Kate Downham: How I started homesteading without any land

The author of 'A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen' shares her gradual path to homesteading.

Editor’s note: I’ve asked Kate Downham, the author of this season’s giveaway book, A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen, to share her story with our readers. I hope it inspires you to know that you don’t have to wait until you can quit your day job and move to the country to start homesteading! Here’s Kate with more. - Lisa

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Pickled garlic scapes in Kate Downham’s off-grid kitchen. All photos courtesy of Kate Downham/The Nourishing Hearthfire.

By Kate Downham

I grew up with the typical suburban lifestyle of the eighties and nineties. My family had no connection to how food was grown. At a young age, I learned about the horrors of the industrial system that provided our food and wanted to get away from it, but I did not know how.

From around the age of twenty I began to dream of a life on the land. I wanted to get away from this and fend for myself, being surrounded by nature, drinking pure water from mountain streams and finding real independence.

I began to grow vegetable gardens in backyards and abandoned lots, with varying success. It filled me with so much joy to harvest the foods I had grown myself and cook with them. I wasn’t officially homesteading, but I was learning every day, and getting closer to my dream.

Turnips and potatoes, two great crops for northern climates.

I got to know local farmers and local wild fruit trees. Seasonal abundance flowed into my kitchen over the years, and I learned many ways to cook and preserve it. Some of my early experiences were disasters, but they were learning experiences, they improved my skills, and helped me figure out what does work for me. I think our own experiences teach us the most, and it works out best to start small with different methods of food preserving and figure out what you like to do and what works for your kitchen and lifestyle, rather than investing in hundreds of canning jars or some other preserving system only to find that you prefer other methods of preservation.

The Downham family’s homestead goats.

I kept chickens and goats in rental house yards, and learned to make my own cheese. The joy of interacting with animals and bringing nourishing staple foods into the kitchen every day inspired me. Still dreaming of land, still saving up for it, we did what we could, in the place where we were, and there was a lot to be grateful for.

Eventually, we ended up on fifty acres in the forest. Our water comes from a mountain stream, our warmth and cooking fuel from the forest around us, and there’s no shortage of projects and inspiration to turn this neglected logging land into a permaculture homestead. Over the years, I had met people who had bought their own land and didn’t have the skills to make use of it, but my years of learning had prepared me for life on the land. I was used to making meals from raw local and seasonal ingredients, so it wasn’t such a stretch to use these same ingredients that were homegrown. I knew how to make sourdough bread in a way that takes minimal time, so it was not much of a stretch to make it from homegrown, home-milled flour. (Note: Lisa will share this method in Thursday’s post.) Home dairying tasks and natural animal care were a part of my everyday life, so it was not overwhelming to get more animals, to further our self-reliance, and to find time to write books and teach others.

Kate’s other book, Backyard Dairy Goats: A Natural Approach to Keeping Goats in Any Yard.

There are many skills that can be learned anywhere, and can be taken with us, wherever we go. All our years of renting houses and wanting land of our own were not wasted: Without realizing it, I had been learning the very skills that I most needed toward our future homestead. There still is a lot to learn, but by learning homestead kitchen skills, growing food where I could, and keeping animals in the backyard, I had provided a solid foundation for our off-grid homestead.