Homesteading On The Edge Of The Ozarks
We moved to our homestead 5 years ago after raising our family and leaving our suburban home. Now we live on the Edge Of The Ozarks right where the wooded hills meet the great Kansas plains. We are carving out a comfortable place to live from an overgrown woodlot where we garden, raise animals and enjoy the quiet of country living.
We've had some great successes and a few failures, but our little homestead farm brings a lot of pleasure. Our Pekingese puppies are a blast to raise and bring happiness to lots of families who adopt them. Catfish in our pond will be ready to eat later this year.
We've seen lots of cool projects on social media and tried them out. Some work really good and some just don't work out at all. But by trying some things we have learned to grow some of our own food and are making great progress on supporting ourselves just by living on our farm.
The best resource we have ever found so far, hands down is a book we bought that is written by a couple who homesteaded most of their lives and did a lot of it “off grid”. We have had a lot of success by just following the plans and ideas from their book.
We found literally tons of great ideas to use on our homestead, some of which we had already been thinking about. One project we are working on right now is building a system to capture rain water. We just feel like we need to prepare to take care of ourselves best we can, and we don't want to go without water! Anyway we found great instructions in our book – even better plans than we could find on the Internet or YouTube.
When we first moved out to our farm we didn't think we would have enough room to grow much of what we needed to live, but turns out after studying our book that we can grow all we need and more with space left over.
So after reading through our “book of knowledge” and talking about what we wanted to do there are a bunch of projects we have tackled and quite a few more we want to try. Raising chickens from hatching eggs to gathering eggs for the table and butchering our own chickens is our project for this summer.
So anyway, we hope the articles in our website will help and inspire you to make the leap to homestead on your own, or maybe garden and grow what you need right where you are. If you want to check out the same book we have gotten all our great ideas from you can see it here.
Enjoy every day and when you're done may you come sliding in sideways shouting “Woo-hoo, That was quite a ride!”
Ken and Pat Heistand
Edge Of The Ozarks