A Glance into My Homestead Journey

Homesteading Before It Was “Cool”

If you would’ve asked me when I was a child if I would be a homesteader when I grew up, my answer would’ve been a swift, “no”. It wouldn’t be until later in my adult life that I would finally be at peace with what homesteading really meant. I grew up gardening, hunting, and preserving food. It was hard work, and in Alabama, it is really hot during the main summer growing season, something I’ve never been a fan of. My ambition through out high school was to become a nurse. I went to college and then life happened. I couldn’t afford the tuition and I dropped out to go to work full time.

Years later, I had children. Life was crazy busy. Then, my daughter, who was a year and a half old, got sick with a terrible case of double pneumonia she caught at daycare. I had to take off work to take care of her and lost my job in the process. Afterward, my husband and I realized that financially, it would make more sense for me to stay at home with our children. At the time, he made more money than I did. Me staying at home with the kids would save us a ton of money on childcare and keep them healthy.

Taking the plunge

After about 6 months of being at home with our two children, I decided to start a few seeds and plant a garden to save even more money on our grocery budget. We began to budget everything. At the time, we didn’t even have a mortgage but we had a ton of debt. We were managing to pay our bills but a lot of the time but we were just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Payday loans became a vicious cycle, we had just enough every week to keep us a float financially. We buckled down, my husband began to work a ton of overtime. I got rolled up my sleeves and dove head first into the homestead lifestyle. Eating out became non-existent, we tackled one debt at a time, and celebrated every victory together.

After a year of budgeting, I bought chickens built coops, and began to plant bigger gardens. I started teaching my children, and giving extra food to my neighbors. I felt such a sense of belonging and fulfillment. We had abundant food! I knew in my heart that this, homesteading, was what I was meant to do. Every season, I made more plans, the garden grew bigger, we added more chickens (chicken math, ha!). This is how Bonny Oaks Farmstead began.

Our budget got tighter as I started my new business, and our new lifestyle. My dreams were huge, and as I sold my first ever chick, I was so full of excitement! This was really happening for us. My business got bigger, I sold chicks, eggs, produce, and homemade goods. During year 3, my husband and I decided that our future was too big for our half acre. We needed a bigger space, room to grow. Our half acre was not going to support anymore gardens or chickens. We had reached our limit. That’s when reality hit and we realized that our budget was no where near ready for a mortgage.

If I’m totally honest with my reader’s, this lifestyle isn’t cheap to “start”. We accumulated supplies for preservation, cooking, gardening, chicken keeping, overtime. None of it happened overnight. It took years of saving and decision making to get to the point of “comfortable” or just having everything we needed just to can our veggies.

As we kept paying our debts down (over 50K when we began), we both got better at budgeting. I got better at planning cheap meals, being frugal, and studying money. We had to make sure that every part of our life made financial sense. The more sufficient we became at growing what we ate, the more money we saved. Yes, after a while okra and squash gets a little redundant, but we ate what we grew and there was no way we could add more cash to the grocery budget. We made due with what we had on hand and it paid off in a big way!

Now here we are in 2023, 5 years in business, finally where we want to be. We are still going strong and I wouldn’t change our journey for anything in this world. The only difference is, we are no longer eating as much squash and okra, haha! I’ve gained so much knowledge and we have so much more to learn and share with others. The want to share knowledge is what has driven me to start this website. I hope we can all gain something from our wonderful community together.

Thank you so much for being here!