What Is The Essence of Modern Homesteading? A Guide to Simple Living for a Working Mom

ESSENCE OF FARMHOUSE LIVING for the Working Mom

The goal of every working mom is to work hard and make her family’s life as simple as she can. In that pursuit, many are turning to modern homesteading.

With having a full-time career, whether desired or required, it can be hard to incorporate wholesome living into your family’s lives. Between work schedules, school schedules and every-day life, finding ways to simplify life can be incredibly challenging. 

Oftentimes, it can be as simple as changing strategies. If a meal plan or a decorating idea that worked the week before doesn’t work this week, change your plan and strategy. That’s the beauty of capturing an essence. Change it to fit into your life and your family so it works and provides joy.

Maybe you’ve been using DoorDash a little too often. Maybe fast food and convenience meals have become a normal occurrence for your family, leaving you short on funds and long on worry about what your family is eating. 

It can make you feel frustrated, helpless, caught in an endless cycle of a low-quality lifestyle. Today can be the day that you change that! I’m going to share a lifestyle and a thought process that will help you save money, feed your family quality food, and simplify your life without losing the ability to maintain your work-life balance. 

I’ll cover the essence of modern homesteading and mindset, how it works while being a working mom and how you can get started.

Keep reading for more details.

What Is Modern Homesteading?

Modern homesteading or urban homesteading is an essence, a goal, a deliberate mindset. You can choose to live a homesteading-style life without ever setting foot onto a farm. Here are some pieces that I, as a full-time working mom, feel capture the simple and every-day lifestyle of modern homestead living.

Homestead life aims to simplify and encourage deep connection. Secondly, to use, enjoy and encourage quality meals, ingredients, and experiences as well as to celebrate the simple beauty in every-day pieces of life. Additionally, homestead lifestyle is about having meals together, simple or not-so-simple. Making said meals together and growing/making/preserving food items to enjoy when these items aren’t available on a fresher basis is another way to incorporate this mindset. It’s about simple decor, simple lifestyle patterns and rhythms, and choosing whole family activities instead of individual pursuits. It’s choosing to view the world through a different lens: choosing to view and keep only the items, foods, activities and people in your life that bring you joy and peace.

Sometimes, this involves a fair bit of hard work and time-consuming work at that. Baking is time-consuming; freezing extra fruits and vegetables is time-consuming; canning pickles, tomato sauce, peaches and jam for winter enjoyment is time-consuming. Is it worth it? I will always give you a resounding yes.

Why is this lifestyle and mindset worth considering or implementing? Because every single family benefits from it; it truly doesn’t matter where you live. Whenever a life focus is changed to include a greater level of quality and joy, it can be applied to any living situation.

Put Your Thoughts Into Action

By delving into this lifestyle, you’ll become acutely aware of the beneficial short-term and long-term changes it will bring to you and your family. 

The beauty of simplistic life is that it gives the ability to add desired areas of complexity or complication when it works best for your family situation as well as allowing the less flexible family members to still feel as if their lives aren’t being negatively affected. 

Simplifying life with children involved, especially teenagers, can be difficult. Sometimes, they view it as a more restrictive life and not as many outside resources, items or opportunities. Sometimes, when home life doesn’t include frequent take-out, shopping trips, and a constant stream of external entertainment, it can cause resentment and anger. We’ll talk about that too.

Examples of Simple Living and the Modern Homesteading.

If homestead living without living in a rural setting sounds confusing, I get it. There are some who would say that simple living and country life is only for those who live in a quaint rural setting with a chicken wandering around their front yard. I disagree. As I explained above, farmhouse living and life simplification is an essence and a thought process. It’s a way of approaching the different aspects of life to increase the level of joy and contentment for you and your family.

Easy for me to say…I know. It IS easy for me to say and do because it’s how I’ve chosen to live and think for the past twenty years. There have been changes along the way, especially when my jobs or living situations have changed in a negative or positive fashion.

So, I put together the following examples below to break it down for you so you can see how I chose to fit these pieces of simple living and farmhouse life into my home as a working mom.

Example #1: Meals

Although food seems over discussed, tired, worked to death… it’s actually one of the foundations of modern homestead living. The farmhouse kitchen and the food associated with it has inspired more cookbooks, blogs and websites than I care to count or measure. The home centers around the kitchen, no matter who does most of the work in it. Additionally, what better way to bond with your family (kids, husband or extended family) than to do it by preparing food for immediate enjoyment or delayed satisfaction.

Simple farmhouse fare is marked by short ingredient lists, wholesome additions, and satisfying taste, otherwise known as comfort food. Stews, soups, breads, roasts, casseroles, desserts, etc. all stem from the basis of farmhouse cooking and the need for simple tasty fare that often sat on the back of a stove to stay warm for extended periods of time. The longer these items sat, the better they tasted, creating a richness of diet that couldn’t be found anywhere else.

Preparedness: The Homesteading Mindset of Saving for Later

Preppers, homesteaders, hobby farmers…there are so many names for the same mindset. The goal is to form a life that provides a continuous independent stream of high-quality food, nutritious drink and sometimes income, depending upon the individual situation.

Whether the residence/farm/garden provides fresh produce now and enough to can, freeze or dehydrate for later or the chickens produce eggs to utilize now and freeze for later, the mindset remains the same: enjoy now, but save some for the off-season.

Preserve and ferment some cabbage as sauerkraut, can some cucumbers as delicious bread-and-butter pickles, freeze strawberries and blueberries for cheery winter-time smoothies and cobblers. This is the heart of modern homestead living: enjoying really good food while it’s in season, but keeping enough extra to save for a future day. Check out my blog post, Why Canning Doesn’t Work, all about the modern take on canning and preserving here.

Reuse, Reuse, Reuse: The Simple Method of Making Do or Doing Without

We’ve discussed two legs of the three-legged stool that comprises the foundations of farmhouse essence and simple living. The third leg is how you do it: use, reuse, repurposed, repeat. Let me explain: when canning foods to use later in the fall and winter, we use glass jars of multiple sizes and shapes. They are not single-use containers; we don’t seal them with harvest goodness packed inside, open it in December for a treat, then throw the jar away. Wash the jar out and put it on the shelf with the other empties waiting for the next canning season.

When you find yourself with a proliferation of old, ratty blankets (clean, preferably), ask a friend who is familiar with quilting or sewing to help you convert said blankets into one special blanket for memorabilia or a special gift.

When making sourdough bread, the starter is used and fed, reused and fed, sometimes for years at a time. Fruit and vegetable seeds are saved for the following garden season, food scraps are given to the chickens and ducks who produce eggs and meat. There is always a way to use, reuse and re-purpose in your home to get the maximum benefit out of each item.

For some GREAT sourdough ideas, visit the blog Farmhouse On Boone.

Join Me, A Working Mom, in this Amazing Modern Homestead Life: No Regrets on Simple Life Here

This introduction to the farmhouse essence and simple lifestyle is such a small piece of the exciting things we are going to discuss and learn.  If you take anything away from this guide, remember that capturing this life in any living situation is possible. It’s worth pursuing, it’s worth living and it’s definitely worth the effort.

The best way to get started on this road is to start with goal-based journaling, meal planning, and house inventory; that way you can set yourself up for a great start. So, what do you say? Are you ready to give it a go?