About

Welcome to Almost a Homesteader.

 

Many of you know me from my day job as the editor and lead writer over at Rural Sprout.

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Almost a Homesteader is my place, where I kick off my shoes, and things get a little more personal. It’s not all gardening over here.

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Like all of us, my warped childhood shaped my character and made me who I am today. 

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My childhood looks pretty similar to lots of people my age. I grew up spending the week with one parent and the weekend with the other. For me, this meant weekdays with my mom in a home with cable TV and a pantry full of store-brand PopTarts. 

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Where my story takes a departure from the norm is my weekends.

 

Those were spent with my dad in the log cabin on his homestead. And Dad was all about homesteading. If there was an article on it in Mother Earth News (back when it was still a magazine), he was probably making it, growing it or building it. Because of Dad, I learned a ton of stuff most kids stopped learning about a century ago. 

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Like how to make switchel. Or even what the heck it is. 

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My weekends were very Laura Ingalls Wilder with a Sony Walkman.

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Between my homesteading weekends and being a latch-key kid with divorced parents, I grew into an I-can-do-it-myself-thanks, self-reliant adult with trust issues and a wry sense of humor!

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Little did I know growing up with one foot in the modern world and one foot in the past would serve me well as an adult. I come from generations of folks who canned, hunted, foraged and made with their hands, so the thought of embracing a fully modern life of convenience never really crossed my mind.

 

Of course, there are things from my childhood I hope never to revisit, like the character-building experience of using an outhouse. 

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In January.

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In the middle of the night. 

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Instead, I’ve decided to be almost a homesteader. 

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My life is a bizarre mix of old-timey self-sufficiency comingled with my favorite aspects of modern life, such as pizza delivery, craft cocktails and indoor plumbing.  

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If you enjoy playing in the dirt, puttering in the kitchen and prefer reading to scrolling, I think you’ll like it here.