Hello! I am so grateful that you have come to check out Confessions of a Spontaneous Homesteader. I’d like to take a few minutes to introduce myself to you, give you a little background on our journey, and lay out what my hope for this blog is.
For starters, I’m Mollie! I am a wife and a mother to two awesome little people. This past year I homeschooled my oldest, and moving into this upcoming school year we will by adding my daughter to our homeschool as she enters Kindergarten! I am passionate about nutrition and wellness as well as providing the best possible life I can for my kids. I grew up in Massachusetts and met my husband in 2013.
Five years ago, my husband and I left our New England apartment with our two children in favor of living a slower paced life in a warmer climate. We wanted to be somewhere that our kids could have more freedom to play outside. We packed up and headed south, moving into our very first house in a suburban neighborhood in South Carolina where we still reside. One of the big draws to this particular house was the large raised garden bed in the backyard. I had never gardened before, but the idea of growing fresh produce intrigued me and I knew that I wanted to try my hand at growing some of our own food. The first few years we had a small vegetable garden, the kind that you go out and pick a few things to cook for dinner that night. We tried all different types of crops, spending hundreds of dollars at Lowe’s or Home Depot purchasing plants, soil and compost. Some of our plants produced abundant harvests, and some were a huge flop, but we were happy to have grown some of our own food and introduce our kids to how food is grown. In the early months of 2023, both my husband and I felt a strong pull to become more self-sufficient. We both knew that just growing our little summer garden wasn’t the key to long-term food security. By spring of that year we discussed adding three more garden beds to our existing two so that we could hopefully produce enough of a harvest to begin learning how to preserve food, as well as branch out and try growing some new crops. The next day we headed to Lowe’s to buy the wood, dirt and plants to build and plant our new garden beds. Two nights after we got our new garden beds ready, just after we had put the kids to bed, my husband asked me what I thought about getting a few laying chickens “since the backyard is already looking like a farm anyways.” I gave it a few minutes of thought, and told him he was crazy…..but then I gave it a few more minutes of thought and realized it wasn’t that crazy, and why wouldn’t we at least give it a shot and see how it went. So, the next day we loaded the kids in the truck and off we went to Tractor Supply. We went with the intention of getting six or eight birds, but ended up leaving with 15! After that, in true backward fashion, we began our search for a chicken coop. Very quickly, we realized that premade coops don’t tend to come in sizes suited to accommodate the number of birds we had in our brooder box . The only logical next step was to start looking up plans for building the coop ourselves. Keep in mind that neither my husband or I are carpenters and neither of us has ever built any sort of structure that would be inhabited by living creatures! The experience of building a coop really helped to forge a stronger bond between my husband and I as we problem solved together and bounced ideas off one another. It could have easily turned into a power struggle of who thinks they know better, but by working as a team and coming into the situation as equals (equally clueless haha!), we made it work and got the job done. We were even able to get the kids involved, teaching my son who was seven at the time, how to use a power saw and a drill, helping to measure and mark the pieces to be cut, and asking for his expert opinion on our process so far. Once the coop was built, the kids were a huge help in getting it painted and ready for our new flock to move in.
This is how our little backyard homestead came to be. We make a lot of decisions fairly spontaneously – hence the name of the blog. We learn whatever we need to learn as we go. Since last spring we have added another four beds to our garden, learned how to water bath can and pressure can, acquired a sourdough starter and now bake all of our own bread products, learned how to make soap, bought a beehive although we haven’t caught a swarm yet, incubated and hatched chicks twice, added several blueberry bushes, and have started gardening through three seasons. We quickly learned that some things about homesteading are best learned through doing and trying, and that you won’t necessarily find the best advice on the internet. We are still learning which crops work best at what time, which seeds to start indoors and which to just direct sow, how to grow crops affordably, what pests to be on the lookout for, and how to keep them away through organic gardening processes.
There are still lots of things we would love to learn and add to our homestead, some of which will have to wait till the day we are able to move to more land. I’m so thankful for my husband who embraces this lifestyle with me and encourages me to pursue any new “thing” I want to try. This past year has shown me that there is so much potential and possibility even in our little backyard. I am beyond excited to see what else we are able to do with it going forward. This journey has been full of learning moments for myself as well as my children. I am so blessed that I have the opportunity to share this with them and have them involved in the daily tasks that are required. Seeing their independence and confidence blossom as a result has been everything I could as for as a mother.
My hope is that this blog is a place where I can be transparent about what our lifestyle looks like, both the joys and the hardships. I hope that it will encourage you to learn something you might have been holding out on, or didn’t think was possible. I hope that you will take a step out in faith, and realize what you are capable of. Once you take that first step, you will realize that you made it out to be bigger than it actually was, and something you thought was going to be so tough and difficult wasn’t actually that bad at all. I hope that our journey will encourage you to keep trying even if something doesn’t go as planned, to look at the situation and find what can be learned as you move forward from it. There have been plenty of things that haven’t gone as planned over the last year, especially because we jump into things headfirst, but we keep on moving forward and doing the best we can do. I am so excited to get to share our journey with y’all and hopefully get to know you in the process!
Thanks for taking the time to visit, and read this little introduction. Please leave a comment below with a little something about you so I can get to know you as well!
