Three things I’ve learned from homesteading

I’ve spent a lot of time cursing homesteading resources under my breath lately. The Internet is a treasure trove of information for the first-time homesteader, but after a while, I’d begun to notice a trend in articles: the authors all have a lot more money and resources than I do. Whenever a fencing article starts off with, “my first step was to hire locals to put the fence in for me,” I know this writer and I are in totally different worlds. Have they seen the price of fencing? How on earth could they afford to hire even the neighbor kid after buying a couple thousand feet of that stuff?

Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of really good information out there by some really resourceful people, but there’s also a lot of articles that seem to be written by hobby homesteaders with enough resources to glide gently into their new world. Such is not the case with my family. Sometimes I think we repel money like my car repels hubcaps.

At the moment, my pride and joy is my $20 alpaca shed. Made from mostly recycled materials and spare parts, it might not be pretty, but I don’t think the girls will mind as long as it keeps them dry. Although, if I’m being totally honest, I was a little nervous that my friend would show up to deliver alpacas and decide she wasn’t leaving her babies in such a hovel. Thankfully, that didn’t happen because we adore our lovely ladies. They seem to like their shelter, too. Granted, the first couple of days they were a bit nervous about going in it, so they’d sidle up to the side of the shed with their hay manger and use their long necks to reach in and grab a bite of hay before running off, only to come back and repeat the process. I guess they’ve decided the shed won’t eat them since they’ve stopped those particular antics.

The fence cost slightly more than $20, but even it was done with a bit of creativity to save cost. I’ll expand the fence as I go along, but at least they’ve got a big enough area to get us started. I put the terrible twosome in the alpaca enclosure for a week before the alpacas arrived to be sure they wouldn’t find a way to break out. (The terrible twosome being Shoeshine and Po, my Great Pyrenees/Welsh Corgi cross puppies.) The way I see it, if the fence can hold those beasties in, it’ll do the trick for the alpacas, too.

Now that I’ve been at this homesteading thing for a year, I’ve realized a few things were left out of the articles. So, if any of you are thinking of making the homesteading plunge, here’s my advice:

1)      It’s never as easy as they make it look. Life will throw you every conceivable curveball. When you get to the point where it’s either laugh or cry, choose to laugh. It’s more fun that way.

2)      The tool you need will always be the one you left back at the shop, on the other side of the fence. You won’t notice this until you’re on top of a ladder, leaning precariously over the roof of an animal shelter, feeling around for the tool in question. The sooner you accept this, the less frustrating the walk back to the shop will be.

3)      Animals have no sense of style. You can build a fancy nest box only for your chickens to decide they prefer the old burn barrel. Don’t worry so much about making it magazine pretty and go for functional. Besides, a good coat of paint can cover a multitude of sins.