How Homesteading Save Us Money

Homesteading has become our lifestyle. Not only will it save you money but it’ll also empower you into a more self-sufficient and fulfilling lifestyle. We grow our fruits and vegetables. We raise hens for eggs. Other than saving money, homesteading helps us to stay active and live a simpler life.

What is homesteading anyway?

Wikipedia defines homesteading as a lifestyle of self-sufficiency. It is characterized by subsistence agriculture, home preservation of food and may also involve the small-scale production of textiles, clothing, and craftwork for household use or sale.

To me, homesteader is people who become self-sufficient and it can be done however you see fit and wherever you live. By that definition, we are probably a suburban homesteader who commits to self-sufficiency and tries to provide our own needs with a small suburban plot of land.

Before we moved back to where we are now, I made myself a promise that we’d raise chickens for eggs. I’m glad we decided to do it. Raising chickens helped us understand the true cost of living. It really empowers us into a more self-sufficient and fulfilling lifestyle. Having backyard chickens led us to become a suburban homesteader. Not only will homesteading save us money but it’ll also lead us to live a simpler life.

Our pets make us breakfast.

5 Ways homesteading save us money

1. We grow our own foods

A major benefit of homesteading is having foods right in your own backyard. It drastically reduces our grocery bills.

Growing your own fruits and vegetables really have great benefits. Not only will you have fresh produce but also they are free from harmful pesticide and chemicals. There are peaches, Fuyu persimmons, tangerine, different kinds of figs, blueberries, blackberries, hardy kiwi, goji berry, muscadine, kumquat, kefir lime, and passion fruit in our backyard. We just planted olive trees and can’t wait to get a mulberry tree and apple trees this Summer.

We raise hens organically to get pastured organic eggs. And we love how orange our egg yolk is!  If you’ve been buying free-range and/or organic eggs, it can save you money.  Let your hens free range will cut your feed costs down. Make sure your hens are safe from predators. Buying your grains in bulk will save you money too. A future post “How to make homemade organic chicken feed”. We only have a total of 6 hens and that’s more than enough eggs for three of us year round. Having backyard chickens is not always allowed though. Check with your county if you can raise chickens in your backyard.

We learn to eat seasonally. During Summer, we plant tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, to name a few. While in the Fall and Spring, we plant collard and different kinds of kales.

There are herbs and vegetables that you plant it once and it can provide an unlimited source of foods. We have rosemary, thyme, and lavender as part of our landscaping. They function as a beautiful shrub and a source of herbs. Cilantro and green onion are a perfect example of a never-ending vegetable year round. They survive cold weather and come back every year. Next time you buy a green onion from a store, save the rooted stem and plant them. You’ll never spend money on green onions ever again.

We make our own jams, kumquat jam specifically. Each year, we get so many kumquat fruits from just 2 trees (and they are even planted in a pot). Have you ever noticed how expensive a pint of the kumquat is? In our town, a half pint of kumquats costs as much as $6.99. Our kumquat jam tastes great and they smell wonderful. The fruit is also perfect for a fruit tray and dish decorating.

Having your produce in your own backyard has another benefit. Since you don’t have to go to grocery stores as often, you save money on gas by grocery shopping in your backyard.

We cook our meals from scratch using fresh organically grown ingredients from the garden. By cooking from scratch, we buy less highly processed packaged ingredients and foods.

Since we have eggs all year round, we eat less meat. Hence we save money by buying less meat/red meat.

Free-ranging your hens will cut your feed costs down.

2. We compost and make our own fertilizer

• We save kitchen scraps for chickens. Anything that we cannot give to chickens (like avocado peels, onion peels, seeds, etc.) goes to a compost bin. There is no foods waste at all in our home. Any composable materials like paper, toilet roll paper, and plant-based packaging materials also go to a compost bin. Due to these, we don’t need to get a trash pick-up service which saves us a monthly cost of $45.  Instead, we pay to dump our trash once in a while at the county landfill at $3 for a 55-gallon bag. It takes us a LONG time to fill up the 55-gallon bag. By composting and having minimal trash help us save money on waste bills.
• Not only our hens give us fresh eggs every day, they also give us a perfect natural organic fertilizer. We use it on fruit trees, shrubs, and flowers.
• Chickens do an amazing job flipping the compost pile too. It’s entertaining watching them doing that. We use the compost on vegetables.

3. We exercise in our own backyard

• From cutting trees, splitting wood to cleaning a chicken coop, we burn our calories through these endless tasks. No gym membership is needed.
• You can get daily exercise by simply walking around your homestead.

4. We learn to DIY and barter

• We learned about sewing. I sew and alternate our clothes.
• Taking care of our garden tools and landscaping gadgets has become our top priorities. We learned to fix stuff and took better care of our tools.
• We learned to barter and trade stuff with our neighbors.  Our neighbor is good at cutting big trees down. We have eggs and vegetables more than the three of us can eat. So we trade our homegrown organic foods for tree cutting service. It works perfectly.

Homesteading provides endless tasks like plugging weeds…

5. We spend most of our time in the garden

• Homesteading comes with endless tasks. Working on a homestead is hard sometimes but there are rewards that go with it. There’s a sense of accomplishment whenever you see your plentiful fruit trees. I still remember how excited we were when we got our very first egg. We looked at the egg like we’ve never seen an egg before.
• There is always something to look forward to at a homestead. We truly enjoy plugging weeds, planting fruit trees or vegetables, pruning shrubs, fertilizing the garden, cleaning a coop, and playing with our chickens! On weekends and holidays, we find ourselves spending most of our time in the garden.  We rarely go shopping. Actually, we haven’t gone to a movie since we started homesteading (that was over 10 years ago!). Due to this, we really reduce our entertainment cost and save money by not making impulse purchases.

We really enjoy our pesticides free homegrown okras

What other homesteading ways can we do to save even more money?

• Install a clothesline. I’d like to install a clothesline in the near future. We can hang our clothes during the Summer months and save some money on electric bills.
• Install rain barrels for the garden. To save money on water bills, install rain barrels is a way to go. It’ll pay for itself in the long run.

Happy hens make good eggs

While these great benefits of homesteading may not be true for everyone, it has changed our lives for the better. Best of all,  our family values the time we spend together and the foods we produce. We learned new skills and improved our house and land. You can be healthier, happier and live a simpler life.

Are you considering homesteading? Would you like to live a simpler life or just want to eat less processed food? 

Give homesteading a try. It could change your life as it did to us.