Apartment to Acre Homesteading: how it all began

Homesteading has received a lot of attention over the past few years; really since Covid. Many have flocked to the country to start afresh; learn where their food comes from, practice self-sufficiency, and live a more natural lifestyle. In a world where the system is so obviously broken (or perhaps it’s working exactly how it was designed to), the appeal to take back some control over our food source is strong. We’ve seen how fragile the food supply chain is, Covid showed us that. Inflation is out of control, even though we are continually reassured that it’s not (anyone with eyes can see that it very much is). The idea of being able to grow and raise your own food, when families of four are spending $1,000 a month on groceries is fascinatingly alluring.

But for us, that’s not really why we started homesteading.

My husband and I both had a fairly dramatic life shift at the age of 11/12. For Andrew, his father retired from the Air Force and his family bought a property in the southwest corner of Missouri to build a house and farm on. They got some livestock, eventually entered into the world of breeding Spanish goats (his parents still do this and have quite the goat business). It was wonderful for a boy of 12 to have land to roam with his dog Coco.

For me, my family bought a property in Western North Carolina, built a house, and started hobby farming. Just a garden turned into chickens, rabbits, an orchard, blueberry patch, and eventually, cows. I kind of laugh when I see women on Instagram drooling over the idea of having a family milk cow - it IS wonderful, but definitely not as glamorous as one might think when you are up early every morning to milk.

Well, my husband ended up settling in a small town in mid-Missouri, in a thousand-square-foot duplex right on a sidewalk and the access road. You could see the highway from the house, and the back yard was quite small. This is where he was living when I moved in with him after we married.

At first, I relished the absence of farm chores. I was busy building my business; he was on night shift, we were two newlyweds setting up house together, getting to know each other. We didn’t really want to have a lot of responsibilities like plants, but it was 2020, and the food supply chain WAS iffy.

So we started - late, because we married at the end of May - a couple of tomato plants, a basil plant - just dipping our toes in. I also made some applesauce and my husband shot a deer which we processed ourselves.

The next year, in 2021, we expanded on that. We planted tomatoes in barrels cut in half and filled with dirt we hauled from a farm near us.

We actually had a decent little harvest that year, and I brought back fresh tomatoes from my parents’ farm and canned tomato sauce in my little duplex kitchen.

I also canned applesauce and apple pie filling. My grandmother taught me how to can at the age of 12, and when I got married she gave me a canner and jars, so it was pretty easy for me to do myself. We also found a deep freezer on facebook marketplace for bulk meat purchases.

In 2022, we had wanted to move, but just weren’t ready yet, so we asked our landlady if we could put a raised bed in the backyard and one in the front. She said yes and my husband built one out of cinderblocks, using fresh farm dirt. The front was shaded so we used that one for lettuce and built a smaller raised bed there out of wood.

This year, I started working on my health - I’d had health issues crop up and started diving into fixing them. I also had decided to retire from wedding photography at the end of the year and started leaning into more homemaking. I went U-Pick berry picking, started to refine my cooking skills, and got into sourdough.

we drove an hour and a half to find these tomatoes during a shortage

I also started doing kombucha. I found local eggs and raw milk. I was able to find boxes of canning tomatoes and can a bit of tomato sauce, and went to a local apple orchard to pick up apples to make and can applesauce.

In October of 2022, I shot my last wedding, and a couple weeks later we started house hunting. We closed on our homestead in December.

In 2023, we started the year by renovating our new home! It was a 900sq foot home on an acre of land about half an hour out of town. Houses on all sides, but we were free to do whatever we wanted on it (within reason). We moved in at the end of February and jumped into homesteading.

Andrew built a garden, we ordered 12 laying hens and 4 ducks (we still have the laying hens, but are down to 8 now). We worked really hard on our garden that year, and it was also the year that I started my homemaking Instagram, MrsAriaLewis. I also spent a lot of time working on my health and just resting. I was pretty sick from my chronic illnesses and this was a good rest year for me. We also found a local Amish community where we buy produce we can’t grow, milk, and meat.

In summary, here are things we prioritized when living in an apartment:

a bite-size garden - still cultivating skills even if we couldn’t have the large garden we wanted
growing my homemaking skills like cooking, sourdough, working with food and making it tasty
preserving what I could, even though I wasn’t able to put up 50 jars of applesauce, I still had 12!
finding local sources of food and getting to know farmers

And then the first things we prioritized after we bought our homestead:

building up a garden - it takes years in less fertile areas to actually establish a healthy soil
locating fresh produce and food sources near us
starting chickens - which takes a good deal of startup effort but is easy to manage afterwards
doing bit by bit where I could

Homesteading is not one size fits all. You do not have to put up a thousand jars of food every year. You don’t have to grow everything you eat. You don’t have to have a family milk cow.

Just start with one skill at a time and slowly get closer to your food source.

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