My expensive, exhausting, happy failed attempt at homesteading

Everybody knows that drought is bad for growing things, but it wasn’t until last year that I learned heavy rain following drought is also bad, at least for tomatoes. The dry weather causes their skin to lose elasticity, and the sudden increase in moisture causes them to swell and burst. The fruit is still edible if you pick it fast enough, but a tomato becomes bug bait as soon as its insides are exposed. Crops don’t wait, and they often don’t keep.
This is one of the many lessons we’ve learned since leaving our concrete stamp in Philadelphia for three green acres in North Carolina in 2022. My wife and I initially relocated to be closer to family and because we wanted a yard where our kids could play. But as we acclimated to the greenery of the Piedmont, our appetites grew. We wanted more than a yard; we craved the full pastoral.
And so we bought a property with a large perennial pollinator garden, fruit trees, numerous trellises, a lengthy blueberry hedge, nine large raised beds and the pièce de résistance: a Lord & Burnham greenhouse built over the top of the walkout basement. We saw the house for the first time on a Wednesday. By Sunday, we were under contract and fantasizing about a homestead, where we would strive for self-sufficiency: growing and raising most of what we eat.
But three years later, most of the produce and all of the animal protein our family of five eats comes from Costco, Walmart or our local farmers market. Homesteading was simply not for us – though it did reinforce for me the miracle of modern agriculture.
How many square feet of raised beds do you need to meet a toddler’s strawberry demand? I still don’t know. We dedicated 80 square feet to strawberries last season. The bugs ate half our harvest, and the other half equaled roughly what our kid could eat in a week.
Have you ever grown peas? Give them something to climb, and they’ll stretch to the heavens. Have you ever shelled peas? It is an almost criminal misuse of time. I set a timer on my phone last year. It took me 13 minutes to shell a single serving. Meanwhile, a two-pound bag of frozen peas from Walmart costs $2.42. And the peas come shelled.
The work of homesteading is never-ending and constantly undermined. I rebuilt our composting system but forgot to put chicken wire under the bottom, which allowed a possum to dig a tunnel inside it. The house came with 1,200 feet of deer fence surrounding the gardens, but deer fence doesn’t last forever. It has fallen in some places, and the deer can now jump over it. They like to eat the blueberry bushes, which I spent 20 hours pruning last year.
In addition to possums and deer, we’ve faced unrelenting assaults from across the eukaryotic kingdoms: the tomato hornworm caterpillar, the cabbage looper caterpillar, the squash vine borer, the aphid, the thrip, the earwig and the sowbug; cucurbit downy mildew, powdery mildew, collar rot, black rot, sooty mold, botrytis gray mold and stem canker; the nematode, the gray garden slug, the eastern gray squirrel, the eastern cottontail rabbit and the groundhog. All of these organisms reside in the North Carolina Piedmont and like to eat what we eat. Many of them work toward this existential goal while humans sleep, which is why the North Carolina State Agriculture Extension advises growers to inspect their plants at night. No, thank you. And even when we manage to keep the critters out of the beds, we’re still at the mercy of the skies.
And all this self-sufficiency costs money. Our property came with wooden raised beds, but since everything, everywhere, is hurdling at a constant rate toward death and decay, those need to be replaced ($1,000-plus). The greenhouse needs to be cooled in the summer, requiring new motors for our thermostat-controlled louver system ($165), and heated in the winter with propane ($2.80 a gallon last year, $3 the year before). To avoid overextending our well – there’s no city water in the county – we plan to buy a 500-gallon cistern for capturing and storing rainwater ($800) and an automated drip irrigation system ($300). Then there are what economists call nondurable inputs: fertilizer, mulch, compost and seeds (a few hundred dollars per growing season).
What’s more, you can’t grow everything all the time. Self-sufficiency means eating foods straight from the garden only when they are in season. Hardcore homesteaders don’t eat fresh blueberries in January.
Many homesteaders enjoy living this way. They are problem solvers. They love working in the dirt and the sun and finding new ways to cook tromboncino squash. Knowing where their food comes from gives them peace of mind; growing it themselves fills them with pride. These two feelings empower them to eat jarred tomatoes for half the year. I honor their truth. But we part ways when the conversation turns to the superior virtue of spending the bulk of one’s time and money avoiding the grocery store.
In our third growing season, my wife and I have accepted that we are not cut out for homesteading. The realization liberated us. We don’t have to maximize yields or lose sleep over pests. We don’t have to replace or even use every raised bed. The greenhouse can sit empty; the blueberry hedge can grow wild. Our two young kids can dig for pill bugs while my wife and I weed. When they’re ready to go inside or do something else, we can pause our work, no matter how much is left.
This was not an option for my ancestors. In the early 1900s, one of my paternal great-grandfathers moved from urban Illinois to a homestead in Oklahoma. Our only picture of him was taken shortly before the Dust Bowl destroyed his farm. After his farm failed, he abandoned my great-grandmother and their children and migrated to California with thousands of other Okies. When my crops fail, I go to Whole Foods. I have options my great-grandfather couldn’t dream of, and as a result, my kids will have a better life than my grandfather did.
Embracing the economic interdependence that some homesteaders work so hard to avoid has helped us establish a healthier relationship with the land we live on. With less pressure to grow food, we can focus on the rest of the surrounding nature. Just last week, we saw the first monarch caterpillars. The pipevine caterpillars have already built their chrysalises and will soon emerge as blue swallowtail butterflies. Somewhat ironically, we garden just as much. This season, we’re growing tomatoes, hot peppers, tomatillos, strawberries, basil, dill, watermelon, ground cherries, cucamelons and squash. I also plan to build two trellis systems for the Concord grapes we planted last year.
How much of it we’ll get to eat remains a mystery, but not a pressing one. A good heirloom tomato is a good heirloom tomato, even if we didn’t grow it ourselves.