Welcome to Not Exactly Homesteading!

Welcome to Not Exactly Homesteading!  What we mean by the name is that we try to live a more off the grid style of life without actually going off the grid.  We want to be free from the industrial food web, but we still want to have jobs.  We like our jobs.  Above all things, we try to be pragmatic.  We avoid pesticide use wherever possible, which is pretty much everywhere, but we don't try to be "organic" with our livestock or produce.  We figure that if it is grown at home, caught from a local lake or stream, or hunted from the landscape, it is of the highest quality.  Our taste buds tell us this is the case, and so do our waistlines.  So do our wallets. 

We kill deer, raise chickens for meat and eggs, catch fish, grow a huge garden, grow corn for food and feed, shoot gamebirds and waterfowl, pick wild asparagus, and compost everything.  But we also work 40 hours a week and buy some of our food, maybe 25%, from the grocery store.  We strive to find the balance between the simple joy recieved from providing for oneself and the comforts and safety of modern life.  We try to grow or harvest as many ingredients as we can, but we realize we can't produce them all.  For example, we don't want to buy a canned tomato ever again, but we love our dishwasher.  You don't have to go "off the grid" to have food of the highest quality at a bargain while minimizing your environmental impact and freeing yourself of the industrial food web.  You can know exactly where your meat, veggies, and grain came from, and it can be fun, especially if you love to cook.  We like to see our hard work in the garden, the field, or on the water translated to our plate.  We love being free from the confines of the inferior ingredients available at the grocery store.  Ours tastes better in almost every case.

So this is about food health, quality, and safety,  and reducing your environmental impact in any way possible.  But to be pragmatic about it.  Join us on our journey toward quasi-sustainability.  Share our successes and failures.  Hopefully we can develop a discussion community to lend insight to one another to get better at doing all the little things that make like more fulfilling and delicious.And we will try not to be too snobby or smug because of where our food comes from or how we live our lives, because we've all got some weeds in our garden.