About

Herein I will be chronicling my endeavors toward purchasing and living on my own homestead by learning old ways. By learning how to garden effectively, manage livestock, create soap using my own lye, building my compost system and then using it in the garden, making my own vinegar, making cheese, and the like, I hope to reduce my dependency on the world while increasing my dependency on the Lord. As I grow closer to the Creator, my eyes are being opened to how far we have fallen. How very far we are from a life that glorifies God and yet reminds us of our dependence on Him and His mercy through the redemptive power of Jesus.

My name is Lisa. Welcome to Sweetgrass Homestead.

While I do not yet own a place to name Sweetgrass, its concept lives in my heart. It has been a dream of mine for some time, but it is only in the last year that it has taken shape into something more than a concept, more than a dream. Something closer to reality.

To deliberately return to a less conventional and less worldly life.
To live simply, to live fully, to live close to the land,
to experience the wild thing that dances inside us all.

I am a twenty-six year old woman, attending college to become a licensed veterinary technician. I will also be taking classes to focus on agricultural practices and business models to discover everything I can about this world I plan to enter and choose, with much prayer, the way that is best for me.

Currently my livestock collection consists of one rather ornery domestic feline named Nova.
I live in the State of New York, in among the Catskill Mountains. My town has about 1200 souls living here, and not a single traffic light. I have lived here for most of my life, and it's here that my family has lived for generations. Most of the generations behind me are farmers, or were until that didn't make enough money and electricity came along.

Right now I live with my Mom. My Gramma lives literally across the driveway in one of the two apartments we own. We live in the house. This is the house my mother also grew up in, and where she raised the four of us. It used to be part of a larger farmhouse, when this was still a farm. Now it's a 1.6 acre piece of the former farm. The other part of the old farmhouse now belongs to the next door neighbors.

We live in such a safe place. Really one of the few places where sleeping with the doors unlocked and knowing your mail person (her name is Erica, and she's very nice) are still common.

Our area is known for its dairy farms. A lot of New York State above The City is farmland. I would even say most is part of the dairy business. On the drive into town, I pass two dairy farms. There are countless others. The people have lived and farmed here for generations. If you don't know someone by their first name, chances are you know them by their last. You will often recognize certain people because of familial traits, even if you have never seen them before.

I didn't grow up on a farm, but we had a strawberry patch and the local plant nursery across the road had pick-your-own blueberries every year. Plenty of people we know would push their tomatoes and peppers and whatever else they had grown too much of onto us much to our pleasure.
As for me, I intend to start an heirloom garden; saving the seeds from year to year. I would like to sell vegetables at the farmer's market in the Square, and to sell my crafts at the local Fairs. I would love to purchase my own land, of at least forty acres (a dream leftover from something I read about the 'forty acres and a mule' campaign of 1865), and then populate it with chickens, goats, a cow or two, a few horses, and plenty of fields filled with growing green things to sustain me, my family, and anyone else who tags along. Maybe starting a whole-food CSA. All the while finding ways to rely less and less on electricity, on the modern stores, on the world as a whole to grow closer to God and become the person He has been shaping me to become.

This blog will be the lessons I learn, as I learn them. The goal of this being to chronicle my journey (and adventure), and to maybe, through my mistakes, help others on this path.

Won't you come along?

"I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green."
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from and Old Manse