constantly annoyed by the egg bucket that cannot go anywhere else besides on your dryer, right next to the clean clothes? Do we just not talk about how much dirt comes into the house with the garden produce?
Think this should just be extrapolated out to so many things. I thought I wanted to be an opera singer for nearly 2 decades. Turned out I mainly liked the idea of it and hated the reality. Narrowly escaped wasting thousands on training. Your advice to young women is spot on.
Re: music, creativity, homesteading. As a professional musician and educator, I remember a teacher quoting Stanislavsky: “You should love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.” Doing anything creative and unusual takes deep motivation, not just the desire to slap a label or brand on your identity. Do whatever because you will not be a whole person without it. Otherwise, move on and find something else.
Yes, the advice and questions in this article for discerning how to tell whether you'd be a good fit for homesteading are gold. More careers and vocations should discuss questions like those.
Really important points you make!
I took a permaculture class several years ago from a community of homesteaders and they had very intense and difficult lives that I don’t think most people could handle.
It’s interesting because one their biggest sources of income was instructing others on different facets of homesteading (mostly in permaculture and construction) and because of this they had to have online presences. While these particular people were fairly honest about their lifestyles and didn’t romanticize or glamorize them online, there certainly exists an incentive to do so among people who use instruction as one of their income streams. In this sense their hobby was homesteading, but their actual job was teaching and marketing a small business online.
Yes, among other plant-related fields (agriculture, horticulture, botany), permaculture has a bit of a reputation of being a pyramid scheme.
But as Lane says, don't do something based on respectability. Some people really like teaching and marketing a small business online. I just hope that's not an unsatisfying fallback for masses of people who were hoping to make a living off of actually practicing permaculture.
For the first couple years of marriage, I’d look at my husband on the weekend and say - let’s go visit a farm. I want to be in a garden. I need to pet horses! I felt like a cooped up sheepdog! I’d done enough brunches, parties, yoga classes, and it was starting to feel so empty. I had my mind set on 5 acres somewhere. But that didn’t happen. I slowly started getting competent in the little things - baking, cooking from scratch, broth making, seed starting, companion planting, etc. Now, my urban garden is more than enough for me (though I am plotting for some chickens!) Going from scrolling to doing was game changing for me. I’m a totally different person! The life and joy that the garden gave me were exactly what I was searching for.
I connect with this so much as a writer and as someone who grew up on a farm!
I didn’t really enjoy farm life, always preferring to be inside with a book to anything outside on the farm. My favorite outside activity as a child was crawling up onto high spaces—barn roofs, etc—and looking out over the horizon, pondering my thoughts. And playing with our many cats. The rest was not appealing to me at all.
My husband would love to live on an acreage and have a little homestead, and it feels like a hard no for me. Our lovely friend group at church is all farmers and homesteaders; we are the only ones who live in town😄 So I apparently love the vibe of people who do that work—I’ve actually never really connected the dots that they are by nature (or desire) creative, outside-the-box folks! But I do not want to do it. I want to sit inside and read and write.
Also, science was and continues to be my very least favorite subject! It all tracks😂
Ok, you're convincing me that I'm right I should not be homesteading (not that I was ever confused about that. I'm the kind of person who complains about being on a beach because there's sand. I do NOT deal well with rough textures or strong smells, as one would find on a homestead. I got rid of half of the previous tenant's plants, and kept the really healthy ones out of guilt- but you bet I'd never willingly add to this collection). But I should be writing. Because god knows I spend way too much time on this platform (among others) writing long comments. Even with a bunch of kids and lots to do, somehow I still manage to vomit out hundreds if not thousands of words a day. Maybe this one won't turn out very long. That'd be an outlier. Might as well spend some more effort and craft them into actual essays.
Yes to the sacrifices! We alll have to make choices about what to prioritize and how to manage those priorities given our own circumstances; and the vast majority of us will never get everything we want. But each of us get to choose how we focus our energy, and we reap what we sow.
Yes! We Reap What We Sew!
