If you are just starting out homesteading, planning for someday homestead, or trying your hand at urban homesteading, it’s it important to understand what is realistic to accomplish in your first year.
Setting goals is a great way to plan for the long-term and motivate yourself towards completing a task, and knowing what’s possible in the first year of homesteading can help you set these goals. This isn’t by any means a list of everything you should do in a year, but rather, everything on this list is something you can feasibly get done in one year. Let’s begin!
Grow herbs
This will be particularly appealing to urban homesteaders, but anyone can do it. Growing herbs is very simple, can usually be done indoors or in limited space, or, if you’ve got lots of space and want a relatively quick and easy crop to sell at a farmer’s market or put into homemade soaps and lotions, this would be a great focus.
Grow vegetables
Starting a simple vegetable bed or pot garden is an excellent place to start producing your own food. In one year, you can plant a few different crops at least and watch them come to fruition, and during this time, you’ll learn about your capacity as a gardener and things like your soil content, water quality, ability to irrigate, gardening zone, where to get the best seeds, etc.
Stockpile
Wherever you live, you can start stocking up on food, provisions, and anything that would make you more self-reliant in your day-to-day life and if a disaster were to strike. Grocery shopping in bulk and stockpiling can be a great way to save money, too, and will get you more in the groove of a homestead mentality.
Preserve Your Harvest
This one goes hand-in-hand with the first three. Real homesteading often involves preserving and stockpiling the food and sustenance you are able to produce on your homestead, so within a year, you should be able to start this stockpile. Think about what you want to grow and the best way to preserve those crops, and consider investing in preserving equipment like a pressure canner or dehydrator.
These are a few of the most realistic starter goals for your first year of homesteading. Other possible goals can include raising chickens, a pig, clearing more land for planting, or finding a cash crop you can invest your time in. Whatever you choose, remember that you will always learn by doing, so don’t worry about getting it all right right away!
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