The way this year has gone has a lot of people thinking about leaving the city and finding a simpler, more sustainable life in the country. Today I’m sharing ten helpful tips I wish I knew when I got started homesteading.

A year and a half ago, my husband and I packed up our whole lives in Seattle and moved across the country to Nashville, Tennessee.

I’m hoping by sharing these ten lessons with you, I might be able to help make your own transition into homesteading go at least a little smoother than mine was! So grab a cup of coffee, settle in, and let’s make a plan together...

Keep Your Spaces Flexible

It’s tempting to hit the ground running when you land on your farm, setting up fences, running waterlines, building infrastructure (even building… buildings!) right off the bat.

But some of the best advice I received early on was to live in and use your space for at least a year or two before doing anything “permanent.”

Keep an open mind and a literally modular way of thinking about how you can best use the space to serve your actual needs will serve you longterm- especially because as you actually use those spaces, you might (and, if you’re anything like me, you WILL) change your mind, change your approach, or pivot and go in another direction entirely. This way of thinking also translates to your outdoor spaces as well.

outdoor spaces

Instead of looking at our property as one giant slice of land, I initially divided it into multiple modular spaces using temporary fencing that allowed me to rotationally graze my animals, using regenerative agriculture practices in the process to improve the land. When we first moved here, I had a really specific fencing plan in mind, but having lived here for the past year and a half, having actually had my animals on the land, watched how they used it taken note of what kinds of things made my life harder/thinking about what might make it easier, I am now ready to invest in some permanent infrastructure that will actually make my life easier and serve my animals better as well. And my new plan is very, VERY different from the original. I’ve thought to myself many times this past year how GRATEFUL I didn’t waste the time, effort, or HUGE expense of making those changes early on, because had I done so, today I’d either be limping a less than ideal situation make that investment “work,” or I’d be investing that time, effort, and expense a second time now to redo it all.

And, for what it’s worth, a year and a half ago, all of my plans were designed for goats. Never in a million years did I think I’d ever even own a cow, but a year and a half in, it turns out our land is far better suited to cattle, and I’m now the proud owner of not one, but NINE head of cattle.

indoor spaces

When we first moved to the property, I wanted the barn to be a barn; a place for me to keep my animals and store my feed and do all the things that you would imagine a barn would do.

2. Build Escape-Proof Pens (Modularly, Of Course)

I brought my dairy goats and my donkeys here from Seattle. And so first and foremost, I needed a place to contain them, protect them from the elements, and protect them from predators, because suddenly, we were on WAY more land with WAY more possibilities for danger and for mischief for all the animals involved.

Though my dream was to have a barn that was just a barn, I also needed a place to store a whole bunch of STUFF while I built my craft school. I built a ROCK SOLID modular stall for the goats using (chew proof) cattle panels.

Because one of my goats was pregnant, I knew that I would also need to have a kidding stall and a place to milk once she had actually given birth.

The original stall was fairly small as far as most stalls go, but everything is modular and can be grown/changed/expanded as I am able to reclaim more of my barn for “barn stuff.”

Off the barn, I built 3 small semi-permanent paddocks I could easily rotate/turn out the animals to/from/through so they always had a place to get outdoors even when weather conditions were too harsh and just in case I needed a backup for my rotational grazing setup.

Sure enough, two months after I built those 3 semi-permanent paddocks (a big time/financial investment, might I add…), I had to take one of them down and move it because it wasn’t working in reality the way I’d imagined it would prior to actually living with it.

But I’m still forever grateful I had something there, because as it turns out, I DID end up needing a backup for my rotational grazing setup, because soon after getting Livestock Guardian dogs, I started having a huge problem containing them. More on that below…

3. Training Livestock Guardians is a TON of work

Livestock guardian puppies are very cute, but they can't actually be trusted alone with your animals until they've been trained fully for two years. Livestock guardians aren’t family pets, and I’ll admit I was really naive bringing these two home, thinking I was ready/able/knew enough about dog training to put in the time and effort required to get my new guardians up to speed.

We were lucky enough to find a trained guardian dog (Johnny) that came with a puppy (June), so that made the training process go a little bit easier, but it was still a massive, massive time and effort investment in getting these guys up to speed and getting them to where we could actually trust them to do their job and to actually stick around.

A few months in with Johnny, he figured out how to jump over the short portable electric fencing I was using to contain the goats during our rotational grazing. That ended up causing some huge headaches and gray hairs for me because of some problems with neighborhood dogs, problems with keeping him away from my chickens, and figuring out how to work with Johnny and re-train him to be where I needed him to be and do what I needed him to do (not to mention the hundreds of hours I spent wandering through the woods looking for him when he’d gotten out) took the better part of six months.

4. Use What You’ve Got to Get What You Need

My grandpa always said, “Use what you've got to get, what you need.”

When the craft school that I'm building was hugely delayed, and I still needed to be able to use my tools and do woodwork, without space available I decided to split the animal barn in two- use half for the livestock and half to set up a temporary woodshop, because I needed to get back to work building furniture and teaching others to do the same, and needed a space to do that.

It meant that I had to be flexible in my thinking, this is never going to be a pristine space- it’s not temperature controlled, there’s dust and ammonia in the air which makes it a huge chore to keep the cast iron surfaces on my very, VERY expensive equipment clean, and there's always going to be weird considerations, like having my animal food bags strewn about the floor of my woodshop and a compost tea brewer going in the corner. It’s not the calm, well lit, perfectly organized space I’d like to have, but it works. And that’s what’s important.