Hi! I'm new here and saw your article on men in Fairer Disputations, which I really appreciated. I direct a Catholic Worker women's shelter, which isn't a homestead, but I felt a real kindred to what you said because we OFTEN have people come to us and tell us they want to start a house. I tell them we put our own money in, didn't take any salaries for years and still take very little, carry a on call pager, and the list goes on. I laugh at Hobby Lobby quotes like "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life." In reality, doing what you love is work, and work is of God, but it's work, and we have tenure no where and don't get paid to travel and aren't really given the best seat at the banquet table. I imagine Jacky wants those things and you can't have all the things.
Yes I think a similar phenomenon exists across multiple callings or vocations. Many people very much want to be a person *who has been called* to do something, but they don't want to do any of the work inspired by that calling. In some ways this is a faith and works metaphor, really. If you have the calling, if you are genuinely into the thing and not just the esteem of others, then you will do the work. By their fruits we shall know them.
When I was younger I was naive as to the sheer number of people who want to be esteemed as creatives or individuals but who have absolutely no desire to do anything. They have an entirely different motivation system. They want the recognition without the works. These types are always buzzing around creative or alternative lifestyle endeavors, mooching off others.
Not in the homesteading world, just remember watching this video when it came out. Also a Gen-Z guy who can definitely fall into the trap of wanting to put myself on a “team” like “homesteaders” or “writers.” I feel like I struggle actually noticing what sorts of things actually draw my attention like the way you described. I read, play soccer, enjoy music, but probably just as much as the next guy. Not comparing myself here, but do you think everyone has something that is “their thing?” And if they do, how do you cultivate it or figure it out?
That's a good question; I'm not sure. I can tell you that my parents had me play sports and really pushed that, and so that was most of my childhood. I grew up thinking that was "my thing."
But looking back, I remember when I got a second to myself, I almost always drew houses. I must have made 100 house plans before I was 16. Like floor plans and layouts etc. I also used to sing and record my voice and try to improve it and try to make it sound like people I heard on the radio. Once or twice, over Christmas vacations when I finally didn't have basketball practice or school, I made a city out of the manzanita tree forest on my parents' very wooded property when I was about 15. Like roads connecting treehouses for each of my three siblings, a "city hall" massive tree house, etc. I thought nothing of any of this; just messing around and filling time.
But after college I definitely was sick of sports, and found myself more interested in architecture, design, music, etc. And as I pursued those things I found I was about a thousand times more talented at that stuff than sports and philosophy. I wish my parents had noticed that, because I probably would have been an architect instead of going to grad school for political philosophy. But I was 30, maybe 35 before this became clear. I just thought I was a jock who liked to read.
I think I would have made a good homesteader, and would have enjoyed it. I can answer in the affirmative to most of your questions, more so regarding plants than animals.
In reality, after college and a few years in a boring office job, I went to grad school for landscape design and practiced that for a few years. After getting married and moving to very different climates a few times for my husband's job, I got my bearings in each new location by working in retail garden center management, which was the most enjoyable of my paid jobs.
Then I quit to have kids: three so far. I'm forty and we're planning one more baby. Being a homemaker with young children has been by far the most enjoyable time of my life. I wish I'd been able to start a decade sooner and have five kids.
Unfortunately for my homesteading potential, both my health and my husband's health are unpredictable. This unfortunately places us in a lower category of total productivity, or "competence," as you put it. Realistically, the two of us can only sustainably pick two from the following list:
- Have him work a paid job
- Have me work a paid job
- Have kids
- Homestead
My primary health issue is that pregnancy and birth injuries have reduced my back's safety for heavy lifting - so perhaps my choices are even more restricted than the above suggests. And my husband is not an outdoorsy or "dirty jobs" type, unlike myself, so he wouldn't want to pick up the homesteading tasks I can't. I'm fortunate to have a wonderful husband, but marriage involves compromise.
All in all, I feel I'm making the best life I can out of the hand I've been dealt. I have a great husband and three kids that I love with all my heart and get to stay home with. I have a quarter acre with gardens and swingsets (although it feels small to me compared to the acre and a half I grew up on). We live in a walkable neighborhood and our property backs up to an extra acre of woods, so the kids can learn independence from both walking to suburban destinations and free play in nature.
Is it everything I've ever wanted? Not literally. But I'd have to live for centuries to fully experience every career I could thrive in, all the kids I'd love to have, all the places I'd love to travel to or put roots down in. Nobody gets to do everything. I don't resent not being able to go all in on homesteading.