Balancing The Homesteading Life – HomesteadEdu Campus

Balancing The Homesteading Life

Hey all,

This next topic that I’m going to be writing about will be coming in a series. This is just part one of that series. I wanted to talk to you all about something that every homesteader deals with at some point in time.

Sometimes, it feels like life is snowballing and you have things piling up at the homestead. It can be very overwhelming. How do you deal with that? How do you manage to keep it enjoyable despite the amount of work that needs doing? How do you keep it all in balance?

First off, you don’t have to maintain absolute perfection. Homesteading is not about having your place look like something out of Better Homes And Gardens. It can still look nice, but sometimes you will need to let something slide that you feel ought to be gotten done that day. Homesteading is about learning and enjoying the process. It’s not a competition about who can have the neatest looking garden for example.

Because homesteading is enjoyable, it is easy to let things snowball, such as one of the challenges that we have to remind ourselves about, it is possible to keep one too many doe kids. The amount of milking involved past a certain number of does, is more than we can handle. (sometimes this is exceptionally hard if there was something you really wanted in your flock, but you have all the does you actually need)

I mean seriously, they are so hard to resist especially when they are this tiny!

You also need to keep in mind that more is not always necessarily better, whether gardening or livestock. You can plant too many gardens or keep too many heads of livestock. Sometimes, you have to make the decision to cut back on how much work you have. Sometimes, you may need to sell some livestock to do this. It doesn’t have to be permanent. The key phrase to keep in mind is “for now” Sometimes, “for now” you need to cut back. The dream is not ended, it’s just put on hold.

Stay tuned, I’ll be back with more that you can do for simplifying your homestead and your life.

Until next time,

Emily