5. Embrace Temporary Solutions

Everything about the move to Tennessee has taught me the importance of embracing temporary solutions, to constantly be on the lookout for possible improvements, and always to stay flexible in my thinking.

Temporary solutions get us moving so we can get to the important work of learning. As we are actually doing all the things, we run into problems, we experience failures, and we collect all of the information that we learn along the way and, eventually, we can create permanent solutions and build infrastructure that solves those problems.

6: Things don’t need to look Perfect to… Work.

When we first moved here, I wanted to recreate the garden that I'd built in Seattle over five years, right out of the gate, even down to the fencing. But then we found ourselves in the middle of a pandemic, I didn't have a truck to pick up supplies, and suddenly didn't have the money to buy them if I did, so rather than giving up on the idea of gardening entirely because the conditions I hoped for obviously weren’t going to come to pass, I decided to experiment.

I put some seeds in the ground in the spot I hoped would someday become my “permanent” garden. I wanted to determine whether it actually was a good location for the garden, wanted to see what the soil was like here, what kinds of pests I would be up against, and what it would be like gardening in a different climate.

Something that hangs me up and slows me down FAR more than I'd like to admit is my desire for things to be picture-perfect from the outset. Waiting until I could recreate that perfect garden would have stopped me from being able to have a garden at all that first year.

7: Identify what’s essential

Learning to identify what’s essential, and how to separate it from what might be nice has helped me overcome a lot of those kinds of potential hangups here.

When it came to having a garden, trellises pathways, soil amendments, watering solutions, those are all great things to consider, work towards, and plan for, but the only thing that’s actually essential to having a garden is putting some seeds in the ground and actually trying to grow something.

8. Collect Your Learnings, Build a Permanent Solution

Moving across the country gave me the opportunity to put ten years of chicken keeping to the test in finally designing and building the “perfect” chicken coop.

I'd had imperfect coops that had problems with predators. I’d had stationary coops that concentrated the chicken manure and burned the earth below them. I had tried every kind of waterer, feeder and nesting box. I’d learned enough through actually keeping chickens, actually using all my prior temporary, imperfect chicken coops, that I was finally confident I could make the time/effort/financial investment in a permanent coop that would actually solve all of the problems I'd had with my temporary solutions prior.

Chickens seem to constantly be inventing new ways to die.

I designed this coop around a trailer that had a grate as a bottom. This grate is thicker and stronger than chicken wire, which is not predator-proof (I found that out the hard way)— the grate is predator proof.

I hate cleaning up chicken poop.

So this grate also served another purpose in that all the poop will fall out of the bottom and I never have to clean chicken poop again.

Chicken poop smells HORRIBLE, especially when it’s hot out, and, when concentrated in one area, burns the ground beneath it.

The grate also provides constant ventilation for the coop as well as a convection-style airflow that keeps the air in the coop circulating which keeps the coop cooler and minimizes smell.

I wanted to have my chickens mobile so their poop didn’t scorch the earth below them, but also so they could follow my livestock as they grazed the pasture. That way, the chickens could stir the livestock manure into the soil and eat the fly/parasite larva from the fields to help minimize, offset, perhaps even eliminate fly and parasite problems in our pastures.

Mobility does present some challenges…

I want to be able to pull the chicken coop all around our pastures, but, in so doing, I didn’t want to have to carry buckets of water across 15 acres to keep the birds hydrated, so I designed a rain water collection/automatic delivery system using the roof of the coop. 2 years in, I’ve only had to augment and fill it with a hose once.

9: Always remember to have Fun

When we do actually make things permanent, it's also okay to make them a little fun. So my chicken coop is also a perfect quarter-scale replica of the barn here on the farm, even down to the barn quilt.

10. give Yourself a Break

There are unfinished projects around me all the time, and that has, in the past, allowed me to feel really guilty.

Learning, how to prioritize our time is just as much about figuring out what's actually important and also allowing ourselves to be okay with putting things aside or letting things take a back seat for a little while.

MOST IMPORTANTLY… Learn How to Ask For Help

I realized pretty quickly after moving here that I had bitten off way more than I could chew. I had two basic choices…

To absolutely run myself into the ground, trying to make something that wasn't going to work, work…
To learn to be vulnerable and how to ask for help.

When my craft school build was massively delayed by the pandemic, when my business had to make a huge pivot during the pandemic to keep everything afloat, when SO many things I’d dreamed about tackling one day were, in fact happening, but were also robbing me of time, energy, capacity, sleep, and the sanity I needed to get everything I needed to get done in a day done, I had a conversation with my dad that changed my perspective about pretty much everything. He said that if you are never open and honest about where you're failing, where you're lacking or what's really going on “behind the scenes,” then you're robbing other people in your community of the possible satisfaction of lending a hand. You’re robbing them of getting invited in and having the opportunity to shine the ways you might not be able to shine.

While I don't know if I'm ever going to love being imperfect in front of anyone else, this first year and a half on this farm has taught me so much about the value of letting people know help is needed.

What about you? I’d love to hear about your big lessons and what they’ve taught you! Leave a comment below or send me an email (hi@anneofalltrades) and share!

Cheers!

10 Things I Learned My First Year on the Farm

Keep Your Spaces Flexible