Hey y’all! Allow me to introduce our family to you.
First and foremost, we are a christian family who believes Jesus Christ died for our sins and we are called to love one another and make disciples for Christ. Our family consists of husband and dad, Josh, wife and mama, Alicia and three beautiful and wild littles, I, A, and T.
A little background on us- Josh grew up in the city, he had no experience with farms and/or farm animals at all before we started our farmstead. Alicia grew up in the country, however, she also had no animals or legitimate farm skills to speak of prior to this adventure. But we had the heart and the desire to build our own little slice of heaven and live life the way we felt would bring us closer to God and away from worldly pursuits.
Everyone will have their reasons for homesteading, we had MANY, not the least of which was just wanting to be self reliant. We, also, want to know what is going into our food and were tired of being lied to about this fact. We wanted to get back to the roots of life, raise our children closer to the way that we were raised- outdoors and away from screens- and with solid christian values. The public school system is failing our children, teaching them worldly ideas and taking the innocence out of childhood. With this in mind, we decided it was time to implement our plan to change our lives.
Both of us are military veterans and preceding the move into our small farm lived in Florida, although we are both Texas natives. It took almost a year for our family to find our piece of land from the time we decided to move from Florida to build this life in Texas. We pulled our kiddos from public school and started homeschooling, sold our home in Florida and moved in with family in Texas while we house/land hunted, it took 8 months, during which time we were researching, learning, and gathering all the items we knew our new farm would need when we saw them on sale or caught a deal on used items (i.e. trailers, a silo, tractor, etc.). We even made a chicken coop and raised up 20 layer chickens, (which started laying the week we moved into our new home!). It was discouraging at times being in limbo the way we were, and we had put in multiple offers and were rejected multiple times, we even went under contract on a home that fell through on the day of closing, but it was all in God’s timing. We found the perfect little farmstead, it surpassed all the other homes we had seen and was right in our price range! It was even already set up for almost everything we wanted to do. The previous owners had raised cows and chickens, so it was already fenced all the way around, gated and cross fenced. It even had an orchard with an automatic watering system, can you believe it? The orchard has an approx. 600′ blueberry patch, there is about 500′ in grapevines and about 30 peach trees. So we were buying a property that was ready to farm!
We spent the first 2 months renovating the house to make it what we needed, the next month building our vegetable garden beds and acquiring animals, 5 cows, 5 goats, a handful of guinnea fowl and 2 livestock guard dogs (LGD’s). We have learned from tons of other homesteaders blogs, vlogs and even television shows and after researching and discussing, we try the routes that seem will work best for our family. There is no one way to homestead you see, everyone has different access to items, land types, financial situations and even personalities. So what works for one homesteader, might not work for you. It is up to you to find what that is, however, we feel strongly that you can still learn from others and keeping an open mind is key!
We hope that by starting this blog, we might be able to be an inspiration to other homesteading families, as so many were to us.