Homesteading was not in the original plan for our family. My city boy husband originally had visions of living in a loft in Uptown in Dallas. However, dreams change and we realized that homesteading was an adventure we both wanted. Not only for us but for our kids, too! While you don’t necessarily have to be raised a country girl to start a homestead there are some skills you may have missed out on wherever you lived that can make homesteading easier. As such, I’ve created this list of homesteading skills to learn before starting a homestead.
Woodworking and Construction
There is a constant need to build things on a homestead. Coops, Barns, or any multitude of home projects would be much simpler if I had even spent some time at Home Depot classes getting familiar with tools and how to use them.
Constructing a building is certainly more complicated than an end table but I wish I had started with some smaller projects to make these big ones doable as DIY jobs. Smaller projects allow you to gain both experience and acquire tools a little at a time.
I consider basic home repair part of this category. You can save quite a bit of money if you can be your own handy man! It’s much easier to gain these skills when you can take your time with it versus when you have farm animals to tend to, gardens to weed, and orchards to prune.
By the same token a background in electrical and engine repair is extremely helpful. Tractors, trucks, cars and appliances all break eventually and it’s nice to be able to, at the very least, diagnose it yourself. It’s even better if you can fix it.
Youtube can get you pretty far with a lot of this but finding a class is even better.
It can also be helpful to use this time to start building up a supply of good tools for both auto and home repair.
I started trying to do basic gardening while in the suburbs but taking some classes would have improved my results. While just diving in and doing it will teach you a lot, a little education beforehand will save you time and money. Many gardening centers offer free classes on a variety of topics to help you find your green thumb in less time.
Even apartment dwellers can start patio boxes of plants and start producing their own food. It’s hard to find excuses to not start this skill. In fact, you would be amazed at the sheer amount of food you can produce on a small suburban lot. It also gives you the advantage of being able to start your homestead with a much larger garden since you are more experienced.
My early garden mistakes are documented in the Top 6 Mistakes I Made as a Beginner Gardener Post.
Researching and learning more about setting up sustainable systems on a homestead is a great skill to have prior to starting your homestead. There is nothing to stop you from taking a PDC (Permaculture Design Course) even if you live in an apartment.
The method of thinking that comes from taking the course can help you plan out your homestead much faster and with fewer mistakes. Fewer mistakes means less money wasted! As a bonus you’ll find permaculture principles can be applied to other areas of your life not just gardening.
If you’ve never heard of permaculture check out Geoff Lawton in Australia. If he can get plants to grow in the desert imagine what we can do on a few acres of decent homestead.
I did have a bit of an advantage here that at least my Mom knows how to water bath can vegetables. You don’t have to have a huge garden harvest to start practicing this skill. A good trip to the farmer’s market or a pick your own fruit/veggie farm can provide you with enough produce to start learning.
The two main types of canning are water bath and pressure canning. It is super important to distinguish the types of foods that can safely be canned using a water bath method versus those such as meat that require pressure canning in order to be safely stored long term.
Dehydration has many advantages; it’s simple, increases storage time, decreases food volume to save storage space, and reduces food waste. While we’d all love an Excalibur 9-tray dehydrator you can often find used Ronco dehydrators at thrift shops.
Dehydration is easy but I had never tried it until the past couple of years. I do think there is a little trial and error involved with getting your food sliced the appropriate size for what you want to do with it.
This is another instance where you don’t have to have a garden to utilize your dehydrator. I also use mine if I have any fruit or veggies that are about to become overripe. As an FYI, dehydrated kiwis test like candy! You can also make fruit leather in the dehydrator for a snack for kids or you.
Dehydration isn’t just for fruits and veggies. Use your dehydrator to make jerky and you can have another option to use up extra meat from the homestead or hunting.
Prior to homesteading I had never given much thought to fermented foods but they serve as both a food preservation technique and a great source of probiotics. Many cultures have a history of fermented foods everything from sauerkraut to kimchi but it is a staple that has unfortunately, fallen by the wayside in modern Western diets.
I have one of the German style fermentation crocks for sauerkraut and other ferments. Overcoming the intimidation factor is really the first step and many recipes can be found to create new and interesting fermentation combinations.
Chicken keeping is much more common than it used to be in suburbia but many places still make it challenging to own chickens. If you can’t have chickens yet, research and plan out your ideal coop. Make up mock feeding schedules, what feed you would use, what type of coop litter, breeds you want, what do you do if they get sick, etc.
Researching ahead of time allows you to implement much faster once you have a homestead. You will likely still revise your plan but you will already be 10 steps ahead. Talk to people with chickens and find out what they would change about their setups.
For example, we started with a small little Tractor Supply type coop for 5 chickens but it was extremely challenging to clean and you had to crawl into it to rake out shavings. This drove me NUTS and was the main reason for wanting a new coop. Save yourself the trouble and expense by just starting with an easy to clean coop!
Learning safe methods of rain water collection and how to use it is important so you can integrate it into your homestead design. It is almost unreal how much rainwater you can collect off of even a very small roof.
It is beneficial for both garden use and as an emergency back-up water supply. Remember, if your electricity is off you can’t even flush a toilet without water. For more emergency preparedness ideas check out my Ultimate Guide to Emergency Preparedness on the Homestead.
This is a topic that is less about taking a class or watching Youtube videos. My husband and I both said this was an area we needed more experience in since it can be very hard on a homestead to prioritize your projects. We want to do a million different things and my husband especially will buy things for a project that realistically he cannot even start for weeks or months and it ties up cash flow in a project that is not even going to be completed for a long time.
We both still way underestimate the amount of time a project will take leading to further delay. Like I said before, this skill is not as easily gleaned from just reading about it but paying attention to when you projects at work or with hobbies can help you utilize your time in a more efficient manner.
I think another component that we don’t often think of is flexibility. If your personality tends toward following a rigid plan (like my husband) you are going to have a harder time going with the flow when projects don’t go as planned. And if there is one thing to be said for homesteading it’s that there are often changes to the plan!
Being able to roll with the punches and being mentally okay with the fact that your to-do list will never actually be empty is necessary for the mental health aspect of homesteading. Being efficient and productive but very adaptable is what will allow you to not only SUCCEED but ENJOY homesteading.