Search For a New Homestead – A Look Inside the Author

Why the Search for a New Homestead?

Hello there! Thanks for joining me on the search for a new homestead! My name is Marina, and I’d love to share my homesteading journey with you. I’m a proud wife to an amazing, hardworking, talented, and gracious man named Ty. I’m also a mom to a 3-year-old boy with a heart of gold, and an almost 2 year old baby girl who’s a real firecracker. I feel incredibly blessed!

2012- Where it all began!

Fast forward several years

In the meantime, I pursued nursing and became a Registered Nurse. Ty changed careers and learned construction skills along the way. We navigated through life while renovating homes. In 2019, my dream of becoming a flight nurse came true, just as I became a mother. Ty’s house-flipping business took off, and we were determined to improve our finances.

Jumping to 2022 – we decided to make our backyard more kid-friendly. We removed over 20-year-old trees, and we replaced berms with curbing, level grass, and plenty of rocks. This marked the beginning of my serious desire for my homesteading journey.

Experience in homesteading and gardening

I’ve always maintained a garden since we got our own place in 2013. Growing up, my mom was always into gardening. But having my own garden brought its own set of challenges. With the backyard changes, I told Ty that I still wanted a big garden. Until then, I had only done in-ground gardening. Ty promised to build me raised garden beds. To be honest, I wasn’t immediately sold on the idea of raised beds. My hesitation came from the thought of sacrificing all the in-ground space for limited raised bed space. That’s when I came across Square Foot gardening by Mel Bartholomew. I got excited and began planning my spring garden.

It took several months to finalize the exact design I wanted for my raised beds and then to actually build them. Once they were built, it took several more months to prepare them for planting my seedlings. It was a long journey, but I’m happy to say I made it through a whole gardening season with raised beds! Hooray!

Exploring flower farming and how it lead to the desire to search for a new homestead

During this time, I started exploring different Instagram pages and stumbled upon flower farming. I was really intrigued. Although I had never grown flowers before, I learned that many vegetable farmers transitioned to flower farming due to better profit margins. That’s what inspired me to become a flower farmer. I’ve always loved growing vegetables, and I thought I was pretty good at it. But flower farming had a certain beauty that captivated me.

That’s when I discovered Lisa Mason Ziegler, the author of “Cool Flowers,” and her website. I took her basic flower farming course, and it really propelled me forward.Having a homestead close to our families was always on the horizon. Considering the substantial commitment of time, effort, and resources to my homestead endeavor, I aimed to ensure it would align with our long-term residence, if not become it.

The end goal in the search for a new homestead

My focus shifted towards all things homesteading. Why homesteading? I wanted to cultivate my own organic food in my backyard, create my own home remedies, consume homegrown meat, and transition to products that are pesticide-free, antibiotic-free, and hormone-free.

So here I am, on my little quarter-acre subdivision plot, nurturing a garden and striving to learn as much as I can. Our current goal is to find a bit more land where we can eventually raise our own meat, have our own eggs, cultivate our own food, produce our own medicine, and find ways to become more self-sufficient.

Join us on our journey!

As property prices continue to increase and the economy and real estate market show fluctuations, we’ve chosen to use our skills to buy land and create a new homestead from scratch. Come along as we begin this journey, searching where to start our new homestead, and building it piece by piece.